Steve: This is my and Jonathan's other boyfriend Argyle. He is also friends with benefits with Eddie.
Argyle: Fascinating outfit choice, sir
Steve: This is Jonathan's girlfriend Nancy. We are also friends with benefits
Nancy: Hello!
Steve: This is Robin. She is also Nancy's girlfriend and my platonic soulmate
Robin: Platonic with a capital P!
Steve: This is Chrissy. She is together with Robin and Nancy and Eddie also
Chrissy: Have a nice day!
Steve: This is Vickie. She is also girlfriends with Robin and Chrissy and maybe with Jonathan? I am not completely sure what's going on there to be honest
Vickie: Nice to meet you, sir!
Mr. Harrington: Was- Was that all.
Steve: Of course not! We haven't even gotten to the kids yet! This is Jonathan's younger brother Will
Will: ...hello
Steve: this is Will's boyfriend Mike
Mike: I can definitely tell that you two are related...
Steve: Don't listen to him, he is a little shit. This is Mike's ex-girlfriend El. She's in a throuple with Max and Lucas now.
Eleven: *passive aggressive stare*
Steve: This is Max. She's going steady with El but she and Lucas is more of an on and off thing. But everyone knows that she actually loves him and vice-versa but is just scared because she's let him build a home behind her walls and feels like she is too broken and messed up to deserve him.
Max: That last part was completely unnecessary. Asshole.
Steve: Ouch. This is the aforementioned Lucas. Besides El and Max he's also got an on and off thing with Mike
Lucas: Uhm. Is your face supposed to be this red, sir?
Steve: And this is Dustin.
Mr. Harrington: Dustin?
Steve: Yeah, Dustin.
Mr. Harrington: Just Dustin?
Steve: He has a long distance girlfriend
Dustin: I am regrettably straight, sir.
Steve: Dustin.
Mr. Harrington:
Mr Harrington: *explodes on the spot*
...and this is the story of how Steve defeated his deadbeat dad with the power of love
It’s 1979, and every day, Barb wears a dark purple bracelet around her wrist. It’s pretty, although a bit more basic than what Nancy would normally wear—just a simple band of woven fabric, and a little star charm dangling from the middle.
“Where’d you get it?” Nancy asks her one day out of the blue. She does that sometimes—asks people things without any lead up. Her mom tells her she’s inquisitive. Her dad just says she asks too many questions.
Barb never seems to mind. Over the last few weeks of getting to know each other, there’s never been a question that Barb isn’t happy to answer.
This one seems to make her sad, though. She holds her arm up and twists her wrist a little, watching the charm catch the light.
“It’s a friendship bracelet,” she says. Nancy is old enough to recognize the twinge of jealousy for what it is, but she isn’t quite old enough to understand why it’s there.
“With who?” she asks anyway.
This time Barb does hesitate. She looks around the middle school cafeteria, but they’re the only ones sitting at this end of the table, and the buzz of students is loud enough no one can really hear them even if they decide to pay them any mind. Not that they ever would. Nancy and Barb tend to fly under the radar.
“You know Robin Buckley?” Barb says, lowering her voice.
Nancy shrugs. She’s heard the name. It’s a small school, after all.
“She has the other one,” says Barb. “My parents took us to Indianapolis a few summers back. A lady at the mall was making them. I got purple for her favorite color. She has pink for mine.”
“And the star?” Nancy asks. She reaches out without really thinking about it, holding the little charm in her fingertips.
Barb smiles. “We used to stay out in the park for hours after dark, watching the stars. She knows all the constellations, and a bunch of old stories about them. She knows a ton of stuff like that. She’s pretty cool.”
“You guys don’t hang out anymore,” Nancy feels the need to point out. But Barb just shrugs.
“Yeah. We had all different classes last year, and I guess we just drifted apart. I say hi when I see her in the halls sometimes, but we just…don’t really talk anymore.”
“Oh.” Nancy lets the charm go. Barb lowers her arm and picks up her fork again. “We could get friendship bracelets.”
Barb’s eyes light up. “I saw some charms and stuff at Melvald’s the other day. We could make some!”
“Let’s do it,” Nancy decides. “When you spend the night Friday, we’ll ask Mom to take us to Melvald’s.”
“Deal.”
-
It’s 1983, and Nancy has a pink bracelet—with a pen charm, not a star—that she keeps in a shoebox of all of Barb’s things.
She only pulls it out and looks at it when she knows it’s a bad idea; when she’s already one bad thought away from breaking, and she holes herself up in her room so she can push herself recklessly over the edge.
She takes the bracelet in her hands and runs her fingers over the soft, time-worn threads. Pink for Barb’s favorite color. Barb had a soft, sky blue for hers. She thinks about that bracelet, dangling around Barb’s wrist while she drove them to Steve’s house, tied to her still, soaked in blood and rot as she decays in the Upside Down.
Nancy tucks the bracelet into her pocket. If Barb’s association with Nancy led her to her death, then Nancy’s association with Barb can mark her until the day she dies.
-
It’s 1985, and when a new girl walks up with Steve, Dustin, and Erica, looking terrified and in shock, the first thing Nancy sees is a pink bracelet around her wrist.
