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“Ow!”
Robin looks up from her lunch to see Steve rubbing at his cheek, burger haphazardly abandoned in the bright red basket sitting in front of him after just one bite. He swallows slowly, gingerly, before grimacing, touching at his teeth with a finger. He pushes down. He winces again.
“Ow, what?” Robin asks, putting a handful of fries in her mouth.
“My mouth hurts.” Steve grabs a fry off of her tray and takes a bite. Another wince.
“In what way?”
“It— All of it hurts. Like… my gums.”
She leans forward across the greasy diner table, squinting at him. “Smile.”
He gives her the most forced smile he can muster, letting her reach out and poke at his gums. He hisses through his teeth, and she backs off.
“They don’t look inflamed or anything, but if it hurts this much… Did you want to go to the dentist? I’ll cover your shift.”
Both of them fall silent at that. They haven’t exactly been friendly with doctors of any kind after Starcourt, with Nancy usually having to drag them both to their general physicians kicking and screaming. Dentists are out of the question, especially since they both nearly faint at the sight of needles these days.
“I can wait. To see if it goes away.”
“Yeah. Sure,” Robin says with a shrug. “I can buy you a shake, or something?”
“Really?”
“I feel bad. You get these big sad eyes whenever you’re hurt and it makes me feel bad even though it’s not my fault. Gotta get away from it,” She stands up, then, sliding out of the booth and brushing off her pants. “Chocolate?”
“Yup.”
When she leaves to go up to the diner counter, Steve goes back to picking at his food. He tries tearing off little bites of the bun, but his mouth hurts all over, painful and sensitive just like the rest of his body.
He’s felt… odd, if that’s one way to put it, since their fight with Vecna, since he got nearly torn to shreds by the demobats. Odd feels like an understatement, considering all of them are still recovering from various wounds, considering that underneath the bandages wrapped around his midsection, his body looks akin to hamburger meat more than human skin.
But beyond the unfortunately familiar exhaustion that follows a monstrous showdown, Steve is tired . It’s a drag to get out of bed in the morning, so much so that Robin had to bang on his front door for nearly half an hour just the day before to wake him up, and at night he lays in bed tossing and turning, every position painful and every thought haunting him. He thinks he slept maybe half an hour last night.
He and Robin have been going to work to try and feel any sense of normalcy — and also to avoid losing their jobs, as Keith wasn’t thrilled when the pair suddenly skipped a few shifts without warning — but so far it’s done nothing but wear him out. This sudden pain is just one new inconvenience piling onto the many pre-existing ones already plaguing him.
She comes back, then, two milkshakes in hand, and she sets the bigger one down in front of him. He grabs it and takes a big sip, relieved that he can handle the chill.
“Better?”
“I guess.”
“Eh, I’ll take it,” She says, taking a bite of her melt that’s gone slightly cold.
They spend the next few minutes in comfortable silence, Steve nursing his milkshake and Robin scarfing down her food — always an uncomfortably fast eater — listening to the grainy music playing from the beat-up stereo sitting on the counter. He doesn’t recognize the song, and he bets if he asked Robin she would, but it’d probably result in her telling him all about the history of the band or the radio station or whatever, and as much as he really does love her rambling and trivia, he’s got a wicked headache coming on and the idea of talking makes him feel sick.
Speaking of sick, a chill runs up his spine just as he takes the final sip of his shake, his head suddenly spinning and face warm. He shoves the styrofoam cup away from him and hurriedly gets up, running to the bathroom.
“Steve?” Robin calls, abandoning her own food to follow him. His hair is too short to need holding, but she’s not going to abandon him now.
By the time she reaches the bathroom, he’s hunched over the toilet, eyes shut as he breathes heavily, business already squared away. It reminds her of the mall bathroom, though much dirtier, and yet she leans behind him anyways, rubbing at his back.
“Do you want me to call Nancy so she can drive you home? I don’t want you driving like this.”
“No, it’s— it’s fine,” He says, sounding strained. He tries to stand up, Robin backing away to give him space, but he stumbles on his feet and falls back against the side of the stall, the metal clanging. “I—”
“I’m calling her. You stay here,” She hurries out of the bathroom and comes back in what feels like thirty minutes later, though he knows it must have been just a minute or so. He’s seeing double when he looks at her, twin faces of concern, eyes wide with fear. “She’ll be here in ten.”
They wait around in the bathroom together, Robin alternating between rubbing his back and brushing away the strands of hair that keep sticking to his sweaty face. She doesn’t talk much, which he appreciates, and he thankfully doesn’t get sick again, though he doesn’t even know if he’s got anything left in him to make him sick.
Nancy arrives in about ten minutes exactly, ushering them out of the diner and to Steve’s house. She doesn’t question them much, besides trying to take a moment to figure out what Steve had eaten to see if that’s what made him so sick, but when that train of thought is mostly unproductive, she’s happy to drop it to give him some quiet on the car ride home. After making sure that Steve isn’t going to collapse, die, or need a speedy trip the hospital, Nancy bids the two of them goodbye, considering that her break at work is almost up. When she’s gone, Robin calls out of work herself and puts Steve to bed.
