Chapter Text
No I don't think it needs solving
I'm not stuck I'm evolving
I won't question it now
I'm looking for an easy thing
- Dom Fera
April 14th, 1993 - Tacoma, Washington
One of the very last phone calls Steve Harrington ever receives from a kid in Hawkins comes in mid-Spring of 1993.
Steve is twenty-six years old.
It’s 1993 and Steve is twenty-six, and it’s been nearly ten years since an interdimensional hell-beast fell through Jonathan Byers’s ceiling and jump started the process of turning Steve into someone his sixteen year old self wouldn’t be able to recognize, someone kinder and softer and smarter.
A lot changed in those ten years, both for Steve and for the people close to him, but if there’s one thing that stands the test of time, it’s that Steve can roll with the punches. It was true in 1979 when his parents had decided for the first time to leave him alone at their big house in Loch Nora while they went away for business. It was true in 1983 when he had charged back into the Byers house and beat the shit out of that demogorgon. It’s still true now, in 1993, when the phone in his apartment in Tacoma, Washington rings with a call from his hometown.
“Steve!” Robin immediately yells, “Can you grab that? I’m going to work!”
Steve rolls his eyes, standing up nonetheless.
1993 marks Steve’s fifth year living with Robin, existing with Robin, his best friend, his favorite person on this entire goddamn planet, probably his soulmate, if he’s honest with himself (and if he believes in that sort of thing and he’s not entirely sure he does).
Robin, at least, is one part of Steve’s life that hasn't changed.
Robin was – is – Steve’s ride-or-die in every sense of the phrase, had been since the second she decided not to immediately scramble out of the stolen convertible Steve had nearly steam-rolled over Billy Hargrove in (something, she had noted somewhat hysterically afterwards, she'd had very little context for at the time). Steve doesn’t think one person has ever been as important to him as Robin, and he has no idea what he would do without her, no idea what he would have done if Vecna had gotten her like he’d nearly gotten Max and actually gotten Chrissy Cunningham.
(Years later, Steve learned about shared trauma, and that had been another revelation entirely, one Robin had allowed him two days of rambling about before she nixed the topic entirely, saying as she did that she needed a friend who wasn’t a psychologist).
Now, the challenges they face are less of the supernatural variety, but they’re still there for each other, still fighting in each other’s corners regardless.
Steve had been there for Robin’s first girlfriend (and subsequent first break-up) and all the ones that followed. He’d lent a very patient ear every time Robin had a crisis about her major (and went with her to the registrar’s office every time she changed it). He continues to be there as she grieves the deaths of her parents, her adolescence, her sanity, and everything else she’d lost after two battles against the evils living underneath her hometown.
And because Robin is wonderful, she’s there for him, too. She stuck around throughout Steve’s process of unlearning all the shit that had made him the asshole he was in high school. She’d helped Steve come to terms with his sexuality, and teased him only a little as he’d clumsily started to navigate the world of dating guys once he moved to Tacoma (a city that proved itself to be far more open-minded than his small, conservative, midwestern home town). She had supported Steve as he decided he wanted to be a trauma counselor, and as he figured out how to be good at school to make it happen – something he’d literally never tried to do before.
Even before four concussions in the span of three years, school had never come easy for Steve – that wasn’t new.
Actually wanting to do well in school? Wanting to succeed?
That was new.
He’d honestly never cared in high school, scraping by on pure obligation and the fear of disappointing his dad (though, as it turns out, his dad is disappointed in him even when he’s thriving, so he could have spared himself the aggravation). Starting college and wanting to be there, wanting to fight through the challenges he went up against had been difficult for Steve to adjust to.
He’d always sort of known getting hit in the head over and over again had messed up his memory a little bit, but never so much as when he’s studying for a big exam. He knows it’s why he has a hard time staying focused on things, but it’s most obvious ninety minutes deep in a three hour seminar when he’s supposed to be taking notes. It’s also why his eyes are more sensitive than they used to be and why he gets headaches all the time, but never so plainly as when he’s trying to write a long case study for a psych class (this, at least, he’d been able to mostly fix with a pair of wire-rimmed glasses that Robin is either calling cute or utterly roasting him for, depending on the day).
So figuring out how to be good at school wasn’t easy for several reasons. That first semester in college had been the hardest, but with Nancy and Robin’s combined efforts (mostly displayed through some very aggressive nagging), he’d made it through, and with every semester that followed, things got better.
And Steve really does love psychology. It’s true that he’d gone to college for Robin, but he stayed for psych, and learning about trauma counseling had only strengthened that for him.
He’d started applying to doctorate programs for clinical psychology halfway through his final year of undergrad, and to his (and apparently no one else’s) shock, he was accepted into all of them. He’d ended up choosing the one offering him the most in scholarships because, as it turns out, grad school is expensive as fuck and his parents had made it very clear they wouldn’t be helping him pay for any degree with psychology in the title, and now, he’s nearly two years into a four-year PsyD program, something Robin teases him about relentlessly, and in all fairness, the direction his life has gone in is surprising even to Steve, but god is he fucking happy.
He’d spent his teenage years insecure and confused and concealing so much of himself, so many curiosities and interests and bits of who he was, behind the thin veil of social status. Getting his ass beat several times was just the start of Steve being able to reevaluate himself, his priorities, his wants. What had followed over the next few years – friendships, family, healing – had caused that reevaluation to solidify into actual change, and now, all these years later, Steve knows that he’s practically unrecognizable from who he used to be.
