Chapter Text
They’re making headway, with Murray’s help, but so much feels like too little, too late, and Robin just constantly feels like she’s a hair’s breadth from a panic attack.
The search as it stands is… it’s beyond her. None of it was ever really in her wheelhouse, wasn’t like cracking the Russian code with Steve and Dustin. It was all Nancy’s strengths and Robin had been along for the ride, but now she feels like she doesn’t understand anything and all she can do is worry.
Sometimes she and Murray both spend the night in Steve’s house, but she doesn’t think Murray even tries to sleep, when he does. There’s a bed right in the room they work out of, plus the second guest room, and it’s not like Steve’s parents would ever know if he spent a night in their bed instead of going back to the Byers’ basement, but she’s pretty sure he just… spends all night in front of their wall. If they’re there on the same night and she wakes up and can’t get back to sleep, she sees the light under the door. Sometimes hears pacing. Once, they met in the kitchen at two AM and he offered her a cup of coffee. She took him up on it.
He’s looking for an omega trafficking ring, they have enough information that he feels like it’s their best line of inquiry, and…
And, she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know how to feel about that. She doesn’t know how to picture Steve. She just keeps seeing him like he was under Starcourt, when they dragged him in and she thought he was dead, and they had hardly even been friends, had maybe started to be, and suddenly everything felt empty, thinking now they never would be.
He’s taught her some actually useful Russian phrases, along the way, tossed her a book she could translate word by word with the dictionary. She suspects just to give her something to focus on that isn’t the search for Steve, while he and Nancy do the real investigating.
“I just need you to keep it together.” Nancy tells her, when Robin asks what she can do. Sweeps off to follow some lead alone. Some connection she must have seen on the wall, that she didn’t tell either of them about.
Murray hums, studying what Nancy had just been looking at, but he turns when Robin groans and throws herself down on the bed.
“She’s not wrong. Keeping it together is a job.” He offers. He’s not big on touchy-feely sympathy, which she appreciates. If she wanted touchy-feely, she’d go to her parents. But… he’s not without a sympathy.
He reminds her of Nancy in that way. He’s less coolly detached, more prickly and ready to rant about any given subject, but… the same, in the way they care deeply and don’t want to hug and cry and sing kumbaya about it. Which is kind of reassuring. Again, hugging and crying and singing kumbaya, she can get at home.
“Keeping it together isn’t getting Steve back faster.”
“Well, if there’s ever a code involved in all of this, we’ll need you– that was you, correct? The codebreaker at Starcourt?”
She nods, not particularly mollified.
“Finding Steve is… it’s only the start of this, you understand that?” He continues. “Getting him back isn’t going to erase any of what he might be going through. He could be in very rough shape. Nancy Wheeler isn’t who he’s going to need for that.”
“We’re not– I’m not his new girlfriend.” She says. She’s never been sure how it is he knows Nancy, or how much of the ups and downs of the Steve-Nancy-Jonathan drama he knows, but he knows at least as much as Robin does. Not that Steve had ever wanted to dwell much on the stuff with Nancy and Jonathan.
Murray snorts. “No. Does that mean he won’t still need you?”
“... No.”
“Damn straight. So. Like Wheeler said– keep it together. Be someone he can be safe with. There’s every chance we’re bringing home someone who’s been… severely traumatized. Threatened with enough, even if they haven’t physically harmed him– and that’s if they haven’t physically harmed him, which is only likely if we’re on the right track about who has him and why… and if he hasn’t– Well. Just… be ready to take care of him.”
“I will.”
“I’m… This isn’t to, you know. I’m not trying to scare you here, I’m just–”
“Being realistic?”
“Yeah.” He blows out a sigh. “Tracking him down if he’s been sold is going to be very hard. How he does depends a lot on the buyer. Feral is a possibility. And there are no guarantees. But– I would really like… to get to find a kid alive here. I would really like that.”
-/-
If summer ends while Steve is stuck here, he’s going to be seriously pissed off.
He’s seriously pissed off enough as it is, he guesses, but he’s used to fucked up situations. This summer has been full of fucked up situations of many kinds!
It’s just… stuck here, there’s no jumping into the pool when it’s hot out. There’s no talking to Robin about this, that, and everything while they work the same shift at Family Video. No gaggle of kids spilling in from the arcade to make demands.
What if he gets out and all his friends are in high school and he’s stuck working all his shifts with Keith? Will he even still have a job? Keith can’t fire him for getting kidnapped, right?
Shit, what if he got fired for getting kidnapped?
He is getting out. He’s watching for any kind of opening in security all the time, he’s playing up being the big dumb jock who never had to learn how to be a proper omega before, putting on the whole act. Wide-eyed, pretty, and trying his best (bless his heart), and just… not good enough. Not good enough to send through to whatever hell comes next, but not bad enough to send back to the previous hell.
