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“Technically, I heard what you said,” Robin says, eyebrows vanishing beneath her bangs. “I’m just having, oh, a little trouble believing it. You seriously mean to tell me that you, Steven Daniel Harrington, have never seen It’s a Wonderful Life?”
Steve’s hair is full of dust, and probably asbestos, and it feels unimaginable that there was ever a time—this calendar year, actually—that Nancy would have rucked it up with her fingers to pluck the debris out. He hasn’t seen Nancy in four days, he hasn’t managed so much as an accidental shoulder brush in two weeks, and yeah, OK, there were years when he had accepted a much-less-frequent status quo the way he supposes an amputee accepts a lost limb, but hope is a drug, and you get used to it fast.
He rubs his dry eyes against the crease of his elbow.
“I told you I hate my middle name.”
“Because it’s your dad’s name, yes, Harry Chapin, I know.” Robin sweeps away some crumbled ceiling junk and adds another cassette to her towering stack. Keith—who is now living in Omaha—called Robin because he got a call from their absent big boss. The Family Video franchise had cut its losses in Hawkins.
Take what you want, Keith said. Apparently the building’s been condemned? Demolition is scheduled? Ciao.
Typical Keith.
The library gate—now MAC-Z property of course—sheared off some foundational stuff from the Family Video end of the strip mall, and the ceiling now sags like a bad souffle. Steve is not an architect; he only knows that take what you want is actually kind of a dangerous proposition, but Robin and he couldn’t resist the treasure-trove.
There are so many double-VHS memories, tapes Steve wishes he could rewind, of ’85 and ’86. And they’re staying on the less-saggy side of the store, so.
What could go wrong?
“—I’m just saying, it’s honestly poetic. All those big ideas, the boat-sized suitcase, and then poof! His dreams go up in smoke. Or do they? Bedford Falls is alive because of him, Steve. But really, I’m ruining the entire plot for you, which I swore I’d stop doing after we watched Rebecca, and—”
“Honestly, Rob, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Hmph.” Robin sets down the tape, thumbnail scraping at a tear in the vinyl. She glances warily down the length of the store, at the floating dust. Even the snow in Hawkins isn’t real. It’s ash, it's dust, it's mystery particles.
Steve says, “Let’s get out of here.”
His mom calls on Christmas morning. It’s a miracle his house-phone still works—the Lover’s Lake gate and the trailer park gates missed the line by about six yards total, in two different locations. Steve’s been spending most of his nights at the Squawk, because even when Robin’s not there it feels less lonely, but the Harrington house on Cornwallis is still his responsibility. He makes sure the pipes don’t freeze and the basement doesn’t flood and that kind of shit.
Absolutely devastated market value, is what his dad says, not that Steve talks to him much. Still, Christmas is Christmas and Steve isn’t such an indifferent son that he can bear the off-chance of another accusatory voicemail (even if he’s done exactly that every other month so far).
He’s there, parked on the faded sofa, listening to Robin’s pre-recorded Christmas broadcast and trying not to count the number of ghosts in the house when the phone finally does ring.
“So what did you talk about?” Robin slides the tape in, leans back beside Steve on her overstuffed daybed. Robin’s parents are incredibly chill about Robin having a boy in her room, either because they’re not-entirely-reformed hippies, or because they’re kind of relieved that a boy has made an appearance at all, or both.
Steve takes advantage of it, because Robin’s room is cozy, and fundamentally unchanged since before.
“What?”
“With your mom, dingus.” Robin elbows him gently. Clearly she has decided, as Steve has, that there’s no point in talking about the disastrously awkward potluck they participated in at the Wheelers’ this afternoon.
Steve will turn over every detail of that in his mind, pretty much as soon as he’s out of Robin’s immediate proximity, but whatever. Since he’s going to miss curfew tonight—the military dumbasses keep insisting on a curfew, reasons unknown—Robin’s mom has set up the guest room for him. Her hippie free-love bent doesn’t extend to letting them have their sleepover in the same room, though sometimes he sneaks back into Robin’s.
Not for the reasons most people would think. It’s the nightmares. It’s always the fucking nightmares, and hey, mostly Steve has to sweat through them on his own time. It’s kind of nice when he can have someone else around.
Robin agrees.
“Steve? You’re a million miles out.”
“Huh? Yeah. Not with my parents, though.” He cracks a grin, is sure it’s unconvincing, stows it away. “She’s fine. She asked how the house was, how I was.”
“In that order?”
“Yeah. Which is kinda funny, because she really hated it here, you know? She couldn’t believe my dad meant it when he said he wanted to settle down in the same town he grew up in. I think she always thought he’d change his mind. And now he has, I guess. By default.”
“Domestic bliss,” says Robin, dryly. “But actually, very thematically appropriate for our Frank Capra special. Hometowns loom large.”
It’s a Wonderful Life is… not Steve’s usual fare.
They agree that Donna Reed is a total babe, and disagree about whether black and white is better (Steve’s a technicolor guy, what can he say?). Robin cries, Steve doesn’t. He doesn’t cry over movies. He doesn’t cry much, period, even for really tragic shit… he has historically reserved the waterworks for Nancy Wheeler effectively dumping his ass, back in ‘84, and getting his clock cleaned by Russian interrogators. You don’t really control your tear ducts when you’re taking hits from a dude who probably cut his teeth on granite baby biscuits. You just don’t.
Robin’s sniffles are affecting in their own way, though, and Steve tries to understand what she’s seeing. This guy is the most ordinary kind of good-hearted loser, right? He works for his dad and he doesn’t live out his big plan. His house is full of booby traps and he misses what’s right in front of him, even if it’s a swimming pool opening up to swallow him whole. He loves his kid brother, but he’s not actually much of a role model for him. He makes the wrong enemies, marries the right woman, lives and almost dies in the place he thought was just a beginning.
So. It's pretty good.
Robin’s elbowing him again.
“No man is a failure who has friends.”
“Mm,” Steve says, scooping up the last of the popcorn with salt-studded fingers.
“Just thought you should know.”
He stares at her. “Yeah, Rob, I get it.”
The corners of her mouth pinch in a smile that looks vaguely like it hurts. “Do you?”
Oh.
Sometimes the thing that haunts him most from the past year—and it’s genuinely embarrassing, that this is what he finds embarrassing—is the thing he said to Nancy in the old Creel house. She was picking those damned cobwebs out of his hair and he was babbling, the way he does when he’s nervous, which he was, and he said,
Maybe after we find Vecna, kill him, save the world and stuff, maybe we can all go out. You know? Me, you, Robin, Jonathan, when he’s back.
And it just absolutely flattens him, how stupid that was, as a thing to say. A thing to suggest. Like there weren’t going to be any issues, like he could flutter as a moth to Nancy’s flame but it would be totally cool, and nothing would hurt, and it wouldn’t be the end-all-be-all of his existence.
Again.
Robin’s nudge has turned into her head on his shoulder, her hand patting his knee.
“You don’t want me to be alone.” Steve digs deep, because he needs to give Robin something. She’s seen, more than anyone else, how ably he’s managed to combine apocalypse shit with lovesick shit, also known as the Steve Harrington special. “And I’m not. And thanks.”
“It’s OK,” Robin says softly.
Suddenly, he can’t speak.
“Steve—it’s OK to want to lasso the moon.”
The thing about Hawkins, Indiana, 1986, is that you can know nothing and everything about how things end. But until they do, Steve knows where he needs to be tomorrow, and the next day, and the next year, and the year after that.