Archive of Our Own ^beta

In spite of the horrors that had nearly overrun the town in the small, darkest hours of the night, the sun rose to illuminate a clear, crisp Hawkins morning. Any hint of the supernatural terror slithering just a thin membrane in the fabric of reality away, was shouldered aside by the utter normalcy of yet another Monday in suburban Indiana.

For everyone else in town, it simply signalled the start of the next work week; for the tangle of exhausted, unlikely heroes holed up in the Byers House, the dawn of this new day was so much more.

That did not mean, however, that any of them would not be rising to greet this new day any time soon.

Defeating the second existential threat to loom in less than a year had earned them that privilege.

Those who could slept through the rising of the sun and the blaring of an alarm clock in one of the bedrooms. The kids, middle and high schoolers alike, had made valiant attempts to resist their exhaustion once they were all reunited once more. One by one, though, they’d dropped off where they huddled anxiously in the living room, still awaiting El and Will to regain consciousness from their battles with the Mind Flayer.

Those who hadn’t surrendered to sleep—namely Joyce and Hopper—did their best to set the house to rights, stepping over sleeping teens and stray pillows as they went, and kept a wary watch out of the remaining windows. It was one thing to see a monster defeated; it was another to believe it was well and truly gone.

To that end, a few quiet phone calls were made, and soon enough, schools and workplaces were notified of the “stomach bug” they’d all caught over the weekend. The world beyond the Byerses’ front door couldn’t be ignored forever, but for the day at least, everyone was excused from any responsibilities beyond one another.

Sure enough, by mid-afternoon, reality began to reassert itself. The kids—save Will, who gave every indication of sleeping until next week—had mostly awoken by then, jittery and a little stiff from the impromptu sleepover on the living room floor but starving. They demolished what Joyce had stored in her cupboards, the food in her fridge having been sacrificed for the “advancement of scientific understanding” as Dustin kept arguing, trailing Jonathan and Steve as they hauled the dead demodog out of the house. Only Jonathan returned, Steve having taken the opportunity to escape and drag a still objecting Dustin with him.

Max started getting antsy, then, trading low, worried murmurs with Lucas until she finally announced that she needed to be getting home, muttering something about Billy and his dad that made Joyce and Hopper frown as she refused to meet their eyes. Nancy was volunteered to chauffeur, much to Mike’s vocal frustration.

In spite of his protests, he was eventually herded into his sister’s car, having extracted a promise from Joyce of being allowed to return as soon as Will woke up. He also made sure to crush El in a long hug, though he didn’t push his luck in extracting a similar promise from Hopper. Still, he practically hung out the window of the station wagon as Nancy pulled away from the house, drinking in the sight of El like he was saving up the memory until he could see her again.

El stared right back, staring after the car until she could no longer catch the glow of the taillights through the trees. Then she was left to linger by Hopper’s truck, observing as he spoke with Joyce. Even on the ground, Joyce standing a step up on the porch, Hopper had to duck his head to look her in the eye. Before he turned away and left, he didn’t fold Joyce into his arms the way Mike had just done to El, though she wasn’t quite sure why. Joyce certainly looked like she might need it.

El would have to ask him about it later.

”You ready to go, kid?” he asked, ignoring the curiosity in her gaze and settling himself behind the wheel.

Her answer was to climb in beside him, not even asking where. After all, there was only one place for them to go.

As they drove through the outskirts of Hawkins, away from the painfully ordinary bustle of Main Street and into the surrounding woods, the cab of the truck was quiet. Not the kind of quiet that had sometimes ruled over them the past year: the kind that communicated frustration and anger better than even the loudest yelling. Instead, El and Hopper were simply tired, too exhausted for frivolous chatter or more substantial conversation.

And, finally, they were at something like peace.

They’d need to talk, of course. Probably. For their own reasons, talking had never been either El or Hopper’s strongest suits, but this was the kind of thing that couldn’t be packed away and forgotten in the cellar.

That argument—fury and hurt and fear the shrapnel and the fuse and the spark—they’d exploded into just a few nights ago was only a blurry memory now. A wound already cauterized by the inferno they’d weathered.

