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“Friends don’t lie.” Those were the sacred words the Party swore by, and for as long as Eleven could remember — before then, even. They’d led whole lives before meeting her — they’ve stuck to the code. For the most part, they’ve obeyed.
Dustin declares, one Tuesday afternoon the summer before they start junior year, that they have to tell each other everything from now on. It’s an obligation. Mike says he’s full of shit; they have no such rule. El agrees – but she swears she’s not biased. It’s the thought of sharing every single detail about her life that seems a little… extreme.
She knows she’s been through more than most kids her age. The fact that she spent the majority of her life cooped up in a lab to be poked and prodded and used, instead of having movie nights with her friends and garage sales with her parents, is never far from her mind. There’s no such thing as normal anyways. Jonathan always reminds her of this when she doubts herself. It’s reassuring.
Her whole life has become a sort-of twisted fable filled with childhood trauma and otherworldly creatures, but there are still small things she wants to keep to herself. She’s a teenage girl, after all.
While Dustin rambles on about things like “the interest of full disclosure” and the “new most important rule of the party”, Eleven considers just which parts of her life she feels comfortable talking about.
Everyone, including the few agents she’s willed herself to trust over the years, is clued in on the basics. They know about Hawkins Lab and the man who called himself her Papa. Everything about the Upside Down, too. She thinks Nancy and Will might know things about that place that even she can’t understand. She only tells a select few – Hopper and Joyce and Mike. Max to an extent – about the smaller things.
Everybody plays their part in her story. The thing is, she hasn’t exactly figured out what her role is. She’s never been quite sure if she was the hero or merely a villain in disguise. She’s long since accepted that she is not a monster, to blame for Hell reaching through to their world, but even with that fear put to bed, there are still some things about her that feel off; out of place. Bad.
Mike says she’s a superhero – his – but superheroes are supposed to be beacons of good. Aren’t they meant to represent the very best humanity has to offer, saintly beings to be worshipped on a podium? El is not comfortable being seen as ethereal, no matter how much she likes the fantasticality of the word. She hates the thought of holding that much power over people.
Eleven has dark thoughts sometimes. There are things she can’t share with the Party — Dustin who wants to pluck and pull at her every thought out of curiosity. She can’t unload all of that on people who knew nothing but light until she entered their lives, no matter how much they want to carry. It’s never been their burden to bear.
But those select few are special for a reason. Hopper gets her in ways no one else can because he’s been through the circles of hell, too. She lives at his heels, a shadow, but it’s a comfortable life because it’s safe. There’s assurance there. Joyce is a different story; she offers warmth where Hopper is lacking and cares for her how any mother would their child. Joyce’s nurture was never in question. Max represents all the things she missed out on over the years, but she comes with her own baggage and broken dreams, too, and El wholeheartedly believes there’s a part of them both, however small, that can fix the other.
Eleven assigns her loved ones characters to play in the story of her life because it’s easier for her that way. She gets a cleaner grasp on who they are and just how they can affect her. People are not so easily defined, but that’s the thing about characters, she thinks: there’s more to them than meets the eye, than you’d gauge from a first glance. Considering Max to be her best friend doesn’t strip the girl of everything else that makes her special – the things that make her her.
Ticking boxes, assigning roles to fill is just how she distinguishes the good from the bad. But Mike is… odd. She’s never really known who he is to her. Was he the first friend? Her lover? The savior? A saint?
Eleven would like to think that he could be all of the above at once, but Mike has dark thoughts, too. He doesn’t belong up on that pedestal, either.
Sometime around his seventeenth birthday, they spend their first night together and she wakes up to his screaming; glassy dark eyes, black curls sticking to his forehead in a cold sweat. His nightmares have been going on for three years, he tells her. El reaches for his face with steady hands, and when she stares into his eyes she understands in just under a heartbeat. Goodbye, Mike.
Mike doesn’t say it’s her fault, and he’d refute the notion if she ever dared to suggest it, but Eleven commits the look on his face to memory, storing his teary-eyed gaze for safe-keeping. She needs to protect it — him. Whatever light he had in him dimmed as soon as he came across her in those woods. You burdened him in one fell swoop of a flashlight. That little voice eats at her, teeth nipping at her nerves until she feels an ache between the eyes. You’re responsible for whatever darkness he feels.
When she finally garners the courage to tell him, bluntly so he understands that it’s her fault, he doesn’t say a word. He merely grabs her by the back of the head and pulls her into a kiss — long, sweet — as if it’s the only response he can muster. As if the simple act of touching her will heal internal injuries, stitching the broken parts of his brain back together again.
