Archive of Our Own

Eleven woke with a gasp, sitting up in bed. Her room was dark and quiet like she was used to, but with the frightening thoughts buzzing in her mind, it seemed far more scary than usual. She could practically see the long-legged shape forming out of the shadows of her room. It had approached her in her dreams, tall and terrible, and it felt so, so real.

This was not the first time she had dreamed of this thing, this not-spider, but tonight, for the first time, it had spoken to her.

We see you in his mind.

Eleven shuddered at the memory of the voice. It was cold and all around her, like the air from the vents in the ceiling. She didn’t know what it meant, or what it was talking about. She couldn’t make her mouth work, but it didn’t matter. The not-spider spoke again after that.

You are strong.

The not-spider had no eyes, but she was sure it had been looking at her, making her feel even more scared. Even now, she felt like it was still looking at her.

We see your pain. We can free you.

That had confused Eleven. She didn’t know what it wanted.

We want you for one of ours. One of mine!

And then she had woken up.

Eleven squinted hard at the clock above the door, trying to see it through the darkness. The littlest hand was somewhere between the three and the six, which meant she would be alone for a long time.

She grabbed her pillow, hugging it to herself as she pressed her back against the wall, staring into the shadows of her room. She wished Peter were here, but he could not always be there, especially at night. He had to sleep too, and she often wondered where he slept, and what it looked like. Some people, like Papa, left the lab for whatever lay outside, and maybe Peter was one of them. No matter what, he seemed far away in these scary times at night, when the dreams woke her up. He would come in the morning, but she wished he would come now.

She tucked her chin against her pillow, imagining that it was Peter instead. He would hold her and tell her that the dreams weren’t real no matter how scary they seemed, and she tried hard to keep that in the forefront of her mind, but it did nothing to dispel the chill the not-spider had left over her mind and body. She would not feel safe until he arrived in the morning, and she would have to be brave until then. All she knew was that he was Good, and the not-spider was terribly, terribly Bad.

After staring into the shadows for a while to ensure that nothing appeared, Eleven finally laid down again, pulling the blanket most of the way over her head to act as a barrier between her and the frightening darkness. She was conflicted; she wanted to sleep, because she felt tired, and getting enough sleep was important to feel good and do well on Papa’s tests, but she was deathly afraid of falling asleep, and seeing that not-spider once more. Its voice echoed over and over again in her mind, a dark whisper she could not get away from.

She grabbed her stuffed lion, cradling it to her chest. She felt like crying, but she wouldn’t, because she was brave like her lion was. That was what Peter had told her.

It was a long time before she fell asleep, but she did not dream again that night.

Once the children in the lab were old enough to dress themselves and find their way to the cafeteria by themselves, they were given a little bit of autonomy in regards to when they got up. But Peter had taken to checking on Eleven every morning to ensure she got up in time to avoid any unpleasant consequences. Something had happened to her lately, her dreams full of distressing images that kept her up at night, and he found her sleeping later and later. He wished he could be alongside her, to help her go back to sleep, but if he did not follow his own set of rules he risked being removed from her life altogether, so he did what he could within his limited means.

As soon as he opened Eleven’s door, he could tell it had been a rough night for her. When she slept soundly, she moved very little, but now she was curled in a tight ball close to the headboard, her body completely immersed beneath the blanket, head and all.

Eleven came halfway awake when she heard her door open, and she clung to the warm haze of sleep tightly. Her body felt heavy, and all she wanted to do was stay in bed.

“Eleven.” Peter’s soft voice reached her ears, along with the click of the lamp on the table. “It’s time to wake up.”

Eleven screwed her eyes shut even tighter, trying to block out the lamplight. She was glad to hear him nearby, but she didn’t want to wake up yet.

When she hardly stirred, Peter let out a quiet sigh, beginning to tug the blanket away. Eleven mumbled something incoherent in an attempt to protest as her warm cocoon was removed, pushing her further into wakefulness.

“Come on. Up you come.” Peter took hold of her gently, lifting her into a slouched sitting position.

Eleven finally cracked her eyes open, squinting in the light and giving him a bleary, unhappy look. After a moment, she tilted forward, resting her forehead, and then her entire body, against his side in an exhausted slump.

