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powderblueblood · 5 months

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STEVE HARRINGTON X MILLION DOLLAR MAN !!!!

( idk if that’s what you meant 😭 pls delete if it’s not <3 )

send me 🎵+ character name and i’ll write a lil blurb inspired by a song from their playlist (you can also request songs and i will do my level best. god is a dj and i'm god)

▶ MILLION DOLLAR MAN - LANA DEL REY

you've got the world, but baby at what price? or how falling in love with notorious conman steve harrington began your career as a fence of stolen jewelry.

an: @stveharringtn cherry how the fuck did you know that i've been sitting on a conman!steve au for what feels like a hundred thousand years. PERFECT SONG PERFECT CHOICE lets begin i hope you like it

warnings: my blatant obsession with the oceans eleven cinematic universe and pathological need to create a heist au out of EVERYTHING. and CUSSING IS IN THIS TOO.

word count: 2.5k

MIAMI BEACH, 1990

“Whatever happened to a good old-fashioned safe?”

“I don’t trust a safe. I don’t trust me, I don’t trust you, and I most definitely don’t trust a safe.”

Dustin Henderson dangerously toes the edge of squawking, but he doesn’t know any better. At this point in his career as a thief, he doesn’t understand that when Steve Harrington says he doesn’t trust anyone, it’s not dismissive. It’s simply a missive, a fact of life. Everyone’s got knives, everyone’s got backs. Stands to reason that someone’s going to thrust and someone is going to get stabbed.

Steve likes to take all the necessary precautions.

He doesn’t trust anyone.

“But her you trust?”

Robin Buckley’s tone is hard. Robin Buckley is the only person that Steve could imagine himself trusting, and even so, they keep each other at an imperceptible arm’s length. To the outside world, they’re bosom buddies, best friends eating dirt together. But they both understand the business that they’re in.

They keep their knives sharp.

They take all the necessary precautions.

So why the fuck is Steve bringing an outsider into the ring.

“I never said that.” Steve grabs a coaster and pointedly puts it where Robin might next aim her beer bottle, dripping with incriminating condensation. All over his agarwood coffee table.

“It was inferred.” Robin pointedly puts the bottle down– to the far left of the coaster. Fuck you.

“I don’t see how that’s my problem.” Fuck you right back.

“I know why he’s not using a safe,” Eddie Munson crows from the near background, wiping ash from his face. Eddie Munson, munitions expert. Eddie Munson, expert in blowing up any conversation within a three mile radius. Detonation test, by the way, that’s why his face is covered in shit.

Steve holds out a hand–stop right where you are–before he can reach the agarwood table.

“Because he’s–” and proceeds to make that finger in hole gesture that doesn’t crack a single smile in the room. Not even Dustin Henderson’s, mostly due to the fact that it’s happening behind his head. “Because he’s fucking her.”

“It’s not that,” Steve and Robin say in unison, with Steve’s eyes narrowed on Eddie and Robin’s eyes trained unmercifully on Steve.

It’s not that. They’re right. It’s worse.

There’s something psychosexual about the game of tennis. The grunting, the tiny little skirts, the whacking of balls. The amount of money rich people love to spend on it. There’s something evil here, and you’ve committed yourself to a summer of trying to figure it out.

Well, half-committed. Your real commitment is making enough tips to make a dent in your looming student loans. Post-graduation, a friend had given you a hot tip about private tennis clubs in Miami. They use hundos like napkins there, girl. Go get your piece.

Your nana lives in Miami. Lived. She’s dead now, three months. You’re living in her condo now– technically in a seniors complex, assisted living type of thing, but it’s okay. It’s quiet. The people chat and force you to play bocce ball sometimes, the only sport you understand.

Tennis, you don’t understand, other than the fact that these people have more money than they know what to do with and they’re all too repressed to grunt in the privacy of their own homes.

After a time or two taking drink orders and bringing their rackets for in-house repair, they all blend into the same amorphous blob– the white outfits-on-white people effect does not help. They tip you in enormous digits, confident that you’ll remember them and treat them right, but you don’t have that skill. Some of your co-workers do, but you don’t.

So, you notice when someone stands out.

You smell him before you see him, and you know how that sounds, but bare with–

The thickening, insistent incense smell of patchouli. Rainwater. Dust. Lemon.

When you turn from your place behind the bar, fetching your eighth double vodka soda in what seems like as many minutes for another bleach-blond man in his mid-forties, he’s leaning with one elegant elbow propped on the marble top. Sunglasses push over a shock of brown hair, streaked with blonde from the Florida sunshine.

