Chapter Text
And then there were two.
Nancy stares past Robin’s shoulder into the shadows that writhe in Eddie’s trailer, hating how they protrude in disfigured shapes, almost like lithe arms reaching out - tendrils that seek the warmth of human skin. Dust settles on her shoulders and blankets every breath, further coating their lungs ash-gray as the darkness steadily grows. There’s something eerie about being in the Upside Down, where Barb once was, her final steps taken somewhere beyond these dirt roads. She was here, and Nancy didn’t even know for days. Weeks.
Her body might be out in the forest or the streets or the pool, of course, the pool— decaying.
And Nancy can’t do anything about that. She can only gaze at the monsters her mind conjures in the looming stillness, watching over her, waiting to strike.
From right next to her, Robin exhales through her mouth, something like a dazed grin on her face, and they wait for Eddie to scramble off of the mattress with the clumsiness of a newborn baby deer, hitting his head on his kitchen cabinets as he backs up. He winces and Max glares at him, unimpressed.
Robin turns to Nancy with something like hope, and it hurts to look at, to feel anything in a place like this. Care is a dangerous thing, and Nancy has too much of it to bear.
“Go.” Nancy tells her, before the shadows start to form silhouettes and she sees every regret laid out in front of her in the form of broken glass, the shards splayed out beneath her boots.
Robin opens her mouth, closes it.
“I was gonna suggest rock paper scissors, actually… but that’s— probably not the best thing to be doing right now, is it?”
Nancy glares at her.
“...Right.” She mutters, looking down. Her brows lift, suddenly, and she kneels down. “Actually, you go ahead. Gotta tie these.”
Nancy purses her lips. “And to think, right when I was starting to be nice to you.”
Robin snorts, the sound lost to the others waiting on the other side of the gate. Nancy makes out the beginnings of a grin beneath the cover of her short, unruly hair, and smiles down at her just as Dustin shrieks with his head twisted at an unusual angle: “Hurry the hell up! My neck is starting to cramp over here.”
Steve whaps him across the chest, saying something about his voice being ‘as hard on the ears as the goddamn demo-bats’ screeches,’ and the rest is lost on Nancy as they dissolve into mindless quarrel that speaks more of relief than actual annoyance at both of them being safe. She clambers onto the handmade rope, thighs tightly enclosed around its length, and begins to make her way up.
Just as she feels the air shift around her, cleaner and easier to breathe in, bathed in the warmth of the lambent flickering in Eddie’s run-down trailer, her hair lifts from her head. It’s kind of like coming back from space, feeling the pull of gravity on her for the first time after an interminable endlessness, but—
Then, just as she realizes the lights are flickering:
Darkness.
Nancy has never known fear— at least, not like this. The all-consuming dread that settles deep in her bones as she falls, and falls, and falls feels something like dying, or never living again. Time escapes her grasp, lost to the void, and with the frayed, worn-down instincts of a teenager who seems to always lose the things she wants most just as she’s about to get them, her arms unfurl from where they lie tucked against her chest.
She spreads herself against the nothingness, flattening, and falling starts to look like waking up and painting her face on. It starts to sound like an empty house and an emptier body, devoid of will. It starts to taste like tears and cheap lipstick. It hurts. It has always hurted. She wonders what she’ll wake up to this time, and where the nightmare begins, or if it has even started yet, and what she faces now is only the preamble - the beginning of the beginning.
And, just as she expects, she’s met with worse. Her head hits concrete with such force that she groans into the silence, cradling herself like her mother did, like her father didn’t. It hits her then, the very few ways she’s ever been loved. The ache of her bones carry her over vine after vine, across the deep end of Steve’s pool, and a part of her deep inside knows what awaits at the very bottom before she can even cast her gaze to it.
There, against the cracks in the concrete and dried blood between the grout of worn tile, Barb’s body lies. Still, unmoving, and still in the same clothes she wore the last time Nancy had ever seen her. Her chest heaves, and God, Barb might have been the only person to have ever loved her at what was considerably her worst. Before Steve, or Jonathon, or - Robin, even. Before any of them, she’d been there.