“You’re just a big sleepyhead, aren’t you?” Peter brushed a hand over her prickly hair, caught between fondness and worry. This was the worst she had ever been.

Eleven let out a small, wordless groan, pressing her face against his shirt. As silly as it seemed, she could easily fall asleep here, sitting up.

“Did you have any dreams?” he asked.

The question banished some of her grogginess as the frightening memories came filtering back into her mind. She lifted her head, and the fear on her face told him the answer before she even spoke. “Yes.”

“The same kind of things?”

“Yes…but…” Eleven fumbled for a good explanation. “Worse.”

“How?”

“Something talked to me…” Eleven frowned. The things she had heard now seemed distant and foggy. “Can’t remember.”

“That’s okay.” Peter had considered the possibilities behind Eleven’s nightmares. It could’ve been something to do with her abilities or the testing she faced, which was likely, though his understanding of those things had waned considerably in the years of his own suppression. Some small part of his mind wondered if it was something else, the resurrection of the shadow that had twisted his life into something unfathomable, but there was no way for him to be sure.

“You know, sometimes I have bad dreams too,” he told her.

Eleven’s eyes went wide. It was amazing to think that someone as big and strong as him could have such scary dreams. “Not lying?”

“I’m not lying.” Peter knew he was walking a dangerous line, potentially revealing more about himself than Brenner would approve of, but he couldn’t leave Eleven unassured. “Lots of people have bad dreams, like me and you. Do you want to know what helps me?”

Eleven nodded eagerly. “Yes.”

“I tell myself that everything I see is in here.” He tapped his forehead. “Whatever is in my mind can’t actually hurt me.” It was a half-truth, considering what he did see in his dreams hurt him in his heart, the memories of blood and violence beyond his control, but Eleven’s struggle was not nearly as horrific.

“In here,” Eleven repeated softly, touching her temple.

“The next time you have a bad dream, try to think of that. What you see in your dreams can’t hurt you, no matter how scary it was.”

“Okay.”

He did not expect the idea to be effective right away, but he hoped that in time, she would come to be less scared of whatever lay in the lands of her dreams. And he quietly wished that she would never be as tormented as he.

“How about we get you dressed and get you something to eat?” he suggested.

Eleven let out a pitiful whine, looking very unhappy with the idea, and he couldn’t blame her. She clearly needed more sleep, but maybe she would be fortunate enough to have Brenner take pity on her later. Until then, he would do his best to remedy the situation with the sympathetic knowledge that long hallways were a big task for tired little legs.

“Would you feel better if I carried you?”

“Yes.” Eleven answered with no hesitation, and he smiled.

“I thought so.” He held out his arms. “Come on, sleepyhead.”

“Not sleepyhead,” she grumbled even as she flopped against him. She was still tired, but now that Peter was with her everything was a little better.

Peter was happy to see, years later after much hardship, that Eleven did not seem to have any great difficulty sleeping. He did not ask her outright, but from what he observed, she seemed to be well rested.

He was not so fortunate. The dreams did not start right away, maybe because his body was still adjusting to being in the human world again after seven years, but they were bound to come again. They had tormented him for years in the lab, visions of things he had done and whispers from the voice that had won his hurting heart over.

And then, there were the things he was not yet familiar with from the seven years trapped beyond, the things he caught little flashes of in his mind’s eye that frightened him to think about and almost didn’t want to remember. The sensation of falling as otherworldly lightning that set some appalling threadwork of vines stretching across his skin, his feet dragging across the dry plains of a hellish landscape, compelled by the power that had taken his mind in near completion to stand before the living death that was the monster, his hand outstretched to form it into what it wished, his thoughts not his own but whispered as though they were.

We became an explorer. We found something beautiful. I found something beautiful.

I found us!

Peter remembered his house, but it was not his house, not truly. It was a dark reflection of what he knew, and he did not know if it had formed from his own subconscious yearning to return to a safe place, or if the monster had brought him there. The monster had latched onto his mind, integrating with his thoughts, taking on his voice, twisting what he felt into something horrible to befit its vision.

There was more than even that. He caught little flashes of faces he did not recognize, gazing on him in utter terror, and he wondered if they had been victims of the monster, the Mind Flayer, in its bid to enter the true world, but he tried not to think of them too long. The guilt became too much to bear if he did.