He still can’t sleep, even as worn out as he is, even though he knows he’s perfectly safe, the soft sounds of Robin watching TV in the other room audible through the door.
—
He doesn’t really get better.
He’s able to fall asleep, finally, mercifully, as the sun falls low in the sky. Robin, to her credit, never leaves, checking in on him every half hour or so to bring him water and ask how he’s doing. She tries feeding him some toast, too, but his mouth still hurts, and his stomach fills with pain the moment he’s able to swallow a piece so small he barely needs to chew.
She leaves him be.
It feels like no time at all before she’s waking him up to try and get him to do something, to eat, or drink, or shower or sit up, but he doesn’t want to do much besides sip at the water she keeps refreshing. The only evidence that time has passed is that the sun is coming in through the cracks in the blinds, getting in his eyes and irritating them.
“Shut the blinds, please,” He mumbles, Robin doing so quickly. He feels a bit better instantly. “‘m going to sleep more.”
“Whatever you say,” Robin mumbles in return, looking down at him with a look of discomfort. “No doctor still?”
“No doct’r, no Nancy, no Dustin—”
“Yeah, alright, I get it,” She says, waving her hand a little. “Sleep.”
He doesn’t need to be told twice, and the moment the door clicks shut behind her, he’s passed out again.
When he wakes up again, it’s to Robin shaking him, fingers digging into his shoulder as she does so. His eyes fly open and he sits up, grabbing her hand a little to steady her, and she lets out a sigh of relief.
“Jesus Christ, Steve— You scared the shit out of me. You— You haven’t woken up in, like, twenty-four hours and I decided to just let you sleep but when I came in to check on you, you were— you were cold and it felt like you weren’t breathing so I just— Okay, God —”
“Robin— Robin, I’m fine,” He says, still holding onto her hand, and he means it. He feels more rested than he has in weeks, though he’s a bit warm, so he kicks off the blanket tangled around his legs. “Really. I— It must have been the flu.”
“You sure?” She says, and when he tries to stand up, she helps him, dragging him up to his feet. He barely stumbles, and he feels like all of the pain in his body has just vanished, leaving him intensely hungry in its wake.
“I’m sure, I— Maybe my body just needed its last stretch of recovery for everything,” He ventures, though that doesn’t sound super accurate. It’s enough to sate her, though, and she nods, letting go of his hand and shuffling downstairs to the living room with him on her heels.
“Good. Look, I really want to stay here with you, but it’s been days and we’re both going to be fired and get in trouble if I don’t go home and go back to work, so… I’ll be seeing you? Call me if you need anything?”
She looks exhausted, too, and he knows she must have been anxious about him this entire time.
“Yeah, of course. Thank you, Robin. Do you need a ride home?”
“Nah, I can walk, it’s close enough. Call me if you need me! I mean it!” She says, heading out the door with a wave, and he watches her go and gives her a wave and a smile of his own before she’s gone.
His first order of business is to make something to eat, and Robin was nice enough to not eat all of his frozen meals while she was staying, so he digs out a frozen pizza from the back of the freezer and pops it in the oven.
When he goes to eat some, though, it comes right back up again.
The joy from the fact that his teeth no longer hurt was short-lived, and after a few minutes of sitting on the cold tile floor of his bathroom, he clambers to his feet, hands planted on the countertop as he stares at himself in the mirror.
He looks different. Not in the way where he used to lament that he looked different, fingers brushing over the scars littering his face, the crooked part of his nose that set improperly after his fight with Hargrove years ago. He looks… pale, washed-out like he did in the Upside Down, hair messy and all over the place. He really must have been sick.
He makes a face at himself in the mirror before letting out a yelp.
His teeth are sharp, at least his canines are, gone from his neat and straight smile and turned into wicked fangs that poke at his lips, the lower ones sharp and pointed, though to a lesser degree. He pushes his thumb to the tip of one of them, as if unsure they’re real, and reels back when it breaks the skin with no effort, a little prick of blood forming on the pad of his thumb.
“ What the fuck, ” He says, blinking and rubbing at his eyes for a second before he looks again, face inches from the mirror. He smiles. He grimes. He bares his teeth. The fangs stay in place.
He was always positive that no matter what kind of freaky, disturbing, otherworldly shit happened to him, he would always stay the same. Sure, he’d grow as a person, maybe come out of it all with some new scars, but he’d still be human, still be reliable and still understand his playing field, his dimension.
But it seems like the Upside Down has caught up to him. It has to be related to the Upside Down, because every damn weird occurrence in Hawkins can be chalked up to that nightmare realm.
The demobats.
