quackeroos

[quackeroos]

forgive me for what is likely a basic ass request but... steve has a crush on eddie's best friend? smut optional but encouraged :) (love, j.d. aka mypoisonedvine)

✶ ┄ LOVE YOU, ON PURPOSE (i)

summary: steve harrington took extra care to avoid the local freaks of hawkins. having shared custody of a fourteen-year-old forced him into a bitter friendship with one, he's steadfast in his refusal to befriend the other. that is, until you start working at the groove beside family video. steve claims he only fell for you because you tripped him. (17k)

pairing: steve harrington / eddie's bff!reader

tags: strangers to friends to lovers, mutual pining, protective eddie, canon divergence TW swearing, bullying, some smooching, talks of insecurities, reader is doubtful of steve's intentions because steve used to be a dick <3

a/n: this request has been sitting in my inbox for ages. ages, i tell you! i wrote the outline the day it was sent in and ended up turning the blurb request into a full on 30k+ word fic. i'm sorry for the wait j.d. (and to everyone else who's been waiting patiently for me to put this out). i quite literally put my heart, soul, pussy, and so, so many hours into this. please enjoy! feedback is always appreciated! xoxo

˗ˋˏ ♡ ˎˊ˗

Something happens and I'm head over heels.

It would be a total disservice to call you Eddie’s best friend.

It wouldn’t even feel right to call you his platonic soulmate or his sister from another dimension. Not when the two of you are essentially an extension of the same human being. It’s a twin flame on steroids — your mirrored souls make the rest of Hawkins believe in some sort of higher power. There’s no way it wasn’t destiny that placed the two of you together at exactly the right place, at exactly the right time.

Your entwined spirits could’ve been a beautiful thing.

It’s too bad you’re both total fucking freaks.

Unfortunately, being a couple of metalheads who spend their free time creating fantastical worlds in silly little board games hasn’t become cool yet — for some sad, strange reason. It leaves you and Eddie as the town’s token social pariahs. The kind of misfits you only spot when you care enough to look — laughing too loudly at the lunch table or sharing a cigarette in the alleyway between school buildings.

The kind of weirdos who get your attention without trying. The kind that people only look at when they need something to make fun of.

With that being said, everything Steve knew about you came from the people that hated you.

Tommy Hagan said that you and Eddie had been fucking since the seventh grade, that the two of you had gotten close between blowjobs and fingerbangs in the old chemistry classroom. No one’s quite sure where it came from, but they believed him without thinking twice. You and Eddie tried to squash the rumor for years before leaning into it full throttle.

“And these are the freaks,” Tommy announced when he approached your lunch table. He was giving Billy Hargrove a grand tour of the high school, or rather the shithole, and detoured like you and Eddie were some kind of sideshow attraction. Him and his goons ogled at you like zoo animals.

Steve idled some feet away, not as interested in the bit as the rest of them. He was even less interested in entertaining the new kid on the block thateveryone else seemed to be obsessed with.

“Hey, Tommy...” Eddie sing-songed through a mouthful of PB&J. You’d given him the other half of your sandwich, because you always give him the other half of your sandwich. “Hope you’re not comin’ back to ask for a handy again. I already turned you down, remember?”

A dumb grin took over the boy’s freckled face. He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned over to the California boy. “I wouldn’t get too close to them. Don’t know where their hands have been, you know? If I had to guess, I think Punchy got Munson’s rocks off in the janitor’s closet before lunch period.”

Neither of you were particularly fazed by the laughter that erupted all at once and threatened to swallow you whole. Instead, you smiled with bits of grape jelly smeared on your chin. “I bet you think about it a lot, don’t you, Tommy?”

You really lived up to the nickname. Punchy. You weren’t entirely sure where it came from — your fierce temper, perhaps, or maybe your intense personality. Either way, it suited you.

Vicki Carmichael once said that you bit a guy on a date one time. Barry Jenkins, a tennis douchebag who thought the world revolved around him because his dad owned a string of local laundromats. He took you on a date in his mom’s Impala and assumed making out in the backseat gave him free rein to stick his hand up your skirt.

The asshole sported a red mark on his neck the next day.

When people asked you about it, you smiled with all your teeth in place of any real answer.

Carol Perkins loved to comment on the state of your wardrobe, telling anyone who would listen about the time she caught you rifling through the $1 bargain bins outside the thrift store. She liked to joke that you were stealing from them. “Because she can’t even afford a couple measly dollars. It’s kinda sad, honestly. I feel a little bad for her,” you overheard her saying once.

You were smoking a cigarette in the stall and watching through the crack of it while her and her friends touched up their lip gloss. 

“Wait, really?” Tina wondered, stopping mid-swipe of mascara through her long lashes to gape at the girl beside her. Because, god forbid, they don’t have someone to make fun of.

Carol snapped bright pink bubblegum between her teeth. She looked offended, almost — manicured brows furrowed and shiny lips snarled — like the idea of her taking pity on you was insulting. “No,” she snapped in response.

You’re pretty sure it’s the only rumor about you that’s got any bit of truth to it. Or any rumor of hers, really. The thrift store was great and all, but you firmly believe that your best pieces come remanufactured straight from Eddie Munson’s closet.

So it isn’t any wonder why the two of you seem to dress so similarly — all leather jackets and distressed jeans and hand-me-down t-shirts that are either too big or too small. The both of you take little care in your appearance, wearing only what you feel good in. And sometimes that means wild hair and baggy clothes that swallow you whole.

To make it worse, you and Eddie even talk the same. You’re both loud and brash and have very little awareness of personal space. You aren’t scared to make a scene or use your voice when you think it’s being stifled. And when you love someone, they know it, because you won’t leave them the hell alone.

These are all the things that Steve hated about Eddie. So he hasn’t quite figured out why he’s so damn in love with you. 

But he is. 

Quite dreadfully so. 

Head over heels and stumbling since the day he met you for a second time.

It was the spring of 1986 and The Groove had just opened up. Steve had heard murmurings of a record shop taking over the empty outlet adjacent to Family Video but had no idea it would nearly run them out of business. The shiny, new music store attracted all of their usual customers. People were more excited to buy new cassettes than rent movies they’d seen a thousand times already.

Steve didn’t mind, though. He liked it best when the store was empty. But all of his friends — a closeted lesbian, a basket case, and a couple of fourteen-year-olds — seemed to have the same affliction that was plaguing the rest of the town. 

He tried not to be offended when Robin said she was going to spend her break next door and not with him in the closet-sized break room. 

He failed.

Robin spent her half-hour and then some meeting you. She returned forty-five minutes later with a blushing face and a bleeding heart. Suddenly, there were two people in Steve’s life that couldn’t seem to shut up about you. As much as it annoyed him, he let her gush about you anyway, because that’s what best friends do, after all.

But Steve knew you once upon a time. Or he thought he did.

You were a loudmouthed metalhead who wore all black to blend in to Eddie’s shadow. You created fictional characters because it was easier than making friends with real people. You were strange and awkward and mean and gauche — the total opposite of this heavenly, mystical creature Robin was making you out to be.

But then it became this whole… thing.

With Robin and Eddie constantly talking over him about you, the rest of the kids were as confused as Steve was. And as they so often tend to do, the group decided to take matters into their own hands and make the short trek to meet you formally. Steve figured that their answer would be final. When those teenagers hate you, you know it. He learned that the hard way

They’re gone for a little over an hour and come back with a thousand stories and various tapes they say you gave to them for free.

Lucas has got a new Beastie Boys cassette and a proud smile on his face as he recounts the promise you’d made him about catching his next basketball game. “And she said she really liked my ranger,” he brags less than humbly, telling the older teens about how you’d heard stories about his track record in Hellfire campaigns. There’s a sudden suaveness to his voice as he bounces his brows up and down at them.

Max scrunches her face in disgust. She clutches a Kate Bush tape close to her chest, like it’s a prized possession she never wants to let go of. She rolls her eyes at her boyfriend (or maybe ex-boyfriend, but Steve can never keep up these days) and makes her own conversation with Robin. The two girls are the only ones with more than half a brain cell between them, or so they claim.

The redhead tells her that she plans on bringing her broken skateboard over to your store soon. She says the thing’s been wobbly for days, and Robin nods along like she knows all about it. “Well, apparently, she has some tools and knows how to fix it. Said the trucks just needed to be reinforced or some shit, I don’t know, I’m just glad it’s getting fixed.”

“Wait, why didn’t you tell me?” Steve asks her, confusion contorting his words along with his features. He crosses his arms and leans against the counter. “I could’ve fixed it.”

“You don’t know anything about skateboards,” Max monotones.

“Okay, but you don’t even know this girl! She’s a total stranger, Max. That’s dangerous.”

She rolls her eyes. “She’s nice, Steve. Way nicer than you—”

That makes him scoff.

“—And you’d know that if you got to know her.”

It’s Dustin’s turn to gush about you next. His opinion, for a reason Steve has never been able to place, arguably means the most to him. And the kid is just absolutely fucking beaming about you. He holds a Star Wars orchestral vinyl in his hand —  the brand new one he’s been talking about for weeks but couldn’t afford. 

He talks of the collection of DnD figurines you were painting behind the counter and the promise you made to make one for his bard come the next campaign. 

Dustin gazes at Steve, wide-eyed and nodding like he’s as amazed by the revelation as Steve is.  “She’s cool, Steve. Like… really cool.” 

The boy thought that Robin just had a crush, that Eddie was just being Eddie and overdramatizing all of his stories about you. But you’re everything they said you’d be and then some. The kind of stranger you meet that takes your breath away, that makes you sad in the understanding that you’ll never see them again. Dustin is grateful you don’t have to be a stranger anymore.

You sounded… nice. More than nice. They painted you out to be a fucking angel, the way you took care of a bunch of kids you barely knew for the better part of an hour. You weren’t the freak everyone made you out to be all that time ago.

They talk a great deal about your looks, too. Dustin, mostly. Lucas had received a glare and a half-hearted punch on the arm from Max when he said how pretty you were — even though she ultimately agreed with him. The curly-headed boy uses too big words to describe the renaissance painting you are, all heavenly morose and beautifully strange.

“Hey,” Eddie scolds from the sidelines, mostly playful. “That’s my sister you’re talking about. Bring it down a few notches, ‘kay?”

Steve is silent for the rest of the day after that. He’s not pouting about it like Robin keeps saying he is, just reserved in his reminiscence. 

He can’t tell if he’s intrigued or annoyed. They talk about you the way people used to talk about King Steve — with a borderline obsession for someone they don’t really know. And deep down, he knows he’s just jealous. Jealous that no one talks about him that way anymore. Jealous that none of the kids have ever talked about him that way.

It leaves him skeptical and wanting to see the real thing for himself.

Steve opts to meet you on his lunch break the next day with a tight chest and sweaty palms, like a part of him knew it was going to change the trajectory of his life for the foreseeable future.

The door dings with his arrival. The record store smells like earth and nostalgia, a bit like flipping through the pages of an old book. Vinyls sit in rows and in towers that rise to the ceilings. Colorful cassettes, of which there are thousands, have nooks and crannies of their own. Posters decorate the walls along with various patterned records — there’s hardly a blank spot in the entire store.

And when Steve sees you for the first time, he only sees the back of you.

You’re in all black, just like he imagined you’d be. A sliver of skin at your midriff is showing from where your too small shirt has ridden up your torso. And your hair is as wild as ever, though a little longer than he remembers. You’ve haphazardly pinned back the ornery strings with a sparkly pin, but it doesn’t do much to tame them.

A breeze of warm wistfulness washes over him at the sight of you. A reminder of a life that used to be his, that you were a part of only passively.

It’s your smile that does him in. Maybe because you’ve never looked at him with it. As far as Steve’s concerned, no one’s ever smiled at him the way you do, and you barely even know him. You hadn’t seen him in over a year and if you shared any words in the past, it wasn’t anything more than snarky one-liners. But here you are, looking at him with sunshine anyway.

“Hi,” you beam with the warmest grin he’s ever seen, swiveling in your chair to face him. “Welcome in.”

He’s too stunned by the sight of you to respond. He just stands in the doorway, all wide-eyed and gaping, like he’s the first to see an angel on earth. And it’s strange because you’re far from perfect. 

You’re blousy and a little disheveled, like you’d been running late that morning. The lack of makeup allows your imperfections to shine through in a way that makes you somehow more alluring. And you’ve got paint splattered like freckles on your cheeks, the culprit being the figurines you’re painting behind the counter. If you know you’re dotted with shades of red, blue, and green, you don’t show it.

“Can I help you find anything?” you ask him, still kind even though he’s acting like a fucking weirdo. That’s supposed to be your thing, not his.

Steve grasps for something to say but comes up short. His lips part and then close again in an embarrassing pattern that resembles a fish out of water. It makes sense, though; it’s a bit how you’ve made him feel just now.

When he realizes he can’t make out anything intelligible, he shakes his head. “Uh… nope.”

He’s leaving before he even realizes he’s leaving. The door dings again and he’s on the other side of it, long legs carrying him the short distance to Family Video at record speed. 

He swings and slams the egress shut in quick succession, as though the ghost of you had been chasing him. He leans against the glass pane and exhales a heaving sigh, eyes squeezing shut as he recoils at what he’d just done.

He always knew that King Steve had died some time ago, but this was a new low.

Robin watches from the front counter with wide eyes. “…Did you forget something?”

Steve sighs a big, hopeless sigh, then peeks his eyes open. “My dignity.”

“She’s cute, right?” she asks, already knowing the answer. Her brows bounce in time with the smirk on her painted lips.

“Yeah, she’s cute,” he answers, all mad because it’s obvious. “She’s fucking— she’s beautiful.”

“Aw. Look at you,” she sing-songs and tilts her head to her shoulder. “I think your heart grew three sizes today, Stevie.”

˗ˋˏ ♡ ˎˊ˗

I never find out 'til I'm head over heels.

Steve, all caught up in his boyish misery, has no idea that he’s enraptured you in a similar way.

You hadn’t cared very much for the guy in high school. You didn’t really know him then, and you didn’t particularly want to. King Steve was rich. King Steve was pretty — too pretty. King Steve got attention from pretty cheerleaders and overaggressive douchebags alike.

King Steve didn’t need any affection from the local freakshow.

But, by some strange turn of events, he’d managed to make nice with your best friend. 

The way Eddie talks about Steve, his words always dripping with a distant venom, it sounds like they still hate each other. Maybe they do. Or maybe he just doesn’t want to admit that they hang out far too often not to be friends.

If you were still in school, you probably would’ve judged him for it. Being friends with the boy whose buddies made your life hell certainly warranted some degree of ridicule. But now, having graduated and trying to move on from it all, you can’t find it in yourself to. 

High school might as well have been a lifetime now. There’s no use in holding onto old ghosts.

If Eddie could let that shit go, so could you.

