chapter fourteen
the mind flayer

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RUBY SITS IN THE BYERS' BATHROOM, as Nancy wraps a bandage around Ruby's left arm. She's awkwardly perched on the toilet, sitting in her bra because her top's too tight to roll up past the scratches. Ruby wasn't too bothered about being almost topless, joking to Nancy that there wasn't much to see anyway. But she felt better, Nancy helping her compared to anyone else. And, besides, Joyce seems a little preoccupied right now, what with her boyfriend dying...

"So... What's going on, with you and Jonathan?" says Ruby, as Nancy finishes up the first set of bandages.

Nancy falls silent for a moment, and smiles awkwardly. "I mean... I could say the same for you and Steve," she says. Ruby doesn't say anything, hoping that her quietness will encourage Nancy to explain. "I think I wanted Jonathan to ask me out after last year, but he never did, and Steve came back... I was surprised, though. I thought Steve liked you... He sure acted like he was pining still."

"Yeah, uh," says Ruby. "He said he loved me last Christmas."

"Oh," says Nancy, her eyes widening. "That's... big."

"Right?" she says, thankful that someone actually agrees with her. "But Carol and Tommy hated him, and I didn't want to be a loser like you guys... no offence..." Nancy snorts. "So I told him to leave me alone."

Nancy begins to clean the second set of scratches, and Ruby inhales sharply; as she does so, Nancy murmurs an apology. The scratches aren't too bad, thankfully. Ruby's mostly worried about their overall presence, considering the way that Will's been affected by the Upside Down. What if that happens to her?

Ruby looks across at Nancy, as she cleans one of the cloths she used to clean the wounds. "Isn't it weird," says Nancy, "how all this year, none of us were with the person we actually wanted to be with?"

The eldest out of the two sighs. Ruby Brenner, the queen of Hawkins High, the editor of the school newspaper, the girl who's mere presence terrorised the self-esteem of every Hawkins High student. Ruby Brenner, who's auntie has the cool business job in the city. Ruby Brenner, best ass in her class. Ruby Brenner, who one time spoke to David Bowie and he told her she was pretty. Ruby Brenner, who in her first month at Hawkins High — having just hit puberty — was consistently called Rose by the teachers, mistaking her for her mom... Ruby Brenner, the crush of every one in her school; she couldn't walk three feet in Hawkins without someone recognising her. Carol used to tell her, "Everyone wants you as either a friend or a fuck," which Steve would call gross. A lot of the time, Ruby sees herself as two people: this Ruby, the Ruby that everyone fantasises over, and her actual self, the girl who wound up a lab experiment, who knows everyone only sees her that way, because she was made to be like that. She's perfect because the lab made her so. But the projection of herself is not her, and she knows that. She sees the way Nancy is carefully tending to her wounds, the way that Steve jumped to her defence earlier, and she appreciates the care in those friendships. Carol and Tommy would never do that. So, what's the point in being popular, if her friends don't even care about her?

"I can't wait for high school to be over," says Ruby, finally. "I'm... I'm kind-of sick, of wanting nothing but Snowflake Queen, when it means nothing."

"There's something about the culture, I think," says Nancy, agreeing with her. "Everyone worries about these—these bullshit ideas, when they aren't important. Like, there'll be another Snowflake Queen. Another basketball captain, another newspaper editor... No one remembers that stuff, but it feels so important in the moment. It's so weird."

Ruby wishes she hung out with Nancy more, this year.

"I was so jealous of you, you know," says Ruby.

"Why?" says Nancy, surprised. "Because of Steve?"

"Partly," she admits. "But you're so... normal. And I'm never going to be that. And I don't mean that in a back-handed way, I genuinely mean it. I remember you telling me and Jonathan, last year, about your parents and the stereotype of it all, but I wish that was me. I would kill to be normal... I wish I never got these powers."

Nancy frowns at Ruby, and argues, "But they're what make you, you. Last year, so much made sense when I found out about your powers. Like, your opinion of yourself—" Ruby scoffs. "—Not like that!" Nancy starts to smile, embarrassed. "I mean... You have such a high opinion of yourself, because you've got these powers and you know you're important — but then, you're desperate to be normal, so you're fixated on your appearance and how you present yourself to others. And... I don't know. Your recklessness is terrifying, but admirable. You're a superstar, Rubes."

Ruby smiles softly.

