So, on the subject of ‘things i finished a while back and needed to post,’ this is Part Two of this thing.  It’s basically shippy nonsense and discussion of how Sarah Williams is a weird motherfucker.

“So who’s Sarah?” Jonathan asked after they’d eaten dinner—just takeout, because they were both feeling particularly lazy.  He was toying with the folded bit of notebook paper with Sarah’s number on it, curious, and Nancy smiled as she dropped the last few dishes they’d used into the drying rack.  She padded over, barefoot with her hair loose around her shoulders, and settled herself in his lap without so much as an ‘as you please’.  He wrapped his arms around her snugly and tucked her back against his chest, his chin hooked over her shoulder like a little boy.

“Sarah,” Nancy said, reaching out to play with the paper herself, “is the girl who recited Der Erlkonig in its original German.  She’s a freshman and she’s…odd.”

“You’re one to talk,” Jonathan mumbled, voice muffled in Nancy’s wild hair.  She smacked his arm absently, sharp enough to crack in the empty room, and rolled her eyes, more for her own benefit than his.

“That was sort of my point, genius,” she said, and he straightened slightly.

“Oh,” Jonathan said, in the tone of someone abruptly interested in goings-on.  “Really? Odd how?  Like…”  He trailed off, and Nancy huffed a breath.

“Odd like odd,” she repeated with a vague flail of her hand.  “Like weird.  Like ‘I wonder what her deal is.’”

“El level of weird, or just Mike level weird?” Jonathan asked, pragmatic as ever.  This was their usual method of handling some of the stranger things that happened around them—Eleven’s magnetism for trouble was contagious.  Nancy had better instincts for the uncanny, a good sense of when something was off-tempo from the rest of the world, where Jonathan had a strong grasp of the strictly practical side, the part that let the two of them figure out exactly how to light monsters on fire.  It was a complementary arrangement in every way.

Nancy considered his question for a while, the kitchen soothingly quiet around her, Jonathan’s heartbeat steady against her back.  “I don’t know,” she said finally.  “She has that look, you know?  Like she knows something and she thinks it’s kind of funny to watch everyone else blunder around.”

“I know the look,” Jonathan said wryly, and she could feel the warm brush of his breath when he hid a smile against the soft skin of her neck.  He pressed a brief, almost perfunctory kiss there before moving away.  “You think she’s like us, then?”

“I—sort of?  There’s just something weird about her, weirder than us. She almost reminded me of Eleven sometimes,” Nancy said, thoughtful and distant.  Jonathan didn’t interrupt, letting her grope for the words until they came.  “Like she hadn’t just seen something, she’d done something, or like maybe she was something.  She looked at me like El looks at people, you know?  Stares right through you?”  Jonathan nodded against her back and she went on, the words coming together more easily in the face of his absolute trust—even if she sounded crazy, Jonathan would believe her.  “But I don’t think she was reading my mind, it was more like…more like she took one look at me and just knew I’d been to the Upside Down.  And there was this one moment–”  Nancy broke off as an involuntary shudder crept down her spine, and Jonathan’s muscles started to tense behind her in response.

“Did she hurt you?” he asked, a low and dangerous rumble against her skin, and she brushed a hand down his arm gently.

“No, she didn’t, there was just—I asked her something about her fiancé, and she said he was possessive, and that she was too, and there was just something about her eyes…” Nancy realized that she was rambling and closed her mouth with a click until she thought she would be able to produce a sensible explanation.  “It was like,” she said slowly, “she’d taken off a mask, and there was something else underneath.  A predator.  And then she shook it off and she was nice, kind of weird Sarah again.”

Jonathan made another dissatisfied noise, and said, “So. What you’re saying, Miss Let’s Go Into The Woods, is that you’re going to call her.  Right?”

“Come on, there’s something going on here,” Nancy said, poking him with a pointed elbow and hearing him grumble a complaint.  “Aren’t you dying to know?”

“Not really,” he muttered, nosing through her curls to press another kiss against the nape of her neck.  “That sentence always gets us into trouble and you know it.”

“You’re such a serious old man,” she teased, twisting around so that she was straddling him, smiling down from her vantage point. Jonathan still wasn’t a particularly handsome man, but his broad face was steady and kind, and the glint in his eye was like magic—and Nancy knew from magic, these days, no matter what Mike insisted about science we don’t understand.

He gave her a look that did nothing to contradict her words and said, in his most stiff and stolid voice, “I’m only a few months older than you, you young hooligan.”

Nancy giggled and draped her arms carelessly over his shoulders.  “Come on, Jonathan, it’ll be an adventure.  Nothing’s been half so bad as the thing from the Upside Down, how dangerous could Sarah possibly be?”

“You have no respect for the concept of a jinx, do you, Nance?”

She pecked a kiss on the tip of his nose and said, “I’m going to call her and get coffee.  You can’t stop me and you know it.”

He sighed and settled his hands around her waist, where the crest of her hip would fit perfectly into his palm.  “I know.”  He looked up at meet her gaze clearly, the shaggy edge of his dark hair falling away from his eyes.  “Bring your knife.”

“I always do,” she said, and brought her lips down to his.