Chapter Text
Whenever Nancy blinks, it’s not the jelly-bean lights, red and blue and green, shining blearily into her home.
It’s silhouettes flinching away from the screeching—a gun with no bullets, a bat that’s struck too many nails. It’s the screaming in her throat, the screaming across her palm. Red, a dozen mouths open in shock. White, eyes wide and wider. It’s fire. It’s the form writhing within.
“Nancy?”
She blinks, frowning.
It’s heads craned together, voices like spun sugar. Puzzle pieces scattered in a carpet, the wrong socks packed in the wrong bag. Laughing so close that his laugh becomes yours. Pink, the shade of cheeks drunk on attention. Green, his eyes wide and wider. It’s fire. It’s your skin lighting within.
The end of the world as you know it, once, twice.
Break the monster.
Break his heart.
“Nancy.”
The fire waves back—the fireplace. Her home. Lost time stretches, languid. Voices, soft. Not terrified.
Buttery, amber shades of light that bleed into the constant snowfall outside; embers, more embers. It all looks like it’s on fire, or on the verge. Ash and embers and if Nancy isn’t careful, she’ll start breathing them all in great, heaving inhales—screaming in her throat, screaming across her—
“Um… earth to Nance?”
No one’s screaming.
In fact, they're all looking at her. The table tilts, a tidal wave’s worth of curiosity.
Nancy pauses.
She’s here. At home. Her family's Christmas dinner. Too many chairs for one table. Smashed feet, knocked elbows, the wrong fork in the wrong hand, two place-settings burning in their emptiness. Shitty sweaters, longer hair and shorter hair, circles under eyes, bitten nails.
The rough threads of her dress scratch the back of her arms as she shifts.
Nancy no longer lives here, she wears her hair in ways that make her mother’s mouth twist, she’s abandoned the fear of suburbia. And yet, the same gnawing anxiousness her mother seems to radiate all the same, mutating the latent reflex to please, to host into a series of jerky, awkward motions. Take coats, slosh wine. Ask questions, forget facts.
She forgot half of what she was supposed to bring at her apartment—she’s a suitcase that’s partially open and spilling out. No toothbrush, only one pair of jeans. A too-thin jacket, one glove.
There’s only one light on, barely enough to power the whole machine. Enough to wake up, nibble on toast, walk aimlessly. Listen to Holly as she relays Derek’s failed attempt to overthrow their PE teacher. Read Mike’s thirtieth draft, a dull throb where her own loss would be.
A quick trip, she told herself, there and back. The needle in, the needle out.
Clean out her mother’s closet, hold up sequined skirts you never knew she had. Sit silently while your father watches television, laugh at the nonsensical joke he cracks.
It’ll fly by, she told herself, nothing to worry about. Shallow wounds, nothing to clean, nothing to cry over.
Nancy spends the days before Christmas a shade, a wraith, a ghost, a phantom, drifting—doomed by what novels call prophecy and knotted fate, by what real life names herself—letting time consume itself until she’s zipping up her dress, she’s cramming her feet into shoes that pinch her toes, she’s helping Mike move their table into the family room, the only space big enough for everyone to fit.
Booking the flight to come home hadn’t been a nightmare, alternating between ugly, hiccuping sobs and a complete lack of anything while the poor travel agent wrote as fast as he could, keeping an uneasy eye trained on her. Every muscle remained tensed, locked into the same position she’s been toying with for years and years, now. Run at the slightest provocation, flee when you remember yourself.
The paperwork had swum in her blurred vision, the words Hawkins, Indiana rearranging themselves—
Too small for you. Well, good luck, Nance. Good luck finding somewhere that’ll—
If she looks over to the left, she’ll find the tiles they scrubbed their fingertips off on. If she looks upstairs, she’ll find the carpet they had to rip up. If she stares too long at the bathroom, she’ll remember the bathtub can hide a body, two bodies.
Her home is the same and it isn’t.
The worst part is that everyone seems concerningly unconcerned with them. Nancy supposes this is when she should tell herself to relax, that she doesn’t need to be on her guard, that she’s around the only people in the whole world who know what it happened and know what it cost, but she’s found that it doesn’t matter who tells her to relax, that it’s over, that she can move on, she’s still in the corner collecting dust. Plan the exits, form the weapons, react fast and faster.
It can always change for the worse.
Smoke rattles around her lungs, souring whatever half-smile she spins from nothing.
“What was that?”
“When are those assholes gonna give you the reins, Nance? That was the idea, right?”
Nancy swallows a mouthful of green beans, looking thoughtfully down at the paper that’s slowly being covered by errant potatoes and gravy. (She doesn’t mind. Doesn’t matter now.)
She brought home a copy of the Herald, pages splayed open like a downed bird. Her name’s small and yet the same typeface as Harper’s, but anyone who’s in the industry knows that a name following a comma might as well be a name redacted.
“Guess it’s a waiting game now.” Nancy shrugs, one of the straps of her dress sliding down further. “I think this was the test, and I hope that after Christmas they’ll have something to say.”
Dustin splutters from behind a dark pair of glasses. “Seriously? A test? Don’t they know what a brilliant mind landed right in their laps?”
Nancy doesn’t have the heart to tell them the truth—that she had in fact passed the test and Marcus had been thrilled by her competency. Not that she had been allowed to write that much, Harper had her claws all over the copy and seemed to ignore that she had spent weeks with little sleep cobbling interviews and notes and observations into a tapestry worth more than a tabloid, endless tabs on possible angles they could continue the story, her voice recorder bursting at the seams.
Do you ever not run full tilt? Robin asks, hands braced on her hips as the two of them stare at the crawl map.
I can’t, Nancy admitted simply. Don’t know how.
Her knees have enough scar tissue to shock a grown man because she wouldn’t take no for an answer, not even from her own bicycle, the wheels still spinning as it lay upside-down in the gutter. Her shoulder has a permanent mark from her shotgun, the fingerprint of violence rippling whenever it catches the light.
She used to think it was a gift, a super-power even. To commit so much of herself to whatever she was doing, a ruthless shedding of anything holding her back, the unbearable drive to achieve, sinking your teeth into the flying colors and tearing.
