𝐍𝐢𝐧𝐞⊰᯽⊱┈──(𝑚𝑦 𝒉𝑒𝑎𝑟𝑡 𝑖𝑠 𝑟𝑎𝑐𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒 𝑖𝑡'𝑙𝑙 𝑏𝑢𝑟𝑠𝑡)
⊰᯽⊱┈──╌❊ ¤ ❊╌──┈⊰᯽⊱
𝐄𝐕𝐄𝐑𝐘𝐎𝐍𝐄 𝐆𝐎𝐓 𝐓𝐎 𝐖𝐎𝐑𝐊 on Operation: Keep The Demon Inside Will From Figuring Out Where We Are. That's what Dustin was calling it, the little asshole
They mostly did it in silence as they covered every inch of the shed behind the house with cardboard and paper to make it unrecognisable to Will. They brought Will in and strapped him into a chair. Elias looked away when that happened and busied himself with setting up the lamp and connecting it to the extension cable. When they were done, the place looked every inch like an interrogation room instead of a tool shed.
Hopper ushered them all out, leaving only Mrs. Byers, Jonathan, Mike, Weaver, Taejin, Yunha and the chief himself inside the shed with Will.
Now back in the house, Elias took the chance to slump over the dining table as the evening's activities caught up to him— right across from Bridget. Even that he couldn't manage to do properly, because the wound on his shoulder chose that exact moment to act up even though it had been quiet since they left the lab.
He sat back up and hissed as he touched the wound lightly with his hand. It caught on fire when his hand came into contact with it. "Shit," he cursed.
"You okay?" He heard Bridget ask. He turned his head up to face her and found her looking at him concern.
He wanted to wave off her worry, but he knew it was dangerous to leave that bite untreated. It could get infected or perhaps whatever malignant germs the monster that bit him came with from the Upside Down would spread inside him and leave him helpless to the Mind Flayer's control. It was probably a far fetched thought, but Elias had become open to the idea that anything was possible ever since he got dragged into this mess.
He grimaced as he pulled his hand away. "Nope. The bite is starting to burn," he tells her quietly.
Bridget stood up and moved closer to observe the wound on his shoulder. "We should probably clean and dress it before it gets infected," she told him. "Come on. I think they still have that first aid kit in the bathroom."
Elias pushed himself up and followed Bridget to the bathroom. When she opened the door and stepped in, she sat him down on the toilet lid and opened the cupboard underneath the sink to pull out a first aid kit, some towels and a small basin.
Before she could even ask him to, Elias started to take off his sweater, but it proved to be mountain of a task, what with his injured shoulder and all. "Here. Let me help," Bridget mumbled as she grabbed the hem of the sweater with her hands.
It was a struggle to remove the sleeve from his injured side, but they managed to do it. Everything was going fine until Bridget asked him to removed his long sleeved shirt.
He must've looked at her strange because she scoffed and rolled her eyes. "Oh, don't look at me like that. I'm not trying to get you to see you naked, dude. Don't flatter yourself. We can't clean your wound properly with your shirt on, now can we?"
Elias shifted on the seat uncomfortably. "Can't you just pull the collar down instead? That can work just as well."
Bridget shook her head. "That's way too bothersome. Plus, treating it in that angle might irritate the wound, so it's better you remove it."
Elias tried to calm his rapid heartbeat as he racked his brain for a solution to prevent Bridget from seeing his arms. He couldn't ask her to just leave him to do it on his own no matter how much he wanted to—he knew enough about her to tell that she was stubborn.
He could have asked him to get his father and have him dress his wound instead, but he got the feeling his interruption wouldn't be appreciated. His wound throbbed as if in protest at his hesitance.
He sighed deeply. "Okay, fine," he relented. "Turn around first."
Bridget pursed her lips, then turned around without further questions. To keep herself busy, she took the basin and went to the bathtub to fill it with warm water. Elias tried his best to take of his shirt, but it proved to be hard with only one of his arms working properly.
"Come on," he grunted when his shoulder seized in pained. He really wished he wasn't sober right now. He tolerated pain better when he was high.
"Just let me help you—"
"It's fine, Bridget," he snapped, feeling hot and frustrated all while being in an immense amount of pain. "I got it."
By this time, he'd managed to get his good arm out of the sleeve, and so he used that very arm to pull the collar off. The most difficult part of getting his injured side out of the sleeve was where he had to peel the fabric from where it was sticking to the wound. It was the most excruciating thing he'd felt in a long time.
