Summary: The Number 1 Rule of Traveler Magic: Don't Follow the Voices You Hear Across Dimensions. Easy, when it's the snarls of monsters. Not so easy, when its lost kids.
FC: Hope Mikaelson
Travelers Magic from The Magicians: Travelers can transport themselves between places and realms. They possess varying levels of natural telepathy. Astral projection, telepathy, and being able to transport others comes with mastering their ability and/or tattoos spelled on their body.
If that did exist, a place like the Vale of Shadows, how would we travel there?
Well, picture an acrobat standing on a tightrope.
Now, the tightrope is our dimension.
And our dimension has rules.
You can move forwards, or backwards.
But, what if...right next to our acrobat, there is a flea?
Now, the flea can also travel back and forth, just like the acrobat, right?
Here's where things get really interesting.
The flea can also travel along the side of the rope. Even underneath the rope.
The Upside Down.
Exactly.
ACT I CHAPTER I
flea
She takes something called Morpheus's delight.
She has no interest in the cocktails of bliss, lid poppers, pixie bolts, and something called chocolate sunshine.
But dreams? Pleasant, stirring dreams?
She's baited, even half-convinced it's a gimmick, 'nother name for another pitch, another brand of snake oil. At most, it will be a little dopamine and melatonin more cheaply found in a gas station's candy aisle. She puts the tablet on her tongue, feels it dissolve and fizzle out, like meaningless carbonation.
And nothing. The placebo bust, with nothing to draw on, to mimic.
She starts to walk away, and -
Stumbles. No, no, she...falls?
She shakes her head, woozy, feeling like she's fallen on the tracks and she can feel the freight train.
She fights it, feels her control slip, feels herself untether. Drift in the cosmos. Full sail, no anchor. Far, far, further.
Something pulls. Voyager spiraling into the wrong gravity, wrong and wrong and doomed to crash.
She falls in a sinkhole of snarl, of feral, rotting, hunger. A concrete grave of slick, sliding walls. A realm of shadows.
Nancy! wails in her psyche, seizing like a hook-line of barbs. Dragging. A mouth of ruin opening like a flower. A hundred sharp, glistening teeth.
Not real. NotNot. Only a dream. It'snothappening, this isn't -
Nancy, please! Nancy! Nanc-
She slams back into her body. Jumps on pure, mindless instinct.
Blinding white, in a bracing cold to jumpstart her lungs. No, not cold! She scrambles, jumps, falls in a surf, on hot white sand, the sky and the ocean a bright cyan blue. She rolls out of the spray, lands on a busy street, streaked in sand, powdered with snow, with a thousand indistinct voices crowding her head, none terrified enough, strong enough in their death knell, to grab hold.
Her subconscious wants too many things for her to focus. Shocking, and warm, and sun, and living people.
She has to remember where she can land. In a blink there's light streaking through the blinds, deafening silence of her single dorm room.
She hunches, palms pressed in her eye sockets, wishing she could shutter her mind and erase it.
It's not safe, for someone like her, to be collecting nightmares. Not when one image is all it takes, for the ground to slip beneath her feet.
'Want some advice, kid? One cursed son of bitch to another? Don't dream of volcanos, or the bottom of the ocean, or the stars in the sky.'
She ignored the most important rule, beyond trying not to be what she is.
'Try not to dream at all.'
Barb? Barbara?
She steps into endless dark. Water shallow under her feet.
She's dreaming.
There's a girl, with a shaved head, in a crinkled pink dress, scrambling away from a bloated, grey corpse, a slug sliding out of its mouth like a rolling tongue, and the girl is screaming Gone! Gone! Gone!
"Whoa," she reaches out, turns the girl away from the sight at the same time a voice bounces off the water, an older woman trying the same thing, I got you, I got you.
The girl freezes, brown eye wet and wide as she looks up at her. There's a zing of familiarity, like calling to like. Two consciousness used to reaching out, meeting in the middle. "Who...?"
