Chapter Text
Robin flops onto the bed next to Nancy, making it rock.
Nancy laughs and readjusts, tipping her head back on her pillow to mimic Robin’s position.
Nothing else needs to be said. Not yet. Both just stare mindlessly at the ceiling for a while, simply settling into the quiet.
Despite all of Nancy’s initial thoughts and assumptions about the taller girl, Nancy has learned that there are a lot of complex ebbs and flows that go along with being her friend (now that they’re officially friends, and all that).
Robin’s a lot more than the loud, fidgety ball of annoyance Nancy originally perceived her to be.
She has layers.
Like a storm raging over a landscape, everything comes in phases. Yes, sometimes she’s nothing but energy and elbows and words. Tearing and disturbing and swirling through Nancy’s space like an unstoppable force.
But then she’ll shift. There will be a pause.
It’s always when they’re alone. When no one else is around, it’s like Nancy can reach the eye of it.
If she says the right thing, acts the right way, Robin’s mood will mellow.
She somehow settles in a way that Nancy’s never quite experienced before. It loosens something in Nancy, too, like the pressure of the world around them just drops, letting them finally exist in their bones without all of the draping and the positioning they normally have to shroud themselves in for everyone else.
It’s peaceful and recharging, and it only makes it all the more fun and exciting when her energy surges back up and Nancy gets caught in the whirlwind once more.
In a lot of ways, Nancy’s started thinking she wouldn’t mind being caught along in the wake of Robin’s storm for the rest of her life, as long as it means she gets to stay near the other girl. Near this feeling.
But, she never let's herself think about that for too long. She always pushes it down, burying it away with the thousands of other frivolous thoughts that have tried to distract her in the past.
She doesn’t have time for silly fantasies like that, especially not when there’s so many more important things going on.
Especially when she’s honestly, seriously starting to worry about Robin for other reasons.
It’s just that, the more time she spends with Robin, the more she’s started noticing other things about her behavior, too. Things that, if she’s tracking them right, have been getting increasingly worse over time.
Things that, she’s pretty sure, have nothing to do with everything that happened in the Upside Down.
And Nancy is tracking them. As soon as she realized she was noticing a pattern, her investigative instincts kicked in and she began to pay closer attention. For the last several weeks, she has observed and tested and studied.
The trends are clear.
Her first piece of evidence breaks her heart.
Robin jumps away every time Nancy gets too close to her when she’s not expecting it.
Sometimes everything is fine. They can laugh and lean against each other. They can joke and grab each other’s arms. They can end up smushed next to each other on the couch during a movie night. They can even wake up from a sleepover tangled in each other’s arms.
But as soon as Nancy accidentally gets a little too close when Robin’s not expecting it, she bolts.
It comes racing back to the forefront of Nancy’s mind a few minutes after she rolls onto her side to face Robin better, putting her just a couple of inches closer to Robin’s side.
Not touching, not quite, but just close enough.
Nancy honestly doesn’t think about it as she does it. That’s often the problem. The reason this one breaks her heart so much. She does it automatically, like she’s drawn in.
She just wants to be closer to Robin. To see her more clearly.
Robin doesn’t notice right away this time, either. Her eyes are closed and her face radiates that exquisite peacefulness Nancy is really starting to crave. But, she’s not quite there yet. Even though Robin might be calm now, Nancy knows she won’t truly be able to settle until she’s gotten the rant out of her system.
They sit in silence for another minute before Nancy decides to break it. “That long of a day at the store?” she asks.
Robin lets out a groaning sigh. She keeps her eyes closed even as her hands lift dramatically to start her story. “We had ten children come in looking for the same movie that we haven’t had in stock for over a month. Ten! How do we even have that many children in Hawkins that aren’t part of Steve’s pack! They all threw fits. All of their parents looked at me like I was the problem for not being able to go into the backroom and just magically make the tape appear for them, or whatever. One gremlin actually knocked over an entire rack during his tantrum, which surprise surprise, the parent did nothing to clean up, so then I had to spend the next hour picking them up, checking for damage, and reorganizing the shelf.”
Nancy laughs. It’s a good rant. Explosive and effective in a way that Nancy knows will mean a calm evening full of soft, sleepy conversation before a movie. She’s looking forward to it just as much as she always looks forward to the nights full of rapid monologues and chaotic adventures.
