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Nancy has learned two things in the past month: first, the world doesn’t end when it ends, spitting fire and monsters and blood, and second, neither do Christian holidays. Or any kind of holidays for what it matters.
And she resents that. She resents them.
Christmas is in three days, and the whole town is celebrating – there is a tree on the main avenue sheltering the people passing by from the wooden boards nailed on abandoned shops, middle school kids are rehearsing a show about creation myth, the community center is holding a festive dinner – and Nancy is waiting for catastrophe with a gun strapped to her shoulder. She loves her weapons, sure. Heavy in her hands, reliable, always. She loves how time moves when she fires at deadly creatures: how it slows down when she aims at her target, fingers precise but tensed with anticipation; how it takes only a fraction of seconds for the bullet to reach its victim; how everything fastens with the recoil.
With a gun, Nancy is a master of time. But in this town, all that time does is moving on, going forward. Slapping metal floorboard on crevice from hell, and Santa pictures over military warnings.
“I’m bored,” Robin yawns while looking at the woods. She’s always looking at the woods. Has not diverted her attention from the shadows once, no matter how jiggly her legs were. No matter how much Nancy looked at her. Wants her to look back.
Robin has been bored for most of the night. Nancy knows that extensively so, because it’s the only thing that lands past her lips, right into the dark, cold night as they stand guard for the cabin. Technically, it’s Robin’s turn. But Nancy doesn’t mind. She likes being outside at night better than being inside with all these teens sprawled out on whatever surface they could find, mouth agape, heavy lids.
Her restless mind needs to be kept busy. She wants to shoot at shit. But the monsters are cruel, and they deprive her of any pleasure, hidden away.
“What is your ideal Christmas?” Nancy asks because she cannot deny the itching, the fantasies. She should be forcefully stuffed into a party dress with a tight collar by her mother. And hates it. Instead, the cold bites into her ankles, right where the leather meets her bare skin. She hates it all the same.
“What? Does it imply my favorite Christmas isn’t spent guarding our friends from interdimensional monsters?” Robin laughs.
“Humor me”
Nancy is back to giving orders. She only has a certain amount of patience for questions. And has exhausted most of her reserves on Jonathan – What was California like? Do you miss it? Do you wish you could leave Hawkins behind? Do you want to leave me? Why aren’t you trying harder? Do you even know you should be trying harder? – and she knows Robin won’t mind.
Nancy watches as Robin stretches her legs and flattens her palms against the porch’s wooden floor. The heel of her boots slightly creaks as it hits the stairs. It punctures the silence of the night. Nancy loves a good icebreaker.
“Hmmm…It wouldn’t be at my home for sure. I love my parents, okay? I think I do. But, oh boy, they don’t like me at Christmas. Don’t like how I speak. Don’t like how I dress. Don’t like how I shake hands.”
She pauses, realizes how off course she went. Nancy wants to set fire to her family's house, but she just nudges her from afar. Their shoulders touch, barely bones beneath layers and layers of wool and leather.
“Your ideal Christmas,” Nancy repeats, softer, having found patience again in the grace of this brief contact.
She looks at Robin. More scrutinizing than watching, always the goddamn journalist. In her head, she’s taking notes, has been for the past hour: how her freckles look in the winter, darker and duller all at once, washed out by the snowflakes that rarely melt on her cheeks, making her skin oddly wet and shiny, the way her coat makes her look smaller despite the unnamable length of her limbs. Nancy has things she wants to add to the list now: the way shame weighs on her features, how it sinks underneath her epidermis. It is subtle, Nancy thinks. Shame concealed in the crook of her nose, in the twitch of her mouth, in the quiet line of her eyebrows.
For the first time in an hour or so, Robin turns towards her.
“Steve,” Robin says and it makes Nancy laugh, because of course it’s the first thing that comes out of this. “There was this one Christmas…1985, I think. It was awful and strange, but he made it better, I guess. I just needed a breather from everything, y’know. He waited for me with a cheap wine and a joint. We sang silly Christmas songs, and we danced. He made it good.”
