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There’s a part of Nancy that does, in fact, recognize how impulsive her plan is, but it’s a part of her that she listens to less and less these days.
It’s the same part of her that color codes her notes before every test even when she knows she can ace it without even studying. It’s the part that tries on six different outfits in the mirror every night before going to bed so she can find the perfect one that will make her look clever or serious or well put together at school the next day. It’s the part that only thinks it’s sensible because it’s doing what everyone in her life has ever told her to do, and more and more these days, she thinks it needs to either shut the hell up or just shrivel up and die.
Maybe that’s impulsive, too. Maybe she should worry about the urge to kill off another part of herself when so much of her has already been ripped away and left to rot somewhere in the last three years.
But she’s been worrying a lot lately, and the whole point of this plan is to stop doing that, even if it’s just for a week. For a day. For one fucking moment, please.
So she ignores that old, put together, logical part of her brain and shoves a few outfits—casual ones, comfortable ones, things she doesn’t have to plan and approve before she carefully hangs them on her closet door—into a duffel bag.
It’s not like she hasn’t thought this through at all. She has money—she hadn’t spent anything from her job at the Post until she was buying a shotgun at the War Zone. Her parents’ credit card doesn’t hurt, either. And she has her parents’ car; Mike will be annoyed he couldn’t keep practicing with his brand new learner’s permit, but he’ll get over it. She bought chips and cereal bars and a bag of apples, and she dug a cooler out of the pantry to pack a couple of sandwiches. It’ll last her a day or so, at least. She’d even stopped by Family Video that morning to return the small stack of movies she’d gotten at Robin’s recommendation before they become overdue when she’s gone.
She’ll stop at a payphone somewhere—after she’s put at least a couple states between herself and Hawkins—and tell Mike that she’s fine. It’s not like anyone will really be worried, anyway. Hell, if she closes her bedroom door behind her when she leaves, they might just think she’s holed up in her room the whole time.
It takes longer to sneak her bags out to the car than it does to actually pack them. But eventually Nancy slips out of her house and into the driver’s seat. She watches the doorway, sure Mike will come out to ask for a ride, or her mother will appear to watch her with sad, knowing eyes.
No one does. Nobody’s going to follow her. Maybe if they did, Nancy wouldn’t be so desperate to go.
She puts the car in reverse and backs out of the drive before someone can prove her wrong.
-
Someone proves her wrong.
She’s almost free, too. She stops for gas at the station on the edge of town, the one that technically isn’t even in Hawkins, even though it serves as the universal indicator that you’re officially too far into rural small town America. There’s no one there as she fills the tank, no one there as she digs around the passenger seat for a road map she already knows she was stupid enough to forget, no one there when she growls under her breath and marches inside to buy one.
But when she turns around, map in her hand and a water bottle tucked beneath her arm, Robin Buckley is glaring at her.
She gasps, mortifyingly. The water bottle slips and she has to squeeze her arm around it tight to keep it from falling.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” It comes out harsh. Heat prickles at the back of her neck, sharp and angry, embarrassed at how rude she sounds, at how startled she was.
It’s fine, she tells herself. Robin is always forgiving about these things.
“Asking you the same thing,” Robin says shortly, not sounding very forgiving at all. “What the hell are you doing, Nancy?”
“Getting gas.”
She arches a brow. “And a road map?”
“Is that a problem?”
“Why are you lying?”
“Why is it any of your business?” Nancy starts to walk around her without waiting for an answer. The water bottle slips even more, and she huffs and adjusts it in her arm, then spins back around to face Robin. “How did you even know I was here?”
Robin shrugs, and it’s far too casual for the fact that they’re fighting. Are they fighting? Nancy feels hot, agitated and helpless, the way she gets before she really, really wants to snap.
“It’s the last gas station before you get out of bumfuck nowhere Indiana,” Robin says. “Figured there was a good chance you were stopping here.”
It makes sense. It does. Except it also doesn’t at all, because even if Robin could make that—very educated—guess, it doesn’t explain—
“But how did you even know I was leaving? And how the hell did you get here?”
“The bus stops here on its way to Indy.” Robin nods toward the door.
Nancy looks over her shoulder and, yeah, sure enough, there’s a bus stop sign across the road.
“As for the first part of your question, you seemed a little off when you stopped by the video store this morning. And then Max saw you at the grocery store earlier, and she said you had your planning face on. So when Mike saw you throw a duffel bag into your car, he panicked and radioed everyone.”
“Oh.” It’s ineloquent, she knows. It’s stupid and dumbfounded but sue her—she has a hard time believing that Mike of all people was perceptive enough to think that something was wrong.
There’s nothing wrong. It’s not a big deal. She has a plan, even if she doesn’t really have a reason. She’s jumped into far worse situations with far less preparation before. Everything is fine.
And once she’s out of this stupid town, she can stop pretending that’s true.
“So, did you plan on saying goodbye at all?” Robin asks.
It’s sharp enough to sting, but the hurt draws Nancy back in. She pulls her thoughts together enough to bite back.
“I’m not leaving forever.”
“No?”
Nancy scoffs. “God, Robin, what do you think? That I’m going to go drive my car off a bridge?”
“I don’t know what to think, Nance!”
She’s too loud. At the other end of the room, the clerk clears his throat. Nancy feels heat creep up her neck again, but Robin appears to have no such shame. She steps forward, close enough that Nancy can feel the height difference between them.
“I thought Max just needed some space and it turned out she was cursed by a serial killer! I thought Steve and Dustin were just being dumb, but no—they had stumbled across a Russian conspiracy! I thought Barb ran away and—”
“Don’t,” Nancy warns.
Robin crosses her arms over her chest and glares at her. “You can’t just do this shit, Nance.”
She’s trying to act tough, but her voice cracks. Nancy deflates a little.
“I was going to call.”
“Before or after you ran off the bridge?”
“I wasn’t—” She cuts herself off in a huff, shaking her head to hide the reluctant, inappropriate smile she can feel creeping up on her. She closes her eyes and feels herself settle a little. “I’m sorry, Robin.”
Robin doesn’t respond. Nancy looks up at her again, suddenly nervous. But Robin’s expression has softened. She shakes her head—gently, her own reluctant smile pulling at her lips.
“It’s fine—I mean, it’s not. Don’t pull this shit again. But I’m not, like, mad, you know?” Robin drops her gaze. “Not that you really care for or need my approval anyway, but I just—I was worried.”
It touches her, but Nancy shakes her head and responds on instinct. “I’m fine.”
Robin snorts. “Fine people don’t skip town without an explanation.”
“I need to not be in Hawkins.”
It’s the explanation she cares to give—the only one she understands well enough to say out loud, even though she isn’t quite sure why she feels the need to give one at all. She expects Robin to press, to dig for a better answer than that. Or maybe to roll her eyes, because duh, they all want to not be in Hawkins.
But it’s not a want, for her. It’s a need. She can feel her hometown sticking to her skin. Like ash from the Upside Down lingering on her clothes and in her hair for days after spring break. Like blood staining the creases of her palms and drying beneath her nails until she got frustrated enough she spent an hour on the fifth of July scrubbing her hands raw. Like the memories that live like tar in her lungs, settling for a moment only to rise up at the smallest provocation and drown her from the inside out.
She keeps thinking that if she doesn’t get out soon, she’ll be infected beyond cure.
To her surprise, though, Robin doesn’t press. She looks pained, almost. Weary. For a split second, Nancy sees her own desperation reflected back at her.
She can’t stand it.
“So don’t try to stop me,” she says, short and impatient again.
But Robin surprises her once more. Her lips twitch and she holds her hands up. “As if I could ever stop you from doing something you wanted to do.”
Nancy has to fight hard not to smile back. It’s true—Robin has never tried to stop her. Most of the time, she falls perfectly into step right beside her.
“Do you want to come with me?”
Robin stares. Nancy stares, too, not entirely convinced she actually said it.
Until.
