My Number One (001/Henry Creel/Vecna x Reader)

You Are the Saboteur

Only a split second after the vines slipped into place around Eleven's wrists, she gasped.

I had fooled her.

I felt bad. I did. But this was better than having to kill her.

The plan needed to go ahead, and I wasn't going to let her get in its way. We hadn't made it this far, done all of this, for nothing. Hundreds of people hadn't lost their lives for nothing.

Now Eleven was trapped, bound to a chair in my basement.

There was no portal down there. But I had no choice, I had to lie to her. If I didn't do this, Henry might have caught her running up to the attic to the real portal and killed her anyway. Technically, I was doing her a favour. I could easily have killed her myself—with how in control I was of the Upside Down, the Demodogs, the Demobat, and with Henry in my side—but, out of the kindness of my heart, I chose not to.

"What are you doing?" she asked, breathing heavily.

"Don't worry about it. Don't even think about it. Just stay quiet."

Eleven struggled to use her powers against the vines, but it were no use. She was no match for the plant grown in this underworld. "...You tricked me."

"No, I saved you."

"No," she whispered, shaking her head.

"You're lucky I'm doing this. You're the one person, apart from Mike and his little friends, who is trying to get in the middle of mine and Henry's plan. You're the one person I should want to kill. But I'm not. I'm simply restraining you. You're not dying, like all of those people who burned in the bonfire out there, and whose meat I'm preparing right now, so be grateful."

She shook her head again, slowly, in disbelief. "Can you even hear yourself? What has happened to you?"

"You wouldn't know, would you? You didn't care. As soon as you found Mike, as soon as you found someone else other than me, you took that opportunity and ran with it. Ran as far away from our friendship as you possibly could."

"That's all wrong," she said slowly, pitifully. "You did that. The day you tried to escape the lab with Henry, and, even after he tried to kill me, you came here to see him. Lived with him."

"I begged Henry to go back and fetch you to escape with us that day. And, I only visited him in the Upside Down afterwards because, on the first occasion he had kidnapped me there, and after that, when I chose to visit him and live with him on my own accord, I knew you didn't want me anymore!"

"In fact, this is all because of him," said Eleven, ignoring everything I had said apart from the word Henry. "Not just the slaughter of innocent people, but the changing, the corruption of you. He's infected your mind. He's manipulated you with all of this insanity. Spending every day with just him has completely screwed with your sense of perspective...your sense of reality. This isn't normal—"

"I know it's not normal," I interrupted. "But that doesn't mean it's wrong. Human society, normality, is an inhumane, corrupt system, and because everyone is confined to it—every day, every hour, every minute, every second—you're brainwashed into wanting it. Into thinking it should be normal. It's just like Henry told me: Stockholm syndrome."

"'Just like Henry told me'," Eleven mocked. "Of course he did. Can you not think for yourself for once? Yes, society has its faults, but that doesn't mean you need to kill everyone in it! You can help people from inside of it, change it that way. But, by killing everyone off, you're becoming worse than what you hate. At least society has made murder illegal."

"Oh, because torture day in-day out isn't better than death itself? It makes you dead inside. And, how many people do you think have had the idea you're telling me to try out? Just to do their best, change society, inspire people. How many do you think have tried that in the last few hundred years?"

"'Torture', really?" asked Eleven. "I would have thought that, after everything we've been through, experiencing real torture at the lab, that that word would have a deeper meaning to you than a 9-5 job, or whatever it is you're referencing. And, as for the people who have tried to make a difference in society, it has worked. From what I've been learning at Mike's school, a lot has changed in the last couple hundred years. So much has improved. Maybe you should have at least given it a chance, given society a chance, school a chance, and learned, educated yourself on the subject you talk so much about before you waltzed off, rebelling against it, at hearing a moment of Henry's words."

I had to admit to myself, this school of their must of been doing something right, because Eleven's vocabulary seemed even better than mine—but I ignored that. "And, just because murder is illegal, do you think that has ever stopped people? War is so common amongst them."

"Don't you realise you're committing war against them now, by doing this?"

I paused. "How exactly do you even know what we're doing? What we've been planning?"

"You didn't think we could figure it out? Didn't you think we're intellectual enough compared to you and Henry?" Eleven asked sarcastically.

"It's not that. I know you're smart...but you're also just kids."

"Well, to be completely honest, I spied."

"How?"

"...I can do something. Something Papa taught me at the lab, where I lie down in a pool and take my mind somewhere else. Hear people, see them." Eleven looked up at me triumphantly from her chair. "I've been watching you while you plan."