Chapter Text
It’s Thursday, March 26, 1987, 10: 46: 32 pm, and Dustin has officially spent the better portion of four days mourning the first-year anniversary of losing one of his closest friends to date. Many people would have called him silly or stupid for counting the days, the hours, the seconds as if they held all the lost time he could’ve had, but Dustin supposes that grief is silly and stupid because it never makes sense, not even to himself.
He thinks that maybe grief would have made sense to someone like Eddie Munson. Maybe Eddie would have taken all the mismatched jumbled pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and they would have fallen into place under his touch. Maybe Eddie would have been able to make a picture out of all of the mixed chemicals swirling around in Dustin’s brain.
But he wasn’t there for that. No, Eddie Munson had been dead for a year now.
Dustin wasn’t actually sure if Eddie had died on a Thursday, or if he had died on the 26th at all. But he did know that Eddie was dead before his physical body had died. Eddie had been dead since the Friday he had gotten involved. Anyone who had died because of the Upside Down had been dead before their death date. It was just how it worked.
The boy worms himself deeper into his pages upon pages of scribbled notes—many of which were nothing but chicken scratch, jotted down in an insomniac haze. His desktop light hadn’t been switched off in almost two days and he can feel the heat of the bulb from where he nosed further through his half-drawn diagrams and arrows that led nowhere.
There’s an ache behind his eyes that he has become familiar with by now, but he has no more tears to cry.
It’s Thursday, March 26, 1987, 10: 52: 18 pm, and Eddie Munson has been dead for a year.
But that wasn’t what was keeping Dustin Henderson up for days on end, no. That was barely half of it. But maybe it was the grief that kept him looking deeper.
On his desk, the only well-lit part of his small room, and nestled in between his scattered papers, were three different missing child posters. Each was printed out on a standard 8 x 11.5 white sheet and each had the same lousy typewriter font. Each had the same school photo pose in their picture. It was almost uncanny. It made Dustin’s stomach twist in a way that begged him for more. To look deeper.
Simon Davis, twelve. Marcus Velaquez, twelve. Michael Moore, thirteen.
There was no physical connection, none of the boys looked like each other. There was barely a social connection—apparently all the boys went to Hawkins Middle School, but they were all in different friend groups. They never spoke to each other inside or outside of school.
At pretty much any point in time in the last four years, they could have easily written it off as the Upside Down. More kids had gone missing because Vecna/Henry/One was some demented bitch who liked to monologue to people because apparently, soliloquies weren’t cutting it anymore. It was easy and believable and the party could have taken control of the situation without batting an eye.
But this wasn’t any other point in time in the last four years.
The Upside Down had been sealed behind the gates for months now, locking away Vecna and his horde of creatures for good. Hawkins had started to heal slowly afterward. The clouds cleared for the first time since spring break and the ground stopped shaking. The cracks from the quakes filled with eroded dirt and rainwater, losing their supernatural glow and evening into the lay of the land. People could breathe the air freely, without the ashes and without fear.
The electricity was still spotty and some of the phones never even started to work again—Dustin’s home phone included—but it was a very minuscule price for safety. He tries not to think of Eddie. How his sacrifice had been more. How it wasn’t fair.
It was supposed to be over. But, Dustin guesses, they say that every time they think the Upside Down is gone. It was like a hydra, a five-headed beast that kept growing more heads until they’d all eventually be swallowed.
He pores over his pages for days and scans the newspapers for any more information. But all he gets is hurt families begging for their children to be returned home. Eventually, the police start to back off the investigation. The missing posters become old and faded and are rarely changed out. It’s a bittersweet silence for months.
Robert Blaire gets snatched on his way home from basketball with his friends in June. He’d been fourteen for the better portion of a week, going into his freshman year of high school. Nobody hears a word from him and, after three days, the investigation is re-opened.
Dustin grabs one of the younger teen’s missing posters off the bulletin board outside of a corner store and places it with his others. But there’s nothing. No physical connection and, now, not even a social one. He screams at his corkboard that held everything. It just doesn’t make sense.
He throws himself into any and all leads he has. He ignores his mother and Steve at the door when they knock and ask him to come out. No. There are more important things going on. Children are missing and for the fucking love of god, Dustin knows it’s all connected. A part of him knows instinctually that there’s a pattern here. One that he can pick out but can’t name. It’s driving him mad. He almost screams.
Christopher Vang goes missing in July. No one reported the poor boy as missing until a week and a half after he stopped showing up to friend hangouts. He had just turned thirteen.
