prompt: pool (@steddiemicrofic)
word count: 442
rating: t? they're smoking
He settles a hand on Robin’s ankle, easy and loose-boned and half-high. He can hear the kids’ voices drifting out from inside, their conversation escalating into a full-blown shouting match over which Stephen King adaptation is best (it’s Christine, obviously, and Steve will broker no argument; he’s been forced to see them all at this point). He watches a block of stars wink in and out of existence in the patchy sky overhead as the sound of Eddie’s voice cuts through the chatter in an attempt to draw them all back into their campaign.
He takes a deep breath, and it catches in his chest.
“Hey, can I, uh- ask you something?”
Robin hums lazily, slumped in her seat. “Always.”
He taps ash over his armrest onto the ground and picks at his tumbnail. He’s staring into his lap when he says, over the rushing in his ears, “Do you ever feel weird?”
She’s silent for a beat, and when he looks over at her, she shifts, sitting up straighter.
“Weird?”
He blinks. His hands shake. “Different. I don’t know.”
He listens to her release a careful breath. “Okay,” she says. Her voice is quiet, attentive. “Are we talking like, scary Upside Down-y, spores-inside-my-brain different? Or- ”
“No, it’s not- that.” He shakes his head, squints over top of the covered-up pool and out at the treeline to the spot where Jonathan Byers had once crouched in the dark, snapping photos of a demogorgon eating Barb Holland. “I don’t know. No.”
“I mean, I think you’d know if- ” She draws his attention with a hand on his shoulder. “Is it a head thing?” she asks, over-enunciating in that way she does when she’s trying to make it easier for him to focus. “Because if you’re seeing spots again…”
He sniffs and shakes his head, and she leans forward to wrap an arm around him and tug him close so she’s speaking directly into his broken fucking brain when she says,
“Steve.” Soft. “Babe.”
“Yeah.” His heart is in his throat. “Sorry, I mean- my ears have been sort of… ringing lately, I should definitely see a doctor, but no, I- it’s not a monster thing.”
It’s very quiet outside now. The kids have calmed down, lulled into submission by the steady rhythm of Eddie’s voice guiding them through a dark cave which Steve knows for a fact has an evil elf hidden inside it. His chest clenches.
“You know I love you, right?” she asks, right up close to his good ear. “In every conceivable way. Almost”
He does know. He also knows that she knows what he’s about to say.
And someday you suddenly wake up with a disgust for almost everything that's happening around the world and the fact that in some way or the other the actions and doings of others affect you in small and big ways. Someday you wake up and start seeing things for what they're - ugly lies wrapped in beautiful covers. You wake up and see all the hypocrisy around. You wake up and see the futility around. The purposelessness, the wild goose chase, the rat race, the delusional worlds that are being constantly created. And somehow you're stuck as a part of this large system, entangled in its web, lost in its never ending mazes, a hole that has been designed in such a manner that you are unable to come out. From governments and their illegitimate taxes, from banks and their unjustifiable interests, from trading and their evident adulterations, from education and their vested goals - there barely remains a phase of our lives that's outside the influence of such exploitation. What truly surprises me is the fact that billions of humans still believe that they are FREE & LIBERATED. They still celebrate independence days and participate in freedom parades not knowing that human history has never witnessed such mass slavery as is happening today right in front of our eyes and under our noses. Chains are missing but humans have never been enslaved the way we are today. But who would ring the alarm because it seems like everyone have their own interests associated with the current system and if someone somewhere exposes the propaganda, then he's somehow effaced from the very existence or thrown behind bars - thus continues an ever lasting silence, and well, sitting here pondering about all this, the only conclusion I can come up with is that nights don't last forever. The dawn is near. The fight between good and evil is eternal. Wherever there has been a Pharaoh, there will rise a Moses. Where there has been a Goliath, there comes a David!