508. girl i'm bored let's all accept our grief and open our hearts again!!!!

508 / girl i'm bored let's all accept our grief and open our hearts again!!!!

Hawkins Lab was much scarier when Lucy was all by her lonesome and had no one to pretend she was brave for anymore. She crept through the stairwell slowly, peering through doors on each floor, shining her flashlight through dusted windows and praying no Demos would run up on her. She was defenseless, alone, scared out of her mind—and, worst of all, she had cried so much after her fight with Steve that she had given herself a migraine.

It had only been a brief moment in which she allowed herself to break, sitting with her knees pulled to her chest and head buried between her legs at the bottom of the stairwell. She sat sniveling and weak for only as long as she knew she absolutely needed; thinking about Steve's words weighed so heavily on her that she could not carry on without pretending she wasn't bothered.

So she took five or so minutes and cried to herself pathetically. It reminded her of sophomore year when she had broken up with Steve after he had humiliated her so terribly. She felt fifteen again, angry at the world and mortified that she had ever fallen in love with Steve Harrington.

Once her five minutes were up, she stood, wiping her face, and continued searching the lab. After all, she could not forget about everything else just because Steve had been mean to her and Dustin. Holly was still somewhere out there, trapped by Vecna. Poor, innocent Holly Wheeler.

Jesus, Lucy was worried she was about to start her period what with how emotional she had suddenly become. The thought of Holly made her eyes well. She groaned at her own sensitivity and wiped at her eyes with her sleeve, carrying onto what would now be the third floor. Steve was somewhere above her, still searching; further up would be Jonathan and Nancy; and Dustin was still in the basement, as far as Lucy knew. All spread out through Hawkins Lab, and all having absolutely no luck.

Lucy had no way to know how long they had been searching the lab by now, but she knew they were coming up empty. Dustin's shield generator, or dark magic, or whatever—it was nowhere to be found. At this point Lucy was traipsing around the lab, watching her back, trying to reconnect with any of the others so they could recuperate and organize a way out of the Upside Down. It was clear they needed a better strategy if they were going to find Holly, but they could only assemble one if they were all back together.

That did mean, however, that Lucy would have to face Steve once more. The mere thought made her shudder; if she could have it her way, they would leave him in the Upside Down, let him sit and think about what horrible things he had said to her and Dustin. Perhaps then he would feel apologetic. Lucy knew such a thing would be a flat-out miracle.

Though she continued to wonder if (and she would never admit it aloud) perhaps Steve had been right, at least about one thing. He accused her of latching onto those who reminded her of Leo. It wasn't an irrational thing to come to understand, either, and even Lucy herself had beat herself up over how she would wrap her arms around a child and pretend they were enough to fill the hole Leo had left. She'd done it with Holly, and now that Holly was gone, she was doing it with Dustin. Each of them were their own person, yet had just enough in them to remind Lucy of Leo that she decided they were Leo. She turned them into him in her mind and lived in a bubble for two years; a bubble in which Leo (or the closest thing to him) was still there, and together they lived a normal life, free from the supernatural.

It was a fantasy she had trapped herself in, one Vecna hadn't even needed to touch. It gnawed away at her, filling her chest with a loud, relentless guilt, one that choked her and weighed down every step she tried to take. Every time the illusion cracked—every time she remembered that Leo was truly gone, that the child in front of her was not her baby brother—she was dragged back into the raw cruelty of reality, and it hurt worse and worse every time she had to face it.

She remembered Leo's murder, the weight of him in her arms. Most of all she remembered the promise she had made as his blood soaked through her clothes: A promise to leave Hawkins, to live, to be happy—a promise she had broken the moment she failed to make it out of their stupid, little town.

Lucy hadn't built a life after Leo. She had built a chasm. Two years frozen in place, clinging to echoes of him because letting go felt too much like killing him all over again. And now, standing alone in a dark stairwell of Hawkins Lab, she finally understood something she had not let herself think before: Leo wouldn't have wanted this.

He wouldn't have wanted her hollowed out and orbiting other people's lives, pretending survival was the same as living. Of all her failures, of all the mistakes she had made since the night he died, that would have hurt him the most. He would despise the idea that she was clinging onto his friends in the hopes that they wouldn't let his memory die.

He would be disappointed in her.

She stopped walking, the world around her becoming fuzzy and unfocused as the realization hit her. She reached out and held her balance on the wall beside her. Her ears rang; she felt as though the world was sinking inward, swallowing itself whole, taking Lucy with it.

