◦☆＊★ ━━━━━━ ★＊☆◦

The rain had picked up greatly when they left Max's house. The girls were forced to put on the rain jackets they'd brought with them, Sam giving them the reminder that it was going to rain, although neither girl had heard anything about that. Nevertheless, Max and El were grateful Sam had told them.

Now, Sam was wearing an electric blue rain jacket, the color of it scarily similar to the color of that spark of electricity she'd created in El's room. El's rain jacket was red, while Max's was yellow. Sam had joked that they were the primary color trio.

Because of their young age, the girls had to bike in the rain so that they could reach the local pool. Well, Sam and Max biked, while El rode on the back of Sam's. It wasn't a two-seater bike like Mike's or Lucas's, so El really just had to hover over Sam in the single seat, but they made it work.

The reason they were at the local pool was not just because Billy worked there, it was also due to the fact El found a lifeguard fanny pack and bloody whistle with the ice tub in Billy's bathroom. After parking their bikes, they jogged under the overhead to both get away from the rain and contact the front desk.

Luckily, the pool manager wasn't hard to stop. He was reclined behind the brick half-wall lazily, reading a newspaper and accompanied by another female lifeguard who had the same nonchalant attitude. They didn't even look up when Sam, Max, and El approached them.

"Excuse me?" Max announced their presence impatiently, hair drenched and curling like the other two.

Not even sparing Max a glance, the pool manager drawled, "No one in the water until thirty minutes after the last strike. And don't try and argue with me. You wanna get electrocuted, go climb a tree."

Sam scoffed, offended with the rudeness that was totally unnecessary. "Excuse me, Polo Shirt. We're not here to swim," her look morphed unsure for a beat, "or get electrocuted."

"We found this," El said, holding up the fanny pack they'd found.

Finally, the pool manager looked up from his newspaper, though his demeanor was still frustrating. He eyed the accessory silently.

"Does that belong to anybody here?" asked Max.

"Oh yeah," he finally spoke. "That's Heather's. I'll get it back to her."

"We could give it back to her," El blurted, sounding much too eager for the statement to go overlooked.

The pool manager tilted his head in offensive amusement. "You could... 'cept she's not here. Bailed on me today."

Sam, Max, and El looked to each other, sharing expressions of rising suspicion. Sam met El's eyes, and El's eyebrows raised gravely. Sam gulped.

"What is this?" asked the dude, watching the looks on their faces. "You girls want a reward or something?"

Sam turned away from Max and El to put on a fake smile of innocence for him. "Nope!" she cheered falsely, shoulders rising with a virtuous gaze. "We're just good Samaritans."

The girl lifeguard next to the pool manager smiled at Sam, pleased, which Sam didn't really understand, so she eyed the girl in wary confusion.

Sam felt movement from right next to her, and glanced to the side to see Max was turning around. Not only that, but El was walking away. Clearly Sam didn't get the memo.

She quickly faced the two lifeguards again, said, "Bye! Have a good day!" before seeing what El and Max (mainly El) were up to.

They'd walked over to a bulletin board which had flyers and American flags posted onto it. On the left side, there was a headline that read MEET YOUR '85 SWIM SEASON LIFEGUARDS. Pinned underneath, were six labeled pictures of the presumed lifeguards. Max and El were staring at it seriously.

First, Sam saw Adam, which was "pool manager's" name, so Sam was glad she could finally pin a real name on the dude. But, then, Sam actually saw what was important.

"Heather," said Max, eyes on the beautiful lifeguard whose picture was fifth. In the picture, Sam could note both her fanny pack and the whistle that had once been yellow but was now bloodied.

Sam sucked in a weary breath, because this was just fucking unnerving. She forced her eyes off of Heather's picture, and onto El. "Do you think you can find her?" asked Sam.

El precautiously looked back at where the pool manager (Adam) flirted with the other lifeguard (Sam still didn't know her name). They weren't paying attention to anything around them in the slightest.

So, El reached forward and stole Heather's picture from the bulletin board.

The three girls rushed to the changing rooms before anyone could notice what they had done. Although they didn't need to speak, Sam formed a plan for them quickly so as to get the job done in a swift and efficient manner.

