Chapter Text
When Steve Harrington collapses on the floor of Hawkins General Hospital exactly five days after the world doesn't end, Robin really wishes she could say she's surprised.
She's the first one to get to him, out in the hallway. The first one to see him convulsing on the linoleum flooring as the nurses desperately clear the area and a doctor comes running in. She's there when they lift his shirt to reveal the angry red bites with yellow-tinged edges, and when they frantically check his temperature and heart rate. She sees them lift him onto a gurney, his muscles spasming weakly, and watches, unable to tear her eyes away, as they wheel him quickly out of sight.
She sits with him too, once he's awake. Standing in as his new, and only, emergency contact while they tell him he's contracted a tetanus infection as well as a mildly severe case of pneumonia.
And then she's there to smack him upside the head when the doctor isn't looking and chew him out once they're finally alone.
She stays while he gets his IV in, holding tightly to his larger hand as the Nurse gently injects the needle, and watches him carefully as he finally falls asleep. Sequestered snugly in the newly divided room he now shares with Eddie Munson.
Through it all, Robin remains blessedly detached. The emotions stay tucked in and out of reach, a natural reaction to the many things she's seen in the past year. She takes a deep breath. She squares her shoulders. She does what must be done. It's incongruous with her nature. It chafes to stuff down the chaotic thoughts and feelings that are clawing their way into her conscious mind with tenacious ferocity. But then, Nancy is pale and shaking. Dustin is yelling curses and bitter insults through hysterical tears. Lucas is dead-eyed and Erica is silent. Steve is hurt and alone, so Robin does her best.
When the silence settles and her best friend is finally sleeping, she gets more details from his doctors. Timelines and prognoses and recommended treatment and prevention plans. It's all so much. A crushing litany of consequences for something that could have been so easily prevented, if anyone had managed to look. If anyone had bothered to see. If Steve had been taught to talk and if anyone had ever listened.
It makes her head spin and her thoughts run wild. It's then, in the quiet after the storm, that Robin is angry.
It's so unbelievably stupid of him to hide a tetanus infection. He's been in a fucking hospital for days, and he never thought to address the numerous symptoms he must have accumulated since then. He's been running errands and bringing Wayne dinner and making Dustin and Lucas sleep at his house every night when visiting hours have ended, just because it's closer.
Robin isn't sure she's even seen him sit down for more than a minute since they brought Eddie and Max in. Since Steve pulled up beside the ambulance in his Beemer and told the entire staff to fuck themselves when they refused to treat Eddie. Pulling out his parents good name and throwing threats around like candy until every receptionist was red in the face and the doctors finally relented.
And here's the thing. It's so stupid, and she's so mad, but she's also not surprised.
It's just so quintessentially Steve. So in tune with his every aggravating characteristic. She's seen how he is when people are hurt. The way he rushes in to help put on everyone else's oxygen mask first and never once thinks of his own. He's a self-sacrificing idiot.
So she's not surprised, she's just furious.
She'd thought once, near the beginning, when sleep was still a long-forgotten dream and bone-saws and flesh monsters invaded her memories, that it was the Upside Down that had made Steve this way. That the yearly peril and endangerment had forced out his heroic nature in a damagingly self-destructive streak. Maybe it has, a little. But sharing nightmares has a funny way of telling you who people really are, and Robin knows now, that whatever goes through Steve's mind when he pulls stunts like this is a lot deeper. That it started earlier and mattered more than whatever has happened to him in the last few years.
"Where would you go? If you Didn't have to stay in Hawkins. If you could be anywhere, do anything, what would you choose?"
She asks it into the darkness of his ceiling as they lay on Steve's bed. Tangled together in his too-soft sheets at midnight; pretending that they are only staying awake because it's the last day of summer, and not because Robin can't stand the thought of the crowded school hallways. The way the shoving and jostling of them is so often harsh and unkind. The way those nauseating presses remind her of other hands. Gripping her chin, tying her to the chair, pushing the needle into her skin.
