Time After Time (a Stranger Things fanfiction)

One Way or Another

One way or another, I'm gonna find ya

- Blondie

Joyce went straight home to wait, calling for Will. In order to boost the strength of her own voice, wearied now from days of crying, her throat sore and dry, she brought Will's boombox into the living room, playing his song for him in order to call him to her.

"Come on," she said, tense and impatient, pacing back and forth, unable to stop moving. "Come on!"

The song kept playing, and nothing happened, and Joyce completely lost her cool, forgetting this was her son she was waiting for, forgetting that he was hiding from some creature trying to get to him. "TALK TO ME!" she screamed. "I know you're here!"

She could feel him here—why wasn't he speaking? She tugged on the lights in various places, pacing the floor underneath them as they stayed dark and silent.

Slowly another sound intruded itself over the blare of the music, over the pounding of Joyce's heart. Thud. Thud. Thud. She turned the music off, listening for where the sound was coming from.

Behind her. The same part of the wall that monster had come through. The monster who was chasing her boy, who may have been the one to take her boy. Who was putting her through this nightmare.

She stood there in front of the wall. This time, if the monster came through, she wasn't running.

Then there was another sound, faint but real—not through a phone, not through the lights. Will was calling her. From somewhere on the other side of the wall, Will was calling her.

Joyce gasped, for a moment unable to believe her ears. "Will?" She put her hands on the wall, as if somehow she could touch him through it.

"Mom?" he called again. "Mom!"

"Will!" He was outside. He must be. She ran for the door, calling his name ... but there was nothing outside. No Will, no nothing. Just ... the chairs and the porch swing. Everything normal. Joyce looked around helplessly, confused and frustrated and panicked, before running back into the house.

The thumping was still coming from the wall.

"Will?!"

"Mom!" He was louder now, more strident.

"Will, I'm here!" Joyce ran her hands up and down the wall. What could she do? If he was there, how could she get to him? "I'm here!" she said again. Reaching up, she grabbed the wallpaper in both hands where it was starting to come loose at the seams and pulled, ripping a big piece of it away.

What she found was ... well, if she could have stopped to consider it, she would have vomited. It was a big pink mass, like ... meat, almost, and it was glistening. But there was no time to think about what it was, because on the other side of it she could see him. Her boy. Will. He was alive ... somewhere behind that pink stuff.

"Oh! Oh, God! Will! Baby ..." She was weeping now, unable to stop the tears from coming, patting the wall as if he could feel her through it.

On the other side of the pink wall, he looked over his shoulder at a sudden sound, and she could see the terror in his face.

"Mom, it's coming!"

"Tell me where you are! I'll protect you!"

"It's like home, but it's so dark. It's so dark and empty! And it's cold! Oh, Mom!" he shrieked, his fear rising.

Joyce was as scared and as confused as he was, but in this moment she knew what she had to do. She leaned closer to the wall and spoke intently. "Listen to me. I swear I'm gonna get to you, okay? But right now, I need you to hide."

"Mom!"

Something was happening to the wall. In the urgency of her message to Will, Joyce had barely noticed it, but the real wall was beginning to close in again, wallpaper and everything, as if that pink wall had never existed. There wasn't much time.

"Listen. No, no, listen, listen. I—I will find you," she promised.

Will's hands were pressed against the wall on the other side, and sending him away from her was the hardest thing she thought she had ever done—but she couldn't protect him if she couldn't get to him, and that thing was coming for him.

"Listen, I will find you. But you have to run now. Run!"

And he was gone. The hole in the wall closed, leaving only the torn paper to prove anything had ever happened.

Joyce turned and saw the axe, lifting it and chopping into the wall with all her force. If there was a way through, she was going to open it up.

But there was nothing. The only thing she saw as pieces of wall fell away under her repeated blows was the outside, the peaceful fall day a mockery of the unreal torment she was living in.

Will was gone. She couldn't feel him any longer—wherever he had run, if he had hidden, if he had been caught, she didn't know. The sense of him still here in the house that had sustained her all this time had disappeared as though it had never been at all. And wherever he was, or had been, she had no way to get to him now.

Feeling lost herself, utterly defeated, she stood there staring through the hole in her wall and wept in despair.