Chapter Text
The red ON AIR light hums to life — mechanical and vigilant.
Robin leans back in the cracked vinyl chair and slides her headphones over her ears, sealing herself inside the booth. The station smells like warm dust and burnt coffee — almost like home, if home hadn’t been steeped in stale beer and sour wine. If home hadn’t hummed with television static and the low thud of bottles set down too hard.
“Good evening, Hawkins,” she says into the mic, voice smooth, practiced into something silkier than she feels. “You’re tuned to WSQK, and this is Rockin’ Robin keeping you company on this fine Monday.”
She smiles automatically. It doesn’t travel past her mouth.
The board in front of her glows a dependable green. Levels steady. No distortion. She still waits for it. For months after Starcourt, any electrical hum had meant something else — the grinding whine of that machine chewing at the fabric of reality beneath layers of concrete. Even now, the low buzz in the station walls makes her shoulders inch toward her ears before she forces them down. Her body has better memory than her mind. Her body still expects Russian voices bleeding through plaster.
She flips a switch. A soft click. Queues the next track.
Radio is perfect for someone like her. Intimacy without exposure. She can pour herself into the microphone and no one sees the way her fingers twitch when the building settles, or how she tracks every creak like it might open into something tooth-lined and wrong.
She used to think her life would be small in a different way.
Before the mall. Before the Russians. Before she learned Hawkins had layers like rot under fresh paint.
Back then, small meant the kitchen table at 6:42 p.m. sharp. Her mother’s pen scratching across stacks of essays, red ink decisive and final. Her father’s silhouette sunk into the couch, a bottle sweating against the wood grain of the armrest. Conversations that stalled out mid-sentence and were never resumed. A house so quiet it felt padded.
She had arrived late. Years after her parents had already done the hard part with someone else. Her older brother existed mostly in framed evidence — graduation cap, varsity jacket, a grin too confident to belong to the same bloodline. By the time Robin was old enough to ask questions, he was a completed chapter. Out of state. Out of reach. Occasionally referenced like a benchmark.
Silence filled that house faster than noise ever could.
So she learned to talk.
On air, she never runs out of words. Its an easy day today, and it goes by quickly. Nothing pressing from the MAC-Z to announce, no new 'fault lines' to worry about. Just Robin and her music, exactly how she likes it.
A knock on the glass pulls her out of her thoughts towards the end of her shift. Steve leans against the hallway wall outside the booth, arms crossed, hair still offensively cooperative despite the humidity. He gives her a two-finger salute like he’s checking a perimeter.
Post-earthquake life with Steve looks like this: shared grocery lists annotated like battle plans. Flashlights stationed in every room. Sleeping with weapons within reach — bat, crowbar, the revolver Nancy insisted they learn to use properly. It looks like him pretending not to notice when she checks the back door three times. It looks like her pretending not to notice when he stands too long at the living room window, staring at the horizon like it might split open again.
His parents mailed a forwarding address to Chicago. They left him the house.
She had moved in that same afternoon, duffel bag slung over her shoulder. Her mother barely paused from rinsing a wine glass. Her father grunted something that could have been approval or indigestion. It had felt less like leaving and more like adjusting the furniture. It stung less than she expected. Maybe because by then she knew what it felt like to be chosen.
Steve taps his wrist dramatically. Wrap it up. She rolls her eyes, leans back into the mic.
“Alright folks, remember that public service announcement about avoiding the east end after sundown. You know. Because of coyotes.”
The lie tastes flat. She doesn’t mention the military checkpoints blinking red at every major intersection. Doesn’t mention the way spores drift down some mornings like gray pollen, clinging to windshields and eyelashes. Doesn’t mention the tremor that shakes the pipes at 3:17 a.m. most nights — too faint for headlines, too consistent for comfort.
"On that note, here's the last one of my shift, one of my favorites, and certainly on theme. An oldie but a goodie, this has been Hawkin's very own Rockin Robin, over and out.”
She drops the needle. “Wild Thing” — The Troggs, 1966. The booth fills with guitar instead of static. For three minutes and thirty seconds, the world makes sense in chords.
She closes her eyes and imagines that someone is singing the lyrics about her. There was a time she thought love would feel like Vickie — easy symmetry, shared sheet music, knees bumping under folding chairs in the band room. Safe. Predictable. But Vickie didn’t stand in the Creel house with a shotgun and steady hands. Vickie didn’t crawl through choking air that tasted like rust and death. Robin did.
