Chapter Text
“She’s pregnant−”
His world went silent. Steve tucked into the corner of the couch, his mouth dry, heart racing, the pulse at his neck throbbing so badly he could swear it was a physical pain.
The house was quiet, big.
A mausoleum of all the things he had ever wanted, every day dream he had ever had, every prayer he had ever made in the dark of night, hope a burgeoning thing in his chest.
Waiting for the One Day that his mate had told him about, had promised as he coaxed the omega to wait just a little longer.
Until they were ready, when they got that big family house with the white picket fence Steve had always wanted, until that promotion came, until things settled with this new project, until he could spend more time at home instead of the office.
Things said to keep Steve docile, keep him from asking when, when, when.
His eyes prickle as he gets up, Tommy calling after him, “Steve…”
But he doesn’t hear him, not really, his voice muffled by clouds of cotton shoved into the very depths of his brain, muting everything around him as the omega walks up the stairs, toward their bedroom.
The one with his perfect nest, the scent of the two of them the strongest here, even as Steve’s citrus sweet scent cloys more in the air, Tommy’s beta scent more subtle.
Too subtle.
The thought echoes, and it draws a shuddering gasp from Steve as he takes in the room, the forest green décor, the white sheets flattened out just so, crisp and ready for his mate, for them.
The nights Steve would wait up, looking out the big windows until the headlights of a car would illuminate the glass, only to pass right on by, shrouding the room in darkness, the omega curling deeper into himself, into the cold press of sheets at his back.
“I hate sleeping alone,” he had told Tommy once, the beta smiling back at him, fingers brushing the brown locks of his hair behind his ear, “I’d come back to you every night, Steve. Wouldn’t ever leave you cold, honey.”
It was back when the beta had still been courting him, and the words had lit something up inside him for the first time since−
That’s when it hits him, his eyes taking in the coldness of his room.
Like a plague that followed him, big, beautiful, empty houses he called his home.
“She’s pregnant.”
“She’s pregnant.”
“She’s pregnant.”
The words whisper to him, mocking in how ironic it all was.
The only thing he ever wanted from his mate, now somebody else’s.
He knows the script that would follow this:
Divorce.
Tommy moving on to try with the person he managed to make an actual family with.
And Steve would be left out of the house he helped build, discarded like last fall's fashion.
Knows because it’s how he came into this world after all. The universe seeking its retribution on the one thing that had broken up his father’s first marriage. Maybe even the second one, too, for how little his parents wanted him around.
And maybe there would be guilt, shrouded in how much he could get out of the man. But Tommy’s parents had made him sign papers when they had mated, so maybe not that much. Their families never did play the long game after all.
He packs what he thinks he’d need, doesn’t hear Tommy’s footsteps, and knows that Tommy knows he’s leaving.
There wouldn’t be much of a fight, not from an absent mate, not from a man who didn’t choose him, who probably sent prayers up of his own that Steve wasn’t being difficult about this.
But there’s nothing in him that wants to wail and scream and throw things and ask why, why, why.
It was all very…typical.
He closes the bedroom door behind him, and it’s only when he looks up, to the closed door opposite, the pretty pale yellow one.
The one he’d painted all by himself.
The one he’d spent the past two years decorating, getting it perfect for his One Day.
He walks to it, putting a hand on the wood, the other going to the knob, nerves shaking in his appendages as he grasps the golden handle, cold.
It’s a pastel blue, the room lit up softly by the warm glow of the nightlight he kept on, shapes cast on the walls and roof. And there’s a cushioned rocking chair in the corner, something that would have supported his arms as he held a bundle to his chest, a whitewashed cot next to it.
Things he'd collected from the catalogues the women at their local baby store kept out for him.
Showing him what was good, what was popular up North, what would suit the colour-scheme Steve had explained more than once. More than thirty times, probably all these months later.
They were things he couldn’t take with him, even if he wanted to. Where would they go? The one-bedroom apartment he could probably only afford with the part-time teaching he did?
Robin's modest two-bedroom was still less than half the size of this house.
People would think him petty, stealing away a nursery from a woman already a few months along.
That’s when the tears catch in his throat, when his eyes brim over, when his chest rattles with all that he’d have to give up.
“Fuck−“ he whispers brokenly, standing in the middle of a room that held all his hopes and dreams and all the warmth that was holding him together for years and years.
He doesn’t know how he leaves, when his legs finally unstick themselves, when he walks past Tommy and out the door.
But when he does, it’s with only a small bag filled with clothes, and the soft feel of a stuffed teddy bear clenched tightly in his fist, and a golden nightlight crammed in his suitcase.
~/~/~
Robin sets the tea down with a loud clank, bringing the omega out of his stupor.
“Shit, sorry,” she winces, wiping up some of the tea that had spilt over and coming to sit down next to him, her fresh mountain breeze scent wrapping around him as she takes his hand, rubbing gentle circles in the pale, bony skin of his hand. The nails are bitten down so badly that there are tiny splotches of blood coating underneath the nail bed.
