Archive of Our Own

Nancy splits off from the search party as soon as she can.

It’s not that she doesn’t want to find Mike—on the contrary, actually, she’s probably the person here that wants to find him the most—but she can’t shake the feeling that everyone else is looking… wrong.

Michael. They keep whistling his name into the dark of the forest, calling him Michael. The name grates on Nancy’s ears—her brother hates being called Michael. Only their mother gets to call him Michael.

So she pulls Barb aside and tells her that she’s leaving, that she’s tired and she’s cold and she’s sad—none of which are even lies—and that her boyfriend is going to drive her home. Barb doesn’t particularly like Steve, but she does, by and by, trust Nancy, so she nods assent, her red curls bouncing a bit, and Nancy walks off into the woods in the opposite direction, towards where Steve's parked his car, the boy himself close on her heels.

The sun’s setting for real, now, and Steve extracts his metal Maglite from the pocket of his letterman jacket, clicking it on and slicing the misty night with a beam of white light.

“We’re going to keep looking, right?” It’s not resigned, exactly, but Steve asks it like he already knows the answer.

“Obviously,” Nancy responds anyway. The search party had steered clear of the south end of the forest—a lot of little creeks over there, it would be a bitch to fall in the water—so that’s where they aim for, instead of the west end, which is actually where Steve’s car is parked, underneath a copse of ash trees.

They crunch through the general drift of early November leaves that carpet the forest floor for a handful of minutes before all of a sudden there’s too many footsteps echoing through the clearing.

Nancy whirls around, her brother’s name on the tip of her tongue—but it isn’t Mike.

No, it’s Jonathan Byers.

He’s scuffing around behind a big oak tree, peering through the lens of his camera at something on the ground and looking for all the world like he’d just popped into existence as Nancy and Steve had turned the corner. He eyes the viewfinder of the Nikon carefully, twisting the lens to zoom in and out, studying something at the foot of the tree.

His head shoots up as Nancy crunches closer, a startled expression on his face like he hadn’t even heard her coming. He jerks the camera down and thumbs the lens cap closed on reflex, but his face relaxes minutely when he recognizes who’d snuck up on him.

“Nancy,” he breathes, like her name is a relief, and maybe it is. It certainly is to Nancy, since even though she’s faintly disappointed he wasn’t her brother she can think of scores upon scores of people she’d much less rather meet in the woods at night.

Jonathan has a reputation, somewhat, for being a bit spooky—sprung from his dark jackets and general aura of moodiness combined with a stare that can flay you alive—but Nancy, having known Jonathan for as long as Mike and Will have known each other, has long decided that it’s kind of bullshit. The spookiest thing about Jonathan is his taste in music.

“Taking pictures?” Nancy asks.

“Y—yeah?” Jonathan half-asks, half-answers. “I thought—thought I saw something, I dunno. I was on my way to join the search party, actually. Will’s around here, somewhere.”

Before Nancy can say anything else, Steve catches up to her, and Jonathan’s face goes a little guarded-anxious again.

“What’s he doing here?” asks Steve, shining the flashlight directly into Jonathan’s face.

Jonathan gets a weird, shifty look, like he’s waiting for Nancy to whirl around and go, yeah, what are you doing here? He has a bit of a flat, pinched face to begin with, but it’s even more noticeable right now as he squints through the bright beam of Steve’s flashlight.

Nancy blinks. “He’s—I mean, our little brothers are best friends. He’s helping look for Mike.” She turns to face Jonathan, who’s standing there with slightly hunched shoulders, trying to make himself as small as possible inside his black coat. He’s, like, five-foot-ten, so it’s not really working. “Right?”

“Yeah, ‘course,” Jonathan mumbles, hands fidgeting with the buttons of the camera looped around his neck.

Nancy sort of expects Steve to contest it—give a snide comment, or at least a roll of the eyes—but he doesn’t. Just flicks the flashlight beam off Jonathan’s face, quirks an eyebrow—not unkindly—and replies, “Okay. You been around the south end yet?”

Jonathan looks up through his bangs a bit warily, but responds, “Yeah, I—I live over there. First place I looked.”

“You checked Castle Byers?” Nancy asks. She doesn’t—well. She doesn’t truly believe that Mike has actually just run away, like everyone else seems to, but if he had, Will would probably be the first person Mike would run to. Even though Lucas lives closest, and Dustin is most likely to go along with it, something about the Byers’ place—something about Will and Joyce and Jonathan—has always seemed… comforting. At least in Nancy's opinion.

Jonathan nods, slow in a way that makes Nancy’s heart deflate a little. “Not there. Will says he checks every hour.”

Nancy chews her bottom lip. Thunder rumbles in the distance.

Steve says, questioningly, “Castle Byers?”

“My little brother’s—I dunno, it’s a fort he made. In the woods. Like a treehouse, but it’s on the ground.”

“Can we check it out?”

Jonathan squints at Steve, like he’s searching for some kind of evidence that Steve’s making fun of him. He doesn’t seem to find it, so he just clutches his camera a little tighter and replies, “Uh, okay. We shouldn’t actually go in, though. Will gets mad.”

“Sure, yeah,” says Steve, easy as anything, and Nancy, rather uncharitably, wonders what his angle is. He gestures with a hand, the other coming up to curve around Nancy’s shoulders and tuck her into his warm, solid side. “Lead the way, man.”

The last time Nancy saw Castle Byers in person was the summer of 1979, when Will and Jonathan’s dad had still been around. Nancy and Jonathan were twelve and Mike and Will were eight and the little fort wasn’t much more than a vaguely lean-to shaped mass of sticks and twine and draping fabric that could hardly fit one little boy, let alone Will and Mike both, and it came up, maybe, to Jonathan’s skinny waist.

It’s obvious that Will’s been making steady improvements. It’s dark, now, in 1983, autumn-shady and overcast on top of that, the trees whipping their leaves around in warning of the coming storm. Even in the low light of Steve’s flashlight she can see that Castle Byers has become a real castle, fortified with thick logs and rope, almost as tall as Nancy—but even without looking in she can tell it’s empty, wind howling through the miniscule seams between branches and rattling around within.

