Hey, everyone!
Guys... I am literally 18 today. I started this story when I was 15, what the HECK? xD
For a chapter that is only 2k words, it really did have a nerve taking as long as it did for me to write. But no matter, I like how it turned out!
If you have the time to review, that would be so awesome. I love reading them and you'd be making my quarantined birthday 1000x better.
Thank you and enjoy!
The two kids sprang apart in shock as the gunshot blasted out.
The noise ricocheted through her ears; it caused every nerve she had to tense up. Breathing heavily, El looked around wildly to find the shooter. She'd protect them both, she'd take down the threat, she'd–
"El?" Mike said softly.
She turned back to look at him in puzzlement. Following his gaze, her eyes were drawn downwards too, and they widened when she saw what was wrong.
At first, he just felt stunned, unable to move, as if something inside him had completely shifted. Like turning on bright lights after being in darkness.
And then the agony set in. A vicious burning agony spreading through him. Coming from the side of abdomen. He gingerly raised his hand to it, and it felt damp.
Mike looked up at the girl opposite him, his fear reflected in her brown eyes. Just like him, she hadn't quite grasped what had happened.
He wanted to keep focusing on her, but he couldn't. The edges of his vision began to turn black, as the pain slowly subsided into nothingness. Agony melted and dissolved everything in its path. And as he felt his grip on consciousness break, he took gratitude in her face being the last thing he saw.
"No," El gasped, jerking forward as she saw him fall. She managed to catch him before he hit the ground, his weight dragging her down with him. "NO!"
She ended up on her knees next to his unmoving form. El reached out and gently shook him. "Mike?" she whimpered. He didn't respond, and his eyes stayed closed. "Wake up! MIKE!"
Uneven sobs racked through her as she grew more desperate, but no amount of shaking made any difference.
She could see the blood now, a horrifying contrast against his green coat, spreading across the material. She knew what it meant. She'd seen it flow from the people she'd killed. But they had been bad people. And as she watched it flow from the boy she cared about more than anything, El didn't know what to do.
"Please… wake up," she cried. "Please, I–…"
El froze, realization dawning on her. She slowly looked up to see the person still standing across the floor. Brenner didn't even attempt to shoot again, the gun hanging limply from his hand. His eyes were lost of any remorse or sanity as he stared back at her.
She shakily stood up, not breaking eye contact for a second.
She had only just started to understand it now, but she and Brenner had always been the antithesis of one another for as long as she could remember. Except, she had been the reverent one and he had been the one in control. In other words, they had been each other's most important person for entirely different reasons.
But that was over now.
He was a man she had always respected, and feared, and loved, even after she had escaped. And maybe, overtime, she might have even forgiven him for what he had done to her. Because how could she not? He was her papa.
But now, as Mike bled out in front of her, she knew she never could. Now, there could be no redemption. She was scared of so many things. But Brenner wasn't one of them. Not anymore.
Her sobs turned into deep breaths. Everything that had happened had been his fault. He was to blame for it all. And now he'd killed–
She felt something boiling deep inside her, begging to be let out. It was rising to the surface, and she let it. She channelled it.
Soon enough, it was burning throughout her. Tingling at her palms. Fixated in her eyes. It needed to be free. It needed to show the world how petty it truly was, compared to what this was capable of.
Even though Brenner could see the anger manifested on her face, he smiled.
It was the final straw which sent her over the edge. With everything she had, El let out a deafening scream of raw emotion. A scream that was inhuman – amplified by something even greater than all the strength she could muster, as if she was tearing the energy from her surroundings to enhance it.
This energy ripped though her and was released, pelting forwards with human-like persistence.
It was an invisible wave of force, but anyone could see it coming. It smashed every window it passed, cracked every brick it struck. It carried a powerful vengeance full of her rage and sorrow, and it wanted revenge. It wanted to cause destruction.
It hit Brenner will full force, killing him instantly, and sending him plummeting to the ground. Later on, El would contemplate whether he deserved such a quick death.
But the wave didn't stop there. It carried on advancing down the corridor, spreading throughout the entire building, like the aftershock of an earthquake.
As the walls and windows continued to break and crack up ahead, she watched it happen without any guilt.
Eventually, El sunk back to her knees, her fierce sobs returning.
"Mike," she wept, gripping his coat like her life depended on it. "I'm sorry."
They heard the gunshot from above them. The sound echoed through the hall, suggesting it had been close by.
Joyce stopped in her tracks, eyes wide, heart beating fast.
"Oh my god," she gasped. "Oh my god!"
Hopper quickly understood what she meant. "Joyce." He grabbed her shoulders. "Listen to me. It wouldn't be him. He miraculously came back from the dead! That's public information. These people would never risk their reputation by killing him. It wouldn't be either of them."
Joyce threw his hands off her. "You don't know that!" She took off, sprinting up the stairs, following the direction she heard it coming from.
"Joyce, wait!" He rushed after her, but neither of them got very far.
There was an almighty crash as the windows around them shattered. And Hopper could have sworn something… passed straight through him. Something deadly. Something which could have killed him if it wanted to.
"Look out!" he roared, as broken shards of glass rained down on them. They shielded their heads from the danger as they waited for it to pass.
Joyce looked up a few seconds later, shaking some of the glass off her. The chaos had left as fast as it had come, surrounding them with silence. They could only hear the distant sounds of glass still breaking, gradually fading as it got further away.
