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Robin paces the length behind the counter at Family Video. Flexes her hands at her sides to keep them in place. There’s no reason for her to be nervous. Sure, it’s been a week since she and Steve talked about The Thing . The thing being Steve’s implied queerness. It’s only been that long because their schedules have genuinely been chalk full. Robin is preparing for her last two weeks of high school and Steve, Steve's been. Doing things? Fuck knows what, all she knows from the short car conversations is that Steve spoke with his dad over the phone and argued for an hour and a half before hanging up on him at the beginning of the week and he’s been doing things . Like taking up more shifts. She saw that he circled a job ad in the Hawkins Post. He just got promoted to shift lead.
It doesn’t make sense and they haven’t talked for real in a week.
There’s a few minutes left of her shift and she’s bursting at the seams with unanswered questions. She can’t even be angry that Steve hasn’t said a thing. He’s been honestly, genuinely busy. He’s blown off Eddie and Dustin for Pete’s sake! He hasn’t blown her off because this is their first time hanging out in earnest and not for five to ten minutes in the car while Steve does fifteen over the limit.
She’s excited, she’s nervous. She jumps over the counter, and topples over the candy display while she’s at it and Maryanne yells at her and Luke swears up a storm as Robin flips them off. She doesn’t feel bad because they made Steve feel insecure last Thursday and didn’t stop even after she told them to back off and then dug into her insecurities while they were at it which pissed Steve off so much he forgot to feel bad about himself as he told them off. They can fix the display, and if she didn’t do the rewinds. Well, then, it’s a good thing Maryanne and Luke were closing.
Robin bikes all the way to Steve's, thinks about going home and showering to get the plastic and weed stink off. Then she remembers that Steve said Eddie restocked Steve’s weed supply at actual half price because Eddie has the biggest hard-on for Steve and is a total pushover. He was going to restock Steve’s supply free of charge but Steve is also a total push-over.
So Robin doesn’t go back home. Her vest flies behind her as she hurries her way over. She’s excited! She and Steve haven’t hung out in a week and that was too long. Five minutes in the car was nothing when they used to live in each other's pockets. When they move to the east coast it’s going to be different, she knows but hey. It’s the east coast, literally anything beats staying in Hawkins for longer than they need.
Robin jumps off her bike without fully stopping, riding it onto the well maintained grass and letting it fall to its side. The momentum almost topples her over but monster hunting has really quickened her reflexes so she doesn’t get to taste round-up. She skips a few steps up to the door and knocks on it really hard.
As a family, the entire party coalesced at the Byers’ new place just for the sake of meeting up and seeing each other alive and well. Robin, jokingly (not really) suggested that they all make up specific knocking patterns so they knew who was at their door after the fourth time someone knocked and everyone tensed up.
Hopper and Joyce didn’t immediately shoot the idea down and Murray proclaimed it a good idea. Which meant the youngest members immediately began discussing logistics and whether it should be identifiers or a code system to indicate whether it was a business visit or just to hang out. Robin and Steve took one look at each other and giggled.
“Mine and Robin’s is Daisy Bell,” Steve said.
“You can’t both have the same song!” Mike protested.
“Gross!” Erica scrunched up her nose and looked at Steve and Robin judgmentally. Everyone else looked confused and completely unsurprised that Steve and Robin wanted the same song.
“Really?” Dustin threw his hands up. “Daisy Bell?”
Eddie and Nancy shared a look. It was clear that the kids were gearing up to argue with them and well, Robin and Steve tended to argue back like they weren’t arguing with literal children.
“It’s not like Steve and Robin are capable of being five feet apart.” Eddie waves at them, pointing out that Steve is practically sitting on Robin’s lap, his fingers tangled in her hair and rubbing her scalp. They don’t bother pretending like it’s not true.
So Robin knocks the melody of Daisy Bell obnoxiously onto the Harrington’s door. She doesn’t hear Steve approach. She never does, even with her genius ears, but she almost hits him when the door opens to reveal his annoyed, icky boy face.
“Do you have to be so loud? Why didn’t you just come in?” Steve grouches, he moves to the side as she bursts forward without waiting for him to invite her.
