Thinking of Steddie at Christmas...
I wrote a fluffy lil Steddie fic with a silly number of cookies and mistletoe and Jimmy Stewart impressions and some (lightly life-threatening) meddling from Robin and Max. Enjoy...
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“Uhhh, I hate to say it, Steve-o, but I really don’t think we have enough cookies,” Robin Buckley said as she breezily waltzed into the kitchen where Steve Harrington was busy baking up a chocolatey storm, like she didn’t have a goddamn care in the world, like she hadn’t been baking for the last 48 hours straight. Robin punctuated her statement by taking a giant bite out of the sugar cookie she had gripped in her hand, dropping crumbs all over her luridly neon Christmas sweater.
“Oh, God, surely you’re not serious?” Steve asked, his brows knitting with worry, popping his head up from out of the oven that he was carefully pulling a fresh batch of piping hot chocolate chip cookies out of. His hair, normally coiffed to painstaking perfection, had gone slightly poofy from both the heat of the kitchen and the stress that was Christmas baking. Panicked, Steve wildly looked around his kitchen, taking stock. He was surrounded by plates and trays and platters piled high with heaps upon heaps of cookies. Even bowls had been recruited as vessels to hold the veritable army of Christmas confectionary that Steve had whipped up. In fact, there wasn’t even a visible flat surface of the kitchen left that wasn’t covered in baked goods. Everywhere he looked, it was cookies all the way down. Steve wasn’t even sure where the very hot tray in his hands was going to go. The sink, maybe. He’d have to be extra careful in that case when he washed his bowls for the next batch.
“Obviously not, dingus,” Robin said with a laugh, using her half-eaten cookie to gesture around the room, like that was evidence enough (although, looking around, it kind of was, not that Steve was ready to admit it). She fondly rolled her eyes at her best friend, her platonic soulmate, shaking her shaggy blonde hair side-to-side. “And don’t call me surely,” she added cheekily, winking. Steve just huffed as he transferred his latest batch of perfect cookies to the cooling rack that he had, in fact, set over the sink, muttering something under his breath about a lump of coal.
“Steve, you’re like an oversized, preppy Keebler elf in here. We’re going to be eating cookies until next Christmas at this rate. I think you can call it quits now,” Robin said, walking over to Steve and gently patting her hand supportively on his shoulder. It felt a little bit too much like condescension for Steve’s taste so he just ignored her, already scooping out fresh mounds of dough back onto his cookie sheet. “Hey, listen, Steve, stop, stop, turn the oven off and give me the spoon! Look, she’s tired. She’s done. She wants to go home to her drawer and rest. Can’t you hear her? She’s crying out, ‘Save me Robin! Save me from Steve Harrington! He’s a maniac! Help me! I can’t scoop another cookie or I’ll die!’” Robin used such an insane voice for the spoon that Steve couldn’t help but laugh at her antics.
“Okay, okay, alright, I just want this party to be nice, is all!” Steve said still a little bit fussily, but he still agreed to handing the spoon over to Robin. The only thing was he accidentally grazed his hand on the corner of the still-hot cookie sheet in the process. “Fuck! That hurt,” he said, rushing over to the sink to run his finger under water, being careful he wasn’t splashing too wildly: Who cared about a burnt finger when there were precariously placed and freshly baked cookies to consider? When the pain in his finger had subsided enough, he killed the running water, and held it up for Robin’s inspection after ensuring that no cookies had met the splash zone. His eyes went wide in supplication as he waited for her diagnosis, ever the co-dependent best friend, even when she was teasing him within an inch of his life. Robin squinted as she inspected his bright red finger. “I think you’ll live, Harrington. And I think we have enough cookies.”
“Yeah, maybe you’re right,” Steve said with a sigh, literally throwing in the towel as he tugged the dish rag he had thrown over his shoulder off, letting it drop down to the counter below.
