Partners in Crime-Eddie Munson x OC

Chapter 21

"Nancy! Hey! Stay with me! Nancy!" Steve yelled, trying to shake Nancy back to her senses.

Those of us back in Hawkins stepped in to look at the two of them.

"Vecna," Max muttered, swallowing thickly.

"Music! We need music, right?" I turned to the group. "Anyone know what Nancy likes?"

Robin nodded. "Yeah, I saw some tapes in her room!"

We rushed to Eddie's room to dig through his stash of cassettes. All that was here was his metal albums, though.

"Steve says you need to hurry!" Erica barged in and shouted at us.

"Yeah? No shit!" Dustin gave her a dirty look.

"We're trying, but we can't find anything!" Max yelled.

Robin turned, arms full of tapes. "Seriously, what is all this shit!"

"What are we even looking for!" I threw my hands up in frustration.

"Madonna, Blondie, Bowie, Beatles? Music! We need music!" Robin yelled frantically, holding up an Iron Maiden cassette.

"This is music!" Eddie snatched the tape and shouted defensively.

"She means we need Nancy music, and this isn't it!" I kept digging through the piles and piles of tapes. This stuff might save me or Eddie, but there was no way in hell Nancy Wheeler was jamming to Motley Crue in her spare time.

Erica came charging back into the room, a wild look on her face. "She's back! She snapped out of it!"

"What?" Robin, Eddie, and I turned towards her in shock.

We dropped the tapes and hurried back out to the living room. When we looked up through the gate, Steve sat holding a collapsed Nancy. The girl looked shaken and terrified, but awake and herself nonetheless.

"Steve, is she alright?" I called up to the pair.

"I-I think so," Steve called back, clutching Nancy tightly.

We stood quietly as Nancy took a minute to catch her breath and collect herself. Steve helped her climb her way out of the Upside Down, and Eddie and I waited on the Hawkins side to help her down.

Nancy's eyes were shadowed with a haunted expression. Regardless of the horrors she had just been forced to see, in true Nancy fashion, she powered through it. 

She sat, staring off at nothing in particular, and replayed the visions from Vecna. "He showed me things that haven't happened yet...The most awful things...I saw a dark cloud spreading over Hawkins. Downtown on fire. Dead soldiers. And this...giant creature with a, a gaping mouth. And this creature wasn't alone. There were so many monsters. An army. And they were coming into Hawkins. Into our neighborhoods, our homes. And then...he showed me my mom. And Holly. Mike. And they...they were all..." 

Nancy's voice broke, tears running down her cheeks. She took a shaky breath, her face the epitome of pained. We all looked around at each other in silence. It was a funny thing, I could sense that none of us had been able to shake the same feeling of terror since this all started.

"Okay, but he's just trying to scare you, Nance. Right? I mean...I mean, it's not real." Steve looked up at her, hope for reassurance clear in his features.

"Not yet. But there ... there was something else. He showed me gates. Four gates. Spreading across Hawkins. And these gates, they looked like the one outside of Eddie's trailer, but they didn't stop growing. And this wasn't the Upside Down Hawkins. This was our Hawkins. Our home." Nancy's lip quivered as she uttered the words we hoped she would say.