I’m worse at what I do best

Posted originally on the Archive of Our Own at http://archiveofourown.org/works/53617384.

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Category: Gen
Fandom: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Relationship: Robin Buckley & Steve Harrington
Characters: Robin Buckley, Steve Harrington
Additional Tags: Febuwhump 2024, Whump, Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Robin
Buckley Whump, Suffering in silence, Robin Buckley Character Study,
Platonic Soulmates Robin Buckley & Steve Harrington, that feeling
when your best friend is the Tank and so you try to carry everything else
for him, Robin Buckley Needs a Hug, Protective Steve Harrington, the
catharsis of crying in the kitchen, Canonical Character Death
Language: English
Series: Part 4 of dot does febuwhump
Stats: Published: 2024-02-08 Words: 2,346 Chapters: 1/1
 I’m worse at what I do best
by fastcardotmp3

Summary

She feels the heaviness of his body, halfway to lifeless. She hears him screaming. Screaming
from the other room. Screaming forever.

Robin can carry it, if he can do the hard thing of all that hoping.

Robin can swallow it all down and keep it safe, stoke the embers so they don’t forget the
danger.

Febuwhump #4: Suffering in Silence & "Why won't it stop?"

Notes

hello I’m posting a febuwhump fic every other day for the whole month and it's stobin day
babey!

Today’s prompts are: Suffering in Silence & "Why won't it stop?"

Title song: Smells Like Teen Spirit (specifically the Tori Amos version)

See the end of the work for more notes

There is always a time when the weak spots come to break.

Robin knows this. She has seen it.

It’s two mornings after they crawled out of the rubble of Starcourt Mall and there are still
bruises on Robin’s ribcage. There are still welts from the leather straps that held her down,
cutting into her skin in some places and rubbing it raw in others. There is the sound of
knuckles smacking back against her cheek and the harsh thud of her bare hands against a
concrete floor and the silence, silence, silence, silence of the boy chained to her in that dark
place, that endlessly and horribly infinite dark place.

It’s two mornings after and Robin is sitting numbly on her couch, her mother making
something in the kitchen to try and get her to eat while her father is running around town
looking for a copy of the movie Robin always used to watch on sick days as a child.

It’s two mornings after and Robin is broken, she is lost, she knows she has so much to
explain and no way to do so and she doesn’t know where to put any of it, doesn’t know what
to do about it except maybe cry once her mother is back and she can crawl into her arms and
just break.

That will help. That usually helps. That could solve this hollow feeling in her chest where the
adrenaline shoved all the pain in the face of surviving unsurvivable danger.

Except.

It’s two mornings after and Robin may not hear the knock at the door, but she hears his voice.
Asking for her. Asking for her—

“Hi, I’m sorry to— to bother you, but, uh, I was wondering if Robin was around?”

And it's like all the improbable sense of competence that was borne from the necessity to
keep going in that dark and terrible place revives itself, finds a second wind, just at the mere
sound of him.

Just at the mere sound of him, but solidified at the sight as she stumbles off the couch for the
first time in ten hours and sees him standing on her front porch.

Steve Harrington is all slumped shoulders and hopeful eyes. He's battered and bruised and
holding himself gingerly like he maybe shouldn't be upright at all and Robin's ribs are
smarting and her cheek burns and she's so, so tired, but he looks halfway to falling apart.

He came all the way here to find someone who understands and she decides in this moment,
as she takes him by the hand and leads him to the couch, wraps him up in the blanket she had
discarded, that she can be that person.

Robin feeds him painkillers and her mother's soup straight off the stove and she leans her
shoulder against his just enough for him to feel her presence without aggravating any of his
injuries. They don't talk about the mall, don't talk about the monsters within it, but they turn
all the lights in the house on as the sun goes down and keep the TV playing even as Robin
finds enough words from within her chest to talk even a little, even at all.

The thing is, the thing that will matter eventually if not right now, is that he doesn't ask her
for any sort of sacrifice in his search for comfort.

