'tis the damn season

Forty-Four: Vigilante Shit

"I don't start shit but I can tell you how it ends. Don't get sad, get even" 

I open every cabinet I see, finding what I'm looking for in the last one. There were six bottles of half drank alcohol in the RV's pantry, and I pulled out all six, carrying them in my arms, and bringing them outside where Steve and Robin sat on a couple of milk crates waiting for me.

"We'll have to replace all this when we bring the RV back to those people because this is all they had," I say, placing the glass bottles on the grass.

"Perfect," Robin smiles picking up one of the bottles and dumping it into the grass beside us.

I do the same with the other bottles while Robin hands the now empty one to Steve to hold while she pours in the gasoline carefully through a funnel.

Steve was able to find a plain black shirt and an army jacket at The War Zone. Robin and I had already teased him earlier about looking like he was shipping off to war, to which he replied, "We kind of are." I couldn't argue with him there.

Nancy had come up with a whole elaborate plan that the group of us were going to carry out. It was a plan to kill Vecna, once and for all. This war between us and him, has been going on for years now. It has to end.

We'd had yet to talk about the Vicki situation since coming back from the store, and Robin didn't seem like she was going to bring it up. While it felt like the world was crumbling around us, we were still human, with regular lives and feelings. So while in the grand scheme of things, it seemed silly to worry about Robin's feelings for Vicki given the state of the world, it was still important.

She was being weirdly quiet, which wasn't like her. I just wanted to know where her head was at.

"I uh, saw Vicki when we were at the store," I say, gently.

She visibly flinches when I say her name, but forces herself to look calm about it.

"It's okay, really. I saw it coming, it's not a big deal," she says, brushing it off as if it were nothing. Although it certainly wasn't nothing.

"Well I definitely didn't see it coming," Steve chuckles. "That was Dan Shelter she was with, he's two years older than us."

Robin just looks at him. "So?"

"So, that means he's in college, and is visiting for spring break. And Fast Times was returned like ...a week ago," He reasons. "So unless she's got some brother we don't know about—which is possible, or I guess she could be into Judge Reinhold but—,"

"Steve," she says, cutting him off. "I don't really care. And I don't know why you guys do either with everything that's going on."

Steve and I both stayed quiet, listening to her. "Honestly, this feels like the perfect time for that little pull of the rug, because in the fate of the world, compared to the stakes of my love life, it feels spectacularly low."

"Well we can still have hope," I argue. "Bisexual people exist," I shrug.

Robin smiles at me, knowing I'm just trying to help. "Not everything has a happy ending," she says simply. "And I'm not just talking about failed romance."

My eyebrows furrowed as I looked at her. "What do you mean?"

"I just, have this... terrible, gnawing feeling that—," she stops pouring the gasoline to look at us both seriously. "It might not work out for us this time."

It was exactly what I've been afraid of this whole time. The good guys don't always win.

"You think we shouldn't be doing this?" Steve asks.