bambiswriting

You move bodily away from him with Leah clasped to your chest, wondering if you can beat him in, but then a chirp sounds near the door and you watch in slow motion as a young teenager brings a radio to his mouth and says, “Code milkshake!”

You hear a curse and can’t help looking back, right at the bimmer, where Steve is looking up through the windshield with a look of frozen trepidation on his face. 

—

So. 

How did you end up where you are? 

You aren’t one for thinking about the past. Don’t like doing it. In fact, you try your very hardest not to think of the past when you can help it. Once Leah was born, that was easy to do. Babies are demanding, they take over your entire life, and your new life in Portland was already busy to begin with. You find thinking of the past incessant and unnecessary, but. Things are happening oh so fast —you had genuinely figured you could get through your homecoming without being spotted. You figured you could leave Leah at home with your mom while you shopped, but meemaw’s stroke has affected more than her body, and you couldn’t leave Leah there in good conscience in case an accident happened. 

It’s not like you had many friends, before you left. Any, in fact. Steve was the first guy to ever show any interest in you, and as nice as he’d been in the quiet moments after, he hadn’t exactly brought you roses or promised you anything. You’re the dummy who got pregnant by the ‘washed out’ king of Hawkins High. It was probably going to be one of his peers, and it was never going to be Nancy Wheeler. 

Things were obviously more detailed at the time, but you and Steve had come together in a fling. It’s not a relationship that you’d pictured for yourself, but it’s not as though you set your sights on him and thought, yeah, I’m going to fuck him. It was more that he was friendly, and you were both at the same bar at the same time sitting by yourselves, and with a little gin and a ton of mutual loneliness, it’d felt natural to let him kiss you against the hood of his car. When he drove you home, worried you’d get stuck in the rain, you’d offered him into an empty house. Things snowballed from there. 

The sex was good. Steve was kind. He was a bit awkward from time to time and he didn’t know what to say without putting his foot in his mouth, but you liked it. Liked him. 

Then the test. Then the memory of his Harrington name, how his mom wanted him to marry a socialite and his dad was priming him to get into the family business, whatever that may be. That silly conversation about kids. “I’d never put them through it,” he’d said, naked and tracing a star into your shoulder blades through the sheets, his hair damp at the nape of his neck with sweat, “are you joking? They’d be the loneliest kid ever.” 

You remember laughing softly. You’d wanted him to say something different, but you aren’t sure what it is he could’ve said to make it right enough to stay.

In the end, you figured Leah could be part of a brand new start. You applied for a job in the classifieds and uprooted the rest of your life to go to it, and when you finally had your baby, you didn’t let yourself call Steve. What use would that have been, letting him smash the lingering, aching bit of your heart that wanted him to love you? You were smart enough then to recognise that your dream for the future was about as childish as getting knocked up at nineteen. 

It hurts now, though, as he gets out of the car, how badly you want him to want you, and how stupid you’ve always been. 

Steve shuts the door to the BMW and makes his way in a jog across the parking lot. He breathes your name. You’re nervous, not stupid. You don’t try to hide the baby. 

She grumbles on your hip. 

Steve stands in front of you. He’s remarkably not shouting at you, but he’s not smiling, either. He looks different than the last time you’d seen him for sure, fuller and broader, lip dark with stubble and his hair shorter (but not short). There’s a funny scar stretching unkindly against his throat, startlingly new to you but clearly healed. 

He stands there in quiet. 

Leah makes a fawning sound, like she’s tired and excited to see a new person. 

“Hi, Steve,” you say, to get sound out in the air. 

His eyes fall on Leah. She’s a good mix of you both. Got her dad’s eyes and her mom’s nose and a handful of his beauty marks, small dark freckles that sprouted all over her body a few weeks after she was born. 

“Is she mine?” he asks, cutting straight to the fat. 

You shift her closer to your chest. He’s impossible to read for once, not a lick of anything on his face as he waits for you to answer. The cold chaps your lips and the late-fall sunshine threatens to blind you where it’s rising from behind him. 

“You didn’t want to have a baby,” you say carefully. Each word said with less enthusiasm than the previous. 

He doesn’t speak. Leah whines at the pause, her hand spreading against your collarbone in protest. 

“I know you didn’t. You said it’d be miserable, and you’d get stuck with a woman you didn’t love to save face, and I knew that. I didn’t see any good in… in making you go through that.”

To your complete and utter surprise, his face softens. His mouth puckers in sympathy and his arm twitches like he’s going to reach for you. His hair curls into his eyes in the cold breeze. He squints against it, gaze falling once again on Leah, who he can’t get enough of. He’s full-blown gawking at her, watching her sigh and sniffle and press her hand into your neck.

“Is she mine?” Steve asks again.

You clear your throat to answer, but you can’t summon the words. Your nod is jerky and embarrassed and annoyed, all at once. Of course she’s his baby. She looks so much like him, and you never let anybody else touch you. 

Steve opens his mouth to finally speak and you cut him off. “Well, she’s mine,” you say tightly. 

He nods like he understands. He doesn’t even look mad at the insinuation. 

“Her name is Leah.” If he’d been angry with you, cruel, even agitated, which maybe he deserves to be, you’re not sure you could offer this to him now. “She… she looks a lot like you, huh?” you ask. 

Steve manages a laugh, strained as it may be. “Yeah. Yeah, she does.” He swallows harshly. “I thought if I came by the house you’d turn me away. Uh. Because I thought there must’ve been a reason you didn’t want me to know, but now we’re… here.”

You glance around the parking lot. His tattle of a child has made himself scarce. 

“Do you wanna come home with me?” you ask. Mostly for want of something to say. 

“Yeah.” 

You go to leave, but Steve makes a sound and brings you right back. Without comment, he curls an arm around your shoulder and pulls you into a half-hug, slotting his nose against your temple like he used to, even as you tense up in his embrace. 

“I thought you’d be more angry at me than this,” you say under your breath. 

“Yeah, that’s not really how I work.” He parts from you awkwardly and points to the car. “I’ll follow you?” he asks. 

“Okay.” 

“Okay.” He turns very suddenly and makes his way to his car. 

You meander to your own car and pop open Leah’s door. “Sorry, Lee,” you murmur, tucking her into her carseat.

“Why?” she murmurs.

“We’re gonna go to meemaw’s, okay?” If your mom could hear you calling her meemaw before her stroke she’d have knocked you up the side of the head, but it’s all Leah’s ever known her as, and meemaw doesn’t have much choice in the matter now. You’d laugh if you didn’t feel sick. 

“Okay.”

You kiss her cheek, getting stuck there with your nose in her hair, all manner of panic and awkwardness and I’d-rather-nots thrumming through you. I should’ve stayed in Portland, you think. 

Leah kisses your cheek while you’re stooped there. Your misery takes a backseat as you gather your bearings. 

You climb into your own seat, close the door, lock it, and shove the keys in the ignition. Steve’s car idles a few spaces behind, waiting for you to go. You cannot put this off much longer, but you’d pictured the moment so differently, there’s a sense of unreality now. Is this happening? Did you really spill the truth to him the very first time he asked? 

Where’s your backbone?

Where’s your common sense?

With a groan, you pull the car out of the space and begin the drive to your mom’s house. You were never close with her, as strange as it seems. She was a woman with interests and her kid happened incidentally. It doesn't bother you anymore. You came to Hawkins to take care of her. Nobody else was going to do it for you, but so far she’s been an easy patient. She needs help making dinner and she can’t walk more than the length of the hall without finding herself breathless, but she’s recovering slowly, so long as her mental faculties recoup with her body, she’ll be alright. 

You, however, have screwed the entire pooch. You look at Leah in the rearview mirror and worry you’ve ruined her entire life. 

“Chill,” you say to yourself quietly, almost missing the road to your mom’s house. Worst comes to worst and we go home to Portland, you tell yourself. Nothing has to change. 

“Mommy?”

“Mm?” you ask. 

Leah leans forward in her car seat, huffing with annoyance when the belts keep her in place. The jacket she’s wearing has bunched into a lump under her chin. “Off?” she asks. 

“Two minutes.”

“Off.”

“Let me park the car, Lee. I’ll take it off of you as soon as we get home.”

She whines long and loud.

“Sorry, sweet girl. Two minutes and we’re there.”

Leah sulks the entire way there. You park in the space in front of the house and hurry out of the car, quick enough to see Steve in the bimmer pulling onto the sidewalk. You open Leah’s door and offer her a huge smile, hoping to cull a tantrum with bubbly affection. “Hi, off?” 

“Yes!”

You laugh to yourself and bring her out, even as your heartbeat climbs up your throat. You can hear Steve getting out of his car as you unbuckle Leah from the car seat and drag her out. You sit her in the slight dip of the window and use your stomach to keep her up as your fingers search for the zipper of her coat. You pull it tight down and unzipper her, freeing her of the thing that had been irking her so bad and restoring her good mood. 

She exhales dramatically in relief, which has you laughing again. “Is that better?” you ask through it.

“Better,” she echoes. 

Leah sits up at the sound of shoes on gravel. Steve’s crossing the drive, hands shoved in his pockets. 

“Who?” she asks. 

Uhhhh.

“He’s gonna come in and have dinner with us, okay?”

“Y’okay.” 

“Yeah?”

Leah nods enthusiastically. You can see Steve grinning in your peripheral vision, and it’s so much like Leah’s smile you find your heart going haywire. 

“Okay,” you say, your full attention to Steve. “Is that cool?”

“Can we talk, first?”

You don’t blame him for asking. 

“Yeah, we’ll talk first. But… my mom, she’s not doing the best right now, so. Maybe we should talk outside?” 

“I’m not going to yell.”

“No, but. If you’re angry, I get it, but she can’t cope with that right now.” 

“Are you angry?” he asks. 

“No.”

“Then we don’t have anything to worry about,” he says, the sound of his smile palpable as Leah gives one back. “I’m not gonna yell. I promise.”

You show him into the house. It feels like walking yourself to the gallows. 

The room is narrow. The sides of your vision start to dissolve as you drop your car keys in the bowl by the door, then walk Leah to the kitchen. You hold her one handed as you palm off her shoes, dropping them and then her on the floor by the kitchen table. “Okay?” you ask her. 

She wanders off toward the living room and the sound of TV. 

Steve Harrington’s standing in your mom’s rinky dink kitchen waiting for you to talk. You’re standing there useless, taking sips of air that sting, waiting for him to cut the crap and berate you. It would make sense. If he’s upset that you didn’t tell him you were pregnant, or that you were stupid enough to keep her, to get pregnant in the first place, it wouldn’t surprise you. Men are cruel, and Steve had a reputation for popularity. It would make sense for him to be mean to you now. 

“How old is she?” he asks finally.

“She’s turning two soon.”

Steve seems to be holding his tongue. 

“Just– ask.” You try to look sorry. “Ask me whatever you want.”

“Can I–” He throws a hand out, the first sign that he’s not as genial as he appears. “Can I be her dad?”

You flinch. “What?”

“Like, I want to be her dad. A real dad. I want to be in her life, I want her to know me. Did you think I wouldn’t want that?”

“I didn’t think you wanted kids at all.”

“I want kids.” Steve crosses his arms over his chest. “I always wanted a whole team of them.”

“That’s not what you said.”

“When? When you told me you were having my baby?”

This is more what you’d been expecting. There’s a cruel pleasure in being vindicated. “When you told me you didn’t want kids, Steve. You said you didn’t want a miserable kid in a miserable marriage, what was I supposed to glean from that?” 

“Exactly, I didn’t want a miserable kid, which is exactly what I was, and I didn’t want it in an arranged marriage that my mom thought would be good for me.” His anger drains a little. “I never meant– I mean, even if I didn’t, you should’ve told me.”

“She’s my baby.”

“That’s not fair.”

“That’s totally fair, she’s literally mine.”

“It’s not fair to act like I wouldn’t have cared,” he clarifies, frowning at you. It’s so disappointed-looking it pisses you off worse, but you're trying to keep a level head. Nobody here deserves for you to blow up and say words you don’t mean. 

You bite your lip. “I’m sorry, Steve, but I wasn’t convinced that you would. I wanted what was best for me and her.” 

“I can be best for you both.”

You wait for him to hold it up. To prove what he means. 

“If she’s mine, I want to be her dad,” he says. 

“If?”

He waves a hand, like he could roll his eyes. He should thank his lucky stars he didn’t. “Not like that, I’m not saying she’s not, I just want to look after her.” 

“She’s looked after.”

“I’m not saying she’s not,” he says, uneasy now, shifting to hide a hand in his pocket. He wasn’t expecting you to be difficult, you think. “I’m not saying that. I’m not saying anything about you, I’m asking you if I can do right by you.”

“You might not actually want her, Steve.” 

“I haven’t stopped thinking about her since the kids told me. I didn’t get a good look at her, but the idea? Just the idea of her? I wanted it.”

