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It’s cold outside.
Cold enough that even the warm rush of alcohol can’t blanket the bone-deep chill that’s settled in Steve’s bones. Cold enough with the comforter spread haphazardly across his lap, and colder still where he pulls it off to wrap around Robin’s shaking shoulders.
He takes another sip of bourbon. The good shit, Robin had called it as she giggled into her palm and watched Steve pick the lock on the cabinet in his father’s study. It’s not like he’ll know it’s missing— not like he’d mourn the loss even if he did.
He probably wouldn’t even yell at Steve for stealing it, or for breaking into the cabinet in the first place. Steve can’t remember the last time his father cared enough to be mad at him.
The stars are bright and bold where they burn holes in the night sky, and Robin’s head feels light on his shoulder. He sinks into it, tilts his head so his cheek is resting against her scalp. He takes a long, deep breath in.
“Do you think you’ll miss it?” Steve asks, feeling the bitter way his tongue wraps around the words. They taste sour as they leave his mouth, and all at once he wants to swallow them back down and throw the rest of them up, find some way to rid his body of both the question and the reason for asking.
Robin’s head shakes a little as she lets out a deep breath, her hands coming up to uselessly motion at everything and nothing before settling back down in her lap. Her nails are painted, a pretty deep purple that’s chipped along the edges where she picked at them— a nervous habit that she could never quite shake, even when she took to holding Steve’s hands instead.
She’s not holding them now, and Steve wishes she was. They’re cold.
“I don’t know,” she responds, voice quiet yet sharp in the otherwise silent night.
The hum of crickets and nightlife that Steve has come to expect is unusually absent tonight. Almost like the world is making room for them, for Steve and Robin, to exist in this moment. Cutting a hole in the fabric of time itself so that they can take up as much space as they need to, as much space as they want to. Then it can be sewn back up with this night weaved into the design, so that even if their minds forget, the world will remember the way they sat together.
“It’s—” she lifts her hands once more, dropping them with a huffing sound that Steve knows to mean she’s exasperated. Unable to say what she wants to, made worse by the liquor staining her tongue, tinting all her words brown.
“A lot,” Steve finishes in that way he only can with Robin. That way that he fears would come across as douchey to anyone else, but that he knows Robin knows to mean understanding. Knows it because she feels it, deep down, where truth serum and a fear of needles connect them in cosmic comprehension.
“A lot,” she repeats, digging her head further into Steve’s shoulder before lifting it and tilting her chin up. Steve turns to watch her watch the stars.
“I think—” she starts, taking a deep breath. She pulls her knees up to her chest, wraps her arms around them and holds herself at the elbows. The blanket slides off her shoulder a bit, so Steve reaches to put it back in place. His hand shakes.
“I think I will and I won’t. I’ll miss this,” she says, smiling sadly. Her eyes are sparkling in the reflection of the stars, shining in the bright light of the nearly-full moon. She meets its gaze with a steadiness that Steve is only recently starting to see in her, and he’s glad that if anything, this will be how he remembers her. What he sees when he pictures her years down the line.
“I’ll miss you,” she finishes, and Steve’s throat burns.
He reaches over to grab her hand, and it’s awkward with the way it’s wrapped so tightly around her kneecap. But he just spreads his fingers over hers, and it’s not perfect, and it doesn’t matter. He feels warmer at the touch immediately.
“I’ll miss you too, birdie. You know that.”
She smiles again, doesn’t meet his eyes. Keeps staring at the sky like it’ll tell her something if she looks long enough.
So Steve looks too. Follows the trail of her gaze until his neck is craned all the way back, their hands and hearts connected on the roof of his house.
He doesn’t know what she sees up there that has her looking so enthralled. Maybe it’s some long-lost distant star she’s meant to follow, to spend her life searching for. One that only she can see, because only she is looking.
Maybe he’s not supposed to know.
Maybe searching is only for people who believe they have something to find.
“I don’t know if I’ll miss Hawkins,” she says on a laugh, and he follows suit. It’s louder than it should be, given the silence around them and the thickness of the tension that rests upon their shoulders. But he’s a little drunk and a lot sad, and his best friend is leaving for college when the sun comes up, and he thinks he’s allowed to take up a little more space than usual.
“Can’t imagine why you would,” he says, and he both means it and doesn’t.
Robin understands. Of course she does.
