"Hey, you remember what I said last year, right? We're Zombie Boy and Ghost Boy. I'm not ever gonna leave you."
"Promise?"
"One hundred percent."
***
In which Alistair fights the monster that possessed his friend alongside his friends, while trying...
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Chapter Sixty-Six: Lights Out
(The Nina Project, Pt. 3)
***
Alistair stared at the flickering lights of the cobwebbed chandelier, mouth dry, his mind flashing of every moment he'd seen flickering lights for three years.
The buzz of lights in Hawkins Middle, when the Demogorgon burst through. The berserk lights in the gym of Hawkins Pool, when Billy, strengthened by the Mind Flayer, had escaped and nearly killed El. The blinking lights of the hospital when Nancy and Jonathan were nearly killed by their Flayed former boss and co-worker that merged into a horrific monster of dead flesh and organs. The flickering lights in Hopper's cabin when the Mind Flayer's weapon attacked.
The blinking lights in the delivery corridor. The erratic neon lights of Starcourt burning in his vision like the fireworks did.
It was every single light that had buzzed and flickered from the Upside Down, that alerted the presence of the monsters on the other side... or breaking through into their world or already in it.
And this chandelier was flickering now from the Upside Down.
"It's like the Christmas lights," Nancy murmured, eyes fixed on the buzzing lights.
"The Christmas lights?" Robin echoed, frowning. Beside her, Valerie and Leo also looked confused, at the mention of something that most of them knew or heard about since it all started.
"Yeah, when Will was in the Upside Down, the lights... came to life," Nancy explained.
"It's how Joyce knew he was still alive," Alistair pitched in softly. If it hadn't been for Joyce and her lights and insistence that Will was still alive, for El and her powers confirming he was... Alistair didn't want to think what could have happened to Will.
If Will might have died were it not for Joyce and the Christmas lights and El.
"And it also served as a pretty damn good alarm for the Demogorgon," Rowan muttered, reminding Alistair again while he, Mike, Lucas, Dustin and El were in the middle school, his sister, Nancy, Jonathan and Steve were fighting the Demogorgon and attempted to kill it—that Nancy, Rowan and Jonathan had cut their hands open to lure it in with blood, the wounds now faded scars.
Nancy nodded in agreement with with Rowan had said, her scarred hand giving a reflexive twitch as she murmured, "Yeah, it did."
That caused Steve to look at Rowan as she looked at him, heads bending close to each other as they shared a low conversation—a conversation that let Alistair see the trauma of that night play on their faces. Alistair looked away, knowing it was a private moment between them as the couple pressed closer together, his sister sinking into Steve's support.
