Archive of Our Own

“I’m sorry, what , Cunningham?”

Chrissy squares her shoulders and does not back down, looking Eddie Munson firmly in the eye. “I want to join Hellfire Club.”

The words don’t sound any less strange coming out of her mouth a second time, and Eddie must agree, because he keeps looking at her like she’s a poisonous snake somebody stuck in his locker. “No, you don’t,” he says, like it’s Newton’s Fourth Law, and Chrissy didn’t come and start this just for someone else to tell her what she does or doesn’t want, so she almost walks away...

...but she makes herself stay. Reminds herself to follow the plan. “Yes, I do . Why shouldn’t I?”

“Because!” Eddie gestures expansively. “You’re the cheer team captaining, Jason Carver-dating queen bee, and we’re the school pariahs, and I’m going to be generous and assume you don’t actually want to commit social suicide.” He suddenly gives her a warning look. “If you’re just asking so you can get in and sabotage the campaign --”

“No! Why would I do that?” Chrissy retorts. She sighs. “Look, it’s my last year of high school and I’m looking for a way to relax, and you guys seem to be actually having fun. I want to be a part of that. I promise I won’t sabotage anything or make fun.”

That’s not anything close to the whole truth, of course. But it is more or less true, and he doesn’t need to know the rest.

He considers her for a long moment, assessing. Then he says, “Next session’s on Thursday. Get here early, at seven, and I’ll help you put together a character. But if you start something, or someone has a problem, that’s it. All right?”

Chrissy nods. That’s all she needs. “See you then,” she says, and takes off to her next class.

&&&

The whole truth, of course, is a little more complicated, and requires going back a little. 

The whole whole truth requires going back a lot, to when Chrissy was thirteen and starting to get curves and her mother had started tracking her size and weight and ruling them with an iron fist. But the most relevant part had been only a few weeks ago, when she’d been squatted in the girls’ bathroom about to force out her stomach contents and freezing guiltily when someone else walked in. 

They’d left a few minutes later, but in that time, hiding and staring down grungy porcelain, Chrissy had been walloped by the thought that I don’t want to do this anymore. I can’t do this anymore.

It couldn’t be that simple, because nothing ever could - if she stopped, if she gained any weight at all, her mother would notice, and then there would be lectures, escalating into yelling if she interjected so much as a word, and in the end nothing would change.

What she needed was to get out of that house and not come back. But that wasn’t so simple either. In the past, if she’d so much as missed curfew or stayed over with a friend without advance notice, her mother would get her father to come looking for her and bring her back. There was no way she’d be able to get out on her own before graduation freed her up to leave town (if then), and that was months away.

So, in an admittedly desperate moment, Chrissy had come up with a plan: she needed to get her mother to kick her out of the house herself.

The trouble was, most of the things she could think of to accomplish that weren’t things she wanted to do in the least. Terrible grades wouldn’t be enough, and would only hamstring her future. She’d tried alcohol before and hadn’t liked it enough to contemplate consuming it in quantities that would get her disowned. Drugs could impair her to the point of having to drop cheer if she wasn’t careful, and she did love cheerleading; she wasn’t quite that desperate, not yet. Getting pregnant would do the job, but even if she managed to get Jason to go all the way, as opposed to their status quo of making out in his car, she didn’t especially want to have a baby right now, and a fake pregnancy would be too easy to get found out.

Then, walking down the hall, she’d seen a poster for Hellfire Club and heard the ghost of her mother’s voice griping about those horrible little degenerates , and the lightbulb had flicked on.

So yes, this was quite possibly going to be social suicide, if she was even able to understand this strange game enough to not get kicked out after one meeting, but it would maybe get her out of that house , and she could clean everything else up afterward.

Jason would help. She would explain to him, if and when it came up, why she was doing this, and he’d understand, and he’d help. 

He would.

&&&

She had, admittedly, not counted on how creepy the high school could be in the evenings when everyone had left and most of the lights were out. Nor had she anticipated the...atmosphere of the way the disused classroom was set up when she arrived. The cleared space in the middle of the room was lit by old stage lights that had been dragged in, throwing most of the room into shadows and spotlighting the black-draped table at the center, which was covered with a proliferation of arcane equipment. Tiny gray figurines lay in a pile at one corner of some kind of gridded mat, with colorful, strangely shaped...dice? She assumed? What else could they be?...scattered everywhere. One section of the table, the one furthest from where she stood in the door, was blocked off by a screen and several propped-open notebooks.

At that end of the table, lounging in an ornately carved chair that was more like a throne (where had he gotten that?), was Eddie Munson, fingers steepled together and wearing a fey grin thrown into strange relief by the shadows. 

“Punctual, princess. Always appreciated,” he commented. His hands spread out dramatically. “Welcome to the lair of our secret rituals. Are you ready to be initiated?”

Chrissy nodded, eyes wandering over the table again. “Does that mean you’re going to explain what all this stuff does? Or are you planning to throw me in the deep end to scare me off?”

Eddie’s eyebrows raised. “I’m not quite that mean, any rumors notwithstanding.” He motioned to a folding chair at his right. “We’ve only got an hour before everyone else shows up, so ask your questions fast.”

Chrissy sat. “I’m not sure I know enough to even come up with any questions,” she said with as much dignity as possible. “Can you start at the beginning and assume I don’t know anything?”

He hummed for a moment. “Have you read Lord of the Rings ?”

She had, years ago. One of her nicer uncles, her dad’s brother, had given her the books for her fourteenth birthday; her mother had found out that there was adventure and war in them and said they weren’t suitable for a girl, so Chrissy had hidden them and raced to read them two times through in the three weeks before they were found and disappeared for good.

She nods. Eddie lets out a huff of relief. “Well, that’ll make this a little easier. D&D has the same kinds of people as Lord of the Rings , but in a slightly different world. Each person makes up a character and you all work together to tell the story of your characters going on an adventure, fighting monsters, stuff like that. I’m the Dungeon Master, I plan the setting and storyline, play any other characters, run the fights, and keep things organized. The dice are used to see if you succeed or fail at something, like an attack or avoiding a trap or...whatever. You don’t compete, you work together to accomplish a goal and try not to die. Any questions?”

Chrissy chews her lip. She’d never admit it, but she can already almost see herself as an adventurer like one of the scattered figurines, slaying monsters. She remembers, dimly across the years, a woman from a land of horseback warriors, who had felt caged and had fought against it, who stood up and slew darkness and was broken but came back stronger. She had been drawn to that character without knowing why, before she could quite formulate that there was something wrong in her house.

“What kind of characters are there, for me to be?” she asks. “Is there something like the...Rohan people? I can’t remember what they were called.”

“Rohirrim.” He gives her a funny look; great, now he probably thinks she’s a horse girl. It’s not that at all, but she doesn’t know how to explain otherwise and somehow isn’t particularly inclined to. “There isn’t exactly - so there are different ‘races’ you can pick from, and human is one of them, but there aren’t really different kinds of humans.”

“I want to be just human, then,” Chrissy declares.

Another eyebrow raise. “Are you sure?” He passes her one of the notebooks, flipped open to a list. “That’s not necessarily the most exciting option - like an elf, for example, would give you some ability score boosts...”

Chrissy scans the page, considering. She’s not sure what a gnome is, or why half-orc is even an option. She doesn’t remember any female dwarves, and anyway she can’t see herself that way, or as a halfling. Elves and half-elves mainly make her think of...not Arlin, something else, whoever Aragorn’s girlfriend was, who didn’t seem to have any adventures. Or Galadriel, powerful and therefore better, but...also a queen. She thinks of Eddie calling her queen bee the other day in disbelief and thinks, no.

“I want to be human,” she reiterates. “A warrior.”

Eddie looks faintly surprised at that, but takes the book to shuffle through it. “Okay, combat classes, then - a class is what determines how you fight. Do you want to use magic, or not so much?”

It’s very clearly an out for her to avoid parts of the game that other people would view with more suspicion. Chrissy considers the question from the opposite direction: what will be most likely to infuriate her mother when she finds out?

“Is there a...class...that uses magic and fights with a sword?” she finally asks.

“Um, yeah.” More page-flipping. “Right here. Cleric. Kind of like a priest-warrior. You okay with that?”

She finds herself grinning sharply. “That sounds perfect.”

&&&

The hour flies by with dice-rolling and pencil-scratching and the occasional explanation of rules, and before Chrissy knows it, there are footsteps in the hall outside, and people coming into the classroom. 

They’re all boys: three upperclassmen whose names she doesn’t know, Nancy Wheeler’s little brother, a curly-haired freshman, and --

“What’s she doing here?” Sinclair asks, just as she registers that she’s seen him at Jason’s basketball practices. “She’s a cheerleader.”

“I could ask you the same question,” she shoots back before she can really think about it. “You’re on the basketball team.”

“Yeah, but I was a nerd before I got in with the jocks,” Sinclair argues, then snaps his mouth shut like he just let critical intelligence slip to an enemy.

Eddie intervenes around this point. “Gentlemen, I take it you all know Chrissy Cunningham,” he says. “Cunningham, looks like you’ve met Sinclair...”