For now, it was enough that it all was behind them.

Unfortunately, the silent compromise that reigned in Hopper’s truck was immediately thrown into doubt as they stepped foot in the cabin.

It was, in short, a disaster.

If either of them had paused to think about it, it wouldn’t have been such a surprise. After all, Eleven hadn’t made much headway in clearing up the evidence of her telekinetic meltdown when she discovered the box from Hawkins Lab. And she hadn’t exactly bothered to put away the ransacked documents before she set off in search of her Mama. With the detritus from Will’s purging piled on top, the cabin gave off the distinct impression of having played host to several small, but destructive, whirlwinds.

El nearly ran into Hopper as he paused in the doorway, surveying the damage, though when he finally stepped through, it wasn’t hard to understand his reaction.

He must have realized, when she told him she’d gone to see Mama, what she must have found in the cellar. But to see all that paper strewn across the floor, the sum total of information they might ever get about her existence, was another matter.

He eyed her, subtly he no doubt thought, but El could feel his attention anyway. She drifted to the couch, where the file on Terry Ives still sat, mostly intact.

The rest of the documents she ignored, just as she had unearthing them from that carton. Most of them were crumpled and dusty on the floor, scattered and ignored. A few were marred by muddy shoe prints and some even scorched by the ferocity of the space heaters that had been so instrumental in driving the Mind Flayer from Will.

In spite of this, Hopper was careful to step around the piles, unwilling to lose more information than they already had. Heavily, he sat beside her on the couch but didn’t interrupt as she stared down at the photo clipped to the inside of the folder.

“You know,” he eventually said, gruff voice as gentle as it ever got, “I think we might need to add a new rule. No more secrets.”

El turned the proposal over in her mind. She wasn’t sure it was a rule they could both obey, but maybe it wouldn’t hurt to try. Looking up at Hopper, she solemnly offered, “Secrets are stupid.”

“Yeah.” His grin faded to something more serious, uncertain. “So if you’ve got questions, I’ll try to answer. Or find out the answer when I don’t know.”

As much as had been documented at the lab—there weren’t many memories that El had of the various doctors and researchers who’d cycled through her young life where at least one wasn’t busy jotting down their observations—she knew with certainty that only one person could answer her most burning questions.

And he was—he had to be—gone.

Still, no one had ever offered her this before. An asset didn’t ask questions to satisfy her own curiosity. Information was something she was meant to take, to steal, to learn and relay to Papa without ever thinking much about it. Because it mattered to him, not her.

So, she let herself slump to the side, until she could lean against Hopper’s warm, comforting bulk and he could settle an arm around her shoulders. El nodded. She would have questions. But later.

For now, the promise of answers was enough.

Over the past few weeks, Hopper had gotten much better at leaving the station on time.

It helped that ever since the Mind Flayer’s defeat, Hawkins had subsided back into its sleepy self. The most serious crimes lately were a slate of early Christmas decoration thefts, and even Callahan could handle that on his own.

The fact that soon, there would no longer be an active CIA substation operating within town limits also made a difference.

That was no small part of why Hopper was so eager to make it back home tonight. Dr. Owens had just told him that the “Department of Energy” was packing it up, writing off the Hawkins National Lab as a wash out following the backlash to the explosive exposé that had run in the Sun-Times. In less than a month, the entire facility would be chained up and left to fall to ruin the way it should’ve been the minute Brenner decided kids were fair play in his game of mad science.

So if Hopper blew through the door of the cabin a little more forcefully than usual, it wasn’t any wonder. That El jumped and whirled on him from where she’d been tucked up on the couch, a wool blanket draped over her shoulders but a baseball bat hovering threateningly over her shoulder, was a cause for regret, but even the familiar shame of having to apologize to a little girl wasn’t enough to deflate his mood for long.

