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Robin Buckley is a very observant person. She takes notice of everything. She used to find joy in it. It used to help her pass the time in boring old Hawkins. These days, it’s more for her safety than anything.
Whenever someone opened a door, whenever there was a weird noise, Robin noticed.
Whenever someone seemed off or out of the ordinary, she noticed.
So when Steve started shutting himself out, she noticed.
She and Steve were always touching. Holding hands, wrapping their arms around each other’s waists, anything to remind them that they were grounded and together. It was just an extra level of comfort and safety. A reminder that they were both still here.
Steve was pretty affectionate with everyone else, as well. Not quite like he’d been with Robin, but he was always patting the kids on the back, giving high fives, and a pat on the shoulder.
That stopped.
He stopped giving Erica a high five whenever he saw her. He stopped giving Dustin a pat on the back when he was needing encouragement. He even stopped hugging Robin when he picked her up from school.
She wanted to pry. She wanted to make him tell her why. She wanted to ask him what was wrong.
Robin knew she’d never get an answer out of him. So she let him pretend. She let him act like everything was normal.
Until it got worse. He stops inviting her over after work. He doesn’t drive her home or to school, and he doesn’t even talk to her at work anymore.
That’s when she decides she’s let this go on for too long. She decides to go to Nancy for help.
“Hello?” She asks on the phone. She dialed the Wheelers, but it might end up being Karen or Mike. “Nance?”
“Hey, Rob! What’s going on?” Nancy greets. Robin sighs a breath of relief, lucky to avoid the possible awkward conversation she’d have to have with the Wheelers.
Robin twirls the cord around her finger. “Have you noticed what’s been going on with Steve recently?” She asks, straight to the point.
“Yeah, he’s been weird. Probably just stress,” Nancy offers up.
Robin shakes her head, even though she knows Nancy can’t see her. “It’s not just stress, there’s no way. He won’t even talk to me.”
That seems to grab Nancy’s attention. “Wait, really?”
“Ooh, boyfriend drama!” A sing-songy voice teases.
“Mike, get off the phone!” Nancy shouts.
Robin buries her face in her hands and yells into the phone, “He’s not my boyfriend!” Nobody seems to believe her - especially not the kids - no matter how much she insists upon it. “Anyways, do you have any idea what’s going on with him? Did I do something?”
“I mean…” Nancy starts, with a heavy sigh. “He would always get like this when his parents came back around. But, never ‘not talking to me’ bad.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. He always tried to play it off like it was a coincidence or whatever, but… it happened way too much for it to just be a coincidence.” Robin thanks whatever Gods might exist for Nancy Wheeler.
“Okay, thanks, Nance.”
“Hey,” Nancy interrupts before she can hang up the phone. “Take care of him, alright?” Her voice, much softer than it had been before, comes through.
Robin nods again, even though Nancy still can’t see it. It makes her promise feel more real. As if she was holding out her pinky, making the most sacred oath she could. “Of course. Always.”
With that, they hang up.
Robin has never regretted putting off learning to drive more. She *could* drive, if need be - she’d done so before on the night of Starcourt’s explosion - but if she got caught her parents would never allow her out of the house again.
As fast as her rusted old bike would carry her, she made her way to Steve’s house. Robin had no plan going in of exactly how she was going to bring all of this up, but somehow, she was going to get him to talk to her.
Getting into Steve’s house wasn’t a problem for her. She’d snuck through his windows countless times before, each time with more ease than the last. The only challenge now was the one presented by the two cars in the driveway. One of which belonged to Steve, it was the car she was often driven to school and to work in. The other, presumably, belonged to his father.
The outsides of the cars were similar. Pristine, fancy looking (as far as Robin’s limited knowledge on cars could tell), and clean. The insides, however, could not be more different. The car that belonged to Steve’s dad had nothing inside it but a box of cigarettes and a pair of sunglasses that rested on the passenger’s seat - belonging to Steve’s mom, Robin guessed.
The inside of Steve’s car was much messier, but it looked like a car that someone actually drove, rather than one that had just been on display a few hours ago. His car was full of tapes that he and Robin listened to on their way to work or to school, a book that Dustin had left in the backseat the last time they drove him home, plastic green army men that Erica won at the arcade and left scattered around the car, spare batteries in the cupholder that Dustin had *insisted* on keeping there… things that have been sitting there for ages.
