Chapter Text
When the Party crashes through their front door, Steve and Robin are in the middle of their weekly movie night. Granted, it’s more like their daily movie night, but semantics, really— they might miss a night here or there, but they never miss Wednesdays.
Wednesdays are sacred.
Neither of them budges as the gang of strangers spills through the doorway, Robin’s legs curled up across Steve’s because you’ve got freakishly warm skin, Stevie-babe, and also, because Steve just likes it, okay? He likes the reminder that he isn’t alone in their big empty house off the gravel drive in the woods.
The fucking— he pauses, to shoot Robin a look, only to find her already looking back, her mouth pursed into her what the fuck freaked-out look that reads as bitchy to everyone else— but, the fucking kids spill in first, seven of them, all of them bloodied and torn and panting, before the four other almost adults come after.
And Steve’s— he knows he’s not smart-smart. He’s got nothing on Robin, with her mastery of languages, and her freakish ability to mimic the screeches of the monsters that linger outside their home. So he knows. He isn’t smart like that.
He is, however, as Robin says, a jock with a damn good eye for verbal takedowns and remembering faces, and he recognizes three of the four who spill in through his doorway like they have any right— even though he could’ve sworn Jonathan Byers left for something or somewhere like half a year ago.
“Uh,” he says, as Nancy Wheeler slams the door shut and his voice is lost behind the thud. He looks at Robin again, watching as she shrugs her shoulders, because yeah, no, that tracks— neither of them have ever done anything as rude as barge into someone else’s home and interrupt their sacred Wednesday night rituals. If anything, they try to keep their home invasions timed to the middle of the day— there are fewer people around.
“Uh,” he tries again, right as Eddie Munson breaks out into a coughing fit, and the fucking— he’s still not over it— the fucking kids flock to him.
“Um, hello,” Robin says, sharp and irritated, her voice cutting through their chatter, and he’s proud of the way neither of them flinches— not even as Nancy Wheeler cocks and aims a gun at them like they’re the fucking intruders. “What the fuck is going on here?”
The crowd of them are silent, before a kid with an attitude Steve can already tell is exhausting scowls. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“Uh, no,” Robin snaps, angry and tense, and he knows that part of it is in the way that Nancy Wheeler still hasn’t lowered her fucking gun, and that another part is because they were just about to put the next movie on, and she hates it when their routines are interrupted. “I think you’ll find that you shouldn’t be here. So.” She clears her throat and flicks her fingers. “Shoo.”
“No,” Nancy fucking Wheeler says, both her tone and arm unwavering. “No.”
Steve scowls at her. “Listen, Wheeler,” he says, a mean smirk drifting to his lips as she shifts the gun to focus it on her, even as Robin hisses under her breath like an angry little cat, and he can tell she’s forcing back the sharp chitter that’s rising because she’s been getting so much better at the monster noises, and he’s so goddamn proud of her. “I don’t think you get to barge into our home, point a gun at us, and then tell us we’re the problem.”
For a moment, there’s silence, before Nancy cocks the gun, her mouth flattening out more somehow, and if Steve wasn’t annoyed as fuck with her, he’d almost be impressed. “How the fuck do you know my name?”
Steve blinks at her, before turning to look at Robin. “It’s the hair isn’t it?” he almost wails, reaching up to run a hand over the semi-shaved side, from an accident three weeks ago involving gum, peanut butter, and the mortifying ordeal of being tackled while holding a pair of clippers. “You told me I looked the same and you fucking lied to me.”
“I would never,” Robin says immediately, so affronted, he almost feels bad. “It’s not my fault Nancy Wheeler doesn’t know what people look like.” She sniffs as Nancy’s gun shifts back to land on her. “You gonna shoot some old classmates for the hell of it then?”
Nancy falters for the first time, squinting at the two of them. “Steve Harrington?” She says in tandem with Jonathan Byers, as Eddie Munson starts to choke again.
Nancy blinks again, her tone fading into something contemplative as she lowers her arm. “I thought you were dead.”
Steve wrinkles his nose. “Like four of those shitheads behind you try to cheat their way into renting an R-rated movie from me like once a week, and you thought I was dead?”