Now…
Nancy sees the curse for what it is, even as it plays out.
Cut off dead weight. Cut off things holding you back. Cut off, remove, excise. Be faster, be smarter, be better. Always be better than the day before, than the person who bites first, walks away second. Don’t be that person. Don’t not be that person, because the world doesn’t particularly care. There’s only ever been one person that cares—only one person who’s planted their feet in stubborn insistence that deleting the parts of yourself by burying your fist in the mirror when the glimpse turns into a gaze is no way to live—but even that one person can become stretched too thin if you pull enough.
Cut the thread.
Remove the ties.
Lighter. Faster. Smarter. Better.
Doesn’t matter if you get there alone.
So long as you get there.
(But where is there? Where is she going? What is there to do without that smile at your side?)
She reigned, she rusted.
You’ll have to forgive Nancy for being verbose. The firehose has always held an appeal.
Holly and Mike appraise her, features blurring until it’s their mother in fast-motion miniatures. Nancy inherited their grandmother’s watery blue eyes. Her penchant for a nasty temper, too. It used to be a point of pride—to be the vision of the woman who made her own father pause, but… now it’s almost a bad taste in her mouth.
Her siblings look on curiously, waiting for the details they've been denied despite the hair’s-breadth proximity. To them, she’s just as closed of a book, a sore thumb halting the shimmering garlands, lulled music.
In all fairness, it’s easy to pass off her remoteness as overworked, reddened nail-beds and dwindling silences the product of someone who’s crammed into the slices of her keyboard and not someone who stares at the ceiling until the shapes resembles two people in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Hugs clung to Nancy like diaphanous vapors, crinkled grins plinking off armor she never bothered unbuckling.
How are you? You seem tired. What's the weather like there? Has Boston made you soft?
I heard you’re already on the Dean’s List. Isn't that something reserved for someone who's been in school for longer than a semester? Did you pay someone?
Three more inches—I swear. You’ve grown, and I think those pants are too short for you. Don't give me that look, I didn't come here to see your ankles.
As the kids streamed in, Hopper watching Joyce squeeze Will like it would conjure El out the distant lands she’s been haunting, Nancy remained a perfect shell, even when Max strove to catalogue all the changes she’s missed, relentless, commenting on the shade of her eyeshadow, whether or not the city’s gotten to her, if she sits on a fire-escape and watches the world go by. (Max seemed of the mind that Nancy was glamorous, polished.)
A shell. The outside wore a pretty dress, the inside howled.
Nancy shrugs lightly. “One of these days they’ll let up.”
“Jonathan can’t catch a break either, honey,” Joyce commiserates as she drags a fork across her plate.
If it had been a month earlier, Nancy would have exchanged something with Robin.
Now, she thinks about the odd symmetry of her refusal to travel to California paired against his refusal to travel from California.
“I can’t believe Steve couldn’t make it.” Lucas shakes his head sadly, the automatic shift from one grown man to another, from one older brother to another. “This is, like, his dream.” (Nancy withers at dream.) “He’s always complaining about being left behind, and now that we’re all here, the asshole’s off on his own side-quest.”
“No, he said his hands were tied. He had to go to another dinner with… what’s her name?” Dustin squints, lost in thought. “I can’t remember—they rotate so fast. Kimberly?”
“Kelsey, I think.” Max chews thoughtfully, plucking the roll teetering dangerously from the edge of Lucas’ plate. He gives her a look, something to the extent of there’s plenty more, in front of you.
“Yeah—he said he couldn’t leave her behind,” he adds, rolling his eyes. “What a sap.”
Nancy flinches. It doesn’t take a genius to know that’s a jab at her. Even the words that Dustin unknowingly uses verbatim are a finely crafted insult aimed for the worst, festering parts of her.
She deserves it, wholeheartedly.
Doesn’t mean it feels good.
“Children, children,” Robin clucks. “I think we’re all forgetting that Steve lives here. You can still see him tomorrow."
“At his new place?”
“No. He didn’t get it.”
“What do you mean he didn’t get it? His parents know that family. He could’ve gotten it in a heartbeat.”
“I don’t know. He just… waited too long, I guess.”
“For what?” Mike snorts.
Robin’s gaze glitters as she meets Nancy’s eyes, unreadable. Not that she blames her—not that she’s surprised. She treasures her friendship, the girl she’s spent days made of lingering headaches and fried food and ripped maps, but it didn’t come first. Nancy wasn’t the one in the mall.
“What are any of us ever waiting for?”
Inside her head, this is going very differently.
The dragon rears back. This is going exactly how you knew it always would.
In no time she’ll be back in Boston, back home—not home, not not-home, a place, a box, a cell, a coffin. The price of leaving is worth the cost, or however it goes.
The needle will be out as soon as it was in, only a pinprick of blood. String lights flash, gleam. Green, blue, red.
Nothing to cry about—
The front door swings open with breathtaking gusto, swirls of snow threading in a tangled web.
A flickering form, head a rakish tilt. The angel of death, hands buried deep in his pockets.
The needle wobbles, the suture barking.
He wasn’t supposed to show. He was with Kimberly—Kelsey.
He wasn’t supposed to show, Nancy thinks again, too numb to call the spindly fingers dragging up her throat panic.
She’s frozen in her chair, goosebumps prickling, the look out! after the crunch of a car-wreck.
Reflexively, Nancy glances upstairs, towards the bag burning a hole through the second-floor carpeting. A gun that’s only even been pointed at her, a gun she should have left back in Boston.
Her mother is the first to gasp, rising from her chair in one fluid motion, arms open wide in permanent welcome.
“Steve!” She hurries over to the door, dusting off his shoulders, ushering the swaying figure further inside. Click! goes the door, the snowfall cuts off. “What are you doing here?”
“Couldn’t miss seeing my best girl.” Steve pecks a small kiss to her cheek. His cheeks are flushed, hair dusted with snow. “Couldn’t miss seeing all of you.”
A small chorus of cheers flow past Nancy, ruffling her hair.
