PRETTY SICK!
— makes me sick makes me smile ☆

When Gen dreamed it was clear as when she opened her eyes in the morning. Images of the past in vivid puzzle pieces that placed themselves together into a crooked vision of her life; they never fit right, with stupid gaps and ugly cracks that changed the foundation of the very scenario. Pete crumpled to his knees on a long stretch of gravel that she would walk down in Russia, her comrades in the Upside Down with vines that sprouted from their carcasses like veins, sometimes herself in the third person—those ones never felt very much like dreams—doing the mundane: cooking, studying, biking. Her brain was unusually cruel to her with those dreams.

Maybe she had lied, her dreams may have always been nightmares. Gen lied by omission sometimes, a bad habit she never seemed to be able to kick.

Only one constant stayed throughout each night she shut her eyes and cycled through her garbled memories, the fact that no one kept their face when she saw them. The features danced around their head aimlessly, or during a particularly bad bout of memories, ceased to appear all together. Gen thought it was her brain taunting her, at first, but it eventually became a comfort as the dreams became more violent. Bloody. Loud. With each passing year she gained more memories, more dreams, more people to potentially be killed in said dreams. Most of the time the red was stained on her hands, stuck under her fingernails and the cracks of her knuckles, the lines that ran across her palms like grisly crimson cuts. The blood never seeped from her, despite everything.

In the real world, cold hands began to feel like a loose grip on dead bodies, and hangnails that split down her fingers looked like a spray of blood after a particularly nasty job. Though, these things never stopped her from keeping her hands uncovered in the winter and biting on the skin around her nails when she'd already chewed the fingernail down to a nub. Another nasty habit; she picked it up from Boris while on the road.

It made her stomach churn on anyone else—the hangnails, skin bright pink and raw—but she wore it well, or at least well enough that it felt like a comfort throughout annual monster-hunting and bad dreams that kept her up at night as she stared at the cabin ceiling.

Her dreams weren't much different from her concepts of the future. Crimson, starring people with names she would remember until she passed, but wearing faces that were unrecognizable to her. Gen wasn't a spiritual person in any sense of the word, the world appeared very cut and dry to her, but it reminded her of a saying she learned from Eddie—memento mori. Remember you must die.

Everyone she cared about would die, eventually, and she wasn't scared of that, but it seemed like the people around her died at a much faster rate than anyone else. Too fast. If someone asked her how many people she knew that died, she would need more than the fingers held up on her two hands to count all of them. The list felt longer every day, like if she blinked for a moment too long it added another to the lineup. Gen just wished the world could slow down for a minute, or even two.

These thoughts would never be verbalized, at least she hoped not, they weren't right. Hopper's face would screw up and Eddie would tell her to knock it off if she ever did, because weakness was sad, a disadvantage that crept up on the beholder during their worst moments; a trait that Gen wasn't meant to have. Earth shattered in her wake, poison dripped from her tongue when she spoke—she eviscerated anything that stood in her way, human or inhuman, and it felt good, but oh, so lonely. She never expected anything less, however. People treated her for what she was: a destroyer, a punisher.

That's what made Nancy so fascinating to her.

She smiled at Gen, she treated her with a softness that felt neither infantilizing nor forced, Nancy simply wanted to do it. It felt so tantalizing to exist next to someone who emanated such tenderness. Her fingers would skim swiftly, softly along Gen's knuckles when their hands brushed each other in the hallway at school; Nancy's caress felt like a gentle torture when they did each others makeup during sleepovers—every touch scorched Gen's skin to the third degree, Nancy just couldn't see it. Kindness like Nancy's felt more foreign than any dimension Gen could possibly be sent to, her stomach flipped upside down at the thought of her; it felt nice to indulge in something like that even if it was just out of reach.

Gen felt guilty about her mind being so self-centered when the stakes heightened with every second they spent searching for heaters, but Nancy stood directly across from her and she barely had time to process anything that had happened since she left for Illinois. They were in the midst of sorting through the trash to find objects that might be able to heat a room, or more specifically the entire cabin Gen lived in-in order to burn the Mind Flayer out of Will's body.

She tossed another piece of scrap wood to the side with a grunt, gaining Nancy's attention. The curly haired girl had finished a quiet conversation with Steve a few minutes prior, something about how annoying and awful he was as a boyfriend, so the breakage of silence must have startled her.

"If you're getting tired, I can handle the rest," she told her, "So you can conserve energy." Ever so selfless of her, Gen glanced upwards at Nancy with her head remaining dipped down.

"No. I'm just thinking."

"You are?"

"Yeah. I mean, I have a History test on Thursday."

Nancy let out a sigh of relief and smiled to herself, face illuminated with only the flashlight she gripped in her hand, "Oh, good. I, um—I felt bad. I thought I was the only one thinking about myself right now. It feels so stupid to be, but..."

Gen shrugged and dug around under a tarp in search of a heater in the trash tossed from the shed, carefully avoiding raw, sharp edges on things that would definitely give her tetanus. Her heart pounded in her ears like she'd just escaped twelve-hundred Demodogs.

