Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

El was exhausted as she stumbled up the grass towards Mike’s house. There were all sorts of cars and bad men going in and out of the front but she was just so tired. She just needed to see Mike. Make sure he was okay. The house was lit up from within, spilling light out onto the lawn where she stood, looking through the curtains. There was a moment when she could see him, he had looked at her, and then there was yelling and doors slamming and she was running. Running again. Stumbling over her own feet, numb with cold and into the woods.

She was just so tired. So tired and so afraid.

When her toe caught on a log she fell, and the world went fuzzy. Dimly she realised the shouting was getting closer, the flashlights, but she was just so tired. When they caught her, she barely felt it, and then there was a needle in her neck and she didn’t feel anything at all.

…

Flo was just getting ready to turn in for the night when she noticed the lights out at the end of her yard. There were people with flashlights in the woods, just beyond her fence. Lots of people if the lights were anything to go by. She left her water bottle on the counter to peer further out of the window. Henry and Dale were still missing, but she’d have heard if there were supposed to be any search parties out tonight, it had all gotten overlooked in the search for little Will Byers anyway. Tragic how that had turned out.

She looked again out at the lights, she was off duty till eight tomorrow, but still, if something else had happened. She toed on her slippers with a huff and wrapped her cardigan more firmly around herself and stepped out into the yard. They were men’s voices, not just kids, there was the chatter of radios, terse professional language – more professional than the oversized children she worked with anyway. The dew was soaking into her slippers, it was too cold to be out this late.

“Hello? Who’s there?” She wished she had thought to bring her flashlight from on top of the microwave, the porch light didn’t really reach this far and all she could see was brief flashes of foreign torchlight. Then there was a light shining right in her eyes.

“Ma’am we need you to return to your house.”

Blinded she gestured irately, “get that light out of my face young man, I can’t see a thing.”

“Ma’am…” but the light was travelling down and as the fuzziness faded from her vision she could see a rather straight-laced looking type in a neat suit. Not the type to be strolling through the woods in the dark. “Please return to your home.”

“I’m on my property right now, is something going on.”

“Ma’am this is official business and we are asking that you return indoors.”

Fair enough, but she hadn’t been a police dispatcher this long without earning herself a thick skin where badge wavers were concerned. Not that this man was bothering with anything so official. “And what official business would that be? Police? Hmm?”

He fell for it, hook line and sinker.

“Yes, and I need to insist you return…”

“Because I work for Hawkins PD and I know for a fact that this isn’t a police operation so I suggest you…” There was suddenly several more men, and one of them had a body in their arms, a child with a shaved head, hanging limply. But the man who had been talking to her was seizing her by the shoulders and bodily pushing her back up her yard and away.

“Now look here…” She said hotly.

“This is a government operation and as federal agents we have jurisdiction in this matter…”

…

Jim knew it was a bad sign when the asshole standing over him with a fistful of paperwork had to leave the room to take a message on his radio. The government had swarmed the hospital not long after he and Joyce had reached it and it had been a fight to talk his way back to the truck to check on the kids. Most of the kids. He’d gotten the call from Sal, the night responder, to let him know that paramedics and ambulances had picked up the Wheeler, Sinclair and Henderson kid at the middle school and that their parents had been called. Nancy Wheeler and Jonathan Byers had been a little harder to locate and he’d only been a few minutes in front of the suits arriving at Joyce’s place to find them, plus a confused looking kid he only knew from breaking up parties, standing on Joyce’s porch debating what to do next. He’d at least managed to send the random kid home before the suits arrived – the fewer people involved in this thing the better. Especially because he had got the impression people were going to be holding him responsible for helping keep all this quiet. Of course, at this point his minders had arrived and they were all shepherded away while a bunch of hazmat suits swarmed the house. He’d argued they could debrief him, or whatever, at the hospital and headed back with Jonathan to give Joyce a little moral support and keep an eye on the doctor’s treating Will. No one had mentioned the other kid. The little girl was gone.

Between all the bodies Sal had reported being pulled out of the middle school and the helicopters he could hear flying overhead Jim had figured there were even odds that the girl was still alive and free, but the satisfied expression on the agent’s face as he came back into the room suggested maybe that wasn’t the case anymore.

He’d made his choice. Traded a live kid for one that he’d only had a slim chance of bringing home alive. Traded a kid he would never have been allowed to give a home for one that would have one if Joyce Byers had to tear down the lab with her bare hands. Gambled on the probability of that Wheeler kid and his little friends ignoring him again and leaving the place he’d ordered them to stay and on a little girl winning a fight with a bunch of trained adults with guns.

William Byers was alive.

“The kid, your little science experiment. She okay? You guys pick her up?”

The suit just gave him a cold little smile. “That’s none of your concern anymore, Mr Hopper.”

Chapter Text

School on Monday was… tense. Will was still in hospital but when Lucas arrived at school Dustin and Mike were waiting. Lucas got the uneasy feeling at least half the students streaming past the bike racks were looking at them, and it was clear that rumours of Will’s reappearance had made it into the schoolyard. Kinda made him wonder what the rest of them were talking about that wasn’t making them stare.

“Am I the only one getting the feeling they’re not just talking about Will?” He asked, jerking his shoulder to gesture at Chrissy Carpenter and Charlotte Higgins as they walked past in deep discussion.

Mike scowled, “what else is there to talk about? They don’t know about…” he trailed off.

Dustin gave Lucas a meaningful glance.

“Dude, what?” He asked.

Dustin grimaced before coughing and saying, “uh, that is, maybe El…”

“No,” said Mike, “they’re not talking about El.”

“We don’t know that,” reasoned Lucas, “it’s uh, maybe she made it out. You said you thought you saw her right?”

“No” said Mike, “look.”

They had been walking inside as they talked, and it was clear from their new vantage point that Hawkins Middle had undergone some changes since Saturday.

“The blood,” Lucas realised.

The school was full of men dressed as decorators, lugging ladders around, and several men with overalls printed with Hawkin’s light and energy who were talking to a serious looking Principal. Before they could look over Lucas grabbed Dustin by the sleeve and pulled him back, letting Mike take the lead as they rushed towards Mr Clarke’s science room.

There was wet paint everywhere and certain sections of the floor had been taped off. A barrier had been erected over the classroom door and Lucas could see yet another man in overalls inspecting a light-fitting in the room before he felt a hand on his shoulder and Mr Clarke was pulling them back with a ‘Woah there boys, where are you going in such a hurry?’

He could see Mike giving him a frantic glance when Dustin stepped forward, smile already in place on his face.

“We, uh, wanted to come and tell you about Will. They found him in the woods after all!”

Mr Clarke smiled, “yes I heard about that, remarkable that Will managed to survive in the woods like that and I’m sure you are all very glad to have your friend back.”

Dustin nodded sincerely. “Yeah, we were just excited.”

“What’s going on in your classroom?” Mike interrupted, “there are men everywhere.”

“Ah yes,” said Mr Clarke. “I’m afraid I’ve been temporarily evicted. Our lesson today will have to be conducted in geography. Seems there was some kind of electrical fault over the weekend and until the State is convinced this part of the building is safe there will be a few people around inspecting all our appliances.”

“An electrical fault”, repeated Mike, disbelief on his face.

“That’s how they’re explaining all the ambulances?” Lucas muttered, mostly to himself. Dustin elbowed him when Mr Clarke looked a bit intrigued.

“Ambulances? How did you boys here about that?”

“Uh” said Lucas, suddenly remembering the not particularly veiled threats of the men who had watched over him as his parents signed all that paperwork. Thankfully Mr Clarke continued on without waiting for him to formulate an excuse.

“It seems when they were doing the testing, the fault was discovered by someone who hadn’t bothered to properly turn off the electricity to the socket. Let that be a lesson to you kids about always checking something is off before you start experimenting with it. And uh, not to do anything like that without adult supervision of course.” He seemed to misinterpret the loaded look Dustin was levelling at Lucas and Mike and carried on. “Don’t you worry kids, nobody died, there was just some fire damage. Now, I believe you should be heading to first period?”

“Uh, thanks Sir” said Lucas already steering the rest of the party away. “We’ll get there right away.”

The ‘electrical fault’ wasn’t the only gossip going around. Troy’s broken arm had hit the rumour mill even though he wasn’t in first period – speculation ranged from slipping on his own piss-soaked trousers to a beat-down from Jonathan Byers after hearing him insult Will.

“I’m telling you, my mom said that her friend Cathy whose nephew is a cop said Will’s older brother was arrested for trying to kill someone who insulted Will…” Lucas overheard Jack Lawrence telling an apparently engrossed crowd of kids at break. Lucas felt anger deep in his chest.

“I can’t believe this”, he said, “everyone’s got all these stupid theories and we can’t even say anything. Jonathan would be in jail if he tried to kill someone our age! It’s all bullshit.”

Mike kicked at a clump of dirt, “Troy didn’t get in trouble for trying to hurt us”, he said gloomily.

“Yeah, but El kicked his ass!” said Dustin. “It was totally awesome.”

“I still can’t believe I missed that”, Lucas complained. “Do you think…?” He trailed off looking at Mike. There was a determined glint in his eyes.

“It’s not over.” Mike said. “I saw El, I know I did.”

…

It was odd going back to school on Monday. The weekend had been, well… a lot. Nancy almost couldn’t believe school could just go ahead like that after everything that had happened. Studying for Mr Brookes’ English pop quiz just seemed ridiculous after fighting a monster, after seeing helicopters searching for her brother, after hearing a kid Mike’s age screaming about how Barb was gone. The seat across from her was still empty and it was only just beginning to sink in that it was going to stay empty. In the chaos of all the government agents it had slipped her by that, despite everything, the official story hadn’t changed from Barb running away. Barb was dead, and nobody knew.

Nobody had gotten to bed until very late Saturday, the men in suits had hung around for ages, searching through their stuff and no doubt planting bugs everywhere. Eventually even her dad had conceded defeat on waiting for them to leave and had driven them all to the hospital to wait for news on Will. Mike had seemed a bit twitchy about leaving the house behind, which was weird, but Nancy couldn’t exactly ask him about it with so many listening ears.

She’d sat next to Jonathan in the hospital, neither of them talking but making occasional eye contact with Steve, who had reappeared with an ice pack in one hand and sat next to her dad. He had looked a bit nervous and like he wasn’t exactly sure what he was doing there, but had been waiting there quietly and doing a valiant job of ignoring her mom’s occasional pointed or curious stares. He should probably thank his lucky stars nobody had told her dad who he was, Nancy got the impression he wasn’t in a mood to talk football with her dad anymore than the rest of them. After a while Jonathan had been allowed in to see his brother and came back actually grinning with the news he was awake. Eventually the Sinclairs had dragged Lucas home to go to bed and their little grim party had started to break up.

Nancy saw Steve slink away and darted off after him, after checking her mom’s attention was otherwise engaged. She caught up with him in the carpark, where he was having another go at earnestly apologising to a silent Jonathan.

“I just, look I should never have said any of that stuff and… and it wasn’t true and I’m just sorry man…” Steve trailed off looking a little lost.

Jonathan just gave him a little nod. “Alright.”

Steve’s eyes were searching Jonathan’s face a little franticly, but Jonathan was giving nothing away. After a pause he slumped his shoulders in defeat. “Alright”, he repeated Jonathan.

“I’ve got to get something from my car” Jonathan muttered, disappearing round the corner, ignoring the hand that fluttered out, without Nancy’s permission, like it was going to settle on his arm. Which left just her and a very awkward looking Steve.

“I need to apologise to you too,” Steve said.

Nancy glanced back towards the main building where her family were waiting. “Yeah you do,” she said, “but not now, my parents will be looking for me.”

As she turned to leave she heard him mutter, “And if you could explain what the fuck was happening at any point…” It made her smile a little bit, despite herself, but her mom had appeared, looking equal parts scared and furious and Nancy found herself walking away.

“Later,” she said, by way of goodbye.

Sunday had dawned early and then seemed to hang around for approximately twelve years. Nancy’s mom had banned any of them from leaving the house, unfortunately preventing any of them from seeing any of the others, and Mike had barricaded himself into the basement. This left Nancy floating round the house aimlessly. She supposed she could try talking to her parents about what had happened, they hadn’t been explicitly banned from doing that, but the government agents had essentially guaranteed they would never believe her when they had explained the ‘truth’ to them. Her dad might have signed all those secrecy contracts on her behalf, but she had still been sternly warned not to ‘worry’ either of them by some agent who clearly thought they were being clever. Not that she’d have told her dad if she was going to tell anyone. It wasn’t like either of them would ever have believed in a monster anyway. You didn’t get monsters in suburban Indiana and besides, a portal to hell would have brought the house prices down. Instead, she’d spent the afternoon lying on her bed with the door closed to keep Holly out, wishing she could call Jonathan or Steve to talk about it, but knowing that their phone calls were being monitored.

None of it felt real.

And now here she was sat in first period English and wishing for some sign, any sign, that she hadn’t just imagined the whole thing. Any sign but the empty seat beside her.

By recess, the school was abuzz with the news of Will Byers’ reappearance, which oddly enough coincided with the second sign of change – a tired looking Steve waiting by her locker. She supposed the black eyes were giving him an advantage on looking so exhausted, her own dark circles paled in comparison.

“Hey” she said.

“Good weekend?” Steve deadpanned, lip quirking in a pale imitation of his usual smile.

“I think that’s classified,” Nancy replied. This made him snort and then wince as it aggravated one of his many scabs. He looked… scared. Like she’d felt after the woods. The absence of Barb next to her suddenly felt unbearable. “Look, do you want to skip third?” Nancy asked. He looked so relieved she felt guilty for a moment.

“We can go out to my car, I had study hall anyway.”

Chapter Text

There was an office. It was fairly unremarkable looking, decorated in the usual neutral beige tones, with an executive office chair and a few pieces of art work that seemed to have been selected exclusively for its express quality of inspiring no emotions at all in any viewer. In fact, the whole place was remarkable for only two qualities: for its size, which indicated that the owner was fairly important; and for the complete lack of personal effects, down to the picture of a landscape sat on the desk, positioned so that anyone sat across from the occupant would assume it was a picture of the office’s owner’s family. The man sat in the office chair was not much more memorable, possessing the same haircut and height and weight as a very large proportion of those men employed by the government in similar functions. He had a name, but given the frequency with which it was redacted from official documents, it often seemed rather beside the point.

Across from him were sat another two men, one scowling, the other smiling. The smiling one had just finished recounting a brief summary of the events in Hawkins and now they were all waiting for the owner of the office to say something. The long silence was clearly making the grimacing man uncomfortable, and was likely being leveraged for exactly that purpose, but the other man fancied himself a little more experienced at this sort of thing and didn’t allow himself to fidget.

Eventually the man behind the desk spoke, “Brenner has allowed the entire situation to spiral out of control.”

This did make the smiling man falter, “I think the security concerns rather pale in comparison to the significance of his discoveries.”

The other man raised one eyebrow, “At least five households exposed to subject Eleven; maybe half a dozen dead civilians by your own count; numerous losses amongst our own personnel; a creature that was destroyed before we could learn anything about it; and a mysterious hole spewing toxins into a very expensive installation. And to top it all off, thanks to a deal made by your absent boss, Cooper, the boy that was recovered is not even being monitored in one of our own facilities.”

The grimacing man interjected on Cooper’s behalf here. “The boy might be in a local hospital but we replaced his doctors and most of his nurses with our own staff, the kid can’t take a shit without us knowing about it and taking a sample.”

“And if we need to complete additional testing on him? If he only starts showing symptoms after he’s discharged? Do you think, Dr Hollt, that his mother will be happily bringing him in to the people who somehow managed to fuck up a perfectly standard cover-up?”

“We had no way of knowing that he would be able to make contact with his mother.” Cooper interjected hotly. “The situation escalated beyond anything we could have planned for.”

“Exactly,” said the man in charge. “Martin planned poorly and risked not only the new discoveries but the viability of the remaining child subject. This project needs new leadership. I’m asking Sam Owens to come over from project SCANATE and take control.”

“That joke of a project over at Fort Meade! Everyone knows it’s been a total washout! Dr Brenner’s methods surpassed anything that project produced years ago” exploded Cooper.

The nameless man fixed Cooper with a disappointed look, “Not all of our operations are run to such public collapse as project STARFIRE just did. Sam’s ability to keep their results under wraps are rather more of an advantage by my calculation. Maybe he can win back the trust Martin so spectacularly lost.”

“What about subject Eleven?” Asked a still frowning Hollt, “Dr Brenner kept her under strict behavioural conditioning, take him off the case and we don’t have any way to control her.”

“It’s irrelevant at this point. Martin is in no condition to manage the girl anymore and she’s been exposed to the world now. His procedures have already failed. We’ll have to take a new approach.”

…

Hopper had most of his Sunday listening to the suit from the hospital explain to him in smug tones exactly what bullshit coverup he would be expected to help spread, interspersed with frantic calls from Sal and Flo asking for explanations about the large numbers of ambulances and government suits respectively. The temptation to deck the suit right in the middle of his condescending face had only increased when Flo had explained that she had seen them bringing a child out of the woods. It had taken all of his self-control, and a vision of Joyce’s frantic attempts to wake her son, to grit out the official line.

“Look, yeah that was the FBI. Staties found the Byers kid up Brookhaven way in a sinkhole. You must have seen them bringing him back into town. Yeah, I’m sure. Yeah, the kid they found in the quarry looks to have been misidentified, some other kid from a different case they’re running. They’re sending someone down to exhume the corpse Monday, it’ll go upstate so they can try and identify the poor kid elsewhere.”

Flo didn’t exactly sound convinced. He was no expert but this cover-up didn’t exactly feel bulletproof. So long as William Byer’s health hung in the balance though it didn’t matter. He and Joyce were both being held hostage to the promises he’d made. The reporter from the Hawkin’s Post had swallowed the story whole and by the time it went out next Sunday the whole town would know that Will Byers had gotten lost in the woods.

Meanwhile, he would be reassuring Principal Coleman that regardless of whether the missing road salt was tracked down or not, he’d make sure State sent some over by the time the cold snap was due next weekend and sending Powell to reassure Barbara Holland’s parents that the police were doing everything possible to locate their child. Which brought him to his current mission, trying very hard to keep his temper behind his teeth as the same smug suit from the hospital condescendingly explained for the fifth time exactly why they couldn’t come up with some better bullshit to tell Marsha and Pete Holland about why they wouldn’t be seeing their daughter again.

“You are a police officer, Mr Hopper, I’m sure you are aware of how many children go missing every day in this country, and how many are never found. The Holland’s situation is one that many parents must cope with, and telling them such a patently untrue story would only cause unnecessary emotional harm.”

“EMOTIONAL HARM. EMOTIONAL HARM.” It was hard to lower his voice, aware that he could be heard in the bullpen. “Its not an untrue story, it’s the truth. Those people aren’t suffering any emotional harm you lot didn’t dish out, and I’m sure they rather knOW EXACTLY WHO’S RESPONSIBLE FOR THAT GIRL’S DEATH.”

Having failed to keep his temper under control, he could now hear Flo knocking on the door concerned, but didn’t let that stop him from grabbing the bastard by his shirt collar.

“You are going to tell them that girl is dead, Agent Cooper, and then you are going to offer them whatever bullshit compensation…”

“The US government will be doing no such thing,” Cooper interrupted, finally not smiling, “you made a deal with us, and if you break it, we will have no qualms about managing the situation ourselves. Managing the situation and removing the remaining loose ends. I thought you wanted to protect Will Byers?”

Unbidden, a vision of that little girl, limp in Joyce’s arms, head shaven and blood streaming from her nose flashed to the front of Jim’s mind and he had to fight not to throttle the man. When he released him, the suit smiled again, interpreting the conflict on his face as defeat.

“I thought not,” Cooper said. “Manage the Holland case like any other missing person. That’s just what she is after all. Children go missing all the time.”

Chapter Text

When Joyce saw that someone had cut Will’s hair, she nearly screamed. If she’d caught them doing it, she certainly would have punched someone.

