Chapter Text
Robin woke up with a headache that morning. Her hair sticking to her face and feeling more tired than the evening before, she couldn’t remember falling asleep at all. It had been another night of tossing and turning, and it took her a while after waking up to realize she was in Steve’s bed again, but alone this time.
Noise came from the kitchen. Robin’s glance got caught on the mirror on Steve’s wardrobe on her way out, and she rubbed over face and pushed the hair out of it. “You look like shit,” she mumbled to herself, red cheeks and dark circles under her eyes. She stared at herself for a few seconds, before deciding to avoid looking at herself for the remainder of the day.
“Morning,” Steve greeted her when she entered the kitchen. “I’m making pancakes.”
“Did I wake up in another universe?” Robin asked jokingly and glanced into the bowl with the ingredients. “Since when do you make breakfast?”
“Since you’ve had a shit night and I wanted to make sure you have a nice morning.” Steve stirred around in the bowl.
Robin hopped on the counter. “I don’t remember having a bad night.”
“Really?” Steve turned on the stove. “You had like three consecutive panic attacks.”
“Did I?” Robin squinted, staring at nothing in particular. Slowly, the details of last night came back to her. She vaguely remembered waking up in cold sweat, a tight feeling in her chest and panic cloaking her. “I don’t remember going to your room.”
Steve slowly poured the pancake batter into the pan. “That’s because,” he said and paused to focus on what he was doing, “I brought you there.”
“More context, Stevie.”
He gave her the look he always had whenever she called him Stevie, but took a breath to elaborate while continuing his pancake-making process. “I was awake anyway. Couldn’t sleep either, and when I heard you hyperventilating in your room, I obviously went in.”
“No knocking? Rude,” Robin joked lightly.
“Anyways, you were practically clinging to me the whole time. I got you a paper bag to breathe into and I stayed with you, but anytime you seemed to get better it just started to get worse again almost immediately after. And you were barely present. So, I got you out of bed and into mine, where you conked out almost immediately.” He poured the last bit of batter into the pan. “Figured I’d let you sleep there because you tend to be calmer in my room than in yours.”
“That explains why I feel absolutely exhausted.” She slid off the counter as Steve turned off the stove and grabbed the plate with pancakes. “Well, we should probably continue our job search today.” She left the kitchen to put the pancakes on the small dining table. “We really need some money.”
“Birdie.” Steve followed her. “Stop it.”
“Stop what?”
“Stop pretending like everything is okay. Like you’re okay. It doesn’t do you any good.” He sat down next to her.
Robin focused on breakfast rather than his searching eyes. “I’m completely fine, Steve. I just want to find a job to pay rent.”
“I get that you want to avoid thinking about it, I do too,” Steve said. “But you’re not fine. None of us are.”
“I am.”
“A mentally healthy person doesn’t endure panic attacks nearly every night. What happened to all of us was shit, but the others don’t act like absolutely nothing happened. You need to accept your trauma.”
Robin dropped her fork with a clatter and leaned back in her chair. “If I don’t act like nothing happened, that’d mean it actually did happen and I’m not ready to face that, okay?”
She couldn’t stand the sympathetic look on Steve’s face, and she closed her eyes as she took a deep breath. “I am fine. I can handle myself during the day, and that’s the only time I get to avoid reliving the panic I felt when we all nearly died. When we couldn’t help each other anymore because of his vines. Or when we got kidnapped and drugged and I had to watch as they beat you up. You want to constantly think about that? Be my guest. I don’t.”
Steve stood up without responding, and Robin was met by the same feeling she always got whenever she disagreed with someone – the expectation of having disappointed, of having said something wrong and having ruined something good. Her thoughts were about to start spiraling again when Steve returned with a bottle of maple syrup and a pack of powdered sugar, placing them in front of her.
“Alright,” he said. “Fuel up. You’re gonna need energy for all those jobs we’re going to apply to today.” He opened the syrup and poured some over her pancakes, topping it with the powdered sugar. “And in the evening, if it's warm enough, we’ll go to the lake.”
“We could ask Eddie to join,” Robin suggested. “He’s been so miserable; he needs some cheering up.”
“We could not,” Steve said. “He’d say No anyways. But you should ask Vickie. And Nancy.”
“Don’t tell me you’re still convincing yourself that you wanna get back together with her.”
“I don’t. In fact, I’ll invite everyone. Including Jonathan and the kids.” Steve crossed his arms and put on an indifferent face.
“And Eddie?”
“No.”
“Because you like him?” Robin smirked.
“Okay, fine. You can ask him, but he won’t come.” He grabbed one of the pancakes as well. “Gotta eat first, though. We’ll drown otherwise.”
A small, grateful smile tugged at Robin’s lips. “Thanks,” she muttered.
He smiled too, and even though Robin could tell that there was still worry in his eyes, she knew that he was only trying to help her. “Eat up, Birdie,” he said. “I wanna head out soon.”
Now that her vision was gone, Max noticed that she experienced every other sense far more intensely. It was a refreshing change of pace to be out of the hospital room, even if it had to be in a wheelchair – for now, she told herself.
