“And when will you leave?” he asks again. “When are you leaving? After Florida?”
Steve rolls them sideways, rolls them so Eddie is flat on his back, so his emotion-wrought muscles can slump with the weight of gravity, so all he has to do is gaze up at Steve hovering just above him and promising, “never leaving. Not without you. Never again.”
» Steddie // Rated M // Escaped Prisoner!Eddie // 2.3k
» Febuwhump #12: Presumed Dead & "I'm doing this because I care about you"
» Febuwhump Masterlist
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He hears the haste in the footsteps outside his room before anything else, the way they land heavier than everyone else who has come and gone throughout the day.
He hears the testing of the knob next, the turning of it when it doesn’t meet resistance, and then the slide of the door against too-tall carpet.
He opens his eyes to meet the opening of the door and he does it just in time to watch the tension on Steve Harrington’s face melt.
Steve Harrington, full beard and wire-rimmed glasses, a bit of extra meat on his bones since the last time Eddie saw him in person, since I’ll figure something out and the tightening of chains around Eddie’s soul.
He melts. His jaw hinges open on an unsteady breath and snaps shut again in just a passing of a moment, and then he shuts the door behind him and puts the chain on the hook without ever letting his gaze fully leave where Eddie hasn’t moved from the middle of his mattress.
Shirtless and boxers and wondering what differences Steve sees in him.
Maybe the short crop of his hair or maybe the handful of new scars. Maybe the extra lines around his eyes, aging quicker in prison than he ever did in the open air of the apocalypse.
Maybe the ease in the slope of his shoulders that Eddie can feel in the same way he can feel himself taking the moment as it comes and accepting it more than he ever, ever has.
Steve just stands there and stares and looks and melts and Eddie can’t help but to grin at him, pull himself to the edge of the bed with his knees spread wide and his weight leaning back into his hands when he murmurs a quiet, “c’mere then,” that quakes through the whole state of Arizona.
“Nancy Wheeler, twenty-one years old. Nancy— Wheeler—” a pained sound, clawing from the back of her throat, “Nancy Wheeler, twenty-one, from Hawkins, Indiana. Wrongfully imp–imprisoned. For whistleblowing— illegal acts of— human— experimentation—”
» Ronance // Rated M // Hurt/Comfort // 2.2k
» Febuwhump #1: Helpless & Solitary Confinement
» Febuwhump Masterlist
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The fog so filled to the brim with hopeless want that she can sometimes hear their voices echoing off of the walls, sometimes hear Steve’s optimism or Jonathan’s caution; sometimes hear her brother’s ferocity or Max Mayfield’s determination.
Sometimes, most of the time, she hears Robin.
“You have to be more careful about this, Nance. If they find out how much you have on them–”
“They’re going to find out. That’s the point.”
“The point is moot if you end up dead along the way!”
“The point is that too many people already are!”
She hears Robin.
“Please come back to bed. It’s colder without you.”
“I’ll be there in just a minute. I had this thought…”
“It’s three in the morning.”
“I know, just–”
“Nancy. C’mere. Come back to me, yeah?”
“...Yeah. Yeah, okay.”
She hears Robin.
“You are strong but you are not invincible.”
“I’m whatever I need to be to get this done.”
“You are not invincible, Nancy Wheeler. Come back to me.”
And it’s echoing and it’s loud and it’s hard, it’s so fucking hard to hear her voice but not feel the warmth of her calloused hands, to not feel her wrap Nancy up in her arms from behind, those dry lips pressing to the spot just behind her ear.
“You have to eat. Non-negotiable.”
“Come up with an acceptable way for me to do that, and I’m all yours, big guy,” Eddie swings his head around, slashes out with the edge of his smirk, and doesn’t care that the humor behind it will never reach dead eyes again.
» Steddie // Rated M // Kas!Eddie // 2.2k
» Febuwhump #2: "Bite down on this" & Obedience
» Febuwhump Masterlist
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“We can’t keep doing this, Ed.”