It would be ridiculous to say that being bit by those rabid flying fucks would turn him into some kind of vampire , but it’d also be ridiculous to say that it’s impossible, because clearly nothing is impossible. It checks out, too— Unable to eat, trouble sleeping at night, fangs suddenly growing in his mouth. That fits all the tropes he can think of.
Dustin and Nancy would be proud of his detective skills.
It’s unfortunate he can never tell them.
He knows it’s the dumbest decision he could make, not telling his friends that he’s turning into some kind of monster, but just the thought of it has him terrified. What if they all get scared of him and abandon him, or he ends up in some kind of new lab they whip up to study anomalies from the Upside Down, or they just kill him ? Too many risks. He’s taken enough for a lifetime already. He can manage this.
So… if he’s a vampire, or something like that — a demovamp? Is that a thing? He can make up words too — he should probably drink some blood if he has any hopes of getting rid of this painful hunger and wants to keep his food down.
That’s a whole new problem, though. How is he supposed to get blood? He can’t ask for it, but he certainly can’t take it from someone.
Do animals count?
He hopes so.
He leaves the bathroom, heading to the back door and opening it. He takes one step outside before he feels the sun. He immediately reels back, remembering that vampires, historically, can’t do that. That’s not a risk he can take either. He’ll have to wait for nightfall.
He ducks back into the bathroom a few times as the afternoon passes, brief checks to make sure his eyes are deceiving him, but a few hours in he goes in only to be greeted by an empty mirror, and he groans at the loss of his reflection, at the sudden, worsening development.
After several hours of doing nothing but pacing around the house — with brief pauses to go into the bathroom to see if he’s still missing from the mirror (he is) — the sun finally begins to set, and he grabs a jacket and heads outside, trekking into the woods.
He has no clue what he’s looking for, really. He always turned down his father’s offers to take him hunting, something that seemed to work for both of them, so he doesn’t really have a great understanding of how to find animals or, more importantly, catch them.
It seems like he doesn’t have to know, though, because he gets about fifty feet into the woods before his ears pick up on a small sound, little paws skittering across the forest floor, and his head whips around on instinct. The forest looks just about as bright as it does in the daytime, and so he’s able to lock his good eye onto a squirrel running past him.
He doesn’t feel like he has much control over his body as he lunges for it, hearing its tiny heart pounding quickly in his ears as he covers the forest ground faster than humanly possible, grabbing the poor thing and sinking his teeth into its neck.
He feels incredibly gross, standing here in the forest and draining the blood from a squirrel like he’s shotgunning a beer, but it seems to do the trick, because that insatiable hunger is finally a thing of the past.
It doesn’t seem very vampire-like to make a little grave for the squirrel, but he’s trying to retain his humanity, or whatever, so he does it, digging a little hole in the dirt to bury it. His nails have gotten sharper, like they’ve grown out and have been filed down into claws, though he knows he had nearly bitten them down to the quick from nerves just days before. It helps the digging process, though when he nearly draws blood just pressing the tip of his thumb to the claw of his index finger, he knows they’ll be a pain in the ass.
“Sorry, buddy,” He says gingerly, standing up and backing away from it before he starts to head out of the woods, wiping at his mouth and seeing blood come back on his sleeve. He licks his lips and then frowns at himself.
Once he’s back at the house, he makes a beeline for the phone, dialing a number so familiar he doesn’t even think about it until it’s done and he hears Robin’s raspy, sleepy voice on the phone.
“Steve?”
“Hey, Robs—” He says, stopping when he realizes he sounds too chipper to try and pull off what he’s about to do. “I got sick again, just… just can’t keep anything down, so I won’t be in for my shift tomorrow.” He thinks he made himself sound sick and pathetic enough, that time.
“Oh, Steve,” Robin sounds sad. “That’s okay, I can tell Keith. Do you want me to bring you anything? You made me soup that one time, so maybe I can try and make you soup. My mom has a really good recipe from when I was a kid, I can-”
“It’s fine. I’ve got some canned stuff. I don’t want you to catch whatever I’ve got if it’s contagious, okay?”
“Oh, that— That makes sense. Wouldn’t I have it already, though, don’t you think? If I was living with you for a few days?”
“Uh… maybe? But it’s better to be safe than sorry, right?”
“True,” She hums. “Okay, well… you know what to do if you need anything.”
“Yeah, I do. Thank you. Bye, Robs,” He mumbles into the phone, hearing her call back a goodbye before he hangs up and sighs, scrubbing at his face.
“Fuck,” He says, and he swears he can hear it echo around his empty house. He’ll have to get used to being alone again, his house feeling as uncomfortable and uninviting as it did before he had a bunch of rowdy teenagers hanging around.
—
Robin makes it through roughly two and a half shifts, give or take a few hours, before she can’t handle Steve’s absence.
It’s not like they’ve never gone this long apart before — she went out of town during the holidays to visit some family on the West Coast for a week (though she and Steve called nearly every other day) — but knowing that something is wrong with him, that he’s sick with some mystery illness, disturbs her. The fact that she’s tried calling a few times each day, only to get no answer, doesn’t help.
