Chapter Text
Robin Buckley is a menace to society and human life. Well, to Eddie’s life, anyway. She’s sprawled across Eddie’s couch currently, high and giggly as shit and singing “Total Eclipse of the Heart” in a manner that’s astonishingly off-key for someone who actually has a pretty good ear for music. Eddie thinks she might just be doing it to annoy the hell out of him.
Robin had come over after band under the pretense of looking through his records (and Eddie was flattered, really, or would be if he didn’t have a very good idea of what she actually thought of his music taste) but that had devolved somewhere around three hours ago, and somehow they had wound up smoking outside Eddie’s trailer, gossiping like a gaggle of girls abou t people from high school.
Eddie was grateful for it, honestly— the mundane, ridiculous banality of it. It took his mind off of the fact that the world could possibly end in monsters and fire at an y minute, and it was nice, just for a while, to pretend that he was better than any of the rest of the losers that he went to high school with.
But they had come back in about an hour ago, shivering once the sun dipped below the trees that surrounded the trailer park, and now Robin is just. Lying on Eddie’s couch. Eyes closed and dopey, high smile on her face and belting out the wrong lyrics to “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” to the wrong tune. So, Robin Buckley is a menace to society. And Eddie has absolutely no idea how he’s going to get her off the couch before Wayne comes home.
Granted, he doesn’t think his uncle would be mad— he might like Robin, even, if he met her under different circumstances. He just doesn’t think that what Wayne wants to come home to after a 10-hour factory shift is a teenager high out of her mind, absolutely butchering Bonnie Tyler and sprawled across the couch right where Wayne usually likes to sit and watch reruns of M*A*S*H.
If it was Eddie’s dad, instead of Uncle Wayne, it would be a different story. If it was his dad coming home, late at night, to find Eddie and Robin high and loud and acting like dumb kids, he would probably shut the door behind him a little (or a lot) too loud, stalk over to the fridge to get a beer, sit at the kitchen counter and glare daggers in Robin and Eddie’s direction until the whole room filled with a rank, buzzing kind of cold and until Robin felt awkward enough to stutter out that it was late and she had to get home. His dad would grab Eddie’s arm, probably, after Robin left, hold it in a vice grip, smack him around a little for something. Eddie isn’t sure what it would be. Maybe that he was high. Maybe that he had a friend over, got her high. Maybe that he had a friend over, at all. Especially a girl; especially a girl that he wasn’t sleeping with. Eddie is pretty sure that the word faggot would be thrown out at some point, along with a knock upside the head.
But. His dad is dead, now, and Eddie isn’t 15 years old anymore, and Wayne certainly isn’t his dad, and Eddie isn’t scared, exactly. Just… a little concerned.
He isn’t quite sure how this happened, in all fairness. He had assumed Robin had a low tolerance, but then again, he might have forgotten what a low tolerance actually looked like. He had thought, before tonight, that she didn’t like getting high… but maybe she just didn’t do it that often. He doesn’t blame her— after being drugged against your will and held in some Russian torture chamber, he can’t imagine that anyone would be particularly interested in feeling out of control like that again. Eddie’s heard snippets of the story— from Robin, from Steve, from Dustin (who describes the whole thing like some James Bond action sequence, even though Eddie is pretty sure that it had been anything but) but the pieces that he can put together make white hot anger simmer under his skin.
He doesn’t know what kind of fucked up people capture, drug, interrogate, and torture literal teenagers , but if he ever gets his hands on those Russki bastards—
“Whatcha thinkin’ about?” Robin asks, all drawn out and floaty, and Eddie realizes belatedly that the off-key singing stopped a good two minutes ago. Oops. Also, small mercies.
He heaves an over-dramatic sigh and pushes himself up off the couch, coming around the side of it to inspect Robin more critically. “I don’t know, Buckley. I’m thinking that you’re high as shit. What are you thinking?”
“That I’m high as shit,” she concurs, giggling, and then the smile drops off her face. “I’m thinking about girls,” she amends quietly, suddenly morose, and Eddie would find the abrupt change in tone a little funny, if he wasn’t all at once entirely at a loss for words.
He and Robin had talked to each other about this before, sure. In a kind of code, though, mostly. He had heard her lamenting to Steve one too many times about this girl who stood next to her in band, and the feelings she was talking about were definitely not friendship feelings. And Eddie had followed her eye line during a movie night when they were watching Alien , and whenever Sigourney Weaver was onscreen, Robin was glued to the tv set in a way that was… a little too interested.
So he had sucked it up and taken the plunge and let slip something in casual conversation about “a guy he used to see” who lived in Chicago now. And Robin’s mouth had dropped open in a little half-circle o before she seemed to remember to snap it closed again, eyebrows rising in what looked to be a question, finally deciding on a beaming grin. She had told him that the girl in band was named Vickie— or something— and yeah, that was a thing. Maybe. And Eddie had decided that he wanted to make Robin Buckley smile like that more.
She isn’t smiling now, though. Her face is morphing into an almost over-exaggerated semblance of sadness that, again, Eddie might find funny if he didn’t think he had a pretty good idea of exactly what she’s feeling right now.
