A two-parter. Two people. Two soulmate portraits. Two wildly different perspectives on the same increasingly ridiculous situation
PROLOGUE ---> STEVES POV
Modern!Steve Harrington x Reader
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Fic Summary: Steve Harrington doesn't believe in psychics, soulmates, fate, or anything else being sold by strangers on the internet. Unfortunately, after one of Robin Buckley's latest hyperfixations leads him down a particularly ridiculous Etsy rabbit hole, he finds himself unable to stop thinking about a listing that claims to do the impossible: draw the face of your future soulmate. It's a scam. Obviously. A joke. Definitely. A completely irrational thing to spend money on. Which becomes a problem when he can't stop reopening the page.
Hundreds of miles away, a woman is packing boxes for a new town and laughing with her friend over the exact same bad decision. Neither of them expects much from a sketch commissioned from an Etsy witch. Neither of them expects it to be accurate. And neither of them is prepared for what happens when a portrait meant to depict a stranger starts looking a little too familiar..
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Fic Warnings: Eventual smut (18+), eventual sexual content, sexual references and innuendo, adult language, male masturbation, online stalking-adjacent behavior (the romantic comedy variety, not the felony variety), internet psychics, Etsy witchcraft, discussions of soulmates and fate, single parent Reader, mild emotional baggage, mutual pining, idiots in love, and one extremely judgmental cat.
Steve was halfway through cleaning out the backseat of his car when Robin called for the third time.
Not texted. Called. Which was how he knew whatever she wanted wasn't important. Important things got texts. Usually several. Sometimes in all caps. Robin reserved phone calls for situations that could have been a text but would be significantly more entertaining if she forced another person to participate in them.
The first call came while he was standing in line at the grocery store. The second happened during the drive home. By the third, he was crouched awkwardly in his driveway trying to wrestle a tangled bucket of baseballs out from underneath a folding chair and actively pretending not to hear his ringtone.
The bucket won. Three of the baseballs immediately escaped and rolled down the slight incline of the driveway toward the street. Steve watched them go with the sort of exhausted resignation usually reserved for natural disasters. For a brief moment he considered letting them live there permanently.
Maybe they'd start a colony.
Maybe they'd build a society.
Maybe they could elect a mayor.
Anything that prevented him from having to bend over one more time. Instead he shoved himself upright, collected the baseballs, and finally answered the phone.
"What." There wasn't even a greeting on the other end. Just the sound of Robin laughing, which somehow felt worse.
Steve closed his eyes. The sun had been beating down on him since baseball practice ended. His t-shirt stuck to the back of his neck. The driveway radiated heat through the soles of his shoes. Somewhere down the street a lawn mower droned away, adding one more layer of irritation to a day that already felt too loud.
"Hello to you too," Robin managed between laughs.
"What do you want?"
"You sound grumpy."
"I am grumpy."
"You always say that."
"Because you're always calling." The accusation failed to land because Robin immediately laughed harder. Steve pinched the bridge of his nose and glanced toward the house. All he wanted was a shower, leftovers, and an evening where nobody needed anything from him. Unfortunately, after years of friendship, Robin Buckley had developed the uncanny ability to sense exactly when he was trying to have a peaceful night.
The line went quiet for a second. Not silent. Never silent. He could hear her moving around her apartment, the rustle of blankets, a cabinet opening and closing, music playing faintly somewhere in the background. Then came the sound that immediately put him on edge.
A gasp.
Not a scared gasp or even a surprised gasp. An excited gasp. A Robin gasp. The kind that historically preceded nonsense.
Steve stared up at the sky. "Absolutely not."
"Wait, I haven't even told you yet."
"You gasped."
"...you can tell what kind of gasp it was?"
"Robin."
"...that's honestly kind of concerning."
"Robin."
"Fine. But I think I've discovered something." And there it was. The beginning of the problem.
By the time Steve got to Robin's apartment, she'd apparently forgotten she'd invited him over in the first place.
That wasn't particularly unusual. Robin's attention span tended to operate on its own schedule and rarely consulted the rest of the world before changing directions. Steve had once shown up to help her assemble a bookshelf and found her halfway through stripping wallpaper she'd decided she suddenly hated. Another time she'd called him in a panic because she was convinced she'd lost her keys only for them to be discovered twenty minutes later in the freezer beside a pint of rocky road ice cream. Neither of them ever figured out how they'd gotten there.
So when he let himself into her apartment and found her sitting cross-legged on the couch staring at her laptop with the intensity of somebody trying to crack a military code, he wasn't immediately concerned.
Concern arrived about ten minutes later. She'd laughed out loud four separate times, gasped twice, and shushed him when he asked if she wanted the food he'd picked up on the way over. That's when Steve started getting concerned.
