Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Robin Buckley has never claimed to be punctual.

Everyone knows that. Everyone knows that if she can’t get a ride to the station, she’s gonna pull up on her bike five minutes before she goes on air, with her cheeks pinched pink and her hair a rat’s nest from the wind, when she really should be there at least half an hour before. They know she’ll throw herself down in her chair and wince when the coffee Steve’s put on the desk for her burns her tongue, before seamlessly segueing from whatever nonsense Mindy’s left on into something infinitely cooler, like The Cure or Talking Heads.

Today, though, bad luck Robin, Nancy and Jonathan have arrived before her, and Nancy’s looking at her funny. Like she’s annoyed, presumably because of the lateness, but also… something else. Something Robin can’t quite work out. Maybe she doesn’t like Blondie, Robin muses to herself, glancing down at her T-shirt, rolling her eyes and pulling at the hem from where she’d been walking round with it tucked into the waistband of her boxers without anybody telling her.

It irritates Robin, that she can’t put her finger on the look, because over the last two years, she thinks she’s gotten pretty good at figuring out Nancy Wheeler. Or as good as anybody could feasibly get, should Nancy deem them worthy enough of being within touching distance of putting together all of her puzzle pieces. The pool of people trusted with these pieces is small, and it thrills Robin to be a part of it more than she’ll admit to anyone but Steve. Maybe not even Steve.

He doesn’t care about her blasé attitude to such trivial things as schedules, so normally it’s no big deal for her to burst into the little studio with barely a minute to pull her headphones on, rubbing leftover toothpaste from the corner of her mouth and combing her fingers through her hair. Most days Nancy and Jonathan get there later, busy doing whatever it is they do at the Wheeler house. From what Nancy has mentioned to Robin lately, haltingly mumbled with eyes averted, it’s been mostly arguing or straight up ignoring each other. A precious puzzle piece, gifted to Robin almost reluctantly, that Robin cannot let herself mull over. It goes in the box in her head, along with all the other things she’s not allowed to think about.

The box is labeled ‘Nance - Do Not Touch’, and it’s getting heavier and heavier by the day. She drags it around in her mind, lets the weight of it sink her shoulders sometimes if she’s feeling especially melancholy, but absolutely, unequivocally, does not let herself open it until nighttime.

There are a lot of things in the box.

There’s the more general stuff, like, the way Nancy’s perfume smells of summer, the way her cheeks dimple when she smiles, the way she seems to breathe out a little on the increasingly more frequent occasions she allows Robin to hug her, as though she’s letting go of the strain she’s permanently carrying around, just for a second.

There’s the pink top with the diagonal stripes she’d worn at Starcourt when they fought that stupid fucking spider thing. The white button up with the frilly collar she’d worn when they effectively broke into a mental asylum, paired with a blue co-ordinated jacket and skirt. The sweater that was purple at the top and morphed into green at the bottom, covered by a patterned purple jacket, that Robin had seen her wearing in front of Royal Furniture as she crossed the street with Jonathan, back when Steve had been exactly the asshole Robin had thought he was, Nancy ‘The Slut’ Wheeler sprayed crudely and cruelly on the sign outside The Hawk advertising All The Right Moves.

The box’s subsection of ‘Nance - Outfits’ merges often with its much more dangerous cousin, ‘Nance - Memories.’ Pictures of Nancy’s devastatingly beautiful face, flashing behind Robin’s closed eyes, over and over and over. Different hairstyles, different expressions, different times and places, but always with those big blue eyes, sharp jaw and pointed chin, pale, soft-looking skin and long lashes that she has to look up through when she gazes at Robin.

Experiences that Robin tries desperately not to replay but inevitably does, after varying amounts of time spent pointlessly arguing with herself. On a good day it can be thirty minutes before she succumbs to the urge. On a bad day she barely makes it thirty seconds.

God only sends his hardest battles to his strongest soldiers, or whatever that dumbass saying is. She doesn’t feel very strong when she loses the war she fights with her own mind pretty much every night, delving into supercuts of every moment she’s ever spent with Nancy Wheeler. There’s the obvious ones, of course. Holding Nancy’s hand as she followed her into the Creel house. Her shy little smile when she’d asked Robin if they were really friends. That look Nancy had given her, in the library while they were going through Weekly Watcher articles, staring down at her and pinning her like a trapped rabbit with her eyes, just for a moment. She’d thought about that look a lot, and hated herself for it a little.

There are others, too, brief moments that might be insignificant to others but consume Robin’s thoughts in the safety of her bedroom. Like, when they were following Dr. Hatch outside at Pennhurst and Nancy had left her hand on the door behind her, keeping it open for Robin to walk through. Or the way her eyelashes had fluttered when she’d leaned around the COM catalog Robin knocked on in the library, a futile attempt to hide her frustration at Robin’s incessant talking. And the way she’d felt Nancy’s hand reach out, almost involuntarily, the ghost of her fingertips touching between Robin’s shoulder blades, when they’d met Steve, Dustin and Max at Hawkins High after the library, and Steve headed towards a noise that turned out to be Lucas.

Last night when she’d opened the box, she’d seen Nancy’s brief, grateful smile when Robin had abandoned the demobat pinned under her foot in the Upside Down, after she’d spotted another latch onto Nancy’s back and about lost her damn mind, wrestling it off of her and throwing it to the ground with her bare hands using a strength she didn’t know she possessed. Then her mind supplied Nancy’s voice saying ‘Robin, upstairs,’ in the Creel house, but in an entirely different context. That was followed by the pretty blush that had colored Nancy’s cheeks when she’d held her hand out in her bedroom, a lace monstrosity of a bra dangling from one finger, because apparently Robin’s wasn’t sufficient to wear under the pink blouse she was being forced into, to give more of an academic scholar vibe.

Anyway, point being, the box is heavy. It’s bursting at the seams, in fact, getting fuller by the day. This is bad, for a multitude of reasons. One being, duh, Nancy is straight. Obviously. Another being, Nancy has a boyfriend, Jonathan, whom Robin still doesn’t really know but he seems fine. A little pretentious and moody, but Robin guesses he’s been through a lot, so, whatever. A third reason being, Steve appears to be mooning over Nancy more than ever. There are two subheadings to this being an issue; firstly, Steve is her best friend, and any crush Robin may have on Nancy is surely a breach of their bro code, and secondly, the constant dick-measuring he and Jonathan are doing in their bizarre attempts to win Nancy like a prize are clearly driving her mad. She doesn’t need a third loser pining after her and getting on her nerves, when she already has those two doing such a bang up job.

The biggest reason that the Nancy Wheeler box in Robin’s head is a problem should be the Vickie of it all, but it isn’t, because apparently, Robin Buckley is a total butthead. The thing that troubles her the most, instead, about her infatuation with a girl that she can never have, is that she operates under the constant fear that Nancy will find out, and subsequently Robin will lose her forever. Fool that she is, to Robin, any Nancy Wheeler is better than no Nancy Wheeler at all.

She doesn’t want to be seen as some sort creepy lesbian that straight girls feel they can’t be friends with, lest they be leered at or obsessed over. She’d rather die than make Nancy feel uncomfortable… it’s bad enough watching her squirm in obvious distress at the way Steve and Jonathan insist upon fighting over who sits next to her, who takes her coat, who carries her bag, who’d be the quickest to bark like a dog at her feet if she asked them to. They haven’t actually fought over that last one yet, but it’s only a matter of time with the way they’re going. Robin bets she could bark louder.

That thought goes into the box as well.

Robin is also acutely aware of the fact that she’s Nancy’s first real female friend since Barb, and that is a title she treasures beyond all else. Nancy has opened up to her, little by little, on the sleepovers they have because ‘This is what girl friends do, Rob,’ about what it was like to lose her best friend, and the feelings she still struggles with every single day, even four years later. The regret that burns through her body when she pictures Barb, looking up at her from the bottom of the stairs she was climbing, about to lose her virginity to Steve Harrington. The blame she shoulders, when she recalls Barb cutting her hand while trying to shotgun a beer at Nancy’s insistence, dripping a stream of blood that surely lured the demogorgon to Steve’s backyard that night. The grotesque visions Vecna showed her of her best friend, face contorted in fear and pain, a swollen, decaying parody of a human being, and the ensuing sadness that suffocates her, wraps its ugly fingers around her windpipe and squeezes until she’s gasping and wretching in the middle of the night.

Barb had been Nancy’s best friend, and she had never let another girl as close… until Robin.

The gravity of this is not lost on Robin, so she tries and tries and tries to seal the box closed, papering over the cracks in her fragile psyche, but she can’t. Because in two short years, Nancy has become everything to her.

Vickie had lightened the load, initially. Robin had dove in head first, as she was wont to do with most things in her life, flung herself happily and with complete abandon into being somebody’s girlfriend for the first time ever. Vickie is lovely; she’s pretty and kind and funny, she’s patient with Robin even through the stuff she doesn’t, can never, will never understand. That’s not to say there aren’t some flaws… she can be a little overbearing at times, even for Robin, and she seems to be jealous of the amount of time Robin spends with her friends, but nobody’s perfect.

Vickie is still great. She’s just not Nancy.

She’s so not Nancy, in fact, that Robin has begun to feel herself pulling away. Falling out of love with Vickie, although she doesn’t believe she was ever actually in love to begin with. Sabotaging a really good thing with a really good person, because she dreams every night about a really amazing thing with a really amazing person, even though a dream is all it’ll ever be.

And so before Robin really knew it was happening, the box began to bear down on her again, and now, today, with Nancy giving her that weird look, it threatens to split open in the forbidden hours of daylight.

“Robin? You listening?”

She spins round in her chair to see Jonathan gawking at her, so she double checks she has another record lined up, and pulls off her headphones. “Sorry, what’s up?”

“Nancy said another crawl tonight, at nine. An hour and fifteen, zone E5. Can you figure something out?” He glances down at a sheaf of paper he’s holding, then over his shoulder warily, like Steve will materialize at the mere mention of Nancy’s name.

Robin rolls her eyes, and spends the next three tracks figuring out how the fuck she’s going to convey the mission to the rest of the Party over the airwaves. Jonathan slopes off to go and brood somewhere else, thankfully, and Steve’s nowhere to be seen, probably out at the van, checking and double checking all of Dustin’s equipment.

“Know what you’re gonna do?”

Nancy’s voice is clipped, her face passive when Robin looks up from her scribbled notes, but she puts a fresh coffee on the desk next to Robin, so she can’t be mad at her, surely. So weird. “Yeah, think so. Ready when you are.”

Steve and Jonathan appear as if by magic, like two bothersome little ghosts, apparitions on each of Nancy’s shoulders, and for a second Robin imagines herself shooting a proton beam at them like Bill Murray does in Ghostbusters, stowing them in a trap and burying it somewhere deep in the woods. The thought soothes her irritation, and she hears Nancy snicker quietly at what must be a dreamy, blissed out expression on her face. “Come on, Rockin’ Robin, show me what you’ve got.”

Her eyebrow is raised as if in a challenge, so Robin squares her shoulders, snaps her headphones over her ears, and gets to work. “That was White Wedding by Billy Idol, and you’re here listening to the Morning Squawk—” she stops, and lets Steve play his bird sound, “—on 94.5 FM with me, Rockin’ Robin. This next song is a little out there, in fact, one could even say it’s kind of an… upside down choice.” Robin pauses for effect, and to give everyone a chance to grab a pen and paper, wherever they are. She sees Nancy do the same out of the corner of her eye, following along with Robin’s clues to make sure everyone else will be able to understand them.

She can feel the three of them watching her as she drops the needle on Upside Down by The Jesus and Mary Chain, letting the first drum beats play out on the air while she fumbles for her notes, squinting carefully at them and trying to read what she’s scrawled down.

“Okay, couple facts on this band for the many of you who may be unfamiliar. They’re called The Jesus and Mary Chain, founded by two brothers called Jim and William Reid, who are from a town near Glasgow, in the south of Scotland.” Robin glances sideways, and Nancy gives her a small, encouraging nod. “They’re heavily influenced by a German band called Einstürzende Neubauten, and if you feel like looking them up, yes, Einstürzende begins with an E.”

She takes a breath, and a swig of the coffee Nancy brought her. They’re so much better than the ones Steve makes, always the perfect amount of sugar and creamer for Robin’s taste.

“The Jesus and Mary Chain have already changed their personnel four times, so if they switch it again, that’ll make it five, yes that’s five, but maybe this one’ll stick… lest they become like Deep Purple or Black Sabbath, who’ve both already had nine different line ups. Can you believe that? Nine.” Robin’s eyes flick sideways to where Nancy is focused on her notebook, a tiny, proud-looking smirk playing over her lips. “This song is from their first album Psychocandy, and they just released another one called Darklands. If you wanted to check them out and maybe listen to those two records back to back, it’d keep you busy for just under an hour and fifteen minutes.” She waits for Jim Reid to finish drawling his lyric, checking her sheet to make sure she got everything. “Fact time is over, friends! Enjoy the noise.”

