Chapter Text
“What the hell?”
Billy grabbed the edge of the hospital door and stared out at the parking lot. He paused, rubbed his eyes, and stared again at the giant leafy trees that dotted the former huge expanse of concrete. Chunks of rubble pushed up by roots littered the area, and cars were parked haphazardly wherever they could squeeze in. Vines had grown around some of them, and a tree had actually grown through one truck. The few vehicles that seemed operational were parked a respectful distance from the biggest trees.
A nurse bustled by, looking harried, and spied Billy lurking in the doorway. He’d found some clothes that fit in the closet in his room (who would have put them there?), but hadn’t been able to get the damn plastic bracelet off his wrist. His pocketknife had been missing since…
His mind skittered away from being yanked backwards down the stairs, of a sickening touch and a cold sensation slithering into his mind, manipulating him like a puppet.
“Are you all right?” the nurse asked, pausing at the desk, a clipboard in her hand.
Billy nodded automatically and tightened his hand on the door, getting ready to push off if he had to. His chest and sides ached, but distantly. He hadn’t been able to look at himself in the mirror, but his hands had skimmed ropy scar tissue on his torso when he’d pulled the cheap t-shirt over his body. He shouldn’t have been alive.
“Well, that’s good.” The nurse came over to him, examined his bracelet without touching him more than was necessary, and nodded. “Things have been unsettled lately, and, well, it’s just good to see someone up and about. Let me get your records, dear.”
She turned to go back to the desk. Billy was gone before she came back.
Hawkins was green, green as California. Trees grew everywhere, huge oaks and maples that hadn’t been here before he’d- Before he’d crashed the Camero. More trees. More vines. Quiescent vines, not long tendrils of alien flesh looking to-
Billy kept walking. The streets were still clear, even if every yard sported a new tree and a few houses had one poking up through the roof like a chimney. A couple houses sported thatched roofs, like in pictures of England he’d seen a few times on TV and in history textbooks. Cars were parked along the street, some all covered in vines. The weather had a bite of coolness to it, and some of the trees were starting to turn yellow and orange and red. How long had he been asleep? The trees were big. Billy would have been old and dead and gone before those trees could have grown up where they were. He didn’t remember much about that trip to the redwood park as a kid, but the teacher’s explanation of “what these trees had seen in their long lives” had stuck for some reason.
“What the hell?” he muttered again.
People were seemingly trying to go about their business, taking out trash, washing windows, driving to and from work or on errands. No one was mowing their lawns, though, and every house was sporting a wild expanse of long grass and wildflowers. A dog romped around happily in a fenced-in yard, chasing butterflies, its head poking up out of the grass like a dolphin breaching the surface of the ocean.
A bicycle bell interrupted his wandering, and he saw those kids, Max’s nerd friends, riding on a side street. One had what looked like a staff, another what looked like a damn bow and arrow. And… did one of them have a freaking sword? Max was with them, skateboarding for all she was worth, red hair visible as she waved a knife that had to be a good foot and a half long, yelling encouragement as the kids tore down the street.
What the hell was Max doing with a knife like that? It definitely hadn’t come out of Neil’s house, and not out of Billy’s room either; he never carried anything he couldn’t hide in a hurry. And she shouldn’t be carrying it like that, she was going to end up stabbing herself or someone else waving it around like a damn baton!
But his voice caught in his throat as Max and her friends reached the end of the block and turned the corner. He suddenly remembered her at the sauna, at the mall, trying to talk to him, trying to get through to him, whatever might have been left of him under that thing that had oozed its way into his veins.
He flattened a hand along his shirt (put there by who?) feeling the ridges of his healed scars where It had grabbed him. How was he even alive?
Maybe he wasn’t. Hawkins looked a little like California and Indiana had gotten mixed up, and wouldn’t that be something he could be dreaming or hallucinating? That made a hell of a lot more sense than anything else.
He stared down the street where Max had gone, then turned the other way, towards where Neil’s house was supposed to be. No one was looking at him. He was alone.
Maybe he was still dead.