She understands the nuances and intricacies of every sentence he speaks, even if he doesn’t himself. She can read between the lines of the novels he writes in soft-spoken vents and loudly-voiced rants. She can pick apart his silences like plucking a harp, write out all the notes to a song he didn’t know he was singing, play it back for him and make it sound like music.
She gets him better than anyone Steve has ever known.
Which is why, when she continues, she says exactly what Steve was thinking.
“I mean, there’s a lot to miss, even if it’s not all good.” She doesn’t see Steve nodding along, but she continues like she does. “I don’t know why I feel like I’m gonna miss something that was so bad, but…”
Robin shakes her head out in the way she does when she’s overwhelmed. She describes it as a hard reset— like she’s pressing the on/off switch in her brain for three seconds and forcing it to reboot.
“Like, I hated it when it was happening. Everything. The tunnels, being in the Upside Down, Eddie…” She shivers as she says his name, and Steve knows it’s not from the cold.
He didn’t die, but it was a near thing. The way he cried out for Dustin, there, at the almost-end, is something none of them will ever be able to forget. The intonation of his voice scratches at Steve’s throat still, as though he were the one to choke the word out through a mouthful of his own blood.
And that very blood stained Steve’s skin as it did his memories. The dark red sat on his flesh for so long that it dried there, for so long that it seeped into the pores, mingled and meshed with his own bloodstream.
Sometimes, Steve wonders if his body mistook any of it for his own. If it felt the shape of Eddie’s platelets through layers of fat and tissue and sucked them right up, drained them of all their oxygen and used them to nourish another step, another breath that Steve took that night— that Eddie didn’t.
If Steve’s body took part in the decaying of Eddie’s. If Eddie might be stronger, now, had Steve not been so innately, inexorably, cellularly selfish.
Sometimes, Steve wonders if they would have died within him, if Eddie did. If, one minute, his body would exist in an undeserved homeostasis, unaware of the life being stolen with every pump of blood that didn’t belong to him, and the next, it would just… stop.
If it would give up, die somewhere inside of arteries it did not recognize, rest in permanence in the hollow grave of Steve’s body.
Steve would have let it, he thinks. He would have given up that space within him to Eddie, if he could.
If it meant remembering him.
If it meant keeping even a small part of him alive, since his own body could no longer do it for him.
But he didn’t need to. Not then, anyway.
And it’s for this reason that Robin says his name like that. With the dread of someone who had to watch her friend die before he could be brought back to life, with the dread that comes with the knowledge that it wasn’t the first time, and likely wouldn’t be the last.
She continues, bringing Steve back from the edge of the cliff he had walked himself toward. She does that a lot, he thinks, and all at once he feels both immeasurably grateful and decidedly unworthy of it. Wonders how he’ll ever learn to do it himself.
“I hated it,” Robin continues, her voice small. She moves her hand from her knee and laces her fingers with Steve’s, letting their hands hang between them. He squeezes once, and she squeezes back.
“But… it’s familiar, I guess. Even if it was torture. Something about a familiar hell being better than an unfamiliar heaven, you know?”
Steve smiles bitterly. It’s interesting, the way his body reacts to the memories of his childhood with what others might perceive as happiness. Almost like it was born, bred, and beat into him to approach even the darkest of situations with a palatable attitude.
“I do know,” he says. He doesn’t need to elaborate. Not for Robin.
Finally, she turns to look at him. Meets his weak smile with her own— a watery, blurry thing that doesn’t reach her eyes. “Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
She takes a deep breath, closing her eyes. Steve watches her chest expand with it, imagines her diaphragm contracting and pulling the air around her into her lungs. Steve wishes, for a moment, that he could be part of that orbit. Sucked into the space between her ribs, forced to converge with her alveoli until he, too, becomes a part of the effort to keep her alive.
He smiles as she exhales. Feels a part of himself loosen up at the sight, and all at once realizes that he is a part of her, whether he wants to be or not.
(He does. He always will.)
“Other things’ll become familiar, Rob. You don’t have to get used to torture just because it’s the only thing you know,” he says, voice strained. His throat and eyes burn in tandem, and he knows it’s not from the bourbon. He takes another swig, still, just to say that it is.
“You’re one to talk,” she says lightheartedly, knocking her knee in Steve’s direction. He snorts a little, even though nothing is funny.
“Yeah, well,” he starts. “I’m not like you, so.”
Steve knows without looking that her eyebrows are furrowed in that telltale way when she’s annoyed at something, or when she can’t solve a puzzle. It never lasts long, of course, because there’s no code on this planet or another that Robin Buckley can’t crack.
