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Working with Steve Harrington is… not what Robin had expected.
It’s abundantly clear that he doesn’t want to be here (join the club, buddy), but it isn’t half as difficult to get him to do things as Robin had thought it would be.
Honestly, she’d been expecting a spoiled rich kid: someone who had no idea how to do the kind of labor involved in a minimum wage job. Instead, she’s (almost pleasantly) surprised to find that when the time comes, he actually buckles down and works. He scoops ice cream, he restocks, he cleans, he takes on customers with a smile that could actually pass as real – he does his job.
(He isn’t without complaints, of course; any time there are no customers within earshot, he has some kind of catty, judgmental comment to make. It should be annoying, but he’s actually—shockingly—pretty funny. Robin’s had to bite down on her cheek a few times to keep from laughing, just so she doesn’t encourage him.)
The surprises don’t end there.
Never in a million years would Robin have guessed that Steve Harrington is good with kids. He reeks of Only Child (Robin isn’t throwing stones here, she speaks from experience), and yet, he seems to have a soft spot for the little suckers. He pretends he doesn’t, but she’s caught him sneaking extra toppings onto their ice cream when he thinks she isn’t looking, and spraying out silly faces and shapes with the whipped cream on their sundaes. He doesn’t even seem to lose his patience with them quite as quickly as he does with wishy-washy adults.
(And frankly, Steve is welcome to the kids; Robin won’t pretend she has half as much patience when she has to serve them.)
Maybe learning that Steve is friends with (used to babysit?) a pack of feral preteens should have cleared some things up, but it really only muddies the waters further.
When Robin asks after them, he gives her some vague story about helping one of the kids find his lost cat, and how one of the other ones is Nancy Wheeler’s younger brother, and there’s something about Billy Hargrove in there, and maybe a junkyard, and Robin eventually gives up on getting a straight answer out of him. What does she care, anyway?
(Seriously, why is she interested?)
At the beginning of summer, when Robin had learned she would be spending the summer slinging ice cream with Steve, she’d prepared herself to shoot down any and all flirtatious comments, and possibly report him to a manager if it got annoying enough. It isn’t that she’s particularly full of herself—she doesn’t think she’s that alluring or irresistible—it’s just that Steve Harrington flirts like breathing. Everyone knows that.
Except– he doesn’t.
He’s polite to Robin, if a little disinterested, and they quickly move on from there to antagonizing one another at most given opportunities, but that’s it.
Robin would almost be offended (which is irritating in and of itself, because she hadn’t wanted him to flirt with her in the first place; she still doesn’t, it’s just that the idea that she could be the one exception to the rule is a little disheartening. Maybe even frightening. Like maybe he can sense there’s something so wrong with her that he doesn’t even bother trying), but it doesn’t seem like he’s flirting with anyone else, either. Not really.
Sure, he flashes a smile and a wink now and then (and how other people don’t think this is smarmy is beyond Robin), but he doesn’t push it past what he needs to do to get a nicer tip. He doesn’t linger, he doesn’t strike up conversations, and he doesn’t ask for phone numbers. The one time a girl actually does give him her number, written on a napkin with what looks like a little heart, Steve smiles and thanks her and then tosses the napkin in the trash as soon as she’s out the door.
It's baffling, really. All of it. But none of it so much as the presence Eddie Munson.
To be honest, beyond the one class they’d shared and the way he’d effortlessly drawn the attention of the girl Robin had wanted to look at her so badly, Robin really hadn’t paid much attention to Steve in school. She hadn’t paid much attention to Munson, either; the most interaction she’d had with him had been when he’d nearly whacked her in the head while throwing his arms wide during one of his lunchtime monologues (and he’d graciously taken the reflexive shove she’d given him and then gotten out of her space). She’d been vaguely aware of some kind of gossip involving the two of them—something-something, King Steve is friends with The Freak, something-something—but Robin hadn’t paid much attention to that, either.
But it turns out it’s true.
