If you’re still taking Stancy prompts, Nancy wondering what Steve is up to while they keep their distance in s3 is always my jam. Love love love your Nancy and Steve.
my first prompt fill!
i have to be honest, i don’t know if this is really what you were looking for? like, i admit there’s altogether more jonathan than probably anyone wants to see. but alas, i banged this out in like four hours last night and this is where my brainworm took me. thanks for prompting!
also, if you want to get a more exact idea of the kind of headspace i was in writing this, you’ll just want to listen to tswift’s death by a thousand cuts on one long, endless loop.
2,200-ish words under the cut.
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the only thing we share [is this small town]
She sees him sometimes.
Not on purpose. Definitely not on purpose, but Hawkins has a population smaller than the enrollments of some state colleges. It’s kind of inevitable that their paths will cross more than occasionally.
And it’s not that Nancy's avoiding him, exactly. It’s more that every time she gets a glance at him even in passing, it’s impossible not to recall the sad way he’d stared down at her the last time they’d really spoken to each other, resigned to an outcome she wasn’t even sure she herself had reconciled with yet.
It doesn’t make her feel good, and after the past year, she’s more than sick of seeking out reasons to feel bad.
So she doesn’t avoid him, but she also doesn’t not hide behind aisles in Melvald’s when she sees him pass by. And if they happen to be walking along the same side of Main Street at the same time, it just so happens that she’ll remember several urgent reasons why she needs to cross the road right away.
But that’s not avoiding. It can’t be, because Nancy doesn’t avoid. She barrels, head on, right into even the most fraught situations, because at the end of the day she has nothing without her resolute confidence in the fact that she is right.
She is right, and nothing – not Department of Energy hacks, nor the assholes at the Hawkins Post who make a sport of changing up their sandwich orders and the way they take their coffee every other day (“See if you can solve this, Nancy Drew…”) – can shake that certainty.
(Except sometimes – sometimes/especially when she sees Steve – a creeping sense of wrong begins to slither its way in, wraps icy tendrils of doubt around her carefully guarded resolve and squeezes. Hard.
But before it can do too much damage, before it can cause the kinds of hairline fissures that turn into cracks that end in endless interdimensional bloodshed, she turns away. Takes Jonathan’s hand, and looks into his eyes, and remembers why they’re the only two people in the world who could possibly get each other. Even when she can’t understand why he hovers in uncomfortable silence while those dickheads laugh at her. Even when he doesn’t get why she just can’t stop pushing, because a job’s a job and maybe if she let up a little they wouldn’t laugh at her so much.
None of that matters, because she and Jonathan…they just make sense. The photographer and the journalist. Shared goals. Shared trauma. Right? Right.
And so the ground steadies beneath her feet, and her breathing eases, and she sinks back into the safe surety of her belief.)
Most of the time, not-avoiding-Steve also facilitates not-thinking-about-Steve, which is easier now that he hasn’t been around town much lately. She’d heard via the grapevine – amid some derisive tittering that had irked her for reasons she preferred not to examine – that he’d gotten a job at the ice cream parlor at Starcourt, and that he wasn’t headed to college after the summer was over, because he didn’t get into a single school, can you believe it?
The guilt was suffocating. She puts it out of her mind.
So it’s a blessing in disguise that Jonathan’s aversion to crowds and hypercommercialism means that Nancy hasn’t spent as much time at Starcourt as she’d planned to once she heard they were putting in a Gap. Because less time at Starcourt meant less time not-avoiding Steve (and less time – and money – spent stress shopping).
In fact, Nancy’s been lured into such a false sense of security that she never sees the stupid commercial coming.
It’s evening, and still boiling outside, and she and Jonathan are languishing on his beat-up couch after a long day spent toiling in the darkroom (him) and chasing down a specific kind of pastrami on rye with grain mustard available only from the sole deli in Hawkins, which just happens to be about as far across town as you can get on foot (her, of course).
Nancy is the kind of mentally exhausted that means that while she’s valiantly trying to pay attention to CBS Evening News (she likes to flip back and forth between all the major network shows), she’s actually staring off into space as Dan Rather covers a TWA flight hijacking that she knows she should care more about.
The jingle of the commercial doesn’t even penetrate the fog until Jonathan scoffs.
“Christ,” he mumbles. “They’re still playing this shit on TV?”
“Huh?” Nancy grunts before she can stop herself, rousing from her stupor. (It’s only now that she realizes she’s been doodling daisies where she usually takes careful notes on each story’s lead-in.)
“The Starcourt commercial,” Jonathan says, nudging her with his shoulder. “It’s been open for, like, a month. When’re they gonna give it a rest?”
“Oh.” Nancy gets with the program, and laughs perfunctorily at the cheesy stock footage that’s eaten more airtime over the past six months than she’d ever thought city council would have the budget for. (Huh. Maybe there’s a story there.) “I kind of forgot about it.”
