Chapter Text
In the end, Nancy didn’t even have to do anything.
It came out when she was in her second year of college. Every major newspaper was reporting on another illegal CIA operative experimenting on humans even after MK-Ultra was supposedly shut down, starting from as early as when that first report came out in the mid-’70s. God bless the free press. The Washington Post was the one who first broke the story– because of course it was, Nancy had rolled her eyes then– but it never specified any details, no mention of Hawkins, the Upside Down, or the lab, just some names of officials she’d never even heard of and the bombshell that the victims were probably children. From context clues, Nancy could deduce Project Nina was the crux of the story, but they never managed to find out who the victims were or what the objective was.
There was even a louder outcry this time, so loud that Nancy herself didn’t have to be. Another Congressional investigation, another call for action in government oversight, just months before Reagan was out of the White House. Nancy liked the idea that the entire thing gave him more than a migraine and a half even if he wasn’t directly responsible for the project. People around her had been shocked but not surprised, speculating that there were probably similar operatives still out there. One of her friends theorized that the government was making superheroes to use in future wars, like Captain America and the X-Men, and that the comics were just a tool to assimilate people to the idea in advance. It was so outlandish, but also somehow right on the money, that Nancy still laughs to this day when she remembers it.
So that was that. She couldn’t do anything about Hawkins, couldn’t send an anonymous tip to anyone without putting all of them at risk again. She couldn’t do that, not when people like Max and El were just beginning to get their lives back. And without the cold hard evidence she got at the lab last time, there was nothing to water down. So much for taking down the man. The man- one, Nancy- zero.
Then again, another scandalous thing happened in the news not long after that, and people forgot about Project Nina, the way they forgot about the lost children posters on milk cartons and Barb.
It was and still is a microcosm of everything wrong about Nancy’s life that she never anticipated when she was young and dreamt big.
All throughout college, she wondered, what happened. Do people care anymore? Did they ever even care? Do they care about their neighbors? About the city, about the country? Do they care about what she has to say about the world? Did her words about reproductive rights in the Beacon mean anything? Did her report on the anti-apartheid protests? Or did people just read them with a hum and go back to their lives of going to the drive-in on the weekends and getting a co*ke with their morning sandwich? She never found the answers in the classes she went to and the people she spent time with.
Now she’s out in the real world and she’s ended up at the paper that she once had rolled her eyes at. The lemons life hands out are sometimes funny that way, and it turns out, the lemonade that comes out of them is bitter as f*ck.
She had a choice. New York or D.C. The Press or the Post. New and exciting or prestigious and institutional. Either way, she knew she couldn’t stay in Boston.
When she was younger, before Holly and before Mike was old enough to have opinions, her parents had asked her to pick between the beach and Disneyland for their summer vacation. Young and dumb and having just watched Jaws, Nancy picked the beach on a whim; built sandcastles, and buried her disinterested father in sand up to his neck as the sun shone down on Santa Monica. Then for years after that, she hated her own choice, wondering what it would have been like if she had just made a different choice. To make matters worse, Mike never let her live it down either, and it’s eaten away at her even until now.
D.C. was another impulsive choice. No other reason for it than wanting to do something meaningful and different.
“Just do what feels right, honey,” Mom encouraged her sweetly when she called.
“I guess that means no more politics talk at Thanksgiving,” Dad attempted a joke.
“Yeah,” Nancy had echoed Mom hollowly. “Follow my heart.”
And Jonathan was in New York, Mom had said conspiratorially, like she was doing Nancy a favor. She was, because that was enough for her to seal the deal and kiss the concrete jungle goodbye. For all he promised that they would still be friends, Jonathan disappeared off the face of the earth soon after their breakup and never reached out; never gave her a call or anything. Nancy never understood why, but she moved on too, because two can play that game; that doesn’t mean she wanted to risk running into him even in a city filled with millions of people.
She likes to think there is a reality in which she is now doing f*ck-know-what in New York. There’s a very real chance that she’d also be complaining about her life there too but in galleries instead of government institutions. Hanging around with pretentious artists instead of snobby politicians. Or maybe there’s another where she didn’t go to either, instead roaming around the country and putting all her experiences into writing like many others before her. Maybe she could’ve just met a Kennedy. There’s so much she didn’t do that she could’ve done.
D.C. is an electric city, she can’t deny it, always a thrum of energy in the air, whether it’s in the halls where the most important meetings in the country happen or the underground venues where bands like Fugazi scream against the very idea of government. There’s a push and pull in its aura that Nancy can’t help but gravitate towards, but it’s all a wash of greys and beiges and monochromatism when all’s said and done.
She’s lucky, people tell Nancy, to get an internship at the Washington Post right out of college, then get hired as a reporter after that, but this is also the paper that hired Sally Quinn in the first place– as good as she turned out to be– so how lucky is she really?
For her first year there, she was known around the newsroom as the girl from Hawkins. They knew her– not her name but her story– and bombarded her with questions about the lab and the earthquake and the unexplained killings. Nancy hadn’t realized that they even knew about Hawkins and its rural small-town problems that big-wits in the media only pretend to care about when there’s an election coming up. The earthquake itself was overshadowed by the disaster in Chernobyl a month later so nobody who’s worth their salt really cared to dig deeper. Her coworkers seemed confused that she didn’t seem to be too bothered with trying to uncover the truth either, and maybe they felt she was unworthy to be working there if she had that little interest in her own hometown. If they only knew, what she’s been through, what she’s done. Well, she’ll probably go to prison if that happens, but still. The looks on their faces would honestly be worth it. But the senior editor of the paper kept swinging for her, sent her to shadow the other reporters, and had her contribute to local beats. A fresh perspective, he called her. Nancy’s pretty sure he was trying to get in her pants though.
