Disclaimer: Stranger Things belongs the Duffer Brothers and Netflix, not me. This was all written on my phone so the typos and weird formatting is mine.

On November 6, 1983, Will Byers disappeared.

On December 30th, 1983, he disappeared again. But not for long this time. Only about 30 seconds.

They were all in the Wheeler's living room, piled on the couch and the floor watching movies and playing on Mike's new Atari system. His parents were out at a party, leaving Nancy in charge, and Holly was already asleep. It was an unremarkable night.

And then Will vanished.

One moment he was there, the next his Atari controller dropped to the floor and he was gone. There was a moment of silence.

"What the fuck?" Dustin shouted, scrambling back from the empty space on the couch where Will should have been. "What the fuck, what the fuck?"

Lucas leaped to his feet. "Will, this isn't funny!" he shouted.

"Guys, stop!" Mike bellowed. He pointed to the Christmas tree in the corner, its myriad of colorful lights turning on, off, on, off. Dustin clamped a hand over his mouth and hunkered down, stifling a stressed whimper.

It felt like an eternity, but less than a minute later Will flickered back into the room, in the exact same spot, wavering in and out of focus like an image on a TV set. "What the hell just happened?" Dustin demanded.

Will blinked slowly. "Hold...hold on," he said, his voice thin and faraway. "Give me a second."

Mike dropped to his knees beside him. "Will, were you in the Upside Down?" he asked. "Do you have powers now?"

"He's not in the X-men, Mike," Lucas scoffed.

Will swallowed hard, gulping something back down his throat. "He's right," he rasped.

"Which one?" Dustin asked. "Which one's right?"

Will shook his head. "Mike," he said. "I...I kind of..."

"Kind of what?" Mike pressed.

Will sighed heavily and leaned back against the couch, pushing his bangs off his forehead. "Ever since I got back it's been like...like there's a homing device, trying to call me back there," he confessed. "That place...got inside me."

"But you can get out, right?" Mike said. "Not like before?"

"Yeah, it's not like before," Will said. "It's different. It's like...I blink and I'm there, and I blink and I'm gone."

"Oh my god," Lucas breathed. "Does anybody know? Have you told your mom?" Will dropped his head and shrugged. "Dude! Tell your mom!"

"She'll freak out!" Will argued. "She panicked enough when I was actually missing, I don't want to put her through that again."

"Tell Jonathan!" Dustin suggested.

Will shook his head. "It's not that bad, you guys," he said. "It just happens sometimes. And I dream about it a lot."

"Really?" Lucas said skeptically. "Are you really there or just dreaming?"

"I don't know, honestly," Will said. "And she doesn't either so-"

He froze. "She?" Dustin repeated.

All the color drained from Mike's face. "Eleven?" he said.

"I...I didn't realize it was her at first," Will stammered.

Mike stood up. "Eleven's in the Upside Down?" he said, his voice rising.

Will nodded miserably.

"Shit," Lucas said.

"You've known she was there, and you didn't tell us?" Mike demanded, his face reddening. "You were there a week and you almost didn't make it! She's been there for two months! Two months, Will!"

"I'm sorry!" Will burst out. "I didn't...it's all really strange, and I-"

Mike lunged for him. Lucas and Dustin grabbed him just in time, wrenching his elbows back. "She's going to die out there and you didn't want to tell us?" Mike screamed.

Nancy stormed into the living room. "Knock it off!" she scolded. "I don't care what's going on, if you wake up Holly with your shouting Mom is going to-" She paused, taking in Mike struggling in his friends' grip and Will making himself as small as possible in the corner of the couch. "What's going on?"

"I thought you didn't want to know-" Dustin started to say. Nancy shot him a look.

"Will has weird powers, Eleven's alive in the Upside Down, and Mike is pissed that he didn't say anything about it," Lucas said.

Nancy's lashes flicked as she looked from one boy to the next, and then she turned on her heel and grabbed the phone from the wall. "What are you doing?" Mike asked, tearing away from Dustin and Lucas.

"Calling Jonathan," Nancy said, punching in the numbers from memory.

Will leaped off the couch and ran for her, trying to pull the phone away. "You can't tell him," he pleaded.

Nancy held the phone above his head. "He needs to know," she said firmly. "And if Eleven is in there, we need to get her out. We need backup."