"We need something to black out your vision," Sam told El. "You and Max, you need to find something to make that happen. I doubt the community pool has a blindfold, so... I'm thinking goggles and duct tape, like that one night in the middle school." Max looked confused at the reference, but didn't question it, because El clearly understood. "And there's no radio, so I think if I turned all the showerheads on, they'd do well enough for white noise. Would that be all right, El?"

El nodded.

"Okay, perfect," Sam returned the nod. "Then we'll meet back in the women's shower room."

"Go team," Max said lightly through an exhale; Sam's capabilities as a whole would always astound her.

Sam smiled back at her, kindly. "Go team," she repeated in amusement.

While Max and El left the changing rooms, Sam traveled deeper. There was another room, deeper into the changing rooms, where the showers resided. Sam saw about ten cubicles, showers in each, that she figured would work perfectly in drowning out the noise and allowing El to focus. She quickly got to work, flipping on all of the levers. The sound of her breathing was drowned out (ha, "drowned out," get it?) by the water droplets pouring from the shower heads and onto the shower room's ground.

Max and El didn't take long in what Sam advised them to do. When they entered the shower room, Max was holding a pair of scuba goggles blacked-out via grey duct tape, and El was holding Heather's picture. Sam smiled at them in approval as they walked over to where she sat on the end of a bench. There was a gap from the end of Sam's bench before another one was placed. El sat down, crisscrossed on the floor of that gap, while Max sat at the end of the other bench, to the left of El.

Max handed El the goggles, and El set the picture of Heather down before her to grab them. El fastened them on her head in the same manner that the rest of the Party had done before they entered the Upside Down tunnels; the difference between then and now was that the El's goggles provided no sight for her.

Sam and Max just watched her, giving El silence as she tried finding Heather.

After about a minute of nothing, Sam watched as El frowned in real life, meaning she saw something in the void.

"What do you see?" Sam asked, thumb rubbing the B pendant on her gold necklace.

"A door," whispered El unsurely. "A red door."

El went quiet again, presumably inspecting said door more thoroughly. Sam's eyebrows crinkled as a cold feeling crawled through her body, reaching her chest. Max noted the sharp intake of breath, gaze darting between Sam and El warily. She couldn't deny that the two girls were freaking her out recently. Especially when they were agreeing on something that Max couldn't see or feel. As much as Sam refused to accept it, there was something going on with her, and it was getting creepy.

But all those thoughts were thrown out of the window when El gasped in terror and threw the goggles off abruptly. Her head whipped around the room, trying to remember where she was and remind herself she was still here. Her hands grasped the floor uselessly, hyperventilating.

"What happened?" Sam reached down, placing a gentle hand on El's back worriedly. El continued panting, blood dripping down her nostril. Sam shared a panicked look with Max, briefly, then repeated, "El? What happened?"

El seemed shocked at the contact Sam provided, and not in the surprised definition. She tried stabilizing her breathing, holding her head with her hands, fingers gripping her scalp.

Sam hadn't needed to ask. She already knew:

Something was wrong Something was wrong Something was wrong.

◦☆＊★ ━━━━━━ ★＊☆◦

Something was wrong was on a repeat in Sam's head from the moment El jumped out of the void. She knew it, and El knew it, and now it was something they couldn't deny.

After the red door, El had seen Heather. Heather, in the bathtub at Max's house. Heather, who pleaded "Help me" to El. Heather, who had been sucked under right after, like she was already lost and beyond assistance.

Something was wrong Something was wrong Something was wrong.

Sam biked in front of Max, El on Sam's back. She was looking for the place El had seen in the void, using El's input muttered into Sam's ear for help. They needed to find the same red door El found, and they needed to find it quick.

Luckily, Sam's instincts were taking her in the right direction.

Sam didn't know how, but she somehow, miraculously, had biked onto the correct street. Rain hammered down above her, drenching Sam despite having the hood of her blue raincoat over her head. El, suddenly, nudged Sam from behind, causing Sam to brake on her bike. Max was quick to follow behind Sam, skidding to a stop. They all surveyed the house to the left of them, though having to squint because of the crowding rain and dark night.

"Is this it?" Max asked unsurely.

El's eyes were glued onto the red door. She nodded in certainty.

