Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Prologue: Aftermath

I hope it isn’t too late for me to say all this.
It seems like I’ve lived my whole life on second chances,
But I know someday my luck will run out.

I just hope that day isn’t today.

...

Steve stumbled and braced himself against the banister of the Creel house, as the ground shook beneath his feet. His fingertips brushed against one of the slimy vines covering the house, and he jerked away. But it did not move. Whatever had hurt the vines before still had them knocked out. One less thing to worry about.

Another shockwave rattled the house, and Robin and Nancy both gripped his arm at the same time. Robin’s eyes were wide with fear, and her knuckles were bone white where they gripped his jacket sleeve. He lifted his other arm and laid his hand on her shoulder in a gesture he hoped was comforting, but she barely seemed to notice.

Nancy shook his arm. “We have to get out of here, back through the trailer. If the gates are opening, we’re not safe.”

“What about Max?” he asked. “We can’t just…I mean, she can’t be…” His mouth gaped uselessly as he struggled to find a way to voice his thoughts without saying the words.

“Four gates,” Robin whispered in a frail voice.

Steve shook his head. “He—Vecna—he could’ve found someone else. An easier target!”

Nancy set her jaw and jerked his arm to force him to look at her. Her eyes were brimming with tears. “I don’t think he did. We missed.” She took a shaky breath, and her voice broke when she spoke again. “I missed.” She turned and stared back at the way they had come. Steve followed her gaze to the patch of ground where Vecna had fallen from the window and disappeared.

“And we have to go.”

Steve squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, and his feet turned to lead in his shoes. How could they leave when Vecna was still out there? But Nancy was right, they could not stay in the Upside Down. The gates were opening, and Max was gone. They had failed. “Ok,” he said at last, “let’s get back to the trailer and find Dustin and Eddie.”

Nancy paced away without turning to look back at him, carefully avoiding the stained earth and broken glass marking Vecna’s escape. Robin still clutched at his sleeve with hands like a child’s, and he urged her forward and out of the house, his spare hand hovering over the middle of her back. Together, the three of them crossed through the rotting woods back to the trailer park.

The rumbling had died down, and the ground felt solid beneath Steve’s feet again. An eerie quiet settled over him. There was no breeze to rustle the dry branches of the trees, only the gently falling particles gathering around them like drifts of poisoned snow.

As they made their way through the park and approached Eddie’s trailer, Robin grabbed his arm and pulled him to a sudden stop.

“Steve, look,” she said, pointing toward the trailer. “The door is open.”

A cold chill ran down Steve’s spine, and his breath caught in his throat. His thoughts flashed to Dustin and the demobats. Without thinking he reached up and pressed his hand against the side of his stomach where his wounds were still tender. They had to be around here somewhere. Dustin was just a decoy. He had to be alright.

Ahead of them, Nancy turned and scanned the road. “Over there,” she called out and took off running to their right further into the trailer park.

Steve followed behind her with Robin in tow and noticed what Nancy had seen. Two forms were huddled on the ground just off the road. A ring of lifeless demobats littered the ground around them. Whatever had taken out the vines had obviously affected them too. Robin slowed to a halt, and a choked gasp escaped from her throat. A moment later, Steve understood why.

Dustin in his ghillie suit had wrapped himself around Eddie, and a muffled crying shook his shoulders. Eddie was still beneath him. One of his arms had fallen limply to the side, and his fingers were curled like the legs of a dead spider. Something dark and wet was smeared on his palm. The beams of their flashlights made it shine in the darkness.

“Steve, is he…” Robin trailed off.

Nancy brought her hand up to her mouth, her eyes wide and glazed with tears.

Steve stepped forward past both of them and closed the distance between him and Dustin. Up close, there was no mistake about what had happened. A red bruise like a rope burn wrapped itself around Eddie’s neck, but Steve knew it hadn’t been made by a rope. He compulsively held a hand up to his own neck and rubbed it along the still tender marking. Eddie’s clothes were torn to shreds, revealing gaping rents in his flesh and sharp teeth marks. It struck Steve all at once that the only reason he was not another dead boy in the Upside Down was because his friends had come to save him. At that thought, his eyes burned, and he rubbed at them half-heartedly.

He kneeled down beside Dustin and put his arm around his shoulders. The other hand he placed gingerly on Eddie’s knee. He was still wearing those ridiculous black jeans with rips on the knees, and his skin was still warm beneath the fabric. Dustin almost didn’t seem to see him until he was right beside him. As the weight of Steve’s arm settled over him, he looked up suddenly and stared at Steve as if he was not really seeing him. His eyes were red rimmed with tears, and his entire body shook as he was wracked with a sob. A noise like a wounded animal rose up from him in a wail.

“I…I tried to save him, but I didn’t make it in time. I…” Dustin stopped short.

Steve squeezed Dustin’s shoulder and pulled himself closer to embrace him in a half hug. “Hey,” he whispered in a soft tone he didn’t think he’d ever used before. “Hey, buddy, it’s…it’s not your fault.”

Dustin turned away from Steve and stared at Eddie’s body. He brushed a strand of dark, curly hair slick with blood out of Eddie’s face. Steve couldn’t bear to look at Eddie’s face. He was so still and so pale.

Dustin spoke again in a whisper. “He led the bats away. He protected us.” He looked up at Steve, meeting his eyes for the first time. His chin quivered and tears rolled silently down his cheeks. “I needed you,” he said, his voice breaking. “He needed you.”

Something seemed to be crawling its way up Steve’s throat. He tried to swallow, but the lump would not go away. The corners of his eyes stung, and he quickly rubbed them again with the back of his hand. The last thing Dustin needed right now was for him to lose it. “I know. I know, buddy. He saved us.”

He swallowed again and choked out the last two words. “I’m sorry.”

Steve jumped as a clap of thunder split the silence around them. He looked over his shoulder back the way they had come, and his eyes widened when he spotted the storm. In the distance, the peak of the Creel house stood out against the murky darkness of the Upside Down. A massive bank of charcoal clouds swirled above the house, spreading outward in every direction. Flashes of crimson lighting ignited the sky, washing them all in a blood red light. He was mesmerized by the roiling clouds. They moved as if they were alive, reaching out towards them from above. Steve shuddered, overcome by a sudden sensation of being watched. Almost as if the storm was looking back at him. It seemed angry.

Nancy’s voice broke him out of his reverie. “Steve, we have to go,” she hissed. She grabbed Robin’s arm and pulled her away from the storm back toward Eddie’s trailer.

Steve hesitated and stayed put beside Dustin. He gave his shoulder a gentle shake. “We can’t stay here, Dustin.” He looked down at Eddie’s body. “We can try to take him with us, but we have to get out of here.”

With all four of them, Steve thought they might be able to get Eddie back through the gate into their side, but they would have to figure out what to do with him on the other side. They couldn’t just leave him somewhere to be discovered by the police.

As Steve was about to stand, a wall of wind hit them like a tidal wave, nearly flattening them to the ground. It carried a foul scent like something that had been left to rot and mold in some forgotten place. A few of the demobats began stirring around them, their wings twitching. Dustin had not budged, so Steve shook him again.

“We’ll take care of him, ok? But we gotta go.” He glanced over his shoulder at the approaching storm. The bank of clouds had reached the edge of the woods and was encroaching on the trailer park. “Now!”

Dustin gave a nearly imperceptible nod of his head and shifted away from Eddie’s body. He cupped his hand beneath Eddie’s head and gently slid his body off of his lap and down on the pavement. Dustin stood with difficulty and limped a few steps away, unsteady in the strong wind. Steve had not even realized the kid was injured. He hadn’t even thought to ask. He pulled the axe off his back and handed it over.

“Here, lean on this.”

Steve reached over and began to lift Eddie off the ground. His body was heavy and awkward. For a second, Steve felt like an idiot for trying to do this by himself. Eddie’s weight fell in all the wrong places, and his limbs drooped and scraped across the ground. Before, Steve could have pretended that Eddie was just sleeping, that Steve had caught him in some private moment, a moment without fear or pain, where he was just still. Or maybe he was frozen in the moment just before his face lit up in a mischievous grin after making one of his ridiculous nerd jokes. Not for the first time, Steve wondered just how much time he had lost judging the people he should have loved.

He nearly buckled under the weight, and he groaned at the sharp pain that stabbed into both sides of his stomach, but by some miracle, he managed to balance Eddie across his shoulders the same way he’d seen a fireman do once. He started forward slowly with Dustin limping along beside him. The wind pushed at their backs and urged them toward Eddie’s trailer, as if it wanted them to get out as much as they did. Before long, they reached the gate in the trailer where Robin and Nancy helped Steve hoist Eddie’s body back through to the right side.

The trailer was a disaster. The gate had ripped most of it apart, leaving only a scrap of the kitchen, and the two bedrooms in the back. The living room had practically split in two. They laid Eddie’s body down on what was left of the kitchen floor. The four of them sat down around him in the darkness, lit up only by the eerie red glow of the newly opened gate. Dustin reached out and pulled something off from around Eddie’s neck. It glinted in the light, and Steve saw it was some kind of necklace. He also gently tugged the black bandana out of Eddie’s hair and tucked it away in the front pocket of his sweatshirt.

Even though it was the middle of the night, the trailer park was alive with noise. Voices shouted in the gloom and cries of pain pierced the air. Sirens wailed in the distance. From the look of Eddie’s trailer, Steve could only guess what kind of damage the gates had caused to the rest of Hawkins. It was obvious that the rest of the town had not gotten by unharmed.

Steve was not sure how long they sat like that, huddled silently around Eddie’s body, with Dustin cradling his head in his lap, when Robin broke their shared silence.

Her voice cracked as she spoke. “Steve, what are we gonna do?”

He shook his head without even thinking about it. “I don’t know, Robin.”

“We can’t leave his body here,” Nancy added. “There’d be too many questions, and we don’t need anyone connecting him to the gates or the earthquake. The cops still think he’s a murderer. If they find him, case closed, right?”

“Where are we supposed to go?” Robin asked. “The Winnebago is still parked over by the woods, and I don’t think we’ll be able to just stroll out of the trailer park with a dead body.”

“Maybe we can wait it out,” Steve said. “The police have to leave at some point.”

Nancy shook her head. “I don’t know if we should wait that long. They’re bound to be going door to door.”

“So we have to get Eddie out of the trailer park,” Robin said, “and then what? Where are we supposed to put a dead body where no one will ever find it.”

Dustin piped up in a ragged voice. The first time he had spoken since they left the Upside Down. “It’s all bullshit,” he said. “Body or no body, the whole town still thinks he’s a murderer. It doesn’t fucking matter.”

Steve’s mouth fell open as he tried to come up with a response, a reassurance that wouldn’t ring hollow. He shared a helpless look with Robin. Before any of them could answer him, a loud pounding knock on the remains of the trailer door made them all jump. A moment later, the door handle jangled, but it was still locked like they had left it when they went through the gate. Nancy stood and crossed to the kitchen window. She peered through the blinds and pressed her cheek to the cold glass. The knocking at the door repeated.

“It’s some woman,” Nancy said. “I don’t recognize her, but she’s not police.”

The knock sounded a third time, and this time the woman shouted through the closed door. “Max Mayfield?”

Steve straightened up at the sound of Max’s name as if he’d been shocked by electricity. Nancy looked over her shoulder, mouth hanging open with surprise, and Steve shrugged at her helplessly.

The woman spoke again. “This is Agent Stinson. I’m a friend of Doctor Owens. We know what you and your friends have been up to, and we need you to open the door.”

Steve stared in confusion at the closed door. “Ok, who is Doctor Owens?”

“I would also like to know that,” Robin added.

“He used to run Hawkins Lab. He covered up everything that happened,” said Nancy.

“Does that mean we shouldn’t trust him?” Robin asked.

Nancy shook her head. “I’m not sure. He helped hide El, and he paid for the Byers’s new house.” She trailed off. “I don’t know if that’s enough to trust this woman, but I have a feeling we won’t be leaving this trailer any time soon if we don’t let her in.”

Steve stood and crossed over to the front door. If they were being forced to let a potentially dangerous stranger inside the trailer, she would have to go through him before she hurt anyone else. He hesitated at the door and looked back over his shoulder. Nancy gave him a small nod, and Robin tried to smile at him, but it looked more like she was in pain. Still, he appreciated the effort. He clicked the lock and swung the door open, his muscles tense and ready to spring back if needed.

But it seemed like this Agent Stinson was really just some lady. She had short, dark hair in a severe style that gave her face a sharp appearance and a crisp pantsuit that couldn’t have been more out of place in the destroyed trailer park. Without a word, Steve stepped back, and Agent Stinson stepped up into the trailer. Her eyes immediately snagged on Eddie’s body, and a small tsking sound came out of her mouth like she was scolding a small child. Steve looked down at his feet instead of meeting her eyes.

“Which one of you is Max?” she asked. “We came to your trailer hoping to protect you on Eleven’s behalf, but we were too late. You all had already run off.”

Steve’s throat felt as if it was glued shut. Shame burned behind his eyes. Luckily, Nancy spoke for all of them. “Max isn’t here,” she said. “We’re her friends.” She glanced down at Eddie’s body, and her chin quivered. “Can you…can you help us? The cops are blaming him for everything Henry did,” she said, pointing to Eddie. “We just want to take him somewhere safe.”

Agent Stinson’s face softened. “I’ll bring my people over. We’ll take care of your friend. I think you’ve all been through enough.” She looked each of them over individually, and none of them were able to meet her eyes. “I think you all need to get home, now.”

Within a half an hour, Eddie was gone, and the four of them were stuffed into the back of an unmarked black car. After everything they had done that night, they were being escorted back home like runaway children. Downtown was on fire. The bright orange splashed against the pitch-black night sky. Police officers and first responders picked through the remains of their town, searching for survivors. None of them spoke. They didn’t even look at each other. Steve had never been so close to someone and yet so far away at the same. He wondered how they could possibly fix all this, and then he thought of Eddie’s body on the floor of that trailer and remembered that some things just stay broken.

Chapter Text

Chapter One: Our Hawkins

A cold shiver ran down Will’s spine as he stared down the slope of the meadow. Before them, the field was consumed by the decay from the Upside Down. The flowers withered and covered in mold, the grass brittle as ash. The color was sucked out of the world as if they had stepped into an old movie. El stood a little way in front of him, a desiccated yellow blossom clutched in her fist. His blood was icy, and his breath came out in panicked gasps. He was frozen where he stood, gripped by an unnatural fear.

“Will…”

The voice seemed to be coming from far away, like he was hearing it from underwater.

“Will?” Mike reached out to grab his arm, and Will snapped back to reality. “Are you okay?”

Will stared at Mike for a moment before answering. How many times had he been asked that question in the last three years. “I don’t know,” he said. Now was not the time to hide the truth. He was not twelve years old anymore. “I felt frozen,” he said. “Like I used to.”

Mike’s eyes widened and something flickered in his gaze that Will could not identify. “Is it still true sight, or is this…”

“Something different?” Will finished. “I’m…not sure.” He held his hand up to the back of his neck, the familiar prickle was still there. It had not left him since he had returned to Hawkins. It was strange now, knowing everything that had happened had been caused by the same person. One man, not so different from El. In a way, Will should have seen this coming. Even when the others thought the Mind Flayer was just a monster, part of him somehow knew that it was a him. A feeling, thinking evil, standing over his shoulder, breathing down his neck…

Will was snapped out of his thoughts when El tossed the dead flower to the ground and turned to face the six of them standing on the hill just behind her. She approached Will first, and the others gathered around her. Nancy had her arm looped through Jonathan’s, a grimace plastered on her face. He was forced to do a double take when he saw that his mom was holding hands with Hopper. Something had obviously happened between them in Russia, but that was not a priority right now. He shook his head slightly and put his focus on his sister.

El scowled at them. “Henry,” she said. “He’s still out there. It did not work.”

Before Will could speak up, Nancy broke in. “In the Upside Down, we tried to kill him, and we almost thought we did, but…” She paused and looked away from then, her face drawn with pain. “His body disappeared.”

“He’s not dead,” Will announced. Five pairs of eyes snapped to his face, and he almost quailed under their gazes. He wasn’t ready to step into the center of attention again. He had only just escaped. He looked at Mike uncertainly, and he gave him an encouraging nod. “He’s hurt,” he added, “but as soon as I got back to Hawkins, I could feel it. He’s still here. Waiting to make his next move.”

“You can still feel him,” said El. Will nodded, though he knew it hadn’t been a question. Their eyes met, and a flicker of understanding passed between them. They were both connected to Vecna in some way. If anyone knew what he had gone through, it was El. Tears pricked the corner of his eyes, and he looked down at the ground.

Joyce broke away from Hopper and put herself in front of Will, her wide brown eyes swimming with worry. “What d’you mean, you can feel him?” she asked. “What exactly has been going on here?”

“Stinson said you were fighting some new evil,” Hopper rumbled behind her. “Was she wrong?”

Will and El nodded at the same time before El spoke again. “It has always been One.” She held out her wrist to pull up her sleeve and show her tattoo. “He was in the lab with Papa, like me. The first number. He has been reaching out this whole time. The Demogorgon…”

“The Mind Flayer…” Will added.

“Vecna…” Nancy finished.

“Ever since I sent him away, Henry has been trying to get back.”

“Okay, so if this…um…Henry has been trying to get out of the Upside Down this entire time, what changed? What was different?” asked Joyce.

“What exactly was happening here?” asked Hopper.

“That’s what we want to know too,” said Mike. Will nodded along with him. They had a spotty knowledge at best of the events of the past week. They had been away from Hawkins far too long.

Jonathan jumped into the conversation. “We know there’s been killings to open new gates, and he wanted Max to open the last gate, but other than that, we’ve been in the dark.”

“I think I can explain it,” said Nancy. “It started out with Chrissy Cunningham late on Friday night after the championship game.”

Mike interrupted her. “The cheerleader, Chrissy Cunningham?”

“Yes!” she snapped and shook her head. “We didn’t know about it until Saturday morning after you were gone,” she said, gesturing at Mike. “And then it was…” she broke off and took a shaky breath. “And then it was Fred Benson.”

“That kid from the newspaper?” Mike interrupted again.

Nancy nodded and squeezed her eyes shut for a moment before continuing. When she spoke again, there was a distinct tremor in her voice. “He tried to go after Max, but Robin and I figured out music could break the trance, so he took Patrick McKinney next. One of Lucas’s friends on the basketball team,” she added before Mike could interrupt her again.

Basketball players. Cheerleaders. Will heard these names without recognition. He had known that Lucas was playing basketball from one of the postcards he sent to California and that Dustin was playing D&D in a club, but Mike had barely spoken to him for the past eight months. The few conversations they had had on the phone had been about anything but Mike. He knew all about Nancy’s senior year, Mrs. Wheeler’s new hairstyle, and Holly’s struggle with subtracting, but almost nothing about Mike. He tried not to care about it so much—there were more important things to worry about—but it chipped away at him to hear things about Mike’s life since they had moved away that just weren’t important enough for Mike to tell him personally.

After a moment, Nancy spoke again. “And then he…” Nancy’s chin quivered, and her eyes welled up with tears. “And then he came after me and showed me his plan. Four kills, four gates, and the Upside Down would come through to Hawkins.”

Jonathan’s gaze was fixed on Nancy’s face, and he squeezed her arm reassuringly. His brows were knit together, and his eyes glistened like hers. “He didn’t hurt you, did he?”

She shook her head and leaned closer to him, their arms still linked. “There was a whole process to the killings. He liked to stalk his victims. And he chose them for a reason.”

“Why?” asked El, her voice small. “What reason?”

“He chose people that were suffering. People that were haunted by something in their past.” Nancy choked back a sob, and a tear rolled down her cheek. “He tortured them.”

Will’s thoughts drifted to Max in that hospital room, her limbs snapped and eyes closed, all the blood drawn from her face. El had not told them much about her fight with Vecna beside the fact that she had lost, and Max had died. Nothing about how Vecna had tormented their friend. He wondered for a moment about what had been haunting Max. His first guess was Billy’s death last summer, but if El knew for sure she had not said anything to him and Mike.

Then his thoughts took a turn. Mike had been here all year. He might know better than El what Max had been going through. Not for the first time, Will wished he had been here in Hawkins. That he had never left. He had not talked to Max much since moving away, and maybe that was his fault. Maybe he should have tried harder to keep in touch, like Mike said. Then again, she had always been better friends with El. Maybe he wouldn’t have been able to do anything even if he had reached out.

As he thought of Max, the hair stood up on the back of his neck, and the prickling sensation grew stronger. He shivered despite himself and forced his hands to stay at his side instead of touching his neck. He had a feeling that he would be sensing Vecna a lot more than he used to with the gates open. Still, the moments the sensation grew stronger usually meant something, and that thought didn’t comfort him.

Mike’s voice broke Will out of his thoughts. “I mean, we can fix this, right? We know Vecna’s weaknesses, and you can close the gates,” said Mike, gesturing at El. “The plan almost worked!”

El stared at Mike with an expression that Will could not quite read. Her face was drawn like she was conflicted, even angry. Tears welled up in her eyes. “Almost,” she repeated. “Max died. We have to be better this time. We have to kill him.” She turned away from Mike and stared back out over the town and the spreading storm. “I have to be ready.”

Will stepped forward and gripped El’s arm gently. She started at the touch and turned back toward him. Their eyes met, and a shared pain passed between them. There was a lump in his throat when he spoke. “We will be better,” he said. “We’ll fix this together, okay?”

