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It was just after Steve's third birthday when he was diagnosed, his mother sobbing the whole way home, his father clutching the pamphlets like a lifeline. His mother teared up each time she looked at her son for the next month. His father wouldn't even look at him at all. He was put in ABA therapy a few weeks later, the sooner the better according to his father, although little Steve had no idea what that meant.
Steve was officially "cured" a few weeks before his 9th birthday. His mother looking gleeful when it was announced, his father taking him on a celebratory fishing trip, saying how he was glad to have a real son now. Steve was just happy not to have to go to that wretched place anymore.
Steve meeting Robin was kind of an accident. Well, not that they didn't know each other in passing - it was a small town - but before that summer, Steve wouldn't have been able to pick robin out of a lineup.
Robin wasn't quiet per se, but she wasn't particularly forthcoming with information about herself. Which, to be fair, Steve was a real dick in his high school years, probably to Robin at some point, although by that point all the torments he had thrown had kind of blurred together. He wasn't proud of that. He was determined to show her how much he had changed.
After some digging he did get her to speak with him a little, talking about how she was in band and how she worked at the bookstore last year but the store had lost so much business because of the flashy new bookshop in the mall that they turned her away. Steve tried to build her trust, tried to prove that he had changed for the better. He supposed her seeing him with the kids - his kids - helped, but still, he wanted to prove it to her. There was just something about her that made him want to stick to her like glue, never leave her side.
Maybe it was Steve's careful prodding, or, (more likely) it was the near-death experience. Or maybe it was the whole "coming out to one another while high on Russian drugs on the floor of a dirty bathroom stall" thing, but whatever it was, Steve seemed to get his wish as he and Robin were now attached at the hip.
Robin practically ended up living at Steve's place, having claimed her own guest room of the three the Harrington's had (although they usually ended up in the same bed anyway, nightmares tend to be easier to deal with when someone is there next to you). Her parents were laid back and just glad she was making friends and his parents, gone more than they were there on business trips. Steve may have been lonely in the large, impersonal house, but he preferred it alone, it made everything easier. That is, he thought he preferred being alone until Robin started staying over.
Sure, he still had burn scars on his hands from learning to make food other than cereal, and it was true that he entirely forgot to drink water most days, but it meant he wasn't forced to be searching for the tiniest clues that his father was in fact joking when talking about his employees and he didn't have to force himself to look in between his mother's eyes (a trick he had learned from ABA therapy, look in the middle, and you won't be yelled at because they think you are looking them in the eye). It also made it easier on the difficult days, the days when his socks had seams over the toes or fluorescent lighting overhead seemed to have a personal vendetta against him. On those days he could get home and not have to think about making it as quiet as possible while throwing himself into walls, something, anything, just to get it to stop.
But now he has Robin.
The mall was no longer a viable candidate for work. Robin tried to take them to the bookstore (now needing new employees because of the boom in business the mall closing had caused). But he absolutely blew the interview -being able to read above a middle school level seemed to be an unwritten requirement- and Robin refused to go if he didn't, not if she didn't have to. And so they went to the video store across the street that had a "now hiring" sign hanging in the window. And Robin with her amazing persuasive skills got them the job.
Family Video was a lot better than scoops ahoy, there were fewer people, although that might have been attributed to school being back in. The lights were less harsh and the music of every store around them didn’t seem to be mixing in a never-ending competition to be the loudest.
It's there, in the video store in robins after school and weekend shifts, that Steve begins to notice something… different about Robin. He begins noticing her doing all the things he was always told not to, the way she shakes out her hands after some creep starts hitting on her or how she rocks on her feet in excitement when a pretty girl smiles at her. He finds himself not minding, even enjoying these little Robin quirks. And the more time they spent with one another, the more comfortable Robin got around him and the more of these Robin things showed themselves.
It wasn't as if she was changing, on the contrary, she was the same old Robin, just with a Steve attached constantly to her side now. No, it was like she was becoming more herself around him, showing a larger slice of the same Robin pie.
Maybe if she did what those people always said was so wrong, and Robin was his favourite person ever, then he could do it too.
