Work Text:
Sometime after Russians and dizzying mall lights and mall bathroom floors and Steve driving the Toddfather straight into Billy Hargrove’s Camaro, Robin takes a minute to stop and just — What the fuck? Her mom had said getting the job at Scoops Ahoy would be great because it would mean money to spend on school stuff or whatever she wanted really, honey, because the money would be hers, her mom had said the job might mean new friends and maybe even, wink wink, a boyfriend. Now here she is in a hospital waiting outside Steve Harrington’s room for someone to tell her he hasn’t had his skull cracked open or something and she’s already been forced to sign like a bunch of different papers and she’s probably signed away her life to the US government. Desperately, all she wants is Steve.
It shouldn’t have happened really, that she started genuinely liking the guy. As soon as she’d seen her roster sheet and known who she’d be working with the majority of the summer she’d almost turned around and begged off it. Now here she is and the guy has a face mashed beyond all recognition and she barely has a scratch on her and she should just go home. But she’s waiting for him outside a hospital room and she thinks they might be friends.
S he had called her parents with some official guy breathing down her neck and told them she had been trapped in the mall last night because of electrical issues which had triggered the fire tonight and that a load of people had died and yes mom, I’m okay, just waiting in the hospital for my coworker who got hit by falling rubble when he was helping kids out of there and her mom had sort of cleared up on the other end of the phone like she always does when there’s potential for a boyfriend. E ven if it means Robin has been MIA for almost two days trapped in underground Russian bases and fighting interdimensional monsters.
Run of the mill shit, apparently, in Hawkins.
She’s sitting kind of off to the side wishing the guy she’s waiting for could come and sit outside with her even though that’s entirely illogical. Robin is pretty sure she’s meant to feel sort of awkward around Steve right now because he had confessed he liked her not more than three or four hours ago and then she had told him what she was and sure, in the moment of adrenaline and Russians and interdimensional monsters he had accepted her, but did that extend to her waiting outside hospital rooms for him?
Near her, some of the kids are sitting with their parents even though they’ve been begged and entreated to come home multiple times. They’re all pretty cut up about Chief Hopper dying and about Steve getting hurt again and Robin feels diminutive in the face of their grief. She’s just here for Steve, Steve she doesn’t even know that well, and here she is perched on a hard plastic waiting room chair with all these veterans who, she’s gathered, were only a bit older than the age she started learning the trumpet when they started battling monsters. She feels so pathetic, still in her stupid and now bloody and ash-smudged sailor uniform, waiting for Steve who might not even want to see her.
She’s blinking at the linoleum floor under the buzzing florescent lights when Steve appears in the door. Everyone jumps up except Robin who can’t help but stare at his ruined face and the way he’s holding himself awkwardly. The kids start talking all at once and Robin looks at their parents who are subdued and just sort of accepting this with slight smiles, Robin gets the feeling they hear a lot about Steve Harrington from their kids.
“Alright, alright,” snaps Steve and his eyes are slightly unfocussed. “I’ve got a concussion and —”
Mrs. Henderson, Dustin’s mom, bustles into the group of kids. “You can come home with us, hon.”
“That’s very kind Mrs. Henderson but —”
Robin thinks he looks very tired and worn out and like he shouldn’t be left around the kids because he’ll accidentally start babysitting them and exhaust himself to death. “— he’s coming home with me, don’t worry Mrs. Henderson,” she says, without even thinking. She blushes like Steve is about to reject her too but he only smiles at her in relief so pure and blinding Robin almost wants to close her eyes so she can’t see the painful earnestness on his black and blue face.
“But I wanted a sleepover,” says Dustin.
Steve ruffles his hair. “Sorry kid, I need to be woken up every couple of hours. Won’t be much fun for you.”
“But me?” says Robin, pointing at herself, “he doesn’t mind ruining my good night’s sleep.”
“Seriously, you’re welcome to come with us sweetheart,” says Mrs. Henderson.
But Steve is fighting his way through the chattering kids to fling his arm around Robin’s shoulders and all that worrying seems kinda stupid now with Steve leaning on her heavily and his dumb, smushed up face beside hers like before and after photos at a really bad salon. “Thank you so much for the offer Mrs. Henderson, but seriously I’m fine.” She can smell his sweat and the tail end of his expensive cologne from almost two days ago. She can smell his blood, the iron tang of it on her tongue like it’s hers. “You kids need to get home, making your parents wait in the hospital for no reason.” He huffs at them, ruffles Mike’s hair. “Go home, sleep it off.” His voice goes gentle and low. “Come on now, there’s no one left to wait for.” Hopper is gone he says, in soft words.
She calls her parents from the hospital payphone. Mom, my friend’s parents aren’t home but he has a concussion, can he — Hardly even an answer just the warm press of pride down the phone that her daughter is bringing a guy home.
“My mom is going to think you’re my boyfriend, fair warning,” she says, as they wait by the taxi rink.
He shrugs, looks at her. “Well, I’ve tried to be your real boyfriend, I’m sure I can try at being your fake one if you need.”
Robin thinks Steve takes too many unnecessary hurts for people. “No. It’s fine: friends. I’ll tell her we’re just friends. ” It will break her mom’s heart, she’s sure, but for Steve she’s not sure she cares who it hurts.
He grins at her, cracked and painful around the eyes. “I wasn’t sure you’d wait for me.”
She doesn’t say I need you to be there tomorrow, today, whatever time it is, so you can ask again if I’m alright and I can start hysterically sobbing , she says, “I wasn’t sure you wanted me to wait.” It feels almost as raw as the other truth.