You sigh, frustrated, and set your sights on the fridge. “Can’t believe you had kids posted up at Bradley’s to stalk me,” you murmur. 

“I needed to see her for myself.”

“Steve... You’re twenty three. We aren’t married. You don’t have to be anything to her, you don’t have to do right by me, we don’t have to play house until you’re miserable. In a couple of months we’ll go home to Portland and you don’t have to do anything. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, but you don’t have to worry. You can tell everyone you tried and I said no and you’ll still look good.”

“Why are you being like this?” he asks, leaving little air between your sentence and his. “What are you talking about? I’m asking you if I can keep you guys and you’re trying to run me out?”

“Keep us?” you ask indignantly. 

“Yes!” He clears his throat. “I don’t get why you left without telling me and I am angry, but I also don’t understand what it’s like to have to make that decision, and I’m sorry you made it by yourself, and I don’t blame you for running away. Okay? Is that okay?”

He’s so loud, then, so tightly wound and upset, his voice a shade of pleading, that the protests you’d been making die on your lips. 

“Yeah,” you say quietly.

“You didn’t think I wanted a baby, and I guess I didn’t give you a reason to think that, but I do want one. I would’ve— if you’d told me, I would’ve lost my mind. I’m still losing it.”

You pull out a chair at the kitchen table to take a wobbly seat. Your heart is racing, that stupid kiddie feeling of being in trouble for hurting him clouded by a lingering sense of mistrust. You’d thought… all these years, that Steve didn’t want kids, or marriage, or anything, and– and– maybe you didn’t run away because of him, maybe it was all you, maybe— 

“Hey,” he says, a hand landing between your shoulders, “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” you ask, sharper than you mean to.

“I don’t know. I wanted you to stop freaking out.”

“Well,” you say, licking your lips, your breath coming short and shallow, “it didn’t work.”

Steve Harrington rubs your back. You try desperately to chill out, Leah in the other room, your mom sleeping or listening, probably already wound up from all the ruckus, and Steve, who you haven’t seen in years, who used to kiss all over your face before he’d hug you in the dark of his bedroom, waiting for you to calm down so he can say what he needs to. 

A chair pulls out next to yours after a while. Steve sits beside you, resting his hand on your knee. 

After a few minutes, you cover his hand with yours. 

“She’s beautiful,” he says. 

“Looks like her mom,” you mumble. 

“Yeah, she does. More like me though.”

You huff a weak laugh. 

“Are you gonna throw me out?” Steve asks. 

“You want to be her dad?”

For a few seconds, you worry he hasn’t heard you. But he rubs a small back and forth on your leg and says, “Please.” 

“Okay. Okay, then. I’m not letting you meet her if you’re not serious, Steve. You have to mean it.” You raise your eyes to his and all his perfect lashes. “Promise?”

He offers his pinky, which is so dumb. This whole scenario is so stupid. Too bad it’s mostly (almost entirely) your own fault. 

You shake his pinky. He keeps them tied for a long time. 

In a rush, you sniffle yourself dry and usher Leah into the room with a hand on her shoulder. She is so, so small. At least your mom missed the commotion, sleeping sat up in the armchair. 

“You promise?” you ask Steve, pausing at the table. 

Steve nods emphatically. By the looks of things, he’s all in. 

You pull your chair out opposite Steve and scoop Leah into your lap. You hold her wrist in your hand gently and lean down to talk in her ear. “Okay, Lee. I gotta tell you something, okay?”

“Y’okay.”

“This is daddy.” 

You can tell he’s not expecting such a straightforward introduction, but after a moment, he cannot hide his smile. Leah looks at him with his almond shaped eyes, all smiles in return. 

“Okay? This is daddy, and he’s gonna spend some time with us.” 

“Huh?”

You point at Steve, smiling even as your hand trembles between you both. “This is your daddy. He missed you very much and wanted to see you. Can you say hi?”

“Hi,” Leah says, her voice raspy and high. 

“Hi, Leah,” he says, ever so slightly choked up. Just barely. 

“He was my best friend,” you say, “and he wants to be your best friend, too. Do you want to play a game with daddy?” 

“Wam’ play game?” Leah asks Steve. 

“Please, I would love to play a game. What game do you like?” he asks.

“Um…” Leah places her hand in his and you could probably weep, but he’s smiling at her with so much love as he waves it up and down you never get there. She shakes her fist up and down in his, giggling when he over exaggerates her strength. 

“Woah, strong girl!” he says. “Don’t break my arm!”

Leah gives him a good shake. 

—

“I do not understand why you’re so calm. How you’re so calm. This is not how I’ve seen you react to things.”

Steve pushes the shopping cart into Robin’s hip. She squawks and thrusts it at him, the crate of kiddie water bottles he’d balanced on the bottom rung hitting him clean in the ankle. 

“How am I supposed to react?” he asks, wincing as he brings his leg up to rub at the new wound. 

“Uh, to blow the fuck up?” She tucks her hair behind her ears, staring at him. “I was expecting more whining, if I’m totally honest.”

Steve gets back to the task at hand. The aisle they’re in is pink no matter where you look, full of Barbie dolls and ballerina tutus and teddy bears with hearts in their palms. “What would you want if you were two?” he asks. 

Robin offers one of her kinder smiles. “I guess I’d want everything.”

“Well, Y/N’s not gonna like that.” 

He wants to take care of you both. He doesn’t want to make you feel like you weren’t doing that already. So. The cart is full of stuff for him mostly, things he’ll need to look after Leah should he ever be allowed to take her by himself, which he assumes he will. He’s got diapers, sippy cups, wet wipes, rash creams, a mountain of clothes he has to remember to keep the receipt for, baby snacks, a changing pad, bath toys. He has a towel like a poncho with a ladybug hood and a great big bottle of bathroom cleaner to shape things up for his baby. 

He also got you pajamas. He’s not sure why. He remembers that old pair you used to wear whenever he’d make it to your place with the pink and purple plaid, and he’d been wondering if you kept them, and a desire to see you in them again had come over him and now they’re in the cart. He’s hoping he can sort of slip them in between diapers. 

Steve doesn’t want to show you up, but he does want to prove he’s being serious, emotionally and physically —financially. Leah is his baby. Kids are expensive, and she must’ve already cost you a small fortune, and you didn’t want his help but you can bet you’ll be getting it, not singularly because he cared for you (he has to gloss it into that one word, care, things being complicated enough as it stands without remembered notions of falling and love) but because Leah is literally his baby. 

He pauses on the spot. 

Leah is his girl. He’s allowed to buy her things. It will not be an insult. 

He grabs a Barbie with a puppy dog on a leash, a box of stickle bricks, a teddy bear with a big cutesy grin, and purple bunny rabbit to be his best friend. 

Robin watches him put it all in the cart in silence. 

“Is that enough?” he asks, despite previous internal decisions. She’s his best friend. Everyone needs one. 

Robin turns on the spot to look at the shelves behind them, grabbing a box set of storybooks bound with ribbon down the spines. “These ones are from me,” she says, dumping them next to the second jumbo box of diapers.

“I’m not, like, super angry,” he says, getting behind the cart to push for the checkout. “I want kids. I want Leah. This isn’t a bad thing.”

“You kind of missed out on a lot,” Robin says. Carefully, not to be cruel, but to present it to him in case he hasn’t thought about it. Obviously he’s thought about it, but. 

“I mean, yeah. But do you remember being a baby?”

“It’s, like, a deep down thing.”

He swallows. “Sure, I don’t like that I didn’t get to be there when Leah was a baby, but… I’m finding it hard to be mad when she was protecting all of us from things we didn’t want, or, that’s what she thought.” Steve gives a jerky shrug. “I’m sure she got enough love from her without me, but I’m gonna make up for whatever she missed out on.”

“Okay. Well, when you explode, I’m literally right here.”

Steve is overcome with the urge to snuggle her in the middle of the store, but he hits her with the shopping cart again and feels the thanks get stuck in his throat. “I’m not gonna explode. I’m happy.” 

Steve is thrilled. He has a baby. He has a child. Maybe it’s not the wife and six kids he thought he wanted, but Leah is his baby. 

“She’s mine,” he says. 

“I know, dingus. You’ve said it a hundred times.”

He parks his cart at the belt behind a grandma buying cat food. “I can’t wait for you to meet her, Rob, she’s–”

“She’s beautiful,” Robin says, rolling her eyes. “We’re way too young for kids, Steven. You were supposed to go to college.”

“I’m still gonna go!”

“With what money?”

Steve will save again. It’s community college. 

Robin holds his eye. He avoids it, starts putting things on the checkout belt. “You’re doing the only thing you can do,” she says, “I don’t wanna be friends with a deadbeat, but I wanted you to go. I’m too young to be an Aunt.”

“I’ll going, Rob.” 

“Fine. I believe you.”

“Can you help?”

She pulls stuff out of the cart reluctantly. 

Together, they pack what can be bagged and take it all to the car. Steve drops Robin off at home without much of a goodbye —either she’ll call him tonight or he’ll call her, ‘cos one way or another, they’re gonna talk. Then he takes the side road to your mom’s house and parks the bimmer behind your old blue Pontiac. 

He grabs the toys and the bag of groceries. He’ll have to make another trip for the diapers, but he figures it’s best to see your reaction before he lugs it all up the driveway. 

You answer the door. Parenting has been going better than expected considering you kept the baby a secret for two whole years, and you’re already smiling when you see him. Things were awkward that first week, but he’s been coming by every single day after work if he works, bright and early if he doesn’t. He can tell you’re growing more confident in his promises. He’s not gonna realise how big this whole thing is and run. He’s well aware of how world-changing his decision was to stay, but it wasn’t a decision at all. 

“Hi, is she awake yet?” he asks. Leah naps every day at noon. 

“Mm-hm. She was asking me for daddy all morning,” you say. Secrets you may have kept, but you’re glad for both of them whenever Steve and Leah get along. “I promised you’d be here after dinner.”

“Is it cool that I’m early?”

You eye the bags in his hands. “Sure. I already told you, I’m not gonna dictate anything. You can see her when you want to… What’s that?”

“I was thinking I’d make dinner?” He shakes the lighter bag. “And this is for Leah.”

“Right. Okay.” 

You let Steve in. He, despite all things in his body that remember this song and dance and demand he kiss your cheek hello, powers through to the kitchen without making a fool of himself. 

“Brought your favourite. Thought Leah would probably like it, since you liked it so much,” he says. “And those pastries you loved.”

“You want me to go grab her?”

“Where is she?” 

“She’s sitting with my mom. Don’t think she heard the door, she would’ve come out running by now. She’s a little sleepy.”

“That’s okay. I can put all this away and I’ll go see if she’s awake.”

You cross your arms over your stomach, leaning against the counter. “You didn’t have to get stuff for me.”

“I wanted to.”

“You don’t have to, though. Leah’s your baby, but I’m…”

He feels achy in his jaw. He abandons the bag full of groceries to look at you fully. “If you’d turned up here without Leah, after two years of full radio silence, no letters and no clue where you went, if you came back, I’d want to see you. You know that, right?”

“I…”

“I asked your mom where you went, did you know that?”

“No.”

“Well, she wouldn’t tell me.”

“I don’t think she knew.”

Steve hates how much that annoys him, hates the way he relates to it. He dries his hands on his pants, not sure if he wants to hug you or tip your head with his thumb at chin, forcing you to look at him, to say the things he’s said in his head before bed a couple nights a week for years. 

Steve Harrington does not love by halves. 

“You’d tell me if you were gonna leave again, right?” he asks. 

“We are leaving.” 

“I know, I know, but. You’re not gonna disappear in the middle of the night.”

“No, Steve. I’ll tell you before we go home. I promise.”

His shoulders relax. “Okay, then, I’ll keep bringing stuff you like, too. Trade deal.”

“Mutually beneficial. I won't kidnap your baby again and you bring me raspberry turnovers.”

“Exactly.”

You surprise him with a laugh. “Okay.”

“Okay, good,” he says, grinning, wondering if he’s finally paving a path into your lap again. 

From the doorway of the kitchen comes a pleased gasp. “Daddy?” Leah asks, her eyes widening in delight, feet stomping on the spot, “Hi, daddy!” 

He was supposed to give this up for community college? Steve squats down in a half-second and holds out his hands, ready for an armful of sleepy toddler. Her hair is all puffy and her pajamas big at the neck like she’d wriggled for hours, but she’s soft, smells clean as he wraps his arms around her and she burrows into his neck. 

“Hi, Leah,” he says softly. 

Leah hums her content. 

“Good nap?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah? Did you have a good dream?”

She laughs as he strokes her back. He must’ve tickled her. “Da-ddy,” she says, a long, pulling word. 

She’s so small Steve can’t hug her properly like this, so he hooks her in one arm and stands up to his full height, catching your unreadable expression from over her shoulder. Whatever you’d been thinking fades away, your smile strengthening as Leah pulls out of his neck to wave at you. 