Robin took her thoughts away from the cars and now focused on how exactly she was going to sneak into Steve’s house without his parents noticing.
Ever the quick thinker, Robin opened the car door - Steve never locked them, a horrible move on his part but lucky for her - and took Steve’s name tag from the glove compartment. She could pull out her drama class acting skills and pretend he’d left it there and she was doing him a favor and returning it. He’d be able to call her out on it right away, but she’d already been in the house by the time he did that.
She walked up to the door and knocked. That was actually the first time she’d ever knocked on Steve’s door, oddly enough. She tended to have more… unconventional methods of getting into the house.
The door swung open and Robin was greeted by a woman who had to have been Steve’s mom. “Hello!” The woman said, a wide smile on her face.
“Uh, hi!” Robin waved awkwardly. “I’m Robin, I, uh, I work with Steve.”
“Oh, you poor thing.” She said in far too sympathetic of a tone.
She forced a laugh, “Oh, no, he’s great! I just… uh, he left his name tag at work the other day. So I figured I’d stop by and drop it off.” Robin held up the name tag as proof. “Is he here?” She prompted. There was no reason why he wouldn’t be.
Steve’s mom nods, suddenly disinterested. “He’s in his room, you can head up there and hand this to him. Thank you for stopping by, dear.”
Robin steps into the house and kicks off her shoes, an action which Steve’s mom shoots her a dirty look for. She heads up the stairs and tries to ignore it. If Robin were anyone else, she’d be lost walking through these hallways trying to figure out which room belongs to Steve. She’s almost disappointed in his mom for not having that foresight and telling her which way to go, even though she already knows.
She flings open the door and is met with a sad sight. Steve *is* in his room, just as his mother said, but he looks horrible. The room is silent and he should’ve noticed the creaking door opening, but he was still staring up at the ceiling, the smoke from the cigarette in his hand that dangled off the bed curling around.
Robin slowly makes her way over to him, taking the cigarette from his hand and putting it out on the ashtray on his nightstand. She sits on the bed next to him. “Steve.” She taps his side gently. “What’s going on with you?”
He doesn’t answer. She didn’t expect him to.
She also didn’t expect the world to melt away around her, leaving her sitting on nothing in an empty void.
Robin whips her head to the side when she hears a voice. It’s not one she recognizes. She walks closer, hoping to put a face to the voice and recognize it. The world melts in around her again, but she’s not in Steve’s room any more.
A counter forms, then a kitchen island, a fridge, cabinets, the walls, the floor. They materialize around her and the two figures who she’s only noticing now are Steve and his dad.
They can’t see her. She waves her hands in front of their faces, but they just continue on. Robin searches the rest of the kitchen to see if she can figure out when this is happening. It can’t be current, that’s all she knows.
It’s probably in the past, she concludes, maybe it’s not even real. She’s not even sure how she’s seeing this. But all she can do now is try and make sense of it.
Robin looks around the kitchen and finally finds something that gives her a hint. The calendar. It’s got their work schedule on it. This happened recently. She curses her past self for not crossing out the calendar as the month went on.
“You think just because we’re not here you get to destroy the house?” The gruff voice shouts. Robin snaps her attention back to the conversation going on.
“It’s not destroyed! The house is completely fine!” Steve yells back, gesturing around the kitchen as if to prove his dad wrong.
Smack! The slap echoes through the kitchen. “You do not talk back to me.” Steve had been stunned into silence. “That’s better. That’s how this works. I talk, and you listen. Got it?” Steve nods, glaring daggers at his father. “I said, got it?”
Steve closed his eyes and sighed, “Yes, sir.”
Robin startles awake, she's back in Steve’s room. “—obin! Robin, hello?”
“Steve?”
“You saw my memories?” Steve is no longer lying still on his bed, he’s up and pacing around his room.
She nods. “And I don’t like what I saw.” She gives him a look. Robin’s given him this same look time and time again, but she’s never kept it up long enough. This time, though, is different.
He knows exactly what it means. He’s always known, and she always lets him pretend. Robin sees through him. He doesn’t know what memory she saw, but it can’t have been anything good.
“What did you see?” He asks, cautiously as he sits back down on the bed next to her.
Robin gives him a sad look and reaches her hand up to his face. Shit.