“It’s been so long!” Robin dismays, “what if I’ve lost walking in privileges? I mean, we never hang out anymore and you’re keeping secrets from me, your platonic soulmate.”
“Okay,” Steve says and rolls his eyes. He crosses his arms and kicks the door closed as he follows her. “We saw each other this morning. And you’re one to talk about secrets. ”
Robin narrows her eyes as she turns around, hands on her hip like Steve does at the kids. This week's vhs tape is already in her hands from where she swiped it off the coffee table. She pretends that snide remark isn’t about her huge crush on Nancy.
“The Protector?” Robin asks with disbelief and she holds up Jackie Chan’s visage. “You’re gonna make me watch The Protector?”
“You like The Protector,” Steve squawks. “Tell me you don’t like Jackie Chan.”
“I don’t like Jackie Chan,” Robin lies flatly. Steve throws his hands up and walks into his kitchen. Robin throws herself on the couch.
“You know what, out of the kindness of my heart I was going to let you get high off my supply—”
“You’re not a drug dealer—”
“ — and then you go and disrespect Jackie Chan’s genius in my own house so you can watch movies sober until you learn to appreciate art—”
“You’re not serious…” Robin said with a nervous laugh. Okay so maybe Steve has some weird kind of fascination with Jackie Chan and he’s thrown people into the pool because they said something about it so she isn’t entirely sure he wouldn’t share his weed. It’s admittedly fifty percent the reason for their movie nights.
“Say you like— no love Jackie Chan.”
“I’m in lesbian love with Jackie Chan.” Robin said. She fixes herself to look sad and pathetic, looking up at Steve with pleading eyes when he walks back in from the kitchen with a two liter cola, a bowl of chips, and his parents nicest bottle of something . Steve rolls his eyes and lifts a leg to dig his foot under her shoulders where she’s laying on the couch.
“Sit up, doofus,” he grouches. She does as asked and sticks her tongue out at him. Robin reaches out to take the cola and the booze from him. She uncaps both and starts to tilt the booze into the cola.
“Ah!” Steve set the bowl on the coffee table. “No. Last time we did this I let you mix the bottle and I had the worst fucking hangover since sophomore years halloween party at Julie’s.”
Robin pouts. “I didn’t go to sophomore year’s halloween party at Julie’s.”
“You weren’t missing out,” Steve grunts, “the only memorable part was someone barfing on Tommy H.”
“Oh I bet you never let him forget that one.” Robin cackles. Steve shakes his head.
The Protector is a good movie if you don't think about how American cops have no jurisdiction in other countries and that what they’re doing cannot possibly be legal in any sense of the word and you focus only on Jackie Chan. Which doesn’t matter, Robin remembers, once she’s high enough that she can’t really focus on anything but the way her fingers have detached from her body.
Steve has to pee. The movie’s paused and he stands up. Robin stands up too, follows without thinking too hard about where she’s following him. She thinks about Nancy instead, her big pretty eyes and how they look up at her. There’s always this little glint in them like she’s trying to decide if she wants to burn the world down or keep it alive. Robin thinks about how soft her hands are, how warm they feel when she takes Robin’s and yanks her along. Joining the journalism club for Nancy’s sake was the best decision Robin has recently made. With the sudden dramatic dip in population there weren't enough people for band to continue at the moment and it fills up her time. It’s a plus that it fills up her time with Nancy. Now she was running at Nancy’s heels while she sniffs out the next headline. Robin draws little cartoons for the paper. Like the New York Times, Nancy said bright eyed and happy that Robin agreed to join.
Under Nancy’s hand the journalism club dealt with more than just high school nonsense. She brought attention to the ways the people in their community have been affected. Robin got to make fun of how stupid people were, drawing thinly vieled caricatures of people in power.
She made one with Hopper once, he got a good chuckle out of it. Put it on the fridge next to Will’s most recent gift drawing. A place of honor, Robin felt like she could float into outer space. Her parents never put her drawings up. They supported her in an abstract way, in a way that wasn’t really support. Gentle nudges towards different career goals.