Lightning flashed above Sam's head, thunder clapped as she took a deep breath in. "Well," she kicked down the stand to her bike, hopping off of it, "let's solve the case of the missing lifeguard."

El got off of Sam's bike, the object standing up on its own due to the kickstand attached to it. Max propped up her bike, too; dismounting it and joining Sam and El as they walked to the porch of the house.

For a few moments, the girls just stared at the red door before them. El was in the middle, hands curled into fists at her sides. The super-powered girl sucked in a sharp breath, and—

"Sam, what are you doing?" asked Max.

Sam's hand was also curled into a fist; only, that fist was raised up, right in front of the red door. She froze in place, and only her head glanced back to meet Max's confused expression.

"I'm knocking...?" Sam answered, as if that should've been obvious.

Max and El glanced at Sam, glanced to each other, then back at Sam.

"Are you serious?"

"Yes, I'm serious," Sam cried over the pounding rain in response to Max's question. Her friends still looked completely incredulous, so Sam's hands flew up in the air, baffled. "I can't not knock! That would just be rude."

Max sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose for a moment. "Sam, we're not gonna just—" she eyed Sam longer, knowing her friend meant every word she said. Tiredly, Max continued, "Whatever. Never mind. Go ahead."

"Thank you," Sam said, pointedly ignoring the agitation in Max's tone. She faced the door again, bringing her fist back up and tapping her knuckles against the wood in a knock, knock, knock, knock, knock... knock, knock! pattern.

A minute passed. Then another. Then another.

Sam frowned. "No one's answering the door."

"I can open it," El announced, reminding Sam that they never needed to knock in the first place. El was pretty sure Sam knew that, and just refused to be seen as impolite, but she also wanted Sam to know they were going more for a "not seen nor heard" operation.

"Oh, you wanted to—" Sam realized, nodding to herself and stepping back from the door. "Okay, sorry. Go ahead."

Once again, El held her arms firmly at her sides. Her head tilted downwards, slightly, and her gaze was set furiously on the red door. In the next few seconds, the door unlocked without any contact necessary. It opened up slowly, creaking to a stop, showcasing the inside of the house to Sam, Max, and El.

Max walked into the house first, each step just as hesitant as the last. As Sam took down the hood of her wet raincoat, she heard light string music playing throughout the house.

While the house was warm, Sam couldn't help but feel a biting cold in her chest.

The three exited the narrow hallway, only to be met with a second narrow hallway. It was dimly lit in warm lighting, which should have worked to ease Sam's nerves, but it seemed that nothing would be accomplishing that goal.

Max noticed the big picture frame first. Since she was leading the line of three, she walked over and came to a stop before it. Sam was in the middle, so she stood right in front of the picture and stared at it in unease.

The picture was of a family portrait — not a silly, bright one, like pictures Sam, Max, and El had taken in the mall, but a serious, familiar one. There were two older figures in the picture; a man and a woman that Sam didn't know. That part didn't matter, because Sam did recognize the younger, beautiful girl that leaned her head on her father's shoulder with a bright smile.

"Heather," Sam whispered, feeling her breath catch in her throat.

Max's brows furrowed, because she was really put off now. "This is her house."

El breathed out shakily at the realization.

Suddenly, the trio heard loud, bright laughter belonging to a woman. Sam's heart dropped in fear, but they ultimately chose to follow the noise and inspect the house further.

When they left the hall they were in, the three girls were met with what could only be the Holloways' living room. There was where the stereo played the instrumental music. Sam urged to change the channel, urged to get Fleetwood Mac playing instead, but held back her impulsive urges to analyze the scene a little more.

Connected to the living room was the dining room. At the dining table, were three people and four chairs set for eating. Sam inhaled through her nose when she saw Heather's mom and dad laughing with Billy. It was weird to see him laughing so happily, dressed perfectly in a light blue button-up, but it was undeniably Billy.

Sam, Max, and El just stood, having no clue what to think, say, or do.

"He's so funny," Mrs. Holloway commented to her husband, in regard to whatever joke the apparently-friendly Billy had told.

Everything seemed fine. Everything seemed so perfectly fine, yet the sight only made Sam's chest constrict further. She wondered where Heather was. She wondered why Billy was behaving this way.

Finally, the three occupants of the dining room seemed to realize there were random teenage girls just standing in the house. Their eyes narrowed on them in bafflement.

