Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

I

Population Hawkins: dropping by a few thousand a day.

How many thousands are there to go? Steve isn’t the kind of guy to have statistics floating around in his head, unless they have to do with sports. And even then, he’s never been the sharpest tool in the shed. Was mostly just a tool, actually.

Was, past tense, but that’s cold comfort, especially when life as we know it has basically become ancient and unchangeable history at this point. Steve’s heroism, present tense or not, hasn’t done jack-shit to fix it.

To save anyone.

It’s like this: the apocalypse is here to stay. The town has opened up like one of those paper fortune-tellers the girls used to make in middle school. People died, Eddie among them. And Max?

But Steve can’t think about Max. He can navigate the painstaking roundabouts required to keep his tires clear of burning interspace goo, and he can and did drag his ass and everyone he’s responsible for (everyone left living) back through a gate that’s hot to the touch. Yeah. Sure. That’s just Hawkins-is-Hell stuff. But he’s been to the hospital only a couple times in the last forty-eight—the initial visit, fast as they could get there when the ground was still groaning under their feet, and then a second time, alone, passing through the corridors like an unworthy ghost—and it was a couple times too many.

He was on his way to get patched up himself (and that’s all it was, getting patched up; he’d survive—a little uglier, a little older, but he’d survive until the fucking end of time—). He was woozy, light-headed, all the adrenaline drained away. It didn’t make the sight any easier. He couldn’t—detach, seeing what there was to see.

Seeing what was left of her.

He puked for ten minutes at the nurses’ station, even with nothing in his stomach, and they all thought it was from the first round of rabies shots.

Dear Steve...

(Yeah. Dustin gave him the letter.)

Steve…

(And Nancy gave him hope, right there in the dark pit of hell, then snatched it back from him under the sunshine.)

It’s a whole new day, reunions and reshufflings, heroes returning to empty battlefields, discovering how little the common soldiers could do in their absence. It’s happiness and heartache, forehead kisses and promises, the kind of bullshit that makes the world go round. Steve’s sorting shirts in the Hawkins High gym, stacking the deck in favor of happiness because he got off easy, he really did, and he can’t complain on his own behalf.

Since morning dawned with no new disasters—just the all-consuming ones of the foregoing days—there have been scraps of news transmitted over the working phone lines, over the airwaves. The Sinclairs have managed to make it to the hospital—Erica radioed that in. Max’s mom still hasn’t resurfaced, but nobody knows quite how to reach her; they need to give it time. Robin’s parents are both A-OK and volunteering at the hospital. Claudia Henderson stayed up all night with Dustin, trying to understand what he couldn’t say. When Steve picked him up this morning, she tried to get an explanation from him, too—but Steve couldn’t give one. Couldn’t help but see how much, in the course of two days, Dustin had changed.

Happiness, he tells himself, watching Robin and Vickie babble back and forth. Catching Carol Perkins’ eye across the scuffed expanse of the floor, and returning the cautious half-smile she gives him. Happiness—it’s not too late for happiness—

Because Max is still breathing, and they are still standing, and—

When the first flakes of living ash begin to fall, Steve isn’t ready.

He’s never ready.

That’s not what counts.

II

“Like the blizzard of ’78,” murmurs Mr. Henry, who works at the bank on North Main—well, when there was a North Main, which there isn’t anymore.

Robin automatically bites back the urge to say, No, sorry, this isn’t an opportunity to satisfy the masculine need to dredge up old weather events, this is Apocalypse Part Two, and finds that it isn’t actually much of a hardship to keep her mouth shut. Her tongue feels like it’s made of cotton balls.

Maybe because it’s Apocalypse Part Two.

Vickie has vanished into the crowd, and the momentary high of brushing hands and joking about peanut butter has faded with her. Robin turns her head, searching for Steve—and finds him, hair and height instantly recognizable even in a high ratio of people-to-windows.

She needs Steve right now. Needed him when she was being choked to death by otherworldly vines, needed him when they found Dustin curled over Eddie’s body, needed him when they were standing in Max’s hospital room, even though Steve’s hand, then, was very cold in hers.

Needs him when it’s snowing-but-not-snowing.

Her heart’s pounding high in her chest, low in her ears, by the time she reaches him. She wraps a hand around his wrist before he even sees her, which is a bit stupid, because Steve has frayed nerves just as much as she does (maybe more) and he jerks like she’s poked him with a cattle-prod.

“Jes…Rob. Hey.”

“Hey,” she says, slipping her hand in his. It doesn’t matter, right now, if Vickie’s watching and gets the wrong impression. If Carol Goddamn Perkins is curling her lip in curious disdain a few yards to their right. All that matters is that it isn’t over. Whatever the fuck Vecna has planned is moving into Phase Two.

“This is bad,” Steve murmurs, which is vaguely comforting. Steve’s not being Steve if he isn’t softly pointing out the obvious.

“It’s—” Robin can’t quite bring herself to say it. It’s fucking weird, is what it is, standing here with half of her high-school class milling about, her sixth-grade math teacher bobbling a tray of coffee cups, the postman on her street looking a little out of it thanks to the bandage wrapped around his head. And all of them are just—frozen in place, trying to make sense of their own reckoning.

Weakly, Robin resorts to saying,

“Nancy’s vision.”

Steve gnaws his lip. He knows exactly what she’s talking about, even setting aside the fact that he’s thinking of Nancy pretty much non-stop. It used to be a half-funny, half-sad feature of working alongside Steve Harrington: watching him drift into vacant melancholy over the prospect of Nancy Wheeler, unreachable.

Now, in almost too many ways, it’s so much more than that.

“She said it was our Hawkins,” Robin says, low, like Steve needs reminding that the town is currently fissured by the Gates of Hell. “And that—the Upside Down took over. Guess that’s…that’s this.”

Steve’s quiet. He squeezes her hand, once, and lets it go. Turns, purposeful. “We need to get back to the others,” he says. “Nance. El. We need to—shit, we need to find Dustin.”

III

Talking to Mr. Munson is exhausting. Dustin wouldn’t trade the chance to do it for the world.

It’s his duty, to honor Eddie’s memory, even if that memory’s so recent that saying his name is like someone’s taken a rusty knife to Dustin’s heart and twisting hard.

Hell, three days ago, Eddie was alive.

There’s a lot he can’t say to Mr. Munson, of course. Not because it’s classified—Dustin doesn’t give a shit anymore about that—but because he doesn’t want Mr. Munson to think he’s being mocked. Belittled. Lied to.

Not everyone’s seen what Dustin’s seen.

He clutches his too-thin paper cup of black coffee—which he doesn’t even drink—and tries to explain Hellfire instead. How Eddie made him and Mike and Lucas feel included, gave them something to look forward to when life crashed down too hard.

But wasn’t Eddie supposed to have something to look forward to?

Mr. Munson wipes his eyes and blows his nose in a disreputable handkerchief he keeps in his breast pocket, and after a while he starts asking the kind of questions that Dustin wants him to ask (even though they’re the kind that twist the knife just a little more).

“He ever show you his guitar?”

“Yeah.” Dustin can’t see a damn thing, the tears running like grief’s flicked on the faucet again. He sniffs. Waves away an offer to share the handkerchief. “Yeah, he played it for me—once.”

“Loved that damn thing like it was his own child.” Mr. Munson shakes his head. “Loved it better than some people love their own children.”

“Eddie loved a lot of things,” Dustin says. “A lot of people.”

Mr. Munson nods. “He didn’t get that from nobody. Just—just pulled it out of himself. Must have been born with it.”

It makes Dustin think of El.

“Some people,” he says, “Are just—good. Really good. No matter how badly the world treats them. I’m not that way, Mr. Munson. I don’t know what I’d have done if I didn’t have a—a family, and friends, and—but Eddie...” He has to stop short again, clear his throat. Then—“I think Eddie was one of those people, who can be good without a lot of help. But you helped him, too. I just know it.”

Mr. Munson looks ready to shrink away from the praise, to start arguing. He doesn’t get a chance. Something’s changed in the room around them—everyone’s abandoning their stations, whether for sandwich-making or toy-sorting or trash-collecting. Everyone’s flocking to the windows, jostling across the squeaky wax floor.

Dustin knows more than he should.

Dustin knows there are no good changes in Hawkins.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Munson,” he says, because he really, truly is, and because where he’s going, no Munson should ever have to follow again. “I have to go.”

He doesn’t even make it to the windows before Steve and Robin crash into him.

“Dustin!” they say in unison, like they’re his goddamn parents.

Dustin’s in no mood for being babied, even if his leg does hurt like a bitch from the exertion of trying to jog across the gym. “What’s going on?”

“Phase Two,” Steve says grimly. Robin flicks a look at him, nose scrunching slightly, but she picks up the thread.

“Of Nancy’s vision,” she says. “The Upside Down—it’s—”

Outside, the light looks…wrong. Worse than it did under plumes of rising smoke. Now there’s—there’s a blur, like snowflakes are swirling between earth and sky.

Snowflakes that aren't snowflakes.

“It’s here,” Dustin finishes, a little breathless. “Hawkins is…becoming one.”

“Pretty much,” Steve says. “We need to meet up with the others. Come up with…” If he says a plan, Dustin still might sock him.

(He needs to get a handle on all this fucked-up, misplaced anger he seems to have to aim at Steve.)

“…with the next step,” Steve says, like he sensed that Dustin was on the very edge of sanity.

It seems like there is nothing on earth that could distract everyone else from the toxic blizzard drifting down, but when the gym door swings open and a bullhorn blares, there’s not a head in the room left unturned.

“Attention, Hawkins.” A voice Dustin would know anywhere, at least since the fateful fall of ’83. “This is your Chief of Police.”

Turns out there is one good change—one last roll of Hawkins’ twenty-sided die:

Jim Hopper, back from the dead.

Chapter Text

Vecna let her live. What that means—well, it’s a question Nancy tried to answer with the business end of a shotgun, a solution so absolute as to leave nothing but rubble. Instead, they both survived: him in hiding, her in plain sight.

Sitting pretty. Waiting for return fire.

She’s not so naïve as to pretend that she’s the biggest player in this whole mess, not even close. But nor can she ignore, as she tried to at sixteen—at seventeen, and as recently as a few weeks ago, maybe—the single greatest warning of girlhood:

You’ll never give as much as the world is willing to take.

Vecna was a man once: the worst kind of man. Bitter and powerful. He didn’t need Nancy to be important to recognize that she had all the rights wounds for his probing talons to reach.

She didn’t need to match his strength to be made his mouthpiece.

I would like very much to show you where I am going.

I want you to tell Eleven. I want you to tell her everything you see.

She’s barely said a word to Eleven since the pizza van rolled up on Maple Street, other than the usual loving lies—I’m OK, we’re all OK—and an offer to go with her, to go with all of them, to see Max.

Nancy has hidden behind her reunion with Jonathan, her typical sibling sniping with Mike, rather than face up to the girl who really has seen everything. It’s like if Nancy says it out loud—says all of this was for you, and there’s more coming—it will make it real.

Anyway, it’s likely that Eleven already knows.

Anyway, the wildflower field is withering around them. Red poppy flags fading to gray; sunflowers rotting on their stems. The plumes of smoke rising from Hawkins are coming alive.

It’s too late to keep secrets, and too late for Nancy to be a hero.

(In her mind’s eye, she sees Holly torn in two.)

“The others,” she hears herself say, tugging on Jonathan’s hand. “We need to find the others.” His fingers hold hers loosely, almost gingerly, like he’d rather draw into himself than cling to her right now. Nancy hasn’t decided yet whether she feels the same.

Gasping, sobbing, no, no, Holly, Mom, no, Mike! Mike—

I’m right here.

Coming out of the dark, Steve’s hand warm against her face.

I’m right here.

(You’re there. You’ve always been there.)

“C’mon, kid,” Hopper’s saying to El, stepping forward to drop an arm around her shoulders. They’ve all moved closer to her, their too-young leader, after the initial shock that stopped them where they stood, like so many statues—so many headstones. “Nothing we can do from here.”

“The Upside Down,” Eleven says. (Nancy will always think of her as Eleven, as El, even if she’s been Jane for quite a while now.) Her voice is low with grief. “It’s here. He—he won.”

“Enough of that talk.” Hopper pulls her against him, tighter. Joyce is on El’s other side, rubbing her arm.

Nancy shuts her eyes, imagining what it would feel like to be safe, even if the face of the red storm.

Hopper says, “We’ve got to act fast now, get out of this nasty lung-killing shit. Right?”

Wait. Lung-killing?

They’re back at the cabin, out of breath from high-tailing it through the ash-laden woods, when Nancy finally ventures to ask,

“Chief?”

“Yeah, Wheeler?”

“What did you mean…lung-killing?”

He tosses her a musty bandana. “I mean wrap this around your mouth even if it smells like an oil change. Those flakes are toxic.” He tilts his head, squints at her. “What’s the matter? You look like you’ve seen…well, yet another ghost.”

“We…we spent like a whole day in there,” she says, hoping the tremble in her voice is muffled a little by the cloth she ties over her face. “We didn’t—we didn’t know.”

“Who’s we?” Joyce demands, coming up alongside them. Her unshakeable Mom-instinct kicks in whenever some kid’s on the verge of tears, even if that kid is eighteen and (hopefully) badass and (definitely) has fought enough battles to make her a war veteran.

(Nancy used to think that Joyce would be her mother-in-law someday, and when she was, she'd make sure that Nancy had a seat at the table. A hug to come home to. Understanding, where Nancy's own mother—try as she might—could never quite manage.)

“Yeah,” Jonathan says, coming back from his temporary side-quest to find a makeshift mask for Will. “Who’s we?”

Nancy squares her shoulders. She’s not going to break down. Not here. Not in front of any of them. “Steve—Robin—Dustin.”

(And Eddie, but Eddie’s never drawing breath again.)

“Shit,” Mike says, voice cracking. So much for sibling sniping; what little color he ever has drained out of his face. “Shit, are you gonna die?”

“No, she’s not going to die,” Hopper snaps. To Nancy, he says, with a glimmer of soldierly camaraderie—“Just got an unpleasant few hours ahead of you.” With this ominous proclamation, he switches gears: there’s a bigger plan to be made of this mess than whatever crap is piled up in Nancy’s lungs.

The plan, as it comes together, is this: Hopper is going to make his grand reappearance at the High School, since that’s where the majority of non-vacated Hawkinsians are gathered. Joyce will head to the hospital, where Claudia Henderson’s the head nurse on duty, and try to convince her to get the necessary lockdown protocols in place. Jonathan and Nancy are designated to collect Steve, Robin, and Dustin, and meet up with Joyce for their unpleasant few hours, or whatever.

“Then we need to get everyone who’s in the know back here, stat,” Hopper concludes. “Murray was taking Dmitri back to his place—Christ, they’re probably already across state lines—”

“Who’s Dmitri?” asks Mike.

“Reason I’m here,” Hopper says. “A friend. He’s in the know.”

“So’s Murray,” Joyce says, with a grin that only tilts slightly towards irony. She has one arm around Will’s shoulders, and her other hand twisted in Jonathan’s sleeve, like she’s let them out of her sight and reach for the last damn time. “All the way in the know.”

“Murray’s place,” Nancy says, trying to be helpful, and not think about dying from Upside-Down toxic ash flakes. “His bunker. Maybe that would be…a better place? For El?”

The cabin with its drafty, boarded-up windows isn’t looking like such a great hide-out right now.

Hopper scratches his head. “Too far,” he says. “For now, we’ll stick to the pizza van, then we’ll batten down the hatches here when we can.”

“I can help,” El says. She looks hauntingly young—her hair shaved almost to the scalp again, her eyes wide and weary. “I can—keep the cabin safe.”

“You need to rest,” Mike says. His voice is only soft when he’s talking to El. There’s something so broken, Nancy thinks, about their family—they can only find the kind of love that can be spoken outside of it. It makes her feel like a fraud, like she’s pretending, when her heart beats for her brother, her sister, her mother.

Even her father. She was his little girl once, the little ballerina.

The girl who was afraid of the dark before she knew that there was anything waiting in it.

“I’ll rest in the pizza van,” El says seriously, linking her fingers through Mike's. The way they move around each other—it’s miles apart from the way Nancy was around her crushes at fourteen, fifteen. (Sixteen.) She was silly and flighty and shy, debating whether to shave her legs above the knee because that’s where her skirts stopped, fretting if she got her period when she wanted to show off a cute bathing suit. She was afraid of boys, and wanted them to be afraid of her.

El and Mike—they’re not like that. They’re gentle with each other, braver together than apart.

“Enough talking, for now,” Hopper growls. “Lord knows I’m about to do a crap-load of it.”

“Officer Callahan’s going to be so glad to see you,” Mike mumbles through his bandana, which Nancy takes as a good sign. Mike’s not so worried that he can’t find it in himself to be a little shit.

Jonathan’s…eccentric…friend Argyle was taking a nap on the cabin floor when everything was going down, so he’s sort of out of it. Nancy thinks Jonathan should really give him some kind of lecture about Indiana mushrooms. She remembers Outdoors Skills, or whatever weird eighth-grade home-ec project had the Hawkins Middle School population tramping around the woods looking for sorrel or some other edible shit, and the teacher consensus was that that all mushrooms were a no-go.

Wrong one’ll kill you. Hey, Harrington. Put that down!

Yeah, Jonathan needs to talk to him.

For now, though, they just need Argyle’s keys. They’re heading for the school in his west-coast wunder-mobile, and Chief Hopper’s driving.

“Whoa, dude,” Argyle breathes. His eyes are a little red-rimmed, though whether that’s from the mushrooms or from something else, Nancy isn’t sure. “You ever…you ever handle a pizza van before? You ever—sling those grease-wheels?”

“I think I’ll manage,” Hopper says crisply. If Nancy hadn’t spent as much time as she has in the company of Steve Harrington, she wouldn’t actually know it was possible for someone’s eyebrows to go that high. “Everyone ready?”

The ride back into town is quiet. They swing by the Wheelers’, first—parking a block up the street so that they don’t draw too much attention. Nancy gives Joyce her station wagon keys and Joyce and Will tumble out of the back of the van. Right before he shuts the door, Will catches Nancy’s wrist.

She stills, startled.

Will asks, “You OK?”

God, he’s grown. They all have. His voice is deeper—deeper than Jonathan’s almost, like he’s going to be a completely different kind of man someday. His eyes are the same as they’ve always been, though. Deep. Dark. Haunted.

(Even when he was a little kid, there was a shadow inside him. The shadow of waiting, maybe, for life to treat him hard. The sweet, shy kindergartner Nancy used to bake cookies with. The one she used to read to from Little Women. Of course he liked Beth best—Beth, the one who didn’t make it.)

“Yeah,” she says. She can feel a lot of eyes on her. Jonathan, next to her. Hopper, glancing back in the rearview mirror. “Yeah, Will. I’m OK.”

He swallows. Shakes his head. “Sorry. I just—I’m coming, Mom. I’m coming.”

“What…” El pipes up from behind her. “Was that about?”

 Nancy settles back against the curve of the side-wall. “No idea.”

Nancy.

(She takes a breath.)

Nancy. I can still—see—you.

Whoever is running the Hawkins High Red Cross station is doing a pretty airtight job, literally. There aren’t any civilians milling about in the parking lot, even though the ash-fall seems to have only just begun here. What they saw on the hillside was the opening act: now, it's the spread.

A week ago, Nancy was ordering Fred around and cursing the traffic jams that always seemed to pile up right when she was trying to get home to call Jonathan before his ridiculously early lights-out hour.

Now the lot is packed with unfamiliar cars, and the gym is full of unsuspecting people who still don’t fully understand that their world has ended, and Jonathan is right beside her.

“It’s gonna be chaos,” Hopper says from the front seat. Argyle, who took shotgun as soon as Joyce got out—uninvited—goggles admiringly at him. Apparently whatever…substances are in his system are enough to make him pretty much unfazed by every naturally-occurring Hawkins threat, whether it be fissures to the center of space-time continuum or Jim Hopper’s dead-eyed glare. “Jonathan. You and Nancy follow me in and find them. Harrington, Dustin, and you said—”

“Robin,” Nancy finishes. She remembers, suddenly, that Hopper doesn’t know who Robin is, really. He saw her only in passing, in the gory neon wreckage of Starcourt.

He taps the wheel, affirming. “Robin.”

“Who’s Robin, again?” asks Jonathan.

So I figure that you and Jonathan are still going strong, ‘cause you guys are going to college together, and you’re like, one of those unstoppable power couples—

“A friend,” Nancy says. She thought he’d remember, but honestly, they didn’t really…mingle, that much, with Steve and Robin in the months after the mall fire, before Jonathan went west. Jonathan had never liked Steve before everything happened, and as it turned out—he kind of still didn't.

“Oh, yeah,” he murmurs, now. “The ice-cream girl.”

Nancy slouches a little lower. “Uh-huh.”

“If you two are done making sheep’s eyes at each other,” grumbles Hopper, which is honestly kind of an unjust assessment of the situation, “Why don’t you move your asses and get out of this monstrosity?”

Nancy shoves the door open, cutting off Argyle’s faintly offended, “Wow, my dude, way harsh—”

The bandana over her face really does smell like motor oil. The ringing in her ears isn’t quite consistent enough for her to be sure it’s real.

The voice that whispered, I can still see you, was one she can’t pretend not to have heard.

“C’mon,” Jonathan says, his voice muffled behind a tattered gaiter. “Let’s get this over with.”

Attention, Hawkins. This is your Chief of Police.

There’s a massive commotion after that, of course. Nancy wonders how Interim Chief Powell feels, if he’s conflicted about having his old friend as rival for his position, or if he’s just pretty fucking relieved after all that he’s had to deal with in the last few days. She kind of expects the latter.

“Do you see them?” asks Jonathan, and Nancy pretends that it’s just a question of height that makes her look for Steve over the others.

“Yeah,” she says. He’s at the edge of the crowd, staring slack-jawed at Hopper, Robin and Dustin beside him. “They’re right there.”

Through you, I will see everything.

“Nancy?”

“Shit.” She jolts when Jonathan touches her arm. “Sorry. I spaced out.” She picks up the pace, jostling her way through the crush of people who are trying to ask Jim Hopper and themselves about forty-thousand questions at once, and doesn’t stop until she’s nearly toe-to-toe with Steve.

“Hey,” she says. Is it just the exhaustion and lung-filling crap, or do his eyes soften the longer he looks at her?

“Hey, Nance.”

“What the hell?” Robin and Dustin say at the same time. “He’s—”

“Yeah, long story,” Nancy says. When she can be in charge, she’s not so—so jittery. It’s like she’s back in the attic, gripping the shotgun, steady-armed and steady-eyed, aiming to win. “Hopper’s here, Joyce is here. And we’ve got problems.”

“Yeah,” Steve says. “Well, less problems, maybe, with them back in action. But—this?” He gestures broadly. "This sucks."

“The Upside Down is here,” Jonathan says, suffusing the words with sufficient gravitas to make them seem like they echo to the rafters. “El’s back in the van. You need to come with us.”

“Hello to you, too, Byers,” Steve says, with just the slightest edge of irritation in his voice. “And where are we going?”

“Chief’s orders,” Nancy says, fighting the sudden, insane urge to put a hand on Steve’s arm. To take his hand and feel the callouses on his palm. She shifts her gaze to Robin, feeling like that’s safer. “We’re meeting back at Hopper’s cabin, as soon as he figures out how to convince everyone to stay here. The—fake snow, or whatever we’re calling it…apparently it’s toxic. People need to stay inside, and not breathe it in. Not to mention whatever the hell else is about to crawl out of the Gates.”

Monsters.

“What you saw…” Dustin says, frowning deeply. His eyes are more red-rimmed than Argyle’s were, and he looks like he’s in pain. "What he showed you—"

"Exactly," Nancy says. Bitter. Powerful.

“I’m sorry,” Robin says, waving her hands in that agitated way she does when she’s about to absolutely flip her shit. “Did you just say that all the floaty-ash-thingamajigs are—toxic? Like the crap we were breathing in for approximately a full day?”

“Oh, Jesus,” Steve mutters. “That sucks. Supernatural emphysema, anyone?”

Nancy tries to smile. “Hopper didn’t seem too worried about it,” she says. “Just…I think he has a way to fix it.”

“An unpleasant way,” Jonathan mutters, which makes Robin go even paler.

“Thanks, Jon,” Steve says, clapping him on the shoulder as he passes. “Way to lift the mood.”

Hopper makes passing eye contact with the lot of them on the way out, nods just once, and Nancy feels reassured enough to take the lead on outlining the rest of the plan as they make their way down the empty hall.

“Next stop is the hospital,” she says. “Joyce is talking to your mom, Dustin, about having that be a shelter zone too, if it’s needed.”

“Is she the one in charge of the unpleasant solution?” Dustin asks, still limping a little as he walks. Nancy offers him her arm, and to her surprise, he takes it.

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“‘Cause I’m just warning you,” Dustin says, giving her a slightly weak smile, “This one time, I ate like, rat poison or something? When I was a toddler? And she made me drink dishwater so I’d throw it up.”

“Rat poison?” Robin asks. “Good God.”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember. It was dire. Dire and then dishwater.” He sighs, but Nancy huffs a faint laugh.

“Never change, Dustin,” she murmurs, and wonders why that’s what makes him pull away from her like he’s been burned.

But of course, it could be anything. Any memory. There’s so much history in these halls—both of the mundane little cruelties of growing up, and the slow recoveries, increasingly plural, from the kind of horrors no amount of repetition can truly dull.

The way back to the parking lot means passing the lockers, and it’s even weirder this time around, flanked by Jonathan and Steve, trailed by Dustin—old enough to belong here now, and Robin, for whom Nancy barely spared a glance mere days ago.

It’s weird, and then it’s all—it’s all too much—

“Nance?” Steve, speaking softly, like they’re the only ones here. “Nance—”

“I’m fine,” she says. Too sharp, too loud. “We just need to get out of here.”

Jonathan’s hand closes firmly on hers. It should be a comfort.

It almost is.

Chapter Text

Sound doesn’t have a shape. It just fills, extending in all directions when there are no walls to hold it in. The only thing that changes, in the—the eternity, is sound itself.

The sentence ends. The page turns.

There is no room, and nothing to fill what does not exist.

In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit…

The page turns. The chair scrapes. The door closes.

So: if there are no shapes, and there are no rooms, what’s left? Why is the door a door, and the chair a chair, when the eternity is blind and blank.

Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell…

Oh, shit. That sounds like—the past. Which is just bonkers, because how can there be a past? Shit. You know this.

You. You—are you.

And you know this.

Plink, plink, plink: sounds that don’t belong with the other sounds. Sounds from the past? Sounds that threaten to become—pain. But that’s not a problem, not right now, because you—you? don’t exist. It’s just the eternity. There’s nothing here, and there’s—

Oh. There’s a wave. A wave? That’s a shape and a sound and a terror and an army, all in one. Water. Black water—no, no—back to the eternity that has no color, no light, no darkness—

Black water.

(You.)

You don’t want—you don’t want to see, and you’re not sure you can, at least not where you are. You can’t see where the water ends. You don’t think it’s the ocean. You think if you were drowning, you’d be fighting for your life.

Your life. You don’t want to go. You don’t want to die. You’re not ready—

You’ve been scared a lot. Fear doesn’t have a shape—it just fills whatever it can.

In a hole in the ground.

In a hole.

Not a nasty, dirty, wet—

By some curious chance one morning long ago in the quiet of the world, when there was less noise and more green—

You’re still scared. You’re still you. You don’t have a body, not that you know of, but you’re looking down at your hands. They are palm-up in front of you, and because they don’t quite belong to you, you cannot move your fingers.

Sound has a shape, now. It flickers across the water. Plink, plink, plink. The waves are receding, but there is no shore.

You imagine sitting down. A thought inside…the eternity, which is smaller now, or larger, since you still can’t see (or sense?) a wall. A thought inside a thought, at least. Sitting on a chair. Shutting the door, and leaning against it.

You imagine that the sound is a voice you know. You’re pretty sure it is, but nothing belongs to you, and you don’t—you don’t even know your own name.

Then the wave speaks.

Max.

Fear has a shape, but you cannot run from it.

You cannot run from anything.

Chapter Text

“I’ll take my car,” Steve says. There is no way in hell he’s getting into Jonathan Byers’ stoner friend’s pizza-mobile, that’s for goddamn sure. Not while he’s got a pulse and some passable approximation of free will.

(If this is punishment for stealing the Winnebago, he supposes it does fit the crime.)

“I think we should stick together,” Jonathan says, eyes narrowed. He still hasn’t let go of Nancy’s hand. In his other hand, he has a set of keys that are honest-to-God fitted out with a Styrofoam grease-wheel. The red pepperonis are mostly rubbed off.

“Yeah, I’ll ride your bumper so close the chaperones will tell us to leave some room for the Holy Spirit,” Steve retorts. “How’s that sound?”

Nancy stares at him incredulously above her mask, like she can’t believe he’s mildly picking a fight in the Hawkins High parking lot (not for the first time) in a near-death situation (also not for the first time). Beside him, Dustin snorts.

“Jeez, Steve, do you have to make such a production out of everything?”

He doesn't sound like he's teasing, and that sort of—throws Steve. There’s an undeniable edge to Dustin’s voice that wouldn’t have been there before. Which is in itself an insane thing to be pissy about: of course the kid’s on edge. Of course he’s not himself.

He just lost a friend, which is something Steve has only ever had happen to him by dumb luck and unavoidable realizations.

He’s never held someone who’s bleeding out fast, trying to talk faster. (Not that Dustin told him, but Steve has to imagine that Eddie talked.) Steve’s never lost someone who was his protector, like Eddie was for Dustin, or his daily comrade, like Barb was for Nancy.

All of this points to another unavoidable realization: Steve’s still plenty capable of being an asshole at the slightest provocation, just as soon as the carnage is in the rearview. A couple (a dozen) hours too few of sleep…a couple memories too many of Nancy’s hands on Jonathan’s face—bam. The knot of weary jealousy that he was so sure he could release gently, with death, is twisting in his chest again.

And Steve didn’t even die. There’s the whole problem in a fucking nutshell.

“It’d be crowded, that’s all,” he mumbles now, since everyone’s looking at him. Mike and El are probably watching through the tinted windows right now, wondering what the hold-up is. Steve’s grateful for the shield of the bandana wrapped around his mouth, so that it’s anybody’s guess if he’s blushing.

The whole thing is an embarrassment—having to go to the hospital at all instead of straight back to Hopper HQ. The truth is, they got really fucking—cavalier (a word Robin says so much that he’s confident in using it himself) about the Upside Down. Kitted up in armor, crafted their weapons…and breathed the poison in.

It was a shit plan. It was the best we could do, and it wasn’t enough. It’s a shit plan when all it does is go to shit.

Eloquent, Harrington. Real fucking eloquent.

(If he was dead right now, and Eddie Munson was alive, would that be a better outcome? Would it mean that they had acted fast enough—that Steve was a casualty of victory, not of loss?)

“I’ll stick with the Beemer, too,” Robin pipes up cheerfully, covering, as she so often does, for Steve’s temporary lapses into total stupidity. He’d say, someone has to, but actually, they don’t. It’s a gift of which he’ll never be worthy—the gift of people staying by his side.

It’s the most important part…

God. He’s so far from that guy right now. The guy with the living heart in the dead forest.

“Are you sure?” Nancy asks, the kissable dent between her eyebrows making its predictable appearance. Apocalypse or not, she clipped a little barrette in her hair this morning, and Steve was bold enough to reach up and swipe his thumb along it, when they were packing up comforters in the Wheeler basement. Feels like a century ago. “Seriously, we have the room—”

“Suit yourself,” Jonathan interjects, shrugging. His hair’s in his eyes. His hair’s always in his fucking eyes. Guy’s never put an ounce of care into his appearance in his entire life, and yeah, you can’t just say shit like that out loud, because he’s also not made of money like Steve is, much good that did him—but still.

Asshole, remember? Zip the fuck up.

“Hospital,” he says, trying to be conciliatory. “We’ll meet you there.”

And can’t help but notice that Dustin chooses the pizza-mobile over the Beemer.

It’s not just the edge, with Dustin. It’s the silence. Dustin’s been quieter than usual since—well, since he screamed himself hoarse, fighting Steve tooth and nail on their way out.

What the hell am I supposed to do? some part of Steve was screaming back, even though the only thing that actually made it out of his mouth was I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so fucking sorry, Dustin, I’m sorry, Dustin, I’m—

What the hell am I supposed to do? Leave you?

So yeah, Steve kind of can’t deal with thinking about right now. He’s not repressing, he’s really not, he’s just…coping. They’ve been out of the shit-hole and into the shit-sewer in pretty short order, all told.

“Steve?”

“Little busy here, Rob.”

“Yeah, I see that. You’re doing like, fifty, on a road that has giant holes in it.” She taps his shoulder with two fingers, then snaps those same fingers. “Earth. To. Steve.”

There’s no naysaying Robin. She’ll just wear him down until he settles down. “I get it.” He eases off the pedal a little, resists the urge to point out that Jonathan Goddamn Byers is going fifty on the same exact road, maybe fifty-five, and he’s doing it in a yellow van that looks like it’s been through hell and back, not in a German-engineered marvel that’s only gotten in two fender-benders.

Robin’s bandana, pulled down from her mouth because they’re in the car, is tangled in one of her suspenders. He told her she looked cute this morning, because she did, and she didn’t hear it enough.

Real looker, Buckley. The babes are going to be swarming.

Swarming? she said, feigning horror. I don’t want any more swarming, I don’t care what species. I will take the babes one at a time.

It was easy to talk with Robin, even at the end of the world.

“So,” she says now, leaning back in her seat, folding her arms. “What do you think they’re going to do us, huh? Pump our stomachs, like Dustin said?”

He licks his dry lips. “Uh, yeah. Seems pretty likely.”

“Oh, shit.” Robin rubs her eyes. “That’s like, my worst nightmare.”

“I thought your worst nightmare was rabies.”

“Yeah, but like…also having my stomach pumped.”

(There was this one time. April ’84, actually. The sixteenth. He absolutely remembers the fucking day and the hour and the minute he woke up alone, but that’s not the point—the point is that he found Nancy sobbing in his guest bathroom in the middle of the night, with an open bottle of pills scattered like buckshot on the floor. He got down on his knees, trying to count them, begging her to tell him how many she’d taken.

It had taken her a while to convince him that she’d only taken two.)

“I’ve heard it sucks,” he says, trying for lightness. “But we’ll get through it. I’ll hold your hand.”

“Don’t get any of your puke on me.”

“Scout’s honor, Buckley.”

Even Jonathan can’t drive over the speed limit the whole way to the hospital. Hawkins is divided—not just in terms of yawning, weeping gates and rubble, but in terms of streets that are ghost-towns and streets that are jammed with sedans and station-wagons packed to the gills. The slow-movers, Steve thinks. Planning to leave for good, but taking more than twenty-four hours.

Slow-movers. Wouldn’t make it for a second when the world that’s now theirs comes to flower-mawed, bone-breaking life.

The hospital is like…not like a church, exactly. Too much death for it to be a church, too many pagers and code reds and ambulances shrieking in and out of the garage bay. But the hospital looms strangely calm above the chaos, standing unscathed against the sick, bruise-shaded smoke that rises miles high around it.

“Masks up,” Robin says, and they join the others.

Will’s at the door to meet them, and he seems about as optimistic as Will Byers, demon-whisperer, can be under circumstances like these. Steve hangs back at the back of the group, right next to Jonathan’s affable stoner friend, while Will gives them the lowdown.

“Mom talked to Claudia,” he says. “They’re providing face-masks to anyone who has to go in and out, and they’ve called the local stations to get the word out about toxic air and keeping windows shut. And Mom also told them you’d need treatment. You guys, I mean. Dustin and Nancy and Steve and—Robin, right?”

“Right-o,” Robin says, saluting, like she’s not terrified.

“Dude,” says Jonathan’s stoner friend, and Steve realizes the guy’s just been…staring at him for like, a full minute. “Your hair is…radical.”

“Uh, thanks,” Steve says, and then, wonder of wonders, he happens to catch Nancy’s gaze.

She winks at him.

He’ll take the stomach-pumping.

They follow Will inside. Erica takes a break from her long-running vigil at Lucas’s side, says there’s been no change in Max, but if anyone can think of more books to bring, Lucas would love them. He’s just finished The Hobbit and he’s kind of worried that when Max wakes up she’ll be pissed he didn’t pick something with a stronger female character.

Steve has read The Hobbit. He’s pretty sure there weren’t any female characters in it at all, but he might have skimmed some parts.

Did you ever consider, Dustin had said once—said it delicately, like he used to present Topics of Great Import to Steve—that you might be dyslexic?

Is that another word for “bombed the SAT,” Henderson?

Dustin had grimaced. In a way. How’d you do on the math?

I don’t wanna talk about it.

Dustin’s limping along with Will and Nancy on either side of him. Mike stayed back with El again. Jonathan seems to be having a hurried conversation with Argyle—yeah, his friend’s name is Argyle—about the way back to Hopper’s cabin, the way that doesn’t attract attention.

Steve knows it pretty well. Used to head up there with grocery deliveries, spring of his senior year.

Eleven was scared of him at first, like she’d been expecting some of kind of legend. Once she figured out he was a harmless screw-up who she could wrap around her little finger as easily as the other kids did—easier, even, because superpowers or not she was a soft-eyed sweetheart—they got on just fine.

“I just don’t know how long this is going to take,” Jonathan says. “We’ll have to ask my mom.”

This. The stomach-pumping or whatever.

Jonathan’s planning on staying for it, because of course he is. If Steve was Nancy’s boyfriend (which he isn’t, sixteen months and counting), he’d stay too.

As it is, he’s here because he’s not her boyfriend, just her comrade-in-arms, who didn’t put two-and-two together about the air they breathed.

“Dusty!” Claudia Henderson arrives on the scene like a cyclone, sweat-stains showing through her scrubs. She’s been on a shift since early in the morning, Steve knows, because Dustin called for pick-up around six-thirty. “I told you, you can’t keep putting weight on that leg! Strains become sprains, sprains become stress fractures—”

Dustin waves away her concerns. “I was mostly sitting down at the school, Mom. I feel fine.”

She sniffs. “Lying to a nurse and your mother? A nurse who happens to be your mother? Come on—thank you, Will, sweetie, you’re being the crutch he won’t agree to carry. This way, please.”

This way means getting ushered into a big room with a few curtained beds, and countertops and cabinets largely emptied out. Joyce Byers is there, methodically filling a duffel bag with supplies.

“Gang’s all here, Mom,” Will says.

“Oh, good,” Joyce says, springing up like she’s been caught red-handed, even though the duffel appears to have Claudia’s blessing. “Hi, sweetie—” to Jonathan—“How’d things go with Hop?”

Jonathan accepts her hug with pretty good grace. It’s not his fault he has a mother who loves him more than anything, who clings to him like a ship in the storm. Steve tries not to watch too hungrily, tries not to sort out another root of jealousy.

“Hop’s Hop,” Jonathan says cryptically. “You know. He’s handling it. He gave us the go-ahead to leave.”

“I’m sure—I’m sure. God, it must have given everyone such a shock—”

“Now who needs to take their medicine?” Claudia demands briskly, coming back in with her gloves on and a tray of dropper-filled bottles that don’t exactly make Steve feel great about his current prospects. He hears Robin take a breath.

“What is it?” Nancy asks, never backing down from a challenge.

“Joyce told me that you four—you and my poor Dusty—”

“Mom! No nicknames!”

“I’m sorry sweet-pea—I mean. I’m sorry, Dustin.”

Steve wants to make a joke really, really badly, but he sort of figures it would absolutely bomb given current timing, so he holds back.

“Joyce told me that you were exposed to an unusually strong concentration of the unidentified toxin floating here, there, and everywhere,” Claudia says, back to her businesslike Head-Nurse-of-the-Floor manner. Dustin has explained the significance of this before—how, when his mom brings out that tone at home, you don’t play around with it. “I’ve measured out four doses of a particularly powerful expectorant. That should help clean out what you’ve consumed and inhaled.”  She sets the tray down. “There are scrubs for the four of you to change into on each of the beds, behind the curtains.”

“Scrubs?” Robin asks.

Claudia smiles sympathetically. “About that, honey,” she says. “I’m afraid this is going to make you upchuck every last thing in your stomach. Part of its magic.”

“So,” Steve says, turning the bottle in his hands, “Who wants to go first?”

“You mean you haven’t figured out how to shotgun it?” comes Nancy’s dry voice from the other side of her curtains.

It’s just the four of them, one to a bed, with a giant basin for, you know, the good stuff, and a need to decide who’s actually going to bite the bullet. Drink the potion. Etcetera.

(Jonathan had offered to stay, but Nancy didn’t want him to. I don’t want you to have the image of me vomiting playing on a loop in your head for the rest of our lives, she’d huffed, and that would have made Steve laugh, a little, if it hadn’t been for the rest of our lives part.)

“I’m going to make a lot of noises,” Dustin says dubiously.

Steve drags a deep breath in, blows it out through his nose. It just adds to the weirdness, only being able to hear them. Like they’re in rooms inside of rooms. “I think we’re all going to make a lot of noises, Henderson.”

“Can we just…” Robin sounds the worst off of any of them. “Can we just do it? I’m freaking out.”

“Robin,” Nancy says, in that sweet, encouraging voice that always turns Steve’s knees to water (good thing he’s sitting down). “It’s going to suck. And then it’s going to be over, and we won’t be like, a couple of Victorian consumptives together. No more high collars, right?”

“No more high collars,” Robin agrees tremulously.

“Bottoms up,” Steve says, and uncorks his own personal hell.

If anyone’s keeping track, this is probably the un-sexiest half-hour of Steve Harrington’s teenage life. He’s not really paying attention to the sounds anyone else is making, and he sure as shit hopes no one’s paying attention to the sounds he’s making, because all he can do is blink out like a strand of lights, torn between the raw, acid pain in his throat, the lurching terror that always accompanies puking—fuck, try having a week-long stomach bug when you’re eleven and your parents are renewing their vows in Sweden—and the blinding white pain from his recently-stitched wounds.

Then everything goes dark.

Steve! Steve!

“Steve!”

He doesn’t know what happened, for a second there. A second...maybe a minute. Maybe a couple minutes. Not the point. Point is, everything hurts—everything. He figures out where his hands are, first: clenched in the bile-stained sheet beneath him, but can't seem to figure out the rest of his body.

He’s still seeing stars.

“Is he OK?” That’s Dustin—calling from somewhere, sounding hoarse but concerned. Thank God. The little shit still cares about him.

“He’s fine,” Nancy says, and it’s Nancy who was calling his name, always Nancy who’s tearing through the boundary of what’s real and what’s in his head. She’s here now, on the other side of the curtain, her pale lilac scrubs all crumpled. She looks—washed out, eyes a little bloodshot, hair a little wild, but she’s not a scummy mess writhing on a hospital bed.

That makes one of them.

“Jes-us,” Steve croaks. He doesn’t even know what his stupid hands are doing, avoiding the swirling basin trapped between his knees, reaching for—reaching for her.

She reaches for him, too. Crooks her arm around the nape of his neck so that her wrist is cool against his fever-hot cheek. Her fingers graze his forehead, smoothing back the damp strands of hair sticking there.

“Steve,” she says, low. “You sounded like…like you were dying.”

“I mean…probably not,” he mutters. “Given my track record.” God, but he’s missed this. Missed the beat of her heart in his ear. Missed the delicate rack of her ribcage, the soft swell of her curves.

He has his hands on his knees. He can’t touch her like she’s touching him, or it will push this somewhere outside the realm of just offering comfort.

“Is it the bites?”

“Yeah. Probably.”

“Did the stitches reopen?” The disembodied voice of Robin demands, because her ears (even disembodied) are tiny geniuses and she never misses a damn thing.

He glances down. Through his scrubs—an offensive shade of spearmint—he doesn’t see anything. “Nah,” he calls back. “Think I’m good.”

Throat screaming, stomach searing, head pounding.

Nancy, holding him close.

Yeah, he’s good for now.

Chapter Text

They take turns in the shower. Dustin first, because he’s the youngest and Steve and Robin and Nancy all agree over his protests that that means top priority.

The three of them, the older ones, are quiet as they wait. Steve sits on the floor with his back against the wall, and Robin stands beside him, sort of hovering, sending a few nervous glances his way like clockwork.

Ha, Nancy thinks. A hollow joke—clockwork. Even ordinary words aren’t the same anymore. And sure, that’s kind of a melodramatic reaction, seeing as she’s been avoiding swimming pools since 1983, hasn’t rewatched Risky Business since the fall of ’84, and never wants to set foot in a mall again for the rest of her life. But she figures, for all that, she’s entitled to a little melodrama when she wants it.

For her part in the waiting, she’s been aimlessly pacing the linoleum. Limping, actually, as if she’s the one with the leg injury, not Dustin. It just kind of—knocks all the energy out of you, spewing your guts and whatever you can hack out of your lungs for what feels like an endless string of panicked minutes.

It felt like dying, of course, but Nancy knew that she wasn’t. Nancy knows she won’t go out like that. Won’t—won’t go that easy—

“Cheers, amigos,” Robin mutters finally, thumping her head lightly against the peach-painted wall. “Let’s never do that again.”

Steve huffs eloquently in response, picking at a stray thread on the knee of his mint-green scrubs. Nancy says nothing, wraps her arms around her aching ribs and shuts her eyes. The voice in her head is quiet, but that doesn’t mean a damn thing.

You’re a traitor, Nancy Wheeler, even if you don’t know it yet.

Why can’t she bring herself to explain?

Because that would make it real.

“So how far has it gone?” Steve asks, after a beat. Then—“Nance?”

The question’s for her.

She opens her eyes. Still the same room, rancid and stuffy because they can’t open a window for obvious reasons. “Sorry, what?”

“The…creepification of Hawkins,” he says. Face tilted up, catching the fluorescents’ unforgiving glare in the shadows under his eyes, but she still thinks that he looks better than he did. Some of the pain-drained color is returning to his face. “You said the field—”

The flower-field, crumbling into deadly dust beneath her feet. She had lain on that hillside with Jonathan, June of ’85. The very beginning of their internship. Before she was always unhappy, or after she’d been unhappy for such a long time that she didn’t know how else to change for the better.

He’d kissed her neck. She had undone her buttons for him, to invite him in.

“It was dying, that’s for sure,” she says. “Dying fast. But I don’t know how far it’s going to reach, and I didn’t—I didn’t see anything else come out.”

Robin winces, which tells Nancy all she needs to know. Tells her that they’re all thinking about the same thing: the vines.

“He’s gotta be dead, right?” Steve mutters. “Vecna.” Says that like they need the clarification. “He must have, I don’t know, dragged himself off to some hole. Choked on his last demon-breath and a whole bunch of extra-crispy lung bacon.”

“Lung bacon?” Robin snipes. “You’ve got to stop trying to be metaphorical, Steve. It’s not a good look for you.”

“He’s not dead,” Nancy says, turning away from them so that she doesn’t have to see whatever new grief and misery the certainty in her voice will write on their faces. She was the one at the cabin conclave, with Eleven and Will trading dreadful insights into what they knew, into how to make sense of what they’d seen.

So yeah, she’s pretty damn certain.

(She’s the one who has him in her head.)

(See no evil, speak no evil, hear—)

“Fuck,” Steve says. He always sounds heartbroken when he’s scared.

(Nancy would know.)

“Will can sense him,” Nancy says. She paces towards the sealed window. The world outside is unrecognizable in light, in grisly color. Is the distant sweep of trees already decayed, or only drifted in gray? “Will said he’s hurt, but he isn’t dead.”

A scuffle of sound: Steve getting to his feet. “So it was Vecna the whole time? In Little Byers’ gourd?” He does that, slips into his charmingly colorful Steve-speak (wrong kind of charm—God, that was a little mean of her, though it doesn’t matter now—) when he’s trying to lighten something that can’t be lightened.

The shadows are so very near. The shadows are alive. Nancy turns away from the window.

“I think so,” she answers slowly. “At least—I mean, as much as any of us understand it. Eleven tried to explain what she saw. She’s been through a lot. She was—” And this part is hard to say, even though Eleven barely said it herself. “She was in Max’s head, fighting him. That’s how they knew to come back.”

They look to her like she has all the answers: Steve and Robin, her companions on the road through darkness.

(She wasn’t afraid when she was with them. She was just afraid of losing them.)

“Holy shit,” Steve says, taking this latest revelation in. “Alright, that does it. Henderson!” He barks the last word, the sudden upswing in volume enough to make Robin jump an inch and then elbow him in retaliation.

“Jeez, Steve, you think we’re not all a little on edge as it is?”

“He’s taking too long,” Steve mumbles.

“And you couldn’t possibly take on the end of the world with puke in your chest hair,” Robin drawls. “Blood and bat-guts only, am I right?”

“Shut up. You’re such a dick.”

“Literally impossible,” Robin retorts, enunciating every syllable like she’s picking out notes on a piano with a single, stabbing finger.

“Ha-fucking-ha.”

It’s funny, Nancy thinks, watching them now that she knows that there’s nothing—between them, in the usual way. Funny how it worked out, too. They simply told her what was and what wasn’t, and she found it easy, somehow, to believe them.

(The dynamic is sibling-like, maybe. That’s the closest Nancy can come to describing it, and if she isn’t quite right it’s only because she’s a shitty sister to an emotionally-distant little brother and a tiny, perfect no-longer-baby who probably can’t remember a time when Nancy was really there.)

(He showed me my mom…Holly…Mike…)

“I’m coming,” Dustin hollers, and when he returns from the narrow, clinical bathroom, dressed in his own clothes, Nancy pretends not to see how red his eyes are.

She’s up next, because Robin says she has a code of chivalry that applies to Nancy and not to Steve. Nancy’s too tired to argue the point.

Nancy’s—

Traitor. Traitor. Traitor.

She tells her brain to shut the fuck up, hoping the message is passed to Vecna by…psychic courier, or whatever. She’s not to going to talk to him. She doesn’t feel what Will described, when he said that the Mind-Flayer was in him, dormant and watchful and building up demands like layers of dead skin.

This is just…an open door, that Nancy can’t quite shut.

Water—black water—a hallway she can’t stop running down—

Fuck.

She dresses quickly, slipping the silly little barrette in her back pocket.  

Fuck you. I’m going to tell them everything, all right.

Claudia Henderson meets them in the hall, says that Jonathan left with his friend, and Joyce took Will home. Claudia is sure Joyce said they were going home, but she’s not sure where that is, because last she heard, they were planning on staying in California—

Dustin’s the one who waves away her inquiries and explanations. “Yeah, yeah,” he says. “The Byers are always up to something. Don’t worry about it. Anyway, we’re gonna—go by the school again, I think.”

“After that? Listen, Dusty, I’d keep you for observation if I could, but I barely have a spare minute to observe anyone—”

“Exactly, Mom.” He reaches out and sets his hands on her shoulders, and Nancy has to bite back a smile, her first genuine one in a while. Dustin and his mom are a surprisingly well-matched set. “The school’s been overtaken by the Red Cross. They’ll know what to do. They’ve got cookies and juice-boxes.”

“Ginger ale,” Steve supplies helpfully.

Claudia gives in. She clearly trusts Steve’s word, which can’t come as a surprise given all the time Steve and Dustin have spent joined at the hip since—well, since Nancy dumped him by default, and carved herself a path she thought she could walk into the future.

(On their way out, they stop by Max’s room. Lucas hugs all of them. Holds onto Dustin the longest, of course, but drops a tear or two on Nancy’s shoulder. Erica’s taken up the reading, more serious than Nancy’s ever seen her. And Max?

All Nancy can hope is that Max isn’t in pain anymore.)

They take Steve’s car, though they’re not going back to the school. Nancy gets shotgun (more of Robin’s chivalry, or something), which means she has to relive a lot of pre-homeroom memories on the winding way to Hopper’s cabin. It was like…every single day, leaning over the console to sink more fully into a kiss, hand on the back of Steve’s neck. Helping him study with her endless array of flashcards—a strategy that never seemed to click with him quite right. Putting her loafers up on the dash just so Steve could subdue his immediate frustration into something more gentlemanly and ask her to pretty please not do that.

(And it’s not just the past. It’s his wrist, arched against the wheel. The staccato tapping he does with his fingertips. His profile, lip between his teeth. The noose-mark on his neck, still screaming-sore.)

