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fastcardotmp3 · 27 days

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Ronance; childhood friends; Barb Holland haunts the narrative; S1-2 AU; grief/mourning; 3.4k Written for @strangerthingsfemslash week day 1: different first meeting read day 2: women over thirty read day 3: secret relationship

Nancy technically meets her before she meets Barb, but the two events are inseparable in her memory.

It all happens the same day, after all, five years old and being dropped off at a Summer day camp on the Hawkins High grounds because her mother is all ballooned up and wobbling with the little brother that’s already claimed the attention Nancy has gotten used to dominating.

The day camp itself isn’t big because Hawkins isn’t either, but Nancy gets put in a room with the other first-graders-to-be and some teenager who seems infinitely old and wise from behind Nancy’s big round eyes and it feels big. She’s never spent all that much time with kids her own age before, not having made any proper friends in kindergarten and living in a house where day care was considered shameful since it meant Karen Wheeler wasn’t doing her job as a stay at home mom.

This room is only kids her own age, though. A grand total of ten of them split into pairs of two and that’s when Nancy meets Robin, that’s why she technically meets her first.

They’re declared buddies by the teenage girl in charge and told to stick together for the whole week they’ll spend here doing activities and playing games, and Nancy doesn’t know how to talk to kids her same age, but Robin doesn’t seem to have the same issue.

She’s babbling about a book her mom is reading to her at bedtimes within the same second they’re turned loose with coloring pages and crayons, turning the leaves of a tree pink and orange and saving the green for the trunk.

She’s got dirty blonde hair tied into two pigtails hanging over her shoulders and with pieces sticking out at the sides, but Nancy’s smart enough to know that just because a little girl talks to you doesn’t mean she wants to be your friend.

It’s why she doesn’t talk much back, in those first five minutes before their lives are set on a path towards tragedy, because she isn’t sure how and she isn’t sure it’s worth it and she, generally speaking, isn’t sure.

Five minutes. Nancy meets Robin first, in all technicality, and they might not have even been friends if it weren’t for a little redhead coming in and disrupting the even numbers as her frazzled mother apologizes for their lateness and—

Nancy meets Robin first, but it’s Barb that makes them what they are.

She’s got these glasses that are too big for her face but just the right size for her attitude, all opinions and snark wrapped up in a little pink dress and white sneakers. They’re deemed the group of three in a class of pairs just by chance, just by the wave of a teenager’s hand making a decision that she’ll never think twice about but which will change all of their lives forever and which will— which will one day—

“Trees don’t look like that, you know,” Barb says as she peers over Robin’s shoulder, sitting up on her knees in the seat of the chair so she’s the tallest of them all.

“Yeah, but I like it,” Robin responds simply, not an ounce of self-consciousness and not even an inkling that her feelings are hurt.

“Okay,” Barb shrugs, like it’s easy as that, and then turns her attention across the small desk to Nancy. “Can I use your green?”

Nancy hasn’t ever spent much time around girls her own age. Mostly they call her weird because she stares too much with eyes too big for her little face; mostly they don’t notice her at all because she doesn’t speak unless spoken too; mostly it’s her and her mom, but even that won’t last much longer, will it?

Nancy stares at Barb across the table for a moment, so still in all this newness, but Barb doesn’t flinch. She just looks back at her expectantly, waiting for her question to be answered, waiting for Nancy to fill the empty space whenever she’s ready.

“Here you go,” Nancy passes over her green crayon and Barb smiles.

Robin tells them more about the book her mom is reading her at bedtimes.

By the time they reach middle school they’re not just inseparable, they’re impenetrable. A trio— no more and no less— and anyone who tries to break that down or build it up simply can’t.

There’s no space for anyone else, not in romps through the woods in search of fairies and not in their corner of the lunch room where they gossip and giggle and roll their eyes at each other as much as the world around them.

There’s no space for anyone but the three of them, and Nancy loves it. She loves being a part of this thing with these girls, not having to worry about relating to anyone but them and not having to be anyone other than herself.

