#ahh only fifteen minutes late I'm calling it a success

[lunar-years]

'Tis the Damn Season

Pairings: Jonathan Byers/Nancy Wheeler, Nancy Wheeler & Robin Buckley friendship, just generally super indulgent teen group friendship, very minor & extremely background Robin Buckley/Vicky

Rating: T (for discussions of teenagers having sex [non-explicit]; mild language; minor references to PTSD)

Summary: “You really did sound like a total nut on the phone earlier, Nance; 'Code red, code red.' I thought you’d seen Vecna reincarnated behind your house or something—” 

Worse. "I slept with my ex," Nancy burst out. //

Jonathan and Nancy mutually decide to break up before going off to their separate colleges. It lasts for all of three months.

Written for @jancyweek2022 Day 4: I'll always come back to you or partners in crime

Read below or on Ao3.

A/N: Just a warning because I know some of my fellow jancys are not big Steve and Robin people...this one is heavy on the teen group friendship (especially between Nancy & Robin). It's written in a very author indulgent, idealized way, as I imagine them all becoming closer during and post s5 while defeating Vecna. In my mind, by the time they all go off to college they've fallen into the kind of friendship where they're not ~best friends~ by any means, but they are bonded by this massive thing they all experienced together, and as a result they do like to catch up with each other when they're all back in town.

This is supposed to be a silly fic (sillier than I usually write anyway) and not taken super seriously. I do not think Jonathan and Nancy will actually break up (I hope not!), but if they do, I can't imagine them staying away from one another long. Also, this is sooo not polished and editing might be bleak because I wrote most of it this evening. I still hope you enjoy and happy jancy week!

***

“So what’s up?” Robin asked her over the top of her glass, one hand casually twirling the straw around her Diet Coke with, Nancy thought, not nearly enough urgency for the situation at hand.

The women were sitting on opposite sides of what had become, over the previous summer, their usual table at the Hawkins Diner, a table which actually had seats for six. It was only the two of them at the moment, however, because Nancy had phoned Robin earlier during an episode of near-panic to declare a state of emergency. This, essentially, had meant begging Robin to come to the diner an hour earlier than she’d told everyone else to. 

Now that Nancy had the woman here in front of her though, she realized she was at a total loss for how to begin. For one, they hadn’t seen each other since the summer, and things were more than a little different now than back then, still on edge as they'd all been from the battle, forming their tentative friendships when there were no more monsters to kill. Nancy liked keeping in touch with her friends, and she tried to make an effort, she did, but she’d also been so busy at school lately that they’d barely even spoken over the phone in the months intervening.

Robin seemed far more relaxed now that the fight was behind her. Happier. Probably, before Nancy started dumping out all her own problems, she should at least ask her how she’s been. Exchange pleasantries. She racked her brain for ideas, but it didn’t seem to be functioning all that well at the moment, because she only managed to comes up with: “Um. How’s school treating you?” God, she sounded like her dad. And just when she thought things couldn't get any worse.

Robin’s eyes narrowed critically, like Nancy had asked her to go back into the Upside Down without a flamethrower, alone, instead of tell her about Purdue. “Nanceeee. C’mon, I did not drop everything, cut into the very limited time I have with my girlfriend while we’re both home on one of our very few breaks from school and run over to this greasy, horrible diner just for this completely flat Diet Coke and some boring conversation with my good friend Nancy about...college. You sounded like you were about to pass out earlier—I mean, no offense. So what’s really up?”

Nancy opened her mouth to say something. Immediately closed it again like she was a fish. It was easy, once she'd been away from it for a while, to forget how...much...Robin could be. She gave herself a mental shake. “Um. Right. Sorry.” 

“Okay, you are being so weird right now,” Robin declared, taking another long sip of her drink and narrowing her eyes still further. There was actual concern on her face, now, which did feel like progression. “You really did sound like a total nut on the phone earlier, Nance. 'Code red, code red.' I thought you’d seen Vecna reincarnated behind your house or something—” 

Worse. “I slept with my ex.” Nancy burst out, refusing to look up from her cup of coffee. Saying it out loud, she almost wished she had seen Vecna. Believe it or not, she was pretty sure she'd have been better prepared for that than she'd been for seeing Jonathan. Robin set down her glass.

