Chapter Text
Will drifts in and out of dreams that revolve around the Upside Down. There are a thousand variations, but they are all cold, and dark, and lonely.
In one common version, he wakes alone in the Castle Byers with black water soaking his shoes and rotting ivy growing up the walls like perverse Christmas lights. The pair of patterned pajama pants, dotted with little R2-D2s, does nothing to keep out the cold that creeps through the blanket that blows in the doorway and prickles on the back of Will's neck, seeping through a thin layer of skin to race through his veins, a parasitical infection that takes root in his heart.
Something is inside of his throat.
Will tries to cough, but blood comes out instead, pooling in the palm of his hand and running quick down his chin and staining. He is surprised by how warm it is, and for a moment Will almost savors it in shocked silence, before something rips through him from the inside and the coughs rack his body as it tears at him, pulling itself out by whatever means necessary.
When the first sluglike sharp-toothed creature oozes out of his mouth with a plop, he squeezes his eyes shut, refuses to look. His mouth tastes of something sweet gone terribly bitter, full of salt and slime, and for a moment he almost thinks it's over (stupid, it's never over, someone who sounds suspiciously like Lonnie whispers) and then another rips its way up his throat and out his mouth with surprising speed.
He keeps his eyes closed throughout it all but he can feel the sickness even after the last of the slugs are gone. Will knows if he opened his eyes he'd see slowly darkening lines crawling up his arms and creeping cross his chest. Will is full of sickness, contamination, nuclear waste, he's lived so long in this cold wasteland that it has been planted in his internal organs and grown there, a weed that cannot be uprooted, slowly absorbing his lungs, his heart, the obscure corners of his spleen into this trauma that has defined him.
He is rotting. Dead boy walking. The kids at school are right to call him Zombie Boy, because he is something twisted and ugly, a lightning-struck tree that no longer grows, dead but still upright. Only a stiff breeze, the feeling of a cold breeze, the smell of mold, and he'll become nothing more than rotten meat, overripe for the taking.
Will can see the headlines now: LOCAL FAIRY FOUND DEAD, COMMUNITY REJOICES.
In other dreams, he is running, bare feet sinking into the sinkhole marshy ground. He can't breathe for fear and the way his lungs burn from the effort of continued moving. Behind him, Barbara Holland pants, glasses grimy with weeks of dirt. Their scent bleeds into the wind, the only warm thing left in this land of slow, drawn-out death left out in the rain for the vultures and the flies.
Hunted, the trees whisper, branches catching on his clothes, pulling him back for a moment- they whip across Will's face, reopen old cuts and press on new bruises. Even the landscape is a predator, here.
Hunted, they whisper. And he runs.
There is a cry of animal joy from behind him, shrieking strangely, the way vultures do, and he allows himself a glance behind him just in time to see Barb stumble, a dog-like creature arrayed with teeth that only a few days ago had been the size of Will's fist latches on to the tender area behind Barb's knee and bites. She gasps (not enough air to scream, Will thinks as he stares in horrified fascination, feet still pounding at the ground) and stumbles, then falls with a gentle splash.
He doesn't watch the monsters get her, but he hears the growling, the screaming, the sounds of tearing flesh, and the way Barb's screams turn into moans and gurgles and then, slowly, silence.
In a way, that is much, much worse.
Will runs and whispers the few bits and pieces of prayer that he still remembers, the words of the Shema Yisrael heavy on his tongue, tied into knots. Please, he begs silently. Please. Please. Don't let them catch up to me.
It's a few minutes into the dream that his luck runs out.
There's a large tree root along a ridge that he doesn't spot in time, and it catches under his ankle. He goes down hard, the wind knocked out of him, and something twists in his left ankle in a way that he knows does not bode well- it won't support his weight, he knows it won't.
Behind him, one of the dogs howls in gleeful victory. Will pulls at a thick length of wood, intending to use it as a walking stick, and looks up to meet the eyes of a girl he's never seen before.