“Holy shit,” Steve murmurs, and that wakes Nancy back up from whatever stupor she’s sunken into.

They’re on the outskirts of town, forced to take the long way because of the gaping compass-rose that splits the town ten miles in each direction. But Steve’s not talking about the gates.

He’s talking, Nancy realizes at once, about the trees.

It’s been a mild spring. The buds swelled early, their translucent hulls dropping at the faintest breeze. And the leaves furled new and so green they were almost yellow, so alive that they seemed to carry their own warmth.

“Oh, God,” Robin says. “They’re…”

“Decaying,” Dustin finishes, voice bitter. “They’re like the trees there.”

It’s not that they don’t have leaves anymore, it’s that their leaves are gnarled, blackened, clinging to the branches like the cocoons of some slimy thing. It makes Nancy want to cry. It makes her want to scrub herself bloody.

Shit, she’s actually crying. She can feel the tears stinging, can feel one escape from the underside of her eyelid and start treacherously rolling down her cheek. She holds her breath and turns her face away from Steve. Out the window, the army of the undead marches on alongside, trunk after trunk, branch after branch.

Then she feels Steve’s hand on hers. It’s a wordless gesture, not acknowledged by either of them, or by the Backseat Observers. (There’s no way Robin’s missing this.)

Nancy doesn’t resist as his clever, calloused fingers pry hers from their desperate grip on her pantleg. Doesn’t resist when he threads both of theirs together, traces the pad of his thumb over the joint of hers, just the way he used to.

“Took you lot long enough,” Hopper grouses, when they finally join the assembled throng. Every stick of furniture that can be sat upon is being sat upon, which leaves Steve and Nancy and Robin (Dustin gets Joyce’s chair immediately because of his leg) shuffling their feet on the leaf-strewn floor of the cabin.

There’s something precious about these dead leaves, now. They’re not—they’re still themselves. Dry, red-brown leaves of ordinary autumns.

“Had to do some expelling, Chief,” Steve quips. “Never actually got that far in high-school, you know. Great time for a bucket-list.”

“Cute, Harrington. Real cute.” But Hopper sounds like he’s smiling under his bandana.

Right kind of charm, Nancy thinks ruefully.

Steve leans against the wall, all nonchalant grace that Nancy knows full well is not actually nonchalant, and Robin huddles next to him.

“Nancy,” Jonathan whispers, behind her. “C’mere.”

She’s not immune. (Not to anything, really.) She goes to him, and perches on the edge of his dilapidated armchair. He links a finger through her belt-loop. Weirdly demonstrative, for Jonathan. He’s usually hands-off in public.

Of course, there’s nothing usual right now. And they’re not exactly in public.

“First things first,” Hopper says, planting himself in the middle of all of them—Will and Joyce and Dustin, Jonathan and Nancy, Mike and El, Steve and Robin—and Argyle, who doesn’t seem overly bothered by the fact that he’s practically the only outsider. “We’ve got the hospital and the school, and in a few days, we’re probably going to need to get everybody left in this hellhole into one or the other.”

“Why can’t people just stay in their houses?” Mike asks. “Seems pretty straightforward: keep your windows shut, dumbasses.”

“Never underestimate dumbassery, Wheeler. And more to the point, do you really think these shit-flakes are the last thing coming out of the gate?”

Mike shakes his head, momentarily quelled.

“We need a better headquarters,” Joyce says. “El, honey, we can’t have you using your powers like this, making some kind of—of forcefield around us. It’s a slow drain.”

“Because I’ll…need my powers later?” El asks sadly, swiping at her nose.

“No!” Joyce says it so emphatically that everyone jumps a couple inches. “No, not because of that. Because it’s hurting you, and you’ve already been through so much.”

El takes a breath. “I’m OK.”

(She was in Max’s head.)

“You’re not.” Mike picks up the thread, slinging an arm around El’s shoulders. “Joyce is right. I mean, hey, if we get my parents to go to the school, we could probably use…”

“The basement?” Nancy says, horrified at the thought of trying to cram everyone in there. “No. Plus, if anyone does come looking for El, that’s the first place they’d try.”

“Right-on,” Hopper says. “There’s some pretty big fish to fry, but we’ve all seen the choppers overhead. They’ll realize they’ve got a white whale on the line at some point, if we’re not careful.”

“Are you calling me a whale?” El asks. That gets a laugh.

“Sorry, kid,” Hopper says, dragging a hand over his face. “A little rusty on the metaphors.”

Robin nudges Steve. Nancy tries to catch his eye, but ever since they got here—ever since they let go of each other’s hands, still without speaking a word about any of it—he’s been avoiding her gaze.

Now he speaks, though. Not to her—to Hopper. To Joyce. “We could use my house.”

There’s a little silence.

“Yeah, I’m sure your parents would love that,” Jonathan says.

“If they were around,” Steve says, more mildly than Nancy would have expected, but maybe that’s just for show, “They probably would. But they’re not. They’re in Montana until this all blows over, which it won’t. I may not live there anymore, technically, but I’ve still got the key.”

“I’m listening,” Hopper says.

“It’s a big house,” Steve says, spreading his hands apart like he can’t resist a demonstrative gesticulation. “And airtight! I mean, a lot more than this, and also in the no-secrets-getting-out way. I don’t think anybody would expect a rebel HQ to get set up there, you know? And if we park closer to the Byers’ old house—assuming it’s been abandoned like half the houses in Hawkins—we can cut through the woods to get back and forth.”

“Ah, man,” Argyle interjects, sitting bolt-upright from where he’d been slouched and seemingly inattentive. “I don’t know how much I wanna cut through those woods, you know? Those are some pretty messed-up woods.”

“I’m sorry, who is this, again?” Hopper asks.

“A friend,” Jonathan says.

“We used his pizza freezer to help see,” El says. “To travel. He’s a friend.”

Steve pinches the bridge of his nose.

(Nancy needs to stop watching Steve.)

“A friend,” Hopper mutters. “OK, so, we use the Harrington house for now. I managed to get Murray on the horn—he and Dmitri will rejoin us when they can, but Murray’s not leaving his bunker until he’s sure it’s a pretty solid Plan B for us all.”

“We can’t leave Hawkins.”

That’s Will. Everyone’s attention snaps towards him, and he bears it pretty well, considering he’s always been the shy one of the group. Always a deep thinker.

He looks like he’s in pain, right at this moment. He looks like Nancy feels.

“What do you mean?” Dustin asks gravely. “Can’t—”

“I told Mike,” Will says, ducking his head for a second, as if he’s trying to decide what to hide and what to reveal. Goddamn, but Nancy can relate to that. “And then I told all of you, of course, well, most of you—but the point is, I can feel him when I’m in Hawkins. I never felt him in California. The link—doesn’t reach that far.”

“Especially not when he’s weak,” El says, nodding. “He’s…drained, like Joyce said.”

Drained. Max with barely an unbroken bone left in her body, Eddie’s sightless eyes staring up at the black bowl of a starless sky. Steve, fighting to breathe—

And all they did was drain the motherfucker.

Nancy clenches her fists.

“When you say you can feel him,” Hopper rejoins, “Just so we’re straight…you don’t mean he’s still…in you.”

“Jesus, Hop,” Joyce mutters. “Don’t talk like that.”

Will shakes his head. “No. It’s not the same. It’s like—I can see him, in a way. That’s all. Whatever’s in between us is rubbed sort of thin.”

“You’ve got a clear lens,” Jonathan says quietly.

“Yeah,” Will agrees, grateful for the assist in language. “I have a…pretty clear lens.”

See no evil—

Joyce fumbles for her pack of Camel Lights. “Anybody want one?”

“Hell yeah,” says Argyle.

Steve sighs the deep sigh of someone who managed to work up a pretty intense nicotine addiction by the age of seventeen, until Nancy came along and made him drop it. “No, thanks.”

(Nancy supposes she could have had more sympathy for him, at the time.)

“It’s hard to explain,” Will is saying. “He’s not—like I said, he’s out there, and he’s wounded, and I can feel how—how angry he is. How full of hate. But it’s more these waves of that, like a—a sensation, and it’s clear sometimes and less clear other times. Like dirt gets on the lens, or like the signal gets weaker and I can’t feel things as strongly. But that’s it. Just a feeling.” He shrugs. “It’s not like he’s talking to me.”

Speak no evil—

“No,” Nancy says, finding her courage at last (too late). “He’s talking to me.”

Chapter Text

I

He’s talking to me.

He’s talking…He’s talking…talking…talking…

(I know who he is. I know what he is. I can do this. Will you let me do this?)

(I trust you. Yes.)

Nancy’s mind is a lonely place. Where Max’s mind was all crowded skate-parks and school dances, places where people belonged (or had once belonged), Nancy’s mind is full of…wilderness. The way her memories are sorted out is more like a road than anything else: like long stretches of quiet road. But it isn't the bare desert that you saw from the windows of Dr. Owens’ car, miles of burning sand as far as you could see, taking you so far away from Mike, from hope, from home, that you despaired almost at once of ever coming back again.

No. Nancy’s memories escape through a mirage of Hawkins in all seasons: green leaves turning golden-orange, silent snow burying branches and filling ditches to the brim.

You have to keep going.

Sometimes you almost catch her—a different, younger Nancy, little more than a flowered skirt disappearing around the gnarled hulk of an old tree-trunk.

Sometimes you hear her voice.

And sometimes, what’s real instead of what’s wanted springs up in ghostly shape like one of Jonathan’s pictures developing in the dark-room glow.

(He brought you to the studio a few times, in California—Will a few more times than that. That was before he stopped taking pictures, and drifted deeper into smoke…)

We were here. We’re all here.

No one is listening to me!

Like we didn’t—kill—Barb—

…she’s not just another suburban girl who thinks she’s rebelling by doing exactly what every other suburban girl does, until that phase passes and they marry some boring one-time jock who now works sales, and they live out a perfectly boring little life at the end of a cul-de-sac…

Part of me thinks that we would have made it.

You find her sitting on the floor of the familiar living room, her legs crossed, a new doll in her lap. She loves the doll so much; you just know it by the way she strokes its yellow hair. You know the soft pink dress this younger Nancy wears, the way its fabric feels a little stiff against your skin, but a good kind of stiff. Safe. Pretty.

She’s always been so pretty. Even when the dress is so big on her that the sleeves have to be rolled back twice.

Nancy…

She’s all alone here, in your view of the memory, but she wasn’t alone when it happened.

Nancy, says the voice of someone you can’t see. Her mom. You can picture Karen Wheeler, even when she isn’t here. The kind incomprehension in her dark eyes.

Karen says,

You’re going to be a sister.

You keep going. You didn’t come here to find out anything about Nancy, you came to see if he was lurking here as well. And to find him, you have to go deep.

(What you see and do not need is going to stay quietly with you. You promised. You said, I have to look, do you understand?

And Nancy said she did. So the promise wasn’t in words, exactly, but you meant it all the same.)

You know the places he hides—the dark places—and so you tread the long road until you find yourself there. It’s hard work, going deep. You only have radio static and a blindfold, and that was enough to get you in, since you were able to take both of Nancy’s hands in yours, but it’s still a reach to keep going.

(You held Max’s limp fingers for a second at the hospital, their warmth the only sign that she was still living, and you went inside.)

(The trouble is that you didn’t find anything there.)

Nancy, eyes blown out, shirt red with—no, not blood. She isn’t hurt, and the stain is fading. She glares through you, fighting someone you can’t see.

Bullshit, she spits, and you flinch.

Across the water that isn’t water, the road that isn’t a road, someone else’s sorrow skims like a pebble.

…like we’re in love?

Nancy in the forest. Nancy in the wrong forest. Nancy, not so much older than you are now, shaking with a fear so deep and old you begin to cry.

The monster. The monster is here.

But that’s not the same—

I know you, you shout, in the memory that isn’t yours. You’re weak, and you’re afraid. You’re afraid of me, or you wouldn’t have had to trick me. The beasts you send don’t hide. They hunt. But you hide. You hide and you run.

Coward—coward—coward!!!

There’s only silence. Silence, in a world of Nancys who are trying to find their way through the dark.

You gasp yourself free. You didn’t find an answer—

Which means, in another way, that you did.

II

“I know who he is,” El is saying gravely, “I know what he is. I can do this.”

You know what she’s offering. You’re not sure if Nancy does.

After all this time, it’s hard to say, sometimes, who knows each other best. Is it Nancy and Jonathan, because they’re supposed to be in love? (Jonathan doesn’t talk to you about them—never really has—and there’s a small selfish part of you, the little-brother-est part of you, that thinks that means they’re not.) Is it you and Nancy, because she used to read to you and share her crayons and felt-tipped pens, before you were trading impressions of the devil in your head? Is it you and Mike? (You used to think so.)

Or is it you and El, because you both understand what you’re facing?

Nancy is standing in front of Jonathan’s chair now, her feet planted on the rough floorboards like she’s about to throw a punch (or take one). Her hands are braced against her elbows. Nobody’s looking at you, since she made her big announcement, and so you can look at everyone else: at Jonathan, who’s working his jaw in that faint, shifty way he does when he’s thinking hard, and at Steve, whose worried affection is so plain to see that you’re starting to wonder if he really did love her two years ago, despite what Jonathan has said.

(You know Steve’s a good guy. You know Jonathan’s a good brother, obviously. You’re not qualified to judge them as boyfriends.)

(Nothing’s simple. You know that.)

“What—what do you mean?” Nancy asks. She sounds scared. She almost never sound scared. Nancy’s one of the bravest people you’ve ever known. Hell, she’s the one who got him out of you, as the fire-poker scar on your side attests.

You hate what he has done to her.

(To you, too, of course, but it’s been so long you almost don’t remember life without a link to him.

God, you’re tired. Has it really only been two years and change?)

 “I can go in your mind,” El says. She’s standing too, serious but unafraid. Buoyed, no doubt, by the strength of Mike’s gaze, steady and worshipful, at her back.

You try to ignore the twist of pain blossoming in your chest. A sick flower, maybe. Demogorgon-red.

“In…my mind?”

“I can see if he’s there,” El says.

“That sounds dangerous,” Hopper says.

“It’s not,” El says stubbornly. “He’s weak, and I beat him when he wasn’t. In Max’s mind.”

Dustin exhales a shaky breath.

“You’re sure?” Mom demands. She’s got that Mom look, like she’s about to pick up a fire-poker herself and take him on in hand-to-hand combat. She’s basically done it before.

“How will you know?” Jonathan asks. “Like—you can find him, or you can sense that’s it’s not just Nancy in there?”

“Will it hurt her?” That’s Steve.

“Would everyone please shut up?” Nancy asks, the tremble in her voice swallowed into sharpness. “It’s my head, and El’s powers.”

“I won’t hurt you,” El says, smiling one of her tight little smiles for Steve. She reaches, a little shyly, for Nancy’s hand. They’re the same height now—and that gives a mirror-like quality to the sight of them that chills you a little. It’s like you can’t live with one more parallel.

(You, with the shotgun shaking in your hands, the lightbulb throbbing overhead—whitewhitewhite--)

(You, in the field. Always, the field.)

“Will you let me do this?” El asks, and Nancy says,

“I trust you. Yes.”

They sit cross-legged, their knees almost touching. Jonathan offers to sit beside Nancy, and Mike offers to sit beside El, but as usual, El needs as few distractions as possible. One of the stray bandanas kicking around binds her eyes, and Nancy shuts her own even though she doesn’t need to.

Then El takes Nancy’s hands in hers.

You wonder, sometimes, what it looked like when you weren’t the only one in your body.

You wonder, sometimes, what it would be like to be brave.

“He’s not there,” El says, tearing the blindfold off. “He’s not…he’s gone.”

“Gone?” Nancy whispers, and you don’t know if she looks relieved, exactly, or if her relief (like yours, sometimes) just means that she’s about to cry. “But then why can I—why can I hear him?”

“Because he wants to talk to you,” El says. “He—can talk to you. But he’s not inside you.”

“He just has a free pass in and out,” Nancy snaps, scrambling to her feet. “That’s—fucking amazing. He can just—”

“Nance,” Steve murmurs, but you’re pretty sure you’re the only one who hears it. Jonathan leans forward and drops his head in his hands.

“Easy there,” Hopper says. “We don’t know that, right, E—Jane?”

El shakes her head. Without her hair to hide behind, every emotion is clear to read on her features. You know she’s disappointed. Guilty, even. “He’s angry,” she says, plainly struggling to find the right words. “And he—he leaves marks. Like me.”

Like me, you think, but the bloodstains left by Bob Newby’s body aren’t the same as a fissure between worlds.

They’re worse.

“So he left a mark,” Robin murmurs. “On Nancy.”

“In her mind,” El says. “Like with Max. He knows—it’s like, if you were a telephone…” She flushes, probably thinking that she sounds silly, but forging on all the same. “He could call you. He has your number.”

She looks at you, at Jonathan, quickly. Confirming that she’s gotten that right.

You nod.

Nancy rakes her hands through her hair. “This is…I can’t be here,” she says. “I can’t be around any of you, or I’ll—”

“You’re clean, dude,” Argyle mutters. “Didn’t you hear the little psychic wonder?”

Nancy wheels on him. “I’m not clean, you fucking—who the fuck are you, anyway?”

Argyle gapes at her. You feel kind of bad for him, which is more than you can usually summon up in your secret heart of hearts.

“Nancy,” Mom says, her voice going all soft and soothing. You kind of want a hug yourself, but Nancy needs it more. “Come here, sweetheart. It’s OK.”

Nancy doesn’t push her away (who could?) but she doesn’t exactly calm down, even in Mom’s inexorable arms. “It’s not safe,” she keeps saying. “It’s not safe if he can just—how are we supposed to fight him if he can just come and f-fuck with my head whenever he—”

Steve runs a hand over his face. Robin touches his arm.

No matter what Dustin says, you don’t think they’re in love. It’s not quite like that.

“You’ll hear him,” El says. She sounds confident, but you see the way she’s wringing her fingers together, balling her hands in fists. “He has to reach out to you. He is trying to scare you, because…you made him angry.”

Angry. Very, very angry. You felt it before, when you were in the van with Nancy, and you—you reeled from the heat of fire searing in the distance of another dimension, in the smothering proximity of a mind linked to yours that wasn’t yours.

He hates Nancy.

That’s enough for him not to want her dead.

Chapter Text

Fumbling for the spare key under his parents’ doorstep like a kid breaking curfew is a weird experience to have in front of the Chief, basically all his friends, a few people he wouldn’t really count as friends, and Nancy.

Steve gets through it. He’s had weirder.

They’re here, in the waning daylight that doesn’t even look like proper daylight, because they stuck with the plan of leaving all the cars at the Byers’ old place. It was indeed abandoned, which meant that Joyce insisted on spending a few minutes poking around inside the old place, like its walls would still talk to her.

Steve had lived a lot of life in that house. He kind of hated the sight of it. But who was he to tell Joyce not to relive her memories, in a place that was home and horror, fortress and fear?

He wasn’t the guy to tell anyone anything.

“C’mon, Mom,” Jonathan said, quietly impatient as always, and Steve didn’t know if it made him feel better or worse, that Jonathan was capable of irritation even with people he really loved.

They continued on foot from there, walking silently together through the eerily blighted woods. Almost every single one of them—even Hopper and Joyce, who were born and raised and schooled here—had played make-believe in this tangle of forest.

A week ago, it would have been easy to make conversation here, to share the memories they had. Now? Now all they could share was the sick and certain knowledge that it shouldn’t look like this.

Sap rotting under bark. Every shadow suggesting vines.

Nancy hung towards the rear of the group, which meant that Steve—once again in charge of directions, and thus towards the front—couldn’t see how she was doing. It sucked, because he hadn’t seen her break down like that in a long time, especially not in front of other people. Even after she’d come out of her Vecna-induced trance, she'd been reestablishing control over her nerves despite the tears running down her cheeks. That was the Nancy he knew—the Nancy she wanted everyone to know.

The one who didn’t break under pressure.

God, Nance. You don’t have to hide it from us.

(From me.)

Anyway, they’re here now, standing in front of the shell of Steve’s childhood. Steve has the key stuck to his sweaty palm, and Hopper says, “Haven’t been here since ’83, when people two miles over were making noise complaints.”

If Steve had a laugh left in him, he’d laugh at that. Thing is though, he really doesn’t. All he can give Hopper is a tired smile.

“Times change, huh?”

“Yeah, kid. Getting a little short on neighbors ‘round these parts.”

That’s true enough. In a way, when it comes to the Harrington house, it always has been.

There’s this one crazy moment when Steve opens the door, where he imagines his parents there, framed in the hallway light, or maybe frozen midway down the stairs. He knows exactly how they’d look—horrified. Confused. Like they were grappling with the awful truth all over again that they’d picked out the biggest house in the smallest town they could find, once Mom was too nervous for Chicago, and it still hadn’t been enough to make them happy.

That, and a dumbass for their only son.

But the house is empty. Dark and empty and cold.

“Welcome, everybody,” Steve says, voice a little too loud. “Make yourselves at home.”

There’s the living room, décor changing every couple years. It was all neutrals when he ushered Nancy inside that fateful night in ’83, and now it’s polished leather. Through the living room is the imposing (unchanging) door to his dad’s home office. Then there’s the dining room, with its swirling acacia table in the middle. He used to build card-houses and race-tracks on it while his mom sat on the chaise longue nearby (and yet so far away). A glass of chardonnay swirling in her hand, the Righteous Brothers’ record swirling, too, needle dragging smooth as butter…

And time goes by so slowly

And time can do so much

Are you still mine?

I need your love

I need your love…

“We can go anywhere?” Mike asks, little shit that he is. “Cool. I call dibs on your old room.”

Steve snorts. There’s the laugh he didn’t know he had in him. “Uh, joke’s on you. My dad turned it into an exercise room the minute I moved out.”

“Wait, seriously?”

“Yup.”

“Dude,” Argyle drawls. “That’s cold. That’s stone-cold.”

“Yeah, well. That’s my dad.” Steve clears his throat. He’s not looking to do group therapy, even if they are loitering near the exact spot in the hallway where his dad maybe slammed his head and shoulders against the wall during that one fight they had that was maybe the last time they really spoke.

His dad’s a big guy. Big ego. Big yeller. Big hands.

The world’s ending. Steve hasn’t lived here for almost a year.

“In terms of food,” he says, feeling like the worst host in the history of ever, “I mean, they left for Montana a week ago, I think? So I don’t know if there’s going to be much in the fridge. Probably in the pantry, though.”

“Ah, yes,” Dustin mutters, limping by to find a place to rest his leg. “The pantry.”

Dustin and Nancy are really the only two who have been here, with any frequency. Dustin’s visits, despite the looming specter of Steve’s parents, were actually a lot more frequent than they have been lately to Steve’s apartment. Nancy slept over a couple times when his parents were gone, and hated every minute of it. He doesn’t know, now, why he even asked her to come back to the place where her best friend died, while they were literally going at it, just so they could do the same thing all over again.

No wonder she tried to—

He squeezes his eyes shut. Opens them again. Everyone’s still waiting for him to tell them what to do. His house, his rules, right?

Fucking joke.

Fortunately, Joyce takes pity on him. “So, the pantry, right?” she asks, song-bird chipper, like she hasn’t been on her feet for like—eight-hundred hours straight, in time-zones so different from this one that she probably feels like she’s been to another planet. Steve still hasn’t gotten the whole Russia story, but if it ended up with Hopper, back from the dead, it’s got to be pretty wild.

Joyce finds two bags of russet potatoes, flour, half-a-dozen cans of vegetables, and a rack of spices Steve’s pretty sure no hired chef has ever touched. His mom certainly hasn’t.

“How does soup sound?” she asks, still acting like Steve’s giving the orders.

He’s tongue-tied. “I—uh—”

Jonathan gently shoulders Joyce out of the way. “Only if I’m making it, Mom.”

She smacks him lightly with an oven mitt. “Stop—I’ve gotten way better!"

It’s like Steve is…what’s that phrase. A stranger in a strange land. Honestly, it checks out. Even though he’s spent a lot of time in this kitchen, frying himself eggs and picking at stone-cold leftovers, he never really felt at home here.

Apparently, Jonathan does.

Take the girl, take the house.

(That’s a shitty way to look at it, though, especially now. Jonathan didn’t take Nancy. She chose him.)

“Knock yourselves out,” Steve mumbles, while Jonathan fiddles with the stove-burners and Joyce starts hunting for pans.

He doesn’t want soup. Not after all the puking he’s done today.

He heads back down the hall to see what havoc is being wreaked on the living room, and almost crashes into Nancy and Mike, who are having a whisper-fight at the foot of the stairs that is rapidly escalating out of whispers.

“—because there’s no goddamn way around it, Michael. I can’t go back there. What if he—starts saying shit to me and I’m with Holly? What if he—sees her? Or Mom?”

“I’m not telling you to go,” Mike snaps. “I’m telling you that I’m not going either.”

Steve knows that he’ll catch serious flak for interrupting a Wheeler show-down, but he doesn’t really see a way around it.

“Uh, hey,” he says. Grand opening. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing that concerns you,” Mike spits, and damn, it’s a lot worse dealing with Mike’s particular brand of venom now that they’re basically eye-to-eye.

“No, Mike. Tell Steve what it’s about.” Nancy’s not afraid of her brother. Never has been.

Steve wishes, for her sake, that Nancy didn’t have to be afraid of anything.

(I can’t be here, Nancy said. I can’t be around any of you.

Like they were going to leave her. Like Steve was ever going to leave her.)

Mike heaves a sigh, like he can’t believe that, on top of all the other indignities of the apocalypse, he has to explain something to Steve.

“It’s not that deep,” he says, to Nancy, not to Steve. “Mom’s—we can just tell her that I’m staying with Will. And you’re staying with Jonathan.”

“Right after she told you that you were never leaving again?” Nancy retorts. “She’s not going to buy that, Mike. And we really can’t have her asking around, much less—coming out to find us. God, I can’t believe that she hasn’t sent the police for us already.”

“The police are already here,” Mike deadpans, which doesn’t improve Nancy’s mood. “It’s out of the question. I’m not leaving El. Or you.”

“Somehow you manage to mix up loving brother with a whole mess of brat,” Nancy says. Then, as if it’s suddenly become some sort of trump card, “Steve agrees with me.”

Mike scoffs. “I don’t care what Steve thinks.”

“I’m right here, dude,” Steve says, but he doesn’t know what else to do. They both have points. They both know what’s going on, when the rest of their family doesn’t. Nancy’s more of a risk there, then here. She’s more a risk anywhere but here. That’s what they all told her, what Will and Eleven insisted upon when talking her off the ledge of her own mind. She needs to stay close to people who are tapped into the same phoneline she’s desperately trying to hang up. Meanwhile, El is the love of Mike’s life, and he almost lost her. Why would he want to risk that again?

“Steve,” Nancy says. “Tell him he needs to go home.”

“Steve,” Mike says, “Butt the hell out.”

“It’s a temporary solution, Wheeler,” comes a new voice, and thank God or whatever higher power is paying attention to this situation (if one actually is), because Hopper’s here and he’s pretty much the only force on earth that can go toe-to-toe with an incensed Mike Wheeler and come out on top.

“A temporary solution for me to leave El, right after she was imprisoned in another government lab for like a week?”

“I’m safe here.” El’s standing next to Hopper, one of Steve’s Mom’s mohair afghans draped around her shoulders. Which, hey, Steve can’t blame her. Those things are soft. He hopes Dustin has found one, wherever he is. The absence of communication between them today has been…weird, but it’s been a weird-as-hell day.

El says, “Really, Mike. And so is Nancy.”

“If I go back home,” Mike says sourly, ignoring the righteous little head-tilt Nancy aims in his direction, “You really think they’re letting me out again?”

“They won’t have a choice in a couple days,” Hopper says. “I expect we’ll be evacuating the rest of the houses just as soon as we can figure out supplies and beds for the school. The hospital, too.”

There’s a pause as this sinks in. “Big Brother will do it if we don’t,” Hopper says. “I talked to a few of ‘em. National Guard, mostly. Streets are choked up, as we know. But they’ll come one way or another. And when they do, we need to not be acting suspicious. You’re helping all of us, Wheeler, by keeping peace. Your parents are worried. Go keep them calm for a day. Hell, less than a day. Can you do a night-shift?”

Mike doesn’t answer, which is answer enough.

“Mike,” El says, so soft that Steve’s heart kind of—twinges, in response, just because it’s been a long time since anyone spoke to him that way—chose him that way. (Well, except for Robin. Robin’s good at all that touchy-feely shit, even if she rags on him a good eighty-percent of the time.) “Mike, I’ll be right here. Waiting for you.”

Mike stoops to hug her.

“I know,” he mutters. “It’s just—”

“We’re OK,” El says, like they’re having a conversation that the rest of the world can’t hear. “We need to stay OK.”

(Mike and El. Lucas and Max. All the rest of them, just trying to get by.)

“All right, you two,” Hopper interjects, but he’s not really being a hardass about it. “I’ll take you back, Wheeler. I’m going to the school after this.” He shifts his gaze to Joyce, who’s drifted into view from the kitchen, a dripping spoon in her hand. Steve’s enough his mother’s son that he glances in horror at the splatter on the floor, but he says nothing.

“You’re going again?” Joyce asks.

“Yeah. Yeah, I think I have to. I’ll miss the soup.”

Add to the running list of couples in Steve’s mind—Joyce and Hopper?

He raises a mental eyebrow, but it’s obviously not the time to like, point it out or anything.

“Be careful around those military guys,” Joyce says, shaking her head. “Any one of them could be—a plant, or something. Shit, I don’t say this often, but I wish Murray was here.”

“I’ll be careful,” Hopper says. He looks like he doesn’t belong here, either—like the broad, smooth-surfaced expanses of the Harrington house can’t offer him rest.

Steve gets it. Steve, who spent most of his life not knowing that there was a world outside of this. Even now, when he comes back knowing, when he comes back changed, he doesn’t quite fit. The change, perhaps, is too absolute. They’re safe here—Nancy, as much as she can be; Joyce and Jonathan and Will, able to be together; Dustin and Robin, trusting that Steve will do what he can for them.

But Steve himself?

He has to keep going.

Crawl forward.

“I’ll come with you,” he says to Hopper, deliberately avoiding the turn of Nancy’s gaze, the question on her lips. (Or maybe he’s just imagining all that.) “I’ll take this night-shift, too.”

Because they can’t afford to lose Hopper again.

There’s no argument, this time, about which car. (Steve’s.) There’s only the aggravating business of finding their way to it, this time in the dark, through woods that are beginning to emit the strange chittering noises, however faintly, that are the hallmark of new life.

“Fucking hate this,” Steve mutters, because he gets worse and worse at shutting up the more exhausted he is.

The bite-wounds hurt. He’s trying not to be a baby about it, but facts are facts. Best he can do is just keep the whining to himself. Except for the whole exhaustion-means-less-shutting-up thing. Yeah, he’s got a couple of problems.

“Tell me about it,” Robin says, in answer to his cursing, not to the dire lecture in his head.

Robin insisted on coming, of course. All but socked him in the jaw for even considering a plan to slip camp without consulting her. “It’s like we’re in a time-loop or something. Just endlessly wandering and wandering—remember when I thought that tree was the same tree, and we were lost?” She sighs, shaking her head, then stops short—stops so abruptly that Steve puts out a hand to catch her, like they’re on the edge of an invisible pit.

“Jes—what’s the matter?”

“I just…” She starts walking again. Ahead, Hopper and Mike are pretty much making zero conversation, which is par for the course, but also, Steve hopes that they can’t hear what Robin says. It’s self-conscious, maybe. A little unfair to her. But goddamn, Mike Wheeler can pull a bitchface like none other, and his slights sting for days.

“Yeah?” Don’t you dare be embarrassed of Robin, you little shit.

“I just feel really stupid all of a sudden. You were—what were you saying to Nance when I came back from scouting?”

Oh. Shit.

“I…” He scratches his nose. Robin and Nancy have gotten along a lot better than he would have expected, these past few (insane) days, and he’s really glad for that, but it doesn’t mean he can forget all the times Robin tried to shake him out of his Nancy-devotion. “Admittedly, Rob, you’re not gonna like this.”

“Huh. Why not?”

He drops his voice below any plausible Mike-Wheeler-hearing level. “I…kind of laid it all out there.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. I just—I thought—”

I thought I was going to die, and I needed her to know.

“I like it fine,” Robin interjects, to his utter surprise. “Just sorry I interrupted.”

“You probably saved me one hell of a rejection,” he says. “So, thanks for that. Sometimes it’s best to just leave something—out there. Unanswered.”

“Hmm.”

“Hmm? What’s hmm?” She knows he doesn’t speak cryptic, so why is she just making noises he’s supposed to translate?

“It means…” Robin throws her hands up, one of those wild, jerky, flighty motions he loves so much. She moves like that when she’s thinking so hard she forgets what her body’s doing. “It means, I don’t know, Steve, I don’t want to get your hopes up, but girl to girl—even me-girl to Nancy-girl, I just—I don’t know if you were about to get rejected. Dammit! Now your hopes are up.”

“Yeah—put that away, nobody wants to see that,” he quips, like his heart isn’t just about pounding out of his chest. I don’t know if you were about to get rejected. I don’t know if—  “Did she…say something to you? Like something you can say in—not break—like, did you both—”

“Please take a breath, dingus.”

He tries.

Robin clearly doesn’t find it very convincing. “Take another one. I’m not a doomed love guru, Steve. You know that. I can barely score a conversation, much less—”

“You and Vickie looked like you were making sandwiches pretty happily together.”

“That one encounter took months of pining.”

“Huh,” Steve says. He’s got years. “Hopes are under control, Robin, I swear. Thanks for…telling me. You don’t have to feel bad, though. Truly.”

“I want you to be happy,” she says, nudging his shoulder with her shoulder, voice indisputably gentle even through the muffling bandana. “We just keep changing our minds about whether that’s too much to ask.”

Dustin, heartbroken. Max, just broken.

Nancy, sobbing in Joyce’s arms.

“It’s OK, Robin,” Steve says. “You don’t have to worry about me.”

Chapter Text

As if to punish her with irony for her earlier outburst, Vecna has been stubbornly quiet for hours.

Asshole, Nancy rages. Asshole—bastard—shithead—

All this in a general kind of way, of course, not a daring-him-to-talk-to-her kind of way. She’s not an idiot. (She might be insane.)

It’s just that she can’t rest in the silence, because it’s not peace—it’s blindness. (He always goes for the eyes.) She feels like she’s scrabbling under the floorboards of her brain for a lost key. Something to turn in a lock: to open the door, and make the future he showed her inevitable.

All this, in the face of so many losses, and even more threats.

All this, in Steve’s house.

Yeah. There’s irony there too, and if Nancy looks, she knows she’ll find a ghost in every room.

The few times she’s been here are burned in her mind like an x-rayed image—or like one of Jonathan’s photographs. Barb, of course, waiting by the pool: black-and-white, seen and unseen, dead and gone. But there were other times. After November’s pages finished turning, Nancy tried to be a real girl again. A girl who wasn’t afraid of herself and what she was capable of.

A girl who lied to her parents (again) and spent the night in her boyfriend’s almost-empty house (again).

She made it through delicately orchestrated evenings that tried to make something sacred out of pizza and movies, slow-dancing to the records Steve said were his mom’s. She pretended she couldn’t see all the loneliness around them. All the loneliness in him. His parents were always gone when she came by. She wondered if it would feel more like his home if they were there, but from what he always said, that seemed unlikely.

She let him hold her hand up the stairs, kiss her in the hall where his baby pictures hung, lay her down in his bed (again). It was always tender like the first time, but hungrier, like something had changed for the worse in both of them—and maybe between them, too. At the time, she didn’t understand that.

Steve certainly never did.

You’re there. You’ve always been—

She’s in Steve’s house again. But this time, Steve’s the one who’s gone.

Nancy doesn’t part from Mike on good terms, exactly, because he’s still royally pissed at her for winning the fight, and even more for being right from the start. She doesn’t trail the departing party to the door like El does, even though she wants to say goodbye to Steve.

El presses a kiss to Mike’s sourpuss lips, hugs him tight. El sees a softness in Mike—brings a softness out of Mike—that nobody else can.

Nancy has pushed everyone away who could cultivate softness in her.

(Jonathan doesn’t always respond when she’s soft. Lets her be the one to whisper sweet nothings, doesn’t say much in return. Jonathan doesn’t always like it when she’s hard, either—when she’s trying to call the shots on who they are, who they’re meant to be.)

There’s an appetizing smell drifting out of the kitchen, which explains where Jonathan’s disappeared to at the moment. He’s always said that his mom couldn’t cook to save her life. I don’t know how a fried egg can be rubbery and runny, he said once, pulling one of those classic Jonathan faces, wry and remembering something almost secretively, something you’d only see the photonegative of, but she managed.

Nancy doesn’t go into the kitchen. (If she recalls, the window over the sink overlooks the pool.) Instead, she retraces her steps towards the living room, meeting Eleven in the process.

El’s pacing in a sea of overstuffed leather, a throw blanket wrapped around her shoulders like she’s cold or scared, or maybe because she just likes how soft it is.

“Hi,” El says, stopping short like she’s embarrassed at being discovered.

“What’s—” Nancy finds that she doesn’t really know what to ask, now that they’re talking like normal people and not going on a rollercoaster ride through Nancy’s actual brain. She’s desperately tempted to ask what El saw, but also, she doesn’t really want to know. A lot of bullshit, probably. Years and years of bullshit, miring her desires for freedom.

For love.

None of that sort of thing matters right now. The world is ending—their world, anyway, and only they understand, entirely, what will follow if they do not put an end to the end.

“What’s on your mind?” Nancy asks, finally. A reversal of the question she’s sure is written all over her face.

(What’s on mine?)

“Max,” El says. “I—” Her mouth twists painfully, as if she’s about to break down, but she recovers. All her tormented life, El has been recovering.

Nancy should probably learn from that.

“I keep looking for her,” El says. “And I can’t…I can’t find her.”

“I’m sorry,” Nancy says, trying not to succumb to tears herself. Max—prickly, defiant, inquisitive, sensitive. Max, who never stopped fighting.

(The first time they made it to the hospital, before they’d even had a chance to get back to their homes, or what was left of them, Max hadn’t been out of surgery yet. They’d stood around in the waiting room with Lucas. With Erica, clinging to her brother’s side.

She didn’t want to go, Lucas said, the tears trickling unevenly down his swollen face. She didn’t want to die.)

(Nancy, seventeen, looking a little too closely at the wrong edge of a razor blade. Tracing the curved trigger of her own gun.

Nancy, in Steve’s guest bathroom, two o’clock in the morning, counting pills.)

“What’s…on your mind?” El asks, since Nancy won’t.

Nancy remembers that she’s here, dammit, she’s here and alive and talking to Eleven, and Vecna hasn’t said jackshit since they got here. That’s because he hasn’t needed to.

“Don’t you know?” she asks, a little wearily.

El shakes her head. “Not all of it. I tried not to look.”

The temptation again. Dangerous, because it seems like such an easy way out: tell me what’s inside me so I can know it myself.

Nancy resists. Tilts her head. “Join the boys?”

Will and Dustin have returned from parts unknown, and are setting up camp on the L-shaped sofa across the room. Dustin has an armful of what looks like comic books, though Nancy has never seen comic books in the Harrington house.

“El, check this out!” Dustin says. He sounds a little more like himself. Almost—cheerful. “Steve’s dad has like, a ton of mint condition Captain Americas in his office.”

“Oh,” El says. “I like Captain America.”

“Should you really be—going through Steve’s dad’s stuff?” Nancy asks, feeling compelled to be the voice of reason. If she’s going to pretend to be sane a little while longer, it seems like the path forward is to lean into the role of scolding older sister.

“His entire town is smashed four ways to hell, Nance,” Dustin retorts, in his best I’m a reasonable person, what aren’t you getting? voice. “His house is currently the secret headquarters of humanity’s last hope. I’m pretty sure he can sacrifice a few collector’s items.”

“Fine. You’re explaining it to Steve, though.”

“Steve hates his dad,” Dustin says blandly, like Nancy should know that, too.

She rolls her eyes at him and takes a spot on the sofa a little removed from their huddle, one where she can put her feet up. There aren’t enough throw pillows for her to have something to sort of—cuddle with, if she’s being honest (embarrassingly mourning the loss of Mr. Rabbit already, apparently)—so she draws her knees to her chest and wraps her arms around them.

“Hey, Nancy?” Will has sidled over. The dynamic has shifted, a little: El is looking at the comic with Dustin, and apparently Will saw that as an escape.  

Nancy wonders what Will’s…sensing. Probably, he’s about to tell her.

“Yeah?”

“He’s been quiet,” Will says, keeping his voice down. He doesn’t have to say who he’s talking about. “He’s been…hiding.”

“I know.” Nancy rubs her eyes. Not because she’s crying, but because she’s tired. How has she been reunited with Jonathan and Mike, learned of Hopper’s resurrection and Joyce’s safety, seen the world begin to wither, learned she might be dying of deadly inhalation, and found herself to be a goddamn ongoing conduit for the demonic puppet-master of this whole disaster, all in one day?

I won’t miss, she’d told Max, snapping the barrel off the shotgun. It hadn’t been enough.

“I just…” Will clears his throat. Wrinkles his nose in a way that reminds Nancy of both Joyce and Jonathan. “I know how it feels. Like you’re—like you’re a traitor.”

Nancy laughs a little, so she won’t break down. “Yeah. Sucks, right?”

“He wants you to feel that way,” Will says earnestly. “He wants you to feel like you’re…alone. Like he’s the only one who understands you. And it’s—it’s like—he can find stuff, you know? Stuff you—you don’t want to tell anyone, and use it to make you…start to believe him.”

Have you forgotten so soon?

“That’s great.” Nancy hasn’t eaten since Claudia Henderson forced some dry crackers on her at the hospital, but she feels like she’s going to throw up again.

“You can’t let him,” Will says. “You can’t let him get in between—you and everyone else. OK? We’re here, Nancy. Jonathan’s here, and Mike, and—Steve, and—”

“And your mom,” Nancy points out, because Joyce feels like a safe option to focus on. “We’ve all got your mom.”

“Yeah,” Will says, a smile breaking through his sober expression like a sunray through a bank of clouds. “He’s no match for her. He never has been.”

The floor creaks. It’s Argyle, bearing a tray of steaming bowls. “Hey, brochachos,” he says cautiously, which is a word that Nancy has never heard before, and hopes to never hear again, “Soup’s up.”

“Oh, thank God for soup in these trying times,” Dustin says, lurching up to try to get a bowl. “Wait, where are the biscuits?”

“Uh…Jonny-Boy is the one calling the shots here.”

“Jonathan better have made biscuits,” Dustin grumbles.

“It smells good,” El says. “Can you save some for Hop? And Steve?”

“Likely, likely,” Argyle agrees. There are two bowls left, presumably for Will and Nancy, but Argyle isn’t making a move to approach them. He’s just kind of…loitering.

Nancy stifles a little sigh, and gets to her feet. “Hey,” she says. “Thanks for—bringing this out.”

“No problem.”

Nancy collects both bowls, and stands her ground a second longer, until Argyle looks her in the eye.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “For yelling at you. It was shitty of me.”

He blows out a long breath. “Oh, no problem. You’re pretty scary, though.”

She smirks, despite everything. “Thanks, I get that a lot.”

He nods sagely. “Cool, cool. Hey, go easy on Jonny-Boy’s heart, OK?”

She doesn’t know quite what to say to that. Fortunately, Will interjects.

“Jeez, dude,” he says—dude sounding a lot dryer and less surfer-mellow from a Byers—“Don’t try to give romantic advice.”

Argyle accepts this and returns kitchen-ward without further comment. Nancy settles back against the couch cushions with her bowl and spoon. She’s hungry. She didn’t know how hungry until now.

“Sorry, he’s—kind of a lot to get used to,” Will says.

“He’s eccentric,” El says, from the other end of the couch.

Nancy flushes. She didn’t realize El and Dustin were listening—both to her apology, and to Argyle bringing up Jonathan. It’s bad enough that Argyle seems to be…privy…to unknown, Jonathan-derived details about their relationship.

It’s bad enough that Nancy can’t really guess what Jonathan has told him.

Sometimes Jonathan seems to sense he’s being talked about, and makes an appearance, like he does now. Argyle isn’t with him; the rise and fall of voices from the direction of the kitchen suggests he’s in there with Joyce.

Nancy watches the way he walks: the familiar slight slump of his shoulders, the photographer gaze—almost clinical in the way he surveys the room, even with his overlong hair in his eyes. Nancy wants to brush it away, but mostly she just feels like she’d burn her fingers if she touched him. Like, out of all of them, he’ll be the one to sense just how much of a traitor she is.

“Hey,” Jonathan says. Soft—tender—so much love in his eyes.

He’s not looking at her.

“Hey,” says Will in answer. “Thanks for the soup.”

(It’s OK. Nancy first fell in love with the way he talked about his brother. The way he fought for his family. He was so much better at that then her.)

Satisfied by Will’s adulation, apparently, Jonathan takes a seat next to Nancy. Puts his arm over her shoulders. It doesn’t burn, so she reciprocates: rests her head against his collarbone. Takes a different kind of risk, slips her hand under the hem of his shirt, brushing skin.

Jonathan shivers. “Your fingers are cold.”

She pulls her hand back. “Sorry.”

“It’s OK,” he says, in her ear. “Bunk together tonight?”

She doesn’t want to sleep alone. Doesn’t want to listen to clocks ticking. Steve’s house, no Steve. She swallows hard.

“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, let’s do that.”

Down the other end of the couch, El sends her a quick, darting glance. Her eyebrows are drawn together, like she’s confused.

Nancy tries not to wonder what El saw (again).

The Harringtons don’t have a ton of sleeping bags. Go figure—they’re not exactly the camping type. The search for usable bedding splits everyone up in search parties: Joyce and Dustin on the first floor (so that Dustin doesn’t have to climb stairs), Will and El on the second.

Nancy and Jonathan take the basement, with Argyle trailing behind them.

The Harrington basement is literally just a billiards room with a ridiculously well-stocked bar. Nancy’s never seen it before, and now she’s just picturing Steve and Tommy H and Carol sneaking down here for their so-called “parties,” which were really just the three of them hanging out and doing dumb shit bankrolled by Steve.

Bankrolled by that liquor cabinet, probably.

“Whoa, dude,” Argyle says. “They’re like, loaded loaded.”

“Yeah,” Jonathan scoffs. “His dad’s a banker or something. Classic, you know?”

Nancy chews her lip. Maybe if she snags a bottle of scotch that’ll be enough to keep her warm.

“Steve-o seems like a pretty cool dude, though,” Argyle muses. “Little jumpy, yeah, I can admit that. Probably just needs some herb to settle him.”

“I think he’s more of a keg king,” Jonathan says. His eyes meet Nancy’s—it’s like he’s teasing her, or testing her, or something. Vaguely picking on Steve when Steve’s not here to defend himself.

She doesn’t like it, but she doesn’t know what to say.

Me, you, Robin…Jonathan, when he’s back. There hadn’t been a trace of snark in Steve’s voice, when he proposed that in the Creel house. He’d been—trying to build a bridge, Nancy thinks.

Trying to keep the lines open.

“I don’t think there’s anything down here,” Nancy says. “Let’s go back.”

The kids and Argyle spread out in the living room, while Joyce says she’ll take the first watch. When Jonathan protests, reminding her that she needs sleep just as much of the rest of them, she waves a hand, dismissing him.

“Honey, my internal clock doesn’t even know what time it is. I couldn’t sleep if I tried.”

He kisses her temple. Some of the warmth that always shines in his eyes for Will shines for Joyce, too.

Nancy waits for him to finish saying goodnight. Waits for him to take her hand and lead the way.

Sure enough, he tugs her towards the basement door.

“I was thinking…”

“Yeah,” she says. Her heart’s beating fast. She’s—excited. It’s been so long, since they could be alone.

Jonathan flicks on the light. It glows dimly enough that Nancy thinks she can—probably sleep, or at least, that she has a better chance with this than with facing total darkness.

He sets down the pillows, the blankets he’d stolen for them, and grins. “Floor or table-top?”

“Jonathan,” Nancy says, rather severely. “It would totally mess up the felt.”

“I don’t know. I’ve never played pool.”

She sniffs. “Yeah, I’m sure. Not really your scene.”

“Floor it is, then,” Jonathan murmurs, and starts making a neat little nest for the two of them. Nancy’s reminded of the first time they shared a room, when she came back from her shower, still trembling, every nerve-ending aflame, to find him kneeling beside her bed, planning to stay the night.

The tears that spring to her eyes can’t be accounted for by any one reason.

“Alright,” Jonathan says, when he’s finished. “Are you gonna join me or what?”

It’s OK at first. They lie facing each other, his hand warm against the side of her neck, legs tangled together, staring into each other’s eyes.

Can he see that you’re lying?

Lying to yourself?

…kind of glad you weren’t here…

Nancy pushes all that bullshit down and smiles, soft and close-lipped, praying that it translates in her eyes.

You can do this.

You can.

In the end, it’s her fault (it’s always her fault) that the whole thing goes sideways. She goes in for the kiss first, but when he tries to deepen it, when he starts moving against her, she just—

I can’t.

“Jonathan. I’m sorry.”

I can’t.

He sits up, scrutinizing her. “What’s the matter?” Then before, she can answer, he huffs a breath. “‘Cause we’re in his house? Is that it?”

I guess what I’m trying to say, in a really stupid, roundabout way, is, um—is thank you.

“I guess,” Nancy says, even though it’s not—just that. “It feels a little…it…I don’t know.” If she says disrespectful, she expects this will turn into a real fight. But that is what she’s thinking.

“You broke up with him like a million years ago, Nancy,” Jonathan says, which shows that he’s miffed, because he’s usually freaking allergic to any kind of exaggeration. “Seriously, what’s he gonna do? Burst in here and smash something?”

“That’s not fair.”

“Fair!” Jonathan shakes his head, like he actually doesn’t believe her. “I haven’t seen you in months. We almost died. And yet somehow, we’re still doing the same fucking runaround about Steve, and—” He stops short.

Ask it. Ask the question.

Jonathan asks it. “Did something happen, with you and him?”

It’s true. Every last word. But I left one part out—

“Because I cheated on him, with you?” And here comes the real fight—

“Nice,” Jonathan says, laughing a little in a way that means it's not funny at all. “I mean, if that’s how you want to look at, after all this time. Or maybe you could just tell me the truth for once. Do you want me?”

It’s like she feared. She doesn’t need Vecna in her mind to fuck things up, to make her throw the life she’s built away.

“Stop,” she says. “I—I didn’t want to—I can’t. It’s not about that.”

Silence, from Jonathan. Right now, Nancy wishes that the lights were off, so she didn’t have the run the risk of seeing too much in his face, his eyes. She clenches her fists, and drops her gaze.

His hand closes over hers, covering it. His voice, when he speaks, is a lot softer.

“Can we start over?” he says. “We can just—we’ll just take it slow. We don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. We’ll just…sleep. Like old times.”

Start over. Start over.

It’s all she’s ever tried to do. It’s as close as he’ll come to an apology.

“OK,” she says, and reminds herself to breathe.

“Lights on or off?”

The tired lines of his face; the bloodshot corners of his eyes; the overgrown hair. All constant reminders of distance and the toll it’s taken on him—on them. And more than that, she’s afraid that what’s familiar, his smile and his gaze and the little tics of irritation or humor that she always deciphers a moment too late, isn’t enough.

Nancy says, “Lights off.”

Chapter Text

(That’s presumptuous of you. But yeah. You might have been there. Max. Sinclair, in a buzzer-beating leap—something we’ve rarely seen from this team, and certainly something we didn’t expect from a benchwarmer freshman! Max, it is only a matter of time. I love you. OK? Is that what you want to hear? You have nothing left to hide behind.)

It hurts to look at her. You do it anyway. Try to count the freckles on her bloodless cheeks, try to imagine her smiling. Opening her eyes—her blue eyes.

You hold her hands. Her fingers, anyway, since the casts over her broken wrists extend pretty far. You stroke her hair. You play her voice over in your head.

You read to her, in case she can still hear.

Your parents are here, in and out, trying to relieve you from bedside duty—even though you mostly haven’t listened to them at all. Max’s mom still hasn’t made an appearance, which is one of the reasons the hospital has been so lenient in allowing the Sinclair takeover.

