Chapter Text
Steve ends up spending some of the hours immediately after the “earthquake,” amidst the chaos rocking the entire town, in the hospital getting stitched up and—of all fucking things—vaccinated for rabies.
It wasn’t his idea. Not that he loves being super public about this information, since his reputation has taken enough hits already the past couple years, but he actually kind of hates needles (which he knows is probably ridiculous given all the other shit his body’s been through at this point, right, but still) and he’s heard the rabies shot especially is supposed to, like, suck. And he doesn’t think it’s super likely that hell-dimension bats carry normal-dimension viruses. And anyway, there are honestly so many bigger priorities right now: there’s still a body in the Upside Down. They still haven’t met back up with Lucas and Erica, and all the garbled intel they’ve gotten on Max via walkie-talkie is wildly contradictory and extremely alarming. The official count keeps going up and they’re at five (six) people confirmed dead already post-quake according to the news that’s blaring on Max’s trailer’s television, plus probably hundreds more in need of actually urgent medical attention, and Max and maybe Lucas are among them, and so is Henderson, because he’s not walking right and is barely talking either. (Not that Steve knows what to say to him, anyway.)
But it isn’t up to him, in the end. It’s up to the creepy vines, maybe, or else up to Robin, because the former dig into his still-healing sides way too hard as they’re choking him out, which isn’t actually that much of a problem until the latter says to him, after they’ve found Henderson and gotten the story halfway out of him, after they’ve gotten him out of the Upside Down and over to a trailer that isn’t actively being destroyed (and thank God for the fact that Max’s mother is apparently out late tonight, except not, because now Steve doesn’t know how they’re going to get ahold of her to tell her what’s happened to her daughter) and Steve is bent over a table, bracing his hands against it for just a minute or two to catch his breath and let his head clear before he straightens back up and figures out what the hell they’re going to do next—she says, voice slightly wobbly, “Uh, Steve? Steve, you know there’s blood, blood on your shirt, right?”
Which actually was news to him. Not really news he wanted to hear, either, but what can you do.
What he does: he sits in the chair she tells him to, because she’s making so much goddamn noise about it, Jesus, enough noise that Nancy looks up from whatever quiet conversation she’s been trying to have with Dustin and comes over to take a look at him there—hands pressed to his sides, teeth clenched together because for some reason, the pain’s getting steadily harder to ignore now Robin’s pointed it out for him, funny how that works—and then ten minutes later he’s in the backseat right along with Henderson as she drives across town and the four of them join the long, long parade filing its way into the waiting room of the local hospital.
The doctor and nurses who come to patch him up don’t ask too many difficult questions, probably because their hospital is literally overflowing and there isn’t time for them to ask difficult questions. But they do apparently at least feel obligated to go for a basic “what happened here” upon laying eyes on the messed-up mess that is now his torso. Should have seen that one coming. Then again, he guesses there’s been a lot on his mind. Steve in turn feels obligated to give them something for an answer, but he doesn’t have one ready and he’s still stuck trying to think of what exactly might sound even a little bit plausible when Robin (Robin, his best friend, Robin who he loves a lot but who really, really needs to learn how to keep her mouth shut sometimes) blurts out, “He was bitten by—some kind of wild animal—”
So then the two of them are stuck waiting in the room together while the nurses go and dredge up a course of rabies vaccine he probably doesn’t even really need, because Robin said “wild animal” and he can’t really amend that down to “hell-world bat” now without ending up in the freaking psych ward or something.
