#phryctoria

[stobinesque]

phryctoria | chapter 1: pyrseia (torch)

Sometimes your gay awakening is just having someone to show you it's possible. Steve comes out to Robin, and the two of them figure out how to weather being two gay teenagers in rural Indiana together.

[1][2][3][4][5][6 & 7] | [Read on AO3]

They’re both sitting in the beamer, engine idling in the Buckley’s driveway, when Steve finally works up the courage to ask the question that’s been burning a hole in the back of his head for weeks. 

“Hey. Robs?” Steve drums his hands against the side of the steering wheel to give all the restless energy a place to go.

“‘Sup, dingus?” Robin shoots back on autopilot—but when she turns to look at him she must see…something on his face, because her tone drops into something more sincere. “What’s up, Steve?”

“I—uh.” He swallows, trying to work the words past the lump in his throat. “How did you, uh, know?” the second they escape he wants to snatch them back out of the air because—really, is that not the stupidest thing he could have said?

Robin frowns. “Know what?”

Steve closes his eyes and pinches at the bridge of his nose, pushing down tears, and nausea induced by what he knows to be unnecessary fear. His face is hot with shame and all he wants is to fold himself up and hide in a corner. But. It’s Robin. It’s just Robin. He can talk to Robin. His head knows it, his stomach and heart are just having a hard time catching up right now. 

“H-how did you know that you…that you like girls?”

Steve knows that she can hear the weight behind the question, because she doesn’t poke fun at him at all—doesn't shoot back the easy 'well how did you' that sits like low hanging fruit—instead she goes quiet in that way she does when carefully considering something.

“Well…I guess I don’t know exactly when I knew, you know?”

Steve shakes his head. If he did know this would all be a lot easier. Instead it feels like he’s been turned inside out and knotted up. Like none of his pieces fit together the way he thought they did. It’s a feeling he thinks he ought to be used to by now, even if he knows he never will be. Each time his entire world is rewritten feels like it ought to be the last. (Sometimes Steve wonders what this must be like for Will. Or El. He’s got some (suspected) traumatic brain injury and a little light torture to cope with, but he was, at the very least, on the other side of puberty for most of it. He can’t wrap his mind around what it must be like to just be a kid who keeps having their life ripped away…) 

Steve is pulled from his thoughts by Robin reaching over him to turn the keys in the ignition, so that the car sits still and silent beneath them.

And then Robin—light of his life, master of his heart—continues talking. “It was all just a…gradual realization, y’know? Like—there were all these bits and pieces falling in my path along the way until one day it all kind of came together. But I guess the first time it went from this sort of, like vague awareness that I thought women were really soft, and–and pretty, and cool, was when I kept thinking about how nice it would be to hold Hailey Carmichael’s hand. Or, uh, kiss her, or…um. Other stuff.” Robin cuts the train of thought off with an awkward huff. “I think that was the first time I really thought about what it would be like if I was with another girl. But after that I thought back to other girls I’d been friends with—how I was always just a bit more cuddly with them than it seemed like I was supposed to be. Or–or how I got jealous if a girl I really liked suddenly had a new friend. And I realized there were also, like, a lot of actresses I had just thought were ‘objectively’ pretty, but actually I think they’re, like, super hot.”

Steve nods slowly and tries to catalog all of the examples Robin just listed against his own memories. He thinks about the way he used to get teased by other boys about his hugs being too soft and girly because he’d lean into them just a little too much, and linger in the embrace for just a little too long. (And, okay, it’s possible that had a little more to do with the fact that he could count on both hands the number of times either of his parents had hugged him in his memory and still have a few fingers left over but he’s going to save that crisis for another day and maybe also a shrink if he can find one that won’t try to lock him up for talking about fucking demodogs and drowned teen girls in his pool, and—right. Having one crisis at a time.) He remembers when Tommy started dating Carol and he was sulky and bitter for weeks, and it had nothing to do with wanting Carol for himself like Tommy had thought at the time. He conjures up images of Harrison Ford and Tom Cruise with no effort at all and realizes he definitely has more than a benign aesthetic appreciation for them. 

Steve’s mouth is dry when he goes to speak again. “A-and how did you know that you...don’t like guys?" Steve is shaking and he seems to lose the connection between his brain and his mouth as he rambles out the totally unnecessary clarification of— "Boys. Men. Whatever.”

At that Robin cocks her head at him, a curious look on her face. “You know it’s possible to like both, right?” She asks the question so gently. Like she’s talking to a spooked animal. Like he really might not know, and like it'd be okay if he didn't. 

(He bitterly thinks for a moment that it'd be better if the problem was just that he didn't know that was an option open to him. Except he knows that in some ways, for him, that might have actually been worse.)

Steve’s knuckles go white as he clutches the steering wheel tightly. “Yeah, I know. Just—answer the question, Rob.” His voice is hoarse and he sounds scared to even his own ears.

Robin’s eyes widen slightly, but she nods. “Y-yeah, okay. Well, uh. I guess I just never really thought I did? Like, I’d tell other girls I had crushes on boys because I knew I was supposed to. But I never really got what other girls meant when they called so-and-so hot or what’s-his-face sexy, y’know. I’d just, like, pick a guy to say I liked so that I didn’t stick out too much.” Robin is silent for a moment, but Steve doesn’t make any attempt to fill it. After a few beats of silence Robin continues on. “But that—Steve, that’s just my story. And, like, I don’t really know other, um, not-straight people, but I’m pretty sure it’s different for some people? Like, some people get married and have kids before realizing that oh, actually, maybe the love they have isn’t actually romantic, or something.”

Steve nods again. That…almost makes sense—after all, that's what happened with his feelings for her, wasn't it?—except… “What about, like, sex, though? How does someone have sex with someone for years without being attracted to them?”

Robin’s brow furrows. “Steve…you know I’m a virgin, right?”

Steve is nodding with embarrassment before she finishes the question. “No, yeah, I do. I’m sorry that was dumb—”

Robin is shaking her head. “Nope! This is a no-dumb-questions type of convo.” Robin takes a deep breath, like she’s bracing herself. “Okay. I can do this," she says to herself. And then she fixes all the intensity of a Robin Buckley Stare on him to say, “Just this once I’m gonna let you talk to me about your—” Robin wrinkles her nose “—sex life. And then never again—understood, Harrington?”

That manages to get a smile out of him and Steve turns to look at Robin fondly. God, he loves her. “Understood, Buckley.” He throws in a mock salute to really sell it. 

 “Okay, so: If, hypothetically, you have had sex with someone you weren’t attracted to, why do you think that would be?”

Steve drums his fingers against the wheel again as he considers the question. “Well, I guess…I mean, I’m supposed to like girls, right?” Steve almost expects Robin to contradict him, but when he steals a glance at her, the expression she’s sending his way just looks sad. It bolsters his resolve to keep going somehow. “Like, Steve Harrington: Golden Boy; Captain of the Swim Team; King of Hawkins High. Everyone just…expects that from me, right? And if—hypothetically—I actually didn’t want that—what I was supposed to, then the best way to make sure no one—” (even me, he thinks, but doesn't say. He thinks Robin will hear it anyway) “—that no one looks at that too closely would be to, like, throw myself at girls, right?”

Robin nods along like everything he’s saying makes sense, rather than being batshit insane. And how would she know? She doesn't have any more of a frame of reference for this than he does, really. And he thinks he has the shape of the rest of it, but it's hanging formless at the periphery of his mind. He really wishes learning things about himself didn't require so much fucking messiness and honesty, but he manages to find the courage to fight through the awkwardness to tack on, “Plus, I mean…sex…feels good? Like, regardless of if I think the person is hot or whatever.”

Robin wrinkles her nose again, but takes it in stride. She bites her lip and looks at him hesitantly—like she’s afraid of how he’ll take whatever it is she’s about to say next. “And…what about Nancy?” The question is almost a whisper. Said softly so as not to break him.

Steve blows out a shaky breath and squeezes his eyes shut. “I…Nancy Wheeler is the girl I could have lived a happy enough life with, even if it wasn’t exactly what I wanted. Or, at least, that's what I thought she was.” Steve leans back in his seat, fighting down tears. “And, Rob—I want kids. I–I’ve always wanted to be a dad, even before I wound up stuck with all the little rugrats I currently cart around.” The car is silent for a few charged beats and into the space he whispers, “How could anyone not love Nancy Wheeler?”

Robin lets out a long breath of her own. “Fuck, dude.”

Steve laughs, and somehow he’s surprised to hear how shaky it comes out. “Yeah.” He reaches up to pinch at the bridge of his nose again, still keeping his eyes shut, taking comfort in the dark. (Something he can only do now, in the safety of daytime, above-ground, where light is only a blink away.)

Silence falls again, and this time it settles like the first real snow of winter.

“So…did that…" Robin's voice carefully breaks through the silence. "Did that help?” 

Steve opens his eyes and turns to look at her, his best girl. Robin looks a little uncertain. A lot out of her depth. He reaches out to take her hand into his own. 

“Yeah, Robbie,” he murmurs. “You always help me.” And maybe that's too much, too soon. A little like saying I love you after the second or third date. But everything between them has been like that. He knows that going through hell with someone is the quickest way to tie people together, if you let it. But for the two of them it feels like more than that. Even with its short existence he knows that nothing ever has or ever will be as strong as what they have. And really, that's what he means. That's what helps. Knowing that for once in his life, he has someone that'll never leave him. 

“Oh.” Robin says, like she's managed to hear all of that (she probably has). She squeezes his hand and the two of them sit in silence for a bit longer.

Robin is the one to break the silence again, and her tone is still careful, but there's a lot more open curiosity to it now. “So…when did, um. When did you—”

“Bathroom.”

“Huh?”

“Th-the…when you…” Steve stops to take a deep breath. For some reason this feels bigger than the rest of it. Bigger than the whole sky. ��Robs, you’re the first gay person I’ve ever known. At least that I know of? And, like...my whole life, uh 'queer' people had kind of been made out to be the boogeyman, you know? But I’ve, like, seen actual monsters and you—you’re just a person—the best person. And I just…if Robin Buckley can be gay, I thought…maybe it’s okay if Steve Harrington is too?”

“Oh, Steve.” Robin sounds choked up.

“Don’t you dare cry on me Buckley, or I will too.”

“I don’t know if I can help it,” Robin pulls her hand out of his to wipe not-so-surreptitiously at her eyes. “So. Did you figure it out?”

Steve looks down at his lap, staring into his empty palms. He grits his teeth. “Yeah, Robbie. Yeah, I’m…” he pauses, gathers himself up, and turns to look at his best friend—his soulmate—and prepares to shed away another layer of King Steve (fuck that guy, may he rest in fucking tatters). Robin meets his gaze head on. “I’m gay.” It’s thrilling to say. He feels euphoric.

It’s the scariest thing he’s ever done.

Robin throws her arms around him, and then it’s just two gay teens in Hawkins, Indiana, sitting in a driveway, crying about what it is to be two halves of a whole. What it is to be seen so entirely.

#steve harrington #robin buckley #stobin #stobin fic #read writes #phryctoria #semiotics 'verse

[stobinesque]

phryctoria | chapter 2: four by four (tau)

Sometimes your gay awakening is just having someone to show you it’s possible. Steve has just come out to Robin, and suddenly she's running around with ideas and schemes.

[1][2][3][4][5][6 & 7] | [Read on AO3]

“We should go to Indy this weekend,” Robin declares as she slams the beamer’s door behind her the next morning.

“Hello to you too, Rob. And you’re so welcome for the ride. My morning’s been great, how about you?”

Robin rolls her eyes with a put-upon little huff. “Yeah, yeah. Good morning and thanks for the ride, mom.”

“Don’t take that tone with me, young lady,” he snarks back in his best ‘beleaguered housewife’ impression. It’s enough to make Robin snort and elbow him in the side. 

“Whatever, dingus.” Robin throws her feet up on the dash as he pulls out of the Buckleys’ driveway, utterly ignoring Steve’s resigned protestations. “I don’t know what’s got your knickers in a twist when I’m trying to help you.”

Steve raises an eyebrow in disbelief. “And how would a 3 hour round trip to and from Indianapolis help me, exactly, Buckley?”

“Well, Harrington,” Robin starts, with a tone that mock-suggests that he’s the stupidest thing on the face of the planet. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Hawkins isn’t exactly crawling with queers.”

The last word comes out of her mouth a little wooden and self-deprecating, and Steve seizes up at it—the idea that ‘queer’ includes him now. It’s a truth he’s always instinctively flinched away from (and, oh, shit, he owes Byers a whole new round of apologies now)—but Robin just keeps barreling on, while he feels like he’s about to be pulled under by a riptide. 

“I was thinking last night— Okay, so, you know how you’re kind of a slut?”

Steve shoves aside the cresting wave of panic (if he can take on Billy Hargrove, demonic-gorgon-dogs, and murderous Russians, he can handle fucking homophobia, right?) and lets himself settle into the familiar banter. “I would take offense to that, but you are, factually speaking, correct.” The brightness in his tone isn’t even faked. “I thought we weren’t talking about my sex life anymore, though?”

