may the odds…

After his possession, they believed Will’s ties to the Mind Flayer had been severed. That, however, proved to be untrue the following summer when Will felt its presence regain strength as the Gate was reopened. Then, after their battle against the solid form of the Mind Flayer at Starcourt, they hoped the monster was done and gone for good. But nothing could ever be that simple, not for them, at least. A piece of the Mind Flayer had infected Henry Creel long before it got its hands on Will. That piece of the Mind Flayer was very much alive inside of the man-turned monster, and a piece of it still lingered inside of Will too. It was those two pieces that connected Will to Vecna, both of them having been infected by it. 

Mike called what happened to Will inside the Void ‘hijacking.’ Will’s mind had been momentarily hijacked by Vecna, allowing the monster to control him. Why Vecna used Will to go after Luke specifically, no one was sure of. El had more history with both the Mind Flayer and Henry, but Luke had posited that it was because El was the harder target. If Vecna had been recovering after their fight over a year ago, that would make sense. 

Will was clearly terrified of getting hijacked outside of the Void and hurting someone else. He was so gentle, too kind for all that he’d been through. The weight of hurting Luke was heavy on his shoulders. Yet, his friends kept him from crumbling. They showed through their actions that they weren’t scared of Will. They wanted to help him. They needed to. Finding Vecna before he found them again was the only way they knew how to do that. 

But the monster, even after finally showing his face after over a year, was still elusive. They hoped that Crawl would bring them closer, but it was so uncertain; everything was so uncertain. 

“The Old Man is en route!” said Robin over the radio. She and Tamera were on lookout duty that night, a task usually done by Lucas and Mike, but the two wanted to stay close to Will that night, so the girls volunteered for the job. They watched from the top of the church's bell tower, which gave the perfect view into the military base, for Hopper to sneak into one of the cargo trucks for a ride into the Upside Down. 

Over Sunshine’s shoulder, Nancy tapped her foot against the concrete floor repeatedly as her eyes were glued to her watch. She knew, down to the second, the amount of time it took for one of the cargo trucks to pass through the Gate hidden behind the walls of the base, and to travel the route to what they recently figured out was to the Upside Down base. Hopper would jump out of the truck not long after passing through the Gate and trek to the section he was set to search during that Crawl. 

According to the information that Murray was able to, somehow, get his hands on, the delivery of supplies would take an hour. That gave Hopper just enough time to search the next square on their map for any sign of Vecna. 

A couple of minutes passed before Dustin’s voice sounded from the radio. 

“We got him. Headed west now. Over.” 

Everyone let out a collective breath of relief. Sunshine glanced down at Anne, whose gaze flickered around the room in curiosity. 

“Now we wait,” Nancy said more to herself than anyone. She pulled up a chair on the other side of Sunshine and sat, drawing Anne’s attention. Nancy greeted her with a small smile and wave. “Someone’s up late.” 

Sunshine sighed. “Someone doesn’t like to be left out of all the excitement.” Anne refused to sleep when the basement was full of people. It was like she knew something was going on and she didn’t want to miss out. Even when Sunshine or anyone tried to get her to go to sleep upstairs, in the dark and quiet, Anne fussed until she was back in the action. Sunshine supposed it was a good thing she liked being around people, but she could see the little girl fighting off sleep with each passing minute. 

“Holly used to be like that,” Nancy said. “She still can be, sometimes.” A small frown formed on her lips, and she shook her head. “I thought all of this would be over before she was old enough to ask questions about what is wrong with this place.” 

Sunshine shifted in her seat, facing Nancy. “She’s asking questions?” 

“How could she now?” Nancy replied, a humorless laugh punctuating her sentence. “She rides her bike to school every morning with Will and Mike, past a military base where the library used to be. She asked to go to our aunt’s house on Lake Michigan for her birthday this year, but our mom had to explain why we aren’t allowed to leave town yet.” She paused and lowered her voice so only Sunshine could hear her. “Her room is between Mike’s and mine. How do you explain to your little sister why you and your brother wake up screaming sometimes?” 

Sunshine’s heart ached as she took in the sadness in her friend’s face. Using her free hand, not holding Anne, and grasped Nancy’s and squeezed it in what little reassurance she could offer. “You can’t,” she said. “But you’re doing everything you can to protect her so she doesn’t do the same. That’s something, Nancy.” 

With a tired sigh, Nancy leaned sideways into Sunshine, resting her head on the girl’s shoulder. “I wish I could have protected Mike from it.” 

“You’re trying to keep him safe now. You’ve been trying since this whole thing started.” 

“It wasn’t enough.” 

Sunshine rested her head against Nancy’s. “It has to be,” she said. “It’s hard protecting the people we love, especially when they want to protect you and their friends just as badly.” 

Nancy just hummed in response. There wasn’t much else to say. They all were in an impossible space, trying so hard to save the people they loved, with no real guarantee it’ll work. 

“Shit!” A loud hiss startled Sunshine upright. From across the room, Leia nearly tripped over her shoes as she moved toward the desk. A box of tissues sat on the corner, and Leia hastily grabbed a handful. A small drop of blood stained the front of her white shirt. 

“Are you okay?” Sunshine asked her sister. Leia nodded as she pressed the tissue against her nose. 

“Did you just use your powers?” asked Nancy. 

Leia hesitated before she nodded again. “Mike, uh, startled me. I slipped for a second.” 

‘Slipped’, as in lost brief control of her abilities. But Sunshine hadn’t noticed the lights flicker or the radio crackle with static, which was often a result of Leia using her abilities, accidentally or intentionally. Maybe Sunshine just missed it. 

Wiping the last bit of blood from her nose, Leia tossed the tissue into the waste basket and hurried back to the kids without another word. 

Sunshine’s attention was pulled onto Anne as she let out a whinny cry. “Well, if you didn’t fight sleep so hard, we wouldn’t be crying, now, would we?” she said as she stood up from her seat and headed upstairs with the hope of finally getting Anne to sleep for the night. 

The Crawl had been a success in terms of a smooth entrance and exit for Hopper, but he cleared another square of their map without finding anything. 

About halfway through the Crawl, Sunshine got Anne to fall asleep and eventually returned her to her crib after the basement cleared out. 

Steve stayed behind after returning, and he and Sunshine enjoyed a rare moment alone on the rooftop. 

The night had long settled in, and the chill of fall was making itself at home. Sunshine had changed into a set of pajamas that Steve had brought from her house. Her mom had packed her a bag, complete with a container of cookies and another letter. They’d been exchanging letters since Sunshine’s return, which mostly consisted of her reassuring her parents that she was alright. 

The soft t-shirt she wore didn’t exactly protect her from the dropping temperatures, but she was too comfortable with her head resting in Steve’s lap to get up. An involuntary shiver ran through her, which he noticed immediately; Steve had been keeping a close eye on her since she returned. He shrugged off his zip-up and placed it over her like a blanket. 

She gazed up at him, his hair gently getting messy by the breeze and his features more relaxed than usual. “Now you’re going to be cold,” she said. 

He shook his head, lifting his chin to the starry sky like he was taking in the cool weather happily. “Nah. I’m not the one shivering.” 

The scene felt normal. So normal that Sunshine almost felt like she hadn’t been gone. It was in moments like that one where she could almost forget. But then she became very aware that she couldn’t feel the tickle of hair on the back of her neck, and phantom pain crept through her bones. The memories were like greedy hands, eager to take hold of her and drag her right back under water. 

A soft sigh fell from her lips before she could stop it. 

“What’s on your mind, my Sunshine?” asked Steve, his voice impossibly soft. She wanted to melt into him. 

“I just wish I felt more like myself. I think I could do more if I did.” 

Steve brought his hand to the side of her face, holding her with a gentle touch. “You don’t need to do any more than you already are,” he said. “No one expects more from you.” 

“I know. But I do.” 

He was quiet for a moment; his face pinched in deep thought. He moved his hand from her face and patted her shoulder, prompting her to sit up. Sunshine watched him with a curious gaze as he grabbed a bag of candy they had brought to the roof to snack on. He pulled off the zip tie that kept the bag closed, and with a look of intense concentration, he twisted it into a loop before he held it up. 

“What’s that?” 

“A promise,” he said simply. “After this is all over, and there’s no more evil governments after us or mind-screwing monsters, you, Sunshine, will never feel like the whole world is on your shoulders. That’s my promise to you.” 

Tears welled up in her golden eyes. She wasn’t sure that was really something he could promise, but the sincerity on his face and in his voice gave her no choice but to believe him. She chuckled wetly as she gazed at him with all the love in her heart. 

“That’s a big promise.” 

“Yeah, well, if there’s anyone who deserves a big promise, it’s you.” He shrugged, like what he was saying was so casual, so easy. “You have me, Sunshine. Forever. If you want me.” 

Sunshine was quick to throw her arms around him, and he wasted no time embracing her back. He held her with both a gentleness and a fierceness, like he wasn’t going to let someone take her again. Sunshine felt safe with him; she always had, even in the most dire of situations. And he saw her, really saw her, not as some marvel of science, but a marvel of a girl who loved him. 

“I want you forever, Steve,” she whispered into his shoulder. 

“Whew,” he breathed out before he laughed, almost nervously. 

He leaned back with a smile that was contagious. With the zip tie still pinched between his fingers, he held it out to her. “What do you say? If the world doesn’t end here soon, want to marry me?” 

Sunshine couldn’t help the laugh that bubbled past her lips, something so young and sweet. They really were just two kids, nearing the end of the teenage years with far too much baggage. And while Sunshine had spent most of her childhood not feeling like a kid, with Steve, it came back to her. Around him, she was that little girl running wild and free, not scared of what lurked in the woods or hid in the treetops. No, with him, she was the little girl who climbed the branches toward the sky and picked wildflowers. She wanted to feel like that forever, and with him, she would. 

“Of course I do.” 

He beamed brighter than the moon overhead and slipped the zip tie ring onto her left hand’s ring finger. It was an odd shape and silly; it was perfect. 

“If my mom knew I just proposed to you with a zip tie, she’d kill me,” he joked. “I promise, I’ll find you a real ring, something almost as pretty as you.” He leaned forward, still holding her hand, and pressed a kiss to her nose. 

With a shake of her head, Sunshine grasped the sides of his face and kissed his lips under the twinkle of stars that seemed to push their way out from behind the cloud cover just for them. 

Sunshine could have fallen asleep on the roof, lying with her head on Steve’s chest and his hand tracing patterns on her back. The rhythmic thump of his heart lulled her eyes to a close, but as the early hours of the morning neared, they knew they needed to get some actual sleep somewhere a little more comfortable. 

They stood to their feet and readied to head back inside. The night had grown even colder. Sunshine had slipped her arms into Steve’s zip-up and went to keep her hands warm in the pockets, but she touched something inside the right pocket. 

She pulled out what she thought was just a piece of trash, a crumpled-up napkin. But before she could shove it back into the pocket, she noticed smudges of red that stained the napkin. 

Steve paused at the door to the roof and made a face when he saw what she was looking at. “Oh, gross. Sorry,” he said. “Dustin’s nose started bleeding on our Crawl tonight, and I knew if I left the trash behind, I’d get an earful from Robin. I meant to throw that away.” 

“Dustin got a bloody nose?” Sunshine said, unable to hide the rush of panic from flooding her face. 

“He said it’s from when those assholes roughed him, Lucas, and Mike up,” Steve said, attempting to ease her growing worry. 

She glanced back down at the napkin dotted with blood. “He’s sure?” 

Steve nodded. “He sounded pretty sure, yeah.” He held out his hand, and she passed off the napkin. “Don’t worry, I’m keepin’ an eye on him. I promise." 

With a nod, she followed him back inside the radio station. 

[...]

Mike tried not to roll his eyes as he lifted a full bag of garbage from the trashcan, but it was a reflex he couldn’t help. His dad made some dry comment about him finally helping out around the house. The chores around the house had doubled since the Byers started crashing with them, but Mike didn’t mind that part. What he hated was how his dad liked to act like he did nothing to help because he forgot to take the trash out a couple times. God forbid it slipped his mind between school and trying to stop some fucking monster from ending their world. 

If the Byers weren’t there, Mike probably would have shot back with some shitty comment that got him sent to his room, or one of those looks from his mom that made his stomach hurt with guilt. But Joyce was helping Karen wash dishes, and both women were actually smiling as they chatted. Jonathan was teasing Nancy about her choice of movie that she had picked out from their subpar collection, and they both looked a little less tense than they had in a while. And Will was pretty enthusiastically helping Holly draw her very own D&D character. 

Mike had coined the name for her character one night when he and Will were doing homework downstairs, and Holly came down to annoy them. Instead of telling her to get out, Will started asking her about school, which led to Holly excitedly talking about some made-up game her and her friends played at recess. Will said she and her friends would probably like D&D once it stopped being basically outlawed and deemed ‘satanic.’ 

Holly insisted on coming up with her own character, and Mike gave in to join the conversation. After some back and forth, they settled on Mike’s name suggestion of Holly the Heroic. He promised to paint her a figurine after she drew out what she wanted. 

It was weird, but the extra three people brought a sense of peace to the Wheelers’ household; chaotic peace, if that was even a thing. It was enough to make Mike not bitch back to his dad. Instead, he started to haul the garbage toward the garage. 

Outside, it was as if summer had stepped over the edge of a cliff, sending the temperatures plummeting. The concrete floor of the garage was cool against Mike’s bare feet as he stepped through the side door of the garage to where the bins sat beside the house. 

The wind had picked up too, causing the lid of the bin to smack against the siding of the garage after he lifted it. Mike cringed at the noise before he tossed the bag inside and closed the lid. 

Before he stepped back into the garage, he heard his name being called around the side of the home and toward the driveway. 

Despite his lack of shoes and jacket, he followed the noise. 

“Will?” he called out, spotting his friend in the middle of the driveway with his back to Mike. “What’re you doing?” When Will didn’t respond, a shiver ran down his spine, and not because of the cool air. 

Since the trip to the Void with El, Luke, and Will, Mike had been on edge, along with everyone else. He’d been watching Will closely, worried that something would happen to him. 

What if Vecna got a hold of Will again and made him do something Will would never even think about? What if the monster cursed Will like he had Max? What if…?

There were too many ‘what ifs’ that swirled around Mike’s head that he didn’t want to think about. 

He called Will’s name again as he started to walk down the driveway toward him. He only managed to take a couple of steps before Will broke out running. Confusion halted Mike’s movements for a second before he took off after him. 

The asphalt stung the bottoms of the bare feet as he followed Will down the road, but he didn’t slow. It wasn’t until Will reached the end of the road, a couple of houses down from the Wheeler’s, did Will finally stopped, allowing Mike to catch up. 

“Will?” Mike called out again, but when Will didn’t respond, he closed the short distance between them and grasped Will’s shoulder. 

However, the second Mike’s fingers grazed the fabric of Will’s shirt, he finally turned around. 

Mike’s eyes went wide as he stumbled backwards. The person in front of him wasn’t the Will he knew then, but rather the Will he had once known. The Will in front of him was shorter and skinnier. His eyes and cheeks were sunken in, almost like he was hollow inside. Blood and dirt were smeared against his pale skin, and he had his hands clenched in tight fists at his sides. 

Will’s cracked and bloodied lips parted before he spoke in a higher-pitched and sadder voice. “It got me.” 

Inside his chest, Mike’s heart thundered, and nausea rose in his throat. “T-This isn’t real,” he whispered. He had left his backpack discarded on his bedroom floor, where he kept his Walkman in case something exactly like what was happening happened. They all kept them close, but Mike hadn’t expected it. He hadn’t gotten a bloody nose or nightmares any more intense than the ones he’d had since he was twelve. His head only hurt when he listened to the kids in his classes ask stupid questions or when his dad tried to talk to him about golf. Had he missed something? 

The younger version of Will frowned and tilted his head to the side as he peered upward at Mike. “It was real for me,” he said, his voice growing bitter with each word he said. “Did you even care, Mike?” 

“What?” he sputtered, feeling hot and cold at the same time. He knew he was being screwed with, but it felt so real. So, so real. “Of course I cared.” 

Will was silent for an excruciating moment before he took a step toward Mike. “Do you still?” 

Before Mike could respond, Will’s appearance shifted before his eyes. Instead of the younger version of Will, Mike was staring at the current version of Will, taller and not as ghostly. Still, there was something unsettling about that Will, the way his gaze was sharp, like all of the softness that made up Will had been taken out. 

“Of course I do,” Mike said after a beat, finding his voice, even if it was shaky. He tried to reach out to Will again, to see if he was real, but Will jerked backward as Mike had slapped him. His face was suddenly painted with hurt, a look that made Mike feel sick.

Then, Will shook his head, eyes glassy. “You’re scared.” 

Of monsters. Of the world ending. Of himself. 

Mike’s eyes gathered with tears too, mirroring Will’s expression. He wanted to shake his head, tell Will he was wrong, but Mike felt stuck. He was scared. 

Taking another step back, Will sighed. He turned back around, and Mike suddenly snapped out of his frozen state. He lurched forward toward Will, trying to grab him before he walked away again. But instead of grabbing Will’s shoulder, Mike’s hand went right through him. He was thrown off balance and fell forward, catching himself with his hands as he fell against the road. A sharp sting spread across his palms as the skin was peeled back. That feeling, however, came second to the sting that spread through his chest. A cry broke through his lips so sudden and sharp it startled even him. 

