Archive of Our Own

“How’d you know?” 

They’re sitting by the pool, soaking in the early summer sun and passing the new strain Steve got back and forth. It’s just the two of them, and he feels relaxed and floaty and not thinking about the hundred different things that could be rearing up to attack Hawkins when they least expect it. It was shaping up to be a good day, which of course meant it couldn’t last.

He pauses, joint halfway to his mouth. “What do you mean?”

“Don’t give me that, we all had an awakening. Nothing to be ashamed of. What was yours?”

Steve grimaces, and Eddie frowns at him. “Hey, man, you don’t have to tell me if-”

“It’s kind of embarrassing,” he blurts out, and immediately covers his face.

The joint is plucked from between his fingers, and he can hear the grin in Eddie’s voice when he says, “Well now I have to hear this.”

He groans. “You can’t make fun of me for it.”

“I’m not in the habit of making promises I can’t keep, Stevie-boy.”

“Don’t tell Nancy.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

“Don’t tell Dustin .”

“Jesus,” Eddie says, “calm down. I’m not gonna shout it from the rooftops.”

“...it was Jonathan,” he mumbles into his fingers. 

“What was that?”

He takes his face out of his hands. “Jonathan Byers punched me in my stupid face and reworked my brain chemistry, is that what you wanted to hear?”

“Seriously?”

“I told you it was embarrassing!”

“No, no, this is the best day of my life.” Eddie waves his hands in excitement. “I can’t believe it. Didn’t he punch you for calling him queer?”

“I said some other shit too. I think that took priority.”

Eddie chuckles. “You see the irony there, though.”

“I see it,” he sighs. Talk about karma, or whatever. 

He still thinks about it sometimes. About how for all that they’re friends now, and for all the hours Steve’s spent keeping an eye on Jonathan’s little brother, the closest he’s ever gotten and ever will get to Jonathan fucking Byers was when he was getting his ass kicked. He couldn’t even fully appreciate it at the time.

Not that he still has a crush on the guy. He just…wonders, sometimes. The same way he wonders about Nancy, or-

“So does long hair do it for you?”

He chokes. “What?”

“Jonathan,” Eddie says, like it’s obvious. As if he isn’t sitting there with a mane of curls that Steve dreams about running his hands through. “Do you like his new look?”

“More like his new cologne,” Steve snorts. “I could smell the pot from three miles away. That has to be doing wonders for his health.”

“Oh, absolutely. Every time I saw him when he still lived here I wanted to sit him down and light one up for him. You could smell the stress on him. It was deliberating.”

He nods, and snatches the joint back. “To Jonathan’s new chill,” he says, taking a drag. “Cheers.”

“Cheers.”

“What about you?”

“What about me?” Eddie raises an eyebrow. 

“I showed you mine, you show me yours?” He’s flirting, he registers distantly. Badly. Robin would be laughing at him, if she was here.

Eddie snorts, shaking his head. “I was eight, I ran off to the lake with some friends while my parents did fuck-all and we all forgot trunks. The rest, as they say, is history.”

“I guess we can’t all be as exciting as me.”

“A real tragedy,” he agrees. “And for the record, I have way better hair than Jonathan Byers.”

Steve blinks, caught off guard by the apparent focus on Jonathan. “Join the club. I feel like I need to tie him down and show him the wonders of conditioner.”

“I’m just saying, I would be a much better choice for a sexuality crisis. Why didn’t you have a crush on me?”

Karma. This is karma. He’s not equipped for this. He should jump into Lake Michigan and become a sea monster, never be seen again. Robin could live in a cabin by the shore. Jonathan and Eddie might even cry at his fake funeral.

Maybe not. They’ve had enough fake funerals for a lifetime.

“Sorry, applications are taken in through kicking my ass only.”

“Did Wheeler apply that way?”

“Nancy? She pointed a gun at me.”

“Jesus,” Eddie breathes, sounding impressed despite himself. “You said something about that in—during spring break. I forgot.”

“In her defense, she was trying to keep me from becoming monster bait.”

“I believe it. I swear, before all this happened, if you’d told me Nancy Wheeler knew how to shoot a gun I would have laughed in your face. If I’d known what she thought about the government I would have been her new best friend.”

The idea makes him shudder. The two of them are bad enough as friends now . He hates to think of what could have happened, if they’d gotten past their differences years earlier. If they start plotting anarchy, the world may never recover. 

If they ever find out what they can do to him, he may never recover.

Maybe he should just start staying far, far away from anyone he’s had feelings for. For the sake of his health. Except that eliminates pretty much every friend his age he has. Maybe Argyle will let him third-wheel that road trip he and Suzie’s older sister are planning, he seems like a cool dude. Steve’s excited to actually get to know him when his plane lands in Indy next week. Plus getting high in every state sounds like a fucking dream. 

Robin can come, though. He doesn’t know what he’d do without her at this point.

“Wait,” Eddie says, breaking him out of his spiral, “didn’t I hold a broken bottle to your throat? That should totally count, this is unfair.”

Son of a bitch, he wasn’t going to let this go. Steve’s going to die of embarrassment, because being grabbed like that did do it for him, in retrospect. At the time, it was more terrifying than anything, but now when he looks back on it, or thinks about Eddie doing it again…

He needs more weed.

He steals the forgotten joint out of Eddie’s hand, grabbing the lighter resting in between them and taking a long drag that he immediately chokes on.

Eddie pats his back as he coughs. “Impressive.”

“Thanks,” he wheezes. “I try.”

“You know, if I’m that ugly you can just tell me.”

“What?”

“You can just say I’m not your type, Harrington. It’s no big deal.”

Fuck, but he sounds so dejected about it. Steve’s going to do something he’ll regret.

“You are.”

“What?”

“You held a broken bottle to my throat, man,” he says, laughing a little because fuck, he really does have a type. “I can’t say it wasn’t a little sexy.”

Eddie’s smiling again when he looks over. A cocky smirk that suits him well, that he’d seen in the hallways at school and admired even without realizing it. “Getting a little freaky there, Harrington,” he teases. “Careful, or I might start thinking you’re into this stuff.”

“I’m not a virgin, Munson.”

“I think all of Hawkins knows that by now.”

“I’m saying you’re not the only freak in town. You wouldn’t believe what some of the girls here get up to in their free time.” More like the few city boys he’d brought back to hotel rooms in Indianapolis, but he figured Eddie would enjoy the idea of their small town preps being secret kinksters. 

“Oh-ho- ho, and you liked that, did you?”

“Yeah.” He shrugs. “It was good. It felt good, you know? Or, well, I guess you would know.”

“What, just because I’m a freak it leads into my sex life?”

Steve shoots him a look. “You have handcuffs above your bed,” he deadpans, pulling the hanky out of Eddie’s pocket to drive his point home. 

Eddie snatches it back. “Guilty.”

He rolls his eyes, flicking the burned out joint into the pool. He’ll clean it later. “Anyways, that’s not what makes you a freak, man.”

“Oh? Will you enlighten your poor subject, then, on what does make a freak? My queerness? My satanism? My hair care routine?”

“You have a hair care routine?” 

“I use two-in-one.”

“Please tell me you’re joking.” Eddie’s hair doesn’t deserve that. He likes to think that hair is the most important body part, which Robin says is insane and Dustin says is a little weird but makes sense. No one, absolutely no one , should be using two-in-one on their hair. Not to mention hair like Eddie’s. Steve’s got the straightest hair out of their whole group, and even he could rattle off a million different ways to take care of it. He spent enough time with Dustin, finding him hair products and figuring it out together with Claudia’s guidance. 

“Not all of us can spend daddy’s credit card on blowouts.”

“I’m crying,” he deadpans. “I’m crying for your hair. I’ll cry directly into your hair to give it some fucking moisuture. It has to be so fucking dry by now. It’s probably crunchy. Have you ever heard of deep conditioner?”

Eddie pushes him into the pool.

A day later, Robin is rolling her eyes at him. “I think his hair looks fine.”

“He brushes it dry, Robin! He dries it with a towel! ”

“Okay, and?” She makes a shooing motion, and he turns around while she changes into whatever shirt she grabbed from his closet. They’re getting ready for the the Hopper-Byers’s joint housewarming-slash-graduation party, and she’d shown up at his house this morning in a flurry of movement, insisting that she wasn’t “feeling” anything in her wardrobe and she just had to come over and steal his. Steve told her this was why Dustin wouldn’t let go of them dating.

“Do you think he’d let me brush it?”

Her shirt hits the back of head. “Even I know you’re not supposed to brush curly hair, dingus.”

“There are so many tangles in his hair,” he despairs. “Some of them are probably older than Dustin.”

“Maybe he and Dustin can trade tips. You can turn around now.”

“Don’t even joke about that,” he says, aghast at the idea of Dustin taking hair tips from Eddie of all people. He turns to see her in a Bruce Springsteen shirt he didn’t even know he had. Probably a gift. “I can’t believe I like someone who uses two-in-one. Do I have bad taste? Is that something I have to recognize about myself now?”

“I can neither confirm nor deny these statements,” Robin says, checking herself out in the mirror, “but either way, he’s getting in your pants.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Yes I do,” she says smugly. “I knew when he called you big boy. There was no way you weren’t fucking him after that.”

He groans, flinging himself down on his bed. “What if he doesn’t want in my pants?”

“He gave you his vest.”

“I have, like, three of your sleep shirts in my drawer. You’re wearing my shirt. ”

“That’s where those went!” She smacks him. “I’m going to need those back at some point, asshole. I’m running out of things to sleep in, and I think my mom noticed your clothes in my laundry, because she keeps giving me weird looks and I’m starting to think we need to tone it down- where was I going with this? Right, he gave you his vest. He’s a freaky gay loser, Steve. That’s the equivalent of giving your varsity jacket to some girl to ask her to prom.”

Steve thinks about that. 

Back when Eddie gave him the vest, and the next couple of days they were fighting Venca, he’d thought he was hot, obviously. Gotten flustered when he was flirted with, thought about taking a strand of those curls and pulling just to see what he’d do. If he’d flush, if his eyes would go dark and heady, if he’d push him against another wall and replace the jagged edge of a bottle with his teeth. 

But he hadn’t considered it with any real gravity until he’d seen Eddie after defeating Venca, bloody and grinning and more dead than alive in Dustin’s arms.

Sobbing, heartbroken Dustin, who was almost completely unharmed. Safe. 

Oh, he’d thought two days later, staring at Eddie’s hospital bed. The confirmation that he and Max would wake up had finally come, and Steve had finally gotten a chance to sit down and feel things again. Oh, I’m in trouble. 

He has the vest still, hidden under his bed with his bat. He took it when they went back to the RV. He couldn’t save it, it’s covered in rusty stains and bad memories, but he thinks Eddie would still keep it if he ever gives it back.

It’s a pretty big if.

“I need to get dressed,” he says instead of acknowledging any of that. 

Robin gives him a look that screams “I know what you’re doing, asshole, and it won’t work for long,” but lets it slide. “We have twenty minutes until we have to be at the Byers’s new place.”

“What?” He spins around to see his clock proudly displaying 3:38. “Shit! Why didn’t you tell me that?”

“I thought you knew!”

“I don’t have an outfit picked out!”

“You can pick an outfit in twenty minutes, dingus,” she says, knowing damn well driving there takes at least ten of those twenty minutes and he absolutely cannot. 

“I’m going to kill you,” he tells her, digging through his closet and throwing stuff onto his bed. “Forget elevators, your worst nightmare will be me.”

“Oh no, I’m so scared,” she deadpans. “Hey, you could always wear the vest. I bet Eddie would really like that.”

She shrieks when he nails her in the face with a coat hanger. 

Thirty minutes later, he’s dressed and ready to leave and already drowning in the guilt of being late to see Joyce. 

“It’s not a big deal,” Robin says, “I don’t think she’ll care. Plus, Eddie’s not even getting there for another hour.”

“It’s the principle, Robin!” 

Of course, when they get to the new place, Mike immediately gripes at him for being late even though Eddie isn’t even there yet and probably won’t be for another half hour or so. Dustin tries to rope him into a debate with Max and Erica that he casually sacrifices Robin to, shooting her a cheeky grin as he saunters into the kitchen. She glares at him before her eyes widen and she yanks the scissors that Dustin pulled from somewhere out of his hands. Steve doesn’t want to know what he was going to use them for. 

“Hi, honey,” Joyce greets, pouring some frozen corn in a pot. “How are you?”

“Doing great, slept last night and everything,” he assures as he accepts the cheek kiss she offers him. “Can I help with anything?”

“Actually, can you go find Jonathan? He went outside at some point, hasn’t come back in. I think he’s hiding from all the noise.” Her voice is light, but her eyes are heavy. The Hopper-Byers’s new place edges the same woods that monsters have come out of, after all. 

“Yeah, of course. Do you want me to bring him in?”

“No, no, just makes sure he’s all right. I’ve got the boys helping me,” she says, gesturing at Will and Lucas sitting at the table. They haven’t even noticed Steve, too busy chatting about whatever new campaign Eddie’s planning while they cut fruit for a salad. El chimes in every now and then, stealing pieces of pineapple while Will smacks her away.

He salutes her obediently and ducks out the back door, spotting Jonathan almost immediately. He’s in view of the house but far enough to be out of hearing distance as Steve shuts the door. He makes sure his steps are heard as he walks towards the fallen tree Jonathan’s sitting on.

“Hey,” he says, sitting next to him. There’s a tire iron next to Jonathan’s foot, and a little bit of the tension of being in the woods leaves his shoulders when he sees it.

“Hey.”

“Too loud?”

“When I left, they were all screaming over Star Trek versus Star Wars.”

Steve grimaces, well aware of the ongoing debate. Will and El had gotten really into Star Trek while in California, and Lucas was on their side while Dustin and Mike were perpetually upset because “El is basically a Jedi, how can she like Star Trek better? ” Max has no place in the argument, but enjoys irritating the other two enough that she sided with Lucas and El anyway. 

They only asked Steve his opinion once. He’d taken quick stock of the situation, ramped his “ditz-o-meter” (as Robin calls it) up to 11, and said he liked Star Trek because that one had the cool light swords. He was promptly banished from the conversation. 

If Eddie was there, the kids would have asked him for the seventh time, and he’d loudly declare which one he liked more that day, because he always had a different answer, and Dustin would yell in glee or anger and Lucas would complain about his busted eardrum, and they would all move on. Eddie had that way about him, whether it was confidence or pure magnetism, where you just couldn’t disagree with the guy sometimes. It was the way he wore outlandishness like a shield, like it was another layer over his jacket and the vest Steve never gave back. 

The magnetism part might just be Steve, actually. 

“Whatcha thinking about?”

“Huh?” Steve asks, startled out of his thoughts. 

