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Steve Harrington had a habit of noticing everyone's soulmark. He couldn't help it. Ever since he was told about the concept of soulmates, ever since he had learned that there was someone out there destined to be with him, he wanted to find his person. He wanted to find the person whose soul was intertwined was his, the person who had a mark in the shape of an anchor on their wrist that was identical to his own.
He had thought a lot over the years about what the anchor meant. Soulmarks tended to hold significance to where soulmates would first meet and so, Steve first thought that he would perhaps meet his soulmate on a cruise. His parents had taken him on many cruises as a child and so the idea wasn’t completely ridiculous. He had believed in that idea so much that he hadn’t really considered any other options. That was until his first day at Scoops Ahoy!
The moment he had seen the slightly obnoxious bright blue and butter yellow signage, Steve’s eyes were instantly drawn to the red anchor that sat between the S and the A. It was near identical to the anchor that had appeared on his wrist at ten years old. It was then Steve realised he had been dead wrong, that he wasn’t meant to meet his soulmate on cruise at sea. He was going to meet his soulmate here—at the job where he made $3 an hour and where he was forced to wear a sailor uniform.
Steve spent his summer slinging ice cream for kids with sticky fingers, begrudgingly giving Erica Sinclair free samples and checking the wrist of almost every woman who walked into the ice cream parlour. Days slipped into weeks and yet—Steve never lost hope.
And so, when he first met you—Max’s older sister who had been dragged along to buy her sister ice cream—of course his eyes had shifted down in the hopes of seeing your wrist. But you had been wearing an abundance of bracelets and he couldn't see whether or not you had the mark.
Still, he held out hope anyway because you were pretty and he felt a warm, fluttering feeling in his stomach when he was near you. A feeling his mother had once told him that he would only feel when his soulmate was near.
But you gave nothing away—no indication that you felt that feeling too or that you even noticed his own soul mark.
Steve held out hope that one day he'd see it on your wrist.
And he did—at your step brother Billy's funeral.
He saw it only for a few, brief moments as the sleeve of your blouse dipped while you wiped away your tears. But it was there and it was undeniable—the anchor that was identical to his own etched into the skin on your wrist.
Of course he didn't tell you then. You were grieving and it wasn't the right time. Still, he let you cry on his shoulder, he became a friend—just a friend—who was there when you needed him. He helped to get you a job at Family Video when you worried about your family's finances and he became your ride home from work. But still, Steve didn't tell you and it was eating him alive—being friend zoned by his own soulmate. He was just biding his time and maybe, just maybe, Steve Harrington was fucking terrified that you already knew and that there was a part of you that was disappointed that the universe had decided you belong together.
And so, Steve Harrington kept the fact that you were his soulmate to himself. For now.
⊹˚₊‧───────────‧₊˚⊹
Max Mayfield usually came along to Family Video with her skateboard tucked under one arm just before closing time. It had become routine for her over the past few months—skating after school and letting the hours slip by and then heading to the video store so Steve could give you both a lift back to the trailer park. It had been a routine ever since you had scolded her for skating home late at night. She had huffed at the time, called you paranoid but still—she showed up to the video store after every skate boarding session and got into Steve’s beamer with no complaint.
Whenever Max would walk into the video store, she would always head straight for the horror section. You had told her, perhaps a hundred times, that there was no way you were going to let her rent The Slumber Party Massacre or Friday the 13th but still—Max just gravitated towards it.
The sound of Cloudbusting by Kate Bush blared through her headphones. Max hummed the words under her breath as she picked up a tape for The Evil Dead, flipping it over to read the back.
“You know your sister isn’t going to let you rent that, right?”
Max only just hears Steve’s voice over her music. She rolls her eyes and doesn’t put the tape away.
“Whatever Harrington," Max replied with a small huff, pulling her headphones down to rest around her neck before casting a quick glance over at Steve who was restocking a nearby shelf. “I can still look, can’t I? Or is that illegal now?”
