Chapter Text
“Alright, care to explain why everyone keeps dying?” Jonathan said as he burst through Steve’s front door "Because now I have no parents, no brother, no friends, no anything!” Steve turned the corner and said “Well I’m sure you’re used to the no friends part. Glad to see I’m not on that list. Oh yeah, and Dustin said some weird theory about how our whole world is fake and the only way out is suicide but he had no real evidence so I chose not to believe him but now he’s dead as well. So maybe his theory was correct but it’s highly unlikely.” Jonathan thought about it for a second. If Dustin had been right - that would make sense. But there was also no way he was right. “Yeah,” he said, “Total bullshit. There’s no way that he’s right. No way.” Steve nodded and said “Wow, we finally agree on something.”
Nancy grabbed Robin’s arm before she could take another step and said “Don’t step on the vines, remember?” Robin nodded and hopped carefully over it. Dustin sighed “She’s going to get us killed at some point. Especially since there’s lots more demos than in the original upside down.” The three of them had been walking for a while - trying to find some place to stay. So far, they hadn’t had any luck whatsoever. All they had done was narrowly escape a couple of demogorgons and listen to Robin rant about random things. It was better than her stepping on a vine, but that was probably going to happen at some point anyway. Then someone stepped out of the trees. All three of their jaws dropped when they realised who it was. “El,” Dustin said - too shocked to think of anything else to say. “Hi,” she said.
“This is where I live,” El said as she pointed towards a house that she had rebuilt. It didn’t look like the damages were too bad before she patched it up, but it definitely looked like it was hard to do. But she did have a while to make it. The four of them walked inside and were amazed at how she had cleaned the place up. Broken chairs had been rebuilt, couches with holes in them had been done up, it looked like it could just be a normal house in some ways. “That is my food supply,” El pointed towards a bunch of boxes “And that is my water supply,” She pointed at a couple more boxes “I am running low on water so I need to go get some more. The taps don’t work so I have to find it from outside. Dustin, I will teach you where I find it, let's go.” She walked out the door and Dustin followed behind her. Robin looked around confused and said “Wait, there’s water here?”
“Be careful in the woods, that’s where most of the demogorgons roam. It is not a nice place to be,” El said as she led Dustin towards her water supply. Dustin nodded and kept following her. She halted to a stop and said “Here it is.” In front of them was a giant lake - the water seemed alright to drink and there were no vines inside at all. It was quite abnormal in the world they were in.
“Max, I know something's wrong. You have to tell me or it will just get worse,” Lucas said. Max turned around and felt the frustration building up in her “Nothing is wrong!” She yelled “Can you stop pretending like I'm broken or something! I'm completely Now will you shut up about it!” Lucas stared in shock for a second before attempting to defend himself “I never said that! You just look like something's bothering you and I don’t want anything bad to happen to you.” Max felt herself lose complete control of her body and felt the overwhelming urge to attack Lucas, to hurt him, to kill him. She pushed the thought away and regained control over her body. She still decided that she wouldn’t tell him. Surely it would just go away on its own. And even if she did tell him - why would he want to know that. He’d probably just be scared of her.
“So they would’ve made it out right?” Mike asked
“Yeah, they said they would,” Will replied
“Well, what if it wasn’t actually Robin and Nancy on the other end? What if it was just a coincidence? Or maybe they didn’t actually believe us. Or maybe we were wrong and they both just actually died!”
“Mike, I know for a fact that we aren’t alone in here.”
“Why?”
Will pointed at the ground where footprints could be seen “Look, those aren’t ours. That means there’s other people here. We can go home for the night and keep searching tomorrow. Ok?”