┏━━━━━━━━━━━━┓
𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐬𝐚𝐲 𝐢'𝐦 𝐬𝐨𝐫𝐫𝐲
𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐠𝐨
𝟐:𝟑𝟑 ——————|— 𝟎:𝟑𝟒
♯ 𝐀 ♯ 𝟏𝟎
𝐯𝐨𝐥𝐮𝐦𝐞 : ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▯
┗━━━━━━━━━━━━┛

Saturday, Nov. 12, 1983.

"YOU'RE GONNA PACE a hole in the floor," Corey hisses at Briggs from her place between Dustin and Lucas at the kitchen table.

"Shut up," he shoots back, gaze flickering toward El. She sits with her eyes closed at the head of the table, everyone else intently crowded around her, a walkie playing static on the placemat before her. It's unsettling, the sight of her with no expression in her beat-up dress in a dimly lit kitchen, and Briggs has started taking out his apprehension on the floorboards. Corey fixes him with a scathing glare, but it's interrupted by the overhead chandelier flickering on and off ominously, bathing her in an inconsistent pool of reddish-orange light.

El opens her eyes.

Briggs suddenly finds his breathing abnormally loud in the dead quiet of the room, and he tries to make it quieter as El stares blankly forward. "I'm sorry," she whispers, and Briggs's heart sinks.

Joyce clasps her hands anxiously together. "What's wrong?" she stammers. "What happened?"

"I can't find them," El says, her voice breaking. She looks like she's about to lose it and Briggs hurts for her, this girl who has to be around Corey's age, drowning under the weight of this stupid supernatural mission.

He wants to say something, but his words stick in his throat.

Jon walks away.

Mack puts a supportive hand on Joyce's shoulder and glances at Briggs, and he nods, then turns on his heel to go after Jon. Behind him, El slips out of her chair and bounds toward the bathroom, and Briggs hears Corey snap something at Mike before following her out of the kitchen.

"Hey." Briggs finds Jon on the edge of his bed, breathing out shakily. Jon says nothing but doesn't object when Briggs takes a place beside him. He doesn't say he's sorry, because of course he is. He doesn't ask if Jon is okay, because of course he's not. "This sucks."

Jon laughs without humor, a dry crackle of a sound that seems to fit into the landscape of stagnant dread settled across the house. "Yeah." He sniffs, swipes the back of his hand across his nose. "Fuck."

There's nothing Briggs can say that's reassuring, nothing true, anyway, so they just sit there in silence for a long while. Jon is one of the few people Briggs accepts silence with. Theirs is comfortable, not stifling, and even though this one is heavy, it still belongs to them.

"He loved this thing," Jon says absently, gesturing toward the stereo system in front of them. Briggs nods. "Sometimes I just sit here and play it, all the songs he used to like. Like it'll bring him back." He chuckles. "It's so stupid."

Briggs flicks the stereo on. It's Chicago. "Everybody needs a little time away," Peter Cetera croons. The song only came out last year.

Last year, things were simpler.

If only Will just needed a little time away, off by himself. If only he could come back whenever he wanted. "It's not," Briggs tells Jon. "It's not stupid."

Jon shakes his head slightly and stands. "We should... go do stuff." Briggs isn't sure what there is to do, but he stands and follows Jon out of the room, the radio still whispering behind him.

▮▮▮

"Whenever she uses her powers, she gets weak," Mike says.

Dustin echoes, "The more energy she uses, the more tired she gets."

"Okay, yeah," Briggs says irritably. "We got that."

Lucas ignores him and says, "Like, she flipped the van earlier."

Briggs blinks. "I'm sorry, what?"

"It was awesome," Dustin says, in awe. She flipped a goddamn van. With her mind.

Briggs feels incredibly underaccomplished.

"But she's drained," Mike cuts in.

Dustin nods solemnly. "Like a bad battery." The way these kids finish each other's sentences is unnerving sometimes.

Briggs leans against the table on the heels of his hands, Jon beside him, the younger boys crowded around its perimeter. Nancy, Mack, and Joyce sit across from them, listening intently, trying to puzzle things out.

"How do we make her better?" Joyce asks desperately, her voice unsure and quick and light.

"We don't," Mike says uselessly. Briggs throws up his hands and takes a step away from the table. "We just have to wait and try again."

"How long?" Nancy asks. Briggs points at her. She's asking the right questions. Mike, of course, doesn't know the right answers.

"Hey!" Corey calls, scrambling in from the other room with El on her tail. "New plan. She can do it. She can find them."

