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It might have started before the actual apocalypse, when Nancy and Jonathan had (what felt like, somehow) make-up sex in Nancy’s bedroom. But the exact timing doesn’t matter; the result is the same. There is something following her, something that shambles and looks like different people but always barefoot, always silent, and always, always walking straight at her.
She tries telling Steve about it, and gets a concerned but ultimately confused response. Same thing from Mrs. Sinclair, who doesn’t know Nancy well but should recognize her own husband as he strides towards them. Jonathan is the one who suggests asking Eleven if she can see it.
Eleven doesn’t, either, which scares Nancy more than anything about it so far. She tries to hide it, but El must see it in her anyway, because she grasps Nancy shoulders and tells her firmly to wait while she Looks. (The capital L is audible.)
Nancy stares compulsively out the still-broken windows and jumps at every sound in the woods while they wait. Jonathan squeezes her hand. His eyes dart around but he is otherwise still. Eleven emerges from her room an eternity later, and crouches in front of them so that she can look them in the eyes. “I can see it in my mind, but not with my eyes,” she says.
Nancy lets out a shaky sigh.
“What is it?” Jonathan asks.
El shakes her head. “I don’t know. It’s from him, I think. From the Upside Down. Bu it’s not like the others, and it’s not like Billy.” She scowls with concentration. “Don’t let it touch you. Please don’t let it touch you.”
“No, of course not,” Nancy says.
~~*~~*~~
They run experiments, the two of them. Very carefully, away from the epicenter of the cracks running through town. The figure doesn’t move faster than about six miles per hour, by Jonathan’s stopwatch. It is mildly inconvenienced by the creek, the old stone walls in the woods, and a bullet from an intact shotgun. Nancy doesn’t want to find out about close range, not until she absolutely has to.
They also find out that if it gets close enough, if it’s just her and Jonathan in the woods, the thing invariably becomes — no. it looks like, it pretends to be.
Her mom assumes that Nancy’s new habit of hugging her every chance she gets is because of the “earthquake”. It’s better that way, and it means that she also doesn’t panic as much when Nancy leaves the house at odd moments “for a drive”, just long enough to keep the monster from reaching anyone she loves.
Then the thing switches its attention to Jonathan.
~~*~~*~~
Steve, to his credit, believes them immediately. “Really?” Jonathan says.
“Byers, why the hell would I not believe you at this point?” He gestures towards the gnarly gouges healing on his own torso, to the craters in the streets around them, to the pop-up memorials along the road.
“Okay, he has a point,” says Nancy.
~~*~~*~~
So really, it might have been Jonathan first, but they don’t figure out that that’s a possibility until after the world curdles and burns to ash in front of their eyes.
~~*~~*~~
“Okay, but if it’s just who’s had sex with who, then I should be able to see it too, right?” Steve says.
“Presumably that was before it got here?” Robin looks between them to confirm. “Maybe it’s only following people who it’s seen have sex with Nancy.”
Nancy shivers at the idea that the thing has seen any more of her skin than her hands and face. (Or maybe she shivers because they’re in an unheated boathouse, it’s goddamn freezing even for early spring, and the sun hasn’t come out since the sky turned black six days ago.)
“So if it doesn’t see you having sex, does that count?” Eddie asks.
“How should I know, it’s not like anyone else can see it to confirm it’s there or not,” Jonathan says.
“El—“
“Ew!”
“I’m not suggesting that she stands outside your door, gross,” says Robin. “But you said it doesn’t move faster than six miles an hour, right?”
“Typically. Which, by the way, means we have about five minutes left here until I need to start running.” Nancy taps the clunky, heavy-duty watch that is now perpetually strapped to her wrist. She’s pretty sure she’s going to have a permanent indent there after this is over, since she can’t risk taking it off to sleep.
“Okay. So, what if you and Jonathan drive out of town, El confirms that the monster isn’t in your vicinity, and then you do your thing and see if it switches back to Jonathan again?”
Nancy looks from Jonathan to Steve to Eddie and back to Robin. “That’s not a bad idea,” she says.
Robin flashes her a smile and a thumbs up.
~~*~~*~~
They take separate cars to the next town over, and meet up in a motel that looks like it had been gross even before everything around it died. Nancy reminds herself that it’s for science, and that they can do this. It’s definitely the most awkward sex she’s ever had.
As soon as they’re done, and have spent a minute or two lying next to each other, holding hands, and feeling uncomfortable with how perfunctory this is, Nancy leaves. She meets up with Robin so that at least she doesn’t have to be alone. Somewhere else, Steve waits for Jonathan to show up so they can wait to see whose turn it is to be stalked by an unsettling figure from another dimension. By their calculations, it should take about an hour for them to get results. As soon as they see it approaching, get back in the car and high-tail it back to the designated meeting point (Hopper’s thoroughly trashed hunting cabin). If it’s been two hours and they haven’t seen anything, return to the cabin, because it means the monster has moved on.
Once they’ve established that the monster doesn’t need to see them have sex in order to locate its next victim, that raises the question of: how. And before they can answer that question, Will jumps in with another question: what the hell is going on with all of them?
~~*~~*~~
The conversation with the entire crew is exactly as awkward as Nancy knew it was going to be, which is why she didn’t want to tell them. And then Will wants to make sure that his mom knows. Nancy would love to be able to still look Joyce in the eye after all this; Fortunately, Jonathan is on the same page as her.
