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Nancy knows who Steve Harrington is.
She will keep trying to tell Barb this until Barb is no longer there to speak to. Yes, he's a thoughtless jock and probably trying to get in her pants. Yes, she's heard all of the rumors — she's heard about the under bleachers rendezvous and the bruise he got from Cheryl's boyfriend that he sported with an easy grin. Nancy isn't stupid. Steve is Bad News, capitalized and underlined in permanent marker.
"You say this," Barb will always counter, "but you're still seeing this guy."
"My expectations are where they should be," Nancy will tell her, applying chapstick during passing periods while they linger at their lockers. "It was just — kissing. I know he's not serious."
Barb will look at her over her glasses with that look of perpetual suspicion, and Nancy will flush with embarrassment and explanations. She's a good girl with a high GPA and an unimpeachable reputation. She should know better; she knows she can't tell Barb that maybe she just wants to have fun, too. Barb would wonder when her friend got body-swapped with a massive slut who wants to fool around with the cutest boy in school. And it's not because she thinks she's gonna like, marry him someday, but because it's fun to fool around with the cutest boy in school.
"I'm just worried," Barb will repeat, over and over again, "that you're going to get your heart broken."
"I'm not," Nancy will insist.
In the end, Nancy is right. Barb will never know this.
There are times she wonders.
She doesn't expect Steve to knock on her window, but once he's there she fully expects that he'll expect to make out with her. And so she does, because he is good at it and because she's sixteen and this is what life is supposed to be about, giddy and blushing. It doesn't go any further because she's a Good Girl, her parents are home, and it's her role to say no. She is the guard of her own heart, her own body, and Good Girls don't give it up the first time a boy crawls through their window.
She expects the script to follow the familiar beats. Steve will suggest going further, Nancy will maintain her reputation and emphasize that she's not like the other girls who give it up too easily, and he'll slink off with his tail between his legs until the next opportunity to get another notch on his belt arises. Nancy will return to her flashcards, neatly organized and color-coded, and guard her heart and keep her legs closed for another day.
What she doesn't expect is that he stays.
Steve starts reading off flashcards without any further suggestion of turning studying into strip poker. He makes a joke of it, picks up a teddy bear, and then he helps her study. Sure, they sneak in kisses between flashcards, but that's it. He lounges against her pastel quilt like he belongs there, reads off the cards dutifully as he waits for her to answer them. He peers up at her, grinning when she adds to the memorized pile, framed by pink pinstripe wallpaper. He doesn't leave until all of the flashcards join the correct stack. Steve kisses her again, and she's prepared to remind him of her parents, of bad ideas, of the fact that she's not like that.
But she doesn't. He tells her goodnight, and he leaves the same way he came in.
In that moment, she falls for him. Just a little bit. She's still got her head on straight, she's still not stupid, she's still not like the other girls who are expecting more than a boy like this will ever give. But it thaws, her heart, and she knows Barb would mock her for it if she knew. But maybe he's different, just different enough than she expected, and maybe, maybe, maybe —
This matters until it doesn't.
Nancy can still remember looking up at the theater marquee and seeing her name and 'slut' next to one another in red spray paint. All efforts of protecting her reputation, of being the Good Girl, turned to ash because Steve told his friends she cheated.
And she didn't.
(She didn't then. This later becomes more of an important clarification.)
The righteous indignation is for him for being exactly who she suspected he was, who Barb thought he was. But it's also for her, for buying it, for letting herself believe it for a second. She's the stupid girl she tried not to be, the suburban girl who Jonathan thinks she is. The slap she gives Steve's cheek burns her palm afterwards, but she doesn't have time to think about it before Steve is making some asshole comments about Jonathan's brother and she has to follow the cop car that Jonathan is being hauled away in.
"I can't believe I was actually worried about you," he'd told her.
And she couldn't believe she thought he was anything but an oblivious, uncaring asshole. Barb went missing and he was worried about his dad's reaction. He was cruel to Jonathan, unbelievably so, and he let his friends — his asshole friends, she knows she should have judged him more by the company he kept — write that she was a slut on the biggest sign they could find.
He's exactly who Barb thinks he is, and she's not even here to enjoy being right.
