Chapter Text
Friday, June 27th, 1986
The drive into the woods wasn’t particularly long, an hour or so on the I-70— just across the border into Illinois— and then fifteen minutes on the increasingly narrow and less maintained back roads. Eventually, there was the turn off for the half mile private drive that wound its way through the trees and to the cabin. It was easy to miss if you weren’t specifically looking for it in specifically the right spot. They missed it three times the first time they came up here last summer, Steve having to pull ten-point turns on the rough dirt road to get the car turned around each time to try again. Now, though, she spotted the gnarled old tree with the dead branch that seemed to reach out of the summer greenery like a bony hand and knew the driveway would be just around the next bend on the left. She had made this drive with Steve ten or so times by now, popping up for a weekend or longer here and there whenever one or both of them needed to get out of Hawkins, and right now, Robin Buckley really needed to be out of Hawkins.
She was still the passenger, like always, but this time her feet were firmly on the floor mat of the Wheeler’s station wagon instead of propped up on the dash of Steve’s BMW. The radio was silent instead of blaring a carefully crafted mixtape, and she had to pay attention to giving Nancy directions. She’d meet Steve up there for once; Nancy had insisted on driving her this time.
Robin had left as soon as she could— wanted to leave sooner— but the diplomas sitting in the back seat where they threw them earlier that afternoon were the reason she hadn’t. Graduation had been the one thing holding her in Hawkins after all that happened in March, and even that had barely been enough some weeks. It was a graduation that felt empty and wrong without Eddie there with them, knowing that he was supposed to give them all someone to clap and cheer for during the long stretch of meaningless names between Buckley and Wheeler. Max was supposed to be there in the crowd with the rest of their friends, not lying silent and motionless in a hospital bed, still in a coma after three months. He was supposed to be there, too, of course, but he wasn’t. Another of the many faces missing from the student body or from the spectators in the bleachers, more evidence of a Hawkins pulled apart by loss and tragedy.
So Nancy had awkwardly volunteered to help her pack up the wagon the previous night with the things she’d need for a summer spent in the woods, and drove her up to the cabin after the graduation ceremony. Nancy Wheeler, always the problem solver, always the anchor, still trying to help after everything fell apart. But Robin didn’t need Nancy to try and solve her, not now, not that she could be solved anyway. She didn’t need to be held in place, safe and secure. What she needed was just her and Steve like always, and two months of mosquito bites, sunburns, poison ivy, and no air conditioning to try and pull her life back together. Two months to hope that some of the images burned into the backs of her eyelids would fade away to blackness and let her close her eyes in peace. Two months to heal.
“Turn here,” she said to Nancy, who was driving at barely more than a crawl to avoid the potholes that looked like they could swallow a station wagon whole. It must have rained that morning because they were all water-filled, splashing muck all over the wheels and wood panelling of the borrowed car when Nancy had no option but to drive through them. Potholes as deep as Lover’s Lake, murky and hiding secrets at their bottom.
Steve was much less careful on that stretch of pock-marked road, landing them with a flat tire when they were heading home from a weekend trip one night last November. Robin had to hold the flashlight as Steve tried to figure out how to change a tire— something his wallet had never required him to learn— yelling at her every ten seconds when she’d shine the light off into the trees. She had been convinced that some hungry animal or hungrier thing was stalking them from the woods. She really shouldn’t have spent the weekend reading about the Enfield Horror in the middle of the forest, especially because it happened only 95 or so miles southwest of them. Steve had threatened to drive the two hours and leave her in Enfield if she didn’t keep the damn light on the car. In the end, she managed to keep the light steady and he managed to get the spare put on and they made it home without being eaten by a bear or a wolf or a three-legged woods monster.
The wagon slowed to a stop in the clearing in front of the cabin after navigating the driveway that twisted through dense forest of sycamore, silver maple, dogwood and pine. Robin sunk into the blanket of heavy silence in the front of the car, thankful for it, cursed by it. She hadn’t been up here since the Winter Incident back in December, the longest stretch between visits by far. Ironically, the plan had been to finally bring their friends up with them for the first time and spend part of spring break squashed up here together— a celebration of her acceptance to Tufts and Nancy’s to Emerson— and to take Nancy’s mind off her recent break up. Hawkins clearly had other ideas.
The cabin looked almost identical to the first time Steve drove them up last July with the car windows down in the lazy midwest heat. All of the dead leaves and pine needles that had collected in large piles on the porch that she had spent that first sweaty afternoon removing were back to mock her. She had assumed they were from years of neglect and nature trying its hardest to reclaim the space, but apparently this chore was meant to be an annual tradition.