She's skinny and short (but taller than him, though that's not saying much) and the knees of her loose, oversized overalls are ripped. The cuffs are rolled up four times, suprisingly white compared to her dirty falling-apart-at-the-seams sneakers. Her hair is a frizzy, ungroomed halo round her head, and though she is by all appearances entirely harmless, she is the most intimidating person that Will has ever seen in his life.
She offers him a hand up, and he takes it, grateful. When he pulls himself to his feet, leaning heavily on the walking stick, she has already diverted her attention from him to the army of dogs headed straight for them.
The girl reaches out, splays her fingers out in the air, and her eyes go squinty and sharp and cosmic, as if she has each and every atom in the universe memorized by sight alone, and pulls, somehow.
The dogs howl, but not in victory. They slump, oozing something white at the mouth and black at their seams, and stop moving, and the girl smiles, satisfied, as blood drips down her face and stains her once-white shoes.
A loose sleeve of her green flannel flaps in the wind, unbuttoned, and Will catches sight of the tattoo that states 011 with the precise, neat handwriting of someone who does not think they are tattooing a human being.
His first thought is of his grandmother, and the blue ink on her own wrist. His second thought is Eleven.
A hundred thousand questions spring to his lips, chattering between his teeth- questions like are you still alive and are you okay and when are you coming back, are you coming back, are you safe out wherever you are? Will you come home someday? Did something happen while I was gone, because everything is different in a way I can't explain, did we all change without noticing it? Will you be our mage again?
He doesn't need to ask them. Between them there is an understanding: the two of them, having walked through the Underworld and come out whole together, have no need for words. He sees the favor she's asking with her eyes: keep Mike safe for me?
Will reaches out, clasps her hand, and that is an answer in itself; no words could capture it. She smiles, bright and childlike as any of the kids that Will knows, and presses something small and hard into his palm.
Around the edges of his vision the horizon shivers and ripples and he opens his eyes to the sunlight streaming through the window of his bedroom.
It wasn't just a dream- Will knows that. He'd know that even if he hadn't woken with his fist closed tight around a brightly colored red bottle cap emblazoned with 11 in white lettering, clutched so tight it leaves an imprint on his skin.
He stops fearing the nightmare after that. After all, how can he be afraid when he's not alone?
Most nights, Mike dreams of Eleven.
There are nightmares, more often than not. In them, Mike sees her friends die a thousand ways. Sometimes, it is individually- Will, slowly rotting as he asks Mike why she didn't save him, blood bubbling at his mouth when he coughs, or Lucas, being taken down by a sniper in a tree as he runs, screaming into his walkie-talkie about how the bad men are coming. Dustin bleeding as Mike watches in abject horror, Troy pulling out his teeth one by one. Eleven, screaming Mike's name as the Demogorgon tears her apart.
Most nights it's about that last night, the last time that Mike saw Eleven alive.
There are a thousand variations. The bad men kill Eleven, put her down like an animal, and then they lock the doors to the middle school and light matches to the gasoline thtat has been poured on the floor. First it is smoke, and then it is heat, fire, ash, screaming as they are consumed, fists banging against the doors until it is over.
Or it's the Demogorgon again. It's always so much bigger than Mike remembers it- so large that it could fit a car inside of its jaws. Logically she knows that it wasn't much bigger than a human being, but her dreams never seem to remember that. When it opens its thousand-teethed flower mouth Mike sees a crushed camera and a revolver, the spikes of a weaponized baseball bat like chewed wood and metal between bloodied teeth. A cracked glass compass, the strap of a wristrocket, scraps of fabric from a pink dress.
In the kind dreams Mike is swallowed up quickly. In the cruel ones, it doesn't seem to ever end.
The worst of her nightmares have no Bad Men, or Demogorgons, or dying friends. They begin normally, as if they aren't a dream at all, except that Mike's closet is full of dresses and her drawers are replete with blouses and skirts in her size. They feel strange on her skin when she puts them on, her hands pulling with the zippers with a practiced tug.
