Archive of Our Own

“younger brothers never know what they put their big sisters through.”

—us against you, fredrik backman

night one: may 3, 1977

Technically, Nancy’s not supposed to use the phone without permission, but it’s not her fault someone’s calling their house at two in the morning. It is her fault she’s awake, of course, but that’s a different matter.

Her parents went to bed hours ago and Mike’s at his friend’s house for a sleepover, so it’s just Nancy left awake. Even though it’s not a school night, Mom knocked on the doorframe and told her lights out at nine-thirty, but Nancy’s ten and it’s a Friday and she’s in the middle of a book about Helen Keller that’s too fascinating to put down for something as arbitrary as bedtime. All this to say, she’s been reading under her covers with a flashlight since Mom’s stern and final warning around ten o’clock, but now the phone is ringing, and she sort of has to answer it, because otherwise it’ll wake Mom and Dad up—well, maybe not Dad, but still—and she’ll be grounded for forever if they catch her awake right now.

That wouldn’t be a problem but for the fact that dinner was hours ago, and Nancy’s hungry, so by sheer chance, she happens to be down in the kitchen, eating a bowl of cereal in the dark when the call comes through. The sudden clatter of noise in the quiet house startles her so badly she drops her spoon clear onto the floor.

She’s only supposed to answer the phone if everyone else is busy. Nancy’s a big girl now, which means she can get the door and check the mail and bike to school on her own, and it means she has to look out for Mike more, which sucks because he’s kind of a pain and always poking his nose into her business—just last week he decided he wants to be a writer because she wants to be one; gross, get your own personality, Mike!—but it also means she gets to answer the phone sometimes. Nancy likes doing that. It makes her feel important, even if it’s only when Mom’s busy and Dad’s watching TV (which Mom says doesn’t count as being busy and Dad says does, go figure). She likes the curly cord and the shiny plastic and saying Wheeler residence all grown-up and serious, just like Mom taught her. Maybe when she’s older, Nancy thinks, her parents will let her have her own phone, maybe even in her bedroom, just like some of the older girls at school brag about.

Anyway. The phone’s ringing, and Mom and Dad are asleep, which Nancy figures counts as busy, and she’d like them to stay that way until she’s safely back in bed and not grounded for life, thanks.

Before it can ring a second time, Nancy’s hopped up from her chair and grabbed the phone out of its cradle.

“Wheeler residence,” she says, though a little quieter than normal, just in case the ringing woke anyone up. It occurs to her, a second too late, that she could have just taken the phone off the hook and then hung up to stop the noise, but—well, what if it’s an emergency? People don’t just call at two in the morning for fun, right?

There’s a moment of silence, and then what sounds oddly like a sniffle. Nancy frowns. For a long few seconds, no one speaks.

Finally:

“…Nancy?”

Nancy says, “Mike? Is that you?”

“Yeah,” her brother answers quietly, voice suspiciously thick.

“It’s, like, really late,” Nancy tells him needlessly. “What are you doing?”

Another maybe-sniffle. “I wanna come home.”

Was that a creak from upstairs? Nancy cups her hand over the receiver and listens hard for a few seconds, but no—it was just the house settling.

“Okay,” she replies, not seeing what the big deal is, “so come home, then.”

Mike hesitates on the other end. She didn’t know he even knew how to use a phone, much less remembered their number. Is he standing on a chair in the Sinclairs’ dark kitchen right now, like a smaller version of her? When they were little—littler—everyone called Mike her shadow because he followed her everywhere, and she let him. They used to wear matching costumes for Halloween, she remembers, but last year they both decided they were too old for that.

“It’s dark,” her brother finally says, sounding embarrassed. Ashamed, maybe, that he’s scared of something like walking home in the dark. He doesn’t sound very old right now. He sounds six and tired and upset. “Can’t you come get me?”

Nancy groans. “You’re seriously one house down, Mike.”

If she leaves the house now and Mom somehow wakes up, or if she finds out about it ever, they’ll both be grounded for the rest of their lives. It’ll be Alcatraz in the Wheeler household right up until college. Maybe longer. She’s supposed to sleep over at Barb’s next week, and Nancy is not keen to cancel.

On the other end, her little brother is silent, except for what she now knows for certain to be a sniffle and a hiccup. Against her will, Nancy remembers how Mom told her, back when Mike started kindergarten, that she needs to be a good big sister and give grace because no matter how annoying she thinks her little brother is, he’s still her brother and anyway she used to be just as bad. Nancy doesn’t entirely believe that, mind you, because this is Mike they’re talking about, but—

Well, he’s upset. He’s crying.

It's the crying that gives her pause, really, because Mike rarely cries anymore. Last week, he took the training wheels off his bike on his own and skinned both his knees into a bloody mess from how many times he fell, but he just got right back up and tried again like it was nothing. But the day after that, the school called because he got into a fight during recess, and their parents scolded him until Mike was so angry he’d started crying—not because they were upset with him, but because he’d only pushed that kid after he purposefully tripped Mike’s best friend. Her little brother might be annoying, but he hasn’t shed a tear for himself since he was four.

Nancy feels bad, suddenly, about how shaky he sounds. How disappointed. And she realizes, right then, that he sounds disappointed now because he sounded hopeful when he first realized it was her who picked up the phone.

He’s only six.

More than that—he’s her little brother.

“Okay,” Nancy sighs. “I can come get you, if you want. Does Mrs. Sinclair know you’re leaving?”

Mike doesn’t respond, and his silence is somehow even more ashamed than before.

“Leave a note,” says Nancy, “or she’ll think you got, like, kidnapped or something, and we’ll never hear the end of it. I’ll be there in five minutes, okay?”

“Okay,” Mike says, a little shyly. “Thanks, Nancy.”

Nancy hangs up the phone without answering, but she can’t help the smile that tugs at her lips, just a little.

