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━━━━  " 📂 "

𝙋 𝘼 𝙍 𝘼 𝘿 𝙄 𝙎 𝙀

╰ ╯

"YOU KNOW WHAT PEOPLE DO WHEN they're in comas?" It was the longest of Sadie's old friends who asked this, Jonathan's face filled with concern as he realised what she had just said. "Who do you know who's in a coma?"

"Nobody." Sadie shrugged. "And not just comas... people in vegetative states. Comatose, some may call it." They were horrendous attempts to make this seem better and so eventually, she gave up. "People who have little to no brain activity, people who had suffered accidents, people with mental health issues - like having mental breakdowns, various forms of psychosis... episodes. People who aren't reacting to the normal forms of human interaction."

"How do you know this?" Dustin asked. "I've seen all your school projects because Mom likes to see them, and I was in your room the other day and there's nothing to do with any of this kind of thing in there."

"Well... Nancy was helping Steve look at colleges a while ago, I looked at a brochure and took a day trip up to Purdue and... pretended to be a college student." Sadie said. "I was interested, all right? And it got me a day pass into Pennhurst Asylum, the place you all thought El was from at the beginning? Met a couple low-level patients... people who would greatly aid me in writing my thesis." 

"Your thesis? You pretended you were writing a thesis when you were sixteen?" Nancy's eyes were wide. "...Is that why you wanted to borrow my blouse and skirt that time? Because I have never seen you wear anything but sweaters and band shirts."

"Yeah... possibly." Sadie shrugged. "But it works, and now I know. I don't have my notes on me - and really, they're great notes, better than anything else I've ever written, I met this guy who thought I was some kind of fairytale princess - very interesting. But I can remember a couple of things." Behind them was a clang of metal; Hopper had deemed the shed behind the house an appropriate place to carry out their plan.

"So, what do we need to do?" Joyce asked.

"We need things he's familiar with. Songs - I know he likes that one the Clash song, right?" Sadie pointed toward Jonathan, who nodded. "And people who know key memories for him. When he wakes up he's going to be disorientated and angry, we kinda need to calm him down." She paused, lost in thought as she dived through the limitless amount of information she kept stored away. "Music might be best, though. It's been found to trigger particular emotions, increase memory... stuff like that."

There was silence for a moment, before the sound of Steve ducking out of the way of Dustin's smack. "What the hell, dude?" The Harrington boy asked.

"We have to focus, dude." Dustin replied, shaking his head and coming back to the group, who was staring at him. "It's not my fault he was staring at-"

"Dude!" Steve hissed, his eyes darting across the group to several members of it and resting on Sadie a little too long before adjusting his haze. "Let's just..."

"Yes." Sadie looked around the group. "Jonathan, Mrs Byers, do you think that would work? It was only a suggestion but if you have any other ideas...?" She trailed off, looking at the mother and son sitting at the end of the table. Sadie

Joyce's focus was on the table, almost unaware of what had just transpired between Dustin and Steve, who were evidently becoming closer by the second. "Yeah." She said vaguely with Jonathan's hand landing on her shoulder and it brought her back, voice hardening. "Yeah." Mrs Byers repeated. "That... that should work."

"Alright. I'll get my radio." Jonathan disappeared down the hallway and the rest of them sprang into action in helping the Chief of Hawkins Police to set up the shed outside for that very purpose. And eventually, the room was completely stripped of anything that Will might recognise and Jonathan's speakers and radio attached were set down on a surface. Sadie helped them set it up properly like she had done years before when he initially got it, ignoring the small spark of pain in her heart that had her thinking that Bob, too, would be helping them.

She made her way out of the shed briefly from where she was helping to staple old tarpaulins to the wooden walls, venturing back inside the house to check something with Jonathan about his sound system, leaving Steve and Nancy to work on it alone. Which was... awkward to say the least. It appeared, to both of the exes, that Sadie had been reducing that tension between them just by standing there and bringing conversation to all of them. But now she was gone...

"Hey," Nancy spoke first, as Steve pushed another staple into the wood before stepping down off his stool, wary eyes upon her. "What you did, um, helping the kids... that was... really cool."

"Yeah." Steve's head hung for a second before he brought it back up, a glimmer of guilt in the back of his mind. "Those little shits are real trouble, you know?"

"Believe me, I know." Nancy nodded. A question hung in the back of her throat as Steve got back to work, a memory of herself and Sadie joining the four boys for Halloween one year, long before their lives got caught up in the supernatural. "You're lucky you had Sadie."

"Yeah, she's really the one who kept them all together. I just kinda helped her." He admitted. "I... er... I don't know where you went with Jonathan or what you did, but... I kissed Sadie. Twice."