"Max!" Billy said, tone light, which only made Sam's heart grow heavy.

The girls blinked back at the older occupants' bewildered faces nervously.

"We didn't mean to... barge in," Max tried searching for an excuse that didn't lead to being labeled as breaking and entering. "We tried to knock, but... maybe you didn't hear us over the storm."

Oh, so, now you're grateful I knocked, Sam thought, spitefully, but knew better than to say that aloud. Although, Max could read Sam's look, so she nudged Sam discreetly, side-eyeing her.

Mr. Holloway's lips were tight. He looked unimpressed with the whole situation. "I'm sorry," he started, waving a hand at the trio of girls, "who is this dripping all over my living room right now?"

"Our bad, Mr. and Mrs. Holloway," Sam grimaced, trying to make the situation a little better. "Y-You have a lovely home!"

Max elbowed Sam in the side, harder this time.

"Ow."

Billy exhaled a chuckle — one that held a condescending tone that didn't go unnoticed by Sam. "I'm sorry. Janet, Tom, this... is my sister, Maxine."

As Janet cooed, "Ohh!" happy to see a relative of the pleasant (sarcasm, by the way) Billy, Billy got up from his seat at the dining table and walked up to the girls. Tom, still stared at them unamused, and Sam was getting the feeling he didn't like the fact they busted into his home very much.

"What on earth are you doing here?" Billy stared down at Max, hiding his ferocity with a clearly-fake smile. "Is something wrong?"

Max had never and would never be deterred by Billy in any way, shape, or form. She held his gaze unrelentingly, said, "We just wanted to make sure everything was okay."

"'Okay?' Why wouldn't it be okay?" asked Billy, voice thick with fake concern.

Max seemed astounded by this new attitude of Billy's. She tried to hide being affected by it, but it was so bizarre that she couldn't help stare at him with a bewildered expression.

"Where is she?" El demanded, not buying the behavior for a second.

Billy's head tilted, just in the scary slightest, and his gaze planted on El. Slowly, he said, "I'm sorry. Where is who?"

"Well, they're a little burned!" Heather came out from the kitchen harboring a kind smile, holding a pan of cookies with oven mitts. "I'm sorry—"

Heather immediately stopped at the sight of Sam, Max, and El in the living room. Her smile fell, caught by surprise.

The whole situation reminded Sam all-too-much of that nightmare she'd had a few days ago. The fake one, creating the eerie scenario of Sam with her family in the car right before her parents died.

I told you we were going to be late because of the damn casserole, Tony!

We couldn't show up empty-handed! It's okay if we're late, darling.

Sammy? What's wrong, sweetie?

This... This isn't right. This isn't right. What's going on? What's going on?

"Heather!" cheered Billy, pretending the tension didn't exist. "This is my sister, Maxine." He made eye contact with El, again. "And, I'm sorry, I did not quite catch your name."

El gave Billy a hardened glare. Bluntly, distastefully, she answered, "El."

"El," repeated Billy, her name sounding gross on his tongue. Thunder rumbled outside, the two stared at each other, and Sam didn't like how it all made her feel in the slightest.

"I'm Sam," she couldn't help herself from blurting, trying to defuse the tension. She was met with annoyed stares from almost everyone, and tried shrinking into herself. "If... anyone was wondering..."

"Oh," Billy smiled, amused, "I know all about you, Samantha."

He called her Samantha, just like how he had done the morning of Sam and Max's sleepover. That moment was the exact moment Sam had recalled in Max's bathroom, with the anxiety that his behavior was connected to what happened last year. Sam furrowed her brows and clutched her chest with her hand, sensing something was wrong.

"Now, what is it you were saying, El?" Billy quickly put his attention back onto the young brunette again, almost condescendingly. "You were looking for somebody?"

But how could El say that she was looking for Heather, who was right in front of them, perfectly healthy and alive and not missing?

Case of the missing lifeguard, solved.

Eyes on Heather, El stammered, "I — I saw — I saw you—"

"Your manager," Max quickly interjected, swallowing the panicked note in her voice. "At the pool. He said you guys didn't come in to work today, so we got worried."

Billy was quick to dismiss the worry, explaining, "Heather wasn't feeling so hot today, so we thought we'd take the day off to nurse her back to health."

