Chapter Text
She's immediately mortified. She just isn't sure why. She's a successful woman in a male dominated field. She's a successful woman in a sector of a male dominated field that requires her to be stern, unflappable, and to strike fear in the hearts of people who have done heinous acts of all sorts. Nancy Wheeler has taken her shame and her mortification, her embarrassment and her self-consciousness and put them down like a particularly unsightly demo-creature.
But looking at the freckled nose of Robin Buckley. The expanse of her neck revealed by her messy, grown out pixie cut. Nancy is mortified.
She doesn't need a new mystery, but this is something that needs solved more than whatever it was she came here for.
She stacks her theories in neat lines:
- Midwestern courtesy, she's just sworn at someone who at this point is as good as a stranger
- Surprise, she hadn't know that someone she saved the world with was in the same city as her
- Her list falls apart here.
"Nancy! Nancy Wheeler, wow! Jan sent you? You do seem a little stressed, I prefer Italy but you seem like you'd like France."
Absent minded professor, Jan had said, and that is one way of describing the whirlwind that is Robin Buckley. Robin H. now, she's gotten married sometime since leaving Hawkins, settled into her skin. She drags Nancy into a broom closet masquerading as an office. Space made smaller by bookshelves on each wall encroaching into the usable space, stuffed so full the shelves are sagging under the weight of books and knickknacks. No photos on the shelves, but there's one on the desk beside a small monitor near the phone, turned away from prying eyes. And Nancy's eyes beg to intrude.
"Jan likes Paris, but you don't strike me as the Parisienne type, no offense. I mean it's been like, what, eight years so what do I know, maybe time has made you an eiffel tower type," she curls her nose, something in the thought disgusting her. Is it the thought of Nancy as a tourist, is it the tower itself? Jan has dropped a new mystery in her lap, everything about this Robin in front of her is new and fascinating. It makes her fingers itch with the need to unwrap, to find a peeling corner and pull until something new is revealed.
"I've got to stop spending- feel free to chime in here anytime, Nance. Have you been Vecna'd?"
That reminder of their past. The creature that sent her away. The mission completed, the evil defeated, Nancy a fighter without a fight sent off into the sunset to find a cause now that peace had made her home unfamiliar; according to Mike, anyway, who was having a little too much fun in his creative writing program.
"You got married?"
No, shit, she needed a translator. That’s why she came all the way out here. To speak with a professor, Robin, who speaks both of the languages she needs, apparently. She's one interview away from a goddamn pulitzer, she just needs a translator, and she's making small talk.
Robin has big eyes, they always look half lidded and sleepy. She favored a heavy brown liner in high school that turned lazy into seductive. Nancy isn't sure why she remembers that. Maybe because they're so wide now, open all the way to the point of distraction. Was it so weird that she might want to catch up with someone that might have been a friend. Trauma always entangled its way into her relationships in those days, it was always so hard to parse out what was what. She loved Jonathan, except she didn't without a tragedy. Steve had grown so much, except he wanted something from her she couldn't give. Robin was so much, except she was good in a crisis and threw a molotov with such grace.
Removed by time and by distance from everyone in Hawkins but her brother, and by extension Will and El, things cleared. Clarified. She never did the therapy thing, but she's worked on herself. Knows the boys she thought she loved wouldn't have been good for her, nor her for them. Removed from everyone who might have ever understood the woman she's become, save her brother and the two people he's kept so close to him as to become indistinguishable from, Nancy wonders if she might have been too hasty to chase her career so far.
Maybe she's lonely.
She still needs that translator.
"Yeah, uh, yep. We sent you an invitation, but it returned to sender; and your mom wasn't sure what your new address was and Mike can be so Mike."
"Oh."
And she's hit all of a sudden by an urge she hasn't had since Hawkins. To rage, to scream, to take the gun from her purse and squeeze the trigger again and again and again until the chest squeezing feeling that has taken over her disappears. She's almost 30 years old, how can this make her feel so small, so unsure. She's been a professional writer for longer than she hasn't these days, how can she not have the words for what she's feeling right now.
"So how should I credit you," she asks instead.
"Oh! You never said what this is for? Buckley is fine still, I mean- no I guess you're writing important, not that you weren't always- he's going to hate this." This is familiar, this is the Robin she remembers. Not the suave professor with the choppy Winona Ryder hair. The rambling one who seems to be talking more to herself than her companion. The one who can't run in heels and acts like lace was created specifically to ruin her life. The set of her shoulders when she decides on something. The flattened downturn of her mouth. "If my name's actually going to be in print, on whatever your current world changing crusade is now, make sure it's Harrington-Buckley."
She thinks she'd be less shocked if she'd been shot.
The door to Robin's office squeaks when it's opened, she isn't sure why she notices this. Except maybe as a holdover from the same battle hardened instincts she's never truly let go.
It doesn't matter. She doesn't register it quick enough. Barely hears, "Bobbie bird, you ready-"
Because all she can say is, "Bullshit!"