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stobinesque · 9 months

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the firmament in you ✨

For Lex’s Spicy Six Summer Challenge! Thanks again for putting this together, @thefreakandthehair! rating: T | wc: 4k | cw: Insomnia, Sleep Paralysis, Suicidal Ideation, References to past self-harm, hurt/comfort | tags: Stobin, Stargazing, Dancing, Post-Season 3 prompt: Dancing under the stars [ FIC PLAYLIST ] [ READ ON AO3 ]

Robin stares up at the ceiling, the glow-in-the-dark stars she’d stuck there when she was a kid winking back at her. The only sounds she can hear are the hum of the box fan in her window, and the rasp of cicadas beyond it. She’s resolutely refusing to turn her head to the side and face the blinking numbers of her clock taunting her.

Every time she closes her eyes, she sees smug faces leering down at her. Feels Steve’s dead—not dead, just slack, just passed out—weight strapped to her. She invents horrors that never happened.

If she keeps her eyes wide open, she only catches it in snatches and brief whispers.

Who needs sleep, anyway?

She thinks maybe the meat-monster spider should be getting more traction in the waking nightmares of her insomnia. And there are certainly times when she squeezes her eyes shut and fireworks burst behind them to a soundtrack of shrieks and groans and echoing fears. But they haunt her far less than the memory of cold fear gripping her chest when she thought, for just a moment, that she had a corpse tied to her back.

She moves to burrow herself into Steve’s side, hoping his warmth might trick her brain into thinking she’s safe.

It’s not a trick. We are safe.

There’s no way of knowing that for certain.

There’s no way of knowing anything for certain.

She rests her head on Steve’s chest and feels his heart rabbiting against her cheek. It makes her lever herself right back up to get a look at his face. She can barely see it in the darkness of the room, but the pale light of the streetlamps filtering in through her curtains is just enough to make out the way his eyes are darting back and forth beneath his eyelids. His breathing is coming in ragged pants, broken up by the occasional pained moan. Fine tremors course through him, like he’s fighting against something, but can’t actually move.

Robin’s own heart kicks up to a racing beat. Steve has spent the past couple weeks trying to explain the last two years of horror to her, and she can’t help the panicked thoughts that start running through her head. What if it’s back? What if it never left? What if it has Steve? Because apparently possession was totally on the table in their lives.

“Steve? Steve! Can you hear me? You’ve gotta wake up.”

His eyes stutter open like he’s being dragged to wakefulness. Hazel eyes stare back at her; unadulterated fear glinting in them. The small whines and groans he’d been making shift into muffled humming, like someone trying to talk through a gag. Like he’s trying to say something, but can’t form his mouth into words.

Robin is seconds away from grabbing the phone off her nightstand and calling anyone and everyone who might be able to help—wishing she had a walkie instead to radio out an all-purpose Code Red—when the dam breaks, and Steve sucks in a giant gasp of air and jerks upright like he’s surfacing from underwater.

“Steve! Steve, are you okay? Are you there?” She’s gripping his shoulder so tight that her nails are biting into flesh, but she can’t loosen her hold on him because if she lets go, he’ll float away.

“Couldn’t—” he gasps out. “Couldn’t move.” He’s nearly hyperventilating; chest heaving as he sucks in big gulps of air like he’s just been drowning. “Tied up. Frozen. I can’t—” He bites out each word like it hurts to speak. “Robs, I can’t—” He breaks off as something seems to crack in him, and collapses into her chest with a muffled sob.

“Hey, it’s alright,” she murmurs, trying to force her voice low and comforting as she wraps an arm around him. “I’ve got you.” She rocks him back and forth, gently, like she’s trying to coax a scared child back to sleep. “It’s okay. You’re safe. It’s all over now.”

It has the bitter taste of a lie on her tongue, but she just has to pretend that it’s true for now. Between the two of them, they can just barely afford a scrap of empty hope.

“—The kids are safe, and the gate is closed.” She knows Steve won’t really accept that until he sees everyone with his own eyes. But they’ve gotten used to telling each other these kinds of lies in the dead of night.

The band that’s been tightening around her chest snaps, and a tidal wave of exhaustion crashes over her. Sleep is all but a lost cause for the night, but they’ve each been at their wit’s end since Starcourt, and the unending turmoil of it all is finally catching up to her.