“Right, well—” Robin gestures dismissively like he’s missing the point. “—the grace period has been extended.” She pulls down the visor to start messing with her hair. “Anyway, I figured—you learn by doing, yeah? And regardless of how you actually feel about women, you know you’re good at sex, right?” Robin draws up short and turns to shoot him an intense look. “…And that is literally the only time I’m ever gonna say anything even remotely positive about your ‘sexual prowess,’ and if you try to bring it up around anyone else they’ll never find the body, Harrington.”

“Threat acknowledged, Buckles.” The corners of his mouth turn up into a helpless smile. God—how does she manage to make the end of the world so easy?

“Eugh—Buckles??” Robin looks ready to grab the wheel and steer them off the road.

Steve shrugs. “It felt right in the moment.”

“I hate you,” she says, shoving a finger in his face to emphasize the point. She falls back into her seat and continues, “Anyway, back to your gay crisis—”

“Yeah. About that.” He frowns as the dark edge of his thoughts is drawn back to the forefront to be held up for inspection. “Did you…did you, like, turn my coming out into a science experiment? Are you trying to code break my gay awakening?”

“I can neither confirm nor deny these allegations.”

“Rob.”

“Okay, look.” Robin flips up the visor and turns to look at him straight-on. “You have an opportunity in front of you that I bet most gay people don’t get to have!” The look on her face is so painfully earnest it’s almost hard to look at. “I’m pretty sure most of us realize we’re fucked up by age eleven, and then spend the rest of our lives hating ourselves so hard we can’t see past our own navels. Or we just make it everyone else’s problem. Or repress the shit out of it until we get stuck in a loveless marriage with two-and-a-half kids, a dog, and a white picket fence!” The anxious edge to her voice has Steve sitting up straighter: muscles tensing up, spine going stiff.

“Robin,” he says, slowly, delicately. “Have you…met another gay person?” 

“No? I thought we’d already established that. Also, I don’t see how that’s relevant here.”

Steve drums the fingers of his left hand against the steering wheel as he reaches over with his right to fiddle with the radio. On every inhale he can feel his chest going tighter and tighter as his lungs struggle for air. He feels like he’s back in the tunnels, breathing in pores of the Upside Down’s death-ridden atmosphere, wondering between heartbeats if his next one might be his last. “Is that …do you think we’re fucked up?”

Steve is very pointedly staring at the road ahead of them, but he can still feel the way Robin’s face falls as she continues to look at him with what he knows will be too much sincerity. 

“I…” The way Robin’s voice trails off into quiet uncertainty is what finally makes Steve turn to look at her.

She’s wearing an expression he doesn’t think he’s seen before. Sadness, yes—but tied up with confusion, and anger, and—well, he looks in the mirror too often not to know what self-loathing looks like on a person. The two of them are too alike, he thinks.

“Robbie.” He reaches out a hand to her, palm outstretched and expecting. The comforting weight of her grip tightening in his follows a moment later, and he squeezes her hand twice, like a heartbeat. For courage, maybe. Or just to say I’m right here. And, I’m not going anywhere. Robin squeezes back twice in return. 

“I used to,” she whispers. “I still do, on bad days, y’know?”

Steve nods. 

“And, yeah.” Robin sighs and turns to lean her head against the passenger side window. “Up until now I’ve been figuring it out on my own. And, like, there are books and stuff? But anything I read I’ve gotta make sure to do at the library, but without anyone seeing me. And there are, like, two pulp novels—that are literally disintegrating—where the lesbians die at the end—and holy shit I think that’s the first time I’ve said that word out loud—and one book of gay history that I have to assume was ordered by accident in 1976. And I’m pretty sure if we were literally anywhere other than bumfuck Indiana I could probably find more…more anything. But. Uh.” Robin shoots him a halfway sheepish look. “I don’t have a car?”

Steve laughs, the shock of it unraveling the inky vines of panic that’d been working their way across his chest. “Oh my God,” he gasps through the laughter. “I realize I’m gay, and somehow the fact that I have a car is still the most interesting thing about me. Also, hold on a second— Robin, you don’t even have a license.”

Robin throws her hands up. “Exactly.”

“Thirdly—”

“Thirdly? Since when were we making lists!”

“Thirdly—” Steve over-exaggerates his steering on the turn he’s making to emphasize his point. “I can’t believe I’m being saddled with a field trip in exchange for baring my soul to you.”

Robin snorts. “We find the right bar in Indy and you can bare more than that.”

Steve blinks, thoughts grinding to a halt again, but this time he’s flashing hot with something closer to interest than shame. “Are there gay bars up there?”

Robin shrugs. “I mean, yeah? It’s a city, right?”

“Oh my God.” Steve stares off into the middle distance as he comes to a horrifying realization. “Oh my God. We really are just two idiots up against the world together. Doomed to symbiotic cluelessness for the rest of our lives.”

“Think of it this way: it’ll be an adventure! This time with at least 70 percent fewer drugs and torture.”

“Yeah, that’s comforting,” Steve scoffs as he pulls into the parking lot outside of Hawkins High. 

“Oh, come on, Steve. We won’t be the first gay teens who’ve stumbled into the city with no idea what they’re doing. We’ve just gotta…look the part?”

Steve bangs his head against the steering wheel with a resigned groan. “Fine. Let’s go on a big gay field trip to get me laid, and get you…gay…summer reading? Also we should probably talk about that whole ‘this is the first time I’ve even said the word ‘lesbian’ out loud’ thing at some point.”

Robin swats at his arm, and he snaps his head up to glare at her in confusion.

“You’ve concussed yourself enough without willfully banging your head against things, asshole! Also, it definitely doesn’t count as summer reading anymore.” She pushes open the door with a dramatic flourish, and Steve doesn’t bother to say anything when it bangs open with just a touch too much force. He’s already accepted that he’s never going to meet another person who treats his baby the way she deserves. Robin turns to plant an obnoxiously loud, smacking kiss on his cheek with a manic grin on her face. “But yeah, sounds like a plan! Except for that last part, I’m pretty happy to just keep ignoring that.”

Steve gazes heavenward as Robin slams the door closed again. He’s not sure what he did to deserve Robin Buckley, but if he ever finds out he’s gonna thank his past self, and then firmly smack him across the face. 

Actually—maybe in the opposite order.

“Have a good last first-day, Rob,” he calls out the driver’s side window.

“Yeah, yeah, see you at three, Steve!” She waves back at him without really paying attention as she runs to catch up with a couple of students he assumes she must know from band, or something.

Steve smiles after her, and then catches sight of the kids all nervously congregated by the bike rack. Dustin turns to face the lot, beaming his toothless smile back at Steve, and Steve waves back in response. Once the warning bell rings, and they’ve all dragged themselves into the building, Steve pulls away, wishing, for the sake of them all, a happy and uneventful year.

Notes:

We are simply handwaving away the fact that in season four Steve reveals that he didn't realize that Robin doesn't have her license. As funny as that is, it simply does not make sense for how close I have written them here. …and also I wrote that bit of dialogue before remembering it was technically non-canonical, but I liked it too much to rework it. Steve being out as gay already breaks season four canon and also this series will more majorly break from season four canon down the line so you can just consider this the first (second?) casualty. The inspiration for the line about a history book getting purchased accidentally in 1976 is a reference to Gay American History by Jonathan Katz, which did in fact come out that year. Also, while Robin is at least a little nervous about her parents potentially finding gay books she's brought home, her refusal to check anything out from the library is more because she's worried about the librarian seeing them/having a paper trail of what she's borrowed (even if no one should be looking at her browsing history). Also, to be clear (and also as a warning for chapters to come): while Robin and Steve did kind of forget about the AIDS epidemic for a hot second, I very much did not. They've got a lot going on in their little traumatized, teenage minds, is all.

#steve harrington #robin buckley #stobin #stobin fic #gay steve harrington #read writes #phryctoria #semiotics 'verse

[stobinesque]

phryctoria | chapter 5: five by two (chi)

Sometimes your gay awakening is just having someone to show you it’s possible. Sometimes love is a lightning bug.

[1][2][3][4][5][6 & 7] | [Read on AO3]

On the way back from the bookstore Robin cranks up the volume on the beamer’s cassette player, and they both scream-sing along to the mixtape they’d finally finished at 4am this morning, after a sleepless night. Steve drums his hands on the steering wheel to the beat of “You Spin Me Right Round (Like A Record),” while wind whips through his hair from the cracked windows.

“Okay, so—I’ve got this loose floorboard back in my room—”

“Yeah, Robs, I’m aware.”

“Shut up, I’m trying to tell you something.”

“Oh yeah? What’s that?”

“Well you can’t exactly bring your stuff home with you, can you?”

Steve is silent for a few beats, the mood tanking even while Pete Burns sings All I know is that to me / You look like you're lots of fun. “Yeah, I guess not.” Steve turns to look over at Robin, whose face has gone all serious. “What about you, though? Are you sure it’s safe to have it at your place?”

“Steve, you’ve met my parents—they’re sometimes weird about boundaries, but they don’t go snooping through my stuff. Definitely not to the point of prying up loose floorboards. Is that…?” Robin trails off, the concern in her voice evident, and Steve looks over to see that she’s frowning. “Is that something your dad does?”

Steve shrugs. “I don’t really keep stuff in my room for him to find.” Really, he tries not to own or possess anything that he isn’t prepared for his dad to find anywhere. (Aside from the occasional pot stash, which he always buries in a small tin in the flower bed whenever he has enough left over to warrant it. Most of the time he just doesn’t buy more than he’s planning to smoke through before his parents get back from whatever trip they’re on.) “Anyway. That’s not the point. What if they do find it? Like, I don’t know, one of us forgets to put it away, or something.”

Robin bites at her lip and turns away to stare out the window. Her shoulders hitch up around her ears. “I don’t know. I don’t think...I mean I’ve never heard them say anything, you know? And, like, they were both hippies when they were younger, or whatever. It’d be weird for them to be homophobic, right?”

“Adults never make any sense.”

Robin huffs out a laugh. “Yeah. Right.” She twists one of her rings around her finger. “There’s no way to be totally sure of anything, right? But keeping it at my place is definitely safer than keeping it at yours.”

Steve sighs. “We really need to find another job.”

“Holy non-sequitur, Batman!”

“Non-sequi-what?”

“Random subject switch,” she explains, waving her hand.

“Hey, no, not random!” He pulls a hand off the wheel to flap a hand at her. “If one of us gets kicked out it may as well be both of us getting kicked out. And I don’t know about you, but I do not have enough saved up from Scoops to try to get an apartment.”

Robin grimaces. “That’s a good point.”

“I’m full of good points, Bobbie.”

She flashes him a lewd smile. “Not yet you aren’t,” she says with an exaggerated eyebrow waggle.

“I think at this point we just have to accept that you enjoy talking about my sex life, Buckley.”

Robin gasps dramatically, pressing a hand to her chest like he’s wounded her. “I can’t believe you would say something so grossly offensive.”

“I hope you know that you’ve doomed yourself to a play-by-play the next time I get laid.”

“Ugh. Being friends with you is such a burden.”

“You love me, asshole.”

“God fucking help me, dingus. I do.”

“We headed back home?” Steve asks as they pass by the ‘Welcome to Hawkins Hell!’ sign.

Robin lifts her head from where it’d dropped against the window and yawns wide. “Wazzat?”

“Home.” Steve turns to look at her. “Are we going?”

Robin flops her head against the headrest, looking at him with a sleepy smile. “Keep driving?”

“Sure thing.” He keeps driving; no particular destination in mind, following backroads along the edges of Hawkins. The sun is still bright and warm, but low enough on the horizon that it shines through the windows and lights Robin up in gold.

She giggles off to his side.

“What? What’s so funny?” he shoots her a quick, suspicious glare.

Robin reaches across the center console to poke him in the face. “You’re shiiiiny.”

Steve slaps her hand away. “Will you stop? I’m trying to drive here! Do you want us to crash?”

“No, no.” Robin clears her throat and straightens in the seat as she speaks, making her voice all low and silly-serious. “Certainly not, monsieur.”

“See, no—what is that? ‘Monsieur’?”

Robin giggle-snorts, and then her face scrunches up as her laugh transforms into a full-on cackle. “Hey Stevie?”

“What.”

Robin flops back into his space, leaning in close to whisper conspiratorially, “Did you know you’re reaaallly easy to irritate. Like, so easy?”

Steve rolls his eyes, gently pushing her away with one arm. “Yeah, well, did you know that you act like you’re three drinks under the table whenever you take a nap for longer than 30 minutes? Huh?”

Robin yawns again, stretching her arms high above her head. “Absolutely worth it,” she says, sounding smug.

Steve shakes his head but can’t bite back the smile she brings to his face. He clicks back into a conscious awareness of their surroundings and realizes they’re passing by Weathertop. (Try as he might to deny it, the kids’ names for places have fixed themselves in his mind.)

He pulls off and parks the beamer on the side of the road, circling around the front to pull Robin out of the passenger seat. “C’mon, Bobbin, we’ve got a hill to climb.”

Halfway up, Robin suddenly starts flapping a hand against his chest. “Hey, hey! How’s that song go? The hills are alive, dah-da-dah daaah dah, you know?”