And Nancy. Nancy, with her impossible steadiness. Nancy, who studies maps like they owe her answers. Nancy, who holds a gun like she’s already accepted the cost of pulling the trigger. Nancy, who looked at Robin in the Upside Down — really looked — and didn’t turn away. Robin doesn’t say much to her anymore, now that the Byers are back from California. She doesn’t say a lot to anybody but Steve anymore. But she times her sign-offs carefully. Calculates which nights Nancy might be up late, rewinding cassette tapes of news briefings, connecting dots on a bedroom wall.
Just in case.
As the song fades, Robin leans into the mic one last time.
“Stay safe, Hawkins. Lock your doors. Bring your pets inside. And if you hear something strange…” A beat. Dry humor coating steel. “Contact our lovely guardian angels, the military, for immediate assistance.”
She clicks off before her voice can betray her. The ON AIR light dies. Silence floods the booth.
For a heartbeat, she is twelve again at a kitchen table where no one is speaking, waiting for someone to break the quiet first. The door swings open. Steve steps in without knocking.
“Clear?” he asks.
Robin nods, pulling the headphones down around her neck. “For now.”
And even that feels like a temporary condition. Steve perks up at the distant sound of an engine rumbling outside, “Supply run!”
Robin swivels in her chair. “You say that like Santa’s pulling up instead of a middle-aged conspiracy theorist with a hernia.”
“That middle-aged conspiracy theorist,” Steve says, already halfway out the door, “is the reason we have batteries and candy and you're disgusting ice cream.”
She follows him into the hallway, the station suddenly too small, too quiet. Outside, an engine rattles into submission. Familiar. Overworked. Stubborn. Through the front window she spots the van first — dull paint, questionable structural integrity, somehow still alive out of spite. The back doors are strapped shut with more optimism than engineering.
Murray. The truck lurches once before cutting off entirely. And if Steve’s here, that means the kids are here too.
Right on cue, the front lawn explodes into motion. Five smaller figures untangle themselves from the shade of the station’s side wall, where they’d clearly been pretending not to wait. They swarm the van before the engine’s heat has even settled.
Robin slows on the steps. She knows Dustin and the cadence of his voice, the way he wields hope. She’s learned Lucas’s skeptical eyebrow and Mike’s tendency to assume command when no one assigns it. Will is quieter — she’s noticed that much — but it's the kind of quiet that feels chosen, not empty.
She knows these as facts, from proximity and the shared weight of the world on their shoudlers, but if she’s honest, she doesn’t know them. Not really. They are veterans of things she only stepped into later. She watches them crowd the back of the van, arguing over who gets first inspection rights, and feels like an older cousin at a reunion she didn’t attend the early years of.
The van doors creak open, and Murray emerges from the driver’s seat with the gravity of a man delivering classified intelligence instead of canned goods. He surveys the children like a general assessing undertrained recruits.
“If any of you touch anything before I conduct inventory,” he announces, “you will be walking home nutritionally deprived.”
“Did you get it?” Dustin blurts, already halfway inside the van.
“Which it?” Murray snaps. “I was given a list longer than the Geneva Conventions.”
Steve jogs ahead, clapping his hands once. “Okay, okay, let’s not assault the supplier. We talked about this.”
Max would have been at the front.
That thought lands without warning. Robin lingers near the doorway. Not because she was loud — she wasn’t. Not because she demanded space. She didn’t. But Max had this way of standing like she’d already decided the world wouldn’t intimidate her. Chin up. Shoulders squared. A kind of still defiance that made you want to straighten your own spine in response.
Robin had liked her immediately. Wished, privately, she’d been that self-possessed at fourteen. At fifteen. At any age, really. The memory curdles at the edges. The air thick and wrong. Max suspended in something between life and death. Another friend reduced to aftermath. Her chest tightens in that quiet, specific way she’s learning to recognize as grief trying not to be dramatic about itself. Steve glances back at her. Just once. Quick scan. Present and accounted for. She gives him a small nod. He returns it, equally small.
That’s how they do this now.
Across the yard, Jonathan Byers steps out from the passenger side of the van, running a hand through hair that looks perpetually wind-tangled. He circles around to Nancy’s side without thinking, opening the door before she reaches for it. Nancy exits with a folder tucked under one arm, because of course she does. She surveys the chaos with clinical efficiency, and she can almost hear her thoughts. Kids. Murray. Supplies. Perimeter. Her eyes don’t seem satisfied, they flick once toward the tree line before settling on the house across the street.