He really believed it too. El had always faced her problems alone, but she didn’t have to do that this time. Her family would be by her side every step of the way, and they would fix it.

El gave his hand a squeeze where it still rested on her arm. “Okay,” she said. A small smile flitted across her face, the first one she had given him since they rescued her from the NINA base.

Hopper interrupted the moment. “Right now, we need to figure out what to do next, and we need to keep you kids safe.” He turned to Nancy and put a hand on her shoulder. She looked up at him with tear-filled eyes. “What did he show you about the town? Are we safe where we are?”

She shook her head. “No,” she said, and her voice broke. “I saw monsters in the street and dead soldiers, and my family…” she trailed off, and Jonathan put a protective arm around her shoulders.

Hopper turned to Joyce and leaned over to talk to her head on. “We need to get Stinson back here. Tell her to get Owens out of that base and bring him here. Now.”

Jonathan’s brow furrowed. “You know about the base? In Nevada?”

Hopper nodded over his shoulder. “Stinson filled us in on the flight.”

Jonathan caught his mom’s eyes before looking down at his feet bashfully. “I’m sorry about the house,” he said. “I know I was supposed to be in charge.”

Joyce titled her head and gave him a soft look. “Jonathan,” she breathed out in a sigh, “don’t worry about the house. I should have been there for you. I’m just glad you’re safe.”

Hopper spoke again. “Come on. Let’s get back to the cabin and figure this out.” He put one arm around Joyce’s shoulders and the other around El’s and began ushering them back out of the field.

The others turned to follow Hopper. Nancy still leaned against Jonathan for support, her shoulders gently shaking. Will hesitated for a moment behind them and stared out over Hawkins. Dark storm clouds billowed from the four gates like pillars of smoke, stretching far into the sky. Flashes of red lightning illuminated the storm. The particles falling from the storm clouds drifted gently down around him. He could have almost mistaken them for snow. He held out his hand and caught one in his palm, but it didn’t melt away.

He thought back to that first Christmas after he had been rescued from the Upside Down. At the time, everyone else thought that it was over. But even then, he knew it was far from finished. The Upside Down had clung to him, followed him home, lived inside him, and it had never left him since. The hair rose on the back of his neck, and a shiver ran down his spine. He let his hand drop to his side, the particle swirling away from him, and wiped his hand on his pants. He nearly jumped out of his skin when a hand clamped down on his shoulder.

He turned with a start, but it was only Mike. His heart fluttered in his chest, and before he could stop himself, he found his eyes tracing the path of Mike’s arm down to where his hand was touching his shoulder.

“Are you okay?” Mike asked.

He nodded. “Yeah, I’m fine,” he said. “I was just…thinking.”

Mike nodded in return. “Okay,” he repeated. “Come on.”

Will stared at Mike’s face for a moment. His expression was so open, so trusting and vulnerable. Like there was no doubt in Mike’s mind that he would answer his questions truthfully, that he would let Mike know if there was something going on. He thought back to their conversation in the van when he had lied to Mike about the painting. A pang of guilt wracked his stomach. That was the first time he ever remembered lying to Mike.

“Yeah, let’s go,” was all Will said.

They all went back to the cabin to figure out their next plan of action. Hopper and Joyce both huddled beside the landline in the cabin, trying to reach Stinson and get Dr. Owens back to Hawkins with his men. Nancy and Jonathan disappeared behind the curtain divider into the other half of the cabin. Nancy was still upset from their conversation in the field. There was something she had not told them, but Will was not sure what it was. Maybe she would tell Jonathan. Shortly after they came back, Argyle had burst into the cabin with a single wrinkly brown mushroom he claimed was edible. He lay down on the upturned couch and stared at his find, unfazed by what was going on around him.

He and Mike lingered awkwardly just outside of El’s old room. She sat cross-legged on the floor and fiddled with an empty coke bottle in her lap. Will knew to wait for her, but Mike’s leg was bouncing impatiently up and down. After living with her for eight months, Will knew that if he waited long enough, El would eventually choose to open up. She just needed her space first. He understood what that was like. He was also hesitant to open up to people. It seemed like he always kept everyone in the dark for as long as he could. Even Jonathan and mom and Mike. There was too much about him that he was not ready to share.

El turned to look at them, and her eyes found Will’s. She held the empty bottle close to her chest. “I could not find her,” she said at last. “Max was not there.”

Will and Mike shared a look, and they both stepped over the threshold into her room at the same time. Will sat down next to El on the floor, but Mike stood above them with his arms crossed. Will glanced up at him, but he could not tell why Mike was keeping his distance from them. Or maybe it was just from him. He couldn’t be sure.

“Max wasn’t in the in-between?” Will asked.

El shook her head, and her eyes welled up with tears. “I do not think it worked. It was wrong.”

Will took one of El’s hands. “You saved her life, El. She has to be in there.”

A tear rolled down El’s cheek, and her chin quivered. “I do not know. She is gone.”

He squeezed her hand reassuringly and rubbed his thumb across the top of her hand in a soothing motion. “Do you remember last summer when you couldn’t find the flayed?” El nodded, a flash of confusion crossing her face. “It wasn’t because they weren’t there. They were just…lost. Vecna was hiding them from you. Maybe Max is just lost.”

“Then where is she?”

“I don’t know,” Will said, shaking his head, “but we’ll find her. We’ll bring her home.”

El rubbed her other hand against her face to brush away the tears. “Okay,” she said in a shaky voice.

All of a sudden, the hair on the back of Will’s neck stood up, and an icy chill coursed through his body. His eyes widened, and he pressed his hand to the back of his neck. His breathing came in quick, shallow pants, and he struggled to choke out any words.

“I can feel him.”

El’s eyes were wide with fear, and she took both of Will’s hands in her own, letting the coke bottle fall to the side. Mike snapped to attention and practically threw himself onto the ground at Will’s side. He placed a tentative hand on Will’s shoulder.

“Where is he?” Mike asked. “Is he coming here? Do we need to leave?”

“Is he inside?” asked El.

Instead of answering, Will just shook his head. No, Vecna was not on the move, and he was not inside his head, not in the same way he was when the Mind Flayer was inside of him, and it was not the same as one of the episodes he used to have. This was something new.

Will was seeing something in the back of his head. Like a dream. Like the now memories. But he could feel it too. It creeped through his veins like ice and pounded against the inside of his skull. His chest ached, and he gasped for breath like a fish out of water. The room shrunk around him until all he could see was the image in his head as if it was playing out before his eyes and within him at the same time. Seeing it and living at the same time. There and here all at once.

“Will…”

A deep, gravelly voice called out to him from the darkness, and a blossom of blood red light bloomed before his eyes. Pain erupted across his skin, and he cried out in anguish. Before his eyes, his skin shriveled and darkened, and a smell of burnt flesh filled the air.

He was burning alive.

He was going to die.

Right here.

A scream tore itself out of his throat, and he writhed on the ground. His skin was alight with fiery pain, like being stabbed all over his body with a thousand needles. But he was not alone in here.

Other voices screamed inside his head and tore at his mind with their many hands. They pounded away at the back of his eyes like they were trying to rip their way out of his skull. They were trapped with him, burning up in a body that wasn’t theirs. As long as they were here, he could not die. He would persevere. Their faces flashed before his eyes. Frightened children, screaming in pain, their limbs twisted and blood streaming from their gouged out eyes. Grown men cowering on the floor, begging to be spared. Teenagers who died with screams on their lips, running circles inside their own minds. And one more.

A girl with flaming orange hair who did not want to die.

He looked into her bright blue eyes, and he knew her. Because he was Will, and that was his friend Max.

He had to go back.

With a start, Will opened his eyes. He was curled up on the floor of El’s room with his hands clamped down on his ears. El and Mike crouched on the ground on either side of him. Jonathan and his mom stood above him with Nancy, Hopper, and Argyle just behind them. He gasped for breath and ran his hands down his limbs, but there were no burns.

He was fine.

He was with his family. In the cabin.

El helped him up into a sitting position and pulled him against her chest in a tight embrace. Her cheeks were wet against his neck. Joyce and Jonathan kneeled down on the ground and reached out to him.

“What did you see?” his mom asked in a world-weary voice.

Chapter Text

The Dream Warrior: Part One

It was cold and dark and empty. She couldn’t remember ever feeling this cold before. Her bones ached as if they were in danger of snapping if she dared to move, and an invisible weight pressed down on her chest. She gasped for breath in the darkness. She could see nothing, remember nothing of what had happened to her; the only thing keeping her tethered to reality was the crushing pain that permeated every fibre of her being.

A flash of light erupted before her eyes and disappeared again before she could make anything out. It was blurry and scattered like the bursts of color she might see when she closed her eyes and pressed her palms into her eyelids. That was something she used to do. It came back to her in snatches. There would be days when he would come after her—yell at her, push her, grab her, tear her down until she was less than a person—and she would retreat into her room, push her dresser in front of the door, crawl under the bed, run away into her mind. Press her hands into her eyes until she saw the dancing lights and felt like she had escaped.

Back in California, where it was never this cold. Where she moved into a stranger’s house, and an angry shadow haunted her.

Billy.

That was his name.

And she was Max.

Someone had hurt her again. Someone different.

The pressure in her chest grew until she thought she would burst with it, and a strangled sob forced its way out of her throat. Her shoulders shook, and her mouth opened wide in a silent scream. Wherever she was, she could still cry. She wrapped her arms around her knees in a tight embrace and whimpered into the void.

“N…o…no,” she choked out. “No, I don’t want to go."

"I’m not ready.”

Chapter Text

Chapter Two: Tin Soldier

The wind whistled through the brittle desert brush, the high afternoon sun beating down on the bare earth. There was not a cloud in sight across the slate gray sky. Even though the fires had been put out more than a day ago, the air was still coated with a thick haze of acrid smoke that stung the eyes and coated the throat with bitter tasting bile.

In Sullivan’s eyes, it was a dead place. Too flat and exposed. He learned a lesson in this desert two days ago. They had shot down those twisted defectors who called themselves scientists like they were dogs, and a little girl had killed his soldiers and destroyed his convoy with a flick of her wrist. He had miscalculated, and he had failed his men.

He would not make the same mistake again.

Footsteps echoed up the set of stairs leading to the top of the broken open door in the desert. Sullivan turned with a scowl and waited for his soldier to speak.

“Colonel,” he said, “there’s a call inside for you. From your contact in Indiana.”

Sullivan straightened up and ground his teeth, sending a flash of pain shooting up his jaw. He ignored the familiar ache and followed the soldier inside. It was a bad habit he had had ever since he came back from Vietnam. Sometimes, he would wake up from a nightmare with his jaw closed so tight he could not open his mouth. The army doctor had ordered him to let the habit go and given him a bottle of nerve pills, but there was never enough time for him to care about it, and the bottle had gone in the first dumpster he had seen.

He stepped into the rickety elevator and slammed the metal grate shut. It brought him back down into the NINA base. With the destruction of their vehicles, his men had had ample time to search the base while waiting for backup and had succeeded in destroying a large quantity of sensitive equipment and records. Part of these records remained intact, however, in order to condemn the good doctor and his recently deceased colleagues. There would be no more MK-Ultras, no more Montauk Projects, no more Hawkins Lab. The only remaining loose end was the girl.

The elevator finished its descent and opened up onto the bulk of the base. A military issued satellite phone was waiting for him in their newly erected base of operations. He lifted it to his ear.

“Lieutenant Colonel Jack Sullivan speaking.”

“Jack…” the shaky voice started and broke off for a moment. “It’s…it’s Powell. Chief Powell. Down here in Hawkins. I’ve been trying to reach you…”

“I’ve been occupied on another operation,” he said tersely, cutting Powell off. “What’s going on down there. Has there been another murder?” His jaw clenched, and his hand wrapped tighter around the phone. If Brenner’s science experiment had made it back to Hawkins, killed another innocent kid, he would torture Owens himself.

“No…uh…no,” Powell stuttered into the phone. “It’s something a little different.”

As Sullivan listened to Powell describe the situation in Hawkins, a dull throbbing sensation grew in his head, and he pinched the bridge of his nose. It was even worse than he thought. An earthquake had ripped the town open causing mass destruction. 22 dead, many more missing. And there was no cause that anyone could find. Sullivan could think of one possibility.

“But that’s not…” Powell hesitated on the other end of the line. “As terrible as it is, that’s not what’s wrong with this whole thing. The cracks in the ground, there’s four of them meeting in the middle of the town, like they were made on purpose, and there’s…uh…there’s something coming from inside them.”

A wave of cold shock washed over Sullivan’s body, and his hands grew clammy as he gripped the phone. “What do you mean ‘something inside of them?’ What is it?”

“Well, there’s…uh…there’s a couple things, really.” A tremor entered Powell’s voice as he spoke. “There’s some kind of light coming out of them. This red light. And I don’t know what’s causing it because it’s nothing warm. It’s…it’s cold, real cold.” His voice trailed off as if he was lost in thought.

Sullivan cleared his throat. “Continue. What else is there?”

“Well, there’s these things coming out of them. They look like tentacles almost, or vines. And there’s some kind of…barrier across the rifts.” Powell paused again and drew in a shaky breath. “Jack, it looks like…like skin, like a membrane or something.”

“The cracks in the ground look alive.”

Sullivan nodded to himself. Now that the initial shock had worn off, everything Powell described sounded like a perfect match for the very same opening Eleven had created in the Hawkins Lab in 1983, only the length of an entire town this time. She had clearly grown in strength. He wondered for a moment how she had managed to return to Hawkins so quickly but dismissed the query. A telekinetic lab rat could probably do a lot more than he could ever imagine.

Powell’s voice came through the phone again. “And there’s something new. Just a few minutes ago, this sort of ash or something started falling out of the smoke like it was coming from somewhere else. I called you as soon as that started happening ‘cause that’s the first change there’s been these past few days.”

“You did the right thing,” he said. “Is there anything else? Anything else strange?”

“I don’t know,” Powell said, and a silence fell between them for a few moments. “Wait,” he added. “There is one thing. The smell. Like some kind of rot or decay. I haven’t smelled anything like it…well not since ’84 when all those fields were poisoned by the chemical leak at the lab.” Another pause. “This couldn’t have anything to do with that place, could it?”

“Anything’s a possibility,” said Sullivan, avoiding the question with a non-answer. He quickly changed the subject. “Who else has seen the rifts? Are they contained?”

“I got my officers out as soon as possible, and we set up barriers all across town. The National Guard came soon after, and they’re just as spooked as we are, but they’ve got orders to keep their mouths shut,” Powell said. “No one’s gotten close since we set up, but it’s possible some people may have seen them when they first happened. I mean, they went through the whole town. That’s hard to ignore.”

“You’ve done well. Continue keeping the public away. If anyone comes forward with knowledge of the rifts’ appearance, shut them down. Quickly. This can be dealt with without causing a panic.”

“What do I do in the meantime?” Powell asked. “How exactly am I supposed to deal with this?”

“For now, sit tight, and keep things under wraps. There’s a specialist of sorts nearby who may be compelled to offer his professional opinion.” Sullivan glanced down the hallway to the room where Owens was being kept. “I’ll call you back when I have some answers. Me and my men can be in Hawkins by tomorrow, and I’ll be able to personally assist you and your police force in handling this situation.”

Without another word he ended the call and straightened up. Owens would assist him in taking down the girl if it was the last thing the doctor did. He would make sure of that. He crossed the short distance down the length of the hallway. The guard at the door saluted him and moved aside to let him pass.

“At ease,” he grunted.

Sullivan brushed past the guard and shoved the door open with a metallic groan. Flakes of rust flecked off the hinges as the door swung open. The silo was starting to show its age. It had been empty and forgotten about for years, left to rot underground. Dr. Owens huddled in the far corner of the room, both wrists handcuffed to a metal pipe.

His face was caked with dried blood that oozed from a deep cut across his forehead. His once pristine clothes were now filthy and bloodstained, and an animal sort of stench rose up from the corner. His hands trembled, making him appear old and feeble. He had become a trapped creature, far past its prime. Despite his condition, there was still a fire within his eyes. Sullivan would have to put that out.

“Dr. Owens,” he began and stood above the other man, his hands folded neatly behind his back. “I truly hope you’re feeling sociable. It would make things easier on the both of us.” He stooped over until his face was only a few inches away from the doctor’s. “You’ve fed me all of your lies about the girl losing her powers and you bringing them back with only a tub of saltwater and some pretty pictures.”

“Today, you’re going to tell me the truth because your experiment struck again, and this time, she destroyed an entire town.”

“What?” Owens choked out. His face fell, and he shook his head in disbelief. “We were too late,” he whispered to himself, his voice dry and cracked. He had been withheld food and water since he had been found.

“Too late?” Sullivan repeated. “Too late for what?”

“The girl—Eleven—she was supposed to stop him,” he said. “That’s what all this was for. But we took too long. And Martin…”

“Forget about Dr. Brenner,” Sullivan said, cutting him off. The old man was beginning to ramble. “Focus on the girl. What was she supposed to do? Were you helping her commit these murders?”

Owens adamantly shook his head. “You’re wrong about Eleven. She did not kill those children. She was supposed to stop the person who was actually responsible. Number One, the first experiment.”

Sullivan chuckled. “There are no records of a Number One in this program, Sam. If you’re only interested in feeding me more lies, maybe I should try a different approach.” He straightened up and stared the doctor down. “You’ve already lost a son. Do you want to lose a wife as well?”

“You leave her out of this!” Owens yelled, his voice cracking. “She has nothing to do with this! She doesn’t know the kind of work I do.”

“Then why don’t you tell me what I need to know,” Sullivan said. “The girl has opened up a massive rift across the town of Hawkins, killing a number of residents, and it’s only a matter of time before she takes even more lives. If you want a chance of getting out of this building alive, you will tell me everything you know about how Eleven’s powers work, how she caused this destruction, and how she can be killed.”

“September 8th, 1979,” Owens said in a tired whisper.

Sullivan closed his eyes and took a deep breath before speaking again. It wouldn’t do him any good to lose his temper. “What about it?”

“Martin kept the security tapes from the lab. Everything…everything you need to see is on that day. Better than I can explain it myself. If you haven’t destroyed them, just play the tapes, and you’ll see that I am telling you the truth. About everything!”

“It’d take hours to comb through the footage from an entire day.” His eyes narrowed, and he ground his teeth before he could stop himself. “Are you trying to stall, Sam?” he asked. “Because there is a town in real danger, and you are allowing those people to die.”

“No,” he breathed out, desperation in his voice. “It all starts at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, and it’s over in no more than fifteen minutes. Please, Jack. Just look at the tapes. If I’m lying, if I’m trying to trick you, you can shoot me right here. But if I’m telling the truth, we have a lot of work to do.” Owens paused and gave a strained smile. “We don’t have to be enemies, Jack.”

Sullivan ground his teeth and exhaled loudly through his nose. He crossed his arms. “I’ll indulge your wishes, if only as one last good deed for a man I used to respect. In the meantime, I need to tell a frightened police chief how to protect his town. You told me once than something is going on in that town that no one understands, but you understand it better than anyone I know.”

Owens heaved a sigh of relief and leaned back against the wall. “If our mission here failed, no one in that town is safe. They need to get as far away as possible as quickly as possible.” He paused and pursed his lips. “Issue an evacuation order.”

Sullivan nodded. “Duly noted,” he said and turned on his heels to leave the room. As the door slammed shut behind him, he leaned over to the guard. “Keep a close eye on him. There’s something I need to look into.”

Chapter Text

Chapter Three: Contact

Will leaned back against the mint green wall of El’s bedroom. He was perched on top of her messy bed, legs neatly crossed. El sat on one side of him, squished into the corner where the bed was shoved against the wall, and Mike laid down on his other side, his long legs dangling over the edge of the bed. Nancy and Jonathan leaned against opposite sides of the open doorway, Argyle just in view sitting on the floor next to Jonathan’s feet. Will did not think that Jonathan’s eyes had left him since he had described his most recent episode. His mom and Hopper’s voices drifted in from the kitchen as they argued with a woman named Stinson about getting Dr. Owens back to Hawkins.

This episode had been different from the ones he used to have. Back then, it was only the world around him that changed; his body always felt like his. He was just Will, Will Byers, stuck between the Upside Down and Hawkins. This time things had changed. For a moment, he had been someone else.

He shivered and crossed his arms over his chest. This caught El’s eye, and she reached out and tapped his arm. She held out her hand, her eyes wide and vulnerable. He hesitated for a moment and stared at her open palm before uncrossing his arms and letting her take his hand. Their fingers interlocked comfortably. He glanced self-consciously around the room, but if Mike or Jonathan noticed, they did not seem to care. He and El had only ever held hands like this in private before. Back in California, their rooms had shared a wall, and when one of them had nightmares, they would retreat to the other’s room and get through the night together. Will didn’t hate their arrangement—he might have even secretly enjoyed it—but he doubted Mike and Nancy ever held hands. He and El were different. Their mom tried her best to help them, but they both knew the only person who could truly understand them was each other.

They stayed like that for a moment until El whispered in his ear, “How was it different?”

“Hmmm?” Will hummed, only half paying attention.

“You said it was not the same. Your vision,” she said. “Why?”

“I don’t know, exactly,” he began, hesitant to describe what he had felt in any more detail. “Before, every time I was back in the Upside Down, the Mind Flayer was watching me, stalking me. And I could feel him. This time…” he trailed off. “I don’t know.”

El tugged on his hand and forced him to look at her. Her mouth was turned down in a small frown. “Friends don’t lie.”

