Chapter Text
15 days, 7 hours, 12 minutes and 10 seconds.
That is how long it has been since Chance Lawson last saw Will Byers.
The farm is empty. It is always empty now.
Chance pushes through the barn door and collects the cuts of wood he left stacked against the far wall two weeks ago, carrying them out into the field without thinking about it, muscle memory doing the work his brain is too tired to do. The wind moves through the long grass around him. He sets the wooden cutouts up one by one, aligning them in a rough semicircle in front of the barn, spacing them the way Marty spaces opponents at the fight-ring — close enough to be dangerous, far enough to require movement between.
15 days, 7 hours, 12 minutes and 59 seconds.
He rolls his shoulders. Takes a pair of knives out from his jacket pocket. There is nothing special about them, just standard steel combat knives. But as he is going to retrieve them, he feels the ghost of another pair of worn dark handles brush his hand. He recognizes them from instinct and memory, afterall, they have been in his jacket for days.
The Balisongs.
He takes them out and settles them into his palm. The weight of them feels wrong on his skin — the sight aligned to every other betrayal in his life— painful in the way they always do now. The familiar, del Rosario pressed into the wood under his thumb feels like ice. Chance cannot stand to look at them for another moment.
He pockets the Balisongs and grabs the other pair of knives, one on each hand instead.
The blade catches the last of the midnight light as he moves through the first form — a sweep, the handles spinning through his fingers in the fluid counter-rotating pattern that took him three days to stop fumbling and now happens before he decides to do it. His father's muscle memory, living in his hands without his permission. He stopped resenting it somewhere around day eight. It is useful. It is the only thing that provides him an outlet, a distraction.
He applies his mind to the tip of his fingers and releases.
The first blade flies clean and buries itself in the leftmost cutout's head.
He is already moving — weight shifting, stance changing, the second blade leaving his hand before the first has stopped vibrating — and it slides through the second cutout's throat with a sound like a decision being made.
15 days, 7 hours, 15 minutes and 30 seconds.
That is how long it has been since Chance last saw Will Byers.
He retrieves both blades without stopping, pivots, and throws them simultaneously at the remaining three cutouts. Two hit clean. One catches the edge and spins off into the barn door, embedding there with a sound that scatters the birds from the roof.
Chance walks to the barn door and pulls the blade out.
He stands there for a moment with both knives in his hands, looking at the hay on the floor where the blanket used to be stored under the loose board. Where it still is, he thinks. He hasn't checked. He hasn't let himself check.
Just over two weeks, and it would be an understatement to say he is going insane.
Chance had never understood addiction. Or more accurately, he never wanted to understand it. Not when his dad was drowning in beer bottles and not when his mom was treating cathedrals like a drug. He always thought falling so deep into something that it leads you to unbridled mania was a sign of weakness.
Maybe Chance is the weakest man alive right now.
Every day feels like active withdrawal. Like a man forced to get clean from happiness — from the dopamine a shared glance, a crooked smile provides. Months of heaven embodied in the soft eyes of his bunny: the way Will looked at him sometimes like Chance is the most real thing in the room. The way he laughs before he means to. The way he fits against Chance's side in the long grass like he was always supposed to be there.
All of that, just to be torn away in a heartbeat.
Gone.
He practices for another two hours.
The cutouts take everything he gives them and ask for nothing back, which is the only relationship Chance currently has the capacity for.
He runs through every form he knows and then invents new ones, the blades moving faster as the light fades into an ugly, suffocating gray. His arms are burning, a white-hot agony screaming through his shoulders, his footwork getting sloppy because he is far past the useful now, and deep, deep into just pure punishment.
He keeps going anyway. He drives the point of the knife into the splintering wood until his teeth rattle, hacking at the shadows, desperate to outrun the phantom static buzzing in his ears.
By the time he finally stops, his hands have deep, angry bruises forming, the skin bloody and scratched where the handles have bitten back. He stands there in the damp, freezing air of the barn, his chest heaving as he looks down at his hands in the last, dying light. Bruised knuckles, rigid blade calluses, and a thin, new scar along his palm from a form he got wrong on day twelve when his mind had drifted too far east.
He blinks, and suddenly, the cold air vanishes.
There are soft hands running carefully over his ruined knuckles instead. The sensation is so violent, so sharp, that he can literally feel the phantom warmth of fingers tracing the torn skin. He can envision it with a terrifying, agonizing clarity—the specific texture of medical tape being unspooled, the gentle, firm pressure of both thumbs smoothing down the white edges against his skin to make it stick.
Chance breathes in, and his lungs don't fill with the smell of dry hay and rust; they fill with the scent of cheap laundry detergent and the distinct, rainy-day smell of Will Byers.
He looks up, his heart leaping into his throat, a ragged name already forming on his tongue—
But, ofcourse, there are no soft eyes.
There is only the jagged, hollow face of a plywood cutout staring back at him in the dark. The barn is freezing. His hands are bleeding. There is no tape.
Chance violently shakes his head, his fingers clawing at his own hair as he slightly stumbles backward, nearly tripping over an old crate.
"Not this again," he whispers, his voice cracking into a raw, broken sob that echoes off the rafters. "God, I'm going crazy."
He presses the bloody palms of his hands against his eyelids, trying to force the image out, trying to crush the hallucination until it stops hurting. The fifteen days of silence haven't just starved him; they have turned his own head into a haunted house, and every time he closes his eyes, he is standing right next to the boy who left him behind.
He grabs his jacket, pockets both blades, and walks out of the barn without looking at the loose board. He gets in the Cadillac and drives off without looking back.
-
Like the past fifteen nights, Chance comes back to the Lawson mansion at Five AM in the morning. The usual emptiness of the farm was cut more harshly than ever today. Maybe he is lying though, maybe it was always this harsh. Since the day it started. Since the day he saw the news.
The first time he had gone back to the farm, it was the night the rifts started.
He didn't make a conscious decision to go. He just ended up there, the route memorized so deeply in his feet that his boots carried him across the county line without his permission. He stood at the perimeter fence in the pitch dark, watching Hawkins burn somewhere in the middle distance while the sky above the McCorkle farm remained the same enormous, indifferent blanket of stars it had always been.
The barn was entirely empty. The blue blanket was still tucked away beneath the loose floorboard where Will always kept it, untouched and freezing.
That was the night he started noticing the weird things. The things that didn't add up.
There was a massive, aggressive streak of red paint on one of the weather-beaten barn panels—crude stick figures drawn with an unsettling, chaotic energy. Chance didn't know the first thing about Art or style, but he knew everything about Will’s hand. He knew the specific weight of his strokes, the way his lines held a quiet, neat precision. This wasn't that. This looked like a nightmare clawed into the wood, but he knew with a sickening certainty that it had been drawn by his bunny.
Beneath it, a dark stain of dried blood marred a patch of scattered hay, as if someone had been violently scrapped and bruised against the floor. Nearby lay frayed, severed slacks of rope and a heavy trench shovel, half-heartedly thrown into the shadows as if someone had been interrupted in a frantic hurry.
It was too much to take in on that first day. The implications of it felt like a suffocating weight on his chest. Chance sat in the long, overgrown grass for an hour, staring at the empty doorway, and then he went home.
He went back the next night.
And the next.
By the end of the first week, the silence had driven him entirely crazy. Desperate to outrun the howling vacuum in his chest, he had driven out to the county line, intending—he was deeply ashamed to admit it now—to throw himself back into the underground fight rings. He needed the violence. He needed someone to hit him hard enough to make the static stop.
But even the phantom memory of Will’s eyes, soft and fiercely protective, made him pull the car over a meter away from the venue. It was completely stupid. Will had obviously fucked off somewhere else, becoming a goddamn national fugitive on the evening news, and he hadn't even had the basic courtesy to tell Chance where he was going. But despite the anger, despite the bitter sting of the abandonment, something in Chance’s heart held the breaks. He looked down at his own arm, staring at the faint, silver remains of a charcoal sketch Will had drawn on his skin weeks ago, and he just couldn't do it. He couldn't drag that memory, the pretty drawing made by Will on his hand, and ruin it in that blood-spat gutter.
So, he turned the Cadillac around. Instead of the fight ring, he gathered heavy wooden scrap, splintered panels, and rusted iron brackets from around the county, and he built his own violent sanctuary inside the McCorkle barn.
It became its own exhausting routine, entirely separate from the collapsing world around him. By day, he navigated the absolute chaos of a town under strict military occupation—the high school locker room full of paranoid theories, Andy Harper getting louder and uglier by the minute, preaching about hellfire and what the freaks had done to their town. By evening, he endured the stifling atmosphere of the Lawson house, his mother quiet and withdrawn in the specific way she got when she was managing a grief she wasn't ready to voice, while Robert Lawson spent hours behind the closed door of his office, barking orders into the telephone.
And then, when the house finally went dead dark, and the silver cross above his bedroom door threw its heavy, judgmental shadow down the hallway, Chance went out the window.
He walked the long, empty miles back to the McCorkle farm.
He sat in the long grass, his knuckles split, his knife heavy in his pocket, waiting for the wind to change.
Will did not come. He never did nowadays.
-
Chance had been in the house when the emergency broadcast cut in — he remembers it in blurs, the specific angle of the afternoon light through his window, the sound of Robert Lawson's television downstairs suddenly getting louder as his stepfather turned up the volume on whatever was happening. He had come downstairs to find his mother and Robert standing in front of the TV with the particular stillness of people watching something they cannot fully process.
He turned to the footage in shock.
Earthquakes. Everywhere. Every part of Hawkins he knew by name — it was like an volcanic eruption all over the city, as if the rapture had finally come to fruit— cracking open simultaneously like the town had decided all at once to stop pretending it was a normal place.
He had stood in the doorway of the Lawson living room and watched it and thought, first: Was I wrong this whole time? Is hell actually real? Is this the second coming? Were the pastors and preachers correct?
Then the names came.
And suddenly, he remembered another conversation from the day. He remembered the single line spoken by his sweetheart. When his usual honey crisp tone was hurried and desperate: ‘don't come to the barn today, I'll explain later’.
So his next thought was, with a cold and total certainty: Will knew about this?
And so started Chance’s mournings from the depths of hell themselves.
Chance should be used to the lack of Will by now, but he is a fool. A fool that keeps hoping for a miracle— he is an atheist finally falling back into his place, on his knees in front of the altar and begging and begging and begging. For his bunny to finally show up. To finally get some answers to why hell broke out on Hawkins the day he left. Begging him to understand what his words on the last phone call meant. Chance wonders if it would have been different if he ignored Will's plea that day and just gone to the farm anyway.
‘Don't come today, I'll explain later’.
Later when?
Maybe it's always a lie.
He starts obsessively playing back all the conversations they have had.
Every single one of them, turning them over in the dark of the Cadillac the way he has been turning them over for fifteen days. Everything Will said and didn't say. Every time Will went quiet in that specific way and Chance let him, gave him the room, trusted that it would come in time.
And only one word he keeps circling back in this head, despite it all.
Antichrist.
He sits with it the way he sits with things he does not want to sit with — directly, without flinching, because flinching has never once helped him.
So was it true, baby? This whole time, were they actually correct?
The field stretches out through the windshield, barren in the early dark. No soft-eyed boy in the long grass. The barn silent, no echoes of shy laughter, no lamplight through the gaps in the old wood.
Chance had always thought that the day he made the grave mistake of loving would be the day he finally reaped all his sins. That had seemed like the logic of his life — a transgression that would bring everything down.
Falling in love with the town's probably-real Antichrist would, by that logic, be the ultimate sin.
But it turns out there are things more harrowing than reaping the world's greatest sins.
It is reaping them and continuing to love his sweetheart anyway.
He tried, oh lord he tried, but he cannot do it. He is a fool, watching the world around him burn, as he clings to explanations that do not make sense anymore. He no longer possesses the ability to stop even when the town is building a case against Will and his friends.
And the odds are not in their favour.
-
Chance finally enters the house. It is late enough that he forgoes his window and just pushes open the Lawson mansion door.
Surprisingly, his mother is awake. He finds her sitting at the kitchen table in her robe, hands wrapped around a mug of tea that has gone cold, the kitchen quiet around her in the particular way of someone who has been waiting without wanting to be caught doing so.
She looks at him.
He looks at her.
"Anak," she says quietly.
He does not reply. Sets his jacket down. Does not look at her.
"You look terrible. Are you hurt—"
"I'm fine."
"Chance…where even were you—?"
"Nanay." His voice comes out sharper than he means it to, the edge in it surprising even him. "Stop."
She stands up. "Stop?!" The quiet of the kitchen breaks all at once. "Chance, there are barricades on every street and a curfew set by the goddamn military. Do you know how many people went missing this week alone? Five. Five people!"
He tunes it out, turns back toward the hallway.
"Go back to sleep."
"Tell me why my son is breaking curfew every single night and coming home looking bloody and bruised—"
"No." The word comes out quiet and flat and final, building for too long and has finally found the crack.
"Chance—"
He turns around.
"You do not suddenly get to act like you care about me now." He snaps. His mother’s face stands stunned, tears threatening to break out. The kitchen is very silent. "Go back to bed, Nanay. You've always been good at sleeping it off.”
He moves past her toward the hallway.
He feels her eyes on his back the whole way to his room.
He closes the door.
-
Despite his bone-deep exhaustion, Chance does not sleep.
He lies on top of his covers and stares at the ceiling and spirals back into the one thought that he has been spiraling in for the last two weeks now.
Is he okay? Is he okay. Is he okay?
The question runs on a loop underneath everything — underneath school and the Lawson house and the cross above the door. Underneath the news broadcasts and the Military press conferences and the emergency alerts that have become so constant they have started to feel like weather. Underneath all of it, wearing a groove into Chance's chest.
The world has never been this cruel. The world has never been this dark. The truth has never been this out of reach.
He feels like a fraud, a rascal, a traitor in every place he walks into. The whole town is a never-ending loop of the same talking points — the freaks, the earth rifts, the supernatural incidents that have plagued Hawkins since 1983, the coordinated attack, the names — and Chance walks through it all feeling like he is on the wrong side of a glass wall, watching everyone perform a certainty he cannot share.
He does not know what is real anymore.
Will's name comes out of the television in a news anchor's measured voice, accompanied by a school photograph that Chance recognized — younger, probably from his time in California, so young and innocent. Chance had stood in the doorway that day and felt the floor shift slightly under his feet.
‘Individuals believed to be responsible.’
‘Known connections to supernatural incidents.’
‘Anyone with information please contact—.’
His stepfather had said something. Chance did not hear what. He went back upstairs and sat on the edge of his bed and looked at his telephone and called Will's number.
It rang out.
He called again.
Rang out again.
He called every number he had — the Wheeler house, the Squawk line he had memorized from Will mentioning it once, every possible variation— and got nothing.
He even tried the last unknown number Will had contacted him from — but all he got from that was a girl picking up and telling him that he had the wrong number.
Silence. Final and lonely, and deliberately dark.
Despite it all, he never stops calling. He calls each one of them, every night without fail.
-
Will's name appears in the known associates section of a poster posted at school too.
Chance is sitting in the school cafeteria when Andy reads it aloud, holding the printed sheet with the particular relish of permission he believes he has now received.
"Henderson’s fucking freak squad," Andy says. "Knew it. Knew the whole time."
Chance looks at his lunch tray. He wants to pick it up and smash it across Andy's face. The urge is so strong he has to press his palm flat against the table, just to give his hands something deliberate to do so he does not act on it.
He looks at the black and white photo on the poster, and thinks about Will in the school hallway, careful and contained and so so angelic. The way he always moved like he had calculated exactly how little room he was allowed to occupy and stayed precisely within it. Quite but sharp, quickly becoming the centre of Chance’s everything.
He misses his bunny so much.
Is he missing a villain? Has he been falling for an antithesis this whole time?
Is it true? He wants to scream. Is Andy correct, Will? Why did you not tell me?
I would have followed you to the end of the earth anyway. You must have a reason.
What was your reason?
He thinks about the barn with blood drying and Will looking at him like he was a genuine surprise. He thinks about the farm and the stars and Will’s soft lips and his innocent eyes.
He looks back down at the image on the fugitive poster, it is deliberately made to make Will look rugged and villanized and delinquent.
This cannot be him. This is not his Will.
He knows his bunny, his sweetheart, his baby. Will would not hurt anyone. Without cause, he would not even hurt a fly. Let alone a whole town.
