Chapter Text
Steve Harrington has always been restless. Bouncy, that’s what his mom used to call him. Like many toddlers, he was constantly running around, touching everything, bouncing off the walls, banging on the tops of tables and chairs and cushions like they were bongos. His mom hoped this was an indicator of musical talent and got him into drum lessons with a local teacher, but that didn’t stick. He wasn’t musically inclined—he just couldn’t sit still.
By elementary school, his father lost his patience and long ago stopped thinking it was cute that his son was always moving, always talking, always fidgeting. His dad started yelling at him whenever he was drumming on any surface in front of him. He began shouting when Steve couldn’t stop his legs from bouncing when he was sitting at the dinner table or on the couch or in the car, but especially in public. He started breaking Steve’s toys when Steve would run into end tables and sidebars and coffee tables, knocking over and breaking wine glasses or phones or vases because his body was bigger now, and he hadn’t quite adjusted to how much room his took up now while he’s flying around the living room furniture, unable to just “keep still, Steven!”
That’s when Steve started messing with his nails, picking at the cuticles until they bleed while he tries to stay still enough to keep his dad from yelling at him or his mom sighing or his teachers scolding him in front of the whole class. (Steve violently avoids thinking about his father’s reaction when in a parent-teacher conference, his teacher had asked if they’d ever had him “seen by a doctor” about his fidgeting.) School was stifling, and it was hard to learn and retain anything when he’s using all his mental energy to not bounce his leg or tap his pencil on his desk or get up and stretch his legs. It was why his parents put him in sports in elementary school in the first place. They hoped it would work some of his energy out, make him quieter and more still. It sort of worked—it at least gave him an outlet for his “bounciness.”
But in reality, Steve mostly learned how to tamp down on those physical manifestations of his restless energy in front of others because it turns out that if you’re relentlessly yelled at or humiliated over something, you eventually try to avoid said thing. And if that grew into a creeping sort of anxiety that seeped into him as the years went by, well, he learned to ignore that too. Because his dad was much happier now. He bragged about Steve now, about how well he was doing in baseball, about how much faster he could run than the other kids in track, how much longer he could swim.
So Steve ignored the way his heart beat harder when he was around his dad, how sometimes it felt like he couldn’t breathe when his dad’s brow furrowed and his jaw tightened, because his dad was proud of him now. Steve ignored how hard it was to focus in school by focusing on impressing his classmates and charming his teachers because it was easier, though he still managed to pass his classes. And because his dad was much happier, his mom was much happier, and really, Steve didn’t want to be the reason his parents were always angry, so he shoved that restlessness down as much as he could, only letting it out when he was playing a sport, and it worked. Mostly. It turned out doing fancy tricks with his baseball bat was a lot more acceptable than drumming with his pencils.
His teachers liked him, and other students liked him, and his coaches and teammates liked him, and that felt much better than when he saw his first-grade teacher clench his jaw at the incessant tapping of Steve’s pencil, or when the two girls on the bus in front of him in third grade threw him dirty looks when his bouncing knees kept hitting the back of their seat, or when his dad slammed his fist down on the counter when Steve skidded into the table and nearly broke a box of his parents’ wedding china.
Then Steve walks into the Byers house and finds out that monsters are real, monsters with teeth for faces that literally rip through the fabric of reality, and, well, he thinks the anxiety that Nancy (amateurly) diagnosed him with is perfectly warranted. All of the sudden, being home alone while his parents are on vacation or business trips is no longer exciting. Now, instead of being happy to have the whole house to himself, walking through his dark and empty home makes his heart race, and he swears he sees shadows slinking along the walls in the dark. He keeps the lights on in every room in the house for a long time.
It’s the picking at his cuticles and nail biting that come back first. He throws himself into pretending everything is fine, going to parties and taking Nancy out on dates and trying to get himself the slightest chance of going to college. His mom notices the scabs on his nailbeds and his bitten nails when she’s home, and she makes it very clear how disgusting that is. He’s grateful for his parents taking off again before she can notice the knuckle cracking he’s picked up.
