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solarmorrigan · 1 year

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(One more thing about Steve and Robin working at a diner. The other waitresses look out for Steve, small side order of platonic stobin)

Admittedly, the first time Steve comes in for a shift at the diner wearing sunglasses and swaying slightly on his feet, most of the other servers assume he’s hungover.

It’s not necessarily that he’s given the impression of someone who stays out all night partying (or who would drink so much on a Tuesday night that he’d show up still hungover on a Wednesday afternoon), but what other reason could there be for the way he flinches at any loud noise, or the way he squints under the fluorescents of the dining room?

They watch him carefully as he takes an extra few seconds to balance a tray before heading out to his table, but he doesn’t falter after that, so they leave him alone. Whatever’s wrong isn’t affecting his work, so it’s none of their business.

(Naturally, this means they all watch him like hawks for the remainder of his shift. Servers are the nosiest people in the world; they won’t even deny it.)

But then it happens in the middle of a lunch rush; he’d come in just fine, as energetic and ready to complain about unpleasant guests as ever, but somewhere partway through, he starts to flag. He holds himself sort of hunched when he thinks no one is looking, like he’s in pain, and he looks about ready to throw up when the dishwasher slams an entire bin of silverware down on the counter (a noise fit to rattle the eardrums of anyone who isn’t already feeling sick).

When Robin takes her break at the end of the rush, she seeks out Steve, the same as always, and she catches on immediately to the fact that something is wrong. Her eyes narrow in displeasure as she marches up to him, and they have a vehemently whispered discussion in a corner of the server’s line that involves a lot of pointing at the parking lot from Robin and a lot of defensive arm-crossing from Steve.

Evidently, Robin loses the argument, because her lips are pressed into a line of displeasure as she shoves a glass of ice water at Steve, followed by a cup of black tea she’s made from the Lipton tea bags they keep under the counter. She spends the rest of her break making sure he drinks it all.

The other servers are more curious than ever.

It doesn’t happen often. Sometimes Steve will come in looking pale and off, sometimes it will start partway through a shift, sometimes no one will notice anything is wrong at all until the night is over and he lets himself drop, but there doesn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason to it. He calls out of work all of once, and Robin catches a ride with someone else that day and spends her entire shift distracted.

The other servers start to worry. What if he’s sick? What if it’s serious?

Something finally breaks one slow evening when there isn’t much to distract anyone from their own boredom – least of all Steve, who seems to power through those days when he doesn’t feel well by keeping busy. He leans against a counter and stares into space for the better part of fifteen minutes and then has to make a dash for the men’s room after he stands too quickly, nearly loses his balance, and turns an alarming shade of green.

It's Dottie who goes in to check on him (she’s 58, has three sons, five grandsons, and reasons that literally nothing going on behind that door could surprise her at this point), and she finds him bent over the toilet losing whatever he’d managed to eat earlier in the day.

“If you’re sick, you need to go home, sweetie,” Dottie tells him. “No one wants that near their food.”

Steve shakes his head. “Not contagious,” he insists breathlessly, spitting into the toilet and leaning back when it seems like his stomach has settled. “Just a bad headache. Should actually start getting better now.”

Dottie frowns, but she doesn’t force the issue. She trusts that Steve wouldn’t willingly spread a stomach bug around the restaurant, and besides that, she’s seen how carefully he counts his tips at the end of the night. He might still be living up in his parents’ house, but she doubts if they’re footing the bill for much these days.

True to his word, Steve seems better for the rest of his shift, but this doesn’t stop Dottie from sharing what he’d said – and it’s exactly that comment that finally clicks something into place for one of the other servers.

Migraines, Arlene insists; her cousin gets them, says they’re like headaches from hell. Sometimes they’ll put her poor cousin down for as many as two or three days. It only makes sense, Arlene declares.

Migraines. Well, now that they have a word, and they’re reasonably assured their Steve isn’t dying, the other servers go about their business.

They keep an eye on him as best they can (though, by and large, he seems to do alright taking care of himself, or being gently bullied into it by Robin), but aside from helping to pick up the slack a little when he stumbles or pushing a cup of tea at him, there isn’t much they can really help with.

At least until the night one hits with the worst possible timing.

It’s Saturday night. Ten o’ clock. The last showing at the movie theater’s just let out, there are teenagers whiling away the final hours of their last free night of the weekend, couples prolonging their dates, bar-goers stopping in for a bite – the diner is packed, the cooks are slammed, the servers are swamped, and Steve drops a plate.