Steve smirks. “Aren’t your ears supposed to be little geniuses? Robs, the next lines are literally the title of the movie.”

“Pretty sure it was a musical first.”

“This does not actually help your case, you know that, right?”

“Whatever, dingus. Just tell me how the song goes.”

“You sure you wanna hear me sing?”

“Okay, you’ll notice how I didn’t say ‘sing how it goes for me,’ you could just tell me the words.”

“No, no, now you’re going to be subjected to the musical stylings of the Harrington family singers, because,” Steve leans into her space and starts singing, sickly sweet, “My heart wants to sing every soooong it hears.” His head is almost fully resting against Robin’s shoulder as he looks up at her with a shit eating grin.

“Oh, my god, get off me.” She shoves him away, laughing.

Steve lets himself be pushed, taking a couple dramatic, stumbling steps away from her before righting himself and drifting back into her space. “You know the next lines have always been my favorite, though?”

“Do you have the whole song memorized?!”

“...yeah?” Steve frowns at her. “Robs, it’s one of my favorite movies! I thought that’s why you asked!”

She shakes her head, looking at him a little dumbstruck. “Nope, I’m pretty sure I would have remembered that little Harrington factoid.”

“Well…yeah. My mom really loved it, so I guess I just watched it a lot growing up? Especially when my dad was out of town—before she started going on the trips with him—because then we could sing along.”

Robin opens her mouth to say something, before seeming to make the conscious decision not to approach the whole ‘you couldn’t sing along to the movie about being forbidden from singing?’ thing with a ten foot pole, and snapping her mouth shut again. “Huh.” She takes a couple more striding steps forward with a pensive look on her face. “So...how does the next part go?”

He smiles at her, and even without being able to see his own face he can tell that it’s radiant. “My heart…wants to beat like the wings of the birds that rise from the lake to the trees.” He looks at her, and he can feel the way his gaze has become just a little too intense.

“Birds, huh?” She knocks his shoulder with her own, a gentle smile on her face.

“Yep. Always loved ‘em,” he says, his heart feeling a little gooey in his chest.

“Ugh, get away from me,” she says, shoving him away again. “You’re such a fucking sap, it’s disgusting. Where was this two months ago?”

“Mmm, don’t know if you knew this, Birdy, but I am very gay. I think I was probably driving girls away accidentally-on-purpose.”

Robin gives him a small nod. “Solid theory.”

As they begin to crest the top of the hill, Robin turns to look at him. “You have a really nice voice, you know?”

“Do I?”

“Oh, totally—like, two whole steps up from Kermit, at least.”

Steve rolls his eyes. “I’m so touched.”

“As you should be.”

“As we both should be,” he says with a playful little leer. They’ve reached the top of the hill, and Steve flops onto his back with a giant exhale. Robin just stands there, peering down at him, so he reaches up to her with a beckoning gesture. “Come down here.”

Robin takes his hand and lets herself be pulled onto the grass. She settles into a lax position, her arms hovering out at her sides, like a snow angel at rest. Steve folds his own hands over his chest, like he’s been posed in a coffin. The two of them stare up at the clouds rolling past in silence.

“Do you think you’ll try to find someone to get friendly with when we go out?” Steve asks after a while.

“I don’t know. Maybe?” She pauses, and Steve tracks a sparrow flying overhead. “It’s weird, because I don’t think I wanna just dive in headfirst with something casual, you know? But at the same time, it’s like—why let that hold me back? ‘Cause what are the chances there are any more of us out here in Hawkins?”

Steve shrugs. “I mean, I don’t know, I was never good at stats or whatever, but it’d be weirder if there were only two of us, right? And, like, we only know about each other because of…” He waves a hand around to encompass the Russians, the torture; the fucking truth serum…

“Yeah.”

“So, that just goes to show that if there are other gay people in Hawkins, they’re probably also keeping it pretty close to the chest.”

“Maybe, but that doesn’t exactly improve my chances.”

“Point.”

“I just. If I do meet someone, I don’t want it to just be some casual thing, right? I’d want to, like, get to know her and go on dates and…and hold hands, you know?”

“Yeah.” They lay in silence, watching the sun make its slow creep toward the horizon. Steve turns to look at her. “We’re losing light.”

Robin turns to meet his gaze, and smiles. “Wanna stay ‘til the stars come out?”

It’s something they do now. One of the routines they’ve fallen into since Starcourt. Sometimes the sleepless nights will take them out to an empty field under a canopy of starlight.

“Sure.” Silence settles between them again, and Steve turns back to stare up at the sky. The world around them is abuzz with chirping crickets, and the occasional croaking toad. For awhile, Steve just settles into the little symphony. The pocket of peace out here. But eventually, he has to break the silence again. “So…are we gonna talk about it?”

“Talk about what?”

“The whole ‘I’ve never said “lesbian” out loud,’ thing.”

Robin is quiet for several moments. “I don’t know if I can.”

Steve thinks about turning to look at her again but decides against it. Sometimes it’s easier not to be looked at. “Why not?”

“I don’t know, it’s just…it’s just a whole thing, right? Like, I don’t know, maybe it’s weird to think of it this way, but it’s—it’s a noun. And maybe that shouldn’t matter because, like, I don’t know, woman is a noun too, I guess. But it’s just like…weird? To think of this as being something that I am, as like…I don’t know.” Steve hears the grass rustle next to him. “I don’t think I’m making any sense.”

“No, no…I think I’m following. It’s like…what if it’s suddenly all that you are, and there isn’t room for anything else?”

“Yeah.” She sounds more confident now, like maybe she’s on the right track. “And, like, what if all that I am is…wrong? And I know that it’s fucked up to think about it like that, but—”

“But it’s hard to talk yourself out of thinking something you’ve spent your whole life hearing?”

“Exactly.”

Steve hums, weighing his next words in his head. “You know what I think?”

“What?”

“I think that all of Robin Buckley is pretty fucking rad. And I know there’s more to you than being gay. You’re also—and, fine, I will admit it—the funniest person that I know, you’re scary good at solving puzzles, you can barely walk ten paces without tripping over yourself, you’re so, so incredibly brave, and protective, and caring. You have a fucking weird obsession with bugs—”

Robin’s hand darts out to smack his shoulder. “They’re cool!”

“They’re creepy!” Steve says, jumping out of her warpath.

“Okay, one, no they’re not, and two, even if some are, you can’t just paint a whole phylum with that broad of a brush.”

“If I agree that some bugs aren’t creepy, can we get back on topic?”

“…fine.”

“Okay, so, what I was saying, is that you’ve got so much going on that, as far as I’m concerned, there’s no risk of you only every being one thing, and, more importantly: all ofthe things that you are—even the fucking bug love—are the things that make you my favorite person, and you’re not allowed to say mean things about my best friend. So there.”

Robin is quiet for so long that the crickets seem to multiply in volume.

“Hey, Rob…you OD over there?”

Robin cracks a small laugh. “No, I…I’m…” The grass rustles again, and he turns his head to see that Robin has rolled onto her side to face him. He turns onto his own side to face her right back. “Hey, Fen?” she whispers.

“Yeah, Birdy?”

Robin takes a deep breath. “I’m a lesbian.” The second the words are out her mouth she breaks into a wide, relieved smile. A dam seems to burst, and suddenly she’s rolling onto her back and laugh-crying up to the heavens.

Steve rolls onto his back as well, and as he does a lightning bug—one of the few bugs that he will acknowledge sits in the “totally not creepy” category—flits past his head. He reaches up to scoop it out of the air, and to his right he sees Robin doing the same. They turn their heads just enough to look at each other again, each holding a firefly on the back of their hand. The light on Robin’s flares, and a moment later the butt of Steve’s lights up too

“You think they’re talking to each other?”

“Yeah, that’s how it works right? Like, um…” Steve searches around for the word and snaps the fingers of his free hand when he finds it. “Like Morse Code!”

“Yeah.”

“Wish we were lighting bugs. Then we could talk all the time without having to say anything at all. Plus—we’d be really pretty.”

“We can already do that,” Robin says. “And we’re both really pretty.”

“Touché.”

Steve watches the bug crawl across the back of his hand, fascinated by the way its little antennae flick and flutter.

“I don’t think you’d wanna be a lightning bug,” Robin says.

“Why not?”

“Because—no one actually appreciates them, y’know? Like, they think they do, but really they just wanna capture them and bottle them up for how pretty they are. And then they stuff you into a jar, and you slowly suffocate, and with each passing second your light shines a little less brightly, until it’s just dimly flickering, and so muted that you can’t even signal to anyone around you how close you are to dying.”

Steve blinks slowly, trying to process everything she’s just said. “... what the fuck, Robs?”

Robin jabs him in the shoulder, but light enough so as not to jostle him. “What I’m saying…is that I like you all glowy and free.”

The lighting bug has now made its way halfway down Steve’s arm. It opens its wing and flutters off. A moment later, Robin’s follows.

“Okay, I think that’s enough sad fossilizing for one day,” Steve says, pushing himself upright. Once he’s standing, he holds out his hand to Robin and hauls her to her feet.

“Come on. Let’s go home.”

#steve harrington #stobin #platonic stobin #gay steve harrington #read writes #phryctoria #semiotics 'verse

[stobinesque]

phryctoria

Teen And Up | WC: 16.5k | Complete

Relationships: Steve Harrington & Robin Buckley

Additional Tags: Coming Out, Gay Steve Harrington, Internalized Homophobia, HIV/AIDS Crisis, Panic Attacks, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Lesbian Robin Buckley

Sometimes your gay awakening is just having someone to show you it's possible. After Starcourt, Steve realizes he's gay, comes out to his best friend, and starts to figure out how to navigate his new reality with her.

[Read on AO3]

Read on Tumblr:

Chapter 1: pyrseia (torch)

Chapter 2: four by four (tau)

Chapter 3: two by three (theta)

Chapter 4: one by three (lambda)

Chapter 5: five by two (chi) [associated playlist]

Chapters 6 & 7: four by one (delta) & Erratum & Appendices

"phryctoria" was a semaphore system used in Ancient Greece, which used a system of torches across two towers within a short distance of each other to communicate a prearranged message over larger distances.

Messages were communicated by using two sets of five torches—one set was controlled by each tower.

Messages were constructed by using the Greek alphabet arranged in a 5x5 grid pattern, and flashing the torches on each tower to indicate a letter’s position on the grid. The left indicated the grid row; the right indicated the grid column. [source]

Each chapter (aside from chapter one) is named after a Greek letter, and its chart position in this system.

#steve harrington #robin buckley #stobin #stobin fic #platonic stobin #gay steve harrington #read writes #phryctoria #semiotics 'verse

[stobinesque]

phryctoria | chapter 6: four by one (delta)

Sometimes your gay awakening is just having someone to show you it’s possible. Steve realizes there's a whole gay world out there, waiting for them.

Now Complete!

[1][2][3][4][5] | [Read on AO3]

"Robbie, honey, is that you?" Mrs. Buckley calls out as the front door swings shut behind them.

"Yeah, mom!" Robin shouts back as she toes off her shoes.

"Is Steve with you?" Robin claims her mother has some sort of sixth sense for Steve's presence in the house. Steve thinks it’s just a safe bet to assume he’s there, seeing as that's the case more often than not.

"I am!" Steve affirms, as Robin grabs his hand to drag him up to her room. The staircase has a direct line of sight to the living room, where Robin's parents are curled together on their squashy couch, watching something Steve can't make out on the tiny television set.

"There are leftovers in the fridge." Mr. Buckley says as they pass by.

"Thank you, sir." Robin tugs at Steve’s wrist impatiently. "Uh…we’ll grab some later," he says, tripping up the stairs after Robin.

"Ugh, you're such a suck-up!" she declares as she flops back onto her bed.

"I have to stay on their good side! They’re both half-convinced I'm one step away from stealing your virginity."

"Eugh, please don't say that." Robin pulls open her bag and starts dumping the contents onto her mattress. "Besides, they wouldn't have any room to talk. I was conceived in the back of my dad’s Volkswagen."

Steve hops up onto the bed, stretching his legs out in front of him. He picks up his pamphlet from the books and 'zines strewn across Robin's bed, and rolls it up to point at her. "Now, how—and why, exactly—do you know that?"

"Remember what I said about my parents and boundaries?"

“Okay, sure, that tracks.” Steve flips open the booklet with a little flourish. “So, wanna learn about how to fuck without dying?”

Robin arches a brow at him. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

“No? What would I—?”

Steve flinches as something hits his chest and he looks down to see the reading glasses he’d bought earlier. “Really?”

“Yes, really! Put them on!”

Steve rolls his eyes, but puts them on. “Happy?”

“I am,” she sniffs with haughty self-satisfaction.

Steve pulls a face and mouths a mocking “I am!” as he picks the pamphlet back up and flicks it open. He skims his way down the table of contents—there’s a foreword, a preface, and an introduction for some reason—and his eyebrows start creeping up his forehead as he goes. Sucking, Fucking, Sadism & Masochism (S&M), Fist Fucking…mixed in with things Steve doesn’t even recognize (what the hell do “water sports” have to  do with sex?)

