#nancy/barb

[fastcardotmp3]

AMEN | Nancy & Max (Stranger Things)

» youtube link under the cut » video masterlist

[dufrau]

Nancy’s backstory from the TLOU Bill & Frank AU, written for @strangerthingsfemslashweek Day 6: Came Back Wrong

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Stranger Things (TV 2016) Rating: Mature Warnings: Major Character Death Relationships: Barbara "Barb" Holland/Nancy Wheeler, Barbara "Barb" Holland & Nancy Wheeler Characters: Nancy Wheeler, Barbara "Barb" Holland Additional Tags: barb dies!, dont read it if you dont want to read barb dying!, comphet, like a lot of nancy comphet tbh, Prequel, Backstory, Canon-Typical Violence, this takes place in my TLOU au but its not really in any way a TLOU au on its own, POV Nancy Wheeler, Nancy Wheeler-centric, the birth of a doomsday prepper Series: Part 2 of Every Thing That You've Done Summary:

Nancy swallowed hard, and told a secret that didn't matter anymore to anybody but her. "There was a girl, once. When I was sixteen. But we didn't... But she died."

or

Nancy's origin story from My Piece of Land.

Written for Stranger Things Femslash Week Day 6: Came Back Wrong.

[miraculousagentsofkrypton]

All the Better to Protect You With, My Dear Ch 3

Werewolf Wheelers AU - Link to full fic on Ao3 - Chapter summary: A look into Nancy and Barb's relationship before everything falls apart.

----------------------

The first few days after a transformation were always a toss up. Some months, Nancy just found herself wound into a ball of hyperactive energy that needed an escape, on others she found herself dragging herself out of bed, with exhaustion and pain smothering the bright ball of pressurized energy. This month seemed to be better than usual, and unusually painless. After being locked back in, Mike and her had spent the rest of the transformation expending excess energy through play. 

She still found herself bouncing on her feet and squishing her after-the-full-moon stress ball as she waited for Barb at her locker the following morning. Her relationship with Barb had changed over the last few months as she tried to take her mother’s words to heart. Nancy’s priority was always going to be to protect Barb. She never wanted to be the cause of her pain, yet that seemed unavoidable, no matter what she did. 

She started to grin as she caught sight of her best friend down the hall, only to find it faltering as she also saw who Barb was walking with. Band Girl. Despite all her efforts advocating for the two’s rekindled friendship, Nancy had gone to great lengths to ignore Band Girl’s existence. She was unwilling to even learn the other girl’s name. She didn’t do this out of malice, rather as a coping mechanism against her intense jealousy. The same jealousy that her mother had warned her was bad for her best friend. 

Nancy hadn’t even realized how much she had been pushing potential friends away from Barb until after her conversation with her mother. She was trying to be better, and not so possessive, but it required her to create distance between her and her best friend. Nancy had to stay away in situations that might allow Barb to make other friends. This meant giving her friend some of her free time in the afternoons and during school back. 

In the morning before classes started was the only time during the school day that Nancy allowed herself to claim Barb all to herself. Yet, here came Band Girl, taking that away from her. Band Girl, with her stupid fluffy-looking hair, and apparently great sense of humor, if Barb’s laugh was anything to go by.  A soft growl escaped past her lips before she could regain control. 

The blood drained from her face. See that wasn’t normal. That was the kind of behavior she was working to stop. She glanced away from the two, trying to catch sight of Steve. He had been talking to her a lot recently and she needed something to distract herself from Barb and the other girl. However, she couldn’t see him anywhere. 

Instead, Barb caught sight of her, and waved excitedly. Her face lit up in a smile against her will and she waved back. Nancy watched as her friend said goodbye to the other girl, and quickly came over to her. She couldn’t help herself from pulling her friend into a hug and taking a deep breath of her scent. The feeling of her best friend next to her calmed her, and eased that strange ache in her chest that grew when they were apart for too long. Her brows drew together as she contemplated that concept. It was likely wolf related, most unusual things in her life were, but she couldn’t fathom how. 

Barb pulled back and greeted her, “Good Morning!” Nancy saw her hand twitch, as if she wanted to do something with it, “Are you alright? You seem a little off for some reason.”

She plastered a smile back on her face. “Just peachy!”

The other girl started fidgeting, “Are you going to be able to sit with me at lunch today?”

Everything within her seemed to be compelling her to say yes, but Nancy committed to stay true to her goals. “Sorry, Mom asked me to give Mike his homework he forgot this morning. I was going to drop it off to him at lunch.”