Chance has no doubt Will is capable of violence, —he has seen the fire in Will’s eyes when his family and friends are bought up— but he knows it comes with a good reason.
Maybe Chance does not know a lot of stuff, but he would like to think he knows Will.
But then why did Will not tell him?
Chance thought they told each other everything.
He told Will about the knives and his mother's bruises and the church steps and every ugly complicated true thing he had been carrying, and Will —
Will had told him about his childhood too. Told him about his nightnames and his kidnapping and how it still haunts him. Most of all, Will had shown him the mark. Chance was the only person Will had shown it to willingly after his brother.
Will had let him in, as far as Will let anyone in. Will told him about the nightmares sometimes too, he did.
So why not this? What is Chance missing here?
He knows Will has nightmares about being taken somewhere. He knows Will's visions are vivid and probably related to his kidnapping and some specific "him". He knows Will said he had a reason he cannot share about Eddie Munson with a certainty that was not speculation. He knows Will probably knew something about the rifts that opened, he knows Will has a walkie that he keeps on him at all times for some sort of updates with his friends. Which means Will has been connected to whatever this is for a long time.
And Chance knows that he will never ever trust the government. They are just like the church, organizations with too much to gain rather than people that serve.
He thinks about the conversation in the Cadillac. About Eddie Munson and Dustin and the hellfire theories that had been circulating since before Chance arrived in Hawkins:
"He has a reason, Chance. Maybe not one he can share." Will had told him.
A reason he cannot share.
He thinks about what Dustin said, the day Chance apologized to him for Andy and the bullying. Dustin had been surprised enough by the apology to say more than he probably intended to — talking about Eddie with the specific grief of someone who has not found a way to put it down yet, saying:
“They blamed him for something that was never his fault, that none of us could have stopped, and now he's just—” and then stopping. Catching himself. Pulling back behind whatever line he had decided not to cross.
None of us could have stopped.
Not none of us knew. Not we had nothing to do with it.
Could not have stopped.
Which implies they tried. Which implies they knew what was happening and were in the middle of it and could not prevent the outcome.
Which is a very different thing from caused it.
“And we need to bring the hunts back—!” Andy is still yapping.
His voice is a grating, rhythmic drone as he lays out a plan to elevate the witch-hunt initiatives around town. He’s mapping out sectors, tossing around names of people who look too suspicious, people who need to be interrogated. And Chance just—he can’t do this anymore.
Why the hell can’t Andy just keep his mouth shut for once in his miserable life?
The urge to draw blood is so intense it makes Chance’s jaw ache. His fingers twitch against the cold plastic of the cafeteria bench, the familiar, violent pressure building behind his eyes, begging him to just lean across the table and take it out on Andy's teeth. But whenever the fury hits, before he can even shift his weight, the visual breaks. All Chance can envision is Will’s honeydrop brown eyes looking at him with that quiet, fierce concern, his soft hands reaching out to pull Chance back from the edge.
He forces a slow, heavy breath into his lungs and forces himself to think about the suspicious things he’s been keeping secret in the McCorkle barn. The chaotic red painting. The severed ropes. The dark smear of blood in the hay.
If Chance were to listen to the emergency broadcasts looping on the radio every hour, he should have reported that scene to the military the exact day he found it. He should have given Sullivan's men the coordinates. Instead, he had quietly cleaned up the mess, burned the ropes, and hidden every single scrap of evidence until the barn looked like nothing more than an abandoned shell.
He tells himself he didn't know why he did it. But his heart knew. Deep down, beneath the anger and the confusion, a twisted, devilish truth had already settled into his bones: even if the worst of the town's rumors were true, even if the news posters were right, Chance would have chosen to protect Will anyway. He would have burned the whole town to keep him warm.
Besides, while the military says Will and his friends caused this, Sullivan is a man who needs someone to blame for something he cannot explain and cannot control. Frightened people build around the things they do not understand — find the one who is different, already in the story, and draw to them.
Will and his friends were already in the story.
So the far more likely truth — the one that fits everything Chance knows about his sweetheart— is that Will and his group have been dragged into something that was already happening. Something that keeps finding them. Something that Will has been trying to manage and keep away from Chance.
What if something terrible had happened to him instead? What if his bunny was hurt somewhere out there in the dark and completely alone? Chance needs to find him. He has to make sure.
And Chance will have absolutely no shot of finding Will if he starts acting out of character now. If he lets the armor crack, if he loses his mind and starts smashing Andy’s face into the linoleum in front of half the student body, everyone will notice. The town will look at him differently.
As far as Hawkins is concerned, Chance Lawson is still a Tiger on their side—the reliable varsity player, the loyal muscle, the boy from the Lawson mansion. It’s the only real leverage he has left.
So, he forces his knuckles to unclench beneath the table. He sits entirely still, burying the urge to kill, and makes his voice flat and steady instead.
"Are you done talking," Chance grits out, eyes unfocused.
Andy stares at him in surprise. Chance picks up his tray and moves to a different table.
That night he calls all the numbers again— like he has for every single day now—and receives the same stark silence, no response. No Will.
16 days, 2 hours, 12 minutes and 13 seconds.
It’s about time he stops that goddamn timer.
-
Will Byers has spent most of his life in cramped spaces.
The gap behind the couch when Lonnie's voice traced in the hallway. The inside of Castle Byers, small enough that he had to fold himself to fit, which he never minded because small meant safe from the demogorgons. The corner desk at the library where the shelves came together at an angle and nobody could catch him reading about black marks. He has always known instinctively how to make himself fit into whatever space was available, how to occupy the minimum and call it enough.
By all accounts, he should be fine in Murray's bunker apartment.
He is not fine in Murray's bunker apartment.
Will does not even know when Murray was able to build something like this in Hawkins, especially so near to the WSQK. But he does know that it was only built for one person.
Fifteen people — give or take, the number shifting as people cycle in and out of what Murray generously calls the common area — is chaos in a space designed for one paranoid man and his filing system. The filing system has been moved to make room for sleeping bags. The sleeping bags overlap. Someone is always awake when someone else is trying to sleep. Someone is always eating when someone else needs the table. The bathroom has a queue in the morning that Murray times with a literal stopwatch and enforces with the energy of a man who has been waiting his entire life for power.
There is no agency when you are fugitives. And the person affected the most by this absolute lack of agency, without a doubt, is Lucas.
Lucas has not slept properly since day two. During the day, he is a ghost of a soldier; he sits at the table during planning sessions, contributes his tactical knowledge, and performs every function required of him with a mechanical, haunting precision. But at night, the mask slips. Will can hear him from across the cramped room, lying perfectly still in his sleeping bag, radiating a silent, vibrating rage that seems to heat the very air of the bunker.
Will knows the fury is born of failure.
As promised, Hopper and Steve had tried to help him get Max out on day seven. They had slipped out of the WSQK station under the cover of a storm, but they hadn't even cleared the main road before a lookout spotted them. They were forced into the tunnels, tracked like animals by the local witch-hunt mob—neighbors turned hunters—and nearly cornered by Sullivan’s advance teams.
They never made it to the hospital. They never got to see her.
Worse, the failed extraction had painted a target on the WSQK station. They’d been forced to scramble, packing their lives into Murray’s van in a frantic, undignified retreat to this concrete hole.
Amidst the suffocating isolation, Robin had managed one call—a single, desperate lifeline routed through three separate lines to minimize tracing. Vickie had answered. She confirmed that Max is still there, still breathing, still protected.
“The military hasn't breached the hospital yet; even Sullivan has lines he won’t cross in a building full of injured civilian witnesses.”
“For now.”
‘For now’ is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and everyone knows it. Case in point: the replay of the same jagged conversation currently tearing through the common area.
“WE ARE RUNNING OUT OF TIME!” Lucas shouts.
His voice cracking as he towers over Hopper’s sitting form.
“When she wakes up, she becomes visible! She’s not just a patient anymore, she’s a name on a list by being associated with us. A target! Do you not understand that? The second she opens her eyes, they take her!”
“And if we go out now, we get hunted down before we even hit the parking lot!” Hopper barks back, his own patience frayed to a thin wire. “Then there is no one left to help her. We wait for the window, Lucas. We need the odds.”
“It’s been sixteen fucking days!” Lucas’ eyes are bloodshot, his hands shaking at his sides. “I don’t care about the odds! She isn’t safe!”
“I’m sure Vickie is doing her best to keep her safe, Lucas,” Robin interjects softly, her voice small in the face of his grief.
“Your candy striper friend does not know anything!” Lucas spits out like it’s poison, “She probably thinks this is a riot, she doesn't know about Vecna!”
Will finally speaks up, his voice the only thing steady in the room. “Hey, Robin is only trying to help.”
“Will, you literally saw it!” Lucas turns on him, his anger shifting into an agonizing sob he refuses to let go of. “The only people who know the truth are in this room. And she’s inside his head! With Holly, outrunning that freak, and we’re sitting here with our heads in our hands!”
The window of safety is exactly as wide as her unconsciousness. It is a horrific paradox: her life depends on her remaining a vegetable. Nobody is comfortable saying it out loud, but the thought sits in the center of the bunker like an unexploded bomb.
Hopper sighs, the fight draining out of him as he looks at the wreckage of the boy in front of him.
“I know, kid. I know.” He places a heavy hand on Lucas’s shoulder, ignoring the way the teenager flinches. “We will go the moment the chances are better. I promise you.”
Lucas looks like he does not believe a single word out of his mouth.
-
Despite it all, sometimes Will lies on his sleeping bag at night, staring at the ceiling. And unbidden he starts thinking about the farm.
He knows this is deeply inappropriate given the circumstances.
The world is ending. Vecna has taken a number of citizens that keeps getting larger. The rest of Hawkins being patrolled by personnel who would very much like to find them. Everyone knows what that actually means: they want El, and quite possibly, they want Will too. Every night, without fail. His brain cycles through the plan, his new powers, Max, the children, and Vecna.
And then, without his permission, his mind arrives at Chance.
By all means, his brain should be focusing on the mechanical logistics of how they will survive and not anything else. Definitely not this.
He thinks about it anyway.
The comforting memory of strong hands pulling Will in. The earlobe Will liked to bite and giggle into for months. The annoying smirk plastered on Chance’s face after one of his stupid jokes made Will laugh. The solace in Chance’s soft voice, reserved and only for him. The taste of his lips on Will’s and the shape of the many nicknames whispered against them.
He wonders if he will ever get that back again.
Probably not.
Chance must hate him by now anyway. With his face plastered all over the news, he probably — finally— has accepted, from his perspective, the truth of it all. Whatever explanation Hawkins has cooked up about him, fuelling fire into Will’s rightful reputation as this town’s curse.
He has asked others about it sometimes. He tells himself it’s to get perspective, but deep down Will knows it is because he is still a fool with hope.
“What do you think they think?” he asks his brother one afternoon.
They are tucked into a quiet corner of the bunker's storage nook. Jonathan is hunched over a small crate, carefully bending a piece of scrap wire into a makeshift pencil stand, probably because Nancy has been complaining about the pens constantly getting lost in the chaos of their daily meetings.
“Who thinks what?” Jonathan asks, working with focused precision.
“The… rest of Hawkins,” Will says, his fingers tracing the edge of his jeans. “Y’know… about us.”
Jonathan’s hands go still over the wire. He pauses, looking up through his hair with a sharp, discerning gaze.
“Since when do you care what they think?”
Will stutters, his chest tightening as he scrambles for an excuse. He shrugs, looking down at his sneakers. “I—I don’t. Obviously.”
His brother doesn't let it go. He drops the wire entirely, his expression shifting. “Will.”
The absolute lack of judgment in Jonathan's voice is what breaks him. Will swallows hard, his grip tightening around his knees. “I just—I miss someone.”
Silence. It only lasts a second before turning into a second of thoughtful consideration on Jonathan’s face.
“Hmm, the one you sneak out to meet?” Jonathan says softly, his tone dropping so it won't carry. “Birthday guy?”
A hot, furious blush crawls up Will's neck. “Shut up. Don't call him that.”
“What else can I call him?” Jonathan smirks, “I don’t exactly have a name, do I?”
Will sighs, a heavy, defeated sound that feels like it takes all the oxygen out of his lungs. He leans his head back against the cold concrete wall, staring blankly at the exposed pipes above. “It’s stupid. I just—I wish I could know if he hates me now, too. If he thinks I'm... what they're saying we are.”
Jonathan watches him for a long, agonizing moment, and for a terrifying second, something akin to pity flashes across his features. Will instantly hates it.
He reaches out, his hand resting gently on Will's knee, but his eyes are heavy with a brutal, protective honesty.
“Will,” Jonathan says quietly, choosing his words with immense care. “People out there... They're terrified. And when people are terrified, they look for someone to blame. If we make it out of this alive... you might need to be ready for the possibility that he does look at you differently. That he believes them.”
The words land like ice in Will's stomach. Jonathan isn't trying to be cruel; he's just being the older brother who has spent his entire life watching the world throw stones at Will Byers, and trying to prevent and protect him from it.
But as Will sits there in the dim light, head resting on his brother’s shoulder, the truth of it settles deep into his bones: I will probably never get to have him like that again.
-
At least he has solitude in knowing that Chance is alive and fine. Probably.
Will can feel whenever Vecna takes another victim; he has been hijacking the hive mind for days now. The half-dead Demogorgon body attached to the roof of the bunker—the one they trigger electricity into every day—is the physical evidence of his tether to the dark.
The first time he and Robin had climbed up there to set it up, the air had been thick with the smell of wet earth and static. They had scrambled back down and cranked the generator, the noise of the engine deafening in the small space. Every single person in that room had turned their eyes on Will, their breaths held, as he plugged back into the hive mind.
The transition was a violent slide into cold, red shadows. He wasn't just Will anymore; he was a guest in a monster's skin. He felt the cold pulse of the Mind Flayer, the twitching limbs of a thousand creatures, and through the static of Vecna's consciousness, he found her—a flicker of life in the red haze.
"Max!" he screamed, his voice was Vecnas’s and it came out distorted, layered, tearing through Vecna’s psychic ether. "Max! If you... can hear me, you... need... to run! Run!"
Suddenly, the world in his head fractured. The sound of discordant, clanging piano keys echoed in his skull, vibrating through his teeth.
"Get out," a voice hissed—not a sound, but a command that felt like a physical blow. Henry.
Will’s body arched on the bunker floor, his muscles locking tight as he let out a strangled groan.
"Get out! Get out!" Henry’s voice rose to a shout, the fury of it rattling the very foundations of Will’s mind.
"What is happening?" he heard Robin’s voice, distant and tinny, like she was shouting from the bottom of a well.
"Get out!" Henry screamed again. "Get out!"
The connection snapped like a frayed wire, and he went stumbling back.
"Will, can you hear me?" Joyce’s voice was right there, her hands fluttering over his face.
"Come on!" Mike was shouting, his voice thick with a panic he couldn't hide. "Come on, Will."
"Crank it! Crank it!" Lucas was yelling at the generator, his voice cracking with desperation.
Will had been unconscious for fifteen hours after that, a hollowed-out shell of a boy. But for some reason, Vecna had not come to stop him permanently.
And despite the outrage and the terrified concerns of his family, Will continued the ritual day after day. He connected to the hive mind, and as a part of it, he acted as a silent spy on the people falling prey to the rifts.
It is a particular, cruel tactic: the Demogorgons wait until individuals wander into the wrong shadows, and then they are pounced upon and dragged away into the dark. Will tries stopping the creatures when he can, exerting his own mental weight over theirs until his nose bleeds and his lungs burn, but it exhausts him to the point of collapse.
But at least through each run, he knows. He sifts through the terror and the screams in the hive mind and finds the absences. He knows it wasn't Chance who was taken. He knows it wasn't Max who was taken.
He is fine, Will reassures himself.
Both of them are safe. For now.
-
The power switch lighting up the Demogorgons on the roof is slowly becoming Will’s version of El’s bathtub.
Every time he drops his chin, closes his eyes, and forces his mind into that cold, echoing expanse of the hive mind to map out Vecna’s movements, it opens a can of worms in itself. It forces the occasional teammates in the bunker to watch him do it.
It probably shouldn’t be that big of a deal, but it becomes one. Somehow it has started to shed an awkward, stark light on Mike and El’s months-old breakup.
Everyone and their mom can see the tension brewing whenever Will slips under, and the source of the discomfort always starts and ends with the awkward, heavy eye contact between El and Mike.