‘Enough cookies’ honestly was an understatement. Steve knew that. He wasn’t, like, an idiot. He had eyes. He could see that the kitchen was plainly out of space and that maybe he had gotten a little bit carried away. Just a teensy bit. Maybe.
But, like, baking was fun, okay? So, sue him for going just a little bit overboard. It was kind of awesome, actually, the way that you could mix up some butter and sugar and flour and have it turn out into—“Steve, I feel like these sugar cookies you made are making me see God a little bit and you know that I don’t even believe in any kind of higher power. Besides Eleven,” Robin had cut in. But, like, exactly! You can take some simple ingredients and, about 12 or so minutes later, have it turn into that.
Steve had stumbled into baking a few months ago, and, like most things he discovered, he barreled into it confidently, even though he really had no idea what the heck he was doing. It started when he forgot to pick up some cookies at the Kroger, and, having a hankering for them that just wouldn’t seem to go away, he thought to himself, ‘gee, how hard could making fucking cookies be?’ Well, one triggered smoke detector alarm and a tray of blackened hockey pucks later, Steve learned the answer to that question was ‘harder than I initially thought.’ But he was sort of hooked and, like a dog with a bone, he kept at the whole baking thing until he actually wasn’t half bad. In fact, now he was pretty damn good at it, if he said so himself.
Once Steve had started, he hadn’t been able to stop. He was just having too much fun, testing recipes, learning what flavor combinations worked best together, and which ones were scorched earth (and he meant that sometimes literally because he occasionally fucked up the bake time). Steve discovered there was a great comfort to be had in the simple alchemy of baking. There was something about it that let his mind go quiet for once, left him feeling content, and gave him a huge sense of accomplishment for something that was so low-stakes. Plus, there was just something so undeniably homey about the way it made his house smell—like cinnamon and chocolate and nutty, melted browned butter. And, like, those were pretty much all the best smells in the whole world!
Once Steve had figured out that he could combine his love of baking and fill his house with all his favorite people in the world? Well, that was when his idea for the “First Annual Party Holiday Cookie Party and White Elephant Extravaganza” had been born. After weeks of build-up and recipe planning, tonight was finally the night for it.
Preparing for the party, Steve had started with simple chocolate chip cookies. Santa’s favorite! The can’t-go-wrong cookie. They were a classic for a reason. But then, when he’d gone searching in the cabinets for some extra baking soda, he’d stumbled upon a dusty, old recipe box that had belonged to his grandmother, long forgotten behind some bowls that never seemed to get used. Finding it was like unearthing buried fucking treasure, or something. After that, all bets were off. He knicked the tips of his fingers zesting lemons for lemon cookies. He ate more than his fair share of Hershey kisses after individually unwrapping a metric shit-ton of them to place on top of all the peanut butter blossoms he made. He shelled out his hard-earned Family Video earnings to pay a king’s ransom for the pine nuts that were the essential ingredient in pignoli cookies. He thought he might have cleaned the town out of sprinkles, too, but, like, whatever—if the good people of Hawkins had wanted sprinkles for their own holiday cookies, then they should have gotten to the damn Kroger faster than Steve had. He’d even harkened back to his days slinging ice cream at Scoops Ahoy and invented something that he was calling a “banana split cookie” that he was particularly excited for Erica to try. And then there were his sugar cookies—the ones that he had made into perfect circles using a cookie cutter he found at the bottom of his mother’s baking drawer and had hand-whipped buttercream frosting to top them with. They were—if Robin’s review was anything to go by—divine. Well, actually, back up: It was his baking drawer now, wasn’t it? It wasn’t like his mother was coming back for it. Steve shook his head clear. There simply wasn’t room for his mother in the kitchen with all those cookies anyway. Besides—
“Woah, did Vecna finally get me and have I gone to cookie heaven? And, if this is heaven, what the hell are you two doing here?”
The thing was, if Steve’s mother had come back for the contents of her baking drawer, she might have been startled to learn that her bedroom had been unexpectedly and unceremoniously overtaken by a crabby red-headed teenager with a particular penchant for Kate Bush.
