Work Text:
She and Steve sit side-by-side on his kitchen floor, legs crossed, knees touching, hands in their laps all polite like they’re waiting to start Sunday school or something. They’re facing the floor to ceiling windows which back out onto his garden, the swimming pool is dark, white moon reflecting off the black water, the dense wall of the trees beyond is unflinching, impenetrable. The only light inside is a single lamp, glowing yellow gold and smooth in a way that reminds Robin of old libraries she’s never been to and the mellow shine of old money.
Outside a storm is starting to pick up. Just where she can make out the jagged line of the tops of the trees against the almost-black navy of the star studded sky, she can see a wild wind thrashing the canopy, eddying and resurfacing in giddying rushes, howling down through the blank space of Steve’s yard. In front of all that is what they’re really looking at: their reflections in the glass, eerily doubled like she’s wearing a mask of her own face but something is slightly wrong about it, like catching yourself at a half glance in the mirror and thinking it’s someone else entirely. Like the storm has peeled back a layer of them to flutter about, snapping fiercely in the gale.
Robin doesn’t really know what they’re doing, reaches for the glass of fizzy white wine — which tastes sour but the more she drinks the less she notices — like that will remind her. She looks at Steve out of the corner of her eye, the way he’s tilting his head like he’s trying to get the slightly displaced mask to fit his features. She feels how tense he is through the press of his knee against her, so still it’s like he’s vibrating with the need to move. She shifts closer.
He turns his head to look at her and for a moment Robin doesn’t recognise him, like something imperceptible has shifted about his features. She blinks and it’s just Steve, his soft eyes tired and droopy in the corners.
“Do you think it’s going to happen again?” he asks, like he’s not the survivor of four of these events. Like he’s not the expert in all this.
Her breath catches in her throat, she watches the sharp little exhalation of breath ripple across her wine. “I don’t know,” she says, keeping her voice low so that he might not hear the probably in her voice.
She thinks he does anyway, because he lifts his own glass — half empty — and drinks it down in three fast gulps. She presses her lips together, doesn’t say anything.
It’s only been three days since they saved the world again, Robin thinks she still has the grit of another dimension under her fingernails. Agents are crawling all over Hawkins. Eddie is in intensive care, Max is in a coma, Steve’s sides are finally properly bandaged, she hates the pure white of them against his skin. She feels like something is crawling on her at all times. (She thinks it’s the ever present worry that this isn’t over.)
On the floor of Steve’s kitchen she grabs his hand, eyes back on their reflections. They don’t look like her and Steve, they don’t look like anybody at all. He is still watching her over his glass, she can see him against the wild, black night, she can feel his eyes on her. His thumb twitches, smooths over the backs of her knuckles. Sometimes she still wonders if he likes her, likes likes her, and then hates herself for even entertaining the possibility, knows he would be offended if he ever knew she considered him like that sometimes. (Sometimes she wonders if she wants him to like her, nobody before Steve in that bathroom on the other side of hell has ever told her they’ve had a crush on her.) But then she catches him watching her like this and it’s not like how he ever looked at Nancy, its like how he looks at the kids, something familial and familiar. She loves him for that, sometimes so deeply it feels like a second skin. (She wonders if that’s what she sees in the window, her second skin made of love only for him, fluttering in the wind just an inch off of her skin.)
“Rob, are you okay?” he whispers, and it’s a stupid question but he’s a stupid guy and she knows what he’s really asking. She knows the words that are being blown away in the wind outside. Am I going to be okay? Steve is like a kid sometimes and it kills her that he has to act like he’s the adult, kills her that she acts like he is sometimes too.
She squeezes his hand. “We’re going to be fine Steve, we’ve got each other.” She watches her ghostly doubled reflection, wonders if that’s what she looks like.
The kitchen is so quiet and still, only the hum of the refrigerator and the wind outside wooshing down through the trees and into the yard, buffeting the house. She’s itching suddenly with the deepness of the hole they’re in, untouchable by the outside world. Just her and Steve in this quelling, all-encompassing silence. It’s like they’re missing something and that hurts because she and Steve shouldn’t need anyone else, they’re Robin and Steve. A duo. She doesn’t want to miss anything when she’s with him.
