Time After Time (a Stranger Things fanfiction)

Should I Stay or Should I Go

"Should I Stay or Should I Go?"

Should I stay or should I go now?

If I stay there will be trouble

If I go there will be double

So ya gotta let me know

Should I stay or should I go?

- The Clash

The ringing of the phone beneath her fingers woke Joyce from a fitful sleep. She had the handset in her hand before she had fully awakened and remembered why she was sitting here by the phone—but by the time she had said "hello" and heard the faint breathing on the other end of the line, it had all come back to her in its awful clarity.

She couldn't stay seated. Rising to her feet, she cradled the phone in both hands. "Hello! Who is this? Who—?"

The person on the other end drew in a deep, shuddering breath, like a child crying. Like her child crying. Could she ever forget holding Will when he was a baby, a toddler, a small boy, crying in her arms, hearing that shuddering sigh as he tried to get hold of himself? This was Will. She knew it as well as she knew herself.

"Will?"

More breathing.

"Will, it's me." She was on the verge of tears herself, trying to hold it together and be calm for him. "Talk to me. I'm here! Just—just—just tell me where you are, honey. I can hear you. Please!"

"Mom?" His voice sounded as though it was coming from far away.

Joyce gasped at the sound and the lights flickered, as though they were as happy to hear from him as she was. "Will! Yes, it's—it's me. Yes!" She held the phone closer, tighter, as if it were Will she was holding. "Where are you? Where are you? Just talk to me!"

And then lightning arced from the phone, crackling across her fingers, and she screamed and dropped the handset instinctively, jumping back, only then realizing that the phone, her one precious slender connection to her missing boy, was fried. Again. And there had been no storm to blame it on this time.

Joyce knelt, picking up the handset, sobbing incoherently as she pounded on the little plastic reset buttons on the phone's base, holding the handset to her ear as she cried out "No!" over and over again and strained to hear something, anything, on the other line.

All her strength left her. She collapsed next to the chair, against the dead phone, weeping, feeling more helpless than she ever had before.

Damned phone! She was just about to get Will to say where he was! Just about to know where her boy was, to be able to get him. She shrieked aloud, picking up the whole heavy piece of plastic and heaving it away from her, tearing it from the wall, and then sat there weeping and screaming and generally having a tantrum that even Jonathan on his best—worst—day as a toddler couldn't have matched.

As she sat there, shouting out her pain and her anger and her fear, the lights flickered again. And then again. She looked up, then, realizing that only the lights in the hallway were flickering. Two bulbs in the sconce, so unless they were both about to burn out, it couldn't be the bulbs. Was there something wrong with the wiring?

Curiosity got the better of her tantrum, and she got to her feet, investigating, standing beneath the lights as they continued to flicker.