After ten minutes of a lot of shouting, they reach a compromise:
1. Jonathan and Nancy will continue handling the situation with Steve, Robin, and Eddie for backup.
2. Jonathan will inform Will if there are any updates in the monster’s behavior
3. Will is allowed to check in with Jonathan at any point in time to find out what’s going on
4. In exchange, he and Mike will cover for their respective siblings with their parents
5. If at any point in time Jonathan or Nancy go out of contact without alerting someone else first (and at this point, they each receive a heavy-duty walkie-talkie) Will or El will bring Joyce into the loop
Nancy isn’t a fan of most of these provisions, but she also can’t argue that it’s effective. Desperate times, and all that. They should probably have walkie-talkies anyway, considering how many phone lines were taken out by the opening of the gate.
She’s also kind of touched when Mike lunges forward and hugs her tightly, like they’re in middle school again. She pats him on the back. “We’re going to be fine,” she says. “We just need to deal with this until we’ve finished dealing with whatever Henry’s done to Hawkins, and then we just need to make sure it’s on the other side of the gate when it closes.”
“If it closes,” Mike says.
“When it closes,” Will repeats.
~~*~~*~~
Nancy can’t deny that it’s easier to maneuver around the approaching … whatever it is … when there’s more people in the know. There’s no school now — there’s no point, and the auditorium is still an emergency shelter anyway — so they’re free to meet up and bounce around town as necessary. They develop code and hand signals, in case she or Jonathan are around outside people when they catch a glimpse of the figure approaching from the other side of town, and need to get moving. She doesn’t need to explain to Mike why she needs to leave the house at three in the morning, and he can ping her if their mom starts to get nervous about not seeing her around the house enough.
She doesn’t want to attract attention by volunteering, as shitty as it makes her feel. She spends a lot of time with Jonathan, so they can look out for each other, and she spends a lot of time with Steve, Robin, and Eddie, who have appointed themselves their honor guard, or something. Eddie is proud of his garbage-can and tent-peg shields. He totes them around whenever they’re together. He points out that he doesn’t need to see the thing to block it from getting to her, which is a fair point. And Nancy gets very familiar with parts of Hawkins she’d never been to before, or wasn’t familiar with before the change happened. It’s hard to tell sometimes: a broken-down house covered in dead ivy might be in a bad neighborhood she’s always avoided, or it might just be a casualty of someone fleeing town and their garden being killed by Henry.
(Everyone in the party calls him Vecna, but she refuses to give him the distance or the cool-sounding name. His name is Henry Creel, he is human, and he is an asshole.)
~~*~~*~~
It’s Steve who first complains that it would be easier if more of them could see the damn thing, but Eddie is the one who suggests actually doing something about it, at a strategy meeting in the woods.
“What do you mean?” Nancy asks.
He shrugs. “Sleep around? I’m gonna hard pass on seeing the spooky stalker thing, but Steve,” —
“No. Just no,” Nancy says. She can’t, she can’t deal with the Steve thing, not right now. Not unless the road trip is to save the world, and the six kids they have in the back of the car are Mike and his friends.
“It might give us a chance to sleep more,” says Jonathan. The dark circles under his eyes are ever-more pronounced. “Non — not like sleeping around, like sleeping, period.”
“Jonathan!” Nancy starts to protest, but he isn’t joking. He’s just hunched over on himself with his back against the giant boulder on top of which she and Steve used to make out.
“Or you could just pass it around once, and then keep it between you two, but we’d all be able to see it,” Robin suggests. She doesn’t look up when she says it. She grabs a stick and starts using it to sweep away leaves and twigs from the ground between them.
Steve says nothing at all. He passes Robin a half-dozen rocks. She places them on the ground, more-or-less in front of each of them, and starts drawing lines between the rocks.
“Okay, so see, you could pass it off to Steve, and then he’d be able to see it. And then …”
Something furious and scared snaps inside of Nancy. “Why does everybody want me to sleep with Steve?” she asks. Her voice rings out in the unnatural silence of the woods. Nobody speaks or looks at her. Her heart pounds.
After a couple of seconds, Steve raises his hand. “Uh, hi. Nancy?”
She turns on him. “What?”
He stays seated and swallows hard. “This isn’t about — what I said before. It’s not, I swear. But if I can help — my parents barely want to be here, they aren’t paying attention to me, I can run from this thing for longer before I’d need to trade off.”
This is ridiculous, this is a terrible conversation to be having in front of Robin — and fucking Eddie, who came up with the idea in the first place. Nancy digs her fingernails into her palms and wills herself into having some sort of control over the situation. She checks her watch: seventeen minutes before she needs to start moving south again.
She looks at Jonathan. Jonathan looks between her and Steve.
“I mean, if she doesn’t want to, I’ll sleep with you,” he says to Steve. It comes out very dry and very quiet.
Steve’s face does some things, including looking Jonathan up and down, before he nods once, determined. “You think that’ll work?”
Eddie rolls his eyes dramatically. “It’s a creature from another dimension that switches bodies on a whim to stalk victims who dare to have sex, you think it’s going to care if it’s gay sex?”