Instead, she reached a shaky hand out and ran it over the stubble where Will’s hair had been.

‘Mom?’ he asked sleepily.

She’d only stepped out to get some fucking cigarettes and a change of clothes.

‘Oh baby’, she said, trying very hard to keep all of the rage and fear behind her teeth, ‘what happened to your hair?’

She’d spent two days solid by the side of his bed. Almost too scared to sleep in case he disappeared once she was no longer watching him. She wouldn’t have left him alone, but she’d banned Jonathan from sleeping at the hospital after that first night and then Will, trying his first solid food since the rescue, had vomited on her, and she’d realised how desperately she needed a change of clothes. It had been maybe 40 minutes?

God, he looked like that little girl who’d helped her find him.

‘The doctors said I might have some parasites. The nurse shaved it off.’

He looked so much like that little girl.

‘Mom?’ Joyce forced herself to relax her shoulders a bit, smile. Will looked worried, almost like – ‘you don’t think I look… weird without it?’

Joyce almost sobbed at that. ‘No baby’, she settled for, stroking what remained of his hair again. ‘Of course not.’

Will didn’t look convinced, but he gave her a watery smile and squeezed her hand softly.

Joyce waited until Jonathan arrived before leaving Will again, even though part of her had wanted nothing more than to march right up to whoever was responsible and scream at them right then. She wouldn’t leave him alone here again. What with the monster and the upside down, she’d almost forgotten about Terry Ives and her lost daughter. Well, they wouldn’t touch her son. Not again.

She’d just been working herself up to a good yell, when Hopper arrived in a cloud of cold air. He took one long look at the tableau, Joyce, aware there was still vomit on her sleeve, and some smug, know-it-all doctor trying to fob her off with the parasites excuse, and grabbed the doctor by the collar. ‘Alright.’ Hopper rumbled dangerously, ‘anyone going to tell me what’s going on here.’

She cut the doctor off before he could try to speak. ‘They shaved off all of Will’s hair. Waited till I was gone and just…’ Distantly, she was aware she was hyperventilating, but it felt like all the panic and fear from the last week had come crashing back around her and suddenly everything else seemed very far away from her need to check on Will.

Hopper let out a breath like he’d been punched, though he didn’t release the doctor. ‘Flo saw them,’ he said.

‘What?’

Hopper could clearly see she hadn’t quite followed that. She sort of got the impression he hadn’t meant to say it aloud. He glanced over at the doctor and released his hold on the man’s shirt. ‘Get out of here’, Hopper said to him. Hopper then grabbed her by the arm and started marching her back towards Will’s room.

‘Hop? What?’

‘The little girl, Eleven or whatever her name was,’ he was talking in an undertone, watching each door as they went by. ‘Flo saw the feds bring her out of the woods. They’re claiming it was Will.’

This made Joyce’s heart clench, ‘but what does that have to do with?’

‘The girl had a shaved head. They need Will to look the same so they can pass him off as her. They’re covering their tracks.’ They were at Will’s door now. Hopper looked across at her. ‘Hey, it’s going to be okay,’ he said. ‘Don’t leave Will alone with anyone you don’t trust. I’ll come and sit with him if you need, just be careful.’ And then he was opening the door and Joyce was smiling for Will. She had to be strong for Will.

…

That night, Mike took the walkie talkie into the basement after dinner. It wasn’t the same. The bad men had removed the blanket fort and half of his stuff. They’d brought most of it back after the showdown at school, but it was all still piled in the corner.

He’d spent Sunday reconstructing the blanket fort, but he just couldn’t get it quite right. No matter what he did, it never looked exactly as it had before. It didn’t help that his mom had washed some of the blankets before he could get them.

It would have to be close enough. He crawled inside with the walkie talkie.

‘El?’ He said. ‘El, do you copy me? Its Mike…’

…

When the doorbell rang, Jonathan’s first thought was that it was the monster. It was a stupid thought, but he couldn’t help it.

It was Tuesday afternoon, and he had all of the lights on. It was pointless and expensive – the sun was up after all – but the thought of turning them off and not knowing made him want to throw-up. He would turn them off though. The monster was dead. It wasn’t coming back. And that meant that by the time his mom came home with Will tomorrow he would turn off all the lights they didn’t need.

But first he would have one last night with all the lights on and his lighter in his hand as he slept.

After the first night sat up holding Will’s hand his mom had sent him home to get some ‘real’ sleep. He’d tried to talk her out of it, at least persuade her they could take turns watching over Will, but she had that guilty look in her eyes that said she wasn’t going to let him take that last responsibility.

Of course, that look had tripled in intensity when she had realised where she was sending him to their house alone, but he had told her that the monster was dead and that he would be fine, and he would.

It was probably his mom at the door anyway. Hopper was coming over to the hospital to watch Will for a few hours that evening so they could fix up the house a bit ready for when he came home. She probably just forgot her keys.

It wasn’t his mom. It was Nancy.

‘Hi!’ she said brightly, face determinedly cheerful as Jonathan cast about for a response.

‘Uh, hey Nancy… is everything…?’

‘I brought a casserole,’ Nancy ploughed on, ‘my mom made it for you. She thought you might not have had much time to eat anything.’ She paused a second, where Jonathan figured he was probably supposed to be expressing something politely appropriate about the casserole, but continued before he felt forced to try ‘and also I thought I should probably give you this back.’

Nancy reached into her bag and pulled out his dad’s revolver. Her smile was sheepish, ‘it’s probably best my parents don’t find out I have this.’

That nearly did make him laugh, the thought of her perfectly conventional parents finding a gun in their perfect little daughter’s perfectly organised sock drawer. Forget Mike and the Russian spy, that would really blow their minds.

‘Uh sure,’ he said, ‘do you want to come in?’

Chapter Text

It was Tuesday morning when an unusually thick dossier made its way to Sam’s desk. About four pages in he was calling his secretary to book him a flight. It was mid-afternoon when he made it to Hawkins laboratory, having finished all the files he had been provided with. There were several more on his new desk. Those files he read with half a bottle of whisky he had purchased at the airport. Then he broke his pen, swore, and made a mental note to purchase a stress ball or something similar.

Then he went to see the little girl. Subject 011. Jesus.

She looked very small in the hospital bed. After reading the file, something in it had made him expect someone bigger, a little more deadly looking. With the shaved head and the bruises under her eyes the kid looked more like a cancer patient than a weapon. And she was a weapon. Brenner had made sure of that.

She was hooked up to a drip and under sedation. With Brenner out of commission nobody had been brave enough to wake her up. He could understand the concern. Eight of the bodies they had pulled out of the school had been agents whose brains had literally been reduced to mush, with no other marks of violence. It was enough to give anyone the heebie jeebies.

Still didn’t help him with what to do next though.

The hole in reality in the basement was a whole other problem. Nobody even understood quite what caused it. Certainly, the little girl sleeping upstairs had been the tool, but he didn’t think that the police chief’s reports of a strange ruined Hawkins should automatically be traced back to a child who had never seen the town before the portal was created. There were too many variables to draw any conclusions yet.

And wasn’t the police chief himself another dangerous variable, he had a bunch of reports he hadn’t even read yet on that man and the other people swept up in this. Files on Vietnam and psychological assessments on the potential impact of James Hopper’s dead kid; reams of data on Joyce Byer’s short stints on Prozac and a visit to the hospital with a fractured wrist; detailed analysis of the Wheeler family’s political and personal beliefs; and even what looked to be a telephone transcript for someone called Scott Clarke he had yet to link into this whole mess yet.

He finished the bottle of whisky that evening, pacing his hotel room with a file in hand. He’d been in the business a while, seen some things he probably wouldn’t have wanted to. Ordered a few things done he wasn’t so proud of. But this… he wasn’t even sure what he was being asked to do. Clear up the mess, study it, or weaponize it. In his business it was rarely a case of picking one.

…

On Thursday morning, Will was allowed to go home. He’d been scheduled to go the day before, but he hadn’t stopped coughing yet, and the doctors had been worried about whether the poisonous air had done some permanent damage to his lungs. His mom had gone all quiet and angry when they told her, and Will worried that he was being too expensive, but she had seen him looking and smiled and squeezed his hand and changed the topic.

He asked Jonathan later, while his mom was in the corridor arguing quietly with the doctor.

“No”, said Jonathan, “no its not that.” He stopped for a second, and Will watched him calculate how much to protect him from whatever was going on. “She’s just.. worried.” Jonathan settled on. “The doctors, well they wanted to do some tests that you didn’t need, because they are curious about the place you got stuck in.”

“How did you know?” Will asked.

“It’s… mom hasn’t explained that much, but I think one of the nurses brought it up with her. She just doesn’t want them messing around with stuff that could keep you here for ages when you could get better much quicker at home.”

Will thought about this. “You just don’t want to have to keep eating my horrible green jello for me!” he accused Jonathan.

“You caught me buddy. It’s just so bad.”

Mom and Jonathan brought him home in a wheelchair. He didn’t really need it, but he still got tired easily. Will decided he was glad that he’d had to stay that extra night in hospital because that meant that it wasn’t dark yet. In the dark he thought the house might have looked too much like it did when he was stuck in the other-Hawkins. It was almost strange seeing it in the daylight, like at the end of the movie when the theatre turns the lights on and it’s just a room with scuff marks and peeling paint and popcorn on the floor.

Everything was, well not fresh, but clean and not covered in weird vines. Instead of decay, he could smell wet paint and Buster and an undercurrent of smoke. It was nice.

Will realised he had been staring a bit too long when his mom’s face was suddenly right next to his, hand reaching up to where his hair used to be. “Are you okay honey? Do you want to lie down?”

He shook his head. “No I just…” he trailed off as he got out of the chair a tiny bit shakily. He had hidden in that wall cupboard for a couple of days. He’d built a sort of nest of the least disgusting material he could find, the curtains from opposite the couch, a bedspread from the back of the airing cupboard. He’d scratched his name in the wood there with a nail he’d pulled from the rot.

When Will pulled the door open, a huge knot of Christmas lights came spilling out onto the rug. “Oh that’s just full of junk” his mom said from somewhere behind him, but Will was already pulling them out, digging for the back of the cupboard. There was nothing there, just dusty floorboards. Something had splintered the board where he’d carved his name hiding from the monster. It was just a cupboard again.

“You alright buddy?” Jonathan asked.

“Yeah”, Will replied. “Just checking.”

That night, Will dreamt of a seed, deep down in the darkness. As he watched it cracked under the pressure of a strange inner light and unfurled, sending questing tendrils into the earth around it. Then a banging sound came from Jonathan’s room and Will turned in his sleep and he was dreaming of that afternoon instead. His friends had come round after school finished to welcome him home. For some reason dream Dustin had a beard and kept trying to persuade them to play tennis instead of DnD and dream Mike was wearing his costume from the previous year’s Halloween, but otherwise it was just like the afternoon had been. When he woke up the next morning, he had forgotten the first dream.

…

It was Friday afternoon and Joyce was sat in the carpark outside the hospital, smoking a cigarette and steeling herself to go in. The hospital had given her the bill yesterday and it sat on the front seat taking up much more space than a single sheet of paper ought to. She took a deep breathe, flicked her cigarette away, picked up the envelope, and headed in.

It took a while to get the receptionist’s attention but eventually she was able to get directions to her appointment with hospital administration, to talk about setting up a payment plan. The directions were a bit odd, sending her past what looked like the main office, down a corridor to an office marked Dr Stevens. Before she could wonder too much, it opened, and there was a man standing there.

“You must be Joyce Byers”, he said smiling. “Come in, come in.”

Joyce let herself be ushered into the office, which was very clearly a consulting room and not an office at all. The man saw her looking and smiled apologetically. “Yeah sorry about the room, it’s the best I could do on short notice.” He offered her his hand, “I’m Dr Sam Owens by the way – I work with Hawkins laboratory.”

Joyce froze, her heart in her throat. She’d suspected the hospital was reporting to the government, but she hadn’t expected anyone to announce it. Had they done something wrong? Was this how she found out the government had changed their mind about letting Will go?

“What’s this about?” Joyce asked. She didn’t shake his hand.

“Nothing bad don’t worry”, Dr Owens said, retracting his hand without comment. He gestured her towards a chair and sat himself at the desk. “Well, nothing additionally bad I suppose. It probably wouldn’t be right to say nothing bad at all has happened, but this isn’t a conversation you need to worry about, I just wanted to have a chat and make sure we are all on the same page.”

Joyce didn’t sit down. “I haven’t told anyone about what happened if that’s what you are worrying about.”

“And its much appreciated.” He was smiling too much; Joyce didn’t like it. “No, this chat is more for my benefit than anything else really. You see I only just got here – reassigned on Tuesday actually – and I’ll be taking over management of the situation. I know the old management well… made some mistakes is putting it lightly, but things are going to change and I thought you’d appreciate knowing what was going on.”

Joyce sat down in the chair at that and snorted, “oh so you are here to tell me that I can trust you and you are nothing like Brenner?”

“Sounds a little insincere I know, but hopefully I’ll be able to prove it eventually.”

“Prove it,” Joyce said in a flat tone that she hoped conveyed the depth of her disbelief. The phrase ‘when hell freezes over’ came to mind.

Dr Owens smiled ruefully, twiddling a pen he’s picked up from the desk absentmindedly. “Yes, well, it’s not how I would have wanted to introduce the topic, but I didn’t lie about the meeting subject. This really was just to let you know the United States government will be covering the cost of your son’s hospital treatment, I’ve had a chat with reception and you can consider that bill paid. In the circumstances the Department of Energy will also be reimbursing you for funeral costs, given that they turned out to be unnecessary.”

“You sent us that fake… thing… to try and convince me my son was dead!” Joyce seethed.

“I know its unpleasant. But you should know, the people who made those decisions are gone. Dr Brenner had his unfortunate meeting with the – I think you called it the Demogorgon? – and while I can’t erase the damage caused by their decisions, we are all going to have to move forward.”

“And what is all this generosity from the Department of Energy going to cost me huh?” asked Joyce, spitting out the word generosity like a curse. “I suppose you want to do more tests on Will, turn him into another of your little experiments?”

Dr Owens put the pen back down and gestured widely with his hands, as if to demonstrate there was nothing in them. “No, while I would recommend you bring your son to his check-up here next week to keep an eye on his lungs, we won’t be bothering him. He is in fact remarkably healthy for what he went through, which is a testament to his luck and a good nose for survival I reckon.”

That, Joyce couldn’t believe. “You don’t want to run any tests on Will. You really…. Do you expect me to believe that?”

“As far as anyone can tell, your son is on his way back to health and while that’s the case any further tests would be unnecessary. Really, I think we all want the same thing here.”

“The same thing huh?”

“Misguidedly as we may have gone about it, the government has a duty to protect its citizens. As his mother, I’m sure you know better than anyone what Will needs right now. But I’ll give you my card, and if anything happens that you think merits more than a visit to your local doctor, I’d be happy to check it out.”

Dr Owens reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a business card, very plain looking, with his name and a whole bunch of important looking initials after it and tried to hand it to her. Joyce accepted on autopilot, mind whirring.

“I suppose that’s everything then”, Dr Owens said, wearing the smile he’d met her with. “Unless you have any questions you’d like to ask me?”

It seemed like a bad idea, but Joyce’s mouth was open before she could stop it, “and the little girl. Eleven? Is the government experimenting on her?”

The doctor’s smile suddenly looked very forced. “She’s… well I’m afraid the confrontation with the creature left her very sick. Our priority for the moment is making sure she recovers. After that, well, we’ll see.”

Joyce wanted to challenge that statement, but she was also getting the impression she’d pushed her luck enough, and after a brief pause Dr Owens was saying goodbye and leaving the room.

The front desk confirmed Will’s medical treatments had been paid in full. Which left Joyce with nothing to do but go home, repeatedly running over the encounter in her mind. It was definitely too good to be true – the same plea for trust that Brenner had made to her in that interrogation room – but she couldn’t quite work out the angle. She needed to talk to Hopper about it, he was the only other adult who would even begin to know what she was talking about. The only adult she could even legally talk to.

When she pulled into the drive, Jonathan was playing some rock song of his at earsplitting volume. She could hear him half-shouting over it to Will. They both looked up when she came in, Will lying on the sofa with a blanket and a bowl of ice-cream, Jonathan sprawled across the floor with his own bowl finished on the table.

“Everything okay mom?” Jonathan asked, a little too casually.

“Of course,” said Joyce, smiling. “Try not to give yourselves stomach aches with all that ice-cream.” And then she went and put dinner on and tried not to think too hard about when the other shoe would drop.

Chapter Text

El opened her eyes. She was lying on her back, staring up at a ceiling. It was a ceiling she knew well. She was in her room in the lab, lying in her bed. Only it wasn’t really her bed. It was their bed. Just like it was their room.

It took her a moment to realise something was wrong. The light was off in her room, as it often was, but it wasn’t dark either. There was something throwing light on the ceiling, a bit like but not at all like the lamp Mike left on for her in the basement. As she sat up to look, she became aware of the second odd thing. She was not wearing the dress anymore. This was not surprising, although she mourned its loss. But she was not wearing a hospital gown either.

Instead, there was a pair of pants made of some soft fabric and a long-sleeved top that matched. In the half-light she thought they might be the same colour as her dress had been. She had seen similar clothes in Mike’s house scrunched up at the end of his bed; the room that had belonged to his little sister had a whole drawer of them.

The rest of her room had not changed. The little bed, the picture she had drawn, her lion, even the plant her Papa had brought her on that last day was there beside her bed. One of the flowers had drooped and fallen off. She thought of Mike’s house, of how full every room had been. Her room had not changed, but it was different, emptier, smaller. She was different.

And the door was open.

El regarded it for a moment, sure that she couldn’t be seeing it right. Maybe she was dreaming still? But the door stayed half-open, leaking light into the room.

It had never been open before. Sometimes it might be briefly moved, to let Papa in or to let him take her out, but it always swung shut behind him, leaving her alone. And once it was shut it would only open again for him. The other doctors never came into her room, though she thought they might have when she was very small.

El slid off the bed, testing the cool floor with her bare feet. When she got up, her body ached and felt stiff. She reached up to her nose, but there was no blood there. She approached the door cautiously, but it did not swing shut. The corridor looked like it always did, not-quite white and humming lightly in the lights. She had never before seen it empty before though.

She had always turned right out of the door, towards the rooms with doctors and speakers and the bath. That door was shut though. There was clear plastic and yellow tape all over it, and a sign in big black letters. She didn’t want to go that way anyway. She wasn’t going deeper into the lab, she was leaving.

To the left the corridor was empty, all blank closed doors but one. Someone else was still down here. El wondered if it was Papa. She had heard the screaming when the Demogorgon got him, but he was always here. It didn’t make sense that it would be anyone else. She crept up the corridor towards the open door.

El paused before peering round the door, wondering if she should just start running. She still felt tired, ‘drained’ Mike had called it. She didn’t want to have to use her powers. She thought she still could though. She had done things she had never thought she could. She had unmade the Demogorgon feeling much worse than this. She could handle whatever was in the room.

It wasn’t Papa.

There was a man she had never seen before sat in the room. He had grey hair and a tired expression and when he looked up and noticed her standing there, there was a long second where he looked still and a bit scared and El found herself wondering absently whether she would have to kill him. But he did not reach for anything or call out for help, he just looked and then he smiled and leant back into his chair and the moment had passed.

It was a room much like the ones she was sometimes brought to when they wanted her to look at flashcards or listen to someone. The man was sat behind a desk, with a telly sat on it so he could see it, a jug, some glasses and a stack of paper. There were some pens and a small black ball. El wondered absently if Papa had designed this as some kind of test. The man had not pulled out a gun or a taser or a needle and she was not really sure where this would go from here.

‘Gave me a fright there kiddo. We might have to get you a bell if you always creep around so quietly.’ The man smiled again, wide. El watched him silently. It occurred to her there was nothing stopping her from keeping walking. The way the man was talking and smiling reminded her of Benny, but it also reminded her of the woman who had killed Benny. She had talked and smiled too. She had been sent by Papa.

