Sleepwalking into the open palm of the empty sky [August 4]

[hey_dingus]

"Are you okay?"

Is she okay? In the last twenty-four hours, she's hurtled who knows how far down underground to a Russian base beneath the mall, been drugged out of her mind, watched Alex P. Keaton try to bang his mom, spilled her literal and metaphorical guts, and watched a middle-schooler throw a car with her mind. And now they've just crashed the stolen Toddfather into another car on purpose and she's wondering if this is blunt force trauma because how is any of this real?

No. She is not okay. She's pretty sure this is going to fuck her up for life and the weirdest part is that Steve only barely seems fazed by mini-Carrie.

"Ask me tomorrow," she stumbles out, proud to at least sound kind of quippy about it given the circumstances.

It lasts approximately half a second before she's thrown for yet another loop by the sound of shattering glass as some kind of...something leaps up onto the ceiling. It's huge and toothy and has way too many legs and Robin thinks she's got to be hallucinating. "Oh shit!"

Scrambling to unfasten her seatbelt, Robin leaps gracelessly from the car. In the corner of her eye, she sees a station wagon pulling up and starts to run toward it–and nearly straight into a glass door.

It's suddenly bright and Robin's eyes go wide as she glances around, trying to process. It's daylight. The cars are gone. Through the glass door she almost smacked into, she can see the courtyard of a mall but it's definitely not Starcourt.

"Holy shit," she says again. "I'm in Hell."

Comments

[haplesshairpile]

"I'll tell you everything, but not here," Steve assures her, because if he's going to tell someone all about the Upside Down and its associated horrors, he wants them both to be sitting down somewhere relatively private.

Steve stands back to give Robin room, but around the third time she physically recoils from a price tag he realizes that he left out a pretty important piece of information.

"Uh, yeah. One more thing, no big," Steve says casually, sidling up next to her and resting his hands on his hips. "Inflation's a bitch. Because we're in 2019, here. Surprise, you're in the future!"

He laughs and the sound of is is tinged with an obvious edge of manic stress. "Robin, it's wild. Remember when the Walkman came out and people were like wow, this is the height of technology? Yeah, it wasn't."

[hey_dingus]

Somehow, the fact that they're several years into the future is the easiest part to believe. Now that she lets herself observe the world around her, Robin can see all these tiny ways in which this mall is different from Starcourt in ways that have nothing to do with being in another world. It's all so much more...sleek in a way that feels distant, futuristic.

It doesn't make the pricing any less of a blow, especially when Steve sounds like he's about to crack. Or maybe she's just projecting how she feels.

"Please tell me that you mean this in a good way," she says. Robin's not proud of how her own voice sounds, all faintly alarmed, picking up on Steve's own anxiety. "Because I could really use some nice, happy news."

[haplesshairpile]

“There are upsides,” Steve says, thinking of cell phones and apps, about digital movie rentals and food delivery from pretty much anywhere. “It’s a lot easier to be lazy now.”

Steve wanders around the men’s clearance rack to give Robin some time to look and plucks a navy blue polo shirt out. He stares at for a second, looks over at Robin’s Scoops Ahoy uniform, and then puts it back to get a dark red one instead.

“Shit,” he says suddenly, remembering what Lois has told him. “You’re eighteen, right?”

[hey_dingus]

"The whole point of being lazy is that it's easy," Robin counters, mostly out of a desire to be contrary than any other reason. Just looking around the store, she can see lights and screens everywhere, people holding little glass squares that are brighter and more colorful than any TV she's seen. Everyone is speaking English but half the words around her sound made up, like the kind of slang she'd hear in a science fiction movie about the future except it is the future.

Feeling sort of overwhelmed, she grabs the simplest thing she can that's in her size and not appallingly expensive–a black t-shirt with a ribcage printed on it–and hunts for a pair of jeans. Those, at least, can't be that different.

"I'm eighteen in January. Why?"

[haplesshairpile]

“You haven’t known lazy until you’ve experienced 2019,” Steve says as he heads for the counter. “I can turn my lights off with my voice. It’s real spaceship type shit.”

He takes Robin’s clothes as they wait behind the customer currently at the register, and then visibly winces when she says that she isn’t seventeen yet. He doubts that she’ll be thrilled with her living arrangements.

“Well, this place gives you an apartment,” Steve begins, and then turns his wince toward her. “If you’re eighteen.”

[hey_dingus]

"I've always wanted to fly away in a spaceship," she says nonsensically. "Besides, don't they have that Clap on! Clap off! thing? I saw a commercial for it." She knows it's ridiculously beside the point but it's not the first time she's resorted to the inane under stress.

The impulse only strengthens at the way Steve looks at her. "And if I'm not eighteen?"

