104 — Coming Home
The drive back to Hawkins took most of the day.
Hopper had the heat running in the truck and nobody talked much for the first hour — the specific silence of people who had been through something and needed the distance between it and conversation to increase before the conversation was possible. Eleven sat in the back between Richard and Carly, asleep within twenty minutes, her head finding Richard's shoulder with the unconscious accuracy of someone who had decided he was a reliable surface.
Carly watched the highway and didn't say anything. Ricky sat in the rear-facing seat with his eyes closed. The twins were in the truck bed under a tarp with two sleeping bags Hopper had produced from somewhere, and if either of them complained about it nobody heard them.
By the time Hawkins appeared on the horizon, people were talking again. Quietly, in the way conversations started when everyone was tired but too wound up to actually sleep.
Richard explained Hawkins to Ricky — the Lab, what it had been, what Brennan had done there, how it had ended. The gate. Eleven. The year they'd spent managing the aftermath. Ricky listened without interrupting, and when Richard finished, he was quiet for a long moment.
"We knew about the Lab," he said finally. "We knew it was there. We just —" He stopped. "We couldn't figure out how to go at it. So we didn't."
"You got out," Richard said. "That wasn't nothing."
"You took the whole thing down." Ricky said it without accusation. Just the flat acknowledgment of a gap between what they'd managed and what someone else had managed. "With a handful of people and no institutional support."
"It took a while," Richard said.
The twins — Jamie and Marcy — had been listening from the truck bed through the rear window, which had been cracked since Indianapolis. Jamie said through the gap: "We're in, for whatever comes next. The Upside Down, the particles, all of it. You don't have to ask."
"I know," Richard said. "Thank you."
The immediate question was where to put four people who needed to stay out of sight.
Carly was a known fugitive — the Lab's classification, still on paper somewhere even if the Lab itself was ash. Ricky, Jamie, and Marcy had spent years being careful about exactly who knew they existed. A motel was out. An apartment meant a landlord and a lease and a paper trail. Richard's house had the spirits and the ongoing renovation work and wasn't configured for guests beyond Robin, who had a specific arrangement with the household entities that had taken months to establish.
Richard called Steve from a payphone outside of Indianapolis.
Steve's answer, after about four seconds of processing: "Yeah, obviously. My parents won't care."
The Harrington house was the right call for several reasons. It sat on enough property that neighbors weren't a concern. It had more bedrooms than the family used. And Steve's parents — who had been through the pseudo-human incident the previous year and had watched Richard pull their family back from something they still didn't have complete language for — were not going to say no to a request from Richard. Whatever combination of gratitude and practical understanding had settled in them after that night, it was enough.
When they arrived, Mrs. Harrington had already made up the guest rooms.
Steve met them in the driveway, looked at the group climbing out of Hopper's truck, and extended his hand to Ricky first. "Steve Harrington. Richard's told me basically nothing about any of you, which means this is either great or terrible."
"Ricky." He shook it. "Number Three. My ability is — " he looked slightly pained, "— I can make people feel positively toward me. Without trying. It just happens."
Steve stared at him. "You mean like, you're just automatically likable?"
"More than that. It's — involuntary charisma isn't quite the right word. People develop feelings. Romantic ones, sometimes." Ricky clearly had a prepared explanation and equally clearly had never found a way to deliver it that didn't sound absurd. "I try very hard not to let it affect how I interact with people."
Steve looked at Richard. "This guy has the most simultaneously useful and terrible ability I've ever heard of."
"That's roughly what I thought," Richard said.
"As long as you don't use it on me or anyone I know, we're fine," Steve said to Ricky, and meant it, and moved on with the efficiency of someone who had stopped being surprised by strange things a while back. He looked at the twins.
Jamie introduced herself first — pyrokinesis, Number Nine, did not lead with the part where it could get out of control. Her sister Marcy, Number Nine-Point-Five, was quieter, with the particular stillness of someone who spent a lot of time listening. She explained her own situation simply: she and Jamie shared a sensory connection. When they were close, Jamie's ability worked at full strength. When things went wrong, Marcy was the only one who could bring her back.
Steve looked at Marcy with genuine respect. "So you're the reason she doesn't burn everything down."
Marcy gave a small smile. "Most of the time."
Steve nudged Richard. "Fire ability. Against Upside Down creatures."