Honestly, you’re starting to wonder if Max even has a mom anymore, or if the trailer park—where at least ten of the casualties so far were located—swallowed her up, too.

You keep getting this flashback of Jason, torn in two. And yeah, the guy was insane—and you hate him for his part in Max’s current plight, for stealing her safeguard, for keeping you from her—but the way he died wasn’t something you wanted to see.

The way she almost died—

(You have started to keep track of the parts of yourself you can reach, can almost feel. Your hands. Your throat, though swallowing’s a little strange—a little uneven. You have to think very hard about all of it, about flexing a single knuckle, moving your tongue in your mouth. You never had to do this before, and when a memory floats in—clear and vivid, color and light—of the freedom with which you used to move, the wheels of your board over smooth pavement, or the grip of your fingers around handlebars—

You work on this, as if it’s a project with an end-goal in mind. Something you can win. Something that will free you. You count and find and fight and figure until you hear him.

Then you let it all ago, fading into nothingness, so that he cannot reach you.

It is only a matter of time.)

“Hey, bud,” your dad says. “I’m going to go rustle us up some dinner. How does that sound?”

It’s almost eight o’clock, but you haven’t even thought about eating, till now. “That sounds good.”

Mom and Erica have been gone a couple hours, packing bags from home. They got medical-grade masks from the hospital, which is good. You’re still not thrilled about the thought of them out there wandering, but you couldn’t—how could you explain, to Mom, what might just crawl out of the earth?

What might be already here?

I assume the risk.

You rub your eyes when your dad leaves, feeling another bout of crying coming on. You’re not embarrassed by it, even when Erica’s here. Why would you be embarrassed? Who cares about keeping up a manly façade when the love of your life is never—

No. Shit. No. Don’t do that.

You sniff hard, reach for your walkie.

“Dustin, do you copy?”

Static crackling. Then—

“Lucas! I copy. What’s—”

The door swings open. Even before someone enters the room, you know it’s not your dad.

You switch the radio off.

(Something is coming. Something is changing. You are the final sacrifice, and you’re still here. Is this the punishment you asked for? When you taunted him with the truth?)

The guy fills the doorway: tall, broad-shouldered. You’d know he was a military man, even if you didn’t recognize the uniform. There’s a lot of stars and bars—Lieutenant-Colonel, you think, immediately, because that’s always been your little corner of the nerd world. Military history.

For your dad.

You’re kind of surprised that a guy this high-ranking is Black. You would think that that was really cool, actually, except that there’s something about the way the guy moves, and the way he looks at Max for a long moment before he looks at you, that sends a shiver down your spine more than anything else.

“Uh,” you say. “Hello? Can I help you?”

“I don’t know,” the man says. A level, controlled voice. Like he has no intention of showing you what he thinks or feels. “This is Max Mayfield, is it not?” He pauses, but before you can answer, he says, “Victim number four?”

Yeah, that shiver was real.

“Victim—”

“Chrissy Cunningham,” the man says. “Fred Benson. Patrick McKinney—Black kid like yourself, right? Did you know him?”

Shit. Think. Think fast. “We were on the basketball team together,” you say. “But I—”

“Didn’t know these deaths were connected?” He paces into the room, hands clasped behind his back, the medals on his chest winking. His uniform is not exactly—pristine. It looks like he’s been through some shit.

Your throat is dry. You shake your head.

“Perhaps I should introduce myself,” the man says. His gaze, turned on you, is definitely the full thousand-yard stare. “Lieutenant Colonel Jack Sullivan. I’ve been assigned to the case.”

You set your jaw. You try to think of the bravest people you know. Max. Eleven. Will. Steve.

Your friends.

“What case, sir?”

“The Hawkins case,” he says, smiling at you. It’s not a nice smile. “Now what’s your name, son?”

You don’t want to tell him. You don’t—

“Lucas!”

Of course this is the moment your dad chooses to come back in, balancing a couple trays of disreputable meatloaf. He almost drops the lot of it when he sees that you and Max aren’t alone.

“Excuse me? Who are—”

“Lieutenant Colonel Jack Sullivan. And you must be Lucas’s father.”

Your dad sets the trays down on the bedside table. Extends a hand. You can’t stop him. (You’re never fast enough.) “Charles Sinclair. You served in Vietnam, sir? I—”

“I’m afraid I don’t have time for pleasantries,” Sullivan says, but he doesn’t sound like he’s sorry. Doesn’t sound like he’s afraid of anything. “I have been dispatched here to oversee the quarantine zone.”

“The…quarantine zone?”

“The largescale implications of this natural disaster, and the need for containment of the toxic material emanating from an unknown source—”

“From the sky?” Your dad interjects, sounding confused.

“From an unknown source.” You’re not sure if it’s just you, or if Sullivan’s voice really has gotten a little colder. “I hope you weren’t planning on going home tonight, Mr. Sinclair. We’re closing down pretty much every road.”

“My wife and daughter are on their way back to join us,” your dad splutters. “What—”

“And why is that, exactly? What relation are you to the victim?”

“The victim?”

“That little girl lying there busted four ways to Sunday.”

Your dad squares his shoulders. He was a soldier, after all. He’s seen war. Now, he’s seeing another one. “We’re her guardians.”

It’s a bluff, but it’s one you would have begged him to make if you could.

You’re proud of him.

Sullivan shrugs, seemingly accepting this. “They’d better hurry, then.” He turns back to you, like he stopped midway through a bio-class dissection, and he’s picking up the scalpel again. “Now, Lucas. I was just about to ask—you lived in this town long?”

Your whole life. “I—uh, I guess so, sir.”

“You know the Byers family?”

(There’s a new voice. A voice you haven’t heard before, and you want to fight it, want to throw a punch, even though you’ve lost proper hold of your ears, and you can’t make out every word it says. You know that Lucas is here, asking and answering, because Lucas is always here. Wherever this is, wherever you are—Lucas is here.

You just need to find all the parts of him.

You need to protect him, from voices that aren’t his.

You splash helplessly in the nothing-world around you.)

You don’t know if your dad is going to go along with this. You don’t know how well your dad can lie. You have to risk it anyway. You know in your bones what you have to hide.

“Uh, I went to school with them. They moved to California, I think?”

“They did indeed.” Sullivan doesn’t resume his pacing. He just stands stock still, glaring. Your dad clears his throat, but doesn’t say,

You think? Lucas, Will’s one of your best friends—

“I heard they might be back in town,” Sullivan says. “And that’s the kind of data we’re trying to gather. Demographics. Residency numbers. Trying to make sure that everyone has a safe place to stay.”

“I think everyone who doesn’t have a place to go is staying at the school,” your dad says, quietly. “Last I heard.”

You try not to breathe a sigh of relief. It’s eight o’clock at night, and there’s no fucking way that the Byers are at that school. They’re at Hopper’s cabin, or their old house, or wherever else they’ve figured out is a hiding place good enough for them all—for El.

“I’ll try the school then,” Sullivan says. He looks at your dad. Looks at you. Looks at Max.

“You let me know if you hear from them,” he says. His eyes shift just one more time, and he says, “That’s a nice radio handset you got there, son.”

Then he’s gone, shoes striking like distant gunshots down the hospital hall.

(Lucas. Lucas! Can you hear me? Lucas, it’s not safe—)

“That was strange,” your dad says, rubbing his forehead with two fingers the way he always does when he’s thinking. “Damn, I better try to ring your mother. Tell them to drive back here as fast as they can.”

You swallow hard. You’ve got to radio Dustin—Will—someone, before Sullivan and however many soldiers he’s brought with him start tapping into every frequency they find.

“Or you could go to them,” you say. “I’ll stay here with Max. Dustin’s mom is here. She’ll get me what I need. I just—I want you guys to be OK, Dad. I don’t want you feeling like we all—”

“Have to be together?” He moves in, pulls you close. A rare hug, and not because he isn’t a good dad, affectionate even, in his way, but he’s not usually a hugger.

Despite the urgency, you hug back. Tight.

“We’re sticking together, son,” he says. The word is so different coming from him, from the cold mockery it was from Sullivan. “I’ll be right back.”

He’s off to find a phone. That gives you all the time you need.

(The water shivers. You shiver. You have found enough of you to shiver.

Dustin, this is Lucas, do you copy. Will, do you copy. Mike—

This is Wheeler. I copy. Over.

Code red, Mike. Code red!

This is Dustin, over!

Code red! Code red—

Red. Everything is red.

There you are, Max.)

Chapter Text

“At least it doesn’t smell like pot,” is Mike’s sole remark when he climbs into the back of Steve’s car.

“Why would it smell like pot?” Steve demands, because hey, sure, end of the world and everything, but he’s got the Chief of Police sitting shotgun.

Also, he only smoked once, back when he was sixteen, it didn’t sit well, and his dad busted him.

Not an experience to be repeated, to say the least.

In the rearview, he sees Mike shrug. “It wouldn’t.”

Robin and Mike in the back, Hopper and Steve in the front. This will be…interesting.

Dead quiet—that’s what it actually is. At least it’s harder to see the lanes of ruined trees in the dark, though the fucking nasty ash-flakes keep hitting his windshield. He doubts there’s still a working carwash in Hawkins, and his Beemer is about to look grody as hell until…well, until they’re all dead or something and nobody cares about cars anymore.

He taps the wheel, two fingers. He’d have to be dead not to care about this car. For a long time, it’s been the safest place he knows.

(He tries not to think of Nancy back at his house—one of the un-safest places she’s ever known. Tries not to think about her thinking about the fucking pool. Tries not to think about Jonathan holding her, setting her to rights the way Steve, in that house, never could.)

You’re so beautiful.

(How many times has he replayed that scene in his head? The one time he could be sure she wanted him?)

(How many times has he called himself fucking selfish for comforting himself with the night he ruined her life?)

By the time they pull up to the house on Maple Street, there’s been a total of eight words exchanged.

Hopper said, “Running a little low on gas.”

Steve said, “Yes, sir.”

That’s it. But—

“Thanks,” Mike says, unexpectedly, pulling his bandana over his face before he tumbles out of the car. “Tell Dustin and Will they better radio me updates every hour, you hear? Every. Hour.”

“Yeah, uh, we got it, little Wheeler,” Robin says. “Thanks.”

Mike makes a disgruntled noise at Little Wheeler but doesn’t put up as much of a fuss as Steve expected.

“Stay safe, kid,” Hopper says. “You keep us posted, too.”

“Will do.”

“Bye,” Steve says, which is a useless contribution.

He starts backing out of the driveway, since he doesn’t need the Third Degree from Karen Wheeler (right now or ever), and then Robin says,

“Uh, Steve, maybe you want to siphon a little gas out of Ted Wheeler’s car before you go?”

“Hey, Buckley,” Hopper growls. “I’m right here.”

“Yeah, I know—sir. But you’re sort of like, well on the other side of casual criminality in the face of unusual need, so like, don’t you agree?”

There’s a beat of silence. Steve bites down on a grin.

“Fine,” Hopper says. “You got a funnel in this thing?”

They top off Steve’s tank, and get back to the school after eight o’clock. Took a while to get across town. The sky isn’t just dark, now—it’s crackling red, the unearthly glow spreading farther since there’s no sunshine to relieve the smoke.

It’s not even the longest day of Steve’s life, but it’s been pretty goddamn long.

There are more cars in the lot. Nurses at the entrance, masked. Powell and Callahan and some more guys in military garb, also masked.

“Guess they got the memo,” Hopper mutters. “Listen up, you two. We’re trying to gather intel. Just because word has spread about the air quality doesn’t mean our problems are solved. The more we know about where people’s heads are at—and how many we’ve already got sheltering here, not just volunteering, the better off we are. Got it?”

They match yessirs like this is fucking Army bootcamp. They’re all halfway to the doors of the gym when Hopper presses something into Steve’s hand.

“What—” Steve mumbles, through his mask, but then he sees. Feels. It’s a five-pointed silver star.

“Deputy,” Hopper says, like Steve can’t read the word engraved in it. “Hang onto it. Just in case.”

Steve nods, tucks it in his jacket pocket. Isn’t sure what to say—the moment’s either too big or too small for it.

Robin taps him between the shoulder-blades. “Hey. Congrats.”

Inside, under the blinding-bright lights, they split up. They’ll cover more ground that way, Steve tells himself, though he kind of has a mini panic attack, letting Robin go.

It figures that the first person he sees who he knows—like really knows—is Carol Perkins. She’s sitting on a rolled-up sleeping bag, her hair piled on top of her head in a messy bun. Nothing like the perfect waves Tommy used to drag his grimy hands through in high-school.

No sign of Tommy, come to think of it. Last Steve heard he was headed to Miami to caddy golf for rich dudes in Hawaiian shirts. Something like that.

Maybe he’s still there.

Steve hopes so. He doesn’t wish this on anyone.

“Stevie,” Carol says when she sees him. It’s a nickname that used to get under his skin, real nails-on-a-chalkboard shit, but that now makes him nostalgic for…not the self he was then, but the world he lived in, where asshole friends were his biggest problem. “Didn’t think I’d see you back here again.” She rubs her eyes with the back of her hand. “Didn’t think they were letting people in and out much.”

“Nah, it’s just…” It’s inconvenient (not to mention mortifying) that the exhaustion hits him right then, coupled with the pain in his gut, the fact that he hasn’t eaten pretty much all day. His throat is still sore from the expector—something. It was a long word. “Oh, fuck.”

“You OK?” Carol’s on her feet, and sure she’s only like, five-foot-one, but she’s helping him, taking him by both hands and pushing him down onto the makeshift cushion of her bag. “Jesus, Steve. What the hell?”

“Long day,” he croaks. His scraped-up back still hurts like the worst sunburn of his life, too, but it always just seems like…something to be lived with, since it’s only skin-deep. “I’ll be—I’ll be fine.” That’s not strictly true; he’s on the verge of a total breakdown, and he can’t afford that now—or ever. Where the hell is Robin? He wishes she were here.

“You don’t look fine.”

“I—kind of inhaled some of that nasty flaky shit, earlier.” Sometimes it’s easier to tell half the truth. “Had to get my stomach pumped.”

“Holy fuck,” Carol says. “Really?” She grins, sharp and sharky. Just like old times. “You really are still a dumbass, aren’t you?”

He flips her off, but it’s friendly fire. She was never as much of a shit to him during Billy’s reign as Tommy H was. “Guess so.”

“Hold on—” she darts off into the crowd, bombing his whole intel-gathering plan, but before he can drag his sorry ass off to find Robin, she’s back.

“Here.” It’s a PB&J. Looks a little squished, but Steve’s never wanted to wolf something down more in his life.

“Thanks,” he manages, around oversized bites. “So you were like—saying that people aren’t allowed to leave?”

It was a weird comment; caught his attention. Hopper had said they likely wouldn’t have a real evacuation plan in place till tomorrow at the earliest. The people who are staying at the gym are the ones who don’t have homes to go back to.

“The new guy,” Carol says, shrugging. “Lieutenant-Loud-Voice-Something. He’s the one giving the orders around here.”

The sandwich churns in Steve’s stomach. He should have chewed slower.

“I gotta go talk to someone,” he says. He also needs water, but he expects that’s in rationed supply. “Thanks again. Good seeing you.”

“What the hell, Steve!” she hollers after him, but there’s no time to explain.

Just a feeling that things have taken a turn.

They’ve taken a turn, all right. Before Steve even makes it halfway across the gym, halfway to where Hopper’s hands-on-hips pose can’t be mistaken for anyone else on earth, even though the guy’s lost a few pounds (or fifty), a voice comes over the loudspeaker.

“Road closures will be in effect as of nine o’clock tonight. Unauthorized traffic will not be permitted. Shuttle transfers to the hospital will be available on a rotating basis.”

Steve stands like he’s frozen. Nine o’clock. Nine o’clock. Fuck. It can’t have been a whole hour since they got here, right? He still doesn’t have a watch, since his got drowned in Lover’s Lake. Of course, it wouldn't have made a difference if he'd left it with the clothes that stayed in the ill-fated little boat, top-side.

The lake opened up like a goddamn crater.

You played in this gym for four years. There’s a wall-clock right behind you, dumbass.

OK, so Carol was right.

It’s 8:30.

He needs to find Robin and talk to Hopper. The order of those events doesn’t matter very much, because as it is, he doesn’t get a chance for either. The gym doors swing open and a military guy who puts the National Guard recruits to shame strides through.

Guy looks like he’d wear sunglasses at night.

Looks like he doesn’t fuck around with mere mortals.

Hopper, of course, makes a beeline for him. Steve follows. Skids to a halt a few paces a way, when he remembers that, deputy star or not, this is probably above his paygrade.

Military Guy is the one to start the conversation with Hop, which is, in and of itself, not a great sign.

“So you’re the Chief of Police,” he says. “Back from the dead, I hear.”

“You heard wrong,” Hopper parries, in that low, growly way of his that somehow manages to be both mocking and sincere. “I’m afraid I don’t know you.”

“Lieutenant Colonel Jack Sullivan,” the man says. He doesn’t extend a hand. “You wouldn’t happen to be familiar with the decommissioning of Hawkins Lab, would you? I know I don’t have to ask you if you’re familiar with the explosion at the Starcourt Mall, because you were there. Hell, I could have sworn I saw the goddamn death certificate for you, Jim Hopper.”

Steve’s heard every word. Doesn’t know what to make of it, to make of Sullivan, except a litany of shitshitshit running through his brain. Thank God he doesn’t have to think, though, to see.

Because he sees, now, that Hopper knows he’s here, even if Sullivan hasn’t clocked him yet. Hopper angles his body a little, right side towards Sullivan, left towards Steve. Sullivan’s tall, but he’s not look-over-the-top-of-Hopper’s-head tall.

Hopper moves his left hand to his thigh. Two fingers.

TapTapTap. Tap Tap Tap. TapTapTap.

SOS.

Steve doesn’t need a repeat performance.

He backs away slowly, turns, ducks around a couple old ladies who are arguing over a can of soup. Hears the loudspeaker blare to life again, something about evacuation procedures, but doesn’t pause to listen. He has to find Robin.

Of course, being Robin, she’s down on all fours, trying to rescue the lens of someone’s glasses that has fallen out and skidded across the shiny floor.

“Rob!”

“Got it, Mr. Macready,” Robin says cheerfully, and gets to her feet. She looks a lot better than he does, probably. “Steve, holy shit. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Language,” says the ungrateful Mr. Macready, whoever the fuck he is. Steve rolls his eyes at him.

“Rob, we gotta go. Now.”

He actually takes her hand (can’t lose her again) and drags her along with him, nearly tripping over a row of bedrolls in the process.

“Steve! Slow down!”

“No time,” he gasps (stomach still giving him shit, of course). Then he considers the very real possibility that Sullivan is going to swivel that vulture gaze of his a couple of notches and see Steve running like the seat of his jeans has caught fire and then Sullivan is going to have some hard-beaked questions about that.

He slows down.

“Listen to me,” he says. Grabs Robin’s other hand for good measure, and they stand there, practically nose to nose, steady in the storm. “Whoever this new Chief is, he’s bad news. Hop says so. You and I need to get out of here.”

“Hopper told you all that?”

The silver star in his pocket told him that. Just in case.

“Just—trust me, OK?”

Her blue-green eyes are very wide. “OK.”

“Back to the car,” he says. “We need to get out of here before the road closures.”

“Road closures?”

“Nine o’clock,” he says, somehow calmed a little by how predictably—unfocused Robin can be, when she’s busy focusing on something like a glasses lens on the gym floor. “Trust me on that, too.”

They make it to the edge of parking lot without incident, in part because Steve knows every back door the school has. He has practice sneaking in and out of places—out of this place, ducking the hall monitors and Principal Haynes and Ms. Glick.

Stealthy like a ninja, right? And right now, stealthy or not, he’s gotta get back to his own house so that he can make sure Nancy’s OK, make sure they’re all going to be OK. He’s given them the safe-haven he never had for himself, and he’s not going to let a few road-closures and a Stars-and-Bars hardass fuck with that.

He doesn’t want to leave Hopper behind, but Hopper can handle himself—

And Hopper wanted him to go.

Just when he’s congratulating himself on a smooth exit, his luck runs out. There are two guards posted at the exit, and a row of traffic cones set up. Seems like nine o’clock was too generous an estimate.

“Stay low,” he whispers to Robin.

“Aye, aye, Deputy Harrington.”

He fishes his keys out of his back pocket. A step forward, another step, and now they’re running hunched-over, like a couple of garden gnomes sprung to life. If Tommy H could see him right now—or Billy Hargrove, come to that—

But who gives a fuck what the assholes of your past think about your need to survive in an apocalyptic hellhole?

Who gives a fuck when the people you love need you?

They drop down next to the driver’s side of the Beemer.

“I’m going to open the door,” Steve says, “And you crawl across first. Capiche?”

“Yeah.”

“OK.”

Have the fucking keys ever been louder? He doesn’t think those two bozos at the gate can hear him, exactly, but he’s paranoid after the questions Sullivan was asking, and also, he’s about to piss the guards off pretty badly. He’d like to condense the whole thing into as short a time-span as possible.

It seemed like Sullivan knew everything.

He yanks the door open. That’s louder than the keys.

“Now, Rob.”

She scrambles across. He follows.

Keys in the ignition. Engine starts up, loudest of all.

“Hey there—”

“OK, hold on, Buckley.”

“You know,” Robin says, “I hate when you call me that.”

They tear out of that parking lot like they’ve got demodogs, demobats, and Vecna himself on their collective ass.

At least the guards weren’t on orders to shoot on sight. Yet. They just jumped out of the way, shouting and swearing.

The traffic cones weren’t so lucky.

“OK, that’s definitely a hefty little ticket,” Steve says, because he has to say something.

“No shit, Sherlock.” Robin runs her hands through her hair. “You better be thanking me like I’m your guardian angel for the gasoline idea.”

She’s right. It would have…sucked profoundly, to run out of steam a few hundred yards down the road.

“Thank you, Guardian Angel Robin,” he says, but he’s got his eyes on the road, now. Nothing else for it but to try to get around whatever roadblocks may or may not be prematurely set up.

Also, like it or not, he has to take the long way round.

There are parts of Hawkins that look the same as they ever did, just emptier. There are parts of Hawkins he’s known all his life that have pitched into the earth, bricks torn from bricks, window-frames blackened with smoke.

There were bodies they had to pull out of that rubble.

There’s a body on the other side, and a body in the hospital, both of which belong (belonged) to people who were in Steve’s charge.

“Sullivan,” Robin says. “I mean, could this be who the Cali gang was running from?”

“The…Cali gang?”

“Byers, little Byers, Mike, and that stoner dude.” Robin says it like it’s obvious. “Which—not to the point right now, but what do we think Nance thinks of Jonathan being a pothead?”

Steve has had the same question in mind since he saw the peculiar bloodshot tint of Jonathan’s eyes, and smelled the unmistakable scent that followed him and Argyle (and Mike and Will to a lesser extent) around like an aura.

“Not the point right now,” he mutters.

“I bet she makes him quit,” Robin says. “I would, but I don’t have to. Just another reason not to date dudes.”

“You’ve never tried it?” They’re getting off track, but they do this. At the worst and weirdest times, and it keeps him sane.

“I am not filling my lungs with any more gross shit, dingus.”

“Fair point.” He clears his throat. “I used to smoke, y'know. Cigarettes. I only tried pot once. Didn’t like it.”

“Yeah, I remember you telling me. We’ve been high together, in case you forgot.”

“That was a special case.”

“You liked it then.”

“I mean…” He bursts out laughing, despite himself. “Yeah, total fantasy trip, being tied to a chair and—”

“You have a fantasy where you’re tied to a chair?”

“Shut up, I didn’t say that.”

“I’m pretty sure I—” Robin says, but then she stops. “Steve—is that a roadblock?”

He squints ahead, wishing his headlights had smoke-and-interdimensional-matter deflectors. “I think so, but it doesn’t look manned or anything.”

“Don’t you think that’s a little, I don’t know, weird?”

“Everything’s weird.” He eases up off the gas quite a bit, though, moving at a crawl. It’s a barrier, all right, one of those skinny wooden clotheshorses, although its spine-board has been snapped in two.

“Is it just me,” Robin says, in a voice he recognizes as scared, “Or is that—blood?”

If there was any question about blood on the white-painted wood, the answer is the guy lurching up from the bushes in the ditch right beside them, with only one arm and only half a face—

Robin screams bloody murder. Maybe Steve does too. And the only reason that the guy missing vital parts of himself isn’t screaming is because he didn’t jump.

Something tossed him.

The thing is Steve’s first nightmare, if not his most familiar: a full-grown Demogorgon, arms swinging, gory face opened up. The roar it lets out is deeper than the dogs’.

You never forget your first.

Steve floors the gas just as the creature takes a swipe at his window. Talk about nails on a chalkboard—its claw scrapes a gouge in the glass that’s a lot more than fingernail-deep.

The broken barrier splits easily against his front grille. Ted Wheeler’s fuel-supply doesn’t let up, and neither does Steve’s lead foot. The roaring in his ears is pounding like a tidal wave, and he doesn’t know if he’s talking (and crying) or Robin’s talking (and crying) or the thing is riding the roof, guttering its primal call of hunger before it strikes again.

Steve doesn’t know a goddamn thing.

Code red—code red—

Chapter Text

Nancy knows it’s a dream. She’s been having this one since she was five years old, the one where she’s waiting in the dentist’s office, trying to convince her mom not to make her go in.

Her mom’s hair is its old, honey-natural brown. Her mom’s face is basically the same as it is now, her expression all worried and confused, like she doesn’t know what Nancy wants, or like she doesn’t know if Nancy is really her daughter.

Nancy shifts in the stiff-backed chair, tries to pretend the receptionist doesn’t have glowing eyes.

“I just—they’ll strap me in, and I—I had this—nightmare recently, about that—”

(A dream within a dream.)

“It’s going to be OK, sweetie,” her mom says, for the fifth time. Same cadence every time. “I promise.”

“I just—I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Nancy says.

(Aren’t you supposed to wake up when you know you’re dreaming?)

“It’s going to be—”

Nancy.

Nancy scrabbles desperately against the linoleum floor, the pinstriped wallpaper, as if she’ll find a way out, somehow. The rules are changing: the chair is gone—Mom is gone.

But Max is standing over her, her hands clenched at her sides, blue eyes shining down.

Why won’t you listen to me, Nancy? Why won’t anybody listen to me?

Nancy shuts her eyes. Dream within a dream. When she opens them, Max is still there.

I’m trapped inside my own body, Max says. You know that, right? So why are you surprised to see me?

Before—him—Nancy would have chalked this up to a guilty conscience, to the sin-stained shadows that haunted her wherever she went, whenever she slept. How many times has she dreamed about Barb? About staying in Barb’s car, saying yeah, OK, let’s skip Steve’s stupid party, how many times has she woken with a scream in her throat—or worse yet, a name?

“Max,” she says now. (Still dreaming.) “Max, I know it’s not you.”

 I know, Max says, and her blue irises fade, milky white stealing over her gaze. Black blood streams down her cheeks. But if you helped me, it could be.

Nancy wakes alone.

Jonathan’s gone. Has been for a while, judging by the cold blankets pooled around her. The pool table beside her is a hulking shape so unfamiliar and near that Nancy lurches away from it on instinct, as if she’s woken next to a slumbering bear.

Where—where—

(What if she isn’t really awake?)

She clasps both hands over her frantic heart. She’s awake. She’s awake, and she’s in Steve’s house, but that’s not—doesn’t have to be such a bad thing, just because of one night—

This place isn’t what killed Barb.

This place is just where it all began.

Upstairs, she hears voices. Not alone, after all. Just abandoned. For some reason, that’s what almost releases the floodgates on her tears, and she has to fight her way back from the brink before she heads for the steps.

How much more pathetic can she be? She was ready to die in the goddamn Upside Down, guns blazing. Then she survived.

That’s what’s killing her.

…if you helped me, it could be.

(What the hell does that mean?)

Everyone else is awake, huddled in the living room, voices pattering like raindrops over each other, bedsheets and blankets scattered to the four winds. They’ve been having a fucking conclave while she slept, it seems. Nancy has never felt less—less important, like the whole world (or what’s left of it) is spinning on without her. Of course, that's the way it needs to be. The less she knows, probably, the better. 

“Hey,” she says, “What’s going on?”

They can decide what they want to tell her. El can look into her goddamn brain and decide what's safe.

“Oh, sweetie,” Joyce says, her face twisted with worry, and please let this be a dream, please don’t let there be news she can’t bear—MomMikeHollySteve—

Steve.

“We got a code red from Lucas,” Dustin says. Nancy’s a little steadied by the reminder of his presence. Of everyone here, he’s the only who was by her side for the past week. He’s the one who followed her lead—much good it did him, or anyone.

(Maybe that’s why she’s really being left behind. Maybe Vecna made the right choice.)

“From Lucas?” she repeats, still half-convinced that this is a dream.

“About half an hour ago,” Dustin says. “Right after we turned in.”

How—did she sleep through that? Jonathan offers an answer.

“You pretty much passed out,” he murmurs, shifting on the couch to make room for her. She sits beside him, even though she doesn’t really want to. “When I heard a commotion upstairs, I tried to wake you, but—you didn’t stir.”

Yeah, she thinks. Because Vecna had opened the door. Shouldn’t Jonathan have—tried a little harder? Realized her eyes were rolled back in her head or something, before he dashed off to help save the day?

(Something.)

(That’s not what matters right now.)

“What’s happening?” Nancy asks. “Is it…Max?”

“No, no.” Dustin’s still acting as spokesperson, which Nancy might think was strange except for the fact that Dustin loves being the spokesperson. “But some military guy showed up at the hospital and asked Lucas a lot of questions. Noticed his walkie, too, so Lucas thinks he might have all our frequencies tapped before long. If that happens…we’re in deep shit.”

Nancy knows she sounds a little dense, but these dots are swimming in her mind, not connecting. “A military guy?” At least this is the kind of shit she can still be privy to, because it doesn't seem like it has anything to do with Vecna.

“We think it might be one of the same ones who tried to kill El,” Will says. He’s on one side of El, who’s been quiet this whole time: Joyce is on the other. “He asked about us.”

“The ones who shot out the California house,” Jonathan adds quietly. And Nancy has heard part of the story, sure, but she’s still having a little trouble wrapping her head around the fact that they don’t just have a psychic supervillain on their hands, they’ve also got an Army strike team stepping up to the plate. Apparently.

“Man,” Argyle muses, seemingly remembering. “That was some…messed-up shit.”

“Sure was,” Will mutters.

“Before you came up,” Joyce says, with one of her quick, nervous smiles—strangely comforting, despite the nerves—angled in Nancy’s direction, “We were trying to decide what to do next. Lucas said the guy was heading to the school, and I—”

Steve. Robin. Hopper.

Steve.

“Hopper will know what to do, wherever he is,” Nancy says, trying to believe it herself. “And I—I mean, nobody knows that you guys are here, right? Except Claudia, and my family—and they wouldn’t—”

She doesn’t actually know if they wouldn’t.

“I was in the gym,” Jonathan points out, nudging her. “With you, earlier. It was just a minute, but—”

“Someone could have seen you. Shit.”

“Nobody knows we’re here, though,” Will says. “At Steve’s house. And nobody’s seen El.”

“These men,” El says. “They knew about—Papa. About Dr. Owens. They knew where to find me.”

“So did we,” Will says, reaching over to squeeze her hand.

“Has anyone tried Hopper?” Nancy asks. Jonathan’s arm is around her shoulders, but not really holding her. She supposes she can’t complain, after she shoved him off her in the middle of what could have been a real reunion.

She supposes she can’t fairly complain about anything.

She amends—“Or Steve?”

“Yeah, we tried them,” Will says.

“Hop doesn’t have his police radio back yet,” Joyce says, “And even if he did—it’s too risky. What if they're right there with him? God.”

“Plus Steve’s not going to remember to bring his handset into the gym with him,” Dustin scoffs, shaking his head. “I swear to God, mind like a sieve—”

“He’s not going to clip it to his belt, or whatever,” Nancy says, annoyed to find that she’s defending Steve against Dustin, who’s supposed to be on Steve’s side. “It would call way too much attention. Too risky, like Joyce said. The point is, we don’t know if they’re in trouble. Why would they be—be recognized?”

“It might seem a little weird to the higher-ups that Hopper is back from the dead,” Jonathan counters says. “They’re not terrified townspeople; they’re not welcoming him with open, unquestioning arms.”

“But unless they know he’s connected to El—”  

As if to mock her for trying to be a voice of reason, Dustin’s radio crackles to life.

“Code red—code red!”

It’s not Lucas. Not Hopper.

It’s Robin.

“What is your emergency?” Dustin all but screams into the receiver. “Over!”

“—on our tail,” Robin answers. The signal’s absolute crap, dropping in and out. “Fuc—gorgon—on our—”

“We can’t hear you!” Dustin thumps his left fist against his knee in frustration, clenches the talk button again in his right hand. “Over!”

“Demogorgon on our tail!”

It’s like everyone goes crazy. Dustin and Will are actually tussling over the walkie, Eleven is trying to go into some kind of trance then and there, Argyle is asking a bunch of questions nobody’s bothering to answer, and Jonathan is on his feet because Joyce is. She’s shaking, actually shaking, gripping Jonathan’s forearms and trying to explain to him that Hopper doesn’t have a weapon this time, doesn’t have what he needs, and he almost died ten times over in the prison, it was like watching Bob all over again—

All this, and Robin is just—

Alone?

Please. No. Not—

Nancy makes a dive for it, snatches the radio neatly out of Dustin’s hands, cutting short his indignant rant to Will about personal property, Byers, ever heard of it, what’s gotten into you?

Before anyone can stop her, she stalks a few paces away. Presses the talk button.

“Robin, it’s Nancy. Do you copy?”

“Nance. Thank God. We copy.”

“Who’s with you?” She can barely hear anything straight over the pulse pounding in her ears, but she’s vaguely aware that the room has fallen silent around her. “…over.”

“Steve’s here. We’re both here. But Jesus, Nance, you should have seen it, I mean, I know you have, but I never have, and it’s so fucking big—”

“Insecure line!” Dustin shouts.

Nancy doesn't know how to convey that. She sticks with the basics. “Robin, are you hurt? Over.”

A pause—a terrible pause. When the next transmission comes in, the voice is different.

Even more familiar.

“Nance, it’s Steve. We’re OK. Just parked at—Mirkwood. You know where I mean? Over.”

Nancy wasn’t prepared for the…effect just hearing his voice would have on her. It makes her want to drop to her knees. He’s OK. He’s OK. He’s—

“Mirkwood,” she says. It hits her, then, that he’s being—careful. Talking in code. Something more than the monster has happened. “I copy. Over.”

“Chief’s holding down the fort back at the High School,” he says. “We ran into trouble on the way out. Pretty far out.”

“Where is it now?” Joyce asks. “Where’s that…thing?”

Nancy clears her throat. “Are you safe? Over.”

He actually—laughs, over the airwaves. It’s like he’s here in the room for just a second, and she’s going to start bawling her eyes out if he keeps this up. God, she missed him.

(It’s been, like, an hour.

Tell me about it.)

“I think,” Steve says, and drags out a long enough pause that Dustin mutters something about radio etiquette.

Little shit, Nancy thinks, affectionately.

“I think,” Steve repeats, “That it left. Wish we could say we outran it, but I don’t know. We …we don’t want it to follow us back to…HQ. Over.”

Nancy turns and surveys everyone. Joyce, jaw set and eyes aflame, with a son on either side of her. Dustin, gnawing his lip with all the anxiety he won’t put in words. Eleven, nose bleeding slightly.

Eleven opens her eyes.

“It’s gone,” she says, with calm finality. “For now. It was…I think it was a scout.”

It’s like 1983 all over again, flash cards and girlish hopes turned to ash, a creature from the underworld moving among them, hunting flesh and gathering scents—gathering sensations.

Nancy feels sick, but that’s not what matters.

“If it comes back,” Joyce says, fury laced like poison in her voice, “We’re ready for it. Tell him to come home.”

“Steve,” Nancy says. “We’re waiting for you. Over.”

A scout, because more are coming. A scout, even though Vecna should still be too weak to send any.

Earth and sky torn open: less a wound, more an open mouth.

You’ve seen this before.

Dustin radios Mike. Turns out he was already listening in. They get the rest of the necessary info through, patched into weird nerd-speak that would take the entirety of the CIA to decipher. Mike, in turn, assures them that they’ve seen nothing at Maple Street. El asks Dustin to say I love you, even if he can’t say from whom. Dustin actually does it.

Joyce paces the living room, smoking and dropping flakes of ash on the Harringtons’ cream-colored carpet. Jonathan and Will catch Argyle up to speed, if the alarmed noises he makes are any indication  

Nancy stands by the front hall window, watching for headlights.

Finally, they come.

Steve and Robin leap out of the Beemer like goddamn grasshoppers. Robin shines a flashlight beam in thirty different directions in quick succession, while Steve races to the trunk and grabs (as Nancy could have predicted) the axe he tossed through the portal in Eddie’s trailer, and the nail-studded bat that’s managed to survive about four straight apocalypses now. Then they’re racing towards the house, and Nancy knows better than to run to them, but Eleven’s at her elbow, concentrating hard on whatever the fuck else comes out of the Cornwallis woods, so Nancy could take the risk.

She really could, except that her feet seem to be rooted to the ground.

“Jesus, come on,” Dustin hisses beside her.

“They are safe,” Eleven says.

“I know,” Dustin mumbles. “It’s just—”

Nancy unfreezes, moves towards the heavy double doors to undo the deadbolt that’s keeping everything out. When she flings the doors open, she remembers the first time she walked through them.

It wasn’t like this. That was giddy, stupid excitement. This is pure adrenaline—and relief. She nearly gets bowled over by a Steve-and-Robin-terror-hug, a few sharp edges included.

Fortunately, the nail-bat rolls clumsily away across the floor.

Robin buries her face in Nancy’s shoulder, still nervously talking, but that means that Nancy’s face is pressed against Steve’s collar and the edge of his jaw, his five o’clock shadow (how many five o’clocks now?) scraping her cheek. She holds on, and he holds on, and Robin is shaking like a scared rabbit against both of them so it takes Nancy a minute to realize that she—Nancy—is crying.

Steve notices right away, of course.

“Nance,” he says, lips moving against her temple. “Nance, it’s alright. We made it.”

The door slams shut behind them. The lock shifts into place.

“Thanks, El,” says Steve. Then—“Hey, Henderson.”

“Hey, Steve.” Dustin’s voice sounds a little shaky, too. “Glad you brought some weapons this time.”

“Not quite enough to go around,” Steve says, sounding more like himself. He still hasn’t let go of Nancy or Robin, but that’s OK.

They’re here. They’re safe. It’s not a dream, this time.

It’s not a dream.

(It could be.)

Chapter Text

Steve needs a drink.

He needs a lot more than a drink, actually—another stitch in the worst wound on his side, maybe, because he’s pretty sure he popped one during the drive-out-of-death’s-jaws situation. A hot shower, somehow managing not to ruin all the gauze and tape currently holding him together. Twelve hours of dreamless sleep.

(He needs Nancy to keep clinging to him like she did for that glorious moment after he and Robin burst through the door, safe.)

His dad’s liquor bar has served a lot of purposes it wasn’t intended to, though—so for now, it’s Steve’s solution. Once the initial debrief is over, he heads downstairs, snags a couple bottles of super-freaking-expensive Scotch, along with some vodka and a squat flask of tequila, in case Jonathan’s stoner friend is the kind of guy who likes the worm at the bottom.

All this, delivered to the living room coffee table. It’s only when he realizes that everyone’s staring at him that maybe this wasn’t exactly a hive-mind kind of idea.

Maybe it just makes him look like a borderline alkie, scared shitless.

Which like, yeah. In one universe, he probably is just that.

He shrugs, committing to the moment. “What? It’s been a long night.”

Jonathan nudges Argyle, mouths something that might be I told you so, but Steve’s not going to focus on that. Surprisingly enough, it’s Joyce who grins.

“I’ll have a shot.”

“So will I,” Dustin says, and Steve, Nancy, and Robin all say,

“Absolutely not!” at the same time.

“Technically,” Joyce says, “None of you should be drinking anything on that table. Except for me. But I’m one to bend the rules.”

(First question he answered, over the top of Nancy’s head, was Hopper’s fine, he’s navigating some tricky shit, but he’s fine. Navigating, like he was the captain of a ship. S.S. Butterscotch, ha.)

(He wondered if he was out of his mind, seeing something in Joyce’s face when she knew Hopper was handling it, that he thought he’d seen in Nancy’s when he told her his dream in the blue-black woods.)

By the time Steve comes back with the shot-glasses and a couple of lowballs, because dammit all, he wants scotch, the image of everyone in his living room has—softened a little. Argyle is admiring the worm, sure enough. El’s back with her blanket, sharing it with Dustin. Nancy and Robin are side-by-side, which is kind of a relief, because Steve saw the lovers’ nest on the basement floor and kind of had his suspicions, before he put the image rapidly out of his mind.  

“So,” Joyce says, tipping back her vodka so smoothly that Steve feels pretty shown up by a middle-aged mom. “Sullivan. You said he knew way more than he should.”

A sip of scotch; a throatful of fire. You never really get used to it, at least, Steve doesn’t. He runs a hand through his hair, hates how sweaty it is. He probably smells like the Hawkins’ locker room right now. “He said he’d seen Hopper’s death certificate. Referenced the mall. The lab.”

“Shit,” Dustin says. “Couple that with what Lucas said, and it spells catastrophe. This guy is like, Mr. Inside information. Lieutenant-Colonel Inside Information. But it makes no sense! Why’s he want to get El, if he knows so much?”

“I don’t know, Henderson, I didn’t exactly tap him on the epaulet and start asking him questions.”

“You know what an epaulet is?” Dustin deadpans.

Steve just rolls his eyes. Pretends he didn’t hear Jonathan snicker.

(He’s pretending a lot lately, not that that’s the point.)

(At least, with a drink inside him, his hands have stopped shaking.)

“Maybe he wants to use me,” El says. “Maybe he wants to kill me.” She looks so small, so young—younger than Steve’s ever seen her, except that time she was screaming on the bloody Starcourt floor, dragging a monster out from under her own skin by her own strength alone.

“Either way,” Will says, “We’re not going to let that happen.”

El shakes her head. “But it did happen,” she says. “With One. Henry. He was—he did this. It is not so hard for someone to think I did this.”

Dustin curses, drops his curly head in his hands. “She’s right,” he says, through his fingers. “We can’t exactly drag Vecna’s ass out of the Upside Down and say, hey everybody, here’s your Supervillain.”

“Maybe he’ll drag himself out,” Jonathan suggests. “I mean, since now there are gates six ways to Sunday.”

“No,” Nancy says firmly.

There’s a beat of silence. Joyce tops off her shot-glass. Nancy’s too. “No?”

Nancy turns her gaze from Robin to Steve, then back again. She holds Steve’s eyes just a few seconds longer—or maybe that’s his imagination, warmed up a little with the drink.

“We were there,” she says. “He—he could barely even fight us. And he—he was strung up in this weird…flesh web. Like it was a part of him. Like he needed it.”

Will shudders.

“You’re saying,” Robin follows up, twirling her empty glass in her hands (she hasn’t picked a drink yet, doesn’t have the overdeveloped tolerance of King Steve, asshole that he was). “You’re saying that he doesn’t have physical strength?”

“He uses a lot of smoke and mirrors,” Nancy says, sounding so suddenly bitter that Steve feels a flash of that old, helpless worry that used to drive him to distraction when they were together—and used to drive her away when he clumsily showed her he cared. “I just think if he had the power to crawl out of his own personal hell-hole, he’d have done it already.”

“I changed him,” El says. “When I—sent him away, I changed him.”

Will’s quiet, staring down.

God, Steve thinks. It’s not fair. All they’ve been through—all they’ve had to face and fight, they still have to strategize about the inner workings of this vicious, soulless bastard who just can’t content himself with one dismal world.

Apparently, One needs two.

They don’t make much headway beyond that. It’s hard for El to explain what she did, and why. In the end, Steve offers a few more assurances to Joyce, and wishes he could offer something better to Nancy and El about Mike, considering that the Wheeler house is as unprotected as anywhere else in Hawkins. El keeps looking for the Demogorgon, and finding nothing.

Nancy radios Mike a couple times, pacing the corners of Steve’s living room.

Steve…tries to finish his scotch, and finds he’s a real lightweight when he’s still recovering from blood loss and living on pure adrenaline for a week and a half. He wanders towards the kitchen, wondering if Jonathan really can cook as well as everyone says. Gets halfway there before he retches all over his already-grimy shoes.

And holy fuck, if that doesn’t just take the shit-cake of this shitty, shitty day.

There are too many people in his house. This house wasn’t meant to be welcoming, even though it’s the size of a fucking castle. It’s meant to intimidate, to isolate—Steve’s convinced. And of course, it feels as big as the Mall of America when it’s empty.

There are too many people here, filling its dismal corners. More people than Steve ever thought would matter, more than he ever thought would know him, and maybe they know a little too much about him, because right now, they’ve got his number and he’s in deep shit. It gets worse before it gets better, that’s what they say.

(Who says?)

I was defeated, you won the war / Waterloo / Promise to love you forever more…

He’s lying on the acacia dining table, wishing that he was a record on a record player, spinning and spinning, no cares in the world, just a beautiful wave of sound.

‘Course, where there’s a record player, there’s a needle.

“Ok, on three,” Joyce says, and that’s the signal for Jonathan and Argyle to lean really hard on Steve’s shoulders.

Of course he’s got to keep it together while trapped in a veritable chokehold by his goddamn girlfriend-stealing, sometime-enemy, cautious-as-hell ally.

Jonathan Fucking Byers.

(You bully a guy a few times, you pay for it through the nose for the rest of your life. You actually whimper in his ear, because his mom is dragging a needle and wax-coated medical thread through the raw red flesh of your carefully cultivated abs.)

(This is the penalty for all your crimes. Pay up.)

“Hang in there, buddy,” Jonathan says, which is…incredibly unhelpful.

“Oh, shit, that is some gnarly stuff down there,” Argyle murmurs, which is even worse.

“It’s just a flesh wound,” Steve snaps. “Motherfucker—”

“Hey,” Jonathan says. “That’s my mom you’re talking about.”

“Ha-ha. You’re a fucking com—oh, shit.”

“Hang in there,” Joyce says, steady as steady when the chips are down. “Hang in there, sweetie. You’ve got this. We’re so close.”

“Steve!” That’s Robin, hovering somewhere above his head. “Stay with me. Me and Nance, we’re right here.”

A hand on his forehead. Cool. Comforting. Could be Robin, could be Nancy.

Almost doesn’t matter which.

He doesn’t pass out, which is something, but all the fun of the little nightcap party has dissipated like smoke—like real smoke, the kind that fades away. Steve limps towards the stairs, figures the least his parents owe him is dibs on one of the real beds in the house. Everyone else is cleaning up the mess he made, trying to find peace again that he stole, plunging back into their world without Hopper, without an answer to the rising monster problem.

Not all of that is on you.

Some of it is.

Part of being the Steve who steps out in front, who doesn’t turn back, who dives in, is that he doesn’t let himself off the hook anymore.

Dustin and El have decided that they want to explore the basement, probably to get their minds off what they just witnessed in the dining room. Argyle went with them, still murmuring his condolences on Steve’s “formerly perfect abs, my dude, such a shame,” because he wants to see what else lives at the bottom of Steve’s Dad’s liquor bottles. Joyce and Jonathan are talking in the living room. Will’s with them. Will said very little during the whole WTF is Sullivan’s Deal, and Also Vecna’s discussion, but Steve feels like Little Byers has thoughts he’s keeping to himself.

He’s not calling the kid a traitor—never that.

He’s not calling Nancy a traitor, either.

They’ve just gotten dealt the raw hand of having to figure out what’s real and what’s not, what’s worth saying and what is a misdirect.

Nancy may have accepted that they’re not sending her away, or leaving her behind, but that’s about it. She’s got her walls up; she’s spent years trying to get harder and harder to read.

(The walls weren’t up when she cried into his shoulder, but Steve doesn’t dare make something of that, just yet. He’ll just keep it as exactly what it is: a moment to love and remember.)

“Steve?”

A moment to love and remember.

He’s dragged his sorry ass to the top step, and Nancy’s looking up at him from the foot of the stairs.

Remember…

“Hey,” he says. “You turning in?”

“Not yet,” she says, her whole self seeming to flinch at the thought. Confirmation, like he needed it, that sleep’s no picnic for her, either. “I just…I wanted to make sure you were OK. That you didn’t need any more help.”

“Nah,” he says. “I’m good. Just going to figure out how to shower.”

She knits her brows together in that determined way of hers, suddenly all business. “Wait here.”

Her wish is his command, a fact she’s probably pretty well aware of at this point. He waits, trying not to get his hopes up.

Trying not to hallucinate an image of the goddamn Demogorgon crashing through his front door every three seconds.

He’d been so sure that that was it. So sure that the car wouldn’t go. That the thing would break the glass—tear off a limb—his, Robin’s—

“Got it,” Nancy says, reappearing. She’s brandishing a tube of saranwrap like a sword.

Steve’s throat is so flayed from all the puking, scotch, and yes, maybe a little…manly roaring he did while fleeing for his fucking life from a monster that eats with its whole face.  Still, he laughs.

“Do I want to know what that’s for?”

All he needs is for Dustin or Robin to come around that corner, clock this scene and start giving him shit.

(Better them than Jonathan.)

“It’s for you, dummy.”

He’d let her call him dummy for the rest of his life if she always said it like that.

“OK,” he says, because he almost fucking died tonight and he wants her to touch him more than he wants to live to see another day, actually.

He forgets that they’re in the guest bathroom until they’re literally in the guest bathroom.

Nancy doesn’t seem fazed. Maybe enough has happened that that memory, that worst-night-of-his-life-or-close-to-it memory, just doesn’t rate so highly anymore.

(He’d felt like such a failure. Like whatever he did in his whole life to follow, however he tried to change, he’d never be worth shit if he didn’t keep Nancy Wheeler from this.)

“Ok,” she says. “Shirt off. Time for the show.”

He’s pretty stiff, so she has to help him. That in itself is—a lot, to be honest, and it’s nothing compared to the press of her fingertips against his ribs, holding down the edge of the filmy plastic. It’s nothing compared to her tongue caught between her teeth in concentration, less than six inches from his sternum.

Nancy maneuvers the roll around him, has to bring her arm right up against him in a half-hug that turns into a whole, honest-to-God, arms-around-him hug so she can grab it again behind his back.

If he shuts his eyes, he’ll die from how real it feels. The continuation of holding her in the doorway, of feeling the heat of her tears against his face.

(Happy tears. They were happy tears.)

“Thanks for doing this,” he says, walking the tightrope between savoring and ignoring when her knuckles brush his chest. “I know I’m like, totally rank. I’m sorry you have to smell me.”

“It’s fine.” Nancy smirks. “I’m pretty disgusting myself.”

“Yeah, no, I don’t think so.”

“Did the drink help…with the whole, nerves thing?” she asks, tucking her widening smile away in one of those little Nancy hiding places that Steve can never reach. “I mean—I can’t imagine. Seeing it again like that. Knowing that it’s…”

“Yeah,” he says. “I feel like I took the edge off. Which is sorta funny, you know, because it took like, more than an edge off my window.”

“I’m glad that’s all.”

“Oh, yeah. Me too.” He waits while she makes another pass around him with the roll. “I just—I wish Robin hadn’t had to see it. She’s seen the vines, and like, the whole fucking…flesh-flayer. But somehow this was…I don’t know. Like it just reminds you how much it’s everywhere. How we’re never going to get away from it.”

“We will.”

 The words might be enough to give him hope, if it weren’t for the fragile chill in her tone.

“What do you mean?” he asks, careful not to infuse the question with any judgment.

“The Demogorgon always left an opening,” Nancy says, echoing what she’d said the day at Skull Rock, when Eddie was still breathing, when Max was still Max, when they were still—

—themselves, in a way they probably can’t ever be again.

(Nancy, silent in his arms for so long, until she finally whispered—

Two, I took two.)