“Mommy,” she says, poking at Steve’s neck. “Look. Daddy’s for dinner.”

Steve laughs loudly. “I’m for dinner? You’re gonna eat me? I thought you liked me!” His head falls in a dramatic agony. “Leah wants to cook me up for dinner, I can’t believe it.” 

“No!” Leah says, giggling as she grabs his face. She pulls at his cheeks, forcing his head up. “Not eating,” she says, like he’s silly. 

Steve shifts her so she’s sitting braced on his lower belly, looking down at her. God, she’s so pretty. She’s perfect. She’s tiny, slim for her age according to you, but she isn’t weak. She holds herself up, her hands confident as they spread over his chest. Steve has to confess that this feeling is the strongest he’s ever experienced. Nothing compares to looking at this little kid who already treats him like he’s the best person she’s ever met, knowing that she’s his. He has to look after her. He gets to be loved by her without hesitation. Leah has no reason to love him, and yet here she is giggling in his arms from the excitement of seeing him. It’s like every day she likes him more, and every day, Steve gets to love her more. It’s so weird, but it's nice.

“I brought you something,” he says, shifting her again so he can cover her back with one arm, using the other to brush a stray bit of lint off of her face. “But– mommy, can she have it now?” he asks. 

You flush. Steve recognises this look on you, pleased and startled. He’s seen it on you a hundred different times. You were always that girl who didn’t expect kindness, or to be considered. He remembers how endearing it was to surprise you with a kiss to say thank-you, or picking up the bill no matter how casual dinner felt, or something as small as helping you into your pajamas after you’d both showered. It was heartbreaking, but he’s never been unfamiliar with the bare minimum. 

“Yeah, of course she can.”

“Alright,” Steve says, grinning. “Your Aunt Robin sent me with a gift for you, but daddy’s is better, so you can have mine first.” He twists for the bag it’s in and yanks it out, Barbie to him so she can’t see. “It’s only small, but I saw it and I thought you’d like it.”

“Can have?” she asks. 

“Depends. Can I have a hug first?” he asks, checking  your face to make sure he’s not being weird. 

Leah nods erratically and throws herself forward. Steve gets a big kiss right on his smooth-shaven cheek, and he can’t stop himself from beaming, his punched out sigh poorly suppressed as he turns her to give her a much gentler kiss at the very top of her cheek. “Thanks, Lee.”

Her eyes squint with a smile. “Can I have, please?”

Steve brings the box up and tosses it to flip it, brandishing it right way round to her glee. 

“Barbie!” she cries.

“With a puppy!” 

“Oh gosh.”

Steve bursts out laughing. “Gosh! Should we get the box open? Then you can gosh at the accessories. She has two pairs of shoes, Leah. Two!”

Leah squirms to be put down, hands clenched tightly on each side of the box. You’re already grabbing scissors to get it open. 

“Thank you.” You lean over Leah to start the dissection. 

“Don’t,” he says, quiet but less shame-faced. “You don’t have to say thanks.” 

You shake your head to yourself. “Yeah, well.” 

“She deserves it, and it’s not up to you to say thanks. I’m serious.” 

“It’s nice of you.” 

He doesn’t know how to prove how certain he is about staying. He decides to keep his mouth shut for now, which is hard. Almost slips up that whole evening. You don’t look happy when he doubles back before he leaves that night with the bag of snacks and the huge box of diapers, but he catches you as you and Leah stand on the stoop waving at the bimmer. You’re smiling. A real one, teeth on display for the first time since you came home. 

—

“Okay,” you say quietly, “up, baby. And another one. Good job.” 

Leah demonstrates a unique level of concentration as she climbs up the stairs with you. You’d have carried her if she didn’t insist she could do it herself with a displeased squeal. Her eyes are nearly closed, her tongue slipping between her lips and a hand thrown out for balance, the other held in your own as she manages two, then three, the few shallow steps that lead into the WSQK building. 

“Hi,” you greet a quiet man sitting at the door. “Is Steve in?” 

“Think so. Why?”

“I wanted to talk to him, if that’s okay.”

The man gives you a suspicious look that eventually metes. “Sure. Gotta knock the booth before you go in, though, they might be on the air.”

“Sure. Thank you.” 

Leah stumbles with you inside. There’s a wide wooden panelled room and smaller glass one within. You knock on it and wait for movement, too scared to look through the panels. You’ve learned that Robin has her very own radio show on the 94.5 called The Morning Squawk, and Steve, through best-friend nepotism, gets to be her sound guy. He has this WSQK van they drive around to do on the road interviews, and they’re both a hundred times happier here than they were rewinding tapes at Family Video. 

It’s a pretty firm knot of roots to lay. 

The door opens a good fifteen seconds after you’d knocked. You’re immediately greeted by a blondified Robin Buckley, her freckled cheeks slack with surprise. “Uh…”

“Hi, Robin.”

“Hi,” she says. 

The last time you saw Robin, you’d been laying on Steve’s couch in his socks and what might’ve been Robin’s own sweatshirt, the three of you arguing on what movie to watch and what candy you were gonna tip into your popcorn. You’d laid your head in Steve’s lap. 

“Leah,” you say, clearing your throat as subtly as possible, “say hi, bubby.” 

“Hi, bubby,” Leah says. 

Robin snorts. 

“This is your daddy’s best friend ever, Aunt Robin,” you say, shooting Robin a sorry look as you mouth, “Is that cool?” 

Robin culls your misery and manages a real smile. “That’s me, babe.” She bends at the waist. “Oh, you really do look like Steve. Shit, this is so cool.” Her awkwardness has melded to full-bodied delight. “You’re like his twin! Well, you do look like your mommy, duh, but this is trippy! Hey, did you get your books?”

Leah looks up at her with huge eyes. 

“Did you like your storybooks?” you ask Leah, kneeling down behind her to hold her shoulder. “Aunt Robin gave you those ones, remember, daddy read one to you about the ugly duckling?” 

“The duckies,” Leah says factually. 

“Awesome,” Robin says. “I’m so happy you liked them, sweetie. And I’m so happy to meet you.” 

You don’t question for a second that she means it. 

You pat Leah on the shoulder. “Aunt Robin is your daddy’s best friend in the whole world.” 

“Daddy’s here?” she asks Robin. 

“Uh, not right now, he had to go get lunch.” 

“Oh.”

“But you can totally come in!” she says, opening the door to the booth wide. “I can show you how the radio works! And then Steve– then dad can come back. I bet he’ll be here any second.”

“You’re not busy?” you ask. 

“I mean?” Robin laughs, nervously incredulous, “if I ever have kids they’d be her cousins. That’s pretty important. And, like, she’s Steve’s, so? I’d die for her?” Robin scratches a hand through her hair. “Come on, baby Stevie, I’ll show you the keyboard. It’s your dad’s favourite gimmick.” 

You hover in the middle of the small room as Robin slides a chair over to the desk with a keyboard and a mic balanced on top of it. She glances at you before she holds her hands out to Leah, and Leah goes into them willingly. Robin pulls her up and settles her in the chair. She can barely see the keys, but she’s already reaching for them as Robin starts to explain which ones do what, toggling a switch that you assume makes sure whatever sounds Leah plays are off air.

You sit yourself down on a loveseat by the door.

“We can play all of this stuff on the radio in the car,” Robin says, “do you listen to the radio?”

“The music, bubby,” you say. 

Leah gives a neck-breaking nod. 

“Well, me and dad choose what songs to play. Do you have a favourite song?” 

“She loves ‘Save it For Later’ by The Beat. She gets super into it,” you say. 

“Oh, we have that one! Let’s queue it up, Leah.”

Leah mashes the keyboard in a cacophony of introductions and funny sounds, then a long run of the Rockin’ Robin intro. She finds a sound bite of applause loaded up on the tape deck, hitting it over and over as she giggles. 

“Be careful, Lee, don’t break it.”

Her hitting doesn’t slow. 

“Lee,” you say more firmly, “baby, stop. You have to be nice. Don’t slap the buttons.” 

Leah throws you a glare. “Mommy,” she whines. 

“What? You have to be nice to other people’s things. Aunt Robin is letting you play with her keyboard, but it’s  important. It’s okay to try all the buttons! But with nice hands. Yeah?”

The ajar door opens fully. “Is my Leah not being nice?” Steve asks, already beaming with all his teeth as he sees her behind the keyboard. “I don’t believe that for a second!” 

Leah wiggles her excitement in the depths of the chair. Doesn’t bother calling out for him, there’s no need. Steve laughs, saying hi with a quick hand dropped on your shoulder, the gentlest squeeze anyone’s ever given with his thumb rubbing a half circle before he bends down by Leah’s chair. “Hi,” he says, your heart beating so loudly in your ears that you hardly hear him. “You’re at the radiohouse! Did Rockin’ Robin show you how to play a song? Do you wanna talk on the microphone?” 

“Hi,” Leah says. 

“Hi.”

“Hug me now?”

Steve’s like butter in the sun. He melts into nothing. “Yeah, babe, right now.”

She slinks forward and he picks her up, standing with a baby on his hip like he’s been doing it all his life. 

“I’m gonna play her a song,” Robin says. “My queues almost empty.”

“Okay, thanks,” he says, to which Robin wrinkles her nose. 

“Sure,” she says, sending you a look as she heads to her desk. Like, get a load of this idiot.

Steve presses his nose to Leah’s hair and smells her. Then he smiles, patting the small of her back. 

Leah looks straight at you and says, “Daddy’s here,” in case you weren’t aware. 

Steve blinks away a pained flutter, his brow pulling like he’d been in pain, quickly wiped away and hidden by the time Leah glances at him again. 

You think maybe, for a second, he’d wanted to cry. 

“Steve?” you ask quietly. “You okay?”

“Yeah. No, yeah.”

“You sure?” 

He tugs Leah higher on his hip. “I’m okay,” he tells you, holding your gaze, his left sclera bloodshot but his nearly-tears blinked away. “I’m great, ‘cos Leah’s here,” he adds, pressing his mouth to Leah’s cheek, “at work! She’s a working girl now, we gotta get you on the payroll.” 

It’s a little while later, sitting on the couch and waiting for Steve to ask you what it is you’re doing here, when the door opens. Leah perks up in his lap, the headphones she’d been wearing falling down around her neck in a heap that makes her cringe, giving a warbly cry as Steve offers assurances to her. 

You’re focused on the teenager standing in the door. It’s the kid. 

His eyes widen at the sight of you. 

“Lucas Sinclair,” you greet, giving him a stony look. “You ratted me out.”

“Uh– did I?” 

“I know it was you.” 

Lucas grimaces. “Are we sure it was me?”

“I saw you.”

“Steve could’ve got the information from anyone.”

You glare for a few more seconds, then relax. “I’m messing with you, Lucas. I’m not mad. Even if you are a narc.”

“I am not! I told Dustin and it was Dustin that radioed Steve. He’s the narc. I said we had to wait for proof.”

“Well, thanks for trying.”

Lucas hesitates with you, though he comes further into the room and lets the door shut behind him. “I am sorry. Kind of.”

“We’re working things out.”

Leah tugs the headphones off of her head and out of the outlet in a great show of toddler rage, Steve laughing where he holds her. He grabs the headphones before Leah can throw them at the floor. “Hey!” he admonishes through laughter, “Those aren’t mine, babe. Should we put them on the desk?”

Steve takes them from her and sets them high. He moves the chair, bumping Leah on his knee, forcing her eyes to the new figure in the room. “Look, Lee, it’s your Uncle Lucas.”

Lucas gives an awkward, endearing smile. “Hi.”

“Hi!” Leah says. 

“What’s up?” Steve asks. 

“Can I get a ride, tonight? I asked my dad but he’s going to that miniature car thing.” 

“Where to?” 

“Max’s.”

“Why are you being cagey?” Steve asks, lifting an eyebrow. 

“I’m not!” 

“You so are, dude. What’s happening at Max’s?” 

“Nothing! She doesn’t, like, know I’m going, that’s all.”

Steve leans in his chair in what would be a total act of casual derision if he weren’t also holding Leah to his front, his fingers waving patterns into her tummy affectionately. “So I’m gonna be on her shit list for whatever it is you have planned? No deal, dude.”

“I’m not in trouble. She’s not mad at me,” Lucas says.

“For once.”

“She’s not. I have a surprise planned? And it’s gonna get ruined on my bike, so.”

Steve’s suspicion wavers. “What sort of surprise?” he asks. 

His smile is nice. Doesn’t it suit him? He’s calm where he sits despite the rumble of noise coming from Robin’s booth and Leah talking to herself in his lap. The red glow of the ON AIR light makes his brown hair nearly purple at the tops but leaves his face untouched, tan fading pale in the fall, his beauty marks the darkest bit of colour to him when you aren’t looking into the well of his eyes. His irises are like wet tree bark. His lashes look long from across the room. 

