Automatic
Written for nothing other than my obsession with these two 🙏🥰 in short, what if Steve had kissed Eddie in the RV? Whoops!
wc: 2.4k | rated: G | cw: none | tags: pre-steddie, POV Steve Harrington, fluff, Steve has a bi awakening | AO3
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An RV isn’t what Steve expected, when Munson said he had something that might work, but beggars can’t really be choosers, times like this. He’s just checking in on Munson up front, and maybe it’s the RV that gets to him—it’s been an RV, in his pointless wishes for the future, a family that wants to spend time together, not like his family or a townie burnout life like he seems to be heading towards—and maybe that’s why.
Robin comes in, and asks if Munson will be the one driving, and he leans into Steve, tilts his head just so, calls him “big boy,” and Steve moves without even thinking.
It’s just a peck. Steve doesn’t even notice what he’s done for a moment, the warm satisfaction of a date gone well radiating from his lips before it catches up to him.
Then the discordance of what he’s feeling and where he is and who he just kissed hits him like a sack of bricks.
“Uh,” he says, and then there’s the radio blaring as Eddie’s hotwiring connects and shouting from outside and a scramble inside and Steve can feel the leather of Eddie’s jacket where he brushes past him as they swap places.
The sensations linger, on his bare shoulder and on his lips, but there’s no time to process, so Steve presses on the gas pedal, swinging the steering wheel as recklessly as they need to get away, but as carefully as he can so as to not run over the family outside. They skid on the dirt a little and Steve hopes to god he hasn’t hurt anyone with their getaway, and then the owners of this RV are shrinking in the rear-view mirror, shrinking, and he makes a turn and the trailer park is left in the dust.
Steve slowly relaxes into the seat when sirens don’t materialize behind them after one minute on the main roads, two. Good. They’ll have to deal with this at some point, but that point isn’t now, and they can focus on getting to The War Zone.
“Steve. Steve.”
And that, of course. Steve groans quietly, gripping the steering wheel tight. “Can we do this later?”
“Absolutely not,” Robin hisses into his ear, leaning over him with an arm around the back of the driver’s seat. “What was that?”
He pushes his best friend away carefully. “Get your seat belt on, Robin.”
She does, of course. Statistics of car deaths and injuries run through his head in Robin’s voice until he hears the click.
“It’s not a big deal, okay? It was an accident, I bet Munson’s already forgotten all about it.”
“Nope, nuh-uh, you do not get your first gay kiss before me by accident. Not fair.” Robin’s tone is light, but Steve feels the truth in it.
“Rob, seriously, is now when you want to grill me on this?” His grip tightens on the steering wheel. “It’s not a big deal.”
“Then you won’t mind telling me all about how you kissed him by accident. How the hell do you accidentally kiss someone?”
Steve blows through his teeth. “Fine. Sure. So…” he pauses to gather his thoughts. It just sort of… happened. There wasn’t exactly a lot of thought behind it, but clearly Robin isn’t accepting that.
“Okay, so. You know when you’re on a date, and—” he glances towards Robin and tries again. “Or—so. When you get on a date eventually, there are some—signs. They’re not perfect, but I mean, you’re already on a date, so if you think there’s a sign, it’s probably a sign. And I think I just—automatically… read into things? Like, not like I felt like I was on a date, that would be ridiculous,” Steve assures her, “but I mean, it was one thing after another and it felt like the end of one, kind of?”
“It felt like… you were at the end of a date… with Eddie Munson.”
This is exactly as hard to explain as he’d expected. How does he describe this in a way that makes sense?
“I said kind of!” he defends. “It’s like—Jesus, this is hard to describe. It’s a feeling, when a girl does certain things. You’ll get it, when you finally ask Vickie out.”
“Steve.”
“It’s just a feeling!”
“I am begging you to try harder.”
“Fine!” Steve smooths his hair back, letting out a sigh. Try harder. Sure.
What was it that really drew him in?
It wasn’t the hair, though that might have been a part of it. Maybe how close Eddie had been? He had leaned in, right then. The smell of lake water and weed and leather and body odor, already clinging to him with Eddie’s vest, had gotten a little stronger. That’s something he’d ever considered attractive before, but… he leans over to sniff at the denim on his shoulder. Huh. Yeah. He’s maybe not going to mention that to Robin.