‘And Nancy Wheeler’, the bylines read for the first year she’s there. Not just Nancy Wheeler. And Nancy Wheeler. Is that all there is? Now that she’s become a real journalist at a real paper that real people read, is that all there is? Is her life now confined to a small space on Page whatever the design editor sticks her story to? Not the Style or Opinion section where people like Allen and Williams can eloquently wax poetic about the human condition under the guise of observation but tucked somewhere between the recent Commanders' wins and the weather forecast, reports that depreciate in value the moment they go into print.
The way things are, she’s never becoming a managing editor, much less the editor-in-chief, of anything anytime soon, unless she starts her own paper now and gives herself the position. Maybe she’s being over-ambitious, over-eager. Maybe her time will come. At least they’re not relegating her to covering topics lesser than her. That’s how her mom placates her when she calls, what her boyfriend gently points out when she complains, and they’re right. It makes Nancy want to scream but they’re right. Stick it out, her seniors say. Here, fortune doesn’t favor the bold, but the patient, the ones who put the work in and keep their heads down until the opportunity presents itself. They’re right too of course, and her moment does come. In the form of a tedious exercise in endurance.
She’s been given the opportunity to work solo on an ongoing story about the Clinton campaign, something she felt she couldn’t refuse because it is her first major story. It also turns out to be incredibly boring, and Nancy even feels guilty for thinking so sometimes.
They wouldn’t send her to Los Angeles to cover the riots. They wouldn’t let her write about education reform in the city. They’ve kept her in this cage, and it’s her job to sift through the inner workings of the political heartbeat of the nation, but anyone with half a brain and eyes knows it’s a fool’s errand. There’s probably layers upon layers of corruption, in forms she’s not even aware of, all through these hallowed spaces. A little insider trading here, a little lobbying there, and the system is working exactly as it was designed and it’s f*cking everyone else over in the process. A little skepticism is crucial, her professor had said. Too much, you risk paralysis by analysis and get nowhere. If you have none, you should just go into public service because they need naïve people like you. Everything in moderation, and there’s no breathalyzer to measure cynicism that she knows of. She set out to change the world when she left Hawkins behind, but now she’s meeting with different factions of the DNC every day to get an accurate representation of their fundraising efforts, all important stuff but she finds no real excitement in any of it.
It’s a good thing, they say. She’s doing good work, focusing on the details that others tend to overlook, holding the man accountable. Somebody has to. So f*ck it. If she has to report on the finances of a presidential campaign, she’s going to make sure it’s the most airtight, no-nonsense report there ever was. Plus, this is the guy whose campaign is running on the economy, stupid. There needs to be scrutiny there. If she can’t take down the man– the metaphorical man that covers the infinite other metaphorical men– she’s going to at least hit him where he hurts, even if it means being out of where the action truly is. Even if it means letting go of other interesting ideas. Even if it means wearing stupid blazers and matching pencil skirts.
Her nails are a hue of pink so pale it practically blends in with the beds underneath the polish. None of that hot fuchsia she used to wear in college. Her hair is a modest bob now, set in place with hair pins and sprays she thought she’d left behind in her teenage years. The one tattoo she has, of a can of beer on her ribcage, is covered up by the blazer and the dress shirt underneath. It’s strictly professional now with Nancy Wheeler, and it is a bottomless pit of despair. The rebellious streak in her has no place in this town, she’s discovered, and one wrong accessory can sink her credibility around here.
A f*cking dog on a leash, that’s what she is. Not some big-shot investigative journalist that brings hardline politicians to their knees with the power of her pen. A demure dog who only does what it’s told and doesn’t dare stray from it because there is just too much on the line to be truly free. The economy and the security and the f*cking ambition of it all. What does that make her? Some sort of lower 'h' hypocrite. For all her desires to be independent, she bows her head in the face of just the slightest notion of respect and validation.
Today has been particularly dark in the pit, where everything she does feels meaningless, more than usual. The public trust in the institutions is at an all-time low, and nobody outside of politics she talks to seems to be particularly enthused about anything substantial. There has to still be a hole in the ozone layer, even if people aren’t really talking about it anymore. It seems like the world is heading steadily to its own demise, even without the influence of bloodthirsty monsters from another dimension. And they have no one to blame but themselves. So what’s the point? One day, all of them are not going to be there anymore; no more presidents, no more constituents, no more nation under God. So why even try?
f*ck, she’s turning into one of them, she realizes as she walks down the street to her next meeting– the ones who don’t care. The ones trapped in their bubbles and wouldn’t dare peeking through to the other side. The idea is so terrifying she can feel it trying to escape her empty stomach as it turns. That’s not happening, she tells herself as her high heels clack on the pavement as she walks. She cares; half her problems have arisen from her caring too much. She could easily ask her editor to take her off the story and she’s positive he would. There’s a reason she’s still doing this, day in and day out, there has to be.Maybe she cares too much that it comes back around to not caring at all sometimes.
Nancy strides into the restaurant where the meeting is and maybe she was just hungry because her stomach growls in anticipation as she talks to the hostess about her reservation. It’s been a busy morning.
Mind swimming with questions and notes and the idea of a good steak, she starts heading to her table but soon stops in her tracks when she catches sight of a familiar face in the sea of people in the big room. All her prep work escapes her mind like clouds dispersing, leaving only snapshots of him, soft around the edges and rosy-tinted. She feels her stomach drop and her heart races for the first time in what feels like forever.