"It'll kill them!" Will said. "If my mom and Jonathan find out, it'll ruin everything." His chest heaved. "Everything's been going so much better. My mom is happier, Jonathan isn't so stressed all the time." Nancy hesitated, her fingers hovering over the buttons on the phone. "Please. Nobody tell them. Not yet."

The room fell into thick silence. "I don't know if that's a good idea," Nancy said. "They'll want to help you. And besides, if Eleven is trapped there-"

"I'll tell them, I swear," Will promised desperately. "I will. Soon. Just...just not now."

"But what about Eleven?" Mike said. "What if something happens to her?"

Will swallowed hard. "I'll think of something," he said. "I just...need to figure out how to tell them. I promise I will though."

Nancy studied them for a long moment, then hung the phone back up. "If I see or hear anything weird happening, I'm calling Jonathan," she warned. Will nodded.

She left the living room. The four boys stared at each other in silence.

"You're sure she's alive?" Mike whispered. Will hesitated, then nodded.

He was so distracted he didn't realize Joyce had entered his office until she closed the door with a firm click. "Jesus!" he swore, scrambling for the remote to pause the tape. "Shit, Joyce, how long have you been there?"

She hid a laugh behind her hand. "Just a few minutes," she said.

He tried to smile, tried to shake off the weight on his shoulders and the images in his head. "You could have said something," he said.

"I did," she said. "What's got you so wrapped up?"

He turned off the TV. "Work," he said. "What's up? What brings you all the way out here?"

Joyce adjusted her purse on her shoulder. "I wanted to see if you wanted to stop by for dinner," she said.

"You could have called."

"I did. Four times." He sighed heavily, dragging his hand over his face. "What's got you so distracted?"

She reached for the nearest VHS tape. He lunged for it. "Joyce, don't-"

"Eleven, zero-two, fourteen, seventy-seven," she read aloud. She frowned and flipped the tape over. "Hawkins Power...and Light. Hopper, what the hell is this?"

He looked down at the scratched surface of his desk. "I took 'em," he said miserably. "After they cleared out of the lab. I dug around and took everything I could find about...her." He gestured broadly at the dusty crates stacked waist high along the wall. "There's tapes dating back to '72."

Joyce stared at him in horror. "Eleven?" she said, and he nodded reluctantly. "Hopper, she's dead. The gates to the Upside Down are closed. It's sad, it's so sad. And I hate that we lost that poor little girl. But we need to put this behind us and-"

"She's alive," he said, cutting her off. "The gateways are closed but she's in there and she's alive."

She dropped the tape like it was burning her fingers. "Are you serious?" she sputtered. "But she...the boys said...they were so sure!"

He shook his head. "I made a deal," he said quietly. "To get us into the Upside Down so we could get Will. I told them everything I knew, everything I saw. I didn't think..." His voice trailed off. "They didn't tell me where she was or what happened to her until I'd already spilled."

"But we can get her out, right?" Joyce demanded. "If we can get Will, then-"

"There's no guarantee," he said. "I've been...I've been leaving her food. Every day. It's the least I can do."

Joyce traced her fingertips along the edge of the VHS. "Do the boys know?" she asked.

"No, and we're not telling them," he said. "Let them keep thinking it's over. If we can save her, great. If she dies out there...better that they didn't get their hopes up."

Joyce nodded, furtively swiping at her eyes. "That poor little girl," she whispered. "No one even told her goodbye." She looked down at the VHS box on the desk. "Is she...is she on the tapes?"

"They recorded everything," he said. "The experiments they did on her, surveillance from when they left her alone in her room, recordings from-"

He broke off midsentence. Joyce didn't need to know about the tapes of Eleven alone in solitary confinement, night vision recordings of a little girl locked in a tiny pitch black cell for hours and days and weeks while she cried for someone to come save her. But Joyce didn't notice.

"I need to see," she said quietly.

"Joyce, you don't-"

"I need to see it," she repeated, a little more firmly. She fixed her gaze on him, her chin lifted.

He leaned back in his chair and hit the power button on the television. If she wanted to see, she was going to see.

The screen flickered into static before settling into the figure of a small girl, dressed in a hospital gown with her long hair draped around her shoulders. She sat on an uncomfortable metal chair, her short thin legs dangling, and her feet were bare. Her eyes were blank, staring past the camera like she was envisioning herself somewhere far away. She couldn't have been more than five years old.

Joyce grabbed onto Hopper's bicep and squeezed hard.