The bruise is hardly visible. It had taken a while to start healing, but it’s faint now. Faint enough that it could only be seen if you’re close to it.
Steve leans back, trying to get far enough away from her that she can’t see it anymore. He pretends that it’ll stop her from ever having seen it in the first place. “Steve.” Her voice is cold. It doesn’t sound like her. “Tell me what happened.”
He inhales sharply. “You already know.” From the look on her face he already knows that’s not a good enough answer. He sits back upright and takes a deep breath. “I promise you, Robin, it’s not a big deal.”
Robin sighs, “You’re smoking again.” He hates when she’s blunt like this. “Didn’t we say we’d stop?”
He can’t look at her anymore. He chooses to focus on the laundry basket that’s been sitting there for days instead. “I’m sorry. I’ve just… I’ve been stressed.” His lies sound weak even to him.
“I’m not upset with you. You know that, right?” Robin asks. He can feel her eyes on him and manages a weak nod. “I’m really worried about you.” She gives him some time to process that, which he gratefully accepts.
After a lot of silence, he speaks up, “I’m sorry for worrying you.”
“How long has he been doing this?” The intensity in Robin’s voice scares him. It’s not directed towards him, but it’s just so unnerving to hear her so upset. “How long, Steve?”
He shrugs. “Whenever he’s home. So not often.” He laughs humorlessly. Robin doesn’t join him.
She stands up and speedwalks towards the door. Steve hardly has any time to realize what she’s doing before he can jump up after her and stop her from attacking his father. “Woah, woah, Robin, wait!” He manages to grab her arm. “Look, it’s really not that bad, I promise you.”
But as soon as Steve touched her arm, the world melted away around Robin once more.
There was nothing but complete darkness and a shaking figure on the ground. The figure, a person, is curled in on themself, sobbing. She takes a few cautious steps closer. It’s Steve again. Slightly younger looking this time. He must’ve been in high school in whatever time this memory took place in.
He’s clutching his arm, gritting his teeth. Robin kneels down next to him, trying to get a closer look. The same gruff voice she’s quickly grown to hate fades in. This time it’s accompanied by a much more shrill voice. Robin can’t make out exactly what they’re saying, but it seems to be an argument.
Memory-Steve sits up, grunting. He rubs his arm meaning Robin can now get a glimpse of it.
She is going to kill Richard Harrington.
“—lo? Robin?” Back in the real world, she and Steve are sitting on the rug in front of his bedroom door. Robin hates this rug. It’s a weird brown color and the material is so uncomfortable it makes her want to scream, but there are more important things going on. He looks away from her now that he knows she’s back. “What did you see?”
Robin takes a deep breath, an action she regretted as the smell of cigarette smoke filled her lungs. She takes a hold of Steve’s arm, the same one she’d seen him clutching, and rolls up his sleeve. There’s more than one scar now.
“Oh.”
Robin wants to scream, and this time it’s not because of the rug. “Anything else you want to tell me?”
Steve pulls his arm out of her grasp, rolling his sleeve back down and covering up the cigarette burns. “Robin. It’s really not a big deal. That’s just how he is.”
She’s not mad at him. Really, she’s not. She just wants him to stop pretending. “Steve, please. I get it, alright? I know it’s hard, and I know he’s still your dad despite everything, but this is not normal. It’s not okay.”
“I — I know that. God, Rob, do you not think I know that? I’m not stupid, Robin.” He sighs, exasperated. “I only have a little while until I move out, and then I’ll never have to deal with him again, okay?”
Robin rests her head in her hands. “You’re not stupid, I know you’re not, okay, I just… I care about you. You deserve to be treated better than this.” Her tone becomes less cold, and more like the Robin that Steve is used to.
“I know. And thank you for that. But I can handle it.”
“You shouldn’t have to.”
She’s right and he knows it. “…You shouldn’t either.”
Her jaw clenches and her whole body stiffens. “This isn’t about me.”
Steve stands up and offers her a hand. “It is, actually. This is about you and the superpowers that you apparently have now, how did we just gloss over that?”
Robin lets her pull him up and gives him a knowing look. “I know what you’re doing. I’m gonna let you get away with it for now because oh my God, is that what that was? Do I have superpowers? Why do I have superpowers? ” Robin looks down at her own hands in shock.
