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This, Steve vows, would be the last time he let Hopper talk him into anything.
The bed is tiny. Maybe a full if they’re lucky. He’s actually focusing on the bed because it’s the least offending part of the room they’re standing in. Hopper had called it a ‘cabin’, when he described it to them, when he did his sales pitch for this expedition, but it’s basically just a room. A room the size of a shed, with a leaky roof that he can hear dripping into the corner, no bathroom, what looks like no running water, and a tiny bed.
For three people.
Steve and two people he doesn’t want to sleep with.
Nancy crosses her arms and huffs. “At least it’s warm.”
“I don’t know what your definition of warm is,” Steve sighs. “This might be warm for the arctic.”
She glowers at him from under her dripping bangs. She reminds him of the time he tried to give his cat a bath when he was five. Key word being tried. The cat might have looked happier. “At least it’s dry.”
Jonathan clears his throat; when Steve looks over at him, he seems to be having a debate over whether to point out the leak in the corner. When he sees they’re watching him, he sighs and opens his mouth.
“I know!” Nancy snaps, storming off to the other side of the cabin. Shed. Whatever it is, there’s no place to go to get away from each other.
This is going to be fun, being stuck in a room with his ex-girlfriend and her boyfriend for the night.
“So how long do we think before the rain stops?” Jonathan asks. He has his bag hugged to his chest, hunched slightly over the top of it, and Steve knows that he’s trying to keep it dry because his camera is inside. His hair is dripping just as much as Nancy’s and Steve’s, and Steve kind of expects him to shake like a dog to dry it out. He can. Steve and Nancy can’t, damn long hair.
“Not before the morning, guaranteed.” Nancy walks back toward them with her arms still crossed. It’s partly to keep warm when the rain is leeching all the warmth from their bones and partly because Steve knows that look on her face— she is royally pissed. “It looks stable enough, but if that… thing follows us in here, we’re going to have a hard time keeping it out.”
“Don’t say that,” Steve warns, gripping his bat in an automatic attempt to keep his heart rate from spiking. He isn’t entirely sure what the monster that they were looking for was, and if he’s honest, it would have been better to see it clearly than to leave it to his imagination. It was eating people’s pets, including larger ones like goats, so in his mind, it has fangs. Maybe claws. Maybe spikes on its head, with how easily it followed them through the thickest bushes they could get through without getting stuck. His mind is infinitely worse than whatever it actually was, he’s sure.
“It can’t hear us.” Nancy rolls her eyes, shuddering. “Jonathan, please tell me our extra clothes are dry.”
“They are.” Jonathan sets down the bag on a small table, but not before placing the small lighter carefully in front of it. So he can see it, can reach it easily because most creatures, from the Upside Down or not, fear fire. Steve wonders if he sleeps with it the way he sleeps with his bat and Nancy sleeps with her gun. “Not all of them, but the ones on the bottom are, so they’ll work for tonight.”
“What about your camera?” Steve asks.
Jonathan looks up at him in surprise; Steve just waits for the answer, trying not to be annoyed. Somehow, even as they go on patrols to make sure that the Upside Down isn’t trying to take over Hawkins again and weed out the traces they find, Jonathan always looks surprised when he addresses him and not Nancy. Part of it’s just Jonathan— it probably takes a lot of getting used to, talking to other people, when he was so antisocial before that— but he gets the feeling most of it is because it’s Steve who’s asking. He and Jonathan are… okay, but there were a lot of things said before that aren’t forgotten or forgiven so easily.
His patience is rewarded. After a second, Jonathan smiles slightly, pulling it out. “Good as new.”
“One piece of good news,” Nancy says, pulling the dry clothes out of the small pile he dumps out. “You got a picture of it, right?”
“Yeah. Hopefully it’ll come out alright in the dark. Then we can figure out how to kill it.”
“And whether it’s the same thing that Hopper saw. We might be dealing with more than one.”
They’re so good together, Steve thinks, resisting the urge to just stand and watch them. That’s the part that he keeps coming back to, when the wounds and the memories get unbearable and he just wants to hate them for breaking his heart. He wants to, because it would be easy, it would fit the narrative— boy and girl are happy, new boy comes in and steals her away, and he’s left all alone. It’s too simple, though, and that’s where he gets stuck. The narrative doesn’t account for monsters and government conspiracies. It doesn’t talk about how Jonathan and Nancy have faced danger down together more times than Steve has and it built a gap between them, left him standing on the other side before he even knew there was a distance. It doesn’t talk about how the leaving for someone else doesn’t happen in a vacuum and if they were really, truly happy, she wouldn’t have looked at someone else in the first place.