“There’s something on your mind,” Jonathan says, as if the fact that he’d notice that shit should be a given. There’s no doubt in his voice, and when Steve looks over he’s staring at him the same way he did when they would hang out before. When neither of them were sleeping and going out to smoke sounded a hell of a lot better than laying in bed waiting for dawn. 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says weakly. 

Jonathan just looks at him, the asshole. With those same big eyes Steve used to avoid, for the sake of his own sanity. It helped that Jonathan didn’t do eye contact, would stare at the his ear or his hair, but in big moments he’d hold it, wouldn’t let it go until Steve gave in. For the guy’s obvious discomfort as much as keeping his heart from exploding. 

It hits Steve like a bat to the head, the way his heart beats faster when Jonathan blinks at him. It feels like he’s sixteen again and on the run from a monster, heartbeat thundering in his ears as he’s pulled down a hallway. Seventeen and hearing Jonathan laugh, possibly for the first time. He’s nineteen, now, and apparently still stupid enough for his heart to skip a beat at the sight of Jonathan’s eyes. 

Those fucking Byers. Steve swears they have the saddest, wettest eyes known to man. He’s fallen victim to all three of them more times than he can count. 

“I have a crush on Eddie,” he blurts out, because he has to say something. If he doesn’t Jonathan will keep pouting at him until he breaks. Besides, Jonathan’s perceptive, he’d figure it out eventually. Might as well get it over with now instead of later. 

It immediately backfires on him when Jonathan’s eyes get even bigger. “What?”

He just groans, putting his head in his hands. He should have kept his big mouth shut. 

“Eddie? Really?”

“Can we forget I said anything?”

“Sorry.” He does look sorry, with his sad eyes and the frown he has more often than not. Steve wants to wrap him in a blanket. 

“It’s fine.”

“It’s not.”

“It’s fine , Jonathan.” He rolls his eyes, already plotting an escape. God, why’d he open his big mouth?

“It’s not ,” he insists. “I’m doing this all wrong.”

“Doing what all wrong?”

“This!” He waves his arms around. “You’re, like, coming out to me, man. That’s a big deal!”

He’d honestly forgotten he hasn’t told Jonathan. Or, well, he’d just kind of assumed he might know, given the way Steve can feel his eyes boring into his soul whenever they’re together. He screws his face up. “I guess.”

“Is it not?”

“I don’t fucking know,” he groans. “It’s like, it’s supposed to be this big deal, but whenever someone acts like it I get so…uncomfortable? Like, yeah, I like guys! So fucking what? Are you gonna throw a parade?”

“Actually I think that’s exactly what people do now,” Jonathan says, smile hinting around his mouth.

“Fuck, yeah. We want to go to one of those someday.”

“We?”

“Me and Robin,” he says automatically, before he realizes he’s opening his big mouth again. “I mean, to support me. Robin would be supporting me.”

Jonathan gives him a dubious look, but doesn’t comment. “I think…” he says, “I think I’d like to take Will to one of those, one day. I think it would mean a lot to him.”

Steve’s eyes sting a little. “I think he’d love that.”

“Yeah, well…” Jonathan looks down at his legs, then at Steve through the fringe of his hair. His fucking eyes. Steve’s so fixated on them at this point it’s insane. “It would mean a lot to me, too.”

“Oh,” he says dumbly, because apparently he hasn’t improved in the year since Robin came out to him on a bathroom floor. “ Oh .”

“Yeah.”

“Shit, man, thanks for telling me.”

“What, no parade?”

“Don’t be impatient. There’s a planning period to work through here.” They both laugh, knees knocking. “Hey,” he says softly, and Jonathan looks at him. “Thank you. For trusting me. I know I wasn’t always…the best. About things like this.”

“You said it first.”

“You’re my friend.”

“You’re my friend, too,” Jonathan says, brow furrowed. Like even with everything that’s happened between them, he can’t imagine a world where Steve isn’t. 

It’s too fucking much. He thinks about telling Eddie how he knew he was queer, the quiet ache that came with knowing he’d never be that close to Jonathan again. There was always a careful distance between them after, Nancy and Steve’s words and what Robin would probably call “that weird thing guys do” but Steve thought was maybe just plain fear. 

Jonathan’s quiet laugh over the phone, two time zones and half a country away. The way the calls slowed, stopped, leaving Steve with a dial tone and a pit in his stomach that had nothing to do with whether he’d eaten that day. 

He sighs, and thinks about monsters much scarier than Jonathan Byers could ever hope to be, and leans into the man next to him. 

It almost feels like he’s holding his heart in his hands, presenting it to him on a silver platter. And for the main course we have Steve Harrington’s bisexual awakening, slow-cooked and tender enough to fall apart at the slightest touch. Bon appetit! 

Jonathan stiffens, and he freezes in turn. Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid . What kind of idiot was he? He’s always been kind of a ditz, but he never thought he was this fucking—

His thoughts all screech to a halt when Jonathan wraps an arm around his shoulders and pulls him closer. As if that’s all it took to bridge the gap between them. Three long years, and all it took was Steve’s impulsive ass decision making to cross the gorge. 

Jonathan’s chest rises and falls, and Steve times his own breathing with it. They stay like that, breathing in sync, watching the woods as one organism. Steve thinks he could stay here forever, if he were given the chance. 

A snapped twig breaks them apart, both whipping around in panic. Steve grabs the nearest branch, and out of the corner of his eye he sees Jonathan grip the tire iron he’d brought out. 

“Jesus, guys, it’s just me!”

“Eddie,” he breathes, dropping the branch to run a hand through his hair. Jonathan guiltily puts down the tire iron. “Shit, make some noise next time or something. You about gave me a heart attack.”

“Sorry,” Eddie says, hands still up in surrender. It looks almost comical with his cane waving in the air. He brings it back down, stuffs his free hand in his pocket and looks between them. Steve can’t read his face. “Didn’t realize you were busy.”

“We were just talking,” Jonathan says. Steve needs him to stop staring at Eddie, so that the guilty blush that’s crawled on the tips of his ears can get a move on. Why is he so squirmy? What is he supposed to do while they have their awkward staring contest? Pretend he doesn’t exist? 

Actually, that’s looking pretty good right now. 

“I bet you were.”

Jonathan’s nose scrunches, but Steve speaks before he can say anything. “How’re the kids?”

“Well they’re all screaming, so I guess they’re acting like normal fifteen year olds.”

He and Jonathan both snort. 

“Anyways,” Eddie says lightly, “I was just wondering where you ran off to. I’ll leave you two alone now.”

“What? No, come sit down,” Steve says before he can think better of it.

Eddie shakes his head, but Jonathan surprises both of them with a hand on Steve’s shoulder. “I have to leave, anyway,” he says. “I should go check on Will.”

“Will’s fine,” Steve argues. “Those munchkins are probably all in a dog pile by now, he’s happy as a clam.”

Jonathan laughs lightly, but keeps walking, leaving he and Eddie in silence. 

They both watch him go. 

“Sorry,” Eddie says, once Jonathan closes the door behind himself. He comes and sits down, on the opposite side of where Jonathan sat. Steve is distracted enough that it takes him a minute to process. 

“What?”

“For ruining your moment with Jonathan .” It’s teasing, and it startles him more than he cares to admit. The blush that had stuck firmly on his ears crawls down his neck. 

“Shut the fuck up,” he hisses, swatting him. He just laughs, loud and gleeful, and Steve takes a moment to revel in it before he launches himself at Eddie. 

The cane hurts like a motherfucker when it connects with his shins, but it’s worth it for the newfound knowledge that Eddie is ticklish. 

Still, though. Bruises. 

“Whose idea was it to give you a cane?” Steve complains. “All you do is use it for evil.”

“If they stuck me in a wheelchair I’d just run over your toes.”

“Please, I get enough of that from Max. I think she’s trying to get me in a matching set.”

Eddie grins, leaning in close. “Don’t worry, Stevie, I’ll make sure to decorate it real pretty for you.”

“If anyone is decorating my wheelchair it’s Will. None of you other assholes are allowed to touch it.”

“Good luck stopping us.”

He doesn’t have a comeback to that, so he just shoves him again. Eddie dramatically flails off the tree and lays on the ground. 

“Oh!” he cries. “Betrayal! Agony! How could you do this to me?”

“ Dude,” Steve laughs, “get up. You’re gonna be totally covered in dirt.”

He sits up, grinning. There’s twigs and leaves tangled in his hair, dirt on his jacket, and he looks happy as anything. 

“God, you're a mess,” Steve sighs, and starts picking the underbrush out of his hair.

Eddie’s smile falters, slips into something more wide-eyed, before picking back up in full force. “Words hurt, Harrington,” he chides, but doesn’t push his hands away. Sits with his ass in the dirt, letting Steve run his hands through his hair even as they snag on tangles and pull.

He doesn’t let himself think about it, when he gestures for Eddie to turn around and let him check the back. Starts the process all over again, neither of them talking. It’s soothing, like brushing Max’s hair, or helping Dustin and El figure out how to style theirs. He picks the last stick out, sets it gently to the side, and keeps pulling apart the knots. Eddie’s hair isn’t soft, but it’s long and getting frizzier by the minute as he brushes it out with his fingers. The fact that he’s going to look like a mad scientist after Steve’s done is only a little bit of the reason he keeps going. 

Their little moment can’t last forever, though, and before Steve is done Dustin is screaming from the back door about how they need to get their asses inside for dinner. 

“Little shit needs to watch his language,” Steve grumbles as Eddie jerks away from his hands like he’s been shocked. 

“Do you think they picked him to call for us because he’s got the most lung capacity?” Eddie asks as he takes Steve’s offered hand and clambers to his feet with a groan, using the cane to leverage himself. Steve can’t contain the snort of laughter he lets out when he sees the seat of his pants. 

“What?”

“Your ass!”

“I’ll have you know that my ass is no laughing matter.”

“No, it’s—“ he wheezes. “There’s so much dirt, it looks like you shit yourself.”

Eddie stares at him, unamused, as he tries to pull himself together. 

“Yeah, okay,” he says, brushing the dirt off his butt as Steve giggles. “Nice to know you’re actually twelve years old. Can we go inside now, princeling?”

Hypocrite. If it was Steve in his place he wouldn’t shut up about for days. He gathers himself enough to go inside. 

As soon as they walk through the door, Dustin shrieks. “Dude, what did you do to your hair? Stick a fork in an socket?”

Steve breaks down laughing again as Eddie slowly turns around and glares at him. He has to hide behind Nancy to escape his wrath until Joyce calls everyone to the table. 

He ends up sitting in the middle, Robin on one side of him and Eddie (who has put his hair in a very poofy ponytail) on the other. Max and El are on the other side of Robin, across from Nancy. Dustin whines for all of five seconds about how he wanted to be between Steve and Eddie before Eddie grabs him and pulls him down on his other side. Mike glares at Steve, probably because he wanted to be the one sitting next to Eddie, before settling down between Lucas and Will. Jonathan takes the place across from Steve, on Will’s other side and next to Nancy. Erica worms her way into the spot at the head of the table, between Lucas and Dustin. Hopper takes one look at her smug face and rolls his eyes, sitting next to El. Joyce smiles at all of them as she brings the last dish to the table, finally settling across from Hopper. 

It’s a mess. They’re all smushed into tight quarters, knocking elbows and fighting for space. Eddie gestures too strongly, and Steve’s fork gets knocked out of his mouth and he has to get a new one. Max forgets to lock her wheelchair and nearly rolls across the room when Robin knocks her elbow into it. Jonathan keeps kicking him by accident. Will’s glass gets spilled. At least three food fights occur, one of them between Lucas and Max from opposite sides of the table, with El launching the food with Max’s direction. If Steve finds mashed potatoes in his hair later, he’s going to be pissed. 

It’s the best meal he’s ever had. 

After, El and Will are put on dish duty, Hopper declaring them “the least likely to break a plate over someone’s head.” Steve quietly disagrees with that assessment, given the absolutely brutal way they teamed up against Dustin at dinner, but he doesn’t have to do them so he won’t complain. Plus, El likes sticking her hands in the warm water. 

Lucas and Max have figured out a system for bringing them dishes, loading them up into Max’s lap and then wheeling her to El’s side. El lifts them in the air, grabbing them one by one to wash. 

She’s so fucking cool. The nosebleeds have slowed down, now only happening when she uses her powers for something extreme. Owens says they may stop completely one day. Steve hopes he can see it. 

They’re only halfway done with cleaning when Dustin marches up to him. “Did you forget the brownies? I can’t find them anywhere. ”

“Brownies?” Steve says, playing dumb. “What brownies?”

“ Steve ,” Dustin whines. “You promised. ”  

“He totally forgot,” Mikes says sourly from where he’s loading plates in the dishwasher. 

“He better not have,” Erica says. “That man owes me.”

“Would you guys relax?” Steve asks. “I left them—“

Everyone groans. 

“ —in my car . I brought them, you little assholes. Who wants to help me carry them in?”

“I can,” Jonathan offers, at the same time Robin says, “Eddie’ll do it.”

Eddie and Jonathan look at each other, surprised. 

“Offering me up, Buckley?” Eddie jokes. “Jonathan’s got all working limbs, he can do it.”

Jonathan’s already shaking his head. “You can go,” he says. 

“No, really, I insist—“

Steve and Robin look at each other. Is this weird to you, he asks silently, raising an eyebrow. 

So weird , Robin agrees, a grin playing around her mouth. 

Finally he claps his hands, silencing Jonathan and Eddie from their…politeness stand-off. Which is another thing. When has Eddie ever been polite?

“If you can’t agree, you’re both coming with me,” he declares. “First one out the door gets first piece of brownie.”

Eddie’s flinging himself down the front steps before Jonathan can even move. 

Steve rolls his eyes and meanders out after him, Jonathan on his heels. Eddie’s leaning on his cane in front of the porch. “ Fuck, that was a bad idea,” he complains, rubbing his bad leg with a grimace. Steve pats him on the shoulder as he goes by, making a mental note to give him an extra large piece. 

Jonathan frowns when he opens the trunk. “Where’s your bat?”

“His bat?” Eddie asks, hooking his head over Steve’s shoulder. 

“Under my bed,” Steve says, shooting for casual and missing by a mile. He hands Jonathan a tin and picks up the second one, refusing to meet his eyes. 

“Guys,” Eddie says, moving so he can look Steve in the eye, “don’t do this to me. You gotta remember I’m new here. What fucking bat?”

“His—you haven’t seen it before? Nancy and I hammered nails in it, during our first go around. He uses it when there’s some upside-down shit going on.”

“I haven’t used the bat since Will was possessed,” Steve corrects. 

Jonathan gapes at him. Eddie does too, but they’re two very different kinds of confusion. 

