Time After Time (a Stranger Things fanfiction)

Eye of the Storm

"Eye of the Storm"

Another night, the curtain's coming down

I hear the silence just screaming loud

I can see the sunrise rising from the smoke

Will you be there for me, will I ever know?

- Scorpions

Joyce didn't know how long she had sat there on the end of her bed, wrapped in a blanket, lost in a merciful fog in which she couldn't seem to think or feel or really even be. But it couldn't last—eventually she had to come back to herself, to a world in which Will was lost to her and Bob was ... dead and there was no hope of getting either of them back.

She knew Hopper was there; knew he had been there all along, just sitting, just being there. And she was grateful that he hadn't spoken or tried to fix things. Some things even he couldn't fix.

The house had remained silent all this time, despite the presence of all of Will's friends. She could remember when these boys had been so loud she couldn't hear herself think, when she'd had to send them outside to play in the rain or snow just to lower the volume.

It was almost a relief to hear them start to move around out there, hear voices. Mike's, of course, the leader. Always the leader. But Dustin, too, helping him talk through, helping to figure things out. And Lucas occasionally, with the red-headed girl and Nancy's ex-boyfriend joining in, mostly asking questions. Joyce followed all this without trying to, or even really meaning to, letting the world go on around her. Maybe after a few more minutes she could be part of that world, but not yet. Not yet.

She was aware of Hopper getting up and leaving the room, of his glance backward before he softly pulled the door closed behind him. She could hear him out there, starting off combative: "Can you guys hold it down?" and then slowly getting drawn into whatever idea the kids had. They were smart kids; Joyce was glad he was listening to them.

Without exactly meaning to, she caught words and sentences, enough to fill her in on what they were thinking. Something called a Mind Flayer, which Joyce took to mean the black monster from the Upside Down who had taken her boy; and what it wanted was to conquer everyone and everything that wasn't it. Well, she supposed that made sense. This thing was big enough and mad enough to do it, too.

Hopper had been into the theory for a minute, but then the conversation devolved into him and the kids shouting at each other.

Joyce got to her feet. Slowly. Reluctantly. Not wanting to. But—Hopper was never going to understand and make the connection the kids already saw, not without being led there by someone he trusted. And he trusted her.

"Even if they come, how are they going to stop this?" Mike was asking as she opened her bedroom door. "You can't just shoot this with guns!"

"You don't know that!" Hopper roared at him. "We don't know anything."

"We know it's already killed everybody in that lab."

"And we know the monsters are gonna molt again!" Lucas added.

"And we know that it's only a matter of time before those tunnels reach this town."

Before Hopper could respond to Dustin's point, which was a good one, Joyce spoke up. "They're right." Her voice sounded strange to her ears, all croaky and off. Maybe nothing would ever sound normal again, like nothing would ever be normal again. Everyone turned to look at her as she said what they were all thinking, but what only she could determine. As Will's mother, as Bob's girlfriend, they would follow her. "We have to kill it." As Hopper came toward her, she added, "I want to kill it."

"Me, too," he told her. "Me, too, Joyce, okay? But how do we do that? We don't exactly know what we're dealing with here."

Before Joyce could come up with anything, or protest that with all the brains in the room she was hardly the one to come up with the plan, Mike spoke up. "No. But he does." As Mike moved toward the too-silent, too-still body on the couch, she realized that the 'he' was her son. "If anyone knows how to destroy this thing, it's Will. He's connected to it. He'll know its weakness."

The red-headed girl frowned. "I thought we couldn't trust him anymore. That he's a spy for the Mind Flayer now."

Mike was thinking of something, a plan forming in his head. Joyce had been seeing that look on his face since he and Will were very small boys. "Yeah," he said, "but ... he can't spy if he doesn't know where he is."

He explained his idea, which was a good one. When they all looked at Joyce, she nodded, putting her stamp of approval on it, and under Mike's leadership, they started prepping the shed, cleaning out of it anything that might look familiar to Will. Hopper did most of the work; it looked to Joyce as though throwing things around was helping him. He always had needed a physical outlet for anger and frustration.

They found some old tarps and sent Steve and Nancy out to hang them on the walls of the shed, to conceal the old wood boards that Will would recognize. Dustin and Lucas sorted through the garbage looking for old newspapers and cardboard to put over the windows. Mike and the red-headed girl, whose name turned out to be Max, looked for aluminum foil and taped together pieces of cardboard.

Jonathan came with Joyce out to harvest sheets off the line. Would she ever do something as normal as a load of laundry again? Would she ever do Will's laundry again? She didn't want to think about it, but she couldn't stop. Like a broken tooth that she couldn't keep her tongue away from.

After a long silence, Jonathan finally spoke up. "You sure this is going to work?"

No, she wasn't, which made her all the more determined to convince Jonathan. "He knew who I was. He's still in there." When he still looked skeptical, she added more firmly, "It's gonna work." And then, because it was the truth, "It has to."

Bundling the sheets in her arms, she hurried off to the shed. When Will was lost in the Upside Down, she had been so sure she could find him, so sure she could get to him and bring him back. What she wouldn't have given for an ounce of that certainty right now.