a heart's a heavy burden @sun-daisies - Tumblr Blog

you want blood and i promised

Robin tries not to let it consume her.

She tries to let it go.

But her dreams are filled with swirling smoke, a cocoon tightening around her until she’s suffocating, until her lungs are soot black and frozen. And she wakes every night gasping for breath and soaked in sweat, clinging to Steve like he’s the only anchor to reality. And she swears - she swears - that there are shadows stalking her, always lurking in the corners, just outside her vision.

For weeks after the steelworks incident, Robin tries desperately to stop thinking about it. If she pretends she’s fine, then she’s fine, right? If she squeezes her eyes shut and counts the spaces between her breaths and runs through all of the grounding statements she and Steve practiced, eventually she’ll be okay again.

She drifts through the days, untethered, floating far above herself like the sky is trying to reclaim her, like the night remembers that the atoms making up her body were forged in the violent explosions of ancient stars thousands of years ago. Like the stardust she’d been loaned is overdue at the library of space, like she’s been on borrowed time since she’d been born.

Steve knows something’s up. He keeps catching her zoning out, lost in her mental spiral of there is black dust in the steel mill there are remnants inside me it will come back and you will hurt everyone you love and there is nothing, nothing you can do about it. He notices every time it takes her a moment too long to respond, every time she cuts her food up into smaller pieces without ever raising her fork to her mouth, every time she digs her nails into her skin to try and stop it from eating her alive.

Is her blood black like-

She squeezes ice in white knuckled fists, and she thinks it’s almost as cold as the remnants inside of her. Sometimes she feels phantom claws digging into her heart. Her body remembers it, remembers the feeling of all the cold settling deep in the marrows of her bones.

Her body remembers - and it craves - the feeling of bleeding out. Draining her life out into cold dirt. Making room for something else to inhabit her earthly vessel.

She is just dust.

I am not dust. And I am not on an island.

If only she could believe it.

part 4 of lion hearted girl - the season 3 flayed!robin au (read here on ao3!)

#stranger things #stranger things fic #robin buckley #nancy wheeler #steve harrington #platonic stobin #ronance #st fic #stranger things moodboard #flayed!robin #rabbit hearted robin #holly's moodboards #guys this post has been in my drafts since JANUARY 26TH i cannot believe we're finally here

lesbeanthingz27

I love the idea of Robin and Nancy not having the energy to take care of themselves after everything that happened to them, even decades later.

But they have the energy to take care of each other, because they’d do anything for each other.

Nancy stops taking care of her curls only a few weeks into college, and they get so matted she has to cut them all off. Robin keeps them neat after that. She reads articles about how to properly care for curly hair and does a ton of research, terrified to mess up her girlfriends hair. She makes sure Nancy’s hair is healthy, has all the right product in it, and is styled. Nancy feels so much more like herself with her hair being taken care of again.

Robin’s always been fidgety, but it gets worse after she leaves Hawkins. She bites her nails until they bleed, often not realizing until it’s too late. Nancy paints Robin’s nails for her every week, to keep Robin from biting them. Nancy’s hands are much less shaky than Robin’s and she has the patience her girlfriend doesn’t.

Nancy forgets to eat a lot, and even when she does remember she often doesn’t have the energy. (And let’s be honest, Nancy can’t cook for shit. She burned water last time she tried). So Robin cooks for her, and during the short time they date but live separately, Robin meal preps for Nancy so her girlfriend has meals she can take home and just pop in the oven or microwave during the week. When they start to live together, Robin doesn’t even bother reminding her, she knows Nancy will argue and grumble. So she just puts a plate in front of her girlfriend and walks away. An hour later, the food is always gone and Nancy is much less cranky.

Robin never schedules doctors appointments. She too scared of needles— and anything medical in general after being kidnapped and drugged by Russian’s— to feel okay going. Nancy schedules them for her, and attends each one with Robin, without even being asked. She holds Robin’s hands the entire time, squeezing Robin’s hand every time her girlfriend gets particularly nervous.

Nancy gets so caught up writing and working, that by the time she’s finished she’s too tired to move, let alone walk back to bed. Robin always comes and gets her in the middle of the night, carrying her back to bed with a small smile and fond eye roll.