For a little bit, his sleep was undisturbed. It took a couple of weeks, long enough to begin to lull Peter into a false sense of security, that perhaps the dreams were gone. But then they came, and they came with force.

The day the voice came to Henry was a difficult day. Another attempt at befriending some of the neighbors had gone awry for him. He didn’t know why he couldn’t get along with the kids here. Before they moved, he had some friends, but here no one seemed to like him. He didn’t care about tossing a ball around as much as he wanted to draw, but the other kids didn’t seem to like that.

At first, he considered going to Alice to tell her about the hurt, but she wasn’t home. She was around less and less now, having found some friends of her own, and it made him a little mad. But, seeking a place to hide for a while, he wandered through the halls of the house until he found the attic staircase. No one had been in the attic that he knew of; the rest of the house was so big there was more than enough room for all the furniture they had brought.

With solitude in mind, he hurried up the creaky attic stairs. It was larger than he thought it would be, and practically empty save for some cobwebs; a perfect hideout. After he found the lightswitch, the single lightbulb hanging in the middle of the room flickered to life, shining dimly on the darker corners of the room.

For a while, Henry wandered around the room, letting his imagination run wild as he thought over constructing a hideout for himself using some spare furniture that had not yet found a place in the house below. Eventually, he retrieved his sketchbook and settled against one of the support pillars, beginning to draw out the room he envisioned.

Then, the light began to flicker.

It startled Henry at first, and he looked up at it, waiting for it to stop. It didn’t, continuing to blink erratically, and he frowned as he tried to remember where his parents might have put the spare lightbulbs.

A faint noise interrupted his thoughts, and Henry blinked, looking around the attic. It was almost like leaves skittering across the shingles, but not quite. There was a nuance to it that sounded like a voice, calling from some far-off place.

“Alice?” he called. “Is that you?”

He did not hear his sister shout back from below, and the whispering continued, as did the flickering. Confused and curious, he stood up, intending to find the source of the noise, and as he moved towards the lightbulb, it seemed to grow louder. Something tingled on the back of his neck like static electricity, and the air felt charged as he came to stand beneath the light.

The voice grew louder, but Henry could still not make out what it was saying. He reached out towards the lightbulb, not quite sure what had compelled him to do so, but maybe he would be able to hear the voice better…

“Henry!” His mother’s voice called from somewhere below. “Henry, it’s time to eat!”

The spell was shattered, and the voice was gone. The lightbulb glimmered brightly with not a trace of interference.

“Henry!”

“Coming!” Henry yelled, and he left the attic, casting one final look over his shoulder.

That night, he dreamed that someone was trying to call to him from far away, but he did not return to the attic for a few days. Things continued in the same way they had before, with failed attempts to make friends at school, and when the weekend came he found himself in the attic again.

For a while, he doodled in his sketchbook undisturbed, drawing whatever came to his mind. Trees, animals, and a halfhearted attempt at Superman from one of the comic books he had read appeared on the pages, slightly smudged by his left hand moving across them as he drew. Using a corner of the paper, he wiped the pencil smudging on his skin off. Being left-handed was not as much of a problem now, but sometimes the teachers still looked at him funny. There was nothing wrong with being left-handed, his dad had told him. His teachers and some of the other kids made him feel like maybe it was, but he was never able to learn how to write with his right hand.

The pencil stopped in its trail across the paper as the light in the room flickered. Henry lifted his head to the lightbulb, and it blinked back at him. Something seemed to shiver in the musty, still air of the attic.

And then he heard the voice once more.

It was a little louder now, but he still could not make out any words. Setting his sketchbook aside, he rose and approached the lightbulb once more, and like the first time, the whispering got louder. The light seemed to react as well, flickering more incessantly, sending light and dark across the floorboards in quick bursts that made it hard to focus.

“Hello?” Henry felt a little silly talking to a lightbulb, but the feeling vanished when it responded, the flickering growing more frantic.

The whispers grew louder, and he felt that creeping, prickly sensation on the back of his neck. He reached out towards the light, and though he expected the air around it to be warm, he found it strangely cool instead. His fingers touched the glass, and the light went out completely.

In the corner of his eye, in the sudden dimness, he thought he saw something, or multiple somethings, like vines or legs, stretching down from the support columns towards him from both sides. But before he could react, the light flashed on with a brightness than momentarily blinded him, the glass growing frigid beneath his skin.