“Maybe…we could check it out soon,” Jonathan says, eyeing her almost cautiously. “See if it’s as awful as it looks.”
Nancy does a double-take before she can stop herself.
“You said it’d take a literal alien invasion to get you to set foot inside that mall.” And with the bizarro turn their lives have taken over the past year, she can’t be entirely certain he’d been joking.
Jonathan shifts, and scratches the back of his head.
“Well – they do have a bookstore,” he says, defensive. “And, like, I know this internship hasn’t been what you were hoping, so it might be nice to –” His jaw drops before he can finish the thought. “Holy shit, is that Steve Harrington?”
Nancy’s head whips around so fast she almost hears a crack. And yeah, that is Steve Harrington. In vivid technicolor, standing behind a cash register next to a vaguely familiar-looking redhead with a tousled bob – Nancy’s pretty sure she’s seen her around school before.
She recognizes the discomfort in his face all too well – it had stared across the table at her every time she’d tried to quiz him on SAT vocabulary words last summer.
Only then, he hadn’t been wearing a hideous polyester sailor costume.
“That’s new,” Jonathan says, the ill-disguised laughter in his voice so uncharacteristic that Nancy’s head whips back around again. She’s going to need a chiropractor by the time this commercial ends. “I guess we definitely gotta check out Starcourt now.”
She rolls her eyes, and relaxes the fist she’d clenched around her pencil during the seven seconds – max – that Steve had been on screen. Jonathan doesn’t seem to have noticed her tension, and she’s grateful.
“What’s so interesting about watching Steve scoop overpriced ice cream?” she deflects skeptically, sinking further into the couch, wincing as she hits a spring. Now Jonathan’s the one who double-takes.
“Um. Nancy. It’s King Steve.” She doesn’t love the way he says that. “Dressed like a stand-in for The Village People. Slinging banana splits. What isn’t interesting about that?”
“It’s just a job,” Nancy retorts, face heating. “D’you think it’s funny that I run around buying lunch and pouring coffee for a bunch of dipshits who wouldn’t know a good above-the-fold if it hit them with a two-by-four?”
“Of course not, Jesus!” Jonathan sputters helplessly, shoulders hiking up to his ears. “I just meant – I didn’t – of course I don’t think that’s funny.” His mouth flattens. “I think it’s really shitty. You’re right, I shouldn’t make fun of anyone’s job. We don’t have to go to Starcourt. I just thought it’d be something we could do together.”
He looks deflated, and all at once, Nancy feels like shit. Jonathan was so serious all the time, and usually she liked when he let that go a little bit and dropped his guard. But she’s ruined it by getting defensive, and she doesn't even totally understand why.
“No, I’m sorry,” she backtracks, grabbing his hand and linking their fingers. It’s warm, as familiar as her own at this point. “It’s just…been a shit day. I overreacted.” She just has to work harder. Make them see how serious she is about this. Make them see how good she is at this.
All at once, she’s acutely ashamed of how lax and distracted she’s been, scrawling stupid pictures all over her notepad when she should be working. Improving her craft. Showing everyone that she belongs in that newsroom. Showing them that she’s right.
In return, Jonathan’s smile is strained, but it seems genuine enough. He squeezes her hand, with a strength that still surprises her sometimes.
“Things’ll get better. You’ll see. You’re brilliant. They’ll figure it out. Eventually.” He ducks his head, then looks up again, a little more relaxed. “Speaking of ice cream…I think Mom brought some Rocky Road home last night. Two spoons?”
Nancy nods, accepting the peace offering for what it is (even though she prefers strawberry).
“Yeah…that sounds good.” He leaves to clatter around in the kitchen, and she turns back to the TV, suppressing the urge to chew on the end of her pencil (what serious journalist walks around with bit-up erasers?).
Against her will, Steve’s face plays on a rewind loop in her mind’s eye.
Maybe it was just her imagination, but he’d looked miserable, and she was pretty sure it wasn’t stage fright (he used to preen whenever the yearbook photographers were in his general vicinity. It was equal parts endearing and annoying).
Had he really not gotten into any colleges? (None of her business.) His dad probably hadn’t taken that well. (Really none of her business.)
She should’ve tried to help him more, after the whole…incident. He’d been insanely concussed, and that couldn’t have helped with the whole college essays and applications thing. He’d already been having a hard enough time with it all.
But what could she have done? The thing with Jonathan had been so new, and every time she chanced a look at Steve, he was already staring back, hurt scrawled plainly all over his face.
It would be better now, though, right? A lot of time has passed. She’s firmly settled into her new relationship, and Steve is – Steve knows how to rebound. He’s always been good at that, on the court and in life.
Maybe she should go visit him. Not – not to laugh at him, but just to see how he’s doing.
Would that girl be there? The coworker? She’s cute, in a “probably listens to too much Depeche Mode” kind of way. So not Steve’s type. (Nancy, why would that matter?)