It's all a little daunting—like he should have started with a basic field guide to Sex With Men before jumping into figuring out how to do it safely.

But he’s here now, so he takes a deep breath, flips to the next page, and begins.

Barely three paragraphs in and he's right back to feeling in over his head. Is he supposed to have opinions on the causes of AIDS? He can count the number of times he’s heard or read about it in a context that wasn’t riddled with disgust and condemnation. All he really knows is that a diagnosis is as good as a death sentence.

He shakes his head, frustrated. "Hey, do you have a highlighter or something?"

Robin doesn’t say anything, but when Steve looks up to ask her again, something smacks him on the head—Robin having chosen to answer by way of lobbing a highlighter directly at his face. He's grudgingly impressed by her aim.

"Stop throwing things at me!"

Robin ignores him. "Careful, Stevie, you might turn into a nerd if you're not careful."

"...shut up." He uncaps the marker with a bitchy flourish to highlight the sentence “Sex doesn't make you sick—diseases do. Gay sex doesn't make you sick—gay men who are sick do.” It settles something in him that's been strung tight since Monday. Even if some part of him knew that he wasn't sick just by existing, he couldn't shake the memory of kids asking anyone they thought might be gay if they knew what it stood for, before shouting “Got AIDS Yet?” down the hall after them.

Steve grimaces at the memory, and carries on reading until he’s reached the end of the introduction, highlighting a sentence at the end there

Our challenge is to figure out how we can have gay, life-affirming sex, satisfy our emotional needs, and stay alive!

He's never really thought of sex as anything more than a kind of fraught balancing act between performance and pleasure—let alone “life-affirming.”

Except...that is kind of what it was between him and Nancy right? It's why they'd drifted back together after everything. They'd both only had each other—well, Nancy had Jonathan, too, kind of. But Steve had lost his two closest friends, and even if he hadn't, it’s not like he could have shared anything that'd happened to him without putting them in harm’s way.

(There had been a few times early on when Steve had considered reaching out to Tommy or Carol. But even without the worry that he might revert back to a version of himself that he was all too eager to leave in the rearview, he also didn't know what the point of trying to maintain a relationship with them was, when his entire understanding of the world had turned on its head.)

So Nancy and Steve had become NancyandSteve—not so much in deed as in perception. After Barb, after…everything…they'd both been hesitant to have sex again for a while. Steve didn't want to push Nancy into doing anything that would make her uncomfortable (and if Steve benefited from not having to perform quite so much, all the better). And Nancy always seemed like it was something she felt guilty for even wanting.

And then one night Steve had just kind of snapped and asked her outright “Do you want to have sex?”

It was like a dam bursting. As if all Nancy had needed was for someone to ask her what she actually wanted, instead of thinking herself in circles around what she should want.

"Penny for your thoughts, Fen?"

Steve doesn’t look up from where his eyes have lost on the words swimming in front of him. "Just…thinking about Nancy."

"Oh?" Robin’s voice is cautiously curious.

"Yeah, just like. I don't know. We didn't have sex all that often when we were together, but when we did, it was like…" Steve trails off, struggling to find the words.

"Like what?”

"Like…I don't know. Like us?” He says, finally looking up at Robin and gesturing between the two of them. “Like when we sleep together?”

Robin doesn't wrinkle her nose like he expects her to. Instead she tilts her head and gives him a considering look. "Like…comforting?"

Steve snaps his fingers and points at her. "Yeah! And it was fun, too, I guess. But it was mostly just…it was the one time where I felt like I could actually give her what she needed, you know?”

Robin shakes her head with a little frown. "I don't. That sounds…really sad, actually."

Steve huffs and drags a hand through his hair. "I'm not explaining this right."

"No, I think you are!" Robin reaches out to take one of his hands into hers. "Look, you don't really talk about Nancy, and I'm not asking you to do it now anymore than you already have or want to. But, the silence kind of speaks for itself, you know? I don't know what happened with the two of you, but I…I don't know, I'd see you together, sometimes, after Barb, and you both always seemed so sad. But you never really seemed like you were sad together, you know? You didn't even look like you were causing each other's sadness, you just…you looked like you were on these parallel tracks of grief. So…so maybe, when you were having sex it was like the one time where you both actually were on the same track? And that's…"

"Fucked up, because I'm gay, and her best friend died while she was losing her virginity? To me? A gay man?"

"Well, I wasn't gonna put it like that."

"Sure."

Silence falls between them, and Steve stares at the Ripley poster hanging on Robin’s wall. Thinking about Nancy has left him unsettled in a way he wouldn’t have expected it to. Not that realizing he’s gay should suddenly erase all of the heartbreak he’d felt at the end of things. But he thought he’d moved on. Come to terms with everything. But now, recontextualizing their relationship, and realizing how much it had really just been a means of survival than anything else for both of them…it leaves him feeling a little sick.

Robin cuts into his thoughts. "Okay, enough wallowing about shitty exes—"

"Nancy wasn't—”

"Shhhh,” Robin says, waving a hand in his face to get him to stop talking. “Let me be dramatically overprotective of you about this."

"Fine,” he says, even though something about it doesn’t sit right with him.

"Back to my point: stop wallowing, and get back to reading about how you can have hot gay sex safely, so I can live vicariously through you!"

Some of the tension bleeds out of him. "Okay, first of all, I don't think you want to be having the same kind of hot gay sex as me, and second of all, you’re coming with me! You can find a hot girl to bang!"

"I thought we’d already established that I don't want to have sex for the first time with a stranger!"

"Oh.” Steve falls back. Even having just talked about it earlier that evening he’d kind of…forgotten that other people might prefer to know the person they lose their virginity to. He hadn’t really had a choice. “Right."

"I think I'd be okay with kissing a girl that I don't know yet. But, like, how do you even tell if someone's interested in you?” She tangles her fingers in her hair and starts tugging at the roots. “And how do you flirt?"

"Okay, okay, one thing at a time.” Steve reaches forward to pull her hands from her hair, holding them to his chest. “You don't have to rush anything, you know—”

"Steve! It's not rushing things if I've…if I've known this about myself for years and I'm still just a clueless virgin!"

"Okay, well, I don't think me not being a virgin means I have any more of a clue about things than you do. It's just…” Steve gestures in the space between them. "It's just bodies! And, like, hearts and guts and brains, or whatever—but that's still just bodies! And if we're going to a gay club you'll have to exert a lot less effort into trying to figure out if someone likes you. You can just ask!”

"'You can just ask' he says.” Robin scoffs. “Have you ever 'just asked' a girl if she likes you?"

"Well, no, but that's because they're supposed to act like they don't."

"What?" Robin yanks her hands out of Steve’s grip with a violent jerk backwards.

"Yeah! Girls are supposed to act like they're all bashful or whatever about a guy liking them. So you have to come at it sideways, give them a little opening to sneak through." He holds his hands a couple inches apart and makes a little snaking motion in demonstration.

Robin gapes at him. "Straight people are fucking weird."

"Yeah, it's exhausting." There was something of a thrill to a successful seduction, though. It was a game Steve had been good at playing, once upon a time. It had just lost its appeal somewhere along the way. Maybe in a new context he'd find a way to make it fun again. "But there aren't any guys in the equation for you, so you don't have to do any of that."

"Okay, yeah, but what if everyone does still act like that, but because there's no men to do the asking everyone is just like! Awkwardly hovering around each other!”

"I literally just told you to do the asking."

"Yeah, well, what if your advice is bad! I've seen you try to flirt, Steve!"

"Yeah, you've seen me try to flirt with girls who I am not attracted to,” he argues back, gesticulating wildly. He slumps back and bites his lip, considering. "Okay, how about this,” he starts, leaning forward again. “I bet you that if you ask, you can get a girl to kiss you."

Robin narrows her eyes, "What's the winner get?”

Steve thinks for a second. "Full control of the stereo on the ride back."

"Deal." Robin spits into her palm and extends it to him. "Shake on it, Harrington."

Steve grimaces, but spits into his own palm, before grasping her hand in his. "Deal"

Steve returns to reading, but a few minutes later tosses it aside again with a frustrated huff, pressing the tips of his fingers into his eyes, as though that will chase away the budding headache.

“…you good over there?”

Steve drops his hands and blinks rapidly. “Yeah, why wouldn’t I be?”

Robin snorts. “Liar. What’s up? Why do you look like you just got your head shoved in a toilet?”

“Nothing, I just—it’s dumb.”

“Yeah, and?”

“And—I don’t want to bore you with stupid questions.”

“I’m pretty sure the no-stupid-questions rule is still in effect.”

“Yeah, but this isn’t a gay question or whatever—I just don’t know how to fucking read.”

Robin frowns, leaning forward to look at him more closely. “Okaaaaay, but clearly you do—you’ve been highlighting up a storm over there.”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean I understand anything!” Steve snaps his mouth shut and looks away. “Shit, sorry, I didn’t mean to yell at you.”

Robin plays with her hands, expression nervous. “Why does it matter if you don’t understand it?”

“What’s the point in reading any of this if I don’t know what it means?”

“No, no, I get that, I just mean—why are you acting like not understanding something will matter to me?”

Steve shrugs. “I mean, it has before.”

Robin stares at him, mouth agape. “What are you—are you talking about what I said about Click’s class?”

Steve doesn’t say anything.

“Okay, well, if it is, then you are an idiot, if you think literally any of 15-year-old me’s thoughts about you still apply now.” Robin shakes her head sadly. “Steve, you could ask me what color the fucking sky is—and I’d probably lie first, just to fuck with you a bit—but I definitely wouldn’t judge you for asking. I literally don’t care whether you’re a genius, or-or if you don’t know what two plus two is! The stupid little thoughts of a jealous teenager are entirely irrelevant to what we have here,” she says, gesturing between the two of them.

Steve is quiet, assessing her for even a bare hint of insincerity. There’s none to be found. Maybe he can hazard a chance at trusting someone again. As though he hasn’t been doing that this whole time. He sighs and hands the pamphlet over. “It’s not even that I don’t know what it’s saying, I just…every time I get to the end of the page it’s like everything I’ve just read falls out of my head.”

“Okay, well, maybe between the two of us we can get it to stick.” Robin holds her hand out and makes a grabby motion until Steve drops the highlighter into it. She skims through the whole section, humming occasionally as she underscores something.

A couple minutes later she looks back at him with a smile. “Okay, well, first off: this was also kind of dense for me. There’s, like, a lot of information here and it’s all presented very argumentatively and kind of assumes the person reading it knows more about the debatable causes of AIDS than I think either of us do. But basically it’s arguing that instead of AIDS being caused by one virus, it’s instead caused by a build-up of CMV, which is a totally different virus.”

Steve nods along. He does follow that. The foreword, preface, and introduction had all alluded to it, but once the authors got further into the details they’d started to lose him.

“Second of all, I don’t know if it really matters. I mean, obviously it matters that, like, scientists and doctors and whoever know the exact cause. But from what I can tell, it seems like regardless of the exact cause, we still have a reasonably good understanding of how it spreads—namely, sperm and blood. So I think as long as you understand everything else in here about how to prevent spreading or catching things, you’re probably good not to understand all of the science behind it.”

Steve nods and takes the pamphlet back from her. “Okay,” he says. “Uh, thanks.”

Robin nods. “Anytime, Steph.”

Steve blushes and smiles at her.

Reading the rest of the pamphlet gets much easier from there. He skims over the sections specifically covering CMV, figuring that he can return to them later if needed, but that they probably aren’t strictly relevant to him just yet.

About halfway through reading, he realizes that despite the heavy subject matter, he’s actually kind of enjoying reading it, in a way that’s unfamiliar to him. He’s always enjoyed having sex, but he’d never considered that he might also like learning about it. It’s a similar sort of satisfaction that he found in learning first aid for his lifeguard certification. But most of that was a hands-on kind of learning. Steve can’t remember a time he’s been anything other than frustrated while reading.

The writers talk about sex with an unrelenting frankness that is completely foreign to him. And they don’t limit themselves to the mere mechanics of the act. They dive into ethics and philosophy, and by the time Steve has made it to the last section, he finds himself highlighting whole paragraphs.

Gay men are socialized as men first; our gay socialization comes later. From the day we are born we are trained as men to compete with other men. The challenge facing gay men in America is to figure out how to love someone you’ve been trained to “destroy”

It knocks Steve off his feet. Like someone has held a mirror up to his life.

He remembers the adrenaline flooding him when he pinned Jonathan to the ground in that alley—and again, when Jonathan took him by the wrist and pulled him to safety hours later.

He remembers the jealousy and fear of losing to a boy he felt the need to prove himself better than.

But what if there had been love there all along? Buried deep beneath the pain and self-loathing.

The goal of gay male liberation must be to find ways in which love becomes possible despite continuing and often overwhelming pressure to compete and adopt adversary relationships with other men.

Steve traces over the lines of those sentences like they’re precious. Robin is the only other gay person he knows, and she knows only fractionally more about this world than he does.

And it is a world. There’s a whole history here. Beyond the scientific analysis of disease and recommendations for safer sex, that is what he’s found here. A community. A lineage. There’s a culture there lying in wait of discovery for the both of them. There are men who have walked the same gauntlet that Steve is just beginning to—and who have emerged on the other side. And maybe they’re all in peril together. But at least it is together.