Mike doesn’t share everything either. Their friends have been his for even longer, and yet there are still things he refuses to discuss with the group. When Dustin clarifies: “we need to know everything everybody is up to, Micheal. What if something happens?” he nods in agreement but keeps his mouth shut, glancing at El out the corner of his eye. She understands straight away what he needs — There’s been an invisible tether between them since the start. It’s charcoal black and frayed at the edges but it’s strong.
“Guess we broke a cardinal rule,” Mike says in a sigh, flipping an old binder full of notes and sketches closed. He grabs a can of Coke from the table, shaking the few dregs inside about with a crooked smile. Mindless. “Do you think they have vending machines in hell?”
El is on the sofa, his two-sizes-too-big hoodie drowning her. She pulls on the sleeves, widing the bobbly material around her thumbs with a slight furrow of her brows. “What do you mean?”
Mike plops into the seat next to her, disposing of the can on the floor. He leans into the cushions and cranes his neck to look at her, jawline cutting into his shoulder at an awkward angle. He makes no effort to move, instead reaching for her hand and pulling it to his mouth. Touch again. “You know, because we disobeyed the rule of law or whatever. That’s, like, a sin, and by Dustin's reasoning I’m totally going to hell.” El figures he’s joking because the corners of his lips twitch into a smile, but she’s still not brushed up on what exactly constitutes a sin.
“If you are, then I am too,” is all she says, and it must be enough because suddenly Mike is pulling her into a half-lying position in his lap, head against his chest, his long fingers carding in her hair. El stares up at him. “If they don’t have vending machines, you can just make one.”
He laughs at that. “I have to make it? You’re the one with all that power in your hands – I need you to turn it on.” He messes with the toggles of her borrowed hoodie, eyebrows raising to his hairline. “I couldn’t tell one of my best friends about- about a… fucking sleep disorder. It’s so stupid.” He shakes his head, resting against the back of the sofa.
Eleven watches as his Adam’s apple bobs, throat tight. Tense. She grabs his chin between her fingers, urging him to meet her gaze. “It’s not stupid, Mike.” She nuzzles into his neck, pressing warm lips to his jaw. “We all have bad stuff. I do, too.”
“Yeah, but- It’s different, though. Sort of.” He pauses, “I don’t know, maybe it’s not. It’s just- I feel like I should be able to tell them these things, right? I mean, they were there. Dustin and Lucas, they- they know. And I’m too, like, chicken shit to just say, ‘By the way, dude, I have chronic nightmares about my girlfriend disappearing into thin air and it’s fucking terrifying and it eats me alive. So what’s new with you, man?’.”
“It’s not the same but- I have nightmares, too, Mike. They’re just not about you.” She’s told him before, in passing. They’ve never really discussed it. “I’ve killed people, Mike.” When it looks like he’s going to interrupt — say something like ‘they were bad guys, El’ — she continues, “it doesn’t matter who I killed. I… see them. A lot. When I have a bad day and I can’t sleep, they’re there again, Mike. And it’s bad,” she explains, voice breaking as tears pool, “really bad.”
“You-” Mike drops whatever he’d been going to say and offers, “does talking about it help?”
“A little.”
“So then… tell me.” A beat. You burdened him. “Seriously, El, I can take it. The more you talk about them, the more they might, you know, disappear. Kind of like ghosts, right? They don’t really exist but we still imagine them in the dark. At night. But they’re just shadows.”
“Or memories.”
Mike nods, “exactly. And if you share them, even if it’s just with one person, then it’s like you’re clearing them out of your head. You know what I mean?” He runs his thumb along her bottom lip gently. “You’re not bad for having those thoughts, El. It’s not like you can help them. Nobody can. We just… I don’t know, I guess we have to deal with them and- Like, our nightmares are different but they’re still scary, right?”
He quirks a brow when El moves to sit up, meeting him at eye level. “You can tell me about the scary things, El, because they don’t scare me. What scares me is losing you, and- and I don’t want those things to eat at you the same way mine do.”
Mike has dark thoughts, too. He doesn’t scare easy, and he’s not haunted by murder, and the thought of his own death doesn’t seem to shake him. He’d follow her to another dimension and battle monsters if it meant keeping her safe. He'd kick and fight and scream if the bad men came to take her away. He’d grab her hand and run, hiding her from the authorities and her own father if he had to. He’d sacrifice himself for her and say he was only returning the favor.
He cares more about the people he loves than he does himself, and that kills her.
Maybe that’s who he is. Not the first friend or the savior. Not the saint. Not even the lover.
The sinner. He’d go to hell and back for her.