"I swear, if I'm dying tonight because of you, I'm gonna haunt your ass so hard, Harrington!"
"Oh yeah?"
"Yeah! I'm gonna go full Poltergeist and shit!"
"Then bring it, Graveswood."
"Challenge accepted."
***
In which after years of suppressing their...
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Chapter One-Hundred-And-Sixty-Two: Talking Of The Future
(The Piggyback, Pt. 2)
***
Rowan didn't know how long they'd been walking for.
It felt like hours since they entered the woods of the Upside Down and walked among the rotting trees choked with vines and slime, heading toward the Creel House while keeping an eye out for any sign of the monsters that lurked in the woods, Rowan all too keenly aware of her very first descent into the Upside Down, the feeling of being hunted by a monster amid decaying woods with ash floating in the air shivering in her bones.
Along with keeping an eye out for monsters, they were carefully to avoid vines, the flashlights and Rowan providing just enough light to penetrate the perpetual darkness of this hell-dimension. No earthquakes had struck—thank fucking God—but neither of them wanted to count that as a blessing, just in case one indeed struck again. All of them had made sure before entering their weapons could be reached in case they stumbled across a Demogorgon or a pack of Demodogs, and the storm inside Rowan crackled, ready to be used if her sixth sense tripped her up and a flower-headed monster came crashing through the woods or the vines leapt up to strangle them. But none of them were scared, at least not on the outside.
This wasn't a place where fear could have you live for long.
Rowan's boots tramped on the dead and dying ground, mould, deteriorating soil and something rotten and insidious, something only unique to the Upside Down and its decay, its parasitic death, clinging to the soles, joining the monster bat brains and blood. Her electrical light illuminated the dark around her, in defiance against it—unable to be darkened, not like a regular flashlight. And while Rowan liked to think she was getting used to the toxic air, she knew she was only deluding herself—each breath she took was just as cutting as the last. Just as she liked to think her face was blank except for the anger, the thirst of vengeance for Chrissy, thrumming through her, that she was not scared, not like the first time, but a part of her was, the fear coiled in her bones and lurking in her bloodstream, pounding its rhythm alongside the beat of her her heart. The fear of still being prey, even though she was one of the most dangerous things in this fucking place.
But she hid it well, hid that tiny, dark bit of fear—because fear wouldn't let you live long in this hell-world, fear would only do so much before you were killed by it as much as a Demogorgon's teeth or Vecna's psychic claws—just as she was certain Steve, Nancy and Valerie hid theirs. She assumed Robin was doing the same, until her best friend stopped and said nervously, "Uh... I don't mean to freak anyone out, but I swear we've seen this tree before."
Rowan frowned, halting in her steps as she raised a hand, pulling the electricity shining through her to rise from her skin and up above her hand in a writhing ball of lightning, illuminating the tree so twisted and strangled by vines and rot she was certain it couldn't be classified as a tree anymore.
