Work Text:
“You know, with every second that I’m in this room, I feel like I’m absorbing your entire childhood,” Robin says as she runs her fingers through an old printed photo. It shows Nancy when she was maybe ten years old; she’s taking up the whole frame, her wide-eyed toothy grin blurred across the picture. Robin smiles to herself. “This song is great, too,” she adds, turning around to face Nancy who is sitting on the carpet and leaning against the bed frame.
“Yeah, it is,” Nancy says.
Robin turns back to Nancy’s bedside table. “Honestly, it’s still kind of mindblowing to realise that I’m in Nancy Wheeler’s bedroom right now.”
“You were already here before,” Nancy scoffs. “And why do you always say stuff like that? Do you have some kind of obsession with me?” She says it playfully but her mouth freezes after she finishes her question, as if hoping the words would somehow hop back into her mouth.
Robin doesn’t seem to care, though. “Not an obsession. Just a general admiration.” She keeps flicking through Nancy’s things nonchalantly, and Nancy averts her gaze from her. Not that Robin could see her looking either way.
“Thank you for staying, though,” Nancy mumbles. “I just didn’t really–”
“Yeah, of course.” Robin plops down the music tapes she was playing with back on the table and picks up a small bracelet, playing with the beads as she sits herself next to Nancy. “I totally get it, I wouldn’t want to be alone right now, either.”
They are technically alone in the house, though. Nancy’s parents and Holly are at school – like most of the town (or rather, whatever's left of it) – and Mike has barely entered his room since his return from California. He’s been staying with the Byers’ for the past couple of days and Nancy calls every once in a while to check in on him. Sometimes, she hears Johnathan in the background but rejects every offer Mike makes to hand the phone over to him.
She hasn’t talked to Steve much, either. She doesn’t really know what she has to say.
“Nancy?”
She snaps her gaze back to Robin. “Sorry, I just..” She makes a conscious effort to unclench her jaw and immediately bites the inside of her cheek when she notices Robin following her movement with careful eyes.
The song has stopped playing. The room is quiet. Robin keeps fidgeting with the bracelet, eyes darting across the room as if she just walked in for the first time.
Nancy is the first to break the silence. “I think I’m going crazy.”
Robin turns her gaze to her and Nancy looks away. “I wouldn’t blame you,” she says, “we just fought a literal demon in another dimension. We’re probably all going a little crazy.”
“No, yeah, I know.” Nancy sighs. “This is different, though.”
“What is it then?” Robin shuffles on the carpet so she’s lying on her stomach, propping herself up on her elbows. Her hands are still toying with the bracelet but Nancy doesn’t mind.
“The past few weeks have just been really weird, you know?” Nancy waits for a bit, not sure if she’s expecting Robin to say anything. “And, like, we’re trying to save Max and stop Vecna and, out of nowhere, Steve just starts saying things and–”
“What kind of things?”
Nancy purses her lips. “Like, I don’t know. I think he wants us to get back together.”
Robin flicks her eyes up to Nancy for a split second but brings them back to the bracelet just as quickly. “Oh.”
“Yeah.” Nancy stares at the carpet. “And on top of that, things have just been really weird with Johnathan, and it’s so weird, like, both of these guys are just right in front of me and I just…”
“Is there something in the way?” Robin asks. “Someone?”
Nancy shoots a panicked glance at Robin and they lock eyes. “Uh.” She wants to say no. She wants to blame all the strangeness on the Upside Down, which, to be fair, is a totally valid reason. She wants to choose Johnathan. No, she wants to want to choose Johnathan. Nancy takes a slow breath. “Sometimes,” she almost whispers, “I feel something sort of like love. It’s not with Johnathan or Steve. It’s more… Pink.”
Robin huffs. “I doubt you could get any more pink, Nance,” she says while turning her head to hint at the bedroom walls.
“No, Robin, it’s not..” Nancy sighs, growing oddly impatient. “It’s such a familiar feeling but it feels–”
“Pure?” Robin suggests. “Citric? Honey-ish?”
Nancy tilts her head slightly to the side. “Since when did you become such a poet, Buckley?”
Robin whips her gaze from the bracelet. She clears her throat. “I was… Just trying to finish your sentence, Wheeler,” she mocks, but she squeezes the bracelet between her fingers harder than before. Nancy wishes she could press all her troubles away.