“Got good news,” he told her as they sat down for dinner. They were still mostly subsisting on frozen meals, but it worked for them. Hopper’s culinary successes were few and far between, and El wasn’t exactly complaining. It was possible he was putting away bit more than his fair share as they stumbled across things El didn’t care for—creamed spinach never failed to make her grimace and it looked like green beans would soon follow suit—but that she was surviving off more than Eggos and whatever she could forage from the woods was a win he’d take.

El lifted her gaze from her mashed potatoes and meatloaf, raising her eyebrows expectantly. “I can see my friends?”

“Soon,” he said and, to cut off the mulish frown taking over her face, added, “Promise. It won’t be so dangerous in a few weeks.”

“Few weeks?”

Hopper grinned. “That’s when the lab is shutting down. For good. Everyone who was looking for you, they’ll be leaving town. You can be a normal kid soon.”

Eleven was silent as she considered this, taking a bite of her dinner as the considerations drew on.

For one, a future where she wasn’t confined to the cabin, maybe not even under the watchful eye of Hopper, who’d been stubbornly vigilant the few times he had smuggled her elsewhere, was hard to envision. For all she’d gotten more practice this past year in exercising her imagination than she had in her whole life, she couldn’t quite picture what it would be like to live without the constant threat of discovery. The ever-present worry that the bad men would find her and drag her back into the uniform warren of test areas and labs and lonely cells. What would it be like to just go where she wanted? To not have to run and hide and sneak?

She thought she’d found freedom that first day she crawled out of the storm sewer, before she ever met Mike or the Party or Hopper, but maybe this would really be it.

For another, though, part of her couldn’t help but continue to worry. El thought about Kali, hiding out in abandoned buildings within huge cities, always on the run as she sought her own vengeance.

Was sleepy Hawkins, even without the lab or her Papa, really safe for someone like her? Would it ever be?

These considerations and more occupied El all through dinner. Hopper seemed content enough to let her mull, though the longer it went on, the more often he shot her less than subtle scrutinizing looks from the corner of his eye. If she weren’t so deep in thought, teasing out possibilities and repercussions in an endless tangle, she’d find it annoying, an itchy irritation at being so closely observed. As it was, El hardly even noticed. Just like she hardly noticed the movie Hopper put on after dinner—which had desert and men in funny hats and strange guns, all of which would have been bafflingly entertaining any other night. Only habit sent her into the little bathroom across the cabin to brush her teeth and then scurry back across the chill, wooden floor to change into thick, flannel pajamas that would keep her warm through the night.

By the time El found herself tucked in, Hopper already cracking open his latest bedtime story, she was still thinking.

Slowly, the steady rhythm and rumble of Hopper’s voice combed through the knots of her thoughts, letting the flow replace her worry and draw her into at least following along with the story. It was hard, though, to conjure up the pictures that went with the words he was saying, frustrating to know they might not be right. She had been imagining since dinner, and she was tired now. Would the story still make sense later if she only listened tonight? Maybe Hopper would just have to read this part over.

She didn’t think he would mind.

“You’re quiet,” he observed, turning the page. Hopper didn’t read to her every night, but the nights he did, she found herself more like a dam in the stream, the course of the story running up against the walls of her experience, trickling slowly through as she asked questions and began to comprehend.

“Why do you read this?” she asked rather than explain.

“What, don’t you like it?” Hopper asked, already stung and trying not to let it show. Sarah had loved—

He was a little gratified when El’s reply was sure if a bit slow. “I do. It doesn’t make sense.”

“You like that it doesn’t make sense.”

She shrugged. “It’s nice.”

“I guess nice wouldn’t make sense,” he muttered, not low enough that she didn’t hear.

“Yes,” El agreed.

Hopper’s sigh and subsequent silence was tinged with the same regret as always. It happened sometimes. El would say something that turned him—or Mike or her friends—inexplicably sad. Usually, it wasn’t long before they went back to normal, and whatever started their strangeness was never mentioned again.

Sometimes, though, they didn’t. Not right away.

To try and cheer him, she said, “I like these. I remember… Before I learned, they read to me. Not stories.”