Max Mayfield had just walked into the kitchen. Resting her cane against the island, she looked around wildly with the widest grin, like an unsupervised kid set loose in a candy shop. Or a cookie shop. A bakery. Whatever.
“I’m just choosing to focus on the part of that statement in which you referred to my baking as quote ‘heaven,’” Steve said, placing his hands on his hips in indignation.
“Sure, sure,” Max said. “Just keep telling yourself that, Harrington.” Her grin somehow got even wider though as she grabbed and tried a peanut butter blossom. “Fuck, these are good.”
“I know, right?” Robin asked, grabbing one for herself. “How does he do it?”
“Language!” Steve chided, ruffling the top of Max’s head. She tried to duck and cover, her hands flying up to protect the intricate French braids in her hair—getting crumbs in it in the process, not that Steve would be telling her that. “Hey! I swear to God, Harrington, if you mess these up, you’re redoing them yourself! And I’ll knock this whole of tray of cookies to the floor.”
“You wouldn’t,” Steve said, his eyes narrowing.
“Try me,” Max said back, squaring his shoulders like she meant business. Steve knew that she always did.
“Okay, okay, truce,” he relented, but he did take the tray of peanut butter blossoms in front of Max away under the guise of bringing them through into the dining room. In there, somehow, there were even more cookies awaiting on the dining table. Hmmm. Steve frowned looking at all of them. Maybe he really had overdone it.
It had been nine months since the entire Party had lived through their final confrontation with Vecna. He’d left scars upon all of them, literal and mental, but his parting gifts to Max had been particularly cruel. Besides the coma she had thankfully come through, she’d gone completely blind in her right eye and had a permanent limp after breaking nearly every bone in her legs, forever requiring her the use of a cane. Max hadn’t officially moved into Steve’s house, no, but it was more comfortable for her than the trailer she shared with her mother was. The primary suite located on the bottom floor in Steve’s house was way more accessible for her, too—and it was far easier than having to navigate around her mother in their tiny home. Plus, it also had the added bonus of being both unoccupied and not directly across the street from the place where a gate to the Upside Down had opened up. Both Max and Steve liked the constant company so it was pretty much a perfect situation all around. Even if they bickered ‘til the cow’s came home, there was a lot of trust and unconditional love there between the two of them. Max went home every once in a while, just to keep up appearances, but something about the “earthquakes” and Max’s injuries had kicked her mom’s drinking into overtime again so, more often than not, Max just stayed at Steve’s. When life had dealt them shitty families, they were lucky enough to build their own with each other.
Obviously, Steve had been more than happy to have Max, he was already driving her to physical therapy appointments three times a week (helpfully paid for by the government, not that they ever chipped in for gas, too, those cheap bastards). It was especially great to have Max around after his own parents had made it very clear that they wouldn’t be returning to Hawkins any time soon, not even to make sure that their only son had made it through those earthquakes alright. Which, he had—more or less. Of course, there were the headaches, and the gnarled scars that wrapped around his neck and torso, and the nightmares that had him gasping awake at all hours of the night, and the fear of water, and the way his whole body seemed to occasionally ache first thing in the morning for no reason at all, but, hey, the point was, he had lived. Everyone had lived. That had been more than enough for Steve. The rest he could just, like, white knuckle his way through and deal. It certainly fucking beat the alternative.
There was another spare bedroom on the second level down the hall from Steve’s room that hurricane Robin pretty much tore apart and claimed for her own. Although she, having a much better relationship with her parents than Max and Steve had with their own, was around less often.
