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laundrybiscuits · 1 year

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(purify our misfit ways tag | AO3)

Technically speaking, Eddie’s not actually allowed to know any of the stuff he knows about what went down at Starcourt. Robin isn’t even totally sure how much he does know at this point; both she and Steve have completely and without discussion disregarded all the NDAs they’d been strong-armed into signing, when it comes to Eddie, but it’s not like they’ve sat him down and walked him through the night beat-by-beat.

She hasn’t told Eddie that Steve knows about her, now. She’s not sure why. There’s no one reason that she can point to, she just doesn’t feel ready to have a real conversation about it.

It’s not like Robin to avoid conversations. She’s usually the kind of person who’ll march right up and confront anyone about anything, as soon as she gets the idea in her head. She’s never really understood why other people don’t do that more, honestly—it normally drives her up the wall when people talk around issues and dodge questions.

This is different. It’s not because she’s scared. It just feels too big, like something she can’t see the edge of, looming all the way up to the sky. Every time she starts to think about it, her mind kind of skitters away. She has to think around it, which is getting pretty annoying, actually.

Lately, a lot of things have been feeling really big. She’s so tired of feeling like she’s got all these massive secrets inside her, Russians and monsters and sketchy government agencies and—and the Tammy Thompson thing. It’s gotten so that she doesn’t even feel like she can breathe unless she’s with Steve or Eddie.

She’d thought it was impossible to talk to her parents before, but now she just stares at them across the dinner table and feels like a completely different species. She’s pretty sure kids aren’t supposed to know huge complicated things about the world that their parents don’t, because how would anyone deal with it? How is anyone supposed to live under the roof of people who can walk around not knowing about what’s out there in the dark?

It’s not that she’s scared, she just can’t get herself to believe they know what’s best for her anymore. This isn’t some stupid teenage rebellion, she’s signed official government documents that prove she knows more than they do about what goes on in Hawkins.

So it makes sense, how she only really feels okay when she’s around the two people who know all the things she has to remember not to let slip around everyone else. There’s a line around their little three-person pack, an us-and-them kind of line, and now she finally understands why all the high schoolers she knows are so obsessed with being in cliques: being part of an incontrovertible us means it doesn’t matter how many other groups you’re not in, because you know who your people are. You’ve got a steady place to stand in the world, when you’re part of an us.

She’d briefly considered feeling bad about dragging Eddie into all of this, but it’s not like they’d really had any other option. She swears Eddie can read minds sometimes, with the way he just looks at her and knows what she’s feeling. There’s no way she’d have been able to keep something like this from him for long, and if it just so happened that telling him would give her another safe harbor in Hawkins, so much the better.

Robin lies to her parents all the time now. She never used to, but she never had a good reason to before. But she knows that no matter how much they like to talk about their wild times in the sixties, they would never in a million years let her sleep in Eddie’s bed like she’s been doing lately. She just sneaks out as soon as she hears their bedroom door click shut and bikes over; by now, Eddie knows to expect her. He’s usually up anyway, and when he’s not, he’ll leave the door unlocked so she can come right in and shove at his shoulder until he wakes up enough to move over so she can get under the blanket with him.

She doesn’t go to Steve. For one thing, his parents are around a lot more than Eddie’s uncle is; for another, Steve’s house is much farther than Forest Hills, and Robin doesn’t love the idea of biking for like an hour in the middle of the night. Not now that she knows about what’s out there. She’s not scared, she’s just being practical.

Steve finds out about it when Eddie swings by to visit them at Family Video for the first time. It’s their third shift there ever, and Robin’s already bored out of her mind. It’s not like it takes an abundance of intellect or effort to shelve returns and dust the shelves.

Not that she’s complaining, at all, because this job is a pretty big step up from Scoops—no uniform, just a vest, and no food safety protocols to follow. Plus, they get to put a movie on in the background, even if Steve’s taste is totally pedestrian. She’s working on getting him to appreciate more of her favorites, but it’s been an uphill climb. To be fair, most of her efforts have revolved around pointing out how hot the actresses are. It’s not very subtle.

Robin’s contemplating whether she can sell him on Les Demoiselles de Rochefort when the bell above the door jangles, and Eddie saunters in.

“M’lord, m’lady,” he says, bowing deeply. The one other customer in the store, some little old lady, gives him a withering side-eye. Eddie’s so embarrassing sometimes. She doesn’t bother hiding her fond grin as she leans her elbows on the counter.

“Welcome to Family Video,” she sings out. “Can we interest you in some of our very finest John Hughes films?”

Eddie clutches at his chest, faking a swoon. “You always know the way to my heart, Buckley. But, uh, I just wanted to swing by and let you know that Wayne’ll be in tonight. Just in case.”

“In case of what?” Steve butts in, looking confused.