“Did you walk?” Her mother demands, hands fluttering around him. She enjoys a good fuss, and despite Nancy’s own misgivings, it soothes something in her. “It’s freezing! You’ll be lucky to wake up tomorrow with only a sore throat.”
“Went a little crazy with the schnapps, I think,” he admits cheekily, the glint in his eye twinkling dangerously over her mother’s shoulder, pinning Nancy in place. So that’s how they’ll play: dealing in measured words, booze the silky, slippery veil it promises to be. “Next thing I know, I’m walking up the front steps. Nice decorations, by the way.”
Her mother rolls her eyes, touching the wreath lightly. “If this is a roundabout way of complimenting yourself, I’ll spare us the trip and say thank you.” She glances backward at the flickering curiosity, explaining, “Who do you think strung the lights around the roof? Not your father—he…” He can’t move that side of his body the same.
In response, her father grunts and shovels another mouthful of potatoes in.
Nancy regrets not asking who did that. She had noticed them the other day, wondering why this year and not last they made it, smiling out into the snow-dusted trees.
There’s a rush and a clambering as Steve’s tackled by a small army of children—or, small no more. They’re older and stronger, he takes a staggering step back, wrapping them up until it’s only his eyes squeezed shut, hands splayed as he gathers them closer and closer and it’s the portrait it always was, Steve and the overabundance of love sprouting at his feet.
His gaze moves slowly across the scene, taking it in—what was interrupted.
Nancy knows she’s staring, knows she hasn’t rearranged her expression properly. Robin’s waiting too, only three people in the whole room inching across shallow ice. Everyone else skates by, blissfully unaware. Bing Crosby’s voice distorts, ducking out of harm’s reach.
“Nancy.” Not Nance. Has he made his first move? Wasn’t it coming here in the first place? “Long time no see,” Steve says, waiting, almost awkwardly—not quite close enough to the table, more than a few steps past the front door.
She smarts. Ah. There it is.
It’s itching at a few of the people at the table, shifting in their seats, an impatient sort of inhale gathering and gathering and now it’s on Nancy, pick up the gauntlet, lest she string together seconds into a frigid nightmare.
Robin leans away from the table to cough, waving a poor excuse about fir-scented candles.
A year has folded itself into two weeks, sticky lashes and exposed teeth popping up before the page turns, a new spread springing into place: the reeling girl, the gloating boy.
Is it too late to say she doesn’t want to play this game?
“Steve,” she finally says, one word leaving grooves in the wood paneling. Glass ornaments shake from the branches of their tree, stockings trembling against the mantle. Snow bats at the window panes, a cold sweat slithers down her back.
A tether snaps. Springing into motion, Steve walks straight towards her—what is he doing, the table, he’ll run into it—and swerves at the last second, eliciting a sort of gasp that smooths itself into a laugh as he makes another glib excuse about the liquor at Kelsey’s place, and the world rights itself beneath the silken tone and the careless deprecation.
Nancy doesn’t bother to hide her unease.
He runs a mechanical eye down the length of her. She hates that she wore this dress, she hates that she wanted him to notice her in it, she hates that he does, the betrayal when the hook slides in; midnight blue, spilled shadows.
I know how to hurt you too.
He slides into the space directly across from her, a cruel twist of fate she almost diverted, that is, until Max noticed she had miscalculated where Lucas set his own food down, nothingness waving a one more indignity.
Has he aged since Nancy last saw him?
Perhaps it’s the cold—it squeezes something out of everyone. Without the spell-binding nature of his entrance, there’s the uncharacteristically disheveled hair, a loosened tie bearing a bobbing throat, sleep-bright eyes, music that’s gone on for just a little too long.
She watches, unembarrassed by her intensity. She can’t predict what he’ll do next—the fog is as thick as anything. There’s no telling what Steve’s going to say, why he’s here, except, you know, to make a point.
“How long are you here for?” I didn’t expect to see you. Since your life is so grand.
“Not long.” Her food sits like lead in her stomach. A glass of wine sits nearby, untouched. Nancy’s been sipping water all night long. “I head back in a few days.”
To go back to her apartment and wear socks to bed even though she always swore that it was only psychopaths who did it, curl around the stained glass littered in pieces around her chest.
“You’ll have to try and talk her out of it,” Holly insists, flickering back and forth between the two of them. Either she has a death wish or she really can’t pick out what’s spoiled. Regardless, Nancy wants to throttle her. “She insisted she couldn’t stay long and we never get to see Nancy anymore.”
Steve flares, a bonfire that’s swelled out of control. Five minutes in, and they’re all about to be incinerated.
“Can’t keep that life of yours waiting.”
There’s nothing to rebuild, she reminds herself. No one can’t just… reverse their way onto the plank. She’s just treading water, keeping her head up—just until the ship passes the horizon line.
It sears, anyway.
They’re no longer in the heady, warm family room, they’re in a basement that leaks water for weeks after it rains.
Dustin smooths over the hiccup, clapping a hand on Steve’s shoulder. “What’s up with you these days, man?”
“Same old, same old.” He splits into another smile that another Nancy would have whistled appreciatively at, impressed by the sheer will that rearranges the twisting hurt into marbled impassivity.
He was never bad at setting aside his feelings, but this?
“Derek’s batting average is, like, way better than last season. Kids are crazy, dude. Always improving—their little brains are like sponges.”
“Doesn’t hurt that you’re his hero,” Will points out with a laugh. His hair is shorter, cropped almost, finally free of the dated bowl-cut. Everyone's older—sharper, the sweet edges of their baby fat fading.
Robin lets out a laugh loud enough to border on inappropriate, jerking her chin up at him.
“Remember when you actually tackled him?” She giggles again. “Fully on the ground—were you thinking about trying out for the football team?”
Will shoots her an unimpressed look.
“Remember when he told you to suck, and I quote,” he raises air-quotes, “his fat one?”
A collective cringe. The adults take this as their leave, her father and Hopper heading out the garage for pretend conversation about the state of Hawkins’ shifting economy, her mother and Joyce retreating to the kitchen.
“He also said that to Vecna, so I wouldn’t take much offense,” Holly says with thinly veiled disgust, breezing past the name like the weatherman might forecast a slight shower. She smooths her errant fringe, long enough to tuck behind her ears, before adding primly, “I don’t know if he had anything else at the time.”