“Dustin said you took it everywhere with you.”

“And when did he say this?” Jonathan grimaces, and he nods. “Yeah, exactly.”

“Why?”

I kept having nightmares about being stolen from my bed by evil Russians, he doesn’t say. He just took it inside with him one night after the Fourth of July and just…didn’t put it back. It’s not like he used it when the Russians captured him, and the axe was probably a better weapon, anyway. 

“That probably would have been really helpful against the man eating bats,” Eddie says, poking him in the side where his scars are. “Just saying.”

Steve bats his hand away. “Wow, Eddie, thanks. I think it’s a little late for that now.”

“Well maybe if someone —“

Jonathan rolls his eyes, shutting the trunk with his free hand. “I’m sorry I asked.”

“Aww, don’t be like that, Byers,” Eddie pouts, batting his eyes. They’d struck up a friendship, in the weeks since the Byers came back to Hawkins. Eddie called it a Freak Bond, which Steve found redundant. Their entire friend group stopped the apocalypse, most of them several times over. There’s nothing freakier than that. 

“I gave you free weed,” Jonathan says, starting the path back to the house. “I think you can call me my name.”

“But it’s so long. Listen, Jonny-can I call you Jonny?”

“That sounds stupid.”

“Jon?”

“No.”

“Jimmy?”

“That’s not even a nickname for Jonathan.”

“Sweetie-pie?” 

Jonathan raises his eyebrows, but Steve can see the hint of a blush on his cheeks when he shoots a glare over his shoulder. “Absolutely not.”

“Ugh, fine.” Eddie sighs forlornly.  “Leave me bereft and nickname-less, why don’t you? Jonathan. Breakin’ my heart over here.”

Jonathan laughs, brighter and happier than he’s heard from him in a while, and it hits Steve like a truck. He stops in his tracks. 

“You good?” Eddie asks, turning around with a furrowed brow. Jonathan stops at the door, giving him an identical look of concern, and shit. Steve’s an idiot. Because they both make him feel fluttery, kind of, and a little foolish, and a lot of trouble. 

He rues the day he ever hugged Jonathan on that log. Past Steve thought he could get away with it. Past Steve was a fucking bitch. 

“I’m good,” he says, rolling his eyes at them. “Just wondering if I can run away with this before the kids demolish them all before I can get any.” He hefts the tin higher, as if to say look at this! Brownies! Pay no mind to the man losing his marbles!

“You already promised me first piece,” Eddie says, punctuating his point with a thump of his cane on the stairs. “If any of those little shits tries to undermine me, it’s war. ”

Jonathan laughs again, opening the door to a clamor. Steve catches Robin’s eye on the way in, widening his eyes in a way that screams we need to talk, and she glances at the two boys he came in with before nodding. Something in him relaxes at it, at the guarantee that whatever it is, Robin’s got his back. 

That’s all he gets before Dustin slams into him, nearly knocking the brownies to the floor, and everyone starts yelling. 

His coming out to Robin was something that could almost be called an accident, if you didn’t count the fact that it’d been all he thought about for the three weeks between Starcourt and then. 

They were sitting together on his bathroom floor at three in the morning, drunk and bemoaning the hangovers they would have when they woke up. 

My bathroom is so much cleaner than the mall bathroom, he thought, which made him think about what happened last time they were on a bathroom floor together, and he just blurted it out. 

“You know Jonathan Byers?”

Robin squinted at him. “The guy who stole your girlfriend?”

“He’s more than that,” Steve protested. “We’re friends. Sort of.”

“Which is still kind of weird to me,” she told him, and slid down the wall until she was lying on her back. “Your floors are so much cleaner than the mall’s,” she said, echoing his own thoughts. “Sorry, off topic. What about Jonathan Byers? It’s not about Nancy, is it? I guess I can get why you’d be in love with her still, after seeing her in action, but it’s been, like, a year and—“

“What?” Steve blinked, trying to catch his thoughts up. “What does Nancy have to do with anything?”

“Uh, you’re telling me you’re still in love with her?”

“No I’m not.”

“Then why are we talking about her boyfriend?”

“Because it was him, too,” Steve said, completely nonsensical. Robin rolled over to look at him. 

“Him, too?”

He just nodded, staring intently at the ceiling. Had the paint always been so white?

“I’m gonna need a little more than that, dingus.”

He shut his eyes. “I never got to kiss him,” he confessed quietly. “I really, really wanted to. Just once. It would have been enough.”

It wouldn’t have been. But he could have carried it with him. 

Robin didn’t say anything for a while, and it made him nervous enough to open his eyes. “Rob?”

“Jonathan Byers is definitely a boy,” she finally said. He shot a dry look at her. 

“Last I heard.”

“I’m very drunk,” she informed him. “I can’t…there’s so many words in my brain, but none of them are right. ”

“I mean, as long as you don’t hate me,” he said. “Or think I’m weird.”

“I’m gay too, Steve.”

“But I’m not, ” he said. “I like girls, I still like girls. I like girls a lot! I just also like—“

“Jonathan Byers?”

“Boys,” he corrected, squeezing his eyes shut again. “Not just Jonathan. I like girls and boys.”

Then he leaned over and threw up in the tub. 

Later, months later, they went to Chicago together. Robin heard something about some feminist bookstore, and begged Steve to drive her. He didn’t even bother to ask why she wouldn’t drive herself, or bitch about how reading gave him a headache, just asked for a weekend off work and put aside money for a stay at a motel. They spent an entire day searching, until Robin yanked him to a stop in front of a tiny, unassuming building. He didn’t understand until she quietly pointed out the rainbow sticker in the front window, half hidden. 

Going inside was fucking magic. 

It was just a normal bookstore, really, small and quiet, but the fact that it was for them made it feel bigger than it was. The cashier greeted them with a smile, and Robin immediately left him for the romance section. Steve stopped in front of a display labeled zines, flipping through them quietly. 

There was one on flagging, which he found interesting, and another on something called a beard, which he set aside to maybe show Robin later. A couple on safe sex that he quickly added to the growing pile, Robin’s rambling about diseases getting to him. A few on gender, which were intriguing and he thought Robin might enjoy. 

He stopped when he flipped through one and saw the word bisexual proudly printed on the page. He’d known he couldn’t be alone, even when it sure fucking felt like it in a town like Hawkins, but the fact that there was a whole fucking word for what he was, an entire sexuality for people just like him…

Robin found him still standing in front of the stand, holding back tears. 

“Dingus?”

He thrust the zine at her, still opened to bisexuality. She juggled the books in her arms, grabbing the pamphlet in two fingers and bringing it in front of her face. She’s always been a fast reader, so it’s not long before comprehension dawns on her face. 

“Bisexual?”

He nodded. 

“Is that you?”

He nodded again, trying to convey how overwhelmed he was with his eyes. Hers softened in return, and she cooed, fumbling with the books as she leaned forward to butt her head affectionately against his chin. 

“We’ll take it,” she promised, adding it to her collection. “Any more you want to bring?”

They marched up to the register together, dumping an armful of books and zines in front of the cashier. She smiled at them warmly, clearly clocking how nervous they both are. 

“First time?” She asked as she started checking them out. 

“That obvious?” Steve croaked, still reeling. 

She hummed. “It’s a lot, isn’t it?”

“It’s so much. ” Robin said. “I didn’t think I’d ever see this much queer literature in my life , much less a single store! It-it’s amazing . And I knew there were more of us out there, obviously, because all anyone ever talks about is how there’s enough for an entire epidemic but n-n-not about anything else, and it’s all here, and there’s not a lot but there’s so much of it and I got to come here with someone and he has a word a-and we’re not alone— “ her voice cracked. 

Steve put an arm around her shoulder, and she turned her face to wipe her eyes on his shirt. 

“We live in a small town,” he explained to the cashier, who looked at them affectionately. She grimaced in acknowledgment. 

“Small towns suck, ” she sympathized. “I grew up in small town Illinois, got out as soon as I could. I think that place was actually cursed.”

He and Robin both laughed. “Indiana,” Steve said. “Trust me, it’s worse.”

“Indiana, huh? You know, I’ve heard a lot about the Indianapolis scene. Might be worth checking out.”

“That would be great, because it took four hours to get here and I get really carsick.” Robin said. “Indy is like, less than half that. Also, interstates are kind of terrifying. Also, Chicago drivers. Also, Chicago. It’s so big , yanno? But it’s so exciting! And there’s always something going on. There’s always something going on in Hawkins, too, but it’s either monsters or about how Kenny Richards knocked up the pastor’s niece—“

Steve hadn’t heard that yet. Now that he’s out of school he only ever heard the gossip Robin told him or whatever the ladies who come into Family Video mentioned while renting their movies. “No shit? Reverend Carter?” 

“ Yeah, he’s so mad—“

“God, it’s like being back there,” the cashier chuckled. “I’ll tell you, people can be the worst monsters out there.”

They both froze, realizing Robin’s slip. Steve laughed awkwardly. 

“Yeah, it sucks.”

“I hope you get out of there soon,” she said, bagging their items. 

“I’m in my senior year,” Robin replied. “After that, I’m going to college and never coming back.”

Steve frowned. “What about me?” She’d never told him she was leaving. Although maybe it should have been a given, he just didn’t like thinking about it. 

Maybe it was too soon for that. They’d only been friends for…god, was it really only three months since Starcourt? The realization made him feel weird, made his skin itch like something was crawling beneath it. No wonder he didn’t know, he was fucking insane . Did he really expect her to stay with him? For her entire life? In the grand scheme of things, they barely knew each other. Never mind that she knew Steve better than anyone ever had, and he knew her the same. 

Robin interrupted his internal freak out, as seamlessly as he always did hers. 

“You’re coming with me, Dingus,” she said, as if it was a given. Like she’d thought it all out, and no matter where she went she knew he’d be right next to her. It soothed his fears, made him feel all warm and fuzzy inside, but…

“You know I can’t leave the kids.”

She frowned back at him, like she hadn’t thought of that. “Fine,” she said. “I’l stay close. And come back sometimes. And you’ll visit, like, all the time. And then when your little batch of gremlins graduates, you’re coming with me and we can get an apartment together.”

He liked that plan. 

“You have kids?” The cashier asked, surprised. “You seem pretty young. How old are they?”

Steve groaned, and Robin laughed. “He’s a mother,” she said gleefully, and he swatted her. 

“Ignore her,” he said. “They’re not my kids, they’re this batch of 14 year olds that have commandeered my entire life.”

“You love them.”

“They’re the bane of my bank account.”

“You’re using daddy’s money to pay for their shit, Harrington, don’t act like you don’t love it.”

She was right. He always got some sort of perverse glee when he pulled out his dad’s credit card to pay for something his dad definitely wouldn’t approve of. Not like he would notice anyway. 

The cashier laughed, handing them their bag.

“Right,” Robin said, vibrating. “Thank you so much, it was really nice to meet you!”

“Pleasure’s all mine, honey. Have a nice day, and be safe out there!”

They tumbled out the door together, books double bagged to hide the contents. 

They checked out the Indy scene at some point, too. Zine exchanges, community meetings, even sneaked into a bar or two. They got kicked out of the first one and side-eyed at the second. The bartenders there served them, but cut them off early and gave more than a few pointed warnings to be safe. Steve met a couple guys, and Robin kicked him in the shins the first night he sauntered into their hotel room with a line of hickies around his neck and a dazed grin on his face. 

Point is, Robin’s been there for it all. It almost feels like she’s been there for everything, his sexuality crisis and the year he spent suppressing it and hating himself. Replaying the feeling of Jonathan’s hand in his over and over into the early hours of the morning. Throwing himself headfirst into his relationship with Nancy like it would cancel out the undeniably queer feelings he had for a boy who wouldn’t even look at him, before the second apocalypse happened and he decided he had bigger things to worry about. 

She knows about the after , their talk and the push-pull nature of their not-quite friendship. So when he drops her off at her house that night, he doesn’t hesitate to follow her inside and lock her bedroom door behind him. 

Her parents definitely think they’re fucking, but as much as it makes her nose wrinkle Robin prefers it to them finding out the truth. 

He collapses on her bed and decides to just get it over with. 

“Hey, remember when I told you I didn’t have a crush on Jonathan anymore?”

“…yes?” Robin says. “You looked very confident about it. Nearly had a whole presentation over how over him and Nancy you were. I was impressed, really. I think you put more work into that rant than you did on any school project.”

“At least I was right about one of those,” he mutters. 

Her mouth drops open. “Wait, seriously?”

“I thought I was over him! I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“There’s nothing wrong with you!” She pauses, thinks about it. “Well, except that your returning crush is on Jonathan. Out of the two of those, Nancy is probably the better option.”

“I already did that!” He protests. No offense to Nancy, but they’re definitely better as friends. Also, she broke his goddamn heart. “Plus, Jonathan’s cool. He’s cute—“

“Is he?”

“—and artistic, and he has those eyes , and he’s a good brother…”

“Oh, yeah,” she nods. “Good with kids. Your weakness.”

“I’m pathetic, Rob. Pathetic . My ex’s ex-boyfriend.”

“It can’t be any more pathetic than having a crush on your ex and her boyfriend,” she consoles. “Actually, I think this is a step up.”

“I’m destined to die alone.”

“You won’t be alone, you’ll have me there,” she says automatically. He loves her so much. “Wait, no. No sappy bullshit. What about Eddie? I thought you guys were getting somewhere.”

“I do like Eddie.”

“Yeah, duh . What are you gonna do about it?”

“Lie down and die?”

She smacks his chest. He doesn’t even protest, just groans and flips over to stuff his face into her pillow. 

“Maybe Eddie wants kids,” Steve mumbles. “Maybe Jonathan wants kids. Maybe we can all live together in some faraway place and have six kids and they won’t have to deal with monsters or evil government agents and the only Papa in their lives will be me and you’ll live next door and we get to drink on the porch together after I put the munchkins to bed and we’ll live happily ever after the end.”

“I didn’t understand a single word of that.”

He just moans forlornly, smashing his face further into the pillow. The mattress bounces when she flops on top of him. 

“Maybe it’s not all bad,” she consoles. Steve just shakes his head. “There’s no way at least one of them doesn’t like you. Have you seen you?”

“Strong words from the lesbian,” he mutters. 

“I still can’t hear you, Dingus, stop trying to suffocate yourself and talk to me.”

He rolls over, and Robin yelps as she almost falls off the bed. 

“Rude!”

“Sorry.”

“No you’re not.” 

“No I’m not,” he agrees. 

Steve and Nancy end up coming with Jonathan to pick Argyle up at the airport. Steve doesn’t know how he got roped into it, especially because Jonathan can drive, but here he is. Stuck in the backseat and listening to The Cure. 

