#ronance tlou bill & frank au

[dufrau]

anyway nick offerman won an emmy for playing Bill on TLOU so in a way if you kinda squint that makes Regional Emmy Award Winner Nancy Wheeler also Actual Emmy Award Winner Nancy Wheeler.

[judasofsuburbia]

whatcha readin?

seeing some similar posts floating about so i wanted to contribute bc i love hyping up fandom writers!! here are the few fics i've been reading recently:

The White Rabbit by @fastcardotmp3 (rating m, steddie): dot knows EXACTLY how to tear your heart to shreads and then gently mend it back together. presumed dead! steve and a confused, mourning eddie. the angst is so delicious and the slow burn is BURNING!! i haven't finished this one yet but i am ITCHING TO!

and they were roommates by @yournowheregirl (rating e, ronance): alice knows Exactly how to make me scream into my pillow and yearn for sapphic love day in day OUT!!! robin and nancy are roommates and the sexual energy between them comes crashing down when nancy catches robin masturbating!!! what else could u need!!

when they raise the landing gear (will your heart stay here?) by @hexiewrites (rating m, steddie): been in my tabs for MONTHS and i finally got to read it the other night! ww2 steddie au based loosely off the notebook........oh this took me for a fucking RIDE dude!! a fury of emotions!!! hex wrote the pining and the grief so vividly i am in absolute AWE!!

My Piece of Land by titface (rating m, ronance): four words: ronance, tlou, epsiode 3. BRO!!!!!!!!!! this is such a perfect tlou au with nancy as bill and robin as frank. nancy's POV is so, so compelling and natural it's such a treasue. also not finished with this one yet but i know it will tear me APART!!!

mister funny, mister cool by @figthefruitfaeth (rating m, steddie): BEEN ON MY TBR FOR SO LONG AND IM SO HAPPY IM FINALLY DIVING INTO IT!! me? enjoy steve angst? use it to project my own feelings onto? haha.... please....that'd be so silly....no but fr zoey's writing is so captivating and special in a way i find difficult to explain in mere mortal words. i'm also not finished with this one but zoey will most definitely crumble my heart and soul into DUST and i'll allow it<3

what are YOU reading??

tagging with no pressure: @thefreakandthehair @fragilecapric0rnn @gothbat99 @cheatghost @kkpwnall @figthefruitfaeth @yournowheregirl @starrystevie @starryeyedjanai @seths-rogens @hellsfireclub @gideoncharov @fastcardotmp3 @sidekick-hero @legitcookie @vecnuthy plus anyone else who wants to participate!!

[eskawrites]

1) @dufrau‘s Ronance TLOU Bill & Frank AU is a masterpiece and i know i reblogged it but i’m linking it again bc everybody needs to read it (i mean, you all already know that, you’re smart people, but i’m telling you anyway)

2) My Piece of Land is now my favorite song on my spring playlist

3) i have a confession to make....i like billy joel

[dufrau]

Bigfootverse or TLOU Ronance Verse? (I'm evil for asking you this 'cause I would not be able to pick between them myself lmaoo good luck!)

OOF. I feel like i have been stabbed in the gut 😭

This is so hard.

I think.

I think I have to say Bigfoot???

I think the main TLOU story is the best thing I've ever written and I love it more than anything else I've written.

BUT.

Bigfootverse is like... like I feel like that series was so instructive to me as a writer, I just learned so much writing it. And that version of those characters, and writing them growing up etc etc. Like I truly don't think I could have written TLOU without writing Bigfoot first.

And Bigfoot is like... that's when I really started talking to people in the fandom I think, around then? Like that's when I really entered the ronance fandom instead of just being a weirdo loner posting my little stories and not really interacting at all about them outside of the comment section. And that is very dear to me. And that's when I started talking about writing, like the process of it and the art of it. All of that stuff.

Plus? Bigfootverse is good! Almost nobody read the last part because it took me a year to post it but I am very proud of it start to finish tbh.

[dufrau]

Robin POV for the ronance bill & frank AU. 

Please mind the tags on this one and skip it if you have to!

