Archive of Our Own ^beta

1993.

Nancy moves back to Hawkins in 1993.

This is an accurate description of events; it's not the whole unfiltered truth. She's not sure if it's better or worse if she couches it within the appropriate disclaimers: Nancy is forced to move back to Hawkins (more precisely, her childhood bedroom in her parents' house) after being laid off from her job at The Boston Globe in 1993. She didn't choose to move back. This is important to remember. It's not giving up and consigning herself to small town living — it's being forced to, tail between her legs, as an intermission until she can get her feet back underneath her.

She is temporarily embarrassed. Temporarily should be underlined twice in red pen.

The Globe is slimming down after its purchase by the Times, cutting its costs, focusing on the beats and bylines that are the most widely read and easily digestible in the midst of declining advertising revenue and plans for the nascent World Wide Web. Not that the Globe knew what to do with it, knew what came next, but they knew change was coming. The Columbus Dispatch had been online for nearly a decade now, and now was the time to play catch up. Trim the fat. Be agile for the future under new ownership. That's the idea.

That meant Nancy Wheeler, junior reporter focusing on local crime and corruption, was cut from the payroll. They had enough crime reporters, several with three times her tenure and more connections than her scrappiness alone could make up for. Never mind that Nancy was ten-times more adept at using Microsoft Word, never mind that she called through lists of contacts quicker than even the hungriest interns. These decisions were above her pay grade, especially now that her pay grade was precisely zero.

She tried to stick it out. She really did. She applied the same vigor to job searching in Boston, in Cambridge, in Salem (and oh, she would have been so perfect for Salem, if they only knew). But she wasn't the only hungry young journalist lined up in stiff chairs to be called upon. She wasn't the youngest, the scrappiest, or maybe even the smartest in any waiting room. Nancy Wheeler, once a girl-wonder, is now twenty-six and without a degree to her name.

The bills pile up, her savings run out, and Nancy is forced to run home.

So she takes up her old room, next to Holly's, and is forced to recall what it was like to be sixteen like her sister. Nancy tells her mother it is just for now, and her father grunts rather than ask questions. Her mother asks plenty for both of them:

Have you tried calling your Uncle? He may know someone at the — Nancy, I'm just trying to help. You could always try the Post? The Hawkins Post, not Washington. They won't care as much about the degree. Maybe you should go back to school?

Mike is in Chicago, Holly is in high school, and this town has enough ghosts to haunt it for eternity. She can't understand why they stayed in this house, after. Why her mother would want to keep cooking in a kitchen her throat had been ripped out in, why Holly was content returning to the room she was ripped from, why her father keeps his useless golf clubs. She wonders if she's the crazy one when she blinks and sees the blood smearing the linoleum, the cavernous holes in the walls, why she scrubs and scrubs in the shower until her skin is red and raw and still never feels clean. They act like this is normal, like this is how things have always been.

Nancy doesn't ask these questions. She clips out hiring notices from newspapers, prints out copies of her resume until the ink runs out, and does what she does best: plans her next escape.

She tries not to flinch when she notices the scars on her mother's neck, still after all of these years. They feel like her fault. If she'd been faster, smarter, there. She doesn't have to be here anymore, it's not life or death. Her work in Boston was important, high stakes. The highest stakes left in Hawkins are who wins the football game, who hasn't mowed in weeks, if Holly remembered to tape The X-Files.

Nancy isn't sure she belonged here at sixteen. She definitely doesn't at twenty-six.

-

Nancy doesn't announce her arrival nor her departure. She didn't have friends in Boston so much as she did co-workers, and with the layoffs those happy hours fizzled out into nothing. That was the nature of adult friendships without the convenience of proximity. It was the nature of the grand plans she once had with Robin, Jonathan, and Steve, formed while drinking PBRs on a rooftop. They'd met precisely once in Philly, and then it was Nancy's deadline and Jonathan's final and a promise Robin forgot she made to her new girlfriend.

Besides, it's not as if she has very many people to tell. Most people have moved on from Hawkins, anyway. Even the kids aren't kids anymore, they're off at college. It's only some of the parents who were stubborn enough to remain, and the now-teenagers who could write off their experiences at nine and ten as a bizarre, fantastical dream.

(There's a glaring exception to this rule. She doesn't name it, not for a while, not until—)

Nancy is huddled by her wire headboard, the wind banging branches against her window. The Midwest is windy. This has always been the case. But thunder sounds, and when the wind woke her up in the middle of the night a part of her wondered if it was all beginning again. If she shouldn't have come back, if her presence was only asking for trouble, if gates could remain closed forever.

Get out. Get out. Get out.

She gets up, the floor creaking underneath her feet. Her old shoe boxes don't have guns anymore. Her mother had explained this with a laugh as Nancy set her suitcase atop her old bed. They'd given the guns to Hopper, at loss for what else to do with them. Nancy suspects her mother kept one, just in case. The blue telephone on her nightstand can remember the number she dialed, over and over, when she was sixteen and fearless. But Barb isn't there to pick up.

Nancy checks Holly's room first. She finds her sleeping. She cracks her parents' bedroom door, and only hears her father snoring. When she pads down to the kitchen, barefoot, she grabs a knife. She stays there, listening to the storm, illuminated only by the numbers of the clock on the stove.

They read 4:52 by the time the storm settles and she sets the knife down. No one is the wiser to how she spent the night, her latest overreaction in a series of many.

-

Holly gets the door before Nancy can the next morning. The knock is clear, loud, but with a friendly little rhythm to it. Nancy is over in the next room, addressing envelopes, when she recognizes the voice.

"I think your garbage cans got blown out in the middle of the street last night. I think I got them, but one of them might be missing a lid…"

"There was a storm last night?"

He laughs. "You slept through that? Tough as nails, Little Wheeler, just like your—"

Steve stops mid-sentence when he notices her in the periphery, his mouth falling agape. Nancy folds her arms around herself as she comes to a stop, leaning against the banister.

"Hey," she offers. It comes out quieter, more subdued than she means it to.

"Hey," he echoes, eyes fixed on her. He almost steps forward, then seems to stop himself. "Nancy. I didn't know you were—"

Holly rolls her eyes dramatically, the gesture fitting for a sixteen year old (God, remember being a normal sixteen year old? She does, in flashes, but she had longer than Holly did before she had to face it all) and trudges upstairs. "She's been here two weeks," Holly announces over her shoulder, the traitor.

Steve blinks. "I'm sure you just wanted to visit your—"

"Family," Nancy finishes, nodding as she presses her lips together. "Yeah."

"Long break from work?" he asks, sounding almost meek in his attempt to sound casual. She can nearly hear him doing the math in his head. Two weeks in Hawkins in the middle of July, but her job is in Boston and she arrived without so much as a hello or an offer to grab coffee.

"Laid off." She confesses sooner than she anticipates. Better to rip the bandaid off.

"They're morons," he tells her, and this response is immediate. Steve does step over the threshold, then. "Absolute idiots. Did they lay off the whole company?"

"A third."

"I'm cancelling my subscription immediately, I can't trust a word they print if they fire their best reporter."

"You have a subscription?" Nancy asks, eyebrows raising.

"Had a subscription, as soon as I call that phone number," Steve corrects, shaking his head. "I'll tell them exactly why, too."

"Why did you have a subscription to The Boston Globe in Hawkins? You're way outside our delivery radius."

"They can mail anything these days. Just meant the headlines were a little out of date. But I was still more informed than otherwise, so…" Steve trails off, shrugging his shoulders. "I guess you'll have to tell me your new paper and I'll subscribe to that one instead."

"Haven't figured that out yet," she admits, the corners of her mouth twitching upwards. He has to be lying. He's always been prone to exaggeration, big gestures, the whole gamut. She hasn't seen him in four years, but he doesn't look much different. The hair remains, the broad shoulders, the easy tone of voice. Steve Harrington, preserved in eternal form in Hawkins, still attached to a baseball bat and a gaggle of kids.

"I'm sure you will," he says. It's so easy, automatic the way he says it. He says it like he doesn't have any doubt, like she's going to make the shot as she always does.

Nancy hasn't been sure of this for a while now.

"I'll let you go," he says, looking over his shoulder apologetically. "Again, the trash cans, they're—"

"I'm sure we'll find the lid," Nancy finishes. He turns to leave, and she finds she has one more question. "Why did you find our trash bins, anyway?"

"Oh," Steve replies, stopping in his tracks. He jerks his thumb to his left. "I'm, um, a few doors down. It's pretty recent."

"Bought the house?" she asks, curious.

"Yeah. I swear, I'm not stalking your family. It was a very good price—"

"If you were stalking, you did a really bad job of it. I've been here two weeks."

"Exactly. Well, yeah —" Steve laughs, running his hand through his hair. "I would've said hi earlier, if I had known."

"Didn't realize you were so nearby." She knows, he knows, this wouldn't have meant much. He would have said hi, would have been the adult, would have been knocking on her door. It's unlikely she would have knocked on his. "It's good to see you, Steve."

He gives a little salute as he steps away from the door. "Don't be a stranger, Wheeler."

Nancy closes the door, then leans against it. She thunks her head, once, against the wood. She thinks. She's not sure of what.

"I got stuck in the snow," Holly interrupts, stepping down the stairs to rejoin her.

"In July?"

"In February," Holly clarifies. She tilts her head towards the door. "I was learning to drive in Mom's car, I had my license for a month, and I told Margot I'd meet her at her house after a snowstorm. And then I got out of the driveway and my car wouldn't stop spinning. I think I hit ice, and I was pretty sure I was fucked."

Nancy can't get used to the sound of her smallest sibling cursing. She should have been prepared for it by years of Mike. Worse, once she processes the words, she pictures her sister spinning and spinning.

"You shouldn't have driven," Nancy says, frowning. "If something happened—"

"It didn't," Holly says quickly. "The car stopped, and then it was stuck. By the time it stopped, Steve was out in nothing but his pajama pants, barefoot in the snow, and I was crying. He had me scoot over to the passenger seat — I guess he must have heard the car from his house — and then parked it back in the driveway. Said if I was that desperate to go somewhere, he'd take me, but he wouldn't recommend it."

Nancy bites her lip. It's not that this is out of character for Steve, but painfully just like him. A scared kid, and he's out frostbitten with bare feet, probably barely woken up. He's done more, risked more than a snowbank and some ice, and she knows Holly knows this as well as she does.

(Some of the other kids may have forgotten things or rationalized them, sorted them into neat childhood boxes. Holly never did.)

"Sounds like Steve," she says, because it does. "Glad you have someone else looking out for you," she adds, because she is.

Steve is a good guy. She's known this. It didn't change anything. It doesn't change anything.

-

Nancy doesn't belong in Hawkins. She knows this. It's a small town with small ambitions, and Nancy has had ambition gnawing at her for years. Determination to be the best student, the best shot, the best reporter. Now she's a college dropout, no longer even owns a firearm (she never got a license to carry in Boston, and her landlord would have had questions), and she can no longer claim to be a reporter. Still, the hunger remains. Hawkins never cared for hunger, not even when red, gluttonous jaws opened on its streets.

Steve belongs in Hawkins. He's got the folksy, earthy charm to succeed here, affection for its small scale, contentment with not asking for too much. Nancy always asks for too much — it's what she does best. It's not like Steve had any affection for his parents in staying behind; he'd always rolled his eyes at mention of his father, grown distant at the reminder of his mother. Dustin was gone, the kids grown and moved out of their empty nest. Not even Hopper and Joyce remained. It wasn't guilt, it wasn't obligation, it was just the fact that he liked it here.

She's never understood that about him.

He'd lie there, beaten and bloody, and rationalize how it could be worse. He'd look at a monster and reach for a baseball bat, then laugh afterwards as if he wasn't inches from death. The world could be ending, was ending, and he'd still be debating the merits of novelty snacks.

She knows all this because she's seen it, over and over again. Nancy got tougher, got harder, and Steve just let himself stay soft and malleable. Maybe that's why he found Hawkins easy to love.

