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It ends.
Will's screaming stops. The thing stops. It bursts out of him and escapes out the window like some monster in a movie. The room is void, empty, still. They all take a breath at once.
It ends.
The longest moment of Jonathan's entire life, the agony of watching the person you love the most cry out in unimaginable pain. The realization that you are, and always will be, helpless in the face of anything like this.
It ends. Will doesn't.
He passes out in the car on the way home, his head cradled in their mother's lap. She whispers something to him, a song maybe. Will, Will, Will. Baby, baby, baby.
It's an hour from the cabin to their house. It's two minutes from the cabin to their house. It's an infinite moment in the car, with his unconscious brother and his weeping mother and the girl he just lost his virginity to.
Nancy's still holding his hand like a vice so Jonathan's only driving with his left, but it doesn't matter because nothing could even touch them now, no matter how hard it tries.
They continue.
The soft of his bed and the slick of Nancy's skin under his. And maybe it's wrong because Will nearly just died, or maybe it's right because she saved him and Mom and he can't thank her with words. Or maybe this is how it always has to be for them. The end of the world.
It's not. It never was.
Morning comes at Murray Bauman's, and Jonathan doesn't feel any different. Not the way movies say you're supposed to, anyway. He feels closer to Nancy, maybe. Maybe more in love with her than he's ever truly realized. Maybe more feeling than he's allowed himself, after months of shoving it away, forcing it back down inside him because she deserves a good relationship and she deserves something normal and perfect and if that something is Steve, then he is perfectly okay with that.
She cradles his face after and whispers something his exhausted brain doesn't register, only that it sounds soft and sweet and he wants to hear it again. They both reek of sweat and the day and fear and monster blood, probably, and before he falls asleep, Jonathan thinks maybe normal isn't what Nancy wants at all.
Morning comes at the Byers, and he makes Mom and Will and Nancy and half a dozen other kids and Chief Hopper and Steve all eggs and toast for breakfast.
There aren't enough eggs, so Steve volunteers to drive to the store and get some more, and when he sets them down beside the pan he looks up with an expression too serious and too real for eggs. And then he kind of smiles, and gives Jonathan an awkward pat on the shoulder, and goes off to yell at Dustin about saving some food for the rest of them. And Jonathan accidentally burns that batch of toast because he spends too long trying to figure out what the hell that exchange just meant.
It's like living in a dream. Or a sitcom. They patch up the house and talk and laugh and pretend like they're all old friends. Not bound together by what they've faced. Not linked by death and gunfire and superpowers and nail bats. Nothing to see here, move along, move along.
Will cries.
Sometimes at night. Sometimes in the middle of the day. Sometimes all night and all day, and none of them know how to make any of this okay again.
Nancy cries.
Not at the funeral. Not facing Barbara's parents. Not when the story breaks on the front page of the news, the lab exposed and shut down forever.
At little things, like when her necklace chain breaks or when Grease is playing on TV. When she gets so frustrated she wants to scream, and instead she implodes softly, sobbing into his shirt in her family's living room.
Jonathan cries.
That endless night in his bedroom. Little boy lost. The tape he made, the songs he thinks Will will never get to hear.
The hospital. Safe and sound. Back from the dead.
Hopper's cabin. Burning and biting and screaming.
His room. Alone, and with Nancy, and with Mom, and with Will.
Will. It's always, always Will. Will and Mom. Mom and Will. The three of them, forever.
It's someone else now, too.
If they set their hands side by side, like that night at the motel, Jonathan thinks the scar would run forever, one bleeding into the other, forcing them together.
Nancy kisses his cheek and his neck and his chest and his mouth, over and over and over. And he's not sure if it's the sweat or if they're both crying, or if they're even two separate people anymore, or just one entity, wound so close together nothing can tear them apart.
She doesn't. They don't. Retreat.
The first night, Nancy tastes like flowers and candy, and a little bitter too. It's kind of like a dream, the one he's had so many times since last November. The one where she holds his face in her hands and whispers It's definitely you.
It's kind of better, even as his hands shake and she has to hold him still. Even after, when the truth of what they've done catches up with them. Better. Real. Imperfect. True.
They do.
Nancy's hand in his, her head on his shoulder, her mouth on his cheek. Her fingers wrapped around the grip of a gun. Prying open a bear trap. Hugging her brother close. Writing a letter to destroy the government.
The way she holds him, the way she smiles at him, the way she does anything at all-
Incredible, really.
He does.
More than he ever thinks he could say out loud, more than the word covers, more, more. More than he wants to.
Her, and Mom, and Will. Hell, Hopper. The kids. Even the redhead whose name he's still not sure of. Steve, even, sometimes.
Love. Love. Love.