Heavy hearts stay afloat in the shallow end
Where the wild things
Make sense
- Clover the Girl
February 11, 1994 - Boston, Massachusetts
Robin Buckley is a terrible person.
She's convinced of it.
Robin is twenty-six years old (the oldest she's ever been) and she feels with the utmost certainty that she is a terrible person.
Truthfully, there isn't one specific, character-defining moment that she attributes this to — well, that's not entirely true; she can (and does) think of many examples that support the notion — and in a general sense, she knows she's kind of an asshole, though that's mostly by accident, a natural consequence of her tendency to she says things without thinking too much about it beforehand. Still, sometimes it is on purpose when she doesn't really have the energy to do anything about it. She thinks she'd rather be an asshole on purpose than by accident because at least then it would be a choice rather than a product of her character, but the stats might not be in her favor there. In any case, Robin just knows she's a bad person down to the core of who she is.
She's certainly not good, after all, and if she's not a good person, then it stands to reason that she must be a bad one.
Literally speaking, Robin is clumsily navigating her way through Logan Airport at rush hour going purely off her limited memory of the last time she was here — Christmas of '91, when Nancy had hosted the holiday gathering that she, Robin, Eddie, and Steve have made into a tradition over the years. Eddie had hosted this time around, at his minuscule studio apartment in Marion, Indiana, and that had also marked the last time their little group had been together, the last time Steve and Eddie (boyfriends) had seen each other, the last time Nancy and Robin (kind of, sort of dating but stubbornly not putting a label on anything while they live on literal opposite sides of the country) had seen each other.
That's why Robin is fighting her way through Boston Logan on a Friday evening in February, anyways — to see Nancy (and to escape the apartment in Tacoma she shares with Steve while he and Eddie spend their Valentine's Day doing sappy shit and inevitably fucking their brains out. Gross).
Nancy is pretty much the greatest person Robin has ever known — well, aside from Steve, but Robin is pretty sure everyone knows by now that Steve comes first in all matters of hers. Everyone else is just vying for second and at this point Nancy's pretty much got that locked in.
It's funny — Robin hadn't actually liked Nancy all that much at first.
Well, that's not true either.
At first, like, truly at first, when they'd merely been fellow classmates at Hawkins High, Robin hadn't really thought anything of Nancy at all (aside from wrinkling her nose at her prissy, goody-two-shoes nature, but even that was more of an alt kids against the world thing than anything else). She'd barely known Nancy— their school was tiny, so it was practically impossible to not know of someone, but Robin certainly hadn't known her well enough to have any other opinion of her besides decidedly neutral.
Their paths had officially crossed during the Starcourt Mall fiasco, and in the immediate aftermath, that opinion had been mostly unchanged. Sure, Nancy had been a little bit mean to Robin, maybe, but curt might be a better word for it, and either way the situation at hand hadn't exactly left time to spare for pleasantries, so she hadn't thought too much about it at the time. Plus, Robin had later watched Nancy practically get steamrolled by Billy Hargrove as she shot at him with an actual gun, so she chalked it up to Nancy being a little more intense than she'd originally thought.
Not too long after Starcourt, though, when just enough time had passed that her thoughts were only sometimes plagued with reminders of what she'd gone through and what she'd seen instead of constantly, she'd bullied the previous two years of Upside Down activity out of Steve, and with it, she'd gotten the true, unabridged, demo-dog-infused details of his breakup with Nancy.
And from that point on Robin had hated her.
She'd hated Nancy for the way she'd scored the most wonderful boy in the world (just in time to drag him into the arcane horror show that lived beneath Hawkins' soil, no less) and made him fall in love with her just to do away with him and their relationship less than a year later like he was nothing.
Like Steve wasn't everything.
And Steve is everything. He's the kindest, sweetest, most caring and kind person Robin has ever known. She knows how he puts every bit of himself into his relationships and how deeply he invests in them, she knows how truly and passionately he loves. Even now, he cares so much about the people around him that he's making a whole damn career out of it — nineteen months away from a fucking doctorate in psychology. If Robin is a terrible person (and she is), then Steve is her polar opposite. After Starcourt, Robin hadn't felt that anyone really deserved him, and that feeling has only strengthened with time.
(She's big enough to admit, however, that Eddie has the potential to be the first — he's still on seriously thin ice, though, and Robin's got her eye on him).