Then, the sudden feeling of a hand on his back caused him to scream. The hand didn’t move, though. Shook his shoulder. He blinked, and the empty road in front of him was replaced by the concerned expression of Nancy. He grabbed her forearms, ensuring that she was solid and real. Once he was only somewhat sure of that, he fell forward into her, burying his head in her chest as he continued to cry. 

“Oh, Mike,” she said softly, holding onto him tightly. 

He flinched as something was slipped over his ears, but his body relaxed slightly when he realized it was a pair of headphones. Music flooded through his head. 

I would say I’m sorry

If I thought that it would 

JJ leaned out the side of the window-less bus and waved them down. 

The two stopped dead in their tracks at the four of them halfway hanging out the window, like they hadn’t actually expected them to find a ride. 

"Well, I’ll be damned,” muttered Cleo. Her eyes fell onto Jane, who looked lost but followed suit in waving to the two people who were strangers to her. “You brought a friend?” 

Jane smiled. “Hey, I’m Jane. Kiara’s former bunkmate. Well, kind of. Does it count if you never actually slept in the bunk?” Kie shrugged but didn’t have the chance to say anything before a stressed-out Pope looked over his shoulder. 

“We gotta go!” he shouted. 

Cleo nodded. “Start runnin’!” The two then took off and rounded the bus to the other side, where they used it to hide behind as vehicles turned down the road in pursuit of something- them, Lottie quickly pieced together. 

She groaned and threw her head back. “Already?! We just got here!” They scrambled to gather their sparse belongings and hurried off the bus to where Pope and Cleo were.

“Those are Singh’s men,” Pope quickly explained. “They knew we’re here, so we need a plan, and fast.” 

The Jeep’s Singh’s men were parked across the street from the bus and started to get out, large guns slung over their shoulders as they looked on the hunt. 

Lottie looked around for somewhere to hide and locked her gaze on a collection of roadside fruit stands a couple of feet away. She took off toward them and beckoned the group to follow. There was just enough room behind the stands and the wall for all of them to crouch and stay out of sight. 

They could hear the men question everyone they could get their hands on, practically interrogating the people who had been on the bus with them. By some miracle, no one had ratted them out. Lottie didn’t know if it was because they didn’t pay enough attention to the four clearly out-of-place Americans, or maybe they could smell the trouble on Singh’s men and thought it was best not to say too much. 

The men had gotten close but didn’t spot them. It wasn’t long before they decided to move on and continue their hunt elsewhere. The group waited for the sound of their vehicles to fill the air. Pope slowly lifted his head and let out a sigh of relief after he told them the coast was clear. 

Cleo clicked her tongue, resting against the wall. “Welcome to South America.” 

On the other side of Kie, Jane wiped a hand down the length of her face, her eyes blown wide. “When you said we were running away to South America, I was thinking more fun vacation and less, uh, trouble?” 

Kie winced and shot the girl an apologetic look. “I probably should have explained everything a little bit better.” 

Any normal person would have been angry, upset, or somewhere in between that they weren’t told exactly what they were getting into by joining the Pogues. But Jane didn’t exactly seem like your typical girl. She willingly snuck out of Kitty Hawk with a group of strangers and jumped aboard a weird dude’s plane with little hesitation. And she hardly seemed that disturbed that they were actively being hunted down by brawny men with guns. 

Jane just shrugged her shoulders. “It’s cool. Beats talking to my therapist and doing yard work.” 

Pope furrowed his brows at her. “Does it?” 

“Hey!” JJ said sharply, earning everyone’s attention. “We gotta move out, like, now. Mike said if we needed it, he knows a guy with a boat.” 

The group stood up and moved out from behind the fruit stands. Lottie looked up and down the street. “What about my brother and Sarah?” 

“If Singh’s men went after the two of us, they know John B. and Sarah are here too. They probably dipped out of here to find Jose, the dude with the riverboat. We told each other if we get split up, just follow the direction from Neville, and we’ll all find our way back together,” said Pope. 

Lottie hated it when they all split up, but it was partially her fault. They had gotten there late because of their rescue mission. If they agreed to follow the plan and find each other again along the way, then Lottie would honor that. They all were after the same thing: Big John and El Dorado. 

After Mike loaded up his plane, he met them at Tres Rocas. He texted JJ to meet him at this old shack near the river, with boarded-up windows and an overgrown yard. The place looked abandoned, but they didn’t venture inside it. Instead, Mike led them down a worn path to the river. On the shore was a boat, fixed with tarps to keep the harsh sun at bay and a little worse for wear. The boat was nothing pretty, but Mike assured them it was full of gas and would get them to El Tesoro. 

Unfortunately, they didn’t have the guide Jose, who knew exactly where he was going. All they had was some loose map drawn by the guy Mike knew and their blind faith that they could bullshit their way through just about anything. 

“Thanks,” Pope said to Mike before he stepped in the boat first. Cleo, Kie, and Jane followed suit. 

“Don’t thank me; I’d start praying if I were you guys,” Mike said with a shake of his head before his gaze fell onto the blond. “JJ?” 

“Yeah?” 

“You owe me. Times ten.” 

JJ gave him a curt nod before he motioned for Lottie to get into the boat so he could push it offshore before joining them. Once they were all in and on the water, they began their journey down the river. 

JJ steered, seated beside the engine with an expression fixed in determination with a small hint of worry. His debt to Mike had grown exceptionally. If they didn’t find El Dorado and bring back some gold, Lottie didn’t know what would happen. They’d be found out the second they returned to the island. 

But that was a worry for another time. First, they needed to find Big John and pry him from the hands of Singh. 

Lottie fixed her gaze out ahead of them, taking in the thick walls of greenery on both sides of the river. Bugs hummed, and animals somewhere in the jungle howled. Overhead, birds of bright colors flew and listened to their own singing from the treetops. If they had been there under a less stressful situation, Lottie would have found it peaceful. Instead, the hot and humid air on her skin made her uncomfortable, and her chest carried an unforgiving tightness. 

“So, Jane, right?” Cleo spoke, cutting through the silence that had fallen between the group. The girl nodded, seated across from Cleo and toying with the tied bracelets around her wrist. “Why’d you want to tag along here?” 

“Oh, um, well, I didn’t really know what we were doing or why. But I wanted to get the hell out of Kitty Hawk and probably wouldn’t have gotten another chance until my aunt stopped by to see if I’d stopped being such a, in her words, ‘pain in her ass,’” she said. “Which is funny because she also calls me unmotivated and lacking ambition. I don’t know how I can be both, but whatever. All I know is, it’ll be a lot harder to call me lazy when she finds out I ran away with a girl I just met and her friends. She’ll probably kill me, but that’s only if I go back to her stupid house with her stupid cat.” 

Jane hardly took a breath the whole second half of her story. She finished and slumped down in her seat before she looked at everyone staring at her. A sheepish smile graced her lips. “Sorry.” 

With a shake of her head, Lottie said, “You know, if we make it out of here in one piece, we can crown you an official Pogue, and you can hang with us if you don’t want to go back to your aunt’s.” She wasn’t one to invite just anyone into their tight-knit circle, but it had worked out great with Cleo, even if she had sort of been dragged into their issues then stranded on an island with them. 

“What’s a Pogue?” 

“A friend,” Kie said. “And Lot’s right. If you don’t mind slumming it with us, we don’t mind the extra company.” 

Pope added, “I promise we don’t always do shit like this.” 

“Don’t believe him. We’ve become real treasure hunters lately,” said JJ. 

A scoff sounded from Cleo. “Some sorry ass treasure hunters who can’t hang on to any of the shit they find. But sure, Rude Boy, we’re treasure hunters.” 

“That’s not our fault!” JJ argued. 

Jane looked between the group thoughtfully, lips pursed slightly. “When I was little, I did seriously consider a career as a pirate,” she said, in what sounded like full seriousness. “So, I’m down.” 

They all laughed, their numbers growing in size as they continued to pick wayward teenagers along the way. If only they had somewhere to go back to when they returned to the Outer Banks. 

With the map from Mike and Pope's beautiful brain and Cleo’s sense of direction, they came upon El Tesoro. However, from a good distance away, they already spotted Singh’s men, who had to be waiting for them to show up. Before they could be spotted on the river, they parked the boat up on the bank, shielded by the thick of overhanging branches, and crept their way through the jungle until they reached the wooden dock, a handful of men, and a shed. 

They were able to sneak into the shed from the opposite side of where the men were lounging, not paying a whole lot of attention. Singh didn’t leave behind his most alert men; he probably took them with him and Big John to ensure there were no surprises. That was good for the Pogues, though. 

Pope and Cleo had stolen some firecrackers from Tres Rocas that some kids had left unattended, and JJ always carried a lighter on him. From Jane’s backpack, they used a piece of paper and a pen to write a note to the men, warning them about how they’d have five seconds after the first ‘gunshot’ before things got nasty. Inside the shed were fishing poles and other miscellaneous supplies. They hooked the letter and cast it out to the closest man seconds before the boys started lighting the explosives. 

It worked like a charm. The loud bangs of the firecrackers tricked Singh’s men into thinking they were being ambushed, and they were quick to bail. They retreated into their boat and hurried away without much issue. 

Once the immediate threat of Singh’s men was gone, the Pogues scrounged around for any supplies they could steal, then started on foot through the jungle, following the vague directions Neville had told John B., JJ, and Lottie back on his houseboat. They were also following the hope that Sarah and John B. had already been there and were ahead of them on the journey, and the hope that they at least knew where Big John and Singh were, if they hadn’t found them already. 

Mike had been kind enough to arm them each with a machete, which came in handy to fight against the greenery, but also in case they encountered trouble along the way too. JJ was enjoying himself, whacking through the thick vegetation and saying how he felt like Indiana Jones. 

After they were walking for a bit, Pope had spotted footprints in the dirt, which brightened their hope of finding either John B. and Sarah, or Singh and Big John. Lottie doubted many people were trekking through there for a leisurely stroll, so it had to lead them somewhere. Pope and Cleo led the way, following the prints. 

As much as Lottie hated running, she quickly realized she also hated hiking. When they found themselves in breaks between the tree cover, the hot sun set her skin ablaze, and her worn-out sneakers rubbed against her heels. She gritted her teeth and focused on the path ahead, trying to avoid the swing of JJ’s machete. 

“You doing okay, Lot?” JJ asked, pausing to turn around after he climbed a steep, small incline. He held out his hand for her, and she accepted it gratefully, letting him help her up. 

“Never take me on a date hiking,” she muttered, keeping hold of his hand for a couple of seconds longer, even though both his and her palms were sweaty. 

JJ chuckled lightly. “Noted. No marathons and no hiking.” He gave her hand a squeeze before letting go and continuing to clear a path through the greenery. 

After another mile or two, the group all caught up with each other and stopped in a grassy field for a quick break. Pope had snagged him and Cleo two water bottles before they were chased by Singh’s men. They were borderline hot by that point, but no one cared as they passed them around. Lottie wiped the sweat from her forehead and fixed her ponytail into a bun to keep her hair off of her neck. 

Once they all had a bit of water in them and caught their breath, they continued on following the vague path of footprints not yet erased by the abundance of nature surrounding them. 

↕  

JJ had lost track of how long they’d been hiking for. Why couldn’t El Dorado have been somewhere a little colder? Or somewhere easier to trek through? He knew that was the point; treasure wasn’t supposed to be easy to find, and neither were treasure hunters, apparently. 

He paused for one second to ease the start of an ache in his legs, but was startled half out of his mind when the sound of an explosion tore through the air. He cursed loudly before his gaze went upwards, where birds fled from their perch on the high branches with loud squawks. 

“I think it came from over there!” shouted Pope, not waiting for anyone’s reply before he took off toward the noise. 

Beside Kie, Jane’s face scrunched up. “Are we sure following the sound of a bomb going off is a smart move?” 

Lottie shook her head. “Nothing we do is a smart move.” 

So, they headed right toward the sound. It wasn’t long before familiar voices waded through the air. JJ let out a breath the second he heard John B. and Sarah up somewhere through the trees. 

Then, a third voice sounded. 

“They found him,” Lottie rushed out as she started to pick up her pace. They could see John B. and Sarah not too far ahead, with their back to them. JJ heard what Lottie had too: the voice of her dad. He couldn’t quite make out what they were saying, but he was the first to hear the fourth voice in the conversation. 

“Wait,” JJ said, grabbing Lottie’s hand to stop her before she broke through the surrounding plants to where her bother dad, and Sarah were. The Pogues stopped at JJ’s words too. “Is that…” 

A long simmering anger appeared on Pope’s face as he finished JJ’s sentence. “Ward.” 

The group crept forward and found a fallen tree trunk close enough to the others to hear what they were saying and large enough to keep them hidden. They needed to figure out what kind of situation they were entering before they jumped in. That usually wasn’t JJ’s forte, but he knew that Ward was bad news. 

JJ spotted Big John seated on a rock, but most of his figure was blocked by John B., and Sarah stood close by. Her attention was fixed on her dad, who stood opposite the three of them with a gun in his grasp, aimed at the two Routledges. JJ assumed Ward wanted to shoot Big John, not John B., but the latter wouldn’t have been a shock. Yet, JJ wasn’t sure if Ward would shoot John B., knowing it would be the final line in the sand Sarah drew, keeping her forever beyond resentful of her dad. 

“No,” Lottie whispered. She reached behind her and grabbed the handle of the machete sticking out of the top. 

JJ already had his knife in his hands. He glanced at the other Pogues, and honorary Pogue, Jane. “All in?” 

They all situated their gifted machetes in their grasps before nodding. 

JJ whispered a countdown, and once he hit one, all six of them raced out from their hiding spot, yelling. All of the attention fell onto them as they surrounded Ward with their knives raised. 

Lottie pointed her weapon at Ward. “Drop the gun!” she shouted. 

While JJ had felt bad for Sarah, back when they thought they had watched Ward blow himself up on his boat, he wished the man would have done it for real. He kept being the largest pain in their ass, constantly standing between them and something good almost within reach. 

Ward didn’t budge, but he looked wildly surprised to see them. His eyes were blown wide, and the look on his face made it easy to see that he didn’t know what to do next. 

“You’re outnumbered, Ward,” said JJ. 

The man changed his aim, moving back and forth between the group frantically. He wasn’t expecting an ambush. 

“What?” Pope called out. “Are you gonna shoot all of us?” 

“If you’re gonna shoot anyone,” Big John said, his voice loud to draw Ward’s attention. JJ took his eyes off Ward for just a second. Big John was holding his hand against his side, the fabric underneath stained red; he was hurt already. JJ wondered if it had been Ward or Singh’s doing. “Shoot me.” 

John B. shifted more in front of his dad and took a step toward Ward. His jaw was hardest, and anger flared in his eyes. He took another step. Then another, making JJ inch to knock his friend out of the way and take his face, but he was worried any movement too sudden would cause Ward to pull down on the trigger his finger hovered over. John B. didn’t stop until he was only a foot or two away from Ward and the gun. 

“Or me,” he challenged. 

From the corner of his eye, he saw Lottie run forward. She moved too fast for him to realize what was happening. His fingers just missed her shoulder, wanting to pull her back beside him. As he stumbled forward, Lottie had already slotted herself between Ward and her brother, chest heaving and hands shaking as one gripped the machete and the other curled into a fist at her side. 

JJ felt another wave of panic surge through him. He felt like that any time any of his friends were in danger, but with Lottie, it was tenfold. Blood rushed in his ears and his chest constricted. He wanted to do something; he needed to do something, but he was rooted in place, watching the scene play out on high alert. 

“You’re not shooting any of us,” Lottie said lowly. “Haven’t you done enough?” 

At Lottie’s side, Sarah appeared. Her eyes were lined with tears, but she too looked angry. “Stop it,” she said coldly. If there was anyone who could make Ward pause, it was her. 

There were several, impossibly tense, seconds where nothing happened. The Pogues all stayed with their machetes tightly in their grip, itching to take Ward down. Ward’s finger backed away from the trigger, but he didn’t lower the gun, still aimed at Lottie’s chest. His gaze, however, had moved onto Sarah. 

He knew the second he pulled the trigger, it was over for him. But one shot was all it would take for him to kill any one of them. That couldn’t happen. 

“I know you,” Sarah then continued. “You forget that I know you.” Slowly, she reached up and grasped her dad’s wrist. He let her take the gun from his grasp, and she passed it off behind her back to John B. 

Tears shone in Ward’s eyes too as he quietly cried out, “I…I can’t…” 

“I can.” 

JJ’s eyes snapped onto a man who had slipped out from the jungle directly behind Big John. He had a gun in his grasp with the tip against the man’s head. John B. was quick to aim Ward’s gun at Singh’s man. 

“Drop it,” the man said coldly. 

“Easy, bud,” Big John rasped out. “Your boss is dead. You got no reason to do this.” 

“I can think of a few reasons.” His gaze hardened before he shouted at John B. to drop his weapon once more. 

John B. slowly raised both of his hands and let the gun fall to the dirt. Singh’s man stepped around Big John and picked up the other gun, pocketing it so none of them got any bright ideas. To be fair, JJ was about five seconds away from diving for the gun on the ground to replace his machete. The knife was nice, but not against a gun. 

“Thought you’d get away with the gold, eh?” said the man. He eyed the group, his gun slowly passing by all of them. “My mate back there is dead.” His gaze zeroed in on Sarah, and it didn’t leave her. 

