Work Text:
In the chaos of the military storming the truck, Will loses his grip on El’s hand. It should be innocuous, but the moment it happens, Will’s vision flickers and goes black.
“Will!” Someone shouts his name, but everything suddenly sounds far away.
Another voice echoes into the darkness. “Get off me, he’s—he fucking gets seizures, asshole!”
Well, shit, he thinks. That’s probably not good.
This isn’t like Henry, though, and it doesn’t feel like the Shadow. There’s no pull into some other perspective, no red-tinged demogorgon massacres. It’s just… empty. A Void.
Empty and familiar, now that he thinks about it.
He’s only seen it in snatches, in the moments he’s falling in and out of psychic conversations, and he’s only ever done that with one person—at twelve years old, at sixteen, scared and cold and dying in the dark.
“Will.” And suddenly she’s there, like she is every time—hardly a blink before she appears, the muffled background noise fading away. Her orange hoodie—Will’s, which he’d wrapped around her shoulders when she shivered on their way out of the Upside Down—stands out starkly against the endless black surrounding them.
“El, what’s going on?” Will’s heart is racing, and El’s unreadable expression isn’t helping. “Is it—he’s not—”
“No, no,” she assures him quickly. “Don’t worry. Henry is dead. He can’t get you anymore. This,” she gestures around the empty void, “is me.”
“Okay,” Will says slowly. “So what’s wrong?”
She smiles—and Will usually loves El’s smile (because god knows she deserves it), but something about this one makes his stomach curdle with dread. “I need you to promise me something.”
“El,” he says—warns—but she keeps going.
She doesn’t break his gaze. Her hair has come loose from its careful bun—she’s ignoring the errant strands of hair falling into her face, flyaway curls that make her look as young as she was when they first met in person. “None of this will ever end, not if I’m still here.”
“Not if you’re—” Will cuts himself off, because the pieces are starting to slot into place. “El, no. You can’t.”
“I need you to talk to the others,” she says calmly, the only thing betraying her emotions being the redness of her waterline.
“We can figure something out,” Will tries desperately, reaching out and pushing the hair out of her face so he can look her in the eye. It’s more an excuse to touch her than anything; an impulse to prove to himself that she’s really there. “We can fix it together, like we said.”
Finally, El’s expression cracks, and her eyes well up. “I need you to thank them for me. For being so kind to me.” She lets him grab her shoulders, and she pats his arm in what’s clearly supposed to be a soothing manner, but her touch just burns. “And teaching me what it means to be a friend. And—” El’s voice wavers violently. “I need you to thank Hop and Joyce and Jonathan. For letting me be in your family. For taking me in when you didn’t have to. For—for loving me. And you—you showed me what a real brother is. Not like Henry. He didn’t love me. But you chose to. You have to know what that means to me.”
“Don’t,” Will pleads, gripping her tighter, as if he could physically keep her from going. “Don’t do it alone, let me come with you—”
El is already shaking her head. “There is still so much for you to do, Will,” she tells him. “I need you to take care of them for me. I need you to help them understand my choice.”
“El, I can’t.” Please, he wants to scream, but El is being so brave and Will just feels so small. The worst part of it all is that he does understand. He hates it—more than he’s hated anything or anyone in his life—but he does. Please don’t make me do this. I can’t do this.
“You can,” she says firmly, and her hand is on his face—just as it was back in the Nevada desert when she scanned him for injuries despite her being the one in shackles—forcing him to meet her gaze. “And you will. Because you understand me better than anyone. Before we ever met, you understood me—the real me, whoever that is.”
A pink dress and a shaved head; slicked back hair and dark makeup; bright colors and patterns that got mixed with hand-me-down flannels and bangs. A hospital gown and wires and blood before that. Fear and hope and resentment and love. They’re all a part of her.
“You’re you.” Will grasps at anything that makes sense in a conversation spinning out of control, feeling wildly unmoored. “You’re my sister, and I love you for exactly who you are. For whoever you want to be. There is nothing you could ever do to change that.”
“We are connected.” Her smile is a small, shaky thing. “We always have been. And we always will be.” She pulls him into a hug—tighter than she ever has before—takes a long, steadying breath against his shoulder. She’s shaking, and so is Will, and he grips the back of her sweatshirt with a ferocity that frightens him.
“Please,” he begs, even as the weight of inevitability crashes down on him. “Don’t leave.”
