Archive of Our Own

“Do we really have to do this?” Steve hears Eddie say from their bed as he laces his shoes, watching as Steve puts on his shirt and shrugs on his jacket.

“Sure we do, Munson.” Steve replies, checking the mirror in an attempt to fix his hair. He doesn’t know why he still bothers, really. Not like there’s anyone left in Hawkins who actually cares.

Hawkins is split into four in the aftermath of the world’s end. While they had done enough damage to Vecna to render him weak in the battle before everything went even more to shit, Max had still died long enough for Vecna to open his gates, unleashing horrors into Hawkins that none of them could have ever imagined. 

Most of the population had moved out way before the monsters even began climbing through the gates. The people who chose to stay (couldn’t really afford to leave, more likely) were sequestered into the parts of town that were still salvageable. Relatively untouched by the incomprehensible monstrosity of the upside down. The government tells the people every day that it’s a major chemical leak, and every day no one believes them. But Steve guesses that they shutter their faces and keep silent because they know that the truth is truly much harder to swallow than the lie, and sometimes you have to pick your battles with the world or else you lose your mind entirely.

The entire party had opted to stay behind, of course, facing every wave of terror the upside down unleashed into their world like they had nothing to lose. 

No one really wanted to stay, of course. Everyone is incredibly aware that what they were doing was essentially a suicide mission. And it wasn’t even their fault that this was happening in the first place. If the government hadn’t decided to play God by experimenting on children and playing with things that are beyond human comprehension, 1986 could have just been like any other normal year. Will Byers would have gotten home safe and sound back in 1983, parking his bike outside their house just like he would any other normal evening.

But they did play God. Fucked around and found out. Poke at the beehive enough and don’t act surprised when the bees start stinging.

And El wanted to fight. This was personal for her, more personal than it is for any of them.

Steve places his hands on top of the drawers and pauses his fussing with his hair, staring at Eddie who is playing with the rings on his fingers. He’s reminded of what Eddie said to him three weeks after he finally woke up from his one-on-one round with the demobats, bandages covering every inch of his body and his uncle refusing to leave from his spot beside his bed.

“If we’re going to die, might as well die trying, right?" Eddie had whispered, voice still quite rough from disuse. It was a strange, somewhat similar echo of what Robin had said to him once outside the camper, making Molotov cocktails and discussing the possibility of their untimely demise like they were just talking about what they were going to have for lunch that day. Like a normal conversation between friends. And to them both, maybe it was. They have, after all, lived through so much already.

And there had been Max to consider, too. One of the not-really-an-elephant-in-the-room-but-still-quite-important-to-talk-about major players when they all silently decided that they would stay behind.

When El had restarted Max’s heart she forgot to remember (and no one blames her, of course) that Vecna didn’t just kill her. He had toyed with her mind, too. Her thoughts, her memories. The sole weapon Max had against the monster was a space in her head where she could hide from him. A secure and happy space that, ultimately, she wasn’t really all safe in. Vecna had still invaded it. Distorted it. Took her from the one place she found comfort in and then killed her like she was nothing. Like she didn’t live a life that mattered.

El brought her back, sure. But Max was still lost in her head. 

In the end, the choice had been easy for Steve. He can’t speak for the others, but he’s sure that the grim determination in their faces meant that they lined up with Steve’s thoughts.

Stay and fight. Die trying. If not for the world, then do it for Max.

“We’ve been cooking this thing up for months now.” Steve says, trying to ease Eddie’s nerves. It was pretty simple, really. Part three of a series of plans that would lead to one final showdown (he hopes it’s the last one, even if he isn’t really that confident about it. Though El seemed pretty sure when she insisted that the final step of their plan would be the last they’re ever seeing of Vecna.) “You know, this is kind of like the plan Mike had cooked up back in 1984: hurt Vecna’s hivemind by creating a distraction from both the upside down and our world. Lure the monsters out of where El would be sealing the largest gate. Get the fuck out immediately and let the fire do its work.”

Eddie stares at him like he’s grown a second head, and Steve wonders when Eddie’s finally gonna get used to the fact that this is their life now, whether he likes it or not. Maybe, at some point, he’d find comfort if Steve tells him again that no one in the party really had a choice in the matter.

“What?” He asks, shaking his head. “It’s simple. Easy. Why’d you think I volunteered to do it myself?”

“Suicide is what it is, Stevie,” Eddie whispers, crossing his arms in front of him. Steve bites his lip and turns around, facing Eddie and finally getting a real good look at the fear plastered on his face. “It’s—fuck. This is suicide.”

“It’s not suicide, Munson. Come on, don’t be such a defeatist. Hey, I didn’t say shit when you fought two demogorgons by yourself at the junkyard two weeks ago.”

“Wheeler was there to back me up, Steve. She was close by if I needed help. You’re going into this alone. Forgive me if I’m kind of worried.”

Steve takes a step forward, and then another, not stopping until there’s only the tiniest bit of space between him and Eddie. He uncrosses Eddie’s arms from his chest, moving them around his waist. Eddie responds to the touch, burying his face on Steve’s midriff and taking a deep breath.

“Hey, I’ll be fine. I have a walkie with me, okay? It’s really easy, Munson. And, shit. Yours is arguably worse, you know? You’re going back to the upside down.”

“With Nancy, Hopper, and Joyce.”

“And yet I’m still safer up here than down there. Come on. Don’t you trust me?” Steve says, framing Eddie’s face with the palms of his hand. He leans down and presses a soft kiss on Eddie’s forehead, trying to smooth out the wrinkles borne from his concern with his lips. “I’ll be fine. I promise.”

“Okay. Okay.”

Eddie unwraps his arms from Steve’s waist, lifting it up instead to pull him down for a long kiss. Eddie kisses him like it’s their last, and it may be now at the end of the world but Steve doesn’t dwell on it much, not when it all tastes so sweet, like Eddie’s packed every bit of love he could manage into this one kiss between the two of them.

“I have to go,” he whispers, though his eyes are still closed and he could still feel Eddie’s lips at the corner of his own. “I have to go.”

Eddie just nods. He doesn't really let go of Steve though. Instead, he pulls him into another kiss, and then again and again, each one more desperate than the last.

"Quit kissing me like you're never gonna see me again, Munson," Steve says. "It's weird." Eddie just kisses him again as a response.

"I think I can do what I want." Eddie replies, though he finally relents and lets go, but not before pressing one last peck at his cheek.

Steve steps back and runs a hand over his face, trying to clear his thoughts. He walks out the door and looks back just once, tilting his head to the side to say goodbye. Eddie acknowledges it with a sad smile before waving at Steve, going back to staring at the dresser and twisting his rings around his fingers. Steve would be worried, except it's always like this between them before missions. Eddie's afraid Steve won't come back, and Steve's afraid he won't be there to save Eddie again.

Neither of them say I love you. It had been an unspoken agreement between them that manifested by the third time they found themselves laying side by side on then just Steve’s bed together, hands laced in the space between their bodies. They know what they mean to each other. They know how their weird bond works. In almost the same fashion that Starcourt tied Robin and Steve, the matching scars on his and Eddie’s torsos bound them in a way that no one else in the group did. Just something about waking up at night from the same terrors that transformed the tension between them into something else. Something less destructive and more… More.

They don’t really need the words. Both want it to be said somewhere special. Or some special time. It doesn’t need to be said just because they both harbor the very real fear that they may not see each other again by morning.

Robin meets him at the front door just as he prepares to walk out. She pulls him into a hug, whispering into his ear. “Are you sure you can handle this by yourself?” She asks. She hugs him tighter, and he knows that she’s silently urging him to reconsider. “You should have someone else with you. I don’t think this is safe at all.”

Steve looks from behind her and watches as Erica and Dustin silently argue over the placement of the walkies, and he spares a thought for Eddie, Nancy, Hopper, and Joyce who would once again be crawling back to that place. He thinks of El, Jonathan, and Will on the other side of town, waiting for the signal so she could exhaust herself again in sealing their third gate in five months.

“None of what we’re doing is safe at all, Robin,” he replies, pressing a kiss on her forehead. “Don’t worry about me, okay? Worry about your hair. I’ll fix it when I get back.”

“That’s the problem,” she says as he walks out the door. “I always worry about you.”

Standing here now, he thinks that hindsight is a bitch. A whole fucking pain in the ass and Robin, once again, was right to worry. 

So he was unfamiliar with this neck of the woods. Big deal. All forests end at some point. All he had to do was pick a direction and run before the flames or the bats could get to him. It wasn't that far from the base either. The walkie sounds to life and Dustin’s voice from the other end tells him that the team sent to destroy a different hub in the upside down has begun their trek into the other dimension. It was, all in all, a sign for Steve to start moving forward with his own part of the plan. He grabs the canisters of gasoline and starts drenching every inch of the place just like he did the tunnels back in 1984.

It should be easier now, really. Firstly, Steve’s not beaten into a bloody pulp like he was back then. No concussion, no bruises on his face or his ribs. He wasn’t reeling from the idea that if he didn’t die from Billy Hargrove’s fists, then he surely would from Max’s heinous driving skills. And the most important part of this, perhaps, is the fact that Steve’s not in tunnels this time. He’s in an open space with plenty of different directions to run from. 

“Okay, the place is set up. Over.” He whispers into the walkie, dropping the last empty canister into the grass and looking up at the sky. 

Some places in Hawkins look so much like the upside down now. The floating spores were the first to enter their world; specks of gray dust that look like ash began to blanket their town while they were in the middle of relief operations for what they assumed was just an earthquake. And then the vines came, crawling out of the rifts and latching onto whatever object they happened to touch: bushes, trees, cars. Even houses ended up being covered by them. The monsters came almost immediately after. The bats and the dogs and the gorgons, nesting all around Hawkins. 

And then, lastly, the dark clouds and the red sky. The thunder and lightning that never seemed to stop. In the blink of an eye, Hawkins went from the town he grew up in to a town he barely recognized. It was like the life had been sucked out of it. And, in a way, it had been.