It began slowly. Ever so slowly.
He was sitting on the floor of his bedroom with robin. His parents were on a month-long trip to New York, so they had the house to themselves. "One way or another" playing softly through the room -although Steve couldn't really hear it properly, turns out having so many strikes to the head eventually messes with your hearing- it helped Robin concentrate though.
Robin was ranting, she'd gotten back from visiting family in Indianapolis the day before and was telling him every detail. It was more like she was processing the events of the weekend by talking with him. Her parents had let her roam the city for a few hours while they caught up with one of her father's old friends for lunch, and she managed to find something amazing. A bookstore, tucked in-between a tax agency and a bakery on a small street. She explained how from the outside it looked relatively unassuming, promotions about new books in stock and promotions about getting a free poster with the purchase of a certain book. But something caught Robin's attention, a small pink triangle sticker in the corner of the window. There were apparently fiction books about women who liked women and people who were neither men nor women. There were non-fiction books too, about rights movements and how being like them was a thing in ancient societies like the ancient Greeks.
She grabbed his hands, by this point they were sitting criss-cross facing each other. She continued to explain about these little homemade booklet things called zines and how she would take Steve there someday, and she begins to rock backwards and forward, tugging slightly on Steve's hands as she does so. Now, this wasn't uncommon for robin, especially not recently, often impatiently rocking on her feet while waiting in lines or going from side to side when listening to a "colourful" (as she called them) song. As was usual, by this point Steve felt the urge to join in, like when someone is laughing and you just want to join. Steve thinks about the time he did just that at the dinner table when he was 14, talking about how his history teacher had mentioned 15th century Japan in that day's lesson and how he was scolded by his father for it, his mother tearing up saying that she thought it was over.
But this is Robin, and so he does.
Moving forward as she goes back and back as she moves forward. A massive grin forms over Robin's face and she does a little squeal from the back of her throat, a sound Steve had figured out was one of the very "Robin" ways she expressed happiness. She squeezes his hands in encouragement, smiling her grin that seems to only be for them while staring at the wall behind his head.
Something clicked. It felt so right like a weight had been taken off of his chest. He felt more like the Steve the universe wanted him to be, not the Steve Hawkins high wanted him to be.
He began to do it more, and more. Jumping up and down and flapping his hands in the break room, scrunching his nose when stacking DVDs when someone with a strong perfume graced the premises, he began to let himself not look at Robins's eyes when talking to her (not that he was actually looking at them anyway, just the general vicinity). He bought about a billion lamps to go everywhere rather than the tiny devils that were the "big" lights, he moves his dad's record player to the kitchen whenever he's away (which is a lot) and cranks the volume up so that he can feel the vibrations of the sound. Suddenly he's no longer attempting to make scrambled eggs in a cold and empty house, he could just have a dance party while he cooked. Suddenly food didn't seem so evil when he let himself buy the foods he wanted to eat, it turns out he was a pretty good cook.
He started having fewer of his "episodes", he was less stressed, he was suddenly getting along with Jonathan more, and he found himself enjoying the act of eating, and sharing a meal, something that used to be a time for arguments and yelling was now a time for shared community and love to be expressed (this was helped by Mrs Byers’ insistence on inviting him (and most of the rest of the party) over at least once a week). Steve found himself with a community, a family, and people who were like him. He started feeling at home in his body. He was feeling more like himself than he ever had to his memory
In one of Robin's school breaks they end up going on a road trip, Robin pulls him through the back alleys she had mapped out in her head for months by this point and they eventually find themselves in the bookstore robin had been telling him about months before. Steve was so freaking excited, he may have only ended up listening to about half of Robin's original rant, but it's okay because she gave him the same one about 5 more times, not including the 2 on the way up there. Steve walks along the aisle, seeing books about the Roman Empire and ziens about all the best clubs and bars for confirmed Bachelors, and feels like he can breathe out. As he was walking along the aisle hearing robins little squeals of content as she finds an autobiography on Alan Turing (a book that would later be bought and lent to Will Byers) he begins to flap his hands, finding himself not having the stress that always arose when he felt happy, and he was, happy that is.