A residue of horror is emitting from the corpse. She feels the tie of it trying to sink her into the body, her psychic signature there, like smudged fingerprints. Confusing which is meant to be dead.
The girl named Barb, the girl who screamed for Nancy, the girl who was being consumed while her astral form was pressed against her psyche.
She focuses on the little girl in front of her, who, like her, yanked on a thread, and unraveled something horrific.
"Ally," she answers, an alias more than a name, but an honest enough one, to not taste like a lie. Even if this is a little girl who looks too harmless to treat with caution. "I...heard you."
The girl blinks up at her. Heard me? echoes softly in Ally's mind, tentative, like she can't hope Ally is like her.
She doesn't want to say why she was pulled in, had planned to sidestep it altogether, but thoughts are harder to shelter here. She has a brief vision of the other girl's fate (the horror of being dragged off the ladder, of being devoured) and knows by the expressive eyes in front of her, the cringing shoulders, that she sees the same thing. Her hands tighten in apology, though contact might make it worse.
"I can guide you out, okay?" she offers.
The girl shakes her head slowly, eyes unfathomably sad. "Can't," she whispers. "Find Will."
You- you can't find him? whispers across the water.
Ally's brow furrows, wondering at the phantom voice. "Is someone making you do this?"
The girl's brown eyes drop. "I need to find Will," she declares softly. My fault, echoing beneath it.
She ducks her head to catch the girl's eyes, lowering her voice delicately. "I don't think humans can...survive...in that place."
"Have to try," the girl declares. Promise, underlaying her words. A memory of a boy's voice, imprinted like a warm sunbeam, 'it means something you can't break. It's what friends do.'
What's happening? The anxious whisper ripples across the water.
Her hands fall off the thin shoulders, debating pushing the girl out and back into her body. It's one thing, for her to stumble into the scars the preternatural creates. To be pulled in, when your senses are an exposed nerve. It's something else, when you're this young, sent out to catalogue the dead, exposed to rotting, corrupting realms.
The brown eyes stare up at her, hearing Ally's thoughts, preparing for betrayal.
She can see it, the adults who stood over her, Papa, with soft approaches and tiny smiles. A hand on her shoulder.
She's used to guises. She's used to shallow affection that disappears when she does something wrong, when she's about to be pushed, locked away.
And...Ally had been ready to push.
The water tings and echoes. Dark and cavernous, and for someone who has a knack for places, she isn't sure what or where this is. Something like a mirror realm? A bridge construct? The most alien mind-scape she's ever witnessed? It's both primitive and effective. But for her presence in front of her, there's nothing of her slipping through. Is it even possible to build a mindscape so empty, without memories, and personality flickering through?
She shakes her head, focuses on not thinking about the little girl's capabilities, acting nothing like this Papa.
She doesn't want to touch that place, not even as a ride-along, not when the image can sear, but -
The alternative is overpower her or leave her to scream at the sight, and psychic horror, of another ravaged and dead.
"Just because it's simple, doesn't make it easy," she murmurs.
The girl's head tilts curiously, as she repeats the phrase carefully. "Just… because…it's sim-ple, doesn't make it easy…"
The naiveté makes her pull in her lips, swallowing down the unfairness of it, that kids can be marked this way.
She reluctantly slides her hand to her chest, demonstrates for the girl to do the same. "Center." The girl copies her, nodding. "Will," she speaks clearly. Focus on Will, she speaks into her mind, guiding, emptying her own thoughts so they don't distract.
"Will."
Something new appears in the dark. A haphazard fort of sticks, corrupted by the realm its housed in. A construct, and sanctuary of a child.
"Castle Byers," the girl whispers.
She looks at Ally, just slightly turning her doe eyes. Wanting but not asking, to used to doing this alone.
Ally reaches out, curling her fingers around the smaller hand, taking echoing steps to the grungy sheet affixed to the doorway.
The little girl pulls the curtain back, and Will, the lost boy, is there, curled on his side, his eyes closed. There are deep shadows under his eyes, the only color under the filth streaked across pale, lifeless skin. He's soaked through, unnaturally still even against shivers that should be wracking his body.