She stopped giving them her work when she was ten and found it in their room's trash can.
Robin gave her cartoon to Hopper with the knowledge he would probably hate it and it would get tossed. It hasn’t left the fridge since she made it. It was one of the first she drew for the paper.
Robin found a log of complaints from Principal Higgins stuffed in Nancy’s desk once. Which explains the fiery look she sometimes gets when she tells Robin to be meaner, to cut deeper on her punchlines.
Robin never liked Political cartoons.
Robin thinks she could do this everyday for the rest of her life.
She’s sitting on the sink counter with her head against the mirror. She opens her eyes to Steve washing his hands. There’s highlighter ink on his wrist.
“Why are you job hunting?” Robin asks.
“Second job,” Steve mumbles. He looks up at her with that face that begs her not to ask further but she doesn’t need to. She knows Steve argued with his dad earlier that week, his real dad. Not Hopper, who may as well be his real dad with how often he’s checking in on Steve and tell him to stop by his and Joyce’s, who may as well also be his real mom. Regardless, she knows Steve argued with his dad. So he’s getting a second job to save up faster so they can move into a place for a year and save up for the move out east where Robin is going to bully him into picking up a class or two. Maybe Eddie will follow. Maybe he won’t. But Nancy’ll have her own apartment by then too and she’s already promised Robin she could crash with her when she moves out. She doesn’t know if she’s going to Emerson. Doesn’t know if Boston is for her. Nancy’s offer is tempting.
Anyway, second job and not new job to abandon Robin with.
“Ok,” Robin sings, “don’t lose your mind without me.”
“No promises.” Steve sang back. “Get your greasy head off my mirror before you get it all dirty.”
Robin gasps.
“W— you— my head is not greasy, dingus, I’ll have you know I take great care of my head,” Robin says with an air of indignity. She pushes away from the mirror anyway, knows how weird Steve gets about cleaning, sometimes.
They end up sitting in Steve's en suite. Robin doesn’t remember bringing the bottle upstairs with her. Doesn’t really remember what they were doing before they started passing the bottle and joint between palms and fingers. Robin hates smoking but likes being high more, she thinks, the feeling of being cut from the wire and floating a few feet off the ground— she wonders if she could convince El to do that one day. Just make her float.
She knows she’s talking. Robin is pretty sure she said that thing about El out loud. But when she looks over to him, Steve is looking up at the ceiling blankly.
It’s been a week since they hung out, she remembers. A week since Robin broke up with him and then opened up her arms to take him back like the gracious and kind soulmate she is. She’s started talking about Nancy and Steve is barely paying attention because he’s a bitch.
“You know when I joined the journalism club I was terrified but Nancy looked at me with those big puppy eyes and started going on about how great it’ll look on a college application and how nice everyone is but all I could think about was not going on about how college applications are a sham and why should we even have to pay to apply when we’re already going to pay to attend which then would have gone into how the SATs are just a gatekeeping tool but she just finished talking about how college is the only way to go somewhere in life and god she’s so pretty when she gets all passionate and I joined because I forgot I was going to say no, how did you ever say no to her? She looked so hopeful about it because the journo club has been, like, short on people ever since everyone hightailed it right out of Hawkins and the club was gonna shut down! I honestly don’t understand how you and Jonathan just bam! said no to things! But now I’m kind of realizing that I could d—“
“I’m queer.” Steve cuts her off. Oh. Right. This was why they were here in the first place. She whips her head around and she kinda feels like she’s turned into one of those wood tops where the whole point is to like, spin it really fast? She’s about to tell him as much when he continues, “I told Nancy before I told you.”
And. Ouch. That. Wow. She didn’t think that would hurt but Steve is looking at her with tears in his eyes and he looks so sorry about that. She gets it. She doesn’t get it. No. She does. She gets it. She gets it. She gets it . And if she continues to repeat that she gets it she might actually get it. Instead of not getting it. Robin is kind of the easy first person to tell. He doesn’t have to sit there and wonder if he’s going to get hate-crimed. Soulmates meant something, right? And, no. He didn’t owe her being the first person to know. Nobody owes that to anyone but, she guesses she assumed that’s how some fantasy scenario where Steve isn’t straight happens. In her head at least. No, no. This is real life.