The food itself was already making the apartment smell better. Robin's place had developed a tendency to absorb the scent of whatever she forgot to clean out of her refrigerator that week, and tonight's contribution seemed to be leftover Thai food and something vaguely citrus-scented burning in a wax warmer on the windowsill. Outside, the sun was starting to dip below the neighboring apartment buildings, casting everything in that weird golden light that made even Robin's clutter look intentional.
Steve dropped onto the opposite end of the couch and started pulling containers out of the takeout bag. "You know, most people usually talk to the person they invited over."
"Hmm?"
"You invited me here."
"I did."
"You remember that?"
"Barely."
Steve snorted and handed her a container. She accepted it automatically without taking her eyes off the screen.
That probably should have been another warning sign.
Instead, he spent the next few minutes trying to figure out what exactly she was looking at. Every time he caught a glimpse of the screen, there seemed to be a different website open. One featured what looked like a medieval illustration. Another had several photographs of crystals arranged in concentric circles. A third appeared to be selling candles with names like Moon Water and Divine Feminine Awakening.
At some point Robin abandoned the food entirely.
Then she abandoned sitting.
Then she somehow ended up kneeling on the couch.
By the time she announced she had discovered something important, Steve had reached that special level of exhaustion where absolutely nothing sounded surprising anymore.
Steve watched her for another minute before finally giving up on trying to figure it out from context clues. That strategy rarely worked with Robin. Most of the time her train of thought had already taken three separate connections she hadn't bothered explaining to anyone else. By the time she invited another person into the conversation, she'd usually spent enough time with the idea that she forgot nobody else had access to the previous forty-five minutes of internal monologue.
"What are you doing?" Robin looked up from the laptop. The expression on her face immediately made him regret asking. Not because she looked guilty…because she looked excited and excited Robin was infinitely more dangerous.
"Research."
Steve groaned. That answer alone told him everything he needed to know. Research was never actually research. Research implied a reasonable amount of curiosity directed toward a reasonable topic. Robin used the word to describe everything from learning a new hobby to spending three hours investigating whether raccoons could theoretically survive a zombie apocalypse.
He'd made the mistake of asking once. She'd had charts. Actual charts.
"Research for what?" Instead of answering, Robin rotated the laptop toward him. Steve immediately wished she hadn't. The page looked like a crystal store had exploded across the internet.
Stars.
Moons.
Gold lettering.
A woman wearing approximately twelve pounds of jewelry smiled back at him from a profile photo while advertising services that included aura readings, spiritual guidance, energy balancing, chakra cleansing and something called ancestral communication.
Steve stared. Then he looked at Robin. Then back at the screen. Then back at Robin.
The silence stretched long enough that she started smiling. "Oh no," Steve muttered.
"What?"
"You've got the look."
"What look?"
"The look you get right before you become unbearable." Robin laughed so hard she nearly dropped the laptop. The annoying thing was that she knew exactly what he meant.
There had always been a specific point in Robin's interests where they stopped being casual curiosities and became full-blown obsessions. Once she crossed that line, the rest of the world had no choice but to come with her. Steve had lived through enough of them to recognize the symptoms immediately.
The sudden inability to discuss anything else.
The rapidly accumulating collection of facts nobody asked for.
The tendency to somehow connect every conversation back to the topic.
Three weeks ago it had been vintage record stores.
Before that it was mushrooms. Not eating mushrooms. Learning about mushrooms. Steve had spent an entire afternoon listening to Robin explain fungal communication networks while they waited for an oil change.
Now, apparently, it was witches. Internet witches. Which somehow felt worse.
"You paid one, didn't you?"
Robin's eyes widened. Then narrowed.
"Oh my God, you did.”
"I paid for a service."
"You paid a witch."
"That's a very judgmental way to phrase that."
Steve actually laughed. The kind that escaped before he could stop it and Robin immediately looked offended, which only made it worse.
"You paid an Etsy witch."
"She's highly reviewed."
"Robin."
"Four point nine stars."
"Robin."
"Over two thousand sales."
"ROBIN."
She finally lost the battle and started laughing too. The sound filled the apartment, bouncing off the walls and mixing with the distant hum of traffic outside. The sun had slipped lower while they'd been sitting there, turning the windows amber and gold. Somewhere downstairs a dog barked. Somebody's television filtered faintly through the floorboards.
For a moment, Steve found himself smiling despite every intention not to. This was familiar territory. Robin got excited. Robin made questionable choices. Steve complained about them. Robin ignored him. The universe continued spinning. It was one of the few constants left in his life.
"What did you even buy?"
Robin hesitated. That was new. Not a long hesitation, but it was just enough to make Steve suspicious. "Oh no."
"What?"
"Whatever it is, it's worse than I thought."
"It isn't."