“Macallan, buddy. Up.” But he’s not talking to you. He’s talking to the bartender, Trent, the picture of incompetence. Trent nods to him, smiling broadly, but that flattens into a hard line as he turns toward the bar.

This guy politely turns his head, eyes glossing right over you. But you are just staring a bullet hole right though him, and you can’t help it. He’s magnetic. He’s dressed in a light blue linen suit, a far cry from the tennis uniforms or the hollering Versace shirts every other man in the place seems to be wearing. The slope of his shoulders suggest something… provincial.

He’s not a city boy– man. This is a man.

You hear a clatter to your immediate right and see Trent pouring a finger of Chivas into a tumbler.

“Oh, Trent, that’s not–”

He passes it off to the linen gentleman, this Miami cowboy, with a serene smile. Most people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a Chivas and a Macallan, but you would.

And you bet he would too.

He departs in a cloud of the same heavenly scent he’d arrived in, heading courtside to watch trust fund kids fumble over backhands.

“Trent,” you say, reaching for the correct bottle and a fresh tumbler. “Meet Macallan. For next time, okay?”

The blond kid just shrugs at you. “All that shit tastes the same to me.”

To you.

You linger near the arm of his chair before speaking, suddenly able to hear your pulse in your ears. Up close, you can see moles dotting the hand holding the errant glass of Chivas. A big hand too, it seems to dwarf the crystal.

“Excuse me,” you say, as steady as you can manage. It’s not very steady. You wish you would’ve thought to check your makeup before you made a beeline out here, but time, you couldn’t help but feel, was of the essence.

He looks up at you over his sunglasses and you think your knees might buckle.

Eyes like a dark wood. Inviting you in. The kind of eyes that don’t look through you.

Christ, people had been looking through you all summer, but it didn’t matter now.

“Is that the Macallan?” he mumbles conspiratorially.

You just– nod, uniform-required ponytail bouncing.

“I’ll trade you,” he says, about to pass off the glass of Chivas, but then he pauses. Takes you in, surveying you in a way that makes you blush, “if you can finish this one with me.”

“Um…”

“Is that allowed?” he asks, “I don’t want to get you in trouble.”

Trouble be damned. The hell with trouble. Not only is your reputation as a little worker bee here untarnished, you can’t not sit with him.

“I’m due a break, actually.”

“So I’ll trade you. Sit down, get comfortable. Give me the scoop on these tennis brats.”

He leans in to take the glass of Macallan from you, to pass off the glass of Chivas, and he brushes your hand. You experience the full entirely of a cliche, feeling electricity thrum under your skin– but then he passes a fingertip over the ring finger of your right hand.

“That’s a pretty piece,” he hums, “Princess, right?”

For a second, you falter. Princess? Me? But it’s the ring he’s referring to– the yellow diamond engagement ring that once belonged to your nana.

“Close!” you say, twisting the band on your finger in an act of self-consciousness. “Carré cut. Less pricey than a princess.”

“But just as pretty.”

“And more rare, actually.”

“Huh,” he says, and you smooth your skirt out with one hand, taking the seat nearest him. Enveloping yourself in the cloud of him. “Rarer than a princess.”

From the court, a headband-wearing pre-teen in dazzling whites hollers fuck you, Mommy! Fuck you and your fucking bullshit topspin! I fucking hate this place!

“I’ll drink to that.”

NEW YORK CITY, 1995

The car door slams behind Dustin Henderson, raindrops rolling from the brim of his baseball cap. It’s late November and a freezing rain has descended upon the Diamond District.

Steve had at least hoped he might see sunshine when he got out of the joint.

From the wheel, he cranes his neck to the back seat where Dustin sits, wiping the dripping water from the hat’s beak. His Thinking Cap. He’s had that thing since he was a kid and has somehow managed to keep it in immaculate condition. Dustin loves details. Dustin also loves risk. Which is why he’s the only man for this recon job.

“Tell me,” Steve says, tone as level as he can possibly keep it.

“She is way hotter than I remember.”

“Dustin.”

“Miami always makes people less hot. I think it’s the heat,” the kid chuckles, an obvious attempt at lightening a tense mood. See, they weren’t supposed to be here. They weren’t supposed to be looking for you. Robin hadn’t said don’t go looking for her, but that more or less should have been in the terms of Steve’s release from Sing Sing.

“Dustin.”

“She’s in there, just like you said she’d be in there. It’s a white room and it’s got every kind of goddamn sparkler you could think of. Three layers of security. Three. What kind of jewelry store you ever been to that’s got three layers of security?”

A detail like that would make a less accomplished thief sweat. But Dustin and Steve share a knowing smile.

“A jewelry store selling stolen jewelry.”