Steve is queer.
She gets it.
He’s known Nancy longer. They have a weird will they won’t they. She guesses this ended things for real between them which is probably why Steve even tells her.
Or maybe he needed to be crossfaded to tell Robin.
Which. Ok. Yeah. She’s not going to think about that because it’s salt to the wound. She’s a lesbian! She’s probably the safest person outside of like. Eddie and Little Byers that he could have told. And. Wow. Yeah. His gaydar needs some work if he caught feelings for her when they were working at Scoops Ahoy. That’s just embarrassing.
She decides to forgive him. He smiles brightly at the ceiling.
She cackles, too loud for the bathroom tiles digging into her legs. “Oh. We really do find each other,” Robin said.
“Well. I told her I was bisexual. But. It felt true then? But lately— or maybe it always has— it doesn’t. I don’t. I thought it would feel like a snug sweater. A second skin. You know but when I roll it around my head it just kind of feels like. A rock in my shoe. Or. Or a sweater? That totally doesn’t fit and it’s too hot and it’s itchy but your mom is still making you wear it because you have to look nice for the company Christmas party. It feels. It feels like a. A wet parka. Like saying I’m straight. So I’m not bisexual. Or maybe I am. But I. I like men. I like people. So I’m Queer. Definitely a Queer.”
She ignores the business party allegory because wow! Yeah! No! It felt too real and they are definitely too crossfaded to get into that particular suitcase. This she does get. The feeling that you’re wearing a shirt much too big for you. Something you still have to grow into. She thinks it’s different for him. For her it was because she had to grow into the shirt. Or maybe she needed to get used to the feeling of wearing a parka. But it was her parka. She just needed to keep thinking about it. Keep forcing the scared feeling down until lesbian and queer were the skin she wore below the surface. She just had to get shrink wrapped into who she knew she was. Snug as a bug.
Steve describes it like he’s too big for the clothes he’s in. He has to go to the gay parka store and get a different gay parka.
“That’s good enough,” Robin said with a shrug, “you’re queer, you’re here, y’know?”
He lolls his head, rolls it so that he’s looking at her instead of the ceiling. He kind of looks like a puppy, the way his head tilts and rests on his shoulders.
Sometimes she wishes Steve was a girl. Maybe now she’ll sometimes wish she was a guy. He smiles at her and she thinks she could have fallen in love with him if they were anyone else. They aren’t anyone else. Robin doesn’t want to be anyone else other than who she is, that’s the whole issue isn’t it? With people like them. They don’t want to be what they aren’t, what other people who have never met them in their lives think they should be. So maybe she never wishes Steve was a girl or that she would be a boy. She wishes Nancy would kiss her though. She looks like a good kisser—
“Yeah I am,” Steve mumbles. His eyes close shut. And then he sits up. “Fuck. Fuck. We need to stop getting drugged in bathrooms.”
Robin blinks once. Twice. Remembers how pretty the lights at Starcourt were that night. They didn’t technically get drugged in the bathroom she doesn’t think.
“Who do you work for?” She says in a muppet voice. She points finger guns at Steve and he laughs in a way that tells her he’s really fucking high. She’s not done thinking they should stop smoking when he stubs the joint. Tucks what's left of it behind his ear and raises his hands up in defeat.
“Scoo-Scoops Ahoy,” he stumbles through his laughter and does the worst muppet voice she’s ever heard.
“Why did you tell Nancy first?” Robin asks. She forgot she isn’t supposed to care. She’s supposed to be cool. This is her soulmate. Sometimes Steve gives her a look and she knows the entire contents of what he’s trying to convey. She’s only ever caught things he throws, like he knows the exact way her limbs are going to fumble about this time or that. They’re made for each other, it’s true. It has to be true because who else would have them? She is just supposed to know what goes on in that head of his. She worries sometimes, about that head of his, he’s been getting knocked around since birth. Falling down flights of stairs, getting plates smashed over his head, oxygen getting cut, tortured, some more knocking around.