“Do…do you want me to go with you?”
Somehow, answering that is so much harder than asking it in the first place.
So, she doesn’t.
“Whether you’re in the car or not, I’m leaving as soon as I buy these.” She shakes the map a little and shifts the water bottle in her arm again. “And I’m not looking back.”
She turns on her heel and walks down the aisle toward the register. She doesn’t look back, but she does hear Robin shuffling along behind her. This time, with her back turned, she lets herself smile.
-
Robin is in the car when she pulls out of the gas station. It’s a distracting enough reality that Nancy doesn’t put in the tape she was going to before she starts driving, so they spend twenty impossible minutes in silence.
Robin sits in her passenger seat and tries not to fidget. Nancy shifts her hand around the steering wheel and tries not to tell her to relax. The highway stretches ahead of them, still looking too much like Hawkins to feel like anything at all.
Nancy keeps driving.
-
Robin asks if she has any tapes. Nancy points to the glove compartment, and a minute later Autoamerican is coming out of her speakers. Nancy relaxes a little into the seat. Out of the corner of her eyes, she sees Robin smile, looking a little pleased with herself.
-
They’re talking freely by the time they pass the first exit sign for Indianapolis. About music, about annoying customers, about Nancy’s own horror stories from the Post. About Steve or Mike, Jonathan and his weirdly close friendship with Argyle, how sweet it is watching Will and El hanging out together, how often they think Max is convincing El to skip school.
They don’t talk about their conversation at the gas station, or about the miles they’re steadily putting between themselves and Hawkins. The closest they get is when Robin pulls out the road map just to have something to do with her hands and says,
“You’re heading east.”
“Yeah.”
“…Emerson would be in full swing by now, huh?”
Nancy shakes her head. “That’s not the reason.”
“Okay.” Robin focuses back on the map, and they fall quiet again for a few miles.
-
They get out of Indiana, but Ohio looks so much the same that it really doesn’t matter. She keeps driving.
-
They park at a rest stop on the far side of Cleveland. Robin digs out crumbled up dollars for a vending machine dinner, but Nancy shoves one of the sandwiches into her hands and sits at a picnic table without a word. They eat quickly and quietly, and then they keep driving.
-
They stop for gas at a run-down old mart on the side of the highway, too late at night, and the cashier looks over Robin’s button up and suspenders—god, she’s still in her work clothes—and gives her a look so nasty Nancy regrets leaving her gun in the glovebox.
She grabs Robin’s wrist and pulls her back to the car.
They keep driving.
-
At Robin’s insistence—with a slightly frantic warning that Steve will now be worried about both of them—Nancy calls her house from a payphone.
“If it’s not Mike who picks up, I’m hanging up and trying again tomorrow.”
“Really?” Robin asks. “You’d hang up on your baby sister?”
Nancy scowls at her.
Mike does pick up, thankfully. He’s huffy and annoyed and he calls her an asshole when he asks where she is and all she can say is I don’t know, some rest stop in New York. But it’s clear he was worried, and she feels guilty for the first time since Robin caught her at the edge of town.
“What am I supposed to tell Mom?” he says.
“Where does she think I am?”
“I said you were hanging out with Robin and Steve—I couldn’t think of anything else!”
Nancy looks over her shoulder. Robin is keeping a respectful distance, standing a few feet away and stretching her calves on the edge of the sidewalk.
“Well. That’s half-true, at least.”
“You’re with Steve?”
“No.”
“Oh.” The disgust in his voice drops, replaced completely by pure confusion. “Wait, why is Robin with you?”
Good question, Nancy thinks. “Honestly, Mike, just tell Mom the truth.”
“What, that you ran away from town like a psycho?”
“I didn’t—why does everyone think I’m running away?”
“You didn’t even leave a note!”
She sighs and rubs her forehead. “I’m coming back.”
“Yeah. Now. You have to bring Robin home or Steve will never forgive you. Anyway, you really want me to tell Mom you decided to leave town randomly and don’t know where you are or when you’ll be back?”
“No. I want you to tell her Robin had a few days off so we decided to get out of town for a while.”
“That’s not the truth, though. You didn’t plan on taking Robin with you.”
“How do you know?”
“Because she freaked out when I told her you looked like you were leaving.”
Nancy looks over her shoulder again, but Robin has turned away now and put even more distance between them.
“Well,” she says after a moment. “It’s close enough to the truth. And if Mom gets upset, tell her I’m perfectly fine, I’m almost nineteen, and I’ll be back in a few days.”
“Why don’t you tell her?”
“I’m going to hang up on you now, Mike.”
“Fine. Whatever. I’m glad you’re not dead on the side of the road or whatever.”
Nancy closes her eyes. Why does everyone keep assuming that—
She shakes her head. “Good night, Mike,” she says pointedly, but she waits long enough for him to say it back before hanging up.
“That didn’t sound frustrating at all,” Robin says from her spot on the sidewalk.
Nancy rolls her eyes. “Phone’s all yours.”
She walks past Robin, switching places with her as Robin sets up at the phone and Nancy wanders a ways down the sidewalk. She hears Robin’s greeting, followed immediately by, “Slow down, dingus. We’re both fine.”
Nancy keeps walking, trying to get far enough away to tune her out without letting her out of sight. The only other vehicle around is a dark eighteen wheeler parked at the edge of the lot. The area around the building is well-lit enough that she could probably see something coming if danger did decide to show up.
It does nothing to put her at ease, though, and Robin doesn’t bother keeping her voice down as she talks to Steve, so Nancy sits herself down on the curb, stretches her legs out in front of her, and listens. Even with just Robin’s responses, she can feel how easy the conversation is. How fond it is—especially compared to the way she just spoke with Mike.
Robin says something about New York, then laughs at whatever Steve’s response is. Then she stops and mutters an embarrassed shut up through what sounds like a smile.
“I don’t know,” Robin says a minute later. Her voice drops before, “I’m not sure she does, either. I think that’s kind of the point.”
Nancy twists her neck and props her chin on her shoulder, watching her. Robin is picking at a sticker on the side of the phone box. Her brow is furrowed as she listens to whatever Steve says, but then she softens, smiling slightly.
“Slow down there, Lancelot. Like I said, we’re fine. Besides, we’re too far out now for you to catch us even if you tried.” A pause, then, “I mean, sure, you could try to track us down, but I’m not telling you our location, and we both know Nancy could evade the federal government if she wanted to, so good fucking luck.”
Nancy shakes her head and looks forward again. Of course Steve wants to chase after them. She remembers what Mike said. She has to come home now—someone has to bring Robin back to them all safely. If Robin hadn’t caught her, would Steve still want to chase her down? Would anyone?
But…Robin had caught her. Which means someone, at least, is willing to chase her down. She wonders if she could evade Robin. She wonders if she could, actually, evade the federal government. Maybe. She’s picked a few things up from Hopper and Murray over the summer.
She realizes she can’t hear Robin talking anymore and looks up. Robin is still at the phone, leaning against the box and gazing at her with this concerned, knowing look in her eyes. The kind that usually precedes her asking something no one else dares to ask.
She could evade the federal government, she decides. But evading Robin would be much harder.
“I don’t think I can drive anymore,” she says before Robin can find the courage to say whatever she wants to say. “I hope you’re okay with sleeping in the car, because I have no idea where to find a hotel around here.”
She says it evenly, confidently, like this is part of the plan and not just a byproduct of the fact that Nancy has no idea what she’s doing. But Robin only shrugs.
“I’ve slept in worse places.”
She starts walking back toward the car, leaving Nancy with the chilling mental image of the terrible places Robin has slept before.
She’s never quite been able to picture any of them beneath the mall. Not even when Dustin finally sat down and told everyone in great detail what happened. She especially couldn’t imagine Robin—who she knew as the girl sitting in the back of the classroom or halfway up the bleachers—trying to grab a couple measly hours of sleep on the hard metal floor of an elevator.