Sam raised an unconvinced eyebrow at him. Really, something was wrong.

"Are you sure?" challenged Sam. "Or was the problem that she was hot?"

Billy stiffened slightly. His head craned towards Sam. "What was that?" he questioned.

Sam glared at him, and they both seemed to know what she meant.

He likes it cold.

"Nothing," grumbled Sam fiercely, once she knew he understood.

"Right," Billy held the same, tense tone, "well, she's feeling just fine now, aren't you, Heather?"

"I'm feeling so much better," Heather nodded, and it all felt like forced comforting. It all felt wrong. "Do you girls want a cookie? They're fresh out of the oven."

Thunder rumbled again. They stared at the tray.

The girls denied Heather's offer, wanting to get out of the house as fast as they could. Sam practically ran to where her bike was propped up by the kickstand; she could feel Billy's burning gaze on her, as he was the one to let the girls out of the house. Max and El were joining the bikes with her, and none of them said anything yet, knowing Billy was in earshot.

They hadn't found a single piece of incriminating evidence, and yet, Sam's anxiety wasn't quelled in the slightest.

◦☆＊★ ━━━━━━ ★＊☆◦

The rain did not dare to cease when the girls traveled to Sam's house for another sleepover. If anything, the weather got worse; in the coziness of her room, Sam could hear the hammering rain and roaring thunder. She could see bolts of lightning through her window, even though her sunshine-patterned curtains were drawn.

If Sam was honest, she enjoyed this room of hers a thousand times more than her old one on Mike and Lucas's street. Since Aunt Kathryn and Uncle Dan's divorce, they had to move. While this house was significantly smaller than the last, it brought everything the other house did not — comfort, warmth, and happiness.

"Your boyfriend won't stop calling," Stephanie had told her once Sam stepped into the house, soaking wet.

Sam sighed, taking off her rain jacket and hanging it on the coat rack. "I'll talk to him later, Steph. Give me a minute."

Stephanie huffed, unamused — Sam usually cared a lot more about her relationships than the nonchalance she was displaying now.

"Do you know where Core is?" asked Stephanie then, like a mom.

"Why are you asking me?" Sam shrugged. "I'm not his keeper."

"You know where he is, don't you?"

"Yeah," Sam exhaled in defeat. "He's at Mike's."

"Okay, well—"

"I don't know if you noticed, Steph, but I kinda have people over," Sam gestured towards Max and El, the latter who was just standing there awkwardly. "This is El. Short for Eleanor. She's Mike's cousin from Sweden. We're having a sleepover."

El snorted, having been the only one who understood the inside joke. You wouldn't be able to tell it even was a joke if you hadn't been friends with a Party a few years ago.

Since that interaction, Sam and Max had properly gotten ready for bed. Sam lent the girls clean and dry clothes to change into, and Sam had done the same herself. While Sam and Max situated themselves on Sam's queen-sized bed, El was still in Sam's bathroom, presumably brushing her teeth.

"Oh, my god, Sam, we've gotta introduce her to DC," Max commented, picking up Sam's comics that were on the floor from the last time she and Sam went through them.

Sam wasn't listening to Max. She was biting at her thumb nail that had finally just grown back to an acceptable length. Yet, here Sam was, gnawing it down again.

I'm Sam. If... anyone was wondering...

Oh, I know all about you, Samantha.

And Heather was fine, presumably, but it didn't feel like Heather was fine. Billy didn't look like he was fine.

So why hadn't they found anything in the house?

"—am? Sam."

Sam's eyes refocused, and she blinked rapidly to see Max was waving her hand in front of Sam's face. She was staring at Sam expectantly, and Sam realized just then Max had been asking her a question.

"Uh — sorry," Sam forced her thumb out of her mouth. "What is it?"

Max rolled her eyes playfully, like Sam had just been daydreaming; like Sam wasn't thinking about Billy or Heather or the house with the red door or the Upside Down or anything. Like this was just the usual, silly Sam.

"I said — which comic should we start El off with?" reiterated Max, nodding down.

And, oh, there was a pile of comics shared between Sam's and Max's laps. Sam hadn't noticed those there until just now. It looked to be Sam's entire collection of DC comics that Max wanted her to choose from.

