"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-Fifty-Four: The Truth In Memories And Dreams
(The Massacre At Hawkins Lab, Pt. 6)
***
Rowan had no idea how long she'd been falling.
It felt like hours or days or years since the world had dropped out from underneath her and she had been tumbling down in this black void. Nothing lit the darkness around her, and her electricity leapt underneath her skin, responding to her panic, but it was never unleashed—it was smothered in way that made Rowan's skin crawl and her heart leap to her throat more than it already had, that had it feel numb and almost... almost gone. And the void she was falling in was silent—silent, except for her echoing screams and the slow, ominous ticking of the clock.
And Rowan kept falling, like she was Alice and this pitch-black abyss was her rabbit hole, falling down, down, down into whatever twisted version of Wonderland awaited her, her screams ripped from her throat and roaring in one ear, and a ticking clock booming in the other, she was just falling—
And then she landed.
Pain ricocheted through her, her bandaged wrist and the slashes striped across her hands sparking in white-hot agony, trembling down her arms and racing throughout her body as Rowan sat up with a pained gasp. Slowly, she got to her feet, breathing through the pain. She reached out for her lightning, and while she could feel it, it was only a flicker, the barest trace of a spark compared to the storm that lived inside her. It unnerved Rowan how suddenly and efficiently her lightning had been doused, how she could barely feel it.
No, it did more than unnerve her. It fucking terrified her.
Pushing down the fear, the wrongness, of having her powers so smothered it was like they were gone, Rowan registered her surroundings.
When she did, fear rose up again in a new wave.
She was standing in the ruins of Starcourt.
Lights sputtered in neon hues over the darkened husks of abandoned stores, the glass ceiling was shattered from where the Mind Flayer had fallen through, and a fireworks haze hung in the air, the phantom booms thundering in Rowan's ears. She couldn't see the Mind Flayer, or any of the others that had been there with her, hurtling fireworks at its body to buy El time to escape while down below, Joyce destroyed the machine and closed the gate, Hopper sacrificing his life in the process. But on the floor, a few metres away...
On the floor was Alistair, a hole in his chest and blood in a crimson pool around him.
Rowan choked back a sob as she stepped toward her brother, seeing his brown eyes staring glassily upward, feeling the sticky blood on her hands, coating them in scarlet, as she stood at his side, the memories flashing in her mind—trying to restart his heart, screaming at someone to save Alistair, her sobs shredding her throat as she imploded with grief over her brother dying, right before he—