“And I think I know who you are,” she tells Nancy’s brother. “Mike Wheeler, right?”

He nods. The unknown freshman waves, introducing himself as “Dustin Henderson, at your service.”

The three older boys, who she can dimly remember clustering at a table with Eddie every lunch period for the past four years, indicate their names to be Carl, Jeff, and Gareth. All of them, and Eddie, are wearing club shirts - white with black sleeves and the club’s name and devil symbol on the front. She needs to get her hands on one of those.

Carl is the one, after a nearly-invisible exchange of looks, to say it. “Sinclair has a point, though. What’s the cheer captain doing at Hellfire Club?”

“The cheer captain,” Chrissy speaks up, “is trying out an extracurricular that might just be fun, as opposed to her other ones that are fun but involve a lot of work. Is that allowed?”

She’s not sure whether she hits the right tone - the last thing she wants is to come across as some spoiled, entitled girl who thinks she should be let in anywhere just because she feels like it. But she also doesn’t want them to decide to say “no, it’s not” and haul her out.

Eddie steps in and ends the dilemma. “She asked politely and genuinely to join, and in the spirit of being better than most of the idiotic cliques around here, I said yes. Are we going to debate the issue all night, or are we going to tackle the dungeon up ahead?”

With a minimum of further muttering, everyone else settles into chairs around the table, with Dustin ending up in the seat on her other side. He glances over at her character sheet. “Ooh, cleric, nice. We’ve been needing one of those. You picked out a name yet?”

“We left that for last,” Chrissy says. This had only partially been for practical reasons, and partially because she hadn’t been sure what a proper name would be. “It can wait. I don’t want to hold things up.”

Eddie’s been arranging the figurines - miniatures, he’d called them - around the grid while everyone settled, and now, after a quick glance around to see that they’re all set, he seems to...shift, somehow. Or perhaps just come out of himself more. A gleeful, plotting light is in his eyes, and he cracks his knuckles before starting to speak in a lowered, dramatic voice.

He spins a tale for them, setting the scene of an ancient, abandoned network of caves, of the party gathering to break through a sealed, enchanted door to the next room, and finally getting it open (with some translation help from Jeff’s wizard) only to nearly walk straight into a trap. They cautiously navigate their way through the caves, dodging traps and on a couple of occasions finding treasure, and then at last, they stumble into a huge chamber full of goblins who are attacking from the high ground.

Up until this point, there hasn’t been all that much for Chrissy and her as-yet-nameless character to do - she asked questions once out of unsuspecting curiosity that led to Mike spotting a trap, and she healed Carl after he fell into a hidden pit (and no, she wasn’t smug about that at all, after he’d questioned her being there, why do you ask). But now, a goblin comes charging straight for Lucas’ ranger, and he swings and misses by a mile (to general howls of mostly-dismay, though Chrissy has to stifle laughter at the way Eddie acts it out and describes it). This means the goblin is now about to attack her cleric.

She’s not sure what they all expect of her, but judging by the brief stunned silence when it happens, they weren’t expecting her to react by blasting the goblin with a column of sacred fire, or for her to end up with dice rolls that, it turned out, meant the creature was instantly incinerated.

The freeze only lasts for seconds, though, and then Eddie is right back into character (because she’s starting to understand that his Dungeon Master routine is its own kind of role-playing), giving the goblin’s death due drama, and Dustin at her other elbow lets out a barbarian howl of triumph, and they all leap into combat.

Chrissy ends up calling down fire on a couple more goblins, although neither instance quite finishes them off, and lays into several more with her longsword. She laughs and groans and cheers along with the others - it’s a feeling not all that different from a sports game, but distilled down to just eight people at a small table. At the end, once they’ve wiped out the goblins and found a stash of treasure big enough to share and racked up their due experience points, she gets pulled into the mix of high-fives along with everyone else.

She hasn’t laughed like that, or felt that good, in she doesn’t know how long, but she doesn’t think about that until everyone’s starting to trickle out, and Dustin nudges her. “Hey,” he says, “so you can totally say no if you want, but I had an idea for your character name.”

“What?” she asks, still being fresh out of any ideas herself.

“Ananda,” he tells her, and spells it. “It’s from this book A Swiftly Tilting Planet , and it means ‘that joy in existence without which the univese will fall apart and collapse’.” He shrugs. “It seemed like this made you happy.”

Ananda . Chrissy shapes the name in her mouth, tasting it. It doesn’t sound quite like the bits she remembers of Lord of the Rings . But she wants it anyway.

“Thanks,” she says. “I think I will use that.” And she writes it at the top of her character sheet.

It’s at that point that she realizes - during the game, she hadn’t thought even once about her real reason for being there. She hadn’t thought about home or her mom or any of her normal problems at all. It had been...amazing.

She wants to have that again. She wants to keep coming back, not just to push her mom over the edge, but for its own sake.

So she turns to Eddie, who’s gathering up his (presumably) organized chaos of equipment, and asks, “Do you guys - do we - meet at the same time every week? Or if you don’t, can you let me know when the next meeting will be?”

“It’s been Thursday nights pretty consistently so far this year. We’ll see what happens when basketball season starts taking more of Sinclair’s time. And yours, I guess.” He shoves everything in a backpack, hoists it onto one shoulder. Then he says, “You need a ride home?”

&&&

Chrissy wants out of her parents’ house as soon as possible. But she doesn’t want it to happen tonight - she needs to set up a safety net of some sort, and hasn’t had the chance yet. Besides which, if her mom finds out about Hellfire Club tonight, after just one meeting, she probably won’t be mad enough. There’ll just be a fight, and punishments, and she’ll be prevented from going to any further meetings, but she’ll still be kept under that roof. Her plan needs more time to build up if it’s going to work.

So she has Eddie park his van a ways down the street when he drops her off. He doesn’t question it - likely, he would have been more surprised if she hadn’t been trying to keep a low profile. She doesn’t want to get out, when they finally arrive - Eddie plays heavy metal cassettes, loudly, while driving, and the van smells strongly of cigarrettes and beer and weed, tangling into a single eau de stay-away-from-that-boy , but there she can cling to the last cobwebs of the night’s fun and freedom. Once she gets out, her real life has to start back up.

But her curfew’s getting close, and her parents will only believe her alibi of having been at an evening study session for so long, so she checks her pocket one last time to make sure her character sheet is safely folded and hidden there, and says, “Thanks. For the ride, and letting me join in.”

“Hey, no problem. See you back next week?”

“Next week,” she confirms. They both know without discussing it that they won’t be talking at school, even though they’ll almost definitely spot each other there.

Then she makes herself get out of the van.

&&&

Her original plan is to mention what’s going on to Jason sometime between the first and second Hellfire Club meetings.

Because it shouldn’t be a problem - all right, he’s never not called Eddie and his crowd names, and she’s pretty sure the only reason Lucas has lasted on the team is because Jason is unaware of his continued semi-secret nerd status. But this is her. His girlfriend. He knows her. He’ll believe her and understand when she explains that there’s nothing evil going on here, even if she can’t manage to convey the particular...aliveness she felt during the game. If nothing else, when she explains the part about her mom and how all this got started, he’ll understand then, right?

There’s no reason for her to think otherwise. It’s just that she doesn’t actually get the chance to bring the subject up that week, or any of the next few weeks, because there’s always something else going on. When she’s with him, usually his team and her cheerleading/popular crowd friends are all around and it’s not the best time, plus everyone’s already talking about something or other, and when they’re alone, most of the time he ends up talking, about school or sports or something happening in town or at church, and it’s all she can do to contribute to those existing conversations.

(Or they’re alone in a different way and that’s a whole different kind of bad time to talk, and anyway she finds she doesn’t like to think about Hellfire Club when she’s making out with Jason. It feels like...well, she’s never cheated on anyone, but it feels like what she imagines cheating would feel like, except that, bizarrely, the feeling is that she’s not cheating on Jason with the Club, but the other way around.)

So it keeps on like that for most of October. She practices flying with the cheer squad and Ananda slays a giant spider singlehandedly. She invents new hiding spots for her cheer uniform and favorite clothes so her mom can’t take them in and pretend she didn’t, and levels up to gain a set of new and interesting spells. She sits next to Jason at lunch, with him doing all the talking, and sits next to Eddie on Thursday nights, cheering and watching the light catch on his rings as he bats a monster miniature aside in defeat, reveling in the the reactions from him and the others when she makes a particularly high roll.

But there finally comes a day when, without her planning it at all, everything just sort of falls into place. Or falls apart, depending on how you see it. It doesn’t start with anything that should be a big deal. All that happens is that Eddie and Gareth and Mike are having an effusive debate over...she’s not sure, but it sounds like over the merits or lack thereof of something called Time Bandits , and at one point, Eddie throws back his head and laughs, apparently at too high a volume for Jason’s taste. 

“Can’t somebody shut the freak up?” he mutters.

Maybe it’s because Chrissy has Billy Joel running through her head for no reason -- we ain’t too pretty, we ain’t too proud, we might be laughin’ a bit too loud, aw but that never hurt no one -- or maybe it’s because she gets the briefest flash of memory, of Jason and the team hooting and hollering after trouncing another team, but she finds herself saying, quietly but firmly, “He’s not.”