The thing that matters is that she gives it anyway.

She puts all of her energy into making him laugh, into seeing him smile again, into doing
anything and everything to keep that little shine of hope in his eyes because if she can't feel it
herself she wants to witness it. Wants him to have it.

He's been doing this longer than her after all, so if he can be the optimist, if he can look at all
this horror and see light on the other side, Robin can carry the other thing. The heavy thing.
The silence strapped to her back and the knowledge that it might remain that way, that at any
point they could end up back in that place in one way or another, that in all of his optimism
Steve is all the more prone to getting hurt.

Getting lost in the belief that there's something better worth fighting for.

Robin makes them a pot of sleepytime tea while her mother sets up the pull-out couch in the
living room so they can stay in front of the television set and she sees blood that is not her
own on her hands. She feels the heaviness of his body, halfway to lifeless. She hears him
screaming. Screaming from the other room. Screaming forever.

Robin can carry it, if he can do the hard thing of all that hoping.

Robin can swallow it all down and keep it safe, stoke the embers so they don’t forget the
danger.

But still she knows that there is always a weak spot where things come to break.

She watches the sharp of glass pressed to Steve's throat and it all flares, that darkness deep
inside of her, with fire burning hot but lacking in light.

It burns like the sun, tenderizing her insides while she maintains steadiness on her feet and in
her behavior, but she keeps it there. She keeps it there even as it burns hotter and hotter over
the course of the next week, every new instance of watching things get worse and then harder
and then more dangerous adding fuel to the flame until she's choking on it at the back of her
throat.

Steve volunteers to dive towards Hell and she lets him; she follows him when it inevitably
goes to shit; she wails on monsters with all the strength available to her and tries not to panic
when she sees what they did to him, how they hurt him, how he's hurt. Again. Again.

(She almost loses it then and there, crouched at Skull Rock and trying to cover up genuine
terror with rambling facts about rabies, and when he makes a joke she feels something sink in
her gut. That hope is still unwavering. Such a dangerous thing.)
There is a weak spot in everything and that is where the breaking tries to worm its way in, but
even when she tries to instill caution into him, even when she says I don't know if we can win
this time, still.

Still.

“I still have hope,” he says, because of course he does.

And the fire burns inside of her and it hurts, it hurts, it hurts, but what is she to do but stand
her ground and keep on fighting. What is she to do but carry it and stoke it and keep it, just
like she promised she would?

“Steve-- Steve, we have to go--”

“No, no, I can save him, just-- he just needs-- need to get air in his--”

“He's gone,” Robin tells him, eyes burning in the smoke that funnels from her mouth, gut
churning like ashes at the sight of Eddie Munson's body.

Nancy is dragging a screaming, sobbing Dustin back towards the gate and Steve has so much
hope that he truly believes, is trying to convince himself at the very least, that he can bring a
dead man back to life twenty minutes after his body went cold.

“He's gone and the Gate is gonna close--” Robin grabs Steve's shoulders and she pulls, she
yanks, she leaves all gentleness at the door and forces him back with his hands still bloody,
with Eddie's blood almost certainly in his mouth. “We have to leave, we're gonna get trapped
here, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm--”

He's trembling when they make their way through to the other side with seconds to spare.
Trembling and silent and haunted.

Robin holds him. She holds him and she keeps a finger on his pulse at the inside of his blood-
stained wrist because he's silent, silent, silent and she needs to know he's still with her.

She watches the hope of Steve Harrington shatter and she knows that there are weak spots,
weak enough for breaking.

This must be one of them.

There's so much to grieve, even after they win.

There's so much to grieve that Robin doesn't think it feels much like winning at all.

They keep going, she keeps moving forward, because that's what's supposed to happen and
that's what they've always done, but no matter how much time passes between them and
watching that place, that monster, burn, she still feels it.

Tastes it. Can't swallow around it some days and wakes up needing to rush to the toilet to
puke it up on others.
It burns her from inside and as she gets her diploma, as they help rebuild the town into
something still broken but at least standing, as people make plans and leave and get away,
away, away from the mass grave that is Hawkins, Indiana, she keeps it there. Inside.

