Work Text:
It's three weeks into the semester when Nancy and Jonathan drive up to Indianapolis to see Steve. Three long weeks, three weeks of phone calls almost every night and Jonathan dropping photos into the mail just about every other day -- nothing special, nothing sexy, just photos of Nancy laughing and Will's new bike and the kids holding up hand-painted cards that say GOOD LUCK AT COLLEGE STEVE!
Steve hugs the shit out of them both in his dorm-room lounge and they pepper each other's faces with kisses, and then Steve pulls back and looks at them seriously and says, "The laundry room is haunted."
Nancy smacks him in the arm. "What kind of a hello is that?"
"I'm not kidding. It's haunted. The whole dorm knows it."
"Is that why you wanted us to come up and see you, instead of you driving down to Hawkins for the weekend?" Jonathan asks, and Steve gets a shifty look.
"You wanted us to come hunt dormitory ghosts with you?" Nancy says.
"... maybe?"
Nancy and Jonathan share a look, a look which says they might have known something like this would happen, and then Nancy says, "Can we see it?"
*
The laundry room is small and narrow, with some washing machines and dryers and a sink in the corner. There's a lot of clutter, piles of laundry (damp and dry) on the countertop for folding, and a tired-looking girl with a ponytail putting an armload of laundry into the dryer on the end.
After the ponytail girl leaves, Jonathan says, "So is there a haunted dryer, or ..."
Steve hops up on one of the washing machines and swings his legs, heels tapping against the machine. He points to the sink in the corner. "Mostly it seems to be around there. In the back, against the wall. Sophomore girl said something reached right out of the faucet and grabbed her hand last spring. People talk about seeing something down here with teeth, out of the corner of their eye, gone when they turn around. Sometimes the machines leak water the color of blood."
Nancy knows Jonathan's skeptical expression is reflected on her own face. "And have you actually seen any of this?"
"I've seen the blood water," Steve says. "It happened to my roommate just last week. And can you feel how much colder it is in here than the rest of the dorm? Which it shouldn't be, all these dryers running. But back against that wall, it's always cold." Steve waves a hand. "Go feel."
So they do, holding their hands against the wall, and Nancy doesn't want to admit it, but Steve's right. It is colder back here, in a weird patchy kind of way, like you'll be warm and then cold and then warm as you move around. She looks at Jonathan, who shrugs.
"It's an old building," Nancy says. "The AC isn't that great, that's all."
"Just stand back there for awhile," Steve says.
So they do, and ... okay, now she knows it's just her imagination, it's stupid Steve Harrington planting ideas in her head, but ... it does feel colder the longer she stands here, and worse, she feels weirdly twitchy, like there's something gnawing on the back of her brain, some little rodenty hindbrain instinct poking at her, telling her this is a bad place to be, she needs to get out --
She felt it before, with the Demogorgon in the woods.
She feels it now.
She looks up and realized that Jonathan's already moved away from the wall, and she has too, a little bit. She didn't even notice she was doing it.
"See?" Steve says triumphantly. "See? It's creepy back there, right? Nobody folds their laundry down here at night. It's not so bad during the day."
"It's just drafty," Nancy says, but she finds herself eyeballing the wall as she moves further away, not quite wanting to take her gaze off it.
"So, even assuming there is some kind of ghost, and ghosts are a thing now," Jonathan says, "what are we supposed to do about it?"
"Well first of all, maybe not talk about plans in front of the ghost," Steve says, hopping off the washing machine. "Come up to my room."
*
Steve's room is, unsurprisingly, a mess, and it also has his roommate in it, an athletic-looking blond who is hunched over a desk on his marginally tidier side of the room, scribbling in a notebook.
"Guys, Bruno," Steve says cheerfully. "Bruno, Nancy, Jonathan. Friends from Hawkins."
"Yo," Bruno says, lifting his hand in a little wave without looking up. It looks like he's copying from ... a note? No, more like a love letter, since it's on pink paper and written in purple ink. Nancy decides not to look any closer.
Steve plunks down on his unmade bed, and Jonathan, after a minute, pulls out the chair at the desk that is presumably Steve's, so Nancy sits beside Steve on his bed and tucks her legs up under her and looks around. There's a bulletin board over Steve's desk where all the photos Jonathan mailed him from Hawkins are tacked up, every last one. She notices Jonathan looking at it and getting a little pink. Steve is oblivious; he's leaning off the bed and picking up hardcover books that are spilling over in a couple of heaps beside the bed.
"So basically I went to the library," Steve says, piling books in front of Nancy, "and I got everything I could find that had to do with ghosts."
"You went to the library," Nancy says, looking at the books in front of her. "You did research."
"Yeah, well, I actually asked myself what Nancy would do if she was here, and that was it, so ... that's what I did." He's not looking at her, leaning off the bed to retrieve more books. His neck is a little pink-looking now, too.
"Oh, hey." Bruno swivels around from the desk. "Are these your friends that are gonna help you catch the laundry room ghost?"
Steve gives him a thumbs-up.
