Chapter Text
There is something blissfully simple about a gun.
Disengage the safety. Point. Squeeze. There is a skill, sure, and instinct played a role, too, but at its base, it is those three actions. Those three actions to change everything.
Vecna fixes Nancy with his glare, flames leaping off his shoulders like demonic wings. He’s stayed on his feet somehow, after two rounds of Molotov cocktails–she’d be impressed if she wasn’t so terrified. He takes one step toward them, but Nancy is already advancing, sawed-off glued to her cheek and shoulder, the way she had read. She hardly stops to take the first shot. The recoil takes her by surprise, more intense than any gun she’s shot before. She flinches, eyes closing involuntarily, but not before she sees the buckshot nail him in the shoulder. He doesn’t break eye contact, though, and he straightens up to come at her again. She pumps the shotgun and slaps the trigger again, getting him in the stomach–she can see the spray of buckshot enter his gut. This time, she’s ready for the recoil and keeps the muzzle up, pumping and delivering the next shot in rapid succession. Then the next shot. Then the next. Until finally, she has one left. Vecna must be counting, too. He squares up to her, roars. It’s utterly horrifying, but rage and hatred and sheer determination guide her finger as she gives the trigger one final pull. The shot lands in his chest and knocks him through the boarded-up window of the attic.
There’s a moment of stillness as they all process what has happened. Then, Robin is gasping. “Oh my god, oh my god.”
“Fuck,” Steve barks.
Nancy is still moving, stepping carefully over the still-burning timber as she approaches the hole Vecna created. She hears boards creaking, and in half a second, Steve has his hand on his shoulder. “Hey, careful.” As if she’s going to fall through the window. She holds back an eyeroll.
There’s nothing below.
“He’s–” Nancy breathes.
Steve peers through the gap next to her, and is running back to the stairs in a second. Unarmed, like an idiot.
“Wait,” she calls, snatching the bag with the buckshot rounds in it and his axe as she follows him, Robin picking up the rear with the backpack of clinking bottles. “Steve, stop!” she yells as she hits the landing. He’s already a full floor down, but she quickly reaches him, holding the abandoned axe out to him. “Take this.”
He does, letting out a small, “thanks,” and makes to pass her, but she holds out her arm.
“Long-range weapons first,” she insists.
Robin squeezes past him in the stairwell, and he lets out an indignant groan.
“Why can she go first?”
Robin bounces once on the stairs, eliciting a clink from the bottles in her pack. Nancy smirks, and the two lead the way to the front door.
Nancy throws it open, and sure enough, all that remains of their encounter with Vecna is a patch of charred grass and a few sputtering flames.
“What the…” Steve mumbles.
“Fuck,” Robin supplies. For two non-dating people, they finish each other’s sentences a lot, Nancy has noticed.
“He’s not dead?” Nancy wonders aloud.
“Or he is, and he’s, like, some kind of video game villain and he just vanishes once defeated,” Robin rambles. The past few days have endeared Robin to Nancy, sure, but no amount of endearment could make Nancy entertain, or even appreciate, such unhelpful conjecture.
“Did he just walk off?” Steve says.
“He’s on fire, Steve, and it’s dark. We’d be able to see him,” Robin retorts.
Nancy tries to ignore them. “He’s hurt, so he’d go somewhere he can be safe. But if this was his safehouse, then–” Nancy is interrupted by a sound that sends a chill down her spine.
The clock inside is chiming.
Max had described the sound to them once. “It sounds wrong,” she had said, “like a ghost clock.” It was the kind of thing the boys would have teased her about in any other situation, let’s fight a ghost clock in our next campaign, but the gravity of the situation was such that none of them did. Hearing it now, Max had described it perfectly. It sounds like the clock is moaning.
Robin is already on the move, and Nancy follows, Steve lagging behind as he gives the yard one final glance.
The clock chimes again. And again. And again.
“Four chimes,” Robin gasps.
Nancy’s heart falls. “Max.”
The ground shutters. It’s almost imperceptible, and Nancy thinks maybe she imagines it. Then the floor pitches and rolls underneath her, and she reaches out desperately for stair banister to steady herself.
The deafening sound of splitting wood rends the air and for a moment, its meaning doesn’t compute, but then the ceiling above them begins to glow red. “Move!” she shouts over the din, grabbing a fistful of Robin’s sleeve and pulling her toward the dining room, trusting Steve to be behind them.
Please be close behind.
They make it into the dining room as the stairs split, then the floor, the sound of it louder than a train. The house is ripping apart down the middle. The red crack swallows the front door then proceeds into the lawn, violently unzipping the land of the Upside Down.
