Archive of Our Own

In his defense, Steve does immediately realise that something’s wrong when he wakes up in Nancy’s pastel-purple bedroom.

He’s just a little foggy on the what.

‘A little foggy’ pretty accurately describes how he’s been feeling about everything for a while now, though. People are probably not supposed to get hit in the head more than three or four times in a row and then get shot full of truth serum or laughing gas or whateverthefuck within twenty-four hours. Or, like…at all. Honestly, when he thinks about it, it’s kind of a miracle he and Robin both survived. And that Steve’s still got all his teeth.

Thinking about it tends to make his head hurt, though, so he usually doesn’t for long.

This morning, thankfully, seems to be an exception to that rule so far. Thankfully, because Steve doesn’t have to remember how or why he got here to know that he’s absolutely not supposed to be here, and he’s going to need all his dubious ability to focus if he’s going to get out again without making things worse.

Joel Goodson’s looking down at him from Nancy’s Risky Business poster with what Steve can’t help thinking is a winking accusation in his eye, and Steve wants nothing more than to pull the covers over his head and disappear. Even when they were dating, they never did it at Nancy’s place, her mom was always so nosy, it was just too much of a risk. Not that Steve thinks anything happened, that’s absurd, they’ve been broken up for nearly nine months now and there’s no sound or warmth or weight of anybody else in this bed. And Nancy seems happily joined at the hip with Jonathan Byers these days, and Steve can’t even drink on these painkillers, and he wouldn’t do something like this to Nancy and Jonathan if he was sober. Even if Nancy’d ever agree to it, which is a pretty insurmountable if.

But it’s still early, and Steve’s just woken up, and he is drawing a total blank on any more-realistic reason why he’d be lying under this pretty floral comforter that smells sweetly of Love’s Fresh Lemon and shampoo and Nance –

Steve shifts, and freezes.

And, okay, yeah. He can think of one other reason why he might find himself inexplicably tucked into Nancy’s bed with a big black hole where his memory of how he got there should be. One other reason why his whole body might be feeling weird and wrong.

He got hurt again, didn’t he? Some more goddamn Upside Down bullshit came out of nowhere despite it barely having been a month and a half since they closed the last Gate, and it hit him in the head, again, and that’s why he’s got this weird almost-detached limbs-on-wrong feeling and can’t remember any of it. That’s why he’s curled up in Nancy’s bed all alone. Her house was probably closest. She’s probably waiting right outside the door with a first aid kit, ready to pounce.

The thought might almost be reassuring. Except that it doesn’t quite add up. For one thing, Steve’s actually not hurting. For once. He just feels kind of…there really is no other word for it than weird. And whatever this thing did to him, if it knocked him out and it was bad enough that Nancy got Jonathan to help haul Steve back to her house instead of just taking him home to sleep it off, but they didn’t take him to the hospital…it must’ve been something that would’ve been too hard to explain to a regular doctor.

And that thought makes Steve feel a little like he’s just stepped into the gym showers before they’ve had a chance to warm up.

But he’s gotta see. He’s gotta know what the damage is. Know just how big the lie he’s going to have to spin for his parents this time is gonna have to be. Steve takes a deep breath, bracing himself, and then, fast, like pulling off a bandaid, sits up straight in Nancy’s bed and throws off the covers.

Nancy’s mom bangs the door open before Steve’s even stopped screaming. “Nancy? What’s wrong? What’s going on?”

Steve looks Karen Wheeler dead in the eye, and thinks faster than he’s maybe ever thought before. “I – nightmare. I was – at the mall, and Barbara -”

Thankfully, Nancy’s mom hurries over to pull Steve into a hug before he has to come up with anything more to say. His cheek, though, is now mashed firmly against her chest, which is more than a little awkward.

Well. Not his cheek, exactly.

“Oh, sweetheart,” Nancy’s mom mutters into the top of Steve’s head – at least, it feels like his head, right now. “Oh, Nancy.”

Steve manages to shift enough to get a look down, at the pretty blue pyjamas he’s wearing, over the pretty little legs and the pretty little curves he’d admired in the school hallways long before he ever took a chance on asking their owner out. The pretty little hands he used to watch tapping pencils against frustrating chemistry problems, the pretty little hands he’d squeezed under the table during that one disastrous dinner with his parents. The pretty little hands that once held a gun in his face, while the pretty little voice that just lied to Nancy’s mom had told him to get lost.

Nancy’s hands. Nancy’s voice. Nancy’s legs, moving when Steve shifts. Nancy’s hair, tickling Steve’s nose.

Nancy’s body.

Oh, Nancy is right.

There’s one tiny bright spot, though, Steve thinks, as Nancy’s mom starts rocking gently from side to side and stroking a hand over his hair and he tries not to drop dead from mortification on the spot. If he’s here – somehow – then at least he knows Nancy must be there. At his house. Waking up in his body. With his permanent headache. And – oh, shit. And with his brand-new, hard-won job to get to.

Steve’s got to get over there. He’ll talk to Nancy, and she’ll – she’ll probably talk to Jonathan, honestly, but that’ll be okay so long as it means Jonathan knows what’s going on and doesn’t try to kiss Nancy’s body hello with Steve in it. And then Nancy and Jonathan will figure it out the way they always do. And they’ll drag Steve along for the ride via their weird network of siblings and mutual monster-fighting acquaintances, the way they always do. And everything will be fine.

Everything’s going to be fine.

…

Nancy’s getting a little more used to waking up to the smell of cigarettes.

Neither of her parents smoke. Her friends don’t either, except sometimes at parties, if somebody lets Stacey bum one or there’s a joint being passed around. The first time Nancy’d slept over at Jonathan’s, she’d dragged herself down the hall to the bathroom still half-asleep, caught a whiff of his mom lighting up a cigarette, and gone tearing back into Jonathan’s room to tell him something was on fire. In retrospect, not one of her more scintillating moments.

She’d never make that embarrassing a mistake now, not even half-asleep. Nancy’s woken up in Jonathan’s room with her face mashed into his scratchy sheets and her nose full of the sharp perfume of his cheap laundry detergent and the warm-bitter smell of his mom’s cigarettes enough times now to know instantly where she is.

There’s a quiet, steady sound, muffled slightly by the wall, coming from another room, Nancy thinks. For a moment she thinks it’s stifled laughter, before she realises. Somebody’s crying.

She shifts over in Jonathan’s bed carefully, trying not to make a sound. It’s bad enough trying to sneak out of Jonathan’s house on a regular morning, but now that there’s an extra kid in the house and everyone’s grieving and things are still sour from their fight – it’s weird, honestly, that she’s even here. Nancy certainly hadn’t planned on it. And, now that she’s thinking about it, she doesn’t really remember it, either. Although logic would suggest that she and Jonathan must have –

Nancy rolls her legs over the edge of the bed, sits up, and stops cold.

“Oh no,” she says.

But it’s not her voice that comes out.

…

Nancy doesn’t remember what excuse she gives Jonathan’s mom on her way out the door. The quest to get out silently and secretly and not disturb whoever was sobbing in the other room failed spectacularly the first time she misjudged the distance from her feet to the floor and nearly faceplanted into the stereo. Why is Jonathan so tall? Why does anybody need to have limbs this long?

Nancy thinks she’s finally starting to get the hang of piloting all of his gangling, though, by the time she collapses into the front seat of his beat-up jalopy. Driving is still a little interesting, although easier, surprisingly, than walking. Fewer opportunities to fall flat on her face. So long as she doesn’t think too hard about it, Nancy thinks, she’s doing all right.

She’s just starting to feel like herself – well. ‘Herself’ – again, when she pulls up outside her house. Just starting to feel like maybe she can spare a little concentration to start thinking about issues slightly bigger than where all of her limbs are and what they’re doing.

Which is when she realises that she’s not the only one parked outside her house.

“Steve?” she demands, as she marches across the lawn. It’s so thoroughly weird to hear her own words coming out in Jonathan’s warm voice, to see her own self standing on the step of her house, clutching her elbows like she’s cold. Her face, when it turns towards her, isn’t quite how Nancy remembers it from the mirror. It takes her a moment to realise it’s because it isn’t reversed, like it would be in a mirror. And she’s looking down at it.

She only spares her own face a second or two of shocked staring, though, before rounding on her ex-boyfriend again. There’s something – different about Steve. Maybe the fact that he doesn’t seem to have stopped to style his hair before coming to see her. Maybe just the expression on his face. “What are you doing here? It better be something important -”

Nancy realises that she must be making Jonathan look like a jealous fool at the exact same time as her own voice pipes up from beside her, atrociously high-pitched. Does she really sound like that? “Uh, Nance? Over here.”

Nancy looks back and forth between her own face and Steve’s for what she will admit is an embarrassingly long time before the penny drops.

“Steve!?” she demands, again, and gets to watch her own face squinch up into a grimace that Nancy knows a little better under a familiar brunette bouffant.

“Yeah. Don’t get mad at me, I had nothing to do with this.”

Nancy hasn’t had time to think about why she would be mad about this yet. She’s still processing. If Steve is in her body, and she’s in Jonathan’s –

“And for the record, I still think you’re cute when you’re…well. Me,” Steve’s voice says, out of Steve’s face, with a trademark slow, crooked smile that can only belong to –

“Jonathan?” Nancy asks. It’s a little less shocking – there’s really only one place he could be. And yet, somehow, she’s still shocked. “How did this happen? How do we get back?” She turns and points at Steve, a horrible thought striking her. “I want my body back in exactly the condition you found it.”

“Jesus, what do you think I’m gonna do with it, take it out for a spin at the demolition derby? In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m trapped inside it!” Steve tucks Nancy’s arms tighter around Nancy’s sides, shifting from one of Nancy’s feet to the other. “I haven’t even changed out of your pyjamas. In a couple minutes, though, I’m gonna have to pee, and I am really not looking forward to that.”

“Don’t even try to do it standing up,” Nancy warns him.

“At least you two have both already seen your new bodies naked,” Steve’s face says, still with that wry smile. Nancy has absolutely no idea how to describe what she’s feeling, looking at her ex and knowing it’s actually her current boyfriend in there. It is really not helping her stuff down that tiny voice that refuses to ever shut up about how, even if he did turn out to be kind of an insensitive jerk, Steve never stopped being nice to look at.

“At least you got familiar parts,” Nancy snaps, and then realises she wasn’t the only one who said it, or something like it. Steve raises both of her eyebrows at her, but thankfully doesn’t follow up on that train of thought.

“Speaking of,” he says, instead. “Jonathan, man, I’m giving you free rein, okay? Do what you gotta do, treat my body like your own as long as we’re stuck like this. Just – don’t get ‘DOUCHEBAG’ tattooed across my forehead, or anything.” Does Nancy pout that much when it’s her in that body? She can’t possibly. “This sucks enough already. No point making it harder on ourselves by being a bunch of prudes. Right?”

“You are not…jerking off…in my body,” Nancy hisses at Steve, who scrunches Nancy’s whole face up.

“Nance. Come on. You know that’s not what I meant.”

“He’s going to have to shower eventually,” Jonathan points out, which does not seem fair to Nancy. She’s not sure why they’re suddenly ganging up on her.

“Not,” she protests, “if we figure this out first.”

“Great idea,” Jonathan says. “How?”

Nancy is, thankfully, spared having to try to answer that when the door to her house swings open and her mom leans out. “Nancy? Is everything okay out – oh, Jonathan! Good to see you again. How’s your mother?”

“Hi, M- uh, Mrs…Wheeler?” Nancy says, managing to catch herself at the last second. “She’s – my mom’s -” She remembers the quiet crying she’d heard through the walls, and says, “About as well as anybody could expect?”

Her mom frowns, a little. But anything she might have said gets interrupted when Mike comes rocketing through the door, pushing between her and Steve. “Mike?” Nancy’s mom calls after him, and he pauses on his way to the garage just long enough to shout back over his shoulder.

“Headed over to Lucas’! Don’t expect to see me again until dinner!”

Nancy’s mom’s frown gets a little deeper. But she turns back to Steve without asking Mike any more questions. “Nancy, did you need…” Her eyes flick in Jonathan’s direction. Jonathan, who’s currently looking exactly like Nancy’s ex-boyfriend. “Anything?”

“Oh, uh, Steve was just leaving,” Steve says, and now Nancy’s sure he’s pitching her voice higher than usual. On purpose? She can’t tell. “He’s got a shift at the video store. With Robin. Starting at nine.” The whole thing’s delivered while making aggressive eye contact with Jonathan. Nancy gets it, really she does, but she sees the look her mother is giving them both and wants to drop dead on the spot from humiliation.

“Yeah,” Jonathan says, clearly taking the hint. “Yeah, I should get going. It was good to see you again, Mrs. Wheeler. I’ll let my mom know you asked about her.” Oh, god. If Steve wasn’t already going to be getting the third degree from Nancy’s mom the instant Nancy and Jonathan are out of earshot, he definitely is now.

“Um,” Nancy’s mom says, clearly caught off-guard. “I did?”

Jonathan, thankfully, seems to have realised his mistake. He nods, and then wastes no time turning around and jogging across the lawn to Steve’s car.

“What was that about?” Nancy’s mom asks Steve, who looks up and locks eyes with Nancy.

“Nothing,” he says, quickly. Too quickly. Nancy’s mom will have scented blood. But before she can ask any more questions, Steve’s grabbed Nancy’s borrowed hand and is pulling her toward the door. “Jonathan, can you come up for a minute? I need your advice on something.”

Nancy flashes a smile at her bewildered mother, and lets Steve drag her up the stairs to her own bedroom.

She’s dreading whatever he’s going to say, when he shuts the door behind them and turns a desperate, pleading look in her direction. But when he opens his – well, her – mouth, what comes out is none of the things Nancy’s dreading. Actually, it’s nothing she’s expecting at all.

“Thank god that worked. Nance, I need you to help me dress like a girl.”

…

Jonathan really hopes Family Video makes its employees wear nametags. Otherwise, he’s not sure he’s going to know who ‘Robin’ is.

He shouldn’t have worried, though. Because he recognises the girl behind the counter when he comes rushing in, knows her face from school even if he hadn’t known it from that awful night at the mall. And she recognises him, too, by the way she frowns. “Harrington! It’s two minutes to nine. What happened?”

“I thought my shift didn’t start until nine?” Jonathan asks, mentally cursing Steve for not keeping better track of what time his shift starts and Nancy’s mom for holding him up and whatever mysterious Upside Down bullshit put them in this predicament in the first place. He’s not sure why he’s even here. His head aches something fierce, and, oh yeah, he’s trapped in somebody else’s body, somebody he’s pretty sure he’s going to fail spectacularly at imitating.

But – he’s not enough of an asshole to get Steve fired because of some supernatural nonsense that’s out of any of their control. And it’s not like Jonathan’s never worked a shitty minimum-wage job before. He can put up with it for a day or two. Just until they get this figured out.

Robin frowns a little more. “Yeah, dingus. You’re two whole minutes early. If you’re gunning for my Employee of the Month title, you’d better be ready to do better than that. I’ve got this one sewn up.” She reaches across the counter to ruffle Jonathan’s – well, technically Steve’s – hair, and Jonathan jerks backwards in shock. Robin takes it in stride. “And your lustrous locks are somewhat lacking this morning. Where’s your vest?”

“My what?”

Robin tugs at the ugly green polyester vest she’s wearing with a knowing smile. “I knew something’d have to give to get you here any earlier than five minutes late.” The words are accusatory, but the way she delivers them is – fond. “C’mon, I’m sure Keith’s got a spare kicking around somewhere. Can’t help you with the hair, though.”

“That’s all right,” Jonathan says, sounding a little faint to his own ears. He hadn’t realised Steve had made an actual friend his own age. Last he’d heard, via Nancy and via Will, Steve was still spending most of his free time acting as chauffeur for the under-sixteen set.