(Steve, it’s OK. I didn’t—I’m not leaving. I’m not leaving you—)

(—pretending like it’s OK—)

“And that’s a good thing?” he asks, while she tears the saranwrap and tucks the end in. He lowers his arms.

Nancy doesn’t look at him when she says, “It could be. The main gates are impassable, right?”

“Right,” he says. They’d barely made it through the remains of the old gate in Eddie’s trailer before the heat was too intense for them to even have a prayer. If they’d been a couple minutes later—

(If they’d done what Dustin wanted, and taken Eddie’s body with them—)

“Impassible,” Nancy repeats. “For anything that doesn’t want to get burned to a crisp. But somehow, the Demogorgon got through. And that means…it could mean…that there’s another way in. Or a safe way to pass between.”

Steve’s whole body aches. The exhaustion hitting him now is almost as bad as the sudden burst of nausea an hour ago.

He doesn’t want this, standing in the rooms of their past, planning certain death as their future. He just wants her.

“Why would we need,” he asks, already knowing the answer, “A safe way to go between?”

Swords are for warriors, swinging and hacking onwards. Guns are for those who only want to fight once.

Nancy sets her jaw.

(Nancy, who always goes for the gun.)

“Because as soon as we can,” she says, “We need to go back.”

Chapter Text

I

“It’s late,” Mom says. She smells a little like cigarettes and a lot like alcohol, not because of the vodka but because of all the disinfecting she had to do when she was stitching up Steve’s stomach. “You two should get some sleep.” She tips her chin down, eyes on Jonathan. “Sleep. Not hanky-panky.”

Jonathan almost jumps out of his skin. You laugh, even though it’s totally a gross thought, one you have avoided focusing on for all the time that he and Nancy have been together.

“M-om,” Jonathan says, sounding way more like the Jonathan who headbanged to The Clash with you and way less like the slurring stoner who pissed you off (who made you feel so lonely). “Don’t say that. Please don’t ever say that again.”

Mom grins cheekily, never more cheerful than when she’s gotten an embarrassed reaction from one or both of you.

“Deal,” she says. “If you actually listen.”

The grin’s a good sign. It means she’s not too anxious about Hopper, after all, even if he is going toe-to-toe in the Hawkins High Gym with a guy who tried to gun El down from a chopper.

Huh. She’s got a lot of faith in Hopper, or she’s just gotten better at bluffing.

(Sometimes, you think your whole family was made to lie.)

El exerted herself. Looked for him, for Hopper. Said he looked—stressed—but that he wasn’t hurt. Then she sort of got shaky, and Dustin looped an arm around her, said,

No more.

Right, Mom agreed, looking guilty. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked. I just—

You knew that kind of guilt pretty well, the kind that comes after you’ve shown how much you want—more and more and never enough.

Mom kisses your cheek, ruffles your hair. When she’s gone, you gather your blankets. The thought of shutting your eyes, letting go, slipping away—it sickens you. But you can’t say that to Jonathan, even now.

You wish Mike was here. God. You wish—

You stretch out on Steve Harrington’s parents’ sleek leather couch, nudging your foot up against Steve Harrington’s dad’s vintage comic books. You pull your foot back. You don’t want to be on the hook for like, a thousand dollars, on the other side of the apocalypse.

“Hey,” you say. Mom’s disappeared, back in the kitchen, to watch and wait apparently. Grin or no grin, you can hear the far-off sound of her pacing.

El and Dustin and Argyle went downstairs. Steve, post-puke and post-emergency surgery, went up.

And Nancy?

You’ve lost track of Nancy. Not that it’s your job to keep track of her—technically it’s probably Jonathan’s—but you like to keep tabs on everyone.

Will the Wise. An old nickname, silly and transient, slipping through your fingers like sand with the rest of your childhood memories.

(The good ones, at least. The bad ones stay. It should tell you something, that you feel pretty much no alarm over the Demogorgon. It’s here, it’s gone, it’s not going—to hurt you—)

(What if he never left?)

“Hey,” Jonathan says. He loiters for a moment, shifting from one foot to the other. Since you’re lying down, looking up at him, he looks tall again. A protective shadow over you.

(But see? See that? You only think in loops, in parallels, in mirrors. There is always a shadow over you.)

“Are you gonna go downstairs again?” You don’t say, with Nancy. That part should be obvious.

“No,” Jonathan says. “No, I think I’ll just stay here. If you don’t mind.”

You don’t, but you’re supposed to. You’re supposed to be rooting for his happiness outside of you.

You pinch the bridge of your nose. You ask,

“You OK?”

“What?” Jonathan has this breathy way of talking when he’s surprised, which he kind of inherited from Mom, but which he softened still further in his own Jonathan way. All your life, he’s been the steadier one. The safer one, in some ways. Like there’s something about him that just—you always knew what he was going to do next.

You thought you knew.

“I’m just…we’ve just been through some shit,” you say, like that doesn’t extend backwards to infinity (or at least, the length of your lives, with a special and unfortunate focus on the last few years). “And I haven’t really gotten to talk to you much.”

(Since the pizza place, and that moment you stole from everything else that was happening around you. Yeah. Since then.)

“I’m just…pretty wiped out,” Jonathan says, but he does what you hoped he would, sits down next to you with one leg crooked so that his knee almost thumps the top of your head.

This way, you can just hear his voice. Makes you feel—realer, somehow, to isolate the sound like that.

Makes you feel like you could almost sleep, without turning into something else.

“Yeah,” you say. “Think we can convince Steve to let us, like, shower and stuff? I feel like I’ve been in these clothes for a hundred years.”

“I don’t think he’s stopping us,” Jonathan points out, with that slight edge to his tone that you’ve heard arise as many times as you’ve heard him mention Steve. If you pointed it out, he’d deny it. Say Steve didn’t get under his skin, that he didn’t mind him so much since they became part of the same team, that, most of all, he didn’t think about him much.

The last part, you’re pretty sure, is the only part that’s true.

Whatever the case, you don’t feel up to the task of explaining to Jonathan what Steve’s merits actually are, and anyway, you don’t really think that’s what Jonathan wants to hear. He wants Nancy to come to him without having to be asked. He wants Nancy to keep her expectations low. No-strings-attached, in a way, which like. If you know anything about the Wheelers (and you know a lot about the Wheelers), that’s never going to work with Nancy.

“Tomorrow,” you say. “Tomorrow, before we hunt and kill…anything…I want a shower, for sure. Also waffles.”

“Who’s going to make waffles?”

You smirk. You can get away with it, with Jonathan. “You.”

“I wasn’t planning on being the resident chef for eight people,” Jonathan grumbles, but there’s not much heat in it. He pauses, then says, “I wasn’t planning on killing any monsters, either, to be fair. But I don’t really have a choice, it seems.”

“We have some choices,” you murmur, because you have to believe that.

That piques his interest. You kind of knew it would. Maybe you wanted it to.

“What’re you getting at?” He asks it soft, non-combative. He’s genuinely interested in your opinion. Again, that’s the Jonathan you know.

Say he was in my mind, OK? But not like he’s in Nancy’s, or El’s. Not like the hivemind. I mean he’s there, like he keeps coming back because it was an easy opening. Like he keeps coming back because it’s me.

You could say all that, and then Jonathan would have a million (a billion) questions about what you saw and heard and felt, and you wouldn’t be able to answer any of them, because the truth was—

The truth is…

You shrug. “Nothing. Just saying stuff.”

Of course, that’s never been a real trait of yours, which is probably why Jonathan immediately counters it.

“You’re not, like—distracting yourself from something, are you?”

The way I feel when Mike looks at me. The diary I burned in the backyard. The day I broke down Castle Byers.

The reason I don’t see or hear him, I just feel him.

(It’s because I think I might be him.)

“Close enough,” you say. Then, dropping your tone out of deference, and also because you are desperate to get out of your own head, even if that means being a nosy little brat brother, “What’s going on with you and Nancy?”

You hear Jonathan sigh.

“Not sure,” he says. “Not sure what I want, I guess. Like on the one hand, we really meant to give it a shot—we really mean it, and like—” He stops himself. “I’m being stupid.” Then, very quietly, “Or we all are.”

You certainly are. You just haven’t told him how much.

(You think he knows.)

“It’s fine,” you say. “We don’t have to talk about it.”

His hand brushes your shoulder. “Thanks. It’s all going to work out, bud. Nothing to worry about.”

You’re both such liars.   

II

Dustin snores. So does Argyle.

You don’t mind.

You hate silence more than anything—the silence of your old cell, the silence in the gigantic space that Hopper left, when he died. The silence in your most recent prison.

The silence that would be here now, if it weren’t for your friends.

Hopper’s fine. You saw him. Except that nothing’s fine, not really, and none of this is going to last.

You roll over on Steve’s green-topped table. Argyle hoisted you up, said, fit for a queen, and you thought it would be kind of an interesting place to sleep.

It’s lofty—that means high-up—but not particularly comfortable.

You do something you shouldn’t.

You close your eyes and reach.

Blurry and black and cold and searing—

Memory and grief and violence and malice—

Grief and grief and—

“El?”

You spin around and around, fighting through the smoke that clears away every image you almost catch.

You resurface somewhere you don’t know: a library. There are rows and rows of books, spines dripping red. You blink, not wanting to believe what you see, and then everything is ordinary again.

(Well. Not everything. Max’s hospital bed is here, with Max in it.)

“Max!” It was her voice, you knew it was. You know her so well, because she’s the only one of her kind you have been allowed to know—really know, without the threat of bloodshed hanging overhead. The thought of Max bleeding, broken, dying by inches, is almost more than you can face.

And you, all your life, have faced everything.

“Max,” you plead. “Can’t you hear me?””

(Because why is she here if she can’t?)

You can barely breathe, where you stand between the shelves. (This isn’t where you are, this isn’t you breathing. Papa, smooth and measured, saying never forget that, Eleven, they cannot hurt you there—but that, too, was a lie, and you are the only one between the two of you alive to know it.)

You say her name again, and this time, she opens her eyes.

“El, I’m sorry.”

“Sorry? You don’t have to be sorry. I was too—slow. I didn’t get to you in time.”

Max shakes her head. Her gaze is sorrowful, but at least it’s still farseeing, blue and bright in her milk-pale face.

“I wasn’t strong enough,” she says. “I couldn’t stop him.”

“What?”

Her face flickers in and out. Her whole body is swallowed up in casts, in bandages, in the proof that she was never meant to be strong enough to take on Henry.

Max says,

“Say you understand.”

Chapter Text

The sun, when it rises, burns red. Nancy sees the wrong-tinged light through the filmy curtains of Steve’s parents’ guestroom the same way she’s used to seeing it filter through her eyelids: blood-veined.

She lies very still, shoulder-blades digging through the carpet, trying to match her breathing to Robin’s drifting down from the bed above.

She should be grateful for dawn. But when she shuts her eyes, the shape of the light burns like waving tentacles. Like something coming through the terrified gap between worlds.

(What was she expecting, really? There’s no sunlight in the Upside Down. Maybe the days will fade darker and darker, until dawn never comes again.)

Shit. So much for sleeping. She shakes the tangle of blankets from her legs. Grimaces at the way her sweat-stained shirt clings to her ribs, her armpits. She knows there were nightmares. Hell, in a second she’ll probably be remembering most of them.

But will you remember enough?

Robin’s still snoring lightly. Nancy insisted she take the twin-bed, even though she had to glare until Robin gave in. Having Robin nearby was familiar, at least, like they were still organizing confabs in the Wheeler basement about how to track down Vecna and save Max. When they hadn’t known who he was.

When they hadn’t lost Max beyond all saving.

There came a time after every prior horror—the Fourth-of-July madness in all its sparkle and gore, the dank wood from which Barb would never return—when life began to stitch itself back together. A gate closing within a gate. A gate inside your mind, maybe, to match the yawning, pulsing one torn in the fabric of the not-quite-physical world.

There will not come a time like that again.

Nancy tiptoes down the hall, catching glimpses of the past (her past), distorted not only by the light but by how much the house has changed. Steve’s parents’ door is shut, but his old door is open.

Steve wasn’t lying about his room. Through the doorway, she can see the shadows of hulking exercise equipment on the geometric wallpaper that still scrawls its way across too many of her dreams.

You can know so much about Hawkins and its inhabitants, she’s found, while still knowing nothing at all.

(Last night, standing in the bathroom’s cold light, feeling the warmth of his broken skin—a different kind of dream.)

Downstairs, morning is submerged in an eerie kind of peace: Dustin and Eleven and Argyle are nowhere to be seen. Jonathan’s sprawled on the floor beside the length of sofa that Will claimed. Will’s hand dangles over the edge of the cushions, fingers almost grazing the hunch of Jonathan’s shoulder.

Nancy’s heart aches—no other way to put it. Her heart aches enough that she can’t pretend to not know the feeling—the twisting weight between her ribs.

Then Jonathan stirs, and Nancy darts away towards the kitchen.

She’s expecting to find Joyce there, almost exactly as she does: wide-eyed, wild-haired, clutching a mug of coffee in both hands.

She’s not expecting to find Steve, bedhead immaculately tousled, arms folded across his chest in a way that draws Nancy’s attention to the unbuttoned collar of his waffle-knit Henley.

She swallows.

“Hey, sweetie,” Joyce says.

“Hi,” Nancy says. Steve doesn’t say anything, but he smiles at her, lips rather than eyes—his eyes are almost sad, like he’s seeing all the nightmares hanging around her, the ones she can’t remember well enough.

(Maybe it hurts him, too, seeing her in his house. The place he used to want to feel like home to her.)

“We’ve been strategizing,” Joyce says. “Because of course, I couldn’t sleep a wink, thinking about Hop—”

“Has there been any news?” Nancy asks.

“Just some radio chatter,” Steve says. He turns towards the countertop, where Nancy sees the half-filled swell of the coffeepot. “Cup of Joe, Nance?”

“Thanks.”

“I should wake Jonathan,” Joyce says. “He insisted on making breakfast, but I—I want him to sleep. He’s worn out. You all are.”

Nancy is keenly aware of Steve’s fingers brushing hers as he hands her a steaming mug.

“Hop hasn’t contacted us directly,” Joyce goes on, apparently resolved not to wake Jonathan just now. “But he sounded—he sounded OK. And if I can make it through six months, I can—”

“I’ll drive back to the school today,” Steve says, as calmly as if he didn’t just face a Demogorgon less than twelve hours ago. As if Nancy hadn’t told him, in the middle of binding up his wounds, that she planned to spend her second chance at life defeating what had nearly destroyed all of them. Who has nearly destroyed all of them. “This Sullivan dude has no reason to suspect me. And I’ll be ready with the bat this time, in case…” He grins. “Y’know.”

Joyce sighs. “I can’t argue with a plan that lets us make contact with Jim,” she says. “I just—damn it, I’m so mad I could spit.”

“Sullivan wouldn’t know what hit him,” Nancy wisecracks, feeling weirdly tuned-in to Joyce’s mood. How can it be that she knows her better when Jonathan’s not around?

“Mom?”

Speak of the—

Jonathan’s sleep-mussed hair doesn’t stand up to Steve’s standard, but that’s a petty grievance to have on the morning after the apocalypse.

“We were just talking about today,” Joyce says, setting down a mug to wrap her eldest in a hug. “Also, breakfast. You said you were going to make breakfast.”

“If there’s anything to make it with,” Jonathan says, looking over her shoulder at Steve.

They find oats, powdered milk, raisins. A giant bag of slivered almonds from one of Steve’s mom’s health crazes. By the time Jonathan has a pot of oatmeal bubbling on the stove, everyone else is waking and congregating. Robin comes down, and Dustin and El come up.

“How’s the leg, buddy?” Steve asks, and Dustin shrugs.

“Still kicking.”

Last time they really formulated a plan, in that strange calm that follows a panic—in the red morning that follows a long night—Hopper was here, brisk manner and booming voice making everything feel, if not safe, then at least possible. Now Hopper’s gone, and Steve and Joyce seem to be passing the baton between them of deciding what to do.

Nancy remembers Steve’s voice cutting across the radio, steadying her. Relieving her like nothing else could.

You’re there. You’ve always been—

She turns away from the little conclave, from the slight kerfuffle over whether Robin is ready to face another Demogorgon—“Not at night!”—and almost collides with Will.

He’s taller than her now—a lot taller than he was six months ago. She’s still getting used to that.

She doesn’t think she’ll ever get used to the look in his eyes.

“Hey,” she says. “Sleep OK?”

He shakes his head. “Not so much anymore.”

The chatter behind them—Robin and Dustin, Steve, Jonathan, Joyce, Argyle asking for some special spices in the oatmeal—is enough to grant Nancy sufficient privacy to ask,

“Did you…feel him?”

Will waits a little too long before he answers. “It’s hard to tell when I’m dreaming. If it’s a memory or…something happening now.”

“Or something that isn’t real at all.”

“Yeah. But I’ve given up on that.”

Nancy doesn’t have a good answer. “OK,” she says. “Anything we should…know?”

She’s the one with the open door, after all. The one chosen to be his eyes.

“He’s getting stronger,” Will says. “That’s what I feel.”

Stronger. Stronger, though only a few days have passed.

“It’s not over till it’s over,” is the inane response she musters for the time being, and then Eleven joins them.

“Mike,” El says, an unmistakable cast of worry over her features. “When can we bring Mike back here?”

With a pang, Nancy remembers the fight she had with Mike before he left. Saying goodbye to him—telling him that he had to be the one to go home to Mom and Dad and Holly, because it wasn’t safe for her to—had made so much sense at the time, before they knew that monsters were already climbing out of the rift.

Of course, the monsters haven’t reached Maple Street yet. Eleven would know if they had. Eleven can see Mike, can feel him.

But even that isn’t enough. The distance is unbearable for long. Look at Joyce—look at Nancy herself, gazing into dark waters after Steve jumped—

“Hey, kiddo,” Steve says, nudging Eleven’s shoulder lightly. “I’ll swing by the Wheelers’ on my way into town. Barricades permitting.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Not sure Mr. and Mrs. will let me bring him back quite yet, but Lord knows Mike’s a persuasive little son-of-a-gun.”

“He’s not little,” El says, smiling. “He’s as tall as you, now.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Steve chuckles, but his gaze, finding Nancy’s, is serious. “Any messages, Nance?”

Getting stronger.

She can’t keep running. “I’m coming with you,” she says.

That turns every head in the room.

“You said it wasn’t safe,” Jonathan interjects. “You said you’d draw him—One, Henry, whatever—right to them.”

“I won’t stay long,” Nancy says, thinking fast. She can still think fast. She can still stand tall, buoyed by Steve’s trust and Robin’s confidence, even by Dustin’s impatient desire for someone, anyone, to present a plan for his consideration. “But my mom thinks I’m with you. And how long is she going to want to go without seeing me again? And if anyone comes around asking questions—or if she tries to find out where I am—she’s going to be talking about you. Pointing a big old arrow in the direction of Byers. We can’t have that. I need to reassure her. Reassure my dad, if this whole, end-of-the-world shit has gotten his attention enough to make a difference.”

“That makes sense,” Dustin says. Plan considered.

“Are you sure?” Jonathan asks.

“I’ll reason with Mike again, too,” Nancy says, ignoring Jonathan. “The Demogorgon…changes things. Nowhere in Hawkins is safe.”

As if she summoned it, the abandoned walkie radio on the table blares to life.

“Attention Hawkins residents… Attention Hawkins residents. This is an evacuation order. All persons within the town limits are to report to your nearest emergency location immediately.”

The upshot of the order—not delivered by Hopper, but by some federal goon—is that the hospital and the school are accessible to most people scattered across the four busted-up corners of Hawkins. With a little rapid calculation and a stub of pencil stolen from the Harrington junk-drawer (which Nancy’s surprised exists), they sort out who will go where. The consensus is that the Wheelers will end up at the school, the Sinclairs and Claudia Henderson will undoubtedly stay at the hospital.

What’s less clear, and more terrifying, is just what is driving the evacuation order.

Who is driving it.

“Doesn’t change a thing,” Steve says. “We’ll just touch base with the Wheelers at the school. And that way, if Mike stays at the school, he can be our point of contact with Hopper.”

“There’s no reason for you to go, Nancy,” Jonathan rejoins, nudging her gently with the sharp angle of his shoulder. “This is the perfect cover. Steve can tell them you had to the head to the hospital.”

He smells sour. Smoky.

Nancy’s known for a while that his heart wasn’t hers. And maybe—

“I’m going,” she says. “That’s final.” She chooses to look Joyce in the eye instead of Steve. Woman to woman; leader to leader, when certain chips are down.

When almost all hope is lost.

“We need to get our story straight,” she says. “Our messages straight. We don’t have much time.”

It feels downright weird to win one, but Nancy does. She knows she has her way, free and clear of everything but doom and Demagorgons, when she’s riding shotgun in the Beemer again, Steve’s bat slanted between her knees.

“So in all the message-establishing,” Robin pipes up from the backseat, which she is sharing with Dustin, “Did we sort out our signal for when Nance—no offense—becomes a Vecna-portal?”

“Robin,” Steve says, severely.

“I said no offense!”

“None taken,” Nancy answers, too grim to be hollow. That’s why she came, as much as anything. She’s herself when she’s fighting. It’s the rest of life that gives her trouble. Waiting in the last shadowy corners of safety, or what passes for it now. “I just need to tell my mom that I’m safe, and that—” That the Byers are in danger, and Nancy is too, by association, if that’s what it takes to keep Sullivan away?

“Mike’s probably covered for us already,” Steve murmurs. He’s keeping his speed around thirty miles per hour, watching all sides for threats—human or otherwise.  The air smells like smoke and ozone, not blood. Nancy keeps expecting to see bodies, though, torn and burned in the rubble of houses and the mangled shells of cars that didn’t make it through the earthquakes.

She shuts her eyes. Grips the baseball bat tightly.

(It’s not as much comfort as Steve’s hands.)

The school is a lot more crowded than Nancy remembers, and a lot more…guarded. The feds who were calling over the radio are stalking the perimeter like hunting lions, guns glinting at their hips. Hopper’s nowhere to be seen, but Steve says that’s to be expected. No reason to worry, not yet, he adds, like he’s not keeping his eyes peeled for this Sullivan guy.

Nancy scoffs at no reason to worry, but she keeps going anyway—aided, a little, by a squeeze of Robin’s hand. Nancy can never be certain, now, if the shiver of intuition that runs down her spine is a product of her own mind or—his mind.

She shudders the feeling of dread away.

Too soon. There’s Carol Perkins, an unwelcome face from the past, grinning sardonically. Nancy can’t find her own damn family in this mill of people, but she can find herself face to face with a gum-snapping memory.

Carol is a little paler and thinner, but otherwise unchanged.

“Hey, Princess,” Carol says. She ignores Robin and Dustin entirely, rolling her eyes towards Steve, then back to Nancy.

“Carol,” Steve says. Growls, actually, which is...sexy. “Don’t start.”

“I know, Stevie. End of the world, and all that. I’m just—” she wrinkles her forehead—“Surprised, I guess, that we’re still playing the same game we were three years ago.” The question, when it comes, is for Nancy, and it’s much too loud.

Carol asks,

“Didn’t I see you with Jonathan Byers just yesterday?”

Chapter Text

Of course Carol Perkins is still a bitch.

Robin can’t be surprised. You don’t spend six years of band (Middle through High) and perform enough theater to choke a horse without drawing the occasional (scathing) scorn of the aimless popular set.

The arrows hit harder when they come for the heart. Robin remembers how much it had stung, having her first crush on Carol.

(She hasn’t told anyone that. Not even Steve.)

Right now, she hangs back while Steve manages the situation, telling Carol to Stuff it, please, that’s not what’s important, while Carol fixes her lynx-keen eyes on Nancy and makes perfectly plain that she’s unconvinced. What’s a run-of-the-mill angle of attack for Carol, of course, is mortal peril for their friends. Robin doesn’t know the Byers particularly well—and she certainly doesn’t care much for Jonathan—but she doesn’t want Big Brother breathing down any of their necks.

And as for this situation? The one where the lines of Nancy’s lips and chin suggest that she’s holding back a withering insult (and maybe, just maybe, a few tears)? It’s the kind of bravery that Nancy carries with her everywhere she goes like a goddamn mantle, and it makes Robin wish she could put herself between Nancy and Carol, like, physically. Maybe make a few threats that Carol should actually listen to—would listen to, if she’d seen Robin kitted up for the Upside Down. 

Much good that did. Step off, Buckley.

Nancy doesn’t need her like that. Carol never needed her at all.

Anyway, there isn’t much more time to deal with Carol’s insinuations—or their larger implications for the Byers’ need for discretion—because Karen Wheeler is cutting through the crowd like a speedboat.

“Nancy! Nancy!”

At her approach, Carol fades away, with one last too-knowing smirk. Steve makes an aborted gesture towards Nancy, likes he’s about to put a steadying hand on her arm, but Nancy is already springing forward towards her mom.

Robin’s parents are at the hospital, not at the school. When Robin was at the hospital yesterday, they were helping clean up their half-imploded street, so she hasn’t seen them since the not-really-ashes started falling. If she’s honest, she hasn’t wanted—no, it’s not that. It’s not about wanting. She’d given every single one of her earthly possessions if it meant getting to safely hug her mom right now.

Safely. That’s the key to it all. There’s nowhere safe in Hawkins, maybe, but the hospital is farther from the yawning gates than the school. The hospital doesn’t have this mysterious Sullivan asshole roaming around.

Maybe she should suggest that Vickie go volunteer at the hospital.

“Robin. Robin.”

Shit. She’s totally spaced out. Steve is up in her face, trying to bring her back to earth.

“Sorry,” Robin says. She sees now that Nancy and Karen are holding each other by the elbows while Nancy explains in one of her low-but-fervent Nancy-tones why exactly it is that Karen has to listen to her daughter, instead of the other way around.

“You looked like you were in a trance,” Steve says. “No like…visions or anything, right?”

It’s easy to forget sometimes that he’s only a year older than her. He has fears just as much as she does. He’s seen more than she has, and suffered more, too.

“No,” she says, reaching up to tap his cheek lightly with her fingers like he’s the one who needed waking up. “I’m just having a dingus moment. Look familiar?”

“Is that what I look like?” Steve asks, his grin returning. “Jeez.”

“What should we do about Carol?”

“Nothing, right now. I think I convinced her to let the…Byers question alone,” he finishes, muttering the last words so quietly that Robin can barely make them out.

“I wouldn’t depend on her to do jackshit,” Robin returns crisply. “But that’s not the point. We’re here for a reason, right? Find the Chief, and—”

“Yeah, yeah.” He casts a distracted glance towards Nancy, who’s still locked in Karen’s hold. “I’ll go look for him, but do you mind—”

“Sticking with Nance? No problem.”

She really, really hopes Vecna’s not lurking in Nancy’s brain right now.

Steve turns to where Dustin was standing a minute ago, probably to loop him in, but Dustin’s already gone. Robin can see his hat bobbing through the crowd. From the look on Steve’s face as he tracks this development, Dustin’s absence isn’t exactly unexpected—but nor is it welcome.

Robin asks a question she’s been kind of meaning to ask.

“Everything OK with the Rugrat-in-Chief?”

“Not really,” Steve says, but he doesn’t hang around to say anything else.

Nancy has a stronger will than her mother. Robin could have guessed this accurately since she learned that Nancy Wheeler wasn’t actually a priss, but she’s had more than enough confirmation thanks to spending a week in and out of the Wheeler home.

It’s no surprise, then, that Karen is eventually placated and Nancy is permitted to “head back to the hospital for more volunteering,” which is the cover story they’re going with.

Hospital’s a real hotspot, turns out. Hopefully Vecna doesn’t see it that way.

“Now I just need to find Mike,” Nancy grumbles. “Where the hell is Steve?”

He’d be glad you asked that.

“Went to talk to the Chief,” Robin says. This whole plan to stick together and maintain an organized front is kind of going haywire. “Also, speaking of the hospital, I’ve had this idea, and I’m aware it’s kind of crazy, but like—do you think maybe you and I should try to get nurse credentials or something?”

“Nurse…credentials.” Nancy’s brow furrow. “What?”

It’s ironic, Robin supposes, given that the last time they came up with a scheme like this, it ended with a break-neck chase across the Pennhurst lawn, but she forges on. “From Dustin’s Mom. I just think—we don’t have a snazzy little deputy star like Steve, and we might need a way to get past barricades and all—”

“Steve has a deputy star?”

“Yeah. From Chief. Last night.”

Nancy makes a face that Robin supposes means she’s imagining Steve in a uniform and likes what she sees. Then she says,

“OK, you’re right. We’re volunteers who have been shadowing Ms. Henderson. We should try to get over there later today and make it official.” She grimaces. “Before curfew.”

Robin nods. “Before curfew.”

There’s still no sign of Chief Hopper. Robin catches another glimpse of Dustin—sure enough, he’s talking to Mike Wheeler, who really did get ridiculously tall this year. Good for recon, at least.

Of course, there’s a hundred people here whom she recognizes—school friends, teachers, neighbors—and all of them are tired, hungry, haunted. Robin tries to do a headcount of the increased military presence, but she keeps losing her place. Olive green fades into olive green. There are too many guns. And there is a constant prickle down her spine, now; a tightness in her lungs even when she’s indoors, bandana off.

She doesn’t need a direct link to Vecna to know that death is coming.

“I’d better go,” Nancy says, close by. “It’s safer.”

“Go? Where?”

“Just back to the car.” Nancy’s already tying her kerchief around her face. “Wish I could see Holly, and Mike, but—”

“Steve told me to—stick with you.”

“You need to go find him,” Nancy says firmly. “Shit, we really didn’t coordinate the ins and outs of this. I’ll be alright.”

“Really? Because I’m pretty sure you’ve got me like glue, Wheeler. I’m not letting you go anywhere without me.”

“Letting me?” Nancy’s eyebrows arch. “Seriously, Rob. When have you let me do anything?”

“That’s not the point,” Robin sputters. “The point is, you have—a higher risk-level than the rest of us, and Steve is going to come right back here to find us so—”

“—so we won’t be here when he does,” Nancy interrupts, never more maddeningly sensible than when she’s trying to risk her own life. “I’m not having an episode, I swear. I’m trying to take precautions. I shouldn’t stay.”

The compromise they strike is this: Robin escorts Nancy to the Beemer, all but buckles her in, then sprints back inside to find Steve. She has to navigate past the soup line for dinner, overhears the complaints that the school’s pudding supply is already depleted (some things never change) and nearly slams into a soldier with the coldest eyes she’s ever seen.

Makes you understand how Vecna was human once. Some people are just born shitty.

(This is the kind of thing Robin didn’t used to believe.)

“Where the hell is Nance?” Steve catches her by the elbow, hard enough that Robin yelps, which makes him let her go instantly and raise his hands apologetically. His face is still stormy, though.

“She’s in the car, chillax.”

“What happened to not leaving her alone?”

“Nancy happened. She didn’t want to be in the gym anymore, but someone needed to collect you. Where’s the Chief? Do we have any signs of life?”

Steve scrunches up his face. “Chief’s in the comms room. AKA Mrs. Glick’s old classroom, shudder. Anyway, he can’t get out—that Lieutenant-whatever dude is really riding his ass. Apparently there’s been a lot of questions about his…connections.”

“The Byers?” Robin whispers.

“Yeah. But he says he’s fine, and it’s better if he’s here. Until he’s seen how this whole evacuation thing plays out, he doesn’t want to leave Hawkins High and its new population in Sullivan’s hands. So Joyce is in charge and…” He trails off. That’s a thing Steve does sometimes, but it’s always surprising, because even in the depths of hell Robin defines him most by his freight-train insistence on moving forward.

“And what?”

“And I’m in charge, too. Apparently.”

She grins. It’s the best thing she’s heard all day, because it’s goddamn true. “OK. What’s the problem?”

“Would’ve thought he’d pick Jonathan.”

“Uh, fat chance. You think Hop can’t tell he’s a pothead?”

“Pretty sure Hop was a pothead.” Steve glances at his watch. It’s a different one than he used to wear, which makes sense, seeing as the other one—

Robin’s spacing out again. Something something sea-of-fire-all-your-friends-are-dead—

“We should go,” Steve says. He throws up a hand, waving frantically. “Hey! Henderson!”

Dustin’s near at hand, for once, but even though he turns in answer to Steve’s call and shuffles towards them, he’s got a particularly mulish expression on his face that makes Robin’s heart drop into her stomach. Ever since they made it back (made it back without Eddie, that is), something’s been brewing between Steve and Dustin. When she tried to ask about it before, Steve wouldn’t give her a full answer.

Maybe the full answer is just going to have to play out in front of them.

“I’m hanging here,” Dustin says, sure enough.

Steve sputters. “What? No way.”

“No way?” Dustin’s eyebrows disappear under the brim of his hat. “There’s nothing for me to do at your place, Steve.”

“Nothing for you to do? It’s not about that, it’s about keeping you safe—”

“I’m just as safe here, with Chief and the Wheelers,” Dustin snaps. “And come to that, safety isn’t exactly your specialty. Radio me if anything comes up.”

He’s gone before Steve can even protest.

Robin grimaces.

“Way harsh.”

Steve shrugs. “Yeah, well. I deserved it. Let’s go.”

He walks a hell of a lot faster than Robin does when he puts his mind to it. She’s out of breath keeping up with him, and then struggling for breath through the stuffy filter of her bandana, when they burst out into the parking lot.

It’s daylight this time, of course, or what remains of it. Robin doesn’t find that comforting. How is anything comforting, after what she’s seen?

Why is she almost more afraid of the Demogorgon than of freaking Vecna?

Maybe because the thing you’re not expecting is what scares you.

Lieutenant Colonel Sullivan is leaning over Steve’s car, talking to Nancy through the passenger-side window.

“Fuck,” Steve mutters through his own mask, summing up Robin’s feelings exactly. “Rob, don’t do anything. Don’t say anything.”

“What do I look like, a dingus?”

Steve doesn’t answer. He’s already squaring up like he’s an Army-man himself, all broader-than-last-year’s shoulders under his preppy little jacket.

(In a different moment, Robin would be wondering whether Nancy prefers preppy-jacket-Steve or camouflage-and-leather-Steve.)

“Excuse me, sir,” Steve says. “Is there a problem?”

Sullivan’s a shark. Robin can tell that at a glance. She can’t see how cold his eyes are, though, shaded by reflective aviator-style sunglasses. He says, voice as flat as a cornfield,

“Why don’t you tell me.”

“This is bullshit,” Nancy says, thrusting her head and shoulders out the window, since Sullivan is blocking her from opening the door entirely. “Steve, would you please tell him—”

“Now hold it right there, Miss,” Sullivan says. Miss sounds terribly disrespectful from most men, Robin finds, but especially this time. “These your loyal comrades, then? Funny, because you two happen to match a certain description my men gave me last night. As does this shiny little car.”

“I was on official business, sir,” Steve says, flashing his deputy star with admirable quickness—and speaking with an admirable ability to hang onto sir, which Robin is sure she’d have dropped immediately. “Making sure I complied with curfew.”

“Is that so.” Sullivan, apparently, doesn’t ask questions like they’re questions.

“Yes, sir.”

“This one’s fairly forthcoming,” Sullivan says, addressing the remark to Nancy. Nancy looks like she’s about to spit fire, but Sullivan continues before she can get a word in edgewise. “Say, Deputy. You know the name Byers?”

“I’ve heard it,” Steve answers, speaking more slowly this time.

“We’ve all heard it,” Nancy snaps. She’s trying to open the door now, basically ramming it into the side of Sullivan’s wool-trouser-clad leg. “The point is, the Byers moved to California last year, and everybody knows that, too—”

“Moved to California and then ran right back. See, a little birdie told me that this one here is dating a Byers boy,” Sullivan says. “Nancy Wheeler, my source said. Look for the china doll. Byers won’t be far behind.” He’s holding firm against the door. He’s not letting her out. Not until he’s made his point.

Robin clenches her fists.

“Well your sources are shit,” Steve says, dropping the sir this time. “Because she’s with me.”

Robin has a clear view of Nancy’s face for that, and it’s a sight to behold.

Sullivan just laughs. It’s not a pleasant sound.

“Should’ve guessed there’d be a twist like that,” he says. “Something fishy about you, Deputy. You and your shiny car and your girlfriends. I mean, who’s this one? Maybe all four of you got some dirty business going on.”

“A friend,” Robin says, stalking forward to take her place in the backseat. They’ve given this asshole enough to chew on, she figures, and she can see that Steve agrees. “Ever heard of ‘em?”

Sullivan doesn’t laugh this time. He taps the narrow bridge of his glasses. “Well, now. You three seem to be in a hurry,” he says. “Official business, I take it. Otherwise you wouldn’t be trying to exit this assigned evacuation area like you couldn’t miss tonight’s drive-in feature, right under the nose of the Officer in Charge.”

“We’re going to the hospital,” Steve says tightly, tossing his keys from hand to hand. “The other assigned evacuation area. Running errands for the police department.”

“We’re volunteers supervised by Nurse Henderson,” Robin shouts from behind Nancy’s headrest. She figures it’s time she did something useful. Steve just fell on the sword of being in love with Nancy to save her from association with Jonathan Byers, after all.

(Could work on a number of levels, if they weren’t in mortal peril.)

“You are certainly chockful of excuses,” Sullivan says. He slaps the roof of the car. “Tell me if you hear from the Byers, eh, Miss?”

Nancy says nothing.

“Any of you three.” The blank, glassy stare seems to consume all of them. Something inhuman about it, almost like he has no eyes. Almost like— “It’s like the Deputy said. I could use new sources.”

“So Carol Perkins is a bitch,” Robin says, when they’re safely out of the parking lot. Her voice is shakier than she hoped it would be. “That’s who must have told him.”

“No kidding,” Steve mutters. “Dammit, that was an unlucky hit.”

“I’m sorry,” Nancy says.

“Sorry? What for, Nance?”

“I shouldn’t have—” There’s a seatback between her and Robin, but Robin can see that Nancy’s slumped forward, elbows on her knees. Her voice comes out muffled, even though inside the car, they don’t need their bandanas. “Gone out alone. Brought Jonathan with me to the school. Rolled down the window for that asshole.”

“Hey—hey.” Steve reaches over and pats her shoulder. It’s a little jumpy, a little awkward, probably because he’s playing over in his head what he said to get Sullivan off their case. “Don’t worry about it. Now we know what he knows. What he wants to know.”

“And that’s good, I guess,” Robin interjects, unable to hold back any longer. “But like—I hate to say this, guys—they’re going to follow us, all the way back to HQ.”

“That’s the only reason he let us leave,” Nancy agrees. “So he could see what we’re really up to. We could go to the hospital, I guess, but it’s a long way around with the closures—and you’ve got to save fuel, Steve.”

“We’re not going to the hospital,” Steve says. “Better that Sullivan think we’re liars than to have him start leaning on the Sinclairs and Mrs. Henderson. They have to be able to look after Max without that bastard trying to make the place a trap.”

“Good point,” Robin says, but the rest of the day stretches out like a bleak gray cloud. An ash cloud, probably. “What do we do now, though? Where do we go?”

Steve grips the wheel with both hands, clearly making up his mind.

“My place.”

“But that’s even worse than the hospital—” Nancy begins, but Steve shakes his head.

“Not my parents’, Nance. My place. Here in town. We’ll consider it HQ 2.0.”

Chapter Text

“So this is it,” Steve says, feeling extremely lame in his capacity as host for the second time in as many days.

Maybe it’s the weight of being an only child that he’ll never quite shrug off. Maybe it’s the way that he can’t quite believe in himself the way Hopper seems to.

You’re what we’ve got, Hopper said, in a rapid-fire undertone. Byers can’t be out and about. Wheeler’s got voices playing in her head. The Buckley girl spooks too easily. It’s you, Harrington. It has to be you.

Of course, Steve said, because really, what other choice did he have?

What other choice would he want?

However it all shakes out, his apartment is about the farthest thing from his parents’ digs as can be imagined. Robin’s used to it, at least—to the rust-rimmed stovetop, the sagging couch that’s somewhere between vomit and Dijon in shade. Nancy isn’t.

But—

“It’s cute,” Nancy says, the ramrod-stiff line of her spine relaxing a bit. Her curls are a wild tangle, her bandana is limp around her throat. All the Nancys she’s ever been are thoroughly combined in Steve’s mind, somehow, as he looks at her now—Nancy with her pink-princess bedroom and her steely gaze, Nancy with her button nose and quick trigger-fingers.

Steve keeps thinking about kissing her, which isn’t helping his case.

(What’s his case again? Something about nobility, or restraint, or some shit like that—words that are as alien to him as the town split four ways is to everyone else.)

“Make yourselves at home,” he says, like Robin needs permission. She’s already rattling around in the cupboards, muttering about some of that crap mac ‘n cheese you swear by.

Nancy loiters by the sofa. She doesn’t sit down. Finally—

“Sullivan’s a nasty son of a bitch,” she says, low enough that it’s a conversation temporarily between her and him.

Like in the woods. Like—

“Yeah.” He tucks his own bandana in his pocket, considers telling Robin that the water probably isn’t running anymore and they’ll have to eat cold vegetables out of cans. An end-of-the-world feast. “Yeah, he is.”

“Do you think there’s more to him than just…that?” Nancy’s brow is furrowed: her signature thinking face. “Like, he’s already zeroed in on Eleven…the Byers…us. It’s like someone’s feeding him intel, or like…”

“Or like he had an upper hand already,” Robin says, coming to rejoin them with her fox-sharp ears, but alas, no edible discoveries. “He’s not a supernatural being, Nance, if that’s what you’re after. He’s just a government tyrant.”

“Can we be sure?”

That’s why Nancy wanted to go back to the car, after all, because she couldn’t be sure. The slow boil of confusion that gave Sullivan an opening to be a goddamn menace is, as most things are, on Steve. Steve wasn’t quite thinking straight—or at least not thinking organized, thrown by Carol’s tired routine of bitchery, by the still-distracting pain in his stomach. He didn’t watch Nancy’s six, so to speak. He didn’t make sure that they had a plan that accounted for everyone, all at once.

Dustin isn’t even here, now.

Safety isn’t exactly your specialty.

“It would be a weirdly bureaucratic meatsuit for Vecna’s purposes,” he says now, pulling himself back from a reverie on all his fuck-ups. “If that’s what you’re getting at.”

“Amazed you know the word bureaucratic,” Robin muses.

“Hey! I learned it from you.” He shrugs, conscious of the weight of Nancy’s eyes on him more than anything else. “We didn’t come back here to lose our shit. Not before we’ve eaten and slept, at least.”

Host, or mother hen? It doesn’t matter.

“Sleep?” Nancy asks. “It’s barely noon.”

“You can tell?” he deadpans. “Listen, I don’t know about you, but I didn’t get a lot of hours last night. We should rest while we can. Give Sullivan absolutely zilch to gather intel on.”

“I bet he’s got goons outside on the corner right now,” Robin intones, and she’s half-joking, but they all glance towards the window, where gloomy light filters through the crooked blinds.

“We’re not running on a normal schedule, is my point,” Steve says. “So let’s have…lunch, or whatever, and then an afternoon nap. It’ll be like being back in kindergarten, right?”

“Oh, yeah,” Nancy says, rolling her eyes. “Remember those little roll-out sleep mats? I hated them. I always wanted to stay up and keep reading. Also, the floor was still so hard.”

“That’s because you’ve got poky bones,” Steve says, and hey, if he’s fondly recollecting the days when those poky bones fit together with his, elbows and ribs, what of it?

“Sure do,” Nancy murmurs.

They manage a slightly better meal than canned vegetables. There’s most of a loaf of sliced bread that’s only halfway stale, and plenty of peanut butter. The kind of food that’ll keep you alive. Of course, that’s what they kept saying to Eddie, and look how that turned out.

Safety isn’t exactly—

“We should radio to Joyce,” Nancy points out. “I mean—not to Joyce directly, but—”

“Argyle,” Robin says, around a mouthful of sandwich. “Does Sullivan know who Argyle is?”

Steve doesn’t want to have a walkie-talkie chat with Jonathan’s stoner friend. Not that Argyle is a bad dude, it’s just—less is more, with these things.

“I have a better idea,” he says.

Lucas, do you copy?

This is Lucas. Over.

It’s Steve. We hit a roadblock. We’ll stop by tomorrow. Me and Nancy and Robin. Over.

Lucas is a smart kid. He doesn’t ask questions on what may be a compromised frequency. Copy that. Over and out.

“Good,” Nancy breathes. “That way—anyone listening in will know we’re OK.”

She’s probably thinking about Jonathan. And why shouldn’t she? Nancy has a lot of room in her heart for love. She can care about Steve—and he knows she does—while staying faithful to the person who gave her a reason to live in the first place.

Way back in ’83. Way back before Steve even understood, much less appreciated, what exactly he was fucking up.

It used to be a hell of a lot easier to be ignorant. Ignorant and selfish.

“That’s done, then,” he says. “Next stop on this crazy train is sleep. You hear me, Buckley? I can see you trying to bug your eyes out, and I’m telling you, it’s not gonna work. You take first nap, and I’ll take first watch.”

“See the thing is…” Robin drawls. “It was all a ploy. I wanted you to take first watch. I’ll take the couch.”

This is familiar, in that Robin has slept over more times than Steve can count, usually when they’ve eaten a truckload of popcorn and drifted off in the middle of one of her infamous two-VHS recommendations.

(Steve is fairly certain that Family Video didn’t make it out of the rubble. That’s the kind of realization they’ll have to live with now, if they live at all.)

“Do you have an extra sleeping bag, or something?” Nancy asks, not even bothering to negotiate for a watch. Now that they’ve eaten and settled a little from the morning’s adrenaline rush, her eyelids are drooping shut, and her shoulders are hunched forward like she’s cold. Nancy always gets cold when she’s tired.

“No need,” he says. “Take the bed.” Hopefully that’s not too awkward of an offer.

“And you’ll wake me up when it’s your turn?” Nancy prompts. Robin has drifted off to arrange the couch cushions to her liking.

“What?”

“You said you didn’t get enough sleep last night. If this is our only chance at it, you need it too.”

“Oh—” He’s nonplussed, all of a sudden. “I’ll take the rug. Something. Maybe I’ll kick Robin off the couch once she’s had a sufficient amount of shut-eye.” He doesn’t know why he’s talking so much, filling the little spaces between them with useless words half-promises, insinuations. It was supposed to be easier to talk to Nancy once they made it through, not harder.

Maybe it was just easier when he thought he was going to die.

“No. We’ll switch when it’s my turn for watch,” Nancy says, dusting the crumbs off her fingers with the air of someone who will brook no further argument. “OK. Who knows what the actual night will bring. See you in an hour, Steve.”

Nancy probably doesn’t even need a clock to set her sleep schedule.

That, or Nancy doesn’t think she can really sleep.

That his apartment didn’t look anything like his childhood home was actually one of the reasons Steve liked the place from the first day he saw it. Hell, it didn’t look like somewhere his parents would so much as set foot in, if they had their druthers. His mom certainly hadn’t enjoyed her brief ventures upstairs in the early days of Steve’s tenancy. She’d wrinkled her perfectly straight nose and asked him if he was sure he wouldn’t reconsider a private SAT tutor.

You don’t have to do this, was the clear underlying message. There’s a way out, with money.

In the end, she just invited him over for dinners when his dad was away.

It has never been totally quiet here—not like the house in the woods, where silence settled like a vampire’s cape. Here, the hot-water heater and the pipes crackled in the wintertime—fans whirred in the summer.

Steve found it easier to sleep with a little noise, even if it was a mechanical hum.

Right now, though, he isn’t supposed to be sleeping. He’s supposed to be watching, and he is, but only an eerie, sporadic silence keeps him company—the kind that belongs to a town torn apart. Occasionally, the silence will be broken by Robin stirring in her sleep—for once, she isn’t snoring, dammit—but mostly, the only signs of life are occasional distant crashes, rumbles, and weird primordial groaning that Steve imagines is probably from splintering timbers but might also be from demo-somethings.

He was honestly less freaked when he was trekking through the Upside Down with an axe on his back.

Again, it’s easier when you’re about to d—

The door to the bedroom whines open, and Steve scrambles to his feet. It’s been well less than an hour since Nancy went to lay down, and he’s just about ready to tell her so when he realizes that Nancy isn’t walking out of the room.

She’s crawling.

Hands clawed in front of her, hips and knees dragging slowly behind. She’s moving like a puppet with half its strings snapped. Her hair hangs in her face, so he can’t see her eyes. It makes her seem—inhuman.

Steve tries to shout her name, but he can’t even get it out of his throat. The wind’s been knocked out of him as much as it ever was on the basketball court.

Maybe he’s insane for hurling himself towards her, instead of running away, but it’s not even a choice. She’s—

Nancy. All the Nancys she’s ever been.

He grabs her by the arms, hauls her upright. She collapses against him, gasping, and when she blinks up at him through her sweat-matted bangs, her eyes are her own: wide and very blue.

“Nance?” he croaks, able to manage a word at last.

She shakes her head, lips sealed shut.

He hugs her. He doesn’t know what else to do. Her elbows dig into his ribs, because she has her arms wrapped around herself instead of around him. She hides her face in his shoulder.

They haven’t made enough noise to wake Robin. It isn’t like there’s a right move right now but Steve figures it’s better to figure out what the hell is going on without Robin hearing the first-draft version.

When he leads Nancy back into his room and shuts the door, she doesn’t fight.

She just sits down on the edge of the bed, hands clamped on her knees.

Steve sits next to her.

“You’re…here, right?” he asks. “You’re not—”

“I’m here,” she whispers. “I’m—I was just—I was dreaming.”

He doesn’t want to know what she was dreaming about, not really, not in the simple, stupid core of his heart that just wants to love her forever and get away from all of this shit.

But he has to ask.

“Was it…him?”

She nods. Then she slumps forward and buries her face in her hands.

She held him when he was puking his sensitive guts out. Cradled him, practically. He does the same now—puts one arm around her, then the other, not letting go while she cries.

“We’re gonna beat this,” he says, lips against her tangled hair. It’s a pretty big promise, but one he intends to keep—against Vecna, and Sullivan, and whatever crawls out of the rift, whatever it takes. “Every last nightmare. I swear.”

“I don’t remember,” she hiccups miserably, so garbled that he doesn’t really hear until she repeats—“I don’t remember—he won’t let me.”

A puppet with half its strings snapped.

Steve’s scared, sure. He’s also pissed.

“Then forget him,” he says. “Seriously, Nance. Don’t let that asshole twist you up—it’s all a game. He’s not going to show you anything that helps us. He’s only going to try and scare you.”

“Well, shit,” Nancy says, still pretty watery. “He wins this round. I’m pretty damn scared.”

“Yeah, me too.”

She sniffs. Nestles a little more comfortably against him, Steve can’t help but notice. “Really? You never seem scared.”

He’s gob-smacked. “Are you—how many times have I screamed my head off in front of you?”

“Girlier than me and Robin combined,” Nancy agrees, sneaking one hand from his hold to dab at her eyes. “But that’s not the point. That’s like—adrenaline, and all that bullshit. You never seem scared underneath.”

“It’s because I bashed my head as a baby, remember?”

She huffs a little laugh. “Yeah. About that…Steve…”

He hasn’t heard that voice since he was telling her his dream.

(Maybe they’re always just about to die.)

“Yeah?”

Nancy draws her hand lightly over his cheek, turning his face towards hers.

Nancy kisses him, soft and sure.

Chapter Text

Every time you shut your eyes, you see Eddie’s eyes. Glassy, unblinking. You don’t know why some hell-creature didn’t take you too, since you were an easy target—your leg gone to shit and all. You don’t know why it ended up like this, Eddie going from Dungeon Master to dead in a week flat.

You hate this town.

You hate the hopes you used to have. 

Steve left with the girls, but you’re not going. Mike can’t exactly head back to Eleven just yet without raising questions, and since Sullivan started sniffing around about the Byers, it seems like even Steve will have to take the long way home. If he’s smart, you mentally add, and then you try to figure out why. You’ve wanted to bite his head off this whole time, since—

Glassy. Unblinking. Not coming back.

“Dustin? You’re still here?” To be Mike Wheeler is to never leave a question unasked.

You swallow hard, not wanting Mike to see you on the verge of crying. Mike wasn’t even here. It’s like months of time have passed between you, since you were on one side in the basketball-or-campaign argument and Lucas was on the other.

