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Steve Harrington is, by all accounts, a strong, masculine, capital-m Man. As his parents’ only child – and, therefore, his father’s only son and rightful heir to whatever fortune he might have – there are certain things that are expected of him.
Such as picking a sport and sticking with it until he either gets a full-ride to IU or, like, loses all of his limbs in a tragic accident. Such as finding a nice girl and marrying her straight out of high school before settling down in a nice two-story with a couple of kids. Such as getting a well-paying office job and making a reliably mundane career out of it.
Such as caring about his appearance only enough to make the girls swoon and the college scouts take notice, and nothing beyond that.
In his father’s eyes, Steve is an abject failure. Single, working at a goddamn video rental store for minimum wage, spending all his time with a pack of fifteen-year-olds – it’s all far from the rosy life his dad pictured.
At some point, Steve figured What the hell? and just started leaning into his loser-ness. He accepted the kids’ invitations to their weekly D&D sessions, he started spending half his meager earnings on hair products and clothes that look cool (the other half going towards saving for an apartment once he finally escapes the lonely hell that is his parents’ house), and he stopped giving a fuck about what everyone else said and thought about him.
He started tentatively letting himself look at guys the same way he looks at girls, and finally admitted to himself that maybe his grudge against Jonathan Byers was less about losing Nancy and more about being afraid of what else he wanted.
And so what if his dad scoffs every time he catches sight of Steve in a new, candy-colored shirt, hair styled to fall artfully into his eyes? So what if his dad says things like When did you start looking like such a queer? It’s not like his parents are even home all that much anyway. The insults bounce off the walls of the big, empty house and rocket around Steve’s skull, but there’s not much there for them to stick to. Or so he’s been told.
Steve always figured he’d make a nice drunk someday, once the shine of his youth wore off and all his old high school friends forgot his name. He used to look at Chief Hopper, always stoned or tipsy or sad – or, more often than not, some pitiful combination of all three – and feel like he was staring at some future version of himself. It just felt inevitable that Steve would be a peaked-in-high-school kinda guy. Nothing wrong with that.
So he just… gave up. Or, rather, gave in. Let himself go. Saved the world a couple of times and tried not to miss Nancy too much when his insomnia caught up with him and the house felt just a little too lonely.
And then he met Robin.
Robin who made eight-hour shifts at the mall feel like mere minutes, who laughed at his jokes and called him dingus and dipshit and moron but never made him feel like any of those things. Robin who hated Steve in high school but still, somehow, wants to be his friend now. He knows she likes girls, and that’s fine, and Steve loves her anyway – like the sister he never had, like a best friend, like someone he can’t imagine living his life without.
It’s nice having a girl for a best friend. Weird, because Steve’s never had one of those before, didn’t even know it was a possibility really, but nice. He’s learned far more about shaving and skincare and sexism than he ever really wanted. And periods. God, hormones are hell. And Steve, in turn, has tried his best to teach Robin all the really important, masculine skills he's acquired over the years, like how to shotgun a beer and shoot a basketball. Robin, bless her, tries her best. Even if her best, well, leaves something to be desired.
-
They’re chilling on Robin’s floor one Friday night, just two young adults with nothing better to do, while Robin paints her toenails over a bed of toilet tissue to protect the carpet. The color she’s using is an almost garish red which, since Robin isn’t exactly the most skilled at painting nails, smears across her cuticles in a way that makes it look like someone’s just pulled her nails off, leaving the exposed skin raw and bloody. It's a fate Steve has pondered frequently ever since it nearly happened to him.
“It’s just not even that good of a movie!” Robin exclaims, the culmination of a tirade against The Breakfast Club and the resulting influx of customers to the store who keep asking – with varying levels of desperation – whether it’s available to rent yet. (It’s not.)
“Never seen it,” Steve says. “And until this very moment, I honestly thought it was a movie about a bunch of kids who hang out at a diner or something every morning.”
“You thought what,” Robin says, looking nothing short of alarmed.
Steve shrugs. “Yeah, sounded kinda lame to me.”
Robin’s mouth curls up in a grin, equally parts disbelieving and gleeful. “I’m actually going to murder you one day,” she says. A drop of polish falls from the brush she’s dangling in the air, landing squarely on the top of her foot. “Oh shit.”
“Hey,” says Steve as she wipes it away with her thumb, a potentially disastrous idea beginning to form while he watches her. “Do you want to do mine, too?”
“What?” Robin asks, still distracted.
Steve helpfully wiggles his hands in front of her face. “My nails,” he says. “Wanna paint them?”
