I think you're my best friend

Posted originally on the Archive of Our Own at http://archiveofourown.org/works/39745761.

Rating: General Audiences

Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Category: Gen
Fandom: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Relationship: Robin Buckley & Steve Harrington
Character: Robin Buckley, Steve Harrington
Additional Tags: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Dealing With Trauma, Post-Season/Series 03,
they're besties your honour, Platonic Cuddling, 3 am emotional
breakdowns, Platonic Soulmates, tfw when you trauma bond with you
co-worker and now youre inseparable
Stats: Published: 2022-06-19 Words: 1688

I think you're my best friend

by AsterAspera

Summary

Sometimes, when she’s alone in her room and staring at the certificates pinned up on her
wall and the sheet music on her desk, she wonders if it even happened at all.

And when she wakes up gasping at midnight, it feels like she’s still there.

Notes

Yeah I’m not sure why I waited till season 4 came out to write a post season 3 fic either

Title is from ‘The kids aren’t alright’ by fallout boy because 1) I’m not very original and 2)
I think it fits them very well

See the end of the work for more notes

When all of them limp out of the mall, smelling of gunpowder and blood and fear, Steve is right
beside her. The cold night air hits Robin and in less than a second she can feel the adrenaline fade
from her body, her windpipe seeming to narrow and her vision blurring over. There are flashing
blue and red lights and she wants to cry because it’s so mundane, so normal. Today, her entire
world changed, today she saw things that could not be real, not even in her worst nightmares, and
now, a man in a white coat is asking her who the current president is. It’s almost enough to send
her into a hysterical laughing fit, but she refrains, because the last thing she needs is to be locked
up like a lunatic.
But god does she feel like one. She has so many questions about what she saw, but Steve just gives
her an apologetic smile as he’s dragged away by another paramedic and then she’s sitting on a
stretcher alone and watching the flashing lights with a blank look.

She doesn’t know where to go from here, she should probably talk to someone, call her parents,
find a way home. But that all feels so far away, and she’s so tired. She doesn’t want to deal with
the mundanities of phone calls and worried parents, not when she just saw a guy get torn apart by
some eldritch flesh monster. The world can’t go from that to being normal again.

Somehow, she does make it home, and her parents come outside and hold her close for what feels
like an eternity. She feels simultaneously like she’s five years old again and like she’s floating
somewhere far away from this. Her mom kisses her on the forehead and tucks the bedsheets around
her and tells her if she ever needs to talk, they’re right here. Robin thinks of a lift plummeting deep
down beneath the earth and just smiles at her mom, reassuring her she’s fine.

The next few days pass in an unfocused blur. Some official looking government people stop by and
she tells them all she saw and signs the stack of papers they put in front of her without reading
them. Her parents give her worried looks for the rest of the day. She doesn’t know if the others had
to sign papers too, or if they’ve been through this enough times they’re excused by now. She
doesn’t know what any of them are up to really.

Sometimes, when she’s alone in her room and staring at the certificates pinned up on her wall and
the sheet music on her desk, she wonders if it even happened at all.

And when she wakes up gasping at midnight, it feels like she’s still there.

Her parents don’t ask questions, and she’s not sure if that’s better or worse. At least it saves her
from having to fabricate a story. A mall fire, the news tells her, and she thinks the official looking
agents may have said something about that too. Everything these days feels like spun glass,
endlessly stretching out and endlessly fragile, waiting to break.

Until one day, the glass snaps.

The nightmare leaves her sitting up in bed, gasping for air and clothes soaked through, images of
blood spattered walls and gleaming knives leaving her shaking. She barely registers what she's
doing as she stumbles into a loose pair of pants and trips down the stairs as quietly as she can. She
doesn't think she has a destination in mind when she grabs her bike from the shed and starts cycling
through the dark, empty streets of Hawkins. But when she stands in front of the cold imposing
silhouette of his house, she knows there was nowhere else she could have gone.

Only when she rings the bell does she begin to think it through. Because what if this is the wrong
place, what if one of his parents opens the door, what if he never wants to see her again? She starts
to back away a bit, scrambling for something that will explain her standing on his porch at three
am looking like she crawled out of her grave.

But before she can run back to her bike and escape, the door opens and Steve peers out blearily into
the darkness. It takes him a minute to find her in the dark, and his brow crumples in confusion.

“Robin?” He asks, as if he’s not really sure she’s actually there.

“Hey dingus,” She replies, and to her surprise it only comes out sounding slightly like she wants to
cry.
His confusion deepens and Robin feels the pit of shame and awkwardness grow.

“It’s like 2 o’clock.”