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Stranger Things (TV 2016) Rating: Mature Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con Relationships: Robin Buckley/Nancy Wheeler Characters: Robin Buckley, Nancy Wheeler Additional Tags: tlou episode 3 bill & frank AU, POV Robin Buckley, based sort of structurally on the Left Behind dlc?, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, non graphic but its there, Violence, lots of blood, Fire, Graphic Injury, listen this one gets rougher before it gets better, Eventual Happy Ending, Angst, Post-Apocalypse, Flashbacks, you have to read the first one in the series to understand this i think Series: Part 3 of You Are My Home Summary:

Nancy looked so fucking small out there, bleeding through her sleep shirt and a pair of jeans that used to belong to some middle school kid that had been dead for a decade, and Robin thought about herself ten years from now. Pictured herself haunting this big old house, wearing clothes that used to belong to Regional Emmy Award Winner Nancy Wheeler who had been dead for a decade, and she wondered when exactly she had fallen in love. And she wondered how many apocalypses a person could be expected to survive.

or

Robin's backstory from

[dufrau]

Apparently today is the day TLOU Bill & Frank die but it is NOT the day Regional Emmy Award Winner Nancy Wheeler and Robin (No Last Name) die because i moved the timeline 10 years later and also I moved their ending into Fall because it felt Thematic.

(anyway read this fic if you havent yet i am very proud of it)

[dufrau]

Hello here is the Ronance TLOU Bill & Frank AU that has taken over my every waking moment for the past month. I hope you like it. Please let me know if you do!

It’s sad but in a good way? Maybe? Ish? If you’ve seen Episode 3 of TLOU HBO you know what to expect. If you haven’t, watch that first, it’s one of the best episodes of television I have ever seen.

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Stranger Things (TV 2016) Rating: Mature Warnings: Major Character Death Relationships: Robin Buckley/Nancy Wheeler Characters: Nancy Wheeler, Robin Buckley Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - The Last of Us (Video Games) Setting, TLOU HBO episode 3 Bill & Frank AU, Canon-Typical Violence, Suicidal Thoughts, Assisted Suicide, If you have seen the episode you know what to expect, Sad Ending, Nancy Wheeler-centric, POV Nancy Wheeler, doomsday prepper nancy wheeler, Apocalypse Beans, Billy Joel Slander, Older Characters, Angst and Fluff, Epic Romance, it is sad but it is about love, Loneliness, human connection, Aging, aging together Summary:

Nancy heard a rustling from down in the hole, a panicked animal kind of movement. She stopped in her tracks, kept her gun up steady.

The noise stopped as suddenly as it started. There was a pause. All Nancy heard was her own deep breathing, the gentle wind, and some scattered birdsong that told her this thing probably wasn't a predator, whatever it was. And then the quiet broke.

"Stay back!" A woman's voice, raspy and dry. Nancy was thirsty at the sound of it. "I'm armed! You don't want to mess with me, I'm- Shit."

"I'm armed too," Nancy said, her voice calmer now, modulated, despite the pounding of her heart in her throat. "And you're stuck in a hole. I can leave you to it if you want, or I can throw a grenade down there to keep you company. Or you can put your hands up and maybe we can talk like civilized people. Your choice."

-- Or: the Ronance TLOU Bill & Frank AU nobody asked for but my brain insisted on writing anyway

[dufrau]

So I *think* the structure of this Robin POV is going to be alternating between "current day" taking place at a certain point in the original story, and flashbacks to Robin's pre-Nancy apocalypse. I'm at ~4600 words right now and somewhere in the middle of the fourth scene, and I think I have 4-5 more scenes I want to write for it, so realistically I think we're probably looking at something like 10k for the finished piece. So, longer than I originally planned but still nowhere near as long as the first one. Hopefully.

[dufrau]

this fic is legit gonna be for like 5 of you. this is not a crowd pleaser. it is barely fanfiction right now its more like a survival horror video game.