Nancy's thinking on this shifts and it doesn't.
Steve jumps into danger he knows nothing about and saves both her and Jonathan's lives in the process. He does the right thing, the good thing, when it matters the most. As it turns out, Steve is a good guy.
He's earnest when he turns up on her porch after the hospital. He asks if she's okay, she lies and says she is, and he tells her he's sorry about Barb. Steve keeps showing up — an easy smile in the hallway, steadying when her hands won't stop shaking. He's willing to give when Nancy can't do anything but take, present and warm when Jonathan recedes entirely and she's left trying to process it all.
It's not fair. But Steve is solid and comforting when she's left with uneasy questions, and she knows she won't let herself fall completely for a man her dead best friend regarded with such suspicion. He doesn't hang around Tommy and Carol, not anymore. He's unfailingly loyal and dutiful and —
She is going to break his heart. She's harder and colder now. If she could let herself fall before, she can't now. Barb is dead. Barb is never coming back. It's only fitting that a version of Nancy who was concerned about cute boys, who could fall for a high school sweetheart, should die with her. She can't be wrong, not again, can't let herself be young and careless.
And when he asks her to try being young and careless, that's the first time out of several that she breaks his heart because it's the last thing she's capable of. It's not a clean kill. It's overlapping, broken conversations filled with denial and the red smear of punch of a white shirt and interruptions. She never ends it, and if it dies by her hand it's a death without any dignity.
Maybe a part of her fears fallout, a reaction, even if this Steve isn't who he used to be and her name stays off theater marquees. It's easier to let someone else finish the job: matchmaking from a conspiratorial private detective, sleeping with Jonathan in a bunker, Steve sorting through a pile of scrap.
"It's okay, Nance."
He tells her this. His voice is soft, and the nickname remains. She doesn't believe him. It just doesn't change anything. These last gasps feel like a mercy kill, one she should have done herself. It's too easy to blame what he could say, and it's easy understanding that twists the knife more than any blow up or insults ever could. He'd be right to call her a slut, a whore, every name in the book now — she slept with someone else, and the evidence was right in front of him. She didn't have the courage to end it. He says none of this. He insults himself, he leaves with promises to take care of the kids, and that's the end of it.
Nancy avoids Steve after that.
Seeing him is a reminder of her own worst attributes, her own cowardice when she's started identifying herself by her bravery. If she's some kind of expert markswoman now, he is the shot she missed and let suffer in the process. She is distracted with Jonathan, with the paper, with the future that's in front of her and leading straight out of Hawkins. Jonathan is not Steve. This is supposed to be a good thing.
Where Steve would say he understood, Jonathan would mean it. That's why he's able to push her, to tell her when she's doing too much, going too fast, asking for more than she deserves. Steve would have blindly agreed with her, would have insisted that the guys at the paper were assholes, would have told her she was a genius at the end of her flashcard pile. Jonathan has no such mercies, and this is a good thing. She is going to be more than her mother, more than the suburbs, more than the rest of this shitty town and its endless string of curses.
But the curses keep coming. All roads lead back to the Upside Down, back to failed military experiments, back to a car hurtling towards her no matter how many shots ring out from her gun.
And it's Steve, bloodstained in a ridiculous fucking sailor uniform with his new girlfriend in the passenger seat, hurtling to stop it with his own car. He's a good guy; he shows up when it matters the most.
She knows this now.
The kids do, too. They flock to him with an ease, like he's some mother hen they can hide under the wings of. He'd called himself a good babysitter and he evidently meant it. Steve doesn't have a reason to be here like the rest of them. His siblings aren't represented in the brood of kids eager to chase down the next apocalypse, none of his friends have been killed by forces none of them can quite understand. But he keeps showing up, again and again, and that might be why Dustin keeps looking at him with something like awe.
But Steve could never understand, not like Jonathan could. He hadn't suffered their losses (even if Jonathan's losses never materialized, he'd felt some of that grief) and he hadn't been through what they'd been through (even if he'd been present). There's no time to examine the thought further, for second-guessing, for wondering what-ifs when there's always a new threat in front of them. Jonathan and Nancy are hardened soldiers in this bizarre world, eager to get out and bonded for life by what they'd been through together. No one else would understand Nancy, no one else ever could.