Robin takes off her headphones so she doesn’t have to listen to any more of what she personally considers to be a pretty horrible song, and looks around at the others. “South, E5, nine o’clock, an hour and fifteen minutes,” Nancy reads out, tapping each line with her pen as she goes. “Great job, Robin.”

The kind smile Nancy gives her morphs into a scowl pretty quickly when Steve pipes up, “Yeah Rob, that was awesome, dude.”

“Really clever,” Jonathan tries to speak over him. “Coming up with those messages was such a cool idea.”

Nancy sighs and gets up to leave the studio, shooting Jonathan a glare to stop him in his tracks as he stumbles after her, and when Steve snorts out a little laugh he gets a glare of his own, making him hang his head, and stare down at where he’s scuffing his shoe on the floor. Robin just grits her teeth and turns back around, lining up Barracuda by Heart and finishing off her coffee with a huff.

The crawl goes how all the other crawls have gone so far. Steve, Dustin, Mike, Lucas and Hopper head out to their respective posts, while the girls and the Byers boys are left in the basement, waiting around for the others to radio back to them, and hoping nobody dies. ‘Relegated to the bench,’ Nancy had once muttered sullenly to Robin before a prior mission, glaring daggers at Hopper’s back. ‘Because girls and sensitive boys aren’t strong enough, apparently.’

Robin doesn’t mind being a benchwarmer one iota. Fighting and being brave aren’t exactly in her wheelhouse, as far as she’s concerned, and she thinks her skills would be better put to use here, somehow, when things inevitably go to shit. She tries to keep out of the way once Joyce takes over the transmission to Hopper, but Nancy invariably ends up following her around after the usual fifteen minutes of her and El chomping at the bit, furious at being left behind. Selflessly, they should both be out there, their gifts wasted here in this stupid radio station… they’re both better suited to kicking monsters’ asses and saving the world, but selfishly, Robin’s glad they have to stay back. She’s become very fond of El, fascinated just as much by her supernatural powers as she is by her innate humanity despite all the horrors she’s experienced. And Nancy… Nancy follows Robin around.

It’s like she wants to be near to her, sitting pressed up tight to Robin’s side, or close behind her, even when there’s plenty of space for her to sit wherever she wants. Even when her boyfriend is like, right there. She wants Robin.

“Can you get a ride back with your mom? I’m gonna take Robin home,” she hears Nancy say quietly to Jonathan while she’s shrugging her jacket on, everybody busy packing up after Hopper returns with no news of Vecna in zone E5. If he protests, Robin doesn’t hear, scooting up the stairs after bidding the others a quick goodbye so she can pull her bike around to the trunk of Nancy’s station wagon.

“Have a good night, Robin!” Joyce calls from where she’s heading to her car, and Robin waves at her, smirking internally at Jonathan’s sour expression as he follows his mother.

The drive to her house is quiet, almost silent really, but for the steady tapping of Nancy’s fingertips on the steering wheel. “You were weird this morning. Did I do something?”

“Hm?” Nancy glances over at her, so fast she barely catches it, and Robin sees her fingers tighten around the wheel a little.

“I’m sorry I was late,” Robin sighs. “I swear my alarm clock’s out to get me… I think Steve keeps setting it to stupid times whenever he comes over. It went off at two in the afternoon the other day.”

“No you’re—you’re fine. I didn’t mean to be weird. Sorry.” Her eyes are fixed on the road, and her posture is rigid.

“You wanna talk about it?”

“About… what?”

Robin shrugs. “Whatever it is that’s got a stick up your ass.” She watches as Nancy visibly forces her shoulders down from where they were hiked up near her ears. “I mean, other than the obvious, you know. Vecna, quarantine, our military overlords, the insurmountable trauma we’re all riddled with. What’s up? Boy trouble?”

Nancy flinches. “I’m fine.”

Robin Buckley considers herself to be something of a fool in many different ways, but even she isn’t fool enough to try and pry information out of Nancy Wheeler when she’s clearly not going to give it up. “Okay.”

She’s gripping the door handle with a word of thanks on its way up her throat as they finally pull up in front of her house, when a gentle touch on her shoulder stops her. “Do you wear boxers?”

Robin twists around, and tries to peer at Nancy through the gloom. “Huh?”

“Boxer shorts,” Nancy rushes out, and Robin can just make out the pink tinge of her cheeks. “Do you wear boxers instead of like, panties?”

“Uh—yeah,” Robin laughs, a little nervously. “I find them to be, um… more comfortable.”

“Oh.” Nancy gnaws at her lip, and stares straight ahead out the windshield, hands placed carefully in her lap. “Does Vickie like them?”

Do you? Robin thinks wildly, desperately, just for a second, before she shuts that shit down. Into the box. “Does… what? Nance,” she tries to laugh again, but it comes out strangled, and when she looks up, Nancy’s gazing at her intently, expecting an answer. “I don’t know. She hasn’t said.” Nancy hums, and nods, but doesn’t say anything else. “Thanks for the ride, I really appre—”

“Stay a minute?” Nancy asks, her eyes wide, pleading. Robin’s ass melds itself to her seat. “I wanted to talk to you. I’m—” She takes a breath, and her hand spasms where it’s clutching at her own thigh, like it wants to reach out for something but can’t. “I’m going to break up with Jonathan.”

Robin gapes at her for a long beat. “Fucking hell Nance,” she says eventually. “You’d better come inside.”

In the house, Nancy chats casually with Robin’s mom and dad in the living room, up late watching SNL, while Robin makes tea for them in the kitchen. It isn’t until they’re sitting on Robin’s bed, facing each other and sipping at their tea, when Nancy finally speaks again. “Are you going to ask why?”

“Steve, I presume?”

Nancy blanches. “What? You think I’m breaking up with Jonathan so I can be with Steve?”

“Are you not?”

“No. Jesus, Rob.” Nancy leans over the edge of the bed, and sets her mug down on the floor. “I know he’s your best friend, but come on. He’s been a total pain in my ass lately, all that bullshit macho stuff he’s been doing with Jonathan. It’s gross.”

“I tried to tell him,” Robin offers, quietly. “I did. I tried to get him to cut it out, but you know how pigheaded he can be.” Nancy smiles then, and it’s a real smile, one that doesn’t come out very often, one that on Robin’s more delusional days she can convince herself is saved just for her. “So why are you breaking up with Jonathan?”

“I don’t love him anymore.”

Robin coughs around a mouthful of tea. “Well—yeah. I guess that’ll do it.” She bangs on her chest with her fist. “Since when?” she rasps out, her breaths sharp and jagged in her lungs, waving away Nancy’s concerned look.

“Consciously? A… a few months ago.”

The words ‘a few’ seem like they’re doing some heavy lifting in that sentence, but Robin lets it go. “And subconsciously?”

Nancy shifts around, and her eyes lock somewhere over Robin’s shoulder, half closed and unseeing. “When he got back from California.”

Tea spills in Robin’s lap as her hand jerks involuntarily at what she’s hearing. “Wheeler, that was over a year ago,” she scolds, rubbing her palm over where her thigh is burning a little through her jeans. “We’re supposed to be friends. Don’t friends tell each other this sort of stuff? Why the fuck didn’t you say anything?”

“It’s complicated,” Nancy mumbles. Robin glares at her, and she has the decency to look admonished. “Steve’s your best friend, and you know what he’s been like. I didn’t know if you’d tell him to give him some sort of advantage.”

“You’re my best friend,” Robin blurts out before she can stop herself, swallowing as she watches Nancy’s cheeks light up with the most gorgeous flush. “I would never tell Steve anything you didn’t want me to. Ever.” She reaches out on a brave little whim and takes one of Nancy’s hands, holding it tight and squeezing when Nancy’s eyes flicker down. “What made you realize?”

Nancy’s bottom lip catches between her teeth as she studies the way their fingers are entwined on Robin’s bed covers, four Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles staring back. “He stayed in California over Spring Break when everything went to shit, supposedly waiting for a college letter that was never going to come,” Nancy murmurs, toying with one of Robin’s rings. “He lied about applying to Emerson. And not just once or twice, but like, continuously, looked me in the eyes and lied to me, over and over. He still thinks I don’t know that he never even filled out the application. Like I’m some kind of fucking moron.” Her fingers twitch in Robin’s grip. “The whole reason he wasn’t by my side when—when—”

Nancy blinks quickly, eyelashes fluttering. Robin aches to inch closer to her. “When everything happened,” she says instead, softly, rubbing her thumb over one of Nancy’s knuckles.

“He should’ve been here,” Nancy huffs. “The reason he wasn’t, was that he was waiting for a letter that he knew didn’t even exist. And obviously, now that we know what happened, I’m glad he was with them, with El and Will and Mike, y’know, I’m glad they had him.” She scrubs her free hand over her face, frustrated, keeping a firm grip on Robin’s fingers with the other. “But he wasn’t with me when I watched you and Steve get strung up by those—those fucking vines, listened to you both scream for my help while they choked the life out of you. He wasn’t with me when I made a friend and then found him dead. I watched you and Steve carry his mangled body back from the Upside Down while I had to drag Dustin along behind you. He was hysterical.”

She doesn’t need Nancy to tell her; Robin remembers. Her arms sag under the phantom weight of Eddie’s corpse as Dustin’s howls echo in her ears and a lump swells in her throat, and she fights it as best she can, gulping until it shrinks enough for her to breathe.

“Everything. Everything that happened. Fred, and Chrissy, and Max—” Nancy’s voice breaks, and her chest heaves with a cracked sob. “And do you know what? After he got back, when the novelty of seeing him wore off, I realized that I hadn’t even missed him. Not really. Because I’d had you and Steve.” She glances up at Robin, her eyes watery and so blue, so earnest that Robin’s breath catches. “I know that he went through some awful stuff, but it was the three of us that walked into that godawful fucking house, knowing we might never come back. And you weren’t even supposed to be there.”

“Nance—”

“You weren’t, Robin.” Nancy gives her a tired smile. “All of this happened to you because your mom made you get a summer job and you were so bored out of your mind that you couldn’t help but try and crack that stupid code. You weren’t supposed to be there. But you were.” She takes Robin’s tea and puts it on the floor so she can hold her other hand. “And I’m glad. Selfishly. I’m glad you were there. I’m glad it was you, and not him. Not because—”

She pauses, and drags a hand over her face again, then worms it back into Robin’s grasp, breathing slowly with her eyes closed. They’re clear when she opens them, bright in the darkness of Robin’s bedroom.

“Not because I’d rather it had been you having to deal with all that than him. I wouldn’t wish the things you’ve been through on anyone. But… I don’t know how to be around him anymore, you know? I haven’t for a while.” She straightens her spine, cracks her neck, shakes her shoulders out the tiniest amount. “He’s not the same person he was, and not just since California, even before that. He’s not the boy I fell in love with. And I’m—I’m not the same girl, either. All the things that have happened to me, all the things I’ve seen happen to other people… they’ve changed me. But he thinks I’m still the person I was when all of this started, and Steve does too. They think I’m stuck in 1983, when Will went missing, when Barb died. I’m different now. And I want… different things.”

Robin takes a slow breath, trying to process what’s definitely the most words Nancy’s ever said to her in one fell swoop. “So… you’re mad that he lied, and that he wasn’t here when everything happened, mad enough that it’s made you fall out of love with him. But you’re also not mad because… I was here?”

“Something like that,” Nancy mutters, shifting around. Robin can see a blush crawling up her neck in the streak of moonlight she’s sitting in. “I told you, it’s complicated.”

Robin feels like her tongue is glued to the roof of her mouth momentarily, and she busies herself trying to unstick it while she sorts through the mess of thoughts in her head. “I like the person you are now,” she says, eventually. “I think I would’ve liked the person you were back then, too. The version of you that Steve and Jonathan have in their heads. If I had given you a chance, obviously, instead of lumping you in with all the popular kids. But I really like the person you are now.”

“I don’t know where this ‘popular’ thing has come from.” Nancy’s shoulders drop as she exhales. “I guess from dating Steve, but, I don’t feel like I’ve ever been one of those cool girls. Barb and I spent most of our time studying. And I mean, I dressed up as an elf for one of the boys’ D&D campaigns one time. That’s definitely not cool.”

“Oh my god,” Robin laughs, “you’re a nerd!”

Nancy gives her an indulgent smile. “I like the person you are now, too, by the way.” Her voice is soft, like she’s telling a secret. “We couldn’t have done it without you, you know. Any of this.”

Robin ducks her head, her face burning. “I don’t know, Nance—”

“God, would you stop being so… so self-deprecating,” Nancy sighs, shuffling closer to Robin on the bed, so their knees are touching. “You’re too modest. Have you ever thought about where we’d be if you didn’t figure that Russian code out? Or what would’ve happened if you hadn’t realized that music could help bring someone back from one of Vecna’s trances? You did those things. You’re… you’re amazing, Robbie.”

Robbie. Fuck. The box, Robin thinks, desperately. Put it in the fucking box.

“You’re important to this group. You have a place here, a role to play, and you belong with us.” Nancy tilts her head to the side as she surveys Robin closely, a smile tugging at the corner of her lips. “I know you think you don’t. You won’t say it, but I know that you feel like a spare part sometimes. You’re not a spare part, Rob. We need you. I need you. I can’t… I couldn’t do this without you.”

