#its the “Eddie and Robin drag Steve to a Gay Bar” trope but with a twist

[sp0o0kylights]

You know what I want to see, I want to see more of Steve, Eddie, and Robin being 1980s small town kids from Indiana, by which I mean;

Robin is The Source of Gay Knowledge purely because her parents host Hippie Christmas and she managed to sneak away to find a neat bookstore in Indiana once. 

Her knowledge is not in depth. It's patchy, woven together through rumors, stories she heard or things she picked up from her parents' old pictures. She's got a handful of zines, one book, and some movies she managed to order for Family Video behind Keith's back.

She acts like she's Queen of the Queers because in Hawkins she pretty much is.

(Max and El ask her what a lavender marriage is once, something they overheard snooping around. 

Robin confidentially answers that it's code for when one woman dresses up as a man, fooling officials into wedding two woman.

She does not live this down two years later when they find out what it actually means.) 

Eddie doesn't spend every weekend in Indianapolis. 

Gas is expensive, his busiest days of his "job" is Friday and Saturday, and he has no fucking clue what the hanky code is. 

He's wearing that bandana because Metallica front singer James Hetfield has one on all their tour posters. 

Eddie does make it down to a gay bar though, by accident. Rick needed some back up for a shady deal. Promised Eddie a boatload of free drugs to sell if he agreed to just stand there and look mean. 

He was warned the bar they were meeting in was 'weird' and to not 'freak out' --which Eddie thought was hilarious given his nickname and general appearance, but whatever.

He doesn't understand when they get there, because it's just a bunch of hot men with hanky's in their back pockets everywhere.

Then he sees two women kissing and it clicks. 

He can't out himself in front of Rick, but one of the bartenders playfully dresses him down for his own hanky, letting him know all about the code and teasing him through his embarrassment. 

He's got an offer to come back and learn what color and which pocket his hanky should actually be in, a prospect Eddie was salivating at until Chrissy Cunningham up and died on his ceiling.

(He still wore the hanky, because the feeling of that bartender tugging it out and stuffing it back in might be the closest thing he's ever had to sex and he absolutely wants a repeat. 

He's young and horny, sue him.) 

Steve Harrington may not be academically smart but he's not dumb. 

He figured out a while back that the basketball team as a unit probably crossed the queer line more than once--or at least it did before Hargrove came in. 

( Brad Handly for example, went around slamming kids into lockers and screaming slurs like a fucking movie villain one Monday because the varsity team got dead drunk at Laura's party on Sunday and hey, look, there weren't that many girls there, okay?

They all had fucking hands and mouths. Everybody but Tommy was single and hot to trot. Nothing gay about it.

Its not even like they were kissing or treating each other like chicks. It was just Brad's first time and they got to tease him later for overthinking it. 

Dude graduated soon enough after and given Steve was on the team as a sophomore, he hadn't thought about the guy and why he might be freaking out so bad in years.) 

Robin's entire panic attack at Starcourt, and a few more after had Steve replaying that whole incident. Reframed it a bit, and, yeah.

In retrospect that had been extremely gay, actually. 

It sat with him a lot easier than he'd thought it would. Partially because of Robin, but mostly because that's just who he was.

Stranger things had happened to Steve and this one didn't want to kill, maim or otherwise eat him, so it got filed under 'interesting facts he should never tell his parents if he wanted to keep his trust fund' and then he went about his day. 

(Or he tried too, anyways.

It caught up to him when Eddie and Robin somehow figured out the other was queer and dragged him along to some bar Eddie had a standing invitation at, with demands for Steve to do what he did best.

Babysit.

Their magical trip was utterly destroyed when Brad Handly happened to be the very same bartender who had given Eddie the invite.

 Considering Brad's immediate bark of laughter followed by a hug and introducing himself as "Steve's gay awakening", Steve ended up having to speedrun through Eddie and Robin both having a crisis for him.

It didn't help that Steve had politely, and laughingly, corrected Brad with a casual; 

"Pretty sure that was Tommy man, but if it helps I think that tongue of yours gave Matt Burdon a crisis."

--which ended up with him answering a lot more gay sex questions with Brad than he cared too. 

At least he, through Brad, was able to help Robin connect to some local lesbians and--after a second crisis from Eddie regarding how Steve managed to have more sex than "the resident town freak and guy who actually knew he was gay, Steve!"-- even helped Eddie out by catching the metalheads tongue with his mouth later that evening.

The last one landed him a boyfriend, trust fund be damned.)