"You hesitated."
"I did not."
"You absolutely did."
Robin pulled her lower lip between her teeth, a nervous habit she'd never managed to break despite years of trying. The sight alone immediately told him there was a reason she hadn't answered the question and that, unfortunately, made him curious. A terrible development. Curiosity was how Robin won. Because once a person became curious, they were already participating. Steve knew that. Robin knew that. And Robin was counting on that.
Steve shouldn't ask. The problem was that he'd known Robin long enough to understand exactly what the hesitation meant. Whatever she'd paid for wasn't just embarrassing. It was embarrassing enough that she was actively avoiding saying it out loud, which unfortunately made him want to know even more.
Sure enough, thirty seconds later he found himself asking the question anyway. "What did you buy?" And the smile that spread across Robin's face told him he'd walked directly into the trap.
For a second she didn't answer. Instead she reached for her laptop and started clicking through tabs with the sort of confidence usually reserved for attorneys preparing closing arguments. And yet again, this clue tells Steve more information. Robin was many things, but organized had never been one of them, so whenever she started producing evidence, it meant she'd spent enough time with an idea that she'd crossed the line from curiosity into conviction.
The screen finally stopped on what looked like a PDF.
A PDF. Steve stared. "Robin."
"What?"
"Why is there a PDF?"
"Because she sends detailed reports."
"Who sends detailed reports?"
"The witch."
Steve dropped his head back against the couch cushion and stared at the ceiling. The apartment above them thumped with the sound of somebody walking across the floor. Somewhere outside, a siren wailed briefly before fading into the distance. He suddenly had the distinct feeling that if he stood up and left right now, he'd still somehow end up hearing the rest of this story.
"What did you buy?"
Robin spun the laptop around. "The cat reading."
Steve blinked. “The what?"
"The cat reading."
"The cat reading."
"Yes."
"The cat reading."
Robin's expression immediately soured. "Why are you saying it like that?"
"Because I want to make sure I'm hearing you correctly."
"You are."
"The cat reading."
"Steve."
"What cat?"
Robin looked offended. As if he'd forgotten a close family member. "The gray one."
Steve stared at her. "The gray one."
"The gray one."
"The cat that lives downstairs?"
"See? You know exactly which cat."
Unfortunately, he did. The cat in question spent most of its life draped across the railing outside Mrs Jensen's first-floor apartment like some sort of furry gargoyle. It was old enough that nobody seemed entirely sure who originally owned it anymore. Residents fed it. Residents petted it. Residents took photographs of it. The thing had somehow become a shared community asset.
Steve had never given the cat much thought. Robin, apparently, had. “You paid money because of Mrs Jensen’s cat?”
Robin immediately sat up straighter. "Okay, first of all, it isn't Mrs. Jensen's cat."
"Robin."
"It isn't."
"Robin."
"It belongs to the building."
"The cat belongs to itself."
"Exactly."
Steve pointed at her. "That's not helping your case."
Robin ignored him. “Second of all, I've had concerns for months."
The words were delivered with enough seriousness that Steve almost laughed. Almost. "What concerns?"
Robin leaned forward. "The way it looks at me."
There was a beat of silence.
Then another. Steve was waiting for the punchline. It never came. "The way..."
"The way it looks at me."
"The cat."
"Yes."
"The cat."
"Steve."
"You paid an Etsy witch because a cat looked at you." Robin threw a throw pillow that hit him directly in the face.
"I paid an Etsy witch because that cat has had a problem with me since the day I moved into this building. Haven't you heard about cats, Steve? They're not all right. You like...have to be careful with them around babies and everything. They'll steal their breath or something straight from their cribs while they sleep!"
Steve was laughing now. The kind of genuine laughter that scrunches up the corners of his eyes and makes his shoulders shake. Robin watched him for a moment before reaching for the laptop and opening another document.
"See, this is why I made a timeline."
That immediately stopped him. “A what?"
"A timeline."
Steve slowly lowered his beer as Robin clicked to the next page. There was, in fact, a timeline…and it was color-coded. With dates and bullet points and what appeared to be witness statements. "Oh my God."
"I documented everything."
"ROBIN."
"I wanted objective data."
Steve couldn't breathe. “Objective data?"
"Look at April nineteenth."
Steve made the mistake of looking.
April 19th: Cat observed staring at me for approximately four minutes without blinking.
Below that:
May 3rd: Attempted friendly greeting. No response.
May 17th: Accepted pets from woman in red coat. Rejected pets from me.
June 2nd: Made direct eye contact while knocking my iced coffee off balcony railing.
Steve folded in half. The sound that came out of him barely qualified as human. Meanwhile Robin looked vindicated.
"You think this is funny."
"I think you made a surveillance report."
"I think there's a pattern."