Conversation at their table hushes, and Jason twists to look at her. “What was that, baby?”

He sounds more confused than anything else, so Chrissy doesn’t immediately catch herself and shut down, but says, “He’s not - they’re not freaks. They’re just...people. Okay?”

It doesn’t have the desired effect. From the look Jason gives her, she knows just what he’s going to say before he says it, and sure enough, “Chrissy, it’s sweet how you see the good in everybody, but some people are just bad apples. I mean, Munson literally named his club ‘Hellfire’ - that should tell you something about what they get up to.”

“It’s not like that,” Chrissy insists with, she doesn’t yet realize, too much authority. “It’s just a game. It’s fantasy, and they have magic names for things, but it’s all pretty much just math.” In the middle of her third session, she’d briefly used this to her advantage when she’d discovered a trick of rolling the dice consistently high by holding them a certain way. Ananda had scampered like a jungle cat past half a dozen traps before Eddie had caught on and forbidden the tactic.

Jason gives her a funny look. “What would you know about that?” She starts to open her mouth, and then he seems to realize what she might be about to say, because he takes her arm and hauls her up and away from the lunch table, out to the empty hallway.

“Chrissy,” he says lowly, once they’re sequestered away from anyone whose opinion he cares about, “have you been...spending time with those creeps?”

Okay, they’re doing this now. She swallows, looks him in the eye. “I’ve been going to Hellfire Club meetings for weeks now.”

Jason takes this anything but calmly. “You can’t be serious!” he hisses. “C’mon, babe, tell me you’re joking.” When she doesn’t give any evidence of not being serious, he almost snarls. “What did that freak Munson do to you, huh? He get something over you, to make you hang around with his losers? They do some kind of occult thing to you? I swear I’m gonna make him pay for this, baby, I’m gonna get you back --”

“He didn’t do anything to me!” Chrissy snaps. “None of them did. It really is just a game. And they didn’t make me join - I asked. I asked the first time and I asked to keep coming back and they didn’t believe me at first but they still said yes. They’re not evil , Jason.”

He doesn’t seem to be able to fully hear her, keeps shaking his head almost without realizing it. “No, no, Chrissy, I know you, you’re not the kind of girl who does this stuff. Think about what the team would say, and the pastor, and your mom --”

“My mom is the reason I’m doing this! She’s making my life miserable, so I thought if I got her mad enough at me about D&D she’d - she’d let me move out, so at first I was just using them, but I’m not anymore, it’s amazing, I’d keep doing it even if I didn’t need to get at mom --”

“What? What’re you talking about? Your mom is awesome!” Jason’s looking at her like she’s completely lost it. “She’s great, she’s always been nice to me, nice about us --”

“-- she’s nice when you’re around because you fit into what she has planned for me --” Chrissy not-quite-screams back, only realizing how true it is as she’s saying it.

Jason just carries right on like she didn’t say anything. “-- I know she gets on you about food and stuff but she just wants what’s best for you, and y’know, sometimes she has a point --”

That brings Chrissy up short. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

He blinks. “I said sometimes she has a point. Like about eating right and wearing the right clothes, it’s important to keep a certain image - which is exactly why you should be staying away from Munson and the other freaks --”

Chrissy has another of those sudden little flashes, of Jason balancing a loaded-down lunch tray on a game day while she tries to convince herself that half a sandwich isn’t too much, of Jason taking her out to the diner and ordering a combo while she picks at a salad and tries not to stare longingly at his fries --

She cuts it off. This isn’t about the food thing, not really. This is about her and Jason and their relationship and double standards and him not listening to her and trying to tell her what to do and --

“If I stop going to Hellfire Club,” she says, on a sudden burst of inspiration, and she can’t quite remember what kind of check this would be, but she hopes she rolls a nat 20, because she couldn’t bear to quit Hellfire Club, but she’s pretty sure Jason won’t agree to what she’s about to say, “if I stop, you have to quit throwing those parties with the basketball team.”

Jason briefly gets a kind of discombobulated look, like he’s not sure how they started talking about this. “What? What does that have to do with...?”

“I like D&D, but you don’t like me playing,” Chrissy says, takes a deep breath, and then forges on, “and you do like throwing parties and getting drunk and, and raucous with the team, but I don’t. I don’t like being there, and I don’t like that you do that in the first place. So you promise to stop, and I’ll quit Hellfire.”

He just stares. “But...what does that...you can’t just...”

“If I don’t get to tell you what to do, why do you get to tell me what to do?” Months ago, perhaps weeks ago, she wouldn’t have dared to have this much spine, but she’s fought monsters since then, and discovered that other so-called monsters aren’t actually so monstrous, and that changes a person. Plus, now that she’s thought of this, she’s genuinely curious about it.

“Because...because...” Jason splutters. “Because I’m your boyfriend, and that’s how that works!”

“So why is it not how being your girlfriend works?”

“Because...” he struggles for a moment, “because husbands are supposed to be in charge of their wives, and lead them, and women are...are supposed to be submissive!” he concludes, clearly thinking he’s made a telling point.

“Well then, thank goodness we’re not married,” Chrissy declares, and then, before he can think of a comeback, adds, “And that we won’t ever be. I’m done, Jason.”

It actually takes him a solid few seconds to comprehend what she’s said. “But - but you can’t!” he protests.

“I can and I am.” Maybe she should have thought it through more, especially because Jason was a key part of her original plan - she’d entertained the notion that he might let her crash at his place after the kicking-out finally occurred. But the only thought she can hold onto is that if she has to end this conversation still tied to him, she doesn’t know if she’ll be able to breathe. “I’m breaking up with you, Jason. Goodbye.”

That should be the end of it, when she turns to walk away, but it isn’t. “This is about Munson, isn’t it?” Jason seethes, trying to catch her arm. “He has got something on you - what’s he been making you do for him? It’s okay, you can tell me, I know how these cults can be --”

Chrissy simply does not have it in her to argue with him any more, or to listen to him say these ugly things. She jerks away from him and runs.

&&&

She spends the rest of lunch period hiding in the girls’ bathroom (for once not to make herself throw up, although she feels sick enough that it would be easy), and then somehow makes it through the afternoon’s classes. None of them have Jason in them, but all of them do have at least a few people she knows, and judging by the whispers, word of the breakup has started to travel.

It’s a Friday, so she at least has the weekend ahead of her to avoid everyone. All she wants to do is go home and cry - not for the breakup with Jason, but for his being less than she’d hoped he would be, and for the ways her plans will have to change now - but before she can even leave the school grounds, she’s intercepted by, of all people, Dustin Henderson.

“Hi,” he says, like talking at school is something they do. “Quick question: do you actually want to talk to Jason right now?”

Chrissy shakes her head fervently.

“Great. Figured not. Lucas is stalling him with basketball stuff so he can’t come looking for you. Follow me.”

Lacking any reason why not, Chrissy does follow him. Her mom won’t expect her until much later - usually on Fridays she goes on a driving and dinner date with Jason, and staying out until her usual time will put off the inevitable breakup lecture. She’s not sure where she expects to end up, but it’s definitely not Steve Harrington’s car, pulled up at the edge of the parking lot. Robin Buckley from band, of all people, is sitting in the passenger seat.

“Lucas heard about the thing with Jason - not the details, just that you guys broke up - and said you might want help,” Dustin says in an explanatory sort of way. “Steve can take you anywhere you want to go to avoid him. If you can’t think of anywhere, you can always hang out at Family Video - that’s where Steve and Robin work.”

“Quit volunteering my workplace as a hideout, Henderson!” Steve calls through his rolled-down window. He half-waves at Chrissy. “Hi. Harrington’s Taxis, at your service, I guess.”

Chrissy has far too many questions, but the one that spills out is, “How do you two...know each other?”

“I emergency-babysat him and his friends a couple times,” Steve says, like that makes sense. “C’mon, get in or we’re going to be late for work.”

She gets in. Dustin waves as they drive away, and she waves back, trying to process everything. 

“Thank you,” she finally says, unsure of what else to say.

“Don’t mention it,” Steve shrugs. “I used to know Jason, kinda. When he figures he should have something, he doesn’t really...stop. Which is great for basketball, but not so much for...people. Stuff. Y’know.”

She does.

“How come you guys broke up, anyway?” Robin queries. “I mean, you don’t really know me, so you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, it’s just that you guys always seemed like sort of the perfect couple.”

Chrissy isn’t sure if she wants to explain all of the reasoning behind why she joined the Hellfire Club, because she doesn’t really know these people but they do apparently know the people she plays with, but she says, “I started playing D&D with the club Dustin’s in, and Jason found out and wanted me to quit. And...I couldn’t.”

It sounds lame and nonsensical to her own ears, but Robin nods like it makes all the sense in the world.

&&&

She ends up asking to be dropped off at the library. It’ll keep her busy for the evening, she probably won’t get in trouble for having been there (at least, not any more trouble than she’ll already be in for dumping Jason), and even though there’s technically no food allowed, she can probably find a quiet corner to eat the parts of her sack lunch that she didn’t get to, in lieu of an actual supper.