When she didn’t reply the man got up very slowly and cautiously. He walked round the desk but didn’t come any closer, so there was still about three arm’s lengths between them. Then he held out his hand like Mike had to Lucas and said ‘I’m Sam, what do you like to be called?’ He did not look at her wrist, not even when she didn’t reach out and take his hand. She didn’t want to take his hand. She was not sorry, and if he was sorry she did not want to forgive him. She wouldn’t forgive the bad men. She dimly remembered that Mike and Dustin had shown her another type of handshake that meant something different, but the man had not spit so he did not have something she shouldn’t break.

She didn’t know whether she should reply to his question. She liked El better than Eleven because it reminded her of Mike and Dustin and Lucas, but she didn’t know if she wanted this man to know that. Most of the doctors had never even called her Eleven anyway. They did when they talked to each other, but most of them never talked to her. It was just Papa. She figured if she said nothing he would call her Eleven though, and she realised with a surge of feeling that she didn’t want him to call her that. She had stopped being Eleven when she met Mike.

‘El.’ She decided. Her voice was scratchy and dry.

‘Well, it’s a pleasure to meet you El,’ said the man, putting his hand back down. ‘Would you like a glass of water? It sounds like you might have a rather sore throat.’ He quirked an eyebrow and when she slowly nodded reached behind himself to offer her a glass.

The water was very good and El drank the whole glass as quickly as possible, before the man could take it away again. He didn’t try though. He just waited patiently until she was finished and then asked if she would like some more and maybe something to eat. El’s stomach nearly answered the question for her, she was so hungry, but then she remembered her mission and hesitated.

‘No.’ She said ‘Mike.’

It was not a question.

…

The first reporter showed up at the station on the Saturday morning. The Hawkins Post had been through earlier in the week, to take Hop’s statement, and then once more to give them a preview copy of the article they’d be running that weekend, but this was not a reporter for the Hawkins Post.

Jack Coel had given Flo one of the smarmiest and least sincere smiles she had ever been inflicted with in nearly thirty-five years of dealing with self-important drunk drivers and charming wife-beaters and even Larry Kline’s attempts to smooth over his youthful ‘escapades’. He said he was here about the boy who had come back to life. He was far from the last. By Monday morning there were nearly eleven of them, from a variety of local and state papers (and even one from New York) wandering around trying to harass Flo into talking about how a corpse could have been so badly misidentified and haunting Melvad’s in ambush for Joyce. Flo had actually had to establish a set of tactics for dealing with them.

First off, she’d send them into Hop, for an incredibly terse little interview which would always end with an unsatisfied reporter and Hop one step closer to a stress-related heart-attack. Then when they emerged and inevitably tried to sweet-talk Collette who made the coffee or chum up to Callahan or whatever other nonsense, she’d very politely march them out by talking about how busy they all were with the cold weather and other cases and deflect all other requests by offering to squeeze them in for a second interview with Hop some time next week. They never took her up on that one.

Only one reporter turned up that second week. Murray Bauman – an independent reporter Hop had almost had to bodily remove from his office the first time he’d been so determined to ask his questions. He arrived bright and early for his 9am, apparently indifferent to the raised eyebrows all around the bull-pen.

Flo figured he’d give up in the end. For all the big talk last week about scandal and mystery and police incompetence, only two articles had ever actually materialised – the story from the Hawkin’s Post and a footnote of an article in the Indy Star. Apparently, Hawkins just wasn’t exciting enough for the National News.

Hop rolled into work for his interview at a quarter past ten. Flo thought he looked tired. More than usual.

Chapter Text

The gate was bigger.

El had only seen it briefly before. She had been too focused on running, too scared of the monster. But when she had accidently pulled it through it had come through half-crouched and roaring – now the gate touched the floor and ceiling, big enough for the monster to walk through with its arms wide.

She was wearing a strange white suit on top of her clothes. “To keep you safe from all the nasty stuff floating in the air,” the smiling man had told her. He didn’t smile when he said that though, just looked serious. He had also told her that the clothes she was wearing underneath were pyjamas, or clothes you wore to go to sleep.

He was standing there as well, also wearing a funny white suit, although his fit him better. They’d had to use quite a lot of grey tape – duct tape – to make hers fit. There were other people there as well. Men with guns and clipboards and machines that made beeping noises all dressed like them.

“We’re taking measurements.” Said Sam. “The hole, we don’t know much about it yet, but it’s very dangerous. We need to know how dangerous so we can start to contain it.”

“Contain…it?” El asked, watching the hole breathe.

“It means to stop something spreading any further. We don’t know why its growing, or how big it’s going to get. And all of the stuff floating in the air, if too much of it gets out it could start to hurt the people in town and they’ll get sick.”

El thought of Mike and Dustin and Lucas again. “Sick?” She wondered if Will was okay. He wasn’t in the upside-down anymore but she couldn’t tell anything else. Not without a walkie-talkie.

“Yes, the boy who was exposed to it – Will Byers – it damaged his lungs and introduced a lot of toxins – those are things that make you sick – into his blood. He’s improved a lot, but he’ll need to have regular check-ups for the rest of his life to watch for complications. You see, sometimes you might get sick, or hurt, or expose yourself to toxins like those floating around in here or in cigarettes or alcohol or whatever and you’ll be fine then, but you are more likely to get sick ten or twenty years down the line.” He was watching her, not the Gate. El felt like she should be watching him too, or looking for Papa in the people milling around her, or even asking what a cigarette was, but she couldn’t take her eyes off of the gate. It wasn’t like the one she had climbed through in the school, this one seemed almost alive.

“Will,” El murmured. “Home?”

“Will’s doing fine. Almost unbelievably well in fact, and his mom took him home from the hospital earlier this week. Best kind of medicine that sometimes, but we’ll keep an eye on him all the same, make sure he keeps getting better.” One of the men in white suits signalled something to Sam and he waved back before turning to her again. “Shall we get out of here? I don’t know about you, but I think it really might be time for some dinner now.”

El took one last look at the Gate and then she let him lead her back out into the lift. She was very hungry, even if there would be no Eggos. The food in the lab wasn’t like the food Mike had given her or Dustin had carried in his rucksack. Sometime it tasted more like the sheet on her bed than Eggos.

They weren’t alone in the lift. Two people in big white suits had gotten in with them. One of them was staring at her like a mouth-breather. The other was facing stiffly forwards like the door was very interesting. It just looked like a door to her though.

“Mike,” she said.

“Yeah, look kiddo that’s kind of the thing.” Said Sam. El just watched him steadily, ignoring the lift door opening and the other people leaving, even though one of them had to squeeze past her to get round. “You see the thing about dangerous things, particularly things as dangerous as we think that hole might be, is that sometimes other people are interested in them. These people – bad people – they might even want to make another one themselves, and if they want to do that, they’ll want you.”

Because she had opened the gate, she had let the monster in. It was because of her that Will had got hurt, might still be hurt secretly inside.

“Michael Wheeler and Dustin Henderson and Lucas Sinclair, they are all safe right now, but if you were to go out into Hawkins and talk to them it would put them in danger. Make them targets for people who wouldn’t care about hurting them to get what they want.”

“Bad men,” said El.

“Yes, very bad men,” said Sam. He didn’t seem to realise that the people at this lab were the bad men. Maybe there were more of them out there, all fighting over horrible holes that made tox-ins and monsters and other bad things. People that didn’t care about friends and Eggos and the Snowball.

“It’s not forever, and it won’t be the same here anymore. Brenner and most of his people have gone. You won’t be locked in your room or poked and prodded unnecessarily – we don’t want to hurt you at all. We just want to keep you and the people in this town safe, and that means maybe putting up with some things in the short-term while we make things better.”

El thought about this. She didn’t want to stay in the lab, but if she went to Mike what would happen? The bad men would know exactly where she was and they would come for her and she would end up right back here. And what if these other bad men came, what if Mike or Lucas or Nancy or anyone else got hurt by the other bad men? They were safe and happy now, they had Will back. “Not… now?” She eventually settled on.

Sam’s face went all funny underneath the helmet on his suit, but then he said. “Eventually. I promise you won’t be stuck here forever.” He made a laugh noise, but it sounded a bit hollow. “Now, I seem to remember promising you food…”

…

Two weeks after he entered the hospital, Will went back to school.

He’d tried to persuade his mom to let him go back the week before, but he still struggled with his breathing occasionally and got tired easily and she’d refused. It’s not like school was particularly great, but he missed seeing his friends – even though they had come over after school nearly every day. It wasn’t the same hearing about Mr Benson getting his tie stuck in the door second-hand.

He hadn’t been left alone in the house in all that time. At first both his mom and Jonathan were there all the time. Then even towards the end of the second week when his mom had to go out and do a couple of shifts and get some groceries Jonathan was always there. Will was sort of glad he hadn’t been alone in the house, but it was also like. Well…

He’d have to be alone in the house one day. He couldn’t go everywhere with Mom or Jonathan for the rest of his life.

But he’d vanished from the house so he figured it would be the worst there for a while. He woke up in the night a lot and it seemed like his mom was always coming in to check on him. He wouldn’t mind, but he’d started sleeping really lightly in the Upside-Down in case the monster came and he couldn’t shift the habit. Jonathan did it sometimes too, although he’d stopped when he noticed that it was waking Will up.

So, school.

Mom had given him a lift to school and actually come in with him to see the principal. Will didn’t really want the fuss. If he’d just cycled in and joined Dustin and Lucas and Mike it would have been a bit bad, but everyone was going to stare so much when he joined them halfway through first period.

Dustin had told him about all of the rumours going round about his ‘death’, and even that Jennifer Hayes had been crying at his funeral. He seemed to think this was cause for celebration, but it just made Will feel awkward. He hadn’t actually died and it sort of felt like he’d… cheated? Like people like Jennifer might be upset that they had wasted all that emotion on him and he wasn’t even dead. He didn’t even really know Jennifer. The last time they’d spoken had been third grade.

Eventually his mom ran out of questions to ask the principal and he was allowed to go to class with the strict instructions that if he felt at all unwell, he’d go to the nurse and she’d call his mom to come pick him up.

Everyone stared when he came into math. Mr Thompson actually stopped the lesson to welcome him back to class and everyone clapped as he went to his seat. But when Mike grinned at him and Dustin clapped him on the back as he came past and Lucas tried to subtly shift his desk closer to Will’s (making a very loud squeaking noise) the second Mr Thompson’s back was turned, Will decided he didn’t mind.

Thankfully Mr Thompson quickly went back to talking about fractions and most of the attention in the class went back to staring out of the window, although Will could feel eyes on the back of his head and hear Freddy B and Troy sniggering about something behind him. He tried to keep his eyes forward and focus on Mr Thompson instead.

Something flickered at the edge of Will’s vision. Out of the corner of his eye he could see ash floating in the shadow of his desk. Will tightened his grip on the desk, it was just a trick of the light. He was in school with his friends, he wasn’t in the upside-down.

He jumped as Lucas reached over and nudged him before passing him a folded piece of paper torn from the back of the textbook. As Lucas gestured for Will to open it, Will realised thankfully that the shadows under his desk were empty again.

The note read, ‘Welcome back to the party! Don’t mind the Troglodytes in the back row.’ He’d scrawled a picture of two Troglodytes underneath – one was standing in a yellow puddle carefully labelled as ‘piss’. Will smiled and then winced as a spit ball hit him behind the ear.

“Troy Walsh!” yelled Mr Thompson.

…

At break they all convened around the back of the bleachers to get away from the staring.

Dustin still thought it was pretty cool though. This wasn’t staring cause James had just tripped him or he’d had a muscle spasm in class or something boring and everyday. This was staring cause Will had come back from a parallel dimension. Or from the dead. It kind of depended on your perspective. Either way it was awesome.

“Hey do you think you might have superpowers now Will?” He asked.

“What?” said Lucas, “why would Will suddenly have superpowers?”

“I mean he was in a parallel dimension for like a week. That’s an origin story if I ever heard one.” Dustin reasoned.

“I don’t think I have superpowers,” said Will, “I mean not unless broken ribs is a superpower.”

“Ha, Broken-Ribs Man,” Dustin grinned. “Would his superpower be breaking other people’s ribs or do you think there might be some weird advantage to having broken ribs? Like more room for his lungs or something?”

“That’s not how lungs work.” Said Mike, scrunching his nose up in disgust.

“It’s not how our lungs work,” Dustin corrected him. “Broken-Ribs Man on the other hand…”

“Nanannananana….” Lucas started singing, swinging his arm over Will’s shoulders and trying to make him laugh.

“…nana-broken-ribs-man!” Dustin joined in. “Broken-ribs Man…. broken-ribs man….”

Will just rolled his eyes. He was grinning a bit though now, and Dustin counted that as a success. Mike had clearly caught on as he stopped looking outwardly sceptical and joined in, until they were all cackling wildly and a bit out of breath from singing. When they were done Dustin collapsed onto the grass and asked, “but really though?”

Lucas punched him in the shoulder before joining him on the floor. “Leave it man.”

“Yeah,” Mike complained. “Besides, we said we were going to talk about the plan now Will’s back.”

“The plan?” Will asked, sitting gingerly between Dustin and Mike.

“The plan.” Mike said, settling into command. “We couldn’t talk about it in your house cause Lucas reckoned it might be bugged. We don’t want the bad men to know what we know.”

“The bad men.” Will repeated. “You mean the government?”

“Mike thinks he saw El the night you came back.” Said Lucas.

“I don’t think”, Mike retorted. “I know. It was definitely her.”

“She disappeared into a cloud of ash when she killed the Demogorgon,” Lucas said. When Mike opened his mouth to complain Lucas quickly continued, “I’m not saying you’re wrong. I’m just saying, if she’s alive, what happened? How did she un-disappear herself?”

“I mean she just blew up the Demogorgon,” Dustin returned. “If anyone could disappear and come back it would be El.”

“Yeah but her powers followed a pattern, right?” Lucas had clearly been thinking about it. “She could move things with her mind like Phoenix in X-Men, and she knew things we didn’t…”

“Also like Phoenix,” agreed Dustin, following him now.

“Exactly,” said Lucas. “But disappearing. That’s like teleporting. That’s a whole different superpower that we never saw her use. That’s what Nightcrawler does.”

“Just because we never saw her do it doesn’t mean she can’t,” Mike argued. “We didn’t know she could obliterate the Demogorgon like that until she did, so why can’t she disappear? We haven’t got enough evidence for you to prove that.”

“I’m not saying she can’t,” Lucas replied, “but I don’t think we can prove she did either.”

“She turned up at the quarry.” Said Dustin, mind whirring. “She knew we were in trouble and she just appeared out of nowhere!”

“What? I thought you said she walked up the road,” Lucas complained.

“I mean we assumed she walked up the road. Maybe she teleported.”

Lucas did not look convinced. Oddly enough Mike didn’t either.

“Maybe it’s not that,” he said. “Maybe it’s more like when Will got lost. Maybe she went to the upside-down. There were portals all over the school remember? Ones the Demogorgon left behind. If Nancy could crawl through one into the upside-down maybe El could get out.”

“If she went to the upside-down in the first place.” Dustin thought out loud, “you didn’t disappear in a cloud of dissolving Demogorgon, did you Will?”

Will grimaced. “No it was more… slimy.”

They all grimaced at that as well.

“How did…” Mike trailed off, clearly reluctant to force Will to talk about it.

Will was looking at his hands now, but he continued. “The Demogorgon, it appeared in the shed behind me and sort of grabbed me, and then it was pushing me and everything was – we were in the upside-down.”

“How did you get away?” Dustin asked. When Mike scowled at him, he just scowled back. He’d asked Will about it as well.

“It tried to grab me but I was still holding my dad’s old rifle and it got the gun instead. I just let go and ran for the trees. I guess it must have lost sight of me. Or smell I guess.”

“That’s pretty epic man,” said Lucas. “I don’t think many people can say they survived being dragged into the Vale of Shadows by a Demogorgon.”

“I didn’t shoot it though,” Will mumbled, playing with the grass. “I was holding the gun but I didn’t shoot it.”

“It wouldn’t have done anything.” Said Mike confidently. “At the school the government men shot the Demogorgon a bunch of times and it was still basically fine. You did the right thing running away.”

Will shrugged, but he looked a little happier. “So you think El is still alive? Where is she?”

“We don’t know,” Dustin complained. “It’s the whole problem.”

“I still reckon we need to search the woods,” Mike said.

“I mean we could try,” said Dustin, “but if El’s in the woods how come she hasn’t made contact?”

“Because the governments still watching us,” said Lucas. “If we go find El, we could lead them right to her.”

“We can’t let that stop us,” Mike argued. “She could be hurt. Besides, it took ages for the government to work out where she was last time.”

Lucas frowned, “last time they didn’t know to watch us. We don’t have that advantage anymore.”

“We can’t let that stop us.” Mike said. This was a decision. “Our houses are Fort Knox for now, but soon they’ll have to let us out. Then we go find her. We go find El.”

…

“Joyce? Joyce Horowitz?”

Joyce looked blankly at the man behind the counter. She didn’t know him, although there was something vaguely familiar about him. He was beaming at her though, completely unfazed by her reaction.

“Sorry, I…”

“Yeah, it’s been a while I suppose, hasn’t it?” Said the man. He’d been doing something with a screwdriver and what looked like a big box of mechanical junk to Joyce, but which Will would probably have told her was actually a very expensive and cool toy, but he had put the screwdriver down in favour of giving Joyce his full attention. “Bob? Bob Newby? We were at school together. You used to sit behind me in history.”

As Joyce struggled for something to say, recalling a hazy memory of a much smaller boy with a similarly round face and a rucksack that was much too large for him. Bob smiled ruefully and added “people used to call me Bob the Brain.”

“Didn’t you used to run that electronic-thingamjiggy club in Middle School?” Joyce asked, searching for some common memory to show she remembered him.

“Huh yeah. I’m surprised you remember that.” Bob replied looking bemused. “Never really got the impression it was your thing.”

Joyce had to give him that. “No, but my youngest son loves that stuff. Scott Clarke – I think he was a few years below us? – runs a similar sort of thing with radios now for the kids.”

Joyce had never seen a man look so genuinely pleased to hear something. “Oh yeah? That’s great! Scott took over the club from me when we graduated to Hawkins High and its funny to think he’s still sort of in charge. Your son isn’t president of the club as well, is he?”

“No,” Joyce smiled. “One of his friends.”

Bob shrugged “Well it’s his loss. Good to know the clubs still running though. You would not believe the trouble I had persuading the school to buy that equipment. How about you though? One son with excellent taste at Hawkins Middle, you have any other kids? You and Lonnie Byers got together, didn’t you?”

Joyce fought the instinctive urge to grimace at the mention of Lonnie, although it was a little easier than usual for some reason. It was funny, normally the question would have felt pointed, the way most people around town asked about Lonnie with that knowing little smug smile, but Bob just looked genuinely interested in what she had to say.

“Two boys. The older one – Jonathan – is at the High School now. And Lonnie and I got divorced four years ago.” And good riddance. “You? I don’t remember seeing you around – did you move away?”

“Oh yeah. Left for university, got a taste for the city and stayed away for years. Got a bit bored in the end though and my parents still had a house here after my grandfather died so I thought I’d come back and give it a try again. See some old faces. Didn’t think I’d run into you though!” He was smiling widely at her and Joyce found herself smiling sheepishly back before he suddenly switched to comically aggrieved and smacked himself softly on the forehead with a hand. “But I’m sure you didn’t come in to hear me talk your ear off about Middle School and what I’ve been doing. Was there something I can help you with?”

He looked so cheerful and Joyce realised she was fighting the urge to laugh as he actually winked (people really did that?) and asked in a very cheesy radio advert voice “What can we at Radio Shack do for you today?”

“I’m looking for an….” she dug around in her bag until she found the piece of paper where Jonathan had written down the name for her – “Atari 2-600?”