Or the unforgiving grip of a chair and leather binds. Steve had shown them the scars on his wrists from where he’d struggled to break loose. Robin had tugged her sleeves down over her own and glared at anyone who looked her way.
Nancy hurries to catch up with her and reaches out. Her fingers wrap around Robin’s wrist—thinner than she expects, tensing beneath her touch. Robin jerks for a second like she wants to pull away, but she stops herself and just looks at Nancy instead. The alarm fades and she raises an eyebrow expectantly.
“I’m…” But Nancy has no idea what she wants to say. That she’s sorry? She feels sorry, but she doesn’t know what for. That she’s glad Robin is here? Saying that feels even harder.
She doesn’t even know why she started speaking in the first place. She lets go of Robin and drops her gaze. Robin doesn’t say anything, not even when Nancy starts walking toward the car, still avoiding her eyes.
They’re parked close to the building and under one of the lights, and she decides that’s good enough for tonight. She digs out the blanket she keeps in the back of the car, decides she’s sick of the driver’s seat, and opens the door to the backseat instead.
She can picture Robin’s hesitation even before she looks over her shoulder and sees her standing there, debating internally. She’ll stay out there for minutes if Nancy lets her, so Nancy grabs her again—avoiding her wrist this time—and pulls her into the backseat with her.
They settle on opposite sides of the car. Robin bunches her sweatshirt up against the window and rests her head against it. Nancy sheds her cardigan and does the same on her side. She drapes the blanket over both their legs and hopes it doesn’t get too much colder tonight.
-
She wakes up shivering in the morning light. Nancy reaches instinctively for the blanket and pulls, then stops when she remembers there’s someone else with her.
She lifts her head. Robin is still asleep against her door, curled up tighter than she’d been last night. Cold, too, probably. Nancy leans over and adjusts the blanket higher around her, covering her again.
Dew coats the windows. There’s a little cloud on the glass where Nancy’s face had been. She reaches up and rubs her cold cheek, trying to press some warmth back into her skin. Then she glances at her watch. Not even seven yet.
“Why the hell are you awake?” Robin grumbles. Nancy looks over, but she hasn’t even raised her head. Her eyes are still closed.
Nancy debates telling her to go back to sleep. They could get a few more hours in. Take their time. It’s not like they have anywhere to be, or any idea of where to go.
But she’s cold. And stiff. She can just make out the blurry outline of the phone box through her dew-covered window, and she feels restless again remembering her conversation with Mike, Robin’s conversation with Steve.
When she looks back over, Robin’s eyes are open.
“I’m cold,” Nancy says, but it’s not really an answer. She sits up a little higher. “Want to get coffee?”
-
They stop at a gas station a couple miles down the road for stale donuts and terrible coffee. Robin is half asleep, blinking slowly and standing a little too close as Nancy pours them each a cup. But she pulls out a couple of wrinkled bills and pays before Nancy can stop her.
“You bought gas, that’s much more expensive,” she says through a yawn when Nancy scowls at her.
“Yeah, with my parents’ money.”
“Cool. Keep buying gas with your parents’ money, and I can shell out a couple bucks for shitty gas station coffee.”
-
They’re on the road again before the sun has even truly made it into the sky. Nancy tells Robin she can sleep again if she wants, but Robin shakes her head, asks which tape she wants to play, and spends the morning singing under her breath in the quiet dips of easy, effortless conversation.
-
She thinks she should feel more tired, more restless, more achingly heavy as they put mile after mile after mile behind them. But Robin tells pointless stories and asks Nancy easy questions and even goads her into playing twenty questions a few times. Robin wins, and she laughs when Nancy gets more and more competitive about it each round.
She does get sick of the car, though. So as the clock on her dash creeps closer to noon, she glances over at Robin and says, “I still have stuff for a picnic. Want to find a park or something for lunch?”
“Yeah,” Robin says, oddly soft. “Yeah, that sounds nice.”
It takes longer than it should to find a place—apparently, for all of Robin’s vast knowledge about things Nancy has never even heard of, she struggles to read a road map. But they figure it out eventually, and Robin reads the street names in funny voices, and throws out random remarks, and Nancy finds herself smiling even though she really is starting to get hungry.
The park is quiet, and pretty. There’s a small brick building with restrooms and a water fountain beside the parking lot. Beyond that, a scattering of old picnic tables and small trees—most of them already fading into yellows and reds—makes up the bulk of the park. There’s a playground at the far end, too, but it’s empty. The only other people here are a young family with a little boy who is playing in the dirt at the base of a tree, and a little girl who watches him enviously while she sits dutifully beside her mother on the bench of a picnic table.
Or maybe Nancy is projecting.
“Hey,” Robin says before Nancy can move to one of the tables. “Want to go eat on the playground?”
Nancy glances at the family, then back at her. “Hell yes.”
They settle on the swings. Robin digs a rut in the wood chips with her toe and props a bag of chips up between them. It’s surprisingly stable, even when she leans over dangerously to scoop out a handful. Nancy twists back and forth in her swing, letting the chain pull against her seat as she unwraps her sandwich carefully.
“Did your family ever go on road trips?” Nancy asks her. She looks across the park. The little girl is watching her and Robin now, but she drops her gaze quickly when she notices Nancy.
Robin shakes her head. “They’ve traveled all across the country, but after they had me they decided to settle down. Just my luck, really.” She takes a big bite of her sandwich and looks across the park, too, chewing thoughtfully. “You?”
“Just to other parts of Indiana to see my grandparents on holidays and stuff. I don’t really count it.”
“I wouldn’t either.” Robin drags her foot across the ground, drawing a line in front of her. “If you could go anywhere, where would you go?”
“I’ve never thought about it, really.”
“Really?” Robin looks up at her, eyes widening at Nancy’s head shake. “Alright. Then…where are you going now?”
Nancy smirks. “You say that like you’re not along for the ride, too.”
“Well, yeah. But I’d be happy ending up anywhere.”
“Oh yeah?”
She nods. “You know, I used to want to live in France? I mean, I still do, but this was back when I thought Hawkins was the most boring place on earth, and if I didn’t leave, I’d die.” She sighs a little, weary and reminiscent and, oddly, amused. “It sure isn’t boring anymore, but I do think it might still kill me someday.”
“Not on my watch.” Nancy’s voice is dark, serious—the kind of tone that used to make Steve nervous, that would have Jonathan immediately trying to calm her down.
Robin doesn’t do that. She smiles down at her sandwich, and Nancy notices a tinge of pink in her cheeks. She reaches down for the bag of chips, maybe for something to do. Nancy follows suit, and she doesn’t even care when she can feel salt and crumbs sticking to her fingers.
“Do you really think it’s over?” Robin asks.
Yes, she tries to say, but it dies on her tongue. She wants to say it. She wants to be reassuring. She pictures Vecna’s head separated from his body, remembers El’s voice, exhausted but resolute as she said he’s gone. She could say it’s over. She could pretend she believes it, for Robin’s sake.
“El says it is,” she says instead.
It’s the best she can come up with. Robin looks at her, eyes softening with an affection so clear it makes Nancy look away.
“I know what El says. And I guess she would be the expert—god knows I’m not questioning her anytime soon. But that’s not what I asked.”
Nancy twists her swing. She plants her feet and pushes until the seat squeezes uncomfortably against her, the link where the chain meets rubber pinching her thigh.
“Whether it is or not…” She lifts her foot and the tension releases. She misses it. Stupidly. “I’m never going to feel like it’s over.”
-
Later, once they’ve balled up their trash and shoved it in a can on their way back to the car, and once they’ve stopped at the restrooms and filled up their water bottles at the fountain, Nancy spots the family across the parking lot. The mother looks haggard as she loads the kids into the backseat. The father stands a few feet away, scowling at nothing as he finishes off a cigarette.
They get into the car. Nancy starts to put her key in the ignition, but then she stops. She turns and stares at Robin.
