An independent and selective RP blog for Henry Creel of Stranger Things. Unaffiliated with any fandom or RPC. Highly sporadic activity. AU based with influence from personal headcanons. Minors and personals DNI. Freed by โ๐๐๐ถ๐๐๐พ๐. 30+. He/him pronouns. Please read my carrd before interacting.
๐๐๐๐๐ & ๐ธ๐๐๐
๐ณ๐ด๐ฐ๐ป๐ธ๐ฝ๐ถ ๐ธ๐ฝ ; Unseen horror, cry for the devil, memory turned malevolent, the corruption of innocence, a mirror of suffering, used to be a sweet kid and neither living nor dead. || ๐ณ๐ณ๐ณ๐ฝ๐ด, you have been warned. Stranger Things is horror based media. Cosmic, religious and sci fi horror are massive aspects of my lore and portrayal and wont be held back or censored here. Do not follow me if this makes you uncomfortable.
Firstcure / Lastcurse โ Patty Newby + William Byers โฆ Noxaecor โ Dr Martin Brenner + Chris Redfield + OCs.
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Henry is truly a muse that I would like to completely remove from canon and re-render as an OC, and its funny because when I started writing him, he WAS "removed from canon" and ""written as an OC"" or so said the entire fandom, and then a year or so later, Miss Trefry steals all my shit (lh), and the first Shadow comes into being and suddenly hes no longer a "crazy OC take" and instead COMPLETELY canon (which I still have very mixed feelings about personally for a number of reasons LOL) BUT then the Doofus brothers come in and somehow manage to shit on all of that by completely retconning almost everything important for season 5 and dropping almost all the established lore, so now hes kind of back to being an OC take of the character except not because if those two idiots did ANYTHING the right way my own lore would be very much canon to the show, and far superior to the bizarre chatGTP slop we ended up with.
Which leaves me in this awkward weird limbo where, yeah, my canon and lore is very canon but at the same time completely not canon at all and I really hate how completely stuck and its made me feel with Henry as a character because he was already like a character almost no one understood or cared about, but he's also still highly recognisable as that one character from a massive series that fucked up catastrophically and no one really wants to touch it or go into it.
It's kinda like he's the way superior "book version" of himself, except the book doesn't really exist anywhere outside of my own insane fan ramblings, and yeah, it's just so... Sad and restrictive to me! Which is just especially disheartening when he's such a special muse to me, and I've put an unreal amount of love and time into him and everything surrounding him.
I also really don't have the social skills to do anything more about it, except sit here and complain. /lh. Like, I genuinely don't know how OC writers get their muses off the ground and find RP partners, it's genuinely so impressive to me bc I really do not even know how to begin with that. Like, yeah, I can make graphics and write like no one's business, but I cannot rizz people into caring about a character/canon that doesn't exist anywhere but my own delusion LOL.
Decided to look at Tales of 85 because frankly I'm bored and feeling sick and stuck in bed. Didn't really expect anything because everyone hates it and I was thinking okay so its cute and animated, it must be more kiddified..... First 15 minutes and two asshole kids are getting violently flayed and devoured. .... Ok Duffers, I'll watch your shitty cartoon.
I know someone once asked me how you "defeat/kill" my version of the mindflayer and just know the answer is you don't. Metaphorically, its the Shadow Self. Its darkness, its negative emotions, its turmoil, its hate, its jealousy, its sadness, its hunger, its intrinsic to humanity, to be human is to feel all of these things, its counter is love, friendship, joy, kindness, etc as corny as this is!! Like thats a big canon aspect and also why they included a wrinkle in time (which is essentially a more... "child friendly' metaphor of the same thing) But no, you don't "defeat" it, just don't "defeat" mental illness or any of the negative emotions that make you human, you manage them with the love and support of your friends and family. The mind flayer isn't a physical thing that can be killed with guns and sticks, its a unseen force, its an incomprehensible psychic predator, an disembodied ocean of vast, ancient consciousness, it is not good, it is not evil, it does not acknowledge or adhere to human morality or constructs, it cannot be "destroyed", it can only be "contained".