He even saw Susie in that week from another dimension, when you haven’t seen her in ages. Nothing makes sense. Life itself has been fractured in four directions.

“Yeah,” you say. “Someone with brains needs to be stationed in every HQ.”

He rolls his eyes, mutters asshole, but you can tell he’s relieved you’re sticking around, which makes you feel a bit better about things for a second. He can’t have had a great time, away from Eleven after he just got her back, stuck with his parents and Holly, who don’t know shit about shit.

“We’re going to need to get a lot smarter than Steve and all them,” Mike says, in an undertone, as you follow him in the direction of the current Wheeler camp. “Hopper’s barely able to get away from that Sullivan guy for five minutes.”

“Steve talked to him.”

“OK, maybe Harrington isn’t completely worthless.”

It’s your job to defend Steve—has been for years now. Why won’t the words come?

Mike casts a quizzical glance back at you, like he’s noticed the missed cue. He doesn’t say anything more about Steve, though. “I can’t stand being away from her,” he says, half to himself. “But someone’s got to protect against him. I figure we can handle the human enemies. They won’t start shooting in a crowd—yet.”

You’re still processing the info you’ve heard from Mike and Will about the total destruction of the Byers home. Two government goons, not the bad sort, shot and killed. One of them died in Argyle’s pizza van.

Then you think of Eddie again, and the dark horrors, and the way you haven’t even seen Vecna, but you know what he can do. Max, nearly lifeless; a fate almost worse than death.

“We can handle the humans,” you say, and find a place next to Holly to take your share of the peanut butter sandwiches.

A couple of hours later, you’re not so confident. You haven’t had more face-time with Hopper than the blink of an eye, during which you tipped your hat at him to give him a sort of all-clear. Whatever may be said for the status of communications, however, you are sure he wouldn’t have authorized the plan you cooked up in the meantime.

It started like this: after enough consultation to fight about who went where, Mike pulled a fire alarm on one side of the gym. Conveniently (intentionally), it was the side where the Army had stockpiled equipment, a fact that manages to draw the rats out of their trap. Just as you expected, Sullivan’s leading the charge to determine who in the hell is endangering his precious resources by means of the finicky sprinkler system, and Hopper is trailing him, moving his big hands in what are probably supposed to conciliatory motions.

You don’t have time to confirm whether or not Mike escaped the scene of the crime. You’re up to bat (or whatever stupid sports metaphor suits), so you high-tail it to the janitor-closet-turned Secret Meeting Room and make the most of your five minutes of infamy.

Sullivan didn’t bring a lot of shit with him. There’s a dogeared file on the card-table desk. You open it to find pictures of Chrissy…Patrick…that Fred kid who used to trail Nancy around. You swallow hard, trying not to picture Eddie again. At least he didn’t die like that, you could tell yourself, but what good would it do?

Dead is dead is dead.

Outside, in only a few minutes, the alarm has been…resolved. Interesting. When the teachers used to scare you about how inevitable wrath and ruin would erupt if anybody futzed with the system, you imagined setting off a bell that would ring forever.

Maybe there's a high enough concentration of firemen and janitors and plumbers in the gym to know what to do right away, or maybe Sullivan just found the right thing to smash.

You flip another page of the file. Notes, names. Too much about Dr. Brenner and the lab and Eleven, which creeps you out but isn’t a surprise. That’s why he’s here, after all. Laying blame at all the wrong doors.

What’s weird—and you don’t have time to get distracted, you really don’t, but it’s the end of the world and you’re pretty friggin’ tired—is how much this closet is the same as it was when you and Mike and Lucas snuck off to do a quick campaign in here, before Hellfire properly adopted you.

The same musty smell. The little tray of rat poison on the floor. The dirty mopheads tangling above the empty bins in the corner.

Other than the files and the Army comms equipment—mostly some military-grade scanners and a few hand-held radios, the leftovers from the main stronghold in Glick's classroom—this could be a pocket of reality before.

There are no windows to look out of and see how the world has changed.

Sullivan barks an order over the loudspeaker. Apparently the sprinkler system wasn't activated. That's a relief—you don't need everyone mad as hell because they're all wet—but you also remember that he’s coming back.

Shit, you bark at yourself, too paranoid to mutter. You turn another page, but it’s just a map.

Wait. Not just a map. It’s a map with your name on it. All your names. Henderson. Sinclair. Byers. Wheeler.

Harrington.

Sullivan has a map with Steve’s house marked on it.

You barely have time to consider what this means for El—for Will—for everyone when low, angry voices and rapidly approaching footsteps send chills over your whole body. You found something out, yeah, but then you were supposed to abort mission.

You and your bum leg are about to fail to stick another landing.

There are two sizable garbage cans in the corner, and you drag your sorry (half-lame) ass behind them just as the door swings open, letting in an arc of light.

“Little fuckers pulling pranks,” a seemingly junior soldier says. “That’s all it is, sir.”

Sullivan waits a minute to answer. You think he’s looking at the file, and you have never tried to breathe more quietly in your life. The bins smell pretty rank, anyway, even grading on the curve of gym-full-of-people-who-haven’t-showered-in-days. Maybe it would be better not to breathe.

(Maybe the sprinkler system would have done them some good.)

You flipped the file closed, but is it exactly as he left it?

“We’ll see,” Sullivan says at last. You can’t see, but you wonder if he’s wearing his stupid sunglasses even in the dim light. There’s a bare yellow bulb swinging overhead, nothing more.

Thank goodness for shadows, as far as you’re concerned.

The scanner crackles to life.

North highway barrier, in position. Check-in confirmed.

You check your watch, and it’s on the hour. Makes sense that Sullivan has a system going especially since one of his precious sentries became Demogorgon dog-chow less than twenty-four hours ago.

There wasn’t anything about the Demogorgon in the file. There must be a lot that Sullivan doesn’t know.

Of course, dumbass. All the shit that would show him how El isn’t the real enemy.

Maybe he wouldn’t believe the proof even if he saw it. Some people are like that.

You gulp another quiet, painful lungful of rancid air.

“That’s everybody,” says the junior soldier. “Sir.” He keeps tacking on sir like it’s an afterthought.

“No, it’s not,” Sullivan answers. “The rear guard at the hospital is two minutes late.” A rattle: he must be picking up a mic.

You wonder if Hopper has figured out what the hell is going on. Maybe he’s chewing Mike out at this very moment. Maybe Mike is explaining that Dustin is trapped in there with him.

“Hospital position two,” Sullivan growls. “Report for check-in.”

A beat.

“Hospital position two, report for check-in.”

Nothing.

The door bursts open again, and Hopper says,

“Found your culprit, Sullivan. Some five-year-old turned a storage tub over and climbed up. Big fan of the color red.”

It’s not a very plausible story. Maybe Mike came up with it. Mike, for all his Dungeon Master cred, is sometimes sorely lacking in the imagination department.

“That so?” Sullivan retorts. He sounds distracted. The radio is still ominously silent. “Well, slap some handcuffs on ‘em, Chief. You just got promoted.”

Hopper scoffs, then seems to recover himself. He’s trying to play nice with the snake in the grass, and you can’t exactly blame him for it. The name of the game is bigger problems, we’ve all got bigger problems. “Promoted?” Hop asks, in his politest tone.

“I’m leaving you in charge for a few hours,” Sullivan says, like it was his fucking privilege to give that to anybody, much less Hawkins’ Chief of Police. You shake your head, which is woozy from all the breathing-not-breathing. The nerve of some people.

“You losing interest in our situation so soon?” Hopper asks, probably doing his best not to sound hopeful.

“Far from it.” Sullivan’s voice is as flat as ever. “It’s just that I have somewhere to be.”

Chapter Text

Kissing Steve feels like home. Nancy has feared, sometimes, just how true her suspicions would prove to be on that score. In the long, lonely months since the California move, she’s had to look at all of it in the rearview mirror: Jonathan’s cool gaze and deliberate, precise hands—Steve’s babbling, eager, unchanging warmth.

(Seasons shifting and the bricks of the house on Maple Street staying sturdily, reliably the same. Danger coming and going, nightmares growing and deepening, Nancy a selfish girl becoming a woman in search of herself.)

Jonathan’s been so very, very gone. Meanwhile, Steve has never, not once, been a jerk to her since the breakup. He’s never, not once, been as far as he should be from her mind.

All of this has burned brighter and clearer since they were thrown together by Chrissy’s murder, in the old Creel house, down the depths of Lover’s Lake. All of this has been driving Nancy closer, closer, closer to this moment.

You’re there. You’ve always been—

Her mind is muddy and raw, confused and frightened from whatever it is that Vecna won’t let her remember. Kissing Steve dispels that confusion. His stubble-rough cheek is hot against her hand. His lips are tender…familiar. He opens his mouth under hers, always ready to press on, press forward.

Always ready for her.

Which is why it’s such a surprise when Steve’s the one to pull away, his hands releasing their bracing grip on her shoulders and dropping to lace through hers again.

There’s a finality to the gesture that brings all of Nancy’s fears rushing back.

“What…” She sounds stupid. Lost. Alone in a nightmare that never lets you go. “What’s wrong?”

His voice is a low rasp. “It’s not the time,” he says.

Somewhere, a clock is always ticking.

“Because of Jonathan?” How unfair it is that Jonathan gets to come between them at this moment, when all he’s ever done is drag his feet.

(She sees that now.)

“Not really,” Steve says, sounding a little embarrassed. Even in the dark, his face is wide-open—she can read his doubts, his hopes, but they flicker away a second later, leaving only resolve. “I mean—yeah, I guess—you guys are still together, right?”

“Hardly,” Nancy says, bitter and desperate. She gave it one last shot, didn’t she? She gives everything one last shot. “But I get it. You don’t want to be the other guy this time.”

“Nance…I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to.” She’s escaping him, if not the moment, pushing herself off the bed, stumbling across the room that she’s never had a chance to know. All the hours spent in Steve’s family home, eerily untouched by the change in everything…that was haunting, but this could have been comforting.

Was comforting, until she closed her eyes and was lost to darkness.

(Until Steve’s lips left hers.)

“I don’t want to hurt you,” says Steve.

The hurt’s all around, can’t he see that? The hurt is crawling out of the pit of her nightmares, clawing at the doors of her mind.

Nancy doesn’t know that she’s falling until the floor is under her knees and Steve is in front of her, hazy yet solid at the same time, hands wrapped around her elbows.

Again. He’s holding her up, holding her back from the cliff’s edge again.

It’s déjà vu. The last three years of her life are forever on repeat, in one cruel way or another.

Nancy.

“Vision,” she croaks desperately, but Steve must not understand, because he isn’t letting her go. He isn’t putting as much distance between himself and her as he can, to try and to block the flow of outside information from reaching Vecna.

“Tell me what you see,” comes Steve’s voice, from very far away although his touch is still warm. He does understand, then; he’s just making a sacrifice. Typical Steve.

There are terrible truths revealed through fighting a monster inside your own mind, and one of them is that it changes you every time. Nancy’s more aware of that than anything—as angry as she is afraid, as violated as she is exhausted. This time, Nancy knows she needs to remember.

The only word she can say will have to be enough:

“Max.”

Robin springs into action the second they exit Steve’s bedroom door, and if Nancy was more herself, she’d probably be grateful that Robin doesn’t ask why they were in Steve’s bedroom together. That’s not the kind of thing that matters, while Nancy is catching her breath like she’s snatched her life back from the jaws of the beast—except shit, it still matters.

She’s still thinking about the kiss, even while trying to clear Vecna out of her head and keep what he showed her in it.

She’s still wanting more.

“Max,” Steve urges. “You said Max—we needed to see Max. Like, right now? The hospital’s in danger?”

It’s an understatement, seeing how all of Hawkins is in danger, but even the gates of hell don’t equal the terror and heartbreak of seeing Max, upright but not truly alive, moving like a puppet, eyes glowing blue.

Say it, Nancy orders herself. Tell them what you saw.

“Yeah,” she replies, scraping at what little remains of the chipped varnish on her nails. “The hospital.”

Where’s the rest of the truth?

Coward. You’re a coward.

… I would like very much to show you where I am going.

I want you to tell Eleven. I want you to tell her everything you see…

Nancy keeps it together, barely. Nancy doesn’t scream at the voices in her head to shut up.

“Bandanas, check. Axe and nail-bat, check,” Robin chirps. “Hell, might as well bring the peanut butter too, eh?”

Robin’s the queen of deflection, of course, and there might have been a time when Steve could be called the king—but he’s all directness now, staring Nancy down with the same soft heartbreak in his eyes that has haunted her since ’84.

You can’t save me, Nancy thinks, and there. That’s the truth. That—not Jonathan—is why the kiss couldn’t last.

She just didn’t expect Steve to be the one to recognize that first. The one to take it as a sign.

Nancy wants what she can’t have. Nancy doesn’t want to understand herself anymore. She marched into the Upside Down to take revenge, and it took something from her instead.

The whole truth is that none of them can be sure yet how much of Nancy survived.

Steve doesn’t hold her hand in the car this time. (No reason for her to expect it.) The roads are getting worse, and he needs both a firm grip on the wheel—veering around potholes, trying not to gun his engine too much. Robin tells Nancy, as a way of keeping the conversation light and easy, that they stole some of her dad’s gasoline.

“Uh, that’s great,” is all Nancy can give her. She’s sick with sadness—fear—rage. Strange how those powerhouse emotions can combine with such force that they leave you feeling…numb.

“I swear I’m going as fast as I can,” Steve observes, like anyone was criticizing him. “It’s just that we still want to keep the Army off our tail, if possible.”

Every time Nancy opens her mouth to tell them everything, she can’t force it out. Since it’s absolutely exhausting to parse who’s being betrayed by her silence, she focuses on the spitting, snowing sky, the torn streets, the dying town around them.

Robin’s parents are at the hospital. So are the Sinclairs—so is Claudia Henderson. And Max, or what’s left of Max, is there too.

Max, eyes glowing blue—

Maybe Nancy can justify her secret-keeping by telling herself that it was a warning—not reality. Not yet.

She presses her hands together, pinning them between her knees.

Again, Steve says,

“I’m going as fast as I can.”

The hospital isn’t exactly outside of Hawkins proper—not if you were looking at a map—but it’s far enough from the yawning gates converging on the town square to still bear some resemblance to normalcy. The colors are wrong, of course. The woods behind the back parking lot are black and gloomy. If Nancy squints, though, she can imagine she’s staring at a sepia-toned photograph, nothing more.

Maybe everyone inside the hospital, inside the school, is trying to do the same thing. They know so little; maybe that gives them hope.

It’s a false hope. Everyone is unprepared for so many possibilities. What happens when the gates split wider? What happens when more monsters emerge?

What happens when you don’t tell them everything you know?

It’s like the words are trapped in Nancy’s throat under strangling vines.

“Steve,” she begins, but her voice is drowned out by the radio handset shrilling in the backseat.

“Steve, do you copy?”

It’s Dustin.

Robin’s on it at once, capable at this point of communicating telepathically with Steve, who can’t reach the radio. Wholesome telepathy, that’s Robin. No grinning black pit of insanity, blue-eye-shining, death-rattle voice.

“Buckley here,” Robin chirps. “We’re checking in with your mom.”

Smart, Steve mouths. Nancy has to agree, because, while it sounds benign and non-specific, it actually tells Dustin exactly where they’re headed.

“Aw, shit,” comes Dustin’s response. “So is the not-so-full-bird.”

Maybe if Dustin was here, Nancy would be more distracted from all of Vecna’s crap because she’d be so damn confused. Robin voices that confusion.

“The…what?”

Steve snaps his fingers. He’s found a parking space, incidentally, even though it’s technically an illegal one. The lot is jammed with cars of every make and model. Half of Hawkins was supposed to end up here, after all, for better or worse. “Not-so-full-bird, so like, a full bird is a colonel, and a half bird—”

“Sullivan,” Nancy murmurs, and Robin yelps.

“How do you know this shit, Harrington?”

Steve shrugs. “Who cares? Point is, Sullivan’s on his way. We need to be quick. Nance, what are we doing here again? Like, beyond general…badness involving Max?”

They trust her. They trust her too much.

They cannot understand you. Not like I can.

Shut the hell up, Nancy answers, and then aloud,

“I don’t know. He…he showed me Max, in danger. It didn’t seem like something we could risk.”

“Right, of course not.” Steve isn’t giving up easy, though. “But like—what kind of danger? Are we bringing the bat? Are we telling Lucas and his family to run for cover?”

“It wasn’t like that. It was like…” She pushes through the vines that don’t exist, focused on Steve and his wide eyes and his gentle mouth. “Like he was…controlling her.” That’s as close as she can bring herself to saying it.

Is that really what you saw, Nancy? What do you think I see?

“Message received?” Dustin demands impatiently.

“Copy that, your majesty,” Robin answers. “Over and out.”

Nancy ties on her bandana, resists the urge to fix Steve’s even though he’s just an arm’s length away. He doesn’t want you touching him, she berates herself, even though she knows that’s way too harsh of an assessment.

Why can’t she be the Nancy who was willing to tear every board of bitter memory down if it meant escaping Vecna’s hold? Why can’t she be the Nancy blasting a demon full of buckshot?

Why does she want to be those Nancys—the ones in the grip of unveiled terror, the ones on the verge of death?

“Nance?”

“What?”

“Doors’ opening,” Steve says. Above his bandana, his stare is concerned, his brows drawn together. “Wanted to make sure your mask is A-OK.”

“Yup.”

Robin’s quiet.

The air temperature has started changing weirdly. That’s something Nancy notices every time she goes outside. Some moments there’s a blast of brimstone heat; other times it feels as cold and drafty as the Upside Down.

Does the rest of the world know what’s happening in Hawkins? Does the rest of the world, outside some crazed Army vigilantes, even care?

“Do we just march in the front door like last time?” Robin asks. “Or is that like…calling undue attention ourselves?”

There’s no time to answer her, because Argyle’s pizza van screeches into the lot at that very moment, effectively putting all questions of calling undue attention to rest.

“What the…” Steve doesn’t even finish the sentence.

Inside Nancy’s head, Vecna is mercifully silent, but that doesn’t mean she can sort her thoughts as efficiently as she needs to. The pizza van doesn’t belong here (doesn’t really belong anywhere) and that’s because the Byers…because El…because Sullivan—

Jonathan and Joyce are the first out. Then Will, then—shit, they really have brought El with them.

“Have you all lost your minds?” Nancy snaps, bounding across the worn asphalt. “What are you doing here?”

“It’s OK,” Joyce says, waving her hands. As usual, in times of crisis, Joyce is more convicted than immediately convincing. “In and out. We’ll be in and out. I called Claudia, explained that we just need a minute—”

“We don’t have a minute!” Nancy says. “The guy who wants all of you dead? Dustin radioed, he’s on his way right now. None of you are safe, and El—he’ll kill you on sight.”

“She had a vision,” Jonathan and Will say at the same time.

“No shrooms needed,” Argyle hollers from the front seat. He’s the only one who hasn’t gotten out of the car.

“What?” Robin says. “Hold on, Sullivan aside, that’s so weird, because Nancy…”

“I really don’t think we can afford to put Sullivan aside right now,” Steve says.

“I hate to agree with Harrington,” mutters Jonathan, “But I think he has a point.”

“This vision was serious,” Joyce retorts. “And I’ll take that goon out myself if I have to. Nancy, we’ve got this under control. Kids before monsters, monsters before asshole men.”

All the fight’s gone out of Nancy. Suddenly it doesn’t matter that Sullivan’s guards are patrolling the hospital as well as every other road, with the man himself about to make an appearance. It doesn’t matter that Hopper gave strict orders, that Joyce seemed to understand them, that Steve’s house was supposed to be safe and secure, that the Byers and El were supposed to wait there.

It doesn’t matter, what Nancy thought…only what she dreamed.

“What…” she faces El, unable to escape that soul-deep gaze. “What did you see?”

“Max,” El says. “I saw Max become…him.”

Steve and Robin could take Nancy to task right then and there for not telling them everything, but they don’t. Robin just seems befuddled, which is fair, and Steve…

Steve, who shook Nancy out of not one but two visions—Steve is concerned.

Concerned Steve has gotten a lot subtler over the last week (the last few years), and so he merely keeps close by her side as they head into the hospital, instead of bombarding her with well-meaning questions.

As a group, they don’t even make it through the double-entrance. They can all see that the place is a lot busier than it was last time, which is extremely inconvenient as far as the Byers are concerned. Bandanas simply aren’t going to cut it; there’s a terse whisper-fight between Steve and Jonathan and Joyce, which leads to Joyce (but not Jonathan) agreeing that El will go with Steve and Robin and Nancy. Joyce and Will will leave with Argyle, since the van’s a dead giveaway to Sullivan (and Argyle can’t be trusted to defend himself alone). Jonathan will stand as lookout until the visiting party is finished checking in on Max.

Steve swears his Beemer can fit two extra passengers for the ride back. And—

“We’ll keep her safe,” he promises Joyce, who’s wringing her hands over about a dozen different flaws in their plan.

Again, his eyes cut to Nancy.

Again, Nancy doesn’t deserve his loyalty.

How right you are, Nancy. You don’t deserve it.

El, thanks to being…supernaturally gifted, is capable of eyes-on-the-back-of-your-head scrutiny, even though she’s trailing well behind Nancy and has a hood pulled over her face.

What did you see, exactly? Can I look?

Shit. So maybe it’s a bit more than eyes.

No, Nancy answers. Please. As kindly as she can—Get out of my head.

El obeys; everything goes still, like a rock creating ripples in a pond, only played in reverse.

Despite the crowd, there’s no mad hubbub, no signs of violence. The only suspicious thing they observe is that some of the hospital security are huddled together, consulting with a guy in a military uniform whom El immediately ducks away from, tucking herself between Steve and Robin. Nancy doesn’t look directly at her, or at anybody.

Nancy feels as if she’s about to cry.

They take one of the side-tower stairs to travel between floors. The steps echo like distant thunder beneath their feet. Sounds are strangely warped, now, even indoors. The air is growing thinner, or the air is closing in heavily enough to choke them. It’s difficult to tell which it is. It’s difficult to forget about the vines.

(The hallway to Max’s room…is there a bluish tinge to the overhead fluorescents, or is it just the contrast to the yellow stairwell light?)

“Seems pretty…lowkey,” Steve murmurs.

“He’s not here,” says El softly.

“Nance?” Robin asks, but even that, just her name, isn’t a question Nancy can answer.

When they knock on the narrow-windowed door, Nancy has a flashback: visiting Mrs. Driscoll, flowers in her clammy hands, believing that she was about to uncover something she could face—solve—defeat. She’s known hell in this hospital, more than once.

Why hasn’t that been fresh in her mind every time she’s come here? Did El see all that terror when she looked inside last time?

Is Nancy losing everything that made her who she is?

(But no. He knew to show her Barb. The pool. The deepest guilt.)

(That’s who you are.)

Mr. Sinclair opens the door.

“Hey,” Robin says, because Steve is seemingly distracted again—oh, right. He’s looking at Nancy.

Shit. Shit, shit, shit.

“We just stopped by because…with everything going on, and volunteering at the school, we’ve heard some pretty freaky rumors and we wanted to check in on you all. And Max.”

“Yup,” says Steve.

“Of course,” Mr. Sinclair says, charmed by Robin’s, well, charm. “Come right in. She’s peaceful. At least, we hope that’s all she’s feeling.”

He drops his voice a little lower for that last part, like he’s trying to protect Lucas and Erica, who are sitting side-by-side in chairs next to Max’s bed.

Nancy doubts that there’s much, at this point, he can protect them from.

Still, what she and El saw hasn’t yet come true. A warning, not reality. Max hasn’t moved at all, it seems, since the last time they saw her. Her ruined eyes are closed. Her broken limbs remain immobile in their thick casts.

“I don’t understand,” El murmurs. “How it could be real.”

Nancy says, “Maybe it’s not.”

Hope? False hope?

The conversation doesn’t proceed further, since they’re too busy exchanging hugs and coded messages about the state of everything with Lucas and Erica. It’s Steve, unsurprisingly, who has the wherewithal to ask Mr. Sinclair if they’ve had any further encroachment from the soldiers. Crawling all over the school, Steve explains helpfully, as casually as if he’s discussing the weather.

Mr. Sinclair shakes his head. “Minimal…minimal I would say.” He retells the story of Sullivan’s arrival, assuming they haven’t heard it, and says the man hasn’t been by again. “There’s sentries posted outside though,” he says. “Not sure what they’re guarding us against, at least with guns. This mess doesn’t seem like it makes much to shoot at.”

Nancy suppresses a humorless laugh. You’d be surprised.

“That’s great,” Steve says. “I mean, nothing’s really great, is it? Heck of a mess we’ve landed ourselves in. But, uh, we’re glad to see you’re all hanging in there.” He fist-bumps Lucas affectionately, and raises his eyebrows in Nancy and Robin’s direction.

“We all good here? I bet Mrs. Henderson can get us those credentials on our way out.”

“Credentials?” Mr. Sinclair asks.

“We’re doing some volunteer nurse work at the school,” Robin explains. She’s really on her game today, and thank God, because Nancy can’t speak a sentence straight to save her life, apparently. “Helps to be all, you know, official.”

Back down the hall. El is silent, head down. Nancy’s beside her, and think she hears a sniff.

“El?”

El looks up at her without speaking. There are tears running down her face.

“Still nothing,” she whispers. “Inside. Not him…but not Max. Just—nothing.”

El deserves a better friend than Nancy (hell, who doesn’t), but Nancy’s all she’s got right now. Steve and Robin are walking shoulder-to-shoulder ahead, talking in low voices, so Nancy reaches over and squeezes El’s hand.

For a moment she feels a flicker of strength, something knitting her together, that she didn’t sense in any of the nightmares she keeps trying to untangle.

There’s an answer in El, in Steve, in Robin and the rest of them. Nancy just doesn’t know if she’s able to reach it on her own.

“El,” she says, very quietly, still holding the younger girl’s hand like she’s walking Holly through the mall. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to shut you out before, I just…”

Then they hear it. Even though it’s well beyond the hospital walls, it’s unmistakable—unforgettable—and much too close for comfort, since it’s coming to them at all.

A guttural, yelping howl. Not crying at the moon like a wolf, but signaling a pack that’s hungry for blood.

Demodog.

“Demodog,” Steve hisses, spinning on his heel. “Fuck, we—”

Another howl follows, much too quickly. Another, another, another. Answering—or maybe just rising together like a wave since the need for stealth is gone.

The vision wasn’t a warning, after all.

It was a trap.

I want you tell Eleven, Vecna said. He has them where he wants them, now.

Chapter Text

Steve has tunnel vision. Repeat interactions with demodogs will do that to a guy. It’s just—there isn’t time to think, to do anything but run. The shifting light beyond the glass doors promises the same death that they all seem to be spending their lives on risking.

It’s a risk with a price; it’s wearing Steve down at least. His lungs, well-trained by years of athletics, have been coming up short lately: too much gunk, too many abdominal injuries. But he pushes on. So do Nancy and Robin and El: bandanas up; doors open.

He wishes his bat and his axe weren’t in the fucking trunk of his fucking car.

One thing Steve’ll give to Jonathan Byers: he’s not a coward. Steve has pretty much never thought otherwise; the shoe’s been on the other foot forever. Like in the days of King Steve, when bullying kids like Byers was just a right of passage, Steve always had this uncomfortable twinge, buried deep in the pit of his uncomfortable soul, of knowledge. Steve was the coward, the one who needed everyone to like him and follow him.

Byers could stand his ground alone.

He’s doing it now, as Steve and the rest burst out into the flake-filed air. Jonathan the misfit, standing with his skinny shoulders squared, a crowbar from who-the-hell-knows-where clutched in his hand.

“Tell me you have a plan,” Jonathan snaps, and Steve realizes, a half-second delayed, that Byers is talking to him.

Huh.

Did Hopper have a point—

(No.)

“Not really,” says Steve, right away blowing his chance of earning the leadership role everyone keeps offering him.

Jonathan rolls his eyes. “Typical. Look—we just gotta hold the line. Keep them out of the hospital. Argyle will outdrive them, unless Mom makes him turn around—”

“She can’t,” Nancy points out. “Sullivan might recognize the van.”

“Oh, come on,” Jonathan says impatiently. “Do you really think he’s a bigger problem than this right now?”

Nancy’s eyes narrow and her voice sharpens, almost reaching shrill. “I don’t know, you’re the one he was shooting at—you tell us!”

“I’m the plan,” El interjects confidently, stepping forward. She looks older and younger than Steve remembers: awkwardly boyish, thanks to her shaved hair, and yet almost as tall as Nancy. “I can hear them. There aren’t many.”

“Sounded like a lot to me,” Nancy says, more quietly than she’d spoken to Jonathan, but still through what sounds like gritted teeth.

“I don’t know how to count them,” Robin says. “And I really, really, don’t want to. What the fuck, you guys? What the fuck is going on?”

Steve glances back over his shoulder. They weren’t followed outside by curious Hawkinsians, thank goodness, but that doesn’t mean people aren’t gathering. The eerie howls are drawing a crowd.

Does everyone get it now? The missing bodies, the decommissioned lab, the massacre at the mall? Do the pieces fit for anyone who doesn’t have all of them?

“Kid,” Steve says to Eleven. “Pull your hood up. We need to play this straight for now. Keep those powers in reserve.”

El stiffens, and Steve’s grateful for the way that Nancy draws in a little closer to her, a protective—if diminutive—presence.

“Harrington,” Jonathan says, cold and condescending again, “I trust you have something useful in that car of yours?”

“Yeah,” Steve says. His brain is doing that thing now that it made it so hellishly useless in math class, chem class, English class—where it spins around like an off-kilter top, or like a bug dropped on its back in a puddle. He keeps thinking Sullivan Max Joyce Nancy Eleven Hopper Dustin in an endless loop, like he’s the only person who can be depended on to keep those threads untangled and unfrayed. Clearly, he sucks at his job. Clearly, the worst of the dangers are right here. “Yeah, got something.”

He digs for his keys in his pocket, and then El says,

“I see one.”

They can all see it, on the far edge of the parking lot.

The muffled panic on the other side of the glass doors suggests that their audience is seeing it too.

Not since the fall of ’84, Steve thinks—and he wanted to die then, or thought he did. Thought he was close enough to being useless that it didn’t matter what happened to him.

Amazing, how squaring off with the dripping, eyeless, tooth-filled face of a thing that wants to kill you will jumpstart your survival instinct.

“Stay together,” he says. He wishes he could tell the people behind the glass to get back, this thing’ll cut through like a knife through butter, you won’t have a chance—but there’s no time. “Jonathan, give me the crowbar.”

Jonathan gives it to him.

“I’m gonna cover you,” Steve says, passing him the keys. Their relative distribution of brute strength makes this delegation make sense. “We’re going to make for the car, and get the good shit out of the trunk, and then we’ll bring it back here.” He feels like he’s reciting lines from Dr. Seuss or something, even if he’s not clever enough to make it rhyme.

“I’ll cover you,” El insists, tears in her eyes and voice. “Nobody will know it’s me.”

“No,” Steve says, and maybe this is why Hopper said he was in charge even though Nancy blew Vecna away with a shotgun, and Jonathan drove a couple thousand miles in and out of enemy territory. Steve says no, and knows that El will listen to him when it really matters. “No powers yet. Anyway, if it comes to that, you’re covering Nance and Rob.”

“Steve,” Nancy murmurs, but it’s barely more than a breath.

The thing on the other side of the parking lot is biding its time, but only in the way that all demodogs do; gearing up for a springing leap. Steve’s heart hammers in his chest. The crowbar does not give him the necessary extension to whack a hole in the damn thing without its nasty petal-jaws having full access to him.

“Now, Byers,” he says, and they sprint.

The dogs move pretty silently when they want to, and Steve knows this, but it’s still uncanny as hell to watch one stalking, then leaping, without the earth shaking beneath its monstrous feet.

Steve ducks out of the way before it’s on him, using the crowbar like a blade rather than a club. It’s kind of like the bat—hook and tear. Take some chunks out of it before it does the same to you.

The dog isn’t used to a fair fight. It snaps its head around, roaring from its open throat.

“Hope you’re two seconds from having that thing open,” Steve hollers.

“I got it!” Jonathan retorts, even though it really doesn’t seem like he does.

The next attack sends the crowbar ringing out of Steve’s hand. He hears the wind rushing in his ears, and he imagines he hears (or maybe he really does hear) Nancy crying out.

The demodog pounces, and explodes in midair.

So much for Eleven not using her powers.

“I got it,” Jonathan says, with greater confidence.

Steve wipes some black blood off his forehead. Fortunately the bandana covers most of his face.

“Gee,” he says. “Great timing.”

Jonathan shrugs. He has the bat in one hand and the axe in the other. The axe is clearly too heavy for him, so Steve takes it.

There’s more monsters where that one came from, and they really shouldn’t be using Eleven like this.

She has her hand up, across the lot, and Steve can’t see the blood running from her nose because of her mask but otherwise, it’s uncannily like every time he’s seen her in action before: powerful, vulnerable, stopping time as well as changing it.

Maybe that’s why it’s both a shock and not a shock, when she falls.

Crumples, really, like Nancy fainting—like her spirit’s being pulled into another dimension.

Robin and Nancy catch her. Steve’s too far, and too near to whatever is coming at them next. Unexpectedly, Jonathan’s hand lands on his shoulder: a grip and then a slight shove.

Get it together, without words.

“She’s all right,” Nancy yells. “We’re getting her out of here.”

Even when El isn’t doing too hot, she manages to buy them some time. Real hero shit. Possibly intimidated by one of their kind being unceremoniously exploded, the rest of the demodogs are staying out of sight—for now.

That gives Steve and Jonathan enough seconds to rejoin the girls, who are sagging a little under the awkwardness of El’s deadweight. They’ve almost made it to the hospital doors; hopefully El’s bandana mask and shapeless hoodie keep her from being too recognizable. Hopefully the lookers-on are scared too far out of their wits to ask questions.

“Killing the—dog-thingy,” Robin babbles. “It really took it out of her, like it just—pulled something out of her, like—”

“Robin,” Nancy says, in her most soothing voice. It helps Steve’s nerves, even here. “Calm down.”

El’s dark eyes are open.

“Hey, kiddo,” Steve says, like they know each other well enough for that. He knew her, if he’s being honest, mostly through Max and the boys.

Max. It’s always at the least practical, most inconvenient moments that it hits him—the possibility that he’s never going to look into her eyes, or hear her voice again.

“What are you feeling?” Jonathan asks, straight to the point. “Did you—did you see something?”

“Something big,” El slurs woozily. “Really…big.”

This is far from comforting. It’s also the not-so-perfect time for a couple of Army jeeps to come roaring into the parking lot.

Sullivan.

El’s not the plan anymore, even if she wanted to be: keeping her safe is. There’s a brief flurry of communication and miscommunication, but since neither El nor Jonathan can be seen by Sullivan it’s agreed they’ll go back inside. Better to be belatedly recognized by some of the terrified citizens than to face Sullivan head-on. If Jonathan can get El to Max’s room, she’ll have somewhere to sit tight for a bit. Somewhere, maybe, to hide.

“Go with them,” Steve says, to both Nancy and Robin. He doesn’t want them out here with the hunters either—human or inhuman.

It shouldn’t surprise him that they both try to stall.

“Steve, don’t be ridiculous—”

“We’re not leaving you al—”

“Stop,” he snaps, surprising himself. “We don’t have time. Jonathan needs help with El. And Robin, you haven’t faced one of these things. No point in dying over a buddy system.”

“Robin, go ahead,” Nancy says, switching tactics. “I’ll stay with Steve. I can handle the bat.”

Turns out, he’s still a colossal failure at arguing with Nancy when push comes to shove.

So here they are, with the jeeps grinding to a halt, and the doors thudding open, and the sky raining ash that never really lands. Steve has the axe, and Nancy has the bat, and the howls are still eerily absent, so they both look like crazy people holding a hospital hostage.

“This isn’t going to go well,” Steve says, even though he’s feeling a bit more grounded now that half his worries are behind closed doors again.

(Now that he has Nancy with him, the strongest, safest person he knows.)

“No shit, Sherlock.” She sounds somehow fond and scared at the same time.

Sullivan doesn’t bother to put on a mask. Maybe he has lungs of steel. He looks exactly the same as he did in the parking lot of the school, except that it’s now afternoon, and night comes early in the new-and-seriously-unimproved Hawkins. His sunglasses don’t glint; there are just hollows of darkness where his eyes should be.

“The BMW kids,” he calls, crossing the pavement at an unhurried pace. “Always at the scene of the crime.”

“Don’t know what you mean, sir,” Steve calls back, hoping his bullshitting powers, honed in sophomore year but rather rusty by now, will pull through. “We said we were coming here.”

“Didn’t think that volunteering required an axe,” Sullivan retorts, beckoning with two fingers to the armed goons piling out of the vehicles. A few flank him immediately, attack dogs waiting for a command. The rest start spreading over the rest of the parking lot in pairs.

Shit. Shit shit shit.

“Something came out of the woods,” Steve says. OK, maybe less bullshit. More fear. You’re nervous, you’re just a dumb kid, you don’t know anything… “Everyone’s freaking out.” He gestures back over his shoulder. “We don’t know what it was, sir.”

“Why don’t you try to describe it?” Sullivan has reached them. Steve can see the gun on his hip, the big scarred hands resting at his belt. His knuckles are bruised, like he’s thrown a few punches recently.

Steve’s throat is dry. He’d never wish for demodogs, he’s not totally batshit, but he does want proof that he and Nancy aren’t the real enemies here.

An axe isn’t going to do much against a semiautomatic.

“It was an animal, I think,” Nancy says. “It was bigger than a dog.”

Sullivan doesn’t answer, just takes a step forward, then another, until he’s almost chest-to-chest with Steve. He reaches out, presses the pad of his thumb against Steve’s cheek, above the bandana, right where the splatter of black blood landed.

“What’s this?”

“I don’t know,” Steve says.

The soldiers who split off are still weaving in between the empty cars. None of them get massacred. None of them seem to be threatened by anything. They’re just Sullivan’s robots, doing his bidding without even having to ask it.

At least, that’s what Steve would like to think, but then one shouts, and Steve remembers too late that there are chunks of demodog corpse just lying there for anyone to see.

He doesn’t have a good explanation for that.

Does Nancy?

Our friend, the one you’re looking for—she killed it with her mind.

“Sir! We found something!”

“Be right back,” Sullivan says. “Don’t move.”

He turns his back, walks off with a quicker stride this time. Steve looks at Nancy, and she shakes her head.

“We can’t go in,” she whispers.

“I know.”

“So what do we do?”

“I don’t know. We look pretty damn suspicious right now.”

“If we make a run for it, he’ll kill us.” Even as she says it, Nancy looks like she considers that to be the best option.

Steve’s not so sure.

“You two,” Sullivan shouts. “Get over here. Now.”

“If we run, he’ll think we’re guilty,” Nancy says. “It might not occur to him that El is anywhere near here.”

Sullivan also might open fire—but presumably not while they have a civilian audience.

Nancy’s probably already done this math. Nancy’s smart. Smarter than Steve, and just as stupid when it comes to near-death situations. He loves that about her.

He takes a deeper breath than he should, bandana and all.

“OK,” he says. “Let’s go.”

Running with an axe slung against your shoulder is not exactly the easiest thing. Steve would drop it if he was only worried about human pursuers, but he doesn’t want to meet a demodog empty-handed.

Maybe running for your life is just…never the easiest thing.

Still, they’re alive. Alive, and leading a furious chase away from El and Robin and Jonathan, and Max and Lucas and so on and on. Steve is still too selfish to feel out-and-out relief, but he’s close to it.

Damn his weakened lungs and the white-hot stitch in his side. He used to be able to run away from almost anything.

Despite his present handicaps, knowing the layout of the hospital building proves useful; he and Nancy broke left with just a head-start of a couple hundred feet, but they managed to duck around some of the giant medical waste dumpsters and cover their tracks for a crucial moment. Behind the rear parking lot, the edge of the forest looms.

Reaching the woods, of course, is a double-edged sword.

Time is elastic; twisted by the conflict of too many opposing forces. They’re both breathing heavily, crouching in the shelter of some blackened shrubs that lost all their leaves to instant rot: what once was green flakes gray against the gnarled branches.

Only the thorns are intact.

“He’ll shoot us out here, no question,” Nancy whispers. Her bandana is cockeyed. “There’s nobody to see. We should keep going.”

Then, in the distance, the howling begins again. Involuntarily, Steve shudders, and bites down on a groan. The stitches Joyce made so carefully in his fucked-up abdomen are probably going to waste right now.

He doesn’t want to think about a rematch with her formidable needle, except that maybe he does. That would, after all, mean that he and Nancy made it out of this.

(There is no future where Steve survives and Nancy doesn’t.)

Nancy’s left hand, the one not gripping the nail-bat, catches at Steve’s sleeve. Tugging at him to emphasize the urgency she feels, or clinging to him for moral support?

(Steve wishes he’d had the nerve to kiss her back, mere hours before. If he’d known they’d end up here, he just might have—because it’s never going to be the right time, when they have no time left at all.)

“One sec,” he rasps. The footsteps of their pursuers stopped when the demodogs started, so they have a moment’s distraction on their side. Steve tries to focus, to tell whether or not the accursed things are getting closer, but he’s zeroed in on the wrong threat.

They can hear voices now. The soldiers are picking up their pace again.

“Go,” Nancy hisses, and he lurches up, the axe-handle digging against his collarbone.

When Steve was a kid, he didn’t know how to measure happiness. Thought his life was OK, mostly, so long as his parents didn’t watch him too closely and the toys were heaped high at Christmas and birthdays. It was like the absence of bad things had to be enough to make good out of…nothing.

That’s what he told himself, and it left him empty.

Truth is, all the real happiness he’s ever known this side of childhood is mingled with the worst fear, the worst pain, the worst loss.

Sometimes you have to bleed to know you’re still here.

The bullet glances off the blade of the axe with a ear-splitting ring, and Steve falls to his knees.

The pain doesn’t hit at first; it usually doesn’t. He’s mostly aware of what he can’t feel: the burning ache in his gut, the compression in his lungs. They’re strangely absent. He’s lost most of his body—that’s his first, ludicrous thought. He sees Nancy turn on her heel, face paper-white above her mask, even in dim light.

He knows she needs to outrun him.

There is no future—

“No!” he shouts. Still has enough of himself to try (and fail) to order her around. “Keep going!”

Old habits die hard (harder than Steve, apparently). Nancy might as well be deaf to his orders—his pleas. She’s on the ground in front of him, her hands bringing life back to his body by their touch.

Life, and pain.

“Steve,” she says, “Steve, are you—where did it hit you—Steve—”

“Hold your fire!”

Nancy falls silent, her mouth a wavery line, but she doesn’t let go of him. Steve blinks and there’s two of her. Blinks again and black spots dance in front of his eyes.

Overhead, Sullivan says,

“Take them alive.”

Chapter Text

Truth be told, Robin doesn’t know Jonathan Byers from Adam. They were in the same grade, of course—still are, Robin supposes, just a couple thousand miles apart—but even when they were walking the same halls their brands of weird just…didn’t intersect. Robin’s way of being a loner was about hiding parts of herself she desperately wanted to share.

Jonathan seemed to truly like being alone.

Still, Hawkins gossip is as hard to uproot as sentient interdimensional vines. Robin remembers the rumors, the hushed speculation about what happened to Will Byers, two-and-a-half years ago. She remembers when Nancy Wheeler made the inscrutable switch between Steve and Jonathan, a change that got people talking again even though there had been a few world-shaking events sprinkled in between.

After the Starcourt fire, Robin was finally in, and the Byers were out. All the way to California—it was a pointed message, though Robin wasn’t savvy enough to know for whom. From scratch, she tried to understand the ways they still mattered, or didn’t, to the people they’d left behind. Steve wasn’t over Nancy, of course, but he didn’t complain much about Jonathan. You had to see them together to witness the friction they created, the way they threw off angry sparks just by talking.

In all of this, of course, she has sided with Steve. She only calls him dingus and jackass and the like out of a deep knowledge that teenage boys need to be razzed, and an even deeper affection. Jonathan is…cold as a fish, if Robin’s being honest. (Robin’s almost always being honest, at least in her own head.) Steve is all warmth, all generosity, all in no matter the cost—

And now Steve is gone. On the other side of the glass—but he might as well be a world away.

Robin is half-supporting Eleven’s weight, half-throwing herself forward through the worried crowd by virtue of an internal cocktail of nausea and adrenaline. Even the most charismatic bartender in the world couldn’t sell it.

Eleven is panting, her breath high and tinny, her eyes very wide.

The first fear, of course, is discovery—but people around them are torn on where to focus their attention. Do they choose the eldritch horror that appeared then disappeared—the military skirmish—the seemingly injured kids stumbling through their midst?

“She’s all right,” Robin says, when a nurse in scrubs tries to reach around her and pull Eleven’s hood back. “She’s all right. Excuse me, please.”

The confusion is working in their favor right now. Nothing else is, though, and when she finally manages to jerk open the door of a supply closet next to the empty reception desk, she finds that she’s wheezing almost as hard as the girl with the superpowers.

“We have to…” Eleven whispers. “We have to help…”

“We have to get you somewhere safe, kiddo,” Robin says. Kiddo is what Steve called her—Robin hopes it isn’t patronizing, coming from her. Does Eleven care about being patronized? “Steve and Nancy are smart, they’ll—”

In the distance, is that a gunshot? Or just another fracture in the earth groaning open?

“Shit, there you are.” Jonathan whirls into the closet beside them, and shuts the door without realizing that there’s no interior light. They’re all trapped in a moment’s suffocating darkness, and Robin feels like bursting into tears.

She doesn’t, though. That has to count for something.

Robin doesn’t know Jonathan Byers from Adam, but she needs to figure him out fast.

“What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know,” Jonathan sputters, which does not inspire confidence. “It’s more crowded than I thought it would be, but I guess people love a spectacle. Even a fatal one.” He clears his throat, settles down a bit. There’s more to him than meets the eye—Nancy had to be drawn to something, after all. “Max’s room is still a good plan, but I—we need to radio my mom. She can come back for El. Different car—she’ll need a different car, but Sullivan doesn’t know her on sight, maybe—”

“Where are we going to get a radio?” Robin asks. She elbows the door open a crack so that a little yellow gleam trickles in.

“Lucas,” says Eleven.

“Right,” Robin says. Dingus, dumbass…words like that should be reserved for herself when she’s under pressure. “OK, but we don’t want to go to Max’s room until we’re sure the soldiers aren’t coming after us.”

Jonathan says, sounding a bit pained, “They all took off after Steve and Nancy.”

She knows that Steve and Nancy are out there facing down the U.S. Army, but she didn’t think…

“They ran?” There’s a twist in her chest, right where her heart is.

Jonathan nods, tightly, his face in shadow.

“They ran. So we need to use the time they bought us.”

Sullivan’s orders, to strafe the Byers’ California house with gunfire. Sullivan’s orders, to destroy Eleven no matter the loss of other life.

Sullivan’s orders, to shoot Steve and Nancy on sight?

Robin’s more frightened than she was facing Vecna in his lair, and there’s absolutely nothing she can do.

Eleven’s hand closes on her wrist. Warm, firm. The grip of a friend, not a killer. But Sullivan won’t take the time to understand that. He doesn’t want to.

There are many different kinds of monsters in the world, and Robin has met too many of them for her taste.

“Max’s room,” Eleven says, amping up the urgency. “Lucas. We can go to Lucas. The soldiers are gone.”

“Gone where?” Robin whispers.

Eleven shrugs. “I can’t see.”

“Come on,” Jonathan says. “Once we get Eleven upstairs, we can—”

That was definitely a shot outside, this time. From a distance, but deafeningly clear. Robin’s throat closes up, keeping company with her chest.

She’s not the same girl she was in 1983, when she was crushing on Carol Perkins, hoarding offbeat records, cutting up her clothes to make them cooler, watching life from the sidelines. She’s not the same girl she was two weeks ago. The reasons she’s changed—transformed—are too many to count, but most of the deepest reasons have to do with other people, and what she’s learned that she would do for them.

She’d do anything for Steve. Anything for Nancy.

Anything.

Right now, she needs to get herself in order.

Eleven’s senses were (as usual) accurate. They are able to take the back stairwell up to Max’s floor without anyone holding them at gunpoint, or even so much as asking them who they are and where they’re going. It’s not lost on Robin that they’re making it harder, in the long run, to get back out…but with demodogs and G.I. Goons on the loose, maybe the long run is nothing more than a long shot.

Eleven is slow on the stairs. She pulls her arms from Robin’s supportive hold, trying to push some invisible obstacle away.

What are you seeing? Robin wants to ask, but Eleven, unlike Nancy, is usually forthcoming with her visions. If she was seeing something she could describe, she’d say so.

(Nancy and Steve, coming out of Steve’s bedroom, looking like they’d seen their own deaths play out in front of them.)

(Nancy, not being able to tell the whole truth.)

 “Please, can we stop?” Eleven asks, when they’re halfway up the last flight.

“We’re almost there,” Robin pleads.

But Jonathan holds up a hand. “We can afford ten seconds,” he says, crisp and decisive now that he’s had a few minutes to think. Robin is both annoyed and kind of impressed. It’s obvious that Jonathan has no talent when it comes to romance (how do you win a girl like Nancy and then leave her hanging?), but maybe his real strength lies in being what he knows best: a brother.

Not for the first time, Robin wonders what it would be like to have siblings.

Does she know now? Does she only know when she’s losing—

Eleven leans against Jonathan, breathing hard. Her bandana hangs limply around her chin, and her nostrils are crusted with dark blood, drying sticky.

Robin bites her lip. Overhead, the lights flicker.

“…’s getting stronger,” Eleven murmurs.

“What?” Jonathan ask. “What’s getting stronger?”

What…or who.

Robin doesn’t want to think about that.

“OK,” Eleven says, after a couple beats. She blinks rapidly. “Keep going.”

The hallway outside Max’s room is deserted of orderlies. It’s more noticeable on the stairs, closer to the outside of the building, but the whole place is beginning to smell of the dank decay that pervades the Upside Down.

They can only keep the bad air out so long.

They can only keep the monsters out so long.

Robin replays that distant gunshot in her mind, and a few tears do start falling—not bursting out, as she’d expected, but trickling silently into the handkerchief she still has tied around her mouth. She doesn’t care if Jonathan agrees or not. Once they get El safe, she’s going after her friends.

Mr. Sinclair is surprisingly easy to sway to their cause.

OK, so "sway to their cause" is an embellishment, but Robin is stressed as hell: she needs a few embellishments, especially when it’s her last-minute idea that gives them a way forward. They don’t tell him who Eleven is, exactly, but they explain that all that craziness outside has people starting up the Eddie-Munson-witch-hunt business again (well, Robin explains this. Jonathan still barely knows who Eddie Munson is, another curiosity, since they were also in school together) and that El, Max’s best friend, is getting seriously harassed. It isn’t safe for her to be on her own.

Mr. Sinclair doesn’t need much explanation. He has a son with a broken face and a broken heart to make him extra sympathetic.

“She can hang out here, sure thing,” he says warmly, which is enough to make Eleven’s eyes well up fit to match Robin’s. “We’ll keep things quiet.”

He hasn’t asked any questions about the presence of a Byers.

Lucas throws an arm around El’s shoulders. “Anyone comes looking,” he says, “She can hide under the bed.” Then, when his dad’s back is turned, he mouths, “I’ll call Joyce.”

“S’fine,” Jonathan says, slow on this particular uptake. “As long as I can borrow the radio—”

Robin tugs at his sleeve. What’s funny (it’s not funny) is that this is the biggest ask of her life—are you ready to die with me?—but it’s also something for which she’ll readily take no for an answer.

If Jonathan won’t come, she’s still going.

“What?” Jonathan asks. Jeez, but he’s snappy under pressure. And not in the lovable way Steve is, either.

Steve, I swear to God…you’d better be alive…

“Nance,” Robin says, since Steve’s name won’t have the same effect. “I’m going after Nance.”

She watches it all register on his face: the challenge, her fear, and the fact, probably, that Lucas was offering to call Joyce because he assumed that Jonathan and Robin would dash back out into the fray. There’s something predictably narrow about Jonathan’s focus; he has his sister here, and his brother and his mom a radio signal and a short drive (please God) away. That’s where he wants to train all his energy. Robin is throwing a wrench into the mix. She’s gritting up the cogs of his fine-tuned machine.