The dark of the forest is heavy like a blanket, wrapping around this half-rotted porch and going on for what seems like forever in every direction. It’s different at night, these woods, even though Eddie knows the paths through them like the back of his hand after years of kicking rocks around Hawkins.
It’s not his Hawkins anymore though, is it? It’s not the place a thirteen-year-old Eddie hitchhiked to in search of an uncle he’d only met twice, not the place where he’d made a friend for the first time by way of Jeff.
Neither of them know he’s alive yet.
Neither of them know about the ways he isn’t.
Even in the dark of night, Eddie can sense the differences, though. The smell of it gone sour; the eerie sort of silence that comes along with the usual summer wildlife being either killed or chased off by bigger things with sharper teeth.
Sharper teeth.
“Eddie.”
“I heard you,” he says without moving from his perch on the steps, staring out into the faint rustle of what leaves remain on the trees.
It’s like a melody, the whistle of wind. It’s accompanied so beautifully by the sigh that falls from Steve Harrington’s lips, only to be interrupted by the creak of the porch, of the steps, as Steve moves forward and lowers himself into the empty space beside Eddie.
“You can’t keep avoiding this,” Steve says on a breath. Eddie wishes for a horizon beyond the trees, some way to see the place at which the world ends. “You’re just gonna end up hurting yourself.”
“By whose metric?” Eddie scoffs, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees so his face is out of Steve’s direct eye-line, masked by the fall of his hair.
“A person doesn't get those from being trampled,” Eddie keeps on going, keeps digging their communal grave, “you weren't just trampled in the panic, did-- did the mall even-- no, it burned, we saw on TV, but--”
“Eddie, stop.”
» Steddie // Rated T // Pre-S4 // 2.3k
» Febuwhump #3: Rope Burns & "You lied to me"
» Febuwhump Masterlist
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“I think you should stay here for a few days,” he breathes, thumb chasing the tear that drips when Steve squeezes his eyes shut against the suggestion. He’s lying on his good shoulder facing Eddie. He can smell the remnants of the chain smoking Eddie had been doing out the cracked window during the hour or so he had thought Steve was sleeping. “I think maybe you shouldn’t be home alone for a little while.”
Steve hums at the back of his throat, broken and crackling with the force of holding himself back. He wants to crawl into Eddie’s lap, straddle him and kiss him as deep and as long as he ever has, because it’s ending. He knows its ending, but he can’t stop it, so he has to just make do with the moments he has left before it all—
“Here, can you take this off to sleep?” Eddie nudges a finger between the strap of Steve's sling and the place it digs into his collar bone, like he's checking the tightness, like his biggest concern is Steve's comfort. “Come on, sit up and I'll help you with it.”
Steve lets himself be maneuvered, relishes in it in a way that only doubles down on the pit of guilt bubbling with toxicity in his gut. It feels good, feels steady, and even still Steve needs Eddie to know that, “you don't have to do this.”
Eddie isn't looking at him, focusing on moving slow as he figures out the buckles on Steve's sling and eases it away from his body. Those eyes though. Those eyes are big enough to feel captured by them even without their direct attention.
“Yes, I do.”
“Ed—”
“Wayne had the news on and the death count kept going up and you weren't answering your phone and—” he cuts himself off, gripping the sling in his lap where he sits criss-crossed facing Steve and halfway slumped in on himself, chest all but heaving, “I'm doing this. Okay?”
“Okay,” Steve croaks, unable to do anything but agree in this quiet bubble of vulnerability Eddie has built between them.
Robin stops mere inches in front of Nancy, bends at the waist to be at eye level as she raises a hand and lets the gentle pressure of her fingertips trace across the apple of Nancy’s cheek.
“There’s magic woven into you, Nancy Wheeler.”
