Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“But you don’t— you don’t love me anymore.”

It’s not a question and she already knows the answer. 

“Who—“ he pauses, collecting his thoughts into something that resembles a sentence. “Who said that I didn’t?” 

She can see his cop out from the few metres away she sits. She says it in a way that screams she already knows the answer, even if Mike won’t give her the courtesy of telling it to her straight. Sensing his hesitancy, she cries, “You never say it!” and El looks at him with such determination, like he’s a demogorgon or Billy but it’s heartbroken in a way she’s only felt twice. 

He doesn’t think before he answers. “I say it,” he says, and El’s eyes water even more at how much she wants to believe it, even if the evidence against his claim is sitting in her drawer, sprayed with a bottle of cologne she bought from the mall just so she could have something to remember him by that isn’t empty words on paper, and flowers tucked in a vase with the words From, Mike etched on their label. 

(El was a stranger to kindness before the age of twelve. She grew up in hospital gowns and cold rooms. She could count before she could form sentences because the numbers two through seventeen were the only words she ever heard. El Hopper (—Byers?) grew up with the words “Good, Eleven,” instead of a warm hug and being subjected to punishments that were far beyond having a walkie-talkie being taken away for a week or two. But El thought that changed; when she met three gangly preteen boys and helped save a fourth; when she ran away from a cabin in the woods and found a sister, only to come back and think I can’t leave again. I don’t want to leave again)

She thought it was different when her name was no longer Eleven and now Jane Elle Hopper.

But then there was California and Starcourt and losing-Hopper. 

And now it’s not just California and Starcourt and losing-Hopper but also losing-Mike.

“You can't even write it, Mike!” she yells, voice thin. El’s face is flushed and wet, tears dripping off of her chin, and all she can think of is broken glass and screaming and tugging at her hair when Hopper yelled but she doesn’t think that she’ll have the luck to be welcomed back twice. 

She darts off of her chair and grabs a stack of letters, some yellowed with age and others pristinely white, the ghost of his pen echoing through to the other side of the paper. She pulls off a blue spiralled elastic from around the bunch and it snaps onto her wrist as she tears them apart. “‘From Mike’, ’From Mike’, ‘From Mike,’” she bites out through her tears. “From, from, from!” 

And she hates herself, in that split second; the pause between one tear and the next. “Eleven— you’re being—“ he begins and El wants him to say anything but what he does. “You’re being ridiculous!” he yells and he doesn’t wait a second to continue. “You know what I think of you! You’re the most—“ 

beautiful kind smart “bitchin’” loving capable stubborn phenomenal relentless “pretty” 

( Say anything, she thinks. Anything that lets me know you mean it when you say “I miss you, I say it, I wish you were here.”)

(Something that’s more personal than what he does.)

“—incredible person in the world and you—“

He doesn’t seem sure what to say next. 

And El knows it’s his fault she’s here crying in a bedroom that isn’t hers in a house that she doesn’t want to live in with people that she loves but not in the way she loves her Dad that isn’t her dad. 

But, El thinks, she’s lost so many people and she can’t lose Mike too. 

——

Her feet sting slightly against the cold, crunchy ground. Wind swirls around her legs and sends a chill up her spine as her hands hang by her sides, motionless. 

A man exits a house, hauling a black bag over his shoulder. He lifts the lid off of a shiny cylinder, throwing the bag in and dropping the lid down again with a clash that makes her itch to cover her ears. The door creaks as she follows him inside. The floor is shinier than outside, the smoothness making her toes curl. She’s used to moving quietly and it’s an asset she doesn’t take for granted. 

A strange smell draws her to another room, bypassing the room full of people. The yellow sticks are warm in her hand and she clutches them against her wrists for a second. A tang of something she can only describe as spicy hits her tongue as the warmth engulfs her mouth. 

They’re gone in a split second. She wishes that she savoured them. 

“Hey!” the man shouts and the only thing El can think is bad men more bad men. “Come here!” he demands as she runs, her feet moving too slowly. 

Hands tighten around her arms and she can’t do anything but freeze. “You think you can steal from me, boy?” he asks in a gruff voice. 

She staggers, looking him up and down. 

“What in the hell?” 

It’s only a moment later that something red hits a hot, black plate with a sizzle. The man seems to have calmed down and Eleven is glad he isn’t shouting anymore. Her ears were starting to hurt. He hands a basket to her and she doesn’t hesitate before digging in, her eyes occasionally flitting back to him. 

“Geez. Your parents forget to feed you? Is that why you ran away?” 

There’s so many words that she can’t understand, especially with the heaviness of his accent. 

(She’s only ever heard Papa in his eloquent, well-enunciated, simple words.)

“They—uh— They hurt you? You went to the hospital, you got scared, you ran off, you wound up here, is that it?” 

He’s trying to construct a story that doesn’t make sense to her. One that Eleven wishes was true, years later, when she thinks back and knows what his words mean. 

Hospital? Parents? Wound? 

“All right,” he says, grabbing the food from her hands. Her chewing slows and only then does she notice how sore her stomach is. “I’ll give this back, all right? And you can have as much as you want. All right?” Maybe even some icecream.” He says that word— eye- scream— like Eleven should be smiling at the thought of it. “But you gotta answer a few of my questions first, all right?” 

He seems to like the words all right quite a lot. 

“We got a deal?” 

She stares at him blankly. 

“All right”— and there he goes again— “let’s start with the easy stuff. All right?” She doesn’t know exactly what he means but those words are starting to get slightly annoying. 

“My name’s Benny. Benny Hammond. See?” He says while he grabs her hand— not as tightly as he grabbed her arm—and slides it into his own palm. “Like this. Here. I got you, don’t worry. It’s okay. Nice to meet you, yeah?” 

Those words, she does recognise. All of the men would say those words to her the first time she met them and before they even tried to plug wires into her or onto her. 

“And you are?”

Eleven, she thinks, but she casts her eyes down to the food again. Her stomach aches for more and it’s so close and maybe this man would be proud if she brought it to her lips without moving. 

He seems disappointed at her lack of response and sighs like she’s done something bad. His gaze falls to her wrist and she snatches it away, a strange sense of protectiveness washing over her. 

“Eleven? What’s that mean? What’s it mean?”

She can’t tell him. In all of her picture books none of the little girls had numbers on their hands or bruises on their legs or bloody noses that never seemed to stop running. 

“No.”

(She does tell him, only when he gets off of his chair and moves to take the food away.)

(Even years later, El still isn’t sure she’s ever had a burger and fries better than Benny Hammond’s.) 

(She also knows, years later, that if she ever saw “Connie Frazier” again, she would have a snapped neck before she even had the chance to pull that gun out of her jacket pocket.) 

She’s gone before Papa could even know she was there. 

She runs. 

And she decides that she will never go back again. 

——

It’s soaking when they find her, shivering and sniffling in an oversized yellow t-shirt. The bright light in one of the boy’s hands make her eyes squint in the darkness.

——

She doesn’t like these boys. 

They talk loudly and punch each other in the arm and whisper about her like she isn’t there. 

At least the tallest one gave her a jacket to throw over herself. 

“Is there a number we can call for your parents?” 

“Where’s your hair? Do you have cancer?”

“Did you run away?”

“Are you in some kind of trouble?”

“Is that blood?” 

The one with tightly curled hair and dark skin reaches towards her before the tallest slaps his hand away, Eleven flinching at the sudden noise. “Stop it! You’re freaking her out!” he chastises before the other retorts “She’s freaking me out!”

“I bet she’s deaf,” the third adds, staring at her. He claps suddenly and Eleven flinches again, staring at him with unconcealed disgust. “Not deaf,” he decides after a moment. 

“All right, that’s enough, all right! She’s just scared, and cold.”

He’s right about that. She’s so cold she feels strangely warm and her stomach aches with how full it is, the remnants of a dead man’s food occupying her stomach that isn’t used to such rich, fatty dinners. 

The tallest runs towards a basket of clothes and pulls out something that looks like a rag when another clap of thunder startles her. 

She’s found that she isn’t too fond of nature, now. Reading about it and seeing the occasional plant when Papa or one of the other doctors would allow it was one thing, but in her short hours out in the world Eleven doesn’t like the inconsistency of things like weather and foliage and especially, she decides, thunder. 

“Here, these are clean, okay?” he says, offering a pile of cloth to her. She grabs at them and the soft fluff is pillowing underneath her fingers. It might be the softest thing she’s ever touched. 

It’s even nicer under the skin of her dirty cheek as she holds it against her face. She wastes no time in shrugging off the jacket and crossing her arms to pull the yellow shirt over her head before her ears start ringing with unanimous “no!”s yelled in various states of distress. 

She turns back to them to see all three of their faces bright red like the blood in her veins. “See, over there,” the tallest points, “That’s the bathroom. Privacy. Get it?” 

Yet another word Eleven isn’t sure she’s heard before. 

The “bathroom” is bright and cold in the right ways: only cold enough to have her toes curling, but not freezing enough to have her shivering like she was in the wood. 

He tries to close the door before Eleven grabs at it, startling him. “You don’t want it closed?” he guesses and finally Eleven is thankful for somebody who seems to understand her. 

“No,” she responds. 

“Oh, so you can speak,” he says, a light smile playing on his face. “Okay, well…Um— how about we just keep the door…” he trails off, slowly closing the door until she can only see a sliver of the previous room through the crack, “just like this! Is that better?” 