Despite his best efforts, despite throwing himself into swimming and basketball and track, that nervous energy, as Nancy calls it, won’t be shoved down like when he was younger. No, now he’s struggling to sleep, feeling like he’s going to crawl out of his skin if he keeps still. He starts driving around Hawkins in the middle of the night when he knows sleep isn’t coming, when the streets are empty. He’s aimless at first, just driving wherever the green lights take him, but when he passes Nancy’s house and feels an immense wave of relief that everything looks fine and safe, he starts his routine. On nights when he knows he won’t be sleeping easily, he gets in his BMW and drives a loop around Hawkins, making sure to pass the Wheeler and Byers houses, sometimes more than once. (Sometimes the Hollands’ house, though that often makes him feel worse.) It helps a bit, and “a bit” is more than anything else has helped.
He keeps at it even after the kids drag him into the tunnels under Hawkins (because surprise, the Upside Down is back). All that changes is that he adds the Henderson, Sinclair, and Mayfield houses to his route. He starts taking the nail bat with him, though. He thinks he should probably learn to use a gun at some point because there’s no way in hell he thinks this shit is over, but the idea of asking Nancy to teach him stings just a bit too much. Maybe when he feels a little more whole.
He’s surprised when, a few months after El closes the gate, he sees Hopper on one of his late night patrols, parked in his K5 Blazer outside the Byers house. He forgets to breathe for a moment, ice rushing through his veins, and all he can think is, Oh god, not again. He pulls up next to the SUV and rolls his window down, but before he can say anything, Hopper leans out his window and asks, “What are you doing here, kid?”
“I—is everything okay?” Steve asks, not even processing what Hopper said. “Nothing’s back, right? Will’s okay?”
Hopper’s furrowed brow smoothes out, his expression turning understanding. “Everything’s fine, Steve,” he says.
“Then why are you here?” Steve asks, and he knows he probably shouldn’t ask the Chief of Police that, but he sounds panicked enough that Hopper doesn’t correct him on it.
“Probably the same reason you are,” Hopper says with a sigh, dragging a hand over his tired face before glancing at the clock on his dash. “It’s almost 2:00 a.m. Go home, Steve. Everything’s fine here.”
“Right,” Steve says, nodding, though Hopper’s expression makes it clear he doesn’t believe he’s going to.
“I’m serious, you need some sleep,” Hopper says.
“Yeah,” Steve says, avoiding his gaze. “See ya.”
Steve rolls up his window and drives away before Hopper can say anything else. But he doesn’t drive home, instead heading to the Henderson house and parking across the street. It’s better than sitting outside the Byers house in the middle of the night, surrounded by the forest, trying to tell if the shadows he’s seeing are demogorgons moving between the trees. He stays there until the night sky starts lightening just a bit, only then starting his car and heading back home. The yawn that racks him makes his jaw crack and his eyes water.
Usually Steve only really runs during track season, but he starts going on runs almost daily. Before school if he really feels like he’s going to jitter out of his skin, but usually after. Then once school is out (his parents do bother to come to his graduation—they have to keep up appearances, after all), whenever he isn’t looking for a job.
Ridiculous outfit aside, getting hired at Scoops Ahoy actually does help. He distracts himself by (unsuccessfully) flirting with every cute girl in his age range that comes in, arguing with his coworker Robin, and translating his baseball bat tricks to his scooper. And by the time he’s off work, he’s usually tired enough that his restless energy is mostly as tired as he is, and he gets by with just drumming his fingers on the steering wheel on the way home and clanking around the kitchen if he makes himself dinner.
He starts to feel more settled. Nothing weird, nothing Upside Down, has happened in almost a year. He goes to work, he goes on the occasional date, he hangs out with the kids (they act aloof when they see him at work, especially that little shit Mike, but they’re not too cool to come over for movie nights or to use the pool). It’s his own fault for getting complacent, really. He should have known better than to have assumed that there would never be evil Russians torturing them and a giant flesh monster chasing after them. That’s his bad.
Everyone’s quite a bit clingier after that. Wild amounts of trauma will do that to someone. He, Robin, and the kids spend a lot of time at his house when his parents are gone (they’ve been on an anniversary trip the French Riviera for the last…three weeks), and rotating through the Wheelers’, the Hendersons’, and the Sinclairs’ when they’re back. (The parents all love him now that he helped save their kids from the mall fire—or so the government agents they dealt with told the families—so they’re more than happy to have him over. It’s a strange revelation, having parents who want him around, even if they aren’t his. It sometimes makes ugly jealousy prickle in his chest, but he shoves that away hard.)
