Not the Mind Flayer but definitely not just some wandering dog that'd gotten lost too close to the Hopper cabin. It was far too big to be just any old wolf and Billy felt his gut twist in fear once more.
He's in no frame to defend himself if it decides to attack, especially not with the pathetically bandaged hole in his chest and without a single weapon to defend himself with.
"Haven't I been through enough? The fuck are you?"
The wolf opens his giant maw up, showing off a lot of sharp, white fangs as a voice comes out. "One who will not be disrespected by a young pup like yourself." His voice is hoarse and rusty, anything beyond howls and snarls not having come from the vocal cords in a very long time.
He bounds forward in a few swift movements, staring at Billy with a critical eye. "But I'm not the first thing that lives in dark places that you've encountered, am I?"
For a moment, Billy wonders if he had died or if maybe he'd actually passed out from blood loss and was hallucinating because last he checked? Wolves didn't talk.
But then the giant talking dog bounds towards him and pain explodes through his whole chest at the sudden movement he makes to get away from it and tears spring to his eyes. It's still talking to him while he breathes through the worst of it.
"Not yet, I'm afraid. If you were, I'd be eating you." Ivar says this all very pragmatically, as if casual cannibalism is just a common thing that everyone should indulge in. "Frankly, I'm wondering how you're even still alive. You look like shit." This close up, he's got a better idea of what Billy looks like. His eyesight as a wolf isn't the greatest from far away. He sees the world more through scent and sounds.
His nose quivers as he inhales Billy's scent once again. "Why do you smell the way you do? I've never smelled anything like it before."
"How are you talking?" Billy slides down the wall until he's sitting on the floor and leaning against the side of the cabin, watching the wolf with a furrowed brow. None of this made sense and Billy was too tired to even try and figure it out.
"Yeah... I kinda went a few rounds with a monster from another dimension. I'm not dead yet so I guess I didn't totally lose." A beat. "Of course, I'm also talking to a wolf so... Who even knows."
"You're not too bright, are you, pup?" Ivar says this in a tone that's partly condescending, but not entirely cruel. He just expects not everyone can be as smart as someone with over a thousand years of life experience these days. "I'm a varúlfur." He's lost most of his accent after all this time, but it does come back strong on the Old Norse word. "They call my kind werewolves these days."
He licks his chops and then goes on. "Ah, that explains why you smell the way you do. Monsters have a habit of leaving their signature on a person. Gives them a different sort of scent. That's what caught my attention."
"The fuck, man? You're saying a whole lot of words and I nearly died a couple hours ago, I think you can cut me some slack." There's a huge part of Billy that's still not sure any of this is actually happening but then, if you'd told him a week ago that monsters existed at all, he'd have laughed in your face so maybe it did make sense.
"If you're a werewolf, does that mean you can be, y'know, not a talking dog?"
"I could. But unless you have a spare pair of pants or blanket lying around, that might turn awkward very quickly for you." Ivar has gone the better part of a decade without needing clothes hanging out in the woods, so it wasn't as big a priority for him as one might think.
Somehow, the sharp-toothed smile on the muzzle managed to translate without looking out of place or too disconcerting.
“Not my place, but despite how much it looks like a piece of shit, this crap shack was a home two days ago. Probably something wearable inside. But the Chief’s a bituva fat ass so you’ll be lucky to find anything that fits.” Billy attempts a shrug but it falls short when it pulls at the gaping hole in his chest.
There’s more black blood staining his already destroyed tank in seconds and he looks at it.
Ivar doesn't say anything at first. Then he goes right up to Billy and snaps his mouth around his hand, just hard enough to let him know that, yes, he's real and those fangs are sharp enough to tear him to ribbons if he really wanted to. "That should answer your question."
Then he trots right inside like he owns the place. Ivar begins nosing around for both clothes and to see if there's any food around the place. The wolf instincts have their priorities and having something to eat is always a big one.