Robin notices her and fidgets in her seat. “Um. What?”
“Where do your parents think you are?”
She laughs. “If you’re worried about kidnapping charges, don’t be. My parents won’t even notice I’m gone, and if they did, they adore you, so.”
“They do?”
It takes her by surprise—not that they like her; parents always like her. But that she’s so pleased by the confirmation.
She hadn’t even been trying with Robin’s parents, really. She hadn’t even realized that was who was standing with Robin at graduation. She hadn’t cared enough to look—she was too focused on reaching Robin through the crowd, on getting a hug from someone who knew how much of an accomplishment walking across that stage really was.
“Mhm. You should’ve heard my dad after graduation. ‘That Nancy girl, I like her,’” she says in a rough approximation of a generic man’s voice. “‘She’s the type of girl who’s gonna overthrow the government one day.’”
Nancy smiles a little sheepishly. “Guess he clocked how angry I was that day.”
“Well, he’s also heard me talk about you, to be fair.”
“And that’s what got him to like me? Really?”
“Um, yeah? He and Mom are too mellowed out to be into the protests anymore, but they still respect the spirit when they see it.”
“Remind me to never introduce our parents,” Nancy says.
“Uh, no. Definitely not. Not unless you want to send Ted to an early grave.” But Robin looks over at her, grinning mischievously. “I think your mom could seriously benefit from sharing a joint with mine, though.”
Nancy laughs, a little disbelieving. But in all honesty, there have been worse ideas.
-
“You know,” Robin says, a few hours and a couple hundred aimless miles later, “you didn’t really answer me earlier.”
“About what?”
“If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go?”
“…I’ve always wanted to see the ocean.”
-
They find another parking lot, and Nancy swears up and down she’ll find them a hotel tomorrow.
What she doesn’t say is that she doesn’t feel fully like a person, or that she can’t imagine just walking into a hotel lobby—or even just the shitty reception desk of a roadside motel—and booking a room.
It’s not that she doesn’t feel grown up enough to do it; she’s done it before. It’s not that she doesn’t have the money, either, because she has plenty specifically for this purpose.
But with hours of driving behind her and no clear mission ahead of her, she just…can’t.
They find a spot outside some grocery store and try to settle down, but the streetlamp at the edge of the parking lot flickers. Nancy is up and crawling to the front seat before Robin can even finish asking if they can find a different place to park.
They do. And this time, when they curl up, Robin stretches her leg out to rest against Nancy’s. The weight is warm. Grounding. Real, in a way she doesn’t think she could quite grasp in a hotel room.
Nancy presses her smile into the window and falls asleep.
-
Something twitches against her leg. She’s aware of it—focused in on it, trying to determine if it’s a threat or not—before she’s even fully awake.
And then she hears Robin’s choked whimper.
Nancy pushes herself upright. Her eyes are adjusted enough to the dark that the car feels oddly bright. She can clearly see the way Robin’s face scrunches up—the painful furrow of her brow, the wobble of her mouth.
“Scoops,” she mutters. She’s curled in on herself, shoulders up to her ears, her hands trapped between her head and the window. “Work for Scoops.”
Realization hits. Cold dread seeps through Nancy, waking her up completely. She slides across the seat and grabs Robin’s arm to shake her gently.
“Robin.” Another whimper is all she gets in response. She squeezes a little. “Robs, you’re dreaming. Wake up.”
“Code—” Robin gasps. Her eyes fly open and she jerks back. Her head knocks hard into the window. She winces, one hand coming up to her head while the other yanks away from Nancy. Her legs twitch and flail, adrenaline probably pouring through her as she comes down. Nancy grabs her thigh and pushes it into the seat to avoid getting kicked.
Robin freezes.
Nancy watches the moment she wakes fully. Her eyes widen. The wince disappears, replaced by something so fearful Nancy can feel it in her own chest. She realizes she’s still holding Robin’s leg—her thigh, pinning her to the seat. Heat creeps up her cheeks and she lets her go. Robin curls tighter against the car door, trying to make herself small.
“Robin—”
“I’m sorry—”
“Stop.” There’s that serious voice again, commanding and stern. Robin doesn’t move. “Come here,” Nancy says, softer this time, but still an order.
Or maybe it’s just that Robin obeys. She stays hunched over, shoulders curled up and in, not quite meeting Nancy’s eyes. But she does lean closer—close enough for Nancy to wrap her arms around her and hug her.
It’s easier, in the late hour. In the cold. In the dark. She still second guesses herself—wondering if she’s too close or too much or not enough at all—but it doesn’t take much effort to swat those thoughts away and focus on rubbing warmth into Robin’s arms. She trembles against her. Nancy pulls the blanket up and around both of them, draping it over their shoulders and using it as an excuse to press herself as much around Robin as possible.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
Robin doesn’t answer. Nancy runs her palm up and down her arm again, relaxing a little as she feels Robin loosen up against her just slightly.
“You were talking about Scoops,” she says. Robin tenses again, and she immediately regrets it. But she keeps talking anyway. “Scoops and codes.”
“You already know what it was about, then.”
“I didn’t ask what it was about. I asked if you wanted to talk about it.”
“You didn’t go on this trip to listen to my bullshit, Nancy.”
“It’s not bullshit.” Her voice is sharp. Harsh. Robin flinches a little, and Nancy has the sudden, stupid urge to cry.
But then Robin lifts her head enough to look at Nancy, and she’s the one with an apology in her eyes.
“I know,” she whispers. “I’m sorry. I just—you don’t have to do this.”
But Nancy is already doing it. She’s already holding Robin, and she doesn’t think she can let go now. She certainly doesn’t want to. So she shifts them both to sit a little more comfortably against each other.
Robin takes the movement as a dismissal and tries to pull away, but Nancy tightens her grip and pulls her closer. When Robin settles against her, she moves her hand to run the ends of her hair through her fingers.
“I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours,” Nancy says.
It comes out awkward, halfway between playful and earnest, and she isn’t sure exactly what she’s trying to say here other than the fact that it’s okay. It does matter. She’s spent too long trying to live with all these broken, fearful parts of herself to hear Robin call it bullshit now.
Robin squints at her, like she’s waiting for a trick. Nancy can feel herself warming up between the blanket and the gentle weight of Robin. She decides to be brave.
“Mine is always things Vecna showed me,” she says. “That one might be obvious. But, um, it changes, sometimes. The people change.”
“The people?” The disbelief is gone. Robin is simply listening now.
Nancy clears her throat. “Yeah. Like…I told you all I saw my mom, and Mike and Holly.”
Recognition floods Robin’s gaze. “Oh.”
“Yeah. So…that. They’re usually still there, but sometimes there are others. Jonathan and Steve. The kids.”
You.
She doesn’t say it. She thinks she will, but it’s too heavy on her tongue; she shies away at the last minute.
Her grip tightens on Robin anyway, seeking comfort instead of comforting. Robin won’t meet her eyes, but she doesn’t pull away, either.
“I’ve had that,” she says quietly. Nancy sighs and leans her forehead against Robin’s shoulder. “It—it’s always Starcourt, for me. Even with everything that happened last spring. Even though the Upside Down is objectively more terrifying. I just…I knew what was happening then, you know? I had no fucking clue at the mall.”
“Steve said you saw the gate before any of them.”
“Yeah. I thought they were, like, testing weapons or some shit.” She laughs hollowly. Nancy feels it in her own chest. “Is it bad that I wish that’s what they were doing?”
“I think it makes sense.”
Robin sighs. “Anyway, I—there was a moment when, um. I don’t think I’ve ever talked about this, actually. But there was a moment when I thought Steve was dead. They—they dragged him in all beat up, a-and for a second—but it’s that. That I dream about. Among other things, but it always comes back to that moment. And sometimes it’s not Steve. It’s Dustin or Erica. Or, after spring break it was always Max. Or it’s Will or Lucas or Mike, or—or you.”