(Maybe that's why he once found her—

It doesn't matter now.)

-

Hawkins is changing, even if Steve Harrington isn't.

She learns this over bits and pieces, copies of The Hawkins Post left on the dining table. It's not the Cold War anymore, and people aren't nearly so skittish at the idea of former quarantine locations and grisly deaths. Land is cheap in Hawkins, and people are buying. One developer promises luxury condos, the next a Wal-Mart. The citizens stave off the Wal-Mart (organized by Bradley's Big Buy), but the mobile home residents don't have nearly as much luck with the condos that require razing the land they live on.

At the very least, the developers are wise enough not to suggest a mall.

There's a new mayor who insists the town is up-and-coming, who plays "Don't Stop" on the tinny Main Street speakers over and over again as if Bill Clinton's recent electoral success could rub off on an entire town, who proudly attends ribbon cuttings and says 'vitality' so often and in such a variety of contexts Nancy can't be sure the man knows what the word even means. Buried underneath these headlines, reader-submitted firework noise complaints ('It is July 16th, stop it!'), and advertisements promoting Beanie Babies, there's a sentence a reader must have paid for.

Has anyone seen Maggie Frank? Cops don't care. Call me.

Nancy frowns.

She doesn't recognize the name. She eyes the phone number, then types it into the dialer.

"Hello?"

"Hi, I saw your phone number in the newspaper. I was wondering if you found your friend?" Nancy asks, feeling stupider the longer she speaks. She had no context for any of this. But a part of it made her itch, and she's forced to assume she's been out of practice in reporting for so long that she's going mildly insane trying to find a reason to do it again, with or without payment.

"Uh, no," the voice, feminine and low, says. "Have you seen Maggie? Who is this?"

"Nobody," Nancy says quickly, then amends, "well, I'm a reporter. I was just curious about your story here, why you listed your friend's name in the newspaper."

"I haven't heard from her in weeks," the voice replies. "Her parents haven't, either. Reporter? With who?"

"Used to be The Boston Globe. My name is Nancy."

"Used to be?"

"I'm in between jobs right now," Nancy says, holding the phone between her ear and shoulder as she reaches for a pen and notepad. "What was your name?"

"Tiffany."

"Tiffany…"

"Tiffany Harvey."

"And you said in your listing that the cops didn't care? How old is your friend?"

"Nineteen," Tiffany answers. "Too old for the cops to care or file a missing persons report, I guess. Something about her not being at risk, either."

"Well," Nancy says, frowning, "what makes you worried about her?"

"I haven't heard from her in weeks. It's not like her."

"Is her family worried?"

"Fuck her family," is Tiffany's immediate answer.

"You said her parents hadn't heard from her either—"

"They haven't, but that doesn't mean they care." She can hear Tiffany sigh over the line. She must take a drag of something, a cigarette. "They never cared."

"And how do you know Maggie?"

"Are you asking all of these questions because you're going to find her?"

"Maybe," is all Nancy initially offers. Then she just slightly changes her answer. "I can try."

-

Tiffany agrees to meet her at Benny's. Nancy's hunch about her phone call cigarette must be right, she reeks of smoke. She's years Nancy's junior, so she must be close in age to her friend. Her hair is gathered on top of her head, the straps of her tank top dig into her shoulders. Nancy doesn't recognize her. It's not as if she can recognize everyone in Hawkins, though it often feels like a town where everyone knows everyone. Tiffany is older than Holly, younger than Mike, outside the range of her usual knowledge.

"So," Nancy begins, tapping her pen against her notepad after they've exchanged initial greetings "You said it's been weeks? How many weeks? When did you last see her?"

"June 20th, saw her at her apartment," Tiffany answers. "I've tried it, over and over, and her landlord hasn't seen her either. I think her ex did something."

"Her ex?" Nancy repeats, writing as she speaks. "What's his name?"

"Fucking Jared."

"Last name?" Nancy asks, ignoring the modifier.

"Flemming. He's an asshole."

"Did he ever," Nancy pauses, searching for words. "Hurt her, or do anything—"

"Not physically, but guy was a piece of work," Tiffany says, shaking her head. "Like a small, anxious dog. He about lost it when she broke up with him."

"When you say lost it—"

"Cried like a baby."

Nancy blinks. "Anything else? Any comments or anything that really stood out to you?"

Tiffany leans back, scowling at a memory Nancy cannot see. "Lots of little sneaky comments."

"Like?"

"How she must not care about him, how she didn't return his calls quickly enough. Stuff like that."

"A little controlling," Nancy nods. "Got it. When did they break up?"

"Three months ago."

"Oh," Nancy says, frowning. "So, it's been a while."

"Long enough for him to get over it," Tiffany says. The fan trying desperately to cool the diner oscillates in their direction, and Nancy has to press her fingers down on the paper she's writing on to stop it from flipping over.

"And he wasn't? Over it?"

"Kept calling until a month ago."

"So you think it escalated from there?"

"Maybe," Tiffany says. The waiter brings out their food. Tiffany starts eating before gracing her with any elaboration. Nancy watches, waiting. She's learned to leave space for people to speak, maybe uncomfortable space, in the hopes of getting the other person to fill it. "I'm just saying, it's suspicious. I'm no," she waves her hand, still chewing, "cop or reporter. But I haven't heard from her for weeks, no one has. And he had a screw loose, that one."

"Have you seen Jared since?"

Tiffany takes another bite of her burger. "He still goes to work. But that doesn't mean she's not like, hogtied in his basement or whatever."

"Right. And where does he work?"

-

Nancy wonders, more than once, if she's insane for following a hunch from a woman with a grudge and access to a newspaper advertisement. Tiffany had been kind enough to leave her with the bill, so it's very possible she's been the victim of a very stupid wild goose chase and a ticket to a free meal. But she must be desperate, because she visits the theater multiple times that day. She sees Jurassic Park, after checking the name-tag of damn near every employee there. But he might be on a different shift or assigned to a different theater, so that leaves her with The Firm at 5:30. She doesn't realize it's two and a half hours long. One more movie and, armed with her father's credit card or not, she's done.

(She tried the phone book. His parents still live at the address listed, but he doesn't. They don't ask further questions of the young woman trying to sell them Tupperware off an outdated list.)

There's an 8 PM Sleepless in Seattle, so Nancy consigns herself to Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks and hopes that this ex-boyfriend shows himself during closing shift. The theater is hardly crowded, everyone flocks to Jurassic Park for their Saturday night viewing. Nancy slumps in her seat, armed with more popcorn she doesn't have the appetite to actually eat, and swears she hears someone gasp when Tom and Meg see each other for the first time without knowing the other's identity.

When Nancy cranes her neck, it's Steve Harrington behind her.

Nancy quickly redirects her eyes to the movie. He's so invested in this movie (this movie?) he doesn't seem to register her, but if she dramatically flips her head one more time she may not be so lucky. She might have to explain why the hell she's watching a romantic comedy alone on a Saturday night.

Then again, so might he.

She'd half expected a woman beside him, a Kirsten or an Angela or a Molly. But Steve is flanked by two empty seats, and she could almost laugh at the absurdity of it. She listens for his reactions the rest of the movie, unable to help herself. He groans when the characters make the wrong assumptions, then again when the leads have another near-miss. It's a good thing the theater is damn near empty, and it isn't, because when the credits roll and she gets up—

"Nancy?" Steve asks, the reflection of projector light in his eyes. It's a small theater.

She walks off, quickly, hoping he can chalk this up to mistaken identity. He doesn't, of course. Steve strides after her until she's forced to explain herself in the hall.

"It's not what it looks like," she says first.

"You're not enjoying a Nora Ephron movie on a Saturday night solo?" he asks, sounding amused.

"No, but you are."

Steve raises his hands. "Guilty as charged. Dustin bailed last minute, and I still had the tickets."

Nancy cocks her head to the side. "Did he pick it?"

"No, but he made me watch Jurassic Park already. It was my turn. What did you mean when you said it's not what it looks like?"

"I'm here for," she looks around, gets on her tip-toes to peer over his shoulder. She sees a name-tag with a large 'J' but the rest of the letters are indecipherable from here. "I'm here," she starts whispering in now, aware of the risk of being overheard. "For a story. Maybe. I don't know."

"A film review? I gotta say, I'd like it better if she wasn't engaged the whole time—"

Nancy sighs. "No," she says, cocking her head slightly in the direction of the guy now working the concessions. "There's a woman who might be missing, and I think that's her ex-boyfriend."

"Missing?" Steve repeats. He nearly turns his neck to look behind him before Nancy grabs his arm, and he looks at her before his head can swivel. She drops his arm, her hand as if stung. "Missing, how?"

"Her friend is worried about her," Nancy says. "That's all. It might be nothing, but…"

"It could be something," Steve finishes. "You think he did something?"

"I don't know," is Nancy's honest answer. "But maybe. His address is out of date, but maybe if I followed him after his shift…"

"Wait, wait, wait—"

"What?"

"So let me get this straight," Steve says, his hand gesturing at his side, "you think there's a chance this guy has his ex-girlfriend in bits in his freezer. And you want to go over to his house."

"I didn't say that," Nancy replies, even as she presses a finger to her lips in a plea for him to lower his voice. "I don't think he killed her. He just might know where she went."

"Did you maybe ask him?" Steve asks, complying with a loud whisper.

"And spook him?"

"Why would you care about spooking the guy if you don't think he's a murderer?"

"A very small chance."

"But a chance!" Steve whisper-yells.

"Very small!" Nancy replies, showing the smallest of gaps between her thumb and forefinger.

Steve sighs, shaking his head. Then he nods as if in resignation. "I'm coming with you."

"No you're not," is Nancy's instant reply. "I've done stakeouts before."

"I'll add safety concerns for reporters to my list of cancellations complaints to the Globe. "

Nancy rolls her eyes. "I'm fine."

"Do you still have a gun?"

"Mom gave my rifles to Hopper," Nancy admits.

"Unarmed?!" Steve asks in disbelief. "Alright. We're taking my car. I still have a bat in my trunk. How long do you think this guy's shift is gonna last?"

"You won't need a bat. I'm not going inside. I'm just looking. And I don't need you there."

"Too bad," Steve nearly sing-songs. "The buddy system perseveres in Hawkins, Wheeler. Monsters or no monsters, it's a bad idea to go into danger alone."

Her protests fall on deaf ears, and eventually it's easier to just agree and set ground rules (the bat stays in the trunk, Steve stays in the car, and so does she) than it is to keep arguing the point. She had been on plenty of stakeouts alone, had far dodgier leads. The adrenaline kept her sharp, kept her going. She'd dive into anything without any questions asked. Her bosses loved her for this until they didn't.

Steve takes his time ordering a final popcorn on their way out, his eyes fixed on Jared's name-tag (she never should have told him his name) the entire time.

-

That's how she ends up in the passenger seat of Steve's car — the Beamer, may it rest in peace, replaced with a 4Runner that might more easily handle rough terrain. Not that it has to, in Hawkins, and there's no Upside Down to drive the car into anymore. But it stores its share of baseball equipment, and Nancy guesses this is the point. Steve groans as he realizes a kid has stuck gum to his chair from the backseat, and mutters something about detailing. There's no malice in it. There never is.

Steve, to his credit, is still good at tailing. He takes out a lot less fence-posts now.

"Why did Dustin bail on you, anyway?" Nancy asks, eyes fixed on the house's front door as Jared disappears through it. She takes out her binoculars, leaning to peer into windows.

"He had a date, if you can believe it," Steve says. She doesn't have to look at him to tell he's smiling, shaking his head. "They grow up so fast."

"He's twenty-two," Nancy points out, adjusting the lens of her binoculars. A light turns on inside, but there's no other side of movement within the small house.

"Still." Steve's voice is fond. "He lives in Indianapolis, you know."

"You must be relieved he isn't too far away."

"A little," Steve admits. "Not that — I mean, everyone has a right to get the hell away from Hawkins. I get it."