Steve shudders. “Thankfully, I haven’t been graced with that kind of language, but you would never be able to guess what they tried to pull on Monday…”
This goes on for a while.
The kids—and they’re not really kids anymore, but Nancy doesn’t think she’ll ever see them differently—razz Steve about his permanent position as a babysitter in every corner of his life, Steve exchanges winces for rolled eyes. Robin tells the odd story about a group of girls convinced they had supernatural powers, which is a slight damper on the mood, until Mike procures a postcard he’s been jealously hoarding, and a new wave of wrestling and fighting and spontaneous crying, all for a glimpse of Eleven in scrawled handwriting, shining like a beacon in his grip.
(He had tearfully declared it was the best present i’ve ever received after Hopper pressed it into his hands, making sure to allude to the difficulty of back roads and odd channels the small letter, a few lines at most, had to travel before arriving at its precious destination. Mike launched himself at Hopper anyway, blubbering into his thick coat.)
(The crumpled postcard made Nancy so sick she had to sit on the toilet lid with her head between her knees.)
After the initial strike, she had assumed Steve lost interest, carrying out a valiant effort of ignoring her.
Nancy really should stop making assumptions about this night.
“This place is how it always was,” Max says admiringly while everyone takes in the Wheeler house, home to runaway girls and outcasts and angry newcomers and haunted ghosts and the ones who came back, dripping in gold and green and red. Her mother outdid herself, draping garland after garland until achieving the effect of suddenly stumbling into a forest, glitter dusting the ground—striped peppermints and golden stars reaching out hands to any passerby. Beyond the sparkle is the same home, the spilled blood and the safe basement, people too sharp for their old skin.
She’s struck by another sense of déjà-vu, because not all scars may be visible, but when there are this many, invisible or not, it acts as a sort of tear in reality that serves as the violent reminder that they are a group of people not bound by suburban tradition but by something as incomprehensible as defeating a mind-invasive monster from another dimension.
Steve’s watching her, but so is Max, waiting for Nancy to return to the loose thread dangling in Holly’s hands—convincing Nancy to stay, convincing Nancy that she was a girl in Hawkins, convincing Nancy that she was a girl that found something to love in Hawkins.
“Yeah.” The landmine clicks as her weight shifts. “Looks like it.”
Steve scoffs, a hateful sound. “Nancy doesn’t want to know about Hawkins.”
She eyes him warily, at a loss. Touchy—too touchy, circling closer.
He widens his eyes, as though what he’s referring to is obvious. “You’re big city now,” he breezes, letting big city drag its own line in the sand. Not letting it go, then. Easily masked as overexcitement for the city they all knew she was chomping at the bit for.
Dustin frowns in kind, ready to correct Steve.
Somewhere, someone’s foot is tapping nervously.
“She was just telling me how good it is to be home,” he counters.
She balls her hands into fists beneath the table as layers of conversations, some old and some new, press together in a series of words only two people present can understand. Nancy knows she shouldn’t have let it slip earlier, but seeing her brothers and his friends bounce off one another’s energy like an elevator shooting for the heavens was a slice of familiarity so potent that all her homesickness came hurtling out at once.
Steve turns to her in mock-surprise, though Nancy sees it for what it is—how it gets under his skin.
“Oh really?”
The errant elbow catches her somewhere soft. She's never seen anything like this, having thought they brushed the highest limit. Not they, he.
No one properly explained that the people you love can hurt you in equal measure. No one bothered to describe the impossibility of lining up the parts of someone as incomparable as Steve to the parts of yourself that maybe never fit in the first place.
She blinks rapidly. Her mind keeps sorting it all into monochromatic boxes, a rubber-band reflex.
It’s not having baggage, it’s routinely opening it up, wearing the same clothes again and again. A creature of habit is only as endearing as the same breakfast it has every morning.
“Two things can be true,” she answers as diplomatically as she can. Stay beneath the surface of the water, do not make waves. The wound is still shallow, do not make it worse.
Steve sits up in his chair, reaches over the table around the gravy-boat and the candles and the cranberries, and plucks her glass with the air of she wasn’t having it anyway. The mouthful he takes can only be described as insolent.
There’s nothing flirtatious about it, unless you count the single pinprick of light in his eyes, amidst a dark wash of color looking at nothing and no one but her.
Come on, he seems to say, urging her. You gonna let me get away with that? Go for the throat.
Nancy lets her own cup of water hide her face. Pulled pigtails are not worth her energy.
She never should have landed, even for a second. Rain-soaked, feather-plucked, a ball and chain, broken spirit. She couldn’t take off, even if she tried.
His hair gleams like burnished gold, his eyes never leaving hers for long.
Even now, Steve is painfully, terribly, disarmingly beautiful. Nancy keeps herself from drinking him in to the effect of heels sliding down a hill made of gravel, losing more and more ground with every second.
What does it take to swallow a pill as bitter as knowing that you were never happier than when that one smile was in the corner of your eye? Tripping over your shoelace when his car first pulled up onto the drive? Biting your tongue when his gaze washed over yours? Dying to yourself in small bits and pieces, scraping the blunt end of the razor on the bottom of the barrel, offering them up on an invisible platter.
Nancy pauses. No, how do you swallow the cyanide capsule?
You do not. You bite down and let the sound of your own teeth grinding together wash away the plastic distance in the space between his words as he says,
“Did the Kelsey Christmas Spectacular at least go well?” Robin asks like it’s a known event, but Nancy isn’t an idiot. She can pick out the stiffening he undergoes on a microscopic level, the slightest flash of the same thing he did a shitty job of alluding to in a basement in Pennsylvania.
“Yeah, at least for now. She’s nice—maybe she’s the one.”
She stiffens, a thumbtack of anger pressed right into the sensitive junction between her neck and her shoulder.
What a waste of time, thinking the ordeal was over.
“Look at you," Dustin coos. “All grown up and attending boring-ass parties with adults you don't even know. Next thing we know, you’ll be the president of the PTA. Maybe Kelsey’s gonna be lucky enough to be the queen.”
