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silverwhittlingknife · 7 months ago

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hi Silver! o/ because that fanart made me wonder - would you happen to know when/where Dick's stuffed elephant plush Zitka turns up in the comics?

GREETINGS CAM <3333 THAT ART WAS SO CUTE

Yeah, I think your instincts are right - it's a truly adorable bit of transformative fandom, but I'm 95% percent sure it's not comics canon. Barbara has canon plushies, but I don't think anyone else does.

I got kinda invested in the investigation (it's hard to prove a negative!) and I ended up typing out an entire History of Elinore/Zitka, so, uh, if you're curious, meet me below the cut for:

Where does Elinore / Zitka - the animal - appear in comics?

Did Dick ever have a stuffed elephant toy in comics?

Where does Elinore / Zitka appear in comics?

We're gonna go in chronological order!

Dick's circus elephant friend was first created for practical reasons: in Batman 436, Marv Wolfman does a big expanded flashback to Dick's circus backstory as a way to subtly show us Tim before officially introducing him (so that we can have a technically-solvable mystery-of-Tim's-identity in LPoD). In this comic, there's an elephant named Elinore who loves Dick:

Aww. Such a cute elephant!

Batman 436 comes out in August 1989. New Titans 60 comes out a few months later, in November, and guess what? When Dick visits the circus, he is suddenly surprised by an unexpected blast from the past! It turns out that even though it's been years, Elinore still remembers him!

Here's the part where Elinore remembers Dick:

SUCH a cute elephant. I love her.

(Guess who else still remembers Dick even though it was so long ago. Guess which other character is about to be an unexpected blast from the past. Guess which character Elinore is directly paralleling guess guess guess sorry everything is about Dick and Tim in my mind but I can focus I swear)

Four years later, in 1993, Batman: The Animated Series retells Dick's origin story. They like and keep Wolfman's elephant, but they change her name to Zitka:

Wolfman doesn't return to the elephant beyond those two appearances, and a few years down the line, New Titans gets cancelled and Wolfman's not writing Dick anymore anyway. So the animal gets abandoned for a while, until Devin Grayson, a fan of both Wolfman and B:tAS, revives the Wolfman-era Titans team in JLA/Titans and then the ongoing series Titans 1999.

Grayson then brings back the elephant in a flashback to Dick's past in Titans 16 (Jun 2000), where she imports the B:tAS name. Sometimes I'm skeptical of TV-to-comics imports, but honestly, I endorse this one. You lose the alliteration, which is a shame, but IMO Zitka is a better elephant name than Elinore.

Here's Dick with the newly-christened Zitka in Titans 16:

Grayson also briefly references the elephant in Gotham Knights 20 and - in a final angsty callback - in Nightwing 88 (Feb 2004), where Zitka tries futilely to comfort Dick in the midst of his trauma conga line:

... And... honestly, I think that's it for comic appearances? The two Wolfman comics plus the three Grayson comics.

Both Wolfman and Grayson are writing multiple titles - Batman, New Titans, Titans, Gotham Knights, and Nightwing between the two of them, spanning a big chunk of Dick's post-Crisis canon - and both writers use the elephant for heartwarming moments of nostalgia, which means if you're doing a post-Crisis readthrough for Dick, Elinore/Zitka feels memorable. But I don't think she actually shows up that much.

For post-2011, I am not as well-informed - throwing this out to the dash? anyone know? - but I feel like Zitka the heartwarming symbol of Dick's heartwarming circus past is, uh, thematically very at odds with the Court of Owls evil!circus vibes, so my instinct is that this story element was almost certainly dropped in the reboot.

Did Dick ever have a stuffed elephant toy in comics?

In WFA, yes; in main comics continuity, no. Technically, I have not read every comic ever published, so I could be wrong!! But I don't think so.

Below, find my rambling reasoning on the tonal vibes of pre-Crisis, post-Crisis, and post-2011, and why this particular story element doesn't seem right to me for the first two.

Pre-Crisis (...okay, mostly the Silver Age): stuffed animal, yes or no?

tl;dr no, requires too much background knowledge on the part of the reader, plus the elephant wasn't a thing until later

Elinore doesn't get created until post-Crisis, but also just generally, pre-Crisis callbacks are more along the lines of this reference in Batman 129 (published in 1960), where, wow, Batman and Robin are hunting jewel thieves - and it turns out Robin recognized this strongman! BUT HOW?!

The comic goes on to recap Dick's entire origin story in flashback, on the assumption that you may not know it.

(BTW, if you'd like to know more about Haly's Circus throughout the years, nightwingology has a great post here summarizing a lot of fun plotlines and characters!)

Basically: Silver Age comics are very self-consciously episodic and kid-friendly; they're not generally gonna do overly-elaborate callbacks because they don't know what comics their kid readers may have randomly picked up or remember.

By the time of post-Crisis, comic books were being written for an adult audience buying from the direct market, i.e. readers who are collecting whole runs & don't need or want Dick's origin story to be recapped to us in full every time it's referenced. That's why in post-Crisis, we get stuff like "hey, neat, this particular soda brand is getting mentioned in several different books!!" or "in order to understand this story arc, buy SIXTEEN DIFFERENT COMICS in FIVE DIFFERENT RUNS and read them ALL ACCORDING TO A NUMBERED ORDER and also you better be following the individual plotlines and recognize these five minor characters who we don't bother to introduce!! Good luck!!" But the elaborate post-Crisis plotlines - and subtler worldbuilding like a stuffed animal callback to Dick's backstory - don't make a lot of story sense UNLESS you're imagining your readers as completionist adult fans.

So IMO a stuffed animal wouldn't be a pre-Crisis thing unless it was The Episodic Story Of the Week, and I don't think a stuffed animal is action-adventure-y enough for the fast-paced storytelling of the Silver Age. (Unless it, like, came to life and tried to eat you or something.)