[haplesshairpile]

“You would, nerd,” Steve says, even as he instinctively claps along as Robin says the jingle, ending with a softly spoken, “the Clapper!”

For a moment he pretends like he didn’t hear the question, and then steps up to set all their clothes on the counter. The salesgirl starts ringing them up and Steve can feel Robin’s stars burning a hole in the side of his head, so he gives her a sideways glance.

“You have a place to stay,” he finally says, trying to sound casual as he digs his wallet out of his jeans. “But it’s kind of an orphanage type situation.”

[hey_dingus]

Steve doesn't answer and Robin knows it's deliberate, just like the hundreds of times she's pretended not to hear out of annoyance, contrariness, or any number of reasons. When he does answer, he's not making eye contact, which only makes it worse.

"Orphanage situation," she repeats. Steve is so deadly serious about it that she wants to call bullshit, would have if this was the Steve she'd known at the beginning of summer. By now, she thinks she can tell when he's fucking with her.

Only now, it really sinks in and Robin grabs the edge of a display because she's not going to crumple now. "We can't leave, can we?"

[haplesshairpile]

The salesgirl looks between the two of them awkwardly and Steve hands over his weird Darrow debit card before giving Robin a pained look. Telling her that there’s no way out of this place is going to be harder than realizing it for himself, and he feels like such an asshole because there’s a large part of him that is so fucking glad to see her.

“Robin,” he says quietly, finally looking over at her as he reaches out to take the bag. “Let’s just get to my place, okay? I said I would tell you everything.”

She’s gripping the edge of the counter and Steve holds out his hand for her to take, and it’s not even a weird ploy to touch her or anything. He just wants to offer some support. He may not be the person she would go to in a bizarre, devastating situation like this, but he’s the one that’s here. “Robin, come on.”

[hey_dingus]

Robin can't help it. Her first instinct is to shoot the salesgirl a nasty look even though she probably doesn't deserve it. She doesn't want to call herself a mean-spirited person but she's had a hell of a day and it's just not stopping.

Steve holds out his hand and Robin's torn, unable to hide it. He has no idea. She's going to have to tell him all over again, a thought that's way more terrifying than it should be given all the actual terrifying things she's seen. If she takes his hand now, what's he going to think?

But also she's freaking out a little and she could really, really use her best friend right now. So she takes his hand and sighs.

"Can we at least get some food? The last time I ate, we were still at Scoops."

Food feels so normal right now.

[haplesshairpile]

Robin’s hand slips into his and Steve gives it a reassuring squeeze before leading her out of the store. It’s weird, because he should be excited, right? Sure, yeah, holding hands is little kid stuff, but he likes Robin. This should feel like the start of something. It should thrill him, shouldn’t it?

Instead it just feels comforting. Grounding, in a way, and to Steve that might almost be better. It gives him something to think about, at any rate.

“There’s food at my place,” Steve says, and then rolls his eyes at himself and lets the bag handle slide up his forearm so he can get his phone out of his pocket. “But obviously neither of us are in the mood to make something, so I’ll order a pizza.”

Bev showed him how to set up the food delivery app, so he concentrated on the little screen and puts through a quick order for the same thing he got last time, and then holds up the phone for Robin to see. “Beats the hell out of the Clapper.”

[hey_dingus]

Steve doesn't make it weird and Robin feels a little better, even if her head is still spinning. And only spinning more when she watches the images and words flicker across the screen of the device in his hand. "That's...definitely more than a Walkman," she agrees, trying not to show that she's impressed. Except how can she not be? It even blows away the thirty minute guarantee.

"I'm going to have to do so much catching up," she laments. "I thought I was up on things when I learned how to program the VCR. But let me guess, the future doesn't even need those." Robin waves a hand to stop him from answering. She's not actually sure how she'd feel about confirmation of that right now.

"It doesn't even have buttons."

[haplesshairpile]

“Well, as you’re so fond of reminding me, you’re smart as hell,” Steve points out as he slides the phone back into his pocket. “I had to make kids show me how to use this crap like I was their tech-challenged grandfather.”

They leave the mall hand in hand and it still doesn’t feel weird. It just feels easy, and Steve kind of revels in the simplicity of it. He sort of never wants it to stop, because it just feels nice.

It isn’t a long walk to his apartment building and he leads her inside, finally letting go of her hand to fish out her keys and unlock the door. The space is pretty barren, all beige and generic looking, but it beats his bedroom at his parents’ place.

“Well, here it is. The place would be a mess but, uh, I don’t have any stuff.” He tosses his keys on the countertop and then fishes the stuff he bought out of the bag and hands it over to Robin. “Now, I remember how desperate I was for a shower when I first got here. All the mind blowing revelations can wait a few if you want to wash up. You kinda smell like USS Butterscotch and it’s freaking me out.”

