Archive of Our Own

“You’ve all seen Return of the Jedi?”

Jonathan casts his eyes about the lobby of the lab, taking in its odd blue cast and shadowed corners. He hates this place. Not just the Upside Down, but this place specifically.

This dark mirror image of the world he knows, this ground zero for a crack that first took his brother and then, when they scrabbled him back by the skin of their teeth, just kept consuming; his family, his home, his dreams, his future.

Dustin is still talking, fighting off interjections from Steve, and Nancy’s mouth is set in a hard line, and he can feel the impatience radiating off her in waves.

His relationship. His happiness. Eat, eat, eat.

He hates this fucking place.

“Yeah, cool,” Steve snarks at Dustin. “Thanks for the summary of a movie we’ve all seen.”

“It’s an oddly relevant movie, Steve,” Dustin snarks back. Jonathan wonders which one of them Nancy will threaten to shoot first. He gives her sixty seconds, tops.

He knows what Dustin’s getting at; the supernatural parallel of the energy shield that protected the Death Star. He’s not sure if Dustin remembers it but he was the one to take them all to that movie, eager to use his new driver’s license. He’d had to listen to Will, Dustin, Mike and Lucas argue about it all damn night and nearly a week after.

When they asked him to take them to see it again, he made them ride their bikes.

He knows Dustin can go on about this for days. Someone’s gotta move this along.

“So if we find this dark magic shield generator…” he prompts.

“We destroy the wall,” Dustin concludes with a flourish.

He sees the light turn on in Nancy’s eyes. “Find Vecna, save Holly.”

“Medals for all.”

“And it looks like what?” Steve interjects.

Dustin glares, waves his hands. “How would you expect me to know that?”

He has a headache. He’s had a headache for days now. Longer, probably. But right now, Jonathan thinks, he really has a headache.

They turn back to the stairs.

“Up or down?” Dustin asks.

“I say both,” Nancy says with a firm nod. “Search in teams of two. Cover more ground.”

“Yeah, that’s cool with me, but can we just switch the teams up?” Jonathan watches Steve turn a plaintive gaze on Nancy, tipping his chin down to make his eyes bigger. “Nance, you and me to go up?”

“Oh, I mean…”

His spine goes cold.

He is sick of this, Jonathan realizes. He is fucking exhausted, to the marrow of his bones, by this dance they’ve been doing for months; not the whole time he’s been back but much more of it than he ever would have expected. Especially when Nancy made it abundantly clear that they were still together. That things were a little weird and he knows they’re not being fully honest with each other and, of course, the world was literally ending, but it was still Jonathan-And-Nancy, they were still them.

And while that hasn’t wavered, neither have Steve’s efforts to keep testing the waters like there’s an unspoken promise that was made he’s trying to collect on. Which Nancy has told him, multiple times, isn’t the case. And he thinks Nancy is a lot of things – stubborn, brave, arrogant, brilliant, selfish, spoiled, the love of his life – but a liar she is not.

She also clearly hasn’t put the kibosh on what Steve’s doing. And for months, that’s made Jonathan irritated, and sad. But not now. This time the sad doesn’t come.

This time he’s just angry.

“Sure,” he says before anyone else can chime in. “New teams. New eyes, new thoughts; maybe we’ll find something different. Maybe we’ll finally break through.”

Steve is gawking at him. Dustin is not, but his eyebrows are so far up his forehead they might actually be under his cap.

Nancy’s mouth is hanging open, and he’s surprisingly pleased by that.

Then it snaps closed and she looks at him, hard, then to the left.

He steps that way without a word and feels a grim satisfaction when his easy acquiescence seems to throw her off more.

“What the hell, Jonathan,” she whispers when they’ve put a few feet of distance between themselves and the other duo.

“What?” he shrugs. “I’m just doing what you wanted.”

“When did I say I wanted this?!”

“You hesitated.”

“I didn’t hesitate.”

“I know you, Nancy. You hesitated.”

“Okay. So what if I did, which I didn’t? It doesn’t matter. My sister is missing.”

“Yeah, which is exactly why it does matter. After everything that has happened, that is happening, I’m scared, Nancy, okay? I’m really scared.” His mouth twists, the words are bitter and rotten on his tongue. “I don’t know what’s on the other side of any of this. But what I do know is that if we want to stand a chance of surviving this, all right, we need to be a team. A team like we used to be.”

“We are still a team.” He hears a grace note of hurt in her voice. A part of him, somewhere deep inside, twangs. The rest of him is too fed up to change course now.

“No, we’re not,” and these words taste even worse. “Not anymore.”

Maybe the only thing that keeps the flicking flame of hope alive in his chest is the swirl of hurt he sees briefly penetrate the cold fury in her eyes. Hurt means she cares. Caring is better than not.

“Maybe we need a break,” he says and her jaw sharpens further. “We know each other too well; we miss things because we already know where the other is looking. Maybe shuffling the deck will reveal something we can’t see between us. It’s worth a shot if it could get us to Holly.”

Her face softens a little. “Jonathan—”

He doesn’t want to hear her tell him it’s not like that again, so he reaches out and takes her hand. It’s cold and dry and so thin, her knuckles hard under her skin; she’s been pulled tight as a drum for months but it’s so much worse since the attack. He wishes he could just pull her into a dark room and make her breathe, slow and deep, force her to relax, just a little.

Pot meet kettle. He still remembers, acutely, what it felt like when Will was missing.

He moves slightly closer, enough so his breath can move her hair. “Be safe, Nancy. Come back safe.”

He strides away before she can reply.

“Okay, Dustin,” he declares, voice overloud in the empty space, pointedly ignoring Steve’s stare. “Up, or down?”

+++

Eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen

Nancy counts the stairs as she climbs each flight, restarting each time they reach a landing and she shines her flashlight through the door. The hall, the rooms, all of it is covered in vines, like graffiti. Her eyes scan over it but don’t really see it.

The counting helps on two fronts. It drowns out the sound of Steve’s continuous drone of mundane observations. It’s a nervous habit she remembers all too well from the year they were together; he fills silence with any and every thought that comes into his head. It drove her crazy then, and that hasn’t changed.

It also drowns out Jonathan’s words still bouncing around her skull.

A team like we used to be.

We are still a team.

No we’re not. Not anymore.

“So, like,” Steve is closer now and his voice makes her jump, “what are we looking for?”

Thank god he’s just a bit behind her; he can’t see her roll her eyes.

She takes a breath, steadies her voice so it’s not quite so obvious she wants to strangle him already. “I have no idea.”

“Well, any ideas on where to start?”

“I don’t know.” She wonders if he even notices how clipped her voice is. He never read her all that well. “Maybe look for something weird?”

He scoffs loudly at that. “Yeah, okay, sure Nance. Something weird. You mean like the perma-dusk, or the air spores, or maybe the… whatever the hell is on the walls.”

“Vines,” she supplies absently, turning to the next set of stairs. One, two, three, four—

“Right. Vines.”

“No,” she stops on the mid-flight landing, glares at him until he picks it up and jogs up the stairs to her. She doesn’t want to lose him in here. “Not like those. Something else. Something weirder.”

She doesn’t know how to put it into words, what she’s looking for; she’ll know it when she sees it. Something more out of place than what’s already so unnatural. Jonathan would understand what she meant. He wouldn’t distract her search with a running commentary, or these inane questions.

THIRTEEN, FOURTEEN, FIFTEEN, SIXTEEN

“OK, fine,” she hears him huff behind her, clomping up the stairs behind her.

She sweeps the hall again, considering counting the swings of her flashlights to keep her inner voices quiet, when it falls on a door.

The knob is weird.

She approaches it slowly, like it might come alive and bite (and what does she know, maybe it could). It’s misshapen, warped—almost… dripping?

She reaches out slowly then forces herself to grasp it. It’s cool and metallic, normal in her hand in every way but its shape. She tries giving it a turn. It snaps clean off.

“What the hell.” Steve is right behind her.

“I don’t know but,” she glances at him over her shoulder, holding the broken handle up. “It’s weird.”

“Right,” he nods. “Weird.”

They both consider the door for a moment until he puts his hand on her arm, pushes her to the side.

“What are you doing?”

“I think we need a little heft for this,” he says, backing up to the far end of the hallway, then running at the door, slamming into it shoulder-first. It rattles but stays shut. So he backs up and does it again.

This time it pops open, Steve stumbling through and only catching himself from falling with a hand on the frame. She shines her light past him on a stairwell that is, well, melted. Partially, at least.  

“What the fuck,” she says.

“Seriously.” His tone makes her want to grin and to hit him, in equal measure. She steps up next him, considers the stairs, whether the drips look dried or wet. She can’t quite tell. She’s still holding the doorknob; it clangs as she drops it as she takes another step forward. “Wait, Nance, no. You can’t be serious.”

The knob is solid. Brittle, but solid. They might need to be quick.

“Step lightly,” she tells him, testing the first step with her toe before stepping onto it. It holds her weight; she’s less sure about his. He’s much bigger than her.

And Jonathan.

“And don’t fall behind,” she adds, and takes off.

Onetwothreefourfivesixseven—

+++

“Dustin, hold on,” Jonathan pauses at the bottom of the stairwell to catch his breath. “That was a lot of stairs.”

“Treasures are always hidden in the deepest depths of the dungeon,” Dustin replies loftily.

“Whatever you say, but give me a sec.”

“Fine. Jeez, you’re only like eighteen, you should be more spry than this.”