Outside of that, Stranger Things could have and should have been such a fun entry into the cosmic horror genre for a wider audience and for horror lovers that aren't particularly familiar with it but rip I guess, lets fuck it all up and retcon all the cool shit we established for .... ??? Mass appeal that backfired tremendously ??? Who fucking knows.
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๐ ๐ท๐ด๐ป๐ป ๐ฒ๐พ๐ผ๐ด๐ ๐๐พ ๐ท๐ฐ๐๐บ๐ธ๐ฝ๐ :: season 5 divergence notes.
So, if anyone has read any of my crazy headcanon posts over the years regarding Henry/Vecna/The mindflayer, you already know that not only was I absolutely right about everything I ever wrote about Henry and the MF and their connection to each other as of the release of TFS, but that I had a lot of crazy concepts for season 5 and canon overall. Unfortunately, when it was time to lock in, the Duffers went totally off track, so we got a hugely disconnected pile of gen AI-assisted slop that annoyed most fans for very understandable reasons.
So this a post about MY canon, MY mindflayer, MY Upside Down, and MY season 5, and what the whole point of season 4 was because I'm happy in my cosmic horror genre and have no interest in mass marketing or in appealing to a general audience.
As mentioned in my other MF headcanon overview post, my Upside Down is not a "wormhole"; it is the viscera of a god, suspended between dimensions. My mindflayer is not just a random alien lifeform; it is a hunger that predates life and form itself, and Hawkins is not being "invaded" so much as it is being consumed.
In this canon, the mindflayer is identified as "god" in the truest, most horrifying sense: a primordial force of chaos, rot, growth, and annihilation. Older than the universe itself, it exists across dimensions. You can think of it most simply as a mega-parasite and a cosmic super-collective. A thing that, in its natural state, does not possess a body at all. It exists instead as a disembodied, collective consciousness, vast and impossibly ancient; a storm of thought without flesh. A presence suspended in a dead, unreachable dimension that canon chooses to call "Dimension X," though even that implies geography where none truly exists.
"The abyss" is a better suited descriptor as it is best understood as a psychic void, housing a vast, disembodied collective intelligence that cannot meaningfully act upon reality without something to anchor it. The abyss is the mindflayer's very own "mind scape". Without life to infect, within the abyss, it exists as a swirling, eternal psychic ocean โ aware but unable to act without possessing and manipulating a physical vessel. Unfortunately for humanity, it is very, very intelligent, very, very manipulative, and very, very adept at psychically communing with intelligent lifeforms.
In 1942, during World War II, American scientists were working on a way to turn US military vessels invisible to aid in the war effort. They created a device and tested it aboard the USS Eldridge, aย USย Navy ship. Rather than becoming truly "invisible", the unstable device slipped the ship sideways through a "barrier" in reality.
Essentially, humanity, accidentally breaches a boundary and releases something that should have remained sealed. The mndflayer is not a random alien predator that came hunting; it is a force disturbed by mankind's fumble. Fucking around and finding out in a terrifying way. Though the USS Eldridge's contact with "Dimension X" was brief, the entire crew were killed, with only Captain Brenner as the sole survivor. He returned, but he did not return whole. True to its nature and an opportunistic predator, the mindflayer embedded a piece of itself in Captain Brenner, who carried it back through to the human dimension. It is unclear whether his contact with the entity caused his condition or whether unprotected exposure to unstable, dimension-ripping technology was to blame, but Captain Brenner was rendered largely catatonic upon his return to the human dimension.
Captain Brenner, however, had a son. Young Martin Brenner, and through exposure to his fathers bizarre "illness", he developed an obsession with the accident that caused it. Martin Brenner went on to become a scientist, working closely with the US government. Needless to say, Dr Brenner's work with the government was never purely scientific curiosity. He spent years trying to recreate the Eldridge incident, not to undo it, but to understand what had come through, what had afflicted his father all those years ago.
I have drastically altered the canon dealing with Henry's initial contact with the mindflayer because I always found the weird, mysterious stone thing they inserted in season 5 to be a very boring way to approach it, and once again, I'm not trying to make my content "general audience" friendly; I'm writing a cosmic horror shit show here.