“Thanks for the ride,” Robin said to Nancy, sounding more flat than she meant to while opening the passenger door. Before she could swing her legs out into the humid air, though, there was a hand on her wrist.
“Robin.” Nancy was looking at her in that cautious way that she looked at anything she was trying to figure out, like she was something to be carefully analyzed. Robin hated that look when it was directed at her. She didn’t want to see anything else, either.
“This isn’t…goodbye…right?” Nancy asked with a softness she wasn’t used to hearing from the girl these days, vulnerable and small.
“I’m not gonna off myself in Steve’s cabin, Nance,” she scoffed, a dry, humorless laugh following her words.
Nancy’s hand didn’t leave her arm. “That’s not…I didn’t mean that. Just…come home, okay? Don’t take off after and never look back. You have other people, too. Please. Come home.”
She took a deep breath, not aware that her friends considered her a flight risk; the kind of person who would leave without a goodbye, especially after what they’d been through. She hadn’t realized that it had gotten this bad. It wasn’t particularly surprising, though.
Looking at Nancy’s face, pleading and desperate, she forced a smile that she knew didn’t reach her eyes and told her, “It’s just for the summer. I’ll come back.”
She raised her right hand, thought about placing it on top of where Nancy’s was still closed around her left wrist, still pressing the soft leather of the jewelry she wore there further up her arm than it normally sat, but thought better of it and closed her hand into a fist. It was true, it was just for the summer and she would come back— even if it was only briefly— even if Hawkins didn’t feel like home anymore, could never really feel like home after the losses of the spring. A blood stained town where she peeled her blood stained clothes from her blood stained body one morning in late March as the sun rose into a blood-red sky. Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky in the morning, sailor’s warning she had thought. The warning came too late, they had already sunk below the waves in the darkness.
A year ago she and Steve were dressed as idiot sailors in stripes and solids; blues and whites and reds. Still on solid ground then, not yet lost to sea. Now, she didn’t think she’d ever be able to look at anything she wore without seeing only the red.
“Do you want a hand bringing things inside?” Nancy asked her as she helped pull the boxes, cooler, bags and gasoline cans from the back of the station wagon.
“No, it’s alright, a bunch of it is going into the garage anyway,” Robin told her.
“What even is all of this?” Nancy questioned as she placed a particularly heavy box on the ground beside the car.
“Books, food, tools and movies, mostly.”
Nancy flipped the box open to peer inside. “ The New Mechanic’s Guide to Combustion Engines.” The inflection in her voice at the end made the title sound like a question.
Robin kicked the cardboard closed with her foot and dropped another box on top, effectively ending Nancy’s snooping. “Yeah,” was the only answer the other girl got.
Taking the hint, Nancy set Robin’s duffle bag on top of the boxes to keep it off of the still-wet ground and closed the trunk of the wagon. Robin watched her shifting her weight between the balls and heels of her feet, not knowing what was expected next. She couldn’t stand the awkward stasis between them, that space in between words and actions when everything devolved into a guessing game of what the next move would be when time started ticking again. She wondered if she ran fast enough if she could disappear completely into the cabin in the time it took Nancy to blink; vanish while those blue-grey eyes were closed and not have to see the sadness there when they opened; escape from where her boots were squishing into the mud without feeling Nancy’s gaze staring at the back of her head as she walked to the front door. She hated her cowardice, but hated the courage it took to walk away more.
Nancy brought time back to life first, a collision of ticking seconds all fighting to catch up. “I’ll call…if that’s okay. To see how it’s going.”
Robin tried to keep looking at the ground where she was digging her toe into the muck. “Yeah, that’s…that’s fine.” Silence, stillness, mud under boots, earth under feet and dammit, she looked up to blue-grey eyes staring back at her, waiting.
“You still have the number?” Robin asked, wanting to focus on anything else.
An almost imperceivable nod from Nancy, her refusal to look away bringing Robin to the edge of a full panic attack. “Yeah, it’s in my address book by the phone in my room.”
More silence, mud seeping through the tear in her boot, stillness replaced with feet moving over earth and dammit, delicately strong arms thrown around her shoulders and a crystalline wetness to blue-grey eyes. She wanted to relax into those arms, let herself be carried away and tucked somewhere warm until she forgot about Eddie and Max and… everything else. She wanted to sob into Nancy’s pretty neck, press her cheek against the soft skin there, feel the life pulsing with each heartbeat and beg her to never let her go, never leave her. But now wasn’t the time for sobbing and this wasn’t the place for begging, so instead Robin felt herself stiffen until her muscles ached under Nancy’s fingers and the curly-haired girl mistook it for a different type of discomfort and released her. She was relieved. She was devastated.
