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From inside her tiny Boston apartment, Nancy can hear the voice calling to her as clear as if they were sitting next to each other.
“Nancy! Come on, Nance!” A voice she recognizes. Steve’s voice.Why’s he calling her? Why’s he outside her door?
She opens her apartment door and steps out into the backyard of Steve’s parents’ house. The teal water of the pool is softly illuminated. The night is quiet. Steve is smiling up at her from the pool, still in his jeans and sweater, looking like he did at 17.
He splashes water up at her. “Come on, Nance!”
She looks around. It’s so quiet. Someone else should be here-
He laughs and swims away, and now her shoe is in his hand. “Come back in!” He calls.
Nancy laughs a little and crouches at the edge of the pool, reaching out her hand for the shoe. Steve gives a soft smile and swims back, holding out his hand to her. Their fingers almost brush.
Something pulls him under. The water is dark now, black, and she can’t see through it. “Steve!”
He resurfaces in the middle of the pool, out of her reach. There’s something coiled around his neck. “Nancy!” He reaches out a hand for her, eyes wide and terrified. Then he’s pulled back under, into water so dark it looks like tar.
Nancy touches the water and the world tips over and she’s falling forward through open space.
She’s in the hallway outside her apartment. It’s dark.
“Nancy!” Steve’s voice echoes through the hallway and she’s running toward it. The hallway is long and there’s no elevators and no stairwells. She turns a sharp corner and another and another and more hallway stretches before her. Her name echoes again and again.
Then Steve’s in front of her, 20 yards away, shadows too deep to see through behind him. He’s on his knees, his hands bound behind his back. His hair is longer now, like it was in ‘87. It’s damp, but now with blood, not pool water. One eye is swollen shut, purple, black and red like a rotted fruit. His nose is broken; green and purple bruises mottle his cheeks and jawline. Blood drips from his mouth in a thick line. He’s swaying slightly, like he might fall over, his head drooping, his breathing heavy and ragged.
Steve lifts his head with an effort, meeting her gaze with his good eye. Tears are streaming down his face. “Please, Nancy. You have to help me.”
Nancy doesn’t move. She can’t move. She can’t speak.
“Nancy, help me!”
Something unseen hits him from behind, slamming him forward so he’s prostrate on the ground now. Steve screams. Nancy didn’t see any claws, but now there are wide slashes in the back of his sweater. A dark stain of blood seeps through the fabric.
“Nancy, no! Don’t leave me!”
She still can’t move. It’s like she’s not even really there anymore. She’s just an observer.
“Nance, please…” Almost a whimper that time. Claws rake his back again.
Nancy’s feet move of their own accord, backing away, leaving him there.
The clawed-something in the dark reaches out and grabs Steve’s ankle, and he vanishes into the dark. Nancy’s turning now, walking away, Steve’s screams echoing behind her.
*****
Nancy startles awake. The sheets are twisted around her legs; her nightshirt is soaked in sweat; she’s shaking and breathing hard.
It’s January, 1991. She’s not in her apartment in Boston. She’s in a motel in Buffalo. There for a conference. It’s not quite 4 AM.
At 23 she’s a pro at nightmares, having dealt with them regularly for the better part of a decade. They’re a little worse when she travels. She fights her way out of bed and goes to see if she can scrounge together a makeshift cup of tea from cheap motel room resources. It’s easier to shake nightmares at home in her own kitchen with her own mugs and her own blankets, but she manages.
There are some repeated nightmares. Reruns of her favorite traumas and worst imaginings, worn familiar in their horrors. This one was new. It’s vivid. It clings to her like a damp mist. It doesn’t fade as she wakes up–the afterimages hang in her mind. The bruises. The blood. The screams. Sitting in the dark cold little motel, they grow more real, not less, taking on the feel of a premonition.
She gives up any idea of going back to bed. The shadow of the dream hangs too thick. Instead she sits by the window, cradling a tepid attempt at tea in a paper cup and stares out at a view of the still-dark parking lot.
What Vecna showed her in the spring of ‘86 was an illusion meant to scare her, not a vision of the future. If parts of it came halfway true, it was because he worked with all his shrunken evil heart to make them come true and still came up short. Nancy believes in a lot of things, but she doesn’t believe in visions of the future. She reminds herself of this.
The cries of the dream ring her ears. Please, Nancy. You have to help me. It’s strange that it should seem so real: she’s never heard Steve plead like that. Doesn’t think he ever has. (Or maybe, once, she heard his voice sound close to that small, that desperate, in a wisp of memory mostly drowned in alcohol that she pretends isn’t there at all. But that’s different.)
(She has heard him scream like that. That memory needs no sharpening.)
She doesn’t believe in premonitions, but the sunrise, when it comes, doesn’t burn away the nightmare like it usually does. The nightmare still sits in her bones, like the ache of an old injury before a storm.