The teeth around his hand are sharp and Billy can feel the strength behind that jaw and, yeah, if the wolf-man-person-whatever wanted him to be dead -deader than he should be- then he'd be dead.
And then he's gone, disappearing into Hopper's cabin without even a glance back. Billy follows, after a good six minutes struggling to get back to his feet and using the walls for balance.
He watches from the couch as Ivar looks around the broken up shack.
"If you're not here to finish what he started," killing Billy, "why are you in bum fuck Indiana?"
"Oh, I took off from civilization about 1979. Just got tired of humans and all their bullshit. I just wanted to just be by myself for a bit. I was passing through when I smelled something interesting." He finds something on the floor that no human being would ever consider eating, but which he finds delicious as he snaps it up.
Ivar finds a bundle of clothes tossed into a corner of the bedroom and noses through them, ignoring the scents he's picking up. "Jeez, you weren't joking about the size of this guy." Ivar was tall, but he was much leaner then Jim Hopper was. Well, maybe he could work something out using a belt.
"Then you missed all the fun." There were plenty of signs that showed what had happened in the last few days; mostly the giant holes in the wall and the gaping chunk of missing roof that had left most of the ceiling on the floor.
And that was just inside. The Mind Flayer Billy had built had left one hell of a mess in the woods behind him.
"How that man became chief of police is beyond me." To be fair, there weren't a lot of better choices.
"Such a pity. I would have loved a good battle." This is said without any signs of a sarcasm and a whole lot of enthusiasm instead. At his core, Ivar was still a warrior through and through. It was one of the reasons he occasionally left civilization behind. His time and people were long past and would never come again. Therefore, his way of thinking was unacceptable to most people.
"Now, now." The words were now mumbled as he dragged the most-likely looking clothing out of the pile with his teeth and paws. "Being fat used to be a sign of prosperity. You only got that way if you had enough to eat."
He pauses and then looks over his shoulder at Billy. "You're going to want to look away now." Aside from the visuals of watching a wolf turn back into a man, which isn't fun as the entire form melts and contorts like putty being reformed, there's the sounds of it too. The snapping and stretching as tendons and muscles shrink or expand, the bones grinding as they physically change shape, and just the general gnarly noises of a body changing entirely from one shape to another.
When it ends, Ivar's got his eyes closed, panting just a little. Over a thousand years and it still isn't a pleasant experience changing back and forth between forms. Still, he's more used to it now then he used to be.
"Maybe I wouldn't have this fucking hole in my chest." Seriously, how was he alive? He wonders if it has anything to do with the Mind Flayer's powers, the ones he'd possessed while being possessed, the ones that had kept him alive when the girl had thrown him through the concrete wall of the pool sauna.
Pulling a face, Billy rolls his eyes. "Now it just means you're a fat ass who doesn't work out." Something Billy wasn't.
He doesn't look away and he immediately regrets the decision to not take Ivar's advice. It's terrifying to watch and Billy winces so hard at it that he hurts himself.
"If I wasn't sure I was alive before, I fuckin' am now."
"Hmmm. We'll have to do something about that," Ivar muses. It won't do to have the young fella keeling over on him dead from blood loss or something else inconvenient like that. Ivar had only just gotten started with him.
"I warned you, pup. You've got no one to blame for that sight but yourself." Ivar says this as he pulls one of Hopper's shirts over his head. It's far too baggy, so he bunches up the edges of it, and turns it into a twisted-up shirttail that he keeps in place with a rubber band. It still is far too big, but at least he doesn't look like someone let the air out of him anymore.
Then he shifts himself, using the momentum to get the pants on his legs. He's not paralyzed, just possessed of weak bones, so at least he can bend and move them a little without them being a complete pair of limp noodles. But he's still unable to walk even after all these years. Modern medicine had only identified brittle bone syndrome starting in 1895, so treatment for it was still very sparse.
"Oh? What, you got magic powers as well?" Honestly? Wouldn't really surprise him. Not anymore. "The fact that I'm even alive... Probably something to do with him."