"That's not wrong, right?"

If anyone else had been interrogating her, she might have told them to fuck off. She paused and shrugged again. "No."

"Good... good," replied Nancy. Her lips pursed and her brows furrowed as she glanced down, signaling Gen that she was about to start speaking again, she was thankful that Nancy had such predictable body language. "This isn't how I pictured my life... um, what it would be like."

"Sifting through garbage isn't exactly most people's ideal Sunday," she deadpanned.

Heaven's gates opened as Nancy laughed at her statement, Gen looked away from her. "Oh—No... I meant that—" she smiled, "Um, this. All of this. The monsters, the lab. Hawkins." Her lips tugged back down into a concentrated frown, something more sat on the tip of her tongue, but Nancy stayed silent and surveyed Gen. She didn't know what she wanted her to say.

"I'm not going to say that everything happens for a reason, because that's fucking stupid. But I'd rather be, err, balls deep in the action than a victim in the crossfire," Gen told her, albeit a bit aloofly as she tossed a hunk of garbage out of her way. "Maybe this isn't great, or even good, but it's what we're doing whether there's something better to be done or not. At least the people you're doing it with are fine, for the most part."

Nancy nodded. "You're right."

A tingle of a hot flash crawled up Gen's arms and spine when Nancy continued to stare at her for longer than necessary, eyes wide with curiosity or hopefulness, she couldn't decipher what. It frustrated her when Nancy did this; she would give her a look that clearly meant something that Gen simply couldn't read or pick up on in the time she gave her to do it. She wanted her to just say what she thought, whatever came to mind so Gen didn't have to play Likes me or not in her head over the slightest of interactions—if these interactions meant anything to Nancy at all, seeing as she and Jonathan were now a "thing". Her stomach flip-flopped at the concept.

The darkness that enveloped them was forgiving, as Nancy would be unable to see Gen's quickly reddening face while she crouched to get a better look at one of the heaters. She heard her inhale sharply.

"I feel weird about leaving Hawkins while everything was going on," Nancy admitted.

"You didn't know," she replied, frowning. Her fingers went to spin the beaded friendship bracelet on her wrist. Nancy made it for her.

"I would have if I were here." Gen could hear the frustration in her voice, how Nancy wished she could be anywhere, everywhere, all at the same time, and she felt the same pang of guilt punch her in the sternum. Chronically guilty, chronically in need of control, they had to have been two sides of the same coin or something poetic like that.

There was a gnawing in her chest again, one that told her to focus on the task at hand instead of how strangely close she felt to her friend. How similar they were and how she managed to stay so composed throughout every up and down. None of what she thought mattered in the long run, though: Nancy was Nancy, and Gen was herself. Every invisible burn along the surface of her skin and sinking feeling in her stomach was something comparable to Joyce, when she gripped her hand with the love of a mother. However, Nancy was young. Inexperienced. Callous on some occasions. She wasn't meant to be proportionate to Joyce in that way

Liar.

She nodded in agreement. "You would have. But things all—" Gen swirled her hands around, "—came together. Steven took care of it, as much as it pains me to admit."

Nancy knit her brows together. "Did he, though?"

"He isn't very smart, but he pulled his weight." Every backhanded compliment made her want to rip her own hair from her scalp. Gen sighed at the blank look on her face. "We can't change anything now."

Then Nancy stared at her again, watched her as closely as she could without looking intimidating, not that Gen could ever be intimidated by her. Her eyes bored holes into her face, her nose, the freckles on her cheeks, every twitch of the eyebrow—maybe Nancy couldn't tell what was going on inside of her head either. They played an unseen game of tennis between their thoughts, and now Gen had no resources to figure her out; she never used her power on Nancy unless she asked her to, which was twice out of her own curiosity, not in any way under Gen's own conviction. But still, it appeared as a security blanket to her when she needed to remind herself that she could understand anyone at any point in time.

Now, she felt so lost, tossed into a world that she never bothered to try to understand on her own because she never needed to. Gen got too comfortable and now she had to pay the consequences with a wandering mind when it was crucial that she stayed focused.

Human connection was always viewed as a weakness by her commanders in Russia, and it wasn't until she came to Hawkins that she truly understood why. Gen felt indifferent to people before then; they were to be used as allies or pawns for an end goal, when she became friends with someone, she got attached, and when she got attached those people became vulnerable to being used as leverage against her. Comity was fragility. Fragility meant that Gen could be broken, and that simply didn't work for her—Gen was an immovable object, an unstoppable force, the person meant to stand tall amongst the rest while everything around her crumbled.

When did she become so soft? Everytime she looked at the people around her she felt her bones melt and her muscles become slush, her brain filled with static, but not the kind that overwhelmed her senses right before she was about to burst—it mollified her thoughts into a single mass of bliss. Like playing her favorite song on repeat; over and over and over.

"Gen?" Nancy asked as the final plug-in heaters joined the pile.

She barely lifted her head while examining the cord of one of them. "Uh-huh?"