“Do you feel it too?” Nancy asks, her voice hushed, and for the first time ever, Robin keeps her mouth shut. Nancy despises the quiet and her bones start to ache with the impulse to reach over and shake Robin violently to rattle an answer out of her, all while being completely terrified of whatever she would have to say. Their eyes meet and Nancy tries to find something in her gaze, some sort of sign, anything that would just say something.
“Do you mean,” Robin mutters slowly, “do you mean if I feel… That sort of love?”
Nancy doesn’t blink. She’s frozen. Her temple begins to pulsate. Robin’s looking at her jaw again and Nancy has the sudden urge to tilt her gaze up just a tiny bit. Just so she could look at her –
“I feel it,” Robin breathes out. “All the time. I–I kind of love it, honestly, although I know this entire town probably doesn’t.”
Nancy barely even processes what Robin says before she blurts, “I don’t.” She inhales for a second; pauses. “Like, I don’t not like it. I think that…” She thinks that she feels it, too. The honey. She feels it coating her heart, smooth gold layers of sweetness. It spreads to her collarbone, her shoulders, her arms, the tips of her fingers. Everything is so warm.
Robin finally lets go of the bracelet and sits up in front of her. “I’ve spent so much time just hating it,” she says. “Everytime I even thought about it, I would just snap myself out of it; I was torturing myself. And it’s bullshit – how are you supposed to hate your love, you know? But I would feel it all the time and I just hated that I liked it.”
Nancy is about to overflow. Robin likes it? Robin likes it. Still petrified to reveal exactly what ‘it’ is, she grabs Robin’s wrists and entwines their fingers together. “Do you feel that?” she asks. Nancy can feel it – the way the gleaming heat spreads like a slow fire in her veins, the way it melts through her hands so patiently. “You were right about the honey,” Nancy whispers carefully, as if scared to spill over.
Robin smiles smugly. “Am I ever really wrong?”
If Nancy weren’t so anxious right now, she would have bit back a snarky remark. “So you do feel it,” she says, almost reassuring herself.
“Yeah.” Robin’s voice is raspy. “Only with..” she trails off.
“With what?”
Nancy sees her falter, hesitate, her lips twitching as her mind whirs. “Girls,” Robin finally whispers. “I only feel it with girls.”
Nancy stops breathing.
She said it. Girls.
She doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “Oh god,” she shakes out. “I…” It’s real, then. She can still feel the echo of the word in the dense air.
Every muscle in Nancy’s body aches. Her back suddenly stiffens and her crossed legs start to cramp. A wave of nausea slams into her stomach and her chest tightens. Everything is mixing up. This thing that’s covering her heart – the pink, the honey – is sticky. It’s not coming off. Eyes shut, she tries to scrape it off with her mind. Although physically still, her heart is frantic. She’s suffocating, the warmth from before suddenly boiling and bubbling, burning her from the inside out. And she hates the word that Robin said. ‘Girls’. She hates how it makes it flutter. She hates the thing inside her that does the fluttering. She hates how she can’t control it. Most of all, she hates how she knows it’s not going to stop.
“Nancy.”
Nancy snaps her gaze down at her hands and instead feels the emptiness where Robin’s fingers used to be and it’s suddenly so, so cold. Her body almost hurls at the wild shift in temperature.
“I’m right here,” Robin says, and only then does Nancy realise that Robin’s hands are on her face. Cupping her cheeks. Nancy has no choice but to look straight at her and is met with wide, concerned eyes. They stare at each other in silence before Robin jolts as if she was electrocuted and pulls both her hands away abruptly. “Sorry,” she mumbles, “I just.. You were lost in there, I didn’t really.. I’m sorry if I hurt you or – I should have asked you before I did that, but you were just–”
“Robin,” Nancy interrupts, her voice weak. She looks down at Robin’s lap where her hands are kneading each other, her knuckles white with nervousness. Without much thought, she takes Robin’s palms into her own, squeezes gently and places their hands in her lap. “It’s ok.”
“I thought that Vecna creep got you again – the way you totally zoned out.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, don’t apologise.” Robin sighs, eyeing their woven fingers in Nancy’s lap.
