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Steve Harrington is an idiot and she hates him.
Well, that’s not completely true. He is her best friend, has been for years, her Platonic Soulmate with a Capital P, but now, at this moment, she strongly dislikes the boy. Because, for as much as the last statement declaring her hatred for Steve is false, the first one absolutely stands true.
He is an idiot.
And she is a bigger idiot, she would argue, because this idiot knows her well enough that he knows she won’t back out from a challenge, no matter how ridiculous or downright dangerous it is — Robin has emotional and physical scars in her body from the time he’d dared her to jump from the balcony to the pool at his house once. (Eddie had called that one “the most metal and stupidest thing I’ve ever seen, simultaneously”, which seemed just about right.)
They were making their way back from the grocery store, where they had spent a small fortune in junk food for the movie night they were planning, when Steve had given her a look that told her that only bad things could possibly come out of his stupid cherry red mouth — he’d grabbed tube of cherry flavored lip balm back at the store and Robin wasn’t fully convinced he didn’t buy it to eat it.
(She’s speaking from experience.)
“Bobbin Buckley,” He begins, a goofy grin on his face. “I dare you to ding-dong-ditch the nicest house in the street.”
Robin blinks, and then she frowns, “What are you, five ?”
“No, are you?”
“That is so childish. You’re like, eighteen next month -”
“That’s why I’m daring you to do it,” Steve rolls his eyes, as if he thinks Robin is being silly. Like he’s not the one with a bright red mouth and daring his best friend into doing something so stupid. Then, he smirks, “Unless you’re too scared.”
Robin scoffs, rolling her eyes, “I’m not scared of anything.”
“Second grade, you made us leave the coolest birthday party we’ve ever been invited to because it was carnival themed and you heard a rumor there was gonna be a clown.”
“Okay, one, clowns aren’t a fear. They are a survival instinct. They’re not to be trusted, Steve .” Robin stops, “Like, magicians! You know what I always say - never trust a magician. Like, their whole thing is about tricking you. That’s - that’s like, clowns . You know what I mean? And do not get me started on the whole racial problem with the beginnings of clowns in history, did you know that, Steve?”
“Have you been watching those video essays on YouTube again?”
“This one was a Netflix documentary, I think. But that’s not the point — the point is, how the hell is a second grade birthday party the coolest party you , Steve “The Hair” Harrington, King Steve, Captain of the Swimming and Basketball Teams, Eddie Munson’s baby girl Steve, have ever been?”
“You know, sometimes I hope you run out of breath and pass out.” Then he stops walking and turns to her, “Now, stop verbally abusing me to try and distract me from the fact that you’re chickening out on a dare because you, Robin Buckley, are a coward.”
Robin groaned. She knew that there would be no way around this. She either didn’t do it, refused the dare and got teased to hell and back for the rest of the night, possibly resulting in another balcony-pool scenario, or she accepted it and was the seventeen year old moron who thought it was funny to bother other people at their homes. And, frankly. Both options just really make it obvious that, at the end of the day and at her very core, she was an idiot.
Steve seems to see the resolve in Robin’s eyes before Robin can actually say anything, he lets out this really stupidly adorable squeal that reminds Robin of when he was six and she’d helped him read through an entire paragraph. It makes her smile as they stroll down the street looking around, trying to find the nicest looking house. Their eyes settle on a big house to their right, and Steve grins at her as she takes the front yard in and the well-lit porch.
The house is not as nice as Steve’s, but it still looks expensive and big, and Robin briefly wonders what the inside of the house might look like.
This is the chosen house, apparently, because they stop in front of it and Steve nudges her forward until Robin is walking up the path, making her way to the front porch and then up the steps leading to the front door. She stands, unsure, staring at the door and wincing when Steve just rushes her in a hushed voice that just sounds like a hiss from where she’s standing.
Robin gulps, deciding that it’s ridiculous that she’s intimidated by a door, and reaches for the doorbell, wincing a little when she rings it, and then she turns away, fully intending on running as fast as she can from the door (even though she hates running for personal, medical, physical and psychological reasons) and having her plans stopped to a halt by her running into someone that had been making their way up the porch steps.
Oh brother .
Not only had she been caught doing stupid Steve’s stupid dare, but she had been caught by a very attractive someone — the bluest eyes she’s ever seen (and her own eyes are pretty fucking blue), brown hair falling over her shoulders, pale skin and the sharpest jawline Robin has ever seen in her seventeen years of living.
