Chapter Text
Chapter 1: The Echo of the Gate
The first sign that something was wrong was a flicker. It was not the dramatic, strobe light panic of a Demogorgon's arrival. It was just a single lightbulb in the string above the Wheeler's basement table, a hesitant blink, like it was thinking about going out but decided against it at the last second.
Mike Wheeler did not even notice. He was too busy glaring at the twenty sided die in his hand, willing it to roll a natural twenty. Dustin Henderson, however, noticed. He noticed everything these days, or at least he liked to think he did. His eyes darted up to the bulb, then back down to the hand painted miniature of a mind flayer that served as their current campaign's Big Bad.
"Did you guys see that?" he asked, his voice cutting through Mike's dramatic monologue about a psychic assault.
"See what?" Lucas Sinclair asked, looking up from the graph paper map he was meticulously drawing. "Dustin, if you are trying to distract Mike so he does not wipe out my ranger again, it is not going to work."
"No, for real," Dustin insisted, adjusting the peak of his cap. "The light. It flickered."
Will Byers, who had been quietly studying the battlefield, felt a familiar, cold knot tighten in his stomach. He looked at the bulb. It was steady now, a warm, constant glow. "It is just an old bulb, Dustin."
"Yeah, probably," Dustin conceded, but his brow remained furrowed. Since everything that happened, since the tunnels and the Mind Flayer and the sauna test, his paranoia meter was permanently stuck in the yellow zone. A flickering bulb was enough to get his attention.
"Forget the light!" Mike exclaimed, throwing his hands up. "Are we going to play or what? My wizard is about to cast Fireball!"
Lucas groaned. "Mike, you cannot just cast Fireball! We are in a confined psychic space! You will kill us all!"
"That is the point, Sinclair!" Mike shot back with a grin. The old Mike was slowly coming back, the one before Will went missing, before the world turned grey and scary. The Snow Ball had helped. Seeing El dance, seeing her happy, it had put a light back in his eyes that everyone was grateful for.
The argument devolved from there, a familiar and comforting rhythm of shouted game mechanics and playful insults. Will let the noise wash over him, a shield against the quiet. He was getting better. The doctors said so. His mom said so. Hopper, in his gruff way, said so by grunting and ruffling his hair whenever he came to pick El up.
But sometimes, in the quiet, he could still feel it. A coldness at the back of his neck. A sense that something was just out of sight, in the corner of his eye. And right now, as the argument raged on, he felt it again. He looked at the lightbulb. It was steady. He looked at the basement stairs, leading up to the dark hallway of the Wheeler house. For a second, just a second, he thought he saw the air shimmer, like heat rising off asphalt on a summer day.
Then it was gone.
He blinked, and it was just a hallway. Just a normal, boring, safe hallway.
"Will? Earth to Will?" Dustin was waving a hand in front of his face.
Will startled. "What? Sorry."
"I said, are you in? We are going to let Mike be an idiot and try to kill us all, but your paladin has a high enough charisma to maybe convince the Mind Flayer that we are not a threat and we can sneak past."
It was a terrible plan, but it was their plan. Will forced a smile. "Okay. I will try."
As he picked up his die, he pushed the feeling down. It was nothing. Just the echo of a bad dream.
Across town, in the relative quiet of the Hopper cabin, the air was thick with the smell of burnt macaroni and cheese. Jim Hopper scraped the blackened bits from the bottom of the pot into the trash, muttering a long string of curses under his breath.
"Language," El said, without looking up from the small portable TV where she was watching a black and white movie.
Hopper paused, spatula in hand, and shot her a look. "Excuse me, kid? Who is the parent here?"
"You are," she said, her eyes still glued to the screen. "But you are also the one who burned dinner. Again."
He could not argue with that. He plopped two bowls of slightly less burnt mac and cheese onto the small kitchen table. "Eat."
El finally looked away from the TV, her big, dark eyes studying him. They held a depth of knowledge that still made his chest ache. She knew things. Real things. Terrible things. But here, in this cabin, she was just a kid. His kid.
"Mike says his mother is a good cook," she stated, picking up her fork.
"Mike's mother does not have to chase down Russian spies and man eating lizards from another dimension," Hopper grumbled, sitting down across from her.
El processed this for a moment. "The Demogorgon was not a lizard. It was a humanoid predator."
"It was a pain in my ass, is what it was," he said, pointing his fork at her. "Now eat your dinner. And no using your powers to get the last of the ketchup. Use your words."
A tiny smile played on her lips. It was a victory he cherished more than any medal. They ate in a comfortable silence, the only sounds the clinking of forks and the soft dialogue from the TV.
