✓ | 3. soldier, soldier, spy [STEVE HARRINGTON]

twenty-two.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO:
THOMAS MIRKWOOD'S LAST FIGHT

[ THE BATTLE OF STARCOURT ]

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Ever since the hospital, or even their sauna test, Thomas had been pushing himself onward not out of choice, but out of the refusal to die. The lack of sleep, the injuries, the anxiety -- none of it mattered, because if he was to stop and rest, he would be succumbing to the grim fate that awaited him down the Mindflayer's gargling, toothy oesophagus.

He knew that it wanted him, and it was going to have him, and so he had fought, because he had no other option.

If, in some parallel world, the Mindflayer had come for him in the winter of 1983, maybe he wouldn't have fought; but for now, in this world, life was worth living. He had friends, a family, a Steve Harrington, a collection of aspirations for the future and a handful of college applications to write. And so he'd trudged on for days because this would some day end, and some day he'd be driving to Berkeley with Joyce.

But this -- this act of summoning up strength and courage and energy to spend on dashing back into the mall, throwing himself back onto the front line -- this was choice. For Eleven, he chose to dive back into the depths of danger, for a collection of reasons he didn't actively know, but he felt them, in his subconscious. Things like: he owed her; and she would do the same; and he'd done it before so he'd do it again; and this was what he'd promised... And, after all, isn't this what siblings did?

When he entered, across the destroyed food court, Eleven didn't face him as she began to sit up, the rest of her slumped on the floor, and a bullet of a glance around showed that Max and Mike were nowhere to be seen. Behind her, Billy towered above her, and both of their faces were craned upwards, two round white Os.

The centrepiece of the mall, its huge frame filling the entire food court, the Mindflayer gargled and growled gutturally as it lowered its head toward her and Billy. Still moving forward, though slower now, and completely without realising it, Thomas got his first look at its full form for the first time, this time up close, ultra HD.

Like in his nightmares, and like he'd seen through the gap in the Gate last year, its head was pointed and huge, its many arms thick like tree trunks, some clinging to the second floor, filling the space. Behind it, fuzzying its edges, the Starcourt sign flashed pink and blue, now dangling from its former position, yanked off by the monster's colossal frame.

On the floor, Eleven crab-crawled away from it on her hands and feet --

But too late --