“We haven’t actually pushed the definition — like, what makes it switch its attention,” Nancy says.
“Then this sounds like a great way to find out,” says Steve.
~~*~~*~~
“You’re sure you’re okay with this?” Nancy asks Jonathan. She’s proud of herself for only feeling concern for him; it’s hard to be jealous because it’s Jonathan, it’s Steve, it’s purely a practical solution, and it’s the end of the goddamn world.
Jonathan looks away and shrugs. “I’m so fucking tired,” he says.
Nancy nods, takes his face in her hands, and kisses his cheeks.
~~*~~*~~
Whatever Steve and Jonathan do together, it works. Nancy can tell, because the next time that it appears, it looks like Mrs. Harrington. Steve’s eyes widen, and he lifts his shield. Nancy fires off a couple of shots at it since they’re in the woods. If anyone hears the shots, they’re likely to think she’s just one of the many newly-minted poachers whose pantry rotted when the change happened.
“That was my mom,” Steve says.
“No it wasn’t,” she says, and reloads the shotgun.
~~*~~*~~
Mike sidles up to Nancy. “Are you okay? Is it … is it here?” He glances around the cabin.
Nancy shakes her head. “It’s not following me right now,” she says. She holds up her left arm to show him the lack of watchband.
Mike looks across the cabin. Jonathan has his head bent over a map and an old newspaper, arguing with Robin and Erica. With both of his hands braced on the table, it’s clear that he doesn’t have the watch, either. Mike frowns at her, a question.
Nancy sighs. “Steve has it. Don’t — don’t think too hard about it,” she says.
Mike pulls a face and covers his ears with his hands.
~~*~~*~~
Jonathan is supposed to meet up with Steve the next day, and then spend the next few days on the run with Nancy while Steve catches a break.
Steve catches a clawed hand to the arm instead. Eddie pages them frantically over the radio; Nancy can hear clanging in the background.
“It fucking threw me! I can’t see it, but it — fuck! Over!”
“Eddie! Eddie. Try fire. I’m coming. Over.”
The thing still looks like Mrs. Harrington, but longer, stretched out like an afternoon shadow, wading in obvious frustration at the edge of the lake. Eddie paddles furiously away from the shore, with Steve just barely visible sitting in the base of the canoe. The thing turns to Nancy as she arrives at the lake, and she readies Lucas’s wrist rocket. It knocks the thing back just enough for her to strip off her sweater and shoes, and dive into the lake after the canoe.
~~*~~*~~
The hospital doesn’t ask any questions about what happened to Steve. Deep, oozing injuries don’t surprise the staff there anymore.
~~*~~*~~
The four of them gather around Steve’s hospital bed, where he’s sitting with monitors attached just to make sure that he doesn’t develop what the doctors are calling “antibiotic-resistant sepsis” and what Steve is calling “Upside Down sludge syndrome”. By Nancy’s reckoning, with the hospital being ten miles away from the lake, they don’t have much more time before the monster shows back up. She looks Steve up and down. He gives her an exhausted wave with his uninjured arm.
“Either we need to get you out of here, or we need to make sure it doesn’t get in here,” she says. “Which is it?”
Steve huffs. “Jeez, Nance, way to put a guy in the mood.” He starts to move, and the blood pressure monitor starts yelling at him.
“Sorry that saving your life isn’t more romantic,” she says. She means it to be sarcastic, but it comes out gentler.
Jonathan nudges her shoulder.
Robin clears her throat and steps up. “I’ll do it. I can — just, like, make sure you guys keep the nurses out for a couple minutes, okay?” She speaks directly to the screen currently displaying Steve’s heart rate as it increases.
“What? Robin, no, you don’t have to,” — Steve starts.
“You’re my friend, Steve,” she says. “Of course I have to.” Her cheeks are bright red.
“It’s not the same,” —
“You did — I mean.” Robin jerks her head minutely at Jonathan.
“Not. The. Same.” Steve raises his eyebrows, jaw clenched, and tilts his head at her.
Robin’s eyes go wide. She opens her mouth.
Steve rolls his eyes and sighs.
“Huh,” she says, higher-pitched than normal, and steps back.
Nancy looks between them, and tries to make sense of what just happened. Across the bed, the gears appear to be turning in Eddie’s head as well.
She reaches for Jonathan’s hand. He squeezes it. “Fine,” she says. “Everybody out of the room, I need to try to save Steve’s life.”
~~*~~*~~
Far outside of Hawkins, in the dusty remnants of a cornfield, they hold a conference.
“I want in,” Eddie says. “I don’t care how, I don’t care who with, but I’m good at running away, and it was freaking impossible to fight that thing off of Steve without being able to see it.”
Steve groans. “You did a pretty good job, man. Especially with all the chunks taken outta you.”
Eddie eyes him. “Yeah, but what about next time? There’s gonna be a next time, and Dustin’s gonna be real pissy if I let you get ganked by a Puritanical sex monster.”
“Weren’t the Puritans the ones with those black hats with the buckles?” Steve asks. “’Cause let me tell you, this thing doesn’t have one of those hats.”
“No no, that’s the Pilgrims,” Robin says.
“The Pilgrims were the Puritans, oh my god, how are you in your senior year?” Nancy asks.