JJ’s pulse hammered, and his mind spun. No Pogue was dying that day. He just needed a plan. He needed to think. He needed to- 

However, before he could even let out a breath, Ward was yelling and charging at the man. Gunshots rang out, and blood was quick to seep through the fabric of Ward’s shirt, but it didn’t stop him. He ran right at the man and tackled him. They rolled right beside a steep drop-off. Maybe Ward knew that, or maybe it was just a kind of fucked up luck. As the man regained his footing, so did Ward. With one final yell, he tackled the man for the second time, sending both of them right over the edge of the drop-off. 

A heavy silence filled the air, and no one moved for a moment, unsure if what just happened was even real. It was Sarah who shook out of her shock first. Tears streamed down her flushed cheeks as she peered over the edge. Everyone else followed suit. 

JJ stared at the two bodies sprawled out at the bottom, dead. He felt both nauseous and relieved, just as he had when he thought Ward blew himself up. But that time there was a body and no chance of him finding a way to cheat death. No, Ward Cameron was dead for good that time. 

A horrible sob tore through the air from the lips of Sarah. John B. wrapped her up in his arms, his expression a cloud of different emotions. JJ imagined he felt the same conflicting thoughts spiral around his mind, only probably ten times worse than whatever JJ felt. Ward had tried to kill him and his dad. Ward had him framed for murder and nearly put him on death row. Ward had caused all of them so much grief it was dizzying. 

Ward did a lot of awful things, but he died saving Sarah. JJ supposed they had to give him the smallest amount of credit for that. 

“John B., Lot!” Pope shouted, drawing everyone’s attention. He was at Big John’s side, who had his head tipped back and face scrunched up in pain as he pressed against the injury at his side. Up close, JJ could see how much blood covered the man’s hand and soaked through his shirt, and that was just around the wound. 

The twins were quick to their dad’s side. They helped him to his feet, earning a pained groan. 

“We gotta get him out of here,” said John. 

Lottie’s face only grew in worry, twisted up like she could feel her dad’s pain. “What happened?” 

“Singh shot him.” 

“You lost the load, JJ,” said Mike. “Now, instead of me getting paid, I owe them. Which means you owe me.” He paused, eyes flickering from JJ to Lottie. “Get in the car, both of ‘ya.” 

JJ cleared his throat. “As much as we’d like to do that, we kinda got somewhere we need to be so…” 

Mike’s friend with the gun narrowed his gaze, unwavering. Time was slipping from their grasp too quickly. They needed to jailbreak Kie and haul ass to South America. 

“You heard him,” the man said. “Get in the car.” 

Lottie could practically hear the wheels in JJ’s head turning, trying to think of a quick way out.

“All right, if that’s how it’s gonna be,” JJ started. “Look, I know you’ve heard the stories of our friends and us, yeah? The stories about a little something called the Royal Merchant. A pile of gold. Is that ringing any bells?” 

Mike’s expression didn’t change. “What I heard was some bullshit.” 

“It’s real,” Lottie rushed out. “We found the gold from the Royal Merchant.” 

A dry laugh sounded from Mike. “Oh, yeah? Is that why you got a bunch of dudes throwing your furniture into a dumpster in your backyard, JJ? You’re livin' high off the hog, huh?” 

JJ’s muscles tensed under Lottie’s fingers, but he didn’t let it show on his face that Mike’s words were digging into his skin. Lottie knew better than to buy that, but Mike didn’t. JJ chuckled, like he didn’t have a care in the world about his home. “Yeah, you’re talkin’ about my foreclosed house? You mean my cover? The one to throw off the scent?” JJ said. “Rule number one, don’t do flashy shit like pay off a mortgage when you’re cashin’ in.” 

“Let me guess, you got the gold, and it’s buried somewhere in a barn, right?” Mike said, not buying it. “And if I let y’all go right now, you’ll run and get it. We’ll split it, right?” 

JJ hesitated, so Lottie swooped in before Mike could see through them. “Not exactly,” she started, her voice steady and calm. “It’s a little sweeter than that. I mean, the Royal Merchant’s just the tip of the iceberg. We’re going after something a lot bigger; something with a payoff you couldn’t even imagine.” 

With a nod, JJ added, “We’re going after the Mother Lode. That’s why we need to get to South America, okay?” He looked at Mike as if they were old friends and not like the man and his friend were eager to either shoot them or force them to give them their payout. “We’re trying to help you out, man, by giving you the opportunity to make ten times more. No skin off your nose, just a lottery ticket.” 

There was a beat of silence as Mike seemed to mull their words over. He wasn’t buying it fully, yet. 

“So,” JJ continued. “You can get the pleasure of beating my ass right here, right now. I get the temptation, really I do. But in this hand.” He held up his right hand in a fist. “Mike, you’ve got a pile of gold sitting and waiting for you. All you need to have is a little bit of patience, okay?” 

“And a flight to South America,” Lottie added with a small smile. If they could secure another ride, they could tell John B. and the others to go now, and they’d meet them there. 

Mike took a step forward, and for a moment, Lottie feared he was going to ignore their offer of gold entirely. However, he stopped just short of the two teens, his hands at his sides. “One more chance, Maybank,” he said lowly. “Don’t screw me over again.” 

With a quick nod, JJ promised Mike gold would follow their adventure. How true that was, Lottie had no clue. They were after her dad, no El Dorado, but the two were one in same if she was being honest. Even if they rescued their dad before Singh forced him to find the lost city of gold, the man would insist on going looking for it; Lottie could already hear his voice and the way he wouldn’t take no for an answer when he was so close. 

The two stayed rooted in place until Mike and his friend drove off. 

“Holy shit,” Lottie breathed out, dropping her hold on JJ’s arm. “I can’t believe that actually worked.” 

JJ smirked proudly. “What can I say, we’re a hell of a team, huh?” She laughed before they quickly worked to change the tire and continue on their way to save Kiara, not wanting to waste any more time that they really didn’t have. 

JJ opted to drive the rest of the way, being the slightly more reckless driver of the two. While they hurried down the roads, Lottie snuck some not-so-subtle glances at him. The windows were down, blowing his sun-blenched blond hair around. It had grown out a bit longer than he usually kept it. Usually, he and John B. would cut each other’s hair; they’d been doing that since they were younger, and it never turned out as bad as Lottie always expected. But since they both had been so busy, neither one had the time, and their look became a little shaggy. Lottie liked the look on JJ. 

“I can’t tell if you’re staring because I’m really hot or because you’re plotting against me, and it’s really starting to stress me out.” 

Lottie smirked. “Could it not be both?” she said, a teasing tone in her voice. “Though, I don’t think your looks are gonna get you out of Baracuta Mike’s wrath if we come back without gold.” 

With a sigh, JJ drummed his fingers against the steering wheel. “Then hopefully we find some gold.” 

“You’re not worried about the curse?” Lottie asked. 

He shrugged. “Let’s be honest, Lot, could a curse really do us any worse? I could handle a little curse if it meant we came back with some cash.” 

Lottie returned her gaze to the road ahead. Maybe he and Kie had a point. They weren’t even at rock bottom anymore, or whatever came after. Lottie really felt like she was as low as she could get; her home in ashes seemed to be the final blow. Maybe something worse would follow the gold, but at least they’d have some fucking money. Lottie officially had nothing to her name but a change of clothes, her ID, and some first aid supplies. That was it. 

Getting into Kitty Hawk proved to be a hell of a lot easier than Lottie had planned for. All JJ had to do was say they were dropping off a package to the security at the front gate, and they let the Twinkie roll in without any more questions. Once they parked and found a woman in the main office. JJ made up some story about Kie’s dead cat, having clocked the three photos on the lady’s desk of her pet cats. Lottie slipped in that the cat’s name was Marley, hoping when the message got to Kie, she’d know they were the ones who delivered the message and were there to rescue her. 

After they bid the woman goodbye, they had to lie low until sunset. There were way too many people roaming around the school grounds. They’d be spotted too quickly if they tried to break Kie out while it was still light out and the girls were outside doing some kind of yard work therapy. While Kie had only been there a couple of hours, Lottie knew her friend already loathed the place. 

JJ had moved the van where it would be harder to spot and where they could hop in for a quick getaway once they got Kie. 

Finally, once nighttime had settled in, Lottie and JJ watched from behind one of the buildings as Kie was escorted into one of the large cabins. From the number of girls who had entered it, Lottie assumed it was where they all bunked. 

To be honest, Lottie did feel a little creepy lurking around camp, especially once nighttime hit. But she had also been in much weirder situations. She needed to focus on getting Kie back and then hightailing it to South America to get her dad back. 

They timed their movements between when the lax security passed by, chatting with each other and not even paying attention to their surroundings. To be fair, they probably weren’t looking for anyone breaking into camp, only those trying to break out. 

Lottie and JJ hurried down the alley that ran behind cabins four and five until they reached where Kie was in cabin six. When the coast was clear, they hurried along the side of the cabin and up the front steps. 

Lottie wiggled the doorknob, but it was locked. Luckily, JJ had learned how to pick a lock from a book he found at a library when he was thirteen, when Lottie dragged him along with her. He plucked a bobby pin from her messy up-do and jimmied the lock in impressive time. If they weren’t in such a race against time, she was certain he would have made a cocky comment about it, but he refrained and opened the door as quietly as he could. 

Through the dark cabin, Lottie made out the large, singular room lined on both sides with at least ten bunk beds. Soft snores echoed through the cabin, and moonlight poured in through blind-less windows. 

The two split up, JJ taking the left side and Lottie the right, quietly whispering Kie’s name in the hope of finding her with some ease. What they thought would happen? Lottie didn’t exactly know. Maybe that they’d spot her, and slip out without waking another soul. Obviously, that wasn’t the case, though. The second they started whispering for Kie, their steps caused the floorboards to creak, and bedside lamps started to switch on. 

Lottie froze, guilt flushing her face. 

Across the room she heard JJ clear his throat before he said, “Oh, uh, hey.” Confused mumbles tumbled from the sleepy girls’ mouths. “I know this looks bad. But we’re actually just here for our friend.” 

More girls started to stir. Lottie held her hands up in defense. “We come in peace!” she whispered. 

Then, from one of the top bunks, a familiar voice sounded. “Lottie? JJ?” 

Kiara hurried down her bunk ladder and rushed to Lottie, who was closest. She threw her arms around her friend with enough force to send them both stumbling. “Holy shit!” Kie breathed out in disbelief. “What are you guys doing here?” 

JJ sauntered up to the two, a smirk on his lips. “You thought we just let you hang out here and miss all the fun saving Big John?” Kie just laughed and hugged him too. 

“We found another ride to South America,” Lottie explained quickly. “The others probably took Ward’s jet by now, but we can still get there if we leave, like, right now.” 

Kie just stared at them both with fondness in her dark eyes. “I love you guys.” 

As Lottie said it back, JJ’s attention was pulled to the startling number of eyes that had fallen upon them. Every single girl in the cabin was wide awake and staring at the three of them making a scene in the middle of their sleeping quarters. 

“Apologies, everyone,” he said with a wince. “You all have a nice night now.” He started toward the door, ready to bolt, but Kie hesitated. Her expression shifted into something Lottie couldn’t read before she took off back to her bunk, but her attention was on the girl on the bottom bed. 

“Come with us,” Kie said to the girl. 

Lottie and JJ exchanged a confused look. 

“What?” said the girl. 

“Do you really want to stay here and spend the next however many weeks reflecting on your ‘bad choices’ by doing fucking yard work and singing around a campfire? Or, do you want to run away to South America with me and my friends?” 

The girl’s wide eyes blinked as she mulled it over for just a second. Then, she stood up and shouldered her backpack that had been halfway peaking out from under her bed. “Fuck it!” she exclaimed with a grin. “Let’s go!” 

Kie took the girl by the hand and brought her over to where Lottie and JJ were still standing in the middle of the cabin. All eyes were still carefully trained on them, like they were engrossed in a TV show. 

“Guys, this is Jane,” Kie introduced the girl. “She’s smart, like crazy smart. I’m talkin’ Pope-level smart.” 

Jane looked between all three of them oddly before she shook her head. “Oh, no, I’m not religious. I don’t believe in the Pope.” 

JJ cocked his head to the side. “I’m pretty sure the Pope’s just some guy.” 

With a shrug, Jane said, “That’s none of my business.” 

Lottie felt like she just got whiplash. With a quick shake of her head to refocus, she shot the girl a smile. “Okay, Jane, welcome aboard. Now, let’s get the hell out of here!” They all agreed and bid the dazed girls in the cabin a quick goodnight before they all fled through the door. Through the darkness, the four of them raced through the woods until they reached where JJ and Lottie had hidden the Twinkie. The two collected what they needed from the van and made a quick choice. 

There was only one road in and out of Kitty Hawke, and the security had already seen the Twinkie. It wasn’t a subtle vehicle. If they used it to escape, they’d probably be spotted before long. They decided to ditch the van instead of risking getting caught. Thanks to their deal with Barracuta Mike, JJ shot him a text, and before long he arrived to pick them up and take them to his plane that he used to smuggle drugs in the Outer Banks. 

Lottie had to admit, she wished his plane more closely resembled Ward’s, something comfy and rich-looking. Mike’s plane was the opposite of that, meant to haul cargo, not people. It was a hunk of metal that looked uninviting, but that didn’t matter. Lottie had a dad to save from a treasure-crazed millionaire, and that was her one-way ticket. 

They all ventured aboard and attempted to make themselves comfortable before a rocky lift-off. 

↕  

Not long after take-off, Lottie had fallen asleep, as did Kie’s new friend, Jane. That left Kie and JJ, who both couldn’t seem to join the two, in comfortable silence for a while. JJ listened to the lull of the plane’s engine and tried to shove down the small pit of nerves that coiled in his stomach. He didn’t know what awaited them when they landed, or what the others had already been up to. But he wanted to save Big John, and he wanted to find some gold to solve his growing list of issues. Obviously, he knew the priority was Big John, but JJ was really banking a lot on El Dorado. He had no other way to pay off his debt to Mike. And Mike wasn’t exactly a forgiving man. 

JJ would take the fall for their screw-up with the U-Haul- it was his idea in the first place. John B. and Lottie were just forced along for the ride. But he’d prefer not to have to do anything more than pass off a hunk of gold to the man and call it a day. JJ hoped that wasn’t too wishful thinking. 

With a shake of his head, JJ tried to distract himself from his spiraling thoughts. He outstretched his foot, careful not to move too much since Lottie’s head was comfortably using his shoulder as a pillow, and poked Kie’s foot with his own. 

“You sure made friends fast,” he whispered, his tone teasing as a smirk grew on his lips. 

Kie’s friend, Jane, had sprawled out beside Kie, using her backpack as a pillow. The girl was a bit on the shorter side, with dark skin and dark hair that was braided. She and Kie were in matching Kitty Hawk pajamas, which JJ assumed Kie wanted to burn the second she got the chance. 

“She was the only one to talk to me,” Kie replied with a shrug. 

“So you invited her on our treasure hunt/rescue mission?” 

“She needed an out too,” Kie said. “Obviously I don’t know her well, but I think she can help us. When she gets nervous, she just starts rambling off a bunch of history facts. 

JJ raised his brows. “Killer credentials.” 

With a roll of her eyes, Kie said, “Don’t act like you ever think through anything you do.” 

He smirked. “Fair enough.” For a couple of seconds, they fell back into quiet, listening to the hum and rattle of the plane before Kie tapped his foot with hers. 

“Thanks for busting me out of that place.” 

“Thank Lot,” he said. “I was just backup in case things got hairy.” 

“Still, you guys could have left without me, but you didn’t.” 

JJ smiled a bit softer. “You would’ve done the same for any of us,” he said. “Besides, we’ll probably need all hands on deck for whatever bullshit we’re running headfirst into.” 

JJ leaned out the side of the window-less bus and waved them down. 

The two stopped dead in their tracks at the four of them halfway hanging out the window, like they hadn’t actually expected them to find a ride. 

"Well, I’ll be damned,” muttered Cleo. Her eyes fell onto Jane, who looked lost but followed suit in waving to the two people who were strangers to her. “You brought a friend?” 

Jane smiled. “Hey, I’m Jane. Kiara’s former bunkmate. Well, kind of. Does it count if you never actually slept in the bunk?” Kie shrugged but didn’t have the chance to say anything before a stressed-out Pope looked over his shoulder. 

“We gotta go!” he shouted. 

Cleo nodded. “Start runnin’!” The two then took off and rounded the bus to the other side, where they used it to hide behind as vehicles turned down the road in pursuit of something- them, Lottie quickly pieced together. 

She groaned and threw her head back. “Already?! We just got here!” They scrambled to gather their sparse belongings and hurried off the bus to where Pope and Cleo were.

“Those are Singh’s men,” Pope quickly explained. “They knew we’re here, so we need a plan, and fast.” 

The Jeep’s Singh’s men were parked across the street from the bus and started to get out, large guns slung over their shoulders as they looked on the hunt. 

Lottie looked around for somewhere to hide and locked her gaze on a collection of roadside fruit stands a couple of feet away. She took off toward them and beckoned the group to follow. There was just enough room behind the stands and the wall for all of them to crouch and stay out of sight. 

They could hear the men question everyone they could get their hands on, practically interrogating the people who had been on the bus with them. By some miracle, no one had ratted them out. Lottie didn’t know if it was because they didn’t pay enough attention to the four clearly out-of-place Americans, or maybe they could smell the trouble on Singh’s men and thought it was best not to say too much. 

The men had gotten close but didn’t spot them. It wasn’t long before they decided to move on and continue their hunt elsewhere. The group waited for the sound of their vehicles to fill the air. Pope slowly lifted his head and let out a sigh of relief after he told them the coast was clear. 