And his biceps don’t look half bad when they’re wrapped around your baby. Her tiny stature emphasises the bulk he’s put on while you were in Portland. You’ve been noticing more of him lately—his weight gain, the change in his muscle, the cut of his hair, those reading glasses he keeps in the console of his car. But there are things about him that didn’t change. He’s pretty happy, as things go. He likes doing things for other people. 

Their conversation drifts into focus. “…not too much, right?”

“Nah, I think that’s appropriate. Four years of dating is a long time.” 

“Even if you’re broken up for half a year in the middle?”

Steve chuckles. Leah looks up at the sound. “I wouldn’t mention that part,” he says. “Look, I’ll come get you after I’m done here–”

“You’re not coming tonight?” you ask, entirely sincere in asking. Not a lick of judgement in it, but surprise, and a second emotion you aren’t eager to name. 

“I was– I was gonna come,” Steve says. “If that’s cool.”

“Oh, sure. Sorry. I thought you were– Yeah, it’s fine,” you say. 

Steve looks at you for a long second. “I can’t miss out on dinner,” he says, dipping down to speak in Leah’s ear, “can I? What am I making tonight, Lee, do you remember?”

“S’getti,” she says, with a vindication bordering evil. 

Steve presses his lips together. Shrugs at Lucas smugly. “S’getti,” he says. “I’ll be there at six, okay?” 

Lucas shoots an “Awesome, thank you, sorry,” over his shoulder as he leaves. 

“Thank you sorry,” Leah repeats. 

Steve has to lock into work and he doesn’t ask you to leave, moving Leah around in his arms and plugs the headphones in. She enjoys the novelty enough to sit there without complaining, bathed in attention. It’s weird to have Leah with you without having to look after her. Like, she gets uncomfortable and Steve moves her. She whines in his arm and he opens a drawer to uncover a bag of chips. He does ask if it’s alright for her to eat them, but you say yes and he doesn’t need guidance after that. He wipes her dirty face in his sleeve and twists a knob on the keyboard. 

He is startlingly capable. 

You are startlingly hot. 

You pull at your neckline, wishing you’d brought a book to read or a zip tie to garrote yourself with for thinking such stupid shitty thoughts. 

—

Steve packs his shit up at five with Leah on his hip, happy to stay with him. You’ve been quiet bordering silent and he hasn’t summoned up the bravery to ask why. He didn’t wanna look a gift horse in the mouth, ‘cos you’re here, and you brought Lee without any begging on his part. He shows her off to everyone they pass on the way out, less subtly to the smiley cleaner Cindy who loves to call him handsome in the morning. Who’s this? she asks. 

This is my baby, Leah.

The problem arises when he’s trying to pass Leah to you to part ways in the parking lot. 

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard something that loud,” Robin laments, blinking fast. Because, despite years and time to learn, he’s her ride home. 

Leah screams another ear-splitter. “No!” she’s shouting. “No, no!” 

She sobs. 

You try to disentangle her from Steve’s chest. He can feel your individual fingers pressing into his pecs. “Lee, come on!” you say, laughing nervously. “Daddy has stuff to do, we’ll see him for dinner!”

She sobs louder. 

Robin shakes her head as though dislodging water from her ears.

“Baby, please,” you say, apparently possessing the patience of a god, “it’s okay, I promise, it’s not long. We’ll be okay for a bit.” 

Leah sews her hands in his hair tightly, yanking until it stings. Steve flinches and you immediately stop trying to make Leah disengage. 

“Sorry, honey,” you say, and Steve realises with a full body start you’ve spoken to him, your hand resting open on his upper shoulder. It’s an obvious slip of the tongue. You lean forward with a slight stammer, “I– Leah, don’t pull, you’re hurting.”

“Not going,” Leah says. 

“Just for now!” 

“No!”

You give Steve a wide-eyed frown. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s going on. She doesn’t do this… usually.”

“That’s okay, it’s fine, maybe you could come with me?” 

You nibble your lip. “I gotta go check on my mom, I haven’t been home all day, I don’t know if she’s eaten yet.” 

Steve tries to pass Leah into your arms with renewed purpose. The snap of hair behind his ear gives him pause. “Uh, can she come with me?” Steve asks, loud now, his head angled against her hand. “Ow, Lee!”

Leah stops pulling his hair with a sob. 

“I’ll take her with me and I’ll drop Robin off, pick Lucas up early, and we’ll come straight to the house.”

You falter.

The thought of you not trusting him hurts his stomach, but you say, “Steve, can you deal with that? She might not get any happier for a while.”

“Sure I can, you’ve had to do it a hundred times. I’m mostly patient. If she doesn’t calm down, I won’t yell–”

“I didn’t think you would.” You pout, wrinkling your nose. “You’d have to move the car seat–”

“Yeah, I got one.”

“You got a car seat?”

“Installed it last week. Jesus Christ, Leah, not the hair!” He reaches up to force her hand as gently as he can away from his scalp. “Baby, owwww. Not the hair.” 

Leah shudders away to check he’s not angry. He can see it on her tiny face, the worry. He brings his hand to her cheek, finds his hand is too big, and has to rub her cheek with his thumb alone. “You wanna come with daddy to drop off your Aunt Robin?” he asks.

“Yeah.”

“Yeah?” 

“Come with you,” she says, a crocodile tear rolling down her cheek. 

“But mommy has to go home, is that okay?” 

Leah shudders again. “Y’okay.”

“Okay. Give mommy a big kiss,” he says, repeating one of your favourite lines when it’s time for Steve to leave. 

You get a kiss. You’re startled, he thinks, almost expressionless in how slack you’ve gone, but Steve smiles at you and you smile in turn. “You know how to do the car seat?” you ask. 

“Sure. It’s got the two mechanisms, right? Her arm goes through each of the triangle strap thingys?” 

“Yeah. Okay. Are you sure you can manage?”

“Are you okay with me taking her?”

You shrug. He can see why Leah does it as much as she does. “I guess I am. I mean, when we go home… like, you’ll have to have her for summers, I guess?” you ask, and you’re as beautiful as you usually are, the awkward twist of you and your tired eyes don’t touch it. You were beautiful when he walked into the sound room and found you in the loveseat, beautiful when you told him you’d stay for now without saying goodbye, beautiful when he spotted you across the parking lot with his surprise on your hip. You’ve always been beautiful. He knows you don’t feel strongly about your looks, but he does, and now you made his girl? And she looks so much like the two of you? 

Steve stares at you, not even in hopes of any realisation, but he stares at you and thinks I cannot let this girl go back to Portland without me. 

He doesn’t expect you to stay. All he needs is to beg a ride. 

Because yes, Steve will become your awkward cling-on. He’ll find a shitty apartment close to you and he’ll build his life around Leah if that’s all he can have. 

But it’s not everything he wants. 

“You go take care of your mom, and we’ll meet you for dinner at 6? 6:15 at the latest?” 

“Okie dokie.”

Steve rolls his eyes to stop from kissing your cheek. “Say see you later, mommy,” he tells Leah. 

“See you later, mommy,” Leah says. 

You use his shoulder as an anchor to kiss her cheek. He swears you rub his arm as you pull away, but Robin would call that delusional thinking. “See you soon, bug.”

He watches you walk away. Every step is perfect. “Your mom’s such a bombshell,” he murmurs, “holy sugar, she’s everything.” You turn over the top of the car and give him a wave, blowing Leah a kiss. He wants to catch it. He finger waves back. 

Then he spins and finds Robin judging him hard.

It takes them twenty whole human minutes to figure out how to get Leah safely secured in her car seat. Then he spends four minutes framing her face in his hands and kissing her cheeks, enamoured beyond anything to see her in the bimmer. Robin laughs at how lame he is and he strokes a hair off of Leah’s forehead rather than feed into her ridicule. His baby laughs up a storm as he chucks her under the chin. 

“Steve, I’m gonna starve!” Robin warns.

“Right, right!” 

He kisses Leah’s small forehead and clambers out. 

Robin talks a big talk, but she bends around in the passenger seat to chatter to Leah the whole way to her neighbourhood. “And then dad got us stuck on the side of the road! It was crazy! I told him we were in trouble and he kept laughing! But nothing is that funny, Leah, nothing. I think it’s ’cos your dad has a bunch of screws loose from that time he slipped on melted ice cream at work.” 

“Don’t listen to her, Lee!” Steve protests, laughing at her rolling giggles. 

“He busted his head! Luckily I saved him, because I am very very smart and I went to camp–”

“You went to Girl Scout’s sleep away camp, that’s not real camp! You were there for a week.”

“But they taught me what to do when your dingus gets a concussion,” Robin says, in her silky radio voice that Leah’s magnetised to. “And that’s why dad only looks a bit wonky, as opposed to a lot.” 

“I’m not wonky, am I, Lee?” Steve asks, checking the rearview for her. 

“Wonky?” she asks.

“Does daddy look wonky?”

“Mm,” she says. 

“What! That is so mean! Baby, I thought you liked dad?” 

She giggles and goes all shy. Robin, bless her clumsy, alternative, mixed-up huge heart, goes soft as taffy against the seat. “We don’t like him at all, do we?” she asks, reaching out to rub Leah’s arm. Steve nearly hits a curb trying to watch. “Stinky dad. You can be my girl instead, if mom wants to share. I don’t mind your Harrington blood.” 

He drops Robin off, but her mom comes out and wants to meet Leah and that’s a whole thing. She’s squarely heartbroken when she first sees her, going, “Aw,” and “Oh,” as her eyes fill with tears. 

“Mom!” Robin says. 

“Sorry, but she’s beautiful. Well done, Stevie.” 

He murmurs a Thank you, Mrs. Buckley and gets the usual It’s Melissa, Steve.

It takes another ten minutes to get Leah in the car after her quick trip. He heads straight for Lucas’ and finds him freaking out about the bouquet he got Max —Erica told him to put salt in the water to keep them fresh. Steve drives him to the florists ten minutes before they close and they end up with two smaller bunches combined into a vibrant hodgepodge.

Steve buys a handful of daisies for Leah, tucking one behind her ear. 

Max likes her flowers, but she’s far more interested in the baby. Lucas stands behind her rubbing his mouth. 

“She does look like you,” Max says thoughtfully. 

“Right? She has my eyes.”

“Yeah.” Max leans into the car. “Hi, Steve’s baby,” she says quietly. 

“This is your Aunt Max,” Steve says. 

Leah, who has taken all these new aunts and uncles in her stride (or is too young to get what the hell is going on), offers Max a huge smile with her tiny baby teeth. “Hi Am’ Max,” she says. 

Max grins despite herself. “Hi. Are you having a good day?” 

“Yessss.”

“Yeah?” She glares at Steve momentarily before standing in front of him, like she’s annoyed he’s seen her being normal, like he doesn’t catch her in a good mood all the time. “Don’t worry, you don’t have to lie. Did you have dinner?” 

“Max, I am perfectly capable of looking after her.”

“I’m just checking!” She shakes Leah’s hand nicely. “This party had enough boys,” she says. 

Steve ruffles Max’s hair, unbound and bouncing behind her. He’s lucky he makes it to the car with his hand. 

Steve sighs when they’re on the road to your place. “Okie dokie,” he says, clenching the steering wheel to listen to the leather creak, “let’s go see your mom. It’s only–” He checks his watch. Blinks big and wide. It’s 6:37PM already, and it’s a five minute drive to your side of Hawkins. “Oh, my god. You’re mom is gonna kill me dead.” 

“Kill?”

“Kiss!” he says, cringing. “Yep, she’s gonna kiss me! No other words.” 

“Y’okay.”

“Who taught you to say that so cutely?” he asks, fully stressed now, the tightness in his voice surprising a giggle out of Leah. “Stop laughing!”

She giggles worse. 

He can’t be more anxious as he pulls up to the house. He climbs out of the car, grabs Leah from her car seat, and in his rush to get her home before you murder him, slams his head so hard into the roof of the car he sees stars. 

“Oh, fuck,” he says, holding Leah to his chest as his vision fades out. 

Your laugh sounds out from behind him. “Every parent has to do it, Steve, I’m sorry to say,” you call, jogging down the path to the car. “I was wondering where you guys went. It’s… Steve?” 

He blinks hard as he stands up, his arms around Leah shaky as his head pounds and pounds and pounds. “Sorry,” he says. 

“Steve, what’s wrong?” You rest your arm behind his shoulders to hold him. “Hey, are you okay? Do you need to sit down?”

He urges you to take Leah. 

The pain is radiating from the centre of his skull outward, into each eye and down the nape of his neck. It’s such a sudden sharpness he loses his breath, spotty vision fading in and out as he curls into himself. 

