[A/N] Woah, I didn't expect to have so many followers on the first chapter. That's the best response I've ever got to one of my stories so far! Thank you everyone for the reviews, favorites and for simply readinf this fanfiction! I'll makre sure to keep this story exciting!
"You know, it… It can't get us in here"
"We don't know that" – Jonathan Byers and Nancy Wheeler.
"Ugh, I can't believe we paid to see that!", Nancy said, unbuckling her seatbelt.
"Yeah, I didn't think it would be that bad", Jonathan agreed in an apology tone "I should have just taken you to the ice cream store or… What's so funny?".
The two teenagers were parked in front of the Wheeler's house, back from a very tedious afternoon at the Hawk cinema. The couple had watched what was meant to be a romantic comedy, but ended up being a very lame excuse for a movie. Not so great of an experience for their fifth date.
Now Nancy smirked at Jonathan, looking deep into his eyes.
"It's kinda cute how you think that everything is your fault", she said.
"But it was!", he laughed a bit, resting his head on the seat and looking at the ceiling "That was awful".
"No, it was not", Nancy denied, laughing as well "I had a good time, actually".
Jonathan shook his head.
"It could've been better", he said.
"Stop worrying so much. It wasn't bad", she spoke, opening the door "Okay, I have to go. I have a huge pile of homework to do and I'm screwed if it's not all done by Monday".
"Hold on. Before you go…", Jonathan reached into his pocket and pulled a tiny orange ticket out of it "I was wondering if you'd like to go to the fair tomorrow. I know it's a cliché, but maybe it'll be better than today".
A cheerful gasp escaped from Nancy's lips and she couldn't help but grin. An amusement fair had recently arrived in Hawkins, which was a pleasant surprise to the town, where such events were so scarce. Needless to say that both kids and adults were excited about it. Obviously, Mike and his friends had planned on going to the festival for months.
The girl remembered going to a fair when she was five and Mike was only a baby. It was an absolutely magical night that would never fade from her memory. Of course, she was planning on eventually buying her own ticket with the money left on her piggy bank – Which had abruptly decreased after Mike 'borrowed' her money to spend on the arcade – , but going to the fair with Jonathan Byers was infinitely better than going with her geeky little brother and his friends.
She looked at the boy who stared back at her, still holding the ticket and noticed that he waited for her response.
"Yeah! It'll be great!", sounding just as enthusiastic as she felt.
She picked up the ticket and put it in her purse.
"So… Can I pick you up at three?", he asked.
"Sure, I think so. I'll call you to confirm just in case", she confirmed.
He nodded and a heavy silence fell upon the car while the two teenagers awkwardly stared into each other's eyes. Nancy moved closer to him and her action was reciprocated by the boy until they were mere inches apart from each other.
"I guess you need to finish that homework…?", Jonathan broke the silence.
Nancy blinked twice as if she had just woken up from a trance.
"Huh? Oh! Yes, right… T-the homework", she nodded "I… See you later. Bye".
"Bye".
The teenagers shared a quick and shy kiss before Nancy moved away and got out of the car. Jonathan smiled as he watched the girl walking through the garden and only looked away after she got in the house and closed the door behind her.
That's when he angrily punched the steering wheel.
"'You need to finish that homework'? Really?", he mumbled to himself, getting increasingly self conscious at the phrase that ruined what could have been a romantic moment between him and his girlfriend "What's wrong with me?"
Nancy gazed at the ticket on the corner of her desk maybe for the fifteenth time in five minutes while she tried to focus on answering a biology question related to photosynthesis. Before she knew it, she was already picturing herself and the boy walking among the many colorful tents that would sell food while kids would try to knock down piles of cans with tennis balls in exchange for stuffed toys.
With a silly smirk on her face, she forced the jolly thought to fade away and looked back at the book in front of her, trying to focus on the question. And so the minutes went on obeying to that never-ending cycle of obsessing over the upcoming date and achieving some slight progress on the homework.
Then, it happened.
Nancy was looking at her notebook when it started, focusing on yet another question, so it took her a few minutes for her to look away from the table and notice everything had stopped.
There were no birds chirping on the trees, no dogs barking far away in the distance, no cars lazily sliding down the street. The only signs that she was able to hear at all was the dry little noise of the tip of the pencil against the paper as she wrote and her very breathing.
Noticing the chilling silence, she looked up from the desk and then all around her room. Inevitably, her eyes caught the spores floating outside the window.
