Chapter Text
May 1st, 1997
Hawkins, Indiana
Dustin considered himself to be pretty smart - not to toot his own horn or anything, but he got three degrees before he was twenty-five! That was a significant achievement in his book, and to everyone around him as well.
So how come he was stuck in his red, busted-up second-hand Honda Civic - the only thing he could afford with his student debt and Steve Harrington (a middle-grade teacher and baseball coach with his fourth kid on the way) as his guarantor - absolutely dreading his shift at what once had been his dream job?
The engine kept running even though he was already parked, and that’s how he knew he was stalling. He spared a glance at the dashboard’s digital clock as it blinked 7:52 A.M. in that dull red font that made everything feel vaguely like a countdown. Eight more minutes before he had to clock in, not even near enough time for him to try and suffocate the frustration sitting heavy in his chest, but he guessed trying wouldn't hurt.
Dustin rested his forehead against the steering wheel and felt the vinyl’s warmth seep into his skin. Coffee sloshed faintly in the thermos cradled in his hand, its familiar bitter smell mixing with pollen and cut grass as spring settled over Hawkins. The cap still didn’t seal right - not after the night he’d smashed it against his wall in a moment of pure, incandescent frustration he couldn't even remember what for.
The smell reminded him of Mike.
Mike, who’d been borderline insufferable about coffee throughout their whole high school experience - brewing it way too strong, drinking it way too late, swearing it helped him think. At the same time, Dustin insisted it just made him twitchy and anxious. Mike had treated caffeine like a personality trait back then, walking around with his chipped blue mug as if it were a badge of honor. Dustin huffed softly at the memory, the edge of his irritation dulling just a bit.
MIT. Physics major. Astronomy minor. Master’s in Applied Physics.
He recited it like a spell, as if it might still work if he said it often enough.
He tried to cool down a bit more, turning on the radio as Robin's familiar - sometimes aggravating - voice announced Blur’s new song, "Song 2", and glancing at the clock again - 7:55. The opening guitar hit hard and fast, melting away some of his sulking. He wasn’t quite chipper enough to sing along, but he felt less furious. The song reminded him of Will, who’d always leaned harder into Brit bands than the rest of them.
How have they been lately, anyway?
Will had been even quieter the last few years - not distant, exactly, just… turned inward in that careful way he'd learned young. Mike, on the other hand, seemed to make it his mission to make it harder for everyone to reach him. As the years passed, he became less responsive to their calls, to the point where it made more sense to just give up on calling altogether. At the end of the day, Dustin hadn’t seen them in person ever since before coming back to Hawkins, only getting some passing updates through short phone calls, pictures, and secondhand stories - he knew Will had had a boyfriend for a while now, Carlton. He’d met him once, briefly, when they decided to have a 4th of July get-together in NYC a couple of years ago that felt more like a checkpoint than a proper party - filled with the awkwardness that came with polite smiles, careful laughter, everyone still figuring out how to exist at the same time in the same room once again after so much time.
Carlton had seemed nice. Soft-spoken and quiet, the kind of guy who listened more than he talked and stood just close enough to Will that it was obvious without being too loud about it. Dustin liked that about him. Liked the way Will seemed safe around him, like he wasn’t always bracing for something to go wrong, at last.
It made Dustin strangely emotional to think about - Will finally letting himself be loved properly. After everything he’d been through, after all the years where happiness felt temporary at best and he was insecure to exist, like he had to apologize for being, it felt right that he’d found someone steady. Someone gentle who gave him space to be himself.
Dustin hoped he knew how happy everyone was for him. How proud they all were.
He swallowed, the feeling settling somewhere warm and tight in his chest, and let the song carry him the rest of the way.
It was hard not to think about all of his friends constantly. Between balancing his coursework, relationships, research, and the new, sprawling social life that came with college, keeping in touch the way they had when they were kids had been impossible. Everyone had splintered outward, following their own trajectories, carrying their own quiet damage, dealing with their own shit that came with adult life.
At least some of that distance faded when he came back to their childhood town the year before to pursue his career - driving through the same roads he used to bike down at all hours, stepping back into his childhood home (which had become his adulthood home as well, seeing as his mom moved to Florida to live her best life and left it for him to take care of), breathing in the scent of the woods and asphalt and familiarity so deep it had lingered even while he’d been states away in Cambridge.
It helped that Lucas and Max were still here, too.