"What was that?" she asked quietly.
Hopper examined at the destruction around him. The walls, while still upright, were in tatters, missing large chunks of plaster that was scattered along the floor. The broken windows were letting in a gentle breeze from the night air outside. Some sort of energy was aggressively making its way through the Lab.
There was only one person he knew capable of such desolation.
"Keep going," he urged her, as they were currently only halfway up the stairs. Joyce complied and they hurried to find the girl responsible for this.
"Do you have any idea where you're going?" Dustin panted, the four of them still running through the Lab's hallways. He reached up to keep his hat from falling off his head before remembering once again that it wasn't there.
"No!" Steve shot back. "Are they still on our tail?"
Lucas looked behind him. Furious voices could be heard from around the corner. "Affirmative," he said.
"We can't… keep this up forever," Dustin argued between breaths. "They're gonna… catch us!"
"You're right," the older boy pondered. He slowed down and stopped. "You guys keep going."
"Wait, what? Steve, no!" Dustin hesitated and looked back, but Lucas tugged on his arm.
"He's right, man," he said.
"We'll find Mike and El," Will agreed.
A few moments later, Dustin gave in to their tugging and the three of them ran, leaving Steve alone.
The teenager counted ten seconds, before the guards rushed around the corner and saw him. By this point, the three boys were far enough to be out of sight.
"Hands up!" one of them bellowed, probably angry to have been led on a wild goose chase.
Sighing, Steve obeyed. "Here we go again," he muttered under his breath.
However, his capture did not last long. Above the soldiers' roaring demands, Steve could hear… glass smashing? He looked up and watched in astoundment as the thing breaking the corridor apart sped closer towards him. The men who were yelling fell silent and did the same. Steve wondered if this was one of those life-flashing-before-your-eyes moments.
But then the wave–
–passed through Nancy and Jonathan the same way it had done to Hopper and Joyce: a force to be reckoned with which had decided to spare them. Only, this level of subtlety didn't happen for everyone.
The guards surrounding them were thrown backwards several feet as the force impacted them, leaving them sprawled across the floor along with the litter of rubble and glass. Most of the men were out cold. A few were awake and groaning but were still too lethargic to be of any threat.
The two teens looked at each other in bewilderment.
Thinking fast, they both reached to take one of the abandoned guns each – although Nancy had a hunch she wouldn't need to use it anymore – and then they took the opportunity to make a run for it.
Directly one floor beneath them, Steve did the same thing.
"Where is he?" Nancy muttered, walking briskly down the hall, ponytail swinging from side to side, the gun still readily in her hand. They'd stopped running after some time, since finding Brenner was taking longer than expected. "For god's sake, where is he?"
"Nancy!" Jonathan protested, trying to keep up with her. "He was probably affected by that thing the same way as–"
"He could have recovered by now!" she retorted. "We know he has a gun, and we know he's looking for El! Or Mike! Hell, he'd probably shoot the first person that–"
"Wait." Jonathan put an arm in front of her and they came to an abrupt stop. "Do you hear that?"
Nancy listened. It was a girl crying. Her heart thudded. There was only one girl in this entire building. "It's coming from that way," she said quietly. "Let's go."
A part of her didn't want to see what was around the corner. She'd already figured out what to expect and she just did not want to face it.
She saw the white-haired man first. Nancy felt nothing but contempt walking past the dead body of Martin Brenner. It was the scene in front of her that caused her to swallow back bile, her heart to plummet, her face to grow hot.
She ran; the world suddenly felt unrealistic – a dream she was about to wake up from. She dropped to her knees opposite the distraught form of El, on Mike's other side. Nancy felt the viscous red substance pooling around her jeans and staining them – the blood so placid, the situation so dire. She wanted to be sick.
The whole point of this crazy scheme had been to get her brother back. And it had been an unspoken rule to get him back alive and safely! Not…
Nancy couldn't let her brother down. She just couldn't. She'd already let Barb down; failing Mike as well would break her, no doubt about that. Because these weren't the kind of let-downs that could be fixed with a simple apology.
He can't be dead. Nancy leaned forward to check with straining anticipation. A few seconds later, relief flooded through her.
"He's breathing!"
El looked up and blinked through her waterlogged eyes. "Breathing?" That meant… That meant…
"He's alive, El!"
El felt her anguish fade into something which was almost… pleasant. It was a feeling of
(hope)
something she couldn't quite describe.
"What are you…?" She watched as the older girl hurriedly shrugged off her jacket and pressed the fabric against his injury where the blood was most concentrated. "Stop, you'll hurt him!"
"No, it's alright," Nancy reassured her, trying to keep her hands steady as she held it in place. "I'm helping him."
El nodded slowly. "Will he… be okay?" she asked, her voice thick from crying.
Nancy looked around worriedly and cursed. "We need to get him out of here."
The force of aggression continued on its merry way through Hawkins Lab, mercilessly wrecking several empty corridors, never once losing momentum. It progressed all the way down to the control room at the very edge of the building.
The staircase splintered and splayed metal everywhere; the barely-working lightbulb cracked and fell apart; the chair hurled across the room and hit the wall; the desktop computer tumbled off its table, screen flashing inconsistently.
And the machines… well, the machines churned and complained noisily as the wave fell upon them. Energy mixed with energy in one twisted moment of fate, creating something the world had never seen before.
It sparked once.
It sparked twice.
And then it exploded.