“That’s bullshit, Steve,” she says, her voice suddenly sharp. She grabs the bottle from him and brings it to her lips, wincing as she swallows. She wipes her mouth with the hand still holding Steve’s. “And you know it.”
Steve shrugs. He doesn’t, and she knows that.
“I’m just not meant for college like you are. It’s fine, you know I’ll find something to do. But it’s true.”
She rolls her eyes, tilting the bottle toward him as though to poke a finger at his chest. “Steve Harrington,” she starts, “you are the smartest guy I know. And the dumbest thing you’ll ever do is refuse to believe that.”
Steve laughs as soon as she says it, if only because the words sound funny coming out of her mouth. And then his laughter turns into something else, something sadder. Something born from deep within him, where his lungs know the shape of Eddie’s breath and his wrists know the feeling of Robin’s tied to them.
And then he’s crying without really putting much effort into it, silent tears falling as he lets out the last breath of laughter. He wipes them with the hand still intertwined with Robin’s, and she brings her free hand, fingers wrapped around the bourbon, to catch the ones he misses.
He finds his breath, voice hitching as he tries to speak through the thick sadness threatening to choke him from the inside out. “Robin Buckley,” he starts, taking the bottle from her hand and intertwining his fingers with hers, “you are the smartest person I have ever met, and ever will meet. And it…” he takes a deep breath, feeling more tears warming his cheeks, “it is an honor to know you.”
He decidedly doesn’t say “was.”
(He doesn’t, because there will never be a time that it isn’t true. There will never be a time that he speaks of his love for Robin in the past tense, because he will love Robin as long as he’s alive. And even in death, he thinks, he’ll still find a way to.)
She meets his gaze, eyes shining as bright as the stars above them, and brighter as they fill with tears and reflect the light of the world. The city, the moon, it all pales in comparison to the light that lives within his best friend. The light that he is lucky enough to have seen with his own eyes, that he has felt warming his skin as he grew under it, within it, because of it, blossoming and blooming like a plant in photosynthesis.
“I love you, Steve,” she says, taking their hands and pressing them awkwardly against his face.
And it’s funny, hearing her say that. Knowing that there was a time, not long ago but so far from where they are now, that he used to dream about her saying this to him. About her saying it, and meaning it, in an entirely different way than she does now.
And it’s better, he thinks. Better that he’s loved by her in the way she can love him.
He’s better for it. Better knowing what it feels like to be loved by Robin Buckley.
“I love you, Robs.”
They’re quiet, then, breathing in each other’s exhaled air and exchanging it with their own. It would be romantic, if it was 1985. If Steve hadn’t yet known the feeling of taking a punch by a man trained to throw them. If Steve was still a puppet of a person, too big for the body he was born into yet too small to try to crawl out of it.
But it’s not, of course. It’s 1987, and he still sees the swirls of the Starcourt ceiling when he closes his eyes. It’s 1987, and he still cries when Back To The Future comes on.
It’s 1987, and his best friend is leaving for college in the morning.
He looks up at the stars again, bringing Robin’s hands and therefore her gaze with him. The sky is glittering with them, little clusters of white in such large quantities that it feels impossible to try to distinguish one from another.
If he focuses on one spot for long enough, he can see that they’re all moving. Just barely, but they are. Vibrating, it seems, in their stationary spot in the sky.
Steve realizes, then, just how similar they are.
Steve, like the stars, is locked in one spot for the rest of time. Vibrating in his place, feet glued to the ground where his body will be laid to rest.
Born to die in Hawkins, Indiana.
His gravestone is already picked out, sprayed down each week to keep it fresh. His epitaph already etched into the marble.
He doesn’t know what it says, but it doesn’t matter. It’s not for him.
And then there’s Robin. Unable to stay still and unwilling to even if she was.
She’s not like Steve. Not meant to stay in one place for too long, lest she burn out bold and bright and leave a hole in the place of her absence. An irreparable supernova.
Shooting stars, Steve thinks, make a sky worth looking at.
They’re a rare thing, and that’s what makes them so special. If you look up at the right place, at the right time, and only if you’re meant to— you’ll see one. It will cross your path for no more than a second, but if you’re lucky, you’ll see it.
If you’re lucky, it will change your life.
He wonders just how many people might look up at the same time, the right time, and see that very same star. Wish for the very same thing.
He wonders just how many people get what they ask for.
Steve’s only seen one shooting star in his life, but he thinks it’s enough.