“Jesus, Nancy…you haven’t even been home forty-eight hours!” 

“Trust me, I know,” Nancy said miserably, not elaborating. She'd drove into Hawkins from Boston just yesterday morning. By yesterday evening, he was in her bed. Clearly, it hadn't taken much. 

“So, wait. Hold on. Which ex are we talking about here?” 

“What do you mean which one? Which one do you think?” Her voice had gone high-pitched, most definitely frantic. Nancy was still very much in the processing stage of this whole experience. She finally looked up to see Robin’s face. The other woman was indeed frowning, but she looked more exasperated than actually disappointed with her, which Nancy took as a good sign. She'd kind of been expecting...well, judgement.

“Oh, thank god. Because if Steve hadn’t immediately called me to tell me he'd made that mistake again, I’d’ve—”

“Robin,” Nancy all but hissed, whipping her head around the diner to make sure there was no one else listening. She so did not want any of this getting back to her mother.  “Can we please focus?”

“Right sorry, sorry. But really Nancy?" she repeated, "Also, didn’t you just break up with Jonathan like, three months ago?” 

“It was mutual,” Nancy replied sharply. “We broke up with each other.” 

Robin shook her head. “Yeah, and I still don’t get that, by the way. I mean, by the way you were all over each other last July...like, there's a literal, honest-to-god monster-demon-man on his way to kill us all and you two are making out in the corner—” 

“Okay, that's not fair,” Nancy bristled, crossing her arms. “You were every bit as bad. Or did you not 'pop off to the cabin to get more weapons’ just so you could make out with Vicky in the car.” 

“Yes,” she said smugly, taking this in stride, “but I didn’t break up with her a month later for no apparent reason!" 

“We had reasons! Jonathan told me about NYU, and then he got in—which wasn’t surprising, by the way, Jonathan’s photos are really amazing—but then next thing we knew, he was going to New York, and I was off to Boston—” 

“Stupid reason, New York and Boston are only four hours away.” 

“--and we weren’t very good at long distance the first time.” Nancy argued, determined to make Robin see what she had, that day in August with Jonathan in her driveway. The breakup had been logical, even necessary. They simply agreed they couldn’t do long distance again.

(Nancy hadn't been good with long distance, true. But she'd failed to consider that she'd never been very good without him entirely, either.) She quickly brushed that thought aside.

“You’re not convincing me,” Robin said bluntly. She waved their waitress over and ordered a plate of cheese fries. After the woman bustled back over to the kitchen, Nancy glanced at the old clock hanging behind the lunch counter. The others usually showed up early (if Jonathan was still planning to show up at all), which meant someone would be here soon. 

“We agreed,” Nancy repeated, even though she was beginning to lose steam. “We agreed it would be for the best to go our separate ways, experience new people….” Her voice sounded so unsure that it wasn't even doing much in way of convincing herself they’d made the right choice. Jonathan’s mouth on her last night, anyway, had certainly said otherwise. She flushed at the recollection, once again refusing to meet Robin’s eyes. 

Still, Robin pushed on. “And, have you?"

“Have I what?” 

“You know,” Robin waved her hands around nonsensically, "experienced new people?" Not for the first time today, Nancy felt that familiar mix of fondness and exasperation she'd felt many times before around Robin.  

She'd been at school for just over three months now. In that time, though she didn’t want to admit it to Robin, she'd actually experienced very little beyond the inside of Emerson College’s library. Sure, she had her few, steady friends—her roommate Gale, their friend Peggy down the hall—but mostly they studied together or watched movies. Every now and then, they found some house party to disappear to on the weekends for purposes of free alcohol, but they’d always left together and come home together, even on the night Peggy spent two beers insisting to her that the frat boy across the room had eyes for Nancy, and Gale all but dared her to go talk to him. 

She hadn’t. She had taken one look at the boy—tall, with dark, curly hair, and a wide, cheesy smile—and dismissed him. He wasn’t Jonathan. 

