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Steve Harrington is the perfect guy. King Steve, Steve ‘The Hair’ Harrington, The Machine, everything. He’s every straight girls dream guy, and he’d been through nearly every girl his age by the time he graduated. He’s perfect, he’s charismatic, untouchable, hot.
Steve Harrington is the kind of guy you imagine having no problems. The kind of guy who never cries, never breaks down, the only problems he has are with teachers, and freaks, as far as anybody in his highschool career knew.
Steve Harrington is, in truth, pathetic.
He’s a freak. An outlier, overdramatic, mental. He’s a nutcase with anger issues, one that his parents hide behind closed doors. He doesn’t even know what’s wrong with him, because they refused to admit anything. When he got old enough that his tantrums became something unbecoming, they just… disappeared.
When people said something might be wrong with him, that they should commit him, have him see a shrink, they upped their punishments. Less food, time in his room. They forced him into situations that triggered tantrums until he learned how to shut the hell up and cope with the feeling.
They forced him to be normal, to become Steve ‘The Hair’ Harrington, and then they disappeared. All they ever left him was how to be fake. How to hide himself, his feelings, how to integrate into society and how all of that was required. Taught him that his social standing was life or death.
When he got old enough, his parents encouraged him to go to parties. Stay in the sports teams, mingle, get a lifeguard job to look normal. To look like the perfect son who just lashed out a bit longer than other kids growing up.
He learned how to be normal. He learned how to move his face just right, how to look loose, how to talk to who. He made eye contact, he stopped moving so much. Keep his legs still, take his feet off the seat, stop fidgeting. It was a necessity.
It was life or death, for ten, twelve, fourteen, seventeen year old Steve Harrington.
Then life and death became demogorgons, labs, the upside down, mind flayers. Then life and death became Russians, Robin, ice cream, Starscout, and drugs. Life and death was so much more than what he thought it’d been.
He’s not so scared of his dad holding a belt, or a paddle, or his mom and her glasses. He’s not so scared of the sleep medication forced down his throat, now that he knows what’s really out there. When he knows that they won’t kill him. It’s too much for their image to take, their son beaten to death in their own home.
So, when life and death became so much, his original life and death became… nothing, in comparison.
He can’t keep up the pretense. The only thing holding it in place has been fear, and he’s so, so, painfully, utterly filled with fear. With terror, a gut wrenching horror that seeps into his veins and his bones, cuts into his skin and plunges behind his eyes.
It’s all done and over with now, but he can’t stop feeling like it isn’t. Like at any moment a new gate will rip open beneath his feet, or a stray demogorgan will crash into his car. The feeling ripples under his skin.
He’s with Robin when he comes to the realization that there isn’t any need to keep himself in check. The kids he needs to keep himself together around are gone, shipped off to their own houses or spending the night with people they want to make sure are still alive.
Dustin tried to stay with him, but he shooed him off with shaking hands and plastered on a smile. Nancy, Jonathan, Hopper, every adult that had shown up has left to drive themselves or others home.
It’s just him. And Robin.
Getting traumatized, and then truth drugged, together really bonds some people. Even if they hadn’t become quick close friends working together before, they would’ve after tonight. He needs to drive her home, and he’s thinking about this as he watches the final car pull out of an empty Starscout parking lot.
EMTs have come and gone, the fire department put out the fire twenty minutes ago and packed up their bags. Police got statements from everybody who needed to give statements, and they too left. His car is sitting in the far corner of the parking lot, Robin sitting with her knees to her chest on the sidewalk, and Steve leaning against the hood trying to look okay.
He’s realized he doesn’t need to look okay. There’s no point in trying. Robin has seen him throwing up, crying, freaking out. It’s not his worse, but she’s about to see that, too. He can’t get her home, and himself into his room before it comes crashing down.
That’s a lie. He could. He doesn’t want to, though. It’s building up, it feels like a nightmare. He thinks he might hurt somebody if one more small thing goes wrong. He hates this. He hates that his parents couldn’t train this out of him, too.
No shrinks, no committing him, it’d look bad. Nobody could help him fix this, fix this broken part of his brain that made him lose it when things got too much. All they could do was hide it. Teach him how to hide it until they thought they’d fixed it.
He learned how to freak out quietly.
He doesn’t want to freak out quietly, anymore.
The parking lot is empty, save for a girl sitting on the sidewalk with her hair hung in front of her face, and a dirty Scoop’s Ahoy uniform clinging to her sweaty skin.
Life or death has changed.
“Rob?” He croaks, because it just feels disrespectful to not warn her. He wants to scream, he wants to break something, he wants to cry. He wants to hit, and he wants to lose it. He wants to throw a tantrum, loathe as he is to that word.