And she looked pissed.
“Were you just doorbell-ditching my house?” The girl asks, tone clipped.
Robin pauses for a short second, wondering what are the chances of her utilizing the world renowned technique of deflecting by screaming “look over there!” and making a run for it would work. Probably very close to none, if at all. She glances around surreptitiously and realizes that her best friend has in fact fled the scene, which, truly not surprising in the least, but Steve was still a bitch for that and Robin would one hundred percent remember this, so. She frowns, trying to focus on the matter at hand, “I wasn’t -”
“You weren’t?” The girl interrupts her, tone mixed with sarcasm and incredulity, as if she can’t quite believe that Robin would even try to deny something that was so obvious it could bring you to tears — Robin can’t believe it either, but it’s not like there’s anything functional up there in her brain at the moment. Clearly.
“My friend —” She attempts again, but she’s once again cut off.
“Your friend, what? Held you at gunpoint to do something as childish as ding-dong-ditch in someone's house in this day and age?” She scoffs, and okay, like. Robin knows that she’s absolutely in the wrong here. And that Steve technically did not hold her at gunpoint — she doesn’t think he’s ever even seen a gun before. He probably would faint. He’s such a baby. Anyway, yes , bottom line, Robin and Steve are in the wrong here, absolutely, Robin would never victim blame, but —
She did not care for this girl’s tone. An insult is lodged somewhere in Robin’s throat, begging to come out, because she suddenly feels weirdly defensive. She knows she’s stupid, yes, she never claimed to be otherwise! And she’s more than just a little embarrassed to have been caught doing something this immature, but this girl did not have to use that tone on her. It’s a bit degrading, to be honest.
Robin was already humiliated enough, having been caught by one of the most beautiful girls that she’s ever seen.
“I-” She attempts to say again, but she’s cut off once again and she sighs.
“Honestly. We have been through enough . It’s 2022, and I can’t believe there is still people like you -”
Robin kind of tunes the girl out then, because they don’t know each other, really , and this girl is talking to her as if she knows her, which she doesn’t, and most of her words are kind of repetitive and it just sounds like she just had a bad day and needs to vent. Robin desperately wants to fucking choke the living shit out of Steve as soon as she finds him, so she just figures she could just kinda stand there, daydreaming of murder to cope with the humiliation.
After a few minutes of angry words spat at her, the girl’s anger seems to dimmer and give away to just plain old annoyance, having realized that the dirty blonde she’d been verbally attacking doesn’t seem all that fazed by her words. (And, to be honest, now that she thinks about it, working retail over summer definitely taught Robin how to deal with this kind of situation. Just a thought for her to think about later).
The girl concludes her rant with a huff and an eye roll and says, “Just leave, okay? And stay away from here.”
And she can’t imagine what makes this girl think that Robin would ever seriously consider coming back here, but she seems to be deadly serious and Robin isn’t particularly in the business of ignoring any kind of passable threats, so she nods once and gives her a salute while she says, “yes, ma’am,” because she is a fucking idiot, and this seems to piss the other girl off even more, which, fair .
She pushes past Robin to get into her house and slams the door on her face.
That was also fair.
She finds Steve sitting down at the curb down the street, casually eating from one of the Pringles cans they’d gotten for their movie night.
“Thanks a lot for that, jackass. I appreciate the support.” Robin states as a greeting, and Steve just shrugs in response as he stands and pats the back of his jeans to get rid of whatever dirt might’ve gotten stuck there.
“I panicked,” He shrugs, handing Robin one of the bags he’d been carrying, “Did you make a new friend? You took so long.”
Robin glares at him and he only smiles innocently in return.
“You suck.”
“No, I never.” Steve gasps.
Robin snorts and shoves him, immediately getting shoved back.
And here’s the thing. Robin may be an idiot, but she is a good person. She tries very hard to not actively hurt or bother other people. She’s not great with social cues, true, that’s kind of part of the Autistic Bingo Card, and sometimes she does accidentally say the wrong thing to someone, but Steve insisted that that was the case with a lot of people, not just her, and not everyone was a bad person, so, two and two and Bob’s your uncle.
(Whatever…. that was. She swears, there was a point to all of this — oh, right. )
So, she’s not a bad person. Which means that when she goes to sleep that night, she can’t help but feel guilty as she thinks back to the girl’s eyes and genuine annoyance in her tone, and Robin really doesn’t deal well with upsetting people with her conscious actions.