“So… it might have been how close we were, partially,” Steve begins slowly. “The way I was leaning over him, a bit? And the way Eddie leaned into me. It felt like he was leaning in for a kiss.”
“What, so you kissed him because he leaned in? That’s it?” She leans against the window, snorting.
“It wasn’t just that, though.” Steve is gaining steam. “It was also the way he tilted his head, like when you don’t want to bump noses, and…”
"…And?”
“…And the way he called me big boy,” Steve admits, flushing. “It wasn’t something that felt—platonic.”
“Uh, yeah, you can say that again.”
Steve blinks. “What?”
“Oh, yeah, that was gay as hell. I just didn’t expect you to do anything about it.”
“What‽”
“What? I mean, I can pretend if it’ll make you feel better, but that was the strongest sign someone’s at least a little queer I’ve ever seen, and that’s including that bandana hanging out of his pocket all the time.”
Steve pauses. “Wait, what does a bandana have to do with being…” he lowers his voice, “queer?”
“Steve.” Robin levels a look at him. “Is that really what you’re thinking about right now? Trust me. It’s queer as—as Rocky Horror.”
Steve flushes at the memory, that night he and Robin had curled up with a movie Robin was so nervous about sharing with him still, as close as they’d gotten. He hadn’t understood her nervousness until he really, really had.
“What I’m more interested in is that, yeah, Eddie was flying all flags, semaphore-style—”
“What the hell is a semaphore?”
“—and that you picked up on it. And kissed him over it.”
“It was barely a peck, Robin!” he says, throwing one hand up.
Robin takes a breath, huffs it out. Lets them sit for a moment, watching the road pass by. They should be getting to The War Zone soon, it’s not that far.
“Look. Steve. If I leaned in right now, and tilted my head like you said, and called you big boy,” she says mockingly, leaning in a bit, “what would you do?”
Steve laughs, pushing her away with one hand. “Right now? Nothing, I’m driving, Rob!”
“Oh my god, not the point, dingus! Use that pretty head of yours! If I did all that, sent all the signals in the world, you wouldn’t kiss me!” She pauses again. “Right?”
There is a correct answer here. “No, Rob, of course not, that would be—ew, like kissing my sister,” he says, shuddering dramatically. The idea’s not that repulsive to him, not really, but he knows she’d never actually want him to. Plus, he’s found that leaning into disgust puts her a little more at ease, anytime his long-gone crush on her comes up. Even if she’s the one who brought it up, this time. Kind of.
Anyway. Still no.
“Okay, so you wouldn’t kiss me if I did that stuff. What about, say… Nancy?”
Now that’s a harder question.
“I mean…” he thinks, tries to picture it in his mind, Nance leaning in, smiling at him like she used to, calling him—not big boy, that’s not her style, she was never into pet names, but calling his name sweetly, and… “Yeah, probably.” He’d regret it after, he thinks, but he’d do it on reflex, same as he did with Eddie. It’s maybe even more of a reflex, given how many times he’d done it for real when they’d dated.
“What about Keith?”
The disgust is absolutely real this time as he recoils. “Obviously I wouldn’t kiss Keith.”
“Why not?”
He scoffs, rolling his eyes. “Would you?”
“No, but I also wouldn’t have kissed Eddie.”
“Yeah, ‘cause you have no game, Buckley, no sense of moments,” Steve laughs. “Look, what are you getting at here?”
Robin pauses.
“I’m going to say something, and I’m going to ask you to think about it for at least ten seconds before you respond, okay?”
He sighs, but they both know he’d do anything for her. “Fine. Whatever. What is it?”
“I, as someone with my… proclivities, would never kiss a guy ‘on accident.’ Not even with every sign in the world pointing that they wanted to kiss me, because I wouldn’t want to kiss him.”
“Okay…?”
“Steve. Please think. Use that brain of yours, I know you can. How might that relate to what just happened between you and Eddie, hmm?”
Fine. So he thinks, still keeping an eye out for where they’re going to need to turn.
The thing is, he knows what Robin is getting at, of course he does, but that doesn’t mean he wanted to kiss Eddie. He was just there.
But then… if it had been Keith, would he have done the same thing?