The girl’s face dropped. Both of them knew it was a lie, but Nancy didn’t know what else to do. As much as it seemed to almost physically hurt her to disappoint Barb, the idea of permanently harming her through her possessive nature hurt even more. Her mother had speculated that it was something from a wolf’s territorial instinct that was enhancing that part of her nature. Nancy would be inclined to agree if that feeling wasn’t so much more with Barb, compared to everyone else she found herself feeling as ‘hers’. 

This was not the first time Barb had tried to convince her to go back to how they were before, and it wouldn’t be the last. Nancy did her best to make sure her friend didn’t think it was her fault, or because she didn’t want to be friends anymore, but nothing seemed to fully soothe her worries. 

Nancy wished she could just tell Barb about her transformations, but she had kept it from her for so long. Her mom was so adamant that they keep this a secret from everyone, impressing the importance of protecting each other and the dangers of experimentation. Nancy had grown to want to trust the other girl with everything in her life though. Now, she just worried about breaking her friend's trust. 

The tension subsided as they chatted about their days, and fell into the comfort of each other’s presence. Their time in the mornings was short, but it did a lot to boost their moods for the day. 

Nancy hid outside during lunch to maintain the lie she had told that morning. In doing so she ran into Steve and his friends. Tommy H was smoking while they all chatted. Steve looked excited to see her there. The others just rolled their eyes at him. 

“Nancy! What brings you to these neck of the woods today?”

“Um, just needed some air.” She replied quietly. 

“Do you want to join us? Tommy here was just trying to convert us into Cujo fans.”

Nancy held back her reactionary no, and considered the benefits of accepting his advances. She didn’t know how to feel about the boy. She wasn’t blind to his interest in her, and he was attractive. He hung out with Carol and Tommy H, two people she considered bullies. He had a reputation as a playboy, which also didn’t help his case. However, he was always very nice to her, and she’d never seen him be the one to shoot people down like the other two were prone to do. 

Maybe a boyfriend would be just what she needed. He would be a good distraction from the ache in her chest and the strange tugs she felt whenever she was away from Barb. He’d also provide a good reason to split her time. Maybe she didn’t just need to allow Barb to have other friends, but also try to make some herself. 

Decision made, Nancy stepped closer. “Sure, sounds interesting.”

Nancy experienced her first kiss a few days later. Barb acted very excited for her, which should have been a good thing; best friends gushing about a crush. Instead it felt somewhat forced, and it hurt for some reason to see Barb so unaffected by it. Which was dumb, because of course Barb was happy for her. She wasn’t the possessive one harming their friendship. 

At least, that had been what she thought, until some of the hurt and jealousy started to slip through the cracks of her friend’s facade. She played the part of a happy best friend, but sometimes Nancy thought she could see the same hurt she felt in her soul reflected back in Barb’s eyes. Her friend started working harder than ever before to pull her back into her orbit.

Nancy wanted to cry.

Why couldn’t she understand that this was all for her?  All this pain was so that she could blossom into the beautiful person she was and grow beyond the restrictions that Nancy had imposed upon her. She had been hurting her favorite person by taking all her time and attention. 

The goal had been to allow Barb more friends, and she had succeeded. She was happy. It hurt so much, when would this end.

[jonathanbyersphd]

brb going feral from the implications

[williamprattz]

and you continue to haunt me

[eightfifteen]

Nancy hating pools but being fine with natural bodies of water. Mike hating natural bodies of water but being fine with pools. You see.

[snowangeldotmp3]

a study in season 2 nancy wheeler, featuring WILDFLOWER by billie eilish

guilt || grief || ghosts // ribs

[kittyvolvox]

nancy wheeler textposts (except they get progressively sadder)

[rusirius967]

The fact that Nancy will never know that Barb's last word was Nancy.

[the-lark-ascending69]

Nancy Wheeler love triangle but instead of Jonathan and Steve it's Barb and Robin and instead of choosing between two love interests she has to choose between a rotting love for her dead best friend that's haunted her since girlhood even though she will never know if she felt the same or if she was allowed to love her but she clings to her grief regardless because pain is the only way she can still feel love for the soulmate she doomed, and between a living girl who fights tooth and nail to survive in a world that wants her dead and shares her dreams and hopes for the future and knows true love is real but has always felt it was denied to her yet she wants to believe she'll find it one day, and maybe she's found it already if her love looked to the future instead of the past for once since she lost her soul to the jaws of the monster.

[fastcardotmp3]

Nancy & Eddie; Nancy & Barb; implied Nancy/Barb cw: canon character death

Nancy doesn't go to the funeral.