Two technicians in white scrubs worked over her, one of them fiddling with a cap made of wires and silver discs and the other adjusting dials and levers on a machine loaded onto a cart. The tech holding the cap tried to force it over the little girl's head, holding her in place by the neck while he tried to shove it on. She winced in pain, her small face scrunching up, but she didn't make a sound.

"Try it now," the tech said, and the other one flipped a switch.

"Dr. Brenner, we can't get a good readout," the second one said. "Too much interference."

The first tech pulled the helmet away and the little girl yelped as several strands of hair came with it. A tall man in a dark suit walked into frame, and Joyce's nails dug deep into Hopper's arms.

"It's her hair," Brenner said. "Cut it off."

All the adults moved out of frame, leaving the little girl alone. She looked around, shrinking back in her chair, and a horrible shrieking noise grated in the background.

"Hold still," the tech said, and he set a razor to her scalp.

She screamed, flinging herself forward, and the man in the white coat caught her by the back of the neck. "Hold still!" he repeated impatiently.

Dr. Brenner stood beside the chair, hands behind his back. "Now Eleven," he said. "That's no way to behave."

She squirmed. "Papa," she said. "No. No."

Joyce's grip was physically painful now. Hopper rubbed his hand over his jaw. He'd already seen this particular tape before, but it still didn't make it any easier to watch.

"You will sit still," Brenner said. "You do not get to say no. You're doing important work, remember?"

Eleven ran her little hand over her long wavy hair. "No," she whimpered. "No, Papa. Please."

Brenner knelt beside her. "Do not argue," he said. "Be obedient."

The razor revved again, and this time Eleven sat very still, the color draining from her face. The tech ran the razor over her scalp, and hair fell to the floor in long clumps, littering her shoulders and knees. It was short, clumsy work, and at the end Eleven was left with an uneven buzzcut, her soft brown hair shorn close to her head. The tech picked up the netting of wires and electrodes again and snapped it over her head.

"Try it now," he said, and the machine whirred to life.

Dr. Brenner patted Eleven's cheek with the tips of his fingers. "Stop crying," he said. "You know better."

Eleven's eyes welled up, a fat tear rolling down her cheek and plopping on her hands, tightly clenched on her knees. She unfolded her fingers just enough to tentatively touch a long lock of hair that trailed across her lap, and an audible sob broke from her throat.

Brenner pinched her in the soft space between her neck and her collarbone. "I said, no crying," he said sharply. Eleven swallowed hard, a tremor running through her small body, and then she went still, her shoulders dropping and her eyes going blank.

Hopper's arm ached from the tension in Joyce's clenched hand. "She was a baby," she whispered. "She was a baby, and they did this to her?"

He could hear the thickness of barely-contained tears in her voice and he paused the tape. "Joyce, it's okay-"

"It's not okay!" she burst out. "She's just a little girl! And I could have saved her, Hopp."

"We couldn't save her and Will, Joyce," he said quietly. "You know that. And Will-"

"I know!" she said. "He's my boy. He's my baby. I had to save him. But Eleven...she didn't deserve this! Any of this!"

She looked back at the screen, at the frozen image of a terrified little girl with a shorn head, who should have been coloring and playing with dolls and attending kindergarten instead of being used as a human lab rat. "We need to find her," she said. "We need to find her, and we need to keep her."

"That's the plan," Hopper said. But he remembered the box in the woods full of food that had barely been touched, and the way the air of the upside down had clogged his throat, and he gritted his teeth.

Two nights later Will dreamed of Eleven.

She huddled beside him in the rotting remains of Castle Byers, her shoulders covered with tattered shreds of his old sleeping bag and her knees tucked up to her chest. He wasn't sure how long he'd been sitting there- an hour, a few days, a few seconds. "Are you okay?" he asked hesitantly, trying to break the silence.

She raised and lowered one shoulder. "Okay," she echoed. She was thinner than he remembered, and paler, and her skin was damp.

"Are...are you real?" he asked hesitantly.

She rested her chin on her knees, her eyes blank. "Not sure," she said.

Will scooted closer. "I can try to get you out," he said. "I can do it. I tested it. The last time I blinked into the upside down I brought a vine back with me. I can bring things to the right side up."

Eleven's lips tugged bitterly. "Bigger than a vine," she said.

"I know, but I can practice," Will said. "If I can get better, I can-"

"There's not time," she said.

He grabbed her hand impulsively. "I can do it," he pleaded. Her fingers were bony in his grip, slick with the slime of the upside down. "If they could rescue me, I can rescue you. I promise."