“I feel like my grandma,” Max said to Lucas, who was pushing her wheelchair through the hospital grounds. “She had to use a wheelchair too when she got too old to walk.” It was warm, birds were singing in the trees and for a moment, Max was glad not to be back at school yet. Her Walkman and headphones were resting in her lap. She refused to leave them in the room, having been the only distraction from her daily life.
“You’re gonna be able to do it yourself soon once your arm is healed,” Lucas said. “It’s probably hard with one arm.”
“It is,” she answered and with a small smile thought back to last evening when she got to sit in the wheelchair for the first time. “I tried yesterday. I could barely move an inch.”
“You’re not used to it yet,” he said helpfully. “Someday, you’re gonna be faster than all of us on our bikes. You’re gonna win every race.”
“You think I’ll always have to use this?” The smile vanished from her face. It was depressing enough that her own belief she would walk again someday was starting to fade, but if Lucas didn’t believe in her? He always had.
“Maybe not always,” Lucas said, but Max could tell he wasn’t sure of his words. “Either way, we’ll have fun. We’ll still be great together.” He paused for a moment. “Speaking of – can we talk about that for a moment?”
Max pressed her lips together and exhaled. “It’s not like I can run away from you, so by all means.”
Lucas stopped pushing the chair and Max heard him sitting down on something. A bench? A rock? God, how she hated not seeing her surroundings.
“Before… all this, we made plans to see a movie together, do you remember that?”
“Remember? It’s all I think about.” Aside from the haunting visions of Vecna’s hand stretching out over her face, the immense pain from breaking multiple bones at the same time and the anxiety-inducing memory of El coming to her rescue and failing, that movie date was the only thing Max’s mind wandered back to.
“I keep thinking,” Lucas said. “Are we still doing that once you’re out of the hospital?”
She hesitated. Of course she wanted to, of course she had missed him. She hadn’t pushed him away because she didn’t like him. Ever since Billy died, her life and her emotions had just been too complicated to fit anyone else in. She’d only be a burden on him.
“I get it if you don’t want to,” Lucas said when she didn’t respond. He sounded disappointed. Why was everything to do with him so complicated? So great, yet so complicated.
“Do you want to?” Max asked in return.
“Of course I do. Max, nothing about my feelings for you has changed.” He took her hand, and Max assumed he was looking at her intently. “You still mean the world to me.”
“Can you promise me that’s not going to change? When I won’t be able to walk, or actually watch a movie with you? I will never look at you again. I will never skate again. Is that what you want? You could just go off and date someone who’s actually able to give you the relationship that you want.”
“Max,” he said again, his hands closing around hers, “you are exactly what I want. I want this, all of this, because it’s all part of you. I’ll still want you no matter what happens. Even if you’ve changed.”
“That’s the problem,” Max said and tried to arrange the words in her head, so they’d make sense to him. “It’s like you only think of a perfect future for us, one where all of our struggles don’t affect us at all. But they do, and things aren’t always going to stay the same. They’ve already changed, and I have too. I’m not that middle-schooler anymore.”
“Neither am I,” he said. “Just give it some thought, okay? Please.”
“I will,” she replied quietly. “But I can’t promise you anything.”
“I know.” He let go of her hand and sighed. “I won’t stop caring about you, no matter what your answer is.” He stayed quiet for a moment, waiting for her to respond, but Max didn’t know how to. “By the way,” Lucas continued, “Steve called earlier. He and Robin are going to the lake later today, and they’re inviting everyone. Maybe the nurses will let you go too. Just for one evening.”
“They won’t,” Max said. She had asked them before to leave the premises for at least an hour, and she had been met with the answer she had feared. “They’ll only let me leave in company with a parent or guardian since I’m still a minor.”
“Maybe we can reach your mom – “
“Don’t even try to. She’s made her choice. If she wants to come back, she will.” Max wished she could cross her arms, the best she could do was rest her healthy arm across her stomach. “Hopper will sign for me once I’m being released, and as far as the hospital staff is concerned, my mom is on a work trip, returning soon.”
“And they’ll just let Hopper sign for you?”
“I guess,” she said and shrugged. “Since he’s got a whole deal with the government to keep their secrets, I think he can pull some strings.”
“Then he must be able to accompany you to the lake,” Lucas suggested. “I’ll ask him.”
“Lucas – “
“No But, I’m doing this. You’ll get to see something else for once. If you’re well enough to be pushed around in a wheelchair on the hospital premises, you’re well enough to sit by a lake.”
“I can’t go into the water anyways,” Max objected. “You want me to just sit there and listen to you have fun without me?”
“I want you to sit in the grass with us and feel something other than bedsheets and sweat from your cast.”
Max rolled her eyes and sighed, but she couldn’t suppress the smile on her lips. “Okay, fine. Go ahead and try. I doubt they’ll let me outside.” Then, she added, “I wouldn’t mind some ice cream. Strawberry.”
“We’ll make it happen,” Lucas said, his smile audible in his voice.
“Good luck,” Max said and grinned lightly. “Now, would you mind wheeling me back around? It’s the only way of moving I got outside of the nurses stretching my legs, so they don’t degenerate.”