Then they find Robin.
It isn’t dramatic, there’s no music swell, but Robin’s heart stutters anyways. Just a moment of eye contact that holds half a second longer than necessary. Nancy’s mouth presses into something that might be a greeting, might be calculation. Jonathan says something low to her. She nods, distracted. They’re still together. Technically.
Robin can see it in the way they stand close but not quite touching. In the way Jonathan watches Nancy like she’s already halfway somewhere else. In the way Nancy listens but doesn’t fully land. Begrudgingly together is the only phrase that fits.
Steve claps Murray on the shoulder hard enough to jostle him. “You’re a hero, man.”
“I am underappreciated,” Murray replies flatly. “And underfunded.”
Dustin emerges triumphantly with a box of something held overhead. Lucas immediately disputes ownership. Mike insists he called dibs three days ago. Will laughs softly at something none of them catch.
Robin steps out from the shade. The air smells faintly metallic. Like rain that never quite falls. She tells herself she’s just making sure the supply run didn’t attract attention. Her gaze drifts back to Nancy despite that. Wheeler has already opened the folder. Already discussing something low and urgent with Jonathan — probably maps, probably sightings, probably contingency plans. Even in the middle of suburban absurdity, she is organizing.
Robin wonders what it would feel like to be looked at the way Nancy looks at problems. Assessed. Understood. Engaged. She clears her throat, louder than necessary, it’s been long enough of her sulking, Steve was going to get anxious if she didn’t say anything.
“Inventory before anarchy, gentlemen. We are not repeating the Great Flashlight Incident of October.”
“That was one time,” Steve mutters.
“You lost fifteen flashlights, Steve.”
Murray points at her. “Finally. A voice of reason.”
Robin offers a mock bow. Nancy glances over again at the sound of her voice. For a brief, unguarded second, something softer flickers there — relief, maybe. Or recognition. Robin feels it like static along her arms. Then the moment passes. Jonathan says her name. Nancy turns back.
The kids erupt into fresh arguments over batteries, and Steve sighs theatrically. Robin forces her focus back to the tangible. Boxes. Lists. Movement. Control what you can carry. Behind them, the radio station stands quiet and watchful, its windows reflecting a town that pretends the ground isn’t cracked open in four precise, impossible lines.
“For now,” she’d said.
Watching Nancy fold a map with sharp, deliberate creases, Robin revises the thought. For now just means until the next thing. She checks her watch automatically. The light is shifting, that strange amber tone the sky’s taken on since the “earthquake.” Even the evenings feel temporary now, knowing what she does about the false security of sleep.
They need to get home soon, it’s conditioning night, one of those rituals she had as Steve's new roommate that had started accidentally. The first time she found Steve sitting by the pool at three in the morning, his feet in the water, he didn’t hear her approach. The backyard light had been off. The only glow came from underwater — that artificial blue halo turning him into something submerged.
He’d said he couldn’t sleep. She hadn’t asked why. They’d just sat there, backs against the cool tile, talking about nothing in particular — which movie sequels didn’t deserve to exist, whether cereal qualified as dinner, how long you could realistically survive on canned peaches alone. Eventually their sentences blurred and they drifted back inside when their eyes gave out.
Then it kept happening. The waking. The bolting upright, lungs already braced. Sometimes it was her. Sometimes it was him. Sometimes they both surfaced at once, like divers who’d misjudged the depth. They didn’t talk about the dreams in detail. They didn’t need to. The Upside Down had a specific texture. It followed you back.
Then, one day, power outage in the middle of the afternoon, heat pressing down like a physical hand. They’d climbed the narrow ladder bolted into rusting metal, tools clanging against Steve’s hip on their ascent to fix the radio head. The higher they went, the more the town spread beneath them — fractured streets, cordoned-off blocks, military vehicles like cockroaches. Halfway up, Robin’s palms started to slip. Not from fear, at first, but from sweat. The metal burned. Her arms shook. Every muscle engaged, every breath sharp and purposeful. There was no room for memory up there. No room for anything but balance and gravity and the next rung.
They made it down with their shirts plastered to their backs and their hands nearly blistered raw. And that night, they slept. Neither of them jolting awake, no shadows crawling at the edges of the ceiling. It didn’t take a genius to connect the dots, though Robin likes to think of herself as something in that general category.