“Fine,” he said with a sigh. “It was like…it was like I was inside him.” He shuddered at the memory. “I could feel what he was feeling. But I wasn’t alone, either. The people he’s killed. They were there too. Even…even…” he trailed off again. He had not told the others about bearing witness to Vecna’s victims. But El alone, she would understand.

“Max,” El finished for him. Her eyes filled with tears, and Will nodded. “Lost,” El said. “Henry told me the people he took were with him. In his mind.”

“If she’s still in there, we can break her out, right?” They both jumped, as Mike joined their whispered conversation. Neither of them had realized he had been listening.

“You mean me,” said El, and edge of annoyance to her voice. “I can break her out.”

Mike propped himself up on his elbows and looked over at both of them. “Yeah, I guess,” he said with a shrug. “I mean, it’s possible right. When Vecna possesses people, they’re not gone. Maybe it works the other way too. Maybe when someone’s inside of him, maybe they’re not really gone. Maybe they’re stuck.”

Will and El shared a look. “Break her out,” El repeated.

Mike nodded. “It’s worth a try, right?”

Before El could answer, they were interrupted by Joyce sticking her head in the door. Nancy shuffled to the side to give her room to pass, and Joyce gave them a little wave as she ducked into the room. Her face was tight with concern, and she glanced at Will and El’s clasped hands for a moment. Will pulled his hand away from his sister and crossed his arms again.

Joyce gave a small smile and sat down on the edge of the bed. “How are you feeling?” she asked Will.

He shook his head slightly. “I’m fine.”

She nodded, but Will did not think she really believed him. He was not sure if he did either. She sighed before she continued. “We got through to Stinson, and she’s trying to reach Owens. If she can reach him, we’ll get a call back in a few minutes. Otherwise…” She trailed off for a moment. “Otherwise, we’ll figure something out ourselves, okay?”

Will nodded, but El shifted beside him. “I can find him,” she said. “In the in-between.”

Joyce put her hand on top of El’s and gave it a small squeeze. “I know, sweetie,” she said, “but we have to be able to talk to him.”

El deflated and sunk back against the wall. She nodded, and Joyce stood to leave the room. The minutes ticked by, as they waited. The quiet around them was oppressive, but it was not silent. The wind whistled through the trees, and the wooden beams of the cabin groaned. Will’s heart hammered in his chest. The small sounds grew around him until they pounded in his ears, and the walls of El’s bedroom closed in around him. His vision swam and drifted away before his eyes. He was nearly trapped in another vision.

El’s arm pressed warm against his side, but before his eyes was only darkness. The ambient noise of the cabin faded away, to be replaced with a muffled crying sound. Once more, he was not alone…

He was snapped back to reality by the harsh ringing of Hopper’s phone. He shared a look with El, and his mouth parted, the confession of what had just happened on the tip of his tongue. But El sprang off the bed and ran toward the phone, and the words died in his throat. He slid off the bed and followed El to the phone, but Hopper had already picked up the receiver.

“Hello?” he said, and a look of surprise and relief came over his face.

“Owens.”

Will’s eyes widened, and he and El jostled to get as close to the receiver as possible. They were practically standing on top of each other. Mike came up behind them and craned over El’s head with a smirk. Will rolled his eyes, but all three of them were close enough that they could make out what was being said on the other end of the line.

“Hiya Chief-o,” said a voice that unmistakably belonged to Dr. Owens. He sounded terrible, like he’d just run a marathon or something.

“Where the hell have you been?” Hopper asked.

“Well, I’ve…uh…I’ve been a little tied up over here. But don’t worry, it’s all worked out now. And I’ve been filled in on everything going on down there. Nice to hear your voice again, by the way.”

“Great,” Hopper said, his voice terse. “What are you going to do about it?”

“Okay, I do have a plan,” Owens began. “I’ll have military backup in Hawkins as early as tomorrow, and I will be with them. I’ve spoken to Chief Powell, and the Hawkins Police are starting a full-scale evacuation of Hawkins as soon as possible. We’ve arranged for emergency housing in Indianapolis until this gets figured out. Luckily, this is a pretty small town…”

Hopper cut him off. “What about El?”

“Ahhh, yes. Well, that’s where things get a little bit trickier. The agreement that my associate and myself have come to requires that the girl stay close, so to speak. I have special transport arranged for Eleven and your family and any of her friends that have come into contact with the Upside Down to take all of you to a military safe house separate from the rest of the town. When I get there tomorrow, you will all be all be evacuated together. In the meantime, I’ll call Ellen and tell her to stay nearby, and I just need you and the girl to sit tight and fly under the radar as best as possible.”

Will glanced over his shoulder and met El’s gaze. Her wide eyes reflected the alarm that Will felt. Above her, Mike looked just as worried. He did not like the sound of Owens’s arrangement. It sounded like a nice way of saying they wanted to make El the government’s secret little pet again and keep the rest of them just as contained. He hoped his mom and Hopper wouldn’t let that happen. And he had no idea what would happen once they left the town. Sure, they would be safer away from Hawkins, but they would not be able to stop Vecna from outside the town. If they could stop Vecna at all, that is.

Hopped nodded to himself. “I think we can handle staying out of his sight,” he said. “But what happened in Nevada? Who’s this associate of yours?”

“There was a bit of a misunderstanding down here, but I handled it, and everything’s been cleared up now. There’s…uh…actually someone here who would like to speak to Eleven. I think it would be easier for my associate to explain himself.”

El stepped forward and gingerly took the receiver from Hopper. She pressed it against her ear. “Hello?” Will and Mike crowded on either side of her, and she gave them both a worried look.

“Eleven,” the voice said. “This is Lieutenant Colonel Jack Sullivan. You haven’t formally met me before, but I’ve been tracking you down for a while now.”

Will’s breath hitched. This was the person that tried to kill them and destroyed their house. He wondered what Owens could have possibly done to change this guy’s mind. Or maybe this was a trap. Maybe Owens didn’t convince him at all, and this was Sullivan’s way to finally capture El without losing any more soldiers. Or maybe Sullivan’s price for aiding their town was getting to keep El and her family in some secret government facility where none of them would ever see the light of day again. Whatever the truth was, Will was reluctant to trust this Colonel.

The voice continued over the phone. “My actions were a mistake. I know now that I blamed the wrong person. When my men and I reach Hawkins, you will be safe. Our only target now is One.”

El’s face grew red with anger and her brows knit together. “You killed Papa. And the doctors.”

“I know. That was an error,” said Sullivan. “You killed my men.”

“They were shooting at me.”

“Like I said, mistakes were made. I won’t be making the same ones again. I have to go now—it’s a long ways back to Indiana. We’ll find you in Hawkins, tomorrow. Be prepared to leave.”

Sullivan abruptly hung up the phone, and the dial tone buzzed through the receiver. El replaced the phone on the hook. “That man, the bad man that came to NINA, he let Dr. Owens go,” she said, her voice neutral. To Will, it was clear she was carefully considering what Owens and the Colonel had to say.

Mike scoffed. “So what? We’re just supposed to believe that this military guy is on our side now? Just because he said so?”

“He said it was a mistake,” El replied in the same cautious tone.

“A mistake? He killed a bunch of people!” Mike ran his hands through his hair and paced around the room. “Aww, that piece of shit! He’s probably tricking Owens into bringing him right to you!”

Will jumped in. “Maybe he threatened to kill Owens. Forced him to say all that stuff.”

“Are you saying we shouldn’t trust Owens?” asked Joyce.

“We don’t exactly have a lot of options here,” said Hopper.

“What about Murray? And Enzo?” Joyce asked.

“Enzo?”

“The…the guard,” she said. “You never actually told me his real name.”

“Antonov. Dmitri Antonov,” said Hopper. “And they can’t help us right now. Murray’s taking him back to his bunker in Illinois, right now. They’re on the road. It could be hours before we can reach them. And Yuri…”

“Stayed in Alaska to smuggle Enz…Dmitri’s family out of the Soviet Union,” Joyce finished his sentence, nodding along.

“We have Argyle,” Jonathan said, interrupting the conversation.

“What?” said Hopper.

“Argyle,” Jonathan said, pointing to where his friend still sat cross-legged on the floor. “He’s the guy with the pizza van. He drove us all the way here from California. If things go south, he could get us out of here.”

Argyle nodded emphatically. “Hell yeah, my dudes! If you need a quick getaway, I’m your guy.”

Hopper glanced down at Argyle, seeming unconvinced. Will couldn’t blame him. Argyle had been high half the time anyway.

Nancy piped up. “We have a car too,” she said. “If Owens really does want all of us, I could get Dustin and Lucas and the others out of town.”

Hopper rubbed his hand along his chin. “So, what do we do? Do we trust Owens, or do we get out of here on our own? With the military on our backs, we won’t be able to stay here for long either way.”

“No,” El said, and all eyes turned to look at her. “I need Dr. Owens. With Papa gone, he’s the only person left who knows how to help me get stronger. If I’m going to stop Henry, I need to go with him.”

Hopper shook his head. “Are you sure? It’s a risk. We could leave right now and keep you safe.”

El nodded. “I’m sure. There’s something else I need to do before we leave with Dr. Owens.” She paused and looked at Will for reassurance. He knew what she was going to say before the words came out of her mouth. “I need to save Max.”

Chapter Text

The Dream Warrior: Part Two

But it was not the end. It might have been an end—something about the void told her this was somewhere different than she had been before—but there was still something inside of her. She was still Max Mayfield. She lived out on old Cherry Road. It was a piece of shit, and the house was always angry, but at least the street was good for skating.

No, wait.

That happened at the wrong time, too.

She lived in a trailer park with her mom. There was no dad anymore. They had left him behind in California. Or he had left her behind. She could not quite remember anymore. The trailer park had become their only option because Neil had left them with nothing. Max could have seen that coming, though. Everything he had, every excuse her mom gave for picking him, went out the door as soon as he walked into their lives. He has a stable job, she said. One that will give us the life we deserve. He never drank a drop while we were dating, has a clean record.

You have to understand. I love him. I need him.

Tell me you understand.

Max had not been able to say it then, and she wondered if she would ever be able to say it. She did not know why things like this kept on happening to her. Why could she not have a dad or a brother or even a mom the way everyone else had one? There must be something really wrong with her to make this happen.

That was it, wasn’t it? She had wanted her brother to die, and then he did. That made it her fault, didn’t it? He died saving her best friend from a monster. Somehow, that must be her fault, too.
It was all coming back to her now. Hawkins and Billy and the monster. El and the Party. Lucas.

Lucas.

She held onto his name, turned it over in her mind. She remembered the night they broke up. The silence that stretched between them at the skate park. He held her hand, and they listened to Kate Bush on her Walkman, sharing the headphones. She had had so much to say to him and no words to say it with, so she stayed quiet and let the night air fill the void between them like an invisible barrier. There was something else about him, though. Something else lurking just beneath the surface.

Stay with me Max…

His voice reached her ears, and the void flooded with color and light. A dusty attic, smothered in blue. The hum of the lantern. A deep, aching numbness in her body. She could not see then, but she could see now.

You’re not gonna die…

He was wrong. She did die. They had lost. Was that her fault, too? Now, she was here, locked away in some hidden place, trapped within herself. Was this some kind of in-between? A jumping off point before…before…well, she did not know what was coming next. She wished she did not have to face it alone.

Just hang on…

She did not want to disappear.

Max drifted through the void as if she was a broken record, trapped in a loop playing the same note over and over and over again. No matter where she tried to turn, the same memory came back to the surface. It was the memory of her last moments. A slimy, deformed hand unfurled over her face so close she could smell his rotting skin, and Vecna’s long, claw-like nails pressed into her skin as her body was pulled apart.

Even though she had been in a trance, she still felt the pain from far away, like dying in a dream. Except there was no jumping awake in a cold sweat, her hands gripped into the sheets. She was ripping apart at the seams. A great pressure pushed down on her skull and into her eyes. Once she had fallen off her skateboard and slammed her head against the concrete. The world went fuzzy around her, and a throbbing ache spread over her skull. She felt a lot like that now. Only, back then she knew she would be alright. She had had hard falls before—even broken her arm once—and she always bounced back.

Then, something changed, and Vecna flew through the air away from her, a miracle. The red mind lair faded away around her. She fell to the floor, and Lucas caught her in his arms, cradling her like she was some tender, broken thing. For a split second, she truly believed she had been saved. The plan had worked, and everything would be okay again, and they would all be safe. In a moment, she would open her eyes, and Lucas would be there. She wanted nothing more than to wrap her arms around his neck and hold him and never let him go again. Close the distance that had sprung up like the night.

They would go on that date and start over fresh. El and Will would come back to Hawkins, and the Party would be together again, like it should be. They would take Vecna’s body back and clear Eddie’s name, and Max would have someone to look out for her at the trailer park, like a real brother. She wanted it to happen so badly she could almost taste it.

The next instant, she realized something was terribly wrong. Her eyes were already open, but she could not see. Everything around her was shrouded in darkness, like night had fallen without a star in the sky. She could not feel her body. A cold emptiness washed her, and she felt light and far away, like she was floating away.

Lucas’s hand across her body felt like a butterfly’s kiss.

She was so scared.

And the loop started over again. Max screamed into the void, but no sound reached her ears. She was trapped inside the pain and fear of her last moments.

“No!” she wailed. “Let me go!”

Her skull felt as if it were about to burst. She pressed her hands against her ears and fell to her knees. She screamed until there was no breath in her body. The sound tore at her throat like a trapped animal trying to claw its way to freedom. A sob burst through her chest, and she curled up against the nothingness all around her.

“Stop!”

Lucas’s voice broke through to her again, bleeding through the memory of her own death. “Just hold on!”

Another voice joined his. It was one Max felt that she should recognize, but it was so young and frail that she struggled to place it.

“Just…just hold on a little longer, Will.”

As quickly as it had come, the loop was broken as if an invisible hand had clamped down on the record of her mind and brough it to a halt. Max whipped around and found herself confronted by a sight she did not understand. Crouching before her was El and Will. They were both younger than Max had ever seen them. Will was sickly pale, curled up on the ground shivering in a slimy fort made of moldy logs. A rotting sign on the entrance read ‘Castle Byers.’ It was the Upside Down. This was when Will went missing. When El escaped from the lab and found a new home.

“Will,” El repeated. She began to fade away into dust. Her anguished cries echoed in the void. “Will? Will!”

Max was left alone with the small, shivering boy. She closed the distance between them and crouched down at his side where El had been. She reached for his hand and found that it was solid. She clutched it for dear life. His fingers were cold and trembling.

“Will?” she whispered tentatively.

He lifted his chin to meet her eyes, and she almost jumped away in alarm. His whole body shook with cold and fright, but he did not pull away either. Something flashed behind his eyes, but Max was not sure if it was recognition or confusion. She did not understand how she could be seeing something that never happened to her. Unless Will was stuck in the same place she was, but that did not make sense either. He was safe outside of Hawkins when Vecna took her.

“Is this real?” she asked.

A snapping noise outside of the fort made them both jump. Will struggled to prop himself up on his elbow and stared at the flimsy wall of branches and duct tape, the only barrier standing between him and the Upside Down.

He turned back to Max and squeezed her hand, tight. His grip was surprisingly strong for how young he was and how weak he seemed. “Run,” he said, his voice echoing around her. “Run and hide. You have to find a way.”

Will’s hand dissolved inside of her own, and the rest of him faded away into fog before her eyes. She reached out and tried to snatch the shapes out of the air. Hold them together somehow.

“No!” she cried out. “Don’t leave me here alone!”

Another voice came out of the darkness in a deep growl. It crawled up her skin and turned her blood to ice.

“Maxine…”

Chapter Text

Chapter Four: On the Line

Lucas stared out the window of Max’s hospital room, as the ashy particles of the Upside Down rained down outside. A massive red lightning storm encased in sooty clouds spewed from the four gates into Hawkins. For the second time in the past two days, he was completely helpless. He stood by and watched as a force far beyond his control began to spread across Hawkins. Twenty-two people had already died. He had no idea how many more would join that list before this was over. A well of panic bubbled up in his throat and threatened to spill over, but he had to keep it in. Breaking down would not help anyone, especially Max.

His little sister, Erica, stood beside him, and they shared a worried look. Part of him wished she had never been dragged into this mess, but another part of him was glad she had been there in the Creel house to help him pick up the pieces when everything fell apart. He did not know what he would have done without her, how he would have been able to hold on. His eyes began to burn, and he turned away from the window.

A faint, steady beeping and a droning mechanical hum filled the silence. There was a harsh, chemical smell to the whole room. Everything was painted in stark whites and grays and tans. Lucas wondered how people didn’t lose their minds in a place like this. He returned to Max’s bedside and dropped down in the chair. The cushion made a whooshing sound as he sat down. Laid out before him, as still as death, was Max. His best friend, his partner in crime, his guiding light. He reached out and grabbed her hand. She was only a foot away, but she might as well have been on the moon.

He tried to remind himself that her heart was beating, that she was breathing on her own and that that was apparently a good sign if the doctors could be believed, but it rang hollow. He was right there, holding her warm, freckled hand, but she was completely out of reach. He was more grateful than he could ever express that she was alive at all, that El had saved her, but none of it would matter if Max never woke up.

Lucas gripped Max’s hand tighter, and a tear rolled down his cheek when she did not squeeze his hand back. He could not help but feel like he had failed her. There were so many things he could have done differently that night. What if he stopped Jason before he broke the Walkman? What if he won the fight fast enough to try something else? What if he sang to her to break the trance? What if he found the magic words to save the day? What if he was the one with the superpowers capable of protecting Max?

What if…what if…what if…

None of it really mattered anyway because he had not been any of those things. He had been right there, and he hadn’t been enough. He glanced up at Max’s drawing on the wall. The two of them were holding hands. Just two days ago, he thought that maybe when Max let him in again, that would be enough. But he was wrong.

A hand pressed down suddenly against his shoulder, and Lucas nearly fell out of his chair. He hastily wiped at his eyes with the back of his hand and winced as he grazed his swollen face.

“Lucas?” his sister said. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, Erica, I’m fine,” he said without looking up at her.

Even without looking at her, he could practically hear her rolling her eyes. She pulled up the other chair next to his and sat down with her arms crossed. “Are you gonna tell me what’s going on with you or am I gonna have to hurt you?”

“What?” he said, turning to glare at her. “You’re literally eleven. I would pin you to the ground in, like, five seconds.”

“Yeah, whatever you say, loser,” she said. “Seriously Lucas, you’ve barely said three words outside of reading that book. Spill your guts.”

He rolled his eyes. “Fine, but then you have to leave me alone for the rest of the day. Deal?”

“Deal.”

“I was just…” he hesitated. “I was just thinking about Max, you know.”

When he did not continue, Erica nudged him. “What about her?”

“I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. “I feel like I should’ve done something. Maybe I could’ve stopped this.”

Erica sighed and put her hand on his arm. For a second, he considered pulling away—they weren’t really the kind of siblings to bare their hearts to each other—but it felt kind of nice to be looked after for once. He should not get used to it, though. Erica was his baby sister. He should be looking after her.

“It wasn’t your fault, Lucas,” she said. “You did everything you could. You beat the shit out of that crazy white kid. If you want to blame someone, blame Vecna. That monster is the only thing responsible for hurting Max.”

He shrugged. “I mean, I guess all those things are true, in a way,” he said. “But I can’t help but feel like, maybe, if I noticed something was going on with her sooner or tried harder to reach her…” He stopped and swallowed sharply before continuing. “Maybe she wouldn’t have been cursed at all.” He stared at Max’s face, her pale skin and bruised eyes, and thought about how he let her disappear. She moved to the trailer park and stopped coming to movie nights and stopped answering his notes, but he should have gone to her. “I should’ve been there.”

“You can’t see the future, Lucas,” she said, “or read people’s minds. You did the best you could at the time. Even I could see how much you were trying to protect your loser friends from bullies.”

Lucas scoffed. “Yeah, by joining the basketball team and pretending to be just like everyone else. Because that worked out sooo well for us.” He sighed and put his head in his hands for a moment. “I should’ve never done that.”

“Well, why did you, then?”

“I wanted to try something else, you know. Me and my friends, we’ve been bulled our whole lives, and I wanted to change that. I wanted people to know that I wasn’t just the D&D nerd or the black kid. I wanted to be seen as more than that. Everyone tried to tell me it was pointless, but I didn’t listen.”

“Screw that, Lucas.”

“What?”

“That sounds like a perfectly good reason to join the basketball team,” Erica said. “I mean, you save the world from interdimensional monsters, and then you go to school and get singled out for being black. Your friends just don’t get it, but I do. It’s total bullshit.”

Lucas nodded. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

“You guess? I know so. I used to do the same shit too, remember?” she said. “I thought being a nerd was the lamest shit ever because I saw the way the other kids treated you.”

“I remember,” he said. “You made fun of me.”

“You could take it.”

They sat in silence for a moment before Lucas began speaking again. The words were difficult even for him to say. Even when it was just to Erica. “I mean, that’s not the only reason I wanted to join the basketball team,” he began. “I know dad doesn’t want us to talk about it, but ignoring it doesn’t make it just go away. There was this upperclassman I saw on the first day of school, Jay, and I thought he was the coolest kid I’d ever seen. I never really knew a black kid could be cool like that before.”

“Yeah, I remember him. He didn’t come back to school after break.”