She’s fucking terrified to do this alone, but she’s still going.

“Fine,” Jonathan says. Maybe he heard the gunshot too. Maybe he loves Nancy after all. “Fine.”

They don’t leave by the front door this time. Primed by a lifetime of finding the quiet way out of school halls and avoiding the popular crowd, Jonathan leads her to the rear exit.

Somewhere along the way, he lost the crowbar. It dawns on Robin, her initial bravado fading a little: they’re weaponless. Powerless.

She sets her jaw, scrunches her nose. Doesn’t matter.

“This way,” Jonathan says. “I think they headed for the woods.”

“Great,” she says. Even keeping her voice low, it probably sounds high-pitched with hysteria. “We just spent like, a whole day in creepy woods. Went super well.”

He doesn’t answer. He’s just…standing there, not letting the door shut all the way, thinking.

“We really don’t have all day,” Robin says, allowing her impatience to bubble over. Two can play at the snappish game.

Jonathan turns to her, but there’s no ire in his gaze. He says,

“We’re really not going to have any time at all, if we meet up with the dogs.”

She swallows. Her turn to be silent.

“It’s like Steve said. You’ve never even seen one, have you?”

She shakes her head.

“They’re no joke. They’re almost as strong as the Demogorgon, and they travel in packs. We could maybe take on one between the two of us, if we were lucky—and armed. We’re neither.”

“They need our help,” Robin says. “If this Sullivan asshole catches up to them, you know the first thing he’ll do will be to confiscate all their weapons. At best. And then if a pack of demodogs come upon them—”

“We’d be better off keeping watch here,” Jonathan says. He holds up a hand, staving off her indignation. “I know you’re worried. So am I. That’s the point. Ask yourself, what’s the smartest thing we could do right now?”

“If you want to stay, stay,” Robin says. “But don’t give me that bull about smartest, when you know full well you’d jump into a volcano for Will or Eleven or your mom.”

See? Turns out she knows him after all.

“Fine,” Jonathan says. “But—”

The earthquake cuts him off. At least, Robin thinks it’s an earthquake, because what the hell else makes the whole world shake and splinter? What else makes you question whether a cinderblock building like the hospital is going to stand firm?

What tears open the ground under your feet…

Gates, dumbass. It could be another—

Robin has been knocked flat on her back, staring at stars that don’t exist in a sky that’s growing filthier by the hour. She thinks she’s dead for half a second, but then Jonathan’s helping her back up. Cursing under his breath, dragging her with him away from the door and towards the parking lot. Towards the parking lot, away from the rear of the hospital.

Huh.

Max’s room is in the rear wing of the hospital, and that’s how Robin knows that Lover’s Lake lies beyond the rolling treetops. From a high window, you can see where the trees start dropping away. It would have been a pretty view, once upon a time. Now, if you could see past the ruined foliage, you wouldn’t admire a basin of blue-green water. You’d see a gate: the smooth surface of the lake turned into a sort of molten subduction zone.

Strange to think that Robin traversed the Lover’s Lake gate herself, when it was a passable seam between worlds that she swam through, following Nancy, following Steve. Why did she do it then? (Because she had to.)

She’s on her feet, trailing alongside Jonathan, tripping and running, her muddled brain trying to put all the pieces back together. Even through the pounding in her head, she feels like it’s deathly important to recollect that there doesn’t have to be a new gate where there already is one, that the sound and fury could have heralded something else.

Jonathan halts beside Steve’s abandoned BMW. Turns to face the forest. He’s looking at something, and a second later, so is Robin.

Something is rising where the trees start dropping away.

He showed me things that haven't happened yet. The most awful things. I saw a dark cloud spreading over Hawkins...downtown on fire...dead soldiers...and this giant creature with a gaping mouth, and this creature wasn't alone. There were so many monsters. An army...

Robin wishes she couldn’t believe her eyes, but it turns out they’ve never lied to her. The rest of her life did. She sees what looks like smoke—what is smoke, at first, but with something moving in it. Too far away to be sure—much, much too close for comfort.

Whatever it is, it’s carving a path: not quite towards the hospital, but not fully away from it either. The way it moves doesn’t have the scattershot effect of the demobats, shifting and reforming like sand in an Etch-a-Sketch. This thing is solid, judging from the way the forest moves around it. Trees snap like celery stalks. The earth keeps groaning.

This must be what Eleven felt.

This must be what Nancy saw.

There are hundreds of people in the hospital, at the school, still trying to find a way out of Hawkins. There are soldiers chasing down two of the only heroes this town has. There are two girls, a few floors away, who have given everything for their friends, and for strangers, too, because that’s the way that sacrifice works.

Robin reaches for Jonathan’s arm, only to feel his hand grab hers first.

“Come on,” he says.

Robin nods. She thinks he understands what he means before he says it. Before he asks her if she’s ready to die with him.

“We have to—”

“—lead it away from the hospital—”

“—find out what it is and report back—”

“Good,” Jonathan says, grinning. His mask has slipped off his face. Robin realizes that she’s never really seen him smile before now. “You get the idea. Death and glory, right?”

The long run is overrated.

Chapter Text

I

Too fast—that’s how you race towards death. You are not in the same car, but you are in the same body.

Doesn’t matter if it’s a pizza van hurtling down crumbling asphalt at a perilous forty-five, or the old Ford Pinto, Mom talking over the radio, lead-footing it. Doesn’t matter whether you are going to lie cold on the operating table, a real boy this time: they aren’t going to cut you open. They don’t know what they’re looking for.

He’s not inside you, anymore.

You shudder. A few days will change your life; that has been true for years. Now, more than a thousand miles from where you tried to run, you still have desert sand in your shoes. You still have black shadows in your memory. You still have secrets.

You didn’t get to say what you wanted to say, and now, maybe, you never will.

It’s time to leave Hawkins, but you tried that already. Now the thing you can’t go back to is the escape route itself.

Will…Will…

You’re afraid of who’s calling your name until you realize it’s Mom. She’s noticed your silence, since leaving the hospital. She always does.

“Will, are you OK? Argyle, next left—oh, shit, there’s a barricade—”

You left Eleven. (You left Mike.) You left Steve and Robin and Jonathan, and now you are leaving yourself by inches, betraying that razor-sharp instinct that’s the one…gift? that he gave you.

You don’t want to call it a gift. Your neck and tense shoulder jolt painfully as Argyle tries to course-correct.

Then the earth trembles as if it’s going to swallow you all whole.

Still the one I want…still the one I see…

You come back to life with Mom, wild-haired and wild-eyed, twisted around in the front seat so she can shake your knee. Your neck hurts worse, now. Your eyes take a second to adjust.

“Will! Will!”

She’s always saying your name. You don’t have to be afraid of your name; he doesn’t call for you like that. It’s rare enough that you hear his voice, like you did just now, instead of feel him. And now that the second has passed—even if the earthquake hasn’t, judging from the weird, shuddering rattle of the van that goes on and on…judging from the way you feel like you’re about to vomit…

What does it all matter?

“I’m here,” you say, which is only half of the truth.

“What the hell was that, Joyce?” Argyle squawks. “What the hell—are we having more earth-breakers? Like whattt—”

“I don’t know,” Mom says. “Is it safer to stay in the car during a quake? Will, honey, do you know? Do you remember?”

“Yeah,” Argyle says eagerly. “Yeah—yeah. Even I know that. Inside the ve-hi-cle. Arms and legs and everything.”

It’s not an earthquake. That is what you know, zombie-boy who was never buried in this churning soil…only in another world. It’s not an earthquake, just like the Upside Down is not a world you can truly return from, but it’s close enough to one that you’re trapped by practical realities. Your hands are shaking so that you can’t even undo your seatbelt. Can’t do what you shouldn’t, and get out of the car. You can’t force Argyle to accelerate over shifting roads, even if that would mean saving people.

For now, you have to wait.

II

You sit on the floor by Max’s bed and inhale through your nose. Robin and Jonathan are going to save Nancy and Steve, and you believe in all of them. It’s like the whole empty shell of you has been filled up with trust in other people: every single one you’ve known and loved since you stumbled out of the Lab those too-short, too-long years ago.

(If you think too much about it, you’ll know your trust is not enough.)

(You are still the empty one.)

Around you, the room is like all hospital rooms: terribly lonely. Mr. and Mrs. Sinclair are both here, talking in low voices, and Lucas and Erica are watching out the window. They don’t tell you what they see.

What is there to see? You are afraid to ask. You know there are more dogs.

There are more soldiers.

You squeeze your eyes shut, try to do Max the favor you owe her, but you still can’t.

You stay like this a long time.

(You tried to believe what Dr. Owens told you, that you could keep them safe. You went deep; you broke open. You went deeper, you touched the monster. Sometimes the monster is you.)

(Papa, bleeding dark in the smoky light. Papa, begging for forgiveness you would not give.)

Mr. and Mrs. Sinclair hardly know you. Yet, they ask no questions. Lucas and Erica stand guard for you, though the bruises on their skin tell you that you could not do the same for them.

(Max, cold and quiet as snow, tells you that you did not do the same for her.)

You touch your dry mouth with your fingertips. You touch the crust of blood under your nose.

Something big. You couldn’t go with Jonathan and Robin. You can’t see Nancy, or Steve.

You have to wait here for what comes next.

In the end, it isn’t Sullivan. It isn’t the foul, faceless dogs. In the end, the screams that echo down the halls, the clatter and crash of falling shelves, cracking windows, sliding carts—

It’s just another wound in the earth, just another split in time.

Just. Ha.

(There is no laughter in you. Not really.)

(Farther, Eleven. Dark blood, and the hand that harms instead of healing.)

Head pounding, bruised where it hit the wall, you struggle to your feet. You almost fall; you hold onto the rail alongside Max’s bed. The shuddering and thundering of the quake does not so much as make Max stir, but you fix your eyes on her face anyway, as if she will answer you when you call her name this time. As if that’s what she’ll hear through the noise: your faded voice.

“Max,” you whisper. “Max—”

“Look!” Lucas shouts, then, from where he and Erica are holding to each other. Why aren’t they stepping back from the glass? Why are Mr. and Mrs. Sinclair clumsily rushing to join them? “Holy shit, look—”

“Oh God—” “Oh shit—” “What the hell—”

The light outside the window is changing, half-night to full-night, then back again. Red and dull as sick storm-clouds—you might as well be underground again. But you aren’t. You’re here. Too weak to go with your friends; too weak to save anyone.

You touch Max’s hand in farewell. You join the Sinclairs at the window.

You don’t see anything but smoke, and then you do.

Still the one I want, Vecna breathes, but you do not answer him.

You watch the darkness rise.

Chapter Text

Steve can’t die. Nancy has spent the past few days—the past few years—fearing for the lives of everyone she’s ever loved, and sure, Steve’s been among that number. How could he not be? She’s always known that she cared for him, even when caring was reduced to shuttered glances in the school hallways, or awkward greetings at Family Video. The sheer panic coursing through her now, though, is like nothing she’s felt since Vecna showed her the end of the world.

Panic tears you open. The guilt that follows it is stranger still. It frightens you, sure, but until the instant that it’s too late, it keeps you looking backwards. Then, as Vecna did, it wrenches your gaze to what lies ahead, and you find you’ve wasted all the time you had thinking about what was already lost.

(Barb understood something about Nancy that nobody else did. She knew that Nancy wasn’t brave so much as bold—that she took what she wanted, not that she always did what she should. And Barb’s death left Nancy haunted by so much—by so many questions. The dumb high school shit scattered like dust. It was all, How do you become a good person, a brave person, when time runs out too soon? Is it worth it if you only make your way there at the end?)

The bullet is in Steve’s shoulder, not his chest, but he isn’t responding. His eyes are blown wide, hollow pupil swallowing iris, and he’s bleeding a lot. His bandana has come loose, and his lips are too pale—almost blue, as he gasps in lungful after lungful of contaminated air. The ash-flakes are the least of Nancy’s worries: she doesn’t think it would do any good to muffle his oxygen. Worse is that she has nothing but her hands to stop the bleeding, nothing but slick palms and desperate pleas and Sullivan’s fucking soldiers closing in around them, the dead forest come alive again with weapons and tramping footsteps and cold eyes above black masks.

Forget hiding—forget hope. All she has left is rage, and accusation.

All she has left, even of her guilt, is fear.

“You’ve killed him!” her voice rings in her ears, even though it isn’t true, can’t be true, Steve can’t—

“Hands up,” comes the order, and Nancy doesn’t obey. Curses them, in her head and heart.

“Hands up, unless you want a bullet of your own.”

Maybe the earthquake’s a mercy.

Maybe it isn’t.

Nancy wakes up dead. At least, that’s her first, incoherent thought, like maybe whatever power is running the broader universe lately heard her sort-of prayers and decided to trade her for Steve Harrington, the boy she loved too early and too late.

On a moment’s bleary, skull-pounding reflection, she decides that the end of the world (her world, forever) wouldn’t smell like dead leaves and rot. It would be warm and sticky under her hands, under her chest. It would be Vecna’s red nightmare, swallowing everything that Nancy has ever loved.

As it is, she blinks away the pain, the roar, the darkness—and rolls off of Steve’s body (still breathing, still bleeding) to find herself in Sullivan’s sights. He’s gripping one of the black-scarred saplings that will never again grow green for support, but the hand that holds the gun trained on Nancy and Steve is steady.

Whatever calamity has most lately shaken Hawkins can’t entirely shake him.

Not that he’s happy, of course.

“What the hell”—Sullivan’s voice sounds like it’s filtering in from far away, over the radio like Dream a Little Dream of Me—“kind of game are you playing?”

Shit. Nancy tries to pierce through the fog in her head, make sense of what can’t be made sense of, and ask—does he really still think this is them? Does he believe that two teenagers can cause a seismic event? Like sure, El can, but that’s not the point—

“You need to get your men back to the hospital,” Nancy snaps. Her voice is wavery, weak. How much time does Steve have? Blood loss kills you fast. And Steve isn’t the only one who will die if this is… Well. She has no fucking clue what this is. In her head, she’s hearing El slur, Something big…really big.

(El’s not the only one who sees visions anymore.)        

She chokes out, “Whatever the hell that was, it’s going to put everyone in danger! We’re not the goddamn problem—”

She couldn’t convince the head doctor at a psych hospital. She sure as hell isn’t convincing a psychopath.

Sullivan is, all told, less merciful than the earthquake. He doesn’t shoot her—perhaps Nancy should be grateful for that?—but she gets a taste of gun anyway. Having regained his footing, he strides forward. Nancy scrambles sideways, thinking that he’s going to hurt Steve again. Realizes, only as it’s happening, that he’s coming for her.

The butt of the gun smashes into the side of her face with enough force to send her sprawling over Steve. Enough pain to steal the breath from her lungs.

She can’t even scream.

“Thought that would shut you up,” Sullivan says, from above. Reality crackles like fireworks. “Show’s over, boys! Get on with it. Mind your footing.”

It hurts too much to go fully dark, to slip into that verge-of-death unconsciousness that’s hopefully giving Steve some peace. Nancy’s breathing returns in fits and starts, wheezes and moans that don’t even sound like they’re coming from her.

The soldiers who carry her aren’t gentle. If it weren’t for that, she might lose track of the fact that she even has a body.

She’s too selfish, see, to suffer right. Even after everything, after all the warnings and loss and horror and heartbreak, after facing down a monster in his lair and a hundred nightmares in her own head, she’s thinking about… herself. About how to escape from the pain, the motion sickness, the humiliation of being treated like a broken doll. About whether her teeth have been knocked out—trying to count them with a bloodied tongue. About how hard it is to see through her tears and the searing stabs of light. She even forgets about Steve: just for a second—quickly reversed, but the shame of her own self-pity devours her anyway. If they make it through this, she won’t deserve him. If they make it through this, maybe it will all have been a dream.

A small, soothing whisper of a thought—sounds like Steve—says that maybe this is fair, not a flaw. She’s never been hurt like this, by something… human. It’s a different kind of fear.

Sullivan’s team moves with dogged, brutal swiftness, not noticeably hindered by their bruised and bleeding cargo. Reports reach Nancy’s ears in snatches of sentences, difficult to string together when her brain has been turned to scrambled eggs.

“—shuttle off the road, bloody mess—” “Civilians?” “Eight.” “—sentry in pieces—”

“Kids can’t have done all this, sir.”

“Shut up.”

(Whatever it was, the earth hasn’t stopped groaning. Whatever it was, the sky looks darker than before.)

Steve’s still alive when they reach the parking lot. Nancy’s selfish; Nancy loves him. Nancy can’t hear the demodogs growling, but that doesn’t mean they’re gone. Nancy doesn’t know if the shit that’s perennially hitting the fan is going to give them another shot at redemption, but it doesn’t seem likely.

Is it worth it—to only find your way—at the end—

Unceremoniously, the soldiers carrying her dump her on the filthy asphalt next to Steve’s limp body. Nancy crawls to him again, and nobody pistol-whips her for it. Steve’s eyes are closed, now, and he’s pale—so pale. She lowers her throbbing face to his, seeking proof of life, hungry for his breath on her lips.

It’s too dangerous to speak to him, somehow, so she doesn’t. Just thinks, with all her might,

Please, Steve. Don’t go. Don’t leave me. You’re there. You’ve always been—

“Get them into the ambulance bay,” Sullivan orders. Nobody protests; there must not be any bystanders. The hospital’s still packed like rats in a trap, too scared to run, too scared to be useful. “Then stay there, doors down. And don’t let any motherfucking do-gooders upstairs see you. Corporal, we need to stop the other shuttles. Scratch that, stop any and all traffic. Whoever is here, stays here. Whoever is at the school, stays at the school. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m finishing this checkpoint. Lance, Oliver, Seborg, with me. I’ll radio you in the bay when I’m coming in.”

A throat is cleared. “The kid’s fading fast, sir. He needs—”

“Then do some basic goddamn first aid. It’s just a flesh wound.”  

Steve wakes up when they dig for the bullet. He manages an impressive string of curses before he’s fully lucid, slurred but biting. Steve is brave. Has been since the moment he burst through the door of the Byers’ house to face down something that none of them understood.

“Leave it,” one of the soldiers says to the one prodding at Steve’s torn flesh. “He’ll just bleed out. Patch it. Jesus, kid, we’re trying to help you.”

“Fuck off,” Steve growls, but they kneel on his arms when he tries to fight them, and he subsides.

As for Nancy? Nancy might as well be watching this all unfold from behind a pane of glass. She’s been aware for most of the sickening span of time between the parking lot and now, save for a few seconds of black-out when the blood rushed to her head, when the pain became overwhelming. That awareness hasn’t done much good, though. Hasn’t been enough for her to fight, to flee, to intervene. She let herself be dragged out of the forest and into this makeshift prison like a goddamn sack of potatoes.

A sack of potatoes with a beat-up face. She wonders, absently, if her own mother would recognize her right now.

The sub-level garage of the hospital smells like cement and motor oil, and of course, to Nancy, like blood and sweat. Bars of yellow light flicker overhead, casting the whole place in a sickly glow. Other than the soldiers and their captives, it’s empty, bereft of Hawkins’ grand total of three ambulances. Those, Nancy vaguely recalls, are being used as shuttles—moving people in need of medical care, and those who want to visit people in need of medical care, after curfew’s over.

A strangely humane move by Sullivan, orchestrating that. Or maybe it wasn’t—maybe he’s just made sure to keep the sheep-like civilians orderly enough so that nobody questions him, while he gets down to the real business.

Real business is hunting down a traumatized pre-teen instead of an eldritch egomaniac, because you think she’s the more realistic target. Real business, presumably, is Nancy, splitting head in her hands, crouched between two goons while a third and fourth tear Steve’s shirt away from his bleeding shoulder, stuffing the wound with gauze and wrapping it with a fairly shit bandage. Now might be a good time, Nancy supposes, to make some trouble—Sullivan’s away, and the guards are distracted—but she can’t risk Steve. She can’t interrupt what they’re doing, saving his life.

Nancy reaches up to touch the swelling on her face. It twinges sharply, and she drops her hand. She shouldn’t be focused on her own pain right now. It’s the least she can do, witnessing his.

Steve has never really told her much about what happened in ’85, or the fall of ’84, come to that. Somehow, like clockwork, Steve Harrington is doomed to get the ever-living shit kicked out of him whenever there’s an interdimensional crisis in town.

He survived Billy Hargrove’s personal vendetta against his face. He survived the Russians. But this—

Nancy winces at the sound of his rasping moans, his bitten-off pleas-turned-insults. She jolts at the sound of one of the bay doors opening again.

“Kept them alive, did you?” Sullivan’s voice echoes, coldly hollow, in the cool, stale air. He's closed the door behind him; a few flakes have floated in anyway. “Bravo.”

Sullivan’s men don’t carry handcuffs. At his orders, they use scraps of twine, bungee cords, and electrical tape to truss Nancy and Steve like a couple of hapless Thanksgiving turkeys. Nancy still doesn’t put up a fight. What is she going to do, against five men licensed to kill—no weapons, still winded and struggling to see out of her swollen eye? Whatever hope she and Steve have for getting out of this... tomb... is in other people’s hands. At least El has time to hide, with Sullivan’s eyes focused elsewhere. At least Robin and Jonathan can follow Joyce, or rally the public to their cause, or find out what exactly is climbing up from the rift now.

Maybe after that, they’ll all come back for Steve and Nancy.

Nancy squeezes her good eye shut, wanting to believe. But it isn’t Jonathan, nail-bat in hand, who appears tattooed on the inside of her eyelids.

It’s Steve, mouth pressed firmly shut in his ghost-white face, lying on his side with his arms dragged torturously behind his back.

Nancy opens her eye, and sees the same thing. Only, he’s too far from her, with the added jump-scare of fucking Sullivan looming over him. His back is turned towards Nancy, but that just means she can imagine the mirrored aviators he’s no longer wearing, the shark-like glimmer of his teeth.

“Found what was left of my second position guard,” Sullivan says. “A boot—and a torso.”

One of the soldiers gasps.

The dogs, Nancy thinks dully. Of course. They’ve been prowling. She was an idiot to think they hadn’t already eaten their fill.

“One of our shuttles went off the road during the ‘quake,” Sullivan continues. “No survivors, far as I can tell. Just a shit…ton…of blood.”

Who would have been taking a shuttle to the school today? Someone without a car—old folks? A family who’d run out of gas? Robin’s parents?

Tears sting Nancy’s cheeks.

“Good thing…” Steve’s voice is faint, but there’s an unmistakable thread of Harrington recklessness laced through it. “Good thing you had eyes on us the whole time, sir.”

Sullivan kicks him in the ribs. Steve retches.

“Smart-mouthed for an axe-murderer, aren’t you?” Sullivan deadpans. “Why don’t you and your brainwashed girlfriend tell me a thing or two I don’t know? Like how many more members of your sicko cult there are running around? I know you’ve got the Byers holed up somewhere…maybe in that mansion of yours. That’s where the Holland girl died, isn’t it? First confirmed kill.”

Nancy’s parched throat closes up.

“Barb Holland… Fred Benson…” Sullivan pauses. “Not to mention Max Mayfield. Two of my sentries at least, torn limb from limb in the same grotesque way. Some kind of ritual, or some kind of madness—it’s all the same. Thing is, what interests me most is how easy it is to put one or both of you at the scene of every crime. Easy enough for a lesser man to think you were the ringleaders. But I know better.” Deliberately, he sets his boot against Steve’s bloodstained shoulder.

Nancy drags in a breath.

“Where’s the girl they call Eleven?” Sullivan asks, and when Steve doesn’t answer, Sullivan’s steel-toe grinds down.

The first time Nancy Wheeler saw Steve Harrington, she was in sixth grade. She’d gone to the Catholic school in Rockport for all of elementary, because Grandma Wheeler paid for it. That’s half of what earned her goody-two-shoes title, which it took two boyfriends and a few more than two monster head-shots to ditch.

She remembers the rising king of Hawkins High when he was just an aspiring Middle School heartthrob: floppy hair, clean sneakers, notoriously dirty mouth. She remembers being surprised by how dark his eyes were. How his smile hung around longer than his jokes.

Her crush was well-developed by seventh grade. She kept it a secret from everyone, even Barb, until eighth. And then after that, it was a heady stretch of girlish dreams right up through sophomore year, unmoored by anything verging on reality.

You can’t break your heart over a crush. It would be too simple.

Nancy didn’t know she had broken her heart over Steve until she lost him. Then she got him back again.

The last time Nancy Wheeler saw Steve Harrington for the first time was in blue-black shadow, him wheeling around in the middle of their careful, trudging march towards destiny, him saying he’d been meaning to thank her, then saying so much more than that.

After that, this can’t be the rest of their life.

She has only half of herself; one eye swelled shut, one hand going numb at the tight-cinched wrist. One soul, if she has ever had a soul, split and shattered by the sound of Steve, screaming.

No.

Nancy does not remember breaking the cords that bind her, though later she will know that she did, thanks to the raw red marks they leave behind. She does not remember clambering to her feet, or how she was steady on them once she had. How could she forget the pain in her head? How did she decide to face basically a squadron of armed men?

Maybe she didn’t decide.

She only knows that she is standing when the earth begins to shake again, when the dust begins to rise from the cracked cement.

Sullivan leaves off in his brutal questioning for a moment, but not because of Nancy’s brash last stand. No, Sullivan is staring, as disconcerted as his men, at the warping metal doors. They’re heavy-duty, the industrial-strength version of garage doors, but they’re being punched out like tin-foil. It’s not the bullet-headed assault of ravenous demodogs. It’s…the whole row of doors, twisting in on themselves.

I saw a dark cloud spreading over Hawkins...downtown on fire...dead soldiers...and this giant creature with a gaping mouth…

Like a screeching sheet of origami, the doors fold inward. What passes through them doesn’t have a shape so much as it makes a new one every second, shifting and changing as it comes.

A shadow that has strength. A shadow that has teeth.

Adrenaline (power?) sings in Nancy’s veins. She isn’t going to die here. Steve isn’t going to die here. While the shadow rears high above the terrified formation of soldiers, guns hanging useless in their hands, Nancy crosses the floor to where Steve lies, curled in on himself. She understands with all her heart, how shock is probably overtaking any other feeling in him. She kneels beside him, blind to anything else. Leaning forward, she shields him with her body. Even though she’s smaller than he is, it’s enough.

She’s so sure it will be enough.

Nancy doesn’t move until it’s over. Until bones have stopped snapping, until blood has stopped spilling and splattering, until the last scream has been torn from the last throat.

Until the shadow, and whatever dwells in it, has retreated as if it never came.

As if something in Nancy—through Nancy—never called or commanded it.

This is a gift, Vecna tells her, deep in her divided mind. You see how I offer it freely.

Chapter Text

Maybe it’s not surprising that Steve ends up in a hospital bed. How many times has he been here, Hawkins Memorial, since the fall of ’83—aimlessly counting the minutes until his mom comes to pick him up and exclaim over the bruising on his face, or standing guard while the rugrats visit Will, or blearily asking the doctors if they know where his car-keys are (he’s pretty sure the Russians kept ‘em), or—

But this isn’t like those other times. He’s too disconnected from reality, still trapped at the scene of the crime. It’s like he didn’t make it out of the Byers house—either time—or the underground stronghold, or Vecna’s vine-choked lair. Where he can feel his body, it’s all points of prickling pain. What he can remember is…some crazy shit. Dark, crazy shit.

Steve’s all alone in the room. He closes his eyes, pushes past the deathly specters. Tries to imagine he’s floating, no IV in his arm, no meal-sack pillows packed under his head.

No loss. No pain. But that would mean—

No Nancy.

He opens his eyes, but it’s not Nancy who comes into the room; it’s Joyce Byers.

“There you are,” she says, the mother-look all over her face. “Doc had to knock you out a little bit for the surgery.”

The story’s coming back to him in bits and pieces; he doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. It’s weird, because while he was having to steer the boat  alone (no, not alone, Nancy was there), any time during these last few wild days (weeks), he could at least find words. Reactions. Maybe they weren’t always right, and maybe in the end he didn’t accomplish jack-shit, but he still felt like he was…in charge of something. Now he’s just a kid again, parents anywhere but here, someone else’s mom checking in on how he’s recovering from being a dumbass.

“You’re OK,” he observes, testing the waters.

Something in Joyce’s face shatters, but she turns it into a smile. That’s a superpower of hers. “Yeah, kiddo.” This is the only time she’ll tower above him; standing next to his bed. The instant this thought occurs to him, he realizes that technically, she stood over him when he was fighting for his life on his own dining room table but it was—hard to pay attention, then.

“Tell me what happened,” he says. “Please?”

Her hand on his forehead, cool and light, is almost more than he can take. She strokes his matted hair while she talks.

 “It’s still happening,” she says. “You were awake for most of it. When the drugs wear off, you’ll probably remember a bit more. After the earthquake—or what we thought was an earthquake—Will told me I needed to get back to the hospital. He basically commanded me. When we drove up to the edge of the parking lot, we could see that something was coming. It was like this giant black… cloud. A shadow, maybe. We should have been careful—but we weren’t. Thank God, we weren’t.”

Steve isn’t sure what she means by this. Some part of him is still racing breathlessly through the sickly trees, muffled by the bandana he lost long ago, his axe swinging heavily over his shoulder.

Then the bullet. Then Nancy’s terrified face. And then—

He wrenches himself back to Joyce, to what she’s trying to tell him. What he asked her to tell him.

“You said you weren’t—careful?”

“We ran toward the shadow,” Joyce says. “Will ran toward it. It was…it wasn’t the same, he says, as the one that…as the Mind-flayer.” She grimaces, as if acknowledging that they all know better now. They all know it’s not some separate, shapeless entity—it’s Vecna, One, Henry Creel. It’s all the embodiment of his power. His hatred.

“That was brave,” Steve says. “Of Will.”

“Yeah.” Joyce is lost in memory for a moment. Then she says, “The place was shaking. People were—trampling each other, trying to get out. It was terrible. But as soon as they ran…” She shakes her head. “A few reached the woods. Those accursed dogs were waiting.”

Steve’s throat is painfully dry. He’s been beaten, kicked, shot. But nothing gets a knock in like the knowledge that more people are dead.

You spend your whole life in a town ready to shake its dust from your boots, and then—

Then you’re sorry you couldn’t save it.

He doesn’t let himself shut his eyes. Doesn’t let himself drift back into the merciful mists of oblivion.

“We knew better,” Joyce says. “And of course, we had to find El. Or to be exact, she found us. There was no reasoning with her. She held off the dogs, as many as she could, until people wised up and got back inside. By that time—”

Steve strains. Nancy, pressed against him. Nancy, whispering his name. The world around them—

Nancy? Steve? God, Nancy, is he—

That was Robin talking. Robin was there?

“The shadow came for us,” Steve says, and it’s almost as if he’s confessing something, like Joyce isn’t entitled to know the obvious. Why would he feel that way? Why is his whole body, his addled head, seemingly afraid to remember how he survived? “But it didn’t kill us. Go figure.”

“Yeah.” Joyce clears her throat. “You don’t remember, do you?”

He shakes his head, ashamed. “Not enough. Not all of it.”

“Jonathan and Robin saw you get taken by that Sullivan bastard. Once they got El upstairs, Jonathan said they—they went after you. They saw the shadow first.”

Robin was there. Tears rise in Steve’s eyes, hot and blinding. “Robin? Robin’s not—”

“No!” Joyce practically leaps six inches, like he suddenly jabbed her with a cattle prod. “Shit, I’m terrible at this breaking the news stuff. I knew they shouldn’t have sent me, but we didn’t want to overwhelm you and—Robin’s fine, honey. She’s just shook up. I was trying to say that Robin and Jonathan found you and Nancy, and you were the only ones…”

Steve remembers. Remembers Sullivan, there and gone, but not so simply as a few words can seem to make it. One minute the man was strong and fierce and hard, stomping Steve into the fucking ground, and the next he was torn apart, limbs snapped and tossed, entrails dragged and smeared. It wasn’t an outright devouring. Had the…creature…been capable of that?

He says, knowing he’s right, “The only ones who survived.”

Joyce leaves him after a while, promising that she’ll be back with food. Apparently everyone else is in some stage of getting patched up, or calmed down, or helping settle the restless public—with a good deal of assistance from Hopper over the radio systems. Steve will see them all again soon. Anyway, now that Steve is more himself again—shoulder hurting like a bitch, ribs hurting like a motherfucker—he has the dubious luxury of all five senses restored. He can smell his own sour sweat. He can see the bleak red-and-gray sky through the half-drawn blinds on the window. And he can hear…

…voices, a little ways off, and machines beeping, near and far. The voices are familiar, and he even thinks that maybe that’s Dustin crackling over the radio, which suggests that Max’s room is nearby. Is she aware of anything that’s happening around her? Is it still like Eleven said, in her head—all black emptiness?

For the first time, Steve wonders if it’s unfair to wish life on Max. Things have gotten pretty out of hand in her absence, after all. Her mom still hasn’t turned up. Her heartbreaks have multiplied.

Then again, it’s Max. If anyone’s capable of rallying, of finding a way forward through the densest mire of misery you’ve ever encountered—it’s her.

So. Circling back to the original conclusion…her fate is fucking unfair.

His may be too. His memories are mostly piecing back together, from the parking lot to the woods to the underground garage, with the exception of one yawning, devouring question: Why?

Why did the creature let them live?

The only person who could possibly answer that (at least, the only person he’d want to ask, since presumably Vecna knows) is Nancy.

Robin and Lucas arrive next, Robin with her arms folded tightly, clutching her elbows like she’s trying to keep her heart from beating out of her chest, and Lucas carrying his battered radio handset. The swelling still visible on Lucas’s face reminds Steve that Nancy took a pretty hard hit somewhere along the way, when he was…out of it. God, when are they going to let him see Nancy again?

Is she hiding from him?

“Hey Buckley,” Steve says, and Robin bursts into tears.

“Hey,” Lucas says, sounding a little thick himself. “You promised to keep it together, Robin.”

They sort things out with Lucas pulling up a chair, and Robin sitting on the bed, tucked up against Steve’s good arm.

“No more splitting up,” Robin says. “Every time we’ve done that it’s gone to shit. Absolute shit, dingus.”

“Agreed,” Steve says. “But I’m fine, Rob. Really. Just…groggy. It was a flesh wound.”

The kid’s fading fast—

(Did all of those soldiers deserve to die? What does it mean, to deserve anything?)

“Just a flesh wound, he says. You looked dead. And Nancy said—”

Steve shifts. “Where is—”

“I told Dustin I’d radio him when you woke up,” Lucas says, interrupting them both. “Do you want to, uh, call him now?”

“Sure,” Steve says, conscious that he’s in no position to force anything. Not to mention that it’s relieving as hell to know that Dustin wants to talk to him. Dustin’s still at the school. Wherever the shadow-monster went, it can’t have gone there, because if it had, Lucas wouldn’t be so confident about Dustin’s whereabouts.

A lump in Steve’s throat promises to spoil what little remains of his dignity. He blinks hard, waiting for Lucas to finish making the call.

Dustin’s voice is urgent, real even over a crap connection. “I copy! I copy! Where is he?”

“Right here,” Steve says, snagging the handset. “And you forgot to say over. Over.”

Dustin doesn’t even try to parry the jab. “Lucas says we’re all clear on the military front. That true? Over.”

Yeah, all clear, if men reduced to pulp by an indescribable thing that stops just short of killing you for no reason counts as all clear.

“All clear,” Steve radios back. “And I’ll be right as rain in a couple more hours. Over.”

Dustin tells him he needs to stop being a chew-toy for the forces of evil, and makes a few recommendations to Lucas about how he and “Will the Wise” (just in case anyone is still looking for clues about the Byers, probably, though the nickname doesn’t strike Steve as particularly effective code) can improve the base of radio operations, and then signs off with a hurried, “Glad you’re alright, man. Over and out.”

Dustin was angry at death, Steve realized. It lit a fire in him over Eddy, and he needed someone to blame. Kid has a brain like a newfangled computer, but his heart, overloaded, sends everything on the fritz.

All the resentment was leached out of him, apparently, at the thought that Steve might die, too.

That just leaves Steve conflicted. It shouldn’t have to come to this, even though he’s glad to be on sound footing with Dustin again. He wants to grab the radio back from Lucas, say something incredibly sappy like, You can be mad at me as long as you want, you shouldn’t have to be scared, but that would just embarrass the kid. And hey, as much as they pretend it’s not, these are public frequencies.

Lucas slips away, back to his eternal vigil at Max’s side, which leaves Robin curled up against Steve, her unusually serious face inches from his. She smells a little like blood and a little like bleach.

Hospital smells.

“Rob,” he asks, speaking as quietly as if he’s telling her a secret. “Where’s Nancy?”

Three blinks, in Robin Buckley time, might as well be a century. “She’ll see you soon,” she says. “She just…had to get some clean-up herself, and then she felt really faint. She said she wanted to wait until—until she was herself again.”

Steve’s chest hurts. Beneath the words is something she’s not saying—something she might not even know.

It scares him.

“OK,” he says.

“Steve…” Robin screws up her face, tries to relax it, still ends up with a crease between her eyebrows. “What happened?”

He sighs. His shoulder is burning. The re-stitched wounds in his stomach are burning. His head feels it’s being held underwater. “Hell if I know. We lived.”

“I was going to save you,” she hiccups. “But I—I didn’t get there in time, and then you were already…it was already gone, and all the bodies—you were…”

“Don’t.” He reaches up with his good hand—an awkward motion, since they’re sort of squashed together and the bed isn’t very big—and swipes the tears away from her cheek. “Don’t worry about it.”

Footsteps sound in the hall, then hesitate in the doorway. Steve turns his head—irritating that pesky bat-tail burn on his neck—and sees Nancy.

If Sullivan wasn’t dead (without even leaving a recognizable corpse, at that), Steve would kill him himself.

The tangle of Nancy’s hair can’t hide the lumpy red weal that runs from her temple to her jawbone. The hollow of her eye is bee-sting puffy, and butterfly bandages mark the places where skin was broken.

“There she is,” Robin says, rolling off the bed. “Not too much worse for wear, Wheeler?”

“I’ll live,” Nancy answers, echoing what Steve said a moment ago. “I hear that’s the prize these days.” She’s looking at him.

“I’ll give you two a minute,” Robin murmurs. She pats Steve’s shoulder, and gives Nancy half a hug on her way out.

Nancy waits a beat, tucking her already-bitten lip between her teeth. Then she inches forward, as if her boots are heavier than they should be.

Steve stretches out his hand, and she takes it. The way her fingers fit between his is as familiar as breathing.

Nancy’s gaze—even half-shuttered—is piercing. “I thought I’d lost you,” she says.

He should ask, Did I lose you? but he doesn’t. He can’t. He just says, ‘C’mere,” and she obeys, sitting close beside him, the line of her leg pressed to his.

“Can I see?” she asks, and since he’s never been fit to refuse her anything, he nods. She draws down the sheet that’s covering his chest, and opens the ties on his ridiculous hospital gown, and traces the edge of his bandages—all his bandages—with light fingers.

The ghost-touch on his skin makes him grit his teeth together, not out of pain. There are still other sensations than suffering and loss in the world; other hopes.

Nancy doesn’t speak while she completes her survey of all the ways the forces of evil have been making Steve their chew-toy (thanks, Dustin). She drags her knuckles against his sternum, and then rests the palm of her hand there, like she’s making sure he doesn’t stop existing before her very eyes.

Finally, she moves, twisting her body so that she’s leaning over him, one hand on his good shoulder. Her curls dangle around her cheeks: the one that’s still soft and smooth, the one that’s bruised and swollen.

“Can I?” she whispers. “Please?”

Steve whispers back, “Yeah,” and she kisses him.

She tastes of what they’ve suffered—blood and earth and smoke, a sharpness that only fades with the kind of time they don’t have. Steve tries to give as good as he gets, but without hurting her—only that’s impossible, and when he deepens the kiss despite himself, she whimpers.

Steve pulls back, ashamed.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s alright,” Nancy says. “You’re hurt worse than I am.”

“They left me my pretty face,” Steve cracks. The ache in his stomach is hard to ignore, though, and he’s aggravated the bullet-wound, trying to move his arms. Like hell he wasn’t going to try to hold her, given the chance—he’d do it again—but a break’s in order. “Here,” he says. “Bed’s big enough for two.”

“Robin gave it a test-drive, I saw,” Nancy counters, but with a wink to show that she’s not really jealous. “OK.”

Rearranged like this, she can lie with her head on his shoulder, her arm draped gently over his chest. It’s like a dream—a good dream, that Steve thought he’d never know again.

The thing about dreams, though, is that they don’t last. It’s not in their nature.

“Nance,” Steve begins, knowing that he has to—“I gotta ask something.”

“Mm?”

“That…thing. In the garage.”

“It’s gone now. It disappeared,” she says, almost hurriedly. “We called Hopper and Dustin, and they never even saw it, at the school. That doesn’t mean it won’t—come back, but for now, as long as we keep everyone clear of the dogs—”

“That’s not…” He licks his lips, still trying to savor the memory of hers. “I was in and out. Blood loss, I guess. They’ve pumped me up with some good stuff now, but it’s still pretty hazy. I just—it…it didn’t even hesitate over the soldiers. So why…why didn’t it kill us?”

She’s quiet. The distant voices, the machines in the room and those down the hall, go on. The hospital remains a safe haven for another minute, another hour. Another day, even. When she was here, Joyce had explained that people were terrified. They understood, now, that the same sort of horrors Hawkins had once known only in shadows were walking openly now. They wanted a leader, and they had that in Hopper. They wanted answers, but only because they hadn’t yet received them.

Sometimes, it’s better not to know. Easier.

“Did it spare us,” Steve ventures, “Because you told it to?”

Nancy stiffens against him. “It’s not—it’s not that simple.”

He hates himself for having to even speak the next words, to suggest—no matter how innocently—that she’s somehow become a traitor. It’s not that he doesn’t have a choice, exactly. No. This is his choice. To make sure he understands, all the way through his thick skull, where Nancy’s at, and where she’s going.

He owes her that much.

“Nance. Is he in you?”

“No,” she answers. A quick answer, but Steve doesn’t think that she’s lying. “Not yet. But I know now—he wants to be. He wants me to say yes.”

Chapter Text

Everything keeps changing. In just a few hours—by Nancy’s admittedly imperfect reckoning—Hawkins has begun to face what it must. Oh, not that the terrified citizens are managing well under pressure. They could never be accused of that. After all, anyone who hasn’t seen an unearthly horror by the age of seventeen is pretty set in their ways. They can fall to pieces, sure, but they don’t readily answer a call to arms.

Still, demodogs provide a brutal kind of education.

According to Hopper—that is, Hopper through the radio mouthpieces provided by Mike and Dustin—the remaining soldiers at the school got pretty fired up when they didn’t hear anything from their fearless leader. They went in search of him, and some didn’t make it past the monstrous scouts barring passage between the school and the hospital. Those that did were too shaken up to truly countenance what it meant that there was no trace of Sullivan.

(Nancy won’t spare a shred of pity for the man. She won’t.)

As it is, Hopper has commandeered what channels of communication he can and ordered everyone to stay put, for God’s sakes, and not go out of doors. The facing what they must that Nancy’s observed is most clearly divined from the fact that people are listening, for once, to the instructions they’ve been given. Some of the very same that were on a witch-hunt for teenagers a few days ago are now waiting breathlessly for the next radio announcement.

A blessing, maybe, that Nancy ought to be counting.

She’s counting something, that’s for sure. After she left Steve—supposedly to sleep, though the worried depths of his dark eyes suggested otherwise—she wandered back to Max’s room, where the machines wheezed steadily along, keeping Max at the brink of death instead of hurtling her over its edge. Mr. and Mrs. Sinclair were taking a meal break. Robin had gone to spend time with her frazzled parents, and El was being pampered by Joyce, and Jonathan…Jonathan was sitting next to Will on the floor, elbow to elbow like they’d never be separated again. He gave Nancy a cautious smile and she returned it, lips still stinging from Steve’s kiss.

If only that were all—if only life would shrink to the simplicity of us-or-them, the love story beginning again at the world’s end.

Instead, Nancy has to contend with the monster inside.

Not yet, she told Steve, and she wasn’t lying…but nothing, these days, feels like the whole truth.

They’re trapped in the hospital and the rest of her family is trapped at the school. That should spur her to action, right? That should make her want to fight with all the fierceness that surged through her mere hours ago, when Steve’s life was on the line and the power to kill was apparently hers to command.

Instead, she sits curled against the unforgiving curves of a hard plastic hospital chair, stomach sour not hungry, dry-mouthed but not thirsty, listening to Lucas, Dustin, and Mike bat information back and forth across their chosen frequency. Her swollen face feels stiff, strange. Painful if she tries to move, so she doesn’t move.

Inside, she’s coffin-hollow.

All quiet on the mental front.

Is this the kind of thing you can ever, ever come back from?

“Nancy?”

It’s El, wincing sympathetically at the sight of Nancy’s battered face.

“Yeah?” Nancy croaks, almost splitting her lip open again.

“I wanted to ask you something.” El glances cautiously over her shoulder, seemingly reassuring herself that Joyce is preoccupied with Will. “About how…we both saw Max.”

Nancy twitches uncomfortably. Between their fevered visions and now, there’s been a whole lot of bloodshed. Sullivan was his own brand of evil incarnate, but he and his soldiers presented some opposition to Vecna’s forces…opposition that has, in the ensuing build-up of chaos, been majorly diminished.

There’s more than one plan at work, even if it’s the same psycho doing the planning.

“Right,” Nancy says. “I think it was just…fake.”

“You do?” El’s forehead wrinkles. Without hair to hide behind, her expressions are intensified. “I mean, yes. He was lying to us. But—I feel like she’s there. Like maybe he is using her too, but she is still…there.”

Eleven has seen much, much more than any child should. It doesn’t feel fair to think of her as a child at this point. Nancy has seen all the ways Mike has grown up, after all, and has grudgingly acknowledged (if on account of his height alone) that he’s not her little brother anymore.

And yet…there’s something of a child’s hope in Eleven’s eyes, and Nancy doesn’t want to crush it.

“Maybe,” she says. “I’ve seen her, too. And of course I—I want her to be…herself. I want that.”

“He won’t let us save her,” El says, the sorrow of certainty settling over her again. Nancy’s encouraging look must not have been very convincing. “I know that.”  

El’s mournful confidences turn out to be the kick in the pants Nancy needed. Swallowing one of the granola bars Joyce forces on her, she’s on her feet again, ignoring her throbbing bruises, pacing towards Lucas’s radio kit with the knowledge that she has more than one pair of eyes (Jonathan’s included) following her every move.

They don’t even know what Steve knows.

Steve doesn’t even know all that she knows.

“I want to talk to Hopper,” she says. “I have an idea.”

Hopper hates her idea. So does almost everyone else, apparently, though El and Will keep quiet while Nancy explains. If Nancy could call on Steve, she feels like he’d have her back—and not just because the whole, he’s still in love with you part, which makes her heart twist painfully in her chest. No, Steve has asked enough hard-hitting questions lately to satisfy himself that Nancy’s following a thread worth unraveling.

And Steve would be able to warn everyone if (when) she could no longer be trusted.

For now, though—

“We’re sitting ducks,” she tells Joyce, tilting her chin defiantly, Lucas’s borrowed radio clenched in her hands. “We can’t cede the route between the hospital and the school like this. It’s obviously just another trap—separating us so that they can…” It’s not a they, even if it feels like it. It’s him. “Just so that we’re weaker targets.”

“I’m not arguing with that,” Joyce says.

“Nobody’s arguing with that,” Jonathan adds, rather unhelpfully.

Joyce keeps going. She’s never minded talking over anyone. “But we can’t afford to lose you, or anybody—anybody else, running a suicide mission just to get a better sense of the roads—I think we can assume they’re worse than they were, and meanwhile, the radios keep us in constant communication with Hop. Believe me, hon, it’s tearing me up to be apart from him, but separated is better than dead. I’ve never been more aware of that than now.”

Nancy’s idea, simply put, is that she should spearhead a recon of the remaining ways out of Hawkins. People were leaving as recently as a couple days ago, and the main thoroughfare may still be passable—it’s just that everyone’s been too freaked out to try it. Nancy swears her brain isn’t too addled: she can drive, even if that means captaining Argyle’s ridiculous pizza van. And—perhaps most controversially—she wants to take Eleven with her. Eleven, and whoever is sure they’re a fair shot out the window of a moving vehicle.

OK, so maybe she can’t reasonably feign surprise that nobody took the bait.

She still thinks it’s goddamn necessary.

“I know I sound reckless.” She nods toward Eleven. “And like a cold-hearted, child-endangering bitch, probably. But we’re lying to ourselves, thinking that staying in these walls will stop that…that thing. Jonathan, you saw it. Whatever sense of security we have—it’s completely based on Vecna’s rules. And for right now…for right now, El and I are the most attuned to what he wants.” She leaves out Will, since pointing out his connection to Vecna will be no way to convince Joyce of anything. “Sure, he’s lying to us. But he doesn’t seem to want us dead yet.” Her raw throat closes up. The next words are hard to say, but this is the closest she can come to admitting her fears. “That creature didn’t kill me and Steve. It—could have. We have no promises for the future, but it seems like we have a little more time.”

“Nancy’s right,” Will says. As usual, he gets Jonathan and Joyce’s attention as reliably as a fire alarm. He can make a point about himself, about Vecna, capable of breaking through his family’s defensive protections. “He’s playing games with us, and he doesn’t…he doesn’t want the three of us to stop watching his every move. Wherever we are, he has to strike precisely. In a way, that’s what safety means at the moment, if it means anything.”

“The three of you,” Joyce says, a little tremulously. “So now he’s in your head again, too? He’s talking to you?”

“He wants me,” Will says, very quietly, as if it’s not the most foreboding admission in the world. “And he told El that he wants her too, even though…”

“He’s lying,” El adds. She holds her shoulders straight and proud, resisting, Nancy suspects, the urge to shiver. “He wants to kill me, not…possess me. But I think he wants to kill me last.”

“And you, Nancy?” Joyce presses worriedly. Mr. and Mrs. Sinclair’s voices echo down the hall—they’re on their way back. This confab won’t be private much longer.

Nancy, chastened by Will’s honesty, can’t stop herself from nodding. “Same deal, I guess,” she says, knowing that her voice sounds like ice that’s about to fracture. “He’s latched onto me like he did…Will, sort of. Not as—violently.” She moistens her tattered lips with the cotton-wool tip of her tongue. “But it’s all the same. If I give in…I’ll have power.”

“Why did he choose you?” Jonathan asks, and there’s something in his tone that, despite it being a fair question, makes Nancy feel like he has never known her at all.

Barb died, and Nancy sank to the depths, then fought for the truth, then fought for her life, because—

Because she’s always wanted, without even centering that wanting on a singular object. A soul-deep longing, really, to be more than what she fears she is.

(Didn’t Jonathan hear her voice those fears, albeit in a sixteen-year-old’s clumsy terms? Hasn’t Jonathan seen her grapple with the fury and despair that rises to meet the wrong kind of ambition?)

“Maybe he think I’m like him,” she says, with a trace of scorn.

“He’s wrong,” El says. “He’s wrong about all of us.”

(Chrissy, the haunted girl, forced too soon to the ugliest side of womanhood. Fred, a traitor to the memory of his lost friend. Patrick, a boy who believed he didn’t belong.)

(One, two, three. And Max, lying more than half dead, nothing but herself:

Four.)

“Joyce,” Nancy pleads. “We have to act. Will stays here with you, El and I go with—”

“With me.” Jonathan’s face has hardened with unexpected resolve. Or maybe it’s not unexpected; maybe once Will put himself in the line of eventual fire, Jonathan knew that waiting meant death for all of them.

Nancy likes him better like this than she ever loved him. He’s Will’s brother. He’s Joyce’s son. He isn’t Nancy’s—that was a wounded girl’s hope, as blind to the truth of her heart as to everything else. “Are you a better shot than you used to be?” she asks.

“I am,” Mr. Sinclair says, from the doorway.

Lucas wants to blame Erica for blabbing, but Erica fires back that their parents aren’t stupid—otherwise how could I be related to them, dumbass?—and a few days in this hellhole mess plus the past few years in Hawkins had given them a shit-ton of questions, to which Erica gave answers. At which point Mrs. Sinclair said, language, Erica, but mostly subsided.