» Ronance // Rated T // Immortal!NancyxDragon!Robin // 2.8k
» Febuwhump #14: left for dead, “no…not like this” & not allowed to die
» Febuwhump Masterlist
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“So, are you a witch?” asks the girl with hair like fire and a tongue to match. She goes by the name of a boy without an ounce of shame. She bruises her knees and brags intelligence. She is living a life Nancy might have in a different time.
A life she is somehow, impossibly, still living.
“What makes you think I’m a witch?”
“You live in the woods and you saved Will,” she points out like it’s obvious.
“I found Will. Your friends saved him.”
“Same, difference,” Max shrugs. “But why else would you live out here? So far from everyone else? If you’re regular?”
“I don’t have to be a witch to not be regular,” Nancy can’t help the breath of amusement that cuts through her voice. Can’t help feeling it either.
Can’t help that enough time has passed to make it hurt less, if not entirely absent of the hurt even still.
“Are you even human then?” Max asks, a glimmer in her eyes, a spark in the curiosity that envelops her like an aura. There’s no malice to her search for knowledge.
There’s so much wonder, like a girl behind the counter in her family’s shop so many years ago, books hidden in her skirts, cracked open behind the register.
“Endlessly so,” Nancy smiles, and she feels an old, forgotten glimmer return to her own aura as well.
“Go— go help them. Finish this, Mike, it's okay—”
“Shut the fuck up,” he snaps and finds that he means it. He doesn't know how his hands remain steady and he doesn't know whether or not they're vulnerable to any incoming threats but he does know that she can't continue on that train of thought because, “it's not okay. We have to get you inside. Now.”
» Nancy & Mike // Rated T // Sibling Bonding Via Near-Death Experiences // 2.3k
» Febuwhump #13: "I love you" & "Help them"
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He’s half present and distracted when the thing gets to its feet, puts him in its crosshairs, and leaps, which is why it’s not his spear which takes it down before it can get its claws in.
Which is why it’s not even his own flesh where those talons go to tear.
She doesn’t call out to him, doesn’t say duck, but he recognizes the cry of pain from her lips accompanied by a click of an empty clip and that deafening snarl and even as tired as he is, he acts on autopilot before he even registers entirely what’s happened.
Mike whirls around where he stands, sets his aim and sends his spear flying down the open maw of a demodog, watches long enough to be sure it’s been properly struck down, sharp tip pointing out the back of its skull, before striding forward and yanking the thing free to let it bleed out in the dirt and only then, only then does that cry of pain sink in.
Only then does the sound of her labored breath ring true in this reality.
Only then does his gaze land on his big sister bleeding and prone on the ground at his feet.
And Mike has assimilated pretty well to war, at least he thinks so. He’s gotten good at fighting back, used all the excess bitterness in his veins to keep going on spite alone when the nights get too long and daylight rots away.
He knows how to be there for his friends, knows how to look at a situation and find a way out, knows that he can take care of people even when things don’t go their way but— but he freezes.
Right here and now? So close to getting back behind their barricades? Mike Wheeler freezes. There’s no time to freeze, no such thing as a moment to process, but he’s pretty sure the clock stops on his life right then and there because he looks at her and all of a sudden Nancy is— Nancy is human.
She’s no longer armor and bullets and sharp tongue; she’s not the soldier who keeps them all on track, not the leader who, despite his stubbornness, even Mike knows he ought to listen to. She’s not any of it suddenly, none of that strength and bite, because he looks down and sees the blood pooling out of her neck beneath the weak press of her own hand and she is, simply enough, his sister.
She didn’t trust them until Nancy got mad over Robin insinuating she didn’t understand the impact of NINA, got well and truly in Robin’s face about they used my best friend as bait to understand the toothy fuckers better and you think I don’t get it?
She didn’t trust them until Nancy. End of sentence.
» Ronance & Stobin // Rated T // Apocalypse AU // 2.4k
» Febuwhump #10: Truth Serum & "Please don't"
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The monsters came when Robin was eleven.
The earthquake opened up crevices in the ground, jagged and dangerous things, and then three months later, the monsters came, and then in the chaos so did NINA.