Robin lifts her head, shows off her blood shot eyes, tear stained cheeks, and the dirt that’s splattered over her nose and forehead. “Yeah?” Her voice sounds as bad as his does. He wonders if she feels like he does, right now, but he doubts it. He’s never met someone broken like him.
If anybody was broken like him, it’d be Robin.
“I’m gonna freak out.” His voice shakes, it feels like he’s crawling up a mountain with sprained joints and torn muscles trying to talk without screaming. He wants to yell at her, lash out, blame her.
It’s not her fault, he tells himself. It’s not. And it’s not his fault, and it’s not Dustin’s fault, and it’s not Erica’s fault. It’s the Russians' fault, it’s the universe, it’s the circumstances. It’s luck. So he doesn’t say it.
Robin snorts, and he realizes he isn’t being clear enough. “Yeah, I feel you.”
“No, like–” His hands grip the hood of the car, nails scraping across the underside. The sensation makes him grunt and rip his hands away like they’ve been burned, but it’s still there. That grinding feeling against his nails, it feels like life or death. It feels like his hand is being burned.
It sounds like he’s been punched, shaking his hands out and wiping them off on his scratchy uniform. Expectedly, that doesn’t help.
“Rob, I’m gonna freak out.” He chokes. His eyes burn with tears, his skin feels prickly, he wants to rip his nails off. He wants to tug his hair out so it stops touching his neck, he wants to rip his uniform to shreds and burn it. He wants to take the pads of his fingers off so he can stop feeling like this.
“What?” Robin’s on her feet, he can hear her moving, but he can’t open his eyes. His hands are flapping so hard his wrists hurt, but it’s not helping with the feeling. He wants to scream. “Okay. Okay, that’s fine. Freak– Freak out, man.”
He needs to throw something.
He jerks, his movements aren’t smooth, they aren’t Steve ‘The Hair’ Harrington. They’re the movements of the Harrington’s angry, fucked up kid that makes everyone uncomfortable by merely being in a room. They’re tight, tense, and so uncoordinated he hits his hip on the car on his war toward the drivers side door.
His hands fumble for the handle, yanking the door open. He doesn’t know what he can throw that he has on hand. He wants to throw something that’ll break.
There’s a small pile of glass Coca Cola bottles in his back seat. He grabs one, spins on his heel, and throws it. He screams, tears breaking. It shatters, but he isn’t satisfied. The sound is too loud, it grates on his ears, but he needs to do it again. He doesn’t want to hurt Robin, he doesn’t want to hurt himself, but he needs to hurt something.
So he digs out another bottle, throws it, screams. He starts to feel a little better, even though the wind is blowing his hair around and his nails still ache. He pants, like he’s done an entire work out. He risks a glance at Robin, but she’s sat back down.
He almost expected her to be gone, or staring at him with fear, alarm, disgust. To look like she’s ready to bolt at any minute.
She’s sitting on the edge of the sidewalk again, head resting on her chin staring at him. She looks…
He doesn’t know.
Not disgusted, not afraid, not alarmed. Not what he’s used to. He almost wishes it was something predictable, something he knows how to react to, but it isn’t. She isn’t. She’s new, she’s different, she’s weird. She doesn’t care that he's screaming in an empty parking lot and shattering glass.
He doesn’t know what to do with that.
So he throws another bottle. He doesn’t scream this time. He watches it shatter, hand’s twitching, flicking, fidgeting. He can’t seem to stop cracking his wrist, or his knuckles. He jerks his shoulder back, takes a breath, and screams.
It doesn’t echo around the parking lot, or the trees behind him, but it feels good. He hasn’t been allowed to scream like this in years. But there’s nobody here, nobody who cares, so he lets himself fall apart.
He tumbles to the asphalt, leaning against the car door. He tangles his hands into his hair and he tugs, clenching his eyes shut. He’s so tired, he feels like he should be done freaking out now, but it’s all still there. He’s so done with it, done with feeling self destructive and angry, but it’s out of his control.
He can’t stop crying, either.
It all seems to come in waves. He doesn’t know how long he sits there, varying from sitting still, hands in his hair, breathing as best he can, and hitting his elbow against the car. Slamming his fist into his chest, grunting, hitting his knees, flapping his hands, anything to make the feeling stop.
When he opens his eyes, and the remaining light fixtures around star scout don’t hurt, he thinks he might be in the clear. At least enough to get home. He’s tired, but he can make it to bed.
He turns to look at Robin.
She’s sitting a few feet away, also leaning up against his car. She’s staring at the sky, hands fidgeting with the string on her pants. He sighs.
