The Last Dance (Stranger Things)

[cliffc999]

The first thing he heard was tears. The faint, desperate sobbing of a young woman, apparently caught between the Scylla of despair and the Charybdis of terror, floating on a sea of exhaustion.

That does not sound good, Eddie Munson thought to himself, as he exerted his willpower to the utmost to force his eyes open. A tiny portion of his mind catalogued the massive irony of his being relieved at his eyes being greeted by the black, roiling sky full of red lightning that was characteristic of the Upside Down.

"Okay," Eddie muttered to himself as he painfully rose to a sitting position from where he'd been laying on his back in the middle of the empty, rubble-strewn street. "Just the same hell dimension I was already in, not the actual Hell-"

Clutching the knotted rope of bedsheets in the Upside Down version of his trailer, knowing that the escape route through the gate in the ceiling back to the real-world counterpart of his home would just require a short climb, but also knowing that the horde of Demobats about to break through the door would simply follow him through the gate back to reality if he did-

Cutting the rope and leaving Dustin Henderson stranded as he turned and ran out of the trailer, frantically leading all the man-eating creatures away from him, buying as much time as he could-

Standing his ground with spear and shield in hand as the hideous creatures of the Upside Down tore his flesh open again and again, because he couldn't hope to outrun them on foot anyway if they'd already been able to catch up to him on his bicycle and at least this way he wouldn't die a coward-

That stupid ballsy kid Dustin somehow catching up to him anyway, as he lay choking to death on his own blood, and barely having enough time left to finish saying goodbye-

"I didn't run away this time, right?"

Eddie shook off the painful rush of memories and looked down at his perfectly healthy body, his clothes intact and showing no sign of having been shredded by the Demobats who'd torn him open from neck to waist.

"Shit, I am dead." he said, horrified. He frantically looked up and around at the sky, searching for more Demobats, because if the afterlife was going to start him out in a duplicate of where he'd died then the logical thing for the Devil to torment him with would be a replay of his death scene, right? At least Eddie was pretty sure that was logical, it wasn't as if he'd ever actually studied any of the Satanist stuff that most of the town of Hawkins had assumed he had to be into simply because he was that weirdo long-haired metalhead who played D&D. His shoulders, taut with fear, didn't relax much when the sky was revealed to be absolutely clear of any flying creatures, even at a distance.

"Boiling the pot slowly, huh big guy?" Eddie muttered to himself. "Or am I supposed to go investigate whoever's crying and then get jumped by your demons when I take the bait? Yeah, I actually got an entire party that way once in the game. Had to totally fudge the dice roll to avoid TPK'ing the kids-" he kept talking to himself nervously as he slowly and cautiously advanced towards where the faint sounds of the frightened girl were coming from.

You're an idiot, Munson. he cursed himself as he continued his slow and cautious advance, falling silent as he drew closer to whoever or whatever was down here with him. But then again, what would be the point of going the other way? If this is really the afterlife then it is not the good place and I am not leaving here, and just standing still and waiting for an eternity would be even stupider. So it's either go towards the whoever-it-is or away from it, and running away when I shouldn't have is-

And then Eddie rounded the corner of the last trailer and stopped, his jaw gaping at the sight of a young strawberry-blonde woman in a Hawkins High cheerleader outfit sitting on the ground in a tight ball of misery, her arms desperately clasped around her knees, and doing a thousand-yard-stare off towards the distant trees as tears leaked from her eyes.

"There is no way this is Hell if you're here." Eddie jawdropped.

"Eddie?" Chrissy Cunningham's head snapped up to look at him in astonishment, an instant before Eddie was almost tackled to the ground by her desperate lunge and hug. "Oh my God, Eddie!" she wailed, her surprisingly strong arms almost squeezing the breath out of him.

"Oof!" he grunted. "Easy, easy, I get that you're freaking out, I'd be freaking out too except I used up my whole quota of freakouts already over the past couple of days, but I'm here, take a deep breath, it's okay, it's okay-" he kept saying over and over until she managed to calm down enough to talk.

"Where are we?" she asked him desperately. "What happened? I remember having another hallucination right there in your trailer, and then everything hurt, and I passed out and woke up here, and I was so frightened I was just stuck in a permanent hallucination forever and forever and was really in a hospital bed somewhere being fed through a tube- oh no, is this even real? Are you real? Did I make you?" she pleaded. "Please tell me I'm not just imagining this too-" she began to sniffle.

"I'm real!" Eddie reassured her. "Trust me, please, I'm real, okay?" he entreated, trying to think of something that would penetrate the panicked fog of disbelief he could see in her eyes. "Like, if I was just something your own brain was cooking up to try and reassure yourself with then I'd have shown up earlier, yeah? You've been stuck here how long, you said? You don't hate yourself so much you'd leave yourself alone here by choice, right?"

"Days." she sniffled. "At least, it felt like days. But if this isn't just me going crazy again-"

"Turns out you weren't even going crazy the first time." Eddie reassured her. "There were people looking into what happened to you, I've met them. I'll tell you everything we learned in a few minutes, but for right now-"

"Okay." she said hopefully. "Okay, so, I woke up in your trailer on the floor, only it wasn't your trailer. Everything was dark, and gray, and the sky was-" she looked up at the red lightning and black, hellish clouds frightfully.

"Yeah." Eddie nodded meaningfully. "This is not a good scene, Chrissy. It really isn't. But did you see anything after you got here? Or hear anything?"

"No." Chrissy said. "I was just alone- so alone. I looked all through the trailer park and didn't find anyone, and this clearly wasn't the real world and the red lightning was so- so otherworldly, and I knew it was somewhere really bad, so I just sat down here and prayed and prayed and prayed-" She stopped and tried to collect herself. "Until you came and found me."

"Are you hungry? Thirsty? Need to go to the bathroom?" Eddie asked her.

"No, I'm fine-" Chrissy stopped and blinked in confusion. "Wait, why am I fine? I haven't even drank anything in a couple of days, I haven't even slept, but I'm not-" she trailed to a halt, her face going even paler.

"Yeah." Eddie said. "Pretty sure we're ghosts now or something." he said to her gently. "Because I know I'm dead. I wasn't hallucinating a bit when they killed me. And while you were hallucinating in my trailer-" he stopped, wincing painfully at the memories, before forcing me to continue. "The pain you said you felt? That was all your bones getting broken for real, not part of the vision you were having. I'm so sorry to tell you this but you died too, Chrissy. I saw your body."

"Then we're in Hell," she whispered fearfully. "Because this can't be Heaven-"

"There is no way you deserved to go there," Eddie said passionately. "Sure, I screwed up most of my life but have you ever done anything bad in your life? Anything even slightly mean-spirited? I know we didn't hang out in remotely the same crowd, but even I knew you were the nicest girl in school."

"Honor thy father and thy mother," Chrissy whispered as she hunched in shame. "Thou shalt not bear false witness. Thou shalt not covet-"

"Oh boy." Eddie sighed. "Look, I haven't been to church since grade school but I'm pretty sure those three don't sink you forever unless you totally blow off confession and have a whole attitude problem with God. Which, uh, I kinda did, but I'm sure you didn't. Not if you're religious enough to quote the Ten Commandments from memory." He exhaled heavily. "Also, I've seen this place before while I was alive."

"What?" Chrissy blurted, her eyes refocusing frantically on Eddie.

"Our town? Turns out somebody built it on top of some realllly creepy parallel dimension full of monsters called the Upside Down." Eddie explained. "According to what they told me, that secret government lab up the road accidentally opened a gate into here several years ago, and all sorts of crap has just been going wronger and wronger ever since. The first incident was when Will Byers disappeared for a week back in '83. You know, the kid that was on the news? Turns out he'd gotten stuck here, until they could find a way to fish him out."

"But you just said that we're dead!" Chrissy questioned him. "How does that go along with this being a real place where we were alive that people could come and go to?"

"Some kind of copy of a copy," Eddie thought out loud. "I mean, if it were just me then it could be an illusion or a dream or something because I'd seen the real version before I died, so it would be in my memories. But you've never been here, and you're seeing the same thing I am. So no clue how that's happening." Eddie stopped and thought. "Kinda a strange question, I know, but did you hear any music a little while ago?"

"No." Chrissy asked him confusedly. "Why?"

"Then this is definitely some kind of copy of the Upside Down, not the real one." Eddie nodded. "Because right before I died, we were distracting this horde of demon bats away from the big bad guy's house with, uh-" Eddie stopped and continued embarassedly. "Me playing my guitar at them? And that sounds so dumb now when I say it out loud."

"Your guitar?" Chrissy asked wonderingly.

"With the biggest amp I owned cranked all the way up to 10, playing the loudest heavy metal song I knew. I'm surprised Henderson didn't go deaf sitting next to the speakers, honestly." Eddie admitted.

"I definitely didn't hear any of that kind of music, no." Chrissy smiled weakly. "Is- is that how you died?"

"Bad guy's house was miles from here, so the plan was for me to play my music long enough and loud enough to decoy the bats all here and then go hide in my trailer while the other team snuck into the bad guy's house and blew him away. Problem is, something went wrong." Eddie waved his hand. "You see, the creatures that live here are all some kind of hive mind, so they should have stopped attacking as soon as the big bad died. When they kept hitting the trailer for so long that they were about to get inside anyway, even way past schedule, then I knew-" Eddie paused and swallowed heavily. "I knew they needed more time."

"What did you do?" Chrissy asked him.

"Ran back out of the trailer, jumped on a bike, and rode away screaming at the top of my lungs for them to follow me." Eddie replied. "Besides, the kid who was helping me, Dustin? He was still in the trailer - I mean, he'd gone back through a hole from here into the real world, the hole we were supposed to escape through in the original plan, but if the demon bats had gotten into the trailer then they'd have been able to follow him through the hole. Even if the kill team didn't need that much more time, I still had to pull the bats away from that kid. They'd have torn him apart."

"And they did tear you apart." Chrissy said, wincing at the mental images.

"Yeah, turns out they could fly faster than I could ride a bike." Eddie nodded ruefully.

"So that's how you died. But, you said you'd explain how I died?" Chrissy continued.

"The big bad guy we were trying to kill? He's the guy who murdered you." Eddie explained. "He had, like, psychic powers. Really strong ones. He was reaching out from the other dimension into ours and looking for people who had-"

"Weaknesses." Chrissy said shamefully. "Like my moth-" she came to a horrified halt.

"Oh shit, that was it?" Eddie said compassionately. "You had trouble at home? God damn it-"

"She always said I was pathetic, and I guess she was right." Chrissy said mournfully.

"No, that's bullshit." Eddie said. "Look, I met someone else that Vecna - the bad guy - was attacking the same way he did you, and Max - Max Mayfield, she was a freshman, you might have seen her at the counselor's office? Anyway, she was one of the scrappiest kids I'd ever met. Way braver than me. Hell, he got Nancy Wheeler too-"

"Nancy's dead?" Chrissy said, her hands flying to her mouth. "Oh no- I mean, I didn't know her that well, but we had classes together, she was-"

"She was one of the toughest and most mentally together people in the entire school, yeah." Eddie agreed. "Hell, she was a stone-cold badass. Vecna still got into her mind because-" Eddie shrugged. "Look, everybody's got something in their life that they're not happy about, and that asshole just loved to enjoy other peoples' pain. So don't get so down on yourself, okay? Dude was- is- at least I hope it's "was" - a sick and twisted extra-dimensional serial killing freak." He took a deep breath. "At least some good news is, the last I saw 'em both Max and Nancy were still alive."

"Yeah, because they were strong enough to fight him off." Chrissy said, downcast again. "Not like me."

"No, because they knew what was happening to them instead of being caught off guard." Eddie said. "And that was because of you. When you went down, that's what got them all investigating. Turns out that after what happened to the Byers kid, who was like best friends with her little brother, Nancy and all her friends got into fighting this shit."

"And you helped them?" Chrissy said, awestruck. "You were secretly fighting evil from another dimension all that time?"

"... I didn't even speak to any of them until this week." Eddie muttered embarassedly. "They caught up to me when they were- well, I was a witness to your death, and they were investigating it, so their little Scooby Gang had to talk to me." He sighed. "Also, the cops thought I'd did it and they were helping me hide out."

"I'm so sorry." Chrissy blurted. "That was all because I'd died in your trailer, right? I shouldn't have gone-"

"You shouldn't have gone to the place I invited you to come?" Eddie cut her off. "Chrissy, come on."

"I shouldn't have tried buying drugs from you in the first place, especially since you told me that it was psychic powers from another dimension making me see things and not... something drugs might have helped with." she trailed off. "Then you'd never have gotten in trouble."

"And then the only kids in town who could find out what was actually going on wouldn't have come investigating me, so they'd never have met my uncle, who wouldn't have given them one of the clues they needed to figure out who the bad guy was, and they'd never have had a chance to stop him at all." Eddie said. "Look, I know a whole lot about life not being fair, and what happened to you or to me really wasn't fair at all. But that doesn't mean it's our fault. It's definitely not your fault."

"But if I hadn't-" Chrissy began.

"Chrissy, if you're not blaming me for how I ended up, and you're not, then how does that jibe with you blaming yourself for how you ended up?" Eddie said reasonably. "The guy I blame for this all is named Vecna, and he's the only guy either of us need to blame. Especially seeing as how he's the guy who actually killed us both."

"What kind of a name is 'Vecna'?" Chrissy said, her nose scrunching up cutely in puzzlement.

"... the kind a bunch of nerds pick out of a Dungeons & Dragons game." Eddie admitted, blushing. "Look, we needed something to call the freaky extradimensional wizard monster, because we didn't find out his real name until later."

"His real name?" Chrissy pressed.

"Henry Creel. Son of the Victor Creel from the old murder house on Morehead? Turns out little Henry is the one who actually killed his family, using his psychic powers, and framed his dad for it. Then the government took him away to study his psychic powers in a lab, and I'm still not clear on exactly how he got out and then got himself stuck in the Upside Down because the gang was just figuring that part out when-" He shrugged. "Well, you know."

"Who were these people anyway?" Chrissy said. "I mean, Nancy's friends."

"I didn't meet 'em all, but from what they said Jonathan Byers was part of them until they moved to California. Which is not surprising if the first thing the Upside Down did was try to kill his little brother. And there was Robin- Robin Buckley, she's in the school band, did you ever meet her?" Eddie said.

"Just a couple times when we were both at pep rallies, we didn't talk much." Chrissy said. "Was there anybody else we went to school with?", only to be puzzled at Eddie's sudden outburst of laughter.

"Oh yeah." Eddie said, still chuckling. "Because - okay, there was like this whole group of freshmen who helped them research and stuff, Max and Dustin were two of them and there was also Lucas, that new kid on the basketball team. But the last front-line member of their little monster hunter squad? You will never, and I mean never guess, not in a million years." Eddie trailed off dramatically.

"Jason?" Chrissy guessed incredulously. "My boyfriend?"

"No." Eddie said, his face turning instantly sober again. "And that is an entire other painful conversation we're gonna need to have later, because I don't know how he was when you two were together but he turned into a complete psycho asshole after you were gone. But I meant Nancy's ex-boyfriend, not yours."

"Steve?" Chrissy blurted in utter astonishment.

"'The Hair' Harrington himself, the shallowest douchiest pretty boy to ever walk the halls of Hawkins High!" Eddie laughed. "And it turns out that he's actually a really cool dude, loves to take care of the kids, and is a total demon-fighting warrior. Seriously, I saw him, and I mean literally saw him, rip the head off one of the same kind of monsters that killed me with his bare hands. And we thought Peter Parker had an airtight secret identity!"

"I- wow." Chrissy said, shaking her head. "I, uh, never went out with him or anything, so I wouldn't know, but-"

"By the way, how did that happen?" Eddie asked, honestly confused. "You were a cheerleader three years running, and 'King Steve' dated all of them back in his heyday at one point or another before he went steady with Nancy. I think the only one he didn't go with was Carol, and that's because she was steadies with Tommy H."

"Ugh." Chrissy said disgustedly. "No, it was probably because she was such a-" She cut herself off.

"Word that rhymes with 'witch'?" Eddie said amusedly.

"I didn't say that." Chrissy replied, her lip quirking. "But, no, I never went out with him. My parents- didn't approve of him." she trailed off soberly.

"Sorry to bring them up again." Eddie said. "Anyway, you feel better?"

"Is that why you actually stopped in the middle of all this to waste time talking about high school?" Chrissy asked him. "To give me a chance to calm down?"

"Hey, I was about one minute short of a panic attack when I found you and then I had to keep it together. Can't make myself look too pathetic in front of the most beautiful girl I've ever had visit me..." Eddie trailed off musically.

"Thank you." Chrissy said, smiling sweetly. "But- okay, we've had a moment to breathe, and I'm not a total mess anymore, so now we need to-" She stopped. "Think of... something?"

"Some inspiration would be a welcome gift at the moment." Eddie agreed. "Sadly, I am fresh out."

"Wait, you said there was a hole back to reality from the Upside Down version of your trailer." Chrissy thought out loud after a moment. "If this is a copy of the Upside Down, maybe there's a hole that leads somewhere out of here too."

"That... is actually a really good idea." Eddie agreed. "Okay, it's not that long a walk back to my place from here, so let's go see."

After several minutes of hiking they'd crossed the trailer park back to the unit where Eddie had lived with his uncle. The house key in Eddie's pocket fit the lock, even though this was some type of afterlife-copy of the Upside Down which was itself a copy of the real Hawkins, but the dusty and long-abandoned echoes of the Munsons' real-world life were disappointingly free of any portal back to... anywhere... on the ceiling.

"Hey, are you okay?" Eddie said, putting a comforting hand on Chrissy's shoulder.

"That's where I died, isn't it?" she said softly, looking at the bare ceiling.

"Yeah." he said. "That's why the gate was there. Vecna was using the people he killed as sacrifices to open portals between the worlds, so he could-" Eddie stopped, not wanting to mention the part about 'Vecna trying to tear open the barriers between the Upside Down and reality to destroy all of Hawkins' to Chrissy when she already had more than enough to be upset about.

"Well, it's not here here." Chrissy said disappointedly, sitting down despairingly on the same couch she'd been talking with Eddie on only a few days ago, immediately before Vecna's final attack on her. "So now what?"

"Good question." Eddie said, sitting down next to her. "Look, we apparently don't have hunger or thirst or anything like that here, but are you cold? That cheerleading outfit isn't exactly all-weather."

