soulmate-esque au where steve is born with a psychic power where the first time he touches someone who will be important to him, he gets flashes of future moments between the two of them.
the first time he touches nancy he sees flashes of the two of them happy together, then an argument. the flashes clearly jump ahead a few years, as if they maybe stopped talking for a while, but they still look happy in that future. he thinks that maybe they get in a big fight, but clearly they’re still in each others lives for a long, long time.
when he ruffles dustin’s hair looking for dart, he gets flashes of laughter and jokes and a long life of brotherhood. he sees secret handshakes and little plastic dice and being invited to thanksgiving.
they’re not always positive. the first time he brushes past billy in the locker room, he’s filled with flashes of anger and dread and pain, and none of what he sees makes sense in the moment.
on his first day at scoops, he shakes robin’s hands and gets his biggest vision yet. there’s so much love and happiness and joy there, including a montage in which they seem to work a frankly absurd variety of jobs. but he gets stuck on an image of himself in a tux, robin in a wedding dress, and thinks this must be my future wife.
it isn’t until much later, on a dirty bathroom floor, that he realizes he was standing behind robin in that vision of her in a wedding dress, and, oh, he’s her best man.
almost a year later, when eddie pushes him against a wall with a broken bottle to his neck, steve is almost convinced he’s passed out because of the sheer number of visions running through his head. some of the flashes are innocent happy moments—sharing a joint, laughing at a movie, making dinner—but there’s also flashes of pleasure and adoration and devotion on a level that steve’s never felt before.
he sees flashes of waking up next to eddie in bed, walking a dog around a lake hand in hand, watching eddie perform on stage, a soft kiss to a bare shoulder.
and suddenly steve yearns, thinks he’s never fully known the meaning of that word until now. he tries to play it cool, doesn’t want to freak eddie out, but he’s seen so many visions of them holding hands that his fingers itch with the need to interlace with eddie’s.
when eddie is attacked by demobats, everyone tries to get steve and dustin to leave eddie’s body behind, because clearly eddie is dead. and steve can’t explain to them why he knows that can’t be true, he just stubbornly insists and drags eddie to a hospital as he promises again and again to dustin that eddie is going to make it.
everyone but steve is shocked when the doctors find the barest hint of a pulse.
it’s touch and go at first, but they put eddie in a medically induced coma and he starts to improve. steve is there the whole time. he tells the unconscious eddie about all of the things they still have to do together, about how he knows eddie will live a long, happy life because he’s seen eddie with gray in his hair, laugh lines etched into his face, as they welcome their first grandchild to the world.
and eddie makes it, and when he was up eddie tells steve he heard everything. steve steels himself for denial or disbelief, but eddie tells him that it’s the first thing he’s heard in the past month that actually makes sense.
they share their first kiss right there in the hospital room, and even though steve has seen this moment before, it still takes his breath away.
as he grows older, steve notices more and more of the moments he’s seen in visions as they happen. he happily discovers that there’s so much the visions don’t show, and there’s still so much to see.
because yes, just like he saw all those years ago, he stands behind robin at her wedding, and it’s as moving and special as it always looked. but he also gives max away at her and lucas’s wedding, and he helps dustin propose to suzie, and he helps erica pick out her wedding dress. and, of course, robin stands behind steve at his own wedding.
steve lives a long happy life, with so many memories—seen and unseen—to look forward to.