Eddie looks a little panicked, and Robin really needs to find a way to tell him that Steve already knows about her.

“Um,” says Eddie. “In case…there’s…”

Robin sighs and rescues him. It feels wrong to lie to Steve anyway; it feels like violating the sanctity of their little circle. “Sometimes I spend the night at Eddie’s. It’s just easier than being around my parents, with all the…” She waves her hand, meaning all the nightmares come to life in Hawkins.

“Oh,” says Steve. He’s still frowning. “Wait, doesn’t Eddie live in the trailer park? Is that safe?”

Robin shrugs. “Safe as anywhere, I guess.”

“Okay, but…” Steve glances at Robin. “Is that…the best idea?”

She stares at him, confused. He stares back.

Eddie hauls himself up to sit cross-legged on the counter, glancing between them.

“You’re not supposed to do that,” Steve says, but Robin’s pretty sure he’s just saying it on autopilot. They’re both intimately familiar with how Eddie will scale pretty much any available structure whenever he gets even a little bit bored.

Eddie tilts his head, regarding Steve. “You know it’s not like…she’s not spending the night, spending the night, you know? It’s just trauma stuff, Harrington.” He pauses. “You’re welcome anytime, too,” he says. His voice is quiet, not teasing. Honest and unadorned, in a way Robin’s only ever heard him get with the two of them.

Eddie’s been treating both of them a little gingerly ever since Starcourt. Robin doesn’t mind it as much as she’d have guessed; she has to pretend like nothing reality-shattering ever happened to her at Starcourt Mall with everyone else, but Eddie knows better. If that means he acts like they’re skittish baby bunnies sometimes, she doesn’t mind too much.

Steve never seems to know what to do with himself whenever it happens, though. Like now: he looks at Eddie and then looks away immediately, crossing his arms and uncrossing them again.

“I’m good,” Steve says. “Don’t worry about it, man.”

“Okay. Offer stands.” Eddie hops down from the counter. “Probably not tonight, though. Like I said, Wayne’s home, and I doubt you’re as good at wriggling through windows as Robin is.”

“Uh, are we talking about the same Robin Buckley here? The one who can’t walk halfway across the store without knocking over at least two display racks?” Steve snorts.

“Excuse you, I am not the one who dumped the entire contents of the cash register on the floor yesterday!” Robin says, offended.

“That’s not—I just pushed the wrong button! The latch must’ve been broken! Anyway, that’s different. I’m saying, I could totally get through any window way better than you can, because I’m, like, athletic and stuff. I’ve got moves.”

“Sure you do, Steve.” Eddie smirks, glancing over at Robin. “A thousand pardons; I stand corrected. Long as you can make it through the window, you’re welcome to come by my humble abode any day you like.”

#fic: purify our misfit ways #I spent objectively too long deciding on Les Demoiselles de Rochefort for that one throwaway line #I feel like it's one of the French New Wave films most likely to be in a random US video store? I mean it's got Gene Kelly in it #and honestly I don't think Steve would hate it #yes it's subtitled but it's bright and aesthetically pleasing with lots of musical numbers so who needs dialogue really

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a-space-lizard · 2 years

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Hear me out. Take everything from Jacob Geller's video essays on fear of depths, the shape of infinity, and anatomy/the haunted house, and apply all of it to the black garden.

The way the garden feels curated to its visitors while simultaneously being alien and inhospitable, in both the lore, where it reacts to the minds within it and adapts to they presence, and in the gameplay, wherein the garden is a completely artificial construction meant to be navigable by a player, but just challenging enough that you know it was built for these specific mobility controls, yet balances this with an uncanny and unwelcoming feeling due to the boundaries keeping you on the destined path

The way the garden is both infinite and not; it stretches out as far as you can see, or as far as your computer can render, and the patterns in the flowers have the implication of endlessness despite that being impossible. The way the pattern degrades the deeper you go, and it's suggested that if you kept following the crevices and inverted spires you could go on forever into something so unrecognizable that you forget what the surface even looked like. The way the garden takes hold of your mind as a constant, imposing presence, as if you could see it from anywhere in the world, but it's not a beacon, it's a void living somewhere in your memories, changing you every time you recall it

The way it feels alive, like a place once inhabited but long abandoned, where the plants grow wild just under the surface. The place itself is the threat. It either repels intruders or consumes them. Every piece of the garden is connected, and it reacts like a living body, defending itself, feeding itself, growing in all directions. It literally has (had) a beating heart. It can sit and wait for centuries for an unwelcome guest who thought they escaped to be consumed.

#destiny 2 #destiny #the black garden #cosmic horror #unreality #(slight implications)#i love the black garden ok #go watch those videos please so you'll understand my senseless rambling #somehow everything comes back to the black garden #this concludes* my rambling about how much i love destiny's aesthetics and cosmic horror (*for the next 30 seconds)

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