So, she decides to break the promise she’d made earlier to the girl and go back there tomorrow, hoping that if she just apologized, she could somehow lessen the guilt and hopefully move past this unfortunate incident.
(Famous last words).
When Robin presses the doorbell the next day, a lot more nervous than she had been the prior night, the only response she’d gotten was the door open for half a second before it was slammed shut again, and what seemed like the girl’s annoyed muffled voice coming from the other side of the wooden door telling her to go away.
She does not go away, in fact, even though she’s pretty sure that the pretty girl said she has a gun. So Robin just shouts her apology, hoping the girl could hear it through the wood and her incessant ranting. Judging by the muffled voice coming from the other side, Robin guesses she hadn’t. So she sighs and decides to come back tomorrow, or however long it takes for the girl to hear her apology. She has no fucking clue why she cares this much, but.
Maybe she has a thing about being ignored, or something.
(Maybe she wants to get shot by that girl.)
She knows that the angry girl had probably gotten over it by now, any normal person would, but Robin has also never claimed to be normal, so she hadn’t, and that is what prompts her next move.
Well, that and watching The Princess Diaries before bed. As soon as the scene comes up, she brightens up, grabs her phone from her bedside table and unlocks it, shooting Argyle a text.
Robin returns the next day with a warm box from Surfer Boy pizza with colorful M&M’s spelling out “I’M SORRY”, because if it works in the movies, it ought to work in real life, right?
She tries not to spend too much time on that specific thought knowing that nothing good could come out of that and places the pizza box gently onto the welcome mat. She presses the doorbell and runs to her bike, picking it up and ducking behind a truck parked a few houses down like she’s going method on her impersonation of Joe Goldberg from You .
There’s movement in one of the curtains from one of the front windows, as if someone had been there, probably trying to see if that gangly menace that was Robin Buckley’s physical form was back to bother her some more, and she waits a minute, another minute, and then three more, and then twenty more, until it’s been an hour and Robin is kind of hungry and a little bored, so she just sighs, shrugs and decides to just leave the pizza there and check back tomorrow.
When she returns the next day, she finds the pizza box open and empty, only with a piece of paper that reads in pretty cursive: ‘Maybe next time don’t pull a Princess Diaries to apologize for ding-dong-ditching by essentially doing the same thing all over again? Kind of defeats the purpose of your trip. PS. You’re not forgiven, but the pizza was really good. Thank you.’
It is with a heavy heart that Robin realizes that she’s grinning like an idiot at the little improvement with the Angry Pretty Girl. She fishes for a pen in her bag and comes out victorious when she finds her trusty black pen, quickly uncapping it with her teeth and holding the paper on the door as she quickly scribbles down her answer on the back of the note.
‘What I am getting from this is that you want there to be a next time. I’ll win over your forgiveness, you’ll see. PS. You’re welcome, Princess :)’
She folds the note and tucks it under the right corner of the welcome mat, grabbing the empty pizza box and walking away with a smile on her face.
Robin returns every day after that, always finding the little notes under the welcome mat, even if the girl doesn’t open the door to greet her. She ends up learning a lot about the brunette girl with the impressive jawline.
She likes flowers, doesn’t really like chocolate unless it’s dark, and she thinks that Robin’s persistence and downright stalking is annoying. Robin ignores that last part, because in the same note she had told her that she really likes ice cream sandwiches but doesn’t get to have them as much as she’d want.
(The next day, she leaves a few ice cream sandwiches on the welcome mat with a note that says she hopes she gets to them before they melt.)
The next day, after almost two weeks of Robin bringing little gifts and exchanging notes, Robin walks up to the porch and decides that today she’ll give the whole verbal apology thing another go, since she hadn’t really had the time to pick-up a gift or anything for the other girl.
Since it’s been almost two weeks of no verbal interaction with the girl or seeing the door open in response to the doorbell ringing, Robin is understandably surprised when the door opens for the first time, but to the older woman who stood before her now who probably was not aware of this entire backstory, Robin just looked like someone who’d never seen someone open a door before.
“Oh, hello, dear. I’m assuming you’re here for Nancy?” She asks, her tone kind. She has long blonde hair and her eyes are warm, as well as her smile.
“...Nancy?” Robin repeats, squinting a little. The older woman before her was very pretty. This was definitely Angry Girl’s - Nancy? - mom.