Post-Crisis: stuffed animals, yes or no?

tl;dr: no, Dick's a manly tough guy, he's not gonna have a stuffed animal, that'd be lame, like something Tim might do

Part of the edgy grimdark adult vibes in 80s/90s comics is that some characters who used to be kinda silly & goofy & lighthearted - like Batman and Robin - get reimagined as Serious and Angsty and Edgy in a Tough Cool Manly Brooding Way. This massively affects characterization for Bruce, Dick, and Bruce and Dick's relationship.

(I obviously love this change & love the tense Bruce-and-Dick interactions, but plenty of fans of the earlier fluffy comics really disliked the edgy retcons of Miller / Wolfman / Starlin / et al.)

The upshot is that post-Crisis is a period when you could have a recurring reference like a stuffed elephant, but you wouldn't have a stuffed elephant, not for Dick. I think a toy like that would be too cutesy / childish / effeminate to give a male character in post-Crisis, unless you were poking fun at him.

Now, you could probably let Tim have a stuffed animal, because Tim is sometimes cool but also sometimes a tryhard loser who is faking being cool and not entirely pulling it off (see e.g. the Robin comic where he practices tough-guy faces in the mirror, or the Teen Titans comic where Conner discovers his cringy Enya CD, or when he's fanboying over Connor and it's awkward, etc etc.). A stuffed animal would be deeply embarrassing, and you'd have to be careful to compensate by having Tim do something cool afterward - but Tim's character concept allows for "he's kind of a loser sometimes."

But Dick isn't!! In post-Crisis, Dick's a tough / impressive / "cool guy" character, the kind of guy anyone would want to be, even in the flashbacks where he's Robin, and even in the stories where he's more lighthearted than angsty. It'd be kinda lame for Dick to have a stuffed elephant, so he wouldn't. I feel like Dick would be more likely to poke fun at it if someone had one, like when he's making fun of Wally for liking the Hardy Boys. Dick could have a Batman action figure, at most, and if he had one he would have it ironically.

Basically: in post-Crisis, a male character hugging a stuffed elephant feels more likely to be a punchline to me, not something poignant. (Even with Tim, Tim could have an embarrassing stuffed animal, but he couldn't hug it when sad - that's too far. Maybe Booster Gold might do this. Probably he wouldn't, but spiritually, he would. Sorry Booster ilu! <3)

Instead, Dick instinctively deals with his inner turmoil like the TORTURED ACTION HERO he is: by punching things and brooding and yelling and joining the mob and sleeping on rooftops and going on obsessive secret missions and acquiring Angsty Stubble!! Just like Batman!

(Technically I don't know if Bruce ever joined the mob but you know he would.)

Anyway as you know this is my favorite continuity and I am poking fun affectionately, but uh, yeah sdfsfdsfs. No stuffed animals.

Post-2011 / Infinite Frontier / Wayne Family Adventures: stuffed animals, yes or no?

tl;dr it's in WFA! Probably not anywhere else, but it could be.

Post-2011 stuff tends to be cutesier overall, most of all in the current Infinite Frontier era. So I don't feel like this would be tonally out-of-line with IF comics. Taylor tends to go for more meme-y references rather than fanfic references, though.

So the obvious best fit is WFA, which is aiming for a rough approximation of Silver Age family-friendly vibes - wholesome, episodic plots, Teaching Good Moral Lessons For The Youth, etc. - plus lots of Easter eggs for fanfic readers and some comic references.

And look, here we are:

Aww.

Whew - that's everything I could find!

Anyway as you can probably tell, I LOVE the elephant, so this was a very entertaining rabbit hole to go down, thank you <3

#dick grayson #anyone with more info feel free to chime in & we can crowdsource <3 #i do think the toy elephant is awfully cute though <3 #total digression but i was thinking about it as i was writing:#i'm fascinated by the ways that the post-crisis batboys & their stories can intersect with 90s masculinity and all its issues with stoicism #and i'm pro-queering and gender-bending - 90s comics were a total boys' club so i think it's neat that transformative fandom isn't #but i do love 90s masculinity and All Its Issues too & one of the things i find compelling about the dick-tim-bruce trio #& especially dick's place in it - is the unspoken hierarchy whereby bruce is manlier than dick & dick is manlier than tim #and so dick's in the middle as this somewhat softer-character who aspires to be a harsher & more stoic & ultimate manly-man character #caught in the middle between robin & batman & what each role represents #and like. batman is both manhood & the only desirable thing to be AND ALSO it represents this immense narrowing of possibility #because so much of stereotypical masculinity is about reducing the range of emotions you're allowed to have or express #and dick is both incredibly conflicted about bruce AND wants to be just like him & by extension is conflicted about masculinity writ large #so a lot of dick's interactions with tim veer between trying on a frat-boy-ish 'I'm The Manly Guy' persona vs. giving up on it #or trying on imitations of Bruce's Batman persona but also trying to backtrack out of it bc he doesn't like how it feels etc etc #ANYWAY i think what i am trying to say is that if tim had a stuffed animal dick would be entertained & poke mild fun at him #and call him 'teddy' for the next hour or something while tim got increasingly defensive about how the teddy bear was steph's #and/or about how the teddy bear was OLD and tim doesn't even care about it and also WHATEVEr i'm above this #and to an uninformed observer this might look like bullying BUT ACTUALLY #this ritual would IN FACT be very reassuring to both of them + tim would feel WAY better afterward than if dick had ignored it #because by poking fun at him dick shows he still respects tim enough to tease him thus subtextually exorcising the threat of wimpiness #plus allowing tim to defend himself & demonstrate that he can take a joke so they've both reaffirmed their masculinity to each other #& they don't have to be scared of the teddy bear and all it represents anymore #however also afterward dick would have a brief nostalgic flashback to when he was a kid & had a teddy bear & feel weird about the memory #because he would be unable to articulate to himself that what he misses is a past when he allowed himself to be vulnerable #anyway this wouldn't actually happen in comics but it's what would happen in my soul. you know.#ask tag #zitka

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unfinishedslurs · 2 years ago

Text

welcome to eden

this is a love letter. inspired by this song

As soon as Steve picks up the phone, she knows she’s making a mistake.