“Jonathan, have you ever considered expanding your musical horizons? Listening to some Journey? Or Wham!? Wham! rocks.”

“Have you ever considered having better taste?” Jonathan retorts. “Wham!? Really?”

“I like George Michael,” Nancy says. She’s in the passenger seat, because she’s a traitor with no regard to the fact that his legs are longer than hers. If Steve hadn’t been worried she’d get out the actual shotgun, he’d have fought for it. 

“I know you do.”

“What does that mean?”

“Doesn’t mean anything,” Jonathan says, smile hinting around his mouth. “Why would it mean something? Just means I know you like George Michael.”

Steve sits back, letting their bickering wash over him. It’s nice to have the three of them like this. Things have been awkward between them since…well, since ‘83, but they’d found a nice rhythm after he and Nancy broke up. Grievances were aired, apologies made in abundance, and the three of them fell into a camaraderie that was as easy as it was painful. Sitting together at lunch, hanging out with Jonathan in the dark room, going out for night drives when sleeping wasn’t an option. They were friends. Unsteady, full of half-realized oversteps and tension-filled silences, but friends. He doesn’t know why it stopped. 

(He does. It stopped when Jonathan moved. Steve and Nancy didn’t know how to interact without something between them anymore, and Steve had thrown himself into his friendship with Robin so quickly they hadn’t had time to find out. Then Jonathan stopped calling, and it all fell apart.)

He missed them, though. He missed this. 

“—right, Steve?” Nancy asks. 

Steve snaps to attention. “Right,” he says obediently, even if he has no idea what she just said. But he and Nancy have pretty similar music tastes, so he should be safe, right?

Jonathan bursts out laughing. 

“So you agree that I should take Erica shooting?” Nancy grins, sharklike. Steve chokes. 

“Take Eric—take the eleven year old shooting?”

“I dunno, I think it would be good for her.”

“You’re insane,” he says flatly. “You’re insane, and I know you’re fucking with me.”

“I am,” she confirms. “I actually said that The Beatles are better than Queen.”

“ What? ” He shrieks. “I know you didn’t just disrespect Freddie Mercury like that. For shame, Nancy Wheeler.”

“The rest of them acted like I was insane for wanting to be popular” Lucas grumbles, throwing the ball too hard and completely missing. “I got sick of being pushed around. Is that so bad?”

Steve isn’t sure he’s the right person for this. He’s gonna try anyway. “Nothing’s wrong with liking basketball, Sinclair.”

“That’s the thing. I do like it! But I didn’t join the team because I like it.” He misses another shot, and huffs in frustration. “They don’t get it. They can’t . Nobody’s calling them —they just never understood. And the one time I actually did something, they weren’t even there.”

“They were being assholes,” Steve agrees, passing him the ball.

Lucas pauses, looking at the ball in his hands. “Patrick got it,” he says quietly. “He kept an eye out for me. Carver was an asshole, and they started a mob, but…Patrick watched my back. And now he’s dead. He didn’t deserve that.”

Standing there, on the court, Steve realizes that Lucas is lonely. 

Venca, you bastard , he thinks miserably. 

He’s just a kid. They’re all just a bunch of kids who’ve been saving the world since they were twelve, and all they have to show for it is a handful of bodies and a mob out for their blood. 

“I can talk to Eddie,” he finally says, focusing on the problems he can fix. 

Lucas looks startled. “Yeah, no thanks.”

“C’mon,” he teases. “You don’t want me to give him the ol’ what for?”

“Dustin’s right,” he complains, “you’re turning into a dad .”

He grins. “I could make him play a game against you, to make up for the game he made the kids miss. Can you imagine?”

Lucas laughs despite himself. “He’d look like a muppet.”

“He would!” Steve says happily. “I love the guy and all, but he has no coordination. We should do it. I could totally get him to say yes, man, just let me try—“

“Dude, no.”

Steve pouts dramatically at him, and Lucas laughs again.

Eventually it’s time to take a break. He raises his shirt to wipe the sweat off his brow, before deciding to forgo shirts entirely and stripping it off. Out of the corner of his eye he sees Lucas stop in his tracks before turning around and dumping an entire water bottle on himself. 

“You okay?” Steve asks, bewildered but amused. “Actually, give me one of those, it’s hot out.”

“Hot,” Lucas agrees, strangled. “Super hot. Yeah. Yeah…” He’s staring stubbornly at the empty water bottle, so Steve has to get one himself and pour it over his head. He sighs in relief, slicking his hair back with one hand.

“That’s so much better,” he sighs. “You’re a genius, kid.”

Lucas stares at him with wide eyes. Steve has to snap his fingers under his nose to get him to blink. 

“You gettin’ heatstroke or something? Do you need to go inside?” He leans closer, trying to look for signs of heat exhaustion or anything else that could be causing it. Not for the first time, he curses the fact that he can’t tell if Lucas is sunburned. “Are you feeling dizzy? Tired? Do we need to go to the ER?”

“No!” Lucas practically shouts, turning around and grabbing the ball. “I’m fine. Let’s play another round.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“All right, then,” Steve grins. “Show me what you’ve got.”

Eddie arrives not much later, with Max in tow. “There they are!” He crows as he gets out of his van. “The only jocks I tolerate. How are you on this…this fine…“

Steve misses a step, caught off guard by the way Eddie trails off. It’s all Lucas needs to get past him and score a goal. 

“Damn. Good one, Sinclair.” He runs a hand through his sweaty hair. It’s ruined beyond repair by now, but he needs a shower anyway. He shakes it out again. “You alright, Munson?”

When he looks over, Eddie is frozen. He hasn’t even moved to help Max out of the van. 

“What?”

Max leans over the driver's seat. “I got bored,” she admits. Eddie jumps, and starts whistling for whatever reason. “I thought we could go get milkshakes after your game, if you wanted.”

Lucas’s eyes widen, and he grins. “That sounds great! The diner off Main Street?”

She nods. Lucas comes up to lean on the passenger side window. Steve heads to the other side, the one Eddie is one. Eddie stands still, wide eyes fixed on Steve. It’s possibly the first time Steve’s ever seen him speechless. 

“Munson?” He prompts, leaving the kids to their debate on what milkshake flavors to get and whether Lucas stinks or not. He studies Eddie’s eyes, relieved to see dark brown fixed towards his torso instead of the rolled whites Vecna favored. “Eddie, dude, you good?”

Eddie snaps to attention, flinging himself backwards and rolling across the hood of his van. “Harrington!” He greets from the other side. “Imagine seeing you here.”

Steve lets out a baffled laugh at the action. “Were you not expecting me?”

“Not like this. ”

He looks down at himself, and back at Eddie. “You’ve seen me shirtless before.”

“And yet it never gets old,” Eddie says. 

“Dude,” Lucas complains. 

“It’s not my fault your little sister is cooler than you,” Dustin shoots back. Erica smirks as Lucas’s mouth drops open. 

“She’s ten! ”

“I’m eleven,” Erica says, “and I know you know that, ball-boy. You’re the one who got me eleven comics for my birthday. One for every year I’ve been alive, remember?”

“Aww, Lucas,” coos Max. “That’s adorable. ”

“You loved that gift!”

“Doesn’t mean you’re not a nerd. ”

“Yeah, okay, Lady Applejack. ”

“Lady Applejack is going to kick your ass next session.” She and Dustin fist bump, as Lucas looks between them in betrayal. 

“Seriously?” He asks Dustin. “You think she’s cooler than me?”

“Sorry,” Dustin says, grinning. “Scoops Troop for life.”

“ Steve ,” Lucas complains. Steve holds his hands up. 

“Woah, woah, woah, what do I have to do with this? Keep me out of it.”

“You think I’m cool, right?”

“Yeah, kid, you know I do.”

“Cooler than Erica?”

Steve looks at Lucas, who has widened his eyes in the way all the kids have figured out he’s weak to, and then at Erica, who’s staring him down like she’s reminding him about his promise of free ice cream for life. 

“Do you guys want drinks? I’m going to get drinks.”

“Coward,” Dustin calls, but he’s already darted into the kitchen. 

All his age appropriate friends are there, acting as much like children as the shitheads in the dining room. 

Steve puts his hands on his hips. “All right, all right,” he bellows. “Munchkins in the living room in five seconds or else I get to pick the movie!” They scramble to comply, and he turns around to share a commiserating look with the others.

Jonathan and Eddie both snap their heads up guiltily, doing seemingly everything they can to appear casual. Eddie’s even whistling. 

The girls are giggling in a corner, and Argyle isn’t paying anyone any attention, instead riffling through the silverware drawer like a man on a mission. Steve frowns at Robin in confusion, and then frowns harder when she shakes her head. 

Tell me, he says with his eyes. 

Absolutely not, her eyes glint. This is too funny. 

Robin!

She looks away and whispers something else to Nancy, who lets out a loud guffaw that Jonathan and Eddie both jump at. 

“Okay,” Steve says, hands still on his hips. “What’s going on here?”

“Sorry, man, I’m trying to see if I can set a fire with the sun’s reflection. I need something shiny.”

“Not you, Argyle, keep doing what you’re doing. You four, what the fuck is wrong with you?”

“Nothing,” they all chorus. Eddie’s making too much eye contact, as if he can convince Steve that everything is normal through the power of sheer will. Jonathan is looking anywhere but Steve, ears red.

“Whatever.” He rolls his eyes, already moving towards the freezer. “Anyone want a rocket pop?”

For some reason, this makes Robin and Nancy laugh harder. Fine, then. Those assholes can all get their own ice cream. Steve doesn’t know why he fucking bothers. 

“I’ll take one if you’re offering, man,” Argyle says, moving on to the junk drawer. At least someone here has their priorities straight. 

He has to bend down and dig through the freezer a little, and out of the corner of his eye he can see Eddie and Jonathan eye each other before sharing a nod. They’re communicating something , and Steve wants to know what the fuck is going on with everyone. 

At least they’re getting along, even if they’re being fucking weird about it. 

The kids start hollering from the other room, and Eddie sighs. “Sorry to flake on you guys, but duty calls.”

“It’s cool, dude. Go do your prison boss thing,” Steve says. 

“My what?”

“For your game?” He keeps a straight face as Eddie has at least three crises in front of him. It’s not his fault every one of those nerds falls for his “play dumb” routine. Honestly, he’d thought Dustin would catch on by now, but he’ll keep milking it for all it’s worth. “Isn’t that the one you’re playing? The dragon one?”

“Do you…” Eddie looks like he’s in pain. “Do you mean dungeon master?”

“That’s what I said.”

He has to fight to keep down his grin as Eddie visibly hides a conniption. Jonathan raises an eyebrow knowingly from behind his back. 

“You’re lucky you’re pretty,” Eddie finally mutters under his breath. 

“You think I’m pretty?” Steve asks, heart fluttering. 

Eddie stares at him. “Steve, everyone thinks you’re pretty.”

He preens. “I know.”

“I take it back.”

“Hey!” He protests. “Fuck you, man. Jonathan thinks I’m pretty.”

“Does he?”

“I do?”

“You fucking better or I’m gonna go home and cry into my pillow.”

“We’re in your home.” Jonathan points out. Fucker. Whose side is he on?

“I’ll go to your home and cry into your pillow.”

“Can you do that after snack break?” Eddie asks. “I’m pretty sure if we don’t feed the gremlins in time they’ll eat me .”

“Jonathan can do snacks,” Steve says confidently. Maybe Jonathan can do snacks, and Steve can get a fucking nap for once. 

“Can Jonathan cook? Can you cook?” Eddie redirects at Jonathan, who shrugs. 

“Nothing fancy.”

He’s way downplaying his skills there. Steve knows damn well he’s been cooking for his family for years. “The way he makes eggs is downright orgasmic,” he tells Eddie, which of course is when one of the kids walks in. 

“Eww.” Dustin wrinkles his nose.

“Chill you little shit, it just means they were good.”

“Do you have to use that word? I don’t want to hear about your morning after breakfast.”

“It wasn’t!” Jonathan protests, voice cracking. “It was just breakfast!”

“Jesus, Henderson, ever heard of not jumping to conclusions?”

“You’re the one who said orgasm and breakfast in the same sentence!”

“I hate everything about this conversation,” Jonathan declares. “I’m leaving.”

“What? Man, come on, don’t leave me alone with these nerds.”

“You should have thought about that before you started talking.”

“Too fucking bad,” Steve says, as Dustin starts physically pulling Eddie into the dining room. He gives them a little salute with his cane, nearly tripping when Dustin doesn’t let up and letting out a swear when it hits the wall. Steve wiggles his fingers back. “Put an apron on and start mixing.”

Neither of them put an apron on, which should have been the first sign. 

“What the fuck is this?” Steve asks dumbly, holding up the collapsed cupcake like it’s a mystical artifact he’s struggling to puzzle out. Jonathan is standing with his forehead pressed to the kitchen counter. “Why does it look like this? Why does it feel hard? ”

Jonathan groans. “I knew I shouldn’t have tried baking,” he says fervently into the counter. “I can cook. Cooking is fine! Cooking is great! I’ve been making meals since I was twelve! But cake?” He flails his arm at the ruined tray, still not looking up. “We always have to save up for Will’s birthday cakes, because I can’t fucking do it. I can’t make a cake. It’s my curse. I should have warned you.”

This might be the most he’s ever heard Jonathan say at once that wasn’t about photography. He doesn’t know what to say to all that, so he takes a cupcake and lobs it at his head. 

Jonathan lifts his head to blink at him, then blinks at the fist sized projectile that bounced off his ear and onto the floor. 

“Dude,” Steve says, “it’s not a curse. I didn’t read the instructions.”

“Why the hell would you not—“ he starts, and Steve throws another cupcake at him. 

He narrows his eyes, and a little thrill goes up his spine at the calculating look in them. 

Jonathan reaches into the flour bag, and he doesn’t have time to even think about dodging before powder explodes in his face. 

Steve gapes at him. Jonathan looks back, a smirk pulling at his lips. 

He grabs the nearest thing to him, a wooden spoon still covered in cake batter, and rushes him. Jonathan’s eyes widen, and he makes a break for it just before Steve gets him. 

“Get over here and accept your fate you little-“

They wrestle around the room, grabbing different things to throw at each other along the way. The batter bowl ends up on Jonathan’s head. There’s icing in Steve’s hair. 

They knock over the cupcake tray with a clatter and freeze. Steve looks at where he’s got Jonathan pressed against the counter, about to smear more batter on his face, then snaps his gaze up. Jonathan is staring back at him with wide eyes. 

“Is everything okay in there?” Eddie hollers after a minute, and they break apart. 

“We’re fine!” They yell, scrambling to clean everything up before someone comes to check on them. Of course they could never be that lucky, because Eddie comes in not five seconds later. 