Once he was finished, he felt like he'd run a marathon. He slid his wrists into the material, all the way up to his elbows where the scars ended. He cleared his throat when he was sure that Bridget wouldn't see those ugly things.
"You can look now," he told her quietly.
Bridget did as told, and she winced as she eyed the wound. Elias didn't want to look at it, but the expression on Bridget's face was enough of a tell tale sign that it was bad.
"Jesus. That looks like something that can give you rabies," she said to him as she turned back to the basin in the tub. She lifted it out of the bath and set it down on the floor. She set the first aid kit down beside it and sunk to her knees.
She started cleaning the wound. Elias tried to tolerate the pain, but it was hard when his skin set on fire any time Bridget so much as touched it. Elias kept his head down when tears began to prick at his eyes.
"Are you okay? Do you want me to stop?" Bridget asked, her hand pausing her movements which gave Elias a moment of relief from the excruciating pain.
Before he could reply, the lights started flickering again. He looked up at the singular bulb on the bathroom ceiling as it blinked like the Christmas lights he always saw draped all over the houses in his neighbourhood during that holiday. "Is that...is Yoshi's brother doing this?" He asked, his voice slightly breathless.
Bridget was staring at the flickering bulb just as intensely as he was, a thoughtful look to her. "No," she said. "No, that's not him. It's that thing inside Will. I bet it's not happy to find that it's host has been strapped down to a chair."
She worked silently after that, and when she was done cleaning the wound, Elias sighed in momentary relief. She began to disinfect, which was oddly less painful than the cleaning process. Elias reckoned it was supposed to be the other way around.
"How can you tell?" He asked quietly.
"Hmm?" Bridget hummed distractedly as she swiped the disinfectant soaked cotton swab across the wound.
"How can you tell the that it's the shadow thing doing this and not Weaver?"
Bridget shrugged. "I don't know. I just can. When Weaver and Eleven used their powers last year to defeat the Demorgorgon, the lights flickered in a way that you could somehow feel it was out of urgency more than anything," she explained. "But when they flicker because of the Upside-Down or anything related to it, you can tell it's because something wants to kill us all."
And because it had been bothering him since he saw Will's drawing, he blurted it out to her. "I've seen it before."
Bridget frowned as her fingers worked to wrap the bandage around the gauze covering the bite. "Seen what?"
"That shadow," he said.
Bridget stopped and looked at him, her brow furrowed in confusion. "What do you mean by that?"
"Okay, whatever I say in here stays between us, got it?" He said, waiting until Bridget confirmed it for him. "And don't give me that...weird judgemental look you give people when you think they're being stupid. I haven't ever told anyone about this because it sounds completely insane."
"Right," Bridget replied slowly.
"When I was a kid, I used to see...things." He paused when Bridget gave him a funny look. "Don't look at me like that. I know how it sounds, okay? You agreed to not to judge whatever I say."
Bridget snorted and held one hand up in surrender. "Alright. No judgement here. I promise."
Elias scoffed. "So, I used to see things. Like, the sky over Hawkins turning red, this huge shadow in the sky that looked like a spider—"
Bridget nodded slowly. "Like the Mind Flayer, in Will's drawing."
"Exactly. And that Demorgorgon thing you guys keep talking about— some kind of tall beast with no face? I thought I saw one when I was ten in my backyard, but when I blinked, it was gone. I couldn't sleep properly for weeks after that.
"Told my parents about it once, and they said it was just my imagination or whatever but I thought I was probably going crazy—"
"Wait, do you still see these things?" Bridget asked.
Elias shook his head. "I'm not sure. Sometimes maybe, like that day in lab when I passed out, I guess."
"What did you see?" She pressed.
"It's like...I was still in the lab but like another version of it? There was no one there except me, and there were these awful vines sprawled in the floor, white particles in the floating in the air outside the sky was red, and it was cold."
"Dude, that's the Upside-Down," Bridget whispered to him as she quickly finished her work on the bandage. "You can see into the Upside-Down? What the hell? How is that possible?"
Elias shrugged his good shoulder. "I don't know. Didn't you guys say that the Byers' kid can see into it, too?"
Bridget shook her head and got to her feet. "Yeah, but that's completely different. Will can do that because he was stuck in the Upside-Down for a week and it's like he got connected to the place after we got him out or something. So unless you got stuck in there too..."
"I'm pretty sure I wasn't," Elias cut in. "I think I'd remember if something like that happened to me."
Bridget leaned against the sink, her arms crossed. "Then how are you able to see into that place?" Elias shrugged. Bridget squinted at him. "Are you one hundred percent sure that you aren't from the Lab?"