“Hey,” she says into his ear as she pulls back as much as he’ll let her. “Will. Hey.” She manages to get both of his hands clasped between hers, and she huffs fondly, meeting his gaze and smiling crookedly at him. “It’ll be okay.”
It sounds impossible. “How?” he croaks. “How can it be okay? None of this is okay!”
“No,” she agrees, somehow still smiling even as tears trail down her face. “But it will be. I’m not giving you your hoodie back, though. Sorry.”
That’s okay, he wants to say. You can steal whatever you want from me at home. You can have anything if you would just stay. But the words don’t come.
“El,” is all he manages, barely more than a whisper.
“Remember,” she says, squeezing his hands. “I love you.”
And suddenly his hands are empty, his vision flickering. The world tilts beneath his feet, his stomach drops out from under him, and then reality comes rushing back into focus.
“El!” he screams, lurching forward into consciousness only for camouflage-clad arms to pull him back. His friends, who are clustered around him—as much as they can be with the soldiers guarding each of them—seem startled by his sudden outburst.
“Will, Will, hey,” Mike tries, a hand on his shoulder, and Will’s mother is trying to calm him, but Will doesn’t care, blind panic overtaking any attempt at comfort.
It doesn’t matter that his head throbs under the sudden sharp edges of their connection; it doesn’t matter that there are guns pointed at his head—all that matters is his sister. “El!”
“Oh my god,” Dustin finally realizes, horror creeping into his voice as he whips around to face the gate, and now everyone seems to notice, turning their focus away from Will and toward the girl standing up there alone.
“What the hell is she doing?” From the dread in Mike’s voice, it sounds like he already knows the answer.
On cue, a resounding boom shudders through the floor, and Will can feel the bridge collapsing in a vacuum, stealing the air from his lungs. With whatever power he has left, Will grasps at the Void—at whatever connection El was alluding to—in the frantic hope he might be able to pull her back, to convince her to stop—but that flow of energy now feels like the tide receding, slipping away and taking her with it. The sudden weakness in his limbs hardly registers; the heaviness of the Shadow is gone for the first time in almost five years, and though he has had no time to savor it, the sudden lack of such a crushing weight allows Will to throw himself forward, breaking free from one soldier’s grasp just to be caught by two more. The others are screaming now, too, horrible wails of his sister’s name as she watches stoically from the other side of the gate, her hair wild in the sudden rush of wind.
“Let me go!” Jonathan’s voice comes from somewhere behind him. “That’s my sister—” He’s cut off with a thud, and Nancy’s angry voice jumps in, but Will isn’t really listening.
“Don’t do this!” Hopper yells, his voice cracking—held by his own set of soldiers, reproachful like he’s had this conversation already and is desperate to change the outcome.
She’d planned this, Will realizes. Or, at least, she had foreseen this outcome and had hidden it, and he had been too busy managing his own visions to realize. She’s unmoving in the storm, not really calm—from a distance, he watches helplessly as tears slide down her cheeks, cutting through the dirt and grime on her face—but she’s holding it together as the rest of them fall apart.
Thank you, her expression says. She’s standing tall with her chin tipped up defiantly, staring forward with steel in her eyes.
(Remember. I love you.)
“El, please!” I love you, he thinks at her frantically, as if that might make a difference now. Don’t go, El, you can’t leave—
He’s not even sure she can hear him—not with the roaring collapse of the Upside Down, the faint ringing in his ears, the hollow echo of their connection stretching to the breaking point, the fact that she’s pushing him away—but he tries anyway, staggering under the sharp lance of pain that rockets through his temple from the effort.
Please, he repeats. El just relaxes her fists as the storm gets stronger, letting her hands rest open at her sides, the dirty orange sleeves of her stolen jacket hanging just a little too long. As she does, each light on Will’s inner radar blinks out, his mental map of the Upside Down tearing itself to shreds, the burning horizon rapidly approaching.
El meets his gaze for a split second, green-brown and teary and so familiar, and Will knows he’ll be haunted by the look in her eyes for the rest of his life. The corner of her mouth tips up; a barely-there smile, both deeply sad and desperately fond. It’s a quintessentially El facial expression Will has never seen on anyone else and suddenly fears he will never see again.
The others are still screaming, he realizes distantly. Everything sounds so far away.
With a loud, metallic screech, all the lights shatter, and the storm swallows El whole.