A sleek elegant steakhouse in the heart of D.C., where the politicians come during recess and more than a few businessmen join too, greasing each other’s palms while cutting open a juicy steak that bleeds red and drinking wine that stains their teeth the very same shade, is the last place she expects to see Steve Harrington.
But it’s him. Sitting there, next to an older man whom she recalls vaguely from family photos around his house and another man that she’s never seen before. He looks stiff and bored with a faraway look in his eyes, only nodding absently as he twirls the wine glass in his hand. He doesn’t see her. She closes her eyes and opens them again.
f*cking Steve.
He’s in a suit that blends in with all the other suits in the room for how unremarkable it is, grey and oppressive. She can make out a pop of color in the deep blue tie, but otherwise, Steve looks like he went to the department store and asked for an ensemble of cement. His hair is cut shorter with no Farrah Fawcett affectation in sight. Gone is the height and volume and what’s left now is a pale imitation of the greatness it used to be.
It honestly reminds Nancy of their first summer together, before he decided to grow it out, the memories fuzzy and grainy, superimposed on top of each other. It plays out in gorgeous Technicolor, bubbles and popcorns and sunshine and laughter. The knowing playful looks and the cutesy The innocence that’s no more than a faded artifact in herself.
Nancy lets out an exhale.
She has a choice to make, she realizes. And it’s just as important as New York or D.C., Disneyland or the beach, in her mind. Does she approach him or does she go about her day and forget about this until she isn’t sure if it ever even happened? Whatever she chooses, is she going to regret it for the rest of her life, just like countless other decisions she's made before? When your life is just one choice after another, does it even matter anymore what she chooses now?
Before she can talk herself out of it, she finds herself walking over to their table, the background chatter of the restaurant fading away while she formulates the best opening zinger in her mind. Her vision zeroes in on Steve and Steve only and she sees clearly the moment he notices her.
That look of pure surprise, she’ll never forget, the way his face literally shifts from the emotionless tenor of a slightly bored businessman into something unexpected, something to care about, something f*cking real. If he wasn’t before, he’s certainly present now, blinking profusely like he needs to reboot his eyesight to believe it, and Nancy quietly revels in the way she still holds so much power over him, these many years later.
“Hey, Steve.” The words come out just shy of being breathy, halfway to surprise herself. So much for zingers. It’s so cliché but she can’t help it when her skin is buzzing with adrenaline and she feels like she’s downed ten cups of coffee. “Long time no see.”
“Nancy! Oh my god, it’s been ages– what– what’re you doing here?” It could be sweet, the way he stumbles in his words, and it could be funny, the way his eyes are wide like saucers. She smiles at him, real and warm. It is nice to see a familiar face again.
“I live here now– I’m a journalist at the Post… I’m actually here for an interview.”
“The Post?” Steve’s father interjects with a disdainful laugh before Steve can respond, and the other man at the table looks away and hides his face behind his wine. He wants no part of this conversation. “Pravda with a side of Beltway bias, huh?”
“What about you?” Nancy asks Steve directly, brushing off the older man’s comment with a flutter of her eyes. His eyes quickly dart sideways to his father but he looks back at Nancy at her question.
“We’re here on business… celebrating a deal.” He looks dazed, like he’s wrapping his mind around her still. “How– how long has it been since–?”
“Five years? Maybe more?” She feels warm all over, suddenly self-conscious of how she looks, but her practiced smile stays on her face.
Steve lets out a huff like he can’t believe it and looks up at Nancy with those eyes. Those wide searching beautiful eyes. “Feels like a lifetime.”
“Yeah.”
“What’s happening?” Mr. Harrington chimes in again, impatience apparent in his voice. “We’re kind of in the middle of something here.”
“We went to the same high school, Dad, you know Nancy,” Steve explains, eyes darting between her and him, apologetic.
“Oh yeah, yeah,” Mr. Harrington says a little too late, and Nancy knows he has no idea who she is. Steve knows too, and his eyes flicker downwards for a moment before his hand goes for his wine. He takes another sip and shrinks into himself. His movements are slightly robotic, and it makes Nancy’s skin crawl, the silent power the older man has over Steve.
“You know what? We should catch up later,” Nancy makes him look at her again. “There’s a café just around the corner here. I’ll be free after 4.”
“Sure, Steve’ll be there. We’re done with work for the day, I’m going back to the hotel after this,” Mr. Harrington answers for Steve, and Nancy catches the tiniest of frowns on Steve’s face before he nods in agreement, a grateful smile stretched across his face.
“Great, I’ll see you then!” Nancy gives Steve one last smile before addressing the other two. “Nice to see you, Mr. Harrington. Sir.”
“Nice girl,” she hears the father say as she walks away from their table, and the son’s mumbling agreement, and she holds back the lump in her throat as best as she can. She doesn’t look back.
As fate would have it, the guy from the DNC is already sitting at their table when she reaches it, and his polite smile does nothing to cover the annoyance written all over his face. She would feel guilty, but she’s also extremely hungry and trudging through this sh*t same as him so he can deal with it. She greets him with the most neutral expression she can muster and hopes he’s not too much of a narc to report her to her seniors.
“Hi, I’m Nancy Wheeler from the Washington Post, thanks for seeing me again. Sorry about that– I just saw someone I used to know.”
She ends up ordering lunch for herself too in the end– she is willing to bend the rules sometimes– and doesn’t think about Steve for the rest of the meal. She curses herself when she finds that the steak does fill up some of that emptiness she’s been feeling; she really needs to start eating food at appropriate intervals.
The interview goes fine.