Lucas nodded. “Yeah,” he said, “the rest of the team couldn’t handle that he was an outsider and that he was better at basketball than them. I actually really liked playing basketball, you know, but sometimes, it made me so angry too, and Dustin and Mike didn’t make it any easier.”

“Lucas, you don’t have shit to prove to this goddamn town or your clueless friends, and neither do I,” she said. “Some people are gonna hate us no matter what we do, so I’m gonna be whoever I want to be.”

Lucas smiled again. “Yeah, that sounds good.” He held out his hand to his sister. “From now on, no more pretending.”

She shook his hand vigorously. “Agreed.”

The sound of a loud creak filled the air, and they both jumped to attention. Someone was coming into Max’s hospital room. A disheveled looking woman with unkempt curly, red hair and tired, bloodshot eyes shuffled into the room. Her clothes were shabby, and her green shirt had a small stain down the front. She still wore her name plaque from Bradley’s Big Buy.

Susan Mayfield, it read. Max’s mom had come to see her.

For a moment, the three of them gaped at each other in surprise. Susan stopped a short way into the room and stood awkwardly on the other side of Max’s bed. There were only two chairs in the room. Lucas stood up in a flash and pushed his chair out.

“Umm, you can sit here if you want,” he said and crossed over to the other side of the bed to take Susan’s place. Erica stood up as well and followed him across the room, leaving Susan sitting alone beside an empty chair. If she thought this was strange, she seemed too tired to care.

They stayed this way for several minutes. The heavy silence filled up the room like a soap bubble. Lucas clasped his hands in front of him and twiddled his thumbs, staring firmly down at the floor. Susan absentmindedly lifted his book, Stephen King’s The Talisman, from the bedside table and tossed it back down again. She had already lost one child, and even if that child was Billy, Lucas knew enough from Max to know that his loss had shaken her badly. He did not know if Susan knew that he and Erica were with Max when this happened, but he was not sure he was prepared to face her mother if she did.

“Do the doctors know if she’ll wake up?” Susan asked, breaking the silence with her raspy, exhausted voice.

Lucas looked up and met her eyes from across Max’s bed. “No, they don’t.”

She nodded without changing her expression, as if she expected to hear that answer. “Do they even know how this happened? How does an earthquake do…this?”

Lucas hesitated. “No, they…uh…they don’t know that either.”

All of a sudden, the floodgates opened, and Susan’s face contorted with pain. “I don’t understand how this happened,” she said, her voice trembling. Her eyes glistened in the harsh light of the hospital room, and a tear rolled silently down her cheek. “I don’t even know where she was that night. I was…” She hesitated and glanced down at the floor. “I was asleep,” she said, but Lucas thought he knew what she was not saying.

“Next thing I know, the police are at the door, and the trailer park isn’t safe anymore, and I have to find somewhere else to stay. And my little girl is just…gone.” She wiped the back of her hand across her face and gave a huff, like she was annoyed to find herself crying.

“Maybe I should’ve seen this coming,” she said. “I seem to make one mistake after another with her.” Susan met Lucas’s eyes again, and a flash of regret crossed her face. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what’s come over me. You kids don’t need to hear about this.”

Lucas shook his head. “No, no, it’s…it’s fine, really. I know it’s a lot.”

At his reassurance, Susan looked away again, and a shadow seemed to cover her face. There was shame in her eyes.

“Anyway, I’m not here for long. I have my next shift in…” She checked her watch and heaved a great sigh. “In half an hour, and I walked…you’d be surprised how many people are out…and then I’ve got to try to call…and I haven’t eaten since…” She trailed off without finishing her sentences, too distracted to even care if she was making sense to them.

Erica crossed the distance between her and Susan and laid a hand on the woman’s shoulder. “There’s a cafeteria on the first floor. I can show you the way. The food’s kinda shit, but at least it’s food.”

Susan either did not notice or did not care how strange it was that she was being taken care of by an eleven-year-old girl she did not even know. Lucas tried not to think about when his sister started to become so grown up. None of this should be on her shoulders.

Susan gave an absent-minded nod and let Erica usher her out of the room. Lucas took his chair back and sat next to Max with his head bowed against her bed. Her blanket was stark white, thin, and almost rough to the touch. If she was awake, she would have hated it. She loved soft things and bright colors. He loved that about her.

He reached down into his bag on the floor. His toothbrush was there and a change of clothes. And Max’s letter. He pulled it out and held it gently with both hands. His name was scrawled on the front of the letter in her handwriting, and he caressed the word with his thumb. He set the letter down on the bed.

“Max,” he began uncertainly. “I don’t know if you can hear me, but if you can, I want you to know I’m not going to read this letter. I’m never going to give up on you. I’ll sit by this bed every day for the rest of my life if I have to. You’re going to wake up, and then I won’t need this letter.”

He reached out and gripped Max’s hand like a lifeline and wished with all his heart that she could feel it and know that he was there with her. He would always be there with her.

“Max, I know how you see yourself, and I’m sorry I didn’t notice earlier. But you’re wrong. None of this is your fault. You’re not a bad person. You’re the best person I know.” His eyes burned and a lump formed in the back of his throat. “You’re the best part of my life.”

He sniffed, and tears welled up in his eyes, making his vision swim. Max became a blur of red-orange. “You’re super smart and can beat me at every video game at the arcade. Not even Dustin can do that. You love Karate Kid and Wonder Woman and Green Lantern. You love rainbows and sunglasses and strawberry ice cream. You bite your nails when you concentrate and doodle all over your homework. You’ve seen every horror movie at Family Video at least three times, and they’ve never scared you even once.”

Hot tears rolled down his cheeks and dripped down onto the bed. He didn’t bother wiping them away. “You’re kind even when no one’s looking. Especially when no one’s looking. You love skateboarding and surfing, and if you ever go back to California you want to find the biggest wave you can and break a record or something. You’re the best Zoomer the Party could’ve ever asked for. You make me feel like I’m special exactly the way I am, and I want to hang out with you for the rest of my life.”

Lucas let out a sob and leaned his forehead against his hand where it was curled up around her limp fingers.

“You have to wake up. You have to wake up, Max.”

Chapter Text

Chapter Five: The Shire is Burning

Dustin leaned back against the yellow painted brick wall at the back of the Hawkins High gym to take the weight off his right ankle, as he stood and waited for some kind of explanation as to what exactly was going to happen in Hawkins. The storm cloud had been spewing particles from the Upside Down for nearly an hour, and so far, no one in charge had been able to come up with anything to do about it. Dustin doubted they would be able to. Even he wasn’t sure what to make of this, and he was so used to having an answer to everything, or at least having the tools to find an answer. But for the past few days, it seemed like all of his ideas had gone terribly wrong. Maybe he just wasn’t as smart as he liked to think he was.

“Hey!”

A shout from across the gym drew Dustin’s attention. Steve jogged over to him from the first aid station, running a hand through his hair as he did. Robin trailed behind him, her hands in her pockets, and another girl, Vickie Shepherd, followed close by her side. He knew she was in band with Robin, but he had not thought they were friends. That was probably another thing he overlooked without realizing it.

Steve called out again. “Dustin!”

“What!” he yelled back, making several heads turn and shoot him nasty looks. He ignored them. “Do they know anything?”

Steve shook his head and came to a stop in front of him, his hand on his hip. “Nah, they don’t have a clue what’s going on,” he said, making an exasperated gesture with his hand. “Or where the police even are. Apparently, there’s no, like, second in command around here or something.”

“So, what? The sky starts suddenly spewing spores from an ominous storm, and no one is even here?”

“I don’t know, Dustin!”

He sighed and rolled his eyes, but his frustration was less about Steve and more about the utter lack of organization on display at this relief effort. He, Steve, and Robin might have been the only three people in the room with any idea about what the hell was going on right now, and they were standing in the gym, completely useless, waiting for some bullshit authority figure to tell everyone else how to fix a problem they do not know anything about. Some things never change in this town.

Robin and Vickie reached him and Steve, and they stood as a pair off to the side of them. Robin had a goofy smile she was trying to conceal. Dustin raised his eyebrows at Steve, but he shrugged and told him to be nice with his eyes. He stifled another sigh and gave Vickie a strained smile, hoping the effort it took to be cordial to a stranger didn’t show in his expression, but from her equally pained greeting, he knew that it had.

“Hi?” Vickie said. She almost lifted her hand up in a wave, but it floundered and died at her side.

Robin cleared her throat and shuffled her feet. “Umm, we didn’t find out anything useful,” she said. “None of the townies in charge have been able to come up with a rationalization for…” Robin paused and glanced at Vickie. “For such a weird thunderstorm happening so soon after an earthquake.”

Steve nodded along. “Yeah, I told him that.”

“It’s not that weird to us, though,” Dustin said. “I mean, we’ve seen a storm like this before.” The storm above their town was the same storm that had formed above the Creel house in the Upside Down two days ago. They had all seen it. Dustin could not remember the last few moments they spent in the Upside Down as well as he wished he did. He had been…distracted…at the time, but he was sure the storms were one and the same. Nancy told them Vecna showed her a dark cloud spreading over Hawkins. It was the first thing she mentioned. The destruction of Hawkins was still happening, and it had only just begun.

Steve and Robin nodded in unison. “Definitely just like that other storm,” Robin said.

Vickie jumped into the conversation, her brows knit in confusion. “All three of you have seen a storm like this before?” The three of them shared a glance. Steve shrugged, Robin nodded, and Dustin made a high-pitched noise that could have been mistaken for a form of affirmation.

“Okaaay?” Vickie said slowly. “But that doesn’t make any sense. Sure, red lightning is a real thing, I guess, but it doesn’t last this long, and it’s never this low to the ground, and no one has ever even taken a picture of red lightning, so I don’t know how this can even be happening at all.”

Dustin stared, open-mouthed. “Holy shit, how do you know any of that?”

“Because she’s smart, dingus,” Robin said.

“I happen to think meteorology is a criminally underappreciated science,” Vickie said. “But that’s not really important right now. I mean, this is a natural phenomenon on an unprecedented scale, and you’re trying to tell me you’ve seen it before. Like, like, this doesn’t freak you out at all…” She trailed off.

“No, that’s…” Steve started.

“I mean…” Dustin cut him off.

“Yeah, that’s about right,” Robin added.

“Umm, yeah,” Steve repeated.

“Yep,” Dustin finished, popping the ‘p’ dramatically.

Vickie stared at them suspiciously and crossed her arms. “Right.”

Before they could dig themselves into a deeper hole, a hush fell over the people in the gym. A group of cops burst through the entrance, and the crowd parted to let them pass. Chief Powell led the way up onto the stage, where he was handed a microphone. Dustin hoped the police could not see them from where they stood. He was not quite sure where he and his friends stood with them since they escaped custody and vandalized a police car. He was pretty confident it would be better not to be spotted. He thought about that before agreeing to volunteer at the high school, but he wanted to help make things right more than he was afraid of getting in trouble.

Powell cleared his throat into the microphone, sending sharp feedback through the gym, and Dustin winced at the piercing sound. It was an eerily similar pitch to the shriek of the Demobats. He did not need to be reminded of them.

Chief Powell tapped on the microphone and began to speak. “There’s been some new developments in the past hour in regards to our response to the earthquake. As you all may have noticed, a strange cloud formation has formed over town. We’ve surveyed the area and discovered that the recent earthquake released a pocket of harmless gas beneath the soil which is responsible for the strange weather we’ve had today. It’s nothing to worry about.”

Dustin rolled his eyes and let his head fall back against the brick wall with a dull thud. He should have known their response would be to brush everything under the rug. When had they ever done anything different? Steve met his eyes and shook his head in disbelief. Robin glanced over at both of them with her eyebrows raised and threw up a hand in frustration.

Powell continued, and his voice took on an edge of fear. “However, our most recent survey uncovered a much more pressing issue. According to our attending seismologists, another earthquake is imminent within the next week. For this reason, an immediate and unequivocal evacuation order has been issued by the National Guard.”

A shocked murmur spread through the crowd, and Dustin straightened up. Okay, maybe they were taking this more seriously than he assumed. He shared a look with Steve and Robin and knew they all shared the same question. If everyone who knows what really happened two days ago leaves town, who goes after Vecna? Dustin seriously doubted ‘military might’ would be the solution to their problem with the Upside Down. He wondered if there would be a way to avoid leaving town. Surely if El and the others had a chance to go after Vecna again, they would get it right this time. They could not just leave. If they left without killing Vecna, then what was it all for? It couldn’t have been for nothing. That wouldn’t be fair.

Powell continued. “Anyone who can leave on their own should do so as soon as possible. For everyone else, the high school will become our evacuation center. We will be using the school buses to evacuate to an emergency shelter in Indianapolis. Over the next few days, my men and I will be going door to door to ensure this evacuation order is followed.”

He supposed that answered his question. They would be forced to leave Hawkins and watch from afar as the American government failed to accomplish anything meaningful. Fantastic.

“Thank you for your cooperation and patience. If you or a family member need assistance during this time, do not hesitate to contact our office. Florence will be around as long as we are to provide whatever resources we have at our disposal. Thank you.”

The hushed voices of the townspeople bubbled into life as soon as Chief Powell’s proclamation was finished. A few people trickled out of the gym, letting the heavy double doors slam shut behind them with a bang, but most of the occupants stayed where they were, huddled in little groups and whispering about what they had just been told. Much of the noise was simply surprised, anxious chatter, but from where he stood against the wall, Dustin caught snatches of conversation that made his stomach turn.

“…what did you expect, really, with a serial killer on the loose…”

“…I heard the earthquake wasn’t really an earthquake. It was those satanist from the Hellfire cult…”

“…presumed dead means they don’t have proof. We could still be in danger…”

“…always knew kids like that would come to no good…”

But above all, he heard his name, hissed out of cupped mouths pressed against ears, repeated over and over again like a curse by people with glittering eyes and sharp teeth. His name dripped from their lips like venom. Eddie Munson…Eddie Munson…Eddie Munson…

The freak, the killer, the outcast, the satanist, the sodomite, the pervert, the junkie. Every blight their narrow minds could think of, they cast upon his name.

He couldn’t fucking take it anymore.

Without a word, Dustin pushed off the brick wall and hobbled for the door as quickly as his sprained ankle would allow. He shoved the heavy wooden door open and ducked outside. He continued around the side of the building into a narrow alleyway between the gym and the school that overlooked the football field, stumbling in his haste to get out of sight.

His breathing came in heaving pants, and he leaned back against the red brick wall with his hands on his knees. A tight pressure spread across his chest, and a muffled sob escaped his throat. Searing tears streamed down his face, and he wiped them away angrily with the cuff of his blue shirt. He slid to the ground, the rough edges of the bricks digging into his back through his shirt and buried his face in his arms. He sobbed again, and it came out like the rasp of a dying animal.

The sun above him was blocked out by the looming storm. Flashes of blood red lightning lit up the sky among the clouds, and spores from the Upside Down drifted down like motes of dust in a sunbeam. It was like being back there. Dustin never imagined it would be so horrifying. The tunnels had not prepared him for the real place. Cold and empty and dead, with a choking stench of rot and mold. A place of death and decay. And he could feel how much it hated them. The very air hung with malice like a dark cloud. The shadow was not just the monsters and the vines and the ground. It was in them. Inside their heads. He took three showers after he got back home that night, and he could still feel it on his skin. Maybe he would never be clean again. He would never forget a single, miserable detail of that night.

It was branded inside his mind. His eyes were open, and even though he could see the fabric of his shirt through his fingers and the shriveled grass poking up among the chalky white gravel, Eddie’s face swam before his eyes. Still and pale, his eyes fixed open, staring into nothingness. The weight of his body pressed into his lap like a stone, and when he grew still, his hand fell limply to the side, grazing the hard packed earth. Dustin winced, hoping it did not hurt, before catching himself and realizing none of that mattered, now. The sharp scent of Eddie’s sweat mingled with the overpowering metallic stench of his blood. It lingered in his nostrils and the back of his mouth, even now. A part of him knew he was sitting against the wall of the Hawkins High gym. That he got out. But the rest of him was still stuck in the moment he would never escape.

He pressed against the brick wall until pinpricks of pain shot through his back and waved his hands in front of his face as if he were trying to dispel the image in front of him. No matter what he did, it would not go away. It was all in his head.

The gym doors creaked open and fell shut with a bang, but Dustin heard the sound as if it came from far away. The noise of shoes crunching on gravel approached him and stopped beside him. He looked up between his arms with tear-filled eyes. Steve’s worried face swam in his vision, and he quickly wiped away the remaining tears. He sniffed loudly and turned away until he could no longer see Steve standing above him. He heard a sigh, followed by the thud of Steve dropping down on the ground next to him. A warm hand pressed into his shoulder, and he squeezed his eyes shut.

“Dustin?” Steve said, his voice painfully soft. He was not supposed to sound that way around him. They were supposed to joke around and rib each other, loud and happy and comfortable. Not this hesitant, pitying bullshit.

When he did not respond, Steve removed his hand with another barely audible sigh, but he did not leave. He stayed where he was, breathing quietly beside him. Dustin felt the heat radiating off his body through the small gap between them. Anger swelled in his stomach, and his eyes burned again.

“It’s just…” he choked out, “it’s just so fucking unfair.” He wiped his nose with his sleeve and glanced at Steve over his shoulder.

“I know.”

“No, you don’t, Steve,” he said, and the coiled rage in his gut reared its head. It needed to lash out at something. “You didn’t even like him,” he spat at Steve. “You called him a freak, too. Just like everyone else.”

“That wasn’t…” Steve began, but he cut himself off. He leaned back against the brick wall and tugged on his nose with a sniff. “No, you’re right. I was an asshole to him. He didn’t deserve that. I should’ve…I’ve been a really shitty friend, lately. And I’m sorry. I should’ve been there for you.” Dustin felt a twinge of guilt at Steve’s admission. He had not really meant to make him feel bad—or maybe he had—but none of this was Steve’s fault.

Steve continued. “And it shouldn’t have taken something like this to make me…crawl forward again.” He shook his head, as if clearing away a thought. “I’ve been so stupid.”

“It’s not your fault, Steve. It never was. I know that,” he said. He gestured back towards the gym. “It’s this town.” He pointed up at the storm clouds gathering above them. “That place. That’s where the monsters are.”

“I heard what they were saying, too. It’s all a bunch of bullshit.”

“I want to make them pay,” Dustin said, his jaw set. He nodded his head to himself and turned to meet Steve’s gaze. “I want to shove the truth down their throats until they choke on it. They were so, so wrong about Eddie, and they’re gonna know it, Steve.”

Steve’s forehead creased with concern. “Are you sure it’s safe to do that?”

Dustin doubled down. “I mean it. This isn’t over. He deserves better than to be remembered as a killer.”

“How are you gonna do that, I mean? The government doesn’t exactly want the truth getting out there.”

“I don’t know, yet. But Nancy managed to take down Hawkins Lab with nothing more than a tape recorder. I’ll figure it out.”

“Okay, but just promise me you’ll be careful, yeah?”

Before he could answer, the door to the gym slammed open with a clang. A procession of townspeople rushed out into the cool air. They stared at the sky, muttering to themselves, but no one spared a glance down the alleyway. As the exodus slowed to a trickle, a familiar face came sprinting into the alleyway, gasping for air.

“Guys…” Robin panted, her hands on her knees. Vickie stood awkwardly behind her, biting her fingernails and glancing around nervously. “We have to go, like, right now. Before…” She trailed off and stared down at the other end of the alleyway.

Dustin followed her gaze and straightened up in alarm. “Oh shit,” he said and hurried to stand. Steve did the same beside him. At the end of the alleyway stood Chief Powell and two of his officers.

“Thought I might find you two out here,” Chief Powell said. “You’d be surprised how much you can see from up on the stage.” He cleared his throat and made his way slowly down the alley, his boots crunching on the gravel. The two officers flanked him on either side. Dustin pressed up against the brick wall and swallowed heavily. “But probably not as surprised as I was to see you, Dustin Henderson, wandering around the gym in broad daylight after escaping police custody and damaging police property.”

Steve stiffened beside him and shifted closer. When Dustin responded, his voice took on a strained, high-pitched tone. “I don’t…I don’t remember being in police custody, exactly. Being out at a lake isn’t a crime either, so…”

“Oh, but you and I both know it was never about finding you at a lake.” Powell sucked his teeth and glanced down the alley toward the field. “But strange as it may sound, this isn’t about Eddie Munson, either.”

Dustin glanced over his shoulder and shared a confused look with Steve. There was no way he knew about everything else. Powell held out a piece of paper torn from a notebook. “I’ve got a list of names of people not to let out of my sight. People who can’t be allowed to leave town without a military escort. Your name is on that list.” He turned and gave Steve a pointed look. “And so is yours Mr. Harrington. And your friends the Wheelers and the Sinclairs, as well as Ms. Buckley,” he added with a gesture towards Robin.

Vickie gaped at them, but all Robin could manage was a non-committal shrug and a half-smile that disappeared in the blink of an eye.

“Wait, hold on,” Steve said, interrupting the chief of police. “We’re on some kind of list? What the hell does that mean?”

“If I had to take a guess, I would say it means you know something you shouldn’t.”

Steve raised his eyebrows and leaned over to whisper in Dustin’s ear. “We’re already on a list. They know about us.”

“Who is they?” he hissed back.

“You know, the government or Hawkins Lab or the military or whatever.”

“The woman who came to the trailer.”

“Exactly.” Steve ran a hand through his hair. As he spoke his voice grew louder and increasingly more agitated. “They’re gonna come in here and cart us all off. I’m talking hidden bunkers, no windows, padded walls. The chief is right, we know too much, and they know about us.”