Robin looks up sharply, a set to her jaw and a steely look in her eye he doesn’t think he’s ever seen before. “Are you serious?” she asks, as if daring him to say no.
But Steve is the master of faking-it-til-he-makes it, knows how to play it cool when his stomach is twisting himself in knots and his foot is twitching with the effort not to shove itself in his mouth, so he just shrugs and says, “Yeah, I mean if you want to.” Like it’s nothing. Like he can’t hear his father’s voice in his head calling him names he’d rather not repeat even to himself, and especially not with Robin around.
“Why?” Robin asks with a well-practiced coolness. Steve realizes – and it just about breaks his heart – that she thinks he’s making fun of her. After all this time, after all the secrets they’ve shared with each other… some part of her is still afraid he’ll turn on her.
Steve still doesn’t know how to navigate these situations without looking like a douchebag, but he’s getting better. So, something inside him screaming Don’t fuck this up at top volume, he tries to find the right words.
“I just think it would look cool,” he eventually settles on. “You know that shimmery purple one you had on a few weeks ago?” Robin nods, the tension in her shoulders making it look like a flinch instead. “I like that color,” Steve says. Then, lamely, “If you still have it.”
“Of course I still have it, dingus,” Robin says. “What, you think nail polish grows on trees?” She twists around awkwardly to rifle through her desk drawers without letting her wet toenails touch the carpet.
“You ever have your nails painted before?” she asks once she finds the right color, rolling the bottle between her palms. Steve doesn’t even have time to shake his head before she answers for him. “Stupid question. Of course you haven’t. Well, get ready for an experience.” Robin waggles her eyebrows and Steve knows there’s no hard feelings anymore.
Steve, ever the overthinker, starts to panic almost as soon as Robin paints on the first stripe of color. Mentally, he tries to work out where exactly he’ll be every day for the next week and how likely it is that he’ll see anybody he knows.
“You okay?” Robin asks as Steve really starts to spiral. “You look like you’re gonna throw up.”
“I’m just…” But he doesn’t even know what he is besides suddenly, irrationally panicked.
Robin does him the courtesy of continuing to calmly, methodically paint the nails of his left hand, only getting a little on his skin. “Steve,” she says softly. “Are you having a gender identity crisis?”
“A what?”
“Look,” Robin says. “I’ll put it simply. You were raised to be a manly man, right? Boys don’t cry and all that?” Steve nods. “So then if you want to do something that everyone tells you is ‘girly,’ it makes you uncomfortable because it’s not what guys are supposed to do or like or feel or whatever.”
“It’s bullshit,” Steve says on instinct. And who is he, Nancy fucking Wheeler?
“Yeah,” Robin says. “It is. And it’s okay if you feel that way.”
She scoots his left hand over to its own little toilet paper island and pulls his right into her workspace. Steve can feel his fingernails, like, tightening or something as the polish dries and huh, he never knew fingernails could feel before. He’s disappointed to see that the polish looks streaky and uneven, too, not smooth and perfect like all the girls’ manicures he’s seen before.
“You’ll need a second coat,” Robin says as if she can read his thoughts. “It’ll look much better, trust me.”
“Do you feel that way all the time?” Steve asks as he flexes his fingers and watches Robin’s bedroom lights catch on the little glitter flecks suspended in the polish.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know.” Steve tries to gesture with only his left arm. “Like you’re doing something wrong because you’re not the person other people expect you to be?”
Robin laughs, short and wry. “Yup,” she says.
“That sucks.”
“Yeah, but you get used to it.” Robin shrugs. “Kinda.”
And, wow, Steve has never thought about that before. What it must be like to be somebody who doesn’t fit in, not because they want to stand out, but because they can’t help it. He mentally punches his high school self in the face. Idiot.
“Okayyy,” Robin sing-songs. “First coat done. How do you feel?”
Steve holds his hands up to eye level, really gets a good look at Robin’s work. He is… He feels…
“Pretty,” Steve says, voice small. He clears his throat and tries again. “I feel pretty.”
Robin smiles at him, big and bright like the sun. “Well you look pretty,” she says. “Shame I can’t do much about your face, though.”
“Oh, very funny.”
“I mean, I could.” Robin shakes her head. “But I’m not sure you’re ready for that level of social subversion yet.”
Makeup, huh. Steve thinks maybe he could let Robin try that on him sometime. If there’s any chance she’s better at that than painting nails, it could be pretty cool. And if it pisses his dad off, it would be the best kind of win-win.
“Does this mean you’re ready to try a keg stand?” he asks Robin, an answer wrapped in a non-answer.
“Absolutely the fuck not,” she says, very definitively.