IT WAS SAFE TO SAY that the group's scheme to kill Dart had failed. As the five of them traipsed through the woods with nothing but the howls of the Demogorgons to guide them in the direction of Hawkins Lab, where Lucas had determined them to have gone, the tension from his and Dustin's squabble over who had put the Party in jeopardy lingered in the atmosphere. Amara had reminded them that they had more important things to deal with, but her involvement in the situation had more to do with the fact that conflict only worsened her anxiety.

        "Are you sure we're headed in the right direction?" Max's voice echoed from behind. She was in the rear of the pack, given that she believed it was foolish of them to pursue the creatures that had tried to kill them a mere half hour ago, but to her anything was better than going home and facing her stepbrother.

        "I don't know. We'll just have to follow the noise until we reach the lab," Dustin answered, adjusting his hat. "God, the one time I forget to bring my compass... "

        Max was confused, having not been around for Dustin's compass lesson. "What do you mean?"

        As Dustin proceeded to explain to Max how the presence of a magnetic field such as a doorway to another dimension could alter the direction of a compass, Amara, who was leading the group alongside Steve, nudged his arm. "Looks like he's taking my advice now."

        "Huh?"

        "Dustin," Amara clarified. Steve glanced back to where Dustin was relaying to Max how they had used their compasses to determine that the gate was within the lab year ago. His eyes were aglow as they naturally were when he brought up anything scientific, and it warmed Amara's heart to see that he was being his nerdy, authentic self even if it was with a girl who didn't return his feelings.

        Steve had gathered what Amara was referring to. Dustin seemed to have gotten the hint that Max didn't like him back after witnessing her grasp Lucas's hand on the bus amid her panic, so what was the use in him pretending not to care if he had no chance with her either way? He did care about her, perhaps more than he wished to, but if displaying his true self made her want to be friends with him, it could also prove useful in the event that he met someone else he liked. All relationships had to start somewhere.

        Could Steve win someone over that way? Who was he even? He was a basketball star and a ladies' man and prom king, or he was, at least until Billy Hargrove swept in and stole his title of Hawkins High King in one short week. But was his popularity already on the decline even before then? Did he even like the photos of fancy sports cars he had on display in his room, or was it all for show? Did he like parties or did he simply feel obligated to go to them? Did he even enjoy being popular to begin with?

        Fuck, he realized as the trail they were hiking began to slope downward, I don't even know who the hell I am.

        "Everything alright?" Amara asked tentatively. Steve glimpsed to his side to meet her concerned gaze, and he knew that it wasn't fair of him to lie to her when he had compelled her to tell him the truth about her own identity crisis. She of all people would understand what he was going through.

        Lowering his voice to ensure that none of the younger kids overheard, Steve whispered, "I, umm, I just found out I have no idea who the fuck I am."

        "Welcome to my life," Amara replied, and just like that Steve's mood improved a fraction. Nancy wouldn't have said that. She would've insisted that he was worrying too much about his college essay and that what he was feeling was merely a heat-of-the-moment thing. But Amara didn't try to convince Steve that his emotions weren't valid: she accepted them for what they were and implicitly reminded him that she was going through the same thing.

        Maybe losing his popularity presented Steve with an opportunity to rediscover who he was and who he wanted to be. Though he didn't articulate it out loud, he was very much looking forward to watching Star Wars once this was all over.

        "Thanks, by the way," Steve spoke, prompting Amara to face him again. "I probably would've been ripped to shreds if you hadn't saved me out there."

        "It's no problem. I couldn't stand the thought of not doing anything," Amara responded, peeking behind them to ensure that Max, Lucas, and Dustin weren't too far behind. "Though my brother probably would've killed me if I got any further away from the bus. It took a lot just to convince him not to come with me."

        "Wait, he knows about all this?"

        "I had to tell someone," Amara defended, but to her relief Steve didn't appear the slightest bit angry at her. "He got it out of me through bribery. Offered to do my geometry homework in exchange for the truth."

        "And he believed you?" Steve queried, directing his flashlight to illuminate the path ahead. They were slowly but surely nearing the edge of the forest.

        "According to him, I'm a terrible liar and there's no way I could've made any of this up," Amara answered, tightening her jacket around her petite frame. "Like I said, he insisted on coming but I refused to let him miss the Queen concert he and his friends were raising money for. I just hope he's able to stop worrying about me long enough to enjoy it."

        As they persisted in trekking through the woods, Steve wondered what it would be like to have a sibling of his own. Lucas and Max also had siblings, the former a problem child with a knack for getting under his skin with her sassiness and the latter an emotionally abusive stepbrother she despised but cared about in a weird way. Nancy wasn't the closest with Mike and clashed with him frequently, and yet she still looked out for his well-being more than their own dad did. Steve's parents had an abundance of money but had chosen to have just him for reasons he couldn't understand. Coupled with a large house in Loch Nora and his parents away more often than not, his house felt far too empty for him to call it home.