Instead, in my canon, Henry is infected through a nightmarish encounter with one of the mindflayer's "second-generation" victims, a young nurse who had once worked as a caretaker to Captain Brenner. The woman went missing without a trace years ago, and by the time eight-year-old Henry encounters her in 1952, she's no longer a person so much as a she is a vector.
The lead-up to the event remains similar. Henry is eight years old and a proactive member of the Cub Scouts in Nevada. One day, he is with two other young boys collecting kindling for a fire. Henry, in my canon, was mildly clairvoyant, which made him highly susceptible to the mindflayer's psychic interference. His sensitivity made him a beacon for it, and while he was playing and collecting sticks with his two friends during a camp out, it lured him with apparitions and voices toward a cave. Believing he had seen someone go inside and heard a scream, Henry went inside to help someone he thought had been injured.
He was quickly faced with something that hadn't been a human for some time and was violently attacked by it as he attempted to flee. Henry does not remember anything about the event. He was found days later, hiding in the shade under a bush, dazed, scraped and bruised but otherwise physically fine. (This is something I'm in the process of writing a one shot about)
Psychologically, however, it is another matter. Understandably, Henry is very much traumatized by the horrifying event and wasn't able to be the same boy he was before. It is the 1950s, and Henry is quickly pathologized. Post-infection, Henry's symptoms are misdiagnosed because they look psychiatric: insomnia, decreased/lack of appetite, hallucinations (visual and auditory), emotional dysregulation, and violent outbursts. Eventually, he was said to be suffering from "childhood schizophrenia."
Dead animals also became a peculiarity and constant occurrence in Henry's neighbourhood. Eventually, after a violent outburst that wounded a boy at Henry's old school, Henry's mother couldn't stand the social shame and decided to move the family away to Hawkins for a "fresh start". The dead animals followed, and Virginia knew Henry was to "blame" somehow.
Henry is, in fact, "to blame", but this wasn't a result of psychotic cruelty. This was a manifestation of the mindflayer's psionic hunger,ย ย though Henry, a young, troubled boy as he was, did not understand it as such, either.
Dr Brenner, however, recognized it immediately and quickly made contact with Henry's mother. Virginia, more than happy to hand Henry over to someone who claimed he could "fix him", or at the very least "take him away" so she didn't have to deal with the "burden" of him, had planned to do just that.
The breaking point comes in the Creel house one night. Henry and Patty, two abused and neglected children who found solace and comfort in one another, had planned to run away together. Patty to escape her abusive, controlling father and Henry to escape his abusive, hateful mother, who Henry was aware planned to institutionalize him.
Virginia, however, thwarts Henry's escape plan and under emotional stress, the mindflayer seizes control, causing Henry to kill her and his sister. Brenner sees the opportunity to kidnap Henry, fake his death, and frame Victor Creel as the murderer of his family.
Henry is held captive in Hawkins' lab, where Brenner sells him as a weapon to the government. Here, Henry's humanity is systematically dismantled. Brenner isolates, starves, and experiments on him, learning that Henry does not need food โ he can sustain himself by feeding on minds, emotions, and suffering. Forced into repeated acts of violence, Henry begins to understand what he is: not just a psychic, but a predator housing something far worse. (More details in this post)
Over time, the line between Henry and the entity blurs. Brenner encourages this fragmentation, making him easier to control, while Henry clings desperately to the idea that he can use his condition for good โ a "necessary evil" of sorts. This is where Henry's "predator, but for good" concept came from, also mentioned in the previous post.
After a failed escape attempt in his late teens, which ended in death, destruction, and his recapture, Henry is declared too dangerous to exist but too valuable to destroy. He is restrained, sedated, and fitted with the Soteria chip, suppressing both him and the entity. He is reduced to a living resource โ his blood used to create new "controllable" subjects, his body treated as property, his identity further stripped away. For years, he has existed in this state: controlled, humiliated, and trapped between hatred and a child's lingering attachment to Brenner, the man who proclaimed himself as his "father" and whom Henry once believed in as such.