*

Mike’s waiting for her on the Sinclairs’ doorstep, elbows propped on his knees, looking very small under the peachy glow of the streetlights. She was right—he’s clearly been crying. Nancy stops on the walkway a few paces in front of him, kicking at the concrete with the toe of one sneaker.

“You know,” she says, tucking her hair behind one ear, “when I went to my first sleepover, I cried so hard I made myself throw up, and then Mom had to come pick me up. I kept telling everyone I was sick, but I wasn’t. I just didn’t want them to think I was a baby.”

“Oh,” says Mike, very quietly. His eyes are bloodshot. He needs a haircut; his fringe is falling all in his eyes, and it makes him look even younger. Even smaller. “I didn’t know that.”

She shrugs. “Tell anyone else I said that, and I’ll kill you.”

(He won’t tell anyone. Probably. Mike’s annoying, sure, but he’s not a snitch.)

Then Nancy holds out her hand and says, “Okay, come on.”

Mike bounces up from the step and grabs the offered hand, and they start back down the street, joined hands swinging it back and forth a little as they go. He hugs close to her side in the darkness, nearly tripping her a few times, but she can’t really bring herself to mind.

Nancy doesn’t let go all the way home.

night two: november 15, 1983

 Nancy hasn’t slept more than three consecutive hours in four days, and she hasn’t slept very well for longer. Since Barb disappeared, to be exact, so a week, but somehow it feels like longer. She keeps forgetting that Barb’s gone, really gone; keeps looking for her at school and reaching for the phone to call her every night.

She keeps the taped-together picture Jonathan took in her nightstand drawer and tries not to look at it and think about how it’s her fault that Barb’s dead. Barb was only at Steve’s because Nancy asked her, and when Nancy told her to go, she stayed and waited, because Barb is a good friend. Was a good friend. And it’s Nancy’s fault she’ll never be anything but someone who was good again.

If Nancy hadn’t made her stay, if Nancy hadn’t made her try shotgunning, if Nancy hadn’t told her to go home, if Nancy had just gone to the stupid assembly or stayed home in the first place, like she was supposed to; if, if, if—there are a thousand ifs Nancy can think of, a thousand ways she could have saved Barb and avoided this mess. But there was only one thing Nancy did, and that was let Barb down. Let her go. Let her die.

If Nancy had been a better friend, Barb would still be here, but she wasn’t, and Barb isn’t, and now Nancy hasn’t slept well for a single night since she lost her best friend.

(She understands, now, why Mike acted the way he did for the whole week Will was missing. But at least Will came back. Barb isn’t going to. Nancy tries not to be too bitter about that, but bitterness comes easily when you’re forced to swallow loss like a vitamin and pretend that nothing happened. Pretend that monsters aren’t real, and pretend that you’re okay, and so is your brother, and pretend that your friend’s just gone, not dead; that she may even come back someday.)

She and Mike have more in common than she used to think, because Mike hasn’t been sleeping well, either. Mike’s awake tonight, the same as Nancy, and she knows this because she can hear him sneaking past her door right now.

It’s only eleven-thirty. He might just be going down to the kitchen to get a snack. He might be doing any number of things that don’t involve leaving the house on his own, late at night—but Nancy knows that’s not true.

She gives him a three-minute head start, and then she gets up to follow him downstairs.

Nancy catches him in the garage, hands on his bike and stray tears on his cheeks.

“Where are you going?” she asks, folding her arms against the chill.

“Nowhere,” Mike says stubbornly, because it’s been barely three days and they’ve already slipped back to their old ways, passing by one another in the hall, refusing to speak, like lonely ships in the night. She can see how his hands are shaking without him having to say anything, though, and she’s heard him crying himself to sleep more than once on her way to the bathroom late at night. Nancy might not know everything about her brother, but she knows enough.

“Mike,” she says, and then, because he looks like he might run away or break down if she says the wrong thing: “You’re a really terrible lair.”

“Bullshit,” he grumbles, but he sounds a little less jumpy. A little more like himself.

“Hey,” Nancy says softly, stepping forward a little into the sphere of the garage light’s illumination, “I meant it when I said no more secrets, okay? Talk to me. I’m not gonna yell at you. I mean, do I look like Mom?”

It’s low-hanging fruit, just waiting for a classic little brother jibe, which is precisely why she said it. Mike doesn’t take the opening, though, which means this really is serious. Crying himself awake is serious. Her little brother having nightmares and refusing to talk to her after everything they went through—that’s serious. Nancy remembers all too well how not a week ago she stood in this very garage and used Will’s disappearance, used Mike’s reaction to it, as nothing but an excuse to get out of a date with Steve.

It's been really hard on my brother, she remembers saying. She had no idea how right she was just then, but she knows now, because the proof of it is standing right in front of her with hunched-up shoulders and lowered brows.

“Mike,” she says again, gentler this time. “You can talk to me.”

He looks down, shuffling his shoes against the concrete, and sighs. “I’m going to the hospital.”

Of course. She doesn’t know why she didn’t think of it sooner.

Nancy begins, “Mike—”

But there’s a stubborn jut to his chin, the one she knows so well because she sees it on herself in the mirror every single day now. It’s the look of someone who refuses to give up. Who can’t bear to. What’s she supposed to do, tell him no? Lock him in his room and not let him go? Maybe their parents would, but Nancy isn’t her mother, and she’s sure as hell not her father, either.

“Okay,” she decides. “I’m driving you.”

Mike’s eyebrows shoot up so fast she’s surprised they’re still attached to his face by the end of it. “You don’t have your license yet.”

Nancy shrugs. “I won’t tell if you won’t.”