“It’s the aura you carry with you,” Robin says, patting him on the shoulder. “You just look like you’ll die young, Stevie.” She pats him again even harder when he narrows his eyes at her as she reaches out to tweak his ear. “And I’ll be dying right alongside you.”
Nancy flushes, shrugging, but Steve catches the way her fingers don’t stray from the trigger. “Uh. Sorry.”
Steve blinks at her. “Don’t be sorry,” he says, smiling as she relaxes slightly, before he scowls at her, annoyed once again. “Just leave.”
“We can’t leave, you nitwit,” the smallest kid snaps, and honestly, Steve’s impressed that none of the others have butted in yet, but he also knows that at least one has tried, given the way the red-headed girl had suddenly covered the kid with a baseball cap fixed on his head’s mouth. “There’s a fucking monster outside that wants to kill us.”
“Erica—”
“You can’t just say—”
“—completely inappropriate—”
“C’mon, you know you can’t—”
Steve groans, letting the noise wash over him and his head loll back, before he glances at Robin as she sighs.
“We thought we could have a peaceful night,” she mutters. “We thought we could maybe watch Alien, or the Goonies, or I don’t know, maybe even Vivement dimanche! but no, we had to get fucking invaded by elementary school kids and gun-wielding high school classmates, and now— now we have to go kill one of the slobbery fuckers.”
She sighs, kicking her feet out petulantly. “I hate the slobbery fuckers.”
“I know,” Steve says, because he does, and she really fucking hates them.
“And I just showered this morning, I wasn’t planning on showering again until tomorrow because you know I can’t sleep with wet hair.”
“I know.”
“And now, we have to go out into the woods,” Robin says, kicking her feet again and slamming her heel into the coffee table. “And I’m gonna smell like smoke again. So what am I gonna do? I’m gonna take a fucking shower.”
“I know,'' Steve says, before peeking slyly at her. “You could always stay here.”
“Oh fuck you,” Robin says, shooting to her feet. “No really, fuck you, Steve Harrington. Fuck you. I hope you die and rot in a well and die again, and poison the water supply, and did I mention I hope you die?” She punctuates her hopes with a fond press of a kiss on his forehead. “Gimme five.”
“Love you,” Steve calls after her dopily, as she slips down the hallway to their bedroom, before he turns back and realizes the weight of the stares of the entire group is focused on him. “Uh.”
“Is it just me,” the redhead says slowly. “Or are you guys weird as fuck?”
Steve squints at her. “Can you remind me just who broke into someone else’s house and is just kind of, I dunno, standing there in the doorway?” He widens his eyes and looks around the room. “No? Oh, that’s right. It’s you fuckers.” He scowls at her. “Maybe don’t judge a man on what he does in his own home, huh?”
The attitude-kid from before snorts. “No,” he says, shaking his head. “She’s right. You guys are weird as fuck.”
Steve tsks, shifting to sit up straighter. “I feel like this would have a bigger impact on my feelings if I gave a single fuck about what you thought about me,” he says, before he stretches. “Now, I can’t convince you to go back outside, can I?”
As one they shake their heads. Figures.
“Right,” he says dryly. “Then… come in I guess?” He grins at them as they tiptoe further into the room, the group of them stepping off the patch of tile that makes up their weird little entryway. "I'd say, make yourself at home," he says. "But you've basically already done that."
Robin snorts as she re-emerges from their room, her jean jacket slung over her shoulders and three bottles of cheap vodka in her arms. “Go get changed, Stevie-babe,” she orders, rolling her eyes when he blows her a kiss. “I’ll entertain our… guests.”
He grins at her and steps away, catching the tail end of her massively overstated eye-roll as he moves past her, before he’s heading down the uneven wooden floor to their room.
“Sorry about him,” Steve can hear Robin saying as he steps through the threshold. “He isn’t really… house-trained.”
He holds back a snort, well aware of the underlying smug tone in her voice, because out of the two of them, everyone assumes he’s the most dangerous, and most think Robin’s just some girl, and those who don’t wake up either knowing she’s dangerous, or they don’t wake up at all.