Jonathan straightens, takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly to bring his lungs fully back under control. “Twenty.”

“Huh?”

“I’m not eighteen. I’m twenty.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes.” He rolls his eyes. “Birthdays don’t really care about military lockdowns. Or apocalypses.”

“That’s… weird.” Dustin looks shaken, like he’s realizing Jonathan is an actual adult for the first time. Maybe he is.

“Yeah.” Jonathan rolls his shoulders out to loosen the tension of their long descent and shines his flashlight around the landing. “Okay, so onward?”

They move through the doorway and his stomach drops.

“Jesus,” he breathes. “It’s a daycare.”

Their torches don’t provide an abundance of light but it’s more than enough to see the bright colors on the walls and the rainbow floor tiles, the chalkboard, the child-sized tables and chairs. It makes his stomach turn; if this is here, then it means there’s a version of it in their world.

Then it means this is where El grew up.

He can’t dwell on that, not right now. Keeps his flashlight moving until it lands on a table, and something shiny on top of it.

“Hey look,” he says, walking over. It’s a maze, a wooden one, but there are balls inside made of shiny metal.

“What it is?”

“I’m not sure,” he points his light up to the ceiling, like simply looking up will reveal the answers to these strange secrets. It does not. “If they kept kids here…”

“You think it’s a game?”

“Or a test,” he frowns, considering. “Or a training device?”

“Training?” Understanding breaks on Dustin’s face and he winces. “For powers.”

“Like El’s.”

“Or Venca’s,” Dustin points out.

Jonathan nods.

“Then maybe there’s other things.” Dustin flails his light wildly along the walls, and Jonathan squints when it gets in his eyes. “Like notes, or research.”

“We need to search everywhere.” Jonathan claps him on the shoulder, giving him a squeeze. “Good call, on the basement.”

Dustin looks almost taken aback for a second before he schools his swollen, bruised face back to neutral. “Thanks.”

As they start to methodically move down the hall, into each room in turn (and what are they looking for? Notebooks, he thinks, but maybe computers too? Does the Upside Down do floppy disks?), Jonathan keeps Dustin in his peripheral vision. He looks determined, and upset, and like he got the shit kicked out of him and is studiously trying to ignore it.

“So,” he offers in the third room. “Do you… want to talk about it?”

“Talk about what?” The forced note in Dustin’s voice rings loud in the bizarre other-dimensional silence.

“What happened to your face?” He waves a hand in his direction. “Why you missed the crawl?”

“Nothing happened.”

Jonathan resists the urge to roll his eyes. “You gave yourself a black eye? Impressive. Never quite managed that one myself, no matter how many times I claimed I did.”

“You wouldn’t understand. You weren’t even here.”

“Try me.”

Dustin sighs heavily, but Jonathan has practice with this. He’s had to wait out Will’s reticence more times than he can count. He keeps looking, flipping through pages of an ash-covered magazine just in case, and waits.

“Everyone still talks about Eddie like he’s a murderer,” Dustin finally says. “Like he killed Chrissy and the others. Even though there are cracks in Hawkins, even though we’re on military lockdown, they think just because he had long hair and liked Dungeon and Dragons and listened to heavy metal that it’s him, not something else. And I’m not gonna let them get away with that.”

“So you… picked a fight?”

“So I defended my friend,” Dustin snaps, anger burning in his voice. “A good friend, a real friend, a friend who actually believed me, who was kind to me.”

Jonathan winces. “Ouch.”

“Huh?”

Jonathan turns to him and waits for Dustin to do the same, to meet his eyes. “I said, ouch. Look, I didn’t know Eddie that well, and I know that we had already been in California for months when all of this went down, but I have to imagine Will and Mike and Lucas might take some offense to being left out of that category of friends.”

Dustin stares at him.

“Will said you didn’t call that much, especially after the first few weeks. You weren’t home much either. He said your mom told him you were at your Hellfire Club – I’m guessing that was Eddie’s group?”

“…Yeah.”

“Yeah,” Jonathan shakes his head, breaks eye contact to give Dustin a break and casts his flashlight around the room again. “Look, I know childhood friendships change. You guys are getting older, you’re in high school, your hormones are raging—”

“Okay, Jonathan, that’s—”

“—but you don’t stop being friends just because you’re getting different interests. Lucas told Will about all his games. Mike… well, Mike’s a different story. The Wheelers are their own puzzle to figure out.”

Dustin laughs at that, a pained sound.

“I get it. It can get lonely. But I’m sure Mike and Lucas didn’t stop caring about you, or believing you, just because they had new distractions. And I’m sure Steve didn’t like being replaced either. He never has.”

“Steve had Robin,” Dustin dismisses. “And he never believes me about anything.”

“But he cares about you. You two were close. Are close.”

“He treats me like a little kid.”

“Dustin,” Jonathan does roll his eyes this time and turns to make his way back out into the hall. “To us, you are little kids. I’ve known you since you were eight.”

“I can’t believe you’re defending Steve. The guy who’s been chasing your girlfriend for the last year and a half.”

“I’m not defending Steve,” Jonathan snaps back, prickling. “I’m saying that grief isn’t something you have to go through alone. And that Eddie – as great as he may have been – is not your only friend. And that picking fights so you can get the shit kicked out of you to prove a point that I still can’t quite figure out is easily the least productive way to grieve anyone, especially someone you truly cared about.”

Dustin kicks at a piece of debris as they enter the next room, looking down at the floor.

“Eddie wasn’t perfect,” he says quietly after a moment. “But he was never fake. He didn’t care what other people thought about him. He was just himself. He was the smartest, kindest person I’ve ever met. And he would’ve solved this in 30 seconds flat.”

“No, he wouldn’t have,” Jonathan keeps his voice gentle. “I don’t think anyone could solve whatever this is that fast. But I’m sure he would have helped.”

“Actually,” Dustin huffs a humorless laugh, his voice thick with unshed tears, “he had a pretty good knack for hiding from things he didn’t understand.”

“Never underestimate how important hiding is. It saved Will’s life, once. And, if nothing else, Eddie being here would have made you feel better. Safer. And that matters a lot, too, when you’re facing down something as strange and scary as this. You can’t do things like that alone.” He thinks about Nancy, holding ice to his face in the police station, holding a red hot poker to his brother’s leg in Hopper’s cabin, holding his hand as they scrambled down a hospital hallway coated in construction dust. “That’s one I had to learn the hard way, too.”

“I miss him,” Dustin says and his voice sounds so young and small.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Jonathan replies, and suddenly finds himself with an armful of teenage boy.

Dustin’s flashlight crashes and clangs somewhere down the hallway, thrown by the force of his movement. He is bigger than he was when he was really little, when he and Will first became friends, but he’s still smaller than Jonathan’s brother and it feels a little more like hugging the kid Jonathan remembers than it does when he hugs Will these days. He’s crying, sobbing into his shoulder, and Jonathan rubs his back slowly, offers comforting noises as he lets the younger boy get it all out.

It feels, to him, like this might be the first time Dustin’s let himself have this kind of catharsis. He wonders if any of his friends ever offered him their actual condolences before.

He thinks about the hellacious year they’ve lived through, the way they’ve all slowly become more estranged from each other. Not just him and Nancy; him and Will, his mom, all the boys. Maybe the Upside Down isn’t just bleeding over into their world; maybe it’s feeding from them too, sucking up all their empathy and love, leaving them cold and hard and alone, easy to prey on.

When Dustin pulls away his face is tear-streaked and snotty, but in the dim light his eyes seem clearer. Jonathan ruffles his cap on his head.

“Better?”

Dustin nods. “Thanks, Jonathan.”

He steps away to give the younger boy a moment to gather himself, clean himself up. Hears him snuffling and imagines he’s probably wiping his nose on the sleeve of that ridiculous duster he’s wearing. Wonders if that maybe belonged to Eddie too; a keepsake Dustin had squirreled away.

He’d only talked to Eddie Munson a handful of times; bought weed from him, mostly, occasionally commiserated about getting picked on at school, exchanged mixtapes once as a gesture toward potential friendship but, honestly, Iron Maiden wasn’t his jam and The Clash didn’t seem to be Eddie’s. He thinks in a slightly different world they may have ended up as neighbors in the trailer park, if Lonnie hadn’t been so eager to get out of their lives and into as many bedrooms in Indianapolis as possible that he decided not to fight Mom on the house.

Jonathan shakes that thought out of his head and follows the glow of Dustin’s flashlight down the hall instead. It’s resting on the linoleum, shining at the wall and something about that wall looks weird. Instead of stooping to pick it up, Jonathan stops to consider what he’s looking at.

It’s a hall in the lab in the Upside Down. It’s covered in vines like the rest of the hallway. Except… except…

The light moves as Dustin scoops the flashlight up from the floor. “Ready?”

“Look,” Jonathan says, aiming his own light at the wall.

“It’s a wall.”

“It’s weird. It’s blank.”

There is a large rectangle with not a single vine on it. In fact, they loop and swirl around the edges of it, like they do with the other—

“Doors,” Jonathan breathes. “They always grow around the doors.”

Something icy sets up in his chest as he says it. He has a bad feeling about this.

Dustin’s arm reaches past him and pushes. The wall moves. He pushes again, harder. The hidden door creaks open.

Inside is an office, filled with corkboards and papers, a computer on a desk, stacks of videotape cases, binders. It must be Brenner’s office, Jonathan thinks. His research. They found it.

