He eats and drinks and sleeps his way through the sluggishness of the Upside Down; he loses track of the days and doesn't care that he doesn't care.

Food has no taste; water does not quench his thirst; music grates on his ears; and in his nightmares, he is so monstrous that he feels progressively more rabid and wild each time he wakes.

Most days, after he has eaten and drunk his unsatisfying rations, he paces the pantry, wishing that he could leave the confines he created for himself. Some days, he struggles to remember what the purpose of confining himself is.

He has begun waking from his nightmares with the taste of blood in his mouth; he can't find the energy to stand; sleep takes too much out of him when it is filled with images of his face opening into a toothy flower, when he can smell blood from miles away, and when he follows it, he is always inevitably drawn to a dark forest that crawls with thick, wriggling vines; in a clearing in the forest, the Byerses and Wheelers stand back to back, with Henderson and Sinclair, Mayfield and Harrington flanking them. There are monsters that crawl out of the darkness and circle them, and he is one of them.

Sometimes, he dreams of three men, a woman, and two children trapped in a high-up room in a darkened building that guards the entrance. He dreams of a hopeless escape, of a man going on ahead, of another staying behind, of heartbreaking success that costs too much. He smells blood and rushes toward it, and when he reaches it, it is fresh and warm, and the screams that he knows deep down that he should pity – he pushes this knowledge away, into the dark recesses of his mind, where he keeps the things the rulers have told him he no longer needs – do not deter him. He looks up for a moment and sees the ones that got away. Something tells him that they are important, but he doesn't know who they are. He turns his attention back to the flesh and blood before him.

There is a weight in some of his dreams, and he learns about fear and rage and hate; he learns that love and joy and goodness are things best hidden away if he wants to stay away from the pain that the General and President bring when they explore the recesses of its mind.

It does not like experiencing pain, nor warmth, or water. Those things are too pure for it, and it much prefers the murky emotions that are so all-consuming that it need not think. It would rather think of blood but there is none here.

The General and President have shown it the darkness as they showed those before it; they have taught it to crawl along the vines of its homeland; they have taught it to engender fear and disgust and hate, and it knows that there is nothing else that matters more than its ugliness.

The President is terrible to it. The President has perfected the artlessness of ignorance and rage and hate. It thinks – and it is certain that the President will disease such perfections within it soon enough, and then it will be truly ungrateful – that the President is consumed with sorrow that is thicker and greater than blood. It desires such sorrow because such a terrible thing must be accompanied by rage and hate.

It is desirous of the ugly emotions that line the wings of death, for only the General has achieved such ignorance. It thinks – soon, it will no longer experience such wretchedly beautiful things, so soon, if only the President would enslave it before it can experience impatience – that the President is jealous of the General.

At the same time, though, it knows – and it should know nothing other than bloodlust and rage and hate, if only it could feel nothing else, if only the President were brutal enough to steal it from itself – that the President hates the General for reaching such utter ignorance. They planned to spread everything evil into those feeble-minded humans who prefer joy over bitterness and love over hate.

It cannot imagine! It makes a habit of lying to itself – it remembers, back before it was ignorant, that it, too, was more desirous of goodness than evil. It wallows in the shame of the thought – soon, so soon, it tells itself, though it knows that the President despises it when it tells itself anything at all – and consoles itself with untruths regarding all the evil around it.

There is no blood for it here, and so it sleeps.

The President greets it in its dreams and shows it terrible, horrible things. It rejoices – and such a thing is unforgivable, so it regrets instead – in the humans the President orders it to attack. Their flesh is tender when it punctures the stuff with its teeth, and their blood flows freely into its maw.

It knows – and what a terrible thing to know; the President will be furious when it offers up the repulsive deceit its ignorance has wrought – that it could smell this blood from worlds away, as thick with fear and hate and sorrow as it is.

How terrible this mission is; it dreams of spreading the blight of evil to the minds of the others. It was once like them; it knows that they will one day bathe in the regret that such repulsive beauty brings when they care to remember what they were before they became as ignorant as it.

There is a terrible ringing sound that pierces the fog it is drowning in. It snarls in the direction of the sound, but the noise is persistent and continues to tear through the defenses it erected in an attempt at…

An attempt at something.

The ringing continues, and it crawls toward the sound, hissing and shrieking as it moves closer. The world comes into focus around it as the sound grows sharper, tinny and piercing as the repetitive ringing continues on and on and on. The tolling stops for a moment, and then comes back, as loud as ever.

The harsh sound is familiar, somehow, and it can't quite think – no. No, no, no. It is not allowed to think; the President does not want it to think. Thinking is good, and goodness is…

Bad?

But that makes no sense to it. This is the problem with thinking, it tells itself – and it is breaking another of the President's rules, and that is… wrong? – the problem with thinking is that it goes on tangents. It asks too many questions that it does not need answered. But it finds that it wants to know.

But should it know anything other than bloodlust and rage and hate? It knows that the President does not believe so. And then it thinks: believing is for truths, and if the President values lies so greatly, then where does the belief come from?

This is the problem with thinking: the tangents, the ideas, the possession of its own mind. It is meant to be enslaved, just like all the others, in this world and in its own world.

This is not its own world?