Steve hated it. He wanted things to go back to the way they were.

“Good,” Dustin replies. “Be ready, cause it’s just any minute now. Erica has opened communications with Mike already. Team upside down is where they’re supposed to be. Over.”

“Yeah, got it. Just tell me when I’m supposed to light things up,” Steve whispers back. “Over.”

He looks up at the clouds again and he waits. Steve doesn’t have to wait long.

The thing about trauma is that you begin to pick up on things that normal people generally won’t. If a normal person who has never known what it’s like to face a hoard of demobats then the rustling of leaves in the distance would sound just like the rustling of leaves.

But Steve is no normal person, and the rustling isn’t rustling at all.

It’s the flapping of wings.

There’s a saying about how there’s a calm before the storm, how it’s always nice and quiet before the worst disaster strikes. But what should a person do if the calm doesn’t arrive at all? If the storm strikes quick and swift and brutal?

The bats have arrived, and Dustin hasn’t even given the signal yet. They miscalculated.

“Shit, shit, shit.” Steve whispers, patting his pockets for his lighter. The sound of the bats grow louder and louder, and soon enough he could already hear their familiar screeching, almost freezing Steve to his core. 

His fingers close upon his lighter, and Steve wastes no time in pulling it out of his pockets and flicking it to life. The flame dances in front of his eyes for a moment. Small, still.

Steve throws it into the ground and watches as the surroundings rapidly light up in hot orange.

The tendrils of the flames lick up into the sky, spreading quickly into the ground. Steve watches only for a bit as the fire finally creeps into the vines, the hivemind reacting to it by making the vines swipe left and right as though they were trying to put the fire out. A useless endeavor when every inch of the area has been covered in gasoline. Steve grins in satisfaction when, as they begin to break through the forest line, some bats begin dropping in pain from the sky to the ground.

Steve doesn’t stay around for long to watch what happens next. He grabs the walkie from beside him and then he bolts immediately into the opposite direction, feeling the flames grow bigger and bigger as he runs past. The screeching continues in earnest, and Steve pushes himself to run faster while still carefully avoiding the interwoven vines in the path in front of him.

He should have known, of course, that when things don’t go the way you initially planned it then everything that follows right after will be absolute shit as well.

Steve’s head hits the ground before he could even realize that a bat’s tail had wrapped around his ankle.

Steve should know by now what to do when this happens. He had survived it, after all. But the thing about fear, no matter how used you are to feeling it, is that you will always, always freeze at first. It doesn’t matter if you’re the type of guy to run or the type of guy to fight. There’s always that one moment of hesitation. The feeling of a cold hand gripping your heart and shutting your organs down one by one. A slow kill before you could even be dead.

This is what makes accidents fatal. Why people die from preventable things. Why you stare at a car first while it's hurtling at you at full speed instead of stepping away like you should.

The bat is joined by another, and together they drag Steve back to where he came from, the heat slowly enveloping him again as they try to pull him closer to the fire. He screams as his cheek snags against the tiny rocks jutting out of the ground.

“Shit! Sh—Get away from me!” Steve yells as he feels another bat wrap around his leg. His scream echoes around the night, fighting against the roaring fire and the screeching vortex of bats descending upon the flames and his prone body. He flips with whatever strength he could gather upwards and, instead of seeing the sky, Steve is met with the sharp teeth of a demobat snapping at his face.

Steve acts quickly, forcing his hand free from another bat trying to pin his arms down and slamming the walkie he didn’t even realize he was still holding against the bat hovering over his face. It shrieks in pain as it flies away from him, and he lets out a laugh as he watches its body catch on fire after landing on the flames.

The joy doesn’t last long for Steve, however, when more bats begin to take the place of the one he just took down. He was no longer being dragged closer to the fire, but he also still couldn't move. They descend upon him like he was fresh meat. Like he was a meal prepared solely for them.

When they start biting at his body, Steve doesn’t even scream.

The pain that blooms from the places their teeth sink into hurts just as much as they did the first time around back when he was dragged into Lover’s Lake, except it’s worse now because of the fact that there’s just so many of them. Steve tries to turn his head and push them away from his face but he just couldn’t see past their wings; a sea of leather and slick fur obscuring his view of the sky. At the same time, it also makes breathing difficult, and for every bat that falls from the weakened hivemind three more bats take its place, as though they were being conjured up from thin air.

Knowing how Vecna works, they probably are.

Steve pushes a couple of bats away, just enough so that he could raise his head upwards. He catches sight of the walkie, just a couple of inches beside him. He frees his other hand so he could turn the dial and call for backup. 

Robin was right, Steve thinks in his head. Like she always is. I shouldn’t have done this alone.

The walkie crackles to life just as he gets dragged downwards.

A bat starts to sink its teeth into the flesh of Steve’s arm, tiny pinpricks of pain spreading across the area. Blood drips from the wound, and like sharks attracted to blood in the water two other bats latch onto him, gnawing at the exposed flesh.

He closes his eyes, tears traitorously slipping free. The pain becomes so much it finally blurs into numbness, and in his head he starts writing down the things he regrets. The things he should have said and should have done.

Steve’s not making it out this time.

I regret not getting out of Hawkins in 1985. I wish I could have traveled the world. I should have read Max’s letter. I should have taken someone with me here, and maybe things wouldn’t have gone to absolute shit. I should have... I should have...

When the first gunshot rings through, Steve almost thinks he’s actually died.

The bats start dropping like flies for every gunshot that he hears, up until there’s only a couple left hovering over him. He suddenly remembers the small knife he had stashed in one of his pockets, and now that he’s free Steve rifles through his pockets for it and immediately stabs upon the one that’s flying dangerously close to his face. The knife squelches as it sinks deep into the bat’s flesh, and it squeals as it stops flying and lands beside him in a dead heap.

Steve turns to his savior and smiles when he sees the familiar glare.

“I fucking told you to bring someone here with you,” Robin says as she walks forward. She holds her hand out for Steve to grab, and he only stumbles a little when he begins to stand, much of his body weight supported by Robin. She immediately checks over the wounds he’s sure he has and, deeming him fine for the moment, pulls him away from the carnage.

They weave through the trees, expertly dodging the ones covered by vines. They duck at the right moments, the stray bats flying overhead paying them no mind as they fly towards the flames that have now begun to overtake some of the trees, creating huge lines of fire against the night sky with a thick dark smoke that smells so badly of burning flesh. 

“Are you alright?” Robin asks once they’re a respectable distance away from the fire and the bats. Steve leans against one of the trees, rubbing his hand against his neck. For a moment he dreads that he was bitten there, but when he pulls away his hand it’s free from blood.

“I’m... I guess. Shit, how did you even find me?”

“I followed you, dingus,” she replies, rolling her eyes. She slings the gun to her back, then places a hand on top of his shoulder. “See, I knew something wrong was going to happen, so I knew I had to follow you.”

“Of course you did,” Steve grins, sliding against the trunk of the tree and never more thankful that Robin is the most stubborn person he knows. The action pulls at the fresh wounds on his leg, and Robin must have noticed his wince because she falls to her knees in front of him.

“Where does it hurt?” Robin asks, hands hovering over Steve’s leg in preparation of first aid though still unsure where she’s supposed to put them. “I’m no doctor, but I can patch you up temporarily.”

“I’m fine. We have to go.”

She shakes her head, pulling her pack from behind her. “You’re not fine, idiot. Just let me help, please.”

Steve just nods, knowing that he could do nothing more once Robin has set her mind to doing something. He curses under his breath as he watches her pull out a roll of gauze and tape, the pain once again making itself known. His nerves feel fried, and the silence of the night almost feels suspicious.

“It’s too quiet,” Steve whispers as she lifts the leg of his pants up. They both flinch at the sight of the bigger wound with the torn skin, and she immediately starts to wipe it with a clean cloth. “We need to get moving.”

“You need to relax,” she mutters in response, momentarily looking towards where the smoke from the fire is still rising towards the sky. “I think we’ve weakened them enough on our end. El sealed the gate, too, and I’m sure Eddie and the others are finally back topside.”

“Still. It’s too quiet. You know how I get when it’s too quiet.”

Robin hums but she doesn’t say anything else, letting the silence fall over them as she dutifully tends to my wounds. 

“Why do you always do this, Steve?” She says after a while, leaning back to inspect the tightness of the bandage she wrapped. She drops the empty roll in her hand on the ground. “You should have asked for help.”

He sighs heavily, the tension leaving his shoulders as he breathes out. “It’s a fairly easy plan, you have to admit that.”

“But that doesn’t mean you have to go and do it alone. I don’t know why you’re like this, honestly. Have I not yet beaten into your thick skull that it’s okay to ask for help sometimes?”

“It’s—”

“Try another excuse,” she says, cutting him off. “Don’t give me the whole shit about how it was easy. Yes, it was, but then look where you ended up. If I hadn’t been there then what would have happened to you, huh?”

“Woah, hey,” he whispers, hand shooting forward to grab Robin’s elbow. “Look, I’m sorry, okay? I... look, I really didn’t think things would go wrong. And, yes, I know that I should know better by now but it’s... fuck, I can’t really find the words.”

“Try anyway.”

“I just don’t like it when any of you get hurt, okay?” Steve says, biting at the inside of his cheek. “You guys... this is going to sound, I don’t know, fucking insane probably, but you guys are all I have. And this shit we do... It’s so easy to die from all this. One wrong move and I could lose you forever. And I don’t really want to live in a world where any of you get hurt. Max is... we already almost lost her. I don’t want to go through the grief all over again for a different person.”

“So it’s fine if you get hit? If you get hurt?”

“Yes!” Steve exclaims, “I mean, it’s not—I don’t actively look for trouble, Robin. This town just happens to be a weird magnet for it. But I... If there was ever a chance that I could have taken Max’s place then I would have.”

“You do realize what you’re saying, right?” She says, looking at him with that certain expression on her face that she only ever shows whenever Steve says or does something particularly stupid. “Like, you get how you sound like? What the words coming out of your mouth are?”