Cleo clicked her tongue, resting against the wall. “Welcome to South America.” 

On the other side of Kie, Jane wiped a hand down the length of her face, her eyes blown wide. “When you said we were running away to South America, I was thinking more fun vacation and less, uh, trouble?” 

Kie winced and shot the girl an apologetic look. “I probably should have explained everything a little bit better.” 

Any normal person would have been angry, upset, or somewhere in between that they weren’t told exactly what they were getting into by joining the Pogues. But Jane didn’t exactly seem like your typical girl. She willingly snuck out of Kitty Hawk with a group of strangers and jumped aboard a weird dude’s plane with little hesitation. And she hardly seemed that disturbed that they were actively being hunted down by brawny men with guns. 

Jane just shrugged her shoulders. “It’s cool. Beats talking to my therapist and doing yard work.” 

Pope furrowed his brows at her. “Does it?” 

“Hey!” JJ said sharply, earning everyone’s attention. “We gotta move out, like, now. Mike said if we needed it, he knows a guy with a boat.” 

The group stood up and moved out from behind the fruit stands. Lottie looked up and down the street. “What about my brother and Sarah?” 

“If Singh’s men went after the two of us, they know John B. and Sarah are here too. They probably dipped out of here to find Jose, the dude with the riverboat. We told each other if we get split up, just follow the direction from Neville, and we’ll all find our way back together,” said Pope. 

Lottie hated it when they all split up, but it was partially her fault. They had gotten there late because of their rescue mission. If they agreed to follow the plan and find each other again along the way, then Lottie would honor that. They all were after the same thing: Big John and El Dorado. 

After Mike loaded up his plane, he met them at Tres Rocas. He texted JJ to meet him at this old shack near the river, with boarded-up windows and an overgrown yard. The place looked abandoned, but they didn’t venture inside it. Instead, Mike led them down a worn path to the river. On the shore was a boat, fixed with tarps to keep the harsh sun at bay and a little worse for wear. The boat was nothing pretty, but Mike assured them it was full of gas and would get them to El Tesoro. 

Unfortunately, they didn’t have the guide Jose, who knew exactly where he was going. All they had was some loose map drawn by the guy Mike knew and their blind faith that they could bullshit their way through just about anything. 

“Thanks,” Pope said to Mike before he stepped in the boat first. Cleo, Kie, and Jane followed suit. 

“Don’t thank me; I’d start praying if I were you guys,” Mike said with a shake of his head before his gaze fell onto the blond. “JJ?” 

“Yeah?” 

“You owe me. Times ten.” 

JJ gave him a curt nod before he motioned for Lottie to get into the boat so he could push it offshore before joining them. Once they were all in and on the water, they began their journey down the river. 

JJ steered, seated beside the engine with an expression fixed in determination with a small hint of worry. His debt to Mike had grown exceptionally. If they didn’t find El Dorado and bring back some gold, Lottie didn’t know what would happen. They’d be found out the second they returned to the island. 

But that was a worry for another time. First, they needed to find Big John and pry him from the hands of Singh. 

Lottie fixed her gaze out ahead of them, taking in the thick walls of greenery on both sides of the river. Bugs hummed, and animals somewhere in the jungle howled. Overhead, birds of bright colors flew and listened to their own singing from the treetops. If they had been there under a less stressful situation, Lottie would have found it peaceful. Instead, the hot and humid air on her skin made her uncomfortable, and her chest carried an unforgiving tightness. 

“So, Jane, right?” Cleo spoke, cutting through the silence that had fallen between the group. The girl nodded, seated across from Cleo and toying with the tied bracelets around her wrist. “Why’d you want to tag along here?” 

“Oh, um, well, I didn’t really know what we were doing or why. But I wanted to get the hell out of Kitty Hawk and probably wouldn’t have gotten another chance until my aunt stopped by to see if I’d stopped being such a, in her words, ‘pain in her ass,’” she said. “Which is funny because she also calls me unmotivated and lacking ambition. I don’t know how I can be both, but whatever. All I know is, it’ll be a lot harder to call me lazy when she finds out I ran away with a girl I just met and her friends. She’ll probably kill me, but that’s only if I go back to her stupid house with her stupid cat.” 

Jane hardly took a breath the whole second half of her story. She finished and slumped down in her seat before she looked at everyone staring at her. A sheepish smile graced her lips. “Sorry.” 

With a shake of her head, Lottie said, “You know, if we make it out of here in one piece, we can crown you an official Pogue, and you can hang with us if you don’t want to go back to your aunt’s.” She wasn’t one to invite just anyone into their tight-knit circle, but it had worked out great with Cleo, even if she had sort of been dragged into their issues then stranded on an island with them. 

“What’s a Pogue?” 

“A friend,” Kie said. “And Lot’s right. If you don’t mind slumming it with us, we don’t mind the extra company.” 

Pope added, “I promise we don’t always do shit like this.” 

“Don’t believe him. We’ve become real treasure hunters lately,” said JJ. 

A scoff sounded from Cleo. “Some sorry ass treasure hunters who can’t hang on to any of the shit they find. But sure, Rude Boy, we’re treasure hunters.” 

“That’s not our fault!” JJ argued. 

Jane looked between the group thoughtfully, lips pursed slightly. “When I was little, I did seriously consider a career as a pirate,” she said, in what sounded like full seriousness. “So, I’m down.” 

They all laughed, their numbers growing in size as they continued to pick wayward teenagers along the way. If only they had somewhere to go back to when they returned to the Outer Banks. 

With the map from Mike and Pope's beautiful brain and Cleo’s sense of direction, they came upon El Tesoro. However, from a good distance away, they already spotted Singh’s men, who had to be waiting for them to show up. Before they could be spotted on the river, they parked the boat up on the bank, shielded by the thick of overhanging branches, and crept their way through the jungle until they reached the wooden dock, a handful of men, and a shed. 

They were able to sneak into the shed from the opposite side of where the men were lounging, not paying a whole lot of attention. Singh didn’t leave behind his most alert men; he probably took them with him and Big John to ensure there were no surprises. That was good for the Pogues, though. 

Pope and Cleo had stolen some firecrackers from Tres Rocas that some kids had left unattended, and JJ always carried a lighter on him. From Jane’s backpack, they used a piece of paper and a pen to write a note to the men, warning them about how they’d have five seconds after the first ‘gunshot’ before things got nasty. Inside the shed were fishing poles and other miscellaneous supplies. They hooked the letter and cast it out to the closest man seconds before the boys started lighting the explosives. 

It worked like a charm. The loud bangs of the firecrackers tricked Singh’s men into thinking they were being ambushed, and they were quick to bail. They retreated into their boat and hurried away without much issue. 

Once the immediate threat of Singh’s men was gone, the Pogues scrounged around for any supplies they could steal, then started on foot through the jungle, following the vague directions Neville had told John B., JJ, and Lottie back on his houseboat. They were also following the hope that Sarah and John B. had already been there and were ahead of them on the journey, and the hope that they at least knew where Big John and Singh were, if they hadn’t found them already. 

Mike had been kind enough to arm them each with a machete, which came in handy to fight against the greenery, but also in case they encountered trouble along the way too. JJ was enjoying himself, whacking through the thick vegetation and saying how he felt like Indiana Jones. 

After they were walking for a bit, Pope had spotted footprints in the dirt, which brightened their hope of finding either John B. and Sarah, or Singh and Big John. Lottie doubted many people were trekking through there for a leisurely stroll, so it had to lead them somewhere. Pope and Cleo led the way, following the prints. 

As much as Lottie hated running, she quickly realized she also hated hiking. When they found themselves in breaks between the tree cover, the hot sun set her skin ablaze, and her worn-out sneakers rubbed against her heels. She gritted her teeth and focused on the path ahead, trying to avoid the swing of JJ’s machete. 

“You doing okay, Lot?” JJ asked, pausing to turn around after he climbed a steep, small incline. He held out his hand for her, and she accepted it gratefully, letting him help her up. 

“Never take me on a date hiking,” she muttered, keeping hold of his hand for a couple of seconds longer, even though both his and her palms were sweaty. 

JJ chuckled lightly. “Noted. No marathons and no hiking.” He gave her hand a squeeze before letting go and continuing to clear a path through the greenery. 

After another mile or two, the group all caught up with each other and stopped in a grassy field for a quick break. Pope had snagged him and Cleo two water bottles before they were chased by Singh’s men. They were borderline hot by that point, but no one cared as they passed them around. Lottie wiped the sweat from her forehead and fixed her ponytail into a bun to keep her hair off of her neck. 

Once they all had a bit of water in them and caught their breath, they continued on following the vague path of footprints not yet erased by the abundance of nature surrounding them. 

↕  

JJ had lost track of how long they’d been hiking for. Why couldn’t El Dorado have been somewhere a little colder? Or somewhere easier to trek through? He knew that was the point; treasure wasn’t supposed to be easy to find, and neither were treasure hunters, apparently. 

He paused for one second to ease the start of an ache in his legs, but was startled half out of his mind when the sound of an explosion tore through the air. He cursed loudly before his gaze went upwards, where birds fled from their perch on the high branches with loud squawks. 

“I think it came from over there!” shouted Pope, not waiting for anyone’s reply before he took off toward the noise. 

Beside Kie, Jane’s face scrunched up. “Are we sure following the sound of a bomb going off is a smart move?” 

Lottie shook her head. “Nothing we do is a smart move.” 

So, they headed right toward the sound. It wasn’t long before familiar voices waded through the air. JJ let out a breath the second he heard John B. and Sarah up somewhere through the trees. 

Then, a third voice sounded. 

“They found him,” Lottie rushed out as she started to pick up her pace. They could see John B. and Sarah not too far ahead, with their back to them. JJ heard what Lottie had too: the voice of her dad. He couldn’t quite make out what they were saying, but he was the first to hear the fourth voice in the conversation. 

“Wait,” JJ said, grabbing Lottie’s hand to stop her before she broke through the surrounding plants to where her bother dad, and Sarah were. The Pogues stopped at JJ’s words too. “Is that…” 

A long simmering anger appeared on Pope’s face as he finished JJ’s sentence. “Ward.” 

The group crept forward and found a fallen tree trunk close enough to the others to hear what they were saying and large enough to keep them hidden. They needed to figure out what kind of situation they were entering before they jumped in. That usually wasn’t JJ’s forte, but he knew that Ward was bad news. 

JJ spotted Big John seated on a rock, but most of his figure was blocked by John B., and Sarah stood close by. Her attention was fixed on her dad, who stood opposite the three of them with a gun in his grasp, aimed at the two Routledges. JJ assumed Ward wanted to shoot Big John, not John B., but the latter wouldn’t have been a shock. Yet, JJ wasn’t sure if Ward would shoot John B., knowing it would be the final line in the sand Sarah drew, keeping her forever beyond resentful of her dad. 

“No,” Lottie whispered. She reached behind her and grabbed the handle of the machete sticking out of the top. 

JJ already had his knife in his hands. He glanced at the other Pogues, and honorary Pogue, Jane. “All in?” 

They all situated their gifted machetes in their grasps before nodding. 

JJ whispered a countdown, and once he hit one, all six of them raced out from their hiding spot, yelling. All of the attention fell onto them as they surrounded Ward with their knives raised. 

Lottie pointed her weapon at Ward. “Drop the gun!” she shouted. 

While JJ had felt bad for Sarah, back when they thought they had watched Ward blow himself up on his boat, he wished the man would have done it for real. He kept being the largest pain in their ass, constantly standing between them and something good almost within reach. 

Ward didn’t budge, but he looked wildly surprised to see them. His eyes were blown wide, and the look on his face made it easy to see that he didn’t know what to do next. 

“You’re outnumbered, Ward,” said JJ. 

The man changed his aim, moving back and forth between the group frantically. He wasn’t expecting an ambush. 

“What?” Pope called out. “Are you gonna shoot all of us?” 

“If you’re gonna shoot anyone,” Big John said, his voice loud to draw Ward’s attention. JJ took his eyes off Ward for just a second. Big John was holding his hand against his side, the fabric underneath stained red; he was hurt already. JJ wondered if it had been Ward or Singh’s doing. “Shoot me.” 

John B. shifted more in front of his dad and took a step toward Ward. His jaw was hardest, and anger flared in his eyes. He took another step. Then another, making JJ inch to knock his friend out of the way and take his face, but he was worried any movement too sudden would cause Ward to pull down on the trigger his finger hovered over. John B. didn’t stop until he was only a foot or two away from Ward and the gun. 

“Or me,” he challenged. 

From the corner of his eye, he saw Lottie run forward. She moved too fast for him to realize what was happening. His fingers just missed her shoulder, wanting to pull her back beside him. As he stumbled forward, Lottie had already slotted herself between Ward and her brother, chest heaving and hands shaking as one gripped the machete and the other curled into a fist at her side. 

JJ felt another wave of panic surge through him. He felt like that any time any of his friends were in danger, but with Lottie, it was tenfold. Blood rushed in his ears and his chest constricted. He wanted to do something; he needed to do something, but he was rooted in place, watching the scene play out on high alert. 

“You’re not shooting any of us,” Lottie said lowly. “Haven’t you done enough?” 

At Lottie’s side, Sarah appeared. Her eyes were lined with tears, but she too looked angry. “Stop it,” she said coldly. If there was anyone who could make Ward pause, it was her. 

There were several, impossibly tense, seconds where nothing happened. The Pogues all stayed with their machetes tightly in their grip, itching to take Ward down. Ward’s finger backed away from the trigger, but he didn’t lower the gun, still aimed at Lottie’s chest. His gaze, however, had moved onto Sarah. 

He knew the second he pulled the trigger, it was over for him. But one shot was all it would take for him to kill any one of them. That couldn’t happen. 

“I know you,” Sarah then continued. “You forget that I know you.” Slowly, she reached up and grasped her dad’s wrist. He let her take the gun from his grasp, and she passed it off behind her back to John B. 

Tears shone in Ward’s eyes too as he quietly cried out, “I…I can’t…” 

“I can.” 

JJ’s eyes snapped onto a man who had slipped out from the jungle directly behind Big John. He had a gun in his grasp with the tip against the man’s head. John B. was quick to aim Ward’s gun at Singh’s man. 

“Drop it,” the man said coldly. 

“Easy, bud,” Big John rasped out. “Your boss is dead. You got no reason to do this.” 

“I can think of a few reasons.” His gaze hardened before he shouted at John B. to drop his weapon once more. 

John B. slowly raised both of his hands and let the gun fall to the dirt. Singh’s man stepped around Big John and picked up the other gun, pocketing it so none of them got any bright ideas. To be fair, JJ was about five seconds away from diving for the gun on the ground to replace his machete. The knife was nice, but not against a gun. 

“Thought you’d get away with the gold, eh?” said the man. He eyed the group, his gun slowly passing by all of them. “My mate back there is dead.” His gaze zeroed in on Sarah, and it didn’t leave her. 

JJ’s pulse hammered, and his mind spun. No Pogue was dying that day. He just needed a plan. He needed to think. He needed to- 

However, before he could even let out a breath, Ward was yelling and charging at the man. Gunshots rang out, and blood was quick to seep through the fabric of Ward’s shirt, but it didn’t stop him. He ran right at the man and tackled him. They rolled right beside a steep drop-off. Maybe Ward knew that, or maybe it was just a kind of fucked up luck. As the man regained his footing, so did Ward. With one final yell, he tackled the man for the second time, sending both of them right over the edge of the drop-off. 

A heavy silence filled the air, and no one moved for a moment, unsure if what just happened was even real. It was Sarah who shook out of her shock first. Tears streamed down her flushed cheeks as she peered over the edge. Everyone else followed suit. 

JJ stared at the two bodies sprawled out at the bottom, dead. He felt both nauseous and relieved, just as he had when he thought Ward blew himself up. But that time there was a body and no chance of him finding a way to cheat death. No, Ward Cameron was dead for good that time. 

A horrible sob tore through the air from the lips of Sarah. John B. wrapped her up in his arms, his expression a cloud of different emotions. JJ imagined he felt the same conflicting thoughts spiral around his mind, only probably ten times worse than whatever JJ felt. Ward had tried to kill him and his dad. Ward had him framed for murder and nearly put him on death row. Ward had caused all of them so much grief it was dizzying. 

Ward did a lot of awful things, but he died saving Sarah. JJ supposed they had to give him the smallest amount of credit for that. 

“John B., Lot!” Pope shouted, drawing everyone’s attention. He was at Big John’s side, who had his head tipped back and face scrunched up in pain as he pressed against the injury at his side. Up close, JJ could see how much blood covered the man’s hand and soaked through his shirt, and that was just around the wound. 

The twins were quick to their dad’s side. They helped him to his feet, earning a pained groan. 

“We gotta get him out of here,” said John. 

Lottie’s face only grew in worry, twisted up like she could feel her dad’s pain. “What happened?” 

“Singh shot him.” 

SEASON ONE. the lost children of Hawkins, Indiana

ONE. - TWO. - THREE. - FOUR. - FIVE.

SIX. - SEVEN. - EIGHT. - NINE. - TEN.

ELEVEN. - TWELVE. - THIRTEEN. -

FOURTEEN. FIFTEEN. - SIXTEEN. -

SEVENTEEN.

SEASON TWO. the return

EIGHTEEN. - NINETEEN. - TWENTY.

TWENTY-ONE. TWENTY-TWO. - TWENTY-THREE.

TWENTY-FOUR. - TWENTY-FIVE. - TWENTY-SIX.

TWENTY-SEVEN. - TWENTY-EIGHT. - TWENTY-NINE.