When it’s Robin, the star and the wish and the person he knows he’ll love more than anyone else he ever meets, it’s enough.
And it’s beautiful, to witness so much life in one person. To see her for who she is and who she’ll become, to wonder just how many people she’s going to change. How many people will be made better for knowing her, like Steve was.
How many people will be made worse for losing her, like Steve will be.
But that’s unfair, to put such a weight on her when all she’s doing is taking care of herself. Which is exactly what Steve wants her to do, exactly what she deserves to do.
It still hurts.
Steve lets himself have that.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do without you,” he whispers, their hands still tangled together over his flushed face. The cold air nips at their fingertips, and Robin’s blanket falls off her shoulder again, but neither of them move.
“You’re going to be fine,” she promises, tightening her fingers around his. “I’m still gonna be right here.” She moves one of their paired hands to rest on his chest, just over his heart. He feels it beating and hopes she does too. Hopes she hears it in the background of every song she ever listens to.
Steve places his own hand over hers, smiling to himself when it takes up the whole thing and leaves room for more. They fit so well together, is the thing, and Steve might not do puzzles like Robin does, but he knows that pieces don’t usually have more than one match.
“And you have the others,” she continues, pressing her fingers into Steve’s t-shirt. Blood rushes to his skin in search of the threat, but it retreats upon recognizing the shape of her touch. Steve spares a moment to wonder, nonsensically, if some of Eddie’s blood cells were at the frontlines, ready to fight for him the way he did them.
“I know,” he murmurs. “‘S not the same.”
“I know.”
They’re quiet, again, and Steve feels a chill run through him that he knows has nothing to do with the autumn air.
Robin is the only person Steve’s ever felt comfortable sitting in silence with. Never felt like he had to entertain her in order to keep her around, as though his presence alone wasn’t the reason she stayed. As though every interaction was a transaction, and he had to ensure his business partner got what they paid for.
He still doesn’t feel that way now, and yet. Yet, the silence that builds between them is thick and suffocating, and Steve doesn’t know if he can stand to take another breath of it. Feels the urge to fill it with something else, something that keeps the stars in the sky and the night suspended on a tightwire of time.
As though the sun will hold off on rising so long as they still have something to talk about. Something important, something that will keep them here. Keep her here.
He opens his mouth to speak, to fill that silence with something good, something that will make her stay, and the only thing that comes out is:
“You changed my life, Robs.”
And there’s a lot of ways that someone could respond to that. They could say “thank you.” They could be shy and cordial about it. They could scoff it off as though the mere idea is something unworthy of being heard.
Or they could be Robin Buckley.
Robin says exactly what Steve knew she would, and it’s exactly why he fell in love with her in the first place. Why he let himself utter the words, let alone even believe them, when he knows the devastation their truth will cause.
“I know,” she says again. Her finger twitches where it sits over Steve’s chest, and he feels it both over his heart and under his hand. Feels it somewhere within him, too, like every cell in his body is somehow connected to hers. “You changed mine.”
A year ago, Steve would have chosen one of the other options. He would have laughed out loud at the mere prospect that he had any near as much of an impact on Robin as she did on him. Even now, the idea feels impossible.
But tonight, all Steve does is smile. Look at the stars, at the sky, and then back down at his girl. His shooting star.
“I know,” he repeats.
And then it’s quiet again. A half-empty bottle of bourbon sits between them, where their knees are touching and their hands are pressed together against the echoing beats of Steve’s heart, and the sky is glittering and Robin’s eyes are bright and full of hope and Steve loves her.
He loves her.
She pulls back after nearly a minute, turning to face the town she will no longer be forced to call home. She’ll get to choose, now, where she wants to be, the way she and Steve chose to call each other family. The way Steve will choose to tell his children about her, about his sister, even if she’s not around to do it with him.
Robin wraps her arms around her knees once more, and Steve stretches his legs out to hang over the edge of the roof. They dangle heavily in the open air, and Steve thinks for a moment that he wouldn’t have been able to do this, to be up here without fear, before the Upside Down. He wonders if it was the monsters or the girl sitting next to him that made him brave.
The silence stretches on for an immeasurable amount of time, and for however long it is, the world seems still. Steve silently thanks the universe for making an exception in the space-time continuum for them, for prolonging the rise of the sun so they can have this moment. One more time, one more night, before a new day, a new life, comes. Whether they want it to or not.
