Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Robin Buckley has never claimed to be punctual.

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

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

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

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

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

There are a lot of things in the box.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That thought goes into the box as well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Robin? You listening?”

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

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

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

“Know what you’re gonna do?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You wanna talk about it?”

“About… what?”

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

Nancy flinches. “I’m fine.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Steve, I presume?”

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

“Are you not?”

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

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

“I don’t love him anymore.”

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

“Consciously? A… a few months ago.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Nance—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Always.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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