#and there'd be old retired and tired guy steve and ghost of eddie who died just so young

[limerental]

thinking of an elderly retired professor robin buckley who moves home and gets a part time job at the hawkins public library and her partner in crime comes along as well, of course, though he's long-retired and has no interest in actual working in a library. he's always just around.

everyone in town's sure they're an old married couple both because they bicker like they are (usually the arguments end when steve pointedly turns off his hearing aids or robin threatens his kneecaps with her cane) and because they are (married in Vegas in '91).

they live in an old house in town and foster cats the way they used to foster kids when they were younger (half the cats are foster fails and they still have contact with most of their foster kids scattered across the country). the house is tastefully kitsch and full of old books. holidays are loud and chaotic gatherings of old friends and their extended families.

they each have had partners here and there throughout the years but nothing lasted or got serious enough to consider divorce. robin's varying university resesrch jobs took them all over the world and of course, Steve followed.

(The year is 2040. Steve doesn't keep up with world news or politics, saying he's retired from that too. Robin jokes that if he was ever in an accident and the paramedics asked him who the current president was, they'd assume he had brain damage.

"But I do have brain damage," he always says, and in polite company, Robin just pats his arm and smiles indulgently.

Otherwise, she says, "oh, don't we know it.")

Robin's diagnosis was the first secret she had kept from Steve in years and years. Unbeknownst to her, it was the first that he kept as well. He knew all along the real reason she had decided to retire and come home.

They lived a quiet and simple life, intending on seeing through their golden years together without incident.

But this was Hawkins.

Neither realized that their quaint suburban neighborhood had been built over the bulldozed remains of a familiar trailer park.