“My daughter, Nancy?” The woman looks amused, “You’re here for her, right? You’re her friend.” She’s telling this to Robin, as if trying to help this lost teenage girl at her front door to piece together her life story.
“Nancy… friend,” Robin repeats dumbly, and she nearly winces at how stupid she sounds. The woman is looking at her like she wants to laugh, and Robin really wouldn’t blame her for it. She shakes her head as if to clear it, and then nods, “Um, yeah. Yeah, I’m - I’m Nancy’s friend.”
The name sounds foreign to her, which is totally fair, considering she really hadn’t realized that Pretty Angry Girl was probably not her actual government name.
“Right,” The woman nods, and then she offers her an apologetic smile as she continues, “Nance’s not home right now. She told me her friend - which I’m assuming would be you - might stop by sometime today and I should tell you that she’s out and that you should go away,” She chuckles a litte, “That one’s got a bit of a temper, which I'll admit she’s taken after me, but she’s never told me to tell her friends to go away. Tell me, honey, are you two fighting? Should I be concerned?”
Robin blinks, because whoa , Nancy’s mom rambled almost as much as she did, and only one thing really stuck out to her.
Nancy called her a friend ? Was that official? That seemed official. She told her mother!
(Robin only tells her mother things if she’s a hundred percent sure she’ll wake up tomorrow and still feel the same way. She hates having to backtrack on things she’s said before. This thing — imagine she’s pointing at the general area of her brain — works very fast, people! She has no time to catch everyone up on the inner workings of her mind, frankly.)
Robin shakes her head, “It’s okay, thank you.” When the woman smiles again, she continues, “Could you - um, could you tell her I stopped by? I mean, she probably won’t care,” Robin chuckles, “But still, could you?”
“Of course.” The woman smiles, kind, and Robin finds herself smiling back and nodding before she turns to leave. She’s halfway down the porch when she turns again, a little surprised when she catches the woman watching her leave with a curious smile.
“Would you mind telling me where Nancy is?”
Robin walks into the Hawkins Library for what feels like the first time in ages, looking around and taking in the many shelves with what looks like a million books everywhere. There are some people that she recognizes from school, but other than that, there aren’t many people around the main area.
She walks around for a moment, trying to locate the specific person she’d come here for, and then she finally spots her, sitting alone at a table at the back of the room, three books opened before her on the table and her eyebrows furrowed as she quickly scribbles things down on her notebook. Her brown hair falls over her shoulders again and she has on a big denim jacket that makes her look smaller. Robin licks her suddenly dry lips and starts to make her way towards the girl’s table, clearing her throat a little before she sits down on the seat across from her.
“This seat taken?”
Nancy doesn’t look up from her notebook as she starts shaking her head, her mouth forming what was probably a friendly greeting before she looks up and locks her icy blue eyes with Robin. She frowns.
“What are you doing here?” She asks, tone accusing.
Robin shrugs, “It’s a public space.”
“You don’t look like you frequent a Library often.”
Robin squints, “Are you trying to hurt my feelings?”
Nancy doesn’t answer, but doesn’t break eye contact either. “ What are you doing here?” She asks again, emphasizing a different word this time.
“Your mom said you told her to tell me to go away.”
“That does not explain what you’re doing here .”
“I figured it was reverse psychology,” Robin shrugs with a grin, like she knows this will annoy Nancy specifically. She’s right, because Nancy closes her eyes and pinches the bridge of her nose as she sighs.
“You’re so annoying.”
Robin’s grin widens, “Thanks,” then, she continues, “So, Nance -”
“How do you know my name?” Nancy interrupts, squinting suspiciously at the girl before her.
“Your mom.”
“Of course,” Nancy rolls her eyes, and then she looks at Robin with a newfound annoyance.
“Speaking of your mom,” Robin picks up, “She said something real interesting.” And then she drops it. Waits.
Nancy glares and snaps, “Well, can you just get on with it, then? I have things to do, unlike you.”
Robin grins, “Hey, I have things to do too. Doesn’t mean I’ll do them, but it also doesn’t mean I don’t have ‘em.”
Nancy rolls her eyes, and then waits another second. A beat, and then she raises one eyebrow, “So?”
Robin fights the grin that wants to come out, “So, what?”
Nancy honest to god whines , and Robin chuckles, sounding delighted at how annoyed the other girl seemed to get so easily by having information withheld from her.
She was such a Princess.
