All things #stobin because we don't see enough fanmade content for these two goofballs and I honestly can't get enough of their whole "platonic soulmates" dynamic ♥️♥️
Robin and Steve playing a dnd character together because Steve said the only way he'd play is literally with Robin. They take turns each session for who speaks but always planning together. It's a teenage human, gangly and uncoordinated and a bit of a loner. Everyone sort of lets the "two people playing one character" issue slide, as they want to play a game with their friends.
Robin and Steve have wildly different character voices, and sometimes announce which way they are walking before stumbling in that direction, and also mutter to themself in character. when it's Steve's sessions to talk he flits with the NPCs Eddie plays, but Robin is just a little aggressive to them. The personality changes are kinda weird but everyone is just happy they're playing.
Everything is going well until the big bad of the short campaign they're all playing knocks them into a wall. Not hard, but hard enough they're scrambling and flailing and...splitting in half. By their own description. Immediately they start, with their respective character voices (they are committing to this bit) bickering about whose fault it is. And about what they should do now their cover is blown.
The table is silent.
Robin and Steve have been conning everyone the entire time. They're playing twin halflings, who alternated who sat on each other's shoulders pretending to be a human because they were goofing off the day they joined the party and were too embarrassed by the mix up to correct anyone about it until they had to. Their voices and personality changes are brilliantly embedded as not Robin and Steve not being able to keep consistent, it's because they've been playing different characters. It's brilliant. It's horrible. Everyone fell for it and the reveal essentially pauses play because everyone starts yelling at them.
“That’s it?” Steve asks. “You’re not going to go to prom because you don’t know how to dance?”
“I’m uncoordinated enough! I don’t need to be out there making even more of an idiot of myself in some floofy dress,” Robin insists.
“Rob, no one at prom knows how to dance. Everyone kind of looks like an idiot, that’s half the point,” Steve says.
“Oh yeah, Steve, you’re really selling me on the experience,” Robin drawls.
“No, listen, I’m not done,” Steve says, giving her a nudge. “The other half of the point is just… going and having the memories, y’know? You get to dress up and take the dumb picture with your date, and avoid the punch because someone probably spiked it, and you get to dance and be close to someone and just, like, be carefree for a night.”
Robin says nothing. She doesn’t agree that prom night is paramount to the teen experience, she doesn’t tease the shit out of him for having such stereotypical expectations of a dumb high school dance, she’s just… watching him. She’s turned sideways on the sofa, one leg drawn up to her chest, and she’s looking at him like he’s something between a fascinating puzzle and the saddest thing she’s seen all day, and he knows what she’s thinking.
Steve hadn’t gone to senior prom. He’d been planning to, of course, at the beginning of the year – he’d had Nancy then, and even as early as October, he’d been fantasizing about the flowers he’d bring her and the dinner they’d go to and the way they would sway slowly to whatever shitty songs the DJ put on. But by the time spring had rolled around, he not only hadn’t had Nancy, he hadn’t really had any friends in school at all—not real ones—and so he hadn’t seen the point in attending.
He'd gone to a movie with Dustin that night, instead (he’s at least eighty percent certain the little shit had set it up as some kind of pity outing, since he’d known Steve wasn’t going to prom, but it had been kind of nice that someone had cared enough to even try). It hadn’t been bad, but it hadn’t been exactly what he’d wanted.
Stiffly, Steve glances away from Robin and shrugs. “Or whatever. That’s what it’s like in the movies, right?”
Robin opens her mouth, but her eyes are still soft, and suddenly Steve doesn’t want to hear what she has to say. Instead, he levers himself up off the couch and turns to her, holding out a hand.
“C’mon, I’ll teach you,” he says, cracking a grin. “Then you won’t have an excuse not to go.”
“You… want to teach me how to dance,” Robin asks flatly.
Steve shrugs. “You got anything better to do tonight?”
Raising a sharp brow at Steve, Robin starts to smile, too. “You sure you wanna subject your feet to that?”