Because they allow that of her, don’t they? They drag out the dorky bits of her that don’t read ladylike the way she’s supposed to be and when they tease her it is as wonderful as it is relentless.

Nancy chases Robin on their bikes down the road to the Holland house and they stay up all night watching movies and pretending that their laughter really is quiet enough to go unheard from upstairs.

They’re thirteen when Robin, sitting out on the rickety dock over Lover’s Lake, looks down at her two friends clinging to the edge and still panting from trying to push each other under, says that Gareth Watson wants to go to the movies with me.

And Nancy knows that something is off, even if she can’t tell what. Just because there’s no space for anyone else in their little world doesn’t mean she doesn’t still hear the way other girls their age talk.

Boys and crushes and getting asked to the Snow Ball, it’s not the galaxy the three of them make their homes within, but she hears it. She knows.

She senses the tension in Robin’s shoulders more than she even sees it, and she’s five years old and staring again. Staring to the point of eyes stinging and staring with ears burning as Robin and Barb go back and forth about it.

Do you want to go to the movies with Gareth?

He’s a nice guy.

But do you want to?

I want to go to the movies with you guys.

Nancy stares, and her breath comes in sharp at the admission. She pulls herself up out of the water and sits on the edge of the dock shoulder-to-shoulder with Robin.

“Then we’ll go to the movies,” she says, a nudge and a thought about plans for husbands and picket fences and babies and—

Her parents have been fighting a lot lately.

Her parents have always been fighting, in their perfect little house at the end of the cul-de-sac.

“We’ll all go to the movies, right, Barb?” she looks down, sees the way Barb looks up at her and feels that same itching at her skin, that sense of difference that’s chased her from childhood through to this moment and onwards forever.

“Right,” Barb says with a small smile.

Something goes loose in Robin’s posture.

Something else moves them closer to the tipping point.

Barb hates the idea of going to some party on a Tuesday night, but it’s Robin who hates the idea of Steve Harrington more specifically.

It’s all is he even nice to you? with her. It’s all he’s a douchebag and do you know how he talks about girls?

It’s all very vocal and it’s all very silly until it’s not and until it’s only two of them going to the Harrington house that night instead of all three.

Nancy’s never gotten mad at Robin before, not like this anyway, not enough for them to split up like this, not go through what Nancy considers one of those teenage experiences they should be checking off together.

“I could drive us to her place right now, you know,” Barb says from where they’re parked out on the street, Nancy changing out of one shirt and into a different, prettier one.

“She didn’t want to come, Barbara.”

“Yeah, I wonder why, Nance!”

Barb doesn’t want to be here, but Nancy drags her along anyway.

It’s Nancy who does it.

It’s all Nancy.

It will always have just been Nancy who brings Barb to that place and who lets all of her too-big feelings overflow past the flush of her skin and down the staircase to flatten her best friend for the second time in a day.

It will always just be Nancy, trying to shake off all that sense of difference for one night, to just be normal, to be young and stupid.

It will always be her fault, the blood that spills.

“Something is wrong, something is so wrong, and no one is listening— Robbie, no one hears me, I’m just trying, I know I— I made you so mad and I’m so sorry, but we have to— no one is listening to me—”

“Okay, come here, I hear you, I know,” Robin drags Nancy the rest of the way through her ground floor bedroom window, the whole trembling and hysterical mess of her, and grips her tight in her arms.

There’s no easy way to say it, that Nancy had taken her eyes off their best friend and now she’s gone. She’d taken her eyes off of her and let a boy touch her and now Barb is gone, Barb is gone and so is her car and nothing makes sense.

There’s no easy way to explain it except the string of half-coherent confessions that spill out of her and onto the shoulder of Robin’s shirt— my fault it’s my fault it’s my fault mine mine my fault mine—

Robin is still upset with her. She’s upset about all of it, but Nancy knows she’s upset with her, even as they stumble into Jonathan Byers’ orbit and through the woods and into Hell. There’s a set to Robin’s mouth in everything she says, to her shoulders in every move she makes, that tells Nancy she’s messed it all up.

She’s separated the inseparable, she’s broken the impenetrable.