At least, he tells himself, as Robin fidgets beside him and talks at a mile a minute about things that don’t matter, at least Henderson is getting seen with Nancy in another room right now. That almost makes this whole slightly humiliating hospital trip worth it. Although he still thinks he would rather have just washed out the reopened wounds back in the trailer and let Nancy put a new bandage on him there before they drove over, since that seemed to work just fine the first time and involved no needles or wasted medical professional labor/resources at all. He interrupts Robin to tell her as much, because she’s been really starting to get on his nerves, and he doesn’t even leave out the part about the needles. She doesn’t laugh at him—she’d held his hand, wordlessly, the entire time they sewed him up—but she does go indignantly red and start talking at him even louder:
“It’s not wasted if there’s any chance it really does stop you from getting rabies, Steve—which by the way can incubate for up to, like, a year, and is, may I remind you, one hundred percent fatal once you start showing any symptoms—which are absolutely terrifying, by the way, I mean, do you even know anything about what rabies does to you, because I do, and let me tell you, it makes you lose your fucking mind—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know about rabies, Robin, I’ve, like, seen Old Yeller or whatever, chill out—”
Steve has actually seen Old Yeller, though it’s been a while. He remembers how that story goes, at least vaguely: there’s a rabid wolf, at the end, and the dog enters a fight it can’t win to try and protect a kid or something, and it gets bitten up in the process because no one’s fast enough to help it. It proves itself a hero, in that fight. It dies a horrible, painful, lonely death afterwards and the kid has to watch.
They shouldn’t be allowed to make shit like that and call it a Disney movie, is Steve’s opinion. If anyone wanted to ask.
Anyway. Once the nurse finally comes back, it turns out it’s not actually all that bad. All that “twenty shots to the stomach” shit they say about rabies is apparently outdated, and thanks to the miracle of modern medicine he only needs one actual vaccine plus a dose of some immuno-globulin thing he doesn’t really listen to them telling him about. The immuno-globulin or whatever really does suck because they stick it between his ribs by where the bites are, but the other shot isn’t fun but isn’t really worse than any other one he’s ever had to get. Robin holds his hand again which helps even though he’s a little bit pissed off at her still, and he’s not even a baby about it. All told, the whole hospital experience start-to-finish is, like, fine. Definitely not as bad as getting beaten up and stuck with needles full of drugs by the Russians. Maybe worse than getting beaten up by Jonathan Byers. Better than getting beaten up by Billy Hargrove. Easily better than whatever Max is probably going through in this same hospital right now, fighting to survive, or what Eddie must have gone through, getting chewed up to well beyond the point of vaccination by the hell-bats before anyone even got to helping him, so what right does he have to complain, anyway?
They start handing him instructions on wound care plus a couple of bottles of painkillers and antibiotics, and he figures that’s that. Rabies shot: one more thing he can check off the fucked-up bucket list he’s got going on. It sucked, but at least it’s over, etc. He’s about ready to head off and start wandering halls looking for Henderson when what they’re telling him starts to register: it’s not actually over, they say, because he’s supposed to come back in a couple days for a booster dose, and then another a few days after that, and then another, after that, and then maybe even another, he stopped listening by then—it’s all on the paper they gave him but who knows, really, maybe it’ll just keep going on forever. Maybe none of this shit will ever end and he’ll keep ending up here, over and over, waiting for someone to tell him he’s finally out of the woods but instead just getting pumped full of gas and told to fight for his life again.
He guesses he should probably have seen that coming, too.
Two days post-earthquake and the flow of desperate people into and out of the gymnasium where Steve spent his high school career running pointlessly back and forth for hours at a time isn’t getting any thinner. It takes him several minutes amid the crowds just to find a place where he can park the car, and once he does he’s barely popped the trunk before Henderson is shuffling rapidly away with his box of clothing donations under his arm.
The kid still can’t even walk right, and Steve’s throwing open the door of the car, calling after him to wait so Steve can at least take the box for him, but Dustin doesn’t turn back; he just calls, “I’ve got it, thanks, see you later,” over his shoulder (the first words beyond “hey” he’s said to Steve all morning) and keeps right on going. Steve sags back into his seat.
“It’ll take time,” says Nancy, softly, from beside him in the passenger seat, and he half-jumps; he’d forgotten she was there, the words seeming to come out of nowhere. He turns his head, looks at her, over the gearshift, but she’s not looking at him; her eyes are still following Dustin away through the windshield.