In science class, El sits at the desk to her left, and their heads touch as they peer over the work Mr. Clarke assigns them, shoulders bent to the desks. El's hair is longer than it was when Mike last saw her, curling boyishly around the tips of her ears. She wears a white shirt that's at least two sizes too big and needs to be tucked into her jeans, the short sleeves billowy around her arms. Miss Hopper, Mr. Clarke asks when El raises her hand to give one word answers, and no one seems to be surprised by her presence, not even Mike except in the back of her head.
At lunch Will and Lucas banter back and forth, ribbing each other gently in a way that is almost flirting, similar to the way that Nancy and Steve used to flirt. At one point, Dustin jumps in and the conversation turns to his latest gym class failure, something that is a source of contention for Dustin and laughing for the rest of them.
"You guys never laugh at Mike, and she's the one who managed to get a sixteen-minute mile," Dustin protests at one point, when Lucas starts recounting the times that Dustin somehow managed to trip over a soccer ball and score for the other team. There have been numerous incidents. Dustin maintains that he's been cursed. The rest of them think he's just a lousy sport.
"Yeah, but at least Mike owns her inability to succeed at anything athletic," Lucas retorts, which dissolves into a whole new line of conversation. Will laughs from across the table, bright and happy and content in his own skin the way he never is in real life. Next to her, El's hand slips into Mike's like it belongs there as El smiles at her, half-secret and half-laughing. The sun couldn't outshine Mike's heart at that moment, she thinks.
She never knows what's coming.
It happens after a Science Club meeting that Mike stayed behind for, talking animatedly about space and stars and radio waves with Mr. Clarke. Everyone else is going home, and Mike's packing up her books into her backpack when someone shoves her, hard, and she hits the floor as they jeer, yell faggot like it's her name, kick at her ribs as she tries to roll over and get to her knees, at least, bloody her nose, relentless, to the point that she can't help the tears that spill out when they punctuate a kick with another slur.
They get bored eventually, and Mike kneels on the linoleum, teary-eyed and bleeding as her ribs ache with the formation of fresh purple bruises, staring at her reflection in the polished hall floor. She wakes with a lump in her throat.
It is a reminder that even if she gets everything she wants there will always be a catch.
She gets fragments of dreams, too, sometimes, so quick and half-remembered that she can barely even call them dreams. Bloody noses and whispered promises against the shell of Mike's ear, as fresh as if it happened yesterday. El's callused hand in hers, the crunch of leaves underneath their feet as they walk along the train tracks.
But sometimes- not often but sometimes- the dreams are good. Mike dreams of Eleven laughing as they climb trees, shoes gripping the bark of the trunk, or the quiet reverence of watching Star Wars together, shoulders leaning against each other, popcorn forgotten in their laps.
Her favorite dream, the one she holds onto long after waking: the two of them riding their bike together in the early morning dawn of suburbia, sky blushed pink and grass trembling with dew, the hem of Nancy's old dress flapping around Mike's knees as they reach the crest of a hill.
Against her back, El wraps her arms around Mike's waist, and they plunge down, both laughing with the thrill of the wind that rushes by so fast it feels like they could capture the sky in their mouths if they tried, both of them full of an infinite joy as they hurtle into the dawn.
It's a good dream. When Mike wakes, she swears she can still feel El's lips on the place that they'd touched her neck.
Back in the lab, they didn't let Eleven dream. When she slept, they forced her to push at the edges of the dream until it cracked open and she found herself in the dark imitation of the waking world.
"You are a marvel, 011," Papa would tell her, petting the stubby buzz of her hair when she wept into the crease of his grey leg after a punishment. "We need to see what you can do."
During her sleep she wanders the black water world. Nowadays, there are no more monsters, or maybe it's that she wasn't seeking them out like she had in the lab, or back at Mike's. Hopper says she's safe now- no more fighting. She believes him, mostly, but she still slips through the dark cracks of her dreams into the Upside Down and walks, the only sound the splashing of her feet.
El wanders the Upside Down in her sleep because it has become habit, after so many years- or maybe it's muscle memory. Maybe it's the part of her brain that can't accept that Papa was gone and she's safe, the voice whispering in her ear even when she tries to rationalize it. The voice asks but remember the cattle prod? The voice needles, remember the blood? The voice grips her by the shoulder and pleads, but don't you remember the bruising, the electrodes and the rip of duct tape, the hours of treading water? Remember the closet?
