Chapter Text
Nancy was going way over the speed limit.
It hadn’t been the first time, she recalled, and it certainly wouldn't be the last. Her foot pressed down hard on the gas of her blue Mercury Colony Park with a familiar urgency, one she had felt many times before. Escaping a possessed Billy Hargrove at the Starcourt Mall a few years back, fleeing the security of Pennhurst Asylum. It was a wonder her car was still in decent shape, she mused. For all the strain she put on it, she rarely had to get any work done on the thing.
This time, though, the station wagon wasn’t a victim of her saving the world. In fact, a part of Nancy wanted to blow the whole planet up herself. Her knuckles were pale on the steering wheel as she tried to steady her mind, replaying the scene over and over again.
The WSQK tower was dim and peaceful, programming having just wrapped up for the night. The station sat solitary atop a small hill, illuminated only by its own solar-powered lights. They had to get those installed themselves, Nancy remembered. The station had existed before, but had been long abandoned by the time that the idea for The Squawk was conceived. As a team, as they always had, the group had pledged to restore the murky, rusted tower as well as the spirits of the people of Hawkins.
Of course, though, they had no plans to follow most of the orders thrown their way by the military. They planned to feign compliance, instead utilizing the station as a means for encoded communication. It seemed like a pretty brilliant plan, one Mike and Lucas had come up with. Nancy had to admit that she was impressed with her little brother when he presented it, looking stronger and more driven than she’d ever known him to be. From there, the boys explained, they were going to organize break-ins to the Upside Down, eventually defeating Vecna once and for all.
But the real meat and potatoes of the operation, Joyce had argued, in her traditional Joyce fashion, couldn’t begin until they had maps.
And that was why Nancy had been in the dimly-lit basement, ready to pull another all-nighter as she obsessively scribbled details into the empty spaces of her diagram. The room smelled strongly of alcohol markers, making her feel a slight lightheadedness as the tip of her Sharpie squeaked across the material. It was draft six; she was never able to get the scaling quite right when she placed down the tunnel overlay, even when tracing Will’s sketch. It had to be exact, the boy had explained, for fear of misjudging the distance between areas. If she was even a few inches off with her map, they could come up a half-mile East from where they needed to be. No pressure at all.
Normally, they’d have gotten help from the police department or government, people who could create these things digitally and mathematically. Methods that left no room for error. But the officials had all but abandoned the group since the cracks in the earth had opened up, and Nancy was becoming tired. She didn’t mind a few re-dos, but, at this point, her own imperfection was seriously beginning to exhaust her. She rubbed an eye as she carefully labeled Lover’s Lake on the page before her, dropping her marker and letting out a puff of air.
She could do this.
She wasn’t going to let Vecna get away again. Not after what he’d done to Max, or Fred, or Chrissy, or herself. She shuddered as the image of Barb’s corpse flashed in her mind, leaning limply against Steve’s pool, parasites crawling from her rotten insides as if to say You did this, Nancy. You left me.
Nancy shook the feeling away, blinking her eyes until the mental image dissipated. She couldn't let herself think about that now, she decided, running her fingers over the wood of the table in a grounding fashion before returning to the task at hand.
The projector gave a gentle hum as she flipped the switch, illuminating the wall of the stuffy room and revealing a grid-map of Hawkins. Her eyelashes fluttered, adjusting to the sudden light as she positioned the device accurately. Once she was sure it was lined up correctly, she delicately took her map of the tunnels in her hands, short, bitten fingertips maneuvering to place it exactly where it was meant to be. She stepped back with a certain exasperation, already resolving herself to another draft.
As she gazed at the wall before her, though, Nancy’s lips parted in disbelief. The dark lines of the tunnels intertwined with one another in a way that looked almost elegant, free from the disorientation she’d become so accustomed to in her earlier iterations. Her neatly-written labels were a bit fuzzy, blown up wide against the wall, but she supposed that was to be expected. Biting her lip with cautioned anticipation, Nancy’s eyes flickered over every detail.
After a moment, she hummed contentedly. It was exactly right.
A smile tugged at her lips as she hurriedly rushed to place a paperweight against the table, giddily running up the stairs. She had to show Robin.
Robin, her best friend.
Robin, with her honest eyes and disarming smile. Robin, who had stayed pressed against her body through fits of tears, soothing her until she had fallen asleep. Robin, who tripped over her own feet and found wonder in the smallest things. Robin, with exactly twenty-seven freckles peppering her cheeks.
Nancy was still in the process of coming to terms with her crush on the girl, with the fact she had crushes on girls at all. Truthfully, the realization had been more of an inconvenience than anything else – just another thing to add to my plate, she’d thought. Still, she had broken up with Jonathan when she had realized, the guilt of lying to him being too much to handle, on top of everything else. She had always prided herself on her honesty, on her confidence with navigating difficult situations. This was one of those situations, she’d told him softly, that she had to reason with on her own.
She was never going to tell her, of course. That’d be ridiculous. Maybe years from now, when she’d graduated from Emerson and Robin had gone off doing god-knows-what, and the world was more accepting of people like them. When they reunited over a coffee, she would bring it up as a distant memory, a funny tidbit she’d never brought up.