Like now, in the middle of a tactical routing session that Murray is running on a makeshift chalkboard. They believe there are three more rifts that Will open up until Vecna’s plan starts, they just have to figure out where now and use that as an opening to get more information about Vecna’s plan.
Will sits at the center of the table, his chin dipped, his breathing slowing until it barely registers. The milky-white veil drops over his eyes as he forces his mind out of the bunker, climbing into the cold, screaming static of the hive mind to pin down the movements of a Demogorgon pack near the quarry.
Almost instantly, the physical toll manifests. Several thin, dark lines of blood begin to leak from Will's nostrils, dripping onto his lip.
Like the last five times, Mike is on his feet before the blood even hits Will's chin.
He doesn't really ask for permission anymore. He scrambles across the cramped space between their chairs, nearly knocking over a stack of Murray's canned rations. His hands are shaking as he grabs a clean rag from his own pocket, hovering over Will with a frantic, suffocating proximity.
"Will. Will, pull back now," Mike mutters, his voice a tight, high-pitched wire of panic. "That’s enough for tonight. Come on"
He gently presses the cloth to Will's nose, his thumb brushing against Will's cheek to steady him.
"He needs to keep going, Wheeler," Murray grunts from the back of the room, tracking the fading chalk lines on the map. "If we lose the coordinates on that quarry pack, we're blind tomorrow. He should try more. Just five more minutes."
Across the room, the air goes entirely dead.
El is sitting on an upturned crate by the wall, her hands resting in her lap. She watches Mike’s unglued, desperate focus on Will—the way his fingers linger on Will's face, so soft to wipe the blood away, and the way his shoulders shield Will from the rest of the room.
"He is clearly tired," Mike snaps, "He’s been under for an hour now."
"Maybe he just needs more fuel, like El! " Dustin chimes in, he digs into his backpack and pulls out a crushed candy bar. "Here—"
"No, he's not a machine!" Mike shouts, turning violently, volume rattling the loose copper pipes against the bunker ceiling. "Let him rest! He is killing himself for us every single night! Can’t you guys see?"
Silence slams down on the bunker like a physical weight. Dustin lowers the candy bar, his mouth opening slightly in shock, completely taken aback by the sheer raw defense of Mike's outburst.
Slowly, Mike turns back to Will, his chest heaving as he carefully wipes the last of the blood away, his hand incredibly gentle on Will’s cheek compared to the violence of his shout.
El looks strictly at Mike's face.
Will's eyes slowly blink back to their normal hazel brown, the milky veil dissolving. He takes a shaky breath, completely disoriented by the screaming, and looks up. He sees Mike hovering over him, pale and trembling, and way too close to him. Will blushes at the closeness before he can stop.
Then, he looks past Mike's shoulder to see El's hollow, knowing gaze fixed on them from the corner.
The confusion in Will's chest tightens like a vise. Will had never really thought about El and Mike’s break up, if he was being honest. While Mike had clearly been burdened by their separation when El had broken up with him, El had been the one retreating into a quiet, certain grief over whatever happened.
-
Lying awake in the dark of the bunker, Will remembers a heartbreaking conversation he’d shared with El in the cabin, just a few days after it happened.
“Will, can I tell you something?” she had asked, her voice barely carrying over the sound of the wind outside.
Will had turned to her immediately, his expression softening. “Of course.”
“I’m scared,” El said.
“Of…Vecna?” Will paused, a familiar, heavy ache settling behind his ribs. “That’s… that’s okay, El. It’s a scary time, everyone is scared. I am too.”
She shook her head, tears welling up in her large, dark eyes. “No—that too, sometimes. But I meant—” she shakes her head, “it feels wrong to say, Will.”
“Hey,” Will said, shifting closer until their shoulders brushed. “It’s okay. I will understand, yeah?”
It was true. If anyone in the world understood each other more than anyone else, it was Will and El. They were two sides of the same fractured coin, forged in the same quiet, clinical tortures that the Upside Down revelled in the twins.
“I’m scared of what will happen if we actually win against him,” El whispered, a single tear spilling over.
Will frowned, entirely confused. “What do you mean?”
“I… Everyone has lives, that they will go back to. But I do not know what I will do.” She shifts, voice low.
Will stays silent and listens to her.
“Mike said… when we were still together, we both could run away together. Somewhere with three waterfalls? But I—we are not together anymore. So I keep on thinking, what will I do now? And I can’t think of anything.” She rushed out, “He did not love me, and all I did was love him. What am I? When my powers have no one to save and I have no Mike?”
Will’s heart broke for her at that moment. He wanted to tell her she was wrong, because Mike did love her—or at least, Mike had spent the last three years fighting for her, so Will was sure he did.
But when Will tried to defend him, El had just shaken her head with a terrifying, absolute certainty.
“He doesn’t,” she had insisted, her voice dropping to a flat, painful whisper. “He doesn’t show or say it. And— I think I have proof of why.”
Will had been so deeply in the zone of his own heartbreak back then—carrying the heavy weight of a black M.W. on his hip and a year-old painting he’d lied about—that he hadn’t pushed her for the proof. He hadn’t asked what she meant.
Instead, he had just squeezed her hand and offered the only comfort he knew how to give:
“You will be free,” he had told her. “You'll be whatever we want to be, and we'll figure it out together. You can just be Jane, even if it’s scary.”
-
That was how they had resolved it then.
But cutting back to the suffocating acceleration of their current reality in the bunker, Will is forced to reminisce on those words, because the truth about Mike is starting to manifest in tiny, inescapable details. And El is starting to notice them, too.
Lately, whenever Will overexerts his powers, Mike collapses into a panic. He rushes over to Will’s side, breaking whatever tactical circle they are in. He fumbles with medical supplies from the crates, presses damp cloths to Will's forehead, and mutters small, frantic commands.
"Will, stop, look at me, come back to me please."
Each time it happens, Will catches El watching them from across the room. She looks at Mike's shaking hands, at the raw, undisguised terror in his face, and Will can see the heavy realization dawning on her. Mike had never done this for her. Not like this. It wasn't a matter of protecting a superhero; it was the visceral, unglued panic of a boy. He acts like his entire world is slipping through his fingers.
The realization just confuses Will more nowadays. Because, obviously, Will knows Mike doesn't love him either—the black mark on his hip is an agonizing, permanent reminder of that fact. So why is Mike doing all of these things?
It makes him even more curious about whatever the hell actually happened between El and Mike to cause such a clean, sudden break. Maybe they still want to be together, but something invisible is blocking them?
To keep himself from going entirely insane, Will rationalizes it the only way he can: Mike is just desperate to fix their friendship, “bestfriends” being so far apart for so long.
That is another thing making the bunker unbearable, Mike has apparently decided that the apocalypse is an appropriate setting for reconciliation.
Will would not, in theory, be opposed to this. He does miss Mike. So much. Will thought maybe it was another wave of longing for his soulmate, but right now, he just misses his best friend. He has always missed his friend, ever since he was thirteen, even when Mike was three feet away.
Mike keeps doing things that Will does not know what to do with now too. But it makes Will’s heart flutter with happiness unbidden, even when he doesn’t want it to.
Small things. Careful things.
Mike saves him the good spot near the single functioning heater without making a point of it. Mike hands him the coffee before Will has asked for it. Mike sits next to him during the planning sessions in a way that is slightly too deliberate to be accidental and slightly too casual to be confrontational. He tries to talk to Will at every given occasion.
As Will starts noticing things about Mike again— a love that never dies, like an old scar in cold weather—he starts noticing another thing.
Mike keeps touching his own left forearm. Constantly — conspicuously — a gesture so small and reflexive that Will would not have noticed if he did not know Mike's body language from watching him since they were five years old. The thumb moving over the inside of his forearm in small back and forth strokes, like checking for something, like confirming something is there.
Will has not looked directly at it, but it would be a lie to say he is not curious.
-
“Has anyone seen Dustin and Lucas?!” Joyce’s voice cuts sharply through the heavy hum of the bunker, carrying from the kitchen area into the narrow hallway. “Their breakfast has been on the table for hours!”
Will barely registers the words. He was currently standing in the narrow corridor that led toward the communication hub, his eyes fixed on the heavy, rotary phone mounted to the wall. It is nothing more than a cold, matte piece of black plastic, but to Will, it feels like the only tether left to a reality that doesn't involve suffocating inside underground walls.
He stares at the rotary dial until the white numbers blur together into a spinning circle, imagining what it would feel like to just pick up the receiver, rush a number by muscle memory, and listen to the hollow ringing on the other end.
In his head, he can already hear the answer after the ringing. A voice sweet and strong, probably a bit panicked, dropping instantly into that soft, private tone just for Will—‘Hi bunny’.
The phantom echo of it makes Will’s throat tight. He wants to do it so bad. He would kill just to hear a single glimpse of Chance’s voice right now, just a second of solace and comfort. But he knows he—
"Why do you keep staring at it?"
The voice snapped him out of the trance so abruptly that Will nearly jumped. He turned to see Mike standing a few feet away, holding two mismatched mugs. The fluorescent light above flickered, casting long, jittery shadows across Mike’s face.
"What?" Will blinks, trying to clear the fog from his head.
“The phone,” Mike says, tilting his head slightly toward the wall. “You keep staring at it. Is it... is it related to your visions? Are you sensing something in the upside down?”
“Oh,” Will says, his voice sounding thin and hollowed out, even to his own ears. He forces his gaze away from the plastic receiver, but the sudden shift in focus leaves him exposed. "No… um. I just..."
Before he can stop it, a sudden heat creeps up his neck, turning his cheeks a bright, telltale red.
"What, you wanna call someone?" Mike teases gently, stepping closer.
The old, familiar smirk plays on his lips for a fraction of a second as he offers one of the mugs to Will. It’s lukewarm bunker coffee, the kind that tastes like burnt beans and rusted metal, but Will takes it anyway just to give his hands something to do.
Will doesn't reply. He looks down at the dark liquid, but the silence and the flush on his face seem to be enough for his best friend.
“Oh,” Mike says, the tease instantly dying as a stunned, confused expression replaces it. “You do? What… who even? Everyone close to you is already in this bunker?”
Not everyone, Will thinks, the weight of the secret pressing heavily against his ribs.
He looks back up and forces a lie through his teeth. “They are. I just blanked out looking at it for a while. Lost track of time.”
Mike doesn't look entirely convinced, his eyes lingering on the tight set of Will's shoulders. He sets his own mug down on a nearby crate, his tone shifting into that quiet, careful territory he's been pushing for days.
"You’ve been in your head way more than usual... Are you okay?"
Will looks at the faint steam rising from his lukewarm coffee.
"What can one do, Mike?" Will asks softly, his voice dropping into a flat, exhausted truth. "The world is burning around us. 'Okay' isn't really on the menu."
Mike let out a short, dry laugh that didn't reach his eyes. "Yeah. It’s like we’re trapped in one of those low-budget action flicks. You know, the ones where the hero has a mullet and everything explodes for no reason? Except the special effects are way too real and I guess the hero with the mullet would be like…"
The mental image of Murray in a Rambo headband flashed through Will's mind. A small, genuine smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. "Murray?" he suggests.
"Definitely," Mike grinned, and for a second, the heavy, stagnant air of the bunker felt a fraction lighter.
Will lets out a short, dry laugh.
Then Mike’s expression shifted. It softened into something more tentative, something heavily weighted with that thick, deliberate energy he’d been pushing ever since they descended into this concrete hole.
“You’ll tell me though, right?” Mike asked softly, his eyes searching Will’s face.
Then he did something he hadn't done since the sixth grade. He reached out, his long fingers moving slow and careful through the empty space between them. Mike’s fingers brushed against the side of Will’s hand—a gentle, warm, seeking pressure.
Will froze.
He looked down at the physical point of contact, Mike’s pale skin resting against his own, fingers intertwined above Will’s own.
A year ago, this would have been the only thing Will ever wanted. It would have been the absolute center of his universe. Now? It just felt… cold. Like a ghost of a feeling trying to inhabit a body that had been fiercely used to it for years, but suddenly, completely, isn’t anymore.
“Tell you what?” He said instead.
“If there was someone like that…” Mike nodded vaguely toward the black rotary phone on the wall. “Someone you wanted to call?”
“Oh,” Will shrugged, his voice flattening as he looked back down at his coffee. “...Yeah, sure.” He lied.
Mike smiled, a quiet look of relief crossing his features. Will looked back down at their hands, and with a slow, deliberate movement, he pulled his hand back to wrap it firmly around the ceramic of his mug.
The rejection was entirely quiet, but Mike’s face fell instantly. The tentative warmth vanished from his eyes. He looked away, his jaw tightening as his hand dropped back to his side, but it didn't stay still. Almost reflexively, as if his body were seeking a completely different anchor, Mike’s thumb went straight to his left forearm. He began to rub the skin there through the thick fabric of his sweatshirt, a frantic, rhythmic motion.
Will’s eyes tracked the movement with immediate, sharp focus. There it is again.
"Will you ever tell me, too?" Will said softly.
Mike stopped mid-rub, his fingers freezing over his sleeve. "Huh?"
"Your arm. What's going on?"
Mike looked down at his forearm as if he’d only just noticed his hand was resting there. He laughed nervously, a quick, defensive sound, and pulled the cuff of his gray sweatshirt lower. "It's nothing. Just a habit, I guess."
"Is it?" Will asked, his curiosity finally winning out over his desire to keep the peace and play along. Mike was avoiding his eyes, so Will sighed and said: “Mike.”
Mike swallowed, looking cornered. “I—okay, no. But it’s complicated.”
In Mike-language, complicated only ever meant one thing.
“It’s about El?” Will guessed.
Mike’s throat bobbed. “I—uh, I guess in a way?”
Will looked past Mike’s shoulder into the crowded common area. He could see El sitting on an upturned wooden crate, talking in low, hushed tones with Hopper. She looked over at Mike occasionally—her eyes wide and full of a lingering, painful affection—and Mike would look back with a guilt so thick it was almost a physical weight in the room. It made absolutely no sense to Will. If El still loved him, and Mike was clearly miserable, why were they standing on opposite sides of the bunker? Why was Mike acting like a man condemned?
"I don't get it," Will thought out loud, the words slipping past his teeth before he could stop them.
"What?"
“It's like you’re both waiting for the other to say something," Will continued, his voice steadying. "It’s awkward, Mike. More than awkward. If you're so guilty, and you both obviously still care about each other... why not just get back together?"
Mike winced, the words hitting a raw, exposed nerve. He leaned his upper back against the concrete wall, looking entirely exhausted, the flickering fluorescent light making him look hollowed out. "It’s complicated.”
"What does that mean?" Will pressed, stepping a fraction closer.
Mike is silent for a very long duration, then he speaks.
“El... she thinks the universe has already decided," Mike whispered, his eyes locked on the floor. "And maybe it has."
That… what?
What did that mean?
Was Mike really saying what Will thought he was saying?
“What?” Will rushed out rapidly.
Mike sighed, his long shoulders sagging, and for a single, terrifying second, Will’s heart stopped dead in his chest.
“Will.. I—if I show you. Promise you won’t judge me?”
“Of course not, Mike,” Will said instantly, though a part of him—a heavy, terrified part—really, really didn't want to know.
Had Mike finally found his soulmate, and was he implying that it was… not El?
Mike looked around the corner to make absolutely sure Murray and Nancy were deep in their mapping session and weren't eavesdropping. Slowly, with a hesitation that felt like an outright confession, he pushed up the sleeve of his left sweatshirt.
Will leaned in, his breath catching in his throat, fully expecting to see a set of colourful, crisp initials. He braced himself. This is the moment, he thought. This is where I finally see who his soulmate actually belongs to.
But instead, his jaw slacked.
On the pale skin of Mike’s inner forearm were tiny, dotted marks. They weren't solid, embroidered lines, and they weren't forming any letters at all.
But they were definitely there—like miniature constellations of silver thread, twinkling faintly in the dull bunker light. They seemed to appear and disappear, shimmering like distant stars behind moving clouds.
"Residual marks," Will whispered, in awe.
"You know what they are?" Mike asked, his dark eyes snapping up, wide with surprise.
Will nods slowly, unable to tear his eyes away from the shifting silver dots. He looks at the marks some more, the impossibility of it making his head spin. The multi-linearity theory he had read about in obscure texts years ago suddenly screaming in his ears.
“I did not think they were real.”
