Prologue
The Mind Flayer gets Billy Hargrove.
The gate gets Jim Hopper.
The rest of them are left to try to heal and try to move on, except it's not the end of the Upside Down.
"It's never going to end," El whispers to them one day a few years later, too tired to cry, blood trailing from her nose.
The Russians had continued experiments. Steve finds out first, when he runs into Hopper over a year after he'd died – dishevelled, about thirty pounds less than he's seen him last, shirt ripped and bloodied from the fresh bite marks across his ribs.
"There's more. It's bigger than we ever thought," he rasps when he's finally conscious enough to speak. The Byers' return to Hawkins within a week.
A gate rips open out of control in Russia, but it's not the only place. Taking care of the mess under Hawkins bought them some time to fortify, but it's difficult for anyone to truly feel safe. Not with people, then cities, and then countries start falling to creatures of unimaginable horror. Not many live to tel the tale. Mind Flayers escape, their herd of the flayed spreading like wildfire. Trust is hard to come by. Quarantines and lock downs begin to get violent, and then begin to fail.
Eventually the American government remember Eleven, get it into their heads that it's her responsibility to be at the forefront of this fight – as if she hadn't been already since she was a girl. They come for her, but the others protect her. They have killed Will and captured Mike before she has enough and goes with them. She is 18. They keep Mike as collateral, despite the promise to let him go if she cooperates.
Two years go by before they see either of them again. By this time they each have a favourite weapon and Dustin's lost an arm, but Hawkins has become a beacon of hope in a world of turmoil. They are strong and battle ready. They know how to fight these things.
When El comes back she has four others with her, Kali among them, all with numbers on their wrists. They go by Cam, Leigh, and Greg. They are what remains of a secret 'research' division that couldn't hold up.
"They still wanted something from us, from the Upside Down," El tells them, "But it doesn't work that way."
"Mike?" Nancy asks hopefully.
El's expression hardens. "They took him when everything began falling apart. I'm going to find him."
"She needs rest," the one with 04 stamped on his wrist, Greg, says, all distrust.
The arrival of El with four powerful allies boosts morale but also lets their guard down. They are making plans a week later when one of the flayed gets into Hawkins. Mr. Wheeler and Mrs. Sinclair are lost to it before they know what's going on.
As practised and prepared as they might have been, it takes an embarrassingly short amount of time to dismantle Hawkins. The town falls, and the group has to prioritize to save anyone at all. Dead bodies litter the street, torn to unrecognizable pieces. Joyce stays behind, a suicide mission to distract so that the others can leave.
"Mom, no!" Jonathan tries to take her place. Hopper tries harder.
"You've already come back from the dead," she tells Jim and then hugs Jonathan, tight and tearful, "I'm sorry. I just can't leave Will."
They make it out, from one nightmare straight to the next.
They meet up with others who try to steal their gear. They almost lose Holly to kidnapping. An attache of government officials periodically find them, trying to convince the Numbered to rejoin them mostly by manipulation and brute force(but ultimately fail). They fight a lot of demodogs and demogorgons. A lot.
They manage to kill another Mind Flayer on Lucas' twenty third birthday. By the end of the fight he is dead and Max is screaming over his body. Nancy will never walk the same again, and Robin lost an eye in the fight.
Mike finds them, he's part of the next group of officials to try and talk sense into El. Come back and work with the military, he says, to 'take control of the situation'.
"What the hell did they do to you?" Steve asks the question on everyone's mind. The Mike they all knew would never talk like this, but he supposes five years of brainwashing might change anyone's mind.
"Has it been that long, Mike?" El whispers, "Friends don't lie."
El loses a part of her soul that day. They are able to lie low for a week before she tells them something.
"I think it's time to try The Last Plan," she scowls as she says it, in her careful way that tells of how big a deal this is likely to be, "It probably won't work. If it does, I could simply lose myself to it, or it might rip everything open. They wouldn't need gates to get in."
"Too risky. We don't do things that risky," Nancy says.
"Everything we do is that risky," Dustin retaliates.
"Has been for a long time," Steve adds, then looks to El, "What do you need from us?"
What they need is a gate. It's not hard to find one these days, they're everywhere.
They make camp nearby and then settle for a group discussion, because if this plan works there's no going back. Life is about survival now, to live would mean to hide, fight, and flee, over and over and over again. El's plan – whatever it is – would be a fight to the death.
It turns out that Nancy is pregnant. She leaves with Jonathan, Mrs. Wheeler and Holly, Erica and Mr. Sinclair go with them. Their goodbye is too short and awful. Steve hides his best sidearm in the glovebox while they're packing their van with supplies, it is a parting gift, and his last attempt to protect any of them. He knows that they want to look after what is left of their families, but he still doesn't get it. There is no real life to go out and find. All there is now is to kill as many of the shadow creatures as you can before you die.
Dustin, somehow now three inches taller than him, swings his arm over Steve's shoulders as he stares after the van. "C'mon, man. El wants to get started as soon as possible."
Her plan, it turns out, was the right risk to take.
At the very least it feels that way, once she finds a way to transport them in the Upside Down to another open gate. "Let's take a short cut," she'll say, and as the rift between dimensions opens, they come out with guns blazing wherever the gate may be. From a small town in the USA to somewhere in Canada, or Morocco, Russia - anywhere. El needs a long time to heal after these raids, but over time they perfect them. They kill so many creatures. They shut down research stations. Although impossible to stop completely, they at least delay the total destruction of the world.
