#the classic hoh!steve goes to a corroded coffin concert and falls in love

[formosusiniquis]

she likes the boys in the band (i'm her all time favorite) - ch 1

Clutching the flier he’d picked up off the street tight in his fist, Steve isn’t sure if it or being friends with Robin was the worse idea. "Robin! I can literally hear your thoughts. Which is at least one thing we've experienced together that is weirder than this."

In the relative safety of the Family Video, it was still hard to ignore the wakes that Starcourt left behind. He had adjusted for the most part to the constant behind the ear pressure of his fancy new hearing aid that the government had given him. Just like he’d adjusted to the glasses and contacts he had to wear to bring the world back into focus. He hadn’t adjusted to the feeling of both his hearing aid and his glasses on his ears, but he didn’t need Robin anymore to put his contacts in for him in the morning before work.

Really the hearing and vision loss were a small price to pay for everyone making it out of that bunker alive. Steve would sacrifice them and more in a second if it meant making sure Robin, Dustin, and Erica made it out okay. 

The doctors had been amazed it wasn’t worse. Explaining in their patronizing way that Steve likely had further degradation to look forward to, and then getting even more patronizing to the kid with a grade 4 concussion when explaining what degradation meant. The government doctors were a little nicer at least, when they were doing their scans and running their tests; but he figured they knew that a good bedside manner meant the difference between a signed NDA and a leaked press release about all the shit they weren’t taking care of.

Even they were surprised by the lack of memory loss and other fun brain trauma symptoms that Steve should have been showing.

But then they had all conveniently left out the fact that he could feel his coworker in the back of his brain when they were detailing his current symptoms. Her thoughts, feelings, memories of being tortured by people who didn’t feel all that different from the ones that had been poking and prodding them.

That might have gone a long way in explaining the brain stuff. If they’d decided to share.

But then after being tortured, he also wasn’t seeing a huge difference between the government that tied him up, drugged him up, and threatened to break all his fingers and the government with a history of kidnapping, drugging, and experimenting on children but hadn’t done it to him yet.

"Sorry, I'll move back about forty feet before I keep thinking about how you want me to go to an amateur metal show with you."

They were figuring it out anyway.

AO3