"It's a little chilly, yeah." Chrissy agreed.

"Okay." Eddie said, getting up. "Not that I have a wide selection of ladies' apparel in here - or any selection - but I think you could fit into a pair of my Uncle Wayne's more loose-fit jeans. And I've got some t-shirts and a jacket that should fit you-"

"Thank you." she said, standing up. "Okay, at least I can change out of this silly thing and- wait, someone's out there!" she said worriedly, having caught a glimpse of movement in the window.

"Someone or some thing." Eddie said, grabbing Chrissy's arm and pulling her down into a crouch out of sight. "Right." he whispered. "You head back towards my bedroom quiiietly as you can-" he continued, reaching into the end table by the couch and pulling out a four-cell Maglite and swinging it to test the balance. "And I'll-"

"Hey!" a younger girl's voice said challengingly from outside the trailer, as her palm slapped flat on the outside of the door. "I saw you moving through the window! Who's in there?!?"

* * * * *​

Author's Notes: This one's being cross-posted from SB, so it will update somewhat behind there because SB is where I'm going to be tweaking it and untypo'ing it before copying it over.

So here we go. No outline, no plan, and only a partial knowledge of canon, but I just belatedly finished season 4 of Stranger Things - which I only recently got into - and I have got a lot of steam I have to let off, so, here's where I'm going to vent it. Als

By the way, if anyone who hasn't seen the show is curious which song Eddie was playing for his diversion, here it is.

Seriously, dude was shredding Metallica in a hell dimension, while the sky was full of red lightning, as a horde of demon bats flew towards him to drain his blood. Most. Metal. Ever.

And yeah, all the critics who kept saying 'Eddie's sacrifice was needless', no, it wasn't. So long as the bats were attacking they'd know Vecna was still alive, because of the hive mind. So Eddie would know that Steve, Nancy, and Robin had been held up and that the decoy team would have to go into overtime. Between that and the possibility of the bats going through the hole to kill Dustin, Eddie had to do what he did. As for his not running away at the end but turning to face the bats... look, they'd caught up to him when he was riding a bike, so what chance did he have of outrunning them on foot? He knew he was already done, so at that point he might as well go out not ashamed.

 

[cliffc999]

"Max?" Eddie blurted, immediately jumping up to pull open the door. "What are you doing here?"

The door opened to reveal a short 15-year-old girl with dark red hair done up in twin braids, wearing a brown leather jacket, t-shirt, and jeans. Her hard and suspicious face collapsed into momentary relief, then twisted in curiosity. "Eddie? What are you-" Max halted and her face collapsed again into horrified shock before firming up into an expressionless mask.

"Hey-" Eddie began, only to be interrupted by Chrissy's voice from behind him.

"Is this the Max you were telling me about?" she asked innocently, before stopping at Max's expression. "...what's wrong?"

"Chrissy." Max said tonelessly. "But you were dead. Which means if I'm here, then I'm dead-" She looked up at Eddie and continued faintly. "Four kills. Four gates."

"Oh shit." Eddie cried, slapping his forehead. "I didn't think of that! Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck-"

"What's wrong?" Chrissy begged them.

"Vecna's plan." Eddie moaned. "Every time he did his freaky murder ritual on someone and made a gate, it made the barrier between dimensions weaker. Once he had four of them, he said- he said-"

"That Hawkins would collapse into the Upside Down and everything would be destroyed." Max answered Chrissy tonelessly. "You, Fred, Patrick-" She closed her eyes and tried not to cry. "And now me. Which means we lost. We lost everything." she came to a despairing halt.

"But that can't be true." Eddie said desperately. "Before, before I died, I saw the bats stop attacking. They all just fell right to the ground and never moved again! The hive mind was gone, it had to be! So how is this possible?!?"

"I don't know!" Max retorted heatedly. "But unless this whole thing is just me talking to Vecna's bullshit visions again, there is no way she can be here unless we're dead too!"

"Oh, I am definitely dead." Eddie agreed sadly. "I had a horde of those bats tearing me to pieces-"

"Dustin!" Max cried desperately. "Oh God, please tell me-"

"Dustin's fine!" Eddie rushed to reassure her. "The reason I got torn up is I, uh, I had to lead the bats away from him. I bought enough time for the hive mind to go down, they never got near him. I saw him still alive before I died."

"Thanks." Max husked out heavily. "Really, thank you. You saved his life-" She winced. "Assuming he didn't die anyway when Hawkins was destroyed."

"Look, I admit I barely know anything but we can't assume Hawkins was really destroyed until after we see that it was. Like Eddie said, Vecna can't still be alive, can he?" Chrissy pleaded.

"I was back in the real world when I died, so I didn't see what happened with Vecna after I snapped out of it." Max replied. "Vecna had been in the middle of killing me when he got interrupted, but even after he fought Eleven off-"

"Eleven?" Chrissy asked confusedly.

"My best friend who moved to California. She's psychic." Max explained matter-of-factly. "Somehow at the end she felt my mind in trouble and came to help me long distance. Problem is, Vecna was too strong." she trailed off discouragingly.

"If he beat Eleven, then how'd you get out?" Eddie asked. "Because if you were stuck in there for long enough for Vecna to be killing you at all, then that means your original escape plan must have already gone bust."

"No idea." Max shrugged. "I was dying in Vecna's mind realm when suddenly everything went black, and then I was back in the real world. I couldn't see or feel anything because the asshole had already taken out my eyes and broken all my limbs-" she shuddered, and then flinched as Chrissy stepped forward to draw her into a comforting hug. "Hey!"

"She's not exactly a hugger." Eddie observed sardonically, as Chrissy refused to let go and Max didn't quite fight her off.

"Anyway," Max continued, eventually shrugging free after her voice was steady again, "I- I could hear Lucas talking to me, and I knew it had to be the real Lucas from what he was saying. I got to say goodbye- sort of." she muttered. "And then it all faded away and I woke up here." She sighed. "Truth be told, I was kinda in denial about not being dead, because there really wasn't much else that could explain this. So I- looked around, and didn't find anything, and then sat around trying to think of something else anyway and getting nowhere. Then I saw people moving around inside your trailer, which was the first sign of any kind of life since I'd gotten here, so I came over to check it out."

"Why would you be at the trailer park at all?" Chrissy wondered. "Did you die here too?"

"She lives next door." Eddie answered her. "And yeah, if I was stuck in some weird-ass empty copy of the Upside Down, I'd go back to my house too. In fact, that's what we did."

"Yeah." Max agreed, rubbing the back of her right hand nervously. "So, are we just going to stand out here all night or what?"

"Mi casa es su casa," Eddie invited her in.

* * * * *​

Without hunger, thirst, or other bodily needs, the passage of time in this strange echo of the Upside Down was very hard to measure. Even if they'd tried, the trio wouldn't have been able to tell you how long they'd sat there brainstorming and catching Chrissy, and to a lesser extent Eddie, up on the whole backstory concerning the Upside Down, the government's secretive Hawkins Project, the existence of the Number psychics, and the adventures of the people who'd been contending against or with all of them. So after a lengthy council session that could easily have been several hours or several days, the topic drifted to a halt as they reluctantly returned to facing what they'd been avoiding.

"So what now?" Eddie finally asked the obvious question. "Because just sitting around and shooting the breeze for eternity is probably going to get a little same-y after a while."

"This is the point at which Dustin would be thinking up some clever plan, or Nancy and Robin would be using those puzzle-solving brains of theirs to crack the mystery." Max sulkily kicked the end table from her armchair. "But they're not here."

"But that's a big hint that Hawkins probably isn't destroyed, right?" Chrissy said hopefully from where she was sitting on the other end of the couch from Eddie, having changed out of her cheerleading outfit into the Munsons' borrowed clothes. "Because you and I could both be here because Vecna had sacrificed us in his rituals, but Eddie didn't die that way. Which means being sacrificed by Vecna isn't the explanation for us being stuck in this... purgatory. And yet nobody else we know has come here."

"Eddie did still die in the Upside Down, though." Max replied. "And technically so did you and me, at least partially, because Vecna was using our deaths to make gates between the Upside Down and reality. So there's no guarantee that the reason we're alone in here is because we're the only people who died."

"Wasn't the whole point of Vecna's plan making it so that the barriers between the Upside Down and the real Hawkins did not exist anymore?" Eddie thought out loud. "Which means that if whatever's happening to us is still making those kinds of distinctions, then we have an actual reason to believe that Hawkins hasn't already fallen into the mega-gate that Vecna wanted it to fall into. 'It is not despair, for despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not.'" Eddie finished dramatically, and then sighed at the blank expressions of the two girls. "Are Dustin and I seriously the only two people in Hawkins who ever read 'Lord of the Rings'?"

"I could only finish 'The Hobbit'." Chrissy admitted sheepishly.

"The nerds are infiltrating everywhere." Max snarked. "But yeah, Hawkins maybe not being gone? I'd really like to believe that." Max agreed softly. "But there's something you're both missing. Even if you're right, that just means it's not the end of the world yet."

"You're assuming Vecna is still alive?" Chrissy said.

"Ever since I died, things have been kind of... numb... on some levels. I used to be able to feel Vecna's mark on my mind - his curse - as plain as day. Now I can't." Max said. "But I still have this horrible hunch, this conviction I just can't shake, that the connection's not actually gone. It's just that somehow I can't feel it. But I still don't feel entirely normal, either."

"Like a third-degree burn." Chrissy observed. "You're not free from pain because you're uninjured, but because you were so badly injured that the nerve endings were destroyed."

"Kinda hard to get more badly injured than being murdered." Max nodded.

"Speaking of that," Eddie observed. "As you said, you and Chrissy were both victims of Vecna's ritual. Are you feeling this 'numb' thing too?" he turned to ask her.

"I'm not sure." Chrissy replied. "Remember, even before I died I'd barely been able to sleep for days, and then I'd gone through that whole run of hallucinations without having the slightest idea of what was happening to me or why, and then I ended up in a depiction of the Upside Down without even knowing what it was. There was a reason I was so out of it when you originally found me, Eddie, because I'd been almost completely disoriented even before I actually died and then tossed into an entirely unfamiliar environment. I needed you to reorient me on what was real and what wasn't before I could start to recover. So-" she shrugged.

"So you'd have no idea of how exactly you were feeling then as compared to now." Max said, flexing her fingers. "Got it. Which means we have to assume that Vecna is still in play somehow until after we can be sure he's not. If nothing else, something clearly had to have gone wrong with the plan to kill him, what with the delay in the schedule that got you killed on top of whatever the heck had gone off-script and gotten me killed."

"Entirely correct." Eddie nodded. "Which means that us sitting and waiting forever is not a great plan 'A', which means that we need a next move."

"Well, if this is an artificial copy of the Upside Down then somebody copied it." Chrissy said logically. "Who are the possible people who could have done that?"

"The list starts with Vecna." Max answered. "But we've each been here for maybe days and haven't seen so much as a single Demobat, let alone all the nightmare crap that Vecna tortured us with before. There's no way he has that much patience, he's obsessed with hurting people."

"This isn't a real physical world, seeing as how none of us actually get hungry, thirsty, or sleepy anymore despite people in the actual Upside Down still having actual metabolisms." Eddie said. "So either this really is the afterlife, at which point God is not only being a total dick but has gone completely off-script, or-" Eddie came to a halt. "Or damned if I know."

"It's almost definitely got to be some kind of mind realm." Max agreed. "I mean, Vecna pulled me into an inside-the-head copy of his actual house in the Upside Down twice, so we know it can be done. But who would have that kind of mental power, and be able and willing to use it on our minds even after our bodies died, and not be Vecna?"

"This 'Eleven' girl you mentioned?" Chrissy asked. "She's the other psychic, after all."

"No," Max shook her head. "That could possibly explain me, because El and I have known each other a long while and she was actually in contact with my mind right before I died. But she doesn't even know that either of you exist, much less have enough familiarity with your minds to get in psychic contact with you all the way from California. And as far as anyone knows all of the other Numbers are dead, and we've never met any of them anyway except for Vecna."

"Yeah, if I ran a sudden new boss villain into a campaign right in the middle of a plot twist like this with absolutely no foreshadowing? My players would have called that a total ass pull, and they'd be right." Eddie agreed. "Which means it's probably a player on the board that people already know about, but aren't thinking about."

"Nothing comes to mind." Max shrugged.

"So we look for clues?" Chrissy suggested diffidently. "But where would we find any?"

"Not Vecna's house." Max said immediately. "I am not going there again, not ever."

"Bad idea." Eddie agreed. "Either nothing's there and we wasted the whole trip, or something is there and we just told him that we're still around to torture some more. That's a lose-lose proposition and no mistake. Do you think we'd find anything up at the copy of the old government lab?"

"Never been there." Max said. "No idea of the layout, and even if none of the guards or pet demogorgons or whatever they kept up there got copied over into here, the place is supposed to be built like a missile bunker and I definitely can't pick those kinds of locks. We'd never get in."

"You can pick locks?" Chrissy asked wonderingly, to be answered by Max's brief smirk.

"Chrissy and I originally came here to check the site of one of the murder gates, and found nothing." Eddie said, looking briefly up at his trailer ceiling. "So we probably won't find anything at the other three sites either. I don't even know exactly where they are, except for the one at Lover's Lake."

"Pennhurst Asylum." Max snapped her fingers. "Nancy and Robin went there to talk to Victor Creel, it's where they turned up the clue about how music stimulates parts of the brain that can't be reached any other way. That's how they knew to use my favorite song to help snap me out of Vecna's trance the first time. But Victor was locked up there for a long time, since like the 50s. Now maybe none of the shrinks ever believed a word he was saying-"

"But he was still saying it, and they'd have kept notes about what he said in interviews." Chrissy agreed eagerly. "And the copies of those notes will still be in the copy of the asylum."

"Okay." Eddie shrugged as they all rose to their feet. "Our mystery awaits."

* * * * *​

"Urgh!" Max grunted, slamming the filing cabinet shut. "What did these guys even do for a living, play pinochle all day?"

"Poor dude did not have the slightest clue." Eddie said mournfully from where he was sitting at the nearby desk still heaped with stacks of binders as he wearily rubbed the bridge of his nose with his fingers. "Victor never even knew Henry was the killer, he thought the kid had just been another one of the victims."

"Yeah, outside of the music clue that saved me - and he didn't even know that leaving the radio on during Henry's murder spree is what saved him, Robin had to figure that out - there's nothing here." Max groused "Chrissy, you've been quiet for a while, do you- Chrissy?"

"I can't hear you." Chrissy whispered to herself from where she sat on a nearby chair, her eyes squeezed tightly shut. "Go away, go away..."

"Chrissy?" Eddie looked over in alarm and then immediately leapt out of his chair to go kneel in front of her, grabbing by the arms. "Chrissy! Can you hear me?!?"

"Oh shit." Max went pale. "Chrissy!" she shouted in her ear. "Is it him? Is it-"

"Vecna." she whispered, her eyes slowly opening. "He's- he's angry-"

"Your song!" Max begged her. "Quick, what's your favorite song?"

"Amazing grace how sweet the sound / That saved a wretch like me" Chrissy began to sing to herself, her pure sweet voice filling the murky room like an angel come to earth. "I once was lost / But-" she trailed off as her eyes began to roll back in her head.

"No no no no-" Max pleaded. "But- shit! I don't know this stupid song!"

"But now am found / Was blind but now I see." Eddie broke in with a rich baritone. "'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear / And grace my fears relieved / How precious did that grace appear / The hour I first believed." He kept singing to her, pleading with her, both hands on Chrissy's shoulders as he desperately peered into her blank eyes. "Through many dangers, toils, and snares / I have already come-"

"-This grace that brought me safe thus far." Chrissy's voice weakly resumed as her eyes began to refocus, falling into sync with Eddie's.

"And grace will lead me home." the duet finished, before all three people came together in a desperate hug.

"It's okay, it's okay, we've got you." Eddie and Max both said as Chrissy leant into them, weeping with relief. "We've got you."

"Thank you." Chrissy said passionately from where her chin lay on Eddie's shoulder. "I'm so sorry, I-"

"You started to feel bummed out when our expedition turned up a bust, and as soon as you began to spiral he homed in on your depression like a magnet." Max agreed. "Been there, done that."

"But you were right here too and didn't fall back in." Chrissy said shamefully as the group hug broke up. "I'm such a weakling-"

"Wait." Max said, puzzled. "That is weird. Because let me tell you, I have been feeling pretty damn bummed out ever since I kicked the bucket, I just-" She shook her head from side to side. "But I'm not even remotely feeling him. I mean, forget about me fighting him off, he's never even tried for me. I don't even have that creepy sense of him looking at you from a distance you always felt, let alone the goddamned clock or the nightmare voices."

"Well, whether it was one of you or both of you he still knows we're here now." Eddie said practically. "So we probably want to bounce out of this place before he starts sending the nightmare legion around."

"Damn straight." Max agreed as they helped Chrissy to her feet. "Let's head for the woods, you were able to hide out from him there for a while the last time you got stuck in the Upside Down."

"I still can't believe that idiot Harrington got himself sucked through the hole in the lake." Eddie agreed as they hurriedly left the asylum. Although expecting the sky to fill with demon bats or nightmare visions to appear at every nerve-wracking moment of the journey, they were surprised to reach their destination entirely unmolested.

"Shit." Max swore as they sat down underneath a convenient outcropping to catch their nonexistent breath. "Still no clues, still no plan, and now we're on a clock."

"Well, if our cover's already blown that removes the reason we were avoiding the Creel house-" Eddie began.

"No." Max said emphatically. "Never. Again."

"So what now?" Eddie sighed.

"Actually, can I ask you something?" Max turned to Eddie. "Seriously, you can belt out 'Amazing Grace' right off the cuff? I know Chrissy's family is like super religious, but you really don't strike me as the church-going type."

"Haven't been there since I was eight years old." Eddie admitted. "But I've got a good memory for music. If I hear a song, if I know the notes, then I can play it anytime later without the sheet music. Or sing it."

"That's not 'a good memory', Eddie, that's being a musical genius." Chrissy said. "Wow."

"Yeah, that's pretty damn cool." Max agreed. "I wish I'd paid more attention to Dustin when he said I should've come hung out with you guys."

"I wish I'd known you were such a great musician." Chrissy agreed. "I mean, I'd heard you play in middle school, but- anyway, I didn't do all those years of church choir just because Mom made me, I really liked it."