“Ah the 2600! That’s awesome! You looking to play some Asteroids or just getting organised for Christmas?”

“My son,” Joyce smiled weakly. She had decided to spend the money the government had refunded her for Will’s funeral buying it for him. It was probably wiser to save it for the next time someone got sick or the roof started leaking, but after spending it the first time on a coffin, this time she wanted to spend it on something that would make Will happy. By her calculations and some careful research, she had figured it was enough to get Will the Atari and a game and give Jonathan some money towards a new camera. He hadn’t actually told her what had happened to the old one, but it was very conspicuous by its absence.

“That’s great!” Said Bob, “I can tell you now he’ll love it. I would have gone mad for this stuff when I was a kid. Still pretty jealous now to tell you the truth. Now if you want to follow me, we have a bunch of new ones and from memory at least a couple of second-hand consoles that are in pretty good working order…”

Chapter Text

Will started choking up phlegm two weeks before Christmas.

Jonathan had barely noticed at first. Will had a cough on and off since his disappearance, and it didn’t seem too big a thing at first. The doctors had said he might have a full couple of months with a bit of a cough as his body shifted the last of the crap he’d been breathing in and recovered from the ‘airway trauma’.

His mom had told him about the moving vine thing she’d found stuffed down his throat late one night when neither of them could sleep and another visit to Will’s room would have resulted in none of them getting any sleep instead of just most of them. Airway trauma almost seemed like a laughable description for that.

So yes, he’d noticed that Will was coughing more again, but it wasn’t until he was choking up grey slime at dinner and his mom was freaking out that it really registered as a big problem.

Will had been fine after a few moments, he’d definitely had worse coughs before. When they’d built Castle Byers Jonathan had been so stuffed up he could barely talk for a week and Will had acquired a hacking cough that had driven Chester crazy, thinking another dog was barking somewhere. But Will hadn’t just been running around in the woods in the rain, he’d been half-killed by a monster and breathing in poison.

‘Hey, hey buddy, you alright there?’ Jonathan asked as his mom rubbed circles on Will’s back. Will wasn’t looking at them. Instead, he was staring into the middle distance, eyes focused on nothing in particular and breathing heavily.

His mom was muttering something similar – ‘Will baby, just breathe, we’ve got you…’

Will twitched a little, and suddenly he was looking at them again, before burying himself in their mom’s arms and breaking into gasping sobs.

They pretty much abandoned the food after that as his mom had her arms full of a sobbing Will and Jonathan was busy re-reading Will’s medical notes. The chunk of noxious looking phlegm sat at Will’s place at the table seemed to be sucking all of the air out of the room.

He’d just reached the section on what to do if Will’s cough got worse or he had breathing difficulties: ‘…if symptoms don’t appear to be immediately life-threatening, make an appointment over the phone. If condition is critical: blue lips, listlessness, difficult to rouse… call 911 for emergency care…’

Will had finally gotten his sobs and coughs under control enough to choke out an explanation, ‘I, it was like I was back there. You were gone and I…’

Jonathan fought the urge to go and punch something. It just wasn’t fair.

Will slept in their mom’s bed that night. Jonathan reckoned that his mom didn’t sleep at all.

The next morning, Jonathan insisted on driving when they took Will up to the hospital for his hastily made appointment.

‘It’s an infection,’ the doctor said when he saw them. He had an x-ray of Will’s chest on the table for them to see. There were clouds of grey over his lungs, and a thick dark patch on one side. ‘Looks a bit like some pneumonia as well which is fairly common with rib injuries.’

The doctor turned to look at Will over his glasses. ‘Your chest’s been hurting, and so you probably haven’t been doing too much exercise or breathing very deeply.’ Jonathan could see it was pretty clear he already knew the answer, which just made him angrier, thinking that they had been expecting this but hadn’t warned them.

His mom answered on Will’s behalf, ‘it hurts when he breathes deeply and the other doctors said he wouldn’t be able to do anything too strenuous until his body got better.’

‘It’s a difficult balancing act’, the doctor shrugged. ‘But we can give William here some breathing exercises to do a few times a day so the pneumonia sorts itself out, and we’ll put you on a stronger course of antibiotics for the infection. If you cough up any more infected looking material, bring in a sample and we’ll test it – make sure there’s nothing too scary mixed up in there, but it’s probably just something that wasn’t quite killed by the last batch of antibiotics. We’ll catch up with another x-ray after Christmas before we take him back off them just to be sure. The important thing is just to be sure you take the pills every day and don’t stop until we tell you too, even if you start feeling better. Otherwise, the bug might just come back stronger again and we don’t want that do we?’

Will was staring at his trainers so Jonathan replied for him. ‘But there’s nothing serious we need to worry about?’

The man shook his head – ‘I wouldn’t think so. Original circumstances aside, we see stuff like this all the time. Was there anything else?’

The car ride back was pretty quiet.

Whatever the antibiotics were supposed to be doing, Will’s cough continued on more or less the same until sometime around Christmas itself, when it suddenly cleared up. The doctor who reviewed Will’s file seemed unsurprised by this.

Jonathan only found Will staring blankly into space one more time before New Year’s rolled around.

Happy new year he guessed.

…

In the end, Mike had taken the executive decision to start searching the woods without Will.

Or rather, Will had told them just to start without him. It was not looking hopeful that he’d be allowed to go anywhere unsupervised for the next year or possibly until he was in college and they needed to get started looking for El. It was cold out.

So the party started splitting their time between ‘visiting Will’, which was actually a code for searching the woods, and game nights in Mike’s basement to actually see Will.

Problem was, the woods were big. And they were pretty sure they couldn’t track El with a compass like they had with the gate. After wandering around randomly the first two times, Lucas had turned up with a bunch of maps and a pencil and forced them to start searching in ‘quadrants’, which was probably more logical, but was going to take forever. And what if El wasn’t hiding out close to the town? She’d been gone for weeks now; she could have walked miles.

He felt closest to her when he tried talking to her on the walkie, but even then Mike couldn’t shake the feeling that he was just talking to the void. Unless she had a walkie herself, how would she hear him? There probably weren’t just walkies hanging around randomly in the woods.

Still, El was resourceful. She’d escaped the lab, worked out how to contact Will, and absolutely obliterated the Demogorgon. If anyone could live in the woods in the middle of winter evading the government then it would be her. Mike was pretty sure she would be fine. Mostly fine.

He just kind of wished he could talk to her. Bring her some Eggos and make sure she had something decent to eat. They’d done a survival camping thing with the school when they were in Elementary and pine needle tea tasted awful. She’d want Eggos to wash the taste away.

He’d been checking in on the grocery store every day after school, in the vague hope that El would have stormed through and broken the doors again and then he’d know she was ok, but nothing ever happened.

…

It was the week before Christmas break when Steve bought the camera. Finally bought the camera.

He wasn’t actually certain yet he was going to give it to Jonathan. It had been an admittedly asshole move to break it, but he was pretty sure taking pictures of them secretly as Nancy undressed was worse. However, he could freely admit he’d given up any moral high ground he’d had when he’d started badmouthing Jonathan’s family and dead brother in an attempt to pick a fight. At least by replacing his camera he could feel like he’d done something tangible towards not being an unremitting asshole towards the guy.

Nancy seemed to have forgiven him anyway.

So yeah, he’d give him the camera. He’d just spent like two months of allowance on it. What was he going to do, pick up photography himself? Of course, Jonathan might not want the camera if it came from him. Steve couldn’t really work out where they stood anymore.

With Nancy, things were on their way back to normal. She’d forgiven him for being an asshole. He’d gotten the full story of what had been going on and decided that he would never underestimate her again, and she’d kissed him in his car at the weekend. And then he’d kissed her…

He was getting off track.

Jonathan was harder to figure out anyway. He’d come back to school two weeks after his brother reappeared, not that Steve would have noticed if Nancy hadn’t told him. They didn’t share any lessons and the guy seemed to have the power of invisibility or something because he never seemed to be in the canteen or hallways or anything. Apparently, he was spending all of his time outside of class in the dark room or in his car, which was in Steve’s opinion deeply sad given he didn’t have a working camera anymore and it must be like minus a thousand degrees inside Jonathan’s shitty old car. So they hadn’t had a huge amount of contact.

He’d bumped into him once or twice in the halls, normally because Jonathan was being dragged somewhere by Nancy, and asked after his brother, who was apparently ‘getting there’, but Jonathan normally ducked away the second Nancy was distracted. Which was fair enough if that was what he wanted to do, but Steve didn’t want him to think he had to leave for his benefit. He’d wronged the guy enough; he wasn’t going to chase him away now. Besides, he trusted Nancy. If there was one thing he’d learnt, it was that she’d tell him if she had a problem with him. His mom had always told him that relationships were about communication. Granted in her case she meant communicating loudly to his father that if he wasn’t going to be faithful, she was just going to stand next to him and scare off the other women, but the point still stood. Communication.

Maybe Nancy could give Jonathan the camera instead of him? He’d mention it to her. It would be better coming from her anyway, wouldn’t it? She was the one in those photos. Hmm, maybe he was overthinking this. He’d ask Nancy.

He put the camera in the trunk of his car, next to the baseball bat he’d managed to walk away from the Byers’ with. He would have offered it back to them, but he hadn’t been able to shake the idea he might need it again one day. If Jonathan ever wanted it, he knew where it was, and Steve was better at swinging it that he had been. So, this way he’d get both Steve and the bat.

He went to close the trunk, then changed his mind and wrapped the camera box in an old sports shirt and replaced it. It’d really ruin the gesture if he gave the guy another broken camera after braking too hard and sending it smashing into a nail bat. He should probably think about finding something to wrap the bat it too, in case his parents ever went snooping in his car or he got stopped by any cop other than the Chief or something. He’d have to come up with something a little more imaginative than trying out for softball to get out of that one.

It could be worse, he had no idea where Nancy had gotten that gun from, or how she would explain it to her parents if they ever found out. Mr and Mrs Wheeler didn’t really seem like the kind of people that kept a pistol in the house. His parents certainly wouldn’t have stood for it. He wasn’t so sure on their position on horrifying monsters with no faces using the pool. Probably an immediate trip to rehab, or maybe the psych ward. Or maybe they’d just yell at him for having people over when they weren’t there again, even if he hadn’t invited the monster.

Sometimes in the middle of the night, when the only light in his room came from the glow of the pool lights he’d forgotten to turn off outside, he wondered where exactly Barb had died. Had it been on the end of his diving board, or had she been dragged somewhere else still alive? Had she called out? He’d spent one long evening after Nancy had told him what had happened sat in his room wondering if she’d screamed for help and they just hadn’t heard her, before he remembered that Jonathan had been out there as well with his camera, and that he definitely would have heard if there had been a struggle.

He’d gone to dinner with Barb’s parents and Nancy the night before. It was deeply awkward. He’d barely known Barb at all, just a few days of sort of chatting to her as he and Nancy circled each other and then she’d gone and been killed in his backyard. Nothing in the world could have made him go to that dinner if it wasn’t for Nancy. She’d been so torn up with nerves about it he’d ended up volunteering to go with her, even if they weren’t properly going out yet and he hadn’t had an idea how he’d explain his presence to Barb’s parents. In the end they hadn’t actually questioned it though. Maybe Barb had mentioned him more than he’d mentioned her to his own parents.

He wasn’t entirely sure why Nancy had decided to put herself through that dinner – and then to take up Mrs Holland on the offer of the same again the next week. Sitting in the woman’s dining room and guiltily lying through her teeth about Barb’s death couldn’t be healthy for Nancy or for Barb’s parents. Not that Barb’s parents knew they were lying. Still, what did he know? Maybe Nancy was there for the same reason he was.

The chief had pulled him over on the way back from a basketball game a week or so after everything went down to quietly warn him off telling anyone about what happened. Not that he’d been planning on it. Still, it was nice to get some confirmation that there were actual adults with guns and badges and stuff looking into the whole monsters from a hell dimension thing. He didn’t fancy the idea of the only thing standing between their town and some horror movie being Nancy’s kid brother and his weirdo friends. Even if one of them did have superpowers.

When he pulled up at Nancy’s and rang the doorbell (look he was trying to get into Mr and Mrs Wheeler’s good books right?) it was actually one of the weirdo kids that opened the door. Not the one with superpowers though. Although apparently that one was Russian? He admittedly still wasn’t that clear on the specifics.

The kid gave him a once over and then just upped and walked away yelling that the pizza still wasn’t there.

Little dickhead.

Thankfully Mrs Wheeler appeared then, smiling and asking if he was here to see Nancy, which he was. He did unfortunately become aware as he was talking to her that the camera he’d brought in was still wrapped in a sweaty shirt which did detract a little from the charming but totally trustworthy vibes he was trying to go with. He hadn’t tried to charm a girl’s parents in ages and he felt visibly out of practice. How was he going to explain that if she asked? Just felt like you’d appreciate this smelly shirt in your house? Liven up the décor a little? He was an idiot.

Thankfully she didn’t bring it up.

When he eventually headed up the stairs, he made a mental note to come down and help wash up or something later, anything to replace the image of him with his disgusting shirt with something a little more like something you’d want out of your daughter’s first boyfriend. After all, Nancy might have claimed she didn’t care what her parents thought, but he was pretty sure that what her mom still meant a lot to her. He admittedly wasn’t so sure about Mr Wheeler, although he also wasn’t sure that the guy had actually twigged who Steve was, so maybe he was fine there. Mr Wheeler definitely didn’t seem like the shovel talk type. He wasn’t entirely sure Mr Wheeler even owned a shovel.

Nancy did ask about the sports shirt, but that was just so like her he had to spend a few extra moments kissing her. God he was in so far over his head. He was pretty sure it was cheating to be so sexy when telling him off or telling him he was a moron or whatever. Still.

Where was he?

Oh yeah. ‘You’re beautiful Nancy Wheeler.’

She still looked so flushed whenever he said that, which - big result he still had it - but also was totally adorable. She rolled her eyes like he hadn’t just temporarily rendered her speechless to ask ‘so you brought your horrible sweaty shirt in because…’

Oh yeah. He unwrapped it to show her the camera. ‘I thought, to apologise to Jonathan, I mean if you think it’s a good idea…’

He was being kissed again. God, he loved this girl. Liked this girl. Whatever.

…

The… thing… in the sink wriggled and before Will could even think of doing anything it was gone down the plughole. He turned on the tap, willing it to flush away whatever that had been.

He blinked (or did he?) and suddenly he was back in the Upside Down, fully and properly, not just weird bits in the corner of his vision. It was all around him, but it wasn’t touching him. Not yet.

And then he was back in the bathroom. His real, right-way-up, non-destroyed bathroom.

He was in the bathroom and everything was normal.

He was hallucinating, that was all. One of the doctors had said he might get flashbacks. There was nothing in the sink but water.

Will turned the tap off and went back to their Christmas Eve dinner. The ham would be good and the potatoes looked a bit weird and the beans seemed to have gone grey. But that was how it should be. And then they’d watch a cheesy film and he’d complain about being sent to bed and so his mom would allow him to squeeze all the presents one last time.

It would be exactly like it was last year. Like it should be.

Chapter Text

There were more things in El’s room now.

The bed had colourful sheets with flowers printed on them and a soft blanket almost identical to one of the ones that had made Mike’s fort. There was also a new wooden dresser filled with clothes. Proper clothes like El had seen the girls at Mike’s school wear – not the white shirt Papa used to bring her.

El had been allowed to pick the clothes herself. Sam had sat her down with a nice woman – Susie with an ‘s’ not a ‘z’ – and given a catalogue and a pen and told to circle everything she wanted. El had circled nearly everything.

Now she had pyjamas in four different colours; jeans like Mike’s; strange short jeans for when it was hot; two jackets; three dresses; shoes; and lots of tops in bright colours. Her favourite had lots of coloured stripes all together – a rainbow – and when El wore it she felt almost like she wasn’t in the lab anymore. Nobody in the lab had ever worn colours like that.

The only thing she wasn’t allowed was the pretty butterfly headband from the third page. El had circled it three times she’d wanted it so much, but apparently because it didn’t have any matching writing, she couldn’t have it.

Sam had also started bringing her presents. Not all the time, but every five days he would disappear for two days (this was the ‘weekend’) and when he came back, he would always bring her something. So far, he had brought her a doll in a pink dress (which El didn’t like that much); a game which involved moving coloured pieces up and down lots of ladders and snakes (which she liked a bit more); a big set of crayons and a stack of paper (which she used to draw a picture of Mike and Dustin and Lucas); and a tv like Mike’s but smaller (which she loved a LOT). Unfortunately, when El reluctantly told Sam this, he laughed and told her to be careful not to watch it too much or her eyes would go square. This sounded very frightening to El, and she had started being very careful with it. She already looked weird because of her hair; she didn’t want square eyes as well. However, the men who watched the TVs all day upstairs all had normal shaped eyes, so El had eventually decided she would be fine, provided she watched les tv than them.

But the biggest change wasn’t the things in El’s room. It was that, so far, Sam hadn’t lied, and the door had never been locked. The door to her room was always open now. Susie had told her that she could shut it herself and it would still open, but El had only tried this once, because whenever she closed it, she had to open it again to check it still could.

El’s days were different too.

On the days that Sam was there, Susie would come and make her get up, before taking her to get breakfast in the canteen with the rest of the people in the lab. El had never been in that room before. It turned out there were a lot of rooms in the lab she had never seen before. For breakfast El could have porridge or toast, and because she always used to have to have porridge, she chose toast. It looked a bit like Eggos but didn’t taste like them at all. But El had discovered if you covered the toast in a thick layer of jam and peanut butter and honey, you could still make it taste pretty good. When Susie saw her doing this, she made a face like one of the doctors had when the Demogorgon had first come through the wall, but Susie only ate fruit with horrible white stuff called cottage cheese for breakfast so El was pretty sure her mouth was just broken.

After breakfast, El had lessons. Lessons were a bit like tests, but instead of telling people what someone was saying in the next room or hurting cats, El just had to listen to the man in the room with her. She also had to read sentences, add numbers together, and write things down. Her favourite part was when the teacher would read a book with her. At the moment, they were reading ‘The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe,’ which took place in another world like the Upside-Down, but instead of monsters had lots of talking animals which she liked a lot. It had also made her really want to try something called Turkish Delight, which apparently was almost as good as Eggos.

El wondered sometimes whether the lessons she had were the same as the ones Mike had at school, but she thought maybe not. When Dustin had tried to explain school to her, he had used lots of words like ‘swirlies’, ‘noogies’, and ‘The Mile’, and none of these things had come up in her lessons so far.

After this she had lunch with Sam in his office. She brought her game with her and they played once she finished eating. Yesterday she had ‘absolutely thrashed’ him and he had told her he would bring in a new game called chess on Monday and then ‘we’d see who won then.’ El was pretty sure it would be her. She had decided she was good at games; she didn’t even have to use her powers very much. Sam said she wasn’t supposed to use her powers at all, and that this was cheating, but he also sometimes said that when she hadn’t used them just because he rolled really badly and then she got two sixes.

After lunch El was allowed to do whatever she liked, provided it wasn’t dangerous and she didn’t go past the outside fences or into the room with the gate. She tested this on day 3, by going outside and spending a long time examining the fence to see what they would do. But no-one followed her outside to see her do it. Eventually El decided to climb the fence a little, but no-one appeared to make her stop, and El remembered she had nowhere to go beyond it, so she had got down and gone back inside.

When El wasn’t outside, she spent a lot of time following people around, to see what they did. Particularly in the beginning, a lot of them didn’t seem to like this very much.

Lots of the doctors looked scared when El was in the room, and some of the bad men would touch their guns a lot. But after Sam saw one of the men reach for his gun, suddenly a lot of the men with guns didn’t have them anymore. They looked very strange without them, and the men who had had guns clearly thought so too, because they still touched the place they had been a lot. But the more El saw of the lab, the less-scared the people looked.