He drops by after school to keep you company like he always does when he doesn’t have a campaign to prep for. It’s his favorite pastime, perhaps a close second to Dungeons and Dragons. He gets to hang out with his best friend and swim in an ocean of music while he does it. As far as freaks go, Eddie Munson considers himself the luckiest.

He likes to hear you talk about everything new you’ve gotten in while he rifles through the old stuff that isn’t selling as well. You happily let him take what he wants for free. And what he doesn’t take, he doesn’t pay for either, because you cheat the system with your employee discount and then wipe the record from inventory. Just to be safe.

“I love having a criminal for a best friend,” he jokes every time, without fail.

Eddie stays by your side until the sun sets. He parts only to flip the sign at the door to closingfor you, then plops himself back on the counter again. His legs hang off the side of it, sneakers occasionally thudding against the wood when he kicks them back and forth too hard. He scans the back of an old Lynyrd Skynyrd vinyl and bobs his head to the rhythmic bass as the song fills the empty store. He’ll take this one home, he decides.

You keep on painting like you have been all day, breaking only to assist customers or stretch your aching spine. The forest dragon had been far more work than you expected — made of pretty purple leaves instead of scales and blowing blush-colored flowers instead of fire. The little piece of clay has resulted in a day of back-breaking work. 

You’ll be damned if Eddie’s next campaign isn’t the most stellar looking one yet.

Focusing on that makes it easier not to bring up Steve. 

You want to. You just don’t know how. 

Eddie’s friends were Eddie’s, and you don’t get involved where it doesn’t concern you. Besides, you did sort of give him shit for hanging out with The Hair way back when. The last thing you want is him taking the piss out of you about it.  

You don’t want to sound like you care too much. Even more, you don’t want it to be obvious that you’ve been thinking about the boy all day — making yourself sick as you stew in what could’ve run him out like he did.

“Saw your friend today,” you remark, feigning a sort of absentmindedness, as you swipe your brush along the petals of your dragon. “King Steve.”

“Oh, you met him?” Eddie wonders, more intrigued by your words than you expected he’d be. He says it like you didn’t already know the guy — like this new Steve was a totally different person you needed to be reacquainted with to really know.

“I wouldn’t say met him exactly. He just, like, popped in for half a second and ran out.”

With your back facing him, you don’t see the shit-eating grin that pulls at the corners of his mouth. 

Eddie was waiting for Steve to crack and finally see you. He knew he’d bite after the way the kids had talked about you — Dustin, especially. Because even though he claims he doesn’t have favorites, he’s got a very obvious soft spot for the boy. And he knew Steve would like you because everyone likes you. When they’re not clouded by judgment and high school hierarchies, at least. 

He’s still got no idea how a guy that trips all over himself at the sight of a pretty girl could’ve ruled Hawkins once upon a time.

“Fucking idiot,” Eddie laughs to himself, already gearing up for the shit he was going to give Steve the next time he saw him. 

But you see the boy before Eddie does. Steve comes back the next day, an hour or more after opening, less frazzled than the day before. The nearly twenty-four hours he had to prepare himself for the angel he was going to see allowed him not to make a total fool of himself when he stepped into the store again.

And you wouldn’t say it out loud — hell, it’s not even something you want to admit to yourself — but you’d been hoping he’d stop by again. 

You thought Robin would come by and drag him with her, or that Dustin and his friends would come around before Steve dropped them all home. Frankly, you didn’t really care what brought him back. You just wanted to see him again.

Steve’s different than the boy he used to be. Enough that it was obvious from a measly thirty-second interaction. He used to be a charmer who could talk his way out of anything. Not to you, of course, he wouldn’t have been caught dead talking to you. But then he stops by out of nowhere, in rare form, stumbling all over himself and looking like he didn’t recognize you at all.

You’re still trying to figure out if that was a good thing or not.

He’s mystified you in a way he probably isn’t used to. Most girls like the hair and the arms — the super buff, super strong arms that fit so nicely in his uniform — or the fact that he’s got money and a reputation that precedes him. But you’ve never given a shit about any of that. 

You’re more enchanted by the way nothing could even begin to conceal the soft, shy boy that King Steve had apparently turned into.

The door chimes above his head when he enters. The scent of earthy nostalgia is already familiar to him — lavender, sage, and something deeper. Steve considers it progress when he plants himself a few feet away from the door this time. If he runs out again, he’ll have to make an embarrassingly longer escape.

You turn away from your nearly finished figurine to greet the new customer. The practiced smile unconsciously widens at the sight of him. “Hi!”

“Hey,” he smiles with a curt nod. He regrets the half-wave he gives you the second his hand shoots up.

“You gonna run off on me again?” you tease and swivel in your chair to face him completely.

You’re wearing a Hellfire shirt that’s just slightly too big for you. It probably belonged to Eddie before it belonged to you. And you wear a corset-looking thing over top of it, a sheer number with a lace embroidery and a ribbon that’s tied in a bow at your belly. It doesn’t cinch you in the slightest, though, more for decoration than practicality.

“No that was… I just—” Steve huffs out a laugh as he tries and fails to come up with an excuse. He figures anything is better than the truth — that he saw how pretty you were and his brain forgot how to work because he’s the lamest person on the planet. 

So he chucks a thumb over his shoulder and fibs. “I left something back at Family Video. Had to run back.”

“It’s okay. I was just teasing,” you assure. “Uh— Are you looking for anything specific?”

“No. Not really. Just… new records to add to my collection, you know?”

“Oh, you collect vinyls?”

He doesn’t realize that’s what he’s just said until you repeat the words back to him. 

He’s kind of just talking out of his ass and hoping something sticks. That line does, apparently, because you’re beaming at him instantly. He’s scared to say no because then you’ll stop smiling. And he can’t have that.

“Yep,” he answers with a nod. The stack of records collecting dust in his den has to count for something, right?

He can’t find it in himself to regret his little white lie when it has you lighting up like a christmas tree. 

You toss your paintbrush down when you rush from behind the counter to meet him. You seem to have forgotten that you’d just dipped the thing in purple paint. The thing splatters shades of lilac all over the limestone bench. And, in your haste, you nearly smack yourself with the leaden slab as you raise it to pass by.

Steve’s eyes widen when you narrowly dodge the weighty thing — then jumps, startled by the dense thwap that echoes through the small store when it slams back down again. He’s almost worried that it might’ve busted the hinge. 

You cower at the loud sound but move on with a commendable finesse, too focused on him to care about anything else.

“That’s so cool! I’ve always wanted to collect, but records are so expensive, it’s crazy,” you ramble as you walk up to him, totally unthinking in the way you grab his forearm and usher him to the back of the store. 

Your sheer black skirt swishes at your ankles as you walk. The dainty fabric is patterned with sparkly stars and crescent moons. He notices you wear a pair of dark shorts underneath for modesty. Steve tries his best not to stare at your ass. He almost succeeds.

“We actually just got in a couple of Dio records — The Holy Diver, you know, the one that just came out. I’m pretty sure there’s only, like, a couple thousand of these things in the whole world — which is totally fucking bonkers if you think about it,” you explain in one breath, laughing, before stopping abruptly in your tracks. Steve nearly runs into you when you turn around to face him. 

You laugh again, a sadder one, this time at yourself, as you bring your palm to your forehead. “Sorry. I don’t— I don’t even know if you like Dio. I mean, of course, you don’t, right? I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have… rambled like that.”

You’d just been so excited and Steve had just been so different that you forgot who you were talking to. Hawkins High Royalty, Prom King, Biggest Flirt and Life of the Party in the yearbook. 

As far as you’re concerned, Eddie Munson is your only friend. He’s the only person in the whole world you can be yourself around and never get self-conscious about any of it. 

But sometimes you have moments like this one with a total stranger. Moments where you lose yourself in the conversation and your own jumbled thoughts. Moments where you talk and talk and talk until something thumps you on the head and you realize how annoying you’re being. This time, it’s the musky smell of his cologne that knocks you back to Ms. Click’s history class. The crisp breeze of bitter nostalgia makes you shiver.

Steve can see the way you get so suddenly aware of yourself and how the cognizance of the moment makes you writhe. He tries to bat away the lingering insecurities with a smile. 

“Love ‘em,” he responds with a nod. He raises his brows and scoffs, grins and crosses his arms over his chest. “I mean, Dio? God, they’re like… top ten bands of all time, at least. Maybe even five.”

That isn’t totally true. He doesn’t know much about the band to have an opinion, but he’s pretty sure he might’ve said he hated them once. That was only because Eddie wouldn’t stop talking about them, though. Steve could learn to like them, if it means so much to you.

That’s exactly how he justifies spending $60 on four records. 

He tells himself that he’ll listen to them and think of you, that it’ll be a solid conversation starter the next time he sees you. 

You had a whole damn rack dedicated to all your favorite bands — “I put it together myself,” you’d bragged with a proud smile. S it’s a wonder Steve didn’t walk out with the entire damn store. Because you just kept on smiling and talking, so happy to have someone to care about what you had to say, and he ate up every second of it.

He’ll have to work overtime to keep his pockets from hurting, but it’ll be worth it. Because he’ll get to keep talking to you and indulging in all the things you seem to love more than life itself.

You’re still rambling as you ring him up. Steve notices you haven’t stopped yourself like you did before. His lack of dismissal has made you more comfortable, it seems. He likes that.

“I think we’re also gonna get a couple cases of Def Leppard cassettes tomorrow, which is super sick. I think I might have to start collecting, honestly. Tapes are whole lot cheaper than records, you know,” you tell him as you scan and bag all his vinyls. “And it’s also, like, a fucking stellar album. I don’t think I’ve stopped listening to Photograph since it came out.”

“Photograph. Right. Love that one,” Steve nods with a kind smile as he props his elbows on the counter. He doesn’t particularly care that he’s not entirely sure what you’re talking about, or that he’s never actually heard the song. He’s starting to realize you could talk for hours and he wouldn’t get bored.

“Oh, is that your favorite too? Eddie’s more of a Foolin’ kinda guy.”

Despite the fact that he’s never heard the song or this album in his life, he nods anyway. 

He sort of spent the first eighteen years of his life faking just about everything — it kind of came with being the King of Hawkins High. It’s a talent that hasn’t yet left him, it seems, lying through his teeth to impress people. It’s almost become a second nature to him.

“Foolin’s good, yeah, but I think Photograph is obviously better.”

“Obviously, right!” you exclaim with a sunshine-coated laugh. “That’s exactly what I told him! But he’s way too hard-headed to be wrong about anything, so…”

“Well, I’d like to put it on the record that I firmly agree with you,” Steve replies so smoothly that his tongue must be dripping with honey. It’s so easy for him to fall into King Steve mode — when he isn’t forgetting how to speak and running off, that is.

You’ve learned a lot Steve in the past half hour. He likes metal, but leans more toward rock. Particularly all the metal and rock that you like. He hasn’t once had a differing opinion than you, besides telling you he heard Eddie playing a Metallica song once that he didn’t particularly care for. The second you tell him it’s one of your favorites, he backtracks instantly, blaming the Munson boy for being too sloshed to play it properly.

And you don’t miss the way he’s looking at you just now either, with his chin toward his chest as he peers up at you with warm amber eyes. He’s the charmer that he always was. It makes you remember, again, just who you’re talking to.

“We have a lot in common, King Steve,” you lilt with a playful grin.

He deflates at the use of the old nickname. You see the light in his eyes flicker for a just moment before he’s ducking his gaze away from you completely. He tries to brush it off with a laugh. “Yeah, I’m not— I’m not really King Steve anymore…”

“No?”

“Nope. Just… Just Steve these days.”

When he looks back at you, he finds you nodding at him, almost in approval. 

Most people are upset to find that he’s changed so much. They hate that he’s no longer the recklessly stupid dumbass they used to get drunk with. 

Not you, though.

“Cool,” you mumble, smiling softly, as you hand him his bag and receipt.

“Uh, I’d love to, you know, come take a look at those tapes when you get ‘em in,” he says as he walks backward towards the door, finally making the brash offer he’s been thinking about this whole time. “Maybe I can bring lunch and we can—”

“Well, Hellfire’s been doing campaigns during lunch recently. And Gareth’s out sick, so I’ve been subbing for him, you know, so…” you interject awkwardly, shifting your weight on your feet. You hate to turn him down, but Eddie might just kill you if he has to get a substitute for the substitute.

“Oh…” he nods, softly puckering his plump pink lips that you can’t seem to stop staring at.

“But I don’t think they’re coming in until late, anyway,” you add quickly. “So, you can stop by at closing, if you want?”

“No, yeah, that’s cool. So cool,” he replies, a little more flustered than he’d been just moments before. He’s just happy that your rejection wasn’t a total refusal.

You try to bite back the wide grin threatening to take over your mouth. “Okay… I’ll catch you later, then, Just Steve.”

“See you,” he waves right before startling himself when he backs into the basket of clearance tapes sitting just beside the door. He barely catches the thing before it tips over completely. He flashes you a shaking smile afterward and finds you covering your mouth with your hand while you try not to laugh too loudly. 

He wishes you’d just went ahead and laughed at him. He wouldn’t have even cared that you were laughing at him, if it meant he got to see you smile.

And even though he’d just gotten done making the biggest fool of himself, he walks back to work feeling like the coolest man alive. There’s a foreign strut in his step that hadn’t been there before he saw you. It doesn’t leave him when he realizes he’s gone slightly over his break and that Keith is manning the counter in his absence.

The man mumbles a monotoned goodbye to the customer he’d just checked out.

She turns around and Steve realizes he recognizes this girl — Mindy or Mandy or maybe Monica — from Mr. Kaminsky’s class way back when. She did all of his homework for him before and after letting him fuck her on her twin-sized bed in her all pink room.  That’s when Steve was conquering girls like they were Mount Everest, way before Nancy, when King was a title he wore with pride. 

But he’s still so stuck in his head with thoughts of you that he doesn’t even see Mindy-Mandy-Monica or the flirtatious wave she throws his way.

“You’re ten minutes late,” Keith scolds, with his dead tone and his deader eyes.

Steve only shrugs, uncaring if it came out of his paycheck because — “I just got a date with the hottest woman on the planet,” he boasts with a puffed out chest and too smug smile.

It doesn’t lessen Keith’s anger, just diverts it. Because he knows exactly who he’s talking about. And so does Robin, as she pops her head out from behind the man from where she sits at the computer. “No way,” they chorus in disbelief at his words.

Steve nods. “Yes way.”

“Eddie’s gonna kill you,” Robin remarks with the shake of her head. 

He knows she’s right. He just doesn’t care. 

Eddie’s always been protective of you. Everyone knows that. But the two of them were friends now — or somewhat good-natured acquaintances, at the very least. He would’ve been mad about a year or more ago, if King Steve had decided to suddenly woo his best friend. 

But it’s different now. He’s different now. Eddie knows how much everything’s changed, it’s just a question of if he’s willing to rehash old wounds.

It’s a good thing Steve knows how to take a punch.