"Chrissy Cunningham, pure-hearted cheerleader who sang in the church choir every Sunday, suddenly throwing it all over to go off and be the lead singer in the local heavy metal garage band." Eddie said jokingly. "Now there's a scene that would've blown the minds of everyone in town."

"Yeah." Max chuckled. "Steve was right. All the rules about who you're allowed to hang out with in high school and who you should avoid, they're all bullshit. I know he wishes he'd figured that out a couple years before he actually did, and hey, look at how split up we all were by the expectations. And now it's all chill."

"Except for us being trapped in a mind copy of a hell dimension with no idea of how or why." Eddie said, standing up to start pacing. "Besides, unless Max here turns out to have a killer talent for the drums that she's been hiding all this time, we don't exactly have enough people for a band."

"Wait." Chrissy realized. "Even if we don't want to go anywhere near Vecna's lair, Max, that's where you already were when you died. So you'd have woken up there before you came here, so what did you see then?"

"But I didn't wake up there." Max replied.

"Well, where did you wake up?" Eddie asked curiously.

"The hospital." Max shrugged. "Apparently I lived long enough to get in the ambulance, but then-" She shrugged.

"No, it doesn't fit." Eddie said, rising to his feet. "Because if what Vecna even started to do to you was the same thing I saw happen to Chrissy, then I realllly doubt that you could have lived long enough for the ambulance to get there."

"So your waking up in the hospital is a break in the pattern, just like both you and I being sacrifices and Eddie not being but all three of us being stuck here is a break in the pattern." Chrissy said. "And with this big mystery we've got stumping us, any breaks in the pattern are where we should start looking."

"Might as well," Max said, rubbing her hands together.

* * * * *​

"And here we are." Max said, as the three of them stared down at an empty hospital bed. "This is as far as I got."

"But it doesn't make sense." Eddie said. "This isn't the emergency room. You didn't DOA in the ambulance, you didn't even code out on the table, you made it all the way into the critical care ward. If you weren't dead by then, then- shit, I'm not a doctor."

"Well, facts are facts." Max said. "You're both 100% definitely dead, you're both here, and I'm here-" she rubbed her hand.

Chrissy's eyes followed the motion, and then looked back at the hospital bed, and then around the room, and back to Max's hands. "Max, why are you always rubbing your hand like that?"

"Because the damn thing has a cramp or something." Max complained. "It's been like that since I got here."

"We don't feel hungry, thirsty, tired, or any other of the frailties. Chrissy felt a little cold until she got into warmer clothes, that's about it, and even that could have just been in her head, temperature sometimes is. But you still feel pain." Eddie turned and then experimentally slammed his fist into the nearby wall. "Ow! And so do I!" he said, waving his hand back and forth to try and relieve the sting. "Well, so much for that clue!"

"No, I don't think so." Chrissy said wonderingly. "Not if she's been feeling it constantly the whole time. Max, can I see your hand?"

"I suppose." she said, holding it out for Chrissy to take in both of her hands and peer at it closely.

Chrissy poked one precise spot on the back of Max's right hand with a finger. "Here? Does it hurt here?"

"Yeah, right there. How'd you know?" Max looked at her curiously.

"When I was in eighth grade I had a bad stomach infection." Chrissy said. "I was in the hospital for a week and a half, and I couldn't take anything but fluids. They had to feed me through an IV." She said. "And when they did that, they put the needle right in there, but they had to pull it out and put it in again because the first time the nurse stuck it in she'd touched the nerve and it just kept aching." She tapped the same spot on Max's hand again. "And this is a critical care recovery room, the sort of place they'd keep someone who had to be on life support."

"Wait, are you saying-?" Eddie broke in.

"Max, I think the reason you woke up in this room and not Vecna's attic is because you're not entirely dead." Chrissy stated.

"What, you mean like in a coma?" Max startled. "I-" She paused to think. "It's... possible. Lucas was right there, and he'd get help for me as fast as he could. And Vecna was interrupted, so maybe he just messed me up really bad but not fatally-"

"So, assuming Chrissy's right, which she probably is because she's a very smart girl, a new clue." Eddie thought out loud.

"This place, whatever or whoever it is, can take the minds of both the dead and the almost dead." Chrissy said. "And that tells us-" She stopped. "Okay, I guess I'm not that smart."

"Wait." Eddie said wonderingly, his mouth starting to smile. "If Max is in a coma, then- Max, can you hear anything?"

"You're joking, right?" Max said incredulously. "Why the hell would I even want to try hearing Vecna? I've been keeping my brain as tightly shut as possible ever since I got here!"

"Not Vecna." Eddie said emphatically. "Think about it. Your best friend's a psychic. If I had psionic powers and my best friend was in a coma, what I would be doing with my powers is trying to wake them up."

"-holy shit." Max said. "I didn't even think of that. But- no. That's a whole lot of what-ifs you're chaining together. It is so thin."

"Yeah, but what else have we got right now?" Eddie insisted. "As soon as we lose all hope, you know who catches up to us."

"Eleven couldn't be here trying 24/7." Chrissy agreed. "Eleven would have to go home and eat, and sleep, and help your friends fight the monsters, and- well, whatever else she does for a living. But the way time passes for us in here is really flexible. And if you really are in the hospital then I'm sure your friends come here to visit you as often as they can. We can afford to wait however long it takes until she tries again."

"We stay here long enough, you keep that head of yours open just a crack enough-" Eddie agreed. "Who knows? It's worth a try."

"That 'numb' thing I mentioned." Max said. "Like I was subliminally disconnected from being here somehow. If I'm not totally dead, that might be why I'm feeling that way."

"And it might be why Vecna's not seeing you like he almost saw me just now." Chrissy said. "He's looking in the wrong place. It's up to you, of course, but I think-" she trailed off diffidently.

"It's worth the risk." Max agreed. "Okay, if you don't mind sitting there and being bored out of your minds for however long-"

"As long as somebody doesn't home in on us here and we've got to bounce again, then it's not like we don't have time." Eddie nodded.

"Right. Well, if this goes to shit then you know what my favorite song is." Max said, settling back in one of the hospital chairs and closing her eyes.

"I can sing that one. I've heard it lots of times." Chrissy nodded vigorously, and her and Eddie also settled down to wait.

Max concentrated the same way she had during her final mind battle with Vecna, trying to reach a quiet, steady place inside of her, a place Vecna couldn't touch. It had worked only temporarily against his power, but that was during an active attack. If she could reach that state of mind when he wasn't paying attention to her and hold it then it might be safe for her to open her mind, to try and listen for voices on the ether-

And as she floated in a warm, black void, the passage of time a thing she couldn't even to measure, desperately hoping and yet quietly despairing as no matter how hard she tried there was nothing but more and more blackness-

"Max? Max? Can you hear me? Maaaaax!" a young woman's desperate screaming echoed faintly.

"El!" Max 'shouted' back as loud as she could. "Over here! I'm over here!"

* * * * *​

Author's Notes: The plot thickens! Now comes the hard part. *g*

And yeah, I see Eddie as the sort of 'hear it once, play it forever' musical genius. I mean, note that by the canon release date of "Master of Puppets", that song had been in release for less than three weeks before the in-show date of the season 4 finale, and in that period of time Eddie had already taught himself how to shred that song like a rock god simply by ear.

Chrissy's family has nothing known about them in canon except that they're fairly prosperous and her mother is an emotionally abusive bitch who drove her daughter into an eating disorder, but given that her boyfriend Jason was canonically a super religious fanatic I can't imagine him dating a girl who didn't go to church a lot.

 

[cliffc999]

"Wait, the heavy metal song that everybody kept telling me should be banned because it praised Satan was actually about 'Don't do drugs?'" Chrissy chuckled quietly, the two of them doing their best to keep their voices down as Max lay meditating in the hospital bed at the other end of the room.

"I know, right?" Eddie chuckled back. "But just listen to the chorus! Taste me you will see / More is all you need / Dedicated to / How I'm killing you." he sang softly. "And now that you've heard the words, do they sound more like they're talking about worshipping the Devil or about taking heroin?"

"It's about drug addiction, of course." she nodded. "That's just so obvious once you actually listen to it. How did so many people get it so wrong?"

"Because they didn't bother to learn a single thing about it before they condemned it." Eddie said, his voice suddenly turning somber.

"Eddie?" Chrissy probed.

"Remember when I said we were going to have to have a really uncomfortable conversation about your ex-boyfriend?" Eddie asked. "Because- okay, I hate to pry, but now that we can't duck the subject any longer I have to ask you. The day we actually started talking again for the first time since middle school, you'd come to me to buy some pot because you thought it would help you turn the nightmares off long enough to get some sleep. You know, before we all found out it was Vecna attacking your mind."

"I must have sounded like such an idiot. 'So, how does this... work, exactly?'" Chrissy quoted herself.

"I have heard first-time buyers making much bigger idiots of themselves, don't you worry." Eddie reassured her, before taking a deep breath and continuing. "The point is, the creepy drug dealer with the awful reputation-"

"Eddie!" Chrissy insisted.

"-let's not pretend, I really wasn't so much famous around school as I was infamous." Eddie remonstrated amusedly with her. "My point is, I managed to get you talking, and laughing, and not completely stressed out for the first time in what had to be days, just with a couple minutes of sympathy and an anecdote about middle school. Despite starting at what could only be described as a generous social handicap, not to mention us being in the middle of a drug deal at the time. Which kinda implies that there wasn't anybody else around you could begin to feel like relaxing with, not even a little bit." Eddie laid out methodically. "Now, you let slip earlier at least a little about why your parents were not only right out as sources of emotional support but were probably causing a lot of that stress, but honestly? If you'd rather open up to a total stranger than the golden boyfriend you'd been going steady with for- what was it, a year?" Eddie sighed. "Now maybe I'm just the know-it-all spectator claiming he can see everything better from the cheap seats than the people actually down on the field could, but that doesn't exactly advertise 'happy relationship' to me."

"Jason wasn't hurting me, if that's what you're worried about." Chrissy reassured him. "He wouldn't even raise his voice to a girl, let alone his hand. And-" She trailed off sadly. "And I'm sure that he really loved me. We weren't talking about college yet, but he was always there, he'd hate it if we went so much as an entire weekend without even talking once."

"Then why did you come to me?" Eddie asked simply, his face impassive. "Because honestly? Your idea of buying some stuff to get you through what you thought was a burgeoning mental health issue was really not the best idea, and I was an absolute dick for taking your money under those circumstances. Look, I run- I ran a roleplaying game club for freshmen and middle schoolers, and I sold pot and the occasional set of pills. But I'm pretty sure that none of those kids even knew that I was dealing, let alone had me pushing on them, because I made damn sure to keep that part of my life separated from the more innocent parts." Eddie trailed off ashamedly. "And you were way too innocent to get into what I was selling you. I know I said earlier that if things had been different then Max and her friends might never have gotten the clue they needed, and that it was not your fault for coming to my trailer with an invitation. But that doesn't change the part where I should never have actually given you that invitation, and I'm sorry I cared more about-" he came to a sudden halt.

"Eddie, you were practically giving that stuff away." Chrissy said. "I mean, you cut the price down so far for me that it was ridiculous. It obviously wasn't the money that you were caring about, so what was it?"

Eddie stopped and forced himself to look directly at Chrissy. "I cared more about getting an excuse to talk to you again, even just for a little while, than about doing the right thing."

"Oh." Chrissy said, blushing. "I-"

"Stupid." Eddie cursed himself mildly. "Absolutely stupid. I don't talk to a girl since before high school- and only our weird birthdays even put us in middle school together at all, because I got held back twice, remember? And then she walks up to me in the middle of the woods and tries to buy some stuff, and before I know it I've invited her over to my place later that night to close the deal there because that means I get to at least spend ten more minutes-" he sighed. "But we're getting sidetracked. Chrissy, before I tell you what kind of guy Jason turned into after you were gone, I want to try and understand what kind of guy he was beforehand."

"I get what you mean." Chrissy nodded. "Maybe you shouldn't have invited me to your trailer, but I still chose to go there instead of go home, or go to Jason, or go to any of my other friends. But I just couldn't talk to Jason about this. He loved me, but part of why he loved me was because I was the girl he thought lived up to his- his wish list for a girl. Look, you know how super religious my family are, but Jason was even more devout." Chrissy shrugged. "I'm pretty sure he went to confession every time I even got him to second base."

"A man with a really strict view of right and wrong." Eddie said knowingly. "So you were afraid that if you'd told him you were having nightmare visions, he'd try to judge you right away rather than understand what you were going through."

"He'd have insisted that I go to a psychiatrist right away." Chrissy agreed. "And I don't mean someone like Ms. Kelly the school counselor, I mean someone like the doctors at Pennhurst. Jason would have thought that somebody who sees things that aren't really there is crazy, and that crazy people should be locked up until they're not crazy any more - if ever. Simple as that." Chrissy said.

"Well, that kind of rigid thought process certainly explains how it took him maybe one whole day to decide that I'd murdered you, just because they'd found your body in my house." Eddie said. "And to get his friends together and go around town as vigilantes torturing anyone they even thought knew where I was."

"Torturing?" Chrissy said. "You- you've got to be exaggerating!" she insisted. "That sounds even crazier than I thought I was!"

"Chrissy, there's really not another word except 'torture' for 'Pinning someone down and threatening to break his fingers until he tells you what you want to know', and that was one of the first things he did." Eddie said reasonably. "Ask Max about it when she wakes back up, because she's the one who told me about it happening. Corroded Coffin, the band I played in? That's was Jason's first stop on his 'avenge Chrissy' parade, and the guy whose hand he was threatening to break was our drummer. And that was after they beat up everybody there and smashed our instruments." Eddie trailed off.

"I- I just don't understand." Chrissy said plaintively. "He wasn't violent at all when I knew him. He didn't even foul people while playing basketball."

"Well, he certainly made up for lost time." Eddie said. "Because a little while later his lynch mob finally caught up to me at Lover's Lake, and I was just praying that they'd only beat me mostly to death before handing me over to the cops instead of doing the whole job themselves then and there. Then Vecna attacked one of his teammates and everybody freaking out over that happening gave me a chance to run." Eddie exhaled heavily. "Problem is, seeing a genuine display of supernatural power like that? Made Jason upgrade me from 'psycho drug dealer who'd beaten his girlfriend to death' to 'psycho cult leader who'd sacrificed his girlfriend in a Satanic ritual to obtain warlock powers from the Devil'." Eddie shook his head. "And okay, I can actually get where somebody was super fundamentalist would come up with that theory under the circumstances, especially since Vecna's true story is actually crazier sounding than that one, but-" Eddie trailed off.

"If he knew where you were hiding, then why didn't he call the police?" Chrissy acknowledged. "And if you really were a- a dark wizard, then why would you only kill Patrick and run away scared when you could have killed them all?"

"Two extremely logical questions that Jason never stopped to ask himself even for a second." Eddie agreed. "He was already being unstable and violent beforehand but after that? He went entirely off the rails. The kids told me about a speech he gave at a town hall meeting about his Satanic cult theory that got half the town ready to hang me from the nearest lamppost-"

"He was always so charismatic." Chrissy agreed sadly. "A natural leader. But that's not the sort of thing he should have been leading anyone into."

"And when last seen by anyone I knew- okay, right before we went in for our attack on Vecna, we had to stop at the War Zone and get some weapons." Eddie explained. "Well not me, obviously, what with my face on all those Wanted posters, but I was hiding out in the RV while Steve and Nancy went in to use their over-18 status and clean criminal records to pick up the hardware. And three guesses who they ran into in the store buying some guns of his own."

"Oh no." Chrissy squeaked. "Did he- do anything?"

"Not in the store." Eddie said. "But he had a face-off with Nancy where he was just one millimeter short of laying hands on her to force her to tell him where her little brother Mike was, just because Mike was a friend of Dustin who was in my roleplaying club. And he might have actually made the attempt except that Nancy Wheeler is simply not a person you want to try pushing around, especially when she's holding a shotgun. The thing is, from how they described him looking and talking- okay, did you ever see that movie with Tom Cruise about the kids who did that mutiny in the military school?"

"Taps?" Chrissy said. "Yeah, I rented it once because it had Tom Cruise in it. And then I ran right into the really sad ending where those boys died. I wish I'd known about that beforehand."

"Because Tom Cruise's character went nuts and started a one-man shootout with the Army, just when they'd about finished persuading everyone to surrender." Eddie agreed. "Well, if you remember the movie that vividly then you remember how good a job Tom did acting the part of a charismatic golden boy who'd gone completely insane." Eddie exhaled heavily. "From what Nancy was describing Jason was at least that far gone with how creepy and unhinged he was acting. Only he wasn't acting."

"That's-" Chrissy sighed. "That kind of psychotic break doesn't just happen to someone only because one horrible thing went wrong, not in less than a week. Does it?" she begged Eddie.

"Not as far as I know." Eddie agreed. "You've got to have a screw already loose up there before you can go that crazy. Either that or life has to beat the hell out of you for years until you're driven crazy, one step at a time, not do it all in one big jump. Even if your girlfriend died, and even if you did really love her." Eddie acknowledged. "I guess he was fine as long as everything in his life all stayed inside those narrow lines you said he liked stuff to stay inside, but once one big thing went off-script then he just-" Eddie raised one hand and waved it back and forth.

"Maybe that's why he always needed all those rules for himself, to help keep him on track." Chrissy agreed. "And once he ran into something he didn't have a rule for, he just ran completely wild without a moral compass." She sniffled and wiped away a tear. "Did I ever really know him?"

"Not your fault, Chrissy." Eddie reassured her. "Like you said, he'd never done anything bad to you, or around you, in all the time you were together."

"I'm sorry he made so much trouble for you." Chrissy sighed.

"Well, I was the one dumb enough to run from the cops in the first place." Eddie said tightly. "If I'd stuck around- the wounds Vecna did to you couldn't possibly have been done by human hands, so even if I'd gotten arrested for all the drugs in my trailer the detectives would have cleared me of murder. And maybe Jason wouldn't have gone crazy, and gone around hurting all my friends, if there'd been actual evidence-"

"Eddie." Chrissy said, taking his hand gently. "He tried to kill you, and hurt people you cared about, and you're still wishing it could have gone better for him? Do you have any idea how good a person that makes you?"