“Third time’s the charm,” Eddie says, before Nancy waves her hands at all of them to shut up.
“Fine. Fine. Okay. If we’re going to do this, we need to think about it,” she says. She really doesn’t want to sleep with Eddie, but they need to be sensible about this, about how to keep each other safe. Besides, it doesn’t need to be a regular rotation. Just twice: once so that he can see the monster, temporarily draw its attention, and once to pass it back to someone else. She grabs her planner from her bag and opens to one of the back pages.
“You’re making a chart?” Robin asks.
“Just let her do it, it’s worth it,” Jonathan says.
“Sorry, I’m just. Some of us are a little intimidated to be jumping in the deep end from ‘completely inept recluse’ to ‘scheduled orgies’.” Robin’s voice rises in pitch.
“You don’t have to,” Nancy says. “This doesn’t have to be your problem.”
“It doesn’t, but Eddie’s right: what happens next time? Just gotta take a minute to process, that’s all.” Robin takes a couple of deep breaths, hands clenched over her knees.
Nancy remembers the first time she and Steve had done anything, and reaches out to cover one of Robin’s hands with her own. “You can take more than a minute,” she says. “We’ve got this so far.”
~~*~~*~~
Nancy has sex with Jonathan bundled safely under the covers of her bed, where no mold or flakes of paint from the ceiling can touch their bodies. When the timer on her watch goes off, she buries her face in his chest and tries to let herself cry.
~~*~~*~~
Robin catches her on her way to volunteer, now that she has an entire day in which she doesn’t need to worry about getting anyone caught in the crossfire. “Can I talk to you for a minute?” she asks.
“Yeah, of course.” Nancy lets herself be pulled off to the side and under the bleachers. Miraculously, there’s no one else there.
Rather than actually speak, Robin thrusts a piece of looseleaf at her. The writing on it is cramped and abrupt, the opposite of the way that she’s come to expect Robin to speak.
Dear Nancy,
I’m gay. You’re not my type at all but you’re a less disgusting option than any of the boys. Please don’t hate me. I want to help but I’m really freaked out about it.
Robin
Nancy reads it again, slowly, to make sure she didn’t skip over any words. Her face is hot. “Oh,” she says, flustered. “Okay. Let me … I’ll get back to you.” She folds the paper and tucks it into her purse.
Robin looks like she’s going to barf, like Nancy is scarier than getting strangled by vines or thrown around by the Mind Flayer. Nancy pats her on the shoulder. “Thank you,” she says, “for trusting me.”
~~*~~*~~
She brings it up with Jonathan, like it’s her own idea, as they hide in her bedroom. Jonathan gawks at her for a full three seconds.
“I mean … yeah. Okay. How do you feel?” he asks.
She shrugs. “It’s practical.” She’s not sure how she feels. (Or she’s trying not to know how she feels. It’s unclear even to Nancy which is a more accurate description.) But she should give Jonathan some sort of answer, so she pokes at her feelings, just a little bit. “I think I actually feel weirder about sleeping with Steve again,” she confesses. Jonathan twitches. “It’s tactical, but he’s also my ex, so it’s hard to pull those two things apart. I was thinking, with Robin, I’m not — she’s my friend. There’s nothing else there. Like with you and Steve.”
“Yeah,” Jonathan says. He looks unconvinced. “Me and Steve.”
Nancy peers into his face. “Is that not what it’s like?” she asks.
Jonathan shrugs, noncommittal. His cheeks are red. Nancy claps her hands over her mouth and laughs. “Oh my god.”
“I still wouldn’t want to do anything if it wasn’t for the whole stalkery sex monster thing,” Jonathan protests. “I mean, can you imagine me going on a date with Steve?”
Nancy arches her eyebrows and tries to suppress the wide smile her mouth keeps trying to twist into. “Ah, so you’re just tactically enjoying yourself.” Jonathan continues to look worried. She reaches out and curls a hand around the back of his neck. “Hey, sorry. Sorry, that was a joke. It’s just, you know.”
“Everything?”
“God, tell me about it.”
“I wasn’t expecting it, to be honest,” Jonathan says. “From him or me.”
“Is Steve …?”
Jonathan clears his throat and scratches at the back of his head. “He, uh. He told me he didn’t know whether he was more jealous of you or of me.”
Nancy laughs.
Her wristwatch beeps.
“Shit,” she says. The borderline-hysteria rising in her over her boyfriend possibly also being into her ex-boyfriend falls flat in an instant. She takes one window, Jonathan takes the other, and they watch the darkness outside. Her watch says it’s six in the evening, but the sun is already well down, if it was ever up at all. She guesses it must be, just so covered by clouds that she hasn’t seen it in weeks.
As they sit in the sudden silence, watching the streets, Nancy has plenty of time to think. If Robin is gay, then why did she volunteer to sleep with Steve? Nancy replays the whole incomprehensible exchange that they’d had. You don’t have to. It’s not the same, Steve had said.
“Oh my god,” Nancy murmurs to herself. Steve knew, that was why he didn’t want Robin. That was why he was so adamant that he and Robin were just friends.
That’s incredibly sweet of him, actually. She feels a burst of fondness.
“You see it?” Jonathan asks.
“I — wait. Yes. Coming down the street from the right.” The thing — it looks like Mike this time, which makes her stomach churn — walks with a swagger. She grabs Jonathan’s hand and drags him down the stairs.