Jonathan’s got to admit it’s a weird relief, though. He’d felt – maybe just a little guilty, when Nancy’d dumped Steve and Steve had immediately stolen Jonathan’s former title as Hawkins High’s biggest loner. Without King Steve making them untouchable, the asshole power couple of Tommy H and Carol had lost a little of the asshole, a lot of the power, and most of the couple. Jonathan can’t honestly say he was disappointed. The fact that, once he’d ditched them, Steve might not have any other actual friends except for Nancy hadn’t even occurred to Jonathan until it was too late.

Robin’s still looking suspiciously at him. Jonathan swallows, hard. “I’m – trying something new. With the hair.”

“Yeah?” Robin gives the top of his head a long, assessing look. “Try something else.”

Thankfully, the video store job isn’t terribly intellectually demanding, although the flickering screen when he does the rewinds makes his head hurt even worse. Jonathan does his best to keep his aching head down and as much distance from Steve’s coworkers as he can. He learns, very early on, that Keith, their manager, seems to take a gleeful satisfaction in rubbing it in Steve’s face how far he’s fallen since high school. But the more time he spends around her, the less sure Jonathan is about where Steve and Robin stand.

Robin was there for the whole showdown at the mall, but in all the excitement, Jonathan had had slightly more important things to worry about than how one more new face fit in. And somehow, even after nearly two years of this, he and Steve have never really gotten close. Not close enough to seek out each other’s company when there isn’t a horrible monster attacking the town, anyway. Definitely not close enough to shoot the shit about how they feel about friends and classmates and – possible crushes?

Robin really doesn’t seem like Steve’s type of girl, though. She’s loud and brash and in-your-face, sarcastic and totally unimpressed by him. Nothing at all like Nancy – at least, not the Nancy Steve had dated. And she takes plenty of jabs at him, although there’s usually that playful, fond note in them. Jonathan can’t tell if she’s flirting or genuinely making fun of him – Steve.

He decides to err on the side of caution and avoid her, too.

Unfortunately, this backfires.

“Okay, what is going on,” Robin asks, or maybe more like demands, cornering Jonathan in against the counter as soon as the customer he’s checking out leaves. “You’ve been weirdly quiet all day. And you didn’t even say anything to embarrass yourself in front of that girl. What gives?”

Jonathan’s just trying to think of how best to deflect her when Robin peers, hard, at his face, and then says, uncharacteristically gently, “Nightmares again?”

Jonathan can’t do anything but stare. Logically, he knows this shouldn’t be a surprise. Robin was there, she knows what really happened on the Fourth, she knows Steve was there too. She probably knows better than Jonathan just what exactly happened to Steve. And – it’s been nearly two years of this shit, and every time, somehow, there’s Steve Harrington, stumbling blindly right into the middle of it. If Jonathan’s had nightmares – and Jonathan has had nightmares – and Nancy’s had nightmares, then there’s no reason Steve shouldn’t, too.

It’s just – everything just seems to roll right off Steve. Everything’s always seemed to roll right off Steve, at least up until he fell head over heels for Nancy and started wearing his heart out on his sleeve where the high school hyenas could rip it to shreds. It’s one of those things Jonathan’s always assumed was a fundamental, psychological, maybe even biological difference between him and cool guys like Steve Harrington. That they don’t need the armour, the protective distance Jonathan’s always kept people at, because they just don’t care.

It’s always seemed like a superpower, to be able to just not care, just let everything bounce right off. Not to constantly have a bruise-tender thing living just under the surface of your skin, taking everything into it like a knife between the ribs. To be invulnerable.

That’s not the reason why Jonathan had finally smashed Steve’s pretty face in, but it is why he’d kept whaling on the guy even after Steve was down. He’d just wanted to see that asshole hurt, for once, for once. Just wanted to knock that smug fucking smirk off Steve’s face. Just wanted to see something pierce him through, the way everything always seems to cut into Jonathan. Just wanted to see King Steve experience an honest feeling for once in his charmed goddamn life.

The joke was on Jonathan, though. Because it wasn’t his fist in Steve’s face that finally did that. It was just his hand in Nancy’s.

It should’ve felt – it should’ve felt incredible. Powerful, to finally be the one to let it all roll off while somebody else’s world crumbled. To finally turn the tables and break the invulnerable boy open.

It hadn’t.

“Hello?” Robin says, and Jonathan realises he’s been lost in his thoughts for an uncomfortably long time without answering her. “Earth to Steve? Receiving my transmissions in there?” It’s a joke, but she sounds worried.

“Uh,” Jonathan says. And then, “Yeah. Yeah, uh, nightmares.”

Robin’s expression goes – weirdly soft, at that.

What she says, though, doesn’t. “You asshole, I was worried. You are such a wounded cat about this shit, you know that?”

“Um,” Jonathan says. Playing dumb got him this far.

Robin steps back, rolling her eyes, giving Jonathan enough space that he could get out around her now if he really wanted to. “You know you can call me, right? Any time. Believe me, I am definitely also going to be awake around 3am these days.”

“Uh,” Jonathan says, knowing he will not be calling Robin, at 3am or any other time. Everything else aside, he doesn’t know her number. “Sure.”

Robin gives him a way too knowing stare. “You’re not going to do anything like that, are you.”

Busted. Jonathan tries for a chuckle, running a hand through his – Steve’s – hair the way he’s seen Steve do a million times when he’s effortlessly charming some girl or another. It must be something inherent to Steve, rather than the hair, because Robin just squints at him harder and crosses her arms over her chest, obviously unimpressed.

“Fine. Pizza tonight, my place,” she says, her narrowed eyes fixed on Jonathan’s – Steve’s face like it’s a declaration of war. “Bring your favourite haircare products and we’ll figure out something to do with that mop that’s better than – that.”

He’s not actually Steve, and his problem isn’t actually nightmares, but for some reason Jonathan’s still weirdly touched. He wonders where ‘my place’ is. “Yeah, okay. Thanks.”

Robin leans over to bump her shoulder against his. “What’re friends for?”

She then immediately ruins the moment by turning around and pushing the handle of the little cart full of returned and rewound tapes into Jonathan’s hands. “Other than, of course, doing all the shelving for you. Have fun, dingus.”

At least it means no more staring at a flickering screen and feeling like his brain’s trying to melt out his ears. Jonathan takes the cart with a token grumble, feeling weirdly grateful to Robin as he pushes it out from behind the counter.

…

Having Nancy do his makeup is one of the weirdest experiences Steve’s ever had. And he’s fought alien monsters and been kidnapped and drugged by evil Russians.

It would be bad enough if it was just the makeup, just the smeary, sticky, heavy, unfamiliar feeling of it against his skin. It would be bad enough if it was just Nancy doing his makeup. If it was Nancy’s face this close to his, her legs between his knees as she leans in to get a good angle, her breath warm against his lips as she tries to put mascara on him without stabbing him in the eyeball. If it was her hands behind all those gentle, almost ticklish touches, guiding the little brushes and sponges swiping over his eyelids and cheeks, if it was her fingers firmly tipping his chin up and turning his head this way and that to give her a better look. If it was Nancy’s voice brusquely ordering him to shut your eyes and now open and look up, now down and stop fidgeting.

All of that would be bad enough, and would completely explain – well, go a long way toward explaining – why the whole process is leaving Steve strangely breathless.

But Nancy’s wearing Jonathan Byers’ body to do it all, and that? That is taking the whole experience from a memory Steve is going to stash in the back of his mind for later to the weirdest fucking thing that’s ever happened to him in his life.

Because. Well. He’d never, ever admit it, but somehow? The fact that it’s Jonathan’s warm, scratchy, surprisingly high voice giving him instructions, instead of Nancy’s usual impatient or exasperated orders? The fact that it’s Jonathan’s long fingers carefully but firmly cupping his jaw as Nancy turns Steve’s face toward the light? The fact that it’s Jonathan’s face Steve’s forced to stare at as Nancy fixes his eyeliner, up close and personal, all screwed up in thoughtful, careful concentration with all the laser focus of those scarily intense eyes reserved entirely for Steve?

Somehow, that is not killing Steve’s mood the way it really, really probably should.

Finally, Nancy lets him go, stepping back with a thoughtful frown. Steve tries not to feel sorry that it’s over. He’s aware that he’s failing. “I think that’ll be all right. It’s harder to do on somebody else. Even if that somebody else is you, I guess.” She glances up over Steve’s shoulder, at the mirror over her dresser. “Take a look and tell me what you think.”

There’s no reason to be nervous about looking at himself, in Nancy’s body, in makeup. Steve gets up off Nancy’s bed and makes his way over to her dresser without hesitating or hanging back even a little.

And –

It’s Nancy’s face looking back at him, obviously. Nancy’s nose wrinkling, Nancy’s mouth twisting, as he makes faces in the mirror. Nancy looks really pretty, as usual. It doesn’t look like Steve at all. He can’t even tell he’s in there.

The weird twist in Steve’s chest has got to be relief. Because it doesn’t make any sense for it to be disappointment.

“Perfect,” he says, instead of thinking about that too much. “Nobody’ll even notice anything out of place.”

From the face Nancy’s making, Steve thinks, she disagrees.

“What?” he asks, turning his back on the mirror to face her, and she raises both of Jonathan’s eyebrows at him. Jonathan Byers’ face, Steve thinks, not for the first time, was designed specifically for sarcasm.

“Until you open your mouth.” Nancy sits on the edge of her bed, in the space Steve just vacated, dropping heavily onto the mattress like she misjudged the distance between it and her butt. Her compact bounces, once, on the covers, and brushes go rolling against her leg. “I think we should stick together, today. That way I can cover for you. And it won’t look suspicious, anyway, as far as everybody knows Jonathan and I are still dating -”

“Wait,” Steve interrupts, trying not to feel stung by that way I can cover for you. He can handle himself with the weird shit. He’s pretty sure he’s proved that. Three times over, now. But Nancy still acts like he’s some kind of – of idiot. “You’re not?”

Nancy bites down on Jonathan’s lower lip, and stares across her room, and doesn’t answer Steve’s question. “Come on. You’ve got to get dressed sometime today.” She pushes herself up from the bed again with a little wobble, heading for the dresser, still without making eye contact. “Shut your eyes before you strip. I’ll help you with my bra.”

“Nancy.” Steve’s not going to let Nancy deflect, not this time. “What’s going on with you and Jonathan?”

Nancy rounds on him, eyes flashing in a way that’s somehow distinctly Nancy even though it’s also giving Steve flashbacks to getting punched almost unconscious in an alley. And why does Nancy have to be so short? This would be intimidating enough even if Steve wasn’t currently a munchkin.

“What’s going on with me and Jonathan is none of your business. And it’s not a big deal.” Nancy whips open a drawer with what seems like much more force than necessary, and Steve politely looks away as she starts to rifle through stacks of folded pastel and white lace. “We just…had a misunderstanding. We’ll be fine.”

“What, like the misunderstanding you and I had about whether we were still dating when you took off with him?” Steve says, and hears how bitter it sounds only as it’s coming out of his – well, Nancy’s – mouth, too late to stop it. He tries to tone it down, dial it back, aims for gentle as he adds, “He’s moving in less than a month, Nance. If you’re so sure you’re gonna be fine -”

“We are fine!” Nancy protests, slamming the drawer and straightening up. She looks down to look Steve in the eye – why does her stupid little body have to be so short? – before she adds, with what Steve thinks is unnecessarily malicious perkiness, “And my mom is going to notice something’s suspicious if you aren’t wearing my new sundress. I was so excited when I picked it out.”

It takes a second for the initial burst of fuck no to fade. But once it does…well. Nancy’s obviously only doing this to make Steve miserable, to get back at him for sticking his nose in her love life. It’d serve her right not to get the reaction she’s clearly expecting.

Besides. It’s not like anybody’s going to see Steve Harrington wearing a dress, any more than they were already going to see Steve Harrington wearing makeup. He’s Nancy Wheeler right now. There’s nothing weird about it at all.

And now he’s vaguely curious about the whole dress thing, actually. Not that he ever really was before, other than admiring a hot chick with great taste. But anybody with eyes can see that girls get all the best clothes.

And – right now, Steve’s a girl. He is literally never going to get another opportunity like this one.

So he shrugs and says, “Sure, Nance, that’s why I asked you to come up here in the first place. Go ahead and dress me up. Think I could walk in heels?”

And tries to burn the expression on Nancy’s borrowed face into his memory to cherish forever.

…

As it turns out, Steve can’t walk in heels.

He can barely even manage Nancy’s leather flats, and they’ve got only the tiniest little sliver of a wedge. He keeps stepping out of them and then tripping over them, somehow. The third or fourth time it happens, it crosses Nancy’s mind to wonder if he’s doing it on purpose.

She can’t think of anything that would possibly accomplish, though, so she pushes that thought aside.

Nancy’s not sure what to do or where to go. Where to even start trying to figure out how this happened, and how to undo it. But she knows they have to get out of her house. Her mom already knows something is up, and if Nancy knows her mother, she won’t rest until she’s gotten to the bottom of it. The less time Steve spends in a place where he’s likely to get ambushed and cornered by Nancy’s mom for questioning, the better.

Steve’s ideas, though, are not exactly helping.

“Nance, seriously, I’m telling you, we should tell Robin,” he insists, for something like the seventeenth time, as Nancy pulls up in front of the library.

“Steve,” Nancy sighs, as she turns off the ignition. “If we’re not telling Jonathan’s mom – and we’re not telling Jonathan’s mom, she’s got more than enough on her plate right now – then why would we talk to your coworker?”

Steve does not seem to see the absurdity of his logic. “Robin can help, okay? She already knows what’s going on – well, the basics, anyway – so we wouldn’t be, like, breaching government security or anything. And she’s probably the smartest person I know except maybe Henderson -”

“My little brother’s fourteen-year-old friend is the smartest person you know?” Nancy demands, totally not even a little bit stung.

“Nancy – Jesus, that is so not the point -”

The librarian looks up and raises an eyebrow at them both as they push through the library doors, and Steve swallows the rest of his sentence, shooting her a sheepish smile. Nancy wonders, vaguely, if he’s trying to turn on the charm. She wonders, vaguely, if it’ll still work if he doesn’t look like – well, Steve. She also wonders, a little less vaguely, if she always looks that constipated when she tries to fake an apologetic smile. She’ll have to work on that.

“Keep it down, Miss Wheeler,” the librarian says, after a moment, adjusting her oversized glasses on her nose and turning back to whatever she was scribbling in before Nancy and Steve came in. Nancy can see Steve’s shoulders drop as he relaxes, although the bright, fake, constipated grin doesn’t change.

“Yes, ma’am. Sorry, ma’am.” He grabs Nancy’s hand and hurries her around the desk, heading for the stacks. His hand – her own hand – feels surprisingly small in Nancy’s borrowed one, almost delicate, and very warm. Nancy tries not to think about how she’s holding her ex-boyfriend’s hand. In public, even. Although nobody’s going to see anything out of the ordinary.

“ ‘Yes, ma’am’?” she hisses, as soon as they’re out of earshot of the librarian, and Steve yanks his hand back like he’s been burned.

“I haven’t been in here since I was like seven, okay? And she knows you by name. I panicked.”

“You haven’t -” Nancy has to shake her head in disbelief. “How did we ever date?”

She considers making Steve go out front and fish through the news archives, before deciding that the time it’d take him to figure out how they’re referenced and how to work the microfiche would be too much of a waste. Instead, she makes him up a list of call numbers – psychology and physics – and sends him into the stacks, while she scours the news archives herself.

It’s weirdly soothing, feeding the slides for paper after paper through the microfiche reader, the columns of tightly-packed text and dot-matrix photos scrolling past her stare. There’s something about it that makes her think of the things she actually liked about the Post’s offices, of the sheets of newsprint coming clattering off the huge rollers, the proof sheets hanging on the walls. It’s easy to forget where she is, who she is right now, why they’re here.