Mr. Sinclair doesn’t look like the slightly nerdy, clean-cut guy Nancy’s known her whole life anymore. He looks like a soldier. “I don’t pretend to understand the half of it,” he says, “But I was watching when people made it to the tree-line a few hours ago, and I’ve been by this little girl’s bedside since Lucas called me here. I should have taken more time to think, since the fall of ’83, than I have—but now there’s nothing to be said for it but what I’ve seen with my own eyes. Joyce, if you tell me that the best place for all of us is in these walls, I’ll join you in barring the doors to these kids as best I can. But—”

“They’re not just kids,” Joyce answers, shaking her head. “It’s not that simple.”

“We’re not throwing our lives away,” Nancy says to Mr. Sinclair, trying her hardest to mean it. “If you listened to what Erica said, I hope you’ll understand that what we need is a plan, not a hiding place.”

Joyce throws up her hands. “Let’s tell Hopper.”

Can Vecna hear them over the radio? Likely enough, and if he can, he can probably decipher the feeble attempts at encryption that Dustin and Lucas are inventing with each volley of information. Is Vecna listening always, or does he need to recover from a surge of vicious strength, same as El does?

That seems like the more crucial question, but it’s one Nancy can only answer by doing what she told Steve she wanted to do in the haunted upstairs bathroom of the Harrington house.

We need to go back.

She stops in, actually, to see Steve (to say goodbye) before the five of them head out: Eleven, Mr. Sinclair, Jonathan, and Argyle, who insists he’s needed as chief mechanic-guru of the pizza-mobile’s inner workings.

Robin is keeping vigil by Steve’s bedside, flipping through a crumpled magazine.

Nancy lifts a tentative hand, waves.

Robin waves back. Mouths, he’s sleeping, and it hits Nancy like a shot to the heart. She’s not going to get to talk to him. To explain herself. To hear him wish her well, or tell her it’s a bad idea, or rip off his bandages and come with her, bullet-wound and all.

She whispers, “Rob, I’ll be right back,” and runs to catch up with the others.

So yeah, everything keeps changing. There’s not a demodog to be seen on the cratered road out of town. A few cars are upended in the ditches; an army truck loiters empty, crashed against a stoplight. Through a fresh bandana, Nancy can’t tell if the smell of blood is mingled with the smell of burning. Maybe that’s a mercy.

She’s riding shotgun while Argyle drives. He’s surprisingly calm. Mr. Sinclair is positioned behind driver’s seat, Nancy’s long rifle between his knees. Jonathan brought a box cutter from the hospital mailroom, and El has…well, her mind.

Does Nancy’s mind count as a weapon now, too? It seems like a self-destructive one.

Her whole body is beginning to register the after-shocks of the forest chase and what followed. It’s like a car crash (she remembers finding Barb’s car on the side of the road). It’s like the blow to her face broke every bone in her body (Fred, twisted and sightless, looking as if he’d never been alive).

You can hate, and still desire—freedom, guiltlessness, power. That’s what Vecna’s banking on; that Nancy will begin to understand this.

In the rearview mirror, she glances at El. How has El managed to escape being totally jaded? Absolutely cruel?

Hopper asked them to note anywhere that parked cars were intact, so that they could see about siphoning off gasoline to a few larger vans and buses, if it so happened that evacuation was possible. If it so happened: those were Hopper’s words, undisguised by Dustin’s coding. Hopper was a pessimist; ‘Nam did that to people, and Russian prisons did that to people, and Hawkins did that to people.

Nancy takes note of the parked cars anyway.

“It’s too quiet,” Jonathan says.

“Creepy, man,” Argyle murmurs.

“I was about to say that myself,” Mr. Sinclair agrees. “These…dog-creatures, they don’t just hunt at night. We know that. But maybe they’re—satisfied? Not hungry?”

“I don’t think it’s that simple,” Nancy murmurs, echoing Joyce, not bothering to confirm whether anyone hears her or not.

Somewhere, outside this barren wasteland, the world marches on. Reagan is still president. Nancy doesn’t like him, but is that just because her father does? Nancy is registered to vote, but it’s not a presidential year. Will there be other years? Outside, college awaits—or it did. Lives like the ones envied or rejected by Carol Perkins, except Carol is trapped by accident here too, sowing a little chaos where she can.

The bruise on the side of Nancy’s face is Carol’s fault, in a way. Why is Nancy too tired to hate her for it?

I’ll be right back, she promised Robin, promised Steve, but the ruined road is passing steadily enough beneath her, and somehow, against all odds, Nancy has almost reached the edge of town.

(If they kept driving, robbed Vecna of two of his primary targets, leaving everyone else to his furious vengeance—they’d be no better than he is.)

“Weird quest-i-año,” Argyle says, “But…is that smoke? Like, a different kind of smoke than all the other smoke that’s been smokin’ up this joint?”

“What are you talking about?” Jonathan asks irritably, but Nancy says,

“No, I see it,” because she does, because there are two or three distinct gray plumes rising from the crest of the highway-line ahead.

Here’s what they find, when they get there: the border between the rot and the outside world blurred by the reach of decaying organic matter, the lightning-burned trunks of old trees, the rubble where earth shook free of asphalt, and—

Half a dozen emergency relief vehicles, cop-cars and ambulances bearing the insignia of the state rather than the county, tangled in a clouded heap of mangled and scorched metal. There were people inside, of course: people who were coming to help a ravaged town. A dozen demodogs are foraging in the wreckage for flesh and blood to tear and triumph over. A dozen more are ringed like sentries around the open highway lanes leading out.

Here lies Nancy’s idea, dead and buried.

Chapter Text

The anger wasn’t really for Steve. Dustin can see that now, can feel his carefully cherished rage leaching out of his aching limbs, leaving him empty. He’s like a tin can of a person, worlds away from the real boy he used to be. He’d honestly wonder if he was still capable of experiencing good things in the midst of all the bad that’s happened, but that question was answered along with the departure of his anger. He’s relieved that Steve is alive. Scratch that, he’s freakin’ joyful. Hollow, but temporarily filled with light and flooded with the tears that he thought had all been spent on Eddie.

Joy and grief. It turns out they’re like gaseous elements; powerful and fickle. Nothing to make him solid and whole.

What does that mean for his future? Does he have a future?

After radioing back and forth with the escape artist known as Steve Harrington, Dustin finds a corner of the gym, next to a heap of half-distributed boxes of coats and sweaters, and sits very still with his eyes closed. The world moves around him a little easier, that way, and he can actually think. Of course, thinking these days is more like cataloguing, going through what’s gone, and how gone it really is.

He misses…so many people, really. Mom, Eddie, Susie, Max… El and Will and Lucas. Steve. If he opens his eyes, he’ll see half his life jumbled together in the same way the gym is full of barely helpful, still-disorganized crap. Somewhere, there will be his middle school math teacher, guzzling down cold coffee. There will be his mom’s best friend, Pam Howard, trying to keep a passel of toddlers calm. There will be Wayne Munson, so lost in his own mourning that he’s less afraid than everyone else. Maybe Dustin will lock gazes with Holly Wheeler, if he looks, and see that over the years, she’s picked up almost as much knowledge as he has.

Even so, Dustin has seen things these people haven’t. He’s known longer, and he’s used his knowledge to save some of their lives.

He’s failed to save others.

Yeah, this is why he isn’t opening his eyes. This is why he wants to stop his ears, shrink into total…sensory deprivation, like El does when she needs to go deep. Dustin wishes he could cease to exist for just a second, so he could possibly come back to a better appreciation of what he has.

At least Steve’s alive. At least Sullivan is gone.

At least the school is Hopper’s domain now.

That’s probably the reason why Vecna attacks it next.

Thankfully, they get some advance warning. Nancy—and Mr. Sinclair, who has apparently joined the cause—radio in the situation at the border. Demodogs blocking the last clear way out of Hawkins with extreme prejudice strongly suggests that war is coming to the people trapped inside. It’s only a question of when.

Hopper certainly thinks so. Grimly, he herds Mike and Dustin in the comms room one last time. Sullivan’s maps and schematics and perp lists are still scattered all over the damn place.

“Get in touch with Murphy,” Hopper says. He scratches down some letters and numbers on the edge of one of Sullivan’s folders. “Here are his frequencies and call signs. He has some kinda illegal tech he uses to keep Big Brother from listening in.”

“What are we telling him?” Dustin asks.

“Everything,” Hopper says. “Fast as you can. Illegal tech or not, try to be discreet about Sullivan’s identity. Other than that…” He shakes his head. “Nobody’s coming,” he says. “Nobody that can get through. That’s the assumption we’re operating under. Got it?”

Nancy described the carnage on the outbound road. How emergency vehicles didn’t stand a chance against the waiting ambush.

Dustin nods.

“So you want Murray to come here?” Mike asks, with typical Wheeler quickness. “Because he knows what he’s getting into?”

“I want Murray to bring us every bit of firepower he can conjure up, and I want Dmitri to help him.” Hopper’s been changed by his time in Russia, that’s obvious. But what’s strange is the way Dustin doesn’t even… remember, half the time, that Hopper was in hell over there. Hopper’s pain-lined face, ripped arms, and thousand-yard stare make sense with the new world order. Russia and Hawkins aren’t really that different right now. Hawkins is presumably worse.

“When I say fire,” Hopper adds, “I mean it. It’s our best way through those things.”

So Dustin and Mike are shut up in the old closet, talking real-time code with Murray over a crackling connection, when window-glass outside shatters and the screaming starts.

Mike makes it to the closet door first and cracks it open. No coward, Mike Wheeler, and maybe Dustin isn’t either—he certainly took on the Upside Down when he still had two good legs to his name and so, so much to lose—but now it’s harder to say, what with the way every bone in his body seems to have turned to jelly.

The gym floor thunders with running feet, and the hubbub of noise is hard to make out—except for one thing. One sound that can’t be mistaken for anything else.

The guttering, whickering growl of a Demogorgon.

Shit, Dustin thinks and the rage floods back. Rage, more than fear. That would be interesting, in a way, if he had any time to reflect. Instead, he just repeats, Shit.

“It’s here,” Mike whispers. “Goddammit, it’s—”

“It’s not the same one,” Dustin hisses, like that matters. Not the same one that began it all, though maybe the same one that spooked Steve and Robin on their drive between the school and the Harrington house. “What’s it doing?”

“What do you think?” Mike’s voice snaps raw.

There’s a crash, a scream worse than the rest. Somebody’s dead, that’s what that means. Shots ring out—not enough. There are never enough shots with these bastards. More glass breaks. Doors bang towards the rear of the gym, away from the windows, and Hopper can be heard above the din, shouting commands.

Survival is all this town has left to fight for, and they couldn’t have asked for a better captain.

Doesn’t mean that they’ll win.

Dustin’s emptiness, he’s beginning to realize, is one and the same with resignation to loss.

“Come on,” Mike says—Wheelers never being inclined to give up. “We need to get out there.”

He’s an idiot, Dustin thinks vaguely. Fondly. An idiot, and Dustin wishes he could be one again too. Blood pumping in his veins and energy being expressed in his neural pathways as the emotion known as hope. That’s what Mike still has, and what, for Dustin, could be gone forever.

He tries to lock his memory around the gladness he felt when he learned that Steve was living, to keep out the sorrow shredding him as he leaned over Eddie, stained with cooling life-blood.

“We need a plan,” Dustin says. “We’re the backup.” For all the shit he’s given Steve, Steve has always made sure there’s a plan. Sometimes it’s a dumbass plan, but still. Now, Dustin glances around the shadowy recesses of the former janitor closet.

Hears Hopper’s voice in his head again. When I say fire…

“There,” Dustin says, pointing. “We can make a little firepower of our own.”

Mike snorts impatiently, like a monster twice his size isn’t getting ready to tear everyone they know in two. “Better make it fast.”

Dustin knows they can’t justify hiding out like a couple of rats. Mike’s family is out there. So he isn’t arguing, just acting. Handing Mike a mophead dipped in turpentine. He balances one himself, careful to keep the dripping end off his clothes, and they make their break.

“Three…two…one,” Mike mutters, before they go, like he’s readying a roll of dungeon-master dice.

In another world, this is all just a game.

They fling the door open.

Hopper’s a beast, and he has to be, to face down this one. He’s basically engaging in hand-to-hand combat with a Demogorgon that’s much, much bigger than the one Dustin remembers from the fall of ’83. The once-full gym is more than half empty now, people streaming into the hallways and stampeding over each other in their haste to get away from the nightmare come to life. A dead soldier—judging from the uniform, since his whole head is gone—appears to be the only casualty so far.

The Demogorgon is done hiding. No more blipping in and out of dusky forest shadows. No more haunting the corridors of a top-secret lab. This kind of public assault is more like the mall fire than anything else, and even then, most people didn’t see what went on.

“Need some help out here!” Hopper roars to no one in particular, landing a blow against the bony, horn-ribbed abdomen with a table-leg. The creature swipes at him with a clawed, dripping hand. Wayne Munson throws a stray brick at it, but it does little more than piss the thing off further.

“Where the hell are the other soldiers?” Mike demands, but Dustin is past expecting anyone in uniform to be of service.

“Time to light it up,” he says, and they bring their mopheads together so that Dustin can ignite them with one strike of the lighter.

Turpentine’s a fast, bright burn, and its heat and light catch the Demogorgon’s attention at once. The massive, petaled head swings around with ferocious speed, and for a second, Dustin’s pretty sure his heart stops.

But then it starts again, because he isn’t dead, he isn’t dead yet, and that’s all that surviving really means. Blood and energy, right? He lets the rage flood over him—the rage that’s shot through, bullet-sharp, with grief.

They charge. Him and Mike, best friends since Dustin knew that you could have more than one. They’re hollow boys because they’re boys no longer; childhood is long over. They left it in the grooved paths of their bike-wheels. They left it in the tunnels beneath the town. They left it in the offhand goodbyes they said before spring break.

Mike didn’t know, then, that he’d never see Eddie again.

Dustin didn’t know that he’d lose more ever before. Not just Eddie—Max.  

The Demogorgon is strong—freakishly strong—but it’s also been injured. Somebody shot a hole in its gnarled shoulder. If it was the soldier who lies dead, he died bravely. If it was Hopper, he's probably kicking himself for having wasted bullets. He's certainly not using his gun right now. Dustin and Mike work in tandem, swinging and ducking as the turpentine-soaked strings reek and smolder, getting their hits in while they can. Hopper doesn’t have the time or the inclination to chew them out right now, so he just hollers for his deputies and the remnants of Sullivan’s unit.

Finally stirred to action, full-grown men follow where teenagers lead. The desperation of one-on-one turns into a swarm of allies fighting to take down the monster. The screams become battle-cries, even when the creature’s claws and teeth strike home. Just as Dustin’s torch is beginning to flicker out, he plunges it through the side of the Demogorgon’s neck.

It goes down. It actually goes down.

Victory, Dustin thinks, which is so, so different from survival. At last—a win he can bank on, a win he can believe in.

One monster that can’t hurt anybody else.

Dustin grips the sweat-slick broomstick, drives it in harder until the charred strands of the mop disappear entirely into the gory, pulsing wound.

Then he takes a deep breath, what feels like the first one he’s taken since he was hammering nails through that flimsy trash-can lid.

“We did it!” Mike cheers in his ear.

“Steady on,” Hopper growls.

“We did it,” Dustin repeats, like speaking the words aloud will mean believing them. He tries to stand firm, but the world is turning against him again—against all of them.

The shiny gymnasium floor, littered with glass and smeared with blood, begins to crack under Dustin’s feet.

Chapter Text

When Steve wakes up, Nancy’s gone again. Really, this is some déjà vu shit, and Steve’s not having it, not even with a gunshot wound. He heaves himself up, curses, and reaches over to rustle the pages of Robin’s magazine.

“Rob.”

She was sleeping too, mouth a perfect o like she’d nodded off mid-yawn. She jolts. “Hey. M’awake. I’m awake.”

“Sure you are.” Hard to grin through the pain, but Steve hopes he manages. It’s not just the gunshot—it’s the bruised (maybe cracked) ribs. It’s the blood loss. “And we both should be, you know?”

“I’m not sure about that.” Robin rubs her neck. Hospital chairs don’t seem to agree with her. Why would they? Uncomfortable as hell, as Steve knows too well. “I mean, you gotta rest, bud. And what’s going to happen while you’re out, hmm? World might end? Been there, done that.”

“It can get worse and you know it,” Steve counters, and sighs when he realizes he sounded more snappish than he meant to. Doesn’t need to be a jackass just because he’s sore. “Look, I just don’t like feeling… out of the action. You seen Nance?”

“Yeah, she peeped in.” Robin looks uncomfortable in a whole different way now, nothing to do with a hard plastic seat. “Seemed like she was going somewhere.”

“See, that’s what I’m talking about.” Steve tries to swing his legs off the bed, then realizes he’s been dressed in scrub pants and a TP-prank’s worth of bandages. He also has no shoes. Huh. This isn’t going to work.

“Stop scheming,” Robin huffs. “Seriously, Harrington. I hear those brain cells whirring and it ends with me digging through a medical waste bin for the bloody tatters of your wardrobe. And I’m telling you right now: no. Not gonna happen.”

“You’re a quick one, Buckley,” Steve concedes, mirroring her mock-formality. “OK. If not that, then what?”

Fifteen minutes later, Robin returns with the best of the Lost-and-Found bin. There’s a pair of jeans and a pullover that don’t smell too musty. But they’re not enough. “I can’t go barefoot,” Steve points out. He hates the way these stupid setbacks keep slowing him down as much as the big ones. But looking down at his feet, he doesn’t trust them out there in Apocalypse-world. Running barefoot through the Upside Down with bat-wounds leaking blood out of his stomach was enough of that, thanks very much.

Is there an inch of him that isn’t battered and bruised?

“Joyce might know where your boots are.” Robin tilts her head. “They didn’t have to cut your boots off your feet, so like. Why throw them out?”

“Why throw any of it out,” Steve grumbles. “Washing machines exist.” But he’s just stalling now, not wanting to get into it with Joyce, even though getting into with Joyce is, in fact, exactly what needs to happen next. He’ll end a conversation with her with boots on his feet, or a plan to get some. That’s the Mom Magic, regardless of whatever crisis is currently uppermost.

She’s also the likeliest to know where Nancy is.

In stocking feet—Robin did produce a pair of weird, grippy socks—he careens down the hallway. There’s a lot more patients on this floor now. A lot more panicked voices. Can a hospital of overworked, undersupplied doctors and nurses stop death in its tracks?

Steve doesn’t think so.

Wonder where the demodogs are headed next.

He’s readying himself for Joyce’s tongue-lashing about being out of bed the second he enters Max’s room, but he’s not expecting to find her crouched on the floor, a radio handset clenched in her hand.

“Say that again, Murray,” she hisses, heedless of Lucas and Erica hovering over her, worry written on their faces. The Sinclair parents are nowhere to be seen, and neither is Jonathan. Steve takes stock of this, but mostly all he can think is—

Murray?

“Called for back up,” Murray says. A clearer signal than Steve’s heard from anyone else. “Border SNAFU. Big Bird down. Yeah, yeah. I got all that, then—nothing. Nada. Zilch.”

Sometimes dread brings its own kind of certainty, even before facts shade in the depth and details. Steve darts forward, heedless of the burning pain, the stiffness.

“Joyce! What’s happening?”

It’s like she doesn’t even hear him.

“Then he cut out,” Murray is saying. “And I can’t reach him. Can’t reach anyone there.”

“Who?” Steve demands. He feels rather than sees Robin stepping forward, closing the distance between them. An attempt at comfort that can’t do much for him right now.

Lucas is biting his nails, slumped against the edge of Max’s bed. The not-dead girl’s chest goes up and down without skipping a beat, the most eerily peaceful thing in the room.

Erica’s the one who answers Steve. Her eyes are wide.

“Dustin.”

Where the hell is everyone you love when you need them? Steve’s head is pounding, and his ribcage is pounding, and there’s really not enough painkilling shit in the world to put him at a hundred percent, but there’s also—there’s also no Nancy. No Dustin. Hell, no Eleven. It’s just him and Robin and his muddy boots, running down the hospital hall again.

Well, technically he’s running, and Robin is chasing him.

“Steve! You can’t—”

He wheels on her, taking a gamble he’ll hate himself for if anything goes wrong. If anything hurts her. He should be dead right now, in about five different ways, but he’s not.

He’ll be damned if Dustin dies instead of him.

“I can. Rob, I have to. But I’m not going to put this on you. If you—”

“Shit,” she mutters. “I just wish I knew how to drive.”

Turns out Robin’s lack of a driver’s license is not their biggest problem today. Feeling like he’s punctured a lung getting all the way down stairs, Steve stares out through the barricaded doors at his precious Beamer, racking his brain for where in hell he left his keys.

Oh, shit. He handed them to Jonathan. When they were fighting one demodog, not twenty. Or however many came out of the woods to make hamburger of innocent civilians.

An image of Sullivan getting absolutely pulverized flits through his mind. He shudders, which sends pain lancing through his chest and shoulder. But it’s a good enough reminder. He doesn’t—shouldn’t—want even the guilty to die ugly.

That’s reserved for Vecna and Vecna alone.

“Steve,” Robin says, as they clear reception. There’s nobody at the desk. Technically, they’re not supposed to be here either, but Steve’s deputy star is good for one thing in this screwed-up reality: getting him past freaked-out security. “It could be… anything. At the hospital, I mean. Hopper is there, and so are the other cops. Dustin and Mike are smart. A dead battery or some other—interference could have made the signal drop. It doesn’t have to mean—”

“Not good enough,” Steve says, as gently as he can. “Not with Nance out there, too. I…” Fuck, he wishes he knew how to hotwire a car. Eddie made it look so easy. “I gotta figure out something. Give me a minute.”

Wordlessly, she fishes in her pocket and hands him a bandana. It’s actually pretty fresh.

“Steve!”

It’s Joyce. Joyce and Will, to be exact, striding towards them with that signature shit’s-about-to-go-down Byers stride. Joyce doesn’t need a deputy star to go where she pleases.

Steve notes that they have bandanas around their necks, too. Says something, for his current state of mind, that this actually gives him a bit of hope.

“You coming with?”

“Yeah,” Joyce says. “Yeah, we’re not leaving them alone. Not again.”

She’s thinking of Hopper. She’s thinking of everyone.

Assuming they’re still alive, Steve thinks, but doesn’t say. He just locks eyes with her and nods. He knows she knows. Knows she can tell he’s in pain. That he shouldn’t be on his feet. That he’s doing this anyway.

“The guards are keeping things under wraps as best they can here,” Joyce says, as they scan the parking lot for any hulking canine-adjacent shapes making weird gibbering noises. A guard actually followed her downstairs, probably to secure the exit after the crazies leave. He’s hanging back, a good distance from the barricade. Joyce forges ahead. “Most people don’t dare to get within fifty yards of glass at this point, so it shouldn’t be too hard.” She leaves unspoken the whole, unless that gigantic human-decimating monster returns. “And Lucas will radio if anything goes wrong. But the school’s more vulnerable. Easier to… flush out, if that’s what he’s trying.” Her face is set like stone. “I’m not gonna let that happen.”

Steve believes her.

“Uh,” Robin says, just as Joyce starts unwinding the chain around the door-handles. “We do have one little problem. No car.”

Joyce scoffs. “I was the bad kid in high school, not the band kid,” she says. She winks. “You nerds could learn a thing or two from me.”

So that’s how Steve learns that Joyce Byers can hotwire a car.

No demodogs interrupt their little getaway, which is a win in itself. Steve and Robin and Will are standing guard over Joyce’s impromptu mechanic shop with sections of metal pipe, and in Will’s case, a snapped mop-handle—prime chew-toy material.

Everyone breathes a sigh of relief, muffled in cotton, when the engine of the Ford Granada roars to life. From behind the restored barricade and the double glass doors, the security guard gives them a thumb’s up. Steve wonders if it’s ironic, but he feels like tipping one up himself at the way Joyce’s eyes crinkle with satisfaction above her bandana. She wipes her hands on her jeans.

“Alright, everybody in.”

It’s like they’re going to freakin’ soccer practice for a minute, not traversing a dangerous stretch of earthquake-blasted road to see if any of their friends are left alive.

Steve settles his aching muscles into the passenger seat and shuts his eyes.

Seemed like she was going somewhere. That’s what Robin said about Nancy, and even though he knows now that she was going with Jonathan and El and Mr. Sinclair to scout another way out of Dodge, the only way Steve can make sense of the big picture is by looking at her departure as another goodbye. Nancy has been surging towards him and pulling away from him in equal measure. It’s a hard pattern to track, through all the chaos that’s been gathering around them, but Steve feels duty-bound to try.

What’s she afraid of? What is she hiding?

In the backseat, Will is radioing Murray.

“Any word from Dustin? Over.”

Murray answers right away. “Nothing. Static-quiet. If you can find Hopper, patch him through. We were in the middle of something! I am in the middle of something! Over.”

“Will do. Over and out.”

Steve doesn’t open his eyes. He should. He should watch for threats. He should force himself to see what’s passing by around him—the cratered asphalt, the smoking houses. The bodies, here and there. But instead, he just lets light and darkness filter through the red glow of his eyelids for a moment and asks,

“Did Murray get any word from Nancy?”

“We did,” Will says. “Carnage at the border. Help tried to come, and couldn’t.”

Robin groans.

Steve lets silence wash over him. Damn, his whole body hurts. Hope flickers in and out, blood-red.

“Jonathan said they would head back to the hospital,” Joyce says. “Lucas knows what to tell them.”

“So we’re not telling them ourselves?” Robin says. “Like, we don’t want them as backup?”

Joyce shakes her head.

“More like, Mom doesn’t want Jonathan to stop us,” Will murmurs.  

“He’ll come around,” Joyce says. “He always—”

She stops short. Jams on the brakes. Steve pitches forward, gasping for breath. Pain claws at him, but he barely registers it.

Instead—

“What the…” Robin’s voice dies away.

Steve is wishing—coward-like—that he’d never opened his eyes. That he’d never woken up in the hospital at all, but had drifted into the inky blackness of death without knowing what hit him.

Bullshit. You don’t want to die. You want everyone else to live.

The school is gone. In its place is a sinkhole, hundreds of yards wide, still steaming like a pot of boiling water.

Steve’s first fully-formed thoughts are weirdly detached from what this all means. It’s like grief is hanging back half a step, trying to give him a second. So instead of counting the names of the likely dead, his mind runs over all that history. All that daily, humdrum, petty history—life and love and lockers, math homework and gym practice. It’s been swallowed by the unforgiving earth.

Then he remembers Dustin. The name steals whatever air is left in his bruised lungs.

Robin’s hands close around his shoulders from the backseat, nails digging in. Comfort, this time, or survival?

“Parking lot,” Joyce says, tightly. She veers left, wheels crunching over bumpy ground. “It didn’t take the parking lot.”

As usual, Joyce is indispensable. She didn’t let shock claim her ability to breathe, much less to think or plan. In another minute, Steve sees that the school-buses clustered on the far side of the huge lot are full of people, faces pressed against fogged-over windows. There are soldiers and cops running from car to car. Looks like they’re siphoning gas.

Hope strikes its match in him again. And then—

Argyle’s pizza-van careens into the parking lot, bald tires making every turn a dangerous one. There’s what looks like blood smeared on one of the doors, but the windows and windshield are unbroken.

The next five minutes are a lot to handle. Later, Steve will remember most of this shit out of order. His vision, blurred around the edges from pain. Searching for Dustin in the school-bus windows, heart falling with the sight of every face that isn’t his. Finding him instead wearing a cast-off deputy jacket, engrossed in the task of filling up a jug of gasoline. Hugging him without a care for bruised ribs and gunshot wounds.

Dustin, safe.

And Nancy, climbing out of the pizza-van. Taking her rifle back from Mr. Sinclair of all people, and raising her eyes to meet Steve’s in the fading, poisonous daylight.

Hopper is a freakin’ champ. The guy got the school evacuated, the buses gassed up, and a buddy-system down pat. The sinkhole is now being monitored for further movement. So far no more monsters have come out of the growing shadows, or the gaping maw of the ground. But that’s basically all they have in the wins column. Practically all of the supplies amassed in the gym were lost. No food, no meds, no blankets to speak of. Granola bars forgotten in gloveboxes and sweatshirts balled up under passenger seats are precious currency.

But worst of all, of course, is that there’s no way out. That means the dogs (and worse) are probably just taking their time.

This is another calm before another storm they can’t predict, and it fucking sucks.

Except for the last night on earth with Nancy Wheeler bit. Steve almost can’t believe his buddy-assignment luck, except that credit is due Robin, who willingly fell on her sword for him and picked Jonathan.

“We heard from Murray before Joyce did,” Nancy says. They’re keeping watch, side by side, on the hood of an abandoned Impala, as Bad Hawkins’ version of night sets in. It’s not exactly comfortable, as seating arrangements go, but Steve ain’t complaining. He’s watching Nancy’s bandana puff out with each breath she takes. He’s seething over the swelling around her eye. He’s listening to her voice like it’s the only thing he needs to survive.

Maybe it is.

“And?”

“And Murray is doing everything he can to get us out of here. But that’s a two-man show right now—him and Dmitry.”

“Hop’s Russian Prison buddy,” Steve confirms.

“Yeah.” Nancy turns to look at him, like she needs full eye-contact for what she’s about to say next. “Nobody else is coming, Steve.”

He digests this. “What do you mean?”

Nancy’s patient with her explanation, even though she’s definitely repeating herself from before, when she was talking with Hopper and Joyce and the gaggle of shellshocked soldiers who now follow Hopper like the most loyal police dogs a chief could ask for. At the time, Steve was making sure that Dustin was really, truly, absolutely fine, and contributing to the Great Siphoning Project with the other self-styled greasemonkeys. He worked alongside Jonathan, actually, and they seemed to be cool.

There’s another small victory. Steve still owes Robin for the buddy-system thing.

“Media coverage is…contained, Murray says. Mysterious earthquake with no known casualties. That’s it. Sure, some refugees have been interviewed, but their stories are jumbled. Murray’s intel says relief services are trickling, not flowing. And what I saw at the border—that was probably the whole trickle, dead on arrival.”

“Sullivan came,” Steve says at last, aware of the profound irony. But that’s fine. He just wants to keep her talking.  

“And not to save us,” Nancy answers. She sighs. “Sullivan might have been high enough up to claim this was his and his alone to handle. Whether he’s dead or alive, we’re screwed. God, I could use a drink.”

Steve’s still drunk off the memory of her kisses. Takes the edge off the gaping wound in his shoulder. The stitches in his stomach. Etcetera.

For Nancy, he even manages a wink.

“Look at you, Wheeler. A hardened soldier. You expecting me to hook you up with a beer or something?”

“Ah, no. Just wishful thinking. I think the Keg King’s had his day,” she says. He can tell that she’s smirking under her mask. “And your dad’s liquor stock kinda one-upped you, so I’d be asking the wrong Harrington.”

“Ouch.” He stares off into the shadows. Hopper’s voice, rising and falling a couple hundred yards away, is sort of soothing. Like knowing your dad’s home in a good way, which is something new in Steve’s experience. Funny, that the Harrington mansion was a safehouse for a hot minute there. It feels… distant now.

The days are stretching long and screeching short, all at once.

“You know when everybody was searching trunks before?” Nancy asks.

“Yeah.”

“I ran into Carol. She hightailed it.”

Steve’s brain manages a remote aha, all but lost in a deep well of memories that Carol couldn’t even begin to fathom. "I don’t think she knew what she was doing, ratting on us. She’s petty, not evil. Thinking more… slap on the wrist than gun to the head.”

Nancy looks grim. “Huh. I think she’s a murderous little bitch.”

Steve nudges her, conceding. “You’re probably right.”

She leans into him. Actually drops her head against his shoulder. Her curls brush his cheek. She smells like sweat and ash and home.

“I really thought it would work,” she says quietly. “My stupid Hail Mary.”

He would give anything to keep her from doubting herself. “The border? It was worth a shot. Oops, bad choice of words.”

“Hop thinks Murray has a shot,” she says. “But he needs time. He needs…” She doesn’t finish her thought. Just stays there, warmth pressing into him.

Steve wrestles with the silence. Almost trots out some pathetic lines. They’re not even—lines, exactly. More like declarations, as if he hasn’t given her plenty to chew on in that department in the last several days.

Nance, is now a good time to say I love you?

Have you thought about what I said in the woods? I know we both expected to die then, and we’re kind of expecting to die now, but like… if we didn’t, if we don’t… do you ever think—

“How’s the shoulder?” Nancy asks, after a while.

He takes a risk. Not so much with words as with a kiss to her temple. He even pulls his bandana down beforehand, so that his lips can brush against her skin. He says,

“It doesn’t hurt when you’re here.”

Chapter Text

The demodog appears after midnight. It moves like a scout: all stealth until it’s spotted. Hard to say if it traipsed back from the feast at the border, or if it was part of the ambush at the hospital.

Nancy’s not sure whether that even matters.

On soundless feet, it comes from the trees beyond where the school used to be, creeping along the far side of the parking lot after it passes the gaping mouth of the crater. It’s a good distance from where Nancy and Steve are serving as sentries, so they don’t get in on the main action. A pity: Nancy could use a fight to force her back into the right headspace.

As it is, Wayne Munson spots it first. He makes a hell of a lot of noise, just like Hopper told him to. The alarm calls everyone to arms: man, woman, and child. If only everyone understood that it was the children who have been fighting all along.

Nancy hardly has time to master her sleep-deprived fight-or-flight response and get a hold on her gun before everything’s as good as over. There’s no safe shot in this crowd, of course, but she knows better than most how a firearm can double as a club. Tense in every line of her body, she catches a glimpse of the vicious, familiar way the creature moves to kill before Hopper impales it through the throat with a flaming mop-handle.

Taking a page out of Dustin’s book, apparently.

Smart move, Chief. Building a bonfire in the center of this refugee camp. It hadn’t been a popular choice at first—people were afraid about the fire getting out of hand, or unnerved by the chemical-tinged fumes rising from the sinkhole—but now Hopper’s insistence makes sense to everyone.

Scarier than the thing he’s fighting, Hopper twists. Shoves. Digs in his heels, and his weapon. Strong from gorging itself on human flesh, the dog doesn’t go down as easy as that, powerful haunches lurching forward even as black blood gushes from its muscle-corded neck. But with shouts that border on feral, a few of the townspeople join their leader in the fight—even the prim librarian. They beat the dog with shovels, scrap-metal, bricks. It’s like they’re venting all the terror and grief and rage of the past week on the one beast that’s within their reach.

Nancy hangs back, only half-conscious of Steve’s fingers threaded through hers. Of course he ran towards danger when she did, even though she’s the only one with a weapon worth holding onto. So: left hand, Steve. Right hand, gun.

“Holy shit,” Steve breathes.

It should make Nancy feel good, fiercely good, to see Hawkins taking back some courage, making its mark in monster-blood. Instead, she feels vaguely sick.  

They don’t know what they’re doing.

They don’t know what they’re really fighting.

No more dogs come out of the tree-line. The groaning of a dozen minor earthquakes, of cars and houses in the distance meeting the same fate as the school, restores the flurry of madness to a more insidious state: silent paranoia. The people who aren’t trying to snatch a few hours of exhausted sleep or occupying their fretful, frightened children are either watching for attackers or monitoring the asphalt for fault-lines.

Using what remains of Will’s radio handset battery, Joyce and Jonathan have touched base with Murray. They’ve confirmed with Lucas that the hospital is still safe. Murray, contrary to his earlier pessimism, has promised reinforcements. Nancy doesn’t know yet what the plan is, only that there is one. Probably involving more fire.

Seems likely that the plan, whatever it is, depends on a road that is not one hundred percent sinkhole.

Nancy struggles to settle into another temporary refuge. She misses the weirdly peaceful oasis of the Impala hood, leaning on Steve’s good shoulder and feeling his voice in her body as well as hearing it. But Steve was moving more stiffly and slowly after the adrenaline rush that is now just a smear of guts on pavement, and Joyce and Robin intervened to bully him into catching some winks near the fireside.

He should be back in the hospital. IVs, painkillers, clean bandages. Nancy knows he knows that, just like everyone in this parking lot knows they’re screwed. Nobody points out how impossible it is to leave this patch of earth right now, with no light and no idea what’s out there. Nobody argues much with Hopper anymore. People are getting pretty good at not saying what they’re thinking.

That’s a compliment, coming from Nancy.

After a beat, she finds her way back to her family. Dad looks absolutely shell-shocked, but Mom is surprisingly steady. Her permed hair is wild in some spots and flat in others. Maybe even a little singed at the edges. But she puts one arm around Nancy, one arm around Holly. It’s almost as safe as being with Steve.

A few yards away from them, Mike sits shoulder-to-shoulder with El.

Nancy half-closes her eyes, watching the firelight blur in front of them. Primarily, the bonfire is full of burning trash, so it smells absolutely foul, but the power the flames give them all is more important than anything else right now.

As sleep threatens to overtake Nancy’s consciousness, fragments of conversation drift her way.

“I’m hungry,” Holly murmurs.

“I know, sweetie,” Mom says. “We'll find something really good for breakfast, I promise.”

“… can’t just stay here,” Eleven is saying. “Not with…”

“We’ll figure something out,” says Mike.

Huh. Maybe Mike and Mom have more in common than Nancy ever knew. Hiding parts of themselves a lot of the time, even from the people they love best, but strong where it counts. Strong and stubborn and ultimately fearless.

Sound like anyone else you know?

If she strains to see through the drying, sweltering heat, she can make out the shape of Steve, slumped over next to Robin. Dustin’s with him, too. In a way, the reunion of the Hawkins and California and Russia crews mean they are all more united than they were before the town was sucked into total, rather than partial hell. Then again, that kind of wishful optimism just brings Nancy back to the sight of Marissa Waldon whaling on the mangled demodog corpse with a snow-shovel.

Futile. It’s all futile.

She shuts her eyes for real this time. Buries her face in her mom’s shoulder, trying to block out the blood-tinged firelight, the toxic smoke, the endless waiting.

When Nancy wakes, everything is cold. The fire is just a cherry-dark smear in the midst of the gray crowd, and its faithful keeper—Hopper—is nowhere to be seen. Wind whispers from every direction, the muddle of air currents making it seem like thousands of fingers are clawing at Nancy’s grime-stiffened clothes.

Beside her, Mom and Holly look so small. Almost like they’re both children, not mother and daughter.

Nancy is something apart from them; something stronger. Something worse.

Even before she hears it, she feels it: a throbbing pulse. The only warm thing in this cold world.

It’s coming from the sinkhole.

Nancy checks her bandana, which has slipped a little askew. She doesn’t know where her rifle is, but she doesn’t think she’ll need it. She’s sure she won’t need it. She does her best to move stealthily—like a demodog, she thinks ironically—but it turns out everyone’s sleeping like the dead. Everyone? Where are the sentries?

She blinks, and realizes she’s standing in a sea of corpses. All the bodies of her family, her friends, are sinking into ash and decay. Her breath freezes in her throat. Tears freeze in her eyes. She forces herself to blink, again and again and again, and—

Mercy, if it can be called that, comes at last. The world refocuses.

A dream.

She wasn’t awake, walking through a mirage of doom. She’s awake now, still leaning against her mom. The fire is burning merrily, emitting yet more noxious smoke-plumes to give whoever survives this long nightmare a shit-load of respiratory problems. She can see the shapes of Steve and Robin, huddled together for warmth. She can see Joyce leaning against Hopper, Jonathan talking with Argyle.

The pulse is quiet, but Nancy doesn’t think that was a dream.

Slowly—slowly—she disentangles herself from Mom. Resists the urge to reach over and smooth Holly’s hair back from her forehead. She stands up, bones creaking. Her face hurts from Sullivan’s beating. Her whole body hurts.

Old, young. Weak, strong.

Confusion and paralysis are the poisons with which Vecna’s going to finish them off.

Why?

Nancy ponders the question as she begins to pace through the cluster of bodies, the maze of cars. She has her gun this time. Nobody who sees her tries to stop her—after all, she’s one of Hopper’s most trusted. Funny, how high-school teachers and the local business owners who used to roll their eyes at her little reporting notebook finally see her for who she really is.

Power. Power, in the midst of devastation. A tendril of fear coils like a snake in her chest, but Nancy doesn’t allow it to choke off her line of thinking.

She needs to get to the bottom of this. Strength. Power. Weakness. Poison.

Why?

Nancy and Steve and Robin, Eddie and Dustin—they went into the Upside Down with guns blazing. Max offered herself as a sacrifice. Lucas and Erica defended her with their lives. It was supposed to end there: either with all of them dead, or with Vecna destroyed.

Instead, limbo.

Nancy’s seen the hate in Vecna’s eerie eyes. Those eyes are still human, somehow, despite his monstrous face. His insanity is human, too: that’s what Eleven keeps trying to tell them. He’s calculated. Strategic.

And apocalypses take work.

Every time Vecna indulges in a burst of overwhelming force, it’s followed by a lull. The world does his bidding, but his will is inextricable from a kind of life-force that waxes and wanes like human energy does. Smoke and mirrors, as Nancy once said. If Nancy’s muscles are sore and her bones are aching, that means Vecna’s injuries, the not-quite-physical ones, must be plaguing him, too. They incinerated his flesh-web… dropped him three stories down… and that’s before Eleven did a number on his not-so-impenetrable mind.

So. Maybe Vecna keeps taking his best shot and getting hit with a bitch of a recoil.

Maybe Vecna can’t finish off Hawkins as easily as he’d like. Maybe he’s trying to siphon off their hope like so much fuel while he gathers the strength for a true explosion.

Maybe this is why he needs Nancy. Not just for his triumphal emergence into the real world, but to triumph at all.

Surrounded by the living, not the dead, her feet carry her in the same direction as her dream.

The broken edges of the parking lot curve inward, the pull of gravity and the hollowed-out earth beneath making the asphalt look like it’s been melted. A few scattered lampposts are snapped like grass-stalks, a couple heads still sparking like electric dandelions.

The sinkhole itself smells like charcoal and trash. It’s massive, of course, and Nancy feels a little woozy, standing on the edge.

Why did she come here, again?

(Why, why, always why…)

Smoke still rises, but Nancy doesn’t see any flames. Bricks still crumble and fall. She chose this side of the crater to avoid the sentry—Mr. Sinclair, actually—who’s keeping an eye on the depths, just in case this catastrophe was less of a devouring and more of a… birth.

Nancy looks down. Blinks, fearing that her dreams have stolen her from life again, that she’ll see bodies instead of the rubble of hallways, rooms, bleachers, desks.

Is that what she’s afraid of?

No. What she’s afraid of isn’t a dream. It’s what she’s hoping to see.

“Holy shit.”

She nearly catapults forward into the abyss.

“Jes—Will, you freaking scared me.”

Will’s forehead wrinkles, the visible half of an apologetic grimace. “Sorry, we…”

We? Oh. Eleven’s here too.

Nancy’s heart sinks, appropriately, towards the center of the earth. “Did you…” She swallows. Her mouth tastes sour. She’s dehydrated, hungry, and her head is splitting. Not just from the bruises. “Did you both have a dream? That there was—something here?”

“Yeah,” Will says. “We didn’t want to bother Mom and Hop yet, so we just… thought we’d check it out.”

Nancy can’t scold them for sneaking away to the edge of the encampment. The three of them are probably the safest anyone could be from bloodthirsty creepy-crawlies as it is. Vecna wants them alive.

“I heard a heart,” she says. “Well, like a pulse, I guess. I felt it.”

“I don’t think that’s a heart,” El says.

“I don’t either.” Nancy tries to smile, then gives up, remembering they can’t really see her attempt at reassurance, between the bandana and the murky darkness and her swollen cheek.

As if by unspoken agreement, they all take a step forward together. The colors of their old life blend together in shades of darkness: ash, mud, metal, dust.

And red. Pulsing, living red.

It’s not a heart. It’s not even truly alive.

Will’s the one to say it. Will the Wise, as the boys used to call him, when they were just pretending about the things that lived in a world beyond the darkness.

“It’s a gate.”

As soon as we can, we need to go back.

“Of course there’s a gate,” says Hopper, voice low but gruff. “Every goddamn scratch in the earth is a gate until further notice. Or did you not notice that the entire town has become a subduction zone lately?”

Nancy doesn’t appreciate the sarcasm. She also feels like he’s missing the point, until she realizes that she hasn’t fully… emphasized the point. It’s not just that there’s a gate. It’s that this gate was beckoning her. Them.

Vecna is opening the door to the future he wants wider and wider.

Where does it lead?

“He’s working in increments,” she says, speaking quietly too. They’re gathered in a small, tense knot of need-to-know comrades: Hopper, Joyce, Jonathan, Will, Mike, and El. Just like on the hillside, days ago. They didn’t even pull Steve in for this. Nancy didn’t want to wake him, and Hopper clearly doesn’t think Nancy’s news is worth rallying the troops for. “He’s getting stronger; Will can feel it.” Will nods, his eyes fixed on her. El is looking at Hopper, frownlines crowding her high forehead. Nancy points at her, emphasizing with everything she's got. “El can feel it. I can feel it. But it's not as simple as we once thought, like, our attack drained him and he's recovering in a linear way. He’s not at full power all of the time. Every blast—like this—takes effort.”

“So what are you proposing?” Joyce asks. Jonathan has stayed quiet thus far, but he’s watching Nancy, too, with more personalized interest than she’s felt from him in a while.

“See, I don’t need proposals from you, Wheeler,” Hopper interjects. Chief’s manners did not improve in Russian prison. “From any of you three, in fact. Don’t think I didn’t see you coming back from your little expedition together. Whatever kind of psychic connection—”

“You think we can’t be trusted,” Nancy says, furious that he could be right.

Hopper sighs. Scratches his growing crewcut. “I think this shithead has singled the three of you out.”

“The four of us,” El says, voice tight. “Max, too.”

There’s an awkward pause.

“Proving my point,” Hopper says at last. “Sorry, kiddo. I don’t disagree with Nancy’s—assessment. He’s using siege tactics instead of outright devastation, sure. Reason one, it’s probably more gratifying for a bastard like him to watch us go insane before the kill-stroke. Reason two, it’s more efficient, if you’re right about him continuing to sap his energy.”

“I’m right,” Nancy says, just as Will says,

“She’s right.”

“Then keep your noses sharp for his goddamn bread-crumb trail,” Hopper says. “And don’t follow it. Got it?”

“I didn’t say I was planning on following it,” Nancy snaps. “But if we don’t use his disadvantages to our advantage, you’re not getting everyone out of here alive.”

“She has a point,” Mike says, visibly pissing Hopper off further.

“We’re going to make disadvantages, Nancy,” Joyce says, putting a hand on Hopper’s arm. Nancy watches their bandanas puff in and out with the uneven breathing patterns of pent-up, high-octane stress. Hopper, for one, is steaming like a discontented dragon. Joyce adds, “That’s what Murray and Dmitry are pulling together. Firepower that we can distribute to aid the bus evacuation.”

“Plus a few more surprises at the border,” Hopper growls. “Only I’m not telling you lot what and where right now, just in case the phonelines are open.”

“They’re not,” Nancy hisses, and turns on her heel, walking away. She doesn’t want to face her failure, parse its meaning down to the deceptive roots.

Then, too, she thinks her grandstanding may have created a different kind of trouble for the very people she’s trying to help save. Even though they’d kept the conversation as surreptitious as possible, body language can be easily translated. As she pushes her way through the crowd, she can feel eyes on her. Hear the whispers starting to swell.

People are always keen on sniffing out dissent, at times like this.

(What the hell is a time like this?)

Though she’s technically headed in Steve’s direction, she’s not sure if she wants to talk to him right now. He’ll see through whatever disguise she tries to hide behind, and the possibility is real that he’ll agree with Hopper—that he’d be as haunted by the truth about her shared dream of the sinkhole as he was about… whatever happened with the creature that rescued them from Sullivan by means of a bloodbath.

Don’t follow it. Don’t follow it.

Nancy’s angry enough to cry. The tears sting her smoke-bleared eyes.

“Nancy?”

She turns to see that Jonathan has followed her on her stiff-stalking warpath through the maze of people and cars. Weirdly, it’s easier to find herself face-to-face with him than it would be with Steve right now.

“I don’t need a pep-talk,” she says.

“Good, because I don’t give them.” He’s smirking. She can tell from the creases around his eyes. They’ve always gotten on best like this: sharp, unromantic exchanges of ideas. If Nancy hadn’t been such a bleeding heart at sixteen—

“What, then?” she asks.

“Let’s go somewhere… quieter.” He glances around.

Nancy leads the way. They keep away from the sinkhole—Hopper would have an aneurysm—and take shelter beside one of the buses. The windows are shut. There are people sleeping inside, mostly kids whose parents haven’t been found or haven’t survived, and old people.

“You want to tell me what you’re thinking?” Jonathan asks. He thrusts his hands in his pockets. His dirty jeans, as usual, are too big for him.

“Why don’t you tell me why you want to know?” It’s just rhetoric: she already knows the answer. And so she says it, as swift and sure as she once thrust home with a red-hot poker. “Will. You’re worried about him. What it means that he and El and I are… linked. To Vecna.”

“Yeah,” Jonathan says, eyes boring into her from beneath his floppy bangs. “Guilty as charged.”

“I think Vecna needs a body,” Nancy says. It’s a relief to be frank. “Will and I are in the running. He’s had Will before. He could use that… familiarity.” She presses her nails into her palms. Slung over her shoulder, her rifle feels heavy and useless against the kind of weapon they really face. “And he feels like he could use my rage.”

“What about El?”

Jonathan’s a brother to Eleven now, too. Also, not all of this is news to him. Clearly.

Nancy shakes her head. “Not sure. Their power combined… it would be absolute. But El’s beaten him before. I think he mainly wants to kill her.”

“Why the wait?” Jonathan runs a hand through his greasy hair. “Is it just because he’s—winded?”

“Steve and Robin and I blasted him out of orbit, in there. In his own freakin’ house. It was never about physical power for him, anyway. It’s all about having the necessary… connections. He feeds off of the bad emotions to open pathways in people’s minds. The dark, twisted shit. Anger. Guilt. Shame.”

“Because of what someone’s done.”

“Or who they are.”

“I get it.” Jonathan’s voice sounds suddenly hoarse. “Sure, like Hop said, the psychological torture of all of us is a side-benefit, but he’s really trying to buy time. Why has he left Max alone? After the obvious, I mean.”

“He hasn’t. He’s been dangling her as bait for us. She’s sort of a—I mean, if I had to guess, she’s the link between the old and the new. Think about it. Chrissy and Eleven, struggling with stolen childhood. Me and Fred, haunted by a past death. Patrick and Will, feeling—”

“Like outcasts,” Jonathan finishes. He’s a quick study. “Max ticks off all three boxes.”

“So did Henry Creel,” Nancy says.

“How do you know all this? Did he show you?”

“Pieces of it, yeah.” She chews her chapped lips, thrusting herself backwards into the dark world, the empty pool, the deep-end of terror. “He’s been talking to me, you know. And so has Max—sometimes I really do think it’s her, held captive in her own head. And Eleven and Will have talked to me, too. This is the best I could come up with, based on all the facts.”

“Ever the investigator,” Jonathan says softly. “Or should I say, star reporter?”

Nancy’s too tired to laugh.

“He’s still a kid inside,” she says. “Henry. And I feel like it’s a game. The work of a sick child who’s angry at the whole world and wants people to understand why. We’re trapped between his nasty little pincers, no matter how overwhelming his power feels when it’s expressed by the creatures he’s mastered. The point is that—I think it’s really small, in the end. The kind of thing you can’t just take out with firepower. Like how the worst nightmares I have are about the selfish shit I’ve done. All the times I’ve brushed off my mom. Didn’t look out for Mike and Holly. Didn’t—didn’t think of Barb, when it mattered. So when I’m shown their deaths—past or future—I know it’s all on me. I know I’m the reason, not some monster crawling out of the dark. If I’d been a better sister—a better friend—”

“Yeah, that’s how he gets to you,” Jonathan interrupts. “And I can see how Will…” He doesn’t finish. It’s like he’s having a private realization, an interior version of what Nancy’s just vomited aloud.