Joyce swivels in her seat, expression lit with hope, and Corey grins. "Tell them." She lets El step forward, speak for herself in her quiet, hesitant voice.

"I can find them," she echoes. "In the bath."

The kitchen is a flurry of motion as the kids run around collecting things, shooting theories back and forth. A sensory deprivation tank. Apparently they—whoever used to have El, whatever assholes did this shit to her—used to put her in a tank to get her to use her powers to find people. The idea is that it blocks out her other senses so much that it amplifies whatever magic, extra one she has.

"Where's the phone book?" Corey shouts.

"Up yours," Lucas snorts.

"Eat my shorts, Sinclair," Corey shoots back, trotting to the counter and grabbing the phone book for Dustin.

"You're wearing pants."

"It's a figure of speech."

"It's a figure of speech," Lucas mocks in a voice notably higher-pitched than Corey's and about four times as whiny. Mack rolls his eyes.

"You don't think Clarke's gonna find it weird that you call his home phone to ask about a hypothetical sensory deprivation tank?" he asks, and Dustin rolls his eyes like Mack is just very behind the times.

"He already told us how to hypothetically enter another dimension. He loves me."

"Us," Corey corrects.

"Us," Dustin echoes solemnly. "But mostly me."

"Dustin—"

Corey drops the phone book on the table without ceremony, punctuating her protest. "Here." The two of them page through it in the least effective way Briggs has ever seen, flipping pages back and forth with no rhyme or reason until Corey finally slams a finger into a page. "There!"

"Read it to me," Dustin demands as he yanks the phone off the receiver on the wall. He dials as Corey calls out numbers, and then the room falls silent.

"Mr. Clarke? It's Dustin." There's a beat of silence in which Briggs is sure the poor science teacher curses the yellow pages. "Yeah, yeah, I just, I—"

Briggs rolls his eyes and make a forward motion with his hands. Get on with it.

"I have a... science question," Dustin says, squeezing his eyes shut. At least he's self-aware. This sounds ridiculous. "Do you know anything about sensory deprivation tanks? Specifically how to build one?"

"Real subtle," Briggs mutters. Mack elbows him in the side to shut him up.

The room is so full, so quiet in the way Briggs hates. He rocks back on his heels, glaring at the ceiling. Waiting, quiet, watching. Fuck this.

"Fun," Dustin says. Is that the reason he's giving Mr. Clarke for wanting to build a sensory deprivation tank at ten on a Saturday? Jesus.

"You always say we should never stop being curious," Dustin says in a voice way too loud to be warranted by such a silent room. He's definitely interrupting Mr. Clarke's attempt to gently shut him down. "To always open any curiosity door we find. Why are you keeping this curiosity door locked?" he demands.

Briggs buries his head in his hands. "Oh my God."

After a long silence, Dustin flaps his hand urgently and mouths something until Corey realizes he's asking for paper. He throws a notepad that nearly hits him in the face, but Dustin takes it in stride, and minutes later he's sitting at the kitchen table scribbling down whatever Mr. Clarke says, punctuating his listening with uh-huhs and yeahs.

"The curiosity door thing worked?" Briggs mutters, gaping at Jon, who just shrugs.

"He's basically what they're gonna be when they grow up." He gestures vaguely at the group of kids when he says they. Briggs doesn't have a hard time at all picturing Corey standing in front of a room of kids, rambling on about science, except when he does she looks exactly as she does now, thirteen years old and in an oversized windbreaker. He cracks a smile at the image. It's not too far off.

When Dustin wraps up the phone call, he sounds like he's trying to get an annoying customer off the phone because his kid is about to be late to daycare. "Yep, all right. Yeah, we'll be careful. Definitely. All right, Mr. Clarke. Yeah, I'll see you on Monday. See you on Monday, Mr. Clarke. Bye." It reminds Briggs of Ma on the phone, pressed between her ear and shoulder, muttering mhm, yeah, buh-bye. Oh, this is going to be hell to explain to her and Danny later.

Dustin pulls the phone away from his ear as he rambles, then hangs up halfway through the bye.

He looks up at Joyce. "Do you still have that kiddie pool we bobbed for apples in?"

She does, apparently, have the kiddie pool, but apparently that's not all.

"Then we just need salt," Dustin says, gesturing with his pencil. "Lots of it."

Hopper frowns. "How much is lots?"

Dustin consults his notes. "Fifteen hundred pounds."

"What the f—"

Mack slaps Briggs lightly. "Stop corrupting the youth."

Mike gives him a very unimpressed look, like stop calling us kids, we can swear too, and it's that, not Mack, that makes Briggs shut his mouth. "You're right. I'll watch my language around the kiddos."