The coffee shop is on the right side of busy when Nancy finally walks in the door, and she finds Steve there already. He’s apparently punctual now. Wide-eyed and bushy-tailed interns rush in and out around her, handling various containers of coffee in their hands. It’s a neutral place, noisy enough that it’s not intimate, quiet enough that it’s not a pain in the ass just to have a conversation.
Steve looks wildly different without his suit jacket and his shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows that it’s like she’s seeing him for the first time again, her breath stopping short at the sight. He looks handsome, that’s the only way she can put it. Like he always has been. His hair is messier too, free of product, shades of that familiar boy she used to know finally returning in waves. He looks more confident when he’s alone and not flanked by two men decades his senior.
Something aches inside her at the sight of him, and she realizes belatedly that it’s probably her heart. It’s admittedly terrible timing, but nice to know that she still has one though. She was beginning to wonder. It strikes her that she really hasn’t seen him in five whole years, and that suddenly feels so wrong. An improbable thing that has come to pass.
The air crackles with anticipation when she sits across from him and sends him a shy smile. Steve has ordered for her already and Nancy’s heart skips a treacherous beat when she sees that he still remembers how she likes her coffee, milky pale and bittersweet.
Up close, she can smell him, and there’s no trace of the old vanilla scent he used to douse himself in. Oh, no. It seems that Steve is all professional too, with a sharp musky cologne that better suits someone who probably should start thinking about getting a vasectomy. It’s all so hilariously depressing she’d laugh if she could manage it. She almost makes a quip about how they’re masquerading as adults before she realizes that they are, adults. With a capital A. With jobs, and careers, and their parents’ unhappiness that now lives inside them like a pathogen. It’s in Steve too somewhere, she can sniff this sh*t out like a bloodhound at this point.
“You look like a distinguished gentleman,” She settles on saying, easy and teasing, and Steve chuckles sheepishly. It’s a beautiful sound even if it is tight around the edges.
“I look like a f*cking Brooks Brothers salesman.”
“Hm, well then I’m the lead associate at Ann Taylor.”
“You look great.” He sounds so sincere, giving her a wide toothy grin. “Hi.”
Nancy lets the compliment wash over her like water lapping at the shore and takes a deliberate sip of her coffee. “Hi. You still remember how I like my coffee.”
“Of course I do.”
A pleasant blush creeps on Nancy’s cheeks.
They talk about mundane things; the city, the food, that one video that she keeps seeing every time she turns on MTV. Nancy quickly shuts Steve down when he asks about her work; she might actually barf if she has to think about the election right now. Steve works at his father’s company in Bloomington now, also securing a position right out of college with the perfect combination of charm, expertise, and nepotism. He doesn’t look particularly exuberant about his job either, and they drop the subject completely when he looks uncomfortable at the mention of his father, even though the blood in Nancy’s veins sings with validation.
For the first time in Nancy’s memory, their conversation doesn’t revolve around the end of the world, even though she feels like it’s going to, and it’s just nice. They don’t talk about the past, despite never agreeing beforehand that they wouldn’t. It’s been five years, but it doesn’t feel like it right now, and it’s messing with the part of Nancy’s brain that was so scared all that time ago. She drums her fingers on the table as they chat about their college years, cataloging all the ways he is different now.
Steve has changed. He looks older, more experienced, but there’s still that boyish charm in him beneath the businessman front. The arrogance that used to run through him in streaks is nowhere to be found, instead replaced by a certain meekness she’s never seen in him before. She knows how little of a presence Steve’s father has been in his life, but it seems like they’re on better terms now, and that relationship brought about changes in Steve’s personality too. He also seems entirely calm about the state of the world; maybe it is easier to be optimistic when you're making good business even in a recession and doesn’t have to worry about some nosy journalist following a scent trail right to Hawkins. When your past sins have been absolved.
Nancy has changed too. She’s too older and more experienced, but it feels more like she’s worn down by the world rather than grown into it. Nancy wonders how Steve sees her now, if she’s still the Nancy from Hawkins to him, even though she can’t even reconcile that version of her to who she is now anymore.
As if Steve can read her mind, he laughs and shakes his head after she finishes a story about tracing a local cluster of food poisoning back to a single fisherman by tracking down the fish used in various dishes across the district back in college.
“Look at you.” His eyes sparkle with playful mischief as he rests his chin in his hand, leaning across the table. His eyes are fond under the amusem*nt. “Still the same ole’ Nancy Wheeler.”
The color returns to Nancy’s cheeks and the words tear open at her flesh.
“What do you mean?”
“I know you’re a big-time journalist now and everything, but underneath the tough exterior, you’re still the girl I knew, smart as f*ck, compassionate, brave. They’re lucky to have you.”
Nancy lets out a shaky laugh. Steve may never know just how wrong he is, but at this moment, she can’t do anything but giggle, a helpless high-pitched sound, because he is still so sweet and his eyes still crinkle when he smiles. She doesn’t ridicule him for pulling that out of a ten-minute conversation or say he’s wrong. She lets him believe it, just like she lets herself believe that Steve hasn’t changed either.
She wants to just stay here forever, because outside of this coffee shop, the world is a pile of scorching hot mess, something she can’t fix. Here, she can listen to the sound of Steve’s laugh and forget about everything else in the world. Here, they can just be two friends, catching up after a long time apart, and it doesn’t have to mean anything. Not more than everything else does anyway.
After a while, the conversation loses steam, but they just sit there together, totally comfortable in the quiet. There is something so powerful in the silence; you really don’t know what someone means to you until you can just be silent together and be content with it.