“I think I can handle it,” Steve shoots back, and then Robin is up off the couch and helping him push the coffee table out of the way.
They rifle through Steve’s collection of tapes until they find something he deems just the right tempo, pop the cassette in, and stand in the middle of the living room.
“Okay, give me your hand,” Steve says, taking her right hand in his left, “and your other goes on my shoulder.”
Robin does as he says, glancing dubiously down at her feet as Steve places his hand on her waist. “I’m not actually sure this is a good idea,” she says with a grimace. “I might be unteachable.”
“We haven’t even started yet,” Steve reminds her. “Seriously, relax, this is super easy. It’s just a box step waltz.”
Despite her uncertainty, Robin can’t help but smirk at him. “A waltz, huh?” she teases. “Did your parents make you take fancy-pants, rich kid dance lessons when you were younger, or something?”
Steve rolls his eyes. “No. My mom taught me,” he says, and then rushes on before Robin has anything to say about that. “So you’re gonna start by stepping back with your right foot when I step forward, alright?”
Brows furrowed, Robin nods and looks down at her feet again, and Steve squeezes her waist gently to get her attention.
“Look up at me, not at your feet. It’ll be easier, I promise.”
“How am I going to know what my feet are doing if I’m not looking at them?”
“You’re attached to them, Robin.”
“That’s debatable.”
Steve tries not to laugh. He really does. “Okay, you’re in marching band, right? This cannot be harder than following whatever steps that involves while also playing an instrument.”
“This is different!” Robin insists. “I can’t step on the French horn’s feet! The French horn isn’t gonna judge me if I fuck up! Like, the worst that’ll happen in marching band is that the drum major will yell at you, and the drum major is always yelling, so it doesn’t even make a difference anymore, and–”
“Hey,” Steve cuts in, squeezing Robin’s hand this time. “I’m not going to judge you if you fuck up, okay? I am literally the last person qualified to do that.”
Robin huffs out a little laugh. “Right. Two of a kind,” she says.
“Exactly.” Steve grins. “Now c’mon, Buckley, I know you’ve got this. On one, back with your right foot.”
Nodding, Robin glances down at her feet, but looks right back up at Steve. “Okay.”
“Okay. One–”
Steve steps forward with his left foot, and Robin immediately steps forward with her right and kicks him in the shin.
“Ow,” Steve says, dry and flat because it hadn’t really hurt.
“Sorry!” Robin ducks her head, laughing nervously.
Steve shakes his head. “Let’s try that again. Back with your right foot.”
“At least I had the right side?”
“Yep, now aim for the right direction, yeah?”
This time, when Steve counts off, Robin’s right foot goes back, and his left follows her.
“Okay, now what?” Robin asks, looking down again.
“Now, you’re gonna bring your left foot–” gently, Steve judges the top of her left foot with his right, “back,” as she begins to slide back, he moves and taps the inside of her ankle, “and to the left. Just like that.”
“No injuries this time,” Robin quips, and Steve smiles.
“Now move your right foot over next to your left.” He nods as Robin gets her feet back together. “Forward with your left foot – good,” he encourages as he steps back to mirror her. “And now forward and to the side with your right. Like you did with your left before, but opposite.”
“Uh.” Robin makes the move slowly, still staring down, but she looks back up at him when she gets her right foot planted. “Like that?”
“Yep. Now left foot over, and–” Steve follows her, bringing them back to the same position they started in, “that’s it!”
Robin blinks at him. “That’s it?”
“Easy, right?” Steve says.
“Yeah.” Robin nods hesitantly. “I think I can handle that.”
“Of course you can,” Steve insists. “Now let’s try it again. Back with your right foot. One–”
Robin steps forward with her right and kicks Steve in the shin.
“Sorry!”
