Robin gets a memory update. Unfortunately the first person she bumps into is Eddie. Eddie mistakes her nerves for a crush? Did Robin just ask him out?
Hilarity ensues.
⚠ Stranger Things season 4 finale spoilers.
The magical sun was perfect, the temperature was nice and before she knew it, she'd dozed off. It should have been a lovely little midday (was it midday? It felt like midday), but it turned into a literal nightmare.
She found herself with the others in Hawkins, screaming to help Nancy. They dug through Eddie's music (could it be called music if there was no Madonna? Seriously), and Vecna just… let her go. With visions of the future. They tried to stop those visions, but it seemed they made it worse. Maybe if they hadn't come up with this plan…
Who were they kidding? They weren't going to sit around and do nothing. The downside was that what Vecna showed Nancy had come to pass, and in a way, it had been their fault. They thought they were stopping him, but he knew their minds better than they did. The whole town had lost a lot and was likely in for a helluva lot more to come.
At the edge of Hawkins, they watched as the Upside Down gently rushed up and fluttered down from the newly formed gate. Could it really be called a gate if it was a giant X marks the spot in the middle of town?
Robin snapped awake.
Oh.
So that wasn't what Robin had been expecting at all, and somehow she knew this wasn't a dream. This wasn't some fantasy where everything had gone Right. This was a straight-up tragedy, Shakespearean style. Robin knew she'd be studying all the angles to the self-fulfilling prophecy. After all, Vecna did tell Nancy who told the group who couldn't not do anything about it. It didn't really matter, in retrospect, but Robin couldn't turn her brain off. Not with all this new information and nowhere to talk about it. She didn't want to scare anyone with what she knew.
She pulled her phone from her pocket and scrolled the network. Nothing really new there. She was parched from the nap and maybe just the very idea of what was going on, so she began to stroll towards Dexter. Maybe she could make something to eat and grab a drink before heading to the theater to check out the downstairs rooms. She'd heard there were music rooms down there.
Then she saw Eddie and froze in her tracks.
What did Eddie do to pass the time? There had been swimming the first day. It was nice. Probably one of the nicest days he could remember having that didn’t involve D&D or music.
There was food. Good food. Better than spaghetti-Os. People actually cooked here. Eddie was happy to eat whatever people provided, though he rarely stuck around longer than that, and he certainly didn’t offer to help clean up afterward. This was what rich people felt like, right? Minus the dorm rooms and showers on the floors.
It was still nicer than anything he ever had.
Maybe it was his upbringing, or maybe it was boredom, but when he wasn’t hanging out with the others (friends-- they were his friends now) he spent time looking through different buildings and classrooms looking for anything interesting or valuable. Not that he would admit that. Ever.
This was a school campus, right? Someone had to have the books somewhere. Dice? Miniatures? He hadn’t found any yet. Did D&D go away in the 80s? Eddie wondered what he would do ten years from now, twenty… thirty? He’d be old, right?
Eddie couldn’t picture himself at that age. It was hard to imagine a future that wasn’t jail, especially now.
One problem at a time.
At least no one was hunting the freak here.
When Eddie spotted Robin on campus it was the sort of distraction he needed. “Hey, Buckley!”
His face lit up. Maybe she was doing something more interesting and he could follow her around for a bit. He jogged to catch up to her, waving his hand to get her attention.
Shit, he'd caught sight of her. Robin wasn't sure how she was going to keep from spilling everything she'd just seen, but if she didn't at least try, then he was going to know something was up. She'd been friendly till now, because she knew what it was like to be an outsider. They shared that in common, and that made her instantly want to be friends with him.
Then he turned out to be a pretty rad dude with a wide variety of interests and he was kind to freshman. That was about as uncommon as you got, unless you were on a sports team. The fact that he'd gotten a horrifying crash course in the Upside Down and being wanted in a town that hated him… Well, she liked him.
That made his death all the harder. Even if they'd been running for their lives and dealing with some scary shit, he had made it fun. He'd been such a wonderful addition to the team, expanding their crew with his interesting sense of humor, and frankly, she liked his dramatic turns of phrases.
She couldn't, in good faith, turn away from him, despite her brain screaming: DANGER! DANGER WILL ROBINSON!
"Heyyyyy, Eddie. What's the sitch?"
Which made her cringe, because even to her is sounded stupid.
Eddie’s brows came together in a quizzical look. Robin was … Cute was the first word that came to mind because he had eyes. She could be both calming and hilarious, sometimes at the same time, even when her mouth was running about a million miles an hour. He remembered that day in the boathouse, the way she spoke to him. When everything was wrong and she made things seems a little less wrong.
She’d also called being Eddie’s date a few weeks ago. Eddie hadn’t thought much about it at the time, assuming it was part of a plan to get Nancy and Steve back together, and Eddie had been more than happy to encourage that. Not that the scheme seemed to have much of an effect. Eddie didn’t push it or ask.
He remembered on Lover’s Lake the way she’d gone after Steve and Nancy into the water. Eddie respected Robin for that. He’d been a little humbled by the experience. She was brave. Far braver than he was. It’d been her bravery that cemented his decision to go in.
“Sitch,” he repeated back to her, drawing the word out slowly. This was just Robin being Robin, right? Right? There was nothing there. Just like there was nothing there between Robin and Steve despite how long they’d hung out with one another. Because…? Maybe she had a boyfriend…?