If you love the person you are fucking with—even for one night—you will not want to make them sick.

Steve doesn’t know what he and Robin will find when they go to Indy. The world is larger and more complex than anything he’s going to find in a 40-page pamphlet.

But who knows, maybe he will find love there.

Maybe affection is our best protection.

Bonus! Chapter 7: Erratum & Appendices

Annotations to the text “How to Have Sex in an Epidemic” by Michael Callen and Richard Berkowitz, intro by Dr. Joseph Sonnabend - Spring 1985

[A/N: full text can be accessed here]

ANNOTATION, pg 9, following the section “WHAT CAUSES AIDS?”

While the multifactorial theory behind AIDS was already unpopular in the medical community at the time of this pamphlet’s initial publication, a greater preponderance of medical and community health experts now agree that the recently discovered virus HTLV III is the virus responsible for the development of AIDS. However, there is still much we do not know about the virus’ transmission. That said: the guidelines for safer sex outlined by Callen and Berkowitz, and supported by Dr. Sonnabend, are still likely to greatly mitigate the risk of transmitting or acquiring the HTLV III virus and, subsequently, AIDS.

While most professionals agree that CMV is not the cause of AIDS, CMV remains a disease that MSM should be careful to minimize their risk of transmitting. The risks and effects of CMV as highlighted by the authors in this pamphlet—excepting its connection to AIDS—remain sound; as do their recommendations for mitigating transmission.

For individuals interested in getting tested for the HTLV III virus, an Alternate Test Site has recently opened opened at the Indiana University Medical Center. This testing site, unlike others in the area, guarantees anonymity and privacy for those who wish to get tested. A positive test for HTLV III does not mean you have AIDS, an AIDS related condition, nor does it mean you will develop AIDS in the future.

For further information about the HTLV III test, call the Indianapolis Gay & Lesbian Switchboard at [phone]. They have a 24 hour answering service, and make calls back between 7 and 11PM.

ANNOTATION, pg 24, following “KISSING”

While HTLV III has been detected in saliva, there have been no reported cases of AIDS transmitted via kissing, or shared foods or utensils. Community health experts are in near unanimous agreement that kissing bears no risk of transmission of HTLV III/AIDS.

ANNOTATION, p. 20, following “FUCKING”

Studies are inconclusive as to the effectiveness of natural condoms for VD prevention. But as the authors state, natural condoms have a lower risk of breakage to their latex counterparts.

ANNOTATION, p. 21, within the section “GETTING FUCKED”

The importance of lubrication during anal sex cannot be overstated. Lubrication decreases the chances of condoms breaking, and of microtears of the rectal lining.

ANNOTATION, p. 22, following “GETTING FUCKED”

Always be sure to carefully follow the instructions of use for any prophylactic. Condom wrappers should always be opened carefully, with ones hands.

Appendix: STEVE (and Robin's) GUIDE TO SAFELY FUCKING

CLEAR HEAD TO GET HEAD! If you’re planning to fuck, you can’t be drunk!

TALK IT OUT! Always be sure to talk to your partner about limits and safety before getting it on

KEEP IT CLEAN! It’s important to wash up before and after sex to limit the spread of bacteria and germs

WRAP IT UP! If you’re going to fuck someone, or have someone suck you off, make sure you’re wearing a condom

Always open condom wrappers CAREFULLY with your HANDS—ripping wrappers open with your teeth stops being sexy the moment the condom tears

If you’re not going to wear a condom, make sure you don’t come anywhere inside your partner (especially their ass!!!)

KISSING: ✔️✔️✔️

GET CREATIVE There are lots of things to do that pose no risk at all!

GET HANDY: mutual masturbation is a completely safe way for two (or more) to get it on. Throw in some dirty talk to add a little extra HEAT!

IT’S ABOUT LOVE, even if only for a night

***

Authors Note: please keep in mind that everything in this chapter reflects what was known of HIV/AIDS c. 1985! Please do not take safe sex advice from a fanfic!

#steve harrington #robin buckley #stobin #platonic stobin #gay steve harrington #read writes #phryctoria #semiotics 'verse

[stobinesque]

C and F for the fanfic ask game ✨💕

C: What character do you identify with most?

Hilariously I think the answer for Stranger Things are all characters I don't talk about all that often 😅. Somewhat paradoxically (maybe?) I find it easier to project onto characters that aren't necessarily hugely similar to me on paper. Of the characters I yell about most frequently, the answer is absolutely Lucas, especially season 4 Lucas. After that I think Dustin might actually be the character I relate to the most? If the younger kids have a mom friend outside of Steve, it's Dustin, and I'm definitely typically a mom friend in my friend groups. But like Dustin I often end up feeling a little insecure about my position in my friend groups. I am also an annoyingly pedantic know it all 😂

I also relate to Jonathan a whole lot! Just not in ways that feel super comfortable to super closely. To borrow from The Magnus Archives for a sec for analogy purposes: if Steve would be susceptible to being trapped by The Lonely, Jonathan Byers would be susceptible becoming an Avatar for The Lonely. I am Jonathan Byers in this regard. But I have enough healthy fear of exacerbating that in myself that'd I'd rather explore loneliness through a character who is actually afraid of being lonely, rather than susceptible to embracing their loneliness.

........there's definitely not a theme going on with all of those characters. (Also Robin is included in this--really loneliness and ostracization is just a strong thematic throughline for all of the series' characters. Hmm. I'm gonna stop introspecting about this now)

F: Share a snippet from one of your favourite dialogue scenes you've written and explain why you're proud of it.

Okay so in general I just really love writing dialogue, especially for Stobin, so this was hard!

But I think this scene from phryctoria captures most of what I both love and think I'm good at when it comes to writing stobin dialogue in particular:

“I don’t know. I don’t think...I mean I’ve never heard them say anything, you know? And, like, they were both hippies when they were younger, or whatever. It’d be weird for them to be homophobic, right?” “Adults never make any sense.” Robin huffs out a laugh. “Yeah. Right.” She twists one of her rings around her finger. “There’s no way to be totally sure of anything, right? But keeping it at my place is definitely safer than keeping it at yours.” Steve sighs. “We really need to find another job.” “Holy non-sequitur, Batman!” “Non-sequi-what?” “Random subject switch,” she explains, waving her hand. “Hey, no, not random!” He pulls a hand off the wheel to flap a hand at her. “If one of us gets kicked out it may as well be both of us getting kicked out. And I don’t know about you, but I do not have enough saved up from Scoops to try to get an apartment.” Robin grimaces. “That’s a good point.” “I’m full of good points, Bobbie.” She flashes him a lewd smile. “Not yet you aren’t,” she says with an exaggerated eyebrow waggle. “I think at this point we just have to accept that you enjoy talking about my sex life, Buckley.” Robin gasps dramatically, pressing a hand to her chest like he’s wounded her. “I can’t believe you would say something so grossly offensive.” “I hope you know that you’ve doomed yourself to a play-by-play the next time I get laid.” “Ugh. Being friends with you is such a burden.” “You love me, asshole.” “God fucking help me, dingus. I do.”

Okay, so one of my favorite things about Stobin is that at heart they're just two silly goofy guys, both of whom are super neurodivergent (to me). One of my other favorite things about Stobin is that they aren't afraid to be vulnerable with each other. However, these two things present the tricky thing about writing stobin dialogue: halfway through a serious conversation one of them is liable to derail the whole thing with an awful joke. So any time I'm writing a stobin scene I have to figure out how to let them both go on tangents and be goofy and joke around--because that levity in the midst of heartache is part of the whole backbone of their friendship!--without losing the plot of the core focus of the scene.

The snipped above isn't my favorite dialogue moment from this fic, but I do think it is one of the ones that best demonstrates how they can juggle having a serious conversation, being goofy, honoring one another's anxieties, and then being absolute shits to each other.

also idk if you saw the "do you prefer no-boundaries-stobin or 'ew don't talk to me about sex' stobin" poll, but I really enjoy playing with dialogue that is "we're going to make a lot of 'ew don't talk about sex' jokes but also talk about sex with each other All The Time."

#every time i think a stobin conversation is going one direction it instead goes in ten directions #read writes #ask game #phryctoria #del 💚

[stobinesque]

phryctoria | chapter 3: two by three (theta)

Sometimes your gay awakening is just having someone to show you it’s possible. Steve is confronted by the reality that there are dangers around him that have nothing to with monsters.

CW: References to the AIDS Epidemic, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Internalized Homophobia

[1][2][3][4][5][6 & 7] | [Read on AO3]

Usually it’s a mix of fairly boilerplate cover-up stories and commentary that doesn’t raise too many eyebrows. But occasionally, a wild conspiracy theory will slip through. They’re always somehow both immeasurably off the mark, and closer to the truth than the official party line.

Since Starcourt, though, everything has been woven through with sensationalist fear-mongering about satanic cults. More days than not, Steve ends up tossing the paper aside with a scoff and rolling eyes.

Today, though, one of the headlines catches his attention and dumps a bucket of ice water over his head.

AIDS Victim Begins School By Phone

The article itself is fairly short—a single column tucked off to the side of page 5—but Steve reads it with a racing heart and bated breath, despite its fairly generic reporting.

In the midst of all the extra-dimensional and foreign-adversarial threats—not to mention the added shock and thrill of Steve’s recent self-discovery—both he and Robin had somehow managed to forget about this more mundane danger.

His hands are shaking as he looks down at the paper, and his vision blurs out of focus.

Is it already in him? Has it been in him all along? Something festering that he needs to cut away?

The skin of his thighs itches with the need to be scraped apart. New scars to join the old. But—but he promised Robin—

—he wants to just pick up the phone and call her like he’s gotten used to doing over the past few weeks. But he can’t. She’s in school, and he can’t call the school because what would he even say? They wouldn’t pull her out of class because a random former student is calling because his—

—his breath is coming in short pants and he’s gonna collapse, he can’t—

He falls to the floor and flails around until he manages to get his back pressed up against a flat surface. He can’t discern anything about his surroundings with his vision still a mess. He takes in gasping breath after gasping breath, but he can’t get any air because there’s a fist around his lungs, around his heart. His ears are ringing and he feels like a part of himself has detached and floated away to two years ago in the Byers’ living room or last year in the junkyard or, or—

He squeezes his fists. Tries to recall the feeling of lacquered wood against his palms.

He doesn’t know what to do. Where to go. Who can he—?

He doesn’t know how he makes it to a phone, or how he gets his shaking hands to key in numbers, but he does, and it’s ringing and ringing and—

“Hello? Byers’ residence.” Joyce sounds mildly apprehensive. And Steve only knows a little of what November of 1983 was like for her, but he guesses that answering the phone to the sounds of a hyperventilating teenager on the other side probably isn’t her idea of a good time.

“Joyce,” he gasps out.

“Steve? What’s wrong, baby, what’s going on?” She sounds well and truly panicked now, but in a ready-to-grab-a-pitchfork-and-torch kind of way, because Joyce Byers has never met a problem she can’t bully her way through (it reminds him a little of Nancy). Something about the obvious care and concern in her voice pushes the tears that have been welling up over the edge to streak down his face.

“I— N-nothing— Just— Can’t—” he can only get in one word between breaths, so he sucks in a great big wheezing one to finish, “Can’t breathe!”

“Oh, honey. Okay, listen to the sound of my voice, alright, Steve? I want you to try to take in one great big breath, okay? So breathe in for a count of five with me.” He hears her take in a breath, and then start counting soft and slow. Like a heartbeat. He tries to follow, feeling his lungs expand as air rattles in his chest. “Good, that’s good,” she says. “Now hold that for five, four, three, two, one.” He holds his breath, feeling how it fills out the gaping cavity at the center of him. “And exhale for five, four, three, two, one.” Steve lets the breath out, and his heart still feels like it’s racing, but when Joyce tells him to breathe in again, he finds that he can. He sits against the wall, slowly sucking in breaths as Joyce talks him through it, and eventually the tears start to clear as well.

Right when his breathing is starting to even back out Joyce says, “Okay, Steve, can you name five things you can see for me right now?”

“What?” His brain can’t make sense of why she’d ask that.

“Just try it for me honey, alright?”

“Okay,” he says, throat feeling rough and dry. His vision has cleared enough for him to look around and see that he made it to the hall phone. “Hardwood floors,” he starts, twisting the phone cord around his finger. “The phone cord—uh, it’s blue.” He doesn’t know if he should be descriptive or not, so he figures he may as well throw it in. “I can see, uh, the refrigerator in the kitchen from where I’m sitting. And there’s a, um, vase of some kind of fake flower on this little side table down the hall. Does that last one count as two things?”

Joyce laughs a little, sounding relieved. “Sure it does, honey. Now can you name four things you can feel, or touch?”

“The phone cord,” he repeats automatically, still looping it around his fingers. “and the receiver against my ear, it’s, uh, cool, and smooth. And I can feel the collar of my shirt pressing against the back of my neck. And, uh, my hair brushing against my forehead.”

“Okay, okay. You’re doing so well, Steve. You got three things you can hear for me?”