Steve quickly becomes glad they’re both in their socks, or he’d be sporting much more serious bruises by the time they reach the end of the tape. Robin doesn’t have any trouble keeping the order of the steps in mind, but keeps moving in the opposite direction of where she’s supposed to be going, and Steve has been kicked and stepped on more times in the last half hour than he thinks he has been in his entire life.
“This is ridiculous,” Robin groans. “This is the literal definition of women having to do everything backwards and in heels!”
“You’re not wearing heels,” Steve points out.
“I would be at prom,” Robin says. “Why do I have to go backwards?”
“Because you’re following.”
“Well why can’t I lead?”
“Because you don’t even know how to follow!”
“Exactly! I’m starting from scratch either way!” Robin aims pleading eyes up at Steve. “Can’t we just try it in reverse? How much worse at it could I be?”
The thing is, Steve’s only ever led when dancing – he’s never had reason to learn how to do the follow part. But then, he’s already been reversing the steps in his head all night in order to instruct Robin; following couldn’t be that hard, could it?
“Fine,” Steve groans, letting his head hang back for a moment. “Fine. Trade me.”
“Yes! Trade!” Robin pumps her fist once in triumph, and Steve can’t help but laugh.
He lets go of her right hand and instead takes her left before putting his other hand on her shoulder.
“Hand on my waist.” Steve nods to his to his left side, and Robin moves into position. “Right, so you’re gonna step forward with your left this time, okay?”
Robin nods. “Forward with my left. Okay.”
“Okay. One–”
Steve steps back with his right foot. Robin steps back with her left.
They stand there, each half balanced on their back foot, staring at each other, before Robin bursts into laughter. Steve follows suit.
“I– I told you I was unteachable,” Robin giggles once they’ve caught their breath, her forehead resting on Steve’s shoulder.
“Nope, this is a personal challenge now,” Steve insists, still grinning. “I’m a lot of things, but I’m not a quitter. You’re going to learn to waltz if it kills me.”
“Shouldn’t it be ‘if it kills me’?” Robin draws back to ask.
“My death is looking a lot more likely at this point,” Steve says, and Robin snorts.
“God, you’re so dramatic.”
“Yeah, okay, Miss Unteachable. Ready to try again?”
Robin takes in a breath, wiggles her shoulders, and puts her hands back in position. “Ready.”
“Great. Just remember–”
“Forward with my left foot,” Robin echoes, overlapping Steve’s instruction perfectly.
Steve grins. “Okay, then. One–”
Somehow, Robin makes a better leader than a follower. Once she gets over the initial nerves, she manages the reverse order of steps just fine, even getting confident enough to stop looking at her feet after several sets.
(The fact that Steve has no trouble immediately reversing the steps himself and still instructing Robin receives no comment, though it does receive a brief glare, which gets a smug grin in return.)
They rewind the tape again and keep going. Steve lifts their joined hands to spin Robin around when they hit the second song and she follows with a laugh before insisting that, since she’s leading, she should be the one spinning Steve. He has to duck a little to get under her arm, but they feel the maneuver is quite successful.
Robin offers to try to dip him, but Steve declines, insisting he doesn’t feel like getting dropped on the floor today, earning a pinch at his waist even as Robin laughs.
As the evening wears on, they give up their carefully-held waltz positions and lean in close, until Robin’s head is resting on Steve’s shoulder again, her arms wrapped around his waist, while Steve drapes his arms over her shoulders and leans his head on top of hers.
“This is the kind of slow dancing I would’ve expected from Steve Harrington at prom,” Robin says as they sway in gentle circles to the beat of the music.
Steve hiccups out a little laugh. “Yeah, well, I had to make sure you knew how to do the real thing, first.”
“And?” Robin asks. “Do I pass?”
“I think you’ve got the hang of it,” Steve says. “Now you have no excuse not to go.”
“Steve,” Robin draws back a little, enough to look up at him without pulling away, “who the hell do you think I’m going to be dancing with at prom? It’s not like I can ask– anyone I’d be interested in.”