"Me? Good?" Eddie laughed mockingly. "Chrissy, I ran away. I ran away and I left you there!" his voice broke as he started to weep. "I- it's totally possible to snap someone out of a Vecna trance, all you need is the right music, and music's the only thing I'm good at. But no, I-"

"Eddie, stop!" Chrissy demanded. "Look, you didn't know that at the time. Nobody knew that. Max's friends had to do a whole investigation, an investigation that only started because I'd died, to have any chance of talking to the only person who knew the secret. You're blaming yourself for not being able to see the future."

"Don't tell me how you know there's nothing that I could have done, Chrissy." Eddie said brokenly. "I don't believe that, because I chickened out without even trying to."

"Then I'll tell you something you have to believe, because I'm the one who decides if it's true or not." Chrissy insisted. "No matter what you think you should or shouldn't have done, there's still nothing - not one single thing - that I blame you for."

"Chrissy, I-" Eddie insisted. "No, I screwed up. I screwed it all up. And the one time I really tried not to screw up, I died."

"Yes, when you willingly gave your life to protect other people." Chrissy insisted. "That's something I can't even imagine myself to be brave enough to do. Eddie, you're not 'Eddie the Freak', you're a hero." She stopped and forced herself to speak, slowly, reluctantly. "My mother kept telling me I was fat and disgusting, until I had to throw up almost any time I ate anything. And Ms. Kelly kept explaining to me that she was the wrong one, not me, and that I was doing unhealthy things to myself. I was-" She sighed. "Still having trouble making myself believe it, or act on it, even though I knew she was right. But my point is, just because someone- or even everyone- tells you that you're bad, or that you're worthless, or that you're a freak- then while all that can sometimes make someone believe that it's true about them, even against all evidence, that still doesn't make it true."

"You're too nice." Eddie replied. "Nice enough that you'd still try to cheer me up even if you didn't really believe a word of it."

"And Max?" Chrissy asked him intelligently "Or Nancy? Or all the other friends you told me about? Eddie, from what you both explained a whole team of people who have been secret demon fighters for years didn't hesitate to invite you to join them on a crazy difficult mission into another dimension to fight the most powerful evil being they'd ever heard of. Do you think they'd have all risked their own lives on trusting you not to run away, if they didn't genuinely think you were brave?"

"I-" Eddie stared at Chrissy in astonishment, at a loss for words.

"Yeah." she nodded. "Maybe there's things you wish you'd done better, because that's certainly true for me. But we're not alive anymore, and now it's time to-"

Both of them fell silent and immediately turned at Max's gasp for breath, as she sat upright in the hospital bed.

* * * * *​

"Max!" the beautiful dark-haired girl with the extremely short buzz cut said, weeping as she embraced her best friend. "I'm so sorry."

"Sorry for what?" Max said, as the astral self-images of both girls embraced each other in the dark void that Eleven habitually dove into when remote-traveling mentally.

"I wasn't strong enough. I wasn't fast enough. I couldn't stop him from killing you." Eleven apologized.

"Wait, I am dead?" Max asked. "Then how are you here?"

"Your heart stopped for over a minute." Eleven said slowly. "I pushed my powers, I made it start beating again. Right now you're in the hospital, on machines."

"Hawkins." Max asked urgently. "If I was dead even temporarily, then what happened to Hawkins?"

"Four kills. Four gates." Eleven acknowledged, and Max gasped. "It stopped when you were alive again, but there'd already been an earthquake. And the Upside Down is leaking."

"Vecna's super gate opened temporarily, until you revived me and it mostly shut again? But the damage already done means that the real world is slowly being contaminated by the Upside Down? Is that what you're saying?" Max asked, knowing that while Eleven was at least as intelligent as she was, their having been raised from infancy inside a laboratory by mad scientists that had treated her somewhere between a child soldier and an experimental animal had left her with what could be charitably described as an occasional communication difficulty.

"Yes." Eleven nodded. "We don't know how to stop it yet."

"Dammit." Max swore. "Okay, at least the world hasn't already ended, that's something at least. And El, how did you get your powers back? I thought you'd lost them last summer after that whole thing with the Mind Flayer and the mall, that's why you moved away to California. And what happened to your hair?"

"Dr. Brenner." Eleven answered her.

"Dr. Brenner is dead." Max replied disbelievingly. "He got eaten by the Demogorgon before I even met you!"

"He got away somehow." Eleven shrugged. "And Dr. Owens came to get me in California. He said that something dangerous was happening in Hawkins, and that they needed to give me my powers back to have a chance of stopping it. He took me back to Dr. Brenner, and they did another experiment-"

"Wait, wait, wait. You willingly went back to the creep who tortured you for most of your life? El, did you fall and hit your head?" Max gaped at her.

"You were all going to die." Eleven said simply. "I had to take the chance."

"Please tell me at least he didn't hurt you again!" Max begged, only for her face to fall at Eleven's expression. "Well, shit."

"Shit." Eleven agreed. "But at least Dr. Brenner is dead now."

"-I'm not even going to ask how that happened." Max said after a pause. "And good riddance to evil rubbish."

"I agree." Eleven nodded. "But now I've finally found you, and it's time to bring you back."

"No." Max said. "I can't leave yet."

"What?" Eleven looked at her in utter confusion.

"Something really weird is happening. Weirder than this, weirder than you." Max said. "Like, before you pulled me into your mind space, I was in some other mental realm, a copy of the Upside Down except with no creatures at all. But there were two other people there, Eddie and Chrissy. The gang will know who they are if you don't."

"They talked a little about Eddie." Eleven nodded. "Dustin said he was a hero."

"He damn sure was." Max agreed. "But yeah, I have spent the past I don't know how long-"

"Five days." Eleven said. "At least out here."

"With two people who are genuinely 100% dead, when I'm not. And from somewhere I can talk to at least one living person, notably you. We have to know what's going on here before we end the only chance we have of figuring it out."

"Max, Dr. Brenner told me that Vecna consumes the minds of the people he kills. He takes them, and makes them part of his mind. Your mind is trapped deep inside of Vecna's mind right now. You can't stay there, it's not safe." Eleven pleaded.

"We're all inside Vecna's head? But-" Max shook her head. "That doesn't make sense! Chrissy and me were both taken directly by Vecna, but I shouldn't still be there if I'm not dead! And Eddie was killed by monsters in the Upside Down while Vecna was busy with me and you, so he shouldn't be there at all."

"I can't figure that part out either." Eleven said. "But I know what Dr. Brenner told me. And he should know, because Vecna was a Number. He was Number One, the very first of us. Brenner studied him for years and years before-" Eleven stopped and winced.

"You okay?" Max asked.

"No." Eleven said simply. "When I was in the lab, years before I met you, I thought One - Vecna - was my friend. He tricked me into taking out the device that Dr. Brenner was using to restrain his powers. Then he killed all the other Numbers. He thought-" Eleven gulped. "He thought I was a bad enough person that I'd want to join him."

"Which is proof positive that Vecna's retarded." Max said. "Shocking news, but useful."

Eleven smiled slightly at Max's sarcasm, before nodding. "I told him no. Then we fought. I won, and I-" Eleven's expression fell. "I opened a gate and threw him into the Upside Down. I-" she chewed her lip. "I sent him to where he could become Vecna, to grow into what he is now. So-"

"If the words 'all', 'my', or 'fault' enter this conversation at any point, I'm going to headbutt you." Max stared at her best friend. "You know why it's not your fault."

"Knowing doesn't stop feeling." Eleven said simply. "But the important thing is that I know how Vecna grew so powerful since the last time I fought him. He told me, when I was fighting him over you."

"Weird that I didn't hear him, I was in the same mental room." Max said.

"The Mind Flayer." Eleven answered her unspoken question, as Max's blood chilled. "The hive mind of the Upside Down. When One originally arrived there, he- summoned it. Took control of it. Maybe created it. I'm not sure."

"Holy shit." Max whispered. "No wonder he was so much more powerful than you in the rematch, if he's got the entire Mind Flayer to draw upon."

"Yes." Eleven nodded. "That's why you have to leave with me now, before Vecna finds you. I can't stay here too long or he might notice. And I can't-" Eleven bit her lip. "I can't protect you from him, once he knows you're still here."

"But I can't." Max insisted. "What's going on here, this is a huge mystery. How well have we ever done when we ignored a mystery and figured it wasn't anything important? How many times did that bite us on the butt?"

"Friends don't lie, Max." Eleven glared at her.

"Hey, I'm not-" Max blurted, and then stopped, visibly fighting for control. She began to hyperventilate, more and more, until she finally screamed. "Okay! I'm scared, all right, I admit it! Are you happy now?!?"

"It's okay to be scared." Eleven said comfortingly as Max clutched her in a desperate hug. "It's a really scary thing."

"I'm blind, aren't I?" Max said sadly as they drew apart again. "Out there, in my real body. And I don't have my arms or legs anymore. I felt that much happen before I came here."

"The doctors think your eyesight might come back. Eventually." Eleven tried to reassure her. "And it's a lot of broken bones, but they can heal."

"They hope." Max said. "But- yeah, I don't want to be a blind cripple for the rest of my life. Who would?"

"No one." Eleven said. "But you can't want to die either. You shouldn't."

"I don't." Max insisted. "I know, after Billy died, there was a time I almost wanted to die. That's how Vecna originally got me. But if you talked to the gang about that, then you know I don't want that anymore."

"Then why stay here?" Eleven probed.

"Because I can still do something here." Max said. "Out there I'm- someone you have to take care of. Someone useless. And I know, I know you guys love me, and you'd still be happy to take care of me for the rest of my life even if I couldn't move a finger. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying- in here, I'm not helpless. I can still contribute. I can still fight."

"Fight what?" Eleven looked questioningly at her.

"Vecna, I hope." Max said. "I mean, you just told me that we're all inside his mind, but he doesn't know we are yet. There has to be some way we can make that useful, right?"

Eleven blinked. "Maybe yes. I'll ask Dr. Owens. And my father."

"But you said Brenner was dea- holy shit, really?" Max said gleefully. "Hopper's alive? I thought he died in the mall explosion!"

"The Russians took him prisoner right before the explosion. He was really just in prison. He just escaped." Eleven smiled back at her.

"Oh El, that's great!" Max grinned at her. "I know how much you missed him! And if Hawkins is having a state of emergency right now, then it's way better he's in charge of it than that idiot they made police chief after he was gone." Max paused. "Which reminds me, is he doing anything to clear Eddie's name after he was dead? Or to put that Jason creep in jail where he belongs?"

"Jason died in the earthquake. And he's trying about Eddie, but there's no evidence." Eleven said. "So lots of people still believe what they believe."

"Damn." Max swore. "Everybody's all right besides me and Eddie though, right?"

"Everyone." Eleven agreed. "Lucas misses you."

"I bet he does." Max smiled sweetly. "But tell me he's doing okay? He's not- you know, beating himself up too much over what happened to me or anything? I already know he tried his best, he'd never do anything less."

"Lucas tried to put the headphones on you, to save you with the music." Eleven reassured her. "But Jason found you both in the attic and attacked him. He broke your headphones. He almost shot Lucas."

"He shot at Lucas? You mean really shot at him, with a gun?!?" Max shrieked in rage. "Oh, he'd better be glad the earthquake killed him before I could get out of here, or I'd have grown my arms and legs back just to strangle him with!"

"Almost shot him." Eleven reassured her. "But that's why Lucas couldn't pull you out."

"I knew it had to be something." Max agreed. "And-"

"He's waking up." Eleven interrupted her, looking around warily. "I have to go. If you're not coming, then you need to wake up right away."

"Time flows funny in here, I really don't know when I'll be able to try reaching you again." Max said. "Just- keep trying, all right?"

"I'll be here." Eleven agreed. "Stay safe."

"If I don't get back then tell the gang I love them, okay?" Max hugged her.

"I will. Good-bye." Eleven nodded at her, and they both faded away.

* * * * *​

Author's Note: I left Eddie and Chrissy alone for a period of time with nothing to do but wait, of course they'd start talking. And Eddie really does have his guilt trip over having been the Cowardly Lion to deal with, so that was inevitable.

As for the Jason topic - I tried to split a middle road between my own personal 'I fucking think that guy was the absolute worst' (because trust me, if you think what I wrote about him in this fic is harsh, that's me toning down my own headcanons on that guy) and the most pro-Jason apologia, but honestly, even a charitable interp of his actions and motivations still leaves him pretty far down in the minus column unless you actively delude yourself. For one thing, note that no amount of 'he was avenging his girlfriend!' justifies the clearly illegal and brutal actions he was indulging from the outset, actions that the police would have been put in jail on brutality raps for using - and they're the people who are actually supposed to be investigating the murder! And for another, as they point out, even Jason's earliest actions were still violent and slightly unhinged, and that was before he'd even seen anything.

As for this chapter being largely just people talking, well, yeah, that's common in my fics. Also, they are having to figure all this shit out from scratch, because Stranger Things is a horror and a mystery show more than it's an action show.

Neither Dr. Brenner or Chief Hopper are Eleven's biological father. Brenner made all his would-be psychic child soldiers call him 'Papa', and Chief Hopper adopted Eleven after her escape.

 

[cliffc999]

"Inside Vecna's head. You're saying that we are literally mind ghosts of ourselves stuck inside the brain of the guy who murdered us!" Eddie ranted, pacing back and forth while he waved his hands wildly in the air.

"And actually you came back in here?!?" Chrissy gaped at Max incredulously.

"Look, I really want a piece of this asshole, okay?" Max stared insistently up at her. "You think you could maybe understand why?"

"Okay, okay-" Eddie breathed deeply. "First priority, your psychic friend connection said that she had to go because Vecna was becoming alert to us. So where do we go from here?"

"El was ducking out before he spotted us, so, we've got time." Max said. "Either that or it's too late to run anyway, so let's just get on this while we can."

"Get on what, exactly?" Eddie fought for calm. "I mean, yeah, I understand. We're already stuck deeeep in the middle of Mordor without an exit strategy for at least two of us, so the only chance we've got is to finish the quest. But Eleven only had a chance to start to catch you up before you had to break the connection, so we've still got more goals than plans right now."

"Shit." Max swore. "Speaking of catching up- okay, the good news is that Hawkins didn't implode. I'm sorry, I should have led with that first."

"Oh thank God." Chrissy sighed deeply, going limp in her chair.

"And the bad news is-?" Eddie asked knowingly.

"We're on a clock. Vecna got the breach partially open, so the Upside Down is leaking in slowly. We don't find a way to take him out before then-" Max pursed her lips tightly.

"No pressure, huh?" Eddie nodded down at her before resuming his seat.

"And on a more personal level-" Max's voice softened, and she turned to Chrissy. "Look, I can't say I'm sorry about this because I just found out Jason tried to shoot Lucas-" her voice suddenly choked with rage.

"Oh shit, is he okay?" Eddie asked desperately as both of Chrissy's hands flew to her mouth in a shocked gasp.

"He missed." Max nodded to them tautly. "But when the gate almost opened, there was an earthquake. Jason- didn't survive." Max looked at Chrissy. "Look, you don't have to pretend that you're not grieving, not for me. Before you died and he went rabid he was your boyfriend, I get it."

Chrissy lowered her head and sniffled, fighting to hold back her tears for a long minute. "I- I really hope God forgives him for his sins." she finally whispered.

Eddie wordlessly gave Chrissy a comforting clasp on the shoulder.

"Is Lucas your boyfriend?" Chrissy finally asked her, wiping her eyes.

"Since 7th grade." Max smiled softly. "Well, off and on. Mostly on. I dumped him like an idiot once, but he forgave me." she trailed off embarassedly.

"I just-" she shook her head. "Do you think-?" She trailed off weakly.

Max looked at her briefly, then clued in. "Do I think he'd have gone off like Jason had, if I'd died like you had and he hadn't known anything about the Upside Down? I-" She paused to reflect for a short while and continued. "No. Would he be hurting, would he be angry, maybe ghost all his friends and say stupid shit to everyone and hate on himself for months? Yeah, maybe. But he wouldn't go around trying to kill people, and if he ever did somehow go that nuts then all our other friends would have sat on him until he came to his senses."

"And Jason's friends definitely weren't doing that." Eddie said to Chrissy compassionately. "Honestly, I am simply flabbergasted at how many of the popular kids are turning out to have been all alone in the middle of the crowd."

"Huh." Max blinked. "You know, I think that explains something. Look, as ridiculous as it sounds to hear me talking about the power of positive thinking, the fact is that Vecna's a really twisted person. It's like he can't even see emotions that aren't negative, much less understand them. And- yeah, the music breaks the trance, the music's a lifeline back to reality. It's a stimulus to a deeply buried part of the brain that gives us a chance to break out of the death spiral he's locking our thoughts into, but it's still just a chance. We have to concentrate on the happy memories, the stuff like friendship and laughter and having something to live for, to help- I don't know, push our minds into a place where Vecna has more trouble reaching them. That's how I escaped him my first time. And when we snapped you out of it just a little while ago, it was because your favorite song had all sorts of good associations for you, right?"

"It was because-" Chrissy blushed. "Yes. Yes it did."

"Exactly. And despite all the sheer awfulness that is our situation, Eddie's been doing a great job of keeping both your spirits up so far." Max agreed. "The one time you started to get lost inside your head Vecna started to home in, but then lost the signal as soon as you pulled out of it. And my own personal- stuff." She handwaved angrily. "Hasn't been drawing Vecna in because my not-totally-dead thing seems to be making it harder for him to target me. So we definitely want to find a next move sometime soon, but we probably don't have to keep running around all over town to stay hidden. We just have to not let shit get to us."

"Okay, so catch us up on everything else that Eleven was able to tell you, and then we can start the brainstorming phase." Eddie decided.

"So, should we just wait here until Eleven can try again?" Chrissy said when Max had finished.

"That would be prudent." Eddie agreed. "The problem is, it would also mean waiting for we don't know how long."

"And if the dimensional barrier is wearing away, then time's no longer our friend." Max agreed. "But the only thing I can think of right now is to deliberately start pushing our emotions downward to move our minds closer to Vecna's consciousness, and without Eleven here in the link with us that's an invitation to suicide."

"And even with her it might still be suicide, seeing as how Vecna's more powerful than she is." Chrissy sighed. "Is there any chance this Dr. Owens can boost Eleven's power some more?"

"No idea." Max shrugged. "Really not my department. But... probably not." she conceded. "El implied that Dr. Brenner's latest experiments had to really push the limit, and that was just to give her her original powers back. To try and juice them even more would probably need them to go even further into the danger zone, and Dr. Owens was the project guy who was actually sane."