Still though, the three of them had done plenty to put their own stamp on the place. These days, the Harrington house was less a paragon of suburban upper-class success and more a cozy clubhouse for the young adults and teenagers who had just prevented the apocalypse. Gone were the golf trophies; the stiff, posed family photos that no one was smiling in; the hideous crystal knick-knacks that Steve’s mother had collected over the years. In their place were paintings done by Will hanging on the walls; plants everywhere that none of them were particularly dedicated to keeping alive; squashy, oversized knit blankets at the ready for movie nights; accoutrements from whatever hobby Robin was trying that week (currently, crocheting); brightly covered scarves thrown over every single lamp in the house to dull the light for Steve who’d had migraines triggered by far less than overly bright light; dead batteries from Max’s Walkman littering the floor (now those Steve did not love); and the various baking cookbooks that Steve had either picked up from the library or had lent to him by Joyce Byers. The dining room table was no longer used for stuffy dinner parties with food that people barely ate. Instead, it was covered with scratches from dice being thrown all over the damn thing—not that Steve gave a flying fuck about a little wear and tear; he had long since stopped hearing his father’s voice in his head complaining about how much it cost to import the thing from Italy. Nope, now that table was the perfect setting and battleground for a gaggle of teenagers to gather and play Dungeons and Dragons around once a week for hours on end. It wasn’t a house anymore so much as it was—finally—a home, a safe space that Steve, Max, and Robin had carved out for one another and for the rest of the Party as a whole. Steve really wouldn’t have it any other way.
Honestly, his parents would neither recognize nor belong in the place that had once been the austere setting of Steve’s childhood. It used to bother him more that they were probably never coming back; now it was more like an old wound that had long since healed over, like one of his bat bites that had first been rendered into a mottled scar before fading into something less visible. Of course, being constantly surrounded by friends did him a world of good in that respect, even if they sometimes merciless teased him for just, like, existing.
“Steve, let’s be honest, the real reason that you’ve gone completely coo-coo bananas baking what is truly an obscene number of cookies is that you’re hoping to impress a certain slightly unhinged, wild-haired nerd,” Robin said, the absolute Judas, stuffing another cookie into her mouth like she hadn’t just betrayed Steve’s most closely guarded secret: the way he may or may not have been totally gaga over one Eddie Munson.
“ROBIN!” Steve shrieked, his eyes flying over to where Max stood closely inspecting a tray of pignoli cookies, scrunching her nose at the—very expensive, thank you very much—pine nuts. “Ixnay on the Maxnay!”
Max just snorted, breezing a hand in front of her face. “Oh please, Steve, you don’t think that I didn’t already know? What do you think Robin and I talk about when you’re not here? Steve this, Eddie, that, when will the two of them finally get their shit together? Blah, blah, blah, and so on, and so on.” Max took a bite out of a pignoli anyway, apparently undeterred by the pine nuts after all, and Steve stood there with his mouth dropped open like he had nothing better to do than catch flies. “Like, I’m only half blind, Steve. You only practically drool over him when he’s sitting right over there at the head of the dining table leading DND every week. Like, one time I literally saw you visibly gulp when he crawled up onto the table. I mean, shit, the fact that you’re willing to let all those animals into our house for hours and hours on end, let alone bake actual snacks for them, like you don’t mind the fact that they practically tear the place apart”—Max dramatically suppressed a shudder—“should be evidence enough alone that you’re totally head over heels for that guy, which is kind of insane because one time I saw him pick up a cigarette butt off the ground outside of his house and try to light it, but the heart wants what the heart wants, I guess.”
Steve was still rooted to the spot spluttering like a fish in total shock. “Oh my God, does anyone else know? Do you think he knows?” Max, with all of her infinite wisdom, just shrugged. “Oh, Jesus Christ!”
“I think what Max means to say is that ‘no, Steve, we do not think he knows,’” Robin said, jumping in, widening her eyes at Max. “For what it’s worth, though, we think he’s into you too.”
“Think,” Max emphasized, raising a single finger in the air to make her point.