“Rob?”

“No,” she says instead of hanging up like she should.

“Nancy?” He sounds more alert now, and she can picture him standing up straighter, calling to attention at the sound of her voice. “What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

“Not really,” she sniffs, hating herself for it. “I—can we talk?”

He’ll say no. He’ll say no, because it’s one in the morning and he was probably asleep before the phone rang and she shouldn’t be asking to talk years after she broke his heart and didn’t even remember—

“Of course,” he says, and Nancy could kick herself. “Over the phone?”

“No. Not over the phone. I’m sorry, it can wait, you can go back to bed.”

She hears him huff a laugh, even though there’s nothing funny about any of it. “I wasn’t in bed,” he assures her. “Am I picking you up?”

Tears spring anew to her eyes. “If that’s okay.”

“Works for me,” he says. “See you soon.”

“See you,” she echoes, and hangs up.

She spends the time it takes pacing quietly in front of the front door, berating herself for using him like this. But she needs to talk to him, and the sooner it’s over with the better.

Headlights cut through the window way too soon, and she nearly throws herself out the door.

She gives him a look when she opens the car door, telling him she knows how many traffic laws he must have broken to get here this quick. He just grins in return, ready to point out the felony in her closet.

“Where are we going?” He asks, and her heart clenches. He’s so good. He’s so good, and she couldn’t-can’t love him like he wants. She has to tell him.

Tonight probably wasn’t the best night for this conversation, but her skin feels like it’s peeling off and the faster she says something the quicker it will be over with and she can go back to how it was before. Back when she didn’t have anyone to talk to, because Robin might never speak to her again after she breaks her best friend's heart for the second time.

Just rip the bandaid off, Nance.

“I don’t know,” she says instead. Maybe she’s a coward. “A field? Somewhere I can see the stars.”

“I can do that.”

The drive goes by in silence, Nancy staring stubbornly out the window. She can feel Steve periodically checking on her, and she knows he wants to know why she called. She can’t open her mouth to say it in the suffocating enclosure of the car. She rolls down a window.

They get to a field almost out of Hawkins, and the car is barely in park before she’s climbing out, going around to sit on the hood. Steve cuts the engine and follows.

She still doesn’t say anything. She called him to have a talk, why can’t she just open her stupid mouth—

“Nancy?” Steve asks, gentle in a way that used to make her melt. She pulls her legs to her chest, feeling vulnerable. “What’s wrong?”

“Jonathan and I broke up,” she finally gets out.

“Oh shit.” He looks genuinely surprised. “That sucks, I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, well, it was never going to be forever.” Except she’d thought otherwise. She thought they were Nancy and Jonathan, the two of them against the world. She hunches her shoulders. “We never talk anymore, and he was pulling away from me, and he was lying to me for months-“ she shakes her head, clearing the anger she feels at that. “It doesn’t matter. I’m starting to realize there’s things I need to work on, too. A lot to work on, actually.”

“I don’t know what that could be,” he says, flashing her a smile filled with boyish, roguish charm. “You’re already the best person I know.”

She sniffs, and suddenly she’s crying into her knees, shoulders shaking. He freezes beside her, before wrapping an arm around her and pulling her into his side. She leans in for a second, chasing the comfort, before remembering what she came here to do and ripping away violently.

“Fuck,” she whispers. “Fuck, I’m so sorry. I don’t—I can’t—this isn’t what I—“

“Hey,” he soothes. “Slow down. Let it out.”

She wipes her eyes, suddenly furious. “I don’t want to date you,” she says, finally looking him in the eyes. “I don’t—I’m sorry for calling you. I just remembered how much better you used to make me feel, but then I realized that’s like…really shitty of me.”

“Why?” He asks, as if Nancy didn’t come out here to break his heart again. “I want to make you feel better. I like knowing I can make you feel better.”

“I don’t want to lead you on,” she says, mouth screwing up. “That’s why I called you out here. And I know it’s shitty of me—“

“Nancy, you’re not leading me on. I…I don’t want to date you either.”

That stops her in her tracks. “Oh.”

“Yeah, oh,” he echoes quietly. “I—don’t take this the wrong way, okay, ‘cause I know I’m gonna sound like an asshole saying it, but, uh, I can’t do that again. And even outside of that, I don’t like you that way anymore. Uh, sorry.”

She tries not to sag at the overwhelming relief she feels at that.

“Are you sure?” She studies him closely, trying to see if he’s saying this for her sake or if he means it. “Back in the Upside-Down, and when we were fighting Venca, it seemed…”

He grimaces, and Nancy thinks if it wasn’t dark she’d see the beginning of an embarrassed flush on his ears. “I…may have been feeling things,” he admits. “I was testing the waters, I guess. I started feeling nostalgic, and you were there, and everyone was encouraging me, and it all just ended up in this weird…feelings soup. Sorry.”

“You said you wanted to have six kids with me,” Nancy reminds him. “And travel the country in a Winnebago.”

He groans, covering his face with his hands. “I am,” he says, “so sorry. I don’t know why I said that. That had to be so weird for you.”

“It was kind of sweet?” She tries, not letting her relief show. Not yet.

“We haven’t been together in years, and I decided to tell you I used to dream about you having my babies. How do you deal with me?”

“Well it helps to know you were dropped on your head. Puts everything in perspective.”

