꧁꧂

ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀ ᴛᴡᴇʟᴇᴠᴇ: ᴀɴᴅ ɪ'ʟʟ ᴄᴀʟʟ ʏᴏᴜ ᴍɪɴᴇ, ᴀɴᴅ ɪ'ʟʟ-

I threw the book onto the table, sliding it over to Dustin. There was no way I was going to mention it was my own DnD book. I hated playing DnD if I'm being honest. The boy across the table flicked through the pages, then back at the contents page, forgetting the number.

"The Mind Flayer." He began, looking at everyone around the table. A few more had joined us at Dustin's lecture.

"The hell is that?" Hopped asked in the same quiet tone he usually spoke in when he was stressed.

"It's a monster from an unknown dimension." I could imagine how more difficult that would be to understand if DnD didn't exist. "It's so ancient that it doesn't even know its true home." Hopper listened to the boy, eyebrows raised, probably trying to choose whether he should believe what he was hearing or not. "Okay, it enslaves races of other dimensions by taking over their brains using its highly-developed psionic powers."

"Oh, my God, none of this is real..." Hopper muttered. "This is a kids' game."

"NO." Dustin argued back at him quickly like he was no longer the chief of Police. "It's a manual. And it's not for kids. AND, UNLESS you know something we don't, this is the best metaphor..." Dustin pointed down at the page and over at Hop as he spoke.

"Analogy." Lucas corrected. Now was not the time for bickering.

"ANALOGY? THAT'S what you're worried about?" Dustin asked back at him. "FINE. An analogy for understanding whatever the hell this is."

"Okay, so this Mind Flamer thing-" Nancy began to speak up, confused by the horrid explanation given.

"Flayer. MIND FLAYER." Dustin corrected. I would've told him to calm down if it wouldn't have anything to do with the world close to ending.

Nancy sighed, looking over at the boy in the cap next to her. "What does it want?"

"To conquer us, basically." He explained to the best that he could while we listened. Go Dustin, go! "It believes it's the master race."

"Like- like the uh... like the Germans?" Steve offered and we all went silent until I spoke up.

"Do you mean... the Nazis?" I asked him, of who quickly nodded.

"Uh, yeah, yeah- the Nazis..." Steve murmured, while Hopper was close to throwing one of us out the house's window.

"If the Nazi's were from another dimension, totally." Dustin agreed, moving along. "Uh, it views other races, like us, as inferior to itself."

"It wants to spread," Mike told. "take over other dimensions."

"We are talking about the destruction of our world as we know it." Lucas added, making a great atmosphere.

"So please, for the love of God, let's not lose our shit-" Before I could finish the sentence, Steve was breaking what I'd said.

"That's great. That's great." He threw his hands around in the air as he moved away from the table. "That's really great! JESUS!"

"Okay, so if this thing is like a brain that's controlling everything," Nancy continued, looking down at the book and picking it up to read. "then, if we kill it..."

"We kill everything that it controls." I finish. "Voilà."

"Theoretically." Lucas says.

"Well, aren't you a buzz kill..." I muttered over at him.

"Great, so, how do you kill this thing?" Hop asked, moving over to Nancy and taking the book out of her hands to read it. "Shoot it with Fireballs or something?"

Dustin chuckled, thinking now was the time for jokes. "No. No, no... No fire... no Fireballs... uh, you summon an undead army, uh, because..." He gets one good look at Hopper and Nancy's face. "because zombies, you know, they don't have brains, and the Mind Flayer, it... it... it likes brains-" Hopper closes up the book as he listens. "It's just a game. It's a game..."

"What the hell are we doing here?" Hopper slammed the book onto the table, walking away almost like a five-year-old in a strop.

"If you're so pissed off at our idea, I thought we were waiting for your lovely military backup." I pointed out, regretting it the moment it came out of my mouth.

"WE ARE." He shouted, turning to look over at us.

"And even if they come, how are they gonna stop this?!" Mike asks. "You can't just shoot this with guns."