In a strange way, she hoped it would. She knew no other way to free herself from the chains of guilt in which she'd been living for the past two years.

The buzz cleared from her ears. She came back to herself slowly, and ran a hand down her face, sighing. Her cheeks were still wet with tears—or perhaps they were new, having fallen down her face as she stood there thinking about Leo. She didn't know. She just wiped them off, sniffing.

One thing was for certain: She could keep searching for their way to destroy the wall. Then they would reach Holly, and Mike and Nancy would not have to know the feeling of losing your baby sibling to such a cruel fate.

Lucy drew in a sharp, deep breath, steadying herself. She aimed her flashlight upward and continued climbing the stairs. A small voice in the back of her mind reminded her that it was likely a useless search, but she pushed the thought away, determined on finding this shield generator and blasting it straight to hell.

Suddenly she paused, her foot hovering over the next step. She could have sworn she was hearing shouts; desperate, pleading cries coming from the basement. Then another noise began to grow in her ears: Boots slapping the cement with vigor.

Lucy frowned, then leaned over the railing to shine her flashlight down toward the basement.

"Dustin?" she called down, her face scrunching up.

"JONATHAN!" he was screaming, holding the radio up to his face as he raced up the stairs toward Lucy. "IF YOU CAN HEAR ME, I WAS WRONG!"

"Dustin!" Lucy tried again, more urgently this time as he quickly approached her spot on the stairwell. "Dustin, what's going on!?"

"I WAS WRONG!" he cried, and whether he was speaking to Lucy or Jonathan, she could not tell, though she wondered if it was both. He finally gained on her and wasted no time in passing her, clawing his way up the stairs at lightning speed. "JONATHAN!"

Though Lucy's mind was certainly somewhere else by then, she did have enough sense left in her to know that if someone was running for their life through Hawkins Lab, you should very likely follow them.

She took off after Dustin, her shoes hitting the ground where his did. He led the urgent way upstairs, screaming while they went.

"The shield generator—it's not a shield generator!" As he spoke into the radio, Lucy realized he had taped the antenna back on, having snapped it off in the fight with Steve. She thought perhaps this was what was blocking Dustin's communication with Steve but obviously she did not point this out. "It's not dark magic! It's something else! JONATHAN! NANCY!"

"What the hell is going on!?" she asked again, panting as she followed Dustin's boundless race up the stairs. "Dustin! What did you find?"

"I WAS WRONG!" he said again, glancing back at her now. Then he spoke into the radio again. "Jonathan! If you destroy it, you will die! We will die! Holly will die! Everyone will die! DO YOU COPY!?"

He took off again after only a brief pause to catch his breath and Lucy was on his heels immediately. After hearing his blanket warning that every one of them would die, she felt much more urgency; she joined Dustin in screaming Jonathan and Nancy's names, praying they could hear.

Dustin rounded onto the next flight of stairs and stumbled into Steve—though Steve grunted and fell back against the wall, Dustin carried on upward, crying out to Jonathan and Nancy.

"What the hell are you doing!?" Steve demanded, watching the two of them storm up the stairs. "Hey—what the hell!?"

From the sound of his footsteps, Lucy could tell without looking behind her that Steve had joined in the chase.

"Listen to me!" Dustin cried into the radio. "DON'T—TOUCH—ANYTHING—"

"Do you know what the hell's going on?" Steve asked Lucy, gesturing up toward Dustin. "Seriously, what is Henderson on—?"

"Not sure," panted Lucy in reply, not so much as glancing over her shoulder at Steve. "But fuck you."

She did not hear a response from him but could imagine the roll of his eyes that he gave her back. She ignored it and buttressed the red-hot rage simmering back toward the surface of her mind, instead turning her focus to watching Dustin's feet pound against the cement stairs, following each step he took closely.

Just as Dustin opened his mouth to call out yet another warning toward Jonathan and Nancy, his words were cut short as an earth-quaking explosion knocked the three of them off their feet; Lucy screamed as she flew back into the wall of the stairwell and slid down to collapse in a heap on the floor. Her head knocked back hard against the wall and her vision sunk to black momentarily, her mind pounding with pain.

When she finally managed to open her eyes—though she had no way to tell how long it had been since she'd closed them—she realized two things. One: That Steve was in front of her, shaking her shoulders and staring at her with a kind of manic look in his eyes; and two: That it was raining from the ceiling.

