Work Text:
spring ‘96
Steve met Levi on Valentine’s Day of 93. He was an architect, an incredible one, lured with a fat salary to Hawkins to help revitalize the town. Steve and Robin were at a bar, drinking to forget their painfully celibate states when Levi came up to him gracefully and asked to buy Steve a drink. Steve did a spit take as Robin gawked.
“Jesus man, you can’t just ask that to anyone in this town!” Steve hissed. “They’re all still in the fifties in their heads.”
“Not you though?” Levi smiled that cocky but charming smile Steve would end up falling for.
“…not me,” Steve admitted.
“So about that drink?”
Later that night, after Levi took Steve back to his motel room and made him see stars behind his eyelids, Steve asked: “So are you new in town? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you before.”
“I am. I moved for a job, I’ll be out of this motel room once I find a place to stay.”
Both of the rooms in Steve’s house were empty since the last tenant had left for college around Christmas. “Not to make this awkward, but I do have a room for rent,” Steve said. Levi’s eyebrows rose. “You asking me to move in? Wow, was I that good?” he teased, kissing away Steve’s embarrassed blush. “I’m joking, I’m joking. But still, I need a room and you need a tenant? It’s basically fate, lovely.”
Without leaving space for Steve to panic and spiral, Levi asked him out right after he moved in. He even insisted on kissing Steve outside his bedroom door after he “dropped him off”, and smiled giddily all the way back to his own room. In two weeks, they were properly boyfriends.
To be honest, Levi was like a balm to Steve’s soul after Eddie. Eddie was wild, all long curly hair and big dreams and a dangerous smile. Eddie had broken his heart and didn’t even show Steve the mercy to stay away. Levi was all winning smiles, fleece jackets and adorable rants about architecture. He had moved in, and he had stayed. Levi held him tight in his arms when Steve fell apart. And Steve chose Levi. He loved Levi.
Their break up happened in slow motion. Steve hadn’t seen it coming, at first. In hindsight, it made sense - he had grown up unloved, so it didn’t raise any alarms for him when Levi fell out of love with him. He had chosen Levi, and Levi had chosen him. But sometimes choosing wasn’t enough.
***
The town had managed to bounce back from the trauma of the 80s quite impressively. By 1995, it was almost fully rebuilt and repopulated. Those who wanted to come back to their hometown and bored urbanites who wanted cheaper rent and smaller communities had flooded the town. Though the locals were still traumatized, an outsider would assume Hawkins was any old small town. Steve was fully settled down, as well. He loved job as a counselor at the middle school, which paid reasonably well for an unambitious guy like him. He loved his cat, Fiona. He loved his boyfriend, Levi.
The arguments started out small.
Steve was stretched out next to Levi in his bed. They had never ended up merging their rooms, at Levi’s insistence. Though it had reminded Steve of his own parents at first, Levi had said it was healthy to have one’s own space and that it didn’t lessen the love. Steve had gotten behind the idea when he realized they could switch to the other bed after sex instead of having to clean the sheets right away. As they made pillow talk that night, talking about their future, Steve brought up how much he wanted kids one day.
“You do realize we can never have kids, right?” Levi said, raising his eyebrows.
“I mean, yeah, not biologically. But there is adoption, and surrogacy and stuff.”
“Sure, adoption agencies are just handing out babies to gay men.”
Steve sat up, vaguely hurt by Levi’s blunt attitude. “Do you not… want kids?”
“I mean, maybe I would have if I wasn’t gay,” Levi shrugged, reaching for the pack of smokes on the nightstand. He lit up a cigarette. “It’s just not realistic. The kid would definitely get bullied too. Plus, I’m just super focused on work right now.”
He got up before Steve could respond. “I’m gonna go change your sheets, lovely. You enjoy this.” He put his cigarette between Steve’s lips and bounded out of the room. Steve frowned. They would definitely have to talk about this at some point, but he was just going to enjoy the afterglow for the moment.
They started arguing about moving around mid-1995. Now that Hawkins was almost fully rebuilt, the job opportunities for Levi had started dwindling. He ended up having to go to Indianapolis more and more often for projects, and sometimes even ended up spending the night at motels if the deadline was close. He started hinting at moving there, until they finally ended up talking about it.
“It just makes more sense,” Levi kept saying. “There are more jobs for me there, and you can work at any school you want. We can get a smaller place, only two bedrooms. You can even bring Fiona!”
The problem was that Steve loved his house. It was the first place he had truly felt safe living in, it was his home. He adored the kids he worked with. He couldn’t possibly give up Robin, Max and Will either. He didn’t want to leave Hawkins.
As months crawled by, intimacy slowly crept out of their relationship. Levi spent more and more nights in Indianapolis, and whenever he was at home, they argued. Levi treated him like a petulant, unreasonable child for not wanting to move, which reminded Steve way too much of his father.