“I’m so tired,” she whispers into Steve’s hair.

“Robs.” his voice is croaky—strangled with some emotion she can’t quite place—and a calloused thumb sweeps across her cheek. She hadn’t realized she’d started crying.

“I’m tired too,” he admits. He lets out a shaky exhale. “I just want it all to be over.”

Fear catches in her throat. The way he says it makes her think he’s not just talking about the monsters and the torture. She remembers the scars she’d found littered across the skin of his thighs the other day. Remembers tracing a finger over them gently; begging him to never leave her.

The fear she felt in that moment is still lodged in her, tucked firmly behind her heart. But in the grey emptiness of the witching hour, she thinks she understands him.

“We should get out of here,” she says, not really knowing the scope of what she means when she says it.

“Where would we go?”

She shrugs. “I don’t know. Anywhere? Paris, maybe.”

Steve laughs, but it’s watery. “Might be hard to do on short notice.”

“Let’s just drive then. See where the road takes us.”

Steve sits up and looks at her, expression open and honest. “I mean…I’ve got the Beemer back. We could, if you wanted?”

Robin hooks her fingers through his. “Maybe just for the night?”

They sneak through the house, careful not to wake her parents. They haven’t bothered to change, so Steve’s still wearing an old marching band shirt and checked boxers; Robin, a Hawkins Swim Team shirt with a worn neck, and a pair of Steve’s sweatpants.

They pile into the car silently, Robin curling into the passenger seat, tucking her socked feet underneath her, and resting her head against the window. Through some unspoken agreement, neither of them makes a move to try to pick through Steve’s glove compartment of mixtapes. Steve just reaches over to tune the radio until he lands on something that seems to suit his mood well enough, and turns to her with a questioning tilt of his brow.

…because a vision softly creeping / left its seeds while I was sleeping / and the vision that was planted in my brain / still remains…

Robin’s breath hitches, and she turns to look at Steve, whose face is now glowing in the light of the streetlamps. His hands tighten on the wheel, and the corners of his mouth are drawn tight. She doesn’t want to ask what he saw. She thinks she can guess. Even with the whole gallery of horrors his mind has to choose from, she thinks there’s only one that would leave him paralyzed.

The song bleeds into another as Steve pulls out of her driveway, a soft bass line humming beneath a lilting guitar riff, filling up the car like it has physical presence. It leaves an ache in Robin’s chest, and she reaches out with a shaky hand, laying it palm up on the center console. Steve’s slots home a moment later.

They pull up to the quarry. The chorus of crickets and cicadas echo so loudly it’s like they’re the only sound left in the universe, even though she can still hear the music drifting like smoke from the radio (stars fade, but I linger on…)

“Here?” Robin turns to Steve with a frown. She tries not to think about them standing together at the precipice. Tries not to think about the drop. Tries not to think about how much a part of her wants it.

L ’appel du vide.

The thought scares her, and she has to force herself to back away from it.

Steve meets her gaze with a gentle squeeze of his hand. “There’s a clear view of the sky,” he says. “Thought we could stargaze.”

Robin’s face twists up into an expression she doesn’t think she could put a name to, even if she was looking in a mirror. Eyebrows scrunched, lips twitching upward. She feels some funny mix of fondness and bemusement, tangled up with love. “You wanna go stargazing?”

Steve shrugs. “Figured you’d rather see the real things.”

Robin doesn’t say anything, just stares at him. In defiance of all sense, Steve always drifts to sleep fairly quickly—his troubles are always with staying there than getting there—so she’s had no reason to think he’d noticed her tendency to go cross-eyed staring up at the stars on her ceiling.

“That…that would be great, yeah.”

Steve nods once, decisively, and turns the engine off, but leaves the car on so the radio keeps playing. Robin steps outside, wiggling her toes where she stands. She stretches them out wide; presses them down against the rough, rocky ground.

“C’mon, hop up.”

Robin jerks her head around at Steve’s voice. He’s produced a threadbare quilt from somewhere and is throwing it onto the hood of the car, before climbing up and patting the empty space next to him. Robin settles at his side and under his wing.

“So. Tell me about the stars.”

Robin looks up at him. “What do you wanna know?”

Steve shrugs, rustling her hair. “Dunno. They’re all, like, stories, right? Tell me one.”