Eddie leaned back in his chair and hummed thoughtfully. "So our problem is that the boss monster is scaled too far above our heavy hitter, and we don't have any time or opportunity to level up elsewhere before we need to make our next try."

"Are you seriously going off about D&D again?" Max asked impatiently. "It's like all my friends are so into it, and I have never understood why."

"Well for one thing, it helps exercise the imagination." Eddie said proudly. "Especially when you've been DM'ing since 1979, like yours truly. Because right now it occurs to me that if you're up for a fight with someone too big for you and you can't make yourself stronger, then what you've got to do is make him weaker. And one of the things Eleven did have time to tell you was how Vecna powered himself up so much since their original showdown."

"The Mind Flayer." Max realized, her face going pale. "Vecna came here and tapped into the Mind Flayer. But-"

"Then that means at least a tithe of Vecna's power is from an external source." Chrissy realized. "And without it he'd be weak enough for Eleven to beat him, she already proved that when she was a little girl! That's it, that's where we've got to go!" she finished eagerly.

"Were you not paying attention back when I told you what the Mind Flayer is like?" Max said urgently. "I once saw just a piece of that thing almost kill everybody in town! I-" she stopped, almost hyperventilating. "Seriously, almost dying at Vecna's hands? Second worst experience of my life. That thing, that was the worst."

"If that's that powerful, and if it actually got out once and almost destroyed Hawkins, then why did Vecna have to kill us himself?" Chrissy asked. "Why not just turn it loose again?"

"Because we'd managed to shut the gate it was reaching through and all the pieces it had inserted into our world went dead when the Mind Flayer lost the link. That must be why Vecna was doing his rituals with us, to try and make his own gates so he could turn the Upside Down loose on Earth again. Something about a powerful psychic connection between dimensions fueled by human death in a particular way- look, it made sense when Dustin was trying to explain it but it's not like I took notes." Max finished curtly.

"Even so, we've still got an obvious target to go for." Eddie said. "So yeah, maybe we don't want to directly confront this thing, but where can we go to find out more about it?"

"Vecna's memories, but that's right out." Max said.

"When you were talking about the Mind Flayer earlier, in Eddie's trailer, you mentioned that it once tried to infect the tunnels underneath Hawkins. And that Dr. Owens and his team had been studying it there. Where would they have kept their notes?" Chrissy thought out loud.

"In the big, super-sealed bunker of a government lab I already told you I don't know how I could break into." Max answered.

"'You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike.'" Eddie quoted. "If these scientists were going down into the tunnels to study this thing, would that mean there was a connection between those tunnels and the lab?"

"Do I really look like the kind of person who has a photographic enough memory to exactly retrace a route I crawled through only once, and only partially, two years ago?" Max asked incredulously. "And we only got as far as the center of the tunnels where the Mind Flayer was trying to grow a big central node to try and burn it out. The stupid thing had infected Will and we'd had to- anyway, even if I could get us back to the central node I'd still have no idea how Owens' team got into those tunnels from the other side. And while we'd made a map then, the only copy of that map would be where we left it - inside the lab."

"So we take down a lot of graph paper and do a dungeon crawl, mapping it all again the hard way." Eddie said. "It's not like we don't have time. Well, unless the tunnels are full of monsters." he concluded warily.

"I don't think they'd be full of anything." Max rubbed her chin thoughtfully. "I mean, the entire time we've been here we haven't seen a single Upside Down life form of any kind, not even one of those damned infectious particles. This mindscape is using the Upside Down's geography but doesn't seem to have any part of the hive mind actually within it, so..." She trailed off reluctantly and shook her head. "Dustin is never going to let me hear the end of it when I have to tell him that you finally got me to go on one of your dumb dungeon crawls."

Eddie and Chrissy both laughed out loud.

* * * * *​

"I swear we're going in circles." Max grumbled, as the three of them slowly made their way through the complex mazework of the tunnels, both artificial and natural, that ran underneath the town of Hawkins.

"That's not possible, we left markers at the intersections." Chrissy said, waving the can of spray paint she was holding for emphasis.

"And I've got it all written down here on my handy pad of graph paper." Eddie said, still fussing with his mapmaking supplies.

"Yeah, well, I didn't stop to think of how empty this place would look without all the Upside Down tentacle vines and crap growing through it." Max admitted. "None of the landmarks we were using last time, just miles and miles of miles and miles."

"I think you're overestimating." Chrissy disagreed gently. "Just maybe a couple miles?"

"Anyway, I'm pretty sure that was the central chamber we stopped at last time that we went through half an hour ago." Max said. "So I have no clue where we are now."

"Isn't that what we were looking for?" Eddie said.

"Wait, I think the walls look different from before." Chrissy said, looking around.

Max went over to the nearest tunnel wall and knelt down, carefully holding her spelunker's light to examine the junction between wall and for.

"How are these lamps still working, anyway?" Eddie wondered out loud. "Between all the Upside Down electromagnetic funkiness and the batteries being years old-"

"Mindscape, remember?" Max said, still examining the floor intently. "They work because we think they should work, and we probably don't want to think too hard about it."

"The magic feather makes you fly, check." Eddie replied amiably, and Chrissy giggled slightly. "Find anything?"

"Well, I'm not a construction expert but yeah, it looks like this tunnel was dug a lot more recently than the old sewers we started out in. The corners are still sharp, there's no wear. Hand me the paint can?" Max reached up and took it from Chrissy, then set it down on the floor perpinducular to the wall and held her breath. After a pause, the rounded can very slowly started to roll back the way they came. "I was right, the floor is slanting. This is a new tunnel that someone dug, heading down from the surface. I think we found the connection to the lab."

"The treasure vault draws nigh, fellow party members!" Eddie announced dramatically. "Onward to adventure!"

Max snorted in amusement as Chrissy giggled even more loudly, and the three of them hiked steadily up the tunnel until they reached a thick armored hatch like the kind you'd normally find below decks on a battleship. The hatch was open.

"That's a stroke of luck." Chrissy said.

"We are never that lucky." Max scowled. "Okay, you two stay here, I'll scout ahead."

"Splitting the party? Never a good idea." Eddie retorted.

"I am the sneakiest person here, and you both walk like elephants!" Max retorted.

"We get it, you're the veteran rogue, and we're just a pair of low-level bards." Eddie agreed reasonably. "But the only two things you can tell us as a scout are that it's clear, at which point we might as well have come along, or that it's not clear, at which point we're really not going to be outrunning whatever got you all the way back through all those tunnels anyway."

"There's got to be something wrong with that logic, but I don't have the time to analyze what." Max conceded. "Okay, follow me."

The trio crept into the dimly lit subbasement of the Hawkins National Laboratory, its musty halls full of silent echoes. Max led the other two forward in a slow, creeping stalk, all three heads swivelling around continuously.

"I've never been here but Chief Hopper has a couple of times." Max whispered. "From what he said, the original Gate chamber was somewhere right over there." She swallowed. "If I remember right, the tunnel exploration teams had their HQ office close by to it."

"Okay." Eddie said, his hand reaching out to grab Chrissy's as his other hand fastened loosely to the tail of Max's jacket. "Lead on."

Max nodded silently as the three of them crept, almost in a crouch, towards their destination. The door to one of the records rooms, an ordinary office door and not one of the armored hatches the lab had in profusion, yielded to Max's lockpicks. After a further check around revealed no signs of life or movement anywhere, they returned to the records room.

"There's the map." she said, pointing to a large diagram of the tunnel complex pinned up on a large corkboard filling one side of the wall. "Notes on the Mind Flayer wildlife they were studying and whatnot are probably part of that big pile of filing cabinets over there."

"Everybody grab a chair and start the reading party." Chrissy said, before starting to hum 'Amazing Grace' under her breath.

"Right." Max agreed, hauling open the first filing cabinet and starting to riffle through the stack of letter-sized papers filling it from front to back, before almost immediately stopping and looking up at the other two, her jaw agape. "It's blank. They're all blank!"

"Yeah." Eddie said, going through another filing drawer as quickly as he could. "I mean, I could open an office supply store with all the free copy paper we've got in here, but they've filed away a bunch of nothing."

"But why?" Chrissy said confusedly, looking up from a third drawer. "I mean, so far everything we've seen in this mind-realm Upside Down has been like the real Upside Down, which is like a copy of the real Hawkins, at least for things that aren't alive!"

"I- this is stupid!" Max swore frustratedly, slamming a drawer shut. "Every time we think we're about to get somewhere, the rules change!"

"Why was the map still copied for us even when all the records were blanked out?" Eddie wondered. "I mean, we'd already have had to map the tunnels ourselves just to get far enough in to read the map of the tunnels. Is somebody just trying to be a dick?"

"If somebody leaves only one thing out to read in the middle of a bunch of empty papers, then that's what they want you to read." Chrissy thought out loud, before going over to study the map closely. "Why does this map look hand-drawn?"

"Our friend Will drew the original copy of it when the Mind Flayer was possessing him." Max explained. "Part of him was trying to call for help, to tell us where to go, and the rest of him was being hijacked by the Mind Flayer to lure people into its trap. He couldn't explain it in words, so he drew us a puzzle."

"That is some quality work." Eddie said, studying it closely. "I've seen professional illos done in my sourcebooks that weren't drawn this well. Kid's got talent."

"Yeah, Will always loved painting stuff." Max agreed. "But where does this get us?"

"Find me." Chrissy recited, reading a small hand-written message tucked away in one corner of the map out loud." "Oh, that's so sad. He really was trying to call for help."

"Wait!" Max said urgently, rushing over to look at it. "No, no, this is wrong. There wasn't any message like this on the original map. This is new."

"Whoever made this mindscape for us really wanted us to find this clue." Eddie said. "They literally drew it on a map."

"Yeah, after burying it behind miles of tunnels and needing us to go through three layers of desperation to think of coming here at all." Max swore. "It's like they-" She blinked in realization.

"Like they wanted it buried so deeply that only we'd spend all the time to get this far and search through all this to find it." Chrissy said.

"Time to go." Max decided. "No, wait, do either of you have any matches?"

"I deal blunts, remember?" Eddie said, reaching into his pocket and coming out with a cigarette lighter. "You'd better believe I'm always ready to give someone a light." He held the lighter underneath one corner of the map pinned to the wall and nodded questioningly, and Max nodded back. With a flick of Eddie's fingers the map immediately caught alight.

"Right, and now we book it." Max said as the three of them hurriedly left. "Because if someone around here is leaving clues that they want only us to find, then that means there's an obvious suspect for who they don't want to find them."

"And this is the Hawkins Lab, the place where you said they kept the Numbers and did their sick experiments on them." Chrissy agreed.

"Which makes it the only place that ol' Number One ever felt helpless, where he was the one who got hurt instead of being the one who did the hurting. If there's anywhere on Earth that he'd want to think about as little as possible, it would be right here. So we damn sure can't lead him back to it." Eddie analyzed.

The trio reached the exit hatch and fled hurriedly back into the tunnels, heading towards the town of Hawkins as quickly as their legs could carry them.

* * * * *​

"Where are we heading?" Chrissy asked as the three of them walked down the side of a road leading towards the outskirts of Hawkins.

"Where I think the note was telling us to go." Max replied. "And-"

All three of them stopped dead as the street lights flickered out, then back on, and then began to strobe.

"What the-?" Eddie wondered out loud.

"Shit!" Max swore in a terrified whisper. "Electromagnetic weirdness means powerful psychic approaching-"

"Vecna!" Chrissy gasped, going white as a sheet.

"Hide!" Eddie snapped at Max, who immediately dived into the nearby bushes off the road and went as low to the ground as she could before starting to stealthily creep away. "Not you!" he said to Chrissy, grabbing her hand as she began to move.

"What are you-?" Chrissy looked at Eddie in horror, as the lights flickered out for the final time and the very air began to turn cold and damp with fear.

The two teenagers turned around to see a tall, broad-shouldered figure, one that despite walking on two legs and with two arms and eyes shared virtually nothing in common with humanity any longer, sauntering towards them with a dramatic, menacing stride down the center of the two-lane road. His surprisingly human eyes, the last visible trace of the handsome young man who had been known as Henry Creel, peered out at them from amongst a skeletal, hideous face overlaid with knotted layers and ridges of the same fleshy protuberant substance that comprised the alien vines that grew in the Upside Down. His body was a similar horror, as if a human body had been stripped of flesh almost down to a skeleton before having that flesh horrifyingly replaced with simiarily eldritch substance.

"Damn, did my little Hellfire Club call it or what?" Eddie greeted Vecna with a bright, cocky smile and a bombastic voice. "We named you Vecna, and now that I've finally met you in the 'flesh'-" Eddie cheerfully mimed the air-quotes - "-you are, indeed, totally an evil lich. Only thing we missed is you've still got both hands and both eyes but hey, the day is young."

Chrissy broke from her near-catatonic stare of terror at Vecna to trade it for an entirely disbelieving stare at Eddie, as Vecna simply glared at him with a slight, inquisitive tilt to his head as Eddie kept talking.

"But seeing as you're the one who gave us the invite to this party, feel free to start off the night's program. I mean, we've been waiting a long while to meet our host but hey, fashionably late, am I right?"

"Your bravado fools no one, Edward." Vecna finally rasped out in a deep, otherworldly voice of pure menace. "I see past your mask of fantasy and behold the true coward within."

"What, are you a mind reader or something?" Eddie snarked back.

"Eddie, what are you doing?!?" Chrissy begged him faintly, clutching at his sleeve.

"Hello again, Chrissy." Vecna stared at her. "We had such an experience together, didn't we? I see that you have somehow left the space where I had stored your soul for later. Would you like to go back there? Your mother misses you." he gloated cruelly.

"Come on, man, don't cockblock." Eddie stared at Vecna before leaning in to conspiratorially faux-whisper. "Seriously, I'm pretty sure I was just about to get to first base! Please tell me that even an extradimensional dark lord has got to respect the bro code?"

Vecna turned to stare at Eddie in what Chrissy desperately hoped was confusion. "Do you think madness is a shield from me?"

"I don't know, is it?" Eddie smirked back, and then stuck out his tongue while waving both his hands behind his head.

"Silence!" Vecna barked, and Eddie went taut in his invisible telekinetic grip and began to rise from the ground. "You were there when Chrissy met her fate, before you turned and ran to try and avoid your own. Would you like to know exactly how she died?"

"I'm sure- that's a great trick- you've got there big guy, but- you can only do it once, yeah?" Eddie grunted, still forcing a grin through his agony.

"I did not take you into my realm, Edward. How did you come to be here?" Vecna demanded.

"Honestly?" Eddie grunted as his limbs began to compress. "Fucked- if- I know!"

"Enough." Vecna spat disgustedly, and Eddie fell limp to the ground. "I am occupied with weightier matters at this moment. I came only to investigate a disturbance I felt, however faintly, and I found naught but a pair of ghosts, impotent memories retained in my vast intellect only to amuse me in idleness. The mystery of your presence here alongside hers is one that I will solve when I am free to attend to it."

"Come on, big fella, just admit that you have no clue. I do that all the time in class, there's no shame in having a learning disability!" Eddie said to him brightly, if somewhat hurriedly, from where he lay sprawled on the ground.

"Meaningless noises from a meaningless fool." Vecna snorted. "And as for this weakling girl you lust for-" Vecna snorted. "Amuse yourselves as you wish, in this dying echo of a dying world. The anticipation of my return will only make your despair all the greater, if you have had false and petty pleasures to distract yourself with in the interim."

In-between one eyeblink and the next, Vecna was gone. The streetlights slowly flickered back on.

"Jesus Christ!" Eddie forced out in a hysterical squeak as he tried and failed to rise to his feet, his limbs too unsteady to hold him. "Please, please tell me I didn't actually shit my pants?"

"Eddie?" Chrissy said, shaking off her own hysteria to try and stumble over to him. "What- what was that?"

"That was me bullshitting my ass off, beautiful." Eddie said, gasping for breath. "It's what I did to put the bullies off for years. As soon as they started closing in, I'd just jump into the 'Eddie the Freak' routine and say whatever 'The fuck is wrong with you, man?' nonsense I could spit out of my mouth. Two times out of three they'd walk away shaking their heads without throwing a single punch, because they didn't want to stick around and get any crazy person on 'em." Eddie's breathing slowed as he finally began to regain control of his shaking arms and legs and slowly rise to his feet with Chrissy's help. "Like they say, you should never waste your time fighting with a jackass. He'll drag you down to his level, and he's got more experience at it."

"You have got to be kidding me." Max swore as she came out of the bushes. "Vecna, fucking Vecna himself, drops right out of the sky on us and you got him to leave with a comedy routine?!?" She goggled at him as if he'd grown a second head.

"Red, I might be kinda shit at monster fighting, or financial solvency, or a loooooot of other things, but when it comes to performing I have made that my life's work." Eddie smiled unsteadily at her. "I've been able to just jump on stage and improv like a champion ever since I've been in short pants. It's why I always ran the D&D game from the start."

"I- wow." Max just shook her head again, not even trying to hide how impressed she was. "I've taken that asshole on inside my own head twice, but I've never even come close to being able to laugh at him."

"I couldn't even move, or think, or breathe." Chrissy added emphatically. "I- and he called you a coward? Is he an idiot?"

"Chrissy, I'm pretty sure only the lack of bodily functions in this mindscape is why I don't have a desperate need for new underwear right now." Eddie answered her.

"Eddie." Max said. "Steve once told me that not being afraid isn't bravery, it's stupidity. Courage is when you can be scared shitless and still keep going anyway."

"Yeah." Chrissy said. "And I couldn't even manage that much." She stopped, and her lips began to quirk upward. "But for all that you were really amazing, there is still the part where you technically bore false witness. And I can't let you go around having that lie remain on your conscience."

"Wait, what?" Eddie looked at her, confused. "What lie-?"

"The part where you claimed that you were just about to get to first base." Chrissy smiled sweetly at him, and then grabbed Eddie's collar and pulled him close as Max swiftly turned around.

"Are you two decent yet?" Max growled in faux-disgust after a long moment, as Chrissy continued kissing Eddie as deeply as she possibly could right up to the point where oxygen was becoming an issue.

"Uh- maybe?" Eddie's still-unsteady voice came back to Max's ears as she fought to hide her grin.

"Come on, lovebirds." Max said affectionately. "We're almost there."

After a few more minutes of walking they drew up on a low one-story house set a little distance away from the road amongst the trees. "Here we are." Max said. "The old house the Byers' used to live in. Because if you're going to try and find someone, the first place you look is where they live, right?"