They’d gone to college together in Chicago for Max to pursue her Psychology degree. When Dustin heard they were coming back to Hawkins after graduation - lining up almost perfectly with the end of his Master’s - it felt like a strange kind of mercy. Lucas had a job lined up in town as an assistant basketball coach for Hawkins High's team, having gone full circle after earning a varsity scholarship through his efforts.
Max and he shared an apartment where she held her counseling sessions for troubled teens; it was small and simple, but homey, stubbornly carved out of a place neither of them had ever really intended to return to, yet ended up doing so anyway. Being able to sit on their beat-up leather couch, surrounded by pictures full of their memories and drink cheap beer, laughing about old stuff that felt unreal now - that grounded him in a way nothing else did.
It reminded him that he wasn’t completely untethered. That not everything had been sacrificed at the altar of ambition.
Still, this part of town wasn’t nearly as fond of him.
Hawkins Lab rose in front of him in the warm morning - concrete, flat, smug in its certainty that it and all its dirty (not to say highly unethical and outright illegal) secrets had been here longer than he had and that it certainly would outlast whatever ambition he dragged in with him. A year ago, if someone had asked him what it felt like to work as a scientist in the most advanced, top-secret lab in the state, he would’ve beamed and called it the coolest thing in the world.
And it was. Kind of.
The Hawkins National Laboratory was a huge opportunity, both financially and academically, but it was also heavy - especially considering his and his friends’ history with the place. Still, he’d hoped it would be worth it. That if he did his best, he could one day land somewhere important enough to make a difference. To use science for good. To make sure that what happened in this town before never occurs again.
Twice valedictorian. A thesis that damn near killed him. Entire terms where the sun rose and set without him noticing - because orbital mechanics don’t really give a fuck if you’re heartbroken after your girlfriend chooses to “take a tactical break” the night before finals week. Days and nights where the only thing keeping him awake was the thought that one day this would mean something. That he’d earn his place and work with what he loved, with something that made sense. That when he walked into a lab, people would see him for everything that he was.
Instead, he badged in and got asked if he was old enough to be there.
“How ya doing, kiddo?”
“Could you go fetch me a sandwich, son?”
“Are you even supposed to be here?
Once, someone had asked Dustin if he was an intern - funny thing is, he didn't even correct them! He just laughed, because laughing is easier than explaining how many nights he'd stared at equations as big (or bigger) as the national anthem until they blurred into stars, how many times he had to run to the campus nurse scared he was having a heart attack when he was actually nearing an energy drink coma, or how he'd learned - painfully so - that intelligence didn’t automatically translate into authority when your face still looked like it belonged in a yearbook.
As the song reached its end, Dustin shut off the engine. Silence rushed in, heavy and immediate.
The thing was - he knew how good he was at this, not out of arrogance so much as self-respect. He knew how to do math like muscle memory at this point. He could spot an error in any model from across the room. He’d seen anomalies no one else noticed because he’d learned, painfully, what happened when you ignored the feeling that something was wrong. Really, really wrong. The kind of wrong that doesn’t show up on instruments until it’s already too late and everything's gone to shit.
He knew just how dangerous science could be when not handled with attention, with care.
But Hawkins Lab didn’t give a shit about instincts, attention, or care. Hawkins Lab cared about politics and hierarchy. About tenure and badges and age and credentials and who drank with whom at conferences. About the unspoken rule that if you looked too young, you still had everything left to prove.
His jaw tightened, and he caught himself before he could start grinding his teeth, a habit he was trying to avoid so as not to damage the pearly whites he worked so hard on - after finally taking his braces off in junior year of college, the last thing he needed was to crack his now perfectly normal teeth over bullshit like this.
Dustin has to, once again, tell himself not to get too angry. Again. He’d spent these last years mastering the art of keeping his rage contained - how to clamp down on his very much still present childish instinct to snap back all the time, to raise his voice, to remind everyone exactly just how much he knew.
Anger never helped before. Anger gets you labeled as difficult. Anger gets you sidelined.
So he took a deep breath. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. Slow. Measured. Just as his teachers taught him when things went wrong in the field, and panic meant certain death.
Was it all worth it?
Was it worth trading late nights with friends for problem sets? Worth missing things he couldn't even remember anymore because he was always chasing the next answer, the next certificate, the next proof that he did belong in rooms like this?
Was it worth the distance? Separating from his best friends in the world for so long without as much as a second thought?