“Yes,” she answers, as he walks away. 

“She tried to get naked!”

“Like, wrong in the head.”

“I bet, she escaped from Penthurst. The nuthouse in Kerley County.”

“…and why she’s so crazy!” 

“She’s a psycho!”

“I think we should tell your mom.”

“Who’s crazy now!” 

“…our houses become Alcatraz.” 

“She sleeps here tonight. In the morning… goes to the front door and rings… mom will answer and know…”

All of their bickering sounds like radio static to El when she can only focus on how loud the water is. She splashes it in her face and reels back as the dirt from her brows falls into her eyes. Blinking quickly and scrunching her eyes shut, the pieces manage to absolve themself. Carding her wet fingers through her hair, El stares at herself in the mirror. In any other circumstance, she would gently guide the stray water out of her ears and off of her shoulders, the sticky left over of her large yellow t-shirt like a damp reminder of Benny and that thing he called strawberry icecream. But she finds that even the thought of moving or finding or searching settles uneasily in her weary bones. 

When she leaves, the shorter two are ushered out as the tallest with unruly black hair directs her into a small building. 

The floor is plush with different quilts. El’s fingers run over the delicate stitches and shivers when she remembers the scars on the back of her legs and back and seemingly everywhere that’s covered by the baggy clothes she’s been given. The red darning thread is eerily similar to stitches that always seem to pepper her skin. 

——

“Hey, um, I never asked your name,” Mike asks. 

( Or where you’ve come from or why you were out in the rain at 10:30 or when you’re planning on saying something other than a monosyllabic word.) 

To be truthful, Mike Wheeler would rather be anywhere but in his basement, staring at a girl that looks at him like a threat. He doesn’t know why Dustin couldn’t take her in: not to be insensitive or anything, but it’s just him and his mom in a four bedroom house and his mother does little else than sit and pet her cat in front of the T.V. 

Mike, on the other hand, is crammed into a large-ish house with an overbearing mother, an uninvolved father, a Steve-Harrington-occupied older sister and a Holly. 

Which, truly, should’ve been enough of a reason to have this girl housed somewhere that wasn’t here. 

(But then he thinks of Will— they all do— and they know that if a trio of unruly preteens found their “Will the Wise” out in a towering forest with little else than a mustard fishing shirt six sizes too big draped around him, they would kill for them to take him in in the way they are for this weary, socially- inept girl with a strange haircut and the smell of blood around her.)

She regards him with suspicion before holding out her wrist and pulling up the sleeve of Mike’s old soccer pullover that his dad bought him a few birthdays ago that he “still hadn’t had the chance to wear”. 

“Hey, is that real?” he asks with the sort of excitement that has the girl reeling back away from his hand. He curses himself a little for acting so abruptly— his mom would be poking him in the shoulder to act like he was raised in a suburban home and not a barn. “Sorry, I’ve just never seen a kid with a tattoo before.”

(It’s kind of a lie. Mike will never forget the intricate drawings Will used to “tattoo” them with: the red, blue, green and black inks not even budging when his mom used acetone that was normally reserved for a bad nail day.) 

(He tries not to think about Will.)

The black markings on her wrist look like his alarm clock eleven minutes after midnight: a blocky 011. 

“What’s it mean? Eleven?” 

She pauses and stares at him for a split-second, the points at herself. 

“That’s your name?” he asks with a slight edge of horror. Eleven isn’t a name- it’s a number that comes between ten and twelve. It only amplifies how much of an alien this girl is, with her buzzed hair and guarded expression and tattooed wrist. 

“Eleven,” he states again. 

(Mike Wheeler looks back on that night when he’s no longer a boy— no longer a middle-school nerd who would’ve fainted if any girl even took a second look at him— and says That's the night I first used her name.) 

( Maybe it’s inconsequential, but it seems a little special.) 

“Well, my name’s Mike, short for Michael,” he reveals in a quick burst of energy, fiddling with his thumbs while he looks upon the girl in front of him. 

Her hair is cut short, uneven, with some parts showing the pale skin of her scalp that doesn’t look as if it’s ever seen the sun. The brown of her eyes is only a shade warmer than her pupils, and the gaze she regards him with is almost as cold as her cheeks, a flush of life nowhere to be seen. “Maybe we can call you El,” he suggests, flicking his gaze between her face and his hands. “Short for Eleven.”

She hesitates for a second, before quickly nodding her head in agreement. Mike’s glad of her cooperation: El is much less conspicuous than her full name, and if he intends to pull off this whole “hide a russian-spy-mental-patient-homeless-person” operation, drawing attention needs to be avoided. 

“Well, um, okay,” he says, “night, El,” the nickname running off of his tongue easily. She’s quiet— which really shouldn’t be a surprise, Mike thinks. She’s barely spoken a word to him. 

But before he can exit the basement and enter his home— a home that is so different compared to the coldness that seems to have invaded the lower level of it— a small “Night, Mike,” reaches his ears from the tiny blanket fort. 

And suddenly, Mike thinks, the basement doesn’t seem so cold. 

——

Eleven lies awake that night, the sound of thunder too close to gunshots and thinks of Benny Hammond. The night’s events pass her by in a quick trail of hurt and cold and now, Mike . 

She curls in on herself until she looks as small as she feels. 

——

El wakes up to the cold sunlight hitting her eyes at just the wrong angle. She lies there, huddled up against herself, until her brain is empty of thoughts and the silence weighs down on her chest like an anvil. 

When the black box in the corner of the room reads 6 03 (or 6 30?) in a blocky, bright red script, a loud bang shakes the house, followed by a sharp exclamation of “Ted! Holly’s sleeping!” 

Her hands hit against a cold block of metal and it’s almost as if it’s begging her to touch it but not touch it.  

The door to her little room is lifted open before she even has the chance to retaliate. 

(Her panic slows a little when she realises it’s only Mike.)

“Hey! You found my supercomm! Pretty cool, huh?” 

A supercomm. 

El has no clue whether she should be in awe. 

“I talk to my friends with it. Mostly Lucas, ‘cause he lives so close. The signal’s pretty weak.” Mike searches for a reaction but the hunger in Eleven’s stomach and the pain in her throat doesn’t give her the energy to supply one. 

He digs into his pockets and pulls out something that looks like a softer version of a yellow dinner plate. “Got you breakfast.” 

Breakfast. 

She takes the disc from him and bites into it while he rambles on, savouring the soft cloud-like feeling on her tongue. 

“So listen, this is gonna sound a little weird, but I just need you to go up there,” he says, pointing upwards. “Then, go to the front door and ring the doorbell. My mom will answer and you’ll tell her that you’re lost and that you need help, but whatever you do, you can’t tell her about last night,” he rhymes off, “or…that you know me. Understand?” 

Papa used to say that a lot: understand? Like he needed the reassurance that she knew what to do. The difference was, Papa’s plans usually had some logic to them that Mike’s apparently lacks. 

“Really, it’s no big deal! We’ll  just pretend to meet each other again. And my mom— she’ll know who to call.”

Eleven likes the way he says mom. There’s a strange sense of hope that he inflicts onto it. 

She still isn’t convinced, though.

In the brief hours that she’s been away from her home, El has learnt three things. 

One, the ground hurts her feet. 

Two, these yellow disc things actually taste quite nice. 

Three, people can come and go in the blink of an eye. She isn’t sure she has it in her to trust mom. Not when Mike says her name like she holds the answers to the universe in her palm. She wouldn’t like for him to lose his mom, even if she turns out to be quite an unremarkable person. 

El isn’t sure she can rip that away from him. That she can rip mom away from him. 

“No?”

“No.”

“No, you don’t want my mom to get help?” 

She slowly shakes her head. 

Mike considers for a second, his eyes glazing over her short hair and her pale skin and her thousand-yard stare before replying, “You’re in trouble, aren’t you?” 

All El can do is look him in the eye. 

“Who… Who are you in trouble with?” 

Bad, she thinks. Anytime she disobeyed, anytime she didn’t do exactly what was asked of her, anytime she was told jump and responded with anything other than how high? Eleven was called bad. 

That’s the only word she can think of. 

“Bad,” she utters under her breath. 

“Bad?” Mike repeats. “Bad people?” 

She nods her head. Bad people, she thinks. Yes, bad people. Very bad people. 

“They want to hurt you?”

And she thinks of “Connie” and Papa and Benny; the smell of smoke and gasoline and oil. The taste of bubbles in her mouth and strawberry icecream coating her teeth. And she remembers the pool of blood around Benny’s tall body for the split second she had to look at it before Connie Frazier turned her metal scythe on her. 

She puts two fingers to her temple, and then to Mike’s forehead. 

( She sees a gunshot in Benny’s chest and the weapon being aimed at her own.)

“Understand?” she asks. 

Understand why I left?

Understand why we can’t tell mom? 

Understand why we’re alone?

Mike looks at her, horror flooding his eyes. 

“E—“

“Michael, where are you? We’re going to be late! Let’s go!” 

Mike curses to himself. shooting a final look to El. “Just stay here, okay? I’ll be back, just— stay here!” he calls as he throws the soft covering in front of her escape to the outside. 

——

El learns a lot from Mike. 