Friends don’t tell lies, as Mike’s friends are always saying, and sisters don’t tell secrets. Neither do little brothers, when they happen to be Mike Wheeler. He got very good at keeping them when Nancy wasn’t paying attention, but that’s a thought that makes her a little sad, so she does her best not to dwell on it when she shoves Mike back into the house with stern orders to get a coat, Mike, while she retrieves the car keys.

Mostly, she succeeds.

*

The drive to the hospital is entirely silent. Nancy asks, just once, if Mike wants to talk about it—purposefully vague, in case there’s anything specific on his mind—and he shoots her down with a surly no, but he doesn’t tell her to fuck off or anything, so she figures he’s not actually mad at her, or at least not her specifically. He always gets snippy when he’s upset about something, and God knows they’ve got plenty to be upset about right now. So Nancy drives, and Mike sits in the passenger seat with his arms crossed, and they don’t talk about it.

So much for telling each other everything, right?

It’s way past visiting hours when they get to the hospital, but Mike has, astonishingly, charmed half the nurses there with his dedication to “his sweet little friend” since Will was admitted—he’s spent more time at Hawkins General than at home since Saturday night—so they let him and Nancy up to Will’s room for a bit.

Will is asleep. Mrs. Byers, however, isn’t. She’s sitting in a chair at her son’s bedside with her knees pulled up and her feet on the seat like a kid, coat draped around her shoulders. She watches him intensely, like she’s afraid he’ll evaporate into thin air if she so much as blinks or looks away. Her gaze snaps up when Mike pokes his head in the door, and she rubs at her eyes, blinking tiredly several times before she seems to register who he is.

“Hey, Mrs. Byers,” Mike says, offering a little wave as Nancy stands awkwardly behind him, unsure of what to say or what to do with her hands. She’s friends with Jonathan now, sure, but she hardly knows Joyce Byers, or even Will for that matter. She’s been busy with high school and her own life for the last couple years, neither of which really had room for the Byers in more than passing.

“Hi, sweetie,” Mrs. Byers says in a low voice, her brow furrowing. “Isn’t it a little late for visiting?”

Mike drags the toe of his sneaker along the tile with a mildly unbearable squeaking noise, chewing his lip until Nancy puts her hands on his shoulders and forcibly walks him a few more steps into the room. She feels weird just standing there in the doorway. She feels weird about this entire situation.

“Sorry,” her brother says at length, sounding uncharacteristically small. Nancy’s not sure when the last time she heard him apologize was. “I, uh—I just. Wanted to make sure Will was okay.”

Joyce Byers’ face softens, then, as she looks at him, and it reminds Nancy an awful lot of the way Mrs. Holland used to look at her and Barb when she’d check in on them during sleepovers and study sessions. Mrs. Byers looks at Mike almost like she looks at her own sons, and it makes something hitch in Nancy’s lungs to see.

“He’s doing just fine, Mike, I promise. Here,” she says, and unfolds herself from the chair with a grunt and a stretch, “you can sit with him for a little while, if you like. Just don’t wake him up.”

Mike darts across the room so fast Nancy almost doesn’t see him go. He scoots the chair right up to the edge of the bed, where he folds his arms beside one of Will’s and leans forward to rest his chin on them, seemingly content to sit there and watch his friend sleep. Under normal circumstances, it might be creepy. Here, it just seems sweet, and maybe a little sad—Mike watches him just like Mrs. Byers. Like he’s afraid he’ll disappear again.

Mrs. Byers, crossing the room, takes Nancy by the elbow and steers her gently out into the hall. She stops a few paces from the doorway, far enough to be out of earshot but close enough to where she can still see in to check on the boys, and then turns to Nancy.

“Is he all right?” she asks, and Nancy blinks.

“Who, Mike?”

Mrs. Byers nods.

Nancy shrugs a little helplessly. It’s not the easiest question to answer, especially considering she and Mike aren’t exactly close. “He’s okay, I think. Handling everything better than I expected, but—he worries about Will a lot.”

(A lot a lot. He’s gotten into more than one shouting match with their parents over being allowed to spend afterschool hours with Will this week.)

Mrs. Byers just sighs. It seems like everyone is worrying about Will Byers, and Nancy can understand why.

“He tried to sneak out and bike over here,” Nancy continues, shifting from foot to foot, “and I caught him, but he wasn’t really going to stop until he saw Will, so I drove him over instead. I figured it was better than letting him go by himself.”

This earns her a soft laugh and a squeeze from the hand still on her elbow.

“Yeah, I can imagine,” says Mrs. Byers with a tired smile. There are circles under her eyes and exhaustion hanging off her shoulders like a heavy winter coat. Nancy realizes, suddenly, that she looks the same kind of tired as Mike has for days now. The same kind of worried, and miserable, and hopeful, too. And then Nancy isn’t thinking about how Joyce Byers looks anymore, because she’s saying, “You’re a good sister, you know.”

The thing is, Nancy’s not sure she even knows how to be a sister anymore, much less a good one.

“Oh,” she manages, after an unexpectedly difficult swallow. “Um, thank you. I just—didn’t want anything to happen to him.”

Mrs. Byers’ eyes are sad when she says, “Trust me when I say I understand.”

*

Mike has fallen asleep when they step back into Will’s room, head pillowed on his crossed arms just a foot away from where Will’s face is half-mashed into the hospital-issued pillow. He looks more peaceful than he has in a week. In months, maybe. Nancy almost doesn’t want to wake him.

So she doesn’t.

Twelve years old is much too big for your sister to be carrying you to the car, but Nancy decides she can let it slide for the night. She’ll wake him up when they get home. For now, she carries him back to the passenger seat, head tucked into her neck, and she lets him sleep the whole way home. At least one of them should get some rest tonight.

night 3: november 7, 1984

It’s been two days since they closed the gate to the Upside Down, four days since they sent out the evidence against Hawkins Lab, and three hundred and sixty-five days since Nancy’s best friend died. Tomorrow is the official anniversary of Barbara Holland’s disappearance, and even the news breaking via the papers and surging across the nation like a wave isn’t enough to make Nancy feel much better about it. Barb’s still dead, after all, and now Bob Newby is, too, and a hell of a lot of people in Hawkins Lab, which may have been the place that got Barb killed, but they were still people. Nobody deserved to die like that. Like Barb did. Like Mike almost did, too.