Every word that Robin’s ever learned in any language promptly falls out of her head at that, leaving her grasping at straws for something to say. She leans down and picks up her cold tea instead, sipping at it slowly, trying to stop her hand from shaking where she’s gripping the handle so tightly her knuckles have turned white.

“Can I stay?” Nancy asks softly, and Robin nods.

“Always.”

She stumbles over to her dresser and pulls out the too-small sweatpants she keeps for Nancy in the top drawer, roots around for a T-shirt that won’t drown her tiny body. “Do you sleep in the boxers?” Robin turns, to see Nancy watching her with hooded eyes. “I’ve only ever seen you in pajama pants. But… when you don’t have company. Do you sleep in them?”

The boxers again? Robin thinks, the voice in her head equal parts tormented and intrigued. “Yeah,” she manages to choke out, shoving the clothes into Nancy’s hands blindly, trying to keep her eyes on the ceiling. “Usually.”

Nancy hums, but is otherwise silent as they go through their usual routine, heading separately to the bathroom down the hall to brush their teeth and change their clothes. Robin snags one of her pillows and pulls the sleeping bag out from the bottom of her closet, burrowing into it and then stretching out languidly as she zips it up. “I wish you’d let me take a turn on the floor,” Nancy says disapprovingly, as she slips under the covers in Robin’s bed. “Or at least just get in here with me.”

It takes everything in Robin’s power to gather up her liquified brains before they start melting completely out of her ears at the notion of sharing a bed with Nancy. “I—I can’t. I have a girlfriend. I know you don’t like, mean it like that, obviously,” Robin blusters, screwing her eyes shut. “But it wouldn’t—it wouldn’t look right. It wouldn’t be right.”

The silence is deafening. “Right,” Nancy says quietly, after a long minute. “Of course. Well, thanks for tonight. You’re a good listener.” The sheets rustle as she nestles herself in them more comfortably. “Goodnight, Robbie.”

“Night Nance,” Robin whispers. She waits until she finally hears Nancy’s breathing even out, before opening the box in her head with a sick, tortured kind of glee.

It’s been almost two weeks since Nancy broke up with Jonathan, the day after she stayed over at Robin’s house, and Steve is still bouncing around with a vindictive gleam is his eyes. “It’s very unbecoming of you,” Robin tells him, slurping her coffee noisily as she watches him organize his sound effect tapes. “To be so thrilled at another man’s misfortune.”

“His loss is my gain,” Steve shrugs, and they both glance through the glass to where Jonathan is moping on one of the couches, reading a magazine with his eyebrows knitted together in a somber little frown. He looks kind of pathetic, and Robin feels sorry for him… a sentiment not shared by her best friend, if his broad smirk is anything to go by.

“Is that so?” Robin asks skeptically. “Because it seems to me like Nance has been less interested in you than ever.”

It’s mean, but it’s true, Nancy’s barely looked his way. The pissing contest between him and Jonathan might be over, but it’s turned Steve into even more of an obnoxious jackass, strutting around in front of Nancy like some weird peacock trying to impress her with a fan of colorful tailfeathers. Robin pictures him instead as a praying mantiss, being eaten alive by its mate once its purpose has been served, and smiles to herself a little spitefully.

“Is this how you were with her four years ago? Because if it is, I would hope your prefrontal cortex has developed enough to help you understand that if it didn’t work then, it’s not going to work now. And it didn’t work then, Steve.” She looks him square in the eye, and is pleased to see his face is solemn, taking her words as seriously as she means them. “Because she picked him. And everyone thought you were a jerk. You know, all the people who are your friends now? Lucas, Dustin, Mike, and especially me.”

He moves over and perches on the desk next to her, folding his arms. “I guess I have been trying to show off,” he muses, looking a little ashamed. “What are you saying, I should just be normal?”

A revolutionary concept, Robin thinks dryly. “I’m saying you should probably just leave her be,” she advises instead. “I’m not trying be an asshole, but—” She meets his big hazel eyes, and takes a breath, “—I don’t think she wants you, buddy. At least, not right now. If she didn’t come running to you when they split then it’s probably time to bow out for a while. Just be her friend. She’s carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders. She needs you to be her friend.”

Steve reaches down for Robin’s coffee and takes a huge gulp of it, then wraps her up in a bear hug. “Thanks, Rob,” he mumbles into her ear. “Sorry for being a weenie.”

“Oh, being a weenie you can’t help,” she teases, ruffling his hair as they separate. “You’re always a weenie. It’s been the caveman assholery of it all that’s pissed everybody off. Speaking of which…” He turns to follow Robin’s eyes, locked on Nancy walking through the door in front of them, catching sight of Jonathan, and immediately spinning on her heel to leave, clearly taking the back hallway down to the basement. “It’s not really me you need to apologize to.”

Steve nods, and bounds off after Nancy, sending a regretful wince in Robin’s direction when he clatters into a stack of records near the door in his haste. The two of them resurface a half hour later and Steve has clearly been crying, but he gives Robin a watery little thumbs up and gestures that he’s going outside. Nancy settles herself into the chair next to Robin, and waits until she’s finished introducing Piano Man before speaking. “I’m guessing that was your magic at work?”

Robin shrugs, and sneaks a sideways glance at Nancy, who’s smiling shyly at her. “It was the kind thing to do. Like putting an animal out of its misery.” Nancy laughs, and passes her the sleeve of Diana Ross’s I’m Coming Out, a silent request for it to be played next. She quirks her eyebrows at Robin’s surprised look, but says nothing, helping herself to a sip of Robin’s coffee and making a face at its sweetness. “Is he okay?”

“He’ll be fine,” Nancy sighs, “I just think he needed to hear his best friend say—oh.”

“Say ‘oh’? What do you mean?” Robin asks, confused, but Nancy just shakes her head and juts her chin, staring straight forward. Robin follows her gaze, to see Vickie walking into the room in front of them, waving through the glass. She steps into the booth, giving Nancy a perfunctory smile, and if Robin were a dog she would’ve felt her ears flatten against her head at the dangerous flash of Nancy’s eyes, but Vickie doesn’t even notice, turning to Robin with a big grin.

“I just thought I’d come see my favorite DJ, I’m at work so I won’t get the chance before our date tomorrow,” Vickie says, perching on the desk next to where Nancy’s sitting, the words spilling from her mouth in a rapid fire jumble like usual. “Could I pick the next song?”

Robin glances quickly at Nancy, and Vickie catches it, her eyes narrowing slightly. “I, uh—already have one queued,” Robin says, apologetic, “but the one after, sure, absolutely.”

“I think I’ll go for My Girl by The Temptations.” Nancy rolls her eyes so hard Robin worries for a second they might get stuck. “Do you have it?”

“Um—yeah, yeah definitely,” Robin stammers, withering a little under Vickie’s scrutiny, “I think it’s up here, hold on—” She stands, and reaches above the two women for the record, stretching her arm high and feeling a whisper of cool air around her torso where the hem of her T-shirt pulls up with her movement. “Okay, got it,” Robin says when she’s plucked the vinyl from the shelf, holding it up for Vickie to see.

Her eyes are stuck around Robin’s midriff, and when Robin looks down she sees that her shirt is still rucked up around the bottom of her ribcage, exposing the waistband of her boxer shorts and a strip of skin just above it. Robin gaze flicks to Nancy, who’s fixated on the same spot Vickie is, a light pink hue blooming over her cheeks.

A loud knock makes Robin spin around in surprise, and she sees Steve stood at the window, pointing at the desk and miming something animatedly. She lurches over to her chair, pulling her T-shirt down with one hand and her headphones on with the other, just making it before Piano Man’s five and a half minutes are up. “Hey Hawkins, it’s still Saturday morning, I’m still Rockin’ Robin, and you’re still on 94.5 FM listening to WSQK The Squawk.”

She scoots rapidly across the floor, wheels squeaking, and shoves the tape for Steve’s bird noise into the machine. It sounds loudly as Robin throws her weight against the back of the chair to get herself over to her desk, and fumbles to switch the records over while she plays for time.

“It’s a beautiful day here, military oppression aside, and that calls for a beautiful song, requested by my friend. Check it out, this is the Queen of Motown, Ms. Ross.”

She lets the needle fall, and turns the dial, feeling Vickie lean down and press a light kiss to her cheek. “I’ll be listening in the car for my song,” she says sweetly in Robin’s ear. “See you tomorrow night.”

Robin watches Nancy watch Vickie leave with a stony expression, her bottom lip pouting and her brows a flat line, drawn down just slightly above her eyes. “Will you stay at her place, after your date?” she asks once the door has banged closed behind Vickie, her shoulders drooping a little, like she’s letting go of some tension she didn’t realize she was holding.

“No, I don’t go round there,” Robin sighs, pulling My Girl out of its sleeve so it’s ready to play. “Her parents don’t know that she likes girls.”

“So? It’s not like you have to make out in front of them.”

“No, I know, I mean—they’re just weird. I’ve met them and they didn’t really like me. They’re like, rich, you know? My mom can’t work because she has PTSD from being a nurse in Vietnam, Vickie’s mom doesn’t have to work, because her dad’s closing in on making six figures. He’s some big shot supervisor at IBM in Bloomington, and… and my dad’s a mechanic. They seemed pretty put off when I told them that, and it was like… like they were looking down at me.”

It’s quiet in the studio, and Robin can hear Nancy trying to control her own breathing. “Does she stay at your house then?” Her voice is carefully even, but the faintest trace of anger shakes it slightly.

Robin squirms in her seat. “She has done, in the past. But not like, after every date.”

Nancy’s surveying her interestedly when she can finally bring herself to peek in her direction. “You could come and stay at my house,” she offers, her tone neutral. “After, I mean. You can fill me in on the date while we watch a movie or something.“

Going on a date with her girlfriend and then sleeping over at a different girl’s house afterwards does not seem like a very good idea to Robin. “That’d be great,” her traitorous mouth says before she can stop it, and Nancy makes a pleased little sound as her eyes light up. After all, who is Robin Buckley to say no to the girl she really loves?

Robin quickly opens the box in her head, and tries to stuff the feeling of her heart rate quickening at Nancy’s obvious satisfaction over them spending the night together into it. She fails miserably.

Chapter Text

Nancy Wheeler had meant it when she’d told Robin Buckley that the reasons she’d kept the disintegration of her relationship to herself were complicated.

She hadn’t lied to Robin, not at all. She absolutely had thought that Robin would feed the information to Steve; they’re perpetually on each other’s team, a pair of mismatched peas in their own weird little pod, and the unshakeable bond they’ve developed is clear for everyone to see. The last thing that Nancy had wanted was for Steve to think he had any kind of chance with her, even more so than he already did for reasons that are still beyond her comprehension, especially after the whole six kids conversation. The thought of it makes her shudder.

Everything she’d said about Jonathan was true as well. Things had gotten so bad that she’d started pretending to be asleep whenever he snuck up into her room, trying not to let the tears that pooled in her eyes fall down her cheeks at the way her skin crawled when he touched her, at the irritation that always seeped into his sighs when she flinched under his fingertips. If the constant sulking, weed-smoking, and bitching at her he’d been doing hadn’t been enough to turn her off, his insecurities and the absurd competition he’d let himself fall into with Steve had certainly done the job.

Nancy had tried her hardest to make things work. To make things right between them. Normal. She’d bought him the soundtrack for that odd Bowie movie he’d waxed poetic about. She’d helped him with the extra credits he’d needed to graduate from Hawkins High with the rest of them. She’d organized date nights, took him into her bed and made love to him, reassured him over and over that she didn’t want to get back with Steve. She’d held him as he’d hiccuped and cried his way through telling her about the shootout in Lenora Hills, and the pressure he’d felt being responsible for not only both of their brothers and Argyle, but also the most indispensable weapon in their arsenal: El. She’d even took a hit of his stupid bong at his encouragement, hoping that more than the relaxation and euphoria he’d promised, she’d feel closer to him.

None of it worked. They had always been a team, Nancy-and-Jonathan, but it didn’t feel like that anymore. She wasn’t the same Nancy from that duo, and he wasn’t the same Jonathan. When she’d added this to the pain he was actively causing her with his repeated dishonesty about the college situation, she’d realized there was no coming back for them.

Then there’s the Robin of it all.

As much as she’s tried her hardest not to, Nancy can’t help but compare her to Jonathan, one effectively taking the place of the other as her sidekick over the six months he’d spent on the other side of the country, especially towards the end, when they’d fought side by side to try and protect their friends.

Robin does not lie to Nancy. She knows this, like she knows the sky is blue and water is wet, because she’s seen Robin lie, and she’s mostly terrible at it. No matter how unnecessarily nervous she gets over whatever she has to say, Robin tells Nancy the truth, always. It’s how she’d come out to her, trembling like a lambasted dog, when Nancy had offhandedly asked her if she had a crush on any boys at school right before they graduated, and suddenly plantonic with a capital P had made so much sense. It’s how Nancy had learned other things Robin had thought she might not want to hear, like how she thinks Tom Cruise is a shitty actor, and how she’d thought Nancy was a preppy little priss at school, and how she abhors guns and thinks they have no place in modern society.