The little girl glances at her, solemnly, like she knows Ally doesn't want to move closer, as she carefully extracts her hand.
(There's something strange about his clothing, about the girl's too.)
"Will," the girl kneels, shuffling on her tube socked knees, her fingers hesitant to connect.
There's a shaky exhale, a held in sob on the water. You tell him…Tell him I'm coming…Mom is coming.
"Your mom," the girl repeats dutifully, touching the outside of his hand. "She's coming for you."
His eyelashes flutter.
"He hears you," Ally breathes, wondering at it. How? That shouldn't be possible.
"Hurry," he whispers, as soft as a dispersing cloud.
Listen, you tell him to stay where he is. We're coming. We're coming, okay? We're coming honey.
The pain is whispered into the girl's ear as she holds Will's unresponsive hand. "Just hold on a little longer." His dark eyelashes flutter against his cheeks, and stop. "Will?"
The fort, the surroundings start to disintegrate into smoke.
"Will!"
Ally lunges, to grasp the girl's hands before everything -
She wakes, hands outstretched, clutching nothing. The vision of the dying boy's fluttering eyelashes, the little girl's panic still with her.
She can't find her way back. Her only connection is to the hell-scape that parallels it. To the concrete pool, splayed with blood.
How could he survive there? Survive further?
How could he go through that, and die there anyway?
Joyce wraps a towel around Eleven's shoulders, her mind too consumed with Will's cracked voice coming through the radio asking her to hurry, to remember that Eleven saw someone else while she was in the deprivation pool.
Hopper however, remembers. He watches the kids huddle together to support Eleven and keeps his face expressionless. They know where Will is now. That he's alive. And he knows what he's going to have to leverage to Hawkins Lab to make sure he gets his chance in this Upside Down. "Was there someone there, that you were talking to?" he asks, wondering if it's another person with powers. Another hurt kid. Another science experiment. A reason that the radio kept going static-y.
The others look at her curiously, except for the Wheeler kid, who glares like he shouldn't be asking anything of her at all.
Big brown eyes look up at him, weary, with silent, drying tears. She nods, reluctant to speak it aloud.
"Were they like you?" he continues gruffly.
She shakes her head slowly. "She said…her name…was Ally." Joyce's breath hitches, lips pressed against the sound as she rubs Eleven's shoulders. Eleven looks up at her, wondering at the affection, or if she said something wrong. She doesn't realize the tragedy of knowing that this girl was different because she had a name, not a number. "She was…pretty."
"What did she say to you?" he tries to keep her focused, not sounding so young with too much yearning.
"She…she said it wasn't safe there. That she could…guide…me out."
"Was she in the Upside Down too?" Joyce asks, wondering if it's possible this girl could help Will. Not that she's going to hope for that, or that it would stop her from keeping her promise, in finding her boy herself.
Eleven frowns, shaking her head slowly like she's unsure.
"What was simple but not easy?" Hopper questions, guessing by the lift that Eleven was repeating the phrase back.
Her lack of vocabulary makes her seem very young and naïve, but her stare is as haunting as an old solider. "Trying," she answers softly.
Hopper and her stare at each other for a long moment, both understanding what it will take to save Will, in a way the others in the room haven't.
Dustin pips up. "Was she a good guy? You know, like an al-ly."
Eleven thinks about the girl, who blocked Barbara's body from view, who helped her, and held her hand. She doesn't know what 'ally' means. But she's learning good guy. "Yes. A good guy."
She's down scope of a rifle, the beam of light like a bullseye aimed at her chest.
They look like quarantine doctors, in their suits, features blurred beneath the plastic and the condensation of their trapped breath.
She tries not to move, especially at the voice that barks, "who the hell are you?"
She can't answer, verbally.
While they're better equipped, she's a hotchpotch of running shoes, and diving gear, and a machete. Raided supplies. A choice of mechanical over magical, given how temperamental magic can be in other dimensions.
'Friend, I think,' she communicates mentally, wary as his hand tightens and the woman jolts.
