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The day after the mall is basically flattened, Steve sleeps like the dead. He sleeps like he actually died the day before and it's only just catching up to him. He sleeps until the phone wakes him up—his mother calling in from some hotel because Steve hadn't been able to find the itinerary she'd left so she must have found out from the evening news. "Steve!" she calls over the phone, loud in his ear, talking like maybe he's far away. "Steve, did you—the mall—were you—?"
"I'm fine," Steve says. He doesn't want to lie to her, it's too much work, so he admits that he was at the mall, but adds "It's not as bad as it looks. I mean—" He struggles for the cover story, and can't quite remember. All he can manage is, "I mean, Hop and Mrs. Byers got us out of there in time."
His mom thanks God, and breaks away from the phone to relay the news to Steve's father, from whom Steve doesn't hear a response. Then his mom returns to trying to pry out all the messy details out of him right now and Steve can barely remember what he told the cops yesterday, much less what Mrs. Byers told the cops, and he doesn't want to think about what happened now.
So he does lie. Just a little. He says, "I'm pretty beat, I was thinking about going to bed early," and then holds his breath.
"Okay, honey," his mom says. "Okay. Make sure to eat dinner, use the emergency money to get yourself something nice, and then rest up. I'll call again tomorrow."
They hang up without the long and somewhat embarrassing string of repeated goodbyes Steve knows some people's mothers prefer. His mom isn't like that, too practical and too busy.
Steve looks at the phone. And then just kind of lets his gaze wander around the room. It's dark, which means it's late, and the moon is out, casting strange shadows across the room. It's weird, Steve decides, that he keeps living through this shit. But it's pretty great.
Eventually he stops staring at nothing, waiting for something to rise up from the pool outside and swallow the moon or eat the diving board or whatever. He starts actually noticing things, and what he notices is that the light on the answering machine is blinking furiously, like a bomb.
Will it be the police?
Will it be Marty, the manager of Scoops Ahoy who Steve and Robin have collectively met about half a dozen times?
Will it be Dustin, harbinging some new hellish danger?
He can't ignore it and go back to bed. He rewinds the tape and plays it.
"Steve?" comes Robin's stripped-down voice. "This was the only Harrington number in the phonebook, sorry if you're some other Harrington. Steve, if this is you, could you—" She cuts herself off. The tape runs silent for a few seconds except for the tik-tik-tik of the machine working. "Could you call me back?" she finishes, and then leaves her number, all the effort gone out of her voice, turning it into this dull cardboard thing, sort of like the way she used to talk to him when they were first hired by Marty.
Yeah, that's not good, and there's no way Steve is just calling her back. He's going to go see her.
The plan is to go to the general area of Robin's neighborhood and drive around until he sees a house that looks like her house from last night, the old farm house where Flo the Hawkins PD Receptionist had dropped her off, but then it turns out that Steve can't find his car keys. First he looks at the table by the door, but his keys aren't there. They're also not in the kitchen, the living room, the dining room, or his Scoops Ahoy shorts from the day before. Finally, he thinks that maybe he left them in the car last time he drove, at which point he opens the garage door to a cavernously dark, undeniably empty space and remembers that he saw Flo the receptionist drop Robin off because his car keys are probably buried under three or more stories of rubble under the mall. Because the stupid Russians took his keys, those assholes.
But it's okay. Steve is a problem solver. Steve will not be defeated. Steve is going to go check up on Robin in person.
He grabs the spare car keys from his parents' room and calls the taxi company and pays with money from the 'emergency' fund his parents have left him. Steve has to give very vague directions to the taxi driver. but eventually the guy remembers the right old farm house on the other side of town. It's an expensive taxi ride, and takes them past the still-smoldering ruins of the mall, but it's worth it. To see Robin. To be sure she's okay.
"Hell of a thing," says his taxi driver about the mall, where lights are flashing and machinery is moving. "Hell of a fucking thing."
"Yeah." Steve swallows, leans his once-again-busted face against the cool glass of the window. "Yeah, you got that right." He closes his eyes so that he doesn't have to look at it.
A woman who must be Robin's mom opens the door. Steve has no idea what her name is, but she's probably married still—and even Mrs. Byers still goes by Mrs.—so he waves awkwardly and says, "Hi, Mrs. Buckley. Uh, I'm Steve. Robin called but the answering machine didn't catch her number, so..."