But it doesn’t last forever, because Steve gets this look in his eyes. That happy-sad wide-eyed look that she’s oh so familiar with. The one that still manages to flip the contents of her stomach upside down. She braces for impact and she gets it when she feels his hand reach across the table and gently places it on hers. It’s just barely there, but she feels the enormous weight of it all the same.
“I missed you, you know.”
She looks down at where the contact is and smiles.
“I missed you too.”
She doesn’t apologize for not keeping in touch, but she lets herself be truthful. She has missed Steve, tucked him away in the back of her mind, but there were moments when he peeked through. Even when she was with Jonathan, the littlest things would remind her of Steve, like the way he would run his hand through her hair the exact same way, and she would feel like the worst girlfriend in the world. Only when she starts seeing Jonathan in her current boyfriend as well, does she realize that this is just her reality now, and that she can’t just leave the past behind no matter how hard she tries.
She should have known it wouldn’t last long, the peace.
It’s almost too much.
The way he’s looking at her like she’s still the most beautiful thing in the world, the way he used to back then.
“Nance,” and it’s too soft, too familiar, too nailed into the long-forgotten chamber of her heart that she has to look down at her coffee and take a deep breath. She bites her lip hard enough that it stings but doesn’t draw blood, fighting back the queasy feeling from before. It’s a move she has done since she entered her first newsroom, way back in Hawkins.
Nobody calls her that anymore. Not the way Steve does, like she’s the reason for sunshine and rainbows and everything good in the world.
“Steve,” she begins but she has no idea what to say. She bites her lip again. Sometimes the skin does break and give way to blood, but this isn’t one of those times.
It’s just Steve, she tells herself.
Steve, who asked her out with a shyness that contradicted his reputation even at fifteen.
Steve, who loved her so much it made him stupid sometimes.
Steve, whose heart she broke years ago, but who stuck around still, hovering around her and jumping in whenever things got messy.
f*cking Steve, who told her with the utmost amount of earnestness that he wanted six kids and made her even entertain the idea of it for more than five seconds.
The memories may be hazy but some things are forever. People tell her, you never forget your first– crush, love, f*ck, whatever. And Steve is all of those things rolled into one wonderfully infuriating human being. She still remembers how she felt to have Steve look her way in class. And she doesn’t just never forget her first f*ck. She has nightmares about it still. Of wet dripping blood on her hands and her soaked shirt, and the echoing scream of a girl’s life cut short. She certainly has never left behind those proclamations of love that seemed so sure but then quickly crumbled into nothing– in whatever meaning of the word a 16-year-old suburban teenage girl like her forged from song lyrics and movie quotes.
This conversation suddenly feels like a very bad idea.
When she doesn’t say anything beyond his name, Steve’s gaze flickers to his hands for a second but when he looks back at her, it’s no longer with the adoration from before. He looks conflicted for the first time since sitting down, and Nancy can’t think of anything except the lingering reminder of a kiss on the underside of her wrist from this morning, where Steve’s fingers are still brushing over.
“I have a boyfriend,” Nancy blurts out quietly.
A wide range of emotions flicker across Steve’s face in one singular second– confusion, pain, offense and he pulls his hand away. The background noise in the second before Steve responds is deafening.
“I’m not trying– Nancy, I’m just–” His words tumble out in quick succession, each one more tinged with discomfort than the last.
“I know… it’s not– sh*t, sorry.” Nancy rubs her face with her hands. “I don’t know why I said that.”
“I’m not trying to make a move or anything. I just– it’s just surreal to see you again.”
“I know.”
Nancy clicks her jaw, mad at herself. They had a good thing going, but now Steve looks like a kicked puppy and it’s her fault.
“I will always love you, you know that,” Steve states plainly, the words her subconscious has been f*cking dreading for years now. They hit like a ten-ton truck and they hurt like being stabbed with a thousand daggers at once. The way he’s so casual about it. “I’ve always–”
“You can’t, Steve,” Nancy interrupts, voice desperate and harsh. How dare Steve do this to her? After everything they’ve been through, after how much she’s hurt him, he can’t possibly still love her, when she’s done her part to move on and forget. “You can’t love me. I’ve told you, we’re not right for each other. And f*ck– with everything that’s happened, even if we’re both single, nothing’s happening. I’ve used up so much of my time trying to move on.”
“And I don’t love you, anymore,” Nancy says conclusively, complete with a nonchalant shrug, like that’s the ultimate hammer, and watches Steve’s face change with a sick knot in her throat. “So– yeah– you can’t love me.”
“Please, Nance– just hear me out.” Steve puts both his hands on the table and appeals to her, eyes pleading. He has never looked more pitiful.
Nancy presses her lips together firmly.
Steve clasps his hands together and sighs, so open in his facial expressions it's scary. “I know… that nothing can happen between us now. You don’t love me anymore, that’s okay. I’ve come to terms with that. It doesn’t change the fact that you’re still one of the most incredible people I know… and I will always love the person you are on a fundamental level. It’s– it’s not even necessarily romantic. I just have a great deal of admiration and affection for you, and however you want to accept it, that’s your prerogative. But I’ve gone years without seeing you and I’ve only just realized how much you still mean to me.”
Again, he is so sweet, and the words still hurt. She has never seen herself the way Steve has, even back then, and especially not now. She cares so deeply for him but she can't bring herself to soften the truth with a white lie.
“You mean a lot to me too, you know, I care so much about you,” Nancy says through a weak laugh, pushing back the well of emotions that spring inside her. This is exactly what she has been afraid of, this never-ending thread of affection that will follow her to the grave. “But you can’t– you can’t keep holding onto me. I’ve moved on, you should try to too.”