Nancy lifts her head at that, but Robin isn’t looking at her. She tries to imagine it. Robin screaming for her, begging her to be alive the way Nancy knows she begged for Steve.
Tell her, a voice in the back of her mind urges. I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours. Robin had been honest. Nancy can, too.
But the words don’t come. Before she can figure it out, shape them in her mouth, take the breath she’s suddenly aching for and just fucking say it, Robin shakes her head and leans a little more heavily against her.
“Sorry I woke you up,” she whispers.
“Don’t be.”
Nancy rubs her arm again, settling for this if she can’t be brave enough for anything else. She glances around the car. It feels bigger, suddenly. The world outside seems darker, vast and endless. She instinctively pulls Robin a little closer and feels smaller, more scared, by the second.
But she doesn’t let her go. They fall asleep like that after a while, and in the morning, they’re still intertwined.
-
Emerson hadn’t been on her mind when she packed her bags, but she does take care to steer clear of Massachusetts entirely. They’ve been cutting through Vermont and New Hampshire instead. The colors are nice. Reds and oranges and golds more vibrant than Nancy has ever seen them—colorful enough that she remembers the woods can be pretty instead of nightmarish.
She sneaks glances at Robin, who sits with her cheek pressed to the window. There are shadows beneath her eyes and she’s been quiet all morning, but she’s smiling now as they drive through the mountains, and Nancy thinks she looks golden, too.
-
They end up on the coast of Maine, further north than Nancy really intended—if she intended anything at all. So they meander down Route 1. The air is cold any time they step out of the car. Clouds hang low over the highway, turning the entire coast gray. There’s a sharpness to the air, an edge of anticipation at the forefront of every chilled breeze.
Nancy kind of loves it.
They stop at some tiny coastal town to fill up the car and stretch their legs. It’s there, pinned to the bulletin board of the gas station they end up at, that Nancy spots the flier for beach rentals.
Robin catches her looking at it. “Whatcha thinking, Nance?”
“What are the odds they have a place that isn’t booked?”
“Late September? In a tiny town no one’s ever heard of?” Robin bounces on her toes a little. “It’s not impossible, I suppose.”
“What do you think?”
“I think this is your trip.”
Nancy turns to meet her eyes. “What do you think?” she asks again.
Robin tilts her head. “It’s worth calling.”
So they do. The woman she speaks to sounds vaguely surprised that Nancy is asking after places, but she does tell her they have a couple small houses not booked up. She tells her about one that’s an hour or so down the coast. She warns Nancy that it’s a bit rundown, little more than a glorified shack, but it’s in her price range.
Nancy looks up at Robin, who is leaning in to listen to the conversation. She raises an eyebrow. Robin shrugs, a smile tugging at her lips.
“When can we check in?”
-
It really isn’t much. The entire place is stuffy and stale and smells like salt. The paint on the siding is chipping and the ugly, sun-faded wallpaper on the inside is peeling off the walls. There’s one main room with a bed against the wall and a small but open kitchen, and a tiny bathroom tucked into the back of the house.
But it faces the ocean, and it’s only a short walk down to the rocky, private beach. They open the windows and let the sea breeze roll in, and Nancy finds a stack of clean, surprisingly soft blankets in the little closet beside the bathroom, and, well, it’s like Robin said. They’ve definitely experienced worse.
They eat the last of the food Nancy packed on the front porch, listening to the waves roll in. Robin can’t stop watching the water.
“It just…doesn’t end,” she says eventually.
Nancy smiles into the apple she’s eating. “I mean. It does eventually.”
“Logically, yeah, sure. But look at that, Nance. Tell me you aren’t going to just drop off the end of the world if you keep going.”
“Are you telling me you believe the earth is flat now, too?”
Robin grabs a chip from the bag between them and throws it at her. It hits the porch beside Nancy’s knee. “I’m trying to bask in the raw power of nature here, Nance. Work with me a little.”
“I’m not known for my collaborative skills.”
“That’s just ‘cause most of your coworkers are shitty.”
“Were. Past tense. My coworkers got turned into mind flayer goo, remember?”
Robin bites the inside of her cheek. She shifts uncomfortably, and Nancy wonders if she’s gone too far, spoken just a little too carelessly about something so objectively horrifying.
“I was talking about Jonathan, actually,” Robin mumbles.
Nancy laughs, short and unexpected. Robin stares at her.
“Sorry, just—” She clears her throat, trying to choke down her smile. “I guess you’re not wrong, technically.”
“It was mean. I shouldn’t have—”
“Hey, he’s not here to hear it.”
Robin looks at her carefully. But then she shrugs. “Guess not. Either way, my point stands. I find you a delight to work with.”
“Now that is definitely not true.” Nancy picks up the chip she’d thrown and sends it back at her. Robin jumps as it hits her forehead. “After the way I spoke to you in the library? And dragging you to a mental hospital? No way you think I’m a delight to work with.”
“Are you kidding?” Robin’s voice is soft, now—softer than she expects. Not a hint of teasing in it. She turns and stares down the beach again. “I was in awe of you that whole week.”
“I was an asshole,” Nancy says, a little hoarsely.
“You don’t have to be perfect to have my respect, Nance.”
She stares. This time when Robin looks over, there’s a knowing smile already tugging at her lips.
-
They take turns in the bathroom that night. It’s a relief to shower off two and a half days of driving, even if the space is cramped and musty.
But the main room smells fresher now, and it’s pleasantly cool with the evening breeze they’ve been letting in through the screen door.
Robin goes after her, and Nancy takes the time to lock the front door, shove her bags against the wall, and spread the soft, heavy comforter across the bed.
When Robin exits the bathroom, she lingers at the edge of the room, shifting her weight nervously. Nancy looks up at her—dressed in a pair of gym shorts and a dumb Maine t-shirt with a lobster across the chest that she’d picked up at the gas station they visited earlier. Her legs are long and warm in the low light of the lamp. Her wet hair leaves damp spots on her collarbone and across her shoulders. Her eyes flicker across the bed Nancy is already laying in, and with no rings on her hands to fidget with, she starts tugging at the skin between her fingers.
“I-I can take the floor.”
“Don’t you dare,” Nancy says. She’s left half the bed empty, anyway. She pulls the blanket back and scowls at Robin until she walks over and slips underneath it.
She lies stiffly on her back, staring up at the ceiling. Nancy tugs the blanket up over them and rolls onto her side to watch Robin. It feels familiar in a way that she doesn’t quite expect, but it doesn’t surprise her, either. She thinks about that motel room with Jonathan, and how she’d known what her feelings were even as she skirted coyly around them.
She’s less coy now. Less confident. But less frustrated, too.
Robin’s hair is surprisingly dark when it’s wet. She glows a little in the lamplight. Nancy thinks that if she left Hawkins without her, she would’ve turned back before the day was even over.
“Can we leave the lamp on?” Robin asks the ceiling. Her voice is so small.
“I can’t sleep with it off, either,” Nancy says, whispered like a confession. She sees Robin’s soft smile, feels her relax a little further into the mattress. She wants to confess more.
She rolls onto her back instead and drifts off to the gentle rhythm of the waves, and of Robin’s quiet breaths.
-
There are no nightmares, but Nancy wakes up in the middle of the night anyway. She feels Robin pressed against her side, her arm draped over Nancy’s hip. The bed around her is soft and deliciously warm. Nancy cuddles closer to her without thinking about it, and she’s asleep again within seconds.
-
The bed is cold when she wakes in the morning. The breeze through the window is just a little too chilly. And she’s alone.
She’s up and out of bed, stumbling against the sheets tangled around her legs, before she’s even fully conscious.
She doesn’t have to go far to find Robin, though. She’s standing at the kitchen counter, perfectly within view once Nancy actually looks. Nancy forces herself to breathe. She presses her palm to her racing heart and digs her nails into her skin through her shirt, as if the pain will help her recalibrate.