“No?” he said, the corner of his mouth ticking up, but it wasn’t a smile that reached his eyes. They were just tired. “There an official handbook for kiddie black ops?”

Her silence was reply enough.

At some point, she’d have to run out of revelations that left Hopper feeling like he’d just gotten the wind knocked out of him.

“Okay,” he croaked. “Yeah, okay. Uh, we’ll save the spy training for daylight hours. Just stick to the classics for bedtime. Sound good?”

El gave a nod of agreement, but she still seemed unsettled, distant. Hopper closed the book and leaned his elbows on his knees, trying to figure out how to explain.

“The government— That’s who the bad men at the lab work for—”

“The United States of America.”

Considering what he’d learned about El’s previous storytime material this evening, that bit of knowledge shouldn’t have come as such a surprise. Nonetheless, he swallowed down that acrid taste on the back of his tongue to forge on. “Right. The government, the scientists at the lab, they wanted you to be a tool, a weapon.” Eleven nodded. This was no news to her. “I just want you to be a kid. And kids get bedtime stories.”

The pinched expression on El’s face eased, just a little. Just enough to make Hopper sigh.

Feeling uncharacteristically earnest, he promised, “Once the lab’s shut down, you won’t ever have to worry about going back to how it was.”

In spite of all her thinking, all her imagining this evening, trying to picture all her possible futures, El hadn’t thought of one where she hadn’t worried at all. Still, she knew enough to know that telling Hopper that would only make him sad again.

So, she nodded, and Hopper’s obvious relief was a relief to her, too. “Okay.”

“Don’t suppose there’s any, uh,” Hopper cleared his throat and winced, “anything you’d like from there?”

El considered. The thought of having to go back to the lab, even now, made some part of her shrivel up. But…

“Lion.”

Hopper nodded encouragingly, but it was clear he needed more to go on.

“He gave—” She paused, frowning. It was true her Papa had given her things, had been the sole source of comfort most of her life, which made him all the crueler when he took from her, too. “Sometimes, I had a stuffed lion. I want…”

He picked up the thread more easily this time. “Yeah, of course, kid. I’ll see what I can find.”

She offered him a small smile before letting her eyes drift back to the book in his hands. “What happens next?”

“Let’s see.” Rifling through the pages, Hopper found his place and started to read once more.

“‘You’ll get plenty of fresh air, won’t you?’ said Mary.”

”’I’m going to get nothing else,’ he answered. ‘I’ve seen the spring now and I’m going to see the summer. I’m going to see everything grow here. I’m going to grow here myself…’”

After the Snow Ball, it seemed like El and Hopper’s life found a groove.

The cabin remained home base, and El spent the vast majority of her time out there, Hopper reporting in to the station for work as usual. But now, she stepped outside without worrying about the disappointed, fearful lecture she’d get when he found out. Her friends made semi-regular pilgrimages to hang out with her, earnestly executing evasion tactics they’d picked up from movies through Hawkins’s back roads and the woods. They were all careful to return home by dark, unwilling to risk anyone looking too hard into where they’d been.

Their caution had even been rewarded. Careful negotiations had been entered to allow El further afield once the weather warmed up. She’d grown like a weed and hardly looked like the freshly escaped mad science experiment she’d been just a year ago. Maybe once the new mall finally opened; she’d be able to blend in there, one more teen in the crowd.

It wasn’t perfect. El was still lonely too often, and Hopper still had protective urges to combat.

But it was certainly better.

El seemed more settled, more willing to exercise caution, just as he seemed more prepared to loosen the reins, however much it pained him to actually follow through.

If the alternative was the kid running off to God knew where only to come back with yet another jarring style shift, he’d just have to adjust.

Carefully, slowly, but adjust nonetheless.

It was one thing to take Owens’s advice, to lie low and keep from attracting too much attention, but it was another to feel even more like this poor kid’s jailer. He might not have a government funded research lab at his disposal, but he was just as capable of putting her in lockdown as Brenner had ever been.

Danger had proven that it would come for her whether or not Hopper stood in its path, just as El had proven she could more than handle herself. Whether he wanted it or not, she’d find her way into the world. Sooner, rather than later, if she had any say in the matter.