"Jeez," Sam huffed, overwhelmed. "I don't know."

But then she started looking through them with Max. The girls chatted idly, discussing the best of the best comics to show El while Sam's cassette player played idly in the background. To no one's surprise, "Rhiannon" by Fleetwood Mac was the current song they listened to.

In perfect timing, Sam and Max successfully dwindled their options down to just two comics — Wonder Woman and Green Lantern — by the time El returned back into Sam's room.

Max held up the two comics for El with an eager smile. "Which one?"

"I don't know," shrugged El, getting under the covers on the other side of Sam. The three girls squished together to all fit, but it wasn't that necessary, because the bed was big enough to fit them all.

El was laying back in Sam's bed, and there was a despondent look on her face. Sam could instantly tell El was thinking the same thing as she was. Billy and Heather and the house with the red door and the Upside Down. Additionally, Sam couldn't pull her eyes away from her own radio, and, for once, didn't care much for the sound of Stevie Nicks' voice.

Against Sam's own will, she barely touched El's radio and it somehow turned onto an empty station. The soft crackling of static filled the room.

What her friends hadn't noticed as they'd been talking, was that when Sam put the radio on an empty channel, a blue, electric spark connected the technology and Sam's finger when she touched it.

The song flickered between "Rhiannon" and empty static, all the way from the other side of the room.

"Hey," Max's voice broke, snapping them both out of it. No one commented on the cassette player, assuming it was the weather's effects on the piece of technology. Sam's head snapped back over to Max, and the music continued playing just fine. Max tilted her body into Sam's. "There's nothing to worry about anymore, okay?"

El didn't look persuaded, eyebrows furrowed and breathing heavy. "It doesn't make sense," she claimed.

"She was too normal," Sam added, chill running down her spine.

Max sent the girls confused looks, asked, "What are you talking about?"

"Heather," El urged. "The blood. The ice."

"Heather had a fever, so she took a cold bath, but she's better now. That has to be it," sighed Max. She disregarded either of Sam's or El's worries with the story that Billy planted back at the house; the same Billy who was just as eerie as Heather was.

Sam shook her head with a vexed face. "Something about her didn't feel right. And that blood wasn't there the day before."

"I don't know where it came from," Max admitted, "but we saw her. We all saw her. She's totally fine."

"What about Billy?"

"What about him?" questioned Max.

Sam sent Max an incredulous look. There was no way Max was blind to all the red flags that arose tonight. Like, seriously, red door — red flag. It was a sign!

"He seemed," El tried piecing her thoughts together, "wrong."

Max chuckled softly, undeterred. "'Wrong' is kind of like his default."

"Not this kind of wrong, Max," Sam disagreed, bemused. "He's not okay."

"Well, at least he's not a murder," joked Max, trying to defuse the tension. "That was good to find out. It would've totally sucked if he was."

Max laughed at her own little joke, and Sam and El smiled back, but it didn't meet Sam's eyes. Lightning struck and Sam's cassette player crackled for a couple moments. Sam didn't want to laugh about any of it or pretend like it was all normal. There was still a lingering, painful cold in her chest. Sam had a burning desire to get to the bottom of it.

"Night, Sammy, love you!"

That was Stephanie's voice, shouting to Sam in her own respective room. Her sister's yelling pulled Sam out of her deep thoughts, and the cassette player suddenly switched to "Storms" — another song by Fleetwood Mac.

"I love you, too, Steph!" Sam called back.

There was a twinge of sadness in Max's eyes when Sam turned her attention back onto her friends. Sam knew Max was thinking of her relationship with Billy compared to Sam's relationship with Stephanie, though Sam thought it wasn't healthy for Max to try and do it at all. It only made Max more upset in the end, and reminded Sam why her relationship with Stephanie was like this in the first place. They weren't this close when their parents were alive. It was their death that pulled them together.

"Who... is that?"

El had let herself get distracted from the topic of Billy and Heather or Billy and Stephanie. Her gaze was now on Sam's pastel pink, yellow, and blue patterned comforter. Or, one of the comics that rested on top of them.

Her tentative hand was gesturing towards Wonder Woman. Sam and Max, without planning, both sent El scandalized looks.

"Who is Wonder Woman?" Sam repeated incredulously.