“She said you told her that I’m your friend,” Robin reveals, happy. She studies the girl closely for a reaction, and Nancy does not disappoint.
She hurriedly avoids eye contact with Robin as she looks down at her book and clears her throat, her cheeks flushed pink, “We’re not friends,” she says, her tone evasive, “because I don’t like you.”
She’s still avoiding to look at Robin, so Robin doesn’t believe her. “Right.”
Nancy licks her lips, and Robin tries really hard not to think about it and looks away once the other girl looks back up at her, “Was that all? I’m busy.”
Robin decides that she probably should let the girl go back to her studying, not wanting to add the girl flunking her grades onto the pile of things Robin had to apologize to Nancy for, and nods.
“See you tomorrow, bestie,” Robin says as she stands. She’s given ten steps when she hears a half-hearted “I’m not your bestie ” from behind her, and smiles in response. Without turning around, she salutes the girl, the same way she had done the first time they met, and her smile widens as she feels eyes on her back until she’s out of sight.
Robin goes over to Nancy’s again the next day, because why she’s not sure, and she’s greeted once again by the girl’s mother, who smiles once she sees her and tells her that Nancy was at the Library again and, yes, she very much kept to her message of “go away”, only adding on that she’s carrying her pepper spray and she is not afraid to use it.
Her mom looks amused as she relays the message to Robin, and the younger girl nods and smiles at the older woman before she turns around and heads to the Library once again.
Nancy is at the same place she had been the prior day, but this time there is only one book open before her and she’s writing more calmly then she’d been the prior day. Even her facial expressions seem calmer, devoid of any frustration or stress.
(Robin doesn’t particularly feel like dwelling on the fact that her heart beats a little faster when she notices how pretty Nancy looks like this.)
She makes her way to the girl’s table again and sits down, this time not saying anything in greeting. Nancy doesn’t look up at all, and they spend a few minutes like that.
Robin watching and Nancy pointedly ignoring her.
Until “do you have like, any sense of self-awareness?” comes out of Nancy’s mouth, her eyes glued to her work. Robin fights her grin.
“Yeah,” Robin answers. And then, “Not around you, though. I try my hardest to turn it off because I know you like it when I’m annoying.”
Nancy scoffs. “Are you always like this with strangers?”
“We’re not strangers, though,” Robin shakes her head, frowning a little, “I’m pretty sure I remember you calling me your friend to your mom. You only tell your parents if it’s real and official. Everybody knows that,” when Nancy only rolls her eyes, still not looking at her, Robin adds, “Besides, you never told me to go away.”
This finally breaks her — Nancy looks up at her, incredulous, “That is all I’ve told you since we met!”
Robin pretends to think for a second, “I must’ve missed it.” Then, she smirks, “Or maybe you’re such a bad liar that you couldn’t convince me that you really meant it.”
Nancy stays silent after that, and Robin thinks that her silence says everything that she needed to know. She smiles a little to herself at the realization that Nancy did not dislike her as much as she tried to convince Robin and her mom of.
“Has anyone ever told you that you’re annoying?” Nancy asks after a few minutes of silence. Robin is the one to roll her eyes this time.
“Yeah, my best friend - that’s Steve, by the way, Harrington. He’s - uh, nevermind, that’s not important, he’s just Steve,” Nancy raises one eyebrow and then Robin shakes her head, as if to say ‘don’t ask’ because really, don’t ask, and then she continues, “Anyways he tells me that I’m annoying all the time. But so do you, but you’re like, secretly obsessed with me and my ways, so that doesn’t count.”
Nancy, not surprisingly, rolls her eyes at that, but Robin notices that she’s fighting back an amused smile.
She grins widely.
Robin keeps going to Nancy’s house after that. Her apologies have become half-hearted, because it’s actually been a little over eighty five years, basically, and she doesn’t actually feel guilty about what she did anymore. But something keeps making her come back, and deep down she knows that the something can be explained very easily, actually, but like -
It’s kind of a thing. Like Nancy will do this funny thing where she pretends she’s not home, and Robin knows she is because she can hear the girl chuckling at Robin’s half-assed attempts at apologizing, and it’s all very exciting stuff to Robin, because that means that Nancy might actually be warming up to her now.
She likes the days Nancy is at the Library the most, though, because she can look and hear Nancy’s voice and interact with her. Well, Nancy rolls her eyes at her a lot and pretends like she’s not interested in Robin’s one-woman monologue shows for the most part, but still. It’s kind of a solid bit of progress. It’s good enough for her to be happy about.