It’s about a week and a half before Steve realizes part of why there always seems to be someone at his house lately is they’re worried about him. It’s a bit embarrassing that it took him so long to figure that out, but he thinks that in his defense, he was incredibly concussed for a while. After everything at Starcourt, he’s by far the most physically battered, and that’s how he prefers it, honestly. He’d much rather it be him than Robin or Erica or Dustin, though he could do without the incredibly guilty looks on Robin’s and Dustin’s faces when he winces as he moves.
Everyone seems to have conspired to make sure that he’s never alone, that he always has someone watching over him. He’s more touched than he expected, having to blink back tears when he realizes what they’re doing, even if Robin’s hovering and Dustin’s incessant worrying grate on him a little bit. Robin wants to stay with him as much as she can, but her parents absolutely refuse to let her spend the night, not after almost losing her in the “fire,” so she ends up coming over in the morning, oftentimes with food, and gets picked up at night.
Even Nancy and Jonathan take a Steve Shift, as Dustin calls it, which is a lot less awkward than Steve had been worried it’d be. It’s a lot harder to get too worked up around his ex and her new boyfriend when his body feels like one gigantic bruise and he has a whole new set of nightmarish fears rolling around his head. His doctor forbids watching TV with his concussion, so the party ends up playing a D&D campaign at his house over a few days, and as much as he teases them for “this nerdy shit,” he’s incredibly glad they’re here.
Dustin’s over nearly as much as Robin, and his mom does let him stay over sometimes, but it ends up being Max that spends the night the most. Max is in and out of his house for the first week, along with the rest of the party. She tends to stay close to him or El, sitting at the base of the couch where he’s gingerly lying those first few days, pressed to El’s side. But then she starts coming over more and staying longer. She’s getting dark shadows under her eyes, her lips more likely to tilt into a frown than a smile. But what really makes his dread start to build is how quiet she is. She takes part in conversations at first, but she never initiates them. Then she starts talking less and less, giving a lot of one-word answers mixed with nods, head shakes, and shrugs.
Steve tries to prod her into speaking, trying to include her in conversations when the party is there, and when that doesn’t work, when it’s just them alone. He doesn’t want to push too hard and have her just retreat further, so when it’s just him and Max in the living room, Robin and Nancy in the kitchen putting pizza on plates, he tells her that he’ll also be there if she ever needs him. That should earn him an afternoon of mocking at the very least, but she just gives him a shrug and “Okay.”
Steve tries to give her her space while keeping her close, a balance he’s not particularly great at finding. The first time she spends the night, he doesn’t say anything, just happy that she felt safe enough to crash at his place. She falls asleep on the love seat in his living room, curled up under a throw blanket, and Steve doesn’t have the heart to wake her. And her mom never bothers to come pick her up. She never even bothers to call.
The next week, two weeks after Starcourt, Max starts dozing on his couch, jerking awake whenever her head lists to the side a bit. Steve carefully makes his way to the linen closet, nearly tripping on a pair of basketball shoes Lucas left behind, and comes back with a pillow and blanket. He tosses both at her, making her jump a bit.
“Just get some sleep. Come get me if you need anything,” he says.
Max looks relieved and just says, “Yeah okay. Thanks.”
“Tomorrow we’re gonna talk,” he says, giving her what he hopes is a no-nonsense look. She just rolls her eyes. “That’s the spirit.”
He halfway expects her to take off before he wakes up, but when he comes down the next morning, she’s still sleeping, her face buried in the pillow. He sighs, scrubbing a hand over his face, then immediately winces when all his injuries remind him with a scream that they’re there. Max is usually a lot less grumpy when she’s eaten, and Steve wants her to be as agreeable as he can get her, so he starts on pancakes in the kitchen. He pulls out the eggs once he has a good stack of pancakes done, and he hears her shuffle her way into the room behind him.
“Hey, how do you want your eggs?” Steve asks, glancing over his shoulder at her. “Scrambled? Sunny side up? Over medium?”
“You know how to make over-medium eggs?” Max says, voice scratchy from sleep but still full of the attitude he’s been missing.
