Chapter Text
Everything and nothing had changed since that bizarre week. On the one hand, he still went to school, to baseball practice, still went on dates with Nancy and partied with his friends. Sometimes, everything would seem so normal that he was able to forget for days at a time that anything strange had ever happened, that it must have been a dream, because nothing that exciting could ever have happened in Hawkins. Nothing ever happened in Hawkins. And he preferred it that way.
Most of the time he was able to forget that, for a brief moment, he had stood shoulder to shoulder with his girlfriend and Byers and fought a monster. Demogorgon, they both called it, and he wondered where they got that name from, because surely that thing didn’t, couldn’t, have a name, but they both said it like it was a fact. They had told him the whole story, at different times, sounding more like confessions than anything. Nancy had told him how she had gone into that other place (The Upside Down) when she was looking for the monster, and Byers, looking down at his feet, had told him how he had pulled her back out of there, as if it were something embarrassing instead of heroic. They told him about how they had made a plan to kill it, how they had figured out that it was attracted to blood, how they had stood in that house, under hundreds of Christmas lights and sliced open their hands to lure an interdimensional being into their trap, about Eleven and Will and men in white vans.
Nancy had nightmares of it, he knew, only because he had overheard her talking to Byers about them one day when they were in the darkroom, and he admitted that he had them, too. Steve didn’t. For the most part he had managed to put that thing out of his mind. Unlike the other two, he hadn’t had the time to prepare for seeing it, hadn’t known what was going to happen that night he went to apologize, and everything went down so quickly once he was there that it was almost a blur in his mind. It had been them who had lost someone, them who figured out when things weren’t right, them who had made a plan to trap and kill something they couldn’t understand. It had been them, together, who had risked everything for a chance that they might be able to avenge the people they loved. He had just happened to show up at the right time to see them. Nancy with her hand wrapped in gauze, Byers standing in his house with blood pooled on the carpet around him. Nancy, pointing a gun at his head and telling him he had to leave, now.
And that was what he remembered most, after the fear and adrenaline had worn off. Nancy, her steady hand, and the unnervingly calm look in her eye as she told him to get out. That was what had changed most. He’d known Nancy had a crush on him for a long time, that there had been months of her ‘accidentally’ bumping into him, her laughing at his jokes, showing up at his games in pretty new dresses. But then Barb vanished, and Nancy had become someone else. Someone who fought monsters, who didn’t care if anyone thought she was crazy (and people did, she was buying bear traps and kerosene, for god’s sake), who had decided that Jonathan Byers, the weirdo who had taken pictures of their party, her, without their knowledge, was the person she was going to make her last stand with.
He knew it was a stupid thing to think about. Nancy worried about other, darker worlds, about children being snatched up in the night, about her friend who had died alone and afraid when they were upstairs hooking up. He worried over the fact that he wasn’t the person she trusted most, wasn’t the person she shared her fears and nightmares with, wasn’t the person she prepared to face evil with. It was stupid, even she had told him that, in so many words (“You came back for us, Steve, and that is what matters. You saved us.” Her tone was final, and he never brought it up again), but her reassurances sound hollow to him. All he wanted was for things to go back to the way they were before, when they had walked down the halls of Hawkins High without a care in the world except how they would sneak around their parents to see each other.
But she didn’t want things to go back to normal. The new Nancy huddled in the basement of her house with Byers and her brother’s friends, talking about those other worlds that existed, wondering if there were more monsters out there, if there was a way to kill them if they came back. The new Nancy spent her weekends sorting files at the police station and whispering to Hopper about what else they could do. The new Nancy wanted to hang out with Byers, and she wanted Steve to do it with her, so he spent more Friday nights than he could count sitting in the newly-cleaned and hole-less house on the edge of town, watching Nancy talk and Byers nod along. Listened to conversations about alternate dimensions and portals and rips in space-time, about speculation that if Eleven had been able to open the gate from here, something in one of the other worlds might be able to open a gate from there. The new Nancy had a loaded pistol in a shoebox and snuck out to the woods to shoot at beer cans. She had a pile of books about apex predators and astrophysics that were dog-eared and covered in notes.
Nancy From Before was gone, and Steve was the only thing that had stayed the same, a vestigial remain, still part of the body, but useless.