It was an interesting sight, the wall in Murray Bauman's living room. Covered with all kinds of tangible pieces to a puzzle she found herself a part of. An outsider's eye on the chaos. Because boy, she hadn't realised what chaos it looked liked from the outside. She immediately saw multiple glaring errors in his efforts to piece everything together.
"Your timeline's wrong," she informed him.
"I'm sorry?"
"Your timeline is wrong. And that girl with the buzzed hair, she's not russian. She's from Hawkins Lab. Her name was Eleven."
"You may want to sit down for this."
"Last november my brother didn't go missing in the woods. He went into another dimension," Jonathan started before looking for Nancy to continue. She was better with words than him. She took a breath and just dove straight in.
"That girl escaped from the Department of Energy building on the edge of town the same night. She had been kept there since she was a baby and raised as part of a lab program exploring the possibilities of mind control. She was treated as a test subject, refered to as number Eleven. Their illegeal experiments gave her telekinectic powers. Which they hoped would be useful in spying on the Russians. But instead she accidentally made contact with another dimension. A dark, evil dimension. And they forced her to make contact with the thing she found in it. Which made it aware of our world. It was a monster, some creature that doesn't exist in our world. A portal was opened in the lab between the dimensions and the monster came into ours."
Murray didn't show any reaction at all. He didn't laugh in disbelief or tell them to get out. So far, so good, she guessed.
"The Lab's in the woods close to our house. When Will biked home from the Wheeler's, he passed by as the monster escaped. It took Will with it back to it's own dimension. Will managed to run and hide in its world," Jonathan started again.
"The next night Barb vanished," Nancy added.
"This other dimension, is it an exact parallel to ours?" Murray suddenly asked, tone serious.
"A dark parallel. It mirrors ours but is filled with death and decay," Nancy explained.
"They can intersect… in the radiowaves, through lights, sounds. Eleven came into contact with it through radio waves. Then my mom… she could hear Will's voice on the phone before the circuit blew. He could control the lights and turn on my record player from the other dimension. Mom learnt to communicate with him through the lights. He warned her as the monster was coming through the wall. I didn't believe her, I thought she was going crazy. The Lab made a fake body of Will. To cover up their mistakes. We had a funeral."
"My brother and his friends found Eleven the same night Barb disappeared, when they were searching for Will. My brother hid her in our basement."
"What exactly was she capable of?"
"She could use her mind to communicate through radio waves. She could move things with her mind. She could hurt people with it too, if she wanted to. Maybe more, I don't know what else. She recognised Will in a photo because she'd seen him in the Upside Down... uh, that's what we call the other dimension. She promised my brother that she'd help them bring him back."
"And this monster you speak of? Please elaborate."
Jonathan reached in to his inner pocket.
"This is a photo I took, just before Barb disappeared. It was so fast I didn't even see it."
Murray studied the photo closely.
"Why is it torn apart and taped back together?"
"Doesn't matter," Nancy deflected. "The next day I went back to where Barb disappeared and I saw it in the woods. It was right next to me but went by so quickly. But I was sure it wasn't anything I had ever seen before.
"We teamed up to hunt it down in the woods."
"I saw something on a tree trunk… It was a portal, I crawled through it and suddenly I was there. I was in the same place but in another dimension. Then I saw it. And it heard me. I ran and I ran."
"I could hear her screaming but I couldn't find her."
"I followed the sound of his voice until I found the portal again and Jonathan pulled me back."
She paused, glancing at Jonathan and collecting herself before continuing. She hated reliving her time in the Upside Down. The relief and comfort of his embrace as she came back into their world, however…
"So now we knew it could create temporary portals to our dimension. And that it had poor eyesight, good hearing and great sense of smell. It couldn't see me but heard me stepping on something. And it went after the smell of blood," Nancy explained. "It could detect it from… I don't know how far away. Far. Barb had cut her thumb that night. I wasn't bleeding which saved me. Will didn't either, that night, so that's why it didn't kill him."
"The next day we went to get more supplies to be able to kill it but uh, a misunderstanding kind of got me arrested," Jonathan looked embarrased.
"It wasn't his fault," Nancy added.
"They found all our supplies in the trunk of my car and then Chief Hopper came in with my mom and had questions. They had been working together."
"He was on to the lab. He found out about Dr. Brenner's project, Eleven and the portal in the lab, and all they did to cover it up, when he searched for Will," Nancy pointed at a part of the wall, "Oh and that was part of it, Hopper thinks Benny found Eleven first and called social services so the Lab had him killed and staged a suicide."
"The girl was still with your brother at this point?"
"Yes. But the Lab was on to them. Agents swarmed our house, but Mike and his friends managed to flee with her. Mike says she flipped a van in the air using her mind."
"They hid until we could contact them and bring them to my house."
"Eleven could contact Will and look for Barb if she was in a sensory deprivation tank, so we kind of built one, in the middle school gym" she took a breath before continuing. "She found Barb dead."
"But Will was still hiding from the monster."
"Hopper and Joyce went through the portal in the Lab to rescue Will. But they would just be killed aswell if we didn't do something so we went back to his house and drew the monster to us with blood, caught it in a bear trap and set it on fire."