*****
Sixteen hours later she breaks down and calls him. She admonishes herself as she pushes each well-rote digit of his number. This is silly. Childish stuff. Embarrassing. Worse–it’s awkward. Asking for humiliation.
She would almost pray he doesn’t pick up, except that she knows if he doesn’t it will only spark new visions of his dead body in her mind.
It rings once. She bites her nail. Twice. Three times.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Steve.”
There’s a pause. Of course he’s surprised. It’s not that they never talk on the phone, but it’s been… two months? Not since before Christmas. When she spent an entire week in Hawkins avoiding him. And 10 at night on a Monday seems an odd time to break that streak of silence. “Nancy. Hey.” And of course he recognizes her voice instantly.
Nancy chokes on whatever she’d planned to say. She spent all day trying to talk herself out of making this call, tried out a hundred different starters, and never came up with a good way to say ‘hey, how’s it going–you didn’t get eaten by a monster today did you? And do you think there’s a chance it might happen in the near future? Just checking.’
“Nance? You there?”
“Yeah. Yeah I was just wondering how you are. Everything okay?”
“Um. Yeah. Everything’s good. Any reason it shouldn’t be?”
“No. Just… wondering.”
She listens to him thinking through the static on the line. “Everything good with you?” There’s concern and confusion in his voice. Why wouldn’t there be? This was the kind of phone call a crazy person would make.
“It’s good. Work’s good.”
In spite of it all they’re usually good at falling into conversation. But she can’t think past the stone in her gut. And Steve’s not picking up the slack. Maybe it’s the lingering sting of Christmas. Maybe it’s that he can feel the tension in her voice.
Nancy takes a leap. “Do you get nightmares?”
He clears his throat. She can imagine him shifting his weight, playing with the phone cord. Trying to figure out what the hell she’s talking about. But he follows her lead, if a little reluctantly. “Don’t we all? I mean, I think we’ve all got more than our share of fuel.”
“Recently?”
Another pause. “Nancy, did something happen?”
“No. No, just…” She picks at the sleeve of her sweater. He waits on the other end. “I just had one last night that I can’t shake.”
He makes a little noise to show that he’s listening. Another beat of consideration. “Yeah, recently. Maybe once or twice a week.”
That’s a lot. More than her. She’s a little surprised he offered that information up. It’s hard to tell which shade of Steve you’re going to get. Funny, cavalier, always ready with a joke Steve. Grouchy, sarcastic, just a tad catty Steve. Or heart-scorchingly earnest Steve. As he’d gotten older he’d gotten so much better at timing which version of himself he showed.
“What are they about?” Now she knows she’s crossing a line. Prodding that heart on his sleeve.
“Nance, I…What is this?”
“Please, I just… I need to talk.”
He’s quiet. She wonders if he’ll hang up. Or call her on her crap. She wouldn’t blame him either way. “Hold on one sec,” he interrupts her thought. There’s a brief, muffled, indistinguishable conversation between him and someone off the receiver, and the noise of a door closing. “Okay,” He sighs a little, back on the line. “Russians or bats are my usual suspects. Sometimes both. Which gets trippy.” She breathes a little huff of laughter. “Does that make me, I don’t know–selfish? Pathetic?”
“No, I think you’re entitled to those.”
“Hmm.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you were with someone-”
“No, it’s just– No. Don’t worry about it.” She must really sound like a wreck if he feels like he has to drop whatever he’s doing (a date?) to talk her off the ledge. She lets him though because she feels like a wreck.
“You know what’s surprising though,” he offers, “the giant flesh spider I think has only made an appearance, like, once. You’d think that would make more of an impression.”
She laughs a tiny but genuine laugh. “Yeah, you’d think. Doesn’t show up for me either.”
“What is in yours?” His voice is hushed, gentle. But she’s the one who opened this box.
“Vecna sometimes. The demogorgon a lot. The demogorgon in my house, with my family.”
“Yeah. With, you know the Russians and the bats, most of the time it’s me, but plenty of times it’s Robin or Dustin or… you know, any of you guys. Them getting hurt. Me not saving them.”
That’s what they’d found that spring break, the biggest source of harmony between them was their need to protect everybody. The difference she’d found afterwards was that he was, surprisingly, better than her at showing it with things other than just a weapon. Who’d have guessed that in ‘84? (Or maybe it had already been there.)
Steve lets her sit in silence for a few minutes. It’s more companionable than awkward now. But he doesn’t avoid these things like he used to.
“So which was it last night?”
Dark water. Blood and screaming. Turning her back and walking away.
“Can I tell you something a bit crazy?”
Steve doesn’t take the redirection willingly. His voice drags at her lead. “Sure.”