A flash of light; the pendulum returns.
“Yeah, Nance. Anyone lucky out in Boston?”
Dustin’s reference to her comment earlier must have really pissed him off. No, she knows it pissed him off, because it’s the exact opposite of what she threw in his face, and if there’s anything that Steve hates more than all else, it’s when she lies to him.
If only because she’s done it so often.
“No,” Nancy replies stiffly, gripping her fork tighter. You know that.
“C’mon, babe.” Steve flashes her a showman’s smile, glittering and empty. Why is he here, if he’s already renounced her? “Church girl act’s wearing a little thin. Surely there’s someone.”
If there was anyone left confused by the uneven ground, the scales swaying wildly, they aren’t anymore. Mike’s watching Steve like a shark or a hawk, pick your predator, because that’s what he’s doing—locking on to his next victim with terrifying clarity. Whatever tentative piece he had carved out with him is splintering. The whole table lists to the left, silverware tumbling to the ground, plates crashing, breaking, one leg collapsing, the other following.
Or maybe it’s just Nancy, her heart pounding hard enough to level the neighborhood.
He presses and presses and presses, her spine against slats of wood, her throat bared. She holds herself with the dignity only an animal with a broken leg could, waiting for the final chance it has to dart out of harm’s reach, knowing all the while that it’s useless.
“Why are you here, Steve?”
Sidestepping the snag in the carpet, as though he were awaiting the question at any moment, Steve says, “Because I want to know how you're doing. Because I want to know about that special someone,”—he stresses in a way that looks like no one in any other light but this—“taking up all of your time."
“Surely you know.”
“No.” He narrows his eyes. “I don’t think anyone does."
There’s a scalding pressure in the room. Nancy sweeps a frigid glance around, inviting them in further to the battle, the losing one. She knows it, Steve knows it—even worse, he knows she’ll go down swinging, and seems ready to walk right to the precipice.
“And do they really know how you’re doing? Kimberly?”
Steve’s lip curls. “Kelsey.”
“Kelsey, Janey, Lauren, Kristen, Dawn, Margaret, Julie.” She holds seven fingers up, taunting. “What’s the difference?”
“Very clever,” he replies stonily. “But… since you mention it, you know what they all have in common?”
Nancy raises a brow. “Besides the obvious?”
“They don't push me away when the going gets tough.”
“Must be nice,” she sneers, “to not know the kind of tough that pushes people away.”
“Not a matter of pain, Nance.” Steve sits up straighter, runs an aggravated hand through his hair, lets it dip dangerously low into his eyes. He’s a mess—how hadn’t she noticed that earlier? Steve is the only person who even remotely looks like how she feels. “They know what’s in front of them.”
Nancy glances sharply away. Make no mistake, she runs because she knows what’s in front of her.
“So, who’s the special someone?” Just say it, Nance.
Her silence is relinquishing enough.
Or… not.
“No—I want to know.” Steve burns as hot as the fire—the figure in the fire, only it isn’t writhing or screaming, it’s clawing its way towards her on the same bleeding, cracked fingernails she’s ground her heel down onto, again and again. “Who do you have to push away when the going gets tough?”
Checkmate. The switchblade at her pulse-point. The crack of the gun while she was turned around.
No time-out, no cop-out, no tap-out.
You are only breaking your own heart, Nancy reminds herself. And you are very good at that.
“Just myself,” she grits out, picking at a hangnail, wincing at the sting.
It telegraphs across Steve’s face in a ripple of brutal certainty.
“Just you!”
She isn't the only one to flinch at the sharp spike of volume, the school of fish jerking to the left as it avoids the silvery fin.
His eyes widen. “But it must be great.”
Nancy burns a hole through her plate, the table, the bedrock. If only the ground would swallow her up.
How is it that now of all times she can’t leave?
“Free—you’re free.”
Free? She isn’t free. Shackles come in all shapes and sizes; how sneaky are the kind you willingly snap over your wrists.
Where’s the key?
“Or is it…”
She makes the mistake of glancing up, searching for the metal glinting in his hand.
He sees it then—her desperation.
“Ah.” The glass clinks as he sets it down, scorch marks on the table. Steve runs a tongue along his teeth. “Lonely.”
Frost on windows seals her lips.
If he wants to cut ties, fine. Nancy will go lower—she’ll plant a wedge as wide as an ocean between them.
Don’t think I won’t, she warns the way he twirls a napkin holder, the ring flashing.
Fool me once, he mouths, his eyes bathed in fire.
Everyone stares as though they’ve both grown two heads, everyone except for Robin, who’s watching like she’s seen this movie before, and doesn’t particularly enjoy when the main characters die.
Mike demands, “What is he talking about?”
She lowers her eyes.
Nothing worth explaining. Nothing worth reading. No one will read what you write.
“Just a little disagreement we had,” says the boy across from her, with that one voice—though not one she’s ever heard him use. No, it’s her own. Taut as a bowstring. “About the perfect way to do things.”
How was she supposed to know that every time she swallowed her misery, it was another nomination for an award-winning performance in pretend?
Nancy hears rather than sees his tone inch further backward, the threads groaning as the pointed tip gleams.
“Who would have thought? Nancy Wheeler, lonely? After she left ol’ Hawkins so proud.”
A smile like a fist hurled through glass. Plucking feathers, one by one.
She combs through the memories as the end looms, wincing at all the snags. Steve letting her curl her feet beneath his blanket, Steve watching her as horror slowly creeped into his expression. Steve leaning against her car door, Steve slamming his shut. Steve leaning over her, laughing as she held the toothpaste out of reach, Steve’s eyes reflecting the flames she chose to burn herself in.
The silver lining corrodes.
She thinks she doesn’t recognize him, but that isn’t right either. She sees herself in him, Nancy sees no one but herself snarling out of Steve; a mirror of the cruelest calibre. Is this her legacy? Bringing out the worst? Has he always remembered her like this?
It’s strange seeing him like this, like her. They call it a lone wolf for a reason.
There can’t be two.
“Steve—that’s enough.”