So they started manufacturing exhaustion. Push-ups in the living room until their arms trembled. Sit-ups on the carpet with the news murmuring in the background. Laps around the pool, even when the water was too cold. Bicep curls with plastic milk jugs filled from the tap. Pull-ups on the beam above the garage door. Anything that got her heart racing the way it did when she was in danger. Anything that tricked her body into believing the threat had already come and gone. Rewrite the feeling. Reroute it. Compress it until it was manageable. Some nights they barely spoke during it. Just counted reps for each other. Just existed in the shared understanding that this was maintenance.
Trauma as a muscle you could train.
Across the yard, Nancy hands Jonathan a folded map and says something firm. He nods, but there’s that fractional delay — the half-beat where he’s deciding whether to argue. Robin wonders if Nancy sleeps. If she lies awake cataloguing contingencies instead of counting sheep. If she feels the same restless electricity under her skin and just funnels it into plans instead of push-ups.
Nancy glances up again and their eyes meet across the chaos of children and canned goods. She always knows when she’s being watched, it seems. Robin is suddenly acutely aware of her own body — the residual hum under her skin, the way she stands slightly braced even at rest. Nancy’s gaze dips, running along the length of her, and something unreadable passes over Nancy’s face until she blinks herself out of it and frowns. It unsettles her more than the staring would have.
“Robin?” Steve calls, tossing her a small box. She catches it without looking, reflex clean.
“Add it to the list,” he says. “Murray came through.”
Murray snorts. “I always come through.”
The kids resume their inventory squabble. Jonathan closes the van doors. Nancy adjusts her coat. Robin exhales slowly.
They’ll head home soon. Eat something simple. Then the drills will start — timed laps, controlled breathing, the familiar burn that drowns out memory. Until their bodies give out. Until sleep wins by force instead of chance.
For now. And she knows — the way you know a storm isn’t finished just because the rain pauses — that conditioning isn’t about strength. It’s about outrunning what waits in the quiet.
Nancy watches her for a second too long before turning back to Jonathan.
Robin feels that too.
—
They don’t talk much on the drive home. Steve’s BMW still smells faintly like chlorine and fast food fries, no matter how often they roll the windows down. The sun is dipping low enough to smear gold across the cracked pavement. Hawkins looks almost normal if you squint and avoid the barricades.
Steve kills the engine in the driveway but doesn’t move to get out right away.
“You alright, Rob?” he asks finally, eyes still forward. “You’ve been quiet.”
She has. There’s something off today. Not loud. Not visible. Just a hum under her skin, like static before a storm. She flexes her fingers against her thighs.
“I’m fine,” she says automatically. He waits. She exhales through her nose. “Okay, no, not fine-fine. Just… weird.”
“Weird how?”
She searches for language and comes up short. It’s not dread exactly. It’s sharper. Electric. “I feel like there’s a socket in my spine,” she mutters. “Like if someone flicks a switch I’m gonna light up.”
Steve turns in his seat now. Concern, but measured. He’s gotten better at not escalating.
“You think it’s one of those things?” he asks carefully.
She thinks about Will. About the way he used to go still, like a deer listening for something only it could hear. The way he’d tilt his head slightly, eyes unfocused, like the air itself was whispering. She wonders if this is what that felt like, a warning with no coordinates.
“I don’t know,” she admits. “Maybe. Maybe it’s nothing. But it’s not nothing-nothing.”
That lands between them. Steve runs a hand over his face. “Okay. So what’s your brain telling you?”
Robin hesitates. Then, firmer than she feels: “I want to do a crawl.”
Steve’s head tips back against the seat. He closes his eyes. He hates crawls. Crawls mean getting close to something that already tore through their town. Crawls mean fucking around and finding out, poking into places that breathe wrong.
“Not a big one,” she rushes to add. “Just the gate by Melvald’s. The one they haven’t fully covered yet. They’ve got fencing and warning signs but it’s sloppy. And you know the MAC-Z put out that PSA about coyotes attacking pets over by Hess’s farm? And we got that call last week from that mom who swore something was scratching under her porch in that area?”
Steve opens one eye. “You think that was—”
“I don’t know what I think.” She pushes her hands through her hair, agitation spiking. “I just— it’s lining up in my head in a way I don’t like. The air feels wrong, Stevie. Like before…” She trails off.
