Chapter Text
They all feel guilty. They all have cried over it. They’ve all grieved - well, all been grieving, as in current-tense, because grief doesn’t fade as easily as they would like.
Guilt doesn’t fade as easily, either. At least Dustin’s doesn’t.
They don’t quite get it. All of them have different guilts, different regrets, different ‘what if’s about Mike and Will. The rest of the Party wonders what would have happened if they had made Will stay home that day instead of going home from D&D. Jonathan and Joyce wonder what would have happened if they had stayed home instead of working. Nancy wonders what would have happened if she’d been watching Mike closer. Hopper wonders what would have happened if he’d figured out where the gate was before it closed with Will inside, lost.
But for Dustin, it’s different.
They don’t understand. They all loved Mike and Will. They all have things that they maybe, maybe, could have done. But Dustin, he…
He was the last person to see his two best friends alive.
He watched Mike die, screamed ‘no’ as Mike stepped off the edge of the quarry, dropped 300 feet into the water below.
He watched Will pedal away into the dark, never to be seen again because he went missing that night before he got home.
Dustin may not have seen their bodies, may not have been the one to see them actually stop breathing, but Dustin was the last one to see both of them alive. He was the one to see them die.
That’s on him. Not on anyone else. Just him.
It haunts him like the pictures on the walls are really haunted by the ghosts of two twelve-year-olds who were the first casualties of the Upside Down. It haunts him like those pictures’ eyes are following him. It haunts him like Dustin doesn’t want to return to the base.
It’s been five years since the Upside Down first started taking people, since it took Will and then Barb and then caused Mike to die. It’s been four years since the first cracks in the earth started. It’s been three-and-a-half years since quarantine was implemented. It’s been two years since the population dropped from ten thousand to maybe five hundred. It’s been five years since Dustin’s been able to breathe.
The Upside Down has infiltrated Hawkins like an infection. What they’ve been calling the Mindflayer has been slowly creeping into the real world, heralded by a red-and-black sky and Demogorgons alike. Between a fundamentalist religious cult-mob-thing convinced that the devil is in Hawkins, the government killing anyone that steps out of line, and the Upside Down itself, the world has… pretty much ended.
Dustin hasn’t been to school since he finished ninth grade despite now being seventeen, same as Lucas and their friend Max. While the older teens, Nancy and Jonathan and Steve and Robin - though they’re not really teens anymore, ranging in age from 20 to 23 - managed to graduate, they’ve all been stuck ever since. They’ve all been stuck.
Dustin, it feels, mostly in grief.
He was the last one to see Mike and Will alive. He was the one who had to talk to the police the most, the one who had to swear that Mike went into the quarry when they couldn’t find his body, the one who had to tell Mrs. Wheeler what happened. Then, when the quarantine went up, his dad stopped being able to get chemo and died. Then his mom died a year later.
He’s not the only one who’s lost someone. Lucas’s parents were disappeared by the cult-mob, Erica only saved because fifteen-year-old Lucas fought like hell to protect her when they came for one of the only Black families in town (because apparently that means they’re ‘of the devil’ or something according to freakish white-supremacist cultists) and literally got shot and stabbed at dragging her to safety. Jonathan and Joyce lost Will. Nancy lost everyone except for Holly, who’s already grown up to being eight.
There are so few people left in Hawkins that are still considered civilians that the government stopped letting supply trucks through. It’s only because they’ve been stockpiling for years now that their group has enough food. So many people are dead that the government gave up on helping those left alive.
Those are the pictures on the wall of the WSQZ. All of the dead that they knew have been put up on the wall like a shrine, whether smiling twelve-year-olds or wedding pictures of adults.
Dustin feels much, much older than seventeen.
They’ve been fighting a war instead of trying to escape Hawkins like so many people did. They’ve been helping civilians, sure, sending out radio broadcasts (because Robin and Jonathan and Steve all worked at the WSQZ radio station before shit really hit the fan and now they have full control of the radio and the building itself) about safe hiding places and supply stockpiles, but most of their energy has been devoted to Crawls.
They’ve discovered that the best way to fight the Upside Down is fire. A lighter is enough to scare away or confuse one of the smaller Demodogs, a flamethrower done right can make a gate shut down enough that they can seal it with El’s powers. So, armed with flamethrowers and gasoline as well as the gas masks and bulletproof outfits that are required, they do Crawls, small trips into the Upside Down where the Upside Down part of the group sets the gate on fire and beats back any of the Demogorgons and Demodogs that come running to defend the hive while the real-world crew protects El while she uses her powers to shut it down.
They started the Crawls trying to kill the Mindflayer. They cut that out pretty fast when all it did was get people killed and summon more warped, more unbearable monsters.
But… yeah. They’re all soldiers now.
They’re seventeen. Almost everyone they’ve ever known and loved is dead. They sleep in the basement of the WSQZ building in piles because it feels safe as well as conserving warmth in temperatures that drop to easily negative-thirty.
Joyce, the self-appointed mom of the group (partially, Dustin thinks, because she misses Will), used to talk about how she’d take care of them once they got out of here, how they’d move somewhere safe and she’d look out for them and keep them taken care of.
She stopped that around the time that they gave up on winning and just chose to try to buy time and maybe keep some of the Demogorgons in the Upside Down if they were lucky.
Dustin’s drowning in guilt and grief, but not just because there’s so much of it - at least partially because he’s just too tired to swim.