to love is to burn

The bar is loud.

They’re at a table in the back, the tall kind with wooden stools to sit on. They’re too close to the speakers. When Noel asks her what she wants to drink, he has to lean over the middle of the table, raise his voice from up close.

She winds up ordering only a beer, chickening out on a meal and turning this into a date-date.

Noel, if he catches on, doesn’t seem to mind. Both elbows on the table, he's angled toward her, as relaxed as ever. She’s sitting more stiffly, back a little straighter, not yet comfortable, wondering if the turtleneck is too dressy when Noel himself is in a flannel.

“Chandler been riding your ass too?” he asks, picking up a cork coaster from the middle of the table to fidget with. His eyes widen, eyebrows shooting toward his hairline.

Work talk. That’s casual. Light. And it comes pretty naturally at the office, which gives her hope this won’t be completely awkward.

Loosening up, she plants her own elbows on the table to lean on, arms crossed. “Six months in and I feel like I’m still glued to my seat instead of, you know, having feet on the ground. I’ve got,” she does some quick mental math, “six articles they’ve got me line editing right now? So, yeah. I’d say he’s… pretty firmly attached.”

She doesn’t mind it most days. She didn’t get the job expecting to work her way into an actual position anytime soon. Without a degree, she’s lucky her previous experience got her a foot in the door at all. But, still. She spends most days getting berated and having it called ‘critique.’ When she does get to go out into the real world, it’s usually to an inquest, and those tend to dredge up a lot of unresolved turmoil she likes not thinking about.

Noel is chuckling. “I’m in social page hell. Poli-sci, and I’m writing about shit like, ‘the new norm: unmarried couples living in cohabitation taboo’ like anyone over the age of 80 is gonna give a shit.”

She lets out her own quiet laugh, commiserating. The big journalism dream is to be a reporter, covering high profile news, revealing groundbreaking information to the public, scratching an investigative itch, and what it ends up being is writing about the domestic dispute between two elderly men with a twenty year history of arguing over the same parking spot. It’s so mind numbingly dull most days, it feels like high school all over again, dishing on locker room gossip.

“Well, thank god, we’ve only got—an entire lifetime of it ahead?” she offers with a wry, upturned lilt at the end to turn it apologetic.

Noel drops his head in mock mourning, which is when the waitress comes over with their drinks and the basket of fries he ordered to share.

Nancy gives her a smile as the beers are distributed, eyes bright. She waits until they’re alone again to ask, “Is this what you went to school for?”

Noel snags a fry from the basket he’s moved to the middle of the table, biting off an end. “Lamenting about the living arrangements of strangers?”

“I mean…” She tilts her head and makes a face, sarcastically considering the journalistic validity of it.

He smiles. “Yeah. BU. What about you?”

A familiar feeling of shame curls up inside her, but it’s not like she hasn’t had to present and sell this side of herself before. She got her job with the ‘dropout’ title unavoidable right next to her name. She had to sit at a table with three men staring her down, rationalizing her decision to them while they silently doled out judgment.

“Emerson, yeah. For about a year, and then—” She gives him a ‘voila, here I am’ smile with a shrug.

Noel picks up his beer bottle and tilts it at her, waiting for her to do the same. As they clink, he tells her, “Good for you. Spared yourself about three more years of the same bullshit, a couple grand in tuition, and a useless piece of paper.”

His easy acceptance warms her, reburying some of that shame.

“I’ll have to remind my mom of that.”

Actually, her mom has handled it surprisingly well. There was shock, initially, even from her dad who felt stirred enough to look up from the plate of pork chops and potatoes she broke the news over. But, hey. Go through enough near death experiences, it gives a person a new outlook on life.

All Nancy had to do was assure them she was fine, have her job already lined up as proof she hadn’t lost her ambitious vigor, and keep a smile fixed firmly in place.

Noel, maybe sensing it might be a touchy subject, skirts around the topic by asking, “Where’d you grow up?” He's got his fingers wrapped around the neck of his beer bottle, mindlessly tapping in beat to the INXS song playing through nearby speakers, so close there’s a distortion. “You’re not from around here, right?”

