#phdyke

[groovebunker]

working on vito russo's 'why we fight' speech and it's honestly one of the most powerful things i've read in the course of my work.

i think about the 'someday, the AIDS crisis will be over. remember that. and when that day comes -- when that day has come and gone, there'll be people alive on this earth -- gay people and straight people, men and women, black and white, who will hear the story that once there was a terrible disease in this country and all over the world, and that a brave group of people stood up and fought and, in some cases, gave their lives, so that other people might live and be free.' quote so fucking often because it's not and we lost so many (including vito) but i love the hope that it engenders.

[fastcardotmp3]

Ronance AU where after the Upside Down has been neutralized and the fight for Hawkins is over, they go their separate ways and stay in touch largely through letters.

A couple of months together at the end of the world, a couple more helping Hawkins rebuild in the aftermath, and then Nancy is off to the East Coast for college and Robin is taking a gap year to spend the time with her family she lost in the war and they're not quite close enough for regular phone calls at that point, but Robin gets a great picture of Mike and the kids that she just knows will bring a smile to Nancy's face so she sends it and that's--

Well that's how it starts.

Polaroids with little notes at the bottom to show each other what they're up to, where they've been, who they've been with. Robin thinks it's easier to get to know Nancy Wheeler through the written word, none of their individual hang-ups can be in the room to get in the way and Nancy is just-- God she knows how to string a sentence together.

It's life updates and questions asked and answered and book and movie recommendations and--

Steve and I are moving to Chicago in the summer so I can start that linguistics program I told you about.

I usually have a layover in Chicago! Maybe I'll take a day to see the sights...?

It's plans made and it was good to see you's and more Polaroid photos with little notes at the bottom and it goes on for years, is the thing.

They move around and never end up in the same place. Nancy is chasing her dreams and chasing stories from city to city and country to country and she hardly sees her family outside of major holidays let alone Robin, but Robin gets the uncensored preview to a lot of her articles in long-hand scrawl from a cramped airplane seat and that's nearly as good.

Steve is Robin's platonic soulmate, always will be the bastard, but the more years it goes on through the end of both their undergraduate years and then into Robin's first Master's and Nancy's first staff writer gig and then into careers and new friends and lives and their thirties, well.

Well, Robin is pretty sure that Nancy Wheeler is her best friend. At least on paper.

It's like, the letters don't come every week or even every month, but every single time that familiar handwriting with a new return address comes sliding into her mailbox, thicker with photos the longer it's been, there's this flutter of utter joy and gratitude that Robin just can't deny herself.

Nancy Wheeler sure can string a sentence together. She can string a sentence together so good that Robin knows her just from pen and paper. Sees her just from the wall of Polaroids that travels with Robin from Chicago to a couple years getting yet another degree at UCLA and all the way back home again to Indiana.

When Robin imparts the news that she's gotten a teaching position (now that she has her doctorate) at IU, Bloomington to Nancy, it's with tongue-in-cheek jokes about whether or not this place is haunted too, but mostly Robin points out that she'll be close by again for when Nancy visits her parents.

She sends the letter before she gets into the passenger seat of the U-Haul Steve has insisted on driving cross-country for her out of fear for your safety, Buckley which is code for we haven't been on a road trip in too long and I miss you. But what it really means, the haste and the excitement, is that she doesn't manage to get her new address into the letter before it's already in the mail.

It shouldn't matter. She'll send another one when she gets to Bloomington in a week or so, depending on how many roadside attractions she and Steve decide to indulge in like they're teenagers with all the time in the world and not thirty-five-year-old dweebs singing along to mixtapes they made in 1987.

It shouldn't matter.

Miraculously, it doesn't.

She's getting a feel for the new campus the first time she sees Nancy Wheeler in probably four years, walking through the lobby of the student union like she belongs there.

(She belongs anywhere she decides to lay her feet, Robin thinks.)

She's walking through the student union, and out of nowhere Robin is a too-blunt, no-filter teenager and--

"What the hell are you doing here?"

Hallowed halls of a respected institution, Robin couldn't care less about it as Nancy turns over her shoulder and beams.

"I'm sorry," she gives Robin a once-over like she had been waiting for this moment, like she had known, "who are you?"

Robin is lifted across the room by the force of her own joyous laughter before she even has the chance to call Nancy any of the names she'd like too, wrapped up around her and swaying in the middle of what will become a well-used study space once the semester starts in a week.

Wrapped up around her. Feeling her here and now and real as she is on the page. Nancy Wheeler knows how to string a sentence together with a pen, but god does she know how to do it off her tongue just the same. Everything that rolls out of her and into the world has Robin's cheeks aching from how hard she smiles, has her buzzing despite the lack of caffeine in her system.

Because as it turns out, Robin isn't the only one coming home, isn't the only one looking to maybe create a home base to return to at the end of each long trip, isn't the only one who snagged a gig teaching a new generation of world savers just how to do it. (The IU School of Journalism is, after all, one of the best in the country, and thus fitting of a mind like Nancy Wheeler's.)

It's strange, not to need to pen a letter to talk to her anymore, to be able to go for dinner on Thursdays after classes or work on lesson plans in tandem in Robin's eclectic living room because Nancy is still very much working on the whole having furniture thing after so many years on the road.

Robin knows it won't last forever, that Nancy can't sit still for more than the next couple of years she's on contract here, but the longer they spend together the more it becomes clear that Nancy really does want a place to come home to for longer stints in between assignments.

She wants roots, she says, people and bars where she can consider herself a regular and students to teach how to take no shit from the old guard.

Robin wants that for her too. Wants to make that happen for her. Wants it to be here.

With her.

They're not kids anymore, and the world doesn't need saving in the same way it once did, and the pictures they take now are together, together, together and Robin finds it's so much easier than she ever thought it could be at seventeen years old to look at the woman she loves and not be afraid of it.

To lean into her on the couch while they listen to a record Nancy had picked up somewhere in her travels in a language Robin speaks and can translate in real time, to share her space, to kiss her like they've been kissing all this time and like they're inventing something new wrapped up in one.

"So, roots, huh?" Robin breathes, foreheads tipped together and those blue eyes bigger and brighter than ever.

Nancy Wheeler knows how to string together a sentence, but all she needs right then is two words.

"Yeah," she smiles, bright as the flash on a Polaroid camera, "roots."

[finelythreadedsky]

broke: clytemnestra wove the tapestry in the carpet scene

woke: the ocean wove the tapestry in the carpet scene

[finelythreadedsky]

I’m usually not particularly interested in using reclaimed slurs for myself (not for any principled reason or anything) but Nicola Griffith’s twitter name includes “PhDyke” and being able to do that is a pretty good motivator for grad school applications