Time After Time (a Stranger Things fanfiction)

Silent Running

"Silent Running"

Teach the children quietly

For some day sons and daughters

Will rise up and fight while we stood still

- Mike and the Mechanics

Joyce's eyes fell first on Eleven, who was clearly in pain, her face drawn and heavy dark circles under her eyes, and she hurried to the girl's side. "Are you all right?"

Hopper joined her almost immediately. "What happened?"

Eleven leaned her head against Joyce's shoulder, shutting her eyes briefly as if in relief, and reached a hand out to Hopper.

"It was the Mindflayer," Dustin said behind them.

"I can feel him," Will added softly.

"Oh. Oh, no." Joyce reached her free hand for her boy, who took it for a moment before remembering that he was a cool teenager and snatching it back. "It's still here?"

"We think part of it got stuck on this side when El closed the gate." Mike was kneeling at Eleven's other side, his hand on her shoulder. "And now it's—"

"It's killing people." Jonathan's face held nearly as much weariness as Eleven's, and Joyce, with a final squeeze, left Eleven to Hopper and Mike and got up to hold Jonathan close. She reached out a hand for Nancy, too. Just having them all in her arms again, in reach of her touch, made her feel better. Stronger. This little group of people, young as they were, had saved themselves and Hawkins and possibly the world already multiple times. Working together, she believed they could do it again.

"Killing people how?" Hopper asked, even as he was gently lifting El and helping her find a place to sit up, leaning against his shoulder. The others followed, standing or sitting around the fountain and the bench Hopper and El were sitting on.

Max spoke up, looking as pale and dispirited as Joyce had ever seen her. "It's taking them over. It got Billy." It surprised Joyce a little that the girl cared that much about her step-brother. Joyce strongly suspected Billy of having hit Max a time or two. Still, family was family.

"What do you mean, taking them over?" Hopper never had gotten the hang of the way the kids talked, one at a time, over each other, little bits of the puzzle coming together piece by piece.

"It's ... it's transforming itself into them, somehow, and when you kill them, it becomes this big melted pile of ... people." Nancy shivered.

"What the hell is going on here? Aren't the Russians enough?" Joyce didn't recognize the girl talking, but she was wearing the uniform of the ice cream shop Steve Harrington worked at, so it seemed clear how she had been roped in to this situation.

"There's a gate in Hawkins to another world, a dark version of our world," Dustin explained patiently. "El closed it, but there's a monster who lives in it—"

"The Mindflayer," Mike said. "It built this monster in Hawkins, to stop El, to kill her and pave a way into our world."

"And it almost did," Nancy added. She nodded toward the smear on the floor where the something Hopper had stepped on had been. "That was just one tiny piece of it."

"How big is this thing?"

"It's big," Jonathan said. When Hopper frowned at him for the lack of any actual clarification, he added, "Thirty feet at least."

"Yeah," Lucas agreed. "It ... sorta destoyed your cabin. Sorry."

To his credit, Hopper took that in stride.