"Already noted," Richard said.
Last was Carly, who said her name and her number and then demonstrated the illusion ability by producing a very large, very convincing black bear directly in front of Steve's face. Richard caught Steve's shoulder from behind before the instinctive backward lunge could take out the porch furniture.
Steve stood with his arms up in front of his face, watching the bear dissolve into nothing. He exhaled. Lowered his arms. Looked at Carly.
"Okay," he said. "You're terrifying. Do you want the room with the window seat or the one with the better closet?"
Carly blinked. Then the corner of her mouth moved — not a full smile, but the architecture of one. "Window seat."
"Done." Steve turned to lead them inside and looked back over his shoulder at Richard. "You're introducing her to Jonathan."
"Already planning on it," Richard said.
Richard got home just after dark.
The house was not what he'd left. Four days of renovation — a full crew, working fast, compensated well enough that the speed had been enthusiastic — had put it back together more completely than he'd expected. The front wall was solid. The floor where Billy's car had come through was refinished. The kitchen cabinets were re-hung, the magnetic knife strip back in place, the axe hole in the floorboards patched and sanded flush.
Robin had managed the crew. He could tell from the specific way everything had been put back exactly where it belonged, which was not something a renovation crew did on their own initiative.
She'd also washed his sheets. He noticed that when he sat on the edge of the bed — the particular smell of clean linen that had been line-dried rather than machine-dried, which was a Robin preference she'd quietly extended to his laundry at some point without announcing it.
He sat with that for a moment.
The house was quiet in the particular way it was quiet when the spirits were settled and the renovation crew was gone and the town outside was doing its ordinary nighttime business. He'd been away four days. The Louis family had managed things. Nothing had gone wrong.
He opened the basement door. The spirits came up like dogs that had been home alone — not frantically, but with the specific energy of things that had noticed an absence and were registering its end. They circled him twice, which was their version of a greeting, and then dispersed at his direction to find their places.
He went back upstairs and sat on the bed and pulled up the skill panel.
AGENT: Richard Li — Rank E Investigator
SKILLS:
Programming — Rank A
Culinary Arts — Rank A
General Housekeeping — Rank A
Marksmanship — Rank A
English Language — Rank B
Misfortune Perception — Rank D
Phantom Spirit Body — Rank C
DERIVED SKILLS:
Hyper-Digestion
Universal Repair
All-Beings Comprehension
INVESTIGATION ARCHIVE:
001 — Phantom Parasite
002 — Revenant Spirit
003 — Pseudo-Human
004 — Dying Hypnosis Manual
005 — Bad Seed Ghost Doll
AVAILABLE PLOT POINTS: 1,469
He looked at the numbers for a while.
Rank E. Skill cap raised to A-plus across the board. Skills that had been sitting at their previous ceiling had room to develop now — Programming could move past where it was, and Phantom Spirit Body had been bumping against its limit for months. That was the most immediately useful thing in the panel. The soul-combat capability was going to matter. Henry wasn't finished. The particles under the lab weren't finished. Whatever was sitting thirty degrees off true north beneath the sealed gate wasn't finished.
He closed the panel and lay back on the clean sheets and looked at the ceiling.
Four days. Two facilities. One Ghost King. One mercy kill. Four souls who'd guided them out of a collapsing building and then gone somewhere he hoped was better than where they'd been.
New allies — four of them, with abilities that complemented what the group already had in ways that weren't accidental. Pyrokinesis against Upside Down biology. Illusion-casting against targets with intact psychology. Ricky's ability, whatever the full scope of it turned out to be.
And Carly. Number Eight. Who had come into Hawkins Lab's orbit the same way Eleven had, and survived it differently, and was still here.
He needed to reach Kali. He'd been sitting on that thread for months. He had a better framework for it now — understanding what it meant to want revenge badly enough to build your whole life around it, and what it left you with when the thing you'd been aiming at was gone. Carly had shown him what that looked like from the inside.
He filed it and let himself stop thinking for a while.
Outside, Hawkins was quiet. Cold November air moving through the trees. The town doing what the town did when nothing was actively trying to tear through it.
He'd take it.
He fell asleep with the light on.
[Support Goal: 500 PS → +1 Chapter]
[Support Goal: 10 Reviews → +1 Chapter]
Your review helps the story grow.
P1treon Soulforger (20+chapters ahead)