She learns that you have to use bubbly purple liquids that smell sickeningly sweet in your hair, that you have to find a place called a bathroom before you change clothes, that showers have hot water as well as cold, that mom and dad are people that raised him like Papa did for her, and that school, apparently, ‘sucks.’ 

When he explains what school is, El’s eyes are wide with wonder and her head is filled with the thought of why Mike thinks such a wonderful place could suck; he has ‘classes’ with Dustin and Lucas and Will where they learn things like math and science and English: he can eat in a ‘cafeteria’ surrounded by hundreds of people and sometimes they go in a big metal tube called a ‘bus’ and travel to places like the mall or a museum or Indianapolis on something called a ‘ field trip.’ 

Mike says school is boring apart from AV Club and seeing his ‘party’ and science class with Mr Clarke. 

And it’s science homework that has him in the basement, colouring pencils in hand as he draws a triangle with one line going in and seven going out: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. 

“What’s that?” El asks as she points at the triangle on the page, carefully drawn in heavy pencil against Mike’s ruler. 

“This? Oh,” Mike replies, casting his eyes down onto the page and back up at her. “This is, uh, light refracting through something called a prism— it’s like, a shape, with a triangle bottom and three triangle sides.”

“Why is it black,” she asks, pointing at the light going in, “and then coloured?” 

(It’s the most she’s spoken since she arrived, her curiosity breaking down her walls.) 

He smiles at her, quickly, before explaining. “Well, this is actually white light,” he says while pointing from the drawing to the dingy lightbulb that illuminates the basement, “and when it goes through a prism it splits up, or refracts, into different colours: all of the colours humans can see— a rainbow.  We’re only learning about it in science class now but Mr Clarke showed us an experiment a few months ago and it was so cool, El— I wish— I wish you could’ve seen it.” 

His excited rant comes to a depressing halt as he stares at her. 

Just for a second, El wishes she could’ve seen it too: seen a rainbow in real life instead of drawn on a piece of sugar paper headed with a blocky title in black sharpie. She wishes she could’ve grown up in Hawkins as a regular girl with soft pink dresses and yellow plates for breakfast and enough homework to keep her up until all hours of the night, straining her eyes in the soft yellow light of a basement that belongs to her. 

The word rainbow sounds pretty, with its hard beginning and mellow end. El’s mouth forms to shape the word, repeating it softly under her breath as Mike moves on from his lesson and continues writing underneath his drawing, and it’s familiar in a strange way that has El searching through the file cabinets in her head to figure out why, and even then, she knows it’s not familiar because she’s heard it before. It’s familiar because the word echoes around in her head in the soft mumbling of a woman. 

(A woman named Terry Ives.)

——

“Here,” she states as her eyes move swiftly between Mike and the house.

“Yeah, this is where Will lives,” Mike responds, hesitantly. 

But Eleven knows that isn't right. Will is here, she’s sure. She can feel his presence, frantic and cowering as clearly as she can see the chattering of his teeth and the tears threatening to overflow the cold blue of his eyes. He’s as clear as the swoop of Mike’s hair or the sound of Dustin’s lisp or the strange tone in Lucas’ voice when he calls her a “weirdo.”

He’s here, but no one can find him. A game of hide and seek, even. 

( “Yes, Eleven, just like the game. Find him for me,” Papa instructs, his pointer finger stabbing into the picture of a man Eleven has never seen before. There’s a scar covering his eye and treading into his eyebrow and a cut on his lip. Eleven feels herself tensing at him. 

“Bad,” she whispers. 

“Yes, Eleven. He’s been very bad.”

Eleven searches, the taste of iron invading her lips. “Drop off at Oaker at 11. Do not be late,” the man speaks into a payphone on a busy street, the echo of babies crying and horns honking invading the hush of his voice. 

She’s pulled out of her seeking with a sharp breath. “Oaker at 11,” she repeats, even if the ring of the intercom is enough to tell her that Papa already knows. 

Papa smiles gently at her. Eleven likes the sight of it.)

“Hiding.” 

Mike rolls his brown eyes. “No, no, this is where he lives. He’s missing from here. Understand?”

Lucas and Dustin finally catch up to them. “What are we doing here?” Lucas asks, his frustration apparent. What’s also apparent is Lucas’ dislike for Eleven. His gaze when he looks at her is too familiar to Two’s, Three’s and Four’s when they used to corner her in the playroom and twist the skin on her arms until the shade of red matched the hatred in their eyes. 

She doesn’t trust him, or Dustin, or even really Mike. But, she thinks, he’s the closest to achieving anything close to her confidence. 

“She said he’s hiding here!”

“Um, no?”

“I swear, if we walked all the way here for nothing-” 

“That’s exactly what we did! “ Lucas yells, “I told you she didn’t know what the hell she was talking about!”

Mike stares at Lucas coldly for a few seconds before turning back to El, his eyes pleading for an answer that makes their search anything but a waste of time. “Why did you bring us here?” he asks with more patience than El knows she deserves. She stutters for a second, trying to think of a way to communicate that Will’s here and she’s not lying because she and Mike are friends, aren’t they? She’s helping him find Will and if she had anything that was cool— like “comic books” and “trading cards”— she’s sure she would let him have them, and she said she would find Will. Mike will find Will because El promised and friends never break a promise. Mike said friends tell each other things but El isn’t sure she has the words to convey what’s invading her mind. 

“Mike, don’t waste your time with her–”

“What do you want to do then?” he asks Lucas, anger rising with his tone. 

Lucas scoffs. “Call the cops like we should've done yesterday!”

Mike rolls his eyes again, less playfully this time. He looks at El, up and down until his eyes come to rest on her frightened eyes. “We are not calling the cops,” he chastises. 

Dustin says something but El can only play attention to Mike and Lucas’ bickering, the looming threat of cops weighing on her heart.  “Guys!” Dustin yells and the two fall silent, El following their line of sight to settle on bright lights and piercing sirens. 

“Will,” Mike utters like he doesn't want to say it. El can’t do anything but run to Mike’s bike and hop on the back, the comforting heat of his body anchoring her to the cold November road of Hawkins, keeping her ashore when the rogue waves of darkness threaten to pull her into the sea. Murky water splashes around her ankles as they speed away into the darkness.

They pull to a stop only a few feet behind a large red truck with flashing lights. Mike immediately hops off his bike, and El almost falls before she catches her feet. They run and huddle around the vehicle, watching from a distance as the sounds of flowing water are interrupted by large men in glossy boots. 

“It’s not Will. It can’t be,” Mike whispers. El’s eyes are glued to the small body, dripping and pale in the water. But something’s wrong because it’s Will but it’s not Will. This isn’t Will. 

“It’s Will. It’s really Will,” Lucas breathes, and El thinks it’s the first time he’s said a word around her that wasn’t packed with distaste for her. 

It can’t be him, El thinks. She just felt him, at the Byers’ house, even if he wasn’t there. 

This is not Will Byers. 

—-

“Mike–” El begins, thoughts racing. 

He scoffs, staring her down with a glare that holds so much frustration and heartbreak because his best friend is dead and El had the fucking audacity to act like she couldn’t have been wrong. “Mike? Mike what? You were supposed to help us find him alive,” he shouts. “You– You said he was alive,” he yells, his face only inches away from her’s. “Why did you lie to us?” he asks– begs–, his voice cracking with every other word. “What’s wrong with you?”

It must've been some twisted game , he realises. She’s not homeless or a spy or a mental patient. She’s not in danger or– or anything else. She’s just another Troy, he thinks. His eyes sting and his nails cut crescents into his palms as he yells what is wrong with you? Like he expects an answer. 

“Mike…” Eleven pleads softly, and Mike hates that he still can’t find an ounce of malice in her face. 

“What?” he snaps sharply. 

She stares at him for a second, biting her lip, before she shakes her head, resigned. He raises his brow, daring her to continue. 

She doesn’t. 

(He wishes she would: El is brutally honest– I missed you, I dumped your ass, You don’t love me anymore– about any thought that enters her mind and Mike hates that he terrified her into silence.)

—-

When Eleven concentrates, all she can feel is a creeping sense of dread travelling up her spine and taunting the back of her neck as her nose spouts blood. Mike yells at her again and again to put the comm down, to do something worthwhile, to stop “making his life worse than it already is.”

She tries not to mind, truly. 

(She fails.)

But when the slightly off tune voice of Will Byers swallows the room whole and fills it with a little bit of sunshine, El thinks the yelling was worth it. 

Mike runs over to her and wraps his arms around her when the broadcast cuts out. 

It’s uncomfortable in a nice way and El finds herself missing the contact as soon as he pulls away, his eyes filled with water that he hastily blinks away and his cheeks as red as the blood on her nose. 

She’d like to make Mike that proud again. 

—-

Her head is spinning. The bright warmth in front of her does nothing else but pull her towards the welcoming embrace of sleep as Dustin aims a red cylinder in her direction. Her head is foggy and feels like it weighs ten pounds, and her forehead hits the desk in front of her with a hard thud. Mike pulls her up and asks her too many questions, his sleeve rubbing away the blood on her upper lip. She can faintly feel his arm and someone else’s wrap around her, hoisting her up. 

Her only coherent thought is don’t get the pretty dress dirty. 

—--

Of all things to freak out about, El didn’t think it would be a few faulty compasses. 