Billy continues to stare, face twisted up in horror even as Ivar dresses himself in one of Hopper's t-shirts. It's far too big on him but it's better than nothing, Billy supposes. The teen watches him the entire time, brow furrowing further as the limber wolf is slow to put on the borrowed pants.
"Does it hurt? When you change? And... what's up with your legs?"
"Sort of. Werewolf saliva does wonders for the healing process I'll have you know." That was how werewolves got the reputation of being so hard to kill. Their bodily fluids were made to speed up the healing process, so saliva and blood could both be used to help close their wounds when they were in need. He could always spit into a handkerchief or rag and offer to Billy, as he thought the pup wouldn't appreciate him licking his chest no matter what form he was in.
"Always. But you get used to it," comes the gruff and laconic answer. If it had been too much to bear, Ivar would've died years ago. These days, it was a pain that he was able to bear.
There came a guarded look across Ivar's face, the emotion shutting down behind his eyes when Billy asked about his legs. It had been a thousand years and more since his own times when people mocked him as a useless cripple that should've been left to die in the woods, but he still got extremely touchy over anyone remarking on them. He finished getting the pants on and then threaded the belt through the loops before he bothered to answer. "They're useless. Back in my day, it was thought I was cursed by our gods. These days, the doctors call it osteogenesis imperfecta. Brittle bone disease. I can't walk on them for fear of shattering them into pieces."
"Of course it does. Guess it's my lucky day then." Or something, he supposed.
Even with all that Billy had been through -and he'd been abused most his life before he'd become a puppet for an inter-dimensional monster- what Billy had just witnessed looked more than a little bit horrifying. "Doesn't look like you do. Looks like it still really fuckin' hurts."
Raising both hands in the international sign of 'I come in peace' Billy nods along to Ivar's explanation.
"That's really shitty, man. There's nothing they can do to help?"
"In my experience, there's no such thing as luck. Just fate taking different forms," he says, a philosophy the Norse believed in wholeheartedly. You could take the Viking out of the North, but not the North out of the Viking.
"Well, what do you expect? You've had a bone or two broken before in your time, I imagine. Now imagine all of them being snapped and reformed over and over again each time you switch from wolf to man and back again. You either learn a level of being able to tolerate or just going completely insane," he explains. "Besides, I was already in pain my whole life even before I was turned. Brittle bone syndrome means your bones hurt all the time." It accounted for why Ivar always seem to be a bit tetchy and grumpy at all times.
"No. There's not a lot of treatments for it, save for shoving metal rods in my legs to help me walk better. That would hinder more then help with being able to shift to my wolf form," he says as he goes on. "But I've spent many years dealing with this. If I haven't made my peace with it, I've at least gotten to the point of acceptance."
Mostly. There was still moments where Ivar would fly into a complete rage over one little innocuous comment about his legs, but these days, it was better then when he had been young and wanted to burn down entire nations for the same offense.
"Fate, huh? Can't say I've put a lot of thought into it. Probably because that means my whole life was a shit show on purpose." And wasn't that bleak?
Billy looks down at himself, at the pathetic attempt to bandage himself closed and sighs. "Got some now. This is enough." Nodding again, Billy feels a pang of sadness at the idea of Ivar having suffered his whole life; perhaps he could even relate a little, even if the causes for their pain had been different.
"It's still shitty that you have to go through it at all." With another soft sigh, Billy says, "my old man... he used to beat my mum. When she left, he turned on me. Blamed me for her leaving, for us having to move out here, for everything. It got worse when he drank."
He doesn't know why he says it, maybe because Ivar had shared something about himself that he seemed uncomfortable sharing.
"Perhaps. But the thing about fate is that you can change it if you try hard enough. I was fated to be a poor, pathetic cripple among my people and instead I became a king whose name people remember even today." He sounded quite proud of that fact. Ivar had worked hard to get where he was in life. He'd wanted to be one of the most famous Vikings in the entire world and had succeeded in that goal.
