Work Text:
Tammy Thompson gets on a train for Nashville at the end of July.
Robin knows this because Tammy tells her she will. Or at least, tells Robin and Steve and a bunch of the other survivors of ol’ Clickety-Clackety’s history class. It’s after the memorial for the Starcourt victims held in the school gym, when everyone’s milling around the parking lot, all wanting to leave and waiting for someone else to do it first.
‘I feel like it’s even more important now?’ Tammy says. ‘Like, I have a duty to honour their sacrifice. With my voice.’
Which is…nice? It should be nice, shouldn’t it? If Start-of-Summer Robin had heard that, she’d have swooned at how empathetic and creative and inspired Tammy was. Tammy is still, objectively, swoon-worthy; so, so pretty in her mourning dress.
(dark charcoal not black, to match the teeny pink accents she’s smuggled in there, her watch strap, the little heart-shaped studs in her ears).
Robin wants to swoon, wants to so badly, but she’s After Robin now. and what After Robin wants most of all is to say this isn’t about you? It’s not even about me, and I was there.
Steve, seeming to sense her internal scowl, goes to hold her hand, remembers they’re surrounded by a good chunk of the Hawkins High gossip network, and briefly rubs her forearm instead.
He’s been doing that a lot, lately, seeming to sense what she’s thinking. She’s the same; they can link eyes now and wordlessly know the other has reached their limit of talking, or being outside, or just having to act like a functioning human.
Maybe the drugs have linked their minds, or some kind of radiation from that drill-probe-megalaser thing - Robin could and has broken out in a flop sweat at how those are Actual Things That Have Actually Happened To Her. But mostly she thinks it’s because no one, not even Dustin and Erica, no one else in the world will ever know how it felt to be tied to those chairs, in that room. The memory of it is smeared all over her every waking thought, and Steve’s too, so of course they think the same now.
Still, she doesn’t answer his calls the day Tammy leaves, just curls up on her bed and cries a little but mostly just lies there, thinking about the difference between the Tammy in her head, and the Tammy that just waved goodbye to Hawkins, and how vanishingly unlikely it would have been for Robin to have kissed either of them, and also how she’s not sure she can breathe without Steve anymore, and she’s doesn’t begrudge him that, at all, but she can sure as hell be angry about what got them to that point.
It’s not cathartic. She wakes up the next day feeling mopey and sort of bleached out, and is still in her jammies at lunch when there’s a knock on the door.
‘Ok, look’ Steve says, from behind a large cardboard box. ‘This is a long story, but I think you’ll like the ending, and there are multiple instances of me looking like a jackass.’
He puts the box on the coffee table, because Robin’s mom is not so understanding of her and Steve’s need to be close that she’ll be fine with coming back from the store to find Steve in Robin’s bedroom and Robin in her pyjamas. Also, Steve’s kind of used to their living room now, as opposed to the first time he came over, when he’d gaped like a fish for a full minute and then said are your parents really hippies or are they just trying way too hard to make people think they are?
‘So my folks didn’t really do Halloween, because, ehhh’, Steve makes a yadda-yadda gesture, while Robin listlessly unpicks a rafiawork coaster.
‘Riff-raff hanging on the doorbell, better things to do than traipse me around the streets all night, what if I ate too much candy and puked on the rug, your standard rich asshole shit, yeah? So they’d dump me on my nana.’
He flips open the box and extracts - oh. Oh. A photo album.
‘Baby pictures?’ Robin feels like she just went from black and white to colour. ‘Harrington, are you going to show me baby pictures? Halloween baby pictures?’
‘Will you be patient?’ Steve holds the album out of reach of her grabby hands. ‘I need to set the scene.’
‘Hurry up!’ Robin squeaks. ‘You can’t just dangle the possibility of silly little outfits and then withhold it!’
‘Ugh.’ Steve rolls his eyes, smiling. ‘Ok, fine, Cliff Notes version. Nana loved Halloween, she could sew, she had very clear ideas on what I’d be dressed as. Go nuts.’
He presents the album like he’s offering a crown to a princess. Robin opens it to the first spread, takes one look and literally has to hug it to her chest for a minute.
‘Steve, I want to make it absolutely clear that I am not condoning the military-industrial complex in any way when I say OH MY GOD LOOK AT THE CUTE LITTLE G.I..’
Steve utters a bone-deep sigh and pulls a granny square afghan over his head.