There was nothing left to say, so Nancy turned away first, walked back to the station wagon with the mud now dried in sickening splatters across the side and got into the driver’s seat. The engine roared to life, coughed a cloud of hot exhaust at Robin’s legs, and the vehicle crept away. She hoped that Nancy wouldn’t look back, wouldn’t glance in the rear view mirror and see her watching her as she made it to the first bend in the driveway and then out of sight. For once, she was lucky, and Nancy kept her eyes forward the whole time.
Robin walked over and filled the generator with gas and got it started and then stored the gas cans in the garage that stood separate from the cabin. There would be enough fuel for the generator until they had to make a trip into the tiny excuse for a town that was nearby for food and supplies. She tucked the box with the tools against the wall, looked up at the Polaroid photo she pinned there last July and smiled. Then she started hauling the rest of her things up the three little steps and into the cabin. She left the cooler with fresh foods in the shade on the porch for now, it would be a while before the fridge inside was cold now that the generator was providing the cabin with power.
“Nice to see you. Thanks for the help, dickhead,” she said to Steve with her duffle bag slung over her shoulder, one box in her arms and another being pushed across the floor with her muddy boot.
“I thought you were handling it just fine,” he told her with his feet resting on the rough wood coffee table.
“I wasn’t.”
“Figured Nancy would give you a hand.”
“She offered, she tried. I just thought it would be easier to say bye if she didn’t come inside. Will you at least grab this one?” she asked, holding the heavy box full of various canned foods and VHS tapes— the ones that she unapologetically stole from Family Video before she quit— out for him.
He got up from the couch with a groan and accepted the box. “You two looked like you were having a moment out there, I didn’t want to interrupt,” he teased while placing the box on the coffee table.
“There was nothing to interrupt. I don’t want to talk about Nancy right now. And why were you watching? Creep.”
He laughed and unpacked the movies into a haphazard tower next to the TV before bringing the box into the kitchen to store the canned goods in the cupboard. Robin watched him stack what seemed like endless cans of soup, fruit salad, creamed corn, bottles of tomato juice and things she didn’t even remember buying when she was filling her shopping cart at the grocery store yesterday morning. Did she even like cream of mushroom? Probably not, but watching Steve doing something as mundane as putting away groceries brought a sense of calm to her, like a gentle ocean breeze moving in from the water to break the summer heat. At least she assumed, she had still never seen the ocean.
He caught her watching him and with a raised eyebrow asked, “What?”
“I just missed you is all.”
“We’re literally always together,” he said and then gave a can of corned beef a disgusted look as he shoved it to the back of the cupboard.
“You know what I mean.”
She pushed the front door closed a bit harder than she meant to and watched the wooden sign that rested on top of the door frame wobble. ‘Hellhole’ was roughly carved into the single board and she smiled as she read it.
***
Sunday, July 7th, 1985
“This is it?” Robin asked unenthusiastically as Steve stopped the car in front of the simple, run-down log cabin in the late morning. Thick green moss was growing between a handful of the logs and a large maple tree shaded half of the roof.
“Yep. What were you expecting?” he replied, pulling up on the parking break and removing his keys from the ignition.
“I don’t know, something more…Harrington?”
“I told you it was my grandad's hunting cabin— mom’s side, not dad’s— so not at all Harrington, by the way. It's not a summer home, Rob. And no one has been up here in like…” He counted on his fingers. “Four years? I’m mostly surprised that the windows haven’t been smashed.”
“Does this place even have any shitty kids who would care about breaking things in the woods? We didn’t pass a single house for at least five miles,” she asked, now out of the car and using her foot to sweep away the accumulation of leaves from the front steps. She clapped her hands and held them out in front of her and he tossed her the keys, which she dropped before picking up. She cleared a little path through the crunchy leaves on the porch, unlocked the door with the peeling green paint, and stepped inside.
Less than two and a half days ago she stepped across the threshold and into Steve’s house for the first time, dirty, shaken and exhausted. It was large and professionally decorated, a beautiful house but not a home, not lived in. She felt wholly out of place, like her very presence there broke some unspoken rule; she didn’t want to touch anything. His parents were gone, spending the summer somewhere or other, leaving him to face the embarrassment of a working minimum wage job alone. Robin was thankful; she wasn’t sure she could handle seeing the relief wash over their faces when they found out that their son wasn’t dating the weird girl with the doodles on her shoes and bandaid on her knee who said awkward things when she was nervous.