Then, he heard the words clearly in his mind.

Anger.

Fear.

Searching.

We know these!

We have found a way.

A gate.

Henry wasn’t quite sure what happened next, but the next thing he was aware of, Alice was standing next to him, shaking his shoulder.

“Henry!” she said, sounding exasperated. “Didn’t you hear me calling a thousand times?”

“No…” Henry looked around. He was in the attic. The light glowed above them undisturbed, and he was curled on the floor beneath it, sketchbook at his side.

“Did you fall asleep up here?” Alice asked, wrinkling her nose at the dusty, unkept state of the room.

“Uh…I guess so.”

“Well, get up sleepyhead. Dinner’s soon and Mom will have a fit if you show up in those dusty clothes.”

“Shut it, ladybird!”

Alice stuck out her tongue at him, and before Henry could think of a suitable retort, she was already dashing away, eager to get out of the dirty room. He sat there for a moment, looking around for anything different, but everything was as he had left it. Maybe he had fallen asleep, and the strange experience had been nothing but a dream.

But it wasn’t, and things were never the same again.

Henry started to hear a voice speaking to him even when no one was around. It frightened him at first, but then he began to wonder if it was an angel like the ones he saw in the stained glass windows at church. The voice spoke with understanding as he struggled his way through the days, trying to find his place in the town of Hawkins.

You are suffering , it said. You are hurting.

Henry was comforted by the companionship of the voice, but it did nothing to stop his outside woes. He continued to find no place at school, and Alice seemed even more distant as she spent longer and longer intervals out with friends. His parents were not much help either.

Something shifted when some of the other children started bullying him outright. He came home with a smarting head from where someone had thrown a crabapple at him, and in an effort to hide from his parents who would ask too many questions he didn’t want to answer, he hid in the attic, letting his tears flow in silence.

We see the fear and anger , said the voice. We know these. We will use them.

“Will you stop it?” Henry asked through his tears. “I just want this to be over!”

Yes. We will.

Strange occurrences began. Sometimes, Henry would find himself somewhere with no memory of how he got there. Other times he would stare at the grandfather clock, the chimes reverberating in his mind and meshing with the whispers.

Four. Fear and anger in all four. We will take them. We will end the suffering.

Henry started collecting the spiders he found in the bathroom vent. He always thought spiders were interesting, but now, for some reason, they were endlessly fascinating. A sketch appeared in his sketchbook, one he didn’t quite remember making, and it looked like a spider, but something more than that.

Henry’s troubles became more distant, as did his mind. He began to feel things, almost like the thoughts of others around him, and it confused him. Things began to move around him without being touched. A glass shattered in the pantry when Alice snuck up on him by accident. Lights flickered when he passed by them.

His mother approached him one night as he was getting ready for bed, her brow furrowed with deep concern. “Honey, are you alright? You don’t seem…normal.”

“I’m fine,” he replied honestly. The things that had bothered him before no longer did anymore, and he was happier for it.

His mother took his hands, and there was a pause before she spoke again as she seemed to look over his hands. “There’s a doctor I know. I want to take you to him, just in case.”

Henry swallowed back the bile that rose in his throat. He had been to plenty of doctors before, and they had tried to “fix” him. His father had said before they moved to Hawkins that these visits would stop, that he was just fine the way he was, and he felt angry that his mother had gone back on that promise.

Parasites.

When Henry spoke, it didn’t feel quite like his voice was the one that came out. “There’s nothing wrong with us—me.”

We see your anger. We will end it all.

Someone or something started killing rabbits and leaving them outside the house, their bodies twisted into unnatural contortions. Frighteningly vivid waking nightmares started to torment the family, and it made Henry scared too. His father said a demon prowled in the attic and he shouldn’t go there anymore, but he found himself upstairs anyway, though he didn’t remember walking there.

Things came to a head one night at dinner. He had heard—felt?—his parents having an argument over whether or not to send him to the doctor his mother knew, their tempers running high and angry from the overarching sense of stress that had filled the house for weeks. Then, they tried to eat dinner and act like nothing had happened, though Henry could see how they looked at him.

And then everything went dark. Henry was no longer in control of his body, and he watched in horror as his mother lifted from her chair, her limbs shattering.

