the monster's new name

. ✧ ・゜. +・o ✧

The dining room was quiet, the silence punctuated only by the sounds of someone wiping tears off their face or Skywalker's soft purrs as Alina clutched him to her chest. Max was now staring off into space, and Lucas had moved back to his own seat, biting his lip and trying not to convey the sadness in his eyes. Gabe propped his head up with his hands, closing his eyes and trying to take deep breaths. He was enjoying the quiet when Mike suddenly stood up, walking to the living room. Gabe's eyes shot open as he watched him grab a brain teaser—a blue box tied with a string—and held it in his hands, his thumbs tracing over the grooves in the box.

"Did you guys know that Bob was the original founder of Hawkins AV?" Mike asked.

"Really?" asked Lucas, glancing at Alina, who had looked up at Mike at that. Oh, yeah. With everything going on, Gabe had almost forgotten that they were in the AV Club. They were using the room for their secret meetings, but he had never seen them actually do anything with the radios. Perhaps everything with Dart had distracted them.

Mike turned to them, unshed tears glistening in his eyes. "He petitioned the school to start it and everything," he said. "Then he had a fund-raiser for equipment." He began to walk towards them. "Mr. Clarke learned everything from him. "Pretty awesome, right?"

"Yeah," the others chorused, as Mike put the brain teaser on the table. Alina picked it up, holding it in her hands, another sob making its way out of her throat. A wave of sorrow went through Gabe for her. She'd lost her dad, she'd lost her friend, and now she'd lost someone else. It wasn't fair.

Mike clenched his jaw, watching Alina. "We can't let him die in vain."

"Seriously, what do you wanna do, Mike?" Dustin asked, frustrated that he was repeating the same thing he'd said only a couple of minutes ago. "The Chief's right on this. We can't stop those Demodogs on our own."

"Demodogs?" Max repeated, her eyebrows raising.

"Demogorgon dogs," explained Dustin, using his hands to demonstrate. "Demodogs. It's like a compound. It's like a play on words, you know, it—"

"Okay," said Max quickly, before Dustin could continue his miserable rambling. Even he didn't look well, which was strange considering he'd always been the more collected one of the group. Gabe looked around, but there was not a face without misery. Even Steve, who was leaning against the wall with his bat in hand seemed upset.

Dustin swallowed. "I mean, when it was just Dart, maybe..."

"But there's an army now." Lucas finished, his eyes glancing at Alina's bandaged leg.

"Precisely."

"His army," Mike muttered, his gaze glued to the wooden table. He didn't seem so miserable anymore.

"What do you mean?" Steve asked.

"His army," Mike repeated. "Maybe if we stop him, we can stop his army, too."

Gabe sat up straight. Maybe there was a way after all. "And maybe we can help Will."

With a new determination in his eyes, Mike got to his feet, making his way into another room and bringing a drawing back. He handed it to Dustin, and the others crowded around him. "The shadow monster," Dustin said, staring at the drawing. The shadow monster had jutting limbs, a pointy head, and had red lightning forking behind it. Alina, who was behind Dustin, visibly tensed at the sight of it.

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

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

"To the tunnels, to the monsters, to the Upside Down, everything."

Steve raised his hands. "Whoa. Slow down. Slow down." He looked lost.

"Okay, so, the shadow monster's inside everything," Mike explained to the older boy. "And if the vines feel something like pain, then so does Will."

"And so does Dart," added Lucas.

Alina chewed on her nails, and Gabe turned to look at her. Her eyes were wide, her face even paler than before. Her cheeks were sunken in, and she seemed to be trembling, sweat pooling on her forehead. She seemed like she wanted to say something, tell them something desperately, but when she opened her mouth, she immediately closed it again, looking away from Gabe.

Gabe wondered what was wrong with her. From the collapsing to the constant sweating to the times her eyes would glaze over, like she was seeing something else, to the way she'd gasped at the lab, like she'd known what had happened to Bob... he didn't think it was her powers anymore. But Alina was obviously not saying anything because she knew it wasn't important.

He'd have to ask her later. But right now, there were more important tasks at hand.

"Yeah," said Mike now. "It's like what Mr. Clarke taught us. The hive mind."

"Hive mind?" Steve repeated.

"A collective consciousness," Dustin explained. "It's like a super-organism."

"And this is the thing that controls everything." Mike gestured to the picture of the shadow monster. Even though it was just a drawing, the sight of it sent shivers down Gabe's spine, and he found himself stepping back a little. Alina's nail-biting got more frenzied. "It's the brain."

"Like the Mind Flayer," said Dustin, and Lucas nodded, snapping his fingers in recognition. Alina and Mike seemed to get the reference, too, but Gabe, Max and Steve were all confused.

"What?" they all asked at the same time, and Dustin shook his head like he couldn't believe they didn't know what it was. He dug through his backpack, looking for the Dungeons and Dragons manual, while Mike gathered Hopper, Nancy and Jonathan into the room, as things were beginning to come together.

"The Mind Flayer," Dustin announced, slamming his book down on the table and flipping to the right page.

"What the hell is that?" Hopper asked.

"It's a monster from an unknown dimension," Dustin started, talking a mile a minute. The opportunity for him to talk about his favorite game had turned him from the sad-eyed pessimistic boy from earlier to one whose determination had been restored. "It's so ancient that it doesn't even know its true home. Okay, it enslaves races from other dimensions by taking over their brains using its highly-developed psionic powers."