"Lucy!" Steve exclaimed upon her wake, his eyes widening. "Luce, come on, wake up—"

He was still shaking her and she realized it was because she was not fully awake; her eyes were still slow to peel open and her ears, ringing with a tinny little noise, refused to hear Steve's words entirely. She groaned in pain as her body awoke further.

"Shit," she muttered, lifting a hand to feel the back of her head for blood. "What happened?"

"No idea," he replied, his eyes searching her face for any injuries. "Are you okay?"

"Fine," she said immediately, struggling to push herself off the ground and stand again. She wobbled on her feet but steadied herself against the wall, then looked around. "Where's Dustin?"

"No idea," Steve repeated, glancing around, looking less manic now that he was able to take his eyes off Lucy. Then the two of them froze as they heard a little groan from the top of the next flight, where they'd been heading when the explosion occurred. They shared a glance, then raced up the steps to find Dustin in a heap on the ground, looking disoriented.

"Dustin!" Steve exclaimed, kneeling beside him. Lucy did the same. "Hey, Dustin. What the hell was that? Was that the shield generator? Did they find it?"

Dustin's eyes were wet with tears and he refused to meet either of their gazes. He spat, "I was wrong. I was terribly, catastrophically wrong."

"What?" panted Steve.

"Dustin, what do you mean?" whispered Lucy, searching his face.

He shook his head. His gaze was empty and glassy. "After you two left, I found a journal. Brenner's journal. The key to destroying that wall is in this lab, but it is not a shield generator. It isn't dark magic. Vecna didn't make it. Science did. Theoretical physicists call it exotic matter. A single source of energy that is holding that giant wall together... and I think Nancy just shot it."

"How is any of that bad?" demanded Steve. "That's exactly why we're here, to get through the wall."

"You are not listening to me!"

"Yes, I am listening—"

"Vecna didn't make the wall!" Dustin yelled. "So that means he isn't on the other side, which means Holly and the missing kids aren't either. Nobody is."

Lucy furrowed her brow. She glanced between the two of them, a feeling of inexplicable yet immense anxiety overcoming her at once. She wet her lips.

"So, Dustin," she said slowly, afraid to hear the answer, "what... is on the other side of that wall?"

Dustin stared ahead—not at Lucy but at the wall behind her, his expression empty and defeated. He shook his head.

"Dustin?" she repeated, losing her patience. "What's on the other side?"

"Death," he said flatly. He inhaled a sharp breath and ran a hand down his face, lulling his head back against the wall behind him. "This whole time... everything we have ever assumed about the Upside Down has been dead wrong. This place, the Upside Down—it isn't another dimension. It's not another world. It's a wormhole. A bridge between two points in time and space, between our world and another."

Lucy shut her eyes as the realization hit her. "Like Sir Gawain," she muttered. "The bridge is collapsing, isn't it, Dustin?"

He said nothing but nodded slowly, finally meeting her eyes.

Steve glanced between the two of them quickly. "And if the bridge collapses?"

"We go with it," Lucy said, her voice coming out flat, defeated. She spread her hands like a miniature explosion. "Sir Gawain fails, and humanity goes right down with them."

They took a brief moment of silence to accept the truth of Lucy's words, then gathered around as Dustin began to rifle through Brenner's journal.

"Any clues in there about how long it takes a wormhole to collapse?" Steve asked Dustin, pacing across the staircase landing. "Ten minutes? Twenty?"

"I thought it'd be instantaneous," Dustin said, frustrated as he flipped another page. "Clearly not."

"Why do you sound disappointed we're still alive?"

"I'm not disappointed!" Dustin said defensively, looking up at Steve with his brow furrowed. He looked next to Lucy for help. "Do I sound disappointed?"

"No," she said fairly, her arm propped up on her leg as she held Dustin's flashlight over the journal pages. "You sound confused."

"Well, I am confused!" he exclaimed, sitting back on his heels. "As far as I see it, there are two distinct possibilities. Either this is the afterlife, and the three of us are spirits, which seems unlikely—"

"Orrrr—?" said Steve impatiently.

"Or Nancy didn't completely destroy the exotic matter," Dustin finished, leaning back over the journal as it sat on the floor. "Because if she did, the walls of the wormhole would have collapsed, and we would have been sucked into oblivion."

"Okay," sighed Steve, his last nerve disappearing instantaneously. He crouched down and collected the broken radio. "So what the hell are we waiting around here for?"

"Where are you going?" said Lucy, watching him climb the stairs in disbelief.

"See if I can get a damn signal."