Steve just happened to keep showing up.
She still doesn't get it.
Hopper is dead, a teenager is twice-or-thrice-orphaned, and the Byers move to California.
Jonathan got out of Hawkins after all. Nancy stays because she has to, because she still hasn't graduated high school despite it feeling like she's lived a million lives since her sophomore year. The exit is so close she can see it — Emerson, Boston, Jonathan, all of them merging together into one.
In the meantime she's left just being a high school student. She completes homework assignments, she has dinner at the table with her parents and siblings, she runs the school paper with an iron fist, she's stuck returning her little brother's VHS tapes to the video rental store her ex-boyfriend works at with his new girlfriend.
Robin is chipper and friendly, too friendly. Nancy drops the tapes on the counter as Robin rambles, talking about mall's last gasps in the questionable company of the store's other patrons, and Steve only briefly turns to look in their direction from his position down the counter.
"If you need anything," he offers, "I'm around."
Nancy doesn't ask if he means her or his girlfriend, if he means matters relating to video rentals or monsters. She just leaves.
Steve keeps being there.
After Fred's grisly death, he's there with Robin and the kids in tow when Nancy is the closest to falling apart. He's at the Creel house with her, he's glue on Max's side until they find a way to keep her safe, he jumps headfirst into the Upside Down without a second thought. He doesn't have the same stakes as the rest of them, and neither does Robin (platonic with a capital 'P', Nancy is not sure why this sticks in her head when it should be the last thing she cares about). The point is, neither of them have siblings on the line or have witnessed or been blamed for horrible deaths.
They keep putting their necks out regardless.
It's either very noble or very stupid.
So when Steve is dragged under the water, of course she doesn't hesitate. She might be the reason he's in this mess in the first place, if you were to trace the tether back, and while they shouldn't mean anything to each other now—
It doesn't matter. It just doesn't. She can't think about it, she doesn't have the room to. The clock keeps ticking.
And he's there when she's tear-stricken and gasping on the floor, cushioning her from falling in the wake of Vecna's vision. His hand takes up much of her cheek, his worry much of her line of vision. None of this will matter, not if the end is as near as it feels. She has to do something, has to keep moving forward, has to prevent the worst future from taking shape.
In the end, it's only delayed. One of them is dead. And no matter what Steve says about dreams of the future, about her presence or absence, it doesn't matter if their ends are met anyway. She'll deal with it later, sort it into smaller and smaller boxes until she has the capacity to open and sort through their contents. Not now, never now. She locks her window at night; it's just habit.
When Jonathan is back, he apologizes for not being there. She's honest, too honest, when she says she's glad he wasn't.
"I guess it’s good you were here too. Otherwise, who’d’ve been in charge? Steve?"
"He’s grown up a lot, you know," she says the words before she can stop herself.
Jonathan just stares at her for a moment. She knows she's said too much.
"Yeah, I— I'm sure."
There's a hammering in her head, louder than what the tools in their hands are capable of. Crawling forward. Crawling backwards. Does it matter? Jonathan is the here and now, Steve is the past. Even if he is different, even if she's been proven wrong in the assumptions that kept her sane in her own self-appraisal, even if,
"You've always been there."
And he's always been there, here. How can it matter? What is she going to do, reunite with her ex-boyfriend after leaving him the way she did? Was she going to leave Jonathan like she left Steve? How many hearts would that break for happiness that was bound to be temporary? She made a decision, and the version of Nancy who entertained the idea of driving down roads with abrupt ends is long gone. Nancy can't be governed by feelings that may only be whims, can't let herself be taken off the course she's decided is her salvation.
So when Jonathan asks if they're okay, the only answer is yes. It'll stay that way until her hand is forced, until they are on their last gasps and the gun is the only answer.
It's three years later that she realizes something critical.
Steve has changed, evolved, grown up, adapted. Everyone says the same thing. Jonathan confesses to feeling a strange fondness for him when he's out of earshot on the roof, and Robin cracks jokes about her biggest wing-man and best friend turning out to be the guy she was once most certain would stay a high school douchebag. He cheers the loudest for Dustin at graduation, and she has no doubt that he carries that energy towards all the kids he goes on to coach.