Will’s not here. More importantly, Mike’s not here.

She says as much, tugging her jacket a little tighter around herself—it’s more of a windbreaker than anything, and not very warm. She hadn’t really expected her brother to be here, but the absence in her chest still aches, and the worry in her head still throbs.

Steve looks at the wooden fort with an unreadable expression—it’s not derisive, really, but it is a bit pitying. Jonathan watches Nancy, eyebrows drawn together in the middle.

“Let’s keep looking,” Nancy says after a moment.

Jonathan shifts his gaze to the swirling indigo of the stormy night sky, heavy with humid clouds. “It’s about to rain.”

“You can go home,” Nancy replies, rather waspishly, and a stab of guilt goes through her as Jonathan’s expression turns a bit wounded. “Sorry, just—I don’t want to stop. I want to find Mike. I don’t care if I get wet.”

“You can’t look for Mike if you get sick,” Steve says, irritatingly reasonable in the way he often is. Before Nancy can protest, he continues, “We don’t have to go home yet, but, y’know, let’s start heading to my car, at least.”

Okay. That makes sense. Nancy gets about twelve steps before she realizes that she can only hear one other pair of shoes crunching leaves beside her and turns around, spying Jonathan twenty feet behind them, still staring at Castle Byers.

“Hey, man, you coming?” Steve calls, surprising Nancy once again, and aims his flashlight in Jonathan’s direction.

Jonathan looks up, raising a hand once again to shield his eyes against the beam of light. His face is washed out by the glare, but it’s suspicious and hopeful all at once. “You want me to?”

Nancy looks at Steve. Steve looks at Nancy. Nancy lifts a shoulder and nods. He cares enough to look for Mike. That’s good enough for me.

With a don’t be stupid sort of tone, like it’s obvious—like there wasn’t even a question of it—Steve shrugs and replies, “Uh, yeah?”

They don’t make it back to Steve’s car before the rain starts.

Actually, they don’t make it back to Steve’s car at all for a while—they get lost somewhere between Castle Byers and the trees that border Maple Street, turned around in the dark and the cold, even though all three of them should know the stretch of woods the boys call Mirkwood like the backs of their hands. Jonathan wrestles his camera into a bag Nancy hadn’t noticed him carrying as soon as he feels the first few drops of rain falling from between the sparse canopy of stubbornly-clinging leaves, but that’s about all he has time for before the clouds open and the wrath of God comes down on their unsuspecting heads.

“This sucks,” Steve says, half-shouting over the sound of the driving rain, before promptly stepping wrong and wiping out on a slick of wet dirt that’d crept up beneath his feet as he was walking. His back impacts the forest floor with an audible smack, and he gives a put-upon groan as he feels the wetness of the mud and leaves start to soak into the back of his shirt. “Aw, hell.”

Nancy doesn’t laugh, but she probably would have under, like, any other circumstance. She thinks Jonathan huffs out an amused breath beside her.

“I hope Barb’s not out in this,” she says, half in response and half to herself, and absentmindedly peels a few soaked locks of hair away from the side of her neck. “Christ, I hope Mike’s not out in this. He’s always hated getting caught in the rain.”

Jonathan, who’d been given the flashlight a mile or so back, scans the forest in front of them back and forth a few times. His hair is sticking to his forehead, and Nancy watches a droplet of water slide down his nose. “Think we’ve looped around enough that we’re headed towards the road?”

“I mean, what’s the other way?” Steve asks, apparently having peacefully come to terms with being wet and dirty. He’s still on his back on the ground, hair pushed back from his face and eyes closed against the onslaught of water, the fingers of one of his hands tapping restlessly against the turned-up soil.

“My house,” says Jonathan, which relieves Nancy—the Byers’ house, in her mind, is always lit up and cozy and full of good smells—“and the Department of Energy lab,” he finishes, abruptly dropping a metaphorical ice cube down Nancy’s back. She’s seen that place, all concrete and barbed wire and an austere, cold façade.

“You don’t think—“

“Nance,” says Steve. “Your little brother is a huge pain, but no way is he stupid enough to try to get in there.”

He sits up, then, ignoring Nancy’s toothless glare, and reaches with a hand to tug at Jonathan’s sleeve like a little kid. Jonathan, bewildered, extends an arm automatically, which Steve immediately uses to haul himself up off the ground.

“The eight foot tall shock fence is probably enough to scare people, but even if it isn’t, hasn’t that place been abandoned for, like, half a decade?” he asks, unceremoniously brushing forest floor detritus off his shoulders and the seat of his pants. He swipes a hand through his drippy bangs, trying to wrangle the limp strands, but it’s a lost cause—one he seems to recognize, because he makes a face and quickly slicks them back out of his eyes again.

Nancy looks to Jonathan for confirmation, but he just lifts a shoulder and grimaces, raising a hand of his own to rub some rainwater out of his eyes. “I don’t keep track of the place.”

“Well, the fence wouldn’t be electrified anymore if the place was abandoned,” Nancy points out.

“What if they left stuff there, though? Stuff they don’t want people to get at?”

“Why would they do that and then abandon it all? If it’s so important? And go through all the trouble of keeping up an electric fence as a deterrent?”

“I dunno, so nobody graffitis the place? That’s what I would do. Or maybe they’re worried about, like, keeping out animals.”

“Maybe they’re trying to keep something in,” Jonathan says.

Steve and Nancy both go quiet, absorbing that, and Nancy thinks that maybe Jonathan is a little spooky, actually, and then, somewhere close behind them, a stick cracks.

Jonathan jumps about a foot in the air, whirling around and swinging the the flashlight wildly, and Nancy sucks in a huge, fast breath, and Steve plants his feet in the mud and raises a fist like he’s prepared to fucking sucker punch whatever monster’s about to ambush them—but it isn’t a monster at all, as the beam from the flashlight soon illuminates. It’s a person.

“Whoa,” says Nancy.

“Holy hell,” says Steve.

“Shut up, you guys,” hisses Jonathan, and then, because he’s the closest, carefully raises his voice to ask, “Hey, are you—are you okay? Do you need help?”