Some of the people El followed would talk to her a lot and explain what they were doing. One doctor had even let her help measuring things, and then made his little fire burn different colours for her.

Most of these people were new, or new to El at least. She had lived her whole life before the escape in a small section of the lab and never seen most of the people there. But she did still see some of the doctors that had helped Papa.

El almost never followed these doctors around. She had only tried once, because she had seen one of the doctors that Papa used to talk to a lot, and become convinced he was going to go and see Papa. He hadn’t though. He just went to Sam’s office and then Sam asked her to please leave so they could talk in private.

El considered going to her room and using the tv to spy on them, but then she realised she could sort of hear them if she pressed her head up against the door. They were talking about Will, but El didn’t really understand the conversation because it was all complicated words like the doctors used to use when they weren’t talking to her.

She was still sitting outside the door when the doctor tried to leave. This led to a long stare before the man said “hello Eleven.” El didn’t say anything back, but she followed him until he went to his car just to make sure.

Most of the doctors El knew from the before still pretended she wasn’t there, which suited El fine. But a few had changed a lot and had started trying to talk to her, which made El feel very hot and upset. They had never tried to talk to her before, and she didn’t know why they were doing it now.

El followed Sam the most. He went to lots of places all over the lab and he always talked as he did it. By following him she had been allowed to see the Gate two more times (although Sam grumbled about it the whole time). El didn’t think he really meant it when he grumbled though, because he still said yes and explained what everyone was doing. Sam got a lot more annoyed when he was working in his office and El span round on the chairs and moved things with her mind. Apparently, this was ‘distracting’. El thought he was just angry about the time she moved his chair before he sat on it and he fell on the floor though.

But even then, Sam still didn’t punish her. He just said she should go and draw something with her crayons. El drew him falling off his chair.

Before Sam left in the evenings, they would have dinner together and he would ask her lots of questions about what she had done that day. El was pretty sure he knew the answer to a lot of these questions, particularly when she had spent her afternoon following him, but if she didn’t answer he would just talk some more and then ask her another question. Four days ago, she had asked Sam what he did with his day instead, and he had laughed and gone and found her some ice-cream which El liked a lot.

By the time Sam left El was supposed to be in bed. But she generally got straight back out of bed once he was gone and went to see Frank. Frank was one of the men with guns, but El had never seen him before and Frank only had his gun sometimes so El had decided he was probably not one of the bad men. He had found her wandering around the lab one night, and made her hot cocoa and told her about his family and now El went to find him every night. She particularly liked talking to Frank, because sometimes he would say mean things about some of the bad men.

Frank would send El back to bed when the clock hands got to nine and six, but if she could get him really talking, sometimes he forgot. When El managed this he would say ‘shit’ a lot, then say it again when he realised he’d done it in front of her and make her promise not to repeat it. Then he’d make her go to bed before he got ‘fired’ (which was apparently nothing to do with actual fire but was still bad).

The days when Sam wasn’t there (‘week-ends’) were mostly the same, only El didn’t have lessons and there were fewer people in the lab.

These days were good because she got Eggos for breakfast, and in the afternoon they would make the tv play a long story for her. After the woman in charge of the food on these days saw El watching her, she had made her start helping cook the food in the evening. El discovered she was very good at stirring pots and chopping things, but not as good at peeling potatoes. But her finger didn’t bleed very much and the chips she helped make were very VERY good. Everyone said so.

The first day Sam came back, he brought her a chess set. Chess was a stupid game. It had too many rules, she couldn’t use her powers to cheat, and Sam beat her three times with a big smile on his face before lunch was over. El considered using her powers to flip the board, but decided against it. She would ask Frank to help her practice in the evenings instead until she was really good at it, and then next time she played Sam, she would beat him.

El spent the afternoon with Susie putting up lights and streamers of shiny tinsel in the canteen. When they were done it looked a lot like Will’s Mom’s house, but they didn’t paint letters on the walls as well. El also got to float two actual trees up the stairs – one for the canteen and one for her own room. By the time they were finished, the lab looked almost like the houses on the tv that the happy families lived in. Almost.

When El asked Frank what the trees were for, he said that Sam was a ‘soft-touch’. This sounded to El like the opposite of when Frank had called Sam a ‘hard-ass’ six days before, but Frank didn’t explain the difference. Frank also beat her at chess.
El considered the board, and sent it flying into the air. Frank made her pick up all the pieces, and then proceeded to beat her again.

Chess was stupid.

El spent the next few afternoons putting up more lights, helping make mince pies in the canteen (which were nasty and she did NOT like) and watching the people on tv.

Then, on the afternoon of the fourth day – Thursday – Sam asked her to go in the bath.

They were playing chess in his office again and the game had gone on a bit longer than usual. El had managed to take more of Sam’s pieces than usual and thought she might actually be winning this time. Sam was smiling at her over the chess board, but it wasn’t his normal smile. El had watched him smile a lot and she knew this wasn’t the one he used when he was happy. This was the smile he used when someone else was going to be not happy.

He had paused like he expected her to say something, but El didn’t want to. Eventually he picked up one of his chess pieces and started rolling it in his fingers as he talked.

“We’ve taken measures to stop the hole down their spreading’, Sam gestured down towards the basement and the Gate it contained with the chess piece, “but the creature that attacked you and your friends didn’t seem to need that portal to get into our world. And we don’t know if there are more things like that creature out there. We don’t really have any idea what might come out of the singularity, and that means we can’t protect people. Can’t protect the people in Hawkins.” He paused here and put the piece back down. El examined the chess board instead of looking at Sam, mentally counting the tiles between Sam’s bishop and her queen.

“We wouldn’t be using the tank in the basement – we’ve mostly removed it now in fact – but we’ve got something similar set up upstairs. We don’t – I don’t want you to do anything that’s going to be dangerous. Not like last time. Just a quick look around while we take measurements and then you just let us know anything you find out about things that might be lurking on the other side of that hole.”

El continued to examine the chess board and then moved her queen forward to take the bishop. Then she pulled her knees up to her chest and waited.

“El,” said Sam, “please could you just look at me for a moment?”

El reluctantly looked up. “Dangerous”, she said.

Sam swallowed and then said “yes. Maybe.” He had stopped doing the smile and just looked a little bit sad. “But it will help keep other people safe.”

El remembered the last time Papa had asked her to go in the bath. He had said they were doing something important and then they had brought the monster through and killed all those people.

But that wasn’t the last time she had been in the bath. She had done it again to look for Will and Barb. Will’s mom had asked her to look and she had found him.

El nodded once, and looked back down at the chessboard. She noticed then that moving her queen had left her king in the path of Sam’s castle.

“Thank you”, Sam said quietly.

El just kept staring at the board. She was pretty sure she had just lost again.

That night, instead of going and finding Frank, El turned the tv to the static channel. She had checked there was no-one in the corridor and stolen material for a blindfold from the kitchen. In a second, she was standing in the darkness looking out at the empty space of the In-Between.

Then Mike was in front of her. He was lying in bed, all scrunched up in a ball with just his head sticking out from the blanket. El thought he might be asleep, but then he made a deep choking noise and moved a bit under the blanket. El came closer, kneeling in the rippling darkness. Mike was crying. His eyes were red and open in the darkness, staring furiously out past El at something she couldn’t see.

“Mike,” said El hopelessly. For a moment she thought he might respond, but then he just pulled the blanket over his head. She reached out a hand to touch him, but the blankets dissolved into smoke and then El was back in her room, pulling the blindfold off so she could cry.

The next morning Susie woke her up as normal, but for breakfast El was given Eggos rather than toast, even though it wasn’t one of the days Sam was gone. El poked at them suspiciously before biting into them. She could feel people watching her. They watched her anyway, but today felt more like those first few days after she woke up, when people moving round the lab would jump when they saw her. This wasn’t fear though, this was something else.

After breakfast El went to her lesson. It wasn’t very long though before Sam appeared, waving at the teacher through the door. He ushered her through the corridors into a little room with a chair and a pile of fabric that looked a lot like the suit El had worn the last time Papa made her go in the bath.

“If you just put this on and leave your old clothes in the chair – I’ll be right outside. Ok?”

El silently reached up to touch her hair and looked back up at Sam.

He didn’t seem to understand, because he was looking at her like Mike and Dustin and Lucas had when she first found them.

“Everything ok kiddo?”

El touched her hair again, unsure if she wanted Sam to understand or not. “Cut?” she asked.

It took a moment before understanding flickered in Sam’s eyes. “Ah no, we don’t need to cut your hair for this test…” he paused, clearly thinking hard. “Unless you want us to cut it for you?”

“No,” said El, hands now protectively flat over her hair. It was still short, but longer than it had been. It was as long as Lucas’s hair now.

“Ok then,” said Sam. “I’ll just leave you to get changed and we can get this over with.”

El looked at the grey fabric piled on the chair and touched her rainbow top. She took a deep breath before she took it off.

The room with the bath in it was very like the other one had been. Not as it looked now, obviously. There was no Gate and no ash floating in the air, but the tank of water looked the same. There were doctors with screens and buttons and tubes getting the bath ready. She recognised most of them from around the lab. There was only one doctor in there from when Papa was in charge, and he was right at the back looking at some flashing lights.

El noticed cameras blinking in the corners of the room, and realised there were probably more people watching with the tv men upstairs. She stared at the scientist who knew Papa until he looked up. It was the same blank looking doctor she had followed to Sam’s office a few weeks before.

Sam’s hand grasped her shoulder and made El jump. “Ready kiddo?” he asked, gesturing towards the platform where two doctors waited with the helmet full of air. El slowly nodded and followed him up the stairs. Then she was sinking into the water, looking out at the distorted faces of the watching people. For a second, she was in the basement room again, watching as Papa gave the nod to take away her light, then she was in the In-Between.

It was empty here, and El realised with a jolt that she did not know what to look for. She had found the Demogorgon looking for the man in the picture and had seen the Upside-Down again looking for Barb and Will. But Will wasn’t in the Upside-Down anymore.
Barb.

El hesitated, but now she had thought about Barb she could feel herself getting closer to what remained of her, even without her conscious decision. Then there was a shape in front of her, lying in a mass of other decaying things. El walked closer very carefully, listening out for the sound of anything moving in the darkness.

Something moved on the shape that was Barb and El choked back a sob as she realised that there were things crawling on her. Tiny slug creatures had eaten away at Barb’s face, revealing a terrible grinning white thing underneath that peered out at El from the remains of Barb’s flesh. El stumbled backwards, turning the world around her into smoke as she went. She was trapped, she was trapped, she was…

Suddenly there was light and people and someone was saying her name and holding her in the embrace of a towel.

“It’s ok, you’re alright, we’re all alright – just breathe kiddo. El I need you to breathe with me.”

The world seemed to be shaking at the edges, and as El watched the glass on the tank splinter and leak water she realised it really was. Dimly in the back of her mind she realised she was the one shaking it but it took a long moment before she could remember how to stop – how to lock the shaking back inside her chest.

Sam brought her into another room, his hands wrapped around her shoulders in something that wasn’t quite a hug and wasn’t quite just a way of steering her along. Then El was sitting down and they were rubbing circles on her back.

“Now there we are. Just take a deep breath and talk to me kiddo. What happened?”

El did as she was instructed and started to talk, steadily, quietly. She reported what she had done and what she had seen and all the while the frown on Sam’s face got larger.

“That’s – thank you for telling me that El – but I was asking about you. Did something happen to you? Are you hurt?”

El shook her head slowly. She was tired and there was an ache deep in her head that came from using her powers a lot, but she wasn’t hurt.

Sam tried again, “Were you scared? It sounds upsetting seeing what you described.”

El just shrugged. “Done?” she asked.

“I,” Sam paused, mouth open but nothing coming out. Then he paused and sighed. “I just need to take a scan of your head and check we didn’t do any damage. Then you can go.”

El nodded and waited and was good for the scan. Then she went back to her room, not bothering to go and change back into her clothes. She shut the door and then used her powers to move the dresser in front of it and then she put the blindfold on and went to visit Mike.

Mike was eating lunch with his family, pushing peas around his plate. El could see his little sister trying to copy him from across the table until Nancy shoved him and he stopped to scowl at her. Their dad was telling a story El couldn't follow, about a bunch of people with complicated names, but then Nancy rolled her eyes across the table at Mike and he grinned, and El felt a pang in her chest. Mike was home. She switched to watching Dustin. He was lying on the floor reading a comic book. There was a cat sat next to him, which hissed when El saw it. It turned to face her, back arched and fur on end like it was protecting Dustin from her. She could hear him asking the cat what the matter was as she left them. Lucas was having an argument with a girl. He held a video tape like the ones El sometimes got to watch in his hand, and was waving it above the girl's head, laughing when she couldn't reach it. He stopped laughing when she kicked him and grabbed it, putting it in the machine and sticking her tongue out at him. He still watched it with her though, despite complaining that the video was for babies. El stayed with them until she was tired and the tears had stopped coming, and then she got into bed and went to sleep. She didn’t move the dresser from where it blocked the door, and she didn’t answer the door when someone knocked on the other side of it.

The next day was one of the days when Sam was never there, so El wasn’t expecting to see him in the canteen. He was wearing the wrong clothes. Instead of the clothes doctors always wore, Sam had jeans like Mike’s and a blue sweater and brown heavy looking shoes.

“Good morning El,” he said.

El looked at his strange clothes and decided to ignore him. This didn’t seem to put him off though, as he came and sat with her with his coffee. El looked around the canteen, mostly empty like it always was on the days Sam wasn’t supposed to be there, and then back down at her Eggos. She took a vicious bite.

“What no good morning for me? That’s fair I guess” said Sam, like she had ever said good morning to him before. “But I thought, if you weren’t too angry with me, you might like to go out today.”

El stopped chewing. Out, like… ‘outside?”

“There is a trail a little drive from here that’s supposed to be very pretty, and - this is key – easy enough to navigate I’m not likely to get us lost. So, what do you say kiddo? Fancy a little walk in the woods?”

Outside the lab.

“Not Hawkins?” El asked.

“No this is a little further along the Eno. There are too many people in Hawkins but we can have a little Christmas walk if we stick to the woods. You’ll have to wrap up warm though.”

El stood up, ready to get going, but Sam waved his half full coffee mug at her and told her to finish her breakfast first.

The car ride was very exciting. El was bundled into her jacket, but also a funny fuzzy hat, gloves, and thick boots Sam had produced from his car. She was bouncing in her seat, eager to leave the lab, but Sam insisted on talking to the man guarding the gate for what felt like hours before they left. The journey didn’t take El past anywhere she recognised, because they headed off in the opposite direction to Hawkins, but from her seat she could see other cars and huge stretches of woods. Eventually, Sam pulled up a smaller road, which quickly turned into a track and then disappeared into the snow.

El had been in the woods before, when she escaped from the lab and then again with Mike and Dustin and Lucas, but it was different with Sam. For one thing, there didn’t seem to be a particular aim of the walk, although he kept checking a map, even once they reached the little lake they were walking round. It was also much colder than it had been when they were looking for Will, although not as cold as El had felt when she had gotten wet in the storm.

The walk was over sooner than El wanted it to be, even though it was so cold that she was also quite glad to get back into the car. The next day was Christmas and El – just like the people on the tv – woke up to presents. She had some chocolate, a box of Turkish delight, a new game called Monopoly, a strange multi-coloured cube that twisted into different combinations and a hairband just like the butterfly one from the catalogue. The Turkish delight was – weird-tasting, but El wore her new hairband every day for the next week. And then the next one.

Things settled back into the same rhythm in the lab, with lessons and board games and making the doctors jump. El even won three games of chess, two against Frank and one against the nice doctor that sometimes let her help – Dr Pete. It wasn’t until day seventy-two that Sam asked her to do another test.

Sam was going to send a man with a gun into the Upside Down, and El was going to use a machine to locate him, and then see if she could stay looking when he came back to the lab. El didn’t think this was going to work, but Sam said they would try it anyway.
She was poking about the room they were going to do the test in, watching as a doctor set up a big radio. Sam had said she didn’t have to be there yet, but no-one had stopped her either. Sam had disappeared again when it had become clear she wasn’t going to get scared without him.

The man she was supposed to find was putting on his special clothes – like the ones you needed to look at the Gate, but made out of a tough orange fabric instead. He had come to say hello to her so she would know who he was to find him.

“Just remember this face kid. And don’t leave me hanging in the highest stakes game of Hide and Seek I will have ever played.”

El had never played this particular game, but she nodded anyway because the man looked nervous. He was pretending he wasn’t though, and smiled and winked at her before he left the room. Shortly after he had gone, Sam came back to do the test. He was not alone though. He came with two other doctors and with another man who El recognised.

It was the man who had come to the junkyard and rescued them from the bad men. The man that had gone to find Will with his mom. Chief Hopper.

Chapter Text

There was a suit in Jim’s office.

This wasn’t exactly surprising. Agent Asshole had spent enough time in it, lecturing Jim on how he should handle the situation or dictating some new official line that made Jim want to punch something (well not something. Agent Cooper. He really wanted to punch Agent Cooper. Right in the middle of that smug fucking smile). But this clearly wasn’t Cooper.

The man in his office was somewhere in his sixties, unarmed, and comfortable that way. However, this guy had ended up in Hawkins, his career hadn’t started with the army or FBI or whatever other bullshit Jim’s town hosted nowadays. In fact, Jim was willing to bet that this was the doctor that had spooked Joyce, the new man in charge, here to give Jim his very own courtesy call.

Hopper considered him through the glass in the door for a few moments, and turned on his heel for another donut and a cup of coffee. Screw it, the suit could stew for a little bit longer.

Flo threw up her arms in defeat as he went past but followed him back into the bullpen, straight through the card tower Callahan was in the process of building.

“Hey!” Callahan complained behind him. “Now I’ve got to start again.”

Jim grunted, grabbing the coffee pot, “Or, here’s a thought, maybe you could do your job instead.” He went to empty the pot into his mug, but all that emerged was a thick grainy sludge. Perfect.

“Gee Chief, who pissed in your cornflakes this morning?” Powell asked as Jim slammed the coffee pot back down.

“Is it really too much to ask that one of you jokers refill the coffee pot every now and then and actually do some work?”

Powell just smirked as Callahan started complaining that he’d refilled it last time. “So is it another Fed, or is Murray back for round three?”

“A Dr Samuel Owens from the Department of Energy,” said Flo from behind him.

“Hang on the space laser people?” Said Callahan, “the ones from the lab?”

“Been a lot of Feds around lately” observed Powell.

There were at least still a few donuts to go with his sludge. Which was just as well, because Powell seemed to have taken him at his word and actually decided to do some detective work.

“I don’t get it, what would they want with us?” Callahan complained.

Jim sighed around a completely unsatisfying bite of coffee-less donut. “Maybe he’s here to actually explain what the hell went wrong at the Middle school they needed all those trucks. Maybe he wants Callahan’s mom’s number...” He carried on over the lazily offended exclamation from Callahan, “Or, here’s a thought, maybe I don’t know yet.” Jim didn’t need to turn around to know Flo and Powell were exchanging looks. “Just…” he waved a hand at them, unable to work up the energy this early to actually communicate anything. Judging by Powell’s snort they got the message, and as he headed back to face whatever was waiting for him in his office, Callahan got started on a new card tower.

The suit was still sitting where Jim had left him, looking completely unruffled by the wait. Jim put his feet up on the desk about five inches from the man’s face and was disappointed to see that he didn’t flinch. In fact, the slightly wry grin didn’t falter.

“Well, you can only be Chief Hopper – can’t imagine there’s anyone else brave enough round here to put their boots up on the desk of the Chief of Police.”

Jim elected to ignore this attempt at banter in favour of a second bite of now only moderately disappointing coffee-less donut. “What do you lot want now?” he asked.

The man across from him gave him a slightly rueful look, but he started talking.

…

“So he came to your office?”

Hopper sighed gustily, collapsing into the armchair in Joyce’s living room. “Yes, that’s what I just said.”