˗ˋˏ ♡ ˎˊ˗

Don't take my heart, don't break my heart.

Steve finds you again the next day less happy than he’s gotten used to.

The record store is dim and the red sign at the entrance has been flipped to closed, but the door is left unlocked — for him. The warm scent is a distinct contrast to the frigid spring night, a cozy high hemp and lavender, but your absence is noticeable and terribly heavy. 

Steve lingers in the doorway, his shadow looming like a giant before him from the moonlight streaming in from outside. 

He calls for you in the emptiness.

“Uh… Punchy?”

He’s relieved when you answer. The “back here!” you shout to him is muffled and far away. He follows the sound of your voice, filled suddenly with a childlike consolation. 

The yellow fairy lights dangling over his head guide him through the aisles of cassettes and closer to you. Through a cluttered backroom, Steve finds you standing just outside an opened door — left ajar, for him.

The smile you flash when you see him is as dim as the closed-down store. It lacks all the sunshine you usually look at him with, shades of stormy gray rather than the usual yellows. 

A look of concern flashes across his features — furrowed brows and inquisitive twinkling eyes — as you take a drag from the lit cigarette caught between your pointer and middle finger. You muster your best grin, but it flickers like a shoddy radio signal. 

“Punchy, huh?” you tease.

Steve’s brows pinch together as confusion floods his features. It takes him a moment to realize what he’d said and the nickname he’d used — and he doesn’t want to be dramatic or anything, but he kinda wants to die. It’s embarrassing, he thinks, to hold on to an old high school monicker. And, fuck, if you hate it half as bad as he hates being called king, he deserves a slap to the face right about now.

You laugh instead of ball your first. He’s able to smile meekly in relief. “Oh. Shit. Sorry, I… I don’t think I even realized it came out.”

“No, it’s okay,” you assure when you see him getting all apologetic. “Eddie still calls me that all the time, so… Old habits die hard, I guess.”

Steve tries to move on, but it’s hard to when you’re so obviously gloomy. He hates how reserved you’ve gone in your quiet, not talking up a storm like you had been the last time he saw you. Now you’re just… a storm. It’s a little like sitting next to a rumbling rain cloud.

The rumbling rain cloud beside him takes a drag of her cigarette.

“You okay?” he asks and sounds like he really cares.

You didn’t think King Steve was capable of caring about anything other than his hair, but he looks down at you like he can feel every blue bolt of your doom and gloom. He makes you feel seen in the void of your sadness despite all the years you spent being invisible to him.

“Uh, yeah. It’s just the tapes. They didn’t come in,” you answer with a shrug. Smokes leaves your mouth and lingers in white clouds in the air. “So I’m a little bummed.”

“Oh…” is all Steve says and his pink mouth forms a too pretty ‘o’ shape that you can’t draw your gaze from.

The following silence makes you momentarily cautious. Insecurity runs cold over you because no sane person gets this about upset over a broken promise of a couple cassettes. It’s stupid, you know it is, but you were really looking forward to them. It’s like promising a kid the most metal present ever and then snatching it out of their bare hands.

Now, over the course of a couple hours, you’ve managed to convince yourself you won’t remember happiness until you get those stupid tapes.

“Sorry,” you apologize to him for a reason he can’t place. You shift your weight on your feet and peer at him from beneath your lashes. “I know you were looking forward to them, too.”

You extend your hand and offer him the cigarette between your fingers like it’s an olive branch. He takes it from you with a distant smile, then opts to laze against the brick wall like you are. He stays a respectful distance on the other side of the entryway. 

“It’s okay. They’ll come. If I’m being honest, you know, I was kinda more excited to see you.”

His admission is brazen and a tad bit brash, even for a certified ex-douchebag. It lacks all of the usual honey-coated flirtation that usually tints his tone when he’s talking to a pretty girl. Because he wasn’t trying to make you swoon — though he certainly wouldn’t have minded if you had. This wasn’t some romantic advance, just a proclamation of his own personal truth.

A flash of shock contorts your features. “Really?”

“Of course,” he answers, breathing out a laugh that exits along with the smoke in his lungs. “I love talking to you. You’re… You’re cool, you know? S— Super cool.”

His face screws up at his stuttering, and he shakes his head at how the words sound leaving his mouth. His cheeks glow cherry red beneath an orange street lamp. 

“Super cool, huh?” you repeat with a giggle that’s bright enough to illuminate the velvet night. “I don’t think anyone’s ever called me that before.”

Steve scoffs when he passes the cigarette back to you. Because, lately, that’s all he’s been hearing about you. From Eddie, from Robin, from Dustin — every good thing a person could say about someone else, they all say about you. 

He’s starting to understand why.

Because you’re sweet. Like, pure sugar poured on the tip of his tongue kind of sweet. You’re bright like sunshine and soft like summer rain. You’re a shot of pure espresso for a boy who thought his life was at a dead end. He’s not entirely sure how he ever could’ve thought you were some deep, dark, devil-worshipping freak.

“I don’t believe that,” he dismisses with the shake of his head.

You breathe out a sharp exhale and a puff of nicotine-coated smoke. “I’ve been the town pariah since I was eleven, Steve. Everyone thinks I’m some kinda delinquent who’s in a cult because I play a dumb board game. So, no. No one’s ever thought I was cool before.”

“Still?” Steve wonders with a twisted face. “You graduated, like, a year ago. Are... Are people really still on your ass about that?”

“A little,” you answer with a shrug, trying your best not to look as affected by it all as you feel.

Steve feels his chest swell with the fiery urge to protect you. The same one he gets when Dustin tells him about the assholes at school that are bothering him. He wants to defend you from the same sort of assholes that he used to be. The impulse is borderline primal, rooted somewhere deep and far within himself, because god knows he’s got a terrible track record when it comes to winning fights.

“Shit, Punchy… I’m— I’m sorry.”

You sputter out a laugh at the apology, louder when you realize he’s using the nickname again.

He can’t relate to any of this. The trials and tribulations of being persona non grata everywhere you went were certainly lost on him. Steve might’ve lost his touch somewhere down the road, but he’ll always be crown royalty — the kind of guy you think fondly of when your wonderyears are long gone. But you? You’re lucky if people don’t cross to the other side of the street when they spot you coming.

Perhaps that’s why his words warm you so much. Because, despite all that, he’s trying to make you feel better anyway.

You give him a tender smile and a dwindling cigarette. 

“It’s okay. I mean, it’s whatever, you know? I think it’s because I still hang out with Eddie all the time. Like, people see us and remember what fucking freaks we used to be,” you say with a laugh, then start to ramble without thinking. “We saw Tommy Hagan at Melvald’s the other day, and he looked at us like we caused him severe PTSD or something, like, he looked terrified. I honestly felt a little bad.”

Steve smiles, wide-eyed, equal parts intrigued and unsettled by the reminiscent glimmer in your eye and the daunting giggle that spills from your lips.

“But I wouldn’t leave Eddie, you know?” you blurt, suddenly serious, like you’ve taken offense at the very thought. “Not even if it meant people stopped being so mean. ‘Cause I love him and everything… Even though he’s a pain in the ass.”

“Oh, he’s a total pain in the ass,” Steve agrees and flicks the butt of the cig between his fingers. “He loves you too, though. I can tell. The asshole never shuts up about you.”

“He talks about me?” you ask, voice fragile and pitched higher than normal.

Steve doesn’t like the way you say it. He hates how you look at him even more, with a scrunched up face and eyes that flicker with embers of shock. Like you don’t believe it, like you think yourself unworthy of it.

“You’re all he talks about,” the boy assures, feeling so suddenly brave and wanting to make you feel brave too. He hands the cigarette back to you. “I don’t blame him. If I were him, I’d never shut up about you either.”

The contorted look of confusion on your face untwists itself, and your features fall flat with disbelief. A smile pulls slow at your mouth. Your eyes glitter an orange gold beneath the streetlight. They flit over to the boy beside you just long enough to take the stick from him.

“Steve Harrington…” you lilt, almost scoldingly so.

It makes him smile. “What?”

“Stop flirting with me.”

“Well, that’s very presumptuous of you,” he retorts playfully. “Who’s to say I was flirting?”

“So you weren’t then?”

“Maybe a little,” he shrugs with a knowing, practiced smirk. “Can you blame me?”

You don’t seem impressed by his not-so-subtle attempt at flirting, and he isn’t at all used to that. The bravado and the puppy dog eyes are his one-two punch — any other time, he’d have a phone number tucked safely in his pocket by now. But you’re not biting.

“I’m so not your type,” you dismiss with the shake of your head.

“Yeah?” he challenges, shoving himself off the brick wall with his shoulder and making the short trek over to you. He plants himself next to you, leans with one sneaker crossed over the other, and smiles with a playful twinkle in his eye. “And what’s my type?”

“Nancy Wheeler,” you answer without missing a beat. “Pretty girls.”

“Well, I think you’re very pretty—”

“Not like her,” you interject with a foreign firmness that Steve hasn’t seen from you until now. You’re still smiling at him, though, still kind but looking like you don’t believe him. Like you think this must be some kind of sick joke that he’s taking too far.

You can entertain Steve. You like Steve. Mostly because he’s totally different from the douchebag you remember him being — the douchebag you were expecting him to be. 

You find that he’s terribly clumsy and not overtly good with words. He says dumb jokes that don’t come out right and smiles in relief when they make you laugh anyway. He’s soft like peach fuzz or a fluffy cloud, mushy like warm chocolatey gooey goodness, and not at all like you remember him.

But then he does this. He morphs into something else, changes shape right in front of you. He smiles at you with little of his dumbassery behind it — all smirks and faux longing gazes with the intent of making you swoon at his feet. He grins down at you and all you see is the teenage boy who would’ve never looked at you that way four years ago. Hell, not even one. 

It reminds you of who he is, who he used to be, and who you are now. 

You haven’t changed so much since high school. You’ve matured a little, sure, but there was never an asshole exterior that you felt the need to outgrow. You’re still loud at times, unaware and ignorant of the world around you. You still play lightsabers outside Eddie’s trailer in between lengthy Dungeons and Dragons campaigns. You still pretend like the lingering glares from all the people you used to know don’t bother you. 

They do, though. They always have.

You look at Steve and you see this butterfly — someone made of rainbow colors and mostly mature. He’s growing, and you’re stuck in the same cocoon you’ve been wrapped in since freshman year, still fumbling around and trying to figure out where you fit.

He’ll always be the pretty butterfly he always was, with his pretty little iridescent wings that catch the light and all the attention. He’ll feed off the applause he gets while you’re sitting on the sidelines. The girl who’s destined to stay bundled in her cocoon forever only hears all of his praise — never watches, never receives.

“You and I are completely different people, Steve Harrington,” you declare with a grin that tells him you’ve already made up your mind.

The boy doesn’t get it, though, why you seem so upset by the idea. Him and Robin were completely different people. Him and Dustin were, too. The two people he adored — tolerated — most in the entire world weren’t a single thing like him, and it was better that way.

You don’t seem to share a similar philosophy, though. You take a drag from your mostly gone cigarette and mourn what could have been; if only he had been the town freak or you had been born the pretty girl next door.

“That doesn’t have to be such a bad thing—”

He’s abruptly cut off by the sound of muffled rock music and the bright yellow headlights of Eddie Munson’s van. The two of you shield your eyes when he whips into the desolate parking lot and parks in front of you. The sudden intrusion feels like being blinding like the sun after you’ve found such comfort within each other in the dead of night.

The stifled Def Leppard song — or maybe Poison, Steve can never quite tell the difference — is brought to a sharp halt when the engine shuts off. The headlights dim. The metallic slam of the driver’s side door sounds so much louder in the darkness.

Eddie rounds the front of his van and eyes the two of you rather suspiciously. The boy inhales deeply, puffing out his chest and splaying his hands on his hips. “…What’s going on here?” he squints at you.

You give him a terribly manufactured sunshine smile and bat your lashes his way, like you’re pretending to be un-innocent. “Nothing…” you sing-song.

Eddie rolls his eyes at you, then turns his attention to Steve. They’re not really strangers anymore, but he still feels the need to treat him like an outsider anyway.

“Harrington,” he says in the place of any real greeting. “Don’t you have other shit to do? Like, I don’t know, a shift as the mannequin at the GAP or something?”

Steve can’t find it in himself to get self-conscious about his fitted-sweatshirt, khaki-slack combo when the insult comes from a guy in a decade-old leather jacket, unwashed t-shirt, and ripped jeans.

“Very funny,” the brunette monotones. 

“I’ll see you around, yeah?” you ask when you turn and walk backwards towards Eddie, like there’s a gravitational pull dragging you to him.

You say it to be polite mostly, but you’re hoping for an affirmative — a promise that you’ll have another night like this one, where he sees you just to be seeing you. Hell, you’ll even take a nod if that’s all he’ll give you. And when he does, he gives you a tiny smile that almost makes you trip over yourself.

Fuck, you think to yourself, like your brain is talking to your heart. We just agreed not to do that.

Before you get in the van, you walk by Eddie and bring your cigarette up to his mouth. You coax the stick between his lips with your pointer and middle finger, opting to let him take the last couple of hits because he never turns down a free smoke.

The passenger door shuts once you’re tucked into the seat of it. The sound it makes punctuates your absence. Steve feels all of its emptiness.

He eyes Eddie from the distance, immediately noticing the darkened skepticism dancing in his dark eyes. 

The boy’s always felt the need to protect you. When the entire town got spooked about stories of some satanic panic and started treating you like monsters, he wanted to shield you from the boogeyman everyone turned into. 

Steve wasn’t one of them, the bad men. But Eddie loves you and it’s made him doubtful.

“It’s not what it looks like,” Steve feels the need to say, as though he’d been caught with his pants down and not just sharing an innocent cigarette with a friend.

Eddie takes the final few puffs of it and exhales rather dramatically, lips pursing to blow it in his direction though it’s too far away to hit him. The boy throws the filter to the concrete and extinguishes the ashes with the toe of his dirty sneakers. 

He waits until the white smoke has fully dissipated to speak.

“Damn right, it isn’t.”

That’s all he says. He doesn’t even look at Steve when he says it, or when he rounds the van and hops into the driver’s seat next to you. Steve squints when the too bright headlights come alive again in time with the roaring engine and dated rock music. His tires screech when he speeds out of the back parking lot. 

The tin can he drives nearly tips over when he turns too sharply onto Main Street.

Steve doesn’t get a chance to get a good look at you before you’re gone completely. It makes him all boyishly upset, knowing the hours without you will be most agonizing, but the empty feeling is eclipsed by the warm relief of not getting clock cleaned by Eddie Munson.

Damn right, it isn’t. Four words. That’s all he gets. But they’re daunting and coated with a lingering foreboding that feels almost like a threat.

So, by all accounts, Steve probably should’ve known there was no way Munson was ever going to back down that easily.

