Chapter Text
She looked lost at sea. Treading water in a flood of unnatural blue light, leaning on her uninjured leg as she turned this way and that, searching the faceless bodies zipping back and forth for the familiar. El’s eyes, already shining with a short lifetime of grief and hurt, found hers. And she knew.
She knew home wasn’t coming back.
And Joyce clung to half of her own home, her youngest boy, and watched El’s world crash down around her yet again. Face screwing up like paper in a fist, hair swishing as she shook her head no, no, no…
Joyce slid her hand down the length of Will’s arm and gripped his hand tight as she pulled back from the embrace, and a moment ago she couldn’t have taken another step but now she was half-running across the lot, towards the little girl-turning-teenager who’d been so brave and fought so hard and brought her baby boy back to her.
Joyce had noticed the way Will and El’s eyes tended to linger on each other at innocuous moments, like they couldn’t quite believe the other was real. Trying to puzzle out the other half of their own equation, the person whose fate had become so tangled up in theirs. But even she was surprised to find Will moving to El with the same determination once he read the look on her face, not being dragged by her hand but merely anchored by it.
El’s chest hiccupped with the first sob and her arms opened just slightly right as their momentum carried them into her. Joyce folded her in close with her free arm while Will looped his around her back, and she and stroked her hair with a trembling hand she tried to soothe. Her tears smothered her voice as she whispered, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, baby, I’m so sorry.”
El’s shoulders shook, and Will was holding tighter as if he were trying to shield them both from the cold, but his own breaths were short and wet as well.
“It’s okay, I’m sorry, it’s going to be okay…”
“It’s not okay!” El choked, and her breath squeaked out her throat. She clutched tighter, buried her face in deeper to Joyce’s shoulder. The voice that muffled into her jacket was angry. “Where is he?!”
Hopper’s smile flashed into her consciousness; and it had been a smile, not the grimace of a dead man killed before he knew his daughter was safe, or the sardonic grin of a pessimist saying I told you so. It was a sad, watery kind of smile, the kind that accompanied a single breath of laughter and a humoured, “So much for dinner, then, huh?”
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered, and couldn’t manage anything else. She closed her eyes and held the back of El’s head and tried to take a deep breath. She just held her, tight and quiet except for all the crying, and tried not to say the words I’m sorry, Hop, out loud. She squeezed Will’s hand, and he squeezed tighter. The kids started to flock together, being drawn by El and Will, which pulled in the teenagers all clinging to one another as well. She wished she had more hands, so that she could hold Jonathan’s face in them without letting go of her youngest two.
“Are you kids all alright?” she managed, and poor Max looked like her knees would cave in without Lucas and Mike holding her up on each side, but they all nodded vaguely or muttered assurances and nobody mentioned the big, empty space where Hopper should have been although they’d all left a space for him to stand without thinking about it. “Right,” she nodded, trying to gather her thoughts into an action plan. “Right, who’s got the keys? Let’s get everybody home. I’ll drop you all off…”
“I’ll drive, Mrs. Byers,” said Nancy, and it almost sounded like a command. She flipped the car keys into her hand and repeated with a slight wobble in her voice, “I’ll drive.” And maybe that’s what she needed to feel in control, to feel okay, because the wobble only seemed to make her more determined. As many of them crammed into the station wagon as they could; Jonathan and Nancy in the front, she, Will and El in the middle, and Lucas, Mike, and Max in the back. Steve assured them that he could drive himself and Murray and Robin in the “Toddfather”, and would pick up Dustin and Erica on the way. Lucas gave Steve a stern warning about getting Erica home on time, and he waved him off, muttering about someone called Tina, and Uncle Jack’s party.
Joyce rubbed circles on El’s hand with her thumb all the way home, and Will clasped her other hand. Sandwiched in between them, and with Mike and Lucas at her back, El let herself relax a little in her exhaustion, slumping just slightly against Will. Joyce found herself dozing in and out of forming plans of defence in case some other unleashed horror jumped at the car before the night was through.
Jonathan and Nancy’s goodbye was shorter than their standard. Mike and El’s was almost nonexistent, nothing more than a promise to come over with Nancy the next day as El kept her eyes low, her arm against Will’s. She nodded, and Joyce closed the car door, raising a hand to wave them off down the track. She put an arm around El’s shoulders and led her inside. The ache of someone missing threatened to rise up in her throat, and she squashed it down. Not now. The children need you. Be Mom now. Be Joyce later.
Jonathan helped her amass a selection of quilts and pillows for El to choose from, and Will made grilled cheeses with expert culinary skill, filling the kitchen with warmth that spilled into the living room. They all bundled onto the sofa in exhausted, comfortable silence to eat their midnight snack, and then Jonathan mumbled that he was going to get some sleep and wandered to the bathroom to drag a toothbrush over his teeth.