“Lee, can you go inside, baby?” he hears you ask. There are a few steps, your dark shadows on the ground drifting further away before one returns, all alone. “Steve, what happened? How hard did you hit your head?” you ask softly. 

“It’s– I got that–” Every word pulls at the nausea brewing in his stomach. “I’m gonna–”

Steve gags. He aims for the grass. Everything goes white. 

—

Steve does a valiant job of keeping himself upright long enough for you to sit him down inside, but after that, he’s useless. 

“Okay, it’s okay,” you’re saying, a ringing in your ears you can’t cope with, “it’s alright, Steve, you’re okay. Come forward, honey, let me see–”

You aren’t sure he’s conscious, but he slumps forward regardless to expose the back of his head. You feel through his hair and pull your hand out quick to check for blood on your fingertips, but they come away clean. 

“Daddy?” Leah asks, wandering into the living room with her little smile and a daisy drooping behind her ear. 

“How was meemaw, bub?” you ask. 

“Sleeping.”

“Why don’t you go snuggle with her for a minute? I’ll bring you a buppy?”

Leah hugs your leg from behind. “Buppy?”

“Yeah, do you want one?”

Leah shoots for the bedroom. You take her absence as an opportunity to pull Steve’s head up, meeting his droopy gaze. “Steve, baby,” you say, so softly it’d be a wonder if he could hear you, “are you okay?” 

He groans. “Just a migraine.”

“Are you sure?”

“Feels like one.”

“You get them a lot?”

“More since you left.”

You swallow roughly. “I’m gonna call an ambulance.”

“No.” At that, he sits up, holds his own head up to plead, “You don’t have to. I’m fine, this just happens sometimes. After I hit my head at the mall, I get these killer migraines.”

“You hit your head, though. I think you have a concussion.”

“Not my first one.”

You hold his cheek in your hand. Your thumb brushes over his beauty marks. “No?” you ask. 

“Had three.”

“You never told me.”

“I know. Didn’t want you to think I was– some loser? I don’t know. I don’t know, I don’t know why it was hard to be honest with you, guess I thought– it’s not like it’s ever done any good before. I always say the wrong thing.”

You get on your knees in front of him. To cope with the strain of looking up at him, but more to see him face to face. “Steve, you nearly yacked in my yard. I think we’re past appearances.”

Steve covers his mouth with a big hand. 

You tuck as much of his hair behind his ears as you can. “Can you look at me? I want to check your pupils.” 

He opens his eyes properly, pouring his gaze into yours without hesitation. You check the size of each pupil and find them normal, though the longer he looks, the bigger they become. “I think there’s something wrong, Steve. Your eyes are blown.” 

“It’s fine. It’s not ‘cos I hit my head. It’s a headache.” 

“You almost knocked yourself out. You’re throwing up. What if I don’t call the ambulance and Leah’s dad dies on my couch?”

“I don’t need an ambulance. I barely puked, it was all spit.”

“Steve.” 

“I’m serious. I didn’t even go for the first two concussions, and the third one, they said this could happen. Turns out that taking a couple of bad knocks to the head makes you fragile, I’m fine.” He cups your cheek. “Jesus, don’t feel sorry for me–” 

“I do feel sorry. I’m so sorry.” 

Seconds of stringy silence follow. He squints at you through the pain. “It’s okay,” he says, his own thumb rubbing at your veins. “I’m sorry, too.” 

You pull his hand off your face. Not without care. 

“…Can I please call an ambulance?” you ask, uneasy.

“I don’t need one.” 

“How do you know?” you whisper. 

He turns his hand in your grip to hold yours. His eyes are brown and teary with pain, but they’re so familiar. “I just do. Can you trust me, please?”

You try to stand. Steve squeezes your hand in his and makes you sit on the couch beside him as his eyes shutter closed and his head tips back, the column of his throat there and pale and working as he swallows his pain. You stare at the length of it with your hand too hot in his grip, wondering when it’s acceptable to pull your hand away, and if you’d even want to when the time came. 

You told me you didn’t want this, you think, your two joined hands rising and falling where he’s pulled them to his chest. You swear you can see his heart in his chest. The gentle bump-bump of it against skin. A miserable wife. 

“Can I get you anything?” 

He croaks a hum. “Mm, no.”

“Are you sure? I have aspirin.”

His fingers flex. “It’ll go away.”

“When?”

“It depends. It can take a few hours, sometimes, but I don’t get the worst of the pain for long.” His voice is hoarse with its quiet. 

“The other times?”

“They can last for days.”

You’d seen the physical change in Steve. He went weak and sweaty in seconds. His nausea was obviously extreme. You can feel the tremor in his hand as he talks like every word spurs pain.

“It won’t, though,” he says. “Don’t worry. I need five minutes and I can make dinner.”

“Uh, no you can’t. You can sit right here until you feel better, thanks.”

He sinks impossibly further into your mom’s old couch. “Okay. Sorry.”

“It’s okay.” You lower your tone. “I don’t mind. I’m sorry if you thought I would.”

“I didn’t mean to–”

“To what? Give yourself a concussion on the roof of the car? I gathered that.”

“Didn’t mean for it to become your problem,” he says. 

“You’re not a problem, Steve. I promise.” 

You fight for better judgement and lose, letting yourself caress a piece of hair away from his pale neck. 

“I think I really screwed up,” he says. “Think I made out all the wrong things. You didn’t think you could tell me about the baby–”

“We don’t have to do this again–”

“Yeah, we do. We do. Because I made you think I wouldn’t want you. I lied to protect my ego and I could’ve had everything I wanted,” —his brow pulls tight and glared, his jaw rigid— “and I hurt you.” 

“I hurt myself. You didn’t make me run away, Steve. I did it all alone. I’m good at that.” 

“I don’t want you to be alone.”

“I don’t want you to live a life that you hate.” 

“I don’t. I won’t. How could I ever hate anything about her?”

You have to give him that. But. “I didn’t tell you for a bunch of reasons, Steve,” you confess, hardly wanting to let it out. “I was scared of everything, you and your parents, making you into the reluctant husband, or– or at the least the reluctant father. I didn’t want to deal with it. And I didn’t wanna be that stupid girl who got knocked up by the prom king. I ran away and nobody had to know.” 

“It wouldn’t have been like that.”

“I realise that now.” 

His head lolls to see you. He pulls his lashes apart enough to peek through them, that dark hedging a line you’d like to count. You tip your head toward his and face him across the couch cushions, hands joined and hot as a hearth. 

“It was never messing around, to me,” he says quietly. Sweat wets the hair at his temples. 

“You don’t have to–”

“I got my heart stomped on pretty hard over and over and I stopped trying. I put all my cards on the table every time. But with you, I couldn’t do it again. I thought I couldn’t, so I acted less into you than I was.”

You remember all his kisses and tight armed hugs, his affectionate nudges, his nose lined to your temple as he bore down. It hadn’t felt like less. But you’d never thought it was more, either. 

“I pretended we were this summer fling, told you I didn’t want kids, that I wanted to live in the city and get a full time job at a firm with a company car, like that stuff mattered.” He frowns at you deeply. “I’m sorry. I wish I could change it.” 

His throat bobs. 

“S’it still hurting?” you murmur. 

“So much,” he murmurs too, holding your hand against his heart. “I can’t get it to stop.” 

“I can’t do this with you.” 

He shakes his head minutely. “M’not asking you for anything you can’t give me. I’m just sorry.” 

You want him to lean in and align his mouth to yours. You imagine it vividly, the press and taste of him, the scratch of the stubble on his upper lip and his hand slipping behind your neck, squeezing your nape gently, his thumb at the hinge of your jaw trying to open your mouth. You want him so badly it’s a palpable ache in your teeth, like he’s already kissed you harsh and quick, that clack of a collision and the subsequent metallic on your tongue. 

But you aren’t lying. You can’t do this.  

A thudding noise echoes from your mom’s room, compelling you up and away from his warm touch. Your hand sings with pins and needles as it falls out of his. 

“Lee?” you call. “Sorry. I have to go make sure she’s okay.” 

He frowns again as he pinches the bridge of his nose. “That’s fine. I’ll be here.”

—

The bedroom throw blankets haven’t changed since you were here last. Your mom didn’t waste much time turning it into a guest room, but the sheets and blankets are the same, soft with wear in your hands as you lay them out. Leah waits for you to finish before climbing into bed, her bottle teat bitten between her teeth. It slips out of her hand with a rush of air as she slips into the pillows. You pick it up and offer it to her again, your shoulders aflame with the weight of an uncommon gaze. 

“What side do you sleep on?”

Steve, at half-mast but less obviously pained, takes his time answering. 

“Left.” 

“Left side’s all yours.”

He shuffles forward in a polo and a pair of his old sweatpants. You, in a horrible stroke of great luck, had them in the bottom of the chest of drawers. 

“Make room for me?” he asks Leah. 

She grins around her bottle. 

You’re pretty sure that if Steve can’t open his eyes for more than ten seconds at a time, he can’t drive, and you don’t want him to fall asleep at home and never wake up. Hence your impromptu sleepover. The bed is a queen and you have a shared child as a buffer, but you’re already annoyed with yourself. Your arms keep remembering what it felt like to stretch out over him whenever he ended up on his front. It is not helpful. 

You put the big light out and the nightlight on, a ladybug on a mushroom that glows a warm orange on Steve’s side of the room. In your own sweatpants and a vest, you climb into the right side of the bed and nearly fall straight back out at the lack of space. 

Steve curls an arm around Leah tentatively, encouraging her into his side to make room for you. 

“You okay?” he asks Leah quietly. 

“You okay, daddy?” she asks. 

“I’m fine, beautiful. I’m good.”

“Sleep?” she asks.

“With you, if that’s cool?”

“Cool,” she says decidedly. 

When you lie down, Leah immediately rolls out of Steve’s grip and makes herself comfortable in the curves of you, her nose digging hard in your arm, the bottle warm on your chest. 

“I’ll move her when she falls asleep,” you whisper, nodding to the foldout cot next to the bed with its padded interior. 

Sleeping in the same bed as Steve Harrington is a long gone artefact of the past. It’s odd to be face to face with him, to smell him so close, the toothpaste on his breath and the salty, earthy sting of sweat mixed with allspice. You don’t strictly mind it, but you didn’t think you’d ever be this close again. It hurries the heart. You miss him like a slap. 

Refusing to think on it is the best way forward. 

“You sure you’re okay?” you ask him under your breath. 

Leah suckles at her bottle, breaking the quiet, though it’s a monotone sort of sound. Steve doesn’t answer. You glance at him and find him dozing already, not a blanket over him nor a sheet untucked. 

“Steve.” 

He blinks to attention. “Huh?”

“Pull the blanket up over yourself.” 

He must like your tone. You’d gone soft by accident, too used to lulling Leah to sleep via sweetness and dulcet murmuring. He kicks it down and then pulls it up to his ribs, a tight white parcel with the pink throw laid over his feet. 

“It’ll be cold tonight. Does that make the migraines worse?” you ask. 

“No. I’ll be okay.”

You let him fall asleep. Leah snuggles under your chin. This isn’t the daydream. You aren’t being cuddled and coddled by warm kisses along the side of your face, his big arm around you, your baby between you. Steve keeps a good distance and he’s exhausted. 

Leah takes a lot longer to fall, but when she does it’s for keeps. You give her ten minutes tucked up on your chest but decide to move her when you feel your own eyes drifting shut. A rush of unnecessary shushing and a soft kiss later, you creep toward the bed and lay down on your side. Steve sleeps as your mirror, one cheek and eye hidden by the pillow, the sheets pulled haphazard over his hip. You yank them from under you and pull them up to cover him to the shoulder, tempted to tuck his hair behind his ear again. It’s long enough. 

“Can feel you staring,” he whispers. 

Your heart leaps in shock, though thankfully you don’t jump. “Hm?”

“Staring at me.”

“Trying to gauge whether you died in your sleep.” 

“Still ‘live.”

You do reach for him, then, stricken by how badly you want to take care of him. “I can see that.” 

He peeks down at your hand on his cheek and grins dopily. “Missed you,” he says. 

“Missed you, too.” 

You wouldn’t tell him if it weren’t dark, if he weren’t in pain. 

“You did?” he asks. 

“I always miss you,” you say. You pull your hand away like it’s him that’s said the wrong thing, annoyed at your own boldness, moving onto your back to stare at the ceiling. 

He feels at your wrist, up your arm. Steve slides his palm over your stomach and holds it there. When you’re starting to think he might’ve fallen asleep again, your breath aching in your throat to be expelled, he presses down carefully and sighs. “I wish I got to see it. Don’t know why you were alone.”

“I wasn't.” 

“Would’ve looked after you, though.” 

“Steve…”

“I would’ve.”

“I know.” You know now. You could’ve stayed here and had him look after you, but it’s not what you wanted. “I wanted… more, than that.”