‘Are you kidding me with this, Harrington? Your helmet’s falling over one eye, if you were a puppy you’d have one ear inside out. This is the best day of my life.’
‘It gets worse.’
‘I’m assuming by worse you mean even better, because oh, oh no, look at you in your little tux! Oh god, there’s a cowboy, I’m going to EXPIRE, and this -‘
Robin flips a page. ‘-this is a gladiator outfit. Steve, why did your grandmother dress you as a gladiator in late October?’
‘There was a cloak for when we were outside.’
‘I’ll rephrase the question. Why did your grandmother dress you as a gladiator period?’
‘It was the only one of his classic roles she hadn’t done yet.’
Robin tears her gaze away from teeny tiny Steve and his teeny tiny sword and shield. ‘Who?’
‘My nana’, Steve says, in the manner of someone divulging an ancient and embarrassing family curse, ‘was a Lockwood Lass.’
‘A what?’
‘Sean Lockwood? You know, Bronco Ward? The Sacrifice? Merneith The Woman Pharaoh?’
‘Mer-what now?’ Robin splutters.
‘The movie star! From the 50s!’ Steve reaches into the box and produces one of those glossy pictures you get actors to sign. It’s a black and white shot of some Montgomery Clift-ish guy leaning in a doorframe. Rumpled suit, no tie, lit cigarette dangling insouciantly from one hand. It’s captioned Sean Lockwood as Alec Kane in Drink To Me Only (1952). Kind of reminds her of someone, from a certain angle.
Robin shrugs. ‘Never heard of him. And I’m a film nerd, so that means he’s pretty damn obscure.’
‘Hey!’ Steve is incensed. ‘Sean’s scheduling conflicts are the only reason Horst Buchholz got to be one of the Magnificent Seven, show some respect.’
Briefly distracted from the thing he’s been using to distract her, Robin says ‘If you know so much about minor 50s matinee idols, how come you played so dumb when we were interviewing with Keith?’
Steve waves a hand over the picture and the box and the photo album of it all. ‘And have to explain to Keith that I know who Sean Lockwood is because my nana had the hots for him so bad she was still dressing me up as him 20 years later?’
‘Aw, I think it’s cute.’ Robin flicks back through the album. ‘I bet it reminded her of her youth.’
‘It’s not cute, Robs, she was weirdly horny about the guy.’
Robin thwaps at Steve’s arm. ‘Hey, asshole, there’s nothing weird about women of a certain age still experiencing desire.’
Steve holds the photograph up to his face and gestures between them. ‘Uh, it is when they’re experiencing desire for someone who looks like their grandson?’
Oh, that’s why this Lockwood guy’s face rang a bell. Robin tilts her head on one side and squints. There is a resemblance, but…
’Nah’, she says eventually. ‘He’s what you’d call classically handsome.’
Steve glares at her. ‘Ok, One: ouch. Two: like you know shit about what makes a guy hot.’
Which, fair, but being trauma bonded for life has only increased the enjoyment Robin derives from dunking on Steve, so she shoots back ‘and you do?’
‘Well, everyone looks’, Steve says, rummaging in the box again.
‘What?’
He looks up. ‘What?’
‘Nothing’, Robin says, deciding now is not the time. ‘So when you said I’d like the ending of the story, did you mean I’d like that you know slightly more about movies than I thought but in a highly specific way?’
Steve lifts a ring binder out of the box and hands it to her. ‘No, we’re not at the ending yet.’
Robin opens the binder to be greeted by a yellowing, typewritten sheet cheerfully announcing itself as the first issue of the Sean Lockwood Fanclub newsletter. It’s followed by a few more typewritten sheets, and then some newsprint booklets and a few years worth of actual colour printed little magazines, and then a run of stapled-together mimeographs, which eventually give way to blurry photocopied single sheets. It’s a little sweet, and a little sad. ‘She still subscribes to this?’
‘Uh, no’ Steve does the particular futzing-with-his-hair move that Robin associates with him feeling awkward. ‘She, um, she passed beginning of last year.’
Robin turns to the most recent newsletter. ‘This says June 1985.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Steve. Are you subscribing to the Sean Lockwood fanclub newsletter in memory of your nana?’