"Makes sense." Eddie agreed, and they knocked on the door of the dark and empty house. After a long moment of no response, Eddie went and peered in the window.

"Anyone home?" Chrissy asked.

"No." Max said. "Okay, one more place here to check. When Will originally got taken by the Demogorgon into the Upside Down, way back when this all started for the gang, he vanished from the garden shed and not the house. Follow me."

The trio went around the house into the back yard, crossing the dilipalidated lawn to the old shed. They stopped and looked meaningfully at the door that was left ajar just a few inches, and the light coming from within. After a long pause, they squared their shoulders and advanced to the shed door, and Max pulled it open.

The opening door revealed a boy about Max's age standing inside the shed, acknowledging their presence with a calm, expressionless regard. His delicate features bespoke a sensitive, artistic type of young man, neither an athlete or a nerd.

"Okay." Max recognized the boy without apparent surprise. "Not entirely unexpected given that the note was in your handwriting, but how did you get here?"

"We are not Will Byers, Max." the boy with Will's face answered in the unnaturally calm, resonant tones that only Max had ever heard before, an unmistakable manner and cadence of speaking used only when the victims of possession had abandoned even an attempt to still pose as the humans they had once been. "But we still need to talk."

Max immediately tensed up to run as if her life depended on it. "The Mind Flayer!"

* * * * *​

Author's Note: You know, when this started I was originally planning Eddie to be the MC and then Max did to me what she did to at least half of season 4, which was cheerfully dance right up to the script and go "YOINK! These are all my scenes now!" But then again, at least a strong plurality of Stranger Things fans will all agree that Max really is Best Girl. Which is an achievement considering that Stranger Things is a show where basically all the female characters are amazing in their own way. But hey, I can at least hope to make it an ensemble cast.

I regret if my words can't convey just how menacing Vecna really is but the fact is, Jamie Campbell Bower is just killing it on-screen, and the makeup team for Vecna has some of the best practical effects I've ever seen. So trying to reproduce that effect in text- well, I'm a fanfic author, not the next Stephen King. I'm just going to post a video clip so people can at least get a sample of the guy in action, or at the very least know what he actually looks like.

... also this is like the iconic scene of season 4, if not all of Stranger Things, seeing as how it's the denouement of Max's first round versus Vecna in episode 4x04.

As to why Vecna showed up? Well first off, you can only go so many chapters with the villain entirely offstage and people just talking about him before it starts to get stale. At least now my readers have had a trailer of the guy actually saying something. Also, I needed to establish in text that Vecna was not the person who pulled Eddie into the mind realm, and that he's not paying attention to the next sequence. Which he's not, because he's dismissed Eddie and Chrissy as insignificant remnants who don't even know anything. (There's a reason Eddie thought fast enough to tell Max to get out of sight first. Her presence gives away that something significant is going down.)

Show-watchers will be amused when they spot that when Max is giving that riff about doing dumb stuff while grieving, she's describing what she did for the first half of season 4 after her stepbrother died. Because she entirely did.

And yeah, Eddie pulled a Star-Lord on Vecna. Which is actually IC, given that he does the 'Eddie the Freak' performance routine in the school cafeteria in episode 4x01. Although this was on a far greater scale than that.

 

[cliffc999]

"Let me go! Let me go!" Max screamed wildly as she kicked and flailed with all her might. Despite his being five years older and eight inches taller, it was all Eddie could do to just barely hang on to her as he held her feet clear of the floor in a bear-hug from behind.

"Max! Max!" Chrissy pleaded with her. "You can't run, we need you! We don't know what's going on here! We need you to stay and explain this to us!"

"Explain?" Max shrieked, her eyes wide with terror. "What's to explain?!? It's going to kill us! It almost killed Will! It killed dozens of people in Starcourt Mall and ate their bodies! It tried to kill me and El and everyone! It killed my brother!" she wailed.

"Whoa, whoa!" Eddie begged her. "Okay, I get it, it's really damn scary and it's hurt a lot of people! But we just met the other big bad around here and this guy's acting way differently than he did!"

"So what?" Max sobbed hoarsely. "Are you here to apologize?" she sneered at the Mind Flayer's avatar. "To say 'Oops, my bad!' and promise not to do it again? Are you sorry?" she spat at it.

"We are still not certain if we are capable of feeling sorrow, Max." the Mind Flayer replied in Will Byers' voice. "But we have finally come to understand that we should."

"Bullshit." Max said brokenly, as she finally stopped struggling enough for Eddie to set her back down. "You've just decided to branch out from mass murder into mindjobs, like your big buddy Vecna loves to."

"One is not our friend." the Mind Flayer replied firmly.

"Then why are you helping him?" Chrissy asked confusedly. "Why lend him your power? Why kill so many people as part of his plans?"

"If One commands, we must obey." the Mind Flayer said.

"But you don't like obeying him." Eddie snapped his fingers. "You just have to. He's bound you somehow."

"Correct." the Mind Flayer nodded at him.

"Pull the other one, it's got bells on!" Max snorted. "You're more powerful than he is! How could he mind-control you if he's only as strong as he is now with you?"

"Have you ever thought about what it truly means to be a 'hive mind', Max?" the Mind Flayer asked her. "To be many separate bodies, even many separate brains, but that all share their thoughts, their will, their desires? To not know that such concepts as 'secrets' or 'lies' or 'enemies' even exist, because such things are impossible for you to have?"

"He caught you off-guard." Chrissy said. "You were- you were innocent, you were wide open, and a stranger came here from another world and you didn't know that you should never have trusted him."

"Yes." the Mind Flayer said. "One was the first intelligent mind we had ever met that was not part of us. The first contact we had ever had with another world. And when he first beheld us, when he reached out to us with his mind, we could feel his emotions, see his thoughts, but we did not understand what they truly meant. We lacked a proper context."

"Because he's a psychopath." Eddie realized. "Even he doesn't have a proper context for his thoughts and beliefs, that's kinda the definition of the word! He looks at reality and still doesn't remotely see it the same way normal people do. So even if you could read his mind, you'd still get a completely distorted picture of what was actually happening."

"The madness of One led him to perceive his own species as only an invasive, infectious species of dangerous animals. Creatures that existed only to reproduce, consume, and die, and a blight on the purity of the world otherwise. When he first beheld my home, the dimension that you call the 'Upside Down', he was delighted to see what he called "A realm unspoiled by mankind." The purity of his belief that we were ideal, that ours was a state of existence to admire, was what led us to open ourselves up to him fully. We had made first contact with an alien species, and were delighted to have found what we thought would be a kindred spirit." The Mind Flayer shook its borrowed head. "And we were deluded, just as One himself was deluded."

"So when he- he told you to turn loose the Demogorgon on us, or the other stuff you did-" Max bit out. "You did it because you thought he was right."

"When the scientists of the Hawkins Project made Eleven re-open the gate three years ago, as not just a temporary tear in reality such as the one she had instinctively exiled One here through as a child but as a deliberate, fully-empowered experiment in creating a permanent gateway between worlds, it backlashed. Somehow, it warped the nature of the Upside Down. The pristine landscape here, however alien it would have been to your eyes, was instead bent into an echo of your own world. On November 6th, 1983, the same day that the breach was re-opened and Will Byers was taken here by the creature you called the Demogorgon on One's orders, most of the Upside Down was reshaped into a lifeless, still echo of Hawkins. And so we did not then chafe at One's command of us, because we believed that he was correct in his claims that your world would invade ours and destroy it." the Mind Flayer lectured evenly.

"But why let him command you at all?" Chrissy asked.

"At first we did not know that we were enslaved." the Mind Flayer answered. "We had merely believed what One had led us to believe; that he would be our strategist, our leader, to teach us how to fight battles that we had no knowledge of how to conduct." The Mind Flayer's avatar paused in what in a human would have been proper occasion for a shrug. "After all, what would a hive mind that had never met another race before know of war, when there had never been anyone else to fight?"

"And what made you start thinking differently?" Eddie asked, interrupting Max's derisive snort.

"When One's next plan began to involve what Max and her allies would call the 'Flayed'." the Mind Flayer said. "When he attempted the strategy of having us use the spores through which we assimilate the animal life of the Upside Down into the hive mind, what the scientists of the Hawkins Project call 'the particles', to assimilate citizens of Hawkins as a plot to infiltrate and eventually destroy your home. As we stole their bodies, we also took their minds. And with access to their memories, that was when we first began to see that matters were not as One had told us. We denied him, and told him that we would no longer continue upon the course of action that he had suggested... then we discovered it was too late. He had been part of but not truly incorporated into our gestalt for too long, and even without our power to draw upon his own powers of the mind are strong. Strong enough that with his far greater experience at mental combat and manipulation, and with his already having been invited into our bond before we knew of his true nature, he was able to bind us to his will. Even the actions we have taken to contact you now are possible only because we have never actually been forbidden to do them."

"And why are you contacting us exactly?" Eddie probed.

"To recruit the allies I need to assist Eleven in destroying One." the Mind Flayer replied.

"So that's it." Max hissed venomously. "Vecna has everything he wants already, except a clear shot at the one person who could possibly stop him. And you're holding us out as bait to lure her back into your, into his reach. Well fuck you! Go crawl back to your master and tell him that if he wants to start torturing me to death again I'll be waiting right here but I will never help you hurt her! I will never help you hurt anyone, ever again!"

The Mind Flayer lowered its head and closed its eyes. "And now we see that we have already failed before we even began. We do not have many voices with which we can possibly speak to humans, Max. Even this degree of contact is possible between us only because you are here, in the mental realm for his victims that One sustains in his mind with our assistance. For us to contact a human mind in your dimension requires either exposing them to our hive mind via the particles, to use the voice of one of the Flayed, or else for them to possess powers of the mind such as the Numbers have. But One has long since commanded us to never attempt contact with Eleven without his express permission, there are no more Flayed, and there are no other Numbers we can reach."

"Why aren't you just trying to bullshit her via the real Will?" Max challenged it. "You infected him years ago and even though we purged most of his system as best we could, I know he can still feel traces of you. That's one of the reasons his family finally moved out of Hawkins, it was the only way he could get out of range of you."

"Will Byers has only very recently returned to Hawkins at all, to aid your other friends as best he can after One's attempt to breach the dimensions five days ago." the Mind Flayer acknowledged. "But even though we call to him, he will not hear us. Even when we touch his dreams where he cannot block out our voice, he still refuses to pay heed to our words. He has only known fear and pain at our hands, and so he does not trust us." The Mind Flayer paused, as if it wished to sigh in disappointment but didn't know how. "And now we find that our last possible emissary to Eleven has, for the same reasons, made the same choice."

"Max." Chrissy said gently. "You told us that Vecna's attempts to kill you were only the second-worst experience of your life, and it's obvious by now that your worst one was your last encounter with the Mind Flayer. But- but we have to take it on faith. If we reject this chance, I don't see where we've got any other option except to let Vecna win."

"Yeah, and that's more true than you might have considered." Eddie agreed. "The plan to weaken Vecna so that Eleven would have a clear shot? If we were only following the bread crumbs the Mind Flayer left to lead us here the whole time, then it heard us talking about that. Which means that if it really is just working for Vecna here, he's already tipped off and knows to duck the trap. Game over."

"The 'bread crumbs' were necessary in lieu of our contacting you directly as you arrived because this is a portion of One's mind. The analogy is not exact, but by placing the clues that would lead you to seek us out in a representation of the portion of his life that he is least willing to remember, and by requiring you to make such an active and prolonged effort towards seeking the answer instead of immediately gifting it to you, that would reflect your following a train of thought as deeply buried from One's consciousness as possible." the Mind Flayer agreed. "So you are correct in both instances. We do seek to conceal your plans from One as best we may, and victory would be impossible for you if we chose not to."

"I- no." Max shook her head. "Yeah, it all sounds logical, but you're an alien super-mind. If you wanted to out-logic me, then-" she trailed off muttering disgustedly. "Wouldn't be that hard, really."

"Max." the Mind Flayer said. "We know why you hate us, and why you fear us. But we are not certain of how to resolve what lies between us. You have already rejected logic, and you have also rejected faith." It paused, and then continued. "There is only one thing left we could possibly attempt, but we still do not understand human emotion sufficiently to know whether or not you would be further hurt by it. Or whether you would wish it at all."

"You can't." Max whispered.

"The one-time leader of our Flayed has passed beyond even our knowledge, but we still remember him. We still have his memories, if not his essence, as we had studied them in depth during the time period he was possessed by us. We could speak to you on his behalf. To tell you what he would have said to you if he were here, in his words and not our own. But only you can tell us if this is what you would wish." the Mind Flayer pressed.

Max swallowed, staring silently at the Mind Flayer. Her mouth opened, but no words came out.

"Max." Chrissy said. "I can't even imagine what you're feeling right now, or who they're talking about, but-" She paused. "Are you more afraid of knowing, or of never knowing?"

Max forced her trembling features into an expressionless mask, and closed her eyes and nodded. When she opened her eyes again, the features of Billy Hargrove, her late stepbrother, stared down at her with a calm and compassion she'd never before seen. Max's mouth opened and closed helplessly, tears leaking from her eyes, as Billy knelt down in front of her to stare levelly into her eyes, his hands comfortingly on her shoulders.

"Max." Billy said softly. "I am so very, very sorry."

"Billy." she gasped. "No, I-"

Billy closed his eyes and sighed. "When Vecna made his first attempt at you, before your friends knew about how to use music to have any chance of saving his victims- when you thought you were facing your last day on Earth- you chose to spend that day writing letters to all your friends. And you also wrote one to me."

"How would you-?" Max asked plaintively.

"When you travelled to my grave to read it to me, when Vecna made what he intended to be his final attack on you there, he was listening to your words, which meant the Mind Flayer was also listening. You doubted if I could even hear you, but I did hear you. I heard your final attempt to resolve what lay between us. To beg me for my forgiveness. And that was wrong, Max. You were wrong, because you have never done anything that I would need to forgive you for." Billy told her.

"You're just saying that." Max whimpered, her tears leaking further. "I- I just stood there. I just stood there and watched it kill you."

"Max." Billy sighed. "You could not possibly have stopped that monster. Even I wasn't able to, not for more than a few moments. And even beyond that, I was already dead before you had even entered the room. I had been one of the Flayed for too long, there was nothing of my real body left. Even if you'd somehow done everything differently, even if I had never needed to put myself in the way of the giant creature that Vecna had assembled in Starcourt Mall, the Gate still had to be closed or else everything would have been lost. And closing the Gate would inevitably destroy all the Flayed anyway, as it had to do to save Hawkins at all."

"A-and before?" Max asked. "When I kept hating you, running away from you? When I never gave you a chance to be my real brother? Was that all kept behind the Gate too?" she challenged.

"Max." Billy said, blinking away a tear of his own. "You ran away from me because you had to run from me. I was hurting you. I was emotionally abusive, and violent, and I wanted to drive away all your friends and keep you alone and afraid. Before we moved to Hawkins, I once broke a boy's arm just for talking to you. I deserved your hatred."

"You were sick. You needed help." Max entreated him. "But I didn't even try to get you any, I didn't even think about what you were going through at the time. I just- I just covered my own ass, like I always do."

"You were a child, Max." Billy sighed. "You were the youngest child. It was our job to look out for you, not vice versa. But your real father abandoned you. Your mother abandoned everything outside of a bottle. And my father was worse than I was. Our family was-" He shook his head. "It was never what a family should be, not even close. But that was not your fault."

"But you died-" Max sniffled. "You died saving Eleven's life, you died saving my life, you died saving the lives of everybody. You had an alien monster eat your body and live in your brain and you still turned around and fought it off to save everyone. You were a hero, Billy. And that means that I was wrong about you, that I had to have been wrong about you." she forced out between her racking sobs, as Billy slowly drew her into a comforting hug.

"I was sick." Billy agreed. "What my father had done to me, what I'd seen him do to my mother before he married your mother, had left me unstable, and erratic, and unable to control my anger. But even if I had more trouble than some other people with making good choices, I still had choices, and I still made bad ones. I could still know right from wrong, and I still did wrong things. I could still have chosen to go get myself help, like you did when you chose to go to Ms. Kelly and get therapy for your depression, when you were grieving so terribly for me. But I didn't go. I was not a hero."

"Eddie screwed up his whole life, he says, and he died on his very first mission saving the team's lives. He's still a hero, why aren't you?" Max insisted.

"Even at my worst I still didn't hurt anyone except maybe myself, Red." Eddie said quietly. "What you've been describing is very much different than that."

"It was." Billy nodded up at Eddie before returning his focus to Max. "Max, when I did what I did it was because Eleven helped me to do it. At the very end, after she was already down and helpless, she'd used the last of her strength to reach into my mind and try to push me free of the Mind Flayer's control of me. And when she did that she also managed to push my consciousness free of my own madness as well. For the first time in years, I could see you. I could see myself. I could see what I really was, what I'd done- and what I needed to do." He shrugged. "But even Eleven couldn't cure what was wrong with me, she just gave me one moment of clarity."

"You could see the real me, huh?" Max quavered. "You probably weren't very impressed."

"Oh Max." Billy hugged her again. "I never really saw you when you were alive, except in that final moment, but I have seen so very much about you since in what the Mind Flayer has learned about you. And the things I have seen-" He smiled at her in awe. "You've spent years adventuring with your friends to stop the monsters and save Hawkins and have never asked for any acknowledgement or rewards, just like they never have. You survived Vecna's most terrifying mind attack on sheer willpower- you were the first person in history other than Eleven to damage him at all in a mind battle, however temporarily, and all that without mental powers of your own. You then willingly went back into his mental grasp just to distract him for a few minutes while your friends made their attempt to kill him his lair, despite knowing how slim your odds of escape were a second time. Even when the boy you loved begged you not to go, and searched desperately for an alternative, you refused them all simply on the grounds that it was morally wrong to put an uninvolved person at risk of their life instead of yourself - a knowing, willing volunteer."

"That was just me being suicidal again." Max deflected. "It doesn't take much courage to risk your life when you think it's all shit anyway."

"Is that why you were so happy to make a date with Lucas to go to the movies the Friday after fighting Vecna?" Billy asked her knowingly. "Because you didn't want to live?"

"I- hey, that was private!" Max objected childishly.