Mike lets out a short, breathless laugh. “Me neither. Not until I got them.”
Suddenly, the memory of a conversation Will had shared when painting with Chance on the cold floor of the Lawson Mansion comes rushing back. Chance had talked about how soulmarks weren't always a straight line, how the universe sometimes worked in ways we did not yet understand fully.
Maybe Chance was right in believing in it, Will thinks.
In their limited understanding of the phenomenon, residual marks were anomalies—unformed, fluctuating patterns that appeared in abnormal forms, completely missing the definitive ink of a traditional mark. Nobody knew exactly why they happened or how a soul broke its predetermined path to create them, only that they were incredibly rare.
“When did you get them?” Will asked.
“I don’t know.” Mike smiled sadly, his thumb hovering over the silver thread. “I started getting this… this feeling in California, but I ignored it because—y’know?” He waved a hand around vaguely, gesturing to the memory of their messy spring break. “Then after that… it just kept growing when we got back home. I thought... I thought I was going crazy.”
“El saw them first. She thought that it was finally our moment, that they were going to form her name, but it….” He paused, his voice dropping to a raw whisper. “I tried everything to make it work, Will. I tried so hard. But I couldn't even say that I love—” he breaks off again. “Anyway, when the twinkling started, she just decided. That’s why she broke up with me. I think she thought the mark not staying solid was a sign."
Will stared at the shimmering dots, a cold, striking shiver racing down his spine. M.W. was etched in permanent, unrequited black ink on his own hip—a final, dark rejection from the day he turned sixteen. And here was Mike, literally wearing a "maybe" on his sleeve, a cosmic question mark.
"But…how are you sure it’s not her?” Will asked, his heart hammering violently against his ribs.
“I—I thought it was," Mike said, his voice cracking. "But I don't know anymore.”
"It’s a residual soulmark, Mike. And you and El are... maybe it’s just taking time to show up?" Will tried to rationalize, desperately trying to ignore the way his own pulse was racing. "We don’t know how these things work, after all."
"That's the thing!" Mike’s voice rose in sharp frustration. "My mom has taken me to every doctor in Hawkins… they just. They don’t know what’s going on. There’s not enough cases in history to help understand it, either. It doesn't show initials, Will. It’s just... this. They react when I think about things, or when I’m near... I don't know. It’s like the universe is trying to write a name but it keeps running out of ink."
Near what? Will's mind screamed the question, but his throat was too tight to form the words.
"So who do you think it is?" Will asked instead, his voice barely a whisper in the dark corridor.
Mike looked up, his dark eyes wide, completely unglued, and utterly terrified as he looked directly at Will. He opened his mouth to speak, his thumb hovering directly over the twinkling silver stars. "I don’t...—"
CRASH.
The heavy steel door at the top of the bunker stairs slammed open with a violent resonance that shook the concrete walls, cutting Mike off instantly.
"MEDICAL! WE NEED MEDICAL NOW!"
“What the—!?” Mike said, his voice dropping as the rest of the bunker’s inhabitants started pouring out from the kitchen and sleeping quarters, drawn by the screaming.
The panicked scream belonged to Dustin, his voice cracking in a high-pitched frenzy that echoed down the iron stairwell. Will and Mike scrambled out of the narrow corridor and burst into the common area just as Dustin came staggering down the steps, nearly losing his footing on the iron rungs. He was covered in black soot and smears of dark crimson, his face a mask of pure, unadulterated terror. In his arms, he was cradling a limp, heavy figure.
"Lucas!" Will shouted, moving forward as his chest tightened.
Will’s heart stopped dead when his eyes landed fully on Lucas. The sight was sickening. Lucas’s shirt was torn at the collar, exposing raw, purple-and-black bruising that wrapped entirely around his neck in jagged, distinct bands, like a thick rope had been wrenched against his throat. His face was swollen, his skin a terrifyingly pale shade of gray, and dark, tacky blood leaked from a deep laceration near his hairline, matting his hair. He was completely unconscious, his head rolling back against Dustin's shoulder like a broken doll.
“What the hell happened?!” Hopper shouted, his massive frame pushing through the crowded filing cabinets as he took Lucas from Dustin's trembling arms, laying him flat on the nearest sleeping bag.
“We went to check on Max…” Dustin panted, his chest heaving as he collapsed against a metal shelf, tears cutting clean lines through the soot on his cheeks. “We were safe. We used the service paths, we were so careful—but a Demobat got us. It followed us. We got out of the tunnel fine, but then it came out of nowhere and it started choking Lucas, I don't know why! It didn't just bite, it just—it went straight for his throat!”
Hopper immediately pressed two fingers to the side of Lucas's bruised neck, his eyes fixed on the teenager’s chest. After a tense, agonizing five seconds, the chief let out a rough breath.
“He is okay,” Hopper said, though his jaw remained clamped tight as he examined the angry, swollen bands on Lucas’s neck. “He’s breathing. Should be awake soon.”
The immediate medical panic handled, Hopper turned on Dustin, his eyes blazing with a terrifying, protective fury. He grabbed the front of Dustin’s jacket, his voice dropping into a dangerous, low rumble that rattled the room.
“You both could have died! What the hell were you thinking?!”
Will didn't hear Dustin’s stammered defense. His eyes were locked on the purple bruises on Lucas's throat. Moved by a sudden, magnetic pull he couldn't control, Will stepped forward and knelt by the sleeping bag. He reached out, his hand trembling as his fingers brushed gently against the cold, clammy skin of Lucas’s shoulder.
The physical contact was a catalyst.
Instantly, the bunker dissolved. Will was violently wrenched out of his body and slammed into the freezing, sulfur-choked atmosphere of the hive mind.
He was looking through a split-lens, upside-down perspective. He was a creature of screeching wings and leather. He felt the phantom sensation of a demobat's tail and claws writhing, remembers the visceral thrill of circling Lucas in the dark outside the hospital precinct, wrapping itself around the boy's throat to squeeze the life out of him. The vision blurred—the creature had let go, forced to retreat as Dustin and Lucas scrambled into a frantic flight, but the hive mind hadn't lost them.
The bat followed the heavy, panicked footsteps, roaming low through the overgrown grass of the alleyways, tracking the scent of copper and fear.
And then, a sickening shift occurred. The cold, animalistic instinct of the demobat was suddenly suffocated, crushed under a massive weight of conscious malice. Will felt the temperature drop to absolute zero within the hive mind. The phantom limbs of the creature stiffened as a towering, parasitic presence poured into its eyes.
Vecna.
Through the creature's hijacked vision, the shadow did not follow Dustin back to the bunker.
Instead, the winged beast slowed its flight, hovering in the damp night air. It stopped directly in front of a shattered, glowing window, its slitted eyes locking onto a massive, rusted metal exterior plaque attached to the brick wall.
“HAWKINS COMMUNITY HOSPITAL.”
The realization slammed into Will’s bones with the force of a physical blow. The monster wasn't hunting Lucas. It had used Lucas and Dustin to find the one place they had spent weeks trying to hide.
Will’s eyes snapped open, his hand ripping away from Lucas’s shoulder as he broke the connection, gasping violently for air.
He sat back on the concrete floor, his chest heaving, his nose instantly pouring a thick, steady stream of dark blood down his lip. The entire room had gone dead silent, Hopper’s shouting ceasing instantly as everyone turned to stare at him in a horrified, expectant hush.
Will looked up, his eyes wide with a cold, absolute terror. He wiped the blood from his mouth with a shaking sleeve, his voice cracking under the weight of the realization.
“We have to go,” Will breathed, his gaze finding Lucas's now awake face. “Now!”
“What?”
Will snaps up to Hopper and Mike, fear in his eyes. “He knows. He knows exactly where Max is.”
-
Chance did not expect the most monumental thing, the thing that actually moves it all forward for once, to happen in church, on the Sunday of his mother’s birthday of all times .
It starts with a knock on his bedroom door at nine in the morning.
He has been awake since six — last night’s practice having done their usual work, leaving him staring at the ceiling with the cold in every limb of his body— and he is sitting on the edge of his bed doing nothing productive when his mother appears in the doorway in her good blouse, holding a pink tupperware box, looking at him with the expression she gets when she has already decided something and is simply waiting for him to catch up.
"Why are you here?" Chance says.
"What," she says, perfectly serene, "A mom can't want to celebrate her birthday with her only son?"
He looks at her. "I am sure Robert already has a whole day planned for you."
"Too bad I told him to cancel it then." She moves past him into the room without invitation and sets the pink box on his desk — directly on top of his homework, without a single moment of hesitation — and opens it.
It’s dessert, a Bibingka.
A proper one, the real kind, the kind that cannot be purchased at any bakery in Hawkins because no bakery in Hawkins knows how to make it. The kind that takes two hours and fills a house with the smell of coconut and rice flour and something that is not just food but memory — his lola's kitchen, the house in the photographs, somewhere warm and loud and nothing like Indiana.
Chance stares at it.
His mother finds his plates without asking where they are, because she has always known where everything is even when he has tried to make his room unreadable to her. She cuts two pieces and hands him one and sits on the edge of his bed like she has done this every Sunday for years.
He sits back down.
He eats.
The cake is exactly what it always is, which is the best thing he has eaten in weeks. He had forgotten what it tasted like when food was made with attention rather than obligation. He eats his whole piece before he realizes he has been doing it without thinking, without the grey mechanical consumption of the last fifteen days, and something small and reluctant loosens slightly in his chest.
His mother watches him eat with the expression she wears when she is about to say something she has been rehearsing.
"You know," she starts, "when you were small — four, maybe five — the bigger kids in the neighborhood used to wait to fight you on the corner by the bodega."
"I remember," Chance says.
"Every single time," she says, "you went back. Never once did you take a different route. Never once did you back down." She looks at her plate. "And every single time, you came home bloody and bruised and you walked straight through the door and you never cried until you got to me."
He looks at the bibingka.
"I made you this cake everytime," she says quietly. "You always asked for it specifically. You would sit at the kitchen table with your bloody nose and your split lip and you would tell me everything."
They are both quiet for a moment.
He had genuinely forgotten that. The bullies he remembered, the bloody knuckles he remembered, but the specific ritual of it — the walking home with his jaw set, holding it, and then his mother's kitchen and the smell of it and finally, finally being allowed to fall apart — that he had let go somewhere along the way, filed under things that belonged to a version of his life he had stopped looking at directly, that he had forgotten.
"You were so brave," she says. "You have always been so brave."
He does not say anything.
And then, with the particular timing of a woman who knows exactly what she is doing: "The cake was very good, wasn't it."
“What do you want, Nanay?” He breathes out.
She breathes in very deeply, like it is taking all her might to say the next words.
"Come to church with me," his mother says.
Chance’s hackles immediately go up. But before he can strangle out a vapid ‘No’, she speaks out in a devastating tone.
"One last time," she says. "Last time, anak"
Chance’s jaw snaps shut and he furrows his brow, because despite it all, this is his mother and he knows when something is wrong. Something is different. He can feel it in her tone.
Chance stares at her.
"Nanay."
"I am not saying it as a condition," she says, although Chance completely feels like it is a condition.
"But?" He questions.
"But, it is a mother's birthday wish." She starts collecting the left cutlery. "Just one time. There is something I want to show you. And then I will never ask it of you again."
He looks at her. She looks back, patient and immovable in the way she is when something matters. She hasn’t looked like that to him since he was five, from a time when he actually thought of her as strong.
"Fine," he says, despite his brain screaming to run the other way.
-
The church is empty at this hour, the Sunday service long over.
His mother leads him to a pew near the middle — not the front, where the truly devout sit, not the back, where the reluctant ones hide, but the middle, which has always been her way of doing things. She sits down and folds her hands in her lap and looks at the altar for a long moment.
Chance sits beside her and stares at his own hands. The calluses from the knives . The bruise still fading on his left knuckle. He turns his hands over in his lap, looking at the lines of his palms, and waits.
"I never properly told you about my parents, did I?" she says.
Chance waits. He realizes, sitting there, that this is true. His maternal grandparents are a gap in the story of his own life —names mentioned in passing, nothing that ever resolved into a full picture. He had assumed distance. He had never pushed.
"They divorced before I was born, almost," she says. "But they stayed in the same house because they did not know how else to be. They were just — gone. Gone from each other, gone from me." She pauses. "There was no structure in how I grew up. No one asked where I was. I was completely lost."
She is quiet for a moment.
Above them, the church ceiling arches high and pale, the painted saints looking down from the walls with their particular expressions of beatific suffering. Chance has always hated those expressions. Has always found something dishonest in them — the way they make suffering look clean and purposeful and worth something, when in his experience suffering mostly just looked like long sleeves in summer.
"And then I found this." She gestures, briefly, at the church around them. "And it gave me everything I had been missing. Rules, belonging, a reason that things happened. And then the soulmark teaching — that God writes his plan on your skin, that the mark means something, that you follow it no matter what." Her voice is very even. "I wanted so badly for someone to have written a plan for me. To not be adrift anymore."
Chance exhales through his nose.
He looks at the stained glass window to his left — Mary, arms outstretched, expression serene and distant — and feels the familiar grinding frustration of this particular conversation. He has heard versions of it in churches across three states. The explanation, the context, the justification dressed in the language of self-awareness. He did not have any expectations from her to be honest, but he did not think it would be the same reused sob story again.
Is this really all she brought him here for?
"I know what it cost us," she says. "I know."
She is quiet again.
Outside, somewhere in the church eaves, a bird is making noise — a persistent, oblivious sound that seems to Chance like the only honest thing in the room right now. The afternoon light comes through the windows in long dusty columns, illuminating the particles of air between them.
"But I have been thinking recently, reflecting," she confesses. "The best things in my life — the things that were actually good, actually mine — they all came from when I broke the rules."
Chance turns his head.
He had not expected that. Something shifts in his posture — involuntary, the way the body responds to surprise before the mind has caught up — and she must sense it because she continues without waiting for him to respond.
"Going to the Philippines," she says. "Everyone said too far, too dangerous, too much. I went anyway." A pause. "And then — leaving your father." She straightens slightly in the pew, the movement small and deliberate. "Every structure I had built my life around said I could not do that. The church said I could not. The family said I could not. The soulmark—" She stops.
She turns to look at him directly.
"To hell with the fucking soulmark."
Chance stares at her.
His mother. Who says goodness when she drops something and Lord have mercy when traffic is bad. Who has never, in his memory, in any language, produced a word stronger than that. His mother, just cursed while sitting in a church pew, on a Sunday morning.
"Nanay, what—?" he says.
"You were right, Chance." She breathes in, steady and deliberate, the way she breathes when she has decided to say something she has been holding for a long time. "He was a monster. He was a fucking monster and I was wrong to not leave him earlier."
Chance goes very still.
The painted saints look down from the walls. The bird in the eaves keeps making its noise. The dusty light moves.
He has waited years to hear her say that. Has turned the shape of it over in the dark of every bedroom in every city, the words he needed her to find, and now they are in the air between them in a church that smells like old wood and candle wax and he does not know what to do with them. They are too large for his hands right now.
"But I do not regret it." She raises her hand and wipes a stray tear from her own cheek, the gesture practiced and unsentimental. "You know why?"
Chance shakes his head.
"Because the best thing," she says. "The absolute best thing that has ever happened to me." She looks at him. "Was you. My stubborn, brave, impossible boy. Who came from all of that chaos and all of those mistakes and is still—" Her voice cracks, just slightly, at the edge of the last word. "Is still the best thing I have ever done."
The church is completely quiet.
Chance looks at his hands again. The calluses. The fading bruise. He does not trust his face right now.
"I thought," she says, and her voice has changed — gone smaller, more careful, the voice she uses when she is approaching something she does not know how to approach. "I really thought that was the extent of my sins, making my perfect child suffer at the hands of a monster like him." She breathes in, very shakily. "But, that is not true, is it?"
Before Chance can respond, asking what that even means, she reaches into her bag and produces something.
"I found something in your drawer the other day," she says, very quietly. "I— it was an accident, I was just looking for the scissors and—”
—she holds it out to him — and he looks down and feels his heart stop.
It is a photograph.
Small, slightly worn at the edges. It is Will, laughing at something off-camera.
Will’s brother, Jonathan, had taken it. Will had shown Chance one afternoon at his house, going through a stack of polaroids to kill time, and Chance had fallen in love with the photograph within seconds. Had asked to keep it even faster. Will had said yes with the particular expression of someone who finds the request deeply embarrassing but wanted it to happen anyway.