“We should go outside,” says Steve.
“What? Why? It’s cold and windy.” Her voice sounds foreign and unlike her own. She sips her wine.
“Because it’s so —” He doesn’t have to say the words. Still. Stagnant. Quiet. “We’ve been in here for two whole days, Rob. Let’s go out there.” He waves a hand to the black garden, the silver moonlight dancing in the rippling windswept pool. “We need to.”
And that’s how they pull themselves out. The night tears at them with cold hands, their hair frothing and cresting like waves. She keeps her hand tight in Steve’s as he whoops and tips his head back to the sky where the stars scream out in the Indiana night and surely in Hawkins they shouldn’t be able to see the stars , something alien that isn’t cruel. She watches him, the feral, manic gleam in his eyes and thinks sometimes that he needs her to hold him down so he doesn’t go off up and up into the sky. (She thinks that sometimes she needs to hold on so he can pull her up, up into whatever free fall he’s found because something dangerous might be better than this grave she’s sinking into step at a time.)
If only for a moment they are wild and cold, faces up to the unreflective sky, letting those wispy masks settle back onto their features, forget they even have faces maybe. Just a boy and a girl holding hands watching the stars as the wind tugs and pulls them, kindly cruel in a way that mends.
Maybe they don’t need anyone else, she thinks, maybe they can stay there until the wind strips them to their bones . She wouldn’t mind dying if it was with Steve.
He turns to her and she thinks he might kiss her but then he’s just holding her against his chest and it feels like such an impossibly mean thought to have about Steve, to even think that he might do that to her, that she starts crying. Sometimes she thinks she doesn’t deserve him and he doesn’t deserve how she thinks about him. He’s just so much good sometimes Robin thinks something must turn for the worst, surely King Steve isn’t all gone, surely at some point he’s going to reveal himself: he was making fun of her the whole time, trying to make her normal .
His hand smooths across her hair and he probably thinks she’s crying about Vecna, or Max all limp and colourless in a hospital bed, or Eddie with even worse bites than Steve with foreign blood in his veins. He probably thinks she’s a good person. His palm is big on the back of her skull, his chest warm against her wind stung cheeks. She likes how she fits against him, like she was made to cry here on his shoulder, in his arms. She thinks it’s awful that Steve was made for her , he deserves someone better, someone who can love him better, who can fuck him, kiss him. She thinks they were meant to be like that but then whoever made them fucked her up, made her something she wasn’t supposed to be.
She wants to hurt, then.
She pulls back and tries to kiss him.
His face pulls away before she even gets close, his floppy fringe blowing in the wind his brown eyes petrified . He looks so suddenly terrified for a reason she cannot gauge, surely this is what he wanted? Then she realises the look in his eyes is hurt . She’s never seen it directed at her before and it’s the fact he never lets go of her arms, holding her so gently, the fact that he still looks worried for her, even though she’s causing him pain, that makes her burst into harder tears.
“Robin I — Rob,” he says and his voice cracks up and splinters like it’s going to blow away in fractured rainbow shards up into the wild black night and she wants to hold him together, wants to take it back. “Are you okay?”
She can’t stop crying, he won’t let her bury her face back in his chest holding her back at arms length . She doesn’t know what she’s doing, she’s drunker than she remembers being a moment a go. “I’m sorry,” she’s saying, again and again like maybe one more repetition might make it better, “I’m so fucked up, I’m sorry.” She’s fighting to burrow back into him, into the place she fits, but he still holds her back, she must look so ugly and pathetic and pitiable. Like an animal.
“Rob —” One of his hands leaves her arm and his fingers are wiping away her tears. Her tears are on his skin, on his fingertips, glittering in the moonlight. It’s obscenely beautiful for a moment, before she remembers why she’s crying, remembers she hurt him and it shouldn’t be beautiful, there’s nothing radiant about tears, remembers he shouldn’t be the one comforting her. “What’s wrong?” he says, like there are words for what she wants to say.