"I swear. That's one thing I'm completely sure about." Bridget turned to wash her hands in the sink, and Elias used this chance to put his shirt back on. "Don't turn back around yet."
As he struggled with the menial task, Bridget continued speaking. "Well, this can't be a coincidence. You can see into the Upside-Down, yet you've never been there as far as you know. You have some kind of weird telekinetic ability, exactly like Eleven did. But you're not from the lab. So, what does that make you?"
"I don't fucking know," Elias grunted as he finished. "You can look."
Bridget did as such and stared at him with a look of mild suspicion. "I knew there was a reason why you piqued my interest so much."
Elias scoffed through the pain currently enveloping his shoulder. "I bet," he grumbled. "Thanks for this, by the way."
Bridget held out her hand with a wry smile to help him stand up. "Anytime, dude. Let's go and see what they found out."
When they walked out of the bathroom and rejoined the others, they found them huddled around the dining table with writing materials in splayed out before them.
"Yeah, I got it," Dustin announced.
"C," Max and Lucas turned to Nancy to tell her this.
"What's going on here?" Bridget asked as she went up to saddle herself next to Yoshi and Elias leaned himself against the wall, just next to the blue telephone embedded on it.
"Will is talking to us through Morse code so that the monster doesn't know," Yoshi answered her question with a somewhat proud smile on his face.
Bridget nodded slowly in approval. "Clever kid," she hummed.
The next few minutes were spent with the group of middle schoolers translating the code being transmitted through their walkie-talkie—or super–comms, as Dustin Henderson would so viciously correct— until they had a nine-lettered instruction.
"Close Gate," they all read outloud in unison.
Before anyone could even begin to decipher what that meant, the phone rang.
Elias's heart jumped at the scare and his hand shot out to quickly pick up the phone and stop it from ringing.
"Shit," Dustin cursed as they all left the table to approach Elias. "Shit, shit, shit!"
"There's no way he could have heard that right?" Jenny asked anxiously. She was looking around them with wide eyes as she wrung her hands repeatedly and Lucas tentatively reached out to pry them apart. She looked so much more shaken up than everyone else.
Elias lodged the phone back into the wall as he shook his head unsurely. "I don't know," he answered.
Then the phone rang again, but this time, Nancy yanked the entire thing out of the wall with a frustrated grunt and threw it to the ground before Elias could even disconnect the call again.
"Okay, there's no way he didn't hear that," Max chimed in.
"It's just a phone," Steve offered in consolation. "It could be anywhere, right?"
Elias got that tingle on the back of his neck again, and that was enough answer for him. "Shit," he cursed and everyone turned to look at him in a startle.
"What? What's the matter?" Nancy question near frantically.
"It knows," he told them. "It fucking knows where we are."
Nancy shook her head with a furrow in her brow. "How do you—?"
As if on cue, the monsters screeched in the distance and Elias felt like he was going to be sick. The bite on his shoulder throbbed again in warning.
"That's not good," Dustin announced what they were all thinking.
"No fucking shit, Henderson," Yoshi replied just a tad abrasive, although one could definitely hear the underlying fear in his voice.
The kids immediately rushed to the windows to look out for the monsters, but Elias remained back with Bridget by his side. She could tell that he was feeling like shit again and she calmly asked, "Are you going to pass out again?"
Elias shook his head. "I don't think so," he answered.
The back door burst open and Jonathan came through first with his unconscious brother in his arms. Joyce, Weaver, Mike and Yunha followed them closely behind, and the two boys went to join the others in looking out the windows.
"Vee, I hope you're all amped up because we're gonna need you to stay alive," Lucas said to Weaver when the boy came to join him.
"Which idiot rang the phone?" Weaver demanded with near aggression. "I'm gonna kill them if we make it out of this alive, I swear to God."
"We don't know. Nancy yanked it out of the wall before we could find out," Max answered him.
"Hey!" Hopper's booming voice interrupted. "Hey, get away from the windows!"
The kids did as he asked. The chief had two guns in his hands and he turned to Jonathan with one of them. "Do you know how to use this?"
Jonathan looked at the gun. "What?"
"Can you use this?" The chief repeated slowly. Jonathan looked hesitant to answer that question, but Nancy cut in just in time to save him.
"I can," she said. The chief threw the gun at her without hesitation and he turned to Weaver who was staring at the window with a glare so vicious that Elias almost felt sorry for the poor thing.
"Hey, kid," Hopper called out to him. "Are you good to fight?"
Weaver looked like he was about to answer the chief, but someone else jumped the gun before he could.