She pulls herself out of the woman's thoughts, looping and frazzled, all nerves and overloaded awareness. Will, Will. I'll find you. I promise, I'm coming. I'm here. Oh god, my boy. Will!
She centers on the man with the gun.
"Name," he demands, thinking she looks ridiculous, like she's just been scuba diving.
'Ally.'
The woman's thoughts spark, so quickly moving from Who is She? Lab? How'd she get here? We're Wasting Time to: she'll help. She's here to help. "Hopper," she beeches. WastingTimeWastingTime. ShecanHelp.
The man recognizes the name too, pulling the sight off her.
He's more stoic, insular instead of projecting. She focuses on him to block the tide of the woman's thoughts.
They're a stone throw from the destroyed Castle Byers, have just committed to following the trail of black blood.
'The monster has been slipping in and out between this place and your realm. It's been injured.'
"We know that."
'Injured after it captured Will.'
Oh god. "So – so the blood won't lead us…" Oh god, is he alive?
'I can.' She sends out strongly, to overcome the mother's blaring inner voice, mentally she slides even closer to the man. 'But the closer we get to Will, the more likely that creature or...something else...is going to fight to not let him go.'
"We're ready," the woman answers quickly. "Let's go!"
The man with the rifle is trying to read her, through one mask to the other.
'You think Will is bait?' comes through clearly, not voiced aloud. It surprises her, how quickly he realized the communication can go both ways. That he can utilize it to not spook Joyce.
She answers back, still in-tuned to the dim consciousness that was uprooted here.
'I'm not sure why else he'd be alive.'
In an unguarded fortress, in a pile of decomposing bodies, Will is hoisted to the wall, with…
She can feel that it's a... a living thing, not an apparatus, not an inert vine.
Hopper grasps the muscle, pulling on the fighting, slimy, wiggling tentacle that tries to burrow back down Will's throat, like a tick fighting to stay.
A flash of a memory, of a young, bald girl in a hospital bed, with a coiled blue tube down her throat, breathing for her imprints on Hopper's mind, makes his actions automatic and single-minded.
It squelches out of Will's throat at the same time Will's lungs stop, his heart stops, the numb awareness in his distant mind goes quiet.
Hopper shouts "Jesus!" as it's yanked free, throwing it to the ground where it squirms. The gun fires in a rat a tat, the firelight bright and blinding. Ally protects her eyes, hears Joyce's shout.
"Oh god, Hop he's not breathing!"
A heart monitor's flatline drowns out Joyce's sobs. The pull of Hopper's memories and Joyce's pain is sinking her. She pulls off her mask, though she knows better, does it because they do it, and her mind is in tandem step.
There's no air to gather as rot and decay steals her breath. Pollen floats onto their bare heads, like ash.
"He was," she stutters, eyes tightly shut against the tears, trying to stay in her own head. "Stopped, thing, out. I can, do…"
Hopper is thinking about CPR, on not giving up yet, SaraWillSaraWillSaraWill. Not again. "You can what?" Hopper looks at her. It gives her double vision, seeing her own face reflected back.
She forces her teary eyes open, focuses on her need to save SaraWill.
"Link you," she blurts out quickly, hands clawed over Will's chest. "Your heart, jumpstart his."
"What? You -you can do that?" Joyce clutches Will tighter, every hope resting on the girl in front of her.
Hopper stares at her. "Do it."
She places one palm on his wide chest, as he breathes as if to make it wider, his heart bigger, unfurrow his protective rib cage.
The other she lays flat over Will's small, quiet heart.
"Can I –" Joyce starts, unable to finish, feeling useless and desperate, pained that she might have to let go of Will for this to work. She feels if this is dangerous, it should be her heart at risk.
Ally catches her eyes. No, no she isn't supposed to do it like this - "Together."
Joyce curls her hands over Ally's, pulls closer in the huddle they've created, as if a bomb is about to go off, as if she can protect them all.