Before Nancy knows it, Steve’s dropping into a chair beside her with a flounce of pastel-striped seersucker skirts, slamming a stack of books down on the table between them with a hollow boom. “There is nothing useful in here, Nance,” he declares, and Nancy has to shush him. Steve lowers the volume, but he also leans closer to her, resting an elbow on the table. “And these books are all like six inches thick and full of scientific bullshit. It took me ten whole minutes to read just one sentence in this one.” He jabs a finger at the offending text, a fat hardback with a pattern of stars on the back cover that’s turned toward the ceiling. “Can we swap?”

Nancy sits back from the reader, blinking hard. All that text is not exactly easy on the eyes. “That might not be such a bad idea. Do you know how to use one of these?”

Steve shrugs. “Film goes under the lens, knob turns to focus. It’s not rocket science.” He makes a face at the stack of books he’s picked out. “Not like those.”

Nancy can’t help a little snort of a laugh at that. Steve turns what’s probably supposed to be a flat, unimpressed stare in her direction, but ruins it by cracking a reluctant grin.

“Okay. Push over,” Nancy says, and gets up from her seat.

She’s barely opened the cover of the top book before Steve, of course, is talking again. “Did you find anything interesting in the papers?”

“Not exactly.” Nancy tucks her finger into the book to hold her place and shuts it again before looking up – well, up from the book - at Steve. Maybe he can concentrate on more than one thing at a time – although, given his high school grades, she kind of doubts it – but Nancy either reads or talks. Not both at once. And with Steve here, Nancy figures, she won’t get to do much reading. It always used to annoy her when they tried to study together. Steve’s good for a good time, but he just cannot sit down and concentrate. “I thought I’d look up and see if the experiments with – you know who – might have had anything to do with anything like this, but so far, nothing. I’ve learned some interesting things about what people used to think about LSD, though.”

Steve twists in his seat to give Nancy a blank look that somehow, even though it’s on her face, looks so undeniably like him. “Nance…I don’t know who.”

“Yes, you do,” Nancy says, raising both her eyebrows at him. She’s not sure exactly what the situation is with the girl called Eleven, now, but it probably can’t hurt to be cautious, especially in a public place. After all, Nancy’s had it drilled into her over the last two years – you never know who’s listening. “Remember last November? At the Byers’? The surprise visitor?”

Steve’s expression clears all at once. “Oh! Right, duh.” He turns back to the microfiche reader, scrolling in silence for just long enough for Nancy to flip the book open again. “What did you look for?”

“What?”

Steve waves a hand at the little stack of microfiche Nancy left next to the reader. “When you picked out your papers. How’d you choose which ones you’d look at? What’d you look for?”

“Oh!” Nancy shuts the book again, this time pulling her finger out. This is going to take longer than she’d expected, at first, and it’s not like she’s gotten deep enough into the book for it to matter for her to keep her place. “Um, I started with anything mentioning the Hawkins National Lab prior to two years ago, and worked outwards.”

Steve nods, and turns back to the microfiche reader. Nancy waits, but he doesn’t say anything more, so she opens the book back up and flips to the table of contents.

She gets so buried in the dense scientific text that she barely notices when Steve gets up and leaves the reading room. Probably he sat still for too long. Nancy’s disappointed, but hardly surprised.

She’s fully absorbed in a passage in one of the psychology books about multiple personalities as a response to trauma when Steve shakes her shoulder. “Nancy. Hey. I think I’ve got something.”

Nancy tucks her finger in the book to mark her place and looks over at what Steve’s laid out on the table atop her stack of discarded books. He’s beaming like it’s a basketball trophy or something. It’s not, thankfully. It’s a flimsy paperback printed on cheap paper that he’s opened to a section titled, in a whimsically curly font that reminds Nancy of shampoo ads from when she was a kid, ASTRAL PROJECTION.

“Steve,” Nancy sighs, looking up, but Steve’s got an unusually serious expression on his – Nancy’s – face.

“No, listen. I started where you said to, with the lab stuff, but then trying to chase down one of those doctors got me onto this MKUltra project, and when I looked into that it was all this psychic stuff, but the news articles didn’t have a lot of information about what it was or how it worked so I found some books about it and – Nance, actually read it. Look, here, it’s all about how a person could get outside of their own body -”

“Steve,” Nancy sighs, again. It feels like she does a lot of that. “This is a bunch of New Age bullshit, it’s not real -”

Steve gives her a flat look. “Yeah, well, tell that to the government. And isn’t this basically what you-know-who does when she finds people?”

That’s…actually, a fair point.

“You really think…?” she starts, and Steve shrugs.

“Have you found anything better?”

It sounds like a genuine question, but Nancy’s still needled. “How did you find all this stuff about – MKUltra and psychics – anyway? I’m sure I hadn’t pulled any articles about it.”

Steve gives her a hunted look, like he’s not sure if this is a trick question. “I just got the librarian to give me a hand? The reference system’s a little confusing at first, but it’s not so bad once you know what you’re doing.”

“The librarian? What happened to panicking?”

“She just caught me off guard, that’s all. Give me a little credit.”

Nancy’s going to have to. Especially if this astral projection stuff actually turns out to be useful. She has to admit, she’s not sure she would have found it on her own. Not because she wouldn’t have gotten there eventually following the breadcrumb trail in the papers, but because, well, it’s New Age bullshit. Nancy hadn’t considered that it might be anything at all like what Eleven does. It took Steve to make that connection and keep Nancy from dismissing the idea out of hand. And after she didn’t even think he’d be capable of figuring out how to the library’s reference systems on his own, much less using them to come up with the best theory they’ve got right now.

Nancy’s not sure how she feels about any of that. Currently, she thinks, she’s hovering somewhere around ‘mortified, but grudgingly impressed’.

“You really think this might be it?” she repeats, looking down at the book and then up at Steve. “Do you think…what, that you-know-who did it, somehow?”

Steve shrugs. “It’s somewhere to start.”

“But why?”

Steve raises both of Nancy’s eyebrows and makes a face that Nancy is sure she’s never made before in her life. “Well, that’s the sixty-four thousand dollar question, isn’t it?”

Nancy pushes herself up out of her seat. It is weird to stand up and suddenly be taller than Steve, again. She’s not used to looking down at people. Even Mike is taller than Nancy is in her own body, now. It’s not fair. “Okay. Then we ask her.”

They’re just about to head out the library doors when those doors fly violently open. A half-second later, Nancy and Steve almost both get bowled over by Mike and Dustin, both travelling at top speed.

“Hey!” Nancy snaps at her little brother, but Mike doesn’t even turn around.

Dustin turns to call out, “Sorry!”, though. And then stops in his tracks, grabbing Mike by the arm and pulling him up short, too.

Mike scowls at him as he turns, but his eyes widen when they land on Nancy – and widen even further when he sees Steve. “Oh – guys!”

“I thought you said you were going over to Lucas’?” Nancy asks, glancing back over her shoulder at the doors. If there’s a third too-tall teenage boy about to come barrelling through them, she wants to know about it before she steps directly into his path.

Mike suddenly looks hunted. “Yeah, uh. Listen, you will not believe the morning we’ve been having -”

“Mister Wheeler. Mister Henderson! This is a library, not a playoff game. No more running, and no more shouting.”

Dustin looks like a deer caught in headlights. But Mike just gives a huge, exasperated huff, slouching forward and rolling his eyes toward the ceiling as he turns to face the librarian, who’s just come out of the reading room with Nancy and Steve’s discarded books. “We weren’t shouting.”

The librarian raises one eyebrow at him, and Mike slouches a little further.

“I could show her shouting,” he mutters, under his breath, and under the librarian’s watchful and extremely unimpressed eye.

“Don’t,” Dustin advises him, helpfully. “We’re here on a mission, remember?”

“Yeah, us too,” Steve says, and Dustin frowns at him. “This morning you’re having that we wouldn’t believe, is it an emergency?”

Mike and Dustin exchange a look.

“Nooo,” Mike says, at the same time as Dustin says, “Not yet.”

“Great. Then we gotta fly. Try to stay out of trouble, all right, Henderson?”

Dustin frowns at him harder.

“Mike,” Nancy says, both struck by sudden inspiration and eager not to hear any more of what are obviously Steve’s words coming out of her own mouth. “Is your girlfriend around?”

It’s Mike’s turn to frown suspiciously at them.

“What?” he asks, and then, like he’s just had a minor revelation, “Oh! Shouldn’t you know where she is?”

It takes Nancy a second to remember that she’s Jonathan right now. And that El’s living with the Byers.

“I haven’t been -” she starts, and then lamely finishes, “home,” when she looks up and sees the librarian standing behind the desk, apparently logging their books but actually peering hard over her glasses at the four of them. “I thought maybe she might have gone somewhere with you guys.”

Mike looks over at Dustin, who shrugs.

“Okay,” Nancy says, curious despite herself. “Thanks anyway. We’ll check at - home.”

“Yeah,” Dustin says. “We’ll let you know if we see her. Or if the morning turns into an emergency.”

He lets Mike tug him along into the stacks, under the watchful eye of the librarian.

“That’s weird,” Nancy says, as she and Steve hurry down the library’s front steps, heading for Jonathan’s rustbucket of a car.

“What’s weird?”

“Mike’s spent every waking moment with that girl since November,” Nancy muses, folding Jonathan’s abnormally long limbs into the driver’s seat. Steve drops into the passenger seat beside her, tucking her skirt in before he pulls the door closed behind him with a metallic screech. Nancy hopes Jonathan’s car doesn’t finally fall apart on her watch. That’s the last thing she needs. “And now all of a sudden he doesn’t even know where she is?”

“Yeah, but didn’t they have some kind of middle-school romantic drama over the week Starcourt blew?” Steve asks. “Maybe that’s all it is. Take it from me, at that age, things burn bright and burn out fast.”

Nancy snorts. “You haven’t met Mike.” She has to turn the key in the ignition four times before the engine turns over. “It’s just weird.”

“Okay,” Steve says, in that tone Nancy’s always hated, the one that means he’s humouring her. It’s not better up an octave. “He’s your brother.”

“Yes. He is my brother,” Nancy agrees, sharply, as she pulls away from the curb. “Which means I know when he’s acting weird. And he’s acting weird.”

“Okay! I was agreeing with you! But, Nance, can we please solve one mystery at a time?” Steve shifts uncomfortably in his seat, crossing one of Nancy’s legs over the other. “Because I’d really like my own body back. I’m going to have to piss again soon, and having to do it sitting down? Is terrible. And this bra pinches.”

“Fine,” Nancy says, and makes a left turn to point them south.

…

Steve’s job sucks.

If somebody’d asked Jonathan, a couple years ago, what he thought of Steve Harrington, he would’ve said he tried not to, thanks. If that person had pressed, though, Jonathan probably would’ve said something along the lines that Steve was an arrogant, self-involved asshole who was, if there was any justice in the world, going to end up working a miserable minimum-wage job and lamenting his lost glory days as the star forward on the high school basketball team for the rest of his life. And it’d serve him right.

Jonathan never expected that the part he’d be wrong about would be that last sentence.

But he’s stunned to discover, as the day wears on, that he actually feels bad knowing this is what Steve has to deal with every day.

The job itself isn’t actually all that bad. The customers are, well, customers, but they’d be that anywhere. The actual workload is surprisingly reasonable, although Jonathan does end up having to lift anything that looks even slightly heavy, since the other two refuse to do it. No, the problem is – and isn’t it always? – Steve’s boss.

The one saving grace of this job is that Keith has to cover both the video store and the arcade, so he isn’t even there half the time. Which is good. Because when Keith’s around, he apparently makes it his personal mission to make Steve’s life miserable. Which means, today, that he’s making Jonathan’s life miserable.

Right now, that’s manifesting as following Jonathan around the video store munching from a bag of Cheetos like Jonathan’s some kind of fascinating street performer, constantly criticizing literally everything Jonathan does, and undoing half of it. The third time Keith ‘accidentally’ bumps into a shelf that Jonathan’s just spent twenty minutes facing to Keith’s increasingly exacting specifications and knocks all the empty cases to the floor, then meets Jonathan’s eyes with a supremely sarcastic, “Oops,” Jonathan nearly rips off the stupid green polyester vest Keith’s making him wear and throws it in his face. Even Steve doesn’t deserve to be treated like this.

“Steve!”

The shout comes from over by the desk. Jonathan’s more than happy to take the excuse to walk away. And if he catches Keith’s eye and gives him a far-too-innocent what-can-you-do shrug before leaving the Comedy section, leaving Keith to pick up his own damn mess…well, hopefully he’ll be back in his own body before Keith comes up with some exciting new way to retaliate.

Jonathan thought he’d recognised the voice that yelled Steve’s name through the whole store, but when he stops in front of the checkout counter, it’s not the kid he was half-expecting. Lucas Sinclair is leaning across the counter, frowning with apparently sincere confusion at Robin. She looks over his shoulder and catches Jonathan’s eye with a raise of her eyebrows, and Jonathan realises that, even if she recognises Lucas from the Fourth, she’s definitely forgotten what his name is. If she ever knew.

And Lucas seems to be taking that harder than Jonathan would’ve expected, judging by the huge, relieved grin that breaks across his face as he turns to face Jonathan. “Steve! Great, maybe you can give Robin a hand.” He looks all around, at the redheaded girl with the enormous side ponytail browsing the Horror section and the guy with the skinny rattail and jean vest checking out the new releases, before shooting Jonathan a weirdly intense stare. “It’s me.”

“Yeah,” Jonathan agrees, not entirely sure what it is he’s supposed to be taking away from this interaction. Maybe Steve would know. From all Will’s accounts, he’d been helping them sneak into movies all summer, until everything blew up at the mall. Maybe they’ve got some kind of arrangement here, too? “Hi, Lucas. What’s going on? Are you looking for a movie?”

From the grateful look Robin shoots in his direction, Jonathan deduces he was right about her forgetting Lucas’ name.

Lucas himself looks even more annoyed, though. “Come on. Steve.” He leans in closer to Jonathan, like he’s going to tell him a secret, and lowers his voice. “It’s me, it’s -”

“Hey, Harrington? Do I pay you to stand around yakking with every nerdlord who walks through the door?”

Jonathan barely manages to resist rolling his eyes at the sound of Keith’s smug self-satisfaction. And then he remembers who he’s supposed to be, right now, and gives in to the urge. He finishes just in time to catch Lucas in the act of making the exact same face.

Robin presses her lips tight together, like she’s trying not to laugh, and looks down at the top of the counter like the scratched Formica has suddenly become unbelievably fascinating.

Keith looks back and forth between them with a frown, like he’s aware he’s not in on a joke. He catches Jonathan’s eye, and quirks one eyebrow, voice a careful deadpan. “Sheesh, you didn’t mention that fire left you deaf along with scrambling your brains. I asked -”

“You don’t pay us at all,” Jonathan blurts, before Keith has a chance to loudly and slowly repeat his rhetorical question. And, well, now he’s in too far to back out – “Unless you’ve been the owner of this place the whole time? Kind of slumming it if you are, though, I’d think you’d have more important things to do than stalk the minimum-wage peons. Hey, do you follow Robin around watching her every move, too, or am I the only one who gets that dubious honour?” When Keith starts to open his mouth, Jonathan shrugs Steve’s shoulders, trying to imitate the nonchalant hair flip that he’s seen Steve do a million times before, the one that always used to piss him off so badly he’d be thinking about it for hours. “I know, dude, my ass is fantastic, but subtlety. Ever heard of it?”

Lucas hastily turns a laugh into a cough. Robin’s still fascinated by the Formica.

Jonathan’s struck by a mortifying burst of pride. Mortifying because he was just saying what he thought Steve might say. And it was – easy. Too easy. And felt entirely too good, to get in a good jab at the guy who’s been making his life hell all day, to make Robin and Lucas have to work not to laugh.