He glanced at his reflection in the rearview mirror. Same curls, just shorter. Same eyes, just bleaker. Still looked like the kid who talked too fast and laughed too loud and believed the world made sense if you were smart enough.
The badge around his neck felt heavier than it should.
Not letting himself get lost in his thoughts any longer, he looked at the clock once more - 8:01.
“Shit”, he muttered, sighing deeply as he opened the car door.
Cold air rushed in, and the lab loomed closer now, all sharp edges and security checkpoints.
Dustin stepped out anyway.
Because even if they treated him like a child, he knew what he’d seen. He knew what he’d survived - and what the people closest to him didn't.
Eddie.
El.
When Dustin thought about one, it always bled into thinking about the other, even though the two of them had never really occupied the same space in his life. Eddie was noise and chaos and untamed, stubborn joy; Eleven was a little bit more complicated - that mysterious, quiet gravity. After all that suffering, he quickly discovered that loss had a way of stitching people together in his memory like that.
With her, it had always been different. From the beginning, he hadn’t looked at her like a weapon, a miracle, or a problem to solve. Amongst all the things that hurt Hawkins, El's existence had truly been the one that had harmed it the least. Dustin hadn’t needed her to be useful or a hero. He’d noticed the way she listened more than she spoke, the way her face softened when someone waited for her to ask, and then explained something to her instead of just assuming she didn't know, the way she laughed with her whole body when something genuinely caught her off guard. To Dustin, she’d never just been powers or trauma or someone else’s girlfriend or daughter - she was a person who liked her own things - dressing up, soap operas, bad jokes - who hated being underestimated, who got embarrassed when praised and stubborn when challenged, just like he was.
There had been a fondness there, gentle and unclaimed, the kind that doesn’t demand anything back. He loved her in a way that never even thought to possess or define her, a way he’d later realize was rare. Not falling in love - not that consuming, terrifying plunge he saw in other people - but something quieter and steadier, something he would probably never know how to name properly. And now that she was gone, frozen in memory, that affection felt unfinished, like a sentence cut off mid-thought.
Sometimes he wondered what it would’ve been like to know her without the monsters, without the blood and the running and the world-ending stakes. To meet her as an adult - her own person. The thought always hurt more than he expected.
He didn’t let himself linger there for long. Thinking about El like that felt dangerous - like hoping for something the universe had already proven it loved to take away.
The thought made his heart ache, so he swallowed it down.
One day, whether they were ready or not, everyone would have to listen to what he had to say.
Just not today.
Today, Dustin walked in quietly.
The first thing he heard when he crossed the doors of the building was that obnoxious voice from Sheila, the old lady at the reception.
“You are late, Mr. Henderson”, the small-framed woman shook her head in disapproval, her grey curls dangling along with the pearled string that held the back of her glasses.
“Morning, Sheila”, he forced himself to answer, looking at his watch. “It's been, what? Like, two minutes?”
“That’s two minutes more than allowed”, she scanned him as if he'd committed a federal felony (which, admittedly, he had, a few times). “Your generation has no sense of urgency; it's deplorable.”
“Yeah, I'll keep that in mind next time.” Despite his best efforts, Dustin threw her a forced smile, ignoring the last part.
He couldn't help but mutter an annoyed “old hag” when he was out of earshot, just so that he wouldn't blow up on the spot.
The automatic security doors swallowed him whole.
Hawkins Lab smelled like ozone, disinfectant, and stale coffee that had been sitting on a hot plate since before sunrise. Dustin followed the familiar corridor toward the monitoring room, where Kelly Nguyen - one of the less painful people to be coworkers with in that place, and his official lab partner - was already flipping through a stack of printouts thick enough to kill a man if dropped from the right height. Her silky black hair was pulled back in a tight bun, contrasting beautifully with her olive-toned skin.
“Morning,” she said, without looking up, chewing on a pencil absent-mindedly.
“Define ‘morning,’” Dustin replied casually, dropping his backpack under the bench and pulling on a lab coat. “‘Cause the way Sheila clocked me in the entrance hall, you'd think it's noon or something.”
She snorted. “You are late, so...”
“By two minutes!”
“That’s how they get you.”
Dustin smiled despite himself.
Kelly Nguyen was technically his work partner, though the hierarchy here was a mess of titles that meant very little in practice. On paper, she outranked him. She always had, and she deserved it.
She was the only girl in their department and sharper than all of the men in the room, faster with her hands, quicker to see implications they missed - while also being treated like that mattered only about half the time, if not less.