Steve’s heart sinks a little, the same way it always does when he’s reminded of how fucking unfair the world is to Robin and to other people like her. He shrugs a bit lamely. “You could go with friends?”
“I guess,” Robin says, staring at the front of Steve’s shirt, suddenly lost in thought.
Steve frowns. He doesn’t even remember what had gotten them onto the subject of prom—it’s January, the dance is months away—but what had started out as something fun is starting to make Robin feel bad, and he can’t have that.
“Hey, I didn’t mean–”
“You should go with me,” Robin cuts in, looking back up at him.
“What?”
“To prom,” Robin says. “You should be my big ol’ platonic date.”
“Right,” Steve drawls. “Because going to prom the year after you’ve graduated doesn’t scream that you haven’t moved on from high school at all. Definitely not sad, or anything.”
“Sure,” Robin agrees wryly. “About as un-sad as not going to your senior dance at all.”
Steve cuts a sharp look at Robin, who just smiles at him.
“I mean, I’m just saying: who better to give me the whole prom experience?” Robin shrugs, tone entirely too innocent to be trusted. “If you go with me, we can dress up and get the dumb picture together, and we can avoid the punch, and you can tell me all the gossip I know for a fact you still know about at least half the people there, we can dance… The whole shebang.”
When Steve had been imagining prom night with Nancy the year before, he’d imagined romance. He’d imagined meeting her eyes across the dinner table and sneaking kisses on the dance floor. He’d imagined going back to his place afterwards and making love, spending the rest of the night worshipping Nancy and making sure she knew how beautiful she’d looked and what a wonderful time he’d had with her.
But when he thinks about it now, he thinks about making jokes at dinner with Robin, about standing around in the tinsel-strewn gym and making catty remarks about who’s dressed terribly and whose dancing is even worse. He thinks about them dancing together, still, and maybe they’ll still go back to his place afterwards, where they can watch terrible movies for the rest of the night.
It doesn’t sound at all like what he’d wanted a year ago.
It sounds perfect, now.
“You’ll have to buy the tickets,” Steve finally says, and Robin’s face lights up. “And I expect my corsage to be very fancy.”
Robin laughs. “Should’ve known you wouldn’t be a cheap date, Harrington.”
“We can go Dutch on dinner, if you want,” Steve says.
“How generous,” Robin deadpans, and Steve doesn’t bother to hold back his own grin.
They both know he’s probably going to pay for dinner. He doesn’t mind.
“You’re serious, though?” Robin asks, looking up at him. “You really want to go to prom just to waltz with me?”
“Well, I went to all the trouble of teaching you.” Steve shrugs.
Robin bites her lip around a smile. “Do I get to lead?”
“For the sake of my shins, you’d better,” Steve says, and Robin laughs, leaning back in to cinch her arms around his waist again.
“You are my favorite person, you know that?” she says softly, just audible over music still crooning from the stereo.
“Yeah,” Steve says, pressing his cheek to the top of her head and closing his eyes. “You’re mine, too.”
Stobin at 3 am for NO FUCKING REASON, completely off key and our of sync: I'm at the Pizza Hut, I'm at the Taco Bell, I'm at the combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell *maniacal laughter*
Steve Harrington just up and disappeared the summer of 83’.
He wasn’t seen around town, and he didn’t talk to any of his old friends. No one knew what happened to him. But the thing was Steve hadn’t actually -gone- anywhere. He was still around, still shopping for groceries and driving the kids around, because even though he wasn’t involved in their end of things the first go around, Steve was instantly protective of the shitheads.
Steve had just stopped looking like Steve.
Him and Nancy had ended up breaking up after all was said and done and he’d gone in a bit of a bender after school had let out for the year. Getting lost in the streets of Indianapolis and trying to figure out who he was, who he wanted to be.