But sometimes she doesn’t get him. She’s a sham of a best friend. Why would he go to Reagan-raised Nancy Wheeler who kind of cheated on him and kind of didn’t because they were only kind of broken up. Pretty, smart, beautiful, intelligent, Nancy Wheeler who smiles at Robin and makes her feel like goo.
Oh.
Yeah.
She doesn’t want to be hurt because she gets it, she thinks. But he wouldn’t lose her. Not the way he would Nancy if she turned out to be the wrong kind of person. Him and Robin… they’re two sides of the same coin but they’re different sides .
Robin was alone during high school. She had one teacher and sometimes she didn’t even think he liked her all that much, let her hang around because it’s what he got paid to do, fellow queer or no. Robin is a lot, Robin got left behind by all the people who she thought were hers, or could have been hers because they got a peek at her parka and its pink frayed edges. Robin is terrified of losing people just because she wants to be who she knows she is. Steve cuts them off even when it hurts.
People aren’t like limbs to him, that terrifies her the most. Would he leave her if she became an obstacle to who he wants to be? She can’t be alone in the world anymore. Steve has shown her how good it could be. How accepting some people are. Even if they also turn out to be queer. Even better. She doesn’t want Steve to leave her behind. She doesn’t want to become a noose around his neck. So why did he go to Nancy fucking Wheeler first?
Steve takes a swing of the bottle and Robin idly thinks maybe they should stop. So Steve puts the cap on the bottle and gently lets it roll all the way to the other side of the frankly ridiculous bathroom. He’s looking at her again with those tears in his eyes and an expression that screams I’m sorry and I don’t know all at once.
But she wants. She wants more today. So she accepts the apology again and waits. Usually moments like these where they’re sitting on a bathroom floor Robin can fill up the silence talking about her newest interest or worry and sometimes Steve will do the same keeping the topic light. They’ll talk for hours about nothing. Avoid topics that hurt like how Eddie has a nice smile and a gentle soul and nobody but them can see it. Or how Nancy is always being set on predetermined paths that make her unhappy and it shows in the way she walks away from Steve and Robin and they all hurt for it. She hasn’t been doing that lately, and Robin supposes that has a whole lot to do with Steve going to her first. Or how Robin and probably Eddie and now Steve have a secret so terrifying that it could end them in the way defending a supposed murderer never fucking did. They left work for a week to save the world and make sure Eddie Munson survived and they didn’t get fired. Somehow.
“I was closing.” Steve finally said. “I sent Maryanne home, she looked tired and there was a storm brewing. I didn't want her caught up in that.”
“Maryanne doesn’t deserve you,” Robin said because their coworkers hate Steve and honestly he’s shown them exactly how much he’s changed since high school and they couldn’t get the fuck over it. Grow up. There’s better things and better people to hate.
Steve smiles at her shyly. It’s always so shy. Robin wants to tell him he’s allowed to think he deserves better. There was a storm brewing. She knows what that means. Knows that it caught Steve, that he went home and sat in his car hoping for the rain to stop. That he got drenched when he made the run to the door but instead of calling Robin to talk about the apartment they’re going to move into or how much they’ve saved up for Europe, he calls Nancy.
“If I got out of the car I wouldn’t have called anyone.”
Her heart stops for a moment. Robin thinks of a world where Steve Harrington doesn’t move halfway across the country just drive her to school and work. Thinks about how he wouldn’t have been able to go over to hers because her parents listen more to the gossip surrounding how many girls he sleeps around with than they do her. Thinks about the wet parka sized barrier keeping him from knocking on Eddie Munson’s door. God forbid he place something like this on the kids. God forbid he takes this to Hopper and Joyce. Steve cuts people off even if it hurts, but she doesn’t think he’d survive cutting Hop and Joyce out of his life. So Nancy Wheeler. Nancy Wheeler, last on the list.
It’s not supposed to make her feel better.
It does anyway.