Nancy presses her lips together. "Do you?"

"Yeah," Steve says. "It's…it's had its history."

"Why did you stick around?" Nancy asks, trying to keep her voice light. "Cheap housing?"

"It won't stay cheap, at this rate," Steve mutters. "But. You know. If everyone leaves, what happens then? Everyone has the right to leave, I know, it's just self-preservation past a point. There were literal monsters roaming the streets, gateways to hell, the whole thing. You'd have to be crazy to stick around."

Nancy leaves her response left unsaid. It's implied enough. Jared putters about his house, his lights on, TV reflecting on the wall. He's unhurried, unwinding from a late shift. She pauses in hopes Steve keeps talking. She has to wait a minute.

"But if everyone leaves, then who can look out for this place? It had good memories too, with all the bad," Steve says, his voice soft. "Someone's gotta do it."

"And it's a job for good ol' Steve Harrington?" Nancy asks, lowering her binoculars. Jared is watching the television. Nothing is happening inside. She turns to look at Steve, watching him as he looks out the window.

"Something like that," he says.

They stay there for a while, until Jared's curtains close and Nancy says,

"You know, that movie wasn't even good."

Steve gapes. "You have some nerve."

"I mean, she's with another guy the whole time," Nancy continues, undeterred. "They've never even met, but she hears a widower on the radio and thinks she should drop everything? Write a letter to a stranger because she watched some movie?"

"She didn't mail it," Steve says defensively. "And it's Jonah who really makes the connection, the people in their lives can see it working—"

"The eight year old?"

"Wise beyond their years!"

Nancy laughs, shaking her head. "There is no way. There is way too much suspension of disbelief. She lives in Baltimore, he lives in Seattle, they have totally different lives—"

"They make it work!"

"You don't know that! The movie ends way, way before you can know that."

"Okay," Steve adjusts in his seat, leaning over the center console as if brokering a negotiation. "I will concede. Nora Ephron has done better. You know she was a journalist, right? She was in a whole class action against Newsweek because they wouldn't let her — and other woman — write, then the New York Post, then Esquire."

"How do you know so much about Nora Ephron?"

"It doesn't matter. What does matter is that's not her best work." Steve argues, sitting up in his chair. "Don't tell me you haven't seen When Harry Met Sally, Nancy. You'll break my heart."

Nancy sighs. "I haven't really had time to watch movies, Steve."

"You have all the time in the world today," Steve says, checking his watch. It's just after midnight. "You know what's still open?"

"It's not even today anymore."

"Family Video," Steve continues. "And I happen to know they have a copy of When Harry Met Sally. Several, in fact. But if you're tired—"

"I'm not tired, but," Nancy gestures to the house. "I should probably stay with this situation. I wasted that many movie tickets on it. You can drive me back to my car, and I can—"

"Nope, nope," Steve says quickly. "If you're staying, I'm staying. But I don't know how much you're getting," he points to the closed curtains, "out of that. Unless you expect he's gonna come out at 3 AM with a body bag."

Nancy considers this for a moment.

"Fine," she says. "I don't believe you about When Harry Met Sally, for the record. I think it's just spite motivating me at this point."

Steve turns the key in the ignition, grinning. "You're wrong."

"You're wrong," she rebuts, feeling juvenile. He laughs, and she does too.

-

Steve's house is —

Well, it is important to acknowledge she never meant to end up in Steve's house. She hadn't meant to end up in Hawkins, either, but the circumstances were what they were. This is yet another set of circumstances, more context required to explain it, but she's not sure if someone saw them checking out a romantic comedy from the video rental store at 12:23 that she could explain it very well at all.

But she's in Steve's house, and it's cozier than she expects it to be. She remembers his parents' house (had her share of nightmares involving his parents' house, their pool, the emptiness) and this is nothing like it. The floors are warm shades of wood, rugs strewn about them. There's more than a few trophies taking up the entryway, none of them bearing his name. The couches are plush, deep, and indented; they look nothing like the stiff leather of his parents' house.

"Mi casa es su casa," Steve says, already setting upon the VHS player underneath the TV. He curses as the screen flickers, Meg Ryan briefly appearing. "Previous renter didn't rewind. Or even finish, looks like. Give it a second."

Nancy takes advantage of the time, the whir of the VCR as it rolls the tape back, and keeps looking around the living room. An umbrella stand has been repurposed to hold baseball bats. She could almost laugh at the absurdity of it, until she remembers she still dreams of bleeding holes in the ceiling. Baseball coach or not, it's the explanation that makes the most sense for their presence here.

"It's nice," Nancy says quietly, eyes scanning the curtains and photos on the wall. Steve and Robin in the DJ booth, kids in uniform with a trophy, Dustin and Max and Lucas peering into the Grand Canyon. She can imagine Steve behind the camera in so many of these, tutting to prevent movement before the flash sounds. He's no photographer, not like Jonathan. The photos blur at the edges, the lens slightly out of focus. But the intent is there, all the same.

"Thanks," Steve says, peering up at her from the floor. "It's still a work in progress. The basement is a mess, it's unfinished and has more spiders than…well, at least they aren't bats." Steve laughs, scratching his chest absentmindedly, underneath the open buttons of his polo. "I think I've had enough rabies shots in my life already. I haven't gotten good at dry-walling. Yet. I was going to try my hand at it over the summer."

"How long have you been here?" Nancy asks, still eyeing the pictures on the wall.

"Maybe ten months?" Steve says, squinting as he does the math in his head. "Something like that."

"Holly says you've been a good neighbor." She says this with the corner of her mouth turned upwards, her eyebrows raising.

Steve laughs, shaking his head. "She tell you about her winter driving skills?"

"Or lack thereof."

"I'm just glad she didn't get past the neighborhood. Better she spin out at ten miles an hour than forty." Steve hums. The tape stops. "Alright, we are rewound. Settle in, Wheeler."

"Should I prepare to have my mind blown?" Nancy grins, settling into one side of the couch.

"Absolutely," he says. He sets a pillow between them, a barrier of decorum erected. She eyes it, not sure whether to be grateful for it. "Now, this is directed by Rob Reiner, but—"

"So not even Nora Ephron?" Nancy asks, her voice accusatory.

"Screenplay, Nance. Screenplay."

He watches the movie, and watches her watching the movie. The pillow remains between them. Two hours later, Nancy feels her head growing heavier on the back of the couch.

"It's a short trip home, I can walk you—" Steve offers, and Nancy shakes her head.

"Don't wanna wake anyone up," she slurs, eyes heavy. "I'm comfy."

"Are they going to be worried about you?"

"'m not a teenager anymore."

"Doesn't mean they can't be worried," he says, voice warm. "I have a guest room. You don't have to sleep on the couch."

Nancy allows herself to be led, however reluctantly, to a bed upstairs. She spends no time examining her surroundings, merely slumps into the mattress. She hasn't slept well in — well, some time. Maybe the sleep deprivation, borne of staring at the ceiling in search of something that's out to get her, is finally catching up to her. She feels a blanket pulled over her, and she's asleep in no time at all.

-

When Nancy wakes up, she starts to process her surroundings. The walls are a pale green, striped curtains pulled with the sun just barely filtering through their gaps. The bed is small, a twin mattress with neutral bedding. A basket of toys on the other side of the room, a small bookshelf, a closet with a dresser and labeled sizes with sloping letters.

It's a kid's room, she realizes. This makes her shoot up straight in the bed.

Steve and his dreams of six kids and a camper van. Steve and his car full of baseball equipment. Steve and Kirsten or Molly or the names she's lost track of. Eventually one will stick. How did you even fit six kids in a car? Were minivans even big enough? Would you have to get a commercial van just to fit them all in? Maybe this is the point of the camper.

This wakes Nancy up like no alarm can. She's on her feet, padding down the stairs, wondering what time it even is—

"You must have needed the sleep." Steve greets her from the kitchen, coffee in hand. He taps his free hand against the coffee pot. Nancy notices the clock on the stove; it's after noon.

"Fuck," she says, looking for her shoes.

Steve points to the rack in the entryway. "It's Sunday, I think you can be forgiven for a lie-in."

"My mom, I should—"

"Holly showed up here," Steve explains, setting his mug down on the counter. "Said she thought you might be here. I explained it was just a regular old stakeout, you were still asleep in the guest bedroom—"

Nancy exhales. "I guess she figured out I hardly know anyone else in Hawkins these days."

Steve looks down at the floor. "Yeah. Guess so." He scratches his head. "There's coffee, if you—"

"Thank you," Nancy says quickly, awkwardly sidling past him to reach for a mug, then the coffee pot. She feels uncertain of what else to do. She could rush out, come up with an excuse, she still hasn't so much as brushed her teeth and she's still in last night's clothes. But

"The room," she says, looking away from him and into her coffee. She laughs weakly. "Big plans, huh?"

"Oh," Steve shifts, pressing his lips together in thought. "Yeah, that. None that immediate."

Nancy nods. She's silent. It's not a purposeful, prying journalistic silence. She just can't think of what to say.

"Uh," Steve begins, scratching the back of his neck. "Sometimes the kids, the kids I coach, they don't have the greatest of home lives. Sometimes someone just needs a breather, but I'm on a call list for emergency placements. Usually a night or two, and usually you don't know who it'll be until they call. So," he gestures to the door upstairs. "gotta be prepared for everything, I guess."

"Oh," Nancy says softly.

It feels so adult. Here Nancy is, scrambling for a job and living with her parents and arguing with her sister over who is hogging the bathroom the longest. And here is Steve, homeowner and teacher and emergency foster parent. She can still vaguely remember him as an asshole teenager who blew through his dad's money, her as the goody-two-shoes who stayed far from trouble and was certain she'd be settled by twenty-two at the latest.

But it's him, too. Steve Harrington: bad boyfriend and good babysitter.

She thanks him for the coffee, for the bed, for reassuring Holly. And then she leaves, not looking back behind her.

-

Nancy receives one rejection right after the other. She's prepared for interviews, but she doesn't so much as get a scheduling call. The position was already filled, they were looking for something different, thank you for your application. Nancy tries to expand her scope beyond her dreams for East Coast journalism; she applies in Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, even Iowa. But jobs are scarce, everyone is tightening their belts, and Nancy still doesn't have a goddamn degree.

(It wasn't an issue at the time.)

But she did have bylines, and wasn't that worth something? Sure, the bylines were shared, but they had to count for something. She calls her old colleagues, her old bosses, and they reassure her all along similar lines:

"It's not just you, Nancy. The industry is just going through some changes right now. It might be a good time to go back to school and take advantage of the break. Take a minute to breathe."

Nancy is tired of going backwards. She breathes plenty.

Her mother points out there's an opening for a reporter at The Hawkins Post. She's tried not to apply for papers in suburbs and small towns. She doesn't want to spend her life writing about county fairs and football teams. She wants to write about the things that matter, wants to be somebody who matters.

If Nancy could solve this missing person's case, if she was a missing person at all, that could be something. An independent investigation with a byline of one.

So she gets back in the car, and stakes out the ex-boyfriend's place again.

-

It's an uneventful stakeout. Nancy considers her other options. She'd already tried to talk to Maggie's parents, but that was a dead end. Her father didn't take kindly to reporters, and her mother didn't believe her guileless old friend routine. They didn't seem worried, not like Tiffany was. And Tiffany just insisted the same thing, over and over again, that Jared had to have had something to do with it.

But Jared is painfully boring. He goes to work, goes home, and occasionally visits the grocery store or the video rental. Nancy doesn't notice any looks over the shoulder, any suspicious activity, or much of anything. She's been doing this long enough to know what a dead end looks like. She has to find another lead.

Afternoon turns to dusk turns to night. Nothing changes. Nancy sighs, prepared to turn the key in the ignition and go back home, but the streetlights flicker above her. She freezes. Her hair stands on edge, and her hand shakes until her keys rattle. She turns her head, slowly, in the direction of the house. All illumination has disappeared from the street, encasing it in darkness.