Eddie comes back the next day, a thundering storm cloud of the boy he usually is, head wild with curly hair and a million thoughts. 

The door dings far too gently for such an aggressive arrival. Metal bangs against metal as the handle collides with the window pane. He stomps to the counter in several quick strides, dark eyes darting around the half-empty store — obviously searching for something.

Robin, manning the front counter, is entirely unable to be threatened by him. The all black, chunky metal rings, and crazy hair stopped being so intimidating when she found out you called him Eddie Spaghetti. Now, it’s all she can think about when she sees him. 

Even as he stands ahead of her, obviously upset, all she sees is a very cartoonishly angry Eddie Spaghetti, and it takes everything in her not to laugh.

“Where’s Steve?” the boy finally wonders when he realizes the boy’s not in the front.

“Uh, he’s in the back, I think. Why?”

Eddie doesn’t humor her with an answer. He just storms past the counter and makes a b-line for the break room.

Robin watches him over her shoulder. “You’re not supposed to go back there!” she half-heartedly shouts, but makes no further effort to stop him from doing so.

He finds Steve working beneath the dim yellow light of the back room. There’s a warmed-up container of leftovers on the small round table on one side of the room and a stack of unorganized tapes on the counter on the other. Steve multitasks between both and hums something summery under his breath — The Beach Boys, maybe.

He’s too distracted to notice Eddie’s abrupt appearance. It’s the subtle click of the shut door that gets his attention.

Steve’s confused at first. His head snaps over his shoulder like a ghost must’ve closed the door on him. He realizes that it’s just Eddie, and he’s so innocently relieved that it’s almost humorous, then confused all over again. His brows pinch together and through the chicken tender jutting out his check, he mumbles: “You’re not supposed to be back here—”

“Yeah, I got that part,” Eddie interrupts in a monotone.

He swallows. It’s as thick as the tension that settles between the two of them, made heavier by the lengthy silence. He crosses his arms over his chest, stands up a little straighter, and bares his neck when he lifts his chin. “I want you to leave her alone.”

Steve scoffs and chews through his mouthful. “Leave who alone?”

“You know exactly who I’m talking about,” Eddie squints with an unusual sort of seriousness. “I don’t want you messing around with her anymore, man. I’m, fucking— I’m so fucking serious right now.”

The clarification makes Steve laugh. He shakes his head and goes back to piling the myriad of tapes into organized stacks on the counter. “We were just talking, Eddie. I don’t need the lecture, okay?”

“We both know it’s never just talking with you.”

“What? Are you in love with her or something?” he retorts, trying to make a joke of it.

Eddie, for the first time in his life, isn’t amused. “Oh, god, get over yourself, dude. I know what kinda guy you are, alright? I’m not gonna let you hurt her.”

His words hit Steve like a pot of boiling water. It prickles his skin, leaving blisters and burning red blotches in its wake. He’s all but on fire with his anger, less offended by the accusation than by the person it comes from.

Steve and Eddie aren’t friends by any means. They’re just two guys with shared custody of a bunch of teenagers, bonded in their want to keep them all safe. But through their lighthearted animosity, is a sort of understanding: neither of them are the assholes the entire town claims them to be. Eddie isn’t apart of some satanic cult. Steve isn’t a douchebag that uses women as accessories. And that’s just a silent agreement they’ve both come to on their own terms. 

But now here they are, talking like it’s 1984 all over again and they’re strangers who hate each other’s guts.

“No. I’m not gonna hurt her. Because we’re just friends, Eddie.”

The boy just shakes his head. He scrunches his nose like he’s wincing, then laughs — a big, dramatic laugh that fills the tiny break room. He begins to pace, waving an accusatory ringed finger Steve’s way. “No, see… That’s the thing. I don’t think King Steve is capable of being ‘just friends’ with a pretty girl.”

Steve rolls his eyes with a heavy huff. He comes to the conclusion that Eddie’s just projecting and that there’s no use in arguing his case. He shoves a black VHS tape into its designated sleeve and slots it in with the rest of them, muttering under his breath, “I’m not King Steve anymore…”

“What?”

“I said, I’m not King Steve anymore!” he yells, a bit louder than he intended to.

He drives a tape onto the pile with an unexpected aggression. It hits the wall with a resounding thud. His arms flail wildly at his sides when he turns to face Eddie again. “God, you guys act like people can’t change! I’m not the asshole I used to be, alright? Jeez…”

Eddie exhales sharply through his nose in the place of any real reply. Deep down, he knows all that. He knows it’s all true because he would’ve never befriended him otherwise. Steve Harrington — the king, the rich kid, the douchebag — turned out to be a pretty damn good guy. 

And maybe if Eddie didn’t love you so much, he’d be able to wrap his head around all that.

But does. So he can’t.

He saw you two together the night before, sharing a cigarette behind The Groove — albeit a little too close for his liking — and suddenly, it was junior year all over again.

You’re stressed out about the ACT and college acceptance rates, none of your clothes quite fit you, and you’re trying out bold things with your makeup that don’t quite fit you either. You grin wildly up at Eddie through the vibrant lipstick smeared on your lips, laughing at his half-hearted attempt to cheer you up. 

And Steve is a senior, standing on the other side of the hallway — with his pretty clothes and prettier hair — and he lets all of his friends laugh at you. They make fun of your un-styled hair and the way your shirt makes your boobs look, and Steve doesn’t find any of it particularly funny but he lets them mock you anyway.

Eddie sees you together and forgets about the man Steve is now. All he sees is a boy who never stuck up for you, for either of you, who let his best friends make your lives hell because his reputation mattered more.

And it wasn’t like it was his job to defend you, because it wasn’t. Not really. It’s just that you would’ve done it for him, if the roles were reversed. Eddie, too. Neither of you would’ve let a lamb be led to the slaughter quite like that. It was the Hellfire motto, after all — to protect the little sheep from the creeping wolves.

That’s where the difference lies. It’s where the mistrust settles deep and where the root of all of Eddie’s worries lingers.

But Steve has done more to prove himself than Eddie likes to give him credit for. 

He takes care of a bunch of kids like it’s his job. He runs Robin to and from school most days out of the week, on time each morning — which, for a guy who showed up late every day for four years, was definitely saying something. He even comes to Eddie’s shows when he’s not too busy working the graveyard shift, never minding that he sticks out in his collared shirt and slacks — a pretty boy amidst a crowd of freaks.

Fuck. Steve Harrington was a pretty alright dude.

But you’re better than alright. You’re better than good. Better than perfect. 

If you got your heart broken, Eddie thinks he’d feel all of it times a thousand.

Steve’s been through his own kind of heartbreak, though. He’s slapped a bandaid over his own bleeding heart, and it’s made him soft. The good kind of soft — the kind where he sees a bug on its back and has to flip it over because it hurts too much to let it suffer. Eddie knows he’ll be that kind to you. Kinder, even.

“Yeah, you better hope so, Harrington,” the boy concludes with a slow nod of his wild head. He steals a chicken tender from the styrofoam box it sits in, like it’s some kind of power move, and waves it at him like a condemnatory point. “I hear you do anything — anything — to her… And your ass is grass.”

Eddie takes a hearty bite from the strip, then tosses it back into the container again. He spins on the ragged heel of his sneaker and stalks out of the break room, punctuating his absence with the slam of the door. The ancient thing gets lodged and doesn’t quite shut all the way, so he has to double back and shut it fully.

Steve is left dumbfounded, in more ways than one.

“…He just ate my chicken,” he mumbles to himself with a frown settled deep between his brows. But there’s a lingering tension in Eddie’s storming out — a tangible fog within his words that settles something heavy in the Family Video breakroom that doubles as storage. 

It feels almost like a blessing.

˗ˋˏ ♡ ˎˊ˗

Won't escape my attention...

The more time you spend with Steve, the more confident you get. 

You visit him at work more often, caring less and less about bothering anybody when you realize they all wanted you there. You let yourself ramble in front of him, too, not stopping yourself nearly as often as you used to. Steve guesses you started to believe him somewhere around the millionth time he promised he liked hearing you talk.

You turn to glitter in his presence, becoming more unapologetically yourself and glowing with it — with all the things that used to make you insecure, things that King Steve would’ve made fun of you for some time ago. Everything you were scared made you too different, is why he liked you in the first place.

And Steve gets to watch it all play out right before his eyes. You inch slowly out of the protective shell you’ve built around yourself and bloom like springtime flowers. He’s grateful he gets to witness it, even more that you feel comfortable enough to do it all in front of him.

You’re hardly as timid as you usually are when you saunter into Family Video. Rather than tiptoeing in and apologizing for intruding, you burst through the front door with a beam and a high-pitched squeal. You’re as bright as every star in the galaxy combined; even dressed head-to-toe in black, you’re more blinding than the sun. 

Eddie’s leather jacket, either stolen or unenthusiastically lent from the boy himself, swallows your upper half. You wear a piece of Metallica merchandise beneath it. The thing is cut up to your ribcage. The jagged edges in the fabric, likely from a dull pair of kitchen scissors, tells him the chop was intentional.

A leather skirt clings effortlessly onto you, revealing the pudge of your stomach and the curves of your hips. The thing is donned with two spiked belts and several chains hanging loosely at your waist.

Steve is dozing at the counter with his chin propped on his first when you walk in. He’s half-asleep until he sees you. The shot of espresso that walks in makes him instantly forget how tired he is.

“Guess what?” you ask with wide, sparkling eyes as you skip to the counter with your hands behind your back.

Steve always hated that question. Usually, it came from Dustin or Robin — or, god forbid, both of them — followed by a “No, seriously. Guess.” It left him with no choice but to humor them until they ultimately caved and told him something he couldn’t have guessed in a million years.

He isn’t so annoyed now, though. In fact, he smiles. “What?” he replies.

You pull your bottom lip between your teeth, as though in a futile attempt to conceal the wide grin on your face, and take your hands from behind your back. You flash him the cassette tape you hold in the palm of them, a blue and yellow thing with the angled Def Leppard logo printed on the cover.

“No way!” Steve finds himself exclaiming like he’s the number one fan of the rock and roll band. He isn’t; never has been, really. But he is a fan of you. All of his excitement, all of his bright and shining smiles — they’re all for you.

“They came in last night— when I was off, of course— and I opened this morning and there was a whole damn tower of these tapes! I’m the one who does the tape towers, okay? Plus, I’ve been doggin’ my manager for weeks about the things, so I can’t believe they came in and no one told me, you know?”

Steve gets lost in your rambling right along with you, nodding because he never wants you to stop talking. His twinkling gaze follows you back and forth as you pace in front of the counter. You gesticulate wildly with your hands, nearly elbowing a customer when they get too close to the line of fire.

“And she was all like ‘I can’t control when they come in,’ And I was like ‘well, you can’t control when I come in either, I’ll be taking a long lunch now, thank you’—” you recount, albeit at a slightly louder volume that shocks anyone who doesn’t know you. People shoot you lingering side eyes from over the aisles.

Steve doesn’t care. He’s even happier that you don’t seem to either. You feel comfortable enough with him now to stop caring about the rest. When you stop yourself, you do it because you’ve said everything you need to say, not because you feel like you’ve annoyed him in some way. 

“Anyway,” you conclude with a sigh. “I wanted to run it to you personally because, besides Eddie, you’re the only person I know who cares as much as I do.”

You smile sweetly at him, peering at him through your lashes, so suddenly timid — no longer the boisterous girl lighting up the whole room. Steve notices that you do that a lot, go from loud and sunny to shy and glimmering. Eddie does it too, sometimes, but it’s not nearly as cute.

“My wallet’s in my locker,” he tells you when you hand him the tape. He cocks his thumb over his shoulder with his free hand. “Let me go grab it. I’ll be, like, two seconds—”

You reach over the counter and take him by the arm, wrapping chipped maroon nails around the crook of his elbow to keep him from straying too far. Shock coats his features at the suddenness of your touch and the way it makes him buzz.

You scoff. “Are you serious? I’m not gonna make you pay, you weirdo.”

“No?”

“Of course not! It’s a gift.”

“Well, gee, Punchy. Considered me flattered,” he concedes with a faltering smile.

You laugh at his half-hearted attempt to be charming.

He rests his crossed arms on the counter and leans over the top of it in an effort to be the slightest bit closer to you. He gazes up at you with honey eyes and raised brows and a big, dumb smile. “And, you know, flattery... it goes a long way with me.”

You arch an un-manicured brow at him. “Does it, now?”

“Yep. So much so, I’m willing to break a few rules and let you pick out a couple of movies. On the house.”

It’s dumb and it’s sweet and so terribly innocent. He wants to give you so much than that but he’s got about eighteen dollars to his name, so all he can do is offer you a few measly VHS tapes. It has you beaming like he just offered you the world.

“Steve Harrington,” you scold playfully. “I didn’t know you were so naughty.”

He falters. His resolve slips and, for no more than half a second, his brain forgets how to work. 

He’s not quite sure how you manage to do that to him all the damn time. You make his brain shortcircuit and his belly quiver and his vision swim. He’s known you for a while now, long enough that the lovesickness should’ve well worn off.

Steve’s worried that there’s no cure for you, that he’s in it for the long haul now — upset stomachs, heart palpitations, and all.

“Well, I’m full of surprises,” he shrugs and sways on his feet. “What’s your poison, Punchy? Molly Ringwald? Robert Downey Jr.? The John Hughes type?”

You can tell he’s joking. You squint over at him and rest your elbows on the counter top your face-to-face. 

The wintergreen mint on his breath makes your head swim. 

Your rouge-tined lips are so close he can taste them — he wants to, desperately so. 

You don’t miss the way his gaze flits to your mouth, lingering there for no longer than a blink.

“Try Night of the Living Dead,” you challenge. 

“That is so dreadfully on brand for you,” he manages to reply without much stuttering. He’s surprised he’s able to get any words out at all, with the way his heart feels like it’s about to beat out of his chest.

“I’m nothing if not predictable.”

Steve doesn’t respond as he leaves the counter to get what you asked for. Silence is easier than saying that you’re the most surprising thing he’s ever met in his life.

When he returns, he brings the entire film franchise with him. All three movies are stacked in his arms and he scans the backs of them, hoping Keith won’t notice that they’re being rented free of charge.

“Have you ever seen them?” you wonder.

He shakes his head. “No. I saw one of them at a drive-in a long time ago, but I wasn’t exactly paying attention, if you know what I mean—” he answers with a soft laugh, quick to cut himself off. It was supposed to be a dumb joke, but both of you know what he was insinuating and it makes everything awkward. 

Robin would’ve slapped him on the back of the head if she were around to hear it. 

He would’ve deserved it.

“Well, you missed out,” you scold, not quite meeting his gaze. “They’re actually pretty good.”

“I’ll try and watch ‘em sometime then.”

“Tonight?” you offer suddenly.

Steve furrows his brows. “…Huh?”