They stand there holding each other by a sleeve and a shoulder and a jacket zipper until the shaking crescendos into a final, distant boom that nearly topples them over. Then it’s truly still. Truly quiet.
They exchange glances, and Nancy assumes she looks as shell-shocked as Robin and Steve do. Her heart is racing, ears are ringing. But they have to investigate.
She starts toward the red glow in the entry but Steve’s hand catches her elbow. “Wait, give it a minute.”
If worse is going to happen, she thinks, then they’re as good as dead. So she ignores him, pulling her arm free, and approaches the rift.
She knows instantly that it’s a gate.
The glowing red sinew, the faint pulse of light, even the slight coolness it lets off, like standing next to an ice box. “It’s a gate.”
“It’s no snack-sized one, either,” Steve says, looking through the destroyed front of the house where the rift stretches on into the distant treeline.
“Well, short cut home at least?” Robin quips, tone forcibly light.
Steve shakes his head. “We need to go back to the trailer park. Make sure Munson and Henderson made it out okay.”
“Right, yeah, of course.”
“We should hurry,” Nancy says. “If this happened in the Upside Down–”
“It happened in our world, too,” Steve finishes.
They jog the whole way back to the trailer park.
–
Nancy can’t help but notice that Steve is flagging by the time they reach the trailer park. He’s a few paces behind, heavy breaths punctuated with coughs. “You okay?” She asks as they slow to a walk at the park entrance.
“Yeah,” he replies, not looking at her. Focused on the route before them. “Check the Munsons’ place first?”
She nods, then glances over to Robin, who is also giving Steve a dubious once-over. But Steve isn’t keeling over, and Dustin and Eddie are unaccounted for. They have to keep their priorities straight. But as they near the trailer, a red glow begins to catch the filth floating in the air.
The trailer has been torn apart, just like the Creel house.
“Well, shit,” Steve mutters, eyes roving their surroundings. “Do you think they made it back to–” He stops, eyes fixed on something, mouth gaping. Nancy follows his line of sight to see, in the distance, the silhouette of a person kneeling over a body. Steve takes off at a sprint. “Dustin!” He shouts, a desperation in his voice that Nancy has never heard before. Nancy and Robin chase after him. Dustin calls Steve’s name back.
The ground is littered with demobat bodies, which Nancy distantly notes as strange but doesn’t have the capacity to process. By the time she reaches the three boys, Steve has come to a halt at the scene, staring dumbfoundedly at Eddie’s body in Dustin’s arms.
“Oh god,” Robin whispers as she skids to a stop alongside Nancy.
Eddie is covered in blood, his face expressionless and pale as his eyes stare beyond them. Dustin is visibly trembling, still clinging to Eddie’s shoulders. He barely looks at them as they approach. It’s a macabre scene.
Then, as if broken from a trance, Steve crouches next to Dustin, puts a hand on his shoulder. “Are you okay?”
Dustin is beginning to cry. “Eddie, he– he–”
“I know, I know, buddy.” Steve says softly. “But are you okay? Are you hurt?” Steve is eyeing the graveyard of bats around them like they might spring back to life at any moment.
Dustin shakes his head, a sob breaking loose. Steve’s face crumples, and he pulls the kid in, gripping him fiercely in a hug. Nancy’s chest tightens as pressure builds there, a surefire precursor to crying. She hadn’t known Eddie well, save for these past few days, but something about the sight of his usually expressive eyes staring blankly into the distance breaks her heart.
Nancy kneels across from them and gently closes Eddie’s eyes.
Dustin wails.
Steve looks up at Robin, who is still lingering a few paces away, hand over her mouth. His brown eyes wet but intense. “Robin, get him out of here.”
But Dustin is already pulling away from Steve. “No, no, I’m not gonna leave him,” he cries.
Robin moves in next to them, arm protectively wrapping around Dustin’s shoulders. Dustin doesn’t jerk away from her this time. “It’s not safe here, Dustin. We have to go. Steve’ll take care of Eddie, okay? But we need to get out of here.”
“No! I’m staying with him, I can’t leave.”
Nancy can’t hold back the tears any longer, her voice thick with them. “Robin’s right. Vecna disappeared, but we don’t know what that means. We–we heard four chimes at the Creel house.”
Dustin’s eyes drift toward the gate, the red glow like a wound through the park, his face the picture of pain as the realization hits him. “Max,” he bellows, bowing forward like he’s been sucker punched. Robin keeps her hold on him, eyes gleaming with tears as she looks back and forth from Steve to Nancy.