All those years ago, she watched Nancy push away every sign of affection in place of the means to shallow, short-lived ends, the simple highs of climbing social hierarchies all while crying that she was happy. She was okay, her life was great, no worries! Mike argued with her most days, angry at her for her compliance, her desperation; the last time she spoke to Dad was when she dislocated her ankle four months ago and he was forced to look her in the eye while she limped, like a weak, wounded animal; all she had was the opinions of others to live off of. But she’d be fine. She’ll play whatever role suits her best. She’ll survive another day.
And Barb, the one who should’ve, won’t.
She inches closer to her carcass, eyes flitting over the thinning layer of almost translucent skin and the whites of her eyes without so much as a speck of light in them, any life long since been consumed by another, swallowed down and forgotten. Bile rises in the back of her throat as she gazes at Barb in an overwhelmingly bittersweet trance, caught between regret so immense it burns in the hollow of her chest and nothing but love. Sweet, hollow love.
Only death lets Nancy appreciate people properly, it seems. She wonders if her own death would invoke the opposite reaction— hate, a festering resentment that only sees the light of day once she no longer can. Slow realizations that leave memories tainted and unfixable, burnt at the edges like a photograph taken at just the wrong angle, too close to the sun and its fiery self-destruction, when it’s really only meant to be appreciated from afar. From a distance that Nancy creates on her own, for others’ good.
People will realize that she’d never been worth the time of day.
“...Nancy!”
She’s so lonely.
“Wheeler! We’re here! We’re right…”
She’s never been so deprived of true, human connection in her life, and even if it were to somehow return to her, Nancy is sure she’d ruin it anyway. It’s an inevitability, a fixed outcome on a one-track course over the lapse of time, bound to her for as long as she’ll continue to live atop the corpses of others.
“Your friends are calling.”
She looks to Barb, and instead finds what is some amalgamation of every horror to have existed in Hawkins in a single existence. Vecna, she can’t help but to think, looks almost like miscalculation rectified, all errors to have ever existed made tangible, engraved across the rotting, exposed joints of his figure. Risen from the dead, almost. Coming back to haunt her and every single other victim of his. His hand reaches for her, and despite the movement, he seems to have little control over his fingers, as though they’ve been scorched beyond use.
“Do you not care for them?”
She says nothing.
“You killed her.”
And she did. Nancy remembers it with clarity: the slow lowering of herself onto Steve’s bed, the willful ignorance, the easy rhythm, the auto-pilot, and finally, her mind going quiet, calm. She thinks about nothing. She watches the way he thinks he’s unfurling her between his hands, eyes glittering in the low light as he presses his lips to her skin, and it makes her remember all over again why they can’t ever return to each other.
So much as her mind seeks it, and her hands crave it— warmth, or love, or some fucking attention— he doesn’t deserve that again. The weight of her empty stare on his walls, on the family photos lining his stairwell, all those years confined to gilded frames and ill-lit confinements. She was lonely and a bit wild-eyed, that’s all. He needs better and she needs to get her shit together. She needs to learn how to love wholly, the right way. As everyone else does.
The pool is filling up, slow like molasses, the smell of it copper-sharp and vitriolic in her nose. Vermillion grazes the soles of her shoes, moving further up their length as Nancy lifts her foot. She turns to see bloody footprints behind her, disappearing beneath the slow rise.
“I’ll be back.” He says, voice all around her, within her— and maybe he’s always been within her, the unspoken words she’s never wanted to let out. Nancy feels the tears roll down her cheeks, in faint, thin lines, lost to the red lake at her feet the moment they meet its surface.
__________________
Nancy’s eyes snap open.
What greets her first is Robin’s back, and, shortly after, the rattling of the entire trailer. Nancy falls to her haunches, catching herself with her hands, and the momentum propels droplets of blood from her face onto the floor. She stares at them with confusion and lifts a hand to her face. There’s something warm against her cheek, and when she retracts her arm, the pads of her fingers are stained dark red.
Robin glances back at her and her eyes widen, darting across her face.
“Nance! Shit, I thought— I thought you weren’t going to come back for a second there.” She stumbles over her words, a half-smile on her face, and she’s not quite talking to her, no - it’s more like she’s talking around her, moving through the trailer in a flurry as she rambles, hunting for something in the cabinets.