To his credit, he knows with some satisfaction that sixteen-year-old Steve Harrington would be appalled to learn he’s spending his twenties as a bisexual doctorate student in counseling (a female’s job, he would have ridiculed), so busy with school he’s barely dating, and willingly living with his lesbian best friend who had rejected him at the first opportunity.
Usually, the further along this train he goes, the more his sneering younger self morphs into his father (something Steve would not be touching with a ten-foot-pole anytime soon), but thankfully, on this particular day, Robin is yelling for him before Steve can go too far down that rabbit hole.
“Steve!”
“I’m coming,” Steve yells back as the phone continues to ring, then mutters, “Jesus Christ.”
Steve enters the kitchen of his and Robin’s tiny apartment to see Robin pulling a denim jacket on over a dark green t-shirt Steve knows reads Books and Balderdash across the back.
Books and Balderdash is the independent bookstore in Old Town where Robin has worked since her freshman year of college. Technically speaking, she’s the store’s manager, but unofficially she’s been funneling every bit of knowledge she has from her business degree into updating the store’s brand design, a crusade that reached its peak about five months ago when they partnered with a local coffee shop (one of Steve’s favorites, actually) to open a second location in Seattle.
The owners, an elderly lesbian couple who’ve been saying they’re seventy-five since the day Steve met them in 1988 and who share in his deep-running adoration of Robin, couldn’t be happier.
“You’re not supposed to work today,” he tells her, raising his voice only slightly over the still-ringing phone.
“Oh, I am very aware of this, Steve-o,” Robin replies, “But apparently Marie’s closer didn’t show up and she’s in hysterics about it.”
Steve rolls his eyes again – Marie is one of the Old Town location’s two shift leads, and the far more high strung of the pair, so this isn’t the first he’s hearing of her antics – and finally grabs the phone.
“Hello?” he asks, waving as Robin ducks out of the apartment.
“Hello, Harrington,” a familiar voice comes through the receiver.
“Erica!” Steve grins. A glance at the clock above the door tells him it’s half past twelve in the afternoon – half past three where Erica still lives in Hawkins, “What’s up?”
“We got the date of graduation – finally. Figured you’d want to know.”
“Finally!” he exclaims, “When is it?”
“June twenty-sixth – so you can stop harassing me about it, already.”
“I was not – whatever,” Steve stops himself. It’s possible that he’d asked about her graduation every time they talked since she started her senior year of high school, but he wouldn’t go so far as to say he harassed her about it. He’s not going to argue, though. She’s headed to Georgetown University for pre-law in the fall and he hasn’t won an argument against her since she was ten, “We’ll be there.”
The rest of their conversation is short, and the second Steve hangs up the phone, he's headed for the Harley Davidson Dream Girls calendar Eddie had gotten him and Robin as a joke this past Christmas (they’d still hung it on the wall by the door on January 2nd). Steve flips two pages up to June, finds the twenty-sixth, and writes ERICA’S GRADUATION!!! in big green letters.
It’s been a long time since Steve and Robin were back in Hawkins – the closest they’d gotten to their hometown was Eddie’s apartment in Marion back in December of 1990, and not succumbing to his desire to check in on everyone he left behind when he moved to Washington had taken quite a bit of restraint on Steve’s part.
All these years later, even when they’re all grown up (well, twenty-two, so they’re technically adults, even if they don’t always act like it), Steve still feels an innate responsibility for the kids he’d taken several beatings for back in the mid-eighties, and for a while he didn’t think he’d ever be in a place where he didn’t worry about them constantly, where he didn’t have dreams every single night in which the gates to the Upside Down opened up yet again without him there to protect everyone.
But it’s 1993, and Steve is well and truly in that place. He’s in a place where he only worries that Dustin will try to take on another major at MIT and be in college for the rest of his life, that Lucas might not be taking care of his rolled ankle properly and end up sitting out the rest of his final season playing basketball at Carnegie Mellon, that Max might pick up a third retail job and forget her twenties are for having fun, and Mike...well, Mike is a different story, one he’s hoping Nancy will have an update on soon.
It’s 1993 and everyone has moved on, moved away from Hawkins, Indiana, and now Erica is the last one left, the last kid who’d been caught up in the four-year war against the Mind Flayer, the last one to finally get out.
If there was ever a time for Robin and Steve to make the thirty-five hour drive back to their hometown, the town that had torn both themselves and countless others to shreds and left them to pick up their ravaged pieces, it was now.
They’re going.
September 4th, 1987 - Hawkins, Indiana
Steve had known that Robin’s departure for her freshman year of college in Tacoma, Washington wouldn't be easy on him. The dread he’d felt in those last few days before she left had been so strong it made him nauseous, and when she’d actually needed to go, he’d hugged her for such a long time outside the jam-packed Audi that Robin’s Gran had snapped at them both.
Though she’d only been gone six days, he still felt her absence like a punch to the gut.
Today was Thursday, which meant dinner at Joyce and Hopper’s house in the woods, the first without Robin there yelling at him from the other end of the table, and god did he fucking miss her.
She had called halfway through dinner (during a break between classes, in her time-zone) with just enough time to lament her own absence from the weekly tradition (and to begrudgingly admit that she’s already fairly certain she wants to change her major) before she’d needed to hang up and make her way to class.
Steve hadn’t returned to the table, instead slipping out the back door to sit on the steps of the wooden deck, alone in the quiet September evening with a homesick feeling in his chest even though he was already at the only house that had ever felt like home.
He wonders somewhat darkly if he’d miss Robin this much even if he hadn’t watched her nearly die. Yes, he’d like to think, but he supposed he’d never know, because he had watched Robin nearly die.