Robin had also been there for Nancy when Jonathan hadn’t, had become as dependable as her own right hand, wildly intelligent, fiercely loyal, and willing to do whatever it takes to save a town that Nancy knows she doesn’t really give a fuck about, because it’s never given a fuck about her. Willing to follow Nancy anywhere; a mental hospital to help her question a would-be family annihilator, a lake-bottom gateway to another world to help her save Steve’s life, a house replete with malevolent vines to help her destroy the physical body of a monster.

Saving Hawkins aside, being around Robin just makes Nancy feel better. It’s why she follows her around the The Squawk’s basement whenever there’s a crawl, craving the calm she feels just by being in Robin’s proximity, the way the fog of worry that clouds her brain seems to float away if only for a moment, the way the vice grip around her lungs loosens so she can breathe again. The way her pulse slows when she can screw up enough courage to hold Robin’s hand, and Robin’s thumb presses carefully into the scar on her palm, comforting, reassuring, grounding.

She likes listening Robin to blurt out the random facts she’s got ferreted away in the deepest recesses of her mind, about seemingly anything and everything, likes listening to her ramble about the movies and books and TV shows that she loves. She likes it when Robin stays at her house and Nancy can coax her into letting her paint her nails, only ever a dark color, while they eat pizza and watch Dallas and pretend they’re like everyone else, just for a while. She likes the way her tummy flutters with butterflies when Robin smiles at her, the way her cheeks warm with a blush when Robin compliments her outfit, and the little thrill of anticipation she feels when they pull up to the radio station and Robin’s bike is outside, usually discarded haphazardly on the grass in her rush to be on time.

Nancy had thought that was all part of having a girl best friend, at first, because she’d had almost the exact same experience with Barbara. She’d always put extra thought and effort into her looks when she knew she was going to see Barb, and felt that excited little swoop in her stomach whenever Barb’s eyes landed on her, constantly catching herself smiling goofily at anything she had to say.

She’d only realized that those things might not be the standard features of female friendship eight and a half months ago. Robin had climbed up the trellis next to her window in the second week of November, the night before Nancy’s birthday, disheveled and mischievous with an untidily wrapped gift held precariously between her bright white teeth, too big for the grip of her mouth. When she landed on the floor she’d offered it to Nancy in a grand, ceremonial gesture, as though she were the Lady of the Lake presenting Excalibur to King Arthur, and laughed like a hyena as Nancy opened it to find a special Tom Cruise edition of People magazine with his face pasted all over the front. Her big smile had morphed into a smirk when Nancy rolled it up and batted her head with it, and she’d made some silly joke about Nancy taking it to bed with her that night, her voice dropping into a low, suggestive, teasing rasp. Nancy had never heard Robin’s voice sound so sexy, and it was that, of all things, that made Nancy realize something she thinks she probably knew all along: girls are hot, and Robin Buckley is really hot.

Nancy’s sexuality crisis had lasted just over a week. The one person she could talk to about it was also the one person she couldn’t talk to about it, because she was Nancy’s gay awakening. How inconvenient. So she’d twisted herself into knots all on her own, laying awake at night with a weight in her chest at the thought of what her father might say. At thoughts of what her life would look like if it were spent with a woman, all the things that she wouldn’t be able to do, all the things she would have to hide. But then when she’d pictured sharing that life with Robin, in an apartment in Boston with a little cat and a bunch of plants and an all-for-show second bedroom, suddenly none of the rest of it mattered.

Nancy had spent the next months flagellating herself both for crushing on her best friend, and for crushing on someone that wasn’t her boyfriend, but whatever she tried, she couldn’t stop thinking about Robin. She thought about the clean line of her jaw, her deep blue eyes, and her big, strong hands, with veins protruding on the backs of them, long, dexterous fingers always stacked with rings. The thrifted men’s shirts she wore as she tried on different versions of herself, figuring out the person she wanted to be in a way that made Nancy ache with affection. Her shaggy haircut hanging around her ears, choppy, messy, painfully cute, so cute she’d given Nancy no choice but to keep her, with her hair that turned golden whenever the sun hit it, and almost black when it soaked through in the rain. The soft-looking pillows of her full lips, that screwed together adorably when she tried not to laugh, and pouted like a child’s when Steve told her off for riling up the military on air. Her bizarre and brilliant mind, deciphering a Russian code with relative ease, improvising her summer camp nonsense to Dr. Hatch, deducing that music was the key to escaping Vecna’s telekinetic clutches.

Nancy had replayed over and over in her head how Robin had silently cried listening to Victor Creel’s story in the dingy cells of Pennhurt’s high security section, empathy and pure goodness radiating off of her even in the face of a man they’d thought was a murderer. How Robin had gazed up at Nancy when she got on the boat to go to Watergate, and backed her without a second thought when Dustin tried to argue, taking her side and trusting her when she had no real reason to. How, when ordered upstairs in the Creel house, Robin had done as she was told, and saluted in a way that Nancy had found dorky and sweet at the time, but has somehow morphed into being an outrageous turn on the more she’s envisioned it.

She’d thought about the way Robin had looked to her, immediately, like Nancy’s welfare came before her own, as she lay sprawled on top of Eddie while Nancy had Steve’s arm wrapped her body, the four of them recoiling from a clap of earth shattering thunder at Skull Rock in the Upside Down, drenched and bloody from swimming through Lover’s Lake and fighting off a swarm of demobats. The fire in Robin’s eyes, burning with a kind of vicious violence that Nancy hadn’t seen her show before or since, when she’d torn a demobat off of Nancy’s body and beat it to death with her bare hands, which, by the way… unbearably attractive, so much so that Nancy actively tries not to think about it. She thinks instead about the way Robin’s face had lit up with curious fascination, a mirror of Eddie’s, when she’d stroked her hand through the haze of light they used to contact Max, Dustin and the Sinclair siblings, the horrors around her momentarily forgotten in the face of something so cool.

Nancy’s favorite thing to think about is the way Robin dropped to her knee in Eddie’s trailer, offering herself up to be climbed on, her adorable little beret skewed sideways and her eyes wide, obedient, ‘use me.’ Not even the unwelcome introduction of Vickie Dunne to Nancy’s life could stop that image from looping round her mind late at night.

When she’d felt a peculiar flare of jealousy light up her stomach, unexpected and intense, at Robin nervously presenting Vickie as her girlfriend to her, Steve and Jonathan, one December morning at The Squawk, Nancy had known she was done for. It had triggered something primal in her that she hadn’t even known was there. All her pseudo-innocent visions of Robin being sweet, or brave, or cute, had swiftly been intertwined with new daydreams of Robin doing unholy things to Nancy’s body, with her hands, and her mouth, and the toy she had stuffed behind the underwear in her nightstand’s bottom drawer, furtively ordered from a catalog she’d found hidden in the garage.

The fantasies she’d started with, of Robin making out with the hot, sweat-slicked skin of her neck while she scrapes her fingernails over Robin’s scalp, had quickly snowballed into thoughts of Robin’s fingers between her legs, Robin’s tongue licking over her nipples, and the way Robin’s back might bend and arch so beautifully should Nancy ever get her mouth on her cunt. She always wakes up before it gets really good, panties wet and sticky under her little slip nightgown, writhing with a combination of shame, guilt and sheer frustration.

On some of those mornings, when she was still with Jonathan, she’d roll over and look at him contemplatively, wondering if the release would be worth the discomfort she’d started to feel at his touch. Every time she’d sigh, and scurry off into the bathroom instead, biting her fist in the shower as she rubbed two fingers over her clit furiously while imagining they were Robin’s, and hoping the noise of the water drowned out her muffled cries when she came. It wasn’t worth the overwhelming self-loathing she’d suffer afterwards, feeling like she was betraying Robin’s friendship, but she couldn’t stop.

If Robin Buckley didn’t exist, Nancy knows that she and Jonathan still wouldn’t have made it. But Robin Buckley does exist. And Nancy Wheeler wants her. Nancy Wheeler loves her.

The boxer shorts had just tipped her over the edge.

This is how she finds herself sitting on her bed in her room, waiting on yet another object of her affection to climb up the trellis of her house, ABC’s Sunday night movie playing quietly in the background as she reviews the projected schedule she’s drawn up of the military’s movements over the next week.

She jolts in surprise at a muffled sort of crash, suspiciously similar to the noise someone would make if they rode their bike into the small viburnum bushes that line the base of her house. It’s followed by a pained hiss of, “Shit,” and Nancy listens with her mouth screwed up into a fond smile at the sounds of a person unsnaring themselves from the shrubbery and abandoning their bike with a muttered curse, before clambering up to her window.

“I told you I could’ve come picked you up,” Nancy says in lieu of a greeting, not looking up from her notebook.

“And how would that’ve looked? ‘No thanks Vickie, I don’t need a ride home from our date, the prettiest girl in Hawkins is gonna come take me to her house for a sleepover.’ Yeah right.”

“I meant from your place, dork, not from the—” Nancy stops, as her mouth catches up to her brain, feels her jaw fall open and the hand holding her pen slacken. When she glances up quickly Robin doesn’t seem to have noticed what she’s said, busy kicking her backpack into the corner of the room and trying to wrangle her arms from the sleeves of her overshirt while staring at the TV.

“Ghostbusters! Fuck yeah, I love this movie.” She throws herself onto the bed, completely unaware of the way she’s just turned Nancy’s world upside down. How ironic. “You know I picture myself doing this to Steve sometimes,” she says with a secret little smile, nodding at where Venkman is trapping a ghost on the screen. “Jonathan, too. Sorry.” She shrugs, not sorry at all, and toes her shoes off of her feet before crossing them at the ankle, and resting her arms casually behind her head as she leans back. “You okay?”

“…Yeah,” Nancy croaks out eventually, once she’s managed to unravel her brains from the knots they’d twisted themselves into at being called ‘the prettiest girl in Hawkins.’ She sets her notepad and pen down on the nightstand, and inches the tiniest bit closer to Robin. “How did the date go?”

Robin makes a dismissive sound in the back of her throat, and keeps her eyes trained on the movie. “Sucked. She’s mad at me, and I don’t know why because she won’t say.”

“How do you know she’s mad?”

“It was pretty obvious. I mean, even I could tell,” Robin sighs. “She was like, really distant. She barely even looked at me, and we just talked about her work the whole time. She wouldn’t hold my hand in the car like we normally do either.“ She looks down at the floor, her pretty mouth set into a flat, glum line. “I bought a new shirt. She didn’t even say anything about it.”

It takes a certain cruelty, Nancy thinks, to be cold enough to somebody like Robin for her to believe she’s in trouble, but then not tell her why or give her a chance to fix it, when everybody knows that the one thing she struggles with is reading other people’s cues. “Did you ask her if she was mad? Or if you’ve done anything wrong?” Nancy asks, moving to pick Robin’s shirt up from where she’d dumped it on the carpet.

“Yeah, she just said, ‘it’s nothing Robin.’ Like, what does that mean?”

Nancy eyes Robin closely as she folds the shirt, and drapes it over the back of her vanity chair. “Have you done something wrong?”

“No,” she says, too quick, too defensive. Nancy thinks she hears her mutter, ‘Nothing she’d know about, at least,’ as she sits on the bed in front of her, but before she can say anything, Robin blurts, “I’m gonna break up with her.”

“Robin,” Nancy says carefully after a moment, and she can hear a hint of accusation in her own voice. “What did you do?”

“Nothing,” Robin mutters, staring down at where she’s twisting her fingers together. Nancy lays a hand over the top of them and they still instantly. “I just… I don’t feel about her the way I feel about—” She makes a weird choking sound, then shakes her head. “The way I should feel about her. I’m… I’m not in love with her, Nance.”

“Jesus, Rob.” Nancy lets out a long breath, and Robin looks up at her a little miserably. “How long?”

She waits, and watches Robin’s eyes flicker over to the window, then the door, like she’s mapping an escape route so she doesn’t have to talk about her feelings. “I’m not sure I ever was,” she murmurs eventually. “You’re supposed to just know, right? That’s what my dad said. He just knew that he was in love with my mom. But it’s been like, seven months now, officially, and I don’t… I don’t think I feel it. And like, why?” Her gaze locks onto Nancy’s suddenly, blue and intense and hurting, a little. “She’s really fun, and super kind, she likes cool music and she dresses nice and she’s so pretty, why can’t I love her? It would be so much easier than...”

“Easier than what?” Nancy probes gently when Robin trails off, rubbing her thumb over Robin’s knuckles and trying to wrestle her heart back towards her ribcage from where it’s leapt into her throat.

“Than… than having to try and find someone else to love me, in this stupid fucking town. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Nance, but I don’t exactly have girls lining up at my door.”

You should, Nancy thinks. You will, one day. I’m already there. She concentrates on stopping her thumb from shaking as she swipes it in a steady rhythm over Robin’s skin, thinking about how there mustn’t be any other girls in Hawkins who are remotely curious about their sexualities, otherwise they would surely be trying to knock down the door she’s standing at. “You know you probably shouldn’t stay with her just so that you’re not lonely,” Nancy says instead, making sure to keep her voice soft and kind.

