In your opinion how and when could Nancy and Steve get back together in the 90s?
Well we have a bucket load of unresolved feelings, two characters who can't help the fondness from oozing out of them when they're in each other's vicinity, and a monthly meet-up on our hands, so I'd say something like this:
Group hangouts where they can't stop finding each other's eyes across the room, sneaking little looks at every opportunity. Steve always makes Nancy laugh, of course. They're not subtle about how much yearning is stretched out between them. When they're around each other, there's the feeling of two people hanging on the precipe of something; they just need to find the courage to jump off. Robin and Jonathan get to the point where they're exchanging looks like, "Can you believe these two?" Lots of eye rolling. They can see the inevitable outcome these two idiots can't.
And of course Nancy gets Steve's number, and after she calls with a question one day, they start talking regularly, in between meet-ups. Calls that start from the most mundane check-up questions spiral into the late hours of the night, Nancy lying on the bed of her cramped Boston apartment, unable to hang up because it's the only time her apartment doesn't feel lonely (maybe the only time she doesn't feel lonely), Steve hanging onto every word she says. They don't care that they have to get up early for work in the morning because they can't let each other go. And it's easier this way, the separation of distance, keeping their conversations to phone calls in the hushed late night hours when it feels safe enough to say anything.
It's much harder when they're in front of each other in person, and Nancy can feel how the tether to Steve has grown stronger. It's harder to ignore how her heart skips when he looks her way, or when their arms brush as they walk alongside each other in the entry hallway, or his hand touches hers when they're passing cartons of takeout around the kitchen table.
Steve doesn't want to hope their conversations mean anything significant, not after how battered his heart feels, and he's just happy to have Nancy's friendship. That's all this is anyways, right? The late night calls, the wistfulness he swears he can hear in her voice, the look in her eyes when she opens the door to the meet-up house and sees him for the first time—it's just friendship, right?
When Nancy goes back to her apartment after their meet-up, she tells herself the same thing every time: she doesn't know what she wants, and Steve does. She bottles everything else away. She has an internship to focus on proving herself in, anyways.
Sometimes Nancy asks him about the girls he's seeing, almost masochistically curious. There's an undercurrent of jealousy at the edges of some of her words, and her teasing front is almost enough to disguise it.
But Steve catches onto it, and it frustrates him. He's the one who laid his heart bare for her, and she still hasn't ever acknowledged that confession. It hangs in the background of their conversations (along with The Night they still won't speak about), more painfully noticeable during calls like these. They always end strained and awkward, sometimes snippy, usually with a clipped, "I have to go."
But her and Steve's calls also get deeper, swimming into more intimate waters they can't go back from. On Barb's birthday, Nancy ends up quietly bringing it up on the phone. She tells him about the last birthday Barb and her spent together, Steve listening intently. It starts small, the way they start poking the Barb-sized elephant in the room that's always lurked in the corner of their relationship, Nancy mentioning when something makes her think of Barb, though still dancing around The Night everything went wrong.
Until Nancy's drinking one night when she calls Steve. He can tell immediately that something's wrong. So she tells him about a case she was investigating, trying to help a mom find her daughter. But it was too late; Nancy was too late, and they'd found the daughter dead. Steve recognises the guilt in her voice.
It reminds Steve of the conversation at Tina's party, the one that's haunted him ever since. Not just because it was the implosion of their relationship, which was always going to happen, but because of what slipped through: that she blamed them, blamed herself. And he's never been able to stop seeing that weight clinging to her.
"It's not your fault," he tells her this time. The conversation starts to drift into murkier territory, into deeper wells of guilt, but it's late, and Nancy's words start to slur together. For that night, they manage to side-step The Night again.
But then the anniversary of The Night happens, and it's too heavy between them to talk around it. What starts with a quiet, "I miss her," from Nance spirals into "I shouldn't have left her. I shouldn't have made her come to that party in the first place," and finally, finally Steve can say to her what's he's been holding inside him ever since that night at Tina's. He tells her she couldn't have known what would happen to Barb. That the only one at fault was the Demogorgon. The conversation is messy, sometimes going in circles, sometimes Nancy even angry at Steve's attempts to relieve her of this guilt she's white-knuckle-gripped onto for so long. But there's catharsis in finally acknowledging it, all of their tangled up feelings.
Maybe that one phone call doesn't cure everything. But it does feel like letting go of some of that weight, for both of them. And there's a palpable feeling of freedom in their conversations after that, without them needing to dance around The Night anymore.
When they see each other again for their December meet-up, they can both feel it, how much lighter they both are. Nancy's comfortable enough going in for a hug of greeting with Steve, and they just melt into each other, their eyes shutting in relief. It's like coming home for the first time all year. Their eyes usually find each other like magnets at regular intervals, but that night, they can't keep their eyes off each other at all. Robin and Jonathan might as well not be there (to their chagrin). When their hands brush, they linger, fingers twitching to fold around each other, but they just barely hold themselves back. The air around them crackles with the feeling that they're a step away from something new.
When they're preparing to say their goodbyes and touching on their upcoming plans, Steve reveals that he's planning on using his holiday break to do a little solo travel before he goes to pick up Dustin. He holds Nancy's eyes, an unspoken invitation, maybe not even fully conscious it's an invitation until he's looking at her. He's not ready to open the door to all of his hope yet, because he's been there before, thinking they were on the precipice of something only for it to go nowhere. But he'll crack the door open, and he'll let her know it's open.
Nancy heads back to Boston to finish the last week of her internship. Her apartment's lease is up at the end of the month. She's still deciding what all her next steps will be, but she realises she does know the first. She does know what she wants now.
So she shows up at Steve's door in Hawkins, bags in tow, the day Steve's heading off for his trip. And Steve, he can't help the smile that just completely overtakes him. He picks her up in a hug and spins her around. After a year of them trudging through their jobs, walking back to empty apartments at the ends of long days, finding pockets of light in their conversations with each other, it's like they've finally let all the light in, and they're both glowing in it.
Steve needs to be sure, so he asks her, "What is this?" And she tells him. She tells him she didn't forget about his speech to her in the Upside Down. She tells him it wasn't about the "nuggets," that she got that. It was just easier to focus on that and deflect from everything else. But she's done hiding from her feelings.
She tells him when she dreams about her future now, he's there, too. And she's nervous for a second when she adds, "If your dream's still the same, that is."
Steve can't hold it back any more. He pulls her in for a kiss. "It never changed," he tells her when they finally pull apart.
So they head off on an adventure together. Of course, they still need to figure out the exact details: Nancy, which job she's going to take, Steve if he can find a job in the city, if they're even going to stay in Boston or go somewhere else, but they're not too worried about it all right now, because they know the most important part:
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