“I mean, like— I don’t know… I thought maybe we could watch them tonight,” you stammer with your eyes turned down toward the counter, where you draw invisible patterns onto the granite with the tip of your finger. “Like, together… if you want.”

Steve is momentarily speechless. He’s spent weeks plotting how he was going to ask you out. It would come to him in waves. He’d feel like he’d concocted the most perfect, foolproof plan right before realizing there was no way in hell he could ever go through with it — all in the same fleeting thought. 

But here you are, biting the bullet for the both of you. 

He’s grateful. He thinks he’s dreaming.

“That sounds…” Steve trails off with the mindless nod of his head. “Yeah. No. Totally. That sounds… really cool.”

A wide smile pulls at the edges of your lips. You purse your mouth to the side in attempts to conceal it. “Cool,” you murmur all cool-ly, like his affirmation isn’t heaven to your ears.

“Uh, not to sound like a total douchebag or whatever, but my dad— he’s got this theater room and everything, and my parents are almost never home,” Steve rambles as he puts all three movies into a paper bag. Then his eyes go wide and his face glows cherry red. “Not like that! I didn’t mean it like— That sounded really weird… I’m sorry—”

You giggle at him, at the way he can pretend to be so suave, and then reveal all the marshmallow fluff he tries to keep hidden a moment later. “It’s okay, Steve. I got what you meant.”

He writes his address on a yellow sticky note with the Family Video logo printed in green at the very top. His handwriting is boyish and sloppy, the sign of a boy who never did care much about school. Some letters are connected, others far apart; some written too big, while others are too small. You find it endearing, but Steve knows it’s just because his hand was shaking something fierce.

He leaves his number written at the very bottom. Just for good measure.

“No funny business, alright, Harrington?” you joke, waving a ringed finger at him as you walk backward out of the store, heading back to your own job.

Steve bites back a smile. Once upon a time, he was all funny business. No girl was ever going to invite King Steve over and not expect some heavy petting. And he wants so badly to kiss you — fuck, he wants to kiss you all the time — but the want to spend innocent time with you eclipses all of those boyish feelings.

He yearns to be close to you. Like magnets. Or a moon and the ocean’s tide.

“No funny business,” he promises.

˗ˋˏ ♡ ˎˊ˗

You keep your distance with a system of touch.

It isn’t until you arrive at the front gates of the Harrington home you realize you’ve never been in the suburbs of Hawkins before.

You grew up on the very outskirts of town, where there were more trees than people or houses. The block was half rundown already and horribly secluded. The only interesting thing about it was the winding trail through the woods that led to the anterior of Forest Hills trailer park.

That’s where you spent the bulk of your time, practically living with Eddie and Wayne in their one-bedroom trailer, until you felt guilty enough to go back home for a day or two. Your parents would inevitably remind you why you ran off in the first place, and then the cycle would start all over again.

It was all just far enough away from Hawkins that you could pretend like the town’s bullshit didn’t exist. The freak from the wrong side of the tracks didn’t belong on Maple Street or Fairview Road or Laurel Avenue. That was for people who could afford new shoes every school year, who could go clothes shopping and not feel guilty about cutting into their food money, who were set up with trust funds before they were even born.

But here you are now, on Fairview Road, seven o’clock sharp, and standing in front of the biggest house you’d ever seen. 

You ring the doorbell and flinch when it’s louder than expected. The chime is light and jaunty. You wonder if it’s been programmed for the change in season.

Steve answers no more than a couple seconds later. He swings both French doors open, arms spreading wide like the smile on his face.

He’s traded in his slacks for comfier jeans and his vest for a form-fitting sweatshirt he’s bunched at the elbows. You realize, then, that you’ve never seen him without the forest green Family Video jacket. It makes him look naked, almost, like a totally different person — no longer the dork who works a measly nine-to-five with his best friend and visits the freak next door on the off chance his manager won’t dock his pay for it.

The vest had humbled him to a certain extent. Now he just looks cool. Like the boy people would either praise or avoid like the plague, for fear of getting in King Steve’s path — just a little bit more mature looking now, with his chiseled jaw and scruffy chin.

It makes you feel a little stupid from where you stand on the porch ahead of him, wearing the same thing he’d seen you in earlier that day. He’s got no idea you spent the past couple of hours agonizing over what to wear. For the sake of not seeming crazy overzealous, you opted not to dress up. Now you’re scared he thinks you just didn’t care enough to.

But you do care. So goddamn much that’s it scary. 

You never had to worry about what you wore or what you looked like before you left the house, about what you had too much of and what you lacked. Now, it’s all you can think about.

If Steve notices anything at all, he doesn’t show it. He just keeps on smiling at you, too happy to see you to care about what you’re wearing. He’s just glad that you showed up.

Truth be told, he had a six-pack and Robin’s number on speed dial on the off chance you canceled on him. He was preparing himself to wallow in self-pity and spend the rest of the night ranting to his best friend about the bleeding heart he had for you. Because, as far as he was concerned, you were far too good to be true. 

You were beautiful and funny and kind and perfect. You treat him like you’ve known him for years, like he didn’t spend so many of them avoiding you in attempts to keep some measly title that didn’t mean shit. You were too perfect. Sometimes, Steve gets scared that he just made you up.

But whether you’re a dream come true or the real thing, you’re standing on his front porch anyway, with a smile and a bottle of grocery store wine. 

He saves the beer in his fridge and the wallowing for another day. 

Steve escorts you through his lavish living room and to the downstairs area that’s got a movie screen hanging on the walls and a couple of leather couches sitting in front of it. The coffee table in front of them holds a myriad of glass bowls — popcorn, various candies, and more popcorn.

“You planning on throwin’ a party down here, Harrington?” you tease with a soft chuckle, trying to conceal how your heart’s about to burst at the mere sight of it all.

“Well, I just— I didn’t know what you liked, and I didn’t— I wanted to make sure you had something to eat, you know,” the boy stammers out. He brings the palm of his hand to rub at the back of his neck. “So I just… I got… everything.”

“It’s a good thing a like everything then, huh?” you smile at him as you pluck a Red Vine from its dedicated bowl. You rip off an inch or two with your teeth and then talk as you chew: “I hope you’re prepared for all of this shit get eaten, Harrington. I can get quite ravenous.”

Steve nods to himself and tries not to smile too big. “Sounds entertaining… Maybe I’ll just watch you instead of the movie.”

It was supposed to be a joke. 

But then you settled down next to him on the couch, keeping a respectful distance but sharing the same fuzzy blanket, and he has to physically force himself to drag his gaze away from you. 

He was right about what he said before, you were far more entertaining than the black and white film projected ahead of him — grabbing handfuls of popcorn at a time and quoting the movie through the mouthful. 

It’s a tad bit barbaric, the faintest bit off-putting, and otherworldly levels of endearing. It leaves him virtually unable to take his eyes off of you. 

He didn’t think you could get more beautiful, but you keep on proving him wrong. 

He’s starting to realize he doesn’t know shit.

You’re slowly coming to the same understanding.

You’ve heard stories about Steve. Usually from gossiping cheerleaders standing in circles at their lockers or whispering in the back of a classroom. Doomed as the freak and all but banished from the inner society of Hawkins High, you became an observer. You were so invisible that people sometimes didn’t realize they were talking right over you, sharing secrets they wouldn’t want someone else to get a hold of. 

But apparently you were the exception. Because you weren’t a someone to them.

They talked about how kind he was, how well endowed, how they were meant to go on some stupid date but missed their reservation because Steve got a little too handsy beforehand, and how they spent the rest of the night with their hands shoved down each other’s pants at Lover’s Lake. 

You were seeing, firsthand, how much he’d changed. How he made his promise of no funny business and how he was sticking to it — no teasing you about the whole thing with a knowing smirk and flirtatious honey eyes, no urging to close this distance between you, no tiny touches on your arm or thigh in the hopes of heavier petting.

He spends the entirety of the first movie perfectly respectful. Just like you’d asked him to be. 

And it was nice, knowing that you weren’t wasting your evening with some asshole who was only spending time with you in the hopes of you putting out later. But it leaves you the faintest bit empty. Hungry. You long for his touch like a missed meal. Starving and feeling it all.

It’s not even heavy petting you want, you just want to feel him next to you — to press yourself into his side and to warm yourself with him like a blanket. 

But you weren’t a pretty cheerleader or a girl dripping in expensive clothes and daddy’s money. You were the weirdo, the freak, the loudmouth nerd, Punchy — all names you wore proudly, like lit-up signs or steel armor. 

Until now. 

Now you think if you weren’t Punchy, if were you someone different, then maybe he’d want to touch you more.

The first hour and thirty-seven minutes of your favorite movie are strangely agonizing. 

Your hands itch with the desire to touch the boy next to you, and they busy themselves with the bowls of candy and savory junk food splayed out on the table in front of you. It’s mindless more than it is anything. You’re absentminded binging does nothing more than half-distract you from the thoughts raging rivers in your skull.

You don’t even realize you’re doing it until your hand falls into an empty bowl of popcorn and finds nothing but kernels at the bottom of it. 

It makes Steve laugh, thinking you were just too into the movie to notice — having no idea it was him taking up all your brain power. 

He leaves to fix more snacks for you while you slip the second VHS into the movie player. He returns with a bowl of freshly popped popcorn and two beers after the wine bottle has been sufficiently emptied. When he plops down next to you again, it’s in the same spot he’d been sitting in all night — a couple of excruciating inches away.

Under the guise of sharing the popcorn in his lap, you make the too bold decision to slither in at his side. It’s innocent at first — your thighs just barely graze and your elbows bump when you dip your hands into the bowl. And it’s still innocent some thirty minutes later, when you find yourself resting your head on his shoulder with your legs curled up behind you.

Steve tenses when he feels your temple pressed against him, but only for a moment before he relaxes again. It makes him all suddenly warm and self-aware of every movement he makes. He tries not to breathe too heavy or shift too often, for fear it might jostle you too much. He doesn’t want to stop feeling you against him like this, even if it’s got his skin prickling with a searing form of anxiety.

“Don’t tell me you’re falling asleep,” he jokes.

“Of course not. It’s way too riveting,” you scoff, even though he can feel you cuddling further into him. Your cheek rubs against the soft cotton of his sweatshirt when you look up at him. He turns his head to peer down at you and his nose nearly grazes your forehead. 

He finds you with a certain glint in your eye. It’s borderline playful, like it so often is, but coated with a sweetness that drips over him like honey. “You like it so far?” you wonder.

“Yeah,” the boy nods quickly. He couldn’t tell you what had happened the past two-and-a-half films, but he could tell you how your jaw tenses when you chew and how your smile curls just before you laugh out loud and how your eyes widen every time you quote the movie. “It’s really good. I like it.”

You beam at him before turning back to the projector again. You shift to get more comfortable against him. “Good.” 

By the third movie, you’re somehow even closer.

Truth be told, Day of the Dead wasn’t your favorite in the trilogy, so it left your mind wandering to far off places — namely, the pretty boy sitting beside you. He goes to put the tape into the projector, feeling immediately cold without pressing into his side, and when he returns he tries his best not to beg you to cuddle against him again.

“My shoulder’s gettin’ real cold over here,” he tries to joke. 

You see right through his beckoning, though. It makes you happy to know he wants it just as much as you do. 

“Just say you wanna be next to me, Harrington,” you tease like you aren’t happily obliging him. You snuggle into his shoulder and rest your head against him while your arms curl around his bicep.

“I wanna be next to you,” he repeats, a playful smile on his lips though his gaze softens with sincerity. “Is that so bad?”

You shake your head against him in reply. Suddenly as mushy as the boy beside you, you turn to look up at him. “Not unless it’s bad that I wanna be next to you, too…”

“Nah. It’s not bad,” he assures in something short of a whisper. “Guess I’m just glad I’m not the only one that’s so far gone.”

He doesn’t elaborate on what he means by that. He doesn’t have to.

Perhaps it’s the admission that this boy is so far gone for you that gives you a sudden burst of confidence. Maybe it’s the comforting feeling of being seen, of knowing you’re no longer alone in your similar far gone-ness. Each feels like rays of sunshine to your skin and has you pressing your lips to his wanting ones without much thought. 

The plump pink of his mouth are magnets for yours. They meet and lock together with little effort, almost destined to do it. It’s a soft, meager, and lingering little peck that sucks you both in a little too easily. It’s hard to pull away from him, but when you do, your lips click in protest.

Then there’s a look, then a deafening silence that says more words than either of you were capable of forming in that moment. His amber eyes dart between both of yours, asking a question without saying a goddamn thing. One that you answer with your own softening gaze. 

And it’s almost better than the kiss itself, the swirling feeling in the pits of your stomach, the knowing of what’s about to happen.

A silent plea and a blink later and his lips are on yours again. 

It’s an awkward mess of yearning mouths and tangled limbs as the both of you fight to find purchase on one another. Your fingers knot in the collar of his sweatshirt, pulling him impossibly closer, while his grip the bare skin of your waist from where your shirt had ridden up. His touch makes you buzz, like a static shock or a bolt of lightning.

Steve makes several observations when he feels you melt into him like honey on toast. He notices how you press yourself into him, like you won’t be satisfied until you’ve swallowed him whole, and how it has you kissing him like you’re scared he’ll pull away — like you’ll open your eyes and he won’t be real. 

You’re as domineering against his mouth as you are in real life, still as all-consuming and overpowering as the girl he’s gotten so familiar with.

He doesn’t realize how you’ve settled so intently on top of him until his back meets the pillowy cushion of the leather couch. You don’t either, until he exhales a sharp gasp against your cupid’s bow. Then you part from him, for the first time in several minutes, breathing in the oxygen your lungs had just begun to scream for. 

Steve finds you with kiss-bitten lips and glassy eyes that look upon him with a softness that he didn’t know existed until now. He smirks with his own swollen and pinker mouth like he isn’t glowing red beneath you. 

“I thought you said no funny business,” he manages to tease through bated breaths.

You don’t bother to make up excuses for yourself. You’re already on top of him, all over him — you’ve already kissed him like you would’ve died if you hadn’t. Now, you’re straddling him, caging him between your legs and under your torso. You’ve settled on top of him with a comforting weightiness, like you’re building a home in the familiarity you’ve sought in him.

“I lied,” you mutter with a lazy shrug. A sly smile pulls slowly at your lips until you’re all but beaming sunbeams down at him. He revels in your warmth. “’S not my fault you’re so damn cute.”

It’s easier to blame it on him for all the reasons you’re attached to him like a magnet to his metal, your moth to his flame. You part his lips with your mouth, rut your tongue against his own, reveling in the foreign familiarity of it all, and then blame him for the way you can’t seem to stop any of it.

Steve doesn’t seem to mind, though. The way his hands find purchase on your hips, petting the warmed skin there and sometimes squeezing to pull you further down onto him, tells you that he has a similar yearning to melt with you. He lets you kiss him all slow, allows you to taste all of him, and doesn’t rush you in your process. It’s comforting, tender. Free.

