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It takes half a second.
That’s all it takes for her to call up the right space of mind, the place that will take her far far away from this hellhole inside a hellhole. But she’s never used it for travel. To find lost things, maybe. Lost people.
But this time, she’s not submerged in water. She’s completely present in the world she’s in. And she just has to escape, get to him. She feels herself being torn apart by her own will, but it does not matter. Everything ceases to matter except for her and Mike.
And then she’s there. In the middle of the upside down.
Except, it takes a second to notice it is the upside down, as it could well be Hawkins. The original Hawkins, that is. There’s no monsters, no swirling masses in the distance. Except for a slight graininess to the air, a taste on the tip of the tongue that unsettles the being inside of it, nothing would suggest anything wrong with the world.
This is what winning feels like, she tells herself, with a bittersweet smile.
Her feet tread lightly along the ground, each crunch under her feet reminiscent of snow, a recent experience of hers. She smiles. It crunches, but it’s not cold in the way she wants it to be.
Even if it was, she doesn’t think it’d help. She doesn’t have her gloves.
And it’s not easy, to drag herself through the mounds of ash shaped in demodog sized piles, and remind herself that this is her . This is her damage.
But this is what winning feels like.
It’s a simple reminder, one her brain does not need to be so insistent upon giving her. It’s not like they won. They haven’t won, they’re all lost. And they need to be found. The future will have them. Because it always did have them. She remembers the visions she used to have, when they were all happy.
There’s no bones. That’s what’s truly jarring. Nothing, no traces of a fight. The piles of dust that lie around the place can be easily explained away.
She wishes it would go away.
Someone is talking in the background. She can hear them, the way their tone of voice grates at the back of her throat.
She wants to sob for years but she just feels numb.
The voice is growing louder. She doesn’t want to accept this.
“El. El?”
She looks at the piles. Focuses on the dogs. Kicks a pile that looks a little too lifelike, and revels in malicious joy when it disintegrates satisfyingly at the touch. She has won.
She will win.
The voice is calling her - she doesn’t want to go. She wants to stay here, in the land of the future. Of no monsters, no life beyond the upside down. Nothing to control or find, no school, no work. Just her and the vast endless plains of a world everyone is cut off from.
She smiles before letting go.
Mike is staring at her. She wants to cry.
“Well? Do we win?”
She nods, because of course she wins. She always wins. He scoops her into his arms and she bites her lip to avoid the tears that come rushing to her eyes.
“We’re going to do this. We’re going to beat him.” He says, with such conviction she can almost believe him.
But they’re not going to beat him.
She is.
And she’s always known it.