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Nancy opens the front door to the Wheeler house just past midnight, wincing as it creaks open.
Despite no longer having a curfew, she knows her mother will still ask where she's been, and she doesn’t know how to explain that she’s working necessary overtime at the radio station to save the world. It sounded ridiculous even to her ears, despite having thrown a flaming bottle of whiskey at the shadow monster himself.
So, she tip-toes up the stairs to her room. Opening her door slowly, she sees that Jonathan has fallen asleep, stomach down above the comforter. She’s told him a couple of times that he should actually sleep beneath the covers, even when she’s not there, and he’d agreed, but couldn’t seem to make a habit of it. He’d once muttered that it started when Will disappeared, he needed to be prepared to spring out of bed at any given moment. She still thought it would be good for his quality of sleep to break the habit, but she didn’t bring it up again after. She’s just glad he trusts her enough to sleep beneath them when they’re together.
She quickly changes into her sleeping clothes.
“Hey,” she whispers, shaking him awake lightly.
“Mmmm?” He groans, blinking awake. “What time is it?”
“After midnight,” she whispers, “Come on.”
She crawls into her side of the bed and tugs at the comforter, signalling for him to crawl underneath too. Jonathan maneuvers himself beneath them and nuzzles the crown of her head lightly before his breath begins to even out again.
Things feel weirdly normal lately for a quarantine-town approaching the apocalypse.
But Nancy knows things are brewing under the surface. Some days she can see the questions on her mother’s tongue. Nancy senses she knows her eldest two children are hiding something from her, and has caught a conflicted look cross her face when she and Mike come home late from a crawl together. Her concern etched across her features, her confusion at the two of them uncharacteristically spending so much time together, but she forces a smile, wanting to be supportive. The guilt eats at Nancy. She thinks her mother would believe her. She even thinks she and Joyce would make a great team. But she doesn’t know where to begin the story, so she keeps quiet.
And Mike… since Will and Barb went missing, the trust between them strengthened, year over year. Mike even cried in her arms after El and Will had left for Lenora, a moment that filled Nancy’s heart with so much love, she shed a tear or two while Mike wasn’t looking. They promised, back during their first encounter with the Upside Down, not to keep secrets from each other. But lately, she can tell Mike is hiding something again. He and Will seem to vanish together on a regular basis, and she’s glad they’re getting along again, but Mike feels far away.
She’s noticed an oscillation in his demeanor that she hasn’t taken the time to inspect. Sometimes he looks happy. Not overjoyed, not excited, but just quietly content and radiating with a soft kind of happiness. Nancy has never seen that kind of secure peace radiate from the ever-anxious Mike Wheeler. She's filled with a proud fondness when she's sees it, even if she doesn't understand where it's coming from.
But other times, he looks sad, heartbroken even, with a tinge of something else. Guilt? Shame? She's not sure, exactly. And again, she doesn't know why but she wishes she could help.
Exhaustion begins to overtake the worry, her breathing falling into sync with Jonathan’s. Her thoughts begin to bend into strange shapes, pulling her into the space in her mind where her dreams lived. She’s at… Lover’s Lake? Her dream-self moves across the surface of the water, navigating her locus of consciousness like a video game.
“Mike!”
Someone calls for Mike. She moves her dream’s consciousness viewport around, but can’t find Mike or the source of the voice.
She hears a muffled sound. Was that a moan? She's standing in the middle of a lake. Why is someone moaning?
“Oh, Mike…” the voice says. No, moans.
She looks down at the surface of the water, where she sees not her own reflection, but the ceiling of her room, and she plunges toward it as she resurfaces into consciousness.
Those sounds were definitely – a muffled voice she recognizes as Mike’s on the other side of the wall. She can’t quite make it out.
“...baby, too loud.” That's definitely Mike’s voice, and it sounds... turned on.
Oh. My. God.
Mike has a girl over.
The moan sounds again, this time shorter, like it’s been punched out of someone. Nancy tries not to think about what that implies. She fails. Unfortunately she knows exactly what would cause that specific sound.
Mike’s voice again. It's muffled but it doesn’t matter what he says because the tone is not one she ever wants to hear come out of her little brother.
“Ah…”
The other voice, primarily making broken moaning sounds, sounds vaguely familiar. She racks her brain. He and El had broken up, had they gotten back together? She didn’t know about any other girls besides Max who… is in a coma. And definitely does not like Mike like that.
“Mike!”
That is not a girl.
A double-punched, high moan. Nancy hates that that’s when she recognizes the voice.
Oh. My. God.
Not thinking, she reflexively elbows Jonathan. Her mind catches up with her body and realizes that her subconscious heard noises coming from Will and had instinctively moved to wake up his brother. That, and she needs someone else to confirm she isn't having some kind of deranged auditory hallucination.
Jonathan blinks, and looks at her. “...wha-”
A high pitched, desperate ramble of words passes through the wall, definitely a please or two in the mix. It’s very evidently the voice of Will Byers.
Jonathan freezes, eyes comically wide, horror beginning to settle into his features as his mind makes sense of what he just heard. Her own expression can’t be much different.
Mike’s voice is a bit lower and more muffled, followed by what sounds like a sob from Will.