Distantly, Nancy realizes Robin is dragging a sledgehammer behind her, the weight of it a quiet rumble against the wooden floors. She attempts to get back onto her feet, see what's going on and try to help, but the rush of blood to her head leaves the room a little too fuzzy around the edges, an overwhelming blur of navy and gray. She stumbles back, landing on her butt, and Robin catches her there, leaning against her.
“Hey, hey. Don’t move too much.” Nancy can feel the heat of Robin against her back, sliding further down as she settles into a low crouch next to her. “I dunno what happened with Vecna, or with anything, really, but somehow he… found us. And he hurt you, during your vision.”
More like Nancy hurt herself. She’s been known to do that for a while, self-inflicted misery and all. But she doesn’t say that aloud, instead mumbling while wiping at the blood dribbling down her face: “Might be because we’re physically here, in his territory.”
“You might be right.” She sighs, a hand still on her back.
Nancy blinks through the dizziness and finds a startlingly large cleaver before her, being offered by Robin. She blinks at her, bloodied brow lifted.
“For the bats? They managed to find us, too. If you haven’t figured that out.” She says, a little snarky at the end, half out of habit and nerves. Robin worries her lip between her teeth as she glances through the dusty windows, watching for movement in the treeline beyond shitty wire fences.
“Oh. Great.” Nancy says through her teeth, accepting the weapon with blood-stained hands. At least it’s been recently sharpened.
She gets to her feet much more slowly this time, with Robin’s hands supporting her, a searing warmth on her side that refuses to fade. Robin keeps examing her, eyes round and with a glint of terror-fueled concern in them. Nancy stares up at her and the pallor of her skin in the lackluster light, the slight shake of her hands as they press into the fabric of her shirt. She can’t remember the last time someone’s looked at her like this, really looked at her. It stings. She doesn’t deserve it— but it’s a lifeline, and Nancy needs it more then she’ll ever admit.
“I’m fine, Rob.” Her voice is quiet, steady. She strains around the tightness of her throat, the burning behind her eyelids.
“You don’t…” Robin doesn’t finish that sentence, too afraid of what lies with the truth of it, the uncertainty, instead jumping onto the next without warning, “that was your first vision, wasn’t it?”
Nancy’s hand has found its way onto her shoulder, the two holding each other as they listen to grotesque screams further off into the night, wings flapping just beyond the front door. It sounds like death’s greeting— or like vultures, circling already-dead meat. “I’ll be okay. I have a day. We have a day to get out of here.”
Just as the words leave her lips, Nancy’s gaze wanders to the ceiling. She stares dumbly at it and, with belated acknowledgement, registers that the tear between their two worlds seems to have been closed off with vines that intertwine with one another like some small, stifling pinky promise, stubborn in their compliance to Vecna.
Robin follows her stare, shakes her head. “The bats realized they couldn’t get to it and— I don’t know, they must’ve communicated with…”
“Everything. The hive mind, right?”
Nancy turns to her, taking in her seriousness. It’s such a stark contrast from when they were at the library bickering—her eyes glittering with mirth, a devious smile on her face—this expression.
Robin meets her stare. “...Yeah. Yeah.”
Nancy sighs into the little space between them and Robin’s hands twitch around her. She’s thankful for the constant of her assurance, even if it’s a little strange for them. Robin clears her throat, working around something— Nancy doesn’t exactly know what— before saying: “We should be okay for a little while here. I killed one of them earlier and I think it might’ve been their, like, leader or something. Ever since then they backed off.”
“Or they’re planning something.” Nancy supplies, grimacing.
She hums. “Let's hope not.”
And then they’re slowly moving through the house, Nancy being carried forward by Robin, towards the bathroom down the hall. It’s hard to keep her feet from stumbling over one another, the sound of the blood dripping onto the floor the only indicator of their existences’. Their breaths have slowed to shallow intakes, whispered outtakes, the very thought of being attacked or, worse, separated dawning upon them like a horrible nightmare. It was better when there were four of them before. There were more bodies between them, more words to be shared, more sounds of familiarity— shreds of human-life to pass between one another like the flickers of a dying flame, reminding them that there was another side to all this. A way out.
__________________
Nancy slides herself past the lip of a gritty, dust-covered bathtub, settling in its crevasse as per Robin’s surprisingly stern orders, and wipes her bloody fingers off on the decorative towel by the faucet. It’s a little strange, that they’ve tried to go for class in this specific room especially when Nancy knows there’s a wall of collected soup-cans in their little sitting-nook (which exactly doesn’t scream elegant by comparison) but she doesn’t question it. It’s strange, but charming.
