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Ronance Femslash February - “go to sleep”

This is the first prompt I filled for Ronance Femslash February! The wonderful @crushcandles sent me the phrase “go to sleep.” Thank you, as always, for the Ronance encouragement!

You, too, can send me Ronance prompts for Femslash February, if you’d like! I’ll be accepting prompts all month and doing my best to fill them in a timely fashion, so please send some prompts my way! You’ll be able to find any other prompts I fill here.

“This is the part where we close our eyes and go to sleep,” Nancy says tersely, and it comes out harsher than she intended, but it’s too late to take it back. She’s always doing that where Robin is concerned, winding herself up tighter and tighter until she says or does something she doesn’t mean.

“Right. Of course. Obviously.” This is followed by a brief interlude of silence, and then Robin whispers, “It’s just . . . I wanna make sure we’re cool.”

Nancy huffs out a sigh, but she can’t help asking, “Cool?”

“Yeah.” She hears Robin turn onto her side and when Nancy opens her eyes, she’s startled by how close Robin is, as if the darkness has shrunk the space between them somehow. How can her eyes be so bright in this low light? “Like, this kind of thing can really screw up a friendship, right? Not that I’d know from personal experience. I mean, the whole thing with Steve is kind of an outlier in the sense that it actually made us better friends—that and being tortured by evil Russians. But historically, most of my friendships have gotten screwed up before things ever got this far, not that they ever would have, because if there was ever any actual chance of it happening, the possibility of it happening probably wouldn’t have screwed up the friendship in the first place, you know?”

Nancy definitely does not know what Robin is saying, but before Nancy can tell her as much, Robin continues.

“But the point is!” Robin stops herself, deliberately lowers her voice like she’s just remembered it’s the middle of the night. “The point is . . . I really like you. I like researching decades-old murders and impersonating college students with you. And I really like kissing you. But even more than that, I like riding around in your car together, and finding out how you like your eggs—poached eggs are disgusting, by the way, but I respect your right to your opinion even if it’s the wrong one. And I’d just, I’d hate it if I had to give all of that up just because you don’t want to keep kissing me. So I, um, I’m just hoping this won’t change things between us.”

Nancy closes her eyes again, because all at once, it’s too much—the way she can still faintly pick out Robin’s freckles even in the dark, the high line of her cheekbone pale in the shadows. “It doesn’t have to change anything.”

“Oh.” Nancy can almost feel the shift of Robin’s ribs against her as she lets out a sharp breath she was obviously holding. The gust of air as she exhales ruffles Nancy’s hair. “OK, good,” Robin says, trying so hard not to sound dejected. “Because I’d really miss you, I think.”

Nancy bites her lip. Her instinct is to leave it at that. She’s always turning away from the vulnerable choice—toward judgment, toward irritation, toward closing something down. It would be easier—safer—if they just stayed friends, if she let Robin think it doesn’t mean anything that she can still feel the starry tingle where Robin’s lips touched hers. It would be easier if she could keep what she wants separate from how she feels, just draw a line between the two and not let herself ask for more than she can have.

But the thing is, she does want it. She wants the tentative pressure of Robin’s fingers at her hip and the velvet drag of the inside of her lower lip. She wants all that and she wants the way Robin will lean into her space to point out a weird sign on the side of the road, the way she’ll talk for twenty minutes straight about an article she read about fatal familial insomnia. And Nancy’s not going to get any of that if she can’t overcome that instinct she has—even now—to turn over and pretend she wants to go to sleep. “I mean,” she says slowly, carefully, because she doesn’t quite trust herself not to say it wrong, “that we can still . . . drive around and get breakfast and listen to your pretentious music, even if we decide we want to keep kissing each other.”

Robin is silent—really silent—for a long time. Long enough that Nancy finally gathers up the courage to open her eyes again, to find Robin looking at her with such a searching expression that Nancy’s heart clenches. “Do you?” Robin asks, quietly. “Want to?”

“Yes,” Nancy breathes, and it’s not as hard to say as she thought it would be.

#ronance #robin x nancy #robin/nancy #nancy wheeler #robin buckley #stranger things #ronance femslash february #crushcandles #paging crushcandles #crushcandles please meet your party in the ronance lounge

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Ronance Femslash February - forest

Thank you again to @crushcandles for another excellent prompt: "forest"!

I’m accepting Ronance prompts all month, so please send some my way! You can find previous prompts I've filled here.

“Remind me why we thought this would be a good idea, again?” Robin says, peering over Nancy’s shoulder as she consults the map.

Nancy doesn’t dignify that with an answer. “It should be right here,” she says irritably. “According to this, we’re practically right on top of the path for the waterfall, but there’s nothing!”