She runs into her mother at the bottom of the stairs. “Where are you going?”
Nancy jumps. “I, um,”—
“Visiting Max,” Jonathan says.
Her mother leans back against the wall, arms folded. “I worry,” she says. “You know Debra Nelson said she saw Eddie Munson sneaking around down by the lake you keep running off to? You’ve got to be careful out there.”
“I have a better chance of being eaten by the giant slugs in the garage than I do of being murdered by Eddie Munson,” Nancy says. “I’ll be careful, Mom. We both will.”
~~*~~*~~
“Really? Most of the phone lines are down, almost a hundred people are dead, we’re all going to run out of gas and starve if we can’t find a way to reverse this soon, and she’s worried I’m going to kill you?” Eddie scowls. “Fuck this.”
“Hey, easy,” Steve says. “It’s going to be okay.”
“Yeah, didn’t El move, like, the entire house with her mind yesterday? Did I misunderstand what Mike said?” Robin gives Eddie a friendly punch on the shoulder.
“She’ll be able to kick some real ass soon,” Jonathan is quick to agree.
“In the meantime,” says Nancy, “how do you feel about sleeping with me, Jonathan or Steve?” She doesn’t miss the way Robin glances at her, hair flipping around her face.
Eddie rubs his hands together. “Do not give a shit,” he says. “You can rock paper scissors for me, if you want, but you do need to buy me dinner first.”
Nancy looks around their circle. Steve meets her eyes and sighs loudly. “You pay for dessert, Munson, and you’ve got yourself a deal.”
Nancy would give anything to know what the inside of Steve’s head has looked like for the past month. Judging by the frown that Eddie’s sending his way, he’s thinking the same thing.
“Okay, great,” she says, when it becomes evident that they’re all just going to stare at Steve for an undetermined amount of time unless she says something. “In that case, it’s going to have to go from me, to Steve, to Eddie, and then from Eddie back to me, and then from me to Robin. Which brings us back to the planner. Sound good to everyone?”
She looks around. They’re all staring at her now. She clicks open her pen. “Unless you have any better ideas?”
~~*~~*~~
Nancy checks in with Jonathan beforehand, just in case. “I don’t care,” Jonathan says. “Really, I don’t.”
“And you’re not just saying that because you’re pushing down your feelings until you can’t anymore,” she presses.
Jonathan’s eyebrows climb up his forehead. “Oh yeah? What was that?” He cups his hand over his ear. “Pot, kettle, black, anyone?”
Nancy gives him a light slap to the chest. “Yeah, but I know what I’m doing! I want to make sure you’re not doing it, too.”
“I’m not. I promise. I’m just …” He shrugs. “I trust you. And it’s kind of nice? I mean, super complicated and exhausting. But Nancy. I’m not afraid of you leaving me for Steve. Not when we’re both right here, and you’ve got both of us anyway. And … I’ve got both of you.”
“And Eddie?” Nancy asks.
Jonathan full-on snorts at that. “I’m mostly just afraid you’re both going to be so awkward at each other that the thing isn’t going to believe you did anything together and will keep stalking him,” he says, and Nancy really does hit him this time.
~~**~~**~~
She and Steve manage to be brief, almost businesslike, but they spend some time curled up together in his bed afterwards. His arm wraps around her stomach.
“Is this what sex is going to be like for the rest of my life?” Steve asks into the back of her head. “Just — okay, your turn on the schedule, set a timer to make sure you don’t relax for too long afterwards. Jesus.”
Nancy pulls his arms closer around her. She sighs. On the nightstand table, the clock gives them another hour before Steve needs to get dressed and run.
~~*~~*~~
Steve lives nearly thirty minutes’ drive away from Hopper’s cabin, which gives him and Eddie a fairly wide margin of time provided that no one else comes up to the cabin. Eddie makes a weak joke about being taken to a remote cabin by his date to get murdered, which falls extremely flat.
Nancy goes hunting with Hopper while they’re there. Game hunting seems like a useful skill to acquire these days, and it’s refreshing to do something completely unrelated to the relentless alertness and scheduling that have consumed her for the past month. She doesn’t even have to worry about being stalked by a monster that only she can see! Even in the grey, brittle wasteland that should have been a late-spring forest, she feels lighter.
They don’t talk much — the forest is so quiet that it would spook any wildlife that might be worth eating — and when they do, it’s about how to spot deer, and about Eleven. Nancy is desperate to ask him what happened in Kamchatka, but now isn’t the time.
They get back to the cabin several hours later. No deer, but they have a turkey. Eddie and Steve are nowhere to be seen. There’s a new crack in one of the windows. She calls them over the radio. Steve answers immediately, says a couple of breezy things to let her know they’re all right.
Hopper watches her curiously. She gives him a sheepish smile.
“You kids doing all right?” he asks.
“What do you think?” she asks.
~~*~~*~~
Eddie makes it five days before he’s ready to be rid of the monster. Nancy wonders if it’s some sort of masochistic impulse to make up for letting it get to Steve, or to prove that he’s capable of fending it off, or what. He’s not reckless about it, doesn’t let it get too close, but he stubbornly refuses to let it come near anyone else, and not having sighted the monster in several days makes Nancy nervous. She wants to know where the enemy is.