“What?” asks Steve, before his brain catches up to his mouth and he understands, suddenly, where the apparent non-sequitur is coming from. But it’s too late to call the half-assed question back. Nancy’s already turning to him, pulling her eyes away from Dustin to meet Steve’s instead. The early-day sun streaming in through the driver’s side window is at the perfect angle to catch her face and light it up, setting her dark eyes and hair sparkling gold and picking out the slight worried wrinkles at the slightly-downturned corners of her mouth.
“Dustin,” she says, the single word that he knew was coming weighted as if it’s the answer to all the questions in the world. Which in a way he guesses it kind of is. She doesn’t stop there, though. “It’s not—I just mean—” She huffs out a breath, folds her hands in her lap. He can’t stop staring at her. He never knows how to look away from her, especially not when she’s like this: deep in thought, searching for words, determined to lay everything out so clearly and persuasively that even he can follow the straight brutal line of her thinking all the way to its conclusion. She breathes in and starts again. “We can’t take it personally, if he’s distant right now,” she says. “It’s just, you know. It’s been really hard on him.”
There’s something about her voice when she says it that makes Steve think that that general “we” is probably a last-minute substitute for “you,” specifically; it’s the Wheelers’ house, after all, that Dustin was staying over at when Steve came to pick them up this morning. It’s not like Dustin’s been talking to nobody the past couple days. But he doesn’t make an argument about it. He gets what she’s trying to do, and he’s not going to hold her attempts to spare him hard feelings against her even if he can see right through them.
“I wasn’t taking it personally,” he says. He even means it—but somehow it sounds less true out loud than it did in his head. He tries to elaborate. “I mean, I get it, he’s going through a lot of shit right now.”
“No, I know you weren’t,” says Nancy, rushing through the words. “You just looked kind of…” Steve finds himself stiff, waiting to find out exactly how she thought he looked—but she ends the sentence with a sharp shake of her head, folding her arms across her chest. “And I wanted to make sure—you know, he really looks up to you, right? I can tell from the way he talks about you—you’re like the older brother he never had. Especially now that…”
Again, she doesn’t finish the sentence; again, Steve knows exactly where it’s going anyway. He also knows she doesn’t mean it to feel the way it feels: like a hundred tiny little knives or something, driven straight into his chest all at once. Her words remind him so much of Eddie’s the night before he died, it feels almost like having the conversation all over again.
Steve still remembers it with more clarity than he has any right to—the pair of them stumbling through the woods of the Upside Down. Him still woozy from pain and blood loss and near-death-adrenaline, one eye glued nervously to the girls picking their way ahead of them even as he pulled Eddie back for a word. Eddie twitchy, excitable, high on the what-the-fuck factor of his first proper experience with this new dimension. The oddly-comfortable worn-denim fabric of Eddie’s vest right against his bare skin, the bandage Nancy had hastily tied around his torso the only barrier in between. Kid worships you, dude, Eddie drawled, you have no idea. I guess I got a little jealous. I guess I couldn’t accept the fact that Steve Harrington was actually, like, a good dude… And Steve didn’t know how to reply. He was hesitant to even look too much like he was actually taking the words at face value, honestly, because a part of him was more-than-half-sure Eddie had to be making it all up just to laugh at Steve’s over-inflated ego when he took the bait and accepted the praise.
But deep down, even then, Steve knew that Eddie wasn’t the kind of person who’d lie about something like that. Even as a joke, a guy as loudly and openly himself as Eddie Munson was even in the face of a whole town’s disapproval would never pretend to have any respect for anyone or anything he didn’t actually care about.
And besides, he wouldn’t have used Henderson like that. There was something special between Eddie and Dustin, it had been obvious from the way each of them talked about each other—and that’s just another thing Steve feels like shit over, honestly, the fact that he never got around to saying as much. Returning the favor, or whatever. Telling Eddie that Dustin hadn’t shut up about him and his nerd club for six straight months, that he, Steve, was maybe also a little jealous, or something, and that even for all that he still thought that Eddie Munson was shaping up to be, apparently, a pretty cool dude too… He hadn’t even started finding the right words to put together before it was too late, Eddie steering the conversation in a whole different direction—toward Nancy—and Steve letting him. Because it was easier that way, he guessed.