Steve is looking pleadingly at Nancy.
“Dustin, we have to go,” she urges. The boy looks up at her. The devastation is written all over his face. “Eddie would want you safe.”
“Come on.” Robin begins to stand, pulling Dustin up with her. The moment Dustin is upright, he wobbles, and Steve staggers to his feet to steady him.
“Hey, hey, you good?” Steve is looking Dustin up and down, trying to identify what’s wrong.
Dustin is pale. “My ankle, I think I twisted it.”
“Okay, take it easy. Robin and Nancy will help you get to the gate—“
“No,” Nancy interjects, bristling. “If you’re staying, you need backup.”
Steve sputters, eyes flickering from her to Eddie’s body to the gate. “I won’t be long. You really should go with them.”
Nancy gestures to her gun, which is slung around her back. “No. End of argument.”
“I’m not arguing,” Steve says in a tone that is definitely argumentative.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea for either one of you to stay, gun or no gun,” Robin pipes up, still crouching to support Dustin. “We don’t know what’s next.”
Steve frowns and rubs his chest. “We can’t just leave him here.”
“Maybe we can. Just until morning. When we know what’s going on.”
Steve nods solemnly. “That okay with you, bud?” he asks Dustin.
Dustin nods mutely, eyes still fixed on Eddie.
“We’re going to take care of him, okay? I promise.” Steve slides under Dustin’s other arm, and the three begin a slow march toward the gate.
Nancy lags behind, scanning the surroundings for an attack.
The Upside Down is quiet.
—
The smoke from the fires is permeating everything in Hawkins, including Nancy’s bedroom. It’s 2 a.m., and she has finally finished cleaning up and explaining away the evening (and the strange attire) to her mom. She is considering sleeping with a damp washcloth over her face to block out the smoke when she hears a knock on her window.
Steve is leaning up against it, a small yet goofy smile on his face.
There are a lot of reasons she doesn’t want to open it, chief among them the idea of letting in more smoke. But he’s sitting out there being hotboxed by the world, and she can’t help but still fall for his boyish charm as Barb had once, derisively, put it.
She slides the window open. “What are you doing here?” She hopes it comes off as annoyed, but fears it might have played a little flirty. Fine, she can’t help it.
“I was just driving past and saw your light was on. Can I, uh—?” He gestures awkwardly toward the inside of her bedroom. He’s cleaned up and put on a soft blue sweater. His hair and face are clean, but the ligature marks around his neck are more pronounced than before. She can’t tell if he’s paler than usual or if they’re just that severe.
“We live on a cul-de-sac,” she says irritably, but still moves aside to let him enter. He slowly slides into the room, letting out a little held-back cough as he does. He had done this so many times, but the bravado he had once had, the way he would swagger in, is gone. Is it just a product of the night’s events? Or is this how Steve is now—modest, human? Whatever. He isn’t hers to figure out. She narrows her eyes at him as she slides the window shut. “I’m fine.”
“Yeah, I know you are. But it’s just, with Eddie, that was really…” his gaze wanders around her room, though he doesn’t seem to be seeing anything. “A lot.” His expression is dull.
Nancy retreats to her bed and sits, pulling her feet up under her. “Yeah.”
He hesitates by the window, staring at the empty place next to her on the bed. She knows she could call him to it. Knows he would sit with her, maybe even hold her. If she is being honest, she wants that, after such a frightening, terrible day. But she doesn’t want it from Steve.
Does she?
He leans against the windowsill, eyes still roving the bedspread. “Dustin’s really upset. I don’t know what to do for him.”
There’s not much he can do, she knows from experience. “Just be there for him. Whatever he needs.” Her words are void of emotion, and Steve nods mutely. The energy in the room, between the two of them, is so flat, cold. Completely different from how it has been since Jonathan left.
Steve stifles another cough, so focused on the carpet he might be counting the fibers. “Well, I just wanted to check on you. And you’re fine. I’ll let you go to bed.” He meets her eyes and gives her a curt smile, then begins to turn toward the window again.
“Wait, Steve.”
He turns back to her.
“Are you okay?”
“What do you mean? Like, emotionally or–?”
“I mean physically. Those bat bites were insane.”
He shrugs and clears his throat. “I cleaned them up after I showered. They hurt like a bitch, but they’re fine, I guess.”
“Can I take a look?” She’s just curious, she tells herself. She wants to see the state of them, make sure he took care of himself well enough. There’s no more concern in the gesture than what is normal for a friend.