Robin locks the door. “‘No windows, that’s good. They can’t get to us.”
Nancy reclines as though the tub were a backrest, extending her legs. The subdued green color of all the ceramic isn’t so bad, she thinks. It’s kind of calming, if her eyes don’t meet the grim trail of blood left on the tiles while trying to get in. “How are we gonna get out of here?”
“Honestly?” Robin starts, unclasping the mirror’s latch to pilfer through Eddie’s things. “I don’t know. Usually it’s you or Dustin that have the smart ideas.”
“Well, at least you admit it.” Nancy leans over the rim and steeples her fingers under her chin, watching Robin furrow her brows at a bottle of medicine. The pills inside rattle as she sets it on the counter, glancing at Nancy before continuing her search.
“Admit what?” Ointment, eyedrops, aftershave— all of it utterly useless. Another bottle, this time promising-looking, but then she shakes it and not a sound is made. Robin groans.
“That I’m smarter than you.” Nancy slurs, eyes slipping shut. The curve of the tub reminds her of Steve’s pool, and her stomach churns just thinking about it. About him.
Guilt shoots through her like lightning - or like pain, deserved, every single pang of it. She lifts her shirt to find another laceration, deeper than the last, as though a single clawed finger swiped at her just for remembering. Nancy, paralyzed with fear (or self-loathing) at the rounded edges of the bathtub and the slow red trickling onto the floor, finds herself unable to tear her eyes from the throbbing flesh.
Robin bends down next to her and says something witty that she doesn’t catch. All she can discern is the sickening, sanguine trickle for a long while, and as she listens to it hit the ground in slow drops like a leaking sink, she wishes that all the blood ever shed in the last three years were all hers - simply because it’s better, that way. Saves others needless pain. She can bear it, for them. She needs to.
“Nance!” Robin frames her face between her hands and guides her away from the blood. Nancy breathes through the delirium of her thoughts and gazes at Robin, eyes shaking in their sockets.
“I’m going to clean your cuts now, okay?” She says, nice and slow. Easy. Things are always easy with Robin, even when they’re not. They fight and they laugh and they make up. Nancy wants to believe things will be okay, like they always end up being, but the shadows tell her different things, their lips to her ears.
“Nancy, is that okay? Are you with me?” Again, she twists her head just so until they’re face to face, inches apart. Robin doesn’t look anywhere but at her, fretting over the injuries without meaning to, eyes darting across her features. She brushes some blood away from her cheek.
Nancy glances at her lips, tries not to listen to the monsters she’s contrived out of her own cruelties, her own resentments. “I… yeah.”
“Good.” A hand leaves her face, and just as Nancy begins to fall without the support, she shifts to cup the underside of her chin. Her body’s beyond her control now, losing blood faster than she can keep up with, thoughts skidding through her havoc-filled mind like tire tracks, leaving marks wherever they so place. “Just don’t look at anything else. Look at me. Not at the tub, or at the wall, or the floor. At me.”
“So bossy.” Nancy mumbles, leaning into her space.
“Yeah, yeah. Not my fault you probably wouldn’t listen otherwise.” Robin huffs, and Nancy smiles for a small moment before there’s a deep, burning flare of pain at her abdomen— the alcohol being poured over the wound.
She lets out a wounded noise, going dizzy at the sheer heat pooling by her feet. The blood has probably started to taper off into the drain, turning pink as Robin pats her dry. “Robin?”
“Yeah?” Robin looks up at her through her lashes, pale blue caught in the darkness like the ripple of a wave and the consequential moonshine running through it shortly after.
She opens her mouth slowly, words lost to unspeakable thoughts. She was going to utter some variation of ‘ I don’t need this’, or ‘ You’re going to get burned if you stay this close for much longer’, but it all just sounds— wrong. Because it is wrong, and as much as Nancy likes to act like she’s the big gun amongst their gaggle of monster-slayers (quite literally, in some sense), a guise like that can only carry her so far in this moment. Her expression puckers.
“You know, you really need to let people in every once in a while.” Robin says. Nancy tenses and Robin brushes her hand across the arteries by her neck.