“It was either learn or eat Cheerios whenever my parents were gone,” Steve says. “And I got bored of Cheerios fast.”
Max hums but doesn’t respond to that. “Scrambled,” she says after a pause.
Steve nods and turns back to the stove. He hears her moving around in the kitchen behind him, some cabinets opening and closing, then the fridge. Once he gets the eggs in the pan, he turns to see her hop up onto the counter, a cup of orange juice and a little ramekin of syrup next to her. Before he can ask what it’s for, she grabs a pancake from the stack and rolls it up like Fruit Roll-Up and dunks it in the syrup.
“I have plates, you know,” Steve says dryly. “And a table.”
“Obviously,” Max says, waving her rolled-up pancake at him. “This is more fun.”
“Lunatic,” Steve says, shaking his head, but she’s in a better mood than he’d expected, so he’s not going to complain too much.
He stirs the runny eggs in the pan and turns the heat up a bit before turning back to her. She’s finished her first pancake and takes a drink of juice before rolling up another. Steve just watches for a moment, trying to think of what to say. He’s gotten better at deep and meaningful conversations thanks to his friendship with Robin, but he’s still prone to sticking his foot in his mouth, and he feels like this is a delicate enough moment that he can’t afford to fuck it up.
He doesn’t end up having to broach the subject himself, though, because after she finishes her second pancake cigar, Max takes a bracing breath and asks, “Are you going to kick me out?”
“What?” Steve asks, so thrown by the question that it takes him a second to process it. “No—I—no, why would I do that?”
Max shrugs, fiddling with her half-full glass of orange juice. “I dunno,” she says. “I kinda camped out uninvited. You might be sick of me being here.”
“Max,” Steve says firmly, coming to stand in front of her. He places his hands on her shoulders and stares at her, waiting until she looks up and makes eye contact before continuing. “I like having you here. I like having all of you gremlins here, but especially when it’s you. Do you think I’d survive the nerd patrol without you? Who would I make fun of Mike’s haircut with? Who would I root for when you all play Atari? Do you think I let just anyone dig through my room like a raccoon? I want you here.”
Max’s eyes are suspiciously watery when he’s done, and he pretends not to see her wipe at them with the collar of her shirt while he takes a step back, giving her some space.
“My mom and Neil don’t want me there,” Max mutters.
“What?” Steve asks.
“They're fighting a lot. Since Billy died,” Max says, rubbing at her arm and avoiding eye contact. “She’s not taking it well. And I guess I’m not really helping.”
“You mom is supposed to be there for you, not the other way around,” Steve says.
“Oh, like your mom’s here?” Max snaps, but it lacks her usual bite. Deflection, something Steve's very familiar with.
“The reason I’m an authority on shitty parents isn’t because mine are good,” Steve says, managing not to add duh at the end. The kids really are rubbing off on his vocabulary. Max deflates a bit at that and sighs. Steve leans his hip against the counter next to her and quietly says, “Talk to me, Max. What's going on?”
Her breath hitches, like she's about to cry, and that's just a lance through his admittedly battered chest. “After my mom fought with Neil, we started arguing,” Max says. “I said it’d be easier if I weren’t around all the time. And she said, ‘Yeah, it would be.’ ”
“Max…”
“And she's right,” Max says, ignoring him. A couple tears have escaped, sliding down her cheeks. “Billy's dead, and it's my fault.”
“No, Max. No,” Steve says, shaking his head. “It's that, that thing's fault.”
“I wished for him to be gone,” Max says, voice getting thicker, tears heavier. “He was mean and awful, and I wished he was dead. And now—now he is. And I didn’t stop it…he…” She breaks off in a sob, covering her mouth like she can keep it from escaping.
“Fuck, come here,” Steve says, wrapping his arms around her. She clings to him like a life ring in a storm, and he ignores the pain in his ribs as he holds her shaking frame, her tears soaking his Hawkins High Swim Team shirt. He doesn't shush her, doesn't tell her not to cry, just holds her as she lets it out. He has a feeling she hasn't really let herself do this yet. It's only when her sobs have melted into sniffles that he speaks.
“Billy was unlucky,” Steve says softly to the crown of her head. “You heard El. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It's okay to feel conflicted. It's okay to be mad at him and also be sad. It's okay…it's okay to mourn the brother he should have been.”