He stares at them, at Steve’s ruined hair and powdered face, at Jonathan’s batter-covered clothes and red cheeks, and starts laughing. 

“Shut the fuck up,” Steve hisses. “Shut up before the kids—“

Speak of the devil. 

“What are you guys doing?” Mike rounds the corner to ask, because they can’t get a fucking break. “We’re in a critical part of the campaign!”

“None of your business,” Steve snaps, still flustered with the feeling of Jonathan under his hands, Jonathan pressed against the counter, Jonathan’s eyes flickering away from his with a blush on his cheeks that Steve would kill to see more of. 

Mike just glares at him, unimpressed. 

“Everything’s fine, Mike,” Jonathan soothes. “You and Eddie go back, we’ll clean this up.”

“I’ll let everyone know you fucked up the food,” Mike sighs as he turns to leave. 

“Don’t you dare,” Steve says. “We’re doing great. Jonathan, tell him.”

“We’ll have something out when you guys take a break, promise.”

“Whatever.”

They all watch him go, and Steve scoffs before he’s out of the kitchen. “Shithead.”

Mike throws him the finger as he leaves, and he grins. It’s a well-worn routine at this point, them giving each other shit. Steve guesses once you see a guy failing to climb through your sister’s window, there’s no thinking he’s cool, no matter how many times he saves your life.

Jonathan grins fondly. “He is a little bit of a shithead. He used to give me flowers, though.”

“ Really? ”

“Oh yeah. They were eight, and Will got jealous and insisted that he needed to give me flowers too, and then Lucas joined in and they were just handing me dandelions every time they saw me for, like, a week. It was before they met Dustin, and I was thirteen years old and completely unappreciative of the several weeds littering my room.”

Steve gasps. “That’s fucking adorable , oh my God. Why couldn’t I have met that Mike?”

Eddie frowns at him. “He’s not that bad.”

“You would say that. Don’t think I didn’t notice he only started growing his hair out after you met. Kid’s probably a fucking angel for you. I’m pretty sure he spawned directly from hell just to make my life difficult.”

“Right, because you need so much help with that.” He spins around and heads towards the dining room, thumping his cane purposefully. Steve’s poor floors have to be beaten to death by now. “We need snacks, Harrington, and I mean it about being eaten! I don’t want to die like that, man. There’s nothing metal about a bunch of fifteen year olds deciding you’d make a decent meal!”

“Yeah, yeah, get out of here,” Steve sighs, and looks around at the mess. Then he looks at Jonathan, who’s scratching batter out of his hair. 

“Brownies?”

“Brownies.”

“I never got my sweater back, by the way,” Jonathan grumbles. “I want compensation.”

“Which sweater?”

“My yellow one.”

“Oh, yeah,” he says. “Forgot that was yours. I think I was wearing it the day we went to the Upside-Down.”

Jonathan’s mouth drops open. “You got Upside-Down on my sweater?” He demands. 

“No, I took it off first.”

“…do I want to know why?”

“What, suddenly I should have taken it into the Upside-Down?” Steve asks. “‘What do you mean you got hell-dirt on my sweater, Steve?’ ‘What do you mean you took off my sweater so you didn’t get weighed down by lake water, Steve?’ Man, pick a lane.”

“I don’t sound like that!” Jonathan protested, grinning. 

“Sorry for being sensible and taking it off before I dived into the lake. Jesus.”

“So you skinny dipped your way into hell?”

“What? No! It was just my shirt and shoes!”

“ My shirt, apparently.” 

Steve knocks his shoulder into him. “It hasn’t been your shirt for a year and a half.”

She and Vickie have been going out a lot, recently, just the two of them. Robin thinks it’s just what girls do. Steve thinks she’s an idiot. 

“I mean, seriously Robin, she winked at you when she dropped you off. Or tried to wink at you, whatever. You know what I meant when I winked at a girl and told her I couldn’t wait for next time? I meant I planned to get fucking laid .”

“But maybe she didn’t mean it like that! Like, right after she turned red, like super-uper- duper red, and she started stammering so it might just have been an accident! Or she just blinked really weird! Or-or-or she realizes how it sounded and she thought it was weird! Things are different for guys, Steve, you know that.”

“Uh, yeah, because when I pull out the moves I don’t have a girl having a three day breakdown over whether I meant it as a friend thing. ” Honestly, poor Vickie. She’s putting it all into trying to date his best friend, and Robin’s bulldozing over every hint. 

Robin glares at him, which he probably deserves but he swears Vickie is into girls. 

“Hey, can I, uh, talk to you?”

Vickie turns around, eyebrows furrowed. “…yeah? What’s up?” 

“It’s about Robin,” he says tentatively, and a blush blooms on her cheeks. 

“Robin! Yeah, of course,” she says eagerly. “What’s up? You said she was sick, do you want me to bring her some soup or something? Soup always makes me feel better when I’m sick. I mean, obviously, it’s soup! Everyone feels better when they have soup. I could totally bring her soup, I’m great at…soup. I’m going to stop saying soup now.”

He laughs despite himself. “I think she would love it if you brought her soup,” he agrees. “But I actually wanted to talk about something else?”

The nervous look in her eye heightens, turns almost wary. It’s enough of a confirmation that he feels like he can continue. 

“It’s just…” he trails off, trying to think of how to say this while still leaving room for him to wheel back if he needs to, “she’s my best friend, you know? Like, she’s totally awesome, and I love her a lot—“

“Are you asking me for tips on how to date her? Because I don’t think she’s interested, sorry. I don’t think she likes…you.” The you is hesitant, a clear replacement for something else. Something she felt she couldn’t say to him. Something like boys. It makes him feel a lot better about breaking the bro code . “She’s very insistent on you two being—“

“Platonic with a capital P,” he finishes. “I know. That’s not what I’m talking about.”

“Oh.” She relaxes. “Okay. Sorry.”

“I’m just saying that she’s my best friend, and I love her, but she can be…honestly kind of dumb sometimes? Like she’s super smart, knows five languages and everything, but also has a really hard time picking up on, like, social cues? Or what certain gestures might mean.”

The blush returns twofold, Vickie’s wide eyes making it clear she knows exactly what he’s saying. Bingo. 

“I…I don’t…” She takes a step back, eyes flickering around the empty store. He holds his hands up. 

“I’m not attacking you,” he reassures. “I’m…me too, okay? I’m just telling you, if you know anyone who wants something to happen, they have to be, like, super obvious.”

“How much more obvious can I be? ” She blurts out, before slapping a hand over her mouth. 

Steve can’t help it. He laughs, hard enough that he ends up folded over the counter, shoulders heaving. When he peaks up at her, Vickie is staring at him like he’s from another planet, which sets him off again. 

“Sorry, sorry,” he wheezes, “it’s just…I’ve been telling her that for months , and she still won’t listen to me.”

She stands there, frozen as he gathers himself together. Finally, she tentatively takes a step forward. 

“So, like, we’re talking about the same thing, right?” She asks quietly. 

“Yeah,” he reassures her, “we are.”

All the tension leaves her shoulders in one fell swoop, and he feels any tension he may have had leave with it. He feels kind of bad, honestly, cornering her like this, but they only ever talk in short exchanges when he’s working and this is the first time he’s actually seen her without Robin there. 

“And…” she chews her lip nervously, “you said ‘me too.’”

“Yeah.”

“So you’re…”

“Girls and guys,” he confirms, taking a weed wacker to the bush they were beating around. “Bisexual.”

“Oh,” she says, smiling. “Me too.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

There’s a moment where they just beam at each other, in the middle of the empty store. Vickie takes a shuddering breath. 

“This might sound weird, and you can totally say no because I get that it’s weird and it might make you super uncomfortable because we don’t know each other and honestly I shouldn’t even ask—“

“Vickie.”

“Right, sorry,” she says. “Can I…hug you?”

He practically falls on his face vaulting over the counter to squeeze her. It’s not awkward like it probably should be. There’s a camaraderie in it, the knowledge that even though they barely know each other, they’re the same. Besides, they’re basically in-laws. If she sniffles a little bit into his shirt, he won’t mention it. 

“You really think I have a chance?” She mumbles quietly into his shoulder. 

“Oh yeah,” he assures her, “definitely.”

“Good, because I was kind of losing hope,” she admits as she pulls away. They grin at each other, and Steve huffs a laugh, shaking his head. 

“As her best friend, I’m qualified to say that she’s going to be over the goddamn moon . I won’t stop hearing about it for weeks, trust me.”

Her smile is practically blinding. It’s no wonder Robin would go to the ends of the earth to see it again. 

“Good,” she says again. “So…you think she’d like it if I brought her soup?”

“She’s going to freak out if you bring her soup. In a good way! You should totally bring her soup. Maybe don’t kiss her, though, or say anything yet, because she’s never going to forgive herself or me if your first kiss is when she’s all snotty.”

Vickie snorts. “Noted. Anything else I should know?”

“She loves those coming of age movies, don’t watch Back to the Future, her favorite diner is the one with the really good milkshakes that cost way too fucking much, and if you wear your hair up she’s going to call me later about how you have a really nice neck.”

“My neck?” She asks, touching it. A blush rises to her cheeks. 

“Don’t tell her I said that.”

“I make no promises.”

He shakes his head, grinning as he goes back around the counter. She turns to go, but gives him one last look before she opens the door. “Hey, Steve? Thank you.”

“Thank you ,” he tells her. “You make her really happy.”

“She makes me happy too.”

“Good,” he says, and then something he meant to say pops back up in his brain. “Oh, yeah, and Vickie?”

“What’s up?”

“Remember to rewind your tapes,” he says faux-seriously, meeting her eye. “We can see exactly where you paused Fast Times .”

Her face turns as flaming red as her hair, and she runs into the door twice before she finally makes it out. He cackles as she gives him the finger when she leaves. 

It takes everything in him not to spill the beans when Robin calls him later to lament the fact that Vickie saw her all snotty but also brought her soup and isn’t she so nice, Steve, she’s seriously, like, perfect, and we’re going to the milkshake place once I’m better. Vickie clearly has a plan and he’s not about to spoil the ending. 

He ends up calling Nancy instead.

“Oh,” Nancy says once he’s done talking, “she’s going to lose her mind. ”

“I know! I don’t know how I’m going to look her in the eye until then, Nance. She knows when I’m hiding something. ”

“I know. She’s told me all about your mind-meld.” 

“Maybe I should pretend I got sick too, hole up in my house until after the date.”

“Doesn’t she live there like two days a week?”

“Well, yeah, but if I’m sick and she knows someone else is taking care of me she won’t come near me with a ten foot pole.”

“Hmm,” she muses. “Jonathan would probably help, he’s pretty good at taking care of sick people. But if you got it from her, wouldn’t she be immune?”

“Fuck.” He leans his head back. “Looks like I’ve got to do this the old fashioned way.”

“Which is?”

“Pretend I’m hiding something else and spill the beans on that so she doesn’t think I’m hiding this. ”

He can practically see her nodding on the other end of the phone. “What would it be?”

“Shit, I dunno. I’m going to be, like, really antsy, it has to be something big.”

“You could pretend to have a crush on Jonathan,” she throws out offhandedly. 

He chokes, has a coughing fit that lasts so long he’s red in the face and wheezing.

“Steve?” She asks when he picks the phone back up to mutter a quick sorry into the receiver. 

“I’m here. Sorry, I gotta get some water, I’ll be right back.”

He drinks two glasses while he stalls, and throws some water on his face for good measure. Then he makes his way back to the phone like a death march. 

“I’m back.”

“Steve,” she says immediately, voice sharp. He can picture the pinched furrow between her brows, the one she gets when she knows there’s a mystery to solve. “What was that?”

“What was what?”

“ Steve.”

“Don’t be mad,” he says automatically, and hears her suck in a quick breath over the line. 

“I’m not mad,” she assures him. “Just…really?”

“Surprise?”

“I’m more surprised that you admitted it,” she confesses. 

“Yeah,” he laughs weakly, “Fuck, I didn’t want to tell you.”

“Oh.”

“Not that I don’t trust you!” He promises. “It’s just…it’s awkward, isn’t it? I mean, you and me, and you and him, and then…”

“You and him.”

“There is no me and him. There won’t be.”

All he can hear is her breathing. Not confirming his statement, but not denying it either. He’s glad she’s not trying to reassure him, trying to tell him he has a chance. It hurts, a bit, because he knows Nancy and Jonathan get each other and if she doesn’t think there’s a chance he definitely doesn’t have one. But empty platitudes would be worse. 

“I’m just…confused,” she admits. “I thought you and Eddie were heading towards something.”

“I don’t know,” he says truthfully. “I thought, for a little bit…but I don’t think so.”

He’s been pulling away recently. They never hang out alone anymore, and all of Steve’s flirty comments have been quietly rebuffed. It’s disappointing, but it’s not the end of the world. He’ll survive. He always does. 

“Wait, so you do like Eddie?”

“I like them both.”

“Oh.”

“Y’know you’re, like, my soulmate, right?” Steve mumbles into her thigh. 

He hears the smile in her voice when she ruffles his hair and says, “Yeah, dingus. What would you do without me?”

“Die in a Russian base, probably. Stop messing up my hair.”

She digs both hands in defiantly, and he rolls over to bat them away. Eddie laughs when he sits up, hair definitely ruined beyond hope.

Steve shoots him a glare. “Shut up.” 

“Look at you,” Eddie murmurs fondly. “You’re a wreck, Steve Harrington.” And he reaches over to tug a piece of messy hair between his fingers. 

Steve freezes. He doesn’t dare move, doesn’t so much as breathe in case it makes him stop. It’s been a while since someone beside Robin touched him like this, and it feels so good it almost hurts. 

Eddie must see something in his face, the wide eyed longing, because he pulls away like he’s been burned. 

The involuntary whine he lets out at that makes them both freeze. Eddie’s staring at him, shocked, and Steve contemplates jumping off the roof before the look on his face turns curious, almost interested. 

Steve feels like a deer in headlights. 

Cautiously, Eddie reaches back over and scratches his scalp, right at the base of his skull. He goes boneless instantly. 

“Oh my god,” Eddie breathes. 

“He’s like a dog, isn’t he?” Robin asks, taking a hit from the bong they’ve all but forgotten about. She coughs. “A big ol’ puppy dog, like golden retriever or something. All nice and dumb with his big brown eyes.”

Steve would protest, but it feels so nice he can’t be bothered. Eddie rubs at a particularly sweet spot, and he slumps right into his lap. 

“What the fuck?” Eddie whispers. “I—Robin? Is he okay? Is this normal?”

Robin laughs, but he doesn’t care. She’s the only one who ever touches him like this anymore, and Eddie’s hands are bigger and different and they scratch in just the right way. Steve could probably die happy here. 

