They had been at the cabin for almost a week when Eleven decided that she needed to thank Hopper. He had been very nice to her, and she knows you are supposed to do something nice when someone is nice to you.
After they ate dinner that night, she sat down on the sofa so close that she was almost touching him. She didn't know why she felt a little nervous about what she had been about to do.
Papa had taught her that word - nervous.
It meant you were a little frightened, but that you probably didn't need to be. Everything would be fine, Papa would tell her. Even though it wasn't always fine.
She thought she was just nervous because Hopper wasn't Papa. She hadn't done this with anyone that wasn't Papa, but Hopper was a nice man, so it would probably be okay.
Eleven hesitantly moved a little closer to him, and he lifted his arm up on the back of the couch around her, but not directly touching her. She briefly wondered if maybe this wasn't how normal people said thank you to someone who was nice to you. But still, she waited until the news went on commercial break, and then she attempted it anyway. She turned to him and quickly slid her small hand under front of the waistband of his pants.
Hopper immediately jumped up from the couch before she had a chance to touch any more than the skin of his stomach.
Eleven recoiled too and pulled her hands to her lap.
"Woah, woah, hey," Hopper had exclaimed in shock.
El looked at him for only a second, but she could immediately tell that he was not happy. This was how she made Papa happy, so she wasn't sure why Hopper was looking at her this way now.
Hopper's heart was beating too fast, and his immediate reaction was to become upset. But when he saw how El reacted to his sudden displeasure with her actions, he realized that he had to tone it down a little. She made no eye contact and shrank back into the couch, as if she were ready to be punished.
"El, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to scare you."
She was still feeling confused and refused to look at him.
He sat back down on the couch next to her, his mind racing with a hundred questions, but he didn't want to upset her any more than he already had; he knew he had to tread lightly. "I uh, you um, you don't need to…" He had a hard time thinking of how to properly phrase it. "It's inappropriate for you to touch grownups that way."
Eleven did not respond. She was frozen, looking at a spot on the ground. She didn't know what inappropriate meant, but her voice didn't seem to be working to ask him.
"Eleven?" Hopper pressed.
He hadn't worked with many children who had been sexually abused before, but it was all too obvious now that's what he had in front of him. She had thought that because he was a grown man who took care of her, that this is what she needed to do in return.
A normal child would not have done that. And well, he had known Eleven was not a normal child, but he hadn't really thought that the abuse she suffered in the lab had extended that far.
"Inappropriate?" El finally repeated with almost a whisper.
"Uh, yeah. Inappropriate. It means something that you shouldn't do." He cringed, as he knew it was a poor explanation.
"Bad," the girl whispered. She knew what that meant.
"Yeah, uh, yes. It means bad. But not that you were bad," he added quickly, attempting to back-track when he saw where she was going with it. He touched her hand, intending for it to be comforting. Eleven finally made eye contact with him. "Have grownups asked you to touch them like that before?"
Her eyes darted away, and she didn't respond, but it was all the confirmation he needed.
"Right, okay. So I want you to know, I don't want that and I won't ever ask you to do that," he started with a sigh. "And it was very wrong for anybody to ever ask you to."
Eleven's mind flashed back to Papa, to the first time he touched her, and she touched him. That day didn't feel bad. Papa even turned off the camera in the corner of her bedroom, and it made her feel so special. From then on, he would reward her with their special, secret time together whenever she was good, whenever she did what he asked.
When she was bad, he wouldn't come to her room at all, in fact, nobody would. Sometimes she didn't see anybody for more than five sleeps. The other men would slide her meals through the slot on her door, and she had to return the tray when she was finished. Those days made her cry the most, because she didn't like when Papa was upset with her.
She didn't like being alone, but she also didn't like knowing that the other men were always watching her on that stupid camera up on her ceiling. She turned it off with her powers once, and the men didn't feed her for two whole sleeps afterwards.
So it had made her especially happy when Papa had told her that they could turn it off while they had their special time together.
Eventually her punishments escalated to being put in the room. That was the worst punishment she could think of- worse than having to stay in her bedroom by herself, worse than being hungry, and worse than not having special time with Papa. The last time she had gone to the room, she had gotten so upset that she killed the two men who gripped her arms too tightly while they carried her there.
She didn't even think about it when it happened; she just knew she wasn't going to spend another minute in that cold, dark place all alone.
That day, Papa had been so proud of her that they didn't even go back to her room for special time. Instead, he just stayed with her and held her in her bed until she fell asleep, and she had realized that she liked that so much more. She secretly wished they could always do that instead.
And even though their time together sometimes made her feel things she didn't like, she never thought that she was being bad.
Until now.
Despite the boiling rage that Hopper felt, he told her as casually as he could, "Just- hey, it's okay. Let's just forget about it, yeah?"
He said this, though he knew that he would never forget the fact that a 13-year-old kid thought that an appropriate way to thank someone was with a hand job, or more.
Hopper ran his hand through his hair anxiously. El was practically frozen with fear right now, and so he knew this was the only acceptable response. "El, seriously. No big deal," he promised her again.
Finally, she managed a slight nod, still not making any form of eye contact with him.
Hopper got up and flipped through the channels on the television, not sure exactly what he was looking for. Perhaps just something that suddenly felt less heavy than the nightly news. He settled on Gilligan's Island reruns and spent the next hour watching it with her in silence.