Joyce was pacing up and down the carpet, trying not to trip on the hastily discarded bulbs Hopper had scattered about during his latest bug-search.

“But what did he want – did he ask about Will?”

Hopper rubbed his eyes tiredly, “it came up. He wanted to know if Will was doing ok.”

“Ok? What does that mean?”

“I don’t know Joyce. Ok? It sounded like he was just being polite.”

“Polite or…” Joyce interrupted.

“Maybe he had – I don’t know – nefarious reasons for asking, but he had to know I wasn’t going to tell him anything. And I’m sure the government don’t need my help if they want to spy on your son. I do these bug searches for a reason you know.” Joyce flinched, eyes flickering to the clock. It was another hour and a half before she could pick up Will from school and reassure herself that he was still ok.

Hopper sighed, looking mildly regretful that he’d brought it up and Joyce rushed to ask another question before he clammed up to ‘protect her’. She didn’t need coddling; she needed the truth.

“So what did he ask about?”

“Questions about the media – how we’ve been handling it. The Hollands…” Hopper’s jaw worked itself furiously round their name.

“Same old story?” Joyce guessed.

“Yeah. New management my arse,” Hopper sighed. “Think the whole thing was for my benefit more than his. Bit of a performance, tell me that my concerns are being taken seriously. Same old bullshit.”

“You don’t think we can trust him then?”

That got a reaction out of Hopper. “Trust him? Jesus Joyce.”

She waved her hand dismissively – “I’m not saying we can. But, you know, do you think he’s telling the truth about Will?”

This, at least, wasn’t so out of the question that Hopper wasn’t considering it.

“I don’t know Joyce, I –“ She could see him chewing some thought over in his head. It was funny, but he still had the exact same expression when dealing with a complicated problem that he’d had back in high school. Like no time at all had passed and they were still two kids sharing cigarettes and cheating off each other in maths. She wondered what little quirks Will and Jonathan would still have when they were forty. Whether Jonathan would still look at his feet whenever he lied. Whether she’d be able to look at Will and see the same smile.

Hopper seemed to have reached some kind of decision. “I asked him about the girl.”

“El?”

“Yeah, the one they were experimenting on…”

Joyce twisted her fingers nervously, “Is she…?”

“I don’t know. He said she was better and ‘doing pretty well’ whatever that means.” Hopper paused. “Said she misses her friends.” He caught the look on Joyce’s face and exhaled. “Yeah, I don’t think that was an invitation to bring Mike Wheeler visiting either. He didn’t seem all that keen to talk specifics generally. Guess it’s pretty top-secret stuff, whatever governments do to little kids with superpowers. Just wanted us to know we could trust the good folks at Hawkins laboratory with her I guess.”

There was a long pause there, as they both contemplated whatever that might be. Joyce thought of the number tattooed on that little girl’s wrist, of those big sad eyes, and felt the guilt down in the pit of her stomach writhe. Not everyone had got to bring their child home. She thought of Terry, comatose in front of the tv – did the little girl even have a home to go back to anymore?

Eventually Hopper sighed – “There’s been too much excitement in Hawkins already. ‘The boy who came back to life dead again’ is too much of a headline, even for the Hawkins Post. Whatever their true intentions, they’ve sent in the good cop because they need us to play along, not cause another stink.”

“So Will’s safe then.”

“For now,” Hopper said.

It wasn’t until Joyce was seeing him out that he turned back to her. “The girl…”

Joyce nodded. “You’ll try and find out?”

That look in Hopper’s eye had changed any either. That one that said damn the consequences. The one that said he wasn’t beaten yet.

Once his truck had pulled out of the drive, Joyce looked at the clock again. It was only half an hour till Will finished school now. She could wait in the parking lot.

…

There was a great many things Scott Clarke loved about teaching, but the AV club was definitely one of his favourites. A determined teacher could get even the most stubbornly resistant seventh grader interested with the right experiment or fact, but it was always a joy teaching kids who just unashamedly loved learning.

And the whole AV club might have loved science, but Dustin was really something else.

Scott leant over the creature writhing on his desk, and wracked his brains for any scraps of entomology that might be lurking in there while keeping an ear on Dustin’s excited monologue. The other kids were significantly less excited than Dustin, although Will was politely watching as Scott turned the thing over, unlike Mike and Lucas who had started messing around with the dial on the new Heathkit. Finally, Dustin paused to take a breath – “What do you think it is?”

Scott gave the creature one last poke with his pen for good measure and watched it wriggle irritably. “Well, I’m no expert, but I think you might be right that this is some kind of beetle larvae. I’m afraid I don’t know enough about insects to confirm whether this is a new species though.”

Dustin was grinning, but over by the Heathkit Mike Wheeler rolled his eyes - “Aren’t the chances of finding a new species of insect in this country like really, really, tiny? It’s not like we’re in the Amazon rainforest. People would have noticed it before.”

Scott paused, and prepared to blow his AV club’s minds. “Well, you’re not wrong that it’s much easier to find new species in places like the rainforest Mike, but people do find new species in North America every year.” That got their attention. “I believe its something like 16,000 new species discovered every year across the world, so the chances of this being something new are higher than you think.” Scott wondered whether Dustin might actually combust with excitement. “I have no idea whether you’ve found one of them here Dustin, but I can recommend you some books to help you identify its genus – that’s its likely family tree – and then you just need to wait and see what it turns into.”

Scott smiled, watching as all the boys crowded round the table to look at Dustin’s discovery. Well, nearly all of the boys. Will hadn’t moved since he’d started talking, and was standing back, eyes slightly unfocused.

“Will?” Scott asked. “Are you alright?”

He bit off the rest of what he’d been about to say as Will gave a little yelp and ran, sprinting through the door and out into the corridor. Mike gave chase at once, with Scott and the rest of the boys not far behind him. Will was racing down the corridors though and Scott was soon overtaken as he tried to find a middle ground between the speed needed to keep up, and not looking like a complete nutter. Thankfully, when he turned a third corner, Will was there, being swamped by Mike, Dustin and Lucas’s concern.

“Alright boys,” Scott said, a little concerned by the frantic look in Will’s eyes. “Will are you okay? What happened?”

“I…” Will’s eyes were darting from side to side, and Scott noticed that Lucas and Mike were trading worried looks. “I… forgot where I was.”

“You forgot where you were?” Scott repeated.

“I – yes.” Said Will. He looked close to tears.

Scott looked briefly at the other boys for a second. Dustin was mouthing something at Will from where he stood behind Scott, but he stopped the second he saw he had been noticed. Scott would have been inclined to think there was some sort of mischief in progress, if they didn’t all look so concerned.

“Shall I go call your mom and ask her to pick you up early?” Scott tried.

Mike had his hand on Will’s shoulder, and Will looked at that rather than Scott for a moment. “Um, no, we can just go back. Sorry… I, didn’t mean to cause a fuss.”

Scott wondered whether to challenge this, but decided in this case perhaps discretion was the better part of valour. He’d bring it up quietly with Mrs Byers when she came to pick Will up. No need to poke at whatever trauma this might be unless it was truly necessary. “Well, just let me know if you need a drink of water or want to just sit quietly there Will.” He paused as Will shook his head slightly and then continued, “but in that case, I believe we were helping Dustin make his name as an entomologist?”

The rest of the hour passed fairly unremarkably, although Scott noticed all the boys gravitating around Will, keeping him the centre of attention – if with the air of people who thought he might drop dead at any moment. It made Scott wonder if needed to gently bring up the topic of the school counsellor with his class again. Kids were resilient, but the hysteria surrounding Will’s disappearance had made an impact on lots of the kids, and Mike’s grades hadn’t yet recovered from their pre-Christmas slump.

At the end Scott walked Will to the car where Joyce Byers was waiting. They were initially accompanied by the other boys with their bikes, but Mike, Dustin and Lucas had grudgingly cycled away when he suggested it in an attempt to give Will some privacy for this discussion.

Mrs Byers hastily stubbed out a cigarette when she saw them. “Hi sweetie, did you have a nice time at AV club?”

Will made a noncommittal noise, eyeing Scott a bit nervously.

Joyce’s eyes flickered between them. “Um, thank you for walking Will out Mr Clarke, is anything the matter?”

“No, Will just had a bit of a wobble during AV club and I just thought I’d make sure you knew.”

“A wobble?” Mrs Byers’s voice had gone flat with worry. “What’s a wobble?”

Next to him, Will shrugged, shoulders up around his ears and eyes firmly fixed on the floor.

“I’m sure Will is probably the best person to talk too, but there was a moment where he said he didn’t know where he was. Maybe for a minute or so? I just wanted to make sure you were aware.”

As he was speaking, Mrs Byers had seized Will and was looking him over franticly, as if she searching for an injury.

“Mom,” Will croaked, and then louder “Mom.”

Mrs Byers seized Will’s face in her hands and Scott wondered if he ought to leave them to it.

“Yes baby?”

“Can we uh… talk about it at home?”

Mrs Byer’s eyes searched Will’s face over one last time, before she visible steeled herself. “Of course – why don’t you just get in the car?”

As Will slouched off, she turned back to Scott. “Thank you for telling me. He was okay though when he, uh, woke up?”

Scott smiled, “just a little confused I think.”

He watched as they drove away, mind churning with concerns and worry, before turning to retrieve his pile of paperwork. Hanging about in the parking lot wasn’t going to fix anything, and it definitely wasn’t going to get this morning’s pop quiz graded.

…

The moment they were out of view of the school, Mike pulled over his bike and waited as Dustin and Lucas skidded to a halt behind him.

Dustin dropped his handlebars with a huff – “why are we stopping? Aren’t we heading to check the woods behind Benny’s diner?”

There was something hot surging in Mike’s chest. A big lump somewhere in his intestines that was steadily turning his blood to acid. “Will… I mean, that didn’t seem normal to you guys, right? There’s something really wrong with Will isn’t there?”

Lucas scuffed his shoe in the dirt and looked back towards the parking lot. “That didn’t look good to me.”

The lump in Mike’s chest panged in agreement. It was like the crack that had opened up when El had disappeared had solidified with Will’s confusion. Turned into something angry.

“Maybe, maybe Will was telling the truth,” Dustin tried. He didn’t sound convinced by his own argument. “Like when you wake up and don’t know where you are for a second?”

“Only Will wasn’t asleep,” said Lucas. “I mean, he didn’t look asleep to you did he? Just, one minute he was there, the next he was…”

“Gone.” Mike finished. He paused, studying the flaking rubber of his handlebars. “I don’t think we should go into the woods today, Will… Will needs us.” The thing in his chest loosened a little bit with the decision, but he could see Dustin and Lucas exchanging looks.

“What?” Mike said, sharply.

Lucas squared his shoulders with a grimace. “Mike, do you really think we’re gonna find El in the woods?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Mike spat out.

“Just,” Dustin ventured. “I mean, it’s been two months Mike and…”

“We were just wondering, if maybe El’s not hiding in the woods.” Lucas finished. “It’s freezing, and my dad says there’s basically nothing to eat out there in the winter. And, well, shouldn’t we have seen some sign of her by now?”

“What! Are you saying we should give up, that El’s… that she’s…” Mike couldn’t finish that thought. Couldn’t get past the image of her lying lifelessly in the leaf litter. Alone.

“No. No.” Said Lucas, with an attempt at confidence. “Just, if you were on the run from the bad men, would you stay in Hawkins? It’s got to be like, ten times more dangerous for El here than any other town right? Especially now the bad men showed her photo to all our parents. Staying here is just, crazy dangerous.”

“And El’s smart.” Dustin picked up when Lucas tailed off. “She has to know that she’ll be safer in Indianapolis or Chicago or New York or one of those places.”

“Indianapolis? El didn’t even know what school was until we told her.”

Lucas sighed, “If you think El is hiding in these woods then we’ll keep looking for her Mike. But if she’s not… Will needs us.”

It was a hole, a hole in Mike’s chest.

A hole where El should be. A hole where Will should be.

He turned his bike around, back in the direction of the Byer’s house. “Come on,” he said. “Will needs us.”

…

And so Will found himself once again at Hawkins’ General Hospital, waiting to be seen by a doctor.

He had already been seen by one doctor, but faced with Will’s symptoms (heavily edited to avoid mention of the Upside-Down) he’d just given them a tight smile and said they’d do better talking to a specialist. Which was who they were waiting for now.

Will opted to stop staring at the waiting room clock and start looking at his sneakers instead. When he gave his feet an experimental kick, they made a horrible squeak on the linoleum and he saw his mom jump next to him. This made him feel a little bit guilty, so he decided not to do that again.

Pre-Upside-Down, Will had only visited the hospital once when he’d broken his arm falling from a tree in the backyard. Post-Upside-Down, he had spent so many bored hours in this waiting room that he had read all of the magazines cover to cover (and discovered that not one of them was anymore recent than ’81).

Maybe this was just his life now. Flashbacks, hospital waiting rooms, and a tight feeling in his chest which never seemed to go away. Maybe things just wouldn’t get better. Maybe this was it?

When the specialist finally arrived, he recommended a psychiatrist in Indianapolis.

A month later, and after watching his mom hand over more money than Will knew they could afford, that psychiatrist would recommend a different doctor in Cincinnati.

…

Karen Wheeler tried her best, she really did. But while her magazines covered dealing with your daughter’s first boyfriend, taking up hems, the dangers of rock and roll music, and cooking the perfect casserole, they were significantly lighter on what to do when your son got caught up in some government coverup. Or manipulated by a Russian child-agent. Or buried and then regained a friend.

How did you comfort your son when he wouldn’t even tell you what was hurting him? When the mass of men with guns and badges that tore your house apart hunting for your little boy then told you to just go back to living your life as normal? When despite your best efforts, normal had begun to feel like a front she put on for Holly and Ted (and for the neighbours, the school, her mother, the rest of the girls at gym…)

Sometimes, normal is all you have.

“Do you think we should try and get Mike to open up to us again?” she asked Ted.

Ted furrowed his brow, eyes never leaving the tv – “Get him to open up to us about what?”

Karen stared at him, hard. “Get him to open up to us about what happened in November.” She tried to keep her tone steady. “About how he’s clearly still upset?”

There was a long pause, in which Ted blinked uncomprehendingly at the tv before finally turning to face her. “I thought Mike was acting normally. Or normal for our son anyway. He’s still playing dress-up games, riding that bike everywhere and fighting with Nancy - right? It’s hardly like he’s spending all of his time crying in his room.”

Karen needed a moment to digest that particular set of statements. “Just because Mike isn’t – I don’t know – getting into fights and sobbing over dinner, that doesn’t mean nothing’s wrong! You must have noticed him acting out and spending all that time in the basement on his own.”

She was getting nothing but vague confusion from Ted (well wasn’t that familiar). Sometimes his inability to notice things made Karen feel like she was quietly going insane.

“He’s becoming a teenager”, Ted eventually said, in that tone he always used when he thought she was getting worked up over nothing. “Boys are just like that sometimes. God knows we dodged a bullet with Nancy.” And then, tacked on when he saw her eyebrows drawing together – “But I can talk to him if you think it’s a good idea.”

Karen very consciously unclenched her jaw and took a sip of wine. “I just think we need to give him another opportunity to talk to us about everything that happened.”

And that was that, and they went back to watching tv.

Tom Selleck was just in the middle of interrogating a drug dealer when Ted looked back over and said - “You know what’s good for boys Mike’s age? Team sports.”

Karen took another sip of wine. Then another.

…

Jim almost dropped the phone, half-convinced for a moment that he had just hallucinated the last few sentences.

“What?” He asked, dumbly.

“Why don’t you come in and speak to El yourself,” Owens repeated patiently on the other end of the line. “Then you can ask her all of these questions and perhaps even believe the answers, rather than just grilling me endlessly over the phone?”

Apparently, the doc wasn’t a fan of his new weekly phone call. Well good for him, this didn’t mean Hopper was going to suddenly start trusting him. Or wasn’t planning on capitalising on this moment.

“This afternoon.” Said Hopper, firmly.

“Hmm…” Said the phone. There was a pause. “I was thinking next week.”

“This afternoon,” Jim said again, sounding as firm as he could without outright ordering the man. “Or have you got something to hide?”

Another pause. “This is a working facility trying to keep highly dangerous material from leaking into your town, you understand that right?”

Jim rolled his eyes, well aware that the man couldn’t see him do it. He figured his icy silence would do the job for him anyway.

Owens’ sigh was audible over the phone. Well join the club buddy, Jim thought (maybe a bit uncharitably). To be fair, he hadn’t felt the urge to punch this suit half as much as the last one.

“Half two,” Owens said. “We’re running an experiment this afternoon. You can watch and then speak to the kid afterwards. Don’t be late.”

Chapter Text

The lab was exactly how Hopper remembered it, right down to the overly pushy security.

He was just in the middle of an argument with some MP who didn’t want to let him into the lobby until he’d received radio confirmation, when Owens breezed in with a cheery attitude more suited for welcoming someone into a family restaurant than a secret government lab.

“Hey there Chief! You can let him through Leo”, Owens waved Jim past the frustrated looking MP with a casual look he didn’t buy for one minute. “ – sorry about all the security, ‘fraid you caught me on rather short notice and I didn’t have time to organise a pass for you.”

Hint received and ignored.

Jim let himself be ushered through the lab with minimum fuss, focused on seeing the kid. It was tempting to just tune the doctor’s attempts at banter out, but he forced himself to pay a little bit of attention, just in case there was anything useful hidden in there. There wasn’t.

The kid looked well-fed, alert, and calm. She was wearing real clothes, and her hair had been allowed to grow out a couple of inches. She was also looking at him with that stunned wide-eyed expression that made Jim feel uncomfortably aware that he didn’t really know how to talk to kids anymore.

There was a long silent moment. Jim looked at the kid. The kid looked at Jim. Owens looked at them both, an expression hovering somewhere between concerned and mildly amused slowly climbing his face. As it reached his eyebrows he broke the silence.
“Alright kiddo, not sure if you’d remember…”

“Hey kid,” said Jim, completely interrupting the doctor. “I’m, er… Hopper. Jim – James - Hopper, but everyone calls me Hopper.” The kid was still looking at him blankly. Owens had stopped talking when he’d interrupted and gone back to watching them, amusement now firmly planted on his face. Hopper decided to keep ignoring him. “But you can call me Hopper – or Hop.”

Silence. Not even the random background scientists seemed to be talking. Didn’t they all have jobs to be doing? He’d kind of figured the government goons would have slightly more subtlety than Powell and Callahan when it came to eavesdropping.

It felt like about a year before the kid cocked her head slightly, eyes still large enough to count as some kind of superweapon. “Hop?”

Hopper cleared his throat, loudly. Then he did it again. Jesus, didn’t Owens have anything better to do than look at him? “Uh, yeah sure. That’s me, Hop.” He’d had a plan. Hadn’t he? “And you’re…?”

“El.” Said the kid firmly, then her eyes flickered behind him and she was walking past Jim, to look down the hall they’d just come down. Jim turned after her, feeling extremely wrong-footed as she examined the empty corridor with an expectant, hopeful look that was quickly crumbling into something far too solemn for a kid that age. Jim had felt like a bit of a bastard many times in his life, he’d practically trademarked it over the course of his many flings since losing Sarah, but never before had he felt so much like he’d committed some cardinal sin by not being a twelve-year-old boy. Or Joyce, probably Joyce would have been better too.

“I uh, just wanted to check and see how you were doing,” Jim said, as the kid turned back towards him.

There was another pause, as she studied him, brow wrinkled in concentration while she decided whether to forgive him for not being Mike Wheeler or x-rayed his mind or god knows what. “How… you were doing?”

This wasn’t going well. “Yeah, you know, whether the Doc was actually feeding you and all that.”

That solemn look was back. “I had Eggos for breakfast,” she proclaimed, with the tone of someone revealing one of the universe’s more important secrets.

Kids. Thankfully Owens decided to jump back in here, before Jim could give in to the temptation to just take his revolver and put himself out of his misery right there and then. He noticed that the volume in the rest of the room had suddenly risen again now he wasn’t actively floundering. Maybe he was too hard on Powell and Callahan, they were apparently at least as subtle as the government’s finest.