“I’m sorry,” he hears someone else saying. “But who the fuck are you?”
Steve rolls his eyes, stripping out of his sweatpants with an easy motion and tugging on his splatter jeans— stained with blood and gore and viscera and also just like paint from where he and Robin had tried to paint the upstairs bedroom, before giving up and just throwing the pale purple at each other, because no one tells you how much your arms will ache when you paint a master bedroom.
Robin scoffs, and Steve can hear the bottles clinking as she sets them down on the coffee table, the well-worn tread as she steps over to the linen closet, the rustle of wicker as she pulls down the basket full of rags.
“So not only do you barge into my home,” she says, her tone full of something like amazement, because she— like him— cannot believe the audacity of this random group and the way they demand answers like they’re owed it, while they’re the ones causing the problems, stomping into their goddamn home. “But you demand my name, as if that’s not sacred. As if that won’t tell you everything.”
For a moment there’s silence as Steve yanks off his yellow sweater and shrugs on a black shirt before pulling out one of the massive flannels they keep in their closet, before a quiet voice that hasn’t spoken yet pipes up: “Like… Rumpelstiltskin?”
“You guys are weird as fuck,” another new voice says before she can answer, but Steve can hear the wonder in the tone.
He snorts as he exits the room, grabbing the bat from its place by the door and rolling his eyes as Nancy lifts the gun immediately, her unwavering focus attempting to pin him in place.
“Come off it, Wheeler,” he mutters, twirling the bat once. “You’re gonna be mad at me for a bat? But—” He flicks his gaze to Robin, watching as she shrugs once, a clear allowance, and continues without a pause. “—Robin can make molotov’s and you won’t bat— get it?— an eye?”
As one, the group scrambles away from Robin as she plugs the final bottle with a rag and shakes it menacingly in their direction.
“I’d need a lighter,” she says, holding a hand out and grinning as Steve tosses the beat-up one he keeps in his jeans for her. “And now I do.” She half-lunges forward, snickering as Nancy snaps her gun around to wave in her face. “Oh, come off it. If you were going to kill me Nancy, you’d have shot me the moment you saw me.” She grins, menacing and eerie. “Otherwise, I’d say it’s a bit too late.”
“I,” Eddie Munson declares, startling Steve from his adoration of Robin, because he fucking loves her so much, and he’d bleed from her and paint hearts with the blood across the walls of their house if she wanted. (She doesn’t, he knows, because he tried it once, when he was high on blood loss and she slapped his hands down and tore his stitches, and had only been sorry about the red smear it left on the wall.) “Am so fucking confused.”
As if that statement was all that Nancy needed to chill out, she sheathes her gun and sighs, and Steve steals another glance at Robin only to find her rolling her eyes.
“What’re you confused about?”
Eddie licks his lips, and Steve’s not ashamed to follow the path with his eyes, before he hears Robin muffle a snicker and he twists to shoot her a glare.
“I’m— what— what the fuck are you two doing living out here?” Eddie says, the words spilling from him as if he’d been ruminating on them for years instead of minutes. “Why the fuck is Steve Harrington living with Robin Buckley—”
“Oh that’s who that is,” Steve hears Jonathan mutter, and shakes his head. “I knew I recognized her.”
“—and as if that’s not weird enough, neither of you seem all that phased by us stumbling into your house, or Nance having a gun, or the horde of children behind me—”
“We’re beside you, asshole,” one of the children bites out, his hands settling on his hips. “Don’t make it sound like—”
“Can it, Henderson!” Eddie says, sounding hysterical. “And why the fuck do you both have weapons? Why is that something you both have? Are you— are you going to kill us?” He sucks in a deep breath, making eye contact with Steve for the first time, and widening his brown eyes. “Please don’t kill us.”
Steve snorts. “We don’t kill people,” he says, calmness sliding over his skin as Robin giggles and scoops up the other two bottles. “So that’s— you’re fine.”
Eddie slumps backwards, nodding ferociously, before pausing. “Wait… you don’t kill people?”
Steve ignores him, turning to look at Robin. “You ready to go?”
