Archive of Our Own ^beta

Robin keeps trying to catch Jonathan’s eye past the rim of her beer bottle. Jonathan pretends to be extremely interested in the lit end of his cigarette.

“Just give it to me straight, doc,” says Robin, because there was never a world where Jonathan weaselled his way out of a conversation with her. “How long has all that heavy petting been going on?”

Jonathan grimaces. “Don’t call it that.”

Robin laughs. It’s only August, but the night air is cold enough that he can barely see the edges of her foggy breath escaping her mouth. “I call it like I see it,” she says unapologetically. “If you’re gonna do it under my roof.”

“Your uncle’s roof,” Jonathan mutters to be contrary.

“Hey, we’re here more than he is.” Robin shakes her head, sticks her free hand in her front pocket. Babes dig the overalls, she had been drunkenly explaining (without being asked) all night. Now to keep their attention I gotta learn how to build a table and shit, but they don’t really teach that at Smith. “Have you and Stevie been sneaking off under the bleachers every month and I only just now noticed?”

Jonathan takes a long drag. He kind of thought Steve would have already told her, but the face he made when Robin walked in on them in the kitchen made it evident that he hadn’t. Jonathan hadn’t even had the wherewithal to take his hands out from under Steve’s shirt, standing between his legs while he sat on the kitchen counter as Robin blindly turned on the kitchen light and just stared. Shit, Steve had said, after Robin had said welp!, turned off the light, and marched right out, half laughing. Well—shit. She’s going to have opinions.

“Three months in isn't bad time from you, detective,” Jonathan eventually says. “Though we’re usually more subtle than that.”

Robin hums. She shakes the dredges of her bottle. “Are you dating?”

Jonathan takes another drag. Steve always tries to badger him to get him to blow the smoke out from his nostrils but he just does it like a normal person. “It’s complicated. It’s a long drive to Indiana, and all that.”

Robin looks at him critically. Jonathan gets the distinct feeling he’s being sized up, examined without leniency. “You could really break each other's hearts, you know. He’s really stuck on you.”

“He’s stuck on me?” Jonathan coughs around smoke in his throat. He had figured she’d just threaten his life for her platonic life partner or spiritual wife or whatever it is they’re calling each other lately. “I thought you didn't know about this.”

“I didn't know it was actively happening. I knew he wanted it to happen, even though he likes to sabotage himself. Because he’s obsessed with you,” Robin adds emphatically.

“Right.” Jonathan ignores the twinge of pleasure at her words, tamps it down with healthy cynicism. “And how many girlfriends was he obsessed with in the month of January?”

“That’s different. You notice how Steve keeps breaking up with them for reasons he completely makes up? I don’t think he even likes girls.” Robin downs the last of her beer and puts her lips to the rim, visibly considering blowing across it to make a loud whistle. “He hates being lonely, is all. He’d rather be miserable than alone. It's very psychological. I keep asking him to let me psychoanalyze him and he won’t.”

Even like this, her face flush with alcohol and her focus placed on deciding if it’s conversationally appropriate to make sounds with her empty bottle, Robin looks encased in this sense of confident finality. Like she plucked knowledge from the air and graciously handed it over. Jonathan thinks it’d be a nice picture.

Robin finally blows into it. Oo-oo-oo, goes the empty glass like a ghost. “You have to be very serious with our Stevie,” she says. “He’s a romantic. He secretly wants grand gestures.”

“Is telling him I want him to live with me not grand enough?”

“Maybe he thinks you’re not being serious,” Robin offers, but evasively, like she knows some insider information about why Steve’s digging his heels into Hawkins and is only dropping breadcrumbs for Jonathan to collect. “Grander gestures. Or small gestures with grand intent. You know Pride and Prejudice? You have to be Mr. Darcy.”

“I have to be Mr. Darcy?” Jonathan groans. “Why can’t I be Elizabeth?”

“Express yourself on this occasion, my friend, as sensibly and as warmly as a man violently in love,” Robin quotes at him, tongue in cheek. She smiles at the ground and shakes her head. “Does Nancy know about this?”

Jonathan shifts uncomfortably. “No.”

“Not that I think you need her permission. I just think it’s really funny.”

It is, in a narrative sense. “Do you think she’d be mad?”

“Mad? No. Maybe she’d feel weird for a day or so. You didn’t hear this from me,” starts Robin, leaning in conspiratorially, “but I think she might have swapped teams anyway, if you catch my drift. I mean, we all saw the haircut. Think I got a chance?”

“A chance?” Jonathan laughs, surprised. Robin looks delighted to pull it out of him. “I thought you were on again with Vickie.”

“Not as of a week ago. Women are fickle, Jonny boy,” Robin says wisely, pointing her finger to his chest, “So you might as well stay with the boy you’ve got.”

The boy Jonathan’s got is right where he left him, leaned against the kitchen counter with his palms braced on the edge. Steve’s loose-limbed when he’s drunk, like he could tangle himself into a knot if he steps wrong. The tight line of his taut muscle suggests he must be sobering up.

Jonathan comes in front of him, boxing him against the counter, and Steve just looks up and smiles questioningly, looks over his shoulder to see if anyone’s following him.