Nancy is so fucking tired of monsters threatening everyone she cares about. She’s so tired of feeling like she can’t do a thing about it. Even getting the lab shut down won’t bring anyone back, won’t undo the hurt and close the wounds and rewind the clock back to a year ago, when everything made sense and nobody she loved was dead or different.

For a year, she’s felt like she’s drowning. She thought she’d feel better if the rest of the country drowned with her, but it turns out all it gets her is a hollow feeling in her gut when a sobbing Mrs. Holland calls her on the phone to break the news Nancy’s been swallowing down like bile for a year now.

It’s November 7, 1984, and Nancy Wheeler is still drowning. Her best friend is still dead, and her little brother still has nightmares, though these days he won’t admit it. She still doesn’t know what to do about any of it, either. She hasn’t for three hundred and sixty-five days. She hasn’t for maybe her entire life.

She’s already awake in the kitchen when Mike slips down the stairs and stops short at the sight of her. He’s not the only one who still has nightmares, after all. Nancy’s been avoiding him since Monday, because he’s been well and truly inseparable from Will. Nancy has nothing against Will Byers, but she can’t look at him without remembering what it was like to burn the Mind Flayer out of him, not just yet. You’d never be able to tell from his quiet demeanor and nervous smile, from the way he sticks to Mike’s side like a shadow, that just two days ago, he was screaming and sobbing as something else wrapped his hands around his own mother’s throat. That underneath the worn-out sweater he’s wearing, there’s a thick pad of gauze covering the spot where Nancy stabbed him with a red-hot poker that her palm still remembers when she falls asleep every night.

She looks at Will, and she remembers Jonathan falling apart on her shoulder, and the way she felt like—feels like—she should be falling apart too, except she can’t tell precisely where she ends and the person everyone else thinks she is begins. She doesn’t know if she can fall apart because it feels like there’s nothing left of her together in the first place.

Will’s asleep upstairs now. They spent last night at the Byers’ house, the whole little group of them, huddled together against the memory of Will’s disappearance a year ago that day, but tonight it’s just the two of them camped out in Mike’s room with the door shut tight against intrusion. Nancy has a feeling it can’t do much to keep out the dreams, though.

“Fancy meeting you here,” Nancy says from her spot at the island. Mike doesn’t say anything, but he wanders the rest of the way into the kitchen and starts poking around in the cabinets. “Couldn’t sleep either?”

“Not really,” Mike admits quietly. He’s been—different, since Eleven came back. Maybe since Bob died, though she can’t say for certain, because everything happened so fast that it left them all reeling. She thinks he’s okay, but it’s harder to get him to talk to her. It’s hard to remember to try.

Mike lets the cabinets fall shut with a thump, evidently not finding anything of interest, and clambers up so he’s sitting atop the counters, like Mom always yells at him for if he does it in front of her.

“Bad dream?”

Mike kicks a socked heel against the cabinet. “Something like that.”

“Yeah,” Nancy finds herself sighing. “Me too.”

For the last two nights, Nancy has had the same dream. In it, she finds herself back in Hopper’s cabin, glowing hellish orange in the firelight, sweat-slimed and suffocating in the stifling air. There are the heaters, and there is the bed, and here is the poker in Nancy’s hand, heavy and painfully warm against her palm. Except this time, it’s not Will Byers thrashing on the bed. This time, it’s not Will Byers who screams as she burns him.

In Nancy’s dreams, it’s always Mike.

She knows it’s not real, obviously, but the human brain can be surprisingly convincing in all the worst ways. Last night when it woke her up, she had to resist the temptation to do something stupid, like call the Byers’ number at two in the morning or sneak out and drive herself over to make sure he was okay. It was entirely irrational, and yet something behind Nancy’s sternum didn’t unclench until Mike banged in through the basement door the next morning with Will and Dustin in tow.

She’s weirdly glad that he’s here with her right now, even if it means he couldn’t sleep either. And then she feels guilty for feeling glad, but here’s the thing: Nancy Wheeler is seventeen years old and the eldest and a girl. She is good at acting proper, and she is better at being angry, and she is best at feeling guilty. She’s had a lot of practice, not just in the past year. If guilt were a subject, she’d be top of her class. She’s always been a quick study.

Mike’s giving her a quizzical look from his spot on the counter when she looks back up at him. He seems almost surprised by her admission. Nancy’s not sure what to do with that.

“Do you want hot chocolate?” she asks, partially to distract Mike, and mostly to distract herself. It doesn’t work, but it was worth a shot.

“Okay,” says Mike, in a tone that indicates he’s onto what she’s doing. He continues to watch her as she gets up and goes through all the steps—getting out the milk, fishing out packets of Swiss Miss from the cabinets, reaching over Mike’s head to pull two mugs from the cabinet. Or she would have done that last one if Mike weren’t already holding them out to her: the bright red one that he likes so much, and Nancy’s favorite. It’s painted with silver stars.

Barb gave it to her for Christmas two years ago. Three months ago, Mike used it when he wanted a glass of milk. He banged the rim against the sink and took a chip out, and Nancy yelled at him not to touch it again before hiding in her room and crying for an hour. It was a stupid thing to cry about, probably, and an even stupider thing to yell at her brother over, but grief has a way of making us stupid over the smallest things, like mugs and dreams and little brothers.