“I’m sorry, who are you?” Nancy asks.
“I’m Robin, I work with Steve.”
But that’s not the answer. She’s not Robin who works with Steve. She’s Robin who carries stories of the constellations in her head and memories of Barb on her wrist. Robin, with a pink bracelet and a star charm that, quite frankly, looks ridiculous among the leather bands and thick rings she wears.
The group sits down once they’re finally all together. They exchange stories and make a plan, and all the while, Robin sits off to the side, on her own.
Nancy thinks about Barb sitting on her own by Steve’s pool, her gaze turned down and her shoulders stiff around her ears. She watches Robin curl up and hug her knees to her chest, and that damn pink bracelet is all she can see.
-
It’s 1986, and Robin complains every step of the way as Nancy wrangles her into a blouse and skirt.
“You should lose the rings,” Nancy tells her. “They’re unprofessional.”
“Gee, thanks,” Robin mutters.
“You can borrow some of mine if you still want to wear them.”
“No, it’s fine.” She pulls the rings off one by one, dropping them onto Nancy’s desk with small, satisfying clunks. She shakes out her hands when she’s done, and Nancy watches that star charm bounce back and forth along its soft pink band.
Robin notices her looking. She covers the bracelet with her hand and scowls.
“The bracelet stays. I’m not taking it off.”
“That—that’s fine.” Nancy thinks she should say something else—she’s not sure how they’ve gone this far without talking about it—but she can’t stop staring at it.
Robin’s shoulders slump. Her grip on the bracelet shifts and she runs her fingers over the charm, her expression turning sad.
“Sorry,” she says softly. “I just—I got this because of—”
“Barb.”
Robin meets her eyes.
“She told me,” Nancy says. “She—she still wore yours.”
And for the first time, it occurs to her that Barb was wearing a purple bracelet that night, too. That there has always been a part of Robin Buckley rotting in the Upside Down along with her, along with Nancy.
Maybe they were all doomed, intertwined, forsaken from the start.
“A purple bracelet,” Nancy says. “And a star charm. Because you liked watching the stars together. She said you knew all the constellations. She said—”
Robin’s arms are around her the second her voice breaks. She hugs her close, and Nancy swears she can feel that star charm pressing through her shirt.
-
It’s 1989, and Robin is moving box after box from her house with Steve into Nancy’s apartment.
It takes all day to get her clothes in the closet and her desk into the second bedroom they’ll use as an office and her frankly excessive collection of tapes onto the bookshelf in the living room. By the time dinner rolls around, they’ve both decided everything else is a job for tomorrow, or the day after, or next week.
But before they go to bed that night, Robin digs through a box of photo albums and picture frames to pull out a small, black shadowbox. She holds it carefully in her hands and walks over to where Nancy stands by the bookshelf. Nancy takes it from her with a soft, sad smile and reaches up to place it on the shelf. She feels Robin’s hand on her waist, and she steps back to tuck herself into her side.
They both look up at two pink bracelets, a pen charm and a star charm, hanging safely side by side.
the way that people disregard nancy’s grief in fic is my biggest pet peeve- like she didn’t break up with steve because she wanted to be with jonathan :) she broke up with him bc she was overwhelmed with grief from the death of her closest friend and couldn’t stand the fact that barb’s family were still wondering what happened to her - even going so far as to sell there house to pay murray to look into barb’s disappearance- Nancy broke up with Steve because he wanted to just bury the trauma they had experienced and pretend to be normal teenagers. Nancy wasn’t saying that Steve’s love for her was bullshit. She was saying- look at us. Look at everything we’ve been through. Pretending like none of that happened, burying the grief I feel, that is bullshit.- She didn’t go looking for Murray with Jonathan because she had feelings for him and wanted to leave Steve for him. Jonathan, he validated her feelings and was willing to go against the NDA to give Barb justice and give Barb’s family peace. (Or as much peace that can come from at least knowing that they don’t have to wonder where their daughter is any longer- to know that in the least she is no longer suffering.) That was what was most important to Nancy. And being validated in those feelings and seeing that Jonathan could truly empathize with her grief after believing he had lost his brother and that he would be there for her and support her in doing what she believed to be the most important thing she could do- that inspired romantic feelings and led them to get together.
Some of y’all write her like she’s this heartless one dimensional person who just left Steve in the dust because she wanted another guy and that is a huge disservice to her character.
THIS PERSON GETS IT, the amount of hate Nancy receives for calling Steve bullshit after everything he did in the first couple seasons infuriates me.
Look, I love Steve now, but Nancy's grief and trauma and how no one understood how much Barb's death burdened her was executed so well. People want complex characters and representation, but call Nancy boring or uninteresting, WHICH IS a WHOLE NOTHER DISCUSSION.
She deserved to relieve herself of that guilt, AND STEVE KNEW what really happened to Barb, which just makes it all worse - he completely acted like her feeling the way she did was unreasonable.
No hate because I, as a multishipper, love lovers to exes to friends to lovers again.
areudirty
titsay
dailybridgerton
turnnoffyourmind
romaincrisis
andulkaphoto
kianamaiart