Jonathan’s not getting sympathetic to the asshole who would’ve helped Tommy Hagan tape him to the flagpole in seventh grade if Mr. Goldfarb hadn’t intervened. He’s not. It’s just…it feels really different, to be the one people are laughing for instead of the one they’re laughing at. He catches himself wondering how hard it would be, to go from putting somebody down for a good reason, like with Keith, to trying to find – or manufacture – a good reason to put somebody down.

Not, Jonathan decides, hard enough. 

Keith’s turned tomato red, but he’s obviously trying to save face as he squints at Jonathan. “Are you seriously trying to be smart, Harrington? Try sticking to what you’re good at. Shelving tapes and…wait, are you even really any good at that?”

It’s not really him Keith’s taking potshots at. Still, Jonathan catches himself grinding his – Steve’s – back teeth together.

“Speaking of which,” Keith adds, jabbing a thumb over his shoulder like it’s just occurred to him, “there’s still a mess over in Comedy that needs cleaning up. If you’re so desperate for a laugh.” He catches Lucas’ eye, and asks, “Wanna rent something, Sinclair?”

“What? No, I just need to talk to -”

“Your buddy’s on the clock,” Keith says. “He’s not talking to anybody until he’s cleaned up his mess. Either rent something or scram.”

Lucas glowers at him as he slouches back across the store to the door, hands shoved deep down in his pockets.

“Well?” Keith asks, turning back to Jonathan. “Think you could lower yourself to actually work at your paying job, your majesty? Comedy section’s waiting.”

Jonathan doesn’t think it’d be wise to press his luck with another snarky remark. He turns and starts back across the store, expecting Keith to follow.

Instead, though, Robin says, “Hey, Keith, if you’ve got a minute, I could use your help with the rewinder. It’s acting up again?”

When Keith turns back toward the counter with a long-suffering sigh, she catches Jonathan’s eye over his shoulder, and smiles.

Jonathan smiles back.

…

Jonathan’s car stops before they get to the Byers’.

And contrary to her dad’s new favourite joke, Nancy’s driving is actually not the culprit, thank you very much.

“I don’t believe this,” Nancy grumbles, as she and Steve push the stupid heap of rust on wheels that Jonathan laughably calls a car along the street. Somebody – Nancy thinks that might be Reed’s car, actually – whizzes past them, spraying them with grit, and honks the horn as they pass. Nancy wishes, for a split second, that she had her gun. “I keep telling him to fill up his tank. Or at least keep a gas can in his trunk. He always runs this thing on the last quarter-tank.”

“Henderson’s the same way with his batteries,” Steve says, turning his head to flash Nancy a grin that’s so bright, so charming and so obviously Steve that it makes her shiver a little in her borrowed skin. This whole situation is just. Too weird.

Although still not quite as weird as how earnestly Steve seems to have taken to the whole pack of her little brother’s friends. Nancy’d never have expected him to have anything remotely resembling a responsible bone in his body – and, from what she’s heard from Mike, he still doesn’t – but…well. She never would’ve expected it.

Just like she never would’ve expected Steve to turn up at Jonathan’s house that night two Novembers ago, trying to apologise, stepping up to help. Just like she never would’ve expected him to then turn around and go straight back to being the guy she’d never expected to pick up that bat. To try to force her to play along, pretend like nothing ever happened, only to then expect her to know somehow that when he said ‘I love you’, he meant it. Or to tell the whole town she was a slut for making friends with a boy who wasn’t him, only to let her go without a fight, without so much as an angry word, after she’d actually slept with Jonathan. And then to come rushing to her and Jonathan’s rescue at the mall, risking his own life to save his ex and her new boyfriend.

The more Nancy thinks about it, the more unsteady she feels, like just thinking about Steve is making her lose her footing. Not on the ground, but in her mind, somehow. That’s what she’d really hated, in those last few months they’d dated. Never quite being sure where, exactly, she stood with Steve. Never quite being sure from moment to moment whether she was going to get the boy who’d smashed Jonathan’s camera, or the boy who’d picked up the nailbat.

Nancy shakes her head to try to shake off the crawling feeling of seeing her own face animated by something that isn’t her, the crawling feeling that she doesn’t know the person currently wearing her body at all. She puts a little extra oomph into pushing the car, and it groans ominously. “Let’s just get this thing to a gas station, and off the road.”

By the time they push Jonathan’s car up to a pump, Nancy’s breathing so hard she thinks her heart might explode, and Jonathan’s tee shirt is drenched with sweat, sticking to the small of her back. His back? It’s hard to figure out how to talk about this.

She fills the tank, blankly watching the numbers on the pump tick upward, while Steve heads inside. There’s the faintest breath of a breeze, standing here between the pumps, and it goes right through the thin fabric of Jonathan’s shirt. Nancy tips her head back, shutting her eyes, basking in the cool of it after the long, hot, miserable task of pushing the car here.

The air conditioning inside the convenience store is even better, when Nancy steps through the jangling door. She gives the pump number to the pimply kid behind the counter, wondering vaguely whether he’s even old enough to be working here, as she digs in Jonathan’s back pocket for his wallet.

Which…is almost empty.

Nancy can feel Jonathan’s face getting hotter and hotter under the pimply kid’s stare, as she rummages through the folds of Jonathan’s wallet and turns up four carefully-uncreased singles, a handful of change, a Family Video rental card, a photobooth snap of a much younger Jonathan and Will making faces at the camera, and not much else. Trawling Jonathan’s pockets produces ten cents more in change. The kid is looking less and less impressed.

“What’s going on?”

Nancy hadn’t thought she could get any more embarrassed. The sound of her own voice from behind her instantly proves her wrong. And does she always sound so…so little-girlish?

“Nothing,” she snaps, automatically, spinning to glare Steve down. He’s already got the straw from one slushie in his mouth, another in his other hand, and there’s a sinking in the pit of Nancy’s stomach at the sight. If he expects her to pay for those too –

“Here, just put the rest of the gas on with these,” Steve says, looking briefly down at the money on the counter before plopping both the slushies in front of the sad little pile of coins. He flicks a bright smile up at Nancy before reaching into – oh, that dress has pockets? She hadn’t realised that dress has pockets. Hopefully she can get back into her own body soon so she’ll actually get a chance to wear it.

Nancy tries to grip her elbows with the opposite hands as Steve pays for both slushies and the rest of Jonathan’s gas, but it feels clumsy and uncomfortable and she lets her hands drop. “You really don’t have to –”

Steve flashes her another easy smile and hands her the slushie he hasn’t already had his mouth all over. The condensation collecting on the sides of the cup is blissfully cool. “No big deal. You can pay me back when we get back to the house.”

The kid looks between them with an unpleasant grin, like he knows Nancy’s not going to pay Steve back when they get anywhere, and Nancy resolves instantly in her mind that she is. Just to spite this little asshole.

“You know he’s gonna make you go dutch on lunch, too,” the kid says to Steve, as he takes the twice-folded twenty Steve pulled from the pocket of Nancy’s dress and hands back his change.

Steve frowns at him, a little, and then looks up at Nancy’s face.

Nancy knows her voice is not usually that high-pitched when Steve honest-to-goodness giggles, batting his eyes – her eyes? – up at Nancy like he always used to do when he wanted something. “Oh, that’s a great idea, babe,” he bubbles, with a million-watt smile just for Nancy, giving her hips a side-to-side swing to bump her right hip against Jonathan’s left as he twines her fingers easily into Jonathan’s. “What do you think, burgers and a banana split to split?”

Nancy has absolutely no idea how to react. It’s Steve. Her ex-boyfriend. Flirting with her. From inside of her own body.

But then she catches the look on the pimply kid’s face, and returns Steve’s smile with twice the wattage.

“Whatever you say, princess,” she oozes back, doing her best to look at Steve like she’s already forgotten there’s anybody else in the room. Steve giggles, again, which might just be the most painful part of this whole ordeal, and pops the straw of his slushie back in his mouth, turning his face away and down like he’s suddenly turned shy. He doesn’t let go of Nancy’s hand, though.

They’re just about to leave with their slushies when the pimply kid mutters something that sounds an awful lot like “More like whatever you can pay, with that dud”.

Nancy bites down, hard, on Jonathan’s lower lip. She’s just starting to turn, to give the little jerk a piece of her mind –

Steve collides gently with her mouth as she swings around, effortlessly catching her outrage in a kiss.

For a second, Nancy’s so stunned that she doesn’t react. Doesn’t even know how to react. As if the flirting hadn’t been bad enough, now her ex-boyfriend is kissing her, with her own mouth, and of all the strange things that have happened to Nancy in the last two years, this definitely ranks as one of the strangest.

Then Steve pulls back, flashes a huge, bright, insincere smile back at the pimply kid behind the counter, and drags Nancy by the hand out of the store.

Nancy manages to wait until the car door is firmly shut behind her before she explodes. “God! That was humiliating! How does Jonathan never have enough of anything? No gas, no cash…you’d think somebody so obsessed with being responsible all the time would at least try to be more prepared!”

Steve gives his – her – head a shake, tossing her permed curls back out of his eyes the way he sometimes does with his own cowlick. It’s unexpectedly jarring. “Don’t look at me, I’ve got my own problems. I had to sit down to pee in there again, and I think I’m actually getting used to it.”

Nancy tries to start the engine. It takes three tries, this time, before it turns over.

“Are we going to talk about -” she starts, but Steve interrupts her, staring straight out at the road ahead.

“I won’t if you don’t.”

Nancy can live with that.

There’s one question burning in her mind, though, that she just has to ask, as she bumps over the curb and back out onto the road. “Why -”

Steve doesn’t let her finish that sentence, either. “You would’ve done it for Jonathan, if it was really you in here.”

There doesn’t seem to be anything more to say to that.

…

“Steve? Harrington? Dingus?”

Jonathan spins around so fast that he almost collides with Robin. The stack of tapes he was bringing back from the drop-slot go spilling out of his arms and over the floor, cases cracking open and letting tapes clatter over the nubbly grey carpet.

Robin crouches down to help Jonathan scoop the pile of tapes back up, but she doesn’t take her piercing gaze off of his face – Steve’s face. “What is going on with you today, space case? I called your name like ten times.”

“What?” Jonathan tries to rewind his memory of the last several minutes. He’s ashamed to admit it, but he’d gotten distracted by his – Steve’s – reflection in the glass covering one of the new-release posters. There were whole years of his life that Jonathan went to bed at night secretly wishing and hoping and praying that somehow, when he woke up in the morning, he’d see a guy who looked more like Steve Harrington when he looked in the mirror. Somebody strong and lean and confident and gorgeous, with that broad smile just on the right side of mean and those big soulful eyes that any girl would swoon over and that effortlessly perfect hair. Somebody who someone like – like Nancy Wheeler might actually look twice at. Might actually take a chance on getting to know.

But now…

Nancy’s…well, she’s Nancy. She’s so much more than a photo in a yearbook, a pretty face smiling in the hallways, a cookie-cutter pastel romance and a quiet, boring, predictable suburban life. There’s so much more to her than Jonathan knew or gave her credit for, those years ago. Most of it good. And he’s surprised to realise it, but even with the ugly bits, even when she’s being selfish or mean or carrying a stupid grudge, he can’t imagine ever wanting to trade the real thing in for that old imaginary version. No girl-next-door fantasy could ever hold a candle to the reality of Nancy. Sharp edges and all.

And Steve’s perfect hair, as Jonathan learned just this morning, definitely takes effort to look that effortless. The rest of it’s probably the same. Because, as Jonathan realised, looking into the dim reflection against the dark background of the movie poster, there’s absolutely nothing attractive about Steve’s pretty face when it’s got Jonathan behind it.

“There you go again,” Robin says, stacking a few more tapes on top of the pile Jonathan’s holding and straightening up, brushing off her knees. “Seriously, are you sure you’re okay?”

“Oh. Yeah, I’m fine. It’s just -” Jonathan scrambles for an excuse, settling on a half-truth. “Headache. I’ll be fine with a couple aspirin.”

“Steve.” Robin gives him a look of such flat, exasperated fondness that Jonathan can feel himself starting to blush. The only person who’s ever looked at him like that, other than his mom, is Nancy –

Oh.

Oh, okay.

“Fine. If you’re going to be like that. We’ll find you some aspirin,” Robin says, holding out a hand to help Jonathan to his feet. There’s something oddly calculating in the look she gives him when she goes on, “And if you want to take your break early and go find out what that infant friend of yours wanted -”

“No, it’s okay. If it’s really important, he’ll be back,” Jonathan interrupts, and isn’t sure why Robin’s eyes narrow, almost imperceptibly. “Listen. Robin. Thanks for inviting me over, earlier, but I’m gonna have to pass for tonight. It’s just this -”

“Headache?” Robin fills in for him, arching one eyebrow like she’s not convinced. Jonathan nods anyway.

“It’s just – tonight isn’t good. For me. But can we maybe do dinner and a movie or something some other time instead?” He’ll have to let Steve know, somehow, whatever date he schedules with Robin, so Steve doesn’t end up standing her up –

“Dinner and a movie?” Robin asks, like that’s the most ridiculous thing she’s ever heard in her life. The look she’s fixed on Jonathan is pure disbelief. Shit.

He tries to play it cool, not to let on the way his ears are burning. “Yeah. I know, it’s corny, but – you can’t beat a classic, right?”

Robin is staring at Jonathan like she’s trying to laser pinpoint every mole on his – Steve’s – face. “A. Classic. What.”

Jonathan…may have miscalculated, here. But he’s not sure how. Girls like Steve. Robin seems to like Steve, if Jonathan’s finally cracked the code on her constant teasing versus her genuine kindness and concern. He’d thought, if she was inviting Steve over to her house – but maybe, unbelievably, she really hasn’t told Steve about her crush yet? And he somehow hasn’t caught on? Or – oh, god. He’s already noticed she’s not Steve’s usual type. Robin’s seemed fantastically cool to Jonathan up until now, but what if that just means she’s too weird for Steve? What if he’s already turned her down? But then, why would she still be trying to help him, inviting him over to her house? “Uh. Date?”

Robin blinks at him.

Just when Jonathan’s about to apologise profusely for somehow misreading the situation and throw himself on the mercy of the court, though, she gives her head a little shake, frowning down at the video she’s still holding in one hand. “Yeah. Sure. Some other time. Hey, I’ve got to – sort some things out in the backroom, for Keith. Think you can manage up front on your own for maybe about half an hour?”

“Um,” Jonathan says. He’s not sure what just happened. But if Robin’s giving him an out, he’ll gladly take it. “Sure?”

“Great.” Robin hands him the video she’s holding, piling it on top of the stack in his hands with a careful little pat, before starting to back away. “Just – man the counter, do those rewinds, and don’t – go anywhere.”

“Where do you think I’m going to go?” Jonathan asks, but Robin’s already hurrying towards the door behind the half-wall with the garish neon Family Video sign.

Robin pauses just long enough to lean back around the wall and catch Jonathan’s eye. “Just don’t go anywhere!”

And then she disappears into the back.

Jonathan looks from the swiftly-shutting backroom door, down to the stack of tapes in his hands, and shrugs. Steve can figure out his own love life. Jonathan, apparently, has tapes to rewind.

…

Eleven isn’t home.

If ‘home’ is the right word to use about her living with the Byers, now. Steve kind of thinks it probably isn’t, but, well, he still doesn’t know exactly what the hell her whole situation was before, despite multiple explanations from Dustin. Sometimes, multiple explanations from Dustin make things more confusing, not less.

Anyway. She’s not at Jonathan’s house.

Jonathan’s mom, however, is.

And Steve has absolutely no idea how to talk to her.