“No, I have.” Steve looks up at her under his lashes, a small self-deprecating smile playing on his lips. “Like I said, it’s just a bit overwhelming, seeing you now. I never thought I’d see you again.”
Nancy doesn’t bother pressing him on it.
“I’m sorry.”
“No. I understand.”
Steve doesn’t ask any questions about her boyfriend. She doesn’t tell him.
“Do… you have a girlfriend?” Nancy can’t take it back once she asks, and she scratches at the skin where the sleeve of her blazer ends, half-dreading whatever the answer may be.
“No– no, I don’t.” Steve crosses his arms and pulls an embarrassed face, but he looks more tickled than anything. “I’m apparently… too ‘emotionally unavailable’ for one.”
Nancy’s eyebrows shoot up in genuine surprise. “What, did an ex say that to you or something?”
“Psych major. I might’ve been her first patient.”
“Oh, wow.”
“Yeah. It didn’t last long.”
Nancy opens the palm of her extended hand on the table in an invitation but Steve doesn’t take it, instead fixing her with a contemplative look. Somewhere inside her, Nancy feels like a little girl that has disappointed her parents.
“Do you… do you think we ever had a chance? If things had been different?”
“I don’t know, Steve,” Nancy replies honestly, retracting the hand and tucking her hair behind her ears.
Steve sets his mouth into a thin line and nods. “I don’t either.”
The words hang heavy in the air for a moment before Steve seems to remember something and licks his lips, a tiny smile creeping on his face.
“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”
Nancy blinks twice. Jesus. Then snorts at the self-seriousness of it all. Steve returns her amusem*nt, looking pleased with himself that he can get Nancy to laugh even now.
“What the f*ck was that?!”
“Seneca. I did read some books in college, you know.”
They exchange a look then they dissolve into a fit of giggles, the transgressions forgotten already. It is so f*cking easy when they want it to be.
“You’re an idiot, Steve Harrington.”
“Hey, I’m a stoic idiot, that’s gotta count for something.”
Nancy rolls her eyes fondly and Steve has his signature goofy grin on his face.
But then reality sets in again when Steve checks his watch and tells her he should probably get back to the hotel for dinner. “I’m going back home the day after tomorrow. Give me a call sometimes.” It’s a genuine attempt at connection, with Steve taking a card from his pocket and writing down his number with Nancy’s pen.
“Okay.”
Nancy doesn’t give him her number, but Steve doesn’t seem to be offended by it. She thought there’d be some relief there after the conversation. Clarity. Closure. But she just feels so… sad.
The card is a standard business card, with an embossment that bears their family name and the contact number, but Steve has written his personal phone number right over it, blue ink seeping into the white background like inverse clouds across a vacuum sky. It brings her back to when he shyly asked for her number and she wrote it down neatly in the corner of his notes for English class. Her heart aches again.
When they’re outside, they stand in front of the door for a moment, just looking at each other and not saying anything. Steve looks light and happy, the opposite of what Nancy is feeling inside. When Nancy puts her arms out, Steve pulls her into a tight hug, and it makes her breathe out a little laugh even as her insides are screaming to cry. It’s the embrace of an old friend, a former lover, and a stranger all in one, and Nancy dissolves into it, lets herself live in that old–new– reality for five seconds. She feels warm all the way inside her bones; Steve’s always known how to give good hugs. There is a phantom of a kiss in her hair and she lets it happen, smiling into Steve’s shirt.
“Don’t be a stranger,” Steve tells her after they let go, and she looks up into those brown eyes and already knows that she is going to be disappointing him.
Then she turns around and leaves. The chill of the city overtakes the lingering warmth of Steve’s hold and she rushes to escape it, not ever looking back.
Nancy’s boyfriend is waiting for her when she steps into the apartment. He smiles at her, asks her how her day went before pressing a soft kiss against her lips that doesn’t even come close to the softness with which Steve uttered her name. Still, she melts, a grin pulling at her as she kisses back, swaying a bit on her feet as she does so.
He will do very well, her mom had said, when she introduced him to her for the first time.
And Nancy agrees– he is doing very well, the Woodward to her Bernstein, the vanilla to her chocolate, the sensible to her imprudent – and she might even marry him if she was a different person.
She met him at a networking event, when she still held onto the last bit of her blind optimism that everything would be fine in the world. He swept her feet away with his dazzling smile and stupid jokes, and she ignored all the alarms in her head that screamed at her to wait, wait before she threw herself into something new this quickly after moving here. But he was handsome and had connections and didn’t ask questions about her past, only about her future, and now a little less than two years later, they share a space and a life together.
He’s nice because he’s in a position to be. He has a subtle air about him that thinks he’s the smartest man in the room, only he is often right. He sometimes makes off-color comments about issues that he’s in no place of understanding. A political analyst for a father and a high school teacher for a mother. A degree from Yale. It’s a well-tread path, a formula everyone knows already. Nancy can’t imagine that he would be anything other than this– this man who is far too confident in himself and thinks he’s won in life because he has no reason to think otherwise.
But he also introduces her to the merits of classic cinema, shows her The Big Sleep and Seven Samurai on the AMC channel, and he listens to her go on and on about the bullsh*t she has to deal with at the offices without interruption, and he doesn’t treat her like she’s someone he needs to protect.
He’s a million miles apart from Jonathan and fathoms away from Steve in the ways she remembers them both. His eyes are a blue that she’s never seen, flitting between frosted sky and tropical steel depending on how you look at it. It’s both transfixing and annoying. Blue is the rarest color in nature, and it takes Nancy’s breath away that one of its most beautiful shades should live in this man’s eyes.