He wanted to ask her what those assholes had done to her, though he feared he already knew the answer. He wanted her to feel safe enough to talk to him. He wanted her to know that she never had to do those horrible things ever again.
Most of all, he wanted to kill Martin Brenner.
He wanted that man to suffer the way this child had her entire life.
The men left at Hawkins lab had assured Hopper that Brenner died at the school that night about a month ago. But he never saw a body, so he just added that to the list of lies he was sure that he'd been told.
Though now he had wanted to start the search for him even more, he knew that looking into Brenner's whereabouts would not be safe for El, so any form of justice would have to wait.
Eleven tried to watch the television show too, but she couldn't concentrate. She'd never felt so embarrassed and ashamed in her entire life. She could tell from Hopper's reaction, that what she had done with Papa was bad, in fact, very bad.
She watched until the second episode finished, and then she stood up to go to her bedroom. She felt like she could burst out crying any minute, and she thought that she had actually wanted to be alone for once; she didn't want the nice man to see her cry.
Crying was only for babies, Papa used to tell her.
"Bedtime?" Hopper asked, when he saw her heading to her room. She didn't turn around to look at him, but she nodded yes.
It was early- only 7 o'clock, but he let her go anyway.
"Alright. Goodnight kid," he told her.
"Night," she managed to squeak out. She shut her bedroom door as far as she comfortably could, leaving it cracked about an inch. She didn't even change her clothes, but instead, just curled up on top of the covers.
When El disappeared in her room, Hopper stood up and paced the floor. God, he wanted to tell somebody; he needed to talk to someone, anyone. He felt the incredible need to call Joyce. She would be able to help him.
But, fuck, he knew that he couldn't.
It wasn't worth risking El's safety, everyone's safety. So instead, he sat down with a beer and closed his eyes, wishing that all his years on the police force would have left him with a better sense of how to navigate something like this.
It was over an hour later when he heard a strangled cry come from her bedroom. He briefly wondered if he should just leave her alone. After all, she had probably gone to her bedroom for that very reason. But he peered in her bedroom door anyway just to see if she was okay, and when he saw her, he knew he couldn't leave her like that. She was curled up on her side facing the wall. Her knees were pulled up to her chest with one arm wrapped around them tightly, and the other cradled under her head, as if she were trying to disappear.
He sat down on the end of her bed and leaned back against the wall. She startled easily when she felt his weight on the bed, and immediately choked out an apology. "I'm sor-sorry."
He wasn't sure, but it almost seemed like she was apologizing for crying, as though she'd been punished for that before too.
"Kid, I need you to listen to me. You have nothing to be sorry for. I want you to understand that," he assured her with more intensity than he had planned. Seeing her this way was not easy for him. "I know those people where you came from did a lot of bad things to you. But you are not bad. You are just a kid, and you are not responsible for any of those bad things that happened. I promise you, you are not bad."
"I just- I wanted Papa to-" She choked, unable to finish her sentence.
Eleven wasn't sure why this man was still being so nice to her; he had no reason to be. And she really didn't want to cry in front of him either, but she couldn't hold back her tears any longer. She curled in on herself with each body shaking sob, and Hopper's heart broke listening to her. He understood now that Brenner had probably manipulated her easily under the false pretense of being a caring parent figure- the only one she ever had.
He tentatively put a hand on her back, just so she'd know that she wasn't alone in this anymore. It had been the first time that she didn't startle or pull away from him.
Hopper didn't ask her if she wanted to talk about what happened. He hoped she would come to him when she felt ready, and maybe that would be never. He just knew that he sure as hell wasn't going to force her into anything that she didn't feel ready for; she'd gone through enough of her life having no choices. He leaned his head back against the wall and stayed with the kid until her cries turned into whimpers, and she eventually fell asleep.
He carefully got off her bed, trying not to disturb her and pulled a blanket off the rack in her room to cover her up. It was then that he noticed she had one of his Henley shirts balled up in her hands under her face. He hadn't noticed before, but she had snuck it out from his clothes that he had left on the bathroom floor one day. She liked how Hopper smelled- like coffee, tobacco, and the outdoors. It made her feel a sense of safety, and so she had kept it under her pillow to sleep with. It helped when she woke up in the middle of the night with nightmares too.
Hopper sighed and turned off her small lamp. He wanted to make everything better right now, but he knew time would be the only solution. In time, she would hopefully come to trust him. He also secretly found himself wishing someone else would have found her; not so he wouldn't have to deal with all of this, but because she deserved so much more than Jim Hopper.
Over the next few weeks, he'd been much more conscious of how he touched her, making sure it was never a surprise. He never mentioned what happened that night, and she didn't either. But every day she seemed to get a little more comfortable around him again.
Finally, one night before bed, El came out from her room, dressed in only one of his flannel shirts that she liked to wear when she slept. She had missed a button, so the two sides hung unevenly. She pulled a blanket off the back of the couch and curled her legs up next to him.
It wasn't too long before she moved closer and cautiously laid her head down on his shoulder. He pulled his arm out from between them and wrapped it around her shoulder.
"Not inappropriate?" El asked timidly.
"No kid," he promised. "This is just fine."
El curled up against him happily, feeling a sudden sense of relief. His thumb rubbed her shoulder softly, and she realized that she liked Hopper's kind of touching much better than Papa's.
Hopper was a nice man.
She nuzzled her face against him and inhaled.
Hopper was safe. He was home.