She untangles herself from the sheets she accidentally dragged off the bed, but she bundles the comforter in her arms and pulls it around her shoulders. There’s still some warmth left to it, like Robin hasn’t been gone from under it that long. She keeps it draped around her as she shuffles across the room.
“Morning,” Robin says.
She turns with the greeting and pauses, looking Nancy up and down. Her eyes sparkle. She smiles, fond and amused and so, so soft in the cool light that’s drifting in through the window. Nancy wonders if she feels as soft as she looks. She wants to cup Robin’s face and run her thumb across her lips just to see.
“I made coffee,” she says. “But I don’t know how you like yours when it’s not barely passable gas station coffee.”
“Is there sugar?” Nancy asks. She can’t tear her gaze away from Robin’s soft, soft face.
“Yeah. No cream, though.”
“We should get some. We should go shopping today.”
Robin nods and turns back around, breaking the spell. Nancy walks over to join her at the counter. There’s a coffee pot—warm and humming—and two pale blue mugs. Nancy pours coffee into both of them. Robin slides the sugar across the counter, then raises an eyebrow as Nancy puts a few heavy spoonfuls into her cup.
“Full of surprises,” she says under her breath, probably to herself. Nancy looks up at her and winks.
-
The town they’re in is even smaller than Hawkins, but there’s still a bakery and a grocery store and a seafood shack jutting out over the water all within walking distance.
They grab muffins from the bakery for breakfast and sit on the boardwalk with them. Robin watches the seagulls flying overhead with a look of wide-eyed wonder, though she tenses up and leans a little closer toward Nancy when one drops down to the ground and starts hopping closer. Nancy bites back her laugh and decides that’s a good time to get up and go find the grocery store.
It’s not until she’s walking through the store with a basket dangling from her arm that she realizes she has no idea what to get. The only thing she can think of is more sandwiches. Robin shakes her head fondly, takes her hand, and pulls her along through the aisles.
She gets pancake mix and eggs and bacon, little deli meats and crackers and a couple blocks of fancy cheeses, grapes and apples and a pack of hot dogs.
“Hot dogs?” Nancy asks. “Really?”
“Um, yeah? Didn’t you see the firepit on the beach?” She tosses a bag of marshmallows into the basket, too.
-
The sun comes out as they make their way back down the boardwalk, warmer and stronger than they’ve seen it since they reached the coast. Robin strips her flannel off and ties it around her waist, and Nancy finds herself staring at the way the freckles that cover her shoulders and collarbones glow in the sun.
-
They put the groceries away and head immediately for the beach. Neither of them have swimsuits—hell, Robin only has the clothes she was wearing to work the day they left, a couple clearance outfits from a general store they passed in Vermont, and that stupid lobster shirt.
But Robin keeps staring at the water any time a moment of quiet passes between them, so Nancy stands up and holds her hands out to her.
They walk down to the water together. The rocky ground fades into softer sand, and they kick off their shoes and tuck them up against the larger boulders that border their little beach. Robin loses her patience, then. She runs forward, pulling Nancy along with her, and wades boldly into the water.
It’s cold—way too cold to actually be swimming. But it’s harsh and fierce and biting, and it reminds Nancy that she’s alive. She’s breathing. She exists in a world that holds more than just trauma and fear and people who have known her since before she was born.
She looks over and sees Robin holding her arms out and tilting her head back as a wave builds and builds, rushing toward her. It crashes into her and she disappears beneath the surface. Fear coils tight around Nancy’s chest, but then Robin is emerging again, a few feet closer now, pushing her hair from her face and spitting out saltwater.
“Make a mistake?” Nancy asks her even as she starts wading over to help her back up.
Robin grins. “I regret nothing.”
-
They leave the beach house again as the sun starts to set and return half an hour later with a bundle of firewood from the general store. Robin takes it upon herself to set up the firepit. She’s meticulous, balancing every log just so. Her tongue pokes through her teeth as she stuffs in twigs and grass and tightly rolled pages of the newspapers that were piled on the porch when they showed up.
She has a fire crackling in a matter of minutes.
“Where’d you learn to light a campfire?” Nancy asks her.
“Library books.”
“You’re joking.”
Robin grins. “Dead serious. I begged my parents so many times to take us camping—you should see some of their photo albums. They’d have these bonfires with their friends, I swear the flames would be like ten feet tall. But we never went.”
“Never?”
“Like I said, they’d pretty much settled down by the time I came around. And they’re working most of the time, so…” Robin shrugs. “Still. All that pointless research came in handy eventually, didn’t it?”
“Color me impressed.”
Robin beams. The firelight dances in her eyes. “That’s all I wanted. We should let it sit for a little bit, get some good embers burning under there. Then we can cook the hot dogs.”
-
Robin makes them walk down the boardwalk again the next morning so they can find a payphone. She calls Steve and talks to him for a solid twenty minutes, but she keeps turning to watch Nancy as she does so. Nancy sits with her legs dangling over the water and does her best to hide her smile every time Robin forgets what she was trying to say.
Her own conversation lasts just as long, but only because her mother catches wind of who Mike is talking to and hops on the line before he can warn her. Nancy spends ten minutes apologizing and assuring her she’s fine, then another ten minutes dodging questions about what she’s doing and why.
But it ends eventually, and when she finally gets to hang up, Robin is sitting there watching the boats sailing across the water in the distance, her hair fluttering around her face in the wind. Nancy walks over and sits next to her, and together they bask in a world so different Nancy can almost pretend she’s finally managed to escape it all.
-
They buy a pack of cards before heading back to the house and spend the afternoon sitting on the floor and playing Blackjack, listening to the waves.
“I’m not boring you, am I?” Robin asks only half-jokingly as she shuffles between rounds. “I’d hate to see you go to all this effort just to sit on the floor and play Blackjack with me.”
Nancy watches her fingers bend and flex as she bridges the deck. “I like Blackjack better than solitaire,” she says, a little distracted.
Apparently it’s a satisfactory enough answer, because Robin just smiles to herself and deals.
-
On their third morning there, Robin finds a dusty old radio at the back of the closet and plugs it in on the kitchen counter. She hums along to an oldies station while flipping pancakes, seemingly unaware that Nancy is watching her, entranced.
Robin reaches for her coffee mug without looking, then wrinkles her nose when she takes a sip.
“Jesus, Nance, how much sugar did you put in this?”
“Why are you drinking my coffee?” Nancy asks. She realizes she’s giggling. Robin turns to scowl at her, but she can’t hold it. She breaks into a sheepish smile.
“Got distracted. Here.” She presses Nancy’s mug into her waiting hands, then takes her own and drinks. “Much better.”
“I’m not sure I appreciate the judgment, Buckley.”
“Oh, this isn’t judgment. It’s pure, unadulterated disbelief. Never in a million years would I have guessed that Nancy Wheeler has a bigger sweet tooth than me.”
Nancy rolls her eyes. “Only when it comes to coffee.”
“That’s even more surprising! You’re basically a hard-boiled detective at age eighteen, Nance. You should be drinking coffee as bitter as the shitty hand you’ve been dealt in life.”
“Now you’re just being dramatic.”
Robin breaks into a grin. “Guilty as charged.” She spins back around and returns to the stove, going straight back to humming as she does so. Nancy leans against the wall and cradles her mug to her chest.
She’s been dealt plenty of worse hands than this.
-
Robin wants to go swimming again later that morning. Nancy takes one look at the gray skies and declares it way too cold. She goes out to sit on the beach anyway as Robin wades into the water. She’s getting goosebumps just by sitting out in the breeze, but Robin dives through an oncoming wave without even flinching.
“Nancy,” she practically sings from the edge of the water. Nancy shakes her head again, and Robin pouts. “Come on. Please?”
“I’m cold just looking at you.”
The pout disappears and a smirk takes its place. Nancy narrows her eyes.
“Don’t you dare.”
Robin starts walking up the beach.
