Work Text:
Steve doesn’t think anything of it when he says it.
He’s lying on Robin’s bed, squished between a diverse collection of childhood teddy bears. Robin’s sat opposite him up by the headboard, her feet knocking against his knees; she’s massaging Pond’s cream into her elbows, and the room smells of cocoa butter.
Steve breathes in leisurely.
He thinks back to just a few months ago, when he’d first gotten the job at Scoops Ahoy—when he’d found out that his only co-worker was going to be a Robin Buckley: who the hell is she? he’d thought with a familiar carelessness, an echo from his junior year. Before the monsters. Before…
“Hey, Robin,” Steve begins. The words come slowly, like he’s wandering through the thought. “Do you ever think that, like… that it’s kinda crazy, y’know, how we ended up here?”
Robin pauses in her massaging. She gives him a dry look. “This is a pretty standard Sunday evening for me.”
Steve snorts. “Not like that, dickhead.”
Although maybe it is like that actually.
Maybe it’s about how he now watches Murder, She Wrote in the Buckley’s living room without Robin’s parents batting an eye; how they said he could join them for dinner beforehand, and then he kept showing up earlier and earlier to the point where him and Robin just spend the whole day together, and it’s never awkward, there’s no quips or whatever from her dad about them secretly being together; and maybe it feels sorta like a fairytale in the best way; maybe he feels a little like Laurie except he doesn’t want to propose to Jo.
And maybe it’s that the whole thing is just insane: that the entire goddamn trajectory of his life somehow took this wild turn, has made him land here, of all places, and he doesn’t even mean it in an asshole kind of way.
He means…
“Guess I’m just… just thinking. Like, it all kinda worked out, y’know?” Even as he says it, he knows it’s a risk—because they’ve not talked about Starcourt, not really, they’ve just talked around it, but this hardly counts, right? It’s just a joke, it’s just… “Yeah, I, um, got my head knocked around, but, it, uh, it meant I ended up here, so.”
He wants Robin to laugh—or at least, he thinks he does.
She doesn’t. She just goes very still.
He feels something twist in his gut; she’s got this way of looking at him, like he’s accidentally said more than what he thought he did.
“Steve.”
Robin crawls forward, clumsy and urgent. She grabs hold of his wrist. He feels the grease of body lotion as her thumb moves in tiny circles against his skin.
“That didn’t need to happen,” she says so seriously, and for some reason that’s almost the thing that does it, the thing that almost gets him to break on a slow Sunday evening in October, because whenever his stupid brain brings him back to July, to blood and pain and a deep, unimagineable fear, he tries to remember how it felt: how he laughed through it with Robin in a bathroom stall, and it would almost be enough to soothe the sting, that he could endure it, could endure anything so long as he could have this, please just let me have—
“We could’ve had the most boring summer of our lives,” Robin says, with a smile that’s a little sad, a little wistful, but always kind. “And I still would’ve…”
He hears them again, those words he’s been clinging to.
Listen to me, Steve. It’s shocked me to my core, but I like you. I really like you.
“It just would’ve taken longer,” Robin finishes. Her eyes dart all over his face, and he suspects that he knows part of what she’s seeing: the ghosts of bruises. “Okay?”
For a moment, Steve can’t speak. “Okay.”
Robin shuffles up next to him, sitting right on top of one of her bears—“You’re squishing him,” Steve points out, to which Robin just snorts—and then she’s hugging him, maybe tighter than he’s ever been hugged before.
He lets his head fall forward and breathes.
They break apart eventually. If there’s a wet patch on her shirt, Robin doesn’t point it out—just says there’s cake for dessert, and she doesn’t move back to her spot, so her elbows are practically always in danger of catching Steve in the ribs.
And God, Steve tries to believe it: that he could have all of this without… That he could’ve always had it.
He tries.