Max huffed in bewilderment, picking up the comic. "See, this is why you can't just hang out with Mike all the time."

El finally pulled a genuine smile at Max's slight at Mike. Sam would let it slide just this once, because Mike was in fact the reason El didn't know who Wonder Woman was. The three girls leaned back in the bed, getting comfortable before they went through Sam's comic. Max held the comic, so Sam tucked herself into Max's side. Sam then threw her arm around El, who was on the other side of her, and pulled El to lean into Sam. They laid there like dominos, and Sam and El looked up at Max expectantly.

"This is Wonder Woman," Max started, flipping open the comic-book. "AKA Princess Diana."

Sam couldn't help from blurting in excitement, "She's so cool. She's from Paradise Island, which is, like, this hidden island where there are only women Amazon warriors."

"Really?" El said, intrigued.

Sam was officially distracted from the visit to the Holloway household. Her attention was now fully onto El and introducing her to the Wonder Woman's world.

It was much more preferable, in Sam's opinion.

◦☆＊★ ━━━━━━ ★＊☆◦

"Where the hell is he?!" Lucas exclaimed over the rain, peering into every window outside the Byers' house.

Mike and Lucas had caught up to Corey, unfortunately. By the time they did, the two boys couldn't address anything but Corey's burning desire to find Will. He hadn't been answering the door, and Corey worried it was because he hadn't made it home safely. Maybe biking in the rain was too dangerous for him, and something happened to Will.

"He's not in the house!" Mike pointed out obviously. "We should check Castle Byers!"

"What the fuck is Castle Byers?!" cried Corey with an incredulous face. He wanted to go to castle right now? Seriously?

Corey was in love with an idiot.

"It's right behind his house in the woods, come on!" Mike explained quickly, and then he was grabbing Corey's wrist and pulling him into the dark forest.

The rain was pounding harder than it had been all day, and it was thoroughly night by now. Corey currently felt like he had Sam's eyesight, trying to spot Will or "Castle Byers" with all the added factors working against him.

"WILL!" they were all calling out, searching for their friend that had stormed (ironic, right?) off.

"WILL, COME ON! ARE YOU OUT HERE, MAN?"

"WHERE IS HE?"

"Castle Byers should be just this way!" Mike told Corey before he led the trio through more dripping trees. Corey couldn't help but notice Mike was still holding onto Corey's wrist, although it was completely unnecessary.

The continued through the woods, and just like Mike stated, Castle Byers was right there.

Although, it definitely didn't look like a castle right now. It seemed more like broken pieces of wooden rubble piled on top of each other. Whatever Castle Byers was supposed to look like was, in a word, destroyed.

But no one was focused on that right now. Right next to the demolished castle stood a sopping wet Will Byers. He was turning around in circles, as if looking for something that neither Corey, Mike, nor Lucas could ever find.

"Byers!" Corey cried gratefully, upon spotting the boy through the leaves.

The trio of boys picked up the pace, running towards Will hastily.

"Will!" exclaimed Lucas, throwing the hood of his raincoat down.

"What happened?" asked Mike, staring worriedly at the back of Will's drenched shirt. "Are you okay?!"

And Corey had never been scared of Will before. He was like the male version of Sam — innocent, small, and too kind to really find all-that intimidating.

But Will scared him right then.

Slowly, eerily, his head whipped to Corey, Mike, and Lucas. His look was disturbed and serious, his eyes were dark and dangerous. There was a firm hand cupped around the back of his next.

"He's back."

Two words, and Corey knew. He knew it was right to be scared.

He's back.

◦☆＊★ ━━━━━━ ★＊☆◦

and so the plot begins!

i wanted to get all the pre-plot heavy chapters out because i have some good stuff planned coming up... foreshadowing galore in the chapter...

i'll finish next chapter of season 4 (i have 2 more scenes to write dw) and then i'll post the next chapter of season 3!

sneak peak: first two words of next chapter's title are "sam snaps"

hm...

you guys know that tiktok audio that's like "where's my friend? the smiley!" yeah, that's totally max and sam.

oh! also! where would you put sam and corey in the solider, poet, king category? i think corey is a soldier but sam could 100% be all three. idk i've been thinking about that for a while

what'd you think?