If Nancy was really lucky, Robin would confess that her past emotions reflected Nancy’s own. She had her suspicions about this – she caught the way Robin stared at her like she set the world into motion, the way her whole body seemed to redden when it wrapped around Nancy’s shorter stature. Nancy never anticipated that either of them would do something about these possibly-mutual feelings, and she had accepted that. Obviously, they had bigger things to worry about at the moment.
Ultimately, in the soft yellow light of a distant-future coffee shop, they would share a laugh and move on to more serious matters. Nancy would be vindicated, proven right, just as always. And that would be the end.
But here, right now, in the solitude of the radio station, she selfishly only wanted the girl she fawned over to be impressed. To praise her precision as she traced the lines of ink making up the tunnels. If she was feeling especially soft, Robin would hug her, muttering words of encouragement. She had known how much this was bugging her, how she’d obsessively worked since noon. It was a silly, childish fantasy, she knew, but that didn’t stop her from needing it like air to breathe.
“Robin!” she called, her feet hitting the top of the stairs as the door to the dark recording booth swung open, the ON AIR sign turned off. She glanced around, but saw no sign of the blonde hair and deep blue eyes she’d studied so intently for the past few months. She walked more softly as she searched, peering into hallways and storage rooms with the occasional call of her name.
For a while, as Nancy paced the cold tile floors of the station, Robin was nowhere to be found, and she was ready to resign herself to her car, assuming the other girl had caught a ride home with Steve.
But as she made her way through a corridor to the left of the main room, she paused, pulling her lips into a tight smile. Robin’s giggle echoed through the walls, a sound she’d recognize anywhere. Her voice was gentle rain on a summer afternoon, light and warm with a slight rasp to it that could drive Nancy up the wall. She tried not to think about how absolutely stupid that was, how head over heels she had fallen for this girl who she didn’t even want to date, not really. Not when the world was the way it is.
Did she?
No. That’s a later thought, one for the diary, she decided.
She shook herself from her own head, brown curls bouncing against one another as they tossed from side to side. She had gotten lost in the sound of Robin's laughter, which, itself, was not an uncommon occurrence. She made a mental note to work on that part; distractions would be detrimental to the crawl.
Nancy paced softly up to the doorway, her hand resting on the knob as she peered through the window at sandy hair and –
Oh.
The caress of long, neat fingers against a rosy cheek.
Short red locks, curling up to meet soft cheekbones.
Pink lips meeting pink lips, a slight bending of the legs to close the distance between them.
Two smiles, two sets of laughter.
“You’re so cute.” A voice Nancy knew like a prayer.
Wide, hungry eyes staring up at Robin in response.
Her Robin.
Frozen with one hand over the cool metal of the doorknob, Nancy knew she should walk away. But still she stood, staring down a girl she’d never seen before, her gut twisting with dread. She was much shorter than Robin, around the same height as Nancy herself, with long fiery eyelashes to match her auburn hair. Her lips were pink and swollen, her cheeks flushed.
She was beautiful, Nancy realized, the pit in her own gut sinking deeper. She was really, truly beautiful. And she was smiling, with such a warmth that it seemed to illuminate the shelves of the dark storage room around her. Nancy felt sick to her stomach.
After what felt like a lifetime of observation, Nancy watched the two figures pull away from one another, gasping for air. She found herself still unable to move, pools of tears welling up below her eyes.
Robin’s eyes stared down at the girl in front of her for a few more moments, before her smile faltered. Deep blue irises caught Nancy’s own, then, as her head snapped upwards towards the door.
Nancy had come to know Robin’s emotions like the back of her hand, studying her eyes every time she spoke, carving the images into the walls of her brain like a Renaissance sculptor.
This was an easy one. Panic.
“Shit.” Robin breathed, letting go of the shorter red-haired girl and stepping towards the door. Her strides were long, hurried, uncomfortable. Nancy's feet stood firmly on the floor, paralyzed. “Nance, I can explain–”
As Robin’s warm palm touched her bare shoulder, Nancy felt herself snap back into reality.
She ran.
She ran down the corridor, back into the main room. She ran out into the open air, paying no mind to the cold, or the fact that she’d left her jacket down in the basement with the still-lit projector, displaying her hours of work. It was as if she was in a trance, one she wasn’t eager to leave any time soon. She ignored the sweat that gathered on her forehead, and the long, unkempt grasses that threatened to wrap her ankles as she sprinted across the field.
When she reached her car, Robin was still chasing after her, stumbling down the hill in her typical weird-running-Robin way. Ordinarily, Nancy would find it cute, but now the sight just made her feel nauseous. It was a reminder of shared looks, of too-tight clothes, of sprints through a courtyard. Things that, Nancy had hoped, somewhere deep in her heart – a crevice inside a crevice that she’d refused to plunge into – could have been the start of something special.
Robin fell right on her face as she tried to meet her at the drivers-side window. She looked up at her almost pathetically, face red and covered in mud, and opened her mouth to speak.
Nancy didn’t hesitate. She put the car in drive, speeding away as Robin lay on the ground, panting and winded.