Steve racks his brain for any scenario that could lead to Robin spontaneously gaining superpowers. The only thing that was out of the ordinary was… “The Russians? If they knew about the gate… they might have known about El, too. What if they were trying to recreate that?”
Robin thinks for a moment, “What about you? They gave us the same thing, used the same syringe,” She shudders.
“I don’t have any superpowers, last I checked.” Steve shrugs. “It might not have worked on me,” He suggests, “You’re smaller, maybe that’s why.”
Robin snorts. “Yeah, you are so big and strong.” She teases. “Chances are you’ll find out accidentally, like I did.” Robin’s impressed with how well she’s taking this news. After everything she’s seen… It seems a little boring in comparison, but it’s still almost impossible to fathom. “But I don’t get it. Doesn’t El move stuff with her mind? Why am I seeing memories?”
Steve hums and takes some time to think. “She — I’ve heard about this… place in her mind. It’s a black void, like you said, and she can use it to find people. And I think she can see memories, too. Can you make stuff float?”
Robin shakes her head, “I don’t think so. I didn’t even know I could do… whatever it is that I can do until just now.”
Steve crosses his arms. “I think you should try.” He searches around his room and eventually procures a piece of paper. He sets it down in front of Robin. “Just… try and crumple it or lift it. Or something.”
She rolls her eyes but gives in. She feels ridiculous and doesn’t really know what she’s doing. She glares at the paper and tries to envision it crumpling. She closes her eyes and focuses all her energy onto crumpling the paper.
Robin is almost convinced that Steve is messing with her when she hears the sound of paper crinkling followed by Steve’s gasp. Her eyes shoot open and she realizes he’s been sitting on his bed the whole time. “Holy shit. Robin, you have superpowers. Holy shit !”
A grin forms on Robin’s face. She chucks the wad of paper at Steve with her mind. “Oh, you are gonna get so sick of me.” She grins, mischievously.
“I could never get sick of you.” Steve promises, far too sappy for someone who just got a ball of paper thrown at them moments earlier.
Robin doesn’t know how to handle the amount of affection in his voice, nor does she know how to handle his words and everything that she means, so she clears her throat and tosses the name tag she stole from his car at him. She gasps, “Breaking into your house just got so much easier.”
He buries his face in his hands. “Oh my God,” He chuckles, Robin joining him soon after before all but devolving into giggles.
Robin finds another piece of paper and floats it over to Steve ‘accidentally’ hitting him with it on the way. “Your turn.” She grins evilly.
He sighs and sets the paper down next to him on the bed. “Okay, this feels ridiculous.”
“Yup.” Robin nods. “Just imagine what it would look like crumpled up, and focus on the paper and nothing else.” She watches the paper intently, doing her best not to accidentally crumple the paper for him.
“Robin, I feel stupid,” He complains.
“You are stupid, now focus!”
He gives her an over dramatic sigh but goes back to focusing on the paper. After a bit of time, which was probably spent feeling ridiculous on his part, he finally manages to crumple the paper into a ball. Robin applauds. “Holy shit. Did you do that?” He immediately accuses.
“That was all you.” She says. He squints at her, then at the paper. “C’mon, try again!” Robin insists.
He rolls his eyes and looks at the paper once more, guiding it with his eyes, eventually chucking it at Robin.
She laughs, “Oh, this is gonna be so fun.”
Steve Harrington and Robin Buckley have superpowers. It’s not the weirdest thing they’ve experienced in the past six months.
Robin had never been completely unaware about the odd happenings in Hawkins, but she hadn’t truly been involved until last summer when she picked up a job at Scoops Ahoy, and the rest was history.
Still, in a world where flesh monsters and evil Russians exist, superpowers aren’t the most out of the ordinary thing that Robin’s seen.
Upon their discovery, their initial plan was to ask El about it. But what were the chances El, now powerless, could explain what was happening to them?
So they took it into their own hands and decided to sneak into their local landfill. Robin was doing nothing but protesting, going on and on about tetanus and ringworms and other diseases Steve couldn’t bother to remember. He tuned her out and turned the radio up.
“Steve, this is a terrible idea!” Robin shouts, the moment Steve turns off the car.
“Robin, this is an amazing idea!” He yells back in the same tone. Robin is not impressed.
