Chapter Text
December 13th, 1987
"For FUCKS SAKE! It’s not like I’m asking you to keep the world from turning. I’m just saying that it would have been nice if you set an alarm like I asked you to do!” Steve shouted as he sifted through the items of clothing they had discarded the night before. Billy, meanwhile, had found the pack of Malboro's on his floor and took to lighting his first cigarette of the day.
“Time wouldn’t stop if the earth stopped turning." He muttered through clenched teeth as he snapped his zippo under the tip. "You’d still be late.” Steve glared while he hopped into his jeans.
“Yeah, and who’s fault is that?”
Billy's head snapped up. His eyes locked onto Steve like the finder of an air rifle.
“‘Cuse me?” his voice was raspy but poignant. “I’m not your fucking nanny, Harrington. Be glad I let you stay.”
Steve's jaw went slack. Of course. Of course, Billy would pull a stunt like this. He shouldn’t even be surprised.
He continued to put himself together as Billy opened the window by his bed and smoked without making any real attempt not to set off the fire alarm. He couldn’t possibly have looked less bothered. The sheets were pooled around his lower half, which Steve knew to be as naked as the visible parts of his body. The boy looked like a painting, serene and unmovable, gazing out of that window, low sun casting shadows over every angle and curve of his body. His eyes were small and puffy as if they were actively trying to keep the daylight out.
If Steve hadn’t been so pissed or in a hurry, he might have dug his fingers through those curls that he already messed up the night before and he would have buried his nose in the smell of everything they’d done. But Steve was already late while Billy had time. He seemed to have all the time in the world. Cradling his cig between lips, he watched the other students pass by, huddled up in big coats and scarves. He sighed at the familiar burn in his throat as the smoke poured back through his open mouth and nostrils. And as Steve buckled his belt, he wondered if this was how Billy started every day, if he let the mornings wait until he was as ready instead of chasing after it, like everybody else.
“Don’t you have somewhere to be?” Steve asked. Billy didn't lift his gaze.
“Probably.” He mumbled while he brought his cig back to his lips. Steve rolled his eyes. This guy.
“Where are my glasses?” He sighed. Billy patted around and ended up digging them from underneath the pillows.
“Ah, fucking hell.” Steve cried when he noticed the bend in the frame and snatched them from Billy’s hands. The frame was bent at the nose bridge, bringing the temples closer together. Too close to putting them back on without giving yourself a migraine. Just thinking about it made Steve’s hangover pop its head up. He tried to bend the bridge back into shape and naturally, because that was just his kind of luck, it snapped in two.
“Oh FUCK RIGHT OFF!”
“I have neighbors, you know.” Billy’s disinterest was getting on Steve’s nerves.
“Yeah, well they already know you’re a slut so I wouldn’t worry about them.” He snapped. A grunt escaped his lips. He’d only been awake for 10 minutes and everything was already going wrong. Billy didn’t seem to have a spare fuck to give but when had that dickhead cared about anything but his own pleasure.
“Right, I’m off.” Steve was about to hurry back to his own dorm to pick up his books, hand on the doorknob when Billy called after him. Clenching the broken pieces of his glasses, Steve turned around, resting his shoulder against the door frame. Billy pointed at him with the hand that was holding his cig.
“This can’t become a regular thing.” He placed his cigarette back between his lips and mumbled through ground teeth: “People will talk.” Steve raised his eyebrows.
“That’s a concern to you?” In the first weeks of his freshman year, Billy had already made a reputation for himself as someone who will have sex with literally anything that walks on two legs. The fact that this included guys, well- fewer people seemed aware of that. Still, a new voice chanting Billy's name loud enough to be heard from the end of the hallway was nothing anyone would raise an eyebrow at.
“Think it might be to you.” The words rolled cool and easily from Billy’s tongue. Something was growing in Steve’s throat and he just hoped that he’d get through the morning without throwing up.
“Yeah, don’t worry. It’s not gonna happen again,” He mumbled, rapping his fingers against the door frame.
“You think this is the last time you’re gonna try to sleep over?” A dull skepticism was dripping from Billy’s lips. Steve stared at the boy in awe.
“Try- Dude, I-” He didn’t even know how to finish that sentence. Billy put his cigarette out on a causer on his nightstand that housed a small army of burned-up cig butts.
“Just reminding you not to get attached.”
“Please. Don’t flatter yourself.”
There was a few seconds of silence before Steve spoke again. “In case you forgot, you said right at the start of this that we would never work as a couple.” Billy paused to think.