When the chip is eventually removed, everything that has been building โ the trauma, the violation, the humiliation, the entity itself, is unleashed at once, causing the 1979 lab massacre and tragically, this eclipsed Henry's attempt to save a child like himself, Eleven. He was "killed" by her in the resulting struggle after she rejected him.ย ย
Up until that moment, the entity existed as a disembodied, formless psychic mass โ a vast, parasitic consciousness with no true body. But through Henry's mind โ his memories, his trauma, his understanding of the world โ it suddenly had a template.
Henry's transformation into Vecna could be viewed as an ascension as much as a resurrection. Henry's form arrived in the Abyss ruined, and as Vecna, he is held together not by life, but by foreign biomatter and the will of the entity within him. He is, quite literally, a walking corpse animated by something that refuses to let him die. (also more on that here)
The Demogorgon's origins remain a mystery. Whether they were once independent lifeforms who suffered a horrific fate, or have always been the mindflayer's living, mobile organs, becomes almost irrelevant, but what they are now is clear: extensions of the mindflayer, dependent on its consciousness to exist, biologically modelled for hunting, spreading, and feeding. They are not creatures that can truly be likened to animals, rather they are organisms closer to fungi or vegetation.
The mindflayer does not coexist with life; it repurposes it. Henry is not exempt from that rule, either. He is simply the most useful example of it and perhaps the most horrifying, because despite everything, he still retains a unique human consciousness. Henry refused to allow the mindflayer to absorb him entirely, he fought against it until eventually they pressed each other into a terrifying symbiosis.
The Upside Down begins to take shape after Brenner forces Eleven to use her powers to relocate Henry. When Eleven touched the Demogorgon, one of the mindflayer's organs, she accidentally gave it a psychic bridge into the human world, which allowed the barrier to falter and the mindflayer to impress itself upon the human dimension.
The Upside Down is then "formed" via the mindflayer's link with multiple conduits, especially William Byers.
As the Gate stabilizes, the mindflayer begins cycling through hosts: Will Byers: partial integration. The parasitic fragment was expelled before proper integration, though it left him able to sense and tap into the "hive mind". Billy Hargrove: high-functioning host, terminated upon resistance in a display of alarmingly human temper, this was a silver of Henry's consciousness surfacing and functioning within the hive mind. The Flayed: mass assimilation, reduced to biomass.
Each case demonstrates the same principle: The individual is irrelevant. The function is everything. The entity uses bodies as tools, nutrients, and building material, and when they are no longer useful, they are reclaimed and merged into the collective.
The Upside Down is where reality has begun to be digested but has not yet fully broken down. Hawkins is not being copied; it is being absorbed. In many ways, the Upside Down is what happens when something that's body is too vast to be perceived by any human understanding, or perhaps was just something that was never supposed to have a body in the first placeโฆ Grows itself one over a reality it isn't supposed to be in.
The spores, the vines, the slow decay of anything it touches, they are not alien decoration or some creepy, pointless aesthetic; these are biological processes on a cosmic scale. Everything within the Upside Down is part of a larger system. Demogorgons are mobile predatory organs/a living immune system; vines are connective tissue/nervous systems, also functioning as biomass for the mind flayer to act physically, allowing it to grapple with victims, and the spores are atmospheric contamination/propagation, but each of these things exists to spread, consume, and integrate.
Every organism the minflayer infects is not just controlled, but absorbed, their thoughts and memories are folded into the greater whole. Henry is precisely as he was described in season 4: The mindflayer's five-star general. He is its chosen herald, an intermediary of terrifying purpose. When the "gate" was sewn shut again in season 3, the mindflayer used Henry as a battery, an amplifier, using his powers to reach through from the Upside Down and dismantle the barrier completely.
Henry does not see what he is doing as destruction but rather as correction, because, from his perspective and tragic lived experience he has, humanity is fragmented, cruel, and hypocritical. Individuals suffer alone, isolated and misunderstood. Humanity centres and enforces defective, miserable unnatural constructs and systems that devastate society as a whole. The mindflayer views consciousness itself as trapped in flawed, fragile bodies. To it, bodies are either vessels or raw material, and in its endless hunger it offers a solution to what it views as a senseless, finite, shallow existence โ a world where no one is alone ever again, a total convergence: a singular, eternal existence where every thought is shared, every memory preserved, and all pain is understood and alleviated through a collective.