“Robin Buckley, I swear to god, if you come near me—”
She clambers to her feet and tries to get away, but Robin catches her around the waist and sends them both sprawling across the sand. She’s dripping wet and freezing cold, and Nancy squeals and swats at her.
But she’s laughing—laughing so hard she can feel herself shaking against Robin, laughing so hard she can’t muster the strength to push her away, laughing so hard she feels tears in her eyes, and then down her cheeks, and then Robin is shifting her grip around her to hold her closer because she’s actually crying, these full, unconcealed sobs crashing through her as relentlessly and inescapably as the waves lapping against the shore.
-
They lay there beneath a cool, dreary sky for longer than Nancy cares to keep track of. Even after she calms enough to breathe normally again, Robin stays beside her, arms wrapped around her, seemingly content to just hold her for a while.
But eventually—once the tears have cooled against Nancy’s cheeks, and Robin is half-dry and getting goosebumps along the parts of her not pressed against Nancy—Robin pulls them to their feet and guides them back up to the house. She brushes the sand off Nancy’s clothes, then her own. She sits Nancy on the bed, then goes to the kitchen and cuts up the meats and cheeses and places them on a place with grapes and crackers. She brings it and a glass of water to Nancy, passing them gently into her hands before leaning forward and pressing a light, hesitant kiss to her hairline.
“I’m going to shower,” she whispers against Nancy’s head. “I’ll be back soon, but call me if you need anything, okay?”
Nancy nods. She feels a little bit like a child. It reminds her of the days she’d spend at home with just her mom, before two younger siblings took most of her mother’s attention. Back when she could spend the day bundled in blankets and watching her favorite movies while her mom gently ran her fingers through her hair, and neither of them would feel bad about doing nothing when they went to bed that night.
Robin steps into the bathroom. Nancy sips at the water and picks at her food. She feels a little drained, a little tender, a little shaky. But it’s in a satisfying way, like she just finished a good workout. Or like she’s collapsing in bed after a long day of hard work that actually pays off. She settles into herself a little more as the minutes pass.
She doesn’t say anything when Robin comes back out of the shower. Robin sits beside her and steals some of the food, smiling when Nancy rolls her eyes. Nancy scoots closer and leans her head on Robin’s shoulder.
-
The clouds don’t fully go away, but they thin enough that the sun can mostly shine through anyway. Nancy is the one to suggest they go on a walk, but Robin nods eagerly and without hesitation.
She bundles up in a long blue cardigan while Robin pulls on the flannel she had the other day. They venture slowly, aimlessly, up the shoreline. Soft sand fades to coarse beach grass fades to fields of stone, mixed together and worn smooth by the water. They step carefully over the rocks. Nancy keeps close enough to Robin that she can grab her arm and steady her whenever a boulder shifts beneath her.
Whenever her focus isn’t consumed by keeping her balance, Robin gets distracted by, well, everything. She runs her fingers through the swaying grass or stops to stare at the way the waves crash into and rise up against the boulders that jut out into the sea. She bends over to pick up every weird little rock or shell she finds, cradling every single one like it’s precious beyond value.
Nancy finds she wants to look at them, too, to turn them all gently over in her hands and ask them how they got to be so lucky as to capture the interest of Robin Buckley.
-
She fights sleep that night. It should be easy, slipping into the exhaustion that’s been heavy in her bones all day. But there’s a part of her that knows what will happen. She expects it even as she drifts off watching the silhouette of Robin’s face in the lamplight.
She knows it’s happening almost before it actually does. She can feel her body trapped, and she knows she just has to wake up even as she fights uselessly.
Vecna lifts his hand over her face, and she knows exactly whose body she’s going to see bleeding out on the ground.
But then it’s all gone. There’s a warm light against her eyes and warmer arms holding her close and—
“—just dreaming, Nance, you’re okay. I promise, you’re okay.”
Nancy makes some awful, wet, choked noise and buries her face against Robin’s chest. Robin keeps speaking softly. She runs her hands over Nancy’s hair and down her back, every touch soft and steady and soothing. Every stroke seems to brush the shadows and the cold and the memory of Vecna’s voice from her mind. The fear ebbs slowly away, drifting back out to sea.
“See?” Nancy mumbles into her shirt when she’s no longer shaking as much. “Not bullshit.”
She feels more than hears Robin laugh. “No. It’s not.”
“I’m sorry I woke you.”
“Hypocrite,” Robin says, closer to her ear than she expects. Nancy sniffs and hides a little further against her.
She is, though. She’s a hypocrite. She feels like she should apologize for that, too.
But nothing she thinks she’s supposed to say ever comes out right around Robin, so instead she says, “I see you.”
There’s a quiet pause, then, “Um, I mean. I’m right here and everything. But your eyes are definitely closed, and—”
“No,” Nancy says, though she’s laughing a little. It makes her voice shake. It makes her wonder if she’s not actually just crying again. “I mean—in the dream. When he shows me people. I said I saw the others. I didn’t tell you.”
“Nance—”
“I see you.” She sees her now, too. It’s an image she can never truly shake. Robin torn apart by Upside Down beasts, like in her dreams. Strangled by the vines in the Creel house, like in her memory. Limbs snapped and eyes bleeding, like Fred and Max. Slumped in a chair in a cold, metal room underground, a bullet hole in her head, blood matting her hair.
“I didn’t tell you,” she repeats when she realizes Robin is too quiet. “I should’ve told you.”
“It’s hard.” Robin’s voice is so soft, Nancy isn’t even sure she’s talking to her. “Telling people how much you care.”
“You said it to me.”
“Yeah. And it was hard.”
“I don’t want it to be hard.”
Because it’s always hard. Everything is hard. And it’s not fair, because Nancy thinks she could deal with every terrible thing she has ever and will ever face if she could just have this—whatever these moments are, tucked into Robin’s side—come easily.
She thinks she feels Robin’s lips against her temple, knows that she does when she can feel her breath in her hair as she says, “I hear practice makes perfect.”
Nancy can’t help but huff out a laugh at that. She feels Robin smile against her hair and sinks a little further into her.
“Do we have to keep talking about nightmares, or can we practice with normal shit?”
“What the hell is normal in our lives?”
“I don’t know. Compliments.” She doesn’t even have to think of one; it’s been on the tip of her tongue ever since their walk down the boardwalk the other day. “I like your freckles.”
Robin snorts. “‘I like your freckles’ is code for ‘I care about you.’ I think you’re sleep deprived, Wheeler.”
Nancy wants to scowl at her, but she doesn’t want to lift her head. She settles for pinching her hip and smirking at Robin’s quiet yelp.
“Fine,” she says. “I don’t think I could get through this without you.”
Another quiet pause.
“You’re just saying that ‘cause I know how to cook and you don’t.”
“You know, you’re not really making this any easier.”
Robin sighs, and it sounds heavy now. Nancy wriggles free from her arms and frowns up at her.
“Sorry,” Robin whispers.
Nancy shakes her head. She shifts the blanket and pulls it up to their shoulders at the same time that she tugs Robin down. When they’re both settled a little more comfortably on the mattress, she faces Robin and waits for her to look up and meet her eyes.
When she does, Nancy says, “I couldn’t do this without you. And not because of your cooking,” she adds sternly. Robin drops her gaze, but Nancy reaches out and takes her hand, pulling her attention in again. “Not because you’re funny, or smart, or you somehow always know what to do or say to get me out of my head. But because of…all of that, I guess. Because you’re you.”
She sees Robin swallow. She thinks she sees tears in her eyes, too. But then Robin closes them and breathes in, and when she looks up again, it’s gone. Maybe it was only a trick of the light.
“When I thought you were leaving, I felt like I couldn’t breathe.” Robin’s eyes dart back and forth over Nancy’s face. “I didn’t actually think you were going to do something dangerous—or, most of me didn’t think that, at least. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that, if I didn’t catch up with you in time, I’d never see you again.”
“I was going to come back,” Nancy says. “Hell, I’m not sure I would’ve made it out of Indiana without you there.”