"Cool. Good luck, dude. I still haven't got the bloodstains out of my jersey. It sucks." Bruno scoops up a book and jumps out of his chair. "I'm off to meet Sally at the library. Studying, y'know? Peace out."
And he's gone.
Jonathan and Nancy both give Steve a Look.
"What?" Steve says. "I didn't tell him about the Demodogs or the Upside Down. And he already knows about the ghost. C'mon. Help." He pushes the books at Nancy. "I don't know where to start with these. I've been reading them but it's not like they make a manual for ghost hunting, with a materials list and everything. Though it'd be handy --"
Nancy puts out a hand to silence him, pressing two fingertips against his lips. And Jonathan leaves the chair to put one knee on the bed and pretty much crawl into Steve's lap.
So, okay, it's been awhile since they last saw each other.
Ghost hunting can wait.
*
They end up taking a backpack full of ghost books to the student union building because there's a lot more room to spread out than there is in Steve's dorm room (also less of a faintly unpleasant smell of old gym socks, though Nancy is politely not saying anything about it) and they can get food there. Soon they're surrounded by books and notebooks and empty pizza plates.
"So I've got a list," Nancy says finally, and looks up from her notes to find that the boys have gotten bored and are flicking pizza crusts at each other. "I've got a list of -- is anyone listening to me."
"Listening!" Steve says promptly, and Jonathan has his "Steve made me do it" face on.
God, she missed hanging out with both of them, and it's only been three weeks. She has no idea how they're all going to hold out until the Thanksgiving holiday and Christmas break.
"I've found a few things that are mentioned in more than one book as being helpful against ghosts," Nancy says, turning the list around so they can see. "I know how to make some wards and stuff, but basically I think we're going to have to do an exorcism."
"Sweet," Steve says, and when Nancy and Jonathan both look at him, "I've seen The Exorcist twice. I'm like, an expert."
... maybe it's not going to be so torturous waiting until Thanksgiving break after all.
"Yeah, but none of us are priests," Jonathan says.
"There are other ways you can do it." Nancy holds up a book titled Crystals, Aliens, Spirits, and You. "Even if most of this is total bullshit, which it probably is, I've still found a bunch of different ways for warding and protecting spaces from hostile ghosts. We just need to try different things 'til we find something that works. Anyone up for a shopping trip?"
*
Some of Nancy's items are pretty easy to find. Others are next to impossible on a Saturday afternoon in Indianapolis. Jonathan finds some New Age shops in the phone book, which is helpful. Nancy flatly vetoes the idea of stealing anything from a church (although she agrees to collecting a little bag of dirt from the cemetery behind the church, for hallowed ground).
They pick up burgers while they're out and it's getting dark by the time they're back at the dorm, laden with shopping bags. Bruno isn't around when they get back to Steve's room, and Steve doesn't look surprised. "Bruno's a party guy," he explains as he drops the bags on the bed. "Friday and Saturday nights he usually doesn't come back at all."
"I notice you've got no problem spending your Saturday night ghost-hunting," Jonathan remarks, unwrapping a burger with his leg slung over Steve's chair.
Steve shrugs. "You two are a bad influence on me."
He's not looking up as he bites into his burger, so he doesn't see Nancy and Jonathan share a look at that. Because, it's true, in a way, and Nancy thinks about Steve if he hadn't met them; he'd be Bruno, basically, and Bruno doesn't seem like a bad guy, but she's glad that Steve is Steve.
"So how are the rugrats doing?" Steve asks with studied casualness.
Nancy grins. "Dustin says you promised to send him postcards, and I'm supposed to remind you in case you forgot."
"I sent him one! It had the NASCAR track on it!"
"I think maybe he was expecting more than one," Jonathan says, flattening out his takeout bag to make a place to dump out his fries. There's very little space at Steve's desk, so he's put it on top of some of Steve's textbooks, but Steve doesn't look like he minds.
"This is Indianapolis, not the Grand Canyon. It's not a world-class tourist destination with a million things to -- hey!"
Nancy leans back from poking him. "Steve, the kids have hardly been out of Hawkins in their life. To them, Indianapolis is exotic. Don't let them think you've forgotten about them. Send them all postcards. They'll probably keep them forever."
"I'll buy every postcard in the bookstore and mail them next time I have a chance, how does that sound?"
The funny thing is, she thinks he actually will.
*
On a Saturday night, the laundry room is busy all evening, and after repeatedly checking on it, they finally find the last dryer spinning down, and start setting up their gear.
"Oh, hang on," Steve says, and runs off to his room. He comes back with his letterman jacket wrapped around something that turns out to be the same old nailbat from Hawkins.
Jonathan laughs and reaches out to run a fingertip across the crooked, rusted nails. "I can't believe you still have this."
"Don't leave home without it," Steve says, straight-faced.
"Where were you keeping that?" Nancy asks?
"Under the bed. You're not allowed to have weapons on campus." Steve shrugs and leans it against the wall.
A pair of students come in to retrieve their laundry. "What are you doing?" the girl asks.
"Exorcism," Steve says.
"Oh. Good luck."