He wishes he hadn’t, he absurdly thinks.
A few days ago, El had shown him a quote from a book she was reading – a very battered copy of Winnie the Pooh.
“I wonder what Piglet is doing," thought Pooh.
"I wish I were there to be doing it, too.”
El had pointed out the lines with her serious expression.
“It made me think of you,” she had said, “You and Robin.”
Steve had ruffled her hair and swallowed back the tightness in the back of his throat and desperately wished Robin were there to make fun of him for how hard a time he’s having with all this, like he knows she would.
He’s so lost in his thoughts he almost misses the sound of the glass door sliding open again, and Steve knows without turning his head that it’s Jim on the deck behind him.
“Missin’ your girl, Harrington?” he asked, taking a seat on the porch steps beside him.
Steve huffed, “She’s not-”
“I know. I don’t mean it like that.”
Steve’s whole body sagged as he gave a minute shrug.
“Sorry, kid. She’ll be back soon. Thanksgiving’s only in...”
“Two months and twenty-two days,” he finished glumly.
“Alright, Jesus, I get it.”
Steve didn’t respond and Jim wasn’t one who needed to fill every silence, so the porch was quiet for a while.
“You thinkin’ about your future at all, Steve?” Hopper asked after a swig from his beer, “You’re twenty now. You got any plans?”
He was asking questions that brought out a defensive side of Steve because, for the most part, he’d only heard them from his dad who was never asking for the right reasons. It took him a moment to remember that this was Hopper, and Hopper actually seemed to give a shit about Steve, so maybe he could be asking for some other reason than to belittle him. Maybe he actually just wanted to know.
“I dunno,” Steve settled on mumbling.
“What about your science stuff you keep goin’ on about?”
“Psychology?”
“Sure...psychology.”
“What about it?”
“Pretty sure they’re givin’ out degrees for that these days.”
“So?” Steve scowled, and he knew he was stooping to low, teenager-behavior, but he wasn’t ever able to act like this around his actual dad, so he’d take the opportunity if it came.
“So?” Hopper repeated, “College, Steve. You gotta go.”
“You didn’t go to college.”
“Yeah, because I knew I’d do jack shit with a degree. You will. If I’m being honest with you, kid, you’d be doing this smarter than most people do. Most kids go to college because that’s what they think they’re supposed to do – and they party and they let the classes they just-so-happened to like decide their entire career.”
Steve tipped his head to the side as he considered Hopper’s words. He immediately thinks of Robin, Robin who he loves more than anyone, but who clearly should not have gone to college when she did, Robin who Hop just described perfectly.
“And,” he continued, “You can apply to Robin’s school, if you wanted. It might not be the right fit in the end, but why not go for it? Seems like you’ve got your eye on something that you’d probably be good at. And for what it’s worth, school is apparently way different when you actually care about what you’re learning.”
Steve shrugged again, not yet willing to admit to Hopper that he was making a fairly decent point.
“Think about it, Steve,” Jim said firmly, ruffling Steve’s hair as he got to his feet.
Then, Hopper was back in the house and Steve was alone on the deck again, his thoughts entirely different and entirely the same as before.
April 20th, 1993 - Tacoma, Washington
About a week after his phone call with Erica, Steve calls Nancy.
They talk about their respective jobs for a while (Nancy works at the Boston Globe in a college internship-turned full-time staff writer position she’s still deciding if she’s being underpaid for. Steve is a part-time guidance counselors’ assistant at a high school nearby).
When that conversation dies down, Steve remembers Erica.
“Hey! Erica’s graduating June twenty-sixth, and me and Robin are going. You should come too! We haven’t seen you in forever.”
Nancy pauses.
“I don’t know, Steve. I have work.”
“Yeah, and probably, like, a million PTO hours, right? C’mon, you never take a break. And Erica is the last of us to graduate and get the hell out of that town. It’s worth celebrating!”
“By going back to that town?”
“Yeah. It’ll be healing. Therapeutic and all that shit.”
“Well, you would know.”
“Yeah, I would. Also, I repeat, Robin is going.”
“Steve!” he hears Nancy choke.
Steve is referring to the massive crush Nancy has on Robin, the one Steve has known about since the pair came back from Pennhurst in 1986, and Nancy has known about since about two months after that.
Steve’s experience figuring out his sexuality had been a walk in the damn park compared to Nancy’s – hers really could be better described as a full-on cataclysm that, thankfully, Eddie had been her primary confidante in (not that Steve wouldn’t have wanted to be there for her, but some wounds run deeper than others and at the time it definitely would have been weird to help his ex-girlfriend figure out she was actually what Eddie had ever-so-delicately called a flaming homosexual ).
But again, that was a long time ago now. Nancy had taken the crisis with her to Boston and turned it into, from what Steve had heard, a lot of exploration and self-discovery. He was pleased to see her return to Hawkins after her freshman year even more self-possessed than she already was.
As for Nancy and Robin, Steve had made absolutely no progress in the last seven years, a fact Steve can’t stand because it's so obvious that they're perfect for each other – leaps and bounds better than all the duds Robin has gone out with in the past (aside from Nance, Robin’s taste in women is notoriously terrible).
Steve’s been making slow, pain-staking steps in his crusade to pull their heads out of their respective asses ever since Robin confessed to him her crush on Nancy a little over a year ago (because she'd thought he didn't know…apparently). Now, he’s pretty certain that the seeds have been planted and if he could just get the two of them in the same state for a few days, there's no way that something wouldn't happen between them.
“Just think about it, okay?” Steve tells Nancy, “Hey – heard anything from Mike recently?”