It’s been nearly two years of monster bullshit, now. Three times they’ve all saved the world. And yet, somehow, Steve still hasn’t exchanged much more than a handful of words with Mrs. Byers. The closest they’ve come to an actual conversation was last November, when they’d decided they had to interrogate whatever was eating Will’s brain, and she’d told him where to find a hammer and nails.

Even without really talking to her, though, Steve’s seen more than enough to understand that every nasty thing his mother’s ever said about Joyce Byers is wrong. That every stupid, unkind thing Steve ever said about Joyce Byers or her family is wrong. There’s a ferocious, fearless love that all three of the Byers seem to share, a willingness to do whatever’s necessary for each other, that’s genuinely kind of touching. Maybe they’ve got nothing but each other, but like, they’ve always got each other.

And honestly, sometimes, having no money and a dad who’s not around but a mom who’d singlehandedly kill a monster for you sounds better than being stuck in a big fancy house with two people who’ll tear down anybody in reach just to avoid having to admit how much they hate each other, two married people who won’t admit how much they hate and resent each other and maybe just aren’t admitting how much they hate and resent you, too. Steve’s gotta wonder sometimes who’s really the disgrace around here.

The thing is, though, Steve did say those things. And he offered what he could of an apology to Jonathan, and it hadn’t gone over well, if the fact that Jonathan stole his girl right out from under his nose and basically never talked to him again after that first monster fight is anything to go by. Steve’s not stupid – at least, not that kind of stupid. He can take a hint. Jonathan Byers doesn’t like him. Doesn’t want to give him another chance. Wouldn’t have anything to do with him if the end of the world didn’t keep throwing them back together.

Steve can’t actually blame him. He can respect that, let the man have his space. Something, something, responsibility for his own actions or something. His dad’d be proud, probably.

But the point is, Steve’s attempts to apologise to Jonathan have been a spectacular flop. And he’d never actually said any of those things about Mrs. Byers to her face. So he can’t exactly try to apologise to her without just letting her know how much of an asshole he’s been, in case Jonathan hadn’t done that already. And, every time circumstances have thrown them together long enough that they might’ve had a chance to actually talk, they’ve had slightly more pressing things to worry about. Or Mrs. Byers has been grieving a recent loss. Like. Less than an hour, recent.

So. Steve hasn’t talked to her. And he has no idea how he’d even start.

He’s profoundly grateful that Nancy was the one to end up swapped with Jonathan, and not him. That he has a good excuse to hang back and keep his mouth shut as Mrs. Byers comes rocketing out of the dining room at the sound of the door like she’s ready to fight whoever’s just walked into her house to the death with her bare hands if necessary. She does a quick rotation through relief, surprise, happiness, and right back into worry at the sight of Nancy – well, Nancy-in-Jonathan’s-body. “Oh! Honey, I didn’t expect you back until later. You rushed out so quickly this morning, too. What’s going on? Is something wrong?”

“No, no, nothing’s wrong,” Nancy hurries to reassure her, pausing just a sliver of a second too long before adding, “Mom.” Steve stuffs down the urge to wince. It’d definitely only make it worse. “Hey, is El still around? There’s something we wanted to ask her about.”

“What? Oh, hi, Nancy,” Mrs. Byers says, distractedly, with a tiny little wave in Steve’s direction. “No, no, she and Will both left not long after you did. You know they’re both trying to spend as much time with their friends as they can, before – before we leave.” She bites her bottom lip, looking back over her shoulder at the dining room and the boxes scattered around it in various stages of packed, before shooting Steve a bright, worried flicker of a smile. “I’m guessing you already asked Mike?”

“He hadn’t seen her,” Steve agrees.

Mrs. Byers’ smile fades, leaving only the worry. “Well…have you tried the others? Max? She’s slept over there a few times –”

“We haven’t talked to Max yet,” Nancy says to Steve, readjusting Jonathan’s keys in her hand. Steve doesn’t think he’s imagining the trace of a smile on her face, the hint of excitement in her – Jonathan’s – voice. He wonders how he’d ever managed to miss just how much she lights up when she’s getting to the bottom of a mystery.

She’s just turning toward the door when Mrs. Byers stops her. “Actually, if you have a minute before you go – if it’s not anything world-ending…?” She smiles as she says it, like it’s a joke. Steve looks at her eyes and knows it’s not.

“No,” he says, before Nancy can put that practiced, polite, regretful look on her borrowed face into words. “Nothing’s gonna explode if we stick around for a bit. Right, Jonathan?”

Nancy shoots him a look, but she doesn’t say anything, just nods. “Right. It’s nothing urgent.”

Jonathan’s mom gives Steve a smile, and then a curious look, like what he said just registered and something about it struck her as odd. She doesn’t say anything, though, just gives her head a little shake. “Could I get a hand with the table out in the dining room? The top’s supposed to come off the foot, but I can’t get the stupid thing to come apart.”

“No problem, Mrs. B,” Steve agrees, grabbing Nancy’s hand with the keys still in it.

“Oh, sweetheart, I didn’t mean – you don’t have to -”

“Come on. I want to help.”

Mrs. Byers looks, for a moment, like she thinks she should refuse, but she really doesn’t want to. Then she shakes her head, and turns toward the dining room, motioning for Steve and Nancy to follow her.

Nancy’s giving Steve a look, too, but when he meets her eyes and raises both eyebrows, she just shakes Jonathan’s head.

The table Mrs. Byers wants help pulling into two pieces is huge and old and heavy, with a circular top that makes it a gigantic pain to try to balance on its side, and screws with their heads covered in a thick layer of fossilised stain. If there was ever a possibility of getting them out, Steve thinks, it was probably before this thing spent about a millennium in the La Brea tar pits. And there’s another dorky thing he only knows about courtesy of Henderson. He has got to find some friends who give half a shit about sports.

“I don’t think this is going to work,” Nancy says, after maybe twenty minutes of trying to work out if the screws actually need to come out, or if there’s another trick to getting the pieces apart. “Uh, Mom. How old is this thing, anyway? Couldn’t we just leave it here, if it’s not going to fit in the moving van the way it is? Put it in the garage sale, or -”

Mrs. Byers is already shaking her head. “And have to replace it once we get to California? This table’s worked for us for this many years, it’ll see us through a few more.” She gives Steve a sudden, piercing look, and for a second, Steve thinks, absurdly, that she knows. That she can see right through the makeup and the hairspray, through Nancy’s big blue eyes, and see Steve looking back – “Oh, Nancy, you shouldn’t be messing around with all this in your nice clothes.”

Steve looks down. He’d almost forgotten he’s still wearing Nancy’s new sundress. Turns out skirts are comfortable. Who knew. “Oh. No, Mrs. B, it’s fine -”

“No, my mom is right,” Nancy says, firmly. She manages not to make the ‘mom’ sound so awkward, this time. “I don’t know how much longer this is going to take. Here, tell you what,” she offers, like it’s only just occurring to her and not obviously exactly what she’s been plotting since the second she started speaking, “why don’t you take the car and go spin by Max Mayfield’s house? See if El’s there?”

Steve’s on the very edge of agreeing when Mrs. Byers says, sounding uncertain, sounding scared, “Oh – yes, of course, if we don’t know where she is -”

“That’s not what Jonathan means, Mrs. Byers,” Steve says, flashing Nancy’s patented everything-is-fine grin at Jonathan’s mom before flicking a pointed glance over at Nancy. He’d thought the whole point of all the secrecy, of not just telling her what’s happened to them, was not to heap one more thing on top of Mrs. Byers’ already-overloaded plate. Not throw her into a panic over maybe losing yet another person. Not when, as far as they know, El’s completely fine and she and Max are just braiding each other’s hair or whatever it is girls do. “I’m sure he’s just worried, too. Hey, what if I just call over there and check on El, and then I can come give you a hand with those boxes if you still want it?”

Mrs. Byers is still frowning at Steve like he’s just offered all his suggestions in a language she doesn’t speak. But she’s at least nodding. Nancy, behind her shoulder, pins Steve with a glare instead. Steve’s not sure why, exactly. Except that she probably wants her own body back as soon as possible. Steve can’t really blame her.

“Your brand new dress, Nancy,” Nancy says, and, okay, yeah. There’s that too. But the thing she’s doing with her eyebrows, Steve guesses, is saying it’s still mostly about finding El.

He can’t exactly say he blames her. Or that he doesn’t understand. This is just what makes Nancy…Nancy. The single-minded purpose, the determination. He’d even call it stubbornness, if he was feeling mean.

But he’s not feeling mean. He’s just also not feeling like letting Nancy just have her way.

And doing something for Mrs. Byers feels like it’s been a long time coming.

“I’ll be careful with it,” Steve says. “Do you want to call Max’s place, or should I?”

From the glare he’s getting from Nancy, Steve guesses they’ll be continuing this conversation in private. But Steve catches her eye and nods his head, as imperceptibly as he can, in Mrs. Byers’ direction.

He can see Nancy grit Jonathan’s teeth. “I guess you can borrow some of my old clothes. If you’re going to insist on helping with the packing.”

Steve meets Nancy’s stare head-on. “Oh, I am. Going to insist.”

He’s already noticed that Jonathan Byers’ face seems to be designed for sarcasm. He’s got to add ‘intense glowering fury’ to that. For half a second, Steve honestly thinks maybe Nancy’s about to haul off and deck him. But then, maybe he’s just remembering what happened last time Jonathan looked at him with this much fire in his dark eyes. How Jonathan had knocked his block off, laid him out flat and straddled him, pinning him down –

Steve is…suddenly, weirdly aware of the place between his legs – Nancy’s legs – where his dick ought to be. It’s a profoundly strange feeling. Although not, uh. Exactly a bad one.

He’s blaming Nancy for this. Her stupid body needs to just get with the program and figure out that she’s not in here, it doesn’t need to get all hot and bothered over her boyfriend.

Steve does his best to ignore it, trying to conjure up the least sexy image he’s got in his mental arsenal as he stares Nancy down. Unfortunately, that tactic just ends up taking him, via giant monster dripping oozy slime from toothy petal-jaws, right back to Jonathan Byers. And the way Jonathan threw that lighter, that first November when he and Nancy’d dragged Steve into this mess. The smooth, confident, elegant way Jonathan moves when he’s got purpose and intention, when he’s not all hunched over and shuffling, worrying about who might be watching, what they might be thinking. And the way Jonathan and Nancy had moved together, like cogs in a well-oiled machine, almost like they could read each other’s minds –

“Nancy? Nancy?”

It takes Steve a second to clock that Nancy’s trying to get his attention. “What? Oh. Yeah, present.”

Nancy frowns at him, but – Steve thinks it’s not just Jonathan’s face’s natural predisposition, this time. She does look more worried than usual. “Are you feeling okay? You look flushed. Maybe you should sit down.”

“What? No, no, I’m fine. I’m good.” Steve gives his head the tiniest shake he can manage, trying to snap himself back to reality. It sort of works. “But, uh, good idea about the clothes. D’you wanna help me pick out something you won’t be sorry about if it gets wrecked?”

Nancy’s still giving him a strange look. But she nods, and turns toward the hall, like she expects Steve to follow her. She holds Jonathan’s back straighter than Jonathan does, Steve realises, as he trails along in her footsteps. Walks with Jonathan’s full height. He’s – taller than he always appears, in Steve’s memory, in Steve’s imagination. That perpetual slouch has been doing its job, diminishing Jonathan to everybody else’s eyes. Making him smaller.

The thought gives Steve a weird little pang that has nothing to do with Nancy’s traitor body.

Speaking of Nancy’s traitor body, though. It definitely seems to have noticed along with Steve that Jonathan’s-body-with-Nancy’s-confidence is broader through the shoulders than the Jonathan in Steve’s memory, too. And – Jonathan’s hands –

And it definitely isn’t helping anything that now, Steve knows exactly what it feels like to kiss him.

Steve gives himself another little shake, harder this time, and wonders why the hell Nancy and Jonathan couldn’t have just swapped with each other and left him the fuck out of this.

…

“You needed me for something?”

Robin’s voice drifts back from behind the barely-cracked door to the backroom. “Yep! Just back here!” Jonathan doesn’t know her well enough to really tell, but he thinks she sounds unusually chirpy.

Unusually chirpy or not, though, Robin is Steve’s coworker. Helping her with whatever this is is Steve’s job. And Jonathan’s not a big enough asshole to lose Steve his brand-new job just because something about this situation smells. Even if Robin is acting strange.

If she tries to kiss him, though, all bets are off.

“Coming,” Jonathan sighs, pushing the door open and stepping through. He just has time to notice that it’s almost as hot as the summer day outside back here before –

The door slams behind him. Something rustles, and his vision goes suddenly dark as somebody yanks a bag over his head.

“What -” he starts.

Something hard collides, forcibly and with speed, into the backs of his knees.

Jonathan abruptly sits down. It’s not like he has a whole lot of choice in the matter.

Panic kicks in fast, though, as hands grab at his wrists, trying to pull his arms behind his back. Jonathan kicks out, lashes back. A vicious satisfaction blooms through him at the high-pitched yelp from behind him when one of his elbows connects. He scrambles up out of the chair it feels like somebody’s trying to tie him to, yanking the bag off his head to see –

Robin. Glaring him down. Standing with her feet planted shoulder-width apart and her arms raised in an action-hero stance. Brandishing –

“Is that a hair dryer?” Jonathan asks, completely nonplussed. “Where did you get a hair dryer?”

Robin jabs the business end of the hair dryer in his direction. It whines and belches a blast of hot air into Jonathan’s face. “Steve keeps one in the employee bathroom. Which you would know, if you were really him!”

Jonathan isn’t sure what to say to that. Somehow, the part of all of this that’s flabbergasting him the most is the fact that Steve Harrington, apparently, actually keeps a hair dryer at work. So much for effortless perfection.

It’s ridiculous. It’s also weirdly endearing.

And it definitely doesn’t explain why Robin is now waving the hair dryer at him like it’s a lethal weapon. Or why she ambushed him in the first place. Or why it’s so weirdly warm in this fluorescent-lit closet of a back room, compared to the air-conditioned cool of the store out front, or why there’s a little space heater ticking and rattling and glowing a fiery orange-red in the corner just behind the chair Jonathan apparently knocked over when he escaped Robin’s attempt to tie him to –

The obvious conclusion clobbers him over the head like a bat with nails in it. “Wait, you think I’m flayed?”

Robin’s voice is steely and determined, but shaky, as she jabs the hair dryer in Jonathan’s direction. “I know you’re not Steve!”

Jonathan squints, raising a hand to block the desert wind that’s currently scouring his eyeballs. Robin scowls, and jabs the hair dryer at him more aggressively.

That’s weirdly endearing, too, and something in Jonathan’s chest clenches about it for reasons he can’t entirely explain. Something about how Robin obviously knows Steve well enough to be able to tell when he’s not acting like himself. And how she’s clearly scared, clearly thinks something awful’s happened to her – crush? Coworker? Friend? – and yet, here she is, facing down the unknown horror.

With a hair dryer.

“You’re right, okay, you’re right! I’m not Steve,” Jonathan admits. “But I’m not possessed either.”

Robin gives the hair dryer one last jab. “Then what are you!?”

“I’m…Jonathan Byers?”

For a frozen moment, the only sound is the frantic whirling of the hair dryer’s little motor.

Then Robin demands, “…What!?”

…

“When did we agree that we weren’t going to tell Mrs. Byers?”

“You didn’t hear her this morning. And do you want to be the one to go out there right now and explain to her what’s really going on?”

Nancy’s not sure if Steve’s wince is because of being reminded of Mrs. Byers’ grief, or thinking about having to try to explain what they think happened. Maybe both.

Whatever the reason, though, he backs right off. Which is all that Nancy really wanted.