He shifts, mouth opening. Jesus Christ, when did this guy get so awkward? “Yeah. I mean, yeah, sure.”
“Give me a second.” Nancy slips off the bed and out into the hallway, retrieving the first aid kit from the bathroom next door. She reenters and finds Steve unmoved from his position at the windowsill, now staring hard at the Tom Cruise poster.
He cracks a smile at her as she huffs a sigh. “I don’t understand why you don’t just take it down.”
“Trust me,” she replies, “that’s the first thing I’m doing tomorrow.” She sits on the bed and opens the hearty first aid kit, patting the comforter next to her. “Come, sit.” He obeys, gingerly sinking next to her, hands carefully in his lap. “Can you pull up your shirt?” He does. Underneath, the bandages are already pink in places. She grimaces.
“It’s fine, I just need to change them.”
“You shouldn’t be letting them get to this point. You have to keep them clean.” She peels away the first bandage, a large patch on his right flank. Underneath, the skin is puffy and inflamed around the wounds, which are fairly gruesome. They remind her of the time Mike had wiped out on his bike on a gravel road and come home with a chunk of skin on his elbow missing. “You should go to the hospital.”
He almost laughs. “Have you seen town? It’s destroyed. The hospital is overrun.” He’s solemn again. “Nance, I heard on the radio that people died. Regular people.” He looks at her, his expression difficult for her to read. Sorrow? Shame? Not emotions she had really known Steve to have, except for maybe when she broke up with him.
“My mom said there was a massive earthquake,” she replies, taking the antiseptic from the kit and prepping a cotton ball with it. “That there are fault lines through town.” She begins to dab the cotton ball against the wound, and he bites back a gasp, fist clenching.
After a deep breath, he steadies himself. “One big gate, by the looks of things. I had to drive out of the town limits around the Creel house and back in to get here.”
Loch Nora is only a mile north, and if he had driven out of town– “You drove thirty minutes to get here? What if I had been asleep?”
“Then I’d drive back. I have to cross it to get to Dustin’s anyway.”
“Did you go by there, too?” She begins to apply a fresh bandage, taping the sides carefully to his skin.
“Yeah. Lights were off. I was there for about an hour after I dropped you and Robin off anyway, so I figure I’ll try and go by again in the morning. Hey, any word about Max?”
“She’s still in surgery, last I heard. I think Lucas is still there, but I haven’t heard him over the walkie.” She moves to his other side, and he steels himself as she pulls back the bandage. The injury is bigger on this side, and equal parts scrapes and bite wounds. “Jesus.” He doesn’t reply, and she realizes he’s holding his breath. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” he says tightly, “It’s just tender.”
“Have you taken anything?”
“I will before bed.”
She fishes a bottle of ibuprofen out of the first aid kit and grabs the cup of water on her nightstand. “Here.”
He eyes the cup suspiciously.
“Seriously? You won’t drink after me?” When we’ve literally slept together?
“I have a weird thing about it, okay?” He takes the bottle and shakes a few pills into his palm, then dry swallows them. “There. Happy?”
She allows a small smile as she shakes her head, setting the water back down. “So are you doing okay emotionally?” She begins cleaning this side with a fresh cotton ball. He flinches at the contact.
“Yeah, just tired, I guess.” They sit in silence for a moment, him taking shallow breaths. Then he adds quietly, “I feel awful about Eddie.”
Nancy's heart falls. Eddie had nothing to do with this–he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. She’s been trying to avoid the guilt gnawing at her, but hearing Steve express her feelings makes her chest go cold again. “Yeah. He deserved better.”
“I keep wondering if we should have just had them come with us. Or if I should have stayed with them.”
Nancy scoffs lightly. “As if you would have let me and Robin take on Vecna alone.”
He cocks his head to the side, considering, his tongue working on the inside of his lip like it does when he’s thinking. “Yeah, I guess not. But then maybe… I don’t know. I don’t know how we could have made it work.”
She wraps up cleaning his left side and begins to apply the bandages. “We did the best we could. So did he.”
Steve nods but doesn’t seem convinced. “I should go. Let you get to sleep.”
She places the last piece of tape, and he rises from the bed, tugging down the hem of his sweater. For a second, she sees the bottom edges of scrapes down his back like road rash, then they’re gone under his shirt. She thinks about asking about it. Then she doesn’t. “Radio when you get home?”
“Sure,” he replies. He shimmies the window open, releasing into the room the acrid smell of house fire. “Good night, Nance.” He pushes the window closed and vanishes into the night.
Nancy stares after him.
She misses the simplicity of her gun.