Do you, 011?
It doesn't matter why she found herself stepping into the Upside Down before she'd even remembered it was a dream, she tells herself firmly. Instinct or habit or fear, it's all the same. She'd do it regardless. After all, every night El steps into the blackness and walks through the empty void in search of somewhere to go, something to visit.
Someone she missed.
Many nights she's drawn to the Byers household even though she'd never really met anyone in there except Joyce, only briefly- and Joyce isn't the person she stops to visit anyways. Eleven sits next to Will on his lonely bed as he snores and feels herself reach out, the copper knob cool underneath her fingertips. The door in Will's mind opens into his dreams and when she could she stepped through.
Most nights the door is locked. Eleven can't bear to watch those nights- they are full of tangled sheets and sweat and sobbing for breath, begging nonono and it is too close for comfort, too close to her own closet fits, the hours of punishment. She doesn't stay.
When the door is open, though, she slips through, into the Upside Down of Will's dreams, the one full of rotting ivy crawling up buildings like the tendrils of some eldritch horror, where coldness seeps through Eleven's heart. This is the Upside Down as it is, the one that has open doorways in labratories and underground tunnels as opposed to the mental ones that Eleven is able to touch.
It is awful. Eleven can hardly bear it for a few hours. She can't imagine staying for weeks.
There are ugly dog things that live in the place where Hawkins' woods would be, and Eleven followed them to him the first dream that they shared. He was so cold when their hands met, so incredulous at her presence, and she killed the demodogs the first night. All nights after, she keeps him quiet company in the hiding place that he and his older sister built.
He doesn't ask questions like "are you still alive" or "where are you" and she doesn't tell him to make sure that he and Mike and Dustin and Lucas keep safe until she can come home. They don't really need to.
Other nights, she checks in on Lucas and Dustin. Most nights their doors are open and she walks through the thresholds, discreete in the dark, a figure in the trees, a comforting balm just out of sight.
Most often, though, she visits Mike's dreams.
There are so many of them. Nightmares with barred doors on the nights that Mike calls her by name, nights that she can barely keep herself from breaking down the door when Mike cries out despite the memory of the old man gibbering madly, unable to speak, when she was six and didn't know her own strength. There are kaleidoscope dreams that shine rainbow with memories and fragment when she touches them.
Her favorite dreams to enter are the happy ones where Mike sees her. She never recognizes El- that's something that only Will is truly capable of, as far as she knows- and instead El's presence is entirely natural. They climb trees and Eleven tugs the ribbons in Mike's hair, laughing- they watch strange stories about a war in outer space, where nebulas shine in the background of fights with swords of light, and hold hands the whole way through.
The dream that's by far Eleven's favorite is short and full of exhilaration. There is a hill, and their bike, and Eleven is flush against Mike's back, listening to the thrum of Mike's heart through the pink cotton of her dress. Mike whoops, her voice joyous and loud and unapologetic against the early pink dawn in the middle of suburbia and it is everything that they should have already gotten, everything they should already have, everything that Eleven is holding onto. It is the future. It is everything that Eleven is determined to find again. Eleven presses her face to Mike's neck as she holds back tears and thinks as loud as she can, I'm coming home. Wait for me.
When she wakes, Eleven sits in bed for a few minutes and tries to hold onto every detail of the dream. The way Mike's dress felt in the circle of Eleven's arms around Mike's waist, the sound of their heartbeats, the pink hope of the whole dream- the sky, the cold bike, the hair tie wrapped around Mike's wrist, the ease of the two of them back together again.
Just one more moment, she tells herself. One more moment of us again.
It fades so quickly, the memory of Mike's voice overtaken by the sizzling of Hopper cooking pancakes in the kitchen and the static of the radio in the den, the feeling of Mike's neck against her lips replaced by the fuzzy texture of the blankets.
Eleven sighs. Swings her legs out of the bed and stands on the hardwood floor.
She thinks, I'm coming home. Wait for me.