Nancy shivers, but it’s not from the cold. She rarely is. She remembers standing wet and terrified, in the Upside Down, having dived after Steve. Her hair was stuck to her forehead. But she wasn’t cold and she wasn’t blue. She had imagined the water to be kerosene. Ignited her.
Now, she closes and opens her fist, over and over, just to pump some blood into her numb limbs. She remembers Christmas 1985, alright. The porcelain dishes. Not being a girlfriend anymore, a pen-pal or a phone call buddy, at most. Mike and his temper, or, worse, his silence.
She remembers her mother complaining about having nowhere to buy Christmas presents now that the mall had burned down. The nightmares that ended with her punching her pillows, so frustrated. So pissed off at her own loneliness, her uselessness. When a few blocks away, Robin was…dancing.
She cannot help but scoff. She is a bit overwhelmed. She can feel the tension building up behind her eyes.
“What?” Robin mutters.
“It was a strange and awful Christmas for me too, this year, you know?” Nancy verbalizes harshly because it hurts.
It hurts being on the outside of good things. She often is, impermeable to any true form of happiness.
“Of course,” Robin admits, reasonable enough to wince about it. “Which is why, now, you would be at my Christmas party.”
Robin is always kind, but it is never enticing enough to convince Nancy to drop her bones. She never does.
“He was my friend. Steve. In 1985.” Nancy mumbles. “You weren’t yet. But he was.”
“Weird. I could have sworn he was your ex-boyfriend.”
This time, Nancy elbows her.
“That too,” she sighs, annoyed. “But my point still stands. I was alone and…”
The words struggle to come out. Weak.
“We weren’t,” Robin fills in. It’s not apologies – it would be weird for it to be apologies, they were strangers, back then – but it is something.
Nancy nods. Hard. Too much. And she squeezes her eyes shut, which she knows is a terrible idea considering they are supposed to be on alert and that Robin is finally watching her, and Nancy is watching…nothing. She gulps down the ashy taste of admission.
Open her eyes again. Not on Robin’s face, so white and blue under the moonlight. But on the forest nearby. She wants to be razor sharp.
“What would we do?” she asks the wood. “If I were at your party.”
There is a pause. Robin rubs her eyes, and Nancy pretends not to see it.
“We would drink so much wine. You would be tipsy, glassy eyes and a red blush all over your cheeks and your nose. We would be so happy.”
Nancy’s throat closes up. She wants for everything in her body to shut down momentarily. For her sight of shadows and potential monsters to disappear, for her senses to be gone. She wants to crawl up Robin’s mouth, right up to her brain, and hide out into her fantasy.
But is it a fantasy or is it a lie? The voice in her head wonders, cruel. Does it matter?
“Go on,” Nancy requires. “From the start.”
“You would ring, and I would open the door. And there you would be, so pretty and ready to party.”
Nancy feels a muscle in her jaw twitch. “What am I wearing? Do I come bearing gifts?”
Robin slightly stretches her legs. “Hmmm…dunno. What do you want to wear?”
It is an odd question. One people rarely ask her, if Nancy says so. She has a closet full of pretty dresses at home in her childhood bedroom. A spare change of clothes in the cabin, buried in some pile beneath everyone else’s clothes. She thinks hard about what she wants. Comfort over aesthetic. A change of life. An armor. Space for legs, for running. Something that would make Robin’s mouth dry up.
“I think I’d like to wear a pretty pair of pants and a knitted sweater. Something warm I could take off if I just got too warm. But it needs to be fancy, because, well, it’s a party.”
Robin nods, smiles weakly like she just swallowed a bug. “But if you take it off, what would you do? Stand in your bras in Steve’s living room?”
Nancy shrugs, like it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t. She would wear a lacy pair of underwear, pearly white. Could leave the price tag on. “I would borrow one of your button-downs. I want a big red coat too.”
There is a silence. For a split second, Nancy fears she has pushed their little game a bit too far, playing dress-up in her head, with her grown-up outfit and flashes of Robin’s slanderous hands under her sweater and toying with her belt. Using the same hands to take off her coat, to guide her down to the kitchen, to give her a glass of wine.
But all Robin says is “cute” as she chews on her bottom lip. It terrifies Nancy.