More than she ever had before, she found she did.

Of course, she didn’t get to call all the shots. Reluctantly, El had accepted that her introduction to Hawkins-at-large would have to be meticulously orchestrated; she couldn’t just enroll at Hawkins Middle as Hopper’s surprise daughter and suddenly turn into a normal kid. Not least because there was no telling, exactly, how well she would keep up.

Evidently, most academic progress didn’t factor into the training of some kind of psychic spy. Even when the spy was just a kid and wasn’t going to pick up geometry or world history through pure osmosis.

Still, El was determined to go to school with her gaggle of troublemakers next year, thoroughly sick of being left on her own so much of the time. Given the rate she’d been tearing through the hodgepodge of workbooks he’d managed to get his hands on, maybe that wasn’t such an unreachable goal.

The possibility should’ve filled Hopper with pride rather than dread. He made sure to tell her, in fact, just how proud he was every time she summarized the latest lesson she’d taught herself. If he didn’t mean it as wholeheartedly as he wanted to, he would deny it to anyone who bothered to listen.

He’d even deny it to himself, which was why he managed to whistle cheerfully as he carried his haul into the cabin one January evening.

“What’s that?” El was already asking as he shut the door behind him, her eyes locked on the two paper bags in his arms. It wasn’t grocery day, and while it wasn’t unheard of for Hopper to bring a surprise home for her, it was usually something small. A magazine or a puzzle or a note passed off to him from one of her friends. Those came more rarely now that she had her own Supercom, but Max had sent along a cootie catcher the other week and Will a drawing of the woods before that.

“Picked these up from Joyce. We can’t really take you shopping, but I figured you might like picking out some new clothes.”

She certainly needed them. The amount of wrist and ankle sticking out of sleeves and pant legs was getting ridiculous. At least they didn’t have to worry about whatever had been done to her in the lab permanently stunting her growth. Hopper hadn’t had time for a trip out of town, and he certainly couldn’t browse the junior’s sections on Main Street. Not if he didn’t want to field a metric ton of questions about who he was shopping for.

That was the problem with living in the same town his—and possibly the entire Hopper family’s—whole life; no one would believe for a second he had a niece with a birthday coming up.

There was little about El that tracked with the average teenage girl, but apparently, the prospect of new clothes could transcend all kinds of experiential barriers. She lit up, bouncing to her knees on the couch, her history textbook falling with a thump to the floor. Without asking, not that he really minded, the bags were pulled from Hopper’s grip and glided through the air straight to her.

With a chuckle, he headed for the kitchen. Once she was done picking out what she wanted, El would probably be hungry.

In the refrigerator, there was the last of a casserole they had managed to make over the weekend. Hopper doubted it came out right, but it didn’t taste bad. But they’d eaten a lot of it already. Maybe El would want something else...

“Hey, kid, anything sound good for dinner? No, it can’t be Eggos.”

He waited a long, silent moment, but no response came.

El ignoring him wasn’t anything new, but it was rare she’d let a dig like that slip by.

Hopper closed the fridge and went to check on her.

One bag had been emptied entirely, its contents haphazardly strewn around her, betraying the excitement that must have animated her as she dug through the haul. Now, though, that anticipation had dimmed.

“Kid.”

She darted a glance up at him, and though she wouldn’t quite meet his eyes, Hopper didn’t miss the air of disappointment.

Somehow, he was sure, he’d messed this up.

Approaching carefully, he eased his way onto the couch, surveying the damage. Some plain t-shirts, faded but still sturdy, and a few button downs mingled with a pair of brown corduroys with a neatly placed patch on the knee.

“Not quite your style?” he hazarded. If he’d taken a moment to think about it, it wouldn’t have been a surprise. Hand-me-downs that had cycled through two teenage boys’ closets, and possibly Joyce’s herself, weren’t exactly the makings of a young girl’s fashion fantasies.

El shrugged, knowing it was a little silly to feel so put out that none of the clothes Hopper had brought her were exciting. Or pretty.