“I told you, I’m good at running. Lifetime of practice,” is all that Eddie has to say on the subject, but he finally acquiesces.
He takes her to a tent in the woods that’s almost big enough to stand up in. It has a cot, water bottles, a pile of clothes and pillows, and not much else. “Can’t have food out here — bears and coyotes — sorry,” he says.
“That’s fine.” Nancy wishes there was some sort of light source besides a flashlight. Inside the tent, she can only see the outline of his face and a vague suggestion of features. She sits down on the cot.
Eddie sits down a foot away from her. He fiddles with his rings, sliding them off his fingers into the palms of his hands. The air is thick.
“I don’t know if you’ve picked up on this yet, but I’m not the kind of guy who oozes sex appeal,” he starts off.
“Even if you were, I’m really not much into oozing,” she says, successfully getting a smile to flash across his face.
“Right, right. So, like. How are we gonna do this? Can I just — funny thing, it turns out I don’t really want to — go, uh, all the way,” Eddie says.
A weight slides off her shoulders that she didn’t know had been pressing down on her. “Yes, absolutely, that sounds good,” she says. “Let’s just. Here.” She grabs his hand and places it flat on her sternum. “Let’s start here. I don’t expect you to be … romantic? But it’ll be easier for me if there’s some sort of build-up.”
She can feel him watching her, and wishes she could see more of his face. “What?” she asks.
He tilts his head. “I think I can see why Harrington is so ga-ga about you.”
“Oh.” She blushes. “Thanks, I think.”
“Any time.” He scoots up against her side, and puts his other arm around her shoulders. Nancy takes a deep breath, meets his eyes in the near-darkness, and pulls his hand down towards her belly.
~~*~~*~~
Afterwards, they row out onto the lake, give themselves a space where they don’t have to worry about the monster surprising them. Eddie pulls his hair back under a wide-brimmed straw hat, which looks very strange. The extra clothing in the tent turned out to be a green-and-gold letterman jacket of indeterminate origin and some oversized jeans that have seen better days.
“Is that your disguise?” Nancy laughs. It isn’t quite as painful as Robin wearing Nancy’s interview clothes, but it’s a near thing.
Eddie bows with a flourish. “I am but a humble fishing jock, ready to defend fair lady from threats to her person and her reputation.”
“How very noble of you.”
"Did you know that ninjas never actually wore black? They dressed as farmers, with big straw hats and all of that." Eddie taps the brim of his own hat.
“So you’re not just a knight, you’re also a ninja,” Nancy says, raising her eyebrows.
“Exactly. And if anyone asks, my name is Roderick Witherington the Third.” He holds out his hand, one foot in the boat to steady it. Nancy places her hand in his and allows him to guide her into the canoe. If she ignores his stupid disguise (and the bleached algae, and the decomposing fish in the lake, and the blackened sky above) she can almost pretend that she’s just going on a regular date. Not a particularly good one, but Eddie seems to be trying his best, and that counts for a lot in this situation.
~~*~~*~~
She desperately wants to go back to Jonathan, to feel him against her and the familiar ways that their bodies move when they fit together, and she can’t, it’s not according to the plan. She has dinner with him, Joyce, and Will instead. Will looks at her wristwatch and watches her anxiously. After dinner, she and Jonathan retreat to his room. He puts on a record. She arranges herself in his arms, and tries her best to doze there until her timer goes off.
~~*~~*~~
The next day, Nancy has the watch and a shotgun and a heavy rock tied to a length of rope, for swinging at monsters. She and Robin jet out of town in Steve’s car, which has the best gas mileage of any of them. There’s talk of both gas stations in town running low, with delivery from out of town strained by the new tendency of diesel to spontaneously combust; and they’re not going to waste fuel on Jonathan’s clunker.
They drive about an hour. By Nancy’s calculations, that should give them about three hours before they need to start running again. Let it get as close as possible, show Robin what it looks like and how it moves, and then drive back to Hawkins like a bat out of hell.
Robin does not shut up for the entire drive. It’s not a consistent train of thought, either, just random exclamations to tell Nancy about something she sees on the road, interspersed with babbling about how she’d kind of thought her first time would be never, but failing that, “in the back seat of Steve Harrington’s car, with Nancy Wheeler, during the apocalypse, was not on my list of potential possibilities. In a car? Sure, yeah, that could be fun, I guess. Steve’s car though? Ugh, it smells like Steve. Man sweat and cologne.”
Nancy, who happens to like the smell of Steve’s car, clenches her teeth. “I need you to stop talking now,” she says.
“Got it. Shutting up now. You know you’re kind of hot when you’re being all in charge? Okay done.”
When they’re the right distance away from Hawkins, Nancy gets out of the car to stretch, close her eyes, and take a couple of deep breaths. She pushes away the fear and exhaustion and the irritation, and just … lets herself breathe.
She opens her eyes. Robin is next to her, silent, hands shoved into her jacket pockets. Nancy steps in front of her.
“Quick question. Is this going to be your first kiss?” Nancy asks.
Robin bites her lip. “Yep. Turns out the girls at Hawkins High aren’t exactly lining up to date me.”
Nancy smiles and puts her hands on Robin’s shoulders. “Okay, well. Lucky for you, I’ve been told I’m a pretty good kisser.”