Nancy can’t help the small shiver that runs through her chest. Hesitantly, she separates Robin’s hands and places each one back on her face. She feels like a completed circuit, like only when they’re both connected does she feel fully alive. Scared to overheat, she inhales deeply and holds the breath in, holding eye contact with Robin.
“Is that ok?” Robin whispers.
“Is what ok?”
“This,” she says, nodding in Nancy’s direction. “Are you ok with this?”
“I don’t know. But.. I think I feel–”
“So fucking good, huh?”
Nancy bursts into a short laugh. “All your poetry just went down the drain.”
“Well,” Robin says matter-of-factly, “it’s the truth isn’t it?”
Nancy pauses to breathe in Robin’s scent. She smells like her denim jacket and the slightest touch of shampoo and – maybe she’s imagining this – sweet honey. Whatever this thing is that’s fluttering in her chest – “I don’t want it to stop,” she says.
“Ok.”
“Ok.”
They stay like that for a minute or an eternity, Nancy looking at Robin and Robin looking back. Robin’s fingers start to spread and wander across the sides of Nancy’s face, her thumbs brushing back and forth across her cheekbones. Nancy gulps and Robin breaks eye contact to look at her throat and then her jaw. “Why do you always do that?” Nancy whispers.
“Do what?”
“Look at my jaw.”
Robin brings her eyes back to Nancy’s. “Because you look like you hold a lot of tension there,” she says, and subsequently moves her fingers down to trace over her jawline. “Why?” she asks, suddenly stopping, “do you not like it?”
It takes all of Nancy’s energy not to whine at the sudden loss of movement and all she can do is shake her head slightly. “Don’t stop.”
“Ok,” says Robin, and her fingers start to move again.
Nancy’s eyes flutter shut as Robin’s fingers start to skim on the skin just underneath her mouth. Her breath starts to stutter as Robin’s hand moves to the sides of her neck, her thumb stroking the curve of Nancy’s jaw right under her ear.
All too aware of her own hands limp on Robin’s wrists, Nancy opens her eyes. “Do you want me,” she starts, “to… um. Do you want me to touch you?”
She can hear Robin breathe now, feel her body rise and her hands tighten their grasp around Nancy’s neck. “I mean, yes,” Robin stammers, “but, only if you want to. Don’t feel like you have to do it if you don’t actually want to because I really don’t want to force you to do something you’re not comfortable with and–”
“Robin,” Nancy says, with a surprising amount of confidence. “I want to.”
“Oh.”
And with that, Nancy unclasps her hands from Robin’s wrists and gently runs them down her arms, each of her fingertips leaving a line of goosebumps in their wake. She pauses as she reaches Robin’s elbows, stroking the inside of them with her thumb. She has no idea what she’s doing but the only thing she’s focussing on is just how smooth Robin’s skin is and the way she squirms slightly under her touch. She continues to make her way up Robin’s forearms until her nails start to tickle underneath the sleeves of her shirt. And then she looks up to see Robin’s face and curses herself for not looking earlier. “You are so pretty, Robin,” she murmurs.
“Nancy, you’re one to speak. All the freckles on your arms and the squint on your eyes when you’re concentrating and the sharpness of your lips – also your jawline, I mean, Jesus Christ.”
“Wait,” Nancy says, biting on her lip to suppress a smirk. “I thought you said you were looking there because of tension.”
“Yeah – sexual tension,” Robin remarks and Nancy just about dies. “I mean, it’s a bit of both, because yeah, I can see that when you’re nervous you clench your jaw. But, like, in general, you have a very nice face.”
“Oh,” Nancy nods, “thank you.” She’s totally not thinking about what Robin said about sexual tension nor is she thinking about how her hands are teasing under Robin’s shirt sleeve. “You too have a very nice face.” Before Nancy has the chance to act on the thoughts she’s definitely not thinking about, she places both of her hands on the back of Robin’s neck and threads her fingers through her hair. She tries very hard to not pay much attention to the delicious sound that escapes Robin’s lips. Robin’s lips. “Oh, God,” she says before she can stop herself.
“What?”
Nancy freezes. “Uh, nothing.”
“Tell me.”
“No, it’s ok. Don’t worry about it.”