Robin remembers the rumors that had spread through their school back in November of '84 when Nancy had started the walk the halls of Hawkins High hand in hand with Jonathan Byers. There had been whispers that she'd cheated on Steve, but Robin, who wouldn't become friends with Steve for another eight months, hadn't believed them. She couldn't possibly believe Nancy had cheated on Steve with Jonathan because they were all friends. The three of them sat together at lunch and hung out in the library during study halls. Robin spotted Jonathan and Steve talking and laughing together on multiple occasions, and Steve even gave Nancy's kid brother and his friends rides home from school every once in a while. There was no goddamn way Steve would do all that if he got cheated on.
Turns out, Robin was wrong, and, in her opinion, that made the whole thing even worse (and it was probably why she had held onto the grudge for so long) because Steve hadn't even seemed to care. Yeah, he had admitted that he was hurt by the way things had ended, and he flinched if the word bullshit was thrown a little too harshly in his direction for years afterward, but he didn't care. He was friends with Nancy and Jonathan after the break-up, despite how it meant having to watch the two of them be all couple-y together, despite not really getting an apology from either of the two, so Robin had spent her entire senior year hating Nancy on Steve's behalf because he didn't seem interested in hating her for himself, and she'd hated her up until Chrissy Cunningham and Fred Benson were murdered, until it began to seem a little too Upside Down-y to be a coincidence, until Robin was volunteering to accompany Nancy to the library for research because she couldn't stand the notion of what might happen if Steve went with her instead, and from that point on, it wasn't possible to pretend she hated her anymore.
Robin had dropped the forcing herself to hate Nancy thing pretty much as soon as Upside Down War Four began. It would have been dumb not to, dumb and juvenile and a waste of time. Still, she'd gone years continuing to see Nancy as something that was off limits.
It seemed obvious. Nancy was Steve's ex. Robin was his best friend, and although she was finding it harder and harder with each passing day to ignore the ways her eyes and her mind just wouldn't stop wandering over to Nancy, Robin knew best friend trumped all (especially when that best friend was Steve).
Steve had eventually caught wind of this, and when he did he told her she was being stupid.
"There's gotta be a statute of limitation on that kinda thing," he had said.
"Not when she cheated on you," Robin had argued in return.
"She's a lesbian," Steve exclaimed, "She was never even really into me or Jonathan in the first place! She just thought she was because…gender roles or norms or whatever it is you guys go on about! Can you please just get over this and date her already? You know you want to — I know you want to! I'm pretty sure Nance wants to too!"
That conversation, from what Robin recalls, was in 1990, and it still took another little while for her to truly accept her crush on Nancy as something she was allowed to have, and how could she not be having it?
Nancy is cool. She's cool and she's smart and she's capable and so, so sure of herself in a way that Robin had come to rely on when her entire world was upending itself, and she's actually not a priss at all. She just uses it to hide how batshit insane she really is.
She's also pretty — really pretty. Too pretty for Robin, that's for sure, and she can't fucking believe that Nancy is into Robin in the way Robin is into her.
She is, though, or so Nance herself had said during their latest visit to Hawkins in June.
Multiple times.
Nancy had said she was into Robin multiple times.
Unlike Steve and Eddie, who had also used that trip to their hometown as an excuse to sort out their shit after a million years of pathetic pining over each other, Robin and Nancy hadn't put a label on their relationship. It's not that Robin doesn't want to date her. She totally does and it's actually kind of completely bonkers that she hasn't broken down and begged Nancy to have her forever, but they live on opposite sides of the country, after all, with Nancy in Boston and Robin still in Tacoma with Steve until he graduates a year and a half from now, and while Robin isn't completely positive, she's at least pretty sure that living three thousand miles apart doesn't exactly create the strongest foundation for something serious.
Things with Nancy do feel like something serious (and if that scares her, she can keep it to herself).
Robin is big enough to admit that hesitating to let their relationship truly begin is definitely coming from a place of fucked up self-preservation that Steve is probably dying to unpack (seriously, him becoming a full-on psychologist is terrible for Robin specifically). Whatever she's got going on with Nancy is legit. She can just tell, like how Robin knows she and Steve are forever in their own way. In an inexplicable way, it feels just the same (in that it feels like forever).
"Robin!"
Robin whips around in the direction of her name and immediately sees a familiar figure standing on her toes and craning her neck to see around the throngs of travelers.
"Nance!" Robin says with a grin, hiking her overstuffed backpack higher on her shoulders as she pushes through a group of businessmen and their leather briefcases, and then she finds herself in front of Nancy Wheeler.
"Hi!" Nancy says, a little breathless and with a big smile brightening her face.
Her nose is tinged pink, Robin notices, probably from the February cold, and it's cute and endearing and matches the pink beanie she's got shoved onto her head, and Robin wants to kiss it warm again, but they're in the middle of Boston Logan, so instead she just grins and says —
"Holy shit — hi."
