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"Space Oddity"

I'm stepping through the door

And I'm floating in a most peculiar way

And the stars look very different today

- David Bowie

The man in the suit had left after a sharp knock on the door, and Joyce was alone again, angry and now a little scared. Had they found the children? Was Jonathan okay? Did they have Eleven? There was no question in Joyce's mind that if they had taken Eleven back, Joyce was going to look for her, as if she was her own child. But in the meantime, they would be punishing Eleven for running away. Thinking of that scared look in the little girl's big brown eyes, and her all alone with no one to comfort her, Joyce wanted to cry, and she wanted to bust these damned handcuffs off and get up and go do something—for Will, for Eleven, for herself and Jonathan, for Hopper.

Finally the door opened and, to her relief, Hopper was the one coming through. Two soldiers in full uniform were behind him. One of them came to Joyce and unlocked the handcuffs. She rubbed her wrists, which were raw from how many times she had tried to yank her hands out of the cuffs.

Hopper gave her a nod, but didn't say anything, so Joyce kept quiet as well, and they followed the soldiers out of the room and down a long hall.

It was too silent. As though they were the only ones in the building. At last, unable to keep quiet any longer, Joyce whispered to Hop, "I don't understand."

Looking straight ahead, Hopper said, "We came to an agreement."

"What?"

"Look, everything that's happened here and everything that's gonna happen, we don't talk about. You want Will back? This place had nothing to do with it. That's the deal."

Joyce didn't like it. If the place didn't take any blame, then it could keep operating, keep tormenting children like Eleven, keep that Upside Down place open where other people could be lost in it. But—she wanted her son back. Needed him back. Enough to go along.

"You got it?" Hopper asked, still not looking at her.

She nodded.

They were led into a room with big bulky suits like you saw on TV sometimes after an oil spill.

"What is this?" Hopper asked.

A man in a lab coat answered, "Protection. The atmosphere's toxic."

"B-but my son's in there. He—"

"Put it on," Hopper told her, his tone brooking no argument.

It was evident to Joyce that none of the other people around them had been into the Upside Down. They had no idea what lay beyond the wall, and they didn't care. She was fairly certain none of them expected her and Hopper to come back.

Suited up, they were sent alone down the elevator. When it opened, Joyce thought she was … underwater, maybe. In another world. Things floated by, white flakes like ashes, or snow, or feathers. And some kind of slimy vine was climbing the walls.

Hopper led her to the room with the gate, like a giant mouth in the wall. Joyce didn't like it. She was afraid. But how could she be afraid if Will had been in there, by himself, all the time and had been so brave? She had to be brave for him. Looking up at Hopper, she nodded. He raised his gun and led the way.

Even in the suit, walking through the gate was slimy and gross and left Joyce feeling weighed down with leftover goop. Behind them, the hole they had made closed over, like they had never been there.

Hopper understood now what Joyce's kid had meant when he said it was like home, but dark and cold. The Upside Down was a perfect copy of the real world, only it appeared that everything was slowly being eaten away by … whatever the vines were.

Next to him, Joyce's breathing was audible. Even in the silence, it was too audible. He grasped her by the arm. "Hey, you all right?"

"Yeah," she gasped.

She was panicking, he realized, and the artificial breathing apparatus in the suit wasn't helping. "I need you to relax, okay? I want you to slow down your breathing. Take deep breaths. In. And out. Deep breath in. And out. In. And out."

For some reason, he couldn't help thinking about Sara, remembering that day in the park when she couldn't catch her breath, the first time they knew something was wrong. He remembered it so vividly it was like he was there, and this … this was only a nightmare. He had said the same thing to her that day—"Just breathe. In and out." Maybe that was why he was thinking of it. But God, she felt so close right now, like he could almost reach out and touch her. He missed her so much.

With difficulty, he brought himself back to the present, patting Joyce's arm. "You okay?"

"Yeah. I'm good."

"Your house?" he asked.

"Castle Byers." They walked together toward the dark woods.

As they made their way through the woods, Hopper found an open egg. About the size of a dragon's egg, if dragons were real. And hell, maybe they were—if all this stuff could be happening in Hawkins, anything was possible. So the creature was breeding? Brenner had left that part out. Maybe he didn't know. This whole thing felt like an experiment gone wrong, one they were trying to cover up and pretend didn't exist and really knew not a damn thing about.

While he stopped to look at the egg, Joyce went on ahead, and he heard her scream her son's name. There was a desperation in her voice that didn't sound like she had found him alive and waiting for her. Concerned, Hopper raised his gun and flashlight and went after her.

Castle Byers, whatever it had been before, was a pile of sticks now. The thing had found Will. But there was nothing here to indicate that it had … harmed him. No blood or anything of that nature. What he did see was a stuffed lion. A very familiar stuffed lion that brought him back to that terrible cold hospital room, the way they had tried to make it feel like home for Sara. They had read to her, sung to her, held her, colored with her—anything to take her mind off the pain and the discomfort and the fear she lived with.