Jonathan lifts a hand to his temple and grips his forehead like he has a headache. “Nancy, I hate you right now,” he whispers.
Nancy glares at him and whispers back “What, you want to let me suffer alone?”
“With this, I’m so sorry, but yes.”
Thump. The bed frame must have hit the wall on the other side of the wall.
Whatever they say next doesn’t carry, thank god, but she hears their muffled voices.
Then, thump, thump, thump.
Nancy’s horror melts into a helpless giggle. “Sounds like they found their rhythm.”
Jonathan lifts his hand from where it slid down over his eyes and glares. “What is wrong with you?”
Will lets out another high pitched noise, muffled partway through. Mike must have covered his mouth with something.
She purses her lips. The situation just feels so absurd. Another bout of silent giggles wracks through her body.
Will’s noises get higher and more frequent.
“Man, your brother is so much louder than mine.” Nancy observes, bewildered that despite Mike’s ability to talk a mile-a-minute, the soft and quiet Will is evidently the moaner. “Who would have thought?”
“I fucking hate you right now.” Jonathan repeats. Nancy bites her lip to hold back laughter. Her brother and her boyfriend’s brother, fucking in the room next door, she and Jonathan stuck as auditory prisoners on the other side. This must be some kind of fucked-up karma, a strange cosmic bit. She feels tears prickling her eyes.
A mix of moans passes through the walls. Jonathan wraps the ends of his pillow around his ears.
“Do you think they’re facing each other or doing it doggy?” Nancy asks. “Assuming Mike is on top, from the sound of it.” she adds, still laughing, verging on hysteria.
Jonathan ignores her in favor of tightening the pillow around his head. As if in response, Will gets even louder.
Mike, mike, oh fuck, mike… ah…
“I think he’s close.” Somewhere in the rational part of her consciousness, Nancy knows how crude it is to say to said “he’s” brother, but that part of her brain had switched off by the third time she heard Will moan her brother’s name.
“I will literally break up with you.” Jonathan says, and to his credit, he does look like he could commit a crime. It makes Nancy’s giggles intensify.
Just when Nancy starts to actually worry they might wake her parents, Will’s moans get that slight bit higher, generally the telltale sign of… his voice catches and in the middle of his highest moan yet.
“Oop, there it is.” she whispers, holding up one finger.
Followed quickly by “Oh fuck. Shit, Will!”
“Anndddd the other.” she holds up a second finger.
The sounds become a low murmur and eventually quiet.
Nancy looks over at Jonathan, tears spilling over in her laughter.
Jonathan looks at her like she’s morphed into a demogorgon.
“Nancy, what the hell.” he yell-whispers. “We just heard our little brothers fucking and you’re laughing?”
“I’m sorry, I can’t help it!” she whispers back. She giggles again. After a pause, “I mean, it is kind of funny isn’t it? Imagine there’s a God somewhere, throwing us into alternate dimensions full of monsters, but today he just decides. Nah. No flesh-eating bats. Today, they’re going to hear their brothers fuck.” She’s crying with laughter.
She looks over at Jonathan. His mouth twitches. Oh she’s going to get him to crack. “And not only that, they’re going to hear everything,” She looks directly into his eyes, dramatically raises her eyebrows, leans in, and with her best Vecna impression “You’ve heard screams of agony, the shrieks of otherworldly beasts, but you haven’t heard your little brother coming into your boyfriend’s brother.”
For a moment, Jonathan just stares at her, and she thinks she may have well and truly shocked him into silence.
Then, “You’re the most deranged person I’ve ever met.”
He turns his head away, but Nancy catches him pursing his lips, holding back a smile.
“You do think it’s funny!” she pokes him.
“Not until just now, you absolute whackjob.” he rolls his eyes. “I can’t believe you woke me up for that.”
“I couldn’t help it.” Nancy says. “I heard Will’s voice and woke you on instinct.”
Jonathan shrugs as if to say fair.
She snorts one last time, wiping away the tears. Nancy’s fit of giggles finally subsides.
“So,” she says, “Mike and Will, huh?”
“I’m not that surprised,” Jonathan responds. “I’ve known Will has liked Mike for a while now, I just didn’t think that Mike…”
“Oh, really?” Nancy asks, genuinely surprised. “Mike has always been obsessed with Will. He’s so different with him, so gentle. But Will is kind with everyone so I thought maybe it was just Mike…”
Jonathan laughs. “Well, I guess they figured it out.”
“I guess so.” Nancy says, the mania slipping out of her smile into genuine affection for them.
They go quiet, and just when Jonathan’s breathing starts to slow again,
“Will really is a screamer though, wow.”
A pillow hits her in the face.
Just as Nancy thinks she’s falling asleep, she remembers the Mike that she had observed lately. The happy Mike made sense now. But the sad Mike… her heart clenches. He is hiding something from her, maybe not because he wants to, but because he’s scared.
As much as she wants to give him shit about tonight (and she will, someday), for now, she'll find a time to tell him that she loves him, no matter what.
I had to listen to you fuck my boyfriend's brother and I’m not going commit fratricide about it, of course I love you, you shithead.