El thumbed the plain blue hairband on her wrist as Joyce told her that if she needed anything in the night, she should come and find her, and not to worry if she had to wake her up. El nodded, pulling her chosen blankets tight around her and shuffling deeper into the comfiest part of the sofa.
Joyce rested her hand on the wall close to the light switch and gave Will a, Time for bed, mister, smile. He got up from the arm of the couch obligingly, but looked back at El, eyes lingering on hers again. “Goodnight, El,” he said.
“Goodnight.”
El had waited for the nightmares to come, but they’d left her alone in the inky black void of total unconsciousness instead. Sheer exhaustion carried her sleep through until summer sunlight streamed through the windows, when she sat up in a whirlwind of unfamiliar sensations. Not home. Not safe. Escape—
“You’re okay, sweetie,” Joyce hushed, hastily stepping into her line of sight and kneeling down beside the sofa. “You’re safe.”
Why was she here? Where was— “Hop,” she croaked, searching her face, begging her to say it wasn’t true, it wasn’t right, all of it was a terrible mistake…
Joyce just pressed her lips together and regarded her with kind, sad eyes. El curled in on herself and clutched her legs while Joyce rubbed her shoulder. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. He wasn’t supposed to go, he promised, he promised he would always come back.
Friends don’t lie.
But they make stupid promises, sometimes.
“I got Eggos,” Joyce said, tilting her head to try and catch her eyes. “You still like Eggos, right?”
Reluctantly, she raised her eyes to meet Joyce’s, and nodded. She smiled at her, led her into the kitchen with a hand on her back. Her blanket still rested on her shoulders, protective, while she dug into her breakfast – three stacked waffles, sandwiched with whip cream, and Smarties, and fresh berries.
“Mike came by, earlier,” Joyce told her. “But you were still asleep. You want to call him?”
She thought about it. About the way he chatted, awkward but cute, and played with her fingers and her lips. He’d want to touch and talk and kiss her better, and Hopper would say three inches, kids, and—
No he wouldn’t. Hopper wouldn’t say anything. Ever.
“Parents are the worst,” Mike had said once, lying on his back on her bed, staring at the ceiling after Hop had called through the wall that they better stop “sucking face” soon or their mouths would be too numb to eat dinner. El had giggled, and Mike had groaned. “They never give you any freedom,” he continued.
Mike exaggerated; he did it a lot. It was sometimes hard to tell, but she was getting better at it. This was an example. He rolled onto his stomach and looked her in the face. “Come on, you’ve gotta agree. Your dad keeps you here like a prisoner, practically!”
El had shrugged. Hopper said she had to stay away from downtown and the mall, so she did. Her year of ‘laying low’ would be up in the fall. That wasn’t too far away, now, and anyway, being around lots of people was scary. She didn’t mind staying away from all of that.
She shook her head at Joyce. No Mike today. She nodded, not asking for an explanation, and scooped up a handful of berries to pop individually into her mouth. “Okay. Well… I’m thinking I should go to the cabin today, pick up some more clothes for you, anything else you might need.” She spoke delicately. Like treading around broken glass. “You can give me a list, or you can come. Up to you.”
Stuffing her colourful new clothes into a duffel bag was the easy part, but to get to it, she had to step around the debris of Hopper’s grandfather’s furniture, feel the breeze whistle through the holes punched in the wall and the roof. Edge carefully around a splatter of Flayer-infected blood that looked dead, but not for sure.
The new clothes were easy – at least once Joyce showed her how to fold them so they could all fit neatly into the bag. The old jeans and tees and dungarees went in without a fuss, as well, although she let herself be convinced that she didn’t need the ones that were too small or filled with holes anymore. She folded her Snow Ball dress several times before she was satisfied with it, but eventually, that was packed too. Then came the button-ups, and everything ground to a halt. They had to pick through the house to gather them all up, creating a pile that was little less that totally unreasonable for one person to have. But then, they’d belonged to two people, before.
“Right,” Joyce said, regarding their mountainous task. She held up the one of the top of the pile, dark blue plaid. “Want to keep this one?”
“Yes.”
The next one was white and blue with a thin red stripe.
“Yes.”
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Joyce put down the sixth shirt in the ‘Yes’ pile and hummed. “Okay. I know it’s hard to let go of things, but that’s not what we’re doing right now, okay? We’re just picking your favourites. We can pack the rest away in a box, and come back for them later. Yeah?”
Favourites. They were all her favourites.
Joyce smiled at her, and got up from the floor. “Take your time. I’ll go and deal with the fridge.”