Technically, she could take the opportunity to work on homework. But she doesn’t have that much, and she has plenty of time to do it, especially with a Jason-free weekend ahead. So somehow, she finds herself wandering through the stacks looking for something particular...

...and there, there it is. The Lord of the Rings .

It’s not as nice as the copy her uncle gave her once - this one is a little old, and very clearly well-loved. But it’s right there, and no one can stop her from reading it.

She doesn’t know why she didn’t think of this before.

Chrissy snags it off the shelf and promptly holes up in a reading nook, nibbling at her sandwich and losing herself in Middle-Earth. And it’s...maybe those people who say fantasy is dangerous because it makes you forget about the real world have a point, because by the end of the first chapter she isn’t thinking about Jason or her mom or Hawkins at all anymore, but that can’t be a bad thing. Her real life is terrible; of course she wants to escape it.

She’s just gotten to Tom Bombadil’s house when something heavy drops onto the cushion beside her, and she looks up, a little disoriented, to see Eddie grinning at her over the book. 

“Well, look who we have here,” he says. “Chrissy Cunningham, alone and reading the finest nerd literature on a Friday evening.”

She laughs in spite of herself. “What are you doing here?”

“Henderson called me up about a party member in distress - something about a bad breakup?” He tilts his head, considering her. “Forgive me for saying so, but you don’t look all that distressed.”

“I’m not, at least not about Jason,” Chrissy admits. “It’s just - you probably wouldn’t get this --”

“Try me.”

“It’s just that...I’d been dating him since sophomore year, and I didn’t realize until today, but pretty much my whole life, at school and most of what I do for fun, it’s all been either stuff with him or stuff with the friends I have because I was dating him. Now that I’m not...I don’t know what my life will look like. And I didn’t really think about that until after I’d dumped him. Not that I would take it back. But.”

Eddie nods. “Well, this may or may not be comforting, considering that we’re perhaps the least socially accepted crowd in town, but if you need it, Hellfire’s got your back. We stick up for our fellow freaks, and getting shunned for dumping the basketball captain is, like, Freak 101.”

For some reason, it doesn’t sting when Eddie calls her a freak the way it had when Jason had used the word. It feels...like a compliment. She ducks her head, a smile creeping onto her face. “I might just have to take you up on that.”

He shrugs. “Least we can do, after you - reportedly, anyway - got in a fight with your boyfriend over your right to play D&D.”

Chrissy hums. “It wasn’t - I don’t know, I just realized that I didn’t need Jason as much as I needed to keep playing.” She doesn’t want to confess the whole beginning, doesn’t want to admit to using him and his friends, even a bit, at first. But she does say, “It’s...it’s an escape. I know that probably sounds stupid, that I would need something like that --”

“Nah. No, it doesn’t.” Eddie looks...surprised, but not shocked. “None of us get this deep into a role-playing game because we like the way our real lives are all that much.”

He doesn’t elaborate. Neither does Chrissy. 

&&&

Monday morning, she hikes to catch the bus, having planned on Jason not picking her up in his car and secretly glad for an excuse to leave the house early. (Her mom had not taken news of the breakup well, and had spent the weekend making sharp remarks about how she’d better be working on a way to get Jason back.) She doesn’t know anyone on the bus well enough to engage with them, but once she gets to school, she starts to notice the change. 

Nobody is talking to her. A few people from the fringes of her usual circle still wave to her like everything is normal, but the other cheerleaders and jock-girlfriends who usually joined her, chattering, on walks to classes are nowhere in sight. The few she does spot in the distance seem, if she isn’t mistaken, to actually be avoiding her.

Chrissy isn’t stupid, and she’s fairly good at reading people and situations. It doesn’t even take her the whole morning to figure out that she’s being frozen out. Whether it’s because she broke up with Jason and they’re punishing her, or because they just don’t care about her now that she’s not dating him, or because word has spread about her joining Hellfire Club and she’s now untouchable, she doesn’t know. It doesn’t much matter, ultimately. What matters is that it’s happening.

She spends the last period before lunch being burningly furious about this, and then shortly before the bell rings, abruptly resolves to roll with it. If her so-called friends are doing this to hurt her, she’s not going to be hurt, at least not visibly. After all, she has options here.

At lunch, she pretends to not see the whole basketball-and-cheer table watching her to see what she’ll do, pretends they’re not there at all, and walks right past them with her sack lunch towards the Hellfire table. Her head is high and her stride is confident, and she fully intends to drop into a seat at the far end of the table next to the freshmen, but --

It’s quick, and subtle, but not quite subtle enough: Dustin spots her coming and elbows Mike to scoot down, following suit himself and yanking with surprising force on Carl’s arm to get him to move too, all of which has the cumulative effect of creating an open spot next to Eddie’s position at the unofficial head of the table. The next second, Eddie looks up to check what the fuss is, sees her, and unceremoniously shoves a pile of notebooks and random effluvia aside to further clear space at the newly created spot. The second after that, Chrissy’s arrived at the table, and decides to take the opportunity that’s been handed to her without making a fuss. Whatever this is about, it’s probably just a one-time thing, to put on a show for the jock table.

“What do we have here? Looks like the Queen of Hawkins High is gracing us with her presence today,” Eddie greets her, with something akin to a seated half-bow.

“I might not be ‘queen’ anymore, or for much longer, anyway,” Chrissy admits. It isn’t as hard to say as she would have thought.

“Who cares, a warrior’s better anyway,” Dustin says, and the rest of the table murmurs agreement. 

And Chrissy - Chrissy gets that feeling of belonging again, stronger than ever, that she only seems to get with this bunch of people.

&&&

Not everything changes, after that. Chrissy still dresses in pretty clothes and wears careful makeup every day, because she finds she likes looking nice even if it’s not for someone. She still does cheer, still captains the squad, because whatever this silent treatment thing is, it doesn’t override who the teachers put in charge at the beginning of the year. The other girls still listen to her - for now.

But now she spends her lunch periods with the rest of the Hellfire Club, and they seem determined to make up for the loss of her old friendships by letting her more and more into their circle. Dustin evidently has a talk with Steve that results in Steve giving her rides to and from school in Jason’s stead, since she’s purportedly not too far out of his way to pick up Robin. Mike’s sister Nancy just comes up and starts a conversation one day after school, and before Chrissy knows it they’ve been talking for ages and might have somehow become friends. 

Lucas seems to have been thrown into a strange sort of conflict by her change in social position. He has, she learns, only just clawed his way out of his own nerdy middle-school reputation through his position on the basketball team, and is desperate to not drop back down in the pecking order - but is also increasingly uncomfortable by his new compatriots’ treatment of her.

He’s the one who ends up telling her what exactly is going on. “The idea is, or was, that if everybody dropped you for hanging out with the “freaks” - them - us,” he explains, “then you’d realize how bad the consequences could be or something, and want to come back. Except that they, Jason, didn’t count on you just hanging out with us instead. Now I think he’s trying to come up with something else, but I don’t know what it is yet.”

That’s...both comforting and not. She’d been wondering what was up with Jason - she hadn’t forgotten Steve’s comment about him not really stopping when he wanted something, or her internal agreement with the assessment - and now she knows, but on the other hand, being aware that there could be another paradigm shift without knowing what it will be or when is a tiny bit nerve-wracking.

Then there’s Eddie.

Chrissy’s not sure what to call it - it’s like there was some kind of line or wall in place at the beginning, and now, whether it’s because of her unambiguously switching camps or because of the breakup ( it’s not because of the breakup, get a grip ), that line or wall is gone. He doesn’t stop leaving a spot open next to him at the lunch table (and the others don’t stop aiding and abetting him. They think they’re subtle. They’re not.) He walks with her to Ms. O’Donnell’s class after lunch, not just in the same general direction, and they talk. At Hellfire meetings, sometimes he’ll brush against her, just briefly, but far more than the nothing-at-all previously, and she just...gets the sense that he’s paying attention to her somehow. Not in a creepy way. Just...aware.

A tiny voice far in the back of her mind, the same one that occasionally likes to deliver unhelpfully timed comments about how surprisingly pretty his eyes are or wonder if his hair would be soft if she got the chance to card her fingers into it, will sometimes point out that this could be flirting. How would she know if it wasn’t? It’s not like Jason did anything of the kind; he just asked her out to homecoming sophomore year and everything was sort of matter-of-fact from there.

But, she reminds the voice firmly, that also means that she doesn’t have any way to know if this is flirting, and she should probably assume that it isn’t. Eddie doesn’t have any reason to flirt with her. She’s just...imagining things. Yes. That’s it. Definitely.

&&&

The Hellfire Club members take turns bringing snacks to meetings. Chrissy had been sort of vaguely aware of this, and had consistently turned down anything she was offered each week - now that she’d given up purging herself, she really did have to be careful what she ate if she didn’t want to get into another fight.

This particular Thursday, though, the week of her eighth session, it becomes a more immediate concern when Gareth asks over lunch, “Hey, are we adding Chrissy into the snack rotation? ‘Cause if we are, it would be her turn tonight.”