“No,” she answered truthfully, “I haven’t.”

The transition, if she was forced to admit it under extreme duress, had been far harder than she'd anticipated. Nancy had spent all summer in Hawkins shooting her guns, planning and organizing and executing her careful, calculated plan to kill Vecna with Jonathan and Robin and the others, only to leave in August for the world of the shockingly mundane. She liked her classes. She liked her friends. Her parents kept saying how proud they were of her. On the surface, she was still the golden one.

Underneath, though, it often felt like she was drowning. Her new friends were great, yes, but they didn’t know about anything she’d been through, how could they? Gale and Peggy joked about high school in ways that made Nancy equal parts envious and annoyed. The two of them lived life so easily. They had no idea how much it had tormented Nancy to leave her guns behind in Hawkins, the fear that gripped her night after night that she would have no way to protect herself, the next time. 'The next time' still felt inevitable, somehow. How could it not? Fighting the supernatural had occupied every ounce of her being for years. In recent weeks, even journalism, which was usually her safe haven, had lost its flair.

Nancy never, in a million years, thought she’d miss Hawkins, Indiana. But Nancy did miss home. 

Him.

At school, she still called him on the nights she woke up from nightmares. Jonathan had insisted she could, before they had departed for the last time in her parent's driveway, and Nancy was beyond grateful for that. Sometimes she called him when she didn’t even have a nightmare, just to talk about stupid things like an article she was writing for class or a song she had heard that made her think of him. 

Robin waved a hand in front of her, snapping Nancy's eyes back to her, "Um, earth to Nancy?” 

Nancy tried to regain her own focus. "Sorry."

"Man, you really do have it bad."

“I need your advice," Nancy admitted, tentative. She wasn't really sure her and Robin were quite at this point of their friendship yet. On the one hand, they knew everything about the other, like the song that could save them from a soulless, demonic creature and what they'd bring to a monster fight, and the sort of things you could only whisper about on nights when you thought you were about to die. On the other hand, telling her about Jonathan, about this fragile thing happening between them that she wanted to protect but was already afraid she'd ruined, almost felt too personal.

Robin remained silent, but she must have seen something in Nancy's face, because she eventually said, "Sorry, sorry, I'm thinking." She frowned, "It's just, considering I’ve only been in one real relationship—and besides having to pretend we are just two, completely platonic girlfriends every time we go out in public together, instead of you know, actual girlfriends, and only being able to make-out on Wednesday nights at her house between 8:00 and 10:00 p.m. while her parents are at bowling club—we are very happy together, I do not think I am the best person to be giving post-breakup, slept-with-my-ex relationship advice.”

“Sure, but you still have an opinion,” Nancy said, a little desperately. "Please, you've got to have something." Truthfully, she wanted Robin to tell her what to do here. She wanted someone else to have all the answers so that for once she could stop the myriad of thoughts ping-ponging around in her head at all hours. Her mind hadn’t stopped spinning since Jonathan rolled out of her bed early that morning and disappeared out her childhood bedroom window, the same thing he used to do when they were together for real. 

Robin bit her lip. “Okay, I guess…I need more information. Tell me about the sex. Ew, wait, I don’t mean that. Not like…details. Just, do you think it was a usual, post-breakup sex thing? Just to get it out of your system, or…was it more than that?” 

“I'm still in love him,” Nancy stated plainly, without even needing to think it through. It was so obvious. Didn't Robin see that was the whole problem?

The woman threw her hands into the air, and beneath the table, even stomped her foot for good measure. “Well there’s your answer! For someone so totally genius 90% of the time, you can be so goddamn clueless, Nancy. Why do you even need my advice if you already know you love him. Can’t you just, I dunno, get back together?" She grinned. "What do you do, sit at your dorm every Friday night alone, dreaming about him?”

“It’s not that simple!” 

Robin stared back at her blankly. “I will never understand you two.” The waitress returned then with the fry plate, which Robin immediately doused in ketchup. She offered it up to Nancy, who shook her head. “More for me, then.” 