Robin nods, a sad, morose little thing. “I know.”

They’re quiet for a minute, as Nancy watches Robin watch their hands, her lips pushed into a tiny, thoughtful pout. “Do you think she loves you?” Nancy says softly, squeezing lightly at Robin’s fingers until she looks up.

“She says she does. But sometimes… I’m not sure.” She shakes her head again, and spits out a harsh laugh. “Like tonight. She knows I suck at reading people, but she still wouldn’t tell me what’s wrong. I don’t think that’s—that’s very fair of her.”

“It isn’t.” Nancy untangles their hands, and holds her arms out, the skin at the back of her neck tingling when Robin falls into them gladly with a deep, satisfied sigh. She’s halfway through an argument with herself over whether she should tell Robin how much she thinks Vickie sucks, when Robin shifts as Nancy breathes in, and she smells a trace of something different in the air, stirred up by the movement. “Are you wearing cologne?”

Robin’s shoulders stiffen under her arms, and she tries to use them to stop Robin from pulling back but they’re a dead weight, rendered useless at the rush of want that courses through her body. “Yeah,” Robin mumbles. “It’s my dad’s. I wanted to… I don’t like—” She cuts herself off with a disgruntled noise, and glances up at Nancy. “Do you think that’s why she was weird?”

Nancy doesn’t know what to say, distracted by the need to clench her thighs together at how good Robin smells, desperately trying to will away thoughts of a cologne-tinged neck under her tongue.

“Maybe it is,” Robin’s musing when she tunes back in. “I mean, she doesn’t like the boxers.”

“Wait, what? What do you mean she doesn’t like the boxers?” Nancy tries to keep the note of disbelief at how anyone could not like the boxers out of her tone, but from the way Robin’s eyebrows quirk, she doesn’t think she quite manages it.

“I asked her, after you mentioned it a couple weeks ago,” Robin says quietly, ducking her head. “She said they’re too boyish on me, and she was weirded out when she saw me wearing them at the station. So… I guess maybe it was the cologne then.”

She sounds so disappointed, it makes Nancy’s heart twinge in her chest. “Well, I think the boxers are cute,” she says, before she can stop herself. She’s so focused on telling her mouth to shut the fuck up that she doesn’t even notice when it keeps going. “And you smell amazing.”

They stare at each other for a second, before Robin grins, a little awkwardly. “That’s because you like boys though,” she says, rubbing at the back of her neck, “so you like boy stuff like that, right?”

“Well I… I—” The words seem to stick together in Nancy’s mouth, and she gulps, feeling her cheeks flush under Robin’s watchful eye. “That’s not… strictly true.”

“Hold on.” Robin lets out a cute little chuckle, breaking some of the tension that had settled between them. “You don’t like boy stuff? Don’t tell me you had Steve wearing panties and perfume?” She laughs boisterously at the image, but it slowly dies in her throat, and she frowns, working through what Nancy had said. “No wait, you do like boy stuff. Because you like the boxers, and the cologne. So—so the part that’s not strictly true—”

“I don’t just like boys,” Nancy breathes out, quickly, before she can lose her nerve. Robin’s mouth drops open and stays like that, hanging so widely Nancy can see her wisdom teeth as a thick silence stretches between the two of them, taut, like a rubber band. “Say something, Rob,” Nancy pleads, when she can’t stand it anymore.

“Holy shit,” Robin says on a long, heavy exhale, her eyes as round as dinner plates. “You like girls? Since when?”

Nancy casts around frantically for a time frame that doesn’t make it painstakingly, blindingly obvious that she’s in love with the girl in front of her. Robin’s distress at finding out Nancy had kept her issues with Jonathan from her for a year surfaces briefly in her mind. “I don’t know, like, recently?”

She squirms a little as Robin studies her closely. “It was Susanna Hoffs, right?” Robin asks at last, with a sly smirk. “From when we went to watch The Allnighter at the movies the other month?”

Nancy only has a vague recollection of the woman she’s talking about; she’d been too preoccupied with how the loose neckline of the oversized Pat Benatar T-shirt Robin was wearing had dipped below her collarbone, and the way she’d almost put her arm over the back of Nancy’s seat in the theater but seemed to think better of it. “Sure. Susanna Hoffs, yeah. So hot.”

“Sexy as hell,” Robin sighs wistfully. “Is that the kind of girl you like, then? Someone feminine?”

“I like… I like The Raincoats.” Robin’s eyebrows shoot up her forehead so fast Nancy almost laughs. “But I also don’t think I’d kick like, Heather Locklear out of bed.”

Robin lets out a low groan that makes Nancy’s hands twitch in her lap. “Heather Locklear is so fucking hot.”

“Is that… the kind of girl you like? Blondes? If you could have anyone, I mean.”

She makes a careful mental note of how a faint blush colors Robin’s cheeks, and the way she breaks their eye contact to look down at where she’s agitating a hole in her jeans. “More like… Lea Thompson, or Justine Bateman. Girl next door kinda look, I guess.” She flashes Nancy a shy grin that morphs quickly into a soft, sincere smile. “Thank you for telling me,” she murmurs, resting her palm on Nancy’s knee, the warm weight of it a welcome anchor to the dizzying thoughts flitting through her mind. “I know how hard it can be. Like, I know how scary it can feel. Thank you for trusting me. I think… I think you’re so fuckin’ brave, you know.” Robin’s face falls as she hears the Ghostbusters theme tune play over the rolling credits, and she jerks her head sideways with a dismayed grunt, peering around Nancy to look at the screen. “Fuck, we missed the whole thing! Hey, do you think we can get it from Family Video and watch it this week? You could stay at my place, Keith gives me free rentals so long as I don’t bring Steve to the store with me.”

“I… yeah, I’d love that,” Nancy replies, a little bemused at Robin’s abrupt change of direction, and she gets another big, sunny smile in return, before Robin lurches off the bed towards her bag in the corner.

They take turns in the bathroom next door, and when Nancy walks back into her room Robin is pulling the spare comforter over herself on the floor, in her usual spot at the foot of Nancy’s bed.

“Is there any point in trying to convince you to switch?” Nancy asks wryly, climbing under the covers.

“Nope,” Robin sing-songs back at her. “Night Nance.”

“Night honey.” It slips out of her mouth without her realizing, asleep the second her head hits the pillow, warm and content in her bed with Robin nearby.

When Nancy leaves the bathroom the next morning, she walks face first into her brother’s chest.

“Ow, Jesus Mike, what the f—”

“Go back in,” he mutters hurriedly, crowding at her until she acquiesces and retreats into the bathroom, and frowning when he locks the door behind them.

“What are you—”

“Did you sleep with Robin?” he interrupts, his eyes wide and serious. It sucks whatever Nancy was going to say out of her lungs in a vacuum, and she gapes at him until the power of speech comes back to her.

“Are you insane? No,” she hisses, “she has—she’s seeing someone, what sort of person do you think I am?”

Mike shoulders sag a little in relief, but he’s still eyeing her suspiciously. “Why is her bike at the bottom of the trellis then?”

“How do you know her bike is at the bottom of the trellis?”

He shifts his weight between his feet for a second. “I took the trash out just now?” he tries lamely, sighing when Nancy folds her arms. “Okay fine, I snuck out to see El.”

“Not that it’s any of your business,” Nancy huffs, “but she came over to watch a movie and tell me about her date. Because we’re friends.” She glares at him, and he looks down at his feet sheepishly.

“Okay, but still—”

“Mike! Nancy! Breakfast!”

They both wince at Holly’s foghorn of a voice, then scramble over each other to try and reach the door first, racing down the stairs to make sure they get a seat at the table that isn’t next to their father. Nancy throws herself down beside Joyce, and smirks at her brother when he shoots her a dirty look, taking the only other free chair on Ted Wheeler’s left.

Jonathan’s in the middle of boring everyone to tears with some bumbling monologue about a book on Marxism he’s just read when there’s a knock at the door, and Karen gets up to answer it.

“Morning Mrs. Wheeler, sorry to interrupt your breakfast. Nance said she’d give me a ride to the station, do you mind if I wait inside? It’s hot as a stolen car in Phoenix out here already.”

Robin sidles into the dining room with Nancy’s mom chuckling at her and fussing over her, and goes to stand in the corner out of the way, throwing a quick wink at Nancy when nobody’s looking and leaning against the wall near Ted. She looks exactly like she’s just thrown herself down the side of the Wheeler house, her shirt rumpled and a leaf in her hair, and Nancy feels her pulse thud in the side of her neck. Mike catches her gaze and raises his eyebrows knowingly.

“You watch The Open last night?” Ted says, holding a plate out to his right without looking up from his food, and everyone at the table stops what they’re doing in surprise, staring around and trying to work out who he’s talking to.

“Missed it,” Robin sighs, taking a piece of bacon from the plate that’s hovering in front of her. “What happened?”

“Faldo won it off of nine under par.”

“What? I thought Paul Azinger had a three stroke lead?”

“Second by one, Nick got a bunch of bogeys on the back nine.”

Nobody says anything for an entire minute, while Robin and Ted eat their bacon, oblivious to the room’s shocked silence, until Karen finally speaks. “Ted?”

He grunts, and glances up from his breakfast. “What? Kid’s almost as big as Michael, and she biked all the way here. She’s gotta eat somethin’.” Mike snorts into his orange juice but says nothing, then watches in disbelief as his father turns to Robin, and smiles. “Play some Bobby Darin or Sam Cooke today, would ya? The guys have the radio at the office tuned to The Squawk now, but I don’t like all that pop stuff. Put some real music on.”

“You got it, Mr. Wheeler,” Robin grins, and looks down at Nancy’s mostly empty plate. “Nance, you ready to go?”

She saunters from the room with Nancy following her on autopilot, baffled, gawking at Robin as she gives Karen a two fingered salute on her way out, with a little smirk at the blush she receives in response.

“Since when are you like, friends with my dad?” Nancy asks incredulously as they settle into the front seats of her station wagon, Robin’s bike and bag already stowed in the trunk.

“I was at your place with Will working on that campaign he did a couple months ago, and your mom asked if I would help Holly with her homework. We were at the table and your dad was in his chair watching The Masters. Golf,” Robin adds, when she catches sight of Nancy’s bewildered expression. “We got to talking because I watch it with my dad, and now he just chats to me about it whenever I see him.” Robin shrugs, like these are all perfectly normal things that would obviously happen, then her eyes dart to the radio. “God, Mindy, Danger Zone again?”

“Hey, I like this song,” Nancy protests, swatting at Robin’s hand in mid-air where it’s en route to switch the station.

Robin snickers. “Yeah, because it’s in Top Gun,” she says slyly, waggling her brows when Nancy sideeyes her. “Do you watch that movie for Kelly McGillis now, or does ol’ Tom still get your panties in a twist?”

“Shut up,” Nancy mutters, reaching a hand out to blindly shove at Robin, who snorts, turning the radio up instead of over and singing along at the top of her voice.

“You’ll never say hello to you, until you get it on the red line overload—see Nance, it doesn’t even make any sense—never know what you can do, until you get it up as high as you can go!” She stretches the last word out to match Kenny Loggins, then even longer, pitching her voice up and down ridiculously until Nancy’s laughing, the skin at the corners of her eyes crinkling from how wide her grin is.

Steve’s already there when they get to The Squawk, cussing under his breath at something over by the equipment rack, and he jumps when Robin barges gracelessly into the room. “You’re early.”

“Good morning to you too, dingus.” Robin holds the door open for Nancy to follow her through, and slinks over to him to give his shin an affectionate kick. “I already got a couple of requests, can you grab me A Change Is Gonna Come by Sam Cooke please? I’m gonna go find Mack The Knife.” Nancy watches with a smile as she marches over to the booth, and bangs her fist on the glass. “Melinda! What did I tell you? No more Kenny Loggins! He’s like a Lifetime movie for your ears. The Cheesemeister 3000. Cut it out!”

Mindy flips her the bird, and Nancy smirks when the opening guitar notes of Footloose start to play.

“It’s just so annoying, Nance. I mean, I get that he’s trying to protect her, and believe me, I wanna protect her too, I don’t want her out there just as much as he doesn’t. But twelve minutes and thirty seconds on that course? He’s just setting her up to fail! She’s busting her ass trying to do it faster and faster, and what if it burns her out? She’s our best weapon, you know? She’s what’s gonna win this for us, in the end. Hey, I thought you didn’t like Jolly Ranchers? Why are you taking a pack of them over to Robin’s?”

“Why are you still in here?” Nancy counters, pinching the skin between her eyebrows to try and stave off the headache she can feel brewing at Mike’s relentless questions. He ignores her, and shakes the candy in her direction from where he’s sitting on her bed.

“Well?”

“Robin likes Jolly Ranchers,” she mumbles, snatching them from his grasp and shoving them into her bag. “Look, I know you don’t really like Hopper—”

“It’s not about whether I like the old man—”

“—But we have to trust that he knows what’s best for his daughter.” She sits down next to her brother, and rests her hand on his shoulder. “She already has so much pressure on her, to be the one to end this thing. The rest of us have to concentrate on the roles we’re playing, to help her get to the point where she can do that. I guess that’s what he’s trying to do as well.”