"Oh." Nancy couldn't say that something in her hadn't expected it. "When?"

"After we broke up. She was there and... I was feeling shitty after, well, everything, and I've been trying to make it up to her for doing it but I kissed her." Steve nodded, swallowing harshly. "Sorry, I know you're probably not the right person to be telling but I didn't get to tell you on Wednesday because I didn't want to ruin everything between you and Sadie too but geez, she's been feeling so guilty about it and I just felt so bad for forcing it on her but-"

"Steve." Nancy didn't quite know how else to stop him, his self-conscious rambles not having taken up too much of their relationship. After being away from Hawkins for so long, after hearing what Murray Bauman had to say - whatever the hell he had to do with human nature and feelings Nancy didn't quite know - she had come to realise something. Neither she nor Steve had ever shared that much emotion between them. She hadn't really spoken up when she was worried, he hadn't expressed it much otherwise.

There wasn't any way for her to tell if Steve would be ready to hear this, but a lot of their relationship relied merely on the concept of convenience. There wasn't a challenge but comfort to their relationship that was familiar to them, and after what had happened the year before with Barb and Will and having to keep this humongous secret between them, well it made sense for them to be together.

"Steve." She said it again, a little quieter when his digressive worrying came to a stop. "I... I'm sorry for everything I said at the party, and the worst thing is that I can't even claim that I didn't mean... well most of it I didn't mean. I didn't need to be so harsh."

"No." Steve shook his head, chuckling self-deprecatingly. "No, you didn't."

"But I... I kissed Jonathan. And I think, now, and I think you might feel the same after I've seen you with her, but I think that we were with the wrong people for a year." Nancy swallowed, watching as unreadable emotion scattered over his expression. "I think... we'll always be friends, Steve, but I don't think that we're right for each other in that way."

He took a moment, pushing another staple into the wood. "I think that's something was can agree on, then." Steve turned his gaze back to her. "I do... I do think I like Sadie. She makes a lot of sense.. to me."

"Before I would have been blind to it." Nancy smiled. "But it makes sense. It really does, now more than ever. It makes sense, it really does."

"As do you and Jonathan." The words felt initially bitter in his mouth. "After everything last year too. And I'm sorry for being a crappy boyfriend, Nance."

"You weren't that bad." Nancy was just glad he was joking again, the small smile on his face recognisable for that. "And as long as Sadie likes you too... then I'm happy for you." This wasn't outright lying, just a little out of her comfort zone, but she did mean it.

"Thanks. I'm happy for you too." Steve nodded, the both of them jumping as the door behind them opened, Jonathan and Sadie entering whilst carrying several wires and the sound system usually kept in Jonathan's room.

Neither of them seemed to notice the slowly depleting tension between Nancy and Steve.

✧

Finally, after what seemed like such a long time of setting up the shed to house Sadie and Mike's experiment upon waking Will up, the group were gathered in the kitchen, Hopper ready to carry Will's limp, unconscious body out into the structure. It now had every wall covered in material to hide any sense of familiarity, the floor too. Mike had rigged bright lights on several of the wooden columns and Jonathan and Sadie had set up the sound system with a quick clever manoeuvres to replay The Clash over and over

"You should stay in here." Hopper was saying, addressing a crowd of Will's friends. "Jonathan, Joyce, are you ready?"

"I think there should be some other people," Joyce suggested, sitting wrapped in a blanket as they organised. "...Mike?"

"Yeah. I can help." The Wheeler confirmed. He had, after all, been Will's first friend when they started school together in Hawkins, with Lucas and Dustin joining them later on - Dustin coming in the latest of them all after his parents had divorced and he, his older sister and mother moved back to the woman's childhood home.

"Sadie should, too," Jonathan suggested. "She used to babysit Will - you remember what she said after he woke up last year. And it was her idea... I think she could help."

The blonde blinked, arms crossed over her stomach with a hand brushing through the ends of her hair. The feeling in her gut seemed to fizzle and become all the more prevalent. She didn't quite know what had prompted Jonathan to suggest her, someone else would maybe be a better idea - Dustin or Lucas or just someone who spent all the more time with him. Not her, who had spent mere evenings with him when Jonathan or Joyce couldn't, who just spent time teaching him of things that she found interesting with little regard to whether he actually liked it or was just pretending to for her sake.

Because Will was a sweet kid like that. He would pretend that he liked learning about Ancient Egypt, the lost wonders of the world, the wives of Henry VIII or hearing about Jack the Ripper and his murderous tirade through Whitechapel. Or... maybe he actually liked learning too. Sadie didn't know. It was when he went missing that her conscience had finally finished kicking in and her knowledge was something she could actually use to help others.