Their lights scan over the surfaces, Dustin stepping further and further into the room. Jonathan doesn’t even know where to start looking with everything laid out in front of him.

He focuses on the walls, sheets of gibberish to him, but Dustin starts in on the binders, picking them up and rifling through them quickly, efficiently. Thank god, Jonathan thinks, one of them has some idea what to look for.

He hears a binder slam on the table, the pages turning slower. Returns to Dustin’s side and finds him staring wide-eyed at what he’s found: diagrams, notes, equations, but it all looks Greek to him.

“Shit,” Dustin says. “Shit.”

+++

“Jesus,” Steve breathes behind her as they continue their climb. Steve has been trying to keep them moving, keep the pace swift, but once they established the stairs would hold their weight even if they weren’t sprinting, Nancy forced them to slow down and started examining the things around them more closely.

The things are horrible. Walls that were melted, re-hardening mid-drip.  Hallways that warp and tilt like an evil funhouse. Rooms glopping into each other, some subsumed, others frozen halfway through consumption.

It makes her queasy.

“What do you think happened here?” she wonders aloud.

“I dunno.” Steve’s tone is a shrug, dismissive and impatient, and while Nancy knows at its root is probably a great deal of fear she is overwhelmed, not for the first time during this ascent, with the urge to throttle him. “Vecna’s super mega heat gun can melt buildings?”

“Be serious.”

“I am.” He rolls his eyes at her. “I don’t know anything about any of this shit, why not a giant heat gun? Maybe he can do it with his mind, like he apparently does everything else.”

Nancy closes her eyes, counting to five in her head and wishing, powerfully, that Jonathan was standing there with her right now instead of Steve. At least he’d be trying to figure out what was going on.

She swears she doesn’t remember Steve being this impossible when they were last in the Upside Down but she supposes he was mostly hanging back with Eddie at that point. Always willing to jump into a lake or drive through a hole in dimensions without a second thought; less willing, perhaps, to think about anything once the action is over.

Jonathan would have a theory. A real one. It’d probably be wrong, but it’d be a place to start.

Her heartrate slightly calmer, she opens her eyes again and turns, only for her flashlight to light up a skeleton, still wearing fatigues and a metal helmet, melted into the wall.

“Shit!” She gasps, staggers backward and right into Steve’s arms. He holds her shoulders tight, pulling her back a little against his chest. She shakes him off, heart hammering behind her sternum once more. “What the hell.”

“That’s dark,” Steve agrees, still hovering close behind her. “Just… just ignore it. Let’s keep going. We gotta hurry up.”

“Why do you keep doing that?”

“Doing what?”

“That,” she gestures generally around them at the warped, melting hallway. “Telling me to ignore things, to stop looking, to hurry. We are trying to find something maybe no one has ever seen before and you’re just trying to force your way through it like Mike does with hard levels of his video games.”

“I’m not trying to do that.”

“Whatever,” she snaps and makes for the next set of half-melted stairs. Something feels off about where they are, something other than the melted walls, but she can’t put her finger on what it is.

“Look, Nance,” Steve says plaintively, his footsteps close behind hers, “I know you’re stressed right now. I’m sorry I haven’t been able to be there for you, okay? I told Jonathan we should have swung by the hospital to see you before the crawl, that you needed us, but he wouldn’t listen—”

“Come see me at the hospital?” she frowns. “And do what?”

“Bring you flowers. Check on your parents.”

She blinks at him. “What would I have done with flowers?”

“Okay, fine, then be there for you—”

He’s giving her a headache. “What did Jonathan want to do?” she interrupts him before he can get further. “When you told him you wanted to bring me flowers, what did Jonathan do?”

“He called me selfish and a chauvinistic meathead and said you’d want us to do the crawl."

“And he was right.” She turns back to the stairs, starts climbing again. “About the crawl, at least.”

“Oh really—”

“Yes, really, Steve! My sister is missing. She has been kidnapped by Venca! My parents have doctors to watch over them, to treat them, to keep them safe. Holly has no one except for me, and I will do anything to find her.”

“Including getting yourself killed in the Upside Down, apparently.”

“I’m not gonna get myself killed,” she huffs. “But apparently it would still kill you to trust me, for once.”

“What are you talking about, I’m here aren’t I? Would I be if I didn’t trust you?”

“If you trusted me, you’d be helping,” she grits out.

“So now I’m not helping.”

“No. Can you just focus for once and see if you can find anything that might show us the way to where this… this…shield generator, or whatever, that’d be great.”

She can hear him muttering behind her as she presses ahead.

“Why are we even listening to Dustin, he got this whole idea from Star Wars,” Steve grumbles. “Which is a movie.”

Nancy rolls her eyes. “And you have a better idea?”

“Yeah. Go meet Hopper, like we were supposed to.”

“Dustin’s been right about the Upside Down before,” she points out, “multiple times. Why shouldn’t we listen to him?”

“He’s just a kid.”

“He’s sixteen, or haven’t you noticed?” Nancy stops on the stairs, turns on him and glares. “And I thought he was your friend. But you’ve been treating him like a dumb kid all day, when you know he’s not. What gives?”

“He is a kid.”

“Is it because of Eddie?” she raises her eyebrows at him. “Because he found someone else to call his best friend?”

“Eddie wasn’t his best friend. Eddie wasn’t anyone’s best friend. Eddie was a coward with a chip on his shoulder and a death wish, and when he finally got a chance to make good on it, he almost took Dustin with him. Forgive me if I’m not still mourning his loss.”

There’s something blazing in Steve’s eyes, which makes Nancy soften a little. She knows jealousy when she sees it.

“But Dustin is.”

“He’ll get over it,” Steve sniffs, looks away. “You got over Barbara. He’ll get over Eddie, eventually.”

Something ugly flares in the pit of her stomach. “I did not get over Barb. I may talk about her less, I may have healed from what happened, but I am not over losing my best friend. Jesus, Steve, what the hell is wrong with you?”

“Nothing’s wrong with me. Just calling it how I see it.”

“How you see it? What are the spores in the air blinding you or—” But the rest of the words die in her mouth because, actually, there are no spores in the air. There’s nothing at all. The air is completely clear.

“What, chickening out now Nance? Come on, just say it, stop talking around things for once—”

“Shut up.” She holds up a hand, scans the stairwell with her flashlight. “Look.”

“I don’t see anything.”

“Right.” She looks back at him, his glowering face. “There’s nothing in the air. No ash. No spores. The air up here is clear.”

The glower falls off his face, and his brow furrows. “What does that mean?”

“I don’t know.” She wishes, again, that Jonathan was there just so she didn’t have to be the only one coming up with ideas. “But there were spores down there, when we first came into the stairs. The higher we go, the clearer the air is.”

“So then…”

“So then we follow the changes. We keep going. Up.”

She doesn’t waste time waiting for an answer. Hears Steve sigh and mutter something behind her, but quickly his boots are following hers.

At this landing is another door, but it’s different. Wider, and a different color steel.

She pushes it open.

“Whoa.”

They’re on the roof.

+++

“Dustin—”

“Come on Jonathan—”

“Dustin slow down—”

“Look I can explain it when we find Nance and Steve—”

“No I mean slow down,” Jonathan thumps onto a landing and braces himself on his knees, spitting into a corner and drawing in a harsh breath. “We are sprinting and there is shit in the air and I can’t breathe. Slow down.”

“We have to get to them before they do something bad!”

“Try the radio again,” he orders, hacks a cough and spits the phlegm it loosens in the same corner. His head is spinning from fear and lack of oxygen and he blinks a few times. The air isn’t toxic, not the way they feared when his brother was missing, but it’s not their air either and he’s left slightly breathless by it all. The hammering in his heart ever since Dustin started yelling and telling him to run isn’t helping.

“Steve, Nancy, pick up, over!” Dustin is shouting into the walkie talkie but only static hisses in return. “Steve, Nancy, PICK UP!”

“They must be out of range still.” Breath caught, Jonathan motions with his hand and starts climbing stairs again. He won’t say it aloud but he’s feeling a little less magnanimous about Dustin’s decision to start their search in the basement.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Dustin is chanting as they jog up stairs together. “How far do you think they got?”

“I don’t know.”

“God I hope it’s not too far,” Dustin pants, coat flapping as he rounds a corner and attacks the next flight. “Or we are so screwed.”

“Why?”

“Because I was wrong.” Dustin’s tone makes Jonathan’s heart drop like a lead weight into his stomach. “This isn’t dark magic.”

“What??”

“The shield generator isn’t a shield generator. This isn’t dark magic. Come on Jonathan! We have to get in range.”

His heart isn’t just hammering now, it’s pounding in triple time. Suddenly his lungs, his legs, none of it matters. He grits his teeth and starts sprinting up the stairs.

“How were you wrong?”

“Wh-what?” Dustin’s panting now behind him.

“How were you wrong??” He tries not to scream it, but he can feel panic rising in him. Stays focused on the stairs, on not falling, on moving as fast as he can.

“I thought Vecna made… the thing.. that made the wall… but he didn’t. It’s not—” Dustin is gasping behind him but Jonathan’s blood is roaring in his ears, panic at his throat, and he refuses to slow down. “It’s not magic. It’s science.”

“Give me the walkie,” he grits out, pausing just long enough to grab it from the younger boy, then tearing back up the stairs, taking them two at a time. “Nancy? Nancy it’s Jonathan, answer me!”

There’s nothing. Static. Maybe a note of her voice, but it could be his imagination.