And he stays.
Steve does the good, valuable work the rest of them are probably a little too egotistical for. They have Bigger, More Important Dreams in larger coastal cities. But it doesn't matter for Nancy, because after all of these years she hasn't changed a bit. She left Emerson for the Herald, only to find the paper wasn't what she was dreaming of. She wanted the real world, wanted to grasp it with her own two hands until she found it burned her palms. Her dreams are fickle, her assumptions aren't always right, and she is who she has always been.
Steve changed, all the while staying in one place. Nancy stayed the same, and she's kept running.
Later, when Robin and Jonathan go back to visit their parents, Nancy sticks around on the roof and asks,
"How do you know this is the right decision?"
Steve blinks, runs his hand through his hair from the chair opposite hers. "In what way?"
"Hawkins. The job, the house, the girlfriend who you say is the one." She means this to be teasing, but it comes out clunky.
Steve laughs. He doesn't look at her when he does.
"The whole thing, really," she says, sipping at her lukewarm beer to mask the awkwardness that overtakes her. "You seem certain. I'm jealous of that."
She's jealous of more than that, but she doesn't have the right to be.
He pauses for a minute before looking back at her. "I dunno. Just making it up as I go along."
She presses her cup to her cheek. The sun is setting, and dusk is settling in. "Yeah?"
"Yeah," he replies. He's earnest. It almost hurts to look at him, almost makes her eyes water. "Enough hits to the head and you learn your lessons, I guess."
Nancy blinks rapidly. "I never apologized for how I just totally avoided—"
"Nance," he interrupts her, hand raised. "C'mon. That was years ago, now. Silence is an answer. I know that. I knew that. Just another hit the head. I'm course-corrected. Trust me."
An unjust, bitter, resentful part of her hopes he doesn't mean this.
She's learned nothing, so she says nothing.
The four of them don't meet up afterwards, not even once. They blame it on scheduling.
Nancy gets tired of this eventually.
She gets tired of The Herald, gets tired of her shitty apartment, gets tired of herself — the common denominator in all of this. So she ties up her projects and hands them off to the next trainee, re-enrolls in Emerson, starts returning Robin's phone calls, and accepts going backwards. Crawling backwards, even. She was so sure she already found herself, so certain she had it all figured out, only to find out she'd left no room for herself to grow. Nancy is searching for herself in the last place she saw her, retracing her steps, and listening to her gut.
Nancy moves back into a shared student apartment, and she starts unpacking.
She finds out she loves writing again when she's not at the mercy of a conservative publisher, that she missed flashcards and classes and peers, and she lets herself accept invitations out for drinks and shitty party games and being a normal college student. Her hands sometimes still look bloody in certain lights, but when she rubs her palms against her white shirts they don't smear.
Nancy discovers she loves fruity drinks and hates the taste of the warm beers she choked down for the sake of looking tough around her mostly male colleagues, lets herself laugh around Robin's Smith roommates and the wry observations they make that Barb would have loved, re-reads Anna Karenina and Jane Austen and stops trying to get through Dostoevsky, and she buys more knit pink sweaters while her hair grows out. She still loves the puzzle of investigative reporting, still knows her way around a gun even if she never has cause to use it, still worries about Mike despite all of his reassurances.
She's adapting. She realizes that when the feeling underneath her skin settles.
Robin plans a trip back to Hawkins to visit Steve, Max, and Lucas. Nancy drives because Robin doesn't have a car, and because she wants to see them, too. They settle into a booth of what once was the diner of their youths, and Nancy catches her eyes drifting to Steve when she isn't thinking about it. Max and Lucas are happy and well-adjusted given everything they've gone through. They deserve it. Steve seems content and settled. He deserves it too, far away from the train wreck she's capable of inflicting. She doesn't mention leaving The Herald and all of her recent life changes, and they don't ask.
She sees Steve again near Christmas.
It's an attempt at getting them all under the same roof, orchestrated by Joyce and Hopper in Montauk. The wedding will be another reason, another excuse, but for now this is neutral territory. Everyone makes it a point to be there — Max and Lucas, Mike, Will and Jonathan, Dustin, Robin, and Steve. Of course Steve is there. He always is, even if he has every excuse not to be.