She grins up at him and he can catch the flicker of mischief in the corner of her mouth as the group behind them bursts into a sea of noise. “Always, babe.”
Steve tosses a look over at the group of them. “Don’t lock us out,” he warns, before wrinkling his nose. “And I guess like… help yourself but don’t be fucking annoying about it?”
“Go?” Jonathan says, cutting through the chatter. “Outside? You can’t— you can’t leave us alone in your home, what if we—” He glances around, clearly desperate for a reason to keep them here. “What if we— what if we rob you?”
Steve snorts again, exchanging a look with Robin. “Yeah, okay, Jonathan Byers,” he says, grinning slightly as he flinches back. “I don’t think that you’re going to rob us since it kinda seems like you’re running from—”
As if on cue, a shriek rings out from the trees, high-pitched and echoing, the sort of sound Steve thinks should probably give him and Robin nightmares but doesn’t because at this point— at this point, it’s almost welcome.
He arches a brow and tips his head. “That,” he finishes quietly. “You’re running from that.”
He grins at their gobsmacked faces and looks back at Robin, stepping towards the front door. “Ready?”
“Ready,” Robin answers, huffing as Nancy pulls away from the group of them and throws herself in front of them, her arms spread out as if she can stop them.
"You can't go out there," she says, something like desperation in her voice. "I won't let you."
Steve twists to look at Robin, watching as a tiny smirk crawls across her face before she shoves past him, to lean into Nancy.
“Oh yeah? ” Robin whispers, low and quiet, and Steve can see the way she’s not looking away and he wants to shake her— both in celebration because fuck yeah babe, get some, and also in admonishment, because is now the time?— but he keeps quiet instead and lets her finish her threat. “You’re gonna have to shoot me, Nancy Wheeler, if you want me to stay here.” She grins, sharp and angry at the shocked noise Nancy lets out. “If you’re not going to do that, then get the fuck out of my way.”
Nancy drags her gaze away from Robin to look at Steve— and Steve knows that she’s only just arrived to their Steve&Robin show, but honest to god, he doesn’t know why she thinks he’ll put a stop to Robin— and he just shrugs, slow and easy.
“But— you will die,” a quieter voice says from the back of the room, and Steve turns to look as the group parts and the girl with a clearly recently shorn head steps forward, her mouth trembling. “You will die if you go and fight the— the monster.”
Steve can’t stop the snort that escapes, breaking the tension that’s building between Nancy and Robin.
“Oh kiddo,” he says, curbing the urge to snark back, because he might be an asshole, but even he can tell that this kid’s been through hell— something about the set of her jaw and the way her hands curl at her sides. “As if we haven’t killed them before.”
The group of them stills, Steve’s words somehow stopping them fully in their tracks in a way that nothing else had before.
“What?” Steve says, stepping back and bumping into Robin, feeling the reassuring curve of her fingers around his wrist. “That’s not— it’s not easy, sure,” and he can hear Robin force down a huff because, man, what an understatement. The first ten times they’d faced off against the spindly dogs, or one of the freakishly tall flower-face ones, they’d both nearly died.
Now, it wasn’t easy, like he’d said but also: “It isn’t impossible,” he finishes, shrugging. “It’s just not a lot of fun.”
“Speak for yourself,” Robin says. “I have a good time.”
Steve twists to look at her and rolls his eyes. “You like it because you get to stand far away and chuck molotov’s at it, before the grand finale.” He bumps his hip against her and grins. “You don’t actually do any of the hard work.”
“Oh, cry me a fuckin’ river,” Robin mutters. “I’ve told you. Get me a long sword and—”
“—and you’ll be right beside me,” Steve finishes with her. “I know.” He meets her eyes. “And you know that I won’t.”
Robin huffs. “One of these days I’m gonna show up with a giant sword, and then what?” she asks rhetorically, a smirk rising on her face. “And then you’ll be begging for my help.”
“Oh- kay,” one of the kids says, clapping, and Steve glances over to find that it’s the kid that Eddie called— Henders? Henckerson?— something that started with Hen, he thinks. “Interrupting whatever the fuck weird tension you two have going on, what do you mean you’ve been fighting these monsters? Like— like just recently?”