When she tells him she met an old friend today, he only questions if she had fun. She tells him about Steve over dinner, how surreal it is to meet someone from her past, the uneasiness blending with the delight. That unexplainable feeling of melancholy. She leaves out the part where Steve’s the first boy she’s ever loved.
He tells her softly, playing with her fingers as he often does, that it’s always difficult when seeing someone from your past. That it’s part of the human experience, and that the beauty lies in being able to recognize how you’ve changed since that time in your life. That there’s no use in ruminating on what was already done, that you just have to look at the horizon and beyond. It’s strange stuff coming from someone whose job is literally predicting the future by analyzing the past, but he sounds like he has experience on the matter, measured and assuring. His words ride the thin line between comforting and patronizing, and Nancy cuts into her roast beef to find no blood there.
Some days, when she’s alone, she lies on the living room floor of their shared apartment, presses herself against the cool wooden flooring so flat she can almost imagine becoming one with it, like if she stays there long enough, she’ll just sink into the floor, disappearing. In her mind, she sees the open road, a glimpse of the Grand Canyon, the kind of escape she used to dream about. She imagines running away from it all and off-roading into oblivion. She imagines driving over the cliff like in Thelma and Louise.
Then she remembers that someone’s daughter is dead.
She stopped going to the therapist Owens assigned to her after she realized there was probably a classified dossier on her that was being used as intelligence for another nefarious shady purpose somewhere. She thinks about the fact that her name probably lives in the files of the national archives somewhere, and will outlive her when it comes to it. There’s some semblance of cold comfort in that; her name is forever imprinted in the history of the country somewhere, even if it’s not in the way she wants it to be.
The antidepressants she’s on make it so that she doesn’t cry as often– she doesn’t know if she’s grateful for it. She deals with the occasional numbness in other ways. When she was single in college, it was throwing herself into the assignments and the parties; the work and the fun; the hookups that soon led to intense relationships. Flooding her system with oxytocin and endorphins in hopes of boosting her serotonin levels. It never worked. Now it’s sitting by herself in the bathtub until her fingers prune, while her oblivious boyfriend does the daily crossword in the other room.
Once she found herself vigorously cleaning the place, mopping every floor, and dusting every corner, for no apparent reason at all, and she had called Mom in a panic. When Nancy told her how she was losing her mind over nothing, She was only amused and declared that Nancy was a real adult now that she’d started stress-cleaning. Nancy had never hung up on someone that fast, the stench of bleach still fresh in her nostrils. It’s a terrifying thing, feeling like you grew up too fast but you also haven’t really grown up at all, in ways that actually matter.
She knows how to handle a gun with more efficiency than all the gun-lobbying politicians she encounters, but she doesn’t know how to express her own emotions properly so they don’t spill out like entrails from the gutted carcass of her almost lifeless body at the worst times, raw and uncomfortable.
She doesn’t have a lot of friends these days, and none she’s close enough to that she would tell them all her darkest secrets. She’s accepted the fact that she’ll never have someone like Barb again in her life.
It is because of Barb, the therapist told her once, like many other issues she has now. Nancy left Robin behind after everything too, couldn’t fathom the idea of getting too close to her because she feared losing her like she did Barb. It’s a coping mechanism, he said. Avoidance. Her heart and brain were now working together to prevent that kind of catastrophic loss from ever happening again, even if that meant letting opportunities at genuine connections slip through her fingers. Even if it’s irrational. And she’s done absolutely nothing to fix it. She doesn’t think she ever could. She doesn’t think she ever wants to.
Even after she realized in college that she likes eating puss* as much as getting f*cked by a co*ck, she managed to mess up her first real relationship with a woman, who told her she was a coward to her face. She was a flurry of action, beautiful and infuriating and funny. They went to parties together. They came face to face with cops at marches together. They argued about Ayn Rand together. But in the end, it was Nancy’s guarded fortress that ultimately ruined it for both of them. You always do this, her girlfriend had said with the casual cruelty of a woman who knows she’s right– Nancy herself has been in that position before– one night after Nancy brushed off her attempts to soothe her after a bad dream yet again because no one can know. Push people away when they’re just trying to be here for you. I can’t be with someone who won’t even be honest with themselves.
And then she left her for a volunteering opportunity in Guatemala so Nancy didn’t even get to be angry.
Now her boyfriend is clueless, but he tries, or at least she thinks he does. At this point, she’s just waiting for him to get sick of her too, or find someone new, someone who doesn’t stare off into the distance on dates and get lost in her head. Someone who doesn’t run from the comfort that he wants to give.
She holds him close when they’re in bed, maps the features on his face like a reminder– out of guilt or defiance, she doesn’t know– as he pushes into her as lovers do, closes her eyes, and lets the pleasure take over her when she comes. She doesn’t think about her first time or Barb (or Steve for that matter), only the grounding hold her boyfriend has on her hips and the bruising kiss he crashes their lips together for. He always gets a bit rougher near the end, a firm clutch of his hand on her jaw like he can’t contain himself anymore, and it shouldn’t turn her on as much as it does. She stays quiet when he gently wipes away the sweat on her face after throwing away the condom, doesn’t dare open her mouth. She sighs in satisfaction when he gathers her in his arms and mouths a goodnight into the dip of her neck, but she doesn’t whisper it back, doesn’t trust the tremor that will be in her voice, just shuts her eyes.
It’s a true betrayal to herself when her brain decides to replay the moment Steve’s eyes lit up in surprise when he saw her, how unfathomably young he seemed in that moment like they were back in freshman year and all they cared about was kissing between classes. It feels like a thousand lifetimes and months away at the same time. Maybe some part of her has never grown up from that girl, and she’s forever condemned to be trapped in her youth. She feels a surge of something in her belly, moths rather than butterflies, and she turns in her boyfriend’s hold, pressing up against his chest just to be grounded in this moment.