The person—who Nancy thinks is a little girl, probably a year or two younger than Mike and his friends, with short hair plastered against her skull by the rain—doesn’t answer, just sniffs and shivers. She’s absolutely bone-soaked, like she’s been out here even longer than they have, and is wearing a shirt so huge it makes her seem even smaller than she actually is.

She looks incredibly pitiful. Not even in a mean way, but, like—like a kitten that’s been abandoned in a cardboard box, or something. The girl isn’t wearing shoes, her tiny toes curling against the pine needles, and Nancy, looking closer, sees that what she thought was short, wet hair is actually a severe buzz cut.

Something is wrong with this picture.

“Are you lost?” Nancy asks, louder than Jonathan, since she’s a bit further away. “Do you—are your parents looking for you?” The girl’s gaze darts from Jonathan to Nancy to Steve, all pale cheeks and huge, dark eyes, but she still says nothing.

“Do you need help?” Jonathan repeats, shifting his camera bag higher up on his shoulder.

“Help,” says the girl, copying Jonathan. Her voice is very quiet, very soft, and somewhat gravelly, like she isn’t used to speaking. She nervously clutches at the hem of her overlarge shirt. “Help… me?”

It’s a question, not a plea, like she’s asking for confirmation that what she’s saying is correct. Nancy’s concern swells.

“We can help, yeah,” calls Steve, a hand raised to his face like a visor, shielding his eyes from the downpour. “If—y’know, we can drive you home, at least.” Whenever we find my car, he doesn’t say.

“You shouldn’t be out in the rain, you’ll get sick,” Nancy adds, echoing Steve’s words from earlier.

The girl shivers again, more violently this time, and sneezes pathetically. She fists both her small hands in the wet fabric of her shirt. A half-healed bruise colors her left cheekbone.

“Don’t want home,” she says, only just above a whisper, and her voice cracks on the last word. “Bad place.”

“Oh,” says Steve, like a lightbulb’s just flicked on, and Nancy doesn’t immediately get it but Jonathan definitely does. He doesn’t step closer, but he does crouch down a bit to get to the girl’s eye level, angling the flashlight so it’s no longer shining directly in her face, and slowly, quietly asks, “Bad man?”

The girl screws up her face and puts an arm over her eyes, like she’s trying to hide from them, and her tiny bird-like chest hitches with her breathing. After a long second, she nods, and the line of Jonathan’s shoulders slumps in knowing sympathy.

Oh, thinks Nancy.

Jonathan’s the only one of them wearing a jacket that’s both clean of mud and substantial in any way, so he passes his bag to Nancy as he peels it off and drapes it around the girl’s skinny shoulders. She tugs it further around herself gratefully even though it’s still sopping wet. Nancy looks at Jonathan dubiously, but he waves her off—he’s wearing, like, four layers, alright, he’s fine.

They introduce themselves to the girl—Jonathan, Nancy, then Steve—and she seems to understand, even though she doesn’t give her own name back to them.

“Nancy,” she says, pointing, then slides her hand to the left. “Steve.” She turns further, letting her index finger come to rest. “Jonathan.”

Jonathan hands the flashlight back to Steve, so he can hold his camera bag with one hand and the girl with the other. She’s so small, especially pressed against Jonathan’s side like she is—Nancy wants to, like, reach out and grab her, fold her close and wrap her up in blankets, but that can wait. Has to, until they find Steve’s stupid car.

The rain isn’t letting up, and Nancy’s feeling the cold down to her bones—everywhere except where Steve’s warm hand is linked with one of hers, and where Jonathan’s shoulder presses up against her other side so they don’t lose each other in the almost-dark.

“Holy shit, there is no way I parked this far from the south end,” Steve mutters to himself, swinging the flashlight beam this way and that, searching fruitlessly for the shining fender of his Beemer. “Maple Street’s only, like, a mile long, what the fuck?”

“Language,” Jonathan admonishes, and jerks his head meaningfully towards the girl when Steve turns around to glare at him incredulously.

“Whatever, man,” Steve scoffs, but it’s more teasing than mean. Jonathan bites back a tiny smile.

Nancy spies something out-of-place a handful of yards to the immediate side, and hangs a sharp, wordless left, dragging Steve along with her by the hand despite a half-hearted protest. Fourteen steps later, yeah, there it is—the lovely black-ice sheen of Steve’s car, which Nancy has never, ever been happier to see.

“Hallelujah,” whistles Steve, apparently feeling the same way, and shoves the handle of the flashlight in his mouth while he digs in the pocket of his jeans for the keys so he doesn’t have to let go of Nancy’s hand. It’s kind of gross, since the flashlight has been in contact with not only Jonathan’s hand but also the forest floor at least once since the night began, but whatever.

The girl visibly tenses when Steve opens the car’s back door, but relaxes when it becomes clear that Jonathan plans to get in with her. He flicks his eyes to Steve before he does, awaiting permission, and any residual fear Nancy might have had that Steve was going to be weird about Jonathan tonight totally evaporates as she sees him nod decisively and point to the inside of the car in a slightly impatient get in before I make you sort of way.

The radio fires to life as Steve starts the car. Night Ranger is playing.

Sister Christian, oh, the time has come
And you know that you’re the only one
To say, “Okay”

“Got a name, kid?” he asks when he slides into the driver’s side, adjusting the rear view mirror so he can see the backseat, peering at the sliver of the girl’s face that’s left exposed as she hides the rest of it in the collar of Jonathan’s jacket. She doesn’t answer. Steve drops it.

Where you going? What you looking for?
You know those boys don’t want to play no more
With you, it’s true

“Where are we going?” Nancy asks in a hush from the passenger side as he starts to pull out of the woods and back onto the main road, windshield wipers straining against the downpour. “Where are we taking her?”

You’re motoring

“Thought we’d go to my place,” Steve responds, just as quiet, eyes going back up to the rear view mirror. Nancy follows his gaze, catching a glimpse of Jonathan carefully inspecting the bruise on the girl’s cheekbone with a horribly sad expression on his face, before returning to staring out of the windshield at the dark road. “My parents—they’re not there. We’ll get dried off and stuff, call Social Services or whatever.”

