One's body fell to the pavement as a darkness covered her vision. She couldn't tell if it was from her slow descent into unconsciousness or the large shadow of the Mind Flayer's monstrous form looming over her, and she didn't know which one was worse.

"Have you finally given up?" James' voice echoed faintly in One's head.

It took a moment for One to register the words spoken to her because exhaustion was slowly shutting down her body part-by-part, but she had just enough energy left in her to press a smile across her face and answer, "You wish."

As badly as One's broken body wanted to accept defeat, she knew she couldn't. Allowing the Mind Flayer to take her would not only incite the end for her, but the end for her friends and family as well. Somehow she was still breathing, albeit barely, and she could only determine one reason for this: the universe wanted her to clean up her mess.

She had been the one to bring James to the Upside Down. Even if it wasn't on purpose, it was because of her decision to escape the Lab that James had been exposed to the power of the Upside Down and transformed into the monster that now towered over her. As One contemplated this, a thought suddenly struck her. The power.

If James had been able to tap into the power of the Upside Down, surely she could too. She just had to figure out how...and she didn't have much time. One of James' tentacles was spiraling down upon her and she was currently powerless to stop it.

One shut her eyes tight so that she could focus all her energy on the power. As she tuned into the atmosphere around her, she got lost in the darkness past her eyelids and began to see images. She saw Steve and Hopper and Eleven and the party...Their wordless mouths moved in silent shapes but she couldn't decipher their messages.

One's eyes darted open in excitement when she felt a tickle across her skin but she quickly realized that it was just the wind generating from James' tentacle, which was inching closer and closer to her with every blink of her eyes. As the limb descended and sealed One inside, a silence met her that contrasted greatly with the chaos that had surrounded her just moments ago; a terrifying silence, a lonely silence.

"It's over, One," James whispered in One's mind. His voice was no longer malicious, but calm and reassuring. It caught One off guard for a moment.

One neglected to answer and continued to focus on accessing the power within the Upside Down. As she did so, a strange feeling overtook her. It started out small, like a feather caressing her skin, but it slowly grew until every hair on her arms stood on end. A warmth started to ebb from her skin and leaked out into the stale air around her like a blurry aura. Every function within her body became amplified; her blood pumping, her heart beating, her lungs filling...until it all blended into one amorphous concerto.

Next, One could feel parts of her slowly disappearing. First she went physically numb and then she went mentally numb. She couldn't think, she couldn't feel, she could only lay there as the strange force that had overtaken her drained her until she was almost a ghost of herself.

But as parts of her left, she could feel new parts merge with her, mix with the blank slate that was left behind. Thoughts and feelings that weren't hers; anger, hatred, loneliness. Memories of people and places she didn't recognize. Where did they come from?

James.

This strange feeling wasn't the power of the Upside Down, it was her merging with the Mind Flayer.

Before One had a chance to fight it, she was thrust into a series of memories that hijacked her mind and played out in her head like a movie.

"Oliver Nicholas Frederick Towns!" a sweet voice echoed from an unseen location. "Come wash up, it's time to eat!"

"Yes, mum, I'm coming!" answered the voice of a young boy.

The voice of the young boy came from around and within One, giving her the sense that she was viewing this memory through the young boy's eyes.

One watched the scenery of the memory shift from a bright blue sky, swaying trees, and freshly-cut grass to a small dining room lined with olive green wallpaper with white stripes that stretched from the floor to the ceiling. She, or rather the boy, Oliver, was sitting around a table facing three other people: a man, a woman, and a baby.

The man had a clean-shaven face, save the bushy moustache that sprouted beneath his nose. His dark hair and dark eyes gave the illusion of an even darker demeanor beneath his contrastingly pale skin and One felt her set of borrowed eyes quickly move away from him. They settled next on the woman, who offered a much kinder view. She had golden brown hair that fell to her shoulders in springs one would normally find in a mattress, and round cheeks that bunched up over a glowing smile. Despite her comforting appearance, her eyes shared a darkness that she had found in the man's, but also a familiarity...

Oliver's eyes drew away from the woman after a cry from the baby but One felt the need to go back to those brilliant brown eyes. She knew those eyes, she had looked into them too many times to count. She had even gotten lost in them on a handful of occasions. They were James' eyes.

It appeared that James' memories of his family had come back to him after all. And his real name wasn't James, or Seven...it was Oliver. Oliver Towns.