"No promises," she whispered. "No more."

She was beginning to fade around the edges like steam, and Will squeezed both of her hands tightly. "Eleven, I promise!" he said. "I'll get you out. I will!"

"Will?"

At first he thought it was his voice echoing, bouncing off the bleak dark puddle world of the upside down.

"Will, wake up."

Jonathan was calling for him. Will held onto Eleven desperately even as the darkness began to shift and whirl around him, changing from solid black to smudged pale colors.

Castle Byers began to vanish around them but Eleven was still there, still staring at him with wide eyes. "Will?" she breathed. Her fingers began to curl around his. "Will, I-"

Will opened his eyes to his own bedroom and Jonathan leaning over him. "Hey, bud, if you want a ride to the Wheelers' you've got five minutes to get ready," he said. "I've got to go to work."

Will groaned and rolled out of bed, rubbing the heels of his hands against his temples. "Okay, okay, just gimme a second," he said, wincing against the light winter sunshine filtering through his windows.

"You have another nightmare?" Jonathan asked. "About...you know."

Will nodded, coughing to clear his throat as he dug through his dresser drawers. "It's okay," he said. "It was just a dream."

You close your eyes against the solid black of the upside down, your chest aching like someone is ripping you apart, and when you open them again it's still dark, but it's different. The darkness of the upside down is wet and pervasive, sinking deep into your body, slick like oil, but now the shadows around you are soft and velvety and suffocate you.

And then air hits your lungs, clean air, cold and sharp, and you gasp, clutching at your chest with the sudden shock of it. Brilliant white lights shine in your eyes and you cower, flinging your arms over your face. A truck thunders past, close enough that you feel hot exhaust on your bare legs and vibrations under your feet, and the driver blares the horn so loudly, deep and bright, that you're afraid you'll never hear again.

The vibrations settle. The air cools again. The light fades. You raise your head.

Your breath rattles in your chest and puffs into the air as you look around. Under your feet is mottled black asphalt. On either side are tall knotted pines, scraggly and patched with snow. The sky is steel gray but pale, the sun the faintest hint of warmth far on the horizon.

You are in the right side up.

You can't catch your breath. Two months of swallowing the thick soupy air of the upside down has left you with the odd sensation of drowning on land, and the air here is so clean and cold it feels like a knife.

But you are in the right side up at last.

You walk in a slow, hesitant circle, gazing at your surroundings. In the upside down you wandered aimlessly, knowing you were alone. Here is different. Here you might meet kind men who feed you burgers and ice cream, or shrill women who want to take you back to Papa.

A shudder runs down your spine. Papa. You might have killed him. And you're not sure if you regret it.

You need to find safety. You need to find Mike. He can hide you in his basement, give you clean clothes to wear and food to eat. Or Dustin, or even Lucas. They could help.

You think of Will, who you've never met in the right side up, and his brother, who was so quiet and gentle but fierce. And you think of their mother, who held you and kissed you when you cried, and said you were a brave girl, a good girl. You think of the tall man with the sharp tongue and the sad eyes, who gave you his shirt when they pulled you from the bath and you couldn't stop shaking, and who built you the box in the woods where he left you food.

They can help you. You just have to find them.

You look around again, your lower lip trembling. Which way? How are you supposed to move forward? How can you stay safe?

Signs stand on one side of the road and your vision blurs as you state at the words. You're not stupid, you know your letters. You know how to write "Eleven" and "Papa." But these words are unfamiliar, and you can't put them together.

You see a familiar combination at last. H-A-W-K-I-N-S. You saw that word emblazoned everywhere in the lab, and all over the town during your week of escape. And an arrow points down the road.

You take a step. Pain throbs through your body. The upside down, for all its faults, kept you in your dreamlike state where you felt little- pain, hunger, thirst. Now all you can feel is exhaustion seeping into your bones, and you want to lay down and close your eyes forever.

But you aren't safe, and so you take another step, and another, and the next time you look back the road sign is just a small square in the distance.

Author's Notes:

I've been sitting on this for a long time, and I figured I should get up the courage to post it. I'm pretty unsure of my writing nowadays, but I'm just really in love with Stranger Things.

I have the next chapter written and lots of scenes outlined, mostly because there's a distinct lack of hurt/comfort in this fandom and I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHY. So if you like hurt/comfort, please enjoy. And please prompt if you have have prompts!