What’s your price for flight?

“Don’t,” says the girl suddenly, making Steve and Nancy jump. “Don’t call.”

“Wh—why not,” Steve asks warily, one eye on the girl and one on the road.

In finding Mister Right

The girl’s voice isn’t sharp, exactly—she doesn’t really seem to be capable of speaking sharply—but it’s serious, weighty. She means what she says, when she meets Steve’s eye for the first time in the rear view mirror and carefully intones, “Bad men will find you.”

Steve shivers, almost involuntary, and clenches his fists so hard on the steering wheel his knuckles go white. Nancy chews her lip again. The girl, seemingly unbothered by her ominous proclamation, tilts her head onto Jonathan’s shoulder and promptly goes to sleep.

You’ll be alright tonight

“Well,” starts Nancy.

“Um,” says Steve.

“Yeah,” sighs Jonathan.

Steve pulls up to his house ten minutes later, a little more roughly than he meant to—Loch Nora is ritzy, sure, for Hawkins, but it’s not like his parents are home enough to notice the potholes in their own damn driveway—and, upon throwing the car into park, doesn’t get out immediately. Rather, he unbuckles his seat belt and shifts sideways, so his back’s against the side window, and stares into the backseat.

“The, uh, the bad man—you think it’s her dad?” he asks quietly, with more care than Nancy thinks she’s ever seen from him.

Jonathan flattens his mouth a bit in distaste, glancing again at the bruises peppering the still-sleeping girl’s visible skin, and Nancy remembers 1979, when Castle Byers was being built, and bruises just like that on a twelve-year-old Jonathan’s wrists, and the sick, squirming feeling of deep-set unease that Lonnie Byers has always given her.

Bad man, she thinks.

“Yeah,” says Jonathan, just above a whisper. “It might be.”

Steve turns to stare back out the windshield for a long second, bouncing his knee restlessly, like he’s thinking very hard. The soft glow of his lonely porchlight illuminates his face as he scrapes his top teeth over his bottom lip. Nancy doesn’t speak, just watches him, watches the gears spin in his head.

“Maybe her dad—like, maybe he works for Social Services,” he says after a long second. “So if we call, he’ll find her. Or maybe he just works at the phone company.”

That… well. That sort of makes sense, and sort of is better than nothing, so Nancy’ll take it, at least for now.

“So we don’t call. We can—I don’t know, maybe we can talk to the police tomorrow?” she muses, trying to picture Chief Hopper holding this tiny girl the way Jonathan holds her right now and utterly failing.

“Sounds like a plan,” says Steve, his smile just a shade too tight, and practically leaps out of the car. Nancy, and Jonathan with his camera bag and the girl, follow a second after.

Jonathan hesitates at Steve’s front door, and Nancy thinks for a second that it’s because he’s worried about taking the girl inside, but then Steve squints through the low light of his foyer and says, “Have you ever even been in my house before?”

“Obviously not,” mutters Jonathan, averting his eyes. “I don’t get invited to your parties.”

“You don’t seem like much of a party guy, I gotta say,” Steve replies, airy as ever, but something lurks in his voice, cool and sharp, a poison flower budding that Nancy knows she needs to prune fast before it blooms.

“Your parties are loud anyway, that’s why I don’t go,” she interrupts, and waves Jonathan in through the threshold. “Bring her inside so we can all dry off. Don’t bump her head on the door frame.”

“Right,” says Jonathan, the storm cloud visibly clearing from his face, and he tucks the girl a little closer to himself as he carefully maneuvers himself into the Harringtons’ front hallway. She murmurs a bit and frowns in her sleep, eyebrows squinching together in the middle, and Jonathan freezes in place until her expression smooths out.

It’s kind of cute. The girl, that is. Not Jonathan. Or, well, whatever.

(“Are you gonna take your shoes off, or are they glued to your feet?” she hears Steve ask, that nearly-imperceptible chipping in his voice that tells her he’s trying to smooth over the argument-that-wasn’t.

It works, to a wash of relief that she isn’t quite sure why is intense as it is. Jonathan sarcastically replies, “It’s against my religion,” and Steve snorts a laugh, and everything’s alright again.)

Thunder continues to rumble outside, getting quieter as Nancy steps back behind Jonathan to close the front door, and she frowns to herself as her thoughts stray back to her brother. God, she hopes Mike is okay. He’s a little terror, but—well. She hopes he’s at least somewhere dry and warm.

The girl wakes up as soon as Jonathan puts her on the sofa, even though he does it as slowly and carefully as Nancy thinks it must be physically possible for a fifteen-year-old boy to do so. She blinks her big, round eyes and lifts a hand to the left one, rubbing it sleepily.

“Jonathan,” she says, enunciating carefully.

Jonathan looks bemused. “I—yeah, that’s me.”

The girl, seemingly just asking for confirmation, says nothing else.

“Nance,” Steve says suddenly, sharply, making Nancy jump. She turns to look at him, but he isn’t looking at her—or at Jonathan, Nancy realizes a second later as she follows his wide-eyed gaze. He’s looking at the girl, at the girl’s raised left wrist. At the three digits tattooed onto the soft skin in harsh black ink.

011.

And Nancy thinks she gets it, now.

“Jesus Christ,” whispers Jonathan, horror in his voice.

Bad man, indeed.

Steve doesn’t call the police, because for what it’s worth, he seems to be taking the girl—Eleven’s—threat about the bad men seriously. Instead, he anxiously walks the length of the living room over and over, as Nancy perches awkwardly on an armchair and Jonathan remains on the sofa with his camera and Eleven, who watches Steve with an expression of apparent interest.

“Aren’t you going to—um, call your parents?” Jonathan asks. “Will they be home soon?”

Steve pauses his nervy pacing to pull a hand through his drying hair and let out a harsh bark of mirthless laughter.