Steve knocks his elbow against hers and she remembers how their arms had felt pressed and tied together. “Of course. Us sailors have got to stick together. Captains going down with the Scoops Ahoy ship or… something cleverer, wittier.”
She snorts a laugh, breaths up into the hot night sky. Her hair smells like gunpowder, fireworks, and something clinical (not hospital, something deeper below the surface of the earth). “Something like that,” she murmurs.
*
She watches the bruises unripen on his face. They decay slowly, implode like supernovas, leaving behind little silver scars that fleck his smooth face in the gaps between his freckles.
*
They’re sitting in Steve’s kitchen circling job opportunities to try out for when Steve looks less like he just lost a fight (even though some know him as a hero of the mall fire, not everyone knows that story and acts like Steve is some bad boy with connections to the criminal underworld, be he a Harrington or not). For some reason they always end up circling jobs with more than one position open.
“Melvald’s is hiring,” says Robin dully, tapping the lid of her felt tip against her lip.
“Try it out on me,” says Steve.
“What?”
“Ask me who I work for.”
She eyes him, can’t help the tugging smile at the corner of her mouth. “Who do you work for?”
“Russian accent, Buckley, come on!”
She grabs a dirty fork off one of the plates they were eating pasta off earlier and points it at Steve’s face. “ Who do you work for ?” It’s an awful Russian accent, Steve barks a laugh.
“Melvald’s,” he says, backing away from the fork dramatically. He collapses forwards. “Nah, doesn’t have the same ring to it. I think it needs two words so I can really sell the whole ‘Scoops, Scoops Ahoy’ thing.”
She’s laughing about being kidnapped by the KGB beneath a burnt down mall. She thinks she would go through it all over again for Steve’s head knocking against hers as he laughs (like the way, when they were tied back to back, his head knocked forwards and hers knocked back and the dome of her skull rested perfectly on the curve of his neck). (Knocking, knocking, always knocking at each other’s doors.)
*
The first time he says she should stay over she thinks she should feel a jolt of something. Fear? Nerves? Anxiety? Maybe, if she were normal, excitement and apprehension and horny . She doesn’t feel any of those things.
She crawls into his bed giggling and not all the way sober and they’re whispering like someone in this big empty house will hear them like it’s a girls’ first sleepover or something.
“No, but the kids faces,” he says. He’s telling her about some time before Scoops — before them: her and Steve — and she’s kind of lost the thread of the story, thinks maybe that Steve’s telling her two at once, but she doesn’t even care. She just laughs, drunk and giddy. “It was beautiful.”
“I think you’re beautiful,” she says to him and she’s not even lying.
He blinks at her in the half-dark of his bedroom. “Thanks.”
“You don’t think I’m beautiful too?”
“Of course I do.” He cocks his head on one side. Squeezes her hand. And doesn’t try anything. He doesn’t touch her or kiss her or even look at her like he wants to.
She knows she loves him, then. She knows it.
*
Steve’s squatting down beside his pile of records, flipping through them and saying no, no, horrible! every one he drops in the new — teetering — tower of discarded discs. She just watches him, curled up in one of the armchairs in front of the TV, cradling a beer close to her chest.
He’s ridiculous. Polo shirt and cream khaki shorts. Hot summer evening.
He should be having a party: shotgunning beer with Tommy H. and rating girls on the size of their breasts and — and whatever boys did at parties when they looked like sharks, hunting. Instead he’s here, trying to find the music for a smoke sesh with Robin Buckley, hair flopping in his eyes, and not intending to have sex tonight.
She knew she loved him. This just makes it painful.
“You didn’t have any other plans tonight?” Her thumbnail picks at the sticker on her brown bottle.
“What?” he says distractedly. “Do you like Blondie?”
“Yeah. I like Blondie.”
“What’d you say?” He’s fiddling with the record sleeve.
“I asked if I was crashing any other plans. It’s a Saturday. I don’t know, don’t you want to be at a party, or… I don’t know.”
He frowns at her over his shoulder and she sinks down in her chair, eyes fixed on the peeling edge of the beer label. “Rob,” he says, “you do know that I like you? Don’t you? You’re my best friend.”
She swallows, eyes jolting up from her beer not of her own volition. She’s never had a — She’s never — It hurts so much, to love Steve Harrington, that sometimes it feels like — But sometimes it’s so easy she feels — She can’t…
“I know you probably have other, better friends,” he’s rambling, “and you don’t have to — I get that I’m not your best friend, but you’re mine. I like. Have no friends. So. I guess you’re my only option.” He’s putting the Blondie record on the player and laughing nervously. God, she just — “I like Blondie, too.”
“I love you,” she tells him, hardly even thinking about it before she opens her mouth. It’s so easy. Sometimes it hurts, when she sees the way he turns back to her and looks surprised and confused. “Jesus, Steve. Of course you’re my best friend.”
“Right.” He blinks.
“You’re such an idiot.”
“I love you, too.” His eyes are very serious, for a moment, and then he drops the needle carefully down, turning away from her. Dreaming starts to play.
She takes a quick swig from her bottle. “Good.”
She’s probably loved him ever since she stayed up in that elevator and watched him watch the kids sleeping. She’s probably loved him since a bathroom floor and the sound of his bad singing. She’s been in danger of it ever since she walked into Scoops Ahoy on her first day and he hadn’t given her any shit, hadn’t said a word about the way she looked in a sailor’s outfit, had only told her to expect some “annoying little shits” who might come in to laugh at him for his own uniform. She’s definitely loved him, she thinks, since she heard him laugh and wanted to hear it again, and again, and again.
“Dance with me?” He’s holding out his hand to her.
She puts down her bottle, shaking her head, and lets him pull her up for a dance.