And then Nancy is pulling her into a tight hug, slipping her arms through the straps of Robin's backpack so she can curl her arms around her waist.
Robin sticks her nose in the lining of Nancy's jacket as she wraps her arms around Nancy's slender shoulders.
"Holy shit," Robin repeats as she pulls away, her eyes locking on Nancy's brilliant blue ones, "I missed you — also, these New Englanders are no joke. I saw someone use their kid as a fuckin' bulldozer to get off that plane."
"Oh, I know," Nancy replies with a wicked smile, "We're, like, totally ruthless. We should go — this time of day, the trains are a mess and if I have to hear another man in finance talk about inflation, I'll kill someone."
"Hopefully him," Robin comments as she allows Nancy to take her hand and begin dragging her through the airport.
Nancy is right that rush hour is a wreck on Boston's subway system (the T, apparently, though Robin doesn't know why — she thought it might be T as in transportation, like public transportation, but it's not, because Boston's transit system is more than just the subways — there's also buses and a commuter line — and only the subway is the T, and it's not T as in train either, because technically they aren't trains, and Boston's actual trains are the Commuter Rail, not the T, and no matter what, Robin doesn't get it). Robin and Nancy switch trains three times on their route from the airport to Nancy's apartment, and each one is packed full of commuters and students and the occasional drugged-out weirdo that, admittedly, Robin gets a little freaked out by (as cities go, Tacoma is considerably tamer by comparison), but Nancy is unshakable and unfazed beside her, always holding tight onto her hand, and an hour and a half after they leave the airport, Robin and Nancy walk through the front door of the latter's apartment on the Charles River — the Esplanade, actually, because nothing in this pretentious-ass city can just be called what it is.
She doesn't actually mean that — well, she does, but not in a bad way. Robin likes Boston, she likes it a hell of a lot more than Tacoma, that's for sure.
"Sorry for all that," Nancy says as she pulls the beanie off her head and bends down to start unlacing her brown duck boots, "I'd have driven us if it wouldn't have taken even longer."
"All good," Robin shakes her head, "This city's fucking crazy, I love it."
"Move here, then." Nancy looks up at Robin with a smirk on the edge of her lips.
"Yeah, yeah," Robin rolls her eyes, toeing off her worn Blundstones, "Tell Steve to get a move on with his damn doctorate already."
Robin knows that the only thing keeping her in Tacoma is Steve.
The only thing keeping Robin anywhere is Steve.
She'd really had no idea back in 1985 that the idiot jock who'd been hired at Scoops Ahoy a month after herself would end up being something akin to a soulmate — not a romantic one, obviously, but something. Steve is Robin's best friend, has been firmly rooted as her best friend since their shitty food service summer job got them both tortured, but then during the next incident with the Upside Down less than a year later, her parents died, and in the years since then, their friendship has morphed into something greater, something that lacks a word to assign to it, something big and significant and special.
With her parents gone, her remaining family few and far between, and the party no longer condensed into the boundaries of their hometown, Steve is everything to Robin, the most important person in her world, and she doesn't think she's ever loved anyone quite like how she loves him — doesn't think she ever will again, either. Sure, she loves the party, and yeah, she's probably gonna fall in love with Nancy and have a whole life with her someday, but the love she has for Steve is something else entirely. It's incomparable, the way it's so comfortable and deep and true that it feels like it's existed within them for a million years, and there isn't anything Robin would rather do than keep navigating this weird, weird world with him.
Who else would she still have sleepovers with despite their own rooms being separated by merely a wall? Who else's closet would she raid, and who else would she give her failed thrifts to, because she still can't judge a piece of clothing's size to save her life and she almost always realizes it's too big as soon as she gets home. Who else would she spend entire days on the couch with, watching infomercials and drifting in and out of sleep? Who else would she try to cook meals without a recipe with, and who else would give her the last few bites of whatever he was eating, just like clockwork? Who else would ask if she's okay every time she gets so stuck in her own thoughts that she forgets to speak? Who else would possibly — could possibly — accept her and love her so deeply the way she is? Who else, if not Steve?
Yeah, so Robin really has no inclination to leave Washington anytime soon, because Steve has another year and a half of school in Washington before he earns his doctorate, and Robin isn't leaving Steve.
(Once Steve graduates, though, all bets are off, and Robin has every intention of bullying Steve into moving across the country to Boston with her, and she knows he'll cave because he loves Robin just as much as she loves him).
"How is Steve?" Nancy asks.
"He's good," Robin nods, "So goddamn thrilled Eddie's visiting. He was being like a Disney princess about it."
"That's cute," she replies with a laugh.
"I know — he's aging into a total loser, I love it. So what do you have planned for me tonight, Wheeler?"
