Chapter Text
“Oh my god, Dungeons and Dragons has gunslingers?”
Percy’s not sure how he ended up sharing the backseat of a horseless carriage with an excitable preteen, but he figures it’s got something to do with a Plane Shift that, apparently, went horribly wrong.
“Stop asking the nice and injured possibly insane man about the fantasy guns,” the young man in the front seat grits out, veering wildly right to avoid colliding into what the boy had called a demodog, “and call Hopper already Dustin god-fucking-dammit—”
“Possibly insane,” says Percy, a little bit offended and a lot unhappy, what with the pain shooting up his leg from where one of those demodogs attempted to maul him. “I was handling the situation until the two of you waded into the fight!”
“We kinda had to,” says Dustin, who seems supremely unfazed, “we’re like, the experts on the Upside Down here.”
“I’m sorry,” says Percy, “what?”
--
So.
The gunslinger.
Dustin’s not entirely sure how the guy somehow tripped into a nest of demodogs, let alone how the guy tripped into their world at all if he keeps talking about the world of Dungeons and Dragons like it’s real, but he has a feeling it’s got something to do with a spell gone horribly, terribly wrong. That’s always how these things start, in his admittedly limited and mostly fictional experience.
Anyway: so. He and Steve had been patrolling around the outskirts of the woods, because after last year’s bullshit with the Mind Flayer, they’d all decided that it would probably be for the best if they kept an eye out for anything that smelled even vaguely like the Upside Down. Or, well, Hopper had decided, and the rest of them had taken his decision to the logical extremes.
Technically, Dustin shouldn’t be tagging along tonight. But, shit, tomorrow’s Saturday, and all his homework’s done, and he’s not exactly going to let Steve go after demodogs alone, now, is he.
And demodogs there were! Demodogs and some guy shooting at them with a really big gun, which apparently kept them at bay. The guy had looked a little frazzled, but he’d been holding his own, and then a demodog had gotten the drop on him and knocked him off his vantage point.
And that’s how Steve and Dustin ended up with a weird guy, his huge gun, and his injured and bloody leg in the backseat of Steve’s car. The guy’d been unconscious at first, and Dustin and Steve had a frantic conference about him and his gun and his stuff and what if this was some kind of trick by the Mind Flayer—
“A mind flayer?” the guy had said when he stirred awake. “Those things were being controlled by a mind flayer?”
“You know what a mind flamer—” Steve had started.
“Flayer,” Dustin had corrected.
“Flayer is?”
“Of course I damn well know what a mind flayer it is,” the guy had snapped, “I had to fight some!”
Dustin had, predictably, freaked out.
So here they are now: Steve, Dustin, and their weird new friend, careening down the road and running over a couple demodogs along the way. It’s like, the best fucking day of Dustin’s life, demodogs aside, learning that somewhere in a different universe, mind flayers as he knew them before the Upside Down happened are not only real, so is everything else in Dungeons and Dragons.
Then a bear runs out in front of them, and Steve swerves wildly to the side.
“Fuck!” he yells, as they skid to a stop. “What the hell, what in the goddamn hell—”
“Right,” says the guy, pressing on the seatbelt and trying to clamber out of the seat, “I know that bear—”
“Whaddaya mean, you know that bear?” says Dustin, alarmed, just as an arrow embeds itself into Steve’s windshield. Steve makes a small, terrified whimpering sound, eyes wide, and Dustin immediately yanks his door open and clambers out to see a woman, with a bowstring pulled taut, on top of the bear.
“Who are you?” snarls the woman, as Steve also clambers out. “And what the hell is going on?”
“Lady, why the hell are you on a bear,” says Steve, just as weird guy very carefully pulls himself out of the car.
“Vex!” says weird guy, with a palpable relief in his tone.
Weird lady, apparently named Vex, lowers her bow and says, incredulous, “Percy? Where were you? And where’s everyone else gone?”
--
Steve’s having the weirdest night of his life.
Or, you know, one of the weirdest nights of his life, anyway. He’s got Dustin in the backseat, happily chatting up a weird and probably-not-nuts guy with a large gun and fancy clothes, and a very lovely woman in the front seat with pointy ears and now a bear in her fancy necklace, pulling an epic action movie move and fucking shooting arrows at the demodogs trailing behind them.
One arrow gets set on fire.
“So cool,” breathes Dustin, craning his neck to see. At least he’s enjoying this. Steve’s just trying to keep them all alive and uneaten by demodogs, which means going as fast as he can without possibly getting Vex-or-whoever seriously injured because he didn’t notice a sign in her way, or something.
“You still haven’t explained just what those things were,” says Percy-or-whatever.
“Demodogs,” says Steve. “They like eating people and cats. Sometimes cow.” He risks a glance at the rearview mirror, and sees the last of the demodogs beginning to fall behind.
“Steve!” says Dustin.
“Plenty of things enjoy eating people and cats and sometimes cow,” says Percy. “You’re going to need to be more specific.”
“They’re creatures from—you’d know it as the Vale of Shadows,” says Dustin, and Steve can imagine his eyes are just twinkling with delight. “We call it the Upside Down here.”
“Apt name,” says Percy.
Vex squirms back into her seat. “All right, now that those are taken care of,” she says, “where are we? And where are you taking us?”
“Hawkins, Indiana,” says Dustin. “We’re taking you to a hospital.”
“Out of the fucking woods, that’s where we’re going,” mutters Steve. Fucking demodogs. Fucking whatever the fuck these people are. Fucking February. God, he hopes Nancy and Jonathan are at least having a better time than he is. Probably they’re making out in the backseat of Jonathan’s car at the drive-in.
His gut twists oddly around, at the thought of it. He shoves that ruthlessly down. He’s not going to think about Nancy, or Jonathan, or the complicated tangle of emotions the both of them have tied him up in since last year. He’s not.
And then Vex says, “Percy, dear?”
“Yes?”
“What happened to your leg?”
Percy shifts a little in his seat. “It’s a very long story,” he starts.
“He almost got eaten by a demodog,” Dustin says, helpfully, shortening the whole story into seven totally inadequate words. “We saved him, though,” he adds, which is still not adequate, but Steve will let it slide. There’s no way anyone can really summarize what the hell happened tonight in a satisfactory manner, and Steve should know. He’s been spinning stories in his head for the nurse since they loaded Percy into his backseat, and figuring out how to explain everything to the Chief since Vex’s arrow broke his windshield.
Seriously, who the fuck uses a bow and arrow these days?
“I wouldn’t have needed saving if neither of you had waded in,” Percy tersely says, which, rude of him. Probably understandable, Steve will realize later, owing to the leg and all. “For so-called experts, you made some very amateur mistakes.”
“Hey,” says Steve, pride bristling at Percy’s biting words, “between the three of us, we’re the ones who’ve fought those things before. If anything, you’re the amateur.”
“I beg your pardon—”
“We have very different fields of expertise,” says Dustin, quickly, grabbing hold of Percy before the guy can lurch forward to kick up an argument that Steve does not have the time or energy for, “but for what it’s worth you were doing really good until that demodog tried to maul you.”
“Really,” says Vex, surprised and grateful to Dustin anyway despite Percy’s words, and underneath Steve can hear a thread of worry, for the weird and tetchy guy in his backseat. “Thank you, ah—”
“I’m Dustin, and that’s Steve,” says Dustin. “Are you an elf? What’s Percy?”
“I’m human,” Percy supplies.
“Half-elf,” Vex corrects, and this is now officially the weirdest night of Steve’s life. Counting the one where he was in the Upside Down.
He drives on.