Chapter Text
Robin looks at her shirt, stained badly by her blood. It's still pooling on the floor. Maybe she's cut too much now? Her mouth is dribbling bile and it's dripping into the toilet bowl. This was her first time actually leaving her room in three days. Her parents were out of town, visiting some friends. And she could hear the phone ringing and ringing, but she didn't go to answer it. Eventually it stops, but her tears don't. The blood was drying into crusts now and she was gagging desperately. A knock on the door, another, another, another, then they realise that it's Hawkins and everybody has a spare key, and let themselves in using the emergency flower pot key. "Robin!" Joyce calls out. She gasps when she finds this hunched mess. "How long has it been this bad?"
She held up 2 fingers. "Years? Months? Weeks? Days?" Joyce cries incredulously, and Robin just starts shrieking, terrible sobs escaping her. "Your arm! What happened to your arm? I'm taking you to the ER no excuses." She says, as if Robin could speak at all.
Hopper sits at her side. "Don't lie to me Robin, I know you cut yourself deliberately, what I need to know is why."
She can't speak, can't anybody understand that. She literally CAN'T tell him. She presses her hands round the back of her neck, brings her knees to her chest, and just starts rocking. Hopper tries to get her attention again, snapping his fingers in front of her, and she glares at him with such a dangerous look in her eyes, he wonders for a moment if people were right about the mentally ill. She's crying. God, the psychiatrist is gonna have a lot of trouble with this one. Then Steve rushes in. "Rob! Oh god! I brought your cards?"
She takes the stack of green cards, gratefully and immediately searches for the cat saying thank you. Then the dinosaur saying sorry. He shakes his head. "We've been through this, no apologising."
"Me told you, dingus" she croaks, stuttering desperately, and it genuinely hurts her voice and brain. He smiles.
"Use the cards, Rob. Use the signs."
She nods weakly. The nurse comes in. "Time for the transfer, chief."
She paves round the room, refusing to speak. She flips the psychiatrist off then just got up from where he'd forced her. She hates the hospital gown, it doesn't for and if she moves too quick her ass hangs out. She feels his eyes burning into her. They'd taken her cards, she realises. "I need to make a phonecall" she rasps. "Would that be possible?"
"Visiting hours between 2 and 6 each day."
She waits patiently and sure enough, Steve arrives to ogle at the crazy girl. "Took cards." she croaks. "Took them away. In trash." He looks at her, sympathetic but probably just pity.
Hopper arrives too. "Buckley. How you been?"
"They. They don't...they." Her throat has frozen up again. Steve left an hour ago.
The days are long and torturous and she's there for a month and a half. It goes by slowly, but even worse, she's considered dangerous and barely let out of the high security cells where Victor Creep is kept. That's because she won't speak, and she won't behave how they expect so she's a psychopath now, who will be let out, unlike most, after intense treatment to make her normal. She's not even allowed visitors anymore. Why they'd let her out if they think she's a danger, she can't figure out, but she isn't going to complain. Even if she wanted to, she can't speak in this place. 45 long days alone in her cell, screaming and sobbing. It's cold and dark and she wants to be outside, but she's locked in. She can't get out.
She's stuck in a cage like a zoo animal.