“Wow,” he hears Jonathan say from across the room. “He only took like two hits.”

“M’not a lightweight,” Steve complains, even though he’d had more than two hits and is definitely feeling it. “It feels nice. Sue me.”

“He really is just kind of like this,” Nancy agrees. She was always a good sport about it, while they were together. Carding a lazy hand through his hair as he laid in her lap, attention on the flashcards in her other hand. If he weren’t so content where he is, he’d crawl over, see if she still keeps her nails the same, perfect length. Sometimes, he’d fall asleep there and wake up with tiny braids in his hair, her mischievous smile the first thing he saw when he opened his eyes. 

He loved her so much. Loves her still. Even with how everything ended, if his first real heartbreak had to be anyone, he’s glad it was Nancy Wheeler. 

“Hey, man, I get it,” Argyle says. “Getting my back rubbed makes me feel like hot butter.”

“Like butter?” Jonathan laughs. 

“Yeah, man, I’m all melty.”

“Do you ever wonder what butter feels like when you put it in the microwave?” Robin muses. “Like, emotionally?”

“What the fuck, Buckley,” Eddie says. 

Steve giggles into his lap. “Fuck buck,” he wheezes. “It rhymes. ”

“Robin,” he says, grabbing her by the shoulders. Her eyes widen. “As your best friend, and someone who used to have an embarrassing crush on you—“

Her nose scrunches in disgust, and he can hear Eddie choke from behind him.

“—I can confirm that you’re a total catch,” he continues resolutely, “and you’re the coolest person I know. I’m rooting for you. So go out there, be brave, and touch a boobie!”

“That was the worst pep talk I’ve ever heard,” she complains, but her eyes are shining. “And I’m not cool.”

He was being completely genuine. “No, you’re right. I was lying to you.”

“Dingus! I’m fragile. ”

“Don’t worry, Robin,” Eddie says, coming up to pat her on the shoulder. “I think you’re pretty cool.”

“I dunno,” Dustin says quietly, biting his lip. “I just…sometimes it feels like once you got Robin, you forgot about me. Which is dumb, because I see you all the time, but she’s always there too. Which is cool! I like Robin, she’s like, one of the coolest people ever. I just kind of miss when it was you and me? I know you see me as a kid, and Robin is your age and she’s your soulmate or whatever even though you aren’t dating for some reason and you work together and then you’re also hanging out with Nancy or Jonathan or Eddie and I don’t even play basketball like Lucas so we don’t have any shared interests outside the Upside-Down—“

“Woah woah woah,” Steve interrupts. “ What?”

“I miss you!” He snaps. “I know it’s weird, you’re right here , but you’re always hanging out with people who are your age now which is great or whatever but it feels like we never see each other anymore and I’m mad at you. Even though I shouldn’t be! Because it’s stupid!”

“Henderson…”

“Whatever,” Dustin mutters. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Of course it matters!”

“Where’s Eddie?”

“Hanging out with Nancy,” Robin says, thoughtlessly counting the change in her wallet. Steve and Jonathan share a look of impending horror. 

“…I thought Nancy went to the gun range,” Jonathan says when Robin doesn’t volunteer any more information. 

She huffs, pulling out a pen and sticking it behind her ear. “They went together.”

“To the gun range?” Steve asks, voice hitched three octaves from where it should be. “Can Eddie even use a gun?”

“He was a drug dealer, Steve.”

“Great.” Steve’s voice is cracking like he’s thirteen again. “That’s great. Why wouldn’t we give Eddie a gun? Maybe they should take Erica next time, make it a real party.”

“Will and I knew how to shoot when we were her age,” Jonathan says. “We didn’t like it, but…”

“Yeah, we’ve all used guns—“

“I haven’t,” Robin pipes up helpfully. 

“ Most of us know how to shoot. But are we actively giving Eddie a gun? Is that a thing we’re doing?”

“He and Wayne already own one,” Robin points out. 

“Let me rephrase,” Steve says. “Are we okay with Eddie and Nancy going to a place filled with deadly weapons, unsupervised?”

Robin blinks at him. “Ah,” she says weakly. 

“Yep.”

“I’m sure it will be fine?”

“Someone is going to lose a limb , Rob.”

“My money is on Eddie, personally.” Jonathan says, mouth quirking when Steve glares. 

“Had to run around in the stupidest little sailor uniform,” Steve groans. “We found a secret Russian base in those uniforms. I got tortured in that uniform. Robin told me she was gay in that uniform. I totaled Billy Hargrove’s car in that uniform. I fought a melted flesh monster in that uniform.”

“There is,” Eddie says, “a lot to unpack there.”

“He totaled Billy’s car because he was going to run over Nancy and kill us all,” Jonathan volunteers. 

“That I can believe. Guy was a fucking psycho.”

“He was possessed at the time.”

“Yeah, plus I’d–” Steve starts, then stops. “Okay, this is going to sound really bad, but I’d been daydreaming about hitting him and making his stupid fucking car explode all year. I kind of saw my chance and…punched the gas?”

Eddie bends over, cackling. “You just fucking hit him with your car? ”

“I was high!” He defends, which just makes Eddie laugh harder. “And it wasn’t my car. I’d do it again, too. You know he pretended he was going to run the boys over once? He might have done it, too. Max had to yank the wheel. I shoulda run him over sooner.” He pauses. “Don’t tell Max I said that.”

Jonathan nods, and Eddie zips his lips. “Your secret is safe with me. Seriously, though, wish I’d seen you all dressed up. I bet you were adorable.”

“Shut up.”

“It was something,” Jonathan agrees. Steve’s mouth drops open in betrayal. “He wore knee socks with it.”

Eddie makes a strangled noise.

“They weren’t knee socks, Byers, they were normal fucking socks.”

“Hmm, I’m pretty sure I remember them being knee length. Maybe you should model for us, just in case.”

Steve shoves him. “Well your memory is fucking pervy, man, they were mid-calf at most. Besides, Robin and I burned that shit as soon as we got out of there, sorry about your little fashion show dreams.”

Jonathan ignores him. “I bet we could find another one,” he tells Eddie. “Make him wear it for Halloween.”

“How hard could it be?” Eddie agrees as Steve makes a wordless sound of protest. “All we’d need to do is go to the nearest costume store. Or, barring that, a lingerie shop.”

“Why would they have it at a lingerie shop?” Steve yelps. “It was a uniform!”

“Aww, but Steve,” Eddie leers, “don’t you know people love a man in uniform?”

Dustin and Max are whispering excitedly together. Steve can feel his blood pressure rising. 

“What’s going on here?” He asks, hands on his hips. 

“Nothing,” Max says, at the same time Dustin says, “We’re figuring out a way to upgrade Max’s chair.”

Max scowls in Dustin’s direction, and he backtracks. “I mean…nothing! Why would we be doing anything? Actually, what are you doing?”

“Upgrade her chair, huh?” Steve says dryly. Max kicks Dustin in the shin. 

“Ow!”

“What are you gonna do about it?” Max asks, raising her chin challengingly. 

“Absolutely nothing,” he assures. “Go wild. What are you gonna do, tape rockets to it?”

Max’s face lights up, but Dustin shakes his head. “That’s too cartoony,” he complains. “We have plans, Harrington! Grand plans. Scientific plans. We’re going to do so much better than taping rockets to her chair, just wait and see.”

“…right,” he says. “So they’re gonna be fancy rockets. Got it.”

Jonathan raises his camera, quick as anything, and shoots. Steve’s mouth drops open. 

“Dude!”

“What?” He’s fiddling with the viewfinder, raising the camera as if to check the focus, but Steve hears the telltale click again. 

“C’mon, man, there’s no way I look good in those.”

“Steve Harrington, admitting he doesn’t look good? Are we in the right universe?”

“Hey, hey, hey,” Steve says. “I didn’t say that. I said you’re a shitty cameraman.”

Jonathan raises an eyebrow. “You bought me this camera.”

“Nancy and I bought you that camera. It was joint camera-buying. And it doesn’t make you good. ”

Dustin eyes him suspiciously. “You’re being weird.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He starts stacking the tapes again, ignoring the heat in his cheeks.

“You’re blushing!”

“Keep your fucking voice down!”

“You’re actually blushing.” Dustin looks amazed. “I haven’t seen you blush in, like, forever. Since you and Robin were flirting before the Russian thing happened!”

“Rob and I weren’t flirting. I keep telling you, Henderson, it’s never gonna happen.”

“Yeah, cause you suck.” Dustin squints at him again. “Why are you blushing, then? Was it Robin again?”

He groans. “For fucks sake, Henderson, it wasn’t Robin.”

“Well the only other person in here was Jonathan, and—“

Steve feels his entire face light on fire, and Dustin breaks off, gaping. 

“Don’t-“ he tries to warn.

“You like Jonathan!”

“Dustin!” He snaps, looking around the room to check if anyone could be overhearing them. “Dude, shut up. ”

“Sorry, sorry,” Dustin whispers, looking regretful. “I just—you never told me that you like guys!”

“Uh, yeah, I don’t go spreading it around. It’s not exactly the best place to be.” Except the other queers he calls his best friends, obviously but he can’t tell Dustin that. 

“But you could tell me,” Dustin says, still so young and wide-eyed and so fucking accepting Steve could cry. “I wouldn’t have said anything. I don’t care if you like guys or girls.”

Shit, now Steve’s getting all into his feelings. “I know, man,” he says softly, even though he didn’t. Couldn’t. “I was going to tell you soon, I promise. Thanks for being the coolest little guy I know.”

“I’m not little.” He scrunches his nose. “I guess you really don’t want to date Robin, then. ”

Steve sighs, resigning himself to a long conversation. “I’m bisexual. Means you like both.”

“…you can do that?”

“Yeah? I mean, why not, right?”

“Right.” Dustin’s got his thinking face on, and Steve tries not to feel like he’s under a microscope. “So, theoretically, you and Robin-“

“No.”

The little asshole outright pouts at that. “Fine. I guess it wouldn’t be fair to her anyway, if you like Jonathan .”

“Woah, woah, woah, wait a minute-“

“My lips are sealed,” Dustin promises. “I won’t tell Will. Or El, or Lucas, or Max, or Erica, or Mike.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“Can I tell Suzie?”

“Isn’t her older sister dating his best friend? Absolutely not.”

“Suzie is a vault, Steve! She would never betray me like that!”

“Yeah, go ahead and tell your Mormon girlfriend that I’m queer. What part about not spreading it around don’t you get? Shit’s dangerous, Henderson, you know that.”

“Fine.” The kid sulks a little, and Steve sighs, looking at his tape deck one last time. Runs a hand through his hair. He’s sick of his house.

“How about we go get milkshakes?”

He perks up immediately, just like Steve knew he would. “Can we get fries too?”

“Not if you’re going to dip them in your shake like a monster.”

“It’s better that way, Steve, I’m telling you—wait, are we just leaving everyone else here?”

Steve pauses, abruptly remembering that he’s supposed to be playing host. Then he grabs a piece of paper and starts writing a note. 

“Yep,” he says, dotting his i’s with hearts because he knows it will make Robin laugh. He’ll need to get into her good graces somehow, after this. “Get in the car, twerp, and be sneaky about it. Real Indiana Jones shit. I’ll leave this where Robin can see it and be right there.”

Dustin salutes and turns on his heel, pressing himself against the wall and looking around the corner comically. Steve laughs and goes to put the note on the kitchen table. 

The diner is quiet on a Thursday afternoon. Dustin gets him to dip his fries in his shake, and to his surprise, it’s not bad. 

Maybe he should try new things more often. 

“You’re such an asshole,” Robin says when he gets home. “‘Told Dustin about Dorothy, be back soon?’ Really?”

“It’s code!”

“You left me to play host in your house. Do you know how hard it is to corral your children? I had to get Eddie to make Mike listen to me. It was embarrassing!”

“Well, the house didn’t burn down, so I’m assuming you did fine.”

“Max and Lucas started a fire.”

That stops him in his tracks. “ Really? ”

“Yes! Nancy had to put it out. If you ever leave me like that again I’ll wring your neck.”

“ My virginity!” Robin screams as soon as he picks up the phone. 

He yanks it away from his head, ears ringing so much it takes a minute to process what she’s said. Once he does, though, he’s practically giving himself another concussion with how hard he slams it against his ear. 

“—so good, Steve, it was so good you don’t even know. I have a hickey! A hickey, can you believe it? I can’t believe it, she told me she had a fucking crush on me—“

Steve pokes her collarbone, grinning like a loon. “You know, when you said you had a hickey, I thought you meant you had an actual hickey. ”

She slaps his hand away. “What are you talking about? This is a hickey!”

“A baby hickey,” he teases. “It’s tiny, Rob. Any smaller and I would need a microscope to see it.”

“Shut the fuck up, neither of us knew what we were doing! Sorry I’m not a fucking hickey expert yet, Jesus. Keep your opinions about my sex life to yourself.”

“See if I ever give you tips again,” he says, faux-offended. She gets a distant, glazed look in her eye, and he grins. “That good?”

“I did the thing you told me to do. The thing with the, you know, the—“ she’s firetruck red, refusing to look at him. “ Thethingwiththetongue. ”

“There were several things with the tongue, Rob, you gotta be specific.”

She buries her face in her hands. He thinks he can see smoke coming out of her ears. “It was so good. ”

He nods sympathetically, and holds up his hand for a high five. She obliges without looking at him. “C’mon, I’m taking you out to celebrate. Milkshakes on me.”

“Argyle is so fucking awesome, man,” Jonathan tells him seriously. His eyes are redder than the fucking state. 

“I know, Jonathan,” he says. 

“No, like, he’s the best .”

“Uh-huh.”

“He’s the kind of guy who, like…” he trails off, clearly thinking. “It’s like, you’re the new guy at school, right? And it’s senior year, and you don’t know anybody , and there’s only one year left and you're used to not having friends at school so it shouldn’t matter but everything is so new and you miss the friends you did have and, like, you don’t know where to sit at lunch because you don’t know where anything is, so you just find an empty table. And you’re sitting there, and you miss sitting with Steve and Nancy, and then this random dude, like, sits next to you! And it’s wild, man, because he says your loner vibe is bringing him down and he gives you a cookie he stole from work, and he asks you if you want to smoke up after school. And you do! You do want to smoke after school, because you don’t have work to distract you anymore and you’re sad and you don’t know what to do with yourself so you go over to his house and he’s so happy to see you it throws you off a little and you smoke and he tells you you’re going to be best friends like—like you’re in kindergarten or something, but you believe it because he’s so fucking great and so you’re best friends and you hang out all the time and he’s, like, the fifth best thing to ever happen to me.”

Steve stares at him. Jonathan looks like he might actually be crying. 