Mike screws his lips up petulantly, but stays quiet, so she gives his shoulder a squeeze and gets up to finish gathering her things together. It’s been four days since Robin stayed at Nancy’s house and the time has crawled by, so much so that her skin is prickling with anticipation at spending a night in Robin’s bedroom, itching to be alone with her once more.

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Jeez, it’s like an episode of fucking Press Your Luck. What?”

“The other morning, when I asked you if you’d slept with Robin.”

She turns, to see him regarding her thoughtfully. “That’s… not a question.”

He raises an eyebrow. “You said no, because she’s with somebody.”

“Still not a question.” It comes out a little squeaky, and she cringes.

“You didn’t say, ‘no, because I don’t like girls.’ Why?” Nancy stares at him, and he stares back.

“Because… that much is obvious.”

Mike’s eyes narrow skeptically. “Is it?”

A strained silence blankets the room, and Nancy swallows thickly. “Mike—”

“It would be okay, you know,” he cuts in, his voice mild, purposely light. “If you did like girls. Or if… if you liked both.” He holds her gaze, like he’s trying to tell her something, but his mouth won’t shape into the words he needs. “I would understand.” He pushes himself up off the bed, and bundles her bag into her arms. “Go on, you’re gonna be late.”

Nancy only manages to stop periodically turning the words over in her head hours later, her heart full from her evening with Robin.

Keith had practically wet himself with happiness when Nancy had followed Robin into Family Video, never taking his eyes off her as they moved around the store, and waving Robin away when she pretended to try and give him some money with absolutely no intention of really doing so.

They’d watched Ghostbusters in Robin’s bedroom, guzzling Coke from a shared two liter bottle, stuffing themselves full of candy, and giggling when Robin’s dad came in to try and do his terrible Bill Murray impression, before her mom dragged him away. Robin had studiously avoided any mention of Vickie, so Nancy hadn’t brought her up either, more than happy to spend the night pretending her crush’s girlfriend doesn’t exist.

Crush, she thinks derisively, as she lays in Robin’s bed, nuzzling her nose into the comforter and breathing in the familiar smell of the Buckleys’ laundry detergent. You mean, girl you’re in love with. Stupid. She rolls over to face the room with her back to the wall, and feels herself start to doze off to the soundtrack of Robin’s sleepy little grunts from the floor.

Colors flash indeterminably behind her eyes in a way that she vaguely registers doesn’t usually happen, not when she spends the night with Robin, but it’s okay, Steve’s there, dressed in a battle outfit with his face covered in sweat and grime, beaming at her.

“We did it!” he’s saying, exhausted, exhilarated, gripping her shoulder and breathing heavily.

Vecna lies in front of them, dead, broken and riddled with bullet holes, surrounded by the shattered glass of the attic window he’d fell from, that glitters in the light of the furnace his body is engulfed in. Relief sweeps through her own body with such ferocity that it almost makes her feel nauseated, and she gives Steve a triumphant grin.

A chime sounds suddenly from somewhere in the ether, and her stomach drops like a stone in a lake. Steve grabs her arm, and lets out a panicked shriek. “We’ve gotta go!” he’s yelling, shaking her violently. “Nancy, we have to go!”

The chime repeats, over and over, its cadence slipping lower into a forboding gong, as she lets Steve pull her across the uneven ground, faster and harder until they’re within earshot of a harrowing, tortured yowl. This part is familiar, somehow, she’s heard it before, and like last time it makes every hair on her body stand on end as her heart rockets up into her mouth, she wants to stop and vomit at the sound, she wants to gouge out her own eyes so she doesn’t have to see whatever’s causing this terrible wailing, thick with agony and despair.

The noise is coming from a young boy, kneeling over something with a gray hood covering his head, brown curls spilling from the sides and framing his face when Steve grasps his shoulder and turns him away. It’s Dustin, his mouth twisted in anguish, body shuddering with the force of his cries, and she can almost hear the air scraping at his throat as he drags in deep, desperate breaths.

Steve falls to his knees, and his hands flutter over the mass on the floor, as he lets out a long, broken groan, like a wounded animal. “No.” This reaction is different than last time. Last time he’d yelled and paced and then set about trying to pick Eddie up, shouting orders at the others, a plan, a plan a plan a plan. This time there is no plan, only the grief-stricken hunch of his shoulders, the bleak hitches in his breath as he begins to sob.

Realization dawns over Nancy, that laying there in front of them, abdomen ravaged with demobat bites, deep blue eyes open and unseeing, isn’t Eddie, but Robin.

She lunges forward and elbows Steve out of the way, tears at the bottom of her shirt until a strip of material comes off in her hand that she uses to try and cover the huge, bloody maw in Robin’s stomach.

“Nancy—”

“Do something!” she barks at the two boys behind her, scrabbling to rip away more of her shirt to stem the bleeding, when she sees that Robin isn’t bleeding at all, it’s just… blood. From a body that isn’t alive to bleed anymore. She wraps her finger and thumb around Robin’s wrist, lifts it up and lets go, and watches, stunned, as it flops to the ground.

“Nancy.”

“Don’t leave me,” she moans, trembling fingertips brushing Robin’s blood-soaked hair off of her forehead, a wave of sickness knocking her back on her heels at how cold Robin’s skin is already. “Robin, I’m here. Don’t leave me.” She slips both hands around the back of Robin’s head and cradles the base of her skull, pressing their chests together as though she could transfer the frenzied, rabbit-quick beating of her own heart into Robin’s lifeless one. “I’m here Robbie, don’t leave me, please.”

“Nancy.”

Her eyes fly open and she tries to bolt upright in bed but something stops her, something holding her, two long arms wrapped around her torso, shaking her slightly as the remnants of her cries echo around the bedroom.

“It’s okay, Nancy. You’re okay. I won’t leave you. I’m right here.”

She pulls her head back and sees Robin through the darkness, warm, living, breathing, right in front of her and all around her, rocking Nancy gently. “Robin.”

“I’m here Nance. I’m okay. We’re safe.” Her voice is low and soft, her palm hot between Nancy’s shoulder blades as she rubs soothing circles through the thin fabric of her camisole, and even as tears streak down her face without her permission Nancy feels herself start to relax, the tension that grips her muscles ebbing away as Robin murmurs comfortingly down her ear.

“That doesn’t—that doesn’t normally happen. When I’m with you.” The words are forced out around gasps at the flashes of Robin’s corpse under her hands. “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have anything to apologize for, dummy,” Robin whispers, offering the corner of the bed sheets for Nancy to dry her eyes on. “Are you alright? Do you need some water?”

“No,” Nancy says immediately, fisting at Robin’s shirt on instinct, curling tight to keep Robin exactly where she is. “No, stay.”

“Okay,” Robin breathes, circling her arms around Nancy’s shoulders and pulling her close. “Okay.”

“I’m sorry, I know you don’t want to—to share with me, because of Vickie, but I just… I can’t…”

“I’m not going anywhere.” Nancy burrows her face into Robin’s chest, and tries to will her hands to calm their frantic clutching at Robin’s T-shirt. “I won’t leave you, Nancy.”

She doesn’t know how long she lays there for, but she knows Robin’s awake the whole time, the steady rhythm of her breathing too controlled as she wriggles around every so often, for no apparent reason other than that it’s physically impossible for her to stay still for long. The smell of Robin’s cologne and the gentle patterns her fingertips trace on Nancy’s bare shoulder eventually lull her into a black, dreamless sleep, safe in Robin’s arms.

Chapter Text

Break-ups are hard.

Robin wouldn’t know, she hasn’t actually done any breaking up yet, but the mere prospect is bad enough. It’s been a week since she woke from barely two hours of rest with an exhausted Nancy Wheeler sleeping in her arms, cheeks still tear-stained and dark circles under her eyes, and Robin had known with absolute certainty, not that she’d had any doubts before, that she couldn’t be with Vickie anymore. Even if Nancy will never belong to her, Robin knows she cannot belong to anybody else, as long as her pathetic heart is firmly resting in Nancy’s hands, whether she knows it or not.

So, to breaking up, as she can’t see that changing any time soon. A cold sort of dread surges through her chest and swirls low in her stomach every time she thinks about it, visions of Vickie’s pretty face crumpling with sadness and disappointment haunting her everywhere she goes.

“You just need to do it quick and fast,” Steve says sagely around a mouthful of Doritos, spraying crumbs all over the desk in front of them both. “Like ripping off a Band Aid, ya know?”

Robin shoots him a withering look, jerks her head over at his sound effect machine, and turns away. “Good morning, Hawkins, it’s Friday, and you’re listening to Rockin’ Robin on 94.5 FM, The Squawk.” Cue, bird noise. “Humidity is high here today but if you’re looking for the whistle of the wind in your hair, please don’t seek it out by sledding down the metal Band Aid guys. Seriously, the führers over at the Mac-Z hate it. In completely unrelated news, sleds are half off at Melvald’s right now.” Cue, cash register cha-ching noise. “You know, just in case it starts snowing in August. Which it totally possibly could here! This is Hawkins, Indiana after all. Natural phenomena are taking place all around us, people!” Cue, alien invasion noise. “After three and a half hours of my voice, I’m sure you’ll be pleased to hear there’s only thirty minutes left until Vance Goodman takes over, so let’s keep things going on a high note.” She drops the needle on Jackie Wilson’s Higher And Higher, and fades her mic out, discarding her headphones on the desk.

Steve sits back down next to her, and sighs. “You have to stop calling them führers, dingus. They’re gonna barge in here and try and arrest you again.”

“Don’t worry, I’ve got a whole bunch of other stuff I can call them. Next on the list is tyrants. Or do you think I should go with oppressors?”

He laughs, and offers his bag of chips to her. “I like tyrants.”

“I didn’t know you were kinky like that.”

“Shut up.” He slopes off to make them both one final coffee before the end of their shift, and in the two minutes it takes him to come back, Nancy and Jonathan have both emerged from the basement, heading to the couches with a quick wave to Robin in the booth. “What are you doing after work?” Steve asks, sticking his tongue out and panting when the coffee scalds him. “Wanna go to the movies? A new Kim Basinger one just came out.”

“It’s my turn to see Max,” Robin says, and the corners of his mouth droop sadly at the mention of her name. “And then I’m gonna try and break up with my girlfriend.”

“I still don’t get why you’re doing that, by the way.” He waits while she switches the records over when the song ends. “Just because you’re not in love with her doesn’t mean you have to break up.”

“You’re such a boy,” Robin complains. “It’s not fair to stay with someone that I’m not into, and like, keep pretending that I am. Everytime she tells me she loves me and I say it back, I’m lying to her. And like, I should love her by now, right?”

Steve frowns. “I mean, yeah, probably. I was in love with Nance after like, a few days.” He laughs, but it’s weak, fake, and they both cringe at the sound. “Anyway,” he breathes out, glossing over it quickly, “so what are you gonna say?”

“I don’t know,” she groans, slumping down on the desk and dropping her head heavily onto her arms. “What do you say when you’re breaking up with a girl?”

“Who’s breaking up with a girl?” Jonathan butts in as he steps into the booth, Nancy trailing behind him.

“Robin’s dumping Vickie later,” Steve says, wincing apologetically when Robin glares at him.

“Ah, I’m sorry dude.” Jonathan gives her an awkward pat on the shoulder. “How come? Is there someone else?”

Robin tries really, really hard not to look at Nancy. She fails, and feels a sharp pang in her chest when she sees Nancy looking straight back at her.

“Oh yeah Jonathan,” Steve drawls, mocking and sarcastic, “what with all the lesbians in Hawkins, Robin can barely move for babes asking her out.” His eyes flicker around when they all stare at him. “I mean that’s how it should be, obviously,” he says quickly, and Robin laughs when Nancy rolls her eyes.

“I think you should just tell her the truth,” Nancy says softly, and it feels like her gaze is burning through Robin’s corneas, like she’s reading her minding and seeing into her fucking soul.

That’s the main reason Robin can’t get out of her seat quick enough the moment the clock ticks past eleven, skirting around Vance as he enters the booth and rushing out of the station with barely a goodbye to the others before she’s slinging her leg over her bike, and rocketing down the dirt track on her way to the hospital.

Doris gets her customary pack of Twinkies as Robin sails through the reception area, heading in the direction of Mrs. Massey’s room then taking a sharp turn towards Max, realizing too late that she’s not here to see Vickie, so she probably didn’t need any of the subterfuge.

“Hey, Red. It’s me, Robin.” She dumps her backpack by the cabinet at the side of Max’s bed, and drops into one of the plastic chairs with a sigh. She looks up, like she always does, at the picture Lucas has pinned on the wall, then takes Max’s hand. “I need to tell you something, and I can’t tell anybody else, so you gotta keep it to yourself, okay?”

Robin glances up at the closed door, then back down, feeling her lip quiver at Max’s smooth, unresponsive face. The only sounds in the room are the machine beeping in time with her heartbeat, and Robin’s ragged breathing.