“What would you wear?” Nancy asks, because she needs the full picture, because she needs something better than cute.
“I think I would look good in a suit. A weird oversized suit twice my size, so I’m like a little boy…” she mumbles, throaty and hesitant “…with a red tie… so we can match.”
They both inhale sharp and Nancy has to grip her knee so she stops herself from thinking about Robin rolling up her sleeves to pass the plates around. Or the way her suit jacket could swallow two girls when they hug. It is absolutely counter-productive and obscene.
So, counter-productive, in fact, Robin has to make it worse.
“Of course, we don’t have to match. There is no rule at my Christmas party. I could wear pajamas or Steve’s stupid shorts for all I care!”
Nancy cares. Nancy cares so fucking much, but Robin just won’t stop talking, and she has to intervene. Has to slip closer to her until their knees bump. Until their bodies are an extension of each other.
“What are you doing?” Robin’s eyes widen.
She looks like a deer or some sort of animal with sweet fur. Nancy wants to domesticate her features into tranquility.
“I’m cold,” Nancy lies, going as far as to warm up her own hands by dragging them to her mouth and breathing loudly. “Will you love me with a big red coat at your Christmas party?”
Seeing Robin’s blush creep up on her cheeks is exhilarating. It reminds Nancy of sitting on her rooftop with her, earlier this year, during this godawful summer. How beer turned their insides to jelly and their skin red all over, baked under the sun. Month after month, all they did was wait.
“I will love you with your big red coat. In fact, the bigger, the better.” Robin manages to articulate.
“Can I bring a plus-one?” Nancy asks, teasing, light as she buries her chapped nose in Robin’s neck, covered by a hideous jacket. She wants to unravel the whole thing.
Robin rolls her eyes, amused. “I thought it was my ideal Christmas party. Who would you bring anyway, Jonathan?”
“Oh please, I rescind,” Nancy agrees, half-plea, half-groan. “I don’t have friends who aren’t teens. And unfortunately, most of them aren’t even my friends. I’m fucked. Would you be my plus-one?”
“I’m hosting the goddamn thing. I can’t be your plus-one, Nance.”
“You could be.” Nancy retorts, resisting the temptation of putting her lips to Robin’s pulsing point. “Assuming Steve is in charge of the cooking and that your friend, Vickie, isn’t it, is in charge of decoration. You could be my plus-one.”
“Who said I want Vickie at my party?” Robin clears her throat.
“Don’t you want Vickie at your party?” Nancy inquires, an eyebrow going straight up to her hairline.
Nancy knows Vickie Dunne, even if she pretends not to remember her name that well. Redhead. A killer smile and a helpful hand, always. Doesn’t know much about her from school besides the fact that she used to be in band and ate lunch with music kids and theater kids alike. Since the earthquake, the girl seems to be a fixture in Robin’s life. A great friend who gives Robin her candy wrappers and kisses her on the cheek. Saccharine Vickie Dunne.
The air is damp around their bundled frame, and Nancy wonders if it’s this she lacks of, sweetness. Something thick and bright to cover up for the bitterness of the pill, hard to swallow.
“I do want Vickie at my party,” Robin concedes. “As a friend.”
“Okay,” Nancy huffs out. “So…”
“You are my plus one.”
This answer – short, concise, and final, as Robin’s answers so rarely are – brings Nancy great satisfaction. It almost dulls the ache in her chest when she thinks about Christmas. Not the one that Robin has dreamed up for them. But the real one, the annoyingly truthful one with its canned food, its lockdown, her mother and her overpouring glasses of wine on one side of the table, and her father and his thin, close lips on the other.
She knows she could probably skip the whole thing to watch the cabin or to prepare for the next crawl, just in case the soldiers are drunk and distracted and malleable. Danger and adrenaline as a distraction, she could work it out.
“What are you thinking about?” Robin asks after a while.
“Your ideal Christmas. You never told me what we would do, besides drinking.”
It’s such a copout from all the things she really wants to ask, the ideas that press against her sternum, against her low abdomen like a hundred hands on clay: would you kiss me under the mistletoe? Would you put your hands on my knee under the table where no one can see it? Would you speak right into my ears because the music is just so loud? Would you try to figure out why my wine tastes so different from your wine by mixing our spit in the process?