“Sure.” He didn’t remember a whole lot about that specific night, but it sounded enough like him to take Steve’s word for it.
“Well,” Steve said while he shoved the broken halves of his glasses in his jean pocket.
“You had your reasons to say that - and I had my own reasons to agree.”
And before Billy could reply, the door fell shut and Steve disappeared into the cold December morning.
[Florence + The Machine - Kiss With a Fist]
//
The class was pushing its midway point when Steve pushed through the double doors of the lecture hall. An acute silence fell over the room when they opened with a loud creak. The professor's mouth remained wrapped around his last word. Steve's face turned crimson. He mumbled an apology, scanning the tribune for an empty seat. He felt eyes following him as he climbed the stairs to the back row while the teacher continued to rattle off his monologue on foreign tax policies. Steve pulled up a seat next to a girl who gave him a knowing look. It wasn’t hard to guess what they were all thinking. Everything from the scent of his clothes to the state of his hair screamed: 'This Man Got Laid'.
It didn’t take him long to realize that without his glasses, he could barely discern the graphs that the professor was drawing out on the board, not from his strategically chosen seat in the back row. Not that it mattered. It all sounded like Klingon anyway. Maybe if he had done the reading, he’d get at least the gist of what was being explained, but of course, he hadn’t gotten around to doing that just yet.
Last night he really intended to break the cycle of procrastination and show up to class prepared for a change. But he forgot that there would be a rally for the upcoming football game and of course Robin went and he didn’t want to be left alone in the dorm room. So he told himself that he was only going for an hour, max. And then he’d crack open those pesky textbooks. But of course, Billy had been there and things typically ended one way when him and Steve got into a 10-yard radius of each other.
Steve's mind circled back to what Billy had said just before Steve left. ‘Don’t get attached.’ Yeah, like that would be a problem. Their entire relationship was built on not building towards anything.
As mentioned before, Billy was quick to make himself known on campus. It was practically impossible for Steve not to know that his high school nemesis had enrolled for the same college as him. It would only be so long until they’d run into each other at a party, a sports match, a mutual friend's living room. Steve knew that he was on borrowed time before he’d hear the long-forgotten title ‘King Steve!’ chanted at him across a room. People would turn their heads. Surely the new kid wasn’t talking to that Steve. In Hawkins, Steve had been a big fish in a kiddy pool (before Billy splashed him out of the water). But here at Bloomington, he was a goldfish in the Pacific Ocean. And quite frankly, he was drowning.
//
“Oh my God, Steve! You are un-be-lie-vable!” Amber howled as he passed the bong back to her.
“Tell me, how many times have you fallen asleep in the lecture hall - this week alone?” Steve rolled his eyes and muttered something about not having kept count, which - of course - is an answer in and of itself.
“You need to switch majors,” Amber cough up a cloud of thin white smoke in the already quite foggy dorm room. She slapped Steve's knee and made the boy jump in his seat.
“I keep telling you, you’d love psychology!” Steve grimaced and shook his head.
“No, no way. I can barely keep up with business school. Why the hell would I study something that’s all grey areas? That’s- it’s just not me.” Amber shot him a half-lidded look that might have been a glare.
“It’s not just grey areas. You do tests and sometimes you actually get really clear results! Like- I’ve been doing lab hours as a research assistant for a study by this one professor, Arthur Aron. It’s about creating intimacy between two people who have never met before- wait. I’ll show you my notes.” She got up and returned shortly after with a few stacks of paper filled in a small font. Steve twisted his body around in the chair (not without getting tangled in his own limps) to get a better look.
“Okay, so it’s been a long-known fact within the field of psychology that mutual self-disclosure is a critical factor in building and maintaining relationships, be they romantic or platonic or familial. Basically, if you share stuff about yourself and the other does too, it creates a feeling of trust and strengthens your bond. But in this study, we’re looking to discover if intimacy… can be engineered.” Her eyes glinted as if she was engaged in some secretive, ancient kind of magic.
“Engineered how?” Steve eyed the sheets suspiciously.
“We divide the group up into twos and have them ask each other 36 questions. They each have to answer but they ask they alternate between who asks and answers first-”
“Why do they alternate?” Steve asked, a finger to his lip as while Amber handed him the notes.
“It’s- to keep it a mutual thing. Instead of one interviewing the other, they kind of take turns in asking and sharing. The questions are designed to have people open up to each other and share intimate details about their life- WHICH” Steve had opened his mouth again, but was silenced before he could interrupt. “WHICH generates a feeling of closeness and intimacy, aka...” Amber looked at him expectantly. Steve blinked a few times, hoping that she’d finish the sentence herself.