“If I had—”
“Nothing you could have done would have saved him,” Steve says firmly, keeping his hold on her tight when she shakes her head. “Even El couldn’t stop that thing. If you’d run out there, you’d have died right next to him.”
“It's not fair,” she whispers, quiet enough that he almost doesn't hear it.
“No,” Steve says with a sigh. “It's not fair. But I've got you, okay? I've always got you.”
She lets out a little hiccuping sob at that, and he hopes that means she believes him. He’s made a lot of promises over the years, especially to girls, but this is the one he’s most determined to keep. It takes a few minutes before she says anything, having to clear her throat a bit first.
“Steve?”
“Yeah, kiddo?”
“...Your eggs are burning.”
“Shit!”
And he doesn't even care about the burned eggs that are going to take forever to scrape out of the pan, because Max is laughing again, and even if it's laughing at him, he'll gladly take it.
She starts staying over more after that, spending more than half her nights in the guest room next to his after he refuses to let her spend another night sleeping on the couch his parents bought for the aesthetic rather than comfort. It doesn’t take long at all before he drops the “guest” part and starts thinking of it as her room, especially once her clothes start appearing in the closet and her laundry starts to mix in with his in the hamper.
Steve is in his room, door open so he can hear when Robin gets there, when he overhears Lucas in Max’s room ask, “So, do you just live with Steve now?”
“No. Well, kinda,” Max says, trying to brush him off. “Just focus on your hobo character.”
“He's not a hobo, he's a ranger!” Lucas says, indignant.
“You’re right. A guy who wanders around the wild is more of a vagrant hick.”
“He is not—he's a warrior and a tracker and—vagrant hick?!”
“Just the facts,” Max says in such an accurate impression of Erica that it makes Steve snort, which jostles his ribs, making him wince and groan.
The thing about his broken ribs is they’re taking forever to heal. His doctor thinks it’s because his body is also trying to heal so much other damage at once. It's incredibly difficult to do things like, you know, breathe normally, especially when he wakes up hyperventilating from nightmares of torture and flesh melting into a monster. His doctor encouraged him to still move around and be active, but he’s forbidden from running or playing any sports for at least six weeks (probably more). He can’t really drive for too long before the pain gets to be too much, so there go his two major outlets for his restless energy.
Because Robin and Max are over the most, they notice his newly reemergenced restless movements first. Steve was never really a knuckle cracker growing up, but it’s something he’s taken up lately since bouncing his leg jostles his ribs too much, and after the fifth time doing it on accident, he tries something else, going finger by finger, slowly popping each (uninjured) knuckle. If he’s careful about it and goes slow enough, it can satisfy his antsy movements, but if he goes too quick, it just makes it worse.
They’re in the middle of a movie at his place, one of those nights where everyone is together under his roof, and he’s not sure what to do with the warmth spreading through his chest. Robin’s next to him on the couch, eating the peppers he’d picked off his pizza. Her eyes drop to his hands when she hears him pop his third knuckle. She reaches over and grabs his hands, mindful of his bruises.
“You got pizza sauce on my fingers,” Steve says, scrunching up his face.
Robin ignores him. “Cracking your knuckles is bad for you,” she says gently, and he knows he’s in pathetic shape when Robin is being gentle with him.
“Yeah, somehow I think the concussions are worse,” he says, taking her napkin and wiping off his hands. He does try to cut back on the knuckle popping, though, at least when Robin’s there. She doesn’t mind him tapping on things as much, especially when it’s on the arm of the couch and she can’t really hear it.
A few days later, he’s hosting the party’s latest D&D thingy (“It’s a campaign, Steve. You know this!”) in his living room around his giant coffee table. He and Max are watching from the couch and adding their own color commentary every so often. They’re just taking a break to use the bathroom and refill their sodas, and Steve watches with more fondness than he’d expected he’d ever have for Nancy’s little brother and his nerd troupe.
“Sorry your vagrant died,” Max says to Lucas as he stretches after sitting for so long.
“He didn’t die, he’s just…weakened.”
Max laughs. “Yeah, okay.”