“Yeah, yeah, yuk it up.” He looks at her, really looks at her, and she tries not to fidget under his gaze. Too earnest, too caring for someone who doesn’t deserve it. He’s always tried so hard. To woo her, to be a better person, to keep back the vicious streak she still sees in him. “I meant it, when I said I loved you,” he tells her gently, no sign of that cruelty that had him painting her as a whore for the whole town to see. “Back then, I mean. I just wanted you to know that.”

She wants to cry. “I know. I’m sorry I couldn’t say it back.”

“It’s okay,” he says like he means it. He leans back against the windshield, looking at the sky. After a moment, she copies him.

They watch the stars together, and the air feels clearer.

“Where do we go from here?” She asks, afraid of the answer.

“What do you mean?”

“What happens with us now?”

“Well,” he says gingerly, like he’s testing the waters. “I don’t know about you, but I’ve heard you’re a pretty kickass friend.”

Friends. She doesn’t know that she and Steve have ever been friends, not properly. Even after the apologies they made to each other, she doesn’t know that she could call what they had friendship. It wasn’t substantial on its own, needing Jonathan as the barrier between them. When it fell, so did they.

“I haven’t had a friend in a while,” she admits. “Robin is kind of a novelty for me. She’s amazing.”

It’s funny, in a way. She was so jealous of Robin, of how close she was with Steve in a way Nancy wasn’t. She’d thought, at first, that it was because they were so clearly dating. After Robin told her they weren’t, she realized how badly she’d just wanted friends. She missed hanging out with Steve, missed his laugh and his squint and his bitchy attitude. She’d hoped that eventually they’d get to that point, was sure they were almost there before Starcourt. In a way, she’d been jealous of Robin for stealing Steve. She knew it was ridiculous. Steve had found a friend, a real friend who hadn’t cheated on him or slept with his girlfriend. She couldn’t begrudge him that.

She just missed him.

“She is, isn’t she?” Steve grins, but sobers up quickly. “I didn’t really think about that. How lonely you must be, since…”

She’s already shaking her head. “It’s not your fault. I didn’t reach out.”

“I didn’t exactly reach out either.”

They fall silent again, at a loss for words. Barb’s death, as always, the canyon between them.

Finally Nancy huffs. “It’s both of our faults,” she declares, “or neither of our faults. I don’t know. I just missed you.”

“Well shit, Nance, I missed you too,” he says, touched.

“I’ve heard you’re a pretty kickass friend too, you know,” she says, glancing at him. He smiles.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, Nancy Wheeler, I would be honored to be friends with you,” he says, and sticks out his hand to shake, like they’re meeting for the first time.

She stares at him, and starts laughing. “You’re an idiot, Steve Harrington.”

She shakes his hand.

Max has always felt like a mirror. One Nancy wanted to smash, pull her out of the shards of her reflective grief and hug. Stroke her hair the way she wanted someone to do for her and say you’ll get through this. So Max could hear it from someone who knows.

Except Nancy doesn’t know anything. Still drowns in her guilt, the ball and chain dragging her into the depths. She can’t help when she’s still such a mess, three years later.

Her hands clench when Mike says Max is pulling away from Lucas. She wishes she could look her in the eye and tell her you don’t have to be me. You can be better.

She’s Mike’s friend. They barely know each other outside of a quick hello as they cross paths or fighting monsters. Max has enough on her plate, she doesn’t need her friend’s weird older sister butting in to tell her how to mourn the right way.

Nancy just hopes she’s getting out of bed. Remembering to eat. Brushing her teeth. She had more cavities in the year after Barb died than she’d ever had in her life, and she knows Max doesn’t have insurance.

Now, sitting next to Max’s hospital bed, Nancy wishes she’d reached out.

With school back comes studying, and with studying comes Eddie Munson, in all his super-senior glory. Nancy is going to get him a diploma if it kills her.

He laughs when she tells him so. “Shit, Wheeler,” he says. “The day something manages to get you is the day this shithole goes down for good.”

Robin turns down her offer to form a study group. “I’m pretty sure if I joined, I’d just distract Eddie, and let him distract me, and we’d end up throwing things at each other until you killed us. Sorry. Steve’s going to help me study for finals, though!”

She looks at Steve, eyebrow raised. She’s pretty sure it’s fair to be dubious, since she was the reason Steve passed his finals in the first place.

“I’m her rubber duck,” he says as an explanation, and she nods in understanding.

Her mom isn’t about to let her study alone with a boy in her room, though, and especially not a boy like Eddie, so she drags him to the library three times a week. He complains, he bitches, he tells her he doesn’t care about his fucking history class anymore. She just hands him a Rubik’s Cube she found to keep his hands busy as she quizzes him.

Three sessions in, he slowly puts a worksheet down and screams into his hands.

“Stop that!” She kicks him in the shin. “If you get me kicked out of the library I’m never forgiving you.”

“I can’t do it,” he says, staring up at the ceiling. “I’m so fucking stupid, Nancy. I can’t even get past question two. Is this torture? Did I die and go to hell? That would be fitting, wouldn’t it? Doomed to repeat high school for the rest of eternity?”

“Stupid” her ass. She knows what kind of work goes into those campaigns of his, has absently flipped through his annotated fantasy novels and left feeling as if she’d seen the story anew. Plus, she went and made a tape of everyone’s favorite songs, just in case, and she knew damn well how quickly he’d taught himself to play the song he did in the Upside-Down. “Stupid” and “Eddie Munson” don’t belong in the same sentence, much less belong in the same space in his brain. She hates Hawkins High just a little bit more for it. “Stop being dramatic. What are you stuck on?”

“Fucking nothing! I can’t focus, it’s driving me fucking insane. I keep trying, I swear, but it’s like I can’t even read anymore! This always happens, I swear to God it’s killing me more than the fucking demobats ever did.”