Robin knows better than to ask if Nancy’s sure she’s reading the map right. She definitely is. And Robin has absolutely no wilderness know-how with which to critique the job Nancy’s been doing so far. Robin never did Girl Scouts, never went camping, and while her parents are crunchy hippie types, their idea of communing with nature is smoking a little grass at an outdoor music festival. As far as Robin’s concerned, Nancy is a goddamned orienteering genius.

“Well,” Robin says, trying for a silver lining, “at least we haven’t lost daylight yet.” Then she looks up and notices that in the time they’ve spent consulting the map, it has, in fact, started to get dark. Though the sky above is still bright, the little hollow they’re in is caught in the shadow of the hill behind them, hurrying into dusk far ahead of the actual sunset. And that’s when Robin realizes that if you cast any random stretch of late autumn forest in the blue-grey light of twilight, it looks surprisingly like the Upside Down. Years after the world didn’t end, Robin isn’t nearly as jumpy about a possible return to that nightmare dimension as she used to be, but as she looks across at the dim, barren sprawl of trees, she still half expects a shock of red lightning to creep across the sky.

“Oh,” Nancy says, and she’s obviously thinking the same thing Robin is. She gives Robin a worried glance, and starts folding up the map. “We should head back.”

“And miss this view you’ve been talking up all day?” Robin says, trying to force as much confident cheer into her voice as she possibly can. “No way, Nance. I’m with you in this till the bitter end.”

Nancy huffs out a sharp breath, clearly not in the mood for a pep talk. “Robin, it’s late. We’re already going to be hiking back in the dark as it is. Let’s just accept that I got us hopelessly lost and write this off as a failure, OK?”

“Nancy Wheeler,” Robin says, in an overblown Old Hollywood voice that already has Nancy rolling her eyes, “don’t you know there’s nobody in the world I’d rather get lost with than you? Any day we spend together can’t possibly be a failure. I mean, we saw all sorts of cool birds, and that weird rock, and we had a delicious lunch that definitely didn’t get squished because I sat on it. And, sure, it’s a little dark and creepy now, but it’s a beautiful night!” Stepping back, she gives a dramatic sweep of her arm to encompass all the glories of nature, or whatever—and promptly falls backwards into a ditch.

“Robin!”

Robin looks up from the heap of leaves she’s lying in to see Nancy leaning over her, an expression of alarm on her face.

“I’m OK,” Robin says, sitting up and brushing leaves out of her hair.

Nancy grabs her by the shoulders, and for a moment Robin thinks she’s going to shake her, but then Nancy is pulling her into a tight embrace. “You just couldn’t resist the opportunity to clown around, could you? What if you’d hurt yourself? What if I had to leave you here in the dark while I went back to the ranger station to call an ambulance?”

Robin snorts, rolling her eyes as Nancy’s curls tickle her cheek. “As if you wouldn’t figure out a way to splint my broken limb using a fallen branch and bandages you tore from your shirt, or something.”

Nancy huffs out a laugh, and finally releases Robin to help her to her feet.

It’s then that Robin notices something out of the corner of her eye. “Hey, Nance,” she says, pointing to a faded metal sign nailed into the trunk of a nearby tree, “is this what you were looking for?”

The word ‘FALLS’ is just barely visible on the sign, along with an arrow that seems to be pointing straight into the bracken on the other side of the ditch.

Nancy reaches out to push the branches aside, revealing a narrow path leading straight up the hill. “I was right,” Nancy says, and Robin laughs, pulling her into a kiss because it’s important that they both have their priorities straight.

They make it to the waterfall just in time to catch the tail end of sunset, which is all fierce oranges and pinks, not a single streak of red in the sky.

#ronance #robin x nancy #robin/nancy #robin buckley #nancy wheeler #stranger things #ronance femslash february #femslash february #crushcandles #paging crushcandles #crushcandles please meet your party in the ronance lounge #seriously folks send me more prompts! #i love a good prompt! #also for anyone who cares about such things: at least in my mind this takes place in the same universe as laughing at clouds #just maybe a little further down the line

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Seven Sentence Sunday

The wonderful @crushcandles tagged me to post seven sentences from a WIP, so here are several extremely out of context sentences from the Ronance fic I’m working on (which, uhhh, may in fact be the sequel to laughing at clouds that nobody asked for):

When it’s over, Nancy says, haltingly, “It was . . . good?” like she doesn’t want to hurt Robin’s feelings.

“Oh, so you hated it,” Robin concludes. “You, like, really hated it.”

Nancy opens and closes her mouth a few times. “No,” she says weakly.

“Wow,” Robin says, trying to adjust to the revelation that Nancy Wheeler has terrible taste. “You really did not like it at all. OK.”

I’m always too shy to tag people in these, but if you are reading this, please know that I would absolutely love to see seven sentences of whatever you’re working on (so please tag me when you post it).

#ronance #robin x nancy #robin/nancy #robin buckley #nancy wheeler #paging crushcandles #crushcandles #crushcandles please meet your party in the ronance lounge #seven sentence sunday