Billy stumbled a little over the uneven streets, partly displaced with tree roots and cobblestones where the asphalt had worn away, and tugged the jacket that had been in the hospital closet a little closer around him as he walked the last few streets to home. The house was at the end of the block, lawn overgrown like the others, a tree taking up most of the back wall, vines wrapped tight around the garage. The Camero, dusty but whole, damage repaired (how? who? when?), was crouched by the curb. Billy couldn’t see Neil and Susan’s bedroom window from the street, but he wondered if it had been fixed yet. The memory of chill alien tendrils slithered through his mind, having whispered to him that it needed fuel, needed to feed, to grow. It had still sometimes given Billy a choice, or at least the illusion of one. And he’d given into its promise in a flash of searing-hot revenge, sending it after the one whose history of pain was written on Billy’s bruised flesh and healing bones, wrapped around his memories in control and fear and hatred.
His only small consolation was that he’d sent the thing after Neil when he was sure Susan would be gone. She and everyone else in Hawkins would fall to it eventually, but he’d spare her for a little while. He’d sent It after Neil when he’d been sleeping, yanking him out of his bedroom like he’d done to Billy whenever Billy had managed to anger him just by existing.
That flash of hot anger had been the last of the heat he’d felt inside until he’d felt Eleven pulling the alien thoughts from his mind for a moment, letting him turn and face the monster and try to save someone, somehow. And he’d felt justified; he’d die facing it, that was only fair for what he’d done.
The house was dark, and no one moved within. He tentatively moved around to the kitchen window and looked in to see the open cabinet doors and cleared-out shelves, the missing furniture and food. Max couldn’t be living here. Susan couldn’t be either; she kept things neat, like Neil had liked them. Maybe It had gotten her when Billy’s mind had been frozen in fear. Maybe she’d run when Neil had gone missing. God, he hoped so. At least one of them would have had the guts to run away.
He staggered back around to the front, something in him finally accepting that as bizarre as everything was, this wasn’t a hallucination. He wouldn’t have hallucinated someone getting away, getting out, getting free. His imagination just couldn’t have encompassed that, and he was sure his brain would have rejected it.
So this was real. Everything had happened. Neil was gone. Susan was gone. Hawkins looked like it had taken a walk on the wild side. Max was running around with a giant knife.
He owed her a free shot at carving out his heart. He owed that to her for what he’d tried to do. What he’d failed to do.
Tears blurred his eyes, and he sucked in a breath to keep his emerging sob quiet; he was a past master at that. Then he rounded the corner and stopped dead, staring and blinking at an image that refused to change.
It was stupid. It was ridiculous. It was something out of the cover of Max’s Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper.
It was a damn pearly white horse-thing with a spiral horn and it was standing right next to his car. The sight galvanized him out of his self-pitying stupor and into doing something.
“Get out of here! Go!” he shouted, trying to not sound as hesitant as he felt. He’d never seen anything bigger than a dog up close since he’d been a tiny kid who didn’t know better, and the animal was taller than his Camero. It snorted and tossed its mane, shining white and iridescent in the early morning light, and Billy would have laughed at the way it seems to preen like a shampoo model on TV if it hadn’t been blocking the way to his driver’s-side door.
He took two steps closer, and it didn’t run away. Didn’t even step away. Stayed still, stayed real. There was nothing about it that was anything like the crazy horror-show crap he had endured, nothing that made him cold or put his teeth on edge or stabbed into his brain with needle-sharp alien thoughts.
It whickered softly, and it smelled like flowers and fresh air. He put out his hands, meaning to push it, and it didn’t run away. It was smooth. Warm. The mane poured over his hand, and it reminded him of his mother’s hair.
His throat closed, and he tried not to choke. One hand balled into a fist, and he wanted to pull it back and punch away his problems, show he wasn’t weak. It whickered again, curved its neck, putting its chin on his shoulder, laying its soft cheek against his face. The horn was glowing, and he could feel the light on his head like warm sunlight, like California dawn, not like the chilly fall mornings of Indiana.
Something choked him again, too much trying to get out at once. He knew what this was; Mom had read him a fairy tale book a couple of times, before Neil found it and burned it on the stove, saying, “Are trying to turn the boy into a fag?”