“Don’t joke about that,” she snaps. “You’re smart, Eddie, you know that. You just need to try.”

His face twists, and she realizes that was the wrong thing to say.

“Oh, thank you, Miss Wheeler, why haven’t I thought of that? Sorry for wasting your time, I’ll get out of your perfect hair now—“

“Sit down,” she protests as he gathers up his stuff. “Eddie, I’ll help you work through the problem, okay? Just sit down, please.”

“No, Nancy!” He swings around, eyes wild. “It’s what everyone always says. Just sit still, stop doodling, be quiet, pay attention, try fucking harder…I tried, okay! I’ve been trying, I tried for fifteen fucking years, and I can’t do it! I might as well just drop out and get it over with. I’m fucking sick of this.”

“Okay!” She feels herself getting riled up. “You want to fail so bad, fine! I’m not your keeper, do whatever you want.”

“I will!”

“Fine!”

They stare at each other, not moving. Finally Eddie storms off in a huff, flinging open the library door in a grand gesture she pretends not to see. There’s a sinking feeling in her stomach, but she can ignore it.

She pretends not to notice when he comes slinking back five minutes later, shuffling his feet.

“Sorry.”

“For what?” She asks primly, going over her notes.

“Nancy, please.”

She sighs. “I’m sorry too. I’m just…frustrated.”

“I’ve been told I’m pretty frustrating,” he offers.

“It’s not…”

“It is,” he says, sitting down. “It’s okay. God knows I piss myself off with this shit.”

She studies him, looking over his defeated face like he’s one of her flashcards. “You’re trying your best,” she says, sounding it out. She can’t really make sense of it. After all, trying her best has always been straight A’s, not stopping until she knew everything she needed to and more.

“It’s not good enough.”

“It will be,” she says. “You’ve got me this time.”

“Listen, I know you’re trying to help—“

“Do you want fries?”

“What?” He blinks at her, shocked, as she starts packing up her things.

“We’re not getting anywhere today. Sometimes you have to step back, and come back with a clearer head.” Usually she locks her door and cleans her guns, the repetitive motion soothing her mind until she can think again, but she has a feeling that won’t work for Eddie.

“I usually just give up.”

“I don’t. Get your backpack, we’re going to the diner. Dinner’s on me tonight.”

At the diner, he makes her laugh so hard soda comes out her nose. The next day, they go to the library again.

After a couple of days, he solves the cube. After three weeks, he nearly kicks her door down rushing to show her the B he got on a test.

Two months later, he throws his cap into the air and his cane on the ground. Swings her around, both of them laughing.

“Nancy fucking Wheeler!” He crows. “Achieving the impossible yet again!”

“Eddie, put me down!” She shrieks gleefully as he stumbles. She barely makes it back to solid ground before two more bodies are slamming into them, Steve and Robin whooping in their ears.

It was weird, to see Steve and Robin effortlessly communicate the way she and Jonathan always had and have it be so unabashedly unromantic. She’d always thought that knowing someone like that was a sign you were meant to be, and they did it while still loudly proclaiming Platonic with a capital P.

She and Jonathan didn’t do it much anymore. It was like dancing to a song that was always a beat off, syncing for just one moment before stumbling again, unsure that they were still allowed this.

She’d known him better than anyone, once, and he’d known her the same. Now she wonders if that was ever true.

“So,” Eddie says, throwing himself onto her bed. “Steve.”

She sits in her desk chair, raising an eyebrow. “What about him?”

“You broke up with Jonathan, right? Are you going to get back with him? I thought you would, but it's been months and neither of you said anything.”

“No,” she says. “No, that’s not what I want. It’s not what either of us want.”

“Really?” He rolls over, eyes searching. “What happened there, anyway? With both your boys. I’m a nosy little asshole, and I wanna hear it from you.”

It makes her laugh, the way he admits to it so freely. He grins wolfishly at her, baring his teeth in a grin. That’s probably why she tells him the truth.

“I wasn’t okay, when I was with Steve,” she says honestly. “I was distant, grieving…I was a mess, and I stayed with him because I didn’t know what else to do. With Jonathan…I was getting closure, I was healing, and things were good between us. They were so good, but after a while, we just started to…deteriorate. I don’t know if we lost momentum, or if the stress just got to us, but we started fighting more and more,” She traces the desk with a finger, remembering the sour taste of Oliver Twist on her tongue. It was a shitty thing to say. “I thought we’d figured it out, for a little while, but then we just…stopped talking. I think, maybe if we’d talked more, we could have worked it out. But I’m…not upset that we didn’t, you know?”

It’s a different kind of loneliness when your partner won’t talk to you. It was different than grieving, different than not having anyone to talk to at all. Because even when she didn’t have friends, she had Jonathan. And then, slowly, she didn’t anymore.

“Nancy, you’re one of my best friends, so-”

“Steve is your best friend.”

“Steve is my best best friend,” she agrees. “But he’s also more than that? Like, I think we’re literally soulmates. Platonic with a capital P soulmates, but, like, it feels like more than friendship sometimes? Like sometimes it’s like he can literally feel my bad days even when I haven’t talked to him yet. He told me once he just knows sometimes. It’s like I hit my hip on my desk and he felt it, but emotionally. It’s wild. It’s like the drugs literally combined our minds. Where was I going with this?”

“I don’t know,” she says, slightly bewildered. She wants to ask how they do that, but Robin barrels forward.

“Right. So outside of mine and Steve’s platonic more-than-friendship, you’re kind of my best friend? And you’re, like, the coolest person I know.”

She blinks. She’s not sure she’s ever been described as cool before.

After Barb, Nancy tried to cut her own hair.

Her mom found her in the bathroom, unshed tears in her eyes and hair a mess on the sink and floor.