And certainly not bitchin’.

Self-consciously, she turned her face into her shoulder, letting her cheek rub against the familiar fabric of her jacket.

She wore old flannels and hand-me-downs without complaint, but with increasing regularity, the big wool blazer could also be found wrapped around her skinny frame. It was tonight. Hopper wasn’t sure it suited her any better than the coat she’d taken off poor Paul Erickson last winter, but she certainly seemed to like it more.

“You know,” Hopper said, folding up a few sweaters as she continued to poke through the second bag, “you never did tell me who gave you that makeover.”

Her brow furrowed. Whether it was for the faded t-shirt in her hands—for some band Hopper had never heard of, so it must’ve been Jonathan’s first—or his less than subtle probing was uncertain.

“The”—he had to steel himself not to betray a reaction, amusement or concern or something else altogether—”bitchin’ one. Doesn’t really seem like your Aunt Becky’s handiwork.”

El remained quiet, but it was clear she was simply thinking over her answer, so Hopper let her be.

When she finally spoke, he thought she was changing the subject.

“Found my sister.”

“Sister?”

This time, it was pure bewilderment on Hopper’s face, no sign of the guilt that had tinged him sad and sorry as he told her about meeting Mama, before he ever even knew El. “Kid, you don’t have a sister.”

“Not from Mama. Pa—”

But that wasn’t right. Kali wasn’t his, not any more than El herself was.

It took Hopper no time at all to piece together that little puzzle, and his eyes slid shut as the realization washed over him. “Jesus,” he groaned, scrubbing a hand over his face, though it did little to ease his frustration. “Just how many of you were there?”

El shrugged. She didn’t know.

She had found, as time went by and Hopper stopped insisting she never step foot beyond the threshold of the cabin, that she was remembering more about the lab. Memories had begun to surface, rising to the front of her mind like the bubbles in a bottle of pop. She still wasn’t sure how many of them were real and which were mostly figments of her imagination. Except her imagination had never been all that good to begin with.

It seemed entirely possible there were others like her and Kali. More than possible, given her Papa’s single minded pursuit of his research and everything she’d begun to learn about the scientific process. As much weight, responsibility, as he hung from her shoulders, it wouldn’t be like him to pin all his hopes on one girl.

He probably wouldn’t pin them on only eleven.

Whether there were ten or twenty or a hundred others, though, only Kali felt real. Only Kali had ever been her sister.

“Her name is Kali. She escaped before me.”

“And you found her?”

he demanded, mentally rifling through every single document stashed away in that carton from Hawkins Lab. Plenty of them referenced the existence of other test subjects, but not one gave away their current location.

“Mama. Before, she found stories of others who were like me. Gone.”

“Kids she thought Brenner had abducted,” Hopper murmured, barely keeping a lid on the stewing broil of his fury. It had been horrific enough that Brenner did this to one child. That he’d done it to two, at least, was sickening. But Brenner was gone. Kali, on the other hand… “Where is she now? Is she safe?”

“She has a new family,” El replied, going a little distant and making Hopper certain she wasn’t telling him the whole story. That suspicion flickered away when she shifted until she could lean against him. He had a feeling she’d figured out he could be a soft touch, but it was hard to mind with these displays of trust and affection. “I do, too.”

It took a long moment for Hopper to swallow down the lump that was his heart in his throat. His voice was still a little hoarse as he promised, “You do, kid. You do.”

As spring approached, it was hard to deny that El began to get more and more restless. Maybe it was just the cold of winter—or the contentment that came with defeating something straight out of the comic books her friends never seemed to run out of, all malicious intent and destructive potential—that had kept her willing to play homebody. That month last year where she’d had to fend for herself, cold and tired and hungry, to say nothing of constantly wary, couldn’t have left her with much taste for the wintry outdoors.

But as the snow began to melt and the sun started to shine in earnest, it was hard to justify keeping her cooped up inside all day.

So, Hopper didn’t.

There were still rules, of course. An abundance of caution. But he’d mostly come to accept that if El wanted her way, there really wasn’t all that much he could do to stop her.