Before the last thing.
“It’s giving me the heebie jeebies,” she finishes, because humor is easier than naming fear.
He studies her. She can almost hear the gears turning in his head.
“You’re not just trying to burn off the jitters?” he asks quietly.
That hits closer than she’d prefer. Maybe she is. Maybe she wants the burn in her lungs and the scrape of concrete under her palms. Maybe she wants proof that the feeling means something. But she also knows the difference between anxiety and instinct.
“I don’t think so,” she says. “This feels directional.”
Steve swallows. Nods once. “Okay.”
She blinks. “Okay?”
“We check it out. Quick perimeter sweep, and if it smells off, we bail or call Nance.”
Relief floods her so fast it almost makes her dizzy. “Thank you,” she says, softer.
He shrugs like it’s nothing. It isn’t. They get out of the car in sync.
Inside, the house greets them with the hollow quiet of a place too large for two people pretending they don’t need more company. The late light stretches long across the living room floor. The pool glints blue through the sliding glass doors. Robin heads for the hallway closet automatically, pulling out flashlights, gloves, the small crowbar they keep by the door. Steve checks the revolver Nancy insisted they practice with, spinning the chamber with a frown.
“Walkie the others?” he asks.
Robin hesitates. Nancy’s face flashes in her mind — the way she’d watched Robin today. The way she folds maps like she’s sealing the certainty into them. If Steve calls, Nancy will come. Jonathan will come too.
“Let’s just scope it first,” Robin says. “If it’s something, we call.”
Steve searches her expression for a second longer, then nods. “Okay,” he agrees.
Robin pockets the flashlight and steps back outside. The air is cooler now, but the static under her skin hasn’t faded. If anything, it’s sharper. Like a tuning fork struck somewhere far away. She doesn’t know if she’s right. She doesn’t know if she’s about to chase a dead end. But she does know that waiting for the next thing to happen has never once saved them.
—
Melvald’s sits in that strange half-lit stretch between sunset and nightfall. The parking lot is empty, yellow paint cracked into spiderwebs. The fencing around the known gate is exactly what she remembered: chain-link, military signage. They have to break into the quarantine zone and stick to the blind spots, but she's used to this by now. Robin crouches near the perimeter tape and studies the ground.
“Okay,” she murmurs, sweeping her flashlight low, not directly ahead. The known gate is quiet. Too quiet, though the fencing is intact. No scorch marks. The ground isn’t disturbed beyond military boot prints.
Her skin still hums. “Let’s go around the back.”
They move along the side wall, staying low, lights angled down to avoid broadcasting their position. Robin’s brain is cataloguing as they go: trash bins undisturbed, no obvious blood scent, no temperature drop like the full Mothergate used to radiate. They both listen.
Behind Melvald’s, near the loading dock, the wall has split. Not a massive tear like the earthquake cracks downtown. This one is… precise. Vertical. About the width of a doorway and half as tall. The edges pulse faintly, membrane-thin and veined, like something breathing through it.
Steve swears under his breath, and Robin turns towards him, “I fucking hate it when you’re right, Rob. We’ve found the gate, let’s head back.”
Robin feels it before she sees it. The temperature drops in a way that isn’t cold so much as absence. The air smells like rust and damp soil and something faintly sickly sweet beneath it — decay with a pulse.
“Steve,” she breathes out, heart rate picking up and lungs threatening to give out.
The rift shivers. Two shapes move in the seam. Steve curses again. They step through almost in tandem — tall, oil-slick bodies unfolding into the parking lot light. Adult. Fully formed. Petaled heads closed like clenched fists. The second one’s posture is slightly lower, weight shifting like it’s testing the surface. Robin’s mouth goes dry.
“Okay,” she says, voice thin but steady. “That’s new. That’s very new.”
The first Demogorgon’s head opens. Five petals unfurl, revealing the inner maw — wet, glistening, alive with that horrible, layered chitter. The sound hits her like a physical shove.
It isn’t just noise. It’s memory. The Upside Down air, thick and fungal. Vines pulsing underfoot. Demo-bats shrieking in the dark as they swarmed Eddie on the trailer roof, blood bright against his shirt, laughing like it was still a game until it wasn’t.
The chittering overlaps in her head. Demo-bats. Demogorgon. All hive, all wrong. For a half-second, the parking lot flickers. She’s back there. The sky split red. The ground breathing. No. Not now.