“Owens is supposed to be on our side, though. On El’s side.”

“How should I know that? I’ve never met the guy!”

Chief Powell cleared his throat, and Dustin snapped to attention. “Am I interrupting you two?” Powell asked. They both shook their heads. “Now, we can’t help each other unless we’re all on the same page. Let me tell you a few things I know.” Powell folded his arms across his chest and stared each of them down in turn.

“I know your friend Maxine Mayfield is in the hospital with injuries consistent with the other murders, and she might never wake up. Strangely enough, her name is also on this list. I also know it was your friend Lucas Sinclair and his spitfire of a sister that called the ambulance. That’s three of you accounted for on the night of the earthquake. That just leaves you, Mr. Henderson, and Eddie Munson.” Dustin started, but Powell cut him off. “I don’t want to hear it. I know you were with him. There was a report of an RV stolen from one of Eddie’s neighbors at the trailer park. Those neighbors just so happen to be the same ones who’ve reported Eddie to our department three times in the last two years. Put all that together with the simple fact that you kids ran. Yeah, I know Eddie Munson was with you.”

“Wow, you’ve really looked into this,” Dustin said.

“We take murderers very seriously.”

Dustin pushed off the brick wall and scowled at the chief of police. His face grew warm, and he curled his hands up into fists. “Eddie didn’t do this!” he spat. “He’s innocent!”

Powell held out his hands in a pacifying gesture. “Chrissy Cunningham’s body was found in the Munson trailer. Eddie fled the scene, and there was a witness to confirm he was at the scene of Patrick McKinney’s murder. What other conclusion was I supposed to come to, Mr. Henderson? That some invisible monster killed those kids?”

“I guess you’ve got it all figured out, then.”

“If I don’t, then who gave those injuries to Ms. Mayfield?”

“It must have been the monster,” Dustin said. Steve gripped his shoulder tight, but he did not back off.

“And if I were to try locating this so-called monster, where would I look?”

“Oh, I don’t know, on the other side of the earthquake,” he said with a smirk. At that, Steve jerked him back and shook his head firmly. There was fear in his eyes. The smile faded from Dustin’s face.

Chief Powell started and blinked in surprise. “What did you say?”

Dustin shook his head, his anger deserting him as quickly as it had come. “Nothing. I was just being stupid.”

Powell stared him down for several agonizing moments. It felt like hours. At last, the chief relented. He put his hands on his hips and turned away. “My officers are going to escort the three of you home, and then one of them will be posted at each of your houses.” He tipped the rim of his hat at Vickie. “Ms. Shepherd, you are free to go.”

The two officers stepped forward and herded him and Steve toward Robin. Before Vickie walked away, she gripped Robin’s arm.

“Will I see you again?” she asked.

Robin glanced around at the police officers, and Dustin thought there were tears in her eyes. “I don’t know,” she said. “I hope so.”

Vickie opened her mouth to say something, but Chief Powell cut her off. “Ms. Shepherd, I suggest you go now.”

She gave Robin a fleeting smile and disappeared around the corner of the building. Before the three of them were led away. Chief Powell gripped Dustin’s shoulder, speaking low and close to his ear. The scent of stale coffee and cigarettes clung to his breath.

“This won’t be the last time we speak.”

…

Max’s mom had come and gone, and still Lucas and Erica waited together in her hospital room. Lucas read another chapter of The Talisman. Erica brought him skittles from the vending machine. They were Max’s favorite. After another hour passed, Erica went to the nurses’ desk and swiped a piece of paper from a notepad and folded it into a paper football. They took turns shooting it at each other’s heads until it slid underneath the bed and disappeared in the mess of wires coming from the machinery.

The sun dipped down below the horizon, casting a golden-orange light over Max’s room. The brooding storm clouds were cast in deep purples and brilliant reds. Lucas figured there were some things not even the Upside Down could change. The sun would rise and set. Time would pass. His mind cleared and a wave of calm settled over him. He clung to Max’s hand with fierce determination. This too, he thought. He can’t touch this.

His thoughts were interrupted by the creak of the door opening and a series of quiet footfalls. There was no knock this time. His eyes widened, and he jumped out of his chair. It scraped loudly against the floor when he bumped into it. Erica turned toward the door and shot up straight in her chair as their parents entered the room with a police officer in tow.

Officer Daniels held open the door with an outstretched arm as first his mom and then his dad filed into the room. Sue wrung her hands nervously and glanced at the officer as she passed. Charles had his arms crossed, a deep frown on his face. Officer Daniels closed the door behind them and stood in front of it. His parents stood at the other side of Max’s bed. Sue’s eyes drifted around the room as if she could pretend everything was alright by refusing to look at what was right in front of her.

Charles cleared his throat. “I…your mother and I need you two to come home for the night,” he said with a backwards glance at Officer Daniels.

Lucas shared a look with Erica, and a current of understanding flashed between them. This could be about Jason or Eddie or the gates or any other number of things they had gotten up to in the last three years. But whatever target was on their back, they had to get out of it, together. He turned back to his father. “You said we could stay here for the rest of the week if we wanted to,” he said, a question in his voice. “Since the school is closed.”

Charles put a hand on his hip. “I know what I said but…” he trailed off, “…but things change. There’s some things that need to be cleared up better. I thought we had it all sorted two days ago, but apparently not.”

Sue jumped into the conversation, her voice soft and small. “We have some questions is all. It’d be easier to talk about it at home.”

Charles squeezed his wife’s shoulder, and she gave him a weak smile in return. He looked back at the officer again and turned to Lucas with his mouth open like he had something else he wanted to say, but no sound came out. He turned around and looked Officer Daniels full in the face. “Could I speak to my son out in the hallway?” he asked. “Just the two of us?”

Officer Daniels furrowed his brow and glanced at his watch. “I’ll give you five minutes,” he said, “but no more than that. I’m not supposed to let your kids out of my sight.”

“Thank you, thank you,” Charles said. “We’ll make it quick.”

Lucas swallowed heavily and followed his dad out of the room. As he passed Erica, she squeezed his arm for a second and gave him a sharp look. She didn’t need to be worried, though. He would never give the Party up. Officer Daniels held the door open and closed it behind them with a click. His arm still hurt where Erica grabbed him, so he rubbed it a couple times.

He stared down at the polished tile floor and picked at one of his nails. “What’s all this about?” he asked.

His dad sighed. “I was hoping you could tell me.” He put his hand on his son’s shoulder. “Look at me, Lucas.”

He reluctantly lifted his gaze.

“I know we talked about that night you and Erica and your friends ran away.” He rubbed a hand along his chin, and his frown only deepened. “You said you needed to help one of your friends, and I let it go at that point because you were hurt and your friend Max was in a state. I figured we could bring it up again after everything settled down, but I think now is the time for a little more honesty between us.” He shook his head. “What’s going on here? What kind of trouble are you in?”

“I wasn’t lying to you,” Lucas said. “We did need to help a friend, and the next day, we got stuck in the earthquake.”

“And what kind of help did this friend need?”

“They were stuck and needed help getting somewhere else.” Charles crossed his arms. “They were stuck,” he repeated in a flat voice. “And they needed the help of four kids without a car between them.” He paused and shook his head again. “Does this have anything to do with the Hellfire Club? Eddie Munson? Is that what you’re not telling me? You helped a killer get out of town.”

“It’s not like that,” he said. “I wish I could tell you more, but I can’t.”

He huffed. “Really, Lucas? This is all you’re giving me? A police officer shows up at our door and demands to know where our kids are, and you can’t even tell me why?” His voice rose, his temper inflating like a balloon. “This is exactly the kind of life I wanted to protect you from!” he barked. “You’ve filled your head with the idea that if you get loud enough and break enough things, you’ll change the world! That’s a lie, Lucas!”

For once, Lucas snapped back. “People’s lives were in danger! I had to do something!”

“People’s lives?” he repeated. His booming voice filled the hallway. “What about your life? Look at your face! No earthquake did that! You can’t keep pushing things like this! I want you to have a life!” The air trembled with the ferocity of his dad’s words.

Lucas took a step back, his eyes burning. Charles closed the distance between them and gripped his shoulders with both hands. “Come home, son. We’ll get this all straightened out.”

He struggled to hold the tears at bay, but he wasn’t going to cry in front of his dad, not now. He wouldn’t. “I need to be here,” he said, so softly that his dad had to lean forward to catch the words.

“I don’t want to leave you alone with a police officer,” he said, just as softly. He shook his head. “I won’t be alone. Erica wants to stay, too. And nurses come in a lot to check on Max.”

“I don’t know, Lucas. We’re going to have to leave town soon, anyway. You know that, right?”

Lucas barely registered his dad’s words. He promised he would stay. “I need to be here,” he repeated. “What if she wakes up? Or what if…what if she…” He trailed off. “She’s my best friend, dad.” The tears he had kept in check came spilling over, now. His cheeks grew warm, and he tilted his head down, hoping his dad would not see.

Charles did see. He gripped his son’s arm and drew him into a half-hug. Lucas’s arms stayed at his side, but he did not pull away. A moment later, they broke apart. “Tell you what,” his dad said, “since it’s getting late, anyway, why don’t we all stay here, tonight?”

“Really?” Lucas said rubbed his nose with the back of his hand. "You actually want to do that?"

He nodded and smiled. “Why not. It’s just one night.”

“Thanks, dad.” Lucas smiled back, weakly. His dad reached for the door handle, but Lucas pulled him short. “Oh, umm, you’ll need an overnight badge from the front desk, and I can get some extra blankets from one of the nurses.”

His dad patted the top of his hand. “Of course, son.” The door opened with a click. Officer Daniels waited for them on the other side.

“Anything you need to share?” the officer asked.

Charles nodded and put himself between Lucas and the officer. “I do,” he said. “My family will be staying in the hospital tonight with the kids’ friend Max. I hope that’s all right with you.” He flashed an artificial smile.

The officer inclined his head. “Of course. My orders are just to stay with the kids, wherever they are.”

Sue and Erica peeked out from behind Max’s bed. “We get to stay?” Erica asked. Before anyone could respond, she continued. “Is anybody else hungry? There’s a cafeteria on the first floor.” She was already pushing her way past the police officer, not even sparing him a sideways glance.

The family went down together, and Officer Daniels followed them like a shadow. In the corner of the elevator, at the end of their table, outside of their room, there he was. When one of them walked, they heard two sets of footprints because Officer Daniels walked with them, watching their every move. He had seen a list with eight names on it, just eight, and though he could not understand why, it was Chief Powell’s top priority to keep those eight names from getting out from under their thumbs. They were needed, he had been told. Whether it was protection or possession they were after, he did not know, but he did not care. After everything that had happened in the past week, all the ways they had failed their town—the way he failed that boy at the trailer park—he knew the long arm of the law would find a way to hold them tight.

Chapter Text

Chapter Six: Wonder Woman

Break her out.

 The idea swirled around inside El’s mind. She was lying down on top of her bed, staring up at the ceiling. She did not want to focus on the thought for too long or else it would trickle through her fingers like water and disappear. It was better to keep it at a distance, like a soft cloud floating just above her head. She could glance at it and puzzle over its different shapes, but it would stay right where it was, suspended in the sky. Big ideas were tricky like that.

 If Mike and Will were right, there was a chance that Max was still with Henry, in that place, that she was being kept hidden from her, just like Billy and the other flayed had been hidden from her last summer. If that were true, El would eventually be able to reach her and bring her back out. There was only one problem: Henry had always been able to see her in the in-between. To truly rescue Max, she needed to get in and out of Henry’s mind without being noticed.

 It was not something she had tried to control before. People either noticed her or, more often, they did not. She was not sure if she even had power over that. She would have to sneak in like a cat burglar and come back out with the most precious treasure safely in her grasp. She knew exactly how the cartoons went. She used to watch them on Saturday mornings with her dad while they ate toasty warm Eggos with chocolate chip smiles. When the burglar got caught on the TV, the policeman’s gun went off with a BANG! written on a little flag. It was nothing like real life. If Henry caught her again, there would be much worse consequences.

 She bolted upright. He could be watching me right now, she thought, and I might never know. Her eyes darted around her bedroom, but there was no one with her that she could see.

Her door was propped open three inches, the way she usually left it, and hushed voices drifted in through the crack. The others were still out there. After her proclamation about saving Max, Hopper and Joyce had gone behind the curtain partition to discuss what they would do while they waited for Dr. Owens. They could not all stay in the cabin, and Hopper was not supposed to be alive. They would have to be careful about where they went.

 A soft knock sounded at her door. “El?” Hopper called softly.

 Without moving from the bed, she twitched her head to the side and eased the door open.  Hopper stood framed in the doorway, Joyce just behind him. The others huddled in the wrecked living room. They had turned the burnt orange couch right side up again and were spread out across its length. Mike and Nancy crouched on the arms at opposite ends of the couch; Will, Argyle, and Jonathan shared the cushions between them. El avoided looking at any of them and focused on her dad instead.

 “We’ve got a plan,” Hopper said.

 El nodded but made no move to stand up. “What is it?”

 Hopper cleared his throat and leaned over on his knees to look her in the eye. “I know looking for Max is important to you,” he said, “but we’re gonna have to work around Owens’s demands if you’re sure you want to go along with his plan.”

 She nodded again. “I am sure.”

 “Okay,” Hopper said. “The two of us will stay here in the cabin tonight. There’s nowhere in Hawkins I can go, right now, and I’m not gonna send you off with anyone else.” He gestured around the cabin with a wide sweep of his hands. “But there’s a lot of work we should do before anyone tries to sleep here.” A shy smile crept across his face. “You remember the first time we put this place back together?”

 She returned his smile, and something squeezed inside her chest. It had been doing that a lot since Hopper walked into her room. Every time she looked at him, she had the same sense of pressure, as if her heart were trying to remind her that she was here, and he was here, and it was all real. She wondered how long it would take for her to see him and not worry that he would vanish in a puff of smoke, never to be seen again.

 Hopper continued. “Owens will meet us at the hospital, tomorrow. You’ll have plenty of time to do what you need to do.”

 El nodded and a look of determination crossed her face. She sat up straighter. “Okay.”

 Joyce jumped in. “The rest of us are going back to the Wheeler’s,” she said. “We called Karen, and she’s fine with a little company.”

 Nancy interrupted them. “Did she…ask any questions?”

 Joyce shook her head. “Not yet, but I’m sure she will. I think we should try to get our story straight before we go.” She started to turn away but stopped herself short. “Oh, there’s one more thing I should warn you all about. There’s a cop waiting for us at the Wheeler’s. Owens meant what he said about keeping an eye on us.”

 A knock on the door made them all jump. El turned in alarm, and her hands curled into fists of their own accord. She trained her focus on the door. She was prepared for anyone who might walk through it. The knock came again, and a voice followed it.

 “This is Agent Stinson,” the voice called. “Assuming Sam’s call was successful, you already know what I’m doing here.”

 Hopper crossed the room and hovered in front of the door. He turned back and met El’s gaze before he opened it. She gave a slight nod. He pulled the door open, revealing the same woman who had been with Dr. Owens when they rescued her from the police transport van. The same woman who drove Hopper and Joyce to the cabin. El let out a sigh of relief.

 Stinson paused in the entryway. “Jim,” she said, acknowledging Hopper with a nod. “Mrs. Byers.” She turned her gaze toward El. “Eleven. It’s nice to see you again.” She fixed her sharp stare on Nancy. “Ms. Wheeler. I hope you’re doing well.”

 El turned to stare at Nancy, her eyes squinted in confusion. Nancy avoided meeting anyone’s gaze, her eyes firmly fixed on the floor in front of her. Mike must have been just as surprised to find out his sister knew one of Dr. Owens’s people because he caught El’s eye and shrugged. Her face remained blank. It seemed he wanted to be on the same page, but after everything that had happened the past week, she was still conflicted.

 Hopper stepped forward to greet Agent Stinson. They curtly shook hands. “Thanks for coming back.”

 “I won’t be going anywhere for a while,” Stinson said. She glanced around the room one more time, her sharp eyes lingered on El’s face for a moment. “I’ll be just outside if anyone needs me. Don’t let me disturb you.”

 With Stinson posted on the other side of the door, they dropped all discussion of their future plans and got back to the project of putting the cabin back together. Jonathan and Nancy headed back outside to finish boarding up the holes in the walls left by the Mind Flayer’s monster. The dull pounding of nails resounded through the cabin at regular intervals. Inside the cabin, Joyce and Hopper focused on the kitchen. Nancy was right about the water still working, but there was clearly something wrong with it, so they set out to check the plumbing and make sure everything was put back in working order. El, Will, and Mike finished sweeping up debris from the floor and collecting trash from all across the cabin.

 They started at one end of the cabin and worked their way through it. El and Mike both had trash bags for picking up all manner of refuse that had ended up in the cabin. The holes in the walls and the ceiling had allowed all kinds of debris, litter, pinecones, and twigs to cover the floor. Will came behind them with the broom and a wide, metal dustpan to collect dirt, fallen leaves, and months of dust from the floor. El lifted the bookshelf in the living room with her mind and eased it back against the wall. It was the same bookshelf she had pushed over when she and Hopper had their fight about her leaving the cabin and going to school to see Mike. She had accidentally blown out all the windows.

 At the time, all she could think about was getting out of this cabin and seeing her friends again. She had known them for such a short time, but it had been the most important week of her entire life. Overnight, she had gone from only having Papa, only being valued for what she could do for others, to having a real family. People who cared about her and treated her with kindness, not because she was useful but because she was her. She was just El, and that was enough for them to like her. She understood, now, that Hopper was doing his best to protect her, but at the time, it had been torture to be kept separate from the world again.

 El ended up back in her room, collecting trash from the floor and brushing off debris from her bed and other furniture. She wiped a thick layer of dust off the top of her yellow painted vanity with her shirt sleeve and placed the empty coke bottle in the center next to the mirror. She jumped as the door opened behind her. Mike pushed his way into her room with a half-filled trash bag of his own. His eyes met hers for a brief moment before he looked away and started picking up debris from the other side of the room. Will was still finishing sweeping up in the living room.

 They worked together in silence for a while and were nearly finished cleaning up when Mike spoke. His voice was soft and uncertain, and El had to think for a moment before she understood what he had said.

 “Do you remember when we painted this room?” He pointed at the mint green planks of wood with a shy smile.

 She nodded. Hopper had called it a ‘winter project’ and let her choose the color herself from a pamphlet. She had been allowed to invite the entire Party over to help her paint. They emptied out her room and spent a couple hours giggling and splotching paint on each other’s noses as the walls were slowly but surely covered. When that was done, they all had hot chocolate and played Scribbage. Mike helped her spell all her words.

 She was lost in thought when Mike spoke again. “Green is my favorite color.” His soft smile deepened as he said it.

 She glanced around the room. Despite everything, the mint green walls were as bright and fresh as they were the day they painted them. “I know,” she said. “That’s why I picked it.”

 “Oh,” he said, and his smile faded. His forehead creased and an expression crossed his face that El could not understand. Something like surprise or disappointment. The first week they had known each other, he had been so easy to understand. He continued. “You should’ve picked something you liked.”

 For the first time since they had come back to Hawkins, El allowed herself to really look at Mike. In eight months, he had changed so much: gotten taller, grown out his hair like a singer from one of the magazines Max liked. The childhood had faded from his sharp, angular face. She had changed, too. They both knew that. The distance between them was only a few feet, but neither of them closed it. “I did like it,” she said at last.

 She stroked the nearest panel of the wall. Its rough, splintery texture was smoothed over by the thick coat of paint. The drive back to Hawkins in the back of the pizza van had given her a lot of time to think about her past, not just the lab but everything after that as well. The day Mike found her in the woods was the day her life changed forever. The blank, sterile walls of the lab were replaced by the warm, soft world of Mike Wheeler’s basement. And there was a whole world in that house, or it had seemed that way at the time. It was filled with beautiful things and bright colors and pretty people. There was love in that house, and it was Mike who brought her into that world. It was her first real home; he gave that to her.

 Mike broke the silence again. “What’s your favorite color?” he asked, rubbing the back of his neck self-consciously.

 “Red. Strawberry red.” Will taught her about ‘shades’ of color. “Or a red like…” She trailed off as her thoughts were filled with an image of Max. When her hair caught the sunlight, it lit up like a fire. She remembered the way it shone in the early morning light after their sleepover last summer. The coconut smell it left on her pillowcase.

 “Oh, that’s cool,” Mike said. He cleared his throat. “So, how much, umm, how much did you hear?” he asked. “At the pizza place.”

 She let the silence hang between them for a moment before she answered, stroking the downy pillow on her bed. “I heard everything.”

 “Oh, okay,” he said, nodding his head absent-mindedly. “Did...did it...I mean, did you…”

 “El cut him off. “Why did you say all those things to me?” She turned to look him full in the face, and he struggled to meet her gaze.

 “I was trying to help,” he said, “and I thought if I shared my feelings, then…” He trailed off and stared at her helplessly, his eyes wide. 

 She deflated and sat down on her bed. This time, it was her who could not bear to look at him. For a moment, the room faded around her and filled with a sickly red light, as she drifted back to the night everything fell apart. She rubbed her wrists, still feeling the grasp of the tentacles, their cold slickness. Max had been right there in front of her, just out of reach. She had to fight to get to her. That’s what Mike told her to do. But she was too late. She took too long. It was not right. “Will had to tell you to say it,” she whispered at last. “I heard him. ‘You’re the heart.’ What did that mean?”