"You're really... um, really great. I'm really glad you're doing this with me," she smiled.

And Nancy Wheeler had just torn her whole world apart.

For years she denied it. The lingering stares on pretty billboard girls plastered along the vast stretches of highway, Gen watched them with her head poked out of the window and the wind nestled in her hair and it evoked a curiosity within her. She wanted to hold their hands. Feel the hills of their knuckles to truly learn what the word gentle meant. She fantasized what it would be like to talk to them, to listen to their thoughts and dreams until the sun came up and all they could do was giggle lethargically. Anything, everything, the mundane things they would do together ingrained themselves into her brain as hopes for the future. Gen never envisioned a man in her imaginary other-half's place.

That never stopped her from trying, though. She forced herself to try and like Eddie in that way. Jeff in that way. Hell, even Gareth and Brian when she got desperate for a solution to her terminal need to be attracted to women. It made sense to her, and probably other people. A girl in a band full of boys meant that there was a high chance she'd date one of them, and naturally, with all the time spent with one another they'd become extremely close. Unfortunately, she tolerated them on good days. The thought of their lips on hers made her want to gag, it was so abnormal.

And then she met Nancy. Cordial, pretty, perfect Nancy; Gen wasn't the only one who shared this same sentiment towards her, she heard people calling her a princess through the grapevine, though they taunted her with it. She was a princess, the spitting image of everything Gen wanted and couldn't have—so she rejected her feelings altogether, for both of their sakes.

Mouths of Hawkins loved to talk, obviously if the word got out Gen would be socially exiled and harassed along with her friends and closest peers, but surely they'd question if her feelings appeared out of nowhere, or if Nancy reciprocated something along the way. More notably so after Steve and Nancy's somewhat public relationship issues. Both of them would be scorned, called sinners, freaks, unnatural. Though Gen didn't need to be told all of that, she already knew. Deny, deny, deny, became the most frequent thought that crossed her mind, and now she couldn't anymore, not when Nancy stood right there and spoke so sweetly to her.

Gen had to stop.

If she couldn't stomach to deny the truth anymore, she just had to put a stop to it. Plain and simple.

She didn't owe the world her love, and clearly Nancy was much more preoccupied with the men in her life than the third contender for her affection. Gen ran the race invisibly, elusive as she dodged the glaringly obvious reason as to why she even bothered to compete in the first place—Nancy-fucking-Wheeler. It all centered around her. The stress was for her. The sadness. The heartache. She did it because she wished to be seen by her so badly that just the smallest chance made her giddy; and the worst part of it all was the realization that came crashing down during a situation that required her complete and entire attention.

The entire plan could go to shit with Will as the primary victim and all Gen could focus on was her pathetic feelings for a woman who had never given her a second glance. She must have been the worst. The worst of the worst as she found her legs frozen in place, mouth agape and blinking at Nancy like a foreign object.

Her mind barely grazed the fact that Eleven showed up looking like a groupie of Corroded Coffin, or that apparently she had been in Chicago for a troublesome amount of days as a young girl with no friends, no money, and no family in the area. Nor that Angelica teetered on the edge of her lifeline, if she was still alive at all. Bob died in the lab and two thirds of the group were about to take the next steps that led into the final battle, the one that decided whether many people lived to see the sunrise once again. All of this, and Gen focused on her stupid crush on Nancy.

Something so miniscule and futile to the forefront of every thought that night, from the moment she saw her standing next to Jonathan through the brush.

Gen was such a selfish cunt, the kind of person she made fun of with her friends. She loathed the version of her in her head, but like she said before, she couldn't help but indulge herself sometimes.

Every single one of these thoughts bounced around her mind within the few seconds it took for her to respond, which she hoped Nancy took as a sentimental pause rather than a complete undoing of her identity as she knew it. Her mouth floundered for a moment, then shut and she nodded.

Gen barely choked out, "I'm glad I'm doing this with you too."

It burned her throat to speak. She wasn't emotional—but embarrassed, shamed. Every muscle in her body tensed to the point of pain and she felt herself put restraint on the tingling heat that crept up the base of her skull. It threatened to leak out and burst the first thing that got in her way, and she almost let it, but a second explosive reaction was going to put her on the bench and she needed to be there for Eleven when she closed the gate. Whether for support or physical defense, Gen needed to conserve her energy.

Nancy opened her mouth to speak again, but luckily, Hopper called out from beside the Hawkins' police van, "El, Gen. C'mon." He tossed a cigarette to the ground. "It's time."

"I'll see you when this is over, Nance," muttered Gen. Before Nancy could respond, Gen ducked her head down and made her way into the backseat of the van.

—————
——— AUTHOR'S NOTE
this is my love letter to sapphics
in the closet who are in love with
a straight woman

one of my favorite chapters by far
i think?? if not my favorite. thank
you for 13k reads!!!! im really
happy people like my fic and i hope
to keep people interested.

don't forget to vote and comment!

PRETTY SICK
girlpools  /  2023