Eventually, she gives in, calling in another coworker to cover her shift and claiming that she’s got some kind of weird stomach bug — she went into a disturbing amount of made-up detail to make sure they were uncomfortable enough to agree — before she heads to Steve’s house.
The sun is setting, just a few slivers of light making their way through the thick trees, and as she nervously glances over her shoulders as she bikes her way to Steve’s, she swears she sees something moving in the woods.
She makes it in one piece and abandons her bike in the grass, heading to the front door and ringing the doorbell. She gets no answer, so she tries again. And again. And she slams her palm on the door for good measure, loud knocks echoing through the house, but there’s still nothing coming from inside. She tries the handle and it’s unlocked — which is also unlike Steve to do — and once she’s got the door open, she hustles into the house.
Some of the lights are on, the dim ones in the hallway, and right as she rushes into the living room, she sees that the back door is cracked open, someone’s silhouette visible on the back porch, hidden by the frosted glass of the window.
She’s not the stealthiest, but she doesn’t think Steve would be out relaxing on the porch if he’s as sick as he claims, so she tries to sneak the rest of the way, cracking open the door just a bit more so she can peek her head out and look.
It is Steve, thank God, but her relief vanishes in an instant when she gets a better look at him. Beyond his big, messy hair, she can see that he’s hunched over a dead rabbit that he’s holding in his hands, blood staining it’s coarse brown fur as he digs his teeth into its neck.
“ What the fuck, Steve?!” She shrieks, instantly regretting it when his head whips up to look at her, his eyes wide and irises tinged with an unnatural red that she can see even in the dim light of the evening. He drops the rabbit, revealing his bloodied, slightly-clawed hands and the gnarly-looking fangs in his mouth, and he stands up in shock at the sight of her. Robin takes a big step back, ducking inside the house and shutting the door behind her.
“Robin— Wait—” He calls from the other side of the door, and it still sounds like him, which only calms Robin down by the tiniest fraction. She watches the handle on the door turn before he opens it, and she knows she should probably run, knows from what Nancy told her that this could all be some kind of vision or some other fucked up Vecna illusion, but it’s still Steve . It’s hard to see him as something even remotely evil.
He’s holding his hands up when he steps into the house, which she has trouble figuring out whether or not it’s in a gesture of surrender or him baring his claws before he attacks her. She takes several steps back when he tries to get closer, which works for all of five seconds before the back of her legs hit the couch and she falls onto it, trying and failing to scramble over the cushions. “Dude, I’m fucking serious, what the fuck is wrong with you? Quit— Stop coming closer—”
He does, though something that looks like hurt flashes through his eyes. From what she heard, she doesn’t think Vecna would stop if asked, which means this is real, this is Steve, somehow.
“Robin, I can explain, I promise, I—”
“Well then do it! ”
He takes a deep breath, rubbing his hand over his eyes like he does when he gets stressed, but clearly he didn’t think about the repercussions of doing so because all he does is spread blood across his face, and Robin grimaces as she stares at him. “Right, okay, uh— Okay, I know this sounds crazy , but—”
“I don’t care if it sounds crazy! We live through crazy all the time!”
“True, uh— So it started when we were at the diner, right? And—”
“Your stomach bug? How does that lead to you eating a rabbit like a fucking wild animal?”
“Robin! I’m— I’m trying to explain it to you if you’d let me talk!”
“Sorry,” She says, her voice wavering, but the little bickering does remind her of him enough that she calms down a bit, sinking into the couch. He continues to keep his distance.
“Yeah, okay, so… After I got sick and you left, I started feeling really fucking weird. Well— I already was feeling really fucking weird, but it got worse , like I was starving to death or something. And every time I would try to eat, I would throw it right back up, so that wasn’t working, and then when I went to the bathroom while I was sick, I saw that I had these ,” He starts, gesturing wildly with his hands as he speaks and getting a few flecks of blood on the carpet before he raises his hands to his mouth, showing off his fangs with a flourish and a grimace.
“So, like, that was fucking weird, and then I stopped being able to see my reflection in the mirror, and I had this crazy thought. I know it sounds like I’m joking, but I promise I’m not, but I was thinking that maybe I’ve turned into a—”
“A vampire, yeah. Not— well, that is fucking crazy, but it makes sense. With everything,” She’s nodding despite herself, like this is something absolutely normal that would happen to them now. After everything, after the past year, nothing is exactly impossible to believe, and she can put together the context clues well enough.
“Right. Uh— Like… a demo-vampire? Is that a thing? I think maybe because of, uh, because of all the demobats biting me, that they got me sick.”
“Sick? Is this just being sick to you?”
“No? I just— I don’t know what else to call it. Anyways, after my reflection went away I went to the woods and just, like, drained the blood out of a squirrel like a fucking Capri Sun-”
“Gross!”
“I couldn’t think of another way to describe it!”