The tiny white specs hovered outside like ashes, swirling in the slight breeze. They seemed not to fall straight the ground, but to aimlessly wave up and down. At first, she assumed that it was snowing, which wasn't something unusual to happen in February in Hawkins, but then she noticed they were in the room as well. Nancy didn't have enough time to decide what to think of that before the world shook and everything went black.
Nancy had only seen the Upside Down once over one year ago, but she could never forget how it looked like: pitch black vines such as the ones she had seen at the lab covered all surfaces including the ceiling and tangled themselves up around everything they touched. The ceiling light and the lamps on her desk and on her nightstand flickered on and off, providing a slight lighting on that grim environment.
Somehow, that felt worse than last time. Back in 1983, when she crawled into the portal in the woods and found herself in that dark realm of emptiness, she was in a forest, surrounded by trees and with no sign of civilization around. This time, it was right there, in her room, the safest and most private place for her on Earth. If it could reach even there, then where else could she hide from it?
Nancy tried to scream, but all that came out was a muffled sob of despair and she took her hands to her mouth. Her eyes started watering and her legs felt weak. That shouldn't be happening. That couldn't be happening.
With her hands shaking, Nancy opened the door and hopelessly rushed downstairs. The lights near her flickered at each step she gave. She could feel the blood throbbing in her veins and suddenly she was lightheaded. Was she going to pass out in the Upside Down, with no one around to see or hear her? Was that how Barbara died?
After what seemed to be an eternity, she reached the foyer. The same messy and disgusting scenario had taken over the whole house. She shook her head in despair and turned around in search of an exit, a sign of life even. But there was nothing there. The door that led to the basement on which Mike and his friends were playing was closed and covered by those vines. Her parents were nowhere to be seen, either. She was alone in there.
"Nancy!".
Everything flickered back to normal and the light abruptly returned, which made the girl squint. The vines and the spores were gone, giving place to the routine sounds of Hawkins. Her overloaded brain and tense muscles made her turn back, startled. A deeply concerned Jonathan Byers stood in the corridor a few feet away from her.
"J-Jonathan…?", she stuttered in a mix of fear and relief.
"You forgot your blouse in the car", he said, showing her the piece of clothing he held on his arm "Is everything okay?"
She wanted to throw herself in his arms and cry out what had just happened, but she couldn't. Something made her feel like she should keep it to herself at all costs. She took the blouse.
"Y-yeah. Yes, I'm ok", she replied.
Jonathan frowned and looked at how pallid and stressed out she looked.
"Are you sure?".
"Yeah", Nancy said, running her fingers through her hair "I was just… Not expecting you to be back so soon".
Thankfully, that seemed to be enough to dismiss that matter.
"Yeah, I should be home by now, actually. I better go back before mom gets worried. I, uh… I see you tomorrow", he started back to the car.
Nancy pursed her lips.
"Wait, Jonathan!", she said before she could help it.
He halted on the front door and turned back around.
"Yeah?".
She opened her mouth, but the words never came out. Her thoughts and concerns were confined to her mind, unable to flee through her lips. The girl shook her head and forced herself to smirk.
"Nevermind. It's… Nothing", she spoke.
Jonathan nodded, not seeing any reason to be concerned about it.
"Alright, bye", he said.
"Bye", she smiled at him and gently closed the door.
Much later that day, when Jonathan Byers was long gone and all of Nancy's chores were finished, the sight of her own house swallowed by darkness still haunted her and now going to the fair tomorrow didn't seem so important anymore.
The jeep smoothly lost speed until it stopped next to the sidewalk. The chief turned it off, silencing the engine and grabbed his hat before getting out of the vehicle.
It was a typical sunny day in Hawkins with bright blue sky and a soft cold breeze. Before the Byers' fiasco in 1983, he'd just lay back on his chair at the station and wait for the day to be over so he could go back home, crack open a beer and enjoy the view from his porch on a day like that, but now he had a daughter to look after and a whole town to keep safe, since the Department of Energy wasn't around anymore.
Hopper walked across Jason Allen's garden with large steps and rang the doorbell. A middle-aged man with a nearly bald head and stressed out grey eyes opened the door surprisingly fast.
"Hey, Jason. I heard 'bout what happened. I came as soon as I could", the chief greeted him.
"Thanks for coming, Jim", the man said "I didn't know who else to call".
Jason motioned Hopper to come in. The man wasn't exactly the wealthiest person in Hawkins, which explained why his compact house was in worse shape than Joyce's. There was little furniture, most of which sat around the house for at least two decades. In an ashtray on the armrest of the couch, a recently put-out cigarette still spilled out smoke. The tiny television was off and, just like in Hopper's place before Jane moved in, books and cans were scattered all around.