"Tonight?" Nancy repeats, "Nothing much. My roommates want to meet you and we might play some board games if we're all up for it. Tomorrow, though, I wanna take you to the Museum of Fine Arts, and I have reservations for this classic restaurant in the North End and we can go to Mike's Pastry. After that, I figured we'd just play it by ear."
"Sweet," Robin grins, and Nancy takes her hand, pulling her further into the apartment.
September 10, 1985 - Hawkins, Indiana
"Hey, can I ask you something?" Steve asked.
Robin looked up from where she was rewinding tapes — she'd drawn the short straw that day at their shift at Family Video, so Steve was badly sorting her rewound returns into piles by genres (she'd just watched him add The Phantom Tollbooth to the horror pile with way too much confidence) and walking them over to the shelves.
She furrowed her eyebrows.
"Why do people do that?"
"What?"
"Just — if you're going to ask me if you can ask me something, why wouldn't you just ask what you want to ask? Because clearly you're fine asking questions because you just asked me one. The issue isn't with questions, it's with your actual question, and asking if you can ask me a question isn't gonna—"
"Okay, never mind," Steve said, turning away from Robin with a stack of tapes.
"No-o," Robin whined, "I'm sorry — what's your question."
"Jon says Nancy's hosting a poker night for her birthday," Steve said, and Robin had to fight the urge to audibly groan, "I'm gonna go — he said you're welcome to come too. Did you wanna come?"
"Me?" Robin asked doubtfully, "Also a poker night?"
"Yeah," Steve laughed, and there was something infuriatingly fond on his face, "Yeah, she's crazy."
Robin just didn't get it.
Like, okay, she understood that since he'd kind of denounced his friendships with Tommy H. and Carol and pretty much every other jerk-y popular kid in his year, his social calendar had taken a hit. Steve's a social guy, he liked to be busy and to do things, and Robin was beginning to realize that his parents weren't around nearly as often as they should be so he was always just in his big, empty house by himself if he wasn't doing something with Robin. Robin wasn't always free, and Steve didn't like being alone.
She got that.
But why did he have to be trying to fill in the gaps with Nancy Wheeler and Jonathan Byers?
Nancy cheated on Steve. She cheated on him with Jonathan, and if the way Steve tells it is true, they didn't even have any sort of fight where he got to throw some bitch fit about it like he did about everything else he experienced.
(Seriously — he once argued with a customer who didn't like the quality of the coins he got back as change for nine entire minutes. Nine. Robin timed it. Steve is a bitch).
From what it sounded like, the end of their relationship was barely even a conversation, and Steve had basically just rolled over and taken the way Nancy treated him like it was nothing, like it wasn't even a big deal even though he'd totally been hurt by it.
And now he was going to spend her birthday with her and her boyfriend playing poker? And Robin was invited too even though she went out of her way to make absolutely sure Nancy knew just how much she didn't like her? It didn't make any sense.
"I'll pass," she said, rolling her eyes.
"Oh come on," Steve bemoaned, "Can you drop this weird thing with Nance, already? It's stupid."
"It's not stupid. It's totally and completely warranted — why did Jonathan have to be the one to invite you, anyway? Why couldn't Nancy do it herself?"
"Jon and I were already talking and he just happened to bring it up. Look — Nance is bummed he's leaving for Cali soon and she needs friends. There's not that many people who know the shit we went through, and Nance is one of them. It's good to have friends who know."
Robin rolled her eyes — her go-to response whenever she wanted to continue needling Steve even without a solid retort to throw back at him.
"I'm good," she said again, "But you go ahead. Make nice with the perfect couple. Definitely just brush over the fact that you never got a single sorry from either of them for what they did. You're right — I'm the crazy one for thinking that's not completely normal."
Robin turned away, and she felt his eyes still on her for a long while.
"Jesus, Rob," Steve eventually muttered, walking away from her with a stack of romcom returns.
Robin rolled her eyes again and turned back around.
"Steve."
Steve whipped around to face her again, with something so hopeful in his eyes.
"Yeah?"
"Funny Girl isn't a romcom."
February 11, 1994 - Boston, Massachusetts
In the end, Robin and Nancy have a quiet evening in the latter's apartment. Robin meets Nancy's roommates — three born and raised New Englanders, much to her delight, who Nancy met in school, and Nancy orders them all pizza from a joint nearby.
According to Nancy, it's nothing gourmet, just trashy, greasy, delectable, cheap college-town pizza, and her assessment turns out to be completely correct, at least by Robin's standards.