But they had been standing kind of close in the commercial. Maybe they’re friends?
Nancy snorts. Steve didn’t have female friends, except for maybe Carol, and that was mostly vis a vis that shit-for-brains Tommy. In fact, after he cut the two of them out, Steve didn’t seem to have many real friends. Or any. At all. He’d focused all his attentions on Nancy.
She swallows past the tightness in her throat. Anyway. This girl. Definitely – definitely not a friend. Maybe a friendly coworker. Or…
Nancy glares at the whites of her knuckles. None of her business.
It really isn’t. After all, she has Jonathan, and Steve has, well…whoever he wants, really. That’s never been an issue for him, not even after he’d been officially “dethroned”. Girls still lined up at his locker for crumbs of his attention, right smack dab where Nancy used to wait for him in between classes. She assumes that in that regard, not much has changed besides the venue.
In fact, she can see it pretty clearly: Steve, raking a hand through his thick hair every time a pretty girl happens to make her way into Scoops Ahoy. Drumming deft fingers against the glass of the freezer. Handing out free scoops of ice cream like they’re not gonna eventually come out of his check.
Suggesting that they stick around until he’s off-shift so they can catch a movie or – or – something else.
The pencil snaps. Startled, she stares down at her hand, where the two jagged pieces haphazardly dangle, connected by little more than a few bare slivers of wood. What the fuck?
She’s got pretty much no time to figure out what the hell just happened, though, because Jonathan picks that moment to come back into the living room, a carton with two spoons balanced in his grip.
“Sorry that took a sec,” he apologizes, and Nancy shoves the pencil’s remains in between the couch cushions before he can notice. “Will left eggs in the pan again, and I told him he’s gotta wash them out, like, right away or it’s a pain in the ass to scrub them off later –”
“It’s okay,” Nancy cuts in, unsettled by the stinging in her palm as he flops back down beside her. Despite the heat, he curls an arm around her shoulders. It’s light, and wiry, and she tells herself she prefers it that way.
“Dan’s kind of boring tonight,” Jonathan tuts, leaning back. “Wanna see what Tom’s up to?”
Nancy nods, curling into his side and scooping a spoonful of ice cream out of the container crammed between them. It’s creamy, and deliciously sweet on her tongue.
really i think the most insidious part of white supremacy is the way it will convince white people everything is actually About Them. being called out isn’t about you. poc expressing frustration at your behaviour isn’t about you. it’s about how you are affecting others. step one is literally just de-centre yourself from the conversation. anyone who’s not white has already had to learn this lesson the hard way and it gets tiring waiting for the rest of you to catch up
Not to derail or belittle this but I think that (on the internet especially) there's this expectation that after being called out on some behaviour/thought/stereotype/etc that is racist/sexist/homophobic/etc the person in question can/should be able and willing to completely reject that position and change to the new position in an instant with no mental processing.
As someone who has had to actively unlearn things from the benign and kind of funny to the truly harmful, I can say that most times my immediate response is "I'm sorry. I didn't realise that was bigoted." Then I go home and spend 7-12 business months unpacking what I've just learned, how it was woven into my life, and how I'm going to reframe my identity given that taking out that one thing has caused a whole lot of stuff I thought I knew to shift sideways.
Then AFTER I've finished unpacking and reorganising my brain I still need to actively police my thoughts and interactions in light of the new knowledge. Particularly with language where something that was not fraught when I was young has moved on and now has implications that I had no idea even existed. (Tranny anyone? depending on your generation and location it could mean anything from "bloke likes wearing lingerie with his wife" through "drag" to "transgender" and could be anything from affectionate to violently homophobic)
I am trying and I do actively attempt to not be a dickhead but I'm in my 40s and have a LOT of unlearning still to do. At least 3 times per year I get smacked in the face with a thing that "everyone should know" but I don't because I'm simply not interacting with this particular group of people regularly.
So all this to say that if it takes someone a while to grapple with their privilege it's not because they are actively or even passively resisting. Sometimes examinemyprivilige.exe has a long run time.
hey, so, this response is derailing and belittling.
op is talking about how exhausting it is for people of colour to deal with the way that discussions about racism and the effects of racism end up being recentred around white feelings & the impact of the discussion on the perpetrator at the expense of those trying to discuss the racism in the first place. in light of that, this is probably not the place to talk about how long and complicated and arduous the journey of unlearning racism is.
like, do you see how this response does exactly what op is calling out? we've gone from "it is very hard to bring up racism with white people about racism because we will end up being forced to manage their feelings about it" to "but it's really hard for white people (and any other privileged classes) to unlearn racist attitudes (and other bigotry), please have patience and grace for the time it takes to learn better" — which is centring the struggle of the perpetrator and putting responsibility on the victim/marginalised person in the dynamic.
like. this probably should have stayed an inside thought, lmfao