If anyone hates how this Christmas dinner is falling apart before it's even started, then they should take it as a cautionary tale, what awaits pretenders on borrowed time.
Her lack of reaction only seems to egg him on further, an empty triumph in his smile.
“Why don’t you tell us all what you told me? What was it again?” Steve’s mouth flattens. “I’m thinking too small? I’m not doing enough?”
Turns out, there's no difference between the squelch of the knife hitting you instead of him. There is only the added clarity of the sound of your own internal screaming.
“Was it really me, Nance? Am I the one who needed to hear that?”
Nancy’s breaking in two. Her heart hangs from her ribs, scraps of a balloon trapped in a tree.
How does one go from being in sync to stumbling around blindly? The glacial pace one falls into another’s orbit, packaging late nights sharing cigarettes into weekends, thinking that the wary gazes and doubled voices will halt the descent. It didn’t, it doesn’t, it never will.
There is only them or nothing.
Put Steve and Nancy in a sweat-slicked house party, a heart-rending chunk of hell, scuffed sneaker hallways, a demon-infested home, a souring Christmas dinner; the room will only ever include two.
But… there can’t be.
Steve clucks his tongue. “Guess you were wrong.”
Of course I was, she screams. That’s all I’ve been thinking over and over and over again. How wrong I was. How wrong I still am. You don’t need to tell me, Steve, that I was wrong. I already have enough to last me a lifetime.
The swan song, a low C. Feathers kicking up dust, inhaling until you cry. There is no boy waiting on your street. No one will read what you write.
He almost looks like he wants her to snap back, to lower the flame down to the gasoline, to watch it explode right in his face.
Nancy stands in the ocean, just past where her own two feet can keep her head up. The waves come in and in and over her, not shooting up her nose and down her throat but engulfing her entirely.
“I need to use the restroom,” she says blankly.
The excuse lasts about as long as a tissue in the rain, the others immediately clambering for an explanation as to what and how the two people unable to stray from one another have suddenly become two people at one another’s throats (what’s wrong with you guys?, are you seriously doing this again?, why can’t you two ever get this right?), but what Nancy wants to say is that it’s really not that hard at all—feel too much in any direction and this is what you’ll get.
Steve barks out a laugh, and the sudden sharpness in his eyes tells her that maybe he wasn’t as drunk as she thought he was when he entered—if it was ever the booze or if it was… her.
The thought pierces through. I put that there.
Nancy draped doubt over his shoulders and she tucked fear into his collar. She hooked her pinkies into his mouth and curved it down, a shape only meant for disappointment. She squeezed the color out of his cheeks and hammered fury into any crack she could find.
“There she goes, leaving again!”
They lock eyes.
Nancy thought she couldn’t deal with the death of another thing.
Life goes on.
Funny.
Life always goes on.
(Barb would scarcely recognize her now.)
“If the shoe fits,” she murmurs into her shoulder, chin brushing scratchy material.
It’s a procession, one step after the other. Her father, Hopper watching from either side as she drifts by, misplaced concern lighter than the blanket of snow outside.
Not a veil streaming behind her, but tears. Corrosive, blinding.
“Just need a little air.” Her voice shakes, an empty can with a string hanging limply. No sign of a receiver.
Nancy exits, but it isn’t grace holding her up. Something uglier—bone and blood survival, maybe. Her boots sink into the snow and even the chill itself seems to rear back at the impossibility of a dress this short, but she continues walking.
Evenly, a flawless march. Not fast, not slow.
Nancy drifts away.
Her gaze goes unfocused, strung lights fading. She walks and walks and walks.
The snow fizzles, melts on her skin. The threshold of numbness has come and gone, weeks ago. Steve staring at her, open-mouthed. Nancy’s fingers curling around his beating heart.
She thought she had leaned out of the way, but the prophecy adjusted in kind.
There is no prophecy, she reminds herself savagely. There is only you and the habit you can’t shake.
The habit? What habit? Leaving? Screwing it up? Smashing the glass before you could drop it—as if you would ever let that happen, with how carefully you were cradling it in the first place.
As she walks, the ground quivers. It’s split from all the places she drove spikes—constructing the cage, letting the fantasy wash it over in pale pink and glittering gold. Write letters, curl up in a world you’ve made.
No one will read what you write.
She sees herself, alone in a dark apartment, staring at a wall.
Shouldn’t pain be meaningful? Ripples in an empty swimming pool, an overturned boot filled with blood, shotguns with jagged teeth of a barrel, falling in love at an arm's length—always at an arm’s length.
In the end her best friend remained dead, her family is a distorted hologram, her life a series of wingbeats in freezing air.
The permanence clings to her hair, infuses her clothes, attaches weights to her shoes that drag and beg and scream as she pierces a new hole in the quiet.
She walks and walks, the entrance to her neighborhood and the flattened stone Mike used to climb atop and announce his status as the newly crowned king of the world, an errant stick he found on the way piercing the sky, crawls closer.
Nancy crunches through the snow, her toes barely able to move.
She sinks down onto the rock and wraps her arms around herself, watching lone cars skitter by. From here, she’s mostly concealed by the dark, you would have to know what you're looking for to pick her out.
Snowflakes continue to fall, and now that she isn't moving, they gather in the folds of her dress, tiny stars from above.
She’s barely aware of the fact that she walked that far—that she’s out here and not sitting at a table surrounded by plates piled high and candles burned out to stubs and stars made of scrap metal. Only a little while ago, she was hunched beneath the weight of a room so crowded it wailed vacancy.
Nancy lets the world begin the agonizing process of knitting back into place, right itself after the jarring impact. Now is as good a time as ever, she figures, the peace and quiet more like the suffocating slide of cough syrup down a throat. She doesn’t cry, no, this is something to the extent of shock.
Going through the motions, having gone through the motions every day.
How many arguments can you have before it all breaks down?
The scalding winds that force a tree to grow crooked, the elephant who believes the rope can still hold them. How does she explain she is both wind and tree, elephant and rope?
Nature is nature but nature can also be changed, it can be mutilated, these two facts are not so different.