Nancy planned her trip, sorted out a hotel room and logistics without a second thought between finishing papers. She would have assumed Steve had other conflicts that would have prevented him from doing the same, but he's the only guest waving from the kitchen when Nancy walks through the door. Joyce is verbally panicking over the sheer amount that needs to get done before everyone else is set to arrive in the afternoon. Hopper tries to reassure her, but his offhand comments about how 'those kids have survived worse' are hardly helpful to her.
They're both the first to arrive in Montauk, and the first to volunteer to run errands to host the mass of people descending upon the small house. Nancy makes a grocery list, and Steve grabs his keys.
"How's The Herald?" he asks her from the driver's seat of a new truck. It's the first time they've spoken alone since the roof of the radio station.
"I wouldn't know," she admits. "I quit. Back to Emerson."
A beat of silence passes between them, the only sound the dull hum of the radio.
"How's Kirsten?" she asks, unable to help herself.
Steve shakes his head. "Not the one, as it turns out."
"Oh," is her quiet response. She looks down at her hands. She tries not to feel hopeful, but feels lighter all the same.
They bicker in the condiment aisle.
"It doesn't matter if it's on sale, they do not need this much—"
"It's like, four for the same price of one! It's basically robbing the store. They live here! They probably need ketchup for the future, or whatever, and if we're going to spend the same amount anyway—"
"What if they don't want four massive bottles of ketchup? What if they only want the one they asked for?"
"It's not like it goes bad! Er, well, anytime soon."
"Again, it just says one."
They end up coming back to Joyce and Hopper's with a trunk full of groceries. Hopper is out procuring more table space, Joyce is delighted, and Steve looks more than a little smug as a result. She sees him mouth an 'I told you so' over Joyce's shoulder as she hugs him in delight, and Nancy rolls her eyes and shakes her head. Joyce leaves shortly after in pursuit of more chairs — day of, Nancy doesn't know how everything being so last minute doesn't fill the woman with constant anxiety — which leaves Steve and Nancy alone in the house.
Steve peers out the window, watching Joyce's car pull out of the driveway. "Looks like it might start snowing."
"Huh," Nancy replies. She pulls one of the curtains back. "What makes you say that?"
"Color of the sky," Steve says with a shrug. "I dunno. Was snow in the forecast?"
"I don't think so."
A beat of silence passes between them.
"Are we really talking about the weather?" Nancy asks, eyes flicking back to Steve.
He looks back at her. "Is there something else you'd rather talk about?"
"I don't know."
She amends this statement after a few seconds.
"Actually, I do," she declares, stepping closer to him. "I do, and I'm being a coward about it. And I'm sorry, I don't know why that's always my first instinct with this, but I'm trying to stop. Being a coward. Dancing around everything all of the time. Running away the second I get uncomfortable. It's all a work in progress."
Steve's eyebrows furrow in confusion. Nancy keeps talking.
"I've been trying to figure out if I had a dream for what the future looked like, what would it be? Not what it's supposed to be, but what would make me happy? I miss you. I miss talking to you. I think about you all the time. I'm torturing Robin because I won't stop asking questions about you. And I know this is the last thing you need to hear from me, I know I'm four years too late, I know you've moved on."
"Nance—"
"Hang on, just let me say it, and I'm done, okay? When I see the future, I don't see six kids. I get motion sick on long road trips, as Robin can unfortunately attest. I can't even settle on the perfect paper, or what city I want to live in long-term, but I just…" Nancy swallows, finds the rest of her nerve. "You're always there. And I thought you should know. That's all."
Nancy can't quite look at him as she finishes, her temporary burst of bravery leaving her. She's never been skilled at hard conversations, never been prepared for their wake, and she's not prepared now either. She closes her eyes, shakes her head in the flush of embarrassment.
"You don't have to say anything, I'm—"
Steve doesn't say anything. He just kisses her instead. Her response is immediate, her hands sliding upwards to reach his hair as she arches up on her toes. He's smiling widely against her lips when they part. Nancy grins back, unable to help it, forehead pressed up against his.
She doesn't get her heart broken, as it turns out.