And now that’s over, and he doesn’t exactly have the chance to right that wrong anymore—or that fact that he’s probably fucked up whatever respect Dustin ever did have for him by all-but-physically tearing the kid, kicking and screaming, away from the dead body that he left behind on the wrong side of the gate.
“Listen, Steve,” Nancy says, her voice dragging him back to the present. “I… know a little bit about this. Back when my brother, when we thought El was gone… He wouldn’t talk to me about anything. He’d hardly talk to anyone about anything. Then he started acting out, making problems at school, and my parents… I felt like I should have been able to fix it, somehow. To get him to open up to me, at least, if he wouldn’t to anyone else. But I never could. I didn’t know how to be there for him. I guess I just felt at the time like everything he was going through was my fault, for not being able to make it better.”
Steve can’t help staring at her, a little bit. She’s not looking at him anymore though, back to watching all the people around them streaming into the high school, carrying their boxes and bags. They should really get out of the car soon and join them, Steve thinks; he feels restless just sitting in the parked car like this, and Nancy… He can tell from looking at her that talking about this is hard for her. And yet she keeps going—she’s squaring her mouth right now, clearly ready to press on. Steve wishes she wouldn’t. There’s no point in her hurting like this—not when El’s been back from the “dead” for years and Mike is okay again and none of it was ever even her fault in the first place, anyway.
“Yeah, well,” he says, in a tragically misguided (isn’t it always, Harrington, when will you ever learn to at least keep your mouth shut, since obviously you’ll never find the right thing to say in time?) attempt at levity. “You can’t be too hard on yourself about it, it’s not like you didn’t have your own shit going on then too, right?”
He can see the exact moment his words hit her: jaw stiffening, mouth twitching, eyebrows drawing ever so slightly together. It’s an expression of pain, even worse than before. Tiny knives, all over.
And this is the problem, with him and Nancy: here they are, the two of them, having this conversation, and she looks so beautiful in the sunlight, even when they can’t even look each other in the eyes as they speak to each other. She’s always been beautiful to him, and strong and sophisticated and so well-intentioned, and maybe he’s well-intentioned and even grown up a bit now too, and most of the time he really does think he’s at least half in love with her still. In his good dreams (the kind he doesn’t have anymore), she’s still the mother of his children and the person he comes home to every day for the rest of his life. Sometimes he even flatters himself into thinking she might not be entirely over him, either—that maybe there was at least some part of him back then that she might think is worth giving a second chance now that he’s older and wiser and trying to be a less shitty person than he was on their first go-around.
But then there are times like now, when he looks at her and understanding hits him all at once like a flash flood about exactly why the two of them can’t work together like that anymore, no matter what he tells himself in his more optimistic moments. There’s just too much difficult history between them, most of it painful, most of it his own fault, to ever really lay down new foundations for a relationship like that without digging up too many old heartaches all over again.
He knows she understands it, too. She probably realized it a lot earlier than he did. She’s always been smarter than him in that way, and most others too.
“Nancy,” he says.
Something in his tone must capture her attention and make her realize that what he’s going to say next is hopefully not going to be as stupid as before, because she actually turns back to look at him, hands still fidgeting uncomfortably on her lap. He takes a breath before he speaks, gathering the words. “I’m sorry about what I said back a few days ago,” he says. “About the six kids, and everything. I didn’t—it wasn’t fair, to put you on the spot like that. I know you’re with Byers now, and—I guess I just wasn’t thinking, when…”
He runs out of the words there, but she seems to have gotten the idea. “Steve, it’s okay,” she says. “I know you didn’t… well. You had a lot of your own shit going on then too, right?”
One corner of her mouth quirks upward, just a bit. He guesses he deserved that. “I did kind of think we might all die in the next few hours,” he admits.
The other side of her mouth goes up, and she shakes her head, just slightly. Her hair really is beautiful in the sunlight. “So it’s… fine,” she says, still sounding uncertain. “I get it. And it wasn’t… horribly out of line or anything. I think it’s probably good to have cleared the air, if nothing else. You don’t have to be sorry.”