She’s ruined everything and Barb is dead and she is shooting a gun and burning a monster alive and she is the worst person on the planet because when Will Byers comes home, there’s a not small part of her which hates him.

Someone took their eyes off of him too, but here he is.

Someone let him get lost, but they’ll never have to live with the burden of not finding him again.

Nancy ruined everything.

“I need to go home,” Robin tells her when it’s all said and done and the Feds have driven away and the battle is over.

Her voice cracks and her eyes dart everywhere except Nancy’s face and there are tears in her throat, Nancy hears them.

“I need to go,” she repeats, clears her throat, and snatches her bike off the ground.

They don’t speak for a year.

She breaks Steve Harrington’s heart on Halloween and it feels like she’s dying.

Her heart races too fast and her lungs don’t bring in enough air and she genuinely thinks this is the end, almost welcomes it, in fact.

She breaks Steve Harrington’s heart and then before she knows it, she’s climbing through Robin’s bedroom window again.

Crying again.

Throwing up in a trash can, all stained in red, and passing out on her bed.

It’s not that there hasn’t been space for words between them up until this point, but rather that there’s been too much of it. A whole person’s worth of emptiness too tender still to fill, but Nancy is drunk and she keeps hurting people in an effort to save herself and she doesn’t know that she can take it anymore— the unrelenting loneliness.

She says as much, if in fewer and less coherent words, and Robin washes her face with a warm, damp washcloth on the floor of the bathroom before guiding her to bed and tucking them both between the twin-sized sheets.

The space for words is massive, so impossible to breach. Nancy hopes that maybe the quiet and the dark and the surrealness of this moment might help cross that gap.

I’m sorry.

It’s not your fault, Nance.

You can’t even look at me.

I don’t know how.

To look at me?

To keep going. Without her. She didn’t even get a— a funeral, and I just. Don’t know how.

A funeral. We need to give her a funeral. Her parents still think— they still believe—

I know.

Robin, we have to give her a funeral. We have to prove that she’s…

Gone.

Okay.

Nancy’s never been one for mystery novels, never cared for the chasing of a puzzle like this.

It doesn’t come to her naturally, but because she chooses it. It comes to her in a desperate feat of searching, of putting herself in dangerous situations because it’s the only option left if they’re going to be able to lay Barb to rest and grieve her out loud.

Nancy scrambles through the mess of it, dragging them to the Lab for a long-shot attempt at catching them in a lie, dragging them to Illinois and a man who looks between the two of them with a knowing glint to his eye and a comment about oh, we liked Steve but he’s not really our type, is he?

She and Robin sleep in the same bed because they’re in a stranger’s house and because suddenly the gaping, wide-open space between them feels painful. A tender bruise they’re prodding at with watered-down justice for the girl who made them.

Because Barb did, didn’t she? In so many ways it was Barb who was the glue to their little trio. It was her house where they made their memories, it was her games they played, it was her confidence they chased through the creek on hot Summer days.

Who are they without her? For the past year they’ve been nothing, been separate, been lost, but now there’s a sense of newness here. The painful sort of realization that maybe they are their own thing without her. NancyAndRobin. An entity all its own in the wake of what’s been stolen from them.

They sleep in the same bed and then they return to Hawkins and another fight for humanity already in progress and by the time it’s all over for the second time around…

“I missed you,” Robin admits, sitting on the hood of Nancy’s station wagon because neither of them are ready to go home yet, even if neither of them has said as much.

The sun is rising out over Sattler’s Quarry where they’ve parked and the town feels heavy in its quiet, laden with more death and more hurt all over again. Bob Newby is dead and Nancy can’t really feel the weight of it. A whole lot of people at the Lab are dead and she can’t find it in herself to feel sorry for them.

They brought this to their town. They’re the only ones other than herself where she can push blame.

“Please don’t leave again,” Nancy croaks, no tears in her eyes but plenty of hoarse aftermath caught in her throat.

“What?”