Lucas opens his mouth to say something snappy back but pauses, then rolls his eyes and says, “Whatever.” Steve thinks he’s happy enough to hear Max laughing again that he’ll accept the slander against his character, just this once.
Steve doesn’t even realize he’s picking at his nail beds until Max slaps his hand away. He tries to hide the droop in his shoulders but thinks she notices anyway. She watches him a lot closer than usual for the rest of the night, and he does his best to act normally and pretend like it doesn’t sting, like it doesn’t remind him of his dad hitting his hands with a rolled up newspaper and pouring hot sauce on his bleeding cuticles because “Maybe this’ll finally teach you to stop.”
He apparently hadn’t been faking it very well because after the boys go home and Steve is locking up the house, Max is waiting for him at the doorway to her room. She’s wearing plaid pajama pants and Steve’s track T-shirt from freshman year that’s way too small for him in the shoulders now. She looks a little uncomfortable, and Steve frowns, wondering how to ask what’s wrong without being called an idiot, but then she’s flinging her arms around him in a very delicate hug, like this time she remembers he’s a bit banged up.
“Sorry,” she says into his shoulder. Before he can say anything, before he can tell her he’s fine, she lets go and slips into her room, closing the door quickly behind her.
“What, used up your emotion quota for the month?” he calls out.
“Yes!” she yells back, muffled by the door.
Steve snorts and shakes his head, wincing a bit. His head doesn’t hurt nearly as much as it did those first couple weeks, but it’s still not feeling great. He’s healing slower than when Billy had kicked his ass, and he’s really not thrilled about that. He doesn’t want his bones to be creaking in his twenties, but the way he’s going, that’s starting to look a bit like an inevitability.
Max doesn’t say anything else about the picking at his nails for the next few days, but the next time she sees it, when the party is over watching Raiders of the Lost Ark, she shoves something small into his hands. He looks down and sees a tiny neon purple dinosaur sitting in his palm. It’s squishy and stretchy, a little arcade toy, with bumpy ridges along its back.
“Fuck with this instead,” she says.
“Language,” Steve says absently, running his fingers over the ridges of its back. Well, it certainly hurts a lot less than making his cuticles bleed.
“Ugh, screw with this instead. Happy?”
“Ecstatic,” he says, standing, but he does press a quick kiss to the top of her head as he walks past her to grab drinks from the kitchen.
Steve keeps the little neon purple dinosaur in his pocket, partly because it’s the first thing one of the kids has given him (though he’d never say that aloud because he knows how cheesy it is, and he would never hear the end of it), but mostly because it actually does help. It gives him something he can do idly with his hands that takes the place of picking at his nails or cracking his knuckles. He rubs his fingers over the bumps on its back, squishes its soft body between his fingers, stretches it out and wraps its tail around his pinky. He has to rinse it off a few times as it picks up the lint in his pocket, but it works.
A couple weeks later, Max gets back from the arcade with the other kids and tosses a billiard-ball-sized neon yellow ball at him, which he catches easily. He’s not expecting it to be squashy though, and he almost drops it out of disgust on instinct until his brain catches up and realizes Max didn’t throw rotting fruit at him. It’s a squishy ball with a sort of wide netting around it, and when he squeezes it, the squashy inner material bulges out around the netting. He keeps it in the living room and plays with it when movies are on or when everyone’s just talking. Just something interesting enough to keep his hands busy.
When Max sees it working, sees him messing with the toys instead of his nail beds, she takes that as permission. Next, she brings back Silly Putty, then a rubber popper, followed by a cushy puffer ball covered with rubbery fringe. He particularly enjoys the sticky hand on a string that he uses to torment Robin. And Mike. And whoever happens to be sitting near him.
“You don’t have to give me your arcade prizes,” Steve tells Max one night when she hands him another little dinosaur, this time pink.
“Oh I know,” she says. “I never give you the candy.”
Robin figures out what he’s doing pretty quickly and brings over a bunch of paper cut into long narrow strips when it’s just Steve and her. She holds them excitedly between them, and Steve just stares for a second, not quite sure what’s going on.
“Are we…making paper chains?” he asks, eyeing the strips.
“No, dingus, though that would be fun for Christmas,” Robin says. “We’re going to fold stars.”
“Okay…” he says slowly. “Still not making a lot of sense, Robin.