Steve just blinked at his younger friend, his little sister for all intents and purposes, biting his lower lip as a beat of anxiety pricked at his brain as he realized what the news that he liked Eddie would actually mean and he didn’t exactly know… “Uh, hey, I mean, you don’t… you don’t mind that, well, Eddie is a guy, and that… I’m a guy…” Max just fixed him with her hardest glare. “I’m not even going to dignify that with a response, Steve.”
“Okay! Okay! Sheesh, sorry,” Steve said, raising his hands up in an apology.
“Apology accepted,” Max said, popping a Hershey kiss from a tray of peanut butter blossoms into her mouth. Jesus, was nothing safe from her?
“Hey! Those cookies aren’t complete if they don’t have a Hershey kiss on top of them!”
Max’s eyes went wide as she dramatically slapped herself on the forehead. “Oh, no! Call the fire department! Ready the calvary! One of Steve Harrington’s cookies isn’t absolutely perfect! Eddie Munson will never love him back now!” The kitchen was filled with the sound of her cackles. Hardy har har.
“Yeah, yeah, laugh it up, you little shit,” Steve called, already having gone to the kitchen and back to grab a fresh kiss to unwrap and place upon the naked cookie. “There,” Steve said, setting the cookie back to rights. “Okay, so, enough about me and my sad love life. Did you remember to get your white elephant present? I was thinking we could leave them under the tree until it’s time to play?”
“Yes, dad, I remembered to get a white elephant present. You only reminded me 70 million times. It’s in my room.” Steve just tried not to get misty eyed at hearing Max use the words ‘my room.’
“Okay, well, chop-chop, everyone is going to start getting here soon and you’re not allowed to play if you don’t have a gift.” Max rolled her eyes at Steve but she grabbed her cane and dutifully headed back in the direction of her room in search of her offering to Steve’s Christmas game.
Robin came up and stood behind Steve wrapping her arms around his middle and resting her head on his shoulder. Even though Steve was kind of annoyed with her right then, he always found comfort in her hugs.
“For the record, the red terror came to me with her observation about you and Eddie. No sacred bond of Starcourt Movie Theater Bathroom Trust was broken, nor will it ever be. And, really, you gotta know that she’s on your side. We both are. We really want this for you. We’re rooting for you, Harrington. And Eddie, too, I guess.”
Steve just sighed. “I don’t know, Rob. It’s just that things are so perfect right now. We beat Vecna. We saved the world, or, like, the town, at least, or whatever. We lived. Eddie lived. Against all the odds. All of them. Forever. And we’re… friends now. I don’t want to do something that’s going to fuck everything up and mess with that, you know?” Steve’s voice was thick with worry.
Robin squeezed him just a little bit tighter. “Okay, but on the flip side of that coin, what if you telling him how you feel makes everything even better? Have some faith, Steve. It’s Christmas, anything could happen! Which reminds me…,” Robin let Steve go, heading towards the unknowable pile of detritus she always seemed to have collected upon one of the kitchen counters. It was the one place where cookies weren’t. Steve had once dared to ask her to clean it up and had been given such a Look in response that he never dared asked again. “I grabbed some mistletoe at the store earlier, I was gonna hang it right here in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room and see if I can’t kick start a little somethin’ somethin’ into motion.”
Steve felt his face go bright red. “Robin. No.”
Robin and Steve stared at each other for the span of about three seconds. “Okay, fine, you win.” Steve said, breaking first. “As per usual,” he muttered under his breath, rubbing the back of his neck. Jeez, the women in his life really put him through it, huh?
“Yes! You won’t be sorry, Steve, you’ll see!”
“Yeah, yeah,” Steve said, pushing past his best friend as she stood on her tip toes to hang up the offending plant.
Steve entered the living room marveling at the sight before him. Proudly standing in the corner of the room was a bona-fide real tree. Frasier fur and everything. It smelled so fucking good, a close second to the cookies. His parents had never let him get a real one, opting instead to go for an old plastic number they kept in storage in the basement. “Steven, we could never let nature inside of this house,” his mother had always said whenever Steve had asked if they could get a real tree that year. Eventually he had just stopped asking. But this year? This year was different. He had gone with Max and Eddie down to the Christmas tree lot that had popped up in the town square after Thanksgiving. They’d picked out the biggest one they could find and Steve had grinned from ear-to-ear while Eddie helped him tie it to the roof of his car. He’d been so happy that he hadn’t even complained about the needles scratching the BMW’s paint job. Much.