They're burying an empty casket in an empty plot of land surrounded by empty minds stuffed full to the brim with coverups and lies and half-truths and Nancy just can't.

She knows how it will look, Barb's best friend not showing up on this important day, this celebration of life for the girl who never did anything but love her, it's only... just because it's better than the Hollands holding out hope for a search that will never end, that doesn't mean it feels like enough.

Not for Nancy, not when no one will ever know that she was the last one to see Barb alive and all she did was turn her back and walk away. No one will ever know that Barb had a bad feeling and Nancy didn't listen. No one will ever know that it was Nancy's fault, that if she had just gone with Barb maybe they would have been in the car before the Demogorgon found them, been able to drive drive drive to safety.

So Nancy can't go to the funeral, because it's not enough, this watered down story, and it's also far, far too much when she's spent a full year grieving alone and is finally allowed to do so out loud.

She doesn't know how to do that, how to let people see it, how to do anything other than fight it.

What she does do, however, on the day they bury an empty casket in an empty plot of land in East Hawkins, is hide in the woods.

There's a self-destructive part of her that longs for the damp, the living dead of what is Barb's actual final resting place. There's a selfish part of her that wonders why it couldn't have been Tommy Hagan or Carol who sliced their hand open that night.

There's just the Nancy part of her that sits in her funeral best at a mossy picnic table under a canopy of empty branches and longs for the chaos of a world-ending threat so she could at least have a place to put the rest of it.

The restlessness, recklessness, complete and under destructiveness.

"Nancy Wheeler?"

She almost jumps out of her skin, almost trips over her own feet stumbling off the bench and onto solid ground to spin around and confront the new presence in this little clearing, snagging her hose in the process.

How she didn't hear him coming over the sound of her own guilt is self explanatory enough, she supposes, but she works her jaw out of frustration on principle anyway.

"Sorry," Eddie Munson puts his hands up palms out and takes a step backwards, "didn't mean to startle you."

Nancy just hums out a terse sound of acknowledgment, feeling his eyes give her an intrigued and curious once-over, and sits back down with a huff and a shake of her head.

Maybe it should be her cue to leave, him showing up, but she's not going to be pushed out of her own head that easily. She's not going to be pushed out of this place of bastardized reverence by some guy she goes to school with.

"I just..." he chuckles half-heartedly and lacking a little bit in proper humor, "wasn't expecting Nancy Wheeler, is all."

"Can I help you with something?" she all but snaps, elbows on the table in front of her, one knee bouncing beneath it.

Eddie makes a contemplative face, eyebrows lifting high under the cover of crooked bangs.

"Usually I'm the one asking that around these parts," he says pointedly, tucking his hands under his armpits and tapping the toe of his shoe against damp earth.

Nancy looks at him, is seen in return, and then--

"Oh," she frowns ever so slightly as she realizes what he's insinuated.

"Yeah," he agrees, "hence the surprise about Nancy Wheeler."

Nancy scowls harder, down at her hands rather than him though.

"Stop saying my full name like you're making a point about something,” she says, although what Eddie seems to hear is come on over and take a load off buddy, because that’s just what he does.

The way he carries himself is like he’s aware of every one of his angles, not even in a self absorbed way, just like he’s present in his skin on instinct rather than the forced sort of perpetual narrative crafting that Nancy feels herself doing in every minute of every day.

He sits across from her and pulls out a cigarette, but he only gets so far as to perch it upon his lower lip before she’s snatching his bic out of his hands and leaving the thing unlit.

"Well. Alright," he deadpans, cigarette still sitting in his mouth and hands held frozen aloft as he looks at her with ever-growing intrigue.

Nancy doesn't want to be intriguing. She wants to be alone. She wants to be able to attend a funeral like a best friend should instead of sitting alone in the woods in her nicest black dress with her nicest black heels sinking into the mud beneath the table.

She flicks on the lighter and watches the flame flicker in the gentle but cold wind of the day, not going out but hand trembling slightly with the force of holding down the trigger the longer she does it for.

"Um. Are you, like, good?"

Stilted like he hasn't asked a person in a while, or maybe just because she's Nancy Wheeler. God. If only being a teenage girl in a small town didn't mean succumbing to a box and not being allowed to outgrow it no matter how much you see or do or feel or-- or--

"I'm not here to buy drugs from you," she tells him bluntly, flicks the lighter again when it goes out just to watch it burn.

"Sure," Eddie shrugs. "Wouldn't blame you though, honestly. What with. Today."

Her eyes flick up to look at him, and her face is just this side of too numb to control the kind of expression she offers him, but whatever it is has him meeting her head-on for a beat and a half and then... shrugging again.