They said nothing for a minute, Nancy watching as Robin ate her fries. Then, maybe because Nancy was still so totally out of it or maybe because he really was stealthy like a ninja after all, Steve materialized out of seemingly nowhere and plopped into the seat beside Robin. He grabbed the entire, disgustingly ketchup-covered plate of fries out of his best friend’s hands and nodded at Nancy by way of greeting. 

“Yeah, you’re moving when Vicky gets here,” said Robin. 

Steve rolled his eyes. “God, Rob, you’re such a drama queen. I’ll be more than happy to move once Her Highness arrives.” He turned to Nancy, “You should hear the way this one talks about her. Vicky is so cool, Vicky is so smart, Vicky’s the best kisser—”

Robin slapped him on the shoulder. 

“Hey! I’m saying that with love." He grinned. "It’s honestly adorable.” 

“Okay, we’re so not talking about my love life right now. Actually, we’re talking about Nancy’s.” Nancy shot her a look—warningly, threateningly—a look which she was sure could kill, but Robin, naturally, ignored it, plunging onward, “She slept with Jonathan.” 

“Shit, really?” Steve dropped the fry in his hand. Robin had already stolen the plate back from him, so it landed right on the tabletop, dripping ketchup onto the laminate. He did not try to mop it away, too busy looking over at her, gaping. 

Nancy frowned at him. Steve had fallen in love with her and then subsequently gotten over her about three different times at this point, and it was starting to get irritating. If he was really upset by her sleeping with someone else, now of all times, when they were finally in a good place, all genuinely friends, she—

But then Steve turned back to Robin and said dejectedly, “I owe Dustin five dollars. Shit.”

It was Nancy's turn to gape. “You’re serious? You actually made bets about Jonathan and I? With the kids?”

"I lost bets," Steve corrected. "Also, and I know you’ve been gone and all, Nancy, but it hasn’t been that long, they’re not actually kids anymore. They weren't when you left. Hey!” he says brightly, clearly pleased with himself, “I bet they’re the same age now that you were the first time you and Jonathan—” 

“Stop talking,” Robin groaned. Nancy could only shake her head at him in disgust. Okay, so maybe she hadn’t missed her Hawkins friends after all.

“Sorry, sorry! It had to be said. Anyway, how’d it happen, Wheeler? Haven’t you been home for like, an hour?” 

“Since yesterday." Robin had already spilled out the whole secret, so she might as well tell Steve everything, too. “I got home, and I was having an excruciating dinner with my parents—” 

“Yeah, I don’t miss those,” Steve announced. "Your dad is worse than mine." Robin slapped his arm again. 

“Shut up dingus, I want to hear the whole thing before Jonathan shows up."

Nancy took a careful sip of her coffee, which had mostly gone cold, and looked between them, crestfallen. “Well, that’s just it, isn’t it? I’m not sure he’s even going to come, after...well.” 

She’d pulled into her driveway, unloaded her bags and hauled them inside, with no help from Mike even though he was standing right there. Then Nancy had dutifully sat down at the dinner table with her family, answering her mother’s incessant questions about school as her dad nodded along from the head of the table. At the first opportunity, she escaped upstairs to her old room, which looked just the same as when she’d left it three months ago, despite her father’s many threats over the phone to turn it into a home office. 

She’d kept herself busy at first, unpacking, turning on the radio, answering a call from Robin to arrange a reunion dinner at the diner with the rest of the gang. But once she stopped moving, she’d almost immediately wanted to cry.

Her childhood room, with the ballerina music box from her grandmother still on the shelf, and the photo strip with Barb above her desk, and her poster from Jonathan on the wall, felt unbearable. Stifling.

She’d dialed his number without thinking it through.

“But I was just planning to talk,” she insisted. Robin and Steve exchanged a look. 

They had talked, for well over an hour. He had gotten in two days before, because most of his midterms weren’t tests, but photo collections, which meant he got to leave a few days earlier than most everyone else. He'd spent his day decorating gingerbread cookies with Will and El, who of course had been thrilled to see him. He sounded so happy, and it had made something in Nancy’s chest coil with a deep, persistent ache. 