“Love!” She slammed her hands on the armrest of her chair, causing Steve to jump in his seat for the second time in five minutes.
“You can actually make people fall in love with this?” He gestured to the paper with cynicism in his eyes.
“So far, in all pairings, at least one person has said that they would like to see their conversation partner again and in 92% of cases this feeling was mutual.”
“That’s crazy. How long does this take?”
“An hour on average. We do about three interviews in a session.”
“And people have actually fallen in love over this?” Steve asked while he went through the pages. There were some notes on setting and preparation, followed by the full list of questions. Three pages, each with twelve items. He could still vaguely hear Amber rambling in the background.
“That’s the best part. So we’ve been doing this for a few months now and of course, we’ve gone through different iterations of the experiment. Some questions have been added, others left out. But yesterday we got an invitation from this one couple-”
Her sentence was cut off when the door flew open and a cold riddled Robin marched through, inviting with her a cough of frisky winter air into the dorm.
“Close the door!” Steve and Amber both shouted at the same time.
“Yeah, yeah,” Robin yelled back, her voice stifled by her clogged sinuses. But even with her decreased sense of smell, the stench of marijuana was undeniable.
“Guys!” she whined while she took off her scarf. “Is that my weed?”
“I’ll get it back to you.” Steve giggled, leaning over his armrest to see into the hallway.
The dorm rooms at Bloomington we're not particularly large. They only consisted of a small living room, a kitchen, two bedrooms, and a bathroom. Amber technically didn't live with them, but at the start of the year, her roommate had very excitedly entered a new relationship. This was just a nice way of saying that she and her boyfriend were fucking like rabbits every spare moment of the day, on every surface they came across and Amber couldn't do anything in peace without the sound of their moaning in the background. On top of their small size, the dorms also didn't have particularly thick walls. Even after three full months, the couple showed no sign of slowing down and so Amber spent most of her waking and sleeping hours at Robin and Steve's. The space was decidedly messy but in a cozy way. It was a lived space, with textbooks and used cups sprawled over every flat surface. Most of the furniture pieces were hand-me-downs from people in their circle. The couch and the chairs for one, were so worn that you would sink five inches into the cushions.
At 5 pm in Indiana’s winter, the sun was setting quickly. Steve and Amber hadn’t realized how dark it had gotten until Robin flipped the light on, casting their tiny living room in a dim yellow glow. She snatched the bong off the coffee table and mumbled, “I don’t need your leaf. Your dealer is shit,” before taking a hit.
“Well if you’d tell me who your guy is, I wouldn’t have to keep stealing yours.” Steve threw back.
“Robin!" Amber jumped in before the two of them would enter a bickering contest. "Would you like to go to a wedding?” Robin gasped and held a hand to her chest.
“Amb, I don’t know if I’m ready for that kind of commitment.” Amber shot her girlfriend a pedantic glare.
“Someone else’s wedding. I was just telling Steve about this experiment I’m assisting-”
“The one with the questions and the things?”
“Thank you for also including ‘the things’. Everyone forgets to mention 'the things'. I was just saying that yesterday we got a letter inviting the whole team to a wedding from two of our participants! Isn’t that crazy? Three months ago they were strangers and now they are engaged!”
“Damn, that’s wild, Sweets,” Robin sniffled.
“So,” Amber sing-songed, “Will you do me the honor of being my plus-one?” Robin let out a tortured sigh.
“I don’t know if I can be around straight people for that long.”
“Hey!” Steve frowned. “You live with me .”
“Oh, so you mean you finally stopped screwing around with Trashtrove? Glad to hear that tragic chapter of your life is over.” Robin muttered while she wandered off to her room and check the damage that was done to her supply. Before Steve could come up with a snarky comeback there was a knock on the door.
“I’ll get it.” He grunted and pulled himself out of his comfy chair.
As if he was summoned by the utterance of his name, it turned out to be none other than Mr. Trashtrove himself. Steve barely had the time to blink before a jacket was thrusted into his hands.
“You forgot this, this morning.” Steve’s fogged up mind was still getting used to the sight of Billy with actual clothes on. Like- clothes that cover your body. He finally seemed to have gotten the hang of Indiana weather and was wearing a hat, scarf in the university colors and a dark blue puffer jacket that - get this - was actually zip all the way up. Who knew a day like this would come.
“You smell nice,” Billy smirked, glancing over Steve’s shoulder into the dorm room. Steve was still present enough to take a step sideways to block the view.