"Okay," he says, easy as that, not trying to sell her on it in the slightest.

Nancy lets the lighter go out again and smacks it down on the table in between them with a bit more force than intended. Her hands aren't steady today. Her heart isn't.

She thinks the whole of the universe might not be, what with the opening of a space in the ground for a girl already long buried beneath another.

Eddie lights up and takes a long drag, exhales away into the wind so the smoke won't blow in her face. She doesn't know why he's here, why he's being-- maybe not nice, but a person to her.

All week, the whole town has walked on eggshells around her, afraid to breathe wrong near the girl who just learned her best friend has been dead the whole time as if she's not the one who told them. As if she wasn't there when it happened.

"When does it start?" Eddie asks, pulling one foot up onto the bench with him and perching elbow on knee.

Nancy glances down at her watch.

"Five minutes ago."

"You could still make it," he says on another exhale, "these things always take ages longer than you think they're gonna."

Nancy considers it, considers the optics of loud creaking church doors in the middle of a eulogy.

"Everyone will look at me if I show up late."

Eddie hums in understanding. Everyone's been looking at her all week.

She really doesn't want to give them further reason to stare, doesn't want to have this numbness take over in front of an audience that expects her to break down and cry with the catharsis of finally accepting reality because she can't.

There's nothing cathartic about this, barely even closure about it, and Nancy can't move, is hardly sure how she's talking to Eddie Munson of all people right now.

"Bet I could get you in under the radar," he offers so casually she almost misses that it's an offer at all, feels her brow pull together in confusion when she actually does.

"What?" she balks at him eloquently, but Eddie is unphased.

"If I walk in late too, no one's gonna be looking at you.”

“Why would you do that?”

She doesn’t know a lot about Eddie Munson when she thinks about it, what with him technically being two grades above her even if he’s hung around long enough to close that gap to one now, but something about the way he sits there makes her feel like…

It’s not that Jonathan doesn’t get it! It’s not that even Steve doesn’t in his own distant way. It’s not that— that any of them aren’t without their fair share of trauma and loss at the end of it all, but. Well, they haven’t lost someone.

Not like this, not like Nancy losing Barb, not like a person who is so inherent to your life that you can’t quite find the places where they end and you begin to make the amputation clean.

But Eddie Munson sits here smoking his damn cigarette and he said these things like he knows, is offering this thing, this massive thing she isn’t even sure she wants.

She doesn’t know a lot about him, but Hawkins is small enough to have heard tell of the fact that he lives with his uncle instead of a family somewhere in Kentucky.

“Did you even know Barb?”

The name tastes like blood on her tongue.

“We crossed over in band for a year when you guys where freshmen,” he says, a tug at the corner of his lips as he drops his gaze and ashes his cigarette off the edge of the table, “she was the most judgmental, funny little weirdo I’d ever met. Didn't take shit from anyone. I was kinda obsessed with her, not gonna lie.”

Nancy has to clench down on her jaw around the trembling flash of a memory-- Barb carrying her flute case when she crowded in next to Nancy on the bus, knees and shoulders touching, giggling with faces tipped close enough that sometimes, if she was lucky, Nancy could smell the distinct hint of perfume that she'd bought Barb for her birthday.

She breathes deeply where she sits today, gets nothing but the damp of rotting leaves and cigarette smoke.

"She was my..." Nancy chokes on it, because there's not a word that belongs there and because even if there was, she probably shouldn't express that to a near-stranger.

The phantom press of a knee up against hers, fingers intertwined with her own, faces tipped close.

Not a word for it. It's too big for that, really.

"She was yours," Eddie says, quieter this time, a little less confident and a lot more stunned in this big-eyed, knowing sort of way that has Nancy raising her hackles and all but shooting to her feet, heel lodged in mud enough to make her stumble in the process. "Woah, hey there--"

Eddie doesn't touch her, but he throws an arm out as though his instinct was to catch her, only for Nancy to jerk away and wrap her arms tight around her, closing her coat over the front of her body like it might protect her.

"I'm sorry," he says, staying sitting as though to prove something in the same way saying her full name was to prove something. "You don't have to-- be scared of me."

Nancy gets the sense it's the truth, she has a good sense of that kind of thing after all, but she laughs without humor as she looks down at the mud-caked toes of her dress shoes, the run in her tights right there on her shin.

She laughs, brittle and breaking, because the fact of the matter is--

"I have to be scared of everything."

When Nancy turns on her heel and walks towards the church, she isn't sure if it's out of obligation or want, but it doesn't matter anymore.