He’s not used to being on his back like this. Usually, he’s the one taking control. It’s his mouth that does all the work. So, it’s strange to be under you and to have you above him. But it’s more pleasant in an even stranger way not to be rushed — not to have to do all the work. His mouth opens so obediently for you and finds an effortless rhythm with your lips and your tongue. 

It’s the easiest thing he’s ever done in his life, kissing you. 

He delights in every ounce of the warmth and unfamiliarity you press to his mouth, and tries to shove down feelings of unworthiness that simmer in his chest while you do so.

You don’t part until your mouths are numb and tingling with it. 

Your lips are more vibrant in their color, aflame and swollen from being so ardently kissed and sucked and bitten. Neither of you mind making out like a couple of teenagers. It’s comforting to know that things won’t go further than a couple soft touches on burning skin. It was never supposed to be anything more than that, anyway. It was just about being close to each other.

You’ve almost succeeded in your effort to melt into the boy beneath you, when you hear the distant sound of a door opening and closing again. Muffled voices follow — unknown to you but obviously familiar to him. 

You part from him without thinking, like you’re a couple of kids again who’ll get in trouble if your parents ever found out what you were doing down here. Steve groans at the loss of you and in annoyance at the sound of his parents. His heavy eyes fall shut and his head leans back to the couch cushions as he fights to swallow down all of his anger.

His parents never really come around these days. They’ve got a bigger home in the city, closer to his dad’s work, and they choose to stay there most days of the week — month. 

They used to make excuses for why they left their only son behind. It’s five minutes from your dad’s firm. There’s more opportunity for your mom’s real estate business. Oh, don’t be so selfish, Steven, you’ll finally have the place to yourself. It’s a win-win for all of us.

Steve didn’t want their excuses. It was actually easier with them gone. 

But they come around every now and again, whenever it’s most convenient for them, and treat their arrival like something that needs to be celebrated. Like they aren’t supposed to be with their child in the fucking first place. And they somehow manage to pick the most inconvenient times for him, like they know he’s in a bind and want to see him struggle to get out of it.

Usually, it’s when he’s in between paychecks — when they want to take him out to some fancy dinner he could barely afford anyway, but especially when he’s hardly making it until payday. Now, it’s when he’s got the prettiest girl he’s ever seen on top of him, and he’s all hot and half-hard. Steve doesn’t want to let them ruin the moment, as good as they are at it.

“It’s okay. They won’t come in here,” he assures when he feels you tense at the unexpected company. “My mom will go to the bedroom and my dad will go to his office. We’re good, I promise.”

You figure he’s right. The voices grow more and more distant. Heeled shoes click up and up the stairs while heavy stomps head the opposite way. But you’ve already been so woefully knocked out of your stupor that you’re scared it’s too late.

Your lips are numb and the credits are rolling and you’re on top of this beautiful boy and you have no idea how you got there.

It’s almost frightening, the way Steve had consumed you mind, body, and soul by just existing next to you. You become dreadfully hyperaware of the whole thing — of who you are, who he is, and what you’re doing. You lose all your softness and turn to ice, hardening and shrinking back into yourself.

“I should—” you start before clearing your throat when the words come out heavier than expected. “I should head out anyway.”

“Oh,” is all Steve can say. “Right.”

You stare down at him, chest still pressed against his, nose nearly touching the tip of his own. “I just— I have to open tomorrow and everything, so—”

“No. Yeah. Yeah, I— I get it.”

You make tricky work of untangling yourselves.

His legs twist with yours when you both try to rise from the couch at the same time. Then your ring gets stuck in the fabric of his shirt, but not before his belt buckle gets somehow caught in yours. It’s like fate is protesting the imminent parting, but neither of you are paying attention to the signs.

He walks you to your car and chuckles under his breath as you scurry to the front door. 

You’re not-so-distantly terrified of running into his parents. They probably wouldn’t mind that he’s sneaking around with a girl, surely that they’re used to, but you’re almost certain they’re not used to girls like you. Girls with wild hair and leather skirts and chunky boots and too bold makeup. 

You’re not the girl next door. You’re the girl parents warn their sons about. “Leave that girl alone,” they say. “She’s nothing but trouble.”

You tell him all of this on the short trek to your half-broken-down car when you catch him laughing at you about the whole thing. You say it in jest, lighthearted and trying to make a joke of it. But there’s an underlying melancholia to your tone that reveals every truth you’re trying to evade.

“They don’t care enough about me to give a shit about a girl I’m with, I promise,” he confesses with a laugh that sounds more like a sad scoff than anything else. His chocolate eyes turn gold beneath the yellow street light. He smirks at you. “Besides, I don’t know if I told you this or not, but my middle name is actually trouble, so… I think we might be a match made in heaven.”

You roll your eyes at his attempts to flirt with you, though his lack of finesse makes you smile. “You’re an idiot, Steve Actually Trouble Harrington.”

“You really know how to say goodbye, don’t ya?” he grins when you reach the curb where your tin can car sits. 

“Yeah, I’m pro,” you shrug with a teasing glint in your eye, then you beam. “I’ll see you around, ‘kay?”

“Totally,” he nods, suddenly forlorn at having to leave you like he hadn’t just spent the past four hours with you.

Themetallic click of your car door opening sounds much louder in the emptiness of the suburbs. You glance at the boy right before you sink into the driver’s seat, feeling your heart swell with something short of yearning — anticipation. 

You weren’t actually a professional at saying goodbye, you find, because you’re realizing how hard it is to leave him.

“Steve!” he hears you shout from across the lawn when he’s halfway up the drive. 

He turns around, expecting to hear you tease him some more or tell him you were having car troubles. Neither would’ve shocked him. You’ve got a smart mouth and a shittier car. But you keep on surprising him, all but launching yourself into him before kissing him harder than he’s ever been kissed before.

Steve tenses against you at first, then relaxes again in record time. He sighs in the comfort of having your body pressed so intently into his and your arms wrapped around his neck to pull him somehow closer. 

You feel the breath of his exhale fan against your cupid’s bow. It makes you smile, and he feels the expression contort against his lips. His hands rise to the widest part of your hips without thinking. It’s all muscle memory now.

And even though he’s spent the better part of an hour kissing you, this one is so obviously different. This wasn’t just to pass the time. This was more than just to feel him — it was to tell him something. He hears every word you don’t say, but rather press like a stamp to his mouth.

He’s breathless when you pull away. You meet his flushed face with a mischievous grin.

“What was that for?” he wonders breathlessly, but doesn’t waver with his hold on you. He quickly notices that yours doesn’t either.

You shrug in response. “‘Cause you’re pretty.”

“Yeah, well…” he tries to play off like he’s not blushing like crazy. “You’re pretty too.”

Your beam ebbs into a teasing, tightlipped smirk. “Stop flirting with me, Steve Harrington.”

You shove him away with a rougher hand than you realize before you walk away from him. Steve rubs at the ache in his chest with the palm of his hand.

Your playful teasing and your lingering kiss is the only thing Steve has to remember you by when you turn on your chunky heeled boot and head off down the driveway again. He’s frozen, mesmerized by the sight of you and reeling at how you manage to drive him crazy without trying.

Your eyes find him again just before you duck into your car, and you see him still looking at you — mouth agape and eyes wide like you’re some kind of rare find. You figure you must be, in some way. Girls like you aren’t supposed to like guys like him. Vice Versa. Tale as old as time.

The boy stays locked in his stupor until the sprinkles whir on. The spurts of freezing cold water spray all over him and his pretty hair and expensive sweatshirt and his vintage jeans. “Shit!” you hear him swear as he rushes for cover on his front porch. 

He’s quickly soaked and freezing cold, but he smiles anyway when he hears the sound of your giggling behind him. It’s as animated as your personality and spills from your mouth like so many rays of sunshine, just a little too loud for the quiet midnight suburbs. 

It’s perfect, he realizes. You’re perfect. 

[quackeroos]

speed of sound

steve harrington x reader | part 1 of 3 | 6k words

◃ ۪۪۫۫ ༄ؘ ˑ

as will byers older sister, you vaguely know steve harrington. upon becoming steve harrington's (randomly and abruptly selected) lab partner, you realize you know him even less than you thought.

warnings: fem!reader, byers!reader, shy!reader, bickering, lab partners, classmates, starts in season 2 ends in season 4, frenemies to lovers, slow burn, pining, "unrequited" love emphasis on the air quotes, steve is popular and reader is not, doting mother joyce, running with the headcanon that jonathan dropped out of high school, hurt/comfort, language, blood/injury warnings level to what's on the show

PART ONE → 1984

When you knocked, Steve opened the door. 

An unpleasantly dry air curled into your nostrils as you shuffled in, breezing by him and sinking into your seat at the back of the lab. Something citrus was there, too- cleaner or something equally sterile. Your eye caught on the two dozen beakers and one dozen test tubes at the other lab stations; the beakers filled with clear liquid and the tubes filled with something distinctly pink. What is that?

“It’s just food coloring,” Steve mumbled. You nearly jumped as he slipped back into the seat next you, folding his arms. He wore that one light blue jacket that looked like denim but wasn’t, the one he always wore. A strand of chestnut hair hung over his eyes when he readjusted. “Miggins is pissed.”

Normally you might have argued, but it was true. Miggins was your chemistry teacher, and his name was perfectly fitting. He was somewhere between forty and sixty and had a comb-over. That was all you really noticed about him. Your mind was usually elsewhere during his class. 

Miggins glanced over his shoulder after a moment of intentional ignorance. “Oh. Hello.”

You flattened your lips into a small smile. “Hello. I’m sorry.”

“Finally gracing us with your presence?”

You opened your mouth to offer another apology, but Miggins was facing the board again before you took your next breath. 

“Told you,” Steve whispered. His breath ghosted over your hair, not quite touching your skin. He sat up and you did not look at him. This was sophomore year, so sitting next to Steve still made you stiff. You would still be stiff junior year, and senior year, but maybe not as much. Maybe more. But for different reasons. 

“It’s seven in the morning, quit breathing down my neck,” you hissed. 

He made a face. “So angry.”

You shot him a tiny glare, and he laughed with his mouth closed, eyes still glued in fake focus on Miggins. This was his game. Steve Harrington was a senior who everybody knew and everybody loved (or despised), but more importantly, he was your lab partner. Miggins drew names out of a jar to make pairs at the beginning of the semester. He drew Steve’s name first, and then, when your name came next, it absolutely humiliated you. Steve had plenty of friends in the class and it was pretty damn obvious that you were not his first pick. 

But guys like Steve adapt. Anybody who is quiet and also goes to public school just knows. Guys like Steve get to know you and entertain you just to by extension entertain themselves, because they have to. If he hadn’t struck up this game between the two of you; the useless bickering and the teasing and the whisper screaming, then he would have been impossibly bored. You wouldn’t have fallen impossibly in love with him, either, but unfortunately he had decided to pick on you and thus- this was your curse. 

Miggins turned you over to your projects. 

“What is this?” you asked, relieved when chatter filled the room once more. Sitting in silence listening to your own breath was torture. 

“What do you mean?”

“What are we doing? With the beakers, what’s the assignment?”

Steve snorted. “I don’t know.”

You set down your pencil. “Are you kidding me?”

“This is your job. This is what you do.”

“Do what?”

“You listen, and pay attention. And I help.” He smiled like a politician. 

“You don’t even help.”

“I try.”

You stared at him for a moment. Long fingers drummed on the desk, dangerously close to your side of the wood. He got prettier each year. Your freshman year and his junior, his hair wasn’t long enough to push back over his forehead, but now it was. His brows were darker and his eyes looked wider. He was always taller than you, not by a lot- but now, by a decent amount. Really it didn’t matter. You would probably still like him even if he had green skin and no hair. 

Steve’s brows crossed. “Are you planning something?”

You leaned back with a shivery feeling crawling up your neck. “No.”

“You looked pensive. You had a pensive look,” he crooned. 

“Ooh, vocab word.”

“Mhm. Learned it just for you, sweetheart.”

Your head snapped up at an embarrassingly sharp rate. But his eyes were already back on the packet in front of him, caving and trying to decipher the instructions for the assignment himself. You sat there and watched him like you often did and listened to your heart thumping in your ears. 

Steve had a girlfriend until a few days ago. They broke up on Halloween; you heard. Her name was Nancy Wheeler, and you knew her almost well. She was gorgeous. Your little brother, Will, was best friends with her little brother, Mike, and ever since Will went missing last school year, it felt like your lives had become irreparably intertwined. She spent a lot of time with Jonathan after Barbara Holland passed away. They were best friends, as far as you knew. You didn’t have a best friend, really, but you couldn’t even imagine how hard that must have been. You heard she was there when it happened, and that Steve was, too. How bad did it hurt him? Did he care a lot, or just a little? 

The two of you were teetering a thin line. Few people in Hawkins knew about the Upside Down. This should have been enough to nudge you into ‘friend’ territory, rather than just ‘bickering lab partners’. But for whatever reason, it hadn’t. Not even close. 

“Are you gonna help with this or just keep eyeballing me?” 

His voice drew you out of your thoughts. You sat up and pushed your hair out of your face.

“Yeah. Give me the packet.”

. . . 

When Will went missing your freshman year, your Mom was the first to realize what happened. The monster, the world underground. All of it. And then she told Jonathan, but she never told you. You found out about it anyway (as you often do) and asked her why she never told you. 

“Well, sweetie, I… Jonathan wasn’t supposed to know, either. I don’t know. I was so worried about Will, I didn’t want to worry that something might happen to you, too.” Her words. The sentiment made sense, but it ended up being useless. In the very late fall of 1984, evil returned to Hawkins, and this time you knew about it. 

“He’s insane,” Max remarked. 

Dustin grinned out the window beside her. “He’s awesome.”

You blinked out the boarded-up window behind them, narrowing your eyes. Steve stood there amongst the junk clutching a baseball bat dotted with nails. He swung it around and sucked in a breath, as if to bolster himself. Wearing that same blue jacket. Dart the demodog had escaped from Dustin’s house and more like him were out there lurking in the shadows, sniffing you out like prey. 

Ridiculously enough, you and Steve had only had one conversation about demogorgon matters prior. 

“How’s Will?” 

You glanced up from the bunsen burner. It was an uncomfortable angle befitting a conversation topic in uncomfortable territory; clunky lab goggles digging into your nose, hair pulled back in a less than flattering knot. It had only been three weeks since school started, and Steve had barely even begun poking fun at you, barely even begun playing your little game. His expression was calm but his wide hands gripped and un-gripped the thermometer, like he was trying to find feeling in his hands again. 

“He’s good,” you had nodded. Unsure. Steve knew about as much as you did about the Upside Down. He had seen a demogorgon- you hadn’t. Maybe he knew a little more. Regardless, your reasons for being involved with the entity were nowhere near the same. Steve had Nancy. You had your brother. “Thanks for asking.”

“Yeah. He, uh… yeah. That’s good, that he’s okay.”