“Hey,” Robin says, breaking them from their silence. The moon’s light seems to waver as she speaks. “Wouldn’t it be funny if this was the last night we talked to each other?”
Steve looks at her. Opens his mouth, closes it. Turns toward Hawkins and looks up at the sky.
He doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t know what to feel.
(The honest truth, though, is that he does.)
Because this isn’t the first time the thought has crossed his mind. Isn’t the first time he’s stayed up with the stars and thought about what might happen when this day finally came, when Robin took control of her life and stopped living for anyone other than herself.
He knows exactly what he’s thinking, what he’s feeling, and he wants to say it all. Wants to open his mouth and let the words fall out of him like liquor-tinged bile, wants to heave and spit until his parent’s roof is stained with all the gross, sad things that live within him, until it’s all out in the open for Robin and the stars and the sky to see. Wants to throw up until he can’t taste Eddie’s blood anymore.
He wants to say that he thinks that would be worse than all of it. Than the Russians, the Upside Down, the drained pool in his backyard. He wants to say that he thinks he’d mourn it more than everyone they’ve lost, and that it hurts too much to care about how selfish that is.
What he wants to say least of all, though, is what he fears the most. Feels the most.
The inexorable, inescapable truth that is: Steve doesn’t know if they will survive it. Worse, he doesn’t know if they’re meant to.
He is scared, terrified, crouched in the corner hiding from reality like a little boy afraid of the dark, that they weren’t meant to be friends outside of this rotten town. That their love for each other only blossomed because of the monsters who worked so hard to tend to it, and that, like trees that are uprooted from their homes and forced into an environment they don’t recognize, it can only survive where it was planted. That it wasn’t meant to live anywhere other than here, where it could be nurtured, nourished, with shared memories and shared scars and nightmares that only they understand.
Steve is scared that they only became what they are because of what they experienced. That, when Robin leaves, it will be left here to die in the only place it was able to live.
Just like Steve.
He thinks about it. The possibility, the reality.
Thinks about phone calls that get shorter and shorter, daily check-ins turning into weekly catch-ups turning into monthly missed messages.
Thinks about all the people Robin will meet, how none of them will be like him, how that’s both good and bad. How they won’t know how to hold her when she wakes up from nightmares, how maybe she won’t get them once she leaves the place they were born in.
He thinks about how he will never find someone like her again. How he’s going to have to learn to live with the presence of her absence, the way he has with every other person he’s ever loved.
He thinks about the stars, and how they look the same no matter where you are in the world.
He thinks about a lot of things.
He says none of them.
“Yeah. Funny.”
And Robin turns her head, catches his gaze, and gives him a crooked smile before she bursts out laughing. So Steve laughs with her, because that’s what he’s supposed to do, what she wants him to do. Because it’s funny, to her. The idea that they could ever not be the people they are now.
And Steve’s looking at her, and watching her laugh, watching her light up the sky brighter than the stars or the moon or the sun that’s yet to rise.
He’s looking at her, and he’s not looking up, and so he doesn’t see.
He doesn’t see the shooting star that flies above him, that stays around a little longer in the hopes that he might catch it in time. Might be able to cheat fate and get lucky one more time.
He doesn’t see it, even though he looks up a moment later, because they never stay for longer than a second.
Right place, right time.
Only if you’re meant to.
And because he doesn’t see it, he doesn’t get to make a wish. Doesn’t get to squeeze his eyes shut and whisper like a prayer the one thing he wants most in this world.
But that’s okay. He doesn’t need to.
Steve’s already seen his shooting star. Already made his wish.
And when she pulls the blanket so it falls over both of their shoulders, he thinks it’s enough to last him a lifetime.
When the sun rises in the morning, it will take all the stars with it.
It will take Steve’s star.
And he won’t want to let go. He’ll want to kick and scream and cry and hold her like a vice.
He won’t.
Instead, he’ll smile. Shake her father’s hand. Wave goodbye until she disappears from his sight and his life.
When the moon comes back that night, he’ll grab the half-finished bourbon and crawl onto his roof. He won’t take the blanket.
He’ll look up at the sky, and he’ll know what he’s searching for.
(He won’t find it, because she doesn’t want to be found.)
He won’t see any shooting stars, but he’ll make a wish anyway.
Every night, for the rest of his life, he’ll make the same wish to an empty sky.
Every night, for the rest of his life, he’ll wait for it to be granted.
And he’ll wonder, not for the first time, just how many people get what they ask for.
He’ll wonder, not for the first time, if he ever will again.