“I have to break up with Vickie. You remember, I told you about her, right?” She racks her brain, but on the many occasions she’s sat at Max’s bedside in this awful chair, she thinks she could count on one hand the number of times she’s mentioned her girlfriend, too busy yammering away about Nancy to the only person she can be sure won’t tell anyone her secrets. “I have to break up with her because—because I love someone else. You’ve probably guessed from how much I talk about her, but… it’s Nancy, Max. I love Nancy. I can’t make it go away, and I’ve tried, I’ve tried really hard. So I can’t stay with Vickie, you know? I can’t be with anyone until I get over this thing with Nance. And, like, that might not even be until I can get the hell out of this shitty town, to a big city, where I can meet someone else.”

Robin rubs at her dripping nose with the back of her hand, blinking rapidly as tears fall down her cheeks, her head swimming as she chews on the memory of Nancy telling her she likes girls. She’d tried to be cool about it, forced her brain to focus on being a friend, because that’s what Nancy needed, and that’s what Robin is. A friend. Of the girl next door, who likes girls now too. It doesn’t change anything, she thinks miserably. Because why would she ever like me?

She leans back and grabs the cassette player, rewinding the tape and pressing play, and lets the lyrics to Running Up That Hill consume her thoughts as Max breathes shallowly, still as stone in front of her.

Vickie had unexpectedly got called into a shift at the hospital last night, which is how Robin spends her Saturday afternoon breaking up with a girl for the first time.

“I don’t understand what I did wrong.”

“You didn’t… you didn’t do anything wrong.” Robin shoves her hands deep in her pockets, and works hard on stopping her mouth from uttering the words, ‘It’s not you, it’s me,’ as she stands under the apple tree in her backyard. “I just don’t think I feel the way I’m supposed to feel, you know? I’m not sure I feel the way you do.”

Vickie looks up at her from where she’s sitting on the bench, her eyes wide and wet. “Does it have anything to do with all the secretive stuff you do with the others?”

“What… what secretive stuff?”

“I’m not an idiot, you know,” she huffs. “Whatever it is you go off doing, when you cancel dates at the last minute, with Steve, and Jonathan, and Nancy.” Robin detects more than a hint of bitterness in Vickie’s voice when she spits out the last name, and feels her pulse ratchet up as she senses danger.

“I told you, sometimes I end up having to—”

“Work late, I know.” Vickie dries her eyes with her sleeve. “Except when I put the radio on, The Squawk’s down at those times.”

Robin scrambles. “Well, there’s more that goes into things than just sitting on the air. Equipment maintenance, you know, sourcing new records, I mean, sometimes we have to drive out to Kerley County if Radio Shack doesn’t have something in stock—”

“Do you have a thing for Nancy Wheeler?”

Yes. “What? No, Vick, of course not.”

Vickie stands and brushes herself down, sweeping out the creases in her skirt as the silence between them stretches like a rubber band. “I see the way she stares at you,” she says, finally, looking Robin squarely in the eye. “And you… when she’s there, and I’m there, you won’t look at her.”

“Come on, now I’m in trouble for not looking at other girls?” Robin stammers, catching her hand on its way up to rub incriminatingly at the back of her neck.

“No Robin, it’s—you don’t look at her. Like you’re afraid I’ll see something I’m not supposed to.”

Robin tries to breathe normally. “Vick, she’s my friend, and we… we’ve been through a lot, you know, we were together during the earthquake and stuff—”

“I know all about the damn earthquake. You, Nancy, and Steve. The three musketeers.” She lets out a harsh laugh. “Where does poor Jonathan fit into all that?”

“Why on Earth are we talking about Jonathan Byers right now?” Robin asks, bewildered. “He has nothing to do with anything, they split up almost a month ago—”

“Wait.” Vickie steps closer to Robin, and it takes everything in her power to stand her ground and not back away, but she manages it. Just. “You mean to tell me that Nancy is single, and now you’re breaking up with me?”

“I don’t see how that’s relev—”

“Have you cheated on me with Nancy Wheeler?”

“No,” Robin says firmly, holding Vickie’s gaze even though she’s dying to look away. “I would never do that. I wouldn’t do that to you.”

Vickie studies her face closely for a long minute, and then sighs. “Fine. If you say so.” She crosses her arms over her chest and edges around Robin, bumping her a little with her shoulder on the way past. “I loved you, you know,” Robin hears her say, soft and sad, but she doesn’t turn around, not until she hears the side gate clang shut. She drops onto the bench at the sound, and slumps back to stare up at the sky.

She doesn’t know how long she stays there with tears leaking down the sides of her face before she hears the door open, and a few seconds later, the bench dips slightly under the weight of someone sitting down.

“What happened, buddy?”

Robin feels her dad put his arm around her shoulders, worming it under her tipped-back head so the crook of his elbow rests against her neck. The tears start to fall a little more freely. “I broke up with her.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t… I don’t love her.” Her dad jostles his arm gently underneath her.

“Why don’t you love her?”

She lifts her head up and turns sideways to look at him. “I don’t know, Dad.” Her voice cracks, and she chokes out a sob. “I wanted to, but I just couldn’t, it wouldn’t come. She’s so great, I just… I don’t know why I don’t feel like that about her.”

Richard Buckley’s angular face, so much like her own, is warm and knowing when he smiles back at her. “Because there’s somebody else you like.”

Robin swears she feels her heart stutter in her chest. She wants to ask ‘am I that obvious?’ and ‘do you think she could ever like me back?’ and ‘what do I tell Steve?’ but when her mouth opens, she can’t get any words to come out. Instead, she just leans down and rests her head on her dad’s shoulder, sniffling quietly as he squeezes her tight.

“She’s lovely, kiddo. Worth breaking up with a girlfriend for, I’ll give you that.”

“She’ll never be mine though, Dad,” Robin whispers, her throat thick with tears.

“I don’t know, Robs,” he says, nudging his nose against her forehead. “Don’t count her out. You’re a catch.” He stands, pulling Robin up with him and guiding her across the lawn towards the house. “Here’s what we’re gonna do. You’re gonna have yourself a nice cool shower, and while you’re doing that I’m gonna call Steve and get him over here, and then I’m gonna call your mother at Sandra’s and ask her to bring us a case of beers on her way home from their jazzercise class. And then, me, you and Steve are gonna drink every last one of them while we park our asses in front of the TV and watch the Cardinals beat the Mets. Sound good?”

That’s exactly what they do, and it is good, but try as she might, Robin can’t find it in herself to smile fully. Not when the announcer on the TV accidentally calls the Mets’ best hitter ‘Darryl Raspberry’ instead of Darryl Strawberry, not when Steve trips over the corner of the rug and spills his beer on Robin’s mom, not when Robin’s dad makes a very funny joke about the Chicago Cubs that would normally have her in stitches. All she can see is Vickie’s face flipping from sad to angry to resigned and back to sad again, replaying her voice saying ‘I see the way she stares at you,’ riddled with guilt that it’s the only sentence she’d really cared about during their whole break up conversation.

When she goes to bed that night, Robin lays awake for hours, her arm wrapped tight around Steve’s torso where he’d reached back and pulled it over himself until she spooned him. Her stomach scrunches up in discomfort when she remembers how blatantly she’d lied to Vickie about her feelings for Nancy, then almost disintegrates entirely when the boy she’s holding lets out a loud, jarring snore, and she thinks about how she’s lying to him too, her best friend, who loves the girl she loves.

Daylight is bleeding through the gap in her drapes when Robin finally stops crying long enough to fall asleep, her face pressed into the skin between Steve’s shoulder blades, stained with her own dried tears.

Robin’s melancholy drags out for longer than she’d expected, no matter how many times her dad tries to tell her she’d made the right decision. She can’t shake the disappointment she feels in herself, both for her rampant dishonesty, and for how it seems she’d underestimated the depths of Vickie’s feelings for her, meaning she’d hurt her far more than she’d intended. Her lies-by-omission to Steve are doing nothing but compounding her misery, her skin crawling with shame whenever she can wrench her eyes away from Nancy long enough to see that he’s looking at her too.

Some solace comes from an unexpected source: El Hopper, her world view so patently black and white that it’s refreshing, her deep-seated pain so vast and all-encompassing that Robin’s pales in comparison, even though she knows El would never make her feel like Robin’s problems are smaller than her own, should Robin ever be fool enough to let her guard down and blab her closely guarded secrets.

Jonathan’s keeping watch at the front door of the station on a quiet Tuesday morning so El can sit in the booth with Robin for a while, the pair of them leafing through girly magazines and giggling childishly at the stupid submissions in the advice columns, when El asks for a song.

“I don’t know the name of it,” she says, her expression frustrated as she thinks. “But Max danced to it, in my room. She sang… into a brush. It was before we knew about Billy. I was so happy. We both were.” Her face softens with a fond smile as she recalls the memory.

“Okay, if Max danced to it, it must have been bouncy, like pop music,” Robin ponders aloud. El shrugs. “Was it on the radio?” A nod. “A woman singing?”

“Yes.”

“And it was how many years ago?”

“The summer when Starcourt happened.”

“So, 1985.” Robin racks her brains. “We’re probably looking at someone like… Madonna, Whitney Houston, maybe Cyndi Lauper?” El just looks at her blankly. “Let’s try some out.” She sings a little bit of Material Girl, then How Will I Know, then Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, getting nothing but a despondent shake of the head each time. “Can you think of any of the words?”

El screws her face up in concentration. “It started with, I am standing on a cloud. And sadness going away. Disappearing?” She tries the word out on her tongue like she’s saying it for the first time. “My sadness disappears.”

Something clunks into place in Robin’s head. “It’s Madonna. Angel.”

When the previous song finishes and Robin switches the records, she watches El light up in recognition at the opening notes. “You did it!” she laughs, and gives Robin a hug. It’s stilted and awkward, but genuine, and Robin feels a tender kind of warmth settle over her. “Thank you.” She closes her eyes and sits back in her seat, smiling widely, tapping her foot out of rhythm with the music, and Robin leaves her to her memories, returns to making notes on any songs in existence with the words ‘upside down’ in them, so she can use something other than Diana Ross to alert the others of an upcoming crawl. A bunch of people complained that the Jesus And Mary Chain song sucked, and she can’t say she blames them. She leans down to rifle through one of the boxes at her feet for the next track, when El speaks again. “You should stop feeling bad, Robin.”

She looks up, to see El watching her thoughtfully. “What do you mean?”

“You haven’t been… yourself.” Her voice is even, and her gaze steady as it bores into Robin’s eyes. “For two weeks. Not happy. But you should know… everything will be alright, because you have good friends, and you are a good person. It will all be okay, in the end.” Robin doesn’t know what to say. She looks down at her hands as El leans forward, and pries the record she’d picked up out of her grasp; Time In A Bottle, by Jim Croce. “You don’t need to play sad songs anymore.”

“How—” Robin coughs, trying to clear the emotion clinging to the walls of her windpipe, “how do you know that’s a sad song?”

“Hop likes that singer. You don’t mess around with Jim. We listen a lot, at home.” Robin just stares at her, and El laughs, her eyes flickering to the glass behind Robin. “My brother’s here.”

Jonathan pokes his head into the booth. “Somebody called in requesting Fire And Rain,” he states, flat and forlorn. “We okay to play it?”

“Yup. You sure that’s not just you requesting a sad one under the cover of a caller?” Robin tries to tease him, but he just looks back at her blankly. “Never mind. Stay in here with El for a minute would you? I gotta go pee.”

She darts past him before he can say anything, hurrying down the hallway and trying to work out how long she has before the songs she’s lined up run out. When she pushes into the bathroom the window is open, and she hears voices float through it as she sits on the toilet.

“Just because she’s the one that did the breaking up doesn’t mean she isn’t allowed to be upset about it,” Nancy’s reprimanding someone, sounding impatient and irritated.

“I know that,” Steve replies defensively, “come on Nance, of course I know she’s gonna be upset. But it’s been two weeks, and she played When It’s Cold I’d Like To Die yesterday. That’s like, one of the saddest songs ever. I don’t know what I can do to help her feel better.”

“Well, what do you do on those weird boys’ nights you two have?” Nancy asks, and Robin hears Steve make an indignant sound from the back of his throat.

“Hey, they’re not weird,” he says, affronted. “Besides, I can’t tell you. What happens on boys’ nights stays on boys’ night.”

Nancy scoffs. “What do you want me to do then?”

There’s a pause, and it lengthens until Steve finally asks, his voice hopeful, “Girls’ night?”

Which is how Robin Buckley finds herself flat on her back on Nancy’s bed that evening, a foam separator wedged uncomfortably between her toes, as Nancy carefully drags a brush covered in black polish over the nails. The light in the room is low, there’s a reassuring rumble of teenage boys in the house below them, and a Murder, She Wrote re-run is playing quietly on the TV.

“Would you fuck Jessica Fletcher?”

Nancy cranes her head around to look at the screen, then turns her attention back to Robin’s foot. “She’s like, sixty. That’s old enough to be my grandmother.”

“Age is just a number. You don’t think she’s hot?” She waggles her eyebrows down at Nancy, who huffs out a laugh.

“No, but I’m guessing you do.”