It's Steve's suggestion when they decide to move. He's got this look on his face, that one she
knows so well, where it hurts him to say it but even still he believes in what it is he's laying
out for her, this plan to free them in one more way from everything they've survived.

He says, “we can get a fresh start, maybe someplace without such shitty winters. Someplace
warm?” and Robin doesn't have the heart to tell him that she is burning already, that the sun
hurts even through the heavy blinds of her bedroom, that sitting in the passenger seat of his
car feels like being set aflame on a sunny day.

Instead she says, “that's a great idea, Steve,” and she hugs him, holds him tighter than is
maybe necessary, and starts making plans for California.

She gets to hear his laughter come back, gets to watch the color return to his cheeks, some of
the gaunt aftermath smoothing out with time and care.

And she's grateful for it, carries it like water cupped in the palms of her hands, careful and
aware of how easily it might spill because there are weak points, there are weak points
everywhere just waiting to break.

The problem is, she doesn't expect this to be one of them.

Not on a day this simple, this regular, this unobtrusive to their story at large.

Robin stands in their new kitchen in Burbank one morning after a night of restless sleep,
exhausted and heavy on her feet, and she doesn't realize that she's not moving, not doing
anything but staring at the coffee pot which she never pressed the on button for, until he's
combing her hair out of her face and speaking gently.

“You're holding your breath, Robin, you gotta take a breath.”

She does, because he asks her to, but it comes in all shaky and abrupt and goes out like a sob.
It just yanks its way out of her without her permission and before she knows it, Steve is
dragging her into his arms and holding her tight as can be as smoke and ash come pouring out
of her in billowing clouds, remaining only as the tears on Steve's t-shirt.

“Let it out, you're okay, there you go,” he says as he rubs her back and Robin can't stop, she
can't do anything but heave and cry and weep, can't even produce words enough to explain
even if she knew what was wrong with her.

It's just a regular morning, they're just in their kitchen, she likes it here and loves the life
they're building and-- and-- and--

“You gotta stop keeping it in so deep,” Steve murmurs into her sweat-matted hair as he gets
her buckling knees into a seat and lets her bury face in his chest where he still stands, “you
can't keep letting the pressure build this much, you have to talk to me sometimes, okay?”
“It's just--” she croaks, hands fisted in his shirt hard enough it just might rip, “it won't stop, it
never stops, why won't it stop--?”

And the most comforting thing, at the end of it all, is that he doesn’t try to give her an answer.
Steve knows her, he really knows her, and Robin understood that to some degree before this
moment, but it’s only now as her focus slips from keeping such tight hold of the everything
that she too realizes this must mean he’s seen her. The entire time.

He’s known there were weak spots just as well as she did, only he was sticking close and
waiting for the other shoe to drop, ready to catch Robin when she fell where Robin herself
was convincing herself that it was her responsibility alone to carry the emotional weight of it
all.

Steve crouches down in front of her, hands holding her face and pulling her to rest her
forehead against his despite the bubbling snot on her cheeks and the tears dripping off the
point of her chin without easing. He meets her gaze this close up and his eyes are wet,
rimmed in red, and still so goddamn full of hope.

But Robin breathes when she sees it, deeply where there’s never been space before, and she
can see that all of that belief that radiates off of him is for her. In her.

“Play hooky with me?” he asks, his smile warm instead of burning, the fire inside of her still
there but crackling more manageably instead of roaring.

Robin wipes at her face, nods unsteadily, and lets the next sob from her lungs carry with it a
burst of laughter.

“Okay,” she agrees, but it’s to more than just sitting on the couch and ordering takeout and
avoiding work all day.

It’s to this, too.

It’s to letting the weak spots be bolstered by those who are willing to help, rather than leaving
them to rot and burn and fall.

It’s to this life, with this boy, growing from the ashes.
End Notes

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