She left not long after that. Never came back.
It tucked its chin, pulling him close, like an embrace. Innocents. Unicorns protected innocents. He tried to choke out a bitter laugh into its neck at the idea that he was innocent. He was a two-faced shit sandwich who let his body and mind get hijacked by some alien monster, and those were only the tip of the crappy iceberg of bad decisions and worse actions he had done in his life. He’d hurt people for no damn reason… He’d killed his own father, Susan was gone, Max had found some other family…
The warmth on his face increased, and he pulled back, face wet, to look into the deep purple eye nearest him. He suddenly remembered another fact: unicorns protected virgins, and that was almost enough to get him swinging. But the unicorn just pulled him close again, warmth against the cold, and he realized he didn’t care, because it had come for him.
After all this time, someone had come for him.
He put his arms around the unicorn and let a river of unshed tears fall as his protector stood against the cold of the world for him.
Billy wasn’t sure how long he stayed there, but it was long enough for the shadows to grow longer, for his eyes to be sore from crying. The unicorn had gently let him go, but Billy hadn’t left. He lifted his gaze in wonder, staring at the deep purple eye in front of him, and stroked the silken neck. When was the last time he’d touched any animal at all? Probably ten years or more. But Valeria didn’t run away; she wasn’t some petting zoo creature who’d stand for anything as long as she got her cracked corn-
Wait.
“Valeria?” he asked out loud. She nodded her head, neck warm under his hand. He didn’t know how he knew. It wasn’t like some voice had talked in his head, or she’d spoken out loud. But he knew, and she had told him.
Well, that wasn’t the weirdest thing he’d seen, not by a long shot.
“How do I know that?” he whispered. Valeria nuzzled him and just bobbed her head as if nodding yes. He turned to stare into her violet eye, everything falling away for a minute. Then he blinked, coming back to himself, and realized that the sun was definitely lower in the sky. He had a sudden desire to check out the house again, to see if there was any clue to… anything, and steeled himself to walk through the front door. It wasn’t even locked, though the lock looked… old. Old-fashioned, rather. Bigger, simpler, with large black iron plates and a latch instead of shiny brass, and varnished wood instead of weather-proofed aluminum. No leaded glass window inset at all. He shoved the heavy door open and stepped inside, Valeria coming to stand in the doorway as he slowly moved through the house. The place looked odd. Mixed-up. Neil’s armchair was in the same place, but now made of leather instead of upholstery. The sofa was now a padded bench. Plaster walls were now paneled wood, and a fireplace was sitting right where the TV used to be. Billy drifted into the kitchen, seeing the linoleum patterns on the now-wooden floors, wood counters with the color of the old Formica. Shelves holding a few stoneware dishes, drawers holding a couple wrought-iron utensils. It was like someone had taken his house and one of those fantasy movies and smashed them together.
He slowly moved towards the bedrooms. Neil’s clothes were still in the wardrobe, but most of Susan’s things were gone. Max’s posters were now hand-printed playbills and paintings, old-fashioned-looking, but still with the same band logos, the same movie titles and actors, though looking hand-drawn instead of photographed. He drifted to his own room, seeing Valeria outside his window, and laughed mirthlessly at the alteration of his own posters, and the absolute absurdity of his prize stereo and music collection now being some kind of lute and a heap of sheet music on crackling sheets of parchment.
His fingers twitched and he stopped laughing when he realized that he was pretty sure he knew how to play the lute, even though he’d never seen one outside pictures.
Billy moved back to Max’s room, poking very tentatively into the wardrobe, seeing a lot of her clothes gone, but not everything. He’d seen Max, but where was Susan? He didn’t have much to do with her, but he hoped Max still had her mom…
He retreated back to his room and dug into a hiding place he’d found in the back of his nightstand. His knife was still there, though now it was more like a dagger than when he’d last seen it, and in a leather sheath to boot. He blinked at it, but his initials were still engraved on the hilt just like he remembered. He slid the sheath onto his belt, hesitated, and grabbed a backpack (more leather and canvas than nylon it should have been) from the closet. He shoved in the lute and sheet music, then left the house, closing the door behind him as he rejoined Valeria.