THIRTY. - THIRTY-ONE. - THIRTY-TWO.

THIRTY-THREE. - THIRTY-FOUR. - THIRTY-FIVE.

THIRTY-SIX. - THIRTY-SEVEN.

SEASON THREE. the cruel summer

THIRTY-EIGHT. - THIRTY-NINE. - FORTY.

FORTY-ONE. - FORTY-TWO. - FORTY-THREE.

FORTY-FOUR. - FORTY-FIVE. - FORTY-SIX.

FORTY-SEVEN. - FORTY-EIGHT. - FORTY-NINE.

FIFTY. - FIFTY-ONE. - FIFTY-TWO.

FIFTY-THREE. - FIFTY-FOUR. - FIFTY-FIVE.

FIFTY-SIX. - FIFTY-SEVEN. - FIFTY-EIGHT. - FIFTY-NINE.

SEASON FOUR. the deal with god

SIXTY. - SIXTY-ONE. - SIXTY-TWO.

SIXTY-THREE. - SIXTY-FOUR - SIXTY-FIVE

SIXTY-SIX - SIXTY-SEVEN - SIXTY-EIGHT

SIXTY-NINE - SEVENTY - SEVENTY-ONE

SEVENTY-TWO - SEVENTY-THREE

SEVENTY-FOUR - SEVENTY-FIVE - SEVENTY-SIX

SEASON FIVE. the end

SEVENTY-SEVEN - SEVENTY-EIGHT - SEVENTY-NINE

EIGHTY - EIGHTY-ONE - EIGHTY-TWO -

A part of Lottie wanted to just tell her brother and her and JJ, but with everything going on with their dad, she figured it wasn’t the time to stress him out even more. Besides, it wasn’t like she and JJ acted like your run-of-the-mill, totally platonic friends to begin with. They could get away with being close without raising any questions. The Pogues had promised not to tell either; John B. seemed rather oblivious to the whole thing. 

The thin blanket of normalcy of the night eased some of that tightness in Lottie’s chest; the rest of it would remain until she got her dad back. 

“So, what kind of plane is it?” asked Cleo as she peered over her hand of cards. 

“Well, it’s Ward’s. I’m guessing something sweet,” answered Pope as he glanced to his side where Sarah sat. The blonde nodded, causing a smile to spread across Cleo’s lips. 

“That’s what I’m talkin’ about. Flyin’ private, baby!” 

It was Lottie’s turn. She played her hand, but lost to Sarah, who collected the pot of random items the Pogues had in their pockets. She cheered in triumph while everyone’s disappointed broke into laughter. 

One game turned into several, before yawns started to fill the air. John B. and Sarah retreated into his room to “talk.” The Pogues teased the two of them until John B. flipped them off and shut his door. Kie was already half asleep on the armchair, wrapped in a ratty throw blanket, and her knees tucked into her chest in what looked like an uncomfortable position, but Kie could sleep just about anywhere, any way. 

That left Pope and JJ still at the coffee table, engrossed in some light-hearted argument about the card game between just the two of them. But in their sleepy state, everything became ten times funnier to them, and their argument quickly turned into fits of laughter they tried to conceal with a hand over their mouths. 

Lottie had started to gather the empty beer bottles and bring them into the kitchen. She knew it wasn’t exactly necessary to clean up, but it gave her something to do. Cleo helped her. 

“How’s staying at the Heywards been?” Lottie asked. Since they’ve been back, she felt like she hadn’t gotten a chance to talk to Cleo aside from treasure planning and then Lottie’s dad. That was another thing she missed about Poguelandia: the constant togetherness, especially with the girls. They all bonded, bringing Cleo into their little group with open arms, which she accepted happily. 

Cleo’s lips quirked up in a bright smile. “Really nice. They better than any family I know.” 

 “They’re the best." Lottie lowered her voice slightly, a smirk gracing her lips. "And what about Pope?” 

Cleo wasn’t the kind of girl who had her confidence shaken easily, or she didn’t show it. She was tough, had to be. More importantly, she wasn’t normally one to shy away from anything. But at the mention of Pope and Lottie’s gaze, Cleo shifted her gaze onto the counter and distracted herself by emptying a couple of the beers that had a sip or two left. Lottie did notice the smile never left her face, though. 

“He’s also great.” 

“He seems to think you’re pretty great, too."

With a shrug, Cleo said, “Eh, I think he’s just bein’ nice.” 

“I know Pope, okay? He is nice. But... I don’t know, he’s different around you.” Cleo snapped her head up, something like worry flickering in her eyes. “Not in a bad way. In a good way. A really good way,” 

Cleo relaxed and leaned against the counter. “That’s what his momma said. I told her she was trippin.” 

Lottie chuckled before a more serious tone replaced her teasing one. “You’re happy here, right?” 

“Of course I am,” she replied, confused. 

“Good. I just…I wanna make sure because you ditched your whole life to slum it with us."

Cleo’s expression turned into something more serious yet softer at the same time. “I’m happy here,” she said. “The happiest I've been in a long time, actually.” 

Pope cleared his throat in the entryway of the kitchen and stumbled through a lame but cute attempt to ask if Cleo wanted to share the couch with him. Cleo laughed and led the way back into the living room, leaving Pope to follow behind with a little pep in his step. 

Lottie retreated to her bedroom, JJ following behind her. He jumped onto her bed and sprawled out with a loud yawn. She watched with a small, amused smile on her lips before she remembered the last conversation the two had had before returning to the Chateau. 

Instead of joining him on the bed, she stayed standing and hugged her arms. “Jay?” He hummed, lifting his head to look at her. “You’re not mad at me about earlier, are you? I should have told you what happened, I just…I didn’t want to think about it.” 

His expression softened slightly as he sat upright and shook his head. “‘Course I’m not mad,” he said simply. “I mean, I wish you would’ve said somethin’, but I get it.” 

She let out a breath and moved to sit on the edge of the bed. He scooted towards her, wrapping his arms around her waist. She leaned back into him. JJ was warm, and a part of Lottie just wanted to close her eyes, enjoy one night before they ventured to South America with no idea how or in what shape they’d make it back in. 

However, just as JJ started to press little kisses to her neck in the sweet, quiet solace of Lottie’s bedroom, her door swung open without warning. 

Lottie jumped, and JJ pushed himself back, nearly falling off the other side of the bed with a start. 

Poking her head inside, Kie looked both frantic and apologetic. “Sorry! I’m sorry! But, uh, we have to go, like now!” 

Lottie’s warm face flooded with confusion. “What?” 

“There’s a fire!” Kie said before she quickly ducked out of the bedroom. 

For a second, Lottie and JJ exchanged a look, bewildered before the smell of smoke wafted in through her door. She scrambled off her bed and grabbed her backpack from the floor, hooking it over her shoulder as she jammed her feet into a pair of tennis shoes. 

JJ was right behind her, the two hurrying into the living room to see the rest of the Pogues in panic. The smell of smoke grew stronger by the second, and Lottie caught sight of orange flames through the screen door that led out to the porch. 

The Chateau, which their dad had built sometime before the twins had been born, was almost all wood. It would go up fast. They couldn’t leave through the porch. Sarah was the closest to the side entrance. She grabbed the door handle but hissed in pain and quickly drew her hand away. If that door was hot too, then the fire was spreading around the outside of the house. They needed another way out. 

John B. raced toward the opposite side of the house, into Lottie’s room, and threw open her window. The fire had yet to spread around to that side, meaning they had a narrow window of time to escape before it reached there. One by one, they climbed out of Lottie’s bedroom window, landing in the shrubbery below before they put distance between themselves and the Chateau. 

Their collective coughing filled the night air, along with the billowing smoke from the house. The fire roared into a monster in a matter of minutes, engulfing nearly the entire thing. Calling the fire department seemed useless. By the time they’d arrive, the Chateau would be gone. There was nothing they could do but watch it burn. 

Lottie sat in front of the large tree in their backyard, the one carved with her, very much alive, brother’s headstone. Tears gathered in her eyes, both from the smoke and from the sight. Everything but the clothes on her back and a backpack full of random supplies was still inside, being consumed by the flames. Every photo, item of clothing, junk, and books that filled their dad’s office. Her and John B.’s entire life till that point had been centered around the Chateau. It was the Pogues’ meeting place, their dad’s gift to their mom after they got married, the twins' home. It was all turning into ash and cinders before their very eyes. 

The Chateau was far from a mansion or grand estate, but it was home, in every sense of the word, to Lottie. 

Something harsh squeezed at her chest, eyes widening. She scrambled to her feet, earning confused looks from her friends. “My picture. One of us, Dad and Mom. It’s in my room. I left it!” She only took one step toward the burning house, not thinking logically about how there was no way back inside. The photo was probably already burned; it was the only one she had. 

Before she could take a second step, JJ was on his feet, and his hand grasped her arm, tightly enough to hold her in place but not enough to hurt. “Lot,” he said quietly. “You can’t go back in there.” 

She looked over her shoulder at her home. “I-It was the only photo I had of her,” she said, tears gathering heavy in her eyes. She looked at her brother, with tears of his own silently streaking down his face as he sat on the ground, his back against the tree. His gaze was glued to the fire, reflecting his brown eyes. 

At her other side, Kie reached up and gently grasped Lottie’s hand. “I’m sorry.” 

Pieces of the home collapsed into itself, sending sparks and flames higher. Lottie sank back down to the ground. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to scream or cry, but the longer she watched her home become more and more unrecognizable, the more a numbness settled in. 

They watched the house burn until there was nothing left of it. The early morning sun cast a cruel golden glow across the yard, highlighting the ashes of what once was the Chateau. The tears on Lottie’s cheeks had dried; all that was left behind was a pile of ashes.  

If Lottie had any doubts before, the fire only proved that the universe really must’ve had it out for the Routledges. 

It wasn’t until mid-morning that the group picked themselves up from the grass, the air filled with smoke, and the fire extinguished with no more home to consume. They agreed on giving everyone one hour before they met back up on the island’s private airstrip, where Ward’s plane was supposedly waiting. 

Pope and Kie both wanted to at least try to convince their parents to let them go. Cleo joined Pope in hopes that she’d lend a hand in swaying the Heywards. JJ broke away also, needing to gather some things from his house before they left. 

That left Lottie, John B., and Sarah to head straight to the airstrip. Thankfully, Ward hadn’t played them, and his fancy plane was waiting when they arrived. It did seem like the least the man could do for them, especially Sarah. 

The three waited on the tarmac. John B. kept his eyes glued to his watch as the hour drew to a close. Lottie and Sarah sat on the steps of the plane, a comfortable silence between them. 

Lottie hated that her clothes smelled like smoke, but she wanted to save the couple of spare clothing items for later, in case she or someone else needed them. She had quickly put on her tennis shoes, which she still had from Limbery; they would be more useful than a pair of sandals if they, or rather when they, ran into trouble in the pursuit of getting their dad back. She didn’t expect anything to go smoothly; she knew better than that. But she did hope to God or whoever was listening that, even if shit went sideways, they at least came home with their dad. 

Five minutes before the hour was up, JJ arrived with a backpack slung over his shoulder. 

They anxiously waited another five minutes, which stretched into nearly ten minutes before Pope and Cleo showed up. Thanks to Cleo, the Heywards begrudgingly let Pope join them. The only one they were missing was Kie, and Lottie couldn’t shake the bad feeling that grew in her gut as the minutes continued to tick past. 

“It’s gotta be her parents,” Sarah said. “They’ve been up her ass lately.” 

Lottie recalled the wilderness school Kie had offhandedly mentioned the night before, how her parents had threatened her with it. 

Standing up, Lottie strode up to John B. and yanked the Twinkie’s keys from his pocket. He spun around, brows furrowed. “What’re you doing?” 

“Going to find Kie, obviously,” she said, wasting no time as she started toward the Twinkie. “Just give me an hour. Either I’ll break her parents down enough to let her come, or I’ll sneak her out. I don’t know, but I’ll figure it out!” Because Kie would not want to be left behind, and while her parents thought what they were doing was in the best interest of their daughter, Lottie knew Kie better. That, and if the roles were switched, Kie would go after Lottie. 

She jumped in the driver’s seat of the Twinkie and was quickly joined by JJ in the passenger seat. She peered at him before she started the van. “What’re you doing?” 

“I’m here for backup, obviously.” 

A smile graced her lips as she started the van and hurried off in the direction of Kie’s house. 

When they parked in the street in front of the Carreras’, the couple was already outside on the front steps of their home. 

“Let me try to talk to them first, okay?” Lottie said to JJ. Kie’s parents weren’t a fan of any of the Pogues, especially as of late. But there had been a time when Lottie was their favorite friend of Kie’s. Maybe a part of them still thought that, despite everything. 

Kie had once said that her dad saw too much of himself in the Pogues, especially the boys. He had once been a Pogue himself, running wild and free while getting into plenty of trouble around the island. Then, he met Kie’s mom, a Kook princess who decided to slum it with him against her parents’ wishes. He left his reckless Pogue life behind for her, cleaned up real nice, and made a good living for himself, her, and eventually their first and only child. There had only been a handful of times when Lottie saw that Pogue hidden inside of him, like when he shot gunned a beer with his buddies or when a shitty patron got testy with his wife while working at the Wreck. 

“Good call,” replied JJ as he eyed the couple through the Twinkie’s cracked windshield. 

Lottie sucked in a breath and got out of the van, greeting the two with a hesitant wave and a small, “Hi,” as she stood just outside their gate. 

“Charlotte,” Mr. Carrera said, a fall following her name. “Go home.” 

A part of Lottie wanted to retort by telling him her home was nothing but a big pile of ashes now, but she refrained. 

“Look, I know I’m probably one of the last people you want to see right now. But I’m just here for Kie. She was supposed to meet us, but never showed, and we can’t reach her.” 

“She’s not here,” Mrs. Carrera said. 

Lottie didn’t believe her. She bet Kie was trying to see what was happening from her bedroom window. “I know you guys don’t think we care about Kie, but we do. She’s my best friend. I just want to make sure she’s okay.” 

The faintest hint of softness spread across Mrs. Carrera’s face; it was a look similar to what Lottie had once only received from the woman, back when they would watch movies on the couch or steal fries from the restaurant kitchen. 

“She’s not here. I know that you care, but you and your friends aren’t what she needs. And we won’t let her throw her life away.” Because of you. Mr. Carrera left the last part unsaid, but it was loud enough. “You guys won’t be seeing her again for a while.” 

Lottie shook her head, confused. “Where is she?” 

“We sent her to a place where she can try to rebuild what you and your friends ruined,” Mrs. Carrera said, her softness melted into anger, like she suddenly remembered all that the Pogues had done. 

“You really sent her away to some wilderness school?” Lottie didn’t believe that Kie’s parents would stoop to that level. They were far from model kids, and they had screwed up a lot, but taking Kie away from her friends wouldn’t change anything; if anything, it would probably make things worse. The Pogues had been through too much at that point to be torn apart from each other. The thought alone burned through Lottie like acid. 

“It’s better this way,” said Mrs. Carrera, but she was wrong. 

Lottie didn’t utter another word; she turned on her heel and returned to the Twinkie. 

“What wilderness school are they talkin’ about?” asked JJ. 

“I don’t know,” she said, pulling away from the house. “Do you still have Jimmy’s phone?” 

JJ reached into his pocket and held up the dead man’s cell phone. She instructed him to look up the closest wilderness school advertised to ‘help troubled kids.’ It took him a couple of moments and clicks before he found one called Kitty Hawk. 

“That’s gotta be it,” said Lottie. She knew her next plan of action would put them really far behind their current mission of getting down to South America and saving her dad, but Lottie couldn’t get on a plane knowing Kie was stuck at some wilderness school until, or if, they returned. They needed all hands on deck, and if the roles had been reversed, Lottie knew Kie would’ve gone after her. 

“Okay, pull up the directions for Kitty Hawk, then call John B. and tell him our plans have changed.” 

JJ mock saluted and did just that. 

“Oh no,” John B. said through the phone’s speaker after JJ quickly explained where Kie was. 

“We’re looking at roughly eight hours needed for liberation,” JJ said. 

“Eight hours? We don’t have eight hours! The jet is here, and we’re all waiting.” 

Lottie snatched the phone from JJ’s hand. “I know, but we can’t just abandon Kie! Hold out for us as long as you can. And if you need to go…” She hesitated for a moment. “Then we’ll find another way and meet you there.” 

They didn’t have another way, and Lottie had a feeling another one wasn’t going to just fall in their lap, but maybe they’d get unreasonably lucky. It seemed only fair after the shitty night she had, on top of the already shitty time she and her friends were having. 

Her brother’s voice came through the speaker a little louder, landing somewhere between frustrated and panicked. “We can’t…we can’t wait for you!” 

JJ took the phone back and held it to his mouth. “Dude, we’re working on it! Just stay in the matrix-” 

A loud pop cut him off. The Twinkie wobbled before it came to a stop. Lottie glanced in the side mirror to see the back tire of the van smoking and painfully deflated. She cursed under her breath and rested her forehead against the middle of the steering wheel. 

“Piece of shit!” JJ grumbled, hanging up the phone. “Please tell me there’s a spare in the back of this baby?” 

Lottie thought for a moment; the Twinkie had a habit of breaking down more after than not, but between all of the Pogues, they usually got her back up and running. Even in all of their chaos, John B. was pretty good about making sure the spare was never tossed out, and the tools stayed put in the way back. 

“There should be.” 