Ivar crawls forward, a serpentine motion that looks more then just a little eerie. There's the same air as when the Terminator in the first movie got his legs blown off: he might be crippled but he's still incredibly dangerous. As he passes through the kitchen, he pauses, then reaches over to a fallen knife block, sliding one into a back pocket. It's a force of habit after all these years to go armed.
"Sad story. There's sadder, not that it's much consolation I'm sure." He reaches the room Billy's in and stops, sitting down on the floor as he adjusts his legs so that they'll be in front of him and in the least amount of pain. "If anyone had done that to be growing up, I would have killed the son-of-a-bitch. But that was a different time." Murder was sanctioned as long as you had good reason for getting away with it.
"You keep saying shit like that. How old are you? 'Cause you definitely weren't born in the 60's." Not like Billy was, even if he did look roughly the same age. Outside of the high school setting and the "Keg King" and "King Steve", kings didn't actually exist, not really. So whatever made him a talking wolfman, also made him old as fuck.
Billy isn't sure of it's because of the blood loss and delirium but there's something about the way Ivar moves, with the practised ease of someone who has never known a different way, that's mesmerising, even as he arms himself and moves around the rubble that litters the floor. There's no doubting that this man is dangerous for all it appears like he shouldn't be.
And yet, Billy isn't afraid.
"I'm not looking for sympathy. But I know what it's like to have something that hurts that people have no fucking tact about. You were deemed a pathetic cripple and I'm the former king of high school who's mummy didn't love him enough and who's daddy hit him." He snorts a painful laugh at the blase tone used when talking about murder. "Yeah, definitely not born in the 60's."
Ivar laughs a little bit at Billy's words regarding his age. "Let me put it this way, pup. I was born when there was still only triple-digit years on the calendar." Which made him at least over nine-hundred years old, and in Ivar's specific case, made him well-over a thousand.
"My nickname back then was Ivar hinn Beinlausi." His accent again grows thicker on the fluid Norse syllables. "It means Ivar the Boneless in English. I doubt you'll know the name much. They don't teach about me in high school last I checked, though they do at the college level." He knows this after sitting in on some classes years ago. Ivar had enough ego to like to hear himself still talked about even after all this time.
That should be impossible but then so should possession and, currently, his continued survival despite his injuries so Billy just pulls a face and nods.
"Guess I can say you look good for your age then?"
Billy shakes his head to say that, no, he doesn't know the name well. But Billy has also gone outside of the recommended school studies, refusing to give his dad any reason to express disappointment over his grades.
"Think I've seen it. Once or twice. But it wasn't the focus of anything." So, no, he's never actively learned about him. "So, here we are. Two men who shouldn't be alive in a shitty little backwards town like Hawkins Indiana. And you just happened to show up when the world split open and let in monsters from somewhere else. I should probably be far more afraid."
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He's in no frame to defend himself if it decides to attack, especially not with the pathetically bandaged hole in his chest and without a single weapon to defend himself with.
"Haven't I been through enough? The fuck are you?"
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He bounds forward in a few swift movements, staring at Billy with a critical eye. "But I'm not the first thing that lives in dark places that you've encountered, am I?"
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But then the giant talking dog bounds towards him and pain explodes through his whole chest at the sudden movement he makes to get away from it and tears spring to his eyes. It's still talking to him while he breathes through the worst of it.
"What? Am I dead?"
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His nose quivers as he inhales Billy's scent once again. "Why do you smell the way you do? I've never smelled anything like it before."
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"Yeah... I kinda went a few rounds with a monster from another dimension. I'm not dead yet so I guess I didn't totally lose." A beat. "Of course, I'm also talking to a wolf so... Who even knows."
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He licks his chops and then goes on. "Ah, that explains why you smell the way you do. Monsters have a habit of leaving their signature on a person. Gives them a different sort of scent. That's what caught my attention."
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"If you're a werewolf, does that mean you can be, y'know, not a talking dog?"