Eddie visits at least as often as Steve’s child friends, but unlike with the kids (who mostly seem to visit when they want to get into the movies, or pump Steve for free samples), Steve will time his breaks to when Eddie arrives. Often, they’ll ditch the shop, coming back fifteen minutes later (usually pushing the limit) still laughing about whatever the hell they’d been off doing. Sometimes, though, Steve will get Eddie an ice cream and they’ll post up at one of the back tables, where Robin has occasionally snuck glances at them while they talk.
Not in a creepy way, she’s just– what the hell do the two of them even have in common? How did the golden boy athlete become friends with the drug-dealing metalhead?
Robin had briefly entertained the idea that their relationship had something to do with the badly-kept secret of Eddie’s side job—maybe when Steve went off with him on his break, they were making a deal?—but she’s pretty sure you don’t get your drug dealer a strawberry ice cream cone and sit with him at a table so small that your feet get tangled up underneath it. You don’t laugh or lean in to talk quietly under the noise of the concertina music pumping through the speakers.
Really, if it were anyone else, Robin would almost think–
But no. What she really thinks is that she’s reading too much into things. She’s been knocked off kilter by the fact that Steve isn’t as much of an asshole as she’d thought he would be—or at least not as much of one as he used to be—and now she’s just throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what weird new thing about him sticks.
(And maybe – maybe she’s projecting, just a little. Maybe she hasn’t spent this much regular time with someone in too long, and maybe she’s actually—reluctantly—starting to like Steve, and– well. Wouldn’t it be nice if they had something in common? Wouldn’t it be nice if just one person was safe to talk to?)
(But she knows that’s ridiculous. She knows.)
She watches now as Steve checks his watch and sighs. He jams his hat back on his head and Eddie snickers, reaching out to tug on a lock of Steve’s hair. Steve waves his hand away, but he looks more fond than irritated. He leans in to say something to Eddie, who nods, and then Steve reaches out to squeeze Eddie’s shoulder, giving him a gentle, familiar sort of shake, before he heads back towards the counter.
“About time,” Robin says as Steve retakes his post. “I thought you were going to abandon me to spend the whole afternoon with your little buddy.”
“Are you kidding? I’m not letting you take all the tips,” Steve retorts. “I netted five dollars from Mrs. Johnson earlier, and I’m getting my share.”
“Oh yeah, you have a real way with the older ladies of Hawkins,” Robin drawls.
“I do, thank you very much,” Steve sniffs; he’s mostly pretending to be offended, and Robin bites down on the little snicker that wants to come out.
When she glances back out over the tables, checking to see if there are any messes to be cleaned, she realizes Eddie is still there, the last dregs of his ice cream cone melting in his hand. He doesn’t seem to notice – he’s too busy watching Steve.
There’s something to his expression, something on his face, but Robin shakes her head, moving instead to check if any flavors need to be restocked. It’s nothing.
It's probably nothing.
Between one thing and another, what with the melted people monster and the fireworks and the feds, Robin briefly forgets about the conversation she and Steve had had on the sticky floor of the movie theater bathroom.
She forgets about Steve admitting that he’s been in love twice. About how he’d readily spoken about Nancy Wheeler but had hesitated when Robin had asked after the second person. How he’d said, “You first. I gave you one, now it’s your turn. You ever been in love?”, and had effectively distracted her, because she doesn’t think she’s ever been in love, but she doesn’t know because she’s never had the chance to find out, and–
She doesn’t forget the easy way Steve had accepted her – teased her and made her feel so normal in spite of everything going on. That sticks. Everything else, though, takes a backseat.
So she forgets until she and Steve are sitting in the open back of an ambulance, wrapped in shock blankets, waiting for someone to tell them what to do, and suddenly Eddie Munson is there.