Robin hums, considering. “Okay.” She grabs Steve’s hand, arranging his fingers so he’s pointing up at a spot in the western sky, a bit above the horizon. “See that group of stars up there? Looks kind of like two trapezoids smushed together, with little spokes coming out from the corners?”

“I…think so? Maybe?”

“It’s kind of hard to find sometimes, because there aren’t any, like, super super bright stars in it like there are in a lot of the other big constellations? Tonight’s a pretty good night for it, though, especially out here away from all the streetlights. And the new moon, too—it’s always harder to see things when the moon’s out—she’s so bright, you know?” Robin directs Steve’s hand along the constellation’s path. “If you wanna do this again some time I can bring my laser from home and help point things out to you that way.”

Steve nods against the top of her head. “I’d like that.” He lets his hand drop back down between them, but keeps their fingers entwined. “So, which one is that supposed to be?”

“Hercules,” she says. She raises their hands again to continue tracing over the constellation’s shape as she speaks. “That’s his head. And those are his legs—he’s kneeling—and sometimes people draw him with a club in that arm.”

Steve hums. “He was like…some big hero guy, right? Had to kill a bunch of monsters as, like, his job or something?”

Robin chuckles. “That’s not really what ‘labor’ means in this context, but yeah, that’s the basic gist. His whole story’s actually pretty long and complicated, though.” She rubs her thumb over the back of Steve’s hand. “Hercules—or, really, Heracles, if we’re talking Greek myth; the constellation is just named Hercules because that’s the one people know—anyway, he’s kind of cursed from the beginning. His mom gets pregnant with him after Zeus tricks her into sleeping with him, and then Hera—that’s Zeus’ wife—basically makes it her life’s mission to make sure this kid doesn’t exist, right? To the point where his mom just abandons him, because she’s so scared of what Hera might do.”

“Wait, if Zeus tricked the mom, why is Hera taking it out on the kid?”

“Great question! The actual answer is probably that the men telling these stories had really shitty opinions of women. In the context of the story, though, I think it’s supposed to be like…Hera is the queen of the gods, right? And the Olympians as a whole are a mess; they’re fucking mortals left and right, and also fucking each other indiscriminately, but at the same time they’re all, these, like, fundamentally prideful and jealous creatures? So Zeus constantly sleeping around with other people isn’t just a betrayal of Hera, it’s also humiliating to her. But what can she actually do to Zeus, right? So instead, she goes around trying to eradicate all the symbols of his infidelity.”

“That’s dumb,” Steve says. He stares up at the sky. From her vantage point Robin can’t quite make out his expression, but she thinks maybe it’s contemplative. “There’s probably a decent chance I have a half-sibling or two running around out there. And I guess it’s different, because if I don’t know about them, that means no one who would matter to my mom is likely to either. But I still can’t imagine her going out of her way to make another kid’s life miserable just because my dad fucked their mom.”

Robin’s brow wrinkles. Steve hasn’t really talked about his parents. Just told her that they usually spend summers outside of Hawkins, and otherwise carefully side-steps any allusion to the subject. The silence speaks for itself, though. Or so she thought, at least. The way he’s talking now…there’s a bitter edge to it, but he also talks about his mom like he loves her, if in a messy way. “I think…I think that, maybe, it’s easier to hurt people who can’t hurt you back.”

Steve sucks in a sharp breath, but doesn’t say anything. Robin doesn’t either.

Morissey’s crooning slips out from the Beemer. I am human and I need to be loved…

“Yeah, that makes sense, I guess,” he whispers—more like he’s talking to himself than to her. “So how does the rest of it go?”

“Athena finds him, and takes him to Hera, without telling her who he is. And the irony of it all is that she’s the goddess of, like, marriage and childbirth? And since she doesn’t know who the baby is she feels bad that he got abandoned, and she ends up nursing him. But baby Hercules is already so strong that he bites her breast so hard that she spills milk all across the sky—and that’s how we got the Milky Way.” Robin brings their joined hands up again to run along the bright band of stars cutting a path through the heavens.

“…what the fuck?”

“Mythology is super fucked up, dude.”

“That feels like an understatement!”

“Yeah, well, how else would you explain the Milky Way if you didn’t know about astrophysics yet?!”

“Not with some chick’s breast milk!”

Robin purses her lips and gives an exaggerated head shake. “You just don’t appreciate the power of the female form, Harrington.”