Steve just shrugs, sighing as he runs his hands through his hair. 

The thing about him is that he has the overwhelming urge to always put others before himself. Steve can’t really tell if it’s borne out of selflessness, because he doesn’t particularly consider himself a selfless person. For a while, he was the most selfish person there is. At least, in the version of the world that exists in his head. He didn’t particularly like sharing, but what else was he supposed to do as a kid who was barely given any scrap of attention from the people who were supposed to love him? 

You learn to hoard what you can get, and any sign that the love is going to be taken away from you should be met with hostility.

Though, given specific actions in recent years, it’s a disservice to himself to write him off as selfish. He’s never really had real friends before, but if he had to thank the upside down for anything it’s that he was able to meet some of the best people he could ever meet in a town as hostile as Hawkins. Nancy, Dustin, Max, Robin... There's a very long list of people he would die for now without question. A long list of people that, when push comes to shove, he would willingly trade places with in the face of certain doom if it meant that they would be safe.

So you get a guy who keeps things for himself because he doesn’t think he’d ever get anything like them again, but this is also the same guy who’d rather push people away than make them stay in his life, even if he needed them, if it meant that they would be happy. So it’s weird, then, to be selfless and selfish at the same time. Maybe I’m just a special case, he thinks, straddling the balance of selfishness and selflessness to come out with something entirely different. 

Maybe that’s what it means to be a person. To accept that you’re a mass of complexities and different emotions that don’t necessarily have to power over the other. Or maybe he just doesn’t want to be alive, and that’s why he does the things he does without thinking about them first. 

“We need to keep moving,” Robin says, snapping him out of his thoughts. She looks towards the direction of the fire, and we both watch for a moment the smoke. Briefly, Steve wonders if the flames are going to stop soon. While the original plan is now hazy in his head, he’s pretty sure that no part in it included burning down the entire forest system of Indiana in a federally punishable act of arson, no matter how well-meaning it is.

“Not really familiar with this part of the forest here. Never been here before,” Steve says as she pulls him up. He wipes the dirt off his hands, frowning at the mess of the black tar-like substance from the upside down that has clung to his skin. He’s so going to scrub himself raw when they get back to base to shower. “How did you even find me through all this?”

“I have a way of detecting you when you do stupid things,” she replies with a deadpan voice, slinging her bag behind her. “I just followed where the signal was strongest.”

“Haha. Very funny, Buckley.” He says, pinching her cheek. She tries to sidestep, annoyed. “Seriously, I haven’t been this far out in the woods before.”

Robin just shrugs. “Your call, Steve.”

So Steve picks a direction; north, he whispers in his head as he walks. That’s what all the stories say. Follow the north star and keep walking till you find home. He walks and finds himself mourning the things that the upside down has taken from them. Their town, their families, their memories—all tainted. The stars, most of all. 

Like all small towns, Hawkins was the best place to watch stars in the sky. The lack of the light pollution in cities coupled with the fact that there’s always cool air in the evenings, even during the summer, makes Hawkins—in Steve’s opinion only—one of the prime spots to contemplate one’s shitty existence in. Bottle of beer in one hand and the voices in your head telling you that you’re wasting away. In the aftermath of the world ending it wasn’t enough to plunge the town they knew into indescribable horrors. The monsters had to take the stars too.

In the silence of the night it’s easy to jump at the slightest sound, and the crackle Steve suddenly hears from behind them makes him turn immediately. He stands on guard and so does Robin, startled by the speed in which he reached for the knife in his pocket.

“What was that?” Steve asks her. She just stares at him in confusion.

“What’s what?” 

He relaxes a bit, though he keeps the knife up in the air. “I—you didn’t hear it?”

“Hear what, Steve? We’ve been walking quietly for minutes.”

“There was a sound behind us—like crack—you know what, nevermind.” Steve waves off once he realizes Robin doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

“Probably just twigs and dry leaves. You’re so paranoid, you know?”

Steve places the knife back into his pockets, rolling his eyes. He waits for her to fall into step beside him before he starts speaking again. “Yeah, well, given everything I feel like I have a right to be paranoid.”

“Still. You’re a special kind of breed, Harrington.”

Steve snorts, lightly thumping her with his shoulder. She giggles in return, winding her arm around his waist. They walk side by side like that for a while, a walking mesh of boy and girl. In the dark, no one could tell they were even two separate people. No one would know where Steve Harrington began and Robin Buckley ended. 

“Okay, this is kind of stupid,” Robin says after a while, letting go of her hold on him. She stays close, though, and their shoulders remain touching as they walk the path. She kicks a pebble with her feet. “You’re kind of stupid.”

“What does that say about you, then? If I’m your best friend?”

“Who said you’re my best friend?”

“You did.” Steve replies, lacing his pinky with hers. “Like, over a year ago. While you were crying in my bathroom.”

Robin lifts her other hand and reaches over to swat him with it, snorting as she replies. “Quit holding that against me, dingus. It was a moment of weakness.”

“You went to my house after a party instead of going home to sleep your hangover off like most normal high schoolers do. Loser.”

“Yeah, well, I got scared,” she admits softly and easily, like she had been holding it in for a while and was glad he finally gave her the opening to just say it. “I was losing control of the world and for a while I thought I was back in the bunker again. And I couldn’t see you.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah,” she sighs. “Oh.”

They don’t really talk about what happened to them miles beneath Starcourt. Even in the moments of vulnerability—under the sheets in her bedroom, side by side in his bathroom, facing each other on the table at the backroom of Family Video while Keith is impatiently knocking at the door and telling them to hurry up—they avoided talking about it expertly. Like the spies and adventurers in their movies cleverly dodging the booby traps laid out before them. 

They’d talk about anything and everything under the sun. She keeps him up to date on the happenings of Hawkins High School, even though logic dictates that he should leave all that shit behind him now, and he keeps her up to date with everything else that happens while she’s trapped in its hallways. She had told Steve about Vickie and, in return, he told her about his early complicated feelings for Jonathan. Then it was her secret about Nancy and then his with Eddie’s. Their secrets and thoughts became currency—things they would trade in the corners they can find where they’re sure no one else could hear them. 

But Starcourt? No. They don’t talk about Starcourt.

Maybe it’s because they’re still very afraid of it, even if they don’t like to admit that fear. Or maybe they do admit it, but voicing it out gives it power over them and, somehow, they revert back to the versions of themselves that almost died that day. Whatever the reason is, she doesn’t mention it. Steve doesn’t mention it. They bury it behind them and just wordlessly acknowledge that whoever came out of Starcourt that day, bloody and broken and bruised in so many places, were very different people from those that went in.

“We don’t really talk about what happened to us there, don’t we?” Steve says without clarification, knowing that Robin already knows what he’s talking about. She flinches a little, though her pinky’s grip on his doesn’t loosen.

“No, we don’t.”

Steve hums.

“It’s just hard, that’s all. Sometimes.” Robin replies, shaking her head. “I’m still afraid of it.”

“I get it. I’m still afraid of it too.”

She laughs, swaying sideways a bit to avoid the tree root jutting from the soil. “Not healthy though, isn’t it? Avoiding the topic?”

Steve just shrugs, not really knowing what else to say to that. 

The proper answer is simple, in his head. There’s really no proper way to cope with the things we both went through. As shitty as it may sound, the bond they shared is special for a reason, and that’s because they’re the only two people in the group to have gone through it together. And will be the only two people to go through something like that together if they could help it. Tortured at the same time, drugged at the same time. Spill your guts and your heart out—physically and metaphorically—as you sit on the dirty bathroom floors of the cinema at Starcourt while the cheers of people watching Back To The Future echo faintly around you like background music to the worst evening of your life so far. Laugh through your tears as you reconfigure your worldview and come out the other side as something else. Something new.

Steve had considered telling the kids, back then. There were times where he’d look at Dustin and just open his mouth. But then he’d close it again and shame himself in his head for even considering dumping all that to a kid, even if said kid already has a vague idea of what he went through. Sometimes he’d pick up the phone and start dialing Nancy’s number before stopping halfway through, finger hovering over the number 5 for a few seconds before slamming the phone back into the receiver and choosing instead to yell all his frustrations out into his pillow. 

But Steve guesses that that’s simply the price they had to pay for coming out of that whole ordeal alive. The universe has its own currency, too, and maybe for the want of living (or, at least, not dying alone in a cold and sterile torture chamber beneath the earth with no one to even hear their last words but each other and their captors) then Steve and Robin had to give up the ability to ever talk about that specific experience. To themselves and to anyone.

Everyone knows something else though. They may not know what truly happened, but they know that something did. Something bad or unspeakable, if only because Robin could never stand it when Steve is behind her—only ever agreeing on the condition that Steve talk or make sounds the entire time. Or because Steve couldn’t stand it when she’s in another room while they’re in the same place, always having to have her within his line of sight. And how, one time, when they accidentally got tangled in a bunch of rope and string lights hanging from the shed beside Joyce’s house the party found them both almost at the brink of a full blown panic attack.

Steve was just about to reply to her when he hears the crackling sound behind them again. He swivels back quickly, eyes darting back and forth in the spaces between the trees. The darkness makes them all blur together, easing none of the anxieties that begin sprouting in his chest again.

“You can’t not have heard that, Robin,” He whispers, carefully stepping forward between her and whatever threat is stalking them in the woods. “That was—it’s the same sound. Same sound, I swear.”

“Steve, I really didn’t hear anything, I promise you. Maybe you’re just woozy? How many fingers am I holding up?” She asks, stepping back in front of him and waving three of her fingers in front of his face.

“I’m not joking. I swear there’s—you really didn’t hear it? It’s like this weird crackling noise.”

“You know how jumpy I can get,” she starts, placing a hand on his elbow and urging him to turn back and continue with their walk. “If there was truly something there I promise you I’d be the first to jump up and be scared about it.”

Steve relaxes again, though not without one final glance at the dark. He nods at himself before dragging Robin, other hand flying up to his neck to rub at the slight touch of pain he feels at the pull of it.