Nancy only stares at the mug for an extra second before taking it, very gently, and setting it down on the island. Once the milk is warming in a pan and the packets are emptied into the mugs, she pushes herself up onto the counter beside Mike, who is still looking at her curiously.

“What?” she finally asks.

“Nothing,” he says, too quickly.

Nancy rolls her eyes. “It’s not nothing, Mike. Did you think you had the monopoly on bad dreams, or something?”

He looks down to where he’s twisting his fingers up in the hem of his pajama top. “No. I just didn’t think you’d have them.”

Nancy tilts her head at the way he says it, like her having bad dreams is the strangest thing in the world, never mind the monsters and Mind Flayers and mirror dimensions they’ve been living with for the last year. “Why’s that?”

Mike shrugs one shoulder and keeps kicking his socked heels against the cabinets. “I dunno, you can actually, like, shoot guns and shit when the Demogorgons show up. It’s pretty badass.”

She blinks in surprise. Her little brother thinks she’s badass? Her little brother, who complains all the time about how she’s got a stick up her butt and stopped being fun five years ago? That little brother?

Mike says bitterly, “I just stand there and get in the way all the time. I don’t even have a wrist rocket.”

“A what?”

“Nothing,” Mike answers dully. “It doesn’t matter.”

But it does. It’s obvious to Nancy that it matters a lot, at least to Mike.

“Hey,” she says, bumping her shoulder against his, “I don’t know about any wrist rockets, but you were the one who figured out the Mind Flayer stuff.”

He looks up at her through his bangs, looking surprised and pleased. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Nancy says. “You’re not useless, you know. I mean”—(and here, she grins and kicks at his ankle)—"mostly, anyway.”

Mike kicks back and misses, but he’s smiling, and he’s here beside her on the counter, not devoured by Demodogs or screaming in her nightmares, and that’s fine for now.

For once, for a little while, Nancy doesn’t feel like she’s drowning. She’s just breathing. They both are.

And that’s enough.

night four: november 6, 1985

The walls of the Byers’ house, Nancy learned over the summer, were thin. So thin she and Jonathan had to be very, very quiet when she snuck in his window at night. So thin you could hear a conversation through them, almost like you were standing there in the other room yourself. Jonathan had apologized for it more than once, but Nancy could always tell he didn’t really mind, and that was because it meant he could hear Will on the other side of the wall and know he was okay.

Now the Byers’ house isn’t the Byers’ house anymore, and Nancy lies awake in her own room every night, in her house where the walls are not so thin. Today, she knows, is the two-year anniversary of Will’s disappearance. Maybe she should have checked in on Jonathan about that, but by the time she got home from the school newspaper’s meeting, Mike was already storming around the house and fuming silently, which meant that the line was still tied up, so there really wasn’t much point in trying.

Mike’s been quieter lately, since the Byers moved. Since the For Sale sign went up in their front yard late that summer, even, and Nancy found out before Jonathan even said anything because Mike had come home and thrown his bike down in the garage so hard he bent the spokes on the front wheel and had to fix it after. The day the Byers left for California notwithstanding, that was the last time Nancy saw him cry.

She wonders, lying awake in her bed late into the night, her on one side of the well-insulated wall and Mike on the other, if he’s crying right now. If he’s cried at all since then, and she’ll never know because she can’t hear anything but the faint, muffled sounds of his pacing next door.

(Nancy thinks there might be a metaphor in there, somewhere, but she writes for the newspaper, not novels. Metaphor’s never really been her thing.)

She also wonders if maybe he’ll come knock on her door like he used to last year, after that first night in the kitchen with the hot chocolate. Like he used to when they were really little, and he didn’t want to wake their parents.

He doesn’t.

Mike paces on one side of the wall, and Nancy lies awake on the other. Neither of them knocks on the other’s door, and neither of them sleeps much that night at all.

night five: march 29, 1986

The house is crammed full of people, and yet somehow, Nancy can’t find Mike anywhere. He’s not in the basement, still strewn with the sleeping bags and detritus of their spring break vigil, now occupied by one stoner pizza guy from California who Nancy still doesn’t know what to make of. He’s not in his room, offered up for Will and Jonathan to share until more permanent housing for the Byers can be arranged. He’s not in Nancy’s room, which he’s supposed to be sharing with her tonight, and he’s not in the living room or the kitchen or anywhere Nancy’s looked, and she’s—well, worried is too weak a word, but scared is a bit strong. Anxious, maybe, because outside there are dark clouds smothering the sky and otherworldly spores on the wind; outside there could be monsters lurking in the woods already; outside another world is invading their own again, and that was only the first part of the terrible things Henry Creel showed her when he invaded her mind in the Upside Down.

First came the clouds over Hawkins. Then the monsters, and the soldiers, and the teeth. And last came the broken, lifeless body of her little brother, and Nancy’s already lost a lot of people, too many of them in this last week alone. She’s not going to lose Mike, too.

It was a just a vision, she knows, but part of it has become reality, and she’ll fight like hell if that’s what it takes to make sure the rest of it never does.

Right now, seeing as they haven’t yet figured out exactly how to fight this—this being potentially the end of Hawkins as they know it—she’d at least settle for keeping an eye on Mike, which shouldn’t be that hard, since it’s well past nightfall and they’re all confined to one house, and said house only has so many rooms. The operative word, of course, being shouldn’t, because no one has seen Mike in at least half an hour, and Nancy, as mentioned, is a little anxious.

She’s just starting to wonder if he’s gone off and done something supremely stupid, even though his bike’s still in the garage, when she notices that her bedroom window is open, and she definitely didn’t leave it that way. She’s kept it firmly locked ever since the only person she’d care to have sneaking through it moved to California six months ago. Said person is back in Hawkins now, of course, but he’s staying in the room down the hall, so there’s not much need for windows when doors will do just fine.