And, now, here it was! Proudly standing with all the ornaments they’d gotten at the Goodwill and those that had been gifted to them by their friends’ parents. It was covered in tinsel and intermittent strands of popcorn and cranberries (and not a single Christmas light to be seen—they’d all had enough of those things to last them a lifetime, thanks very much). It was absolutely fucking perfect. Steve couldn’t help but grin at the tree like it was the fourth member of their household as he walked over to the fireplace and set to work on building a fire big enough that it would last the whole night. He thought it would be the perfect the addition to making it the coziest Christmas party ever and, You know, what? Steve thought as he watched the blaze come to life and heard the satisfying snaps and cracks of smoldering firewood, I was fucking right!
Steve was just putting his own white elephant offering underneath the tree—a VHS copy of the notoriously rated R Alien which he fully expected to be quite the hotly contested present during the game—when the doorbell rang. Normally, Steve never allowed the kids to rent anything rated R when they came into Family Video and begged him to do so, but he figured that it was Christmas and they could all stand to live a little (as long as the little shits didn’t radio him when they inevitably got nightmares). He ran over to the door in his stocking feet, slipping a little on the hardwood floor but catching himself just in time—“I saw that!” Robin’s voice called out from the doorway to the kitchen; “Saw what?” Steve replied—as he opened the door.
“Nance! I wasn’t expecting you!” Steve said as he took in the sight of Nancy Wheeler on his doorstep holding a plate of frosted brownies, her curly brown hair sticking up out from underneath a pink pom-pom hat.
“Uh, yeah, sorry, I got home from Boston a couple of days earlier than I expected and when the boys said where they were going tonight, I thought I might gate crash.
“Ah-HEM,” uttered an irritated female voice behind her.
“Sorry, the boys and Erica,” Nancy corrected herself, turning around and revealing the middle schooler standing behind her with her arms crossed in front of her chest. Erica Sinclair was the kind of precocious kid that could make even Nancy Wheeler fall in line. Honestly, it was Erica’s world and they were all living in it.
“I’m missing Tina’s Christmas party for this, so those banana split cookies you promised me better be worth it, Harrington.” Erica said, handing her white elephant gift over to Steve.
“They are!” he said indignantly, scowling, but he dutifully took the gift she was holding out all the same, like a vassal accepting an offering from his queen. “Thank you for penciling me into your busy schedule, Erica.”
“You’re welcome,” she replied with a self-satisfied smirk before disappearing into the house, no doubt in search of Max.
“Really, uh, anything beats sitting around the TV with my mom and dad…,” Nancy continued, trailing off, her cheeks turning slightly pink with what Steve suspected was embarrassment.
“The more the merrier, Nance. Seriously. Us adults can always use the reinforcements. Plus, it’s really good to see you.” Steve made sure to hold Nancy’s gaze as he reassured her that he was totally fine that his ex-girlfriend was crashing his Christmas party. And, really, he meant it. It was totally fine. He and Nancy had made their peace months ago—with apologies given on both sides—after everything that happened in the Upside Down. They chalked it all up to the heat of the moment and the fear of death hanging over their heads. Privately, Steve also suspected his sudden outpouring of feelings for Nancy had something to do with his totally unexpected burgeoning feelings for a certain other dark, curly haired—but decidedly male—member of their party, but that wasn’t exactly something that he felt comfortable sharing with anyone who wasn’t named Robin Buckley. And, well, Max Mayfield now, too, he supposed. Apparently though, nothing made you cling to a lost dream of heteronormativity like going through a panicked bisexual awakening.
