Modern Ronance headcanons except they're in their fifties and its not an au.
-They live somewhere coastal and COLD, probably in Massachusetts, but I could see them living somewhere Seattle adjacent as well.
-They host friends, family, whoever, whenever they can. They never go without a guest for more than a month. Robin is a fabulous cook and Nancy can barely boil water, so usually she stays out of Robin's way when they're prepping a dinner party.
-They don't have kids. I just don't see any world in which Nancy would want children. Robin might be open to the idea, but I think that Nancy is just so deeply childfree at her core that ronance wouldn't even consider kids. They do however make the absolute best rich aunts to Mike and Holly's (and Steve's!) kids. Specifically I feel like Mike's hypothetical sullen teenage daughter would absolutely worship the ground that Nancy walks on, much to her dad's chagrin.
-Robin gets diagnosed with both adhd and autism at some point in her late forties. She's still not sure how nobody noticed sooner.
-Nancy has had an extremely successful career. Nancy leaves the Herald for the Globe about a year into her career, and later switches to freelance writing in the late 90s to focus on her investigative journalism. In the early 2000s, Nancy spends two years overseas as a war correspondent for the Globe. This is the source of the only real rough patch in their relationship. The distance makes it hard to communicate and Nancy is falling back into some old patterns she has with not communicating. They patch everything up when she gets home and Nancy ends up going back to school and eventually pursues a doctorate. Somewhere in all of this she manages to rake in a pulitzer. She's also written a memoir, as well as three non-fiction books (all of which become New York Times best sellers, a fact that Robin loves to pull out whenever she's bragging about her wife). These days Nancy has slowed down a little bit (being 58 lends a level of clarity about getting oneself into shady situations that Nancy didn't have in her twenties and thirties). She's mostly writing the occasional op-ed, teaching, and focusing on her second memoir, but she never passes up a good mystery if one falls into her lap. There are still plenty of dead teenagers and corrupt businesses for Nancy to look into before the cops do.
-Robin has also enjoyed a successful career life. She majored in linguistics at Smith, but she enjoyed college radio enough that when she moved to Boston after graduation, she started looking for talk radio gigs. Robin falls completely in love with radio journalism and eventually lands a gig at npr, making her a household name (for people who listen to npr, at least). She's still doing radio today, although the trump administration's budget cuts has made it harder for her to do her job, and she has concerns about the future. Regardless, Robin has done well for herself and continues to do well for herself.
-Nancy got her first gray hair in the summer of 1988 and was fully gray by the time she turned forty. She dyed her hair for a few years in the late-90s but quit when she went overseas. Her hair has been consistently short since the first time she cut it (1987, she wasn't able to wash the hardened lab goo out so she opted for the big chop). She's gone slightly longer and slightly shorter but she likes how short hair looks on her and she likes the lack of maintenance beyond getting it cut. Robin, meanwhile, still has a fairly substantial amount of brown hairs, although at this point she's mostly gray. She's had about every hairstyle (and color) in the book, something afforded to her by the non-visual nature of a career in talk radio. In 2026, her hair is long, going all the way down her back. She shaved it after a week in lockdown and has been growing it out ever since. She usually keeps it in one long braid, which Nancy likes undoing and redoing while they watch TV at night.
- Speaking of tv, they're both pretty intense about it. Watching an episode of something together usually means an entire debrief on the themes and cinematic qualities of the show. Nancy’s favorite (recent) shows are the haunting of bly manor ("dani and jamie remind me of us"), severance, and pluribus. Robin's favorite (recent-ish) shows are the last man on earth, the americans, and the L word. They both love buffy the vampire slayer and were willow and Tara for two consecutive Halloweens.
-Nancy's arsenal is still at the house in Hawkins. She's had no use for most of her firearms since the world nearly ended (although she did keep a handgun in her sock drawer for most of the 90s) but she's never been able to bring herself to get rid of them. So they sit, collecting dust in the shoebox in her closet and in the locker under her bed, just in case some supernatural creature comes back to Indiana and she suddenly needs to go full Ellen Ripley again. She'll still occasionally pull out pictures of herself firing at beer bottles in the junkyard whenever her young adulthood comes up in conversation. These photos are usually met with shock, followed by comments about her perm. She usually responds to this with some variation of "it was a different time."
-At some point in the mid 90s, Robin Buckley brought a cat into their house. Nancy protested initially, but caved almost immediately. The cat's name was Buttercup, and while she died in 2008, her successors, Debbie and Blondie (named for Debbie Harry of Blondie, of course) are somehow still kicking despite being very old. Every single cat that ronance has owned has been one of those white cats that are blind, deaf, and a little bit mean.
-Ronance are the absolute queens of well-made masculine-leaning women's workwear. While they can't share clothes or shoes, they do share a tailor and have an entire closet dedicated to blazers that has been meticulously organized by material and weave. They've been building this collection since they moved in together in 1991, so they both had plenty of suits to choose from when they eloped in 2004 :). Additionally they (mostly Nancy) do NOT play about cat hair. There is a lint roller stashed in every available hiding spot in their meticulously decorated house.
-They both take board games VERY seriously, and are particularly competitive about scrabble and trivial pursuit. When Mike got caught cheating at uno during the 1999 Wheeler family Christmas party, Nancy didn't speak to him for a week. Robin has been known to stretch a game of Catan into a seven hour affair.
-In a similar vein, Robin is GREAT at cards against humanity and Nancy is awful at it. This is because Robin has a solid understanding of comedic timing and rhythm while Nancy tends to pick cards that are either entirely absurdist or only really funny if you're a very specific brand of lightly witty academic.
-Neither of them have much in the way of a social media presence. Nancy has a Facebook account to keep an eye on her friends and family (mostly to make sure Karen isn't reposting AI disinfo) and a bluesky account which she only uses to promote her writing and tell people to vote. Nancy did have a Twitter account at one point but she deleted it when Elon Musk bought the site. Her only active social media presence is her letterboxd account, which she treats with a level of intensity that rivals that of filmbros everywhere. Nancy doesn't do the "witty one sentence review" thing, she writes ESSAYS on that site. Her four favorites are reality bites, alien, full metal jacket, and broadcast news. Robin doesn't have any social media, having fallen into the trap that most adults do: becoming their parents. Richard and Melissa Buckley were big-time hippies in their heyday, and their distaste for modern technology has rubbed off on Robin in the form of a strict refusal to have any form of social media. She figures if anything important happens online, Nancy will tell her.
-they are both patiently awaiting the day that it finally happens.