But even if it wasn’t worth fretting over, she’s glad to be outside, her dirty legs covered by the baby pink of the smocked dress and her head slightly warmer with the blond curls framing it. Dustin and Lucas walk ahead, talking to each other and bickering, as she and march side by side, and his presence calms her even if they don’t speak. 

At some points in their walk, El stops and looks around for a second, her heart buzzing and her head spinning for no apparent reason. 

Dustin yells far and nasty memories come to El’s head, but she pushes them away as soon as they arrive. Her hands are cold and her feet are cold and everything’s cold and the wig feels less like hair and more like wires. 

“Mike,” she whispers, “turn back.”

Her stomach feels strange, like it’s doing cartwheels, and her head is reeling the longer her eyes stare at the ground. 

“What? Why?” 

She thinks of all the excuses she used to give: I feel sick or I’m dizzy or I hurt my head. 

“I’m… I'm tired”, she decides. 

Mike’s annoyance rises. “Look, I'm sure we’re almost there. Just… hold on a little longer, okay?” 

Eleven looks down the strange metal road. A little longer. 

She trudges along after the trio, even if her nose feels slightly wet. 

——

“We’re headed back home,” Dustin groans, as Lucas berates him. Something about magnets that El can’t even hope to understand but when Lucas grits his teeth as he points an accusatory finger at her, El knows her time in the sun is over. 

“It’s not a magnet. She’s been acting weirder than normal. If she can slam doors with her mind, she can definitely screw up a compass. She’s trying to sabotage our mission. Because she’s a traitor!”

El’s eyes water. “Lucas, what are you doing?” Mike yells as he steps closer to her, his eyes alight with fury. 

“You did it, didn’t you? You don’t want us to reach the gate. You don’t want us to find Will.”

“Lucas, come on, seriously—“ Mike interjects. 

“Admit it,” Lucas demands. 

“No,” she forces out, even if she knows he’s right. 

“Admit it!”

He pulls at her jacket sleeve to find it coated with blood. “Fresh blood. I knew it.” 

“Lucas, come on!” Mike scolds, and his hope in her has El retreating back into herself. 

“She was using her powers!” 

“Bull!” Mike calls, “That’s old blood! Right, El?” 

She can’t answer him because friends always tell the truth and friends don’t lie and even after everything, El still holds onto the hope that she and Mike are friends. 

“Right, El?” Mike repeats, more force behind his words. 

“It’s… not…It’s not safe,” she says, begging him to understand. 

El opened that gate and she couldn’t walk or sleep for weeks, tormented by nightmares of things without faces that smelled her blood and came running. She doesn’t want to know what would happen if someone like Mike was to go through it. 

(She already does know. She knows they wouldn’t come back.) 

They’re shouting at each other but Mike still can’t seem to bring himself to shout at her and maybe that breaks El’s heart a little bit, because she’s the reason they haven’t found Will yet. Every word that falls from his lips is in defence of her as Lucas tiresomely tears her down. Her eyes fly between the two as their voices raise. She itches to cover her ears. Screw you rings out from all parties as El pulls at her cuticles too harshly, fresh blood spilling from the cracks in her skin. 

She’s just letting him die in the Upside Down.  

“Shut up!” 

“For all we know, it’s her fault!” 

“ Shut up!”

“ We’re looking for some stupid monster but did you ever stop to think,” Lucas yells, spitting in Mike’s face as he stares El down, “maybe she’s the monster!” 

Mike looks at Eleven with a feeling she can’t name as he pounces on Lucas, the words “I said shut up!” ringing out from his mouth as they both fall to the rocky soil. 

“Stop!” El yells, freed from her paralysis. “Stop it!” she yells again as they roll around on the ground, fists flailing. “ Stop it!” is ripped from El’s throat as she screams, and Lucas flies into the air and slides into a sheet of metal, his head making a terrible echo that she doesn’t think she can ever forget. 

(And it’s that sound that wakes her up years later. Not her own screams as she is plunged into the pool or the blood pooling around her own feet as her family is massacred: no, it’s the noise of Lucas Sinclair’s head hitting against a pile of scrap metal all because of El. Even if it’s been ten, twenty, thirty years since that day at the scrap yard, and Lucas trusts her with his life, El hears the echo ringing out like a death knell.)

“Jesus!” Dustin yells. Mike and Dustin snap out of their frozen stupor and race to Lucas’ side as El stands there, her mouth hanging open as blood drips inside of it. 

Lucas is a boy frozen in time as his friends’ hands push and pull him, trying to open his eyes or cradle his head. “Lucas, come on!” Dustin cries with heartbreaking desperation. 

“Why would you do that?” Mike yells at her. El is left speechless at the remark: she thought— no, she knew she was helping Mike. She pauses, her eyes glued to Lucas as they were to Will’s body as Mike yells at her again and again what’s wrong with you?! 

(Four words that hold so much more.) 

El wishes she had an answer other than “I’m sorry—“ falling from her lips before her mind is invaded with memories of cold water and a black room and El, standing by herself, feeling like she was the only person in the world who deserved to breathe. 

She remembers feeling all of that power coursing through her veins and then nothing: nothing except for a faceless monster that has her feet slipping on the floor because she can’t get away fast enough. 

She screams and she screams until her voice is hoarse within that claustrophobic little tank. 

She’s as hopeless now as she was then, looking at Lucas and Dustin and Mike and wondering why she always had to ruin things. 

They laugh despite it all when Lucas awakens, his eyes heavy. It all seems okay before Lucas screams “Get off of me!” at Mike, slapping his hand away as he tries to push himself into the metal sheet. “ Get off of me!” he repeats as he stomps away, trying desperately to hide his tears. 

The withering look he gives her before he leaves is enough to have El’s tears start afresh. 

The last thing she hears as she walks away is Dustin and Mike calling her name— no, not her name. 

“El!” they call, almost as if they care. 

——

Red, blue, white 

white, green, white 

red, yellow, green. 

Mike tries to focus on the Rubix Cube until his eyes blur. Anything to avoid from the constant reply in his mind of pushing and Lucas and El. 

He knows he shouldn’t have yelled at her like he did, and he hates that when it rewinds in his mind like a horror VHS, Mike knows he sounds too much like his father for his own good. His eyes burn in a different way to his cheeks as he hears the sound in his head, hours after she’s left and Mike was only left with tired eyelids and a head that yearns for sleep. 

(He stays up all night, firstly rearranging his action figures, then conjugating Spanish verbs, and finally counting to ten thousand and back to zero again, all to keep his mind on anything that isn’t her.) 

The blanket fort in the corner of the basement is like a looming reminder of El and that she’s gone and that it’s his fault. Where she used to sit, legs criss crossed and back hunched, now is a pillow with a depressing dip in the centre. 

Mike hates it. 

The chairs hit the floor with a thump that encircles the whole basement and swallows Mike whole, pulling him into the startling reality that El is gone and it is definitely his fault. 

He whips the blankets from where they’re carefully draped across couches and old rickety kitchen chairs, discarded after his mom haggled his dad into buying a new set. There’s no pattern between them: one from his grandma’s attic, another from Holly’s newborn crib and a third quilt made by his dad’s mom for their first wedding anniversary, with red stitching and fabric scraps from his mom’s wedding dress and some from his grandfather’s old shirts. 

Every single one of them reminds him of El: the quilt tucked around her shoulders, Holly’s blanket held up to her cheek, grandma’s fluffy blanket wrapped around her legs. And all of El is ruining his mind, hurting his head with the amount of thoughts and memories that only seem to be about her. He kicks at all of the pillows that smell of Nancy’s shampoo and his mom’s laundry detergent. “Stupid, stupid, stupid—“ he chokes out through the tears welling in his eyes, not sure who he’s talking about. It could be him or Lucas or whatever “bad men” drove El to him in the first place. 

The basement is so cold, Mike thinks the blood stops moving in his veins. He radioes Dustin and his voice is so heavy the other pushes aside any anger he holds and rushes over. 

“I just…I don’t know why she didn’t come back,” Mike says, desperately keeping the tears in his eyes behind their waterline. 

Dustin stares at him with concern, eyes trained on Mike’s pacing feet. “She’s gotta be close—“

“She said it wasn’t safe,” Mike thinks aloud, “and she messed up the compasses because she wanted to protect us. She didn’t betray us,” he says, trying to convince not just Dustin but himself. 

“Mike, calm down!”

“I shouldn’t have yelled at her. I never should’ve done that.” From what El has let slip about her past— through either short sentences or words between tears, only seconds after waking— Mike knows deep within his bones that that was the last thing he should’ve done. 

(And when he gets too excited— like when the party camps overnight on a frigid November night outside of The Video Shack in Chicago to get a copy of Super Mario World and he celebrates a little too loudly— El flinches and scrunches her eyes shut for a split second, even with her arm looped through his elbow and a soft smile on her face.) 

“Mike, this isn’t your fault—“

Mike scoffs. “Yeah, it’s Lucas’.”

Dustin glares at him for a split second. “It wasn’t his fault either.”

Mike stops his pacing, returning Dustin’s glare and holding an accusatory finger up to him. “It wasn’t his fault?” he questions, even if he knows they’re both at fault. “So you’re saying he wasn’t way out of line?”

“Totally!” Dustin agrees, confusing him until he adds, “but so were you!” 

“What?”