In the dark scape of his mind, he saw the voice, the living shadow, tall and many-limbed, hanging over him as tall as the house. “What are you doing? Stop!” he screamed.

His mother’s body crumpled to the floor. Henry’s hand lifted to wipe away the blood beginning to seep from his nose.

One.

The chime of the grandfather clock reverberated through Henry’s mind like a death knell, filling him with cold dread. His father and sister were screaming, his body being dragged along as they tried to run for the door.

But it would not open.

“Stop this!” Henry screamed at the shadow as the lights flickered all through the house.

We are saving you.

Us.

Me!

Alice was next, a strangled cry tearing from her throat as her body was lifted and broken and twisted.

Two.

The fear and anger is with us now.

Another chime, and Henry realized what was happening.

Four chimes. Four lives.

“You lied to me!” Henry shouted.

Lied? The shadow looked at him with eyes he could not see. No. We—I—saved you.

His father was going to be next. Henry wanted to stop it. He had to stop it.

He pitted everything in his mind against the shadow, turning all the rage and fear towards it instead. He stretched out his hand, summoning something from a hidden well he had not consciously known was there, a power only the shadow had touched. A scream of utter desperation tore from his throat.

“Go away!”

Peter’s eyes flew open and his body jerked. He drew in a huge breath, his heart pounding so hard he thought it might break out of his chest, and he bit back the terrified yell that welled in his throat. Crying out did no good anyway, not in the lab, and he did his best to hide from Brenner just how scared he was sometimes.

But he realized a moment later that he wasn’t in the lab anymore. The bed beneath him was so much softer, and the room was not white and sterile, chipped pastel paint on the walls appearing grey in the faint light.

He was in a cabin near Hawkins, with Eleven and the man who had become her father. The lab was no more, and he was safe.

But that made the pain of the memories no less agonizing.

It had been a long time since he had a dream as vivid as that. Somewhere along the way in the lab, his memories had become muddled and hazy, making the truth of what had happened slightly less crushing. Dreams had tormented his sleep, and he knew he had killed his family, but the dreadful details had been lost. However, now that his abilities were free to be used once more, the memories had come back with them.

Peter clenched his fists, trying to stop the quivering that had seized his entire body. This was not the first night he had dreamed since being freed from the Upside Down and the Mind Flayer, as Eleven called them, but this was by far the worst one so far. He dreaded the night when his mind dredged up whatever he had underwent for seven years in the Upside Down with clarity. The things he knew were horrifying enough, and he had no desire to remember the rest, but he had a feeling he would anyway.

With a shaky sigh, he propped himself against the headboard. It would be a while until he could go back to sleep, but he was used to this.

Peter was not sleeping well. It was difficult to see, and he hid it well, but Eleven could feel it. There was an unrest in his mind, and it unearthed little tidbits of her own memory and the nightmares she had struggled with. She looked back on the dreams with a new perspective, that it was the Mind Flayer reaching out to her, though neither of them knew it at the time.

She woke in the dead of night a few days after she first sensed his unrest, her heart pounding. She had dreamed of things that didn’t seem like her own, of faces she didn’t know well and a hungry, preying shadow she knew more than she wanted to. For a few moments, she laid still on the couch, staring at the rafters and trying to calm herself. She got ready to discard it as a random, particularly vivid dream from her experiences with the Mind Flayer, when she felt the faint touch of another mind at the edge of her awareness, a feeling she was growing increasingly familiar with.

After a moment, she pushed herself off the couch, quietly heading for her old bedroom. Had it not been for Peter’s own mind warning him of Eleven’s approach, his heart likely would have stopped altogether as the door slowly opened to reveal the pale, ghostlike figure.

“Hi,” she whispered, seeing him sitting up against the headboard.

“Hi,” he replied softly, only having just managed to get a hold on the shivering.

Eleven shuffled a little farther into the room. “Are…you okay?”

Peter paused, considering his response. Once upon a time, he would have always said he was okay, not wanting to add to the stress that Eleven was already feeling. But now she was older, and she had now seen him in several different states of being far from okay.

“No,” he said at length. “Not really.”

“A dream?”

So, it had been his dream that disturbed her. “Yes.”

“A bad one?”

Peter nodded, his answer hoarse. “Very.”