All eyes go to her. She starts to make an excuse - they would probably let her get away with it, too - but then stops. This shouldn’t actually be undoable. She has a decent amount of allowance saved, and she can get Steve to drop her at the grocery store after school, probably. Maybe since she’s picking, she can even get something safe for her to eat, something she doesn’t have to wave away.

So she says, “Sure, I can do that. No problem.”

Except that there does end up being a little bit of a problem, because she doesn’t keep any of her sack lunch back for later like she otherwise might (not that there’s much available to keep back), and running to the store after school, she realizes too late, means that she can’t stop by her house for even a quick dinner. Not with food in tow. And the more she contemplates her options, the less she can picture bringing, for example, a veggie platter, or a boxed fruit salad. The others usually bring chips or packaged cookies of some kind - on Mike’s week, he’d come in with an armload of Nerds and a completely straight face.

Standing in the middle of the grocery store, the desire to keep up the pattern, to bring something the others might actually like, wins out over her knowledge of how hungry she’ll be later, and she grabs a couple of boxes of Hostess cakes and prays the checker won’t mention it to her mom at some later date. But later, at the meeting, she realizes she’s starving, and can’t bring herself to wave the open box along like she usually would.

She can’t take anything - she’ll gain weight and her mom will notice and harangue her for ages, maybe escalating into screaming about no wonder Jason hasn’t tried to take you back yet, why would he want to date such a pig - but...the last time she tried to play when she was this hungry, she made a couple of stupid and highly egregious mistakes, ones that came with dire consequences and had everyone else looking at her not in condemnation, but in concern , which was somehow worse. Eddie’s hinted darkly that the section ahead is one of the worst parts of the dungeon yet. She needs to be on point tonight.

It takes her a long ten seconds of wavering, but finally her hand darts out and she snags not one, but two cakes. She can almost feel the surprise emanating off the others, but no one says anything.

She scarfs her prize as quickly as she can, to not let herself think too much about it, and the sugar hits her like a wave. Whether it’s that or the rush of doing two forbidden things at once, she plays with a ferocity no one’s yet seen from her. The kobolds don’t know what hit them.

Eddie doesn’t even seem mad about how she and the others end up demolishing his encounter - he always celebrates right there with them when they beat the monsters he throws at them - but tonight there’s something extra in his grin when he bows at the end of the session. 

Nobody directly addresses it that night. That’s fine, good even. She’s not sure how she would talk about it if it did come up.

But. After that, there’s always someone at the Hellfire table who mysteriously has something extra in their lunch, that they end up passing to Chrissy. Robin starts handing her breakfast burritos in the mornings with absolutely no explanation as to why, or how she might have gotten such an idea. If she runs into Nancy on her way out of school, the other girl always seems to have a granola bar in her purse to offer.

She doesn’t always accept them, but more and more...she does. Cheer practice is ramping up and, rides from Steve and occasionally Eddie notwithstanding, she’s having to walk to places more and more since the breakup, and she’s hungry. And once she starts, once she gets used to not going around hollow just for a couple of days, she can’t bring herself to go back.

And at first, there are rewards. She feels better, pays better attention in classes, doesn’t have Ms. Kelly watching her when she goes down the hall. She plays better, more fiercely, even when she’s not on a sugar rush - Ananda hits sixth level just before Thanksgiving.

&&&

Then, of course, the consequences kick in, the way she knew they would.

It's Tuesday night, one more school day left before the break, and her mom calls her to come try on a dress she wants Chrissy to wear for Thanksgiving dinner with Grammy and Grandpa. Chrissy doesn't especially want to, but it's either that or screaming and having her door beaten down, so she leaves her homework and goes.

The moment the dress slides over her head and down her torso, she knows this isn't going to work. Sure enough, when she reaches back for the zipper, it won't go up past the small of her back - the gap is small, but definitely there. Before she can think of what to do, her mom's spotted the issue, and it's too late.

"Chrissy?" Long-nailed fingers grip the edges of the zipper, try to pull them to meet. It doesn't work; the fabric is already straining against Chrissy's chest and stomach. She squeezes her eyes shut and repeats silently to herself that doesn't mean you're fat, it doesn't mean you're fat, it just means she made the dress too small, and anyway I'd rather be fat than throwing up every day again.

"Chrissy," her mom's tone is sweet but dangerous, "have you been overeating again?"

"No, just a normal amount," she makes herself say, and somehow it comes out sounding calm.

A harrumph. "Well, clearly you need to cut back again - I know I made this to fit your measurements. It's no wonder Jason hasn't taken you back yet if you've been letting yourself go like this."

Chrissy thinks of Robin's breakfast burritos, of an extra sandwich at her lunch spot that no one will admit to but that she knows is the same as Eddie's, of her three aced quizzes last week and not having to see Ms. Kelly anymore. Somehow, she finds it in her to say, "Jason hasn't not taken me back because of that. He hasn't taken me back because I didn't want him to."

Silence, like the kind right between the moment someone triggers a trap full of poisonous spikes and the moment they're gruesomely impaled. "And why don't you want him to take you back?" her mom says evenly. "That boy is going places, you're lucky he ever gave you a second look, you pathetic --"

"I just didn't want to date him anymore," Chrissy insists. "Doesn't that matter?" She knows it doesn't, that it's never mattered what she wants, but she has to ask anyway.

Her mom smacks her for that, and has her take off the dress, snarling something about how she'll have to let it out now, and berating her the whole time she's changing about how if she doesn't watch herself and quit pigging out and blowing off opportunities, she'll end up with nothing and no one.

Chrissy escapes back to her room as soon as she can and leans against the closed door, struggling to not cry. She should know better than to let this get under her skin, and she does, it's not even the scolding in itself, really - it's that as she was leaving, her mom wrapped up with, "You know I'm only telling you this because I love you."

She's wanted so badly for so long for that to be true, but she knows it's not. She's got some idea of what love looks like, now, and it doesn't look like that.

She needs to get out of this house. Hellfire Club has been distracting her enough from the rest of her life that her original plan had slipped towards the back of her mind, but now it's back and she's clinging to it. She'll stick it out through Christmas, she decides - she wants to be with her brother for one set of holidays, and she usually gets a little money from extended family around then, which will help with...whatever happens next.

Christmas, and then in the new year she's getting out.

&&&

She's never been so glad to get back to school, rapidly becoming synonymous with "refuge", after a break as she is this year. That is, right up until she catches sight of her locker.

Someone has painted STAY AWAY FREAK in ugly black letters on the door. There's white powder scattered everywhere - salt, she guesses, after seeing the silver rosary and the garlic hanging inside. Those items are also what confirm that Jason was involved; he's had her locker combination since the beginning of the year.

"You too, huh?" She turns, and there's Eddie, looking his very Eddiest.

It takes her a second to catch on to what he means. "You mean they..."

"Trashed my locker, yeah. Although the message on mine was more along the lines of..." He looks up, remembering. "Oh, yeah, 'let her go or else'."

Chrissy doesn't like the sound of that. "That's not good."

"I know, they could've at least had the decency to mess with you for making your own choices instead of as a way to get to me --"

"No, I mean it's not good that they're threatening you." She's never actually seen Jason fight anybody, but she's seen him play, and if he were to apply that fervor, that need to win and be right, to beating someone up... She shivers. "Just...be careful."

"Ah, being careful is overrrated." He grins sideways at her. "Nice to know you're concerned, though."

"Of course I'm concerned, you're my --" For some incomprehensible reason, the word 'friend' sticks in her throat. "You kinda...saved me. I don't want you to get hurt for it."

Oddly enough, he almost looks...touched at that. "Don't worry about me, Cunningham. I've been dealing with this stuff for years; I can handle myself."

He makes some kind of...not-quite-motion, like he's going to reach out for her. She wishes he would. But in the end, he doesn't.

"C'mon," he says, "the thrills of early-morning chemistry await."

&&&

She throws out the garlic and presumably the custodian sweeps up the salt, but when she comes back to her locker at the end of the day, it's Lucas of all people that she finds scrubbing at the graffiti with a soapy rag. He's clearly put time and elbow grease into it; most of the paint is already gone.

He startles when he sees her, then doesn't quite meet her eyes. "I'm sorry," he says. "I didn't know they were gonna do this. If I had - well, I don't know if I could've stopped them, but I would've tried. Or warned you, or something."

"It's okay," Chrissy reassures him. "Thanks for cleaning it up, anyway." She's not ignorant of the risk he's taking in doing so.

After a moment's consideration, though, she taps the last word, FREAK, that's still mostly untouched. "Can you leave this part, though? I...I kind of like it."

Lucas looks surprised, but nods.

&&&

That Thursday, Chrissy shows up early to Hellfire Club and plops the library copy of The Silmarillion down in front of Eddie. His eyes light up when he sees it. "You've been reading that?" he asks.

"I have," Chrissy says. "Have you read it?"

He nods, looking a little nonplussed at her tone.

She takes a seat. "If you can read The Silmarillion , you can pass Ms. O'Donnell's English class."

He pulls the most exaggeratedly disgusted face she's ever seen. "That's different, though. Tolkien stuff is interesting - Ms. O'Donnell's curriculum is probably designed to put people to sleep."

"If I tutor you, would that help?"

He looks at her, blinking in surprise. "You'd do that?"

