Disclaimer: I don't own Netflix's "Stranger Things." Everything belongs to whoever owns them, my wishful thinking aside.
Authors Note #1: Because apparently I need to bring the filth into every fandom I go into, honestly. Set shortly after season one in the alpha/beta/omega universe trope.
Disclaimer:adult language, canon appropriate violence, very mild sexual content, alpha!jonathan, omega!nancy, adult content, embarrassing boners.
Vorfreude
Chapter Two
He'd been home a week when she found him in the parking lot after school, waiting for her. She smiled when she saw him, leaning against the side of his car with awkward casualness. Collar up and hands shoved deep in his pockets in a way that was so him it nearly made her homesick with the distance. There was something on his face that made asking questions useless, so instead of asking where they were going she simply nodded and slipped into the passenger side. Feeling a twinge of guilt as Steve watched silently a couple meters away. Doing nothing to stop her, but not looking happy about it either as they pulled onto the main road.
Not that she blamed him.
A lot of things had changed since they'd taken Jonathan away.
Her and Steve were just one of them.
It wasn't until they were out of town and angling towards the back roads, no destination in mind other than just driving, that he finally started talking.
"I'm going to do it Nancy. What they want? I've thought about it and- well, I can pay off the house in just a few years instead of having that hanging over mom's head all the time. Even start a bank account for Will to go to university. They've already told me they'll pay for mine- no matter what I want to do. Some sort of stupid Alpha perk to keep up the stereotypes, I guess. Assholes. But you don't have to buy into it. I figured it out. You can use it and try to do something worthwhile. Something that matters. Either way, I can't be here right now," he admitted, inhaling throatily before his hands curled like claws around the steering wheel. "At least not until-"
But he cut himself off before he could finish. Shaking his head like he'd said something he'd promised himself he wouldn't. Watching her guiltily before something in the bushes on the side of the road caught his attention. His heightened scenes giving him enough warning to start a gentle brake long before a herd of deer hopped out from the treeline and streaked across the road. Watching silently until all but the buck, mature, large and snorting up steam in the glow of the headlights paused to eye them down.
She barely noticed. Hands clenched so tight around the edges of her seat she swore she could feel the bones creaking. Turning a sickly, bloodless pale as he started up again. Feeling the throb of her pulse between her ears as honest disappointment turned into something far more serious than it should have been.
"Besides, they can't put me in active duty or anything until I'm of age. I think they want me for surveillance anyway. I told them about my camera and they seemed to think they could make something work with that. So it wouldn't be that bad, right? And if it is, I'll-I'll just get out. They can't force me to-"
It was honestly the last thing she expected him to say after all those months apart that for a long smattering of beats everything was just blank. Static. Dark. Like it'd been in the upside down. Where everything had been just a little bit off. A little bit wrong. A little bit…other.
"Nancy?"
The growing dark seemed to press in. Fitting into all the cracks and hollows of her as he watched her through the fall of his hair. The tendons in his throat angular and highlighted. Almost like he was holding himself back from saying something else. Something that would change everything. Something-
"Nancy?"
"Take me home Jonathan," she whispered.
She saved her tears until he dropped her off at home and the night swallowed his tail-lights. Thinking about the kid who'd been given a borrowed gun on his birthday and the weight of his father's expectations. The same kid who hadn't been able to pull the trigger on a rabbit without regretting it.
He sent her photographs in the mail every couple of months without any writing on them.
She never replied but she kept everyone in a shoe box lined with forest green tissue paper underneath her bed. Spreading them out across the comforter whenever she felt his absence too much. Finding herself smiling more than once as she traced the angles of an unfamiliar stretch of road. A woman's face obscured in a haze of orange-red as her hair billowed in front of her face with a gust of wind. The world-hugging curve of the Hoover Dam settled between the sides of a rocky canyon. A sign riddled with rust a bullet holes. A man with a buzz-cut and a bronze whistle trapped between his teeth captured in mid-blow. Ice-capped mountains looming in the distance across a grassy field. A small boy with a wide, gap-toothed smile looking at something outside of the frame. Jonathan's worn boots and an empty pointed cartridge tucked into the pleats like a good luck charm.
