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“When you said we should meet up late at night and go stargazing,” Robin began, breaking the silence that hung over them like the night sky itself, “I assumed that was a euphemism.” Instead they had packed into the old RV that nobody had asked too many questions about when Steve had hung onto it. (They, in turn, didn’t ask too many questions about what grisly fate might have befallen the RV’s owners after Vecna had opened a hellmouth in downtown Hawkins.) “I mean, I’m not complaining that my weird, older friends want to go stargazing instead of drinking, drugs, or sex. Just, you know, surprised.” It was just as well, really, Robin thought to herself, since, out of the four others, she really only wanted to engage in the drinking, drugs, and especially sex with Nancy. Nancy, whom she was lying next to on a ratty old blanket, overlooking Sattler’s Quarry, pointing at the sky.
Eddie snorted from the other end of the blanket. “Can’t say I’m a stranger to shattering people’s expectations.” Out of the corner of her eye she saw him flex his legs before settling back down. “Wouldn’t be my first choice of an evening out but, uh, this is kinda nice. Peaceful.”
“A welcome change,” Steve muttered. He’d never wanted to be anything more than an upper-middle-class jock, he reckoned. And now here he was. Having helped save the world a few times, or at least the great state of Indiana.
“Kind of funny,” Jonathan added. “If you’d told me ten years ago I was going to live through a sci-fi horror show, my money would have been on alien invasion. But now…” He laughed, quietly, mostly to himself.
“The stars aren’t as scary anymore,” Nancy concluded. “Funny, since half the constellations are named after monsters.” Monsters that, if they really existed, Nancy felt confident would have made their way to Hawkins at some point.
“The other half are named after heroes, though,” Robin countered. Like us felt a bit presumptuous even in her own internal monologue, so she kept that to herself.
“Can’t have one without the other,” Jonathan murmured, causing both Nancy and Steve to elbow him from either side. Robin’s eyebrow quirked up; maybe she wasn’t the only one thinking that thought. “Always the villain first,” he continued, undaunted. “And the hero to rise up and stop him.”
“Funny we’ve come so far on our quest only to wind up back in Hawkins, looking up at the night sky like a bunch of perfectly mundane teenagers.,” Eddie added, more wistful than ironic. “Everything coming full circle in the end.”
“Who says it’s the end?” Robin half-rose, indignant. “None of us are thirty yet; we’ve still got a lot of living left to do.”
“Not the end of us,” Eddie amended. “But maybe the end of the story.” The others nodded, and fell back into another lull of silence, gazing up as the heavens slowly spun overhead.