“It would’ve been different,” breathes Robin. Nancy isn’t really sure what she means, but she finds that she agrees.
“I’m glad you caught up with me.” She feels herself smile at the confession. “I didn’t think anyone would come after me, but you did.”
“At this point…” Robin stops herself. Bites her lip. Lets it go and says, quietly, “At this point, I don’t know how not to follow you.”
“Keep following me, then.”
She smiles. “Okay.”
Nancy pushes herself closer. She tucks herself into Robin’s side purposefully this time, fully awake and aware of what it means. Robin only hesitates a second before wrapping her arm around Nancy’s waist. She falls asleep again to the feeling of Robin relaxing little by little against her.
-
Nancy wakes up first the next morning. She opens her eyes and sees Robin’s peaceful face—so soft, so calm, so beautiful in the cool light cutting across the room through the gap in the curtains—and wants to kiss her.
She gets up instead. It’s chilly, but she doesn’t take the blanket with her this time. She’s careful to leave it around Robin, who curls over into Nancy’s side of the bed, her hand coming up to grip the pillow Nancy had been using.
Nancy tells herself not to read into that, decides it’s too late, and turns and walks away before she changes her mind and wraps herself tightly around Robin again.
She runs the coffee maker and makes herself a cup, then pulls down a mug for whenever Robin wakes up. She takes her coffee and slips quietly out the front door.
It’s past sunrise, but the light is still faint, cool, making everything seem fresh and clean and new. Nancy walks over to the rocks bordering the beach and climbs up onto one of the larger boulders.
And then she just sits there. She listens to the waves coming in, fading out, coming in, fading out.
She wonders what the ocean would look like in the Upside Down, and for once, she can’t imagine something horrible. It feels almost too powerful. If the ocean existed in the Upside Down, the waves would crash over the vine-covered grounds, would flood the decaying woods and drown the creatures that haunt them.
Maybe it could wipe the whole place clean, destroy everything and leave a world that is blank and waiting, ready to welcome new life. And maybe, if life began anew in the Upside Down, it would be kinder this time around.
The screen door squeaks open and rattles closed. Nancy listens to Robin’s shuffling footsteps and the quiet shift of sand as she walks over. She waits for her to say something. Robin always says something. But the words don’t come, and Nancy suddenly finds that she doesn’t have the patience to wait for very long at all. She looks over her shoulder.
Robin looks back at her. There’s something nervous on her face, looking out of place in the clear, clean morning sun. She shifts her weight. Her feet dig a little deeper into the sand. Her hands come up in front of her to fidget, but she keeps her eyes on Nancy, even though Nancy is suddenly sure she’s fighting hard to do so.
“I followed you,” she says. The breeze carries her words just close enough for Nancy to hear before they’re drowned out by the waves.
I love you, too, Nancy thinks. She reaches her hand out even though Robin is still ten feet away. Robin gets the memo anyway. She picks her way over the rocks and climbs up to sit beside her. Nancy wraps around her carefully, calculated in every place her body touches Robin’s, as if she needs to find just the right percentage of surface area between them—too much and this ends, too little and she won’t survive.
But she rests her head against Robin’s shoulder without thinking about it at all, and only then does Robin finally exhale and lean into her.
-
They eat the last of the pancakes. Nancy washes the dishes. Robin dries them and sets everything back in the cupboards precisely where they found them—a feat Nancy would never have managed on her own.
They walk down the boardwalk after lunch. It’s cool and gray and there are so few people it surprises Nancy every time they come across someone who doesn’t work at one of the shops.
But even the people they do pass are strangers. No one knows them here. No one cares. Nancy lets her arm swing close enough to Robin’s that she can brush against her hand. When she doesn’t pull away, she slips her fingers between Robin’s. She can feel her rings against her skin. She squeezes, brief but firm, like she’s trying to tell her something. She wonders if Robin knows Morse code, wonders if she could press all the messages she’s afraid of saying into the palm of Robin’s hand.
“Everything okay?” Robin asks after they’ve walked in silence for a while, fingers still intertwined.
“Yeah.” Nancy looks up at her and smiles. “I like your freckles.”
-
They light another fire that night. The temperature drops but the skies clear, giving them an endless view of the stars, and Nancy decides she doesn’t want to leave this spot.
Robin scatters the logs enough that the fire will die if they fall asleep, so they just…do. Nancy drags the comforter outside and drapes it over herself and Robin—partially for warmth, and partially for the excuse to lay close to her. She lays her head on Robin’s chest and looks up at the stars. They can hear the waves on the beach still, a steady in and out like a lullaby, or like someone rocking them to sleep.
-
She isn’t sure why she wakes up. Maybe it’s the cold, or the breeze, or some noise that cuts briefly and inconsequentially through the rhythm of the ocean. It doesn’t matter. She’s awake now.
She’s laid out on the sand, draped halfway over Robin, the blanket draped over her. The sand beneath her is cold, but she’s deliciously warm in every place her body touches Robin’s. She can hear the sigh of the waves and the cries of gulls. She smells salt air and woodsmoke and Nancy doesn’t feel like the world is real anymore, but this time she doesn’t mind it. She thinks maybe they’ve found their own alternate dimension—a little bubble of space and time that exists just for them.
She’s just fine with that.
She shifts a little to look up at the sky. There are more stars than she’s ever seen from Hawkins. They just…don’t end. And the ocean is so big, lying out of sight but never out of mind, so vast and powerful she can feel it soaked into her skin even though she hasn’t been swimming since that first day.
It makes her feel small, but for once, that doesn’t seem like a bad thing. There’s relief in it, almost. She can’t control the ocean. She can’t cling to the stars. She can only lie here and bask in it all. They’ll keep shining. Wave after powerful wave will keep crashing in. No matter what she says or does or doesn’t do, that will never change.
“Robin,” she whispers before she can stop herself.
Robin’s eyes flutter open. Her hand comes up to rub up and down Nancy’s back.
“Hm?” She blinks a little bit. “Nance? S’everything alright?”
“Yeah. Everything’s good.” She feels guilty, just a little bit. But she can’t regret the adoration that slips through Robin’s sleepy expression. “Are you awake? Like, actually awake?”
Robin nods. She screws her eyes shut and tilts her head back, jaw stretching into a yawn. Sand bunches around her head and lingers in her hair. She looks back at Nancy and nods again.
“I’m awake.”
“Good,” says Nancy, “because I really want to kiss you.”
Robin blinks. Then again. “Okay, maybe I’m not awake. I think I might still be dreaming.”
Nancy smiles softly. She reaches up and brushes Robin’s hair back from her forehead. It’s cool and soft, even with the sand she can feel against her fingers.
“Is it a good dream, at least?”
“Good doesn’t even begin to cover it.”
“Robs?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re not dreaming.”
Maybe it’ll prove her point, or maybe it won’t. Either way, she can’t hold back anymore. She braces one arm around Robin’s head, ignoring the press of sand and small, coarse rocks against her skin, and brings her other hand up to cup Robin’s cheek. It is soft, just like she imagined. Soft, and chilled in the night air, and pressing into a smile against her palm.
Nancy kisses her.
She can feel that smile against her lips now. It takes Robin a second to actually move. But when she does, all Nancy can do is sigh against her. Robin’s hands come up to her hips, slipping beneath her shirt, palms warm against her skin. She tastes like salt, mostly. She smells like a campfire.
The comforter slips off Nancy’s back as she pushes herself further over Robin. She shivers fiercely, and Robin’s hands tense against her, fingers digging wonderfully into her skin.
Robin’s eyes are dazed when they part, but she’s smiling. She searches Nancy’s face. Her hands rub up and down slowly, warming her up again in the absence of the blanket.
“We could go inside,” she says as Nancy shivers again.
But Nancy shakes her head. “I’m never leaving this spot.”
Robin is still smiling when Nancy leans down again.
“That’s fine by me.”