“Yeah, we’re erm- burning some incense.” He said. Billy flashed his pearly whites.
“Yeah, I bet.” There was a beat of silence before he added: “So, are you going to the game tonight?” Billy’s eyes trailed up and down Steve's person.
“Sure, I mean-” Steve exhaled, too high to register the way Billy was looking at him. “I probably need to catch up on schoolwork, but-” He made a wavy hand gesture. “You know. How things go. Robin's probably going to drag me along anyway. I don't know why, but for a lesbian, she's very intrigued by guys wrestling each other for some balls.”
Billy squinted his eyes, mouth slightly agape. “Sure. So... guess I’ll see you. We could meet up afterward- if you feel like it.” Billy’s eyes flickered between Steve’s eyes and his lips again.
“Yeah,” Steve replied absentmindedly, “Who knows.” And then, without as much as a nod, Billy turned around and left.
Steve stood in the doorway for a few seconds, devoid of thought and filled with confusion before the girls yelled from: “CLOSE THE DOOR!”
“Right, right,” Steve mumbled before he shut the door behind him.
//
Later that day Steve was bent over the kitchen table, trying to mend his broken glasses with sellotape. The Innovation Science textbook was opened in front of him. It was open, alright? That was a success in and of itself. So Steve decided to celebrate that small success with a snack. But then he found that they’d run out of snacks. So he had to get new snacks but before he could get snacks, he would need his glasses because it wasn’t safe to go into traffic with poor sight. He could get run over or trampled. It was a safety hazard. So it was very important that fixed his glasses first and everything else would come second.
Steve held his work up for inspection. It wasn’t anything to write home about. The sellotape stuck more to itself than to the frame. You would have thought a five-year-old child had done the job. Steve sighed and put the glasses back down. It was a real shame. He’d only gotten them a few months ago.
It took Steve the longest time to realize that he needed glasses. Sure, he got headaches all the time, but that was because he didn’t drink enough water. And the reason why he struggled in class was just that he was too lazy to pay attention. It would never have occurred to him that he might need a prescription if he hadn’t stolen a friend’s glasses on a drunken night in. Everyone had laughed at the way he’d voiced his surprise upon putting them on, his astounded expression had been priceless.
For what might have been 20 minutes or so, he’d sat there simply looking around the room, mouth half-open, unable to convey into words what it was that he was experiencing. No one really batted an eye. They just thought his LSD had kicked in. And to be fair, Steve might not have been on psychedelics, but he was pretty far gone at that night. What had him speechless, however, was how incredibly crisp everything suddenly looked. He could read the title of a Beatles poster on the other side of the room. He could actually tell the band members apart. He could tell that Robin was worried long before she actually reached him.
“Are you okay, bud?” She shouted over the music. All he did was nod.
“Is this what it's supposed to look like?” It might have been the alcohol, but there was something wet in his voice. Who knew the world could be so detailed?
It took Robin literal weeks of talking into Steve to convince him to get his eyes tested.
“I don’t have a good face for glasses,” He’d mumble as if that had any bearing on whether or not he needed them.
“Steve, there’s a right pair for everyone. You’re not gonna look like a nerd, I promise.”
She kept that promise. It took them four hours of walking in and out of shops, consulting with shop clerics who proved their infallible patience. It's wasn't until Steve put on a simple pair of black metal framed glasses that something clicked. He examined himself in the mirror from all angles.
“These look really good on you!” Robin said. It wasn’t the first time she’d said those words, but it was the first time Steve believed it.
This was a sight he could get used to.
Now that they were broken, he couldn’t imagine his life without them. Not being able to see properly made him feel like a baby, impatient and helpless. He could barely distinguish the titles on some of the articles at the end of the table.
Steve picked the paper up. ‘The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness,’ it read at the top. Right, this was Amber’s project. He skipped through the pages again. As he went through the questions, he found himself rather unconvinced. It felt so... cheap. Surely love had to be more than just knowing things about each other. If that was the case, he should have fallen in love with Robin- okay he’d had a crush on her, but that was different. That was before he really knew her. There were other people he knew plenty about. Like Dustin. Yet he’d never ever dreamed of making a move on that child. Ew. Gross.
But now that he thought about it, all the people he knew loads about were people that he liked. Did he know all that stuff because he liked them or did he like them because he got to know them?
His eye paused on one of the questions.
- Is there something that you’ve wanted to do for a long time? Why haven’t you done it?