They both jumped out of the van and around to the trunk. The spare was still there, thankfully. JJ grabbed the tire, and Lottie grabbed the dusty duffel that held everything else they needed. She silently cursed everyone and everything she knew as JJ started changing the tire with a slight sense of urgency. 

No one thought such a tragedy would ripple across town; no one thought they’d lose. 

Mark was still grieving his friend, just like the rest of the basketball team. He was grieving like Fred’s parents, like Chrissy’s cheerleading squad, like Patrick’s lonely little sister, like the whole goddamn town. 

But Mark shouldn’t have brought Max into his ranting.

Dustin tried to push past the blooming headache behind his eyes and the stares of his classmates who had heard about their confrontation with Mark and were on the jock’s side. He reached his locker and yanked it open with a small sigh, wishing the school day would come to an end already. 

Organized chaos stared back at him. He rifled through his belongings, looking for his chemistry notes, but pulled his hand back quickly when his fingers touched something wet and cold. 

“What the hell?” he muttered to himself. 

Sure, his locker could be defined as ‘messy,’ but it wasn’t gross. It was simply a storm of papers, notebooks, and an unstable stack of textbooks that wobbled each time he opened his locker. He never left old food in there - not after the Milk Incident of 1984. His lunch was always secured in his Star Wars lunch box that Leia had gifted him for his birthday - she had bought a matching one in the hope of her starting high school at Hawkins High before she moved to California. And the lid on his water bottle was always closed tightly and rested in the upright position. 

Dustin pushed aside a couple of ace tests and note cards until he opened up the spot where he had touched something odd. When he spotted the source, the blood quickly drained from his face, and the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. 

A faceless, slug-like creature looked back at him. 

“Dart?” he whispered, leaning his head almost completely inside his locker to get a better look. It looked nearly identical to Dart, back when Dustin had first found him rattling around in the outside trash can by his garage. He should have been scared, knowing that the little creature would quickly develop a taste for household pets before it could only be satisfied by human-sized treats. But Dustin found himself more confused than anything. 

He supposed it was more than probable that a baby Demogorgon snuck into Hawkins during the initial earthquake, when the Gate had split open all across town. It would’ve been impossible for anyone to keep track of that until it was too late; that whole night had been one big blur. 

However, if it had escaped the Upside Down over a year ago, it wouldn’t have reached full-size a couple of short days after it arrived. They grew fast, as Dustin had learned. Considering the monster was no larger than a chunky slug, it couldn’t have been in their world longer than a couple of hours. 

Maybe the government's band-aid over a gaping wound wasn’t as effective as they originally believed. The monsters were small, too, in their freshly hatched form. But if it was so easy for them to get into the Right Side Up, why weren’t there more of them? Sure, there was a chance the military was doing one thing right and eliminating the monsters before they hurt anyone or were even spotted. Dustin didn’t have that much faith in them, though. 

Maybe the little guy in his locker was a fluke. Of course, it had to be a fluke that found Dustin again. 

He cupped his hands and attempted to scoop the creature up, but just as Dart had been, the little monster was quick and slippery like a frog. It leapt from the locker, and Dustin jumped back with a gasp. A couple of students nearby shot him a confused or dirty look as they passed, but Dustin kept his focus on the baby Demogorgon. He took off after it, barreling past his peers and ignoring shouts from teachers and staff that told him to slow down. 

Dustin trailed Dart Two down the hall and cursed under his breath as the creature slipped right under the doors to the gym. Luckily, it was still the passing period, so the gym would be empty. 

His old sneakers squeaked as they hurried across the newly polished gym floor, gaining on the little monster fast. When he thought he was close enough, Dustin threw himself forward with the hope of tackling Dart Two, but it jumped before Dustin could close his two hands around it. 

With a hard thud, he crashed against the floor, smacking his chin. He groaned in pain but wasted no time staggering back to his feet to continue his chase. His chin stung, but he pushed it aside and zeroed in on Dart Two just as it slipped under the opposite set of doors and disappeared into the next hall. 

“Son of a bitch!” Dustin shouted as he slammed against the doors to open them, only to smack right into a body. He managed to stay upright, blinking up at the physical education teacher, Mr. Rudy. The man’s round face was pinched in annoyance and disappointment. 

His signature whistle was already between his lips, making it easy for him to blow on it loudly. hurting Dustin’s years. “I don’t want to hear that kind of language in these halls, Henderson!” Mr. Rudy’s only volume was loud, like he was a radio stuck on full blast. 

As much as Dustin wanted to roll his eyes, he couldn’t afford to stick around and wait for the man to write him a detention slip. “I lost a…a frog!” he quickly lied, but the urgency in his tone wasn’t faked. “From the science lab. He escaped, and I’m trying to find him before someone steps on him!” 

Mr. Rudy’s face scrunched up in disgust, and he stepped aside to let Dustin go, thankfully. 

He continued his sprint, catching sight of Dart Two just as he rounded the nearest corner. It passed by a couple of strangling students, but they didn’t seem to notice it, which was good. Dustin pushed his legs to move faster and managed to gain on the little monster. 

Despite his last failed attempt, he launched himself at the creature again. That time, however, his hands closed around Dart Two, trapping it between his palms as he landed on his belly in the middle of the hall. With a huge sigh of relief, Dustin sat up and held his hands close to his chest, hoping he could keep the little monster there until he caught his breath and found a more suitable place for it to be kept until school was out. He was grateful that he found the baby Demogorgon before its taste for humans developed, along with its rows of teeth. 

“Uh, Dustin?” a voice said from beside him. He flinched, pressing his back against the wall of lockers, all red-faced and heavy breaths. Frankie Kline, the niece of the disgraced former mayor of Hawkins, was peering at him with curious eyes. She was tall and blonde with an arm for softball and a brain fit for a future Shakespearean actor. “Whatcha doing?” 

Dustin cleared his throat and attempted to act as casual as he could. “Oh, you know, just…hanging out.” 

Her eyes fell onto his hands. “Did you catch a spider or something?” 

See, Dustin was smart, smarter than most kids his age. That wasn’t bragging, it was statistics. But he had gaps in his intellect. He knew full and well what the creature in his hands was, and what it would eventually do if they didn’t eliminate him or toss him back into the Upside Down. 

However, there was still that sense of wonder that had been there back when he first discovered Dart. 

It was stupid; the monster he was holding would eventually become ruthless and more dangerous than the simple human mind could fully comprehend, but at the end of the day, it was a cool creature from another world! 

“It’s a slug…I think,” Dustin answered. “A new species, maybe.” 

Frannie’s eyes lit up before she bent down in front of Dustin. “No way! And you’re rescuing him?” 

Dustin nodded slowly. It was probably best that she didn’t know the second not-so-dead Jim Hopper laid his eyes on the creature, it was as good as dead. 

“Can I see it?” she asked. Under any normal circumstance, if he’d been holding a real slug and a pretty girl asked to see it, Dustin would’ve believed he really had died and gone to Heaven. Suzie hadn’t been very fond of bugs, but she did love animals. 

Oh, Suzie, Dustin’s Mormon ex-girlfriend. He should’ve known the second that Hawkins went on lockdown and the no-contact rules were set in place that they’d struggle even more in the long-distance relationship. Sure, he broke the rules and had Murray send her letters from the post office a couple of towns over, where he explained, somewhat, of what was going on. 

For a couple of months, they talked via letters thanks to Murray. But one day, a letter had arrived that told Dustin his sweet Suzie had met a Mormon boy at church who lived in the next subdivision over. Long distance was too hard, especially when something much closer came about. That, and she knew Dustin was hiding something big from her, which wasn’t helped by the Byer-Hopper clan and Mike, who ambushed her house on their hunt for El across the west. 

So, Dustin fell back to being single and ended up holding a monster in his hands, still trying to save the world. He had a lot on his plate, okay? And a girl before him, interested in a slug, made him pause his better judgment. 

“Um, sure.” He carefully opened his hands and presented her with…nothing. 

There was no slug, no baby Demogorgon in his hands. 

Confused, he looked left and right to see if maybe he hadn’t felt the creature slip out, even though it would have been impossible for it to do so. It was like it had vanished into thin air. Could they do that? 

“Uh, oh,” Dustin muttered. “I, um, I thought I caught him. I must’ve…missed?” 

Frannie frowned for a moment, standing back up and clutching her textbooks closer to her chest. “Oh well.” She shrugged and fixed a small, friendly smile on her lips. “I’ll see ya around.” Then she started to walk away, headed for her next class. 

“Yeah,” Dustin muttered, but she was already too far to hear him. “See ya.” 

[...]

The radio station was a chamber of noise and smelled like summer, a mix of sunscreen and sweat. Luke sat on the rug in the middle of the basement floor, adding to make the space a little more cozy, with his hands tucked into the pockets of his hoodie that Steve had given him a couple of months ago. It was worn in, not too hot, and the perfect amount of oversized for the sleeves to easily cover his hands. 

There was an argument raging, not an intense one or even a mean one, just one questioning the “right” thing to do next. 

After Luke and El’s trip to the Void, and their pull toward Will’s confusing past and future, they wondered what else there was to be discovered together. It seemed like Luke wasn’t pulled into El’s future when she was in the Void at his side. Together, they were drawn elsewhere. Luke thought maybe that was the key to finding Vecna and/or Max. It was the only thing they had yet to try. 

Kali brought up the idea of adding Will into the mix. He didn’t have abilities and couldn’t enter the Void on his own, but he wasn’t without his oddities. When Luke ventured into what should have been Will’s future during the summer of ‘85, he found himself in the past, reliving the moment Will was taken to the Upside Down. 

That suggestion, of connecting Will to the two like some odd chain, was met with concerns. Hopper didn’t like the idea of Luke and El experimenting with their abilities, and Joyce really didn’t want to throw her son into the Void on a whim. 

“We don’t know what will happen,” said Hopper. “This isn’t something we should be screwing with.” 

“Not knowing what will happen isn’t a bad thing,” argued Kali. “Nothing at all could happen. Or this could be the very thing that leads us to where Vecna’s mind is hiding. At the very least, it could help us understand why Will was taken in the first place and used by the Mind Flayer.” 

Joyce, with a near constant furrow in her brows, anxiously tapped her fingers against her mid-afternoon cup of coffee. “How would learning about why Will was taken help us now?” 

Standing beside his mother, Jonathan seemed to be more on Kali’s side. “Maybe it wasn’t a coincidence.” 

Joyce sighed. “This could hurt him,” she said. “It could hurt all three of them.” 

“It didn’t hurt them last time. And they’re all smart. El knows when to pull the plug, and when she says so or finds her way out of the Void, if we break the connection between them all, they’ll all come right back to us,” Kali said, slight frustration starting to prick her tone. “This could answer our questions, at least some of them! This could get us somewhere, somewhere a hell of a lot further than Hopper’s roaming around the Upside Down, hoping he stumbles onto Vecna or his lair. As I said, if his mind and body were in there, El would have already found him. Maybe, between the three of them, they can find him or get us closer to.” 

Joyce moved her hand from her coffee mug to her forehead, rubbing her temples. “I just don’t see what adding Will will do. He’s…he’s not like Luke or El.” 

“Mom, they saw Will when they went into the Void together. That has to mean something,” said Jonathan. 

“You want to put your brother in possible danger for a maybe?” Joyce argued, causing a pinched look to appear on Jonathan’s face; however, before he could say anything back, El piped up. 

“Hey!” she shouted, her voice almost instantly quieting the room. She had stood up opposite Luke on the floor. He noticed how she squeezed Max’s scrunchie in her hand, like it was giving her the fiery will of Max herself. Everyone’s attention turned onto El, and her face flushed slightly at everyone’s eyes on her, but she didn’t waver. “Stop talking about us like we aren’t here! This is our choice to do this.” 

She looked between Luke and Will. “We know our limits.” 

On the other side of the room, Hopper’s expression softened, as did his tone. Maybe not everyone would’ve picked up on it, but Luke had known the man long enough to spot it. His soft spot for all of them, even Kali, was slowly taking over. “We just want you kids to be safe. We don’t know-” 

“But we do,” Luke cut him off, standing to join his sister. “El and I know how to use our abilities. Even though we’ve only traveled into the Void once together, it was similar to how we both always travel. And with Will, we’ll keep him safe and leave if something starts to go wrong. Besides, he wouldn’t have agreed to this if he didn’t trust us.” 

Will was quick to nod. “We don’t even know if I can travel with them, but it’s worth a try. We haven’t gotten anywhere new in our search for Vecna. But we know he’s not gone. I can still feel him, but it’s faint. He’s…he’s somewhere we haven’t gone. Maybe wherever that is, is where he’s holding Max hostage. We have to try. I have to try.” 

Their words seemed to have extinguished some of the concern. Hopper and Joyce looked a bit defeated, if anything, but there was a hint of pride that glimmered in their eyes, too.

“With the three of them together, they all should be able to help each other out,” Mike said after a beat. He was usually the one to question their safety, especially El’s, when it came to pushing their abilities. It surprised Luke that he seemed happily on board, but he appreciated it. 

With a nod, Sunshine added another thing in the three’s defense. “We have to trust them,” she said. “It’s their choice to do this.” Because they weren’t in the Lab anymore. Because their abilities were their own and they wanted to use them for good instead of what they’d been built for. That, and Will had so many unanswered questions. If he had the chance for even one of them to answer, he had to take it. 

The parents fully relented, and it was go-time. 

Since they were at the radio station, El wouldn’t be using the bath to enter the Void. She wouldn’t be as powerful, but Luke thought that if they all were on the same playing field, it might work better. They needed a starting point; if it didn’t work, they’d try something else. 

With a blind fold over her eyes and a radio positioned in the middle of the circle of three, El entered the Void. The overhead lights flickered, and her lips parted with a short breath before she said, “I’m in.” 

Luke swallowed a nervous lump in his throat before shooting a glance at Will. “Ready?” With a nod, Will held out his hand, his other already grasped in El’s. El also had her unoccupied hand outstretched, ready for Luke. He counted down from three before taking both of their hands at the same time. 

In an instant, it felt like his brain was in the middle of a game of tug-of-war. Like was pulled in two directions between El and Will, but he was in control, he reminded himself. Though he wasn’t sure how true that was exactly, he could at least pretend. He squeezed both of their hands and envisioned something he had come to know quite well before he was back in Hawkins and on lockdown. 

During their stint in California, Jonathan took the liberty of trying to cheer the kids up between their grief over Hopper, who they thought was dead, and missing their friends. He brought them to a nearby arcade nearly every weekend and on weekdays that were particularly rough. They used the money Jonathan had pocketed from his part-time job after school at the local movie theatre. Since the government had given them plenty of hush money for their California stay, Jonathan saved half of what he earned for himself and split the rest between his old and new siblings. 

Standing in front of the arcade machines, with joysticks in their grasp, it did make all the bad melt away for a little bit. Luke learned he really enjoyed video games, the harmless thrill of it all, and the quick thinking with no real consequences of failing. 

So, while trying to navigate between his brother's and sisters' minds, he pictured a joystick. With an invisible hand, he moved it back and forth, working the two sides of his pulled brain until he could feel Will and El’s minds come closer together. He imagined pressing a button on one of the arcade machines that caused his hands to grasp both minds at once.

When he peeled open his eyes, he saw nothing but the inky blackness of the Void and the figures of Will and El standing before him. 

“It worked,” Luke breathed out, a little bit in disbelief. 

El smiled at him before she glanced at Will. “Do you feel okay?” 

Slowly, Will nodded. He looked down at his hands. It was a strange feeling being inside your mind. It felt like your body, but there was something off about it. 

“I can’t believe that worked,” said Will. 

Neither could Luke. Usually when he slipped into someone’s mind or fell into a dream, he was all alone and there was a piece of him that was always scared. No matter how many time he’d done it, it was never that easy. But not being alone loosened some of that fear. 

“Now, we look for a storm, right?” El asked Luke, her face set in determination as she rolled her shoulders back. 

“Usually there’s already one waiting for me,” he said. But the Void was just that, empty and dark. He normally could feel the tug of future visions pull him in like a magnet. Even when he traveled with El, he felt it when he entered, even though it wasn’t her storm that called to him then. 

Then, he heard it, the sound of glass fragmenting or ice starting to crack over a frozen lake. He glanced down at his feet, submerged in a thin layer of water that covered the Void’s ground. He blinked and really focused his vision before he saw little splinters crack under his feet. 

“Grab hands!” he rushed out. El and Will, despite their confusion, did so, locking all three of them in each other’s tight grasp. 

“What’s happening?” asked Will. 

Luke didn’t get the chance to answer before the Void’s ground gave way underneath them. Unlike a frozen lake, they were plunged into the cold waters waiting below the cracked ice. Instead, they free-fell into darkness. There was nothing to be seen, not even each other. The only sensation was falling, and all of their hands interlocked. 

They fell for what felt like minutes, but was probably only seconds, before they landed on solid ground with a thud. Pain shot through Luke’s body. He blinked several times before the scene around them melted into view, like ice refreezing in the bitter cold. 

“That wasn’t a storm,” El grumbled, sitting up and cradling her elbow to her chest. She looked around for a moment before she stilled. “Oh no.” 

“We’re in the Upside Down,” Will breathed out, his voice just above a whisper. 

Luke shook his head. “Not really,” he reminded them. “It looks real, but we’re in our heads, remember.” 

No one had any fond memories of the Upside Down; it wasn’t the place for that. But Will probably had the worst ones there. Sharing a room with Will in California made Luke realize how much the place still haunted him. He had woken Will up from plenty of nightmares, gently reminding him that he was safe now. But Luke should’ve known better than to lie. They wouldn’t be until that place was unreachable, if that was even possible. 

