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BOTH Edward and Veronica wished they could say that the trauma and nightmares went away with due time, but they would be lying. In fact, the nightmares had only seem to get worse as more time passed, and the trauma lingered forever. Edward, who had been at the almighty Gate of the Upside Down, had seen the worst of it, yet his nightmares weren't very often – if he was lucky. Weirdly enough, his daughter, who had only experienced the one loop of the terrifying alternate universe, found the nightmares plaguing her almost every night, and they seemed to get more real each time, even deadlier.
They were so real that sometimes she swore she should feel the slimy arms of the Upside Down around her, that she could smell the gasoline they used to douse the tunnels in flames. Just last night, she found herself in the Upside Down again, crawling through the depths of the world alone. She called out for Steve. She called out for the kids, for Dustin, but there was no one. Veronica had no one but herself.
Oh, and also Louie's body.
She had the same dream every week, a repetition of her memory from when they found Louie's corpse in the Upside Down. Veronica would be alone, finding his body in one of the tunnels, vines curling around his arms and legs. His skin was blue and decaying, mouth covered by a deep, plunging vine that had sucked itself into him. Veronica wouldn't know what to do. She would try to dig him out, screaming for help, ripping at the vines that would just grow back over and over again. She could practically feel the vines winding themselves around her skin. Each time, she swore it was real. In the distance, she could hear Louie's voice again. He was crying, calling out to her for help. There was nothing she could do but continue to pull out vines and weeds and everything in between, even though she knew it would do nothing.
The only thing that could wake her from her deep sleep was her alarm clock, and Veronica always found it hard to move out of bed after having that familiar nightmare. She wished there was something she could do about them – medication, a doctor – but Veronica would be damned before she'd let some kind of dumb medical treatment take away her trauma. She wanted to be rid of it, but the trauma simply reminded her that it was all real, that the Upside Down wasn't just some fictional world out of a game at the Palace Arcade.
She'd just live with them for the rest of her life. It was fine – really, it was. Veronica was a strong person, and neither her, nor Edward, would let their past get the best of them.
Unless, that past began to crawl back from the shadows.
•••
Watching Hopper bound into the police station on an early Friday morning was something unlike Edward had ever seen.
He sat with the secretary, Janice, going over a few recent file reports that she thought needed attention, when Hopper burst through the entrance with a happy-go-lucky grin. He carried a box of donuts from Snappy's Bakery on Old Maple Street, and each officer took one gratefully. As soon as Hopper set the box on the main table in the lobby, it was swarmed by a dozen of his fellow officers, all with the same goal to devour a sweet and sugar pastry that would sit in their stomach for weeks to come. Not like they cared, though.