And before he truly let her loose in the world, he was going to give her every tool in his arsenal to be sure she survived it.

If he started with the wilderness first, leaving the navigation of crowds and people and actual society for later, it was just because there was nothing wrong with taking baby steps. Not least because she’d proven her wilderness survival skills in spades last year. It never hurt to really reinforce the fundamentals.

Plus, at least in the wilderness, Hopper almost always knew what he was doing.

“This is not,” he was careful to point out, leveling El with a serious look as they tromped through his grandfather’s old hunting grounds, “an invitation to go running off to try all this out. This stuff, it’s for emergencies.”

“Emergencies,” she parroted back, echoing his sternness. But with a hint of mischief in her eye that Hopper did his best to ignore. If he didn’t, he only thought too much about how that look was probably going to spark a lot of decisions that led to even more shouting matches between them in the not-so-distant future. “Monsters. Bad men.”

Hopper had to pause to rub at the bridge of his nose, tipping his head back to the calm, blue sky. Finally, he huffed and looked at Eleven again, a little more humor on his face. “I was thinking more like if you set the cabin on fire and have to build a shelter out in the woods, but I guess your sense of danger is a little screwy.”

It was El’s turn to scoff; clearly, he was teaching her bad habits. It made something warm and uncomfortable fill up his chest. Though, maybe, with time, he’d find a way to get used to it.

“I won’t set the cabin on fire.”

The crack of Hopper’s laugh was sharp enough to startle a nearby crow into flight, its disgruntled caws calling up its flockmates until the clear sky was peppered with dark wings and shrill cries. El watched them wheel, the flurry and noise almost distracting enough to make her forget.

But then Hopper’s hand, big and warm and safe, clapped her shoulder and she was back to frowning up at him.

“Don’t think I haven’t noticed you getting creative with the breakfast foods, there,” he said, steering her deeper into the trees. In an effort to expand her palate, Hopper had caved and brought home a tube of cinnamon rolls. The sweets fiend he’d unlocked was more than worth the way her eyes had gone wide and astounded as she chewed on that first bite of warm, icing-covered bun. “Flour can make a pretty big boom.”

The twinkle in his eye and the scrupulously flat line of his mouth even as his cheeks apple were enough to tell El that this was a joke. She’d gotten better at detecting them, even when they weren’t like the ones Dustin told, which all started with “Knock, knock,” for some reason.

El wrinkled her nose, displaying her distaste for his amusement at her expense like Hopper was no more than the mushy peas he insisted she eat.

He kept grinning, but let it drop and pointed out a likely spot for setting up a makeshift camp. They’d already established she knew how to find and cook game, though Hopper promised to show her how to fish once it got warm enough to enjoy being on the lake. He’d have to brush up on his edible plant life before letting her loose on the local mushrooms and roots; she’d never take him seriously again if he poisoned them now. El also had a good sense for disguising her tracks and took to the few evasion techniques he’d learned in Vietnam a little too quickly for his comfort. That left finding, or making when necessary, shelter.

As it turned out, making camp, even with foraged supplies, was an endeavor made much simpler when one of the campers had telekinetic powers. El could levitate fallen boughs that Hopper might struggle to move on his own.

“All right, show off,” he grumbled once she’d shifted an entire felled tree to lean against a sturdy oak and form the spine of a shelter. With the ease of habit, he held out a handkerchief. The fewer bloody nose stains she left on the cuffs of her shirts, the better. “Don’t think you made it quite big enough.”

She cleaned herself up and tipped her head back to survey her handiwork. “You do take lots of room.”

Hopper’s jaw dropped, and El glanced up at him, already giggling. He tried to put on a forbidding look, something stern and no nonsense, but her shoulders just kept shaking, her cheeks round and pink with amusement and the brisk spring air.

“Well,” he scoffed. “There goes me offering to help you turn this place into a clubhouse for you and your friends.”

Her mirth dried up as surprise and intrigue took over. “Really?”