"Of course he isn't!" Mike jumped in defensively, looking positvely appalled at the idea of Weaver doing any such thing. "He drained himself back at lab, he can’t—"
"Shut the fuck up, Wheeler," Weaver shut his friend down as he cracked his knuckles. "Yeah, I'm good to fight."
He held his hands out infront of him and his fierce glare intensified. Elias nearly took a step back because of how much that look intimidated him.
"Seriously? Yoshi, are you just going to go along with this?" Mike turned to ask the older teen. Yoshi didn't seem to like the idea as well, but he wasn't protesting.
He shrugged as he picked up a hammer from a nearby table. "We're all out of options here, Mike. Just lay off," he said to the Wheeler boy.
The ones with the weapons lined up side by side facing the windows; Steve with his nail studded bat, Hopper and Nancy with their riffles, Yunha with her pistol, right next to his brother, Yoshi stood with a metal bat, and funny enough, Lucas with his slingshot.
Everyone else huddled behind them. Though they unarmed, they reminded vigilant all the same.
Elias could hear those creatures getting closer. A hand landed on his wounded shoulder, and he recoiled from the touch with pained hiss escaping his lips. He turned to find his father looking at his shoulder strangely.
"What happened?" Taejin demanded quietly.
"I got bit," Elias answered almost immediately once he saw the strange look on Taejin's face turn severe. "I'll tell you about it later when the situation calms down. Please."
Taejin looked like he wanted to say more, but he simply nodded came to stand next to his son.
The screeching was incredibly close to the house now, but they had yet to see any signs of the monsters. "Where are they?" Max questioned anxiously.
No one answered her, but the monsters continued growling outside.
The bushes on the right side windows rustled, and everyone turned to that very direction
"Oh, God," Jenny whimpered as she held onto Lucas' jacket tightly. She sounded like she was in the verge of tears. "What are they doing?"
"Don't spiral on me, Jenny," Lucas told her in near whisper. "Not now. We'll be fine."
Jenny hit his back with one hand as tears began flooding her eyes. "No, we're not! We're gonna fucking die!"
"Jenny, you need to calm down," Bridget pleaded with her quietly. She wrenched the younger girl away from Lucas and held her close to her side. "We'll be alright."
Jenny said nothing to this and she instead tucked her face into Bridget's hoodie and quietly cried into it. "Shh. It's okay," Bridget whispered to her as she rubbed comforting circles into her back. She didn't look like she believe a word of what she was saying.
Elias gulped harshly. The monsters prowled on outside, and they all waited bated breath for something to change.
And it did, but not in the way they were expecting.
One of the dogs came crashing through the windows, and everyone screamed in terror as it fell to the floor. Elias froze up and he found himself holding onto his father's arm like his life depended on it as he came to the realisation thay this was how he was going to die.
"Vee! Vee, do something!" Dustin screamed as he latched onto Weaver's arm. Elias would've found the sight comical in any other situation, considering that Dustin was significantly taller than Weaver, yet he clung to him for protection. It would've been funny were it not for the fact that they wete currently about to fucking die.
Elias payed attention to the creature on the floor, and he noted that it hadn't made any move to get up. It's flower shaped mouth was wide open and it lay motionless, like it was dead.
"Holy shit," Max breathed in the silence.
"Is it dead?" Bridget questioned as she held on tightly to Jenny, who still had her face buried in her hoodie.
The chief approached the beast to test this theory with his gun trained on it, and he nudged the thing twice with his foot. It didn't move.
The front door creaked ominously, and they all turned in unison towards it. The lock turned and the deadbolt began to unchain itself.
"What the fuck?" Elias breathed as he grabbed the object nearest to him, which was a miniature sculpture, ready to chuck it at the threat if necessary. The door opened slowly. It was like a fucking horror movie and Elias could have gagged at how incredibly cliche it was.
And then she stepped in.
The threat, as it turned out, was what seemed to be a twelve year old goth girl with slicked back hair and a bleeding nose.
Elias felt like something suddenly changed in the room. Weapons were lowered and the fear that had taken it's place on everyone's face was morphed into disbelief.
And somehow, Elias knew. He knew that this girl, despite never having met her before, was Eleven.
⊰᯽⊱┈──╌❊ ¤ ❊╌──┈⊰᯽⊱
Did I really update this story last in 2022? Damn guys I'm so sorry lol
Poor jenny...just what happened back in the lab to make her like this??? And Weaver is such a little hothead I love him
Anyways, ciao. Hope you enjoyed this messy thing. It's not proofread and I ain't got no beta lol