They talk for another fifteen minutes until Robin emerges from the bathroom freshly showered, and then Steve shoves the phone into her more than willing hands.
A lot of surprising things happened after Hawkins’s connection to the Upside Down was finally severed, things Steve wouldn’t necessarily have predicted could even occur as a ripple effect stemming from the permanent end of a supernatural war.
Nancy Wheeler becoming one of Steve’s best friends is one of them.
After their breakup in 1984, Steve and Nancy had sort of toed the line between friends and awkward exes, and he had kind of assumed he’d catapulted them to the latter end of the spectrum with his whole dreams of the future spiel he’d thrown on her, but as it turns out, he hadn’t.
Sure, there’d been some awkward hurdles to get over at first (most notably how just about all of their friends had been angling to get them back together, and that was even before Nancy broke up with Jonathan), but they had sorted everything out and before long, Steve and Nancy had been re-solidified as friends in the eyes of the Party, and things were good.
After four years of Steve letting his life get torn to pieces by the Upside Down and everything connected to it, he’d developed the perspective that it must have happened for a reason - otherwise why would he have survived? He liked to believe it had been to lead him to these people – his people, the ones who showed him what friendship and love and family were supposed to be. Nancy was always meant to be in his life – he was sure of it. His dumbass sixteen-year-old self just hadn’t yet been able to realize that it was possible for a girl like Nancy to be in his life in any other way besides romantically.
His friendship with Nancy is different from his friendship with Robin. In a lot of ways, it’s not quite as deep, but in other ways, it’s deeper. They have a sort of intimate closeness that comes free with the whole comrade in arms thing, and she’s usually his go-to whenever he needs advice or help.
Nancy is the one who’d initially introduced Steve to the notion of working in psychology. Trauma counseling had been his own discovery (one he’d made after taking an Abnormal Psychology course his junior year where he’d learned about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, a brand new diagnosis as of 1980, and immediately thought of himself, Robin, Nancy, Mike, pretty much their entire party after everything that had happened in their hometown), but Nancy had helped him edit his essay when he was applying into PsyD programs.
Like Nancy, Steve wants to help people. He wants to help people who have been through shit like he had (though hopefully not the same shit – it’s been seven years without so much as a whiff of the Upside Down and he would like to keep it that way) because no one had been able to help him and the people he loves.
They had deserved help. Maybe it had taken Steve a while to realize it, but they had deserved to have people in their corner who understood that they’d been through some fucked-up shit no person should have to experience, who saw how they could no longer be the people they’d once been, who could see how their suffering and the pain wouldn’t die alongside the Upside Down, who knew how to help them.
They had deserved better.
There's another thing about Steve that hasn't changed - he still wants to help.
Steve sometimes thinks about that first round against the Upside Down back in 1983. It really hadn't had anything to do with him - not like how Jonathan and the younger kids lost Will for a while, not like how Nancy truly lost Barb. Steve could have cut and run the second he realized that Jonathan and Nancy weren't messing around, but for better or worse he stayed.
He stayed and he helped and he kept staying and kept helping because in all his years of wondering who he really was, it was one part of himself that just felt right.
So he's chasing it.
It turns out that helping people in the field of psych isn't actually all that different from helping fight monsters. He can still jump in head on and pick things up as he goes, and earning a psych bachelors and half the doctorate has helped him see that he's actually pretty decent at learning when it's something he cares about. Steve cares about this, and time has shown him that maybe people had been able to help them all back then. Maybe it's more like they hadn't bothered to even try.
Steve wants to try though. Steve is determined to become the thing that could have made a difference – even a small one – when they had desperately needed it.
March 17th, 1986 - Hawkins, Indiana
It’d been three days since the gates to the Upside Down closed once and for all, three days since the Party collectively came to the understanding that it’s done.
It was finished.
They were actually, truly, triumphantly safe.
It’d been three days that should have been filled with celebrating and healing and beginning to reassemble their lives, and in part, they were, but for Steve it had also been a lot of unsubtle hinting and prodding from Dustin, and completely overt death stares from Mike – they were trying to get Steve to talk to Nancy, to make some grand confession of love or whatever they thought he’s feeling, never mind how he didn’t want that at all. He knew he’d said some stupid shit in that stolen Winnebago, but he’d been starving and sleep-deprived and overdosing on adrenaline, and history had shown him that seeing girls he cared about in perilous situations crossed some wires in Steve’s brain.
Steve needed to talk to Nancy, to make sure she understood that although Steve didn’t want her in that way, he’d like to figure out how to be friends. He knew that the longer he went without saying all that, the more his misguided confession would solidify in her brain and he really didn't want that, so after three days of being harassed by his meddling friends, Steve finally worked up the courage to find Nancy, wherever she was in his big house in Loch Nora (the Party’s home base for the past few days), and dig himself out of whatever hole he was in.
“Can we talk?” Steve asked Nancy upon finding her in his kitchen.
Nancy’s eyes met his with a searching expression.
“Sure.”
Steve could feel Dustin watching them as they walked down the front hallway. Ignoring him, he opened it, letting Nancy pass through first before closing the door behind them, and when he sat on the top step of the small porch, Nancy followed suit.
Steve took a deep breath, already resigned to diving into this insane conversation so it could be over with already.
“Uh, so you’ve probably noticed that pretty much everyone is…”
“Trying to get us back together?” Nancy finished with a little smile, “Yeah. I noticed.”
Steve let out a short laugh.
“Yeah. I-uh…I don’t know if that’s…”
“Oh, it’d be a total disaster," Nancy said, and Steve let out a sigh of relief, "It’d probably take us all of three minutes to realize that the two of us in that way…it’s just not feasible anymore.”