The weapon cradled against her ribcage feels so heavy, all of a sudden. She thinks it would be so much nicer to have Robin’s around her instead. Her long limbs surrounded her like the leather strap of a lethal gun they obtained through Murray’s black-market operation.
In this specific sensual scenario, Nancy is the lethal gun. So easily triggered.
“We would eat a lot of succulent food because Steve has revealed himself to be a great cook.”
“Has he, now?”
Nancy tries to remember if Steve had ever fixed a plate for her. He must have, she thinks, when they were together in this sort of relationship where she was a ghost and he, a boy. She barely ate, back then. She barely did anything but plot revenge or cry.
Robin clasps her hands together. Every time she mentions Steve, something very childlike runs over her face, spike her whole body. It is an obstacle to Nancy’s attempt at composure.
“Roast lamb, sweet potato salad, red cabbage and gravy, so many cookies you will have a toothache,” Robin salivates, probably thinking about their own dinner of canned beans and canned meat. “I adore him,” she concludes, so simply.
There is a pause that Nancy is impatient to fill with why and how, having found her way back to curiosity in the mere presence of Robin, but the other girl beats her to it, building up their delusion, brick by brick.
“We would play cards, and Vickie would probably cheat. Steve would tell us stories about the riches of the world between the main course and the dessert. You would scribble notes on the napkins. One of the kids would probably crash the party.”
“Which one?” Nancy asks.
“Max.” Robin grins immediately.
It’s the easiest answer, probably. First, because the Sinclairs would be damned to hold two tornadoes in the shape of Erica and Max under the same roof for Christmas. Second, because they miss her voice and her snickering.
It’s a shame the air tastes so stale and woody, because Nancy, who has always relied more on her logic than on her imagination, can almost see it with her eyes open. The warmth of a full house, filled with people who can trust each other.
“Would you twirl me?” Nancy asks before feeling a silver of guilt corrodes the roof of her mouth, because she’s been shaping Robin’s alternate reality with all her inquiries. “Will you twirl me?” she asks again, switching from conditional tense to present because she needs solid ground beneath her feet.
Robin’s arm slowly untangles from where it’s been, sandwiched between their bodies, to circle Nancy’s waist. She is not supposed to notice things like this, physical attention or affection, but she does. She remembers every Christmas like snowflakes on her tongue – spilled wine on her blouse from her mother's carelessness, Steve’s loose hand on her shoulder in the living room as they play pretend, papercuts from presents wrapping, and dots of blood from pins chasing her waist – but these fingers sprawled against her hipbones make some of them melt away.
“I will twirl you,” Robin says, her mouth barely moving as she speaks. “I twirl you. I dip you at the end of a really great song. I hold you so close that in my head I can hear the chaperone and her grating voice asking to leave room for God.”
“Do you leave room for God?”
Robin chuckles, tightens her grasp on her, and hooks her thumb into her belt loop. “Nope.”
Nancy swallows hard.
“Not taking a chance,” Robin adds, lips curling, and it feels both unnecessary and subliminally essential.
Nancy doesn’t know if it is sustainable, this dream. Maybe, she could listen to Robin talking her ears off about could and would and what-ifs till the end of time, until Vecna crushes them to dust. Maybe it would, indeed, be enough. She hopes so, already thinking about falling to her knees at the end of her bed camp and joining her hands together and praying to a god she’s not on familiar terms with, asking him not to make her want anything more ever again. She will be good with this dream. A very good girl.
And then everything happens very fast.
At first, Nancy is disoriented. She thinks it must be coming from the door, from behind them. Mike or Dustin or anyone else must have woken up and seen them like this, all cozied up in the cold, their respective guard shifts over by a while. She knows what it looks like, standing at the threshold, with the cabin’s harsh light pouring over them.