She spent that first night after Starcourt in Steve’s room dressed in his Hawkins High t-shirt and gym shorts. Her staying in one of the guest rooms had never really been an option; either of them being alone that night had never really been an option. He gave her the bed and unrolled a sleeping bag on the floor for himself after stealing the pillows from the bed in the room he never once remembered guests staying in. It lasted ten minutes before the distance was too great and the isolation too threatening and Robin was asking him to stay with her. She had gotten used to him almost always being within arms reach after two days trapped and confined together, craving his closeness like a bad habit. She barely knew him and he barely knew her, yet he knew her better than anyone. Only hours ago he was confessing his feelings for her and she was confessing why she’d never return them, and now they were sharing a pillow, his arms securely around her smaller frame in nothing more than companionship and trust.
The next morning she called her parents to let them know that she was, in fact, alive and well(ish), and then spent that day and night really getting to know the Steve Harrington that existed outside the bubble of high school and the panic of life-threatening disaster. More surprisingly, for the first time in a long time, she let someone start to know the girl that existed behind the artificially projected confidence and sardonicism. He filled her in on all things Upside Down related and she found that alternate dimensions, monsters, government cover ups and a girl with psionic abilities were all easier to wrap her head around than the fact that she was snuggled up in Steve Harrington’s bed with him.
He had remembered to ask her again if she was okay that next day, less concerned about physical injury now than he was post-car crash last night, but they both knew there were several kinds of okay. She answered honestly that she didn’t think she was, in one of those not so physical ways. Robin was, however, still very much concerned about his injuries and kept trying to convince him to go to the hospital to have his face looked at. When he kept refusing, she told him it was the hospital or she wasn’t leaving his side until she was sure he wasn’t slowly dying of a brain bleed. He chose her and she stayed put.
By the next afternoon she was calling her parents again to tell them that she was leaving town for a bit with a friend. She didn’t hide that her friend was a boy a grade older. They told her to have fun and be safe and that was that, no apparent concern about their teenage daughter disappearing into the woods with a boy they had never met or even heard of until that moment. She told herself it was because they trusted her, she had never given them a reason not to afterall, or maybe deep down they knew they had nothing to worry about in terms of her and boys. Either option felt better than the third possibility, which was that they just didn’t care either way. She hung up the phone and she and Steve made a list of what they’d need to survive for a few weeks in the cabin.
Now that she was standing inside the cabin that was far more modest than expected, she felt more relaxed. This was somewhere she belonged, a place that held memories and was worn in and comfy, even if it desperately needed a cleaning.
“Are you going to help with this?” Steve called after her, struggling with the supplies in the trunk that she had abandoned him with.
“Nah, you can handle it just fine, Mr. Hot Shot Athlete,” she shouted back over her shoulder.
The open door cast a wide beam of light into the cabin that was kept in darkness by closed curtains. She could see the dust dancing in the sunlight, knew it was in the air all around her and could feel it tickling the back of her nose. Dust was better than the heavy smoke that had settled over Hawkins from where Starcourt was still burning days later, though. She knew they would let it burn to the ground, burn until there was nothing left of the colossal monster made of meat, made of rats and lost pets and so many of Hawkin’s own. The paper said 30 fatalities, but she wondered how much higher that number would be if they included the Russians dead under the mall. She wondered how hot it had to burn before bone turned to ash, and if the Gap or Waldenbooks would have become a firestorm first; a battle of poly/cotton versus paper. She wondered if she’d ever get the smell of fireworks and burning flesh out of her hair. She’d settle for the dust allergies and hot, stale cabin air any day.
She tried the lightswitch but got nothing, forgetting about the generator. “We need power,” she said to Steve who had joined her.
“The generator’s around the side,” he said, throwing her duffle bag at her and disappearing outside again. A minute later she heard the sound of a motor running and the lights came to life in the cabin.
“It’s hot as hell in here,” he said when he came back with the last pile of their things. “There should be a few fans down in the cellar, makes it more bearable without air conditioning at least.”
He walked to the middle of the main room and reached for the steel ring of the hatch in the floor that led to the basement space under the cabin, but stopped when there was a noticeable bang from under his feet.
“What was that?” a startled Robin asked.
“Nothing, I’m sure it was just the generator outside or something, thing is older than me.” He went to open the hatch a second time and another bang and the sound of breaking glass rang out.
“That’s not the generator. I swear to god, Steve, if you brought me out here to a haunted cabin in the middle of the woods after we survived secret Russians and a literal monster I am going to kill you. Ghosts are like my number three greatest fear.”
