••••• "Don't don't you want me? / You know I can't believe it when you say that you don't need me" •••••
"This might be the stupidest thing I've ever gotten myself involved in, but I'm in."
In which Steve Harrington and Kimberly Henderson go from be...
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When they got back to the Wheeler's house, Kim went down stairs to check on Eleven while Nancy took a shower.
"Hey, El, you still awake?" she asked, opening the flaps to the makeshift tent.
"Yes," Eleven replied. "Are you okay?"
"Yeah, I'm totally fine," Kim lied, not wanting to worry the little girl who had already been through too much.
"Kim," El said, placing her hand on top of the older girls. "Friends don't lie."
Kim chuckled. "You sound like my brother and his friends."
"What is wrong?" El asked, still wanting to know what had Kim looking so utterly terrified.
The older girl sighed, thinking it was best to just tell her, even if it was an abbreviated version. "There's this-this monster. I know it sounds crazy, but I think it's what took Will and my friend Barb."
"That doesn't sound crazy to me," El replied, talking more in front of Kim than anyone else, even Mike. "I believe you."
"No one else would," Kim said. "Just being out in those woods with that monster lurking so close by gave me the heebie-jeebies."
"Heebie-jeebies?" Eleven asked, having never heard the term before.
"Yeah, like when you're scared or you get a chill down your spine," Kim tried to explain.
"Bad men give me heebie-jeebies," El nodded, looking up at the older girl to see if she had used the word correctly.
Kim's eyebrows furrowed in confusion. "Bad men? What bad men? Are those the people you ran away from?"
El nodded in response to the question. The two girls continued to talk, until they both fell asleep in the small fort. El had never felt safer than she did when Kim was around. She really looked up to the older girl. Kim muttered in her sleep, seeing pictures of the deer being ripped away and Nancy crawling out of the hole in the tree. She wrapped her arm protectively around Eleven, feeling just as comforted by her presence as El felt about hers.
•••••
The next morning Kim woke up and went up to Nancy's room to make sure she was okay after last night. Kim wasn't surprised that Nancy was awake, dark circles under her eyes. Kim guessed that she hadn't been able to sleep all night. What did surprise her was that Jonathan was asleep next to Nance.
"Hey, you okay?" Kim asked Nancy quietly, trying not to show how shocked she was to see Jonathan.
"Oh yeah, just peachy," Nancy muttered.
Kim smiled, trying to lighten the mood. "You've been spending so much time with me, that you're starting to sound like me."
Jonathan slowly woke up to the sound of the girls voices and Nancy flipping through pages in a textbook about different animals. "Hey," he said awkwardly.
"Hey," Nancy and Kim reliped.
"Couldn't sleep?" he asked Nance, his hair tousled and his eyes still exhausted.
Nancy shook her head in response, still looking down at the textbook. "Every time I close my eyes, I just keep seeing that thing. Wherever I was, that place, I think that it lives there. It was feeding there, feeding on that deer. That means that if Will and Barbara-"
"Hey, we'll find them," Kim reassured her.
Jonathan nodded in agreement. "My mom said she talked to Will. If he's alive, there's a chance Barbara is too."
"That means that she's trapped in that place," Nancy said, a chill going through her whole body at the memory. "We have to find it again."
"You wanna go back out there?" Jonathan asked.
"Nancy, I don't know if we should-" Kim started to say.
"Maybe we don't have to," Nancy said, looking back down at the textbook. "When I saw it, it was feeding on that deer. Meaning it's a predator, right? And it seems to hunt at night, like a lion or a coyote, but it doesn't hunt in packs like that. It's always alone, like a bear. And remember at Steve's when Barb cut herself? And then, last night, the deer-"
"It was bleeding too," Kim nodded.
"One sec," Nancy flipped the pages of the textbook to a section she had marked with a sticky note. "Sharks can detect blood in one part per million. That's one drop of blood in a million, and they can smell it from a quarter mile away."
"So you're saying it can detect blood?" Jonathan asked her.
"It's just a theory," Nancy shrugged.
"We could test it," Jonathan suggested. "But if it works-"
"At least we'll know it's coming," Nancy said.
Kim ran a hand though her dark hair, something she did a lot when she was stressed. "This might be the stupidest thing I've ever gotten myself involved in, but I'm in."