The scathing expression on Wheeler's face is worth it.

"Where are we gonna get that much salt?" Nancy asks. Hopper looks pensive, and then he stands from the table abruptly.

"I know where."

"That's perfectly not cryptic," Mack says.

"Just get in the damn car."

Briggs takes Mack and Jon in the Jeep, and the others disperse themselves between Joyce's car and Hopper's trunk.

"So buzz cuts are a thing now?" Jon asks when they get in the car, watching El trail Joyce out of the house. "Should I join the club?"

"Please don't."

"Well, now I'm gonna do it."

"You'll die a virgin."

"That was gonna happen anyway," Mack chimes in.

Briggs whistles low through his teeth. "Damn."

"Not what Steve thinks," Jon mutters bitterly. Briggs cocks a brow at him. "The graffiti," he explains. "I don't know how the fuck he found out. But I slept at Nancy's after we went hunting—"

"You what?" Briggs and Mack hiss in tandem. Briggs had entirely forgotten what Jon said on the phone after he and Nancy got back from their horrifying woods trip. She hadn't wanted to be alone. He never followed up to see if Jon actually spent the night, and Briggs doesn't know how the hell Steve would know. He thinks of the marquee. Nancy "The Slut" Wheeler. His jaw clenches.

Jon turns beet-red as Briggs reverses and pulls the car behind Hopper's, following him down the not-really-a-driveway.

"Because she was scared!"

"Did you sleep in her bed?"

"Uh—I, she was, like..." Jon runs his fingers through his messy hair, flustered, and Briggs feels the shit-eating grin creeping up on his face without his permission. At least something funny happened today.

"Jonathan," he taunts.

"It wasn't like that! We just slept together!" Jon flushes bright red as soon as he realizes what he's said. "Not slept together, like, we slept in the same bed, I didn't even touch her—"

"Impressive."

"Stop—"

Briggs grins and keeps driving.

Hopper's bright idea is apparently Hawkins Middle, where there is a ridiculous amount of road salt.

Hopper drags Jon with him to stack salt bags, and Briggs walks into the gymnasium to find Dustin trying to roll the kiddie pool across the floor while Lucas looks on. "This thing is heavy," he whines. Corey rolls her eyes and Briggs goes over to Dustin and grabs the pool, hauling it to the center of the gym and unrolling it.

"We sure this is gonna work?" he asks.

"No," Lucas says at the same time Dustin goes, "Of course." They glare at each other.

Briggs tugs on the loose sleeve of Corey's color-blocked windbreaker, pulling her aside as the boys struggle to determine which side of the pool is the bottom.

"Whatever happens tonight," he says, "you take care of yourself first."

She crosses her arms defensively over her chest. "Hypocrite."

"Hey," Briggs says lamely. "You didn't see me running into the junkyard to get you, did you?"

"You used the Supercom," she teases. "You were so scared."

"Oh, can it."

"You're just mad Mike listened to Hopper and not you."

"Wheeler's a little shit."

"Hey, I know that. I knew that before you knew that. Shut up."

Briggs thinks about the hunting equipment confiscated at the station. He thinks about the bear trap and the fire and the stupid, far-fetched plan. They were going to hunt it. Kill it, maybe.

What if it'll be in there, hunting El? What if it gets her while she's looking for Will? Briggs doesn't know how this works, if she's physically there when she's in her creepy trance. There's nothing he can do about it.

But some cryptic, pessimistic part of him knows that he'll see that faceless thing again, and not just in a poorly developed photo.

He grabs Corey by the shoulders and pulls her into him. For a moment she stiffens—it's probably more than they've ever hugged in one day—but then she wraps her arms around him and holds him, tight.

"I love you," she says into his shirt.

"I love you too." He holds her at arm's length. "Don't do anything stupid."

"Okay, Dad." 

Briggs rolls his eyes, ruffles Corey's hair, and releases her to fix the mess that Dustin and Lucas are making of the pool. Across the gym, Nancy and Mike appear with a length of hose in a wheelbarrow, and seconds later Joyce returns with El beside her, a duct-taped pair of laboratory goggles hanging from one hand.

"So we're doing this," Briggs says to no one, and he goes to join the fray.

The Wheelers deal with the hose, Lucas takes the temperature, and Briggs joins Jon, Mack, and Hopper in dumping bags and bags and bags of salt into the pool. The gritty fabric feels oddly unreal under his skin as he slits a bag open and lets the contents spill in a cloud into the water.