“I do that.” She says, dumbly. Without further explanation. “I do.”
Robin sighs, ducking to steeple a bandage over her sterilized injury. Her fingers dance across the sticky parts to keep them in place, and Nancy wishes it didn’t feel as nice as it did, as painless as it shouldn’t be. She’s selfish, and she’ll hold onto this if it stays in her orbit too long. People as kind as this always fall into her palms, somehow. What a cruel joke. “Well, you should do it more, then.”
Nancy’s chin does not tremble in Robin’s hands. She tries to look away but then—”Ah, ah! You’re looking at me , remember, Wheeler?”— and she’s right back to knowing what to say, knowing what role to play but not wanting to do it.
She does, anyway, because she can’t remember the last time she’s told the full truth to someone and it scares her.
“You don’t know me.”
Robin moves onto her head, pressing a cotton pad onto the slit hovering over her left brow. Unphased, she shakes her head. “Yeah, well, have you ever considered that’s because you’re not letting me? That I’ve been
trying
to, but you’re kind of impossible? I mean, it took me a week alone just to get us on friendly terms.”
And shit, there it is. The curtain being pulled, the shutters being lifted. Nancy’s never been stripped of an excuse or white lie this quickly in her life. She gazes at the slight frown on Robin’s lips and how she refuses to look her in the eye.
She’s… hurt by this.
“Oh.” Nancy utters.
Robin bites back a laugh for some reason, an amused, bitter sound caught in the back of her throat. “ Oh. Feels like I’ve heard that a lot lately.”
“Is that a bad thing?” She asks.
“It doesn’t have to be.” Robin’s giving her an opportunity. Something she needs, really, if she wants to survive when Vecna strikes again. A way out. A connection.
“I’m not a good person.” Nancy whispers. Robin looks at her head-on, then, and her eyes seem unclouded. Without any doubt about her in them.
“I’ll decide that.” She says, her breath fanning against Nancy’s face. She shudders, eyes drifting down, coming right back up again.
“...Okay.”
Robin hums, satisfied.
Nancy takes the silence as an opportunity to relax. Instinctively, her mind begins to disassemble Robin in the dim glow of the bathroom, restricted to only watching her languid movements as she pulls Sesame Street bandaids out of a bent tin canister. She’s got the demeanor of an intrigued feline, always itching to seek out the answers to every part of a question, even the ones that aren’t asked at all to begin with. Nancy can see it in the way her wide round eyes flit over her face every so often, searching for that flicker of panic from earlier. Wanting to understand it. Even normally, she’s never not moving or speaking or touching something. It’s endearing, in a way.
“Alright, done.” She tells her, retracting to study her handiwork like it’s something to admire when really all Nancy has on her face is a crooked bandaid meant for children. “Still feeling shitty?”
Nancy’s brows pinch together. “I never said I was feeling—"
“Oh please, Nancy. You’re puzzling at times, sure, but it doesn’t take a genius to see you’re not feeling so hot right now.” She almost sounds chiding, as though scolding her for her deflection.
“God, you are annoying.” Nancy says through a grin, lifting herself out of the tub gingerly. She sits at the edge, her back to the small red puddle, no longer able to make out the iron scent lingering in her clothing and all over her, really. Robin removes her hands from her at last, dropping to their respective sides.
The two of them linger there, blood on their hands, bandaid coverings on the floor beneath their feet. Robin steps closer, examining her. They’re not in Hawkins, and they’re not in the Upside Down either. They’ve come into their own, untethered to the real world if not for a few fleeting minutes. Fatigue settles on Nancy, an after-thought of sorts after the adrenaline has left her body, and even as she slouches in her spot on the bathtub’s edge, there’s also some faint satisfaction at the intimacy offered by her pain.
Nancy leans forward until her head is resting against the scratchy material of Robin’s shirt.
“Wheeler?”
She closes her eyes and says nothing.
Slowly, gently, Robin’s hands find their place nestled in Nancy’s hair, stroking at the disheveled locks with care. Too much, not enough, Nancy doesn’t know - and maybe it doesn’t matter. They have each other, and that’s all there is to it. The rest will figure itself out.
Robin exhales and looks to the ceiling. “We’ll get out of here.”