The age old story of two best friends falling in love...
... Only, one's a lab experiment with an entire Upside Down hunting her down, and the other won't leave her side, no matter how hard she tries.
steve harrington x fem oc / season 2 o...
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chapter thirteen fright night
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AS RUBY SITS UPRIGHT, THE ROOF OF THE bus covered in the monster's blood, Steve appears, helping her back up. Ruby looks down at herself, drenched yet again in blood, and feels like she's gaining a habit with this. She holds onto Steve's hand for a moment, her heart racing still. She remembers everything from last November, how panicked she felt the whole time, how she tried to contain it, so that Nancy and Jonathan wouldn't notice. She remembers how relieved she felt whenever she saw Steve, just like now. He calms her down like no one else can.
"Are you OK?" he asks her.
Ruby shakes her head. "Are you?"
He shrugs. "I've been better."
She smiles weakly. She's so grateful he's here this time.
But she recognises the severity of this, that those monsters, for some reason, are running elsewhere. They discarded Ruby, Subject X, of all people, in exchange for something — something more important... And, like, not to sound conceited, but that must be something pretty important, if they're passing off on her. (As she's said — the world revolves around her!)
"OK," says Ruby, tightening her ponytail. "We've got shit to do."
The two climb back down into the bus, where the kids look close to tears — Max, especially, who stares at Ruby, like she's Carrie White or something. Max begins to ask Ruby how she did everything she's just done, but Dustin stands up, and shakes his head, telling Max that there's more important things to attend to. Ruby's starting to like him.
"They're going somewhere," says Ruby, and she turns to Steve, placing her hand on his shoulder. "Give me two minutes, I'll figure it out."
Max says, "How—?"
"I will tell you on the way, Maxine!" says Ruby, suddenly feeling like this kid is her sister, not Billy's. Max looks at her in surprise — maybe because Ruby used her full name — but Ruby brushes it off, planning to try and enter the In-Between Space. She doesn't have the time to find a body of water to submerge herself into, so closed eyes will have to do. But, just as she reaches the front of the bus, she sees lights flickering in the distance, just managing to penetrate the gaps in the metal sheets boarding up the windows.
So Ruby goes outside to check. The junkyard is on the top of a hill, so she can see past Hawkins, straight towards the lab — the perpetrator of the flickering lights. Ruby's brows furrow. In the seventeen years she's been on this planet, that lab has never had a power shortage. So the monsters must be going that way, there must be something wrong with the lab, that Ruby, yet again, has to sort out.
She's so sick of this shit.
"Why's the lab...?" says Lucas, as the rest of them pile out of the bus.