Chance had tucked it deep inside his desk drawer. He had been absolutely certain it was well hidden.
Apparently not.
As he stares at it now, his blood goes cold. He immediately starts bracing for the impact of what is to come now, looking at it in his mother's hands in a church pew.
The cold is of exposure, of the one thing you have been protecting being seen before you were ready, of the wall between your reality and fear. His mind does not go to anger, but to bone-deep fear to what his mother's face is about to do, what he has rehearsed receiving so many times that the anticipation of it is almost worse than the thing itself.
"Nanay, it is not what it looks li—" He reaches for the photograph.
She turns toward him and puts her free hand on his cheek. Gently. Just rests it there, warm and still, the way she used to cup his face when he was small enough that her whole hand covered it.
The action is so foreign to what he was bracing for that he stops completely. He looks into her eyes.
—And her face is not what he expected at all.
There is no disgust in it. No controlled horror, no the careful blankness of a person managing their reaction, not the expression he has woken up flinching from in the middle of the night since he was twelve years old. Just — open. Soft. Two tears tracking quietly down her cheeks, which she does not wipe away. Like she is not ashamed of them. Like she is not performing any of this.
She looks at the photograph.
Then at him.
"He is beautiful, anak," she says.
Chance's brain stops working entirely.
He looks at his mother holding the photograph of Will Byers like it is something worth holding carefully, and feels the ground shift under every assumption he has been standing on.
She looks at the photograph one more moment and then looks up, and her expression is the same — open, steady, completely undefended.
"Can I know his name?"
Every instinct Chance has says run. Deflect. Say nothing. Manage this. Years of careful silence pressing at him from every direction, the well-worn grooves of it, the muscle memory of keeping this particular door closed.
He does the opposite.
"Will," he says. It comes out quiet. Like a confession. Like something he has been carrying a long time and has finally set down.
"Will." She tests the word. Lets it sit in the air between them. "Does he make you happy?"
The question is so simple and so direct that Chance has nothing to do with it. He has been asked many things in his life. He has not been asked this. Not by her. Not by anyone, about this.
"Nanay, I— I don't understand," he says. "What is happening? Why are you asking?"
She turns away slightly, looking at the altar. Her shoulders do something that is working very hard to stay even — and Chance watches her do it, watches her manage herself the way she has always managed herself, and thinks about how much effort she has spent her whole life keeping her shape in difficult rooms.
"Because I need to know," she says quietly. "I have been thinking for a while. And then…I did some research."
Chance's brows pull together.
"Every place I took you — every church, every city, every new start — I think I just made you feel broken. For being different." She does not phrase it as a question. "Didn't I?"
He is silent.
He does not say yes. He does not say no. But the silence has the shape of an answer and she receives it as one.
"No wonder you hated me for so long," she says. "You probably still do."
She exhales slowly.
Chance looks at the stained glass again — the light coming through it in colors, falling on the worn wooden floor of the pew in front of them. He thinks about every church in every city. He thinks about the one in Houston with the ceiling that leaked. He thinks about the one in Albuquerque where the pastor called him up front without warning to pray over him and he had stood there rigid and furious while everyone watched.
He thinks about all the ways a person can be told they are wrong without anyone using that word directly.
"I am so sorry, anak. I am so sorry I tried to put you in the same cage that broke me." Her voice breaks on the last word — just slightly, just at the edge. "I did not know I was doing it, but that is not an excuse. And I know this is selfish too, but I need to know — despite everything I did wrong — if you found something. Somewhere where there was some peace."
This is the first time they have talked about it.
It is also the deepest conversation they have ever had — and it is not just about Will, not really. It is about all of it. Every church and every city and every new name and every night Chance lay awake in a new bedroom wondering what he had done wrong to deserve all this carrying. For the first time she is not explaining herself or managing him or asking him to manage her. She is just asking. Putting him first, in the pew of a church with tears on her face.
"He does," Chance says. "He is the best thing that happened to me."
His mother nods. Wipes her eyes with the back of her hand.
"I don't fully understand it," she says honestly. "Why did you, of all people, have to turn out a queer—" She stops herself. He watches her stop herself — watches her register the word and its weight and choose something else. "It's scary. I am scared for you, my love. But I am going to try."
She turns back to him.
Her face is wet and completely unmanaged and more herself than he has seen it in years — more herself than she has been allowed to be in years, more herself than she was in the years she spent in his father’s reign.
"I am going to stop coming to church," she says. "This is the last time. And Robert—"
Her chin lifts.
His chin. The gesture that belongs to both of them without either of them meaning to claim it.
"When it comes to you, I am going to stand up. I should have always been standing up." She holds his gaze through the tears, steady and certain. "I want to change. I will change. Just — give me one more chance to be your mother. I care. My love, I promise that I care."
He breathes in shakily.
It is too much at once. It is years of wanting this and believing he would never have it and building his life around the absence of it, suddenly present in a church pew on a Sunday afternoon. He does not know what to do with that much — does not have a word for the specific feeling of something you gave up on returning to you.
So he crosses the distance instead. It translates to an ‘okay’, a ‘yes’, a second chance.
She reaches over and takes his hand as he does — and then he has his arms around her and she holds on immediately, both arms, completely, the way she held him when he was small and the world was too loud, the way she has not held him in years because he stopped letting her and she stopped trying and somewhere in the middle of all of that the distance between them became the only thing they both understood.
He lets her now.
Something wound very tight in his chest begins, just slightly, just at the edges, to let go.
He feels like a child. He has not felt like a child in a very long time. He has also not cried in a very long time — not like this, not the helpless quiet kind, not the kind he used to save for his mother's kitchen and the smell of bibingka.
"My little boy," she says quietly, into his hair. "I love you, anak."
The tears come before he decides to let them. Slow and silent, soaking into her shoulder, and she must feel them because she tightens her grip.
He holds on.
Above them, the painted saints look down from the walls with their clean beatific suffering, and the bird in the eaves keeps making its oblivious noise, and the afternoon light moves through the stained glass in colors across the floor.
Chance holds onto his mother in the last church she will ever take him to and cries without a sound.
-
The emotional warmth was still lingering in the air as they finally stepped out of the archive room. Chance kept his hand wrapped gently around his mother's arm, guiding her down the dim quiet corridor toward the side exit, trying to shield her from the world just as she had promised to shield him.
He was almost at the door when the voice cut through.
"I'm telling you, the military is moving too slow."
A sharp hushed voice from behind the half-closed double doors of the parish council room. Rough and strained, the voice of a man.
Chance stops walking. He places the voice almost immediately.
Ronald Callahan. Head of the recent organized searches — he had seen him at the town hall meeting, seen him at the church gathering, seen his face on the flyers that had started appearing on telephone poles two weeks ago with Will's photograph on them. The man who had turned neighbor into hunter with the specific efficiency of someone who had been waiting his whole life for a cause.
His mother looks at him, questioning.
"They're treating these rifts like a freak weather anomaly," Callahan continued, his voice low and tight with frustration. "But we know damn well someone is causing this."
"Keep your voice down," another voice muttered. Anxious. A town councilman, maybe. "People are still filtering out of the main service."
"I don't care." The sound of a heavy hand coming down on a wooden table, the crack of it echoing out into the corridor. "Organize a gathering in the fellowship hall as soon as possible. I need all of Hawkins there."
"Why?"
A pause. The particular pause of a man about to deliver something he has been holding and is enjoying the weight of.
"We finally got a real lead on those culprits."
Culprits.
The word hits Chance like something physical — a blade, cold and immediate, right through the warmth that had been sitting in his chest for the last ten minutes. The peace of the archive room, his mother's arms, the photograph of Will laughing, give me one chance — all of it vaporizes in a single heartbeat and is replaced by adrenaline so sudden and so complete that he has to press his hand flat against the corridor wall to stay still.
They are talking about Will and his friends.
"What — are you sure?"
"Yes." Callahan's voice, clipped and certain. "Two of the boys were spotted near the old hospital this morning. We need to move fast. We need more eyes. We'll be mobilizing a squad of townspeople this afternoon to track them down."
Chance's hand tightens against the wall.
A squad. Not military — townspeople. Neighbors. People who know these streets and these buildings and these hiding places better than any soldier Sullivan deployed from outside. People who have been afraid for weeks and will now finally be given a direction to point to that fear.
His mother's hand finds his arm. Her grip is tight and quiet. She has heard it too.
He looks at her.
Her face has gone pale, the warmth of the archive room entirely gone, replaced by something that is — not surprise, he realizes. Not quite. She looks at him the way she looks at him when she already knows something and has been hoping she was wrong. But—
I have to know what they know, he thinks.
The protective fire is roaring back behind his eyes, hotter and fiercer than before, and this time it is different from every other time because this time he is not fighting in the dark.
"Chance?" she whispers.
"I think," he whispers back. "We still have one last meeting in the church to attend afterall, Nanay."
She stares at him, eyes wide and confused.
Chance does not answer, just moves quietly toward the half-closed doors and walks out.
-
It is not a church meeting.
The meeting is held in the First Presbyterian on Elm because the community center is still cordoned off from the rift that opened in its parking lot. But it feels like a church meeting. It smells like one. The particular combination of old wood and collective fear that Chance has been smelling in various configurations his entire life sits in the air like something that has been there for days.
He slips in through the side door his mother used to exit, finds a position behind one of the wide concrete pillars near the back wall, and watches.
The room is full.
More than full — people standing along the walls, sitting in the aisles, the whole of Hawkins compressed into this one space with its low acoustic tile ceiling and its fluorescent lights and its folding chairs arranged in imperfect rows. Chance scans the faces automatically, the way he scans any room — exits, obstacles, people who might cause problems. He sees Andy Harper near the middle, sitting with two of the team. He sees the town councilman from the corridor, looking like a man who has been swept into something faster than he can manage. He sees people he recognizes from the bleachers at games, from the grocery store, from the neighborhood watch flyers that started appearing two weeks ago alongside the photographs.
Will's photograph is there.
He keeps his face completely neutral.
“Quiet down! Let's get some order here!"
Callahan does not use a microphone. His voice is loud enough on its own — the voice of a man who has been projecting authority in rooms like this one his entire life, who learned somewhere early that if you speak like decisions have already been made, people will stop questioning whether they have.
He stands at the center of the stage with his sleeves rolled to the elbows, a corkboard behind him covered in maps and photographs and red string connecting locations. A miniature on a church fellowship hall corkboard with civilian hands running the pins.
The sight of it makes something cold move through his chest.
"We all know why we're here," Callahan says, his finger coming down hard on the board, driving into the dark circle around the old junkyard and the hospital perimeter. "The federal government is telling us to stay in our homes. They're telling us they have the situation under control while the ground literally opens up under our feet." He pauses, scanning the room. "Two hours ago, we got a confirmation. Two of them spotted near the junkyard, near the community hospital."
The room shifts. Not panic — something more focused than panic, the particular alertness of people who have been frightened for weeks and have finally been offered something to do about it.
Chance watches it happen. Watches the fear become purpose in real time.
"The military is focused on the main rifts," Callahan continues, leaning over the podium. "They don't know the back alleys. They don't know the service paths behind the quarry or how to navigate the old junkyard without getting a truck stuck in the mud." He lets the implication sit. "We do. If we wait for Sullivan's men to clear the sector, those kids will slip into the woods and we'll be back at square one."
Murmurs through the room. Nods.
Chance thinks about Will each time he says “kids” but keeps his face completely still.
"We need volunteers," Callahan says, his voice dropping into the hard challenging register of a man who knows how to make an ask feel like a test. "A civilian tracking squad. We split into four teams. One for the perimeter, one for the rail lines, two to sweep the interior structures from the junkyard up to the old medical center." He looks out at the room. "I need men who know how to handle themselves. Men who aren't going to flinch if things get hostile out there."
The room goes momentarily still.
The reality of what he is asking settles over the parishioners like weather — literal manhunting, in a disaster zone, for 18 year old teenagers. Chance watches people process it. Watches some of them lean forward and some of them lean back. Watches the room sort itself into the people who were always going to say yes and the people who needed one more push.
He does not wait for the push.
Before anyone else can shift in their seat he steps out from behind the concrete pillar and moves into the center aisle, and the back rows track him immediately — his size, his age, the Lawson name visible in his posture before anyone even registers his face.
"Put me in," he says.
Flat. Steady. Loud enough to cut through the hesitant muttering.
Callahan looks up. His eyes narrow slightly — recognition moving through them, the Lawson kid, varsity, Robert Lawson's stepson — and then a slow approving nod. "Lawson. Good. We need size on the ground."
"Give me the interior sweep," Chance says, moving closer to the stage, his expression a mask of perfect disciplined civic concern. "I know the layout of the old yards better than anyone here. My stepdad used to own the logistics lot next to it."
A lie. Robert Lawson has never owned that lot. But the Lawson name is a golden key in this room and everyone here knows it, and Chance watches Callahan accept it without verification because men like Callahan do not question the resources that arrive easily.
His mind is already running the tactical grid of the sector behind his eyes. The junkyard's northern approach through the scrap heaps. The sightlines. The mud paths. The places where footprints accumulate and where they don't. He knows this part of Hawkins. He has walked it at night for months.
If he can get assigned as point on the main sweeping group, he controls the direction of the hunt. He can look at fresh footprints in the mud and call them deer track. He can steer three dozen armed paranoid locals three miles south toward the old mill while Will and his friends move somewhere else entirely. He can feed Callahan clean consistent reports of nothing found, sector clear, moving on, while the machine burns its own fuel going nowhere.
He can become the friction that slows the whole thing down.
From the middle of the room, Andy Harper looks over at him. There is a smug competitive glint in it — Chance jumping to volunteer, trying to look good, the usual performance. Andy has no idea what is actually happening behind Chance's eyes. He never has.
Chance holds Callahan's gaze.
"Alright," Callahan says, marking the map with a heavy black X. "Lawson, you lead Team Three with Miller. Northern approach through the scrap heaps. If you see so much as a shadow, you don't call the MPs." He pauses. "You blast it on the fucking radio."
"Understood," Chance says.
His thumb moves to the outline of the Balisong in his jacket pocket. The worn dark handles, del Rosario pressed into the wood.
He holds Callahan's gaze for one more second — steady, compliant, a good citizen doing his civic duty — and then he nods and steps back into the crowd.
Andy gives him a nod from the middle row. Chance nods back.
He finds his position near the wall and watches the rest of the meeting with the focused attention of someone building a map.
He is not hunting Will Byers.
But he is hunting a way to make sure nobody else does either.
-
The plan to get Max out was as simple as something like this could get.
The sudden, terrifying news Will had delivered to the group acted as a catalyst. The team just stopped caring about safety anymore. The stakes were too high.
It was Will, Robin, Hopper, Mike, Jonathan, and Lucas heading to the hospital, while Dustin, Steve, and Nancy went back into the Upside Down. They really needed to figure out what was up with that massive wall, and the only way to do that was by being near it again.
Will had fought a bitter, exhausting argument with his mom about going, but he eventually won out. Joyce had finally agreed on one strict condition: Jonathan had to go with him. His brother had agreed almost instantly, which honestly surprised Will a little. Going to the hospital meant Jonathan wouldn't be with Nancy while she was down there with Steve, but Jonathan’s usual insecurities seemed strangely calmed over the last few days in the bunker.
Will was just glad.
He didn’t really understand why Jonathan had been so worried about Steve in the first place. Jonathan and Nancy were basically made for each other. And Will didn't even mean that in the cosmic way of soulmates—they just fit together so perfectly.
Will watches Jonathan and Nancy say goodbye at the bunker door and feels something warm and uncomplicated move through his chest, happy for his brother. His brother cups Nancy's face in both hands, and she says something Will cannot hear. Jonathan nods, and they kiss with the easy certainty of two people who have finally stopped being dishonest with each other.
The rest of the group—El, Kali, Murray, and Joyce—were staying behind to lock down the fort. El and Kali had decided to pool their abilities to monitor everything from the safety of the void, promising to relay messages directly into Will’s head through his connection to the hive mind if things went sideways on the surface. Dustin wanted to come with Lucas, especially since he was clearly avoiding Steve after whatever stupid quarrel was going on between them, but Dustin was too smart to spare—he was desperately needed down below if they wanted to decipher exactly what Vecna was planning.
