Billy's gone.
Ruby Buckley's world ended with him.
But Hawkins isn't done with her yet.
When strange deaths begin again, Ruby is pulled into the heart of the storm. Between shadowy nightmares, the town's newest outcast, and someone she was never s...
( songs for the chapter ) awake // djo gale song // the lumineers
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Her eyes snapped open.
A gasp left her, ragged, startled, punched out of her like something chased it.
She couldn't breathe.
And then her legs gave out. It's wasn't even a stumble; her body simply dropped, folding backward like someone cut the strings.
She was falling again.
Only this time, Steve caught her before she could make any hard contact with the floor. His arms wrapped around her instinctively, a reflex born of fear and familiarity, but she was still going down, her weight sinking, and he followed with her, guiding, lowering, bracing, until she was flat against the floor, her back meeting it far softer than it should have.
"Hey, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa." He whispered, frantic and low, one arm beneath her head, cradling it, the other around her shoulder as if shielding her from something he couldn't see.
"Ruby!" She could hear someone, Robin, screaming her name from above. The voice was sharp, high with terror.
"What's going on? Is she okay?" She thought it was Max shouting now, the pitch a little different, quaking with fear.
She hyperventilated, lying stiff and shaking on the floor, Steve looked down at her with wild eyes. Her breath was coming in short, fast jolts that didn't make it past her chest.
"It's okay. It's okay. It's okay." He repeated again and again, rhythmically, as if repetition alone could force air into her lungs. Holding his hand to her cheek, swiping at the tears caught at her lash line. "It's okay. I'm right here." He breathed, panting and terrified. "I'm right here."
She thought she was crying, but she wasn't exactly sure; everything felt too distant and too close at the same time.
She still couldn't breathe.
She tried to look at him. To feel the safeness of being in his arms. To cling to the steadiness of him, to anchor herself in his voice. Having him say these words. But her vision was blurred, black at the edges, pulsing like a blink she couldn't finish, and all she could feel was a pit in her stomach, a yawning, collapsing gravity.
All she could think about was the sheer destruction.
Her, suspended in the air, limbs cracking like branches in frost, eyes popping into her skull, her life being sucked out of her from the inside out as the clock chimes.
Hawkins, splitting in two.
A red, pulsing river cutting the whole town clean in half.
Like an interdimensional volcano erupting straight into their world, taking over everything that has once been beautiful, alight, alive. A future made of ruin and fire and things with too many limbs.