Steve opens his mouth to reply but honestly—trying to outwit Max Mayfield was something he simply could not do eight hours into his shift.
“Why don’t you check out the more age appropriate films?” He asks, glancing over to the front counter where you were going through the end of shift returns box while Robin talked your ear off about her most recent Vickie update.
“Like what?” Max asked, uninterested. “Annie?”
Steve very nearly laughed but managed to stop himself, pursuing his lips as he placed My Bloody Valentine back onto the shelf.
“Funny,” Steve murmurs, lips twitching slightly as he looks down at Max. “No, I was thinking something more like… The Goonies or—”
“You sound like just my sister,” Max mutters, her blue eyes bright as they flicker over to Steve with a mischievous look on her face. “No wonder you two are soulmates.”
The tapes Steve had been holding all clatter to the floor. Both you and Robin look over at the noise while Max didn’t even bother to hide her amusement.
“Are you good over there, Stevie?” Robin calls out to Steve as he scrambles to pick up all of the tapes he had just dropped, his face burning an impressive shade of red. You meanwhile were looking over at Max in surprise, having only just realised that your sister was in the store.
“Yeah! Sorry—butter fingers!” Steve calls back as he shoots Max a look that plainly says ‘shut up’.
Max sends you a quick smile in acknowledgement before turning to look back at Steve who was now blushing a shade of red that Max did not know he was even capable of turning.
“How did you—”
“—oh, come on Steve,” Max huffs, though Steve can’t help but notice how she speaks in a low voice, eyes flickering back over to you as though making sure you couldn’t hear. “I’m not an idiot, you have the same soulmarks—”
“—I never said you were an idiot,” Steve says quickly as he shoves the last tape back onto the shelf before turning to look at Max fully. “And that’s just a coincidence—”
“—you have an anchor. She has an anchor in the exact same place. You met at Scoops—none of that is coincidence.”
Steve opens his mouth to respond and then quickly closes it again because she was right. When it came to soulmates, there was no such thing as coincidences.
“Plus you act all…pathetic when you’re around her.”
Steve's ears turned red, almost perfectly matching the shade that his cheeks had turned.
“I do not—”
“—you do,” Max tells him with a faint smile. “Really pathetic, actually.”
Steve huffs in response and once again, his eyes shift over to you—mostly so he could make sure you weren’t listening to his conversation with your sister but also because you looked ridiculously pretty. You always did but today you’d done something different with your hair and—
“Exhibit A,” Max says, clicking her fingers directly in his face to snap him out of whatever trance you had unknowingly sent him into. “Staring at her like a lovesick puppy.”
“Well she is my soulmate,” Steve says, his heart thumping in his chest because it was the first—the very first time—he had said those words out loud because he hadn’t told anyone. Not even Robin (though, admittedly that was because Robin had an inability to keep a secret due to the fact she had a tendency to ramble when nervous).
“Surprised you worked it out,” Max says under her breath.
Steve has to force himself to take a deep breath, having to remind himself that Max was going through a lot. Between witnessing Billy’s death, your stepdad leaving, the move to the trailer park and a breakup with her own soulmate, it was no wonder she was a little more brash than usual.
“Yeah well, your sister doesn’t seem particularly fussed about having me as a soulmate,” Steve says finally, looking away from Max and instead looking at the tape still clutched in her hand. “Probably realised it was me and—”
“—it’s not you,” Max interrupts him quickly in a tone so surprisingly soft that he looks back at her. “Trust me she’s just—she’s just skeptical, she doesn’t really—”
“—believe in soulmates?” Steve finishes, jaw tightening because he had always had a feeling that you didn’t by the way your mark was always covered or the way you couldn’t even pretend to be interested when a soul couple would come into the store and share their story.
Steve had never hoped before that he was wrong but as he waited for Max to respond, he prayed he was. But when she says nothing in response—he knew he was right and the feeling that began to burn in his gut could have killed him.