Besides, Robin swears that Nancy is almost always fighting back an amused smile at the stupid shit she says, so. She’s pretty much killing it, maybe.
So Robin tells Steve about Nancy after the fifth week has passed, and Steve frowns, his mouth full of popcorn as he chews slowly, trying to figure out who the fuck Robin was talking about.
“Nancy,” Robin repeats with a sigh, “The girl whose house I harassed?”
“How do you know her name?” Steve asks once he’s finishing swallowing, and Robin pauses for a second. Steve widens his eyes and actually laughs out loud in amusement, “Oh, my God. You went back to apologize?” At Robin’s silence, he laughs even more.
“Okay, calm down, asshole,” She hits his shoulder, “Nancy’s like… warming up to me, I think. I don’t know why I care so much, but I kinda - it’s like I never wanted someone to like me as much as I want her to like me,” she flushes, and Steve softens a bit at that. Robin very rarely shows vulnerability, and on the rare occasions that she does, Steve is always sure to take her seriously and offer her reassuring words.
“I’m sure she already does, Rob,” he smiles, his eyes honest. Robin smiles back, and then Steve smirks, “No one can put up with you for that long if they don’t like you. Trust me, I would know.”
Robin huffs, “Bitch,” she says, shoving her friend off the couch and smiling when she hears him laugh again.
Robin is surprised to find Nancy sitting down on the porch in front of her house on a Friday afternoon, a bowl of what looked like strawberries by her side, watching Robin walk up the path towards the porch. She stands in front of Nancy, a little confused and wholly surprised at seeing the girl outside. Nancy offers no explanation as she bites into a strawberry and looks over Robin’s shoulder at the empty street.
Nancy subtly shakes the bowl beside her, then, and Robin notices with hungry eyes the red strawberries that were in it. She also notices Nancy fighting back a smile at her reaction, and Robin looks at her quizzically. She sits on Nancy’s left, the bowl between them, and fishes a strawberry from it.
“Does this mean I’m forgiven?” She asks curiously and a tad bit hopeful.
“Nope,” is the answer, but Nancy’s mouth is turned up slightly at the corner, and Robin grins to herself.
“Right,” she chuckles, biting into the strawberry and letting out a wince and a full body shake at the bittersweet taste of the fruit.
Why was it so good but so evil at the same time?
(Strawberries are like Nancy.)
She flushes red at the thought, because like, calm the fuck down Emily Dickinson, but then she notices that Nancy’s shoulders are shaking as she laughs silently at her and Robin decides that no, Nancy is pretty evil, actually. And so fucking pretty, it made Robin insane. But that’s neither here nor there.
After that, Robin finds herself having afternoon snacks with Nancy on her porch some days, others they go out to grab lunch between studying - well, studying from Nancy’s part and annoying and distracting from Robin’s - and sometimes they grab coffee together.
Most days, though, they just sit on Nancy’s porch and talk. It takes a few days for Nancy to really open up and talk to her about things, but eventually it happens, and Robin goes home with a huge smile and a fluttering in her stomach and she thinks that there’s no way she can keep pretending like there wasn’t a very specific reason why she kept coming back.
Robin likes routines. She thrives on it. It’s the only way she can get anything done, the only way she can function. Robin and Routines. The two R’s. Very important.
And so, the whole thing with Nancy had become a routine for her. Robin found herself walking up that path for almost two months now, and she’s genuinely surprised out of her goddamn mind and does not know what to do with herself when she doesn’t see Nancy sitting at the porch, or when she rings the doorbell and there’s absolutely no answer — not even from the flamingo legged boy with an attitude that Nancy said was her younger brother. She stands around for a few minutes and when no one comes to greet her, she turns around and grabs her bike.
Nancy is not at the Library, either. Nor is she at the coffee shop close by, and when Robin has tried everywhere she could think of and couldn’t find the girl, she bikes back to her house and tries again. When there’s still no answer, Robin grabs her journal from her bag, rips a page from it, grabs the pen and quickly scribbles down her home address. Underneath it, she writes, ‘ding-dong-ditch me sometime?’, folds the note, and her heart thuds loudly against her ribcage as she makes her way up the porch steps and tucks the note under the mat, like she has done before.
Somewhere deep inside her soul knew that this was it. She tries not to freak out as she bikes home.