The first Demogorgon lunges. Steve fires immediately. The revolver cracks through the night, muzzle flash bright against the dark. The bullet hits shoulder — barely slows it.
“Inside the mouth!” Robin shouts, already moving.
She draws her own handgun, hands steady despite the tremor running under her skin. They learned. They adapted. No more bats and good intentions. The second Demogorgon peels off left, circling. They’re coordinating, because of fucking course they are. Robin backs toward the loading dock, keeping both in view. Steve shifts opposite her, triangulating like they’ve practiced in the backyard between push-ups and laps.
“Fire on my mark,” he mutters.
The first one charges. They both fire. Two shots slam into the open maw as the petals flare wide. The creature recoils with a guttural shriek, but it doesn’t fall. The second one moves fast — too fast — skittering low along the asphalt before rearing up behind Steve. The creature jerks toward movement — toward Steve — and lunges with shocking speed.
No. Not Steve, please.
“Behind you!” Robin yells.
Steve barely rolls clear, the Demogorgon’s claws carving gouges through concrete where his chest had been. She moves. The world narrows to angles and distance. She fires at the second Demogorgon’s leg joint. It staggers just enough. Its head tilts slightly, charges again, this time at Robin. It swipes, and she’s not fast enough.
Claws slice across her torso in a brutal diagonal arc — from the lower left of her stomach up toward her right hip. Heat detonates through her midsection. She stumbles back, breath punched out of her lungs, gun skidding across concrete. There’s a moment — just one — where she can’t feel her legs. And in that suspended second, the chittering gets louder.
She gasps, blood already slicking her shirt and hands. Blood. Her Blood. Bad. It can smell that. She tastes iron. The wound is making her dizzy, sounds blend with demo-bat shrieks in her memory, with the rustle of vines, with the echo of the Upside Down’s hollow wind.
She sees Eddie again. She sees Steve beaten and bloody, an inch away from death in Starcourt. She sees Steve alone in that poollight at 3 a.m. Something in her fractures open. Steve moves between them without hesitation, firing point-blank into its open mouth. The shot staggers it, but it keeps coming. He grabs the road flare from his jacket, strikes it hard against the pavement — sparks shower.
“Back up!” he shouts. She tries. Her legs don’t fully cooperate. The second Demogorgon slams into Steve from the side. He goes down hard. The flare rolls. The world tilts.
“Not him,” she gasps — not to Steve, not to the creature, but to something bigger and crueler and listening. “Stevie, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. Run please, run— I love you.”
The words spill out without permission in between heaving breaths and choked sobs— huh, she doesn’t know when she started crying. It's selfish and desperate all at once she doesn’t want to leave him either, the thought hits like another wound, but if someone has to go—
“Robin!” Steve’s voice cracks. She spares him a glance and instantly regrets it. He looks pale. He’s seen her hurt before. He has not seen this.
The Demogorgon lunges for her.
“Stevie, I’m sorry.”
Robin hears him shouting — hears her name — but it sounds wrong. Distant. Like it’s coming through a speaker. Through static. And then—
Crack.
A rifle shot. Sharp. Precise. The first Demogorgon’s head jerks violently as a bullet punches clean through the center of its open maw. For a split second, Robin thinks she’s imagining it — because she hears Steve’s voice again, but distorted, metallic.
“—Melvald’s— two of them— now!” Walkie. He’d called it in.
The real sound of the shot reaches her half a beat later, as an honest to god angel steps into the spill of streetlight at the edge of the lot, rifle braced, posture steady as bedrock. Her second shot blows through the Demogorgon’s skull cavity as it rears back, petaled head exploding outward in a spray of dark, viscous blood.
The body collapses mid-lunge. Dead. The second Demogorgon freezes.It chitters sharply, head tilting toward the fallen one — toward the ruptured hive-link.
The angel chambers another round without looking away. “Harrington, left!” she calls.
Steve scrambles, grabbing the flare and hurling it at the second creature’s open mouth. It ignites on contact. Flame blooms inside the petals. The Demogorgon shrieks — high, furious, wounded — and staggers backward toward the rift.
She fires again, driving it step by step.
It doesn’t die, it retreats, skittering back through the narrow seam in the air. The rift convulses once. Then seals. Silence slams down so hard it rings.
Robin is on her back. The sky above her looks wrong — too wide, too normal. Steve is over her instantly.