When he asked her if she wanted to go for a drive, who was she to say no? 

That’s how they’d ended up at their old spot, parked out by lover’s lake, passing a bottle of wine back and forth between them. They used to go there all the time, the summer they worked at the newspaper. It was a great place for stargazing, and for passing secrets, and for other things, too.

It had started out innocently enough. One minute they were laughing, the first really good laugh she’d had in months, the kind where you couldn’t just stop, even after it had become difficult to breathe. The next, his face was right in front of hers, so close she could see the small indentation on his nose and the wisps of hair on his cheeks. So close she could feel his breath. “You need to shave,” she’d whispered, eyes never leaving his. 

Then they were kissing, as simple and familiar a motion as brushing her hair or writing her name. His lips felt just like she remembered, and she tasted him hungrily, starving for it, their tongues fighting for dominance, fighting to hold on to a little more of the other. God, she had missed him, missed him so much, beyond words, beyond meaning.

 On the hood of his car, his fingers found hers and held fast. 

“And then, I don't know it just...happened,” Nancy finished weakly. 

Robin and Steve stared at her until she was starting to feel actually self-conscious. Then Steve cut in, “Wait, wait. You did it in his car? God, you really are in love with him. I’m way too old for that shit.” 

“You know, I think it’s romantic,” Vicky said, her own hand meeting Robin’s over those damned fries. She’d arrived somewhere halfway through the story, and sure enough, Robin had immediately made Steve scoot. "You guys are apart for months, only to not be able to resist each other the first time you're together again. It's like...soulmates."

Robin held up a hand. “So what’s the deal then, Nance? Because, honestly, this hardly sounds like a code red, code red. Vicky's right, it sounds like you were both all over each other. You had your tongue down his throat, he had his down yours…why wouldn't he show up today?” 

“Because I kicked him out,” Nancy said miserably. She wished the waitress would come back. Her coffee mug had been empty for twenty minutes, and her throat felt terribly dry.

“Okay, I’m officially confused.” Steve.

“I don’t know what happened,” Nancy admitted. “Well, I obviously know what happened, but...well, after, I invited him over. We went back to mine, and it was brilliant and then…I guess I just freaked.” 

She’d pulled away from him for air, still straddling his legs, and suddenly been consumed by an unquenchable, overwhelming panic. She'd spoken without thinking, "What are we doing?"

Then, "We…we shouldn’t be doing this."

Then, "I'm sorry. You should go."

Jonathan had looked suitably startled, but he'd left without putting up any kind of fight. And when he'd jumped down from her window, he hadn't looked back

Nancy put her heads in her hands, elbows on the sticky, ketchup-gooped tabletop and all. “I didn’t mean it!” she said desolately. Someone, probably Vicky, reached over to pat her on the shoulder.

“You should just talk to him Nancy, I’m sure he’ll understand,” said Robin. "C'mon, this is Jonathan we're talking about."

"Yeah. Jonathan will hear you out."

They didn’t have a chance to say more, though, because then Jonathan himself showed up, wearing a flannel and jeans and looking like he hadn't slept a wink since he'd snuck out of her window. Nancy’s shoulders slumped with relief. 

“Hey,” he said awkwardly, waving at the group. He took the seat next to Nancy, probably because leaving am empty chair unexplainably in between them would be even more uncomfortable than sitting next to his ex the day after post-breakup sex. Nancy plastered on her best smile and hoped it didn’t look noticeably strained. “Sorry I’m late.” 

“No problem,” Robin said brightly, beaming at him in a way that was completely , obviously exaggerated. “We had a lot to catch up on with Nance!” Inside, Nancy groaned. This meal was already shaping up to be more excruciating than the one with her parents last night, and that said something. 

Vicky, bless her, cleared her throat. “Um, now that we’re all here, should we order?” 

They made it through their dinner and an additional plate of cheese fries before things started to get really awkward. Steve kept looking from Jonathan to Nancy and back again, very unsubtly, and every one of Robin’s forced, small talk questions sounded like she was rehearsing them off of a bad script. Robin was not a good actor.