“Still gross!”
“ Whatever. So, yeah, I did that, and then I stayed up all night and then kept catching more little animals and I was making graves for them but that got kind of tiring, so—”
“That would be really sweet if you weren’t mauling them first.”
“Shut up!”
“Whatever,” She replies, in a bit of a mocking tone like she’s trying to replicate his own tone of speech.
“So. I’ve been doing that for the past few days. I’m not throwing up anymore, and I feel… better, so I guess it’s working, but I’m still really tired. I haven’t— Are vampires supposed to drink animal blood? I thought it was people blood.”
“Am I the resident vampire expert now?”
“I thought maybe you’ve seen it in movies, or something.”
“Yeah, alright, that’s fair. Because I have. I do… I do think you should be drinking human blood — God, that’s a fucked up sentence to say — but clearly you’re surviving off of the animal stuff.”
“Barely.”
“Ugh, okay, barely. What do you want me to do about it? You can’t just go out and terrorize the scarce Hawkins nightlife.”
“Uhm,” He sounds like he has an answer, but he won’t say it, and Robin narrows her eyes at him.
“Don’t.”
“Why not? I wouldn’t, like, kill you or anything, Robs! I’d be really safe about it, I promise.”
She stares at the blood covering his hands and his face for a moment. “Yeah, you look like an expert.”
“Fuck off.”
“I’m serious! What if you give me, like, rabies or something? Upside Down rabies? Do you want me to die of Upside Down rabies?”
“I’m not rabid!”
“You’ve been chowing down on wild animals for the past two days! How do you know you’re not rabid? What if the demobats were rabid and that’s why you’re a vampire? I can’t be a vampire, Steve, that’s so inconvenient for me—”
“Inconvenient? If I don’t eat I’ll die, Robin!”
She goes quiet at that. She knows, logically, that if you don’t eat, you’ll die, but all of this still feels fake, like some kind of elaborate prank Steve was pulling. But he can’t, and he wouldn’t, and she knows that, and she knows that he’s right.
If he doesn’t eat real food, nutritious food, he’ll die, and she’d rather take a few teeth marks and some discomfort than lose the closest friend she’s ever had in her entire life.
“You’re right.”
“Seriously, I— Wait, really? You think I’m right?”
“Yeah, I do. I guess. I— I’m not going to let you fucking die, obviously, so… let’s do this. Before you do it, though, you have to like… brush your teeth. Or something?”
“Brush my teeth?”
“Yeah, what if you have rabies-infected blood in your mouth?!”
“Christ.”
“Ooh, does that burn your tongue to say?”
“Fuck off!”
“I’m just curious!”
They bicker all the way to the bathroom, and Steve gives Robin a friendly shove at one point that turns into more fighting because he gets his bloody handprints on her favorite jacket, but eventually they make it in one piece and she sits on the counter and glares while he very thoroughly brushes his teeth. Three times.
“I think my gums are about to start bleeding.”
“Bummer,” She hops off of the counter, still leveling him with a look. “You can stop now, I guess, but I’m serious when I say that if you turn me into a vampire or give me fucked up rabies I’m going to kill you and then kill myself. With a stake to the heart. All dramatic like that.”
“You wouldn’t!” Steve says, following her out of the bathroom and back to the living room.
“I would!”
“No, you wouldn’t!”
“Ok, fine, maybe I wouldn’t, but— but Nancy would! If she had to!”
“She would,” Steve says with resignation, sitting down on the couch and waiting for Robin to join him. She looks a bit hesitant, but since he’s scrubbed off a good bit of the blood that was previously covering his hands and face, he must look more inviting, because she sits down next to him without leaving space between them. “How… How do we want to do this?”
“Well… I don’t really want you, like, chomping on my neck, so… Maybe you could do my wrist? There are some big arteries there, I think.”
“That works.”
She holds out her wrist, then, hesitant at first, and when she realizes she held out her good hand she quickly swaps her arms. Steve reaches up to grab her arm to steady her, and he can hear her heart racing in his ears, the sound intense and overwhelming.
“Are you okay?”
“I— I can’t really… I can’t do needles or anything after, uh, the mall, and I don’t like seeing my own blood or anything, so— No? Not really? But I’m still going to do it, I’m just— Don’t worry about it, I can handle it.”
“You sure?”
“As sure as I can be. You have my full permission,” She gives him a smile that’s probably supposed to be reassuring, but looks so forced it gives the impression that she’s grimacing or holding back tears. It’s good enough.
He tries to hold her steady without gripping onto her arm too tightly, which is a bit of a challenge with the newfound strength he’s gotten since he turned, but he manages. It takes a moment of figuring out where he should hold his head and where exactly he should bite, but eventually he figures it out.
“Don’t look,” He mumbles, and after glancing to make sure her eyes are shut, he opens his mouth wide, lining up his teeth before he sinks them in. It’s just as easy as it had been with the animals he’s caught, but beyond that, the experience is entirely different. The blood is much better, much fresher, like he had been eating only dry, grey steaks at the local diner and now he’s eating a filet mignon from a five-star restaurant.