It’s nearing 9PM and she’s halfway through an old episode of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills because apparently that’s a thing she watches now, when the doorbell rings and her mom yells from her room for her to open it. Robin sighs and stands up, dragging her socked feet towards the door. When she opens it, she almost jumps in surprise.
Standing in front of her is Nancy, and she’s holding a Surfer Boy pizza box with M&M’s spelling out I’M SORRY. There’s a barely there smile on her lips, and Robin feels her heart beat faster at the international implications of this moment in front of her.
“You didn’t do the ditch part of the game.” Robin says as a greeting.
“I did not.”
“You’re at my house.”
Nancy nods, “I am.”
“Do you wanna come in?”
“Please.”
When they had come in and Nancy saw what Robin had been watching before she got there, she had teased Robin until Robin was the one rolling her eyes and calling her annoying, which was a refreshing change and insanely funny to Nancy, apparently, because she keeps laughing like Robin isn’t being serious.
But now, almost half an hour and an entire pizza later, Nancy seemed pretty involved in whatever drama was happening on the television screen, as Robin had been inching closer and closer to her and the girl still hadn’t noticed. Just as Robin was about to give up and sit where she had been originally before, Nancy raised her right arm and put it over Robin’s shoulders, bringing the girl closer to her, without looking away from the TV screen.
“You think you’re smooth,” Robin says, grinning, and Nancy kept her attention on the show and made a point to squint at the TV, as if to show that she was extremely focused. Robin chuckled and shook her head, “You can’t ignore me, Nance. I thought you’d know that by now.”
“Shut up, I’m trying to watch TV.” Nancy said, but her tone was amused.
“Make m-”
She’s cut off, this time, by Nancy’s lips crashing against her own.
She melts into the kiss, grabbing Nancy by the back of her neck and refusing to part ways until it was absolutely, unarguably necessary. When they do eventually part ways, Robin grins as she notices the first wide and genuine smile on the other girl’s now swollen lips.
“So, I’m forgiven?” She asks, curious, and Nancy chuckles and kisses her again.
“You’ve been forgiven since you apologized the day after,” Nancy reveals, a small smile playing at the corner of her lips. Her eyes are sparkling with mirth and warmth, and Robin gasps, genuinely shocked and surprised by this revelation.
“You mean I - you -” She pulls back, a little upset, “Why didn’t you say anything?”
Nancy rolls her eyes, but she’s smiling as she shakes her head, “God, you’re really so annoying. I don’t know why I can’t stop thinking about kissing you.”
When Robin opens her mouth, no doubt to be a smart ass, Nancy gives her a look that frankly makes Robin tense up before she pulls her towards her again, and suddenly Robin’s mouth is way too busy to formulate anything annoying - which might have been Nancy’s entire goal, possibly.
(She would gladly annoy the living shit out of Nancy for the rest of her life if this is how she shuts her up, by the way. Just a thought for later.)
She hates Steve Harrington.
She doesn’t, really, because he’s her best friend and she loves him and his stupid goofy face and his dumb hair, and because Steve’s stupid dare was kind of the whole reason why she’d met the girl of her dreams, but, well. Robin still hasn’t forgotten about how he’d ditched her that one night, so she thinks that it’s only fair that he gets a taste of his own medicine.
“Are you sure he’s home?” Nancy asks, nervously walking up the porch of Robin’s best friend’s house.
“Yeah. He’s got no life outside of me and his babysitting job,” Robin informs, and Nancy eyes her curiously before shaking her head at her girlfriend’s sense of humor. Not that Robin was necessarily joking in this case.
Nancy still looks a little reluctant, probably because she’s the mature one out of the two of them, but after a few seconds she nods to herself and looks at the doorbell determinately. Robin smiles, feeling her heart grow two sizes at how cute Nancy Wheeler could be, sometimes.
“Okay, on three,” Nancy nods. Robin’s hand is over the doorbell and Nancy is up in a fist, ready to knock at the count of three. “One, two… three!”
Robin presses the bell three times as Nancy knocks loudly twice and then they quickly make a run for it, grabbing each other’s hands as they run away from the crime scene.
When they’re halfway down the street, they hear an indignant cry from behind them and they look back just in time to see Steve at the door, both hands on his hips as he shouts expletives into the hot suburban summer night sky.
They keep on running, nothing else being heard but their laughter and the sound of Steve’s door slamming shut.