He stares at you across the pillows. Your breath catches as he brings his hand up to your cheek and encourages your head toward him, as he lifts himself up off the pillows to bear down over you.

“Do you still want that?” he asks. 

You laugh, weak and weary. “Not when you’re concussed.”

He laughs in your face. It’s quiet to leave Leah sleeping, and to stop from hurting himself again, but it’s a genuine laugh of joy leaning over you. His hair falls in his face and he’s beautiful. All freckled and gold in the dim amber light sunning in from behind him. 

“I am not concussed,” he says, leaning down. 

You don’t kiss. Won’t lift your lips to his where he waits, though waiting might not be the right word. It’s like he’s alright with anything you’re about to do, or not do, sharing your breath. 

“I don’t believe you,” you tease lightly. 

He’s moved so much to be over you. It is unquestionably the position of a man who’s going to kiss you. 

You press your forehead to his chin. 

“We should sleep,” you say, because you shouldn’t kiss. 

Portland feels very, very far away as he trails his fingers down the front of you and takes a handful of your hip. 

“I’m not concussed,” he says, though it’s not asking for anything; Steve’s already pulling away. He sits up and slightly away from you, rubbing a wave into your abdomen lovingly, like you never went to Portland at all. Like it’s the sleepover after a night spent kissing slow and watching shit TV. “Get some sleep, angel,” he adds, so quietly you’d doubt he spoke if you hadn’t watched his mouth shape the words. 

—

In the morning, you wake to find Leah chest to chest with Steve, his hair like water on your pillows. 

“An’ my hand an’ my nose as my mouth,” she says factually. 

“And your ears,” he says back to her quietly, stroking a path from her shoulders to her lower back and up again. “Your eyebrows, and your hair, and your neck.”

“Yeah.”

“Your tummy, and your legs, and your little toes.”

“Am’ my toes,” she says. 

“Even your toes are pretty,” Steve agrees. “‘Cos duh. Leah’s the prettiest girl I ever met, right?” His voice drops low enough to rattle hoarsely. “Just as pretty as mommy. I didn’t know that was possible.”

You hide your face in the pillows, pretending to sleep. 

This is not going to go how you’d first thought. 

—

Naturally, your mom is a wreck. You can tell she’s bargaining with the universe, pleading to the god of lost cats to return her furbaby, and reassuring her mind that the thoughts flooding through it are an overreaction. Because god knows the world needs more of your mom talking herself down. 

An image was constructed. Mews is camped out under a deck somewhere, shielding from last night's rain. Terrorising some poor rodent, lifting her paw from its tail before clamping back down again, the little tormenting shit that she is. The image is solid, if morbid, but considering the longest she’s been absent is the gap between the end of class and dinner time, and she hasn’t been spotted since last night, its likelihood of coming true is rapidly declining. 

Meanwhile, Dustin’s innocence hangs in the balance, telephone clasped between two hands and speaking with the poise of an adult to someone on the other end who doesn’t exist. The automated message had floated heavily into your periphery, but your mother was none the wiser, too busy blubbering ‘I love you’s to him and hurrying out to Loch Nora to smell the pants on fire. The door had closed behind her. Outrage permitted. You had demanded that your brother explain his plot to you.

But he had been saved by the bell. 

The bell being Robin.

“Wait, wait— this one!” Robin clears her throat with a show, clutching it. “‘Help wanted. In search of someone to paint a two story house. Required use of ladders. Ideal for a high school student who is looking to gain job experience.’” 

“Oh, my god. Why would they write that?”

She puts on the accent of a stiff upper lip British gentleman. “I hope to find a young Victorian child to sweep my chimney. Must be malnourished. Payment in stale bread and absolutely nothing else.” She snorts in a cacophony, upwards into the treeline. “So I’ll put you down for that one, right?” 

You kick up a wave of leaves that fall wetly over her shins.

She shakes them off, which is evidently hard to do while fighting the giggles vibrating her body like a buzzed squirrel. Once subsided she bends the newspaper into itself to catch the light of the greyed out sun and scans the next recruitment ad. 

“You could be a tester for Coke?” 

“Yeah, great, let’s test how far we can stretch that dental insurance.” 

You rattle the box of cat food, elevated in the air to project the noise over the clearing. 

“You know it used to have cocaine as an ingredient?”

“Why’d they remove it?” 

“(Y/N)!” “I’m kidding!” A beat. “You think I could be a cocaine tester?”

Sticks and soil batter you in the face.

“What else?” You ask around restricted sounds, tongue extended and blowing a raspberry peppered with dirt.

She twists her neck, leaning over the inked paper. “Not much. Lot of hardware jobs. Plenty inside of school hours. There’s tutoring?” 

“I guess. Not much security out of semester, though.” You flick the reddish brown mulch under your finger nail free. “Thanks for the help, by the way.” 

It’s a glowing use of your weekend, ambling through the woods with your best friend. Ground slippy, air stinking potently of manure. Many different obstacles for Robin to knock herself out on. Above all, you’re second guessing the choice to utilise her this way, instead of in a double interrogation of Dustin. 

She flaps her arm your way, hand folding dismissively at the wrist. “I wasn’t gonna leave you unattended. Can’t add matricide to your list of problems.” 

“Holy shit.” Your chest heaves with a laugh.

It’s a bust. She rolls up the newspaper conclusively and follows it with further shouts of Mews’ name. You join in the chorus, with the added percussion of the kibble box.  

She drops her cupped hands when nothing further happens. “You know, I think it’s time we take things back to basics. Lemonade stand—”

“Blood donation.”

“And we can– What?”

“Do you have any idea how much they pay for blood?”

She whacks you against the arm with the rolled tube. “No more than people pay for lemonade!”

“I think it’s a damn sight more than what they pay for lemonade.”

“No!” She barks, causing you to stifle a laugh at how genuinely adamant she appears on the matter. Her hands reach out to pat down your torso, as if poked full of a million microscopic holes that sheer force of will could stop from leaking with O positive. “Keep your insides, inside.” 

You apprehend and shake her wrists. “Fine. If I bomb this interview and the black market doesn’t work out, then yeah, we’ll open a lemonade stand.” 

She puffs up, weirdly delighted by the purely hypothetical prospect of citrus entrepreneurship. She tucks the paper into the back of her pants and slows, preparing to traverse down the slight slope before you. She grips one of the frailer trees and uses it to leverage herself around the thicker coating of leaves on the ground, shiny wet ones that are sure to become a slip and slide death trap. You follow, lodging your shoes into the footsteps she’s embossed the earth with. The friction holds you until the bottom, as you take her waiting hand tightly in yours. 

“So, listen,” you resume, back foot slipping when you move to follow after her. “There’s something I wanted to talk to you about.” 

You can tell by the look on her face that she’s immediately on high alert. And the second your arm settles, slung around her shoulder, the ignition sparks. She hums firmly. “Don’t like that.” Her hand is already trying to untwist you from her, head shaking. 

“What?” 

“This corner.” 

Comedically ironic, given the sparse patch of woods surrounding the two of you. A small cluster of trees being wrapped by wind and funneling through the negative space like a jet tunnel. Nature has a sense of humour, rebutting her with its whistles. 

“Right, yeah, with a million different escape routes. That was my plan all along.”

“All I’m saying is that it feels really suspicious to take someone to the bottom of a plateau where no one can hear them scream just to talk.” 

The Robin effect: your brain scrambling itself into another world of melodrama that makes perfect sense to her and none to you. Floor dropping out beneath you as she floats away on a cloud. “Wha— what plateau?” 

She flaps a hand confidently behind you, drawing your eyes to her evidence of the barely declining plane that you just came down. What kicks it over is her utterly indisputable face on the matter. 

Rivalling your braindead frazzled one.

Her arm flops back to her side, before she’s turning and continuing on her way, strides inconsistent in length to evade brambles and odd pieces of litter left by teens on their way to the nearby makeout spot.

You trod hurriedly on tiptoes to match her speed, shoving her shoulder when you get there in the hope that her mind might kickstart and turn serious for just two seconds. Enough so that you can actually quiz her about what you’ve been carrying with you for the past few days. 

“No,” And you cringe at how much it sounds like a whine. ”You know that asshole who bumped into us a few days ago?”

“Mullet head, far-too-much-denim-and-or-leather asshole?”

“His name’s Billy.” 

She nods. “Right, Billy Hargrove.” 

You’re briefly confused because since when is she the holder of all teen intel? But it’s obvious. No doubt the wave of speculation has come her way from her fellow band geeks, fearing that they might become the target of a new beast after just evading one of the last. 

“Right… Well, I talked to him a couple days ago.”

“Why?” “There was this whole thing, with his car and Dustin—”

Robin’s foot locks around a root bursting free from the ground. “What? Is he okay?”

Probably should have opened with that. “Yeah, he’s fine!” You amend quickly. “The prick tried to hit him."

“You’re kidding.” She stews for a couple seconds. “What the hell is wrong with the men in this town?”

“‘Men’ is a loose term.” 

“Manchildren.” 

“Demons.”

Perhaps those nutty gossip columns hold some truth after all. Something in the town’s water supply, merging with teenage boy chemicals and erupting on rage and unaccountability. Making the insane criminally so. 

That’s what they said when Will Byers turned up in the quarry. And then turned up in the hospital days later. 

Resurrection was the word. Water that simultaneously killed him and brought him back to life. That, or everyone mass hallucinated him going missing in the first place.

A switch flicks in your mind, triggering a bemused smirk to sprout on your face. You gleefully springboard off a stump of a felled tree and land both feet flat atop a shiny red chestnut with a satisfying crunch. “You know Dustin has a crush on his little sister?”

The crater of Robin’s mouth opens, wide enough that a woodland family could nestle inside for the winter. “Dusty?”

You nod, cheeks protruding and lips broadening. 

“My little Duststorm is in love?”

“I don’t know about love, but—” 

She sandwiches you between two fluid arms and jiggles you excitedly. You try once to get a word out, but it’s incomprehensible, jittering within your mouth. You swat her off when it’s gone on long enough.

Her eyes bug out. “We have to get rid of this guy. He can’t be the one thing standing between littlest Henderson and his happiness.” 

“If you wanna go down for murder…” Your hand clasps around the bark of a tree, lifting one foot and swinging off it like a pole. “Funny how families work out, though. His sister is pretty awesome.”

Robin swings from the opposite way, coming around to meet you with her eyelashes fluttering. “You’re meeting the family already?” 

Your nostrils twitch with a light puff of laughter while you settle in against the trunk. “Just… gave her a ride home a couple times.”

“Mhm.”

You slap a hand lightly across the span of her cheek. 

“Look… I talked to him. And he brought up something.”

The span of her body thrusts right back to wariness without even a muscle shift, the energy thrumming off in waves, going from standing on steady ground into a free fall. “What something?”  

You mirror each other, slumping face to face in varying degrees of anxiety. She knocks a knuckle against the tree.

“He mentioned the party the other night. Said that someone was talking to him about what I did—?” 

The tiniest of nerves pulse beneath her jaw, and her lip shifts, revealing where teeth have pressed their marks. 

“And then all day, I kept getting these stares. But I can’t remember what for. I mean, I was a total write off.” 

Robin’s face is the sight of dread. It sinks before you as if she’d rather be anywhere else. 

“What?” You ask. 

Her shoulders slant when the one against the tree shrugs and hits her ear. Her eyes remain where they are, averting yours, locked into where she’s picking beneath a loose segment of bark. “Nothing.” 

You absolutely detest how that feels. 

Her silence is awful at the best of times, but now she falls into a strain of it where you feel like a stranger. Distanced. 

Like you can’t be trusted anymore. 

It makes your throat burn. 

“Robin, c’mon.” Pleading. Already feeling out the damage and finding a cavern. 

You squint your eyes. “Did I do something to hurt you?” 

“You got drunk.” The facts. Coming immediately. 

It jars you, how naturally she slots into passivity. 

“And I was really stupid.”

Her nail comes free and scrapes into the tree. It looks like it hurt, and the knot in her eyebrows would confirm that. Nonetheless, she keeps scratching at it, agitated. “And… I tried to help you sober up, but you weren’t particularly receptive to that.” “And…” 

She huffs through her nose. “And… wouldn’t you guess who turned up right then and there.” 

You open your mouth, but she cuts you off. “Tommy frickin Hagan.”

“Carol,” you finish. 

“Carol.” 

She chuckles sardonically. 

“What did they say? Wait—” You withdraw from the tree in search of somewhere more permanent, for what you’re sure is a long overdue unpacking of recent events. “Come on.” You take a step. Desperate for her to follow and determined to be sure that there’s nothing else unsaid that might remain burning through her. 

Her head lifts from the tree, but with minimal enthusiasm. She folds sideways at the waist once, twice, gaining momentum to push off and follow. Never so unwilling to cooperate with you, and for the first time it’s because of strenuous discomfort instead of playfulness.