Nancy runs. She runs to the front door, slamming her hands against it. She has to warn them, has to—

Jared opens the door, looking confused.

Nancy stands there, panting. "Did you see anything?"

"Not really. It's an outage. Are you with the power company, or something?" Jared says, eyeing her skeptically. He looks up, groaning. "I bet another fucking raccoon got on the power lines."

She realizes her mistake as she looks around. There is no red seam ripping into walls, no growling, no Demogorgon hulking down the street or through walls. The lights only flickered once before going out entirely. He's probably right. It's probably just an animal, or a faulty equipment, or a number of other reasons that have nothing to do with supernatural threats.

"Wrong door," she says, as if this will explain anything. "Sorry, I thought you were—never mind. Have a good night."

Jared closes the door, and Nancy makes her way back to her car.

She can't come back, now, not after her performance. She'd be too suspicious. Her hands shake as she opens the car door, her vision spinning and her breathing speeding up until she rests her head on the steering wheel and closes her eyes. She sees Barb without her eyes, her mother with her throat ripped open, her sister with a tube of vines down her throat.

(Okay, so there may have been other incentives for her to be on the layoff list. She was a great writer, a superb investigator, and prone to panic attacks in the office bathroom whenever the fluorescent bulbs flickered or lightening flashed. Which was stupid — she didn't panic nearly so much when she was in the middle of it all, for her to make such heaving gasps and collapse into herself when the danger has passed makes little sense at all. It's not logical.)

"Fuck," she nearly shouts, slamming her hands against the dashboard. "Fuck, fuck, fuck."

Nancy thought all of this would die with him.

She wonders if this is why she thought so much of Barb when Joyce Byers chopped his head off, one thud for every rise of her axe. Nancy wanted revenge. She got it. Barb's killer was no more. She may have been a neglectful friend, may have failed when it counted, but she got her blood-soaked vengeance. She got Holly out, her mother stitched up, and it should have been enough.

The world could have ended. It didn't.

She shouldn't dream of bones breaking, of red stains, of the world split open once more. She should be able to handle a power outage without having an emotional breakdown. She is Nancy Wheeler. She wasn't the small, weak sixteen year old she used to be. That should all be enough.

-

Nancy takes a job at The Hawkins Post.

As predicted, it's a lot of Back to School lists and relaying the summer hours of businesses whose owners have better places to be. The most exciting thing she writes about are arguments over zoning at city council meetings and developer plans for Hawkins' abundance of cheap land. She doesn't write about murder or corruption or conspiracy; Hawkins hasn't had any of those in a long while. The rats are just rats, the people are just people. The people here (now including two other women!) don't ask her to get coffee or leer at her skirts, and she supposes this is one of the good side effects of the 1990s (or the fact that the worst offenders died years ago).

She's not a junior reporter anymore, and they don't ask about her degree. Bylines at The Boston Globe are at least some currency here, in a town of smaller ambitions, and there's an intern very excited to ask Nancy all about it.

"The article you wrote on the city councilman who took bribes—"

"Co-wrote," Nancy corrects from her desk. This doesn't stop the enthusiasm.

"I used it as an example in my newspaper class," the intern, Heather, continues. "I mean, when I wrote about how I'm pretty sure student council let themselves be bought by Tim's dad—"

Nancy looks up at her wearily. "Student council?"

"City council," Heather says, nodding. "Bribes for councils."

"Right."

Nancy resumes writing about her assignment: a summer block party at the earthquake memorial. There will be funnel cake and a DJ. She wants to bang her head against the keys.

-

Steve shows up at her parents' house. He knocks twice, and Nancy answers the door before the third. His fist is still raised, prepared. He drops it, and looks at her.

"Oh," he says, moving his hands to his pockets. "Hey."

"Hey," Nancy returns, unsure what else to say. "Garbage bins run off again?"

Steve laughs. "I was actually…I was wondering if you think maybe Jonathan and Robin might be open to a visit. I was thinking it's summer, I'm off, you're here…"

"Jonathan and Robin," Nancy repeats.

"Well, I know Robin is down," Steve clarifies. "We talk, like, twice a week. Don't really talk to Jonathan, so I'm not sure if—"

"Neither do I," Nancy clarifies. Steve's eyebrows raise, and she amends, "Well, not since the last time. In Philly."

"Right." Steve nods. "It was probably optimistic to suggest monthly, looking back. Not with four adults spread across three states."

"Probably," Nancy agrees. "But I liked it in theory."

"In theory," Steve repeats, looking thoughtful. "Um. Would that be okay with you? I can reach out to Jonathan, or you can, or if you want I can ask Rob—"

"I can call him," Nancy offers. "Did you tell Robin I was in Hawkins?"

Steve hesitates. "I mean, if that's okay."

"I mean, I am," Nancy says, stating the obvious. "It's not a big deal, I don't know why I'm asking. I think I just didn't think I'd—"

"Be here for that long," Steve finishes. "Yeah. I get that."

A beat of silence passes between them. Nancy, with her arms crossed. Steve, with his eyes fixed on his shoes.

"I subscribed to The Hawkins Post," he says, breaking the silence. "I am sure you will go on to greater pastures, but, for what it's worth, no one can make zoning ordinances as interesting as you can."

"What's your favorite thing about zoning ordinances?" Nancy asks, raising her eyebrows.

"How much they can get people to complain about parking minimums."

"So you did read my article," Nancy retorts, unable to hide her grin. "Getting Steve Harrington interested in zoning is high praise. Can I put that on my resume?"

"Feel free. Tell them you've even got me invested in whatever the hell the new developers are doing with the land around Lover's Lake."

"Good thing you bought your house when you did."

"I'd have to want to sell to care about my property values." Steve shrugs. "But, I guess at least it was affordable on a teacher's salary for a minute there. Can't imagine a big market for people who want to buy luxury condos in Hawkins."

"Lake front," Nancy emphasizes wryly. "I thought you thought everyone should want to live in Hawkins."

"I've amended my statement since. You remember. You can tell Jonathan and Robin all about it."

"Maybe I will," Nancy says, jutting her chin upwards.

He studies her for a moment. Nancy looks away first. She's made a habit of it, over the years.

-

Jonathan and Robin make it into town a week later. Jonathan is agonizing over shot composition for an independent film when Nancy calls him, too distracted to process Nancy saying she's in Hawkins until he's about to hang up the phone. She tries to sound casual, breezy when she talks of layoffs, avoids the landmine of his tone of voice turning sympathetic. She's lucky, she knows, to be the spoiled little rich girl that can run off to her parents to lick her wounds.

Robin, her hair short again, about lifts Nancy off her feet when she sees her again.

"Oh, sorry," she says as Nancy squeaks. "It's just been so long! I know Philly was probably a little ambitious, looking back—"

"Ten hours and tolls," Steve interrupts.

"I flew into Indianapolis for you, champ," Robin says, patting his back. "And not for the first time. New York to Indiana isn't a cheap flight, and I live in a city where I don't even need to learn how to drive."

"I told you, I can teach you—"

"Subway," Robin sing-songs. "I only know a city life now. No one has a car."

They're not on the roof of the radio station, but in Steve's kitchen as he hands bottles over. Nancy takes one from him as her feet become reacquainted with the ground. Jonathan is the last person to arrive, tapping on the screen door before crossing the threshold.

"Byers!" Steve greets. "Good of you to make it in from California, man."

He sounds warm, genuine, and Nancy can see tension leave Jonathan's shoulders. He glances from her, to Steve, to Robin.

"Technically, you're closer to me than Philly now," Jonathan says, clapping his hand on Steve's back. "Nancy, Robin, good to see you both."

"And you," Robin says, lifting her Pabst Blue Ribbon up in a gesture of cheers. "You finish your movie about capitalism yet?"

"All my movies are about capitalism," Jonathan replies with a snort. "How's the station?"

"We are now the second most popular radio show hosted by a gay person with a vocal fry in New York," Robin says, grinning, "which may not sound very significant, but rest assured, in New York—"

"Second for now," Steve interjects. "Eat your heart out, Howard Stern."

"Oh, honey, he's not—"

"Really?"

"You are really bad at this, you know."

Jonathan turns to Nancy. "How's the old Hawkins Post?"

Nancy flushes. She wants to hide behind the bottle in her hand, wants to duck underneath the cabinets, wants to dig herself a comfortable hole. For all of her grand plans and ambitions, here she is: back in Hawkins at the same newspaper she worked at when she was eighteen.

"She just pissed off some local developers," Steve interjects. "Some tools are kicking out the people who live around Lover's Lake to build condos nobody wants to live in. They wrote a real pissy letter to the editor—"

Nancy blinks. "We only published that this morning."

"It made them look way worse," Steve adds. "Seriously, they think they can just waltz in and kick out the people who have been brave enough to stick around through the ups and downs, then price them out of town. That's what you wrote about, right, Nance?"

Jonathan laughs. "See? Everything is about capitalism."

Nancy chuckles, relieved of an explanation she was dreading. Robin is already on a different subject, animatedly gesticulating as she talks about a guest she had on the show and her thoughts on Reagan or Giuliani or some other shitty politician. Jonathan interjects occasionally with a groan or a hum of agreement, and when Nancy looks over at Steve he's already looking at her.

He lifts his bottle. She does the same.

-

They don't plan on monthly, afterwards. They're wiser than that now. Twice a year, maybe. The next time should be around Thanksgiving or Christmas, when Robin is in town visiting her parents and Jonathan can make a pit stop on the way to Montauk. It may have been a mistake to plan on anything but Hawkins; they always made the most sense around each other here.

Steve says something to this effect, referring to the irresistible nature of Indiana's topography ("Steve, where did you learn the word topography?" "The kids are studying their SAT words, Robin, I learn via osmosis") and tipping an imaginary hat. Jonathan leaves first, says something about visiting his brother in New York ("Every single gay person you know lives in New York, don't they?" "I'll be sure to visit you at the station, too") and Nancy counts her blessings that she survives yet another ex-boyfriend interaction unscathed.

That just left this one.

"I'm taking the too-small bed," Robin declares, spread across the couch with her feet in Steve's lap. "It's cozy. The plush giraffe is coming home with me."

"No, it's not."

"I'll send you Polaroids in the mail. Perch him at Central Park, or Times Square, or the World Trade Center," Robin continues, undeterred. She cranes her neck to look at Nancy. "Do you miss big city living?"

"I spent most of my time in Boston hunched over a keyboard," Nancy admits. "In my cubicle, in my apartment…"

She thinks of Emerson, not so much a sprawling campus as it was tall buildings joined together and one narrow, cobblestone pathway. It disquieted her at first. If she were to run, where would she run to? If the building collapsed, what would be left? She paced her dorm room like an animal trapped in an enclosure; is it any wonder that leaving felt like her first deep inhale?

"Boo," Robin replies. "You'll have to come visit me. A real city."

"Boston is a real city," Nancy protests immediately. For all of Emerson's faults, it was right next to the Boston Commons. Afterwards, she lived in Dorchester to be close to the paper, which had everything from a Presidential Library to an actual beach, as much as anywhere on the east coast could have a beach.

"Not like New York," Robin contests. "I lived in Massachusetts, Wheeler. Trust me on that one."

"In Northampton!"

"I went to Boston a couple times!" Robin argues. "And you'll recall I called you, and every time—"

"I had a deadline," Nancy finishes, her voice apologetic. "Yeah, I know."

"You're lucky Nancy Wheeler, girl wonder and workaholic, is just part of the charm," Robin says, her tone light. She sits up to look at her. Steve looks elsewhere.

"Well," Nancy sighs. "Not a lot to workaholic about in Hawkins, I guess."

"When there's a will," Robin says glibly.

Shortly thereafter, Robin gives a little salute before trudging upstairs to go to sleep. Nancy grabs her bag and heads for the front door. In her haste to reach for the doorknob, to throw a goodnight over her shoulder, she accidentally turns the light switch to off. Nancy quickly corrects the mistake, flipping the switch back on, and Steve lets out a,

"Shit!"