"Robin, it's a cat."
"It knows."
Steve laughed harder. "What does it know?"
"I don't know yet."
The answer came far too quickly. Far too confidently. Far too seriously and suddenly Steve understood exactly how an otherwise intelligent woman had ended up paying a witch on Etsy.
Not because she believed in magic (Not entirely). But because once Robin got interested in something, she followed the thread until she reached the end of it. Sometimes the thread led to a new hobby. Sometimes it led to a three-hour lecture, and apparently, sometimes it led to a psychic cat behavioral analysis purchased online for twenty-eight dollars and ninety-nine cents.
The worst part was that she wasn't done. Robin scrolled down to the actual report and Steve's eyes caught on highlighted passages.
Highlighted.
Passages.
"Tell me you didn't print this."
Robin didn't answer.
"Oh my God."
"I wanted to annotate."
"Robin."
"Just ...can we please just read the conclusion?"
Against every instinct he possessed, Steve did. The report concluded that the cat appeared "cautious but curious" about Robin's energy, was "not actively antagonistic," and might require additional offerings to establish trust. Robin slapped the coffee table hard enough to make the takeout containers rattle.
"I KNEW IT."
Steve completely lost whatever composure he had left.
Steve was still laughing when Robin snatched the laptop back.
No, she didn't suddenly become embarrassed. If anything, she looked more convinced than ever. The report disappeared as she continued scrolling through the seller's page, muttering to herself while Steve attempted to regain control of his breathing. "This woman is very thorough."
"This woman is a criminal."
"You're being dramatic."
"She convinced you a cat has a personal vendetta."
"The report specifically says cautious."
"The report specifically says you paid thirty dollars to lose an argument with an animal." Robin waved him off.
Steve took another drink of his beer and settled back into the couch, still grinning despite himself. Outside, the last of the sunlight had disappeared. The apartment had fallen into that comfortable evening quiet where the lamps were on, the takeout containers were open, and neither of them had any real plans beyond existing in the same room for a few hours.
Robin continued scrolling.
Then she stopped and a smile slowly spread across her face.
Steve immediately groaned. "No."
"What?"
"I know that look."
"You don't know this look."
"I absolutely know this look."
Robin tilted the screen away from him and that only made him more suspicious. A few seconds pass before a soft, nearly maniacal chuckle fills the space, the way she did when she'd discovered something she couldn't wait to weaponize. "Oh, this is perfect."
"Robin."
"You know what your problem is?"
Steve barked out a laugh. “You wanna narrow that down?"
"I'm serious."
"So am I."
Robin pointed at him with all the authority of a woman who had just commissioned a psychic cat analysis. "Your problem is that you're impossible."
"I am not impossible."
"You are deeply impossible." Steve rolled his eyes and Robin promptly ignored him. "You claim you don't care about dating, but every six months you meet a woman and suddenly start talking like you're auditioning for a Jane Austen novel."
"What the fuck does that even mean?"
"It means you're grumpy all the time until you decide somebody is interesting and they show any inkling of being interested in you."
"That's not true."
"It absolutely is."
"It is not."
"You literally referred to a woman as enchanting once."
Steve's entire face twisted in horror. "I did not."
"You did."
"I absolutely did not."
"You were wearing a Henley."
"What does that have to do with anything?"
"It was a very vulnerable period for you."
Steve covered his face with one hand while Robin kept going. "You want romance. You have wanted to be the main character in a rom-com since we were teenagers."
"I do not."
"You absolutely do."
"I want a normal relationship."
"You want someone to gaze at across a farmer's market."
"The fuck is wrong with you?"
"You want somebody to make soup when you're sick."
"Everybody wants soup."
"You want somebody to split crossword puzzles with."
Steve pointed at her. "That's not even a romantic activity."
"It is when you do it."
The worst part was that she was laughing now. The second worst part was that she wasn't entirely wrong. Robin clicked something, then rotated the laptop. "There."
Steve looked. The same Etsy page. Different listing. Black background. Gold lettering. A handful of sample sketches.
He frowned. "What am I looking at?"
Robin's smile widened. "A solution."
"To what?"
"To you."
Steve felt immediate dread. "Robin."
"Look."
"No."
"Just look."
Against his better judgment, he glanced down. The title sat across the top of the page.
SOULMATE PORTRAIT COMMISSION
Steve stared before he could even try to look at Robin again. For a moment neither of them spoke until, finally, Robin leaned back into the couch and folded her arms. "Honestly, at this point, put us all out of our misery and just ask the witch who your soulmate is. I can't take another one of your tragic little dating eras. It's embarrassing."
Steve continued staring at the listing."The fuck?"
Steve handed the laptop back immediately. "Absolutely not."
But the smile Robin gave him suggested she already knew she worked her way in.