“Yeah,” Steve nodded as relief continued to ease over him.
“Not that you’re not great,” Nancy hastily added, “Because you are. Really, really great, but I just don’t think we can be good for each other in the way that we deserve.”
Steve nodded.
Nancy looked his way again.
“You know, I never got the chance to say that I’m sorry,” she said, “For what I said at the party a couple years ago — just how things ended, y’know, for us. In general.”
“Oh...yeah, I mean, it’s okay.”
“No,” she insisted, “It isn’t. You were good to me, and I treated you like shit — and I-I think I technically cheated on you…with Jonathan, and I’m not...I’m not proud of it.”
“Well, I wouldn’t say I was entirely good to you. I did spray-paint that stupid shit on the theater sign. That sucked.”
“You did…you did do that, didn’t you? Jesus, I forgot.” Nancy actually had a little smile on her face, “Weird.”
“Weird?” he repeated, feeling something like disbelief.
“Yeah. It’s weird how you did that when you’re...you know, you. You now.”
“Yeah, yeah, I get it. I’ve changed. Get in line. Anyways, that’s rich coming from you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Uh, well, three years ago you were, like, scolding me for sneaking in your window to help you study way too hard for a science test. A week ago you blew a guy’s guts out with a shot-gun you sawed off yourself.”
“I dunno if I’d call Henry a guy.”
Steve ignored her, never one to argue over semantics.
“All I wanted to say,” Nancy started again, “is that I’m sorry. It sucks most of our relationship got…I dunno...tangled up, I guess, in the aftermath of what happened to Barb. I…I balled up all that trauma and grief, and hurled it right at you. It wasn’t fair, and I’m sorry.”
Steve only nodded. Once again, Nancy was putting things he’d come to understand about their relationship and its end into actual words he wouldn’t have figured out how to articulate himself.
“And it’s…nice, I guess, that everyone wants us to get together. They care about us. It’s nice, but I don’t think they could understand that, you and me, it’s always gonna be rooted in that horrible, horrible night. It doesn’t matter how much we’ve changed. That won’t change.”
“Yeah,” Steve nodded, “That’s what I...yeah.”
“I do want to be…friends, though,” Nancy said tentatively, “If that’s okay with you.”
“Are you kidding?” Steve replied with a grin, “‘Course it’s okay with me. You’re, like, the coolest.”
“Careful. I don’t think Robin would be too happy if she heard you say that.”
“Nah, she’d agree with me.”
If there’s a curious glint in Nancy’s eyes at the idea, Steve pretends he doesn’t see it because that, he knows, is a conversation for another day.
And they’ve got time.
May 4th, 1993 - Tacoma, Washington
Steve and Robin’s phone bill is through the roof again. It always is, so he’s not even surprised when it comes in the mail, just asks Robin for her half and watches as she rolls her eyes and forks it over. With the Party scattered around the country, the only connection Steve and Robin have to the people who understand them to their fullest is a very rigid phone schedule they adhere to so strictly it ends up penciled onto the Dream Girls calendar every month.
Steve’s half of the schedule is mostly made up of five ninety-minute blocks scattered throughout the week – one each for Nancy, Dustin, Max, Jim (or Joyce, whoever answers), and Eddie.
Eddie’s block is on Thursday, and those ninety minutes typically end up looking more like two hours for pretty much the exact same reason Robin’s call with Nancy dips out of her own assigned time, the same reason Robin won’t get mad at him for it — Steve has a pathetic crush on Eddie Munson that he can’t shake for the life of him.
(Robin always argues with his way of describing this, calling it a complete and utter misrepresentation and that Steve is entirely in love with the guy, down so bad he hasn’t been able to go on anything more than a first date in years — Steve always finds it hard to argue through his furious stammering.)
If Steve was honest with himself — and he really does try to be honest with himself these days — he would agree with her.
He really does have it bad for Eddie.
Steve’s main obstacle – he has no idea if Eddie feels the same way. Over the years (because this really has been going on for years), the situation has shifted from the back burner to right at the forefront of Steve’s mind and, frankly, it has become a complete and utter distraction. Problem is, with Eddie still living in Indiana – not Hawkins anymore, he has his own place a couple towns over – and Steve in Washington with no way of leaving until he gets his doctorate, he has no chance of doing something about it any time soon.
So Eddie’s usual slot in the Buckley-Harrington Phone Schedule of 1993 is on Thursday, and it’s only Tuesday but today Robin and Steve actually solidified their plan for returning to Hawkins in June for Erica’s graduation (they even called Joyce and Hopper to make sure they’d have room for them in their house – the House – and everything), and the prospect of being in the same state as the man he might be head over heels for has Steve itching to grab the phone, phone schedule be damned.
“Oh, Steve, just call him!” Robin rolled her eyes, her patience worn thin after watching Steve spend practically the entire plot of A League of Their Own bouncing his knee and glancing towards the landline even though he'd been the one pestering Robin to track down a tape of the movie since they saw it in theaters almost a year ago.
“No, it’s–”
“Steve. Call him. Tell him we’re coming, confess your love for him so I don’t have to hear about it anymore.”
“Shut the fuck up,” he mutters, even though he’s already reaching for the remote to pause the movie.
Robin snickers as she gets to her feet.
“Come find me if you wanna finish this,” she says, tipping her head towards the TV as she heads for her bedroom.
Steve nods absently as he grabs the phone and dials the number he’s long-since memorized. As the phone starts to ring, the thought crosses his mind that Eddie may not even be home (what time is it in Indiana, anyway?), but he only has a moment to agonize over this before the phone is answered halfway through the second ring.