Nancy turns around. "Sorry. The switch and the knob—"

Steve straightens himself; he stood straight up in no time at all. "Don't worry about it. I guess I'm still a little twitchy about lights, even after all of these years."

Nancy bites her lip. "Yeah. Me too. A power surge and I get all…" she trails off, shaking her head. "It's ridiculous."

"You ever look up at the ceiling and wonder when it's going to start swallowing you whole?"

She exhales. "All of the fucking time."

"Is it worse at your parents? With all of the…" he gestures, then drops his hand, frowning.

"My shoe boxes don't even have guns anymore," she laughs, shaking her head. "So I wake up from a nightmare and have to go for, I don't know, a kitchen knife?"

"You're welcome to a bat," Steve says, gesturing to the umbrella stand of them. "I have plenty around, these days."

"Was that incentive to coach? Free access to bats?" Nancy asks, and he laughs.

"Yeah. Something like that."

Nancy stares at him for a moment. His brow is furrowed, his mind elsewhere. He always seemed so composed. He'd have to be, to stay here, to walk past these memories every day without flinching so much.

(But he flinched at the lights, just as she did. It's reassuring, in a way, that he isn't exempt.)

"If the Wheeler house ever gets to be a little, y'know, much…" he begins.

Nancy shakes her head. "My little sister was dragged from her childhood bedroom and sleeps there every night. My mom cooks in the kitchen she was almost killed in. I can handle it."

Steve hums in acknowledgement. "Yeah."

"They got used to it," Nancy says with a helpless little shrug. "I can, too."

"I'm sure you can. As I remember, the monsters were scared of Nancy Wheeler. Not the other way around."

"Well, I was the one with a rifle."

"I'm sure you can get another one in Indiana."

Nancy snorts. "Don't think I need one. Might end up putting a bullet hole in a shadow."

"You always had better aim than that. C'mon."

He's grinning, and she matches it. She lingers for a moment, her hand on the doorknob. She should say goodnight, now. This is her cue.

"I think about it all the time," Steve admits, his voice low. "Dream about it. Hard to forget what happened, not the kind of thing you can brush off that easily."

Nancy looks back up at him. "Yeah?" she asks. Her voice cracks. She can't help it.

"In my nightmares," Steve admits, swallowing, "I'm always too late."

"Me too."

She closes the door softly behind her.

-

"I don't think it was Jared."

"Did you search the place?" Tiffany asks, sounding unimpressed with her reporter-not-for-hire, even though she's bought her another burger. And followed dead ends for her for weeks now. "I'm telling you, he's shifty—"

"He's boring," Nancy says. "And yeah, I got into the house for a gas leak inspection." It was not one of her finer moments, but a creative enough idea and costume. She's just lucky he didn't remember her from the power outage when she had the wig on. "There's nothing there. No sign of disturbance, nothing in the basement, nothing."

Tiffany sighs. "Alright. Then who was it?"

"Can you remember anything from before she left? Any arguments she had, any reason she could have had to leave?"

"The only time she got close to leaving Hawkins was for Basic Training, but she dropped out of that real quick—"

"Wait, basic training? She joined the military?"

Tiffany rolls her eyes. "Joined is a big word. Think she thought she'd travel the world, she didn't like the reality of it. That's Maggie. She'll fall in love with an idea way before she'll stick out the reality."

Nancy's brow furrows. She thinks of her own disastrous exchanges with the military, the quarantine zone and its aftermath, Eleven and the way Mike sobbed for weeks after. If Murray hadn't threatened them with a dossier of his own, dangled a leak to the Soviets in their faces, they may have all lived the rest of their lives out in a CIA site. Or more efficiently, with a bullet to their heads written off as another earthquake casualty.

(She'd done the same to some of their men. People. She killed people.)

Nancy blinks. "What branch?"

Tiffany shrugs. "Army? Though it's not like she could serve combat."

Nancy nods, a theory forming in her head.

Nineteen year old Maggie, disappeared after dropping out. There was so much to hide in Hawkins, and the military wasn't always the most adept at hiding it. They did, however, have plenty of experience with tying up loose ends. Even after the Soviet Union dissolved, the U.S. military has plenty of incentive to keep their secrets. Experiments on children, on pregnant women, it's all enough to make MKUltra look like a middle school science project.

There really is no trace of Maggie. Nancy should know, she's been looking for weeks.

-

Nancy drives to Montauk on one of her days off. It takes thirteen hours, but it's less traceable than a flight. This isn't the kind of thing you talk about over a phone line of questionable security. She has yet to visit Hopper and Joyce in their new home; it's not as if she had time before, and she's been far too busy trying to keep her dignity in Hawkins to spread the word of her failures beyond city limits. It was bad enough that Robin and Jonathan knew before she could frame it as a temporary low, one soon to counteracted with being hired back at the Times or the Post or somewhere of equal caliber.

But she's not here for her, she's here for—

"Do you have any idea where Murray might be?" Nancy asks, after Joyce and Hopper do perform the fussing routine they must do with all of the kids. They insist she stays for dinner, make up the extra bedroom, and Nancy can hardly get in a word edgewise after they determine she's not in immediate danger. She takes advantage of a pause in Hopper and Joyce's argument over the proper pronunciation of the Cabernet Sauvignon they pull from the cellar.

Hopper gives her a disbelieving look. "After he threatened to blackmail the military?"

Joyce makes a nonplussed expression.

"Yeah," Nancy clarifies, frowning. "The very one."

Hopper coughs. "He's gotta be so far underground, I don't think even the Globe's finest investigative reporter—"

"About that." Nancy winces.

-

She drives back to Hawkins the next morning with no more information than she started with. Hopper felt like the best lead with Murray, and he dismissed the possibility outright. Hopper himself doesn't have any special intelligence beyond what they already found out six years ago. Maybe it could have been a phone call rather than a twenty-six hour round trip. If the phone lines were tapped, it was not as if any eavesdroppers would learn any new information.

Nancy has a lot of time to think during the drive. She considers her other options, who else would know anything? She's already putting this many miles on her dad's old Carina. What's a few hundred more?

It's this thought that leads to her driving through Indiana, following the signs for Chicago.

Mike always knew plenty. Even if Hopper is tight-lipped, the kid is bound to have some ideas. Dustin might have some madcap scheme, but he's not her brother (and Dustin would be likely to run back to Steve with the accusation that Nancy is prodding the military, which she is not.) Nancy still has his apartment scrawled in her address book. She expects to find him stationed at a typewriter (he resisted Microsoft Word and boxy computers and all the rest, she always gave him hell for it over the phone) with torn off pages surrounding him, working on another novel under his pseudonym.

She doesn't expect to knock on door 1E and for its occupant to inform her that Mike Wheeler has never lived there.

Nancy wonders if she just has the apartment number wrong, if it got lost in translation over the phone line. She frowns as she peruses the names on the mailboxes, looking through the 'W's and only finding White, Whitaker, Web. There is no Wheeler here. She tries his pseudonym, too, just for good measure — nothing.

She finds a payphone outside, and slides her quarters in. He doesn't pick up the first time. He does the second.

"Mike Wheeler, where the hell are you?" she asks, voice accusatory.

"Nancy?" he asks, surprised. "What are you talking about?"

"You aren't in Chicago," Nancy says, huffing.

"What are you talking about," Mike says slowly. He always speaks slower when he's not telling the truth; he's a terrible liar. "Of course I am."

"You little shit, I am—"

"Nance. Nancy. Listen to me, okay," he says, and she can almost see him pacing as he says it. "I'm okay. Alright? Can you believe me when I say that?"

"I just wanted to talk—"

"I'm okay," he emphasizes again. He hangs up the phone before Nancy gets a chance to respond.

She glares at the phone before she slams it back into its receiver.

Another trip wasted.

-

Nancy stops for gas in Chicago before she heads back to Hawkins. She peruses the shelves for something to eat on the way back home. Since she left Montauk, she's been surviving on granola bars and spite. She pauses in front of the phone book between the aisles. She wonders, briefly, if Mike was just being cryptic and really did live in Chicago. She drags it out on the counter, flicking through the pages. Sure enough, Mike Wheeler is listed at the very same phone number, Chicago area code.

Little shit.

She keeps flipping through the pages, idly, until she ends up in the 'F's. She searches for Frank, expecting nothing for this idle perusal, until she lands on Margaret Frank. Nancy frowns. It's a big city. She walks over to the payphone and punches the phone number in.

"Hi, is this Maggie Frank?" Nancy asks.

"Yes," the voice on the other end of the line says. "Who is this?"

"Nancy," she says, "Nancy Wheeler. You didn't happen to live in Hawkins, Indiana until recently," she peeks to when the phone book was last updated. It's August, now, and the phone book was just updated this month.

"Yes," the woman says slowly. "Until like a month and a half ago. Why?"

Nancy would very much like to slam her head against the payphone booth. She resists the urge. Just barely. "Your friend, Tiffany, is really worried about you."

Maggie sighs. "I was going to call her."

"When?" Nancy asks, her voice rising an octave. "She thinks you're missing."

"I'm in Indianapolis! Hardly a different country," is Maggie's response. "I just knew what she'd say, okay? I'm trying to do something else that's bound to fail, I always do shit first and ask questions later, and I wanted to approve I had this handled — it's just a stupid job and a stupid apartment — before she immediately told me I fucked it up, okay? So I'm sorry if I didn't want the immediate interrogation before I had it all," she pauses on the other end of the line, "figured out."

Well.

There's Nancy's missing person.

It won't win her a Pulitzer. It doesn't even merit an update in the advertisements of the Post. There's no grand military cover up, no scorned ex-lover, no tear in reality, no police investigation worth opening. They were right. It really was nothing.

-

"Where were you?" her mother asks, rushing down the stairs before Nancy can so much as take off her shoes. "What the hell, Nancy!"

Nancy blinks. She thought she left a note. "Did you not get my note?"

"What note?" her mother asks, embracing her so tightly she can hardly breathe. "You were gone for two days. No one heard from you, no one could get in touch with you, you were just gone."

Nancy would like to object, would like to explain the note (did it fall behind the stupid table?), but Holly is next to bound down the stairs.

"Nancy!" another addition to the embrace. Nancy pats her little sister's head, only barely shorter than her now, and feels a little guilty.

"I really didn't mean to worry you—"

"Your dad is still looking around the hospital, and Steve—"

Her mother is interrupted by a knock at the door. This dissolves the hug in short order, though her sister pinches at her side in retribution. Karen opens the door, and there's Steve on her porch.

"She gave us a heart attack, but she's okay," Karen says, pinching the bridge of her nose. Steve seems to process this for a moment, doesn't notice her behind her mother. He looks —

Well, with the stubble growing in and the bags under his eyes, he looks more like he did in the Upside Down than she can remember him looking in years. Haggard, tense, and his expression changes the moment he sees her.

"Nancy," he says, an exhale, stepping past her mother to lift Nancy by her midsection. She gasps in surprise, but her arms go around his shoulders like muscle memory. For a brief moment, she's a teenager being swung around by the lockers by her high school boyfriend. It's not real now, it was barely even real then, but his grip is tight and her feet don't touch the ground.

"I thought I left a note," she says weakly.

He sets her down as if remembering himself; it's clumsy, the disentangling. "We were worried sick, Nance. Your sister came over, asked if I'd seen you, then I asked your coworkers, and then I called Hopper and he tells me you showed up asking about the military, and—"

Steve is speaking quickly, a nervous habit he's kept, and Nancy can only put her hand on his shoulder in an attempt at calming him.

"Spent too much time following the wrong lead," she admits, cheeks flushing in embarrassment. "Turns out my missing person just lives in Indianapolis."

Steve sighs in relief. "Well, good. But Jesus. Leave multiple notes, talk to somebody, or take me with you, or…"

'Take me with you' hangs in the air.

