there is a thaw

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.

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.