“Hey, this is Ed.”
And just like it always does, the sound of Eddie’s voice has Steve’s heart jumping into his throat, has him biting back a thousand confessions because he still doesn’t know how Eddie feels and it doesn’t matter because even if he did, Steve could never bring himself to say everything he needs to say over the phone, not when he could say it to Eddie’s face, see his expression, his breath, his movements change with Steve’s words because Eddie wears his heart on his sleeve, puts his whole self out into the world for everyone to see, and it would be abundantly clear before Eddie uttered a single response exactly how he was feeling in return.
And now the universe has given Steve another chance to actually fucking figure out how Eddie is feeling.
“Hey,” Steve manages, “Eddie, hey, it’s Steve.”
“Steve Harrington,” Eddie says, and Steve feels the stupid grin growing on his face before he can do anything to stop it, “To what do I owe the pleasure of a phone call outside of our regularly scheduled programming.”
“Rob and I are coming back to Hawkins,” Steve replies, and then he adds, “In June.”
“Oh shit, no way!” Eddie exclaims, and the actual, genuine excitement in his voice has Steve feeling giddy, “Wait – why? Not that I’m complaining but you haven’t been back in this neck of the woods for years.”
“Erica’s graduation is the twenty-sixth.”
“Well, shit, yeah, we’re not missing that. Is everyone coming back?”
“I dunno about everyone, but Rob and I are going, Lucas will be there, obviously, Dustin will need to be out of his dorm by then so he’ll probably go too. I’m trying to convince Nancy to take a few days off work, but...I mean, you know Nance.”
“I’ll talk to her,” he says immediately, “and I’ll call everyone else. We should all go. She’s the last of the Party to get the fuck out of that hole of a town. She deserves a proper send-off – and we can have a real family dinner again.”
“Y-yeah, man,” Steve said, marveling at the way Eddie is literally always, unexpectedly, astoundingly on his exact wavelength, “That’s what I was thinking.”
Steve relays to him the details of their trip and then they come up with a vague plan to rope the rest of the Party into making the trek home as well, and once they’re done, there’s a beat of silence while he grapples with the understanding that he does not want to end this phone call even though it has to.
Eventually, Eddie does it for him.
“Hey, man, I gotta go. Dustin’s gonna call me in like two minutes and last time I missed his call, he threatened to sic his mother on me for, like, a goddamn welfare check or some shit. You still gonna call Thursday or is Robin docking you phone time for this?”
Steve lets out a surprised laugh.
“No, I’ll call,” he chuckles, “We worked it out. She’s just gonna take my first born and then I’ll be debt-free.”
“I knew she was into some witchy shit. I knew it,” Eddie replies, and Steve can hear the grin in his voice, can practically see the way he’s pulling his hair in front of his face – except he’s not, Steve reminds himself. Eddie cut his hair short years ago and hasn’t grown it back out since.
There’s another second of silence, another second of Steve not wanting to hang up the phone.
“Alright,” he finally says, “I’ll talk to you Thursday. Say hey to Dustin for me – tell him to chill out, will you?”
“For you, Stevie? I’ll try my best.”
Steve lets out a breath of laughter.
“Alright, talk to you later.”
“Bye, Steve.”
And then he hangs up.
Steve lets out a breath, and if it wavers, he refuses to acknowledge it as he places the phone back on its base.
“God, you’re such a loser,” Robin says, and even with his back turned, Steve knows she’s leaning against her door frame with that smirk on her face.
He tips his head back, not dignifying Robin’s eavesdropping with a response.
“C’mon, loser, let’s restart this movie.”
“I hate you,” he manages to grumble, dropping back onto the couch as Robin rewinds A League of Their Own.
“No, you love me,” she replies, balancing on her toes as she crouches like a crab on the couch beside him and wraps her arms around his shoulders, “And it’s all gonna work out. Promise.”
She presses an obnoxious, slobbery kiss onto his cheek just as the tape finishes rewinding, and not long later, they’re settled back on the couch with their half-eaten bowl of popcorn between them as the film begins once again.
For Steve, realizing he was bisexual hadn’t been as big a deal as maybe it should have been – though, again, Steve had always been able to roll with the punches and it wasn’t like the idea of liking both boys and girls was completely foreign to him. Also, nearly dying at the hands of something that should just be a character in a fantasy movie puts pretty much everything as insignificant as who Steve has crushes on into perspective
Realizing he hadn’t been into Robin in that way had been the start of it. What had followed was the notion that if he could confuse platonic feelings as romantic ones, maybe that could go both ways. Maybe he could confuse romantic feelings as platonic, and from there, he and Robin, his forever confidante, went on a deep-dive of every feeling – platonic or otherwise – he’d ever had about any living, breathing person.
The conclusion – Steve is an idiot.
He’s also bisexual.
Definitely bi, definitely an idiot.
Both of these things were relatively easy to process, given how he’d honestly already known it.
His crush on Eddie, though? That had been a little harder to wrap his mind around.
Robin is pretty convinced that Steve’s been in love with the guy since Eddie shoved him against the boathouse wall seven years ago, and it’s the one facet of this discussion Steve doesn’t give her the time of day for. Looking back, Steve is able to see how she could argue that he’d been into Eddie even then, even if he hadn’t known yet, but it doesn’t matter. It wouldn’t have made a difference, and quite honestly it might have made things worse.
