Chapter Text
As always, Nancy Wheeler is the first to take action.
She’s heard a lot of terrible things these last few years -- the shrieks of monsters, the screams of friends -- but so soon after getting Holly back safe, the sound of Mike’s wails of desperation and despair have cut straight through her to the bone.
He’s quiet now. They all are -- trauma has taught them to evaluate first, then react, and, lastly, if they ever get a chance, which they rarely ever do, to feel -- but she can’t shake the immediate and consuming fear that Mike’s silence is different. That it will last if she allows it.
Her mother isn’t here, so it’s up to her to take care of her brother.
While the others are still trying to orient to the newness of silence and stillness and a Hawkins that isn’t crackling red around the edges, Nancy crosses the debris field to Mike. Her feet crunch glass and she adjusts her stride like someone who has walked on nothing but glass for years and won’t let anything slow her down. She reaches her brother and grips his upper arm firmly, attempting to turn him, and when that doesn’t work, she steps around and in front of him instead.
His expression breaks her heart.
“Hey,” she says, cupping his bewildered face with its one tear track, trying to draw his attention away from the desolation of an empty building that wasn’t there before. “Hey, hey,” she says again when she’s unsuccessful, bundling him against her, both arms going around him, one bracing his shoulders and the other cupping the back of his head. He’s taller than her, dramatically so, a fact which pisses her off to no end and is one of the reasons she’s so stingy with her guns, but he lets her fold him down into her reach, his forehead coming to rest where her shoulder meets her neck. They take a breath together, and another, and then she feels his tears beginning to drip onto her neck.
“El,” he says, once, in an absolutely wrecked mimicry of his usual voice.
“I know,” she says.
Others begin to reach them. Dustin slams into the side of them, arms flung wide to reach around them both. Will is next, sobbing openly. After that, Nancy stops paying attention to which friends are adding themselves to the group hug in a terrible, heartbreaking mockery of the hug they all shared when Will came out. Nancy didn’t join that hug, not because she didn’t care or accept Will -- the kid grew up in her house just as much as in her own, she’s fixed him after-school snacks and helped him with his homework and chased him out of her belongings under threat of death just like she has her brother and all his friends -- but because she couldn’t bear to fling herself into a group hug with Johnathan so soon after their breakup. If she hugged Jonathan right then, she might not have let go.
But this hug is different. This hug is about the boy currently shaking apart in her arms, the boy who has always been the center of his friend group, standing strong and figuring out the next step of the plan.
His friends -- their friends -- are stumbling over themselves with words and tears and apologies and absurd statements that are probably meant to be comforting -- why Dustin is talking about D&D right now, she can’t fathom, but she’d like to find his off switch one of these days -- and Lucas, poor, traumatized Lucas who has waited two years for a girl he only just got back is saying, “It’s not fair,” and he’s not wrong but saying it makes it worse somehow, and Nancy wishes, not for the first, or the tenth, or the thousandth time, that her brother’s friends knew how to shut their mouths once in a while --
But Nancy simply repeats one more time, “I know,” and then she’s quiet, shoulders squared, arms strong around Mike. She takes over for a moment as the center so he can fold and crumble and just be without having to know, to put a spin on it or make a plan or tell a story that makes it all make sense.
Her brother's friends will have to figure out the next step all on their own this time. Nancy isn’t letting them have Mike back. Not yet. In this moment, when nothing else is fixable, her little brother is hers to protect.