And it makes sense that he’s there, if only because Steve had all but begged Chief Hopper to call Wayne Munson instead of his parents, and Hopper, beat to hell and practically holding Eleven up, who had been clinging to him like a particularly dangerous but sleepy koala, hadn’t been in the mood to argue. So it makes as much sense as anything else, anyway, that Eddie is there, but then he’s right there, having pushed through the crowd and thrown himself immediately into Steve’s space.
“Oh my god,” he says, reaching up to cup Steve’s face in careful hands. He sounds different than Robin’s ever heard him in school. Quieter. Almost scared. “Oh my god, Steve.”
And Steve, instead of brushing Eddie off, instead of pushing him out of his space, reaches up and wraps his hands around Eddie’s wrists and leans into his touch, and that–
That is when Robin remembers. That’s when it clicks.
Steve had only broken up with Nancy late last year, and who has he been spending all his spare time with since then? Who’s the only person Robin has seen Steve hang around with this summer who wasn’t one of his rugrats? Who might Steve have hesitated to tell her about when she asked who he’s in love with?
“Oh my god,” Robin hisses out, in a kind of shouting whisper that apparently isn’t subtle, because it jolts Eddie and Steve back to reality.
Eddie whips his hands away from Steve’s face, but he doesn’t move away. Instead, he turns a fierce look on Robin, something that says he’s daring her to say anything, to do anything about what she’s just realized. But then Steve’s got his hand on Eddie’s cheek, turning his head back so his eyes are on Steve.
“It’s okay,” Steve says, voice low in a way that might have been soothing had it not been wrecked by screaming and stomach acid. “Robin’s– she’s cool. She’s safe.”
Robin nods rapidly before she has to stop in deference to her aching head. “I’m– yeah, I’m cool. I’m, uh…” She points vaguely between the three of them and then crosses her fingers together in a way she hopes conveys her message.
We’re like this, she means. We’re close. We’re the same.
Eddie’s brows go up in surprise, but she doesn’t really register the rest of his reaction, because it’s just hit her:
We’re close.
We’re the same.
She’s not alone. There’s someone else, someone she’s safe with, someone who had bled for her, who had accepted her, who is like her. She has Steve all the way in her corner now.
(And possibly his boyfriend? Eddie Munson. Go fucking figure.)
She comes back to herself when Steve grasps her wrist, gently shaking her arm.
“Hey,” he says. “They want us to go to the hospital to check a few more things. They said your parents are gonna meet you there.”
Robin glances around and sees that they’ve been joined by two paramedics and an older man who Robin assumes must be Wayne Munson standing behind Eddie.
“Yeah,” Robin manages, feeling the last two days rush back in all at once. “Yeah, okay.”
She clambers up into the ambulance under the watchful eye of the medics, and Steve follows after, a little more unsteady, but moving without help.
Eddie looks like he’s about to follow them in when Mr. Munson grabs him by the back of the shirt like he’s scruffing a kitten.
“We’ll meet you there,” Mr. Munson says.
“Thanks,” Steve says. “I’m sorry you had to–”
“Nope, none of that,” Mr. Munson cuts in with a gruff kind of finality. “We’ll meet you there.”
Steve gives both Munsons a wan smile. “Thanks.”
One medic climbs into the back with them, shutting the doors as he goes, and then they’re off. The siren isn’t going, so Robin figures that whatever they want to check out isn’t a huge emergency, and she lasts all of two minutes before she’s leaning into Steve’s space to hiss, “And you gave me shit for my taste?”
It takes a moment for Steve to connect the dots, but he scoffs when he does. “Uh, yeah,” he retorts. “Because I have objectively better taste.”
“You are so full of shit!” Robin laughs, smacking Steve on the shoulder.
“Hey,” the medic tasks with babysitting them snaps. “No more injuries. You’ve racked up enough between the two of you.”
Mildly chastened, Steve and Robin sit back in their seats, but when Robin glances over again, she finds Steve smiling at her, as wide as his bruised and cut face will allow. He looks at her like she’s done something amazing. Like she’s great just for sitting there – existing.
She knows the feeling.