“If you’re going to insist on sidetracking us,” she says, pulling open Jonathan’s closet, “the least you can do is not destroy my brand new sundress while you’re at it. There’s got to be something in here that’ll fit me…”

She shuffles through the hangers and two drawers in the dresser before she finds a pair of gym shorts and a dark green sweatshirt that she throws at Steve. “Here, try these. I think the shorts are going to be about the only thing that isn’t nine miles too long on you right now -”

“Nancy,” Steve interrupts. He’s staring at the sweatshirt like it’s some kind of rare and fascinating artifact from a lost civilisation. Like it’s a jigsaw puzzle that’s missing one last single piece, right in the very middle. “Why does Jonathan Byers have my sweatshirt?”

It takes Nancy a second to process the words. “What?”

Steve holds up the sweatshirt beside his borrowed face, with a raise of both his eyebrows. Like he’s answering her question, instead of raising several more.

“That’s yours?” Nancy asks, incredulous. But even as she says it, she’s starting to remember. The rapid flicker of Christmas lights, the stench of blood and burning, Steve’s voice rising as it repeats this is crazy, this is crazy, this is CRAZY – “Oh, my god. Oh, no. I found it in my room. I thought Jonathan forgot it there.” Because she’d seen it here. At his house. Of course. Oh, no.

“And he must have thought you forgot it here,” Steve says, more to the sweatshirt than to Nancy. He looks weirdly like he’s just seen a ghost. “Why else would he hang onto it?”

“I wonder why he wouldn’t just ask me if I left it behind, if he thought it was mine,” Nancy muses, as she turns to rifle the top of Jonathan’s desk, hopefully hiding her furious blush. She can’t believe she did that. She can’t believe she just forgot which one of her boyfriends that sweatshirt belonged to. She can’t believe she gave it back to the wrong one. “I left that here ages ago.”

“What, is it weird now to hang onto something of your girlfriend’s?” Steve says, a little too fast. Nancy catches herself wondering if there’s anything of hers tucked into the back of one of his drawers, and has to hastily stuff down the unexpectedly complicated tangle of emotions that thought threatens to unearth. She tells herself firmly that she would not be disappointed to find out that Steve Harrington didn’t keep any little mementos of their failed attempt at a relationship. And that even if she would be, now is not the time. Besides, why does it even matter to her? They’re over. They’ve been over for months. And if Steve had hung onto something of hers, how and why would Nancy ever, ever find out?

She wonders, for the first time, what ever happened to her cherry cola lip balm.

“What are you doing, anyway?” Steve asks, still just a little too fast. Maybe that’s why it comes out sounding so accusing. “I can change into these, they’ll work fine. What are you still looking for?”

“Where Jonathan keeps his savings. I’m going to put some more cash in his wallet. That scene at the gas station was humiliating, I’m not putting him through that.”

Steve gives her a look that, even on her own face, Nancy can’t read.

But all he says is, “Try his underwear drawer.”

…

Somebody’s dinging the little bell on the counter out front for service, over and over and over again.

Robin is ignoring it.

“Explain it again,” she says.

“I’ve told you three times,” Jonathan sighs. “We…swapped bodies, I guess. Me and Nancy and Steve. I don’t know how. Or why.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s all I know! We didn’t exactly get handed a manual.”

“So…you’re telling me that Steve is somewhere, wandering around Hawkins, in Nancy Wheeler’s body?”

Jonathan shrugs. “Unless he and Nancy figured out how to swap.”

“Wow.” Robin leans back in the chair she’d tried to tie Jonathan to. The bell dings another three times in quick succession. Neither of them makes a move toward the door. “I knew he’d do anything to get her attention, but this still seems a little extreme.” Then her eyes go wide, fixing on Jonathan’s – Steve’s – face. “Oh, shit. I forgot. You and Nancy are dating, right?”

“As far as I know,” Jonathan mutters.

“Well, you don’t have anything to worry about from Steve,” Robin says, confidently. Jonathan wishes he shared her confidence. And that whoever’s ringing the bell out front would give up and go away. “Good grief. Can’t whoever that is take a hint?”

“I’ve got it,” Jonathan says, starting for the door.

“See, this is how I know you’re really not Steve.”

Jonathan pauses with his hand on the doorknob. “Am I really that obvious?”

Robin shrugs, expansively, raising both eyebrows as she gestures up and down Jonathan’s borrowed body with one hand. Like it shouldn’t even need saying, how much something fundamental and inalterable separates him from Steve.

Jonathan lets out a sigh, and lets go of the doorknob. “Well, I guess that’s it. Steve’s getting fired.”

Robin somehow manages to raise a single eyebrow even higher.

“No way I can go out there and try to pretend to be him,” Jonathan explains. “Not if it’s really that obvious. Not if I’m really that pathetic.”

“Hey, the dingus is just as pathetic,” Robin says, like that’s supposed to be reassuring. “Just in different ways.”

There isn’t another chair handy. Jonathan settles for sitting down on the cooling space heater. “I thought it’d be easier.”

“Well, peddling movies is a deceptively complex business.”

“Not the movies,” Jonathan says, even though he’s pretty sure Robin knows he didn’t mean that. “The – people. Everybody always used to like him, in high school. It drove me crazy. Everything always seemed to be so easy for him.”

Robin gives a slow nod, looking at nothing in particular, a rueful smile crossing her face. “Yeah. Yeah. Well…” The smile starts to grow, despite her unsuccessful attempts to hide it. “Guess appearances can be deceiving?”

“Very funny.”

Robin beams.

“I thought maybe that would be the silver lining,” Jonathan finds himself saying, before he can give himself time to think better of it.

“Silver lining?”

“Of this bodyswapping thing. I thought, maybe, if I had to be Steve – maybe some of it would rub off. The – charm, charisma, whatever.” He leans back against the frame of the door, looking at his feet, the space heater, the shelves lining the walls stacked with black video-store cases. “I guess I always thought, if I looked like Steve Harrington, if I dressed like Steve Harrington, if I had Steve Harrington’s money, if I could put a stupid ball through a stupid basket like Steve Harrington, then maybe the world would go easy on me the way it does on Steve Harrington. But I guess that was too much to hope for. Not when it’s still me underneath. Not when I can’t just – not care, the way he does.”

Robin’s giving him a look. Jonathan shifts, pushing himself away from the wall. “What?”

“You think Steve doesn’t care?”

“Did you go to our high school? I know he doesn’t care.” Jonathan had been aiming for flippant, for drily cutting. It comes out sounding bitterer than he’d expected. “Consequences happen to people who aren’t Steve. He’s never had a detention he couldn’t just get the basketball coach to get him out of, never had a job he couldn’t get fired from and just go work for his daddy instead -”

Robin coughs into her hand.

“Never had a thing – or a girl – he couldn’t just replace. He didn’t even bother trying to hang onto Nancy Wheeler, when he had her. Just let her go with barely a word. He saved my life from a monster and then went right back to ignoring me at school like nothing ever happened. He’s too cool to care about anything and too rich and popular and beautiful and lucky to ever have to.”

Jonathan’s starting to wonder if Robin actually might have x-ray vision. She’s staring through him hard enough. It wouldn’t be the strangest thing that’s happened in Hawkins.

“Okay,” she says, at last. “I’m not gonna argue with you about the high school stuff, because that would be stupid.” She pauses, twisting the fingers of both hands together and staring at her thumbs for a long minute, before she raises her head between her hunched shoulders to pierce Jonathan again with that stare. “But I think you should know. That night, at the mall? When he rammed that possessed guy’s car and saved you and Nancy’s asses?”

Jonathan nods.

“We weren’t even supposed to be there. We were way the hell and gone up on top of some hill in the middle of nowhere. None of us knew what was going on. Nobody else thought we needed to go charging to the rescue. But Steve heard you guys might be in trouble, and that was it. He was beat to shit and barely even standing, but he was going to get you out of there. He didn’t even stop to explain or argue or even say where he was going. He was already gone.”

Jonathan shifts, again, crossing and uncrossing his arms, trying to find a position where he’s not so agonisingly aware of himself.

His brain helpfully chooses this moment to dredge up the glare of advancing headlights whiting out his vision; the lancing panic that had shot through him with every grind of the engine, the knowledge of Will trapped in the motionless station wagon behind him like a sitting duck pouring like icewater down his back; Nancy’s dark, determined silhouette vanishing quickly into those headlights’ terrifying blaze. The remembered snarl of the Camaro’s engine blends into the weird shrieking roar of the monster in Jonathan’s mind, the rows and rows of its tiny sharp teeth unfurling right above his helpless face –

And then, Steve. Both times, at the last possible second, right when all hope seemed lost, the last person Jonathan ever would have expected had been there. Never acknowledging it, once everything was said and done; never asking for any recognition or anything in exchange. Just, always, there, right when they needed him the most. Just – there.

Robin’s not finished talking. “So. Just. When you say he doesn’t care. You’re not wrong, about a lot of that other stuff. But – maybe you don’t have the whole picture, either.”

“And maybe leopards can change their spots?” Jonathan snarks, but his heart’s not really in it.

Robin shrugs. “Stranger things have happened.”

There’s a beat of awkward silence before she adds, “Also, for the record? I do not understand what all of you are seeing in Nancy Wheeler.”

“Well…” Jonathan thinks of Nancy’s forehead pressed to his own and her lips soft as butterfly’s wings against his, the press of the line of scar tissue across her palm against his own, the way she smiles when she’s about to do something that somebody else would really rather she wasn’t doing, and can’t help a small smile himself. “Maybe you don’t have the whole picture either.”

Robin makes a gagging noise behind her hand.

Before either of them can say anything more, though, there’s a ferocious flurry of dinging from out in the front of the video store. Robin rolls her eyes hugely as she levers herself up out of the chair. “Ugh. Coming!”

She looks over and catches Jonathan’s eye. “Just let me do the talking.”

Jonathan follows her out of the backroom and up to the counter. Unsurprisingly, since this is Hawkins, he recognises the people standing waiting for them. A little surprisingly, they don’t have a stack of tapes they’re in a desperate hurry to rent. It’s two of Will’s friends – Lucas, apparently back for whatever he’d wanted earlier, and his girlfriend. Max, Jonathan’s pretty sure. They’re sure not acting like they’re dating, though. Lucas is leaning against the counter like he’s going to leap across it and shake Robin if she takes one more minute to get up to the front, and Max – Max usually looks kind of pissed off or sarcastic when Jonathan sees her around, but he’s never seen her looking so thoroughly disgusted.

“Finally!” Lucas bursts out with, the second Robin shows her face outside the door to the backroom. “What were you two even doing in there, seven minutes in heaven?”

The face Robin makes in response to that makes Jonathan’s fingers itch for his camera.

“Never say that to me about Harrington ever again,” she says, raising yet more questions in Jonathan’s mind. “Where’s the fire, pipsqueaks?”

“Is Keith gone?” Lucas asks, instead of answering. “He’s not gonna bust in and kick us out again?”

“Last I checked, he was over on the arcade side dealing with an orange pop situation. Why?”

It’s Max who answers, not Lucas. She looks first Robin and then Jonathan hard in the eye. “We need to talk. We have a problem.”

She glances down at herself for a second, her face giving a horrified twitch, before she adds, “We have a serious problem.”

…

Steve doesn’t want to know what it says about him, that today he’s ended up wearing both his ex-girlfriend’s and her new boyfriend’s clothes. Or that he’s weirdly not all that bothered by it.

It probably says nothing good about him, though, that he thinks Nancy’s body looks stupidly cute wearing his sweatshirt tucked into the drawstring waistband of Jonathan’s old gym shorts.

“Stop preening,” Nancy says, annoyed, from the doorway. “You look fine. It’s not even you wearing it. Let’s just go and get this over with, so we can go find El and get swapped back.”

“Jonathan’s going to be so offended when he finds out you hate his body and his life this much,” Steve teases, turning away from the mirror.

Judging by the way Jonathan’s face pinches up, though, Nancy hasn’t taken it as a joke.

“I don’t hate Jonathan’s life,” she says, sounding so genuinely wounded that, for a moment, Steve feels like an absolute shit. “And believe me, I definitely don’t hate his body.”

“Nancy. Come on.”

The smile that flickers across Nancy’s borrowed face is there and gone in an instant. But Steve still thinks it looks unexpectedly mischievous.

He’s not prepared for how much he suddenly misses seeing her smile like that. Making her smile like that. He’d been pleasantly surprised, when they’d dated, by just how much trouble good-girl Nancy Wheeler was willing and eager to get into, with just a little permission. Just a little encouragement, from the right person. At least, until Steve had suddenly turned into the wrong person. Or maybe until the kind of trouble he wanted to encourage her towards somehow became the wrong kind.

Steve tries not to wonder what kind of trouble she’s been getting into with Jonathan. Whether she even does, anymore, now that she’s taken down the lab. Whether Jonathan’s annoyingly down-to-earth responsible streak keeps her on the straight and narrow.

Steve tries not to wonder whether it’s Nancy who encourages Jonathan into mischief. Or what Jonathan Byers cutting loose and doing something a little wild and crazy even looks like.

He fails. Miserably.

(And, for some reason, can’t stop mentally replaying that moment in the alleyway two Novembers ago, the only time he’s ever actually seen Jonathan Byers’ rigid self-control snap. Can’t stop mentally replaying Jonathan’s full weight straddling Steve’s lap, all the passion of Jonathan’s fury focused entirely on Steve like the rest of the world had ceased to exist. Or the black eye he’d left Steve with as a souvenir, that had pulsed dully but insistently every time Steve pressed on or around it for weeks afterwards -)

Nancy’s amusement doesn’t last long, though. “I just want to fix this. As soon as we possibly can.”

“Yeah. I wouldn’t really want to get saddled with some of my exes, either,” Steve says, trying to make it sound light. Like it really is just a joke.

He can’t read the look Nancy gives him.

“We don’t know for sure what caused this,” she says, quiet but intense. “Eleven’s powers have been gone for months. If this was her, that means something’s changed. If it wasn’t her, then that means there’s someone – or something – else out there, messing with us. And nobody’s even seen Eleven since this morning. So you can waste all the time you want worrying about whether green suits my complexion, or whether you’ll be back to yourself before you’re supposed to take Robin out tonight, or having to sit down to pee, or whatever. I want to get swapped back and go find Jonathan as soon as possible. Something weird is going on, and I don’t want to only find out what after it’s already eaten somebody I care about!”

Steve bites down on his – Nancy’s – tongue.

The only words he can summon up in response to that are the absolutely genius, “Robin and I aren’t dating.”

Nancy snorts, crossing Jonathan’s arms over her chest. “Please. You’ve spent basically every waking moment together since the mall.”

“Yeah, well, getting kidnapped and tortured with somebody gives you a special kind of relationship.”

Nancy’s expression goes – kind of frozen. Like she’s very deliberately not freaking out. “Tortured?”

A slow sort of panic steals over Steve as he tries to remember if he’d ever filled her in on what, exactly, happened to him on the Fourth of July. Maybe he hadn’t. But then, had she really not even wondered about the black eye and all the blood and bruising? Did she – did she think he just got his ass kicked again?

Which, actually, now that Steve’s thinking about it, is a more reasonable and sensible assumption to make than ‘kidnapped and beaten and tortured for information by Russian thugs in their secret base hidden underneath the mall’. Maybe he can’t actually blame her. Although it stings, even knowing she has less than zero interest in him anymore, to think that Nancy Wheeler just assumes Steve can’t hold his own in a fight.

“Yeah,” he says, after what he realises is too long a silence. “But Henderson busted us out before they could break out the bone saw, so, y’know, no harm, no foul.”

Nancy just keeps giving him that frozen, incredulous look.

“Jonathan’s mom has the right idea,” she says, at last. “Why do any of us still live in this town.”

Steve snorts. He can’t help it. They were in the middle of a serious conversation, and here he is, cracking up like an idiot –

But Nancy’s grinning, too. Like she’s not sure if she’s allowed to.