[dufrau]

(i had too many drinks at dinner to actually be productively writing tonight but i have A Plan for another TLOU au one shot and i am figuring out the structure for it at least but it is a vaguely Left Behind style Robin POV set in the period after Nancy gets shot, with flashbacks to Before)

[dufrau]

Taking a page from @eskawrites book, in honor of gay bitch day or whatever and also because the tags are as dead as almost everybody in the world in this TLOU AU, I offer you a tiny little excerpt of what is (hopefully) coming soon.

Nancy wrapped herself in a towel, thick and soft, not ready to reckon with her body. She had always been small, and she was still small, but time had been at work all over her. She wasn't the prim little thing on the billboards anymore. She'd grown. Hard and soft in all the wrong places, she was sure her mother would agree, from doing all the necessary work of staying alive, and from eating when she was hungry until she wasn't hungry anymore. She was so fucking hungry all the time.

She remembered being lovely, and resenting it. Hating the way people looked at her, the way they saw her. She wondered now what it would feel like, if it were even possible anymore, for anybody to ever look at her like that again. She pulled the towel tighter around herself.

The hardwood was cool under Nancy's bare feet as she stepped out into her bedroom, dust and pollen sticking where her toes were still damp, and she tried to remember the last time she'd swept the floor in here. 

It was an absurd thought to be having. She should be thinking about how clean her sheets were, or the tell-tale dip of loneliness on her side of the mattress next to where Robin was sitting, back upright against the pillows and the headboard, sheets and blanket pooling below her breasts.

"Oh," Nancy said. The freckles on Robin 's face continued down her neck to her shoulders and down her arms, lean and long. Down her chest in a scooping V. She had a puckered red scar sneaking out from under one armpit, up and over her collarbone and partway around her throat, hidden away until now by the collars of her shirts.

Nancy was suddenly self-conscious, hyperaware of the stratification of farmer's tan up and down her arms, darkest on her hands, lighter again at her elbow, halfway up her biceps, and finally again where the straps of her summer tanktops crossed back over her shoulders. She thought of the ugly scar winding around her right ankle, pale with years, much older than Robin's, but the otherwise the same. She shivered.

Robin was looking at her all kinds of ways, and she felt absurdly underdressed despite the signs that even Nancy's uncultivated social skills could read, like the neon at Margaritaville flashing No Shoes No Shirt No Problem.

She thought about palm trees and bikinis and said "I haven't shaved," and Robin laughed, softly, and ran a hand back through her hair, and Nancy felt ridiculous, blushing at that glimpse of armpit hair when her boobs were already right there to blush over.

[dufrau]

Not quite sure how to suggest this prompt but roughly TLOU ronance au deciding what to name their chickens and or Nancy finding a stray scruffy kitty

Count Them (1706 words) by titface Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Stranger Things (TV 2016) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Robin Buckley/Nancy Wheeler Characters: Nancy Wheeler, Robin Buckley Additional Tags: Interlude, from my ronance tlou au, Fluff, Domestic Fluff, Chickens, Prompt Fill, Silly, Banter, POV Nancy Wheeler, Older Characters, Flirting Series: Part 4 of You Are My Home Summary: "I don't care," Nancy said. She'd been saying it. Robin hadn't believed her any of the previous times she'd said it and Nancy could only assume she wouldn't buy it now either. But it was true. She didn't care. They were just- "They're just chickens," she sighed. "I don't care what you name them. I don't see why they even need names at all." or A rare moment of peace in the ronance TLOU Bill & Frank AU.

---

here you go bud!

[dufrau]

is this anything??? (tlou robin POV snippet, i am trying to make sense of what ive started in this doc and i forget... everything about writing)

She looked so fucking small out there bleeding through her sleep shirt and a pair of jeans that used to belong to some middle school kid that had been dead for a decade, and Robin thought about herself ten years from now. Pictured herself haunting this big old house, wearing clothes that used to belong to Regional Emmy Award Winner Nancy Wheeler who had been dead for a decade, and she wondered when exactly she had fallen in love. And she wondered how many apocalypses a person could be expected to survive.