Robin sighs, as if he should have already caught on by now. “My cousin has anxiety—”
“The cousin who cut off his pinky or the cousin who’s in jail for grand theft tractor?” Steve asks.
“Neither! Well, they probably do, too, the Buckleys can be an anxious bunch,” Robin admits. “My cousin Carrie that’s in college in Boston. She folds little paper stars when she’s a little too in her head. She’s got jars of them all over her place.”
He appreciates her not flat out saying that he’s a head case at least. He sighs and runs a hand through his hair. His head is hurting a lot less than it had been the last couple weeks, so he’s grateful for that at least. Robin seems to sense that he’s not going to say no, so she grins and tugs him over to the couch, and shoves a strip of paper into his hand.
“I just cut up printer paper for this, but we can get fun colors if you like it,” Robin says. Steve doesn’t think that’s likely to happen, but he’s fine humoring her. “Okay, first, you kinda tie a knot with the paper.”
“You tie a knot?” Steve says doubtfully, looking at the strip of paper in her hands.
“Will you let me finish? Jesus,” she says. “Just watch.”
Steve watches her hands as she does indeed fold the strip into a little flat knot until it looks like a pentagon. Steve takes the ends of his strip of paper and copies her, though his isn’t quite as even as hers is.
“Great!” she says. “Okay, you tuck the short end of the paper in like this. Then you just fold the long end along the lines of the pentagon. You’re basically just wrapping it around and around until you get to the end.”
It takes him a few times to get it exactly right, accidentally folding it at the wrong angle a couple times and making a weird shape. But he manages until he has a thicker paper pentagon with just a tiny end of the paper left.
“Perfect, now tuck the last bit inside the fold,” she says, showing him hers. “Then just gently pinch the sides to make it puff up into the star.”
Steve’s a little doubtful, but it works when she does it. Once again, it takes a couple tries to get it right, his normally dexterous fingers feeling unusually clumsy, but he manages to finish a wonky little star. It’s not nearly as neat as Robin’s, each point a different size than the others, but he did it. He sets his star next to Robin’s on the coffee table, and he can kind of see why it helps Robin’s cousin. If he were better at it, the nice repetitive motion would keep his hands busy.
“Can we do another?” Steve asks. Robin’s grin is blinding.
It takes the rest of the afternoon for Steve to really get the hang of it, which is a bit embarrassing considering how easily he usually manages tricky little things with his fingers, but by the time Max, Lucas, and Dustin come over, he has the process down and his stars are a lot more uniform. Steve scoops up the small pile of paper stars from the table before Lucas can squish them with the stack of board games he drops on the coffee table.
“Clue, Risk, Mouse Trap,” Steve says. “What, abandoning D&D?” He pours the handful of stars into a swirly blue vase on an end table that his mom loves. He likes the way they look in there.
“Never, don’t even say that,” Dustin says.
“Max may have pointed out that it’d be nice to play games all of us enjoy,” Lucas says. “Will is bringing Monopoly, and Mike is bringing Battle Ship and Sorry!”
Steve’s near-constant headache has abated a lot in the last few days, so he thinks he’ll be able to survive a lively game night all right. Especially since Jonathan and Nancy show up with pizzas and soda (he doesn’t mind feeding the kids, but his budget is getting tighter and tighter now that he doesn’t have a job anymore, and his savings is starting to dwindle. His dad notices if he uses his credit card too much, so he tries to grocery shop like normal and just stretch it to make it last, but the Party’s parents have been good about sending over pizza money or snacks, which blessedly takes some of the weight off his shoulders.
Steve joins in with Sorry! and a couple rounds of Battle Ship (he beats Jonathan easily, but Nancy demolishes him) before sitting back and just watching, head bobbing along with Jonathan’s new mixtape (he’s picked a song that reminds him of each person, which Steve thinks is pretty cute). Robin is quite the land hoarder in Monopoly, and he’s glad he declined playing with them once he sees how mad with power it makes her.
His ribs are doing well enough that he can lightly bounce his legs for a little bit before he starts getting a little sore. That’s when he picks up the leftover strips of paper and starts folding stars again, putting the finished ones on the end table next to the arm of the couch. Max looks like she’s about to give him shit for picking at his nails before she sees what she’s doing. She watches for a bit in confusion, but when she gets it, nods like she approves (Oh thank god I have her approval, he thinks wryly).