The breaking point came on a regular Sunday night. Talking turned to arguing, turned to screaming. Levi yelled about how unnatural and childish his dependency to Robin and the kids was. Steve called him a selfish asshole for asking Steve to tear down his whole life to avoid commuting to work. He yelled that he hadn’t followed Eddie despite being desperately in love with him, what made Levi think he would follow him ? Steve was staying.
In hindsight, maybe he never should have brought up Eddie.
It never was the same after that. Levi became withdrawn. Secretive about which motels he spent the nights in Indianapolis. They made quiet small talk over their dinners and retreated into their own rooms without a kiss goodnight, and when they had breakfast, they pretended Steve’s eyes weren’t red from crying all night.They had sex only sometimes, quick and dispassionate. Steve spent a lot of time nervously tidying up the house. Levi spent a lot of time in his study. Robin gave him compassionate, borderline pitying looks every time the topic came up.
They had sex for the last time on New Year's Day, drunk on champagne and fueled by nostalgia. Steve loved him, despite everything, still.
Steve caught sight of himself in the mirror one spring evening as he cleaned after work. He frowned, stepped closer. His similarity to his mom was suddenly striking, the slump of his shoulders, the same way she curled into herself in the face of his dad’s indifference. He thought of his parents, always leaving him until one day they just never came back. He thought of Eddie, planning to leave without telling Steve. He thought of Robin, yelling about how people who loved you didn’t abandon you.
Sudden, clean clarity came over him like an ocean wave. He dropped the rag in his hand and walked into Levi’s study.
“Can we talk?” Steve asked calmly.
Levi’s eyes didn’t leave the papers in front of him. “What about?”
“I think we should break up.”
That got Levi’s attention. His head snapped up, a confused frown settling on his face. “You… What?”
Steve thought that maybe he should have given him the grace to sit him down on their couch, and not do this talk while the man was at his desk and Steve was leaning against the door. But then again, if Levi hadn’t had the grace to leave him physically when he had all but moved on emotionally, why should Steve be the bigger person?
“I think we should break up,” Steve repeated.
“Why?” Levi demanded, incredulous. If this was before, Steve would have started to get angry.
“You want to leave. I don’t. I want kids. You don’t. We keep fighting and the only reason we have sex is to avoid speaking to each other. You have an extra key on your keychain that I have a rough idea about where it opens. I’m pretty sure we’re going to turn into my parents if we don’t break up. Do you want me to keep counting reasons?”
“I… what the hell, Steve? Where is all this coming from?”
“We’ve been fighting for months, Levi. Do you see any way to resolve our problems? I don’t. We don’t want the same things.”
“What, so your solution is to just throw away our entire relationship like it’s trash?” Levi got up, obviously gearing up to an argument.
“I don’t have a solution, that’s the point.”
Levi looked at him for a long second before he deflated. “You’re right,” he admitted quietly. He sighed.
Steve averted his eyes, the sudden bout of calmness leaving him as the reality of the situation finally hit him. “I, um, I’ll spend the weekend at Robin’s. Let you pack up,” he said, choked up.
“Okay,” Levi said dully.
Steve managed to hold onto his tears until he was on Robin’s doorstep. “Steve,” she said, alarmed at his sobbing, then pulled him in.
“We broke up,” Steve whimpered. “I ended it.”
“I’m sorry,” she said and pulled him into a hug. “Fuck, I knew this was coming, I’m so sorry Stevie.”
They spent the weekend eating an insane amount of processed food and not talking about it. Steve cried while watching a cheesy romcom because the lead looked a little too much like Levi, and Robin cried because she was a sympathy crier.
“You were right,” Steve finally whispered as Sunday evening crept to an end. He hugged his bowl of mac and cheese closer to his chest. “People who love you don’t leave. He was here, but he wasn’t here . Not like he used to be.”
Robin nodded. “I usually am. Though, in this case, I wish I wasn’t.” She took a bite from her own dinner. “You’ll find the person that’ll stay with you.”
“I think,” Steve said, reaching for his wine glass, “I think I’m the person that’ll stay with me.”
“Steve,” Robin said, painfully soft.
“No, I don’t mean it in like, a self-deprecating way. I think Eddie leaving taught me a lesson. People are going to fall in and out of love with me, to some degree. And they’re going to leave. But now I know that there’s more. After Nancy, I was hurt, but then Eddie came along. After he left, I thought I just might never love again. He just kept coming back every time I thought I was over him. And, like, I think a small part of me is always going to love him, but you made me see that what he was giving me wasn’t enough. That I deserved more. So I let Levi in, and it was - I guess it was healing in a way, loving him. Now he’s gone, and I’ll be sad about it for a while, but I’m not broken. There’s going to be other people. And I have myself too, because I like being loved by others, but I don’t depend on it anymore. And I have you,” he said, nudging her with his foot. “Right?”
Robin smiled. “Of course you have me. I’m so fucking proud of you, dingus. Seriously. I love you.”
“Love you too.”