“What are the first two?”
“Number one is rab–” Another louder bang and Robin grabbed the fire poker from beside the woodstove.
“You’re gonna fight a ghost with that?” Steve asked her and opened the trapdoor.
“Do not go down there! Have you never seen The Evil Dead? ”
“No?” He started down the stairs into the cellar.
“If you find any old, creepy, evil-looking books don’t touch them!” she called after him, still clutching the fire poker.
“I won’t? Don’t worry.” He was fully out of view.
“If you get possessed by a demon, I will dismember you! But in a caring way.”
“Jesus Christ, Robin, what kind of movies are you watching?” Steve’s voice carried up the stairs.
“Better ones than you, clearly.”
Only silence followed. “Steve?” She took a step towards the hole in the floor. Nothing.
“Did you die down there?” A few more steps until she was able to crane her neck forward and peer down the stairs. Silence.
Another crash and a scream from Steve, and Robin was flying down the steep stairs into the basement. All fears of ghosts and Deadites were gone. Her mind only flashed with images of Steve unconscious on the floor— battered and bloody— when they were both thrown into the room together, her fighting the guards and him limp and still. When they were grabbed and strapped together back to back before she could check if he was breathing or if his heart was still beating; when she didn’t know if her unlikely new friend was alive or dead. Running towards his scream now— towards the cause of it— she realized that she’d rather face a ghost or a giant, fleshy monster, or an armed Russian soldier than feel the icy dread of not knowing freeze the blood in her veins ever again. She’d throw herself in front of anything if it meant not having to hold her breath to try and feel his body moving against her back, giving some sign that he was still pulling oxygen into his lungs. She’d spit in the face of anything that laughed at his pain. Two weeks ago the sight of his stupid hair and stupid face filled her with something red and hot, now she thought she might die for him if it came down to it. Love was weird like that, even when it was platonic.
Steve wasn’t dead, though, and there was no ghost or soul-feasting demon. What there was was a large mess, broken jars of what looked like preserved peaches, and Steve trying to convince a large and pissed off raccoon to leave through the broken basement window with an old broom. Robin decided to name him Ash, it seemed fitting. When he refused to be evicted, they cut their losses, found the pair of fans that had been stored down there and decided that they really didn’t need the cellar for anything anyway.
With the fans plugged in and the windows open there was finally a breeze pulling fresh air into the cabin and cooling the sticky air. For half an hour. And then the power flickered and died and the fans died with it.
“Steve? You made sure the generator had gas, right? You filled up the canisters when we stopped for gas in Hawkins?”
“I’ll uh…I’ll be right back. Twenty minute tops,” he said and grabbed his car keys from the hook on the wall beside the door.
He was back seventeen minutes later.
“Success?” Robin asked him, watching him put his keys back.
“Steve?”
“It’s Sunday,” he said quietly.
“Store’s closed on Sunday, isn’t it, Harrington?”
“Store’s closed on Sunday.” He nodded, tongue pressed into his cheek with his shoulders slouched and hands in his pockets.
“You absolute dingus. Of all the ‘you suck’ things I’ve seen you do, this is by far the most ‘you…suckiest’.” The displeasure was radiating off her as she sat on the couch in the heat.
She tried not to think of how dark it was going to be when the sun went down and there were no lights, dark like the back of the station wagon where they sat watching the Spider Monster chase them down a darker road. She tried to ignore how stuffy it was already getting, stuffy like the elevator they spent twelve hours stuck in. Always stuck with stupid Steve Harrington and his stupid actions, bagel crumbs all over the floor, empty gas cans bouncing around the trunk of the car like his only two brain cells bouncing around his empty skull.
“Why did we think coming here was a good idea? Why did we leave your stupid, swanky, air conditioned house with a pool for this hellhole in the ass crack of Illinois?”
“Because it’s our hellhole?” He grabbed a box of crackers from the kitchen and sat down next to her.
And it was true, it was their place away from it all. Away from high school and their roles as king and nobody, ice cream scoops and white board tallies, cracked codes and honesty serum, dirty bathroom floors and a blood stained shirt, away from death and monsters. The dark wouldn’t be so bad; the sky was clear and the moon would be bright. It would cool off at night; it wouldn’t be too hot or stuffy with the windows open. Her displeasure fizzled out and she rested her head on his shoulder. She was glad she was here with Steve Harrington and his stupid way of making her feel better. The empty gas cans could be filled in the morning and she could forgive the cracker crumbs he was currently littering the wooden floor with. Love was weird like that, especially when it was platonic.