Robin knows all this because sometimes she’s the same. Sometimes she goes on days looking in the mirror and not recognizing the person that looks back. Sometimes she has pool water in her ears even though she hasn’t been swimming since spring break and there was a red back glow framing Nancy Wheeler in front of her. Sometimes it’s like she’s walking beside herself. Sometimes she wants to jump into the quarry just to regain the feeling of her fingertips back. She wonders if she’ll recognize herself in the reflection of the black water.
Sometimes Steve calls her and she’s so suddenly terrified that she comes back to herself.
Sometimes she has to call him.
So Steve didn’t let the storm log him down to the bottom of the pool. He drove to Nancy’s. Probably stood there for a while like an idiot getting soaked. It must have been the week that he got sick with the flu. She grouched at him but showed up at his door and let herself in and called him out of work. Those days she didn’t go home and she made Eddie drive her around on errands or stay with Steve if she couldn’t. He complained about not getting sick along with them like it's a group activity but he did what she asked with a certain tenderness that only comes with saving the world together. She barely even had to twist his arm.
“You know. She called our relationship bullshit. Back in my senior year. In a bathroom.”
“Jesus.” Robin snorts, because what else is there to do? The world is shit, this is all shit and one day other worldly beings were going to kill them, probably. So she laughs because literally what the hell. This is a terrible high. She’s too sober. Not sober enough. “So it’s tradition with you. Are you gonna confess to Eddie in a bathroom too?”
“If I figure out he likes guys then god no.” He doesn’t bother to deny it. Now that she knew he’s queer it’s kind of easy to repaint those awkward moments into Steve failing to flirt. Or succeeding and scaring Eddie away. She thinks he has a shot as long as Eddie isn’t working through any extreme internalization. “Me and Nance. We’re ok now. I think. We talked it out. I think-- I think we can finally be friends again.”
Robin admits she used to be worried that Nancy may just be the one that got away from Steve. But really, hearing him she thinks, for the first time, that she’s been reading him wrong. That longing? That intense need to orbit around Nancy during high stress situations? It came from a place of trauma and camaraderie. In the same way Steve sometimes follows her around nipping at her heels. It’s Steve making sure Nancy’s flank wasn’t unprotected because they’ve done this for too long. It should have clicked back when Jonathan and the California party finally made it to Hawkins and Jonathan just looked at Steve and Nancy and fell into place on Nancy’s right.
She takes a deep breath and looks up at the ceiling. The room stopped spinning a few minutes ago and she’s not as easy to convince that she’s turning into a snail, not that Steve would. But Eddie tried once which just led to Steve and him wrestling and almost knocking all of Wayne’s cool mugs to the ground like a couple of dinguses. Steve would try to convince her that the watermelon seed she accidentally swallowed sprouted and was now growing out of her ears. Unlike Steve, Eddie wasn’t inclined to keep him from doing that and Eddie wasn’t here anyway.
“It’s okay that you like her, you know? Hell, I completely understand,” Steve mumbles. His eyes are closed now and he looks like he’s going to fall asleep right on the open toilet. She told him to close it, that he was going to breathe in double the shit particles or get pinkeye for being so close to the toilet and then in hopes of making him do what she asked listed all of the symptoms of pinkeye and then dysentery just to spice it up and he had the fucking gal to roll his eyes at her.
“Let’s go to sleep, trooper,” Robin said. She pitches forward and Steve catches her and almost tosses her up into a standing position. She doesn’t realize how gone she is until she tries to stay standing and sways into the sink counter. Steve laughs at her and the responding laugh bubbles out of her throat.
She doesn’t remember what they’re supposed to be doing right now. She knows she’s supposed to do something. Steve is next to her and they’re dragging each other out of the bathroom.
It’s not until she sees the bed that she remembers they were going to sleep. He lets go of her and tips her over on the bed before flopping face down on his side.
“Mm, bed feels like water.” Steve said into his pillow.
They stumble back up. Robin doesn’t even question it as he slides off the bed onto the floor. They sleep there because it doesn’t feel like water. Or well, Steve sleeps on the floor and Robin sleeps on him.
“We should get real parkas,” Robin said.
“Matching?”
“Of course, dingus.” Robin snorts.