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Somehow, the sharp-toothed smile on the muzzle managed to translate without looking out of place or too disconcerting.
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There’s more black blood staining his already destroyed tank in seconds and he looks at it.
“Are you real?”
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Then he trots right inside like he owns the place. Ivar begins nosing around for both clothes and to see if there's any food around the place. The wolf instincts have their priorities and having something to eat is always a big one.
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And then he's gone, disappearing into Hopper's cabin without even a glance back. Billy follows, after a good six minutes struggling to get back to his feet and using the walls for balance.
He watches from the couch as Ivar looks around the broken up shack.
"If you're not here to finish what he started," killing Billy, "why are you in bum fuck Indiana?"
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Ivar finds a bundle of clothes tossed into a corner of the bedroom and noses through them, ignoring the scents he's picking up. "Jeez, you weren't joking about the size of this guy." Ivar was tall, but he was much leaner then Jim Hopper was. Well, maybe he could work something out using a belt.
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And that was just inside. The Mind Flayer Billy had built had left one hell of a mess in the woods behind him.
"How that man became chief of police is beyond me." To be fair, there weren't a lot of better choices.
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"Now, now." The words were now mumbled as he dragged the most-likely looking clothing out of the pile with his teeth and paws. "Being fat used to be a sign of prosperity. You only got that way if you had enough to eat."
He pauses and then looks over his shoulder at Billy. "You're going to want to look away now." Aside from the visuals of watching a wolf turn back into a man, which isn't fun as the entire form melts and contorts like putty being reformed, there's the sounds of it too. The snapping and stretching as tendons and muscles shrink or expand, the bones grinding as they physically change shape, and just the general gnarly noises of a body changing entirely from one shape to another.
When it ends, Ivar's got his eyes closed, panting just a little. Over a thousand years and it still isn't a pleasant experience changing back and forth between forms. Still, he's more used to it now then he used to be.
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Pulling a face, Billy rolls his eyes. "Now it just means you're a fat ass who doesn't work out." Something Billy wasn't.
He doesn't look away and he immediately regrets the decision to not take Ivar's advice. It's terrifying to watch and Billy winces so hard at it that he hurts himself.
"If I wasn't sure I was alive before, I fuckin' am now."
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"I warned you, pup. You've got no one to blame for that sight but yourself." Ivar says this as he pulls one of Hopper's shirts over his head. It's far too baggy, so he bunches up the edges of it, and turns it into a twisted-up shirttail that he keeps in place with a rubber band. It still is far too big, but at least he doesn't look like someone let the air out of him anymore.
Then he shifts himself, using the momentum to get the pants on his legs. He's not paralyzed, just possessed of weak bones, so at least he can bend and move them a little without them being a complete pair of limp noodles. But he's still unable to walk even after all these years. Modern medicine had only identified brittle bone syndrome starting in 1895, so treatment for it was still very sparse.
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Billy continues to stare, face twisted up in horror even as Ivar dresses himself in one of Hopper's t-shirts. It's far too big on him but it's better than nothing, Billy supposes. The teen watches him the entire time, brow furrowing further as the limber wolf is slow to put on the borrowed pants.
"Does it hurt? When you change? And... what's up with your legs?"
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"Always. But you get used to it," comes the gruff and laconic answer. If it had been too much to bear, Ivar would've died years ago. These days, it was a pain that he was able to bear.
There came a guarded look across Ivar's face, the emotion shutting down behind his eyes when Billy asked about his legs. It had been a thousand years and more since his own times when people mocked him as a useless cripple that should've been left to die in the woods, but he still got extremely touchy over anyone remarking on them. He finished getting the pants on and then threaded the belt through the loops before he bothered to answer. "They're useless. Back in my day, it was thought I was cursed by our gods. These days, the doctors call it osteogenesis imperfecta. Brittle bone disease. I can't walk on them for fear of shattering them into pieces."