“I’m just so fucked up,” she says and it’s not gentle or mean or anything at all but gasped between tears. “I want to be normal for you.”
His face creases up, she sees it blurred past tears and her eyelashes. His eyes soften at the corners. “Rob, you’re not fucked up.”
“I am, I am, I am —”
He swallows and then he’s crying too. “Okay, you are fucked up in the way we’re all fucked up, but not in the way you’re saying. You’re not fucked up for — for not wanting me — for — you’re not fucked up for being a lesbian, Robin.” He says this like he’s telling the truth and Robin feels it like a slap.
“I know that,” she whispers.
“No. No, you don’t.” And then he lets her fall back into his chest and she can’t stop crying, she’s got a headache and she hurt Steve and his face his wet against the side of her head, he doesn’t cry it’s all wrong, it’s all fucked up. And he thinks she’s not fucked up for being like she is. Of course he wouldn’t, he’s too good. And even after she’s shown him she’s not a good person he’s shielding her from the wind.
*
She wakes up in his bed, dehydrated and hungover, with Steve watching her. She closes her eyes again with a groan. She feels rather than hears him laugh, the movement of his body on the other side of the mattress.
“Water?” he asks, and then a cool glass is being pressed into her hand. She half sits up to drink it, too embarrassed to make eye contact with him. “Rob?”
Robin turns over to put the glass on her bedside table before shuffling down beneath the covers. “I’m sorry,” she breathes quietly, she knows he hears her anyway.
“I know, you said last night.” He’s quiet, she feels his fingers tapping nervously on the mattress. “I guess I just — I want to ask why, I want to know if you’re okay, I want to know if there’s a way I can help you with whatever it is.”
She thinks she would start crying again if her eyes weren’t itchy and dry from the night before. She’s through with crying. “Steve, you’re being too nice. I was a fucking bitch to you last night.”
“No you weren’t. You were drunk and obviously we’re going through a lot of shit so —”
“No. Steve. You let me sleep in your bed after I went and —” Her cheeks are burning, her heart his thrumming. She feels like she’s taking up too much space in the room. “I’m really, really fucking sorry.”
“Rob, please tell me how I can —”
“— there’s nothing you can do! I’m just all —”
“— you’re not fucked up.” He sounds genuinely angry and it stuns her into silence. “You’re not fucked up, Robin.” He grabs her shoulder, pulls her over so she’s on her back, so she has to look him in the eyes where he’s leaning over her. “You’re not. I love you, I don’t want you to be fucking normal for me.” He swallows tightly and his face is pinched up tightly the way it does when he’s trying not to cry because he thinks he’s not allowed to. “You are the best thing —” She watches as his mouth contorts like he can’t find the words but she doesn’t need to hear them because she already knows. Because it’s Steve. And she knows Steve, however much he surprises her, she knows him. Everything he knows, she knows.
“I fucking love you.”
He wipes his face with the back of his hand and flops back down on the bed. “I love you,” he says in a very low voice, he’s trying so badly not to cry she wants to cry for him.
“I’m really sorry. I just — Sometimes I want to be normal and I have these horrible mean thoughts about you which I know aren’t true at all because you’re the best person I have ever met.”
“What kind of thoughts?”
“I don’t know if you want to know. They’re going to hurt you.”
He grabs her hand under the covers. “They’re hurting you too, I’d rather hurt with you than make you do it alone.”
“This is what I mean, you’re too good for me.” She glances at him, he’s turned on his side to watch her face. “I just — it’s normally like, you’ve been pretending to be my friend this whole time as a joke, to convert me or stupid shit like that. I know, I know, you wouldn’t ever do that. Sometimes it’s that I think you still like me, or I think you’re going to kiss me, or something.” She can feel her face burning. “It’s so stupid and it feels mean every single time I think it but I can’t stop it, it’s like there’s someone else in my brain saying all this stupid shit and I just —”
He squeezes her hand. “I think you’re being mean to yourself, too,” he murmurs.
She swallows. “I don’t mind being mean to me. I don’t ever want to hurt you again.”