“Uh.” His left ear has been a bit wonky for months, and it’s hard to get any sound to register in it on a good day, and he’s got the phone receiver pressed up against his right, so he really can’t make out anything except— “I can hear you breathing,” he tells Joyce. And then he switches the side the receiver’s on and strains himself to figure out what other sounds he can pick out. “I think I can hear a few cars on the road outside? And the air conditioner in the house.” He switches the receiver back to his right ear.

“Alright, Steve,” Joyce says with an encouraging determination—reminiscent of a coach pulling someone off the bench in the final moments of a game. “Now give me two things you can smell.”

Steve lets his eyes slip closed as he takes in a big breath. “Farrah Fawcett hairspray,” he says, blushing a little. Joyce just laughs loud, and happy, like he’s startled it out of her, and he’s happy that he’s been able to make her laugh so much in spite of everything. He thinks she probably doesn’t get to that enough.

“So that’s your secret,” she says.

“You take that to your grave, Joyce.”

“Of course!” She says, sounding a little conspiratorial. “One other thing you can smell?”

Steve takes in another breath. His sense of smell has never been great, and it’s only gotten worse with each successive concussion, but he tries his best to pick up on anything aside from the hairspray he used this morning. He takes a sniff at the polo he has on today and says “Uh, my shirt, I guess? It smells kind of…lemony?” He thinks that might be from the body wash he uses.

“Good, good. Now one thing you can taste.”

“The coffee I had this morning before going to pick up Robin.” The remnants of it are bitter on his tongue.

“Alright. How’re you feeling, Steve?”

“Better,” he answers, and is surprised by how readily it comes—and that it’s not even a lie. His heart has slowed down, and he’s breathing easy again without having to concentrate on it. “How did you know to do that?” He and Robin can usually talk each other down from these bouts of panicky hyperventilation they both get, but it takes much longer, and often gets a lot worse before it gets better.

“It’s something Dr. Owens taught me to do with Will early on after he got back. It didn’t always work, because his episodes weren’t actually panic attacks, in the end, but there were times when it seemed to settle him back down after a bad dream.”

“Panic attacks?” Steve asks. He hasn’t heard the term before.

“Yeah, Steve. I’m pretty sure that’s what you were having.”

“Oh.”

“Do you get them a lot?”

Steve rubs and rolls the cord between his fingers again. “Uh, sometimes? More, now. After Starcourt.”

“Yeah.”

The two of them are silent for a while. Silence over the phone is always a little weird to Steve, when he can’t see the other person’s face to guess at how they’re feeling. But right now it’s not bothering him too much.

“After Will came back…Doctor Owens said he could have something called post-traumatic stress. At this point, I think we all probably do.”

Steve laughs. “Yeah, probably.”

“Do you wanna talk about it?” The way she asks sounds like she’s just as prepared to take a ‘no’ as a ‘yes,’ but is offering him the space if he needs it.

“I…I don’t know. It wasn’t actually about…” he makes a vague gesture to encompass ‘all of this’, even though he knows she can’t see it. “Wasn’t about Upside Down shit, or Russians, or monsters.”

“Doesn’t mean you can’t talk about it,” Joyce says, too kindly.

Steve grimaces. He’s pretty sure of all the adults he has reason to cross paths with that Joyce Byers is the most likely to not be terrible about this but… “I don’t know if I can,” he whispers, sounding choked up again.

Steve thinks maybe she can hear some of the fear in it, because when she talks again she’s switched back into the sort of gentling tone that she’d used when he was still actively panicking. “I know we don’t really know each other that well, Steve, and I know that you and Jonathan have your history.” Steve winces. “But I’ve seen how you are with the boys—and with Max and El—and I don’t think there’s anything you could tell me that would make me trust you any less with them, or with Will, okay?”

Steve rubs a hand through his hair and lets out a whooshing breath. “Okay.” The line falls quiet again, and he thinks Joyce is giving him space to either speak up, or ask her to move on. “Have you, um, heard about Ryan White?”

Joyce, to her credit, takes the change of subject in stride. “I have,” she says, her tone considering. “I’ve been following along, actually. Reminds me of Will, a little.”

“Yeah,” Steve agrees on an exhale. “Well, uh, I was reading a story about him today and I…I just remembered, all of a sudden, that there are things that could kill me besides monsters and Russian spies.”

“And for some reason that was scarier?” Joyce doesn’t sound judgmental. She sounds exactly like she gets it, actually.

Steve laughs, humorlessly. “Yeah. Can’t take a nail bat to a disease.”

“No, you can’t.”

Silence falls again, and this one feels final, though it still doesn’t chafe. “Joyce?”

“Yeah, hon?”

“Thank you. I don’t…I don’t even really know why I called, it was just…”

“The only number you thought would get an answer?” Again, she doesn’t sound judgmental, or accusatory. It’s all just easy understanding that feels almost impossible to believe. She gives of herself so much and so freely, and Steve has never known an adult willing to do that for him before.

“Yeah.”

“Well, I’m always willing to pick up the phone for you, Steve. Anytime you need.”

Steve nods, “Thank you, Joyce.”

“Anytime, honey.”

Steve hangs up first, not wanting to hear the empty dial tone echoing in his ear. He presses his head back against the wall and feels at once heavier and lighter than he had before.

Notes:

For anyone who doesn’t know, Ryan White was a teenager with hemophilia from Kokomo, Indiana, and who contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion in the early 80s. He was diagnosed late in 1984, and was initially too ill to return to school. When he attempted to return for the 1985-86 school year, he was barred from doing so by the school (and later the Superintendent), and accommodations were made for him to listen to his classes over the phone. The White family filed a lawsuit to overturn the school’s decision, which resulted in a months-long legal battle that eventually ended with Ryan being permitted to return to school the spring of 1986. The family ultimately ended up moving to Cicero, Indiana after repeated threats of violence in Kokomo. Ryan’s story and the White family’s advocacy helped to shift and destigmatize national perceptions of AIDS, though the family had to continuously push back against framings of Ryan as an “innocent” victim of the epidemic relative to people with AIDS who were gay and/or IV drug users. The article title in the fic is pulled from an AP article that ran on his first day of school that year, August 26, 1985. Similar articles ran on August 24, 1985 as well as August 26, 1985 in Greencastle, Indiana’s Banner-Graphic.

#steve harrington #gay steve harrington #read writes #phryctoria #semiotics 'verse

[stobinesque]

WIP Wednesday!

Tagged by @eriquin and @steves-strapcollection, thank you!!

THE RULES

In a reblog (or new post w/ rules attached), post up to five (5) filenames of your WIPs; not titles, file names.

Post a snippet from one of them. Snippet must be words you wrote in the last 7 days. We’re posting progress here. If you haven’t made any, go make some and come back to post!

After you’ve posted, people can send you an ask with one of your file names. You must then write 3 sentences in that file. If the filename is one you can’t share from (for example, an event fic), write 3 sentences on it anyway, and then 3 more on another to share.

That’s it! You can invite others to join in, or just post. If you tag me in your post, I will send you an ask request!

THE WIPS

Jeff is Steve's Bi Awakening AU (fwiw I already have two of these sitting in my inbox from a couple weeks ago)

wigwag [Steve's Big Gay Sex Adventure]

Wayfinder [S4 Fix-it, Lucas POV]

phryctoria bonus chapter 7 (marginalia and annotations of How To Have Sex in an Epidemic)

THE (no pressure) TAGS

@devondespresso @starryeyedjanai @xenon-demon @inairbinad @hellsfireclub @delta-piscium @steddielations @thefreakandthehair @skjachukson @steventhusiast -- and anyone else who wants to participate!

THE SNIPPET

uhhhh, I'm pretty sure most of the writing I've done in the past 7 days has already been shared in various asks (or my steddie microfic), so have a sneak peek at chapter 5 of phryctoria, which I spent a good chunk of today revising.

Robin yawns again, stretching her arms high above her head. “Absolutely worth it,” she says, sounding a bit smug.

Steve shakes his head, but can’t bite back the smile she brings to his face. He clicks back into a conscious awareness of their surroundings, and realizes they’re passing by Weathertop. (Try as he might to deny it, the kids’ names for locations around Hawkins have fixed themselves in his mind.) He pulls off and parks the beamer on the side of the road, circling around the front to pull Robin out of the passenger seat. “C’mon, Bobbin, we’ve got a hill to climb.”

Halfway up, Robin turns to him and starts flapping a hand against his chest. “Hey, hey! How’s that song go? The hills are alive, dah-da-dah daaah dah, you know?”

Steve smirks. “Aren’t your ears supposed to be little geniuses? Robs, the next lines are literally the title of the movie.”

“Pretty sure it was a musical first.”

“This does not actually help your case, you know that, right?”

“Whatever, dingus. Just tell me how the song goes.”

“You sure you wanna hear me sing?”

“Okay, you’ll notice how I didn’t say ‘sing how it goes for me,’ you could just tell me the words.”

“No, no, now you’re going to be subjected to the musical stylings of the Harrington family singers, because,” Steve leans into her space and starts singing, sickly sweet, “My heart wants to sing every soooong it hears.” His head is almost fully resting against Robin’s shoulder as he looks up at her with a shit eating grin.

“Oh, my god, get off me,” she says, shoving at him while she laughs.

He lets himself be pushed away, taking a couple of dramatic, stumbling steps away from her before righting himself and drifting back into her space. “You know the next lines have always been my favorite though?”

“Do you have the whole song memorized?!”

“...yeah?” Steve frowns at her. “Robs, it’s one of my favorite movies! I thought that’s why you asked!”

Robin shakes her head, looking at him a little dumbstruck. “Nope, I’m pretty sure I would have remembered that little Harrington factoid.”

“Well…yeah. My mom really loved it, so I guess I just watched it a lot growing up? Especially when my dad was out of town—before she started going on the trips with him—because then we could sing along.”

Robin opens her mouth to say something, before seeming to make the conscious decision not to approach the whole ‘you couldn’t sing along to the movie about not being allowed to sing?’ thing with a ten foot pole, and snapping her mouth shut again. “Huh.” She takes a couple more striding steps forward with a pensive look on her face. “So...how does the next part go?”

He smiles at her, and even without being able to see his own face he can tell that it’s radiant. “My heart…wants to beat like the wings of the birds that rise from the lake to the trees.” He looks at her, and he can feel the way his gaze has become just a little too intense.

“Birds, huh?” She knocks his shoulder with her own, a gentle smile on her face. “Yep. Always loved ‘em,” he says, his heart feeling a little gooey in his chest.

#wip wednesday #read writes #phryctoria #i maybe listened to the whole sound of music soundtrack on repeat yesterday

[stobinesque]

phryctoria | chapter 4: one by three (lambda)

Sometimes your gay awakening is just having someone to show you it’s possible. Steve and Robin go on a field trip.

CW: References to the AIDS Epidemic

[1][2][3][4][5][6 & 7] | [Read on AO3]

“You look like shit,” Robin says upon entering the car.

“Thanks, Buckley. And how was your day?” Steve starts pulling out of the parking lot as soon as Robin’s seat belt is on.

Robin shrugs. “Whatever. Fine.” She puts on her ‘I will not drop this’ face. “Spill. Why do you look like someone killed Henderson’s cat again?”

Steve tenses up, unsure of how to broach the conversation. “I had a—well, Joyce called it a panic attack?”

“You called Joyce?” Robin’s voice is laden with shock. It’s not like he’s known for asking others for help (sometimes he wonders if he’s known for anything anymore—except getting the shit beat out of him). But Steve can’t articulate what compelled him to call the Byers’ rather than just wait it out, and he knows how to explain it to Robin even less.

“Yeah.” He shrugs. “Just kinda happened. I don’t think I was really all there when I did it.”

“Oh, babe.” Robin smacks a hand on his shoulder with a little too much force to be comforting in any sort of conventional manner, but is so utterly Robin that he’s comforted by it regardless. He can’t bring himself to shrug her off, so he just shoots back a small, dismissive grimace. “Flashbacks?” Robin guesses.

He shakes his head, grip tightening on the steering wheel. “No. Just…” Steve runs a hand through his hair, then immediately looks into the rear-view mirror to straighten it back out again. “Um. You know how you suggested I go to Indy to…experiment?”

Robin nods with a small frown on her face and drops her hand from his shoulder. He immediately misses its weight.

Steve exhales. “I think we both forgot a crucial reality.”

Robin’s frown deepens for a moment, brow furrowing, before understanding breaks across her face, and her eyes widen in horror. “Oh—Oh, shit. Fuck, Steve, I’m so sorry!”

Steve turns to look at her with a mix of confusion and agitation. “What do you have to be sorry for?”

“Why are you emphasizing ‘you’? If I don’t have to be sorry for anything you definitely don’t have to be sorry.” Robin’s hands flail about as she gesticulates widely. “And I’m sorry because I’m the idiot who suggested we take you on a disease-courting spree.”

“Hey, don’t call my best friend an idiot,” Steve says gently. “And I think—uh, I don’t know, that doesn’t seem like the best way to put that, probably?”