“It’s hazardous to our health,” Steve agrees, with a sudden rush of heady relief. “And hell on my hair.”

Nancy huffs out a breath, ruffling Jonathan’s bangs. “I – didn’t mean that. About you…admiring yourself -”

“Nah. No, you did.” Steve doesn’t have an alternate explanation for what he was doing gawking in the mirror at Nancy that isn’t worse, though, so he kind of has to roll with it. “Green kinda suits you, y’know. Brings out your eyes.”

The little smile that flashes across Nancy’s face tells Steve, thankfully, that at least this time his joke landed.

“You know I don’t want anything to happen to Jonathan either. Right?” he asks, and Nancy ducks her head. “But just – think about what Jonathan would do, for a minute? If we just brush his mom off and go racing off without telling her anything -”

Nancy lets out a long sigh. But she doesn’t argue.

“Do you always do that?” she asks, instead.

“Do what?”

“Brush everything off. Or make it into a joke. Pretend it isn’t as bad as it is. Pretend it isn’t really happening.”

“I dunno,” Steve says. Somehow he doesn’t think she’s just talking about right now, about how he talks about torture and the Russians and being stuck in fucking Hawkins, Indiana, supernatural bullshit capital of the world. He hasn’t forgotten the drunken dressing-down she gave him, before they broke up. No matter how he’s tried. But - “Maybe I just like seeing you smile.”

Nancy shoots him a flicker of one for that, again, but it vanishes almost as quickly as it appears.

It’s probably not the time. Or the place. But Steve doesn’t know when he’ll get another chance. If Nancy’ll even still talk to him once they’ve finished saving the world again.

And Nancy’s right. They always seem to come out of these explosions of weird shit down at least one member of their little group.

So Steve just comes out and says it while he can. “You…you know we didn’t actually kill Barb. Right?”

The exasperated look Nancy gives him, even on Jonathan’s face, is just so thoroughly Nancy that Steve thinks even Mrs. Byers would be able to tell who’s wearing Jonathan’s skin. Not in a way that’s anywhere near as creepy as that sounds, Jesus. Steve has got to come up with a different metaphor. One that makes Nancy sound less like a horror movie villain. “Steve.”

“Hey, you were the one who said -”

“I was so drunk, I don’t even remember saying that. Of course I know the monster –”

“I’m just saying. We both thought she’d gone home. Even if you had been out there with her, we didn’t know anything about the monster yet. And, I mean, it dropped out of Byers’ ceiling, so it’s not like inside was any safer than outside. I know you know we didn’t go out and push her in the pool or whatever. But there wasn’t anything we could’ve done to actually help her, either.”

Nancy’s quiet for so long, staring at Jonathan’s carpet, that Steve starts to think maybe she isn’t going to respond.

“You really think that?” she asks, just when Steve’s about to give up and suggest they just go help Mrs. Byers with her packing.

“Yeah. If either of us had tried – it just would’ve gotten somebody else hurt, too.” Steve sits on the least rumpled part of Jonathan’s unmade bed. This feels like it’s going to be a slightly longer conversation than he wants to have standing. “I thought the same thing about the government, you know. I didn’t think there was anything we could do to fight them. And I didn’t want you – or anybody - getting hurt.”

“I know,” Nancy says. She doesn’t sound happy. And she doesn’t come out of the doorway she’s leaning against to sit on the bed with Steve. Or meet his eyes.

“Nance?”

“You don’t know how much I’ve thought about it,” Nancy starts, slowly, raising her face to study Jonathan’s window like the midday light pouring through it is absolutely fascinating. Steve wonders, a little, if that’s how Jonathan looks when he’s really absorbed in taking just the perfect photograph. If Nancy ever notices the way the sunlight at just the right angle casts Jonathan’s brown eyes in gold. He hopes so. Somebody should.

“The only reason Barb was there that night,” Nancy continues, relentlessly, “was because I asked her to come. The only reason she cut her hand was because I pushed her into doing that dumb drinking game. The only reason she stuck around after I told her to go home was – to keep me from doing anything stupid. Like I asked her to. She was my ride. She was my best friend. She wasn’t just going to leave me stranded out in the middle of the woods at your house, if it turned out you – if I changed my mind, or -”

She takes a deep breath in, and lets it out slowly and soundlessly before she turns to Steve. “You didn’t kill Barb.”

Steve isn’t sure what he could possibly say to that.

So he doesn’t say anything. He just pushes himself up off the bed, and walks over to where Nancy’s standing, slowly and deliberately so she can see him coming. She doesn’t move, just stands there stiff and tense and defiant, not breaking his gaze. But she doesn’t pull away when Steve puts a hand over her borrowed one. When he pulls her toward him.

Jonathan’s so much taller than Nancy, nearly head and shoulders. Steve feels a little ridiculous trying to wrap his arms around Nancy-in-Jonathan’s-body, especially when she shifts to try to rest her forehead against his shoulder. It’s uncomfortable. It’s awkward.

Somehow, though, it’s less awkward than he thinks it would be if they were both themselves right now. If he was trying to pull Nancy into his arms as himself, and she still fit nicely under his chin. If he was trying to tug her back into a familiar position, one he’d wrapped her up in a hundred times before, when he was uselessly trying to comfort her, trying to quiet her, over this same pain. And, as usual, screwing it all up.

“I’m not trying to make you stop talking about it,” he hurries to reassure Nancy, as the thought strikes him.

Nancy’s only response is a choked half-laugh.

“And I’m sorry I did try,” Steve goes on, emboldened by the way Nancy’s not pulling away yet, the way she feels so tall, so broad, so tense in his arms. He thinks, weirdly, that there’s something more honest about this than all those other times he tried to pull her into his arms and kiss all her tears and rage and dangerous defiant words into silence, smother her in a loving embrace. There’s something more honest about Nancy being bigger than him, stronger than him, wearing the face of the first person who’d ever kicked the shit out of him. Like Steve’s not trying to force her into leaning on him, like he couldn’t even if he did try.

Like it means something that she’s leaning on him anyway.

“I didn’t think we could fight the government,” he says, quietly, into her – Jonathan’s – hair. “But you did. And I should’ve known better than to bet against Nancy Wheeler.”

Steve can feel Nancy trying to smile into his shoulder.

For some reason, now that he can’t see her face, borrowed or otherwise, the words come pouring out. “I’m…I’m happy Jonathan was there to help you, when I was too scared to. When I couldn’t see past the end of my own nose. And believe me, just because I don’t think we could’ve saved your friend doesn’t mean I don’t wish we’d tried.”

Nancy’s very quiet, for long enough that Steve starts to think maybe he shouldn’t have said that. Maybe he shouldn’t have said any of that.

But then Nancy says, quiet enough that Steve’s not sure, for a second, if he actually heard it, “Thank you.”

“What? What’re you thanking me for, I -”

“And Steve?”

Steve bites off the babbling string of whatever was starting to come out of his mouth. “What?”

Nancy’s eyes aren’t her own, aren’t looking up into his face like they were that night. But there’s something familiarly clear and scrutinising and honest about the way she studies him, the steady gaze she rests on him. “You’re not bullshit.”

Steve tries to laugh. To say something to brush it aside, something to prove he hasn’t been letting those drunken words eat at him for the last ten or so months.

It all sticks in his throat.

So, instead, he wraps his arms as far around Nancy’s bony borrowed back as he can, and squeezes, feeling the tension in her muscles slowly start to bleed away.

And maybe he lets himself lean into it, when she starts to squeeze back.

Just a little. 

They don’t exactly leap apart at the sound of a gentle rap of knuckles against the doorframe, but Nancy does whip upright so fast that the side of her skull collides with Steve’s with a hollow clonking sound. Steve stumbles backwards, pressing a hand to his temple, as Nancy tugs down her shirt at the hem and aims a beaming, patented Nancy Wheeler smile at Mrs. Byers. It looks deeply, deeply weird on Jonathan’s face. “M- uh, Mom! Sorry, we were just coming back out to help with the -”

“Forget about the packing for right now,” Mrs. Byers says. She sounds excited, and Steve doesn’t think it’s a good excited. “Will and Jane are back. And, uh…” She darts a glance back over her shoulder, toward the living room, and a shiver of cold apprehension goes rolling down Steve’s spine.

Judging by the look Nancy darts in his direction, she’s feeling the same way. “What’s going on?”

Mrs. Byers’ nervous flicker of a smile is reflexive, sheepish for only a moment before it vanishes, leaving only the worried – confused? – furrow in her brow. “I, I don’t…well. Come and see?”

…

Nancy’s only met the girl Mike calls El once or twice, and only briefly those times. The impression she’s formed from those short encounters is that El is a girl of few words and decisive action. That El’s unusually stoic and serious for a child. Especially to Nancy, who’s used to Mike’s histrionics.

It’s very, very strange to see her freaking out.

Well. At least. It looks like her.

“Remind me again,” Nancy asks Lucas Sinclair – or the kid who’s currently walking around in Lucas Sinclair’s body. “You’re Mike?”

The kid gives his eyes a huge, obnoxious roll. “I’m Dustin, obviously. That’s Mike.”

He jabs a thumb over his shoulder at Lucas’ redheaded girlfriend, who is somehow managing to scowl like she personally loathes the entire world and every individual person in it even more than usual.

“They came and got us at the video store,” Jonathan says, in answer to Nancy’s unspoken question.

Nancy nods, and glances at the girl in the green polyester vest who’s perched on the arm of the Byers’ battered couch, watching the proceedings with an air of detached interest. “And you’re still…?”

“Oh, Robin,” the girl says, raising her hand in a half-wave before pointing at the nametag pinned to her vest. “From the mall?”

Nancy looks at the nametag. “That says ‘Steve’.”

Robin looks down. “Shit. Yeah, it does.”

Steve reaches over and closes his hand over the nametag in question. “Yeah, I’m gonna just take that back. If everybody else is as confused as I am right now, I think I’m gonna need it.”

Nancy tries and fails not to make direct, meaningful eye contact with Steve. It’s none of her business who he dates. Who he sleeps with. He’s had girlfriends before her. She’d known he’d have girlfriends after her.

It’s just that. Well. She wasn’t expecting that actually seeing the evidence of it in front of her own eyes – her borrowed eyes, anyway – would twist so strangely and bitterly in her chest.

“It was just a stupid joke thing we were doing,” Steve explains, and Nancy wonders if it’s just that bitter thing in her chest twisting harder, or if he actually sounds guilty. “Worked better for Rob than me, though, ‘cause Robin’s a name that can go either way -”

Robin does something Nancy’s never seen a girl who isn’t Carol Perkins do to Steve Harrington before, ever. She interrupts him. “Dingus. How many boys named Robin have you met.”

Steve does the smallest of double-takes at her. “Batman’s sidekick. Everybody knows that.”

“There’s Robin Hood,” Lucas – no, wait, Dustin – volunteers.

Steve nods at Robin, crossing Nancy’s arms across her chest. The effect is slightly different from when he does it as himself. Nancy hopes she doesn’t look that pouty when she does it. “There’s Robin Hood.”

Robin is giving him the flattest, most disbelieving look Nancy thinks her face is capable of. “Those aren’t their names -”

“Actually, Robin Hood, or Robin of Sherwood -” Dustin starts, helpfully, but he’s interrupted by a sudden outburst out of Max. Mike. Whoever.

“Shut up about Robins already! If somebody doesn’t get me out of this stupid body in the next five minutes -”

“Whatever lame thing he’s about to threaten, I’ll actually do something ten times worse,” Mike’s voice pipes up in agreement. Only it’s not Mike. Because Mike is Max right now, which means that Max…is Mike.

This isn’t funny. Nancy’s not going to laugh.

When she glances over at Jonathan, he’s at least also pressing Steve’s lips together like he doesn’t dare open his mouth for fear of what might come out.

The urge to laugh fades, though, when the kid with Will’s face sitting still and quiet in the middle of the Byers’ broken-down couch, hands clenched on his – her? – knobby knees, says, soft but ringingly clear, “I don’t know how.”

Mike’s outrage evaporates so fast that it almost gives Nancy whiplash. Ignoring Joyce Byers’ arm already holding the kid close against her side, he plops down onto the couch on her other side, gripping both her borrowed hands. “It’s okay, El. Nobody’s asking you to fix it -”

“No!” the kid who must then be Will blurts, rounding on him. “You’re asking me! And El’s powers are gone, Mike! They’ve been gone for months!”

“You think I don’t know that?” Mike snaps back, and then Nancy tunes them all out as her brother’s friends descend into their usual bickering chaos.

Jonathan’s looking at loose ends now that his brother’s gone from mostly ignoring his efforts to calm Will down, to totally ignoring his efforts in favour of picking a fight with Mike. Nancy doesn’t know what happened there, but she doesn’t really care. If it means she finally gets a minute to talk to Jonathan, Mike could whip out a cutlass and start an Errol Flynn duel with his supposed best friends for all she cares.

She doesn’t start out by talking to Jonathan, though. She starts out by coming up behind him, wrapping her arms around his waist. “Hey. Missed you.”

Jonathan jumps, a little, and the way he twists around is a little too fast. But the smile he breaks into when he sees it’s Nancy is genuine and soft, and makes her heart do a funny little flip in her chest. “Missed you too. Are those my gym shorts Steve’s wearing?”

“Long story,” Nancy says, leaning her chin against his shoulder. She’s tall enough to do that, now. She’s going to take advantage. “Did you know that green sweatshirt was his?”

Steve Harrington doesn’t really blush. It’s probably one of the things that helped him in his rise to the top of the heap at Hawkins High. But Nancy knew him well enough for just long enough to recognise the way the tips of Jonathan’s borrowed ears are suddenly going pink. “I, uh, might’ve had an inkling.”

“Why didn’t you say something?”

“What was I supposed to do, just pop over to Steve’s to hand over his sweatshirt? He’d probably think I stole it, the same way I stole his girlfriend.”

“Excuse me,” Nancy says.

“Nancy, come on, you and I both know you make your own decisions. But Steve’s a different breed.”

“You talk about him like he’s from another species sometimes.”

“Isn’t he? Homo popularis. They can interbreed with the regular population, but -”

“Did I just hear you calling me a homo?” Steve asks, as he ambles up to join them, in a voice that Nancy thinks is trying to be jokey and overshooting. He settles both hands on his hips as he surveys the chaos in the living room, in a move that’s so undeniably Steve that it feels extremely weird to see on Nancy’s own body. “Jesus. What is it with these kids? Put ‘em all in a room together and I bet you could set a timer to count down until they all start yelling.”

“I blame Mike,” Nancy says, as Jonathan tugs away from her grip. His grin in her direction is a little queasy. She notices that, for some reason, the tips of his borrowed ears have gotten even pinker.

“What, just on principle?”

Nancy shrugs. “He is my little brother.”

Jonathan gives her a look like he’s realising that maybe she’s from another species.

“And I told you, it isn’t working! Look -” The kid who currently looks like Eleven but is actually Jonathan’s brother takes a deep breath in, and lets it out slowly through her – his? – nose, an expression of intense focus crossing the narrow face as the hands ball into fists at the kid’s sides.

Like Will had said, though, nothing happens.

“Not like that,” El says, and for the first time since she and the rest of the kids got here, it doesn’t sound like there’s a sob lurking just beneath it.

“Well, then, you do it!”

El turns a long look onto her own face. There’s something unusually piercing about it, something that’s unsettling to see in Will’s big blue eyes in a way that makes Nancy’s skin prickle with the memory of suffocating heat. She reaches without thinking for Jonathan’s hand, feels his fingers tangle with hers and misses, suddenly and viscerally, the feeling of the scar in his palm sliding over her own.

“Like this,” El says.

There’s a raised ridge of scar tissue in the palm of the hand Nancy’s clutching.