“Yeah, sure, that’s it.” Their hands are still raised high above them, and he idly plays with her fingers. “Tell me the rest of it.”

“You are so demanding,” she scoffs, but carries on anyway. “After he accidentally creates the Milky Way—or, I guess, accidentally causes Hera to create the Milky Way? Whatever, not important. After that, Athena brings him back to his mom to raise him. Which, y’know, passes more or less uneventfully—except for him murdering his music teacher, in some retellings—”

“What?”

“Yeah, I don’t really get it either. It’s just kind of a blip, and then he’s passing from ‘boyhood’ to ‘manhood’ and has to make a choice about whether to follow the path of Vice or Virtue for the rest of his life.”

“Isn’t that a little late since he’s just murdered someone? Also, that seems…overly literal.”

“Yeah, well, it’s mythology. They’re all basically parables.”

“Isn’t that a type of graph?”

“No, it’s like…fables? Moral tales.”

“Sure. Okay. But that still doesn’t make sense, because it’s not like you just make a decision like that once and never get the chance to try again.”

“Well, take that up with Prodicus.”

Steve blows a raspberry, and Robin can picture him rolling his eyes in disdain.

“Do you want me to finish this story, or not? You can give your review at the end.”

Steve is silent for a beat. Squeezes her hand. “Yeah. Keep going.”

“Okay! So, he’s having trouble deciding which path to take, when these two women approach him. One claims to be ‘Happiness’—nicknamed Vice—and the other, Virtue. And each of them presents their case for why he should follow their path. Vice runs up to him first, promising a life of wealth and happiness, and freedom from hardship—”

Steve snorts.

“Have something to share with the class, Harrington?”

“You told me to wait until you were finished!”

“And yet you still interrupted me.”

“What, so I’m not allowed to make sounds?”

“Not like that!”

Steve shakes his head with a laugh. “You’re unbelievable! Keep telling me your little parabola, then.”

Robin rolls her eyes with a dramatic sigh. “Vice promises him untold riches and blah blah blah, and then Virtue comes up and tells him that there are no good things in life to be had without hard work and sacrifice, and that following her path is the only way his memory will be honored and immortalized in death.”

Steve lets out a small disapproving sound. “And? Which does he pick?”

“He picks Virtue, just like any good hero, right?” Robin’s goading him intentionally now, but it’s worth it for the way he actively works to stifle a groan of annoyance. “Anyway, then he starts going on various adventures as a big hero man. He helps defend a city against an invasion, and the king is like ‘here, marry my daughter’ as a reward.”

“Yikes.”

“Very. But the two of them end up being pretty happy together. They get a house, have lots of children. Happily ever after, right?”

“Something tells me the answer to that question is gonna be ‘no.’”

“Yeah, because Hera’s still obsessed with getting revenge. So she induces this, like, godly madness in him, which drives him to kill his wife and kids—”

“What the fuck!!”

Robin shrugs. “Like I said, Greek Mythology, man. Anyway, that’s how we get to the part of the story most people know: Heracles goes to the Oracle of Delphi and asks how he can atone for what he’s done, and that’s how we end up with the Twelve Labors of Heracles/Hercules.”

“Absolutely none of that made any sense. Why would going around killing a bunch of monsters make up for killing his entire family? Especially when it wasn’t even really in his control? Also, if this is how he ends up with his name getting immortalized or whatever, how is that any better than just choosing vice? He didn’t actually really sacrifice anything! His family did! If the way you get to have honor or glory or whatever is by killing your loved ones—even if you ‘atone’ for it later—how does getting those things make you any better than the person who chose happiness?”

“All great questions, young Padawan,” Robin says, affecting an exaggerated, sagely tone. “To answer the first one: arguably, it isn’t. The Oracle was basically working for Hera and sent Hercules to offer ten years of servitude to a king who hated him. As for the others: I don’t know, something to think on, I guess. But. It’s not like Hercules knew he was going to lose his family. And Vice’s path hinges on exploiting others.”

“I don’t know, it just sounds like either way you spin it he’s choosing a path based on what he thinks it’ll get him.”

“I think the way the Greeks thought about morality is probably different from how we do now.”

Steve makes a sort of disgruntled sound. “I guess that makes sense.” He sighs and presses his face into her shoulder. “So, tell me how these ‘labors’ go, then.”