You stop at a rock, concave wide enough to seat two tense friends.

She strains, parking her butt. “Well… Jonathan took a few hits, for starters. Probably nothing they haven’t said before. Real doozies for their IQ. And then, I guess, two girls standing beside each other was the most interesting thing in the world, so they had it out over us for a while. At some point we became Jonathan’s hussies. That’s basically it.”

“That’s not something you’d get torn up about.” 

“That’s what happened.”

“And I suppose that was enough for the entire school to be staring me down.” 

“Yup,” she hits back, popping her mouth on the final letter.

“Rob’.”

Her eyes roll back in that literal way Robin does. Up, over and down. “Don’t do that.”

You shake your head. 

“‘Rob’’ me. I’m mad at you.” 

“If you tell me what you’re mad about I can help un-mad you.” 

“That’s not a word. And you went all WWE on Carol.”

You sputter over nothing, the revelation coming up too quickly for what you were expecting, landing in your head with a thunk. “What?” 

Her green, moss-dyed nails drum against the stone. “I guess it depends on your perspective. Technically she started it, but… you sure as hell finished it.” She huffs blankly, filling the uncomfortable silence.

“Why?”

The corners of her mouth upturn fractionally before sinking again, deeper than before. Her upper lip crashes over the bottom one, preventing its quivering from going haywire. “She and Tommy said some… especially stupid shit.”

“What stupid shit, Robin?” It’s too hard. She’s growing restless with herself. 

“They were… they—” 

You don’t push. You’ve done enough of that lately. You only watch, as displeased a spectator as possible, as each muscle in her face weathers a tidal wave, perhaps still adjusting to the turn of the conversation after thinking she might have made it out of having this exact one days ago. 

“They implied we were a couple.” 

It lands, for sure. But perhaps not with the weight it should. Because you don’t understand. Tommy and Carol say stupid shit all the time. Rarely based in reality. And Robin knows that and mocks them regularly for it. They project all sorts onto the class, based in their own twisted version of things, full of spun tales and prejudice. 

Oh. 

You set a hand down as if they’re right in front of you, fingers tensing into claws. “Did they find out? What the hell did they say to you?”

She’s tired witnessing this flavour of your anger, coming several days too late, in her eyes.

“Come on… you think I can’t handle the casual homophobia of those meatheads? I mean, it sucks and it’s exhausting, but that’s what the world is. Nothing new.” 

Each syllable is fighting the way it comes out, dragging and deflecting, tinged with fatigue and a fortitude that has been worn down too thin, and who can fucking blame her. 

“So— I don’t—”

“Do you remember homecoming last year?” She starts. Your eyebrows knit together, losing your momentum, but for her to bring it up, it has a roundabout point. 

“They played Patti Smith and we had some of that pineapple soda I like?” 

“Yeah, you were convinced they cleaned out the town’s supply. Couldn’t find it for weeks.”

“Exactly. But it felt like those two things had been tailored for me. In this town, of all places. And to top it all off, I saw Tammy across the dance floor, and she was alone. I thought: Okay, universe. You’re throwing me a bone here. So I was gonna walk over there. All I was gonna tell her was that I liked her rendition of What A Feeling. Short, sweet. In and out, before I choked.”

She’d taken a huge bite of whatever it was you were both eating, for luck, and leaned down to tie her shoes again. Double knotting them, because no tripping me today, Satan. 

“I heard her talking about Irene Cara earlier that day during rehearsal. About how talented and versatile, and… beautiful she was. And for a second, I thought, maybe…”

She restarts, patting her lap. Physically recentering her emotions. “So I walked over. Didn’t even fall on my face. And she smiled at me. So big and sweet.” “She does have a pretty smile.” “Oh my god, so pretty. Gave me all the courage I needed. I told her she sounded great and she told me that she wanted to be a professional singer. And my brain had remembered how vowels and consonants work.”

She’s rising slowly, posture straightening, torso lifting. Thighs about to come away from the rock, floating in her reverie. 

You remember it. How she had spied the girl she had fawned over for months. Whacked her face against your pillow at the mere mention of. Tried time and time again to rehearse that perfect first sentence that would unlock everything. 

“And then… who else. They saw me across the hall. Zeroed in on me.” 

Her blinking quickens, deciding for you the moment to pull your arm around and press your palm against her spine.

“All I ever try to do is keep my head down. I don’t draw attention to myself, I don’t do anything to upset anyone. But still, it’s like… it’s like the longer they look at me, the closer they get to cracking into what I’m trying to keep away from them. And I could see them, drawing conclusions about me, or both of us. I guess they saw me smiling at her…? And it felt like I was about to suck her into that mess, too, so… I came right back. I didn’t even say goodbye. I must have looked like such an asshole.”

“There’s no way she would have thought that.”

“That’s not the point. I couldn’t even be nice to a girl without them closing me in. Making me shrink. I can’t…”

She thumps her screwed up palm beside her knee. 

“I can’t love without it creating an implication about me or whoever it is that I—” The words rupture from her all at once, tangling together. “I can’t love on my terms. I can’t even hide on my terms. And at the party…” 

A carefully controlled breath. Breathless. 

“It forced me out of my terms. They didn’t need an answer from me, because the way you reacted told them everything. I mean, sure, they’re occupied with you right now, but how long does that last? I can’t even bring myself to think about what would have happened if Jonathan wasn’t there to drive us home. I’ve tried. I know I have to face it because it’s the reality and I have to understand the dangers of being me in a place like this, but I have to do that every day of my life and sometimes it’s too much.” 

The air is thick. Fragile. Combustible. Unstable around the shape of crossed limbs and hurting hearts.

And Robin still won’t look at you. 

At some point you started crashing. Between Minnesota or Hawkins, it's anyone's guess. 

Robin’s guess. 

But during the crash, you took ahold of her hand and haven't let go since. Twisted it. Bent it until a joint popped out of place and a couple bones shattered. And then time moved on. You found new ways to navigate your problems, which really only meant more volatility. More noise. But Robin always stayed. 

And in the noise, she was buried. Expected to fix it with a bandaid, jest and kiss on the cheek. Collateral. Because she was there. Because she listened. Threw herself in it with you. 

Because alone, you were the sole implosion, and she would never have accepted that for you.

One hand is still on her back. The other cups the ball of her hand and her thumb. “I let you down.”

Her head bobs. Up and down, diagonally. 

Too right. 

“I put you at risk.”

“You were drunk,” she offers. 

“We’re not doing that. Don’t talk it down.”

“I know it’s not entirely in your control.” 

You turn your head inwards towards her. “I’m not just talking about the other night.”

“Me neither.” A beat. “Can we just—”

A piercing screech kills the woods. 

You’re on your feet immediately. 

Birds evacuate the treeline in droves, a marginal distance away. 

Robin stands right after you. 

“What was that?” She gasps, already in a halfway state to tears. 

“It’s… it’s probably a bird. They make weird fucking noises.”

A roar. Monstrous. Far too big and bellyful to come from a pigeon. 

Chittering.

“We should—”

“Go—”

You’re running. Sprinting. Digging hands and knees through the dirt scrambling back up the way you came. Pushing at Robin’s back to help her move faster. She drags you up and onto the path, and then you’re gunning it to your car. 

Another scream. In no way is it human. You make the terrible mistake of looking back. 

The trees at the bottom of the slant bend like they’re nothing. Separating down the middle by a force you can’t see. “Go!” You roar. 

“What the hell is that?” Robin cries.

“I don’t know!” 

You reach the parking lot. Lungs burning, legs thrumming. The taste of blood in your throat. 

Fisting the pocket of your jeans frantically, the loop of the keyring hooks around your finger, but you withdraw it at such a speed that it skijumps off the end and skids across the tarmac. It stops closest to Robin, who claws it up and jostles it to find the key encased in black plastic. “Here!” You shout. Both hands out for a catch. 

“I’ve got it!” She jams it into the slot, twists. No time to argue about who has the license, the two of you scramble into the seats and slam the doors, punching the door locks. 

“Key, stick, pedal–”

The breaks slam. Dust burns off the tires. The car veers and howls violently from side to side and then bumps over the edge of the road, flying away. 

She’s too occupied with not crashing to check the mirrors, and thank god for that. 

Because you see something. 

And it's inconceivable.

—

The Chief is away attending to some personal business.

As we’ve told you, the situation has been delegated to services outside of this department. 

And as I said, the Hawkins Chief of Police is indisposed. 

There’s nothing else I can do. 

You’re welcome to file a report.

The ground comes up faster than your feet were expecting. Body half hanging from the car, sat sideways in the driver’s seat, boots settled against the driveway. 

Robin went home, after…

You peer at your feet. The muscle just above your right ankle pulses. Trying to connect a brain signal to a body part. To move. But you fear whatever part of your mind responsible for such a thing no longer remains. 

Breathing has become manual. You stare at the way the leather of your boots bend and creak. You do this until you’re gasping for air. A hand braces against the door. 

Come on. Work.

A shuddered breath departs your lips at the same time a tremor reverberates through. You stand.

Your world is different. But everyone else’s… it moves on just the same. Same roads. Same neighbour trimming his lawn. Same problems.

Your problems suddenly feel so inconsequential. Or maybe the new ones have just thrown up a curtain over the rest.

“We stick to the original plan. Draw him out and get him with your bat.”

You turn your neck. Everything else is still catching up. 

There are two cars already parked in the driveway ahead of you. One is your mom’s.

“I don’t know if you’ve forgotten, kid, but you said that thing was growing.” 

Wait.

“Correct. Moulting. Three times now, meaning by the end of the day, he could be a fully fledged demogorgon. Which is why we have to find him before it gets to that.”

“And if he’s too big already? What, we just get mauled to death?”

You know that voice.

“Well if it wasn’t for the rest of the party going radio silent, we wouldn’t be in this— Hey!”

You round the wall with the speed of a haggard old woman. You feel the part and surely look the part too, hair brushed out and round into your eyes. Hanging from your head with no real life. Feeling like you’ve been through a paper shredder.

Dustin stands at the entrance to the storm cellar with Steve Harrington. Steve is loaded up with equipment as Dustin piles a spool of fishing wire atop the rest. Buckets, meat products, yellow dish gloves, goggles. And a baseball bat balanced in between, with… are those nails? 

Steve looks like he’s just been caught committing a serious crime. Or is about to be the victim of one. Never mind trespassing, he’s prepared to die by your hand. Dustin looks between the two of you, antenna on his headset whipping your classmate’s shoulder where it flicks back and forth. 

You point a thumb back at your car, still open and wheezing. “She wasn’t there.”

“(Y/N)—” 

“Dustin. I don’t… I need you to start explaining some things to me.”

“What things?” 

“I’ve had… I’ve had a really shitty day, alright?” You slide your hand into the hold of the other, palm shaking. You grip it tighter, trying to stabilise yourself. But it only rattles up the rest of your spine and spreads into your limbs. Like a burning, endless chill. Thrown into a frozen lake. “The last thing I can manage right now is you trying to bullshit me some more.”

Steve flinches. “I’m not bullshitting you!”

It comes out at just the wrong volume of shriekiness that sets your skin ablaze.  

“Dustin!” You shake your hands. “You’ve been lying to me for months! What the hell are you involved in?”

“I’m not involved in anything!” “Then why is he here?” 

“Who?” He turns, trying to pretend like he’s only just noticed the whole other person beside him. “Oh, Steve?” He grins, lie plastered across him. “He’s just—”

“Enough! Please, just enough!”

“Are you okay?”

Your head flinches, up at Steve, whose face appears to only have room for concern. His arms hesitate slightly, moving just an inch before remembering they’re occupied.

“What do you mean, am I okay?” And it comes out with more bite than you might have planned with a little more foresight. 

“I mean, are you okay?” He bats right back, voice pinching. 

Your head shakes erratically, out of your control. “No. No, I’m… I’m done! There’s been weird shit happening all week. All goddamn year. And I know you’re hiding things from me.” A sedate jab at Dustin, fingers bound too tight. Unable to care how crazed you look in front of Steve right now having had your brain loaded into a microwave with a metal spoon. “And everyone keeps talking around me like there’s this huge thing we should all know and I just don’t understand.”

Dustin holds his hands out the way you approach an animal, twisting his upper half between whatever this other engagement is and you. His eyes scrunch up but soften all at the same time. “I don’t… I can’t talk right now.”

“Why?” Asked in nearly a sob.

“Honey!” 

There’s the flatline. 

Movement occurs within the house, and your mom’s head emerges from behind the door. She looks at you. “You’re going to be late for your interview!” 

Because that would be her sole concern. 

The goddamn interview. 

“Fuck,” you cry just below your breath, pressing a hand to the front of your hair and padding it, summoning soundness. 

Dustin and Steve stare in the face of a bomb about to explode. 