"If you wanted me to. If it would help...make it interesting." It's the closest she'll come to acknowledging...whatever this is. This thing where he's kept looking out for her even after she'd found her feet in Hellfire, where his eyes light up when she takes out a monster, where they keep brushing against each other but carefully avoiding contact that would seem too purposeful.

This thing, in other words, that she keeps trying to tell herself isn’t him liking her. Even if she thinks she might want him to.

“I mean, you taught me all this D&D stuff,” she adds hastily. “I owe you.”

“Doesn’t have to work like that,” he says, and then shrugs, “but hey, we might as well try it, right? It’s worth a shot.”

Then the rest of the party starts to trickle in and they drop the subject, but the next day, after school, she rides with Eddie to the library instead of home with Steve, and they start prepping for the tests coming right before Christmas break. And if she thinks about how Friday nights used to be Jason nights, and how this is actually more fun...well, nobody else needs to know that.

&&&

December flies by, with school and dodging her mother whenever possible and cheer and Hellfire Club and studying (alone or with Eddie) and the word FREAK still emblazoned on her locker. 

(She’s come to see it more and more as a point of pride. Lucas got hold of glittery pink stickers from his sister for her to frame the jagged letters with, and Dustin and Mike keep mentioning getting their friend Will to visit from California and paint Ananda above it in a blaze of glory.)

The very last Thursday before Christmas break, everything happens at once. 

Chrissy has been bracing herself all week, staring down the barrel of two weeks of no getting away to school, no Hellfire ( no Eddie ), and having to be in much closer and more constant proximity to her mother. Tonight is supposed to be the big finale to the semester-long campaign - Eddie has promised a “truly sadistic” session ahead, and Chrissy is glad because that means she’ll be able to lose herself in it and then some. She’s been hyped up all day, looking forward to it, and she doesn’t particularly want to go home between cheer practice and Hellfire, so she showers and changes in the locker room, redoes her makeup (just because, no particular reason), and heads to their usual empty classroom --

-- only to find the door already cracked open, with sounds of movement coming from inside.

That’s wrong. That shouldn’t be happening. Eddie usually gets there before everyone else, to set up, but this is far earlier than even he would arrive, and besides, there are multiple people, she can hear them talking.

She charges right in, and freezes. Jason is there, with Patrick and Andy and a couple of other guys from the team, and they all instantly swivel their heads to look at her when she enters. Patrick’s drawing something with chalk on the floor that she can’t make out in the dim light, and Andy’s daubing Eddie’s throne with something that looks awfully like blood, while the others give the folding chairs the same treatment. Jason - Jason has a can of red spray paint in his hand, and has clearly just finished scrawling a pentagram across the black tablecloth they usually use. There are other symbols in the process of being added around the edges, quite definitely intended to look satanic.

Chrissy takes all this in, and finds her voice. “What are you doing? Where did you get - why would you do this?”

Jason sets down the spray paint and steps over the chalk towards her, with an expression, for some reason, of devotion and reassurance, or at least something akin to them. “Chrissy,” he says gently, “baby, it’s okay. I know they’ve got a hold over you, but we’re going to show everybody what they’re really like, and then you’ll be able to get free of them. Once the principal sees this --”

“Sees what you did, you mean?” Chrissy demands, voice rising. “Didn’t you take any time to notice that there wasn’t anything dark or satanic in here before you set it up?”

“Look, you don’t have to pretend, I know they usually hide it. We’re just bringing it into the light --”

“No. No, you’re not. And you know it.” She hopes he knows it, hopes he hasn’t actually lost his mind - not because she cares for him even a little anymore, but because if he has this will be so much harder to stop.

“Chrissy...” For some reason, he actually looks helpless, pleading . “It has to be dark magic stuff, don’t you see? You’re not yourself, you haven’t been since you started hanging around with these creeps, they have to have done something to you.”

“Maybe I have been myself, though,” she fires back. “Did that ever occur to you? Maybe it was with you that I wasn’t myself, and this right now is who I’m supposed to be. Didn’t you ever think about that?”

Silently, she begs him to take the logic she’s spoon-feeding him, to listen and walk away. Instead, though, his jaw tightens. “That’s impossible,” he declares, “you don’t know what you’re saying --”

Chrissy. Snaps.

In three quick strides, she’s past Jason and grabbing the pail of - yes, that is actually blood of some kind, how did they even get that - from Andy so roughly that some of it sloshes onto him. He jumps back, and she advances on Jason, who backs up rapidly in alarm. He doesn’t get far though - he backs into an as-yet-untouched chair, and she moves right into his space, pail held high and menacing.

“Leave,” she says, voice low and furious, “get out and take your friends with you or I will dump this all over you, Jason, I swear. And then you will have to go home, all the way across Hawkins, with blood all over you, and you know people will see, and they will have questions . So get. moving.”

Inwardly, she’s a little terrified - she might be talking a big game, but there’s five of them and a much smaller one of her, and if they decide to not take her seriously and keep wrecking the room, there’s not a lot she can do about it. If they decide they need to hurt her to “snap her out” of whatever they think she’s under, there’s not much she can do about that either. All she has is about a liter of blood, and a threat, and a fervent hope in Jason’s pride coming through.

It does. He ducks away from her, calling “C’mon guys, let’s get out of here,” and then they’ve all run out, their footsteps fading down the hall. Chrissy manages to set down the pail and drop into the unstained chair, shaking. Who knows what they’re going to go and do next, but at least they’re not here anymore. At least they didn’t wreck anything important to actual gameplay; Eddie keeps all that stuff with him and brings it every week --

Eddie’s going to be here in half an hour or so, and the others will arrive not long after that, and the room - it could have been so much worse but it’s still a disaster area, there’s blood everywhere...

She takes several deep breaths, then rolls up her sleeves and heads for the bathroom to see what supplies she can scrounge up.

When Eddie walks in, she’s got the tablecloth bundled off to one side and the chalk wiped off the floor - that was the easy part - and is midway through cleaning the blood off his throne with paper towels. He stands in the doorway for a moment, taking everything in, his initial surprise at seeing her already there being gradually taken over by shock.

“What happened here?” he finally asks. 

“Jason and some of his buddies,” she says, shoving a loose strand of hair behind her ear with her forearm. “I walked in on them trying to frame you - us - as some kind of cult. I got them to go away, and I tried to clean up as best I could, but there’s still all this mess - the tablecloth got graffitied, and there’s blood...”

He crosses the room to her, setting down his armload of equipment along the way, and looks from her, to the wet smears on the floor, to the blood, to the pile of clean paper towels on the table and the trash can half-full of stained ones. “You didn’t have to do this all by yourself. I - we would’ve helped.”

“I didn’t want you to have to,” she mutters. “They did this because of me joining. I just...wanted to have the room back the way it was supposed to be before anyone showed up.”

“Hey now, listen.” His hand comes to rest on her shoulder. “This isn’t your fault. It’s theirs. And now that I’m here, I can help. If it makes you feel better, I can demand payment in the form of you telling me how you drove off those jerks.”

“It wasn’t much. I threatened to dump blood all over Jason - it was a long shot, but it worked.”

That makes Eddie laugh, which helps somehow. It also helps that he turns out to know how to pick locks, and is able to break into the janitor’s closet for cleaning spray. Together, they get the furniture back to its usual state, albeit a little more lemony-fresh-scented than normal, and spread the tablecloth out unpainted-side up. He doesn’t let her set up the equipment, claiming it’s “a Dungeon Master’s exclusive prerogative”, but he does hand her something from the top of the pile.

“Been meaning to get you one of these,” he says. “You’ve definitely earned it. Call it an early Christmas present, I guess.”

It’s fabric, not very big. Chrissy knows what it’s going to be before she unfolds it, and sure enough, it’s a Hellfire Club shirt. Months ago, she coveted one of these as an ingredient in her plan to outmaneuver her mom, but now it’s so much more - a better badge of honor than her cheer uniform, and a better sign of affection ( not necessarily that kind! )  than any of the too-tight dresses her mom claims are made with love.

Her face splits into a grin, and she hugs the shirt to herself. “I love it, thank you!” She jerks her head towards the door. “I’ll be right back; I’m gonna go change into this.” For the epic last session of the year, she wants to be wearing this.

She returns in a few minutes, shirt on (refreshingly, a little big on her) and her blouse stashed in her cheer bag, and stops a few steps inside the room. “How do I look?”

Eddie’s head snaps up from his contemplation of the setup details, and just stares at her for a second. Chrissy blushes under the attention. The shirt probably looks a little weird with her pink skirt, and she knows her hair is kind of a mess from the cleaning and the pulling different garments over her head, and yet --

-- and yet Eddie’s looking at her like she’s in a designer gown, or something. She doesn’t know what to call it, besides a maybe - maybe there really is something going on here...

“You look...like a real freak, Chrissy Cunningham,” he says with feeling, and it’s so very clearly a compliment, and

then Lucas bursts in, out of breath. “Is everything okay in here?” he pants. “I heard something about Jason and the guys trying...trying to...”

“It’s okay,” Chrissy reassures him. “They did try something, but it’s fine now. Mostly.”