“No, it’s not!” She insists, even as she’s dragged into the landfill. “What if someone sees us? What if you get tetanus and die? What if we get a ringworm and die? What if we get bitten by rats—?”
“And die.” He interrupts. “Yeah, you mentioned that. And none of that stuff is going to happen, okay? We’ll be fine.” Steve promises. Robin pouts, she clearly doesn’t agree, but she’s keeping her protesting to herself.
Steve finds them a clearing, Robin begrudgingly following behind. Robin finds the lightest looking object she can find, a tin can, and chucks it at Steve. “If you got cut by that, you would die.”
“Yeah, whatever. Now, find the heaviest thing that you can and try and lift it.” Robin sighs but starts looking anyway, careful not to cut herself on any objects or pick up anything that potentially carried diseases or had rats inside them.
“Jackpot! Broken kettlebell!” Robin exclaims. She falls silent after that as she begins her attempt to lift the handle-less kettlebell. It floats into the air with ease, shooting up far higher than she meant for it to go. She then tries to reduce her focus on the kettlebell in specific, imagining herself turning down a dial until the weight drops.
It’s an interesting sensation, a sensation that she doesn’t have complete control over quite yet. It feels like her brain is vibrating when she focuses on the act of making an object move. Honestly, Robin finds it pretty uncomfortable and hopes she won’t have to use it much. “Jesus Christ, Rob, be careful with that thing!”
“Oh, don’t worry Robin, we’ll be fine!” She mocks with an eye roll, slamming the weight to the ground. “Just be careful, dingus.” Robin sighs exasperatedly.
“Robin,” He says, a suddenly serious tone in his voice, “We are going to be fine. I promise, I’m not gonna let rats bite you, or whatever else you’re worried about.” Steve sticks out his pinky. Robin rolls her eyes and pretends to be annoyed but interlocks her pinky with his anyway, feeling somewhat comforted by the action and his words.
She nods. “Yeah. We’ve got superpowers to protect us now. Speaking of which,” she lifts the kettlebell once more, “we should figure out our limits so that in the case that we need to fight again, we know what they are.” The prospect of fighting is not a thrilling one, that much is shared amongst the two, but having more ways to protect themselves and each other is indeed appealing.
“If we find any rats, I’ll let you practice fighting on them.” Steve offers, shrugging. Robin snorts. “Seriously though, we do need to practice fighting on something .” Robin scours the landfill for anything she deems worthy of practicing their newfound abilities on, Steve takes that as his cue to do the same. “We could always practice on each other, but I don’t want to hurt you.”
Robin turns back to him, an amused expression on her face. “Yeah, you’re so strong, better not practice with frail, old me.”
“That’s not what I mean and you know that.” He crosses his arms. Robin’s smirk tells him she’s more than aware and just enjoys twisting his words. He rolls his eyes and snacks her shoulder, not hard enough for it to actually hurt but hard enough for her to get away with whining about it.
“I feel like there’s much better ways for us to go about this. Ways that don’t involve us getting bitten by rabid rats or dying of tetanus.” Robin reminds him once more, much to Steve’s annoyance.
“Alright, then. Enlighten me, Buckley.” He says, with so much sass that Robin cannot wait to prove him wrong.
“First of all, this was a stupid idea from the start. If someone else walks in here, for God knows what reason, and they see us lifting shit with our minds, they’ll call the cops. And that might’ve ended up okay if Hopper was still --” Alive. “A cop, but he’s not, so whoever gets sent out here will probably call an exorcist. And while that’s a fantastic film, I’d rather not be a part of it! Second, this place is so filthy I actually feel sick. This is not somewhere we should be testing how well we can fight because we could die.” She emphasizes for what she feels is the millionth time. “It would be so much easier to have Nancy teach us how to shoot guns than to mess around with whatever happened to us and potentially get ourselves caught or severely injured! I agree, we should still learn to use whatever powers we now have, but this really isn’t the place to do it.” Robin’s starting to calm down now, and makes sure to add, “It’s great that you’re thinking ahead just in case something else happens, but I feel like you overlooked a lot of risks here, and there are much safer ways we could go about this.”
He raises his eyebrows. “Number one, I’m seriously impressed you managed to do that all in one breath,” Robin gives herself a literal pat on the back, “and number two, you’re right.”