        As the five of them finally approached the perimeter of the forest, Amara and Steve picked up on voices in the distance. While they weren't the screeches of supernatural monsters, the voices could belong to anyone and the two of them readied their weapons once again before continuing forward, Lucas, Dustin, and Max following close behind.

        "Hello?" a familiar voice called out to them as they reached the threshold of the woods. "Who's there? Who's there?"

        They reached a clearing only to come face-to-face with the last people they'd expected to see: Nancy and Jonathan. "Steve?" the two of them uttered simultaneously.

        Steve stopped in his tracks as he made eye contact with his ex-girlfriend for the first time since their breakup. "Nancy?"

        "Jonathan," Dustin piped up, following Steve as the seven of them converged in the middle of the field.

        "What are you doing here?" Nancy demanded. Similar to Steve, she hadn't been expecting to see him so suddenly.

        "What are you doing here?" Steve turned the question on her.

        "We're looking for Mike and Will," Nancy elucidated, her voice softening with trepidation for her brother. Amara recalled how other than their two older siblings, Mike and Will were two of the people Dustin had been unable to reach earlier.

        Dustin appeared to be thinking along those lines as well. "They aren't in there, are they?" he jerked his head in the direction of the lab.

        "We're not sure," Nancy responded, looking at Jonathan for support.

        "Why?"

        The answer to Jonathan's question came in the form of roars echoing from the lab. The lab itself was cloaked in darkness other than the occasional flickering of lights that ensued in the presence of interdimensional monsters. If the creatures had abandoned five humans to go back there, they had to have killed dozens of employees at the lab. Amara could only hope that Mike and Will weren't among those killed.

        After a few beats where Nancy and Jonathan interrogated Dustin on Lucas on when they had last seen Mike and Will, the floors of the lab began to light up one by one. "The power's back," Nancy declared.

        They all rushed to the booth where Jonathan had parked his car and attempted to unlock the gate via the parking lot control system. After several tries Dustin was finally able to get it to open, and Nancy and Jonathan hastened in the direction of the lab to rescue their younger siblings. This left the rest of them with nothing to do but wait. Amara was getting used to waiting in situations like these.

        It was nearly midnight, which indicated that the Queen concert had been going on for some time now even if Chicago was in a different time zone. Amara was grateful that this time she had formulated a better plan to keep her parents off her trail and therefore out of danger without using her default excuse of being with Robin. Perhaps it was unfair of her to lie to her parents, but everyone she was with had done the same at least once. Their logic was that if any of their parents ever caught wind of what they were really up to they would attempt to stop them for the sake of protecting them and inadvertently prevent them from saving Hawkins and themselves.

        "You okay?" Steve queried. Amara could tell that he was nervous based on how he was fiddling with his flashlight. The last twenty-four hours alone had made her recognize that despite their different upbringings and interests, the two of them had more in common than they originally thought.

        "I've been better," Amara admitted, circling her arms around her torso as a particularly violent gust of wind sent a chill through her bones. "But I've also been worse."

        Steve didn't need to analyze Amara's facial expression to distinguish that no matter how she was feeling, it was an improvement from the day before. It was strange how a horde of otherworldly beasts and an alternate dimension brought out the hero in him, just like how it made her feel like she had a purpose. If they were lucky enough to save the world again they'd return to their normal lives where people viewed them as the fallen king of Hawkins High and that one girl who always had her nose in a sci-fi book, but it was nice to know that they would always see each other for who they really were.

        "Look out!"

        "Guys, get back!"

        Jonathan's car had rounded the corner and come into view once more, honking at the five of them to move aside. It sped right past them, followed by the police van that belonged to Jim Hopper. The man in question braked to a stop upon noticing them, in too much of a hurry to even ask why they were there.

        "Let's go!" Hopper exclaimed, and Steve wrenched open the passenger door, ushering Amara and the younger kids in first before slamming the door shut. Not even waiting for them to fasten their seatbelts, Hopper firmly pressed his foot on the gas pedal and drove far away from the Demogorgon-infested lab to the only safe place left for them to go.

THE LAST TIME AMARA HAD BEEN at the Byers house it had been a mess of paint and Christmas lights, at least until she, Steve, Nancy, and Jonathan had helped clean it after their skirmish with the Demogorgon. Now, a myriad of interconnected sketches shrouded every surface of the bungalow. It wouldn't have meant anything to an outsider but just as the Christmas lights and the alphabet wall had proved instrumental in finding Will and fighting the Demogorgon a year ago, the drawings couldn't simply be a display of Will's artistic skills. The boy himself, who was more sickly and pale than usual, lay unconscious on the sofa, his friends having revealed that he was somehow connected to the Upside Down and therefore a danger to them if he was awake.