They pushed those of them already at the bottom of the ladder further down it in the name of protection. They put up fences and created curfews and took charge of the law with the fist of the military and Robin was eleven when it started but she learned how to fight fast.
Her parents were some of the first to push back, to see their protectors for what they were and call them by their proper name: fascists, Robbie, born out of the power vacuum. They want us to rely on them so they can control us, but if we want to survive this we can’t let them, understand?
Robin was eleven when the monsters came, and she learned how to fill a Molotov cocktail with young, uncalloused hands, learned how to rough them up with the handle of a throwing ax launched again and again at the trunk of a tree until she could hit the same spot every time.
She was eleven and then she was twelve and fifteen and she was a freedom fighter because her parents never let her forget what it was like before. Never stopped finding her books to read and music to listen to and stories, so many stories to bury herself in. They stoked the fire in her gut to push back and they gave her hope for a future where it wasn’t like this and she believed them.
Robin believed them, and that was maybe her downfall, the believing.
She met Steve Harrington when she was seventeen, a boy raised in the barracks where they taught him how to control, how to lead, how to follow orders. She met him during the same week he decided to get out of that place and she met him while she was trying to get in. Cause some chaos.
They both learned how to fight young, fight hard, fight tooth and nail without much strategy but a lot of vigor, and it got them locked up underground for three days straight. Broken fingers and something they claimed to be truth serum, Steve didn’t have any information to give up yet, but Robin did.
Robin had plenty and she kept it to herself, kept it safe, kept it hidden, escaping with that stuff still running through her veins and a broken boy hanging off her broken shoulders and so much pride to show her parents what she’d survived only to find that they hadn’t.
“I was so careful with you,” she murmurs, almost quiet enough that it feels as though it wasn't meant for Robin's ears at all. Quiet enough, even that Robin feels herself straining to listen past the muffled flow of cars and people and life just beyond this alley.
“You don't have to be,” she says, even if she's not supposed to, because it feels important. “I'm not fragile.”
» Ronance // Rated M // Vampire!Nancy // 2.4k
» podfic & cover art by @n0connections 💜
» Febuwhump #8: "Who did this to you?" & Came Back Wrong
» Febuwhump Masterlist
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There’s a regular at the bar where Robin works. A girl. Woman, actually, is a better fit in every conceivable way.
There’s a woman who regularly comes to the bar where Robin works.
She orders a vodka soda and sits at the bar, chats with Robin the whole night through, and leaves three hours later with a hefty tip tucked under a still-full glass.
She’s immaculate. Mysterious. Beautiful.
Or at least at first it was only that, this sort of baffling level of oh my god her eyes sparkle when she smiles at me that Robin has definitely felt before in what Steve considers to be her numerous and unending crushes, but Robin knows is just an inevitable eventuality when there are so many beautiful and handsome women walking around every day.
As if Robin’s supposed to just ignore that? Please.
The thing is, though, the woman at the bar? The woman who goes by the name of Nancy and always pays in cash and never, not once, has taken a sip of her drink?
She’s funny too. She’s witty, even.
She holds a conversation with Robin so intriguing and gripping that Robin’s gotten reprimanded by the other regulars for ignoring them on more than one occasion.
She makes Robin feel giddy like she's back in high school and Tammy Thompson is asking to borrow a pencil instead of twenty-seven years old working behind the bar at one of the dingier holes-in-the-wall in Chicago.
The way she crafts a story has Robin leaning forward, elbow on bar and chin in hand, eyes all big and smile dopey and stupid, because she doesn't want to miss a single syllable of it, doesn't want to miss a moment of this woman's attention on her because it feels like a gift. It feels like an honor.
It feels, at the end of the night, like such a fleeting and impossible thing. Because that's what happens isn't it, at the end of every night?
Nancy leaves her tip of crisp bills and says goodbye and then steps away from the bar and finds someone else to take home within the following ten minutes.
She takes someone home with her every time she comes in and that person is never, not once, Robin Buckley.
