Time After Time (a Stranger Things fanfiction)

Welcome to the Jungle

"Welcome to the Jungle"

In the jungle, welcome to the jungle

Feel my, my, my serpentine

I want to hear you scream

Welcome to the jungle, it gets worse here every day

- Guns N' Roses

Hopper kept moving through the tunnels, trying to mark the twists and turns in his mind so he could find his way back. He wasn't sure what exactly he was looking for, but he figured he'd know it when he saw it.

Behind him, he heard some kind of a screech, and he drew his gun, turning and pointing it and the flashlight in the direction the sound had come from. But there was nothing. Nothing moved down here. Everything was dead. Decaying. You could tell by the way flakes of it floated in the air.

Moving forward, he kept his gun at the ready, just in case. Better to be safe than sorry.

The light pointed up at something that looked like a giant, brownish flower bud. As Hopper looked at it, it convulsed, spitting some kind of spores out into the air, directly into his face.

He staggered back, falling against the wall, coughing and choking, then found himself directly in front of another of those things, which spit more spores out at him.

Wiping his hand across his eyes to clear them, sputtering as he tried to breathe, Hopper turned back the way he had come, running. He had to get out of here, get to Owens, get the lab down here to burn all this shit. But he couldn't see where he was going. He kept running into the walls, stumbling over the uneven floors. It was hard to focus, hard to move, as though something in those spores was like a drug of some kind. He forced himself to keep going. All he had to do was get out, he told himself. The light was right ahead of him, he was almost there.

But then he fell, landing hard on the floor. It seemed so difficult to try to get up, such effort. He couldn't do it. The blackness closed in on him.

*****

The entire night had gone by. Hopper hadn't called. Mike had slept over in Will's room, and that had kept Will calm, which in turn had kept Joyce calm.

She had spent most of the night sitting in the living room trying to figure out what exactly it was that Will had drawn. Vines, Hopper had said. What kind of vines? And why vines, of all things? What did that have to do with the Upside Down? She had toyed with and dismissed a dozen far-fetched theories, thinking she sounded crazier all the time.

Joyce didn't hear Will the first few times he called her name, and she jumped when he put his hand on her shoulder. She looked up at him, searching for a sign that maybe this was over and that thing had let him go.

What he said was the last thing she expected. "I saw him."

"You saw who, baby?"

"Hopper. I think he's in trouble. I think he's going to die."

It didn't cross her mind for a second that he might be exaggerating. If Will thought Hop was going to die, then he was in real danger. Joyce felt very cold at the thought, like she'd been left outside in the winter wind without a coat. What would she do without Hopper now that she had him back in her life again? She couldn't imagine it.

*****

Hopper opened his eyes with a gasp, remembering all at once where he was. His head was pillowed on something gross that jiggled underneath his face when he tried to get up, and it was still hard to move. The aftereffects of whatever had been in those spores, he imagined.

His flashlight was still shining, so he couldn't have been out for too long. He crawled toward it, trying to lever himself into a sitting position at least. But before he could do that, he felt a wave of nausea, vomiting up some unpleasant dark goo that he didn't even like to think had just been inside his body.

Once that had passed, he wiped his mouth and retrieved the flashlight and his hat from the ground, forcing himself back onto his feet. He pointed the flashlight up at the ceiling, looking for the opening he had left, desperate to get the hell out of here. But there was no sign of it.

Was he going crazy? He'd been almost there when he collapsed, he was sure of it. Where the hell was it?

At last he came up to a dead end. He had to have missed the opening. Or the vines had to have closed up to cover the opening, in which case—

Panic rose in him, threatening to choke him, and he forced it back down. He'd been in worse situations than this and had come out all right. He would get out of this, too. Although he wished he had stopped to call in his position before jumping down that hole. Of all the stupid, pigheaded things to do.

He thought of Eleven, alone in that cabin. What would happen to her if he never came back? So few people knew about the cabin ... but Joyce did, he remembered suddenly. They'd gone there a few times in high school to drink and fool around. Eventually, Joyce would think to go there.

With that settled in his mind, he was able to keep moving, searching for another way out. This time, he was going to be ready for those spore things, though. He ripped off his uniform sleeve and tied it around his nose and mouth so he couldn't breathe that stuff in again.

He found himself at a crossroads—tunnels going to the left and to the right. Which one to take, and, more importantly, how to find his way back? Reaching into his pocket, he removed the pack of cigarettes. He broke one in half and dropped it on the ground as he took the left fork.

****

"Where is Hopper, baby?" Joyce asked, getting to her feet and holding Will by the shoulders. "How do I get to him?"

He tried, but the words wouldn't come. "I can see him, but I can't—I can't—"

"Draw it," Mike said urgently. "Quick."

Will nodded and hurried back to his desk. The picture seemed to be the same scribbles across the page, Joyce thought, hovering over him anxiously. When he was done, sitting back with relief, as though something that was holding him had let go, Joyce looked closely at the picture, but couldn't make heads or tails of it.

"Okay. This is where you saw him?" she asked Will. "Is this where you saw Hopper?"

"Mmhm. I think so. Yeah." But he didn't seem very sure.

Joyce picked up the page—the back of a piece of wrapping paper, because they had long since run out of any other kind—and tried to find a place where it fit in with the rest of the pages. Mike came with her, both of them searching, holding the page up against others to see if the pattern would match.

"Here!" Mike called at last. It was on the refrigerator. When Joyce held up the new page, she could see clearly now that it was a fork of some kind, where two paths converged. How did that help? Where were these paths? How was she supposed to find Hopper when she didn't know what the hell she was looking at?