“The Chief – Hop” Owens smirked “is here to watch while we run this little test and then maybe you could take him and show him your room afterwards? I’m sure he’d be thrilled to play a game of Monopoly with you.”

Jim was torn between the urge to thank the man for the save, and possibly punch him for volunteering him for one of the world’s lengthiest board games. Still, it was probably the best opportunity he would have. He compromised by saying nothing, and let himself be shuffled off to the side of the room. He watched intently as Owens attached electrodes to the kid’s head, checking out the other scientists in the room just long enough to memorise their faces for reference.

Whatever the experiment was, it involved a lot of equipment, but didn’t seem to have the kid doing anything more than occasionally describing something for Owens while a radio crackled merrily in the background with the occasional sounds of a man talking to himself.

When everything was over Jim stayed watching as Owens talked jovially to El and the rest of the scientists took their readings and muttered among themselves. If Jim focused just on the kid, the atmosphere felt almost familiar. He’d seen that odd old-young look before on many of the children in the hospital with Sarah – the ones who’d been sick for so long that they basically grown-up on the ward rather than at home. But the kid, El, she wasn’t sick. And this was no hospital.

…

El had been talked down from Monopoly to snakes and ladders. She had mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, she was better at snakes and ladders than monopoly, which had too many rules. But on the other hand, she didn’t get to play Monopoly as much because it took so long. Even Frank had only agreed to play with her a few times. And two of those times he’d made her go to bed before they could finish the game.

El won two games of snakes and ladders before Hop had enough. He was staring at her a lot, which was normal, but he also kept staring at everything else in her room with a concentrating face. Or at least she thought it was a concentrating face. It might have been an angry face, but he was still being nice to her so she thought probably not.

“So this is your bedroom huh kid?” Said Hop.

El nodded. She wondered whether she could persuade Hop to play chess.

“You spend a lot of time in here?”

Time was complicated. Time in the lab with Papa had been lonely and also forever. Time with Mike had been so much and so fast. But time with Sam had a ‘schedule’. Days always took the same amount of time, except when they didn’t because she was bored. Things always happened the same but she could change things. Every Monday Sam came to his office, but if she went outside she would not see him, and if she brought the chess set they would play, and if she kept moving the things in his room he would pinch his nose and tell her to go somewhere else. Sam had 3:15 like Mike, but it meant something different.

El was not certain how to communicate this to Hop. Eventually she nodded gravely and stood up. He was concentrating, but she thought he was also tired. And Dustin said when you were tired you needed chocolate pudding to recharge your batteries.

“Pudding.” El told Hop, and took him to the canteen. Hop followed, though he was still doing a lot of staring. Not at her though. The doctors weren’t staring at her either. They stared at Hop instead. Two of the bad men got really close to him to stare and didn’t even look at her. And when Hop stepped forward and stared back one of them took a step backwards and they left.

When they got to the canteen, El took Hop up to the counter where the nice lady called Marlene was. Hop stared at her too.

“Pudding.” El said.

“It’s a Thursday sweetheart, we have fruit and custard today. And you know you can’t have dessert until you’ve eaten your vegetables.”

El shook her head, “No. Hop… needs pudding for his batt-eries.”

Marlene looked at Hop and smiled. “Well, I think I can make an exception just this once, for his batteries.”

Once El had two pudding cups – which Hop carried for her – they went and sat down at El’s favourite table. El opened Hop’s pudding and pushed it towards him. “Eat.”

Hop looked at her. “Uh sure kid.”

Once El was sure that he was actually eating it, if not with the attention that chocolate pudding deserved, she turned her attention to her own pudding, frowning when she got it on her sleeve. She tried to examine the pudding-y sleeve, but this just resulted in her hitting her face with the spoon she was still holding, and then she had pudding there as well.

Hop snorted and got up - “here kid.” He rolled up the pudding-y sleeve first and then the other one. “Now eat your pudding.” Then he ruffled her hair and sat back down again.

When El finished her pudding, Hop gave her the rest of his, saying that he had enough for his batteries. El was a bit sceptical, but after some thought she ate his pudding too.

Once she was done, El took Hop to see all the other places in the lab, and watched as he stared at everyone. Eventually he had to leave though. Sam showed up when she was showing Hopper the room where the white coats were kept and told Hop this and he agreed even though he looked a bit grumpy. El followed them as far as the main door.

Just as Hop was leaving, he turned back towards her and ruffled her hair again and said “I...” And then he paused for a bit looking upset and then said, “uh bye kid.” And then Hop left.

El waited a few moments until Sam and Hop had said goodbye, and the car was pulling away, before she followed Hop's truck out to the main gate. From behind the barrier, she could just see the lights as he drove away. Back to Hawkins. Back to Mike.

El stayed there until Susie came to get her for dinner.
…

When Will got home from school, he found Chester in his bed whimpering. The sight made his stomach twinge with fear, but when he turned to look at the lights and then out the window at the sky everything was normal. No flickering, no ash, just a jolt of self-loathing for being so afraid. Chester whined again.

“Mom?”

“Yes sweetie?” His mom appeared almost instantly around his bedroom door.

Will sat down on the bed next to Chester, who immediately gave up his current position to wriggle into Will’s lap, even though he didn’t fit at all lying down like that.

“I think something’s wrong with Chester.” Chester buried his nose in the crook of Will’s knee, as if agreeing. Or hiding.

His mom frowned. “He’s been a bit off all day. Probably ate something from the woods again.”

Chester whined again, but didn’t seem to have enough energy left to respond any more than that. Will ran a hand over Chester’s wiry fur, but the dog didn’t even wag his tail, just kept looking mournfully up at him through one eye.

“I should – I’ll just go put dinner on,” his mom said, reluctantly. She didn’t close his bedroom door all the way.

Chester sighed a little, lying still in Will’s lap. After a short pause, in which Will figured his mom had probably gone and smoked a cigarette, he heard her start clattering about in the kitchen, the sound of the radio echoing soft and washed out through the wall. Will shuddered and closed his eyes, trying to focus on the warmth of Chester’s wiry head, but it was too late. Ash fell softly in the corner of his vision, drifting in the air currents as he breathed in and out. The noises his mom made were truly muted now, barely discernible unless you were listening hard for them. Or for something else. For the monster.

Will jolted back to reality when Chester lifted his head slightly to whine again, and gave him a thankful stroke.

He was still sat there when Jonathan got home from his shift at the Hawk. Will knew this because the first thing Jonathan did – the first thing he always did now – was come and find Will and check he was still there. Jonathan didn’t say that’s what he was doing, but Will wasn’t stupid. Even if he was, there were only so many times you could wake up in the middle of the night to find either Mom or Jonathan peering at him from the doorway before even a brain-dead troll with an intelligence score of one would have got it.

“Hey buddy, what are you doing?”

“Just petting Chester.”

“Oh yeah?” Jonathan said as he came further into the room. “What did he do to deserve all this attention huh?”

Will swallowed. It was a memory now, for sure. After the Demogorgon took him. Curled up in the same position he was now in a cold echo of his own bedroom, lost and frightened and listening to Chester’s disembodied whines. Torn between yelling for his mom or Jonathan and staying quiet in case the monster came back. Knowing there was no point anyway, that no one was home except for Chester. And then the sudden feeling of warmth, like Chester had stopped circling and sat on his lap. Like if he closed his eyes (he couldn’t close his eyes. What if the monster came back) he would be able to feel Chester’s hot breath on his face.

Will shrugged, “I guess…he was there – you know?”

“There?” Jonathan asked, with that concerned older brother expression he wore all the time now.

“The night it got me, the night the Demogorgon got me.”

Chester had stood between Will and the Demogorgon and actually barked at it to go away. It hadn’t worked, even the neighbourhood cat wasn’t scared of Chester, but he had tried.

Jonathan’s face froze. Will watched with wide eyes, trying to work out what he’d said to make Jonathan look that… scared.

“Jonathan?” Will asked, “Are you…”

“I’m sorry Will.” Jonathan choked out. Will was alarmed to see that there were tears forming in his eyes. “I’m just so… so sorry.”

“I – don’t understand,” said Will carefully, trying not to start crying too. “What…?”

“I wasn’t there the night you were taken.” Jonathan choked out. “I wasn’t – I should have been there. And I wasn’t and that thing took you and you were – you were alone. You were alone.”

“Jonathan,” Will tried to stop him. “Jona…”

“No! No, I was supposed to be there and I wasn’t and I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“Jonathan it wasn’t your fault,” Will said a little desperately. “You had to work and I should have been fine on my own.”

Jonathan let out a little disbelieving sounding sob at that, wiping his eyes with the palm of his hands from the other side of Chester. “Will, you were taken by that monster and..”

“If you’d been there,” Will said, trying to sound surer than he felt, “it just would have taken you too.”

“Good!” Jonathan cried out. “Good. And then you wouldn’t have been trapped on your own in that terrible place. I could have looked after you. I should have been there to look after you!”

Will shook his head, choking on his own tears now. “Mom needed you here, and so did Nancy, and Mike and Dustin and Lucas. You got me out.”

“Mom…” Jonathan sighed.

“No! She needed you! I could hear it, she was… she was…” Will twisted his fingers into Chester’s fur, trying to stop the sobs.

“She was what?”

“I heard! She wasn’t sleeping or eating and it was my fault! I just wanted to come home but it hurt her, it hurt both of you…”

“You could hear us?” Jonathan wasn’t crying any more, just looking at Will with a very scared, vulnerable expression. “You could hear us. That’s how you communicated with Mom through the lights… You heard.”

Jonathan stood back up from where he had sat next to Will on the bed and started to pace. “Everything I said… oh god, Will.”

“Jonathan?”

“You were lost and alone and being hunted and you heard me telling mom that she was crazy, that you weren’t there, that you were dead!”

Will shook his head, not quite sure what he was disagreeing with. “No. You didn’t say that. And you didn’t know.” He was angry now, why was he angry? “You couldn’t know I was alive! You didn’t! You wouldn’t have said that if you’d known!”

“I…I..” Jonathan went to his knees in front of Will and Will pushed Chester’s head off his lap so that he could hug him, sobbing desperately into Jonathan’s shirt. After a moment there was a sigh behind them, and Chester was slowly working his way into the centre of the hug and licking the tears from Will’s face. A moment later their mom was joining in, abandoning her post lurking outside his bedroom door to wrap her arms around the both of them - clearly trying to suppress tears of her own. They stayed like that until the burning potatoes in the next room set off the smoke alarm, and she had to rush off to make sure the house wasn’t on fire.

The mashed potatoes that night were... different.

They buried Chester in the backyard the next morning, under the tree behind the shed. Mom said a few stumbly words about him being a good dog most of the time and Jonathan told a story about trying to feed Chester his homework. Will mostly focused on not crying again as he watched Jonathan pile dirt back into the ground (he’d been banned from helping, under the reasoning that his ribs were still too delicate). It wasn't really the grave, or the story Jonathan had told, or the fact that Mom was also sad. It was the memory of Chester trying to comfort him from another dimension. Of standing between him and the door and the monster behind it. Scared of the monster outside, but still trying to protect Will. Standing his ground while Will ran away.

Afterwards, once the grave was all neatly filled and Jonathan had photographed it, his mom went back inside, leaving Will and Jonathan to observe it in silence. Jonathan put his arm around Will’s shoulders. “Hey, you doing ok?”

Will nodded. “Yeah,” he said. Unbidden, a different memory surfaced. An older one, one that he hadn't realised he still remembered - the day that his dad brought Chester home.

His mom had been upset because his dad hadn't asked her before bringing Chester home, just bought him off a guy at the bar. And Will had been upset too, because Chester was loud and scary and bigger than he was. But Jonathan had been so happy, had pleaded with their mom to let him keep him. Had made Chester sit down so Will could pet him, and had laughed when Chester licked Will's nose and told Will that that was Chester telling him that he loved him. And then Will hadn't been scared anymore (and had licked Chester right back, because he was only three and didn't know any better). And mom had let them keep him and dad had promised to take them all out for a walk the next day.

As Jonathan turned back at the door to look at the grave one more time, Will hoped he was remembering the same thing.

Chapter Text

“Alright,” Jim studied the board… “I’m gonna buy Pennsylvania Avenue and put a hotel on Indiana Avenue.”

“No.” El scowled at Jim, “No. Penn-is… Penn-is-slyvania is mine.”

“That’s funny,” Jim said, pretending to study the board, “because I’m pretty sure I just bought it. Sweet, sweet Pennsylvania Avenue.” He stretched his arms out wide, opting to ignore the way El used the opportunity to nudge her little dog onto the next square – he’d fudged a couple of roles earlier anyway. It was all part of the tried and traditional art of Monopoly.

When El rolled her way straight into jail he made sure to paste on his most smarmy and insincere tragic look too.

“Sorry kid, guess I’m just naturally gifted at this game.” Jim chuckled. A hotel floated into the air, seemingly of its own accord, and hit Jim in the side of the head. He took the opportunity to sneak $100 dollars from the box while El was giggling. He still managed to look appropriately affronted when she managed to make a ‘lucky’ role on her next turn and broke her way straight out of jail in time to take $750 off of him though.

El looked straight at him and smiled as she did it as well, “Nat-urally gif-ted” she gloated.

Which led Jim to the Doc’s office, and to an argument he was really hoping worked better in person than over the phone.

“I mean what’s even the plan here? You really think she’s going to be happy playing Monopoly and eating Eggos for the next five years?” Jim looked at Owens. “Ten years? Twenty?”

“I think we are getting ahead of ourselves,” Owens said in a placatory tone. “We are taking every precaution to make sure El is safe and happy.”

“Oh yeah safe and happy locked up in a government lab being experimented on. It’s been a while since I read a parenting book, must have forgotten that chapter.” Jim bit out. “Must have been next to the chapter on tattooing kids with numbers and shaving their heads.”

“Alright, alright,” sighed Owens. “I don’t think that’s a very helpful attitude to take. You know I don’t agree with the approach the previous administration took.”

And didn’t that sum up the whole problem, Jim thought. Oh, we might have tortured a couple of kids and murdered some civilians. But don’t worry – that was the previous administration.

His scepticism must have been pretty visible judging by the tired look on the Doc’s face, but he was struggling to care too much. Owens sighed again, rolling his stress ball between his fingers, “we are just going to have to take this one day at a time.”

Well there was a non-answer if Jim had ever heard one.

…

Nancy was in the bathroom considering a small speck of blood on the back of her skirt when she heard the door swing open to the laughing voices of Carol and Tommy. Shortly followed by the familiar sound of kissing.

Nancy squashed the urge to call out a reminder that these were the girls’ toilets, the memory of kissing Steve in here a few months before rising like a traitor and flushing her cheeks pre-emptively. As the kissing started to sound more and more… entrenched, Nancy also discarded the idea of trying to wait them out. Better to move before this got any worse.

She exited the bathroom stall as briskly as possible and bent to wash her hands. Tommy hadn’t left the washroom when she had come out of the stall and no-one was saying anything. At least the kissing noises had stopped. Nancy briefly considered drying her hands as well, but quickly discarded that idea in favour of leaving as quickly as possible.

“Hey, there’s our resident movie star…” Tommy’s voice drawled behind her.

“Yeah,” Carol was leaning up against the drier, one hand still in Tommy’s jean pocket. “I swear I saw you in a film just the other day – what was it.”

Tommy’s grin was filthy now, “Allll-llll the right moooves.”

“Oh yeah, that was it,” said Carol. “All the right moves, starring Nancy the Slut Wheeler. How could I forget?”

Nancy gave Carol a withering look, “Reusing your old material? People will think you’re losing your edge.”

Carol arched an eyebrow back at her, cruel little smile still firmly in place. “It’s not exactly old material. You cheated on Steve once already, and everyone’s seen you hanging around with Weirdo Byers’ whenever he’s not there. Going for round two?”

“Only two?” Tommy joined with his hyena grin. “Nah, little miss overachiever here, gotta be five or six times. What is it Nancy – twice a week and three times whenever you get another A on a test?”

“I’m not…!” Nancy bit off her furious retort, trying not to get drawn into something she would regret. “My relationship with Steve is none of your business.” She pushed through the washroom door, but Tommy was still going behind her –

“That’s funny, cause I could have sworn you were fucking my best friend.” He said, following her out into the hallway.

“Steve isn’t friends with you anymore,” Nancy turned and said coldly, “and even if he was it still wouldn’t be any of your business.”

“Ha,” Carol sneered. “I’m actually pretty sure it became our business when you got with Steve, cheated on him, turned him against us, and then just started using him for his money and car. Guess Creepy Byers just doesn’t have a nice enough ride – although he can still do creepy photoshoots.”

“Bet he takes photos of the two of them having sex,” said Tommy. “It’s probably just how he gets off.”

“Yeah I bet he’s like ooooh Nancy, ugh, ugh, ugh…” Carol was punctuating each horrible grunt with a different contortion of her face, while Tommy laughed hysterically.

Nancy tried to stop the angry blush climbing up her face but she could hear Doug from math laughing behind her, and a couple of Juniors in band uniforms had stopped to gawk. She wanted to just walk away, but couldn’t help the feeling that if she did they’d think that they had won.

God she hated this, being outnumbered by these… jerks… who couldn’t even hear how pathetic they sounded! And the worst thing was that everyone else would just go along with them! It made her miss Barb, who had never said Carol’s name without that ironic twist to her eyebrows which told you exactly what she thought about her. Barb, who had never laughed when Carol made some stupid sarcastic remark about Nancy’s clothes. Barb who had always been there.

And then suddenly.

“Gross Carol,” Nancy let her eyes close just briefly at the sound of Steve’s voice, coming up the corridor towards them. “What’s that even supposed to be – the face Tommy makes when he jacks off or something?”

That shut Carol up and got Tommy on the defensive, shouldering past Carol to posture at Steve, who just swung his arm round Nancy and looked at them all with raised eyebrows like they were still friends.

“What the fuck dude?” Tommy snarled, trying to edge Nancy aside and push Steve.

Steve didn’t move except to settle in, nice and easy. Nancy felt a bolt of fondness through her anger, even as she stayed tense in Steve’s arms. “I dunno man,” Steve said. “I mean it kind of looked like you were trying to pull your shit on my girlfriend, but I guess if Carol really was just demonstrating your technique maybe I do owe you an apology."

Tommy made as if to square up, but Carol intervened, pushing him behind her, face pulled into something commiserating, lips halfway between a pout and a sneer. “We were just talking about her cheating on you with Jonathan Byers, figured you’d want to know.”

Carol clearly thought she’d pulled some kind of ace card if her expectant stare was enough to go by, and even Nancy felt that wary flare in her gut. Like this would be the moment this Steve turned back into the Steve from that alleyway. The moment he’d turn and sneer and call her a slut. But instead, Steve just laughed – it almost sounded genuine.

“Is that really the best you can do Carol?” Then he turned back towards Nancy. “Come on, I’m not missing our study-date for these losers.” And Nancy let herself be led back up the hallway, past a group of guys from the basketball team who’d clearly been hoping for a fight, and out into the parking lot.

“Hey,” Steve brushed his shoulder against hers – “you alright?”

“Oh… yeah. I mean, it’s just Tommy and Carol” said Nancy, trying to sound sure about it.

“Well if they give you any more shit, just let me know,” Steve grumbled.

Nancy squeezed Steve’s hand, feeling a little bit touched despite herself. “I can handle Tommy and Carol, Steve. They just caught me off guard this time.”

He was giving her that soft look again, “yeah I know. Nancy Wheeler can handle anything. But you know, I’m always happy to help. Whether it’s, you know, beating up some horrible interdimensional monster with a baseball bat or just telling Carol where she can shove it, I’m here.” He smiled at her. “With you.”

The flush in Nancy’s cheeks wasn’t anger anymore, and she ducked into Steve’s arms to kiss him. When she came up for air, they were wrapped firmly around her. It felt safe.