“My parents are gonna be at the casinos in Jersey for the next week and a half, man,” he says, through a smile that’s too full of teeth to be anything but plastic, likely to distract from the way his hand clenches and pulls on his hair. “And I’m not calling them, no way, that’s not happening. They’d go ballistic. Do you have any idea what they’d do if they knew I was holding some—some feral forest girl? What my dad would do to me?”

Nancy, having never met Steve’s parents even one time, doesn’t actually know what they would do to him, but the desperate look on his face and the fact that Jonathan seems to immediately get the gist doesn’t really reassure her.

Eleven pipes up from where she’s still carefully tucked into Jonathan’s side. “Is he… bad?”

Steve stops walking, and looks at her like he’s only just now seeing her. His hand doesn’t leave his hair, though. “What?”

Eleven shifts a bit. She taps the tattoo on her wrist with her opposite hand, and then points to Steve—and then, bizarrely, to Jonathan, nudging his wrist with her knuckles. “Know the bad men?”

“Oh,” says Steve, for the second time, a horrible weight to the word, and Nancy sees the moment Jonathan understands what Eleven’s actually asking.

“N—no, no,” he says, like he’s trying to reassure her, and tugs the left sleeve of his shirt up to expose his (blank, numberless) wrist. All that’s there are a few freckles. “No, I don’t know the bad men. I’m not from—where you are.” Wherever that is.

Eleven looks to Steve, then, like she wants the same confirmation from him, and to Nancy’s boundless astonishment he actually slides the sleeve of his sweater up for the girl to see without complaint. His wrist, too, of course, is blank.

“My dad, he’s just strict,” Steve says, the last word loaded in a way Nancy will never know the scope of. “He’s not—not one of the bad men, I swear.”

“Swear,” says Eleven, in that non-question way that Nancy’s starting to understand sometimes does mean a request for something.

“A swear is like a promise,” says Nancy, and three pairs of eyes move to land on her. “At least, how he means it. When you say that something will happen, or that something is true, and you really really mean it.”

It’s not the best explanation, but Eleven nods sagely, like Nancy’s just imparted a great bit of worldly wisdom upon her, and then turns her intense gaze back to Steve. “Don’t lie.”

“Wh—I’m not lying,” Steve half-shrieks, and yeah, Nancy can tell he’s reaching the end of his rope. Jonathan looks a little panicked, too. “What makes you think I’m lying?”

Eleven blinks, once, twice, and then turns her head to look out of the sliding glass doors behind them, the ones that lead into the back yard.

“You have the bath,” says Eleven simply, and points outside, through the glass, directly at the Harringtons’ six-foot swimming pool.

They don’t get an immediate answer as to what the bath might actually mean, because the landline phone affixed to the wall of the Harringtons’ front hallway chooses that moment to ring loudly, scaring all four of them out of their skins. Eleven startles the hardest, burying her little face in Jonathan’s shoulder and clinging to his arm.

Steve answers the phone with a brightly hollow “Harrington residence!” and yet another false smile that slowly slides off into a few consecutive looks of confusion, dawning horror, and blatant panic as whoever’s on the other line speaks. After about twenty seconds, he pulls the phone from his ear and holds it out towards them.

“It’s your mom, Byers,” he says bleakly.

Jonathan goes white, faster than Nancy’s ever seen a person pale before.

“How—how’d she even get your number? How’d she know I’m here?” he stutters, but the question is obviously rhetorical. Hawkins isn’t tiny, per se, but it’s definitely not big, and Joyce Byers is a force to be reckoned with when she wants to be. More importantly, though, at least at the moment—

“Does she know about—her?” Nancy asks, not particularly surreptitious, angling her head towards Eleven meaningfully. Steve, helpfully, has already covered the speaker of the phone with the palm of his hand.

“No, I don’t—I don’t think so,” he answers, uncharacteristically serious. “She was just asking for Jonathan. She’s, uh. Worried.” Beneath his hand, Joyce’s voice gets a little more urgent.

Jonathan closes his eyes and breathes deep, steeling himself. Nancy, unfamiliar with the idea of a mother this invested in the whereabouts of her high-school son, reaches out to carefully maneuver Eleven away from his side so he can stand up to get the phone. The girl goes willingly, but still stares after him as he crosses the room, even as she moves to lean on Nancy’s smaller, bonier shoulder instead. Her close-shorn hair is soft and fuzzy against Nancy’s cheek, and Nancy puts an arm around her on pure instinct. Bizarrely, she kind of wants to cry.

“Mom, I’m fine, we just—Mom,” Jonathan hisses into the phone receiver, turning away from Steve and Nancy in what seems to be embarrassment. Steve’s eyes flick back to his hunched shoulders pensively, something like worry coloring his face for a moment before it smooths back out into the mildly perturbed neutrality that Nancy’s starting to associate with tonight’s… everything.

“Mom,” question-says Eleven.

Nancy has to take a minute to process the fact that this little girl doesn’t know what a mom is before she even tries to answer, but by that time, Steve’s picked up the slack.

“A mom is like… a—a girl dad,” he tries, before shaking his head like he’s trying to clear water from his ears and starting over. “No, not what I mean. A mom is the person you were—the person who made you, I guess. She’s older, and she takes care of you and keeps you safe. Or, well. She’s supposed to,” he finishes lowly, side-eyeing nothing in particular. Behind him, Jonathan is gesticulating wildly with his hands as he argues with Joyce—something about study group and science project and yeah, I know about Mike, I’m sorry, I should have called!

Eleven squints a little, but she doesn’t look confused, exactly, just contemplative.

“Like Papa,” she says after a moment, furrowing her brow distrustfully.

Nancy doesn’t know what she’s talking about, but Steve flattens out his mouth and crosses his arms in a displeased way that doesn’t actually seem to be directed at anyone currently in the room.

“Nah, a mom is good,” he says, soft tone at odds with a hard expression. “Moms—they take care of you, like I said. They shouldn’t hurt you.”

Eleven nods seriously, clearly taking Steve’s explanation to heart. She absently reaches up to press at the bruise on her cheekbone, and then tilts her eyes towards Nancy’s arm, still around her shoulders.

“Mom,” she says again, looking up at Nancy, eyes narrowing skeptically.