Curious, Nancy crosses the room and peers out onto the roof, and sure enough—there Mike is, feet planted on the shingles, shoulders hunched until he’s sitting all slouched over his knees. He’s wearing pajama pants and a clean t-shirt, and his feet are preposterously bare. It can’t be more than forty degrees out; Nancy doesn’t know how Mike’s teeth aren’t chattering.

Her first instinct after the initial relief of seeing him very much intact and unharmed is to ask him what the hell he thinks he’s doing out on the roof in his pajamas when there are spores of unknown toxicity still floating heavily on the breeze. But first instincts, Nancy has learned, aren’t always the most levelheaded ones. Someone’s got to be responsible, and between the two of them, Nancy’s always been more focused on practicality. Instead of yelling, she gathers a quilt from the foot of her bed and slides out onto the roof beside him.

Up close, she can see Mike is shivering, though he’s wrapped his arms around himself in an effort to mask it. His hair is still damp from the shower, and he no longer smells like the weed and grease that permeated the pizza van earlier, strong enough to have Nancy breathing through her mouth the entire trip to and from Hopper’s half-wrecked cabin.

“Hey,” Nancy says softly, shuffling so she’s sitting elbow to elbow with her brother. She shakes out the folded quilt and offers it up to him, but he doesn’t look at her, just keeps his eyes trained down at their driveway and the road beyond. “Mike.”

No response. She sighs.

“Mike.”

“What,” Mike says, like he’s trying to sound angry, but his voice is trembling right along with the rest of him. Nancy wasn’t really expecting that. The last six months, they’ve grown further apart than ever. Somehow, Mike starting high school and being closer to her physically just sent them spiraling away from each other emotionally, like gravity sending unlucky comets irreparably far off into space, orbits unbound, never to return.

They ride to and from school together every morning and afternoon on weekdays and have for months, but Nancy can’t remember the last time the two of them had anything resembling a real conversation since last summer. Maybe they’re so similar they repel one another; the north ends of a magnet pushed too close together. Maybe distance comes naturally to Wheelers, and no matter how much they go through or how often they promise to stop keeping secrets, stop telling lies, they always end up back where they started, just like everyone else in their family: apart.

Not for the first or last time, Nancy Wheeler wishes her family were different. She wishes she could be more like Jonathan, actively involved in her brother’s life, capable of drawing him out of his shell with the right words or a hug. She wonders, just a little, if Mike wishes he were more like Will.

In the end, Nancy says none of this. Instead, she says, “It’s cold.”

Mike doesn’t say anything at all, but his shoulders slump a little and he leans closer, allowing her to wrap half the blanket over his back and the other half around herself. She chooses not to say anything about the whiteness of his knuckles where he fists his hand around the edge of the quilt. Maybe that’s the wrong call, maybe she should say something—but Mike doesn’t seem like he wants to talk very much, and Nancy knows the feeling.

“We probably shouldn’t be out here,” she says, once a very long few minutes have passed in silence and Mike has mostly stopped shivering. She holds out a hand, palm-up, and wrinkles her nose at the spores that drift down to settle against her skin. The air probably won’t kill them—she and the others survived crossing half of Hawkins in the Upside Down without any protection or repercussions, after all, and none of them are particularly worse off for it, other than— well, other than Eddie, but that’s a different matter. The air had nothing to do with that. Either way, they don’t know what else is out here with the spores and the storm and the gates.

Mike huffs out what might optimistically be considered a laugh, but Nancy’s a realist—it sounds more like a sigh.

“I know,” he mutters into his knees, “but there’s too many people inside.”

This, Nancy decides, is a fair point. Their house is fuller than ever and has been all week. It’s starting to get a little tiring. She’d kill for some peace and quiet.

Well, it’s quiet out here, she thinks. And it’s mostly peaceful, compared to the last few days. Mike’s quiet, too, she thinks.

Maybe too quiet.

“Are you okay?” Nancy asks, shifting a little closer so their arms are pressed together in one continuous line of warmth. Mike flinches a little, like he’s surprised at the contact, but he doesn’t pull away, doesn’t retreat any further into himself where she can’t ever hope to follow.

His fingers flex around the edge of the quilt, and she watches him open his mouth, then close it again, then swallow—hard, like he’s forcing something down.

Instead of answering her question, Mike asks, “Do you— are you ever angry?” Before she can answer, he continues, voice low and sort of strained, “I mean, like, really fucking angry. Whether you want to be or not.”

Nancy pushes a chunk of hair behind one ear as the breeze picks up, snatching at the edges of the blanket and making them both shiver. “Angry about what?”

And Mike, still not looking at her, says, “Everything.”

And the truth?

The truth is that Nancy Wheeler is eighteen years old and has dreams too big for this town, for her family, for her bones. Her father is distant and her mother is everything she doesn’t want to be and she has two younger siblings she’s supposed to be looking after but doesn’t even know what their favorite colors are, much less how they’re doing at any given time. The truth is that her best friend has been dead for nearly three years and her boyfriend’s been drifting and now some goddamn supernatural serial killer wants her town destroyed, and Nancy might not love the town of Hawkins, Indiana, but she’s not going to let someone else burn it to the ground if she can help it. No one takes her seriously, and no one seems to stay. Every night she dreams of shedding her skin and starting fresh, and every morning she wakes up to find she’s the same fucking person—one who can never be good enough, no matter what face she wears or how hard she works. She is never more than a girl, an eldest daughter, an older sister. She’s never more than herself.

The truth is that Nancy Wheeler has been full of an anger she doesn’t know what to do with since long before everything in Hawkins went to hell in a supernatural handbasket. Sometimes, it’s an anger that goes all the way down to her bones. Sometimes, she fears angry is the only thing she’ll ever be.

Hell hath no fury like Nancy Wheeler, to put it succinctly.