"YOU DON'T KNOW THAT." Hopper yelled. Oh boy oh boy this is not nice. "WE DON'T KNOW ANYTHING!"

"It's already killed EVERYBODY in the lab." I pointed out. "You guys seem to know that for fact." I say.

"AND, we know the monsters are gonna molt again." Lucas says.

"AND, we know that it's only a matter of time before those tunnels reach this town." Dustin added. We knew a lot, actually.

"They're right." We all turn to my Mom's voice. She was broken. "We have to kill it." I walk over to her as she spoke. Her voice trembled as she spoke out to us. "I want to kill it." She glanced over at me and Hop as we moved closer to her.

"Mom?" She went to speak again but I spoke over her. "Mom? Hey. Me, too, okay? Ever since he's started having Episodes again I've wanted it gone. But we need to know how to do that before we go in there with magic spells and blindfolds on."

"We need to know how to kill it." Hopper tells her. "We don't exactly know what we're dealing with here."

"No." We look over at Mike. "But he does." The boy walked towards my twin's still body on the couch. "If anyone knows how to destroy this thing, it's Will. He's connected to him. He'll know its weakness."

"I thought we couldn't trust him anymore." Max says from the kitchen. "That he's a spy for the Mind Flayer now."

"Yeah, but he can't spy if he doesn't know where he is..."

⊹˚˖⁺

We didn't hang around. Hopper got to work setting up the back shed, taking out everything and anything that wouldn't be of use to us. Which was a lot of things... a lot.

"You sure this is gonna work?" The three of us stood outside, taking off all the clothes that could be used. That could be used to save Will's life.

"He knew who I was." Mom says. I give Johnathan a cautious look as I folded a cloth in my hands. "He's still in there." I wanted to believe every word that was being said to me right there and then. But I don't know. "It's gonna work. It has to." Part of me nearly asked about if it didn't work. But the rest of me didn't want to know. The woman nodded over at me. "It has to work." With that, she walked back inside and I let out a last heavy breath before Johnathan threw me the clothes he'd picked off the line, glancing back up at the wire.

"No time like the present..." I murmured and he groaned, putting his hands up in the air and snapping off one end of the wire with cutters.

⊹˚˖⁺

The wire was wrapped around his body, hands, arms and legs and I found myself just standing there and starring in total disbelief. The two lights turned on and I look at my brother helplessly. How had we got here?

Hopper checked with all of us in the shed beforehand if we were ready. None of us were, but it wasn't as if there was any other way to go about it. He walked towards the boy, kneeling down next to him as he shook the bottle of disinfectant.

And just one moment of him smelling the contents later, Will was awake.

The boy looked around, not understanding anything before over at us behind the lights. The boy struggled in the wires and ties. "What? What? What Is this?" He looked everywhere as he tried to get out, failing. "What is this?" He raised his voice over at us and I stay silent. "Why am I tied up?"

Mom stepped over to him, squatting down in front of Will. "Will, we just wanna talk to you." She says. "We're not gonna hurt you."

He looked beyond her, over at us. "WHERE AM I?" He asked, raising his voice even more. Hopper kneeled down next to Joyce, holding out the Shadow Monster drawing.

"You recognize this?" He asked the boy, of who looked at the drawing hard. "DO you recognize this?" He repeated the question when he didn't get answer. Will shook his head. Oh.

"Hey." Joyce says. "We just wanna help you." She tells him softly. "But to do that, we have to understand how to kill it."

"WHY AM I TIED UP?" I stepped forward, pulling Mom backwards as my brother shouted in her face. "WHY AM I TIED UP?!" He repeated the question on and on and I shook my head, staring at Will. The lights began to flicker as I watched him try to move out of the chair. That was not my brother.

⊹˚˖⁺

Hopper held the boy back as the lights continued to flicker and he continued to insist that he should be let go. But then it stopped. Will shouting slowed, too and everything was much quieter. Will...

The colour in his face? It might as well always have been non-existent because that's certainly how it seemed. He looked like a zombie. Slowly, I sat on the seat in front of him, not loosing eye contact with him.