"Steve," said Dustin, gathering up the journal quickly and following him up the stairs, "wait! We don't know if it's safe up here!"

"Hope it's not," Lucy muttered, following after both of them.

"You said the exotic matter wasn't destroyed," Steve said, leading them down the hallway of the next floor.

"No," argued Dustin, "I said it was not completely destroyed. But it was very clearly disturbed! We have no idea what effect this will have on space-time, gravity, matter! This whole building could very well be a highly unstable, physics-defying death trap."

"It seems pretty stable to me," Steve said condescendingly, walking backward onto the next floor of the lab. He raised the radio to his mouth. "Nancy, you copy? Jonathan, are you there? Hello!?"

But he quickly paused in his tracks, as did the others, as they walked out into the main hall and got a clear view of what awaited them in higher levels of the lab.

Dustin's exotic matter was not just irritated—it was furious. The entire ceiling overhead was alight with red, and a membrane of black, curling tendrils writhed around a glowing center of the sphere. Altogether the thing looked like a giant eye, flailing and thrashing and watching the three of them beneath its inter-dimensional gaze.

"Mother of God," Dustin muttered.

"Holy cow," said Lucy.

"Please tell me they're not up there," sighed Steve.

All around them, traces of an odd white substance leaked from an endless pool. Lucy was uncertain what the substance was and whether it was safe to touch, though she got the impression that it was likely not. She lifted her foot from one of the smaller puddles she'd stepped in by accident and watched the rubber sole of her Converse sizzle and blister.

Her stomach dropped.

"Okay," she murmured, backing away. "That's—yeah. That's bad."

The thought of Jonathan and Nancy somewhere above them, trapped inside whatever this was, made her chest tighten. She swept her flashlight through the red haze clinging to the ceiling, her pulse climbing with every unanswered second.

"Jonathan?" she called, forcing steadiness into her voice. "Jonathan? Nancy?"

Steve and Dustin echoed her, their voices overlapping hers, but the stairwell only swallowed the sound. No answer. No movement.

Lucy swallowed hard and turned back toward them. "We have to go up."

"Shit," sighed Steve, relenting. He nodded and led them back out into the stairwell. "Come on, come on—guys, if you can hear us"—he spoke into the radio as though the antenna weren't snapped in half—"we're coming. I repeat, we're coming!"

The white substance coated the stairs thicker the higher they climbed, pooling and stretching like it was alive. Lucy fought to lift her feet as the goo tugged at her soles, resisting every step. It hardened beneath her weight, sticky and unyielding, like it wanted to keep them.

"Steve, slow down!" Dustin yelled after him. "The higher we go, the more dangerous it gets!"

"All the more reason to speed up," he replied, picking up his pace.

"We can't help them if we're dead, Steve," Lucy yelled, breathless now, panic sharpening her voice.

Dustin gestured back to her in agreement. "Would you just slow down, St—"

A particularly loud squelch interrupted him, and the three of them cursed as the stairs gave out entirely to reveal a melted hole beneath their feet. They gazed down at it, awestruck, then slowly lifted their heads to see the substance had not only eaten through this flight of stairs, but every flight above and below them.

Dustin shined his light down through the hole which would lead to a very hard fall, then gave Steve an unimpressed look. "As I was saying."

"It's fine," Steve said over his shoulder, already moving into the storage closet on their flight of stairs in search of something to help them up now. He disappeared inside with the flashlight, then murmured, "Oh, thank you," and reappeared carrying a metal ladder over his shoulder.

"Steve, what the hell are you doing?" said Dustin, raising his eyebrows and looking as though Steve were insane. "That's never gonna work. Stop. STOP!"

Ignoring him, Steve began to settle the ladder over the melting hole, adjusting the length so there were enough rungs to get them over the edge safely.

"Steve!" Dustin attempted to reason with him as he worked, yelling at the back of his head. "Steve, it's not gonna work! You're gonna fall!"

"It's unstable," Steve shot back at him, waving a hand to tell him to back off. "I got it already, okay?"

"No, don't—STOP!" Dustin screamed, pulling him away from the ladder entirely now and shaking Steve so that he faced Dustin. "Stop being an asshole!"

"I'm not being an asshole!" Steve fired back. "I'm trying to get to them!"

"You're always trying to get yourself killed, and I can't let it happen again!" Dustin's voice quaked with pain and his eyes became wet with tears again. He watched Steve closely, breathless, clutching the sleeves of his jacket so tight his knuckles were turning white. "Stop being so selfish, please! If you go on there, you're gonna die, and I can't deal with it again. You can't die 'cause I can't deal with it again. Don't let it happen again. Please. Please don't let it happen again."