Words like boyfriend, crush, date, they all lost their meaning in those first few months after the gates to the Upside Down closed for good. Steve hadn’t wanted any of those things because he couldn’t be any of those things, but it didn’t mean Steve didn’t want.
He wanted love and tenderness and comfort and camaraderie, just like the rest of them. It was why, in the wake of everything, the Party clung to each other. It was why, save for their most injured, they opted for shoddy, crude first-aid they performed on each other in quiet corners of Steve’s big house. It was why, that first night after the Mind Flayer was gone, they all piled into Steve’s living room with pillows and comforters and sleeping bags, the floor together safer than beds separated by walls and doors. It was why it was so easy for Steve and Robin and Nancy and Eddie to find solace in one another – four kids who’d had a macabre responsibility thrust into their chests – because all they wanted was to be cared for and they could do that for everyone but themselves.
They had become friends, a veritable group of them even if it was a goddamn weird one, and during those first few months of figuring out how to heal, they became near-inseparable. Sure, Nancy would leave for Emerson in September like she had planned, like she had needed to, but for a good few months in the middle of 1986, it was nearly impossible to search for one of them without finding at least one more.
And the best part?
It was good.
Steve was no stranger to having a group of friends, but never one that actually added something so substantially positive to his life, and certainly never one that actually made him feel better about himself and who he was as a person.
That was new for Steve, and it was okay because Steve was becoming a new version of himself – they all were, because fighting an army of inter-dimensional hell monsters is one of those things someone will go through and come out the other side an entirely different person. What happened with the Upside Down over those three years shifted Steve’s entire world, so maybe he didn’t notice at first the way his eyes lingered on Eddie, didn’t notice the way Eddie’s laugh made Steve’s chest ache, didn’t notice how every touch left his skin burning.
And the thing is, none of this is even a problem. Steve likes Eddie, he’s probably in love with him, and it’s fine. It’s more than fine – it’s great, it’s fan-fucking-tastic. Steve has actual dreams about dating him, about being his boyfriend, and on the occasions he actually gets to be with him in person, rare as they are these days, he ends up with visions of his entire future stretching out before him and he can’t get enough of it.
The problem, once again, is that Steve doesn’t have one singular clue if Eddie feels the same way.
Robin insists that he does, but Steve isn’t convinced.
He knows Eddie is gay — that’s not the issue, not like the girl Robin had been crushing on late last year who she and Steve had spent weeks trying to determine whether or not she was into girls (she was, and then they only ended up going on two dates, so all the effort was pretty much for nothing). Steve knows that Eddie is gay, has since a few weeks after everything with Vecna had ended, and Eddie has known that Steve also likes guys for basically just as long.
No, Steve has a theory, a time-tested one that he has used to gauge someone’s interest in him practically since high school. Steve has a theory that people act different once they realize they like someone. Steve has seen it happen over and over again with people he’s dated in the past, girls and boys alike. He knows how to recognize that realization in other people – like with Nancy, years ago, he had made a dumbass comment that normally would elicit a scoff and an eye-roll, but actually got him a giggle and a faint flush high on her cheeks. Steve had known in that exact moment that Nancy was into him, and it was his in.
That realization is always his in.
Steve even remembers having his own one of those realization for himself with Eddie and experiencing how fucking hard it was to be normal around him.
And the thing is, several years of crushing on Eddie later and Steve still hadn’t seen that realization in him, hadn’t noticed any sort of change in the guy. Not even once. Eddie’s just always...Eddie – loud, obnoxious, dramatic, boisterous, expressive, sweet, passionate Eddie – the entire time.
And Steve’s theory is time-tested, so there’s really only one conclusion he can draw.
“Or,” Robin always says whenever they go down this particular rabbit hole, “he’s liked you the whole time. No change for you to even see, then, because nothing changed.”
“No way,” Steve always shakes his head, “How would that even make sense? He used to hate me — he said he used to hate me.”
Today, after the movie ends and Robin makes Steve recount his phone call with Eddie while she rewinds the tape for the second time that evening, they end up down precisely that rabbit hole.
“Come on, Steve,” she says, “As an objective third party, I can say – with utmost certainty – that pretty much everyone at school who was into guys was into you. Personally, I never saw the appeal–”
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
“-but trust me. The nerdy outcast secretly crushing on the popular jock? Definitely a thing.”
“I...really don’t think it’s a thing.”
“Okay,” Robin shrugs, “Well, either way, we’ll figure it out, ‘kay?”
“Sure, Rob,” Steve says, forcing himself to believe it as he pours the remnants of their popcorn into the half-full trash can, “We’ll figure it out.”
April 21st, 1986 - Hawkins, Indiana
Steve was working the closing shift at Family Video.
He was also closing by himself, which was bad enough, but it was a Saturday and Family Video's doors didn’t close on Saturdays until goddamn midnight — already absurd in rural Indiana, but Hawkins lost a full third of its population in one way or another over the past couple years, so an already dull close was dragging out even longer than Steve thought was possible.
If he’s lucky, it’d stay empty for the last twenty minutes of Steve’s shift so maybe he could do all the closing shit early and leave as soon as the doors were locked, but, of course, just as the thought crossed his mind, the bell above the door jangled.
He gritted his teeth, prepared himself for the friendly retail employee performance of a lifetime, and turned to see Eddie Munson standing in the doorway.
“Jesus.” Steve let out a breath of relief as Eddie slowly approached the counter. “I thought you were a customer."
“Nope.”
Eddie’s voice was short, and there was a strange look – somehow both manic and tired – in his eyes.
“You...good?”
“Yep. Peachy keen, Harrington.”
Steve narrowed his eyes.
“No you’re not. What’s wrong.”
