Chapter Text
Two days later, an incongrous yellow van rolls into Hawkins.
Max, once they’d picked her and the Sinclairs up, had told everyone that she’d seen Eleven in Vecna’s mind and she was on her way, so they’re more or less prepared for her arrival. Nancy still lets out a small muffled cry when she sees Jonathan clambering out, both hands pressed to her face. They run to each other, colliding and clinging to each other for dear life.
Chrissy’s happy for them, completely, but she does sneak a look at Steve. He’s her friend, too, if not something closer to an older brother, and she doesn’t want him hurting either. But he looks...maybe not content, but resigned. Accepting. Things should be okay, at least for now.
They’re all at Steve’s house (again) when this happens, replanting a flower bed that got trampled during the manhunt, just to have something to all work on together. They’d discussed getting the basketball team to do the work, but in the end decided against it - most of the team was still leery of Eddie, despite the calling-off that Jason had apparently done, and wouldn’t cooperate, and the only ones who’d actually done this particular damage were Patrick and Jason. Chrissy had argued that it didn’t seem fair to put him through reparations when he had already ended up a town pariah, but the truth of it was that none of them particularly wanted to spend time supervising him anyway.
Jason, it turned out, had done the opposite of keeping his head down after escaping the Upside Down, and had made himself a laughingstock trying to assemble a monster-fighting militia of sorts. The intervention of federal agents, informing the police that the murders were committed by an “escaped prisoner” that they’d been tracking, and not by monsters, demons, or Eddie Munson, hadn’t helped his position any. Chrissy’s doing her best to push down the schadenfreude and have a little sympathy, but it doesn’t always completely work.
Just at the moment, though, she’s busy with Mike introducing her and Eddie to Eleven and Will and a total stranger named Argyle - “remember, I wrote to you about her joining Hellfire Club, and it was so weird at first but then it was really cool” - and trying to piece together the disjointed bits of story that everyone’s telling at once. Her group and the California set keep talking over each other, jumbling everything, although the one thing she gets clearly is that the newcomers had been to visit Dustin’s girlfriend Suzie. Dustin shrieks in what seems to be a mixture of delight and indignation at being left out simultaneously.
Then, in the midst of all the fuss, a sleek black car comes up the driveway, and for a second Chrissy thinks Steve’s parents have come back unexpectedly and starts frantically fishing for a cover story as to why one of the spare bedrooms is full of her things. But while the short-haired woman in the business suit who gets out could conceivably be related to Steve, she knows for a fact that the other two passengers aren’t.
“Mom!” Will and Jonathan cry, excited and disbelieving at the same time, and run to her. El just stands frozen, though, and Chrissy doesn’t blame her - she’s shocked to see the presumed-dead Chief Jim Hopper standing not a hundred yards away, and she, unlike El, barely knows him.
Hopper opens his arms, smiling sideways, and El runs into them.
Once the reunions are more or less through, a whole new round of introductions has to start, and everyone starts swapping story fragments all over again. Clearly, there was a lot more going on than their stuff in Hawkins, and they never even knew.
It feels like family, standing there with everyone, Chrissy realizes. Even the people she’s barely met.
&&&&
Two weeks later, Hopper is officially declared not dead, thanks to the power of the shady government people formerly of Hawkins Lab, and everyone gathers to clean out/repair his cabin out on the edge of town. Chrissy had heard stories of fighting the Mind Flayer last summer, but she hadn’t really thought about the scope and scale of it until she sees the damage it did to the cabin. She takes a moment to process it all, and wonders what her life has become that she’s actually glad she got to help fight the undead psychic wizard as opposed to the giant spider-monster made of decayed flesh.
She mentions this to Eddie as they haul in armloads of cleaning supplies, and he laughs. “Yeah, don’t know what we would’ve been good for then,” he says. “Doesn’t sound like there’s a whole lot that a guitar can do against that.”
Every now and then, Chrissy wonders if the Upside Down will strike again, if some other new person will get roped in next time, like Robin and Erica and Max before her. She can’t imagine going through this again, or watching a newbie struggle to come to terms with all the craziness; she hopes fervently that it won’t happen. It shouln’t. Nancy said that they’d made very sure that Vecna was dead, and El had backed her up on it. The gates are all closed, and the shady government people and the Russians should be done trying to make new ones.
But the others thought that before, and clearly they were wrong. There’s just no way to be sure.
All she can do is take care of what’s in front of her. Which, right now, is a truly horrifying amount of mold in the kitchen sink.
&&&&
Two months later, Chrissy grips her diploma, trying not to wrinkle it, and watches Eddie cross the stage for graduation.
In a remarkable show of self-restraint, he refrains from making any obscene gestures at Principal Higgins until he has his diploma securely in hand, and in an even more remarkably restrained display, he does not immediately run out of the high school.
Well, part of that might be because she’s waiting for him. Everyone is - she and Robin and Nancy and Jeff and Carl are seated with the rest of the graduating class, and all the others are clustered together in the bleachers, cheering their heads off. They’d cheered their heads off for her, too, when she’d walked. She’s honestly not sure if her parents are there or not - she’d purposely not looked for them - but if they are there, any polite clapping on their part was completely drowned out.
Afterward, they all drive out to the now-mostly-livable cabin to celebrate. Somewhere in the midst of eating and egging El on to play around with her powers for general entertainment and reenacting the campaign finale against the Rakshasa from last week, Chrissy and Eddie end up on the roof of his van, watching the shenanigans from a bird’s-eye view.
They’ll be leaving town in a few weeks - Chrissy’s going to school at UT San Antonio, and Corroded Coffin (minus Gareth for another year) are going the same way for the city’s heavy metal scene. Steve’s parents will be back from their business trip next month, so the plan is to have Chrissy moved out of the Harrington house and making her way south before they return. It’s not like they or anybody else could make her go back to her mother at this point, but this way Steve has less explaining to do. She owes him that much, at the absolute least.
Eddie’s watching the freshmen like he misses them already, and she nudges him. “I’ll miss them, too,” she says. “You know that we have three different people fighting over who we get to crash with when we visit for Christmas?”
“Hmm, let me guess - Uncle Wayne, Dustin, and...Steve?”
“I didn’t count Wayne - he’s not so much fighting as assuming you’ll at least stay with him. The Wheelers have been working on me to agree to stay in their basement, though.”
“Ah, right, should’ve thought of that. The Wheeler basement is supposedly proof against government agents and the like.” Eddie shoots her a curious look. “You’d really want to come back here? Kind of seems like tempting fate.”
Chrissy hesitates a moment, then nods. “They’re all going to be tempting fate as it is. We might as well come around to help, every once in a while. Besides,” she looks at him sideways, half-grinning, “you know you’re going to want to come back even if I don’t.”
“Chrissy!” Dustin hollers. “You gotta come and tell Will about when we fought the demogorgon in Hellfire - he doesn’t believe you got a crit hit.”
He’s breaking the moment a little bit, but Chrissy can’t really mind. “If you insist,” she calls back as she and Eddie scramble down to the ground.
Then, hand in hand, they let themselves be pulled into their Party’s ridiculousness one more time.