"I think I'm back to good old fashioned local journalism for a while," she says, looking at her shoes. "No more wild goose chases."

"Thank God," is her mother's response.

Steve just stares at her for a moment, forehead creased.

'Or just take me with you,' he doesn't say again, but she hears it all the same.

He'd always go along with her most harebrained scheme without much protest. Jonathan would argue with her, would try to talk her down, would try to be the voice of reason. Steve would run in right after her. That's always how it went.

It's a reassuring thought, in a way, but it also burns.

-

Nancy's hopes for the future have undergone multiple iterations.

When she was six, she wanted to be a princess and also a veterinarian. But then she learned about the details of monarchies and swore never to step back inside a vet's office after her cat died, and the dream died. When she was fifteen, she thought maybe being someone's wife and someone's mother and living a comfortable life wouldn't be the worst thing. Especially if it meant being cared for, if it could be different than the bottom of her mother's wine glass or her father's stony silences.

She grows out of that thought, too. Her best friend dies the same night she loses her virginity (it should have been her) and her mother keeps drinking.

Then came the new dream, the solid dream, the smart dream. Nancy was going to succeed, she was going to be sharp enough to get ahead, and if she lived long enough for it she could get vengeance and her name printed under headlines all at once. The truth and the answers existed, all she had to do was turn on the light. She hated suffering invisibly, hated pushing it down, and with writing she didn't have to. Here's what happened. Here are the consequences.

Simple.

Except it's not, and it's never really been. She should have been sated at Emerson, her stomach full at the Globe, but she's always hungry. She took on more projects, stayed up until she slumped at her desk, carried all the weight she could without complaining. She wanted more. She wanted the credit, the desk, the watery thank-yous. She wanted people to think of her as striving, as razor sharp, as always pushing harder and further.

The Old Nancy was dead; she drowned in a pool when she was sixteen. The New Nancy was different, her hair and temper short, and if you touched her you'd risk drawing blood.

(But the Old is still around, sometimes, even if she has to push her head back under the water. The Nancy that wants softness, that wants to rest, that ways to braid her little sister's hair and call her little brother often enough to know where he actually lives, that wants to land somewhere safe and warm after all of this.)

They feel diametrically opposed; two creatures that cannot coexist. The New Nancy has a gun. The Old Nancy weeps over the blood she can't get out from under her fingernails.

Steve doesn't stick around. She doesn't want him to, doesn't want to catalogue the stress she's given him, the way she could make matters even worse.

Nancy apologizes to her dad when he gets home from looking for her, and he's gruff in his acceptance. He never shows great depth of feeling, never has. He woke up from a medically induced coma after being attacked by a monster, his wife's throat nearly torn out, his smallest daughter returned from her kidnapping and his son prone to crying fits, and asked when he could play golf again with his injuries. It's not that he doesn't care. It's just he doesn't seem to know how to show any real feeling.

(Steve is the opposite, perpetual heart on his sleeve, open and raw even when it hurts to look at him.)

Nancy doesn't know why she's still in Hawkins. Employment, sure, but maybe if she scrounged up the last of her savings and the remains of her willpower she could find somewhere, anywhere else to go. She could settle into another small town, uncover a new mystery on sleepy shores in Maine or bodies buried in the Arizona sand. She could get in the car, and she could keep driving.

Instead, she knocks on Steve's door.

He opens it within ten seconds.

"Did you know Mike isn't in Chicago?" Nancy says without preamble, walking through the door he opens. "I went there, and he never even lived there. I called, and he kept saying he was fine before hanging up on me."

Steve exhales. "Sounds like he's fine. Are you sure he's not just at a different address?"

"Positive." Nancy nods. "He's being weird and cagey. Does Dustin know?"

"I think it's been a minute since the kids have seen each other," Steve replies, closing the door behind her. "Last I heard, Mike was doing his own thing. Traveling."

"That's more honest than I got," Nancy says, frowning. "I got Chicago. If he was traveling, why didn't he just say so?"

"If you're about to ask if I'm up for an international voyage, I'll have to ask that you wait for me to get my passport first," Steve says wryly. "But I don't know where he is. So I think you have a lot of searching ahead of you."

"With my luck, he'll be in Indianapolis too," Nancy mutters, slumping into a chair.

Steve doesn't say anything for a moment. He's still standing, hands on his hips. "Bet I could guess with who, though."

Nancy's brow furrows in confusion. She looks up at him. "Is there a girlfriend I don't know about?"

"Do you remember Hopper? After the gate closed for good?" he asks, avoiding her question.

"Hopper?" Nancy repeats. "What does Hopper have to do with this?"

"Do you remember?" he asks again.

"I remember everything," Nancy says, sitting straighter in her seat. "I remember the military held us for hours, asking those stupid questions over and over again. I remember Mike crying, he was never the same after Eleven died, and I just felt like," she sighs, wiping underneath her eyes at the moisture that swells there, "such a failure because I couldn't fix it."

Nancy sniffs, collecting herself and blinking her tears back. "And I remember Hopper…"

She pauses. She tilts her head, drawing a blank.

"Well, he must have been upset. Probably inconsolable. His second daughter, right?"

"He was upset," Steve confirms, sitting across from her. "But he wasn't inconsolable."

He's waiting for her to catch on; she's not used to falling behind like this. This must be the state Hawkins has her in, that or the sleep deprivation and her sham missing person investigation.

"That's…" Nancy pauses. "I mean, he must have had some time to come to terms with it. Some warning."

"He was laughing in the truck when me and Robin flipped him off right beside it," Steve says. "If I knew my daughter was about to die, you think I'd be laughing?"

Nancy shakes her head. "So. So he didn't have warning? Sometimes the grief, the pain is just too much — you just have to keep going, keep doing the next thing, and you can't just stop and feel it. She made her choice. He had to accept it."

"I wouldn't," Steve says, shaking his head. "Not in a million years. If it was someone I loved, I'd drag them kicking and screaming."

"He couldn't," Nancy points out. "The military had him, he—"

"I've seen him take out more guys with worse odds."

"So what? Hopper is a monster? Is that the conclusion here? From me asking about my brother, by the way."

"No, no," Steve clarifies. "That guy wears his heart on his sleeve to a fault. Think about it, Nancy."

She does.

Mike wanted to hope, at first. Eleven had disappeared before. But Nancy couldn't get his hopes up, couldn't scrape him up and let him be heartbroken over and over again until he accepted the truth, the way that things were. They'd seen it happen with their own eyes. It didn't get more black and white than that. Even if he insisted, sobbing into her shoulder, that there had to be a way.

There just wasn't.

But he dreams, nonetheless. The novel he writes has a happy ending. Three waterfalls and a party meeting again in secret, once the empire has fallen and it's safe for them to see one another again.

(She's never cared for fantasy.)

"That's impossible," she says slowly. "Steve, we saw it happen."

"Mike had this theory he told the rest of the kids after graduation," Steve says. "About the kryptonite, about her friend who could make people see things, about the tunnels underneath the Radio Shack. Dustin told me about it, once. I thought it was nice for them to believe it. Better that way."

"Is it?"

"But the more I think about it…" he trails off. "When did Mike move to Chicago?"

"Never, apparently."

"When did he say he moved to Chicago?" Steve amends.

"Two years ago," Nancy answers. "Or a year and a half, I think. It was hectic at the time. Think he already graduated from college, maybe a little early. He can't possibly have been traveling for that long. Didn't he publish his book right before that, too? We saw him at Thanksgiving and I think he moved right after Christmas."

"Two years ago," Steve repeats. "Okay, what happened two years ago? What year was that? '91?"

"Uh…" Nancy frowns, trying to recall the headlines. "'91…the Gulf War? The Soviet Union fell?"

Steve snaps his fingers. "Yeah. Cold War ended."

"So you're saying the Cold War ended, and Will found her?"

"I'm saying the timing, the mysteriousness, it's all…" Steve gestures. "It's a little convenient. I thought you didn't believe in coincidences?"

She doesn't. But she also has a habit of believing her own eyes. "So, what, you think they're hiding in Russia?"

Steve lifts his hands up. "I didn't say Russia."

"That would mean Hopper knew she was alive, too, if your theory holds," she continues. "How would he know that?"

"They had time to talk. We weren't there for all of it, the sky was a little busy falling on us."

Nancy is silent for a minute. She considers it. It'd be pretty to think. That doesn't make it true.

"Mike could just be chasing after something he'll never find," Nancy murmurs, her voice sad.

"Or he already found it."

"Not everything has a happy ending, Steve," Nancy points out, standing back up and feeling a little irritated. "I know you want to believe everything is nice and great for everyone, that things can just work out, but that doesn't mean that they do."

"What, just because I don't immediately go for every worst-case scenario, even if it doesn't make any sense?" Steve challenges, taking a step towards her. "You aren't poking holes in this, not real ones."

"I'm exhausted, I can barely think," Nancy retorts. "Plus I think the longer I stay in Hawkins, the more my brain is dissolving—"

"Why are you still here, then?" Steve asks pointedly. "You said yourself, there's nothing keeping you here."

"I lost my job and had to stay with my parents. I am literally a college dropout with limited job prospects. That's what Hawkins has to offer me. There's my dignity for you, happy?"

"That's bullshit and you know it, Nancy," he says, shaking his head. "If you wanted to, you'd just keep driving. I was half-convinced that's what you did today. You'd figure it out if you wanted to get out, you always do."

"So what, I'm stuck here because I don't want to leave badly enough? Is this your infinite wisdom?"

"If you wanted to, you would," Steve says. "You'd go back to Emerson or some other school, you'd work for some other small to medium size paper that you could see yourself sinking to, but you're here. And you're miserable here, and I don't know why you stick around if—"

"I don't know why, either!" she nearly shouts at him. "But you're lecturing me about what I could be doing, should be doing, when you're not doing the things you want to do, either!"

"I'm doing exactly what I want, Nancy. I'm sorry if this dream isn't big enough for your standards, but I—"

"No, you're not. You told me your dream, remember? This isn't it. What happened to six kids and family vacations? Shouldn't you have started by now?"

Steve looks down instead of at her. "It's never felt right."

"So Chloe or Samantha or Sophia—"

"It's just never felt right," he emphasizes again, louder than the first time.

Nancy realizes now how close they are to each other. He hovers over her, his arms nearly brushing against hers. She fixes her gaze up at him, unwavering.

"I guess we're both stuck," she says.

When he exhales, she can feel it on her cheeks. "You don't have to be."

"Neither do you."

The next thing she knows, Nancy's fingers are clutching his collar and her mouth is on his. He freezes, just for a second, in surprise before kissing her back. It's been so long since they've kissed, she's not sure she can even remember the feeling. Is this how his lips felt a decade ago, firm and prying all at once? Is this how his hands felt on her waist, clutching her closer and closer? Did she back him up against the wall, tug at his hair, feel his hands come up to cradle her face.

Did she run away afterwards?

(She knows the answer to this one.)

-

Nancy bolts. Sue her, she's gotten good at it over the years.

She doesn't know what to do about Steve. She barely knows what to do with herself. She's running on fumes; in the same day she discovered her brother was lying to her and her missing person was perfectly fine, she kissed Steve Harrington for the first time in almost a decade. It's a stupid decision, and she's been full of them as of late.

She takes the stairs up two at a time, unsure if she wants to shower and collapse or rip Mike's room apart to search for clues. She settles for the latter; she's always felt better when she could meet anxiety with action. It's been mostly untouched since her brother left it, despite their mother's threats to turn it into a step aerobics studio, and his old typewriter remains on his desk. He's gotten a better one, probably better ones, since, but it makes her a little nostalgic to look at the wear on the keys. She looks up at the mirror, at the photos of round-cheeked kids turned gaggly teenagers pinned next to it.

Nancy's eyes fix themselves on a postcard. It looks like Scotland, or New Zealand, or somewhere similarly scenic. She's never traveled out of the country. She doesn't really know. But there are waterfalls, a scenic blue sky and cliffs in the foreground.