"Will? Answer me this..." I say. Thinking, I finally came up with something. "what's March 22nd?" He didn't reply, breathing in so heavily it was hard not to notice at all. "It's our birthday... our birthday. On eighth Mom got you that box of crayons. It was huge with every colour you could possibly imagine. Do you remember?" No reply. "120 colours." I nodded. "And uh, we both got given the same boring old gifts that were played with months on end... but you... all you wanted to do was draw. Draw with those colours."

"And I uh... I remember a time you drew a ship- a spaceship but it wasn't from a Star Wars movie or anything like that. It was your spaceship. It wouldn't surprise me if you used every colour in that box." I say, leaning back in the chair slightly like I was calm. I was far from calm, though. My voice had cracked when I spoke. "And I remember Mom taking it to work the next day, insisting to every customer, every child every worker who walked through the doors that her son drew it. That she was proud." Shaking my head, I looked away from him as he sat up straight, listening to my every word. "Yeah, it was embarrassing. But she was proud. And she still is."

"Do you remember the day Dad left?" I heard from behind me, causing a shaky breath to leave me. Johnathan pulled the Lonnie card. Cue my own tears, yippie! The taller boy kneeled down in front of Will as he spoke. "The two of us stayed up all night building Castle Byers... just the way that you drew it. And it took so long... because you were so bad at hammering..." He said making me and Mom chuckle through light tears. "You missed the nail every time. And then it started raining, but we stayed out there anyway..."

"You both sick for a week after that..." I murmured, recalling the memory.

"Right." Johnathan nodded, not taking his eyes off our brother. "But we just had to finish it, didn't we? We just had to."

"Do you remember the first day that we met?" Mike asked, Will's head turning from Johnathan over to Mike. Mike was in tears at the least. "It was... it was the first day of Kindergarten. I knew nobody. I had no friends and..." He took in a breath heavily before continuing. "I just felt so alone and so scared, but... I saw you on the swings and you were alone, too. Park was too ill for the first day, so you were alone. You were just swinging by yourself." Well if the last two stories weren't heartbreaking enough, ladies, gays, shes, hes and theys, this definitely was. "And I just walked up to you and... I asked. I asked if you wanted to be my friend. And, you said yes."

"You said yes." Mike repeated, breaking everyone's heart in the room. "It was the best thing I've ever done."

Will stared at Mike, almost seeming to be near tears himself.

"Will, baby." Mom kneeled next to Johnathan, hand on Will's knee trying to get to him. He looked at her, interests only on her. "If you're in there, just please... please talk to us." Will was close to tears, you could tell by how his whole body shook, but what threw me off was the empty eyes that I stared at. "Please, honey, please, can you do that for me?"

His breathing shook as he listened to Mom and then... then it stopped. It all stopped like it was flicked off like a light switch. "Let me go." He told us coldly, making me sigh in exhaustion. You say heart-to-heart, the Shadow Monster says fuck off.

⊹˚˖⁺

We stormed back in after Hopper, with the group crowding around us. "What happened?" Dustin asks us as I threw a pen over at Hop, while he picked up the back of an envelope to write on. Look at us and our prepared asses!

The man sighed as he sat down, the whole group crowding around him as he spoke. "I think he's talking, just not with words." Hop drew out the morse code and we all watched.

"Wait, what is that?" Steve asked, behind.

"Morse code." The whole group seemed to answer in unison, causing him to look around at us all, as if he was the only one to not receive the memo.

"H-E-R-E..." Hopper spelt out, causing us all to spell it back as a word.

"Here..."

Hop put the pen down and I raised an eyebrow. "Will's in there." I say. "He's talking to us... just not in the usual way..."

⊹˚˖⁺

"Close gate..." We all read in unison, reading the back of the cardboard for the pad of paper. After another twenty minutes of interrogation from Johnathan, Mike, and Joyce, we'd got another set of Morse code. Just nothing we particularly liked the sound of.

"Well, that sounds delightful." I murmured sarcastically. The phone suddenly rang and all eyes turned to it.