Again, he pictures it: Keith, sitting in the driver’s seat, smiling up at him.
God, even that feels weird. Does Keith even know how to smile? Steve certainly hasn’t seen evidence of it.
Not the point. So Keith is sitting in the driver’s seat, smiling up at him—weird—and he leans in, tilts his head…
Yeah. No. Hard no from him. Keith is… Steve dreads being alone with Keith, can feel the man glaring into him from wherever, knows that it’s just a matter of time before he decides Robin’s not worth dealing with him and fires him.
Eddie on the other hand… Eddie might not like Steve all that much, but he’s surprisingly fun to be around, especially given the being-hunted-for-sport thing he has going on. He smiles a lot, jokes around… and that’s all this was, too. He’d just told Steve something he was clearly sensitive about, so he was trying to change the topic. Defuse the tension, or something.
It was a joke, and Steve just wasn’t in on it, that’s all.
More than ten seconds have flown by and Steve still hasn’t responded.
“He was just joking around,” he says quietly, just for Robin’s ears. He doesn’t have to say the rest; she’ll understand. She does, nodding quietly, squeezing his shoulder gently.
Instead, he turns on his blinker, making a careful turn into the parking lot of a store that Steve never thought he’d be going to, and parks around the back, next to the dumpster.
Robin makes her way into the back, calling for the others to get ready, they’ve arrived. They already know, of course, but it’s nice of her to do while Steve collects himself, calms down a little.
It was just a joke. He knows that. He just… took it too far.
So why does it hurt so much?
He takes a deep breath. These are thoughts for later, when he and Robin can sit in a bathroom or a kitchen or somewhere with tile and she can talk him through it all a bit more. Maybe they can watch Rocky Horror again, or go up to Indy and get a zine for… whatever this is, but these are all for later.
First, Vecna.
He moves to get up and join the others, going so far as to hop out the door, but Nancy, of all people, stops him.
“You stay here, Steve. We can’t leave Eddie alone, just in case, and,” she looks him up and down in a way that feels like he should feel some kind of way about, but he just… doesn’t. “You’re still looking very… distinctive, with that getup,” Nancy says with a small smile, pulling the collar of the vest slightly.
Steve feels himself nodding, his mind entirely elsewhere. If she leaned up to him right now, tilted her head just so…
Would he kiss her?
That is as good a sign of true love as I’ve ever seen.
He doesn’t… Steve isn’t sure. Would he kiss Nancy like he’d kissed Eddie, so easily?
For your modesty, dude.
It should be an easy question. She’s… they’d… She’s the only person he’d ever really loved, it should be easy.
Don’tcha, big boy?
Eddie was just joking… right?
He turns back to the RV, shapeless thoughts whirling in his mind, hard to pin down. His heart pounds in his ears, in his throat.
Would he have kissed Nancy?
And if Eddie did it again—leaned into him, tilted his head, called him big boy—would he kiss him again?
He takes a deep breath. He’s conspicuous, out here; the others have already gone inside. They may be in the back of the store, but that’s no reason not to take precautions. He should get inside the RV again.
…Where Eddie is.
He should get inside. Just open the door and let himself in like they did less than an hour ago, it’s easy, easier than it was then, the door’s unlocked, no need to climb in through the window.
So he does. The handle turns, creaking, and the door opens to show Eddie leaning against the wall, looking bored, of all things, but his face lights up when he sees Steve walk in and shut the door behind him.
He beams.
At what point does a joke become reality?
“Heya, Steve,” he says, making his way over to where Steve is lingering in the doorway. “Keeping company with little ol’ me? I’m touched!”
He leans in. Tilts his head.
Steve leans in automatically, and tilts his head, and kisses him again. He can feel Eddie freeze up like he did earlier, hopes to god he didn’t read this wrong, and then Eddie kisses him back.
It’s chaste, for now. Still tentative, and a little confused.
“…What…?” Eddie breathes when they break apart a few seconds later.
Steve smiles, cradling Eddie’s face in his hand. He owes Robin so much right now. They both do, he thinks.
“Hey, Eddie.”
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Some people who seemed pretty psyched about this while I was writing it: @chronicpainstevetruther @talanashta @vthx @queenofshenanigans @tinytalkingtina @augustjustice @queenie-ofthe-void