"You really think I couldn't pull off a buzz cut?" Jon asks, grunting as he heaves up another bag of salt.

Briggs blinks at him, half you're really bringing this up again and half absolutely not.

"I resent that," Jon mutters.

"I resent you."

Dustin's test of water density is dropping an egg into the pool, and right when Briggs thinks they're going to run out of eggs, one of them floats. El puts on the duct-taped goggles. The boys put a walkie on a chair, leaving the channel open.

And El lets herself float in the pool, everyone else kneeling around its perimeter. It feels vaguely cultish, and the way the lights immediately flicker and go out doesn't help. The folds of her pink dress float limply in the water, and beside him Corey swallows and grabs his hand.

"Like Ophelia," she murmurs, nearly silent. Briggs doesn't know what that means, but he's 90% sure it's a literary reference that he wouldn't like.

The waiting is the worst.

Everything reeks of silence and the tangible sort of dark, and the only sensation other than the stifling lack of anything is Corey's hand wrapped in his. Everything feels amplified, his breathing, his heartbeat—too loud.

And then El talks.

"Barb?" she chokes out. "Barbara?"

Mack straightens up on Briggs's other side, mirroring Nancy as she leans slightly toward the pool.

The second waiting is worse.

The lights flicker again, again, violently on and off like a thunderstorm restricted only to the rafters, and El's breathing hitches. "What's going on?" Nancy breathes.

"I don't know," Mike says.

"Is Barb okay?" Nancy asks El, her voice too loud. "Is she okay?"

And then El says, "Gone."

Nancy gasps, backing away from the pool as El repeats, "Gone. Gone. Gone."

Corey buries her face in Briggs's shoulder. Nancy clamps a hand over her mouth, ignoring Jon's whispering in her ear.

Mack stands and walks away, silent, as El's words escalates to a shout. "Gone! Gone!" Joyce tries desperately to reassure her and Corey pulls away, putting her head between her knees. Suddenly Briggs can't watch anymore. He can't.

He stands up and crosses the room to where Mack stands staring at the bleachers.

"Mack," he murmurs, putting a hand on his shoulder. "I—"

"She's gone," Mack chokes out, and he sinks slowly to the floor, bringing Briggs with him. "Fuck. She—she's gone."

The words hang in the air, delayed and empty, for a long moment. And then they hit Briggs like a fucking torpedo.

This is real.

He knows that. He's known that. But somehow none of this really hit him until now, felt tangible. There's been some veil of translucent fiction between reality and the events of the past few days, and Eleven's words just tore it to shreds. It's like surfacing from the water, all the noise of the world above crashing into him at once, and he wants to plunge back under but he can't.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, Briggs knows he should question it, maybe not take the word of a blindfolded superkid in a saltwater pool as the end-all, be-all truth. But he feels it, somehow.

She's right. Barb is dead.

There's no time to mourn.

"Castle Byers," El says, and it's Mack dragging Briggs back to the pool, not the other way around, desperate for a distraction to latch onto. Briggs lets him, pretending Mack's face isn't still wet with tears, that his breathing isn't ragged with grief. Nancy still hasn't pulled herself away, staring at El like she's a horror movie—Nancy doesn't want to watch, but she can't stop.

El says, "Will?"

Joyce's gasp is the only audible one, but Briggs knows everyone in the room holds their breath at once. Corey is back, now, no longer curled in on herself, holding onto his arm like a lifeline. Briggs glances at Jon, who looks frozen in time.

"You tell him," Joyce stammers, hands still in the pool, "tell him I'm coming. Mom is coming."

It is not Eleven who answers.

The Supercom crackles from its place on the chair, and then Will Byers's voice pierces the still, dark air of the gym.

"Hurry."

▮▮▮

In the aftermath, Briggs can't sit still. After El wakes from her trance, a mess in the pool in Joyce's arms, and Corey bundles her in a towel and leads her to the bleachers, after Nancy and Mack hold each other in a long, silent hug, mourning their friend, after Jon and Joyce follow Hopper out to the cars, Briggs stands alone and wishes more than anything that the stupid saltwater pool was a real one, that he could dive in and hold his breath until his lungs burned, until he could forget.

An engine revs outside.

Moments later, Jon retreats into the gym, looking wrecked, and Briggs opens his arms without comment.

"Fuck," Jon chokes out into Briggs's shoulder. "Fuck."

They went for Will. To the gate, the underground one El talked about before. They went for Will and left Jon here.

Over on the bleachers, Corey announces that she's going to find El food to "recharge," and Dustin runs after her. Even letting her out of his sight has him on edge, or maybe that's just the endless static underneath his skin, the anticipation. The fear.