In this annihilation, there is also unification, and Henry, as figure that has managed to not only retain a form of independent consciousness but has been able to harness the incredible power of the cosmic entity itself, can manipulate that into creation.
Henry is not evil, he is.......... Misunderstood and certainly misguided. The mindflayer itself is also not evil. It does not hate. It does not judge. It simply grows, consumes, and incorporates, like any parasite, like any god, and humanity, in its arrogance, did not summon it or create itโฆThey simply let it notice them, and that invited it in.
By the time we reach Season 5, as season 4 originally established, Hawkins isn't presently "under threat" of being assimilated or "annihilated"; it's already in the process. The "gates" were opened, and the "Upside Down" is no longer held back by a taring, previously patched dimensional barrier; it has been torn through and destroyed. The entities' internals and conciseness now have full access; Hawkins is now within the belly of the beast, literally. The mindflayer is not trying to take the town; it is already digesting it and assimilating everything in it.
Moreover, this doesn't end with Hawkins, Hawkins is simply the first successful merge point. Henry's goal has never been to just destroy Hawkins; it is to trigger a chain reaction: Towns -> Cities -> Planet. A total collapse of separate consciousness into one unified existence.
The tragedy and the conflict here isn't just the world ending threat, its that Henry might not be entirely wrong.
If every consciousness exists within the collectiveโฆ
And if Henry can manipulate that collectiveโฆ
Then yes, theoretically, he could construct an idealistic, paradisaical reality.
A utopia built on psychic assimilation. A beauitful, eternal dream where no one ever wakes up.
Season 5 should have been focused entirely on figuring out what the fuck Henry's deal was, disconnecting him from the mindflayer, particularly through an appeal to his obvious humanity, and re-erecting a psychic barrier to prevent the entity from assimilating everything.
The party wouldn't just be fighting a big, giant, stupid spider monster, in some dumb-ass disappointing marvel movie cgi ass fight, they're fighting a philosophy and a deeply twisted version of salvation because Henry was never trying to "destroy the world", he's trying "make it better", to repair a world that is objectively, flawed and harmful and beneath the rot and the ruin and the screaming collective massโฆ He truly believes that.
But yes, he would be and HAS to be stopped, because even if he can make this idealized psychic world, horrifically murdering everyone to get to it isn't really a thing anyone should be chill with, and the way out of society's issues probably shouldn't be to become one with a colossal cosmic god-mind, but given Henry's undead, deeply traumatized, and unbelievably PISSED OFF with everything that was done to him, he's not really thinking the best and clearest thoughts, despite his tragically "noble" intentions.
Anyways. As soon as I get 500 million dollars I'll make the real Stranger Things season 5 and a final delivers everything it promised. But until then, we stay mourning the Duffer's greed and laziness.
youโre loyal, brave, and fierce in your devotion. friendship and love blur together for you, because at your core, you crave someone who is both your confidant and your other half. youโre the kind of person who would fight the world for someone you love, who sees partnership as sacred and unbreakable. but you also have a streak of pride, sometimes believing you can outwit fate or hold onto something forever when nothing truly lasts. your relationships are marked by both tenderness and ferocity, a love that carries a mythic weight. when people think of you, they remember the loyalty, the sacrifice, and the way your heart kept beating for someone even after they were gone.
Tagged by: @cynicalmastermind TYSM ๐ฉถ๐ฉถ๐ฉถ
Tagging: @firstcure / @aelirium , @unbrave , @paladinstales , @xnotxbullshitx , @sixthseer, @hawkinsown, @fromband and anyone else who wants to ๐ฉถ๐ฉถ
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Anon asked: How do you think Patty would react if she saw โVecnaโ not as the flayed, but as Henryโs current sate because there would be no way to reverse what was done to his body.
Oooh, good question anon. Very interesting question. I think it would vary from circumstance to circumstance and portrayal to portrayal. For me, personally, cause I love that gothic horror and gothic romance shit, I would say her reaction would be very like.... Layered. Let's assume Patty was introduced to Henry as Vecna in all his freaky glory. Let's assume she's had no introduction to Henry's psychic avatar to prime her for seeing his current physical state, but that she at least knows this is Henry.