Steve sighs as another shriek rises through the trees, closer but still far enough away that Steve knows that they have a few minutes before he and Robin really need to go.
“Do we have to do this now? ” he asks, grimacing when Nancy nods.
“Answer Dustin’s questions and I’ll move,” she says, and Steve’s brow furrows.
“I thought his name was Hends or something?”
“Dustin Henderson,” Dustin says, crossing his arms. “Nice to meet you. Answer my fucking questions.”
Robin whistles through her teeth admiringly. “Man, you’ve got no check on that tone, do you?” she says, before shrugging when Steve glances over at her, chewing on her cheek. “I dunno, Stevie— like… three? four?”
“Three or four what?” Dustin asks, exasperatedly, with no sense of patience. “Days? Weeks? Months?”
“When’d we get out here the first time?” Steve asks, ignoring him and tapping his bat against his shoes, careful to not catch himself on the nails. “‘82?”
Robin wrinkles her nose. “It was 1980, 'cause you were wearing the mittens Shelly made you and they got ruined that early spring, remember?” Her mouth twitches with a grin. “When you—”
“I know,” Steve says, cutting her off and shaking his head when she laughs. “But that wasn’t— oh shit, no it was.”
Robin nods once, affirmatively. “Six years, then,” Steve says, turning back to the group and watching as they pale.
“Six?” the girl with the shorn head says, her eyes going steely-eyed as he looks at her. “You are sure?”
Steve nods as another chittering yell spills from the woods, and he glances over at Robin who nods again, grim-faced, before she gently shoves Nancy to the side.
“Well,” Steve says, twisting to face the rest of them. “I’d say this was lovely, but I’d rather never do anything like this again.” Behind him, Robin wrenches the front door open and tilts her head back, the return call building in her throat.
He falls quiet as she screams, the two of them waiting for an answer, before he glances back up at the weird amalgamation of mostly strangers assembled in front of him.
“If we die,” he says, as Robin laughs once, her voice the only noise echoing out into the trees as everyone else inside stays completely still, like they expect her to turn and lunge at them, as if she’s the monster here, and not the person who’s keeping them at bay. “House is yours, I guess.”
He waves the bat at them, grinning when none of them move. “See you later,” he says, before following Robin down the steps and into the darkness, the door clicking behind him.
He smothers the hysterical giggle that rises in his throat, and glances to the side to see Robin biting at her lip to keep her laughter in as well.
“This is why we don’t have other friends,” she mutters, as they step into the trees, nothing but the moonlight and their memory to guide them, and Steve hiccups on a laugh, before subsiding when she elbows him sharply.
“Your fault,” he hisses at her, as they make their way to the clearing, delicately stepping through the brambles and brush, their footsteps steady against the muddy ground. “Stop making me laugh, you little shit.”
Robin laughs into her palm before she shakes her head and drops her hand, her mouth a quicksilver slash of malice in the dark as they break into the smaller copse of trees.
“You ready, babe?” she asks, her face joyful with the kind of sharp emotion that hurts too much to examine, the kind of joy that bleeds from the palms of those who wield it and stings those who get too close, because they want to smother it, because they look at the joy and they see suffering.
“As I’ll ever be,” he says, reeling her in to press a kiss to her forehead and grins when she kisses him on the hinge of his jaw, her grin broad enough that it’s more of a press of teeth to his skin than a kiss. “Call ‘em.”
She melts back into the shadows, tips her head back, and screams, the shriek of the monster rising on the wind in response, because he still doesn’t understand how she can make herself sound like it, but she does— a perfect mirror of the creatures that live in the woods.
But, he supposes it isn’t that surprising, because he’s a little bit of a monster too— all sharp words and violence knit into skin, bundled into the appearance of an all-American boy— and Robin had taken one look at him and claimed him too.
Across the woods, he can hear the thuds of its uneven gait as it strides closer and closer, and Steve sinks down, lets himself settle into a ready position, grinning at Robin’s faint hey batter, batter, hey, as he braces for impact.