"There has to be something I can do," Jon mutters. "I can't just be here."

Nancy and Mack have come over to stand beside them, making themselves known with the quiet squeaking of their shoes on the waxed gymnasium floor.

Mack says, "I think... there is."

Jon pulls away from Briggs and fixes Mack with an imploring look, pleading. "What?"

"They're going to that—the Upside Down, the dark dimension," Mack explains, talking with his hands like he always does. "And the monster lives there. So while they're in there, getting Will—that's where they went, right?—we need to make sure that thing is out here."

"We have to lure it out," Jon realizes. Mack nods solemnly.

"We need to go to the station, get the hunting supplies." Nancy's voice is raw and quiet, shaky but determined. She looks up at Jon. "I want to finish what we started." She stares at Briggs, then Mack, then lets her eyes trail back to Jon. In that moment, she reminds Briggs remarkably of Joyce. Dangerously angry. "I want to kill it."

"It's gotta be now," Jon decides, and Nancy lets him put a hand on the small of her back and lead her toward the doors. Briggs lets himself look toward the bleachers, where El and Mike are talking quietly while Lucas stands like a guard dog a few feet away. He knows what happens now.

Briggs is going to kill a monster.

It doesn't feel real, but it is, it's so horrifyingly real, and if something goes wrong and he doesn't make it back, Corey...

He knows he should talk to her, hug her, something. But if he goes, she'll follow. And there will be no stopping her. As if manifested by his thoughts, Corey's shriek of laughter echoes down the hall and around the corner, something about Not your pudding! Dustin—

The sound wraps itself around his heart and squeezes.

She was fine without a brother once.

She would manage, if Briggs... she would figure it out. She always does.

He doesn't know where that stubbornness came from, whether it stems from her late mother or from spending too much time under the same roof as Briggs and his mom. It certainly didn't come from Danny.

Ma. Danny. He doesn't know how the hell they're going to explain any of this. It sounds crazy. It is crazy.

He thinks of Joyce kneeling by the pool, her hand in Eleven's. Hopper pacing on the other side. Coming from the chief, it might sound a little less crazy.

Corey's been like this as long as Briggs has known her. Annoyingly persistent, curious, pushy, never knowing when to stop. When he kept shoving her away, denying a family that wasn't his by blood, she didn't stop coming back, either.

He's so glad she didn't stop.

Fuck.

He can't tell her where he's going. He won't. It would be selfish, stupid. There's no guarantee the monster—Demogorgon, whatever—will even show up, that this will work, and he's getting all worked up over nothing, and he doesn't need to freak everyone else out too, and Jon's already waiting in the Jeep and—and—

Briggs closes his eyes and thinks of the Hawkins High pool. A shock of cold, the burn of his lungs, the stretch of his shoulders. The silence of the world below the surface, the sudden rush of sound every time he turns his head to take a breath. Silence, sound, cold, burning.

He opens his eyes, and the world is more still than before.

"Mack," he blurts, his name too loud. Lucas glances over at them but loses interest just as quickly. Mack tilts his head like an inquisitive puppy and lets Briggs pull him aside and look at him with heavy eyes.

"Uh-uh," Mack says immediately, eyes widening. "Oh, hell no. You are not about to ask me to—"

"Listen to me."

"You are not leaving me here," he says forcefully. "This isn't gym class. You can't—"

"Mack," Briggs says, and he forces himself to sound firm even though the name is a plea, a question, desperate. He puts a hand on Mack's shoulder and squeezes, because maybe if he can reassure Mack he'll start trusting himself in the process, somehow. "Please. You're the only responsible one here. Look, we're about to do some really stupid shit. And someone with brain cells needs to be here for the kids, because what if they go running off with some stupid crazy plan or—or, I don't know, but they might tell you if they were going to, Corey would tell you, and at least you could stop them and... I don't... Mack, I don't trust anyone else. There is no one else."

It's the truth.

Mack squeezes his eyes shut, drawing in a shaky breath.

"Okay."

"Thank you," Briggs whispers, pulling his friend into a tight hug. "Thank you."

Mack wraps his arms around Briggs so tight his lungs feel abruptly crowded by his ribs, and maybe he can barely breathe, but he doesn't give a shit. He lets it happen, throwing his own arms around Mack, solid, warm, a promise he might not be able to keep.

Briggs hates how cold he feels when they let go.

He turns to leave, but hesitates in the doorway.