Nancy wins six rounds of Battle Ship in a row before Will finally dethrones her to the cheers of her prior victims. She laughs and raises her hands in surrender before getting up and out of the way for Mike to take on Will. She grabs a Coke and sinks in the seat on the couch between him and El, who’s subtly moving pieces on the Sorry! board with her mind when no one is looking. She blushes a bit when Steve gives her a knowing look but grins when she sees he isn’t ratting her out.
“What are you doing?” Nancy asks, looking over with interest.
Steve holds up the star he’s working on, pinching the corners so she can see it take shape. “Robin showed me how,” he says, half expecting her to make a joke about it.
But she looks interested and says, “Will you teach me?”
He expects the ache of being near her, but it’s muted now much more than it was just a few weeks ago. He wonders if that means he’s healing. He’s never been in love before her, so he can’t say for sure, but guiding Nancy through making her first star doesn’t sting nearly as much as it would have earlier in the summer. She catches on a lot quicker than he did, and she sits with him chatting idly for a bit as she makes a half dozen more before getting up for another piece of pizza. It’s nice to be able to talk to her again without feeling like his chest is caving in.
The paper star habit sticks, and Robin does bring him a bunch of colorful construction paper, though the thickness makes it a little harder to fold. Nancy saves the day there, bringing him a big pile of thinner colorful paper she and Mike haven’t used in years, and soon he can fold them without even looking, able to still participate in conversations or watch whatever movie they have on. It doesn’t take long before he’s filled the entire vase in the living and starts on another one.
Neither of his parents notice the contents of the vases when they get back from France, nor that the guest room now has posters and tapestries on the wall and clothes in the closet (he feels bad about Max needing to clear out for a bit, but she has some sleepovers with El when she can’t stand being home). He’s healed up enough that his bruises have faded, so they don’t notice his injuries either, nor that he winces when taking the stairs too fast or when his dad claps him hard on the shoulder in a rare moment of approval (Steve can’t bring himself to feel anything about that).
His parents are only back for a week and half before packing up for Chicago. Apparently his dad’s company is opening a new office, and they’ve tapped top midwest performer Richard Harrington to start it up. They don’t expect to be back for months. They’ve even rented a place in Chicago, and they give Steve strict instructions on how to maintain the house when they’re gone, as if he hasn’t been doing that for years already. They seem to think they’re giving him a great honor, allowing him to still live there, though they make it clear they expect him to find another job soon.
He can’t find it in himself to be disappointed when he sees them pull out of the driveway; all he feels is relief, especially when Max climbs into his car a half hour later, flipping off her mom’s new trailer. It’s all she can afford after Neil left. She’s a lot quieter than usual, always is after spending a lot of time at her mom’s, so Steve doesn’t go home right away. He takes her out for burgers at the Lakeview Diner on the shore of Lake Jordan, ordering a strawberry shake for her and chocolate for him.
They’re almost done eating, Max dragging one of her last fries through the barbecue sauce smeared on her plate, when she says, “She’s drinking again.” It’s quiet enough that no one in the neighboring booth can hear.
“Did she hurt you?” he asks carefully, not wanting to spook her. He obviously would never hit a woman, but he knows Nancy wouldn’t have the same restraint, and he’d have no compunctions about siccing her on Susan Hargrove.
“No,” Max says with a snort. “Nothing like that. She just yells a lot and sleeps a lot when she isn’t working. There are a lot of beer cans lying around, and the fridge wasn’t exactly full.”
“Max…”
“It’s fine,” she says, letting the fry flop into her lake of barbecue sauce. “I had a lot of popcorn and cereal.”
Yeah, he still might sic Nancy on her.
“Well, my parents have fucked off for the next three months at least,” Steve says, glad that it makes her expression brighten.
“Can I have El over for a sleepover?” she asks immediately.
“Yeah, dude, of course,” Steve says. “As long as you don’t burn a hole in the rug again.”
“That was so not our fault,” she says.
“Uh huh,” Steve says.
“It wasn’t!” she insists. “It was Dustin’s!”
And, well, he doesn’t really have a hard time believing that.