Nancy picks up the postcard, turns it over. It's dated November 10th, 1989.

The day after the Berlin Wall fell.

-

There are two doors in front of her. The rest is blackness.

The doors look the same from the outside. They're both standard, wood grain with silver knobs. They host no letters or numbers, no differentiation between the two.

Nancy grabs the first doorknob, and turns it.

There's a baby on her lap. She's sore, she feels sticky, and overstimulated by touch and sight and noise. When she turns, a toddler. They wail, and more wailing follows. Nancy sets the baby down. She doesn't know if she sets it down in the right place, if she's doing the right thing, and it feels like she never knows. She's wearing an apron; she takes it off. More kids come, one almost tripping over it.

"Honey, I'm home," a voice calls, and this at least is familiar if nothing else is.

Nancy almost runs to follow it. "Steve, I—"

He kisses one of her cheeks, then the other, grinning widely. "How was your day? How are the kids?"

"I can't do this," she says, and his face falls. "I never wanted this."

She opens the door he came in through. He's reaching for her, and she doesn't look back when she walks through the threshold.

Steve looks exhausted when she sees him again, she can see it in the way the line of his body sags. He's bouncing a baby in his arms, holding a phone between his ear and shoulder. He's facing away from her, but she knows it's him all the same.

"It's been two days, Robin. I haven't heard from her. You know the shitty thing? This isn't even the first time, the first assignment, the first—" he sees her, and sighs. "She's here. Robin, let me call you back."

"Steve, I'm sorry."

"It's been two days," he says, again. "I'm your husband, Nance. This is your kid. I'd think you were dead or kidnapped or — something — if this isn't exactly the kind of shit you've pulled before."

"You knew who I was when you married me," she defends herself immediately, automatically. "This isn't some mystery. You wanted the girl you couldn't have in high school, the one that left you in high school, and you want to act surprised when she keeps leaving?"

She doesn't want to see the look on his face. So she doesn't. She finds another door and goes through it.

Nancy wakes up crying.

-

If this was then, and not now, she'd wonder if she could ascribe this to something supernatural. Vecna and his mind games, the Upside Down and its torment. If someone can just start playing her favorite song, maybe she can run out of it. But she's awake, wiping her tears away in her childhood bed, and there's nowhere left to run to.

The fact is this: he wants to live in Hawkins, have kids, and settle down. She wants to get out, owe nothing to anyone, and keep climbing.

She thinks.

It's a dead end. She's run into a lot of those, lately. The forks in the roads diverge so much, it'll never make sense for them to meet again. One of them will end up miserable. How long would they have before she's crying 'bullshit' into her wine glass like her mother, or leaving out the front door like her father? She guesses she'd take after her father more in this instance. She'd probably cut her losses and get out for good, at least he came back every night.

Nancy is twenty-six, and she still doesn't know what she wants. She still can't stop moving for long enough to figure it out.

In the days after, Steve doesn't knock, doesn't call, doesn't push it.

He deserves better than being so goddamn patient. She's not worth waiting around for.

-

Nancy digs more into the town's next real estate developers. She pulls up old campaign finance reports, searching for the names of the companies and their LLCs with a highlighter. She doesn't find anything spectacular, nothing groundbreaking, even if Heather is eager to be tasked with digging through paperwork.

"I feel like I'm in a movie," she says, fingers stained yellow, and Nancy almost laughs.

"I don't think this will win any awards," Nancy mutters. "So don't get your hopes up."

Sure, the developers donate to the re-election funds of the city council members. And sure enough, those city council members vote pretty much in lockstep with their biggest donors. This isn't a story; it's just how the world works. Heather looks disappointed when Nancy says this. It's a feeling she probably will have to get used to.

(Even if part of her twinges at the image, the teenage girl in the pastel skirt frowning at the stack of papers in front of her.)

She pulls police reports next. It's never anything particularly newsworthy: break-ins, domestic disputes, drugs. She's not expecting much on this front. This isn't the Globe's crime desk. But her eyes blur, and soon enough she notices a pattern.

Drug dealing reported in nearly every address of the old houses, just outside the mobile homes near Lovers' Lake. Nancy remembers the neighborhood, both the real one and its Upside Down counterpart. The homes were humble, a little small. They weren't grand, but they were the most affordable houses Hawkins had to offer. The Byers lived near there, once.

She takes out an old city map, cross-referencing the addresses. She takes a marker, and follows along by numbering the houses one at a time, dates of the same distributions of a controlled substances, again and again. By the time she's done, she's nearly carved out a whole block. All in the span of a week.

Nancy has her share of privileges. She knows this, learned the extent of it with the flush of embarrassment her first internship at the very same newspaper. Her parents live in a nice neighborhood, and the second she worried about bills she could move right back in with them. But she's not stupid.

There's no way in hell that every house on a block would be involved in drug distribution. She checks the property records, and they were all bought at varying times. Some owners have had their houses since the 30s, others are multi-family rentals, and they all are far from being owned or lived in by the same people. When Nancy calls the assessor, rattling off the addresses, she learns that all of them have been declared condemned.

"How is that possible?" she asks. "That's an entire block. Was there a severe weather event? This is all well after 86, right?"

The person on the phone from the county assessor's office hums. "Says here illicit substances were produced."

"By," Nancy examines the paperwork in front of her, "an eighty year old widow?"

"That's just what it says, ma'am."

"What will happen now that the properties are condemned?" Nancy asks, moving on to her next question.

"Well, they'll probably be demolished and the land sold."

-

The Indianapolis Star picks the story up from the Post. It's not the Boston Globe, sure, but it's something. Police corruption and bribes, malfeasance kicking people out of their homes to make a quick buck for greedy opportunists, it has a lot of the details that are prime for an expose of a sleepy community best known for its murders and natural disasters a month ago.

'Cursed Indiana Town, Once Again in the News,' one tabloid headline reads. It's a mention. There's no such thing as bad publicity. Her old co-workers call her back with something other than pity in their voices. It feels like a start.

There are flowers for her on the table, likely brought in by her mother. "Star reporter wherever you are," it says, unsigned. The 'A' in star has been replaced by the symbol itself. She smiles, shaking her head.

Other opportunities start coming up again. Heather is thrilled to have this, of all stories, attached to her senior project. Other regional papers call her for interviews, even the Chicago Tribune calls her. A journalist she's looked up to since high school reaches out, mentions she's in Kentucky, and Nancy makes plans to meet her for coffee.

-

Mary Elizabeth Port is a no-nonsense woman in her mid-fifties. She wears thick-rimmed glasses, is usually seen in caftans of varying patterns, and speaks with an accent somewhere in-between Mid-Atlantic and Southern. They meet at a patio in Cincinnati. Mary Elizabeth calls this easiest for both of them. Nancy has been enraptured by her for as long as she can remember being interested in journalism.

She helped break Watergate, had her phone lines tapped for years in the aftermath, and has an unrelated Pulitzer Prize for her work with the New York Times. She was offered her own columns, regularly, which she rejected in favor of doing whatever the hell she wanted.

"They would tell me what I could and couldn't print," Mary Elizabeth tells her, cigarette dangling from her fingertips. "I told them to go to hell if that was the offer."

"So that's how you ended up at the Lexington Herald?" Nancy asks, unable to keep herself from prying.

"That's how I ended up Editor in Chief at the Lexington Herald," Mary Elizabeth corrects her patiently. "The same newspaper I grew up working for. And that's how the Lexington Herald got two Pulitzers, once just last year, afterwards. More than any other paper our size with our resources. And that," Mary Elizabeth emphasizes, finger pointing toward the table, "is the power of doing whatever the hell you want. You were at the Globe, right, Wheeler?"

"Was," Nancy emphasizes, chagrined. "Uh, laid off."

"And now you're free," Mary Elizabeth says, hands risen on either side of her. "You're sharp. You're hungry. Your editor give you a hard time over the story?"

Nancy shakes her head. "There's been some, um, turnover at the Hawkins Post."

"Which means you can plow right through," Mary Elizabeth suggests. "There are a million hungry reporters just like you under the big mastheads. Not that many under the smaller ones. Doubt anyone there cares as much as you do about breaking a story that isn't a marching band competition. That's fertile soil, if you ask me."

Nancy's mouth falls agape, unsure of what to say. Whatever she was expecting her to say, this wasn't it.

"I have seen a lot of smart girls who go work for the Globe, or the Times, or the Post," Mary Elizabeth says wryly, putting out her cigarette. "Half the time they end up writing just like everyone else there, playing by the same rules. Some of the break through, but a lot of them fizzle out. You're smart, Wheeler." She taps her fingers against the table. "Don't fizzle."

Nancy smiles.

"Oh, you look so much like my daughter," Mary Elizabeth says, meeting Nancy's grin with a fond one of her own. "I keep telling her to grow her hair out, but you might convince me it's not so bad."

Nancy's mouth opens in surprise. "You have a daughter?"

"Three, to be precise." Mary Elizabeth chuckles. "Triplets, born in '71. Imagine wondering if you were having your goddamn phone tapped with three infants. My husband joked whoever was listening in might cut the damn line themselves if they heard the chaos in the house."

"Triplets," Nancy repeats. "Husband. Watergate?"

"Another piece of advice for you, Wheeler, and it's the same as I give all my girls," she says, brushing her hair out of her face. "Never marry a man that wants you to be smaller. My husband was the best decision I ever made because I think he's the only person crazy enough to keep telling me yes."

Nancy still must look confused, because Mary Elizabeth's eyes narrow.

"What's the issue, Wheeler?"

"I guess," Nancy begins, cocking her head to the side. "I never thought I could…you know, do both."

Mary Elizabeth has the gall to laugh at her.

"It's the 90s. You can do whatever the hell you want, Nancy Wheeler." She keeps laughing, even as Nancy's face turns beet red. "In fact, I think it's better to have people to go home to. Have a life outside of this. Men get it all the damn time. Why the hell shouldn't we?"

-

Nancy drives back from Cincinnati with a lot on her mind.

She'd always thought of herself as two warring parts trying to make a whole; if one were to succeed, it would mean subsuming the other. The girl with the gun, the girl with soft hands. She needed to be harder, calloused to survive in this world. She needed to be smarter, faster, tougher. Otherwise the world would open up and swallow her whole.

She tried being both. When she was seventeen and tried pretending she could be the girl she was before, and cracked in a bathroom at a Halloween party and broke Steve right along with her. The past decade, she's tried being the other girl: the good shot, the tough decision, the first one in the line of fire. She had to pick. That was just the way things were.

That's why Jonathan threw out her pink sweater, why her skirts were ruined with bloodstains, why she was punished for being the silly, oblivious teenage girl who let her clothes be taken off while her friend was being murdered.

(It still felt like punishment.)

Nancy thinks of her mother. Her mother, drinking out of a perpetually refilling wine glass. Her mother, gushing blood on the kitchen floor. Her mother, hobbling out of her hospital bed to build a makeshift bomb in the basement to save the kids. Nancy wasn't there, but she heard enough about it after. Karen's speech therapist gave her hell about straining herself for weeks. Karen just looked over at Nancy while Nancy tried not to look at her scars, and said with a knowing smile that it was all worth it.

There are worse things than being her mother. Like being her father, for one — distant and absent.

Nothing has ever felt right. She wanted the Globe to feel right, wanted Emerson to feel right, wanted and wanted and wanted. Parts of it did, parts of it didn't, but at the end of the night she just felt alone and empty and scared all over again.

"It's the 90s. You can do whatever the hell you want, Nancy Wheeler."

What does she want?

Nancy considers this the rest of the drive home.

-

She knocks just twice.

"I'm sorry. For a lot, but I'll start with the last time. I shouldn't have run, I shouldn't have left you hanging, and I definitely shouldn't have just been totally silent the past two weeks." Nancy starts talking immediately. She's a little afraid she'll lose her nerve otherwise.

Steve blinks, mouth briefly open, and widens the door for Nancy to walk through it.