She scuffs the toe of her boot against the bus’s deep-treaded tire. They don’t speak again until Jonathan says,

“You want to face him head-on, don’t you? Round two.”

“Yeah.” Finally, she’s just saying it all.

“Isn’t that giving him exactly what he wants?”

“Probably, since what he wants is a working body that can cross between worlds. His can’t, I’m willing to bet, or he’d be here already, like I said before. So in that sense, Hopper’s right not to trust me. That doesn’t… change my mind.” She takes a risk, reaches for Jonathan’s hand. It’s not affection; it’s urgency. “I swear I’m not going crazy. I’m not just looking to pick a losing fight.”

“I believe you.” He gives her hand a quick squeeze, then lets go. “I believe Will.”

“Did he—”

“He told me we had choices the other day. I could tell something was rattling around in his big old head. And earlier today… before you all played hooky by the great abyss together, I asked him to come clean with me. He says that he can still hear—that voice. That it still wants him. But that’s not a surprise. It’s something else… what’s really been eating him up. He said sometimes he feels like he is Vecna. Like all these years, what makes Will Will has been slipping away piece by piece. I don’t think that’s true—that’s not what I meant by saying I believe him—but in terms of manipulation, it sure checks out with what you’re telling me now.”

Nancy cuts to the chase. Whatever love Jonathan has ever had for her is because of her ability to save his brother.

She doesn’t resent that.

She thinks she can use it.

I want to finish what we started. I want to kill it.

“That’s why it’s not going to be Will,” she says. “It’s going to be me. For just as long as we need to barbecue him. Mind, not matter. We’ll give Vecna what he wants, so much of it poured down his throat that he chokes on it, just when Hop and Murray are steering his little prize herd of cattle away and out of reach.”

Her heart’s in her throat. Her mind is made up.

This is the only future they can hope to save.

“We?” Jonathan says, without contesting any of the rest, batshit though it must sound.

Nancy nods again.

“Yeah, we. I need to tempt the bastard into joining forces with the body that almost killed him last time, and that’s going to be a full-time assignment." Vecna's been testing those waters already, more than Jonathan knows. It's the best explanation Nancy has of what happened with the creature that killed Sullivan. Still, she had to give in. She had to say yes, to choose and keep choosing. "So we’ll need El to crush him—me—before he’s regained control of his power. Before he's linked me to the hivemind.”

“Catch him with his psychic pants down, so to speak,” Jonathan says dryly. “And what about me? I feel like you’re banking on me being there, or you wouldn’t be telling me all this.”

Damn straight.

She loves this about him: the calculated certainty. The way he’ll do whatever is necessary.

That isn’t the same as being in love with him. It never was.

“I need you to be ready,” Nancy says. “If I can’t manage him, and El can’t stop him, we take him out the old-fashioned way, one body at a time. I need you to torch his old corpse the second he leaves it. And if nothing else works, shoot me in the head.”

Chapter Text

Steve doesn’t want a seat on the first bus, but sometimes, you don’t get a choice. In his case, the pulsing bullet-wound and the light-headedness make him a “top priority candidate,” in Joyce’s words, for evacuation and medical care. He nearly fights the assignment of this pathetic status harder until Hopper presses a fireman’s axe—flashier than his old one, but just as sturdy—into his hands.

“Huh?” Steve asks. Blood loss doesn’t make him very eloquent, apparently.

“Shit goes sideways,” Chief says briefly, “these folks we’re loading up got you. Got it?”

“Yeah.”

So. The smell of duty in the morning has convinced him to say goodbye to Robin, Dustin, and even Nancy for the time being. Nancy hugged him for a long moment, but she wouldn’t meet his eyes. He’s beginning to think he was a real idiot for letting Robin coax him into taking some shut-eye by the trash-heap fireside, when he could have been the one coaxing Nancy to return to their Impala-post. Another moment where he almost had Nancy’s open trust, and then an Upside-Down-nasty, plus his own dim wits, went and ruined it.

Now it’s just another moment, gone forever.

Oh, put a lid on the pity-party, Harrington. There’s women and children that need saving.

Politely (if a bit unsteadily) sidestepping Hawkins’ most feeble, he takes a middle seat, propping the axe beside him with the blade against the floor. He wants to be able to get to the front or the back of the bus quickly, should the need arise, say, in the form of a Demogorgon trying to make a lunch run.

Cafeteria’s closed, bud.

Technically, it’s sunk into the center of the earth.

He should probably be taking the loss of Hawkins High more seriously, but he’ll blame his flippant internal monologue on the blood-loss, too.

The plan, according to Hopper’s dawn briefing addressed to a carefully chosen assembly, is this: a staggered parade of vehicles will head out of the parking lot towards the border crossing. Yes, the one that Nancy told them all was doomed. The hope, thank you for asking Mr. Munson, is that it’s now less doomed, due to Murray and Dmitry’s… deus-ex-machinations. Is Steve using his remedial Latin correctly? Hopper said it in different words. Firepower, mainly, was the word Hopper used.

Point is, the first bus won’t be the first vehicle out. That honor is reserved for the last of the soldiers’ armored vehicles, Hop riding shotgun. Literally. Then the top-priority bus, then a police cruiser. Then another bus—this one for families. Moms and dads armed with lengths of pipe and broken railing. The Wheelers will be on that bus. So will Robin’s parents.

Family units need to stick together, Hopper said, which Steve supposes was his way of breaking the news that Nancy and Robin were Bus Number Two’s frontline defense, same as Steve was Bus Number One’s.

Sacrifices. There are always more sacrifices, a word nearly interchangeable with separations. The way it stings and worries an anxious mind isn’t the same as questioning what’s necessary. Steve knows full well: even though there are soldiers and cops and WWII vets who are ready for another fight under Hopper’s command, the fact remains that Steve and Robin and Nancy, Jonathan and Mike and Dustin, and of course Will and Eleven most of all, have seen shit. They’re the hardened ones. The eyes and ears that Hopper needs, if shit indeed goes sideways.

Doesn’t mean Steve has to be happy about it, in the privacy of his own aching head.

Honestly, it’s hard to keep his spirits up. Unlike Nancy, who’s fighting past her stiffening bruises, or Dustin, who’s getting around pretty quick on that game foot of his, Steve knows he has about thirty seconds of adrenaline, if push comes to shove. He’ll be damn lucky if he can pick that axe up off the floor, much less wield it.

He hunches down in his seat. Hopper is keeping everything moving in stages, so that any fuckery at any point can be communicated via radio and they don’t all crash like dominos into an ambush. With Hop’s convoy inching ahead, Steve has time to think. He thinks about his parents, who don’t love him enough to be here. He loves them enough to be glad they’re not.

Thinks about Nancy, and almost cries like a freakin’ baby.

Then Will Byers climbs onto the bus.

Will takes after Joyce more than Jonathan does. Steve barely remembers what Lonnie Byers looks like anyway—the man belongs to such a far-gone past that his name doesn’t even get mentioned anymore. Will at fourteen is already more of a man than his deadbeat dad ever was. Steve knows that, and straightens up to greet him like he’s not being nibbled to death by the pain in his shoulder… ribs… stomach… no, scratch that. The pain everywhere.

“Hey, Will. There a problem?”

“Can I talk to you?” Will asks, low, pausing beside Steve’s bench-seat.

“You are talking to me.”

“Yeah,” Will says, sounding slightly more like Jonathan now. “But like, privately.”

Technically Steve probably isn’t supposed to get off the bus. But Mr. Coronado is driving it, and he’s been nice to Steve ever since he taught him in the fourth grade. Mr. Coronado won’t leave without hollering for Steve, and Hopper never needs to be the wiser about it.

Right? Right.

“Sure,” Steve says. He tries to pick up the axe, to take it with him, and realizes he really can’t. Feels a little something drift out of him, then: not the will to live, exactly, because there’s no crisis he knows of at the moment except the depth of feeling behind Will’s eyes, but something.

Letting go of the past, or accepting that he doesn’t have much of a future; it’s hard to say which.

He follows Will off the bus. Bandanas on, but the air still smells like exhaust. Weirdly, that’s a little comforting: a more familiar burning than when the world is on fire.

“What’s up, William?”

“I need you to listen to me explain this without interrupting,” Will says.

“Sure.” Steve doesn’t need to be patronized by a freshman in high school, but when does he ever? Also, it’s a common occurrence.

“El was supposed to be in our bus. The last one.” Will pauses, as if to dare Steve to interrupt, but Steve’s a man of his word, so Will goes on. “Then she told my mom that she switched to the middle bus, the one with the Wheelers. Chief’s orders. But Hopper’s already up there.” He gestures, and Steve nods. That doesn’t count as interrupting.

Will says,

“El starts heading towards that bus. But then she doesn’t get on. Nancy gets off.”

Through the general haze of pain, Steve feels a stab of uneasiness. At the moment, it makes him queasier than his torn-up shoulder. “Where’d they go?”

Will doesn’t chide him for interjecting. “Towards the sinkhole.” He clears his throat. The bandana almost slips off his nose, but he tugs it back up. “This is the part I really need you to get. Nancy is planning on…” He lowers his voice to a whisper. “Going through.”

Steve stands at the edge of the abyss. There’s a part of him that recognizes the colossal stupidity of his plan, an awareness that here is where he gives up the will to live, once and for all, charging unarmed into hell. And on the word of Little Byers alone!

But then again, he trusts Will. He trusts Will’s suffering history, and his understanding (as much as anyone can have) of the twisted mind of Henry Creel, and he trusts that Will wouldn’t send him on a suicide mission if Nancy and El weren’t waiting at the other end of it.

Even if they’re not, technically, waiting for Steve.

You think about a lot of weird shit when you’re climbing, very slowly, down to the pulsing heart of the crater where your old high school used to be. Not just family, not just the people you love, but all the shit you’ve buried deep in yourself, about yourself. Steve finds himself remembering his aborted childhood dreams of greatness, like how he was going to skiing in the Alps for his eleventh birthday, but then he got strep throat and his parents went without him because the travel itinerary was already in place. He thinks about how he did go to the Baseball Hall of Fame freshman year with Tommy H’s family, but it was actually kind of lame. He thinks about how the only ocean he’s seen is the Atlantic, and that from a grey winter shore in Maine.

Not the same thing as summer sun in California.

Not the same thing as being overtaken by blue and gold, sky and sea.

Will said, with deadly certainty, that Nancy was convinced about the necessity of her plan. That she thought the only way to take out Vecna was to face him head-on. Will said that Jonathan might be helping her—he’d seen them talking last night, and he’d wormed a few hints out of Jonathan.

Whatever they’re doing, they’re doing it to protect me, he added, with a helpless shrug, like Jonathan’s brotherly loyalty was a stone wall of certainty.

If the past serves as any indicator, it is.

So why come to me? Steve asked, barely knowing what he wanted the answer to be.

Jonathan’s looking out for me, Will said. And Nancy will look out for El. But nobody’s looking out for Nancy.

Steve feels naked without his axe. Dead already without Robin. He’s basically stripped down to a skeleton, that’s what. A skeleton still capable of wincing and whining and making note of the fact that yeah, every one of his injuries still hurts like a bitch.

Not that he’s asking to be put out of his misery just yet. He almost bit the dust when he crawled over the topmost edge of the pit. Apparently, more destruction had been eating away at the ground than was visible from above, so that drooping asphalt lip was deceptively broad. When Steve gingerly shifted onto it, it shattered under his weight. Chunks of pavement and earth and probably some nastier bits like broken glass and mangled metal rained down with him as Steve rolled, cursing all the way, onto a sturdier (though likewise unforgiving) overhang of wall.

Brick wall. This was the seemingly impenetrable flank of Hawkins High. Now it's a glacier-shelf chunk, suspended over the deeper drop.

Thump. Thump.

Is it his heart in his ears, or the red-glinting gate?

Will didn’t stay to watch Steve go. Didn’t want Joyce to get suspicious about the absence of two sons instead of just one. Steve going this alone is the point, of course. The evac train keeps running—assuming Mr. Coronado bows to the needs of the many—and the only additional casualty thrown into the mix is Steve. He doesn’t doubt for a second that Nancy and El (and Jonathan, apparently with them) can make it out of this alive.

If you’re so sure of that, why are you going? Death wish?

He’s not thinking straight. It doesn’t matter. That’s not what counts.

Nancy’s nothing like Vecna. Eleven is nothing like Vecna. But the very ways in which they’re defiantly opposed to the selfish, bitter, violent bastard make for a sort of—magnetic connection. Not that Steve aced middle school science, or anything. (He didn’t.) It’s just that he can see why Vecna picked Nancy out for his campaign of world domination. Why he picked Max. Will. Eleven. He hates people who do something good with what makes them different. He hates people who make him feel small and second-best.

Steve has never had access to nearly unlimited power, but if he had, maybe he would have ended up a monster himself. He certainly let his petty jealousies get the better of him for a while. He certainly thought that he needed to prove himself to almost everybody with a pulse. People like Tommy H and Carol Perkins didn’t actually care what Barb Holland or Jonathan Byers thought of them, but Steve cared. Steve could feel the eyes of even the “losers” watching, taking his measure.

Yeah, he made a shit pack-leader. Thankfully he got knocked down a few rungs on the social ladder and realized it was the best thing that could have happened to him.

Thankfully Vecna’s never looked at him twice.

Won’t know I’m coming that way, bitch.

At least, that’s the hope. The reality is more sobering, which is that Steve’s breathing heavily, bruising every uninjured inch of his skin on the rubble, and feeling terribly lightheaded as he goes.

It’s weird to find familiar objects lodged among the dust-clouded destruction. Like… there’s a desk. There, surprisingly un-smashed, is a stick of chalk, too white to be a fingerbone. Overhead, the sky is a rotten orange-gray, the glow of a distant sun diffused through pollution. In the distance, he can hear the buses rolling out. Even if things go back to normal someday, the people of Hawkins will not want to call this place home anymore. Steve feels sure about that. The people of Hawkins, in this thought experiment, do not include him, because there is no way he’s surviving this last-ditch dumbass plan. He's sure about that, too. Still, if he did, he’d ask them why they waited around so long. If the disappearance of Will Byers wasn’t enough, why not the scandal at the lab? Why not the horror at the mall?

What is so important about this little wart of humanity on the surface of the planet, this once-boring Midwest town turned nightmare-land, that they were willing to lose everything just to keep a hold on it?

He slices his palm open on a nubby shard of brick and curses.

Robin and Dustin would kill him if they knew what he was doing right now.

Nancy, too.

He drops from all fours onto his stomach and drags himself along a narrow ledge of iron, a fairly broad structural beam that was bent like a dandelion stalk by the weight of everything else toppling around it. If he can get to the end of it and let himself down by his arms, he’ll be feet-first above the gate.

There are already vines crawling out of its pulsing center, their wormlike tendrils undulating slightly as they probe along heaps of trash. Part of Steve’s reasoning for dropping off the end of this beam, like a sailor jumping into oil-flamed waters, is that if he makes too slow of an entrance, the vines will have time to do what they like with him.

He had enough of that last week, thanks very much.

And he was stronger then.

He shuts his eyes. He’s never been really religious, but a prayer can’t hurt right now.

Please, he says in his head, to whoever’s out there that’s not Vecna. Whoever’s out there that let him meet Nancy Wheeler, and Dustin Henderson, and Robin Buckley, and all the rest. Please give me a chance.

His left arm’s the winged one, so Steve leads with his right arm. He knows it’s stupid not to have brought a weapon, like, any weapon, but he also couldn’t do shit with the axe or the nail-bat, much less aim a gun right now. His right hand is his best shot at getting to the next stage. He needs it free.

Hanging from the beam by one arm tears at his recently re-stitched stomach wounds. He curses up a storm, calls Nancy’s name for some reason, and hears only the vines hissing in response.

Fuck no.

Steve drops.

He’ll never get used to the clammy, sentient jello feeling of interdimensional space wrapping around him. He holds his breath and squeezes his eyes shut and tries not to hear the glop, glop, glop sound of the gate smacking its vine-y lips as he passes through it.

He lands on his feet.

He’s standing next to his old locker. It’s smeared with cobwebby goo and a glowing mossy substance, but it’s his. It even says his name on it, scratched with deliberate care by Tommy's pen-knife.

Flakes of ash float upwards from the worn linoleum floor. The only visible cracks in the linoleum are the same ones Steve could have sketched out in a dream from memory. This place is…frozen in time, and if not comfortable or restored to its right-world self, at least it’s whole.

He reaches up to touch the bandana on his face. Still there.

He reaches up to tap his left shoulder. Ouch. Still there.

Overhead, the gate whines and spits as the jello-stuff weaves itself back together. Perhaps, as a substance, it has to forget that it’s been passed through, like its very being depends on being undisturbed. That’s part of what makes the Upside Down such an ugly, repellant place: it doesn’t want the outsiders who come to it. They’re foreign objects in a wound. Vecna’s the one who keeps ripping out the sutures.

Steve shuts his eyes. Tries to summon another prayer, but it doesn’t come.

He starts walking.

He makes it out of the school into the unfractured parking lot. There are cars here, frozen and hollow, but the only bodies he sees are those of the dead. Overhead, storms rumble. No sun, just flashes of lightning. Steve shivers in his filthy sweatshirt, the one he took from the hospital lost-and-found.

It hits him, then, that he’s probably never going to see Robin again. He should’ve left her a note or something. He wonders if Will will know what to say. Not just to Robin, but to Dustin. Not just to Dustin, but to Lucas. Erica. Even Mike.

Stop scheming. Seriously, Harrington. I hear those brain cells whirring and it ends…

It ends…

Tears sting Steve’s eyes, but he doesn't stop. Hopefully hell is empty and all the devils are on the other side. Well, no, he only hopes that if they are actively getting blasted to bits by Hopper and Murray’s firepower. Otherwise, it’s a death-wish for the people on the buses, and Steve won’t conjure it up even to save his own skin.

Thank you. For giving my head the biggest thump of its life two years ago. I needed it. It changed my life. And now I’m crawling forward.

Time moves differently here. Steve has no idea where he’s going, but that’s just it—neither does the ground beneath his feet. He shakes, shudders, and blinks awake to find himself in the alley near the theater, where Nancy slapped him across the face like he deserved. He blinks again, and all of that’s gone.

What? Maybe the Upside Down is having technical difficulties.

Finding himself back in the school parking lot, Steve trudges towards the dark fringe of woods at its outskirts. It’s going to be a trek, but the Creel House is not far on the other side of the forest next to the high school. Could be worse. Then again, this is probably what Nancy had in mind, too. How long has she been planning to pull this off?

As soon as we can, we need to go back. Right. It’s not been a secret, at least not from Steve, that Nancy wanted to do this.

He just didn’t want to believe it, or wasn’t quick enough to figure out what the specifics of her plan were. He could kick himself for being thick-skulled, but that would just leave another bruise, and Steve can’t afford many more of those. His feet feel like lead. His shoulder is on fire, and his stomach is worse.

Somehow, he keeps going. Call it sheer Harrington stubbornness.

Crawling forward.

In a way, acting like Nancy’s too good for him is taking the easy way out. Maybe it’s better to be honest: walking into the arms of death really sucks. Accepting that the girl of your dreams might not have the inclination, and certainly doesn’t have the time to love you back is a sharper pain than a gunshot wound.

Steve can admit all that now. Admit it, and accept that it doesn’t change a thing.

Long before he reaches the Creel house, he can see that it’s on fire. Molotov cocktails aside, things don’t burn the same way in the Upside Down. The flames seem to lick more slowly, twisting in the currents of fickle, multidirectional winds. Because of this, the house isn’t so much an inferno as a sculpture of glowing embers: each window and doorframe outlined in scorching color.

Steve takes his thirty seconds of adrenaline here and now. He runs.

On the dead, blackened weeds where Vecna’s body was supposed to have fallen, Nancy and Eleven and Jonathan are standing in an uneven triangle, with Nancy planted at the most distant point. There is a body on the ground between them now, but it’s burned beyond recognition, thick smoke still rising from the charred remains. Steve, gasping and painting, doesn’t think he’d be able to make much sense of who it was even if his vision was clear.

Desperately, he claws at the bandana, pulling it down so that he can breathe without it muffling him. Who gives a flying fuck about the toxic air right now? He hacks a cough that almost makes him black out from agony, but even that doesn’t get their attention.

It isn’t a grand entrance. Nobody calls his name, or accuses him of interfering. Looking lost, Eleven stumbles towards Jonathan.

Jonathan has a gun hanging heavily in his hand.

“Nancy!” Steve tries to shout, but it comes out as a croak.

Nancy isn’t moving. Her body is locked in its stiff, defiant posture, hands held clawlike against her thighs.

“Fight him,” Eleven chokes. “Come on, Nancy.”

They’re too near the flames; the air is chokingly hot. The house burns. The body on the ground smokes.

Steve almost drops to his knees, but manages to lurch ungracefully forward. Only then does anyone acknowledge him, and it’s Jonathan, not Nancy.

“Oh, shit,” Jonathan mutters, confirming that Steve’s presence is indeed unwelcome. Jonathan’s bandana is gone, too, and his face is sickly pale beneath a layer of dirt. “Steve, what the hell?”

“Steve?” Nancy’s head whips around, and one eye peers out of the bruised side of her face, teary and dim and still her own.

The other eye glows sharply, eerily blue.

Oh, God…

“Nancy,” Steve manages to say, even though the ground rises up to meet him and he finds he is on his knees now. On his knees, just a couple of yards away from the burned corpse. There’s a… a hand, still somewhat intact, with unnaturally long fingers and talons instead of nails.

Vecna.

“Nancy,” Steve says again. His mouth is dry. “What did you do?”

“Enough,” says a voice through Nancy’s lips—a voice that isn’t hers at all. “She did enough.” She lifts one stiff arm, her hand still curved like she’s grasping at something solid in the empty air.

“Fight him!” Eleven screams. The scream shifts from urgent command to panicked pain as her arm splays out straight from the shoulder socket, then abruptly snaps in two places.

“Stop!” yells Jonathan, raising the gun. “Nancy, stop!”

Nancy’s arm drops. Her head thrashes from side to side. Steve can’t move from where he’s kneeling, but he knows he needs to. He needs to get up. He needs to—

Eleven moans, curled on her side with her ruined arm crumpled to her chest. Nancy drags her arms up from her sides slowly, as if they have become impossibly heavy, or as if someone is holding them down against her will. She clutches her head, fingers snaking through her hair. “I—” the voice changes mid-sentence into her own—“can’t. Now, Jonathan!”

Jonathan’s looking out for me. And Nancy will look out for El. But nobody’s looking out for Nancy.

Shit. Shit. It’s all gone to shit.

Steve crawls forward.

He wasn’t a happy kid, though he wanted to be. He wasn’t allowed to grow up right: none of them of were. That’s what they all have in common, all these Hawkins natives and transplants, fighting like hell to save a patch of broken earth because they have to know where they stand against the rest of the world. Much good it’s done them, but much good they’ve done, all at the same time.

Jonathan will do anything to save his brother, and Nancy will do anything to save all of them, which is how you get Nancy driving herself to her knees in the black earth and Jonathan raising his weapon, leveled at her head.

Steve doesn’t know what he’s doing, but it doesn’t matter. That’s not what counts. He only knows who he loves, and it’s everyone, but also, there’s no use in looking after everyone if there’s no Nancy to find among the crowd.

You’re there—

You’ve always been there—

Steve can’t really see anything. But he smells ash, breathes smoke, and feels totally numb yet totally alive at the same time. He hears the gun go off when he’s already in motion.

When he’s flinging the only body he has in between Nancy and death, with all his heart.

Chapter Text

This body used to belong to somebody else. Its pain used to be reliably mortal. Scraped knees. Bruised elbows. A hairline fracture from a too-exuberant pirouette in ballet.

This body used to belong to somebody else. The girl Nancy used to be. A girl who knew neither heartbreak nor despair.

It’s still her body.

There aren’t words to describe the pain of holding two souls inside a vessel meant for one. A series of images, pressed hard enough against the inner eyelids to become imprinted. Mark of the beast, we are legion—hateful voices hissing curses from the ancients as a mockery, not proof of anything.

Good girl, Nancy.

But it’s still her body. Still her soul, which is somehow proof that she has one.

There aren’t words to measure the halt and rush of time passing. Strains of that damned song sputtering through the ancient gramophone, the creak of old floorboards, the chlorine scent of pool-water. Nancy’s body is the key to everything, even to the door of this world not her own, but—

This world used to belong to something else.

Nancy, what did you do—Enough—she did enough—Fight him—Stop! Nancy, stop!

There is a barren, sulfur-skied wasteland layered under the murderous red silt, the suspended memories. There is a deep wound beneath every vicious temper. There is a story behind every hollow-eyed corpse.

Here is what Nancy sees, with eyes that are far from hollow: the bullet suspended for the merest instant before it races towards the barren future.

Here is what Nancy knows: memory is not enough.

You know that dream I told you about…

Jonathan’s not a boy any longer. He’s a man who keeps his word. Nancy asked him to take care of business, if it came to that. To put her down if a threat was all she became. Some worlds need men like Jonathan, men who don’t flinch from doing their agreed-upon duty.

Steve wasn’t supposed to be here. Steve can barely walk in a straight line, or hide the wounds he’s earned from this seemingly endless war. Nancy didn’t dare say a real goodbye to Steve because she couldn’t afford to let him change her mind. All worlds need men like Steve, men who never leave their love behind.

Jonathan pulls the trigger, and Steve takes the bullet. Isn’t this a perfect ending? Vecna, who saw it coming, certainly thinks so. Coiled around Nancy’s mind, his will clenching her heart like a fist, he tells her how much he likes the symmetry, balance restored like it hasn’t been since Eleven blasted him to hell. His child vengeance was meant to overpower hers, but then it didn’t.

Through you, I will see everything .

It was almost the first thing he ever said to Nancy. What did he see in her? Why was her rage so appealing to him? Why was she so susceptible to the draw, willing to walk the path that led her here? Here, where death hovers over Eleven, and death calls Steve’s name, where Jonathan pulls the trigger, and Nancy—

Nancy. This isn’t you. (Barb. Flickering and gone. Guilt in the cold blue world. Why is it blue? Isn’t Vecna’s world red?)

No more secrets. Mike, offering a way out of the darkness. An invitation to be a part of something that wasn’t wholly premised on the family bond they shared, so often unwillingly. She’d loved him better in that moment than ever before.

But I left one part out. You’re there. You’ve always been there.

This isn’t an ending. It’s the fight of her life. Nancy watches time ebb, and stops the bullet.

What’s hurting you? What’s holding you back? Oh Death, come quickly. Oh Death, don’t leave me here alone. The past is a trap. Children who never grow up don’t know how to grow at all. Everything’s an imitation.

Everything’s an imitation. A mirror at best.

Nancy opens her eyes. Just hers, though Vecna strains against some invisible inner lens, a distant pounding in her temples, her eardrums. Tap, tap, tap, let the other soul out—

But she doesn’t.

Jonathan has dropped the gun. Steve has dropped all pretenses, and is looking past the shimmering, suspended bullet at Nancy. She’s the only thing he seems to see.

On the ground, Eleven moans like the hurt child she is.

Nancy forces the bullet to fall. It doesn’t clatter on the rucked-up earth; it sinks deep. Probing its way to its unintended grave.

“Are you alright?” she asks Steve. (Her voice.)

“Yeah,” he says. His eyes offer her everything. “Good as gold.”

She can’t give in just yet. She can’t let go.

With great effort, Nancy takes a step. (Her body.) She doesn’t stop again until she’s at Eleven’s side. Then she kneels, and reaches for the younger girl’s hand—the hand that isn’t hurting.

It isn’t fair, but it’s all they have. All the time Nancy has must be spent wisely.

(Her ending.)

“El,” she whispers. “I still need you.”

Eleven squeezes her fingers, which seems like agreement, but then she shakes her head. Blood cakes her nostrils, her upper lip. She whispers,

“Not… enough.”

“What?” Nancy asks, stricken. The burbling laughter within is something she feels rather than hears.

“Both hands,” Eleven says. “Take—both hands.”

“But I’ll—” Nancy tries to protest, but the urgency in Eleven’s eyes tells her that it isn’t a moment for squeamishness. For avoiding pain. So Nancy laces her fingers gently through Eleven’s limp ones, and doesn’t pull back at the way the slightest touch makes Eleven’s face twist with anguish.

Nancy asks,

“What now?”

Eleven isn’t looking at her anymore. She’s looking through Nancy at something—someone—else.

“Take me with you,” Eleven says, pressing Nancy’s hands hard with both of hers. Then the scorched, broken earth around them, with all its promises of death, with all the hurt children, fades away.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

Black and blue. Endless and empty. Nancy has been here before, but it’s a dream she doesn’t remember. Her clean white tennis shoes are fixed, stock-still, in the midst of smooth ripples of shallow water.

No. Eleven’s voice floats towards her. Don’t let him keep you here. This is just the place we go when we can’t feel anything.

We? Nancy answers.

If you can take what was his, you’re one of us.

I don’t want what’s his. I just want—I want to take back what belongs to me.

No answer from Eleven, but the darkness shifts. A point of light is revealed—or no, not light. Just a solid, illuminated thing, free-standing.

Nancy approaches tentatively, her footsteps echoing into the seemingly limitless reach of time and space, but there’s no need for caution. It’s just a staircase, awkwardly freed from the structure of a house around it.

She half-expects it to be the Creel staircase at first, but it’s not. It’s… more modern. Cleaner. The way up to Steve’s room from the night her world changed.

…Go home, Barb.

You left her here.

Nancy wheels around, expecting the ominous looming figure, mangled and monstrous. Instead, she finds herself face to face with a boy who’s shorter than she is. Skinny and pale, with eyes burning blue.

She tries to say his name, but no sound leaves her parched lips. It’s strange to think still deeper thoughts in the recesses of your own mind, but Nancy does. She thinks of Max in the hospital bed, Eleven on the ground, Steve crushed under Sullivan’s boot.

Your selfishness caught my attention, says the boy that Vecna once was. You forgot her so easily.

You killed her! Nancy retorts, like she isn’t terrified.

But I kept her, he answers. He reaches up to tap his forehead, his small hand growing and contorting into the long, blade-like claws she remembers. I kept her right here.

The water splashes as if crossed by running feet. The Eleven who appears like a skipping stone flung between them is younger and smaller than the girl who asked Nancy to take both her hands. Still, she shoves the boy with all her strength.

Eleven screams,

Then let her go!

The red world is suffocating around them. Nancy struggles to adjust to the abrupt change of scenery, much as she struggled to calm herself as she frog-crawled after Jonathan down towards the opening of the gate, El following. It was strange, then, to be able to hear the growl of the bus engines and Hopper shouting orders, only to have those familiar, comforting sounds overtaken by the throb and pulse of the yawning mouth, and then, the eerie buzzing static of the Upside Down itself.

Nancy threw away the illusion of safety and asked her friends to do the same. Who is she now, with Vecna in her head and Eleven fighting for her life?

The boy is gone. Nancy thinks that means he’s behind her.

Listen to me, Eleven says. He only knows pain. You don’t.

That doesn’t make sense. What is Eleven getting at? Why did she insist that Nancy go into the catatonic deep state with her, if what they needed to do was press on with all the power they have? Nancy had expected… well, she doesn’t really know. But she thought it would be more violent, instead of this slow march down memory lane.

She forces herself to focus. To take in the melting brain-matter writ large, the floating debris, the twisted bodies. The bodies are ringed around her, she realizes: every life she’s blamed herself for losing. She stares deep into Barb’s empty eye sockets, and senses how the frisson of horror passing through her weakens her.

Take me with you, the boy mocks.

“Henry,” Nancy says, looking at Eleven but speaking to the empty space with a voice that rings rather than floats. “You’re only Henry now.”

The clawed hand flashes over her shoulder from behind, hovering in front of her throat as if to choke or tear. Nancy doesn’t even flinch, which would be more of a surprise if she hadn’t already realized that none of this is real. It’s a meeting of minds, quite literally. And while Vecna—Henry—might have been able to pull his weight in the contest against Eleven (until she beat the shit out of him), he can’t touch Nancy without impacting the only body he has left.

Even Vecna can die. Good or evil, strong or weak—it’s the great equalizer.

The blue world was a time capsule: November, 1983. The pool and the staircase and the whole damn town are meant to drag Nancy back to a moment of paralyzing indecision—a moment when Barb could still be saved. Everyone has those moments, when you’ve lived enough life to regret.

Everyone who’s ever loved and lost has felt the temptation to reach for the ones who are gone.

The thing is, you have to let go.

“Barb’s not here,” says Nancy, and Barb’s tortured flesh and twisted bones disintegrate into nothingness before her eyes.

Across from her, Eleven smiles.

“Chrissy’s not here,” Eleven says.

“Fred’s not here.”

“Patrick’s not here.”

“We’re not here,” says Nancy, and the red world bruises into blue.

I want to finish what we started. When I kill someone, I never forget. Maybe things can’t go back to the way they were.

Finish it.

“Eleven, can you still hear me?”

“Yes.”

 Nancy opens her eyes, or realizes she’s already done so, and she and Eleven are standing side by side on the blooming hill above Hawkins. Of course, the living flowers don’t last long: the eroding decay of the dreadful week replays at frightening speed while they watch, surging around them in a matter of seconds. The world is both infinitely larger and smaller than its real self; Nancy can see so much more of it, somehow.

“Did we do it?” Eleven asks. She’s her teenage self again, somber yet strong. “Did we drive him out?”

Before she answers, Nancy needs to see the ending. Instead of red and gray, the world is still tinged with the blue light of the past. Does this mean they're one step closer to winning? Or are the constant callbacks a way of forcing Nancy backward, into the self she was when she wrote in her diary—the self who still kept shoes in shoeboxes instead of weapons? She can already feel herself shrinking away from the onset of her great series of life-altering mistakes. If Vecna’s world is slipping from his grasp, his claws are still clinging to Nancy. Her guilt is still powerful enough to make a foothold.

Her fear is still tangled up with her rage.

Then—

“The buses,” Eleven murmurs, horror nearly stealing her voice.

Nancy sees.

The past snaps shut like the jaws of a trap, and the future bleeds out. If this is the hour following their departure, then everything is lost. Demodogs and full-grown Gorgons crawl over the mangled metal hulls that housed Hawkins’ survivors. They climb through the smashed windows, dragging out bodies. Tearing limbs. No one escapes, for out of the broken band of road rises the vast, shifting creature that Nancy once spoke to with Vecna’s voice.

Death. Oh, Death.

But it’s all blue, the throbbing red heart of Vecna’s memory gone. What remains is a question mark. A vision, a last burst of desperation from the second soul trapped in Nancy’s body.

Nancy, though she may be doomed, is no longer desperate. And her soul, as well as her body, is still her own.

“We’re not here,” she tells Eleven, as firmly as she can, and is strengthened by the resolve that instantly rises in Eleven’s gaze.

“We’re not here,” Eleven says, squeezing Nancy’s hand. She lifts the arm that should hang broken, and points. “Look—there’s light.”

Real life isn’t a pretty sight, but it’s still a welcome one. A flickering gap has opened in the gloom—a tear in the vision of the world, more than a gate, something Nancy remembers Max describing the first time Vecna caught her, the time she got away. It’s like a window looking in on what Nancy thought was lost to her. The grimy buses roll along the rubble-strewn road, faces pressed to their ash-glazed windows. Beyond the buses, the guard-truck has already had to stop more than once, judging from the claw-marks and blood-smears on its flanks and bumpers.

Progress. They're making progress out there, and the future Vecna tried to show her as his last attempt at dragging her down with him hasn't come true. 

Voices waft up on the wind (except this is all in her head, and there is no wind).

“Do you copy?” C’mon Joyce, c’mon. Damn it all—

“I copy.”

Shit. Thank God. “Glad to hear it. We just took another out…”

Nancy turns to look at El again, and they both grin.

Hopper, is their shared thought. They just caught a glimpse of Hopper.

Time keeps marching on, and they march with it. Down the ruined hill. Towards the light. Some of the thoughts they intercept are uglier than others: Will is basically eating himself alive with stress. He’s the one who sent Steve after Nancy and Jonathan and Eleven. Nancy prays she lives long enough to thank him for it. Meanwhile, unaware of just how great the risk taken was, Mike is increasingly anxious about where Eleven is, and Nancy doesn’t miss the way pain shivers through Eleven at the realization of it—pain distinct from the bruises and broken bones that are currently held at almost totally at bay in this blue dream-world.

Then there’s the humdrum terror, panic, irritation, and of course—most human of all—boredom that coalesces into a curious miasma specific to the mental state of the average Hawkins survivor. They want off the buses; they don’t want to die. They’re sick of no showers and short rations. They see a demodog in every shadow.

The white noise of their worry is almost enough to make Nancy lose her grip on herself. If she does, will Henry's spirit return, just as she's nearly rooted it out of existence?

When Murray and Dmitry’s explosions begin to go off in the distance, it’s a relief.

“Max? Can you hear me, Max?”

It’s Eleven talking, but the more she shouts, the more her voice is layered over by Lucas’s, asking the same question. Nancy knows it’s all part of the process, kicking and elbowing the walls that aren’t walls, opening the window of life wider, fighting the legacy of Henry Creel at every turn. If Eleven can forge a new channel towards Max, so much the better. If Nancy can reassure herself that the monster is gone, perhaps she'll know peace. But at the same time, she wishes that their journey in the mind’s eye... the minds’ eyes, more accurately... wasn’t so loud. What if she misses an important thought, a voice that’s calling only for her? What if she loses her hold on all the threads, and doesn't find Vecna’s final hiding places? She wants to tear this hellhole apart, but she wants to do it right.

“Come on,” she tells Eleven, but when no answer follows, she turns, and finds that she’s facing herself.

Fuck.

Fifteen-year-old Nancy is as prim and proper as ever, her long hair in loose curls over her shoulders, her pastel sweater buttoned all the way up. White tennis shoes on her feet. The meadow begins to lose shape around her, but she doesn't seem aware of her surroundings: only of her older self. Her wide eyes are as wary as a fawn’s.

Another trick of Ve—of Henry’s?

Nancy waits, but no mocking smile appears. No guttural voice echoes.

She’s just… alone with herself. Alone with her past.

“I’m not here,” Nancy says aloud, and then has to face the fact that she’s lying.

Because she is here, isn’t she? Her whole identity, for worse and for better, is tethered to the story that lies in this darkness. That’s true of Eleven, of Will, maybe even of Steve. Your story can start because you’re guilty, or bitter, or afraid. It ends—well, that’s life, isn’t it? You don’t get to know how it ends.

You just have to keep going.

Nancy stretches out her hand—then both hands. Her old self flickers, then does the same. Nancy feels nothing, even though their fingers are interlaced.

Take me with you? The words ring inside some inner layer of her mind, the speaker made clear by the sound of her own softer, sweeter voice.

No, Nancy answers, reaching through the murky depths. No. It’s time to let go.

I have to go now.

Eleven once said she opened the gate. Not by her own desire, but by her will nonetheless. By the power that lived inside her. Maybe she’d been born with that power, but she hadn’t asked for the ways in which it had been shaped, twisted, tortured by crueler minds. When she lashed out to defend herself, she left chaos: pushing Henry out of one unfinished life into another. He used what he had to make this dimension his own... nightmares, not dreams.

Nancy will never understand what it’s like to be him, but she can understand that. Taking strength from anger, from hatred, even from fear, in order to live.

Henry is gone, Nancy realizes. It's just her. 

Her power. Her will.

I have to go now.

We gotta carry them… Steve’s voice. Come on, you take El, and I’ll—

Harrington, check in. Where the hell is Harrington? Joyce, check in. You heard from Harr—

Chief, it’s Dustin. I’m with Mike. My leg’s fine. I’m with Mike. Wheeler. Mike Wheeler. We’re missing—

Steve, I swear if you’ve left me all alone, I’ll kill you. I swear on my Grandma Buckley’s grave.

Max? Max! Mom, she just—

“El!” Nancy calls. “Eleven! Jane!”

“I’m here,” Eleven—Jane—says. The light’s behind her, haloing her whole body with golden rays. “I’m with you.”

Dustin used to say, to anyone who would listen, that there could be infinite dimensions. Parallel universes full of parallel versions of everybody in the world, or of most of the people in the world, anyway, accounting for chance, changed timelines, freak accidents, etcetera. And there were also dimensions full of aliens and monsters, see, e.g., the Upside Down. Of course that wasn’t all—certain other dimensions might be fully populated by plant life alone: consider, if you will, a Planet Earth that mankind had never sullied.

Dustin used to say a lot of things. But in the end, the one thing that always stuck with Nancy was the idea that, whether you called it God or the Universe or nothing at all but Balance, it was crucially important to live your life with both feet planted on your own ground, not torn in two.

Harmony is always the description Nancy liked best, and never a state that she knew.

But maybe there’s still time. Maybe she’s a work in progress.

(All hurt children are.)

When she wakes, gasping and sore, her body feels empty. The pounding in her head has slowed to that of an ordinary headache. She’s more aware of the space in her mind, all but hollowed out, than she is of the fact that she’s being half-hauled, half-dragged, over horribly rough ground. Everything is dust and ash, sweat and blood, arms hooked under hers—

“Steve?”

“I got you,” he whispers, stumbling. “Just—a little—farther now—”

In the end, Nancy hauls him through the gate. Jonathan has Eleven, whose broken arm is twisted in a haphazard sling made from Jonathan’s overshirt. They’re all coughing, eyes smarting and lungs seared by the billowing sulfuric fumes rising up from the volcanic cracks in the scorched earth. Every vine has shriveled away to dust. Every impression of Hawkins, past and present, has vanished, licked by the flames of light that come not only from the window to their world, but from a vast restoration of color and warmth rolling in like thunderheads all across the strange yellow skies. The heat in the dry air, rising, is enough to cause panic. But Nancy can’t panic: she has to help Steve.

I got you.

It’s a promise to each other, now.

They’ve just reached the charred outline of the gate, hands blistering as they clutch for a hold on metal and stone, when the demodog tears past them. It doesn’t even swing its ghastly head in their direction, just barrels into the belching, smoking wasteland beyond. Dimly, Nancy wonders if the creatures she’s feared since knowing they existed were merely maladapted: monstrous only when they were compelled to be by a greater will, by cruel circumstance.

It doesn’t matter now.

Finish it.

“Don’t give up,” Eleven says weakly. "Don’t look back." She can barely stifle her sobs, but she’s been the one filling in for Dustin, for Steve, talking up a storm to keep them all going. For his part, Steve’s been silent, the blood-loss making him woozy, since the words he spoke after he realized Nancy had returned to herself.

Just a little farther now, he said, but a moment later, they collapsed on each other in an awkward pile of limbs.

Someday, Nancy will smile at that memory.

Someday is on its way.

Chapter Text

It’s bad luck for the groom to see the bride in her dress before she’s walking down the aisle, but Steve and Nancy don’t have a particularly traditional conception of luck. Anyway, considering that the aisle is just sand-drifted boardwalk that stops a few yards short of high-tide line, nobody’s holding a casual morning walk in their wedding clothes against them.

Still, Steve feels the whole world shift when Nancy steps out of the Winnebago, holding her trailing skirts up to her knees. Nancy’s not a pure-white kind of girl, so the fern-like lace is more…Steve would say it’s like the color of the pale sands, but Robin prepped him on this.

Ecru, Mr. Soon-to-be Wheeler-Harrington. It’s ecru.

Armed with this information, he means to compliment the ecru. He means to compliment the delicate flowers Robin and El have woven into the braided crown of Nancy’s hair, but all specifics just… abandon him in this crucial moment.

He gapes; he shuts his mouth. Finally, he musters,

“You’re beautiful, Nancy Wheeler.”

“Yeah?” she asks, smiling softly. Makes him weak in the knees, then and now always. “Hey. You don’t have to look at me like I’m a doll who’s about to break.” She stretches out her hand, and he takes it.

Warm, gun-calloused, familiar.

“Maybe I’m about to break,” he says huskily. “I haven’t worn a dress-shirt in forever.”

She scrutinizes his cuffed trousers, his buttoned sleeves. They’re both barefoot.

“You look nice,” she says. “Will you take me out somewhere nice, Mr. Harrington? Beachfront views?”

They spend the early morning with the sunrise at their backs, gazing at the cool blue expanse of the Pacific, shifting yet constant. Gulls and pelicans wheel overhead, forming patterns in the lightening sky. A curl slips loose from Nancy’s crown, trailing against her cheek.

Steve lets go of her hand only so that he can cradle her face in both of his and lean in for a kiss.

“I’m really gonna like being married to you,” he whispers, when they part.

Nancy’s eyes are ocean-deep and dawn-bright. “Me too.”

When they return to the camper, it’s been practically overshadowed by all the creations their party—the Party—have made in their absence. Dustin and Mike have rigged up a hoop-shaped trellis hung with silk and paper flowers. They’ve also set up a ring of chairs, which Eleven has festooned with brightly colored scarves.

Real hippie shit, Mike said, but it was obvious he liked it.

“OK, you two nearly missed your own wedding,” Erica accuses, hand on her hip. She’s overseeing the operations like a five-star general, and hovering over Max to take any requests. Real multi-tasker, is Erica.

“Eh,” Max says, grinning beneath her dark glasses. Her vision has gradually improved, but she still uses a cane for guidance and tries not to strain her eyes in outdoor light. “I say we give them a pass. Just this once.”

“Generous of you, Mad Max,” Steve says, sweeping her a bow. “I appreciate it.”

She snorts. Since the sand is rather treacherous terrain for her, she’s stayed seated, chatting with Erica, and with Lucas when he’s not on set-up duty. Lucas’s diamond glints on her ring finger. It’s been a long engagement—but Max is used to being patient, she always says. Lucas proposed on her sixteenth birthday, right after she took her first step.

In another moment, Robin barrels towards them, coat-tails flapping. Unlike Steve, she’s wearing a tux, since she says she’s always wanted the opportunity to flaunt one outside of the depressing context of high school band. “Places, everyone!” she trumpets. “Our officiant is ready to preside.”

Originally, everybody figured that Dustin would make a perfect officiant—what with his ability to pontificate—but California’s requirements for ordination were too inconvenient for a computer engineering sophomore to add to his already crowded plate. Joyce came to the rescue, volunteering one of her friends: a Presbyterian minister from their block in L.A. who had somehow found himself saddled with the most eccentric next-door neighbors ever. He’s a mild-mannered fellow, judging by how amiably he accepted his fate of being bundled into the back of Joyce and Hopper’s Bronco and driven three hours up the coast. He assured Steve and Nancy that he would keep the details of their union highly confidential, since, as far as Mr. and Mrs. Wheeler know, they’re getting married seven months from now, in a church wedding in Syracuse, New York.

Steve doesn’t mind Syracuse, all told, but it’s not where he wants to say his real vows. Nancy agreed.

In November, upstate New York looks just a bit too much like Hawkins.

Here’s the version Steve plans to tell his kids someday: We cleaned house. We skipped town. We got everybody out that we could, and we didn’t let go of each other for the rest of our lives.

Only time will tell if those not-yet-in-existence kids will understand, but Steve has faith.

Not everybody invited could show for the little big day: Will is doing a semester in France, and Jonathan is doing a nature photography stint in the Florida Everglades. There aren’t any hard feelings to speak of, Harrington-to-Byers, but if Steve’s honest, he’ll miss Will’s presence today more than Jonathan’s. Never letting each other go, in Party-speak, does leave room for holding some people more at arm’s length than others.

The gang that’s here can’t press close enough, though: Hopper and Joyce, who will (respectively) escort the bride and groom down the aisle; Robin the best woman and Dustin the best man; Mike the man of honor and Lucas the ringbearer. Eleven and Max and Erica are bridesmaids, though they’ll all walk together, so that Max can be supported on either side.

It’s perfect, as far as Steve’s concerned.

Too good to be true, his younger, more insecure self would say, but he’s been trying, in recent years, not to doubt the blessings he counts.

Nancy disappears into the Winnebago one last time to collect her bouquet, and Dustin carefully props up the boombox on its designated card table. The card table, unsurprisingly, is concealed by yet more scarves.

“Press play,” Erica hisses, and I Want to Know What Love Is starts churning out of the speakers, mingling with the murmur of the salt-tinged breeze.

Steve has to jog back up the aisle to link arms with Joyce, then wait for Dustin and Robin to take their places beside Greg the minister under the windblown flower arch.

“Steady there,” Joyce says, patting his elbow. “Everything from here on out is the easy part.”

He’s surprised into a laugh, even though his heart is beating extremely fast. “Nobody’s ever said that about marriage, Joyce. But I like how you think.”

“You’re a good boy,” Joyce says, with one of her dazzling flashes of absolute sincerity. “You’re one of my boys. You know that, right?”

His parents will be at the shindig in Syracuse. He knows that. And it’ll be good, in a way, because they’ve come to love Nancy, and his mom hints about future grandchildren, and his dad is mellowing with age. But this—right here, and all around him—this is Steve’s family.

He leans down to kiss Joyce on the cheek.

Joyce takes her seat after their march, and Steve stands with Robin directly behind him, grateful for her whispered stream of consciousness. After years of listening to it, it's calming to his nerves.

“This is like, seriously, the most idyllic setting you could have chosen, Steve-O. I mean, Nance is the mastermind for aesthetics—you should have seen her color-matching that ecru… you did remember to call it ecru, right? But anyway, I know the ocean was all you. And that, right there, is a sign of serious growth—”

“Robin Annaliese Buckley,” Dustin says distinctly. “Let the man process. He’s only doing this once.”

“Technically again in seven months,” Robin mutters, but she squeezes Steve’s shoulder and then shuts up.

The bridesmaids’ progress is slower than anyone else’s; slow enough to run through Forever Young, which may be a cheesy choice, but Steve doesn’t care a bit. The chorus, juxtaposed with Max’s careful steps, brings tears to his eyes.

We found her, Eleven had said gravely, as soon as they were on the other side of the gate, watching their world crumble back into itself—only itself. We found Max.

And they had. It had been a long road—a slow road—but sometimes, the people you love come back.

Mike saunters down after the girls, hands in his pockets, mouth held in a straight line that can only be interpreted by those who know him as a heroic attempt to prevent the revelation of any genuine emotion. When he reaches his final destination, Eleven stands on tiptoe to whisper something in his ear. He cracks a smile, then rubs his hand quickly over his eyes.

Lucas, the only person who could be trusted not to lose two miniscule pieces of jewelry in the literal sands of time, comes next.

Then it’s Nancy's turn.

Steve remembers the first time he saw her, and the many almost-last times. He remembers all the selves he was over those harrowing years, the good and the bad. Most of those selves were scared. He doesn’t know if he learned courage, exactly, but he did learn how to reach for a better future despite his fear.

One of the many lessons Nancy taught him was that fear was no way to stay alive.

One of the many lessons Steve had to figure out for himself was that love is hard work, but if you’re lucky—in a not-so-traditional way—the work is its own reward.

She’s smiling at him. She’s marrying him.

Once, Steve clung to this like a dream: the only thing he wanted to be real. But the truth is? It’s all real—all the faces here, all the memories they share. The weight of the world has a way of teaching you your place in it. The ocean shifts, and even changes color, but it’s always recognizably infinite.

Hopper’s bear-hug nearly swallows Nancy up when they halt at the aisle's end, but she reemerges uncrushed, stepping light and quick towards Steve with her hands outstretched. This morning, he thought he was supposed say something, but now he knows that the two of them no longer need words.

He takes Nancy’s hands. He can feel the ring on her finger—soon he’ll have one too.

“Hi,” Nancy says.

“Hi,” Steve whispers. Then, with the stupidly blissful inflection of the boy he was when he fell in love with her, he asks, “Will you take me home?”

“Silly,” Nancy says, laughter in her voice and eyes. “We’re already there.”

Sit down. Inhale. Exhale.
The gun will wait. The lake will wait.
The tall gall in the small seductive vial
will wait will wait:
will wait a week: will wait through April.
You do not have to die this certain day.
Death will abide, will pamper your postponement.
I assure you death will wait. Death has
a lot of time. Death can
attend to you tomorrow. Or next week. Death is
just down the street; is most obliging neighbor;
can meet you any moment.

You need not die today.
Stay here—through pout or pain or peskyness.
Stay here. See what the news is going to be tomorrow.

Graves grow no green that you can use.
Remember, green's your color. You are Spring.

- Gwendolyn Brooks