While Joyce screamed for her son, Hopper knelt to touch the toy, still lost halfway between memory and reality, not entirely sure which was which. In his memory he had been helpless, unable to stop what was happening to take his girl away from him, barely able to keep up a brave front to help her be strong, falling apart any time he was alone. Here in what seemed to be reality, he was equally helpless to stop whatever was happening to Joyce's boy, trying to help her be strong, but not sure he could if what lay ahead of them was the horror he expected it to be.

A particularly loud shriek of "WILL!" brought him back to his senses, and he got to his feet, joining Joyce in calling the kid's name as they stumbled through the woods toward her house in hopes that the kid might have gone there.

Then they heard a scream, weird and unearthly, coming from ahead of them. Something was in pain. To Hopper, it didn't sound like a child, but he didn't know what kind of wildlife they had here. He and Joyce hadn't seen any indication of a living thing other than that hatched egg, but that didn't mean there wasn't anything.

They went on ahead to Joyce's house, where the screaming seemed to be coming from. The inside of the house was terrifying—just like her real house, only vines and goop covering everything. Hopper's first thought was to be impressed that Will had lasted as long as he had. His second was to wonder what the kid had been eating all this time. That couldn't have been pleasant.

In the hallway, there was a smear of blood. Something—probably the creature, Hopper thought—had been here, and been wounded. But by what? Or whom?

"It was hurt," he said. Turning, he followed the blood toward the door.

Behind him, Joyce turned to look at the empty house. "Jonathan?"

"Joyce, come on!"

"Hop, it was Jonathan. I think they did something."

"Whatever they did, they hurt it. Now there's a blood trail to follow."

"Then let's hurry."

It was hard to hurry too fast in the suits, but being able to follow the trail helped. It led them into town, a deserted, decaying version of Hawkins that Hopper knew he would never be able to get out of his head.

The trail led them into the library. Judging from the density of vines and goop inside, the creature had been using it as a lair. The blood drops took them all the way into the very back of the building, where it was darkest. The flashlights shone on bodies in various stages of decay half-buried in vines and slime, including that of a red-haired girl that had to be Barbara Holland. Poor kid. She'd never had a chance.

Then Joyce's light shone on a pale face over a red jacket. Some kind of … viny thing was in his mouth. Was it feeding on him?

"Will! Will!"

The kid didn't move or respond as Joyce came toward him.

"Will? Oh, my God! Hopper! Get it out, get it out!"

As he approached the child, Hopper wasn't certain if it was Will Byers in the Upside Down he was seeing or Sara Hopper in the hospital room, a breathing tube down her throat. When he grabbed hold of the vine, it felt as though he was pulling the tube out of Sara as well, bringing her back to life and childhood. He hauled steadily on the thing until it popped free, throwing it to the ground, where it squealed and writhed until he pumped a whole lot of bullets into it in his panic.

They got Will down and laid him on the ground, both of them pulling off their helmets. Joyce put her ear down to Will's mouth and looked up at Hopper in despair. "He's not breathing. He's not breathing!"

She was on the edge of hysterics, to have come so close and to have lost her boy anyway, but Hopper wasn't about to give up. Not yet. Not without trying everything he damned well could.

"Joyce, Joyce, Joyce, listen to me. Listen to me, listen to me." He tugged off his glove, placing his hand flat on the kid's chest. "I need you to tilt his head back and lift his chin."

As Hopper started the chest compressions, Joyce did as she was told, calming when she had something specific to do, as he had known she would.

"Now, when I tell you, you're going to pinch his nostrils and breathe into his mouth. Twice. One second, then pause—twenty-two, twenty-three—then one second. " He finished counting. "Now. Go!" Joyce breathed, but nothing happened. Hopper kept up the chest compressions. "Come on, kid, come on!"

Next to him, Joyce was entreating her boy to come back to her in every way she could think of.

And somehow Will became Sara again, the doctors compressing her chest as she flatlined, Hopper on the sidelines able to do nothing more than hold Diane and watch as his girl slipped away and was gone. That was not happening again today. He was not losing another child. He resorted to pounding on Will's chest to try to shock his heart back, seeing that green line on the monitor in his mind, hearing the beep that meant his daughter's heart had stopped. "Come on, kid!"

Despite their hope, despite how hard they were trying, both of them were shocked when Will suddenly sat up, gasping a breath. Hopper had to take a moment to remember what was real—that the hospital room was in the past, that part of his life over and done with, and this was reality, where they had just brought Joyce's son back from the dead both figuratively and literally.

As he coughed and sputtered, Joyce held him, torn between laughing and crying in her vast relief. Hopper grabbed the breathing apparatus—the kid shouldn't have to breathe this toxic gunk any longer. He had to reach around Joyce to put it on Will, and so he ended up holding both of them while Joyce clung to his arm and leaned back against him, and it felt … right.

For the first time in a lot of long years, Jim Hopper was exactly where he belonged.