Mrs. Buckley actually relaxes at that introduction, maybe because it explains Steve's messed up face and also what he's doing here at this hour. She lets him inside without the kind of stilted and painful interview Mrs. Wheeler might have preferred, and calls up the stairs to Robin, who comes downstairs and looks terrible.
She hasn't slept. She's probably showered, but without whatever products and other stuff she usually does. No make up, in her pajamas, looking ready to launch herself off the third to last step of her steep dark wood stairs and tackle Steve to the floor. Maybe for waking her up? She must be at least as exhausted as Steve is.
But she doesn't tell him to go home. She just grabs his hand and pulls him upstairs to her room, right there in front of Mrs. Buckley and everything. She pulls so hard and so fast that Steve almost slips on the worn-smooth steps. She doesn't look back at him, she just keeps going, like there's something behind them giving chase, and Steve doesn't think to tell her to slow down. He bangs his way up the stairs after her like the clumsy asshole he is these days and tries not to gape when she slams her door shut behind them.
"Tell me that shit was real," she demands, immediately, now that they're alone.
Even like this, even like this, Robin Buckley is still beautiful. Maybe even more beautiful, because she's seen what he's seen now and she doesn't want to turn away.
"It was real," Steve says, and squeezes her hand.
He knows what this feels like. He knows—he hasn't been here, exactly, where she's standing, but he's been in the neighborhood. He'd stood outside of the Byers house, scrambled for his keys, tried to convince himself he was crazy, tried to convince himself he wasn't crazy...but then his crisis of faith had been over, swept away by the sudden certainty that Byers and Nancy would probably die if he didn't go back inside. If he ran away.
Robin hadn't really made a choice like that, not until right now, because by the time things at the mall had started to go off the rails it had been too late for anyone to get off the ride.
It doesn't really look like Steve's reassurance has helped, she doesn't exactly crumble with relief, but she does flop forward into Steve's space, resting her forehead on his shoulder and mumbling, "Great. I think."
"It's kind of a mixed bag," Steve acknowledges. "But hey: we lived."
"Yeah we did," Robin mutters smugly. "Take that, Terminator."
Steve huffs a laugh even though he doesn't think he's going to be watching any movies with Russians any time soon, and rubs her back like he used to for Nancy, the way she'd said was comforting.
"You remember what I told you in the bathroom, right?" she asks, no longer pressed comfortably up against his shoulder.
"Yeah," Steve says. He stops rubbing her back because, uh, maybe that was too much. But he forges on, anyway, because he didn't come over here in the middle of the night for just anyone. He came over here for Robin Buckley, genius little ears and all. "Who cares though, right? We defeated the Russians and kept America safe from, uh... zombie borg people, or whatever Dustin will end up naming them. That's pretty solid friend territory. You're stuck with me."
"Oh, good," Robin says, "my very own Steve Harrington."
"One of a kind," Steve confirms.
They stand there for a few more minutes and Steve listens to the creak of Robin's old house settling and her mom rustling around downstarts. Out the window the moon is peeking up over the trees in the backyard, visible because Robin hadn't bothered to turn on any lights in her room, letting the fat moon peer at them.
"I have to go get my car," Steve says.
Robin sighs, puff of air that skitters across his shoulder as she pulls away. It's hard to tell in the light of the not-quite-full-moon, but Steve thinks that maybe she's shed a few tears. "Okay," she says, stepping away completely, wrapping her arms around herself. "Thanks. For coming."
"Any time," Steve says, and means it, but then he says, "Do you want to come? We could—I mean, if you want to see the mall before they get it all cleaned up..."
She shifts. She looks around the room, glances out the window like maybe the moon will have her answer for her. "Yeah," she says reluctantly. "Yeah, I'd better."
When Robin goes to tell her mom that they're taking a taxi to go look at the mall and get Steve's car, Robin's mom says, "Absolutely not," and puts on a sweater, shoves her feet into a pair of shoes that must belong to Robin's father, and snatches up her purse. "A taxi! No, I'll take you."
So they pile into Robin's dad's truck, Robin's mom behind the wheel and Steve on the passenger's side pressed against the door and Robin in between them, safe and sound. They're followed by the moon all the way down to the mall's sprawling parking lot, where staging lights and vehicles drown out the sky.
It's real and it happened and we got through it together, Steve thinks at Robin, but he can't say any of that, so he just holds her hand.
She holds it back, and squeezes when he does, and he knows neither of them are alone. It's exactly what he wants.