She hadn’t laughed, hadn't said oh, honey, your beautiful hair. Just clucked her tongue and took the scissors from her hands. Stepped behind her and took over, took the uneven mess and made it something good, something presentable.

She didn’t say anything until she was done, setting the scissors on the counter. “Sometimes,” she said, wetting her lips. “Sometimes we need a change, before we can move forward.”

The closer she gets to Emerson, the more she feels like she’s letting someone down. Mike. Max. Jonathan. All the people who have relied on her, all the people who trusted her to fight.

In a strange turn of events, her mom is the only one she doesn’t feel is disappointed in her. Her mom is more excited about college than she is sometimes. Chattering excitedly over dishes about the classes she’s going to take as Nancy dries and smiles and tries not to feel like the ground is being pulled from under her feet.

This is everything she’s ever wanted. Why does it feel so wrong?

She takes Eddie to the gun range, because having a gun in her hands has always made her feel safer. More in control. More like the badass protector she wants to be, than the scared little girl she feels sometimes.

Eddie stares down the scope of the gun and shoots like he has experience, but doesn’t hit a single bullseye.

“Your hands are shaking.”

“I’m in a fucking gun range and a bunch of small town hicks were hunting me not too long ago,” he snaps, taking another shot and missing the target completely. He swears and changes the magazine. “Excuse me if I’m a little bit on edge.”

She hadn’t really thought of it like that. “You didn’t have to come,” she says. “I just thought with everything that’s happened, you should know how to use one. Just in case.”

“I know how to use a gun,” he rolls his eyes.

“You know how to shoot one.” She looks from him to the target pointedly. “Not the same thing.”

“Deep. I could really feel the judgement there. Tell me, is there anything else wrong with me?”

“There’s security cameras all over this place. We’re not in Hawkins, so there’s no mob coming after you. I’m here, and I do know how to use a gun. No one is going to hurt you here.”

“I know all that.”

“Do you?”

He scowls at her. She looks back unflinchingly. She’s been here plenty of times, and the guys laughed at her until they didn’t anymore. By the time she brought Eddie, all she got was a raised eyebrow and a “boyfriend?” from Hunter at the desk. She didn’t know what was more incriminating, so she just shrugged.

“You’re kind of a pain in the ass, you know that?”

She rolls her eyes, taking the gun from his hands and lining up a shot. “I’ve heard worse,” she says, thinking about Nancy Dre-ew, and Nancy “the slut” Wheeler, and priss, and shoots. It hits the bullseye.

So do her next five shots.

Eddie looks begrudgingly impressed when she reloads and hands the gun back to him. It’s more satisfying than it should be, to realize that while he’d known she had guns he’s never seen her actually shoot before.

She raises a challenging eyebrow at him, and he huffs around a smile. “All right, all right,” he says good naturedly. “Let’s try this again.”

He does a little better this time around, now that he’s actually trying. He does a little dance when he hits one of the inner rings.

“Take that!” He crows. “I bet Steve couldn’t do this. In your face, Harrington!”

“He’s much more of a close-combat kind of guy, isn’t he?” Nancy agrees.

“Oh, yeah, definitely,” he says. “Does he really have a bat with nails?”

She blinks, caught off guard by the fact that Eddie hadn’t seen it. She never registered that he hadn’t used it during Vecna. Something about the fact seems weird somehow, as if it was as integral to Steve as his coiffed hair. “He keeps it in his trunk.”

“You and Byers need to update your Steve manuals. He said it’s under his bed now.”

“Ah,” Nancy says, thinking of all the times she’s slept with her pistol under her pillow. Empty, because she’s not stupid enough to sleep with a loaded gun when her little brother sometimes wakes her up after a nightmare, but the comforting weight of it alone makes it easier.

“Just tell me one thing,” he says, widening his eyes imploringly at her. “Did he look as sexy as I think he did? Byers won’t give me a straight answer.”

It’s a joke, but his cheeks are a little pink. She’s not dumb, she’s seen the looks the two of them share, as if he and Steve were circling each other. Caught in a whirlpool, waiting for the moment the vortex would drag them down and they could finally touch.

The looks between Eddie and Jonathan, too, that share a certain camaraderie she doesn’t entirely understand and at the same time understands all too well. Steve and Jonathan had always had a strange relationship, too close to not be friendship but not quite there. Surprisingly enough it was better after she and Steve broke up, Jonathan no longer avoiding them and the talk she’d forced the three of them into clearing the air. Sometimes, she’d wake up to Jonathan climbing into her bed, smelling of cigarettes and a hint of something stronger, and he’d tell her it was Steve who drove him there.

She’s a journalist. It’s her job to notice things. She just wasn’t ready to confront that reality, where the two boys she’d wanted wanted each other as well. But she’s grown since then.

She also knows that whoever Steve chooses, it won’t be easy.

“You know,” she says, considering, “when we were dating, Steve never pressed me up against the wall or anything you’d expect from the King.”

Eddie gets this look on his face, caught between confusion and caught out. “…okay? Did you want him to do that or something? Are you trying to ask me to hint to him?”

“No,” she says. “I’m just saying, he never did any of that. It was kind of funny. He always made it so that he was the one pressed against the wall.”

Eddie misses the next five shots entirely, and she laughs at him through it all.

She’s hyper aware of touching other girls now. She didn’t used to be. Even with Robin, who is a lesbian and definitely won’t hate her. Who’s probably gone through the same thing. She can’t help it.

What if they get the wrong idea? What if someone else sees? What if they can tell, what if they know, what if they hate me?

She hates feeling like this. She doesn’t know why it started, doesn’t know what’s wrong with her. She’s no stranger to casual affection—or at least she didn’t used to be. Why does it make her feel so tense now? It’s been years since she realized she liked girls, shouldn’t this have happened back then?