Then the others start trickling in (Dustin cheers when he sees her shirt), and they settle around the table, Chrissy taking what’s become her spot at Eddie’s right and grabbing her borrowed dice and so, so ready to escape .

&&&

“That’s a miss !” Eddie bellows, sweeping Gareth the Great off the playing field after a particularly unfortunate dice roll. Most of the dice rolls in this session have been unfortunate on some level - they’ve been battling a demogorgon and its minions (which for some reason has had Mike and Dustin and Lucas nudging each other and suppressing grins), all high-level enough foes to make it hard to come by any luck.

Chrissy and Lucas are now, after a very intense hour and a half, the only players left standing. Eddie smirks at them as they weigh their options. “There is no shame in fleeing and living to fight another day,” he intones. “You have both fought bravely, but you must consider the possibility that this is a battle you cannot win.”

Lucas looks across the table at her. Chrissy looks right back. There are, she knows, a lot of battles that are unwinnable - the battle for her mom’s approval, the one for some measure of happiness and peace while entrenched with Jason and his clique - and she has learned, these past months, to walk away from those, to throw her energy into other, more rewarding struggles.

This is not an unwinnable battle. She won’t let it be. She nods to Lucas, and he nods determinedly back, and they both look at Eddie. “We’re not running,” he says, and “Let’s do this,” she declares, and they’re back into combat.

Lucas, higher in initiative at the start, makes his attack roll first. The dice seem to move in slow motion. He achieves a hit, to general cheering - but his d12 roll for damage comes up with a single, mocking 1. 

All eyes flick to Chrissy. Her heart’s pounding like she never would have thought it could over some dice just months ago, but she grins fiercely, like Eowyn probably did right before she killed the witch-king, like Ananda, and puts out her hand for the d20.

Time seems to have slowed down even more now, as she shakes her cupped hands with the die bouncing inside, as she lets it go, as it bumps and tumbles over the whole length of the casualty-strewn board...

...and, for the first time ever for her, comes up with a beautiful nat 20.

There’s stunned silence for a split second, and then the entire table erupts into gobsmacked cheers. Everybody’s out of their seats, slapping her back or throwing her high-fives, babbling at the top of their lungs, and Eddie, Eddie’s laughing in delighted disbelief, and Chrissy can’t quite believe this is happening either, and she throws herself, laughing, into his arms and he actually picks her up and spins her around, face pressed into her shoulder.

And Chrissy is riding high on victory snatched from the jaws of defeat and she can’t think of a single reason to not kiss him, so once she’s got her feet on the floor again, she does, linking her arms around his neck and stretching up and crashing her mouth against his. He responds instantly, fervently, like he’s been waiting forever for this, and frankly Chrissy thinks she can be forgiven for forgetting that there’s anybody else in the room.

Then someone lets out a whoop, and Jeff says, “C’mon, pay up, guys,” and Chrissy breaks away to glare at them, but not very hard. She can’t really be mad at anyone right now. Gareth and Carl are passing Jeff money with only minimal huffiness, and all three of the freshmen are grinning. Dustin looks like he might spontaneously take flight. 

Eddie’s trying to glare at them all, too, but he’s having even less success. He shakes his head, and lets go of her only for a few seconds, to gather the equipment together in possibly the quickest cleanup the club’s ever seen. “All right,” he declares, scooping the stacked notebooks and cases up in one arm and settling the other around Chrissy’s shoulders, “if you’re all quite through - see you nerds tomorrow, I’ve got to be taking the lady home.”

&&&

Once they’ve made it to his van, he dumps the equipment in the back and then helps her in, flopping into the front bench seat beside her with a long huff of breath.

“Sorry about them,” he says. “I would’ve thought they’d know better than to place bets.”

“I didn’t mind.” Then, plucking up her courage, she adds, “Except for getting interrupted, I did mind that.”

Eddie looks at her, a slow smile creeping onto his face. “So that was real, then. Not just...celebrating?”

“No! No way. Of course it was real.” Chrissy tries to find the right words, because this is important and she will not mess it up. “I...I really like you. I have for ages. I was trying to pretend I didn’t, because I didn’t think that you...” She trails off.

He laughs under his breath. “Sweetheart, I’ve been crazy about you since you fire-blasted those goblins, at least. Maybe longer.”

The endearment sends a shiver along her spine, and she scoots next to him, to lean her head on his shoulder. He smells good, smoke and a little bit of lemon cleaner and mostly just himself, and she takes the time to bask in the knowledge that he does care for her, he’s crazy about her, and all those things the back of her brain likes to whisper to her that she’s been telling herself she can’t have, can be hers after all.

Eventually, she asks, “What happens now?”

Eddie hums. “Well, right now, I’m thinking I want to kiss you again. And then I’d probably better drive you home. And maybe kiss you again before I drop you off. And then sometime, if you’re up for it...I want to take you out. However, whenever we can make that work. And we go from there.”

Chrissy nods against his jacket. “Are we...going to do this for everybody to see? It’s not - I don’t want to keep you a secret. I just don’t want...people...to hurt you.”

He shifts his arm out from between them to wrap around her, pull her a little closer. “I told you before, I can handle the jocks. If you’re willing to be seen in public with me? I’m not passing that up. And clearly the whole club already knew I had a huge crush on you, so I’d probably be terrible at hiding that you were my - girlfriend.”

Chrissy doesn’t miss his hesitance at the end. She doesn’t know how to explain how much she doesn’t want to keep him a secret if it’s not a question of his safety, doesn’t have the words, so she settles for twisting around and kissing him again.

&&&

By the time they make it back to her neighborhood, it’s past ten o’clock. Chrissy doesn’t remotely register that, though, nor the fact that her hair is a mess and her lipstick is very thoroughly kiss-smudged, nor the fact that she’s still wearing her Hellfire Club shirt.

Nor the little detail of her not having been home for supper and having forgotten to tell her mom that she’d be gone all evening, until late.

When she slips in the front door, her mom is in the foyer, pacing back and forth, and freezes when they see each other. Her face contorts with disgust and horror as she takes in Chrissy’s appearance. “Where have you been?” she demands, pointing. “And what - what are you wearing?”

Ah.

Okay.

So this is how her mom ends up finding out, then.

This isn’t according to plan at all, but there’s no point in lying, and Chrissy’s not sure she could bring herself to tonight, anyway. “I was at Hellfire Club,” she says bravely, “playing Dungeons and Dragons. I’ve been going every week since the end of September, but I only just got the shirt tonight.”

“You mean to tell me,” her mom says, voice quivering with rage, “that you have been sneaking off with those demonic boys for months now? Which one of them were you fooling around with just now, hm? Did he get you pregnant? Is that why your clothes haven’t been fitting?”

Chrissy lifts her chin with an effort, looking her mom in the eyes, because she refuses to be ashamed of the people who gave her a place with them, and she especially refuses to be ashamed of Eddie. “I’m not pregnant,” she says, “but I am dating Eddie Munson. He’s not demonic; none of them are. They’re just different, but that’s not bad.”

‘Dating’ is probably a bit of a stretch, at this stage, but she needs something that sounds solid, and she definitely does not owe this woman any details.

“I cannot believe this,” her mom hisses. “All the advantages you have, everything I’ve done to make sure you have what you need and live right, and this is what you do? Go running around with heathen delinquent trailer trash --”

“That’s right,” Chrissy cuts her off before she can spew any more awful things. “And I don’t care what you think about it, and I won’t stop, not even if you kick me out.”

A sharp, shrewd look comes into her mom’s eyes at that, and oh, that is not a good sign, not at all. “So you think you can get away with it that easily, do you? Just leave and carry on disgracing this family?”

A hand shoots out and grips Chrissy by the upper arm, and her mom starts marching her upstairs. Chrissy struggles, tries to break loose even though she doesn’t know quite what she would do after that, but it’s no use. She’s shoved unceremoniously into her bedroom, and her mom snaps, “You’ll just stay right here, until I can get some sense into you.” 

She comes into the room herself, unplugging the telephone and gathering it up, and then turns, holding out her hand. “Give me the shirt.”

Chrissy folds her arms over her chest, takes a step back, out of reach. “No.”

“Chrissy, I swear, take that thing off so I can burn it or --”

“I won’t.” Chrissy twists her fingers into the fabric, keeps her voice level, tries not to panic. “I’m keeping this, I won’t let you take it. If you try, I’ll...I’ll scream until the neighbors hear, and I won’t stop until they call the police. I don’t care if you lock me up,” that’s only partially true, but it sounds good, “but you’re not taking this.”

They stare each other down for a long moment before her mom finally huffs and leaves, taking the phone with her and locking the door behind her.

&&&

The next day, Chrissy isn’t allowed to go to school.

Her mom, she learns when she’s released to use the bathroom and be given a tiny breakfast, has called her in sick at the school. Since it’s the last day before break, she won’t be missing much anyway.

“What about in the new year?” Chrissy pushes. “I’ll have to go back then.”

“If you haven’t dropped this stubbornness by then, we’ll transfer you to Christian Academy,” her mom says shortly. “Now if you’re finished eating, go back upstairs.”