She shrugs. “I usually am.”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself.” Steve warns her. “We could find somewhere better,” he admits, “and learning to shoot wouldn’t be a terrible idea, but I’m not a fan of the thought of you with a gun.” Robin grins. “Yeah, alright. Let’s take a rain check and figure out something safer.”
Robin sighs like a great weight has just been lifted off her shoulders - and that has nothing to do with the kettlebell she just stopped holding onto. For Steve’s sake, she resists the urge to say ‘I told you so.’
Thank God for Nancy Wheeler. The pair of now superpowered teens went to her straight after they left the landfill, explaining (and showing off) their new abilities. She was probably the only person who wouldn’t completely freak out about it. Nancy barely even raised an eyebrow when they’d mentioned the drugs the Russians had given them.
She went straight into action mode. Robin really appreciates that about her. Nancy is the furthest thing from indecisive, something Robin admires.
Robin also enjoyed the fact that Nancy sided with her on the landfill argument, mentioning her own experience with rabid rats only months prior. That alone caused Robin to stick her tongue out at Steve while Nancy’s not looking.
They’d been given a resounding ‘No.’ when they asked Nancy to teach them how to use guns, she’d muttered something about them losing an eye.
She did, however, offer to set up some targets for them to work on the accuracy of their powers with, which they greatly accepted.
Nancy, and the goggles she insisted on wearing whilst being around them and sharp objects, stood a few feet away from them as they prepared to start throwing things. They’d ransacked Nancy’s house and backyard for small objects to toss — and of course made sure no one would miss them. Steve and Robin had split the pile of rocks, little figures that Mike hadn’t touched in years, toys from when Holly was younger than she is now, and old mugs that no one would mind not having anymore.
“Alright, take it slow and easy!” Nancy yells to make sure they’d both hear it. She’s started suspecting that Steve’s hearing might be worse due to how many hits he’d taken to the head in recent years. “And one at a time, please and thank you.”
“Ladies first,” Robin teases, waiting for Steve to begin. He rolls his eyes but starts anyway, choosing a nice, flat rock to chuck at the impromptu target Nancy made them. The accuracy was nothing special, but nothing horrible either. Definitely not something he couldn’t improve upon. “My turn.” Robin grins, far too thrilled at the prospect of chucking objects at a target as hard as she can. Her mug shatters against the target. A couple pieces stick in, but that doesn’t tell them much about the accuracy of her throw.
“Maybe break them before you throw them next time.” Nancy suggests, scribbling something down in the notebook she insisted on bringing out. Robin gives her a thumbs up, and Steve is already throwing the next object. It looks like it’s going to hit closer to the center, but it bounces off. Not enough force. “Do you guys get nosebleeds when you do this?” Nancy asks when she looks up from her notebook.
Robin touches a hand to her nose. It comes back clean, so she shrugs and shakes her head. Nancy hums, noting that down, too. Maybe the Russians had tried to avoid side effects like that. And it had worked, evidently.
It was all going swimmingly, until Nancy heard a pained shriek. She whips her head up from her notebook and sees Robin on the ground, curled into herself, hand tightly gripping her arm. “Shit!” Steve rushes over to her, Nancy following soon after. “Oh, Robin,” he gently takes her hand away from her arm and reveals a deep cut bleeding profusely. “Shit, Robin, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“Jesus, what happened?” Nancy asks. She tries to lighten the mood by saying, “I look away for one second and now Robin’s bleeding!” She thinks she hears Robin laugh a little bit, but the joke didn’t do much else.
Steve hovers his hand around Robin’s arm, too scared to accidentally hurt her more by touching it. “I’m sorry! Shit, oh my God, Robin, I’m so sorry!”
Robin hisses as Steve puts pressure on it, “He whipped one of the shards at the target but it hit my arm instead,” She manages to get out.
“I’m so sorry Rob, I didn’t mean to, I promise.” Nancy’s taken over, searching for any little pieces of glass that might’ve broken off in Robin’s arm. Thankfully, she doesn’t find any.
“Let’s get you inside, okay?” Robin’s doing a great job handling this, she still hasn’t cried, although Nancy thinks the adrenaline still might be helping her avoid the pain. “Steve, you go grab a cloth, some soap, and some water, I’m gonna go sit her down on the couch.” Nancy instructs, and Steve heads off quickly to do as she said. He didn’t even make a snarky comment, which told Nancy a lot about how worried he was and how awful he felt about hurting Robin.