What’s bred in the bone will come out in the flesh—what you’ve forced inwards day after day, squeezing yourself into the semblance of being palatable will always reemerge. And Nancy chose to ignore that, stuffing her hands into the box, using all her weight despite the ways it was spilling out the sides.
[Hawkins wasn’t enough, huh? I wasn’t enough.
She wants to say it’s not as simple as pushing the two of them together, because Hawkins’ shrunken nature could never compete with the enormous presence Steve’s always had in her life, but it’s obvious that he’s already done so—even without glancing over at the bitter curl to his mouth.]
It’s happening again.
[We’re never going to work. He laughed. Dragged a hand through his hair. We’re never going to work. And I hate that I’ve spent all this time wasting my life on you. I hate that I don't feel that way at all. Do you remember the roof? Do you remember shutting me out? Do you remember all the times you’ve shut me out, or is it a game to you? Is there a grand prize? Kick Steve Harrington down enough times and what? Win a new car?
Why couldn’t she say anything? Where were the words?
Tucked away, tied shut with a string. She wrapped them up, twisted the lid until it could go no more. Saved them for the perfect moment, blinked in shock when it had come and gone.]
The rain-soaked night, the stillness of the underground.
[When I write, she struggles to say.
Silence screams in the cracks of his frown. Steve’s brow furrows.
A one-two punch. A broken needle. A glimpse above treetops.
Even now, clinging to the scraps she has.
I’ve been writing—
Yeah, Nance. I know. Big job, big city.
No, that’s not what I mean—
Nancy, you don’t have to remind me, okay? I know it’s you versus the world—you and that pen. I get it. His face twists. No one will read what you write.]
No. How did it go?
[If all you ever do is lie, no one will read what you write.]
Ah.
[I’m not lying, Steve.]
Of course.
[So, what? Pretending isn’t lying?]
Like a thunderclap, it tears through her skull—a symphony composed of thousands of minor chords blaring in synchrony.
Feet pounding the pavement, labored breaths.
Nancy’s head lifts on the string woven in trembling hands. The tracks lead to him.
Or they follow. She isn’t sure—the path sprawls out in opposite directions.
Steve, tousled and heaving and untidy, appears out of thin air. A ghost among the snow.
“What the hell are you doing out here?”
If she had to describe him in one word, it would be deflated. Somewhere between her last glance at him and now, the fight’s been swooped out from beneath his feet, but then again, Steve was never one to hold on to that. If Nancy’s being entirely honest, she’s surprised it lasted as long as it did, though she has to assume that’s another strike on the record of her poisonous presence.
She keeps her mouth shut, the truth slipping out of reach.
Steve looks stricken—more than stricken, on the verge of collapse, as hysterical as a sobbing laugh.
“Did you get lost? Forget where the bathroom was?” More tools fall as he rummages through the box he’s always carrying, lugging around useless things to fix a useless relationship. “Feel insecure that we might be able to hear you? You always hated that it shared a wall with the entry hall.”
“Wrong turn,” Nancy replies, just on the edge of listlessness.
Her hands are loosely curled in her lap, now. Posture: straight. Chin: level with the earth.
Keep it level, don’t let it open back up.
Ignore all the times you’ve walked away from him. Forget all the times he’s followed.
Steve watches her like something’s changed—something bigger. The war pauses, the swords gleam as they lay in the brush. The catch in his breath flickers in her chest.
“Nance, what are you doing out here?”
Something drips onto her hands. Ice.
“Can't a woman be miserable on Christmas?”
Her voice sounds so very far away.
Steve makes a pained noise in the back of his throat. The same bandage wrapped around her lets its tails flutter as it peeks out of his sleeve.
“Not—no one should be miserable on Christmas.”
Nancy hums a broken melody. It used to sound like i'm sorry.
Somewhere, a vision above the trees beckons.
She won’t look. Not now, not ever.
Steve drops onto the stone beside her with a heavy sigh. A moment later, something drapes around her shoulders.
Nancy doesn’t really feel anything; she’s been so far up in the air for so long, temperature means very little.
He doesn’t say sorry—there’s no score. They know if they kept one, she’d be in debt all her life. For so many reasons but this one right now, she hates that they know all the steps to this dance—sense memory and letting go of the rope and soaring into zero gravity and picking up words hanging somewhere in the space between a midnight blue dress and a rumpled suit jacket.
“Remember when we said…”
Cars doze by, his cheeks shine with tears. Steve was always one to show enough emotions for the two of them, but Nancy thinks that if someone cracked her ribs like a row of knuckles, there would be only a single bleeding heart.
“Remember when we said what?”
“This isn’t going to work.”
Nancy smiles ruefully.
“I guess neither of us took that very seriously.”
Steve shuts his eyes as though in pain. He probably is, if she herself can hardly breathe.
They’re tired, they’re older. What is left to say? She hurt him, she hurt him again, she hurts him and sometimes he lashes out.
He loves her enough to keep coming back.
She can’t convince herself he needs to stay away.
“I’m so sick and tired of this. I love you, Nancy. You know that. You've always known that.” He swallows at the street to their right. Steve radiates light: the gleam in his eyes, the bottom lip caught between teeth. Steve bleeds shadow: hollows beneath his lashes, the dips molded around his mouth. “But this… this is for real, this time. I can’t keep… I can’t—I don’t want to be the guy who’s always apologizing, who’s always saying it’s okay.”
[I don't know how to not be like this with you.]
“I want more for you.”
He inhales deeply, clenching his jaw.
“More for me.”
If she were a poet, maybe there would be a collection of words arranged into a study on the misery and loss of love, but Nancy Wheeler is not a poet. She is a coward, a liar, a thief, a killer, and people like that deal in not words but severed bridges.
It was stupid to imagine that hands like these could write.
She closes them into tiny fists, knuckles as white as the world around.
“I know,” Nancy says in a quiet voice. She fights a losing battle, pretending like she doesn't feel better now that he's here. Outside, dizzy, crestfallen, one finger halting the spinning top. She breathes easier, for Steve is the skyline in the corner of her eye. “And you deserve that.”
[You live in a fantasy.]
“When are your feet gonna be on the ground, Nance?”