But Steve isn’t ready to just let her brush this off. “I am, though,” he says. “I’m sorry for—all the times I’ve been shit to you, actually. For all of senior year. For—Barbara, and for making you feel like I wasn’t there for you—because I wasn’t there for you, I guess I just didn’t know how to be there for you, back then, I…”
Knives, again, at the sound of Barbara’s name. But she doesn’t look away from him this time. “We were both younger back then,” she says, generously. “I think we can do better this time around.” She’s staring intently at him, as if waiting for him to say something else.
It’s him who looks away, then, feeling heat sting his cheeks.
“Right,” he says. “Let’s get these boxes inside, yeah?”
Another, older name for rabies, apparently, according to Robin as she rambles away while they wait in the still-overcrowded hospital for Steve to get booster shot number one, is “hydrophobia.” She informs him that this translates to “fear of water.” “Could’ve figured that one out myself, thanks,” says Steve, because he’s heard of hydropower and he’s also heard of claustrophobia. Arachnophobia. Homophobia, whatever. There are a lot of phobias out there. He guesses it’s kind of a scary world. “What do they call it that for?”
She makes a face at him like he’s got six heads and all of them are disgusting to look at. “Uh, because its victims end up afraid of water ? Because—the virus wants to get transmitted through your saliva, right, so it doesn’t want you to swallow so that you’ll get your drool everywhere, so it makes your throat spasm any time you try to drink, and…”
She goes on like that for a while. He lets it happen: it’s easier that way. If she’s talking about this stuff then they’re not sitting there in awkward silence trying to think of things to say to each other, and Steve’s kind of feeling out of things to say right now so this works. It’s kind of nice, actually—it half puts him to sleep, sitting there in the waiting room chair with his head leaned back against the wall, letting the sound of her voice wash over him, without focusing too hard on specifics or trying to pay attention. The chair’s not comfortable, but he’s tired enough that it doesn’t matter much. He didn’t sleep all that well last night. He kept waking up over and over from that new dream he’s been having the past few days, where he stupidly pokes at and wakes up some tentacle-monster that drags him down by the ankle into Lover’s Lake again, except this time instead of turning into a gate and spitting him out the other side the water just seems to go on forever and ever. Or he keeps drowning before they get to the end of it, anyway.
Hydrophobia, Robin says, which is interesting and maybe a word he’s going to have to remember, because as much as Steve used to love swimming growing up, for some reason the idea of getting into the lake ever again makes him want to puke now. He can’t even think about the already-hard-to-look-at pool in his backyard anymore. (Is this how Nancy’s felt this whole time? Ever since Barb got dragged down below its surface into the Upside Down while she wasn’t around to stop it, and never made it back out? He thought he’d understood before, but the bile that crawls its way up his throat now every time he glances out the window and sees light glinting off the pool’s watery surface—that’s a new development, anyway.) Standing in the shower is mostly alright, as long as he doesn’t look down at himself and see the shit the bats did to him—it’s actually a good thing he’s probably ruined for swimming for the rest of his life, because he can already tell he’s never going to be able to take his shirt off in public again, at least not without drawing a brand new kind of attention he doesn’t think he’ll be able to cope with. It’s really pretty ugly, this new look he’s got going on. He can already hear the little kids daring each other to run up and ask him, what happened to you, did you get those in a fight or something, did it hurt a lot? Yeah, it could be worse, you should see the other guy, he might respond, except actually no one’s going to be seeing Eddie Munson anytime soon, because he’s still lying in the Upside Down where Steve left him, chest torn to bits, drowned in a pool of his own bloody drool. So there’s that.
“Steve?” Robin’s hand is on his shoulder; she’s shaking him, but she’s being weirdly gentle about it. “Steve, wake up, they’re calling your name.” She hesitates a moment, and adds, “You ready to go?”
He blinks awake, reorienting himself with a glance around the room—sun through the windows, a couple kids playing blocks in the corner while their mothers fill out forms, and an exhausted-looking nurse standing near the doorway with her clipboard, looking at him and Robin. “Yep,” he says, stretching a bit in his chair and then pushing himself up from it. “Let’s go get this over with.”