Deep down, she knows why. The Reagan sign in her front yard. Her dad sitting in his chair, the news always on. “Always that nasty disease, Karen, I swear some people are just asking for it.” She’s always known she could never tell him, but now she knows that if she gets sick he’ll say she deserves it. She doesn’t know what her mother thinks. She’s afraid to find out.

She’s growing up, and her fear is growing with her.

Objectively, Nancy knows she and Eddie don’t make sense.

They’re not cut from the same cloth, like Steve and Robin. They don’t calm each other down, like Jonathan and Argyle. They’re too different, too alike in all the wrong ways, for them to get along. They’re both snappy, a little mean. Eddie’s dramatic enough to get on her nerves, and she’s prim enough to get on his. At their worst, they have earth shattering arguments that end in them not speaking to each other for days.

When people see them walking down the street together, they whisper about “that nice girl Nancy Wheeler” and “that awful Munson boy.”

It’s not fair, never has been. Nancy hasn’t felt nice for a long time, maybe before Barb ever disappeared. Eddie isn’t always particularly nice either, but the court of public opinion takes it to extremes, twists him into something cruel instead of the kindness he carries under his leather armor. Someone to keep their children away from. It really is a shame, because Eddie loves kids in a way Nancy never has. She can see it in the way he interacts with them, his bright smile fading when a parent comes to drag them away. Even when he’s expecting it, his face falls, just for an instant, before spinning around with a grin that won’t reach his eyes.

Nancy wants to take him out of here. There’s an offer on the tip of her tongue that she knows he’d refuse.

He’s not her brother, but he’s not…unlike one. It’s almost like talking to an older, flashier Mike. He’s annoying, is what he is. He picks at her, keeps pressing over the littlest things. Tries to get under her skin, succeeds, until she’s on the verge of stabbing him with her pencil. Looks triumphant whenever Robin has to grab her arm to drag her away, rambling an excuse about “some girl thing I totally forgot, yeah it’s an emergency,” while Steve drags him the other way to have bro time.

“She loves it,” she’d heard Eddie crow delightedly once, when Robin didn’t get her out of hearing range fast enough. “Do you see that fire in her eyes?”

“Do I?” She asked Robin. “Love it?”

“I mean, far be it from me to tell you what you do and don’t like,” Robin answered. “But, uh, as far as I can tell, you totally love it. You look like you’re going to rip him to pieces and enjoy it, and he loves that. I didn’t think you’d be this much of a nightmare together, seriously, like, how are you two at each other’s throats one second and then best friends the next? Steve and I have debated locking you in a bathroom until you get along, but we’re kind of afraid you’ll kill each other.”

So no, Nancy and Eddie don’t get along. They’re kind of a nightmare together. They don’t make sense, and they don’t try to. They have other friends, who they get along with better, that they can seek out.

But when Eddie knocks on her window, the only surprise is that he could even get there.

“How?” She hisses, opening the window. He tumbles in, doesn’t even try to play off the utter gracelessness he’s displaying.

“Wowie, I am never doing that again,” he breathes, flat on his back. “You’re going to have to help me down the stairs when I leave, had to leave my cane at the bottom and I cannot get back down that way.”

She doesn’t even want to know what he had to do to get up on her roof with his bad leg. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m but another lover, nothing but an ant in the face of your unwavering beauty, my queen,” he says, batting his eyes at her. The dramatics don’t hit the way he intends, given that he’s stuck on the floor. He holds a hand out pleadingly, and she rolls her eyes, hauling him up until she can get him to her bed.

“Never mind.” She puts her hands on her hips, a gesture that is so obviously Steve she removes them immediately. From the glint in Eddie’s eyes, he notices.

She tries not to be jealous. She tries, she swears, but…

Three of the four (five? she doesn’t know what Argyle thinks of her) friends she has are dating each other. Two of them dated her, first. She can’t help but wonder, if she’d known that was an option, if everything would have been different. If she wouldn’t have this aching bitterness between her teeth.

(Nothing would have changed, she knows. She’d been too desperate for other things. Trying so hard with Steve so her best friend didn’t die for nothing. Staying with Jonathan because he understood her more than anyone else, so maybe they didn’t need to talk. It wouldn’t have helped anything. She still wonders.)

It doesn’t matter. What’s past is past, and she needs to move forward. She can’t stop to think about could-have-beens, because thinking about boys is what got her into this mess in the first place.

She closes her eyes, taking a shaky breath. That’s not fair. None of this is fair. None of it is fucking fair because Nancy stopped caring about fair when Barb died.

She needs a drink. She needs a nap. She needs to stop feeling like Atlas with the world on her shoulders.

She doesn’t do any of that. She calls Robin.

“Barb was my first kiss.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” Nancy says, and keeps talking, because Barb is dead and Robin is a lesbian and she’s long forgotten what Barb’s favorite chapstick was back then. “We were seven, and I liked it but I didn’t know if I liked her. But I was convinced I was going to marry her, until my mom told me that girls don’t marry other girls. And I knew she liked girls when she died. She told me when we were fifteen, and I didn’t know the word bisexual but I knew I loved her and that was all that mattered. Not—not like that, not romantic, or maybe it was but it doesn’t matter because she was my best friend and I still love her but she’s gone forever. I loved her.”

She feels Robin lay a tentative hand on her back.

“I had to look her parents in the eye and pretend. All those fucking NDA’s, I had to pretend there was hope. Pretend she was still missing. It was like everyone forgot about her except for me and them, and they sold their house to find their dead daughter and I wasn’t supposed to say anything and Steve kept reminding me about the fucking NDA’s—“

“Nancy…”

“It’s my fault,” Nancy says, staring at the water. “I lumped in Steve, because it was easier than being alone. He didn’t know her like I did. She was worried about me. She stayed because she cared, and look where that got her.”