"I don't know."
Steve's voice is quiet in the darkness. It presses into a feather-soft sound somewhere above her, twisting through the quiet of the house as it stands starkly against the peaceful feeling of his room. He sounds strange now. Unsure. Robin wonders how she knows. Wonders how you can care about someone so much, how you can know them so well. It's a new feeling from the isolated years of her childhood. A welcome one.
"I guess I've never really gotten that far."
His voice is tired and resigned. Like he really can't see a future where he ever makes it past the well-drawn limits of Hawkins Indiana. A small-town boy who will live and grow and die here, in a too-big empty house with stone marble countertops and freezing floors.
Robin thinks then that if she ever meets Richard and Emilee Harrington she might just strangle them. She tangles her fingers with Steve's instead and squeezes his hand tightly in her own.
"I think I would go to France. Or Rome." She tells him softly. "Somewhere I can practice speaking the native language and learn all the weird history."
She can practically feel Steve roll his eyes.
“You and languages.” He says in a knowing tone. “Someday you’re going to run out of those weird foreign films you like so much.”
She rolls her eyes in fond amusement.
“You know the point of going abroad is that they won’t be foreign films anymore right?” She says sardonically. “Besides, I think you’re underestimating the number of amazing, deep, culturally significant works of art I’d be able to find anywhere. Don’t insult my linguistical prowess just because you don’t have culture Harrington.”
He laughs, burying his face in her hair as his shoulders shake with it. Eventually, he tightens his grip on her fingers. Pulls her a little closer in.
"You'll send me postcards right?" He says quietly. "You'll mail me long-ass letters and call me on the weekends? You can send me pictures of all the places you go, and I'll tell you all the stupid shit the kids get up to when you're gone."
She hears what he doesn't say. Will you forget about me? Will you still need me? Will we still matter?
Robin thinks for a minute. Lets the words line up in her head before they come teetering out her mouth. She bites back the 'of course' building on her tongue. The 'you don't have to worry about us' that's climbing up her throat. She thinks about his big empty house and the way he spends so much time away from it when he can. The way her dream is born of the same stuff. To get out of a place where she has to keep so many secrets. Where she has to hide and cower and never be too loud. She finds the words she means, the ones he probably needs to hear.
"No." She says firmly. "I won't be mailing you any letters."
She can feel him go tense beside her. She keeps talking.
"Letters are overrated. Obviously, you're coming with me, Dingus. We're gonna travel the world together and see everything. We'll eat gross food and wear stupid outfits. And someday, when you've had enough time to think about it, we're gonna go wherever you want, just you and me."
He lets out a shaky breath. Relaxes a little into the mattress behind her.
"You might have to wait a while for me." He says apologetically, laying his cheek on the crown of her head. "I gotta watch those damn kids graduate and make sure they actually fuckin' make it to adulthood."
Robin feels something a lot like love take its staggering place in her chest, vast and unending. For the kids, starting high school with her tomorrow. For Steve, always watching out for them. They are bound together. All of them. Through demons and hell and late nights like this. She thinks at that moment that she would follow him anywhere. Forever. If only he would ask.
Maybe that could be better than running away from here. To run towards something with him, instead.
"That's okay." She says, smiling. "I'll always come back for you. The world will wait."
Robin doesn't go home after the earthquake.
She spends the first five days of it with Steve. Stumbling after him between hospital visits and relief efforts to make sure that everyone is safe. That they're all okay. After, when Steve has officially been put on bed rest, she makes the rounds with Nancy instead. Alternating between checking in on everything, and staying by Steve's bed as much as she can.