So she sat, cross-legged on her bedroom floor. She took a brown and blue plaid shirt off the top of the pile and thought about it; thought about which one of them had worn it last. Some of the shirts were firmly hers, too small for Hop to fit in any more, but others seemed to change custody on the regular. She buried her face in it and breathed in. Hopper. It smelled like him so strongly that for a second, just a second… it was almost like she was snuggling into the real thing.
And then she wasn’t. And the tears fell.
When she finished packing the ones she’d chosen – the first one he’d given her, after the bath and Will and Castle Byers, was coming with her, even though it was raggedy – she dumped the remaining shirts into a box without folding them and picked out hair ties and bracelets and stuffed all the other knick-knacks and drawings from her room into her bag. She stood in the doorway of her bedroom and watched Joyce finish filling a box with groceries. She smiled at El, and then looked into the rest of the cabin and sighed. El looked at her (What’s wrong?) and she shook her head.
“I thought we’d be able to clean all this up, get it all… sorted, packed away.” She bit her lip and sat down at the table, and laughed shortly, sniffed. “I don’t think that’s gonna happen.” Surveying the mess, Eleven agreed. It was a lot to do in one day, and it had taken much longer than that to unpack everything when Hopper first took her here…
But that wasn’t what Joyce meant, she realised. Sorting through everything in the cabin, feeling Hopper in all of it, that was the hard part. There were memories attached to all these little things, these little bits of home. Something she’d looked at closely while they unpacked all the boxes together, or something of his grandfather’s that Hopper told a story about, or just something she’d particularly noticed while they played Battleships or Scrabble or the Game of Life. There was that mug that Hopper had snatched out of the air when she knocked it off the counter, before she had time to use her powers to catch it, and she had to keep it, it was a piece of home…
And it only made her heart ache harder.
“We’ll have to just take what’s important and… come back for the rest.”
Important. El weighted that word carefully, and then made a decision. She grabbed a flashlight from the floor, pulled up the hatch, and jumped down.
“El?” Joyce said, alarmed, her voice muffled by the wooden boards between them. She didn’t respond; she was looking at the boxes, from label to label, until she found the one marked ‘Hawkins Lab’. She pushed it up into confused, receiving hands, and checked more labels. ‘New York’, ‘Vietnam’, ‘Dad’… She considered that one, but left it. These were all pieces of Hopper, but there was one in particular she was trying to find.
She pulled a threadbare blanket off the top of one stack of boxes, kicking up a thick layer of dust that made her cough. She waved it out of her face and found the box she was looking for. It was the only one that looked carefully looked after, and had a nice flower pattern instead of plain, ratty brown. Carefully, she lifted the box up to Joyce, and heard a sharp intake of breath when she read the name. ‘Sara’.
When she pulled herself out of the hatch and closed it, she looked at Joyce, sitting on the sofa with the Lab box stacked on top of the other. She said, “Important,” as she sat down next to her, and Joyce nodded.
“That everything, then, kiddo?” she asked, and she was smiling but there were tears clogging up her voice a little. Her mouth twitched, at the same time as Joyce winced. Kiddo. “Sorry,” she said. “I won’t call you that again. You’re not a little kid any more.”
No. She wasn’t.
You want to go out in the world? Then you better grow up! Grow the hell up!
“Joyce?” she said quietly.
“Yeah, honey?” she smiled softly, open. Hurting, she could see that in the tears that brimmed out of nowhere, but not turning a sharp edge to anyone.
“Can I… stay with you?”
Joyce stared at her for a moment, blinking, and a slight frown creased her forehead, her lips parted in an almost-word. El clenched her jaw, fearing she’d said something wrong—
“Of course,” she said, and El wasn’t all that good with deciphering tones of voice, but she sounded surprised. Surprised that she had to ask. She took El’s hands in hers, clasping them tightly like she had before the bath. Sincerity. Trust. Thankfulness. “Of course you can, El, sweetheart. I’d never send you away, not ever. You hear me? Not ever. You’re part of my family now.”
El smiled.
“Come on,” she said, squeezing her hands before releasing them. “Let’s get all of this into the car and get home.”
She nodded.
Home.
Family.
Families ate meals together, and watched movies together, and laughed together. This was what Eleven learned. She had done those things with Hopper, but she hadn’t had a name for that. Hopper was just Hopper, and she hadn’t known that dozing off in front of the TV was a family activity, but it sure seemed to be because Jonathan did it too, and then Will pelted bits of popcorn at him until he woke up with a start and glared. Will and Joyce laughed, and he suppressed his own smile before picking the popcorn off his clothes and the chair and stuffing them into his mouth.
The TV faded to black after the movie finished and Will dutifully wound the tape back before replacing it in its case. She and Will brushed their teeth side-by-side, and El watched themselves in the mirror, squinting at the refracted light that seemed to glint off the glass. Joyce tucked El into her blankets and reminded her to come and find her if she needed anything.
