Chapter Text
Tic. Tic. Tic.
There was a clock on the wall. Tic. Tic. Bland. White. Mocking. Tic. Lucas resisted the urge to punch it. It was almost four, the visiting hour was coming to an end. Max was not awake.
Her mom hadn’t come to visit today, but Lucas hadn’t expected her to. Last he had seen her, on Saturday, she had looked… not all there. Hollow, like the slightest spring breeze could blow her over. He could only imagine what she was going through after Billy, his dad, now Max. Alone. Maybe he should pay her a visit, if that could do any good.
It was instinctual now, taking the coppery strands, entwining them. She’d taught him to braid last summer, made him tie them again and again until she deemed them good enough. After everything at Starcourt, the hospital was the first time he’d braided her hair again.
Erica hadn’t come with him this week, not since the day the ash rains first started. He could tell the hospital dampened her mood for the rest of the day, made her unnaturally untalkative. Besides, his mom was more antsy these days than Lucas had ever seen her. If only she knew what they were up to when the ‘earthquake’ hit…
Maybe it’d be best if Erica stayed out of their plans from now on. The thought of how his mom would react if anything happened to her… he remembered Jason’s mother, the way her hands shook as the police retrieved his body from the Creel house. Two stretchers, they’d needed. He hoped the ash had stopped for a moment. He needed some fresh air.
“Just checking in, son, the visiting hour’s almost up.” The nurse.
“Yeah. Yeah I know.”
He finished the braids and laid them out delicately over her hospital gown. As the nurse left, he turned off the cassette player. Until tomorrow.
***
There was a hole in the roof again.
Ash was sprinkling in, white and fluffy, like the powdered sugar in the donut commercials. Except that it was lit red by the dark clouds in the sky. El hopped off the couch and leaned through the window. “Hopper, the roof fell off.”
The man groaned as he stood up from where he was cutting and sandpapering wooden planks. “Yeah, I saw.” He nodded to the big, flat piece of metal leaning against a tree.
“Should I bring it back up?” she asked.
He wiped his brow and flipped over the plank. “There’s no point, the wind’ll knock it back down in minutes. We’ll- we’ll need to secure it. Leave it for now.”
“But the ash is getting in.”
Hopper looked up at the sky with a hard face. “Alright.”
“Anything I can do to help?” It was Joyce. She was carrying cleaning supplies and a bag of other things they would need for the house.
“Got a box of nails?”
Eleven had been living at the cabin again ever since Hopper had returned and they had started fixing it. There were still some of her old things here from when the meat mind flayer had attacked it. Max’s rain-soaked comic books, the old clothes that Hopper’s daughter had worn, game pieces and other little things Mike had given her. All the stuff she had gotten from others. Her stuff. Right now, she was wearing jeans and a t-shirt she had bought with Joyce in California.
California did not really feel real. Nine months in which she felt like a different person, someone who was not from a lab, who was not called by a number. Jane, with a brother and a boyfriend and no friends at school. No dad. No monsters.
Coming back to Hawkins felt like flipping a page in a book only to be back at the beginning again. Ever since the cracks had opened in the ground, there had been a high-pitched buzzing in her ears. At night, she could only sleep for minutes at a time, and only with a lamp by her side. Every day, she spent hours searching for Henry, but every night, she could only find him in her nightmares.
El hadn't seen the others in days. She stayed in the cabin whenever she wasn’t training. But, no matter what Hopper told her, the military did not scare her. What was under the ground did.
“Ready?” Hopper said, a hammer in his hand. El nodded and stepped outside into the white rain.
***
It was cold, but Dustin didn't feel like closing the window.
He'd been in his room for three hours now, and before that he'd been in the living room for two. His leg still ached when he hobbled from room to room, but he couldn't give less of a shit about that. It's not as though his corpse was rotting in another dimension, being scavenged on by monsters.
He switched the radio off for the third time in the past hour. He felt like he was going crazy. Did no one other than him give a shit about Eddie's death? About the entire town spitting out his name like a slur? About any traces of Hellfire being scrubbed from school as if it was some shameful secret? Well fuck them, if they're too stupid to see that the multiple grotesque murders that took place right before an ‘earthquake’ and unearthly weather weren't caused by a high schooler. Were the secret forces swarming town following all of that not enough to tip them off that there was more at play?