“No, I know, I just—God, you’ve survived so much fucking insane shit over the years, and the idea that I could lose you to some kind of virus?” Robin reaches up to tug at her hair, her eyes going round and wide like saucers. “The idea of losing you slowly and watching you just…disappear in front of me? That’s more terrifying than anything the fucking Russians could do to us.”

“Believe me, I know.”

Robin is silent for a few beats. When it’s stretched on for long enough that it begins to feel awkward, Steve turns to look at her. Robin’s lips are moving around half-formed words the way they do when she’s not-quite-talking herself through a puzzle. “Okay, okay, I got it.”

“You’ve got what, Robs?”

“I think we can still go ahead with the plan, just with a few modifications!” She has a bright and excited look on her face. Steve is skeptical.

“Uh-huh. And what are these modifications?”

“Well—okay, the virus is transmitted through, like, blood and sex, right?”

“I mean—I think so?” There’s still a silent part of him that feels like maybe it’s just…in him already.

Robin nods. “So, like, maybe you can’t have, like, sex sex, but you could still do some stuff, right? Kiss people, maybe? Uh, and…handjobs?”

Steve scrubs a hand over his face. “We are talking about my hypothetical sex life so much more than you said we would be.”

Robin laughs. “And somehow you’re the one who’s horrified about it!”

“I think this is the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to me.” Steve says, entirely deadpan.

“Yep, totally. Definitely the weirdest thing.”

“Anyway, I don’t actually know if I can kiss people! I don’t know how any of it works, Robin!” If he wasn’t driving he’d be throwing his hands up in exasperation.

Robin sobers again. “I know, I’m sorry.” She sounds so solemn. It makes his heart ache.

“No, no, it’s okay. Like I said, you don’t have to be sorry, I’m just...I’m just scared, Rob.”

“I know you are, but you don’t have to be, okay?” She looks very much like she is also terrified, but is trying to hide it for his sake. “I’m right here with you, and…we’ll figure it out. Just another code to crack, right? We can still go to Indy, find a bookshop there, maybe? Heck, maybe their library even has something helpful.”

Steve frowns. Reading and research have never been his strong suit. He leaves that to the Nancys, Robins, and Dustins of the world. But they’ve all been pretty good at walking him through things, when he needs it. (Well—Robin and Nancy have. Dustin usually speaks too fast, and uses words that are too long, and assumes a general base level of context and understanding that Steve rarely possesses.) So if Robin wants to go on a research trip to figure out how to get him laid—safely—he’s not going to stop her. “Sure, all right. Sounds like a plan.”

“Sweet. And then we can figure out a bar to hit up for next time!”

“Yeah.” Steve taps his thumb against the steering wheel as something occurs to him— “Hey, Robbie, do you even have a fake ID?”

“Uh…no.”

“Then how, exactly, were you planning on executing your grand plan of us going to a gay bar to get me laid?”

“I’ll be honest, I hadn’t really thought about it that far.”

Steve wipes a hand over his face again, feeling like he’s dealing with one of the kids, and not his best friend who’s only a year younger than him. “Okay. Well. I’ll get that taken care of.”

“Sure, yeah. That sounds like more of a you-thing than a me-thing.”

Steve shakes his head. “The things I do for you,” he says.

And if it brings a small little smile to his face, he makes sure to keep it hidden from her.

***

Saturday afternoon finds Steve wandering the aisles of a small bookshop while Robin combs through a shelf of pulp novels with a single-minded determination that would put Nancy Wheeler to shame.

The shop isn’t what he expected—not that he had any particular image in mind for what a bookstore catering to gay people would look like. But it’s definitely not what he would expect of a—well, a straight bookstore, he supposes. None of the shelves match each other—they all look like they were picked up from various garage sales and thrift shops. Each of the mismatched shelves are plastered with collages of newspaper clippings, stickers, and old postcards from around the country.

Steve distracts himself with deciphering the errata papering the shelves while Robin browses. The newspaper clippings all openly reference lesbians and gay men—news of lunch events, and protests; even some celebrity gossip. Across the various comic strips he notices recurring names—Mo, Lois, and…Sparrow Pidgeon?? among them. The stickers boast an assortment of images and symbols that Steve either doesn’t recognize, or else cannot parse the significance of—there’s a double-headed axe, clusters of violets (which he supposes could just be aesthetic, but in the context of everything else it strikes him as Important in some way), and a symbol that looks a little like a wishbone (it reminds Steve a bit of some of the letters from the Russian alphabet, but he’s pretty sure that even if it is a letter that it’s probably from a different language).

After getting bored with his perusal of the shelves he wanders over to a corner taken up by wire racks of cassettes, and a couple shelves of what appear to be second-hand vinyls. A lot of the music is from singers and bands he doesn’t recognize—Fifth Column, Lydia Lunch, Au Pairs—but mixed in are albums he’s more familiar with. He’s looking over Glorious Results of a Misspent Youth when he hears Robin’s loud cackle from across the store.

He follows the sound of her laughter, and finds her with a basket full of pulps dangling from her arm, and an open magazine in her hands. “What’ve ya got there, Buckley?”

“Oh my God, Steve, you have to look at this!” She passes the magazine over to him, and even if it wasn’t one of the only items of actual interest on the page, it isn’t hard to guess that the column she’s cackling over is the one titled “16 Tips for Heterosexual Women: What to do when you meet a Lesbian.” Steve’s not really sure how much he’s allowed to laugh at it, but the first two points pull no punches, and he really can’t help it.

1) Do not run screaming from the room. This is rude.

For some reason he can hear that one delivered perfectly in El’s gentle deadpan.

2) If you must back away, do so slowly and with discretion.

And—it’s funny, but the idea of someone needing to flee the scene because Robin trusted them enough to open up like that makes his chest ache.

It’s yet another thing he has to worry about for himself now, too. And, sure, in some ways this was something he had always known, but ran from. But now that he’s accepted it, he has to contend with the fact that there’s this whole new aspect of himself for people to hate. This whole new thing that he has to spend conscious effort keeping locked away from people who would wish him harm.

He shakes his head, letting the thoughts dissipate, for now, and continues reading down the list.

He can’t suppress a small snort, thinking about Carol, when he gets to number seven—do not immediately start talking about your boyfriend or husband in order to make it clear that you are straight. She already knows. And he feels a spark of recognition that makes his cheeks heat when he reaches ten—do not ask her how she got this way. Instead ask yourself how you got that way.

“What is this?” He asks, full of a bright-eyed curiosity that feels unfamiliar to him. He flips the magazine closed to get a look at the cover—“The Works” is emblazoned across the top in blocky letters, a gear taking the place of the ‘O’.

“They have a whole rack of magazines and pamphlets and ‘zines over there. Most of them seemed kinda gay.”

“‘Zine’?”

“Yeah, like a kinda homemade magazine? But shorter, and a lot of them were on really specific topics or whatever.”

Steve nods along as he starts flipping through what turns out to be the August issue of The Works. There’s a bunch of short news articles, opinion pieces, advertisements, and listings for local events that have now largely passed. “Hey, is there a newer issue of this?”

“Oh, yeah—” Robin digs a rolled up magazine out of her basket and hands it over to him. He takes it and flips through that one as well, making note of some events he might try to drag Robin to.

“Looks like the place to be is The 21 Club if we’re looking for gay bars. Although—” Steve his eyes scans down the inside cover, squinting hard to make out the tiny text. “—hey, there are a lot of gay bars in Indianapolis?”

“Huh. Bar crawl?”

Steve smirks, “Sure, Buckles, I’ll take you on the gayest bar crawl this side of the, uh…”

“I think the expression goes ‘of the Mississippi,’ but I’m gonna guess that you could take me on a gayer bar crawl in New York.” Robin tilts her head, considering. “We could use the Ohio River instead, except that I’m so sure you could take me on a gayer bar crawl in San Francisco—also the Ohio River feeds into the Mississippi anyway, and it doesn’t really reach far enough to work for this idiom, so I guess that makes it all moot.”

“Okay, fine!” Steve throws his hands in the air. “Gayest bar crawl in the Midwest.”

“Theeere ya go,” Robin gives him a mock-comforting pat on the shoulder. “Hey, wanna take a look for yourself? I saw a couple things that might satisfy your research needs.”

Steve walks over to the rack Robin’s indicated, looking over an assortment of magazines, pamphlets, and little hand-stapled booklets that look like they were put together in someone’s bedroom, right down to handwriting. The little booklets—zines, he guesses, from Robin’s description—cover a wide range of topics, from anarchist organizing (seems contradictory to him), to abortion and birth control, protest-safety and field medicine for activists (he grabs that one, because much as he hates it, he thinks he might find use for it in the future), and herbalism.

Also. A lot of them are about sex. He’s actually a little overwhelmed by how many of them seem to be about sex. He’s not even totally sure what half of them are referring to. He’s about to just grab a couple things at random when the title of a booklet that looks like it was printed more professionally than most of the others catches his eye.

How to Have Sex in an Epidemic

Steve snatches it up immediately, not even bothering to flip through it. “Come on, let’s go,” he says, turning on his heel like he might catch fire if he stands there for a moment longer.

He’s never really understood Dustin’s impulse to always head straight for the library whenever he doesn’t know or understand something—he does understand Dustin’s tendency to go to Mr. Clarke with weird science questions, if only because verbal explanations and visual demonstrations generally work much better for him—but right now he thinks he’s been granted a small glimpse into the thrill that access to knowledge seems to bring Dustin. (Robin’s knowledge gathering reminds him more of a magpie picking up every shiny thing it comes across, which he also doesn’t exactly understand, but it meshes more with his own experience of the world.)

“Oh—okay, sure,” Robin says from behind him. “Steve! Hey, Steve, wait up!” She does an awkward little hop-skip-jog to catch up to him, and wraps a hand around his shoulder before he can reach the register. She has an intent look on her face. “Hey, I uh—” she cuts herself off, biting her lip. “They have some reading glasses over there?”

Steve frowns. “You have perfect vision Robin, what would you need reading glasses for?”

Robin rolls her eyes. “I know I have perfect vision, dingus.” She’s now dragging him by the arm in the opposite direction of the counter. “But, look, I know you don’t read that much—” she says it matter-of-factly, without a trace of judgment in her tone, and Steve could kiss her for it. “—but when you do you have a tendency to squint. A lot. Like, more than is normal for a person with totally perfect vision. Which is, generally, zero amount.”

“That sounds wrong.”

“Well, it’s not. Anyway, what should actually happen is you should go see a doctor to get your vision and hearing checked out to see if anything has been permanently damaged as a result of you multiple head injuries, but since I know you won’t do that, I figure the least you could do is try to at least mitigate the amount of strain you’re putting on you’re probably-already-fucked vision.”

“Yeah, fine, whatever.” Steve lets himself be dragged, and looks over all the plastic frames assembled on the little spinner. “So, what, I just put on a pair at random and see if they work?”

“Sounds like the best plan of attack, Steve-o.”

Steve groans. “Oh, no, don’t call me that.”

“No Steve-o?”

He shakes his head.

“Stevie?”

He wrinkles his nose, thinking of Tommy’s jeering tone following after him, and pre-Russians-Robin calling him Stevie-boy with that slight air of condescension. “Mmm, only sometimes.” He trusts her to figure out when.

“Okay…Stephen?”

“Ugh, no, never.” Stephen has only ever been spit out between clenched teeth while he was pinned up against a wall.

“Okay, okay, how about…’Steph’!”

It draws him up short. It’s not an obvious nickname for “Steve,” really. Robin’s one of the only people who’s not a school administrator—or his parents—who knows how his full name is actually spelled. Even then, it’s too obviously feminine to really work as a nickname for him, right? At least ‘Stevie’ has some plausible deniability behind it. But Robin doesn’t suggest it with anything resembling a laugh at his expense. All he hears in it is a warmth and genuine affection that he’s unaccustomed to hearing when people say his name. That’s got to be why it feels so right to him.

“Yeah,” he says, sounding a little more comfortable than he feels. “Yeah, Steph is okay. But maybe…maybe only in places like this? Or—or when we’re alone?”

“Sure thing, Steph.” Robin smiles at him, rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet. “My next option was gonna be ‘Fen.’ I don’t know how I have a name that has like twenty possible nicknames, meanwhile you’re walking around with one that only has, like, four. It’s unbalanced and unnatural.”

Steve tilts his head. “Fen’s not bad. I mean, absolutely no one other than you would be allowed to use it. But it’s fun. Weird.”

“Ah, the Bobbin rule.”

“Exactly.”

“Okay, Steph slash Fen, stop stalling and start trying on glasses.”

Steve rolls his eyes. “So, what, I just grab a pair at random and…put them on?”

“Yep.”

Steve curls his lip a bit as he pulls a pair of tortoiseshell frames off the display. He tries them on, and everything more than a foot away goes distended and blurry. His face scrunches up in response, and he turns back to Robin. “What d’you think?”

Robin wrinkles her nose. “Not you. Do they help, though?”

Steve shrugs. “Dunno—hand me one of those?” Robin passes him one of the magazines in her basket, and Steve flips to a random page and starts reading. It’s definitely easier than usual, but—

“You’re still squinting.”