Robin makes a face. It seems like she’s about to say something again — probably something snarky about Jonathan or Steve — but Nancy leans in to cut her off before she can get the words out, and then makes sure that she stays too distracted to continue the conversation.
~~*~~*~~
“Holy shit,” says Robin.
Nancy grabs her bra from the passenger seat and starts to put it back on. According to her watch, they still have plenty of time to process before they need to gear up. “Can you get the back for me?”
“Yeah, totally.” Robin sits up and hits her head on the car ceiling. Her fingers fumble against Nancy’s back. Nancy stays as still as possible.
When she shuffles around, Robin’s face is close to hers. “Thanks,” she says. “Really. I — I know everything is shitty right now, and I know that you’re not into girls generally, or me specifically, and I appreciate that you weren’t a bitch about it. Or like, tolerant but super grossed out. Or grossed out and bad at hiding it, maybe you were grossed out and just good at hiding it…”
Nancy covers her mouth with her hand and gives her a firm smile. “Robin? It’s fine. Really. You’re not gross.” Weird, definitely new, but not gross.
She removes her hand when Robin doesn’t try to keep talking. To her horror, Robin’s mouth is quivering, and her eyes are bright. Robin opens her mouth, closes it, and throws her arms around Nancy, knocking their heads back against the drivers’ seat in what turns out to be a very tight hug. “Thanks,” she mumbles into Nancy’s collarbones.
Nancy blinks at this sudden development. She loops her arms around Robin and holds onto her own wrists. She does not mention the tears she can feel trickling down her bare shoulder.
~~*~~*~~
“Do you think handjobs count for playing monster-hunting sex tag?” Steve asks.
"That's the worst way to put it," says Nancy, as she pulls out her planner and flips to the To-Do section. “I think so. Let’s find out.”
~~*~~*~~
They have a schedule, they have maps, they have a wristwatch, and they have a really stupid amount of condoms that Eddie insisted on acquiring. They have guidelines for what ‘counts’ to distract the monster (Steve and Jonathan confirm that yes, a handjob is good enough; Nancy and Robin determine that no one actually needs to orgasm in order to draw the ire of the thing following them, which takes off a lot of pressure.) And now there’s enough of them that whoever is currently a target doesn’t have to be alone: there will always be someone else who can see the monster with them to fight it if it gets too close again. The current target wears Nancy’s wristwatch and carries the backpack that contains the road maps, two heavy batons, and a twelve-pound hammer. Their current chaperone carries at least one garbage can lid and a gun (Nancy and Jonathan) or a polearm (everyone else). When they or the kids have any leads on Henry, they break into teams accordingly . Joyce and Hopper accept the obsession with being armed and moving in pairs as the natural consequences of recent events, even if it visibly sets Joyce on edge.
With all the time she’s spending with the others, it feels a bit like Nancy’s relationship with Jonathan is falling apart. Not in a way where they’re falling apart, just — if Nancy tries to picture it, the image that comes to mind is a monstrous peony in bloom. She and Jonathan as the leaves that, when pushed open by the petals, might be further away from each other, but are still fused at the base; and the petals unfurling in more layers than it had seemed possible for them to contain.
Maybe she’s just trying her best to romanticize her relationship cracking under an impossible amount of stress. That would also be okay, Nancy reminds herself, because she just needs to get through this and finish the job, and then she can figure out what it all means.
~~*~~*~~
Like most creatures from the Upside-Down, it fears fire. Once, they manage to back it into a ring of cooking oil and set the whole circle ablaze. It stands right up against the edge of the fire, staring at them with a dead-eyed rage that Nancy has never, thank god, seen on her mother’s real face. It doesn’t try to get through the fire. They fling Molotov cocktails at it, which affect it more than they affected Henry. It curls up on the ground in apparent anguish.
The five of them pause to watch it, realize it’s working, and whoop with triumph. Eddie stretches his arms out to hug them all at once, Nancy’s cheek mashed against Jonathan’s shoulder, one hand trapped between Steve and Robin, Eddie’s long greasy curls in her eyes. They huddle like that, breathless and beaming.
The fire, with nowhere else to go, starts to burn itself out. Nancy looks up from within the circle of friends, and catches movement out of the corner of her eye. The bottom drops out of her stomach.
The monster rises. It waits, her mother’s perm blackened and flaking away, until a gust of wind blows open a hole in the ring of fire. It opens its mouth and reaches out with impossibly long, sharp nails.
They break apart, and they run.
~~*~~*~~
In the end, Nancy doesn’t get to be the one who pushes the monster back through gate as it closes; but she does get to slice open a Demogorgon's face with a machete mounted on a broom, which is pretty satisfying. And it buys Eleven enough time to free herself from Henry’s mental grip and wrestle him to the ground. Somewhere behind them, Jonathan hollers and lets off an assortment of fireworks directly into their stalker’s gut, propelling it backwards into the waiting crevice. And somewhere, further beyond that, an unfamiliar girl comes bursting through the solid wall of bats and grabs Eleven’s hand. Nancy catches a brief flash of numbers on her wrist before her attention is drawn back to Robin hacking away at a vine twisted around her ankle.