Later, after El had gone to bed, Hopper sat on his porch with a beer. The forest was dark and still. No gate pulsing in the lab. No demodogs howling in the night. Just the normal sounds of an Indiana spring. Crickets. The rustle of leaves. A distant owl.
It was too quiet. After two years of chaos, peace felt foreign, almost suspicious. He took a long pull from his bottle. He knew the government was still poking around the lab, cleaning up their mess, burying their secrets deeper. He knew Owens was keeping an eye on things, or at least claiming to. But Hopper did not trust any of them. His trust was a small, finite resource, and it was all spent on a small handful of people: Joyce, the kids, and the girl sleeping in the room down the hall.
He looked up at the stars, clear and sharp in the night sky. He had made a promise to her, a promise to protect her. To give her a life. A real one. And for the first time in a long time, it felt like maybe, just maybe, that promise was possible to keep.
He just wished he could shake the feeling that something was waiting for them, just beyond the reach of the starlight.
The next day was Saturday. Steve Harrington's car, the famous Beemer, was parked in the driveway of the Harrington house, but Steve himself was not inside. He was at the Wheeler house, for reasons he could not quite articulate to himself. He had swung by to return a copy of "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" he had borrowed from Nancy's younger brother. That was his story, and he was sticking to it.
He found them all in the backyard, a rare occurrence. Mike, Lucas, Dustin, and Will were huddled around a lawn chair, poking at something on the ground with sticks.
"What the hell are you nerds doing now?" he called out, ambling over with his best attempt at a disaffected cool. He was wearing a polo shirt with the collar popped, a look he was trying to phase out but had not quite managed to yet.
Dustin looked up, his face alight with an enthusiasm that was both endearing and deeply concerning. "Steve! Perfect! We need your expertise."
"My expertise?" Steve asked, suspicion creeping into his voice. "In what? Babysitting? Hair? Because that is pretty much the extent of it."
"We found a dead thing!" Mike announced, pointing with his stick.
Steve peered over their shoulders. It was a squirrel. Or, at least, it had been a squirrel. Now it was just a sad, stiff little pile of fur. "And? It is a dead squirrel. Congratulations. You have discovered the circle of life. Throw it away."
"Look closer," Dustin urged, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "Look at the way it died."
Sighing dramatically, Steve crouched down. "Okay, I am looking. It is dead. It is not moving. It is" He stopped. He leaned in closer. The squirrel's eyes were open, wide and milky. Its tiny mouth was frozen in a silent scream, its little paws curled up as if in defense. But the weirdest part was its fur. In one patch on its side, the fur was a strange, ashy grey, like it had been bleached by the sun. But the day was overcast. "What the hell happened to it?"
"That is what we are trying to figure out," Lucas said, his voice serious. "It is not a cat. No bites. It is not a car. No blood."
Will was standing back, his arms wrapped around himself. He had not touched the squirrel. He did not need to. He knew that grey. It was the colour of dead things in the Upside Down. The colour of the vines, the colour of the ash that fell like snow. "It is like it was drained," he said quietly.
Everyone turned to look at him. The silence that followed was heavy.
"Drained of what?" Mike asked, his voice barely a whisper.
Will just shook his head, his eyes fixed on the small, desiccated creature. He did not have an answer. Just a feeling. A cold, familiar feeling that had followed him out of the basement and into the daylight.
Steve, for his part, felt a different kind of cold. It was the cold of responsibility. Of dread. He looked at the kids, at their young, serious faces, and he saw the ghosts of past traumas in their eyes. He saw Mike, who had watched a girl he loved seemingly die. He saw Lucas, who had held a make shift spear against a monster. He saw Dustin, who had befriended a creature from another world. And he saw Will, who had been through hell and back, and was now staring at a dead squirrel like it was a personal message from his nightmares.
"Alright," Steve said, his voice taking on a firmer, parental tone that had become his default setting around them. "Everybody back up. Do not touch it. I will, uh I will get a shovel and a bag from my car. We are getting rid of it. It is probably just some weird disease. Rabies or something." He did not believe it for a second, but he needed to sound calm for them.
As he walked back to his car, he glanced back at the group. Will was still staring at the spot. Dustin was whispering animatedly to Lucas. Mike was holding his stick like a weapon. Steve sighed. So much for a quiet Saturday. The dead squirrel in the Wheeler's backyard was small, insignificant even. But to Steve Harrington, newly minted protector of nerds, it felt like a warning shot. A flicker in the static of their peaceful new life.