“Yeah,” Nancy breathes, somewhere between confession and laugh. “Yeah, Mike. I’m angry all the fucking time.”

When her brother finally looks at her, his eyes are bloodshot and his jaw is as clenched as his fingers, still fisted in the blanket, and Nancy finds herself wondering if anger can be hereditary. If it can pass down from one person to another, her hands to his fists, the same nails in the same palms, drawing the same blood, losing the same people. If they aren’t even more alike than she thought.

“Mike,” she begins, and finds that she’s come to the end of everything she can think to say. It comes out like an apology, though Nancy doesn’t know what the hell she’s even apologizing for. Their family? The loss of their childhood? The apocalypse happening around them? His best friend moving? Growing up? Sharing her room? None of that is her fault, except for maybe the last one, because she’s the one who suggested it, mostly to keep her brother where she could see him. That’s about the only thing that’s gone as planned lately.

Soft and a little bit strained, Mike says, “I’m sorry.”

That startles her.

“What have you got to be sorry about?”

Mike looks away from her, then, ducking his head back down to rest his forehead on his knees. Into the cradle of his arms, he mumbles something she can’t quite make out.

“What?” she asks.

Her brother heaves a sigh, this one short and sharp and not entirely directed at her. His head pops up, hair tugged across his cheeks by the wind, and his eyes stay trained firmly away from her when he says, “I said I’m mad at you. And that’s not— that’s not fucking fair.”

“Nothing’s fair, Mike,” Nancy replies, even before registering the weight of what he’s saying, because it’s true, and because she’s something of an expert on the matter. Then, gentler, “Why are you mad at me?”

The question is met with an extended silence. It drags on for so long that Nancy starts to wonder if he’s ever going to answer, but then Mike sniffs, swallows, and speaks.

“Dustin told me about Eddie,” he whispers, fingers fiddling with the fraying edge of the quilt.

Oh, Nancy things. Yeah, that’s— oh.

“And it’s stupid,” Mike continues, blinking rapidly. “It’s stupid to be so angry because it’s not like I could have done anything. But I’m so fucking sick of feeling sad.”

She wants to ask him what he has to feel sad about, but she doesn’t. This is partially because Nancy feels like she’s used up all her bravery for this week, and partially because Mike makes a face after he says it that seems to indicate he didn’t mean to say that part out loud—and also because he keeps talking after, faster and faster like he can’t help himself, like a train coming off its tracks, like running downhill, one wrong step away from disaster.

“Nobody saved him, and he’s dead, and I wasn’t here, and Max is in a coma and everything’s gone to shit,” her brother says, voice splintering in the frosty air. A few tears escape onto his cheeks, and he dashes them away furiously. “And it’s not fair to be mad at Dustin because he, he had to— he saw it, you know, which is so fucked up, and it’s even less fair to be mad at you because you were, like, fighting One and shit, but at least you’ll yell at me that I’m being stupid—”

“Mike,” Nancy says loudly, reaching out and gripping him by the shoulders. “Breathe.”

He stares up at her, mouth hanging open, chest heaving shallowly. She can feel his bones moving under her fingers. Jesus, why is he so scrawny? Has he always looked this breakable?

Over the last year, Mike’s shot up like a weed, grown his hair out and lost some of his baby fat and gotten into—and lost—more than a few fights at school. She forgot, somewhere along the way, that he was ever little, especially when he started rolling his eyes and sighing dramatically when she calls him her little brother instead of younger.

Mike looks very small out here on the roof, shuddering under Nancy’s hands.

“Breathe,” Nancy commands again, and Mike nods jerkily, just once.

They breathe—in and out, in and out, as the spores drift down all around.

After a few minutes, Mike makes a strangled sort of noise that might be his best attempt at a laugh.

“Sorry,” he says again.

“It’s okay,” Nancy replies, because, oddly enough, it is. It’s easy to be angry at a sibling, she thinks. Safe. Expected, even. It’s harder to come back from being angry with a friend. If anything, this makes them even—after all, she spent so long unfairly angry at him for something he couldn’t control. It wasn’t Mike’s fault that he got Will back while Nancy lost Barb. Mike always seemed to come out on top, somehow. He got Will back twice. He got El back, too. Even Hopper, of all people. She was almost jealous of him, because it didn’t ever work that way for Nancy.

But she’s not jealous now. Time and again, her brother has held onto people, has found them when they’re lost and managed to keep them when it seemed like he wouldn’t. But not this time. Not Eddie.

“It’s okay,” Nancy says again, softer. She wonders if she’s trying to convince herself or Mike. She’s not sure it’s working on either front.

He opens his mouth, presumably to protest, but she silences him with a look. “I don’t mind, I promise. And—I’m sorry, by the way. About Eddie. I can see why you liked him.” Here, she offers him a faint sort of smile. “He was a pretty cool guy.”

Mike looks down at his lap at her use of the past tense. It tastes sour and heavy in her mouth, like the regret that swells on the back of her tongue when Nancy thinks too hard about the people they’ve lost since this war they’re waging began.

“Yeah,” he says quietly. “He was.”

“I’m sorry,” Nancy tells him. “I’m sorry I couldn’t—”

Mike just shakes his head, cutting her off. “It’s not your fault.”

It wasn’t his, either, but he doesn’t seem to care about that.

He sighs harshly and scrubs at his face with a corner of the blanket. “I’m sorry I wasn’t, y’know. Here. But for what it’s worth…I’m glad you were.” He laughs—a watery, wavering sound. “Everyone probably would’ve been a lot worse off if you weren’t.”

“Oh,” she says, startled and pleasantly surprised. Mike isn’t normally one to give out compliments—at least, not to her. Not really to anyone but his friends. “Um. Thanks.”