“I found Brenner’s journal,” Dustin is saying. “The thing that made that wall, the key to destroying it, it’s in the lab but it’s not dark magic. It’s science, and it’s not a shield generator and if Nancy shoots it—”

“What happens?” He can hear the panic choking his voice now.

“Death.”

He doesn’t spare Dustin a glance, even as the fear makes his vision blur. There’s no time.

They pass the lobby and he keeps his eyes on the stairs, looking for where her feet and Steve’s may have disturbed the dust, the vines, the debris, tracking her search.

His heart beats her name, two syllables, over and over, faster and faster: Nancy, Nancy, Nancy.

He shouldn’t have made them spilt up. He shouldn’t have let her go without him. Because he knows Nancy. He knows she is scared and she feels like she has no control —that’s why she’s been so single-minded in her pursuit of Holly; hell, that’s why she’s been so high-strung and focused on Vecna for the last year and a half. And when Nancy is scared, when she feels out of control, she reaches for her guns, because they give her that control back. With a weapon, she can find the monster and kill it.

Jonathan knows that’s all she’s thinking about right now; killing Vecna and saving Holly, and damn whatever gets in her way.

She doesn’t know they were wrong.

He knows that she will find what she’s looking for in this building. He knows that she will shoot it.

And he knows Steve won’t stop her.

+++

“Look at all this melted shit,” Steve murmurs as they make their way across the roof. “Think it’s like Chernobyl, or something? Nuclear?”

“Could be,” Nancy murmurs, surprised he even had the thought. It’s the first real thought she’s heard him put forth since their search started. “Though wouldn’t a nuclear blast burn everything, not melt it?”

“No idea.”

Yeah, she thinks. That’s more like it.

Looking around, though, she sees why he said it. The top of the roof, the safety walls, the radio tower pillars, they’re all melted or covered with the melted substance, like something else had glopped on top of them. Like something’s been melting them from the top, the way her mom uses the blow dryer to even out the candles in their home that have tunneled instead of burning evenly. Except instead of aiming for a smooth, flat surface, whatever’s doing this just melts and keeps melting.

She runs the beam of her flashlight over all of it, still not sure what she’s looking for. A box? Something that looks like a computer? A totem shaped like Vecna? It could be anything.

Maybe Steve was right to doubt her blind faith in Dustin. Maybe he’s just taking wild guesses and getting lucky.

Her light distorts, disappears, then suddenly reappears. She freezes.

“Steve,” she murmurs. “Look at this.”

She does it again as he comes to stand next to her. “See this?”

“See what?”

“My light. Watch.” She runs it over the sky. Again, a strange distortion. Like something is there. Because something is there.  It’s hidden in the stormy sky of the Upside Down, but it’s real enough that it bends and distorts her light.

His light joints hers and ripples in the same way. “What was that?”

She grins from vindication, not joy. “Dark magic.”

“Well damn.” Steve sounds amused. She hears him pull the walkie off his belt, the hiss of him clicking it on. “Dustin, Jonathan, you guys there? We found it.”

I found it, Nancy thinks sourly, rolling her eyes. She lifts the shotgun strap around her head, its weight familiar and reassuring.

She’s going to the end this. She’s going to kill that asshole. She’s going to destroy his wall, and rescue her sister, and put a bullet right between his fucking eyes. She’s not sure what kind of alien mutant he’s turned into, but she’s never seen anything survive a headshot. She’s more than a little excited to test the theory on Venca.

“Dustin? Jonathan? You guys copy?”

She pauses in her motion to raise the gun to her shoulder. “They’re not answering?"

“No,” he sounds like it’s a personal slight. “Dustin, Jonathan, I said do you copy? We found the shield generator.”

They wait. Nancy pushes down the thought that something might be wrong. They’re probably just out of range. She and Steve are on the roof, after all; Jonathan and Dustin were headed to the basement. They could still be down there.

A burst of static is louder than the hiss but doesn’t quite form into words. It makes her jump anyway.

“Dustin?” Steve asks again but just gets that even hiss in return. He shrugs. “Must be out of range.”

Annoyance surges in her. She’s not sure why. This was Jonathan’s idea after all, this whole new teams thing. She doesn’t have to wait for him to do anything. She doesn’t need his permission.

“Then they’ll miss the show,” she snarks and hoists the gun to her shoulder. Steve’s flashlight is still on the shield generator; she aims at the distortion.

Her thumb flicks off the safety, index finger settles on the trigger. The sound of the world around her falls away, ears homing in on her breath and her heartbeat.

Just point, and shoot.

She spares one second to glance over at Steve, to double check. Because if Jonathan was here, he’d ask her the same thing he always has, every time; his last check.

You sure about this?

Steve doesn’t open his mouth. He just frowns at her, confused, and flicks his eyes back to where his light points.

She looks back at the sky and squeezes the trigger.

+++

They’re almost half a dozen floors up from the lobby when they have to stop, have to catch their breaths. Both of them are on the verge of passing out, Jonathan knows; his vision is swimming with every flight climbed.

It’d been too fucking much for the Upside Down to have working elevators, wouldn’t it?

They’re still alive though, and the building is still standing. He has to hope that means Nancy hasn’t found the shield generator yet. Maybe they’re moving slower, searching longer. Maybe they’re not even searching anymore, maybe Steve has finally seized the opportunity Jonathan knows he’s been waiting for and they’re—

He slams the door on that thought as hard as he can. If he lets that in right now, he’s pretty sure he will actually lose his mind. He has to trust her; whatever issues they have, whatever ways his father fucked his head up for the rest of his life, he has to trust Nancy in this moment for his sake, and hers, and maybe the entire goddamn world’s.

“Explain,” he rasps. “You said it’s science, not magic. Explain it to me, now.”

“Theoretical physicists call it exotic matter. A single source of energy that is holding that giant wall together,” Dustin’s voice is staccato as he gulps down air. “And it’s not just holding the wall together. This place, the Upside Down, it isn’t another dimension. It’s not another world. It’s a wormhole. A bridge between two points in time and space, between our world and another.”

“And if the bridge collapses?” He knows the answer. He asks the question anyway.

“It will take us with it. All of us.”

There is a cracking rumble, like thunder after a lightning strike that is too close. The building shakes with it, lurches. It sends both Jonathan and Dustin sprawling on the floor, tumbling through an open doorway and into a vine-covered hall.

“And,” Dustin says, pushing himself up to sitting, “I think Nancy just shot it.”

+++

Nothing happens.

The sky shimmers, like it’s felt the blow of the bullet, but that’s it. There is no other reaction.

Nancy frowns, lowering the gun.

“What the hell,” she mutters. Next to her, she can hear Steve shrug.

“I dunno. I mean, can you shoot magic? That’s what it is, right?”

“According to Dustin.” She leaves the first question unanswered, annoyed he’d ask.

“Well, maybe you missed?”

Her head snaps to him and she glares. He holds up his hand in surrender.

“I—”

Whatever he’s about to say is cut off by a rumble, like thunder but deeper, almost alive. That’s quickly followed by a staticky crackle though the sky.

“Maybe we—” she starts but never gets the chance to finish. Lightning coalesces around the shield generator, or whatever it is, and suddenly there’s a sparking red light and an enormous flash.

The static makes her skin prickle with gooseflesh as the shockwave sends her flying. She shouts, hears Steve grunting to her side, and everything goes black.

+++

He’s braced for disaster, every muscle of his body tense as they creep methodically through hallways, looking for any sign that Nancy or Steve may have passed by. They found one door that was busted down, followed into a nightmare of a stairwell that seemed to be melting, or had been, trapping remains in walls and doorways. They’d followed that for only a couple floors before Dustin pushed them back onto a main level; Jonathan thinks he maybe couldn’t quite stomach what he was seeing.

Jonathan is so tense, in fact, that his back hurts. So does his neck, and his head, and his hands where they’re gripping the walkie and his flashlight. Each new floor he tries again. Each new floor they get nothing but static back.

He has a sneaking suspicion they need to get to the roof.

But there have been no changes since the building shook; no hordes of demodogs or demobats, no more aftershocks, nothing.

At the end of another, increasingly unremarkable hallway he finally voices the thought that’s gotten louder and louder in the back of his mind with each passing minute.

“How long do you think it takes a wormhole to collapse?” he asks and finds he’s already out of breath from barely constrained panic. “It’s been what, ten minutes, maybe twenty?”

“I thought it’d be instantaneous,” Dustin admits, and Jonathan can’t put his finger on his tone. “Clearly not.”

“What, are you disappointed?” It comes out sharper than he meant it to but all he can think about is Nancy and whether she’s hurt, whether she’s trapped, whether she’s de—"

“I’m not disappointed,” Dustin rushes to correct him, holding up his hands in a conciliatory gesture. “I’m confused. As far as I see it, there are two possibilities. Either this is the afterlife, and you and I are spirits.”

“Seems fairly unlikely,” Jonathan wrestles his own tone, his emotions, back into check. His fingers tap a rhythm on the walkie, itching to call again. “I’d hope the afterlife wouldn’t include the Upside Down.”

“Right,” Dustin nods. “Or, Nancy didn’t completely destroy the exotic matter. Because if she did, the walls of the wormhole would have collapsed. And we would have been sucked into oblivion.”

“Bringing us back to possibility number one,” Jonathan points out, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly. He can’t let his thoughts get clouded by panic. The air is clear of spores up here, easier to breathe. He takes another breath, exhales again. He has to think. Because he has to find Nancy. Now. “So it seems like both possibilities are out. What’s possibility number three?”

