𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐝𝐬 𝐀𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐭

𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐝𝐬 𝐀𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐭 - 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝟗

[Sunday, March 24th, 1986. NOW.]

The winter Nancy, Barb and you had been ten years old, your favorite fairy tale had been The Snow Queen.

There had been something about this story, of these two star-crossed childhood sweethearts, torn apart by a frozen heart; of the kind of love that made a girl venture out into the deepest, darkest winter to save her beloved.

You'd taken turns in who would get to be the Snow Queen, who'd get to be the girl who was a hero and who the boy who needed saving from the freezing darkness placed in his heart – and one especially cold day in late December, the three of you had went ice skating on the frozen surface of Lover's Lake to enact the fairy tale in a matching scenery.

You couldn't remember who'd gotten to play whom that day – but you remembered, as vivid as if had been yesterday, how, enraptured in the game, you'd ventured farther and farther out onto the lake, waving your arms and laughing while Nancy and Barb had cried out for you to come back, that it wasn't save to leave the edges of the lake near the shore where the ice was much thicker.

And you vividly remembered the sound of the ice cracking beneath your skates when it had given in.

How you'd been plunged into the freezing waters of Lover's Lake.

You remembered your muscles succumbing to the cold as the water soaked your coat, your sweater, bit into your skin and froze your muscles, knocked the air from your lungs as darkness engulfed you and your arms flailed in a failing attempt to fight against the pull of the drowning dark dragging you down, farther and farther away from the splotches of light falling through the frozen surface as you sunk towards the bottom of the lake, the panic dying in your chest as your mind and body went numb.

It felt like that right now.

Numbing and freezing as you were being dragged down into the abyss of the realization of what you'd done.

You'd opened the door for Vecna.

He'd tricked you, had been tricking you, playing his sick little mind games until he'd found your weak spot, the one thing you'd do everything to save. Eddie. And no matter how accidental it had been...you'd let Vecna in. Opened the door wide for him to step through.

You had never been his first victim after all.

You'd been his puppet.

Chrissy.

Fred.

Patrick.

Max.

Eddie.

It was your fault.

It was all your fault that they were dead, that Max was still marked with Vecna's curse and Eddie's life was in shards, forced on the run because Hawkins was hunting him –

The forest was spinning around you, the stained-glass roses of Max's painting swimming in front of your eyes, dark swirls in the sparse moonlight when another thought settled in your mind, on your heart.

All this time...you'd thought these visions you'd been having ever since Starcourt, the black veins creeping over your body, writhing beneath your skin like vines; the hollow eyes and evil smiles of your reflections in a mirror...you'd hoped it had been an aftereffect of being possessed, of being the Mind Flayer's puppet, a stain the monster had left behind in the same way Will Byers was still connected to the Upside Down and its monsters.

But knowing what you knew now, knowing not the Mind Flayer but Vecna had sent these visions, the headaches and nosebleeds and nightmares, the gruesome images...