“Are you sure I don’t have any wounds on my neck?” Steve asks Robin, tilting his head so she can look closer. “It feels kind of weird.”

She hums as she inspects it, scanning every bit of skin she could see before shaking her head. “Nope. Nothing. Look, it’s been a weird night. You’re probably just shaken up a bit. We should keep moving.”

“Yeah.” Steve replies, nodding. He turns back again one last time, just to be sure.

Still nothing following them. Just the dark and the rising smoke from the distance.

“You think that fire’s stopping anytime soon?” Steve mutters as they walk, nudging his head back. 

“Big fire,” is all she says. There’s a glint in her eyes when she utters the words. “Lots of time to put itself off.”

Steve chalks it off to the unease of walking vulnerable in the woods at night in Hawkins. The town hasn’t been safe for a while now, sure, but all the bullshit of interdimensional monsters and government scientists experimenting on children aside, it’s not like Hawkins was ever a town people were safe to walk outside at night in. All his earlier romanticism of the night sky and the cool evening air doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone shares the same sentiments. Nor does he make it a habit to stay beyond the self-imposed curfew of 10:00 PM.

The horror stories of Hawkins claim that ten years after the town was founded in the 1800s, a man had killed his wife out of a jealous fit and stuffed her body in the covered up well that still stood in the forests surrounding Lake Jordan. In 1923, Gregory Jenkins-Brown went missing after a night out with friends, having only gone back to town for a visit to his mother and sister. The last person to ever go missing in Hawkins before Will. In 1959, Henry Creel’s years long torture of his family culminates when he psychokinetically murders his mother and sister and, after failing to kill him as well, pins the blame of the murders to his currently institutionalized and deeply traumatized father. 

1976, during Steve’s tenth birthday party, the program he was watching on their TV was taken over by an emergency broadcast to announce that a man had been found dead—floating face down on Sattler Quarry. He still remembers the exact same words the announcer had used to talk about it; “Hawkins’ Police are saying it may be a suicide, but they are yet to rule out other causes.” In the end, it had been a murder.

And then in 1979, wearing a lab gown and bleeding from her eyes and nose and mouth, a little girl named Eleven opens a portal to another world and sends the murderer from 1959 to another dimension, where she hoped he could never hurt her again. And then in 1983, Will Byers vanishes on the way home from the Wheeler’s house, and Barbara Holland dies bloody and screaming in his pool. Steve gets his face broken in and the world falls beneath his feet in the same fashion that the demogorgon fell through the ceiling of the Byers’ house.

And then it’s 1986. It’s 1986 and—

“What are you thinking about?” Robin asks, breaking the silence. Steve snaps out of his head, hand once again flying up to his neck. He pulls it back and checks for blood, still not entirely sure that he’s not injured there. She rolls her eyes at the action, pursing her lips, though she doesn’t say a word.

“Nothing. Just thinking about how weird small towns are.”

“Oh? Share with the class, Harrington.”

“Like. We’re always the site of horrors, aren’t we?” he says, yawning and stretching his folded arms behind him. It makes the phantom pain on his neck twinge again. “Perfect setting for scary stories. You hear an urban legend and it always comes back to a small town. There are always things that go bump in the night here. Could the gates to the upside down not have opened somewhere else? New York, for example. Or San Francisco.”

“You’re wondering why the lab is called the Hawkins National Laboratory and not the New York National Laboratory?”

“Exactly!” Steve exclaims, looking up to the sky like he just made an extremely valuable point. “Like, why does it always have to be small town people dealing with small town shit. I think we should let the big city people deal with our problems for once, you know?”

“Yeah, well. Small town curse, I guess.” Robin replies. “It’s probably a thing. I think it’s because everyone knows everyone, you know? And the intimacy of that kind of makes everything scarier. You never expect your neighbor to kill you when your families grew up together, roughhousing in the same playground you did as a child. Plays on the idea that you could never truly trust anyone.”

And it makes sense, Steve supposes. He tries to imagine James Harrington and Joyce Byers—formerly Horowitz—in the same classroom. They were in the same graduating year, right along with his mom, Martha Bower, and Hopper. He tries to imagine what it would have been like if something terrible had happened during their graduating year. Something completely unexpected. Like if his mom had bludgeoned his dad with a rock before he could do any damage to her psyche. Or if someone had died in their year and another got accused of the murder, just like what had happened to Eddie with the deaths of Chrissy, Patrick, and Fred. He wonders if the way his mom was extra silent and sleepless three nights after Will Byers went missing meant something. If it was the small town curse lodged in her brain making itself known again in her veins. Maybe it’s why her and dad stay away from the town.

It all seems genetic, then. The fear you pass on to your children, and then they pass that on to their children. And so on and so forth until you arrive at 1983 and 1984 and 1985 and finally in 1986, where two teenagers are traversing the woods at night, not really armed to the teeth but armed all the same after burning down a hub of demonic vines and bats and debating whether or not there’s any merit to the awful pattern of small towns and the inherent, ancient terror that lies beneath the surface of them.

“I feel like we’re walking in circles,” Steve says after a while, no longer wanting to dwell on the thoughts of cursed towns like Hawkins. In the end, no other small town urban legend in the world could ever compare to the fact that his small town is a literal portal to Hell. “I swear we’ve passed this tree before.”

“No, we haven’t. I know where we’re going. We’re almost out... hopefully.”

“That’s reassuring,” Steve snorts, dissolving into laughter when she shoves him as a response. “Hey, I’m injured. You can’t hit an injured man.”

“I do what I want, dingus,” she replies, pausing a bit before nodding to herself. “Yep, this way.”

“Are you sure?” Steve asks, turning back. His face morphs into confusion when he sees the smoke pillars again. It’s still the same size as it was the last time he looked at it. “I think we’re lost, Robin.” He says, letting just a little bit of fear seep into his voice to let her know that he’s not fucking with her.

Robin sighs, loud this time, like she’s tired of him asking questions. Steve’s eyes flit back to her, his brows furrowing when she just stands there, tapping her foot against the ground. “Look, I promise we aren’t lost, okay? You just have to put a little faith in me.”

“Well, it’s been over an hour. I think.” Steve says, not really sure because he left his watch at the base. “And we haven’t so much as found a break in the woods. I doubt our shitty forests in Hawkins are as big as the ones in national parks. We don’t even have bears or foxes here. How about I lead the way for a while?”

She bites the inside of her cheek, hesitating for a while before finally nodding. “It’s your call,” she shrugs. “Lead the way, King Steve.”

He rolls his eyes at the awful nickname, though not really minding it when it comes from her. “Yeah, yeah. And you’re my squire. Boo. Get better jokes, Buckley. I’ve heard that shit before.”

“Oh, touchy are we?” She snipes, though he knows she doesn’t really mean it. She falls just one step behind him, trailing closely in a way that Steve could still see her from the corner of his eye and feel the shuffling of her coat against his. “Hey, Steve?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you ever think about getting out of Hawkins?”

The question seems innocuous enough. A common question to ask, really, if you’re bored and have nothing else to talk about with someone but you don’t want the silence to fill the air between you and the other person. But between Steve and Robin questions like that don’t ever just lead to a simple yes or no. Robin could ask him about his ideal weather for a perfect date and he could somehow find a way to spin it into a conversation about how sometimes he’s afraid he’s going to die alone. 

It was what happened to them, after all, after he asked her when the last time she peed her pants was in Starcourt.

Weirdness. A shared trait. He and Robin should be twins. Maybe they are, and one of their parents is just lying.

“Everyone always wants to get out of their hometown,” he replies, knowing the vagueness of his answer will annoy the shit out of her. In true Robin fashion she twists one of his fingers, making him wince in pain. He turns to shoot her a glare.

“What?”

“Just answer the question properly.”

“Of course I do,” Steve finally says, a sad smile playing in the corner of his lip. “Sometimes it’s all I ever think about.”

“Oh?”

He nods. “When I was the same age as those dipshits I used to, I don’t know, entertain the idea that I’m going to run away. Leave Hawkins and everything else behind. I used to—this is depressing.”

“No, hey, let’s hear the sob story,” she says, interlocking her fingers with his. Their hands swing between them, and Steve lets out a laugh at the absurdity of it all. “Come on. You tell me a story and I tell you a story, okay?”

“Yeah, sure. Okay. So I used to write down these notes. Just... I don’t ever say goodbye to anyone in it. I would just write down the place I imagine myself going to. If those pieces of paper count as traveling then I’ve been all over the world. And then I’ll say something dumb, like “see you when I see you!” like I had any plan of returning to Hawkins.”

“Oh, Steve.”

“And I used—I think it’s still there, you know?” He chuckles sadly, eyes downcast and staring at the scuff marks on his boots. “This bag. I’d put my clothes there. My favorite ones. Yellow sweater. Varsity jacket. These really comfortable pants I got from my Aunt in Virginia. And then every single time I fight with my dad I stare at the ceiling and whisper to myself “today is the day, today is the day I’m leaving.” But it’s all pointless because I couldn’t even unlock my window, and the bag gathers dust under my bed.”

Robin doesn’t say anything for a while, though the silence doesn’t bother Steve. He’s learned by now what the lulls in their conversations mean, and this one is telling him that Robin’s just thinking about what to say to him next.

“I actually did try to run away once,” she finally says, smacking her lips. “It’s... I think it was your junior year? So, my sophomore year. Everything had just been too much, you know? What with the whole lesbian thing and the fact that my life just... Like I said, it all felt like too much and absolutely nothing at the same time. Overwhelmed but also so... empty. Like no matter how hard I try to hold everything together to keep me from falling apart I just fail.”

Steve pauses. “Wait—Oh. The year you—”

“—pathetically crushed on Tammy Thompson and spent the entire time that I wasn’t ogling her trying to kill you with my mind? Yes.” Robin nods, twirling a piece of her hair between the fingers of her other hand. “I wanted to leave. Fancied myself as this rebel who could do whatever she wanted. I wanted to be anywhere else just as long as it wasn't Hawkins. I wanted a friend who could understand me. A girl I could kiss. I didn’t want to be Robin Buckley, trapped and doomed to die in her small, backwater town. I just wanted to be someone else. Someone happy.”