Oliver Towns and Sarah Hopper. Seven and One.

This thought echoed around One's empty mind until she was reeled back into the memory.

"Haven't you fed the baby yet?" the man asked sharply, his eyes never leaving the plate of food in front of him as he continued to eat. Another cry from the baby fastened into the highchair at the end of the table sent the woman to her feet.

"I'm sorry, I was so busy making dinner that I must have forgotten..." the woman answered frantically as she prepared some formula.

"I work long and hard every week to provide for this family, the least I expect is a quiet home to enjoy my dinner in," the man grumbled between bites of food.

A strong sense of discomfort overtook One. The feeling seemed to have come from out of nowhere, but some part of her knew that it was attached to this memory.

"I work long and hard too, Elliott!" the woman cried, slamming the bottle of formula against the table, which ignited a fit of wailing from the infant. Her features quickly untwisted themselves as she rushed to comfort the child.

"Oh, look what you've done now, Mary!" the man yelled, shoving the table as his chair slid back and he rose to his feet.

One looked down through Oliver's eyes to see that the table had been pushed so hard that it was touching his chest, trapping him in his chair. One felt her lungs fill with quick, shallow breaths as a mixture of emotions overwhelmed whatever senses she had left.

"Maybe if you actually helped with the children every once in a while shit like this wouldn't bloody happen!" the woman screamed.

"Do you hear that, Oliver?" the man turned to face the boy and gestured to him with his fork. He seemed oblivious to the distressed state that Oliver was in. "Your mother wants me to do everything! Perhaps I'll birth the next child myself too!"

The man then turned back to the woman and continued. "Why should I help when one of these kids isn't even mine? I think raising Oliver as my own after his bum father left when you got pregnant is more than enough!"

At this, the woman collapsed against the table and broke down into sobs that overpowered the baby's and the man disappeared from Oliver's vision. When he returned, he was holding a clear bottle with a golden brown liquid inside. He unscrewed the cap and began to drink straight from the spout.

"Oh, of course, we get into an argument and you immediately go for the liquor!" the woman lifted her head from her arms to yell at the man.

The man took another long swig before throwing the bottle against the wall and watching it shatter into a million tiny pieces. "There, you happy? No more liquor!"

Even though One wasn't physically in the memory, she could still feel the shards of glass spray against her skin and she looked down to see growing red specks dotted along Oliver's arm. Tiny pieces had also seasoned the food on the plate in front of her.

The woman pushed herself back to her feet and moved to point a finger in the man's face. "Why can't you act like a grown man for once?"

Before the woman could utter another word, the man grabbed the woman by her throat and shoved her against the wall. Her eyes filled with fear as her feet slowly began to lift from the floor.

"You want to see how a grown man acts?" the man growled as his grip tightened. "This is how a grown man acts. By putting you in your place! Feed the damn baby, shut the bloody hell up, and do not talk back to me."

The woman's face began to turn a bright shade of red as she struggled to breathe. She clawed at the man's hands but they were gripped too tightly around her throat. Her feet flailed in an attempt to find the floor but they were unsuccessful.

Watching the scene, One began to breathe harder and harder, almost as if to make up for the breaths that the woman had lost. Her palms became sweaty and she felt a powerful explosion building within her chest that didn't belong to her.

"STOP!" Oliver's voice exploded through the small room. While it was only a little louder than the baby's screaming, it carried an unseen power that shook the walls and everything within.

At Oliver's demand, the man and the woman froze to their spots and a glazed expression settled on their faces. Even the baby stopped crying and sat still in its highchair.

"Put her down!" Oliver commanded next and the man immediately obeyed.

A strange feeling rose along with the anger that One was experiencing as she was playing out this memory that wasn't hers. She felt surprised and confused but mostly something else...powerful.

"Move the table!" Oliver ordered next. This time his voice was a little quieter but it was still just as powerful. The man and woman each grabbed a side of the table and positioned it back into its original place.

One's line of sight shifted higher as Oliver stood from his chair and moved to stand before his parents. She felt the empty weight of the man and woman's emotionless stares as they remained under Oliver's control.

"No. More. Fighting."

