New system, kiddos: when I’m depressed, I’m going to write mutant AUs, because mutant AUs are good.  This is the decree.  If you want to see a specific one, send me an ask.  Also, ha, spot my favorite character, because I’m a fucking unsubtle trainwreck of a writer.

No one has mutant abilities at the beginning, you see.  Mutants are the stuff of comic books and stories, like Superman or magic or the Demigorgon.  So it’s four kids playing Dungeons and Dragons and four teenagers trying to figure out how to game the system enough to survive high school and a pair of adults fighting to keep their heads above water, and they are all—for a given value—perfectly normal.

And then things start to happen. And Eleven…well, she has a whole host of mutant powers, kickstarted by the drugs her mother took or by the experiments done on her or by the Upside Down.  Telekinesis, radio wave manipulation, dimensional travel—the whole gamut.

Here’s the thing, though.  The thing no one knows, not even Eleven.  She’s contagious.  Or rather, one of her powers is like a jumper cable to a dead battery—touch the leads to the grounds, and sparks fly.

In this metaphor, the others are the dead batteries, and the sparks…  Well.

Mike gets hit first, like a ton of bricks.  They have some theories about this later, throw around words like ‘prolonged exposure’ and ‘emotional attachment’, but finally they all just agree that he’s Mike.  Somehow this is enough of an explanation.  Some people’s abilities are closer to the surface, perhaps.

He goes to bed with Eleven squirreled away in his basement, and everything is normal.  He wakes up and the world is full of humming lights, rippling signals in every color of the rainbow.  Mike doesn’t understand until he sees Eleven playing with the radio again.  Buzz, click—lights.  Buzz, click—lights.  Buzz, click—lights.  Wireless signals.  (The signal from the Upside Down, with Will singing scared and alone, is a green-white-black not-color that makes him sick to look at.  But when he grabs the signal and pulls it toward Eleven, they can hold Will’s voice for longer.)

The others think he’s crazy at first.  And then they get crash-coursed in the fine and delicate art of transdimensional travel at their best friend’s funeral, and Dustin blurts it out word-perfect, complete with illustrations, when they try to recap it later.  They stare, and ask him to do it again.  He does it again.  He explains it better, details the mechanics of slipping through dimensional membranes, talks about how in the metaphor maybe El is like someone whose feet will stick to the rope—not forever, but for a while.  They don’t have a word for what Dustin can do—that’s not true, Eleven has many words for it, and every single one is an apology—but it is gloriously useful.  Almost as useful as Mike’s new ability to spot a radio approaching, and identify the Bad Men at a hundred paces by the color of their signals.

Lucas thinks he won’t get one.  He doesn’t like Eleven, doesn’t trust her, won’t trust her.  He’s wrong, about a lot of things in that train of thought, but we’ll come back to that.

And while all this is happening, of course, Nancy is being dragged through a door to the Upside Down and hunted by a thing with no face and far too much mouth. Now, about Nancy.  She’s her brother’s sister, the same genes command the structure of their cells, the same blood runs in their veins.  The same just-under-the-skin power boils through her body, and unlike Mike, who gets his powers second-hand, Nancy is tuned straight into the source, her flesh scraped on the ground and trees of the Upside Down and soaked with its darklight.  

Nancy is a thing to be reckoned with, in the reckoning of the Upside Down.  

The Upside Down is a faerieland, of sorts—the old-style faerieland, where millennia whirl by in a night of revels and a mortal who enters a dance will never leave alive.  And Nancy, a pretty young thing who has ripped herself free of its grip with heart and mind intact, wins more than just her life, when she grabs Jonathan’s hand and pulls free.  She wins command.  She doesn’t know this, yet, but she will.

Jonathan has nothing, not yet.  Someday, perhaps.  Prolonged exposure and emotional attachment.

And the adults are still normal.  If you can call a woman talking to her lost son through Christmas lights and a man breaking into morgues to cut open the bodies of children ‘normal.’  Sane, certainly—normal, possibly not.

So now they are all collected together.  The truth is spilling out like blood from a wound, Eleven’s powers and Mike’s radio-readings and Dustin’s perfect recall and Nancy and Jonathan’s hunting.  Dustin is building a sensory deprivation tank on the instruction of Mr. Clarke, perfectly recalled and expounded upon, and Eleven, for the first time in her life, is being offered the kind words of a mother.