In reality, they both spent most of their days just the same, elbow-deep in simulations, data revisions, and equipment maintenance for projects they weren’t even allowed to fully understand.</p
Today’s assignment glared up at them from the folder on the bench in bold black letters:
NON-LOCAL MASS DISTRIBUTION ANALYSIS
Project Threshold - Phase II
Dustin exhaled through his nose.
“Still calling it that, huh?” He said. “As if slapping an euphemism on it makes it any less terrifying.”
Kelly shrugged. “If they called it ‘stuff that shouldn’t exist behaving badly,’ then they’d have to admit that we're messing with something unnatural and volatile that could kill all of us, wouldn't they?”
Fair point.
They got to work in no time.
Dustin booted up the terminal, fingers flying over the keyboard as he pulled up last night’s simulation logs - energy density fluctuations, spacetime curvature anomalies, mathematical models that tried very hard to pretend reality was stable. His job, officially, was to assist with data verification and model refinement. Unofficially, as a certified snooper, he was there to notice when the numbers started lying.
Which they did. A lot.
The readings showed another spike - brief, sharp, and wrong. A mass-energy signature that didn’t decay the way it should, hovering at the edge of the model like a held breath.
“That’s not noise,” Dustin muttered, leaning closer to the screen and squinting, just to make sure he was right - which he was, of course.
Kelly frowned. “You’re sure?”
“If it were noise, it’d be messier,” he explained. “This… this is intentional.”
She didn’t argue; never did when he said things like that with that type of certainty.
Before either of them could dig any deeper, a voice cut across the lab.
“Nguyen.”
The girl stiffened instantly at the tone.
Dr. Kale stood a few benches down, arms crossed, lab coat pristine in a way that suggested he didn’t do much actual lab work anymore. He was in his mid-forties, with a (rapidly) receding hairline and a permanent look of mild irritation - the kind of man who liked being deferred to.
“Yes, Dr. Kale?” Kelly replied, doing her best to appear neutral.
“Run up to the break room and grab me a coffee, will ya, dear?” He said in a monotone manner. “Black. And make it quick, I’ve got a meeting in five.”
As soon as the words left the man's mouth, they hit the air wrong.
Dustin glanced at Kelly. He saw her tense up even more, but she didn’t move. Just raised an eyebrow, her fox eyes in a defiant stare.
“I’m in the middle of-”
“It’ll only take two minutes,” Kale interrupted, waving a hand. “Let’s not make this complicated, yeah?”
Dustin’s jaw tightened at his condescending tone.
Two minutes.
Funny how those wasted moments seemed to matter when he was late, and now they suddenly didn't anymore.
He couldn't help but think of Suzie then - brilliant, relentless Suzie, uninvited and immediate - and how professors had smiled condescendingly at her intelligence, called her “surprisingly good for a girl,” as if it were an exception instead of the rule, how they looked past her raised hand and chose to call on boys who hadn’t even read the problem yet. They’d broken up to focus on their academic growth, but that didn’t change the fact that she was still the most intelligent person he knew.
Kelly was one of them, too. She was better than this. Smarter than this. And Kale knew it - that's why he chose to humiliate her so that he wouldn't feel threatened.
Before he could stop himself, Dustin said, evenly, “Why don't I get it?”
The room went quiet. Kale scoffed with a malicious grin.
“No one asked you,” he bit, seeming inconvenienced that someone was wasting his time talking back to him.
Even though he felt like smacking that stupid smirk off the asshole’s face, Dustin bit his tongue and kept his tone light. Casual. Almost polite, even.
“Right. Just… I don't know, figured it made more sense to send the junior assistant instead of pulling the senior associate off a live run.”
Kale turned slowly, eyes on Dustin as if he’d just discovered an insect capable of speech.
“Excuse me?”
“I’m the assistant,” Dustin repeated, keeping his voice even and careful, “If someone needs to grab coffee, shouldn’t it be me?”
Kelly shot him a look - part warning, part gratitude.
Even though Kale’s mouth tightened, it still held the same shit-eating grin as always, as if abusing his subordinates actually made his day. Which it probably did.
“Respectfully, sir,” the curly-haired boy added, because he appeared to still have some sense of self-preservation in him, “she outranks me. And, as I said, we’re in the middle of a run.”
“Who asked you to speak, kid?” He stepped closer, as if this inconvenience was entirely Dustin's fault, and not his own for being a dick. “You're way out of line.”
The other researchers in the room seemed to completely stop what they were doing to watch and see if the situation would escalate further.