“Some papers came for you today, sweetie,” the alpha says just as gently.
“Yeah?”
“Hm, we could sign them now. Rip it off real quick, like a Band-Aid. Get it all out of the way.”
So you can move on, goes unsaid, but it still sits there, in the non-existent space between them.
Steve nods his head, his bottom lip catching in his teeth as she goes to get them, his insides recoiling.
He lets her take them out, a black pen lying neatly on the white, crisp papers.
“You just need to sign and date it. There’s−there’s not much he’s left you, but it’s okay to get by for the next coupl'a months. Hopper had a look at ‘em too; it seems the prenup was pretty heavy-handed. I’m sorry, Stevie.”
“It’s okay, was my fault anyway, you all told me not to do it,” Steve says, his voice raw, almost brittle.
Stupid boy.
“Hey, don’t be too hard on yourself, you loved him. He was the dick who strung you along and fooled around with his secretary like the cliché he is.”
“Y−yeah, guess so,” Steve breathes, glad Robin was ignoring the fact that Steve ended up being the dropped trophy wife with no stable job or money cliché, too.
He sits up, brushing the blanket that pooled around him to the side as he leans forward, taking the papers in his hand for the first time.
And there wasn’t much to it, just like Robin said.
A dotted line where his signature would go (Tommy’s already filled in), and that would be it.
The end of his first marriage. The end of this bleak saga in his life. So he can finally move on.
But then it grabs his eye, those numbers in bold: …08/08/1990-06/10/1996
Six years.
Six years they had been together.
Six years of his life Steve had given to someone else.
Six years Tommy had left him dangling there like a dog, promising and promising and promising.
“Six little nuggets, and a Winnebago,” he had once drunkenly confessed his deepest desire to Robin.
That was it, that was all he ever wanted.
“Gonna give you everything you ever wanted, I promise you that, Steve Harrington,” Tommy had said on their wedding day, the vow bringing tears to his eyes because Steve believed him. Had held those words so closely to his chest, and he knew he would have attached himself to just about anybody who would give him a family.
How pathetic was he really? How desperate he must have seemed to everyone around him who had questioned his decision to marry Tommy fucking Hagan.
“Shit, Robin,” Steve cries wetly, his fingers grabbing at his hair, “All that fucking time, and he left me with nothing.”
No mate.
No money.
No house.
No children.
“Fucking thirty years old already,” and he leans against her, tucking his face into her chest as the alpha’s arms come to wrap around him, cradling him as he lets out a long, forlorn trill. High-pitched and heartbroken as he thinks of all the time he’s wasted.
Omegas were usually their most fertile in their twenties, male omegas even more so.
But there was a catch, a sharp dip in the health of their eggs, their bodies protecting them against further procreation when they hit their thirties.
An evolutionary fail-safe, doctors had said, from their bodies going through the trauma of childbirth.
His thirtieth had come and gone without a heat.
It had been the first time in all his life that his cycle hadn’t been regular.
And he remembered that night after the doctor’s visit, the way he had gone to his knees in their living room, begging Tommy to reconsider their timing. To go to the hospital with him, because there were procedures that could increase the beta’s hormones to help Steve along so that when his next heat came…eventually…it would have a better chance of sticking.
But it turns out Tommy didn’t exactly need any intervention, not when he was spending heat with a younger, more fertile omega.
“He told me we’d try for pups this year,” Steve’s voice comes through muffled, and the words have Robin tightening her grip, her own blue eyes going hazy with grief for her best friend.
And they both know Steve’s marriage would be hurting him a lot less if he had gotten the pups he had always wanted. If he hadn’t been seeing his mate building a new family so easily.
Leaving him lonely.
“Oh, Steve,” she breathes, that hot spike of anger she had felt toward Tommy tempered by her grief for the omega, “you'd have been a great mama, sweetie.”
Steve doesn’t sign the papers that night; he falls asleep right there, face red and blotchy and wet. Lashes still damp as his exhaustion drags him down.
~/~/~
“Okay, hear me out,” Robin announces as she hands him a cup of coffee, milky and sweetened just how the omega likes, so much different to her dark and bitter tastes.
“Good morning to you, too, Robbie.”
She waves him off, coming to stand in front of the omega as he takes a seat at her kitchen counter.
Steve had been declared a divorced omega a few weeks ago, and while he hadn’t been up to the party Robin had been thinking of throwing, they did end up driving from Hawkins all the way to the coast, Steve dumping his wedding bands in the depths of the ocean.
A waste if you asked Robin, who was all for pawning the damn things.
“I’ve been doing some research, and…what if you got a donor?”
“Huh?” Steve questions, eyebrows quirking in confusion at Robin’s words.
“So the way I figure, your next heat should be in the next couple months. What if you just got a…you know sperm donor,” she takes a swig of her coffee, the shot of caffeine making the nerves in her throat way worse as she looks on to Steve with big blue eyes.
She takes another, longer sip.
“A…sperm donor?” the omega repeats, lips parting in disbelief, “Why would I even−what?!”
“And I think you should ask Eddie.”
~/~/~