‘Kind of?’ Steve reaches out and touches the ring binder, gently. ‘After she was gone Mom and Dad just hired people to clear out her apartment and I only found out when they called for the keys. When I got there I only had a minute to take anything I wanted to keep and just…she always had the latest newsletter on the hall table. Always. And the last time I was young enough to get sent to her for Halloween I told her I was too big for a stupid costume and…so I just grabbed her box of Sean stuff and then the reminder to renew her subscription was right on top and…yeah.’
Robin does some math in her head and realises this would have been barely two months after Steve first discovered that monsters were real. She taps him on the knee. ‘Hey.’
Steve heys her back.
‘I really like you.’ Robin says.
‘Yeah?’ He looks surprised. Robin is dimly aware that at one point in the not all that recent past she would have described Steve’s face as punchable. It’s a thought that seems to have come from someone else’s brain.
‘Yeah’, she nods. ‘Treasure this moment, Harrington. I won’t be saying it out loud very often.’
‘Noted.’
‘So, the ending of the story is that you loved your nana?’
‘Nope’, Steve reaches into the box one more time. ‘The ending of the story is this month’s newsletter.’
Robin takes the sheets he hands her. Sheets plural, because we’ve suddenly jumped from one photocopied page to - she riffles through them - eight.
SEAN’S CONTROVERSIAL NEW ROLE, the front page blares. YOU HAVE YOUR SAY! BUMPER LETTERS PAGE.
Underneath is a picture of - ok, yes, grading men’s looks is not Robin’s strong point, but it seems to her Lockwood is wearing well, for a guy who must be pushing 60 now. He’s gone grey, and a little thicker around the middle, but the camera still loves him. He’s smiling widely in the photo, which makes the resemblance to Steve jump out much more.
We already knew that I’ll Be On The Spanish Steps would feature Sean’s character returning to Italy to mourn an old love affair, but as reported in last month’s newsletter, Variety recently revealed that the affair in question was with another man-
‘Oh wow’, Robin breathes.
Steve turns to the next sheet. ‘Yeah, look, you have to see the letters.’
Robin glances down at the first letter and sees I will not know if you publish this as I am cancelling my subscription I am appalled followed by several Bible verses before Steve grabs it off her again.
‘Shit shit shit, no, sorry, not that page, this page.’
~I for one think it is very brave of him
~I wasn’t sure how I felt about this but Sean’s quotes in the Variety interview made me appreciate why he has taken this role, and how characteristically generous of him to say that in a better world this part would have gone to James Dean
~My son ‘came out’ to me last year, I was shocked and sad at first but then I realised he is still my baby and I love him no matter what. All he ever sees in the media are stories about that awful virus and how boys like him will die young and alone. Do you know how proud I was to tell him my hero is playing an older gay gentleman who has lived a full life and known love?
~I can’t wait for this brouhaha to be over. It’s the 1980s for crying out loud, homosexuals are really not that scary. Can we please focus on the truly interesting thing about that interview, Sean’s comment that ‘thoughts of second chances and regrets are always on my mind when I visit Rome’ WHAT DOES IT MEAN? Merneith was shot at Cinecitta, is this finally proof that the rumours about him and Josephine Esperanto were true?????
~I never thought I would say this within these pages but some of the talk about this movie has got my goat so here goes: for as long as I’ve been a member of this fanclub I have known that I like girls! We have ALWAYS been here! Some of us just think he’s a good actor! My partner loves to tease me when the newsletter drops into our mailbox. She says if she is my wife that makes Sean my mistress
There are more support letters than hatemail. Only just, admittedly, but definitely more. Robin counts them. She reads all of them. She reads the I like girls one twice.
After a while there’s a discreet cough, and when Robin looks up, Steve is setting a tray in front of her with a can of pop and a plate of sandwiches. Her stomach growls. She’s suddenly very aware that she hasn’t showered today.
‘I mean’, Steve says ‘there’s not a chance in hell it’ll show here, but Indy must have an arthouse theatre? I could drive us.’
Robin swallows the mouthful of PB&J she’s been tearing into. ‘You want to come and see a queer independent movie with me?’
‘No, I want you to come and see the new Sean Lockwood movie with me. If only to talk me out of the costume when I start missing Nana at Halloween.’
Robin digs into the VHS tapes at the bottom of the Sean box and makes the welcome discovery that Merneith the Woman Pharaoh is an absolute knockout. She thinks about how it might feel, to have Steve memories that don’t involve polyester uniforms, pain, nausea or the smell of burnt hellbeast.
‘Ok dingus. I admit it. I did like the ending.’