“Hey,” Nancy says into the darkness, feeling his steady breath against her neck. “I love you.”
Her boyfriend hums, soft and sleepy, and holds her tighter, doesn't even question it. “Love you too, Nancy.”
She falls asleep like that, cocooned in the safety of a boyfriend who can never grasp the full extent of the woman she is, and therefore is unable to love her the way she needs him to, but it’s not his fault. Nobody should bear that weight of knowledge, certainly not him, whose only sin has been asking her out to dinner and being so sure that she would say yes.
The business card stays in her purse for a week before she gets the strength to face it.
In the twilight moments of the morning one day, she stirs and senses her boyfriend kiss her forehead goodbye because he has to be on air right as the first insane person wakes up and tunes into the news for his take on the day’s most pressing matters. He has said time and time again that politicians also wake up around the same time as him, but it only proves Nancy’s original point that all of them are crazy. And with the genuine enthusiasm in his eyes when he talks about Bush’s approval ratings, maybe her boyfriend is a little crazy too.
At a more sensible hour but still too early for her liking, she takes the business card and holds it in her hand, feeling the weight of it as she picks out her shirt for the day. She reads the print and the handwritten scrawl in tandem while having breakfast, letting the sharp corners dig into her palm. She sets it down when she has to take her medicine, putting it out of her sight and mind for a minute, and only focuses on getting the dosage right.
She gives it a lot of thought with the phone in her hand while she watches the sunlight stream through the window, filling the room with a warm glow.
She thinks about the relationships in her life. For the longest time, she thought her father was cheating on her mother– or the other way around. She’s lost countless hours of sleep wondering about it. But the boring reality was that he was just a disengaged man who couldn’t show affection for his family if he tried, and she was an unhappy wife that tried to fill the hole with shopping trips, lengthy conversations with friends, and routine mani-pedis. They love each other in ways Nancy doesn’t understand, in sickness and trouble, but in wellness, they might as well be strangers. They don’t fight over anything serious, because what was there to fight about when you don’t even communicate with each other, and there was just a distinct lack of warmth in their marriage that soon permeated through the family as well.
It’s in her now, that perpetual coldness that she can’t shake, an icicle lodged in her chest, the chill spreading through her veins and numbing her heart.
Before she left for college, they did a deep cleaning of the whole house, and Mom unearthed a box of old stuff from when she was younger that was just stuck in the storeroom, forgotten. And there were all these journals. Journals filled with accounts of her life before Nancy, musings and complaints and thoughts and questions, about the civil rights movement, about the Beatles and their stupid haircuts, about road trips stretching from one end of the country to the other. When Nancy asked her, why she never told her about them, Mom had only shrugged and replied, I didn’t think they were any good.
It was then that she felt this overwhelming sense of sadness wrenched out of her; the potential, of another version of her that could have been. When she looks at her boyfriend now, it’s the same question she has. Would she be letting go of a happier life if they do marry? What are the odds that they end up like their parents? What are the odds that things with Steve would end up this way too, if they never broke up? Realistically, it was two years of young teenage romance. The probability of them making it to the bitter end is probably lower than successfully starting a fire in wet sand.
She gives herself permission to think about Jonathan too. She thought they were doing so well, but that turned out to be a lie in the end. They were never going to last, even when they both convinced themselves of it. And everything that came out of that landed so flat when it all imploded. She had been both angry and relieved when he admitted to lying about Emerson, that she could end the relationship without the sole responsibility falling on her again. She knew even then that she could never understand him and all his baggage and let him go, even if it broke her heart to do so. It was the best decision she ever made in their relationship.
She had a very good few years where she was single and free to explore her identity and purpose, but then she had to go and get her heart broken by a lesbian who was so in tune with who she was that it scared the sh*t out of Nancy. It made her even more put off by intimacy again, but in the end, that seemed to have meant nothing because she went and found comfort in the first man who showed her kindness in this city.
Everything worked because she was able to compartmentalize and leave things behind– all the necessary losses in her life. She shed the person she was before Barb died, the day she picked up a gun. She shed the person from Hawkins once she got to Emerson, along with Steve and Jonathan, to grow as a person. She even learned to leave her naivete behind once she stepped foot into the Post newsroom, bits and pieces of herself dead and buried in the sand.
Now, Steve’s popped back into her life, threatening to dig up those parts and breathe life into them again with that smile of his. And is Nancy willing to let that happen? She considers her life again. The happiness she might siphon from Steve, will it be enough? Or will it still only fill her up halfway through, leaving her unmoored and unfulfilled again? Is it better for some other poor unlucky bastard to deal with her than someone she cares about?
Nancy knows deep down inside that if Steve knew the person she is today, he wouldn’t want to touch her with a ten-foot pole. He doesn’t know her, not really, even now. He doesn’t know about the cavities inside her, eroding away each day, from her own shortcomings to the world at large. And he can’t be infected by her, not when he looks so normal and well-adjusted. She will just continue to hurt him over and over again.
It can just be what it is, nothing more, Nancy decides. She had a great conversation with Steve, their friendship is still going strong, and she got to hug Steve again after years of being deprived of that specific comfort. The moment is all, and it is enough. One day, it’ll be nothing more than a beautiful memory, washed out in a rosy tint when she dissects it on her deathbed, delicate and fading. She is capable of hurting him one last time to save him from a lifetime of pain.
After a final moment of consideration, Nancy wads up the card as small as it can get and throws it in the trash along with the leftovers of her food.