After they eat, Robin, Nancy, and Nancy's roommates end up sitting around the wooden coffee table in the living room together to play Trivial Pursuit, which Robin can admit to being decently good at (she gets all the art ones correct, which makes up for the sports questions that go almost entirely over her head — the almost is courtesy of Steve; Robin really does try to pay attention when he talks about sports — and she can hold her own in the rest of the categories).
During the game, Nancy and Robin sit side-by-side with their backs against the couch, and Robin spends the evening noticing every accidental brush of their legs, every grin Nancy sent her way, every time she knocked her foot against Robin's own. Once, while one of Nancy's roommates was mulling over an answer, she had run a hand up Robin's arms, slow and casual, and it all had Robin's heart thudding so hard she wondered if it was visible through her sweater.
Robin knows that they're, like, kind of a thing. More than kind of, actually — Robin is Nancy's, one hundred percent — but sometimes it's hard to see that without putting in conscious effort while they live three thousand miles apart. She certainly hasn't been pursuing things with other girls — not that she'd (ever) been having all that much luck in the dating department before Nancy anyways, so she'd sort of forgotten what it feels like to be flirted with and to flirt back, to find someone attractive — and Christ, does she find Nancy attractive — and to do something about it. She'd forgotten about the zing of nerves in her sternum, the electric tingle that ran all the way to the tips of her fingers, the heat bubbling in the pit of her stomach that she really hopes will get recognized before the end of the visit (though she swears it's okay if it doesn't). Robin had forgotten about all that.
She likes it, though.
She definitely likes it, and later, when the roommates go to bed and Nancy brings Robin up to her bedroom and presses her against the door as soon as it's closed, Robin can't help but open her mouth to the kiss, can't help her hands from finding Nancy's hips.
They kiss slowly, so Robin can hear every breath between them. They take their time, hands roaming, catching on denim and corduroy and bulky sweaters until they find all the right spots to hold, like they have all the time in the world instead of three short days.
Nancy's hand slips underneath Robin's sweater and finds the bare skin of her waist. Robin would have flinched at the coldness of her fingertips if Nancy hadn't picked the same moment to slide her tongue against Robin's, and shit, yeah, that was the hottest thing she'd ever experienced.
Half a second later, though, and while Robin is still processing the way Nancy tastes like toothpaste and green tea, the moment gets stripped of its title when Nancy runs her fingers up Robin's spine and shoves her way underneath her bra to splay over her back
(And, fuck, Robin had forgotten until just now that she's wearing the oldest, rattiest bra she owns, purely for comfort on the long plane ride and because she hadn't exactly anticipated Nancy wanting to shove a hand up her shirt practically the second she landed — Robin isn't typically an optimist).
Nancy deserves way better than an ancient, threadbare sports bra dated back to 1986 (look, it's just way too comfortable to part with). Robin's not exactly a lingerie kind of girl, but Nancy still deserves something.
Nancy deserves the whole fucking world. Every bit of it.
Robin's never met a person like Nancy before. She's never met someone who is both disarmingly beautiful and so frustratingly kind, so obsessively determined to do right by the people she cares about.
As Robin's hands come to cradle Nancy's face, her palms molding to every curve and angle, as she tips Nancy's chin up to deepen the kiss between them, she wonders how many people give back to Nancy the goodness, the compassion, the effort that she gives to the world around her, and as Nancy's other hand tangles in her hair, Robin promises herself that she would be one of them.
Nancy backs away, pulling Robin toward her bed until she lands on the mattress, the metal bed frame squeaking louder than Robin likes.
"Jesus, Nance," she mutters as Nancy crowds back into the space between Robin's thighs, curving her hand around the back of Robin's neck to tip her head up, "Your roommates."
"The one I share a wall with has a boyfriend," Nancy shakes her head, blown pupils darkening her eyes, "Call it, like, payback, or whatever."
And if Robin hadn't been able to help all of that, she certainly can't help the way she nods as Nancy finally pulls her sweater up and over her head.
i am weak to y'all's comments. they give me so much joy and so much motivation 3
title and lyrics are from I'm O.K. by Clover the Girl
chapter notes:
1. the T is the colloquial name for Boston's public transit system, the MBTA. i've lived in this city for years and i still don't know where it came from or why it's called that
1a. also if anybody cares, robin and nance would have needed to switch from the blue line to the green line to the red line to get to where nancy lives. what a nightmare.
2. 1.5 hours of research later and i can confidently say that boston's crime stats were worse than tacoma's in 1994 :) which is pretty obvious but i'd rather die than be wrong
3. yes, nancy's duck boots are from L.L. Bean. obviously.
4. do not ask me good places to eat in boston bc i will only be able to tell you trashy pizza joints srry
i'm on tumblr at livwritesstuff :)