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The absolute mind-numbing terror of the past several hours begins to wear off as soon as Steve plummets from the interdimensional portal in the ceiling onto Eddie Munson’s jizz-stained mattress. With Nancy pulled out of her trance and the four of them safely back in the Right-Side Up, Robin feels like she can breathe for the first time since they’d watched Steve yanked under the surface of Lover’s Lake like a scene out of Jaws. Maybe that has to do with the lack of toxic particles floating around, but she thinks it’s mostly because somehow this world feels infinitely safer, even if Vecna’s still out there and clearly gunning for them. It’s probably the lack of earthquakes.
Rather than getting up right away like the other three had, Steve continues lying on the mattress and groans, scrunching up his face like he’s ill-advisedly eaten the fish tacos Hawkins High serves in the cafeteria once in a blue moon. Robin, Eddie, and Nancy had all come down hard–it was impossible not to with the shift in gravity–but there was something particularly boneless in the way Steve had fallen, like he didn’t have much left in him after their fight with the bats, run through the woods, and seven mile bike to the trailer park.
“You okay, buddy?” Dustin asks, leaning over him.
“Yeah, just give me a minute,” Steve says, and Robin can hear the same strain in his voice she’d heard in that Russian elevator last summer, like he’s trying to seem unbothered and in control for the kids’ sake.
“Shit, you’re bleeding!” Dustin says, and Robin can see that the blood soaked through Nancy’s makeshift bandages looks fresh. “What happened?”
“It was those demon bat things,” Eddie says helpfully. The kids all give him incredulous looks. “You don’t know the demon bat things?”
“Just the usual Upside Down creepy crawlies,” Steve supplies from the ground, his arm thrown over his eyes. “Covered in goo, murderous. Lots of teeth.”
Dustin, Lucas, and Max all nod like that’s par for the course.
“Regardless, you are several hours overdue for medical attention,” Robin says, holding out her hands. Steve takes them and stifles a groan as she pulls him into a sitting position. “Don’t forget the very real threat of rabies.”
“I really don’t think it’s rabies, Robin,” he says, getting his feet under him and standing up, only to sway dangerously. Several pairs of hands reach out to steady him.
“Maybe not, but we don’t want infection setting in,” Nancy says from where she stands with her arms wrapped tightly around her torso, clearly still shaken from her encounter with Vecna but valiantly trying not to show it. “Eddie, do you have a first aid kit or something?”
“Uh, maybe?” Eddie says, looking uncertainly up at the ceiling. “But shouldn’t we maybe, I don’t know, get as far away from this thing as humanly possible?”
“I’ve got stuff at my place,” Max offers. “My mom works Tuesday nights, we should be clear for at least a little while. Assuming the police don’t catch up with us.”
“I slashed one of their tires,” Erica supplies nonchalantly, “They’re not getting here any time soon.”
“You what?” Nancy and Steve say in unison, while Eddie nods approvingly and gives her a surreptitious thumbs up.
“Listen, Mom and Dad, do you want to give me a lecture, or do you want to get our asses out of here?”
“I vote get our asses out of here,” Robin interjects, pushing Steve toward the door. “Medical attention. Now.”
After a quick peek outside from Lucas to determine that the coast is clear, the eight of them hustle across the street and pile into the Mayfield trailer. Max shows them to the bathroom and pulls out a surprisingly stocked first aid kit from beneath the sink. When Steve raises an eyebrow at it, she gives him a defiant look and says simply, “Skateboarding.” He squints at her, but takes the kit without comment.
Max looks at the group that’s huddled in the doorway and says, “Robin and I can patch Steve up and then we’ll figure out where to go from here.”
“Actually,” Nancy says, “I think you and I should talk. About…him. I want to compare notes.”
“That’s a good idea,” Robin says. “I can patch up the dingus here, and the rest of you…try to figure a way out of the colossally deep shit we’re all in.”
They all nod and begin to peel off back to the living room. Dustin hovers in the doorway uncertainly, but Steve gives him a tired smile and says, “Get out of here, shithead. Go put your overactive brain to use. I’m fine.” Robin nods at him like I’ve got this, and he follows the others. She shuts the door behind him and turns to see Steve sag against the sink. She feels a surge of affection for this idiot in front of her, always trying to be the strong one.