“I would’ve,” he said, not even a lie. Kids liked forts and clubhouses, right? He remembered something Joyce said about Will having one. Then again, considering one of those friends was the Wheeler boy… It was possible Hopper really hadn’t thought this one all the way through. “But it sounds like you need to learn some manners first.”

El’s nose wrinkled again. Though she’d come around on the fact that joining the world meant following the incomprehensible social rules other people expected her to know and live by, she hadn’t quite accepted that people weren’t wrong about their necessity.

“Ah, well,” Hopper was already saying, hoping not to get her hopes up too high about some remote place she could sneak off to with Mike, “too bad. Let’s head in.”

He strode off, back towards the cabin.

El yelped his name in protest, scrambling to follow after. Her bulky boots crashed through the damp leaf fall and litter on the ground.

There was another thing he could teach her; if she kept that up, she’d have no chance at ever sneaking around these woods.

When he put it that way, he’d let her keep on just as she was.

They’d made it a good distance from the cabin before finding a practice campsite, so it was something of a trek back. Hopper made sure to go slow enough that El’s shorter legs could keep pace with him, but he fought against the instinct that made him want to keep her always in his eyeline, always in range to pull away from some unprecedented danger. It was enough that he could hear her tromping along behind him.

It wasn’t privacy, but it was something like trust.

And it meant that they each got wrapped up in their own thoughts. So much so that when El broke the quiet that had settled over them, it was a complete surprise. But not as surprising as what she asked.

“Is it only me and Kali?”

“No,” he answered before he could think better of it. But then he had to stop, to turn and look at her. A wrinkle had worked its way between her eyebrows, like she was thinking so hard the attempt had dented her forehead. “Well, I don’t know for sure, but those files sure made it seem like there were others.”

El nodded, neither satisfied nor surprised.

“But they weren’t in the lab.”

This time, Hopper was slower to answer, trying to gauge what path this conversation was heading down. “No.”

“What—” El looked more emotional, more upset, than she had in a long time, and Hopper wished he could keep her heart from breaking even if he couldn’t do anything about his own. “What happened to them?”

Regretfully, he had to admit, “I don’t know, kid.”

To be honest, Hopper didn’t even know that the other test subjects of Project Koios existed. There was just one reference to it in the entire mess of paperwork he’d negotiated-slash-plundered from the lab, everything else redacted to hell and back. Anyway, who was to say the program Eleven eventually ended up in didn’t have some other code name? One which might lead to some other rabbit hole of redacted files and bureaucratic red tape before it ever spat up the identities of the other kids who’d been sacrificed to Brenner’s insatiable quest.

He’d tried getting answers out of Owens, but the man had only gotten even cagier than usual. Hopper knew stonewalling when he saw it. If he thought it would do any good, he’d break into the lab once more and tear the place down looking for answers.

But just like he knew obstruction, he knew those flamethrowers the Department of Energy agents had toted down into the tunnels burned paper even more efficiently than interdimensional weeds. Any substantial record of those experiments was as gone as the kids themselves.

“You say the word,” he swore, certain about this one thing at least, “and we’ll do everything we can to find them.”

It was easy to read the sincerity on Hopper’s face, just as it was hard not to immediately accept the offer. Much as she wanted to know if the others, the ones with numbers lower or higher than her own, were safe, if they’d found a place in the world as good as hers, maybe…

Kali had been fine before she found her. El might not have been able to stomach Kali’s mission, wouldn’t choose it for herself, but it was only when she showed up that things began to go wrong.

Maybe there was something festering, rotting within her. But it wouldn’t kill her. Just the ones like her.

El could only hope that, like Kali, the others were strong enough to protect themselves.

“Not yet,” she said, ignoring the worried look on Hopper’s face. “Now, let’s go home.”

The worry didn’t melt away, not even as she stepped forward to hike at his side, but Hopper had gotten better at worrying without letting it get to him. He kept sneaking glances down at her, but he didn’t argue, didn’t insist on pushing his own agenda.

With the woods coming to life all around them, the sun steady on their necks, it was better than enough.