Robin’s been acting kind of weird for the past several days, and Steve doesn’t know if it’s his job to say anything about it.
He’s got enough experience with girls by now to recognize a damned-if-he-does, damned-if-he-doesn’t situation when he sees one: she’s “fine” even when she’s clearly not if you ask about it, but when you don’t ask about it she’ll just get even more clearly not-fine until you break down and bring it up again, but when you do ask about it again you just end up making everything worse with the poking and prodding. All of this is probably sexist or whatever of him to think, he knows, and she’d be even more irritable with him if she knew that this was what was on his mind, so he tries not to think about it anymore, but then they hit the fourth day post-quake and she’s so clearly about to vibrate out of her skin on their drive home from another evening volunteering at the disaster relief center that used to be the high school that he finally caves and asks her, “So, are you ever going to tell me what’s up with you, or…?”
It’s the wrong thing to say. (He knew it.) Out of the corner of his eye he watches her straighten up in her seat, pulling her feet down off the dashboard. “Honestly, Steve,” she says, “I should be the one asking you that same question, because—”
This is the problem with asking women if they’re alright: they always seem to take it as some kind of personal attack, and then they go after you. So Steve immediately goes on the defensive: “Wait, what’s that supposed to mean, you should be asking me ?”
Robin makes a scoffing sound, air rushing out of her mouth with a whoof. “Steve,” she says, “I mean, look at you—you look like shit.”
“Wow, thanks,” Steve replies. She doesn’t seem to hear.
“Have you even been sleeping?” She doesn’t give him any time to start answering the question. “Like, should you even be driving right now? Looking at you I’m, like, a little bit afraid for my life sitting here in the passenger seat, you know, and I’m going to be really pissed off if I’ve lived through Russian torture and two trips into literal hell only to die in a car crash…”
Steve feels a spark of irritation flare up in him at her words. He’s not sure why. “Well, keep talking, then,” he says. “You can keep me awake.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees her mouth fall open. “You know, I can’t actually keep you awake if you’re not listening to me and engaging with the conversation. I feel like everything I’m saying to you these days is just in one ear and out the other, like all I am is background noise—”
“That’s not fair,” Steve protests. “Vickie’s favorite color is orange, she likes strawberry jelly but hates grape, she—”
He’s cut off by the sound of Robin’s hand coming down in an exasperated slap on her thigh. “But I’m not talking about when I talk about Vickie, Steve, I’m talking about the fact that I ask you if you’ve been sleeping and you just make a lame joke about it, and I ask you if you’re feeling okay given your serious wounds or whatever and you make a stupid joke about how it’s not as bad as getting beaten up by Jonathan Byers which can’t even be true, and—”
“Well, it isn’t true, that’s why it’s a joke—”
This time it’s his thigh that she slaps. He’s appalled enough that his mouth falls open. “Hey, what the hell, I’m driving!”
“Jokes are supposed to be funny !” She swats him again, and the car jostles a bit on the road as he tries to squish himself against the door to be as far away from her as possible. Luckily there’s no one else around, as pretty much no one in this town right now has a life that involves much unnecessary travel in any direction that isn’t away from here. “And it’s not funny when I’m asking you serious questions and you won’t just give me an actual answer. It’s not funny when you almost die and then try and act like it’s not a big deal—”
“Jesus, Robin, look at where we live, if I made a big deal out of every time I almost died in the last three years I’d never get anything done. You want home now or you want to come with me to pick up the kids?”