“ And so was Eleven!” and of all the things Dustin could have said, that’s the sentence that has his guilt and protectiveness roaring. “Oh give me a break!” he yells, because none of this is El’s fault, not even Lucas’ concussion or Mike’s tears. Eleven was driven to that by his actions the previous day and the others’ actions for the whole damn time she was here. 

Dustin laughs in disbelief. “No, Mike, you give me a break! All three of you were being a bunch of little assholes! I was the only reasonable one,” he spits, emphasising three only to reiterate that El had any part of their shit show. “But, the bottom line is, you pushed first, and you know the rule,” he adds quickly, daring him to deny it, “you draw first blood—“

“No! No way!” he yells, “I am not shaking his hand.” 

“You’re shaking his hand,” Dustin replies, the thought of it making Mike’s nausea rise. 

“No, I'm not,” Mike shouts defiantly. 

“Look, this isn’t a discussion. This is the rule of Law: obey or be banished from the party.”

( “Okay,” Will introduces, pen poised in his hand. “Rule One—“

“If you hit first, you apologise first,” Lucas starts, leaning over Will’s shoulder. “But, like, make it sound cooler, y’know?”

“He who draws first blood,” Will spells out slowly as he writes, “extends the first hand.” 

“Maybe you should be our DM,” Mike praises, “you’re way better at this.” 

Will beams with the compliment, looking down to his shoes as his smile reaches from ear to ear. 

“Rule Two: no girlfriends,” Dustin adds, “even if Jennifer Hayes seems to really like Will.” 

The party laugh, but Mike doesn’t miss Will’s eyes darkening and his smile falling. 

Damn, he thinks. Maybe Will likes Jennifer.)

(After a few years, Mike looks back on that old manuscript book with their proclaimed “Party Rules”— a few he s exchanged for whoever or they — written by 10 year olds who had nothing but time, he smiles and thinks about when it was just the four of them. He wouldn’t exchange El or Max or Suzie for anything, but his party— when he thinks of it— will always firstly come to his mind as four: Dustin Henderson, Lucas Sinclair, Will Byers and himself. A few kids who got caught up in saving the world and, for a while, forgot how to live in it.) 

“Do you wanna be banished?” 

“No!” Mike reacts impulsively, outraged at the thought. 

Dustin strides over to his backpack, picking it up and slinging it over his shoulder before walking to the basement couch and throwing Mike’s to him. “Where are we going?”

“Where do you think?” Dustin responds, deadpan. Mike flounders for an answer and prays to a God he isn’t sure he believes in anymore for it to be anywhere but the house of Sinclair. Dustin seems to grow tired of his gaping mouth and furrowed brow, adding “We’re going to get Lucas.” 

A contrite fire in Mike’s stomach rears its ugly head. “And then,” Dustin interjects, “we’re going to find Eleven.” 

And, even if Mike’s stomach is rolling and his knees are weak as he peddles at a breakneck speed to Lucas’ house, he knows that he can’t do this alone. 

(Whether this means get away from the bad men or find Will or apologise for yelling at El, a girl whose name he never wants to yell again, Mike decides that he needs Lucas. For all of it.) 

——

Eleven wakes up surrounded by looming trees, soggy ground and beaming sunlight. Her dress is torn and filthy, her jacket is about two shades darker than when it was first given to her and she can feel the congealed dirt on her face. The yellow fur ball that Mike called a wig is clutched in her hand as she breathes quickly, fear pricking her skin. 

She can’t even clearly remember what she was dreaming of, but the blood pooling in her nostril and the quick heave of her breathing leaves enough clues. She treads through the forest carefully until she comes across a wide lake with old brown leaves floating on the surface. 

The water’s surface is cloudy but looking at her reflection, her own self disgust has never felt so clear. She looks so wrong after seeing Mike’s sister with her curly brown locks down to her mid forearm, her pale skin without a hint of blood, her wardrobe filled with rack upon rack of beautiful dresses in every colour of the rainbow. El berates herself for thinking that just because she tugged on a dress the colour of December-cold cheeks and a wig that looks as bright as Benny Hammond’s french fries that she could be pretty. 

She pulls the wig over her head and refuses to acknowledge that she doesn’t feel pretty because Mike isn’t beside her. 

She tugs it off again and screams louder than she thought she could, shattering her reflection. 

——

When Lucas used to invite Mike and Dustin over to his house, the two were welcomed with a bright smile and an arm tugging them up to Lucas’ bedroom or his kitchen to look at the latest The New Teen Titans or to snatch a few of Ms. Sinclair’s chocolate chip cookies, gooey with the odd marshmallow. 

Now, Lucas throws open the door, his eyes darkening when he understands who it is. “What do you want?” he asks coldly, sizing Mike up and ignoring Dustin completely. 

Mike sighs. We need to get El back, he thinks, even if Lucas is being a total jerk right now. “I drew first blood, so…” he trails off, extending his hand even if his shoulder feels like it’s made of lead. 

Lucas shrugs and walks inside, the door swinging slowly in the wind, practically inviting them inside. Lucas paces back and forth on the plush carpet, the relentless voice of Erica echoing from the upper level. “Okay,” he says, “I’ll shake on one condition: we forget the weirdo,” — and Mike doesn’t miss how he stresses it like it has any chance of being true— “and go straight to the gate.”

“Then the deal’s off!” Mike retorts before Dustin even has a chance to open his mouth and interject. 

“Fine!”

“Fine!” 

Dustin scoffs and throws his head back, rolling his eyes. Mike doesn’t think he’s even seen him look so done with their bullshit. “No, no, not fine! Guys, seriously? Do you even remember what happened at Bloodstone Pass?” Mike does remember: the week long planning for a campaign that ended in less than three hours. “We couldn’t agree what patch to take so we split up the party and those trolls took us out, one by one, and it all went to shit! And we were all disabled! So, we stick together no matter what—“

“Yeah, I agree,” Lucas concedes, even if his tone implies anything but, “but this is the party right here in this room.”

(And they all know he’s lying through his gritted teeth.) 

( Especially years later when the party celebrates a housewarming party for two twenty-nine year olds called Max Mayfield and Lucas Sinclair.) 

“El is one of us now.” 

Lucas rolls his eyes. “Um, no? She’s not even close, never will be.” He extends his hand and starts counting on his fingers. “She’s a liar, a traitor—“

“She was just trying to keep us safe!” Mike explodes, “She didn’t mean to hurt you, it was an accident—“ and Mike hopes he’s right; he hopes that El wasn’t planning to hurt not only Lucas but them all from the start. 

“An accident?” Lucas asks incredulously, hurt strong in his eyes. 

“Alright, alright!” Dustin interrupts before Lucas can do anything either of them will regret. “Accident or not, you do have to admit it was a little awesome.” 

“Awesome?” Lucas repeats like he believes he’s in a fever dream. 

“Yeah. She threw you into the air with her mind.” 

“I could have been killed!” 

“Which is exactly why we need her! She’s a weapon! Do you seriously want to fight the demogorgon with only your wrist rocket? That’s like R2-D2 trying to fight Darth Vader! We’re no use to Will if we’re dead .”

It’s a thought that makes Mike’s spine shiver and his toes curl because El is so much more than a weapon, even if she can throw people around with her mind. Mike knows that El is curious and strong and pretty…good. El may be a weapon but she certainly won’t be used as one as long as Mike can help it. 

“You two want to waste your time looking for a traitor, go ahead! ’Cause i’m not spending my time on her anymore. No way.  I’m going to the gate. I’m  gonna find Will.”

He pushes the thought of El being a fucking traitor out of his head just like he used to do when he would overhear his dad calling him strange or Troy calling Will a fairy or kids in his class calling Mr Clarke a weirdo. 

He pushes it away just like Lucas does to him and Dustin as he storms out, stomping up the stairs as the open door lets in a chill breeze. 

——

Karen Wheeler is quite sure that if she were to meet her twenty year old self, she would tell her that her life in seventeen years would be nothing like she wanted but everything she had grown to love. 

When she was a teen, her biggest concern was making sure that her go-go boots were returned to her closet as pearly as she found them. Now, she can‘t even seem to find the time to polish her own childrens’ shoes between ironing countless work shirts, ferrying her two eldest to school and making sure that Holly doesn’t mistake boiling hot pasta water for bath time. 

Honestly, she isn’t sure if she would change anything, even if she could. Her conversations with Nancy always consist of several huffs and eyerolls, but Karen looks at her and wonders how she was only a few years older when she was feeding a baby, alone in a hospital bed, only a few hours after getting several stitches along her abdomen and a nurse popping her head in to say “ Your husband just called, unfortunately he’s been held up at the office.” She was Nancy’s age when she first met Ted, spinning around her father’s company Christmas party in a red dress when her father introduced her to a work colleague. 

(He was twenty-eight at the time.) 

(She ignores the nausea infesting her stomach when she thinks of her daughters ever being in that position.) 

Some days, Nancy and Mike and Holly are the only reason she sticks around, wiping down countertops and making bland food that goes cold in the oven as it waits for Ted to come home. Ted is boring while also somehow bored and she isn’t sure he’s looked at her with anything but apathy in the past three years. 

Sometimes she wishes she was like Joyce— well, she’s wanted to be like Joyce since that first day of high school when she saw Joyce flip off Jim Hopper yet share a cigarette with him only an hour after lunch while Karen was stuck striving for straight As when her grades dropped by the year. 