“Nance, the moment people tell me not to worry about something, it just gives me more reason to worry about it.”
“Ok, sorry,” she says, looking down. “It’s just that… I’m not sure, like, I’m just a bit – a bit scared, you know? To feel this.”
“Oh.” Robin nods slowly. “Do you want to stop? We don’t have to do more.”
More. She looks up to meet Robin’s eyes, so delicate and full of concern. She tries to think of Johnathan. Of Steve. She tries to extract the feelings she felt for them to compare them with the way her heart beats now. She wants to prove that this is different, that this is just nerves or maybe the Upside Down has somehow altered the chemicals in her brain. She doesn’t want more. No, she doesn’t want to want more. But she does. Nancy purses her lips. Opens them slightly. Closes them again. Every part of her body is throbbing. With each slow second that passes, one thought becomes excruciatingly clear. “I want more,” she whispers.
Seemingly taken aback, Robin’s reaction is delayed. “Ok.” Another thick silence blankets them. “What exactly is ‘more’?”
Nancy contemplates voicing her thoughts as she looks at Robin’s lips. They’re so different from hers; they seem softer, redder, bigger, more. More.
“Nancy?”
“Um.” Nancy’s eyes flicker back and forth from Robin’s mouth back up to her eyes. “I kind of want your lips.”
Robin’s eyebrows scrunch. “Like, do you want to steal them or something?”
Nancy swallows a smile. “Like, on mine.”
She watches Robin process her words, watches colour flush across her cheeks, watches her shuffle a tiny bit closer on the carpet. Robin gnaws at her bottom lip for a second, thinking. “I have a dumb question,” she says and looks away. Her hands start to fidget around Nancy’s neck.
“Robin, it’s ok. Tell me.”
“I’ve just never done this before and… I know this is legitimately the worst, most useless question in the world but–”
“Just say it.”
Robin meets Nancy’s gaze. “Ok. Um. Which way are you turning your head?”
Nancy’s lips spread into a playful smirk and she tilts her head to the right. “This way,” she murmurs as she leans forward. She tracks how Robin’s eyes shift to follow her movement, the way Robin reaches back to cup Nancy’s jaw as she shortens the distance between them, the impatient shallow breaths. “I’m kissing you now,” Nancy whispers against Robin’s mouth.
“Please,” Robin whispers back.
So Nancy kisses her and it’s the sweetest, most colourful thing she’s ever done. She pushes her hands further up into Robin’s hair, lightly curling her fingers around the soft strands. The way their lips capture one another feels so familiar yet so different to everything that Nancy’s ever done, and when Robin sighs softly into her mouth, she swears it’s the purest air that had ever entered her lungs. Robin is so gentle, holding Nancy’s face as if she might crumble completely against her touch. The smoothness of Robin’s palms, the innocent touch of Robin’s lips against her own, the warm, quiet sounds that flow out of the both of them – it’s so, so pink. Nancy slides her hands around Robin’s back, carefully pressing herself against her body, and suddenly she feels more. It’s everywhere. Like a flower blooming right in front of her, Robin nudges herself closer, moulding their bodies together as she slowly leans down on her back.
Nancy’s almost fully on top of her when Robin breathes sharply against her mouth. “Ow,” she says, slightly arching her back into Nancy’s stomach and Nancy herself almost doubles over from the sudden pressure.
“What’s wrong?” she says, breathless. “Did I hurt you?”
“No, no, you were doing the opposite of hurting me, actually. It’s just this…” Robin slowly takes one hand out of Nancy’s soft curls and reaches under her back. “It’s just this stupid fucking bracelet.” She hands it over to Nancy.
“You can have it,” she says without much thought.
“What?”
“Yeah. I mean, you like playing with it, right?”
“Yeah.”
Nancy smiles and presses a soft kiss to her lips. “So keep it.”
“Ok,” Robin nods, reaching to take the bracelet again but Nancy throws it to the other side of the room.
“But I don’t want it hurting you again,” she mutters, bringing her hand back to Robin’s face.
“Nancy Wheeler to the rescue,” Robin smiles.
“Mhm. Can I kiss you again?”
Robin laughs softly and it’s the best thing Nancy’s heard in her life. “God, yes. Please kiss me.”