 “I don’t understand,” he said, his voice flat and wounded. “Isn’t that what you said about me? That’s why you made that painting.”

 “What are you talking about?” she asked, an edge creeping into her voice. “What painting?”

 Mike sat down beside her, and their shoulders brushed. She had to stop herself from leaning against him. “The one you had Will make for me? That’s what you meant, right?”

 She shook her head, and her heart sank. She had no idea what he was talking about. “I never told Will to paint anything.”

 “What?” he asked. The question came out in a breath as if someone had just punched him in the gut. “But...he said all these amazing things. He said they were your feelings. That you needed me. Was he just making all that up? None of that was about you?”

 “Mike,” she started, very slowly, not fully understanding why he was so upset, “I did not tell him to make a painting.”

 He stood slowly, as if he were moving through deep water. When he spoke again, his voice was distant. “But, that doesn’t make any sense,” he said. His voice dropped to a whisper, and El was not sure if she was meant to hear his next question. “Why would he lie to me?”

 El stood up with him and delicately touched his arm. Their eyes locked. His eyes were dull with confusion and hurt. Hers were filling with tears. She had one more thing to ask him, but she was not sure if she wanted the answer. “What would you have said?”

 “What?”

 “What would you have said if Will had not pushed you?” she repeated. “What were you going to say before, at the pizza place?”

 He gaped at her. “I was going to say...what I wanted to say, is that, well, I...I mean…” He trailed off, his hands flailing at his sides. “You know what I was going to say! I already said it!”

 Her heart caught in her throat, and her tears began falling. “I will tell you what I wanted to say.” She stepped closer to him, her eyes sharp and swimming, and he seemed to shrink before her. “I did miss you,” she began.

 “But?”

 “But things are different, now. We are different, now.” She took a steadying breath and wiped the tears from her face. “I spent eight months without you. I wanted things to stay the same. I should not have lied to you. It was wrong for me to pretend.” She grasped his hand and clutched it tightly. “I’m sorry.”

 “No, it’s okay,” he started. “I should’ve known…”

 “Let me finish talking,” she said, cutting him off. He stopped and nodded, his eyes wide and shiny. “I think you have been pretending, too. I know you care about me, maybe you even meant it when you said you loved me, but it is not the same for you. It has never been the same for you.”

 “What do you mean?”

 “I think I understand, now,” she said. “I will not stay with someone who does not feel the way I feel.”

 He stared at her without comprehension. “What are you saying?”

 “I can’t do this anymore,” she said, her voice catching. “With you. I can’t wait forever. I need to stand on my own.” His look of confusion only deepened, so she added, “I am breaking up with you.”

 His face fell, and he shrank back from her, dropping her hand. “I don’t understand,” he said in a breathless whisper. “But, I fixed it, didn’t I?”

 She shook her head. “No,” she said, “you didn’t.”

 El brushed past him and left him alone in her room to process what has just happened. She needed the space as well. Her tears still fell freely, and she busied herself in the living room so that she could be alone with her thoughts. She still did not quite know what to do with them. Three things kept sticking out to her no matter what she did, no matter how much she tried to distract herself. She had been trapped by Vecna, Mike had helped her fight again, but Max died anyway. That was the part that she could not leave behind. Max died anyway. She had to make it right.

 They continued to clean up the cabin, and El avoided being alone with Mike again. When the walls were patched up, Jonathan and Nancy pulled an old ladder out from behind the pile of firewood at the back of the cabin and clambered up on the roof to patch up the giant hole left by the Mind Flayer. El shuddered to think of it and pressed a hand against the ugly scar on her leg. They threw a bright blue tarp over the hole to make it waterproof and nailed boards over the gap. Dust rained down from the ceiling with every nail they hammered. Agent Stinson made herself useful by passing nails and two-by-fours up to them from the ground. 

 By the time they were finished clearing away trash, they had six black garbage bags stuffed full to bursting. The cabin was already looking like home again. They filled buckets with warm soapy water and got to work scrubbing the dirt and dust off the cabin. Everything was grimy from the time spent abandoned and exposed to nature. Mike and Will teamed up to clean the kitchen, so Argyle joined El to wipe down the living room. 

 For a while, they worked together without talking. Argyle hummed quietly beside her. Eventually he asked her, “When did you get your head shaved?”

 She kept wiping away at the accumulated dirt on the wall. “I did not have a choice about it.”

 “That totally blows.” They finished the section they were on and moved on to the next wall. Before they could begin, Argyle paused and considered her for a moment. “I have a loooot of hair,” he said at last. “I could share half of it with you.”

 El laughed, and it rang out like clear water. She stopped short and frowned again. She had not laughed like that for days. 

 Argyle started wiping the wall down again in broad strokes. “My mom used to say I had the prettiest hair she’d ever seen.”

 El thought of her own mother and wondered if she was still sitting in that rocking chair, looping through her last memories of El. “Where is she?”

 Argyle shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve been living with my brother. He’s a lot older than me. Sometimes I crash with my friend Miguel. Or at your place, but you know that.” He scrubbed at a particularly stained part of the wooden wall. “It’s like, little by little, all the small things became a mountain and wooosh…” He flourished his hand in the motion of a wave. “She just couldn’t take it anymore, man. She skipped town about a year ago. I haven’t heard from her since.” He looked up and recognized the distant look on El’s face. “Hey, don’t sweat it, little lady.”

 “I understand. My mama, she’s far away too.” El glanced behind her toward the rug in the center of the living room that covered the door to the crawl space beneath the cabin. She wondered if mama’s picture was still down there. “Do you have a picture of her?”

 Argyle pulled out a woven, zippered wallet and removed a creased black and white photo of a beaming young woman with a flower in her hair. She looked young, younger even than Argyle was now. “Pretty.”

 He softly smiled at the photo. “This was at her quinceanera. Her parents died in a car crash when she was really young. She was raised by abuela, but she’s gone too, now. She had my brother not long after this, dropped out of high school and everything for him. Her name’s Carmen. Carmen Munoz. She taught me everything I know.” He said this with a smile, though his voice was sad. He kissed the photo and returned it to his wallet. 

 “I could find her,” she said. “Like we did with the pizza dough freezer.”

 He frowned at his wallet, his fingers hovering at the zipper. “What does it mean if you don’t see her?”

 “Gone.”

 He nodded solemnly. “Maybe...maybe I don’t wanna know right now.” He stuffed the wallet back in his pocket.

 El nodded, and they returned to their cleaning. “If you change your mind, I will still do it.”

 Argyle smiled. “I don’t care what Jonathan says about you, you’re pretty rad.”

 “Jonathan says bad things?”

 “Oh, no, it’s, like, an expression. Jonathan doesn’t say bad things about people.” He paused. “Well, except people he doesn’t like, which is, like, a lot of people.” He glanced at El quickly and held up his hand in a pacifying gesture. “But not you. Not you. You’re, like, one of his top ten people. Top FIVE probably.”

 El chuckled again, and they passed the time companionably as they finished cleaning up the living room. By that time, Jonathan and Nancy were done patching up the exterior of the cabin, and Joyce and Hopper had checked over the plumbing and the electricity to make sure everything was in working order. They all gathered together to put the finishing touches on the cabin. Agent Stinson sat on the porch with the door open. The condition of the sky had not worsened, but it had not improved either. They shook out the blankets and replaced all the furniture to its proper place. Mike jumped and squealed when he stumbled upon a dried up dead mouse in the corner of the kitchen.

 
 Nancy rolled her eyes and picked it up by the tail to toss outside. “It’s just a mouse, Mike. Don’t freak out.”

 “That’s disgusting,” he said, pulling a dramatic face.

 “You’ve seen worse,” she said tartly. 

 While they were finishing up, Argyle took the pizza van into town to pick up some free food from the high school and check out the lay of the land before anyone else returned to Hawkins. They all agreed with Stinson that a stranger would be less conspicuous than a girl with a shaved head, a police chief who was supposed to be dead, and a family who moved across the country. 

 Before long, Argyle returned with a box full of brown paper sack lunches. He distributed these among everyone, leaving the extras on the kitchen counter for El and Hopper to eat tomorrow. 

 He updated them on the situation in town while he did this. “It’s getting freaky in there, man. Lotta cops and shit. They were not very friendly.” He finished passing out the food. “I hope you guys like peanut butter and jelly. That’s all they really had.”

 Hopper ignored his food and pressed Argyle for more information. Stinson stood in the doorway and listened as well. “What about the military? Is there more of the National Guard in town, already.”\

 Argyle nodded. “Yeah, it’s already crawling with uniforms. But the big guy’s not there yet. The fuzz is still in charge.”

 “That’s Powell, right?” Hopper asked, looking towards Stinson.

 She nodded. “He’s your replacement. Given the circumstances, he’s handling this well.”

 Hopper rubbed his hand along his chin, his piercing gaze still fixed on Stinson. “Can you tell us anything more about what Owens and this colonel are planning, or are you all in the government’s pocket, now?”

 She glared at him. “I only take orders from Owens,” she said, “and I don’t know any more than you do. Owens is going to put the safety of the town first. If that means anything.”

 He turned to El, and his face softened. She could see the concern in his face, hear his voice in her head asking her if she could still handle this. The set of his jaw, and the tension in his shoulders told her that if she asked, he would get her and their family out of here, no matter what it took. He was giving her a way out. All this passed between them in the blink of an eye, and she shook her head. She was staying. No matter what happened, she would not leave Max again. 

 “I guess we’ll work it out tomorrow, then,” he said, returning his attention to Stinson.

 With the cabin put back together, the others prepared the leave for the night. El hugged Joyce tightly, pressing her face into her hair and breathing in its familiar scent. Cigarette smoke and caramel and sunlight.

 They broke apart from the hug, and Joyce folded her hands over El’s. “I’ll see you tomorrow, okay, sweetie?” She squeezed her hands tightly. “You’re not alone in this. Me and Hopper...we’ll be right there with you the whole time.”

 El gave her a soft smile and nodded, her throat tight with emotion.

 Joyce smiled back and gave her hands one last reassuring squeeze before she let go. “Okay,” she said as she walked away toward Nancy’s car. She waved behind her one last time before climbing in the front seat. Hopper stood leaning over the car talking to her for several minutes while the kids packed into the van. Nancy was already in the driver’s seat. 

 She hugged Jonathan next. He still reeked of sweat, pizza, and his funny plant he liked so much from all the time spent in the van, but she did not mind. They pulled apart, and Jonathan gave her his shy half-smile. “See you later.” He and Argyle hopped into the front two seats of the van. 

 Will and Mike hung behind, both of them seeming reluctant to be parted from her again, even if just for overnight. She approached Will first, and he threw himself at her, clutching her tightly. She held him the same way. He spoke softly next to her ear as they embraced. “Stay safe,” he whispered. “Promise?”

 “Promise,” she whispered back. After a long moment, they broke apart and met eyes. Staring into his bright hazel eyes was like looking into a mirror. The same terror swam in those depths, the same pain and despair, the same rage. They did not smile at each other like friends parting ways. Instead, the same grim shadow darkened their faces, and they only stared, knowing without words that they were of the same mind. 

 After a time, Will left her alone with Mike. He stood apart from her and stared at the ground, scuffling his converse Chuck Taylors in the dirt. 

 “Mike…” she began just as he started speaking.

 “El…” he trailed off. “You go first.”

 She shook her head. “It’s fine.”

 “Okay,” he said. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. When he opened them again, he looked up and leveled with her. “Could we, like, could we talk about this more?” he asked. “Because I’m not sure I understand completely.”

 El sighed. Jonathan’s eyes were on them from the pizza van, and Nancy was tapping her fingers against the steering wheel, waiting to leave. “What do you want to talk about?”

 “I guess, just, what happened,” he said. “I don’t feel like I’ve been pretending. I really did mean what I said. Even if...even if I can’t…even if it’s hard for me to say it again.”

 Her heart dropped. “I believe you, but…” she trailed off and grabbed his hand, lacing their fingers together. Their faces did not change, but they kept their hands pressed together anyway. A warmth passed between them, one that was familiar and comforting, one El had felt since the first time they held hands. It was strange, looking back. She would have thought that warmth would have come from their first kiss, but it had been sudden that she had not felt anything other than surprise and an unfamiliar sense of shyness. No. This connection was born from a different moment. Laying on a table in an empty classroom, the roar of the Demogorgon echoing just outside the closed door. She was more exhausted than she had even been, but she was not alone. Mike was there. They were two frightened kids, clutching to the only comfort they could find in that moment, a lifeline. That was the first time they lied to each other, when they promised that everything would be okay, and they would make it out and this frail happiness between them would grow and flourish into something beautiful because they saved each other, and it all worked out. But that was not what happened. The Demogorgon came into that room, that room where their fragile hope was born, and it broke it. El sent the monster away, but it claimed her too. She looked down at their joined hands and had the same feeling. “I need to do this,” she said at last. 

 Mike nodded, and his eyes glistened. He sniffed loudly and looked away from her. “Can we still be friends?” His voice was small and delicate, the same voice he had when he was eleven years old.

 “We will always be friends, Mike.”

 She smiled sadly at him and squeezed his hand tightly, her own eyes filling with tears. He tried to return her smile, but his chin quivered, and it was all he could do to hold back his tears. He pressed his hand against hers, their fingers turning white with the pressure as if he could put everything he could not say into one desperate gesture, one last holding on to something that had been broken before it even started. “Bye,” he whispered, his voice so thick with emotion he could hardly speak.

 “Goodbye, Mike.”

Chapter Text

Chapter Seven: Nobody Special

Mike sulked in the back of the pizza van, his forehead pressed against the cool, dusty window as Hawkins rolled past. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Will still sitting on the tiny cooler even though there was plenty of space in the back. He sighed and trained his gaze out the window, the fiery destruction of their hometown flashing by. He could not blame Will for wanting to avoid him. If their roles were reversed, he was sure he would do the same.

Nothing seemed to be going right, lately, but Mike did not know where he went wrong. He could pinpoint the exact moment El began slipping away from him. It was their fight in California that did it; he was sure of it. He said all the wrong things. He had fixed it, he thought, by finally saying everything she wanted to hear back at the pizza place. It had been their shining moment as a couple, a reconciliation to end all reconciliations, the moment where he finally proved he was worth her time, that he was right for her. Deep down, he knew from the moment she opened her eyes again on that table that it had not worked. Why, he wondered. Why couldn’t I make it work?

He had spent the last two days driving back home trying to answer that question. All kinds of excuses floated through his mind. Maybe El was too preoccupied about Vecna to reciprocate, consumed with the thought that this might not be their last fight. Maybe she was so distraught over what happened to Max that she could not spare the time to think about them. Maybe she simply was not able to hear him, after all, and nothing he said had actually reached her. Now, it seemed the answer had been beside him the entire time, and he had not even noticed.

Will.

Will had lied to him, for the first time he could ever remember. Told him exactly what he wanted to hear, and because of that, Mike ruined everything. He glanced over at Will’s backpack on the floor of the van, the painting rolled up on the seat above it. He had not even taken it out of the van, yet. The moment they made it back home, they were off again to see Max in the hospital. He wondered what he would do with it. Hang it up in his room next to his Conan the Barbarian poster? Leave it rolled up on the top shelf of his closet to gather dust? Maybe it would go in the basement, right next to his poster of John Carpenter’s The Thing. Yes, that would be the place for it. Put it in the basement with the rest of his childhood relics: El’s blanket fort, the Party’s first set of D&D figurines, Will’s old drawings, his Star Wars action figures, Roary the dinosaur. Yes, it would join the other memories he would never relive, a testament to the moment their lives were all destroyed, and it was Mike’s fault.

Mike’s fault for leaving Hawkins when it needed him the most; Mike’s fault for abandoning Will for months; Mike’s fault for not fixing things with El and making her feel like she could not trust him enough to tell the truth; Mike’s fault that Will had to lie to him; Mike’s fault that he was not enough to help El defeat Vecna; Mike’s fault that the best he could do was so inadequate. The next time the town needed a hero, they should call someone else.

The squeaking of the van’s braked pulled him out of his thoughts. Jonathan pulled them to a stop down the street from the Wheeler house.

As the engine shut down, Will leaned forward and gripped the back of the driver’s seat. “Oh, shit,” he said, staring out the windshield.

He shot up in his seat to see what Will had seen. A National Guard Humvee was parked in the driveway, filling up the rest of the space next to this mom’s car. Nancy had pulled her car to a stop on the street behind their mailbox and was standing with her door open, staring, just like the rest of them. Two soldiers, armed with rifles, were posted at the front door. Mike was sure there would be more around back by the basement door. Will glanced over his shoulder, and they shared a worried look, their lips pressed together into identical frowns. Owens had meant what he said about not letting them leave Hawkins. For a moment, he wondered if it had been a good idea to stay in town rather than running when they had the chance, but then he thought of Max in that hospital bed, and he knew that El was right to make them stay. They could not leave Max like that.

He shook his head to clear his thoughts. Now was not the time to think of running away. His cheeks burned with shame. He had already let everyone down once. Only a coward would entertain thoughts of running away, now, with everything that had happened. Some leader of the Party he was. He should have been there, before, and he had to be here now. He would make it up to them. He was not sure how, yet, but he would figure it out. That was what a Paladin was for, after all. He was never going to save the world like El or solve the puzzle like Dustin or be the muscle like Lucas, and he knew more than anything that he would never be what Will was to the Party. When Will went missing, all any of them could think about was finding him. When Will was possessed, everything had been about saving him. When Will moved away, the Party had almost fallen apart. Will was their center; Mike was sure of it.

When Will gave him that painting, he thought he finally figured out how he fit into the Party, what he could do for his friends that no one else could. The Heart. It was a nice enough though, but if that had all been a lie, maybe that meant he still had to find his own place in the Party, the thing that his friends needed him for. The Paladin. Maybe he still had a chance to become a leader, to support them and carry them through whatever happens next. If he could make the right choices this time, be where he was most needed. A gush of warmth flooded his chest, and he sat up straighter. We can fix this, he thought. We can make things right. It was one thing to say that to Will or to El, to make them feel better, but, for the first time in days, he allowed himself to feel it, too. They had not lost, yet. And this time, Mike would be there to see everyone through the darkness. Even if he was not what El needed this time, he could find a way to do better.

Mike slid open the back door of the van, but before he could jump out, Will gripped his shoulder. “Do you think your house is safe?” he asked. “Or do you think we should wait somewhere else?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said, “but what other choice do we have? We’re staying with El. We’ll have to go with Dr. Owens’s people eventually.”

A shadow crossed Will’s face. “I know that,” he said. “That’s not what I’m worried about.”

Jonathan leaned over from the front seat. “What is it?”

“What if they expect El to do this all on her own? What if, once we walk into that house, once we’re part of Owens’s plan, they don’t let us see her again? What if they take her away?”

Mike had to admit he had not thought of that angle. Dr. Owens had always helped them in the past. Even back in California, it had been El’s choice to go with him to the base in Nevada. She had been so ready to trust him that he had not bothered questioning his motivations.

“We have to trust El even if we don’t trust Owens,” he said. “She knows better than any of us what they’re capable of. If she thinks this is our best shot of beating Vecna, of saving Max, then we have to be on her side.”

“Mike is right,” Jonathan said. “El knows what she’s doing, and she’s the only one of us who can really fight this thing. Right now, our best way to help her is to follow her plan.”

Will let the silence hang for a moment, his brow furrowed as if in pain, his eyes shiny. He hesitated for so long that Mike began to wonder if he would insist they drive back to the cabin and never let El leave their sight, but after a while, he sighed and nodded his head. “You’re right,” he said and jumped out of the van next to Mike. “This was her choice.”

Together, Mike and Will made their way down the street with Jonathan and Argyle. They joined Nancy and Joyce at the driveway. The soldiers did not approach them or try to stop them. All they did was stare. But that was enough to set Mike on edge. He watched them suspiciously.

One of the soldiers addressed Joyce. “Ma’am,” he said, nodding curtly, “we’ve been expecting you.”

Mike scowled at him. It that was meant to be reassuring, he had failed. His ominous greeting only made the situation creepier. Mike reached for the door, but before he could open it, it was wrenched open in front of him. His mom stood in the open doorway, her blonde hair in a frazzled poof. A smile was plastered on her face, one Mike recognized as her ‘grin and bear it’ smile, the one that said she was deeply uncomfortable but would never say a word for risk of seeming rude.

“You’re back,” she said, in a voice filled with false cheer.

They all bundled into the living room where Ted was reading the newspaper in his recliner. He looked over the top of his paper as everyone joined him in the room. “I see our unexpected house guests are here,” he said.

As soon as they were all settled in, Karen started in on a long-winded explanation of the soldiers’ presence at their home and their evacuation plans. Mike already knew what was going on, so he simply sat on the couch, picking at his fingernails, only catching half of the words that were exchanged. Much to his parents’ dismay, they would be under a round-the-clock guard, and no one would be getting in or out until it was time for them to leave town under armed escort.

“They’re acting like we’re the President of the United States,” Ted muttered under his breath.

Karen cleared her throat. “I think I’ll start a pot of coffee,” she said. “This might be a long night for us.” She motioned to Joyce beside her. “Would you mind helping me in the kitchen?”

Joyce glanced quickly at her boys across the room before pushing herself up from the sofa. “Sure.”

Argyle took her spot and crashed down beside Mike. “I love a good cup of Joe.”