(“ You’re gorgeous, Kare-bear. All you need to know is how to add up grocery prices for a Sunday roast!” her mom joked when she saw her D in math. “ Nobody will care about grades with a face like yours.”)

But she wishes that it was just her and her kids, even if they were living paycheque to paycheque and a few pots and pans were scattered around their home to keep the leaks at bay. Joyce is free and Karen’s heart breaks when she sees Jonathan patrolling around town, stapling up posters with a broken look in his eye because his little brother is too good to be gone. 

The only thing that ever brightens her day is walking into Nancy’s room and catching her gossiping on the phone with some girl friend or another—even if it results in a brisk Mom! I said knock!—, or Mike, babbling about the latest “scientific discovery” or “D-N-D campaign” or Holly, clinging tightly to her and begging to skip naptime. 

So, maybe that’s why Will’s death hits her so hard. 

It’s not just that she had a soft spot for Will, with his too-big shirts and weary eyes— because she did. Everyone who knew Will Byers loved Will Byers; or, at least, that's what Karen hoped to think. It’s that if that was her Mike, or her Nancy or her Holly, she knows that she wouldn't survive the fallout. 

And so when she sees the news announcement that a “mysterious child, with buzzed hair and dirty clothing” is seen breaking into a convenience store only a few minutes away, she drops the plate she was drying and stares at their T.V., praying to God that it’s Will, even if she saw his casket laid to rest. 

Karen Wheeler needs her children like she knows Joyce Byers does, but the only difference between them is that Karen Wheeler didn’t mind letting four boys play “D-N-D” in her basement. 

——

Mike is really finding it hard to keep his focus on his feet. They’re pedalling harder than they need to, propelling him ahead of Dustin and past rows upon rows of monotone Hawkins’ houses that look like every one before it. His mind is working faster, though, flooded with Dustin’s words about Lucas. 

Yes, maybe, he’s his best friend but so is Dustin and Will and— 

and El. 

And Mike can certainly defeat the demogorgons and go into the Upside Down and bring Will back, alive, with or without Lucas. 

( “I’m gonna miss you,” Mike whispers, his head in the crook of Lucas’ neck. 

Lucas coughs, clearing his throat, and blinks his eyes too many times for Mike to think the water in them is anything like allergies. “I’ll miss you too.”

Dustin bounces over to them, done helping Mr Sinclair load suitcases and duffel bags into the trunk of their minivan. Mike and Lucas pull apart, smiling at their friend with wet eyes threatening to overflow. “Guys, it’ll only be a month!” 

Mike laughs, albeit ruefully. “Yeah. Only a month,” he concedes. Lucas will only be with his grandparents for a month. 

They’ll be okay.) 

Dustin skids to a halt behind him, stones flying up against Mike’s legs. Mike stops to look at what made him stop and his eyes are met with flashing blue and red, sidewalks painted with glass and frazzled workers. “Whoa,” he says, involuntarily. 

El. 

This has to be El. It has to be. 

( Mike can’t let himself lose hope. El is out there, and Mike is going to find her and bring her home and clean her up and then they’ll find Will and then—)

(He’s lost her once, twice. He can’t lose her again.)

“You don’t think—“

Mike scoffs in amazement. “Definitely.”

****

Lucas stomps up a decrepit hill teaming with wood worm, cursing under his breath at the shitty compass sworn to his bike, the needle flicking between west and north-west erratically. His observations stop when he comes to a tall metal gate, topped with barbed wire. 

“Oh, man,” he groans. 

****

Eleven is sure that these yellow circles— Eggos— tasted different when Mike gave them to her. They were warmer and sweeter from something that she doesn’t think was a particular ingredient. She shovels them in her mouth, staring at the empty box in front of her. Her stomach rolls at the thought of devouring more but she does so anyway, scared that she’ll have to flee. 

A twig snaps in the distance and her heart stops. She looks up and around, eyeing the birds fleeing from their nests into the grey sky. “El!” she hears faintly, dulled by distance. “Eleven!” she hears, from a different voice. 

Her incandescent terror has her up and running, leaving her Eggos behind. 

****

Mike stills, his ears hearing yet another ghost. 

(It says a lot that they’re straining to find her. His head is like his heart, in a way.) 

Dustin steps on a rather large twig, snapping it in half. The noise sends flurries of birds into the sky like a catapult, and a large ruckus echoing from behind a large hedge metres away. “Hey,” he chides, extending a hand in front of Dustin. “Do you hear that?” 

Dustin looks at him confusedly, cocking his head slightly to the side. “What?” 

The disturbance continues, softened by increasing distance and loudening again in a horrible roulette wheel. A rustle comes from the trees…

…in the opposite direction. Two boys emerge from the tree line, and Mike’s eyes widen and his breathing stops when he recognises whose faces they are. “Hey there Frogface, Toothless,” Troy yells, a taunting smile displayed upon his face and a withering click echoing from the–

Oh God, there’s a knife in his hand. 

Dustin’s heart audibly stalls. “Shit! Run, Mike!” 

Mike is running before he even finishes his sentence. “You're dead, Wheeler!” Troy shouts, his shadow looming over them, the haunting blackness of a silver knife following them as they race away.

****

Lucas feels like the next time he tries to sleep, all he’ll be able to see is the shadowy face of his shitty compass circling around and around and around. He walks along the fence, eyes trained on the fluctuating needle. Moments later, his knees wrap around the trunk of a tree directly in the path of Lucas’ northern needle, yanking his Dad’s ‘Nam binoculars out of his khaki backpack and setting them on the bridge of his nose. 

His eyes scan the large building, now fully exposed outside of the line of fencing and overbearing trees. He spies the largest satellite on the roof, like the one that hangs off of the edge of Mike’s house.

He shivers and moves his mind off Mike and Dustin and that traitor, aided by the rumble of a freaking army truck pulling out of the facility and onto the road, crowded with brown, rotting leaves and chipped rocks. The parking lot is otherwise full with white vans, all perfectly decorated with the same blue script: Hawkins’ lighting and power. 

Holy shit.

****

Mike’s lungs are about to burst out of his chest. Troy’s deadly blade is pressed to Dustin’s pale throat, threatening to spill blood as red as the blisters on Mike’s heels. “Let him go! Let him go!” Mike commands, trying to gain some authority, even with Troy and James surrounding them. 

Troy yells, “Stay back, or I cut him!”

Stay calm. Jesus Christ, stay calm, he reminds himself, slowing his breathing. Any wrong move and Dustin’s throat is going to look like the set of that R-rated movie they rented for Will’s birthday last year (even if Will wasn’t particularly enthusiastic at the prospect.) “What do you want?”

Troy’s smug demeanour shifts slightly, his glare changing from one of power to that with a hint of embarrassment. “I want to know how you did it.” 

Mike stares at him in confusion. “How I did what?”

“I know you did something. Some… nerdy science shit to make me do… that. ”

Mike scoffs. “You mean piss your pants?”

Dustin’s struggling slows. “Our friend has superpowers and she squeezed your tiny bladder with her mind!” he bites, narrowly avoiding the blade poised at his neck as he breathes. 

Troy glares at him disgustedly. “Shut up!” he commands. “I should save Toothless here a trip to the dentist. Help him lose the rest of his baby teeth,” he grits, covering his embarrassment with a sickening, faux-charitable tone. 

“Let him go!” Mike yells a third time, resisting the urge to lunge at Troy. 

“I’ll let him go, sure. But first it’s your turn.”

“My turn for what?”

“Wet yourself,” Troy commands, smirking at Mike and living for the feeling of power coursing through his veins, overpowering him.  

Mike stares, eyebrows folded together. “What?”

Troy holds the knife right against Dustin’s neck. “Jump, or Toothless here gets an early trip to the dentist.” 

Troy is asking him to jump off of the quarry. Mike absolutely refuses to jump off the edge of the quarry. Jumping off is a ridiculous idea: it’s miles deep and the ledges are unstable and there’s no way–

But Dustin has a knife against his trachea and Lucas is investigating a gate to another dimension and Will is stuck in said dimension and El is God knows where. 

Mike can’t do much, but he can save Dustin. 

Troy moves closer, annoyed at his hesitancy. “Hold on, alright? Just hold on!” he yells. 

Dustin stares at him, mouth open in a cocktail of fear and rage that has Mike’s toes curling in his muck-covered tennis-shoes. “Mike! Don’t do it, I don’t need my baby teeth, Mike!” he yells, begging him to reconsider. 

Mike edges cautiously towards the edge and peers down at the murky water below. He tries to ignore Dustin’s desperate pleas that fill his ears and flurry through his head. Chips of centuries-old rock fall into the pool below as his feet push closer. James utters something that Mike can’t understand as Troy tires of his cautious approach and yells “Five!” like the strike of a guillotine blade on flesh. 

“Four!” 

He thinks of his parents: of cold Christmasses and warm summer nights, peppered with sugar cookies and ice pops made from kool-aid filled with an extra spoon of sugar. He thinks of the sports jersey his dad bought him for his birthday that he never wore and pawned off to El as soon as he could. He thinks about his mom letting him stay off of school just because she thought he was worried about Will. He thinks about when he was younger and fell asleep between them both on the couch while Nancy threw down her gifted cross stitch set. 

“Three.”