“So why does it look like Ladyhawke smashed into Hawkins?” Billy asked out loud.
“Billy?”
He whipped around, suddenly noticing Harrington at the end of his driveway, his hair at maximum height, out of that stupid sailor suit he’d been wearing during most of the summer and now wearing a button-down shirt and black jeans. He stared at Billy like he was something entirely new, then blinked gave a quick, nervous smile, eyes darting over him.
“Holy hell, it’s really you! They weren’t sure you’d ever wake up. Are- Are you doing all right?” Harrington looked weirdly glad to see him, considering Billy had been trying to kill him (trying not to kill him, but couldn’t) the last time they’d met.
“I guess…” Billy was distracted, because on Harrington’s belt was a leather sheath for what had to be a sword, the bright silvery hilt glinting in the sun.
Harrington looked distracted as well, staring at Valeria with his jaw starting to sag. He closed his mouth as his eyes darted between Billy and the unicorn, speculation in his eyes as he walked forward slowly. Billy and Valeria held their ground as he came within conversational distance, staring at the hilt on Harrington’s belt.
Harrington followed his eyes and shrugged a little sheepishly. “Yeah, it’s a sword. Things are a little weird around here. Weirder. I mean, okay, a lot weirder.”
Billy clenched his fist a little, wanting to shake a damn answer out of Harrington instead of a bunch of babbling. “How damn weird? How long was I out? What happened?”
“Are you… you again?”
“Far as I can tell.” Billy shrugged and looked away, feeling a deep stab of shame.
“Yeah, sorry, that was…” Harrington trailed off and shook his head. “If you’ve got a unicorn with you, you’ve gotta be all right.”
Before Billy could ask what that meant, Harrington kept talking.
“Right… So…” Harrington took a deep breath. “Eleven thought she got burnt out trying to stop the Mind Flayer at Starcourt Mall, but it turns out that with what the Russians were doing below the mall plus what El and you and the Mind Flayer were doing inside the mall, when El tried to push her powers to the max she ended up cracking like… a gap between worlds? But not the Mind Flayer’s world. She ended up opening another door by accident when Joyce and Hopper blew up the Russians’ machine, sort of forcing another door open to be sure that one shut for good. Except when it started bleeding through to Hawkins it didn’t have Demogorgons and Demo-Dogs and Mind Flayers. It had some other stuff. Like Dungeons & Dragons stuff, sort of...”
Billy thought about calling bullshit, looked at the trees, and decided that if Harrington was going to punk him, he would have picked a less ludicrous story.
“…dragons and dark forests and magic and quests and other stuff. Some things are changing… Hopper’s gone missing, but the kids are on a quest to rescue him. Joyce is leading that charge, and I gotta go with them, because Dustin’s enthusiastic but he’s got way less common sense than the others even if he’s wicked smart. And a sword works a lot better against some of the nasty things that came through better than a baseball bat, so they tell me, and they’ve been right the last three times, so I’ve just stopped questioning it. I have no damn idea where it came from, but that’s sort of normal these days, I guess.”
Billy was blinking slowly, trying to make anything make sense again. Harrington saw the confusion on his face, and started over with something a little simpler.
“So, it’s November.”
“I was out for six months?!”
“Yeah. Look, Max looked in on you nearly every day up until this quest for Hopper took off-”
“Wait. Hopper? Russians?” Billy asked desperately, trying to go back to pin anything down. His head had been such a buzz of alien thoughts and his own impotent screaming at the time he could barely remember what was real.
“Yeah, there were Russians below Starcourt. Hopper and Joyce and me and Robin and some of the kids helped stop them before they opened up another gateway into the Upside Down, but Hopper was too close to the backlash and he disappeared. El says he isn’t dead, and Joyce wants him back. So we’re gearing up. Knights of the Round Table and stuff. Nancy and Jonathan are holding down the fort. Robin too, because a lot of other people are handling stuff a lot worse than they are.”
