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 forty-one the haunting of steve & ruby alt: ruby, baby (part iii)
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RUBY IS QUICK TO CHANGEafter the funeral, desperate to forget the morning's proceedings. She wipes her makeup off clean, splatters of black mascara dotted around her eyes like mud. Downstairs, she knows Harrington is telling the others how she reacted, having already dressed into something more relaxed. But she needs some more time; more time to gather her bearings, more time to get ready again, reset the whole day.
She can't believe she cried like that. What a baby, she thinks nastily to herself, her gaze glaring at her own reflection. She applies her foundation with her fingers, a tan mess covering her skin. It feels oily already, and before she can try to make it work, she's grabbed another makeup wipe, scrubbing it clean off.
She'll go without today. She looks fine without, really — her eyes look darker than usual, more blue underneath them, but it isn't her fault she hasn't slept well the past few days. She gets herself dressed, back into jeans and a David Bowie t-shirt (He thought I was cool, once, she thinks, as if to reassure her own ego), the one she slept in last night. It smells a little like her ex-boyfriend (the one gossiping about her downstairs, she means), and she wonders how close they were, sleeping on that sofa last night whilst on Max duty...
Ruby looks at herself in the mirror, her focus flooding straight to her dark circles, her red eyes. She looks at the pictures of her mom, all dotted around the room, a depressing memorial of both her life and her adolescence. Ruby eyes the pictures, her mom her age in all of them, taken long before she left town, before she got pregnant, before she died. I look just like her, Ruby thinks, her face becoming a miserable reminder of the mother she barely remembers.
She reaches the bottom step, everyone in the party looking up at her, concerned. Ruby gives her ex-boyfriend — already changed into jeans, a striped polo, and a windbreaker she picked out for him, once upon a time — a dirty look.
"OK. So I got upset."
"I didn't know you could cry," says Robin, sounding scared.
"Well, it won't happen again," says Ruby. Her sadness has quickly turned into anger, as it always does with Ruby; she extends her hand, Steve's car keys flying across the house, from the kitchen counter to the hallway. They land in her hand, and she tosses them to him. "Are we going to this haunted house or what?"
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THE GANG ENDS UP STOPPING by at the grocery store on the way, realising that some of them (Steve and Ruby) had forgotten to bring a flashlight. Steve gets the idea that they would've been left to see for themselves if he hadn't been driving, turning harshly into the parking lot and jumping out.