He thinks about his sisters: Nancy yelling at him to knock and Holly clinging to his mom every time he tried to hint at a hug. He thinks about the summers he spent before he even went to school, Nancy sitting him down with reading exercises and stealing their dad’s glasses to practise playing teacher. He thinks of giving El Nancy's old dresses and staring at her, watching how it comes to life on her thin form. 

“Two”

He thinks about his friends: the fact that he’ll never have the chance to say sorry to Lucas, the fact that Dustin might think this was ever his fault. He thinks about El and how he’ll never get to talk to her again and watch her eyes light up when he calls her El instead of Eleven. He thinks about how he’ll never go to the Snow Ball with his friends and (hopefully) see Will freeze up when Jennifer Hayes asks him to dance or whoop when Will asks her first. He can’t take time to question why his cheeks get warmer and his heart beats faster when El looks at him with large eyes and asks him if he thinks she’s pretty. He’ll never get to hug Will when he comes back from the Upside Down unharmed and cry with Lucas and thank him for saving their best friend, their Will the Wise. He’ll never be able to tell Dustin how wrong he was: he doesn’t have just one best friend, he has four. 

“One.”

He steps off of the ledge and into the vacant air below. 

He wonders if they’ll find his body like they found “Will’s”: bloated and drained by the unforgiving water of the quarry. He wonders, as he plunges down into the cold depths below, if his friends will cry at his funeral; if his grandparents will fly in and lay flowers that will soon die. 

He closes his eyes and lets the darkness consume him. 

And then his knees are skidding along sharp stones instead of icy November waters filled with filth and Dustin’s mouth gapes in surprise and Troy looks like he might piss his pants all over again. A deafening crack sounds from Troy’s arm. “My arm! She broke my arm!” he yells, and Mike looks towards the target of his outraged screams, begging that he’s right and hoping that he’s wrong. 

“Go,” El commands, eerily similar to Troy. 

The two bullies are gone, leaving without a trace apart from a few footprints and a sharp knife. 

Dustin regains his footing and rises from the ground, laughing deliriously. “Yeah that’s right! You better run! She's our friend and she’s crazy! You come back here and she’ll kill you! You hear me! She’ll kill you, you sons of bitches!” he yells in quick succession, and Mike laughs with him as he sees Troy and James sprinting away, glancing behind and yelling when they catch a glimpse of El. 

Well, until El crumbles like Nancy's old paper dolls, spasming and writhing on the floor. “El!” he and Dustin shout, running to her side. Her screams echo throughout the quarry as she snatched at Mike’s wrist when he reaches to move El’s nails from where they try to claw at her eyes, folded tightly with pure horror. 

“El!” Mike yells for a final time, pleading with whatever force is keeping her in such a trance. 

“Mike,” she whispers slowly, voice cracking, “I’m sorry.”

“The gate,” she says, “I opened it. I’m the monster.”

Mike breathes a sigh of relief. For a second, he had dared to think that… that maybe Lucas was right– that El was a traitor. “No! No, El, you’re not the monster,” he says gently, watching as her gaze moves off of him as she blinks the tears out of her eyes and Mike hears his heart breaking in time with her eyelids closing. “You saved me. You understand?” he asks, his voice tainted with desperation, “You saved me.”

Their eyes meet for the first time in what feels like aeons, an eclipse of heart broken and breaking. El stares at Mike like he knows why her memories are smothering her and even if Mike doesn’t it makes him need to try. His hands reach under El’s shoulder blades even if his heart quickens and his stomach turns over and pulls her head to his chest, holding her as she clings to him like he’s a raft in a desolate ocean. Dustin edges closer to them, bending down in a familiar hug that reminds him of skinned knees and A+s. 

It reminds him of home. 

—-

El’s face is warm with the wet rag Mike holds to it. “That’s better,” he says gently, a warm smile splayed across his face. The bathroom fan sends a cool chill onto her head and a shiver down her spine. She peers in the mirror, eyes trailing over her head and the short brown hair that lies there instead of long blonde curly locks. “You don’t need it,” Mike reassures, his smile becoming more thoughtful, and, somehow, El knows he’s telling her the truth. 

( Friends don’t lie.)

“Still pretty?” she asks. Her wig is gone and her dress is ruined and face is still streaked with dirt but if Mike still thinks she’s pretty–

“Yeah, pretty. Really pretty.”

They spend a moment in a silence that covers El like a warm “hug”. “El?” Mike asks, a sense of hesitancy in his tone. 

“Yes?”

“I’m happy you’re home,” he replies after a moment, his eyes staring past El and into her mind. 

El lets herself smile. “Me too,” she responds, and she means it. Mike inches closer to her slowly. El looks for her instinct to flinch: to back away from an invading force. But, somehow, she finds herself inching closer, in time with Mike, in a shuffle that she can’t resist. She looks at Mike and feels her head still for the first time… ever. 

Mike seems to have that effect. 

(Especially on her.)

El can feel Mike’s warm breath on her face and his hand reaching awkwardly for her waist. She closes her eyes, basking in the quiet and warmth and Mike and everything is pretty–

“Guys! It’s Lucas– I think he’s in trouble.” 

—-

“Go, go, go, go, go!” Mike yells, his voice stinging El’s ears. Vans circle them from behind, the blue Hawkins’ Electricity and Lighting burning into her mind like a brand of flesh. 

Dustin yells, “Shit!” as he glances behind, more and more vans joining the swarm.

Mike’s feet pedal faster than ever before, urging the others to go faster.

The view of the road in front of them is obscured by yet another van, heading…

…straight towards them.  

“Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!” Dustin yells, his voice breaking as it increases an octave. 

Now, El is by no means an expert in the logistics of the world– to be frank, she knows next to nothing– but she understands that a large piece of metal housing several men with guns hurtling towards them at 70 miles per hour is not going to end well. So, she concentrates. She concentrates on the bright white headlights, distorting her vision, and the masked faces that hold so much hatred in their eyes, and on Papa’s face from behind them, burning a hole in her skull with his stare. 

She remembers being seven, playing dominoes, lining them up only to hit one and knock them all down, destroying hours of effort. 

She stops the two front wheels, the back flipping over like a cartwheel. 

They speed away, Mike’s feet pedalling faster than ever before as they bike over the roads, backed with fiery flames. 

—-

“Holy– Holy shit,” Dustin gasps, hands on his knees. “Did–,” he stutters, trying to regain his breath, “Did you see what she did to that van?”

Mike scoffs, looking at El. “No, Dustin, we missed it,” he replies, sarcasm evident in his tone.

Dustin laughs deliriously. “I mean, that was–”

Lucas smiles– truly smiles, for the first time since he met El. “Awesome. It was awesome.” he finishes. He bends down onto his knees, staring El in the eye without any fear or malice. “Everything I said, about you being a traitor and stuff… I was wrong. I’m sorry.”

El can tell it was hard for him to say that. He avoids her eye line, after, bouncing his arm so slightly El can only see it rather than see it from where it lays on her shoulder.  “Friends… friends don’t lie. I’m sorry too.”

Mike looks at her, pride in his smile. “Me too,” he says as he extends his hand.

Lucas grasps it gratefully, a large smile spreading across his face. 

—-

Mike’s stomach rolls with every step Dustin takes, back and forth and back again in some sickening yoyo. “Will you stop pacing?” he asks when it gets too much, startling El and Lucas out of their trances. 

“It’s been way too long,” Dustin spews nervously, quickly glancing out of the gaps in the bus’ makeshift blinds and back towards Mike. “Do you know, maybe you’re right!Maybe, this is all a trap and the bad men are coming to get us right now–”

Mike stares at El, noticing how her fingers clench around her skirt and her eyes flit nervously between her feet at the mention of the bad men, and opens his mouth to yell at Dustin before Lucas interjects “It’s not a trap. Why would the chief set us up? Nancy, maybe, but the chief?” 

“Lando Calrissian!” 

“Would you shut up about Lando!”

Dustin returns to his pacing while Mike rolls his eyes at the ridiculousness of it all. “I don’t feel good about this. I don’t feel good about this!”

“When do you feel good about anything?!” 

Their bickering comes to a sudden stop due to the loud mess of wheels and car doors slamming. 

“Shit!” Dustin yells as they all race to the front of the bus, watching in anticipation as swarms of people exit, all decorated with guns that make Mike’s toes curl.

“Go, go, go, go!” he yells, reaching for El’s arm. His hand encircles her forearm as he tugs her to the back of the bus, ducking down behind a row of tattered, bug-infested seats. 

A pale hand reaches inside the door of the bus, littered with scars and covered in a black leather half-glove. Mike places a hand in front of El, watching as her pupils dilate and her nostrils are edged with scarlet. Lucas reaches for his bag, fumbling around in it as Dustin picks up a piece of metal sheeting from the roof of the bus that’s since fallen. 

The hand reaches further inside, pulling open the door as the four stand up, brandishing their weapons. “Holy shit,” Dustin mumbles as a foot follows the arm. 

“All right, lets go!” Chief Hopper commands as Mike sets a hand on El’s knee, urging her to maybe not blow his brains out. 

The group stands still, El staring between Mike and Hopper inquisitively. “Lets go!” Hopper commands again, louder. 

They rush out of the bus after Hopper, and Mike tries not to notice that El’s hand is still grasped tightly in his. 

—-

“Is this gate underground?” he asks, and El stays firm under his gaze. He looks at her with apathy but she knows there’s something deeper. 