"Don't drown in a saltwater kiddie pool," he says, smiling at Mack over his shoulder, but what he really means is please be safe, and he's pretty sure Mack knows. The heels of Mack's sneakers squeak against the gym's dirty floor as he rocks back on his feet, arms crossed over his chest, and looks at Briggs long and hard.

They sigh in tandem, two heavy, exhausted, disbelieving sounds muddling the waxy air of the place, saying the thousands of things neither will speak into the open for fear of them coming true.

Mack clears his throat, lets out a puff of air. A reluctant, silent encouragement.

"You better not fucking die."

▮▮▮

"How the hell did our lives come to this?" Briggs snorts, glancing up from where he's crouched by the bear trap and shrugging helplessly at Nancy. She's screwing bulbs back into the dismantled Christmas lights criss-crossing the ceiling while Jon carefully drizzles a line of gasoline down the hall.

"Hell if I know." She finishes her line of lights and brushes her hands off on her pants. "Last week my biggest worry was..."

"Harrington," Briggs guesses. Nancy sighs, staring up at the lights before looking back at Briggs.

"Yeah." She shrugs with one shoulder. "We're... I mean, I don't know what we are. But I'm not torn up about it." Her smile seems half-hearted. "Bigger things to worry about."

"He was cleaning the graffiti off at the theater, earlier." Briggs isn't sure why he says it. He doesn't need to redeem Steve for Nancy.

"Steve's not a bad guy, not really," she sighs. "Just... easily influenced. Surrounded by bad people."

Referring to Tommy and Carol as bad people feels like the understatement of the last seventy centuries.

Nancy falls silent for a moment, but the sense that she's not finished speaking keeps Briggs's eyes on her as she purses her lips, tilts her head. Pondering.

"Something was always... off," she murmurs after a moment. "With Steve, I mean. I know he—I mean, he said he loved me. I don't think he was lying, really. Not on purpose." Jon has stilled, staring at Nancy with poorly veiled confusion and hope, but she's staring toward the door, into nothing. "Sometimes it was like he just... I don't know. Like he was trying to pass me off as someone else, without knowing it."

Nancy shrugs abruptly, shaking her head and glancing between the boys. Jon trips over his own foot, barely steadying the gas can before it tips, and Briggs rolls his eyes twice just to make sure Jon sees.

He also fiercely ignores the strange sensation Nancy's words have planted in his chest.

Jon's weapon of choice is apparently a baseball bat with several nails hammered through it. It sounded like he was demolishing the entire kitchen in the process of making it, but now he flips it in his hand and tests its weight proudly.

"That's... something," Briggs says. Jon just shrugs. Briggs tightens his grip on his crowbar. He glances at the gun Nancy has, then smirks back at Jon.

He sighs. "She's better with it than me."

"That's saying literally nothing," Briggs says wryly.

"I'm a good shot." Nancy cocks a brow, daring him to contradict her, but he just smiles.

"I figured."

"We all know the plan?" Jon asks, fixing each of them with a determined glare and handing them knives from the kitchen drawer.

"Straight into Will's room," Nancy says. Her voice is strange, not quiet or shaky but the strangled sort of sound of someone nervous to be giving a presentation in front of a crowd. "And—"

"Don't step on the trap," Jon cuts in. He looks at Briggs.

"Wait for the yo-yo," he says. "And then..."

Jon lets the lighter flicker to life in his hand. He nods harshly. "Ready?"

Nancy takes one long, deep breath. "Ready."

They both look at Briggs.

He shrugs. "Fuck it."

Jon counts down from three.

The bite of the blade across his palm stings wildly for a few seconds and then dulls, the adrenaline dimming whatever pain surfaces from the red line of blood splitting his skin.

For a while they let the stench of blood permeate the air, and when they deem it safe they wrap each other's hands and sit with their breathing measured and soft. Every so often some dull noise will come from outside and one of them will jump, and another one will give some stupid reassurance, like "it's just the wind" or "it was an animal," and they'll sit there in silence again, and Briggs kind of wants the monster to bust the door down just so he has something to do.

"I didn't think supernatural demon hunting involved this much waiting," Briggs complains, and Jon cracks a smile.

"I didn't think supernatural demon hunting was a thing," Nancy says, "but here we are."

"Where is it?" Briggs mutters, kicking idly at the floor. "Do we need to sacrifice a rabbit or something?"

"Ew," Nancy says.

"The lights talk," Jon says. "When it comes. That's what my mom said, anyway."

"Right."

"Talk?" Nancy asks.

Jon nods. "Blink. Think of them as alarms."

An urgent pounding on the door has Briggs swiveling around defensively, crowbar raised. He turns his head slightly, making eye contact with Nancy, who shrugs and moves cautiously toward the door.