[hey_dingus]

"I mean, only because it's true," Robin shoots back. "But hey, look at you go with your future tech." This–teasing him–feels so blessedly normal in the midst of everything else being completely sideways. The last few days have messed with her worldview beyond what feels fair and it only promises to get weirder.

The apartment is pretty boring, like something out of a catalogue. Robin starts to imagine what she'd do with hers before abruptly reminding herself that she's apparently got a room at the orphanage instead. Not that she has much time to mourn. Whatever moment they're having is definitely ruined by the mention of the U.S.S. Butterscotch.

"You have some kind of sixth-sense for butterscotch now, Harrington? I'm surprised you can detect that under all the blood, sweat, and who knows what was on the bathroom floor I was lying on."

[haplesshairpile]

“I don’t know, man. I’ve got that thing— what’s it called?” Steve snaps his fingers and then points at her. “Stockholm Syndrome, or whatever. The smell is burned permanently into my brain.”

Ha ducks into the little laundry nook off of the kitchen and gets a towel from the dryer, because he’s an adult who does laundry now, and he’s surprisingly not terrible at it. Then he comes over to hand it to Robin before crossing his arms over his chest.

“First door on the left,” he says, tilting his head curiously. “Why the hell were you on a bathroom floor?”

[hey_dingus]

"I worked there longer than you and I still have no love for the U.S.S. Butterscotch," Robin counters. It had honestly been one of her least favorite things to make with all the little components that slowed everything down, especially when there was a line, so she'd never gotten fond. Peanut Butter Ripple, however, was another story.

When Steve gets out a clean towel, Robin once again tries not to look too impressed, but it's hard when Steve is actually some kind of prepared grown up who has spare towels. It doesn't help that the washing machine looks like it has more buttons than a NASA console.

And Steve has to ask the million dollar question that Robin didn't even realize was worth so much.

"We left the movie theater to get water and you were looking at the ceiling and then it's all kind of a blur but I ended up with my head in a toilet, puking my guts out. And then we just kind of sat around, talking, because we still felt like shit."

[haplesshairpile]

“The ceiling is the last thing I remember,” Steve remarks, looking thoughtful for a moment. He hates that there are things that he doesn’t remember, things he was supposedly there for and has no knowledge of. “I puked my guts out in Hopper’s bathroom.”

Robin has kind of an intense look on her face and there’s a weird little emphasis on talking that has Steve’s stomach doing a nervous little flip. His weird feelings for Robin are something he’s mostly processed through in the month that he’s been apart from her, but who knows what he might have said.

“So, we sat on a bathroom floor talking?” Steve asks as he reaches up to rub at the back of his neck. “What, uh— did we talk about?”

[hey_dingus]

"At least his place was probably cleaner." Robin tries not to think of the pervasively sticky texture that's on the back of her arms and the many culprits that could have caused it. The shower beckons but Steve gives her this weirdly serious look that freezes her in place and her stomach feels sour all over again.

He's had a month. A whole month. Robin swallows tightly wondering what scares her more; Steve still having feelings or Steve, when sober, being repulsed by who she is.

"Tammy Thompson," she says, looking at the empty space just left of Steve, not quite in his eyes. "We talked about Tammy Thompson."

[haplesshairpile]

“Tammy Thompson?” Steve asks, blinking in confusion and shaking his head. “The girl from Click’s class?”

Steve sits at the dining room table that sits in the small space off of the kitchen and looks up at Robin in vague confusion. That isn’t what he was expecting her to say at all, and it’s kind of thrown him through a loop.

“I though I might have—“ He cuts himself off and shakes his head. “Why were we talking about her?”

[hey_dingus]

"From Click's class," Robin says. She can't quite bring herself to sit down across from Steve. For all that this apartment is hotel-room-beige, it's still his space. At least the bathroom was neutral territory. Her footing seems so much less sure, even though her head isn't spinning anymore. "I kept looking at you because I couldn't figure out why she was so into you when I wanted her to look at me."

She smiles ruefully. The confession feels just as raw this time but it scrapes at different parts. "And then you made fun of her singing and I told you that you sounded like a Muppet."

[haplesshairpile]

Steve stares at Robin in confusion, wondering what any of this even means, until it finally clicks. If Robin wanted Tammy to look at her, really look at her like she looked at Steve, then there’s really only one thing that could mean.

“Oh,” he breathes out, furrowing his brow a bit as he processes it all. Steve has been rejected by plenty of girls, more than he could even count, and this feels like sort of a distant cousin to that. He didn’t even put himself out there, for one. Or maybe he did, because why else would she tell him this huge thing on a sticky bathroom floor.