Nancy feels her face flush red, and she thinks Steve muffles a snort of laughter with the palm of his hand. “What? No! I’m not old enough to be your mom, I’m only fifteen.”

Eleven actually does look confused, now, so Nancy asks, “How old are you?”

Eleven doesn’t answer, just cocks her head to the side, birdlike. It reminds Nancy of Dustin, a bit, or maybe of Erica Sinclair, who is eight and the most sarcastic girl Nancy has ever known and wears a bunch of little plastic butterfly clips in her hair that click together when she turns her head like that.

“How many years have you been around?” she clarifies. “How many birthdays have you had?”

Behind Steve, Jonathan finally puts the receiver back on the hook with a barely-audible click.

The space between Eleven’s eyebrows pinches in thought, before she gives a small shake of the head and replies, “Don’t know.”

Steve’s not laughing anymore, and neither is Nancy. Jonathan, several feet away, gives a great sigh and drags a hand morosely through his hair, which has mostly dried by now and is laying sort of flatly against his forehead.

“Mom won’t say how she got your number,” he mutters in Steve’s direction, receiving a dismissive doesn’t matter wave of the hand in return. “She doesn’t—she can’t know about… about her. Too dangerous.”

“Because of the—of the bad men?” Nancy asks, pulling Eleven a little closer against her side instinctively. The girl, for her part, allows it. “We don’t even know who these bad men are. For all we know, it could just be—I don’t know, her family. Her bad family, but—“

“Even if her dad was the one who hit her, I know bad family,” Jonathan says quietly, and in that moment, Nancy has never doubted him less.

He nods to Eleven’s wrist, the 011 tattoo stark black on her pale arm, like she’s been labelled as a piece of inventory instead of a little girl.

“This is something else.”

So, this is what happens next:

Eleven looks dead on her feet, and she doesn’t protest when Steve lifts her up—first by the underarms like a particularly large cat and then into a princess hold, like he does this all the time—and carries her upstairs. Nancy and Jonathan follow—Jonathan tucks his camera bag carefully into the arm of the sofa—and Nancy knows the way around, but Jonathan doesn’t, so she leads him.

(Having Jonathan here is weird, but also isn’t. Nancy’s known him for almost a decade, but she still doesn’t know him, not really. They’ve only ever existed in each other’s periphery.

Steve, for his part, while he’s never been outright hostile to Jonathan, has always seemed to hold him in some sort of vague contempt before now, so something about seeing the two of them interact like somewhat-friends—seeing Jonathan in Steve’s house like it’s nothing—is out-of-place, a bit, but in the kind of way where Nancy thinks (hopes? knows?) that she’ll get used to it.)

Nancy raids Steve’s dresser for whatever pajama-esque clothing she can find, since everyone has sort of unanimously, wordlessly agreed on a sleepover. (She figures she’ll call her mom in the morning—Nancy’s desire not to cause her any more concern is strong, but her desire not to get ordered home and immediately grounded for life is stronger. And Barb will understand if she waits, too. She won’t be happy, but she’ll understand.) She extracts a long-sleeved shirt and a pair of joggers for Jonathan, a tank top and a set of gym shorts for Steve, and a pair of too-large t-shirts for herself and Eleven before shutting the drawer with a thunk that echoes strangely in Steve’s large, empty bedroom.

The light that’s shining from down the hallway belongs to the master bathroom, and Nancy enters to find a sleepy-eyed Eleven sitting patiently on the sink counter as Jonathan inspects her various minor injuries. An uncapped tube of antiseptic ointment rests by Eleven’s leg, a pale sheen of it swept generously over the numerous small cuts that litter the girl’s arms and calves where her delicate skin had caught on thorn-bushes and rough tree branches during her expedition through the woods. Steve sits on the broad edge of the bathtub, elbows resting on his knees, watching Jonathan watch Eleven.

Jonathan’s hair is the exact same color as what little exists of Eleven’s—and his might be a little sharper, a little less youth-widened than hers, but they have the same brown eyes. He looks like he could be her older brother, too, right along with Will.

Nancy has never looked as closely at Jonathan Byers as she is right now before tonight. Steve’s expression is unreadable.

“Clothes,” says Nancy, breaking the weird, hazy silence, and Jonathan startles, focused as he was on the large scrape decorating Eleven’s left knee. Steve huffs a laugh. Eleven swings her leg a little.

“Jesus,” he says, clutching his chest, and then droops when he sees the bundle of fabric in Nancy’s arms. “Those gonna fit me?”

“They’re not mine,” Nancy replies, busying herself with pulling out the shirt she’d chosen for Eleven (the softest one she’d touched in that whole drawer—the kid deserves it after the night she seems to have had) and shaking it out of its folding. It’s blue with white lettering, Hawkins Middle stamped across the chest—one of Steve’s much older basketball shirts, the one from seventh grade that he’d accidentally ordered four sizes too big.

(She misses the way Jonathan glances nervously towards Steve, a sort of silent, anxious are you sure it’s okay question in his eyes, and she also misses the way that Steve gives another one of those carefully nonchalant duh, obviously? shrug-nods in return.)

Nancy hip-checks a bewildered Jonathan out of the way so that she can stand in front of Eleven, who slumps and sways where she sits like she’s an inch from falling asleep right into the porcelain sink basin. She has enough sense to ask before she carefully attempts to extract Eleven from the still-damp yellow shirt she’s wearing, not wanting to spook her, but the girl just tiredly raises her arms and allows Nancy to bunch the shirt up at the hem and pull it over her head. Steve and Jonathan look away, Jonathan coloring noticeably, but Nancy isn’t fazed—the girl can’t be older than ten, for God’s sake, she’s covered in bruises and scrapes, and it’s not as if she isn’t wearing underwear.

She’s skinny as hell, though. Not quite worryingly so, but enough to be noticeable. Her lowermost pair of ribs stick out a bit, her hips and collarbones are razor-sharp, and Nancy thinks she could touch her thumb to her own pinky around that tattooed wrist. It makes Nancy’s chest feel heavy with the injustice of it—this little girl, younger even than her own brother, that’s clearly been through so much and, if what she’d said to Steve was true, likely will go through more in the very near future. It just—it makes her sad.