“And then what happened?”

“Well, shit happened. I worked out a deal with the part of me that wants to run and convinced it that maybe I could still make something out of myself in Hawkins. I applied for a job,” she giggles, and Steve rolls his eyes. “I wore this stupid sailor outfit that clashes so badly against my freckles and worked at an ice cream shop with my schmuck. And now here I am, co-parent to the kids he babysits and walking beside him at the end of days. 1984 me would fucking shit her pants. Or kill herself, if she ever found out this is how it ends for me. For us.”

“I think she would kill herself,” he teases. “I definitely think she’d do that.”

“It’s not too bad, really,” she shoots back, voice soft. Her hold on his hand tightens. “She got a friend, so the end of the world has been pretty much tolerable. And, if things go well, maybe she gets the girl too. And then we can all die after that.”

“You’re insane, you know that?”

“Just a minute ago you were telling me that my past self would commit suicide if she found out this is what her future holds,” she deadpans, her hold on his hand turning painful just the slightest bit. “You’re much more insane than me, all things considered.”

They laugh at themselves before lapsing into another comfortable silence. After a while—as though it’s on autopilot already—his left hand flies back up to his neck when it starts hurting again, and he hisses in pain.

“Your neck again?” Robin asks worryingly, her hand going up to his neck too as though she’s trying to help him pinpoint the source of pain. “I swear, Steve, I’m not lying when I say you don’t have an injury th—”

“I believe you,” he says, cutting her off before she could start rambling about it. “I just—fuck, I think I may have pulled a muscle in it, or something? I definitely have to get this checked back when we get to—”

The crackling noise comes back again.

The hairs on the back of his neck stand on end, though he doesn’t outwardly react. With the way Robin is still staring at him with a concerned look on her face it’s obvious by now that he’s the only one who could hear the sound. And because of that there’s only two conclusions to be drawn. Either he’s just growing increasingly paranoid or something is messing with him on purpose.

He debates the pros and cons of telling Robin that he could hear it again when she sneezes, startling him. The sound echoes in the woods, and Steve could barely open his mouth before she sends him an ice cold glare.

“Don’t even start saying shit, Harrington.” 

Steve raises his hand in surrender, shaking his head. “I wasn’t gonna say anything.”

“Yes you were.”

“I wasn’t.”

“Don’t lie to me, you piece of shit.”

“Language, Buckley. Jesus,” he says, pulling her close and slinging an arm over her shoulders. “Who raised you?”

“Bite me, Harrington,” Robin snarks back, tugging at his hair so hard she pulls strands of hair off.

“Ouch—don’t—oh, ew, Buckley, gross. Don’t ever say that again.”

“What were we talking about before this?” She asks, halting their little back and forth before they could spiral into a full-blown argument. “Oh, right. The whole running away thing.”

“Yep. Good old Buckley and Harrington and their shared dreams of making it out of here. Seems a bit too late now though, isn’t it? Every day that I wake up, ever since March I think to myself that I should have run away when I was fourteen.”

Robin nudges him with her hip, making him stumble a bit. He gives her an annoyed look that she waves off as she starts talking. “Don’t lose hope. We may still save the world, I think. Wasn’t that what you said outside the camper? “I still have hope” you said to me. I like to think that there’s still time for us, you know?”

“Really?” He replies, raising an eyebrow. 

She nods. “Yep. And—I don’t know. I’m an optimist at heart, really, despite my awfully awkward disposition suggests. I think we could still make it. See the world. Leave this town.”

“When you say we do you mean all of us or...”

“Well,” she sighs, a hint of shyness shining through the words spilling from her lips, “I’ll take you with me, of course. Or, you take me with you. We’re a package deal, aren’t we? I feel like that’s part of the disclaimers that we give away when people try to talk to us.”

A blossom of warmth spreads rapidly through Steve’s lungs all the way to his heart, lighting him up from the inside. He already knew he and Robin were friends. Platonic soulmates, they’d half-jokingly call each other, but the confirmation is always nice, most of all when it comes from her. 

“You know what? Yeah.” Steve agrees. “We are a package deal. So where do we go then? After Hawkins?”

“We should go to Europe, I think. Or the other side of the world. But, since I am a realistic person I say we go to... Las Vegas.”

“Really?” Steve asks incredulously. “Las Vegas?”

“Why not?” She asks, defensiveness rising up like a shield. “I’ve never been to Las Vegas.”

“I—Okay. Fine. We go to Las Vegas. And then what do we do in Vegas, Buckley?”

“We act like tourists. Like, the worst tourists ever. We speak in a British accent—

“—Jesus, a what accent?—”

“Stop interrupting me,” she groans. “But, yeah. We pretend we’re other people. That I’m not Robin and you’re not Steve and that we didn’t come from a town that everyone in the news says is haunted and cursed. We be stupid teenagers for a couple of nights and make mistakes we’ll both regret and keep as fun anecdotes for our children—who will be best friends, by the way, just like their parents were—like get married to a stranger or... or something. Anything. I don’t know. Just—we get to be whoever we want.”

Steve tries to picture in his head what she’d look like by then. What they’d both look like five, ten, fifteen years from now. He thinks he could grow his hair longer if she was there to braid it for him. Put it in neat little plaits like she always promised she would if he ever made do on his daydreaming of hair that goes beyond his shoulders. He imagines what her wife would look like and then he imagines if he was going to marry a man or a woman. And then he thinks about her kids calling him Uncle Steve and his kids calling her Auntie Robin and somehow—

Somehow, the vision is clear. Their future is bright in his head.

“Can we change names, too?” He says after a beat, swallowing roughly against the lump that’s begun to form in his throat. “I don’t think I want to keep being called Steve Harrington if we become other people.”

Robin grins, crossing her arms in front of her to pull her jacket closer. “Yeah, sure. You can be whatever name you decide for yourself. It’s your call.”

“You know, I’ve never had real friends before you,” Steve opens up, slowing down their pace. “It’s—Tommy and Carol were shit, let’s not lie, even if they didn’t used to be that way. It’s... I don’t know. Even when it was still easy between the three of us we never had what you and I have now. And then high school came around and all of a sudden it was about staying on top and feeling untouchable even if you really aren’t. And then I met Nancy but, well, we all know what happened after that.”

“Yup.”

“And then the kids. I mean, you were right back in Scoops, you know? For a while, they were my only friends. But it’s... Well, those dipshits were never going to be my actual friends, you know? Not... They’re more like siblings, really. Annoying children who bother me and dump their dirty bikes on the lawn I meticulously upkeep. Always looking at me with their shit-eating grins and like, “oh Steve, can you?” this and “Steve, drive us to” that without so much as a please between any of their demands. And I love them, I do, it’s just...”

Robin lets out a reedy laugh as she responds, picking up from where Steve trailed off. “It’s different, I get it. They’re still kids. You can’t... Well. They don’t have to carry your burdens, right?”

“Yeah. But you,” he continues, a warm smile on his face. “It’s... I don’t know. You’re my best friend, really. I... guess it’s nice, kind of. To know that you actually want me in your life after.”

“Of course I do, Steve.” She responds, not missing a beat. Not leaving any space for Steve to start having doubts in his head. “I had... I mean, I was better off in a way? In that I had friends, I guess. Genuine ones. But you’re also a first for me, Steve. I don’t—you know me better than anyone. Sometimes better than I even know myself, and it’s all just... Just two long-lost, broken pieces of the same whole coming together, I think. I didn’t... Well, it’s like I never really knew I needed you until I found you, you know? And now I can’t really think of a life without you in it.”

“It’s the same for me,” he smiles. “I... Thanks, Robin. I can’t really say anything else.”

“What the fuck are you thanking me for?”

“I don’t know. Just—”

“Just... what? Steve? Steve, what are you doing?”

He doesn’t respond to her. Instead, Steve stalks forward to a tree. An insignificant tree, really. Or, it should be insignificant. Should be the same as any other tree they’ve seen before.

Except this was exactly the same tree they’ve seen before. It was the same tree he had leaned against earlier, while Robin was patching him up. The empty roll of gauze still leans against the bark where they left it before they started walking, taunting him. Mocking him.

Somehow, they’re back to where they started.

“Robin, we’re walking in a circle.” He says when she finally catches up to him. Steve doesn’t need to see her to know that she’s frozen up. 

“No, we can’t—”

Steve crouches down and picks up the empty roll, waving it around. “We left this here, right? Robin, we’re right back where we came from. How could we be—”

“Maybe we took a wrong turn! I don’t... It’s—shit, you know, one time we went on this trip and it’s—my mom’s really superstitious, you know her. It’s all been kind of—anyway, so we were driving down this really, really long road and it was so dark and creepy and my dad kept swearing up and down that we were going in circles despite the fact that we were very clearly riding in a straight line—”

“—Robin—”

“—and then he said we passed the same sign thrice now but we didn’t believe him cause—but my mom, she said she had a cousin who was once lost on an expedition somewhere... I forgot where, but she had this—fuck, what was it... it’s, oh yeah. She said the key if you’re getting lost in a place is to turn your shirt upside down and wear it—”

“—Robin, I swear to God—”

“—again so that you’ll be put back on the right road, and, shit is it my fault? This is my fault. Steve, I think this is—”

“—ROBIN!” He finally yells, shaking her by the shoulders. She blinks out of her trance, heavily breathing. 

“What?”

“It’s fine. It’s not your fault,” Steve says, relaying the information to her as calmly as possible. “We went around in a circle but it’s fine, okay? We probably just got distracted. Let’s pick a different direction next, okay? Maybe let’s head west this time, okay?”

Robin nods, not really being given a choice in the matter. “Okay.”

“You get me?”

“Yeah, I get you.”

“It’s not your fault, okay?”

“Yep. Not my fault. Got it.”

“I’ll get you out of here, I promise.” He swears, looking her straight in the eye. “I promise.”