“Ow!” Robin hisses, her eyes pressing shut, and she pulls her free hand up to her mouth to bite at her knuckles so she doesn’t make so much noise. “This fucking hurts! Can’t you make it hurt less?”
He tries to say, “I can’t make my teeth any less sharp,” but it comes out muffled because he doesn’t want to risk pulling his mouth away and getting blood everywhere, and all she does is huff at that.
The process is surprisingly clean at the start, maybe because he’s being as careful as he can be with Robin, but as he drinks more and more, he feels control slipping away from him. The feeling of getting real food for the first time in days is exhilarating to him. Some blood starts to spill, dripping down Robin’s arm, and she squeaks when she feels it.
“Steve— I think that’s good, Steve, you’re good for now—” She says, but it sounds distant, like she’s in another room, and her voice is so quiet and shaky that it’s easy for him to not even notice it.
Until she passes out. That’s definitely noticeable.
He immediately pulls away when she slumps back against the couch, hastily grabbing for the washcloth he had gotten from the bathroom and wrapping it around the bite to try and stop her from bleeding any more.
“Fuck. Oh, shit —” He leans over quickly, holding his fingers to her neck, and he lets out a little sigh of relief when he can still feel a pulse — albeit a weak one — and can still hear her breathing. He doesn’t think he took enough blood to make her pass out, though he does feel pretty full, so he thinks, he hopes, that it’s just panic-induced.
He runs to the bathroom, grabbing some big bandages and antiseptic wipes to clean and cover the bite marks before rushing into the kitchen, piling bottles of Gatorade and packages of cookies into his arms, hurrying back and dumping them all on the coffee table.
“Ah, shit, Robs, I’m so sorry—” He says, though she clearly can’t hear him, and he pulls the towel off of her arm, frowning at the amount of blood on it, before he wipes the wounds down and slaps the bandages on. Once that’s squared away, he holds a cold bottle of Gatorade up to her forehead, hoping it’ll shock her.
It does, or maybe it was just time for her to wake up, because her eyes fly open and she tries to sit up with a weak gasp, hands reaching out and grasping onto Steve’s wrists.
“Steve?” She croaks, taking the Gatorade bottle when he tries to hand it to her, “I— What happened?”
“You passed out. I’m sorry, I— I think I took too much and I scared you and that was really shitty of me Robin, I— I didn’t mean to do that but it doesn’t make it better—”
She’d started chugging the Gatorade as soon as he put it in her hand, but she holds a finger out to silence him halfway through his ramble. “It’s cool. Well, I mean, probably not, and I am a little bit mad, but it’s just… uh… trial and error? If we can call it that? Baby’s first vampire feeding?” She takes another big swig. “God, I’m fucking dizzy though.”
“Yeah, I bet,” He says, sounding weak himself, relieved that she’s alright and even more relieved that she doesn’t want to kill him. “Do you… Do you feel okay? Like, you’re probably not great, but… No rabies?”
She snorts. “No rabies. I think.”
“Good,” He mumbles, reaching out to the coffee table to grab her some Oreos, which she happily takes. “You scared me.”
“And you scared me. So we’re even,” She mumbles between bites, sounding like she’s not interested in talking about this more right now. “Will you turn the TV on, or something? I need to relax before my blood pressure gets so high I need to go on a trip to Hawkins General.”
The rest of the night goes about as smoothly as Steve could hope for, though Robin makes him wait on her every beck and call the entire time, and she ends up falling asleep on his couch after about an hour of shitty late-night TV. He drapes a blanket over her and spends the entire night making sure she was still breathing and that her pulse was steady enough while watching TV until the sun rose, and she woke up with a groan while rubbing the sleep from her eyes.
“I survived.”
“Yup.”
“Want to get breakfast?”
“I can’t eat it.”
“Sucks for you, I guess.”
—
They make it about a week like this, Steve feeding from Robin twice more — carefully, these times — while they find them both a job working the overnight shift at the gas station in the center of town. They haven’t quite figured out the extent to which the sun affects Steve, but all of their brief experiments have resulted in him breaking out in hives or getting so exhausted he thinks he’ll pass out on the spot. Considering that he’s started having trouble staying awake in the daytime, his natural rhythms shifted so he can stay awake throughout the night, it seemed like the best course of action. Robin still has class, but she’d rather get tired during band practice in the early morning than work a shitty, minimum-wage job without Steve, so she’s fine-tuned her schedule to make it work.
It’s far from the most desirable position in all of Hawkins, so they’re both hired on the spot, and though they’re weirdly sad to leave Family Video, their new manager seems marginally less annoying. A small victory.
Their shifts have been going pretty well, giving them opportunities to have quiet time and talk or play loud music of their choice, considering they don’t get many customers at all, beyond the occasional late-night traveler or group of rowdy teenagers out for the evening.