"SHIT. SHIT-" Dustin ran towards it while Nancy calmly walked, slamming his hand onto it, picking it up and immediately putting it back down. The phone wasn't exactly quiet in this house.

Silence sat between us before it went off again, Nancy going to step in before Dustin picked it up before her, going to hang up when she picked up the back of the phone, grabbing the phone itself in his hand and throwing it down the hallway. If I had a nickel for every phone we had...

"Do you think he heard that?" Max asked. My stomach dropped as my eyes went wide at the same time. Fuck.

"It's just a phone. It could be anywhere, right?" Steve said calmly.

"I don't know, that phone we've had for some time-" As I speak, I stop dead mid-sentence when we all hear it in the distance. The roars of a Demogorgon. The group of us walked out to the front where the door was, listening.

"That's not good..." Dustin murmured, stating the obvious. Max and Lucas walked towards the windows while I listened very carefully. Every roar could be heard, crystal clear.

"HEY! HEY!" Hopper shouted, walking around. "Get away from the windows!" He told Max, Mike and Lucas, of who all moved away quickly. "Do you know how to use this?!" He held out a gun, looking over at Johnathan. He wasn't the one for guns. Not one bit.

"What?" My older brother asked, taken back.

"CAN YOU USE THIS?" He repeated, honestly scared.

Johnathan didn't say anything, "I can." Nancy spoke up, stepping towards Hop. Johnathan had spoken about Nancy and her shooting. She was far better than Lonnie ever had been according to my older brother, and I really wouldn't be surprised. He shot two dogs in front of me and Will once, and Mom didn't speak to him for a week without her voice raising.

Hop threw the gun over at her without hesitation and we all stood behind the two with guns. Screeching continued to be heard in the distance while we all waited, Steve next to me with his bat. "Where are they?" I heard Mom ask. No one replied, to scared to speak in case a creature from the other side heard.

The growling got closer and closer as we waited. Not one of us dared to tear their eyes away from the door

The loud thud from the other wall of the house, over where the kitchen was, made us all turn, shook. "What are they doing?" Nancy asked as we all looked over. Moments passed in silence as we stood there, scared for our lives on the line.

We all stared out at the far window, no one moving as we waited. The quietness never fully died down, due to the constant roaring, snarling and screeching from all around us. A yell from another Demogorgon came from the front and we once again all turned. They were all right there.

Mom pulled me back into her grip and embrace while I stared at the front windows, waiting. A monster groaned out in pain, and we stood there awkwardly, not wanting to move forward or away. Then, an explosion from afar.

Each noise that came from a Demogorgon outside sent us all closer and closer to going over the edge, waiting for an attack. Whatever was going on, it didn't sound exactly normal. That's when we heard it. The quietness. Silence. Peace. Furrowing my eyebrows, I looked back at the door momentarily. Silence was never normal when Demogorgons were involved, and that's a fact.

Like most peace and ever-loving silence in Hawkins, though, it didn't last. And, to make matters so much better, a Demogorgon was thrown through the front house's windows. Lovely. Just... lovely... We all jumped back at it and the two aimed right at it, nowhere else.

All heavily breathed in shock as we stared at it and how it didn't move. It didn't move...

"Holy shit..." Dustin murmured beside me as the whole group slowly stepped closer and closer to the corpse of the creature.

"Is it dead?" Max asked the inevitable question as Hop closed in on it. The man moved his foot over its' face, gesturing it around freely. Thank fuck. It was dead.

Relief sat around the group momentarily before we heard creaking behind us. Our lives? A horror movie? Yeah...

The first lock of the door turned vigorously, causing a few to stare. What was that...

Hop staggered at the front of the group, aiming the gun directly at the door and ready to shoot. The chain lock fell down, too as we all watched, lost for words. What creature could even do that? When the door opened, though? That's when it all made sense.

Holy shit.

Hop lowered his gun, and so did Nancy. There, stood in the, now ruined, front room, stood one of the most badass people I knew. El.

a/n- 1k reads already ?? i love u all sm ?? hope u enjoyed this <3 go eat and drink something <33