[dufrau]

bleep bloop she's done. gonna let it sit overnight then edit tomorrow morning and post it whenever its ready. ✌️

[dufrau]

okay bit of a crackpot theory here and idk if this has been asked before but was nancy an asymptomatic carrier in my piece of land? i just reread the series and robins run in with the vines at the start of the apocalypse seemed to have slowly stayed in her system and bit her in the ass later. and nancy in her own origin fic was attacked by vines in the forest and it burned her skin. could it be possible that the upside down disease/illness could of stayed with her but instead of effecting her slowly, it infected other people somehow? did nancy potentially start the apocalypse?? maybe???

Oooh I love this ask so much because it lets me explain my apocalypse in self indulgent (vague) detail!

LORE DROP!

I'll say that wasn't my intention to have Nancy be infected all along, but it did occur to me that it was possible and that it was a possible interpretation people might come to, and I wanted to leave it open to interpretation.

This is why Nancy doesn't have like a tester like they had in the show, because I don't want us to know 100% whether Nancy is a carrier or whether Robin is already a carrier when she gets there.

The outbreak in this AU is meant to be less literal than TLOU. It's not as simple as a zombie apocalypse. It's not as simple as getting bitten, although that will certainly do it. (Also for the record, bitten people turn into demogorgons but like, human sized ones. Not the giant ones from the show. So vaguely clicker levels of dangerous. But there ARE giant ones also. Whether those are people who got bitten a long time ago and grew more monstrous over time or something else entirely is also up for speculation.)

I imagine this outbreak as being more eldritch and unexplainable and more insidious, this is what the descriptions of people's behavior changing is hinting at. A sort of Flaying like in the show, that works slowly or quickly and nobody really knows how, but a connection to the greater hive mind of whatever the Upside Down is in this world that makes people want to feed it, in whatever way. Eventually flayed people will turn, but often they die before that can happen due to their own violence. (This is vaguely inspired by part of the book The Passage.)

I will say, since it's never specified in Into Dust, that Barb was attacked and bitten and dragged into that little pocket of Upside Down, to turn or to be absorbed into the organism of it. To help it grow, one way or another. It was just a little mini outbreak. There were probably others that nobody lived to tell about, or that like Nancy nobody believed them when they tried to tell. The government ABSOLUTELY knew though, by the way, and they covered it up.

I think of the vines as being sort of spore spreaders and incubators, seeking out life to turn and consume. And I think the actual Outbreak Day outbreak happens somewhat similarly to the show where it's the result of a spoilage of some important food staple (not beans, clearly) that some vines got into that results in a sort of mass turning event.

I will say for certain that Nancy does not cause the apocalypse. She's just the first living witness to it. It's brewing, somewhere under the surface, until finally it breaks free. Even if she's infected, she's not contagious in any traditional way.

So maybe Nancy has been infected all along or maybe never at all or maybe she infected herself at any point over the years in all of her chopping and burning of the vines around her property and she's asymptomatic or just hasn't developed symptoms yet. Maybe she's dying too at the end and she just doesn't know it. And Maybe Robin has been infected since the night of the fire, or maybe that happened more recently. And maybe EVERYONE is infected, by now, and they are all just ticking time bombs. Or maybe not.

They don't know, and I think it's a better story if we don't know either. Because if there's one moment you can point to and say "that right there, that's where your fate was sealed, that's when you were doomed" it makes it harder to appreciate the moments after that, which are what really matters in this story IMO.

Thank you so much for this ask!

[dufrau]

My headcanon (i guess its just canon since the entire thing is from my head?) for the TLOU au is that after El eventually saves the world a few years down the line (i have not given much thought to how that happens exactly lol only the important stuff okay) she and Max come back and move into Nancy & Robin’s house and fix it up and maybe other people move into the neighborhood too and it becomes a cozy little home for a new generation of apocalypse queers. 

But one detail i think about a lot is that there are pictures of Nancy in the house because she lived there Before but there probably aren’t any pictures of Robin, so El and Max don’t know what Robin looked like. So they assume the terrible kate winslet’s boobies naked lady drawing on the mantle is supposed to be Robin 😭