There’s one solitary thought that keeps Chrissy going through the day, a day where she’s only allowed out of her room for meals and bathroom trips, a day where she doesn’t change out of her Hellfire shirt because she’s not positive there’s anywhere in her room safe enough to hide it. That thought is that her friends will be expecting her at school, and they know she wasn’t sick last night. They’ll know something is up. They’ll come for her.

Eddie will come for her.

It’s with that thought in mind that she spends most of the day going through and packing the things she figures she’ll need most into her cheer duffel. The clothes that fit best, her stash of saved allowance, a few personal keepsakes, and the library copy of The Silmarillion that she’s still inching her way through - she crams it all in and stashes the bag under her bag in a spot that’s not easily seen but within easy reach if she needs it.

If she gets even one chance to get out, she’s taking it and not coming back. And there will be a chance. Someone will come.

She keeps one eye on the clock, and shortly after sunset, there’s a soft knocking on her window. She turns, and it’s Eddie, perched outside on the roof. 

She has the window open in about two seconds, and he leans partway in. “Well, you definitely don’t seem sick,” he comments. “I figured whoever fed the school that line was lying.”

Chrissy nods. “My mom,” she says. “She locked me in here last night after I came home in this shirt and told her about Hellfire and, and dating you. She wants to send me to Christian Academy next semester if I don’t give in. So I need to get out.”

Eddie is not as taken aback by this as she might have thought he’d be. “What do you need me to do?”

“Just get me down however you got up. And my bag, I guess.” She snags it from under the bed. “Is this - I know this is kind of a lot. My mom might make trouble.”

“Seems like she already is.” Eddie takes the duffel, hefts it. “There anything breakable in this?”

She shakes her head; he leans out and slides it down the roof and Steve, of all people, catches it. He promptly hands it off to Dustin, who appears to be having the time of his life, and assumes a spotter’s pose.

It takes a few minutes, and some delicate maneuvering, but Chrissy manages to scramble out the window, and eventually get down to the ground. Then they’re all running for Steve’s car (“less conspicuous!” he explains) and driving away, somehow ending up at Dustin’s house (“my mom’s out, and nobody’ll think to look there!” he insists). 

Everyone, somehow, is there - Robin and Nancy and the entire Hellfire Club and even Lucas’ sister and his girlfriend Max (“for moral support or something,” according to the latter, and “‘cause I ain’t gonna miss this,” according to the former). It’s wonderful and amazing, but even so, once Chrissy’s curled up on the sofa and tucked into Eddie’s side and the adrenaline starts to wear off, she realizes that she’s not entirely sure what to do next.

“Don’t be sorry,” she says to Robin when the other girl expresses sympathy for the situation, “I...I wanted this to happen, I was actually going to try and get kicked out - I just don’t know where I go now, or what happens.”

Eddie presses a kiss into her hair. “You can come with me,” he says. “You could have weeks ago if I’d known it was this bad.”

It’s tempting, incredibly so, but she’d been thinking about that all day and knows she has to shake her head, albeit reluctantly. “I would love to,” she says. “I would, I swear - but I know you and your uncle don’t, don’t have much, and that doesn’t mean I don’t want you, but I can’t ask him to take in another wayward teenager.”

“He would let you. We could find a way to make it work, once we’d explained,” Eddie insists. 

“I know you would. But I don’t want that to have to happen if there’s another way - I just can’t think of another way.”

This signals the start of an intense, multi-directional debate. It quickly becomes apparent that, while a surprising number of people want to help, neither Robin nor the Sinclairs nor the Wheelers nor anyone from Hellfire can really step up, at least not without parents getting involved, which could well lead to Chrissy being sent home. Mike does comment that they once hid a girl from government agents in his basement, but Nancy points out that that arrangement didn’t even last a week, and anyway Chrissy needs a place where she doesn’t have to hide. Max volunteers, claiming that her mom works or drinks enough to not notice, or at least not protest, another member of the household, but once it emerges that Max lives in the same trailer park as the Munsons, Chrissy refuses to accept the offer, not wanting to impose.

“This is stupid,” Steve finally interjects. “I have more space than I know what to do with, and my parents are never home. Like, actually never. I can totally provide diplomatic immunity or whatever for six months.”

That’s...actually not a terrible idea, and Chrissy says so. Several other people start to nod in agreement, but Eddie’s gone a little tense beside her, one eyebrow quirking up.

“Something wrong?” she inquires.

“Oh, nothing,” he says, far too casually. “Just, maybe, a little...uptight about Steve Harrington wanting my girl to move in with him. Not to be possessive! Just - your reputation precedes you, Harrington.”

Steve blinks. “Wait, you two finally got together? When?” He raises his eyes to the heavens. “Maybe now we’ll all finally have some relief from the constant pining.” A thought seems to strike him, and he points at Chrissy. “I know you have a little brother, but no older brother, right? You need someone to step in on shovel-talk duties? ‘Cause Robin and I’ve got a deal where we have to flip for it.”

Chrissy can’t help it; she snorts with laughter. So does everyone else, and Eddie relaxes beside her, and things...start to seem like they’ll be all right.

When everybody starts to disperse, she hangs back with him a little behind the others. He looks at her and asks, “Are you okay?”

And she tells him, not least to watch his eyes light up at the reference, “In this hour I do not believe that any darkness will endure.”

&&&

Over the break, Chrissy settles into a spare bedroom in the Harrington house, and acquires what few things she needs that she didn’t manage to pack. She and Steve hash out a chore schedule of sorts. Within a few days, she’s already sleeping better than she ever did in her parents’ house.

Her parents, incidentally, end up not coming after her for one reason or another. Maybe they’ve decided she’s a lost cause. Maybe they figure the process of finding her and getting her back would end up creating more familial disgrace than just cutting their losses with her. She doesn’t know, and she’s certainly not going to ask.

The rest of what Dustin refers to as “the Party” all seem bent on making up for her lack of blood relatives. Nancy and Robin, in particular, start seeking her out more and more, with Nancy claiming that “the babysitter-generation girls need to stick together”. They rope in Max and Erica one night and hunker in the Wheelers’ basement, armed with too much popcorn, to watch Christmas movies.

Most evenings, though, Chrissy spends with Eddie, at his trailer or out and about or, on Tuesdays, at the Hideout where Corroded Coffin play every week. Both times this happens during the break, Chrissy kisses him long and hard before the set starts, for luck, and the rest of the band swears that it’s making him play like he never has before.

She finally tells him, one evening when they’re holed up at the trailer and he’s flipping through records to put on, how she’d originally gotten the idea to join Hellfire Club, and what her plan had been at the start.

“I, I understand if you’re mad,” she says, “since at the beginning I was kind of using you guys. I just couldn’t think of anything else. And once I started playing, from the very first meeting, it was different. That was all real.”

Eddie listens, and drops down to sit beside her on the bed. “I might’ve liked to know the whole truth sooner,” he admits. “But I’m not going to blame you - not now that I know everything that was going on. At the time...I hate to say it, but I don’t know if I would’ve believed it.”

That’s fair, she decides. Nobody had ever believed there was a problem - not least because she’d gone to great lengths for years to conceal it - so she’s more surprised that these days there are so many people who do believe her.

On Christmas, most of the Party has family celebrations to attend. Steve gets invited to the Henderson Christmas after Mrs. Henderson finds out that his parents will be out of town, which means that Chrissy doesn’t have to worry about him being alone when she goes to spend the day at the Munson trailer. Wayne Munson warms to her almost at once, and she passes perhaps the best Christmas she can remember in their tiny living room, eating a TV dinner and learning to play rummy. She doesn’t have as much available funds for presents as she’d like, but she gives Eddie a heavy silver ring with a black stone that she’d found in the secondhand shop and polished up. He gives her her own set of dice, painted gold with green numbers, and they tease back and forth about whether he weighted them to give her an unfair advantage.

&&&

On the first day back to school in January, Chrissy Cunningham strides into Hawkins High in her Hellfire Club shirt and a skirt that doesn’t pinch her waist, smiling at anyone who’ll smile at her, and meeting Jason’s eyes unflinchingly when he stares at her as she passes him. She eats lunch (all of it, and Steve had mother-henned her until she took as much as he deemed necessary) with her people, and walks to English class with her boyfriend’s arm looped around her waist, head held high.

She hopes they gossip about her. She hopes word travels all the way back to her mom, about how she’s free and doing all right for herself and has found what she needs just fine on her own, thank you.

Tonight is designated girls’ night, and tomorrow night she’ll be at the Hideout for Corroded Coffin’s set, and on Wednesday she’ll walk into cheer practice and earn their respect even if they’re no longer her friends. Thursday is tutoring night, now, since Jason (coincidentally or not) moved basketball practices to then, and Friday is Hellfire Club and a new campaign, and the days and weeks will pile up until it’s spring and graduation and then she and Eddie are out of Hawkins. Where to, precisely, they don’t know yet. College may or may not be an option for her, but ironically, it’s more likely now than when she was with her parents who wanted her to marry straight out of high school. Whatever happens, they’ll be together.

Right now, though, she’s got possibilities and she’s got her people, her fellow freaks and her Dungeon-Mastering metalhead boyfriend, and that, it turns out, is just what she needs for her life to be good.