“Yeah no shit.”

He looks at a loss for what else to say and Robin knows now this was a mistake. Why would he
care that she can’t sleep, when he’s been through shit like this multiple times already? She
probably sounds pathetic to him.

“Do you want to come in?”

Robin considers denying the offer, but you can’t really ring someone out of bed at 3 am and then
leave without an explanation.

So she trudges inside, and sits down stiffly on one of the couches that looks like it’s more for show
than for comfort. Steve sits down opposite her and fiddles with the string of his sweatpants as the
silence fills up with tension between them.

“Is something wrong?” He eventually asks, eyes focused somewhere just to the left of her and
looking like he wants nothing more than to crawl back into bed.

“No,” She says, and when that comes out sounding pathetically snivelly, she amends: “I just had a
nightmare.”

“Oh,” Steve actually looks at her then, sits up a bit straighter. “About?”

“What do you think?” She bites out, and it comes out a lot harsher than it has any right to.

“Yeah alright that’s fair.”

And then the room falls back into a stiff silence as Robin bites back tears of frustration and anger.
She just wants to sleep. She just wants someone who gets it.

“But like, the Russians, or y’know?” And Steve flaps his hands in a way that’s supposed to
encompass all of that.

“The Russians.” Her hand comes up subconsciously to rub at the spot where they stuck the needle.
“It’s… It’s nothing, it’s stupid.”

“Hey, no, it’s not nothing,” Steve says in that annoying soft parent voice he sometimes uses with
his kids.

“It’s just,” the words come out harsh and choked and Robin is mortifyingly aware that she has
started crying, in front of Steve of all people, “I keep going back to that moment, in that cell, and
they dropped you in there and you weren't responding and I thought,” Her breath hitches
embarrassingly, “I thought you were dead you asshole.”

She thought seeing him would help, she thought the panic and fear pressing on her lungs and
making her hands shake would ease up when she saw that he was fine, and still breathing, and still
his annoying self. But the house is dark and oppressive and she’s sure he’s staring at her as if she’s
crazy and she has no clue how she’s just supposed to go back home now and pretend everything is
normal. Pretend the world didn’t nearly end a week ago.

The soft ‘hey’ is suddenly way too close and she almost slaps him in shock when he grabs her
 hand. She’s not entirely sure how he snuck up on her so quickly; Just a second ago he was sitting
across the coffee table from her. He places her palm over his chest and if she focuses enough she
can hear his heart thumping rhythmically in his chest.

“I’m alive,” He says, so softly, so kindly, and right now she can’t even be bothered to be annoyed
at his coddling tone.

“I can see that,” She tries to snap back sarcastically but it comes out all teary and choked.

“And you’re safe here, and we closed the gate so there’s gonna be no more monsters. It’s over,”
He repeats the last part, as if he’s not only trying to convince her, “It’s over.”

She glances out the window, looking for shapes in the treeline, the memory of a terrifying
silhouette chasing them down the road still fresh in her mind.

And then she looks down at Steve, who’s looking up at her with soft eyes and has her hand held
against his chest and whose hair is a mess and looks like he hasn’t slept in a month.

“We saved the world,” She says, because she needs to remind herself that she did something, that
all the pain and trauma and nightmares weren’t for nothing.

“Yeah, that was pretty cool of us,” Steve says as he slides between her and the armrest of the
couch. Their legs are touching and it doesn’t feel strange in the slightest when she rests her head on
his shoulders, when he wraps an arm securely around her waist. It feels like home in a way her
home doesn’t anymore.

“I get them too,” He mumbles into her hair and when she imagines him sitting on these cold
pleather couches alone at midnight, she’s abruptly grateful she decided to come over.

“Can I stay here tonight?” She asks.

“Of course.”

It doesn’t feel the slightest bit strange, when she follows him up to his room and curls up with him
under the covers. It doesn’t feel awkward when he reaches out and pulls her against his chest,
where she can hear his breathing in her ear and feel the pounding of his heart. She doesn’t think of
the awkward moment when he confessed his love or what his parents might think if they find them
like this. She doesn’t even think of crazy Russians and bone saws and creepy fleshy monsters. She
just thinks of her best friend, curled tight around her, already snoring like a lawnmower. And oh,
she’s gonna tease him so much about that when they wake up.

End Notes

Thanks for reading and f you enjoyed, don’t be hesitate to toss a comment or some kudos to
your local (very) stressed fanfic writer, they motivate me a lot :))

And if anyone wants to yell about stranger thing or drop me some prompts, you can find me
@aster-aspera on tumblr
Please drop by the archive and comment to let the author know if you enjoyed their work!