And that was all. Now you were here, babysitting. You had a soft spot for Will’s friends (though all of your other spots were just as soft) and if they were going to go traipsing through the woods in search of a monster; it seemed better that there be two adults rather than one. Well, almost adults. Steve could not be called ‘adult’ by a long shot, and unbelievably, you were even younger than him. 

Truthfully, if you had been given the option, you would have gone with Will that night. Joyce was still hellbent on keeping you ‘out’ of the Upside Down business. Whether she realized her plan had already failed, you weren’t sure. 

Max turned to you. “Should we do something? He’s going to get himself killed.”

You could only cock your head in response, heart thumping in your ears. “I’m sorry. I don’t think he’ll listen.”

“He might listen to you,” Max bit. A glimmer of confusion rippled over your face, and then, a screeching sound tore across the metal wall of the bus and sent all of you reeling backwards. 

Talons dug into the steel. As they tore down the wall, jagged and molten, Dustin shouted- “FUCK! OH MY GOD!” and then repeated the tail end of the phrase over and over again while Max and Lucas barreled towards the gnarled steering wheel. She tried to wrench the door open and Lucas yanked her back, too shaken to say anything other than, “No!”

Your stomach leapt into your throat as you lunged for the door. Lucas peeled Max off just in time, and you threw it open, slamming it shut behind you. He’s dead, you thought, Steve’s already dead. 

But he wasn’t. You rounded the hood of the old school bus to find Steve driving his nailed bat into the neck of a demodog. It yelped and fell to the ground, writhing and diseased. Something sprayed your cheek. Steve teetered backwards and exhaled, running a hand over his face. Hair stood up on the back of your neck as you watched. 

The demodogs were dead. All of them. There was a pile of them on the ground, but their limbs blended together in bloody harmony, making it impossible to tell just how many of them Steve had actually killed. 

Your tongue darted out over your lips. A cloying taste filled your mouth, and you sniffled. Surprised. 

Steve’s head shot up, and he reared the bat in your direction.

“No!” The word tore from you. 

He made a noise that was something in between a curse and a wheeze and dropped the bat. Completely dropped it, and the nails made a thwacking noise as they drove into the dirt. 

“What the hell are you doing?” he panted furiously.

“I thought it was going to get inside the bus.”

“You-”

“I thought it was going to hurt the kids,” you ignored him. “And you-”

“Stop.”

“-might’ve already-”

“Stop,” Steve murmured, walking forward and rambling off words. “Stop, stop. C’mere.”

Fear filled your belly like acid. “What? What is it?”

“Stay still. You- seriously, stop it.”

You dug your heels into the ground and crossed your hands behind your back. “Okay. Sorry. Okay.”

Steve occupied the space in front of you, blocking the forest and the carnage decorating it. His eyes raked over your face and his brows flicked downward, eyes flicking up. “What is that? Is that your blood?”

“There’s blood?”

“On your…nose…” he replied choppily, leaning in closer. Distracted by whatever had painted your face. Then he reached up and swiped the pad of his thumb over the tip of your nose, there and gone in less than a breath. Your shoulders stiffened and your heart beat on the surface of your skin, everywhere. “You don’t feel that?” he murmured. 

You swallowed. “Feel you?” 

“No, the blood. Your nose doesn’t hurt? Nothing got you?”

Idiot. “No, nothing got me. It probably landed on me when you killed the demodog.”

He examined your nose for a moment more, like he didn’t believe you. All you could do was stand there. This is hell. 

“Hey!” The door to the school bus blew open and Dustin tumbled out, hat sliding off his head. “Are you guys alive?”

“Yeah, we’re fine,” Steve replied, turning away from you. An icy breeze blew over you and the forest opened up once more, corpses and their slashed necks all on display before you. A moment torn in half. He was back on the bus before you even took one step. 

. . . 

All semester long, you had pretended to not recognize the string tied between the two of you. The Upside Down, the demogorgon. Now the demodogs. The string was getting longer and coiling up in front of you like a ball of yarn, a supernatural eyesore. But after that night in the woods, with winter close on fall’s heels, it became impossible to ignore. 

“Steve,” you whispered. The classroom was silent. Miggins sat at his desk with a book up to his nose, reading intently. 

“Hm?”

“We need to talk.”

He looked up at you like you were crazy, but his voice wavered. “About what?”

“Everything.”

His eyes went a little wide. “What does that mean?”

“The demodogs. The Upside Down, Will. All of it.”

He sunk back in his seat but tilted his weight until he was leaning against your desk, head dropped. “What about it?”

Oh. You sat up a bit, moving away. Was he taking you seriously?

“I just… I don’t know, I thought we should talk about it. We never do.”

“You want to talk about it?” he whispered, breath tangible against your shoulder. Miggins glanced up, and you separated, sitting stick straight in your seats. After a moment, he looked away. You glued your eyes to the wrinkled poster hanging over the door. Snow Ball, December 8th, 8:00 PM. A disco ball gleamed behind the chunky letters and each sparkle looked like snow. Your heart swelled at the sight of it. What it would feel like to have Steve’s hands on your back, soft and barely there, swaying like awkward teenagers do. But you would laugh about it. And his breath would tickle your nose, because he was that close. 

“Anybody home?” Steve murmured. 

Your head snapped back to him. 

“Yes, I want to talk about it,” you whispered. Even with Will safe and the kids settled again, it was weighing heavy on your brain. “You could have died last week.”

“I didn’t, though.”

“I know, b-”

“Pretty badass of me, actually.”

“Steve.” You looked right at him for what felt like the first time. He adjusted his head like you sent waves down his spine. “I’m being serious. Why did you go out there by yourself?”

He shrugged like it was obvious. “I wasn’t gonna let the kids go out there.”

“I could have gone with you. I should have. You wouldn’t let me.”

“No,” he scoffed. 

“Why not?”

Instantly his reply came- “No.” And then again, a moment later. “No fucking way.”

One of those rare moments passed where the two of you were actually looking at each other, rather than glancing at random posters on the wall or blinking at the desk. Still, it felt like he was staring straight through you, like you were clenching your fists hoping to become solid and yet all you were was mist in the air. 

“Alright,” Miggins huffed. “You’ve had enough time to go over the instructions. Turn your bunsen burners on.”

Steve sat up like someone had kicked him. “Alright. What are we doing?”

You breathed a sigh of relief as voices filled the silent room once more, talking and laughing. One hand reached out toward the bunsen burner. “Flame painting.”

He made a face. “Oh?” And before you could touch the burner, he flicked your hand away. “No, I’ll get it. Put your goggles on.”

You looked at him. “I don’t mind doing it.”

“No, it gets hot.”

You took a few breaths. 

“It’s a bunsen burner, Steve.”

He ignored you, lighting the flame as you slipped on your goggles. The instructions were quite simple. A list of colors and reactants laid before you on the worksheet, a guide to painting fire. Potassium chloride made purple, lighter fluid made blue. Road salt made orange, but that seemed redundant. Only a few of the options were available to actually try. 

“What’s your favorite color, Byers?” asked Steve. 

Byers. The tips of your ears flushed. “What’s yours?”

“Not what I asked.”

A grin tugged at your lips. “Green.”

He snatched the packet up and read over it, squinting like it was written in Latin. “Okay, yeah. Alright.”

“Okay?” you laughed. 

“Yeah. We can do that.”

His eyes roamed over the tiny jars of reactants in front of you. You followed his gaze and then gave up, just watching his eyes move. His irises were perfectly wide, round like marbles, warm like chocolate. He looked softer, somehow, then he had in the past. Though his attitude was certainly rougher. 

Steve took a small jar of white powder and cranked it open, setting the lid down on the desk. He ogled at it for a moment in his hand, veins flexing beneath the soft skin of his inner wrist. You swallowed, the back of your neck hot, too distracted to stop him before he brought the jar over the open flame and flipped it over. 

The fire roared and screeched like a braking car. 

“Steve!” you hissed. Then, horrifically, he smacked his hand down on top of the flame to put it out. “Steve!”

He cursed and recoiled, knocking into the burner plate and burning himself some more. Heads whipped around, everyone staring at him. When their eyes flicked to you in passing, you stiffened. 

“What?” Steve panted. “Something happen?”

His friends laughed up front. At the sound of it, Steve made a face, something that read like fuck off. A few of them glanced at you like an afterthought. That funny feeling came over you again, sinking in your stomach. 

Steve Harrington was not your friend. He deliberately chose not to be, in fact. He never said hi to you in the hallway, or sat by you at lunch, or even followed you out of class. You were a meager source of entertainment for one hour every weekday. 

Stuck together. 

“Is your hand okay?” you asked quietly, suddenly sobered. He shrugged. 

“No. Fuck.”

“Let me see.”

He raised his hand as if to let you look and then stuck his middle finger out. A glare shot out from your eyes like lasers. 

“Really?”

“Your fault. I need to run this under cold water, hold on.”

“Steve-”

He walked off and said over his shoulder- “Your fault.”

“Steve!”

“Oh, my god, it’s not really your fault. I’m kidding. At least it was green- fuck, this hurts.”

. . . 

Snow smothered Hawkins like icing one week later. The treetops and road signs were rusted with frost, and so were the mirrors on your car, steam gathering in the rearview as you drove. Blue lights flashed in the school windows and silver streamers trampled by heels hung over the door. When you pulled into the parking lot, there was a car next to your usual spot, already parked. Your eyes dropped to your lap instantly, afraid no matter who might be in there. 

Jonathan’s eyes caught yours in the rearview mirror, his tall frame cramped into the backseat of the Volkswagen. He flattened his lips and smiled a little, like he knew you were nervous but didn’t know what to do about it. Will sat beside him and doodled into a notebook, but looked up at you once the car stopped. 

“Honey, you are so beautiful,” Joyce cooed. 

You glanced over. “Thanks, mom.”

She smiled a corny smile until one grew on your own face, taking over your mouth and eyes until your cheeks were sore. Joyce wasn’t a beautician by any means, but she had done her best to make you look fancy- and she was beautiful herself. The most beautiful woman you had ever seen, really. Thinking about it made you think of Nancy Wheeler, and how beautiful she was, and then you were just sick to your stomach all over again when you had spent the entire drive to the school swallowing your nausea. You promised yourself you wouldn’t spend all night thinking about Steve. He probably thought school dances were stupid. He probably wouldn’t be there. 

You hadn’t even planned on attending the Snow Ball, but Joyce convinced you. Memories are important, she said, and just because you enjoy doing things by yourself doesn’t mean you can’t make important memories by yourself. You are your own best company, baby. 

It was a really nice sentiment. You enjoyed doing things on your own and often did. What Joyce didn’t realize was that you hadn’t chosen this life for yourself and it was actually the fault of your crippling inability to communicate with your peers that landed you alone on the night of the Snow Ball, but she absolutely did not need to know that. 

“I’m sorry I couldn’t get your hair all big,” Joyce murmured with her eyes still on you. She took to your face, grabbing you by the chin and shaking. “I just can’t figure it out!”

“Me neither.”

“Like, how do all the girls do it?”

“I don’t know, mom,” you laughed, wiggling your head back and forth until she finally let you go. “I can’t do it either.”

“It’s only your first dance, we’ll get better. We’ll have to buy more of those rollers next time. Bigger ones. Maybe a bunch of little clips, too, to get ‘em to stick better.”

“Okay.”

“For your next Snow Ball,” she kept talking, rambling on and staring at you in adoration. “Or Prom.”

Whatever happens tonight might convince me never to go to Prom, you thought. When she finally snapped out of her doting trance, your heart catapulted into your throat. Her hand landed on the gearshift and you thought you might throw up. 

“This is where we leave you,” Jonathan teased.

Your lip curled. “Don’t go.”

Joyce frowned. “Oh, honey. Do you really not want to go? Or are you just scared?”

Tears pricked at your eyes. Heat stung your cheeks like bees, buzzing over your neck and cinching your throat tight. It was so embarrassing to be crying over a thing like this. 

“I’m just scared,” you shrugged, whispering to mask the tears. It worked, seemingly, and Joyce shook her head in response. 

“Everybody in there is going to be doing their own thing. What’s there to be scared of?”

“I know.”

“Our Snow Ball was last week,” Will mumbled. “It was fine. Nothing bad happened. And nobody came up to me or bothered me.”

“What about the one little girl who introduced herself to you? The one you told us about?” Joyce prodded. 

Will’s face was blank as printer paper. Jonathan snorted. 

“Alright,” Joyce huffed. “What-ever. We’ll be back at ten. Go on, kiddo.”

As you pried open the frozen door, Jonathan called, “You’ll be fine, Y/N.” You glanced back at him and wrinkled your nose, like you would not be fine, but his words were comforting if nothing more. A cracking noise like ice sounded from behind you as Joyce rolled down all the windows on the Volkswagen, singing, I love you, Jonathan and Will a meager choir behind her. 

She drove off like she knew you would get back in if she stayed. 

With her gone, a tear broke free and rolled down your cheek. Penny loafers covered your feet, snow dusting over the small strip of exposed skin around your ankles. All of your dresses were from church years ago, not anything like what girls wore to school dances, so you had settled for a mid-length skirt the color of sage and a copper sweater- knit chunkily enough that you could roll it up to your elbows and have it fall almost flatteringly, a pair of two tiny green crystals piercing your ears. 

It wasn’t what you imagined, maybe, but it was what you got. From Joyce. And that alone made you proud. You swallowed (most) of your tears and went inside. 

“No first of spring, no song to sing. In fact, here’s just another ordinary day.” 

Stevie Wonder’s voice echoed off the gymnasium ceiling, the dance floor a thick crowd of bodies sucking up sound. Blue lasers beamed around like flashlights. You stepped over fallen streamers and white paper circles, some of them cut to look like snowflakes. There was nothing grand about your entrance. No one turned when you walked in, but they didn’t when the next gaggle of girls came in behind you, either. 

You exhaled. It would be easy to blend in here. 

“Byers?”

You whirled around. Oh, come on.

At a punch table dressed in blue plastic was a lean figure in a half-removed suit, blazer draped over his forearm, charcoal gray button-up remaining. His hair was styled as it usually was- immaculate- but there were no strays, no signs of wild highschool partying. You were pretty sure that kind of stuff only happened in the movies, anyway, but you also weren’t the person to ask. 

You stretched on a suspicious look. “Do I know you?” 

Steve laughed shortly, a smile breaking loose on his face before it settled into a crooked one, settling on your eyes and staying there like there was something to really watch. You almost turned around, maybe something behind you had caught his attention, but he started talking. 

“I, uh- I didn’t think you’d be here,” he said softly. His stuttering wasn’t nervous, only humble, an honest process of what was unfolding. Or maybe he was just a good actor. You folded your arms in front of you and stretched out your neck, shrugging. Quit looking at his arms, you creep. 

“Me neither. Are you- where are your friends?” 

Your stuttering was nervous. 