As they retreated to the kitchen, Joyce and Karen spoke in hushed tones. He could not make out what they were saying, but he knew it would be nothing good. Mike sighed and leaned back into the sofa. This was just great. His mom had pulled one of her classic moves to get a parent alone and away from the kids. It was like he was seven years old again, being left out of all the important ‘adult conversations,’ which were really just about whatever one of the kids had done wrong this time or town gossip. At this rate, she would be telling Joyce about his C in Spanish and all the nights he missed curfew playing D&D.

Ted piped up. “So...uh, you guys went on a road trip or something?”

Mike stared at his dad, wondering how someone could be so clueless. Finally he nodded. “Yeah, something like that.”

“Hmmm,” he hummed. “That’s exactly what your mother said.”

“Oh my god,” Mike muttered under his breath. Will met his eyes from across the living room and raised his eyebrows. He shook his head. This was typical.

Holly ran into the room grasping a dog-eared copy of The Last Unicorn, which had been passed down from Nancy. “Daddy! Daddy!” she squealed and threw herself into their dad’s lap. He groaned in mock pain and put an arm around her.

“What is it Hollybear?”

“Can we read another chapter?” she asked in her sweetest voice and stuck out her lip in a pout for good measure. She was not old enough to read it by herself, yet, so she’d been having everyone else read it for her.

“Anything for my little girl,” Ted said in his same dry voice, but it had a different quality when he spoke to Holly, as if the quiet disinterest was only a ruse, a dark cloud that could be pierced by a bright enough beam of sunshine. He used to speak like that to Mike as well.

He stayed seated for a few moments more, his hands fidgeting restlessly at his side, as his dad dove into narrating Holly’s book, doing his best to put on different voices for each character. Mike slapped his hands down on the sofa cushion and pushed himself up.

Ted fell silent and considered him for a moment. “Where are you going?”

“I need a glass of water,” he answered automatically. When he was younger, he used to stumble over his words trying to explain himself, but he knew by now that it was easier to just lie. It saved everyone a lot of trouble.

As he made his way down the dark blue-painted hallway, his dad’s voice in the living room faded, and he picked up the voices of the moms in the kitchen. He hesitated at the end of the hallway, hovering in the doorway of the kitchen just out of sight. In a snap decision, he pressed himself flat against the wall and listened, his mom’s voice reaching him first.

“...didn’t want to say anything in front of the kids, but something about that girl, Jane, the one with the shaved head, seemed strange to me.”

Mike’s heart dropped into his stomach.

“What do you mean?” Joyce asked shakily. “I don’t want to be rude.” Karen reassured her. “I know she’s been living with you. I can’t say I was surprised to find out Jim had a child with another woman, given his...reputation.”

Joyce made a strangled noise in her throat. Mike thought he might gag.

“I’m not even surprised he kept her a secret,” she continued. “I mean, what a scandal. And I stayed quiet about Mike taking an interest in her. I learned from Nancy that it’s no use trying to give them advice about who they date. Young love will do what it wants.” She took a long sip of coffee, as if considering her next words carefully. “But when I saw her...I don’t know. It was like I recognized her. I’ve been thinking about it all day. I know I’ve seen her before, somewhere.”

Mike’s head fell back against the wall, and he cursed silently. She was starting to figure things out. The last three years of his life had been kept so separate from his life at home that he had no idea what would happen if his parents finally found out the truth about everything that happened. He had no idea how things would change between them. Especially when it came to El.

Maybe it had been stupid to think the lie about Hopper getting custody of a previously unheard of daughter would hold up, but after El came back into his life, all he could think about was finally being able to see her without having to sneak out in the middle of the night and live a double life. At the time, it seemed like such an easy lie to tell. On paper at least, El really was Jane Hopper, daughter of Terry Ives and James Hopper. It was not such a stretch of the truth, but even though he did not want to accept it, he knew even then that it could be dangerous to give El a name in the world. One that his parents knew. Had he not yelled at Max for risking the same thing by taking her to the mall?

Not a moment too soon, he realized that the voices in the kitchen had gone quiet. He composed his face into a neutral expression and turned the corner, nearly knocking his mom over.

“Michael!” she said, her hand flying to her heart in surprise. In a split second, she had her own mask on, her face not revealing a single word of the clandestine conversation she had just been having. “What do you need?”

He pointed to the sink. “Water.”

Karen sighed. “You know where the glasses are.”

They left the room, and he leaned back against the counter, sipping his glass of water. He had not noticed before, but he was actually pretty thirsty. The drive through the desert had not done him any good. He was still wearing the same clothes and everything. They were already sweaty and grimy from a week in the pizza van, but now, they had the dust and the filth of Hopper’s cabin all over them as well. He picked at the turquoise jacket with his grubby fingernails. It would be a miracle to feel clean again. As the voices in the living room picked up again, he set down his glass and rejoined his family.

Karen stood in the center of the room, addressing everyone at once. “It’s been a long day for everyone,” she started, “and I think it’d be best for you kids to get a good night’s sleep for tomorrow. It’s going to be another long day.”

They spent a few minutes figuring out where all the house guests would sleep. Jonathan and Argyle got a set up in the basement, Joyce had the spare room all to herself, and Will ended up in Mike’s room. Mike had tried to protests this, but his mom shut him down before he could even get a word out.

“You shared all the time when you were little. He’ll be much more comfortable there than on the couch.” She turned to Will. “Right, Will?”

Will looked up, and his eyes met Mike’s. Mike looked away a moment later, his cheeks warm. He had never been shy around Will before, not like this. The lie about the painting must have bothered him more than he thought. He would have to take it out of the van tomorrow and figure out exactly what to do with it. His idea about the basement seemed silly, now, childish.

“That’ll be fine, Mrs. Wheeler,” Will said at last.

Nancy stood first, stifling a yawn, and the two of them followed her upstairs. At the top of the stairs, Nancy halted and turned to Mike. “You take the bathroom, first,” she said. “You stink.” She plucked at his jacket and wrinkled her nose. He jerked away with a scowl.

He brushed his hand over the spot she had pinched. Who was she to judge? She had not spent the last week packed into the back of a sweltering pizza van. Still scowling, he crossed the hallway to his room and stopped dead in his tracks.

His room was a disaster zone. He had completely forgotten how messy it had been before he left for California. He glanced over his shoulder self-consciously. His cheeks burned as Will took in the state of his room. Bending over quickly, he scooped up a mass of clothes from the floor, not bothering to figure out what was clean and what was dirty, and shoved it all into his open closet.

“Sorry about the mess,” he said, as he struggled to shove the closet door closed. “I haven’t had to share for a while.”

Will stared at him for a moment, and the heat in Mike’s cheeks doubled. Will laughed, suddenly, and sat down on the unmade bed. “It’s fine, Mike,” he said, laughing again. “Way better than where we’ve been sleeping.”

Mike did not know what to say, so he went back to picking up his mess, stuffing bits of paper and some of El’s old letters into one of his dresser drawers and kicking rubbish under the bed.

“You can shower, first,” Will said, breaking the silence. “I can set up some blankets on the floor.”

He started and looked up from his cleaning frenzy. “You can take the bed if you want.”

Will smiled and shook his head. “It’s your room. I’ll be fine.”

“Okay.”

With his room finally in a half-way decent condition, Mike hopped into the shower. It was a relief to wash off all the grime from his days of travel, but he was once again alone with his thoughts. Once again, his thoughts became fixed on one of the most unexpected things to happen in the past week: Will lied to him. They never lied to each other. It was an unspoken agreement they had had since the day they became friends on that swing-set. It was like breaking the law. No, it was worse than breaking the law, somehow. More personal. They were meant to trust each other, always. Nothing had really changed between them with this lie. But, yet, everything had. He did not know how he could ever bring this up to Will. Part of him did not want Will to know that he knew that Will lied to him. As if bringing it up would only make things worse, more real. As if there were something else there that neither of them wanted to acknowledge. He could not think of what that could possibly be, though. What could possibly be too much for them to talk about? They were best friends.

There was another thing bothering him, too. Something El said that he could not figure out either. I think you’ve been pretending, too. That was what she said. Pretending, he thought. Pretending about what? She had not told him what he was pretending about. He had been trying so hard not to lie to her anymore, after the fight they had last summer. Had he changed less than he thought?

Before long, his shower was over, and he changed into a pair of pajamas, brushed his teeth, and left the bathroom for Will to take his turn. He hoped he had not used too much of the hot water. He did not want Will to run out, and Nancy would probably kill him if she had no water.

He went back to his room and flopped down on the bed. A few minutes later, the water turned back on in the bathroom. He sat up and glanced over at Will’s sleeping arrangement on the floor. A handful of blankets spread out beside his bed and a spare pillow. It reminded him of when he slept on Will’s floor, all those months ago, when the Mind Flayer had taken hold of him and he needed looking after. He had not even had a pillow, then, resting his head on Will’s stuffed frog instead. Before he could change his mind, he pulled an extra blanket out of his closet and added it to Will’s make-shift blanket mattress. He did not want him to be uncomfortable.

Will’s dirty clothes were folded neatly at the foot of his so-called bed, and it struck Mike suddenly that he would not have anything clean to wear. He fished out a spare set of pajamas and a sweater from his dresser and left them outside the bathroom door so that Will would not have to walk around with just a towel around his waist. That would just embarrass both of them, he figured.

With that taken care of, he rifled around under his bed and pulled out his supercom. The walkie-talkie crackled to life, as he switched it to the channel the Party always used. “Dustin?” he said. “Dustin, are you there?”

Static filled the line until a response came. “Mike? What is it?”

“I’m back home, now. Will and Jonathan are at my house, too. We need to talk.”

“Yeah, I think we do.”

“Can you get here tomorrow morning?”

For a moment, there was only static. Then Dustin’s voice came through again. “I think I can do that, but Mike…” He trailed off, and his voice lowered to a whisper. “We’re being watched.”

“Yeah, I know,” he said, nodding to himself. “That’s part of what we need to talk about. A lot happened, today. Have you been able to reach Lucas?”

“He’s still at the hospital,” Dustin said. “His parents are there, too. I think he’s going to be there for a while.”

“Okay. We’ll bring him up to speed later,” he said. “See you tomorrow. Over and out.”

With the silence settled around him, the same anxious thoughts returned. He sighed and swung out of bed. He had stewed for long enough. He marched down the hallway and knocked on Nancy’s door. She pulled it open with a look of confusion.

“What is it?”

“Ummm...uhh.” He fumbled on his words. “Can I...talk…to you?” he asked. Will was usually the person he talked to about important things, but obviously that would not work for this situation. Sometime he went to Lucas or Dustin or even Max. But to ask Nancy for advice, he had to be truly desperate. This was his last resort.

Nancy hesitated at the door, and panic flashed through him at the thought of being turned away. He put his hand on the doorknob to keep it open. “Just for a couple minutes,” he added.

“Yeah,” she said, giving a half-smile. “Yeah, of course. Umm….” She swung the door open and moved aside. “Come in.”

He flopped down on her bed, his arms crossed over his chest, and she sat down beside him. “I think El broke up with me?”

“Oh,” Nancy said, surprise in her voice. “You think?”

“I mean, she did. She did break up with me,” he said. “But, I don’t understand what happened. What did I do wrong?”

“She doesn’t owe you an explanation, you know,” she said with a sigh. She lay back on the bed beside him. “Did she give you a reason, though?”

His thoughts drifted to the painting, but he decided not to mention it to Nancy. For some reason, it felt like something that wasn’t meant for her, something that should stay between the three of them. Not a secret, exactly, but private. “She said I was pretending,” he said. “I guess she didn’t believe me, all the things I said about...about how I felt. I guess it wasn’t enough. Or it was too late or the wrong time or something.” He rolled over on his side so that they were facing each other. “I told her I loved her.”

Nancy considered him for a moment. “Do you love her?”

He was taken aback. “Of course I do!” he said, suddenly defensive. “She’s amazing. She saved the world! She can do anything!”

“She knows all that, Mike,” she said. “We all think that about her. Maybe she wanted to hear something else. Something more personal.”

“Like what?”

“I can’t tell you that,” she said, rolling her eyes. “What do you like about her? Other than what you just said.”

His cheeks began to grow warm. “I don’t know…” he muttered.

“Come on, Mike! You’ve been dating for a year and a half! You have to be able to think of something. What do you do when you’re together?”

“We...we just hang out.” The heat in his cheeks grew more intense. This had been a terrible idea. He should have known Nancy would try to get to the bottom of things, always looking for a story. She was lousy at making anyone feel better.

Nancy rolled her eyes again. “What do you talk about?”

He sighed. “We don’t talk about much,” he said. “The music on the radio. The Party. Just...regular stuff.”

“Mike?”

“Yeah?”

“Maybe a break isn’t a bad idea,” she said. “There’s clearly some stuff you need to figure out.”

“So, you agree with her?” he said. “It was my fault?” He buried his head into the quilt on Nancy’s bed and groaned. “What is wrong with me? What is wrong with me!”

“There’s nothing wrong with you!” Nancy said. “You just...you need to think about what you actually want, what you’re actually looking for.”

“How do I do that?” he asked piteously, his voice muffled by the quilt.

“It sounds cliché, but when you know, you know,” she said. “That’s what it was like with Jonathan.”

Mike kept his head buried in the quilt for a little while longer, choosing not to speak. If anything, he had more questions now than he did when he came to Nancy for help. How was he supposed to know what he wanted? His brain did not give him directions to those kinds of things. The way Nancy described it, it sounded like he was meant to stumble around blindly until he chanced upon something that clicked.

A moment later, he realized that it was much quieter than it had been a few minutes ago. The water’s turned off, he noticed. Will was done with his shower, and it was time for him to go back to his room, lest anyone ask him where he had been. “The bathroom’s open, now,” he said lamely to Nancy and stood to leave.

“Hey, Mike?” she called, just as he reached the door.

“Yeah?”

“Don’t worry about it too much, okay?” she said. “There’s a lot going on, right now, and we’ll figure it out.”

“I know,” he said. He turned over his shoulder and smiled a little. “Thanks, Nancy.”

“Yeah,” she said and smiled back. “It was nice. Talking to you.”

“Goodnight.”

He hurriedly returned to his room, but Will was already there. Waiting for him, Mike thought, before shaking his head dismissively. Will was wearing Mike’s pajamas with the yellow sweater over top, as if he were trying to stave off the cold. His mom bought him that sweater from the GAP, said it looked nice on him, but he thought it made him look pale and sickly. On Will, it might as well have been a completely different sweater. It brought out the flecks of gold and green in his hazel eyes. In the dim light from the desk lamp, Will himself looked like he was made of gold, like he was glowing. He made an effort to look away, not wanting to be caught staring.

Will finally noticed he was in the room and smiled at him.

He rubbed his neck self-consciously. “Do you need anything?” he asked. “I could get you another blanket if you want.”

Will glanced down at the extra blanket Mike had already brought so quickly that he almost did not notice. “I’m fine. Thanks.”

Mike nodded and swallowed hard, his throat suddenly dry. If Will was not going to mention the blanket, then he would not either. He flipped off the light and climbed into his own bed. The room filled with the rustling of sheets, as they both settled in.

A deep silence followed, so heavy that Mike found himself holding his breath. The ticking of the clock in the hallway might as well have been gunfire. He turned on his side so that he was facing away from the side of the bed where Will lay on the floor. Mike jumped when the silence was broken by Will’s voice, though he barely spoke above a whisper.

“Mike?”

“Yeah?”

“Are we doing the right thing?”

“What do you mean?”

“Sending her back in there?”

The ‘her’ could only be El. “Hey, don’t worry,” he said. “If she says she can find Max, I believe her.”

“I don’t know,” Will said. “The last time she did this, she was looking for Billy, and we all almost died because Vecna spied back. She almost died two days ago. I don’t know if this is safe.” As Will burrowed deeper into his blankets, his voice became muffled. He whispered something under his breath that Mike did not think he was supposed to hear. “She needs help.”

...

Will opened his eyes in the dark. There was not a shred of light. No moon, no stars, not even the nightlight in the bathroom across the hall. Only a frigid emptiness, an endless black void. There was the quiet noise of water dripping and splashing, rippling out in the dark with no visible source of disturbance. He imagined himself being trapped beneath the ocean, a space beyond reality, miles of cold water pressing down on his shoulders.

“Mike?” he called out.

His voice echoed strangely in the void. A chill ran down his spine. He stood quickly, and instead of the shaggy carpet of Mike’s bedroom, his bare feet touched icy water. As he stepped down, something appeared in the distance.

A door.

A white door.

He moved towards it as quietly as he could, but despite his best efforts, the splash of each footfall echoed in the void, rebounded until it was louder than it ever should have been. The door grew larger as he approached, looming up out of the darkness like a pillar of marble, so white it seemed to glow against the gloom. A gleaming metal plaque was attached to the center of the door, but whatever had been written on it was gone, scratched out with something sharp, marring the otherwise pristine surface. With a trembling hand, he reached out and touched the center of the plaque, tracing one of its scars. As he did, the door opened silently before him, as though it had been waiting for him here, all this time. Although it made his blood run cold, he stepped across the threshold.

The void changed before his eyes, the darkness drawing together into the shape of a room. The door swung shut behind him, so quietly he did not notice it had moved until the handle clicked into place, making him jump. He stood before a small bed with pristine white sheets, stretched so tightly into place that there were no wrinkles. The floor was white as well, cold tile against his feet, and the walls matched. The room was cold and unfriendly, unfit for anyone to sleep in. The only bits of homeliness seemed to have been brought in from the outside, in what seemed to Will a futile attempt to change the nature of this place. A red blanket, faded to pink, was folded neatly across the end of the bed, the edges fraying with age. A desk of dark wood was crammed into one corner with a lamp patterned with stars. Papers were strewn across this desk, some with writing, some with delicate artwork created by a skilled hand. The harsh overhead lights were turned off, the only light coming from the glow of the lamp.

The door swung open again with a rush of air. Another boy passed through the shadow of the doorway and stopped short at the sight of him. A flash of surprise crossed the boy’s face, but it passed so quickly that Will wondered if he had imagined it.

“You’re here,” the boy said.

He seemed older than Will, but still a child. Blonde hair fell around his face in soft waves, turned to gold in the lamp light. His piercing blue eyes stayed fixed on Will’s. A shy smile rested on his face.

“Am I dreaming?” Will asked.

His smile grew wider. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

The boy held out his hand. Will hesitated and stared at him. It was the strangest thing. A moment ago, he had been brimming with terror, but now, he could not find a reason to be afraid. He felt safe here, in this place, with this boy. He was familiar in a way that Will could not place, like a half-remembered memory gone fuzzy around the edges. He took the boy’s hand.

“Come with me.”

The white door opened again without anyone needing to touch it, but the hallway behind was dark and unformed. When they stepped over the threshold, they were somewhere else entirely. His bare feet brushed against a soft bed of pine needles and fallen leaves. The air was cool, but a warm breeze stirred the leaves and carried a sweet, fresh scent. Spring. It took Will only a moment to place himself. The woods, the gravel drive, the battered green pinto parked in front of the run-down house.

Home.

His feet moved before he could think, taking him back toward his old house, the house he had grown up in and made a life in, but before he could take more than a few steps, the boy tugged on his arm and turned him back towards the trees.

“I have something to show you,” he said, pulling him along in the opposite direction of the house, deeper into the forest.

With each step, the presence of his childhood home faded in his mind, as if it became less real the further away from it he walked. He could not explain it, but he felt certain that this was what he should be doing. Following this boy into the woods was the right thing to do. In a moment, it became clear why. The trees drew back before him, leaning away to reveal their secret.

It was Castle Byers, as bright and solid as it had been when he and Jonathan first built it, that night in the rain. Like nothing ever happened here. Like nothing ever happened to Hawkins.

Like nothing ever happened to him.

The boy dropped his hand and followed him inside. Will did not have to crouch down to fit. It was as if he was a child again, truly transported to this past, and everything was the way it was supposed to be, even him. Small and innocent. Castle Byers was exactly the way he remembered it. The walls covered with his drawings. His sleeping bag and stuffed lion still in the corner next to the lamp. A pile of comic books next to them. Pictures of his friends covered every spare inch of space. The Party, with him all the time. Every single remnant of the time before.

The boy spoke spoke as if he had read Will’s mind. “It’s strange how a single moment can define a life. That something so terrible can happen it divides a person in half, who you were before and who you are after. Two separate beings.” The boy held Will’s eyes, and he could not look away. “Not everyone understands, but I think you do, Will,” he said. “So do I.”

“Who are you?” he asked, although he felt he already knew the answer. There could only be one answer.

The boy stroked his cheek, gently. His hands were ice cold. “I think you know my name already, Will.”

“Henry Creel.” The name echoed around him unnaturally, and as he said it, he became fixed to the spot, unable to move or breathe or think. Frozen in place, like a deer in headlights, staring down its own death.

Henry smiled again. “I think you should stay here,” he said. “I’ll find you again.”

Henry Creel stood and left him alone in Castle Byers, still rooted to the spot, the sheet over the entrance fluttering madly in a sudden gust of wind. But Will could not do as he was asked. He could not help himself. It was something beyond his control that brought him into Henry’s mind. Vecna’s was not the only power at work in this place, and Will was compelled to follow.

El’s descriptions had not prepared him for the true terror of Henry’s mind. Standing there was a violation. He broke out in chills, violently shivering in the blood-red mist, and the hair on the back of his neck stood up. Everything within him told him to run, to hide, to do anything at all, but he could not move. His limbs were frozen. The entire place was bitterly cold, radiating misery and fear. The air stank of death.