Max, perhaps noticing the heartache written all over his face, quickly adds, “It—it’s a long story but if you talk to her—”
“—no,” Steve says quickly, shaking his head and pulling himself together in the blink of an eye. “I’m not going to make her do something she clearly doesn’t want to do.”
Max’s expression changes, she looks slightly panicked and shakes her head. “No Steve, you don’t understand—”
“—you should put the tape away,” Steve tells her, nodding towards The Evil Dead tape that Max was still holding. “Before your sister sees.”
And with that, Steve heads towards the stock room before Max could see the way his hands were shaking.
⊹˚₊‧───────────‧₊˚⊹
You couldn’t help but notice the distance that Steve Harrington had carefully placed between the two of you.
He still gave you a ride home from work, still laughed along with you and Robin at work, still showed up to the trailer unannounced with a bag full of groceries for your mom. But Steve no longer lingered, he stopped calling to tell you about whatever story you had missed from your day off at the video store, he stopped giving you those one armed hugs before he went on his lunch break that had become part of your routine. You were beginning to feel his absence like it was a physical ache.
And so, you sit in the passenger seat of Steve’s beamer after a shift at Family Video and two weeks of distance wondering whether or not to ask Steve if you had done something wrong.
Perhaps your nerves were a little too obvious because barely two minutes into the car journey, Steve was looking over at you.
“You gonna stop bouncing your leg like that?” He asks. “It’s distracting.”
“Sorry,” you mutter quickly, eyes fixed determinedly on the road ahead as you place your hands on your knees to try and stop them from moving.
It’s quiet then—aside from the gentle hum of the radio, Time After Time filling the silence between you and Steve.
“You okay?” He asks suddenly, shooting you a hesitant glance before focusing back on the road. “You’re a little quiet.”
You chew your bottom lip between your teeth as you consider your reply. You could be honest with him—you could tell him that you were worried that you had done something wrong, that you had felt the distance Steve had put between you. How that distance had started to feel like a chasm and you didn’t know what to do.
Or you could lie.
You choose the latter.
“Long shift,” you say finally with an attempt at a smile.
It was a lie and you both knew it.
But Steve doesn’t press you further. That somehow hurt more than the distance.
Your leg begins to bounce before you could stop it. Steve glances at you again.
“You’re doing it again—”
“—did I do something wrong?” You burst out suddenly, the feelings in your gut swirling in a dangerous storm.
Steve’s eyes remain on the road but you see the way his face blanches ever so slightly. “Wrong?” He repeats in a voice of forced composure. “Why would you think—”
“—because y-you’re different, Steve,” you say finally, your heart racing as you turn to look at him fully. “You don’t—you’re treating me differently and I just—I’m trying to understand what on earth I did wrong.”
“You didn’t—”
“—then why won’t you look at me, Steve?”
You can feel the anger beneath your words, a tone that surprised even you. But still, Steve doesn’t say anything and you simply watch as his jaw tightens, as his knuckles gripping onto the steering wheel turn white.
“Because I’m driving, Mayfield.”
You feel cold at the use of your surname. In all the time you had known Steve, he had never called you by your last name. It felt cold and distant and it made something in your gut turn uncomfortably.
“Pull over,” you say suddenly.
“What?”
“I said pull over.”
“Are you insane? I’m not—”
“Pull over, Harrington or I swear to god that I’ll open the door and—”
“Alright!” Steve snaps back, his clipped tone matching your own as he signals before he pulls over into the side of the road. “I’m pulling over, happy?”
You wait until Steve’s car is stationary before you decide to answer him. “Ecstatic.”
And then—without another word, you rip open the passenger side door and climb out of his car without another word.
You make it perhaps ten feet up the road before you hear Steve calling after you.
“Where are you going? Mayfield! Have you lost your damn mind?—”
“—Mayfield?” You repeat, anger flaring as you turn around to face Steve, only to find him barely two feet away from you. You try not to think about the way your stomach turns at that. “Since when do you call me Mayfield, Steve?”