She knows her parents are furious and worried. That the one phone call she gave them the day after the gates closed and again when Steve collapsed is not nearly enough. But she can't seem to make herself go back. There is a heaviness there, in her living room and under her stairs. The weight of the secrets she's kept from her parents for so long that it feels as natural as breathing. There is a space, where maybe she thinks security should be, filled with all of the things Robin can't make herself say. All the ways she is sure that she would be a colossal disappointment to her parents, if only they knew. Robin isn't sure what would happen if she went back now. How she would face their worry and gentle hands in the wake of another tragedy that they can't ever understand.
Her mind runs everything in circles over and over. She feels like an entirely new person now, after only a week. It feels a little like it did last summer. When her reality expanded into something beyond Robin's understanding and twisted completely out of control.
The world has gone and changed again. The ground has shifted beneath her feet. Her best friend is in a hospital bed on medical rest for the foreseeable future. The ground split open and she torched an interdementional serial killer less than a week ago. Nothing makes any fucking sense, and she's supposed to tell her parents what exactly? The truth? The stupid cover story the Feds are cooking up that has no evidence backing it and makes zero sense?
Robin knows exactly how much bullshit her parents will take. This is pushing it.
Her dad's voice is tight on the other end of the phone line. She can hear him shuffling from foot to foot the way he does when he's nervous and trying to hide it. His tone is worried and snappish like it was when she came home on the Fourth of July last year, tired and shaky, the ruined mall still billowing smoke in the distance.
"You're not coming home then." He says it like he already knows the answer. "You're staying at the hospital."
She rubs her arm, glancing down the hallway to Steve and Eddie's room, at the nurses and doctors bustling down the hall.
"Steve is hurt, Dad. Like, really bad. I'm gonna- I need to stay and help with everything."
Her dad sighs, all sad and deep, and Robin can imagine the way he must look standing in their kitchen; frustrated and stressed with his hand pinching the bridge of his nose. He's never really liked Steve, is the thing. Steve, who gets into fights with his old friends around town sometimes and who's come to hang out with her every day for the last year but won't take her out on a proper date.
She knows how it looks. A perfect picture outlined in endless sleepovers and colored in with Steve's old reputation for parties and cruelty. Most of Hawkins is convinced they're hooking up. Half of the girls who go out with him send her triumphant looks when they score his number over the family video store counter, like they think they're getting one over on her by sleeping with someone she's never confirmed she's dating. She knows it bothers Steve. Can see the way his smile tightens when he catches the look. The way no girl ever gets farther than that first date. Either because they can't be convinced that Steve is serious about not being with Robin, or because they're the kind of girl who doesn't care. She hates and loves that he never asks her to change the narrative. That he gives up any real chance at a relationship so freely to keep her safe.
Through it all, her Dad is just waiting for the day the other shoe drops. The moment when she'll come home teary-eyed and broken-hearted. It's a fact he's convinced is inevitable, no matter Robins' protests, and something he brings up with varying degrees of displeasure at least once a week. She can hear the notes of his wariness slipping through his reply now, even as he does his best to conceal them.
"Yeah, okay." He says tiredly. "Okay. Just, if something else happens, I need you to come home. Do you have a ride that can take you home?"
Robin looks at Nancy Wheeler, sitting slumped in one of the waiting chairs in the hallway and feels her ears go a little red.
"Yeah, Dad. I do."
She hangs up the phone and heads back into the fray, taking a moment to put her hand on Nancy's shoulder and give it a squeeze before she's back at Steve's side, holding his hand in a white knuckle grip as he coughs so hard he throws up.
There will be time later. Time to face her parents, and figure out all the half-truths she'll tell them that they won't believe. Time to sleep and rest and be ready for all the shit that's coming. Time to heal. For now, she'll sit by Steve's bed and be there for as long as he needs. She'll do the rounds with Nancy and check in on the kids gathered in Max's room. She'll finally talk to Eddie about the black bandanna hanging out of his back pocket in the middle of nowhere Indiana
She'll be here.
Her Dad's voice stays in the back of her mind, furious and worried, but even then, she can't find it in herself to regret her decision to stay.
Her family needs her.