Eleven goes into the Upside Down and Joyce Byers is swamped with a terror not her own.  Empathy is a wicked blade, easily turned in the hand of the wielder, but Joyce has lived with a lot of terror in the last week.  She takes Eleven’s into herself and breathes out calm, tries to push the calm out into the room around her, and to her surprise it seems to work. She does it again, and Eleven’s voice steadies.

Eleven emerges from the Upside Down with news, some of it good and much of it terrible. The Bad Men are coming and Eleven is in no shape to fight them, and Nancy and Jonathan have gone to set a trap (when Nancy screams go away at the monster, it runs, from the fire and from the voice and into the bear trap), and Hopper and Joyce have slipped into the Upside Down to rescue Will, and Lucas and Dustin and Mike grab Eleven and run.

Bodies litter the floor of the school, and in the classroom, facing the thing with no face, they learn that Lucas has a mutant ability gifted to him by Eleven’s presence after all.  Perfect aim. Every time.  (They will test this later and find that it really is perfect, every single time.  But now all he has is a Wrist Rocket and he would give all the stones in the world for one good, solid hand grenade.  He’d like to see that thing put itself back together from having one of those launched straight into its far-too-much mouth.)

Hopper and Joyce escape with Will, and Eleven saves the only friends she has ever known. They are left with a useless Wrist Rocket, an empty sensory deprivation tank, a field of bodies, and powers that no one will ever believe.

One month later, it is Christmas.  Joyce, who has learned quickly how to taste the emotions of others on her tongue, can feel that there is something wrong with Will, but can’t pin down what it is—after what he endured, she cannot distinguish between justifiable trauma-induced fear and anxiety and pressing danger fear and anxiety.  In the event that it is only the former, she is too uneasy to push him.  

Hopper is their mask, their cloak.  This is his gift—to hide those he loves from harm.  He doesn’t know if it’s blind luck, natural skill, or Eleven’s final safeguard.

Mike and Dustin and Lucas show Will their abilities and he goes stark white—they haven’t brought it up since.  Dustin quietly helps his friends with their homework, and Mike lies on his back and watches lights pop in the sky as radio waves and television signals ripple past overhead, and Lucas takes up archery as a hobby.  Will scrupulously knows nothing about these new changes.

Steve doesn’t know that his girlfriend once survived a nightmare world, and when she mumbles things in her sleep, things in strange languages that she doesn’t recognize when she wakes, he ignores it.  Sometimes Nancy feels something in her chest, a slow bubble of something cold enough to burn, darklight coiling through her veins like thick blood, and she breathes out a glittering stream of air, the shimmer of reality in the Upside Down—or the Upside Down in reality.

Will is dimensionally unstuck, not so much a mutant power as a terrible misfortune. He did not escape, and each shudder between the worlds rips a little bit more of him loose.  (Nancy sees, finally.  She sees her little brother’s best friend, the brother of the boy who was almost hers once, who might still be if she can bring herself to do it, and she recognizes something in herself.  She is a symbiont, carrying the darklight of the Upside Down inside her as a champion of that nightmare.  Will is sick, carrying the taint of it like a plague.  It is Nancy who heals him, finally, who lets the darklight in her body unfurl and rip through Will like a gale, peeling away the infection.  It leaves him weak and raw, like removing dead flesh from a wound, but alive.  It leaves Nancy electric, confident and wild like she hasn’t been since she faced down the faceless thing.)

Eleven is not dimensionally unstuck, she is very firmly in one dimension, and that is worse.  But she can reach them, a little—when Mike sees the crackling not-color signal, he whoops like a lunatic and grabs Nancy and summons the others on the two-way. Will is clean of the sickness of the Upside Down, frightened but ready to help, Jonathan a lanky bulk at his back. (Will eyes Nancy like he’s not sure she isn’t about to go for someone’s throat, but Nancy doesn’t hold this against him.  Jonathan eyes Nancy like he might not mind if she went for his throat, like she could strangle him and his eyes would sparkle at the touch of her hand.)  Lucas has upgraded from Wrist Rocket to compound bow, and Dustin has been reading theoretical physics texts under his blankets at night in preparation for just this thing.  They are a haphazard rescue team, the adults held in wait as maybe, as if we need them, but they are determined, and they have already stolen the Upside Down’s prize twice.

Eleven is singing, in the Upside Down, alone and scared, but strong.  Should I say or should I go now?

The radio crackles in his hands, and Dustin grins a little, and Lucas pets his fingers down his bow.  Will shivers, but his gaze is steady.  Nancy and Jonathan look at each other, and her hands crackle with darklight as a glittering breath seeps from between her lips.

There is no point, Mike says somberly, to having superpowers if they can’t save their friend.