At the end of the summer, Nancy had gone off to college in Boston and Steve had stayed behind to continue to grow roots underneath his feet in Hawkins, and both sides were very happy with the resolution. Suffice it to say, Steve no longer harbored any daydreams of driving a Winnebago around the country with his six kids—at least, he didn’t with Nancy sitting next to him, anyway.
“That is, Wheeler, as long as you brought a present for the white elephant,” Steve continued, his eyes playfully narrowing.
“I would never skip an instruction!” Nancy said, holding up a small parcel wrapped with brightly colored snowman wrapping paper. “Where should I put it?”
“Under the tree is cool. There’s a couple there already, you’ll see,” Steve said, moving out of the way of the door to let Nancy through.
“Uh, hello to you, too. Can we come in now? It’s freezing out here,” Mike said sullenly, trotting behind his big sister into the house.
“Merry Christmas, Steve!” Lucas called as he appeared behind the bean pole that was Mike Wheeler, far cheerier than his best friend. Steve loved all his children the same but he thought that he and Mike might never really see eye-to-eye on anything which, honestly, was fine with him. Mike had shown up and that was plenty for Steve.
“Cookies go in the dining room, presents go under the tree!” he called to their retreating forms.
“Yeah, yeah, sure,” Mike said over his shoulder. That kid. Steve just shook his head.
He was about to shut the front door against the Indiana cold that had no place in his warm and cozy house because yeah, Mike was right, it really was frigid out there, when he spotted Will and Eleven heading up the driveway. Leaning to look around them, Steve saw Joyce in her car, waving and calling out to him “Merry Christmas, Steve! I’ll be by to pick them back up at 11!”
“You too, Mrs. B, sounds good!” Steve called, waving right back.
“And, hey, you’re coming over for Christmas Eve, right? Hop is expecting you!”
“Yeah, I wouldn’t miss it!” Steve called. “I’ll bake something!” He was already dreaming of the beer cheese bread he suspected Hopper would really enjoy.
Both Eleven and Will were laden with packages—presents and cookies alike. Steve grabbed a couple things from each of them to help lighten the load. Will had made gingerbread cookies that were painstakingly decorated. “Dude, these are so pretty,” Steve breathed as Will went pink. He tightly shut the front door behind them and led the latest arrivals into the dining room where everyone else had gathered around the cookie table.
“I mean, they’re nothing,” Will squeaked out which was kind of an insane thing to say about the individually painted snowflake cookies. They were way better than anything Steve could have done.
“Seriously, man? They don’t look like nothing.”
“Yeah? I guess I just sort of got carried away. It was fun.” Steve knew exactly what he meant.
“I helped!” Eleven insisted to which Will just spluttered at her in return. “What? You did not. Hey, friends don’t lie,” he said, narrowing his eyes at his stepsister who just laughed in return. It was kinda nice to see Eleven come out of her shell, make jokes, and tease her brother, like a normal kid, Steve thought.
“Merry Christmas, El,” Steve said, ruffling her hair as Eleven giggled. At least she didn’t mind it when Steve did that.
Eleven, for her part, had brought a pile of Eggo waffles that had more than likely long since gone cold, piled high with melted whipped cream, M&Ms, and Reeses Pieces. It was the kind of thing that would appeal to absolutely no one but her but Steve dutifully added it to spread on the dining room table.
He had been heading into the kitchen to grab a soda when he heard it—the roar of an engine that could only come from one beat-up van in particular. His heart lurched in response, and, Christ, was that some anxious sweat gathering at his hair line? Shit. He was Steve Harrington, he didn’t just nervously sweat because someone had a crush was on near! But then he reached up and rubbed at the damning condensation on his skin before hurriedly trying to hide the evidence on his jeans. Steve gulped; he felt like a boxer dancing on the balls of a feet before a fight. Ding, ding! Go time.
dededos
snowghoul
kaledo-art
pixelskylines
baratheonpilled
yousharknotpass
