Stonathan ❤️

82

NOT MINE!!

all credits go to KidA_666 on ao3

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

-T.S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men"

―

The good thing about Vecna is that he's become predictable. He isn't driven by the animalistic desire of the Demogorgon, rushing out at the first smell of blood; he doesn't seem concerned enough with them to spy like the Mindflayer; and he already has his four kills, his gates. He can make ash rain down and columns of fire shoot out of cracks in the earth; surely in the face of ushering in the apocalypse, he's done picking off teenagers.

The bad thing, of course, is almost everything else. Mainly that they're all fucked if he changes his mind.

Jonathan had realized that as Robin Buckley―who's apparently in on it now, brought into the fold by Steve―filled him in on the situation. She was going roughly 100 miles per hour, but what it came down to was trauma. Vecna could prey on trauma and twist it and rub your nose in it, then levitate you and kill you in the most horrible way imaginable.

There had been a compulsion to huddle around the obvious ones at first: Will and El, Lucas who was spending every day at Max's bedside in the hospital. But then they remembered that Dustin had watched Eddie Munson choke on his own blood, and all of Nancy's oldest friends were dead. Even Argyle had been pursued cross-country by the United States government in the Surfer Boy Pizza van and buried a dead body.

So no one did anything alone anymore, after that. They sleep in shifts and carry backpacks full of walkmans and cassettes. Someone always has to be sitting at the hospital with Lucas; a lot of the time, Jonathan keeps close to the bathroom as Will showers, like maybe levitation is something you can hear.

Of course, they know the warning signs: Nightmares, headaches, nosebleeds. But it got harder and harder to keep straight once they realized they'd had over a dozen concussions between them and plenty to have nightmares about.

That's how they end up missing it with Steve until he's frozen on the couch with his eyes rolled back into his head.

―

It's been three eerily quiet months since the explosion rocked Hawkins.

Jonathan finds it sort of amazing the way people have scrambled to make it seem normal, calling it aftershocks. The highschool still held a graduation ceremony in the gym, since the football field was split right down the middle. (Jonathan got his diploma from Lenora Highschool in the mail, and tried not to think about what government strings had been pulled for him to pass all of his classes from three thousand miles away.) People go to work and church and shop for groceries. A few of them start wearing masks or bandanas around their mouth and nose once it becomes clear that the particles aren't going away, but it's regarded as pretty hysterical by the general public.

Hawkins had emptied out drastically in the days just after; but some of those people came back after a few weeks with their out of state relatives, ready to get back to normal.

Soon, there'll be an uptick in animal attacks―maybe they'll blame a bear like back in 1983―or the people who stayed will start getting skin lesions and cancer from the particles. Vecna doesn't seem to be in a hurry, now that he's brought the Upside Down out.