“I’m actually in Hawkins. Right now.”
*****
In her defense, Nancy had held on to her better judgement for over half the day when you considered that she woke up before 4. She’d shoved down her emotions as she so often did, choked down a stale bagel, tried to make suitcase-rumpled clothes presentable, and had driven to her conference. She’d gotten out her little notepad and even attempted to take some of the notes that her boss expected her to take to cover this event (she would definitely need to come up with a story of some kind of dire family emergency or debilitating illness to keep her job after this).
But the tension had built in her like a mounting headache, until echoes of her dream were drowning out the speakers and her notes were pages of meaningless fragments. When everyone else headed to lunch, she bolted back to her motel, checked out as fast as she could, and started the eight hour drive to Hawkins.
During that drive, Nancy spent basically the entire time arguing with herself that she should turn back. When she passed the halfway mark, she resigned herself to the fact that she was going to Hawkins, but kept up the debate over whether she would actually talk to Steve. Once she got to town and checked into a motel on the far side of town (no satisfactory answer existed for her parents on why she was here. Easier to avoid it), it turned to a question of calling or showing up on his doorstep. She’d taken over an hour to actually dial the number.
Nancy didn’t tell Steve any of that. She told him she hadn’t been in Boston, she’d been close by for work. He agreed to drive over to her motel so they could continue the talk in person, and he kindly didn’t ask why she wasn’t at her parents’.
It’s nearly 11, but they decide to go for a walk. The motel room is a depressing clone of the one in Buffalo, and she’s spent enough time in the car for one day. Besides, she’s missed the Hawkins stars. They walk along the side of a road by the woods; Nancy refrains from asking Steve to bring his bat. Nothing has come out of these woods in a long time. No snow lies on the ground, but there is the crisp smell of it on the air. Steve is wearing a coat that to Nancy’s eye doesn’t look quite warm enough, which is typical of him.
The cold air braces Nancy, making her feel more level-headed. The quiet of Hawkins helps too. It’s changed in the past four years. It’s less haunted. Like any small town, there are still things here beneath the surface. The secrets and petty evils of the common man. But there aren’t the same monsters in the woods or lurking government powers. And she’s learned two things since her days here. First, that people are people in small towns or big cities. Boston has just as much of a share in hidden cruelties. Hopper had told her as much before she left, noting that a city just lets you isolate yourself from it a little more. Lets it all be the pain of strangers. Second, she’s started to see more clearly the beauties that ugliness couldn’t blot out. Here in Hawkins and back in Boston. Even in herself, a little.
Steve lets her ease back into the conversation again. A little catching up first. Work is good. Steve is three semesters into correspondence courses for his teaching degree. It’s challenging, but he enjoys it. Nancy smiles a little at the irony that between the two of them he’ll be the one to end up with a college degree, and she’ll be the dropout. She’s proud of him. Nancy’s work is less good. She’s started looking for other opportunities. Maybe closer to home. Chicago maybe. Neither of them are dating (the person at Steve’s place when she called had been a work friend whom he’d been glad of the excuse to leave–maybe that last part is a lie, but she lets it pass). They’ve both seen Robin recently. Neither has talked to Jonathan since their last group meet-up over the summer.
They come back out of the woods to a street lined with businesses. Everything is dark and closed. For a moment Nancy imagines that they’re the only two left in Hawkins. The streetlights catch on the curls of Steve’s hair where they poke out from underneath his hat.
“So,” Steve begins, “how far did you really drive to get here today?”
It’s good that he waited til they got back onto the lit streets before coming back to this. She’s not sure she could bring herself to talk about any of it under the shadows of the trees. But she thought she’d gotten at least that one lie past him.
“I was in Buffalo.”
He whistles. “Quite a drive.”
She nods.
“Don’t shoot me if this makes me sound like a total narcissistic douchebag–like you know, me in highschool–but I’m putting puzzle pieces together here. Slowly. It was about me, right? Your nightmare? Otherwise why call me up out of the blue.”
Nancy gives a tight, wry little smile. “Spot on. Embarrassing right? I’m a grown woman and trying to pretend I’m a reporter and I have one bad dream about my-” Don’t say ex-boyfriend. She tosses a hand in his direction instead. “-and I drive eight hours just to come home and call you, which I could have done from anywhere.”
Steve purses his lips and shrugs. “I don’t know. Trust your gut, Wheeler.” He reaches down, scoops a rock and tosses it into the street ahead of them. “What happened in it?”
Nancy shoves her hands deeper in her pockets. Walking with him here, the images of the dream have faded some, eclipsed by him, real and living and whole. But they’re all still there, coiled like a snake beneath a rock. Lift the rock and get bit.