"I was jealous of you, too," says Nancy, as she wraps Ruby's arm with the bandage. "When me and Steve first started dating, just before Will went missing... He always talked about you. And I always thought that I'd never compare to you, because who would? You're Ruby Brenner, and when we became friends, I realised why Steve loved you so much. And I think that's why it wouldn't work out with me and him, because I'm not the person he likes, and... and I think that Jonathan was always a better fit for me, I just didn't want to admit it."

"And that's why...?"

"We slept together, yeah," says Nancy, and she starts to blush.

Ruby grins. "Was he... good...?"

"Oh my God, stop, someone's gonna hear," says Nancy, starting to laugh. "But it was nice."

That's, like, the worst way to put it. Nice? It was nice? What does nice mean? Like, amazing, or just... positively average? If Ruby was Jonathan, she'd be punching the wall right now. This is so embarrassing for him.

She wonders what Steve's like...

... Anyways.

"Thank you, for this," says Ruby, gesturing to her bandaged arms.

Ruby's top was dirty from the monster's blood, she was given one of Joyce's jumpers, a black knitted one that's pretty scratchy, but Ruby can't complain. She pulls it over her head, and checks herself in the mirror, making sure she's cleaned all of the blood off of her. Her jeans are still covered, but she'll have to make do for now. Apparently, her dad called her auntie a load whilst he was in the lab, trying to check in on Ruby and not realising that (a) her auntie was out of town, and (b) Ruby was out, which (c) her auntie didn't realise, because her auntie doesn't know about any of the lab stuff. So, (d) if Ruby were to head home for clean clothes, her auntie would most likely not let her leave, thinking Ruby tried to run away. So it's blood-stained jeans or nothing, and it's too cold for the latter.

Nancy shrugs. "Don't even worry about it," she says. "You know, you don't have to hang out with Carol and Tommy if you don't want to."

"I know," says Ruby, sighing.

Ruby keeps on thinking about things, as she cleans up the bathroom, placing the first aid kit back in the kitchen cupboard. She thinks about everything from the past year. Her mind trails back to the first day at school, after they found Will and killed the monster. She was determined to go back to normal, she was angry every time Steve asked her how she made fire appear out of nowhere, and the way that her 'friends' treated her made everything worse. She couldn't go back to normal, because Carol and Tommy thought she had spent the week fucking Jonathan, and God forbid she do such a thing. Her best friend Steve was now a pariah, too, and although Ruby tried to make things work — Steve had no interest in staying popular, whilst Ruby did. And, frankly, the questions about monsters and laboratories stopped when he left them. It sucked, losing her best friend, but it was either she lost him, or she lost the normalcy she craved...

But that's normalcy's been pretty shit, since Steve left.

She hears her dad on the phone, trying to get some military backup. He's convinced that a couple of tanks will solve this, which Ruby doubts. He shouts into the phone, "I am the police! Chief Jim Hopper!" There's a pause, as the person on the other line speaks. Ruby crosses the room to Steve, passing Will, who's unconscious on the sofa, his skin damp. "Yes, the number that I gave you, yes! OK, yes, I got it... I will be here." He hangs up the phone, and groans.

Ruby crosses her arms. "That worked well."

Hopper gives her a look. "We'll see."

"'We'll see'?" Mike echoes in disbelief. "We can't just sit here while those things are loose!"

"We stay here, and we wait for help," says Hopper, pointing his finger at Mike. Her dad's seen better days, that's for sure. Ruby wonders how he's doing, after that whole stunt in the Upside Down. He turns to her, though, which almost makes her jump. "We need to talk."

"Uh..."

Hopper starts walking away from the others, and Ruby figures she's got no choice but to follow. The two end up in Will's bedroom, Ruby remembering last year, when her and her friends were stuck in this room whilst the monster lurked outside. Her dad closes the door, before turning to her.

"What happened out there?" he says.

Ruby feels a little awkward. "With... what?"

"You killed one of those things," he says.

"... Yes."

"Are you going to tell me how?"

Ruby pauses. She doesn't really want to.

"That wasn't a question, Ruby," her dad says.

Ruby shoots him a nasty look. "Did you not, like, notice, when Mom went crazy?"

"I don't understand..."

Ruby rolls her eyes. She remembers the elaborate explanation she gave to Steve, and how she's already given this explanation to Max. She's getting fed up. Part of her wonders if she can just tag-team Steve in. Test him to see if he was listening. It would make it easier for her.

"OK. So. Mom went to the lab for tests when she was pregnant," says Ruby. Her dad nods, brows furrowing. "Grandpa wanted to make the perfect human. Me. When I was, like, three, or something, I saw one of those monsters, and I got powers. Do you understand so far?"