Max and Dustin marry by the bullshit power vested in Hopper on New Years Eve, 1999.
A month later they lose Kali at the end of a raid. On their way back through the gate, through the Upside Down to the gate they'd come from, a demodog comes out of nowhere and leaps, catching her throat as it tackles her to the ground. El is in her trance in the Upside Down, concentrating on keeping both gates open. Greg reacts instantly, while his power to slow down time for a few seconds is usually very useful to giving them a head start getting into position or getting an idea of what waits for them on the other side of a new gate, this time merely lets them see the exact moment Kali's eyes go lifeless.
El is quiet afterwards, but they all are. It had all gone fine, and now suddenly another of them is gone. Greg blames himself for not noticing the demodog early enough. He won't listen when all of the others tell him it's not his fault. Steve, who has spent the last eight years getting to know Greg and ignoring his actual thoughts about the man, talks at length that night for so long about why it's not Greg's fault that Greg shuts him up by kissing him.
Robin, of course, wolf whistles from across the fire pit.
Two weeks go by before El finally admits that there's been something on her mind. She's always been the kind to digest new information, explore it on her own before sharing it with the others. It's the one thing that still really gets Hopper's fatherly instincts riled up, to this day.
"The void, in the Upside Down, is brighter. It's all swirling, murky colour. When Greg slowed time, I think..." El breathes, uncertain but determined, "There were pictures. Moving pictures, all around. Live feeds of different worlds, maybe? Different times?"
And then, to general disbelief.
"What if we could go back, and fix things?"
There are discussions, arguments, and experiments. They are patient, and intersperse the 'research' with the work they've been doing for the last few years. They run across the other half of their crew once in all this time, they lost Mr. Sinclair, but Joyce Byers is a gem and already six.
"Call me 'Joy'," she tells them before they part ways again.
With Max, Dustin, Robin, and Hopper keeping lookout outside of a gate, El, Greg, Cam, and Leigh head inside. Every attempt reaps more information, more questions, more certainty.
"We're only going to have one chance," El likes to remind them, "Not a short cut."
She means there won't be any way to come back through.
"We can't all go," is another certainty she shares with them over time, "if I connect with a gate to a past moment in time I think it will shatter everything if we all try to go through."
No one wants to find out what it would mean if the boundaries of the void shattered completely.
"Too soon," she says when they start asking when, "Need to find the right time to go back, the right thing to change."
"Be careful," Greg likes to tell Steve, the moment before he steps after El into the Upside Down. Steve always gives him a crooked grin, because it's a crazy thing for him to say when he's obviously the one about to do the more dangerous thing.
Robin's the one who has to tell him that when he says 'Be Careful' he means something else entirely.
The next time, Steve beats him to it. "Be careful," he says, low enough that Greg can tell he finally gets it. His smile before he follows El is bright enough that it sears itself across Steve's heart.
One year passes, and then a couple more after.
El comes out of a research period absolutely shaking. She goes straight to Max and hugs her tight, and then she finds Steve and fixes her hands on his shoulders.
"Know what to do," she tells them all, but her next words are for Steve, "Have to send you."
She won't give any of them any more details. It drives Hopper mad, and Steve thinks he finally gets it.
"Last resort," she says, mostly. One memorable time when they're having a good day, considering, she eyes Steve teasingly, "Understand basketball better? This move is our Hail Mary."
They trudge along for almost another year, battle hardened. Experts, now, at living in this dystopian future. It's a handful of months after Steve's thirty seventh birthday when they are absolutely blindsided during a raid. Steve's clutching to Robin's lifeless body while Greg is being dragged away, unconscious, by the tentacles of a pieced together Mind Flayer. Its human counterpart is Mike, and he is standing at its side, watching in satisfaction and showing no signs of trying to fight it. The military are here, protecting Mike and the monsters. They take down Hopper, and then Cam. Leigh gets knocked out and dragged away, probably to try and be reconditioned along with Greg. Max is trying in vain to keep Dustin awake, but he is on his back with most of his intestines on the floor beside him. El has tried to talk to Mike, but it's over now, isn't it? Is everything really over? It feels like the end of the world, so of course that's when El yells at Steve.
"Hail Mary, Steve!"
But he doesn't want to, he doesn't have anything left in him to fight with, does he? They stole it when they stole Robin, and Greg – his body is yanked back, and he grapples with but cannot hold onto Robin when he is pulled. He lands beside El just inside the gate, the eery stillness of the Upside Down suffocating him.
"Steve."
"Seriously, El? Don't you think it's too late for - "
"Too late for this world, this future, yes. Still a chance for another," she says, tired, sure.
"They took Greg. Mike took Greg, how can you even - "
"Only focusing on one moment in time," she tells him quietly, straightening him up, giving him her weapons, securing the zipper on his backpack, wiping at the blood and sweat on his cheeks, "Know what it feels like."
"And if this works," Steve's eyes shut tight, he needs a breath before he can continue, "it could change the world for good? I mean, for the better?"
When he opens his eyes, El is almost smiling.
"You have a chance to make a version of us happy. If you succeed we will all be done, but they will live long, and happily. If you don't succeed, they will follow our path and find the same end, and we will all be done," she says gently. The truth never sounded so impossible and hopeful in the same breath.
Her fingers tighten on his arms, and Steve knows they are out of time.
"What do I have to do?"
"When you get there, teach me about short cuts," she says, and then everything about her intensifies, "But first you have to save Billy Hargrove."