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It starts with Mike.
El’s name tears out his throat like its ripping through skin on the way up. She stands before him, silhouetted by the fleshy red light of the gate and all he can see are flashlights. All he can see is rain, his flashlight beam in the darkness and El before him, shell-shocked and cold. He took her home then. Lost and young and afraid, he took her home.
She looks like that now.
He promised she’d come home with him. Her hands in his, blood on her face, a monster in the hallway. He’d promised. And friends don’t lie.
“El!” he screams.
He bucks and jerks in the grips on his arms, twists until he’s sure something’s slotted out of place. There’s an opening, a loosening, and he takes it, thrusting himself forward and running. Wind howls in his ears and it sounds like Nancy screaming his name but he doesn’t stop, can’t stop, not while El’s still here. He barrels into her so hard they stumble. He wraps his arms around her, curls around her like they can merge into each other if he just tries hard enough. Like he can protect her this time.
“Mike? What are you doing? Mike-”
El’s chin on his shoulder, her hands at his sides, giving a gentle but no less frantic push to detangle them.
Mike shakes his head, “Please don’t leave me El. Please don’t leave us. You can’t. You can’t.”
There’s a sob and he’s not sure if it’s his or hers, but it doesn’t matter. Mike only holds on tighter. El doesn’t move from the gate. So, Mike doesn’t either.
It’s Will who follows.
His first memories of El are bright. His memories of the Upside Down are vivid, gruesome stains on his mind, something that he knows he’ll never be able to forget. He’ll never forget the fear, the cold, the decay, but through it all…there had been El. El, kneeling down in a dirty pink dress, so close he could swear he felt her hands on his. There had been a little girl coming to rescue him. He had thought she was an angel, just a dream he’d made up to comfort himself in the dark. Yet she wasn’t. El was real. El loved Eggo waffles and mouthing along to soap operas. El hated the smell of sunscreen and complained about the lights in the cafeteria in Lenora. El liked to sit next to him and paint and use up all the purple on one drippy, shakily drawn flower. El was a girl who wanted so badly to be.
He understood that more than anything.
El stands in front of him now, arms spread like the angel he thought she was. Will crumbles.
“El!” He yells.
He jerks against the hold on him, twists, and there’s a sickening crack as flesh meets flesh. He doesn’t bother to check what happened, what he did, too busy running across the space, barreling across the threshold and into Mike and El and wrapping his arms around them, like that’ll keep them both there.
“El,” he warbles.
Mike is saying something too, a pleading, sobbing, litany of words.
Will feels El twist, just slightly. Her eyes are wide, panicked, wet.
“No, Will, you have to go,” she says. “You have to-“
“No,” Will says, tears starting to fall down his own cheeks, choking up his words. “Please. You can’t. You, You have to stay with us. ”
"Will-"
“Eleven!”
It’s a feral yell Will’s heard across arcades and school gyms and his own house.
Will freezes. So does El.
“Eleven!” Dustin screams. “Eleven!”
He’d seen it first. Of course, he’d seen it first. Dustin Henderson, quick to put together clues. He’d thought it was a gift, his gift, but here he was, here El was, standing at the gate to her death. Prince sounds like a death knoll as panic crawls into his veins. It’s familia. It's too familiar.
He can’t do it again.
Escaping is easier than he thought. Fighting Andy all these months have given him a fire he didn’t even know he had. He bites down on an arm, thrusts his weight—elbows, knees, feet—backwards and then he’s falling, palms scrapping the concrete as he braces himself. There’s no time to check the damage. He pushes himself upwards and runs.
Dustin runs toward the girl in front of him. The girl who saved them over and over, like the superhero they’d all thought she was. The quarry, the classroom, the mall. Their own Professor X. The first problem: that nickname should have told Dustin everything. He should have seen this coming. Because the X-men, the mutants, they were never left alone by the people in their world. And the military didn’t see a girl who pushed tiny fingers into his mouth with innocent curiosity or a girl who threw surprise parties for him. They only saw the snap of bones. They only saw difference.
They’re wrong. She’s their hero, his hero. His friend. And that is problem number two: friends and heroes make a bad mix. He thinks of Eddie, thinks of Steve, thinks of Don’t be a hero. He thinks of what losing El would do to him. What it would do to all of them. He can’t do it again.
Dustin crashes into his friends, joining the hug, resting his head on someone’s shoulder.
“Don’t go El, you can’t, you can’t-“
He forces his voice louder than the demolition around them, the timer in his brain ticking away the seconds they don’t have, until the end of the record. There’s no time for them to pull El away, out of the Upside Down. There’s no time to go anywhere.
“El, no!”
“El!”
Twin shouts from his friends, already getting closer. Dustin shuts his eyes.
Lucas isn’t far behind, hot on Dustin’s tails as he runs past the soldiers trying to grab them. He tries not to think about the basketball team and the horror they had been, but he’s grateful for the drills now. He runs fast.
“El, no!” He screams El’s name like it can bring her back before she’s even left.
He should’ve seen it coming. He knows El, remembers that girl on the tracks, her nose dripping with blood, and a compass needle spinning at the mercy of her thoughts. He remembers the fear and guilt in her eyes, knows that given the choice, she would have done it again. He remembers the way El stood in front of them all, arms outstretched and screaming at monsters. He remembers El resting her head on his shoulder one night when his hope felt like a flickering candle. Remembers “I tried to bring her back.”
Lucas knows what El would do for the ones she loved; he would do the same thing.
“El!” he hears behind him, and it’s Max, oh gosh Max. He hopes El can hear her, knows that she needs to.
He doesn’t stop, can’t stop. He keeps running, for both of them. Lucas fights his way to the gate, landing in the pile messily, hugging more Dustin and Will and Mike than he is El but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter.
“Don’t do it El,” he says and hopes she can hear it, hopes it gets through. “Don’t do it.”
His breath shudders in time with the ruined shaking of the library overhead.
“We’re here,” he says. “We’re with you.”
“You’re not getting rid of us,” Dustin adds, voice all choked up.
Lucas nods in time with the memory of a handshake in a junkyard, “And we’re not getting rid of you.”
People are screaming, Mike thinks. The world is loud, the destabilizers are blaring, the wind is roaring, but it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters except the person in his arms, the people around them.
El is shaking, shuddering, and he knows without asking that she’s afraid for them. That she knows this is it, the point of no return. He doesn’t care. If she’s not leaving, neither is he.
“Not alone,” Mike says. “You’re not alone, El.”
He pulls back just enough to see El’s face. To rest his forehead on hers, noses bumping. He removes a hand from her back, brings it up to her cheek to caress a wet cheekbone. “Okay? You’re never alone.”
He pulls her back in; she buries her face in his shoulder. Hands clench the fabric at his back, equally as fierce as the hold around them.
“We’ve got you El. We’ve got you.”
The record is trailing off, the last notes drifting into the air. Mike braces himself.
El exhales, “Okay.”
And the world goes white.