They stood to their feet and tried to pinpoint exactly where they landed in their mind’s version of the Upside Down. There weren’t any notable landmarks, just trees that stretched toward the dark skies like extended monster claws. 

“Guys…” Will started to say, but his voice caught in his throat as his eyes locked onto something. His hands started to shake at his sides, and his face had gone even more pale in the low light. Luke followed Will’s line of sight and found what he was staring at. Hooked to a fairly high branch of a tree several feet away was a backpack, a backpack that looked a bit too normal compared to the nightmare around them. 

“I don’t think we’re in the future,” Will said. 

With a frown, Luke moved toward the tree. Vines slithered lazily around the trunk and along the ground, not seeming to pay much mind to Luke. Yet, he was careful to avoid them when he stepped. Once he was underneath the branch with the backpack, he peered up at it. He knew objects from their world existed in the Upside Down, but it felt odd to see them. 

“You think we’re in the past?” Luke asked Will. “Your past, right?” 

Will whispered, “Yes.” 

Luke still couldn’t figure it out. With Will, he kept finding himself falling into the boy’s past. He’d never been able to do that before, nor had he since with anyone else. It made no sense. What was it about Will that kept turning the clock backwards instead of forwards? It had to mean something, Luke knew that much. He just couldn’t pinpoint what. 

It was no secret that Will had a connection to the Upside Down in a way none of them did. He had been possessed by the Mind Flayer and bested it. He was taken to the other world, not killed by the Demogorgon like Barbara Holland had been. Will had been a vessel for the Mind Flayer, a puppet for Vecna. That was, until he proved not to be so easy to corrupt, like Billy Harrgrove or even Henry Creel himself. Will was smarter, not as twisted in the head or rotted by the world because he had people who cared for him so deeply that they’d fight a monster before letting him fall victim to it; Billy and Henry had lacked that. 

Maybe Luke kept getting dropped into Will’s past because it was desperate to show him something they were missing. Luke never got visions for no reason. He saw Max’s fate at the hands of Vecna, even if he didn’t understand the dire meaning of it until it was too late. He saw Sunshine battling the Mind Flayer at the mall, in a burst of brilliant light, combating the creep of darkness. Every vision meant something; it was a piece of a larger puzzle. Luke just didn’t always have the right piece in time to see the full picture; that was no one’s fault but his own. 

If Will’s past was begging to be understood, Luke needed to understand it before something else horrible happened. He had to stop being too late. 

“Luke!” El screamed, startling Luke from his thought. He snapped his head in her direction and saw that she had her hand outstretched in front of her in the way she often did when she used her abilities. Something squeezed his leg. He dropped his gaze to see one of the vines curling around his calf like a snake looking to strangle something. He tried to shake the vine, but couldn’t even lift his foot. The vine squeezed even tighter, shooting pain up through his leg. 

“Hold on!” El yelled again. She focused her energy on the vine, and it started to vibrate, but before she could uncoil it from his leg, two more vines sprang up from the ground and circled her wrist. She yelped in surprise and tried to shake her hands free. 

Will tried to help her, grabbing at the vines, but they didn’t move. 

Over Luke’s head, in the tree, a vine curled around the trunk, looped around the backpack, and carried it down. It dropped the bag right in front of Will’s feet. His hands froze over the vines trapping El’s hands, his eyes bugging wide. 

For a moment, it looked like Will was going to pick up the backpack, but instead, he kicked it. The bag went flying before he turned back to El and grabbed at the vines with a fit of fury. He managed to tear them off, as if they were nothing but flimsy vines. 

Will then hurried across the space between them and Luke and dropped to his knees. He freed Luke’s leg and held out his hands. Luke grabbed it without hesitation, and El followed a moment later. When they were all three once again connected, Will led the way, running. 

They sprinted across the uneven terrain of the Upside Down that Will remembered. Even though their physical bodies weren’t running, Luke could still feel the burn in his legs. They weaved between the trees in the woods. It looked like Will was following a path, but there wasn’t one that Luke could see. 

“Where are we going?” El asked. 

“I don’t know!” Will didn’t stop, though. The three of them kept moving until they broke through the edge of the woods and were spit out at the cliff that overlooked the quarry. In their world, Luke had visited there once with Lucas and Will during his one summer of freedom; they rode their bikes there and played cards until the sun started to set, and they had to be home. 

Luke sucked in a couple of deep breaths before he said, “This doesn’t feel right.” Usually, his visions felt cold, like when you took a sip of ice water and could feel it travel down into your stomach. His visions were hardly ever stable; they swirled around him like a painting, which was why he was able to replicate them so well on a sheet of paper. Simple scenes were always hazy around the edges or appeared to him in dreams like a flickering image. But in what he assumed was Will’s fast, the vision felt too whole, too real.

“Should we let go?” asked El, feeling the off-ness too. 

That was the safest call, to re-enter reality and maybe try something else. But going back empty-handed felt like defeat. He didn’t want their trip to be pointless. There was a reason they landed where they had; there was a reason why Will’s future was hard to find, buried somewhere through his past. 

“You said there is supposed to be a storm, right?” Will asked. He had moved to stand at the edge of the cliff, peering over the side. 

Luke and El joined him at the edge. Luke expected to see an empty lakebed looking back at them. Instead, a couple of feet below the cliff’s edge was a familiar-looking storm of futures. Luke felt it beckon him. His feet inched closer to the edge. 

“I think we have to jump,” he said. 

El pursed her lips, her gaze fully focused on the storm. “Are you sure?” 

“It wants to show me something.” Once again, they held hands, but he could feel El and Will’s unease through their grip. Luke took a breath and stepped off the edge first, toppling forward.

The three free fell once more, the wind kissing their face before a coldness enveloped them as they crashed into the storm cloud. 

Their landing was cushioned that time around. The future cradled them, placing them in the eye of the storm with gentle hands; it was much gentler than Luke had ever experienced before. He wondered if it had something to do with El and Will being with him. Maybe the future was kinder to them than to him. 

“Okay,” Luke breathed out. He looked around until he spotted the vision that called out to him the loudest. He led his siblings toward it and allowed it to reel them in. 

When they entered what Luke believed was a vision, the Void was the only thing to greet them. There was nothing, just the inky darkness that seemed to stretch on forever in all directions. 

“No,” he whispered. “This isn’t…this isn’t right.” 

“Isn’t it?” a low, gravelly voice said. Luke spun around, his hands still clutched tightly in El and Will’s. A wooden door was opened, peering into somewhere with a bright blue sky and tall green grass. The view through the door contrasted harshly with the figure who stood in the doorframe. 

“Henry,” El said lowly, her jaw clenching and gaze hardening. 

Venca’s monstrous form stood just feet away. The sight caused a tremble to spread through Luke’s body. 

“William,” Vecna said slowly, drawing out Will’s full name. 

Without taking their gaze off the monster, Luke and El shifted so they stood in front of Will, shoulder to shoulder. 

“Where is she?” El’s voice was sharp. 

Vecna lazily dragged his attention to her for a moment. “Maxine, you mean?” El said nothing, but Luke could feel the rage radiating off of her. Vecna shrugged. “Somewhere. Nowhere. Who’s to say, really?” 

A wave of bravery broke through Luke’s terror for just a moment. “We will find her,” he said, hiding his shaking hands in fists at his sides. “And we’ll find you. We’ll stop this.” 

Something like a smirk crossed Venca’s face; it was horrible to look at. “It’s hard to stop something you don’t understand. Isn’t it, William?” 

“Go away,” said Will. Luke could hear in his voice the fight to keep a brave face, to pretend like he wasn’t scared. 

“I can go anywhere, but it won’t stop it.” 

“Stop what?” asked El. 

Vecna tilted his head. He didn’t cross the doorway and enter the Void, but his presence filled the space regardless. Luke didn’t know if it was because he couldn’t enter the Void, or if he wouldn’t. 

“We never left you, William,” said Vecna. “Can’t you feel it? Can’t you feel us?” Luke heard the sharp intake of breath Will took and his footsteps as he backed up. 

If looks alone could kill, Vecna would have been dust by the glare on El’s face. “You leave him and my friends alone!” 

“Show them, William,” Vecna continued, ignoring El. “Show them what you really are.” The monster raised his hand, and Luke half expected to be flung back by his powers. El mirrored him, ready to fight. But nothing happened for a moment. Luke dared to look away from the Vecna and back at Will. 

His body shook, and his hands twitched at his sides until one of them started to rise. Will looked like he was trying to fight his arm, keep it down. Will looked like he was fighting something no one could see. 

Then, blood started to leak from Will’s nose, just as it did when any of the kids from the Lab used their abilities. The whites of Will’s eyes were all Luke could see. Then, the shaking stopped, and an eerie stillness took hold of his body. As if his limbs were being pulled by a string, Will’s arm outstretched in front of him, and his fingers flexed in a way that mirrored Vecna’s claws. 

Before Luke could get a grasp on what was happening, there was a strange pressure around his throat. He sucked in a breath, but it became hard for air to enter. It was as if someone’s hands had wrapped around his throat. He reached up and started to claw at his skin, growing more desperate for air by the second. 

“Luke?” El called out, but she sounded far away. The air in the Void was suddenly hot, and his throat burned like it was on fire. He fell to his knees as the voice of El grew more frantic. Luke’s vision swarmed, but he forced his chin up to look at Will. All he was met with were the whites of his brother’s eyes and his flinching figure. 

A horrible realization crashed into Luke as little black dots started to cloud his vision. He gasped for air that couldn’t reach his lungs as the pressure grew greater around his neck. Just before he lost consciousness, he saw Will’s hand fall limp, and his brown irises return. 

Horror flashed across Will’s face before Luke closed his eyes. 

One second, Luke was choking in the Void, and the next, he was lying on the floor in the radio station's basement. El stood between him and Will, her chest heaving and eyes blown wide.

Luke gasped and sucked in air as his hands touched his burning throat. 

“What the hell happened?!” barked Hopper. 

Luke couldn’t speak. He lulled his head to the side and met Sunshine’s worried gaze, hovering over him. When he looked to his other side, he saw the bloodshot eyes of a sobbing Will, who was staring at Luke with a look locked in horror. 

Several tense, silent seconds passed before El answered. She hid her trembling hands in fists. “We found him.” 

However, the days were monotonous, which Eddie had warned her about, seeing as how he was also stuck there, believed to be dead. Sunshine needed more things to occupy her mind, so she didn’t feel like the world was trying to swallow her whole. 

Traveling to the Hoppers’ cabin was just what she needed. She followed the instructions Joyce had given her when the woman arrived at the radio station that morning, happy to care for Anne to fill the gaps in her day. 

At the wooden ladder that led to a piece of plywood, Sunshine knew she had arrived. She climbed and knocked a couple of times in a pattern before the kids removed the plywood and smiled down at her. She was hurried inside the cabin by their excitement. 

Hopper was gone for the morning, probably sneaking over to the town’s church to listen to a town-hall meeting that had been called, no doubt because of Nancy and the others’ stunt pulled in the Hawkins Post. The group hadn’t told Hopper about what they did, but Sunshine was sure he already knew by then and planned on giving them an earful. However, they weren’t kids anymore like they had once been, like how the Party still was. 

Nancy, Steve, Robin, Jonathan, and Tamera weren’t stupid either. They knew how much they could say to drum up attention, but not blow the whole big, bad secret of Hawkins wide open. 

The Hopper clan had a quiet day to themselves. Sunshine joined them on the floor in the living room, and everyone gathered around. El and Leia decided to fill Sunshine in on the smaller, more ‘normal’ things she had missed. 

“Will and Mike were all kinds of weird in California,” said Leia. “I mean, our whole spring break was…” she trailed off, but El picked up her sentence to say, “Weird.” 

Luke scoffed slightly, his knees pulled up to his chest and his frame swallowed by an oversized hoodie that probably once belonged to Steve or Jonathan. “Weird is putting it lightly.” 

“But you should’ve seen how weird Will and Mike were!” Leia continued. “I thought it was because they hadn’t seen each other in a while, and Mike never seemed to have time to talk to Will after he was done talking to El.” She went on to explain how the two boys butted heads for the first half of their spring break, until whatever was bothering them fell to the wayside after El was arrested, then went off with Dr. Owens to get her abilities back. By the end of their spring break, before they hightailed it back to Hawkins, Leia had noticed another strange shift between the boys. 

“Then, Will told Mike that El had commissioned him to make a painting of the original Party as their D&D characters. But El didn’t ask Will to make that for Mike; he made it himself as a present for Mike,” Leia said, slightly breathless from how quickly she was speaking. 

El nodded. “Friends don’t lie, but Mike…he’s lied about a lot of things.” She glanced to the side; her brows knitted for a moment before she sighed and shrugged.

“To be fair,” Luke chimed in. “So were you.” 

In a very sister-like fashion, El flicked her chin up and sent a piece of paper from the coffee table flying toward Luke. He swatted it away and stuck his tongue out at her. 

“Anyway,” Leia said loudly, drawing the conversation back to her. “Mike still doesn’t know about the painting, and Will doesn’t want him to know. Why? I have no clue. I think Luke knows why, but he’s being a real a-s-s about it!” Her spelling out the curse word inside of saying it earned a chuckle from Kali, who had been quietly seated on Hopper’s recliner listening along. 

“Because it’s no one's business but Will and Mike’s,” Luke said.

“Since Will and his family have been staying at Mike’s, I think they’re better now,” El said. “More normal, kind of. I think Mike got more normal after we broke up.” 

That took Sunshine by surprise. She remembered the summer of Starcourt, how it was all Hopper could do to keep El and Mike apart. That summer had changed a lot of things, some for the better but most for the worse. After the Byers and Hoppers moved to California, Mike had lamented very dramatically over his girlfriend being on the other side of the country. And El had often mentioned how she missed Mike. 

El didn’t go into much detail about the breakup; there didn’t seem to be much to it. She had bigger things to focus on, and she expressed how she liked it better when she and Mike were friends, best friends. She believed they worked better in a different way, and there was still all of that love and care for each other there, just in a different form. It sounded very grown-up and caused a fond smile to Sunshine’s lips as she realized how mature her sister was getting as her teenage years stretched onward. 

The conversation drifted to the other party members. Dustin was more or less the same, just with a hint of more recklessness since their trip to the Upside Down and the death of Calum that shook everyone up, even those who hadn’t known him too well. He still died helping them; that wasn’t an easy thing to get over. Dustin had been pushing to clear Eddie’s name and Hellfire’s reputation, but nothing seemed to work and only got him and his friends into more trouble than it seemed worth. 

“And Lucas,” El started, her lips falling into a deep frown. “He’s sad.” 

Sunshine mirrored her expression, her heart clenching inside her chest. “I know.” 

It was in the air around him, pinched on his face, and hidden in his voice. Lucas had grown taller since Sunshine had seen him, but he walked like he was trying to fold into himself. His face didn’t light up in the same way it once had. But it was still Lucas, gentle and always trying hard not to show how hard everything had been on him. He didn’t lash out, but crumbled inwards. He lost Max, for over a year now, with no end in sight, just blind hope for something to change in their favor. He lost himself, too. He lost his spot on the basketball team, something new that had welcomed him with open arms and provided a steadiness in the chaos that had been his life since he was just twelve. Lucas was stuck, sad, and teetering on the verge of giving up. 

“We try to help,” Luke said softly. “Try to cheer him up when we’re together. I gave him that painting, Max, hoping it would give him some hope.” He sighed, himself weighted down by it all, too. “I look for something new in her future every night, but I haven’t found anything else, yet.” 

“I look for her in the bath,” said El. “I think Vecna may be hiding himself and Max. I just…I don’t know where.” Frustration sounded in El’s voice. 

Sunshine sat up a little straighter and kept her voice free of her own creeping hopelessness. “There are still parts of the Upside Down that we haven’t searched yet.” 

“His body may be in the Upside Down,” said Kali. “But what I’m worried about more is his mind. It’s much more powerful than his body. His form is just another physical vessel for the Mind Flayer, a puppet with a personal vengeance. If El can’t find his mind, that means it’s somewhere else, probably away from his physical body, and somewhere where El can’t find it. Or somewhere that he’s blocking El from. If he can hide himself, then he can hide Max.” 

Suddenly, Luke gasped and unfolded himself from his hunched-over seat. “Wait, El, when you’re in the bath, you’re only inside the Void, right?” She nodded. “I go there too, just for a moment, before I find myself in the storm of whoever's future I’m going to see. It looks kind of the same, but in the middle of the Void, there’s like this…this tornado of colors and pictures in front of me. Sometimes I have to reach for a vision, other times they call me to it.” 

El pressed her lips into a thin line, taking in what he was saying before she said, “I can go into memories too. I did with Billy and Max. When I saw them in the Void and touched them, it took me into their memories. That’s how I found Max when she was hiding from Vecna.” 

Luke shifted his gaze to the two older girls in the cabin. “What if, while El’s in the Void, I take her hand? Maybe it’ll take us both somewhere neither one of us can reach on our own. Maybe it could get us a step closer to discovering where Vecna and Max may be hiding.” 

Sunshine and Kali exchanged a look, unsure if trying something with the kids not under Hopper’s careful eye was a good idea. But it was their abilities at the end of the day. Sunshine wouldn’t tell them what to do with them. 

“Could be worth a shot,” Kali said, seemingly sharing the same sentiment as Sunshine. 