They loaded into the van at the bunker, the engine roaring to life as Jonathan hit the gas, navigating the cracked, dark streets toward the hospital with a grim intensity. Will’s heart hammered against his ribs, staring out into the bleak, ash-choked fog. He just really hopes the plan works out. If they could just get to the hospital, find Max, and get her back to safety.
Unsurprisingly, they didn't even make it three miles before the universe made it difficult for them.
"Look out!" Hopper yelled, his voice cracking.
Jonathan’s foot slammed violently onto the brake pedal.
Without warning, the asphalt a hundred yards ahead buckled and tore open, a violent, blinding orange rift splitting the road right down the center on the ground beside them. The van fishtailed wildly, tires screaming against the breaking concrete as sparks and sulfurous ash exploded into the windshield, forcing them to a grinding, terrifying halt right before the edge of the smoking abyss.
“Now?!” Robin sighed in high-pitched, manic frustration, her hands gripping the dashboard so hard her knuckles were white. “We have spent the weeks analyzing charts and predicting when these stupid rifts will break, and it happens now?”
“Hold on!” Jonathan yelled, throwing his weight into the steering wheel. The tires slammed down the second the van was thrown into park outside the hospital’s shattered ambulance bay.
Suddenly, the walkie-talkie on Hopper’s belt explodes with frantic static.
"You need to be careful!" Joyce's voice crackled through the speaker, breathless and high-pitched with pure panic as she transmitted directly from the bunker. "El and Kali just saw— there’s a squad of town hunters heading toward the hospital right now."
Robin let out a wild, stressed laugh, throwing her hands up in the air as she stared at the dark, imposing medical building.
"Why?!" Robin yelled, her voice cracking under the pressure. "Seriously, why are they doing this right now? We have enough problems already!"
There was no time to wait for the road to settle. They abandoned the van, splitting up as they hit the perimeter of Hawkins Community Hospital. The air here was already thick with the heavy.
They all rushed through the shattered basement intake, their boots echoing down the abandoned corridors as they sprinted toward the wing where Max’s room was located.
-
Will tracking the hive mind connection for movement — when suddenly he hears El’s voice through the void
"They're diverting," El says in his ear, her voice carrying the particular quality it gets when something does not make sense to her.
“What?”
“The group of hunters,” El says, as she watches the cluster move south, “It's strange. For some reason they just started heading away from the hospital."
"Why?" Will asks, confused.
A pause. "God knows," El says, relieved .
“Well, thank god then.” Will replies and files it away. There is no time to examine it now.
They move.
-
Will’s relief does not last long, because suddenly he feels a dim awareness of things that do not belong here, the clicking that starts somewhere in the east wing before anyone else hears it.
He stops dead in his tracks.
"Second rift," he says, his hand flying to the back of his neck as the phantom, freezing chill of the hive mind, needles deep into his skin. "I can feel it opening somewhere near."
Everyone turns to look at Will.
"Another one?!" Mike says. “Where.”
"It’s… its inside the hospital," Will confirms.
The distinctive, clicking screeches of hunting Demogorgons followed them into the concrete halls.
“He’s sending demos at us, run!”
“Fuck!”
-
They all get split up while outrunning them. Lucas runs for Max's room without discussion. Robin somehow finds Vickie along the way and pulls her into the nearest room and closes the door as Will and Mike press against the wall while the Demodogs move past outside.
Vickie is sitting on the floor with her back against the bed, looking at Robin with an expression that is working its way through several stages of processing.
"Okay," she says. "So let's recap."
Robin nods.
"There is a dark wizard—"
"Uh-huh."
"—who is stealing children—"
"Yep."
"—and putting them in a dream world."
"Right."
Vickie is quiet for a moment. Then she says, with the controlled:
"Wow.” Vickie says, “So all this time, while I was at home waiting for the phone to ring, you were off with your friends getting high!"
"Getting high?" Robin says.
"Come on, Robin. You are going through withdrawal."
"You have completely the wrong idea. I am not on drugs."
"Oh my god," Will says from across the room, pressing his palm flat against the wall and his eyes half-closed, "can you guys please be quiet for thirty seconds? I am trying to keep the Demodogs away from Max."
Vickie stares at him. "He is what?"
"He has powers," Robin says, "He can see the monsters and sometimes control them."
Vickie looks at Will. Looks at Robin. Looks back at Will.
Vickie threw her hands up, stepping back toward the metal shelves. "Everyone is on drugs here! The entire room is completely out of their minds!"
"Jesus Christ," Mike says, closing his eyes fully.
Vickie was ultimately proven convinced a second later, because the connection in Will’s mind plugs into the hivemind with a pull.
He can see Lucas through the Demo’s eyes. He is in a lift, looking like a force of pure, desperate adrenaline, carrying Max’s limp body securely in his arms while the heavy foam-padded boombox was slung over his shoulder, ready to blast her tape the second her eyes so much as flickered.
He physically stops the Demo from moving until the lift shuts close, and the demos turn around and start running in their direction instead.
He turns.
"They're redirecting. East corridor. We have maybe Thirty seconds."
"Thirty Seconds for what?" Vickie says.
"To not be here," Mike says.
But just then, the heavy lead door buckled with a horrific, metallic screech as the fleshy, petal-shaped face of a Demodog slammed through the lower panel. The creature hissed, its rows of needle-sharp teeth glistening with thick slime as it dragged its armored body into the room, its blind head snapping directly toward Vickie.
"Robin, grab the stand!" Mike yelled. Will used a massive burst of hive-mind pressure to physically halt the Demodog mid-leap. The creature whimpered, its limbs locking up as Will held it down with his mind, the blood pouring faster down his lip.
Robin didn't flinch. She grabbed a heavy iron IV pole from the corner, swinging it with everything she had, cracking it directly across the monster's open maw. The creature thrashed, as Vickie watched the blood and the silver teeth scatter across the linoleum with her own two eyes.
They escaped and ran.
-
They are stuck in the laundry room, pressed against walls as the noise plays and Max struggles to wake up. But just then, a heavy thud shook the door.
Before they knew it, the industrial laundry machine detonated with a cataclysmic explosion. A wall of brilliant orange fire and pressurized steam blasted through the room, the shockwave collapsing the ceiling tiles over the ventilation shaft and completely vaporizing the snapping jaws of the beast trying to break through.
They turned back and saw—
"Mom?" Mike breathed.
Karen Wheeler was standing in the doorway with ash on her face and absolutely no expression of apology about any of it.
"Mike." She crossed the room and grabbed her son, and Mike, who has been holding himself together through approximately one disaster too many, let her.
As the flesh of the creature sizzled in the aftermath, the air thick with smoke and ash, they didn't waste a single second, Max was struggling to wake up.
"She needs a room!" Lucas screams, already moving, already not letting go of Max's hand. “Somewhere where we can blast the song without the Demos hearing.”
“Follow me!” Vickie says, leading them all to the first floor.
-
She led them to the first floor pharmacy storage room.
Will recognized it the moment they came through the door — the overturned boxes, the broken glass still on the floor from where they had moved fast and carelessly, the thin layer of dust that had settled over everything since the night he and Robin had been in here with their hearts going too fast and their arms full of stolen benzos for a plan that now felt like it happened in a different lifetime.
The shelves were still littered. Nobody had cleaned up.
Lucas set the boom box on the metal counter with shaking hands and hit play.
Kate Bush flooded the small room immediately — the heavy synth, the urgent rhythm, vibrating against the metal medicine cabinets, filling every corner. Will looked at Max on the gurney, her breathing shallow and uneven, her body somewhere between here and wherever Vecna had been keeping her.
Nobody spoke.
Lucas collapsed at the side of the table.
He did not try to hold any of it together. He put his face against the sleeve of Max's hospital gown and the tears came hot and fast and completely, the raw agony of weeks of perfectly functional mechanical grief finally finding the crack it had been looking for.
"Max," he said, and his voice broke on her name. "Max, please. Come on. Open your eyes. Please, just — open your eyes."
Will stood at the back of the room and looked at her.
On the table, Max's body went rigid. Her breathing stuttered — shallow, fighting something — her mind somewhere in the dark reaching for the sound the way you reach for something in water, something you can hear but cannot yet find.
The music played the chorus.
Lucas kept his grip on her hand and did not let go.
"Yes," he breathed suddenly, leaning forward. "That's it — that's it, come on—"
Max's chest heaved.
A sharp gasping intake of air — the specific sound of someone coming back — and then her eyelids fluttered, straining, and her eyes opened.
"Oh my god," Lucas said, and it came out completely wrecked, barely above a whisper. He wrapped both arms around her before she had fully processed where she was, pulling her up from the gurney, his face pressed into her hair. "Thank god. Thank god, thank god."
"I can't feel," Max breathed, "much."
Lucas pulled back immediately, both hands going to her face, her hands, searching. "Do you feel this? Do you feel my hand?"
"A little."
"Can you see? Can you—"
"The lights are really," she said, blinking slowly, "really bright."
Vickie stepped forward with the calm of someone who has been in a medical setting long enough to know what this moment requires. "Hey. You haven't used your eyes or your muscles for a long time. Your body's just weak. It just needs to readjust. Learn again." She looked at Lucas. "She's going to be okay."
A single tear slipped down Max's cheek.
Then another.
Her chest shook.
"I knew you were there," Lucas whispered, his forehead pressing against her cheek, his tears mixing with hers on the hospital pillow. "I always knew you were still there."
"I saw you," Max said, her fingers tightening weakly around his. "Waiting for me. Playing my song."
"You bored of it yet?" Lucas let out a sound that was half laugh half sob.
Max looked up at him. Her eyes, for the first time in weeks, were completely clear. "Are you?"
A pause. Lucas shook his head.
"It turns out," Max said slowly, "that the whole time, I didn't even need it." Her fingers pressed against his. "I just needed you. Just you."
-
Will sees it before anyone else does.
He is not sure why he is the one who notices first — maybe the hive mind sensitivity, the way his awareness has been calibrated to track changes in living things, or maybe just the angle of the room's light.
On Max's left hand, where Lucas has been holding on for weeks — through every replay of the tape, every night in the chair, every day of perfectly functional grief — something appears.
Max lets out a gasp at the feeling. Two letters. Deep green, the color of something alive and certain, pressed into the skin like thread from the inside.
L.S.
And on Lucas's hand, in the same moment, the same color, the same certainty:
M.M.
Will stops breathing.
The marks glow faintly in the dim pharmacy storage room, warm green light catching the dust in the air around them, and for a moment the whole room looks like something sacred — the cluttered shelves and the broken glass and the ash still on Karen Wheeler's face and all of it somehow luminous with the specific light of something the universe has finally, after everything it has put these two people through, gotten right.
Max looks down.
She stares at her hand for a long moment. At L.S. pressed into her skin in green thread, sitting there like it has been waiting for exactly this — for her to come back, for her to be here, for her hand to be warm and present and alive in his.
"Lucas," she says.
He looks at his own hand.
The sound he makes is not a word. It is the sound of someone seeing proof of something they believed in the dark without any evidence, confirmed at last in the light.
His hand is shaking. Both of them are shaking, their marked hands still locked together, the green of it warm between them.
"Oh," Lucas says softly.
He lifts his marked hand and looks at it. Looks at her and kisses her sweetly. He starts crying again, which makes Max start crying, which makes the marks blur slightly through both sets of tears in a way that is deeply undignified and entirely right.
Around them the room exhales.
Robin has her hand over her mouth. Vickie is crying openly and not trying to stop. Karen Wheeler looks at the marks and closes her eyes briefly like a woman saying a prayer she actually means. Mike stares at the green light with an expression that Will cannot fully read — complicated and private, something moving behind his eyes that he pulls back before anyone can see the full shape of it.
Will looks at the marks and smiles in happiness for his friends.
-
A few minutes later, Hopper stepped into the room, a rare, genuine smile breaking through the grime on his face. "Hey, welcome home, kid."
Max looked at him in total shock, her breath hitching. “You... you are alive?”
Will laughed softly from the edge of the room, wiping a streak of dark blood from beneath his nose. “It’s a long story.”
Then she looked up at the rest of them.
"Will," Max breathed, reaching out her free hand toward him.
Will groaned excitedly, a huge, watery smile breaking across his face as he stepped forward to catch her in a careful, fierce hug. Max squeezed him back, her fingers bunching into the fabric of his flannel shirt. When she finally pulled back just enough to look at his bloodshot eyes and the fierce, protective exhaustion rolling off him, she let out a weak laugh.
"So I leave you alone for a second, and you turn into a superhero?" Max asked.
Will laughs, his voice thick with emotion.
"He’s a sorcerer, actually” Mike comes up and corrects.
“Wheeler, ofcourse.” She rolls her eyes.
"Took your sweet time, didn’t you Mayfield?" Mike said, though his voice was thick with emotion, a massive wave of relief washed over his face. He looked over at Will, sharing a quiet, intense look of shared victory before stepping up to the table, offering Max a hesitant, genuinely warm embrace.
Max let out a soft, weak chuckle, leaning back against the pillows but keeping her left hand firmly locked in Lucas's. "Screw you, Wheeler. Where am I even?"
"Oh. Yeah, that would be confusing," Robin chimed in, wiping her own eyes as she stepped into the crowded room. "Um… You were being hunted by the Demodogs, and we were all seconds away from becoming lunch when Mrs. Wheeler came and… did the laundry."
Through the open door, the faint smell of sizzling flesh still drifted up from the basement stairs.
Mike’s jaw dropped as the reality of what happened downstairs finally clicked. "Holy shit! Mom!"
-
The crackle of the walkie-talkie broke the brief silence, Joyce's voice filtering through with an update from the bunker.
"The hospital is still littered with demos, but for some reason, they are retreating back to the rift," she informed them, her tone a mix of exhaustion and cautious hope. "El and Kali say you all should wait there for a while until it’s clear to leave."
Everyone nodded, a collective sigh of relief rippling through the small pharmacy storage room.
To make the most of the forced quarantine, they pushed a couple of old examination beds together, creating a makeshift hub. They leaned against the metal frames and sat on the edges of the mattresses, filling Max in on everything she had missed over the last two years. In turn, Max began detailing the inner workings of Henry’s mind, sharing what she had deciphered during her long imprisonment.
“Was– was Holly with you?” Mrs. Wheeler asked.
The fragile relief in the room was cut short. Max’s expression suddenly hardened, her grip on Lucas's hand tightening into a vice as she looked at them with absolute gravity.
She told them about Holly.
"She's smart," Max said. "Smarter than she looks. She'll find her way out, I believe it."
Mike said nothing but nodded, hugging his mom.
"Henry said that the rifts—there were three left."
"Yes, we figured that out too. He’s made two already," Mike said, pacing the small width of the room. "We don't know where the third will be, or why he’s even opening them."
"He..." Max paused, coughing slightly to clear her raspy throat. "He has been collecting Hawkins citizens. There is a whole neighborhood full of them in his mind. I saw them. Children, wives, husbands. Everyone. He said it’s imperative to his new mission."
Will nodded slowly, his hand moving to the back of his neck as a phantom chill stirred beneath his skin.
"He told me something similar at the MACZ. Said he started with children because their minds were weak. Then said something about—" He paused. "People with secrets?"
Max agreed, nodding weakly. "That is how he decides who to lure in. I have seen him do it only once, but he picks people and gathers them in one place subconsciously. Then he makes a rift so the demos can snatch them.”
She looks at them with grim eyes: “The children were so easy for him to manipulate as Mr. Whatsit, but…these people inside his neighborhood—” a shiver runs down her spine, “It’s like they are completely brainwashed. He offers them an escape from whatever was troubling them, and then he uses it to make them stay."
The room fell entirely silent, the sheer weight of what she was describing pressing down on everyone.
"But... these two recent rifts, he did not take anyone," Will said, his brow furrowing as he tried to reconcile the timeline. "I usually feel it through the hive mind when he claims someone, and he hasn't."
“What is he planning?” Robin sighs.
They all sank back into deep thought, trying to piece the puzzle together.
Will’s gaze drifted away from the beds, locking onto the rusted, cream-colored rotary telephone mounted on the cinderblock wall. His mind was still spinning through the darkness of Vecna’s realm, trying to untangle the web of truths to even slightly decipher a web of how Henry was building an army out of Hawkins tucked away in a parasitic pocket of the Mind Flayer's design.
And then, the silence was violently shattered.
Extremely loud and sudden in the quiet of the room, the telephone jangling enough to startle everyone in the room.
"Ugh," Vickie sighed, rolling her eyes. "Just ignore it. It happens every night."