“I have no idea,” Dustin admits, and for the first time Jonathan thinks he sounds defeated. “Give me the walkie.”

Jonathan hands it over and watches the younger boy try to get Steve to respond. Somehow the static seems thicker. He takes another deep breath but this time he lets it out in a frustrated huff.

“This is bullshit,” he declares. “We’re not gonna get a signal in here. Come on.”

There’s an open doorway about 30 feet away he can see, because red light is spilling out of it. That is the first different thing they’ve seen in at least six floors. That’s where he will start.

“Where are you going?” Dustin asks.

“To the roof.” He strides off, not looking to see if Dustin will follow, trusting he will. “We are never gonna get a signal in here. We have to get out of the building. So: the roof.”

“Wait, Jonathan!” He can hear Dustin scampering after him. “We don’t know if it’s safe up here.”

“We know the exotic matter wasn’t destroyed,” he points out.

“No, I said it was not completely destroyed,” Dustin scrabbles at his arm, stopping him right before the doorway. “But it was very clearly disturbed. We have no idea what effect this will have on matter, spacetime, gravity. This whole building could very well be a highly unstable, physics-defying death trap.”

“It seems stable enough to me,” he wrenches his arm out of Dustin’s hand and wheels around, finally letting the totality of what he’s feeling play over his face. Dustin flinches back slightly. “And stable enough is going to have to do, because we have to find them and we have to find them now. She could be hurt, she could be dying, Dustin, and I am not waiting around to find out!”

“Okay,” Dustin holds his hands up again, steps back to give Jonathan room to go through the door. It leads to another stairwell, bathed in red light. It’s open in the center, open to the night sky, and there appears to be something liquid at the edges of what must be the roof. It’s dripping.

It pulls Jonathan up short, and the terror is back, squeezing his heart tight.

“Mother of God,” Dustin breathes behind him. “You don’t think they’re—"

“Yeah,” Jonathan agrees on an exhale, then sets his mouth in a hard line. And starts to run.

+++

Someone is yelling her name.

As the cold dark starts to recede from her vision, that’s what Nancy latches onto first. Someone is screaming her name. A man. A man is screaming her name.

“Jonathan?” she mutters, tongue feeling too big in her mouth.

“Nance!” No, she thinks. Not Jonathan. “Nance, come on, open your eyes! Open your eyes, Nance!”

“What,” she tries, blinking her eyes open and meeting Steve’s face, eyes wide with panic, staring down at her. “Steve.”

“Good, good good good,” he chatters and he’s pulling at her arms, forcing her up to sitting. They’re in a room, not the roof anymore, a room that looks as blank and boring as any conference room – she thinks that’s what it might be, actually, there’s a long table and not much else – but she’s still cold. Cold and… wet? “Come on, Nance, sit up. Good. Ok. Are you ok?”

“I think so,” She looks around confused. “Where are we?”

“I’m not sure. We must have fallen or something.” He pauses, shoots her a wry look. “I think you missed.”

“I didn’t miss,” she growls at him. “You saw it flash over.”

“Well you didn’t destroy it.”

“No,” she agrees grumpily. “Just pissed it off.”

“Come on,” Steve takes her hand, yanks her up and she doesn’t quite understand why there’s resistance when he does. It’s not from her. “Let’s get out of here.”

She wobbles slightly on her feet and that’s when she realizes she’s standing in liquid. That’s why her back is cold, her feet. Why she can’t quite maintain her balance. There is thick, gray liquid pouring down the walls, pooling on the floor. And it’s sticky.

“What the fuck,” she says, spinning as she looks for a way out. “Where’s the door?”

“Over there, come on.” Steve is already sloshing through the liquid.

She follows, losing one shoe and then the other in the process. Fuck it. She’ll find shoes when she gets out of this fucking room.

Steve reaches out, grabs the doorknob and grasps it, hard. It disintegrates in his hand.

“No!” He shouts. “Oh, no, shit, shit!”

The liquid is up to her shins now. She looks around, desperate for anything to get through the door. There’s chair, half submerged. It’ll have to do.

“One of the guys we passed,” she pants as she trudges through the goo, “it looks like he cut through the door.”

It feels like it takes a year to get to the chair but when she does she pulls out one soaked, socked foot, braces it and yanks with all her might. The chair leg breaks off.

“What are you doing?” Steve wonders testily. “What’s that gonna cut?”

“Well it’s worth a try!” And it is, but she loses her balance in the goo, now almost to her knees, and drops the leg. “Shit!"

“Yeah like that was gonna do anything—”

“Well at least I’m trying something, Steve, we have to get out of here!”

“I know that, I’m just—” The liquid splashes down the wall faster, and the door is suddenly blocked from view behind a waterfall of goo. “Fuck!”

“Ok, ok, uhh… the table. Get on the table!”

They scramble over to, onto it. The goo is heavier as it soaks into her clothing; she shrugs out of her jacket and hears it land on the wood with a wet slap. Steve does the same with his.

They stare at each other, eyes wide and wild. Nancy tries to remember to breathe, panic rising in her throat. What the hell do they do now?

Jonathan must have felt the blast after she shot the shield generator. The explosion was big enough to throw them back, to knock her out, to apparently send them into an office and cause some sort of flood around them. If it did all that, Jonathan and Dustin must have felt it, even if they were all the way in the basement.

Which means they’re coming. They have to be. Jonathan has never left her behind. Never.

She’s not sure what Steve is thinking, but they seem to come to the same conclusion at the same time.

“Help!!”

+++

“Jonathan!”

Dustin has been yelling his name for two floors now, but he ignores it again, pushes his burning legs to move faster, his burning lungs to keep breathing. He has to find her. He has to find her.

“Jonathan, slow down!!”

Only the panic in Dustin’s voice gets him to slow, to skid to a stop.

“I can’t,” he grits out, trying not to shriek. There have been further rumbles, and an odd, low, constant sound that seems to be coming from inside the walls that feels wrong all the way in the pit of his gut. “I have to find her.”

“Yeah, we have to find them,” Dustin snaps. “But the higher we go, the more dangerous it gets. The less stable.”

“All the reason to go faster,” he pants out, turns to prove his point and nearly steps through a hole in the stairway that definitely wasn’t there a moment ago. He lurches back, sways, and Dustin grabs his jacket, pulling him back and out of immediate danger. “Fuck!”

“As I was saying.”

Jonathan ignores him. “We need a bridge.”

He darts back into the hall, looking wildly right then left. He almost shouts in triumph when he sees it: a ladder. Leaning against a wall.

“Perfect!” he crows, grabs it, and dashes back into the stairwell.

“What the hell are you doing? That’s never gonna work!”

Jonathan keeps ignoring the younger boy, braces the ladder against his toe at the start of the gap and lets it fall. Scoots it back and boom: bridge, with a good lip on either side for stability. He and Will have done this a hundred times out in the woods behind their old house, using logs that were much harder to balance on than a ladder.

“Stop. Stop! I’m serious, it’s not safe Jonathan! You’re gonna fall!”

“No I won’t, I’ve done this a million times before,” he boasts and puts a foot on the lowest rung, ready to climb.

The stairs melt more and it’s only because he hasn’t pitched his weight forward yet that he can jump back and not fall. The ladder, on the other hand, plunges into the abyss below.

“Dammit, Jonathan, don’t be an asshole!”

He wheels on the younger boy. “I am not being an asshole! I am trying to save my girlfriend – who is with your best friend, or whatever the fuck he is to you these days —because I finally got sick of all their bullshit and now I’m not with her! She is the love of my fucking life, and she could be dying, Dustin, she could be hurt and trapped and dying and I’m not there, so I need to get to her now!”

He’s shrieking at this point, but he doesn’t care. The panic chokes him, he’s gasping for air and his vision is going blurry as Dustin pulls him in close, hugs him hard and forces, with the pressure around his ribs, his breath to slow down just a little. His vision clears and the ringing in his ears recedes, letting in the younger boy’s voice again.

“—gonna find her, Jonathan,” Dustin is saying in a low, calm voice well beyond his years. “We’re gonna find her and find Steve, but you can’t just go getting yourself killed, okay, you can’t just rush in there to die because if you die then they die and Nance will never forgive me for it, okay, she will murder me and Steve and everyone else in this dimension and ours if you die, and I know she will because Nance is smart, and she’s brave, and there’s no way she’s dead. Okay Jonathan? Nancy is not dead, and we’re not gonna be either, and we are going to find her. And Steve. We’re gonna find them both.”

He matches his breath to Dustin’s reassurances, blinks back the tears in his eyes, and finally gently pushes out of his grip. Dustin is looking at him warily, like he might suddenly do something supremely unexpected and stupid. Fair enough, considering.

“Okay,” He breathes hard through his nose to tamp down nausea swirling in his belly. “How do we find them.”

“This has to be the exotic matter destabilizing the building, right? So if it’s melted here, then it’s probably melted everywhere up there,” Dustin offers. “Which means they’ve probably sunk down to the lowest solid level. This one.”

“Okay,” Jonathan says again, and wishes he had his bat. He’d feel a lot better with a weapon right now. “Then let’s go.”

+++

She’s gonna die. She is really going to fucking die.

It’s unthinkable, but Nancy can’t see any other conclusion to draw. The liquid is still rising, nearly all the way up the desk now, and her panic is rising with it because it’s not stopping. In fact, it feels like it’s going faster and they’re going to run out of room, oh god they’re going to run out of room because it’s going to fill to the ceiling at this rate.