“Yes,” she responds, taken aback at his amount of knowledge on a gate that only Lucas and herself ever came close to seeing. 

“Near a large water tank?” 

(“ Out!” El yells– begs. She can’t breathe. And it should be easy: in and out and in and out and swallow and in and out–

But El can’t breathe, even in a pocket of pure oxygen.)

“Yes.”

“How do you know all that?” Dustin asks, confused. 

“He’s seen it,” Mike answers, staring between the two in an epiphany. 

Mrs Byers, as Mike had informed her, or Joyce, as she had introduced herself, starts to speak, but all of El’s attention is trained on “Hopper.” 

( She stares at him, gaze hard as she stares at the cards in her hands. 

“You’re bluffing,” Hopper guesses, thumb flicking between his own. El lays her cards down, and Hopper groans, throwing his head back. 

“I win?” she assumes, a smug smile on her lips.

“You win,” he says begrudgingly, pushing the plate piled high with marshmallows, M and Ms, peanut butter cups and eggos towards her in place of poker chips. “Just– don’t make yourself sick.”)

—-

Joyce rips off piece after piece of duct tape. “This’ll keep it dark for you, just like in your bathtub,” she reassures, her smile sliping every now and again. And somehow, El can tell she’s just kind. “You’re a very brave girl. You know that, don’t you? Everything that you’re doing; for my boy… for Will… for my family…” she trails off, trying to think of something to say, “thank you.”

El nods, silent.

“Listen,” Joyce instructs, setting a hand on her knee, “I am gonna be there with you the whole time. And, if it ever gets too scary… in that place, you just let me know, okay?” 

Joyce smiles sincerely, and El thinks It might be nice to have someone to hold on to.

“Yes.”

Joyce looks her up and down, taking in how short and slight she is, and asks– against her better judgement, against her moral compass that’s yelling for her to let this little girl go– “Ready?”

El breathes in deeply, and doesn't even think about her answer. “Ready.”

——

Her breathing quickens as she screams. “Gone. Gone. Gone, gone, gone! GONE!”

Babara’s face is a mix of purple and green and blue and El doesn’t think she could come up with a more revolting sight if she tried. Webs of greasy slime covers her face as some slug-like creature travels out of her oesophagus and up her nose. El’s spine shivers with a similar feeling. 

She screams and snot bubbles out of her nose and she’s never felt more out of control in her whole life. 

Don’t be afraid. It’s okay. Don’t be afraid. It’s okay.

It’s Joyce’s voice but it’s Mike’s and Lucas’ and Dustin and her own all at once: Don’t be afraid. It’s okay.

She believes it. 

“Castle Byers.”

She walks towards the structure and lifts the curtain door. 

( The door to her little room is lifted open before she even has the chance to retaliate.)

And there he is: the face of a boy she’s only seen in photographs and missing posters. His lips may be blue and his hair gelled against his head with spit. It’s Will Byers in the off-coloured flesh. 

“Will!” she exclaims quietly, rushing over to him and bending down beside him, resisting the urge to flinch when she realises how dirty her dress is getting. “Your mom– she’s coming for you,” El reassures, frantically running her hands over him for some sign of life. 

“Hurry,” Will whispers, and El retches then and there. 

“Just– Just hold on a little longer, okay, Will?” she asks, begging him to stay alive for Joyce and Mike and himself. 

But– Will coughs, and becomes ashes. “Will?” she yells, searching for him in the void, in her mind, everywhere. “Will?”

She’s dripping wet. Gasping, she flails around, trying to find something– someone – to hold onto. 

“Oh, sweetie,” Joyce whispers, pulling her to the edge of the pool and encircling her in warmth: the antithesis of the Upside Down. 

Eleven sobs in her arms.  

—-

“Found it!” Dustin yells in triumph, “I knew she was hoarding it, I knew it!” 

“Yeah!” Lucas yells, grabbing at the towers of chocolate pudding and piling it into his arms. 

“Always lying, saying she’s out! Bald-faced liar! Mike! I found the chocolate pudding!”

“ Okay!” Mike yells, frustrated, before turning back to El with an apologetic smile. “Are you feeling better?” he asks, and El can’t do much but shrug. 

Her cheeks heat to a bright bubblegum as she fiddles with her cuticles. “What is… “putting”?” she asks, embarrassed at having to ask Mike when he’s in such an agitated mood. 

But, Mike smiles at her. “Pudding. It’s…it’s this chocolate goo you eat with a spoon. Don’t worry, when all this is over you won’t have to keep eating junk food and leftovers like a dog anymore. My mom, she’s a pretty awesome cook. She can make you whatever you like.”

“Eggos?” El asks and her mouth waters at the thought. 

“Well, yeah, eggos, but real food, too!” he informs her. “See, I was thinking, once all this is over and Will’s back and you’re not a secret anymore, my parents can get you an actual bed for the basement.” Mike’s eyes are bright with enthusiasm and El finds herself smiling, infected. “Or you can take my room if you want, since i'm down there all the time anyways,” he quickly amends. “My point is… they’ll take care of you. They’ll be like your new parents, and Nancy, she’ll be like your new sister.”

“Will you be like my brother?” she asks, even if the word feels wrong in her mouth

Mike’s face turns ruby-red and his eyes bulge out of their sockets. “What? No, no.”

“Why no?”

“Because… ‘cause it’s different.”

“Why?”

“I mean– I don’t know–” Mike stutters, shuffling his feet back and forth, “I guess it’s not. It’s stupid.”

“Mike?” El asks, cutting off his self-deprecating tirade. “Friends don’t lie,” she reminds him. 

“Well…I was thinking… I don't know…maybe we can go to the Snow Ball together.” 

“Snow… Ball?”

“It’s this cheesy school dance where you go in the gym and dance to music and stuff. I’ve never been but I know you’re not supposed to go with your sister,” Mike says, spitting the word sister out of his mouth like it makes him want to vomit. 

“No?”

“I mean…you can, but it’s really weird. you go to school dances with someone that, you know… someone that you like.”

El thinks of it: twirling around the gym with Mike, surrounded by music with a light base and sipping punch that’s too sugary. She likes the thought of it, almost as much as she likes Mike.

“A friend?” 

Mike sighs, agitated. He quietens for a moment, almost as if he’s debating what to say

( Or do, El laughs to herself, a few years on.)

“Not a friend. Uh, someone like a…”

And Mike inches closer to her, bending across the table and pressing his lips to hers in a way that makes El’s heart explode. 

( And that, my friends, is El’s first kiss with Mike Wheeler. 

It is nowhere near her last.)

——

Blood pools out of Connie Frazier and her cronies’ eyes. The rush El feels encircles her whole: like her arms around herself, like Mike at the quarry, like Joyce in the pool. The adrenaline pollutes her blood and strips her of oxygen until El is gone, passed out on the ground in an unsatisfying thud. 

She wakes to the feeling of arms around her, and all feels right. It’s Mike, his arms cradling her head as he hoists her face to his. 

“Let her go! Let her go, you bastard!” A scream rips from Mike’s throat, pleading colouring his tone as El’s eyes flit open, the weight of her eyelids pulling them shut again quickly again and again. 

“Papa?” she asks, too tired to be horrified as she should be. 

“Yes, yes!” he encourages, “It’s your Papa. I’m here now,” he says, like that’s meant to make it all better. “You’re sick– You’re sick, and I’m going to make you better. I’m going to take you back home where I can make you well again,”  a sickening smile on his face making El’s stomach roll, “where we can make all of this better, so no one else gets hurt.”

El always looked at Papa like he held the key to the universe in his palm. 

Maybe it’s time that changed. 

“Bad,” she whispers, “Bad! Mike! Mike!” yells El, arms flailing out towards him. 

But, in true El fashion, she chooses then to pass out cold. 

—-

When she comes through again, all hesitant eyed and tired smiles, Mike doesn’t think she’s ever looked prettier. 

“Just– Just hold on a little longer, okay?” he pleads, swallowing the lump invading his throat. “We’ll be home soon, and my mom… she’ll get you your own bed. You can eat as many eggos as you want. And we can go to the Snow Ball,” he promises. Anything to stay awake, please, El. 

“Promise?” she asks, and Mike knows, somewhere inside of himself that even he doesn’t want to acknowledge, that this is it. 

“Promise,” he replies, even if he’s lying through his teeth. 

—-

“Hi,” Mike says softly, the snow pillowing underneath him as he wraps his jacket around him tightly. “It’s– It’s Christmas, today. I don’t know if you know what that is but… it’s when you get presents for people you… care about. So, I, uh, got you a few things.”

Mike moves the gift bag– glittery, adorned with Santas, with scarlet ribbon handles–from behind his back to sit in front of him, and rifles through it. “There’s eggos, and strawberry ice-cream, and Nancy’s shampoo, and that makeup, and– and a new dress,” he stutters awkwardly, setting the bag beside the tree at the end of his garden. 

“Look, I know– I know you might be gone, but I know you’ll come back. I know you will,” he whispers into the supercomm. “So, when you do, I wanted you to have something new to wear.”

Mike stares out into the woods, fiddling with his hands. “I know you’ll come back, El. Merry Christmas.”

—-

Hours later, El finds the bag, and smiles. 

The eggos Mike left her taste far better than those that Chief Hopper places in the old wooden box in the woods.