Robin forgets things… like a lot. In the winter she forgets to put lotion on her hands, so they very quickly get dry and crack. Nancy notices this the first winter they live together, and puts lotion on Robin’s hands every morning and night. Robin also becomes a house plant hoarder at some point in their twenties— she loves those plants like they’re her own children… but she forgets to water them. After the first few die, and Nancy sees how sad Robin gets about it, she makes sure to water the plants once a week.

Just… Ronance taking care of each other.

#ronance #stranger things

sun-daisies

in what might be the biggest hear me out i've ever posted (very loosely inspired by these prompts)... here are my stranger things circus au thoughts:

in a somewhat "something wicked this way comes" esc scenario, vecna traps children via a traveling circus. trapped children become acts in the circus and do not retain their memories outside of their roles in the circus. when they do remember, they are still trapped (i'm picturing a similar situation to holly in s5)

vecna is the ringleader operating under the alias "mr. whatsit"

this would operate in a completely separate universe from canon. so everyone's first brush with the upside down is this circus. robin is at the circus with the odd squad and doesn't know anyone yet. stancy is broken up and steve's in his aggressively flirting/trying to get her back stage

nancy's the first one to figure it out because holly goes missing early on and she's looking for her before she gets trapped in the circus. i think the moment nancy sees holly in the circus all her memories come back and she becomes hyperfocused on trying to escape

stobin get trapped as literal conjoined twins. which is so unfortunate for robin because she hates that guy fr (but by the time they end the circus they are aggressively codependent, obviously)

the first person nancy breaks out of the trance is robin, and the two of them (plus steve as an unwilling tagalong) work together to end vecna's curse

general rapidfire ideas for the gang's circus roles: - nancy as either an acrobat/contortionist or aerial silks (she is NOT a sharpshooter, but she does acquire a gun at some point i think and it's probably a pivotal moment for steve to realize he's been putting her in a box this whole time and in love with the idea of her rather than her as a person) - billy as a strongman (right hand to mr. whatsit and an antagonistic force to the escapees) - dustin as an animal tamer (+ dart) - lucas as a fire performer (this is based off vibe alone) - max as a trapeze artist (idk it gives skater adjacent vibes) - el as a magician. or a clairvoyant/fortune teller? - will as a mime - mike as... a human cannonball - eddie as a ventriloquist (ahem... master of puppets?) - holly and her kid ensemble from s5 are all like. baby clowns idk

sun-daisies

adding on some lore now that i've let this marinate for a bit:

when kids are taken, they're in this trance, sort of like their identity was buried underneath their new circus persona. there ARE things that can bring that identity back to the surface (similar to how they got through to will when he was flayed in season 2, except instead of possession it's more like repressed memories). the longer they spend in their circus trance, the harder it is to break them out of it until they eventually lose themselves completely

the whole circus is an illusion. attendees and even performers see this magnificent, gorgeous circus and the performers' appearances all look semi-familiar but different enough to be unrecognizable to the audience. when nancy snaps out of the circus trance and regains her memories she sees it for what it is - this creepy, upside-down-y thing run by monsters

stolen kids are replaced in the real world with shapeshifting demons

i think the mind flayer is the real puppet master, and i think it survives off of human souls. maybe it harvests the energy of humans monsters inc-style (hence the need for performers to farm energy from the audience) and i think when it travels to the next town, it slowly replaces the performers from the last with new ones and consumes the souls of the previous ones. i DO think it has a couple of performers that are "favored" though and have been in the circus for years

on that note, i think mr. whatsit has his own agenda of finding a new ringmaster so he can retire because he was the original stolen kid. so he's sort of always assessing the performers, looking for candidates. he'll put in a good word to the mind flayer in the hopes that they'll be favored and spared from consumption

and a couple small notes that i think are neat:

barb has been in the circus for years

barb and nancy's friendship has sort of been waning ever since barb left for a week to go visit her aunt and uncle in illinois a few years back and came back... distant. nancy assumed something Happened but didn't ever push because it never felt like her place to

barb is the sharpshooter and one of the primary ringmaster candidates

#yeah this is...... spiraling out of control. girl help #thank you cherry for letting me yap in your dms for far too long over this #just... think of the IMPLICATIONS. of barb being a candidate #the tension between nancy and barb as nancy tries desperately to save her even though she might be too far gone #and barb as a villain of sorts. always watching nancy as she gets closer and closer to breaking the curse. always sabotaging her.#and robin stuck in the middle. nancy in one ear. barb in the other.#godddddd #stranger things