Steve paused to think, frowned. He looked down at the sheets of paper in his hand, flipped through them again. Then, as if he was pulled up by a string, he jumped out of his chair, snatched his jacket from the floor and in the wink of an eye he was out of the door.
Only to return two seconds after and burst into Robin's room ("Um, can I help you?"). He walked straight up to her bookcase ("Hello?"), picked up a copy of Shakespeare's completed works ("NO!") which upon opening was revealed to be hollowed out, and filled with a handful of tiny packets of a moss-like substance ("I told you to get your own!") He snatched one of them and pressed the 'book' into Robin's hands.
"I'll get it back to you!" He yelled as he raced out of her room.
"YOU'RE AN ASSHOLE!"
That day, Steve Harrington did something he had never done before and would probably never do again.
He went to the library.
//
The weather had picked up while Steve strutted back down the same path from which he came twenty minutes prior, fresh snow crunching under his shoes. The dark had long settled on the overcast campus grounds. Steve hiked up his shoulders to try and keep the snowflakes from crawling under his coat collar. His breath was shallow, the copied pages of the Experiment of Interpersonal Closeness weighing heavy in his bag. He was still unsure of whether or not this was a good idea. Something, deep in the pit of his stomach warned him that it would go horribly, horribly wrong. But Steve was the kind of man who tried to fix his glasses with sellotape. He wasn’t one to perk his ears when his gut told him something was doomed to fail.
He halted in front of one of the dorm buildings and pushed through the doors. The hallways weren't much warmer than the outdoors, not with students walking in and out of the building, causing a constant influx of cold air, but at least it wasn't snowing. Steve hauled himself up three flights of stairs and stopped, panting, in front of the second door to his right.
'Last chance to back out,' his gut told him.
Steve lifted his hand to the doorbell.
'Alright.' it sighed. 'You're on your own.'
It took a moment or two before the door opened and a young man with thick black hair towered in the doorframe. He had barely laid his eyes on Steve before he leaned back and called back into the apartment:
“Hargrove!” Lyall yelled. “King Steve’s here for you!” Steve never quite got along with Billy’s roommate. He was loud, obnoxious and plain in every way what you imagine a fraternity brother to be. Lyall disappeared into the living room just as Billy made his way to the door.
“What are you doing here?” He frowned and draped his body against the door frame. “When I asked if you were going to the game, I didn’t mean pick me up at 7.”
Fuck. The game. Of course.
“Oh-shit. No, I know. I forgot about the game, honestly. This is not- It’s not like that.” Of course, he had thought about how he was going to sell this to Billy. He just hadn’t come up with anything vaguely convincing.
“Can I come in?” He asked through his teeth.
“No.” The frown still hadn’t left Billy’s face. “Because I’m leaving. For the game. In like- 10 minutes”
“Oh.” Steve tapped his shoe on the doormat. “Yeah- no that’s on me. Sorry, bad timing. Maybe another time-” It sure didn't make it easier for Steve to construct a coherent sentence when Billy staring him as if he was speaking in dialect. So he just stopped talking altogether so that there was no sound between them except for the sound of Steve's breathing.
“Why are you being weird?” Billy asked, with a slight shake of his head. His eyes were drawn to slits. Not in a menacing way, at least so it seemed. Billy seemed rather relaxed, now that Steve was thinking about it.
“I- I don’t know.” Steve lifted his arms and let them fall to his side again. 'Go on.' he told himself. 'Something you’ve wanted to do. Why haven’t you done it?' Steve pursed his lips.
“It’s a long story, erm... can I come in, just for a second? It’s… cold.” Billy’s eyes paused on the snow that had gotten caught in Steve's hair. “Fine. But I’m still leaving in 10.”
Steve looked at the threshold as if it were a river he needed to jump. Despite the turmoil in his stomach, he took the leap.
He followed Billy into the hallway as the younger guy picked up a pair of combat boots on his way to the living room. His dorm did not look all that different from Steve and Robin’s except that the furniture was definitely a step up (probably gifts from Lyall’s douchebag oil dad). The clutter levels were roughly the same, although the makeup was different. Whereas at Steve’s the mess was mostly compiled of colorful mugs and the odd dictionary, Billy’s surfaces were clad with empty Marlboro packets and layers of clothing that appeared to be dropped where they were taken off. The walls were largely undecorated, spare for a few movie posters. By the state of the place, it looked like they had some friends over the night before and had only made it halfway through the cleanup. Steve almost tripped over a beer can while he tried to explain his idea.
