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Steve Harrington doesn’t cry.
It takes three months of knowing him for Robin to notice. It never came up when they were working together at Scoops, and it was only in the weeks after the quote-unquote fire at Starcourt (during nights kept awake by nightmares, clinging to her phone and Steve’s voice as a lifeline) that she realized it. Throughout everything that happened in that terrible July, he never cried.
He shows emotion, sure. He’s quick to laugh and even quicker to irritate. But he doesn’t cry.
She wonders about it, of course. Maybe he just doesn’t cry in front of people. Maybe he doesn’t want to cry in front of the kids and upset them or maybe he doesn’t cry in front of her because he doesn’t want her to think he’s a wimp. (Not that she ever would think that. Not after what the guards did to him.) Maybe when he’s home at night, he cries by himself when no one is awake to see it.
Then again, she talks to him on the phone all the time late at night. Even when he calls her after one of his nightmares, he’s not crying. His voice might be thick with sleep and emotion, but she never hears him cry. He never makes her feel bad when she cries—and she cries a lot—and he doesn’t join in.
She starts paying attention.
That’s when she notices it: his tell. It seems that he doesn’t even know he has it. When emotions are running high, she catches him doing it. He ducks his head, pinches the bridge of his nose, and covers his mouth. It’s a quick, subtle gesture, but once she sees it she can’t stop noticing it.
In the spring, when the world is rocked under their feet yet again, she sees it. When Steve looks at the letter Max gave him, Robin notices Steve ducking his head and rubbing his hand over his mouth the moment Max turns her back. After the graveyard, when Nancy and Robin meet up with them again, Robin sees Steve’s eyes in the rear view mirror as he looks at Max in the back—headphones over her ears, Kate Bush thrumming from her Walkman—and sees him pinch the bridge of his nose and suck in a short breath.
He always plays it off. Rubs his nose like he has allergies or scratches his jaw as if it itches. He doesn’t let anyone see what he’s hiding behind that gesture.
But Robin sees. Robin knows.
She sees it again after the final battle, when they rush back triumphantly to the gate and instead find Dustin curled over Eddie’s body surrounded by a circle of demobats collapsed and twitching on the ground. When they’re driving to the Hawkins General Hospital and Nancy is trying to stop the bleeding in the backseat and Dustin is sobbing, Robin looks over at Steve, and she watches him do it. Pinches the bridge of his nose. Sucks in a short, shallow breath. Covers his mouth.
Dustin is sobbing. Nancy is crying, even as she rips her own clothes into makeshift tourniquets. Hell, even Robin is crying, even though she knows it won’t help. But Steve isn’t. Steve won’t let himself cry.
At the hospital, the doctors operate on Eddie for eight hours straight and Max for twelve. The kids won’t go home, so the nurses let them drag chairs together into makeshift cots in the hallway outside their friends’ rooms so they can grab a few hours of sleep. Steve paces, drinks four cups of shitty cafeteria coffee in a row, and paces some more. Robin eventually has to yank him down into a chair because she can’t keep watching him walk up and down and up and down the hallway.
When the surgeon comes out of Max’s operating room, the tension is thick in the air. He approaches Mrs. Hargrove and says a few words to her in an undertone. She collapses to the chair. All the oxygen leaves the room until she manages to get her breath and sobs, “She’s alive, my baby is going to live.”
The reaction is instantaneous. Lucas drops his head into his hands and bends nearly halfway over in his chair. Erica turns her face into his shoulder and sobs. Dustin stares at the doctor, shell-shocked, and Nancy sags against the wall like it’s the only thing that can hold her up. Robin feels like she can breathe for the first time in a full day. She looks at Steve, expecting him to meet her eye, but he doesn’t. He just stands up, runs his hand through his hair, covers his mouth, and walks down the hallway to the men’s room.
She can’t let him be alone. Not now.
The bathroom door swings shut but Robin catches it with her foot. Inside, Steve is bent over the sink with his hands gripping the porcelain on either side. His gaze is unfocused as he stares into the turquoise-blue of the sink.
Robin approaches him slowly. She sees herself in the mirror: still dirt-smudged with bags under her eyes and dried blood obscuring her freckles. She rests her hand on Steve’s back and feels the rattle of his breath under the vest he still hasn’t taken off.
“It’s okay, Steve.”
He jerks his head up. His eyes are red-rimmed and shining. She slides her left hand all the way around his side until she’s hugging him from behind. She presses her cheek to the denim covering his back and closes her eyes.
“It’s okay, dingus. You can let it out,” she murmurs. She rubs her face against his back and slides her hand down the bare skin of his arm. “It’s just me. You don’t have to pretend you’re okay.”
Steve lets out a noise like a dying animal: half sob, half gasp. He crumples forward, only the sink and Robin’s arms holding him up. His body shakes against hers as he finally, finally starts to cry. He folds his arms over the faucet and rests his forehead on them. The bowl of the sink and the tile all around them amplify the sound of his sobs and rattling breath, and all Robin can do is wrap her arms tight around his chest and try to hold him together like she isn’t crying as well.
He’s saying things, but none of them make sense. All Robin can make out is Max’s name, over and over, and finally two full sentences: she’s my little sister, Bobby. I couldn’t live with myself if she died.
Robin cries, too. Her tears soak the back of Steve’s vest—Eddie’s vest—their vest—and she wonders how anyone can think the world is fair when she and Steve aren’t even old enough to legally drink yet but they’ve seen things most adults never see outside of a war zone. At some point, her arms around Steve stop being a hug and turn into clinging, like feeling his breath and the warmth of his body is the only thing that will keep her tethered to the here and now.
It’s a long, agonizing fifteen minutes before Steve finally cries himself out. He manages to catch his breath, though he stays bent over the sink and Robin stays draped over his back. When he finally lifts his head, they both make out his face in the mirror. Where his eyes were red-rimmed before, they’re now completely bloodshot and there are tears and snot leaving tracks down the dust and dirt on his face.
They make eye contact in the mirror.
Steve is the first to laugh. Robin tries to keep it in, but Steve looks like such a fucking mess—she can’t. She snorts, which makes him laugh harder, and then they’re bent double again, clinging to each other while they shake with a sound that could be laughter but could also be sobbing.
Afterwards, Robin pops open the paper towel dispenser and deposits the whole entire roll on the adjacent sink. Steve scrubs at his face roughly with a dry paper towel, but Robin stops him. She wets a towel with warm water and squirts hand soap onto it before dabbing it across his face, mopping away the dirt and blood and tears and snot. He cried so hard that red dots stand out across his forehead. Robin sweeps his hair out of his face and runs a cool paper towel from temple to temple.
“It’s okay. We’re gonna be okay, yeah?” she asks.
Steve’s hand flutters up to his mouth, like he’s about to cover it, but he lets his arm fall to his side.
“Yeah,” he says, nodding. “We’re gonna be okay.”