When Nancy cries alone in the shower, pretends to have found closure around everyone else, she's not sure if that's out of obligation or want either.

Living with the presence of Eddie Munson at the back of her mind for the next year and a half is a thing all its own, and she doesn't seek him out but she doesn't avoid the kind nods of I see you in the halls.

It's something like balance when, in the spring of '86, she's able to return a little bit of the favor.

Save him back, for the sake of a judgmental weirdo who played the flute.

For the sake of those of them still waiting in the woods.

[dufrau]

1000 words of Nancy/Barb pining for Came Back Wrong so far. There is actually going to be sort of a plot to this one but so far its just Nancy having her gay little thoughts. What can you do.

[artiststarme]

Swimming Ground

Warning: mentions of su!cide

Steve hated his pool. Not swimming or lounging near water but the pool in his backyard in particular. He hated the reminders it held. The pool in the Harrington backyard held too much power over him.

He remembers when he was in the eighth grade and his parents decided to get the pool. He remembers how happy they were to be one of the only families in Hawkins with a new in ground pool that Steve could practice for the swim team in. They never could have imagined that just two weeks later, they’d find Steve floating in it. His mom looked out of the kitchen window to find her beautiful boy fully clothed, face down in the water. They didn’t love the pool so much after that.

They didn’t love their son too much after that either. To his parents, Steve had tried to take their precious boy away from them and they could never truly forgive him for being so selfish. They started taking more business trips and longer vacations away from home to forget about the son that wanted to die.

And Steve was left at home with the constant reminder that he failed.

He used the pool to make friends and to throw rambunctious parties but he never stepped foot in it. The first time he did since the eighth grade was with Nancy when he pushed her in. That was the night his pool took Barb. After that night, the kids thought his hesitation around his pool was because of guilt over losing Nancy’s best friend which he went with because it was so much easier to explain.

He’d throw them pool parties and play lifeguard but he would not touch the water.

Some nights, Robin would swing by to the Harrington house just to find Steve sitting at the pool’s edge. Close but never touching the water. She’d lure him inside to complain about girls or any other topic that helped distract her from the uneasy feeling she got when she saw him sitting there.

After their final bout with the Upside Down, Loch Nora was destroyed. Steve’s house was barely standing and his backyard was a chasm. The pool that had haunted him for years was gone but the thoughts that gave the pool such power remained. Steve didn’t know why he deserved to live more than Eddie and he wasn’t even sure he wanted to. As he thought about his fallen friend that could’ve been more, he yearned to feel the floating like he had in eighth grade. He wanted to feel his lungs burn for air and the fire in his chest when he finally breathed in.

But the pool was gone, he couldn’t do what he’d wanted to since he first tried and even though it was gone, the temptation remained. Instead of sinking into the chilly water, he slouched down next to the blazing chasm where his pool used to be. He felt the heat envelop his body and knew that it was the right decision. He was supposed to perish in the Upside Down as a martyr fighting for his friends. That didn’t work out though so now he had to pull the role of a coward and die a fiery, reasonless, self-imposed death alone.

He didn’t leave a note, didn’t think he needed to. His friends would care or they wouldn’t but nothing he said would make the situation better.

So, he closed his eyes and stepped into the void just as he’d done so long ago. There wasn’t peace or panic like there was the last time, just nothingness as he stepped into the crack in the earth.

Strangely, the afterlife wasn’t dark as he’d expected (but to be fair, he hadn’t thought about it much). Instead, it looked exactly like the Upside Down almost as if the chasm wasn’t a portal to hell but a gate to the alternate Hawkins.

When Steve sat up, still alive despite his efforts, it was face to face with Eddie. A bloody and scarred Eddie that looked a little pissed off but Eddie nonetheless.

“Well hello Harrington, what the fuck are you doing here?”

Goddammit, the swimming excuse wasn’t going to work this time.

[jackiietaylor]

And you might never come back home, and I may never sleep at night

A HOUSE IN NEBRASKA by Ethel Cain merry christmas bru 🎄@fadeintoyou1993

[harringroveera]

Steve wakes up and feels weird. His bedroom isn’t his bedroom anymore. He takes another look.

It is his bedroom. Of his parents’ house back in Hawkins. He is back in his old bedroom. The house is empty. Everything looks odd.

He turns on the TV. Will Byers has gone missing. He stumbles outside the door and picks up the newspaper. November 6th, 1983.

He’s gone back in time somehow. 15 years backwards. To the first day it all started.

Steve crumbles the newspapers in his hand and decides this time he’s going to fix everything.

Including saving his soulmate from his death 13 years ago

[deancaslover]

Missing them hours