#once upon a time i wrote a ficlet about nancy and chrissy meeting during s3 and this is a psuedo sequel to that In My Heart

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Wheelingham; S4 AU; Outsider POV (Max); Presumed character death (but not real character death); 1.9k Written for @strangerthingsfemslash week day 3: secret relationship read day 1: different first meeting read day 2: women over thirty

Max goes to Nancy first. 

The lights flicker and the cops roll in and one of them is whispering about— The Cunningham girl? She’s probably dead by now. 

So. Max goes to Nancy, partially because at first she thinks she’ll knock out two Wheelers with one stone before she remembers Mike is already on a plane to California, but also because it’s Nancy. 

Because for the entirety of this past school year, Nancy has managed to bulldoze her way over all of Max’s carefully constructed walls and forced her to keep one of them in her life, at the very least. 

She’s a force of nature, Nancy Wheeler, and the first time she showed up at Max’s trailer with dinner on a night her mom was working a double, that had been apparent, but not everything had been. 

Not the reason Nancy was determined to insert herself in Max’s life; not the underlying despair that Max has learned chases that girl from one fight to the next. 

Max goes to Nancy because Nancy knows what to do when the world ends, in more ways than one. Max goes to Nancy, because she doesn’t realize that saying—

“I overheard the cops talking, they think she might be dead.” 

—she’ll be knocking loose the mask of resolve that Nancy puts on with her hair clips each morning, knocking it straight to the floor and stomping on it hard. 

“They think…” She's small, but normally she takes up mountains of space in Max’s life. She’s got this presence to her which Max can barely admit to herself is grounding, but it is. She actually seems small in this moment though. Wound up and tiny. “And you’re sure— did they say Chrissy? Did they say Cunningham? I don’t… I just—”

“That’s what they said,” Max feels like she’s watching something she’s not supposed to, like when she still lived in California and her mom still cared about the ratings on the movies Max rented from the Blockbuster. “And usually I wouldn’t put too much stock in what the Hawkins PD has to say, but… The lights were… I know what lights like that mean.” 

Nancy clenches down on her jaw and something in her eyes shifts and Max has spent a lot of time with this girl in the past six months. 

Long enough to recognize that there’s a lot Nancy doesn’t talk about, even when she’s actively trying to be vulnerable to make Max feel better; long enough, too, to know that just because Nancy is a force of nature doesn’t mean she’s not also still barely eighteen years old. 

Nancy swallows thickly and her fists clench and unclench around the fabric of her skirt until it's wrinkled and Max wants to ask, but before she gets the chance Nancy is steeling herself and sending Max to the car and telling her to radio Dustin to meet them at the Family Video. 

Before Max has a chance to really get a gauge on what’s going on with Nancy at all (because something is going on) she’s being forced to walk through exactly what and who she saw last night four times over on the fifteen minute drive. 

More than anything, Nancy’s haste reminds Max that they’re in it again. It reminds her that none of it was ever over and she was right, in a lot of ways if not all of them, to expect another shoe to drop. 

The problem is that it’s a lot easier to focus on something going on with Nancy than it is to think about the nightmares that have been haunting her since long before she watched Billy die. He’s starred in her nightmares before, but this is different, this is new, this is so entirely old by now. 

No, it’s easier to let the rest of them try to make sense of what’s going on while she watches the looks on Steve and Robin’s faces when they hear the name Chrissy Cunningham. 

They look at Nancy on instinct, without a beat of hesitation. They look at Nancy.

“Chrissy…? Shit, Nance—”

“Don’t,” she snaps, pushing past Steve’s big and welling eyes that clearly know more than Max does to begin typing away at the computer behind the desk. 

He doesn’t let her run from him though, visibly putting himself between Nancy and the rest of them as he speaks just under his breath enough that Max can’t hear him over Dustin’s own plan-making, but can see the way Nancy’s shoulders tense up and her fingers falter across the keys. 

If Max were, say, Dustin, it would look like the kind of sign that the two of them were starting something up again, but Max has broken up and gotten back together with Lucas enough times to recognize that this isn’t that. 

This is its own thing. This is Nancy on the verge of something else Max has been keenly aware of for too much of her young life: a nervous breakdown. 

Nancy Wheeler is terrified, but not in the same way the rest of them are, not because the world might be ending again. Hers is a different sort of terror, only Max can’t place it. She might even be wrong about the whole thing, looking too hard for a distraction from the pulsing ache at the center of her skull, but there’s something about the slices of conversation she catches that tells her otherwise. 

“... might not actually be…”

“... no way for you to know that, Steve…”

“... not the same as…”

“...don’t have time to… need to focus on this…”

But again, too much is happening with too quick a turnaround for Max to really dig in and find the answers to her queries. 