They fight. They win. There’s something complicated in which Eleven suddenly has a sister who also has superpowers, who wants to help, and together they reduce Henry to a stiff, scabbed-over corpse, eyes blank. Hopper keeps checking the body to make sure he stays real and stays dead. The monsters don’t stop coming just because their master is gone, and so they form a protective barrier between Eleven and her sister while they face down the massive, miles-long gate gouged through Hawkins, and drag it shut.
~~*~~*~~
Nancy has been awake for nearly twenty-four hours at this point, and her skin is still crackling with adrenaline. The sky is dark, but it’s no longer grey-black, it’s a deep, clear blue, and there’s the moon. She didn’t realize she’d missed the moon.
There’s a moon, and the thing following her is no more.
~~*~~*~~
Eleven’s alleged sister vanishes shortly before Mike, all of his friends, and Erica grab their bikes from the tangle under a massive dead oak where they’d tossed them … some time earlier. Nancy had been too busy swinging her rock-on-a-rope to pay attention. Their hurry sends her pulse sky-high again, just as it was starting to calm down.
“Hey! Where are you going?” she yells.
Mike turns back. “Max,” he says. “What if she wakes up while the power’s out?”
Nancy makes herself stand still. That makes sense. It’s going to be okay. She gives him a nod.
She should to go back to her parents, to let her mom and Holly know she’s okay. She should go with Hopper to the police station to make a statement, start clearing Eddie’s name.
She should take a bath at some point, too. She can smell herself, and it isn’t pretty.
Instead of doing any of those things, she grabs Jonathan’s hand, and brushes away the ash and sweat on his face. "Hey," she says.
"We made it. Again," he says. They stare at each other for a moment, and then the giddy laughter of a burden suddenly lifted bubbles up and erupts between them.
~~*~~*~~
They all end up in a fallow field a quarter mile away. Steve spreads out his jacket and lies down with his head on the edge. Robin flops down on his right, and Eddie sits down a little more gingerly on his left. There’s enough room for Nancy and Jonathan to rest their heads on the bottom edge of the jacket, and not get dirt in their hair. Getting settled jostles the cuts on her arms, but they’re no longer actively bleeding, so as long as she keeps them out of the dirt, it should be okay.
They look up at the stars. With all the lights out in town, there are more than Nancy can ever remember seeing.
“Now what?” asks Steve.
“Now we retire,” says Robin. “I’m old before my time.”
“Tell me about it,” says Jonathan.
Nancy reaches up for Steve. Her hand lands on Eddie’s chin, but he graciously moves it over onto Steve’s nose.
“Thanks,” says Steve. Nancy pats his face.
“Now … I don’t want to think about having sex for a while,” Nancy says, the first thing that comes into her head.
“Can I still take you out on dates?” Jonathan asks. He doesn’t sound anxious about it, just curious.
“Yeah. Yeah, of course. I’m not giving up on relationships, I just … want to not feel a lingering sense of doom every time I take my shirt off,” she explains.
“I don’t know, that seems pretty normal to me. I also feel a lingering sense of doom every time Steve takes his shirt off,” Robin says.
Nancy laughs. They all laugh. Their voices mingle with the fireflies and crickets singing in the field.
Out to the west, someone sets off a couple of fireworks. They flash at the edges of Nancy’s vision, not enough to wipe out all the stars she can see above her.
“There’s this girl. I think I want to ask her out,” Robin says. “That might be nice.”
“You should go for it,” says Steve.
“Yeah.” Robin sighs. “Especially since I don’t have to explain the whole … life-saving sex calendar thing.”
“That’d be a tough sell,” he agrees.
“I’m just gonna stick to dating people who already know about the life-saving sex calendar,” Eddie says.
“Oh?” Nancy asks.
“Yeah, watch this. Hey Steve, what’re you doing on … shit, what day is it? Uh, Friday. Or next Friday, if today is Friday.”
“I think it’s technically Wednesday,” Jonathan says. Robin giggles.
“Uh …” says Steve. “Guess I’m going on a date?”
“Hell yes,” says Eddie.
Nancy fumbles around gingerly until she finds Eddie’s hand. It’s sweaty, though he sounded pretty blasé. He links their fingers together. She tips her head sideways until she can meet Jonathan’s eyes, and takes his hand as well. Jonathan gives her a crooked grin.
“Want to do a double-date?” she says aloud.
“That works for me,” says Jonathan. He leaves out the details that no one wants to think about: namely, where would they go that’s not a disaster zone right now? What sort of place is even open? How far away would they have to go to find a place that would let Eddie through the door? Those are questions for tomorrow, Nancy reminds herself. Right now, she has her friends, and she has the stars, and Steve’s jacket.
“I dunno, guys, that sounds pretty scandalous to me,” Robin chimes in. “Maybe I should chaperone. Just in case things get too wild.”
“Or you could bring — the girl you talked about,” Nancy says. “Make it a triple date? We can get one of those big booths at the diner.” (The diner, at least the one she’s thinking of, doesn’t exist anymore, but there will be other diners.)
She hears shuffling from the other side of the jacket. Jonathan slides down, and then she feels the bonk of another head against her skull. “We’ll see,” says Robin.
And they will. They’ll get to see, they have time to see how things work out, and soon — in about three hours, according to her watch — they’ll have the sun to see by, too.