“Robin.” He’s trying to cry silently and sometimes she wishes he would scream and throw shit at the walls and have a proper tantrum. She wants to smash this whole house up with him. She wants to see him lose it. Somewhere for that manic energy to go. “I would rather you hurt me a thousand times than keep this shit bottled up. You’re my best friend. That means we tell each other everything.” It’s such a childish concept she’s smiling up at the ceiling. “I don’t want you to — I want you to be happy.”
“You do make me happy. And you bottle shit up too.”
“I know,” he says. “How about — how about we make a deal? No more secrets, no more hiding shit. No more bottling. We’re smashing up all the bottles.”
“You’re such an idiot,” she says, smiling at him as she looks at him out of the corner of her eye, “too stupid, you’re far too good to be —”
“I’m not too good for you,” he says firmly. “You know what I used to be. You know what I am. I’m not perfect, Robin, nobody is. And nobody could ever be too good for you, Robin Buckley, you’re too good for everybody else in the world.”
“But I’m —” He frowns at her, she closes her mouth.
“I would marry you,” says Steve. “You are everything I could ever want.”
She swallows. “Even if I can’t…” She grimaces in embarrassment. “Even if I would never fuck you?”
“That’s what’s so perfect,” says Steve, “I think I’m destined for flings. I’m never going to find a wife, never going to find the right girl. I’m a terrible serial dater and I think something is always going to be missing. Maybe I’m looking in the wrong place.” He squints at her. “Since we’re telling truths now… I sort of wish we were on a bathroom floor.”
How does he always surprise her? Even when she thinks she knows him back to front, when she thinks she knows everything he knows. “ Steve ?”
“Both,” he offers, “both is — in which case, being married to you would be great.”
She starts laughing. “How are you so — Sometimes I think you were planted in my life by the American government. Are you an alien?”
“Oh. Right.” He looks mock offended. “I know you’re not attracted to men but do you really think I look like a Demogorgon?”
“Oh shut up,” she says, laughing still, “you’re not so terrible to look at, might even be able to kiss you on our wedding day.”
He grins at her. “Did we just get engaged?”
She kicks him under the covers. “Sort of, pending further review. How did you work out both , I thought you would have come to me with that before.”
“You were definitely helpful education wise.” He smiles at her, all soft. “I just — there was a lot to figure out which I sort of wanted to do on my own, the way you did it.”
“I would have helped.”
“I know. I know you would have.”
“No more secrets?” she whispers, looking deep into his eyes.
“No more secrets,” he agrees.
“Last night I wasn’t even sure who I was, sometimes I forget what I look like.”
“Sometimes I don’t even know who I am,” says Steve and sometimes Robin thinks she must know herself because she knows Steve and he’s like a mirror, he’s the other half of her soul. “Sometimes I don’t recognise my voice.”
“We’re fucked up,” says Robin.
“Together,” he says, “so I think we’ll be okay. Together, I think we’ll always find a way out.”
She nods. Believes him because it’s Steve. “I’m still really sorry.”
“You don’t have to be sorry,” he says, because whatever he says he’s too good for her. He grins then, and she knows the moment is over. “I know I’m irresistible.”
She smacks his arm and then they’re wrestling, hungover and laughing. Robin finds she doesn’t mind he’s broken the moment. Not when he’s straddling her waist and pointing down at her victorious and it isn’t awkward and she knows him. She knows he isn’t trying to get into her pants, there aren’t any ulterior motives. Even when she’s between his thighs, defenceless, she knows he would never try anything. His face is pink and breathless, his chest heaving with little pants. She grins up at him, carved up in the sunlight from the bright, clear, still morning coursing through the window. She thinks he’s beautiful, far more radiant and perfect than tears on his fingertips. He ducks down and kisses her temple, it’s so brotherly she thinks something deep in her chest clicks with it, their souls finding another place where they line up and fit together, jagged and fucked up and terribly perfect.
“Toast?” he says, it sounds like I love you.
“Toast,” she agrees, because it’s the only thing Steve can make without burning, and she hopes he hears the I love you too.