"But it didn't die. And then it disappeared from us."
"Agents swarmed the middle school where my brother and his friends were with El. Eleven. They pointed guns at them and tried to take her away, but she killed them with her mind. The blood attracted the monster. It would have killed them but Eleven pinned it against the wall and disintegrated it until they both disappeared. She and the monster."
"The Chief and my mom rescued Will."
"And then the government covered everything up. And Barb's parents still don't know the truth, they still think she's alive. They still hope. It's not right, it can't go on like this. So we've brought proof."
She played the tape.
xxx
Murray was a bit of an enigma to her. He was hard to read and seemingly endlessly paradoxical. A complete cloudcuckoolander but at the same time right on point on certain things; casting a huge net to uncover conspiracies but at the same time able to zero in on details; willing to believe anything but also insisting on telling it as a more believable story to the public. She had never met anyone like him before, but at the same time felt like she could relate to him on some level. His work ethic, not stopping until he had all the answers, she could understand that. Whether it was a chemistry test or a monster from another dimension, she wouldn't stop until she at least had done everything in her power to know as much about it as she could. She liked to finish what she started.
She also found they worked surprisingly good as a team, the three of them. Of course she already knew that she and Jonathan worked well together, but they worked quickly as a trio as well. It hadn't taken them long at all to together build a more believable story to sell the general public on and now they had fallen into a rhythm as a weird line of production, Murray making copies of the tape, handing them to her to stuff in envelopes with their write-up before handing it down to Jonathan who sealed it and got the adresses.
"I know this is for the best," she began. "But I can't stop thinking about what the reaction would be if we just got the full story out there. What would be the most difficult for people to believe, the girl with telekinectic powers or the inter-dimensional monster?"
Jonathan just laughed and shook his head. It all sounded completely unbelievable. If he hadn't been there, he wouldn't have believed it in a million years.
"Funny thing is I think my parents would still find the fact that Mike was able to hide a girl in the basement for a week without them knowing the hardest thing to believe," she laughed. Jonathan half-smiled at her.
"Yeah. Parents are weird like that. I guess it should worry me that my mom seemed more surprised too see you with me at the police station than to see the load of weapons and fuel in my trunk," he laughed.
"Well, can't blame her, Byers. I still kind of think you were a weirder part of that day than the bear trap," she ribbed him and got a chuckle in response.
xxx
Trust issues? No he did not have trust issues, he told himself. Then fucking do something, another part of his brain said. Just for once in your goddamn life trust yourself and make a move. He thought she liked him the same way he liked her. Or frankly, more than liked. Well shit she had just about told him so herself. She had waited for him. She had waited. And now what Murray had said had obviously struck a chord with her as well, why else would she also be up in the middle of the night? He was sure of it. Now or never, if he can't do it now, he never will. Just do it.
He rose from the bed and opened the door.
Retreat? Did she retreat? She couldn't stop thinking about him. All they've said and done. And that he had just been out there in the living room, clearly not being able to let go of what Murray had said anymore than she could. It was as if she could have quite literally reached out and felt the tension with her hand as they had met in the middle, like the whole relationship between them was coming to an edge. And then they had backed away. She had physically and mentally retreated to the safety of the solitary room. Damnit, Murray was right. She hated how right he was, but she was even more tired of her own damn self. Take the plunge. Close a door to fully open the one she actually wanted to step through. Stop retreating.
She rose from the bed and opened the door.
He was there.
xxx
"So, that was…" he started as they laid entangled with each other afterwards. He still couldn't fully comprehend what had just happened. It felt like a dream but Nancy Wheeler felt very real in his arms right now.
"… amazing," she finished his sentence and looked up at him, giving him a quick peck on the lips before getting comfy on his shoulder.
"Yeah."
She'd felt things she'd never felt before. Jonathan's kisses had left her breathless and hungry for more. A desperate need to have him, all of him, had come over her, a fire burning inside her that didn't slow down until now. Now it was replaced by a different, intimate feeling. She'd never felt so close to anyone as she did right here, right now. And nothing had ever felt so good.
They laid in a comfortable silence for a few minutes, Jonathan absentmindedly stroking her hair.
She knew they would have to talk about their feelings for each other eventually but she didn't really know how to approach the subject.
"He may be a drunk but he's damn perceptive," she began, to keep it light.
"Yeah, that was pretty good," Jonathan laughed, making her smile.
"You do kind of have trust issues, y'know. But then again your dad really is an asshole."
"Yeah. And you do kind of retreat. But who wouldn't?"
"Yeah. But I'm done. With retreating," she said, with force. "It's like you said, nothing can go back to the way it was. And this is what I want."
"Yeah. And I may have issues but I trust you. And this. Really," he said and looked into her eyes. She believed him.
"Good," she started, keeping their eyes locked. "'cause I trust you. And I want to be with you."
"And I want to be with you."
She kissed him again before laying down on his shoulder. She fell asleep to the steady rhythm of his breathing and his hand stroking her hair.
A/N: Thanks for all the reviews and follows and all! The next chapter will start with the morning after, but it will probably not be up 'til after the weekend, sorry.