The desk dips suddenly, bobbing wildly; the liquid is too high, the feet are no longer on the ground, even under their weight. Steve shouts, trying to steady himself, but she drops down into a sit immediately.

“Get down!”

“What?”

“Get down,” she repeats, wishing he’d just do as she said for once. “Sitting spreads our weight out. Mr. Goldstein, physics, remember?”

“…No,” he admits, but does as asked.

“Of course you don’t. We can buy ourselves some time. They must have heard us by now.”

“What did you mean? Back in the stairs?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You said I didn’t trust you. You said I never trusted you. What do you mean?”

She wants to shout, but settles for pressing her lips together and pushing down the annoyance, the fear. She can’t fathom why he’s bringing this up now, but if he wants to talk about it, she’ll fucking talk about it. “Am I wrong?”

“Of course you’re wrong!”

“I don’t think I am. I told you Barb was missing, you said she probably ran away, that I was making it up, oh and don’t tell the cops about the fucking beer. I told you Barb’s parents needed closure, that the lab needed to be held responsible, and you told me to just ignore it and be a normal teenager and go to a fucking Halloween party. Every time I came to you for help, for anything outside the realm of a date and a handjob in the backseat of your car, you told me to ignore it, push it down, pretend it wasn’t happening, be normal.”

“What does that have to do with trust?”

“Everything! I found Jonathan in a funeral home and he still listened to me, he still looked at that picture and saw that Demogorgon and when I told him I thought it had something to do with Barb – not with Will, with Barb – he didn’t act like I was a crazy girl, he worked with me to prove it, to find it, to fight it. And then the next fall, when I couldn’t stand pretending Barb just ran away anymore, that the lab didn’t deserve accountability, when I was sure what happened to her could have consequences, he was the one who was willing to help me! He listened to me and he trusted me, and you were so fucking busy being insecure about us even being friends, about your reputation at school and whatever the fuck else, that you didn’t even a hear a word I was saying!”

“Yeah sure,” Steve rolls his eyes. “Between me and Jonathan I don’t think I’m the one that’s insecure.”

It’s so petulant, so childish that something in her flashes over. Maybe it’s because she never really let them have any time alone together since Jonathan got back, because she knew to hold that distance and so it was only ever glances and innuendo, a strange mix of reluctant temptation and restless curiosity, that she forgot about this part of him. And just how much space in him it takes up. But now it sparks fury in her chest, a bright shining flame that turns any wayward seedling of the thought struggling to take root in salted earth to ash in an instant.

It takes willpower, for the space of a heartbeat, for her not to hate him.

“And why wouldn’t he be,” she growls. “You told me you want to have kids with me, Steve! And ever since you have been everywhere, constantly fighting for my attention, needling my boyfriend until he goes insane, which in turn is driving me insane!”

“I’m not needling anyone—"

“Bullshit,” she spits at him, hoping it burns like acid. “Why do you keep doing that to him, Steve? You are constantly poking at him and trying things with me, little comments, little gestures, making eyes at me, when you know he can see it.”

“I’m not making eyes at you. And I’m not trying to do anything, I’m just reminding you that I’m here for you.”

“He is my boyfriend, Steve!”

“And you’re my friend!”

“That is not how friends treat each other!”

“Oh, like how he was when we were dating? He really seemed to care about the sanctity of our union, didn’t he? All those late-night phone calls, lunches alone in the darkroom.” Steve snorts. “Yeah, he really respected that I was your boyfriend.”

“He did! Those were all me!”

Steve looks genuinely shocked at that. “What?”

“You told me you got in trouble because I kept calling late at night, but my nightmares didn’t just go away, Steve! So I started calling Jonathan instead. He was there. He had lived through it all too, or almost all of it. He understood. So I called him at night, and I had lunch in the darkroom where I could tell him about how terrible everything was, and he listened to me and he made me feel better because he was a good friend. He never said anything about you, not one word, though god knows he could have.”

“I… didn’t realize.”

“Yeah, no shit.”

“You know what, Nancy?” he snaps at her. “If I’m so stupid, why did you even want me coming up here with you?”

“I didn’t,” she growls.

“What, that was Jonathan too?”

“Yes! Probably because I was snapping at him and you were needling him and he just wanted to be away from both of us.” She is trying mightily to fight back the tears that are swelling in her throat and losing. “The last things we said to each other were mean, and angry, and we’re going to die in this fucking room and I’m not ever going to get to tell him that I’m sorry, that I didn’t mean it, that I love him!”

“Well I suppose it’s good to know you can say that to someone,” Steve mutters, glaring past her.

“And what’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I haven’t forgotten that you lied to my face about that for a whole year. I mean, did we mean anything at all?”

“Of course we meant something, Steve, but it was different.” She shakes her head. “We were so young. You were cute, you had great hair, you were the most popular boy in school, and you were interested in me. It was intoxicating but it was like… like cotton candy.”

“Cotton candy?”

“Sweet, and fun, but mostly air.” She waves a hand in the space between them. “It’s lovely in the moment, but the moment is fleeting. It’s not meant to last.”

“So you never meant for us to—Jesus, Nancy. It was a year. Were you just faking it the entire time? Did you ever love me?”

She owes this to him, and herself, to be honest. “I don’t know.”

The hurt on his face feels terrible. She is reminded that for all his faults and flaws – and she has counted and recounted every single one of them at some time or another – he only tried to hurt her once. And he has earned his forgiveness for that.

“I know you loved me, or you thought you did,” she tells him gently. The sense of inevitable doom has calmed her for a moment. “I know that you care about me, and I care about you too. But it was never like that with us. Not for me. I won’t speak for you, but I need you to hear me when I say it, OK? It was never like that for me.”

He shakes his head, lips a thin line and disappointment, anger even, plain on his face. She gives him a moment to gather his thoughts, listens to the dripping goo. Begs the universe, silently, not to let this be the end, because it’s not fair to let her set things right with Steve but not Jonathan before it’s her time to go.

“Did you love Jonathan?” Steve interrupts her thoughts. “The year we were together, the year I loved you, were you in love with him the whole time?”

There’s no point in lying if they’re going to die. “I don’t know.”

“Bullshit, Nance.”

“I don’t.” She doesn’t raise her voice or wave her hands; there’s no vitriol left in her anymore, just a deep sadness and longing. “I know I thought about him, all the time. I know I wanted him. I know I needed him. Is that love? I don’t know, Steve. I don’t think I would have called it that, when we were dating. But I don’t know. I don’t remember when everything I felt for him turned into love, I just know I love him, and I have for a long time now.”

Steve hangs his head, runs a hand over his face. “At least you’re not lying to me anymore.”

“I wasn’t lying to you then.”

“I’d beg to differ,” he snaps. “And when I told you, last year, how I felt—”

“I told you it sounded like a nightmare.”

“I thought that was a joke.”

“Steve,” she sighs. “You have to stop ignoring things just because you don’t want to hear them or see them. We have been over for three years. Why did you think that had changed?”

“I don’t know,” he admits. “Being around you… it was nice. Really nice. I forgot how nice. And then when Eddie said—”

“Eddie?!” She knows she shouldn’t interrupt but she can’t help it. “Eddie Munson, who we had met what, three days before?”

“To be fair it was a really intense situation and emotions were running high and we were in the Upside Down so who knew if we were even gonna survive, and yes, okay, looking back, taking him seriously was kind of stupid, but he just said some things about you, and me, and I should have just ignored them but I didn’t. I… I’m sorry.” He meets her eyes and she’s surprised to see he looks embarrassed. “For the last year, too, because Dustin’s right, I was chasing you and you’re right that I was trying to get at Jonathan because I thought… but I was wrong. So, I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry too,” she sighs. “I could have been clearer. You’re not wrong that me and Jonathan haven’t been OK lately, and I didn’t do anything to help by letting you do what you were doing, egging you on sometimes. I think I liked seeing him so annoyed, because I was so annoyed with him. It wasn’t fair to him, and it wasn’t fair to you, and I’m sorry Steve.”

He nods at her and she looks down, shaking her head. A wave of sadness crests and crashes into her. She wishes Jonathan was there, that she was wrapped in his arms, that she had told him everything she’s been holding back, all the secrets, all the fears, everything she should have been confiding to take the weight off her, the weight he was always willing to help her bear, and that she loved him, she still loves him so fucking much, she can’t imagine her life without him. She should have told him. Before now. Every day.

“It’s not fair,” she murmurs, mostly to herself, trying to hold the tears back but feeling two fall anyway. “It’s not fair that it ends like this.”

She’s not sure if Steve hears her but he shuffles a touch closer, rises up on his knees.

“I’d promise to be a better friend from now on,” he says, leaning forward, leaning in. “But I think we’re about to die. And I guess if we are—”

His shadow falls on her as he moves his face towards hers, and Nancy jerks back, eyes wide.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” she shrieks, shoving him back from her, hard. “What was I just saying—”

She’s much smaller than him, but she’s strong, so her shove throws his balance, badly, sending him back to off to the side and falling towards the pool of goo around them. In the split second before he hits it panic clears some of the anger and she realizes she doesn’t know, when he falls, if she’ll be able to pull him back out, if it will tip the desk as a whole, send her to drown in whatever the hell that goo even is, and she is flooded with regret and fear.

And then he slams down on to white-gray surface with a thump, catching himself on his hand.

Catching himself. On a solid surface.