Eddie’s brain slowly tried to work out the puzzle as he shoved his hands into the pockets of his leather jacket. “Not much. Can’t say I’m missing school right now. You?”
"Sitch, like situation which is really dumb, I know. I'm not on a TV show." She squeezed her facial features together as best she could, an example of her embarrassment. Or maybe she just needed to close her eyes for a few seconds to not look at him.
Both. It was definitely both.
Robin kind of missed school. It was where she saw Vickie most of the time. Even this last time when Robin had been assigned to making sandwiches and discovered that her crush was making them too. Unfortunately, it also meant the threat of the Upside Down and Vecna was still there, so maybe here was better.
Especially if it meant that Eddie was alive.
"I liked pizza day. Those stupid square pizzas." She shook her head and gave him a half grin. Her parents almost never ordered pizza. Something, something corporations. "You had to eat them fast or they'd congeal almost immediately, but for about five minutes, they were gold."
This was a disaster. Why was she talking about school pizzas?
Eddie’s mouth formed into an involuntary smile as he watched Robin be, well, Robin. She was kind of a nerd, a little quirky. And… she was talking to him. Their lives weren’t in danger. Things were good this week.
Shit. Did Robin like him?
Or did Eddie like her?
The seed of the idea was in his head now. He watched her closely, searching for clues that he wasn’t just misreading this situation.
“Yeah, they looked pretty good,” he admitted
Eddie always had a lunch box on him, one of those old metal kinds that had been around for ages. It’d been his uncles, in fact, what his guardian used to take to work. There was no food in the lunchbox, but it was assumed he brought his own when in reality, his uncle didn’t always have the money for even questionable school lunches.
Robin probably didn’t want to hear that.
He pulled his hands from his pockets and crossed his arms over his stomach as if to conceal this fact from her. This was supposed to be his year. And now he wanted for Chrissy’s murder. At least that probably meant he wasn’t going back to school.
Shit.
“The food here is about a hundred times better. Maybe we can ask that guy to make real pizzas. Pizzas that don’t congeal after five minutes.”
Robin tried not to think about Eddie, lying on the ground when they got back to Dustin and the trailer. Vecna's disappearance and the splitting walls between the Upside Down and Hawkins had already put a dent in any happiness that Robin could have had, but seeing Eddie there… She wished he'd run. She understood why he didn't, but she wished he hadn't felt the need to be so brave in the face of this bullshit.
She smiled, softer than normal, and reached out to give his folded hands as pat. For all his talk about not being brave, he really had been.
Now she understood Cassandra. This knowledge was torture.
Robin realized what she was doing and straightened up. She was taller than most girls she knew, and now that she was standing up, she realized she was almost as tall as Eddie.
"Feels weird asking someone else to make something for us without, like, money." Robin didn't have a problem talking about how poor their family was. "I mean, I had to work to be able to have anything except my bike. I got that as a Christmas present when I was big enough for a big girl bike. I got my language tapes from babysitting money."
If he meant Pike, though, maybe he would take pity on them. "But I am kind of friends with Captain Pike. I bet I could ask him."
The way Robin smiled and then touched him. Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. Now what did he do? Pretend he didn’t notice? Eddie willed himself not to react. Play it cool, Munson. Just play it goddamned cool. Robin was Steve’s friend first, and it wasn’t like the two of them were dating, but it seemed wrong not to talk to him first.
Shit. What had they been talking about?
The guy who made all the amazing food. Right.
“Isn’t that guy kind of old?”
Eddie Munson, observational genius. What he didn’t realize was the half dopey smile on his face that had made itself comfortable and was going nowhere now in Robin’s presence.
"Oh yeah," came her response, nodding her head. "Totally old. Silver hair. Sometimes wears a uniform for Star Fleet. Tried to scare me for thinking this week would be pretty calm. I had to knock on wood, you know? I didn't wanna be a jinx."
Robin was fairly clueless when it came to social cues — ha! — so she just assumed that Eddie was being nice when he smiled at her. It was different than his usual, but hey, maybe they were Officially Friends now. People acted different around their friends sometimes. She gave his shoe a slight bump, indicating they should head out.
"Oh!" She turned around quickly, walking backwards toward Dexter. Hopefully, she wouldn't trip over something. "He offered to teach me to cook, so maybe I can make the pizza next time."
Was that footsie? It was the sort of move Eddie Munson had gently tried to deploy at least once in his life, and one he had observed many time in his nearly seven years of high school. Eddie tried not to freeze. If this was what he thought it was, he desperately did not want to fuck this up.
“Yeah, that would be rad.”
His fingers twirled nervously with a few strands of his long, curly hair. …Did Robin just ask him out? She definitely offered to make him pizza.
Shit shit shit shit shit.
“Uh, hey, I gotta go check on a thing… Catch up with you later?”
He desperately needed a consult on this.
Oh thank god. She could get out of this without blurting out that he had died, and she was so very sorry, and she was currently trying not to cry about it. Instead, she smiled tightly, nodding her head several times shortly. She gave him a pair of finger guns which then turned into devil horns for some strange reason. Maybe because she'd seen Eddie do it a few times?
"Sure. Yeah. I'll catch up with you in time for pizza!"
For a second, she just stood there. Trying to figure out which way to go, because what if he went to Dexter at the same time she was? Then she'd have to try not to blurt it all out or say something that might make him think about it too much. After a second, she decided to go back the way she came.