        Bob Newby had died. Amara hadn't known him but Kevin had seen him around Melvald's enough to become fond of him. He was Joyce's boyfriend, and despite not being in the know of everything her family had gone through last year, he had adapted to it fairly quickly when the time required him to do so. He had aided Joyce, Mike, Will, and Hopper in escaping the lab, but at the cost of his life. It served as a reminder to Amara that just like Barb, they couldn't save everyone.

        Nobody had a concrete plan of what to do next. Joyce was grieving the death of her boyfriend and the inevitable loss of her son. Hopper, having called the military for assistance, was offering himself as support should she need it, knowing just how much grief left a gaping wound that never fully healed with time. Jonathan refused to leave his brother's side and therefore Nancy refused to leave his, keeping a tentative palm on his shoulder. The kids were sat around the kitchen table, and Steve and Amara stood a few feet away by the sink as though they weren't ready to relinquish their babysitting duties yet.

        Amara had been too deep in thought to notice that Mike had left the table until he spoke, holding a puzzle box in his hands. "Did you guys know that Bob was the original founder of Hawkins AV?"

        "Really?" Lucas asked.

        "He petitioned the school to start it and everything," Mike explained, rejoining them in the kitchen. "Then he had a fund-raiser for equipment. Mr. Clarke learned everything from him. Pretty awesome, huh?"

        "Yeah," Dustin and Lucas replied.

        Mike set the puzzle on the table. "We can't let him die in vain."

        "What do you want to do, Mike?" Dustin articulated, causing Mike to look down in shame. It was always him who would rally the Party together when all hope seemed lost, but he couldn't seem to be able to do that right now. "The Chief's right on this. We can't stop those Demodogs on our own."

        "Demodogs?" Max questioned, her eyebrows raised quizzically.

        "Demogorgon dogs," Dustin clarified, brandishing his hands for effect. "Demodogs. It's like a compound. It's like a play on words – "

        "Okay."

        "I mean, when it was just Dart, maybe... " Dustin continued, consumed with guilt for not realizing how dangerous Dart was from the beginning; killing him before he molted three times would have been so much easier.

        "But there's an army now," Lucas finished. He himself looked like a battle-worn soldier with his bandanna and war paint.

        "Precisely."

        "His army," Mike mumbled, his gaze still fixed on the floor.

        "What do you mean?" Steve queried.

        "His army," Mike reiterated with increased volume as he discovered a possible plan. "Maybe if we stop him, we can stop his army too."

        "Who's 'he'?" Amara questioned, using the counter as leverage to push herself closer to the group congregating around the table. Only Dustin and Lucas appeared to understand what Mike was talking about. Realizing this, Mike led them to Will's room, where a drawing of a six-legged creature framed by dark clouds and red lightning suspended over an autumnal field stared up at them from his desk.

        "The shadow monster," Dustin muttered, taking the drawing in his hands.

        "It got Will that day on the field," Mike rushed to explain. "The doctor said it was like a virus, it infected him."

        "And so this virus, it's connecting him to the tunnels?" Max inquired.

        "To the tunnels, to the monsters, to the Upside Down, to everything," Mike responded quickly.

        "Whoa. Slow down. Slow down," Steve interjected, still not following along. Amara was also confused, but something stirred in her brain in response to their observations.

        "Okay, so, the shadow monster's inside everything," Mike relayed, making a deliberate effort to slow down his speaking. "And if the vines feel something like pain, then so does Will."

        "And so does Dart," Lucas added, catching on.

        "And so do the rest of the monsters," Amara realized, tuning out Dustin's outraged whisper of "Demodogs!" "When I set two of them on fire at the junkyard, they were all affected. And then it must have been the shadow monster that called them away."

        "Yeah. Like what Mr. Clarke taught us." Mike reminded Dustin, Max, and Lucas. "The hive mind."

        "Hive mind?" Steve inquired. Being among a group where everyone was smarter than he had never bothered him before, but at that moment he reprimanded himself for throwing parties and hooking up with girls while the rest of them actually paid attention in science class.

        "A collective consciousness," Amara filled Steve in.

        "It's a super-organism," Dustin further elaborated.

        "And this is the thing that controls everything," Mike pointed at the drawing Dustin was still holding. "It's the brain."

        Dustin's eyes widened. "Like the Mind Flayer."

        The three boys glanced at each other in realization, Lucas snapping his fingers. Just like the Demogorgon, the shadow monster represented a Dungeons and Dragons villain. And just as they had defeated the Demogorgon in the game and in the real world, the Mind Flayer's weaknesses offered a way for them to defeat its real-life counterpart.

        "The what?" Steve, Max, and Amara asked simultaneously, lost once more.

"THE MIND FLAYER," Dustin repeated once everyone other than Joyce had assembled around the kitchen table, Will's D&D handbook opened to display the aforesaid villain, alongside his drawing of the monster. They had very minimal physical likenesses, but then again the Demogorgon from D&D had two heads while the real thing had just one.