“Exactly,” Dustin nods. “I thought she’d be front-of-house, but she’s got her own office. Tucked away in the corner. Appointment only.”

“Any availability?”

The younger man smirks. “For me or for you?”

Buddy’s is the last place in midtown you can get a decent drink and not be surrounded by throngs of yuppies.

You know this, because you tend to date the yuppies in the throng.

This is the one place that seems to be universally avoided by the trader set– it’s too dark and wooden in here, no brutalist architecture to make them feel at home while they rail lines of coke off their girlfriend’s compact mirrors.

At Buddy’s, there’s a pianist that’s been propping up the corner for the last half century, minimum. A carpet that’s never been shampooed spreads across the floor and the mahogany is dented in all the places the light doesn’t hit. You can smoke indoors. Everything Happens to Me by Chet Baker will play, and everything feels like it’s going to be alright. At least until happy hour ends.

You have a regular seat by the bar, a vantage point for people-watching. A gin martini, hold the vermouth, sits waiting for you by the time you arrive. On an average Thursday, you spend a couple of hours drinking three of these in an act of decompression from the violent fluorescent lighting of your workplace. From peering through a looking glass, examining the way light refracts through gemstones.

From moving cargo that isn’t yours to move.

This Thursday has been no different.

You drag a finger along the condensation of your martini glass, it’s perfect conical shape a welcome weight in your hand.

Your hair is piled up on top of your head, and you wear your reading glasses, and though you are beautiful, no one bothers you. Nothing bothers you.

Until you hear a sound you haven’t heard in years.

Tapping, against the bartop. One, one. Two, two. Three, three. Nerves. It was the only time you could ever tell that he was nervous.

“Macallan, buddy. Up.”

Fucker.

He knew you by every single detail about you, let’s get that straight.

He is entirely sure that in a room of a thousand clones of you, he would be able to pick out the real one, just from your minute sigh. From the way your one shoulder always slopes. From curl at the base of your neck.

From the way you play with your grandmother’s Carré cut diamond, still sitting pretty on your right hand.

He positions himself a number of seats away from you, from the seat that he’s been watching you sit at for a couple of nights in a row now. He does not approach you directly.

Partially to see if you’ll still remember him.

Steve is still vain, in his ways. He wants a spotlight shone on him.

He only ever remembers the warmth of yours.

He orders the same drink he ordered that day you met at the tennis club, the same way. He even hopes the bartender will mistake the Chivas for the Macallan and you’ll have to climb over the bar and charmingly correct him. But Antoine, as he’s heard you call him, has been behind this bar longer than Saint Peter at the pearly gates, so there’s no fear of that.

You don’t react right away, and he doesn’t expect you to. He savors it, in fact, the opportunity to slyly watch you. Even if you’re seething. Even if you’re seething, you’re seething like a goddess might seethe. Horrifying and beautiful, all at once. The definite end of him.

Then, the lack of attention you’re showing him stretches on a beat too long.

“Excuse me,” he says from his spots a couple of seats down, “Can you do me a favor?”

You don’t respond. This doesn’t stop him. Never has.

“You mind tasting this for me?” Steve pushes the glass toward you, sending it sliding down the bar. You catch it with your right hand, yellow diamond catching in the light. A cut like that has never sparkled until you’ve worn it. “You think that’s Macallan or Chivas? Be honest.”

Steve’s fingers flex unconsciously as you lift the glass. Tilt it toward your lips. Still making no eye contact. But you don’t sip.

“I think you should be in prison,” you say into the crystal tumbler and place it back on the bar top. “Why the fuck are you not in prison.”

Steve closes the space between you, taking in that powdery perfume you’re still wearing after all this time. Candied violets. He settles into the beside you and props his palm under his chin.

“Why are you selling stolen jewelry.”

He sees you tense for a brief moment, then release. Like you knew he’d say that, like you should have seen that coming. Because you know him, and you always see him coming. Other than Robin, you’re the only one that ever has.

“I asked you first.”

“I asked you second.”

“So that when some bastard in a bad linen suit asks me to hold on to some stolen jewelry, I’ll at least know how much it’s worth.”

A beat. You stare Steve down with such naked disdain that his heart twists in his chest. You hate him, and he sees that, and with all the evidence stacked up against you, he should hate you too. But that wasn’t what bit him.

“That suit wasn’t bad, Princess.”

#powder room talk #stveharringtn #s. harrington by powder #steve harrington x reader #steve harrington x you #steve harrington x f!reader #heist au #conman!steve you will live forever unlike danny ocean who is apparently dead.#stranger things fic #published by powder #blurbs #clear cut

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