As he spoke, Lucy watched Steve's expression changed—whatever reckless fury had possessed him draining away, replaced with something raw and startled and achingly human. He stared at Dustin like he was seeing him for the first time.

"Please don't let it happen again," sobbed Dustin, and he collapsed into Steve, grasping onto his back as though he would disappear at any moment. "Not you."

Steve caught him without thinking, arms wrapping tight around his back. He stood there, stunned, then slowly pulled Dustin closer, one hand settling at the back of his head.

Lucy stood stock-still and in complete silence, certain that any move she made would have shattered her gentle heart; she watched with wide eyes as Dustin tightened his arms around Steve's torso. She understood him instantly, and much too well.

"I'm sorry," whimpered Dustin.

"No, no, no," Steve said softly, his voice shaking, as he put a hand on the back of Dustin's head. He looked shaken.

Lucy turned away, her throat burning angrily. She pressed her palm against the wall to steady herself.

As she did so, the ladder propped up on the staircase gave way; the substance melted through it, and it clanged down though over ten flights of stairs, falling to what would have been Steve's death. It vanished into the darkness below, crashing down flight after flight until the sound faded into silence.

And then, over Dustin's shaking shoulder, Steve looked up.

Lucy was standing a few steps back, frozen in place, staring down at where the ladder had been only a moment ago; when she saw Steve's head lift, she looked to him. Their eyes met, and in such a brief, fragile moment, everything unspoken passed between them: the ladder, the fall, his name which very well could have been added to the list of people lost.

Lucy swallowed tightly, her eyes stinging as they watched Steve. He looked ruined.

Whatever fight had been burning in him was gone entirely, burned out and hollowed, leaving only the raw aftermath. His face had gone pale, his mouth parted slightly like he couldn't quite remember how to breathe. His eyes were glassy and unfocused until they remembered where to go.

And when they met Lucy's, it looked to her as though the regret hit him all at once.

It showed in the way his jaw trembled, like he was clenching down on words he would never say out loud; or in the way his grip on Dustin tightened, not protectively now, but desperately—as if holding onto him was the only proof that the worst had not already come true. His gaze flicked once, involuntarily, toward the empty space where the ladder had been, then back to Lucy, like he was seeing the outcome play out behind his eyes.

His expression crumpled in on itself—not loud, not dramatic, but shattered all the same. Grief sat heavy in his eyes, layered with shame and something close to terror, the kind that comes only when you realize how easily you could have become someone else's ghost.

He didn't look like a hero, not to Lucy. He looked like a boy who had come within inches of breaking everything he loved, and it had been what made him finally understand it.

Their eyes held for one heartbeat longer, and then Steve looked away, blinking hard, as if he did not deserve to be seen like that at all.

From there, it obviously took them a moment to recuperate; Dustin caught his breath without looking at either of the other two, and Lucy retreated down the stairwell a few steps to turn away from Dustin and Steve so they did not see her tears fall. She would venture far enough to say that even Steve had needed the moment to himself to recover.

Either way, they recollected themselves in private, then went straight back to finding Nancy and Jonathan, wherever they might have been; the three of them were much more careful in their approach to climbing the substance-infected staircase, taking their time and holding onto each other for support over the particularly bad bits.

But they finally did reach the top floor of the lab after what felt like ages, and then—and only then—did they get an idea of where Jonathan and Nancy were. Lucy caught wind of their voices, faint and weary, from behind the jammed-shut doors of one of the rooms. On this top floor the white substance had hardened from goo into dried plaster, effectively gluing the door shut and hindering Jonathan and Nancy from escaping.

Steve, however, found a way around this.

It took four swings of a fire hydrant to burst through the wall and hardened plaster; Steve, panting, dropped it at his feet at sight of Jonathan and Nancy inside the room. The two of them let out laughs of genuine disbelief and liberation.

"Sorry we're late," Steve told them.

"Are you okay?" Lucy asked Nancy as Steve helped her out of the fire hydrant hole; Nancy nodded her affirmation but Lucy took her by the shoulders and checked her for wounds on her own.

"We're okay," Nancy said, laughing, putting her hands on Lucy's shoulders in response.

"Jonathan?" Lucy asked, moving over to him as he hopped down from the hole.

"Yeah," he assured her, smiling. "Yeah, we're fine."