“They’re, eh- somewhere.”

“Exciting.”

“Very,” he nodded instantly. Still smiling. His mouth hung open a bit, like he had just eaten something hot. You both went quiet. That familiar feeling dropped in your stomach like a ship anchor. 

You look ridiculous. 

“I won’t keep you,” you started. 

“No, I was just thirsty,” he said, waving a cup at you. “Do you want one?”

“No, I’m okay.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, this gown is worth millions, I can’t risk spilling anything on it.”

He laughed until he didn’t, brows flicking up and down like he was having this conversation without really thinking about what to say next and just saying it. 

“It’s great, Byers.”

“What is?”

“Your clothes.”

Shut up, shut up, shut up. 

“Oh,” you nodded, glancing down. A tiny scoff left your lips. “Thank you. That’s nice of you.”

“I’m serious.”

“I know.” Liar. 

“Quit making that face.”

“What face?”

“Like you think I’m lying.”

“I don’t!”

And there you were, back at it within minutes. He stared at you for a second while shaking his head, features drawn in an argumentative pose, waiting for the perfect comeback to strike. Then his nodding slowed and his face softened in a way you had never seen before, but wasn’t entirely unfamiliar. 

“Do you want to dance?”

You poked your head out and gawked. “Are you serious?”

“Yes,” he retorted. “Stop it.”

“Okay. I mean- yeah, okay.”

“It’s not a punishment, Byers,” he said, stepping away from the table. Heat snaked up your spine and clung to the back of your neck as he approached, excited and horrified. That dominant, always-slightly mortified part of your brain screamed at you to back away and go wait in the parking lot for Joyce. 

You dug your penny loafers into the floor and took a deep breath. Steve breezed by you and his hand was on your wrist suddenly, holding softly but gripping tightly enough to lead you into the swathes of students taking up the gym floor. About halfway into the mass of people your heart started beating on your face, so hard you thought you might pass out. Right on time, Steve stopped, sliding his other arm onto your other wrist and draping your hands over his shoulders. 

It took every ounce of restraint in you to not gulp like a coward. 

“I don’t actually know how to dance,” you murmured. “It might be bad. I’m sorry.” 

Steve made a face. “Nobody here knows how to dance. This is a high school. Look at these people, Byers. They’re swaying like cornstalks in a brisk wind.” 

You laughed, and another smile broke open on his face like a cracked coconut. It seemed like he tried to dissolve it, but it remained there at the corners of his mouth and eyes. Ever present. 

Suddenly two hands were on your waist, spawning out of thin air. Oh, my god. 

“Are you always this stiff, Byers?”

“Shut up.”

“Is it scoliosis or something?”

“Steve.”

He laughed, and it vibrated against your skin, the sound of it buzzing in your ribs. His fingers had crept to your back without you even realizing. His thumb pressed down there between a wide-knit thread of yarn, playing with your sweater. 

“This really is nice,” he murmured. “I meant it.”

“I believed you.”

“No, you didn’t,” he mumbled. You almost laughed before clocking the look on his face; pensive and drawn, his eyes focused on the space between your shoulder and jaw as he lifted his right hand to draw a lock of hair from where it had become tangled in your sleeve. 

You shivered when his knuckles grazed your neck. And then the thought bubbled up in you at once, enough. This wasn’t what you wanted. What if his friends put him up to it? What if he was just trying to get you to come home with him? You wanted Steve, not one lone dance at a stupid Snow Ball he would forget about by tomorrow. In hindsight, maybe you were thinking rashly here, but your fear was real. This moment meant the world to you, and the idea of it meaning little or nothing to him made you sick to your stomach. 

“Steve,” you murmured. 

His eyes flashed to you. “What?”

You both looked up then. Something flipped inside of you, like a switch. He was waiting for something, not expectant, but hopeful. 

“Yeaaaah, Harrington!” 

You snapped out of his embrace. Behind you, Steve’s friends pumped their fists in the air, the others snickering to each other and hiding it behind lazily placed gestures. Laughing at you. The realization was painful but not surprising. 

You backed away from Steve and started making your way out of the crowd. Tears welled in your eyes, and you tried to force the acceptance to come on faster than the grief. 

“Aw, come on, Byers!” they hollered. You sniffled, back to Steve and his friends, back to everyone. Warmth came up behind you, a hand grazing over your elbow. 

“Y/N,” Steve bit off. 

“It’s fine.”

“Y/N.”

You turned. He came right up in front of you, even closer than you had been before. When you sucked in a breath, he did, too, his head tilting down to look over you. His breath fanned out over your nose. The two of you stood there, silent. Stevie Wonder echoed around you. “I just called to say I love you, And I mean it from the bottom of my heart.”

A tear broke free and rolled down your cheek. Steve cursed; an instant, instinctive sound, the same way you hiss at a paper cut. He flinched backwards a tiny step. One hand came up to run through his hair, brows knit together. 

“Goddamnit,” he breathed. 

And then he disappeared into the crowd. 

You sat alone in the parking lot a few minutes later, leaning against the lamppost next to your usual parking spot. Joyce wouldn’t be back to pick you up for at least an hour, but your sweater was warm enough to cloak you if you rolled the sleeves down, and anything was better than staying inside. A chunk of snow fell off the car that was parked next to yours when you arrived- a burgundy BMW, polished underneath a few specks of regular winter-water-damage. There were plenty of spaces open up front near the door. Still, it was alone in the back lot, neighboring your own spot. 

You lied to everyone about the evening being “quiet but pleasant,” when you got in the car. Joyce clapped and squealed like a little girl. Back at home, you settled into bed with the sweater still on, a pair of fuzzy pajama pants kicking up static underneath your comforter. 

There was a knock at your bedroom door. 

“Come in.”

It creaked open and Jonathan poked his head in, glancing around like he was wary to enter. “Hey.”

“Hey,” you murmured, face buried in your pillow, blankets up to your neck. “How was your night?”

“Good,” he shrugged. “I just… School is stupid.”

Your act must not have worked on him. “I know.”

“I mean, I didn’t even finish it.”

“I know,” you snorted. 

“Well, I just wanted to tell you it’s stupid and if you had a bad night tonight that it won’t matter in the long run. At all. Seriously. But I’m sorry if it wasn’t what you hoped it would be.”

You poked your head out from underneath the covers, a little lighter. “Thanks, Jonathan. That’s really sweet.”

“Sure. Love you.”

“I love you.”

He shut the door and you clicked off the lamp. As darkness enveloped you, the knit bindings of your sweater clung to you, your skin hot as an iron. You threw the covers up and ripped it off, hurling it across the room where it landed with a pathetic little pitter on the carpet. You fell asleep sure of two things:

You would rather die than go to Prom. 

Steve Harrington did not deserve the benefit of the doubt that you gave him. And you would never, ever let him make you feel that stupid again.

◃ ۪۪۫۫ ༄ؘ ˑ thank you for reading!!! thoughts or comments or reblogs or literally anything are appreciated! thank you 4 being here and i hope this fic makes you happy and i will post part 2 at the end of this week <3

[quackeroos]

Hi ! I've been a fan of Spring Day since you started it . I've literally read it more than ten times because it's so amazing and I am so excited for the extra scenes/ alt endings. Btw It's good to see you again! Stay safe ,Don't stress yourself and enjoy your summer break! Love you 💓

wuuuuttt MORE than TEN TIMES? you amaze me nonnie wow. damn now i really wanna finish those alt endings :< i hate writer's block. thank you sm for the support nonnie <3

[quackeroos]

HAPPY SUMMER VACATIONS ARI !!!! Hope to see some of your beautiful writings soon !💕

thank you nonnie! ♡

[quackeroos]

new account for anime fics!

hello everyone! just came by for a quick announcement. i've been getting a lot of questions about this lately so i've decided to release my new account where i will be writing my anime fanfics. i've recently published a prologue of my Miyamura Izumi fanfic! so if you're interested go follow @tapiokei on wattpad ♡ i’ll leave the link below!

link to tapiokei: https://www.wattpad.com/user/tapiokei

mutuals (friends) + idols: @tomhollandd @softholand @cunaeparker @euphoria-parker @midtownpetey @hollandstea @curlystom @screamholland @plutotown  @pastelpeter @underoosjae @parkeraul @blissfulparker @spideycurls  @hazsterfield @euphoria-parker @midtownpetey @parkeret @angelic-holland @angel-spidey @allegra-writes  @dahliaspidey @spideycuddles @tomhollandd@spiesindisguise @thinkoutsidethebex

#Ari's works #announcements!

[quackeroos]

Hey! What's up? I recently discovered the Spring Day series and I am obsessed with it . I have never seen such a realistic portrayal of characters!! You are an enormously talented writer!

thank you sm! i’m glad you found the character portrayals to be realistic coz that’s what i was really aiming for! hope you’re doing well nonnie <3

[quackeroos]

Hi ari !! How r u? How is school going? I miss u!! Hope you get the time to write again 💗 Good luck💕

i’m doing well! i just finished my classes a few weeks ago! i’m enjoying my summer vacation and studying japanese. hopefully i’ll be abe to write soon! i’m just reading fanfics atm to help me get back to writing (since it’s been so long since i’ve written anything). 

[quackeroos]

ARI!! I AM SOO EXCITED ABOUT THE ALTERNATE ENDING WHERE Y/N SURVIVES THE SURGERY I AM CURIOUS TO SEE HOW YOU SHOW THE CHANGE IN Y/N'S PERSONALITY AND THE AFFECT IT HAS ON PETER AND THE OTHERS!!!! LOVE YOU 💕

i'm excited as well! but writer's block is being a pain the ass rn so i'm reading fanfics nonnie <33

[quackeroos]

Hi!! I just found out about spring Day and oh man !! I have to tell you it's one of most excellent stories I have ever read! The plotline was beautiful and the emotions you conveyed through the story made me cry !! 💓

hiya nonnie! thank you sm for reading <3

[quackeroos]

Hello, I am a new fan of the spring day series and I have to tell you that you have done an excellent job describing the emotions in the story , I really liked the BTS refrences in spring day, The end was so beautiful it made me cry !! You are so talented

aww thank you so much! it really means a lot to me that you enjoyed it! <33

[quackeroos]

Hello Ari!!!!! Just wanted to check up on you , How are you doing?

hiya nonnie! sorry it took long for me to reply this. i'm doing well! hbu??

[quackeroos]

Hi, I am a new reader of SPRING DAY absolutely IN LOVE with it !!! It's marvelously written and the feelings of all the characters are beautifully described. And the quote “I love you Peter, and I won’t get tired of saying it. Even if it’s just in my head, and even if you don’t. I love you.” 😭😭😭 I have no words 💞

thank you sm for reading Spring Day! i'm glad you enjoyed it. tbh that's my fave line and i cried while writing it lol.

[quackeroos]

Hello, Just finished reading Spring Day and I swear I have never cried this much because of a story. I am totally an emotional mess rn !!! It was so amazing and painful💔

aww thank you nonnie! <3

[quackeroos]

Ari!! Bro!!!!! How are you doing??? How's school? I literally can't wait for the alt. Endings specially the one where peter and reader end up together!! I am just so excited for this one 🤩

hiya! i'm doing fine. i just finished my classes a few weeks ago! currently reading some fics to get me out of my writer's block coz it's been so long since i've written anything.

[quackeroos]

Hey! What songs do you recommend while reading Spring Day? Do you have a playlist for it ?💕

hello nonnie! i haven't made a playlist for Spring Day, but I have some songs to recommend while reading the fic.

For Part 3, I suggest listening to the song "Let's Go Fly A Kite" from Mary Poppins when Peter and Y/n stark watching the movie.

For the Epilogue, play Spring Day first and then Crystal Snow (both by BTS).

I hope this'll give you a more optimal reading experience. enjoy!! <3

[quackeroos]

spreading the word!!

Commissions are Open!

Hello!!! To support myself, my family, and to be able to donate to The Brothers Trust, I’m opening writing and drawing commissions!!

Writing Commissions:

Please check my masterlist for examples of my writing :>

Who I Write For:

Tom Holland and Co.

Holland!Reader

Peter Parker

Stark!Reader

Five Hargreeves

How do I ask for a commission?

You can message me on Tumblr or contact me on [email protected]

How much for a commission?

580 PHP / 12 USD per 500 words

50 PHP / 1 USD for every scene revision

Will I post the commission?

Only if I have the permission of the person I’m writing the commission for!

Will it be an Imagine?

Yes, since that’s what I mostly write on this account. But! If you want me to put your name or someone else’s name with other specifications, you’ll need to send me your or another person’s description plus there will be an extra charge of $5.

How long does the writing process take?

It depends on how many words you want me to write. But since I’m still in high school and also taking drawing commissions, it may take 1 to 3 weeks. But if the fic is longer than 6,000 words, please note that it may take as long as a month.

What I will write:

I write fanfiction about the people mentioned at the tope of this post. I mostly write imagines, but it’s not limited to that. I can write about anything except for what’s listed below.

What I won’t write:

Hardcore NSFW is where I generally draw the line. But light smut is fine.

Also no pedophilia or incest.

How do I pay?

Paypal 

GCash

Contact me for details.

How do I show support without asking for a commission?

Reblogging and sharing this post would be very much appreciated! Liking, commenting, and reblogging my content is also a great way of supporting me and would make me very happy! 

And also! Please consider giving a donation to our art commission group @arte-alta! There is a link there to our Ko-Fi!

How much will go to charity?

For each and every commission we get on @arte-alta, 8% of it will go to a charity of our choosing. 

For every commission I get on this or my other account, @unbelievablehargreeves, 10% will go to The Brothers Trust.

Drawing Commissions:

Tagging some friends and mutuals for support and signal boost!:

@eeyore101247 @euphoria-parker @merceret @tomhollandsmut   @spideyspeaches @londonspidey  @hollanderheart @worldoftom @spideybrie @smilexcaptainx @quackeroos @peeterparkr  @cunaeparker @hotforharrison @cosmichollands-blog @glowunderthemoon @kelieah @webslinger-holland  @fancyxholland @tfw-adhd​

Tagging my permanent tag list just in case you guys are interested:

@spideylovin @used-avocado @why-am-i-so-obsessed-help @annoylinglyaries @autobotgirl15-blog @shootingstarsaretearsofheaven​ @tiffy119 @eridanuswave @potterheadphanatic-blog  @darth-andy @our-whitetulips-us @jackiehollanderr @michaelneedssomemilk @navy-flannel @zhangyixingxing1 @sovereignparker @spaghetittiesbcimgay 

#signal boooooost #sophia beb

[quackeroos]

OMG wandavision is so awesome...You have to see it !! yk you can watch it on YT on the channel fictional Darling !!

it does look awesome! i’ve been waiting for wandavision since the first trailer tbh. i’ve heard of fictionaldarling as well! i don’t really like watching commentaries tho while the episode plays, and it’s not even the whole episode so  (ಥ﹏ಥ)