“So my friend is doing this experiment where she has two strangers ask each other questions and it’s supposed to make them fall in love or something-“ Billy looked over his shoulder, raising a single eyebrow.
“She looking for volunteers?”
“No, but I thought we could try it,” Steve said. "You and I." Billy halted his strides. Steve’s heart stopped beating.
“As a game of sorts. Just… not the kind of game you were planning to go to I guess.”
Billy stood there for a second, in his socks, holding a pair of boots in one hand, his face blank. He closed his eyes, chuckled and shook his head.
“Let me get this straight.” He uttered. “This morning I tell you not to get attached-” Steve raised a hand.
“I know- I know how it sounds-”
“Then what the fuck do you want me to think, Harrington?” Billy hissed. “What do you want me to make of this?”
“Okay.” Steve was starting to feel the pressure of the situation. “Here it is.” A silence fell over the room. He had hoped that whatever he would have to say next would magically appear to him if he commanded it to.
It did not.
Until suddenly, like a light turning on inside his head, it did.
“So- Amber said they do this experiment with people who have never met." He started. "That’s not really that hard. Most people- they will want to be nice to each other. Especially if they know they are being judged-”
“Dude, just get to the point.” Billy snapped. Steve had to take a deep breath to stop himself from grabbing the nearest trash item and hauling it at the guy's head.
“I was just thinking-” He stopped for a second to gather his thoughts. “If we do this... just the two of us with no one else watching or judging- if this can make two people who hate each other fall in love- or even just like each other... then they must really be onto something. Right?” He paused.
“I mean- I’d ask someone else but I feel like we actually have the least in common out of anyone I know, so that should be the ultimate test. Right?”
“It’s not like I’m actually rooting to fall in love with you or anything. Honestly, think I’m just doing this to get out of schoolwork.”
“Besides, what do we have to lose?”
"Can you just say something?"
Billy still hadn’t opened his mouth, but something in his expression seemed to have shifted. His confusion had made way for a thinking frown. He looked down at his shoes before he returned his gaze to Steve.
“What’s in it for me?” He asked. Steve tried his best to keep a straight face.
“Well if this works and we do end up falling in love, I bet tonight is going to end in very, very passionate lovemaking.” Billy puckered his lips, unconvinced. Steve caved.
“I brought weed?”
//
Billy coughed after taking a huge drag. “Dude, this is good stuff. Who do you get this from?” He hung sideways in one of the leather chairs, his feet dangling over the armrest. The armrest of his chair. That was a mistake Steve wouldn't make again.
'Out of my seat, Harrington. You can take the couch.'
So Steve took the couch.
“Those secrets are not mine to reveal,” He mumbled as he cleared up some space from the overspilling coffee table. Billy had convinced Lyall to go ahead and save a seat for him at the game with the promise that he’d get there once he was ‘done here’. Lyall had not asked any questions.
"This is basically 21 questions, right?"
"I mean- yeah, kinda. Except it's 36 questions and someone else chose the questions and it's backed up by science."
"Alright, if you say so," Billy mumbled, twirling the joint between his fingers. Steve started to wonder if Billy planned to share or if Steve was supposed to roll his own.
“How long do you reckon this is gonna take?” Billy asked.
“Amber said it usually takes them an hour or so.”
“So we can still catch the end of the game?”
“I mean- yeah, sure.” Steve straightened his back, hands splayed on his knees.
“Okay, I think before we start we should set up some ground rules.”
“You take this game rather serious, don’t you?” Billy said with a high chuckle. Steve didn’t think that being serious was necessarily a bad thing but Billy sure made it sound like it was.
“I mean- we’re kind of doing science, right?” He tried. Billy shrugged, which in his case could almost count as an approving gesture.
“So the whole objective of the game is mutual self-disclosure. Now- I don’t know what that means, erm... but I- I think it has to do with sharing things about yourself." Steve rolled his lips between his teeth. "So I think it’s important that we answer honestly, for a start.” Billy’s eyebrows rose slightly.
“Alright,” he mumbled. “What else.” Steve pushed up his glasses.
"Let's... try to keep things civil. I don't think this is going to work if we're in each other's hair the whole time."
"I think you're gonna have to pick on or the other, because both might be a stretch." Steve held Billy's gaze the way a parent stares down their unruly teenager until Billy finally sighed and caved.
"Fine, civil and honest. I'll try my best."
"Greatly appreciated. Then... Let's think... Amber said that we have to alternate who asks the question. So how about I take the odd numbers and you ask the even’s?”
“Sounds perfect.”
“Alright,” Steve straightened the pages out. “Question one.”