"Jonathan!" Briggs freezes. "Are you there, man? It's... it's Steve!"

"Fuck," Briggs breathes.

"Listen, I just wanna talk!" He pauses for a moment. "Briggs?"

Shit. His Jeep is out front. Of course Harrington would know.

Briggs stomps to the door and unlocks the deadbolt, pulling it open and coming face-to-face with Harrington's frazzled face.

"Briggs! Okay. Okay, good, right. Hey."

"What the fuck are you doing here?"

"Okay, okay, I deserve that," Steve says, hands coming up defensively.

"You have to go."

"Briggs, please. I need to talk to you, you weren't home and I figured this was my best bet and I saw your car out here and—is that Nancy?" Briggs sighs and cracks the door open a little more. Nancy and Jon stand just over his shoulder, staring at Steve. "Okay." Steve swallows, hard. "Okay. That—this is good. I need to apologize to you. All of you."

"Not the time," Briggs says, starting to shut the door, but Steve grabs it and holds it open.

"Briggs," he pleads.

"You need to go," Briggs demands.

"Listen, there's no excuse for the shit I did. For the way I treated you—all of you."

Briggs's heart stutters in his chest.

As pissed off as he is at Steve, as much as he wants to take his apology and stomp on it until it shatters, some primal part of Briggs wants him gone for another reason entirely.

He doesn't want Steve to get hurt, and he hates the realization with everything he has.

"Harrington," he grits out. "You need to leave."

"Reyes—"

"No," he demands, pushing back on the door. He breathes in, looks Steve in the eyes. "Go home, Steve."

Something, maybe the tone of Briggs's voice, maybe the sound of Steve's first name on his tongue, makes Steve pause.

The door is still but tense between them, both boys shoving against it, Steve's face separated from Briggs's only by inches.

"Go."

"I'm sorry," Steve says, and he looks so pathetic standing there with dried blood around his eyes and that pleading expression, and his stupid perfect messy hair, and Briggs wants to shove him down the porch steps and also maybe kiss him a little.

"Wait—" Steve reaches out and grabs Briggs's hand from where it clutches the side of the door. "What happened? Is that blood?"

Briggs yanks his hand back. "It's fine. Get out."

"No, what's going on? Are you okay?"

Nancy tries to shut the door and Steve catches a glimpse of her bandaged hand, too, and that does it. "Did he—Nancy, what?"

He shoves Briggs aside, bursting through the door, and comes to a screeching halt a few feet inside.

"No!" Nancy shouts. "No, Steve!"

"What is—what the..."

Briggs drags his unbandaged hand down his face and groans, audibly. "You. Need. To. Go." He punctuates each word with a step in Steve's direction until his hand is on his shoulder, turning him back toward the door. "Shit's going on here you don't understand. Go home, Steve."

Jon gets in his face, then, and they're yelling at each other, Jon telling him that he's not asking, he's telling him to go, and Steve asking what the hell is going on, what that smell is, why the hell there's blood on their hands, and then Nancy cocks her gun.

"Steve," she shouts, the pistol aimed right at him. "Get out!" Jon reels back, getting himself out of the line of fire.

Briggs shouts, "Hold it, Wheeler—"

"Briggs," Nancy says carefully, "get out of the way."

Briggs doesn't remember moving, but suddenly he finds himself between Nancy's gun and Steve.

"Wh—what? Wait, what?" Steve shouts, livid now. "What is going on?"

Nancy moves to the left, aiming around Briggs. "You have five seconds to get out of here."

"Okay, is this a joke?" Steve demands, entirely frenzied now. "Stop. Put the gun down."

"I'm doing this for you," Nancy tells him, and then the lights flicker.

"Nancy," Jon says. She doesn't hear him over Steve arguing with her. "Nancy."

"Three," Nancy says, and Steve shouts.

"No! No, no no!" But he doesn't move. Idiot, Briggs thinks. But he knows as well as Steve that Nancy won't shoot him.

"Two."

"Nancy!" Jon shouts. "The lights!" She turns around, panicked. "It's here."

Briggs turns around and shoves Steve in the direction of the door.

"Run," he breathes.

"Where is it?" Nancy demands.

"Where is what? Woah!" Steve shouts as Jon comes near him with the nail bat and Nancy raises the gun. Briggs wields his crowbar, joining the other two in a back-to-back stance in the center of the room. "Easy with that!"

Briggs swears he can hear his own blood rushing. "Get the fuck out. Last warning," he tells Steve.

"I don't know," Jon says anxiously. "I don't see it."