"Sometimes, people don't really say what they're really thinking. But you capture the right moment...it says more."
The only time they really had together was a two week period around Christmas. He came home every year at the same time and every minute he wasn't at home with his mom and brother, he was with her.
She horded every minute greedily. Painfully aware that time was a ticking clock waiting to separate them. She never asked him to stay. She knew him better than that. But every year she hoped it would be the last. That this year it would be different and he'd come home for good. Even though there was a ghost in the back of her head who sounded suspiciously like Steve and bitterness, that asked why she was bothering to wait on someone who only ever ran away on her.
Then one day, just before the start of summer, she woke up to find her sheets wrapped around her ankles and a fever burning under her skin. To the inner of her thighs wet with slick and Jonathan's name on her tongue as she cried out again and again. Screaming for something she didn't know how to put into words until her mother was suddenly there and holding her. Unable to sooth her with her steady Beta scent as part of her slowly started to understand.
He came home before Christmas that year.
She wasn't sure how he knew, maybe Joyce had told him she'd presented just after her nineteenth birthday. Or maybe something else had brought him back before the Christmas holiday. The how and why of it didn't matter. Because one day, just before the end of summer, she was on the field cleaning up after Holly's soccer game when she heard the grate of a familiar engine.
She smiled to herself as she stacked the orange pylons and waved goodbye to the rest of the team. Telling the coach she'd clean up the rest - earn her summer job for a change - as the last of the players and their families streamed off in the direction of the parking lot.
The next time she looked up he was there. Standing in front of her like a gentle road-block she hadn't decided what to do with yet. Just like she knew he would be. Expression a mess of guarded, hopeful, hungry and warm with that same salted-caramel scent rising off him in spreading waves.
She was able to detect the layers this time.
The details and intricacies that had been hidden from her before she'd presented.
And he smelled like- hers.
Home.
His nostrils flared like the realization had been shared aloud. Chuffing deep in his throat like recognition as pleasure pooled in her belly. Rising like warm water on the cusp of spilling over the lip of a tub before answering with a pitchy Omegan keen that made him close his eyes and inhale like nothing in his life had ever prepared himself for such a thing.
And she wasn't much better. Realizing in a spiked, adrenaline-fueled rush that he hadn't been running after all. Not really. In fact, all this time he'd just been waiting. Waiting on her. And now he was here and hers and honestly she could barely-
"You're mine," she said wonderingly, knowing it in that way every Omega does. Unexplainable and vibrant as she took one step then another. Eating up the space between them bit by bit until her head was under his chin and she was half curled around him. Knowing that even now, when it came to this, it would always have to be her that made the first move.
For a long moment they just breathed together. Getting acquainted with the possibilities of what happened next as he nosed into her neck affirmingly. Scenting her, probably just like he'd always wanted to. Sweet and careful enough everywhere else that the slow drag of his teeth down the pale of her throat a moment later caught her off guard and trembling.
Only she didn't pull away.
Instead, she whimpered.
He scented arousal then. Enough to drown her. A surge of pent up want and need and maybe even aggression as every part of him screamed. Bottled up and tense with his new senses – new instincts, drives and needs. Holding himself back from claiming her right there in the middle of the field by the skin of his teeth.
But just like always, there was a part of him that would always be boldly that.
Him.
"I've always been yours," he replied softly. Looking down at her in that serious way he had as the wind picked up. Ruffling the dark feathers of his hair, making him look a whole lot like that quiet, serious boy he'd been not that long ago. The one she'd slowly fallen in love with without even knowing.
She'd never heard anything in her life that made the most and least sense than those four words. But since they were hers - gifts he'd given her - she didn't hesitate to press her lips against his and take their first kiss for her very own.
It was a start.
And more than anything, that was what she believed in.
A/N: Thank you for reading, please let me know what you think. – This story is now complete.