And she had tried to help Will. She had tried to help Will and she had tried to help Eleven and only the former had actually been helped - but only to a point because he was still having visions and nightmares and she could only offer theories with a little scientific proof to back it up. Will had been saved, but she hadn't been able to save the person ultimately essential to his survival in the Upside Down. Eleven was gone. And Sadie hadn't been able to save him.

She had suggested something that could help jolt Will back into his own consciousness instead of being continually possessed by the Mindflayer. But what if it didn't work? What if she was wrong again and she stood in front of his mom, brother and best friend because she had failed to help again.

What if she couldn't help him? And what time if this time it was... detrimental?

"Sadie?" It was Steve who spoke first, after what could have been years and years of Sadie's own worries and plagued anxiety that was really only a couple of moments. "Sadie?" He repeated.

"Yeah?" She replied, her head turning towards him. The poor girl didn't seem to realise that the rest of the group was staring at her, her eyes remaining only on the one who had been a constant in keeping her nerves down since finding her cat dead in Dustin's room. "Sorry... I... I can help." She agreed.

It was that or ultimately regret it if it was found that just another person could have helped it to work. And if it failed, she would see it with her own eyes. Sadie hadn't been granted that misfortune with Eleven, and although she had managed to dispel the initial self-blame for so long, it was coming back in full force now. And she could finally repent.

Which was why she followed Mike, Hopper, Mrs Byers and Jonathan out through the backyard, helping Joyce in keeping Will's limp body from hitting the doorframes they passed under, the warmth of Steve's hand in the small of her back as he encouraged her forward, not so afraid of showing signs of comfort too much now, Nancy just as quick to console her as they were left behind in the house.

Sadie was the last to file into the shed, Hopper waiting to close the door behind her but not bolting it, leaving it open so that they could easily exit if it was necessary. 

Will was tied down to the chair by his stomach, ankles and wrists, which was in turn tied to the wooden pillar behind it and Joyce filled another syringe with the Propofol just in case. Mike turned on the blinding white lights, Sadie took her place beside Jonathan by the speakers and in the chair placed in front of Will, Hopper stepped forward with a bottle of Bo-Peep ammonia and tipped some onto a ball of cotton wool.

The smell was strong, instantaneous for those standing in the shed. And that was no different for Will, who awoke all too suddenly, with a gasp.

"What? What? What is this?" The younger brother grunted out, struggling against his bonds. "What? What is this? Why am I tied up?" He asked, head turning around the group in front of him slowly becoming more and more agitated.

Joyce took a step forward, crouching down in front of him. "Will, we just wanna talk to you." She placed a hand on his shoulders. "We're not going to hurt you."

But this didn't seem to be enough to satiate him. "Where am I?" He yelled, a glimmer of anger completely unrecognisable to his character shining through.

Hopper made his way towards him next, holding the drawing that Will had etched out just a few days before, when the worst was nothing more than a dot upon the horizon. "You recognise this?" He asked, waving it under his nose. "Do you recognise this?"

Will shook his head, looking a little more like himself, eyes round with confusion. But they couldn't just count on that. "We wanna help you." Mrs Byers reaffirmed, noticing the similarity in his eyes. "But to do that, we have to understand how to kill it."

"Why am I tied up?" Will yelled. "Why am I tied up? Why am I tied up? Why am I tied up?" He screamed, leaning forward in his chair so much until Hopper had to pull him back. "Why am I tied up? Why am I tied up?" He continued to struggle, the lights in front of Sadie's eyes flickering ominously.

"Let me go! Let me go! Let me go! Let me go!" The lights flickered even more, Will's voice becoming hoarse with use. "Let me go! Let me go! Let me go! Let me go! Let me go!"

Hopper held him to his shoulder, using his body to push Will back against the chair as he screamed out the crazed, repetitive phrase until it seemed to become quieter, more faint and he fell limp, the lights returning to their usual glaring blindness.

Joyce looked determined, hand reaching behind her and coming to sit on the chair set up. "Do you know what March 22nd is?" She asked. There was no answer. "It's your birthday. Your birthday. When you turned eight, I gave you that huge box of crayons. Do you remember that? It was 120 colours. And all your friends, they got you Star Wars toys, but all you wanted to do was draw with all your new colours. And you drew this big spaceship, but it wasn't from a movie. It.. it was your spaceship. A rainbow ship is what you called it. And you must have used every colour in the box. And I.. I took that with me to Melvald's and I put it up and I told everyone who came in; 'My son drew this.'"