Eddie opened his mouth, as if he was going to insist on his well-being again, but he closed it just as quickly. He sighed and scrubbed at his face, then spun around, turning his back to Steve and absently running a finger over a row of thick plastic VHS tape cases.
“Wayne’s going back to the night shift tonight,” he said, his voice low, “And I...I guess I’m just used to him being around, so...not really looking forward to whatever fresh hell my brain’s gonna cook up tonight without him there to tell me it’s all in my head.”
“Wanna come to mine?”
Steve watched Eddie freeze, watched him prod at a documentary about the South American savanna.
“Nah, all good,” Eddie replied, feigning nonchalance as he faced Steve again, “Gotta figure out how to be at that motel somehow. We’re gonna be there a while.”
“Don’t be stupid, man,” Steve shook his head, “Just come over. Look – I sleep better when I’m not alone in that house anyway, and our couch is one of the ones that, like…”
He tucked the VHS tape he’s holding under his arm to make a vague L-shape with his hands.
“You mean…a sectional?” Eddie asked with a raised eyebrow, and his expression is so almost normal that it’s worth the split-second of embarrassment Steve felt at forgetting the simple word.
“Yeah, that. Rob and I camp out there all the time if we’re having a rough night. We load it up with blankets and pillows and shit, and fall asleep to infomercials. C’mon, it’s fun – well, fun and sad, but it’s good to not be alone, at least.”
Eddie relented. Thirty minutes later, Family Video was closed and Steve was letting them both into his house. Eddie immediately went upstairs to pilfer some clothes to sleep in while Steve arranged blankets and pillows as inviting as he could on each leg of the grey sectional.
Just as he was turning the TV on, Eddie returned in sweatpants and a white t-shirt. He lobbed a balled-up mess of clothing at Steve so it collided with his face just as he looked up.
“The fuck, dude,” Steve grimaced, separating another pair of sweats from an old and very small purple t-shirt that read Hawkins Middle School across the front, “Where the hell do you find this shit?”
“Back of your closet,” Eddie said with a wicked grin, “Which is so weird, right? A shirt like that should be a wardrobe staple. Should be worn daily.”
Normally, Steve would roll his eyes and throw the shirt right back, but it’s the first time he’d seen that classic Eddie smile in a while.
Fuck it.
Steve pulled off his light blue crew neck and shouldered on the too-small shirt that had seen decidedly less shoulder the last time it was worn.
“This what you wanted, Munson?” Steve asked, knowing he looked ridiculous as he tugged at the shirt’s hem.
“Yeah.” Eddie pulled his hair in front of his face to hide a laugh. “Exactly what I wanted.”
“Great. Let’s go to sleep then so I can wake up and take this shit off.”
Eddie cackled, and Steve’s heart fluttered because he knew laughter can come few and far between in the aftermath of the terrible kind of shit they’d been through.
The volume on the TV was low, and once they’re settled in on the sectional, they spent a few minutes shooting snarky comments about the infomercials back and forth before losing steam.
“If you’re planning on waiting for me to fall asleep,” Eddie eventually said, “better get comfortable, you’re in for a long night.”
“Hey, I’m right there with you, man.”
Eddie was quiet for a while.
“God.” He let out a quick, angry breath. “Does this ever fucking stop?”
Steve shrugged.
“Everything feels weird,” he answered, “You just get used to it. You have a shitty day and tell yourself that tomorrow will be better, and if it isn’t, you say it again. At some point, it will be.”
“You think?”
“Yeah, I mean...it’s gotta be. It will.”
“Alright, Harrington. Gonna take your word for it,” Eddie said, “Tomorrow’s gonna be better.
And Steve repeated it. “Tomorrow’s gonna be better.”
June 23rd, 1993 - Tacoma, Washington
“Robin!” Steve yells from the front door, “Let’s go!”
“One second!” he hears her yell back.
“We’re gonna be late!”
Robin doesn’t respond until she’s already fumbling out of her room, laden with a very large, very full duffle bag.
“It’s a thirty three hour drive, Steve!” she reminds him, “I think we’ll be able to make up the time.”
Steve rolls his eyes, holding the front door open as she passes through it before he lets it swing shut. He jiggles the knob to make sure the door is locked before following her down the hallway of their decrepit apartment building.
“I still don’t understand why we couldn’t just fly,” Robin is grumbling.
“Because,” Steve replies, “One ticket alone is twice as much as the gas to fill up the car. I did the math – we talked about this.”
“Yeah, we talked about this. You know what we haven’t talked about?” she questions as they walk out of the lobby, “Why we’re leaving at five in the morning.”
Robin gestures with her empty arm at the still-pitch black sky.
“Told you about that too,” Steve points out as they reach his car – the same BMW he’s had since high school – parked against the sidewalk across the street from their building, “If we leave now we’re in Hawkins by three tomorrow afternoon.”
Steve opens the passenger door for Robin and she feigns a glare at him as she swings herself into the car.
“I’m definitely gonna kill you before we get there,” she says with a matter-of-fact nod, shoving her duffle bag through the gap between the two front seats so it tumbles backwards onto the floor.
“Can’t do that,” Steve counters as he neatly slides his own suitcase beside her bag. He waits until he’s sitting in the driver’s seat to say, “If you kill me, there’ll be no one to drive you to Hawkins and then you’ll never see Nancy.”
Had it not been dark outside, Steve would have been able to see Robin’s face turn a brilliant shade of red.
“Steve,” she growls, “Shut up.”
“Not until you tell me you’re gonna make a move on Nance while we’re back.”
“Steve!”