She helps him out of Eddie’s vest, slinging it over the closed toilet seat, and then braces herself for the worst as she unties the bloodied hem of Nancy’s sweater.
It looks worse in the fluorescents of the Mayfield bathroom than it did in the hazy darkness of the Upside Down. The wounds are deep, and mixed in with the blood is an unknown slimy substance.
“Well,” she says, trying to keep it light. “On the bright side, it’s all along the sides of your stomach, and you don’t really have internal organs there. Except maybe your appendix, I guess, but that’s nonessential. But it’s really just a lot of fleshy tissue. So really, all things considered, this could have been way worse, like way, way w–”
“Robin. You’re rambling.”
“Right, sorry.” She pours the disinfectant Max had handed her onto a clean rag. She looks up at Steve, who has his eyes closed and his brow furrowed. “This is gonna hurt.”
And clearly it does. She doesn’t blame him, exactly–she is kind of digging around in an open wound with alcohol–but the sheer number of “Owww ow-ow-ow-ow”s that come from him in the next fifteen minutes is a bit excessive.
“You were not nearly this much of a baby when Nancy was patching you up,” she mumbles under her breath.
“Nancy wasn’t digging her fingers into it,” he says petulantly. “Seriously, are you looking for buried treasure in there?”
“I’m sorry, but infection is no joke, Steve. Especially infection from another dimension. You have no idea what kind of nasty, freaky, parallel universe junk could have gotten in here.”
After a few more minutes, she pulls back and observes her work. “Ok, I think the worst is over. Some of these might need stitches, but I think for now we can make due with these butterfly bandages.”
“Thank God.”
“Yeah, trust me, if you’d seen my home ec grade, you wouldn’t want me anywhere near you with a needle and thread.” He laughs a little and then winces.
Robin goes to town with the butterfly closures, and is in the process of strategically taping gauze squares to her best friend’s torso like she’s playing Tetris when he says, “Thank you, by the way.”
She gives a quick glance up at him from her hunched over position to see he has his eyes fixed on the ceiling. He’s still clenching the countertop with an iron grip even though she’s done with the painful part. “No problem,” she says breezily, returning her eyes to her work. “What are friends for if not for putting you back together after nearly being eaten alive by bats?”
“No–I mean, yeah, thanks for patching me up–but, I meant, like, thanks for coming after me. Down there. Eddie said you and Nance didn’t hesitate, and I–” he stops to clear his throat, but his voice doesn’t sound any less strained when he starts again. “I just, when those bats were, you know–”
“Eating you alive? I feel like we cannot overstress the eating you alive part of the evening.”
“Yeah, that. I just–I really thought I was a goner. I couldn’t breathe, and they were digging into my stomach, and if you guys hadn’t shown up–”
Robin stands up straight, her brow furrowing. If they hadn't shown up? He can’t seriously think they would have left him down there, can he? She knows he’s taken an inadvisable number of knocks to the head in the last few years, and he’s never been the sharpest tool in the shed, but still.
“Just. Thanks.”
“Steve,” she says softly. “Of course we came.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know, but I–”
“Hey,” she says, far gentler than she usually is with him. “Listen to me. Of course we came.” He falls silent, and Robin realizes a part of him still doesn’t get it. It seems impossible he could ever think they’d leave him behind down there, but then all of a sudden she’s thinking about other, seemingly random moments throughout the months she’s known him, and connecting some very unfortunate dots.
She’s thinking about bursting into Family Video and excitedly telling him she’d been accepted to UC Berkeley. He’d jumped around in circles with her in celebration, but he’d spent the rest of the afternoon stocking VHS tapes in a weird funk. When she’d asked, he’d said something about his date with Cheryl the night before not going as well as he’d hoped, but she’d never quite believed him. She’s thinking about making fun of him for reading Rolling Stone articles over her shoulder but always losing interest before they reached the end, until he’d admitted she was turning the pages too fast for him to keep up. She’s thinking about Friday nights spent at his big empty house watching B horror movies because his parents were out of town on a business trip or another failed attempt to work on their marriage or just because they wanted a vacation. Thinking about how they’re trying to solve this mystery with a bunch of genius children and Nancy 4.0 Wheeler and Robin’s own frankly stellar grade point average, and how that must take a toll on someone whose Sophomore History tests never came back with higher than a C.