The first layer has gotta be shock. There would be fear but not even like necessarily in the "monster scary" way, just in the human way you naturally react to something that shouldn't be.
The silhouette is inhuman, yet its humanoid enough to recognise as a man or something that may have been one once. The more you look at Venca the more alarming this dissonance becomes. He is a man but he isn't, there is human flesh, human structure, but its corrupted by something unknown, some foreign, alien body that is almost consuming him in a very grotesque way. He has to be alive but he can't be.
His voice is also very different. Vecna speaks in a way that is, in my opinion, meant to alarm. Its a voice that is carvous, and layered and feels like a physical weight more than just a sound. For me when Vecna speaks you're supposed to have the idea you're hearing it thrumming and droning inside your head as much as you are recognising it as a voice outside it.
The eyes probably would be the worst part, because there is something very human about them, yet like everything else they also have a wrongness and that would probably be the thing that is most familiar and that screams Henry to anyone who might have known him before Vecna. Something about Henry that always stuck out in my depiction of him is his eyes. They're not just blue, they're strikingly blue, and since his incident in the cave, Henry's always had a gaze that ""unsettles"", where people have often felt like he is either looking into them or looking through them and this true. He is, often, looking into them or through them. This is a combination of Henry's powers and his neurodivergent failure to be aware exactly how much eye contact he's suppose to be giving in a social situation. As Vecna, his eyes take on a different alarming and haunting quality because they have that same humanity, that same unnerving, perceptive intensity, but they're also cataracted. They're eyes that should not see and yet you know they see everything.
All this should ignite the sense to fight or flight but I think Patty's reaction would be to freeze. She would want to run but she'd fight that instinct because this IS Henry. Those eyes, as frightening as they've become, they're his eyes. And that knowing would be solidified to her the moment he recognises her, because he would. Whether it's the way he says her name, or something small โ a cadence, a look, a gesture, some sort of recognition that confirms to her it's Henry
That's when the initial shock gets to transform into something worse. Grief, horror and maybe even anger. Not at Henry. Depending on context, she could get to feel a little annoyed at him, but again, context. In this scenario we're gonna say its just the two of them, and there is no interference from anything or anyone else else: So that little flair of anger is entirely toward what was done to him.
Again, this is a very portrayal specific thing but in my canon, Henry isnโt just a monster he's a result. And unlike the Duffer brothers I refuse to treat that with ""ambiguity"", because it does him and the rest of the narrative no justice after we've already established Henry has been the greatest victim of both the frightening cosmic force that's fucking with everything AND the human evil of the US government with men like Brenner and projects like MK ultra. Henry is a victim who's been reshaped into something that can't come back, and Patty would and could perhaps be the first person to truly comprehend this because she KNEW him and she loved him before it all.
There is no "Is he a monster? Is he evil? Did he deserve this? Was he always like this?" in Patty's mind cause she knows all the answers. He wasn't a monster, he wasn't evil, he didn't deserve it, and he was just a normal boy. In fact, he was more than a normal boy, because he was one of the only boys who ever looked at her with love and compassion and equality and interest in a time when that was unconventional. How heart-breaking it would be, for someone like Patty, who knew Henry the way she did, to see what truly became of him. Patty could be the only person really capable of knowing how cruel and unfair of a fate Henry really came up against.
And that's probably where the denial starts coming into it. Because of all that, she'd probably want to think its possible to help him somehow, to fix it, to believe that that it isn't too late. This is also me mostly going on Nova's portrayal of Patty, because she's the one I got the universe I got built with, but Nova's portrayal of Patty is pure soul. She has a tendency to look for good in things even if they don't have it. She humanizes what others dehumanize.
She needs to believe something can be saved. Patty is a biracial girl who lived through the epic eras of racism in midwest america. She knows what its like to be othered and demonised, she responds to this treatment by projecting the kind of compassion and understanding she always wanted and again this isn't some random monster this is Henry. Her Henry. She'd want to believe more than anything she can help him somehow.