Billy pinched himself, because that’s what they always did in movies and this seemed to be the right time to try it out. Nothing changed.
Well. That sucked.
That left actually trying to make sense of what Harrington was talking about.
The kids, and Harrington, they’d been trying to stop him, stop the monster riding his body, and Mrs. Byers and the cop too, and if they hadn’t been able to do what they’d done, that damned monster would have gotten everyone. Fuck it. He had to do something.
And it wasn’t like he had anything else to do. Besides, a look at Valeria and he knew he had to go along with them. He’d been responsible for what had happened here.
“I’ll help,” he said, and Harrington grinned at him tentatively. “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing, but Max is gonna cut herself the way I saw her waving around that knife.”
“Hey, thanks. Look, the rest of the guys are over at Mrs. Byers’ place. Max’ll hit the roof when she sees you awake. Let’s go!”
Billy wasn’t sure if he was quite ready to face Max, face anyone right now, but he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to be doing. He made an abortive move towards his Camero, but Valeria nudged him about the same time Harrington shook his head and sighed.
“Cars don’t work anymore. Most technology doesn’t. No electricity, and batteries aren’t working either. Not even generators. We’ve been hoofing it, or using bikes. Things are weird.” Harrington, shrugged almost as if in apology.
Billy slid his eyes over to the thatched roofs and cars with trees growing up through them. “No shit.”
“Come on,” Harrington said, turning and gesturing for Billy to walk with him. Valeria whickered softly and nudged him with his nose. Billy got the message and began walking, hand on Valeria’s neck.
“Hasn’t anyone tried to leave? Or got the National Guard or army or something?” he asked as they reached the street. Because there had been way too many people around town still if electricity had stopped working. Susan wasn’t here, so she must have gotten out.
“Can’t.” Steve stopped walking and pointed up to the sky, then slowly moved his arm down, tracing a shape. Billy looked, and could see a faint sparkle in the air, a boundary as delicate as a soap bubble arcing over Hawkins. “Can’t get in, can’t get out.”
“And no one’s panicking?” There should have been damn riots in the streets over suddenly being cut off from the modern world!
“They did at first. But it’s been six months. Food was weirdly easy to find, I mean like growing all over, water still works for some reason, and people got the skills they needed to make a living.” Harrington rubbed the hilt of his sword absently, brow furrowing and a scowl briefly crossing his face. “Like literally got the skills. Woke up knowing some stuff. But the harder you fought against it, the worse it was. Some people didn’t want to know. Some people disappeared because they weren’t careful. Through faerie rings and stuff. Or got taken by some of the things in the woods. Until some of us figured out we were here to guard them.”
Billy felt a sinking sensation in his stomach. “Do you know what happened to Susan?”
Harrington started at the question and rushed to answer. “Oh shit, no no, she’s okay! Moved in with the Langs! They’ve got a tailoring and weaving shop over there and it was closer to the Sinclair’s for Max.”
Harrington looked up at the sky, and then over to the south, towards the mall, before turning back to Billy, looking more hopeful. “If you really want in, we’ve got a chance to save Hopper, maybe help the rest of Hawkins too. The kids think they know where he is, but it’s not going to be easy to rescue him. Him and Mrs. Byers were the ones that saved the town, and Hopper… We gotta help him. He saved us.” Steve locked eyes with Billy. “You saved us too.”
“Screw you, Harrington,” Billy spat out, startled. Come on, he’d been the one to get sucked down into that basement, had his body and mind turned into a vessel for a monster (his mind skittered over the fact that that’d been true for most of his life). The kids, Sheriff Hopper, Mrs. Byers, none of them would have had to do what they had done if he hadn’t opened the door for that horrible thing. It was his fault.
“El said you did. And she doesn’t lie very well. Come on, let’s go.” Harrington gave Billy a small shrug, ignoring the insult; he wasn’t going to argue with him right now. But he was going to give him time to think about what he’d said. And that was more than he’d been given from most other people in his life.
Screw it. Billy didn’t have enough in him to argue about it either. The world had gone extra crazy, and he had half a chance to do something less shitty about it. “Yeah, lead the way.”