Dustin stared and felt the familiar heat rise in his chest - that dangerous, electric pressure he’d spent years learning how to contain. He bit the inside of his cheek until he tasted copper.
He breathed. In. Out. In.
Kelly straightened in her seat. “Dr. Kale,” she said, sharp, looking at her wrist watch and tapping it softly. “Your meeting.”
Kale huffed and walked away without any further commotion. As soon as they saw that everything was resolved, the other workers returned to their tasks.
The moment he was gone from the room, Kelly exhaled and rubbed her face.
“You’re insane,” she murmured, shaking her head with an unamused expression.
“Yeah,” Dustin said, finally allowing himself to breathe. “I know.”
She gave him a small, tired smile. “Thanks anyway.”
As she went back to her work, Dustin stared back at the terminal. The anomalous spike still hovered there, unresolved.
He wondered, not for the first time, which was more dangerous - the things they were studying, or the people in charge of it.
The day dragged by with no further complications.
Not loudly. Not dramatically. It dragged the way water erodes stone - slowly, persistently, until something gives.
By six, the lab had settled into its end-of-day rhythm. Keyboards clicked less frequently. Conversations dropped to murmurs. Somewhere down the hall, a cart rattled as someone wheeled equipment back into storage. The fluorescent lights didn’t change, but Dustin could feel the shift anyway; that subtle permission to finally disengage.
He didn’t, obviously.
The anomaly sat at the back of his mind all afternoon, gnawing. Every task he completed - recalibrating sensors, filing reports, pretending to pay attention during a briefing he wasn’t invited to speak in - felt like a detour around something important.
Wrong.
That was the word that kept coming back to him.
Wrong in the way the numbers clustered too neatly, and the decay curve flattened instead of tapering off. Wrong in the way his skin prickled every time he thought about it.
Exotic matter wasn’t supposed to behave like that.
Not unless it was being stressed on purpose.
Dustin shut down his terminal last, fingers lingering on the keys as the screen flickered dark. He slipped his notebook into his bag - his actual, real one, not the sanitized lab-issued binder under his arm - the pages inside crowded with margins full of questions he knew he wasn’t supposed to be asking.
He told himself, firmly, that he’d look into it later. At home. Quietly. On his own time.
Because if he was right - if the fluctuation he observed correlated with the lab’s exotic matter reserves - then this wasn’t just a modeling error or a sensor glitch.
It was structural.
He swallowed, feeling his throat dry out.
They never called it exotic matter out loud, not in official documentation. It had too many implications, too much history, and most people didn't even recognize it as something real, only theoretical. Instead, it lived behind euphemisms and clearance levels, behind locked doors and warnings not to speculate.
But Dustin knew it existed, what it was - and, most importantly, what it could do.
He’d seen it before. What happened when it pooled wrong, when it was allowed to stabilize something that should have collapsed under its own impossibility. He knew that without it, the Upside Down couldn’t have sustained itself.
And with too much of it-
He zipped his bag shut harder than necessary.
The idea sat heavy in his chest as he swiped his badge one last time and stepped into the evening air. The sun was already low, bleeding orange across the parking lot. His Civic waited where he’d left it, paint catching the light just enough to make it look almost respectable (keyword being almost).
As he reached for the door handle, his pager vibrated.
Dustin froze.
He glanced around out of reflex - old habits - then pulled it free from his front pocket. The screen flashed a short numeric alert, followed by text truncated by the system's limits.
MAD MAX: we need to talk. pls come over?
That was it. No punctuation wasted. No explanation. No smiley face or silly emoticons, which was saying something when it came from Max.
His stomach dropped.
The redhead didn’t do vague unless it mattered. And she definitely didn’t ask for his help unless it was important or bad - or both.
He stared at the message for a moment too long, the hum of the lab still audible behind him, the weight of the anomaly pressing in from the other side. The thought of why she wouldn't give him a call instead crossed his mind - maybe she didn't have the time, which made his thoughts race. Was it an emergency or something?
“Yeah,” he murmured to no one. “Yeah, okay.”
Dustin slid into the car and shut the door, the sound solid and final. He turned the key, the engine coughing to life, and pulled out of the lot without looking back.
Whatever he’d find later in his notes could wait a few more hours.
If Max said they needed to talk, then something was already wrong.
And if there was one thing Dustin Henderson knew by now, it was that when things went wrong in Hawkins, they never stayed contained for long.