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Even with all that Billy had been through -and he'd been abused most his life before he'd become a puppet for an inter-dimensional monster- what Billy had just witnessed looked more than a little bit horrifying. "Doesn't look like you do. Looks like it still really fuckin' hurts."
Raising both hands in the international sign of 'I come in peace' Billy nods along to Ivar's explanation.
"That's really shitty, man. There's nothing they can do to help?"
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"Well, what do you expect? You've had a bone or two broken before in your time, I imagine. Now imagine all of them being snapped and reformed over and over again each time you switch from wolf to man and back again. You either learn a level of being able to tolerate or just going completely insane," he explains. "Besides, I was already in pain my whole life even before I was turned. Brittle bone syndrome means your bones hurt all the time." It accounted for why Ivar always seem to be a bit tetchy and grumpy at all times.
"No. There's not a lot of treatments for it, save for shoving metal rods in my legs to help me walk better. That would hinder more then help with being able to shift to my wolf form," he says as he goes on. "But I've spent many years dealing with this. If I haven't made my peace with it, I've at least gotten to the point of acceptance."
Mostly. There was still moments where Ivar would fly into a complete rage over one little innocuous comment about his legs, but these days, it was better then when he had been young and wanted to burn down entire nations for the same offense.
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Billy looks down at himself, at the pathetic attempt to bandage himself closed and sighs. "Got some now. This is enough." Nodding again, Billy feels a pang of sadness at the idea of Ivar having suffered his whole life; perhaps he could even relate a little, even if the causes for their pain had been different.
"It's still shitty that you have to go through it at all." With another soft sigh, Billy says, "my old man... he used to beat my mum. When she left, he turned on me. Blamed me for her leaving, for us having to move out here, for everything. It got worse when he drank."
He doesn't know why he says it, maybe because Ivar had shared something about himself that he seemed uncomfortable sharing.
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Ivar crawls forward, a serpentine motion that looks more then just a little eerie. There's the same air as when the Terminator in the first movie got his legs blown off: he might be crippled but he's still incredibly dangerous. As he passes through the kitchen, he pauses, then reaches over to a fallen knife block, sliding one into a back pocket. It's a force of habit after all these years to go armed.
"Sad story. There's sadder, not that it's much consolation I'm sure." He reaches the room Billy's in and stops, sitting down on the floor as he adjusts his legs so that they'll be in front of him and in the least amount of pain. "If anyone had done that to be growing up, I would have killed the son-of-a-bitch. But that was a different time." Murder was sanctioned as long as you had good reason for getting away with it.
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Billy isn't sure of it's because of the blood loss and delirium but there's something about the way Ivar moves, with the practised ease of someone who has never known a different way, that's mesmerising, even as he arms himself and moves around the rubble that litters the floor. There's no doubting that this man is dangerous for all it appears like he shouldn't be.
And yet, Billy isn't afraid.
"I'm not looking for sympathy. But I know what it's like to have something that hurts that people have no fucking tact about. You were deemed a pathetic cripple and I'm the former king of high school who's mummy didn't love him enough and who's daddy hit him." He snorts a painful laugh at the blase tone used when talking about murder. "Yeah, definitely not born in the 60's."
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"My nickname back then was Ivar hinn Beinlausi." His accent again grows thicker on the fluid Norse syllables. "It means Ivar the Boneless in English. I doubt you'll know the name much. They don't teach about me in high school last I checked, though they do at the college level." He knows this after sitting in on some classes years ago. Ivar had enough ego to like to hear himself still talked about even after all this time.
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"Guess I can say you look good for your age then?"
Billy shakes his head to say that, no, he doesn't know the name well. But Billy has also gone outside of the recommended school studies, refusing to give his dad any reason to express disappointment over his grades.
"Think I've seen it. Once or twice. But it wasn't the focus of anything." So, no, he's never actively learned about him. "So, here we are. Two men who shouldn't be alive in a shitty little backwards town like Hawkins Indiana. And you just happened to show up when the world split open and let in monsters from somewhere else. I should probably be far more afraid."
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