Steve presses. “I just feel like I need some context. If I’m gonna help or something. Like are we talking a dream where I did something, or you did something, or some of our old baggage or-” He throws up his hands in a shrug.
She owes him something. For putting up with all of this. “You died.”
“Ah.”
“You were beaten and bleeding and begging me to help you and I just… walked away. And you died.”
“Ok.”
They walk a little further as Steve thinks. He pulls off his hat and toys with it.
“Ok,” he repeats. “Sorry if I’m being an idiot, but why’d that spook you so much? I mean, we talked about it. We both have those dreams. Doesn’t seem like you’re breaking into Mike’s dorm room on the regular or camped out in your old room to keep an eye on Holly.”
“I don’t know. It felt different. More vivid.”
“Well. You’ve seen me almost die a few times. I guess it left a mark.”
She shakes her head. “I think it’s more than that. It feels like… Like maybe it means something.”
“What, like an omen or something? Like the Upside Down is back?”
“No. More like my subconscious is trying to tell me something.”
“Maybe it’s trying to tell you that you don’t want to see any more friends die.”
He’s offering her an out. He’s offered her several. Pull up before we both crash. We’ll chalk this whole night up to temporary insanity brought on by sleep deprivation. Aftershocks of trauma. Whatever.
Maybe he wants her to take that out. Maybe he doesn’t want this.
“Maybe it’s telling me I should never have left you behind.”
He stops walking abruptly. The night is impossibly quiet, especially compared to the usual clamor of city life. Steve turns to face her. A few flakes of snow are starting to fall. They nestle in the curls of his hair and then disappear. Beautiful and then lost forever. Something soft and something angry struggle in his eyes. He doesn’t trust where this is heading. Doesn’t trust her not to let him fall again. A line from a book she loves plays through her head: I am half agony, half hope.
Steve twists his hat in hands. “What do you mean by that?” There’s an almost accusatory note in his voice.
Nancy’s moment of courage fades. She drops her gaze. Steve gives a frustrated huff.
“Jeez, Nance.” He runs a hand through his hair. “Why are we here? What am I supposed to do with that?”
She stares down the street, not looking at him. From here she can just make out the white edge of the movie theater marquee. A few blocks from here is the house where they went to that Halloween party in ‘84. They could be at Lovers’ Lake in 20 minutes if they had his truck. If she turned around she could see the Squawk’s radio tower visible over the hills. So many lines of a story etched into the town around them.
Steve looks tired suddenly. It’s late. He presses a knuckle to his forehead and rubs his thumb along his eyebrow. “Nancy, what do you want?”
“I don’t want to lose you.”
“Then why didn’t you come see me last month?”
Because of the fall. Because when they met up in the beginning of November, Robin was supposed to be there, and then she wasn’t. Because even without Robin there, it was comfortable and easy, and they’d laughed and talked about things that they can’t talk about with anyone else. Because they’d spent a weekend together, and it was the best weekend she’d had in a long time. Because Boston was starting to wear thin for her, and that weekend felt like something real and possible and lasting. Because she left that weekend wanting more of it with such an intensity that it scared her–scared her into not picking up her phone for two months, into hiding out in her parents house for a week at Christmas.
“I- I needed to think.”
His eyes are wide and hurting and hopeless. “You’re always so…decisive. Nancy Wheeler with a plan of action. But with this you’ve always gotta think. It’s been four years. I’m still right here. You know what I want, what I’ve always wanted. Nothing’s changed. So what do you want, Nance?”
Nancy draws in a deep shuddery breath and tilts her head back to stare at the soft flakes drifting down from the sky. Anything rather than look him in the eye.
“I want.. to not be alone anymore.” The words come pouring out, chased to the surface by the phantoms in her dreams. “I want to not always feel like I’m fighting on my own. I want someone to believe in me, someone who makes me feel like I’m worth trusting. I want the person I trust. I want my partner.”
The snow’s falling harder now. By morning there will be a clean, fresh blanket over the town. Nancy meets Steve’s eyes again. The anger has gone out of him. He’s watching her, leaning almost imperceptibly forward. The question is between them in the air like electricity. Is she really saying this? Is she giving him the world? Is she accepting the world he’s offered her?
She draws her chin up, resolute. “I want you. I still love you.”
Steve closes the distance between them. His fingers brush her arm tentatively. Her eyes give him permission. He’s pulling her close, strong arms wrapping around her, one hand sweeping snow from her hair as he cradles her head. She’s reaching up and he’s leaning in and the pieces are falling into place like there was never any chance of another outcome. Like he’s her gravity.
Just before their lips touch, Steve whispers into the crystalline night air, “I love you, Nancy Wheeler.”
He kisses her. It’s real and warm and alive. Firelight reflecting off a pure snow. It’s a light burning away the terrors of the night, full of fierce hope and bright promise for the many days to come.