Ally pulls. Hopper pictures his little girl, the way he coached her to breathe, as he feels his heart hit his ribs. The contact shocks them all, like a live wire, an echo in each that sounds like drums.
Will jolts, gasping.
There are flashes of what he saw, what he found out about The Lab. Experimenting, kidnapping, murder, opening gates into hell-scapes. Science at its most cruel, irreverent of consequences.
The deal he struck, to clear the way so they could find Will, so he wouldn't be stolen from Joyce's arms the minute they're back. He sent an army to a school, gave the location of the girl for it. Betrayed one for the other. (Only temporary, once Will was safe he was going to do everything to get her back if they found her -)
It had to be this way. Will Byers has already been buried.
Joyce is already considered cracked for believing it was a conspiracy. Joyce and Terry Ives, shouting for a child the world considers dead. Their mind stolen from them if they persist. (And Joyce would persist.)
Hopper is focused on Will's breathing as he carries him, forgoing his own mask for Will. Accepts that what he's breathing in is toxic and poison. He needs to get Will to the hospital. Let others see him, show he's alive. Keep his figure public. The defense of a crowd.
He asks if she has another way out, as she had another way in.
And he wonders, what she's capable of when she says yes. What it makes him, to tell her to stay off the lab's radar and to ask if she can watch out for…if there's any hope here that they can make it through without temporarily sacrificing one for the other.
She's stripped of her suit, her gear. All that's left is a long Henley, yoga pants, and soaked shoes. Her hair dripping icicles down her back.
Two teenagers are getting their hands bandaged. The girl is surrounded by her parents, by three young boys Will's age, and another teenage boy, turned sideways, with blood as a crescent around his eye.
Hopper stands with a teenage boy of lank hair, with slumped, rounded shoulders. The only one to stand on his side of the divided aisle.
She probes at their surface thoughts, catches a few of their names. The mother is the only one talking, worried at the wound her daughter won't explain. Worried about the scar.
Ally nudges Hopper with a 'glad to see you on the other side?'
He glances over, like he's only scanning the room, face expressionless as he directs clearly that 'the doctors with Will are from the lab.'
There's another warning there, what it might look like, to have an unknown girl approach the Chief with familiarity, given where he's just been, who's watching.
Defense of a crowd though, right?
"Sorry I couldn't be here earlier," she smiles at Jonathan, coming to his side.
His mouth opens. "Uh, what?"
The bags under his eyes makes him look sickly. The glassiness of his gaze makes her wonder if he's still in shock. Her brows raise, seeing the memory of cut palms with a dirty knife, along the bundle of nerves in their hand, to draw the monster out and away from Will. The thread of stitches pulling as they're sewn in.
"I'm sorry I wasn't here?" she repeats slowly, patting his shoulder, trying to ignore the awkwardness he seems to exude, realizing she chose the absolute wrong cover as she continues anyway. "I came as soon as I could. I know I don't know Will very well, but I feel like I bonded with him, back when he used to hide in Castle Byers and your Mom needed help looking for him?"
He just stares.
The pixie girl, Nancy, (Nan-cy!) is faster, her tone lending to the charade that they might be familiar. "Ally?" she asks, a touch unsure.
Ally! is repeated in concert, from the three boys whose inner voice is held at a shout, who's faces show conspiracy.
'The girl Eleven talked to!' 'She can find El!' 'Does she know what happened to Eleven? Can she help?'
Hopper gives them a stern stare down as Ally winces. "Time for talking is later."
The curly haired boy nods, knowingly. The other two share a look, one mutinous, the other worried.
"Nice to meet you, Ally!" The curly haired boy grins, his top teeth missing. "Or...you know, see you?" He corrects, eyes wide and thoughts twirling. Playing it cool, he thinks.
She struggles to smile back, though part of her is a little amused.
"Uh, yeah. Good to see you," Jonathan agrees unconvincingly, eyes diverted from Nancy's prompting look to play along.
A female doctor approaches, announced by Hopper clearing his throat, shifting his stance. No badge. No name sewn on a standard white coat.
Jonathan stands up immediately. "How's Will? Is he…?"