They just work, standing together at the table, water dripping onto the dusty wood floor between them as they frown down at a semi-damp map to strategize tracking a monster. It looks more natural than most couples sitting in a café, holding hands in a park, going to the movies, things that other people in love do. They aren’t that couple. That’s how he lost Nancy— not to Jonathan, but to the fact that she wasn’t made for normal love and he didn’t know how to match her intensity. Jonathan does.
He’ll just… be happy here, Steve tells himself, trying to quell the ache in his stomach that feels like falling off a cliff. Watching them. Getting the tiny bits of their battle-love they’ll share with him.
Nancy looks up for him first. Her face is open, the stress cleared by the fact that they have a plan. “We’ll get going when the rain stops and it’s light again. Are you hurt?”
“Not by my usual standards,” Steve says, just because he knows it will make Nancy make a face at him because he’s being stubborn. It’s fun, sometimes, to rile her up a bit.
She does. “Where at?”
“Just scratches from the blackberry bushes.” He turns and looks at Jonathan, who’s frowning down at his side. “I think your boyfriend needs patching up more than I do.”
“Traitor,” Jonathan mutters, but smiles slightly at Nancy when she turns her attention to him. “Just a little bit. I think I landed on a stick when I tripped. You?”
“Scraped knees.” She sighs, but it sounds relieved, and Steve feels it, too. He doesn’t want to go to the hospital ever again, not for a monster wound. “Alright, boys. Patch yourselves up and then we’re going to get some sleep. I want to get out of here the second it stops raining, even if that’s at four in the morning.”
Steve groans loudly. Jonathan scoffs and shakes his head and says, “Yes, ma’am.”
Steve wants to say something about that, something that will make them laugh— both of them, another odd thing that he doesn’t understand, he’s not supposed to like his ex’s new boyfriend’s laugh— but in the corner of the room, Nancy strips off her shirt and it stalls his brain. She has her back turned, so he can only see her bra, white lace and thin straps over her small shoulders. Her arms have more definition than when he last saw her with her shirt off, from hours spent shooting with her stance unflinching.
She’s his ex. He shouldn’t be watching her undress. He’s not sure why she undressed in front of him— no, he does know, it’s because they’re all in the same room and there is no privacy. That’s it. Not familiarity, not residual feelings. Nothing. Nothing.
He turns around sharply when she reaches for her pants— and finds himself locking eyes with Jonathan. Who is also shirtless, dabbing at an angry cut on his right side, watching him watch Nancy.
Steve feels his shoulders tightening, his hands curling into fists, bracing himself for… for something. He’s not sure what. Jonathan doesn’t look angry, like he thought he might be, but it’s hard to read what he is thinking and the blankness is even more unsettling. Steve tries to look somewhere else, anywhere, and only succeeds in dropping his eyes to the wound. It’s not bad. Jonathan is skinny, but he has defined muscles in his stomach and on his arms that he keeps covered up in baggy clothing.
That’s even more dangerous than staring at Nancy, and Steve pivots to the wall, trying to remember how to breathe normally. He wasn’t this light-headed running for his life from the monster. It’s fucking ridiculous. He’s seen boys and girls with their shirts off, why do these two make him so stupid?
One night. One night and then he can rage at Hopper until he loses his voice and never go on another creature hunt with these two.
Steve sets his jaw and takes his shirt off. It feels like one of them is watching him, at least one, but this peace between them is fragile enough that he doesn’t turn around to find out who or why.
-------------------
“So how are we doing this?” Steve asks, trying for cheerful when he kind of wants to sleep under the beg instead of in it. It’s still a possibility. Being dry is nice, but not enough to cancel out the dread of what they have to do next.
“You know how to sleep,” Nancy says dryly, and crawls to the far edge. There’s space enough for people to walk on both sides of the bed, but one side is closer to the wall, and that’s apparently where she feels safest. She sets her gun on the tiny end table, and then puts Jonathan’s lighter next to it, which answers Steve’s question about whether Jonathan needs a weapon to sleep, too. It makes him feel a little better when he leans his bat against the wall. “Pick a spot.”
Steve hesitates, glancing at Jonathan, who has his arms crossed and brow furrowed like this is a problem he needs to solve. Or maybe he’s nervous, too. Steve doesn’t know his tells. Maybe he should. “Take the middle?” Steve offers.
“Sure.”
Nancy lies down on one side, and Jonathan climbs in and under the covers, and without a beat of hesitation, rolls to face Nancy and pull her close to him.
Steve’s throat feels tight, but he gets in and rolls the opposite direction. He’s facing the dark of the room, illuminated only by an ancient candle that Jonathan lit and placed in the middle of the table where it can’t set anything on fire. It makes shadows dance that put his nerves on edge, and he fixes his eyes firmly on his bat to calm himself. There’s nothing in here with them.
From the other side of the bed, only a few feet away but unreachable all the same, Jonathan says something in a low voice, and Nancy giggles.