"Oh, my God, none of this is real," complained Hopper. "This is a kids' game."

"No it's not," Alina muttered, speaking for the first time in around half an hour.

Dustin clenched his jaw, frustrated at the fact that his favorite game had been slighted. "No," he said, "it-it's a manual. And it's not for kids. And unless you know something that we don't, this is the best metaphor—"

"Analogy," Lucas corrected.

"Analogy," Dustin repeated incredulously. "That's what you're worried about? Fine. An analogy for understanding whatever the hell this is."

Nancy raised her hands. "Okay, so this mind flamer thing—"

"Flayer. Mind Flayer." Dustin was practically pulling his hair out at this point in frustration. Gabe felt a little bad now for thinking badly about Dungeons and Dragons. He'd never played it, and it might've been good. Good enough for the party members to like it, at least.

Nancy sighed. "What does it want?"

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

"Like the... Germans," said Steve, trying to have something to contribute. Instead it caused all eyes to look to him with confusion.

"Uh, the Nazis?" Dustin corrected.

Steve's cheeks turned pink. "Yeah, yeah, yeah, the Nazis."

"Uh... if the Nazis were from another dimension, totally." Hopper didn't seem to be buying any of this, because as Dustin spoke, he pinched the bridge of his nose, still apparently holding hope that his imaginary army would come to save them all. "Uh, it views other races, like us, as inferior to itself."

"Sounds familiar," Alina muttered. Gabe had to agree. He'd only been at Hawkins Middle for a week and he'd already been subjected to racist teasing, especially from Daniel Tree, who'd made fun of him for being one of the only people to dress up for Halloween. God, he hated that boy.

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

"We are talking about the destruction of our world as we know it," said Lucas, and a jolt of panic went through Gabe. He'd thought this was all about just protecting Hawkins, but apparently, the whole world was at stake now. Great. Just great. That didn't make him absolutely terrified at all.

Steve seemed to think the same, walking away from the crowd. "That's great. That's great. That's really great. Jesus!"

Gabe looked around the room. Were nine teenagers and two adults seriously supposed to prevent the end of the world? None of them knew what they were doing, and even with Alina's powers, Steve's fighting, Lucas's wrist rocket, Dustin's intelligence, and the other various traits of the group (Gabe didn't exactly know where he fit into this whole equation), they were no match for the monsters (the Demodogs, as Dustin called them) in the dark.

But they were all the world had.

Nancy bent over to look at Dustin's manual again then picked it up to closely study it. "Okay, so if this thing is like a brain that's controlling everything, then if we kill it..."

"We kill everything it controls," Mike finished.

"We win," said Dustin.

"Theoretically," Lucas added.

"Right," said Gabe. "Because this is only an analogy. We have no idea what the real Mind Flayer is like. If it even follows those rules."

"Great," said Hopper, taking the manual out of Nancy's hands. "So how do you kill this thing? Shoot it with fireballs or something?" He leafed through the pages, his brows furrowed in thought.

"No," said Dustin. "No, no fire—no fireballs. Uh, you summon an undead army, uh, because... because zombies, you know, they... they don't have brains, and the Mind Flayer, it... it likes brains." He trailed off, obviously realizing how ridiculous he was sounding. "It's just a game. It's a game."

Hopper closed the manual and slammed it down on the table. "What the hell are we doing here?"

"I thought we were waiting for your 'military backup.'"

"We are!" Hopper roared.

"But even if they come, how are they gonna stop this?" Mike asked. "You can't just shoot this with guns!"

"Yeah, it's a shadow, the bullets will go right through," said Alina. "Assuming we get this thing out of Will. And the Demogorgons aren't susceptible to bullets, either. We know that from last year."

"You don't know that we can't shoot that other thing!" Hopper argued. "We don't know anything!"

"We know it's already killed everybody in that lab," said Mike.

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

"And we know that it's only a matter of time before those tunnels reach this town," added Dustin.

"And we know that we can stop those things," said Alina. "At least, temporarily. My powers seem to hurt them a little, and Steve was able to get good hits in with his bat. It's not completely hopeless. So we have to do something."

"They're right," croaked a new voice, and the group turned to find Joyce Byers standing in the hallway, her eyes rimmed with red, still in her blue lab scrubs. Skywalker let out a meow at the sight of the woman, leaping off the chair he was sitting on and winding himself around her ankles. "We have to kill it," Joyce continued. "I want to kill it."

Hopper walked over to greet her. "Me, too," he said. "Me, too, Joyce, okay? But how do we do that? We don't exactly know what we're dealing with here."

"No," said Mike. "But he does." He began walking over to Will, who was still unconscious on the couch, swamped in his hospital gown. "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," said Max. "That he's a spy for the Mind Flayer now."

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

. ✧ ・゜. +・o ✧

a/n: i hateeee chapters like this and i hate writing them more, so i hope this isn't a complete pile of garbage lmao. i just really don't like a lot of dialogue because idk it feels annoying to me, and there isn't a lot of room for description (also, this might seem stupid, but when i write my own scenes, i listen to music. and i can't do that if i keep having to click onto the show). 

also, i have absolutely no idea how to do that spotify thing where you can screenshot the image, so i'm just going to post the link in the comments. my spotify name is really weird btw, because i made that email when i was 10. it's my email for wattpad/youtube stuff, and i honestly hate it lol. but yeah if anyone knows how to do that screenshot thing, let me know and i'll post it somewhere!

'till next time!