“I can’t— After the funeral, if I lose you again—” she shakes her head, staring out at the rise of the sun, the fog hanging low atop the ground. “I can’t do it. I can’t keep—”

It gets stuck, the rest of the sentence, or maybe it’s just halted by the sudden drop of Robin’s hand above Nancy’s knee. Her fingers are so long, a spindly thing from the day they met, and Nancy has watched her grow into them with dexterous pressing of keys on her trumpet for so long.

The touch itself is small, a single point of contact, and yet catastrophic to Nancy’s psyche all the same. She thinks about the last time Robin touched her, about a year ago in the Byers’ living room and the smell of gunpowder clinging to her clothes.

It’s been a year.

Nancy is a collapsing star, curling in on herself with the force of it, and although Robin doesn’t say it with her words, she does stay.

She wraps her arms more fully around Nancy and she stays until the sun is in the sky again.

On the day they bury an empty casket in the Hawkins Cemetery, Nancy laughs for the first time in over a year.

A real laugh, no mask and no posturing, just genuine feeling spilling out of her body.

There’s no closure here, not really, not when they can’t tell Barb’s parents what actually happened to her and not when Barb’s body will be forever lost to that terrible place, but something in Nancy snaps.

In as good a way as snapping can go, probably.

It’s like a piece of her settles in knowing that she did what she could, even if the grief isn’t remotely sated by the prospect. It’s like sitting down after too many hours spent on your feet, like release of tension, but maybe that’s just what it feels like when Robin holds her hand.

They go out to Lover’s Lake when the service is done, when they’ve paid their respects and when they’ve had enough of curious and pitying looks shot at the girls who everyone knows knew her best.

They sit at the end of the dock and pull their coats close around them against the cold of December, and although temperatures aren’t low enough for the lake to freeze, the water is frigid where it touches the tips of her fingers as she sets a tea light out to float.

Nancy curls in close against Robin, sharing the warmth of bodies and watching orange flicker over the rippling surface of the water where they once made Summer days endless.

You know there are weeds at the bottom that will wrap around your ankle and drag you under, right? Barb would tease at Nancy when they were ten, eleven, twelve. Little tentacles that’ll grab you!

And then she’d push her weight against Nancy’s shoulders to dunk her in all of her squealing glory, Robin cackling from the dock before diving in to join.

They don’t speak now, don’t tease, but Nancy wonders if Robin is thinking about it too. All the little comments Barb would make about their melancholy, all the pride she’d take in being missed so deeply.

Nancy looks over, barely an inch between them, only to find Robin’s gaze already roaming across her curled-up form at the end of the dock. Her hands and wrists, her neck where her scarf comes loose, the undeniable pink of her nose and cheeks.

Nancy watches her back, watches her focus travel, watches the winter-faded freckles on her cheeks glisten in the orange glow of an early sunset.

She can’t help it, ultimately. Robin touches her again, but Nancy is greedy and Nancy needs more and she just needs to know, needs to test—

Robin tastes like the wind when Nancy kisses her, all cold and chapped. The surprised hum at the back of her throat is Nancy’s new favorite song and the fabric of her mitten where it comes up to cup at Nancy’s jaw is her favorite dance.

She tastes like salt and she tastes like the little cheese cubes that they served with crackers at the wake and she tastes like the stuttering breath on Nancy’s own tongue as she pulls away quick after too-short a time.

Robin looks at her still, watches her, but this time focused entirely on her eyes. Her lips are parted in stunned quiet and her eyebrows are pulled together all confused and sweet and wonderful.

Nancy is filled with a fondness she can’t carry and she is overflowing with a loss she still knows is her own fault, no matter how many times Robin tries to tell her otherwise nowadays.

Robin looks at her, still holding her face in one hand and hardly breathing.

“Will you help me cut my hair short?”

On the day of her best friend’s funeral, Nancy Wheeler laughs.

It doesn’t matter that she’s crying when she does.

#dot fic #femslash week #ronance #nancy wheeler #robin buckley #barb holland #nancy & barb #nancy & robin & barb #i've got a Proper Fic in the works for saturday but until then I've got ficlets! mwah!#did i decide to write these 2 days ago? did i make silly little cover art late last night? whatever!

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