Sadie could feel a glimmer of hope in her stomach as poor Will's gaunt face seemed to become more and more like himself, drinking in every word his mom said to him. "And you were so embarrassed." Joyce chuckled, head shaking. "But I was so proud. I was so, so proud."

"Do you remember the day Dad left?" Besides Sadie, Jonathan spoke up and Will turned to him, dark eyes reflecting the image of his older brother coming to crouch there too. "We stayed up all night building Castle Byers... just the way you drew it. And it took so long because you were so bad at hammering. You'd miss the nail every time. And then it started raining but we stayed out there anyway. We were both sick for like a week after that. But we just had to finish it, didn't we? We just had to."

Sadie couldn't quite find the confidence to step forward next, so with a small nod to Mike, it encouraged him to go. "Do you remember the first day that we met?" Like a moth to a flame, Will's head turned towards him. "It was... it was the first day of kindergarten. I knew nobody. I had no friends and..." A tear slipped from his eye and he sniffed. "I just felt so alone and so scared, but.. I saw you on the swings and you were alone, too. You were just swinging by yourself. And I just walked up to you and I asked if you wanted to be my friend. And you said yes. You said yes."

He swallowed, sniffing back even more tears. "It was the best thing I've ever done." Mike admitted and it almost looked as though Will was near to tears too.

Sadie took a chance, voice wobbling as she began. "I met you before you became friends with Dustin." She said. "I... we had just moved to Hawkins and were strapped for cash and I got a babysitting gig and I had babysat kids back in Ohio but none of them had been as sweet as you were to me. I was only thirteen too, so God knows what your mom was doing letting me look after you but I didn't care. They were the best three hours of my life in Hawkins so far. Do you know why?"

Will's head moved minutely from side to side. "Because you were just the most intriguing kid I had ever met. You were interested in what I had to say... and you listened. You were interested. I told you about the Watergate scandal. Which is maybe the stupidest thing for me to have told you because why would you be interested in politics? But you listened, and you asked questions and you told me that it was stupid. And then I told you... I told you about these comics I read and the next morning I..."

"You dropped off a box of them on your bike." Jonathan finished when he realised she couldn't. He turned towards Will after glancing up at his friend. "It was like this big and tied up in electrical wire with a note about borrowing more. You loved those comics."

"Will, baby.." Joyce reached out to him again. "If you're in there, just please... please talk to us. Please, honey, please, can you do that for me?"

Will's breath shook as he listened, face contorted in utmost sadness before a trigger seemed to have been pulled and his expression was lost, their progress following it. "Let me go." He said again.

But... but if wasn't his phrasing that Sadie focused on. Instead, her eyes moved downwards, past his shaking forearm to his hand as two fingers tapped a pattern into the chair. "Chief." She mumbled his attention following her gaze instantly.

And Sadie knew it wasn't only her who recognised the rhythmic nature to his tapping.

✧

Will was speaking in morse code. Hopper knew it too, and all of a sudden they were bundled out of the shed and leaving Will tied up and newly blindfolded - a further measure to prevent him from somehow figuring out his location as well as inviting temporary blindness to hinder him should he escape from his holds.

Hopper pushed through the door first with Sadie quick behind him, a more cautious Joyce, Jonathan and Mike following. They had been a little more wary when they were asked to follow the Chief of Hawkins Police out of the shed and away from Will, but they were unable to explain what was going on there. They couldn't explain anything where they could hear him.

"What happened?" Dustin said as soon as they walked in, head spinning as he looked between the faces of those behind the man, who had seized a piece of paper and made his way over to the table.

"I think he's talking." Hopper began. "Just not with words." He etched out a combination of lines and dots on the page.

"What is that?" Steve asked.

Mike Dustin, Lucas and Sadie were quick to reply with the exact same thing; morse code.

"H-E-R-E." Hopper finished translating the code. "Here. Will's still in there. He's talking to us."

"Which means it's working." Sadie breathed out, something so welcome bringing her confidence in herself back to life. "It's actually working."

"But it needs more." Mrs Byer seemed to share the growth in faith of the course taken to bring her son back to her as Sadie did. "He needs more."

"Jonathan." Sadie swallowed. "I'll stay here and translate the code. You play the song, someone speaks to him, we get the code."

Nobody disagreed, and Sadie settled down in the seat at the table, one of the walkie-talkies sat beside her arm and Hopper holding the other as he, Jonathan, Joyce and Mike made his way back into the shed. Steve, stood by the door, heard the faint playing of music and knew that they had begun, the walkie-talkie beginning to sound out the pattern of letters that Hopper sent through.