“Robin thinks I’m going to break your heart,” Jonathan says.

Steve doesn’t seem surprised. “Well,” he drawls. This close, Jonathan can smell the beer on his breath. It might have ticked him off a couple years ago. “Are you?”

It’s teasing. Jonathan purses his lips anyway. Well, much heart of yours do I even have to break?, he imagines dramatically asking. Instead he puts his hands gingerly on Steve’s waist. “Do you think I’m kidding when I say you can move in with me?”

Steve’s face rapidly shifts from open, to flustered, to suspicious. “Did Robin tell you I think that?” he asks immediately.

“No,” Jonathan lies. Half-lies. It was a clue, it hardly counts as telling him.

“Don’t bullshit me, I knew she was going to have opinions. Did she say self-sabotage again?”

“Um, kinda. It was implied.”

Steve throws his hands in the air, exasperated. “One psych class,” he starts irritably, “She takes one psych class and she starts practicing all her buzzwords on me!”

Jonathan scratches his neck. It sometimes isn’t wise, continuing to stumble into what obviously constitutes one of Steve and Robin’s million longstanding arguments that they’re able to keep going for months, but seeing as this one concerns him… “Are you?”

Steve’s stare is just shy of pouting. “Am I what?”

“Sabotaging yourself.”

“No,” Steve refutes immediately. His expression shifts back to suspicion again, eyebrows pulling together. “Do you think I am? Did Robin poison you?”

“What I think,” Jonathan begins delicately. “Is that — you should move out of Hawkins.”

“Jon, come on,” Steve sighs fitfully, letting his head loll back like he’d bang it on a wall if he could. “Are we doing this right now?”

“You asked what I think. And I’d think it'd be better for you.”

Steve purses his lips, crosses his arms. “You think New York is better for me,” he says.

Jonathan clenches his jaw, ignores the sting. “What, I’m gonna lie and say I don't want you to move to New York? Even if you don’t want to, anywhere is —”

“Jonathan,” Steve cuts him off, hand on his forearm. “It’s not that I wouldn’t want to — to live with you. It’s not that I wouldn’t like to.”

“Then why don't you?”

“Jesus, why the hell am I getting the third degree?” Steve barks, half-laughing, out of nerves rather than humor.

Jonathan exhales hard through his nose. He squeezes Steve’s waist, runs his palms up and down his side, trying to soothe ruffled feathers before it sparks up Jonathan’s temper. He doesn’t want to fight. Robin would be so pissed if she gave him advice and he used it to fight.

“Look, I’m gonna be honest,” Jonathan says. Steve’s shoulders go up like he’s preparing to be shot or something. “I just don’t think it’s great for you that you still live in your parents’ house. That’s why I keep bringing it up.”

“Plenty of people live in their parents’ houses,” Steve mumbles.

“It’s your parents,” Jonathan reminds gently. He’s worried, is all. It felt like Jonathan could barely even begin to grow up until he didn’t live in a house that Lonnie Byers had lived in, didn’t live in a town where he had planned his brother’s funeral.

Steve doesn’t catch his eye because he knows that. “I’m saving up.”

“To move to Forest Hills. That doesn’t even count as moving.”

“I—what the hell do you want me to say? Goddamnit, Jon.” Steve rubs at his face hard with both hands. He looks completely cornered and Jonathan feels partly guilty, partly relieved. “I can’t go to college, okay? Hawkins is where I live. I have a job. Sure, it’d be nice to be with — you. Or to be in any city without history. Or to not be the only one left behind. But shit, Jon, what if I leave, and it’s fucking fantastic, and then I can never make myself go back?”

His eyes are huge and weary. Jonathan slips his hands around Steve’s back, nudging under Steve’s arms until he puts them around Jonathan’s shoulders, his hands loosely linked against Jonathan’s neck. “Then you don't have to go back.”

Steve’s thumb brushes Jonathan’s nape. He shakes his head. “Then what,” he mumbles, swaying on his feet. “I still need to — to — I mean, shit, I have to drive Dustin home from college. And I’m still trying to convince Erica to do baseball. The kids need somewhere to go that isn’t their parents house. It’s hard for them, you know, their folks love them but it’s hard. You know, they hardly ever noticed when the kids were missing. And they can’t talk to them about everything.”

Oh, so this is about your complex, Jonathan wants to tell him. The one where you have to play house because nobody ever played house with you. Robin was right, you should be psychoanalyzed. He remembers how strange it felt to think that he would leave and it wouldn’t be his job to look after Will and his mother again. But he still had to leave.

Jonathan rubs Steve’s back, thinking for a long silent moment. Grand gestures. Grandly intended small gestures. Maybe the only way to convince Steve to do something for himself for once is to remind him that it counts as doing it for somebody else, too.

Jonathan bites his cheek. This is embarrassing. But fuck it, Mr. Darcy was embarrassed too. “You know I want to write a part for you,” he says in one quick breath.

Steve looks at him, blinking slowly. “You what?”

“A part. In a movie.”