“That’s bullshit!” Robin’s eyes are wide, and she waves her hands around as she talks. “If it’s anyones fault, it’s those—those scientist guys experimenting on El! They knew there was a problem, and they tried to cover it up instead of making sure people were safe. You didn’t know it was dangerous. How were you supposed to know it was going to end up as anything other than normal teenage drama? None of this is supposed to be real, you didn’t know—“

“But I left her,” Nancy cuts in. “I left her alone to go lose my virginity to a boy she didn’t even like—“

“He was your boyfriend, it shouldn’t have mattered if she liked him—“

“It doesn’t matter!” Nancy shouts, and Robin falls silent, mouth still moving. “It doesn’t fucking matter how it happened, because it did and now she’s dead and she’s never coming back and it’s all my fault.”

Nancy is sick of crying. Sick of feeling helpless. Sick of not being able to change the past.

“It’s not just Barb. I took Fred to the trailer park—he didn’t even want to be there, and now he’s dead. Eddie needs a cane, Max is almost completely blind and might never walk again and it was my plan that put them there. My plan that almost killed them. I’m responsible—“

“Fuck that.”

“Robin…”

“No, you listen to me, Nancy Wheeler,” Robin says, grabbing her by the shoulders. “You are one of the most remarkable people I have ever known. Max would have died without that plan. We all would have died. Venca-slash-Henry-slash-One would have won without that plan, and I am not going to sit here and listen to you blame yourself for saving lives. And-and Fred! Venca had already marked him, you know that. You couldn’t have done anything! And Barb is not your fault, okay? I-I-I know I can’t convince you, but I’ll say it as many times as it takes until you start believing it, because it’s true. You didn’t kill her. You didn’t kill anyone.”

“I killed Bruce,” she says, just to prove Robin wrong. And isn’t that shitty of her, to forget about him until she can use him to prove a point? She’s a fucking awful person.

“I don’t know who Bruce is, but given your track record I highly doubt that.”

“I bashed his head in with a fire extinguisher.”

Robin pauses, and Nancy’s stomach sinks. This is it, she thinks. This is what will convince her, this is what will make her see that I’m wrong, that I’m poison-

“What was he doing?”

“What?”

“Bruce. You had to have a reason for it. What was he doing?”

It’s like Robin doesn’t even care that Nancy just admitted to first degree murder. “He was flayed,” she admits, knowing Robin will take it as proof that she’s right.

“That’s not murder, that’s self defense,” Robin says, just like she knew she would. “Also, if he was flayed he was already dead. Sorry, I’m sticking to your side on this.”

“But I’m less torn up about killing my asshole coworker than I am about anything else. How does that not make me a monster?”

“He was already dead, Nancy!” Robin shakes her. “You’re not beating yourself up over it because you know he was already dead, a-a-and I know you’re using him to try and push me away and I won’t let you.”

“Robin…” she says, tears springing to her eyes. She’s so fucking sick of crying. So sick of the way she never seems to stop anymore.

“Nancy,” Robin says. “None of us are going to leave you. Stop trying to make us.”

She pulls her into a hug, and Nancy sags into it, boneless.

There, sandwiched between the sky and the water, Nancy starts to feel like she could forgive herself.

“Nancy,” Steve says, putting a hand on her shoulder and ducking his chin to look her in the eye. “They won’t be alone.”

Tears well up, unbidden, at the way he seems to understand her now in a way he never did before.

“I want this,” she insists.

“I know you do,” he says. “Which is why you’re going to go out there, kick ass, and take names. We’ll be here, okay? We’ll keep an eye on them.”

“I know you will.” She swipes a hand across her eyes. “Can you talk to Holly, too? She gets lonely.”

Steve smiles. He’d always loved Holly, when they were dating. He used to braid her hair sometimes. Asked her about her drawings, her TV shows, listened to her talk with the same attentiveness Nancy’s father had never shown any of them. He’ll be a good dad, someday. To someone else’s children.

“I’ll talk to Holly,” he promises. “Does she still like princesses?”

“Ladybugs,” she says. “It’s ladybugs, now.”

“Ladybugs. I can do that. Black and red, and they’re all ladies. What’s not to like?”

“There are male ladybugs.”

“Wait, seriously?”

She laughs, tearfully, but they’re happy tears. Steve wipes them away gently, and she smiles at him to let him know she’s okay. “You’re an idiot, Steve Harrington.”

“You’re the best person I know, Nancy Wheeler,” he replies, achingly sincere. “You’re gonna have the whole world under your thumb, I just know it. Ever thought of running for President?”

“Can’t be worse than the one we have now,” she says, grimaces as her own joke lands too bitterly to be funny. She sees his jaw tighten before he forces himself to relax.

“I’d vote for you.”

She grins at him, sharp to punch through the tension she’d made. “I’ll make Eddie my Vice President.”

“Oh, fuck no. You lost me,” he says, and Eddie makes an offended noise from where he’s stealing snacks from the glovebox. Jonathan swats him, and she smiles at him too. He smiles back, tentatively, and wanders to her side.

“You gonna be okay up there?” He asks quietly. She can hear the guilt in it, still, and she reaches down to squeeze his hand. The one with the scar that matches hers, so their palms line up. It feels full circle, somehow, the three of them together like this.

“I’ll be okay,” she confirms, and feels the truth of it in her chest. Her boys are here with her, the ones who have been there since the beginning. Eddie’s watching them fondly, munching on a granola bar. Robin is inside somewhere, rambling at her mother. Mike and Holly are probably still bickering over the last cupcake. She loves them so much, all of them.

“Of course you will,” Steve says. “You’re Nancy fuckin’ Wheeler. Nothing stops you.”

She wants that to be true. She can feel in her bones that it will be. Eighteen has nothing on who she’ll be at thirty.

She’s Nancy Wheeler, and the world won’t see her coming.