Nope, they needed a scapegoat and a dead teenager fit the bill. Even fucking Billy's death was treated with respect by the town. Even- his heart was hammering in his chest. He took a slow, deep breath. The world smelled like it was burning.
He needed to find a way to blow off some steam, but it's not as though he was in the best condition for a walk or a bike ride around town. A knock came from his door.
“Hey Dusty, you feeling okay?” Even his mom had been getting on his nerves lately, overly doting but still not believing what he had to say. A match made in the Upside Down.
“I'm fine mom! Just- tired, okay?”
“Okay Dusty, only, one of your friends came to visit.” Looks like he wouldn't be blowing off steam. He doubted it was Mike— he had tried talking to him before, but he just wouldn't understand. Will… it wasn't Will. Lucas, then? But…
“Who is it?” He shouted back. No response came, but his door creaked open a few inches. Dustin rolled his eyes and dropped back on the bed.
“Hey…” Steve muttered with a dumb expression on his face.
“What do you want?” Dustin groaned, hoping Steve would trip over the mess on the floor.
“You… okay? I heard you didn't go to school today.” Amazing timing to bring up stuff that pissed Dustin off.
“Well for one, Steven, I have a tear in my calf, and I'm not exactly feeling my best at the moment. And for another, there weren't any classes today. Just an assembly in which quite literally every single word is misinformation. Sorry to disappoint, but you can go back to not giving a shit now.”
Steve said nothing. Dustin looked up at him, but he didn't have the dumb sheepy expression anymore. He looked pissed off.
“Tell me, Dustin, how long exactly are you planning to mope around in your room? Have you looked out the window? Hopper and Nancy are already planning our next road trip to the Upside Down, because Vecna sure as hell isn't dead. What have you been doing?”
Dustin opened his mouth to retort, but Steve cut him off.
“Eddie's dead. His funeral's passed, for Christ's sake. Refusing to get out of bed isn't going to bring him back or- or fix his legacy or whatever.” If Dustin's mom was getting on his nerves, Steve was officially trampling on them.
“Fuck. You.” He spat out. “I'm moping? If that had been Nancy who'd sacrificed herself out there, you'd be a thousand times worse than me! You'd be insufferable!”
For a second, Steve looked shocked, then his mouth twisted into a scowl. A ‘you did not go there’ face if there ever was one.
“Fuck you too. For your information, the others are worried about you. They say you've cut off all communication. If we want to defeat that thing, we'll need everyone we can get. So either sulk in here forever or grow the fuck up.” He backed out and shut the door before Dustin could say another word.
“Hey! Come back here!” He heard the front door close, then a car driving off. Dustin sat there fuming. It was still cold. He stood up and shut the fucking window.
***
Red was not a colour that suited the sky.
Hawkins stood at its best when lit with the dreary grey skies that came at this time of year, though it used to annoy Jonathan endlessly when he wanted a shot of anything other than gloom. On the other side of the world, California’s blue skies were endlessly deep, almost iridescent in its vast cloudless deserts. Boundless, the future hidden somewhere within them if you looked hard enough. Will could understand how it inspired hours of lying on the truck roof, getting high, hiding.
But red? Red was cold.
Not in the scary, blood-chilling way, but in a way that made Will feel frozen to his bones. Goosebumps, even when he wasn’t outside. Shivers during scalding showers. Day after day of being on edge, of gripping things too hard and avoiding the dark like it would burn him. Of fitful sleep with dreams full of frozen, black particles. Cold, in that every second of every day, he could hear the sound of ice screaming, a shrill, maddening whistle. Cold in that Mike didn’t speak to him, Jonathan wasn’t there, his mother failed to hide how frightened she was.
Cold like a painting he had poured his heart and soul into, hour after hour, lying rolled up on a desk. A gift from El.
A sky red like blood. All that was left was to look hard enough and find the shadow hidden within it.
***
Max was awake.
Above her, the sky was a dull, lifeless blue. Max was in a desert.
Max was in a…
She could see. With her eyes. She looked at her legs. They looked normal.
Max was not awake.
***
Mike was confused, to say the least. To say Hawkins had changed over the school break… would normally be pretty funny, actually. Except that everything that was going on was the furthest it could possibly be from funny. There had been a school assembly that morning, and Mike and Nancy were the only ones to go from the group. Higgins had taken every chance possible to try to calm people's fears. The whole ‘earthquake’ story, the main suspect for the murders losing his life to it, the military being there to protect them. And all of it lies.