"Where's your wife and the kids?", Hopper asked, noticing the absence of Jason's family.
"I sent them to my mom's place. I figured they wouldn't be safe here", the man replied.
Under normal circumstances, Hopper would disagree. It was very unlikely that a bear would come back to a house it already invaded before, especially if Jason's dog put up a fight with it, but if the chief's intuition was right, those were not normal circumstances. He simply nodded.
"So, did you bury the dog, or…?", he asked.
"No, not yet. I wanted you to take a look at it", Jason replied, gesturing at the backyard.
"Why?", Jim asked, following the man.
Jason stopped walking and looked at the cop.
"Chief, you might not believe me, but I've been hunting for ten years before I moved to Hawkins and I'm sure no bear did that", he said.
Jim's intuition was right.
"Why don't we take a look at it, then?".
Jason pulled off the cloth that covered what remained of a black hound, scattering hundreds of flies around the garage and the scent of rotten flesh filled the air. The carcass lay on a table underneath a rather old tool shelf.
Jim had seen some nasty things working as a cop, part of them in the past two years, but that didn't make the scene less disgusting. There was a large hole in the creature's abdomen, which revealed the ribcages and what was left of the guts and long and long teeth – Or claw – marks covered the dog's neck. The paws and the face of the animal, however, were left untouched. As gruesome as the sight could look, it was familiar to the cop.
The chief rolled his eyes and sighed in relief. It was a false alarm.
Thank God.
"So, what do you think, chief?", Jason asked.
Hopper finally lit up a cigarette.
"Yup, you're right. That's no bear attack. It was probably just another dog", he said, covering the animal with the cloth again and letting out a soft laugh "You scared me and Flo pretty good with the whole bear thing, though".
"You're telling me a dog did this?", the man questioned indignantly.
"Yeah, this stuff always happens. Some street dog probably found its way into your backyard, tried to eat your dog's food and then a fight broke out. The raccoons probably ate this fellow's guts afterwards", Hopper explained, then added, noticing how big were the wounds on the dog's neck "It must have been one hell of a dog, though".
"No, chief. If there was a dog fight, I would've heard…!".
"Yeah, it probably happened in the middle of the night when you were all asleep", Hopper spoke, walking back inside the house "Listen, you should just call your wife and kids and tell them there's nothing to worry about.".
"Are you not going to do anything about it?", Jason asked, following the cop.
"I can't just arrest some street dog", Hopper chuckled "It'll be fine as long as you keep an eye out while you're outside. Those mutts are sneaky little bastards; they sneak into your property and you don't even notice".
"What should I tell the kids?", Jason asked.
Hopper frowned. Kids, his least favorite subject matter. What would he tell Jane if one day she woke up and Eggo was floating motionless on the fishbowl? He would have to think of something soon, since the lifespan of a goldfish was ridiculously short. Well, it was still better than owning a damn dog, he thought.
"I dunno, come up with somethin'", he threw the cigarette away and left.
Once back in the jeep, Hopper waved amicably at Jason before driving away. The gesture was received with a concerned glance from the man.
On his way back to the station, the chief couldn't help but worry. The hoped-for relief of knowing that Jason's incident wasn't anything alarming at all wasn't enough to keep the well-experienced cop from dwelling on his ever-present state of deep concern.
Something about all of that seemed off. Dog fights usually ended up with some nasty scars in the snout rather than the neck and that dog's head was totally clear. It was almost like something hunted it, but it was not a bear for sure; the wounds were big, but not that big. Hopper cursed, wishing he knew more about hunting or about animals in general.
He shook his head and tried to pull his mind away from the incident. His instincts were probably just tricking him into over-thinking about the situation. So what if something hunted the poor dog down? It was just some fox or whatever. It was something pretty believable; one of the most believable things that happened in the past two years, actually. No suicide, no missing kid, no field full of rotten pumpkins, no nonsense; just some wild creature that killed a dog. Nothing abnormal about that.
Hopper's concern on the case vanished when he looked at Jane's picture attached to the bottom left corner of the windshield. The idea of her spending an afternoon with a teenager boy currently was much more worrying than the remaining of Jason's old dog and the cop questioned himself why did he let her spend the day at the Wheelers' in first place.
Next Chapter preview: Mike boldly asks Eleven to come to the fair with him, but the chief isn't as excited about the invitation as the girl, which migh cause another father-daughter confrontation between he and his daughter.