She doesn’t answer right away, so Steve makes the call for her: he pulls into the left turn lane at the red light instead of going right. She can give him all the crap she wants about how he looks but that makeup she’s got on to try to hide the dark circles under her eyes isn’t fooling anybody; she needs to get in her own bed and go to sleep as soon as possible. He half-expects her to protest—when she gets in moods like this, every decision he makes is the wrong one—but she’s quiet another minute before she says anything, and when she does speak it’s to say:
“Maybe you’d look less like shit if you stopped trying to get everything done at once for, like, one week while you’ve still got stitches in your side because a bunch of demon bats tried to kill—”
Something ugly happens in Steve’s stomach; one of his fists comes down hard on the wheel. He sees her flinch and a distant part of him feels something like shame but the rest of him is already half-shouting: “Well, I’m not the one they killed in the end, am I?” He sucks in a breath, but she doesn’t fill the silence, so he continues. “And meanwhile there are children who still need to be driven to and from the hospital every day, so unless you want to earn your license in the next week or two—”
The light turns green, and all at once he feels the anger drain out of him, to be replaced with nothing: he just feels empty. He feels a primal humiliation; he feels like a grade-A asshole. He doesn’t put the car back in gear yet, just glances over at Robin. She’s got her knees tucked up to her chest, and she’s staring straight ahead at the empty intersection.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “That was—fuck. Sorry. I didn’t mean to act like—you’re right, I haven’t been—look, I promise I’ll go to bed, or whatever, as soon as I get the kids home, alright?”
Robin doesn’t say anything for another minute, so he goes ahead and looks back at the road. The light’s yellow already but he floors the gas pedal and makes the turn anyway rather than sitting through another cycle. It’s not like the cops have time to complain about it right now. Finally, once he’s got the car back up to speed, she speaks up.
“I’ve been thinking about him too, you know.”
Him. Steve’s first bizarre thought is that she’s talking about his father, somehow, before he takes half a second to pull his mind out of that particular gutter and back to the conversation they were having before Steve went off the deep end, and puts the pieces together. “What, Eddie?” He tries not to feel relieved, that he hasn’t flinched at the sound of the name.
“You see any other elephants in the backseat we should address while we’re at this?” She snorts. It doesn’t sound like a laugh. “Yeah, Eddie. Don’t try and tell me that’s not what all this is about.”
Steve hits the turn signal, changes lanes. “All what? What are you even talking about?”
She makes some expansive gesture with one arm that he catches out of the corner of his eye. “All this—the not sleeping, the running yourself into the ground, the not talking to me—or Nancy—”
Irritation flares again, but he bites it down and keeps his voice even. “What do you know about me and Nancy right now?”
“I know what she tells me, when we actually sit down and talk about things that matter, like normal human beings after—”
“What—we talk about things that matter all the time,” says Steve. He probably doesn’t have any right to feel offended like this right now given how he’s just acted towards her, but he can’t help it. “Robin, we’ve told each other shit that—I’ve hardly told anyone else in my life—since when are you and Nancy seriously good enough friends to gossip like that, anyway?”
“It’s not gossip, but—since last week,” Robin says. “Since we literally went to hell and came back together, twice, among other things. Shared traumatic experiences are a hell of a drug, you know.”
He still remembers the feeling of bathroom tiles sticking to the underside of his legs. “Well, I really am glad you two get along now.”
“No need to sound so sarcastic about it.”
“I’m not being sarcastic!”
“You keep telling yourself that. But anyway.” She huffs out a sigh. It’s a little shaky. “It’s just—Steve, you know you aren’t the only person in the world who ever—who feels like there’s more they could be doing, or more they could’ve done, right? You know some of the rest of us wonder too, if, if we’d just been able to dodge a vine or think of a better plan or run faster or anything like that, if it might mean things would be different right now? You know you aren’t the only one who’s ever wished—”
But he doesn’t find out which of his wishes isn’t unique after all, because Robin’s voice has started to go watery and it breaks off before the end of the sentence.
Steve pulls over and rolls to a stop on the side of the road.
“Hey,” he says, that terrible ugly feeling low in his gut again, except this time instead of wanting to punch something he sort of just wants to fold in on himself and bang his own head against the steering wheel a few times. “Robin? Are you okay?”
“Are any of us, really?” It’s weak, and sounds about halfway on the road to being a joke. He meets it there and gives a huff of a laugh.