Damn . Maybe that’s why she wanted to come over here in the first place. He considers, for a moment, that he might be the other only queer person that Robin knows about in the entirety of Hawkins, and shit if that isn’t depressing as hell. She could talk to Steve, probably, but Eddie imagines that as accepting of Robin liking girls as Steve may be (and he is, apparently, as Robin has assured Eddie of more times than he can count) it’s a little different to talk about girls with a straight guy. Hell, he doesn’t quite know why Robin wants to talk about girls with a guy that isn’t straight. If Eddie is the answer to all of Robin’s relationship and sexuality woes, then they’re both in some deep shit.
He does his best, though. “What… uh, what about girls?” He asks, a little stilted, sinking down onto the floor in a cross-legged position so that he’s at Robin’s unfocused eyeline. He doesn’t mean for this to feel so awkward, but they’ve never really talked about it out loud, not in so many words. He’s holding his breath a little, waiting for one of them to say something that makes it real.
“Girls are just so… so pretty ,” Robin breathes out, face crumpling a little more, and Eddie is suddenly horrified at the thought that she might start crying. He has no idea what to do with a high, crying Robin Buckley on his couch.
“Pretty… yeah,” Eddie says. “Totally. Pretty’s good, right?” He’s not quite sure why the idea of girls being pretty makes Robin look like she’s a second from tears.
“I don’t think I’ll ever be pretty like that,” she responds sorrowfully, and Eddie’s throat tightens.
“Hey— come on, don’t say that,” he says, trying to catch her eye. This is some kind of weird girl talk moment and Eddie’s totally not good at this shit, he’s not. “I think you’re pretty,” he teases, half hoping to lighten the mood and half ho ping to see the twinkle of her smile once again. “Gorgeous, some might even say. Absolutely and totally captivating in your beauty.”
Robin laughs a little wetly, rolls onto her back so that her head is hanging off the side of the couch and she’s looking at Eddie upside down. Her eyes are still a little unfocused. “Come on— we both know you don’t really count.”
Eddie clutches a hand over his heart, pretends to tip backwards a little before righting himself again. “You wound me!” He says, all mock offense. “Just because I’m not into chicks, doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate the beauty of the human form.”
“Ew.” Robin wrinkles her nose a little, but the corners of her mouth twitch up just the smallest amount, and Eddie counts it as a victory. “You totally didn’t have to phrase it like that.” She shifts on the couch again, rolling back to face Eddie right side up this time. “Girls are so pretty, though. And I don’t think— I don’t even think it matters if I’m pretty or not. They’re never going to notice me, either way. Not in, like… the way that I want.”
Eddie’s heart sinks, because he knows what she means, because her words twist into his chest with a familiarity that’s all too painful. Yeah, this isn’t just girl talk.
He reaches out, hooks their fingers together. “Hey,” he says, sincerely. “Any girl that ignores you, Robin Buckley, is an absolute idiot.”
Robin huffs out a breath of laughter, but there’s a lot left unsaid in that statement, and they both know it. “It’s just, like… I’m looking at her, all the time, and she’s never looking at me. She doesn’t… ignore me, she just doesn’t see me. And I don’t think she ever will.” Her voice drops to a whisper, she focuses her gaze on a stain on the carpet near the leg of the couch. “I don’t know if anyone will,” she says softly.
And Eddie is uncomfortable, suddenly, because that doesn’t seem like the kind of thing you admit to an acquaintance, some guy who you had a few classes with and maybe watch movies or smoke weed with after school, some guy who you don’t really know , and all at once Eddi e has the horrible feeling that he ’s invading Robin’s privacy somehow, taking advantage of her in a vulnerable state.
He clears his throat. “Look, do you want to talk about this sometime when you haven’t just smoked an entire joint? Or, I don’t know, talk about this with someone else? Not that I’m not happy to talk, I totally am, I just figured that maybe Harrington would be—”
“No.” Robin cuts her eyes away, face going pink all of a sudden. “I can’t— I can’t talk to Steve about this.”
Eddie frowns. “I thought you said he was cool, you know, with…?”
“Oh! Oh, yeah, no, of course he is!” R obin amends quickly . “It’s just, like… it’s more complicated.”
“You’ve talked about her before, to Steve,” Eddie points out. “I overheard you, like, weeks ago. When you were restocking shelves in Family Video.”
“What!?” Robin’s eyes snap back to his face, and Eddie is getting a little bit of whiplash with the intensity of her expressions— this time, absolute horror is pain ted over her face.
“Yeah… you told me about everything with Vickie, like, two days later. You remember?” His tone wavers between concern and confusion.
“Oh! Right…” Robin breathes out, seeming almost relieved, her facial features rearranging themselves into something r esembling a normal expr ession again. “Yeah, no, this is— this is different. It’s something— I can’t really talk to Steve, about this.”
Eddie regards her for a moment. “Okay,” he nods, deciding not to push, though he’s honestly confused about the entire interaction. “Look… I still don’t think this is something we should talk about while you’re high, okay? You might wind up saying something you regret, and I don’t wanna—” He doesn’t quite know how to finish. They’re still tiptoeing around something, still avoiding saying it explicitly, and he doesn’t want to be the one to make Robin say the words out loud. He doesn’t want her to hate him for it.
