Work Text:
Robin rushes through the backstage, sidestepping a crew member balancing far too many props right in front of his eyes, and very narrowly ducking below a very distressed assistant screaming for everyone’s last water refills. Her jacket almost gets caught in a door handle or two, and Robin has to wonder why she even brought in the first place, because she knows the theatre always gets suffocating, especially during pre-show rush.
Then she sees her.
Crossed arms, perfect posture. Just the barest hint of a crease between her eyebrows, which Robin knows is exclusively due to her being too afraid to ruin her makeup. She’s definitely pissed. And tired, also. But that’s been a constant lately.
“Nance,” Robin calls, dropping her stupid useless jacket on the floor, “it’s fifteen minutes to show.”
“You were late.”
Robin bites down a sigh. She runs a very stressed hand through her hair as she starts rummaging for something useful in the mess of her coworkers’ scraps. “Yeah, yeah, but- Jesus, Nance. I had to run here! There’s like three hundred people on call today- did you know there's other people on call today?”
Nancy does not dignify her with a response. She just turns around and huffs, which kinda tickles Robin a bit, because she thought she was talking to a human and not to a horse, but whatever. She’s got bigger fish to fry. Or mammals. Or whatever. She picks up a couple of pins from Eddie’s station and sends him a quick apology before- fuck.
“Did you put pins in your mouth again?”
“No?”
“How do you always manage to- you don’t even know if you need pins yet, I haven’t told what’s the issue!”
“Oh come on, you always need pins. And- and I like prepared for everything!”
Nancy looks over her shoulder, donned with a little grin. “Sure.”
Robin closes her mouth so hard she hears her teeth click.
Then Nancy goes back to staring forward, focused. She straightens her back even more (which Robin didn’t think was possible), as if remembering the show all of a sudden. “I’ve got a hole on my hip. It’s small, but I’m sure it’s going to get worse if I dance on it.”
“Well.” Robin smirks. “That’s what pins are for.”
Nancy’s “don’t” in reply is on the very edge of a laugh.
She starts working. They sit in a comfortable, albeit small, bubble of silence. Robin knows that outside of their little corner of peace there are at least three different people running around whisper-shouting looking for their stuff, but the only thing she can hear as she closes the seams is quiet. Quiet from her brain too. Sewing keeps her just busy enough that she doesn’t want to think about anything else, without ever getting exhausting. She puts a hand on Nancy’s hip, to move her to a spot with better lighting, and thinks that this might just be her favorite job.
“Why were you late?”
“Mh?” She mumbles. She’s almost done. “Oh. I got a lunch shift at the diner, but there was this one table that just wouldn’t fucking leave-”
Nancy tenses. “The diner?”
“What?”
“You’ve never mentioned a diner before.”
Robin stops for a second, before shaking her head with a grin. She’s a bloodhound. “I saw their fliers around last week. I went in for an interview and they immediately put me to work. I don’t think they know my name.”
Finally, finally, Nancy breaks into a giggle. It’s short, and she evidently tries really hard to stay still so that Robin doesn’t stab her with a needle, but the trembling of her shoulder ultimately betrays her. Robin can feel herself smiling too.
“Had enough of the nail salon?”
“Oh, no. They had enough of me. They kicked me out after I started talking about Judith Butler.”
“Idiots.” Nancy says, sounding kind of almost genuinely angry. “They don’t know what they lost.”
Robin lets the sentiment sit between them for a moment, as she snips off the last thread off her work, tasting the weird feel it leaves on her tongue. It’s not unpleasant.
“They were also asking a lesbian to do long nails, Nance. So, you know. Not really my craft.” She says, and she immediately tries to move out of the way of Nancy smacking her right in the stomach, but she’s too slow. Their corner of backstage gets filled with the world’s tiniest, saddest little whack, and Nancy’s soft grin.
“Are you done?”
“Yep. All fixed. Take it for a spin.”
Nancy rolls her eyes, but she does take it for a spin. She does a pirouette, and then another one just to be sure, and Robin is suddenly incredibly certain that this is her favorite job.
“All good?”
“Yes,” she says. She gives Robin a grateful smile, if a bit subdued, and then tips her head forward in a little bow as she adds: “perfect as always.”
Good. This is where they’d end it, usually. Nancy thanks her, Robin picks up her jacket and goes to hide in the theatre, next to the last exit to the bathroom, to catch as much as she can of the show. She can already see Nancy’s eyes getting lost in choreo, running through positions like they’re military drills. She’s on the verge of turning towards the stage, but then something changes.
She steps in. “Robin.” She starts, far too close. “It’s been... six job changes, since the beginning of the year, right?”
Robin goes for a grin. “Have you been keeping count?”
“Yes.”
Oh. She stills for a moment, and then ticks her hand up to her hair. “Yeah, then. I guess. You guys have been my most stable gig since I got in, and, you know, it’s not too much money but it’s good enough for-”
“But why is that?”
“Why is what, Nance?”
And Nancy gets this look. Inquisitive, curious, and pointed. She moves a bit back, if only to give herself freedom of movement, and of reasoning, which only gives Robin a very minor respite. “You’re good at what you do, Robin. You’re precise, and you pick up things extremely quickly. They threw you in the nail salon without any kind of training and you managed to just learn as you went. It took you three days to memorize where everything here goes. That’s a skill. So.” Nancy snaps her eyes up, staring directly into Robin’s. “Why haven’t you found a job yet?”
Robin goes quiet. She feels a bit like she just got ran over by a bus. A part of her wants to laugh and say that she has gotten a job, and that she’s standing in front of her because of said job, but that’s not what Nancy wants her to say. She opens her mouth once, but nothing comes out. She retries. “I don’t know, Nance.” She tips herself backwards until she meets a workstation. “I just haven’t found the right thing yet, you know? The one that makes me go I wanna stick with you forever. I- I don’t think I’m even wired to think something like that at this point. I’m flaky and I’m... jumpy? I guess? I’m so easy to pull
from one thing to the next and then it all gets so... boring! Or tiring or tedious or whatever. I’m just-” she sighs, bringing a hand up to rub her eyes. “I didn’t have a childhood dream to make my job, Nance.”
Nancy bites her lip, probably digesting the tsunami wave of information she just received. She’s still being mindful of her stage makeup, but a little less so now. They’re both being less mindful. It's late. Robin’s sure that if she focused she could already hear the faint buzz of the public filling the room, but she doesn't. She waits. Then Nancy says: “this wasn’t my childhood dream.”
Now that is a lie, if Robin’s ever heard one. Not that she’d think Nancy would lie, but... This was all she’s ever heard her talk about. She’d mentioned family, sure, an annoying little brother that she’d just started being civil with, and a boyfriend, also, but that just made her clam up even more, so Robin tended to skirt around that. The most she’d shared about was how pissed she was starting to get at her partner, who always seemed to catch her a beat too slow. “What did you want to be?”
And Nancy Wheeler smiles. A four hundred thousand billion karat smile, with a pair of eyes gleaming in a way Robin had truly never seen before, not even when it was January and she was just starting and Nancy was still pretending to care about this stupid place. “I wanted to be a journalist.”