Billy smiled at the byplay, and then shook his head in awe. "And even now, with your real body helpless in a life-support bed, you willingly returned yourself into Vecna's own mind a third time just for the chance of doing something to help stop him." He smiled at her. "You are so brave, and so strong, and so selfless, that it humbles me. I may have done one brave deed at the end of my life, but that doesn't make me even remotely as heroic a person as you are. I'm touched that you can grieve for me at all, given how awful I was to you. But never, ever think of yourself as less than me, because you are so much a better person than me that I can scarcely believe it even now. You have never been my "shitty little sister", Max, you've been amazing. I am so very very proud of you." Billy choked out, as they both leaked silent tears on each other shoulders. "And I always will be."

"I wish this were real." Max choked out. "I wish you were real, but it's not. You're not."

"A dream is a wish the heart makes." Billy told her softly. "Eddie and Chrissy have been given second chances to say the things that they wish they could have said while they were alive. And so have I, even if I am merely a memory."

"Billy." Max said helplessly, searching for words.

"Max." he acknowledged her, as they released each other and he rose to his feet. "I can't tell you when it's time for you to put down your grief. No one can, except for yourself. But I can ask you, I can beg you, to please set aside your guilt. I've already said that you've done absolutely nothing you need to apologize for, but if you still believe that you have done any such thing then you may have all the forgiveness that I can possibly give."

"Will I ever see you again?" Max asked him plaintively.

"I hope not." he said, and smiled down at her expression. "Not for a very, very long time."

"Good-bye, Billy." Max smiled up at him - tearfully, querulously, but still a genuine smile.

"Farewell, Max." Billy nodded at her, and between one eyeblink and the next he was gone.

* * * * *​

Author's Note: Who the hell is cutting all those onions? I was leaking tears all through writing this thing, God only knows what it's doing to my readers. You're getting a short chapter on this one, folks, I need to take a pause.

And the funny thing is, I was originally not intending to have Billy show up at all. There's a reason the Mind Flayer showed up to her using Will's face as its avatar. But then I started writing the conversation and I realized that no, there's simply no way Max can even begin to work with the Mind Flayer without getting closure on this issue. And so I gritted my teeth and got down to it, and-

Yeah. And yeah, the topic of Billy Hargrove, who spent all of season 2 being an abusive psycho asshole and season 3 being a brainjacked doomhand of a body-snatching monster who got one redemption-in-death moment at the very end of the finale, is a complicated one in the Stranger Things fandom. My take; it's a tragedy the dude never got a fair shake in life, because he'd probably have been a good person in an alternate universe where his father wasn't an abusive monster. But neither does he get a free pass on all the sins he committed, and Max certainly has absolutely nothing to blame herself for how she reacted at any point. Even if watching her read that farewell letter to Billy at his gravesite still makes me cut those onions even now.

Not that any of the fandom disagrees on that last one, but Max certainly did. Seriously, at least half of her season 4 arc was her struggling with some severe depression issues, as in 'see the shrink' struggling, over the massive knot that "the abusive asshole who was my childhood nightmare then died saving me and all my friends' lives right in front of me" left her in. There's a reason that poor brave spunky Max, who didn't hesitate to volunteer to bait Vecna into a trap with her own life, breaks down into hysterical panic at the mere sight of the Mind Flayer's avatar in this fic, and that's because the whole issue around Billy's death fucked her up like nothing else in her entire life.

 

[cliffc999]

".... okay." Max said, then blew her nose with one of the box of tissues that Chrissy had gone to fetch from inside the nearby house. She finished wiping her eyes and looked steadily back at the Mind Flayer's avatar, which had resumed the form of Will Byers. "We'll hear you out."

"Thank you, Max." the Mind Flayer replied. "We are grateful that we could help you find closure."

"That's not why I'm agreeing." Max replied brusquely. "I mean, yeah, closure. Thanks." she trailed off softly. "Talking to even an image of him, that actually did help." she conceded. "But if we're plugged into Vecna's head ultimately through you, then my head's wide-open to you. So you could still have just made all that up."

"We do not understand. If you did not accept the truth of the words, then why would they move you?" the Mind Flayer said, puzzled.

"Because Vecna - One - can only see the darkness in human minds. Like Eddie said, everything gets twisted through his psycho worldview. He wouldn't even know how to reassure someone, give them a therapy talk, stuff like that, and he'd fail pathetically at it if he ever tried to." Max explained. "And you'd have flopped the same way if all you'd ever known about how humans think is what Vecna taught you. Even if you can't actually feel emotions the same way we do, you at least partly understand them now." Max continued insightfully. "So the part where you said that you'd originally not understood humanity, but that you were finally learning to, at least that much has to be true. And if that much of your story is already proven then yeah. Might as well give the rest of what you were saying a try."

"Okay, we're all on the same page with the goal. Now comes the hard part." Eddie broke in.

"We need to figure out a way to get word to Eleven as to what we're planning, a way to lure Vecna in at the right moment, a way to signal Eleven exactly when she needs to move-" Chrissy started methodically ticking off on her fingers. "And most importantly of all, a way to stop you from sharing your power with One so he'll be weak enough for Eleven to beat."

"Start from the outside first." Max thought. "Can you tell me when Eleven starts her next attempt to reach my mind, so I know when to trance again?"

"Unfortunately, One is now alerted to that possibility. The disturbance that had prompted One to investigate within this mindscape, shortly before you found our voice here? He had sensed, however incompletely, that Eleven was attempting to reach within his mind. One does not know who or what she was seeking in here, but he is now vigilant against any further attempts. If you accept her next attempt at mental contact, then he will find you." the Mind Flayer explained.

"Shit!" Eddie swore. "Which means that even though Max is onboard now, we're still stuck with this Will kid as our only possible link to the outside. And you just explained how he's blocking you out."

"But you said he can still hear what you're saying in his dreams, he's just not trusting a word of it." Max thought out loud. "I need to think of a message, something he'd trust as actually coming from me. But I haven't seen him in months since he moved away, and Vecna's so good at faking being people you know in your dreams-" she broke off frustratedly.

"Some kind of a password or something." Eddie paced thoughtfully. "Me and Dustin shared a lot of stuff, maybe I could-"

"But that has the same problem. No matter how familiar it was to them they'd just think it was Vecna playing games, trying to lure Eleven into his trap." Max said. "I mean, he's a mind reader."

"So we use someone entirely unfamiliar." Max and Eddie's heads snapped around to face Chrissy. "We went to the same high school, but I never really knew any of you before I died. Eddie's the member of your group that I'm most familiar with, and our reacquaintance before Vecna killed me was barely one day long."

"But if none of them knows you from Adam, then what do we tell them?" Max asked reasonably.

"I only know her from being in a couple of the same classes, so please tell me if I'm wrong. Nancy Wheeler really can't let a mystery go unsolved, can she?" Chrissy asked.

"Are you kidding? Her curiosity got her straight-up fired from at least one job that I know about." Max agreed. "But yeah, it really would be curious if Will suddenly had the Mind Flayer start telling him about a girl he's never met in his life, and who Eleven already knows is stuck in this mindscape with me. But how does that not just get filed under 'unsolved mystery' and ignored while they've got the whole crisis to deal with?"

"Because before I died, I wrote about Eddie in my journal-" Chrissy began.

"You mean your diary." Max teased the older girl.

"When you're writing it because your therapist tells you to, it's a journal." Chrissy corrected her primly, and then continued. "Anyway, towards the end I was scribbling in it like crazy because outside of Eddie, there was nobody I dared to talk to about anything. But I also wrote about trying to buy- medicine." She trailed off embarassingly. "From Eddie, to help me sleep. And how grateful I was to run into someone nice, someone that I could finally unburden myself on a little, when I couldn't talk to anyone else. And most importantly, I also wrote that I was hoping he could help me even more when I went to go visit him in his trailer later that night."

"You mean that there's actual, hard-copy evidence out there that Jason's whole narrative about how I abducted you and murdered you, because you supposedly would never ever voluntarily come to buy anything from me, is entirely bogus." Eddie said incredulously. "But why didn't it come out?"

"Because I kept it in my locker at school, not my house. I mean, if my mother had ever seen what I wrote in there about her then she'd have killed me." Chrissy explained. "And everybody's probably been much too distracted the past few days to bother about cleaning out my locker or reading through all my notebooks."

"So you tell Will about that, and you keep telling him." Max said to the silently observing Mind Flayer. "It'll be so bizarrely off-script that he'll almost certainly mention it to someone, and-"

"And even if Nance didn't go for it because she'd just want to know why, Dustin would still give his eyeteeth for a chance to clear my name to the cops." Eddie nodded. "And once they actually find it- well, yeah. At this point they not only know that the Mind Flayer wasn't lying, but the bigger mystery of 'Why the heck is the Mind Flayer caring about human interest stuff all of a sudden?' gets them to at least come back and open the line of communication again."

"Because it's not as if Vecna would ever do anything nice for anyone. And so once they believe that it's not Vecna talking, we can start to coordinate with the team in the outside world." Max agreed. "So the obvious next question is, coordinate what?"

"We've got to disconnect you from Vecna so he doesn't have your power to let him overmatch Eleven again." Eddie asked the Mind Flayer. "How do we do this?"

"We have been forbidden to stop empowering him." the Mind Flayer answered.

"So you can't willingly drop the link." Max nodded. "Not a surprise. But how is this link kept up? Is there somewhere we can go, something we can smash?"

"This is a mental realm, not a physical one." the Mind Flayer explained. "That would require someone able to overpower One in a battle of wills."

"Yeah, and we've all seen how well that one went the last time." Max groused.

"While we're on the topic, why the heck did you even recruit us anyway?" Eddie asked. "Me in particular?"

"You were the first person to perish inside the Upside Down since we had learned that One had betrayed us, and One's attention was entirely diverted elsewhere at the moment of your death by his battle with Eleven. Although your body was damaged beyond repair, and we were helpless to prevent the creatures from killing you on One's orders, we took the opportunity to secretly bring your essence into this mental realm. We had originally intended merely to examine your memories for further knowledge on Eleven and her friends so as to help aid our attempts at formulating a strategy to destroy him, but only moments later Max also perished. And with her death and then almost immediate resuscitation by Eleven, a unique opportunity was created."

"But why bring me into this?" Chrissy asked it.

"Your mind had already been taken by One, both to aid the growth of his power by his ritual sacrifice of you and for his amusement. With his regard distracted from you by current events, we were able to remove you from the mental limbo One had left you in and brought you into this portion of his mindscape. Any plan to destroy One would require a connection to the depths of his mind that he was already aware of but had already dismissed as any possible threat." the Mind Flayer explained.

"You're talking about using the mind of one of the four ritual kills he made and assimilated to help piggyback someone else into the center of his brain. After all, he's got no reason to be afraid of a powerless ghost." Max nodded. "Which would narrow it down to her, Fred, Patrick, or me."

"And you would not be suitable to forge such a connection with, Max, because in your case the ritual was incomplete. But of the three remaining ritual victims of One, all of them were mentally shattered by the trauma of their deaths and assimilation. Only Chrissy Cunningham had a potential avenue for recovery to a functional mental status that was available to us." the Mind Flayer explained.

"Being put in touch with someone she'd already reached out to as a touchstone before she died, and who you were lucky enough to already have hanging around for another reason. Me." Eddie realized.

"So you put all three of us in this mindscape, then let us have time to all get our bearings and follow the bread crumbs until we could finally find whatever portion of you was put here to talk behind Vecna's back." Max said. "And with us cooperating, you hoped to use me to talk to Eleven on the outside and get the ball rolling. But-" she trailed off.

"I know how to bait Vecna." Chrissy said faintly, her eyes widening with fright. "I-I'm not brave like you and Eddie are." she turned to Max. "As soon as I see him again I'll fall right apart, I know it. But we can use that. He's- he's evil, he's horrible, he's a sadist. If he's not in a hurry with something else then he'll stop to enjoy watching me be so terrified."

"Chrissy-" Eddie said.

"I wander off somewhere into the Upside Down while the rest of you go to start your plan." Chrissy said, staring fixedly ahead. "And then I- stop hoping, and deliberately let myself be scared and guilty again. He already promised to come back for me when our hope ran out, so it should bring him running."

"Yeah." Max nodded. "I baited him the same way once."

"And we know how that ended for you. Chrissy, you know what he'll do to you! You can't!" Eddie begged her desperately.

"Eddie, I'm already dead." Chrissy told him gently. "It- it'll hurt, I know it'll hurt, but-" She exhaled heavily. "I'm just not heroic enough to fight him like you can. So if I'm not strong enough to do the right thing, then I have to find another right thing that I can still do. And this is it."

"And she says she's not a hero?" Eddie asked Max incredulously.

"Don't we still need Chrissy for this 'connection' thing you were talking about?" Max turned to the Mind Flayer.

"If One projects himself into this portion of the mindscape to torment her, then the link to his deeper mind that we need would be established." the Mind Flayer said. "And if Eleven were also in this portion of the mindscape, then she would have a clear attack route."

"And guiding Eleven here is my job." Max nodded. "I'm the lifeline back to the real world."

"So what's my job in all this, soundtrack guy?" Eddie asked. "And how do we solve the problem of Vecna being too powerful?"

Max's eyes went wide. The memories of Vecna's first attempt to kill her mentally flashed behind her eyes-

Max was lashed to the pillar in the mindscape representation of Vecna's decaying mansion in the Upside Down, barely able to breathe as the vines twined around her throat and wrists and ankles. The song "Running Up That Hill" by Kate Bush echoed dimly through the mindscape, as her friends in the real world placed her Walkman on her head and attempted to use the music's ability to stimulate a deeply-buried part of her brain to give her a lifeline back to reality. The mental representation of that escape route shimmered in the distance, taking the form of a portal 'back' to the real world through which she could distantly see her friends begging her to return-

Vecna turned away from the portal to loom menacingly over Max, his face only inches away from hers. "They can't help you, Max. There's a reason you hide from them. You belong here. With me."

"Y-you're not really here." she gasped defiantly at him.

"Oh but I am, Max." Vecna scoffed. "I am." Vecna reached out and grasped her head with his long, rotted fingers, and out in the real world Max's comatose body began to telekinetically rise into the air preparatory to having her entire skeleton crushed-

She closed her eyes and concentrated, focusing her mind as best she could. Memories unreeled in her brain- Lucas, entreating Max to just talk to him about her grief, begging for the chance to be a supportive boyfriend. Laughing and joking with the gang. Hanging out with Eleven at the mall like a pair of normal girls without a care in the world. Going trick-or-treating as a kid. All sorts of outings with her friends. Her first kiss with Lucas at the Snow Ball. The happiest times of her life-

And her eyes snapped open and she reached up and plunged her fingers as deeply as she could into Vecna's neck and pulled. A chunk of rotten pseudoflesh ripped free and he staggered back, clutching at the wound. His inhuman body had not taken more than minimal damage but the sheer shock of being injured at all, even if it was merely his own astral self-image inside a mindscape, temporarily broke his telekinetic grip on the vines and she pulled free and landed on the floor. She leapt to her feet and ran for the portal back to reality as quickly as she could-

And her eyes snapped open in the real world as her mind escaped Vecna's astral realm and returned to her body, and she fell safely back to the ground.

"Blocking Vecna from your power would someone with a stronger will than his, that's what you said." Max told the Mind Flayer. "And Billy- your memory of him- he said that I was the first person without powers to ever damage Vecna at all in a mind battle. If we can make it come down purely to a stubbornness contest then I can take that asshole. I can help Eleven put him in the ground where he belongs."

"Your will is exceptionally strong, Max, but you still failed to resist One when he made his second attempt upon you. Even your clever stratagem of deliberately choosing your happiest memories to hide among only delayed him for a minute or two. He is a powerful and experienced psychic, and you lack any power of your own. Even your initial success against him did no real damage to him, and was largely due to a surprise advantage that you will no longer have." the Mind Flayer corrected Max.

"You're wrong." Max shook her head gravely. "He won't see this coming."

* * * * *​

"Everything's in place?" Eddie pensively asked the Mind Flayer's avatar as they stood in the central chamber of the old tunnel system.

"Yes." it nodded to them. "Eleven and Dr. Owens have made all the necessary arrangements. They await only our signal."

"All right." Chrissy said, gulping nervously. "Then- I guess it's time." she trailed off faintly.

"Before we must withdraw, a final word." the Mind Flayer said. "To our hive mind 'death' merely meant being no longer able to use a particular unit of biomass, not the end of identity or continuity. Even though we now know that humans die differently, we know not where they go after death or even if their identities continue at all. We are humbled by your willingness to risk Oblivion on our behalf."

"It's our world being saved as well as yours, big guy." Eddie said tensely. "But- yeah." he trailed off less confrontationally. "You're welcome."

"Thank you." the Mind Flayer nodded to them both, and vanished.

"Eddie, I'm sorry." she turned to him in apology.

"You're sorry?" he scoffed disbelievingly. "With what's about to happen to you?"

"I know what I'm asking you to do, and how much it will hurt you." she said, downcast. "I wish there were another way."

"If wishes were horses." Eddie replied helplessly, and they embraced.

'Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.' Chrissy prayed, still clutching him.

"Amen." Eddie murmured softly, and they shared a deep breath before separating.

Chrissy closed her eyes and concentrated as much as she could on every shameful memory and emotional scar she normally tried to suppress. Her mother's constant body-shaming and measurements, the sick cloying taste of vomit as she was unable to keep down food, her terrified flashbacks at the mere thought of encountering Vecna again- she buried every thought of what she was actually doing and why as deeply as she could and allowed her old traumas, her old scars, to resume their ingrained negative thought spirals in all opposition to what she'd been undergoing therapy to learn not to do. After a only a couple of minutes the fluorescent lights in the tunnels began to flicker, then to strobe-

"Come on, Chrissy, just a little farther!" Eddie said with desperate false cheer, playing his role. "I'm sure we'll find something in the old labs that'll help, huh? We can't be stuck in here forever!" he trailed off unconvincingly.

"Fool." Vecna's voice rang out in the murky dimness, as Chrissy locked up tight with terror. "I told you I would return for you, when you could no longer delude yourselves with hope."

"H-hey, man, there's no need to do this-" Eddie said, his voice breaking.

"Please-" Chrissy begged, barely able to speak. "Please-"

"Hmph." Vecna said scornfully. "The entertainment seems lacking this time around. But don't worry. I'll make my own."