But the door remains closed, Nancy realizes fast enough, as Robin grabs her arm. The threat is right in front of her. A Demogorgon. Small and hungry for blood but not on a specific mission. It doesn’t run for Will – the boy isn’t even here, under the stern surveillance of his mother, who won’t let him anywhere near the cabin where the training happens – or El. It doesn’t have any peculiar interest on being on this side of the world. Nancy can see it in its eyes, in its limbs, in the circles it operates as it comes closer and closer, faster and faster.
There is no pack of monsters. It is just this single one, out for sports. Hunting.
From afar, Nancy rationalizes, it almost looks like a big dog. Not that she has ever shot at big dogs before, but she gets it: blood, flesh, huge fucking teeth. She has those, too.
She blinks, adjusts a tensed finger on the trigger. She moves her head, just so her vision aligns with the target. She thinks about the Christmas dresses she should be trying on, zipping all the way up.
Nancy is just like these big dogs with an avid hunger and a desire for more that could cause collateral damage. More often than not, she’s on a tight leash, too. She shoots one time, two times, three times. The creature screams as the bullets fly.
Somehow, Nancy hears Robin asking her to stop because it’s “useless” and because they “need to save up on munitions until Murray’s next reassort”. And it’s not like Nancy doesn’t care about the logistics, but she keeps going.
She always keeps going.
Until, of course, at some point, the weapon goes slack in her hands. And a grenade goes way past their heads, in a perfect circle, with a dignified “Eat this sucker!” and all that Nancy can do is watch the Demogorgon almost being blown away and run straight back to Hell.
Then it’s quiet again. The world is still standing. The snow, melting, is slowly turning some spots into puddles. Nancy puts the safety back on, lets go of the gun.
Robin is standing up, with red cheeks and a red nose. Nancy takes a long, good look at her, watercolored freckles, messy hair and eyes, more awake than they have been for the last hour. She watches her intently as her shoulders slump down. Nancy cannot avert her gaze as she yawns.
“Robin, your time is up,” Mike informs her in a doctorate tone that reminds Nancy of his voice as a dungeon master. It is collected and slightly pretentious. But then, he scrunches his nose. “Nancy? What the hell are you even doing here? It’s not your round.”
She rolls her eyes at the brat. “Saving your ass is what I’m doing, okay. Be grateful.”
“I’ll be grateful when you won’t be able to stand your own round of guard,” he bickers.
Nancy waves a hand around, and it seems to end it, because Mike goes back inside, leaving the door wide open. They are assumed to follow, and they probably will.
Nancy thinks about going down the few porch stairs and lying down in the muddy snow for a while. She would turn into one of these popsicles she craves so much in the summer. It would be good. It would be numb.
But then, like a moth to a light, she turns towards the cabin. Her legs are cramped up. Her mouth is dry.
“Let’s go inside, shall we?” Robin says, softly, with the voice you probably are supposed to use when you are either putting an animal down or an infant to sleep.
She has her hand on the small of Nancy’s back. It makes her eyes tingle, like when you’re low on sleep or high on adrenaline. Or when she’s about to cry. Nancy practically moves her tongue around the prison of her mouth; she works out her jaws. She focuses on grinding her teeth as Robin attempts to lead her inside.
Nancy thinks about the Christmas to come, about the recoil of the gun. She’s as soft as a closed fist. She has to uncurl her own to move around, to close the door behind them, letting the night be the night as Mike ties his shoes and pushes his beanie down.
Nobody fusses around them, and Nancy slips into the complacency with which everyone treats Demogorgon attacks. It makes sense.
In a corner, she notices the Christmas-tree-shaped papier-mache, heavy with glue, that El probably made in between training sessions. Nancy winces. It’s gauche, and quite ugly depending on the side she’s looking at, the colors are washed at best, and someone – Will, maybe – handpainted twirling lights and bulbs all over it.
She doesn’t know where it comes from, this innate survival skill of, still, despite everything, crafting a world you can bear to live in. She breaks out in goosebumps at the sight of this stupid ornament. Nancy does fucking hate Christmas.
But, somehow, it occurs to her that Robin still has a hand on her. If Nancy were to lie back, their bodies would touch. If she were to turn around, they would almost spin.
If she were to close her eyes or to keep them open until all of the moisture would evaporate from the sockets, the hand would still be on her back.