Robin’s biting her lips trying to stay quiet, probably not trying to annoy anyone. “It’s okay,” Nancy promises while she sits Robin down, keeping her grip on her arm. “You’re gonna be okay, we’ve got you.”
Robin nods, face all scrunched up like she’s trying to keep her tears at bay. As soon as Steve makes it to the living room with everything Nancy requested, they head to work. Steve grabs Robin’s other hand, shrugging her off even when she mentions her hand is all bloody. Once Nancy has stopped the bleeding, she cleans off the wound and sanitizes it, having Steve rush off once more to grab a bandage that’ll fit a cut that big.
“You’re doing really well, Robin.” She praises, squeezing Robin’s hand now that Steve is gone. “It’s almost over. Just gotta get you all bandaged up and you’ll be back to flinging things at Steve in no time.” That gets a smile out of Robin, even though it’s a weak one, it’s progress. Nancy has a feeling that blood, especially her own, freaks Robin out a lot. “How long does it take him to find a bandage?” She teases, trying to distract Robin, whose eyes are intensely focused on the cut on her arm.
Teasing Steve seems to be a cure-all since Robin looks up and breaks into a soft smile. “He is such a dingus.” This startles a laugh out of Nancy, who apparently had never heard Robin refer to Steve as such. “What? He is!” She defends herself, a wider smile now on her face.
“You two are cute,” Nancy smiles, recovering from her unexpected laughing fit. She tilts her head when Robin fakes a gag.
“Steve and I aren’t dating,” Robin giggles as if the concept itself is absurd. “We’re just friends.” She’s gotten so used to repeating that sentence and it rolls off her tongue easily.
Nancy hums, obviously suspicious, but if they don’t want to be public about it, she won’t push the topic. “Either way, he should be back by now.” Nancy comes to a dreadful realization. “Unless my parents saw him and are currently interrogating him.” She rolls her eyes, praying for the less uncomfortable option. “Oh! How is he? I’m assuming better because you’re both hanging out?”
Robin nods, “He’s… deflecting, as usual. It’s got to do with his parents, like you said. But then we found out about the superpowers and got super distracted,” She admits, seeming almost ashamed. Nancy can’t say she blames them, it seemed like randomly appearing superpowers would take precedence over their other discussion. “I’m gonna get him to talk about it when we’re, y’know, done with this.” She gestures to her arm.
“Good, good.” Nancy’s feelings about Steve are nothing short of complicated. She doesn’t hate him. She knows they weren’t right for each other, and they were both going through a lot while they were dating and when they were broken up. But seeing how much he’s changed and grown, she can’t find it in herself to hate him. “I’m really glad he has you.”
Robin smiles fondly, “I’m glad I have him, too.” She lowered her voice like she knew Steve was nearby and she didn’t want him to hear. Sure enough, he walked back into the living room, bandages in hand.
“Okay, Rob,” Steve kneels down in front of the couch. “God, I’m so sorry,” He says when presented with the sight of Robin’s injury. Nancy lets him take over, hoping to help him get over his guilt about injuring Robin. “Shit, Rob, I’m so sorry. I’ll be more careful, I promise, fuck.”
Robin laughs quietly, “Calm down, you sound like me.” She says, patting his shoulder with her hand, covered in dried blood. “I’m okay,” she reassures him, “it doesn’t even hurt that much anymore, I promise.”
Before he can apologize even more, the trio all quickly recognize the fact that Robin’s wound is healing at a rapid pace. “Uh… Robin? Is that another one of your superpowers we didn’t know about?” Nancy asks, observing the wound seemingly healing itself.
Steve looks down at his own arm, in the exact same place where Robin’s cut had been only moments before. It looks the same as hers, just scabbed over and clearly not painful by Steve’s nonchalant reaction. “...Did I do that?” Steve asks, studying his own arm and glaring at it like it’ll speak up and explain everything.
Robin moves her newly healed arm around, finding that she’s feeling no residual pain. “Holy shit, Steve, can you heal people? That’s so cool!”
“Maybe,” he says, looking down at his hands. “Uh, I guess we’ll test it if you get hurt again. Which hopefully won’t happen for a while.”
Steve Harrington and Robin Buckley had superpowers. It was, still, not the weirdest thing they’ve experienced in the past six months.