Strawberries and Cigarettes // Max Mayfield x girl OC

Chapter Eight: Papa

"Whatever you guys are doing, hurry up!" Steve yelled.

He was still in the Upside Down with Nancy, while the rest of the group went to scavenge Eddie's music collection, trying to find something Nancy liked.

"Steve says you need to hurry!" Erica relayed the message.

"Yeah, no shit!" Dustin yelled back.

It was a very tense situation, and normally all the screaming would have freaked Chris out, but she was too worried about her sister to care.

"We can't find anything!" Max exclaimed.

It was no surprise that Eddie and Nancy had very different music tastes, so it made sense that they wouldn't be able to find anything Nancy liked in Eddie's collection, but they still had to try.

"Seriously!" Robin agreed, turning to Eddie. "What is all this shit?"

"What are you even looking for?" he bit back, not liking the insult to his music taste.

"Madonna, Blondie, Bowie, Beatles?" Robin replied. "Music! We need music!"

Eddie grabbed a cassette from Robin's hand and shook it around in frustration.

"This is music!"

"Chris, what's Nancy's favorite song?" Robin asked as Chris made a mess of cassettes all over Eddie's room.

"I-I don't know!"

"What?!" Eddie yelled. "How do you not know your own sister's favorite song?!"

"I don't know?" Chris tried to defend herself. She was flustered enough, she didn't need people to be disappointed in her. "I don't always pay attention when people talk to me!"

"Everyone, shut up and keep looking!" Dustin screamed.

Erica had gone to check on Nancy and Steve, and when she ran back into Eddie's room, she looked relieved.

"She's back!"

"What?" Chris asked, not sure she heard Erica correctly.

"She's back! I don't know how, but she's back."

Chris felt her heart flutter as the stress left her body.

"Oh, thank god!" Chris exclaimed, running back to see her sister.

•••

After getting Nancy and Steve out of the Upside Down, and calming down a little, the group decided to reconvene across the street in Max's trailer. They sat around the living room as Nancy explained what she saw.

"He showed me things that haven't happened yet," Nancy spoke slowly as she tried to make sense of everything. "The most awful things. I saw... a dark cloud spreading over Hawkins... downtown on fire... dead soldiers. And this... this giant creature with a gaping mouth. And this creature wasn't alone. There were so many monsters. An army. And they were coming into Hawkins. Into our neighborhoods. Our homes. And then... he showed me my mom. And Holly... Mike... Chris... and they... they were all..."

Nancy broke down into silent tears before she could finish talking, but words weren't needed. Chris already knew what Nancy was going to say. When Vecna showed Nancy her family, they were all dead.

Chris put an arm around her sister. She wanted to comfort her—Chris hated seeing Nancy cry—but she knew that nothing she could say would make things better.

"Okay, but... he's just trying to scare you, Nance," Steve tried to reason, even though no one knew if he was right. "Right? I mean, it's not real."

"Not yet," Nancy said through tears. "But there... there was something else. He showed me gates. Four gates. Spreading across Hawkins. And these gates, they looked like the one outside of Eddie's trailer, but... they didn't stop growing. And this wasn't the Upside Down Hawkins. This was our Hawkins. Our home."