#me?? finishing a fic??? unheard of these days wow amazing everyone clapped

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Good Grief

In which Nancy has spent the past 20 years running the Wheeler Funeral Home in Hawkins and in which the death of Jim Hopper brings home just the right ghosts to remind her that her life isn’t over yet. 

ronance // 19k words // rated M

read on ao3 // excerpt under the cut:

“You didn’t tell a story at the service,” Robin says into the unbroken quiet. 

The refrigerator door sinks shut and she leans her weight back against it to face Nancy. 

“Neither did you,” she points out. 

“But I haven’t had one playing out on my face all day,” Robin looks her over and Nancy feels every inch of distance between them to the point where she has to move closer just to ease the pull. 

Closer and closer, Nancy breathes, she breathes, she is breathing. 

“I keep thinking about their wedding,” she says like a sigh as she gets close enough to take Robin’s hand, thumb tracing across her knuckles and fingers curling loosely enough that she could retreat if she chooses. “We danced.” 

“We did,” Robin agrees, shifts her weight off the fridge and onto her feet, into Nancy’s space. “Like this, right?” she lifts their joined hands, into the right posture, places her free one so deftly and surely to drag across Nancy’s shoulder, curling over her back and landing at the base of her neck to tangle in her curls. 

“Like this,” Nancy wraps her free arm around Robin’s waist. 

There is no music playing. 

They sway. 

“You were amazing today,” Robin says, finding a hold on Nancy that has them front-to-front with little to no space between the warmth of their bodies. 

Nancy laughs, but it’s a breathy thing, almost tucked against Robin’s shoulder with their proximity. 

“I took my grief and turned it into a career,” she says, but her derisiveness is watered down, mellowed out, held at a distance by an orbiting gravity. 

“Yeah,” Robin nuzzles her face in towards Nancy’s temple where her gaze is averted. “And you’re amazing.” 

A sound comes out of Nancy, almost a whine if the thought of it alone wasn’t humiliating, radiating from so deep within her that it stuns her silent even as Robin pulls back enough, pulls Nancy back enough by a gentle hold on the roots of her hair, to be able to see each other’s faces. 

“God, what you do? It’s that good grief, Nancy Wheeler,” Robin’s smile lines are deep and her eyes shine like teenage mischief. “You give people a chance to say goodbye, I mean— I mean, that’s just about the most important thing in the world, don’t you think? They come here,” a slight nod of a gesture to the room, “into your home, and you give them space to honor what they’ve lost. You give them the catharsis of holding someone’s hand one last time and you give them the peace of knowing they were there in the end, they got to be there in the end, do you see that?”