        "What the hell is that?" Hopper questioned, having finally left Joyce's side to join them.

        "It's a monster from an unknown dimension," Dustin told him and everyone else. "It's so ancient that it doesn't know its true home. Okay, it enslaves races of other dimensions by taking over their brains using its highly-developed psionic powers."

        "Oh, my God, none of this is real. This is a kid's game."

        "No, it's a manual. And it's not for kids," Dustin retorted, his patience wearing thin. "And unless you know something that we don't, this is the best metaphor – "

        "Analogy."

        "Analogy? That's what you're worried about?" Dustin stammered at Lucas in disbelief. "Fine. An analogy for understanding whatever the hell this is."

        "Okay, so this mind flamer thing – " Nancy began, craning forward to get a better look at the manual.

        "Flayer. Mind Flayer."

        "What does it want?" Nancy asked Dustin what they were all wondering.

        "To conquer us, basically," Dustin answered. "It believes it's the master race."

        "Like the Germans?" Steve spoke up, hoping to make himself useful, but his confidence wavered upon detecting everyone's bewildered expressions.

        "You mean the Nazis?" Amara arched her dark eyebrows. Just like that she had a personal vendetta against the Mind Flayer for being the slightest bit similar to the Nazis. Her paternal grandparents had been miraculous enough to escape the concentration camps and start a new life in Ohio while millions perished; she wouldn't be alive otherwise.

        "Yeah, yeah, yeah, the Nazis," Steve muttered. Amara made sure to shoot him a smile for at least contributing.

        "Uh... if the Nazis were from another dimension, totally," Dustin agreed, missing the way Hopper pinched the bridge of his nose in frustration. "Uh, it views other races, like us, as inferior to itself."

        "It wants to spread, take over other dimensions," Mike added.

        "We are talking about the destruction of our world as we know it," Lucas noted.

        "That's great. That's great," Steve left the circle and began pacing towards the front door in his panic. "That's really great. Jesus!"

        "Okay, so if this thing is like a brain that's controlling everything," Nancy lifted the manual and held it up to the light. "Then if we kill it... "

        "We kill everything it controls," Mike informed his sister.

        "We win."

        "Theoretically," Lucas reminded them, ever the realist.

        Having had enough, Hopper snatched the handbook from Nancy's grip. "Great. So how do you kill this thing? Shoot it with Fireballs or something?"

        "No. No, no Fire – No Fireballs," Dustin chuckled nervously, for he knew no true way to exterminate the Mind Flayer in real life. "Uh, you summon an undead army, uh, because... because zombies, you know, they don't have brains, and the Mind Flayer, it... it... it likes brains. It's just a game. It's just a game."

        Hopper slammed the manual back on the table and walked a few feet away. "What the hell are we doing here?"

        "I thought we were waiting for your military backup," Dustin snapped, his tone implying that he believed Hopper's plan wasn't any better.

        "We are!"

        "But even if they come, how are they gonna stop this?" Mike argued, reminding Hopper of the near-miss they were so lucky to have had in the lab. "You can't just shoot this with guns."

        "We don't know that!" Hopper fired right back. "We don't know anything!"

        "We know that it's already killed everyone in that lab!" Mike pointed out.

        "And we know the monsters are gonna molt again," Lucas stated.

        "And we know that it's only a matter of time before those tunnels reach this town," Dustin added in a declaration of just how much they did know.

        "We can't just sit here and hope for the military to arrive when we know what does and doesn't work," Amara asserted, doing her best to remain calm in the presence of the temperamental Chief. "The Mind Flayer's only going to kill them, too."

        "They're right," Joyce's voice broke mid-sentence as she finally joined them. The woman had lost her boyfriend less than an hour ago and was close to losing her son as well. Grief carved bruises beneath her sunken, red-rimmed eyes but the anguish was long gone, replaced with a burning desire to avenge Bob by ridding the world of the monster that had killed him and made a tool of her son once and for all. "We have to kill it. I want to kill it."

        "Me too. Me, too, Joyce, okay?" Hopper approached her, and Amara didn't miss the degree to which his voice had softened. "But how do we do that? We don't exactly know what we're dealing with here."

        "No. But he does," Mike interposed, moving closer to where Will lay in the living room. He looked so pallid in the lamplight, the Mind Flayer's control over his brain undoubtedly having taken a toll on his bodily health. "If anyone knows how to destroy this thing, it's Will. He's connected to it. He'll know its weakness."

        "I thought we couldn't trust him anymore," Max brought up with sound reasoning. "That he's a spy for the Mind Flayer now."

        "Yeah, but he can't spy if he doesn't know where he is."

published to quotev: 9/1/22
published to wattpad: 8/5/24