084 Are You Good at Fighting?
6:13 PM.
"Richard, I'm literally dying. I haven't eaten since noon." Robin came through the front door, dropped her backpack in the general direction of the coat rack, and shuffled across the living room like someone who had recently lost the will to stand upright. She face-planted into the couch cushion and peered up at Richard in the kitchen with the hollow expression of a person running on fumes.
Since things in the house had settled into something resembling stable, Robin had drifted back into her old arrangement of eating and sleeping here most nights. The spirits had warmed to her gradually — or at least, they'd stopped being hostile, which in this house amounted to the same thing. Her habit of leaving her stuff on every available surface had never once triggered a retaliation, which Richard took as a sign that she'd been officially categorized as household rather than intruder.
The glass of water on the coffee table slid across the surface and stopped in front of her without anyone touching it.
"Thanks," Robin said to the empty air, picked it up, and drank.
She'd stopped flinching at things like that about two weeks in. The invisible residents of Richard's house made certain aspects of daily life genuinely convenient, which had done more to normalize her relationship with them than any amount of reassurance would have.
"Rough day?" Richard asked from the kitchen, his knife moving steadily through a cutting board full of vegetables.
"Ran all over town and took a French exam on top of it." Robin flipped onto her back and stared at the ceiling. "But it's done. I actually stopped by the bakery on the way home and gave my notice. So — when do I start?"
"Tomorrow works," Richard said. "You already know the drinks. It's just about getting used to the pace of a real rush."
Robin grinned at the ceiling. "So you're officially my boss starting tomorrow. I'm just warning you — if you try anything shady with my paycheck, I will make your life difficult in very specific and creative ways."
"Fair enough," Richard said, without looking up. "How many Robins did Batman go through again?"
Robin sat up. "I haven't even started yet and you're already thinking about firing me? That is genuinely villainous behavior."
They kept it up for the better part of ten minutes — the comfortable, overlapping rhythm of two people who had been talking like this long enough that the jokes didn't need setups anymore. By the time Richard set everything on the table, they'd both run out of material and were ready to actually eat.
Robin was halfway through her plate when she looked up. "Oh — I ran into someone at school today when I picked up my report card."
"Describe him."
Robin pointed her fork at him. "How did you know it was a him?"
"Lucky guess."
She rolled her eyes. "Okay, yes, it was a guy. Transfer student, apparently. Good-looking in a way that you can tell immediately is going to be a problem. Driving a blue Camaro like he wants people to notice him."
"I've seen the car," Richard said. "He sat outside the shop today leaning on his horn until the girl he was with came out."
Robin's expression curdled. "So he's that guy. Great." She stabbed a piece of chicken. "I'll be staying as far away from that situation as humanly possible."
"Probably smart."
After dinner they cleaned up the kitchen together and ended up on the couch in the mutual silence of two people too tired to require entertainment. A news program was running — aerial footage of a car chase on a Chicago highway, three police cruisers pursuing a black Jeep through light traffic.
Robin read the ticker at the bottom of the screen out loud. "Chicago gang suspected in tonight's shooting, police pursuit ongoing — oh, that's the Mask crew. They've been all over the news lately."
"They're getting sloppy," Richard said. He was lying on his side with his head near the armrest, watching the helicopter footage track the Jeep through an interchange.
"Right?" Robin tucked her feet under her. "They've got the numbers and the coordination but their methods are too loud. Too visible. If Chicago PD works backward from the pattern of incidents, they'll find the base of operations inside of a month."
"Probably less."
Robin looked down at him. "I want to shower. Want to join me?" Richard asked, looking up at her with complete straightforwardness.
Robin's expression went through approximately four stages in two seconds. She landed on exasperated, which they both knew was her default response to Richard saying something designed to make her react. She reached down and flicked his ear.
"Get out of my lap."
Richard was already moving, grabbing a change of clothes from his room on the way to the bathroom. "What are we watching tonight?" he called back.
"Ghostbusters," Robin said, to his retreating back. She settled against the cushions and listened to the water start running.
Her hand moved, without her fully meaning it to, to her lips. Then she caught herself and didn't finish the thought.
Halloween Morning.
Richard was on his bike with Robin on the handlebars — an arrangement that had started as a one-time solution to her being late and had somehow become the standard commute — when they spotted the four boys at the intersection ahead.
Mike, Dustin, Will, and Lucas were dressed head to toe as the Ghostbusters. Full matching jumpsuits, proton packs built from whatever hardware store parts Dustin had been able to source, the logo ironed onto the front. They looked genuinely great, which made what Richard was about to say harder.
"Ghostbusters," Richard and Robin said at the same time, pulling up alongside them.
"You guys saw it too?" Lucas asked. His smile was enormous.
"Did you check whether the costume thing was still happening this year?" Richard asked, looking at the four of them with an expression that was doing its best to be neutral.
Dustin launched into an explanation — apparently Hawkins Middle had started a Halloween dress-up tradition the previous year, every student in costume, the whole thing. It had been a big deal.
"Was that last year though?" Robin asked.
"I genuinely don't know if that carried over," Richard said carefully. "It might have been a one-time thing. And if it didn't — " he paused, giving them a moment to do the math themselves.
The four of them went quiet.
The math was not good.
The math was, in fact, terrible.
Mike, Dustin, Will, and Lucas arrived at school to find every single one of their classmates in regular clothes. Not one costume in the building. The Ghostbusters stood in the hallway in their full gear and looked at each other with the particular expression of people who have made an irreversible decision and are now living with it.
They couldn't go home. First period was in ten minutes.
They walked into school in their jumpsuits and spent the rest of the morning being very noticeable.
Across town at Hawkins High, the day had taken a different shape.
The gym echoed with sneakers and the hard crack of a basketball meeting the backboard. Billy Hargrove — new transfer, two weeks in — had just put the ball through the hoop from a distance that made the gym go briefly, involuntarily quiet.
Then it erupted.
"Let's go, Billy!"
He had the kind of physical presence that commanded a room without trying — broad shoulders, easy confidence, the specific body language of someone who had been the most athletic person in every room he'd walked into for years and expected that to continue. He played like he was proving something, which made him exciting to watch even when it was annoying.
Carol and her group were watching him from the bleachers with undisguised interest.
Across the court, Steve was playing with less energy than usual, which he'd been privately aware of for about the last twenty minutes. His team was down. Billy's team was up. This was not a combination Steve found enjoyable.
In the locker room afterward, still working through it, Steve was standing under a showerhead when Billy appeared at the next one over, shaking water out of his hair with the studied ease of someone who knew exactly how he looked doing it.
"Good game, Harrington." He said it without looking at him, which was its own kind of dig.
The guys who'd latched onto Billy — some of them former members of Tommy's old orbit, updated with new allegiances — laughed from across the room.
Steve dried off and didn't say anything.
A year ago, that moment would have required a response. The old version of Steve would have felt the challenge land and felt obligated to pick it up. But something had shifted over the past twelve months — slowly, quietly, in the space left by losing the things he used to care about and finding out he didn't miss them as much as he'd expected. He had the shop. He had people he actually liked. He was months from graduation and already on the other side of this place in every way that mattered.
Let Billy have the gym.
Good at fighting. Great. Steve thought, buttoning his shirt in the mirror. That gets you exactly this far. Everything past this point requires something else entirely.
He picked up his bag and headed for class.
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