A nod of agreement from Sunshine set the plan in motion. El, Leia, and Kali worked together to ready the makeshift bath that Hopper built for El to search for Vecna and Max. Luke shed his sweatshirt and steeled himself as he sat on the couch. 

Sunshine sat beside him. “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” she reminded him, even if it was his idea in the first place. 

Luke responded by rolling his shoulders back and saying that he could do it. 

Sunshine looked at him, really looked at him. Luke had always carried himself as if he were older than he was, the protector of his twin sister above all else and his friends and family who followed. As much as Sunshine had always wanted him to rid him of that burden of feeling a sense of responsibility not meant for someone so young, she just couldn’t; it was too instilled in him. All she could do was remind him to be a kid sometimes; the Party helped with that. But she had been gone for a while, and she saw that burden only grow as he grew older. 

“I know Max is out there,” he said. “We brought you home; now we need to bring her home. Or else…what does any of this even matter?” 

El sank into the bath, her body floating in the salty, warm water. A pair of goggles with duck tape over the lens to block out the light rest on her face. At her side, Luke brought up a chair and sucked in a deep breath. The overhead lights flickered as El entered the Void. 

“Ready,” she told Luke. He reached into the water and grasped El’s hand. She curled her fingers around his, and the lights flickered again as Luke’s eyes rolled into the back of his head and his body went slack. He couldn’t speak when he was inside someone’s memories, so El was his tether and voice to the outside world. 

Silence filled the cabin. Sunshine kept her eyes trained on her two siblings, afraid to blink and for something to happen. 

“We’re in a storm,” El said after several moments. “Luke says everything’s moving too fast.” 

Sunshine stood beside the bath, anxiety coiling like a snake around her stomach. “Does he want to be pulled out?” If they disconnected Luke’s hand from El’s, the disconnect would be jarring, but it would send Luke back into his own mind. 

There was a short beat before El answered, “No. We’re being pulled towards something…Wait.” 

The lights in the cabin shut off completely. Sunlight streamed in through the curtained windows, so it wasn’t all that dark, but still, it unsettled Sunshine just slightly. 

“Oh,” El then said. 

“Oh?” Leia repeated. “Oh, what? What do you guys see?” 

“Not Max,” said El. “We see…we see Will?” 

Confusion fell over the room. It was El who was touching Luke’s hand. If they couldn’t reach somewhere new within the Void, they should at least be in El’s future. But they saw Will instead. 

“Is it Will’s memories or his future?” asked Kali. 

A longer pause stretched between El’s answer, drenching the room in anticipation of her answer. 

“Luke thinks it's…both.” 

[...] 

The church was packed with nearly every resident in Hawkins. The end of summer heat and too many bodies packed into pews caused sweat to form on Steve’s brow. He shifted uncomfortably in a nicer pair of clothes that his mom asked him to wear. 

The Harrington’s had never been a family to be seen at church unless it was a holiday, and his dad wanted to make sure the town knew he had some integrity left around Easter or Christmas time, or when his mom woke up from one of her wine benders and wanted to repent for a month or so before her husband did something that sent her back over the edge. 

She hadn’t drank since Hawkins was split into fourths, and the last time she’d been around her husband. But church, she had said, made her feel more judged than loved, so she stayed away. Yet, when a town-wide call was sent out for everyone who wanted to and was able to gather at the church, she insisted they go. 

Of course, Steve had planned to go regardless, considering he was partially responsible for the meeting being held in the first place. He, Robin, Nancy, Jonathan, and Tamera all sat with their families. They didn’t want to raise any suspicion; not that anyone in Hawkins knew the kind of trouble they’d been up to lately, or for the past several years. It was the military that made them paranoid, for a million and one obvious reasons. 

The article in the Hawkins Post had done exactly what Nancy had banked on; it had gotten people talking, and more importantly, it got them complaining much more than they had over the past year. It reminded Steve of the aftermath of Starcourt. The fake death of Hopper, the arrest of the Mayor they had yet to replace, and the rumor that somehow Russians had been involved tore through the town like a tornado. People had been up in arms, ranting and raving about how Hawkins was supposed to be a safe and comfortable place for them and their children; it made Steve want to scoff just thinking about it. 

“I understand everyone’s frustration here, but I want to remind you all that we are working with our military. This is a collaboration, not a game of Simon Says,” said Powell. Steve could smell the bullshit he was spewing from a mile away. Even the people who had no clue just how untrue that statement was could tell he was lying out of his ass. 

“Then why hasn’t there been any updates on when the hell we can come and go from town?” asked some angry person in the crowd. 

Someone else followed by shouting, “We shouldn’t be prisoners in our own home!” 

Powell sucked in a deep breath. “No one is a prisoner. The military is working to ensure that Hawkins is stable and monitoring the town to be sure that we are safe.” 

A woman stood up from one of the pews, her hands on her hips and her face aflame with heat and anger. “I ain’t ever heard of a town being on lockdown after somethin’ like an earthquake. Or ‘help’ that sticks around for so damn long.” She didn’t seem like the kind of woman who would swear in church, but Steve assumed all bets were off when people were hot and pissed. 

“Why don’t you ask any of those people in those photos printed in the paper if they think Hawkins is safer with the military here, huh?” Someone else stood up and said. It was a tall man whom Steve recognized worked at the pharmacy. The man turned, his eyes looking through the crowd for a moment before his gaze seemed to lock on the Wheeler family, who were hard to miss. “Ask Nancy Wheeler what she thinks!” 

She had the most talk about the photo in the paper, as the image of a young girl from a nice, seemingly perfect family, plucked at the heartstrings of the people of Hawkins. That had been the goal, after all. 

All eyes fell onto Nancy, who immediately stiffened up under the sudden attention. She looked around and met Steve’s gaze for a second. He could only offer her an encouraging nod; it was now or never for her to drive home the sentiment they’d been hoping to gain. She faced forward and stood up, much to the horror of her mother. 

“I have all the respect in the world for our military,” Nancy started, lying with conviction. Steve rolled his lips into his mouth to suppress a laugh that threatened to bubble up. In her pink dress with a frilly collar, looking like she had expected the meeting to turn into a Sunday morning sermon, she looked as unimposing as ever. No one would have guessed she was probably the best shot in the whole church; hunting monsters gave her a bit of an upper hand over the normal hunters in town. Nor would they have guessed she was just as screwed up and messy as any of them, stubborn as all hell, too. 

“I was simply asking the soldier a question, the same question all of you have: what are they still doing here? Are we still in danger?” she said. “I have a little sister and brother, and all I want for them is to be able to continue growing up here in Hawkins, safely with all of the freedoms that we expect of our town, of our country. Isn’t that what we all want?” 

Her speech was quickly followed by loud murmurs of ‘yes!’ and ‘exactly!’. 

That was, until a red-faced man stood up tall and broad with a look of rage that didn’t seem to match most of the others. “How dare you all question the motivations of our boys in red, white, and blue?! These men are protecting us, and we’re treating them like the enemy!” 

Well, Steve thought, they are. They kidnapped Sunshine and were experimenting on pregnant women. And that was only their latest offenses. The list was extensive, and that was just of stuff they knew about. 

On the other side of the room, a man opposed the red-faced brute. “Protecting us from what?” 

That was the question everyone wanted to know. You couldn’t stop an earthquake, nor was it something that crawled from the ground and attacked you. An earthquake wasn’t a world with toxic air or children with powers they never asked for. 

Powell tapped on his microphone and did his best to talk over the crowd until they settled. “Hawkins is not in danger; I want to make that clear.” But he was wrong. Hawkins was always in danger, now more than ever. But he, nor anyone else in town besides them, knew about monsters or the man-made ones hiding behind their fortified walls. “The military is here as a courtesy. I know it may feel like they have overstayed their welcome, and some of you are eager to leave. We understand that. I plan to meet with the current Director of their operation this week to discuss a timeline that I can share with you all, and to let them know of your concerns. That is why I have called this meeting today. 

He droned on for several minutes before inviting people to the microphone position at the front of the room for people to “calmly” voice their concerns in a orginzaed manor so that Officer Callahan could jot them down, a job he looked less than thrilled to do. 

The concerns were similar for everyone who spoke. They wanted to know when the military would leave, when they could get the hell out of Hawkins themselves, why a soldier had gotten violent with poor Nancy Wheeler, and if there was another reason the military was there that wasn’t being communicated to the residents. 

“This isn’t a concern, exactly,” the next person at the mic started. A younger woman looked nervous to be speaking, her eyes flickering around and her hands twisting in front of her. “But doesn’t it feel like all of the terrible things that had happened in this town are too alike to be coincidences?" 

That even got Callhan to stop looking bored. 

A weird silence fell across the church, something uncomfortable, like someone was finally saying the one thing no one else had wanted to say aloud. 

She continued, “It’s just…just take a look at everything that has happened over the past decade. Children going missing then reappearing as if nothing had happened. Contaminated water that killed a young girl; that case was swept under the rug as if it had never happened at all. A climbing suicide rate, a serial killer, and other things I’m sure I’m missing. The point is, at some point, we have to admit that all of these things are starting to look a lot less like isolated incidents or…or accidents! It feels like something is seriously wrong here. Doesn’t it?” 

The silence turned into murmurs, conversations Steve couldn’t make out, and that no one wanted to say too loudly. Because she was right. She was too right. 

A people of pews back, sat Robin. Steve looked over his shoulder to find her already looking at him, her face pinched in worry. 

Then, the woman seated beside the red-faced man stood up. “And has any more terrible thing happened since our military arrived?” 

The answer was no, not that any of them could pinpoint. They didn’t know about Sunshine or Vecna or anything really. They wanted to be protected from something they didn’t even know and would hardly understand if they did know. 

The unfortunate thing about the people of Hawkins was that after all they had been through - even if it was just the surface of what had actually happened - they were fragile, shaken to their core. They wanted to be protected; they wanted stability. Most importantly, they were scared, had been for longer than they were willing to admit, and fear was a disease no well-written article or photo could kill. 

After the town hall concluded, Steve felt defeated. It hadn’t worked like they’d hoped. 

They all met up afterwards in the empty church parking lot. 

“Unbelievable,” Nancy grumbled. “I thought we had them! Why won’t they push back against these assholes?!” 

“Because they haven’t seen the shit we have, or know the shit that we know,” sighed Robin. 

“Maybe there’s something else we can do?” said Jonathan. “Something else we can pull to-” 

“You won’t be doing anything else.” Hopper’s voice started all four of them. He was hidden behind a pair of sunglasses, a hat, and too many layers for the heat. He looked like an off-duty superhero who was doing a bad job of hiding his identity. 

“What are you doing here?” Nancy hissed, quickly looking around the lot to ensure no one else was around to see him. According to most of Hawkins, Hopper had died in the Starcourt Mall fire. The last thing they needed was trying to explain that he was alive to some random Hawkins resident. 

Hopper stood with his arms crossed over his chest and a disgruntled look that Steve could read behind his shielded face. “You think I wouldn’t see the paper and immediately know you guys were behind it? I thought I was clear when I said we’re working together through this shit. Now is not the time for you to go rogue and get yourselves killed or put every one of us at risk.” 

“No one knows it was us,” Nancy argued. 

“You better hope not. What you all did was stupid and reckless. I would expect something like this from the kids, but you’re all adults now. Act like it.” 

Jonathan scoffed. “Seriously? We’re doing this for you! To buy you time. If the military is busy dealing with pissed-off townies, then we can keep doing our Crawls without having to worry about them. We can focus on Vecna and ending this, for good.” 

There was a beat as Hopper remained unmoving in his stance and expression. “Don’t pull something like this again without talking it over with everyone. Understood?” 

They grumbled in agreement, half-heartedly and annoyed. 

Hopper dropped his arms to his sides and shook his head. “Look, I know these people better than anyone. I was the sheriff, remember? I know that if you push them too far, if they get paranoid, it won’t be good for anyone. They’ll get scared if they think something is truly wrong with this town; if someone gets the idea in their head that Hawkins is ‘cursed.’ As true as that may be,” he said. “Getting them to question authority is one thing, but you can’t let them run away with it or they’ll be out like wolves, just like they were with Munson. They’ll have their Bibles and pitchforks, and they’ll go after anything and everything that isn’t ‘normal.’ And I hate to break it to ya’ll, but no one in our group blends in very well, especially those kids. We don’t need that suspicion on any of us.” 

As much as that stubborn, teenage part of Steve didn’t want to admit that Hopper had a point, he did. They didn’t need another witch hunt to add to their problems. 

Hopper barked at all of them to go home, which they begrudgingly did, parting ways. Expect Robin to stay with Steve. She said she didn’t want to be around when her parents discussed the events of the town hall while she sat there and pretended not to know anything. 

In Steve’s car, she let out a sigh and slumped against the passenger seat. “I really thought that would work. We were so close to people opening their eyes. Why is it so hard for this town to see things that aren’t just black or white?” 

“I wish I knew.” What he did know was that Robin’s words ran deeper than just Hawkins conspiracies. There were many things that Hawkins was stuck in its ways about. “You’ll get out of here, Robs. You and Tamera.” 

She fixed her gaze out the window as Steve started their drive to the radio station. 

“Maybe,” she said, voice quiet. “But even if we do, it’s not like we can act much differently than we do now. I can’t, like, marry Tamera in some fancy church. We’ll probably burst into flames or open some bullshit doorway to another dimension if we kissed on an altar.” 

Steve shot her a quick look, furrowing his brows. “You want to get married in a church?” 

She shook her head quickly. “No, obviously not. But you know what I mean! Just because we leave the judgmental eyes of everyone here, doesn’t mean there won’t be those kinds of people wherever we go. I’m sure they’d love to tell us we’re going to hell.” 

“I think we’ve already been to hell a couple of times.” The Upside Down seemed close enough. “And you got out of it. Tell those assholes that.” 

That earned a small smile from Robin, a hint of amusement that cut through the somber air. 

“If you want to marry Tamera, then just do it,” Steve said. “Who gives a fuck about some piece of paper from the courthouse? To the people who love you guys, we’ll know you're hitched. I’ll ever throw you a bachelorette party, as your man of honor, obviously.” 

Robin turned towards him, a smile on her face as she rolled her eyes at him. “Alright, slow down, Romeo. I would like to marry her, eventually, even if it’s, like, not legit or whatever. But after college.” 

“Smart,” said Steve. While he had no intention of going back to school himself at the moment, almost everyone else did, if they ever got out of Hawkins. Robin wanted to go into radio broadcasting, since her newfound job sparked a passion she didn’t know she had. Tamera still wanted to go to cosmetology school and work anywhere but the little salon in town. Steve also knew that Nancy and Jonathan had their own dream colleges, but as of late, that seemed like a sensitive topic for the two of them, so Steve refrained from asking about it. 

“That’s just me, though,” said Robin. “What about you?” 

Steve drummed his fingers against the steering wheel. “What about me?” 

“I mean, you’re obviously going to marry Sunshine.” There was no doubt in Steve’s mind about that. Marriage or not, he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. There was no one else for him. He had dreamt about their future a million times over, and while it looked a little different every time, she was the one constant. 

“Obviously,” he replied, smiling lightly at the thought. “Once this is all over and the world isn’t constantly out to kill us.” 

Robin pursed her lips. “Smart.” 

[...] 

Lucas hated the hospital. He hated the stark white walls and the smell of the cleaner that wafted through the air. He hated the candy-stripers who gave him pity smiles when he passed them in the halls, and the sound of beeping that echoed from every room. 

But what he hated the most was seeing Max so still, her eyes closed and skin so pale she looked like a ghost. It made his stomach churn every time he stepped into her room. It made his eyes sting, and his head hurt. Lucas also hated that he couldn’t be at the hospital as much anymore with school back in session after a prolonged summer break following the earthquake. He had contemplated skipping on more than one occasion to spend it by Max’s bedside. 

However, selfishly, he wanted to skip not solely to visit her, though that was a large part of it. Lucas also hated the stares from people in the halls who didn’t know what to make of him anymore. Well, not just him, the rest of the original Party too. The other Hellfire members had either graduated or stuck to the shadows to not be singled out like him, Will, Mike, and Dustin were. 

They had the bigger disadvantage. Between Will’s disappearance that still haunted him, their own odd behavior, and their habit of being caught at the scene of nearly every tragedy in town, the Party didn’t have the luxury of blending in with the crowd. Lucas, on top of all of that, had gone from small-town hero, hailed the next basketball star of Hawkins High after his game-winning basket, to a team-treader after he tried to protect his friends from Jason and his buddies' wrath. 

School had once been Lucas’s favorite place to be, where he could flex his smarts with a rise of his hand and impress his coach at practice. Even with the playground bullies back in middle school and the nasty things spat at him for the color of his skin, Lucas had once enjoyed school immensely. But now the days droned on almost painfully, and all he could do was focus on a way to defeat a monster, bring Max home, and make every other bad thing vanish as if it all had never happened at all. 

In Max’s hospital room was a private bathroom. Lucas set down his geometry homework that he should’ve turned in two days ago, and slipped inside, closing the door behind him. He was still flushed from his bike ride from school to the hospital. He turned on the cold water and cupped his hands under the faucet, letting the water pool in them. He closed his eyes and splashed his face, trying to cool himself down and wash away the knot of dread that had set camp in his body. 

He wiped the water from his eyes and gazed at himself in the mirror. However, when he saw his reflection, he wasn’t the only one who stared back at him. Just over his shoulder stood a head of braided red hair, piercing blue eyes he hadn’t looked into in so long, and summer sun-kissed freckles on rosy cheeks.