It all feels so dramatic, now. He hates this moment, when he’s finished freaking out, and he realizes that it really wasn’t that big of a deal.
In this instance, maybe a freak out is warranted, actually. He almost died. He was tortured. He was about to be tortured even worse. He was non-consensually drugged, and then he almost died.
It just is such a snap, from feeling like the world is ending again, feeling like he’ll never feel okay again and he should just end it all, or like he’s going to hurt the next person who talks to him; to being– Normal.
He feels fine, now. If a little wrung out.
“Okay.” He pushes himself up, stretches. “Okay, okay. Okay.” Oh, he’s looping. He hates looping, his parents hate it when he loops. He gets weird looks when he does it, but he can’t stop, he doesn’t even know how or why it stops on its own. He just keeps saying the word until he doesn’t anymore. “Okay, okay, okay. Ookoh my god, okay. We can go.” He breathes.
Robin groans, as if she’s comfortable sitting with her legs sprawled out and her back nestled into the crook of his car’s tire seam. “Do we have to?” She grumbles, as if he didn’t just… Yeah. “My parents are gonna be all… rahh.”
He gets the feeling she wants to say more, that she would be saying more, if they hadn’t just been tortured by Russians, and then drugged, and then fighting for their lives. “Well, we can’t stay here all night.” He jokes. He almost wishes they could. He doesn’t want to go back to an empty house.
It’s better than a full one, in this instance, but…
“Can’t we?” Robin whines, tipping sideways slowly until she’s laying barely a few inches from his leg. “We can spoon in the backseat, you can tell everyone you got the girl.”
“Mm. It’d be good for my resume, hm?. Can get any girl, even the queer ones?” He quips. She doesn’t laugh, but a tired smile cracks her face, “Why didn’t your parents come pick you up?”
“I dunno.” She shrugs. She’s inching closer to him, wiggling across the asphalt. He finds he doesn’t mind when she drops her head into his lap, squirming until she’s comfortable. “Work? Maybe they’re asleep. Maybe they didn’t realize I wasn’t at a friends house or something.”
“Maybe.”
They sit in silence. He’s fine with silence. He’s tired.
He thinks they both doze off for a while, because the next time he opens his eyes she’s rolled over and curled her legs around so her knees are pressing into his hips. He groans, rolling his shoulders and flapping his hands. He shakes his head, squeezes his eyes, tries to remember how to function.
He’s so tired.
“Rob. Hey, Robin, wakey, wakey.” He yawns, shaking her shoulder and waving the other one about. A shiver wracks his shoulders, an impressive feat considering it’s summer in Hawkins. Robin mumbles, but opens her eyes to blink up at him. “We gotta get up.”
“I know.” Her voice is muffled by his Scoop’s Ahoy mandated shorts, “”re your paren’s home?”
“Nope.” He yawns again, jaw protesting. “Why?”
“C’n I come ov’r?”
“Sure, yeah. Whatever you want, Rob.”
Kill two birds with one stone, he supposes. His house isn’t empty, she doesn’t have to face her parents. Three birds, even. He can make sure she’s okay, that she hasn’t been taken again. He thinks the moment they’re separated next he might freak out, but that’s a problem for future Steve.
Present Steve needs to get a half asleep Robin into his passenger seat, and then he needs to drive the two of them twenty minutes home. And then present Steve needs to get them in bed, and possibly changed. Robin could probably fit some of his clothes. They’d swamp her, but they’d fit.
So that’s what he does. He kicks his legs until Robin gets up, helps her stand by the hand, and pulls out of Starscout parking. He watches the burned building disappear in his mirrors, and wonders what’ll happen to it. It feels…
He doesn’t know. It feels wrong. It feels detached, broken, weird. He thinks he should be feeling more, but he also thinks there isn’t any lost love between him, the Russians, the mind flayer, and his part time job scooping ice cream.
He focuses on the road.
The Harrington residence is the same as always, even when Robin is by his side being tiredly dragged up a flight of stairs. She doesn’t bother leaving the room to change, but he has the decency not to look. She does the same for him, despite her teasing comment about how it’s not like it’ll do anything for her to see him naked.
There’s a moment where they both pretend she’s going to sleep anywhere but in the same room as him, before he decides to run with being too tired to set up the couch for another person and crashing into bed. She crawls in next to him, and there’s nothing weird about it, he finds.
It feels right.
(He can’t stop thinking about how she didn’t care. She didn’t say a word about his tantrum. Didn’t even look upset about it.)
(He thinks he might love her. He thinks they might be soulmates. Capital P Soulmates.)