#maybe im biased but i imagine Nancy being the one to save Robin from this one

[the-lark-ascending69]

You mentioned that you love fics where Robin gets Vecna’d (relatable as fuck lol) and holy hell she would have been #1 on Vecna’s list if she hadn’t found Steve’s love and friendship and support in season 3. This of course made me think of an au where Robin does get Vecna’d in season 4 because somehow she and Steve never become friends, and she’s still stuck in that self-loathing, lonely place. Maybe she somehow doesn’t get involved with the Upside Down in season 3, which would be hard to make work with how essential to the plot she was.

Of course there is the terrible, horrible, heartbreaking option of Robin getting involved and everything going the same, except in this terrible horrible universe, Steve dies. Maybe they’re both under Starcourt in the Russian base, and Steve’s beat to hell and tied to Robin’s back and she feels his breathing get slower and slower until it’s just gone. Dustin and Erica save her, but it’s awful because Robin can’t save the closest person she’s had to a friend in so long after all he did to protect her and they’re forced to leave his body there, cold and alone in enemy territory. Or it happens after they get out, after Robin tells him her deepest secret and he still loves her, differently than he did before, but just as much. Robin would be so happy to finally have someone who knows her fully and loves her for it, only to have it ripped away when the Flesh Flayer makes one wrong swipe that catches Steve in just the wrong way, or even after the battle, when they all think they’re safe and it’s finally over until Steve collapses from an internal injury that nobody had caught.

I really can’t decide which possibility would be worse, Robin mourning the boy who somehow became her best friend before he ever truly knew her, thinking that if Steve had known her fully, he would’ve hated her anyways (Robin’s wrong about this of course) or Robin’s devastation over the first person to love and accept her for who she is being ripped away from her so violently and so soon.

Either way she would be a perfect target for Vecna 8 months later, when she’s dealing with not just the same loneliness and self-loathing from before, but also the guilt of not being able to protect her best friend and the feeling that it should’ve been her why couldn’t it have been her instead and of course the trauma of the entire almost-week of fighting Russians and monsters.

Anyways sorry for rambling and dumping this all in your ask box lol 😅

No no don't apologize for the rambling you're so real thank you for dumping this all in my ask box 😭😭 waking up to this is the perfect way to start my day

I LOVE both options, but the first one is especially heart-wrenching because we know Vecna specifically preys on guilt and self-loathing, and maybe I've been a little too obsessed with the Rebel Robin Podcast but hearing little 15yo Robin say the universe is telling her she's not supposed to have friends, that she always needs to "camouflage" to survive, that there's something wrong with her, that she's rotten inside (it sheds a whole new light on "i feel like my life has been one big error") has me thinking about Robin being a bit confused, a bit worried but also a bit excited hearing Steve say he should have been hanging out with her a long time ago, even though he probably means it in a way she doesn't fully like, but also maybe not, and maybe after all of this they could be friends! And maybe she won't be alone anymore. Maybe one day she could even tell him her secret.

But then he's beaten so badly. He receives some really bad blows in the head, and she can tell he's taunting the guards whenever they speak to her, drawing their attention back to him, telling them she doesn't know anything, letting them hurt him so they won't hurt her and maybe they believe him, so when Robin tries to talk and starts rambling and saying a bunch of nonsense, because she's too nervous and scared to say anything coherent, they gag her and now she can do nothing but scream and cry into the gag as they continue to beat him while he's tied up behind her, feeling the impact on her chair and on her back.

He's still concious when they leave. He's speaking to her, saying he wishes he'd known her earlier and all Robin can think is no, no, no you don't. And she tries to speak but it only makes her feel like she's choking on the gag, and then his speech starts slurring, and she freaks out because she read about this. He's having a brain bleed. Next, he'll be paralized in one side of his body, next he's having seizures that shake both chairs and has Robin sobbing as she tries to cry out his name. By the time it stops, he won't respond to her, and his breathing slowly comes to a stop, body sagging in its bindings.