The two of them look out at the cemetery made of fire hydrants and forgotten bicycles, the figures all the same coated in white. Headstones murmuring a mournful note, voices whispering one same song.
Something fake has died.
Steve picks at the finicky threads of his cuff.
Nancy twirls a loose button in his coat.
Numbly, she thinks that Kelsey will have a lot of sewing to do. If she does that kind of thing. If she makes sure her fingers are tight when she holds on to a falling star.
The stone beneath their legs burns to the touch. A monument, an epitaph, a grave.
Her pulse slush beneath her skin, their pinkies sitting a lifetime apart.
“I can’t keep waiting,” Steve says.
But the lamp of his expression burns.
—
She rummages through her bag, a pulsating, bleeding burn rattling within.
It sits innocently, slightly creased, beneath a beaten legal pad that boasts two words crossed out so forcefully there’s a deep split rending the lines apart.
Nancy smiles sadly at the tear before holding the stack close, closer to her chest.
“What’s that?”
Standing in the doorway, one hand on the knob as though preemptively waiting for the moment she yells get out!, her sister waits with her gaze locked on the thing locked in the vise of Nancy’s hands.
Holly loses youth with every passing day, sharp in the way only someone learning monsters don’t just go away is. Nancy can see all the ways she’s clawing for a reinvention of herself. Nancy can see all the ways an elementary school just… isn’t big enough for her, not anymore.
Selfish pity hasn’t kept Nancy in her room the entire time she’s been home, a facsimile of her sixteen year-old self—determination that there would never be another Wheeler girl swallowed whole by aimless, senseless rage has kept Nancy in a near-constant state of practically breathing down Holly’s neck, and while the hovering may be irritating, Nancy would rather die than let Holly think that pushing it down is better because no one wants a glimpse of what’s really going on.
(She mostly takes on a pale color, blankly staring out into nothingness whenever Nancy reminds her—that when she’s ready, there’s someone who wants to listen.)
Plates clatter loudly, glass bottles thrown away. Chairs scraping along hard wood, a swell of voices.
There’s a pretty big threshold for what everyone’s willing to overlook, in terms of significant absences during Christmas dinners—and Nancy’s almost entirely sure her parents didn’t really even register that something potentially world-ending unfolded between the pop of another cork.
In the end, it had been Mike screeching around the corner in their mother’s station wagon, half-hanging out the window and yelling something about being insane idiots that have the self-preservation skills of the rock they’re sitting on.
And because there hadn’t really been much else to discuss, save for Nancy’s selfish wish that a stack of papers had been sitting in the seat across from Steve instead of her, they shuffled towards the car, hunched against the cold.
Steve’s hands had twitched as though he was about to open the car door for her—Philadelphia is a city made of a boy opening your car door and shutting it for you, climbing out of the driver’s seat and into his arms, ducking behind the steering wheel and counting his freckles one last time—but he swept into the backseat without another word.
He had been right.
That pretending and lying are the same thing, though Nancy supposes she had confused the two. Just a little.
A dull spike of panic tightens her hands. Does she want him to read the words she’s written? Is it another domino in the long line of tipping lies she’s let barrel into him?
Nancy splays her hands to cover any writing peeking out.
“Nothing important now.”
And isn't that the truth? Write down whatever you want, eat your ink-stained heart out—no one will ever read what you write because it inhabits a space built on the fragility of fools and people who spend Christmas dinners talking about mortgages don't like to think about wobbly foundations.
“Doesn’t look unimportant,” Holly points out.
“Looks can be deceiving.”
Nancy remembers one night—back when they were trying to extend an inhale as long as it could go—someone found an old box of water balloons that Jimmy Fast Hands had left behind, gathering dust in a forgotten cupboard.
At first, it was only the kids who were going to let out the same pent-up frustration contorting everyone into odd shapes, but when push came to shove and Steve roped Robin into it, Nancy found herself tossing a balloon up and down, watching from a safe distance and deciding who she’d target first.
Lucas—but she’d instantly regret that. Dustin would be hilarious, and yet it appeared as though Will was always circling him. Robin… Robin was a good choice, and so was El—long-faced and drawn, the sands in the hourglass of her childhood swallowed whole by Vecna. Maybe a surprise attack would stop the grains of sand, if only for a little while.
Nancy braced herself and began slinking closer, closer…
Imagine her shock when one came sailing and nailed her in the shoulder, drenching her entire front.
Imagine her surprise when she whirled around and saw something like mischief before Steve ducked behind a copse of trees, his laugh equal parts breathless and gleeful.
She remembers him coming to grab her from behind, lifting her cleanly off her feet and spinning around, screaming as she was pelted by water balloons, water flooding into her mouth as she laughed and laughed, banging a fist against his arms—knowing he’d never let her fall. Everything spun and spun, midnight and inky green and blurred flashlights, the sun set and set, more squeals and hiccups, Nancy couldn’t stop laughing as her feet sailed out in front of her, weightless, breathless, endless.
It was the perfect portrait of everything right in the world. Splashes of color so vivid you could drink it, her friends running on feet like the wind, a late August heat leaving hair plastered to temples and streaming in thick curls, fireflies dodging the onslaught like dancing stars.
And Nancy had stupidly thought that everything would only ever be right in the world, because that was when she knew that every night ended with Steve’s footsteps crossing a rooftop faster and faster.
Looks can be deceiving.
There is always something more, just under the surface.
She blinks in slow motion, the sweep of lashes carving through syrup. Holly must sense the fracture rending her in two, letting the door shut softly behind her.
Nancy’s reflection shrugs in the corner of her eye as she breathes on the glass, rubbing it clean to watch Robin climb in after Steve to the backseat of Dustin's car, a gentle hand at his back.
The car door shuts.
A figure bows their head. Shoulders shake.
The pain is not new, at least. It’s the same loud and stubborn and demoralizing beast it always was. The same swipe to the Achilles tendon, though she forgot to leap out of the way.
Her reflection is a girl, arms clutched around herself.
Looks can be deceiving.
Her reflection is not only a girl. Its arms end in claws.
You are the monster.
You broke his heart.
Nancy finds there is nothing left to do but to sink onto her bed and cry.
So she does.