“I believe you,” is what she says, and her tone betrays that she really does mean it. Wholeheartedly. “Okay. Your call. Let’s go west.”

Steve drops the roll back, making it serve as their marker. He glances warily back at the tree as they move west, then back at the hazy smoke pillars that are still rising above the treeline. He wonders if fires were supposed to last that long or, if not, the smoke from the ashes actually permeates the air way beyond the fire is put out.

Maybe it’s different when you’re burning mass amounts of flesh, though Steve doesn’t really have much to compare to.

He must really be rattled by the fact that they’ve actually managed to walk in a circle because the sound doesn’t really register in his ears until he accidentally steps on a twig, and suddenly every little bit of noise suddenly seems so loud in the silence.

“Hey, Robin, I know you’re tired of me asking but do you really not hear this crackling noise that I keep hearing?”

“I really don’t,” she stresses. “Like, I’m not shitting you at all, Steve. I really don’t hear anything.”

“But it’s—it’s so loud. I don’t—”

“You may have hit your head earlier, while you were being attacked. Maybe it’s tinnitus?”

“I know what tinnitus is like. This is—tinnitus is ringing. It’s more of like this high pitched bell that sounds more like drawn out beeps the longer you focus on it. This,” he taps his ear, “is different. It’s... I tell you, it’s crackling. Like... when you’re trying to find a radio signal, of sorts.”

“I... Well, shit, I don’t really know anything about that. Sorry, Steve, I really wish I could help. Or that I could just hear what you’re hearing.”

“It’s... What if something got to my head? Or, I don’t know. What if this is bad. Should—oh, shit. I left the walkie back there in the—you don’t happen to have a spare walkie, do you?”

“I wish I had. I followed you right away when you left. I only had time to bring the gun and the bag and my walkie wasn’t in it.”

Steve sighs, running his hand over his face. “Well, we just—the next time I hear it again I’ll definitely think I’m cursed or something.”

“Don’t joke about that,” Robin reprimands. “It’s—look, I’m sure it’ll be fine, okay? Why don’t we... Hey, I have a question actually.”

“Shoot.”

“What did Dustin mean earlier when he said it’ll be just like the tunnels? I overheard, while you were going over the plan. This was before you went to your room with Eddie?”

Steve pauses in his steps, blinking owlishly at her. He squints.

“What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

“You seriously don’t know about the tunnels?”

She rolls her eyes. “Well, I wouldn’t be asking about them if I knew, right?”

“I really never told you?”

Robin mimes flicking the pages of a book between her hands, a fake look of concentration on her face. She adjusts an imaginary pair of glasses on her face. “Uh, no. Nope. Nothing here in the Buckington Book of Traumatic Experiences.”

“Okay, first of all don’t ever say Buckington again. Second of all, it’s—it’s not really how we met, but it’s part of—I seriously never told you this?”

“Nope.”

“Odd. Well, anyway, you already know the part about Dustin asking for help about his pet demodog, right? The one that ate that poor cat.”

“Yep. Rest easy in cat heaven, Mews the first. And then you got your ass beat by Hargrove because he’s a dirty bastard who doesn’t fight fair.”

“Yeah, well, he’s dead now so I win in the end. Anyway, that’s not the point. So after I get beat up the kids had the brilliantly stupid idea to go through with their plan to infiltrate these tunnels to help out El anyway, taking my knocked-out state as a sign from God that they needed to risk it all. Me being out of commission, the dipshits decided that hauling me into the backseat of Billy’s car was better than leaving me to bleed my brains out into the carpet of Joyce’s house while Billy was also unconscious in the same room.”

“Hmm. Smart and considerate children.”

Steve snorts. “Yeah, well, it was smart and considerate until they decided to let Max drive the car. I woke up and she was—Robs, you don’t really know true fear until you wake up after the bloodiest beat down in your life so far to a thirteen year old driving a car in the night and hitting mailboxes and trash cans along the way.”

“Okay, go on.”

“So it’s... we get to these tunnels. It’s like... there’s a hub in the middle. It was all an organism, first of all. Like... an offshoot of the big gate in the lab that grew underneath the soil. This hub opened to many pathways, and because it’s, well, it’s a hivemind, so if you hurt the pathways and the hub...”

Robin lights up in realization, flicking her fingers. “You hurt the hivemind.”

“Exactly,” Steve confirms. He ducks down to avoid a branch. “So we doused it in gasoline and burned it. And then the demodogs came rushing back to the tunnels instead of to the gate where El was trying to close it.”

“So that’s why you volunteered for this? Cause you already know what to do?”

“I mean, it’s all easy, right? It already happened before, just slightly different. Why not do it again?”

She stops in her steps, tugging his hand back so he’d stop too. “And that’s why you didn’t think things would go wrong?”

Steve raises one shoulder, a halfway shrug. An acknowledgement of her question. “I mean, yeah?”

“Did things not go wrong back in the tunnels?”

“Kind of. It wasn’t... we ran into D’Art—the pet demodog—but it seemed to have formed this bond with Dustin so a couple pieces of nougat and we were safely granted passage. But then we underestimated just how quickly those monsters traveled because we were almost too late. Dustin and I were left behind. It’s—I almost thought we were going to die there, you know? But they just rushed past us like we weren’t there.”

Robin purses her lips, clearly disappointed though Steve doesn’t know why. “So you didn’t anticipate that something was going to go wrong?”

Steve reels back from the sharpness in her tone, a contrast to the earlier back and forth between them. “I don’t really get why you’re so hung up on this.”

“I—you seriously don’t get it?”

“Well, I wouldn’t be asking about them if I knew, right?” Steve says, echoing her earlier response to him mockingly. She raises her hands in the air in frustration.

“You always do this—you always—”

The pain hits him unexpectedly, making him fall to his knees this time.

The crackling sound is back, too, but it really isn’t his primary concern.

Steve’s been burnt once. When he was twelve and learning to cook for the first time he hadn’t realized that you weren’t supposed to touch the oil with the pads of your fingers once it’s been on the pan that’s been heated with an open flame. He only wanted to make sure that it was hot enough for him to crack an egg into.

He learns a lot that day while nursing the bandaged fingers of his hand close to his chest, staring out the window and bitterly thinking that had his parents been home Steve wouldn’t have needed to cook for himself in the first place.

The pain on his neck right now is reminiscent of that burn. It sears. That’s the right word for it. It spreads like flames through the nerve endings at the back of his neck, making him feel as though he was being gripped tightly at the scruff by a hot ring of metal. He feels Robin’s hands scramble for his face, wiping at his tears. Her voice feels distant when he hears her, a jumbled mess of unrecognizable words that make him feel like he’s underwater and she’s aboveground.

And then, just as quickly as it came, the pain disappears.

He takes deep, heaving breaths as he collapses, barely catching himself before he plops face first into the ground. Robin follows suit, going from her knees to lying halfway on top of him. He feels her adjust herself, placing her hand on his chest and his hand on hers.

“Okay, you’re okay. Follow my breathing, yeah? That’s good. In, out. In, out. Steve, just look at me, okay?”

Steve tears away his gaze from the smoke in the distance to look her in the eyes again. 

“That’s right. In, out. In, out. Follow my breathing, Steve.”

He closes his eyes, minimizing the world around him to the rise and fall of his and Robin’s chest. He feels her press her hand harder, nails stinging a bit when she does, as though she’s digging into his chest. Like if she could she would tear through his skin and flesh and bones just so she could make sure that he really is breathing.

“I’m okay,” he whispers hoarsely after a while, dropping his hand from Robin’s chest. He opens his eyes, smiling at her. “I’m okay. I’m okay.”

“We need to get out of here, I think.” She says, helping him up. “This is bad. We have to leave.”

“I—Okay. Okay. Let’s go,” he replies, dragging her hand and walking again. They don’t say anything else as they weave through the trees. Steve, especially. Not a single word. He keeps his mouth shut and focuses on finding the way out. Periodically, he looks back to where they came from and ignores the fact that he could still see the smoke rising up into the air.

“Are we even moving?” He wonders out loud, trying to keep his voice from wavering. “It’s—this is weird. Fuck, this is weird. I shouldn’t have left my walkie there.”

“Maybe there’s something to that superstition. Hey, Steve. Turn your shit upside down.”

“Robin, come on. I don’t really think we should be—”

“You and me in Las Vegas. We speak in accents no one would recognize. You say you aren’t Steve and I say I’m not Robin. Hey, what if we just change names, huh?”

Steve shakes his head, “What are—I’m sorry?”

“Steve could be a girl’s name, right? Robin is a boy’s name. I know this. My mom wanted a boy but she didn’t get one. She got a disappointment instead. Your mother wanted a girl and she got a disappointment too. Doesn’t it all suck, Steve? Or should I call you Robin now?”

He lets go of her hand, taking a step back. Robin continues with her spiel like he hasn’t moved. She’s still staring at him—gazes locked in the way prey would with the predator. An illusion of an upper ground. He doesn’t know which role they were supposed to fulfill.

“Small town curse for a small town boy. Do you think big cities are better? Do you think they aren’t cursed? The whole world is sick. It’s sick. The disease spreads fast, you know? Like pathways.”

Steve takes another step back. “Robin, what’s going on?”

Robin just laughs.

“Are you laughing?”

She laughs harder, hysterically. “You’re weird, Steve. You’re weird.”

“What are you—”

He doesn’t get to finish his sentence before she suddenly sprints into a run, passing by him and rapidly darting through the trees in front of them.

Steve could only blink once before he’s shooting after her, yelling at her to stop. She keeps running anyway. And the weird part is that she wasn’t just running forward or running away from him. There's urgency in her stride. A tension in her body that Steve could only describe as single-minded focus.

She’s running towards something. Something he didn’t know about. Something only she could see.

“Robin! Rob—hey! Robin!” Steve yells, dodging the low hanging branches. He tries to reach for her when he gains ground, but she slips just like water. Like air.