Ally takes his hand, and he flinches. She tightens to avoid flinching back.
"Family only," the doctor warns, sparing a glance at the clasped hands dispassionately.
"I'm his girlfriend," she argues.
'THIS is Byers's girlfriend?' a boy thinks in disbelief, almost in tandem with multiple 'Jonathan's girlfriend?'
Two of the boys snicker. The other scoffs.
"Well, his girlfriend is going to have to stay outside. The waiting room is available for the rest of you."
The three boys throw a hissy-fit, yelling come on!, as the mother of one of them snaps at them to quiet.
"That's not fair!"
"That's bullshit!"
"We should be in there too! We're his best friends!"
"Michael!" she snaps again.
"If we're not there, what if he wakes up and thinks he's…" his breath hitches. "Mom, he needs to know he's safe."
The mother softens, gathers her son into a hug. He soaks up the affection at the same time as he's trying to fight it, leaning away. "And you'll see him. We'll stay until he wakes up, okay?"
'Great' the father thinks, the epitome of distant, even from his own discomfort. Nancy feels a deep pang, that reminds her only Will made it back. Even now she's the only one who seems to remember her best friend is gone.
Barb. Barbara. (Nancy, please!)
Jonathan, watching the familial reassurance, shakes off her hand, only thinking of Mom and Will and promising the boys he'll get them first thing.
"Some boyfriend," Hopper murmurs as Jonathan walks off, amused at her failing fib.
She sighs. She should have thought of something better, should have known how to disguise herself. Instead, she's standing in a florescent ER, on the wrong side of the divide, chilled and dripping.
"I figured they might let limpet girlfriends in if pushed."
He shakes his head, thinking you should have said you were Lonnie's kid, if she needed a good enough lie.
Lonnie? she wonders, feeling an edge of his contemptuous disgust.
'The kid will be fine,' he thinks, to her and to himself, prepared to stay until he knows that for sure.
The group spreads out over the small waiting room.
She sits next to Hopper, slumping in her seat as she covers her eyes like she's starving off a headache. Hopefully no one will try talking to her.
Will is her focal point. She watches his chest rise and fall, listens to the quiet chatter of Joyce and Jonathan talking to him.
He should wake up soon, right? Jonathan asks. It's just pneumonia?
She's able to find his oxygen rate on the outdated equipment, tries to listen in on doctors assessment.
She slips back in her body, her head grazing Hopper's shoulder.
"Need a cup of coffee or are you going to slip off again?" he murmurs without looking at her, head tilted back against the glass, beaver hat tilted forward on his brow. He knows she did something.
She shrugs, slightly stretching out. The coffee machine looked ancient, with these large plastic buttons where you could see pictures of beverages beneath, so she isn't likely to take up that offer.
She glances around the silent group, the magazines laid out on the table that no one moves to touch. They look terribly outdated, garish colors and big hair, and poor, blocky graphic design.
That's...strange, actually.
She frowns, moving closer to kneel at the table, to look at the glossy covers, and the dates.
The girl, Nancy, asks if there's something wrong, thinking her expression is puzzled.
Two of the kids next to her are watching her like prairie dogs, popped up in interest, thinking she reminds them of Eleven. The other is scowling, thoughts battering with his need to find out what happened to Eleven, his better instinct saying it isn't safe yet, to ask aloud. It's all the same to her, yelling mentally, or yelling out loud. She tries to ignore it.
She thumbs the covers, doesn't see any signs of wear and tear. "Just trying to find the newest one."
Nancy looks at the catalogue with little interest. "Uh, that, one," she points to the Times, remembers just receiving it in the mail.
Special Edition
Worth the Price?
Tough Moves, Hard Questions
November 7th, 1983.
"Right...Thanks."
Seriously?
Changes Made: I don't know why the trail of blood in the Upside Down would have led Hopper and Joyce to Will. By the timeline, the Demogorgan got Will before it was injured at the Byers.
Next: Ally journeys from the Upside Down, to the middle school, to the hospital.