Eleven pushed the door mostly closed with a slight tilt of her head, approaching the bed. “Do you…want to talk about it?” she asked, pulling on the comforts he had once given her.

“I don’t know,” he confessed, anxiety ballooning in his chest. He could feel the phantom pain of the invisible claws in his mind, maneuvering his body that was caught in the spider’s web.

“It’s only in your mind,” Eleven said, sitting down on the edge of the bed. “It can’t hurt you here.”

The familiar assurance brought a melancholy smile to Peter’s lips. “I’m afraid it’s not that simple, ladybird. It wasn’t just a dream. I saw memories, and they still hurt.”

Eleven was quiet for a moment. “Was it your family?”

Slightly taken aback by her knowledge, Peter dropped his gaze. “Yes.”

“I saw what you dreamed,” Eleven murmured, thinking over the images. “I saw what happened.”

Peter felt a lump growing in his throat. “I wish you hadn’t.”

 “I’m glad I saw. I understand better.”

“Understand what?”

“That you were never, ever the monster.”

Peter felt as though his heart might break beneath her kindness. “But I feel like one. I’ve always felt that way, ever since…it happened.”

Eleven stared at the faint shadows cast by the curtains across the wall. “Do you remember when I started having bad dreams?”

“Yes.”

“Now that I remember them, I realize that I was dreaming of the Mind Flayer. He was reaching out to me, talking to me.”

Peter’s eyes went wide. “…Are you sure?”

“Yes.” Eleven looked at him, and he saw nothing but sympathy in her gaze. “He saw me through you, and he wanted me to join him.”

Cold needles of dread pricked Peter’s skin as he dared to envision the shadow looming over Eleven’s form, and his anger at himself rekindled.

“When I woke up, I would think of you,” Eleven continued. “I knew I just had to wait for you, because you were good.”

Peter let out a choked, incredulous laugh. “I don’t think I did a very good job being good.”

“But I knew the Mind Flayer was bad, because you showed me what was good. You made mistakes, but I have too. I learned that mistakes don’t make you a monster.”

Peter just nodded, unable to reply for fear of unleashing the wave of emotion building in is chest. Brenner was the only one who he had ever talked with about what happened, and he had long ago realized that his sympathy was a lie. But Eleven was nothing but sincere in the face of all his terrible mistakes and regrets.

“Being with someone makes the dreams less scary.” Eleven gave him an inquisitive look. “I could stay if you want.”

It took Peter a moment to find his voice. “Would that be…okay?”

“Yes. We won’t get in trouble.”

“Okay.” Peter smiled, blinking back the wetness in his eyes.

Eleven retrieved her pillow from the couch. It was a bit of a tight squeeze, but neither of them cared, the closeness welcome after the years of dancing around the rules in the lab. As Peter shifted into a more comfortable position, Eleven’s cheek brushed against his shoulder and the soft flannel of his borrowed shirt, and she remembered pressing her face against white, starched fabric smelling of the same chemical sterility that pervaded the entire lab. The scent made her a little nauseous to think about, but the feel of the fabric had always been comforting for who it belonged to.

“Do you still dream of him?” Peter asked after a stretch of silence.

“No,” Eleven murmured. “If I do, it’s only memories.”

“When you started having nightmares, I wondered about you almost every night.” Peter said. “I wish I could have done this for you back then.”

“It’s okay,” Eleven replied. “I thought you left the lab like some of the others did at night.”

The irony was almost funny. “You did?”

“Yes. I never thought you stayed at night, except for that one time when I was sick.”

“I was always there.”

Eleven turned on her side to face him, her cheek pressed against her pillow. “What was it like?”

He glanced at her. “What was what like?”

“Your room. I never saw it.”

Peter smiled ruefully. “Just like yours, except worse.”

“How?”

“I never had a stuffed animal.”

Eleven scoffed. “That didn’t make things much better.”

Peter’s smile turned genuine. “Your younger self would think differently. You loved it.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“Do you remember what you named it?”

“No…” Eleven dragged the word out hesitantly. “What was it?”

Peter just chuckled instead of answering, piquing her curiosity.

“What did I name it?”

“You really don’t remember?” he asked, trying to restrain his amusement.

Eleven scowled. “No! I—” She stopped herself as the memory hit her like a brick. Embarrassment quickly rose to replace her confusion, and she rolled over to put her back to him, unable to face him.