Nancy had been taking notes furiously the whole assembly, but Mike had only stood there and watched. What else was there to do? He felt more restless with each passing day that nothing happened and the sky stayed dark and red.
More and more crops were grey and shrivelled as he biked past them, like they had been before El had closed the portal for the first time, only much worse. Whole parts of the forest were blackening, shedding leaves, looking like an eerie Halloween movie landscape. April had never been this cold and lifeless before.
Apart from Hawkins itself, the people had changed as well. Dustin had been ignoring every attempt Mike made to reach him, which was especially annoying because if there was anyone who knew Eddie as well as him, it was Mike. Lucas was always somewhere else, and Mike hadn't really spoken with El since he had confessed his love, which left them on pretty awkward ground. Will was… distant.
Actually, he'd been spending the most time around Nancy and Jonathan, which was definitely different. And it was really no match for the Party.
He passed by a side road and then stopped.
Did he really want to go home and listen to Nancy's insistence that something had to be done for the twentieth time today? No, thank you. He turned his bike around and took to the side road. It was time to set some things right with El again.
***
Something had to be done. Hawkins was going to shit and nobody seemed to know what to do about it, but Nancy thought that maybe not lying to people about what was going on was a good first step.
There were rumours that the military was planning on putting the town into lockdown, in which case it was essential to get as many people out of Hawkins as possible. To get their families out. She could already see parts of the Upside Down seeping into their world, and it was only a matter of time before the creatures would follow suit.
She and Jonathan were trying to document as much of what was going on as possible. They were at one of the four main seams between worlds, right in the depths of the withering forest. Jonathan's camera echoed loudly in the silence.
“Do they really think that putting up these walls is going to stop the Demogorgons from getting out? It feels a bit optimistic,” he muttered, snapping down the camera's flash. They'd had to come here after dark, so it'd be less likely that military personnel might catch them.
“No… I don't think it's meant to keep them in, but to keep us out.” She looked at the trees around them. “Hey, do you think you could give me a boost?”
They had known something was going on behind the walls for days, but it was hard to catch a glimpse of anything in town, where the entire library block and surrounding streets had been closed off. There were more army trucks, tanks and helicopters arriving in Hawkins every day, and it was becoming impossible not to notice the military's presence in all corners of daily life. Mingling among people in stores, pacing around the library and Hawkins High and the street they lived on. Looking for Eleven.
Jonathan helped her climb onto the branch, and it was thankfully sturdy enough to hold her weight. She straightened up and could see some of the red glow emanating from inside, but it was broken up at points, as though…
“Hey, I think they're trying to cover the gate,” she called down. “Layering metal sheets or something.”
Jonathan sighed. “Oh yeah, that should keep the Demos down. But only until one decides to try banging on them a couple of times.” He dropped the flashlight to help her as she slid off. When she was down, he quickly let go of her.
“Of course,” Nancy said, like she hadn't noticed. “Because the government's famous for its permanent solutions to things.” She slung her backpack on as Jonathan packed up his camera.
“Should we head for the cabin? I have a feeling Jim would want to hear about this.” She nodded.
Once they reached the car, Nancy stopped. She'd been delaying it long enough.
“Wait, before I forget.” She dug in her backpack and took out a handgun. Loaded. “Give this to Will next time you see him.”
Jonathan looked down at it without moving. “Nancy, what use could Will possibly have for a gun?”
“Protection. If you haven't noticed, we don't exactly live in the safest of times, Jonathan. I'm also planning on giving one to Mike later.” She pushed it on him, but he backed away.
“Bullets don't do shit to them, Nancy. They'd be better off carrying around a lighter and a gallon of gasoline.”
“I'm not just talking about monsters.”
Jonathan looked like she'd suggested his brother take down the army single-handed. “Will would never shoot another person. He couldn't if he needed to.”
“Then I'll teach him, and the others.”
“That's not what I-”
“This is war, Jonathan,” she interrupted. “Don't you understand? They would shoot us without a second thought if it looked like we were getting in the way of them capturing Eleven. If they're all choosing to fight, they need to know how to.”
Johnathan said nothing for a second, then he turned and sat in the passenger seat, shutting the door. She went around the car and got in as well. The ignition started, and she took them to the road.
“Are you-” she started.
“I am not creating child soldiers out of them, Nancy. Before we do anything, we're talking to Hopper.
Nancy gave a nod and stepped on the gas pedal.