"Nance, really, it's—"

"It's not okay," Nancy corrects him before he can even say the words. "Really. I just. I'm not trying to hurt you, but in the process that's exactly what I do, and it's not fine and it's not fair."

Steve runs a hand through his hair. "You don't have to beat yourself up over it. I know you think the kiss was a mistake, a heat of the moment kinda thing, and it's — I've come to terms with it, alright? You want something different out of your life."

Nancy shakes her head. "That's not what I was going to say."

Steve exhales. He's braced himself, she notices, only expecting the worst from her. It makes her gut twist. "You don't have to say anything. You probably have offers lined up after your article. It was great, Nancy, it really was. You deserve it all, and I know you don't want to stick around Hawkins—"

"I didn't know what I wanted," Nancy protests. "That's the thing, Steve. I really…really didn't know. That's why every decision felt wrong: college, job, location, all of it."

Steve presses his lips together. "I hope you get what you want, Nancy. I really do. You deserve," he lifts a hand, sweeping it across the air, "anything you want."

Nancy swallows. She steps forward, closer to him, and tilts her head up. "What if there's one thing I want that I'm pretty sure I don't deserve?"

"That's bullshit. You deserve everything."

She steps closer again, her hands finding the side of his arms. He's staring at her, and she's staring right back. "Not this," she says. "Not you."

Steve closes his eyes. He shakes his head until she stops the motion with both of her hands coming up to cup his face.

"I used to think," she says, throat bobbing as she finds her nerve. "Well, it's a long story."

He opens his eyes again. "I've got time," he says, voice soft.

"I used to think that I could be one of two Nancy Wheelers," she says, thumbs sweeping against his cheeks. "I could be just like who I thought my mother was. Agreeable, a mother, a housewife, you know, that whole thing. Or I could be something, someone different. Tougher, stronger, harder to hurt. I could just mold myself into whoever I needed to be to fight."

"I don't think I'd describe Karen Wheeler as agreeable," Steve says.

Nancy laughs, a little brittle. "I think I got some things wrong. A lot wrong, actually. That's why nothing ever felt right."

"The Globe?" he asks, hands coming up to her arms. Hers remain on his face.

She shakes her head. "Not even the Globe. Think at some point my boss recommended benzos. Guess that's what happens when you live at your desk and refuse to have a life outside of it. And so much of it didn't even feel like mine."

"So what does feel right to you, Nancy Wheeler?"

Nancy inhales, steadying herself. "The Hawkins Post. Doing whatever the hell I want there, looking into things no one else bothers to. Coming home in time for dinner. No more than four kids, I don't even know where you'd put two more. Keeping my last name, I'm not changing my byline. Maybe we can hyphenate the kids' names, go Harrington-Wheeler or Wheeler-Harrington — maybe the first one, that's more alphabetical, flows better…"

"Nancy."

"And you, Steve Harrington," Nancy finishes, and he brings his head down to rest his forehead against hers. "You're there. You're always there."

He kisses her, then. They're both crying, so it's a bit of a mess and they both taste like salt, but it works. They break apart, his forehead still pressed to hers, his fingers sweeping her hair behind her ear. She doesn't look for a hole in the ceiling, a crack underneath their feet. She doesn't feel the urge to find the door, to escape, to walk through it.

She's exactly where she wants to be.

2003.

"How the hell did you get the Winnebago to Keflavík?"

"It's a rental. You try finding a better way to get eight people from one side of Iceland to the other, Henderson."

"Eight? Did you have two more kids I don't know about?"

"Yes, their names are Robin and Vickie," Steve says dryly, carrying luggage past the threshold of the cottage. "They are in their thirties, such is the miracle of parenthood."

It's already crowded, but this was inevitable. There was only so much room in an Icelandic cottage made for two, but Christmas was Christmas. Joyce and Hopper are trying in vain to get the fireplace up and going — coached with limited success by Will and his partner, Matt. They keep getting distracted by their kids, who in turn are distracted by Lucas and Max's kids, and El and Mike seem quite content to remain in the kitchen.

"Did we ever talk about sleeping arrangements?" Dustin asks, looking around the space. There's not much of it, not for the amount of people it now has to host. "Last year I think we did rentals, right?"

"And you mock the Winnebago," Steve says, snorting. "I think a few extra cabins got rented within the mile. You'll have to ask someone nicely."

"Ask who nicely?" Nancy says.

"If Henderson asks if there's room in the Winnebago…"

"Absolutely not," Nancy finishes immediately, then shoots Dustin an apologetic look. "Do you really want to bunk with seven girls?"

"I think Robin is the loudest," Steve adds. "So do with that what you will."

"Which one?" Dustin asks.

"The senior, Rory is an angel," Steve says, shaking his head. He presses a kiss to Nancy's head. "As are all of our girls."

"They're getting smarter," Nancy points out, eyes narrowing. "You know, Caroline asked Abby why we had to go to Iceland again instead of Mike and El just coming to Hawkins, and you know what she said?"

"That's your fault," Steve says. "They get their brains from you, Wheeler."

"What?" Dustin asks, curious.

"It's because the United States has a corrupt military," Nancy recaps, biting back her laugh. "I don't think she even got that from me."

"She's got that right," Jonathan adds, sidling past them with a backpack slung over his shoulder. "Should tell her about the Iraq invasion."

"No need," Steve says. "She reads her mom's newspaper, every single day. As much as an eight year old can, anyway. She must have gotten that line from Robin, though."

"I'll loan her my copy of Manufacturing Consent," Jonathan offers, and Nancy only shakes her head.

"Maybe Rory will like softball, or volleyball, or something," Steve says, shaking his head. "We still have time. She's six."

"Or maybe," Robin says, her much smaller namesake on her shoulders. "She'll grow up to be a DJ. It's what every parent wants for their child, right Harrington-Wheelers?"

"Or," Dustin adds, leaning over to Caroline, who is still holding Vickie's hand. "We can get them into D&D."

"They could just do drugs, instead," Steve says. Nancy elbows him. "Nothing hard."

"There's four of them, Harrington. It's a great size for a party!"

"Mike tried to teach me and David," Jo Harrington-Wheeler, the eldest, says, gesturing to Will's eldest son in the next room. "Remember? Last Christmas?"

"Think the rest of the kids need to be older," Dustin says, nodding. He cups his hand, shouting across the room. "Lucas! How old were we when we did our first campaign?"

"Eight!" he calls back from across the room.

"Okay," Dustin says, doing the math. "So we could get Caroline in there, too. How old is Max and Lucas's eldest, again?"

Steve raises his hands. "I have enough to keep track of at home, man. Six?"

"Seven," Robin corrects. "You were sick during that birthday party."

"It was flu season, pretty sure the whole house was sick," Nancy says. "We weren't making it to Arizona. Four kids and a teacher in the house, pretty sure it generated a superbug."

"Ah, the joys of parenthood," Dustin says, humming. He turns to Robin and Vickie. "Does all of this," he gestures to the house, the chaos, "make you yearn for it?"

"Nope," Robin says, popping the 'p'. She presses a kiss to her namesake's head, letting her off her shoulders, and gives Caroline an apologetic look. "I have a cool aunt aura. I can't mess that up."

"It's not so bad," El says. Steve nearly jumps at how quickly she appears beside them. "The kids. It's nice to see them every year, it's good of you all to make it out."

"And you are a saint for hosting us," Nancy adds. "Seriously. Glad we started doing this."

"What better way to start off the start of a new millennium," Max adds, beer in hand. "Think Ed was six months the first time."

"Fun age," Steve adds. He turns to Nancy. "Glad we don't have to do that again?"

Nancy makes a snipping notion with her fingers.

Dustin laughs, turning to Steve. "Oh, I see you made an appointment with Dr. Dong."

El and Max raise their eyebrows. Robin cackles.

"Okay," Steve interjects. "It is very important for you to know that is the very real name of a very real urologist—"

"It's kinda like how bakers had the last name Baker back in the day," Robin says, snorting. "Or like, Smith for blacksmiths."

"And he was very qualified, the vasectomy was over in a second—"

"Did you tell the kids at school about it?" Max asks, grinning.

"Yes, because I believe in transparency and this is just another part of health and family planning—"

El turns to Nancy as the conversation continues. "Sometimes," she admits, tilting her head. Her hair is long, now, longer than Nancy can every remember it being before even half held up by a clip. "I wish it was possible."

"What?" Nancy asks, raising her eyebrows. "A vasectomy? I'm sure you can find a doctor in Iceland."

"The opposite," El admits, tilting her head. Her voice is low. "My blood is…well, it's just not in the cards for me. To pass that on."

"Oh," Nancy says softly. Her eyes go to her eldest daughter. Jo has taken over the fire starting, successfully, leaving Joyce and Hopper chagrined to be upstaged by a thirteen year old. "You know," she says, gesturing to Jo, "there are other options. If you wanted."

(Steve kept his name on that emergency list. When they were ready to try, Nancy kept waking up in blood — a horror over and over again. Crouched on the bathroom floor, sobbing and saying that she failed, she couldn't keep a baby or a promise. Steve hunched over her, saying it didn't matter over and over again into her scalp. "I just need you, baby. It's okay. It's okay."

And Jo, scared of monsters that lived in places other than under the bed, other than the Upside Down, and two parents used to fighting them.)

El swallows. "You don't think that's…selfish?"

Nancy shakes her head. "Not at all. Trust me, you have kids and it's like," Nancy shrugs, "the world gets a little bigger, little deeper. Whether they come from your body or not. You know," she says, pointing to Hopper. "You've been on the other side of it."

El seems to consider this for a moment. She looks at the kids that fill the small space. The sound echoes off the walls. It could drive you a little crazy if you weren't already used to it.

"It's up to you," Nancy says quickly. "It's not for everyone. It's a little terrifying, having a piece of you live outside of yourself. But it's also," Nancy presses her lips together, "you can want multiple things at once, you know?"

"What if they go after them? They figure it out?" El asks. "The military probably cares a lot less about their failed Cold War experiments now, but what if that changes?"

"You do what you always do. You protect the people you love," Nancy answers. "We've gotten good at that over the years. And you have us, too," she says, bumping shoulders with the woman now taller than her. "You'd be great at it, if you wanted to. The girls love their Aunt Jane. You're allowed to want things. We can figure it out."

"Yeah?"

Nancy nods. "Yeah."

The conversation moves along, the kids playing in the living room while the adults mostly slink off into the kitchen. Hopper opens what he simply refers to as a 'cab' while Lucas and Dustin debate the merits of Icelandic hot dogs. Will and Vickie talk about how New York has changed, and Jonathan and Robin get into a long discussion about the radio and the Dixie Chicks. Nancy looks at Mike. He looks happy. Content.

Mike meets her eyes and points to a framed newspaper on the wall.

Steve notices first, and grins widely.

"The 2003 Pulitzer Prize winning journalism that led to an overhaul in the child welfare system,'' he says, tapping Nancy's shoulder from behind her. "Written by none other than…"

"Nancy Wheeler at the Hawkins Post," Mike finishes, beaming. Their voices lead the rest of the room to raise their glasses, and Nancy nearly hides behind her hands in embarrassment. Nearly, because Steve pries her hands off of her face and chuckles in her ear.

"I'm off work," she says. "I'm on vacation and fully out of work mode."

"You're not getting off that easy, champ."

Nancy acquiesces, flushed and blushing, as glasses clink around them.

Later, once the kids are asleep and the adults are getting tired, Steve asks her:

"Is this what you wanted?"

She looks around. Everyone looks warm, either from the drink or the fire, and contented. Mike is resting his head on El's shoulder. The space is too small for all of them, staggered on the furniture or on the floor, but they make do. The kids — all eight of them collectively — insist that the Winnebago is perfect for a sleepover. She's not afraid of a hole opening beneath them, doesn't feel the need for a trigger finger. Steve's arms are wrapped around her midsection, the two of them sitting on the floor. Everyone is happy.

She's happy.

"Yeah," she says, looking up at him. "It is."