“Eddie wouldn’t hurt someone,” Dustin is saying with the sort of forceful defensiveness of someone who is being put on trial himself rather than defending a friend. “He wouldn’t. Something else killed Chrissy—”

Max’s eyes train in on the shift in Nancy’s posture, the thick swallow she takes as she turns halfway away from all of them like protecting her soft bits from coming blows. 

“ – or probably something,” Dustin insists. “Which means Eddie is in danger too if he was there.”

“Why would Chrissy have even been at Eddie’s trailer?” Robin asks, the question broad enough to seem as though it’s angled at all of them, but Max can see the way she looks at Nancy, the direction she means for it to land. 

Nancy seems to feel it too. 

“They’re friends,” she says without meeting anyone’s gaze, arms crossed and eyes downturned. “Ever since she broke up with Jason, it’s been— hard. At school. And Eddie’s just— he’s been a friend, so…”

“So maybe she’s with him,” Robin says, but it’s less like a suggestion of theory and more like the kind of thing meant to ease nerves, softer around the edges, almost imploring in nature. 

Nancy’s grip around her own biceps is tight enough to make her skin go white, and by the time they have an address for Reefer Rick, any proximity that Max gets to her feels like the air is vibrating at a different, but not unfamiliar, frequency. 

When Max stepped out of Starcourt on that night in July, the air had tasted like ash. When she had sat unblinking and trembling in the back of a parked ambulance, she hadn’t been able to feel Lucas’s hand in her own past the shake of the world around her. 

“She’s your friend?” Max asks, a murmur of a question just for Nancy after having forced her way into the front seat of the station wagon for their trek across town, letting the other three keep themselves occupied in the back. 

Nancy’s lips purse and what Max can only imagine is an involuntary hum chokes its way out of her throat. 

“I was— I shouldn’t have been so blunt about it,” Max says. “About what I overheard the police saying. I should have said it differently, because we don’t even know if she’s really—”

“She is,” Nancy says stiffly, grip tight on the steering wheel as they turn down a path that leads to the lake. “That’s how these things work. She is.” 

Max doesn’t have an argument for that. 

In her experience it’s the truth, the only truth, that the worst case is the actual case. 

It keeps her quiet in the passenger seat until they’re parking, all the way up to Rick’s front door, through Dustin’s incessant knocking, until she notices Nancy wandering towards the boathouse and hurries to follow behind her. 

The door creaks when they open it, windows mucked up with algae and the general wear of time to the point where even the fading light of day doesn’t permeate the space. The floorboards groan under their feet and the lap of water against the bottom of the boat at the center of the room makes the whole thing eerie. 

Eerie and nerve-wracking and bad, the whole thing has their collective adrenaline pumping right up until a number of things are happening at the same time. 

The toss of a tarp, the guttural scream of a man, the pushing and shoving and trapping of Steve up against the wall as the rest of them merely try to keep up and act on their feet and prepare for an attack and—

“Nance?” 

It’s quiet, but it cuts through the chaos. 

It’s quiet, but it seems as though it has physical weight in its effect on Nancy. 

“You’re—?” the sharp choking-off of a question, the near-buckling of knees, something starts to click into place as Nancy seems to move a woman-possessed across the boathouse until she’s got her hands hovering over Chrissy Cunningham’s shoulders, drifting down her arms, searching, searching, searching for— “are you hurt? You’re hurt? You’re— oh my god, are you real?” 

Chrissy’s got what appears to be Eddie’s leather jacket tied up around one of her arms like a sling, the stain of dried blood smudged on her cheekbone just under her eyes, but she smiles as she places her available hand on Nancy’s cheek. 

Wet and nervous, but a smile all the same. 

And things are clicking into place, because Max has broken up with and gotten back together with Lucas quite a few times. 

“Um, some stuff is— is happening and I don’t know how to explain—” Chrissy shakes her head, lifting her gaze to meet Eddie’s as he drops his attack stance from Steve, “but we’re okay. And you’re here now, so, so that’s—”

“They said you were dead,” Nancy blurts, chin wobbling and voice thick and cracking. “They said— I thought you were dead, I thought—”

It’s bold, when Chrissy cuts her off with a firm kiss to the mouth, right there in front of all of them in the middle of the dark. 

It’s bold, but Max sees the fondness on the older kids’ faces, the clarity that they’ve known the whole time. 

It’s bold, but pretty fucking cool, Max thinks. Proof, maybe, that it doesn’t always have to go the other way, that maybe sometimes their people can get through to the other side, scared and hurt but okay. Not lost. Not entirely. Close enough to be found. 

“Wha– Wait, what the–?” Dustin balks, confusion radiating off of him as bright as the sun beside Max, almost blinding in its comical nature. “Did you know about this?” he looks to her, face all twisted up in not knowing something more than actually having a problem with it. 

Max looks at him, looks at the gentle way Chrissy swipes away Nancy’s tears as they press their foreheads close and relish in the finding. 

And then she looks back at Dustin and shrugs. “It was kind of obvious, dumbass.”