The loneliness is enough to overpower the anxiety that there’s something stalking him, and Steve closes his eyes, feeling his mouth twisting because he wants to say something to stop them and wants to stay silent at the same time. It’s a paradox, hearing them so happy when he wants what they have with every fiber in his body. It hurts, but it’s not heartbreak anymore, he doesn’t think. It’s morphed into something more dangerous— the kind of hurt he gets when he looks at a beautiful piece of art.
They’re beautiful, the two of them.
He’s happy for them. He is.
He keeps his eyes closed until the giggling starts to fade and he starts to drift off.
-----------------
Steve wakes up with a kink in his neck— the pillows are crap, the mattress even worse— and someone holding onto his arm.
It’s Jonathan. He sleeps curled in a ball, apparently, and his forehead is pressed into Steve’s shoulder so that all Steve can see is the top of his head, his hair nearly in his mouth. His knees dig into Steve’s thigh— he’s all sharp angles, where the girls Steve has slept with were soft— and when Steve holds himself still he realizes that he can feel him breathing. Even, steady puffs of breath against his shirt. It’s soothing, listening to him.
But in the room, there’s a figure moving in the dark.
Steve jerks, flailing to reach his bat when Jonathan has a grip on his arm, but the figure stops, laughs a little, and he pauses. Reassesses. The figure is too small to be the creature stalking them, and he knows that laugh.
“Sorry,” Nancy says. In the mostly-pitch black, he can only see her figure, the barest shape of her eyes when she turns toward the candle. It means he can’t see all of her expression, knows she’s smiling but doesn’t know if it’s genuine or not. “I didn’t think I’d wake you up. I needed some water.”
Steve groans, flopping back down. “Don’t do that, Nance. You gave me a heart attack.”
“Sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”
The room still looks just as dark as it was when Steve went to sleep. “Is it morning yet?”
“No. It’s been… a few hours, I think. You just fell asleep fast.”
Damn. Steve glances down at Jonathan when he exhales more heavily, but he isn’t lifting his head, so he’s going to assume he’s still asleep. “So did he.”
“Sorry,” Nancy says again, and this time it sounds wry, if a little… afraid. “I got up to get the water bottle, and he just… shifted.”
Steve tests his arm. It can’t have been for very long, if Nancy just got up, but he can feel the pins and needles starting that means it’s going numb. “Is he always a leech when he sleeps?”
He meant it to be funny, but Nancy purses her lips, and yeah, he shouldn’t be asking his ex about her boyfriend sleeps. It’s as if he’s always stumbling into minefields, trying to be friends with these two when there’s so much tangled up between them. He doesn’t even notice it. It just happens.
“A little,” Nancy admits after too long, and there’s a smile on her lips again, and she walks over to the bed, sitting down on the edge. A little on Steve’s legs, too, but she doesn’t seem to care. Now that’s she’s closer, he can read her expression, and it’s fond when she brushes Jonathan’s bangs out of his face. “It’s also freezing.”
And there’s more there, in the way she looks down at him, and no matter how much it hurts, Steve forces his mouth to work, because there’s a door here that he’s never brave enough to open. But here, in the dark, just the three of them and nowhere to go, feels… not right, but not wrong, either. It feels untouchable, like the space isn’t real because nothing is familiar, and if he speaks when the space isn’t real, there won’t be any consequences.
“You love him,” Steve says, and he thought it would come out as a question but it’s flat. He thought it would become an accusation but it just sounds… fragile. Nancy won’t lie to him, and he already knows the answer.
Nancy bites her lip. “Yeah.” It’s timid, too, but she takes a deep breath, and he can feel her evening out. “Yes.”
That’s Nancy. She’s not afraid of anything, not for long, and it’s so fitting that Steve can’t help but laugh out loud. Too loud, and Jonathan twitches so they both fall silent. Steve wonders what it says about him, that he doesn’t even want to wake him up when he just heard his ex-girlfriend admit something that she couldn’t bear to tell him after a year of dating.
It’s not emptiness, he feels when he reaches out and tries to figure out what that word wakes up in him. It’s just… nothing. Nothing at all.
Maybe he’s really good at lying to himself.
“Great.” He manages after a second. “Good. Okay.”
“Steve…” Nancy sighs, exhausted, and then pauses. He waits, and he’s not sure what he’s expecting but it’s not for her to take his hand—the one Jonathan isn’t holding— and lean toward him. “I was hurting. I didn’t mean it.”
“You did.” He doesn’t mean to sound bitter, but he is. “I asked you, and you said—”
“I remember.” Nancy cringes, looks down at his hand instead of at his face, and runs her thumb over his knuckles. “I was angry, and… I don’t know. You wanted me to… to be someone I wasn’t.”