She just loves it when they get the chance to spend time together, just them.
It’s fun spending time with the party. Important, too. But it’s never the same as when it’s just them.
It’s been an especially long time since they were able to schedule a sleepover like this, given Robin’s work schedule and the demands of school and everything else, and Nancy’s been looking forward to it all week. It feels especially fitting that tonight’s will be a soft and cozy one, after all.
Robin’s rant keeps going while Nancy muses. “Then, to top it all off, Steve was 30 minutes late to take over because he was with another new girl and it was torture waiting for him. He swore to me yesterday that the last girl was the one and he just needed one more date with her to lock it down. Then, not even 24 hours later he’s rushing in with lipstick still on his neck and a sheepish smile, laughing about how whats-her-face dumped him already so he found someone new. I’m telling you, Nancy, torture! He does it on purpose just to mess with me, I swear. I’m so glad to have the next two days off to just ignore the world for a while.”
Robin’s hands, finally done gesturing, flop down to either side of her. Only…now that Nancy’s closer to her, the hand in between them grazes along the front of Nancy’s knees on its way down.
The change in Robin is instantaneous.
All of her muscles lock up, surging with a tension that Nancy can feel in the air.
Robin’s head turns, eyes flying open. Her face crumples, filling with a strange mix of surprise and actual fear as she registers Nancy’s position beside her. She chokes on a gasp, hand flopping uselessly between them as if she’s trying to get it away from Nancy but can’t quite figure out how to go about doing that without touching her again.
Before Nancy can react with more than a blink of surprise, Robin seems to just tip herself over the edge of the bed, landing harshly on the ground with a painful sounding thud and a curse.
Nancy’s up in a heartbeat, crawling over to the side of the bed to stare down at Robin with shock and concern. Her heart clenches, replaying that look on Robin’s face over and over again in her mind.
Robin only fumbles on the ground for a second or two before jumping to her feet and turning to look back at Nancy.
Her eyes are wide and jittery.
Her whole energy is wrong now. Broken. Shattered.
The soft relaxation of a moment ago has been completely replaced by hard edges and a kind of thrumming running through her.
Dark and wrong in a way Nancy can’t quite describe. Almost panic.
“Oops.” Robin forces out a fake laugh. “Sorry, I’m always such a klutz. My mother always says that if it weren’t for gravity, I’d have found a way to fall off the globe by now.”
Nancy frowns, ignoring her words in favor of studying her face and posture, almost desperately searching for what it was about Nancy’s proximity that could have warranted that reaction.
That panic.
“Are you ok? Did you hurt anything?” Nancy asks instead.
Robin laughs again, so forced it scrapes down Nancy’s spine like claws. “No, no, just my pride, but that died a long time ago. Come on, let’s go for a walk or something, get some air, ya?”
Nancy hesitates and watches Robin for a few more seconds.
She won’t look back at her. Her eyes keep darting around the room, sometimes looking near Nancy, sometimes glancing around the space like she did the very first time she was here and she felt the need to touch and inspect absolutely everything, but never looking at Nancy.
She stands with her limbs all still in the right places but held awkwardly and tense, one hand hooked in her pocket and the other held just a little too far away from her body, as if already reaching for the door. That same darkness still running through her.
Nancy wants to hold her.
She wants to pull her back down into the cushions and melt her back into the warm peace from before.
She wants to stroke along her brow, run her fingers through her hair, and link their hands together until everything bad and harsh seeps its way out of their skin and into the dirt below the house’s very foundations.
But, she won’t. She knows she can’t.
Instead, she packs that image down into her little box of silly thoughts and makes a mental note of this incident as another piece of proof that something is indeed very wrong.
Then, she forces a smile on her face and nods before following Robin out of her room.
They go for a walk.
Robin is rambly and full of energy, flying through topics as she ping pongs from tree to tree and street to street.
Nancy is exhausted by the time they finally return and settle down for the night.
And her heart hurts.
When Robin eventually slips into a sleep that is somehow also filled with that tense anxiety, Nancy curls into a ball next to her and watches. Her own hand fists in the sheets between them to keep her from reaching out for the one Robin has kept trapped in the pocket of her sweatshirt ever since she stood back up from the floor.
She vows for the hundredth time to figure out what’s going on.
She vows to put a stop to it.