“Okay. Yeah.” Robin pushes herself into a sitting position on the couch. “So, uh— it’s late. I should probably, like, head home.”
Eddie glances at his watch, and Robin’s right; it’s nearly 10:30.
Robin makes her way to her feet and stands, swaying slightly, next to the couch. Eddie leaps to his feet, too, to steady her.
“Nuh-uh. No way, Buckley. I’m not letting you drive like this.”
She affixes him with a patent Robin Buckley glare. “I dro ve all the way over here, I’ll be fine.”
He rolls his eyes, holds out his hand. “God, you’d think you had a death wish, or something.” A little less funny, given everything that they’ve been through. “Give me your keys.”
Robin narrows her eyes at him, but fumbles around in her jeans pocket for a minute before dropping her keys into his outstretched hand with little argument.
“How are you gonna get hom e?” She points out petulantly as th ey troupe out of the trailer, Eddie pausing to give the door a hefty tug closed on the other side of the threshold. It always sticks.
“I’ll walk back.” He shoots her a winning smile. “Night air is good for the spirit. Invigorating.”
Robin scoffs. “Yeah, like you really need more invigoration. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you not invigorated.”
Eddie ignores her, bounds ahead to open her car’s passenger side door. “M’lady,” he says, affecting a British accent and sweeping his arm in a low, grand gesture.
“My point,” Robin mutters under her breath, but her mouth quirks up as she ducks into the car.
The drive to Robin’s house isn’t long— 15 minutes if Eddie takes the backroad shortcuts that he knows about and doesn’t cut through the center of town. Robin lives on the same side of town as Steve, and Eddie doesn’t really want to acknowledge that his mind immediately produces this fact, unwarranted and unwanted. He resolutely pushes thoughts of Steve Harrington out of his head.
The drive is quiet, too, Eddie tapping out the drum beats from a few of his favorite Mötley Crüe songs on the steering wheel to break the silence. He was mildly appalled when Robin had told him that there were no cassettes in her car (well, her mom’s car, technically), and frankly horrified when she said that she usually listens to the news while driving.
The clock on the dashboard of the car reads 10:52 when they pull up outside the house that Robin informs him is hers. It’s nice— big, square, white wood siding— the kind of quintessential Midwestern suburban life that Eddie once dreamed of having. He wonders, idly, wha t it would be like to grow up in a house like that. He wonders if Robin ever feels like she’s living in a cage.
Robin’s voice breaks the silence, finally. “Hey, thanks for giving me a ride. Seriously.” Eddie meets her eye. She seems a little more sober, a little more focused. “And I’m sorry for getting all… weepy. I really didn’t mean to do that.”
Eddie laughs it off. “It’s fine, Buckley. We’ve all been there— myself most of all, I promise. Nothing to be sorry for.” He fiddles with the keys, out of the ignition now and cold in his hands. “I would like to talk, you know. About… whatever you want. All of it.” He doesn’t know why it’s still so hard to say. Maybe because he’s never actually said it out loud to anyone. And he doesn’t know if Robin Buckley should be the first. “Just… maybe when we’re both sober, yeah?”
Robin’s face splits into a grin, and somehow, like always, it’s a little infectious. “Yeah, of course,” she agrees, unbuckling her seatbelt and opening the door.
Eddie gets out of his side, as well, closes the door softly. He doesn’t know what time Robin’s parents go to bed, but there’s a light on in one of the upstairs windows, and he’s assuming that they wouldn’t be too happy about Eddie “The Freak” Munson dropping their daughter off at 11 o'clock at night.
He tosses Robin the keys, and she watches them arc over the car and hit the ground with a clatter. She stoops to pick them up. “I don’t know what world you live in where you think I could catch those sober, let alone coming down from a three-hour high.”
“Mm.” Eddie rests his chin on his hands, leaning against the side of the car. “Sorry. Bad judgment call, on my part.”
“Certainly not the first of the day.” Robin s ends him a mock glare.
“And it definitely won’t be the last.” Eddie grins cheekily.
Robin rolls her eyes, smiles, turns to head inside, hand half-raised in a wave behind her.
“Hey! Buckley,” Eddie whispers into the night.
She turns back. “Yeah?”
Eddie fixes her with a knowing look. “Have fun in band tomorrow.”
Robin’s eyebrows furrow in confusion for a second, and then raise in some kind of understanding. “Right! Yeah, band. I totally— I totally will. Yeah. Uh— see you later, Eddie.” She turns to head inside again, throwing a quick “Don’t die on your way home,” over her shoulder, and then she’s in the house, red-painted door closing quietly behind her.
Eddie frowns. Again, funnier if they hadn’t all almost died, like, 20 times over. Or maybe it’s funnier because of that.
He’s not sure why Robin’s response seemed different than the usual, awkward discombobulated rambling that occurs whenever she’s talking about crushes or relationships, but her confusion when Eddie mentioned band nudges something in the back of his brain. He’s halfway down the street when he realizes that he had assumed, but never actually confirmed, that it was Vickie that she was talking about this entire time.