“Thank you,” she said.
Joyce smiled, and stroked her hair back out of her face. “You are so very welcome.” She pressed a kiss to her forehead, and then El did feel like a little kid; the little kid that Hopper read stories to before bedtime, and taught Morse code, and made Eggos for by the dozen.
Joyce said, “Goodnight,” and turned out the light.
When the house settled into sleeping silence, she closed her eyes and breathed until the buzz of the heating or the electronics in the house became the fuzzy hum of radio static. She rode white noise into the dark in-between place, and walked. She didn’t know what she was looking for, just looked into silence and darkness and walked on, ever further. There had to be something she was looking for, and it was like it was right there, smoke beneath her fingertips… If she could just stay focused, maybe she could find it.
The radio whined and purred, and she frowned, trying not to let the sudden change in noise distract her—
“El. El, are you there? I need your help, kid. El?”
She jolted awake, and fumbled for the radio that wasn’t there. It was back in the cabin, and she wasn’t in the cabin, she was at the Byers’ house, and this was her new home and why didn’t it feel like home? This was supposed to be home!
She sobbed and curled upright against the back cushions, wishing to fall back asleep so that she could hear Hopper’s voice again, but at the same time not. She didn’t want the ghost of his voice in her memories, she wanted him here, with her. Not gone. Never gone.
She saw movement and gasped, clutching the blankets close. Will was standing at the foot of the sofa, in his pyjamas. “Sorry,” he whispered, sounding sleepy, and she didn’t really need to ask how he’d known she’d woken up as he sat down at her feet. They were tied together, the two of them. Tangled up in invisible string. She could feel it.
After a few moments of sitting in silence in the dark, El stopped holding her breath for fear of crying, and let it burst out of her. “I want my dad,” she whimpered between sniffles.
“I know,” said Will wiggling backwards and teasing his way under the blankets so that he could sit beside her properly. His hand brushed down her wrist until he clasped his fingers around hers. His hands were warm; she’d noticed that before. Not like the Mind-Flayer. Not like at Castle Byers, where he’d evaporated into smoke. He was real, and human, and warm. “But don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll protect you, and you’ll protect me. We’re family now.”
“Family,” she wiped her nose and nodded. “Family protects each other.”
“Yeah,” he said, and he was smiling at her in the dark. “That’s right.”
And family means home.
Joyce found her youngest on the sofa that morning, as she got ready for work. They were leaning against each other, hands interlaced tightly together and sleeping soundly. She muttered thoughtfully to herself as she left the house, trying to remember where she had put the old camping mattress and hoping it hadn’t got damp or nibbled on. She’d ask Will and El if they’d like her to move into his bedroom tonight, she thought. There wouldn’t be a lot of room, but she had a feeling that wouldn’t be too much of a problem, at least for now.
She wished Hopper was here to see them. See them safe, and faintly smiling in their sleep. The sight might just give him the peace of mind to get a full night’s sleep of his own. At that, she felt a faint tug that she didn’t really understand, as if from her heart to someone else’s. She shivered in the warm morning air, got in her car, and drove to work.
El, El, El, El, El, he thought, because his throat was raw and scratchy from murmuring for hours with no water. Are you there? Find me, El, I need you, I need you, please find me.
And she wasn’t listening for him, why would she be listening for him? When she’d been hurt by the Mind-Flayer in the in-between place, and she was still recharging her batteries, and he was dead, for Pete’s sake, why would anyone be listening?
And maybe he’d try to guess when 7pm on Friday came around, or maybe it would pass him by unawares, or maybe he’d already been in a coma for a week before he woke up in this hellhole and the date had passed him by.
“Sorry, Joyce,” he mumbled, hoarse, as his stomach snarled at him like it was his fault the damn Russians hadn’t given him any food. “Didn’t mean t’ stand you up.” He huffed, more a shudder than a laugh. A few breaths. He was tired, so tired, and that didn’t make any sense because all he could do was sleep and send out prayers that his little girl-turned-teenager might, if he was lucky, astronomically lucky, hear.
Wish you were here, Joyce, he thought, feeling a compass-needle inside his chest swing round to her, to the direction he needed to be moving; and that didn’t make sense either, because of course he didn’t feel that, that was absurd, and of course he didn’t wish she was here, that would be awful, but he was starting to lose faith that anything made sense in this screwed up world he lived in, anyway. So what was one nonsensical brain in the mix?
He knew she was looking after El. Truth be told she should probably have been doing it to begin with, she was way better at this parenting shit than he was. But he was responsible for that kid as long as he was breathing, and that meant he needed to get home. Stat.
I can hold out for you, kiddo, he told El in his mind. I’m gonna get back to you. I just need you to listen.