His mouth drops open; she knows hers already is. They gape at each other for what feels like an endless moment before Steve leaps to his feet, on the goo. His boots hit it with a solid thunk.

It’s not liquid anymore.

“Oh my god,” she says, absently accepting the hand he offers her, letting him pull her up. She tests the surface with her own foot and the solid feel of it makes her want to scream with joy. “Oh my god!”

Steve whoops and pulls her in a brief, crushing hug. She squeezes back, then pushes away, hard, pointing an accusing finger at him.

“Promise me,” she grits out. “Promise me that that was the last time you will ever try something like that, Steve. I mean it. I can’t fucking do this anymore.”

He holds up both his hands, a move she’s seen too many times to trust, but when she looks in his eyes they are wide and clear and looking back plainly, an open book before her.

“I promise,” he draws an X on one side of his chest. “Cross my heart and hope to die, OK? I do want us to be friends, Nance. Can we give it a try?”

He sticks out one hand. She considers it, makes her decision.

“Fine,” she sticks hers out, and they shake, firmly, once. “Friends.”

“Friends.” Steve echoes, releases her hand and looks around. “Now what do you say about trying to get the hell out of this room?”

+++

“How long since you felt an aftershock?” Dustin asks softly.

They’ve searched the floor methodically, keeping their steps soft and voices down just in case Nancy and Steve are yelling or making noise to help them find them. The walkie’s not even making static anymore.

“I dunno. A little while.” He thinks about it. “Five minutes, maybe?”

“And we haven’t seen any more soft spots.”

“No.”

“And we’re still alive.”

“Best either of us can tell.”

“Then I think whatever was destabilized has restabilized,” Dustin declares, standing up a little straighter. “Which means they have to be here somewhere. But now we can try kicking in doors.”

He’s got so much nervous energy built up in him, contained only for fear of falling to his death at any moment, that he perks up at the declaration. Kicking in doors sounds great.

They do, picking up their pace and trying every door they can. Some are half-melted and they can see beyond them into empty, gooey rooms. Some seem to have been fused shut by the liquid, now solidified, but when they kick at the door they can feel it jump, hear the hollow void of a room behind it.

Jonathan is confident it would make a sound, but they get no voices, no shouts, no pounding in return. The rooms are empty. Nancy is still somewhere else.

They’re about to turn a corner when he hears a muffled thump. It pulls him up short, but when he shines his flashlight at the hall he’s met only with white. Lumpy white, to be sure, thicker in some spots that others, but just the white concrete walls. No doors.

The thump comes again, faint but distinct.

“Nancy?” he tries softly, then louder. “Nancy??”

“Steve?” Dustin echoes beside him, but he looks confused. “Steve, Nance, is that you??”

Nothing. They’re both perfectly still, listening as hard as they can.

THUMP.

It sounds like it’s coming from behind a thick layer of concrete but it’s definitely there. A little to his right, where the wall is bubbled and bulbous, like a set of stalactites and stalagmites have met in a cave and formed a barrier. He pounds his fist on it, but the bubbling feels solid, even more solid than a normal wall. Assuming they have some sort of battering ram or are using their whole bodies just to make sounds he can barely hear, he knows there’s no way they can hear him.

They need a thinner spot, and a louder sound.

They’re about ten feet from a corner, and he walks slowly toward it, hitting his fist on the wall every few inches, listening to the pitch it makes. After a few feet it’s a little higher; the wall is getting less thick. The melting got closer than they though, Jonathan realizes. He doesn’t know why it stopped, but with a few more minutes who knows what it would have done. What it definitely seems to have done is started eating at the walls; each hit of his fist is getting higher and higher, hollower and hollower. The wall is getting thinner.

“Wait,” Dustin says, suddenly freezing. “Hear that?”

Jonathan freezes too, closes his eyes and wills every cell of his brain to focus on his ears.

It’s faint, and very muffled, but he hears them: voices.

One low. One higher.

“It’s them,” Dustin says, but he’s already looking around wildly. He needs something, anything, he can use like a battering ram.

For a brief, tilting moment he is back in a hospital hallway screaming her name as a flash monster slithers under a locked door. Then his eyes fall on it, screaming red in the dusky blues of the Upside Down.

A fire extinguisher.

He’s dashing across the hall before he can even form the thought, yanking it off its mount.

“Find the thin spots,” he shouts at Dustin as he skids back over. “Hit the wall, find the thinnest spot you can.”

They’re both smacking at it, listening for different pitches, and he finds a spot he likes, takes a step back to give himself space for a good windup, and he’s just unleashed the twist of his waist when he hears what he is sure is her voice.

“Do you hear something?”

Then the heavy red metal meets shockingly brittle wall and crashes through, sending the restabilized concrete crashing into the room in shards like a pane of glass.

He hits it again, knocking out a bigger space, then drops the extinguisher, scoops his flashlight off the floor and shines it in with shaking hands.

“Nancy!”

+++

She thinks she’s hallucinating until he shouts her name, guttural and terrified, and then she knows.

“Jonathan!"

She doesn’t wait for Steve, takes off at a run across the room. His hand is already held out, reaching for her, and she uses it to scramble though the hole in the wall, jagged edges catching on the goo already drying stiff on her clothes, and when her foot gets a solid hold on the bottom edge she uses the leverage to launch herself into his arms.

He catches her – he always has – tight around her ribs, even as the momentum carries them back, across the hallways and into a far wall. He grunts when he hits it but he’s saying her name, over and over, asking if she’s okay, begging for assurance. She’s crying again as she tries to tell him she is, she’s not hurt, she’s not she swears, but words aren’t enough, not for either of them so she gives up, plunges her hands into his hair and seals her mouth on his.

He makes a muffled noise of surprise but he’s already hauling her closer, as his knees go weak and sinks down the wall until he is sitting on the ground and she is on his lap and she is kissing him as hard and as desperately as she can manage.

Distantly she hears Steve and Dustin yelling at each other, scared and grateful, and thinks she hears footsteps moving away from them, but she doesn’t care. Everything is Jonathan, and Jonathan is everything right now.

It thrums in her blood, his taste and his scent and all the things she almost lost and how long it’s been since she’s felt herself tremble for him like this and when they break for air, she can’t keep the words from spilling out.

“I hate The Clash.”

His arms are still tight around her, her hands are still cupping his face, there’s barely six inches between their faces and his mouth and shiny and swollen from her lips. He blinks at her, eyes still fuzzy with panic, with relief, with lust, with confusion.

“What?”

“I hate The Clash. Every time you put them on, I just try to disassociate from reality.”

His eyes snap back into focus and she sees something in them, a glimmer of a sparkle. She thinks she knows what it is. She thinks it might be in hers, too.

“Yep,” he breathes, fingers digging into her waist, teasing at her lower ribs. “I hate reading your articles.” She feels her jaw drop a little, a flare of irritation in her chest. “You don’t actually want to hear my thoughts. You just want me to tell you they’re great.”

“Because they are,” she scoffs and fights the urge to bite his lower lip.

“Most of the time.”

“Most of the—” she bites back the argument, feeling a different kind of vibration rising through her, mixing with her own relief and lust, honing them, concentrating them, increasing the potency. “Wow. Okay. I never read Slaughterhouse Five. I just read the Cliff notes and pretended I liked it.”

He’s nodding, his jaw sharpening, his eyes practically glowing. She knows that look. It sends a rush of heat through her, directly between her legs.

“I never read Anna Karenina. I just read the Cliff notes and pretended I liked it.”

She shifts slightly in how she’s straddling him and swears she feels him, hardening underneath her.

“You are always exactly six minutes late, and I never say anything, but really, I want to punch a wall.”

His grin is savage now, and she knows she should let him say whatever he opens his mouth too but she can’t keep the distance between them anymore, not without another taste, so she gives into the urge to bite his bottom lip, soothes it with her tongue when he groans and hauls her against him again.

She gives herself over to him as one of his hands leaves her back, grabs her ass and squeezes. In her head they are in the woods behind Steve’s house, screaming about suburbs and cul-de-sacs and teenage parties, are in his car as he told her the real world sucks and to deal with it, and she is burning and fizzing just like she did then only now she is kissing him, too; she burns for him in every way, in anger, in love, in lust, now all three at once and she’s surprised she doesn’t burst into flame in his arms.  

“I flushed the last bag of Purple Palm Tree Delight down the toilet,” she says against his mouth as they catch their breath.

“Oh come on!” he pulls back and just how annoyed he looks makes her want to laugh, want to kiss him again. She feels so alive.

“I hate it when you’re high,” she rejoins.

“I hate it when you’re drunk!” he retorts.

Something inside her softens and she feels it break across her face, sees it in the way his expression softens too. “I hate it most of all when you’re high and I’m drunk.”

“Me too.” There’s a note of regret that sets off an echoing pang in her chest.

“Why do we do this?” she wonders. It’s been so long since they talked to each other like this; why has it been so long? When did they forget how to fight?

“No idea.” He shakes his head, and she thinks he’s not really understanding what she means, opens her mouth to correct him, but he speaks before she can. “I didn’t apply to Emerson.”

There it is. Words she’s been waiting a year for him to say, since she found the purple NYU acceptance packet hidden among his stuff when she was down in the basement, words that have sat rotten and sour in the pit of her stomach and the back of her mind, growing their own ecosystem of resentment and anger that has been poisoning her heart, making her forget.

She has imagined a million versions of this confrontation, all of them ending with her crowing in triumphant fury, excoriating him for his betrayals and lies, blaming him for what he’s done to them, but she just almost died in another dimension without him by her side and where they go to college seems very small and unimportant all of a sudden.