“Okay, so, higher than these, and—” Steve catches a glimpse of himself in the little mirror affixed to the display, and grimaces, “And different frames.” He picks out a pair with round, dark blue frames and a higher magnification on the lens. “How about these?”

“Ooh, you look so studious,” Robin says, affecting the air of a swooning acolyte.

“Oh, shut up.”

“I won’t.”

“Fine, whatever. Guess I’ll try these.” Reading the words in front of him is again much easier than he’s grown used to, and it’s an improvement over the previous pair. He can actually hold the magazine at a comfortable distance from his face, but he still feels himself straining his eyes a bit.

Steve puts the glasses back on the rack, and continues searching the spinner, looking for a pair with a higher magnification, and only coming up with three pairs: Another set of tortoiseshells; a chunky, rectangular pair that Steve rejects out of hand because they remind him too much of his grandfather’s; and a pair of aviator-style frames. He tries those on, attempting the magazine again. And it…it’s better. Comfortable, even.

Reading’s always been slow-going for him, and he thinks Robin might be right that he should actually get his eyes tested, because for the first time in long time he makes it through a whole page without the beginnings of a headache creeping in.

He takes a look in the mirror, and doesn’t even hate how they look on his face. “Okay. These ones.”

“Oooh, take me away, flyboy?” Robin hooks her arm through his, and starts heading in the direction of the register.

“Is that supposed to be a reference? I don’t think that’s actually a reference.” Steve pulls the glasses off and points them in Robin’s face. “More to the point: we are not Han and Leia.”

“Han and Leia could be us if they were cooler.”

“You take that back right now.”

“Nope! We’ve got the better dynamic! Name a dynamic duo better than us.”

“...I can’t.”

“Eeeexactly, Fen!” She leans into his side with a smug little smile. “Now come on, let’s get out of here! We’ve got some reading to do.”

Notes:

The idea for the bookstore spawned from the fact that there was a feminist/gay-friendly bookstore that was open in Indianapolis in 1985 named Dreams & Swords; I have no idea what it looked like though, that all came from me guessing how a bunch of lesbians would design a bookstore.

The characters in the comic strips that Steve finds are pulled from Alison Bechdel’s strip Dykes to Watch Out For, which ran from 1983 to 2008.

The double-headed axe symbol Steve sees is a labrys, which lesbians began using as an identifying symbol in the 70s.

The Works was an actual publication that ran in Indianapolis (and was distributed widely within the rest of the Midwest) in the 80s. It was renamed to “The New Works” in the late 80s and continued running into the early 90s. In addition to local & national gay news, the publication also featured a directory of gay businesses that covered it’s whole distribution area (there was also a local Gay Business Association!), personal ads, and community events. The magazine’s entire publication history is digitally archived in the Chris Gonzalez GLBT Archive Collection.

How to Have Sex in an Epidemic was also an actual publication, written by Michael Callen and Richard Berkowitz in 1982/83. By the time Robin and Steve are visiting this bookstore in 1985, AIDS research had come pretty far relative to what was known in ‘82/’83, so some parts of HTHSIAE would have already been out of date at that point. However, the philosophy and prose of HTHSIAE is genuinely quite beautiful, and I thought it was worth it to include Steve having access to its actual text. So, whether or not this would have been historically feasible, I have decided that Steve found an annotated copy that corrects some of the science/safer sex recommendations of the original (though it should be noted that the recommendations for safe sex re: AIDS in 1985 would still differ in places from what would be recommended today!) I would highly recommend taking the time to read the pamphlet yourself—it’s a reasonably quick read, and provides a really interesting look into the early years of the epidemic.

#steve harrington #stobin #platonic stobin #gay steve harrington #read writes #phryctoria #semiotics 'verse

[stobinesque]

Chapters: 7/7 Fandom: Stranger Things (TV 2016) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Robin Buckley & Steve Harrington, Joyce Byers & Steve Harrington Characters: Steve Harrington, Robin Buckley Additional Tags: Coming Out, Gay Steve Harrington, Internalized Homophobia, HIV/AIDS Crisis, Panic Attacks, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Lesbian Robin Buckley Series: Part 1 of semiotics Summary:

Sometimes your gay awakening is just having someone to show you it's possible.

she’s finished!

#read writes #phryctoria #semiotics 'verse #i will make a masterpost when i don't have to be at work in ten minutes

[stobinesque]

Ok ok I'll say what I want about the stobin writing post (please why are you attacking me 😭), but every time it pops up and I have to force myself to write something I'm stuck on I end up stumbling onto an idea or piece of dialogue that I never could have planned myself.

#just wrote steve and robin having some stancy thoughts #during a scene i was very much not planning or expecting to go in that direction! #this chapter is a mess but i think itll end uo being my favorite one when im finished #although it is also getting LONG #phryctoria

[stobinesque]

phryctoria for wip wednesday!

ahhhh! Thank you! I'm currently drafting ahead in chapter 5, which is both very messy right now, and also the (more than three!) sentences I just wrote don't really make any sort of sense without a good deal of context, so I'm sharing a snippet from chapter 3 that I revised earlier today!

CWs: References to the AIDS epidemic/internalized homophobia (the intersection of those two things), panic attacks, and allusions to self-harm

Help me write!

Is it already in him? Has it been in him all along? Something festering that he needs to cut away? The skin of his thighs itches with the need to be scraped apart. New scars to join the old. But—but he promised Robin— —he wants to just pick up the phone and call her like he's gotten used to doing over the past few weeks. But he can't. She's in school, and he can't call the school because what would he even say? They wouldn't pull her out of class because a random former student is calling because his— —his breath is coming in short pants and he's gonna collapse, he can't—

#wip wednesday #read writes #phryctoria #technically AIDS is not directly mentioned in the snippet but that is what it's about #but actually so many thanks for the nudge to add to chapter 5. i've been avoiding it

[stobinesque]

A part of why I ended up writing phryctoria is because I've read so many Steddie fics that double as coming out fics, and while I love many of them, and have absolutely no issues with it as a setup, the more I encounter it the more I end up thinking about my own self discovery process and I start to feel alienated from that kind of arc. Because if my first gay crush had liked me back I think that would have ended up being super stressful! Coming to terms with being who you are can be really messy and overwhelming and trying to also be in a relationship at the same time would be so, so tricky. And I do love both the fics that explore that, and the fics that kind of handwave it away. But it does make me crave a story where Steve gets to go through all that messy (and sometimes fun!) self discovery with support along the way (Robin).

In this fic I am writing Steve as a gay man, because I don't see that characterization for him explored all too often. But there's been a few posts recently about how bi!Steve almost doesn't read as bi in many fics, and I think it might actually tie back into the trend of having Steve realize he's queer because of a crush who is also the love interest for the fic—I think people end up marrying two things together when they do this: the romantic trope of "The One," and an attempt at exploring compulsory heterosexuality.

Comphet absolutely affects bi people, and can be a big part of why it takes some bi people a while to recognize their attraction for what it was. (This I think being the source of a lot of bi!Steve set-ups where he genuinely doesn't know it's an option available to him.) For me, I kiiiind of knew I was attracted to girls, but I didn't really notice because there just... wasn't any avenue to explore it. I was attracted to boys and had crushes on them, so I could easily engage in straight society and even if I found the occasional girl pretty, it took a whole lot to break through the noise. Even after knowing I was sexually attracted to women, it still took having an IRL crush to really internalize the fact that I was queer. But that wasn't because the girl I had a crush on was prettier or more awesome than any guy I'd had a crush on. She just happened to be the first person to break through the straight noise.

So when the first boy to break through Steve's straight noise is also the love interest of the story being written, people often end up writing a Steve who is pretty dismissive of his sexual/romantic history with girls. I don't think any of this is intentional: I think writers fall back on typical romance tropes of the love interest being singularly Made For the hero. But instead that gets mixed up with the comphet exploration, and it can result in a Steve who is not-quite-gay but also not-really-bi, because there isn't actually an exploration of Steve's bisexuality, it's an exploration of his attraction to men (or, more accurately, to one man).

And to pull in the biphobia aspect: I think people really just don't know how to write bisexuality (unless they're also writing polyamory). It's a bit taboo for characters in romance stories to discuss their attraction to people who aren't the love interest, so despite the fact that basically everyone I know that's in a (monogamous) relationship still talks about their attractions to other people pretty consistently, in fic you don't really see bi characters talking to other people about people they find attractive or even really thinking about their attraction within their own head. So Steve can only be bi because we know he has a history of sleeping with women—but we also know that outside of Nancy, none of those became meaningful romantic connections. So he exists in this weird liminal space where he can't be gay (because obviously a womanizer such as himself can't be), but he also can't really be bi (because his attraction to women isn't romantic enough). And if that's not the quintessential bi experience I don't know what is 🙃.

#read rambles #this is all just a tl;dr to say i have a bi steve fic percolating in the back of my head #where he realizes he's bi bc he gets a crush on jeff (who i am sacrificing on the altar of remaining straight for the bit) #i do also enjoy fics whete jonathan is Steve's queer awakening #but even then those are often still framed as a retroactive realization #also i think people underestimate how tricky a position an out bi man would be in the 80s... #(and i understand the fandom wide hesitancy to really delve into the aids crisis but it very much affected all aspects of queer culture!!) #phryctoria #semiotics 'verse

[stobinesque]

Ooh how about Stobin’s gay adventure for wip weekend?

oh, yay! just the push I needed to start a new chapter! [Context for the snippet is that they just got a few 'zines and books from a gay bookshop]

On the way back from the bookstore Robin cranks up the volume on the beemer’s cassette player and they both scream-sing along to the mixtape they’d painstakingly crafted at 2am the night before. Steve drums his hands on the steering wheel along to the beat of “You Spin Me Right Round (Like A Record)” while wind whips through his hair from the cracked windows.  “Okay, so—I’ve got this loose floorboard back in my room—” “Yeah, Robs, I’m aware.” “Shut up, I’m trying to tell you something.” “Oh yeah? What’s that?” “Well you can’t exactly bring your stuff home with you can you?” Steve is silent for a few beats, the mood tanking even while Pete Burns sings  All I know is that to me / You look like you're lots of fun. “Yeah, I guess not.” Steve turns to look over at Robin, whose face has gone all serious. “What about you, though? Are you sure it’s safe to have it at your place?” “Steve, you’ve met my parents—they’re sometimes weird about boundaries, but they don’t go snooping through my stuff. Definitely not to the point of prying up loose floorboards. Is that…?” Robin frowns. “Is that something your dad does?” Steve shrugs. “I don’t really keep stuff in my room for him to find.”

make me write!

#wip weekend #read writes #semiotics 'verse #phryctoria

[stobinesque]

first of all i love the way you title your work so much, like something about it just scratches my brain and second for the wip title game i am here to ask about phryctoria, like literally tell me anything (or a snippet 👀) i'm so intrigued by the title (and yeesssss on it almost being done)

ahhhh thank you del <33 I actually really love titling things! Especially if I'm titling things thematically (as is the case with semiotics 'verse). I have a whole pile of titles waiting for a fitting story idea in my notes folder in scrivener! Also I collect words and turns of phrase like a little linguistic magpie 😅

also by "phryctoria is almost done" I mean I literally just need to post the last chapter (technically two, but chapter 7 is a bonus non-plot chapter) to AO3!! Chapters 1-5 are up, though! The fic is basically Steve realizing he's gay, coming out to Robin, and the two of them trying to figure out how to be Gay Teenagers in Indiana in the Eighties. All if it is set about a month or two after season 3. Really I just need to do one last quick proofread and put the last couple chapters up, so that will probably happen tomorrow or Friday!

The title for this fic was originally "signal fires" and each chapter was named after a fire-starting process, as sort of a prelude to the stronger focus on queer signifiers and semiotics that I'm planning on getting into later in the series, but as I was trawling Wikipedia for semaphore systems I stumbled across this one (which is a type of fire-based semaphore system)! So each chapter title is based on a Greek letter (which let me tell you it sucked whenever I thought I'd settled on title chapters and then accidentally gained a chapter).

I also realized yesterday that I never shared the playlist I made for this fic (specifically for chapter 4, I think?). So please behold my Stobin car mixtape, which Steve and Robin put together for their gay field trip to Indianapolis.

#read writes #tag game #phryctoria #stobin #platonic stobin #music #del💚 #also re ur tags on the original post: no i am not okay 😅

[stobinesque]

ohhhh this is a tough choice but phryctoria for wip wednesday? [shaky eyes emoji here]

Thank you! I've got a first revision pass done of the first half of the chapter now! 💪

Here's a bit of it:

Robin nods with a small frown on her face. She drops her hand from his shoulder, and he immediately misses its weight. Steve exhales. “I think we both forgot a crucial reality.” Robin’s frown deepens for a moment, brow furrowing, before understanding breaks across her face, and her eyes widen in horror. “Oh—Oh, shit. Fuck, Steve, I’m so sorry!” Steve turns to look at her with a mix of confusion and agitation. “What do you have to be sorry for?” “Why are you emphasizing ‘you’? If I don’t have to be sorry for anything you definitely don’t have to be sorry.”

Make me write!

#wip wednesday #read writes #phryctoria #mexican standoff but instead of guns it's stobin wielding unnecessary apologies