After missing several shifts at her old job to take care of Steve, Robin has some financial catching up to do, and so she offers to stay even later after her usual shift ends on their third night just to get some extra hours. Steve waves goodbye and tells her to get home safe before he heads out, probably off to go trudging through the woods to find food. One of their other coworkers, an older guy who typically leaves them be, comes in to replace him soon after and immediately heads to the back to stock.
Robin leaves at around three in the morning, which is already unsettling enough, and she gets on her bike and pedals maybe about fifteen feet — if she’s being generous — before she feels a hand grab her shoulder and pull her into the alleyway. She thinks before all of this, she would have probably frozen up and panicked until it was too late to do anything.
After hanging around Steve and Nancy long enough, though, she does no such thing. She immediately turns to try and shove her assailant away, hiking her knee upwards into the dark and internally cheering when she meets her target, and she feels the stranger crumple.
“Fuck!” They yell from their position on the asphalt, and she pales when she recognizes the voice.
“ Eddie? ” He’s been gone since they came back from the Upside Down. After their group had reunited and taken some time to patch each other up, they went to their respective homes to get some well-deserved rest. They haven’t seen Eddie since, but chats with his uncle reveal that he is home, just not feeling well. Robin understands the shock that follows an encounter with the Upside Down, understands needing a bit of alone time to process, so she gave it to him, but he seems fine enough now.
“Robin?” He says, wheezing as he sits up, and as her eyes adjust to the dark she can see her friend, curled up on the ground with his back to the bricks. He brushes his hair out of his face to get a better look at her. “What are you doing here?”
“No, you don’t get to deflect— Why did you just grab me off of my bike? What the fuck is wrong with you? You go radio silent on us for a week and then I find you again trying to kill me?!”
“I— Christ, I knew this was a stupid idea, I’m such a fucking idiot. I was— Okay, no, I can’t talk about this here, can we go somewhere privately?”
“Uh, no, actually. You can tell me here.”
“Fine, I— ” He stands up, wavering a little on his feet, and when he gets closer to her so he can lower his voice, she swears she can smell copper on his breath, which earns a bit of a gasp from her.
If Steve turned into a vampire after getting bitten by the demobats, then… “I’m a vampire.”
“And you were going to feed from me ?!”
“I… Why is that your first question?”
“Look, we’ve seen weirder fucking shit than vampires, honestly. I’m— No offense, but I’m going to take your word for it after knowing… everything else about you I already know. Also, you smell like blood,” She feels like she can’t just go out and say that she knows because of Steve, like that would be telling a secret she’s not at liberty to tell. It could get him killed— It could get them all killed.
“Really? I thought I got it all off,” He mumbles with a groan, grabbing the collar of his jacket and bringing it up to his nose, frowning at the smell, “Ugh, you’re right. This is, uh, this is awkward.”
“Yeah, it is,” Robin agrees, going back to the sidewalk to pick up her bike from where it had fallen. “I’m going to give you a pass for, like, trying to bleed me dry and kill me because you helped us defeat Vecna. But you can’t be out here doing this shit, Eddie. You’re already on thin ice with the rest of Hawkins, and do you really want to be a real murderer instead of a framed one?”
“No.”
“I thought so. Can you— You’ve made it this long. I’d— Well, I don’t know if it’s safe, but I’d help you out if I could, but I’ve been, uh, sick recently. Maybe try drinking blood from some deer, or something? Big animals? Big, non-human animals?”
“Maybe,” He says with a scoff, running his fingers through his hair. She swears his eyes are glowing in the dark. “I’ll try it. I haven’t, uh, tried catching a deer yet.”
“Well, do that first and then call me. Or something,” She gets on her bike, and she’s about to take off before she second-guesses herself. “Will you follow me home? I think you could take a demogorgon now that you’re a vampire. Or, like, a random creep. Either one.”
“Quit throwing that word around in public,” He grumbles, but he goes to stand beside her, and when she gets off of her bike to walk it, he walks with her.
“What word? Demogorgon?”
“Buckley.”
She snickers at him, walking down the dark sidewalk and in the direction of her house. She can’t hear his footsteps, but even in the dark she can make out that he’s walking alongside her. “Okay, but, seriously- Why was your first plan to try and kill someone for food?”
“Would that have killed you?” He sounds like the wind’s been knocked out of him.
“How would taking someone’s blood not kill them, Munson?”
“I don’t know! I was just- I was hungry and I didn’t think it’d be that serious, you know?”
“God, it’s a fucking miracle it was me and not anyone else. You’re so lucky. You can survive the Upside Down but not your own stupidity.”
“Harsh, Buckley.”
“Good.”
—
With Robin’s help, Steve has been making it through the last week or so pretty smoothly. They were worried at first that Robin couldn’t sustain this, so he’s been eating plenty of animals to supplement his blood supply so that she doesn’t have to give too much. Even then, it seems like there’s some freaky Upside Down science involved because she gives more in a short period of time than a regular human should probably be able to give. The two of them choose to avoid looking a gift horse in the mouth.