Sadie recognised them by ear but had Max and Lucas checking them against a small cheat card of Hopper's anyway, and on the other side of Sadie, as she wrote down her guesses, Nancy wrote out the beginnings of a sentence in crayon. They continued on, letter after letting coming through from Hopper's signalling, until they had...

"Close gate." They read, Nancy holding up the completed sentence.

Then the phone rang.

And Sadie's confidence was gone.

Dustin swore as he ran to pull it off the hook, but that wasn't enough to stop it from ringing as it began seconds later and Nancy didn't hesitate as she gripped the sides of the telephone jack and yanked it from the wall, throwing it across the floor.

"Do you think he heard that?" Max shared the same worry as Sadie, who slowly stood up from table and pushed past Steve behind her, leaning forward to look through the kitchen windows.

"It's just a phone," Steve said. "It could be anywhere... right?"

"He'll know." Sadie mumbled, and she could have cried. She should have thought of this, should of thought of getting rid of absolutely everything with any remote connection to where they were. And the phone was a big one. "Will knows what that was. It knows."

"It knows?" Lucas repeated.

"The Mindflayer. Will knows so it knows." Sadie replied, and watched through the window as Hopper, Jonathan and Mike exited the shed, a screech sounding in the distance. And Sadie knew she was right. Will had recognised it. "Oh god." She mumbled out.

"You heard that too, didn't you?" Max looked up at her as she stood back from the windows, making their way to the front of the house. "Sadie...?"

"Yeah. I heard that." She swallowed, falling into step beside Steve as they passed the now broken phone and stood, anticipating what could only be horror.

"That's not good." Dustin breathed out. "That's really not good."

Seconds later and Hopper, Joyce, Jonathan, Mike and a once-again unconcious Will came into the house, the  chief brandishing about a rifle. "Hey! Hey - get away from the windows." He ordered, Max, Dustin and Lucas darting back. "Can you use this?" He asked, pointing it in the direction of Sadie.

"No - no way." That was something she failed in; use of firearms had never quite been her forte. Instead, Steve pulled her behiind him, already reaching for his bat.

"Do you know how to use this?" Hopper turned to Jonathan this time.,

"What?"

"I can." Nancy interjected, and without a moment of hesitation Hopper threw it to her, and Sadie watched as she checked the chamber and then aimed it to the door, hands unwavering.

There was silence. The sound of  harsh footsteps and screeching in the distance. All weapons remained pointed at the door as the noises steadily grew louder, a loud screech and thudding to their right and their attention followed it.

"What are they doing?" Nancy asked, breathless in terror.

Sadie couldn't even hazard a guess, theories from the creatures making a point of surrounding them or slowly approaching in groups from every direction to attack cooming from every corner of her mind but none of them plausible enough to make sense.

The sound of the bushes outside the dining room window echoed through the house, mingling with the wet screeches and grumblings of the Demodogs as the group watched.

A loud snarl from the front had them all turning back to it, the anticipation in their veins of what horror was yet to come causing gasps to be emitted from those most nervous. Sadie's hand on Steve's shoulder tightened, fingers digging into the fabric of his jacket. 

The snarling, screeches and groans continued until it stopped abruptly, confusion replacing the horror. Nobody moved, expecting further advances.

And then something came flying through the front window, glass shattering as it was launched through and landed with a thud over some of Will's tunnel drawings. It didn't move, and Sadie, who was closest, pulled the bat from Steve's hand and approached, nudging it.

"It's dead." She said, using the bat to push it onto it's back. It's body remained limp and she turned back to the group.

"Holy shit." Dustin breathed out.

"Is it definitely dead?" Max asked, as Sadie prodded it some more. Hopper used his foot to push the head back. And it definitely didn't move. "Yeah." Max nodded. "Definitely dead."

And it didn't have any wound marks, Sadie noticed as she crouched by the body of the Demodog, adjusting it's position only with the bat and not daring to touch it herself. It was dead, but seemingly uninjured.

It might have seemed crazy to her once, but there was nothing that made sense more than where her mind went when she realised as such. A glimmer of something more that hope fizzled in her fingertips, growing all the more as the door creaked and caused them all to freeze once more and stare.

The lock twisted involuntarily. The chain of the latch was pulled back and fell loose. Weapons remained trained on the sight, and when the door opened slowly, oh-so slowly, Sadie could only hope she was right.

Because then they might actually have a chance.

❛ AUTHORS NOTE ━━ so remember the epilogue i mentioned? yeah, it's 13k words of pure sadie and steve every single little bit

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