“Now who’s not answering serious questions properly,” he says. “Robin, you can’t—” Steve swallows. It was true, what he told Robin, about how he can talk to her about stuff he’s never been able to talk to anyone about in his whole life except maybe Nancy, but he still feels like she’s probably much better at this kind of conversation than he is and he doesn’t really know how to do this. “You can’t blame yourself like that,” he says. “We didn’t know how it was going to go down, we didn’t know—the vines weren’t your fault, if anything it was on me for not cutting through them faster once they got you—”
She cuts him off with another scoff-laugh. He waits for her to say her piece, but she just continues to stare at him, until he finally gives up. “What?” he asks. “What did I do?”
“Nancy was right about you,” she says. “You are an idiot after all. You know, I really don’t understand how a person can possibly be so selfless, and so self-centered, and so—so utterly un-self-aware, all at the same time. I don’t know how you do it, Steve Harrington. I simply don’t know how, after nine months of knowing you, you still manage to shock me to my core all over again every single day.”
Which does nothing for him. “I don’t understand what that’s supposed to mean,” he says.
“Have a think on it and get back to me tomorrow, then.”
That seems to be his cue to stop talking. So he does, for the rest of the way to her house. That’s for the best, probably: he doesn’t really know what to say right now that wouldn’t just make things worse. He doesn’t know if there’s anything he could say at all, that would actually make things better. He watches her fidget in her seat at red lights and stop signs, seeing her mouth swing open on an inhale once or twice like she’s about to say something else to him, but she never does. When he pulls into her driveway, she’s unbuckling her seatbelt before he even has the car all the way in park.
For what it’s worth, he does try to keep his word to her, about getting more sleep tonight: drops the Sinclairs off at their house and immediately goes back to his, and gets into bed as soon as he’s finished up his newly-long and painful shower routine.
Not that it’s really worth all that much, these days.
Eddie’s laughing, at first—Steve shouldn’t be able to hear it over the music, because the music is loud and it’s everywhere. There’s so much of it that Steve almost can’t believe it’s all coming from one person, except that he’s watching it happen. Eddie’s standing right next to him on the top of the trailer, laughing his head off and playing that ridiculous-looking guitar so forcefully that Steve swears he can see sparks coming off the thing. Dancing around them, bright and golden even amidst the gray ashfall of the Upside Down, almost like fireworks—and Steve thinks he finally understands something about why some people like metal music now, and he turns back to Eddie to tell him that (Eddie’s going to love it, the idea that he’s convinced Steve Harrington of all people of the merits of his freaky noise, he’s going to be obnoxious about it and for some reason Steve’s going to tell him anyway) except that Eddie’s not standing next to him anymore. The bats are in a frenzy, and Eddie’s stabbing at them with his spear but it’s not going to be enough, because the clearing’s too big and Steve can’t get there in time, especially now that there are even more bats swarming him too. Steve gasps as they bite into his torso and lashes out against them as he runs, but apparently, stupidly, he hasn’t thought to bring a weapon, and his bare hands aren’t enough to prevent them from wrangling him to the ground. Even then, he lives long enough to watch Eddie fall—still a few paces too far away for Steve to even make out the sound of his last words over the terrible screeching noise of the guitar that somehow still fills the toxic gray air, even as the light leaves Eddie’s eyes and the bat wraps its tail around Steve’s neck—
He wakes up gasping for air. He doesn’t even bother trying to go back to sleep, convinced it’ll pick up right where it left off—but it doesn’t really matter, because it comes right back the next night. And the night after. Over and over.
He guesses he should be grateful—at least this is a change in scenery from the drowning over-and-over he was doing before. Except he can’t find it in himself, because in every single way this new dream is even worse than the old one. At least the drowning-via-tentacle-monster dream was just a nightmare all the way through, but this new one is different—every time there’s that goddamn moment of heart-swelling hope when he hears Eddie’s laughter at the start, before he watches it all get torn apart. At least the worst part of the drowning dream isn’t still true when he jolts awake and instantly gets hit by the overpowering flood of last week’s memories.
At least in the drowning dream it’s only him who dies when he fucks something up.