“It’s not that bad,” Peter said, unable to hold back his laughter.

“Yes, it is!” Eleven shot over her shoulder, her face aflame.

“You were four.” Peter tried to rein in his laughter for her sake. “If it makes you feel any better, I had a teddy bear named Theodore.”

Eleven turned towards him slightly. “You did?”

Peter nodded. “I missed him for a long time, but I have something better now.”

“What?”

“A sister.”

Eleven blinked, a smile slowly spreading across her face. “And a brother is better than a lion.”

“Even one named after me?”

Eleven shoved his shoulder, trying unsuccessfully to hide her smile behind a scowl. “You can’t tell anyone.”

“I won’t, I promise.” Peter could feel the tension from the nightmares seeping out of him the longer he spoke with her, and he wished all the more that he could have stayed by her side in the lab when she needed him, but he fully intended to make up for it.

“Don’t tell anyone anything embarrassing,” Eleven added as an afterthought.

“I never thought I would see you worrying about that.”

“If you do, I’ll get you back,” Eleven said half-seriously.

Peter just smiled. “I look forward to it.”

When Hopper woke to find Eleven absent from the main room of the cabin the next morning, he pushed down the instinctual panic, having a good idea of where she might have ended up. He crossed the creaky floorboards to the bedroom, pushing the door open just enough for him to see in, and found his suspicions confirmed.

In the gray dawn light filtering in through the gaps in the curtains, not one but two figures lay huddled beneath the covers of the bed. Eleven and Peter lay facing each other, as though they had fallen asleep in the middle of a conversation, and they looked utterly at ease.

The sight stirred ambivalence within Hopper. He had known it was only a matter of time until the dreams came for Peter. No one went through that much suffering without them, but it seemed he had found comfort in the one person that would understand him the most. They understood each other in ways that he would likely never grasp, and he was glad Eleven had found—or rediscovered—someone like her.

He left the pair to sleep, quietly going about his morning. It was almost nine before there were any signs of life, and Eleven came shuffling out of the bedroom.

“Hey,” Hopper greeted softly.

“Hi,” Eleven said around a yawn, gravitating towards the kitchen.

“He had dreams?”

That brought Eleven out of her groggy stupor a bit, meeting his concerned gaze. “Yes.”

“Bad memories, I’m guessing?”

“Yes.”

“I know what that’s like.” Hopper sighed, drawing his hand over his face. “Is he okay?”

Eleven thought over the previous night. They had talked for a long time about little things, random bits of good experiences, until they had finally succumbed to sleep. She couldn’t remember who had fallen asleep first, but by the time she had, the unrest in his mind had quieted.

“He’s okay,” she said.

“Good.” Hopper paused thoughtfully. “I know he probably has a long way to go, but I want him to know he can talk to me, too. Not just you.”

Eleven nodded her understanding. “I’ll tell him.”

“Thanks, kid.” Hopper gave her a fond smile. “Now, you slept late, so get something to eat and call your friends before I have twenty concerned people trying to come over here.”

Eleven snorted but did as he suggested. She let Peter sleep for another hour before going to try and wake him. The first Star Wars was going to be on TV soon, and she wanted him to see it.

“Peter!” she called softly, poking at his shoulder. “Wake up!”

He stirred, blue eyes fixing on her blearily. “What…? What time is it?”

“Ten. You slept late.”

“I know,” he mumbled, squinting in the sunlight.

His grogginess reminded her way too much of herself, and she couldn’t resist. “Come on…sleepyhead.”

His gaze became a little sharper. “You don’t get to call me that.”

“I just did.” She tugged at the hand peeking from beneath the covers. “There’s a movie on TV soon I think you’ll like.”

“Okay.” Peter sat up and stretched. Despite the drowsiness, he felt better rested than he had in several days, the nightmares weighing far less heavy on him than they had.

Eleven could not stop a snicker from escaping her, and when Peter gave her a confused look, she said simply, “Your hair.”

Peter reached up, touching the proverbial bird’s nest. “Yours isn’t much better, ladybird.”

“It is!”

“Not for long!”

Eleven let out a squeal as he grabbed for her, and he laughed at the sound. As he began to experience new joys, so did the old sorrows begin to lessen.