Robin stays tied to his corpse for hours and hours, feeling the warmth leave his body, the horrible smell, not daring to turn around to see him. She almost had a friend and he died to protect her. He died because of her. She killed him. If only she'd said something smarter - if only she hadn't freaked out - if maybe she'd thought or something to make the soldiers leave them alone, if she could tell a good lie, if she could defend him the way he defended her, he'd still be alive.

The soldiers come back to rip the gag out of her mouth, now wet and disgusting, and as she sobs and tries to tell them Steve needs help, they inject her with drugs and leave her alone for them to take effect. And now she's laughing hysterically and talking to Steve as if he were still there. She's sobbing, heaving, giggling all at the same time. She feels like she's losing her sanity. She tells them everything when the guards come back, and keeps laughing when Dustin and Erica save her. She laughs when she tells them Steve is dead. This is probably the most traumatic moment in the kids' life, but Dustin manages to keep a level head and not break down until they're safe, and he decides to leave Steve's body there so they can save Robin (if Robin had died instead they could have saved Steve). She's almost catatonic by the time they leave her in the movie theater, giggling under her breath whenever she remembers Steve. Then she goes to the bathroom to thrown up, and with the drugs mostly out of her system, she completely breaks down. This is all her fault. She really, really just... ruins everything.

She's half there, half gone until the end of the battle of starcourt, uselessly following Dustin around. She barely responds to the paramedics when they talk to her (when they perform drug tests on her in the hospital, they think she's a junkie), but Dustin stays by her side as much as he can, both comforting her and seeking comfort.

They take everyone to the hospital in different ambulances, so Dustin leaves at one point. She's one of the last ones to leave, because the police wants to question her on Steve's death. The official story was that he died from asphyxia during the fire, and she was the last one who saw him alive. It's the best lie she can come up with, and she feels so gross telling it.

When she's about to be taken to the hospital, to her surprise, Nancy Wheeler comes to check on her, with black tears running down her face, but with a strong posture and a clear voice when she tells Robin she heard she was the last one to see Steve. She thanks her. She thanks her, even though Robin was the one to kill him. She wants to know if she's hurt and if she needs anything, and tells her she's there if she needs anything.

Then at the hospital, after her parents come to see her, freaking out and holding her so tight she can barely breathe, Steve's parents visit. They're barely holding back tears when they thank her for not letting their son die alone, and tell her they'll be there for anything she needs, and Robin has never hated herself as much as she did then. She hates that Dustin and his friends come see her. She hates that Dustin's fucking mom thanks her. Everything is fucking thanking her as if she did something good or brave when all she did was let the one person who could have maybe loved her die. She hates that during the course of the next 8 months, Dustin takes her with him on dinners with the Harringtons as if she were Steve's fucking girlfriend. She hates that he shows up to her house after seeing her looking sad at school to ask how she's doing. She hates that Nancy Wheeler does the same, and hates it when her parents invite her for dinner because she's "another one of Steve's friends". She hates that even 11 year old Erica comes check on her during school lunch if she hears she had another panic attack. She hates it all. She hates herself. She hates that they don't hate her. She hates the nightmares and the flashbasks and the fact she can't talk to anyone about what truly happened. She could talk to Nancy, she guesses, but then Nancy will look at her with sympathy instead of disgust and Robin doesn't think she could take that.

She takes up a job at Family Video. She sees these people who suddenly care for her for all the wrong reasons a few times a week, when they come rent their nerdy movies. She has no one but Keith to talk to, and he isn't great company. At one point Dustin and Max show up asking her to lend them phones and help them find some dude with dubious links to some Eddie boy and then she gets inevitably dragged along into their new quest, fully aware that it should be Steve instead of her.

She doesn't tell them when she sees a clock in the woods, and Steve Harrington stands in front of her, half of his body paralized, nose bleeding, asking why she left him there. Telling her she'd been right all along: there was something rotten inside of her.