The others were meant to be enslaved?

It thinks – and the President would be so disappointed – that something is wrong. What is wrong, though?

Good is wrong. It knows that. But that is wrong, too. It wallows in its confusion and it hates it. It does not like being confused. It does not like hate – and that… makes sense to it. Like and hate do not go together, do they?

It cannot shake the feeling that something is wrong, but the ringing is still going. It is confused about everything, but it knows for certain that it wants the ringing to stop. The noise irritates it, and it does not like being irritated. Irritation is such a negative emotion, and –

What?

Right. The ringing. It wants to make the ringing stop. To stop it, it needs to pick up the…

The ringing stops when it picks up the…

It cannot remember the name.

What is a name?

"Hop?" a… voice – yes, a voice – says through the…

The thing.

"Hop?" the voice repeats and pauses. "You there, Hopper?"

Oh. A name. A name. Hop. Hopper. That is its name. Is it an it? It does not think so, because if it were, then the voice would be an it as well, and that is too many its. This is confusing. The voice is a…

Boy. Kid. He, the back of its mind supplies. It grumbles; the back of its mind should have stayed where it belonged; there wasn't so much thinking involved when he was trapped.

"Okay, good," the voice says, and he wonders what is good. There is nothing good down here, is there? Goodness is not allowed.

And why shouldn't it be? he wonders, and then remembers that the President wouldn't like it. But the President doesn't like anything, he tells himself.

"… Worried about you," the voice – and if he has a name (Hop. Hopper. Jim. Chief), why doesn't the voice? Why can't he remember the voice's name? It's something like Ste-Steve? Steven. Harrington. Kid. Yes, that's it! – continues.

"You haven't called for a while, man," Steve is saying, "and so I thought I'd try calling you. D'you know, I tried calling the number you've got listed in the phone book, first, but then I remembered that you said you were in my house – and why are you in my house, anyways? – and so I tried calling my own phone, and it actually rang! Like, I could hear it trying to connect, and so I figured I'd try a couple more times, but you never picked up. I called every day, you know, and then you finally picked up! You were really straining my patience, Chief, but man. I'm really glad I finally got through to you. It was totally tubular." Steve laughs quietly to himself, and he – his name is Jim, he reminds himself – can hear it through the phone.

He can't remember the last time he heard someone laugh, and it strikes him as such a joyful sound. His immediate thought when he hears it is: The President won't like that, followed by: Who gives a fuck what the President likes, the thing isn't even my fuckin' president.

"Sorry," Steve says, still snickering. "Henderson and Sinclair are still obsessed with that, even though Max told them that they sound fuckin' stupid when they say it. And that was back in, like, November, man."

"What's… what's the date, kid?" Jim manages to rasp before Steve can say something else.

"It's July fifteenth, man. The last time you called me was on, like, the sixth or the seventh. You completely dropped off the map, and I thought you were dead or something. Jane was really worried, too. She said you were pretty angry after she talked to you last, and she checked back in on you after I told her you hadn't called for a couple a' days. She said you were kinda just… huddled in a ball, and that she couldn't see where you were, exactly, and that you weren't talking to her.

"That's not cool, Hop. You don't just go around ignoring your fuckin' kid, alright. You made Jane feel like shit, and I don't care what she did because there's nothing she coulda done that would've deserved that."

"She… visited me?" Jim manages. He hadn't known that, but he supposes that he didn't know a whole lotta things for about a week.

Steve pauses, like he's recollecting his thoughts. When he speaks again, his voice is softer. "Yeah, she did. You didn't know? You're not mad at her?"

"No, I'm not mad at her. I had no clue she was visiting," he says, laughing sadly. "I had no clue about anything, kid. I kinda lost myself down here. This place is fucked up."

"D'you…" Steve's voice gentles significantly; he doesn't sound like he's angry anymore, and Jim is beyond grateful: he's been angry enough in the past week to last him a lifetime, and he doesn't like hearing such an ugly emotion in a kid's voice. "D'you want to talk about it?" Steve finishes.

"Not… not right now," Jim stammers, not quite able to articulate why.

"Okay," Steve says easily. "In other news, then, Jane's been practicing so that she can close the Gate after we get you out. It was slow going at first, but she's really getting the hang of it, and we're planning on getting you out tomorrow; she's pretty sure she'll be good then."

"Really?" Jim rasps, unable to keep the hope out of his voice.

"Really," comes the soft reply, and then: "I'll see you soon, Hop."

The receiver clicks, and Jim is left alone with himself. He knows, though, that he's never really alone down here.

He makes his way back to the pantry and uses the flamethrower to burn away the vines that managed to creep under the door while he lost his mind.

He eats some food and drinks some water.

He does not sleep. Jim is afraid of sleep, now that he's back in his right mind. The President walks through his dreams and terrorizes him with his worst memories and his greatest fears; he knows what happens when the President gets to a person. He thinks that in some ways it's worse than when the General gets to someone: the latter makes a person's body do monstrous things; the former twists a person so that not only do they do monstrous things, but they also become a monster.

He does not sleep, and so he doesn't see Jane. He only hears a breathed-out tomorrow before he's alone with his own mind in a world ruled by the Dream Walker, in a world where the people have become Demogorgons.