Steve is her best friend, her favorite person in the world, and he was her introduction into this whole crazy other side of Hawkins; he’s so central to this in her mind that it never occurred to her he might feel like he doesn’t belong. Like he’s being left behind. It breaks her heart just a little.
“We would never leave you behind, Steve, you know that, right?” And yeah, she’s talking about the Upside Down, but also about all that other stuff, too.
“Yeah, sure, I get it,” he says in a tone like he’s sorry he brought it up.
“I’m not sure you do,” she says, grabbing him by the arms and forcing him to look her in the face. She’ll just have to spell it out. “You know how you’re always throwing yourself headfirst into danger for me and Nance and the kiddos because you love us?” He gives her a look, like yeah, and your point? and she just raises an eyebrow at him in return. “Is it really so hard to believe we might feel the same way about you?”
She looks him in the eye as she says it, so he’ll know she’s serious, and so she sees the exact moment it clicks, watches his eyebrows scrunch together and his eyes get moist in real time.
“Honestly,” she says with a little laugh. “You are so incredibly dense.”
She throws her arms around him and squeezes as tight as she dares, mindful of his injuries. He hugs her back, settling his cheek on top of her head, and a deep feeling of affection runs through her. She’d felt it first last summer, when they’d been tied to chairs in a Russian lab, about to be tortured but laughing because they were drugged out of their minds–she’d lolled her head back against his at the same time he’d leaned forward and they’d slotted together like two pieces of a puzzle. She’d felt it again later that same night on the floor of a dirty bathroom stall, their feet pressed against the stall next to each other’s faces, Muppet voices harmonizing. She’s felt it over and over again since, a zing in her soul that tells her she’s found her person. Never in a million years would she have imagined she’d feel that way about Steve “The Hair” Harrington, but here she is. Stranger things have happened, she supposes.
After a few moments, she pulls back. “Sorry, I love you, but I can’t stand this,” she says, gesturing to the chest hair situation he’s got going on. “Seriously, this is disgusting. I have no idea why anyone would want anything to do with this.”
He laughs, and she pretends not to notice the watery sound to it. “Yeah, no offense, but I don’t exactly consider you an expert on what does and doesn’t make a man attractive.”
She sticks her tongue out at him, and he returns the gesture. She gives him an affectionate push on the shoulder and says, “I’d follow you into a hell dimension any day of the week, and twice on Sundays.” She pauses enough for him to smile before adding, “But I will also be following you to a hospital for a rabies shot at the earliest possible convenience.”
“Jesus Christ, Robin.”
She reaches for the gauze roll. “On average it takes one to three months for symptoms to set in, and after they do there’s nothing you can do to reverse it. We need to be proactive about this situation. I refuse to hear any arguments.” When she leans in to wrap the gauze around his stomach, he flicks her gently on the forehead and grins at her indignant look.
“I love you, too, by the way.”
They’ve never said it out loud, she realizes. She thinks in the beginning she was consciously avoiding it because she didn’t know if any of those romantic feelings he’d had still remained, but she knows those had quickly faded, if they’d ever really been there at all. After that, she doesn’t know why she’s never voiced the way she feels about him. Maybe she’d assumed that with Steve, actions spoke louder than words, because his always had.
Regardless, she vows to say it more often, and to convince the others to say it as well. Because she’ll be damned if she’s going to sit here and let him think he doesn’t mean the world to each and every one of them.
She ties off the gauze and packs up the first aid kit before helping him shrug on Eddie’s vest. “Come on, let’s go help those kids figure out what to do next. I’m sure they’re lost without you.”
He rolls his eyes and holds the door open for her. He doesn’t believe her, but one day, she promises herself, he will.