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Robin is starting to think she’s going insane. Or maybe something is wrong. She tries to tell herself that she sees Will enough that he would’ve sensed it on her, smelt the rot on her skin. But maybe it’s a different kind of wrong, maybe whatever the Russians did to them down below the earth—but then Steve is okay, she tells herself, Steve isn’t going crazy. And, maybe stupidly, that’s when she gets really scared. Because if it isn’t monsters, if it isn’t something Steve can hit with a bat, that Eleven can crush with her mind, that her friends can’t solve with their smart little brains and their stupid bravery… if it isn’t that…
So maybe Robin is going insane, maybe it isn’t Vecna in her brain and maybe it isn’t a science experiment cocktailing away for a year inside her brain, maybe it’s just Robin.
“We have PTSD right?” she says, lying on the grass beside Steve’s pool in the middle of the night.
Steve is sitting sentry on one of the pool chairs, his eyes fixed on the dark trees looming over the fence like there’s something out there. There probably is something out there, along with soldiers patrolling in their big trucks and the bad dentist-fillings of the closed-up portals, but it’s not making any noise and the lights aren’t flickering and Steve isn’t perked up like a dog so Robin isn’t afraid. “Well, probably,” he says, still focussed entirely on the trees, then shakes himself like he can tell he’s being paranoid and looks down at her, nudges her side with his socked toes. “Definitely. You calling me out, Buckley?” He smiles at her with tired eyes.
She swallows back tears that keep coming too easily, she never used to cry this much, she’s sure of it. “Calling all of us out.” She looks away from his stupid face because it’s starting to make her feel something that’s like anger and she’s not sure at what. She looks up at the dark sky, the silver strip of an almost new-moon. “I just feel kinda crazy sometimes.”
“Yeah, I get you.”
She feels so lonely right then, because she’s pretty sure he doesn’t. Maybe he’s anxious and paranoid and gets all itchy when he hasn’t been outside to check the garden fence for disturbances, but he isn’t irrational like she is. He’s scared of something coming back, of things that he knows go thump in the night; Robin just wants to cry about stupid things like Steve saying good night with a weird tone or angry at the kids for making the same jokes they always make that don’t normally bother her, shouldn’t bother her. You don’t get it, she thinks and she’s so fucking angry with him, and she doesn’t want to be angry because she’s being objectively stupid and mean and she hates herself and what the fuck is wrong with her. And then she just wants to cry, like she always does. And she feels like a volcano, an unpredictable fucking volcano which is going to coat everything in ash and spore like the town that morning after they didn’t save the world (not really because they didn’t save everyone), and she’s going to take out Steve when she does because he’s too close to the eruption zone.
“Aw, Rob, don’t cry,” he says.
She really wants a hug then, but thinks she’s going to throw up if he touches her. She staggers up to her feet. “I’m going to bed.” Once she starts crying it’s really hard to stop and she’s felt like this all day, all week, or maybe she’s never felt anything else, and it’s never going to stop and she’s always going to feel this way and it’s never going to get better.
“Rob,” he whispers. He’s up from the lounger now and reaching out to take her face in his palms.
She jerks back with a little sob. She wants him to pet her hair, feels so pathetic about it she can’t let him. He’s just so okay and he just seems so fine and put together about things more than she is, and Robin realises part of that volcano is jealousy.
“Did I say something?” He sounds so confused and she wants to make him hurt like this but she’s just standing there quaking with this rage she doesn’t understand, petrified by it. Too pathetic to really do anything but tremble. “What’s wrong? Did you see something? Did something hurt you?”
“No,” she says. It comes out all choked, she can hardly breathe. “There’s nothing you can hit, okay? You can’t fix it. I’m just fucking crazy and there’s nothing anyone can do. I’m just wrong. I’m screwed up.” She evades the lurching arms of his embrace, storms into the house.
She’s upstairs in his bedroom before she realises it’s not even her space, that she’s not even home, and she wants her mom. She goes to the window and looks down at the pool. Sees Steve standing where she left him, sentry-mode facing the woods again.
She sobs into his pillows for hours. She’s so sad she doesn’t even think that’s the word for it. It’s like she’s throwing the tears into this cavernous pit inside her and nothing is ever going to fill it up. All her bones are aching and she has work tomorrow and it’s such a stupid thing to cry about but she’s crying about it. And all the crying makes her angrier at herself. Running around eating her tail until she’s sick of cannibalising herself and lies there, staring into the dark, squeezing the pillow even though her hands ache.
She didn’t hear him climbing the stairs but Steve is there, crawling up beside her and putting his palm on the crown of her head.
*
“You okay?” he whispers into her hair as soon as she opens her eyes, like he was waiting for her to wake up.
She lies there for a moment, considering it. “I feel okay,” she whispers back. The relief almost crushes her and she feels like crying again, but not the same way as last night. It’s euphoric. She feels like she could kill a million demogorgons right now, single-handedly. “I really feel okay.” She pulls back, he’s looking worriedly at her like she’s going to turn on him and bite his head off and she’s worried, then, that maybe the volcano doesn’t need to explode to hurt Steve. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
He bites his lip. “I already went downstairs and made you a coffee, it’s on the bedside table.” He pauses, still nibbling nervously at his skin until she reaches out and gently pinches his cheeks so he stops. “I um… I don’t want to make you uncomfortable. But—you might want to go to the bathroom before coffee.”
She sits up and flicks up the sheets immediately because if she pissed herself in Steve’s bed after crying all over him and getting angry with him she’s moving town, county, state. Maybe even country. Instead, there’s bright red blood on the crotch of her sleep shorts and she yelps and jumps out of bed. “Your sheets, shit, Steve, I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay, I’m basically a god at getting blood out now,” he says. Like that’s not heartbreaking.
When she comes back from the bathroom, she helps him change the sheets and sips at the coffee he made her which is only going a little cold. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” he says. “Seriously fine.” He shakes a pillow into a case vigorously. “Not to be a boy about this, but was last night… hormone stuff.”
“I guess,” she mutters. Fake emotions, great. Not even real insanity, just her body rebelling against what it’s meant to do.
“Is that… normal?” He looks at her across the new bed. “Robin, I’m not sure it’s normal to feel that badly. I’ve never met anyone who has it that bad.”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, once we get out of Hawkins and you go to your fancy college we can find a doctor that wasn’t sent here to monitor Upside Down sickness and we can work out if it’s normal.” He shrugs at her. “Until then, I can try and help.”
Robin still feels the sting of that despair that swallowed her. She doesn’t know if he can, if any doctor can either. Maybe this is just normal and Robin can’t handle it. But—but it’s Steve, and even when it’s not something he can hit with a bat he’s got her back. “Yeah,” she says, “okay.”