Steve briefly considers crouching down to grab a rock to throw at her when she finally stops, standing so still it’s almost impossible to believe she had been running if he wasn’t literally there to give chase to her. He slowly walks towards her, hand outstretched, making sure not to make any noise lest he scare her and she starts running again.

Before he could reach her, however, she turns to him and blinks. Once, twice. And then she slumps forward. Steve catches her before she falls.

“What the fuck?” Steve whispers, bridging the remaining gap between them and grabbing her by the shoulder, shaking her a bit. “What the fuck was that? What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“Nothing’s wrong, Steve, I didn’t do any—let go of me. Let go, please.” She says, wiggling against Steve’s hold, voice dropping into a fearful whine. “Steve, please, it hurts.”

He drops her grip on her as though he’s been burned, though he doesn’t get the time to regret his actions when he feels the pain on his neck again.

“Fuck, fuck. What the fuck is happening?!”

Steve doubles over in pain, dry heaving into the ground in front of him. He shuts his eyes, counting numbers in his head and waiting for the pain to subside. The burn is worse than before, and he starts to hear the crackling sound again. Turns out, it’s shockingly easy to tolerate hearing things that no one else can hear when you’re burning up from the inside from some phantom flame licking through your veins.

The pain leaves him again, still as quickly as the last time. When he looks up from where he’s crouched over on himself he spots Robin standing still and staring into the distance; at the smoke that’s still rising from the burnt hub.

“Okay, something’s definitely fucking with us. We need to go, now.” He says as he gets himself back up to his feet. He pulls at Robin’s bag, shoving her earlier descent into madness to the back of his mind in favor of urging her to run with him. “Come on, Robin. We have to—”

They’re back at the tree again.

“What the fu—”

“You’re right,” Robin whispers, still not looking at him. “You are walking in circles.”

“Robin?”

“Your call, Steve.” She says as she turns, giving him a look he can’t decipher before she sprints into the woods, heading into the direction of the burning hub.

Steve could only curse as he once again gives chase to her, refusing to look away from her for even a minute, tracking her with his eyes as she moves almost inhumanly fast through the thick of the woods. He ignores the branches and the vines and the roots now, allowing himself to step over and walk through them. He figures that if he’s already being fucked with by Vecna or whatever other creep, then it doesn’t really matter whether he alerts them to his presence or not by touching parts of their hivemind.

“Robin, wait up—shit!” He yells, trying to get her to slow down anyway. The smoke becomes thicker the closer he gets, and he realizes that there’s no orange glow to be seen anymore, which means the fire must have already died ages ago. “Robin! Where are you!”

He hears shuffling from in front of him and trusts his ears even though he shouldn’t, given that the crackling is coming on much louder now whenever it decides to make itself known to him. Steve follows the sound, waving his hand around in an attempt to clear the smoke. 

“Steve, are you there? Stop going in circles, Steve,” he hears Robin call out. “Come on, just—you’re so close. You’re so close.”

“Robin, I really don’t—”

“Just a couple more steps, alright?”

Steve coughs into the inside of his elbow, the haze of the smoke stinging his eyes. He shuts them in pain. “What the fuck are you talking—”

He hears a wet squelch on his boots before he slips a little, the familiar and slimy body of a bat being crushed beneath his weight.

Steve opens his eyes to find one bat corpse, and then another, and then another, and then another until they start looking like burnt lumps of goo. The hub has been burnt to a crisp—the exposed tendrils still emitting smoke, though they look like dried up husks now instead of the slimy, slithering, sentient creatures that they were from before he doused them in gasoline and lit the fire. There’s hundreds of bat corpses everywhere; proof of his hard work.

Robin, a little off to the side, standing and staring at him.

“Robin, hey.” He says, walking slowly towards her. She shifts a little to the left, as though she’s obscuring something from his view. 

“Steve,” is all she says to him, refusing to budge when he tilts his head.

“Hey, we need to go, come on. We have to get out of here, remember?”

“You’re walking in circles, Steve.” She says again, shaking her head. “You have to stay here.”

“Okay, okay,” he soothes her like she was some skittish animal, raising one hand. “It’s okay. I think what got to me finally got to you too, yeah? This is probably some Vecna shit, okay? We’ll—okay, we’re here anyway, so let’s find that walkie I dropped, okay? And then we’ll call El. We’ll call for backup. So why don’t you just—”

Robin shakes her head again. “You’re walking in circles, Steve.”

“Robs, you keep saying that but I don’t actually know what you mean, yeah? What is it that you want to say, really?”

“Do you trust me, Steve?”

“Of course I do,” he replies, and he means it. Even if he’s not really sure of what’s going on anymore.

She contemplates his answer before nodding, satisfied in whatever she may have found while she rolled it around her head. Steve watches her take a step back, showing him what she’s been hiding.

“I’m sorry,” she says mournfully. Steve doesn’t like her tone at all.

He takes one last glance at her before his eyes fall to her legs and all the way to the spot where she had been standing. It’s still bat corpses after bat corpses, and his eyes follow the trail towards a small pile. Steve’s eyes flit to her again and she gestures for him to walk closer.

Every step feels like there’s forever in between them. A heavy pit begins to form in Steve’s stomach. He keeps his eyes trained on the mound before him, watching the pile become larger the more he gets closer.

The pit in his stomach transforms into a black hole when he spots a hand underneath the pile.

“No. No. No, no, no, no, no, no—”

Steve takes one last desperate look at Robin before he sprints and falls to his knees, pushing away the bats. So this is why she’s been acting weird. Why she can’t hear the same things. Why she can’t feel what—no, no, not Robin. Not her. Not her, please. Not Robin. Don’t do this to me. Please don’t—

He shoves the last bat away and is met with his face. Eyes closed. Still and unmoving.

“I don’t understand... wh—”

“You thought it was me, huh? Of course you did.”

“What, I—”

“You’re dying, Steve,” Robin whispers from behind him. Steve stands, forcibly tearing his gaze from his still bleeding body; surrounded by the twitching, burnt corpses of the bats. He sees the sheen of tears from her eyes. “You never got out of the hub. I never came to your rescue. The real me is still at base, Steve. None of this is real.”

Robin smiles, walking closer to him. She takes his hand in hers, and he realizes faintly that throughout the journey they took to get to where they were now, he never felt a single speck of warmth in his body or hers beyond the fires when he first lit them. It had always been cold, from the moment they started following the star north to the moment they circled back. 

“The crackling sound you keep pointing out? The pain in your neck? The pillar of smoke?” She asks, listing things down, though she’s not really expecting an answer from him with her tone. “Those were just... reminders. Your brain is pointing you to the truth.”

The truth. What an awful, horrible thing. He gets why people lie. Why the remaining residents of Hawkins just nod and go about their business after the government insists that it’s just a major chemical leak. In the end, no one really likes the truth. 

But it’s real.

The truth that I’m dying, Steve says to himself. That I’m probably dead.

“How—why am I here? I don’t get it. And why are you here?” Steve demands, begging for an answer. He still couldn’t bear to look at his body, so he keeps his eyes on the figment of Robin in front of him.

“You were calling out to me,” she says, the smile on her face finally falling into a frown. “I guess, in the end, you wanted someone with you. But that’s the thing with all of us though, right Steve? We never want to be alone when we die, no matter how much we try to push people away while we’re still alive.”

“But I don’t want to die, Robin,” Steve reasons, calling the apparition her name still even though he knows now that it’s not her. “It’s–I don’t really want to die.”

She gives him a confused look, her face pinched like she didn’t get what he was saying. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t want to–I didn’t come here to die. I was... We had a plan. I had a plan. I was supposed to–”

“Steve,” she whispers, forcing him to look at her. “Dig deep inside you. Why do you think you volunteered to do this alone? Why do you think you stood your ground while the bats were attacking you? You didn’t run, Steve. Just like you never ran so many times before. It’s almost pathological with you. A disease.”

Steve tries to open his mouth to deny it but the words just don’t come. I’m not sick. It’s not true, Steve whispers in his head. The voice is quite faint though, like it can’t quite believe that he’s even denying the reality of it. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to—

“It wasn’t Vecna. It’s not your small town curse. It’s just your head, Steve. It’s always been like this with you.”

Yeah, she’s right. Deep down, Steve knows it’s always been like this with him.

It was like this with him in 1983, with Jonathan and Nancy, when it took him two seconds to decide that he didn’t want to run after all and went rushing back inside without even thinking that he might get eaten by the monster. It was like this with him in 1984, with Billy Hargrove and then the tunnels, fighting through the throbbing pain in his head as he watched demodogs run past him. A picture of calm and collected cool like his heart wasn’t begging for him to climb up the rope already. And then it was like this in 1985 with Starcourt and the Russians. And then again, in 1986, pulled underneath the deep and murky waters of Lover’s Lake.

“It’s gotta be me. No complaints, alright?” 

He meant it. He always meant it. There was no such thing as straddling the line between selflessness and selfishness when it comes to him. At his heart, Steve would always be the one to die first.

So many times where he put himself in front of others. Where he jumped headfirst into danger without thinking about what the consequences could be for him. Steve has had his face and his body hit and rearranged so many times in the past couple of years; so much more than anyone would ever have had in their lifetime. All this time he just walked away from it and acted like he was fine. Like he was okay.

But he wasn’t. None of it was okay. It was lonely, and it was exhausting. He was tired of being selfless.

Tired, yes. That’s the word. Maybe that’s what this drawn out hallucination has been about. It was to get Steve to realize his exhaustion. Their talk about dreams. About friends. About running away. All of it was just the byproduct of a dying mind. One last hurrah of the neurons and the synapses, whatever it was that made the brain work. A reminder that what once was alive is now not.

In a way, he all just wants it to be over.

“So what is this?” He asks her, wiping the tears from his face with the back of his hand. Sure, he’s tired, but that doesn’t mean he can’t question what all of this has been leading up to. “Some, what, final play to make me realize something? Is there supposed to be a lesson here that I’m not yet aware of?”