"I'm not stupid," says Hopper, and Ruby looks at him as if to say, sure.

"But Grandpa was like, oh, wow, that's so cool! She's got powers! So when Mom got pregnant again, he upped the experiments. That baby died 'cause of it, Mom got depressed and died, then you drank loads... and here we are."

Hopper sits down on Will's bed, looking up at her. "And that's why you hate me?"

Ruby takes a minute to reply. She doesn't hate him. She resents him, yeah, absolutely, but she doesn't think she hates him. He just pisses her off. And Ruby's always found it bizarre, how he never noticed the stuff happening to her mom. Did he never think, that there was a reason her mom was obsessing over the lab, why she died? Her mom was erratic, that's what her grandpa told her...

"I don't hate you," says Ruby. "But I think you should've noticed what mom was going through."

"OK." Hopper frowns, glancing over at the door. "So you've had these secret powers for most of your life, right? And no one found out? Not even Steve?" It throws her off, that he still remembers his name. Ruby remembers when they were kids, the few times her dad would visit when she started living with her auntie, and how Ruby would get frustrated because she'd rather be at Steve's. But she nods, to what her dad's saying. "So... Where do you think you got that from?" Ruby frowns. "Your mom was good at hiding things."

"But still—"

"I wish I knew what was happening to you, because I would've stopped it," says Hopper. "I wish I didn't become an alcoholic, I wish I didn't ruin things with you. But I'm trying, and I don't want you to spend your whole life resenting me for something I didn't know about. What if one of us dies from these things, and we can't change things? I don't want—" He sighs. "I don't wanna die, and you spend the rest of your life wishing things had been different."

Ruby contemplates things. She used to be a daddy's girl; when she was little, she'd make her dad join in on her tea parties, she'd beg her mom to go and visit him at work, where everyone thought Ruby was the cutest (she was). But when Ruby's mom died, everything shifted. It was her and her dad, and he couldn't cope, so her auntie stepped in. Her dad tried to still see her, but he had a problem, so the visits grew to be less and less — and when he did visit, Ruby wasn't interested. By the time she joined middle school, she wanted nothing to do with him. Her grandpa was a decent enough father figure, that was all.

But the panic she felt the other night, thinking he was in danger. Ruby knows she still loves him, there's just years of history on top of it now. It would take work to get through it all — but, the mere idea of having a dad... Ruby, deep down, wishes she had that.

So Ruby sighs. "OK."

"OK...?"

"I'm not gonna forgive you instantly," Ruby tells him. "But... obviously... I still... love you." She struggles getting that out, cringing at herself. "It would be nice to see you more than once... Well, every time this shit happens."

"Language," he says, quietly.

Ruby starts to smile.

"We'll figure out the best way to do this, once this is over," says Hopper, and he gets to his feet, pulling Ruby into a hug. "I love you too."

Suddenly, Ruby feels like a kid again. Her face feels squished against her dad's stomach, and she keeps on thinking about how much she adored him when she was little. She doesn't know if she'll ever get back to that place, but it'd be nice to try.

"So what's going on with you and that boy?"

Ruby pulls away from her dad. "You know his name?"

Hopper looks suspicious. "That's not an answer."

"He's not my boyfriend," says Ruby. "I'm going now."

Her dad starts to smirk at her, and Ruby can feel herself blush. As she leaves Will's bedroom, she walks back to where Steve was standing — but, instead, she sees him standing closer to the kids. He looks up at her, and gestures for her to come towards him.

"Tell Rubes," he says, to Dustin.

"We think we know how to stop this thing," says Dustin, looking up at her.

Mike nods. "All of those demodogs—"

Ruby opens her mouth to question the name, but Steve goes, "Just go along with it."

"Demodogs," Ruby nods.

"We think they're his army," says Mike. "The shadow monster."

"The shadow monster?" says Ruby.

"Whatever's controlling Will, and the demodogs," says Mike, and Ruby furrows her brows, trying to understand. "The doctor said it was like a virus..."

"And that's what's connecting Will to the tunnels," Max tells Ruby.

Mike nods. "To the tunnels, the Upside Down, everything... The shadow monster's inside everything. And if the vines feel something like pain, then so does Will."

"And so does Dart," Lucas adds.

"Yeah!" says Mike, turning to him. Ruby presumes she's been caught up, as the two look like they're brainstorming. "Like what Mr Clarke taught us. The hive mind."

"Hive mind?" says Steve.

"A collective consciousness," says Mike. "It's a super-organism. And this is the thing that controls everything. It's the brain."

Dustin nods. "Like the mind flayer."