“Are you, like, okay?” He asks tentatively. 

“I need to tell Argyle I love him.”

“Okay, man.”

“He’s so awesome, Steve.”

“I know, man,” he says, looking around for help. Maybe if Argyle is in his line of sight he’ll calm down. 

“I’m kind of his only friend, which doesn’t make sense because he should have all the friends, but also I’m kind of glad because it means he wants to spend his summer here with me instead of in California. Even though Cali is like, way better than Hawkins. There’s no monsters in Cali.”

“I’m glad he’s here too,” Steve says honestly, because Argyle is a fucking riot and also somehow cracked the code to getting Jonathan to chill for five fucking seconds when he’s not sure anyone else ever succeeded. He should be given a medal for that alone, no interdimensional monster crisis needed. 

“He’s the kind of guy who makes a headstone out of a pizza box when there’s nothing else to use,” Jonathan says, and it’s just so fucking out of the blue Steve knows there has to be a story behind it.

“All right, Jonathan,” he says, catching Nancy’s eye on her way to the kitchen and frantically waving her over. “Why don’t you tell Nancy all about it?”

Nancy nods along sympathetically, not even questioning it. He loves her. “What are you telling me about?” She asks, sitting behind Jonathan and running a hand through his hair. 

“Argyle,” Jonathan tells her, tilting his head back and letting out a long sigh as she scratches his scalp. “He’s the best.”

“He sure is,” she agrees. “Whatever happened with that history project you told me about?”

He launches into the story as Steve slowly slides out from under his legs.

“What’s the gayest thing you’ve ever done?”

Sucked off, Steve almost says, but stops himself. There’s a funnier option here.

“So in the locker rooms—“ he starts. 

Eddie cackles, throwing his head back and exposing the long line of his neck. “Of fucking course it’s the locker room shit. Christ, Harrington, could you be any more of a jock?”

“Shut up,” he snaps without heat. “Maybe if someone didn’t skip out on gym all the fucking time, they could have shared the experience, ever think of that?”

“Not without getting beat up I couldn’t.”

“Okay, okay, okay,” Robin interrupts. “Eddie, shut up. I want to hear this.”

“Thank you, Robin,” he sniffs. “Where was I? Right. So in the locker rooms, I used to go around with as little clothing as I could conceivably get away with, which honestly was usually nothing, because I wanted other guys to look at me.”

“Oh my god,” Nancy says, “seriously?”

“Most Hawkins High basketball team from ‘81 to ‘85 absolutely know what my dick looks like. I thought it was, like, me wanting to make them jealous, but looking back I just wanted them to think I was hot.”

“Shit,” Eddie says, “maybe I shouldn’t have skipped gym.”

Robin throws a napkin at him. “That’s like, the opposite of what I did. I changed in the stalls because I was terrified of other girls seeing me change in the same room as them and just knowing. ”

“I think it just affirmed my masculinity, if anything,” Steve confesses. “They all just kind of looked impressed.”

Nancy bursts out laughing, and he realizes how that sounds.  

“You—“ she snorts, which sets her off again, and Robin starts giggling with her. “You aren’t that big.”

Eddie chokes, spewing beer everywhere and making the girls laugh even harder. 

“Yeah, yeah, hyuck it up.” Steve rolls his eyes. “Never had any complaints, might I remind you.”

Robin pulls herself together. “Motion of the ocean,” she intones, before she and Nancy set off into hysterics again. Eddie’s still coughing his lungs out. 

Sometimes it feels like he’s given too much to this town to leave. His blood is mixed with the soil, tying him here. Tying him down. 

Other days it takes everything in him to stop himself from grabbing Robin and getting the hell out of dodge. 

He admires Joyce, honestly. Holding on to Will and El and Jonathan and running full speed out of hell. Apologizing for not being able to take the other kids with her. Giving Steve a kiss on the forehead when he helped move boxes before he left for his shift. Telling him she knows he’ll keep them safe, not as an order, but a reassurance. Because she knew he’d worry about it. Because she’d been there at the hospital with Will when he woke up after Billy’s attack gave him a seizure and the first thing he’d croaked was Lucas’s name. 

Joyce Byers trusted him. How could he leave after that?

Even if she came back. Even if Hopper is alive and well. Even if the Upside-Down is over and done with for good. There’s always going to be something in him, he knows, that will never believe it’s really gone. 

(Steve thinks maybe Hawkins is a black hole, impossible to escape. Or maybe it’s a stomach. Something about the town has always felt hungry.)

It’s fine. They’ll all go skipping off to college eventually, too smart not to, and by that time Robin will be most of the way through completing her degree. They can get an apartment together in the city, in a different state, and only come back on holidays. Escape the unfathomable depths of their small town for good. It’ll be great . 

God, but staying makes him want to peel his skin off. 

The third nightmare that week is particularly gruesome. 

It passes by in flashes. Nancy rising into the air, except it’s not Nancy, it’s Max, then Barb, back to Max. Lucas’s bruised eye. Mike tripping as they run through underground tunnels, but instead of getting up the vines wrap around his legs and pull him into the dark. Max again. Dustin screaming, sobbing, wailing over a body he’s dragged into his lap as the upside-down collapses around them. 

That’s what stands in stark, horrifying clarity among the confusion of a dreamscape. Dark curls, clumped together with blood. A mouth stained red. Blank, unseeing eyes. 

Steve wakes up in motion, halfway to the phone before he’s fully conscious. He dials a familiar number and dry heaves as it rings. Pick up, pick up. 

Finally, the receiver clicks. “Hello?”

“Oh, thank god,” he wheezes, and has to sit down on the floor. His legs are taking a break, try again later. 

“Steve? What’s wrong?”

He chuckles, embarrassed now that the panic has faded. “Sorry,” he says, shaking his head. “I just needed…“ To hear your voice. To make sure you were alive. “Never mind. You can go back to bed.”

“Wait—“ Steve hangs up and then takes the phone off the hook for good measure, which might be a dick move but he doesn’t really want to talk right now. 

He doesn’t know how long he sits there, curled up on the floor, still trembling, before something starts pounding at his door. 

And then it doesn’t stop. 

Shit. Where’s his bat? He runs to his room and grabs it, hands shaking. 

They’re still knocking. Either it’s some asshole having themselves a good laugh, or he’s about to be serial murdered. 

Good fucking luck , he thinks wryly, and opens the door swinging. 

“Sonofa bitch! ”

Steve drops it before it can make contact. “Eddie?”

“Fuck, Byers wasn’t kidding, huh?” It’s Eddie all right, shadowed under the porch. Steve can just barely make out his wide eyes and trembling hands. 

He’d just swung his bat at one of his best friends. He’s basically a poster child for paranoia. Shit, maybe Argyle was right. He does need to relax. 

“Oh my god,” he says, “I’m so sorry. I thought you were a serial killer.”

“So does half of Hawkins.”

“Not like that .” He leans down to pick up the bat, handing Eddie the cane he dropped too. Grimaces at the scratches and dents the bat left in the hardwood. He’ll put a rug over it. “What are you doing here?”

“Well, you hung up on me and then wouldn’t answer any of my calls, so…”

“So you decided to drive to my house at two in the morning and bang on my door like an asshole? What if I’d been asleep?”

Eddie scoffs at the idea, which might be justified but is fucking rude. “Whatever. You gonna let me in?”

“Can I stop you?” 

Eddie uses his cane to nudge Steve away from the door in answer. He doesn’t protest, just sighs and heads for the kitchen.

“Coffee?”

“Are you kidding?” Eddie asks. “It’s almost the devils hour, you masochistic bastard. Hot chocolate.”

“I thought midnight was the devils hour.”

“That’s the witching hour.”

“Aren’t they the same thing?”

“I can’t believe you would say that to me,” Eddie says gravely, but the corner of his mouth twitches. 

“Yeah, yeah, whatever.” He gets out the hot chocolate mix, and starts a pot of coffee for good measure. Maybe he can make the cocoa with coffee instead of milk or water…

“Absolutely not.”

“What?” Steve looks up from where he was looking between the mix and the coffee maker. “I didn’t say anything.”

“You didn’t have to,” Eddie says. “There’s no way you’re going to mix coffee with hot chocolate past midnight, you fucking maniac. Turn that machine back off.”

“Can’t be worse than ketamine.”

“Fuck off,” he complains, propping up his cane and hoisting himself onto the counter. “I can’t even do that shit anymore, you know it messes with my medications.”

Steve rolls his eyes, getting two mugs down. “Sad,” he deadpans, and doesn’t turn the coffee maker off. 

“Whatever. If you’re committing crimes against humanity, I want some.”

“I thought it was too late for coffee.”

“Too late for you, ” Eddie counters. “All it ever does for me is make me tired.”

Robin is the same way, so he’ll take Eddie’s word for it. Freaks of nature, the both of them. 

“I used to do this with Jonathan, kind of,” Steve says. 

“What, make yummy mistakes and drink them in your kitchen?”

“No, just…sometimes after a nightmare, we’d talk. Go for a drive. Smoke somewhere.”

Eddie studies him over his mug. “You still like him.“

“Of course I do. He’s my friend.”

“Jesus, Harrington, don’t make me say ‘ like like,’” Eddie rolls his eyes. “We’re not in middle school, you know what I meant.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Like hell—“

“Eddie,” Steve says firmly. “It doesn’t matter. He’s my friend.”

He falls silent, feet kicking against the cabinet. “It’s okay if you wish he was here instead.”

“What?” He blinks, taken aback. Eddie lets out a self deprecating laugh. “No,” Steve says,” seriously, what the hell are you talking about, man?”

“You’ve been in love with the guy for, like, three years,” Eddie says. “You’re allowed to want him here, instead of me.”

He doesn’t know how to unpack all of that. Doesn’t know how to tell Eddie that he hasn’t liked Jonathan the whole time, that although the attraction had come like a punch to the face it took a while for anything more to form. His stupid crush fluctuated and faded before returning back with a vengeance this summer. He doesn’t know how to say he likes Eddie just as much, because Eddie is smart and sharp and knows Steve, doesn’t let him bullshit himself. “I don’t,” he settles on, and even though it’s the truth it rings hollow with the words he can’t say. 

Eddie smiles, a wry twist to his mouth. “Sure.”

“I don’t ,” he insists. “You’re one of my best friends. Jesus, it’s like talking to the kids. I don’t have a favorite.”

“Dustin is your favorite.”

“If you tell any of them that they’ll never find your body.”

“I’m just saying, it’s okay if Jonathan is your favorite out of us adults. I’m a big boy, I can take it.”

“Robin is my favorite,” Steve says, “the rest of you assholes are equally ranked below her. I’m glad you’re here, man. You , not Jonathan, or Nancy, or even Robin. I like standing here, drinking this fucking delicious hot cocoa coffee with you. Stop being such a drama queen.”

Eddie ducks his head, but Steve can finally see a real smile behind his hair. “Flatterer.”

“If that’s what you call flattery, can’t wait to see you cream your jeans when I call you a bitch.”

“Naughty, naughty,” he tsks. “You’re so dirty minded, Stevie.”

“What are you going to do about it?” Steve asks. He doesn’t mean to charge it with so much meaning, he swears, but it’s late and he woke up crying with Eddie’s blood on his hands. He wants it. Wants the reminder, wants to feel Eddie’s pulse beat faster, hear his gasping breaths and feel every inch of warm, healed skin. Wants to have Eddie, if only for a night. 

Eddie gives him a long, searching look, something tinged with emotions he can’t parse. Affection and grief, and maybe even a bit of anger. “Not a damn thing,” he says with finality, and Steve hears the rejection in it. 

He nods like his heart isn’t aching. So Eddie doesn’t like him back. That’s fine, he’s a big boy. He’s already friends with almost all his former crushes, what’s one more? 

It’ll just take some time. 

He sighs, taking one last look into his barely touched drink before dumping it in the sink. “I think I’ll go back to bed.”

Eddie nods. “I’ll head out then,” he offers, and Steve shakes his head. 

“Stay the night.”

“Harrington—“

His face screws up. It’s not like it’s the first time Eddie’s called him by his last name, but this time it’s like twisting the knife in his gut. Like he’s trying to put distance between them. He knows why he’d try and put that distance there, too. Historically Steve’s sleepovers have them all together in the living room, bundled together or on the couches but still close. “Steve,” he corrects. “And you can stay in a guest room. It’s just…it’s late, and you already drove all the way over here. Don’t want it to be a waste of gas.”

“It wouldn’t be,” Eddie says, pouring out the contents of his own mug before setting it beside Steve’s on the sink. “But fine. I’ll stay in a guest room.”

“You know where they are, take your pick,” Steve says, waving his hand. “Goodnight.”

“Goodnight,” Eddie replies, but he’s already halfway up the stairs. 

When he wakes up in the morning, Eddie isn’t there. The guest bed hasn’t been slept in at all. 

Nothing really changes, after that. He and Eddie don’t hang out one-on-one, but they still bump shoulders at group gatherings. Steve still hosts DND at his house on Saturdays. They’re fine. Steve is doing fine. 

He thought he was doing fine, at least until he’s cleaning up after another six-hour campaign. The boys had gone home with Nancy, deciding to have a sleepover, but Jonathan had elected to stay behind to help clean up. 

Eddie had been particularly vibrant this session. Steve thinks it might have been a big one, judging by the tone of the room and the amount of screaming that had happened when Erica rolled something that must have been impressive. He’d smiled at Steve when he put out the snacks, said, “Thanks, sweetheart,” like he meant it, and then his expression had shuttered when he saw whatever emotions Steve was experiencing play across his face. They hadn’t looked at each other for the rest of the day, but Steve could feel eyes on him every time his back was turned. 

“What’s wrong?” Jonathan asks, as soon as they’re alone. 

“What makes you think something’s wrong?” Steve asks, putting away the dishes. “Nothing’s wrong. I’m doing great.”

“Steve.”

“I’m fine, seriously.” He’s not lying, technically. He is fine, or will be, which is basically the same thing. He’s been rejected before, it’s not the end of the world.

Jonathan’s silence speaks volumes for what he thinks about that. 

“Jesus,” Steve snaps, thunking a mug into its cabinet hard enough he half worries it’ll collapse. “Eddie rejected me, okay? It’s not a big deal, I just…” He sags, all the fire in him gone. “I’ll get over it soon.”

“Eddie…what?” When he turns around, Jonathan’s eyes have widened so much they’re popping out of his head like a cartoon. 

He just sighs, and keeps unloading the dish drainer. 

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“It doesn’t have to,” Steve shrugs. “He doesn’t like me back. That’s fine.”

“But—“

“Honestly, Jonathan, I don’t want to talk about it.”

Jonathan’s mouth snaps shut, visibly debating whether to press or not. Steve doesn’t give him anything, just keeps unloading the dishes. 