Everyone's ignoring Steve now as he stands apart from them, shouting, demanding, "Will someone please explain to me what the hell is going—"

The ceiling caves in.

Briggs spins toward it with adrenaline exploding through every one of his nerve endings, crowbar over his shoulder like a baseball bat, ready to swing.

Nancy starts shooting blindly, one bullet, two, three, and Jon yanks her back, pushing her toward the hall as the monster—the Demogorgon—hits the floor. Briggs reels back, crowbar suddenly seeming entirely insignificant in the face of this... thing.

He grabs Steve by the wrist and drags him down the hall. "Oh my God! Oh my God!" he's shouting, and Briggs yells at him to jump as they approach the bear trap. They slam the door to Will's room hard, and Steve is still talking.

"What the hell was that?"

The three of them turn on Steve in tandem. "Shut the hell up!"

A gnarled, guttural sound comes from just outside the door, and they turn back toward it with their weapons raised, Steve finally silent behind them, with their eyes on the stupid smiley-face yo-yo. It doesn't move.

All Briggs can hear is the ringing in his ears and the deafening lack of monster-attacking noises from outside the door.

"What's it doing?" Nancy asks.

"I don't know," Jon pants.

The lights stop flickering.

"What the fuck?" Briggs says, and reaches for the doorknob.

"Briggs, no!" Nancy screams as he yanks it open. But nothing is there.

"It's gone," he breathes. "Holy shit. It's gone."

He steps into the hallway and the others follow, looking at the untouched bear trap on the floor. A train of four, they step lightly all the way into the living room. The monster is nowhere to be found.

"Well," Briggs says, dropping the crowbar to his side. "Shit."

"This is crazy," Steve mutters, and Briggs is absolutely certain the guy is having a mental breakdown. "This is crazy, this is crazy, this is crazy." His voice rises as he repeats the phrase, and then he beelines toward the phone. Nancy storms over and slaps it out of his hands.

"Are you—"

"Harrington!" Briggs shouts, nudging Nancy out of the way and planting his hands on Steve's shoulders. "Shut up. You saw that, yeah? That thing coming out of the goddamn ceiling?" Steve nods frantically. "Yeah, well, it's coming back. So you need to get the fuck away from this house, now."

"Is anyone gonna explain to me what the hell that was?" Steve asks, laughing a little crazily now, manic in his state of shock.

"No. You're... yes. You're tripping right now. You're on acid. So much acid. Yep. Door. There. Out," Briggs snaps.

For a second Steve just stands there, panting, eyes glazed with shock. And then he nods.

"Okay," he croaks. "Yeah. I... okay."

He runs.

The door slams behind him, and Briggs deflates, the adrenaline still high but relief making it less dense. At least he's gone. At least, when everything goes to shit, the swim team won't be without its captain. Hawkins High won't be without its king.

At least Briggs won't have the time to feel ashamed about caring.

He sighs. "What—"

The lights start flickering again.

Maybe the waiting wasn't so bad, before.

"Where is it?" Briggs shouts, spinning in a slow circle.

"Come on," Jon growls. "Come on, you son of a bitch."

"Get out here," Briggs goads the hidden monster. "Stop hiding, asshole."

Nancy panics. "Where—I don't—"

"Come on!" Jon shouts.

The lights go out.

For a second there is no sound, no light, no anything.

And then that uncanny, otherworldly sound, alien-like, almost a whistle but not quite, sounds from behind Briggs, and he turns to find the thing right behind Jon, rising onto two legs.

"Jon!" he shouts. He swings the crowbar without thinking, hard, and it hits home with a sickening squelch, but the creature bats it out of his hands and turns its ire on him instead.

"Oh, shit," Briggs says faintly, and then it's on him.

His head slams into the wood floor as the monster's claws dig into his shoulder, its grotesque flowery face opening to roar putrid air right into Briggs's eyes. He kicks and thrashes in its iron grip, but it's no use. This thing is so much stronger than he is, and he can't find purchase on the slippery ground to get his legs under him and kick the thing. He thinks he might be screaming, he's not sure, and a claw is drawing a line across his collarbone while the other is raised, poised to strike right across his abdomen.

Briggs closes his eyes against the monster's hot, raging breath, still writhing in its grip, still fighting, but he knows. He knows this is where it ends.

I'm sorry, he thinks. Ma, Corey, Mack.

I'm sorry.

▮▮▮

a/n:

oops! :)

sorry that took sixty years. this semester is killing me, but this weekend i decided to write this in lieu of getting my actual work done. thanks for reading <3

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