You step forward, imploring him. “Are you in trouble? Did you get into something you didn’t mean to? Because whatever’s going on, I don’t care what it is, I just want you safe.”

“I… I know. I am safe.”

“Promise me.” You cup him at the shoulders. “Cut all the crap. The fact that you don’t want to talk to me anymore, you’ve outgrown me, whatever it is… promise me you’re telling the truth. That you’re not in any kind of danger.” 

“I promise.”

You don’t even know what that means. How his mouth parts to utter those two words. And so immediately, too. The way the skin around his eyes moves and cheeks bob. You can’t sync it to one definitive emotion. 

“(Y/N)!” Your mom bites. “You’re not even dressed!”

“I know, I hear you!” Your lungs give out before the end of the sentence. 

Your grip opens back up, releasing your brother. He waits a second longer to check he’s clear, before stepping by you to Steve’s car. 

Steve moves to follow. You hook out an arm to intercept him. He halts, looking down at your wrist around his forearm and then you. You’ve seen him, on the various sports teams. He’s tall and lean, but he packs muscle.

“He’s back by six thirty.” 

He nods once, shortly. “Six thirty.” 

“You stay in the middle of town where there are streetlights.”

“Okay…” “And you don’t go anywhere near the woods.”

His eyes change. “Wait, why?” 

You don’t answer. Can’t. 

Steve’s eyes flick again, jaw shifting as he peers in closer, and asks lowly, “Have you seen something?”

Your lips purse, trembling. Gnawing beneath. While you grip his arm tighter.

Inhale. Exhale, barely functional. 

You watch your fingers unlatch. “Don’t leave him alone. And Steve, if you hurt him…”

“I won’t.”

“He’s more sensitive than you think.”

“I won’t, he repeats. 

The tiniest head movement brings you back up to his features. Slight enough that you hope he won’t catch you checking him. 

He dips his head. “I swear.” 

“That doesn’t mean much.”

“It does to me.”

And part of you might just believe him.

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Author's note: WE ARE SO BACK. I'm so so happy to be writing this story again!!! That was the longest month of my life. I'm absolutely climbing the walls to write the next chapter. Just as a head's up for that, there was a structural issue back in chapter 2 that has bugged me ever since, so it might be that in chapter 6 older readers might spot a scene they've read before. No, you're not going mad lol I'm just having a jiggle around to see where things fit best. Thank you for your patience for the last month! Let's hope it's a while until I need to take another break. Let me know what you think and lots of love!! <3333

The rest of them learned early that love left. That it screamed and hurt, or disappeares.

Max Mayfield still missed California sometimes.

Not because Hawkins was awful, at least not anymore. Hawkins had become home in its own strange, haunted way.

But California had been before.

Before Neil Hargrove. Before fear becoming something that lived permanently in her chest. Before she learned to listen for footsteps and slamming doors and changing tones.

There had been a time where her mom laughed more. Where dinner didn’t feel tense. Where love hadn’t looked dangerous.

The Hargrove men ruined that.

Billy inherited Neil’s rage like it was something carved into his bones, and Max grew up watching what happened when love became ownership instead of care. It permanently altered the way she viewed family. Because in Max’s experience, love was something that eventually turned mean.

Will Byers lost two fathers.

The first one emotionally long before he physically disappeared.

Lonnie Byers had never understood him. Never protected him. Will spent most of his childhood trying to take up as little space as possible around his own dad.

Then came Bob.

Sweet, gentle Bob Newby who made their house feel warm again for a little while.

Bob who smiled easily, listened, tried. Bob who made Joyce laugh in a way Will hadn’t heard in years.

And then Bob died too.

So eventually Will stopped believing father figures stayed.

Now the closest thing he had to one was Jonathan. His exhausted older brother trying to become a man too quickly because life demanded it from him.

Dustin Henderson remembered his dad more than people expected him to.

People assumed he was too young, but Dustin remembered everything.

He remembered sitting on his father’s shoulders at the fair when he was five. Remembered family movie nights. And worst of all he remembered the leaving.

The suitcase by the door and his mother crying quietly in the kitchen for weeks afterward. The way the house suddenly became smaller and emptier all at once.

Dustin learned young that people could promise forever and still walk away.

Mike Wheeler grew up in a house filled with passive silence. His parents weren’t explosive.

Sometimes he thought that was worse. Every conversation between them sounding tired.

Karen Wheeler fought out of frustration, desperate for someone to actually see her, while Ted Wheeler responded like a man waiting for the argument to end so he could go back to his recliner and television.

There was no cruelty loud enough to point at. Just indifference.

And Mike learned that marriage could become two people surviving beside each other instead of loving each other.

And then there was Eleven.

El had been raised by a man who called himself Papa while treating children like experiments.

Love, to her, had always come with conditions.

Obedience. Isolation. Pain. Performance.

Dr. Brenner taught her that affection was something earned through usefulness. That protection meant control. That caring for someone meant owning them.

Even after finding Hopper, even after finally having a home, pieces of that fear stayed lodged inside her. And Hopper loved hard—sometimes too hard.

His protectiveness wrapped around El so tightly it sometimes felt difficult to breathe inside it.

She understood why. But understanding didn’t stop the suffocation.

Given everything they’d lived through, you would think the kids would grow up cynical. That they’d decide marriage was pointless. Because what was the point? You either lost the people you loved or they abandoned you. Or they hurt you until loving them felt unbearable.

So why bother?

Why give someone the power to destroy you?

Except… love did have a point.

And somehow, impossibly, the thing that taught them that was you and Steve.

Not because your relationship was perfect. But because it was healthy. And none of them had ever truly seen that before.

Lucas realized it first.

Or at least he realized it the clearest.

It happened after a fight with Max. A bad one.

Not screaming—Max rarely screamed when she was genuinely hurt. That was the problem. She just shut down. Went cold. Looked at him like she was already preparing herself to leave before he could leave first.

Lucas hated that look.

So he showed up at Steve’s house one evening while Steve was outside cleaning pool leaves.

Steve glanced up. “You look miserable.”

“I need girl advice.”

Steve dropped the skimmer immediately. “Oh, this is serious.”

Lucas rolled his eyes but sat on the edge of the pool anyway.

“I messed up.”

“What’d you do?”

“I forgot something important.”

Steve winced. “Anniversary?”

“Worse.”

Steve looked horrified. “How is there worse than anniversary?”

“Something about her mom.”

“Oh,” Steve said immediately, expression softening. “Yeah. That’ll do it.”

Lucas sighed heavily. “I don’t know how to fix it.”

Steve sat beside him quietly for a second. “You don’t fix it by defending yourself.”

Lucas frowned. “What?”

“You listen first. Like really listen. Don’t argue about intention when she’s trying to explain impact, you know,” Steve mentioned with shrug, like it was common sense to him.

Lucas stared at him.

Because no adult man had ever said something like that to him before.

Steve let out a sigh seeing as he wasn't following. “Sometimes people don’t need you to be right. They need you to care that they’re hurting.”

“And Y/N taught you that?”

Steve snorted. “Repeatedly.”

Lucas laughed despite himself.

Then Steve nudged his shoulder.

“If you love her, act like it when things are hard too. Anybody can love someone when it’s easy.”

Lucas carried that sentence with him for years.

Max had realized accidentally.

One evening she’d gone downstairs looking for water while staying over at your place.

Then she heard your voices in the kitchen.

Immediately she froze.

Instinct.

Years of listening carefully for danger.

You and Steve were arguing quietly about bills.

Max’s stomach tightened automatically, already bracing herself for sharp words and blame and the kind of tension that made your chest feel too tight. Something she understood too well.

Instead she heard you say softly, “you don’t have to carry everything by yourself, Steve.”

Steve exhaled shakily. “I know, I just— I like taking care of you.”

“And who takes care of you?”

Silence.

Then quieter, “you do.”

Max stood there in the hallway for a long time afterward. Because nobody had ever spoken like that in her house.

Not gently.

Not during a fight.

Not with concern instead of cruelty.

It genuinely unsettled her at first—the realization that conflict didn’t have to become violence.

That loving someone could mean trying to understand them instead of win against them.

Will noticed it in the smallest ways. Of course he did. Will noticed everything.

One rainy afternoon, the kids were all crowded inside Steve’s house after plans got ruined by a storm. Thunder rattled the windows while Dustin complained dramatically about boredom.

You weren’t there yet. Still at work. But Steve glanced outside once and immediately stood up.

Will watched him quietly.

Steve grabbed blankets from the hallway closet, tossed popcorn in the microwave, then started setting up the VCR in the living room.

Dustin blinked. “What’re you doing?”

“Movie night.”

“You hate rainy movie nights.”

“I do not.”

“You literally said they make you sleepy and depressed.”

Steve ignored him.

Then Will understood.

You loved rain.

Loved movies during storms specifically. Said rain made everything feel softer somehow.

Steve remembered without you even being there.

Will watched him dim the lights before casually saying you had rough shift today. And something in Will’s chest ached unexpectedly. Because Steve paid attention.

Not performatively, but naturally.

Like caring about you had become instinct.

Will had spent most of his life watching people miss each other completely. But you and Steve saw each other constantly.

Mike realized it late at night.

The Wheeler basement was loud that evening, everyone spread around after another near-disaster.

Eventually exhaustion took over.

At some point during the movie, you fell asleep curled against Steve on the couch.

Mike barely noticed until the credits rolled and Steve carefully shifted underneath you.

Not annoyed.

Just gentle.

He slid one arm beneath your knees and the other around your back, lifting you like it was the most natural thing in the world.

You stirred slightly.

Steve immediately whispered in your ear. “Go back to sleep, baby. I got you.”

And you did.

Trusted him enough to instantly relax again.

Mike watched Steve carry you upstairs slowly so he wouldn’t wake you.

And suddenly he thought about his own parents. About how his mom would’ve loudly shaken Ted awake instead. About how Ted would complain. About how affection in his house always seemed inconvenient.

But Steve looked at caring for you like it was an honor.

That realization stayed with Mike long after everyone else fell asleep.

El always knew. She was observant like that.

Always watching. Always learning.

And there was no way she couldn’t notice the calmness surrounding you and Steve when the rest of the world constantly felt like it was moving too fast.

One afternoon she and Max had wanted to go to the arcade alone.

Steve immediately said no.

“Absolutely not.”

El crossed her arms instantly. “Why?”

“Because last time you two disappeared for six hours and nearly got arrested.”

“That was one time.”

“Yeah, it was one very long two month ago.”

You tried not to laugh while making coffee.

El expected the conversation to become a fight.

That’s what she knew. That's what Hopper would do.

Instead Steve crouched slightly to meet her eye level.

“I know you’re smart,” he said gently. “That’s not the issue.”

“Then why no?”

“Because something bad happens to you guys constantly and I can’t stop thinking about it.”

El frowned slightly.

Steve sighed. “I’m not trying to control you, El. I just… worry.”

You stepped beside him carefully.

“He wants you safe,” you explained softly. “He's not trying to limit you”

El looked between you both.

No anger or manipulation behind your words.

Just pure honesty.

Finally Steve added “if I didn’t trust you, I wouldn’t let you out of my sight at all.”

That made El smile a little. And for maybe the first time in her life, protectiveness didn’t feel suffocating.

It felt like love.

Without realizing it, you and Steve became something sacred to the kids.

A safe place.

The place they escaped to after bad nights at home. The people they called when things hurt too much. The proof that love could survive softness.

That it could be patient and kind.

The kids even started measuring relationships by you two without even meaning to.

One afternoon at lunch Lucas said casually that “if my future relationship isn’t like Steve and Y/N’s, I don’t want it.”

Max immediately threw a tater tot at his forehead.

But she didn’t disagree.

None of them did.

By summer, the Harrington pool unofficially became theirs again.

One Saturday afternoon the kids invited themselves over without warning. Not that you minded. Or weren't used to it.

You stepped outside carrying lemonade only to find complete chaos.

Dustin doing cannonballs (after being banned from backflips). Lucas and Max arguing over the singular pool floatie they had yet to pop. Mike was pretending not to splash El while very obviously splashing El. Will floating peacefully near the deep end with his eyes closed.

And Steve.

Steve standing in the middle of it all laughing so hard he could barely breathe after Dustin slid off the floatie Lucas finally managed steal from Max.

You leaned against the patio doorway watching them.

Your people.

Your strange little family stitched together through trauma and monsters and survival.

Steve looked over eventually, smiling immediately when he saw you.

That smile never changed after all these years. Still soft and certain.

“Babe,” he called. “Tell Dustin he’s banned from doing backflips.”

“I landed it!”

“You landed near it,” Steve argued.

It seemed as the world had finally decided to be gentle with all of you for once. As the sun dipped lower the kids laughed louder.

Somewhere between the pool water, the fading sunlight, and the warmth of everyone gathered together, the kids finally understood something they’d spent years trying to learn:

Love was never the thing that ruined people.

The absence of it was.