“In The Consumer?” Steve asks incredulously. “You want to write me a part in your freaky experimental cannibalism movie?”

“It’s not automatically experimental because it has an overarching metaphor,” Jonathan rattles off like a wind up doll. Steve unsuccessfully smothers a smile. “And not in The Consumer. Just in general. Or maybe in that script too, I don’t know. Just any movie. Hell, all of them.”

Steve laughs like Jonathan is being silly. “I’m a children’s coach, Jonathan. I don’t act.”

“I’ve seen you act,” Jonathan argues. “You do a really, really good sleazy douchebag.”

Steve socks Jonathan one in the shoulder. “Don’t call me sleazy.”

“You also do a good irritated single mother type thing,” Jonathan offers, and gets punched again. “Okay, okay — I’m not making fun of you, I mean it. If you really don’t want to do it, okay, but — I thought — well, just think about it.”

Steve stares. His mouth is doing a funny tug, unsure if it’s worth breaking half-smile into a grin. Looking for something. Reason to doubt, maybe. Search me, Jonathan thinks, I’m a goddamn open book.

“This is just a plot to get me up in the city for a few months,” Steve finally lands on, though his voice is soft in the way it gets when he’s flattered to the point of rare shyness. Like he couldn’t have expected Jonathan would mean any of this. “So you can boss me around all the time.”

Jonathan shrugs. He hums a few notes at him, one of the newer Fleetwood Mac songs that Steve likes so much. The one that goes oh, I wanna be with you everywhere.

Steve laughs again, louder. “Oh, just fuck off, Jon,” he says, but the third shove he gives Jonathan is lackluster and ends with his hand lingering on Jonathan’s shoulder, fingers over his collarbone.

Jonathan can’t help it. He smiles. “Come be the Kyle MacLachlan to my David Lynch,” he tells him, knowing he won’t get it.

Predictably, Steve deadpans: “Is that a confession of love in pretentious nerd language?”

“Pretty much,” Jonathan says honestly. “Is it working?”

“God help me, it might be.” Steve rolls his eyes to the ceiling. “I’ll — I’ll try it. If you really want it.”

Jonathan feels light and heavy all at once. Ready to tear off with triumph and rooted to the spot with anticipation. He could run a mile. He could kiss Steve square on the mouth. He settles for the latter option, both hands on Steve’s face.

“Hey!” Steve protests into Jonathan’s mouth, but he’s grinning because he loves the attention. That’s why Jonathan wants to put him in front of a camera in the first place. “Hey, I said I’ll try it, and that — that doesn’t mean I’m moving anywhere.”

“I’ll get to work on you,” Jonathan promises, because he will, this is his foot in the door. He will drag this man out of Indiana or he will make a fool of himself trying. “New York is closer to Cambridge too, you know. Only a four hour drive to MIT.”

“Do not use Dustin Henderson to taunt me,” Steve says immediately.

“And Smith’s right there too. You could vet all of Robin’s potential girlfriends. I know you want to.”

“I would like to give Stephanie a piece of my mind,” Steve allows, eyes sparkling and crinkled in the corners. Jonathan kisses him again, because he can. And again. And again, and again, until they’re about to be right where they were when this night took a left turn, Jonathan pushing up Steve’s shirt, flush against each other —

“Why the fuck are you still playing tonsil hockey in my kitchen?!”

Jonathan jerks away. Robin stands in the doorway, utterly incensed, hand wrapped around the neck of the empty beer bottle like she’s about to beat one of them with it.

“Stop it, you animals!” she shrieks, waving the bottle. Shut up, shush, you’ll wake up Nancy, Steve hysterically tries to tell her, but it gets swallowed up in his inability to stop laughing. “I’ve been trying to eat parmesan out of the container all night!”

“Hi, Robin,” Jonathan says innocently. “Who’s Stephanie?”

Robin’s face fully colors, stuttering wordlessly. Then she screams. “Did you tell Jonathan about Steph?!” She rounds furiously on Steve, who only laughs harder. “Do not tell Jonathan about Steph! It’s delicate, what we have! It’s a delicate situation! Get out of my kitchen!”

They get out of her kitchen. “You got me in trouble with Robin,” Steve accuses while Jonathan shoves him up the stairs, still giggling.

“You got you in trouble with Robin.” They walk right past the room Steve had claimed as his own, towards Jonathan’s, and Steve doesn’t blink, just smiles huge and dopey.

Jonathan was never one to let himself imagine. But fuck it, it’s the turn of the decade and Jonathan isn’t the Jonathan of 1983, ‘85, ‘87, so he does — pictures him and Steve together, really together, not just for once a month in Philly. Ushering him towards their bedroom. An apartment in Brooklyn, maybe. Looking at him through a camera, capturing the right angles of him. The severe ones and the soft ones, too. Harsh light, backlit. All the proof of Steve through Jonathan’s eyes. Catch the way his eyelashes flutter on film. Catch this exact moment as it is: Steve smiling at him, pulling him by the wrist into his room.

They spent so long being cruel to each other. They probably have more to go. I just want you to be happy, Jonathan thinks fiercely, I want us to be happy. And then he closes the door behind them.