She finishes pulling the blue shirt over Eleven’s head, mustering what she hopes is a somewhat reassuring smile when the big brown eyes make their grand re-entrance. To her surprise (and, she finds, her joy), Eleven gives a tiny smile back, just before her little button nose crinkles up and she proceeds to give a humongous, jaw-cracking yawn.

Nancy turns to the boys, blinking a bit when she does—they’ve turned back to face her, and both of them are looking at her like they’ve never seen her before.

“What?” she asks, defensive, and crosses her arms over her chest.

“Nothing, just—you’re good with her,” replies Steve, inclining his head a bit towards Eleven, who’s in the process of nodding off against Nancy’s shoulder. Jonathan tilts his own head in agreement like he doesn’t even know he’s doing it.

“Well, I have experience,” sniffs Nancy. “With Holly, you know. And—and Mike.” Her voice falters a little on her brother’s name. She needs to call Chief Hopper tomorrow, too, she reminds herself. After she calls Barb and her mom. Something tells her that the search party the three of them had split off from hadn’t found much of anything.

(Some part of her—a tiny, third-grade part of her—thinks that she’ll come home tomorrow to find her brother there, like nothing had ever happened, in the kitchen with his round middle-school face syrup-sticky from breakfast or in the basement with his friends or in her room using her record player to listen to Blondie even though he knows she hates when he doesn’t ask first. That this has all been some—bizarre dream, Steve and Jonathan and Eleven, the rain and the woods and Castle Byers and Night Ranger.

But the rest of her, the tenth-grade part, knows better. Wherever Mike is, Indiana or otherwise, dead or alive, he’s not coming back until someone finds him. Until Nancy finds him.)

She shakes her head, dismissing the line of conversation before either Steve or Jonathan can say anything, and abruptly changes the subject with, “Where’s she sleeping?”

Jonathan looks at her suspiciously, but Steve, because he knows Nancy, goes with it.

“Thought she could take my bed. It’s the biggest in the house besides my parents’. We—uh, the three of us—we could take the floor. Or, um, the guest room.”

Jonathan looks like someone’s just shoved a gun in between his shoulder blades, but Nancy nods determinedly before shoving most of the clothes in his direction, keeping the shirt she’d chosen for herself. “Okay, then. Out, while I change, and then we’ll get to bed. Tomorrow’s Saturday, so we’ll use the time off school to—I don’t know, plan our next move. Sound good?”

Jonathan nods, wide-eyed, like Nancy’s sudden authoritative tone has startled him. Steve says, “Yeah, alright,” in an agreeably clipped sort of way that translates to this is way out of my depth, but I’m going to do my best to go along with it for the moment anyway because I can’t see another immediate option. The two of them file out, and Nancy can vaguely hear them swapping whispers in the hallway beyond the door after she closes it behind them.

Nancy pulls the shower curtain in front of her, blocking her from Eleven’s gaze. She strips at top speed, shimmying with ease into the oversized shirt she’d swiped—Steve’s too-large clothes have been her attire of choice the only two other times she’s slept over—and steps back out just in time to catch Eleven as she nearly pitches forward off the sink counter, having finally, truly fallen asleep.

Nancy’s not particularly strong, but Eleven is so small and light that she finds little trouble in lifting her. She toes open the door to find Steve and Jonathan gone, but a light is on in Steve’s room down the hall—Nancy follows it, holding Eleven, and enters. Steve’s in the middle of yanking the comforter back to make room for someone to lie down, and Jonathan’s standing over by the door to the closet, hands in his pockets awkwardly. Both boys are in their respective sets of pajamas. Jonathan looks incredibly out-of-place in Steve’s gym sweats.

“Voila,” Steve says quietly, gesturing expansively to the bed. Nancy carefully lays Eleven down on it, taking care not to drop her and wake her up, and she has to remove the girl’s arms from where they’d unconsciously clasped around Nancy’s shoulders. As soon as she’s free of Nancy, Eleven curls into a little ball in the middle of the mess of sheets and blankets, giving a tiny contented sigh.

(Nancy doesn’t blame her—Steve’s bed is comfortable as hell.)

After a second in which no one moves or speaks, Steve reaches out, taking the edge of the comforter in a hand and pulling it back up so that it covers Eleven all the way up to her little chin, smoothing it out carefully over her pointy shoulders.

“She’s so tiny, man,” he says raptly, voicing what Nancy’s been thinking all night. “How old is she, nine, ten? I didn’t think they made fifth graders that little.”

“Will was that small,” Jonathan says, hardly audible both from the distance and his naturally sort of low, quiet voice. “Just a body type thing, on some level—but, also, um, I don’t think she’s been eating enough, so…”

“Yeah, that might do it,” Steve agrees absently, eyes still fixed on Eleven, before he looks away quickly and shakes his head, re-orienting himself. “Uh, anyway. D’you guys want the floor in here, or the guest room next door? Guest room’s got a bed.”

“How—like, how many beds?” Nancy asks.

Steve shrugs. “Just the one.”

Jonathan, Nancy thinks, almost perfectly resembles a ripe cherry with how red his face gets, but Steve seems unconcerned—or, more likely, oblivious as to the actual dilemma.

The bed in the guest room could easily fit three teenagers—it’s king-size, because this is the Harringtons’ house and of course it is—but Jonathan is somewhat adorably adamant about taking the floor. Steve pulls a great wad of clean-smelling fabric half again the size of his body out of the closet, and the mass of linen quickly resolves itself into a large selection of sheets and blankets that he deposits unceremoniously into Jonathan’s arms before announcing, “I’m still muddy as fuck, I need a shower,” and practically teleporting out of the room, pecking Nancy on the cheek as he goes. Nancy figures the slight inherent awkwardness of the entire situation is finally catching up to him, but he also did leave a smudgy handprint on one of the loose pillowcases he’d foisted off on Jonathan, so it’s not like there wasn’t at least a grain of truth to it.