Finally, Jonathan moves in to help. Takes the plates out of Steve’s hands and opens the cabinet. They work in silence. 

“So, Stevie,” Eddie drawls, draping himself across the couch. Jonathan stays standing, which does nothing for Steve’s growing nerves. “Jonathan and I had a very interesting talk the other day.”

The hair raises on the back of his neck, and he subtly glances around the room, checking the exits. “Okay?”

“We were just wondering,” Jonathan says carefully, “which of us you…uh…” He looks at Eddie desperately. 

“Have feelings for,” Eddie finishes. 

Everything freezes. Steve swears the world stops spinning. 

“What?” He croaks.

Jonathan squeezes his eyes shut, looking like he’s regretting ever being born, but Eddie barrels on. “A crush, Steve. The peanut butter to your jelly, the yee to your haw, the Hawaiian to your punch. The dungeon to your dragon, if you would.”

“None of that makes any fucking sense,” Steve says fervently. “I need a beer. I need whiskey. I need fucking absinthe for this conversation, actually.”

“No can do,” Eddie says. “If Jonathan and I have to be sober for this, so do you.”

“No thank you.” He stands up, prepared to jump out the window if he has to. 

“Steve,” Jonathan says. Just his name, but the way he says it, the way he looks at him…damn the Byers genetics and their sad, soulful eyes. Why do they look like that? It’s unreasonable, is what it is. Steve hates everything. 

Eddie is looking at them with a triumphant, heartbroken face. “I knew it.”

“Eddie…” Steve warns. He doesn’t know why he bothers, since they’ve already found him out, but he needs some control over the situation. 

“I told you, Jonathan,” Eddie continues. “There’s no fucking way it was me. He can’t say no to you.”

“It’s not just Jonathan,” Steve blurts out, and immediately checks the exits again for a quick getaway. 

At least Eddie looks shaken, the performative nonchalance dropping with his jaw. “What?”

“Steve,” Jonathan says again, “sit down. We need to talk.”

“Can’t it wait?” He asks desperately. 

“Until when? When I go to college? When Eddie moves out of Hawkins? When the next monster comes?” 

“When I fucking die,” he mutters under his breath. 

“You’re not going to die.”

“Eventually—“

“Steve,” Jonathan pleads, “please.”

Oh, he plays dirty. There’s no way Jonathan doesn’t know what using his name does to him at this point, it’s so obviously intentional. He’s making his eyes even bigger and wetter somehow, too, which is just—it’s fucking unfair, is what it is. 

Steve sits back down. 

No one says anything. 

“Okay, I’m leaving.“

“No!” They both yelp. Steve throws his hands up. 

“Well if we’re just gonna fucking sit here—“

“We’re talking,” Eddie says frantically. “We’re talking today, right now, because we have been planning this for two fucking days and I am going to vibrate out of my skin if we don’t get this figured out right fucking now.”

“You planned this?”

“We just want to understand, Steve,” Jonathan explains. “We can’t figure out why you would lie to one of us like that.”

“Lie?”

“Uh, yeah,” Eddie says. “You know, about having a big gay crush on me?”

“He wasn’t lying about that,” Jonathan protests. 

“But he told me he has feelings for you! Ever since you punched him in the face, actually, which is apparently a huge turn on for him—“

“Christ,” Steve says. “Eddie, if you don’t shut the hell up—“ 

Eddie shuts the hell up. 

Steve rubs his temples. 

The silence has returned with a vengeance, and it’s fucking unbearable. 

“Okay,” Jonathan finally says. “We’re not trying to gang up on you. I promise. We’re just trying to figure this out. Why would you tell Eddie you have feelings for me?”

He stares at the ceiling to avoid meeting either of their eyes. Has that bug always been there? Fascinating. 

“What I want to know is why you would tell Jonathan you had a crush on me ,” Eddie says, once it’s clear Steve isn’t going to say anything. “Kinda shitty of you, your majesty. You couldn’t have used anyone else as your wall to hide behind?”

Steve keeps his mouth shut. 

Eddie gets impatient, moving from his spot on the couch to hover directly in Steve’s face and wiggle his fingers. He bats them away. 

“Hey, Harrington,” Eddie says. “C’mon, big boy. Give it to me straight.”

That’s what does it, in the end. The use of his last name, and then calling him big boy. It’s definitely intentional, and Steve curses himself for falling for it again. 

“Fine. Fine .” He throws his hands up, narrowly avoiding smacking Eddie in the face. “Have it your way. I like both of you, is that what you wanted to hear?”

Eddie blinks at him, still way too close. “What?”

“For fucks sake,” Steve snaps, and kisses him. 

It’s an awful kiss, truth be told. Eddie’s mouth is half open in shock, and Steve pulls away as quickly as he can, point made. 

“Both of you,” he repeats. “I like both of you, you stubborn assholes. I can’t believe you cornered me in my own house and made me admit that. That’s such a dick move. I’m going to kill you both—“

He doesn’t get much farther than that, because Eddie leans down and kisses him again. 

He closes his eyes automatically, half in shock as Eddie’s lips move against his. He kisses back, reaching up to wind a hand in Eddie’s hair and feeling him grin against his lips. Shit, this is way better than the one before. He never wants it to end. 

It might be seconds or years, but eventually Eddie pulls away. Steve follows, reaching for him almost unconsciously.

“Easy, big boy,” Eddie murmurs. “This is a bad position for my leg. And Jonathan’s waiting.”

That jolts him out of whatever spell Eddie had on him. He snaps his head around to face Jonathan, flushing bright red. “Shit, man, sorry-“

He stops in his tracks, because Jonathan doesn’t look put out at all. His gaze travels from Steve’s ruddy cheeks to Eddie’s smug grin, tracking down to where Eddie still has his hand on Steve’s arm. 

He doesn’t look put out. He looks fucking interested . 

“Did you mean it?” 

“What?” He asks, dazed, and then realizes what a stupid question that is. Well, Eddie already kissed him, so he has at least one good experience out of this mess. What does he have to lose? “Yeah. Yes. Of course I meant it, I’m not that much of an asshole.”

“Debatable,” Eddie mutters, and Steve would tell him off except he’s stepping away and Jonathan is moving closer and he doesn’t know what to do or where to look so he just looks at both of them and hopes to god this is going where he thinks it’s going. 

Jonathan stops right in front of him, looking him up and down like he’s lining him up through the lens of his camera. Steve feels weirdly on display. 

“Can I…” Jonathan starts to ask.

“Get the fuck down here before I explode,” he says, and pulls him in. 

It’s different from kissing Eddie. His lips are softer, probably due to constantly stealing Nancy’s chapstick, a habit he never broke after they seperated. They’re not bitten to shit, either, something Eddie does constantly and without regard for his poor mouth. Jonathan kisses surprisingly well, although he guesses he shouldn’t be all that surprised. Nancy Wheeler is a great teacher, after all. 

And, he realizes with amusement, he recognizes some of the same moves that he taught Nancy.

He tugs at Jonathan’s waist, and then grabs the back of his knee and pulls harder when he doesn’t get the memo, practically dragging him into his lap. Jonathan goes willingly, almost kneeing Steve in the gut trying to straddle him without breaking their kiss. He shifts, almost grinding down, and shit that’s good. 

Then Eddie is there again, hand fisted in Steve’s hair as he attacks his neck, and Steve gasps. 

“Should we,” he groans as Eddie pulls his hair, “talk about this?”

“Already did,” Jonathan murmurs against his lips. “Tell you later.”

Well okay then. Steve is overwhelmingly happy to let them take the reins here. Except…

“There’s—“ he gasps, breaking away from Jonathan, and moans again when Eddie bites his shoulder. Jonathan grinds down again, more purposefully, and Steve needs them to fucking stop before he has to tell Robin he came in his jeans like a fourteen year old. “Guys, hold on. Slow down for a minute.”

Eddie pulls away immediately, and Jonathan stills, looking regretful. Steve keeps a firm grip on his thighs to keep him from pulling away. 

“I’m good,” he reassures them. “I’m great, it’s just…how far do you want to take this? Because there’s condoms in my room. But don’t feel, like, pressured or anything. We don’t have to do that, I’m cool like this. Also, I’m out of lube.”

Eddie and Jonathan look at each other, sharing one of those silent conversations they seem ever so good at lately. 

“I’m clean,” Eddie says after a moment. 

Jonathan nods. “I’ve only ever slept with Nancy,” he says, and they look at Steve. 

“I’m clean,” he confirms. He’s never been more grateful for Robin’s thing about diseases. She practically frogmarched him to the clinic after he admitted he’d never checked, and he hasn’t been with anyone since. 

Quick as anything, Jonathan is off his lap and Eddie is standing up, both of them grabbing him by a hand and pulling him along. 

Steve laughs. “Eager, huh?”

“Come on, big boy,” Eddie teases, holding tightly to the railing as they make their way up the stairs. Jonathan’s got a sturdy hand on his lower back, since they left the cane somewhere in the living room. “How are we supposed to resist such a nice invitation?”

“Almost impossible,” Jonathan agrees. “Also, I know you already know this, but I should probably tell you I’ve never been with a guy before.”

“That’s fine,” Eddie says. “I haven’t exactly done this either, we can all be in the dark together.”

Steve pauses on the top of the stairs. “Wait,” he says, “what makes you think I haven’t been with a guy?”

“Have you?”

“Once or twice.” He shrugs, aware of the way Eddie’s gaze feels like fire. “It’s been a while. Not anything to write home about. I have a feeling this will be different.” He winks, putting as much roguish charm into it as possible, and Eddie laughs, slightly out of breath.

“Damn straight,” he says, pushing both of them towards Steve’s room. “We’re not going to be doing any actual fucking without lube, anyway, but there’s plenty of other things we could do.”

Jonathan licks his lips, pupils blown. “Do you…you don’t have to say yes, but—“

“But what, Jonny boy?”

“My camera,” he says, looking from Eddie to Steve. “How do you feel about…pictures? Of us?”

Steve can’t take it anymore. He crosses the small space between them with lightning speed to bite down on Jonathan’s lower lip. Jonathan grunts, but gives in to the kiss, melting when Steve fists a hand in his hair. 

“Sounds great,” Steve finally says when he pulls away. “Eddie?”

“Great,” Eddie says hazily, staring hungrily at where he and Jonathan are pressed together. “Yeah, yeah, sounds fucking amazing. Bed?”

“My camera’s in my car,” Jonathan says. “You guys go ahead.”

“Make it fast.” Steve lets go, already missing the warmth. 

“We won’t do anything without you, sweetheart,” Eddie promises. “But yeah, make it quick.” 

“What did you talk about?” Steve asks. 

“Hmm?”

“You said you talked about this,” he clarifies. “What is this, exactly?”

Eddie fidgets, wringing his hands. “We, uh, were wondering if you liked both enough to, uh…date us both. Like, at the same time and everything.”

Steve blinks. “Can you do that?”

“I mean, why not, right?” Eddie grins nervously at him. “Jonathan said it should be easier than saving the world, at least.”

“I need to call Robin.”

“What the fuck, Steve,” Eddie groans. Jonathan grunts in agreement, slinging his arm over Steve’s hips to keep him there. 

“No, seriously, I need to call her,” he says. “Let me up.”

Jonathan pouts at him. 

“Cuddle Eddie, dude—“

“Did you just call him dude?”

He rolls out of bed, shrugging his boxers on and almost tripping over someone’s jeans. 

“Wait,” Eddie says, sitting up, “are you actually calling her right now?”

“Uh, yeah, duh. What else would I be doing?”

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” he starts, but Steve is already out of the room. 

He dials Robin’s number, praying to god that she’s the one who picks up. He’s bouncing a little, humming under his breath and grinning like a loon. 

“Hello?”

“Robin! Are you alone?”

“Yeah, Mom and Dad are having a date night,” she says. “Everything okay?”

“You know how I said that Eddie and Jonathan would never like me back?”

“Yeah, and I said there was no way at least one of them—wait.”

He’s grinning so big he can’t feel his cheeks. “Yep.”

“Which one?”

“They’re both in my bed right now.”

She shrieks, and he holds the phone away from his ear, laughing. “Jesus, Buckley, I need these ears!”

“I need to know what happened!” She demands. “Details, dingus! I thought you said you were taking it to your grave, there’s no way it just came up. Who confessed first? Was it just a one time thing? When you said they were in your bed, you meant sex, right? Wait, they’re still there? Why are you talking to me when—“

The phone is snatched right out of his hand. “Robin,” Eddie greets, leaning against the wall. He’s glaring at Steve a little, but he can tell he’s not actually mad. “Sorry, but Steve is busy right now. He’ll call you back.”

He can hear her muffled cheering before Eddie sets the phone back on the hook.

“That was rude.” 

“What are you gonna do about it? Ruin my afterglow?”

He’s got him there. 

Eddie shakes his head, widening his eyes in a pout. “C’mon, big boy. Jonathan is all alone in your bed. We don’t want him to be lonely, now, do we?”

“He wouldn’t be if you’d let me finish my phone call,” he shoots back, but he’s already halfway to his room.

He opens the door with Eddie hot on his heels, and Jonathan looks up from his camera and smiles. Slow and wide and almost glowing in the sunset peaking through the blinds Steve forgot to close before they stumbled to bed. And Steve…

I want to keep this, he thinks, closing the distance to give Jonathan a sweet kiss. Eddie nudges at him insistently, and he crawls over to the other side of the bed. Eddie lays down like he’s afraid they’re going to leave, flinging an arm and a leg over them both, and Jonathan is definitely being suffocated in the middle of them but he doesn’t seem to mind. He just gives Eddie a chaste peck before leaning over him to set his camera on the nightstand. Steve’s heart swells at the sight, at the way they so clearly want this. It’s not just for his benefit, it’s not some performative act that will fall apart on them. They want to try, genuinely want this for all of them. 

Steve smiles, and wraps his arm around Jonathan’s waist to link hands with Eddie.

They all three burrow down into the blankets, content to sleep the evening away. Talking can come later, when they’re rested and sleep-warm. The world won’t end again any time soon. There’s no rush. 

“Do you think I should call Argyle?”

“Man, shut the hell up and go to sleep. I’m telling Wayne tomorrow, like a reasonable fucking person.”

Jonathan laughs sleepily into the pillow. They should probably have that conversation too, Steve realizes, on who to tell. He makes a mental note to table it for later. 

For now, he meets Eddie’s eyes over Jonathan’s head and smiles. They’ll have time for all that tomorrow. They’ll make breakfast and talk. Eddie and Jonathan can get him caught up on what they’ve apparently already discussed. He’s excited for it, in a way he hasn’t been for a long time. 

He closes his eyes. For the first time in a long time, he’s excited to dream.