“I don’t know. Do you think there is? You’re the one who called me, Steve.” She tells him so matter-of-factly, sounding almost exactly like the Robin he knows and loves, that he forgets for a moment that she isn’t actually real. That she’s just an uncannily and eerily accurate product of his mind. “It’s your call.”

“You keep saying that,” he realizes now. “It’s my call. It’s—what does that even mean. My call. I’m dead, aren’t I?”

“I can’t actually say, if I’m being honest,” Robin replies, no trace of lies in her voice. “What do you want, Steve?”

He spares another glance at his body. It’s weird, he thinks. Steve’s never been one to fully believe in ghosts, but he is one now, he supposes. Is this what all the souls of the dead feel when they take one last look at the body they’re leaving behind before they go to wherever it is souls go to rest? 

At least there’s going to be a body to bury. Barb’s casket had been empty. 

“I’m so tired.” Steve says finally, kneeling. If he could ignore the blood from his neck—so this is why it hurts—and the way that his chest isn’t rising or falling at all he would have just thought that he was asleep. That his eyes were closed because he’s simply fallen asleep. That he’s just dreaming—the regular kind of dream. The one that’s filled with things that don’t make sense. The one that would slip from his mind the moment he wakes up and opens his eyes.

But this dream is... It’s not nonsensical. It’s not gonna slip from his mind, because he’s not waking up at all.

“Why are you really here?” Steve asks Robin again, the fight almost leaving his body in full. “Please, just tell me.”

“I’m not lying, Steve,” she replies, kneeling beside him. Robin rests her head on his shoulder, a silent comfort. She places her hand on top of my lap. “It’s your call.”

“Stop saying that. There must be a reason you’re here. Something beyond me.”

“I told you, you called me, Steve. I’m only here because of you.” Robin says. She lifts her head from his shoulder and grabs his face, holding it between her palms and forcing him to look at her. “The answer is with you, Steve. Why would you call me?”

“Because...”

Because what? Steve asks in his head. Dying would truly be the much easier choice. Not just because his wounds are very obviously fatal, but because it really just makes sense. It doesn’t matter whether Steve deserves it or not. Whether he’s atoned enough for his sins or if he still has unfinished business. They say death doesn’t discriminate, but Steve’s intimate with death and he knows that he’s a special case. 

He's been expertly avoiding death for a while now but you can only evade the darkness for so long until it finally catches up to you. Tag—you’re it! Says Death. I’ve been chasing you since 1983, you slimy bastard. It was all a matter of principle now. You can’t just keep expecting to survive over and over again. There was a price to be paid. Deals to make. Steve remembers his grandmother’s last words: it all comes for us in the end.

From the point of view of logic, Steve has simply run out of luck.

And it’s not as though he’d be... well, he wouldn’t say it has been entirely happy. It was a lonely life for the most part, but it hasn’t been so miserable. He has—had friends. Real people who cared for him. Who cared what he was up to and asked if he was okay. Who said good morning to him and handed him a cup of coffee before he starts the day. Who pat his back when he does a good job and berate him when he does something wrong. There’s Dustin, Lucas, Erica, Max. Steve even had the chance to reconnect with Nancy, the past couple of months having pushed them closer in a way they never were, even while they were still in a relationship. 

He’s bled for them. Still bleeding, if his unmoving body in front of him is any indicator. There’s no other people and nowhere else he would have spent the last years of his life with.

He had a best friend who loves—loved—loves him. Robin. The fact that in his dying moments he chose to manifest an image of her. It’s remarkable what the mind is capable of with its last bits of strength. He looks at her now, and even though she’s just a figment of a dying brain trying to grasp at straws she still looks exactly like the real Robin would. Like the real Robin does. Cheeks speckled with the freckles he loved to trace when they were alone. The tiny scar by her eyebrow from two months ago when she got snagged by a stray piece of wood while they were patrolling one of the rifts that opened by Lover’s Lake. 

Robin Cecilia Buckley. Born March 10th, 1968 during the first week of Spring. Like the season, a breath of fresh air into his life. The one person he knows like the back of his hand, if only because she knows him like the back of hers too. She’s his curse, but in a good way. Stuck with him for the rest of his life and he wouldn’t have traded it for anything in the world.

Wouldn’t have had it any other way, really.

Her hair, shoulder length now. Still halfway done with the bad dye-job that Steve promised he would fix for her when he gets back.

“I’m tired, Robin.” Steve says to her, letting his tears fall again. “I’m really tired.”

“I know you are,” she tells him, mirroring the devastated expression on his face. “I’m the first person to know how tired you are, Steve. You don’t have to tell me twice. You’ve—there’s so much that you’ve done already. For us. For this town. Not all of us deserve it, but you did it anyway. But that doesn’t really answer the question, Steve. Why did you call me?”

Because... because...

“I can’t... I don’t—”

Steve looks at his body again, lying so still on the ground. The walkie he had been holding earlier—He remembers now. He was using it as a weapon when the bats got to him—just a few paces from where his hand is stretched upwards. Like it was violently thrown from his grip and he was reaching for it before everything went to black and his drawn out death hallucination started happening.

He was reaching for it. Steve looked like he wanted to crawl towards it, but he just couldn’t.

“Do you see, Steve?” Robin whispers, and Steve is so close. So, so—

“Oh. Oh.”

Hand stretched upwards. I wanted to reach it. The crackling. It wasn’t a radio. It was the walkie the entire time. I wanted to live.

I want to live.

“Why did you call me, Steve?” She asks him again, though there’s a smile on her face now, like she’s finally gotten through Steve. And maybe she has, because that’s just how Robin is like. His curse, worming her way into the tendrils of his consciousness. The one person he called out to as he was dying. This is her; how she’s always been and will always be if he just—

If he just...

“You’re a fucking bitch, you know that?” Steve says to her, making her dissolve into watery giggles. “I called you because I... because I don’t want to die. Because I’m tired, and we know it, but I want to live. I want to... I want to drive Dustin to his prom again like I did back with the Snow Ball. I want to teach Max how to drive, even though I know she’s going to be so shit at it. I want to... God, I want to tell Eddie Munson that I love him—”

“Of course you do.”

“And I want,” Steve lowers his voice now, biting the corner of his lip. He lifts a hand and starts tracing circles on her cheek, connecting her freckles with the pad of his thumb. “I want to get out of this town with you. I want us to go to Las Vegas and put on a shitty accent. I want to go see the world. Grow old. I want to see you get married, and I want you to see me get married. I want us to be boring old people together. The kind of old people with so many stories to tell that people won’t even believe us. I want our kids to be best friends. I want... I want to stay, Robin. I want to stay with all of you. Is that what this has all been about?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Weird, isn’t it? Being confronted with your mortality and the limited amount of time you really have with the people you love. There’s still so much more you could do, Steve. So much more that you could experience. So many out there waiting for you to get back home.”

“I want to say,” Steve repeats. “I do,”

“You still can, Steve,” Robin says, slumping against him. She lets out a sigh, pursing her lips. “I don’t—I can’t guarantee what happens after this. When you wake up. Or if you even wake up. Essentially, you really are dying.”

Steve sighs too, rubbing his temple. He waves his hand, gesturing to his body. “I mean, yeah. It’s not like I can’t tell.” 

“But I have faith in you,” she smiles. “I do. I’ll be waiting.”

Steve snorts. “On the other side?” He jokes, removing himself from her hold. He places a hand on top of his body’s chest, silently willing it to start moving again. Please, please. Come on.

“Wherever you end up waking,” she laughs, voice sounding fainter now. “I’ll always be with you, Steve. Just call.”

Steve closes his eyes, letting his figment of Robin fade into the background. The rustling of the leaves grows louder around him, and for a while he’s afraid. But he keeps his eyes close, pushing through the fear in his veins. A loud screeching echoes from the distance, and Steve ignores it in favor of finding his way back to his body. To himself. 

Steve opens his eyes to a dark blue. Not black, just blue. For the first time in a long time, it looks like the sky is finally clearing up.

He turns his head left and right, wincing at the sting of the wounds on his neck. He wiggles his hand out from the bat corpses surrounding him—slimy wings sticking to the cloth of his sleeves.

“Fuck. Fuck.” He whispers, quickly moving one hand to press against the flow of blood on the left side of his torso. Steve heaves himself upwards again, fully freeing the rest of his body from the bats. The ground makes the wounds hurt, and he could feel from beneath his palms the stickiness from his blood mixing with the soil and the slime.

It’s nauseating. Steve’s glad he could feel it.

He pushes himself to flip on his front, groaning out loud when his chest meets the ground below him. A rock digs into the wounds in his arm, but Steve ignores it in favor of crawling forwards, inching himself slowly towards the walkie that’s still crackling in between frequencies. A failed call singing into the night while he was dying.

Steve musters all his strength left and closes the gap, his hand shaking as it wraps around the hard plastic. With shaky fingers he wipes the muck of upside down goo and blades of grass from the dial. Steve turns it, hearing the awful crackling that has tormented him slowly morph into voices. Loud voices. Panicked voices. Welcomed voices.

“—Hello? Steve, do you—Fuck. I’ve been trying forever. Steve, do you copy? Steve, are you still there? This is... this is base, over. Steve?”

It’s Robin, stuttering her way through the comms. Steve smiles softly through the blood he tastes in his tongue.

“Yeah, I hear you, Robs,” he croaks out, giving in and laying on his back again. A chorus of voices ring from the speaker, and he hears Robin from the other line yelling at Hopper that he’s alive. That they could come get him.

“Hey, dingus,” she says again, laughing through her tears. “I knew something was wrong, asshole, so I’ve been calling you. I wouldn't say I told you so but I really did tell you so. You have so many promises to keep, yeah? One of them is my hair, and I really, really won’t forgive you if you leave me ugly like this Steve, so you better hold on and come back, okay? I’ll be waiting for you. I’m here.”

“Yeah, you are,” Steve whispers back, walkie slipping from his fingers. He stares at the sky one last time before closing his eyes, knowing that wherever he wakes up, Robin would be waiting for him just like she said she would be.