Jonathan removes the offending pillowcase from the huge stack, dumping the rest of the linen onto the carpet and crouching down to attempt to wrestle it into something resembling a place to lie down. Nancy sits on the edge of the bed, watching—she’d ask if he wanted help, but Jonathan seems to be doing his own thing, separating fitteds from overhangs and duvets from afghans, and she doesn’t want to, like, block his flow.

“So, what do you think we should do?” she asks instead.

Jonathan inclines his head towards the mass of blankets he’s sifting through. “Sleep?”

Nancy rolls her eyes. “Tomorrow morning, I meant. With—y’know, with Eleven.”

Jonathan doesn’t reply for a long second, apparently directing every drop of his focus towards an impressively twisted-up quilt, before abruptly dropping it and levering himself down until he’s sitting on the floor. With his shoulders drooping and his legs splayed out in front of him like they are, he looks much younger than he is.

“I don’t know,” he says after a moment. “I feel like—what I want to do isn’t what we should do.”

“What should we do? In your professional opinion.”

“Call Social Services. Give her to Hopper, maybe.”

Nancy quirks an eyebrow. “And what do you want to do?”

Jonathan heaves a sigh, looking up at Nancy through his bangs.

“Keep her. At least for a while. I don’t—I can’t shake the feeling that something else is going on, you know?”

Nancy does know. She keeps seeing the harsh ink of that sharp, clinical 011 whenever she thinks about the girl sleeping in the next room.

“I just—I want to help her. Make sure we’re not just—I dunno, sending her right back to bad people. I keep seeing Will when I look at her,” Jonathan finishes, kind of self-consciously. He goes back to fussing with the blankets, shaking his head. “But, you know, that’s—we can’t do that. With Mike, and everything, it’s just—yeah. No.”

Nancy says, “I’ll help you.”

Jonathan’s head turns back up. “What?”

“I’ll help you,” Nancy repeats. “If—if you wanted. With the girl. If you were—looking into that. I would help.”

Jonathan stares at her, face unreadable, for a long, long second. Eventually, though, as the sound of the running shower down the hall peters into silence, the tiniest of smiles cracks through.

“Thanks,” says Jonathan.

Nancy can’t sleep.

It’s cold, Indiana-November cold, but Nancy’s warm; Steve’s pressed up against her back, clinging like—like cling wrap, or something, arms flung over her waist and a leg tangled with both of hers, and he radiates heat like a furnace because he’s a boy so she’s perfectly comfortable even though the thin blanket is only covering about half of her body.

No, she can’t sleep because of the sound of Jonathan’s shivering shifting around the blankets.

“Jonathan.”

No answer.

“Jonathan.”

“What,” he hisses back, an audible chatter in his teeth, turning as best he can within the lumpy mass of sheets he’s got covering him. He seems to have precariously engineered it so that no cold air is making direct contact with any exposed skin aside from his face, and would clearly like to keep it that way. He looks like a caterpillar.

“You look like a caterpillar,” says Nancy. Jonathan’s heavy eyebrows scrunch up hard in the middle, making him look almost cartoonishly offended. “Are you cold?”

Jonathan falters. “I mean, um. Yeah. Is the heat on?”

“I don’t think so,” Nancy whispers apologetically. “I don’t know how to change the thermostat, though, and he’ll be annoyed if I wake him up.” She tilts a shoulder in the direction of Steve, who’s still plastered against her back, fast asleep, unbothered, and snoring just a little through his nose.

Jonathan gives a resigned, guess I’ll die sort of sigh, letting his head fall back to where he’d been resting it from the slightly tilted-up position he’d taken when talking to Nancy. “Don’t worry about it, I’m fine.”

“You can sleep up here with us, if you want.”

Jonathan’s head shoots up again, so fast that Nancy is only half sure that she imagines the sound of his neck cracking. “What?”

Nancy shushes him, but thankfully Steve doesn’t stir. “I just mean, you know, if you’re cold sleeping by yourself. The bed is warm—we could share.”

“Eleven’s sleeping by herself.”

“Eleven is sleeping in Steve’s bedroom with a space heater and a blanket the size of Brazil, you’re not making a point,” Nancy replies. “Can you just—this bed is a king. You can sleep here without even touching us.”

A half-asleep “Just get in the bed, Byers,” floats up from Nancy’s other side, startling her a bit. Jonathan’s eyes get, if possible, even bigger in his face, the whites almost luminous in the dark.

“I don’t—I don’t want to make it weird,” he whispers urgently. Nancy thinks it would be less weird if they weren’t talking about it so much.

“You’re bein’ weird righ-now,” Steve slurs, apparently concurring, before shifting himself to bury his head further in the back of Nancy’s neck and apparently falling to sleep again. A quiet snore emanates from his direction.

“You heard the man,” Nancy says dryly, and gestures with her hand to the large, perfectly Jonathan-sized space on her right side. “Come on, you look like you’re gonna turn into a popsicle. It won’t be weird, I promise.”

Even in the dark, Nancy can see the exact millisecond that Jonathan gives in. His face sort of drops its anxious tightness, falling back into place from where it’d been tense with, in Nancy’s opinion, deeply unwarranted nerves. He sits up, letting the cocoon of thin sheets he’s wrapped himself in pool around his waist, and pulls a hand through his sleep-swirled hair to get it out of his eyes.

“You’re sure,” he half-asks, the way Eleven does.

“Yes,” answers Nancy, exasperated.

And so Jonathan wriggles out of the blankets, visibly cringing at the rush of icy autumn air against his exposed hands and feet, stands up, cautiously crosses over to the bed, and—at Nancy’s wordless, impatient urging—slips under the covers at her side.

Something kind of… clicks into place, then, in the back of Nancy’s mind, seeing him there at the same time she feels Steve’s arms around her, even though Jonathan very carefully isn’t looking at her or at Steve. Everything will be okay in the morning, and she falls asleep almost immediately between her boyfriend and her brother’s-best-friend’s-brother, her earlier restlessness forgotten.

(It’s a little weird, in Jonathan’s opinion. But Nancy and Steve don’t have to know that.

And, anyway, under the weird, it’s kind of nice.)