“Stay with me, Rob,” he says, voice raw. “You can do it, kid, come on. Stay alive, please, I’ll let you watch Desert Hearts for the next ten movie nights, and I’ll get you the nasty fucking mint chocolate chip ice cream you like, and I’ll do all the chores for a month.”
“Wow,” she blinks at him blearily. “Dying has perks.”
His face twists. “That’s not funny.”
Footsteps approach. Controlled. Quick. The angel kneels. Up close, she is blinding, glowing and sharp and clear and carved out of resolve. A rifle is set down within arm’s reach. Hands — steady, warm — press hard against Robin’s abdomen. Pain flares white-hot as pressure meets the diagonal tear carved across her stomach to hip. Blood seeps through fabric instantly.
Robin exhales in a shaky little sigh as she tears her eyes away from her guts and back to the woman in front of her. “Pretty,” she slurs.
Blue eyes widen, then crinkle in the corners as they soften, freckles dancing in the lamplight. There’s something fierce there. And furious. And terrified in a way Robin hasn’t actually seen before, but Robin doesn’t recognize her. Not yet. She studies the face like she’s trying to place someone from a dream.
“This is wrong,” she murmurs faintly. “You’ve got the wrong Robin, hot stuff, I’m not going upstairs.”
Chapped pink lips twitch up, then curve down. Oh no, she made the angel sad, “I’m sorry, you’re wasting your time, I’m… definitely going down.”
Steve makes a broken sound beside her. “Hey. No. No, you’re not going anywhere.”
She focuses on Steve’s face because it’s easier than focusing on the sky. He looks younger when he’s scared. Paler. Eyes too bright. Mouth tight like he’s bracing for impact. She hates that look on him.
“Steve, relax, you’re upsetting the angel,” She says as evenly as she can manage. The angel in question adjusts her grip as fresh blood wells under her hands.
Robin stares up at her. Who would’ve thought this is what it would take — to have these hands on her like this. Holding her together. Literally. Lucky, she thinks dimly. The chittering echoes again in her skull — phantom sound now — demo-bats shrieking in a red sky, She squeezes Steve’s sleeve weakly.
“Didn’t mean it,” she whispers. “About running. Don’t run.”
“I’m not,” he says immediately. No hesitation. “I’m right here.”
The angel now shifts, evaluating the wound with clinical precision even as her jaw clenches. Oh her vision clears briefly, it’s Nancy.
“Nance?” She chokes out a laugh, then groans in pain.
“It missed center,” Nancy says, mostly to Steve. Robin’s head rolls slightly toward her. Up close, Nancy does look unreal. Not glowing. Not haloed. “It’s bad, but it’s not—” Nancy stops herself from finishing that sentence with something absolute.
Nancy Wheeler does not promise outcomes she can’t guarantee. Robin registers that distantly — the logic of it — but it feels like it’s happening underwater. She frowns slightly. Nancy presses harder as a fresh seep of blood wells up. Who would’ve thought this is what it takes for Robin to finally know what it felt like to have her hands on her, holding her together? She could die happy now.
“Eyes on me,” Nancy says, and it isn’t a suggestion. Robin grins, as if she could ever dream of doing anything else. “Talk to me,” Nancy continues. “Tell me something annoying.”
Robin blinks. “Steve uses Farah Fawcet hairspray,” she slurs.
Steve gasps in betrayal. “Unbelievable.”
Nancy’s mouth twitches up this time, yay. “Good. That’s good. Keep going.”
The edges of Robin’s vision dim further. She tries to pull in air and it doesn’t feel like enough.
“I don’t want to be alone,” she says suddenly, not sure which of them she’s saying it to. Nancy’s hands twitch.
“You won’t be,” Steve says, too fast. Nancy doesn’t look away from Robin’s face. There’s the faint, distant roar of an engine. Headlights crest at the far end of the lot. Robin hears it like it’s happening inside a tunnel. She exhales slowly, eyelids fluttering.
“Okay,” she murmurs, as if conceding a point in an argument. Nancy adjusts her grip, unflinching despite the blood soaking her sleeves.
“Stay awake,” she orders quietly. Robin focuses on the sound of their breathing. On Steve’s thumb brushing small, frantic circles against her wrist. On Nancy’s steady hands.
“Sorry, pretty girl, I gotta… I just … my eyes — rest my eyes.”
Robin was so, so tired. The parking lot no longer feels like the Upside Down. It no longer felt like anything.
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