Even if part of her already knows that isn't true. And that internal contradiction would be tearing her apart, because you can't look at Henry and truly think you can reverse anything for him now, but the injustice of it is too hard to swallow. Surely there's a way he can be helped, surely. But the knowing it cant is always in the back of her mind, whether it comes forward based on something he says or does or on her own assessment of the situation, it creates a very specific form of grief. She's morning someone who is right in front of her.
She wouldn't be able to detach from him and dehumanise him the way everyone else does, which is the difference between Patty and almost everyone else. Other's hardly knew Henry or didn't know him at all, they can see him now as just a monster to destroy, just an adversary, but Patty can see the truth and that is that he was a person who already has been destroyed and someone who needs saving as much as anyone else, maybe more.
Brings to mind Mark Twain's quote; "But who prays for Satan? Who in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most, our one fellow and brother who most needed a friend yet had not a single one?"
So even if he becomes violent, even if he does horrific things, she wouldn't fully detach from that belief. Like don't get me wrong, she wouldn't be naive โ she'd recognize the danger, but emotionally she wouldn't be able to treat him like an object or an enemy in the same frustratingly shallow way others do. And this is where it becomes fun, interesting and can be deeply tragic because the rest depends on Henry and how HE'S depicted. Which are more things that I think come down to context and what you might want to do with the scene / story, but lets frame it more in the way canon probably would if it always intended Henry to be killed.
If Henry is fully in that detached, flayed mindset of Vecna, you have Patty trying to reach Henry, while being addressed by something that believes it has outgrown him. That creates this awful, tragic dynamic where she's speaking to his humanity, and he's responding from a place that rejects it, and of course, that's not all because we know Henry IS still in there. Enough to respond, enough to hesitate, enough to consider, just enough to make it all really hurt.
Every interaction between them would be inherently painful, because She's trying to hold onto a person who physically and existentially can't go back to being one.
And regardless to like, context, Henry, even as Vecna, does have some form of control or influence over the mindflayer. He's constantly floating around between what he resists and what he allows, not even out of malice or evil, entirely, but often out of what he thinks is necessity or even just a lapse in grasp. Henry and the mindflayer are in a really complicated, volatile, symbiotic existence where they accept each other's influence, but only begrudgingly. Henry couldn't fully dominate the creature but it couldn't fully consume him either.
They're both using each other but the underlying fact is the mindflayer has manipulated Henry more than he realises. (Though this is also complicated because it really comes down to exploiting factures in Henry's identity that were placed there by Brenner's coercive persuasion or lapses in his memory that are from the multiple horrific traumas Henry has suffered throughout his life.)
So! Basically! I think patty would be... Horrified, but not in the conventional "Ahh scary monster" way, more in the knowing this was someone she knew and loved and something horrible has happened to him and none of it should be what it is.
But maybe me and Nova will write a scene of it. We do have a thread currently where Patty is interacting with Vecna, he just hasn't dropped his Mr.Whatsit glamour yet.
It has never controlled me. And I never controlled it. Donโt you see, William? I could have resisted it. But I chose to join it.
JAMIE CAMPBELL BOWER as HENRY CREEL in STRANGER THINGS S5E08 โThe Rightside Upโ
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James's hand tightens around the handle of the cattle prod; the urge to use it had been suppressed โ not on Henry this time, but onย her.
The thought had flared in the hot, red fog of his rage: to press the prongs against Patty's throat, to watch her convulse and scream and lose control of her bodily functions while Henry watched, helpless to intervene. He would have loved to demonstrate, with voltage and the stench of burned skin, exactly who held power here, and to obliterate that disgusting vision of mutual desire that he had been cursed to imagine between the two.
He stepped closer, the weapon humming menacingly, his free hand reaching to grab her collar or her hair, either would have done the job โ and then the irruption, freezing his movements once more, an intervention that almost felt divine in its timing against the brewing of evil it had so quickly dispelled. The pager clipped to his belt vibrated, a sharp, insectileย buzzย that cut through the room's heavy atmosphere like a scalpel. James froze. The sound of authority outranked even his own cruelty. He glanced down at the device, his face contorting with frustration.