And it’s – the wrong hand. Hadn’t she just been holding Jonathan’s with her –

“Dingus?” Jonathan’s voice says, slowly but with dawning horror.

Nancy looks up.

For a second, it’s a relief to see Jonathan’s warm, sleepy eyes looking back at her.

And then understanding hits her like a sledgehammer, at the same time as every single one of the kids starts yelling again.

…

It takes a few more swaps to put them all back where they belong.

Jonathan isn’t suicidal enough to tell Nancy how identical the expressions she and Mike wore when they realised they’d been switched with each other were. She’s already sworn Jonathan to silence about that particular swap happening at all, with nothing more than a glare. But he wishes he’d somehow gotten a picture.

He can’t even begin to describe what a relief it is, to be back in his own skin. For his hands to be his hands, again, to make a face and know it’s his face making it. He’d always wanted to know how the other half lived, and okay, maybe it turned out that there was a reason why Steve Harrington had been so popular with the girls in high school, but. When it comes right down to it. Jonathan Byers isn’t Steve Harrington.

And he’s slowly starting to realise just how happy he is with that.

Will seems stunned, even after they’re all back to themselves. Jonathan can’t exactly blame him. After all, it’s not every day you find out that the traumatising ordeal you went through almost a year ago left an indelible mark on you, buried somewhere so deep that you didn’t even know about it until a horrifying and awful replay of that ordeal must have dragged it all back to the surface. And that would have been bad enough without that indelible mark manifesting as the kind of weird superpowers that ruined El’s life and got her hunted by the government.

“It would be nice,” Jonathan says, and is unexpectedly grateful to hear it in his own voice, “if we could go one year without something like this happening.”

“Well, yeah,” Steve says, with that Harrington devil-may-care flippancy that’s always ground Jonathan’s back teeth before. “But then it wouldn’t be Hawkins, would it?”

He glances over toward the wall separating the living room from the dining room, and the cardboard boxes already starting to pile up there, his easy smile faltering. “I just meant – uh -”

“No. You’re right,” Jonathan says. “That’s why we’re leaving.”

Steve laughs, one short, sharp, ugly bark. “Great. Well, send me a postcard from normal. I’m starting to forget what it looks like.”

To Jonathan’s surprise, that’s actually funny. Enough so to startle an unexpected laugh out of him, anyway.

He doesn’t know what to think about the thing his stomach does at the way Steve grins after making him laugh. So Jonathan pretends not to notice it.

There’s a brush of fingers against his palm as a hand slips into his, and he turns to see Nancy, smiling softly up at him. “So? Does Will turning out to have body-swapping, body-snatching psychic powers change anything about your moving plans?”

“You’d have to ask my mom that,” Jonathan answers, with a glance over to where his mother is apparently trying to hold Will close enough to cover him entirely with her own body, a trick that had worked a whole lot better before he’d shot up over the winter to seven foot something. “But I’m pretty sure it just got more important for us to get the hell out of Hawkins. As soon as possible.”

The only sign of disappointment that Nancy lets show is a short, tight squeeze of his fingers, before she lets him go.

Jonathan’s just opening his mouth to say something, he doesn’t even know what, probably something bland and banal and meaninglessly reassuring, when Nancy interrupts him. And the words that come out of her mouth are the last words he’d ever thought he’d hear Nancy Wheeler speak.

“Jonathan…I think I owe you an apology.”

“For what?”

Nancy grimaces. “Oliver Twist.”

Suddenly, Jonathan can’t look her in the eye. “Nancy, I’d already forgotten all about that.”

“No, you hadn’t. If you had, you wouldn’t have known exactly what I was talking about as soon as I said it.”

Jonathan shuts his eyes for a moment, forcing a smile to his face. “Nothing gets past you, does it.”

When a moment passes in silence, without Nancy immediately agreeing proudly with his words, Jonathan looks over to make sure she’s all right. She doesn’t look like she’s been bodysnatched or bodyswapped or flayed in the last five minutes, but then, he’s not really sure how he’d be able to tell.

She is grimacing, though, the same face she’d made when she’d said ‘Oliver Twist’, and the last of Jonathan’s lingering bitterness boils away. “Hey. What’s the matter?”

Nancy looks up at him, her eyes wide and wet and wounded in that way Jonathan’s always been helpless for. “Your car. It ran out of gas when we were trying to get back here.”

Shit. “I’m sorry. I was meaning to get to that tomorrow,” Jonathan says. It’s not a lie. Even with the mall in rubble and everywhere else in town fully hired up for the summer, he’s managed to pick up a few shifts at the movie theater from Robbie Guzman, and the next of them’s tomorrow. Gas money’s been tight, with all the unanticipated expenses that have come up with selling the house and nearly two whole months of summer job flushed down the drain, but he should have been okay – if Nancy and Steve hadn’t unexpectedly had to drive his car all over town. “Did you have to walk? Where’d you leave it, I can take a gas can -”

“No, we drove,” Nancy says. It’s her turn not to meet Jonathan’s eyes. “I gassed it up.”

A boulder drops into the pit of Jonathan’s stomach and settles there.

“Oh,” he says, dully. “Who do I owe, you or Steve?”

“Jonathan -” Nancy starts, turning those wide wet wounded eyes up at him.

“Jonathan, hey,” Steve says, and Jonathan jolts. How much of that conversation had Steve heard? Had he just been standing around listening the whole time? “It’s fine, man. I got it. You’ve got enough to worry about.” He gestures with one arm, broadly encompassing Jonathan’s family, his home, his whole life. In the sweep of Steve’s magnanimous arm, it all seems terribly small.

“Steve,” Nancy demands, but Jonathan, while he’s more than happy to stand beside or behind her while she brandishes a firearm, isn’t about to let her fight this battle for him, too.

“Thanks. That’s decent of you. I don’t know, uh, exactly when I’ll be able to pay you back -”

“Jonathan,” Steve repeats, a hint of irritation creeping into his voice. Why, because the peasantry are insufficiently grateful for his grand act of charity? “I said I got it.” The irritation vanishes, replaced by humour, as he adds, “You didn’t get ‘DOUCHEBAG’ tattooed anywhere on me, right?”

Jonathan, unsure what this has to do with anything, slowly shakes his head.

Steve nods his, firmly, like the matter’s settled. “Then we’re even.”

“You should still tell me what I owe – what it cost. When I have the money -” Jonathan tries, but Steve rolls his eyes and silences him with a clap on the arm.

“You’ll get me next time.” His smile is as white and brilliant and perfect as it’s ever been, that smile that always filled Jonathan with helpless fury and then despair. That glowing symbol of everything that could never be his. It’s so much worse when it’s so close to in reach. “Pretty sure that’s what friends do.”

“Are we friends?” Jonathan asks. He means for it to come out dry and deadpan and sarcastic as hell. Somewhere in his throat, though, the messages get mixed somehow and it comes out painfully soft and earnest.

Steve’s megawatt smile dims, in the face of that. He seems to realise, at the same time as Jonathan does, that he never took his hand off of Jonathan’s arm. But he doesn’t move it. “I dunno, man. Are we?”

Jonathan can feel Nancy’s eyes boring into him. He can’t look at her. He can’t bear to see whatever conclusion she’s putting together from all the little clues she must be gathering up in her mind. “I…don’t think you’re a douchebag.”

“High praise, coming from Jonathan Byers,” Steve cracks, but there’s something strained in his effort at a smile. “Come on, of course you do. I called your mom crazy, you beat my face in, we never talked to each other again.”

“Yeah, but…I know that’s not…” Jonathan, who’s always prided himself on having exactly the right words to eviscerate any hypocrisy, to skewer any social institution, to puncture any inflated ego, finds himself, embarrassingly, at a loss. “I mean, you came back for us. At the mall, and when the monster -” No good. He still can’t talk about it. Not here. Not right in the same hallway, he realises, where he once stood shoulder to shoulder with these two, waiting with bated breath to see if their trap had really worked or if they were all going to die that night. Not in this house. “You…always come back for us.”

Steve snatches his hand away from Jonathan’s arm like something bit him, resting it on one hip at the last moment like that was what he meant to do all along. He tosses his hair in that way that makes him look like a pretentious dipshit, not meeting Jonathan’s eyes. “Well, for the record. All that shit I said, about you, about your family. It’s not true. None of it’s true. I know you know that, I just…”

His eyes find something to fix on, just past Jonathan’s shoulder. Somehow, Jonathan’s not surprised when he glances back and sees Nancy holding Steve’s gaze, as Steve says, softly, “A lot of things I used to think are just…bullshit.”

For a long, warm moment, stretching out like taffy, none of them speak.

Then Dustin’s voice shouts out, “Steve!” from somewhere in the living room, and Steve gives himself a shake, like he’s just woken up from an unanticipated nap.

“Yeah,” he says, shortly, suddenly awkward in a way Jonathan never thought Hawkins High’s golden boy could ever be. “Yeah, I’d, uh, probably better get back to work. Wouldn’t look so good if I got fired from two jobs in one summer.”

“You didn’t get fired from Scoops,” Nancy reminds him, and Steve makes a face.

“I helped burn it to the ground, Nance. Pretty sure corporate has a list somewhere of people never to hire again, and my name’s right at the very top.”

“Not a chance,” Robin says, appearing out of nowhere to flick Steve in the ear with one finger. He claps a hand over this grievous injury, pouting at her so exactly like a kicked puppy dog that Jonathan has to stifle a laugh behind his hand. “You can only be soft serve’s public enemy number two, sailor boy. That top spot is reserved for yours truly.”

“Rob, ow.”

“Baby,” Robin says affectionately, giving Steve’s ear another flick. “If you’re giving me a ride back to work, we need to haul ass, Harrington.”

“Yeah. Yeah, sure – hey. Jonathan.” Steve pauses in the middle of turning away, looking back over his shoulder. “Think I’ll see you again before you guys ship out?”

“I don’t know,” Jonathan says, truthfully.

He’s not sure – maybe doesn’t want to be sure – what compels him to add, “I hope so.”

The smile Steve breaks into makes him glad he did, though.

“Yeah?” Steve says. “Cool.” And then, “Okay, okay, Buckley. Jesus.”

And then he and Robin are gone, leaving Jonathan alone with Nancy’s x-ray stare.

“Stop looking at me like that,” Jonathan mumbles.

Nancy, to her credit, doesn’t say something silly like ‘looking at you like what?’. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but that sounded almost like a successful example of interspecies communication.”

Jonathan makes a face at her. He can feel the flush rising up under the collar of his shirt, prickling and hot as it inches up his neck. “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”

“Who says I wasn’t trying to be nice?” Nancy reaches out again, offering her hand like a peace offering. Jonathan doesn’t hesitate before he takes it. “I’m happy to see you two finally getting along. Really.”

“What, because that means you wouldn’t have to choose between us?” Jonathan says, but there’s no real barb in it.

And Nancy doesn’t seem stung, as she studies his face like she’s looking for the final clue to a mystery she’s almost solved. “Maybe.” Her voice is hushed. “Would that be so bad? If we could all be…friends?”

Jonathan doesn’t answer that right away. He raises her hand in his, brushing a kiss across the backs of her knuckles as he tries to think.

He’d meant what he’d said earlier, though. There’s no getting anything past Nancy Wheeler.

“No,” Jonathan says, when he feels like he can trust his voice, raising his eyes to meet Nancy’s over their clasped hands. “No, I don’t think it would.”

The smile Nancy breaks into is like sunlight, and just like sunlight, it warms him all the way through.

ONE WEEK LATER

In Steve’s defense, he’s not usually this slow on the uptake. Especially when it involves a girl he likes asking him out.

He’s just not so used to her bringing her boyfriend along for the ride.

“…both of you?” Steve repeats, stupidly, glancing at Jonathan to see if he’s snickering.

Jonathan isn’t snickering. Jonathan is glaring at his sneakers.

“Both of us,” Nancy repeats, patiently, like maybe Steve missed it the first time.

“What, you want me to third-wheel you?”

“It’s a movie,” Jonathan snaps, “not a proposition.”

“Oh? Too bad,” Steve says automatically, before he can remind himself that Jonathan and Nancy aren’t Tommy and Carol, that Nancy doesn’t appreciate his cruder jokes.

Jonathan’s whole head turns tomato red. Nancy puts her head to one side and looks at Steve, which he should have expected.

The weird part is, she doesn’t exactly look disappointed. Not like he would’ve expected, like she’s telling him, ‘You’re an idiot, Steve Harrington’ in her head. Instead, Steve feels a little like he’s about to be dissected.

“…sure,” he says, scrambling for a foothold. “Yeah, sure. Why not.” Apart from the part where he’ll have to sit close to Nancy Wheeler in the dark and resist the urge to put his arm around her, for nearly two hours. That’s why not. First the strange obsession with Jonathan beating his face in, now this. Is Steve secretly a masochist? “I’ll see if I can’t scare up a date somewhere. If nobody else is interested, I can always bring Robin -”

“I didn’t invite Robin,” Nancy says, crisp and clear and certain.

Jonathan is slowly turning purple.

“Hey, Nance, come on. I know you two aren’t exactly each other’s biggest fans, but -”

“I wasn’t asking you to double with us, Steve,” Nancy clarifies. Now she sounds annoyed. Oh, Jesus, is Steve ever going to stop pissing Nancy Wheeler off.

“Okay, well, then, one of you is gonna have to break the Cone of Silence and explain it to me, because there’s something here that I’m not getting.”

“I thought this stuff was supposed to come easy to you,” Jonathan says, almost snarls. If he’d said it to Steve instead of his shoes, Steve might almost be offended.

“Byers, are you seriously trying to tell me your girlfriend’s asking me out? Right in front of you?”

Jonathan takes a deep breath, and raises his still-purpling head to look Steve in the eye. Despite the furious blush, there’s a glint in those dark, intense eyes that makes Steve shiver weirdly. And they don’t so much as dart away from Steve’s face once they find it. “Not in front of me, Steve.”

Steve looks from Jonathan, to Nancy, to Jonathan, back to Nancy again.

“Oh,” he says.

“Hey, wait,” he says.

“Oh,” he says.

Nancy raises both eyebrows at him in a smile, like she used to when they were trying to study together and he finally grasped something she’d mastered days or weeks before.

“Sure,” Steve says, on autopilot, as his mind reels. “Yeah, okay. Why not.” This time, he realises, looking back and forth between them both, he doesn’t already have an answer to that question lined up on the tip of his tongue. Plenty will turn up, he’s sure, when he has a minute to come to his senses. But the little voice already starting to list off reasons not to sit in the dark for nearly two hours sandwiched between Nancy Wheeler and Jonathan Byers, without any restrictions on who he can and can’t put his arms around, is starting to sound less like the voice of common sense and more suspiciously like his dad.

Nancy beams, like she’s just won the Pulitzer, that glowing smile that’s always sucked Steve into her orbit and pulled life out of his barren world. Or whatever it is the sun does. It’s been a while, and a head injury or two, since middle-school science class and The Solar System.

Even Jonathan’s smiling, now, a grudging, secretive little sliver. It’s not like the smile he reserves for Nancy, all helpless, enamoured awe, like even after close to a year together he still can’t believe that she chose him. But something about how he ducks his head, like he’s trying to hide that smile, but can’t seem to bring himself to just extinguish it, makes something in Steve’s chest glow unexpectedly. Like Steve’s just sunk the winning penalty basket in overtime.

And Steve’s surprised by how much he just wants to make Jonathan Byers smile like that again.

Maybe the little dad-voice in his head is right. Maybe there are plenty of reasons, even some good ones, why Steve shouldn’t be doing this. But screw that. Screw them. Life’s too short, and way too fragile, and Steve’s already lost all the pride he had to lose.

He can take a little heat, if it means those two will smile, like that, for him.

“Yeah,” Steve repeats. It comes out soft. “Let’s give it a shot.”

After all, it wouldn’t be the strangest thing any of them have done.