Nancy let out a surprised little noise and the others turned to see Dustin having thrown himself at her in an embrace, hugging her tightly and for a long moment. Finally he took a step back, holding onto her arm, looking at her as though he regretted doing that.

"Was that weird?" he said, eyes narrowed. "I'm sorry. That was weird. I didn't... We just—we all thought—"

"—we were goners," Nancy finished for him, smiling. "Yeah, we did too."

Jonathan puffed up his cheeks. "Turns out that shield generator of yours..."

"Isn't really a shield generator," Steve said. "Yeah. We know"

Nancy furrowed her brow at him. "Well, you'd think that would have been good information to share?"

"Well, we tried," Lucy said, holding up the taped radio. "The antenna snapped."

"His fault," Steve and Dustin said together.

Lucy jabbed her thumbs at both of them. "Their fault."

"Okay," said Nancy, spreading her hands, "if that isn't a shield generator, then what the hell did I shoot?"

"Exotic matter," Dustin replied.

"And... we're supposed to know what that is?" Jonathan said, after a pause waiting for Dustin to explain further.

"It's all in here," said Dustin, bringing out the journal from earlier and tossing Steve the flashlight to illuminate the pages. "Look, check this out. Dr. Brenner's notebook from '83. Rips thing is a gold mine: All his research into the gate, how he created it, what it really is. I'm still deciphering it."

"Yeah," murmured Steve, "this shit will fry your brain..."

"Cliff notes," Dustin continued, looking up from the journal and meeting Nancy's eye. "Holly isn't on the other side of the wall."

Nancy looked up too, her eyes hardening as she realized what Dustin was saying. "Then where is she?"

He shrugged listlessly, putting the journal back into his bag. "I don't know, exactly. But wherever she is, it's not the Upside Down."

"Hang on," said Nancy, holding out her hand. "Give me that. I think we should look through it."

Dustin obliged and the five of them moved to find a table somewhere on the top floor of the lab; when they did, Nancy spread out the journal in its entirety and began to flip through it. Jonathan and Steve had their flashlights fixed on it. Nobody had much to say as Nancy fingered through the pages, but Lucy found that her brain began to hurt after, like, five minutes of looking at Dr. Brenner's work—it reaffirmed in her mind that she was definitely not a physicist.

As Nancy flipped to the next page and Dustin reached down to explain his thought process on it, a different noise stole Lucy's attention, a noise which was unfamiliar to the Upside Down and made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up.

"Did you guys hear that?" she muttered, standing up, glancing all around.

"Hear what?" Nancy said at once, standing as well, her gaze alert and sharp.

The five of them paused in complete silence, then heard it: A desperate scream from what felt like miles away, raspy with exhaustion and complete, utter fear.

"Holly," Nancy whispered, her face going slack with fear.

They followed her back up to the rooftop of the lab, where she and Jonathan had initially been searching before their side quest of shooting the exotic matter. Lucy was on Nancy's heels, and the boys behind them; each person taking steps two at a time and racing with bated breath. All the while Holly's terrified screams rung out from all over.

"Nancy !" she cried at the top of her lungs, and as soon as the five of them spilled out onto the rooftop, her cries became even more urgent. "NANCY!"

It was the strangest thing: Holly hung suspended in the air over the lab, her arms and legs sprawled out and pigtails hanging loosely. She stared down at them all with immense fear—terror so palpable that Lucy choked up on the spot, her own face contorting with fear.

"Holly!" Nancy cried, running over to where she hung in the sky. "HOLLY!"

"Nancy, help me! Help me, please! Lucy!"

Lucy stared, transfixed in disbelief and worry and alarm all at once, at her little Holly. Holly, who had been missing now for two days—Holly, who was not in the Upside Down or the real world, but in the third dimension they had only just then found out about. Holly, who probably thought nobody was coming to save her.

"Holly, we're coming!" Lucy yelled at her, glancing around in a panicked rush and racking her brain for a way to get her down safely.

"Hang on, Holly," Nancy cried, her eyes glistening with unshed tears. "Just hang on!"

"NANCY—"

Holly gave one final scream and flew up, as though something above retracted the string connecting her to the real world. She flailed and screeched and cried for Nancy, but within the blink of an eye she had disappeared into the murky Upside Down skyline once more.

Via Chatter

Nancy and Lucy simultaneously experiencing the same "I can't save her" feeling that they have both experienced already before .... ohhh lunance my soul sisters

Follow me on tiktok if you don't already ayyy @aquamcntii