Once, when he was young, maybe five or six, his dad shot a raccoon in the backyard, blown a hole through its body with a shotgun. He had cried and asked his dad to bury it.

“Leave it,” his father said. “Something else will take care of it.”

Nothing touched that raccoon. Its body decayed where it fell, one last act of defiance against the man who killed it. The smell of its bloated body in the hot summer air was rancid. He could smell it in the house. In his clothes and his hair. It even followed him into his dreams, dreams of that raccoon’s glazed, dead eyes, still staring out of its bleached skull. The cold of this place should have lessened the stench, but the only thing in the air was death.

A flash of movement caught his eye. A bright blue blur, like a flash of lightning, stumbled through the crimson wreckage. He had the sudden image of a songbird, released from its cage after years of imprisonment. The entire world began to shift as the bright little bird flew towards him. The sky fell around them, massive segments of Henry Creel’s home raining down like meteors. Still he could not move, and still the bird flew. He was frozen in place as the darkness closed in, and he was certain that the entire place was about the fold in around them, collapse in on itself like a black hole and catch both of them in its wake.

But the ground remained firm, and he did not fall into the abyss. The little bird drew closer, and he saw that it was not a bird, but a person, someone else who had been trapped by Vecna’s gravity well.

She was close enough, now, that Will could take her in. Her face wild, blue eyes wide with fear. Mouth open in a silent scream. Her clothes stained as red as her hair. But he could not tear his gaze from those eyes. The terror in those eyes. The life in those eyes. She was a small animal swallowed whole by a monster, fleeing from its jaws.

He found his voice again in those eyes. They were the same as his eyes. “Max.”

The force of her nearly knocked them both to the ground, her breath panting in his ears. She gripped him tight on both arms, and her touch was like fire, the only thing warm and alive in this place.

“Run.”

Chapter Text

The Dream Warrior: Part Three

Max’s name hissed and echoed around her. The sound of Vecna’s voice sent a shock down her spine. Though there did not appear to be anywhere to go inside the great expanse of nothing around her, she did as she was told and ran in the opposite direction of the voice. Her feet splashed down in the freezing water, icy droplets stinging her skin.

As she ran, panic bubbled up in her throat. The void stretched endlessly before her, only black water and cold air that struck her lungs like needles with every breath. The frost crept in around her, breathing down her neck, the hiss of Vecna’s voice behind her and around her, ringing in her ears as an endless note.

She thought of El.

El, a child alone in this place with the monster hiding in the shadows, waiting to be found. El, who tried to save her. El, who was there just a moment ago, even if only as a memory, a fingerprint in the dust. The darkness holding on to a singular moment of hope.

A light flickered to life beneath her feet, and she stopped short, dropping to her knees in the shallow water. The light churned beneath the surface of the still pool, flashing in bursts of yellow sunshine. It came up to meet her, eager, expectant, as if it wanted to reach through the surface of the water and pull her through. Through to what, she did not know, but she took a deep breath and thrust forward into the water, not surprised when she fell through what, until moments ago, had been a solid surface beneath her feet. The light swallowed her whole and carried her away.

She fell onto a plush pink carpet, lightly scented with something sweet and flowery that Max struggled to place. The room was bright and spacious. A familiar golden light streamed in from a bay window strewn with belongings. A hairbrush and ribbons, makeup, a gilt mirror, a porcelain doll in a pink dress, and a white stuffed kitten. All as soft and flowery as the rest of the room. A little blonde girl in a frilly blue dress spun by on tiptoes and bare feet, wispy as a cloud. She was Chrissy Cunningham.

A woman with the same cotton candy blonde hair entered the room, and Chrissy fell still, her arms limp at her side. The woman, her mother, took Chrissy by the chin and brushed on a generous amount of cherry-red blush.

“Now the eyes,” her mother said and hovered over her with a black eyeliner pencil. As it touched her eyelids, Chrissy tried to pull away.

“Oh, stop flinching.”

“It hurts,” Chrissy said, in a delicate voice.

“Well, it wouldn’t hurt if you just held still,” she said and grinned at her handiwork. “You look gorgeous.”

“Do we have to do this every time?”

“This is how you win, remember,” she said and adjusted the bow on her daughter’s dress. “We talked about this last time. No more participation ribbons. We’re going for the trophy.” She straightened up and checked the gold watch on her wrist. “Now, get in the car. We’re running late.”

Her mother left the room in a hurry, leaving the door open behind her. Chrissy hesitated in the threshold, delicately poised on her toes, like a songbird about to take flight. She looked over her shoulder and caught Max’s gaze, her blue eyes ghoulishly magnified by the black outline.

“Oh, it’s you,” the little girl said matter of factly. Coming back down to earth, she held out her tiny hand to Max where she still sat on the perfect, pink carpet.

She took Chrissy’s hand and stood beside her in the open doorway. Chrissy’s grip tightened around her fingers with a strength that no real child possessed. She looked up at Max with wide eyes. “You can’t let him find you,” she hissed and pushed Max through the doorway.

For an instant, she fell through the void, timeless and silent, before a flash of deep blue light rushed up to meet her, another memory. She hung upside down, a seat belt strapped tight across her waist, boxed in by crumpled metal. Heat erupted around her like the breeze from an oven. It crawled over her skin and curled the ends of her hair. Acrid black smoke bellowed up from beneath her feet, quickly filling the cramped space. She tried to scream, but every breath burned in her lungs, and she could not catch enough air. Hot, white agony stabbed at her exposed skin, the palms of her hands, the flesh of her face, with curls of steam rising up from her own body as the flames erupted from the engine and climbed towards her.

The passenger door opened. Air rushed in, and the fire licked the soles of her shoes. Gleaming white arms found her, released her, and caught her as she fell. They pulled her from the burning wreckage.

She collapsed face down on the pavement, drinking in the cold night air. Choking coughs wracked her body, bringing tears to her eyes. She retched on the ground in front of her but brought up nothing more than a sickly, yellow bile that stung in her nose and the back of her throat.

Fred Benson stood above her, his arms hanging limply at his side. His scar dripped beads of dark blood down his pale face. He stared at her like she was ghost. “I’m sorry,” he said, his face twisting up. “I’m so, so sorry. I’m…” He broke off with a sob.

Max wiped her mouth with the back of her shaking hand and pushed herself to her hands and knees. She made a move to stand, but her legs folded beneath her as if they were made of tissue paper, so she began crawling away from the burning car, down the asphalt road, smelling of burnt rubber and gasoline.

“Wait!” Fred said and grabbed her shoulder with a bony hand, his grip like a talon. She was forced to look at him. “Tell Nancy...tell her this wasn’t her fault.”

She nodded, throat too raw to speak.

He pointed to a crack in the pavement, face grim. “You have to go,” he said. “You can’t stay here.”

With his words, the road split open before her, and she pitched forward into darkness, falling and falling, down through the crack in the void.

The palms of her hands struck damp concrete, the grit smarting her skin. A boy about Erica’s age dribbled a worn basketball beside her, the leather seams white and fraying. He stood at the chipping paint of the free-throw line, dribbled once, stepped back and shot. The ball sailed through the air in a perfect arc, dropping through the rusted, metal rim without touching the side. The tight curls of his short-cropped black hair ruffled in the breeze. It was Patrick.

He retrieved the ball and turned to face Max, but his brown eyes drifted past without seeing her, gazing out into the black night behind her. A dark purple bruise stretched across his right cheek, and his eye was almost swollen shut. A small, dark cut split his swollen lip. Footsteps came out of the darkness behind them. Max stood and turned.

A streetlight flickered to life in the darkness, illuminating a narrow side-street with another young boy walking down it, hands in the pockets of a comfortable winter coat, blonde hair slicked over.

“What the hell are you doing out here, man?” the boy—Jason—said, voice still high-pitched and soft with youth. He stepped closer, out of the halo of bright, white light and stared at Patrick’s face. “Are you okay?”

Patrick quickly turned back to the board, ducking his head. “I’m fine,” he said, taking a hasty shot. It hit the rim and bounced back. Jason caught it between his pink palms and held it under his arm.

“What the hell happened?”

Patrick shrugged. “Dude, it doesn’t matter. Stop worrying about it.” He made a move to walk away, then suddenly pivoted and rushed Jason, knocking the ball away from him. “Ha!” he said, dribbling away.

Jason just stood there, his hands back in his pocket.

Patrick’s smile slowly faded. “What, you don’t want to play?”

He frowned. “Why don’t you come back to my house? It’s freezing out here.”

Patrick shook his head. “Nah. I’m fine.” He took another shot, this one bouncing neatly off the backboard and through the hoop. “I need to practice anyway. I want to get on the Middle School team.”

Jason sidled over, his voice taking on a pleading tone. “Come on...my mom made cookies. And we could watch The Slayer. You love that movie.”

He hesitated, turned the ball over in his hands. Jason was hard to say no to, always had been. Once he had an idea, he kept at it, like a bloodhound on the scent. “Yeah, alright, sure.”

Jason grinned. “Great! Come on!”

Except Patrick did not follow as Jason passed through the glow of the streetlight and disappeared into the darkness. He stayed on the court with the basketball in his hands. “He’s not a bad guy, ya know,” he said at last. “I’m sorry, by the way.” He turned to look at Max, seeing her for the first time. “We were wrong about Eddie and his friends.”

She shrugged, unable to find it in her to be bitter toward a dead boy. “You think?” she said dryly.

He sighed, took another shot. This one dropped right in without a sound. He made it look as easy as breathing. “Is Lucas okay?”

Max thought back to that last memory. The last moment of her life, with Lucas. His voice, his arms around her. The way he faded away slowly and then all at once, melting like ocean mist in the sunlight. “I don’t think so.”

Patrick only nodded. “He’s not here, yet, though. That’s something.”

A gust of frigid wind sent the dead leaves skittering across the court. It carried the damp, rotting smell of leaf mold and decay, but there was something else beneath it. Something raw and bleeding.

Patrick felt it too and tossed the basketball in his hands. “It’s time for you to leave.”

With an expert flick of the wrist, he passed Max the ball. As the soft leather made contact with her hands, Patrick’s memory dissolved around her. She fell once more into the darkness of the void, passing through like a shadow of a thought.

The ground rushed up to meet her, and she slammed down on a familiar mottled, shag carpet. It was newer and softer than the last time she had seen it, probably cleaner, too. She took in the familiar sights of the cramped trailer: the shelves covered in coffee mugs, the baseball cap collection hanging from the off-white walls, the heavy orange-brown drapes covering the windows from floor to ceiling. The air hung with the scent of cigarette smoke and cheap aftershave. It was Eddie Munson’s trailer.

The realization hit her like a shock to the heart. She could not be here. It was not right. Everywhere else she had been, those people were dead. Chrissy, Fred, Patrick...maybe even herself, she thought with a shudder. Vecna’s four victims. There was no reason for her to be here, no reason for Vecna to have access to this place, this memory, unless...unless…

A pounding knock on the door made her jump, and she scrambled to her feet, half-expecting to hear Vecna’s voice on the other side.

But it did not come.

A door slid open at the other end of the trailer, and Eddie’s uncle—his name was Wayne, she remembered—shuffled out of what must have been his bedroom, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes even though it was the middle of the afternoon.

“I’m coming,” he muttered to himself. His eyes slid right past Max as if she were not even there. As Wayne Munson pulled open the front door, her heart sank because there was only one person who could be on the other side of that door, only one reason for this memory to be here, with her, in this place.

Eddie was younger than she had ever seen him before, younger even than she was now. His dark hair was buzzed close to the scalp, and he was skinny as a rail. He kept his face turned down, eyes fixed on his shoes. A younger Officer Powell gripped him by the shoulder and spoke in low tones that Max could not hear.

Wayne nodded to the officer and stepped down to put his arm around the boy’s shoulders. As soon as the door was closed, Eddie’s chin quivered, and hot tears ran down his face. He sank into his uncle’s arms, who had to bend over to hug him properly. Choked sobs escaped Eddie’s throat, and his shoulders shook.

They stayed locked in each other’s embrace for several minutes, Wayne patting Eddie’s back with a gentle hand. This was something Max had no right to see, and her cheeks burned as she watched the scene unfold before her. It was one thing catching a glimpse into a stranger’s life—she hardly knew Vecna’s three other victims—but it was something entirely different to witness a private, painful moment belonging to someone she considered a friend. She had no right to peek through the blinds and watch his life unfold.

Eddie and his uncle parted and exchanged bleary smiles. She closed her eyes, blinking away her own tears, but when she opened them again, they were gone. In their place hung the make-shift rope of sheets above the stained mattress, bathed in the red light of the gate in the ceiling. A steady trickle of dust from the Upside Down filtered into the trailer.

“Eddie?” she called. “Are you there? Eddie!”

She jumped past the mattress and ran down the narrow hallway of the trailer. The door to Eddie’s room was opened. She stopped short and hung on the doorway to look inside. “Eddie…” she trailed off.

He sat on the floor, absently fiddling with his rings. He twirled the one with the pig’s head around his finger, over and over again. This Eddie was no longer a child; he was the Eddie Max knew, and he looked terrible. Dark circles stood out under his eyes, and his face was drawn and haggard. His hands shook, and he could not stop tapping his foot nervously on the floor.

After a moment, he met her eyes and stared at her like an animal caught in a trap. “I guess we didn’t do so hot, huh,” he said at last. “So much for that plan.”

Max did not rise to his snark. That was her usual move, and look where it got her. Instead, she walked toward him, knelt down on the floor, and hugged him tight. He hesitated a moment before returning the embrace.

“What happened?” she asked when they broke apart.

“Those uh...those fucked up bats got me,” he said, a crack in his voice. “Pretty brutal.”

That sounded terrible, and she wondered how that could have happened. She saw the wounds on Steve’s stomach after he came back, and that was only from three of those things. But Eddie and Dustin were supposed to be safe, just decoys. That was the whole point of their job. This led her down a more disturbing line of thought. Something could have happened to Dustin, or one of her other friends. Was she moments away from walking into one of Dustin’s memories? One of Nancy’s or Steve’s?

“What happened to you?” Eddie asked.

She looked away, focusing on the sole of Eddie’s converse. She quickly told him what he had missed, being on the outside, about El and the mindscape, how powerful Vecna truly proved to be. He was nothing like anything they had faced before. “He knew what we were doing the whole time,” she said. “We never stood a chance.”

As she spoke these words, the air around them became close. A deep crimson fog rolled down the hallway from the gate and crept toward their feet. Bright red light streamed in through the windows like a spotlight. The temperature in the room plummeted, and Max shivered. Vecna knew where she was, and he was still following her.

Eddie put his hand on her shoulder, and they locked eyes. “Listen, Red,” he said. “There’s no shame in running, not right now.”

They ran back into the living room, skirting around the mattress on the floor. The fog spilled out of the gate in a waterfall of bloody mist. Together, they stood in front of the door to the trailer.

“I don’t know what’s out there,” Eddie said, “but there’s nowhere else to go.”

She nodded gravely, and they shared a heavy look. “See you on the other side.”

“See you on the other side.”

She opened the door and stepped out without looking back, but her luck, it seemed, had run out. Vecna’s mindscape stretched out before her. She might as well have climbed up through the gate and confronted him. What more could he do that he had not already done? She knew as soon as she stepped into that place he would see her clearly, if he could not already. This was his place, all of it was him, and she was the intruder, but like Eddie said, there was nowhere else to go, no other memory to shelter in. This was the end of the line. Every memory led to this place, the labyrinth of recollection branching out from the body of Vecna, the rot at the center of the world, from which each vine spread.

Max walked toward the center of the mindscape as if she were drawn toward it, her feet moving forward of their own accord. The pieces of the Creel house hovered in the air above her, wrapped with the choking tendrils of the Upside Down. If the red fog seeping into Eddie’s trailer was cold, it was freezing here. It reminded her of the bitter winters in Hawkins and how much of a shock it was the first year she lived here after California, like all the warmth had gone out of the world, never to return. The skeletal nakedness of the trees and the silence of the still winter air made her wonder in the deep stretches of the night whether life would truly return to this place, or if the darkness and death would go on permanently. This place felt the same way.

Vecna spoke inside her head, a whisper in the back of her mind. “You found you way back,” he said. “Do you not see, now, that you belong here?”

He sounded different, less present. A film was over his voice, like a fogged up window. Something had changed here since the last time she saw it, like El and her other friends’ efforts were not entirely in vain.

A deep laugh echoed around her. “You think I am less than I was?” he asked. “There is nothing any of you could do to harm me. You will soon see the truth.”

A chill ran down her spine, and her heart pounded in her chest. It was like her memory of the Snowball when Vecna invaded her mind, but El was not here this time to defend here, not here to make the darkness something that could be survived. When she spoke, she tried to shove her fear down and sound braver than she felt. It was something she learned from living with Billy. “If that’s true, come out and face me! What are you waiting for?” she screamed into the crimson sky.

Her words echoed within the mindscape, but silence quickly fell. She whipped around, searching for Vecna’s form, come to finish her off at last, but she could see nothing new. A bitter wind picked up, and the blood-red clouds began to swirl above her. The place where she stood was the eye of the storm. The fragments of the house picked up speed and followed the motion of the descending funnel cloud, filling the sky around her with flying debris. She ran toward the peak of the mindscape, hoping she could shelter from this new threat among the twisted towers of vines clustered around the staircase of the Creel house. It was the only thing she could think to do.

As she ran, the storm followed her, picking up vines from the ground and whipping them into the sky. She fell to her knees as she dodged a flying piece of the house and struggled forward once more. She was steps from reaching the staircase when the ground beneath her feet began to pitch. It shifted at a staggering angle and threw her backwards. She scrabbled for a foothold on the slick ground, as she slid toward a crack in the earth that opened up behind her.

“Shit!” she screamed and reached for the end of a long, trailing vine. She grabbed it with both hands and pulled herself back up the slope.

She jumped over to level ground and fell to her knees, panting hard. Although this part of the mindscape was still flat, the ground beneath her hands shook like an earthquake. The whole place was in motion. A flash caught her eyes, and she looked up in surprise at a beacon of light that appeared suddenly in the sky towards the hazy edge of the mindscape. She could not run forever, but like Eddie told her, she was running now.

She slipped in one of the crimson pools, sliding to her knees in the thick, oily liquid. The stench burned in the back of her throat. A section of the house smashed to the ground beside her with the sound of crashing glass. She struggled to her feet and kept running, making for the bright, golden light.

The closer she got, the clearer it became that this was a living sunbeam, a figure bathed in light. For a moment, she convinced herself that it was El come back to save her by some miracle. The brilliance of the light obscured the figure from a distance, but as she got closer, she saw, to her surprise, that it was Will.

Another section of the house fell before her, knocking her to the ground again and blocking Will from view. She rose to her feet one more time and struggled onward. The light surrounding Will faded until they were just two kids, trapped in the same nightmare.

“Max,” he said, just as she reached him, and his voice was music.

She grabbed him by the shoulders, struggling to speak for the intensity of the moment. She managed one word.

“Run.”

They held onto to each other’s arms, leaning against each other, as they struggled into motion. They darted away into the outskirts of the mindscape, where the landscape faded away into darkness, the influence of Vecna lessening with each step. The walls of reality closed in around them, encasing them in a dark tunnel.

They kept running, the noise of the other’s heavy breathing and labored footfalls the only sound in this place. A new light beckoned to them from the end of the tunnel, and they stepped through into a new memory, a new landscape that their minds formed together. Mike’s basement, a place they shared, as friends, a place they both felt safe, though Max would never willingly admit that to Mike.

The moment they were safely away, they threw themselves into each other’s arms in a tight embrace. He was warm and solid. He was real. Will was really here.

“We’ll be safe here for now,” she said, when they finally broke apart, “but not for long.”

Will ran his thumb down the length of one of her braids, as if he too could scarcely believe she was solid. “How am I here?” he asked. “How did you find me?”

“I think you found me,” she said, thinking again of her most recent memory of El. But how Will had managed the same feat, she did not know. There was something else she needed to know, something that terrified her. “Will,” she started, her voice cracking. “Am I dead?”

He shook his head and kept a tight grip on her hand. “You’re in a coma,” he said. “El kept your heart beating, but she couldn’t find...you.” He looked her up and down. “Your mind wasn’t there.”

“Because I’m here.”

“What is this place?” he asked. “I was dreaming and then...We were just inside Henry’s mind, but...this is something different.”

“He’s still here, but, no, this isn’t a part of him.”

“It’s us, isn’t it?” he said. “We made this place. This is like a memory.” Max nodded. “I think so,” she said. “But, I don’t think we’re really outside Vecna’s mind. I think...I think we’re all trapped inside him. Everyone’s he’s killed. Chrissy and Fred and Patrick. Eddie.” She hesitated before she said his name. “It’s like when I first met you guys, and the shadow monster got you. You were you, but you were also it. We’re still us, but as long as we’re here, we’re him, too.”

“Max, listen to me. We’re going to get you back. We’re going to save you. You just have to hold on, okay.” He was slipping away, his hands drawing away from hers despite how desperately she tried to keep hold. The dream was ending, and he was waking up. “Just hold on! El’s gonna find you!”

“No!” she cried. “You can’t let her come back here! It won’t work! He’ll find her!”

A shadow of doubt crossed Will’s face, but before he could respond, he blinked out of existence, fading back into the waking world from whence he came.

“Will!” she cried, but he was gone. She was alone. “Shit,” she muttered to herself.