And now, Dustin is sure. He’s positive. He’s never been more absolute about anything else in his goddamn life. The disappearances are connected. They had to be. There’s something his eyes are seeing that his brain isn’t. It’s an itch under his skin, it’s a burn on his nerves. It’s eyes upon eyes. It’s blood roaring in his ears. Something is here.
And then he’s left to the silence of his own home.
It’s late in the night, so late that it was probably early the next morning. And nothing in the house is moving.
And then something happens. Something that hasn’t happened in months.
It starts out small, with barely any sort of sound, but it grows quickly until it’s all that the teen could hear. It echoes through the hallway all the way to his room from the kitchen. It’s the phone.
It’s the phone.
The phone that hasn’t rung or even worked past a dial tone in almost a year, was ringing. Loudly.
Dustin scrambles from his chair, tripping over his own feet to get to the kitchen. He doesn’t know if the dizziness he feels was from sleep deprivation or something else entirely, but he does know that the phone is ringing. And it hasn’t rung in almost a year.
He all but rips it off the receiver, shoves it up to his ear, and listens harder than he’s ever listened to anything before. The static on the other side is deafening, roaring like a stampede, but he doesn’t dare take the phone away. Not with something behind his fingers, in his bones, compelling him forward. He has to know. Something is telling him something and he can’t seem to pick it up.
“Hello?”
There’s nothing but waterlogged breathing on the other side. It reminds Dustin of Will Byers in the walls of the Upside Down. It sends chills down his spine. “Hello?”
“Ha-hehe—”
His brows furrow. It’s the voice of a young boy, possibly elementary school young. “Are you… laughing? This really isn’t funny, you know. Who is this?”
The boy stutters. Like his breath has caught in his throat. Like he was strangled by something nobody could see.
“... You don’t have much time.”
“What? Who are you?”
“Ha-hehe—”
More laughing. Louder now. A repeating sound that almost sounded on a loop. A recording meant to fuck with him. But that doesn’t explain the phone. That doesn’t explain anything. A pit forms in his stomach, something tight, something nauseous.
“Are you one of the missing boys?”
A wet gurgling noise. Almost a choke. “You. Don’t. Have. Much. Time.”
The line goes dead.
Dustin has the sinking feeling that it’s not the only thing dead.
He’s left alone in an empty house. He breathes. “Oh shit. ”
-+-
Finn’s eyes snap open at the sound of his sister gagging into the toilet of their shared hotel room. The choked noise is wet and jagged and it makes bile rise in the back of his own throat, but he shoves it down quickly and swings himself up and out of bed.
The mattress digs into his palms in the same way the thin mattress did in the basement had and Finn has to breathe for a moment. He’s not there anymore. He’s not Finnney Blake, some scared little kid. His name is Finnick “Finn” Blake, he’s twenty-one, and he’s with his sister in a hotel in Bumfuck Nowhere, Wisconsin. There’s no Grabber waiting for him in the shadows. He’s safe now.
Well… as safe as he can be.
“Gwen?” His voice can’t quite shake sleep as easily or as quickly as his mind could. It comes out hoarse and more like a croak than anything else. He tries to clear his throat but the noise in itself was startling. The teen decided to just leave it. “Gwen, are you good over there?”
The stark bathroom light is practically blinding as Finn steps into the room and observes his surroundings a little. The bathroom is small. Finn prefers to stay just outside of the doorway. A preference he’s had deeply ingrained in him since his time in the basement. The thought—no matter how brief—pulls a frown from his face and curdles the food left over in his stomach.
Gwen nods from where she’s kneeled on the floor. Her long black hair is pulled back into a ponytail instead of her signature braids and her face is stained red and blotchy from tears. Finn leans on the doorpost and loosely crosses his arms.
“Was it a dream? Is someone in trouble?”
A small silence. Gwen stops and swallows the bile in her throat with a small noise. Gently, she turns to look at him, dark eyes full of fear.
“Finney—” she swallows again and sets her forehead on the side of the bowl. “Oh, Finn, something’s wrong. Terribly wrong.”
Finn shifts his weight onto his other foot, standing straighter than before. He feels his brows pinch together harshly.
“Indiana.”
“What?”
“How do you feel about a trip to Indiana, Finn?”
Finn sighs, rubs his eyes, and checks thrice over his shoulders. “Yeah, okay. I’ll start packing. Love you, Gwen.”
“Love you too, Finney.”
Just as he cracks a smile and turns to start packing their things away, the small radio box on the bedside table crackles to life and squeals as it flips through its channels.
“Today’s the day, motherfucker—”
And, despite the situation, Finn’s smile stretches into a wild grin.