“Come on,” she said, “we need to get going if you really want to get that studying in before our dinner with Barb’s parents tonight.”

It wasn’t until later that day, sat in Steve’s car driving to Barb’s house that Nancy remembered.

She had defended Tommy and Carol to Barb. Back at the party at Steve’s house, the one where she had left Barb and then Barb had been murdered. She’d tried to tell Barb that Carol wasn’t that bad. She’d picked Tommy and Carol and Steve over her best friend and then Barb had been murdered by that monster and they hadn’t even cared.

Nobody cared.

Barb was dead and no one cared. Barb was dead because. Because…

…

“Approaching contact site B,” the tinny voice echoed out through the speakers. The room was bustling with scientists and equipment, but Jim kept his eyes on the kid, sat in the middle shivering slightly as her nose bled and the lights flickered softly.

“No change, atmospheric readouts stable.” The voice crackled again.

Jim watched as Owens nodded at the white coat next to the radio and then his voice was echoing out into the lab as well.

“Copy that. Sweep the site and return to base.”

A menacing sounding crackle echoed out of the speakers and the kid twitched, plunging the room into darkness. When the lights crackled back on, Jim watched as a dark globule of blood rolled down El’s chin and onto the floor.

…

“Hello? Hello?”

The phone crackled ominously for a second. “…eep-…site…return-ba… Jonathan?”

“What? Hello?” Said Jonathan again.

“I said ‘is that you Jonathan?’” came Lonnie’s voice down the line. “Jesus what’s wrong with this line?”

Jonathan glanced up at the light, and then back at the phone. “Why are you calling here?” He asked, instead of replying to Lonnie’s question.

“Can’t I call my own family?” Lonnie snapped.

“You don’t bother most of the time.” Jonathan muttered down the phone.

“Oh that’s very mature. You know how hard I have to work to provide for you all?.” Lonnie’s voice complained. “Anyway, your mom called - said Will was still sick. Something wrong with his brain.”

“There’s nothing wrong with Will’s brain.” Jonathan retorted defensively.

“Then why am I getting a bill from some shrink in Indianapolis? Look can you just put your mom on the phone already?”

“She’s not here.” Jonathan ground out.

“Well where is she then?”

“I don’t know, picking Will up from his friend’s probably.”

“Look, just tell her to call me back when she gets in right.”

“Sure.” Jonathan muttered. “Bye then.”

For a second the phone said nothing more, and then the faint sound of a woman’s laughter. “Bye Jonathan,” Lonnie’s voice said finally.

Jonathan slammed the phone back into the cradle with some vitriol. Asshole.

…

“So, what am I doing here exactly?” Jim asked, grimacing at the disgusting grey film on the top of the liquid.

“Making potion,” grinned El. She prodded the liquid again with a stick. Then she sprinkled some grass on top.

Jim looked at the liquid again. It was… mud mostly? Probably. It was definitely quite brown, with chunks of something or other. And what looked like something that had probably once been a snail. Honestly the most worrying part was the container El had it in. If she wasn’t living in a secret government lab, he would definitely have been taking her for a tetanus booster or five.

“Uhuh,” he said. “And what does this potion do?”

El considered that for a long moment, like it hadn’t really occurred to her that the potion might do something.

“Green,” she said finally.

“Green?” Said Jim, “what does green mean?”

El stuck the big metal spoon back in the pot and held some of the gross slimy liquid up to his face with a very satisfied look. A slimy chunk slunked it’s way off the spoon and hit the water with a horrifyingly thick sound. “So green.”

Ah. “Very clever,” Jim grumbled. “I’d like to see what colour you’d turn if I suggested you drink that.” He then had to immediately backtrack when El brought the spoon up to her face with far too considering an expression.

Jim bought her off with Eggos and tried to resist the creeping sensation that he was being played. It was still better than trying to explain to Owens how he had managed to poison the kid in under an hour when left in charge.

…

“It’s a microwaveable pressure cooker.” Ted Wheeler told his wife proudly. “Like the one we saw on the television the other night.”

Karen dropped the cloth she’d been holding to take the box from him, buzzing a kiss across his cheek as she did so. “Where on earth did you get it? Penny went all the way to Brookfield for hers.”

“Some client Frank saw at work today.” Ted leaned over to glance at whatever was cooking in the oven. “Mmm meatloaf.”

“Ted!” Karen complained. “A client?”

“Yeah, apparently they’ll be opening a new store in that mall when it goes up. If it goes up.” Ted amended, heading for his recliner.

“What do you mean if it goes up?” Asked Karen.

Ted sank into his recliner with a sigh, followed by a grunt as a door slammed and Holly came running into the room and flung herself into his lap.

“Daddy!”

“Hello there sweetheart.” Ted kissed the top of Holly’s head and tried to manoeuvre her a bit so she wasn’t kneeing him in the stomach as Karen went out into the hall. He could hear her talking to Michael, or trying too anyway. At least one of his children was pleased to see him. And – disconcertingly sticky? He lifted Holly up to examine her a bit more closely, and was concerned to see quite a lot of jam smeared across her front.

“Ted?”

She had jam in her hair too.

“Ted?”

What? Oh – “Kline hasn’t been able to get a big-name brand for the mall yet – its screwing with the financing. Building won’t go up unless it gets sorted and then Kline would be in the hole for the land and contracts. Not all that surprising, damn thing’s far too big for a town this size” Ted paused surveying the damage – “Why is our daughter covered in jam?”

…

Jim resisted the urge to slam the office door behind him but it was a near thing.

“The security of the United States.” He grumbled under his breathe. “The security of the United States, Jesus Fucking Christ.” A lab assistant came round the corner, took one look at his face, and backed off slowly.

Good.

If this was what the security of the United States cost, he was moving to Canada.

…

It was hot on Main Street. It had also been hot in the Hawk. It was in fact pretty much boiling everywhere that didn’t have working air conditioning.

Will loved it. He’d been sat outside the Hawk for half an hour now while Jonathan finished up his shift and he could feel the unseasonable sunshine right down in his bones. It was great. He was determined to absorb as much of it as possible before the weather changed again (as Lucas had repeatedly promised it would). Still, in just a month or two it would be summer properly, and it would be this warm all the time. Will couldn’t wait.

Hawkins was unrecognisable in the sunshine. Everyone was out trying to catch some of the sun, eating ice cream, mowing their lawns and riding bikes. He could even smell barbeque on the air. And here was Will, perfectly warm (hot even!) with the cold coke that Jonathan had snuck him still leaking condensation. It could not have been further from the Hawkins that had been haunting him since he’d gotten stuck.

Had been haunting him. Emphasis on the had because it was nearly two months now since his last flashback.

The walkie-talkie next to Will crackled and he picked it up to check the dial. Jonathan had been messing with it earlier and it was set to a random frequency instead of one of the party’s usual channels. It sounded like he just had the edge of a transition…

“App… ch—Hawk…-get”

Will frowned and held the walkie up to the sky looking for a better signal.

“No… gg--*” As Will listened intently, curious about what he had picked up, he heard a clicking noise and then suddenly a voice was echoing out the walkie as clear as anything. “-nfected material. Target visible on East side. Proceeding to site-”

The walkie crackled again, loudly, and Will jumped. Behind him, unnoticed in the bright sunlight, the streetlight flickered on for a second, before going dull again.

A door slammed across the street, and Will looked up as a white Hawkins Energy and Light van pulled out and ambled away past two old ladies walking a dog.

The walkie gave one last sad buzz, and fell silent.

…

“Mike?”

When Owens had come to kick Jim out this time the kid had followed him all the way to the car, and was now fixing him with the biggest doe eyes she could manage. “Please?” She added as an afterthought, turning her wide eyes on Owens as well.

Just as well. Jim had no plans of helping him with this one. Let the government sort out their own mess for once.

“I think ‘Hop’ is going back to the station actually El,” Owens said – managing, as always, to add an irritating teasing twist to his name.

Somehow – impossibly – the kid managed to make her eyes even wider at this. Jim flipped his keys over in his hand and tried not to look at them too much.

“Yeah uh back to the station,” Jim muttered.

El tried again, looking beseechingly between them.

“Mike?” And then when neither of them folded, very tentatively, “Dustin?”

“We’ve talked about this El,” Owens tried.

The kid furrowed her brow stubbornly and Jim watched as the light behind her flickered slightly. Yes, this was definitely a problem for the doctor and not for him.

El, unfortunately, didn’t seem to have gotten this message. “Please?” she asked Jim.

Crap.

“Maybe next time.” Jim muttered and tried not to look too much like he was rushing into his truck. When he looked out of the window to reverse, Owens was giving him an impressively dirty look, but El was smiling.

…

The Case of the Mysteriously Not-Dead Hawkins Kid had been pretty interesting to start with. Fairly intriguing as it goes. After all, children go missing all the time – kidnappers, murderers, tragic accidents in the woods – but most of them don’t turn up again post funeral. That’s a juicy little story, right?

Wrong apparently. Well – still fairly juicy as far as he was concerned, but most of the American reading public just weren’t that interested in gross incompetency from their police force. Murray oughta know, he’d died on that hill before. No use dying on the same hill twice.

So, he’d given up on that story, left it to gather dust with the other files in his cabinet. Just another tale of law enforcement sucking at their jobs. At least as far as he could tell, Hawkins Police Department were just incompetent, not actively malicious. Not that it mattered that much when you really got down to it.

Having given up on the Hawkins case then, what to call this. Coincidence? Serendipity? The sort of ripples only caused by an absolute whale of a conspiracy passing two miles to the left and four hundred straight down of Murray Bauman’s modest little operation?

Murray put down his copy of the Indy Star and went in search of some vodka to oil his mental gears. Under the dull lightbulb, the paper revealed two potentially electric stories, separated by the usual raft of banal shit he wouldn’t wipe his arse with.

The first story was not really that at all, although it still told a tale to anyone smart enough to join the dots. Just an advert asking for information on a missing teenager – one Barbara Holland of Hawkins Indiana, disappeared just two nights after William Byers.

The second? A fluff piece about the new malls being built across the state and how they would improve the average red-blooded American’s access to corndogs, Gap and the American Way or some other garbage like that. The article wasn’t important – what was interesting was the picture they had used, showing Hawkins’ Mayor Larry Kline breaking ground on a construction site for a new mall on Saturday November 12th. Just visible in the background of the photo, two black military helicopters, sweeping low over the trees.

Murray knocked back a glass of vodka, and broke out the file on William Byers again. Whale or not, something fishy had happened in Hawkins that November, and he intended to find out what.

…

Hopper was still not sure exactly how it had come to this. He had told Flo he was going to run some errands for the afternoon, ignored Powell radioing in a complaint from what sounded like three very irate PTA moms that would likely come back to haunt him, and driven all the way out to the lab. And now, here he was, sat in a room with two bemused military police officers and one slightly-nervous looking scientist, listening to El massacre three blind mice on the recorder.

Jim clapped at the end, and made an internal note not to trust Owens next time he said he was ‘urgently needed.’ He did not escape the encore.

…

“I’m sorry Joyce,” said Florence, peering up at her through her glasses. “The Chief said he was stepping out to do some personal errands and I haven’t heard from him since. I can take a message or you are welcome to wait, but I don’t know when he’ll be back.”

“Personal errands?” Asked Joyce, but Florence just shrugged, long-suffering expression firmly secured on her face. Joyce bit her lip, and gave up. “No don’t worry. I’ll talk to him another time.” Which unfortunately just left her with rather a lot of it. Time that is.

Donald had asked her if she could just come in for a half day today, and so she’d gone to see whether Hopper was about, to ask him about how things were going with the lab. He’d been pretty cagey about the whole thing, but she knew he’d been allowed to see the little girl they had abducted. Problem was, whatever he was doing at the lab, he’d been around less recently, and he wasn’t exactly easy to get in touch with when he’d banned her from talking about anything lab related on the phone.

Which left her with an hour and three quarters before she needed to pick Will up from school, and nothing to do in it. She could go home, Joyce supposed, but the drive would eat up most of that time, and it wasn’t really long enough to get anything done.

Groceries, she could get groceries.

Or milk and some more eggs for breakfast anyway. And toilet paper. Joyce was pretty sure they were running out of toilet paper.

Thankfully the Big Buy next to the laundrette was pretty empty, with just a scattering of shoppers browsing quietly. Joyce grabbed a cart – mostly out of habit – and pushed it down each aisle, looking methodically at every product in an attempt to kill time. Will was fine. He hadn’t had an episode in over two months. He was safe at school and…

Joyce swore as her shopping cart crashed into the one that had just rounded the corner, wrestling with it to avoid sending it straight into the display of coke cans. “Oh shit… god, sorry!”

The owner of the other shopping cart was pulling a similar manoeuvre. “No sorry, my fault. Shouldn’t have come round that corner so fast. Teaches me to be too enthusiastic about frozen pizza. Are you alright?”

Joyce bent down to pick up a couple of cans that had fallen despite her best efforts and Little (not so little anymore) Bob Newby abandoned his own cart to help her.

Joyce bit her lip nervously, “no, yes! I mean – I should have been paying better attention. Are you…”

“Right as rain, although normally a better driver.” Bob was smiling now, “Still, good to see you anyway, even at the scene of such a terrible crash.” He handed her the last can, still smiling broadly. “How did the Atari go down?”

Joyce flushed. “Good, he loved it.”

Bob looked genuinely pleased to hear this. “That’s great! And how about you? How have you been?”

“Oh yeah, you know,” Joyce made a sort of affirmative gesture, although she wasn’t sure what exactly she was trying to convey. “Well, this is the only shopping cart crash I’ve been in this month anyway so.” She shrugged. “How about you?”

“Ah pretty good here as well.” Bob said, before pausing a second. “Look, I don’t suppose you’d let me buy you a coffee? To apologise for my terrible driving and all?”

There was, Joyce thought, something terribly sincere looking about the way his eyes crinkled at the corners when he said this. Then, to her surprise, she found herself agreeing. "Sure," she said. "That sounds nice."

…

“She’s just a little kid! She should be with her mom and going to school and riding bikes and whatever else kids do these days. Not hanging around here as your pet little science experiment!”

“Look Chief-o,” Owens tried to interject, but Jim wasn’t in any mood to be interrupted.

“No. I’ve been playing nice, keeping things nice and quiet while you clean up your little messes and black ball me about the dead Holland girl, but this ends now.” Jim stood up, letting the chair topple over behind him. “This ends now you hear me?”

Owens stood up slowly, fixing him with an irate stare that took no account of the way Jim towered over him. “And then what.”

Jim scoffed, “And then..”

“No, really and then what.” Owens interrupted, something dark and bitter in his expression. “You take El home and she gets to be a normal child and no-one ever looks twice at her tendency to solve fights by breaking necks? You go on the run from the government in some half-baked escape scheme and get one or both of you killed? You put the lives of those kids she was with in danger again when word gets out to the Russians or, quite frankly, any other world government about the superweapon running round solving mysteries with them?”

“She’s just a kid.”

“No. She’s much more than a kid. And no matter how much we might wish things were different, this is the way things are.”

Jim shook his head, “Those things you said, you could help you know, instead of holding the kid prisoner and sending your goons out to murder us or whatever it was in that little scenario…”

“Jesus,” Owens rolled his eyes. “How can you be so wilfully blind about this whole thing? Do you really think I’m in charge here? Do you think if I just let you take the kid home with you or deposited her back with the Ives anyone would actually let that decision stand? That it would achieve anything asides from getting me fired and putting a bunch of innocent people in the firing line for someone else with a different set of priorities?”

This Jim felt, if not the whole truth, was at least part of it. Perhaps for the first time since he had met him, Jim noticed that the doctor wasn’t smiling. Not the ‘I’m your friend smile’, not the ‘we’ve made some mistakes but we’re fixing them smile’, not even the ‘good ole’ uncle Sam smile’. He just looked tired really. There was a long pause.

“There must be something you can do. Even if all that bullshit were true. There must be something.”

Owens fixed him with a steady look, “What do you think I’m doing now?”

…

Mike had once had a VHS of the Hobbit. He’d seen it on the TV at Christmas, and had begged his parents for the video for months until they’d finally got it for him.

He watched that VHS over and over again, until the backgrounds started to fade away and it was hard to see the action sometimes through the static lines. Nancy didn’t like it because lots of the characters died at the end and she thought the cartoons were creepy, but Mike had adored it. All of it.

It wasn’t until he read the book, and got to the bit they cut out of the film, where Bilbo’s home had been stolen from him while he was away, just like the dwarves, that he really understood what Nancy meant. Or maybe it was only now, having finished his own adventure and having lost his own friends. Found his own home a different place.

Maybe stories always ended before just after the villain was defeated not because it was the coolest bit, but because then they didn’t have to show the hero explaining what had happened to the king or the police or his parents. Didn’t have to bury his fellow knight – or to not bury him after he fell from a cliff or disappeared into a forest or a cloud of smoke. No, the hero got the girl and lived happily ever after. And everyone who was sick got better. And everyone who had been sad was happy.

“Will?” Mike asked.

Will, curled up in a ball behind the steps, said nothing.

Lucas and Dustin were stood behind Mike, looking nervously around from Will to the other occupants of the yard, some of whom were starting to look over in interest. Dustin shifted over, surreptitiously blocking Will from their view.

“Will?” Mike tried again. He reached out to touch him gently on the shoulder. Will jerked, eyes focusing suddenly. There were tears tracking down his face.

“Sorry,” Will muttered, voice cracking. “I’m fine. I’m fine.”

Mike swallowed, and offered Will his hand to get up. Will grasped it firmly, but Mike could feel him trembling slightly as he pulled him to his feet. Mike opened his mouth to ask Will if he was okay, but Will was already changing the subject, and Mike let himself be swept up into the details of the campaign they had planned for Saturday.

…

“You’re joking,” said Hopper.

The doctor didn’t even crack a smile.

“Look,” said Owens. “We both know that William Byers is sick, possibly very sick indeed. It’s also clear at this point that Joyce Byers is not going to bring him in unprompted while there is a single other half-qualified doctor in the whole Northern United States. Now we all hope that there is nothing more seriously wrong than some leftover trauma, but until he’s brought to a doctor who actually knows the full situation, there’s always a chance that it’s not.”

“And bring Will here.” Said Hopper flatly. “To the government child-experimentation lab.”

Owens gave Hopper a very unimpressed look. “I was thinking more bring him to the only people qualified to help. And given the state of Joyce Byer’s finances, also the only option she can actually afford.”

Hopper scoffed. “Perhaps if you really want to help you should go and shake down Lonnie Byers for his child support payments then. You can’t honestly think I’d tell Joyce to bring Will here. Great doctors or not, what am I going to say ‘oh Joyce, don’t worry – if they decide to kidnap Will and keep him they’ll treat him real nice. Maybe even get him some new trainers and a video game.’ That ought to go down a real treat.”

“We have no intention of trying to ‘kidnap’ William Byers,” Owens retorted. “You can’t honestly think that’s why we want him to come in.”

“Yeah, much easier to just pick him up off the street. Maybe fake another death,” Hopper suggested, leaning back in his chair. “The Hawkins’ Post have been having a slow month. It’d give Tom something to write about.” He let that hang in the air between them while Owens sighed into his desk.

“Look,” Owens said eventually. “I know you don’t trust me, don’t trust this. And frankly if nothing I’ve done so far has convinced you, then I’m not going to be able to talk you round. So how about this huh? Take Friday off work, get Joyce to bring in Will in the afternoon, and I’ll send El home with you when you go.”

“What.” Said Hopper. Then, “Hang-on… what?”

“El, you can take her away for the weekend. You live in that trailer on the outskirts of Hawkins right? El gets a little weekend getaway, sees a bit more of the world outside the lab, you bring Will in to get checked out, and everybody’s happy.”

Jim stared at Owens, franticly turning the offer over in his head, looking for the catch. Owens didn’t flinch, just met Jim’s gaze steadily. Calmly even. Hopper would give the man this, he had a hell of a poker face.