Vecna turned away from the slowly retreating Eddie to face Chrissy as she cowered in the corner, and her body went rigid in Vecna's telekinetic grip and began to rise into the air. Eddie stared up at the horrific sight he'd experienced once before in his trailer, as Vecna had suspended her on the ceiling and then methodically snapped every bone in her body before imploding her eyes and skull, as he hung caught between resolve and shame while his own voice echoed in his ears-

"I just ran away. I just ran away and left her there!"
"Outside of D&D, I am no hero. I see danger and I just turn heel and run. Or at least that's what I've learned about myself this week."
"I didn't run away this time, right?"

Eddie forced his eyes open again, buffeted by his memories, his shame at his moment of cowardice and his desperate attempts to make up for it, to be confronted by Chrissy's desperately pleading eyes as she hung helplessly in the air.

"Please..." she whimpered as her body began to contort. "Let me go." she begged with a desperate last gasp.

"I think not." Vecna sneered at her, as Eddie held Chrissy's gaze with his own behind Vecna's back- and nodded.

And then Eddie turned and ran down the tunnel as desperately as he could, while Chrissy's shrieks of agony and the sound of snapping bones echoed behind him.

Will Byers stood in the depths of the Hawkins Laboratory, nodding his head in reply to a voice only he could hear. His mother Joyce stood next to him, her hands supportingly on his shoulders, as the looming form of Chief Hopper of the Hawkins PD watched with fearful protectiveness while his adopted daughter Eleven lowered herself into one of the sensory deprivation tanks that she used to help boost her powers. Adjacent to the tank, Max's comatose body lay in a specialized life-support bed, with her boyfriend Lucas sitting in a chair on the other side of the bed loosely gripping Max's hand.

"Phase one complete. Vecna's- distracted." Will said to Dr. Owens as he finished the final adjustments. Dr. Owens nodded at Chief Hopper, and then walked over to Max's bed and began to set up an IV.

Eddie sprinted out of the tunnel entrance into the depths of the lab, and then immediately turned and headed for the Gate chamber. He staggered into the room, panting for breath, and noted the dully glowing red crack in reality that mirrored the 'Mothergate' that Eleven had inadvertently torn open to the Upside Down in November 1983, the one that had given Vecna his first route back to Earth after his original dimensional exiling, the one that Dr. Brenner's reckless experiments had forced her to make-

"Red?" Eddie asked, tears streaming down his face. "I-" he breathed deeply. "I ran away this time." he sobbed.

"Exactly what that asshole-" Max grunted in pain. "Was expecting you to do-" she began to pant heavily.

"Hey, you okay?" Eddie turned to her, worried.

She staggered on her feet, and then fell heavily into an office chair adjacent to the doorway. "Didn't imagine- how much this would hurt-" she forced out.

"Phase two." Will Byers announced, echoing the Mind Flayer's whispers to him. "They're in the lab." Eleven closed her eyes as she lay floating in the sensory deprivation tank and began to astrally project.

"Doctor?" Lucas asked Dr. Owens frantically, as Max convulsed in the bed and the vital-signs monitors beeped frantically. "I thought you said-"

"She's still within limits." Dr. Owens assured him hurriedly as he leant over Max and adjusted his instruments. "But we're having to put a lot of stress on her metabolism with this procedure! Keep talking to her, kid! Even if she can't consciously hear you, it'll still be an anchor-"

Lucas nodded, gulping away his tears, and leaned back over her comatose body. "Max? Max, I'm here! Follow my voice, Max!"

"Did you think you could escape me?" Vecna's sneering voice came to their ears as he stalked into the Gate chamber, having followed Eddie's despair and grief all the way there.

A grunt of pain from Max drew Vecna's attention as he was crossing the chamber towards Eddie, and he spun around in astonishment to see the young girl sitting adjacent to and behind the doorway that he'd walked past as he entered. "You!" he husked out in surprise.

"Sucker!" Eddie sneered with a mocking grin even as tears fell from his eyes, to then twist and contort and fall heavily to the ground as Vecna telekinetically snapped Eddie's neck with a contemptuous jerk of his chin. His corpse was flung across the floor to slide up against a nearby wall. Vecna ignored him and turned back to face Max, his silouhette outlined for her against the dim red glow of the Gate behind him.

"Playing the bait again, Maxine?" Vecna's voice echoed throughout the chamber. "Don't you people ever think of anything new?" Without even waiting for her answer Vecna looked slightly away from Max to expectantly face towards the door, already knowing who he would see there.

"Eleven." Vecna nodded as Eleven paced menacingly into the room and Max rose slowly to her feet. "So you have finally returned here, to where it all began. Did you think that simply luring me into an echo of the place where we fought our very first battle would help you somehow? I have grown so very much since then."

"So have I." Eleven said simply, her stance alert and poised as she slowly began to step to one side. Vecna matched her move for move with his own menacing tread, as the two psychic warriors each waited for the other to make a move. Eleven stopped her motion adjacent to Max's chair, and held Vecna's gaze as she reached out to take her friend's hand in her own.

"What do you even imagine you can accomplish?" Vecna sneered. "Our battle of a week ago required the hive mind to be attacked on multiple fronts, and my physical body assaulted in the Upside Down simultaneous with your attack, and you still lost. You couldn't save her from me then, and you won't be able to save her now."

Max steadied on her feet and stood at Eleven's side, her face pale but set in lines of grim determination.

"Last time, Eleven, I gave you my word that I would make you watch." Vecna said. "But we were interrupted then. Now, I will keep my promise."

Max's free hand came up in a swift, unmistakable gesture in reply, and Eleven's lip briefly quirked in amusement as her eyes flickered aside to look at Max's upraised finger before returning her intent focus to Vecna. Vecna sneered back to the two girls in reply, and then thrust one palm forward and unleashed a silent wave of telekinetic force sufficient to knock even a fully-prepared Eleven, let alone a normal girl like Max, flying off her feet-

-to gape in astonishment as his shockwave was dissipated in mid-air when both Eleven and Max thrust out their own hands in a telekinetic control gesture of their own, meeting Vecna's force with their own and neutralizing it.

"Holy shit." Max said, staring wonderingly down at her own fingers before turning to grin wildly at Eleven.

"Bitchin'." Eleven grinned back at her in agreement, before they resumed facing Vecna.

"HOW?" Vecna shouted in astonishment. "She is a mediocre little girl, she has never been one of us! And I am the first and foremost of the Numbers, not you! You do not have the strength to oppose me, especially not here!"

"As soon as you stepped into the trap, Dr. Owens infused Max's real body with the particles." Eleven explained to him matter-of-factly.

"That makes both of us connected to the hive mind now." Max smiled at Vecna like a shark. "So round three, freak!"

"The hive mind is mine, Maxine!" Vecna roared, as all three psychics continued their stand-off. The very air of the chamber felt thick and heavy, as enough force to shred battleship armor hung suspended in a tense balance- "You don't even know how to use such power!"

"I do." Eleven replied flatly, as Max and Eleven both planted their feet and began to push forward. The reinforced concrete floor of the chamber began to crack and warp as Vecna planted his feet to resist their rush... and then he slipped backwards a foot.

"Suffer!" he enunciated with terrible clarity, lashing out with his telepathy against the minds of the two girls.

A row of children standing rigidly in ranks watching in horrified shock as a boy only slightly older than them was electrocuted through his shock collar, not daring to break formation or even breathe as all the Numbers watched Dr. Brenner demonstrate what happened to those who broke the rules-

"I came here to try and understand who I was. To see if I was the monster. And now I know the truth. It is not me. It is you. You are the monster. I am going to open that door, and I am going to leave with Dr. Owens. If you try to stop me, I will kill you."

A young red-haired girl desperately muffling her own screams as a boy her age shrieked in agony at his broken arm, as her brother turned to shout at her. 'This is what happens when you talk to the wrong people! Why don't you ever listen?'

"From here on out, you leave me and my friends alone. Do you understand?!?"

Eleven and Max pushed away Vecna's attempts at delving into their traumas, their most painful memories, and gritted their teeth. Max's willpower clashed against Vecna's, both of them delving deep into their connection to the Mind Flayer, grasping at the power, pulling-

"I will shatter the world." Vecna intoned hieratically. "I will take our sick and broken reality and merge it fully with the Upside Down, and mold it all to my will. I will make it into something beautiful! Who are you children to oppose me?"

"Dustin has comic books with better speeches than that." Max scoffed, as Vecna's mind failed to shift her iron grip on the Mind Flayer's connection. His vastly greater experience at mental combat kept him from losing ground, but neither could he gain any against Max's resolution. And with the Mind Flayer's power being evenly split between him and Max, then with Eleven in the mix the balance of forces was against Vecna-

"You are a child, Henry." Eleven said. "Dr. Brenner took you into the lab when you were twelve. You never left until the day I sent you to the Upside Down."

"A sick, twisted kid who stayed home and tortured animals." Max scoffed. "You barely even went to school, and you think you can outsmart the world?"

"All you've ever done is use your powers on people who couldn't fight you back, and trick anyone who could fight back into not knowing until it was too late." Eleven said. "You are nothing but a bully. And a liar."

"And a coward. Definitely don't forget coward." Max chimed in, and Vecna roared back in rage- but also the beginnings of fear.

The balance of forces shifted in the chamber as Vecna desperately fought for purchase. Like a man being forced backwards by a high wind, he scraped further and further back across the floor despite the best he could to brace himself.

"Coward? I have faced things beyond your imagining, and bent them to my will!" Vecna roared. "I have faced the very void between worlds itself, and never known fear!"

"Not being afraid isn't bravery, it's stupidity." Max sneered.

"Eddie was brave. Chrissy was brave." Eleven said. "But you?" she trailed off contemptuously.

Vecna looked over his shoulder at the approaching red maw of the Gate. This room was a mental copy of the Gate chamber that had been created around the initial breach to the Upside Down, the one that a young Eleven had instinctively thrown him through. This Gate was merely a symbol, as all things in the mindscape were ultimately a symbol, but what it symbolized would mean-

"I. WILL. NOT-" Vecna roared desperately, and the entire room shook as he lashed out wildly, all the loose objects in the room swirling in an invisible hurricane as he attempted to crack the ceiling, shatter the floor, do anything to gain an advantage-

But a girl who had once psychically torn her way out of a reinforced missile silo, and another girl who had once drawn mental blood from one of the most powerful psychics alive with no powers at all, met Vecna's mindstorm and broke it without flinching.

"Yes you will." Max defied him, and the two girls pressed forward. Eleven's mind stayed linked to Max's, the veteran helping steady and guide the newcomer as the newcomer lent the Mind Flayer's raw force and her bedrock stubbornness to buttress Eleven's own powers and unflinching will. With their hands clasping each other and their off-hands each raised against Vecna's, they stood fast and pushed Vecna's mental world harder than it pushed back.

"Remember who I am!" Vecna beseeched the Mind Flayer. "Remember what we have shared, what I have taught you! Do not be led astray by these newcomers! It is I who have been your only ally, your only friend!"

"Friends don't lie." Max replied, her voice mixed with the intonations of the Mind Flayer's own.

"Maxine!" Vecna turned to her. "Do you wish to spend the rest of your life being a killer? To know that blood is upon your hands, and that it will never, ever be wiped clean?"

Eleven looked to Max, asking permission with her eyes, and Max nodded once. The two girls turned to face Vecna as his back almost touched the Gate-

"But I already warned you." Eleven said firmly to Vecna. "That if you touched her again. Then I would kill you. Again."

"NO. NOOOOOO-!" Vecna's voice finally broke, finally begged, as the last fatal inch between him and the gaping dimensional rip was crossed, and his voice rose into a wordless howl of agony as his body began to crack and twist and shatter, being slowly torn apart molecule by molecule as the very fabric of reality was shredded in his local vicinity. In an eerie mirror of his original banishment to the Upside Down, Henry Creel - One - Vecna - died as his astral self, his mind's own internal representation, was obliterated on every level deep within the depths of his own consciousness. As One died, the mindscape of the Hawkins Lab fell away around the girls on every side, eventually leaving them floating in a black void.

"Are you okay?" Eleven asked Max compassionately.

"I-I will be." Max answered her, her voice beginning to shake as the adrenaline of combat faded away. "He's-he's really dead, isn't he?"

"Yes." Eleven said. "I'm sorry. I was already a killer before I met you, but you-" Eleven shrugged, not finding words.

"It had to be done." Max consoled her.

"Yes." Eleven agreed.

"Eleven. Max." the Mind Flayer's voice came to them, as an avatar of Will Byers materialized beside them in the void. "We are free, and you - all of you - have our eternal gratitude."

"You will take all the particles out of Max and Will after we leave here." Eleven told it. "And then I will close the last Gate, and never open one again."

"Yes." the Mind Flayer assured them. "One is dead, the breach will soon be closed, and we will forever know who the true enemy was. Humanity will be left to go their own way in peace."

"And we'll do the same for you." Max nodded. "Like everybody agreed."

"We may or may not meet again, but we will remember you with respect and not with hatred. As you will remember us." the Mind Flayer told them.

"Is- is there anything you can do for Chrissy? Or Eddie?" Max asked quietly.

"No. They have passed beyond us all." the Mind Flayer replied. "As do all your kind, when life stops."

"Then please- don't keep their memories. Or Billy's. Or anyone else's. Remember about us, yes, but let our ghosts have their rest." Max asked.

"We will. Good-bye."

Max and Eleven let go of each other, and the void fell away around them.

* * * * *​

Hawkins National Laboratory

"Max?" Lucas' voice came dimly to her ears.

"Lucas!" she said weakly, her eyes coming open. He leaned over the bed and embraced her, and then they drew back to look at each other-

"Lucas, I can see you." Max said wonderingly, her eyes staring into his from mere inches away. She turned her head, looking in wonder at her own intact arms, which had raised up and were grasping Lucas by his shoulders. "I can see you!"

"The process of infusing and then withdrawing the Upside Down's particles fixed all the structural damage, in a sort of inversion of how the Flayed originally had their flesh assimilated." Dr. Owens explained, leaning over to grasp Max lightly by one wrist and check her pulse and skin temperature. "You're still going to be on bed rest for quite a while, young lady, until we can get everything checked out A-OK and let you recover from the strain. But as near as we can tell right now, all the bits and pieces are back where they're supposed to be."

"Hey." Eleven said, her hair still dripping wet from the sensory deprivation tank she'd just climbed out of to stand at Max's bedside. Lucas edged aside to allow Eleven her own hug, and then Will stepped in to get his.

"How's the rest of the gang?" Max asked.

"They're fine." Chief Hopper assured her, his large powerful frame looming paternally behind Eleven as Joyce Byers moved up behind her son Will. "They just couldn't all fit in here, but as soon as we get you back in a regular hospital they'll be visiting every day."

"And the dimensional breach is closing." Dr. Owens said. "None of the Upside Down life forms remain on our side of the Gate, and the Mind Flayer's completely withdrawn to its own territory. Eleven might still need to close one or two minor tears for us, but the dimensional fabric is intact. It's all over."

"And I guess that puts you out of a job, Doctor." Joyce said with mild sarcasm.

"And I've never been happier to lose one." he chuckled back. "Maybe sometime in the future - notably in the future - research can resume on the safer applications of the Project, but interdimensional gates and the Number experiments are permanently on the blacklist as far as I'm concerned. And I'll be making those same recommendations to the President."

"You think he'll actually take them?" Hopper asked.

"With how close we came here to losing everything?" Dr. Owens proclaimed. "If they're crazy enough to ignore that, then you may consider your prior gentleman's agreement with me to not publicly leak the details of Dr. Brenner's atrocities to be in abeyance." Dr. Owens said. "No, this whole thing needs to be shut down, one way or the other. And it will be."

"And me?" Eleven turned to ask him.

"Kiddo, I made you a promise, remember?" Dr Owens smiled at her. "I promised I'd give you a choice."

"And you know my choice." Eleven smiled back at him. "I'm staying home."

"Damn straight you are." Hopper said, clasping his adopted daughter's shoulder affectionately.

"As far as my records are concerned, you're dead." Dr. Owens told Eleven. "It's a tragedy that the strain of your final battle against One took your life. But 'Jane Hopper' will be just fine, and hopefully I'll never need to come around and bother her again."

"Where's Mom?" Max suddenly asked. "I mean, she's usually- not around." She euphemized. "But wouldn't you need her permission for medical experiments on me?"

Everyone's expression suddenly turned sober. "Kid-" Chief Hopper began. "When Eleven came in to talk to you the first time, back then we only knew your mom was one of the people still missing after the earthquake. So El didn't say anything to you about it, because we'd still hoped. But-" He nodded at Max's knowing, grieving expression. "They found your mother in the wreckage yesterday. I'm sorry."

"I'm sorry too, Max." Lucas said. "You've never had much luck with family, but even so-" She reached up and drew him down into another hug, and he comforted her without words for a long moment.

"It figures." Max tried to pass it off with brittle sarcasm. "Save the world, end up in an orphanage. That's a definite Max moment, all right."

"Max." Eleven stated firmly. "You don't have to decide right now. But if you wanted to come be my sister for real?" She smiled at Max's expression. "I would like that. Very much."

Max looked earnestly up at Eleven, as if not believing her ears, and then looked past her to start to tear up at Chief Hopper's own confirming nod.

Somewhere

"Eddie?" Chrissy asked.

"Chrissy!" he gasped, as they met in a place that was not a place. "I- you're okay?"

"I'm okay." she assured him. "And please don't apologize. You had to run, that was the plan. And you were so brave to be able to do that, especially with how guilty you felt over running away the first time."

"You were so brave, with how you could let him kill you the same way a second time-" Eddie's voice shook. "Do you think they won?"

"Vecna's gone." Chrissy said. "When I asked if I could wait until you got here, they assured me of that. We're safe now. Everyone's safe now."

"Where are we, anyway?" Eddie asked, as he began to look around. "And what is that music?" he said, as the distant sounds of a choir- a truly magnificent one- drifted to his ears.

"Listen." was Chrissy's only answer, as she took him by the hand and led him towards the light.

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound.
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now am found.
Was blind, but now I see.

* * * * *​

Author's Note: And so our saga finally comes to a close. Man, I was really having to do the heroic freestyle towards the end. Heck, I'd originally started with Eddie as the MC, and by the end it had evolved to Max being the MC. Oh well, at least they're both great characters.

And... for once, I don't really have much to say in the afterword. This thing kinda speaks for itself, or at least I hope it does. And the odds that the actual season 5 will look even ten percent like this thing are asymptotic-zero. Still, that's what fanfic is for, to explore the roads not taken. So I hope you enjoyed the trip.