Max and Ruby frown, and almost in sync, go, "The what?"

Ruby looks around, and notices that her dad hasn't reappeared yet. She raises her hand to Dustin, placing her index fingers to her lips as means to say stop talking. "DAD!" she calls out, and the second he returns, she relays the information back to him. She turns back to Dustin. "Continue."

"The mind flayer."

Hopper frowns. "What the hell is that?"

"It's a monster from an unknown dimension," Dustin explains to him. Ruby crosses her arms, the scratches on her arms feeling uncomfortable. They feel itchy, and if she wasn't worried about the infection, or the scarring, she would take her nails to the wounds and scratch. "It's so ancient that it doesn't even know its true home. It enslaves races of other dimensions by taking over their brains using its highly-developed psionic powers."

"Oh, my God, none of this is real," says Hopper. "This is a kids' game."

"No, it's a manual. And it's not for kids. And unless you know something that we don't, this is the best metaphor—"

"Analogy."

"Analogy? That's what you're worried about? Fine. An analogy for understanding whatever the hell this is—"

Ruby rolls her eyes. "The mind flayer thingy!" she says. "What does it want?"

"To conquer us, basically," says Dustin. "It believes it's the master race."

Steve frowns. "... Like... the Germans?"

"Uh, the Nazis?" says Dustin.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, the Nazis," says Steve, who looks a little embarrassed with himself. Ruby puts her hand on top of his, the two leaning over the table. She knows history, but this other stuff flies straight over her head.

"If the Nazis were from another dimension, totally," says Dustin. "It views other races, like us, as inferior to itself."

"It wants to spread, take over other dimensions," says Mike.

Lucas nods. "We are talking about the destruction of our world as we know it."

Steve moves away from her, starting to pace around. "That's great," he says to himself. "That's really great. Jesus!" Ruby has visions of last year, how he reacted pretty similarly then, too. She wants to go back, to check on him, but she knows she needs to understand this... Whatever this is.

"Okay, so," Nancy says. "If this thing is like a brain that's controlling everything, then if we kill it..."

"We kill everything it controls," says Mike.

"So how do you kill this thing?" says Hopper. "Shoot it with Fireballs or something?"

Dustin shakes his head, and chuckles. "No. No, no Fire... No Fireballs. Uh, you summon an undead army, uh, because... because zombies, you know, they don't have brains, and the mind flayer, it... it... It likes brains." His confidence in himself dissipates, and he shakes his head. "It's just a game."

Ruby groans, just as her dad puts his hands to his head.

"What the hell are we doing here?" says Hopper.

"I thought we were waiting for your military backup," says Dustin, glaring.

Hopper argues, "We are!"

"How are they gonna stop this?" Mike argues. "You can't just shoot this with guns!"

"You don't know that!" Hopper says. "We don't know anything!"

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

"We know that it's only a matter of time before those tunnels reach this town—"

Ruby presses her fingers to her temples, feeling overwhelmed. She wishes she knew more about the Upside Down, that these kids weren't explaining it to her using some stupid board game. Bored game, more like. She feels her skin warming up, uncomfortable about all of these thoughts about the demogorgon, the demodog, the mind flayer. Her brain doesn't like that last one. She tries to think things through, but she's clueless. She doesn't understand the Upside Down, she doesn't understand it like Eleven did. All Ruby knows is how to kill those things.

"We have to kill it," says Joyce, who's since emerged from her room. Ruby doesn't think she'll ever get Joyce's screams out of her head, how blood-curdling they were when her boyfriend died... "I want to kill it."

"Me, too, Joyce, okay?" her dad tells her, putting his hands on Joyce. Ruby's eyes narrow. She doesn't like that. "But how do we do that? We don't exactly know what we're dealing with here." He looks across at Ruby. "Do you?"

"I can kill it, yeah," says Ruby. "But I don't know anything."

"But he does," Mike chimes in. Ruby frowns. "If anyone knows how to destroy this thing, it's Will. He's connected to it. He'll know its weakness."

Ruby's eyes, like everyone else's in the room, fall to Will, unconscious on the sofa.

"I thought we couldn't trust him anymore," says Max. "That he's a spy for the mind flayer now."

"But he can't spy if he doesn't know where he is."

This is the worst week of Ruby's life.

i kinda don't like the last half of this but like... i guess sometimes i have to follow the actual show :/ i hope it wasn't too boring lol but i can't not include it... but i liked writing the first half!! ruby is going through development yay!! pls lmk what you thought! i'm really excited for season 3 AH!