“Oh yeah,” Robin sighs dreamily. “I’ll bet she could show me a thing or two.” Nancy’s cheeks are pink as she lowers her head, and Robin feels a flutter in her stomach. She can’t work out if it’s nerves from going a little too far, or excitement that Nancy hadn’t shut her down. Maybe both. “Do you ever feel stupid about stuff like this?” When Nancy looks up, Robin’s breath hitches at how her tongue is held between her teeth in concentration, and even at the mildly exasperated frown furrowing her brow.

“Robin, I’m trying to focus here. Stupid about stuff like what?”

Robin wiggles her toes in Nancy’s hand. “Light-hearted stuff like this. Watching TV and painting nails. Going to the movies, listening to the radio, playing board games, whatever. While the world is ending, and we seem to be the only ones trying to save it.”

She watches as Nancy sits back on her haunches, pursing her lips as she chooses her words. “I don’t feel stupid about it, no,” she says eventually, her voice soft. “I feel… guilty, sometimes. Like I’m sitting here, doing this, when I should be visiting Max, or planning the next crawl, or checking our supplies so I know what we need to get from Murray, or having target practice with Hopper, or making sure everyone else is doing okay. But—but I can’t do those things, if I don’t do this. I’ll suffocate under it all, if I don’t take the time to pretend everything else doesn’t exist, for a while, and just be normal and happy with my best friend.”

She glances quickly at Robin, who cannot think of a single thing to say.

“I think the world ending is even more of a reason to do those things, actually,” she carries on, going back to what she was doing. “Life’s too short, and all that. We have to find ways to be happy despite the sadness, otherwise we’ll all just break, you know, be like, consumed by all the darkness and the trauma. I was mad at Steve, once, for trying to do something similar, but over the last however many years I’ve been caught up in this bullshit, I think I get it. Like, I think I’ve realized you have to try and make the best of it, or you’ll just get sucked into a fucking void of despair. So… so this is making the best of it, to me.”

Robin sits forward, and picks up the bottle of nail polish Nancy’s dipping her brush into. “This is the best of it?” she tries to joke, pleased when her voice doesn’t waver as much as she’d expected it to. “Sitting on your bed painting my ugly toes?”

“You don’t have ugly toes,” Nancy smiles, prodding one of them with the tip of her finger. “They’re cute.” She looks up through her eyelashes at Robin. “And yes, it is. Don’t you feel it?”

The air is swirling around her head in a haze with how intensely Nancy’s looking at her. “Yeah,” Robin breathes out. “Yeah, I do.”

There’s a pause, and then Nancy speaks again, her voice soft and careful. “I feel a lot of guilt, actually, about a lot of things.” Her eyes are trained determinedly on Robin’s feet. “I carry it with me. Like… obviously, you know about Barb. I’ve hurt Steve, and Jonathan, and like, my mom and stuff. And it was my plan that ended with Erica getting beat up, Eddie dying, and Max fucking—fucking comatose. It kills me, Rob. People keep getting hurt on my watch. I put people at risk.”

“You save people, Nancy,” Robin argues. “You’ve put yourself at risk to protect the rest of us so many times, you can’t just—”

“I know,” Nancy hushes her gently, with a wry smile. “I’ve learned that I have to just… just try and let that shit go, as hard as it is, and concentrate on the good things I’ve done, or else I’ll crumble under the weight of it all. And then I’ll be no good to anybody.”

You’d still be good to me, Robin thinks desperately, but she doesn’t say it. No matter what.

Nancy’s just finished with Robin’s nails when Karen knocks at the door, poking her head round it tentatively. “I know you’re probably too old for this now, but I just took some milk and cookies down to the boys in the basement, and there’s some left over if you want them?”

“Those little pigs actually left some?” Nancy laughs, slipping off the bed and taking the tray from her mom’s hands.

Karen gives them a sheepish smile. “Well, no,” she admits, “I held some back for you two. Don’t tell them though.” She closes the door with a wink, and Nancy settles next to Robin on the bed with the tray in her lap.

They’re almost done with the mountain of Oreos Karen brought them, when Nancy clears her throat. “You ever going to tell me what happened with Vickie?”

“There’s… not much to tell.” Robin keeps her eyes glued to the glass of milk in her hand, hoping desperately that Nancy doesn’t ask for the finer details on the things Vickie had said. “I told her I don’t feel the same way about her as she feels about me. She cried. She left.”

“And that’s that?”

“Pretty much.”

Nancy puts the tray onto the floor and shifts around at her side, turning to face her. “Do you feel like you’ve done the right thing?”

“Yeah,” Robin mumbles, “but it still feels bad.”

“Because you miss her?” Nancy has her elbow resting on her headboard when Robin looks up, her chin propped in her hand and her legs curled tight to her body. She looks down at Robin’s mouth, and grins. “Rob, you have—” Time stands still for Robin as Nancy reaches forward, and swipes the pad of her thumb firmly across Robin’s top lip, “—Milk,” she finishes, her eyes shining with amusement.

“I don’t miss her at all,” Robin blurts, feeling her ears heat up in embarrassment. She’d almost said ‘miss who?’ with how distracted she’d been at the feeling of Nancy touching her lip, her thumb unfairly soft for someone who shoots guns. “I just… I don’t like that I hurt her. It doesn’t feel great, y’know?”

Nancy nods, and gives Robin a soft smile when she yawns widely. “I know. You’re too sweet to be a heartbreaker, Rob. Shall we go to sleep?”

Robin’s mind spins when she takes her turn in the bathroom after Nancy, tugging her pajama pants on over her boxers and staring at her reflection in the mirror above the sink. She pulls the skin of her cheeks down with her fingertips, works her jaw repeatedly until it clicks, and closes her eyes, playing Nancy’s words over in her head.

You’re too sweet to be a heartbreaker, Rob.

I need you. I couldn’t do this without you.

I think the boxers are cute. And you smell amazing.

Night honey.

I’m here Robbie, don’t leave me, please.

Stay.

Vickie’s voice drifts lazily to the forefront of her thoughts, unbidden and unwanted. I see the way she stares at you.

“Robin?” There’s a soft knock on the wall that separates the bathroom from Nancy’s bedroom. “You okay in there?”

“Yeah,” she calls back shakily. “I’ll be right in.”

Robin had laid the spare comforter out on the floor before she’d gone to bathroom, but when she gets back, it’s been rolled up and returned to its home at the bottom of Nancy’s closet. “You’ll get a bad back, sleeping on the floor,” Nancy says, not looking up from where she’s flicking through a Bass Pro catalog nonchalantly. She’s sitting up in bed with a stretchy fabric headband pushing her hair back, biting her lip around a tiny smirk as she finally glances up to see Robin rooted to the spot. “Robin, it’s not a big deal. Come on.”

She flips the corner of her comforter in invitation, and resumes her casual browsing of bolt-action rifles like it’s the most normal thing in the world. Robin can see her watching out of the corner of her eye as she stumbles over on unsteady legs, the smirk still lingering on her perfect lips when Robin slides under the covers next to her.

“Could you get the lamp, please?”

Robin does as she’s told, then lays stock still on her back in the dark, resolutely locking her limbs in place lest she do something incredibly stupid, like reach out and touch the girl she’s sharing a bed with. The urge to clamp her palms over her ears almost overwhelms her, in some fruitless attempt to keep the slush that her brain has dissolved into from oozing out of her head.

“Would you relax? You’re thinking so loudly.” Nancy shuffles around, and Robin’s stomach falls out of her ass when their legs brush together. “Aren’t you too hot in those pants?” Nancy murmurs, rolling over to face her. “It’s August.”

“I’m fine,” Robin squeaks. She can practically hear Nancy rolling her eyes.

“You’re gonna get all sweaty and make me too hot.” She must be able to hear the crazed hammering of Robin’s heart from how close she is. “You have your boxers on underneath?”

“Yeah.” It’s surely the highest her voice has ever gone in her life. Her mouth is as dry as a fucking desert.

“Take your pants off then.”

“Nancy.” Nope. Turns out her voice could go even higher.

“What?” Nancy’s tone is completely innocent, and Robin thinks she might be having a heart attack. “I’m wearing little shorts, and that’s all boxers are. Come on, it’s way too warm, just take the damn pants off.”

Robin’s hears herself make a weird strangled sound as she wriggles out of her pants, and kicks them onto the floor. “Happy now?”

Nancy just hums, scooching around until she’s comfortable. Robin stays on her back with her eyes scrunched shut, counting her breaths and mentally trying to redirect her blood flow away from her crotch, where it’s rushing with reckless abandon. Nancy’s bare calf skims over Robin’s shin, and all her hard work goes out the window. “You don’t shave your legs?”

It takes a minute for Robin to straighten her thoughts out from the garbled mess they’ve twisted themselves into. “No,” she croaks eventually. “Sorry, I knows it’s probably… it’s weird, right?”

“No,” Nancy breathes. “I—I like it.”

Thankfully for Robin she doesn’t say anything further, settling quickly and falling asleep with her temple resting on Robin’s shoulder. The lack of words, however, means there’s nothing to distract Robin from everything else. She spends at least two hours grappling with the way Nancy’s hair smells faintly like apple shampoo, the way her fingertips are pressing into the meat of Robin’s palm, and the way she’s unconsciously rubbing her foot along Robin’s leg under the covers, before she finally, finally, drops into a restless sleep.

Just over a week later, Robin’s pulse has barely returned to its normal rate after spending the night in Nancy Wheeler’s bed. Mostly because every time it comes close, Nancy will do something to make it accelerate again, like flutter her eyelashes up at Robin, or leave her hand on top of Robin’s a second too long when they reach for the same pen, or, like she’d been doing for the whole of this morning, glancing frequently at whatever she could see of Robin’s legs beyond the cargo shorts she practically lives in during the summer. It’s extremely distracting, making her absolutely no use to anybody, least of all Dustin, whom she’s been trying to help fix the equipment in the van for the last half hour.

“Can you hand me the box-end wrench?” He inspects the tool Robin offers him, and passes it back to her. “That’s the open-end one. The other one has like a circle on one end.”

“Sorry.”

He takes the second wrench she gives him, and puts it down on the floor. “What’s up? You know which one is which better than I do.”

“Nothing, I’m good,” she grunts, her eyes drifting over to where Nancy is holding Lucas’s bike steady for him while he straightens the handlebars. She feels Dustin follow her line of sight, and quickly averts it, so it’s focused on Steve perusing the limited flavors of Gatorade Murray’s been able to bring in with his latest delivery.

“Whatever dude,” he sighs. “Steve mentioned the van was making a rattling noise yesterday. Can you take a look while I finish this? He said it sounded like it was coming from somewhere near the back.”

Robin climbs out of the van, clamps a flashlight between her teeth and lays down with her head hovering beneath the rear bumper, planting her feet on the rough ground and shoving herself along until she’s staring up at the underside. She reaches up and touches the various different parts, testing them carefully, gripping and maneuvering, until she finds the source of the rattling, and takes the flashlight out of her mouth.

“Henderson, I need the socket wrench,” she calls out, “and the WD-40. And the rubber mallet.” She waits, until an oil canister eventually rolls along the floor, and the tools she needs appear under the van held in two hands of differing shapes and sizes. One of them is tan with thicker fingers and bruised knuckles from yet another dust up with Andy Harper, and the other is pale and slender, with painted nails and a thumb that rubbed milk off of Robin’s top lip last weekend. Robin takes the wrench and the mallet with a strained word of thanks, and gets to work.

“What was it?” Dustin asks when she crawls out from under the van ten minutes later.

“Loose muffler. Just had nudge it back into place and tighten a couple bolts.” Robin stands, shaking the sleeves of her T-shirt down from where they’ve bunched up around the barely-there swell of her biceps, and pushing her hair back out of her eyes. Once her line of vision is clear of bangs she sees Nancy standing next to Dustin with her hands on her hips, appraising Robin from head to toe.

“Your dad teach you?” she asks, nodding at the van.

Robin rubs her nose, and shrugs. “Yeah. Many a boring Saturday at his work when I was little.”

“Rob,” Nancy laughs, “you have—” And then it happens again. The outside world ceases to exist as Nancy takes a step forward and lifts her arm up, this time buffing the pad of her thumb over Robin’s nose, “—Oil.” She smirks, and glances behind Robin at the van. “So you can fix them, but you can’t drive them?”

Her words hang in the air while Robin tries to remember how to properly structure a sentence. “I can drive no problem, I just don’t have a license,” she says, proud of how quickly she regains her grasp on the English language. It all bleeds straight out of her ears when Nancy reaches out to fix where one of her sleeves is still folded over, her fingers slipping under the material so her nails brush delicately over Robin’s skin.

“So why don’t you take the test?” Dustin says from somewhere over to her right. Robin had forgotten he was there.

“I get nervous,” she tells him, her eyes stuck on where Nancy’s still playing with her T-shirt. “I can’t figure anything out when I get nervous.”

“No kidding,” Nancy murmurs, low enough that it’s for Robin’s ears only. She tugs on Robin’s sleeve one more time and turns, walking over to where Mike’s testing a telemetry tag about forty feet away. Robin watches her every step, and Nancy smirks when she looks back, like Robin’s doing exactly as she expected.