Finally, Jonathan set down his fork and said, “So all of you know then?” 

The three musketeers on the opposite side of the table immediately started insisting otherwise—loudly and very poorly. Nancy did appreciate their efforts, truly, but she wasn't worth it. “Yes,” she said, turning to Jonathan, “I told them. I’m sorry, I had to tell someone—” 

They looked at each other for a long, unbreakable moment.

“Can we, um, can we talk?” This time, it was clear he was saying it just to her. 

Outside, in the chilled snowy air of downtown Hawkins in mid-December, all of the buildings in town had already turned their Christmas lights on. The effect was a rainbow array of colors, reflecting off the white snow collecting on the ground. A perfect, crisp winter evening. Nancy pulled on the sleeves of her coat and looked at her ex-boyfriend, really looked at him.

Even after all this time knowing him, Jonathan could still be hard to read sometimes. She was afraid he'd be mad at her for spilling the beans to the others, or worse, for how she'd treated him the night before, like he was just a good time, a passing phase. Like she didn’t still look at him and think about forever. 

He had his arms tight against his sides tonight, almost rigid. But he didn't look angry. If Nancy had to guess, she’d say he was determined. 

At the same time, they opened their mouths and echoed, “I’m sorry.” 

Nancy laughed. “You’re sorry? For what?” 

Jonathan instantly looked more relaxed now that he’d said it. One of his hands reached up to scratch the back of his neck, a familiar nervous habit. He continued to stare at her in that soft, penetrating way of his. Like he could see into all of her secrets. “Last night. I need you to know that I didn’t invite you out just so we could…” 

“Me neither,” Nancy hastened to say. “And I shouldn’t have made you leave like that, so...sudden. I was having a really great time. The best, actually. I guess I just….” 

“Panicked?” She nodded. “Yeah, me too.” He paused, reaching out a hand. An invitation. Nancy took it.

They hadn’t moved far away from the diner, and she had to believe the others were watching them through the windows, but she didn’t care one lick. Jonathan wasn't wearing gloves, but his skin still felt warm. “Nancy, I know we said breaking up was for the best, and I really tried to believe it, at the time, I did. But, last night, I…. I’ve missed you so much.” 

“Me too,” she breathed. This moment felt important, definitive. The same way it felt when she'd stood up to call after him that night in Murray Bauman's spare room, when she'd opened the door to find him waiting for her on the other side, and he'd kissed her for the very first time. “Last night, I panicked because I still love you. I never stopped. Sometimes, I’m afraid of how much I do.”

She was close to tears again, but she didn’t quite know why. “I think that’s why I wanted to break up in the first place,” she continued, eyes wet. “We really were bad at long distance the first time, and I thought…I thought it’d be easier to just let you go. Then I wouldn’t have to worry so much about losing you all the time, because I’d already have lost you so it wouldn't matter.” She pulled her hand away from his to angrily swipe away her tears. She was too determined to say this and didn't want to say it through tears. “I know it sounds so stupid, and I was wrong to do that to you, and—”

“It doesn’t sound stupid.” Jonathan took back her hand. “Nancy, I still love you too. I never stopped.”  

Then, for the second time in just as many days, they were crashing against one another, as desperately as if they’d crumble into a million pieces otherwise, like the only thing keeping them afloat was the other’s arms. 

Nancy kissed him and kissed him and didn't want it to ever end, even if that meant standing out in the cold so long it gave them both frostbite. The lights off of the snow flickered. A passing car honked.

Even if she got cold, Jonathan would warm her up soon enough.

This was her home, she realized. Not school, not even Hawkins. Even once he went back to NYU, and her to Emerson—she’d have this to fall back on. She’d have him. Home.

When they finally broke away—minutes or hours later, Nancy can’t be sure—she suddenly remembered where it was they were doing this, and turned back to look at the diner. Sure enough, she could see Robin, Steve and Vicky through the glass, watching them. All three of them were grinning. Robin waved at them. Steve appeared to be wolf-whistling.

Beside her, Jonathan started to laugh. 

It was still the sweetest sound she had ever known.