With these last words, Oliver turned to leave the kitchen but the closer he got to the door the darker One's vision got. Soon she was wading through an inky blackness that seemed to expand infinitely until a pinprick of light appeared in the distance. The light slowly moved towards her incapacitated form until it was nearly swallowing her whole. As it did so, the edges of the blackness that had just recently held her began to blur and muffled noises entered her ears.

The light expanded until it took the form of Oliver's mom. She was standing in the same room that One had just left, but One got the sense that this memory took place later in time. One's sight was also limited, as she could only see the upper half of the woman over the countertop, and every so often she bobbed in and out of view. It appeared to One that Oliver was eavesdropping on his mother from behind a wall.

"Yes, Mrs. Betherst. I'm sorry," the woman said into the yellow rotary phone pressed to her ear. She anxiously played with the cord as she spoke, her pointer finger twisting in and out of the curly wire. "It won't happen again."

The man then entered the scene, arriving through some unseen door. He waited beside the woman until she hung up the phone and stared at her expectantly.

"That was Oliver's teacher," the woman informed him. "She said that there's been another incident."

"For the love of god..." the man muttered under his breath, pinching the bridge of his nose. He sighed deeply before continuing. "What did he do this time?"

"She said that he forced another student to give him their lunch," the woman answered cautiously between pursed lips.

"First he's forcing us to let him stay up past bedtime, then he's making the teacher cancel exams, now he's stealing lunches? What the fuck are we supposed to do with this kid?"

"Watch your language! The children..." the woman hushed the man.

"They're fine," the man waved her off. "Samantha is in her room and Oliver is downstairs."

The woman glanced around the room and One felt her sight pulled back into the darkness as Oliver ducked his head to avoid being seen.

"He scares me, Elliott," the woman whispered with quivering lips. "He's only an eleven year-old boy but he scares me."

"I know," the man sighed and placed an arm around the woman's shoulders. "He scares me too."

"What if he hurts someone?" the woman asked, her eyes glancing up towards the man's stolid face. "What if he hurts one of us? Or Samantha?"

"I won't let him," the man said firmly.

The woman pushed away from the man to look him in the eyes. "But how can you stop him? We don't understand these...abilities...or whatever they are. Lately I've been beginning to wonder if he's even human! All I know is that he's definitely not my sweet little boy."

"What do you suggest then?" the man asked.

"I..." the woman's voice cracked as she hesitated with what she wanted to say next. "I heard about a doctor...an American doctor who deals with children like Oliver."

"Can he cure him?"

"I don't know." The woman shook her head and bit the tip of her thumb. "But he can take him away from us."

The scene immediately cut off and One was thrown back into her own body. Part of her knew that her back was still pressed to the ground, but the infinite abyss of the tentacle made her feel like she was swimming. No, not swimming, sinking. Drowning beneath the weight of what she had just learned.

James had been right; his family had abandoned him.

"Oliver," One whispered, her empathy for the young boy expending itself into a single tear that sat in the corner of her eye. That was all she could afford though. She may have seen a broken little boy in those memories, but that boy was long gone. There was no saving him anymore.

An energy unlike the feeling that had been eating away at One suddenly began to grow within her chest. Where the merging had taken parts of her away, this new feeling put them back. One could feel herself slowly becoming whole again; slowly becoming stronger, slowly becoming more powerful.

Whether it was because One had merged enough with James to acquire his ability to harness the power of the Upside Down, or because some unknown factor decided that she was finally ready, or something else entirely...she found it. And once she tapped into the power, it didn't stop. It filled her to the seams and then spilled over, growing and growing until she couldn't tell where it stopped and she began.

One felt familiar crackles of electricity jump between her finger tips and her face became illuminated in a blue glow as she lifted her hands into her vision. It felt different this time than any other time. The electricity grew with the power until she was encased in a ball of blinding blue light that radiated with untamed energy.

"I'm sorry," One whispered to James before the ball of electricity exploded and obliterated the darkness of the Upside Down with a blinding white light.

When the whiteness subsided, the Mind Flayer was gone...

And the Upside Down was no more.

A portal opened in a dark space and a body fell through.

It took the shape of a young woman with blonde hair painted with faded red tips, a scratched black leather jacket, and holey jeans. Cuts, scrapes, and bruises decorated the visible skin that showed through her torn clothes.

She laid still on a thicket of blackened grass that snickered as it climbed around her motionless features. When it had nearly covered her from head to toe and swallowed her into the dark earth below, the woman's bright blue eyes shot open.

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