That’s when he’d stumbled upon the punk scene and everything sort of changed for him. He didn’t -want- to be King Steve, had never wanted to be him in the first fucking place but it was the only way he knew to keep himself safe in high-school. He’d gone along with it because he wasn’t really a fighter and he knew if he was bottom of the food chain, he wouldn’t have survived. But the punk scene, the punk scene was everything he never knew he needed, and the kind people he’d met behind the hard edges that dressed with had helped him find a way to express himself and protect himself.
So he’d shaved the sides of his head, pierced his lip and eyebrow, and bought enough black and pastel clothing to crop and cut and mix and match till it fit his feelings of the day.
And so King Steve died and Steve was born from his ashes or something poetic like that and Steve felt more himself then he’d ever had before. He even learned about the queer community that intermingled with the punks and metal heads he spent his time with, and discovered you -can- in fact like both babes and boys and he’d been slowly setting into that part of his identity over the summer as well.
It nearly made him laugh out loud when he’d walked into Hawkins High on his first day of senior year and everyone’s jaws seemed to drop in unison when they took him in. Charcoal smoked around his eyes and mesh top covered by his black denim vest covered in patches and pins. The old “Harrington” cut off the back of his lettermen jacket and sewn onto the back of the vest, effectively cutting off every rumor about him ‘running off with that Buckley girl he knocked up.’ His arm was draped casually across said girls shoulders, the pink streaks she’d added to her hair standing in stark contrast to his black clothes.
“People are staring.” Robins whispered words tickled his ear as she leaned into his space, shying away from the eyes on them.
“Let em’ look Buck. Who gives a shit what they think, that’s what Hellen told us right?” He smiled softly down at her. She’d come a long way since the first time they’d run into each-other at one of the only queer clubs in the city, but she was still working on the whole aloof part of the punk roll she was falling into with him. Her outfit more subdued with spikes and patches on her jacket being the most she felt comfortable with in her new fashion. She still wasn’t sure she was totally into the punk look, so she’d taken her favorite parts and found ways to incorporate them into her usual fashion sense.
“Is that Steve Harrington?” Tommy’s voice suddenly rings across the halls and breaks them from their little bubble. Robin pulling her head off his arm and squaring her shoulders.
“Hagen.” He nods, the piercings in his face glittering slightly under the schools florescence. He debates internally if he should go on the defensive or just simply stay aloof, when Eddie Munson rounds the corner making a strange, loud, startled sound so loudly it pulls Tommy’s attention from Steve completely. Eddie’s stumbling to pick up the books he’s dropped eyes glued directly to Steve as a sharp red blush coats his cheeks.
“Fucking freak.” Tommy spits, and Steve sighs, defensive and aloof are officially off the table now, offense becoming his first priority.
Steve and Eddie had never interacted outside of Tommy’s hazing and Steve standing off to the side, trying to not to draw attention to himself. But when Steve had decided to finally be true to himself, he’d also discovered his unwavering desire to protect others, channeling his inner mean girl to punch up instead of down. And Eddie Munson was someone he seems to have deemed in that moment, under his protection.
“Lay off Hagen.” He snaps. Keeping his demeanor indifferent and bored as his ex friend whips around to glare. There’s a startled strangled sound slightly down the hall and Steve’s eyes meet Eddie’s, offering him a small smile and slight nod when he notices Eddie’s eyes are still glued to him.
“Oh sorry I forgot you’re a freak now too huh Harrington?” He growls, stalking towards Steve and stumbling his steps slightly when he realizes Steve stands a few inches taller then him now. His eyes shoot down glancing at Steve’s slightly platformed combat boots.
“They’re called shit kickers.” Steve offers, catching his gaze. “Wanna find out why?”
Robin and Steve totally have best friend nights where they unplug the phone (the walkie is there for emergencies) get all the worst rated movies from the store, a shit tonne of takeout, they've got Steve's fancy face masks on and fluffy bathrobes, Robin is painting Steve's nails baby blue, they're shit talking everyone, they're bemoaning about their crushes, they are happy.
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