She’s tired today, he can see that much when they work together, and she doesn’t seem much better when he drives her back to his place so they can watch a movie together and she can get some well-needed sleep. Her parents weren’t thrilled with her taking a night shift job, so she spends a lot of nights at Steve’s to avoid waking them up when she comes up. Neither of them mind.
Once she’s asleep, this time in an actual bed, he decides to head out into the woods to find something to eat, considering she couldn’t help today. He hates how much it feels like routine, how it feels normal to pull his shoes on at four in the morning and trek out into the forest like he’s taking a casual stroll.
It’s a quiet night, so quiet that for a minute he worries he’s been taking too much from the forest and that all the animals are dead and gone, but it’s an irrational fear, one quelled when he spots a squirrel run past him. He doesn’t chase it this time- he’s going to try for something bigger. An opossum, maybe, or a bobcat if he’s feeling lucky and risky.
It doesn’t feel like he’s gone very far at all when he hears a twig break, his head whipping around and his eyes locking onto a deer, head down as it looks for food on the forest floor. His steps have been practically silent since he turned - he’s given Robin enough scares for a lifetime already - so it doesn’t surprise him that it doesn’t notice him. He’s just pleased. He rears up before lunging at it, nearly grabbing it when something big and heavy collides with him, and he ends up on the ground with a heavy weight keeping him there.
He looks up to see Eddie, looking the same as he did the day they defeated Vecna. Well, mostly the same- Even in the dimmer lighting, Steve can see the blood on his face, the sharp fangs in his mouth that’s wide-open with shock, the red tint in his eyes.
How did he not put together that if the demobats turned him, they would have turned Eddie as well?
“Eddie?” He gapes, shoving the other off of him, though more out of necessity so he can sit back up.
“Steve?” Eddie asks, standing up and holding a hand out for Steve to take. He does, and his touch lingers for a moment before he finally lets go once he’s on his feet.
“What are you doing out here?”
“I could ask the same thing of you, Harrington.”
“Ok, well, I asked you first.”
“That you did.”
“Right. So…?”
“I’m— I came out here, to, uh–”
“Feed? If you’re nervous about telling me about the whole, like, vampire thing, don’t be. I’m… I’m in the same boat.”
“Seriously?”
“Uh, yeah? Why else would I be trying to catch deer with my bare hands in the woods in the middle of the night?”
“Fair enough,” Eddie says with a shrug, and he looks out into the woods. The deer is gone. Most of the animals are gone, really, now that they’ve been talking and making their presence known. It’ll probably be a while before they can find something else.
“Do you want to come back to my house? We’re pretty close. I think we should talk about this.”
“Sounds serious,” Eddie says, following Steve when he turns to start walking back to his place.
“Well, we’re monsters now, or whatever, so I think it’s pretty serious. We need a game plan. I don’t think we can keep eating animals forever.”
“So wise of you.”
The house really is close, and they break the treeline not a minute later, heading in through the back door, Steve making an effort to shut it as quietly behind him.
“Alright, we should—”
“Look at what the cat dragged in,” A voice from the other side of the room calls, and the two of them look over to see Robin leaning against the doorway to the kitchen, a mug of tea in her hands. “Or should I say bat? Is that too bad of a joke? Is it, like, offensive or something?”
“Hey, Robs, uh— Okay, you have to promise to believe me, but, Eddie is also— ”
“A vampire? Yeah, I know. I ran into him two nights ago. He tried to feed from me on my way home from work.”
Steve turns to glare at Eddie. “Really, dude?”
“I didn’t know it was her!”
“You shouldn’t be feeding from strangers either!”
“Relax,” Robin interrupts, waving a hand as she gets closer to the pair. “It didn’t happen, I beat his ass, we’re good.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Steve says, lowering his voice and getting closer as if trying to conspire with her, forgetting that Eddie has the same enhanced hearing he does.
“Because it wasn’t my place to tell? This is, like, a life or death situation, Steve. I’m not going to out either of you as vampires. I didn’t tell him that you were one, I didn’t tell you that he was one, it’s all fair.”
“Out us? This isn’t like being gay, Robin, it’s some weird Upside Down shit! People could have died!”
“I think you underestimate the danger of being gay,” Robin mutters, taking a loud sip of her tea and smiling behind her mug when she hears Eddie snicker. “Seriously, though, I didn’t want to complicate things. If something bad was happening, I would have told you to clear it up, but now I don’t have to. All good.”
“I guess,” Steve says, putting his head in his hands for a moment. “Well… now what do we do?”
“I don’t know, Steve. I’m still not the resident vampire expert. We’ll have to figure it out as we go. “ She looks between the two of them. “I just hope I’ve got enough blood to spare between the two of you without, like, me dying as a result.”