The moment Eleven attacks, everything breaks.

The sky splits open with a sound like glass shattering, red lightning tearing through the Upside Down. Vecna screams—not in rage this time, but in pain—as the force throws him back into the ruins. Vines snap, stone collapses, and the ground beneath them begins to rot and fall apart.

Everyone runs.

She hears them shouting her name, hears the panic, the certainty that it’s over—that he’s done for and the Upside Down is about to destroy itself. Eleven is already gone, pulled back through the gate, exhausted and bleeding. The others follow, one by one.

But she doesn’t move.

Through the smoke and falling ash, she sees him. Vecna lies unmoving, half-buried under debris, his body cracking with dark energy as the world starts collapsing around him. This isn’t justice. This is execution.

She runs to him.

The heat burns her lungs, the ground shaking so hard she can barely stay on her feet. She grabs his arm—cold, heavier than she expects—and pulls. Nothing. He doesn’t respond. For a terrifying second, she thinks she’s too late.

Then his fingers twitch.

She doesn’t think. She wraps his arm over her shoulder and drags him, step by step, every movement screaming through her muscles. The Upside Down fights back, vines snapping at her legs, walls crumbling just feet away. She stumbles, falls, gets back up.

“Don’t you dare die,” she mutters, more desperate than brave.

His eyes open halfway, unfocused. He doesn’t understand what she’s doing. Why she’s still here. Why she didn’t leave him to burn with the world that made him.

The gate is closing.

With a final surge of strength, she throws him forward and collapses after him, the air ripping itself apart as the Upside Down seals shut behind them.

Silence.

When she wakes, everything is painfully normal—cold air, solid ground, distant shouting. Vecna lies beside her, unconscious, stripped of his power for now, looking terrifying and broken and unmistakably alive.

They will never forgive him easily. Maybe they never will.

But when she chose to stay, when she dragged him out instead of letting him die alone in the dark, she proved one thing:

He was no longer just the monster they left behind.