Stancy/Stonathan Fanfiction

Ebb and Flow to Multiply

Stancy, Stonathan, Stoncy, smut,
11744 words
By: lehtonen

And so it went: the monster was defeated, Will Byers was returned to his family, Steve got the girl, and life in Hawkins picked itself up, dusted itself off, and carried on much the same as it had before, with scarce as much as a backwards glance.

Still, Steve couldn’t help but think that maybe there was supposed to be something more. Something else. Walking the halls of Hawkins High didn’t quite feel right, once they’d all returned after Christmas break, simply because it didn’t feel any different.

Well, a few things had changed, Steve guessed. There was a memorial, now, for Nancy’s friend, encased in glass in between the library and the cafeteria. It was just an old picture in a cheap faux-wooden frame, a candid shot, maybe, pulled out from somewhere; in it, she was looking out from under her lashes, turned slightly away from the camera, smiling her small, slightly embarrassed smile. It was surrounded by handwritten notes on white lined paper, pithy, overwrought eulogies from people who’d sat in classrooms with her for ten years and probably never said more than twenty words to her. The photograph itself couldn’t have been much more than a year old, but the glass of the frame didn’t quite hide the way it had already begun to curl and tear slightly at the edges. Looking at it made Steve feel uncomfortable, so, as a rule, he didn’t; within a week of the new year he’d trained his gaze to skip mindlessly over it as though it was just another trophy case for a school team he couldn’t have cared less about.

So it went.

***

Steve timed it so that Nancy, coming out of class, would catch sight of him leaning nonchalantly against her locker just as she rounded the corner. Her skirt swished elegantly around her knees as she picked up her pace a little, heading towards him with a bright, beautiful smile blossoming already across her angular features. Steve ducked his head in the face of it, resting his weight a little more fully on the locker where his hip was pressed, so casually contrived, against it.

“Hey there, you.”

Her voice was melodically upbeat; she leaned up on tiptoe to kiss him. Steve stood up straighter for a second, smirking down at her with his back flat against the locker, before giving in to her playful pout and stooping slightly to press his lips against hers in a chaste and fleeting kiss. When they separated, he allowed her a tiny, genuine smile of his own, almost nothing more than the barest quirk of his lips.

“Hey, yourself.” He lifted her bag out of her hands, holding it for her as she opened the locker and deposited her books inside, then wordlessly passed it back.

“Accompany me to lunch?” She took a step back and turned, holding her elbow out as though inviting him to take her arm, one eyebrow raised in a lighthearted dare. Steve rolled his eyes at her, making an exacerbated show of reluctance, but pushed himself away from the locker all the same, sliding his hand around her narrow arm and then continuing a smooth path downwards until their fingers were loosely interlaced. The crowd of milling students parted easily for them as they strolled, hand in hand, down the corridor. Secretive, Steve squeezed Nancy’s slender fingers in his, feeling gratified by the pink blush staining her cheeks and the shy, self-conscious manner in which she reached up with her free hand to tuck a loose curl behind her ear.

“So how was…” Steve hesitated, feigning forgetfulness for a second, casting his eyes upwards to the ceiling and tapping his mouth with his fingers in a melodramatic display of uncertainty, “…history?”