She does, launching into dramatic retellings of Hercules slaying the Nemean Lion and the Hydra; capturing the Minotaur and the Erymanthian Boar; stealing Hesperides’ golden apples, and King Diomedes’ mares.

The music from the radio keeps playing in the background, a strange sort of backing track. Robin hasn’t been playing close attention to the songs as they roll through—just enough to notice that whoever’s in charge of the late-night programming has been doing the musical equivalent of throwing spaghetti at walls. It suits them, though. She’s halfway through regaling Steve with Hercules’ capture of Cerberus when conscious awareness of the music knocks into her by way of Steve bopping along to the opening bars of “Dancing in the Moonlight.”

He’s up and off the hood of the car before she can say anything.

“Steve!” she yells in protest as he yanks at her arm for her to join him. “I wasn’t done!”

“You can finish later! We’re not going to pass up the opportunity to literally dance in the moonlight when the universe decrees it, Bobbin!”

“There’s no moonlight tonight, dingus!”

“Starlight, then,” he says, shimmying his shoulders at her with a wide smile on his face.

And Robin is a lot of things, but immune to the delight of one Stephen Richard Harrington is not one of them. He starts doing a little swaying and snapping number, beckoning her to join him.

This was how the early seeds of their friendship were planted. Dancing to Dolly and Madonna as they mopped the floor; yelling and laughing together as they worked. It’s easy to slip back into. Into that space where Robin was just starting to see the first glimmers of who Steve Harrington could be—who he is. That time when she started to suspect that—maybe, just maybe—he could be something like a friend to her. Before they were SteveandRobin, sure, but also before they were trapped in a metal box with two kids they’d led into danger. Before Steve was bloodied and bruised for information he didn’t have. Before Robin learned that monsters were real, and the Russians were punching holes through reality to try to reach them. A time when—for once in Robin’s life—it felt like there was moonlight in the darkness of her life.

So she dances. Shoulders swaying, and feet tapping. Hips bumping with Steve’s. Lets him twirl her under his arm like he did in her kitchen last week while teaching her how to make the best grilled cheese sandwich of her life.

She smiles, and she laughs, and for a moment she forgets about heroes, and monsters, and gods.

Her cheeks are aching from smiling so hard, and even though it’s a short song, she’s panting with exertion by the end. It trails off into the night air, and Glenn Miller’s “Moonlight Serenade” fades into place.

This time she extends her hand to him, pulling Steve into her arms. She’s never been that great a dancer—clumsy, and awkward, with limbs that won’t heed her command—but she’d dragged her father to a father-daughter dance thing during the handful of years she was a Girl Scout, and she’d picked up some basics. Enough to know how to lead in a dance without structure.

Steve follows without comment, making himself smaller so he can tuck himself in against her. It actually makes it a little harder to steer them without occasionally stepping on Steve’s feet, but she takes it as the unspoken request to be held that it is, and she dances in the starlight with her best friend. Feels it sparkling through him.

She knows the constellations that dot his skin, the streaks and starbursts of light of his scars, and his nebulae of bruises. The stories written on his skin are just as mythic—just as full of heroism—and all the beautiful contradictions those things entail. And she hopes he knows it. Hopes that she can show him someday.

Notes:

This fic is in the same universe as my other Stobin-centric Summer Challenge fic, which you can read here, and to my Steve-centric fic lay your cuts and bruises over you skin, which can be read on AO3 here. I'm including this at the end since this fic works just fine as a standalone :) Also, my Classical Studies major partner feels it is imperative that I point out that Robin's description of myth vs. parable vs. fable is inaccurate. These are each distinct categories of stories, and not all of them have or are meant to have a moral. (She's right. Don't believe everything fictional teenagers say when explaining complicated concepts to other fictional teenagers :P )

taglist of people who have requested snippets of this as I worked on it! @devondespresso @theheadlessphilosopher @delta-piscium @steves-strapcollection @bifuriouswaterbender @spicysix @inairbinad and @starryeyedjanai. thanks for all the encouragement, pals!

#lexssummerfanworkschallenge #stobin #platonic stobin #stobin fic #stranger things #read writes #me last week: this fic is gonna be 3k. max.#me now: 🤡#(at least i was only off by 1k this time)#also in case anyone is wondering i did indeed look up #the moon cycle and star chart for indiana in 1985 #for the day this is set on in my head

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