They punish him, but compared to the Russians, it’s not even like being punished. No one hits him, and they haven’t drugged him since he needed to be transported, and no one threatens him with scary implements or anything, it’s just school shit, basically. He has to sit in a corner and think about what he’s doing wrong– well, his room is basically solitary confinement– or they give him extra work to do and he messes it up just enough. Even the stuff he’s good at. He’s been cooking for himself and doing his own laundry and cleaning… most of his own house, for years, but they don’t know that he hasn’t lived off pizza bagels and wallowed in filth between visits from the maid. He tries to break something every other time they have him do dishes– he gets stuck with clean-up duties a lot as a punishment.
He figures, if he breaks a glass every time, they’ll know he’s doing it on purpose. The last time, when it was a saucer, he yanked a hair out of his wrist while his hands were hidden by dish suds, in the hopes it would make his eyes water, really sell his ‘distress’ over it. He’s never learned to fake cry, and he doesn’t want to try and go too hard and have it look fake. Carol was a master at that shit, though, and he can pull a couple moves from her playbook without going the whole nine yards. Mimics the way she would breathe and blink and look up.
He’s getting better at controlling his scent, another thing he never had to do before, when he was masking it all the time.
He’s getting better at a lot.
They don’t punish him by taking away yard time entirely, though he gets less than most of the girls. He runs laps, when he’s out there. He’s getting used to the grass under his bare feet, and at least no one tells him he’s not allowed to run. There are a bunch of exercises they’re all encouraged to keep up, jazzercise shit and crunches and leg lifts and side bends. Nothing wrong with the athletic look, one of the wardens had said, as long as you keep slim and trim. Flat tummies and sculpted asses, or whatever.
But fuck that, right?
When Steve is alone in his room, he exercises. There’s nothing he can do for weight lifting, outside of being on cleaning duty and being asked to carry a bucket of water somewhere, and he would kill for a chin-up bar, and he doesn’t dare do anything that would make enough noise to draw attention.
He does a lot of push-ups. Squats, too, if he hasn’t had enough running. If it comes down to really having to fight his way free, he’s got to be able to win. And he’s got to be able to make a break for it. He’s got to be in the best fucking shape of his life.
-/-
Eddie doesn’t know why he drives out the same way again. It’s a couple days later, and he can’t really afford the gas.
Well, he can. He still has his regular customers, and if he refrains from dipping into his supply for personal enjoyment, that’s money. There’s a whole crop of new seniors and recent-ish graduates still bumming around Hawkins– not off to college yet or just not destined for it– who know and more or less trust him, but who wouldn’t dare look for Rick.
And… he knows anyone who did graduate, he should be pointing Rick’s way. Eddie’s not Hawkins’ dealer, and he’s not allowed to be– he’s Hawkins High’s. An underling and not a competitor. Not like it’s competing when he has to go to Rick himself. He could mark shit up and pocket the difference to kids who wouldn’t know better– he does, when they’re assholes with money. But he can’t exactly cut Rick out.
So, he does not smoke up with Jesus, when he gets to the old school, just rolls past it, curious. There are no cars. It all looks about the same by daylight, just worse. Shabbier. No one’s given Jesus a paint job, or even scrubbed away the bird shit.
So who chased him off?
He doesn’t stick around, gets the fucking heebie-jeebies at the thought of being caught. Just takes a turn on a dirt road that he hopes will get him back… somewhere. Takes the next turn back towards the old highway.
Stops, instead, in a field across from what can’t and must be the back of the old school.
Heebie fucking jeebies.
Eddie finds the old highway and tells himself he’s not going to think about that place. Or he’s going to write a very ex-catholic horror story about it, maybe turn it in for the English class he knows he’ll pass easy. One of the only classes he knows he’ll pass easy.
Shit fuck, but he cannot catch a break.
-/-
Dustin does not want to start the new school year without Steve.
He guesses none of them do, but it’s not fair, it’s not the same. Will has Jonathan. Lucas has a dad. Mike… well, Mike has a dad, but Nancy is probably way more helpful with literally everything, outside of maybe shaving, and he doesn’t think Mike has to worry about that yet, anyway.
Steve was Dustin’s person, who he could go to about all this shit. About worrying about school, and fitting in, and– well, he doesn’t have to worry about talking to girls now, he has a girlfriend, but… all the other stuff. He doesn’t want to have to navigate that alone, and at a new school, where instead of being at the very least a nerd who was older than half the kids there, he’s gonna be a freshman.
“Hey, Robin? Do kids at school think you’re cool?” He asks her, because in the absence of Steve, she is at least Scoops Troop, and that’s something real.
“Yeah.” She snorts, rolling her eyes. “They’re probably gonna make me prom queen.”
“I was afraid of that.” He frowns. “... Do kids at school think Nancy is cool?”
“I don’t think so.” She pushes his hat down a little. “Sorry. I– Kids don’t think I’m uncool. I’m just… sort of there, I guess. I don’t think anyone thinks about me enough to think I’m cool or not cool. It’s just… hard. I mean… for everyone! So– you’ll… do great? Sorry. Steve would have said the right thing.”
“Probably.” Dustin sighs. “Are you getting close to finding him?”
“Nancy thinks maybe. I’m not… super useful, with all this stuff. She’s like… Nancy Drew. Or Lois Lane! Anyway– we’ll find him. We will.”
She sounds like she really means it, at least.