He’s still thinking, but Robin is looking at him like maybe she’s scared, and Steve hates that. In his month here in Darrow, he’s met all sorts of people who are gay and he’s fine with it all. Back home it wasn’t something that someone could really be open with and yeah, Steve was an asshole, but never about that. He doesn’t really get it, personally, but how could he? He’s not the one living it.

“If I sounded like a Muppet then it was a good impression, because her singing sounds like Kermit on a bender,” Steve says with a small smile. He can’t imagine that he would have reacted poorly back home either, but she’s looking at him like she doesn’t know what to expect. “Your taste in women is terrible, but I guess that leaves more for me.”

Steve looks at her for a long moment, smiling softly, and then gestures at the chair across from him. It’s his turn to be vulnerable now, and he swallows hard before looking at her again. “So, I’m guessing you didn’t just tell me this because you felt like sharing.” He huffs out a small laugh and feels his cheeks heat up a bit. “Did I make a complete fool of myself?”

[hey_dingus]

"Oh," Robin says back. Relief creeps back into her and she knows she had no reason to be scared in the first place but Steve is the first (and second?) person she's ever told. There are still days when Robin can barely admit it to herself, much less accept it, but here's Steve Harrington.

Robin slouches into the seat across from him and matches his nervous smile. "I guess this means you don't remember singing Total Eclipse of the Heart in a Kermit voice." That's tragic on its own level because it had been so comfortably, intimately, the opposite of Steve trying to be cool all the time. They'd been idiots on the bathroom floor.

But not a fool.

Letting out a breath, Robin shakes her head no. "You were talking about me like this great girl you'd met. It was some of the nicest stuff anyone's ever said about me, really." It's why she'd been honest, why she'd felt like she'd owed it to him. "I owed you the truth."

[haplesshairpile]

"No, but that does sound like me," Steve says with a small huff of laughter. It sounds like the real Steve, the kind he let himself be around Dustin, when he didn't think he had to act cool.

Being in Darrow is kind of freeing in that way. He really has no reason to keep up the act.

Robin sits down and Steve shifts nervously, preparing to be let down easily after a confession he doesn't even remember making, but that isn't exactly what happens. He finds himself smiling because he can picture it, him spilling his guts out on some dingy bathroom floor and her doing the same. It sounds like a pretty good ending to that disaster of a day.

"You are a great girl," Steve tells her, pausing a moment to try and gather his words. "I haven't seen you in a month, right? And-- when I thought of you, and how much I missed you-- shut up, I did-- I just." He takes another breath and shrugs. "I missed just hanging out with you and giving each other shit. I didn't miss you like I thought I would."

He looks over at Robin helplessly, and then in his very best Kermit voice asks, "Does that make any sense to you?"

[hey_dingus]

"To be fair, neither of us were at our best," Robin says, echoing Steve's little laugh. She doesn't remember everything with perfect clarity but she remembers enough to know she'd been totally slaphappy, laughing like a fiend and unable to keep a single thought in her head for too long. It's nice, at least, to be clearheaded about it this time around.

She wants to fire off some joke about how he can't have missed her after seeing her pretty much every day since the middle of May but he's clearly serious. Maybe for her, no time has passed, but it's obviously not the same case for him. Then he makes that Kermit voice again and she cracks a little bit, laughing into her hands for more time than the joke deserves. It's just such a goddamn relief that she's maybe a little bit hysterical.

When she can be serious again, Robin reaches across the table and pats Steve on the shoulder. "I'm not entirely sure, myself, but I'm pretty sure that's what having friends is like." She hasn't exactly had that many of her own but if she's really looking at it, that's what they are, aren't they?

[haplesshairpile]

Robin laughs and Steve finally feels himself unclench. He relaxes back in his seat and watches her giggle into her hands like an idiot, and he thinks about how he doesn't want to kiss her or try to get her in bed or anything. He never thought about that, not while he missed her or thought back on her time together.

He really just wants to make her laugh, and to see her happy. She pats his shoulder and Steve smiles at her, even as his brows furrow slightly in thought. It's probably pretty pathetic, but he's never actually had real friends who actually gave a shit about him. He wasted so much time on fucking Tommy H, that asshole, who probably wouldn't have even pissed on him if he were on fire.

So maybe he was confused, because if he was a guy who had fond feelings for a cute girl, he obviously wanted to bang her, right? God, he's such a fucking idiot. But at least he's getting better. Being in Darrow helps, because this is such a different world. Things are better here, not just for straight white assholes like him but for everyone. He thinks about Robin and how she likes girls, and he can't help but to be excited for the world she's about to experience. He wants her to be happy, wants to make her laugh, and yeah. That must be friendship.

"Friends, then," Steve says as he holds his hand out to her for a shake. "Dingus."