He knows what she means. It’s exactly what he noticed, when she stood with Jonathan and they just looked like two halves of a whole. She was a whole different person, than when she stood with Steve. More real. Raw. The monster business brought something out in her, something relentless and inspiring and a little dangerous, and Steve tried to pretend that things weren’t changing because they were so good where Jonathan let her loose and tried to keep up. One of them did it right and the other did it wrong. They both know it now.
“What about now?” He asks.
He’s not supposed to ask this. He’s supposed to… to move on. To let her go. Let them go, to be happy, be good for each other, because…
Because he loves them. Both of them. He doesn’t know why he didn’t realize it before now, until they found each other and left him behind, except that he’s never been great at timing. He broke things with Jonathan years ago and learned at the last second that he was good, even better than the people he chose. He watched and watched Nancy struggle with Barb’s death and the realization that monsters were real and that people could be monsters too and didn’t understand that she wasn’t going to heal until she was gone. He’s always a little too late, a little too afraid of what he wants to go for it until he’s messed up.
They have each other, and all he wants is them. Nights like this, where time stands still and he can pretend and feel whole.
Maybe more.
Nancy makes a small choked sound and her grip on his hand tightens. “What about now?” She asks, voice shaking.
“Now I… I know who you are.” I wouldn’t hold you back anymore. I know who you are and it’s even more incredible than who I wanted you to be.
“…I love Jonathan.”
Jonathan, who she bled with, who Steve knows she would bleed for without a second of hesitation, sighs again, into Steve’s shoulder. He doesn’t know who he’s holding, Steve is sure, but there’s a part of him that wonders, that keeps him searching Nancy’s face when she’s not going to give him what he wants.
I would bleed with you, too. I would bleed for both of you.
I would die for both of you.
Maybe that was the moment he was too far gone. When he ran unarmed back into a house with a monster in it because they were in there. It was there, when he threw the door open, and he made his peace with it because they needed him. Both of them.
He’s never felt more confused than that moment, more terrified, more out of his depth and scattered; he’s also never felt braver, surer, clearer, more whole. They broke him and made him at the same time, these two.
“Tell me you don’t love me,” Steve says, and it might be begging, but he needs to know. He needs to move on. He needs to put this thing to rest and tell himself it’s impossible.
Nancy doesn’t say anything, but he knows that she’s watching where Jonathan is pressed against his side. He’s starting to uncurl, slightly, but he hasn’t pulled away, just gotten a little more comfortable. Under the covers where she can’t see, Steve can feel his hands smoothing out against his forearm. He knows he can’t feel Jonathan’s scar, the one that matches Nancy’s, but he can imagine it burning on his skin. Wants to trace it with his finger the way he’s seen Nancy do, the same way he did to hers.
“We need to talk in the morning,” Nancy says quietly, and lets go of his hand. “When Jonathan’s awake.”
She didn’t answer the question, but Steve is exhausted, suddenly, worn from exposing old injuries that never actually healed, and he sighs. “Why?”
Nancy presses her lips together, laughs. It breaks in the middle. “Because you… you need to tell him yourself.”
“What? That I still love you?” He never said that, he realizes abruptly, but the panic dies quickly when Nancy doesn’t react. He kind of did, didn’t he?
“No. About this.”
And she could mean anything, when she nods toward where the two of them are touching, but Nancy’s always been smarter than anyone gave her credit for. She knows. Maybe she knew before he did.
But Jonathan wasn’t awake for this, and in the morning Steve won’t have the excuse of the darkness or exhaustion or the feeling that there are no consequences to his actions to explain it, and the fear leaves a sour taste in his mouth. “He thinks I’m you.”
Nancy shakes her head, crawling across the bed. “He doesn’t do that to me.”
Oh.
And just when he’s trying to wrap his mind around that, Nancy scoots back under the covers, her form vanishing in the darkness, and moves toward them, reaching for Steve over Jonathan’s shoulder. He can barely see her hand, on top of the covers, offering.
Feeling like he’s in a dream, Steve carefully turns from his back to his other side, so that he’s facing Jonathan. He thought he might wake up when they shifted, but he just adjusts, straightening out his legs at last. His feet brush against Steve’s, and a second later, so do Nancy’s.
He takes her hand. The movement is practiced and natural, but like this, he feels brand new. Maybe he’s dreaming. Maybe he’s dead.
She didn’t answer. And Nancy is a lot of things, but she’s not cruel. If she was going to tell him she didn’t love him, she would have said it without making him wait and wonder. And Jonathan… he doesn’t know. That’s new, too.
“How is this supposed to work?” Steve whispers.
“I don’t know,” Nancy answers. “But we’ll talk in the morning.”
And that’s enough for him to fall back asleep, Nancy holding one hand and Jonathan holding the other.