Her hands are curled around her own beer bottle. She tells him, “Indiana,” with a half-smile to acknowledge the obvious. It’s not exactly known for its glitz and glamour, but Noel lights up.

“Yeah? I interned for the Globe a couple years back—three, I don’t know, four years ago—we ran this cover story on the government.” He looks away briefly as he’s recalling, “Millions of dollars were being funneled into this small Indiana town, walled off like it was Area 51 or some shit. You hear about that?”

A cold hollowness creeps into her gut as her memories flash automatically back to the rifts, the Crawls, Barb, the brutality she lived comfortably with for 18 long months, now being brought back to life in the middle of a dive bar 900 miles away from where it all happened.

There’s a noticeable pause before she lies, “Nope,” fake to even her own ears. At the same time, a depressing thought surfaces. Maybe she’ll never get far enough away to escape her past.

Maybe it’ll always find her.

Noel’s got his eyebrows raised. “Huh. It was all over. Earthquake, FEMA shows up, the whole town gets quarantined.”

“Right,” she plays it off like he’s jogged her memory. “I did hear about that, actually.” There’s a beat, and then, “Area 51?’

He looks pleased with himself, like he was hoping to hook her, like she’s bit the lure.

From a purely investigative mindset, she does feel a little curious about his outsider POV.

“Folks that would get out, they’d talk about these terrifying, huge creatures, call 'em extraterrestrial, clawed their way outta thin air—nothin’ one minute, alien the next. Mouths like they’d been surgically split, rows of razor-sharp teeth. Killed people.”

“Sounds scary,” she plays along, thinking ‘if only you actually knew’ with a bitter edge Noel seems to read as cynicism.

“Maybe that part isn’t true, the alien thing, but you could track the government absolutely hemorrhaging tax dollars to this one specific town. I’m talking millions going towards tanks, helicopters, hundreds of deployed troops, sheet metal by the thousands—for an earthquake? Something real bogus about it. And any scoop we’d get, the above-the-fold shit, we’d get ‘persuaded’ to shift focus to less sensationalized news. Like it was bullshit tabloid fodder.”

She’s not surprised about the cover-up. It’s amazing how people believe what they’re told to. Even within Hawkins, people who saw the rifts themselves, who were there when the sky opened and the Upside Down briefly encroached on their own reality, it’s like they all forgot.

Even through the surveillance, the monthly ‘health’ check-ups, the food delivery rations, the censored mail, the restricted zones, the military patrols—the people of Hawkins, once so readily stirred into a mob when they thought Eddie Munson was a murderer, endured their multi-year quarantine with baffling ease.

All she can come up with is, “Wow, that’s… wow.”

“Exactly. And then, poof. Almost two years later, the town opens back up like nothing ever happened. Walls come down, military leaves, folks pretty much flee in droves, housing market goes haywire ‘cause who the hell wants to live there? I guess it’s just stuck with me. Especially because, you know. Chernobyl. If it wasn’t aliens, maybe it was a radioactive spill.” Almost casually, while she’s still processing his words and the memories that’ve come with them, he adds, “And now there’s the bat thing going on…”

Through the speakers, INXS plays, 'Whatcha gonna do? Gonna live my life’ as Nancy’s curiosity, and pulse, picks up.

“When you say ‘bats,' you mean—?”

hi friends 👋

Work has picked up and I’ve had less flexibility, but I’m still working on the next installment of the Stancy comic.

author: heroesfading

summary:

Nancy is a very serious investigative journalist. Steve is a laid back sports writer. She's pretty sure he's her nemesis, and he's harboring an unreciprocated crush. When they're assigned to work together on a project, there's a little more underneath the surface than Nancy expects to find.

“I might call her soon,” Steve hedges, knowing he’s only going to get one phone-call, where he says, I really was serious about coming to Boston, and Nancy either takes him up on it or shuts him down. Forever.

“You should,” Lucas says, quiet but confident.