His annoyance is sharp and petulant, like a child being told to put a toy down before he's finished breaking it. His thumb hovers over the trigger of the cattle prod, eyes dragging once more over Henry's slumped formโฆ Then to Patty. There's a hesitation there โ a temptation. โ Well, shit. โ James spat, the words wet and venomous. He stepped back, the cattle prod's crackle dying as he lowered the weapon. โ You're lucky,โ he hissed, though whether he addressed Patty, Henry, or the technology that interrupted him remained ambiguous. โ So fucking lucky. โ
He shot a glance to the two silent orderlies who had flanked the door throughout, witnesses to the degradation who had never intervened, their faces blank as masks. The impression they'd witnessed this before โ or perhaps something worse โ crystal clear. They understood the signal immediately: the session was terminated. Brenner must have decreed an end to the entertainment. James shoved the weapon into his belt with rough, petulant force and then, within a few simple steps, they were gone, the door swinging shut with a click that felt deafening in the still, tense air of the room around them.
For Henry, consciousness isn't a stable thing. It stutters, flickering like a faulty bulb, the voltage having left a residue in his nerves, a humming sting that makes his vision blur at the edges. He finds himself anchored in reality more by the leather biting into his wrists and the rubber gag forcing his tongue to the floor of his mouth, drowning in the aftermath, every muscle twitching with phantom electricity.
She is here with him โ he can sense her presence like a warmth against his bruised perception, though he dares not turn his head to look, dares not confirm with his eyes what his fractured consciousness tells him: that she is whole, unburned, her skin unmarked by the cattle prod. The terror for her safety that has been screaming through his half-conscious haze begins to quiet, not into peace, but into a different, deeper horror. His breathing stutters as he gives another futile pull against the restraints.
His throat works uselessly around the gag as he lifts his head, allowing it to loll back against the headrest of the chair, a movement slow, and languished, taking far more effort than he would have liked as the pain in his nerves subsides from white-hot to merely blistering. In the silence James has left behind, he becomes excruciatingly aware of his own vulnerability, the broken, displayed thing he is, though he is also alone with her now, alone with his shame and the camera's red eye staring from the corner of the room, watching and recording everything.
His eyes do find her again, off to the side, her face streaked with tears, her arms folded defensively across her chest. Physically, she is unharmed โ a prayer for the fact uttered in his thoughts โ but mentally, he knew she was shaken. This was not a reality she had lived for the twelve years he had. She had no time to adjust.
But how he had lived it was another mystery entirely. He tried to speak around the gag, but all that emerged was a strangled groan, saliva pooling at the corners of his lips where the rubber bit into his flesh. He was helpless to comfort her, helpless to stand between her and the camera, helpless even to wipe away the tears he could see in the shimmer of the skin of her cheeks.
He flicked his vision to the corner of the room, the cameras red light staring back at him and he understood that the session might have ended, but the test continued, they were being observed in the aftermath.
The backseat of the patrol car is quieter than the store had been, but not silent. Nothing is ever truly silent for Henry. It was a gift โ no, a curse. The engine hums beneath him, steady and grounding in a way he findsโฆ Tolerable. Perhaps he should have known better than to come back to Hawkins, and yet here he was.
It had been... An accident. One that caused chaos in the supermarket, the shattering of refrigerator glass, the wild flickering of lights, the comotion of shoppers around him. He hadn't had an episode like it in years, and of course, he found himself reacting in the same way he always had. He'd run. It made him look guilty. He was.
He'd run right into him. Jim Hopper. Henry recognized him immediately. And that's why he was here. The familiar face had stalled him, a man had shouted, and before he knew it, he was pinned against a wall, handcuffs around his wrists. Destruction of public property.... He didn't resist.
He sits with his hands resting loosely in his lap, posture relaxed despite the situation. Jim is in the front seat, one arm slung over the wheel, the other adjusting something on the radio before giving up on it entirely. Nothing but static fuzz, something that shouldn't have been, but is. Henry listens to a curse, and then he sits forward as much as he can, peering through the mesh that separates them.
โ โฆYou don't recognize me at all, do you? โ
Why would he? Henry had died, slain by his father nearly 20 years ago โ At least, according to all reports. Reports that were wrong. Falsified. He was now, like the static humming through the radio, another thing that wasn't supposed to have existed and yet.. He did.
