Routine Three:
I
She has to leave.
Chrissy isn't stupid.
Heis in her head because of some sort of thing in Hawkins. He wants- He wants to use her, sacrifice, prey, He had purred mentally, as he had taken her in the cafeteria. In front of everyone. In front of poor Eddie again.
"..open the gates," He had said.
She's a sacrifice, simply, as that. Just like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and He's the one wanting to rip out her heart and set her aflame. She realized it as she had scrambled and begged Him to go away. But Hawkins is- Hawkins is His place, His center. He can't leave it. He's trapped here, she can guess, because why else would He need something called gates? Gates are openings in a boundary, in a fence or in something that's enclosed. Why else would someone or something who could invade the mind of someone else, that could drag them into a world of red and horrible memories, bother with Hawkins, Indiana?
It's a small town that only has one Macdonalds and a KFC, of small people in such a big world. The most exciting things that happened until this point in recent memory were Will Byers going missing, Benny's suicide, Barabra Holland dying due to a laboratory accident, and the explosion at Star Court Mall that had killed so many people- All Chrissy wants to do was get out of it, and she can only guess that He is the same by the way He said He needed to open gates. A gate to get out of His red and rot world and into theirs? Like The Neverending Story, a different world, only this one is full of something worse than the Nothing and something horribly like the Swamp of Sadness but not a physical place but one that followed you. Or maybe was set on you?
But that was small potatoes in the face of monsters and worlds of made of rot and red that wanted to use her as a sacrifice.
Hawkins is cursed.
And if she just leaves- The only smart thing is to get away. She wakes in her bed in the morning light, with sweat-soaked skin, and harsh breathing, and she still hears the whispers.
Hears the clock, chiming once.
Twice.
Thrice.
And four times.
Chrissy barely lets the final chime go when she is lunging out of bed. She barrels past her mother, barely registering her sickly sweet yell of confusion.
Chrissy finds the keys in the kitchen and throws herself into her mother's station wagon.
She floors it, barefoot, chest heaving, with only one goal-
Leave Hawkins.
She see's 'you are now leaving Hawkins' sign when He strikes. Furious at her attempt to leave, because she's the first sacrifice, she's His prey, and He will not let anyone get away.
She's broken again.
Chinadoll Chrissy, Cheerleader Humpty Dumpty, and not even all the King's men can put her together again.