"A glitch in the lines?" Robin asked, her eyes darting to the flashing button.
"No," Vickie said, crossing her arms. "Just some random high school boy. He keeps calling at the exact same time for weeks now." She moved toward the phone. "I'll cut it—"
Will's brain stopped after those words. In his chest, something seized. A cold, electric jolt struck his spine, freezing the breath in his throat.
Vickie stepped forward to lift the receiver and cut the connection to stop the noise, but as she reached out, the pieces suddenly collided in Will’s mind.
Weeks. The math violently collided in his head, a cascade of connections slamming together with dizzying speed.
It was this exact room!
He swirls around as if to confirm, and sure enough the cupboard he and Robin had stolen pills from, standing same and tall was enough to confirm it.
Which means…it was this exact phone number — the one he had called from this exact room, standing in this exact spot before the turnbow trap plan, the last time he had talked to—
Could it actually be Chance?
Will was up in an instant, his chair scraping violently against the linoleum. He leaped across the space, physically blocking Vickie's hand from touching the cradle.
"Wait! Wait, stop—" Will panicked.
Vickie blinked, startled by the sudden explosion of energy. "What? What happened?"
"When did they start?" Will asked, his voice shaking, his chest heaving as he stared at the ringing phone. "The calls. Exactly when did they start?"
"Uh, like... the day the rifts were first announced," Vickie stammered, looking between them like they were losing their minds.
“And they are always on this phone? Nowhere else?” He asks, just to confirm.
Vickie nods.
Will didn't wait for another word. He lunged forward, grabbed the heavy plastic receiver, and pressed it tightly against his ear. He closed his eyes, took a ragged breath into his lungs, and forced the word out.
There was a heavy, suffocating silence on the other end of the line. For a second, there was only the faint, crackling hiss of the long-distance wires.
"Hello—?" Will whispered out, desperate. “H-hi, is anyone there?”
And then, he heard a heavy breathing pattern and a voice broke through the static. It was low, rough with an exhaustion that ran down to the bone, and absolutely unmistakable.
"Bunny?" Chance’s voice sounded sweet as ever, and Will could actually cry. “Holy shit, is it actually you?”
Will left out a wet dry laugh at that, and for a minute, finally, the world stopped spinning.
-
Chance is going through some insane deja vu right now.
He has been here before. Freshman year. At the beginning of it, before Chance had learned the full shape of what he had walked into by joining the team, by following Jason's witch hunt with blind compliance.
Chance had not known Eddie Munson personally. Had known of him the way you know of people in a town this size — face, reputation, the shape of what people said about him, which was never generous. The freak. The cult leader. The murderer.
He remembered it in his body more than in his memory. The specific energy of the school hallways in those days, the basketball team moving through them with the collective certainty of people who had found a cause. Jason Carver with his jaw set, organizing, directing, making it feel like justice for Crissy’s murder.
He remembers the readiness of it. How fast it had gone from suspicion to pursuit to something that had no clean name. Chance had watched from the edge of and felt and said nothing about because he was new and he wanted to survive the year.
Now he stands in the field outside the hospital with Team Three fanned out around him and feels like he is back right there.
Chance has discovered that being a spy is much more scary than being compliant.
He sees the van first.
It is parked at the far end of the hospital's east lot —The WSQK call letters are faint on the side panel. Nearly painted over and almost invisible.
Almost is the key word.
Chance's chest does something immediate and physical — a lurch, a pull, the fifteen-day absence making itself known in a single sharp moment of there, that's probably him, they're here—
He keeps his face completely neutral.
He looks away from the van before anyone else can follow his eyeline, his mind running a mile a minute.
The hospital. The fresh rift that has opened on its south face, the edges of it still crackling and unstable in the air. Miller, his apparent “co-team leader” — a broad-shouldered man in his forties who runs a hardware store on weekdays and has taken to this particular civic duty far too personally — is already moving toward the entrance, hand raised to signal the group forward.
Chance looks at the hospital and runs through a list of all of Will’s friends, why would they be here?
The red-headed girl, Chance, suddenly remembers Lucas's girlfriend. She was in a coma, right?
So, they must have come out of hiding to see her. Will could possibly be in the hospital Miller is about to walk forty people directly into. He acts without thinking.
"Wait." His voice comes out flat and certain. The group stops and several heads turn. "Where are you going?" Chance asks.
Miller looks at him like the question is self-evident. "The rift opened at the hospital. If they're anywhere, they're inside."
"Or," Chance says, "that's exactly what they want you to think."
A pause.
He watches the group process this with uncertainty that moves through them — not much, just enough, the small doubt planted.
Chance looks around with the deliberate unhurried motion of someone doing actual tactical assessment, rather than lying out of his ass. He needs a direction. He needs something plausible. He scans the lot, the treeline, the service road that runs behind the building and curves east toward—
There.
The old access road to the maintenance yard. Exactly the kind of route someone trying to avoid main paths would use and also the total opposite direction.
He points.
"Look at the rift. It started at the hospital, yes — but look at the spread. The gradient is pulling that direction." He moves his finger slightly, southeast, confident. "If they went in through the hospital, it was a distraction. They're probably moving parallel by using the service access."
The group looks where he is pointing.
Miller squints. Chance holds his breath.
The logic is not airtight. But Chance is speaking with the precise measured authority of someone who is confident in his assessment, and he knows Miller probably wants to experience that expertise as well.
"Southeast approach," Miller says slowly, as if it was his idea.
Chance just nods.
"Okay, quick before they clear the maintenance yard," Miller says. "We move now and we cut them off."
The group pivots immediately.
Chance exhales — slow and controlled, not visible— and falls into step with the group, keeping his face forward and his pace even and his eyes off the van in the east lot.
Jesus Christ, He thinks, Will better make up for this with a thousand kisses when Chance finds him.
-
Chance’s group has covered maybe two hundred meters when the second rift opens. This one is smaller, but it makes the group stumble regardless. It is right at the corner of the hospital's ground floor — a window frame buckling outward, and the specific red light of it is unmistakable even from this distance.
Inside the building.
The group stops walking and watches the smaller corner of the hospital collapse.
Miller looks at the hospital. Looks at Chance. Looks back at the hospital with the expression of a man revising his conclusions.
"So it was a trap," he says slowly. "They wanted us to rush in there and kill us!” Chance shallows. “Good call, Lawson."
Chance nods and stares at the rift.
At the corner of the building where Will and whoever is with him are currently — he hopes — nowhere near the window.
Please, he thinks. Please just be okay.
"Yeah," he says, and his voice comes out steady and completely convincing. "Totally thought it was."
Miller nods and starts redirecting the group again, pulling out his radio, calling in the new position.
Chance looks at the hospital one more time. Then he turns his back on it and keeps walking.
It is the hardest thing he has ever done.
-
They ran in circles for an hour.
Chance knew they were running in circle, because he was the one engineering them. Picking up nothing but dead ends, blocked corridors, and the constant, distant rumble of the earth shifting.
His lungs burn as he navigates the suffocating, ash-choked streets of Hawkins.
He could feel Miller’s anxiety spiking beside him, the older man’s breathing getting shorter, his grip on his weapon tightening. Chance knew he had to shake him. He needed space, and more importantly, he needed a way to contact Will without anyone watching.
"We're wasting time," Chance muttered, pausing at a cracked intersection. "We need to cover more ground. Let's divide and do individual searches. I'll take this direction."
He gestured toward a branching path lined with tightly packed storefronts and abandoned houses.
Miller hesitated, but the logic—or the sheer desperation to find something useful—won out. He nodded sharply and moved toward the eastern block.
Chance didn't wait.
He sprinted down the avenue, his boots skidding over shattered glass. His original plan was simple: find a working vehicle, hotwire it, and book it straight back to Hawkins Community Hospital, praying to whatever gods were left that Will was actually there and alive.
But then, out of the corner of his eye, he spotted it.
An old, silver-plated payphone booth, miraculously still upright near the curb, its plastic cord dangling. Chance rushed toward it like a dying man finding water, his heart hammering against his ribs. He slammed his weight into the booth, snatched the heavy receiver, and began punching in the numbers he had burned into his memory over the last two weeks. He didn't even need coins; the line gave a faint, miraculous dial tone, a fluke of the town's failing power grid.
First, he dialed the WSQK radio station. Maybe they went back there to hide. He listened to the rhythmic, hollow ringing.
One. Two. Three.
Nothing. No answer.
He slammed the hook down and instantly dialed the Wheeler house. It rang out into an empty, echoing vacuum. No answer.
Finally, with sweat stinging his eyes, he dialed the last unknown number—the last place he had ever heard Will's voice from.
It rings.
Once.
He didn't expect it to work.
Twice.
He expected the same dead, mocking silence.
Once.
He presses the receiver so hard against his ear that the plastic edge cuts into the cartilage and he does not notice.
Four rings.
And then — the line connects.
Breathing. Real, present, live breathing on the other end, someone holding a receiver somewhere in Hawkins with their hand pressed flat against the mouthpiece like they are not sure they should answer.
"Hello—?"
The voice is barely above a whisper. Desperate and wound so tight it might break. But Chance would recognize Will’s voice anywhere and in any state.
Chance cannot speak. He is frozen, the receiver practically glued to his ear as the heavy, frantic sound of breathing filtered through the static.
"H-hi, is anyone there?"
Chance’s breath hitched, a massive, overwhelming wave of emotion wrapping around his throat so tight he could barely swallow. His chest heaved, his vision blurring as he gripped the rusted metal casing of the phone.
Is this real? Is he actually hearing this?
"Bunny?" Chance choked out, his voice thick and trembling before the reality hit him all at once. “Holy shit, is it actually you?”
On the other end of the line, a wet, breathless laugh broke through the wire, fragile but undeniable. “Yes— it’s me.”
Chance world, finally, finally stops at peace.
He is in the middle of a street in Hawkins with a team of vigilante hunters two blocks behind him, who could find him at any time. But Will's voice is in his ear for the first time in seventeen days and he does not care about any of the other things right now.
“Fuck, thank god.”
Right now he is just here, at this moment, with this.
“Where are you?” Chance demanded, his words tumbling over each other as he pressed his forehead against the glass of the booth. “Are you safe?”
“Yes." Will replied, his voice rushing to reassure him. “Y- you were worried?”
“Oh, you don't even know the half of it.” He breathes out, annoyed at the fact that Will thought any less.
“I’m— sorry I wasn't able to contact you. Uh— so much happened.” Will sighs.
“Yeah, that— I figured.” Chance managed a weak, emotional chuckle, the sheer relief making his knees weak.
Chance presses his forehead further against the payphone housing and breathes. “I missed you so much sweetheart."
“I missed you too—” Will started to breathe in, teary voice, when suddenly—
His voice was cut violently short, the phone ripped from his ear.
Without warning, the concrete beneath Chance’s boots buckled. The ground shifted beneath him.
And it took Chance, tumbling down.
.
.
.
.
.
.
The asphalt groaned with a deep, subterranean roar, and Chance completely lost his footing, his shoulder and head slamming hard against the metal frame of the booth.
"Fuck!" he shouts.
Down the street, front doors open. Neighbors step out onto their porches, looking at the ground with the expressions of people who have lived in Hawkins long enough to know what this means.
"Fuck," Chance says, realizing what is happening.
He stumbled out of the booth, phone still in hand, looking up into the sickly sky. A massive flock of black birds exploded from the treeline, flapping away in a frenzied panic.
The ground was shaking with a violent, rhythmic vibration—a terrifying movement Chance had seen twice before, just a few hours ago.
Over the receiver, Will's voice was loud with sudden fear. "Hey — hey! What happened?"
Chance blinked through the dust rising from the street, his survival instincts screaming as the air began to smell like sulfur and ozone.
Chance groaned, pressing a hand to his temple. "Ugh — just hit my head. The ground... I think another rift is opening up."
"What—?" Will says, alarmed. "No, no, no—!"
.
.
.
.
.
.
"I think another rift is opening up here."
Will's entire world collapses at those words.
There was a sharp suffocating silence on his end of the line. His voice cracked, completely consumed by an intense wild panic.
That is when he feels it too.
A feeling in the back of his neck, cold and sharp and familiar: the opening of the third rift, sure enough.
Then his mind and consciousness is slammed out of his body entirely.
He sees through a Demodog's eyes.
They are gathered just below the rift — a cluster of them, blood-hungry, pressing against the underside of the tear in the world, and something is different about them this time. Their intent is different. Not the collecting, not the herding, not Vecna's careful patient harvesting of the people he wants to keep.
This is hunger.
They are going to kill, Will understands, with cold absolute clarity. Not kidnap. Kill.
This can't be happening right now, he thinks, his heart in his throat. Not Chance. Not him — not him—
"Oh, but it is, William."
Vecna.
Cold and patient and intimate, Vecna’s voice is the way it always is, the way that makes Will's skin crawl because it knows him and has always known him and will never stop knowing him.
"We are so close to our goal now. How lucky — perhaps he will make the perfect final bait."
Will gasps back into his body.
The pharmacy storage room slams back into existence around him — the metal shelves, the broken glass, the faces of everyone turning toward him with expressions that range from alarmed to terrified. His knees have buckled slightly. Someone has grabbed his arm. He does not register who.
He clutches the receiver.
"No, no. " he says. Out loud. To Vecna, to the room, to himself. "No."
He slams back to the phone with everything he has.
"Where are you?! How far are you from it?!"
Chance's reply comes entirely too confused, the voice of someone who does not yet understand what is coming for him:
"...What? Will, what's wrong?"
"How far is the rift from you?! Answer me!"
"Like... right in front of me," Chance shouted over the rising rumble of the earth. "I'm on Sixth, Maple Street—"
Will’s heart stops. "You need to get out of there right now! Please just—"
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“You—" split-second static started to violently buzz through the wire. "right—" It was tearing Will's voice to shreds. "Come out— of" buzz... buzz…
Chance blinked through the dust rising from the street, his survival instincts screaming as the air began to smell like sulfur and ozone
"What?! I can't hear you, Will!" Chance yelled, losing his mind as he frantically banged his fist against the metal coin box.
Suddenly, a massive surge of white-hot electricity shot straight through the plastic receiver, frying the internal wires and violently burning the palm of Chance's hand. He cried out, dropping the smoking phone as it clattered against the concrete, completely dead.
There was no time to think about the pain.
The world rumbled a second time — a deafening explosive tear ripping right down the center of Maple Street. The asphalt tore open like paper, a blinding glowing purple fracture exploding upward, swallowing cars and streetlamps whole.
Chance stumbled backward, his boots skidding on the trembling earth as the ground began to slip away into the abyss. He turned and ran for his absolute life, the heat of the rift burning against his back.
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Will heard the sharp, agonizing click of the line snapping dead. The receiver slipped from his white-knuckled grip and hit the linoleum, a useless piece of melting plastic.
The silence that followed was suffocating. His knees buckled, and he sank to the floor, grabbing the base of the telephone and ripping it violently off the cinderblock wall.
With a broken, frantic sob, he slammed the it straight back into the wall. "Fuck—!"
Hands clamped firmly onto his shoulders, anchoring him through the panic.
"Will!”
Will blinked, his chest heaving, his vision blurred with tears as he finally registered who was crouching down in front of him.
Mike’s face was etched with pure, desperate worry, his grip tight.
"What's wrong? Who was that?" Mike asked, his voice low and urgent.
Will looked up at him, the hot tears finally spilling over his cheeks, his eyes raw with the sudden, agonizing terror of losing someone else he— "The third rift... it has opened," he choked out, his voice a broken, trembling whisper. "And Vecna is— fuck."
This is all because of him!
He wiped his face aggressively with the back of his hand, the sheer terror of the timeline instantly hardening into a frantic, reckless adrenaline. He didn't have time to spiral right now. He didn't have a single second to sit here and process this. He had to move now.
Will scrambled to his feet, his mind running a mile a minute, discarding everything but the urgent image of Maple Street tearing apart. "I need to go there. I— where are the others?"
The heavy door slammed open, and Robin and Hopper stepped back into the cramped pharmacy storage room. Will hadn't even noticed when they left.
"Demos are clear, but we have another problem," Robin said, her voice tight with panic as she clutched the radio. "Joyce said they can't connect with the guys in the Upside Down anymore. It's been too long."
"What?" Lucas breathed, his grip tightening protectively around Max’s hand on the bed. "Fuck."
