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"Stop Draggin' My Heart Around"

It's hard to think about what you wanted

It's hard to think about what you lost

This doesn't have to be the big get-even

- Stevie Nicks

Hopper drove cautiously up to the guard shack whose gates they had burst through coming out just a few hours before. Everything there was still and silent. No one had picked up the gates. No one came out with a gun, demanding to know what they were doing there.

"Where are the guards?" Joyce asked. Having been prepared to talk or fight their way back in, she found this absence of any challenge whatsoever disconcerting.

"Maybe this'll be easier than we thought," Hopper said, although she could tell he, too, found this unsettling.

Murray's voice came from the back. "I don't know, Jim. I've got a bad feeling about this."

The lights were on in the guard shack, but it appeared deserted. "Should we get out and … check?" Joyce asked doubtfully.

"No. Whatever's going on, it's at the prison. That's where we need to get to." Hopper drove on into the darkness.

He remembered how to get to the tunnel they'd used to escape the prison, which was more than Joyce would have. All this snow and all these trees meant that everything looked exactly the same to her.

Parking the van so that the headlights would illuminate the tunnel exit, Hopper used the end of a crowbar to haul the metal cover off into the snow.

Murray went first, then Hopper helped Joyce down, his hands gentle on her back. She glanced at him, wondering when—if—there would be a time to talk about that kiss and what it meant for them going forward. But if there was going to be a time for that, this certainly wasn't it.

She glanced up as her feet hit the metal rungs of the ladder. "Shouldn't we turn off the van? Leaving the lights on is going to drain the battery."

Hopper looked back at it, then climbed in after her without bothering to reply. But she knew the answer—either they were getting an airlift out of the prison when their job was done … or they weren't getting out at all. Either way, they weren't going to be needing the van any further.

She got a very small amount of pleasure out of the idea of Yuri having to come hunt for his van someday and finding it here with the battery completely out of juice.

At the bottom of the shaft, they stood for a moment getting their bearings. Hopper grasped her shoulder, his hand warm even through the big puffy coat she was wearing. "We'd better hurry. I heard gunfire from the prison. Someone's still alive and fighting in there."

Following him through the tunnel, Joyce wondered if she should feel good that there were people alive or not. Maybe the other prisoners—they certainly deserved a chance at escape, at life. But the guards? But there was Enzo. He was a good man who had been working a bad job. And with some amount of empathy, if she understood the relationship between him and Hopper correctly. So maybe there were other good guards there, who had taken on the job to feed their families.

Hopper was the first one up into the prison again, moving cautiously, pushing the flamethrower through the hole first and then following it. He bent over and reached a hand down to help Joyce through, and Murray pulled himself through behind them.

Joyce looked around at the lab in dismay. She wanted to be shocked, horrified, to see that the demodogs' glass cases were shattered, the water or whatever it was in puddles on the floor, that the case in which the Mindflayer particles had been held was broken and it was free. But it was what she had been expecting. The Upside Down always seemed to find a way.

In the distance, she could hear them. The demodogs.

"Oh, dear God," Murray muttered.

"It's what we came here for," Joyce reminded herself. Yes, it would have been easier if the cases were intact and they could have burnt up the demodogs in their sleep … but easy or not, they had come here to kill those things, to destroy the particles, to put down the demogorgon once and for all, and that was what they were going to do.

Hopper looked down at her and nodded. "For El. And Will." He activated the flamethrower. All three of them breathed a sigh of relief at the sight of the flames at its tip. Such a relief when something actually worked, for a change.

Joyce tried not to think about Yuri, and about Antonov there trying to keep an eye on that slippery jerk. Yuri had to know he wasn't getting any money from the prison, not now, and that the only way he was getting paid anything at all was if he got them back to America. So he would find a way to make that hunk of junk he called a helicopter work. And they had trusted Antonov this far, and now look: She had reached Hopper, and he was free and alive. She would trust him to get them the rest of the way. Someday, when their lives weren't in danger, she looked forward to learning his story.

For now, she was just hoping theirs didn't end here. It was hard not to think of Bob, to remember what he had looked like, reaching for her, while those … things attacked him. If Hopper—

But Hopper wasn't Bob. She had loved Bob, and he had shown tremendous courage at the end, but he hadn't had Hopper's experiences behind him. He had never been a fighter, not physically. She had to believe that somehow or another Hopper was going to find a way to win today. He had before, even if it had taken eight months to get to him. And she was here, and they were a team, and that was how they would win. Because they were a team, and they were connected to what was happening in Hawkins as surely as the Mindflayer was.