Steve blinks, seeming to realise his misstep as he rubs a hand over his face in frustration.
“I—I don’t know, I just—”
“—can you just tell me what I’ve done wrong? If I’ve pissed you off or annoyed you or—”
“—you haven’t,” Steve says too quickly. “I’m just—”
“—you’re just calling me Mayfield and avoiding me like the plague?”
“I’m not avoiding you, I just—”
“—you’re just, what, Steve?”
“I’m just upset, okay?” Steve exclaims angrily, and the exhaustion in his voice silences you.
You blink, your eyes flickering over his face as you try and understand his anger.
“Upset?” You repeat, confused, hurt and everything in between. “Why are you—”
“Because I can’t be around you anymore!” He snaps, your name cracking at the end of his sentence like a whip.
Your blood starts to run cold. The skin on your left wrist itches.
“Why?” You ask, your shoulders slumping slightly as you look at him, feeling something inside of you break a little.
Steve looks as though he was bracing himself, scrubbing another hand over his face before he takes a deep breath and looks at you properly this time.
“I can’t—I can’t be around you because—I know. I know you’re my soulmate.”
The air in your lungs disappears. The words seem to echo around you as you try to digest exactly what Steve had just said. And your eyes, your traitorous eyes, move down to the exposed skin of his wrist where the anchor identical to yours was etched into his skin.
“How did you—”
“—I saw it. At Billy’s funeral.”
You let out a breath you didn’t realise you had been holding, glancing down to the wrist you had kept covered for years. The mark you had tried to ignore since you were thirteen years old.
“Steve, I—”
“You knew, right?” Steve asks, taking a single step towards you as his eyes hold you captive. “You knew—you knew I was your soulmate, didn’t you?”
You had the urge to lie, to tell Steve that no, you had no idea. But one look in those big, brown eyes and you knew you couldn’t.
You give a small, barely there nod.
“Yeah,” you say quietly. “I knew the day I first met you at Scoops.”
Something in Steve’s expression cracks—a mix of hurt and betrayal that words couldn’t quite explain.
“Then why—why didn’t you say anything?” He asks you, your name falling from his lips at the end of his question like it had always belonged there. “I mean—we’re soulmates and you didn’t say anything.”
You look away for a brief moment, a sense of shame mixing with that fluttering, warm feeling in your gut you had always felt around Steve. The feeling you had tried so hard to ignore.
“Is it me?” He asks you, taking another hesitant step closer to you. You can see the hurt, the desperation in his eyes as he watches you. “Were you—were you that disappointed that it was me who was your—”
“—no!” You say quickly, your throat thick with emotion. “God, no. Of course I wasn’t disappointed. I mean, you—you’re—you’re great. Amazing, actually.”
Steve’s expression softens slightly, eyes slightly glassy as he looks at you. “Then why didn’t you say anything? Is it because you don’t believe in soulmates?”
You flex your fingers before you dig your nails into the skin of your palms, your breathing starts to feel uneven.
“It’s not that I don’t believe in them,” you say finally, swallowing a lump in your throat as you force yourself to look at Steve. “I ju—just—I’m scared.”
“Scared?” Steve asks, perplexed as his eyes flit down to watch the way your nails bite into your skin. His own hands twitch as though he was desperate to reach for you. “Why would you be scared?”
You want to look away, you almost do but something in Steve’s eyes keeps you there.
“Becuase my mom met her soulmate when she was young too,” you tell him in an uneven voice. “And he—something really bad happened to him.”
You don’t elaborate and Steve doesn’t press you further, but you don’t miss the way he looks at you with softer eyes.
“Then she met my dad who hadn’t ever met his soulmate and they fell in love and things were great for a long time. She had me, then she had Max. And we were happy. But then he met his soulmate—some random woman in a grocery store while me and Max were standing right there. And things just—things fell apart pretty quickly after that. My mom met Neil and she—she was never the same. All because she was trying to fill a hole that couldn’t be filled—her soulmate dying. The person she was meant to have forever with only being in her life for two years. Even in the years with my dad that were good, I could tell she—she was looking at my dad and seeing something else, seeing somebody else. An—and when you know what someone goes through when they lose their soulmate—I just—I don’t want to go through that.”