And because she realized – as she yelled as Steve, as she screamed for help, as she begged the universe for one more chance to see Jonathan and kiss him and tell him how much she loves him – that she was not an innocent party to their problems, or in her own unhappiness. Because she has things to answer for as well.

“I know,” she says softly, hands sliding from his hair to cup his cheeks. He gapes at her.

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Why didn’t you?”

For the first time since she’s gotten out of that room, his gaze slides away from hers.

“I’m not sure. I just felt like I was… doing something wrong,” he says past her shoulder. “Like I was going against the natural order of things. You know, with… with what we’ve been through, it just…”

She uses her hand on his cheek to gently guide his eyes back to hers. “You mean our shared trauma?”

“Yeah.” He sounds sad, resigned, and it cuts through some of the lust in her blood, through the haze she’s been in since she’s been back in his arms. “How could anyone else possibly understand? It’s like this… this thing that… ties us together forever. You know? It made me feel safe. But also… I don’t know.”

“It can be suffocating,” she supplies.

“Yeah.” His hands leave her body, come up and gently take hers off his face. She holds tight to his fingers, doesn’t let him drop them entirely, but allows him to bring them down into the space between them.

“That spring break, when you were in Lenora… I didn’t really have to stay behind to work. I could have had Fred cover for me. But I think that’s why I stayed. That feeling that I just… I needed space. But—”

“Space to be with someone else?” he asks before she can finish her thought, like the words taste bad and he’s been waiting to spit them out for a while. Thinks back to everything she said to Steve and acknowledges he probably has.

“No.” The word comes out firm, settled. He seems surprised she answered so easily. “Steve is a good guy, but it was never like that with him, Jonathan. We’re just different people. We always were.”

A memory rushes back, one she never told him, pulling out a chuckle. Jonathan raises his eyebrows at her.

“What?”

“You know what he told me?” she giggles, leaning in, knowing he’s gonna get a kick out of this. “He wants six kids.”

Jonathan’s eyebrows shoot up his forehead again and she snorts, shaking one of her hands loose to cover her mouth. She’s facing the wall, she doesn’t know how close Steve and Dustin are. She’s sure he wouldn’t appreciate her sharing this. She doesn’t care, but she supposes she can at least try to be polite about it.

“Six kids?”

“Six. Little. Nuggets.” She relishes each word.

“That’s…” He blinks rapidly, laughs incredulously. “That’s like a Happy Meal.”

She’s about to laugh way too loud so she silences herself by kissing him again. It is slow and sweet, tinged with sadness she doesn’t feel and she remembers, too soon, that as much as he seems to sometimes, Jonathan cannot read her mind or hear her thoughts, and he was not in that room. He doesn’t know what she has already realized. And that she was still in the process of explaining it to him.

“But my point is,” she says, reluctantly separating their mouths again, “he knows what he wants, and that’s great.”

“But you don’t,” Jonathan supplies.

“I didn’t,” she nods but hold up her now-free hand, shushing him when he tries to interrupt. “And I still don’t, to some degree. You said it when we split up before: I don’t know what’s on the other side of this and I’m scared, too, Jonathan. I’ve been so scared, for so long. I never let myself think about what might come after, maybe because I stopped believing there’d ever be an after. I let my whole world narrow down to just this – to the Upside Down, to Vecna, to the crawls, and I felt so lost.”

“You never said.”

“I didn’t see it. I convinced myself this was all I was, all I had, all we had—just this ‘shared trauma.’ But that’s not it, Jonathan, that has never been it with us. You’re the only person, I think, I’ve ever let see me – all of me – and you loved me anyway, and I don’t know how I forgot that—”

His hand lets go of hers, rises to sweep his thumb over her cheek, and she realizes she is crying, slow and absent tears every time she blinks.

“Not anyway,” he murmurs. “Only because of.”

“I’m sorry I forgot,” she leans her forehead on his, closes her eyes. “I’m sorry I stopped talking to you, and I’m sorry I stopped confiding in you, and I’m sorry I stopped being honest with you and I’m sorry I stopped fighting with you. I’m sorry I let anyone or anything convince me all we have together comes from fear and from pain, because that was never true. Never.”

They inhale together, his hand sliding to her jaw, fingers around her ear and in her hair, holding her in place.

“California.” He speaks so quietly, she knows if she pulled back even a fraction, she wouldn’t be able to hear him. “I forgot in California. You weren’t there, it was hard to find time to talk, letters only say so much… I was so sure you’d already realized I was just the same old white trash loser you knew before my little brother went missing, that you were already slipping out of my life. I thought I had to transform into the perfect boyfriend, going to your perfect college, finding a perfect ring, having a perfect wedding, a perfect life. Which obviously would turn into a perfect divorce because even if I did everything right, you’d still realize how much better you deserved than me.”

“So a pity party,” she chides, pulling back to frown at him, but her mind record skips on something he already said, skids to a stop. “Wait—a ring? A wedding?”

He laughs at that, clear and uninhibited.

“Like I was saying, I forgot too. So, if you don’t mind; one last confession, okay? A big one. Because I thought—Look, I’ve screwed up with you for long enough. I’d like to get something right, for once.”

She shakes her head at him as he lets go of her hands, goes digging in his pockets, trying to shake away his words.

“You didn’t screw up with me.”

“I did,” he interjects, his voice warm and his hand now holding up a cassette tape in her line of sight. It’s trembling a little. “I did, but I won’t anymore.”

She stares at the tape, not understanding, and he shakes it at her, for her to take it.

“John Coltrane?” she wonders. “Not exactly Jonathan Byers mixtape material.”

“So says the girl whose music collection is 90 percent Madonna.” He’s grinning at her.

“It’s not 90 percent--”

“That’s not the point. Open it.”

She does. There’s a tape, like she’s expecting, but the paper sleeve isn’t sitting right; it’s jutting out. She uses her thumb to pull it back and reveal a thin gold band with a tiny diamond set in it.

She stops breathing.

“This fucking tape has been like a bowling ball in my pocket for two days,” he’s saying as she tries to get her lungs to work again. “I tried to convince myself that this would somehow fix everything. But it was just gonna make things worse. Because I forgot, too. I forgot who I was and I forgot who you are, the girl who told me all about how much she hated picket fences, and cul-de-sacs, and how much she didn’t want to do exactly what her mom did: find someone with a good job and a good facade and settle down to build a nuclear family.”

“Screw that,” she exhales the past but feels it in her bones as vivid now as ever. She looks up at him and finds him smiling, relaxed.

“Yeah,” he agrees. “Screw that. So, Nancy Wheeler: Will you not marry me?”

She feels herself smiling back, her face well beyond her control, because of all the things she may have ever suspected were bothering him, this was the last.

“I don’t—” she searches for words for a moment, trying to put her spinning thoughts back together. “I need you, Jonathan. You said downstairs we weren’t a team anymore, but I don’t want that. You’re my team. I don’t want another team.”

“Neither do I.” His eyes are dancing.

“But I don’t want a ring either.”

His smile grows wider. “Neither do I. So, what do you say? Do you accept my un-proposal?”

She nods. “Yes. I accept your un-proposal.”

His hand is back in her hair, drawing her into a kiss, and she tosses the ring down the hall, flinging it into the distance and hearing the musical jangle of its ricochet as she kisses him back.

The tape falls between them, sharp plastic corners digging into their bellies, and she laughs into his mouth as he digs it out and flings it in the opposite direction.

A year of weight, a year of tension and sadness and anxiety and fear, drains out of her with every movement of his mouth against hers.

They could still die. Leaving this building, whatever she shot melting the stairs under their feet; getting to Hopper and El; could be shot dead by soldiers getting out of the Upside Down. Venca could kill her in her sleep, or send a Demogorgon after her next, or him. Or they could all die whenever they finally find them, when they confront him. If it was between her and Holly, she knows who she’d choose.

But they’re not going to, she decides, fisting her hands in his shirt. They’re going to live.

When the kiss ends, she feels like she could kill a monster or fifty. What perfect timing.

Foreheads to forehead they catch their breath, let their heartbeats slow back to a normal rhythm. Nancy slowly becomes aware that she has been straddling Jonathan’s lap for a long time now and that his legs have possibly fallen asleep.

She rises onto her knees, smirking internally at the little sound of protest he makes, then slowly climbs off him. He blinks up at her, shakes his legs out and winces.

“Ah, shit.”

She laughs at that and offers him a hand up.

“When this is over,” she says. “When Venca is dead and Holly is back, we’re gonna figure this out. What we want. How to get it.”

“Yeah?” He clasps it. “And how are we gonna do that?”

“The same way we’ve done everything else,” she says and pulls, helping him to his feet. He’s a little wobbly but with a couple hops and some smacks of his hands on his thighs, the feeling seems to come back. “Together.”

He’s grinning down at her, as wide as she’s seen in months, and she can’t remember the last time he looked this happy. Can’t remember the last time she felt this good.

“I love you, Nancy Wheeler,” he says.

“I love you, Jonathan Byers,” she answers.

He is about to say something else when footsteps come pounding down the hall behind her.

“Jonathan!” Dustin is yelling as she turns and he and Steve careen into view. “Nancy! Come on, we gotta go! We gotta go now!”

“Well okay then,” Jonathan says quietly, bemused, behind her shoulder. He takes her hand and shoots her a wild grin. “Let’s go.”

And takes off running.