The nice thing about being on a college campus is that, unlike in Hawkins, nobody bats an eye at three teenagers drawing a chalk circle on the floor and arranging candles around it. In fact, for a little while, they have a small audience, but there's a bunch of setup with herbs and crystals and whatnot, and after awhile the audience gets bored and wanders off to study or look for something more interesting to do.
Once the last of the curious students have wandered out, Steve closes the door tightly, and jumps up on the washing machine.
"What are you doing?" Jonathan asks, looking up from sorting herbs.
"Disabling the smoke detector." Steve grins down at them. "Except someone already did it. People come down here to smoke sometimes."
"That's ... safe," Nancy says.
"C'mon, the last thing we want to do is have the whole building go into a fire lockdown because we're burning sage in here."
They've cobbled together a ritual out of half a dozen books, taking an "everything but the kitchen sink" approach and throwing in anything that looks like it might be even remotely useful. Nancy has no idea whether she believes in any of what they're doing or not. She's still a lot more than halfway convinced the only thing wrong with the laundry room is a persistent draft. But it makes Steve happy, and it gives them all something to do on a Saturday night.
Steve flicks his lighter open, and starts lighting the candles.
Halfway through, all of them blow out.
They all look at each other.
"Draft," Nancy says.
Steve tries again. The candles go out again. And then the lights go out.
There's a small shriek from someone and Nancy swears she feels something brush against the back of her neck -- it's got to be one of the boys, but she scrambles for the door and flings it open. Just as she does, there's an incredibly bright flash of light -- Jonathan's camera -- and she hears Steve yell "Did you see that?" and Jonathan yell something back. Then light from the hallway spills into the room and the lights come back on at once.
Nancy turns around. Steve is standing over the knocked-over candle circle with his nailbat, and Jonathan's pressed against the wall with his camera in one hand and a lighter in the other.
"See what!" Nancy says. "Did you see what?"
"Something was reaching for Steve," Jonathan says. His face is white. "I got a picture."
"Like what kind of something?" Nancy turns to look at Steve, who is staring around him wildly.
"Like a hand. Long fingers. I don't know. It was only there for a second in the camera flash."
Right now she wishes he had a Polaroid, and she's also kind of glad he doesn't. "Right," Nancy says flatly, looking around the room. There's nothing visibly weird about it at the moment, but standing with her back to the hall makes her aware of how much colder it actually is in here than out there. "Right. This exorcism is on."
*
In the end, compared to fighting a Demogorgon, it's actually kind of anticlimactic. Steve runs off again and comes back with a can of hairspray. "Blowtorch," he explains, holding up the can and lighter. "Let's see it put this out."
They leave the door open this time, and ten minutes of chanting, sage-waving, and graveyard-dust sprinkling later, they manage to set something on fire in the middle of the candle circle. They all three see it scream and writhe, and then there's something like a muffled bang and the entire room is full of smoke and the building smoke detectors go off.
Nancy can't help thinking, as they all join the students streaming out of the building after hastily stuffing their exorcism gear into the nearest trash can, that the laundry room feels as warm as the rest of the building now.
*
While the fire trucks and students are all gathered outside the building, the three of them slip off quietly. Nothing is open at this time of night, but it's a mild night so they just wander the campus, holding hands and waiting for the fire trucks to go away.
"Think we got it?" Jonathan asks.
"I hope so. If not, we can try again." Nancy squeezes Steve's hand. "How much trouble do you think you're in?"
"Well, none, if nobody rats us out."
"Like a dozen people saw us setting things on fire in the laundry room," Jonathan says.
"Look, it's college, guys," Steve says. "It's not like small-town high school. Just last week Bruno and a couple of his buddies got caught setting off fireworks behind the sports complex. Everybody does stuff like that."
Still, they make a long circuit of the campus and come back to find that everyone's back inside the building, so they slip in. There's a note taped to Steve's door: HARRINGTON. COME SEE ME. - JM
"Dorm monitor," Steve explains. He crumples the note and drops it in the trash basket just inside the door. He glances at the others, and grins. "You guys wanna go check out our work too, right?"
"We should wait until tomorrow," Nancy protests, but nobody is listening to her, so they all troop down to the laundry room.
The first-floor hall still smells faintly of smoke, but the laundry room hasn't turned cold again in the last couple of hours. They all take turns checking out the back wall and turning on and off the taps at the sink. No cold places. No blood-colored water. Nancy nudges a stray candle behind one of the washing machines with her toe.
"Huh," Jonathan says. "It worked."
"We rock as ghostbusters," Steve says cheerfully, and they all high-five.
And there are still a few Bruno-free hours left until dawn. So. Win.
*
A refreshingly laundry-ghost-free week and a half later, an envelope arrives in the mail for Steve, containing Jonathan's developed photo. It's blurry because the camera was moving and everything is overexposed in the flash bulb, so it's very hard to tell what it is, but it really does look like something elongated and pale, stretching out toward Steve's neck from the left side of the frame.
There's also an enclosed note that the kids loved the postcards, and a kiss in Nancy's lipstick.
Steve grins and pins both the photo and the note to the bulletin board above his desk.
And after that, everything's perfectly fine and calm until the ghost in the library second-floor men's room shows up a month later. At least by that point, they all know what to do.