You hadn’t realised that tears had started falling before it was too late, your voice breaking and traitorous tears beginning to slip down your cheeks.
“Baby,” the word falls so naturally from Steve’s lips that it makes your heart feel lighter. A small sob escapes you before you could stop it and Steve doesn’t hesitate this time in taking another step closer, lifting his own hand to wipe away your tears so gently it very nearly took your breath away. “You don’t—you’re not gonna lose me—”
“—you can’t promise that, Steve,” you say, fighting the urge to push him away from you—because the place where his skin was touching yours felt hot enough to burn. “You—I've seen you. You throw yourself into danger without a care in the world! You act as though you’re disposable and I ca—can’t watch it happen, Steve, I can’t—”
“Hey, hey, hey,” Steve hushes you softly, two large hands cupping your cheeks gently and rendering you powerless to his touch. “I know, okay? I can’t promise that—that something bad might not happen to me. Or to you. Or to both of us. Okay? I know that. But—but you’re my other half and no matter how much time we have together, whether it’s seventy years or seventy days, I promise you that I’m in, one hundred per cent.”
“If you need time or space. I’ll give it to you. I swear. But I’m not going to let you throw this away because you’re scared. Baby, I’m scared too. But that doesn’t mean that I’m not going to give this everything I got because—what if we do get seventy years? What if we get seventy great years? You really gonna throw all that away because you’re scared?”
You swallow and you try to look away from him, his words too intense but Steve doesn’t let you—his hands keeping your head gently between palms.
“But what if—”
“—if we don’t get them then what we do get will be beautiful anyway,” Steve tells you in a voice so fierce yet so certain, you found yourself unable to look away from him even if you wanted to. “I can’t promise you a lot, but I can promise you that.”
The fear still lingered in your gut—the place it had lived since you had first walked into Scoops Ahoy! to see your soulmate in a sailor uniform. The fear that kept you up at night, that imagined over and over again what those Russians had done to Steve to leave his face and body black and blue. The fear that kept those bracelets covering your soulmark for years.
But alongside that fear was that feeling that you had never been able to shake—that warm, fluttering feeling whenever Steve was near. The one that made you realise that home wasn’t a place, that it wasn’t Hawkins nor was it California—that home was Steve Harrington.
And in the end, it was that feeling that won.
Your hands move without you thinking too much about it, fisting the front of his vest as you tug him closer. And when your lips met his, it was like two pieces of a puzzle slotting together, like the sea kissing the shore, like everything had finally fallen into place.
Steve’s hands find their way into your hair as he kisses you back with lips so smooth that you couldn’t think straight. Everything else had ceased to exist and all that remained Steve and his lips on yours, You barely even register that you were kissing Steve Harrington on the side of the road—that cars were driving by and honking at the two of you as his other hand rested on your waist to pull you even closer.
It was only when you felt droplets of rain beginning to fall that you finally pulled away from each other.
“Is it really starting to rain?” You ask, laughing as you look up to feel the rain falling onto your skin like a million tiny kisses. “Right now?”
Steve smiles, watching the smile break out onto your face as the rain starts to fall even harder. His fingers gently wrap around your left wrist, tugging down your bracelets to expose your soulmark before lifting it up to press a gentle kiss to the anchor that lived on your skin, the mark glowing golden beneath his lips.
“There’s no such thing as coincidence when it comes to soulmates,” Steve mutters against your skin.
“Maybe you’re right,” you whisper back softly with a faint smile. “Now should we get out of the rain?”
Steve hums, considering your question as he looks back at you. “Maybe just after—”
And then before you could even breathe, his lips were back on yours. You let out a gasp of surprise and the rain fell even harder around you, but you didn’t pull away. Because this was right where you and Steve were always meant to be.