It’s only a side of pancakes, and the cooks already have another one up in the window, but the other servers all catch the way he reacts to the noise as if a gun had gone off by his ear, flinching like he’s in pain.

But it’s busy, and they can’t afford to slow down. The dishwasher pops out of the kitchen to help clean the mess, so Steve goes back to pulling the rest of his order from the window, but anyone standing close enough can see that his hands are shaking. Hard.

He nearly drops another plate—a burger and fries, this time—before Gina swoops in and stabilizes it.

“I can get this, it’s right next to my table. Why don’t you get the drinks for the one you just got sat with?” she offers.

Steve looks like he wants to argue, but he’s got stubbornness and pragmatism in equal measure, and he’ll yield to the latter if he can see he’s slowing other people down. He nods and ducks out of the way, heading for the soda dispenser instead.

Of course, why Gina had thought he’d do better with glasses than with plates is beyond anyone else. He doesn’t drop anything, but it’s a near thing, and the drinks all wobble alarmingly when he tries to put them on a small beverage tray and run them out. He drops the tray back on the counter with a clatter and shoves the heels of his palms into his eyes in a moment of raw frustration.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, not now,” he hisses.

“Honey,” Arlene tries, putting a hand on his shoulder.

“I can do this, just– I just need a minute,” Steve insists.

“We don’t have a minute,” Gina says, blunt, but not entirely unkind. “Just let us help. If you can pick up again later, great, if not – at least we won’t all be even more in the weeds.”

It seems unlikely he’ll be able to pick up again later, and they all know it – Steve especially, with his face gone red and his gaze trained on the counter.

“Fine,” he practically whispers, almost unintelligible over the noise of the kitchen and the dining room on either side of the line. “Thanks.”

They split Steve’s section between the lot of them, each taking a table or two to share the load. It isn’t great, but the diner isn’t huge, so it isn’t the worst, either.

They all expect Steve to find somewhere quiet to sit and wait the evening out—the back office, maybe—but it seems he’ll be damned before he stops doing something to help. They find him standing at the cook’s window, pulling plates down to load trays up with full orders. He’s using two hands and going slowly, but it’s still faster than having to stand at the window individually and fish for orders in the sea of plates that the cooks shove their way.

For the next hour and a half, Steve is their serving assistant. He pulls orders, loads trays with drinks, hands out condiments, and restocks the counter with anything that isn’t breakable. Robin shoots him looks through window; she can’t afford to step off the line and check on him, but she sends him worried glances that eventually morph into ridiculous faces that put something like a smile back onto his face.

At the end of the night, he refuses to leave without doing his share of the sidework—it’s clear he’d like to leave, he’s still squinting under the harsh lights, but some sense of pride won’t let him—and each of the other servers approaches him by almost unspoken agreement.

Arlene is first, pulling several folded bills from the back of her server book and placing them on the counter in front of him. “From tables six and seven.”

Steve blinks at her. “Uh…”

“Oh, right!” Gina plunges her hand into her apron pocket and pulls out a crumpled wad of money. “From eight and ten.”

Dottie adds to the pile, and Steve stares at all three of them, baffled.

“These are the tips from your tables,” Dottie explains, as if he won’t recognize the numbers that had been in his section.

“But – I wasn’t serving. I didn’t serve these tables,” he says.

“But they were yours.” Arlene shrugs.

Steve shakes his head. “You guys should keep this, I didn’t – I didn’t earn this.”

“Sure you did.” Gina gives his shoulder a gentle shove. “You worked, same as we did. Just take it, kid.”

Steve shakes his head again, but Dottie heads him off. “We want you to have it. You would’ve done the same as us,” she says. “And if you don’t take it, we’re just going to leave it on the counter, and then the dishwasher will probably take it, and then where will we be?”

At that, Steve lets out a little huff of laughter, reaching out with still-unsteady hands to pull the pile of bills closer.

“Thank you,” he says, quiet again.

And if his eyes are a little wet as he trains them on the counter, they can all just blame the migraine.

(Robin, though. Robin has no trouble acknowledging what they’d done, and makes their employee meals without asking for any kind of order ticket for at least the next week. It all evens out.)

#platonic stobin #steve harrington #robin buckley #steve harrington and his migraines #makin friends #stranger things #solar wrote

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