She’s too caught off guard by it to say what she’s thinking, which is that she’s glad that Mike was far, far away from Hawkins last week. He wasn’t safe, per se, but he was a hell of a lot closer to it than he would have been here. When she closes her eyes, she can still see Max’s crumpled form, Lucas’ battered face and Steve’s bloody stomach. She blinks and relives the things Henry showed her. She blinks and her brother is dead. Blinks again and he’s right in front of her, half curled into her side on the rooftop, hair falling into his eyes.

He's so much like that kid she walked home from Lucas’ house all those years ago. Still smaller than he seems, still hates when people see him cry, still desperately needs a haircut. She knows, now, that he’s not going to get one. She knows him better and yet not at all.

“What are you angry about?” Mike asks finally, speaking half into her shoulder. Nancy glances down at him, hands stilling where they’d been readjusting the blanket around both of them.

“Who said I was angry?” she asks.

Mike says, “You did. Before.”

And it’s true. She did say that. She just didn’t expect him to ask about it. She doesn’t expect a lot of things about Mike these days—for example, the way he’s looking at her now, clearly waiting for an answer, unable to understand half of the ones she can think to give.

In the end, Nancy picks what is both the easiest and perhaps the cruelest answer.

“I was angry about Barb,” she says. “That she died when Will didn’t. I was angry that you got your best friend back and I didn’t.”

No more secrets, she thinks, right? If it’s not too late to live up to her word. If Mike can be honest about this, so can she. He showed her a small and ugly part of himself, and she’ll do the same, tit for tat, action and reaction. Secret for secret, truth for truth.

Mike repeats, “Was?”

Nancy sighs, shaking her bangs out of her eyes and smiling a little. “Okay, I still am. Well, I’m not— I’m not really angry at Will, you know, or at you. I’m just,” she pauses, searching for words. Mike just waits. “I’m just angry, I guess. Barb didn’t do anything to deserve it. She did literally the opposite of that. And I wasn’t there to— I wasn’t there. I didn’t stop it. And I’m angry.”

She looks down and lets out a quiet breath.

“Maybe I always will be.”

There’s a pause while Mike absorbs this. And then:

“I guess we’re even,” he decides, and Nancy is pulled out of the past, where he’s still shorter than her and hasn’t yet lost anyone in a permanent, unfixable way.

“I wish we weren’t,” Nancy whispers. She doesn’t want anyone to have to live with this feeling that has been gnawing a hole through her ribs since that night in sophomore year. She doesn’t want her little brother to grieve any more than he already has.

She wishes, not for the first time, and not for her own sake, that she and Mike weren’t so similar. She wishes she could have kept him safe from this, though she knows he’s been entangled in everything even before she was.

Maybe a small part of her is grateful, horrible as it seems, that someone understands what she’s been living with, but she’d trade it in a second if it meant she could have saved her brother’s friend, saved her brother this pain, saved anyone from anything. Anyone at all. Nancy would take loneliness over Mike’s devastation any day, because at least she’s used to being lonely, and because that’s what sisters do—they carry the things no one else can.

“Why didn’t you say something?” Mike asks, sounding hesitant but curious.

“About Barb?”

He nods.

Nancy shrugs. “We’re not very good at talking to each other, I guess.”

“We didn’t use to be,” Mike says, and she wonders if she’s imagining the wistfulness in his tone. Probably he’s just tired. Probably they both are—it’s been a very, very long week, and it’s late and cold and dark and they should be inside, asleep. Nancy knows all of this, and despite it, she stays right where she is.

Mike shifts so he can rest his head on Nancy’s shoulder. He does it lightly, cautiously, and she leans her cheek atop his still-damp hair, holding very, very still, as if he’s a bird she doesn’t want to scare away. It’s nice, and comforting, and not the kind of thing they usually do at all.

“Remember when you used to dress up for our campaigns?” Mike asks quietly.

Nancy huffs out a laugh. Does she ever. “Yeah.”

When she was fourteen, she went through their mom’s Polaroids and picked out every single shot of her in costume with his friends. She still has them stashed in a shoebox in her closet, where no one can bring them out to embarrass her. She’s not so sure that’s the biggest of her worries anymore.

Honestly, it had been pretty fun, at least while it lasted. They used to be close, the two of them, a long time ago. She doesn’t like to think about it, usually, because it means thinking about how they aren’t anymore.

Mike asks, very quietly, “Why’d we stop?”

“I guess,” Nancy says back, just as soft, “you grew up on me.”

As the wind picks up, tearing at the edges of the quilt and the ends of their hair, she feels Mike let out a shuddering sigh against her collarbone.

“You grew up first,” he murmurs, just loud enough for her to hear. “What else was I supposed to do?”

In many ways, she thinks, he’ll always be the kid who used to follow her everywhere when they were little, who wanted to be just like her, who just wanted her to like him, who kept following doggedly in her footsteps even when they led him astray. Even when he didn’t want to. Even when he thought he wasn’t. Nancy grew up, and he grew up after her, and somewhere in there, they grew apart, too.

But maybe—maybe they can grow back together. Maybe they don’t have to be like this forever. That would be nice. Nancy would like that. Probably Mike would, too.

“Hey, Nance,” Mike says suddenly, pulling her out of her head and abruptly back to the rooftop, which is starting to get uncomfortably cold by this point.

She hums questioningly, finally daring to wrap her arm around his shoulders and pull him a little closer under the blanket. It’s almost a hug, but not quite.

Mike asks, “Do you think— I mean. Are we gonna be okay?”

And Nancy?

Nancy is scared sometimes and angry always and she hasn’t been okay for a very long time. The world is falling apart, and so is she, and so are all of them. There’s a chance they won’t make it out of this, and a very good one at that. But the truth? The truth is this:

“I hope so,” Nancy tells him, and it sounds a little like a wish.

“Yeah,” Mike says, and snakes his own arm around her waist. “Me too.”