Hopper nodded sharply, his hand resting on his holster. "We need to get to WSQK and try with a stronger signal. Let's get going."
"No— I need to go somewhere else," Will said, the panic in his chest making him sound completely detached, entirely focused on a single mission.
"What?" Hopper’s brow furrowed, his authoritative voice cutting through the room. "Where?"
"Apparently the third rift opened—" Mike started to explain, turning toward Hopper, but Will was already tuning them out. He ignored their questions entirely, dodging their protests like incoming bullets as he scanned the room, his eyes locking onto the one person.
He walked towards Vickie, his chest heaving. "Do you have a car here?"
Vickie blinked, completely caught off guard by the sudden intensity radiating off him. "Huh? What?"
"You drove here, right? I need the keys," Will demanded, his voice dropping into a desperate, unyielding rasp.
"Its... it's my dad's pickup truck, but uh—" Vickie stammered, frantically reaching into her jacket pocket and pulling out a heavy metal key ring.
Will snatched them from her hand before she could even finish the sentence, his body already turning toward the exit. "I'll meet you guys directly at the WSQK."
"Will!" Jonathan’s voice boomed over the noise of the room, his long strides easily catching up as Will bolted past the threshold. "I'm coming with you."
Will just nodded, he didn't even turn around to look at his brother, running out. The terrifying scent of ozone and the phantom weight of Chance's voice crying out into the static was the only thing driving his legs forward.
"Wait, then I'll also—" Mike started, taking a step toward the corridor, but the heavy fire door slammed completely shut in his face.
Will vaulted down the hospital corridor, the heavy keys clinking wildly in his hand, with Jonathan hot on his heels as they tore out into the sickly, ash-choked Hawkins night.
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"6th Maple Street," Will breathes out, his knuckles turning white.
Jonathan gets into the driver's seat and turns the steering wheel as he slammed his foot onto the gas pedal. The pickup truck’s engine roared to life, tires screeching violently against the cracked hospital asphalt.
The truck tore down the abandoned avenue, fishtailing wildly around a stalled sedan. The air outside was turning thick and hazy, a localized storm of red lightning and ash beginning to churn directly over the eastern side of town.
Jonathan glanced sideways, his eyes darting from the trembling road to his younger brother. Will was vibrating with a terrifying, breathless anxiety, his hands gripping the dashboard so tightly the bones showed through his skin.
"Will," Jonathan said, the realization finally clicking in his chest as he watched the sheer, unadulterated panic rolling off him. "Is it him? The boy?"
Will looked over at his brother, the dam finally breaking. Heavy, hot tears spilled over his eyelashes, tracking clean lines through the grime on his face. His voice came out as a fragile, agonizing choke.
"I think Vecna is targeting him because of me, Jon," Will wept, his chest heaving as the phantom, low register of One's voice echoed in his ears. "And the demos.... They felt so…blood thirsty, like they were planning to kill."
Jonathan’s expression instantly hardened, a fierce, protective older-brother instinct locking into place. He didn't ask questions. He didn't hesitate. He just reached over, gave Will’s shoulder a heavy, grounding squeeze, and slammed the accelerator completely to the floor.
"No, they won't," Jonathan growled, his jaw set as he leaned into the wheel, completely locking in.
The truck flew over the buckling asphalt, the engine straining as they rocketed toward the coordinates. The five minutes from the hospital to Maple Street felt like five lifetimes, the air growing progressively hotter, smelling violently of ozone, sulfur, and burning rubber.
They rounded the final corner, and the sheer horror of the situation slammed into view.
Right in the middle of the residential block, the world was literally tearing itself apart. A massive, jagged, glowing purple fracture had ripped straight through the center of the road, the earth slipping away into a bottomless, pulsing abyss of vines and smoke. Houses on either side were rattling on their foundations, their windows shattering outward as the third rift roared to life.
This rift was massively bigger than any they had seen till now. It wasn't just a crack; it was a wide, roaring canyon of shifting psychic energy, bleeding a toxic red glow into the sky.
Jonathan slammed the truck to a violent halt, the tires skidding on loose gravel. Before the vehicle could even fully stop, Will threw his door open and lunged out into the chaos. The air was thick with smoke, stinging his eyes and burning his throat, but he didn't care.
"Chance!" Will screamed, his voice cracking with a terrifying desperation. He ran forward blindly, his eyes scanning the collapsing sidewalks, the burning cars, the panicked crows. "Chance! Where are you?!"
Nothing. Just the deafening roar of the earth splitting. Will's chest tightened into a knot of pure panic, his breath coming in shallow, ragged gasps. No, no, no, please, God, no—
"Will!"
The shout pierced through the rumble. Will’s head snapped toward the far side of the street. Through the haze of sulfur and dust, they spotted him. Chance was standing a bit away from the main fracture, his face pale and smudged with ash, clutching the payphone booth for support.
For a single split-second, everything seemed to move in slow motion. Will's mouth gasped open, a brilliant, overwhelming wave of relief crashing through him. He didn't think. He just bolted across the crumbling asphalt, pushing his legs as fast as they could possibly go to bridge the distance between them.
But the universe didn't give them that second.
From the shadows of a collapsing porch right behind Chance, a massive Demogorgon lunged out, heading straight for Chance.
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It happened in agonizing, slow-motion horror.
Will’s eyes went wide as he screamed a warning that was swallowed by the roar of the rift. Chance started to turn around at the sound of the skittering claws, his eyes widening in sudden, paralyzing shock—and then the beast struck.
With a sickening tear, the Demogorgon’s razor-sharp claws slashed deeply across Chance’s shoulder.
Dark, heavy blood immediately saturated his shirt, splattering against the pavement. Chance let out a sharp, strangled cry of pure agony, his legs instantly giving out as he dropped heavily to the concrete, clutching his mangled shoulder in pain.
The creature hissed, its petal-like face unfolding as it reared back to strike him a second time, aiming directly for his throat.
"No!" Will shrieked.
Driven by pure, unadulterated instinct, Will threw himself across the remaining distance, putting his own body directly between the monster and Chance. He closed his eyes and desperately tried to connect to the hivemind through his exhausted state. He braced for the impact, waiting for the teeth to tear into his own flesh.
But even before he was able to connect, he heard the stall.
Will opened his eyes, trembling.
The Demo had stopped dead in its tracks, just inches from Will's face. Its jaw was snapping, its heavy muscles tensed, but it was frozen, tilting its head in a bizarre, inquisitive rhythm. Will stared at it, completely confused, his chest heaving.
He hadn't used his powers. He hadn't focused his mind or raised his hands. It had just... stopped all by itself.
Behind him, Chance gasped for air, his face twisted in a mask of agony and utter disbelief. "What the... what the fuck is that?!"
But there was absolutely no time to think.
With a vicious, wet snarl, the Demogorgon bypassed Will's torso completely, lunging low. Its jaws clamped hard around the denim of Will’s pant leg, its teeth grazing his ankle.
Before Will could even yell, the creature threw its weight backward, violently dragging him across the asphalt—pulling him directly toward the edge of the roaring red rift.
"Will!" Jonathan shouted, sprinting into the fray.
Despite the blinding, white-hot agony wrecking his shoulder, Chance’s protective instincts overrode the pain. He lunged forward on his knees, his good arm locking around Will's torso, anchoring him to the ground.
The demo pulled harder.
“Fucking Hell!” Chance screamed, as he struggled to pull Will closer. A pained growl tore his throat as he reached back with his injured arm, and grabbed a plain combat knife from his jacket. With a measured swing, he threw it directly at the monster, embedding it into the side of one of its face’s petals. The demo roared in agony, but did not release his grip on Will. Soon, Jonathan reached them and lunged forward. He threw his weight into a brutal kick, slamming his boot directly into the Demodog's snout.
The creature finally released its grip with an angry hiss, tumbling backward into the dust.
"Truck! Let's go, go, go!" Will gasped, scrambling up and hauling a semi-conscious Chance onto his feet, Jonathan on his other side.
They ran.
Jonathan sprinted ahead, hopping straight into the driver’s seat and throwing the truck into reverse. Will and Chance didn't have time to open the doors; they just threw themselves over the metal tailgate, hopping directly into the open trunk of the pickup.
Jonathan slammed his foot onto the gas, the truck fishtailing violently as it rocketed away from Maple Street.
In the back, Chance completely slumped over against the metal wall, his face stark white as the adrenaline began to fade, leaving only the raw, agonizing trauma of the wound on his shoulder.
He let out a breathless, guttural scream directly up at the ash-choked sky, his body shaking uncontrollably as he pressed his hand against the heavy, pumping blood on his shoulder.
There was so much blood. It was pooling fast against the cold, corrugated metal of the pickup bed, staining Will’s hands a horrific, slick crimson. Panic surged through Will's veins, sharp and blinding, but his instincts kicked into overdrive. He spotted an old denim jacket discarded in the corner of the truck bed, grabbed it, and slammed it down over Chance’s shredded shoulder, pressing his entire body weight into the wound to compress it.
“Chance, look at me. Hey, hey!”
Chance’s head lolled back against the side of the truck, his eyelids heavy, fluttering shut as the world grayed out.
“No, no, no. Baby, please. Look here, stay with me,” Will begged, his voice cracking into a frantic sob. He let go of the jacket with one hand, reaching up to cup Chance’s cheek, his fingers leaving dark, desperate streaks of blood across Chance's pale skin.
Chance was slipping fast, drifting into the cold, weightless fog of severe blood loss. His breathing was shallow, his movements agonizingly slow as he weakly lifted his good arm, his fingers reaching blindly into the air between them. “Will... You...”
“I’m here, I’m here, yeah?” Will sobbed, leaning down closer, his tears hot as they dripped onto Chance’s cheek. “I’m right here, baby. Please, please stay with me.”
Chance gave a weak, barely perceptible nod, his gaze fixed entirely on Will.
The truck hit a massive pothole, rattling violently as Jonathan pushed the engine to its absolute limit. Will braced his knees against the metal floor, screaming over the roar of the wind. “Jonathan, faster!!”
Up in the cab, Jonathan didn't answer, but the truck surged forward with a desperate, metallic groan, the speed forcing the ash and wind to whip wildly around them.
Chance stared up into Will’s eyes, tracking the raw agony, the grime, and how bloodshot and red they were from days of crying and fighting. With the last of his fading strength, Chance pressed his trembling hand over Will's cheek, his thumb brushing just under Will’s eye. “Am I... dreaming you? Is this a dream? What was—”
A vicious, wet growl from away cut his slurred words short.
Will’s heart sank as he looked over Chance’s shoulder. Through his peripheral vision, sprinting straight out of the sulfurous smoke, the three Demodogs hit the main road. Their heavy, mutated claws clicked in a terrifyingly fast cadence against the asphalt, their powerful hind legs bounding in perfect, synchronized rhythm as they closed the gap behind the speeding truck.
They were catching up too fast. The leader of the trio lunged forward, its petals unfolding to reveal rows of needle-sharp teeth as its front paws gripped the edge of the tailgate, inches from Chance’s head.
Will didn't even think. He didn't have time to be afraid.
With a fierce, protective rage exploding in his chest, Will let go of the jacket and whipped his body around. He shoved his hand straight out toward the roaring beasts, his fingers splayed wide.
Stop.
A shockwave of invisible, crushing psychic force blasted from his palm. The air violently rippled, the sudden, immense gravity catching the Demodogs mid-air. Chance watched in absolute, paralyzed awe as Will’s eyes went sorcerer white, eyes rolling to the back of his head. He finally looked up to see the monsters frozen mid air as the car chased past them and then, did a double take at Will’s outstretched hand, blinking in shock. “W-woah—”
Will tried to summon the force to snap the demos, but channeling it was harder than usual. At first, he thought it was because he had exhausted himself back at the hospital, but then the cold truth hit him—it was Vecna.
He was crawling inside his mind again, actively trying to suppress him, and clawing at his grip at the Demodogs. But Will ignored the phantom pressure and pushed through the dark, throwing everything he had into the strike.
A screamed and clenched his hand back in.
With a sickening, synchronized crack, the joints and limbs of all three creatures snapped outward. The monsters let out choked, strangled yelps as they were thrown violently back onto the pavement, their broken bodies skidding uselessly into the dirt, entirely unable to continue the chase.
Will pulled his hand back, his chest heaving, a thin line of dark blood instantly spilling from his left nostril. Chance lay beneath him, his chest barely moving, staring up at Will through a haze of shock and wonder. The impossible display burned into his failing vision.
“I’m... going crazy...” he whispered, his voice dangerously slurred, his hand dropping from Will’s face as his eyes began to shut close, his head slumped limply against Will's chest.
“No, no! Baby, just a few more seconds!” Will cried out, spinning back around to slam his hands over the bleeding shoulder again.
He looked up through the rear window of the cab and saw the towering, rusted radio antenna of WSQK looming ahead. Jonathan slammed on the brakes, sending the truck into a hard, sliding park right outside the station doors.
The moment the truck slammed into park outside the station doors, only adrenaline was keeping Chance upright by a thread.
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The journey into WSQK happened in fragments.
Jonathan’s voice, low and urgent, guiding them through the entrance. Joyce appeared from somewhere in the hallway, her face doing several things at once as she took in the blood and the new visitor. El’s hand on Will’s arm, gripping with a steadiness that contradicted the frantic expression on her face completely.
The Squawk was warm and bright when they finally got Chance inside and on a long sofa, careful not to pain his shoulder more.
"Chance," Will's voice was close, breathless. "Promise to stay with me while we look at your wound. Can you do that for me?"
"'m with you," Chance muttered, his boots dragging slightly against the linoleum. "I'm looking right at you."
"I know. Keep doing that."
"Easy," Chance said, his vision swimming but his focus locked on the boy beside him. "You're very easy to look at."
Someone—Jonathan, probably—made a low, stressed sound at that in the background.
Joyce appeared at Will's elbow with a makeshift medical kit— Will was already moving, his hands going to the wound with a focused efficiency Chance had only seen at the barn at midnight. He pressed medical cloth down and Chance stared at his hands in fascination.
“Will—,” He shifts, gazing at where Will and a woman that looks exactly like Will are sitting beside each other.
“I need you to be still, okay?" Will said, his voice trembling but his hands steady.
"Sorry. You're just—your eyes. They were—" He blinked, trying to clear his vision. Everything was so blurry. The Squawk ceiling. Will's face. "And those…things—"
“I’ll explain everything if you let me clean this wound properly, okay?” Will's jaw worked, a muscle tightening in his cheek, applying another layer of gauze. “Like you always do."
"Mhmm," Chance agreed, and tried his best to freeze. He wants to just go to sleep. “It hurts.”
Joyce reaches over and grabs a blister pack of painkillers. Will's hand shot out before she could even pop a pill from the foil.
"No—” He slapped the package straight out of her hand, and she stared down at him with an expression of genuine, stunned surprise.
"He's allergic to ibuprofen," Will said fiercely, not even looking up. He turned toward Joyce without a single pause. "Do we have acetaminophen? Or naproxen?"
Joyce blinked, caught completely off guard. "I—yes, I think—"
"Please," Will said.
She went and came back a moment later with the acetaminophen and a water bottle, handing the pills directly to Will without a word. Then, she turned to stare at the bleeding stranger on the sofa.
"Will, who is—" she started, because she was also still his mother.
"Mom." His voice went incredibly gentle but wreaked, softening just for her. "I will explain everything. I just need to make sure he's okay first. Please help me make sure he's okay?"
She nodded, and went to feed the water to Chance as he took the painkiller Will had given him.
Chance finally closed his eyes, the worst of the burning in his shoulder turning into a dull, heavy throb. The room was warm. Will's hand was still resting against his face, a grounding, solid warmth. He could hear them talking about stitches nearby, could hear Jonathan's heavy breathing, could hear the general ambient hum of everything around him going soft and buzzy.
He was almost all the way under, drifting into the safe dark, when he heard the heavy front door click open. Footsteps. Several sets of them. The air in the room shifted the way rooms shift when a crowd arrives.
Chance forces himself to keep one eye open just for another second and looks.
There they were—Will's friends and family, everyone mentioned on the posters, filing into the main broadcast room in various states of breathless, disheveled panic, taking in the bloody scene on the sofa with the exact expressions of shock.
Chance recognized some of them: Dustin, Lucas and his girlfriend on a wheel chair. But there, standing at the very front, was also the worst person in the entire universe—
Mike Wheeler.
Fucking hell.
Chance let his eyes shut and fell into slumber.