Thanks so much for the nice reviews, I can't tell you how much I appreciate it! Sorry this took a while, I was on holiday so it was hard to get much writing done. Hope you enjoy!
A Rubik's Cube
January 12th
It hurt.
'It' being everything. Sure, not in an agonising, blinding agony, dagger through flesh sort of way, but still, it hurt. She felt a prickling heat that poked under her skin, but she could also feel her teeth chattering.
She lay still for what felt like an eternity. There was an itch on the small of her back that she desperately wanted to reach, but equally she didn't want to move a muscle. Somewhere near her she heard hushed voices for a while, but she only managed to make out bits of what was being said.
"I'm telling you, it was weird." It was a young woman's voice, but she sounded worried. "He just hung up as soon as I said her name – no explanation, nothing, before I could even tell him where we were or what had happened."
"What a jackass." A boy seemed to mutter that. By the way he said 'jackass' El could tell it was like a 'mouth breather' – it wasn't a nice thing to say about someone.
"No – he's not like that…Hopper was there when all of this happened – he…I don't get it…"
"Forget about him." They talked a little more but too quietly for El to make out what was being said. Eventually, she heard the door close and silence returned.
She tried opening her eyes, but there was just darkness. Some slivers of light crept out from behind the doorway, but she couldn't adjust to the dim light. Where was this place? The last thing she could remember was…actually, she wasn't sure. In the upside down everything sort of blended together.
She felt something digging into her arm. She strained to reach her other hand over and felt…a wire? It seemed to disappear into her skin. Sometimes the men that worked for Papa put wires on her, but usually they were above the skin, not underneath. Suddenly a chilling thought hit her – that's where she was, back in the lab, back with Papa – it was the only explanation.
She pulled at the wire, but something was holding it in place. She gathered her strength and pulled again, but harder. Eventually it seemed to peel away, stinging as it left her skin. What was it? She wanted to get up, to try and get out of this room, but her legs were stiff and unmoving. She tried to fight the feeling of sleep creeping over her again. She had to stay awake, to try and find a way out of this place, but sleep was snaking around her, coiling over her eyes. She felt like she was in someone else's body, powerless to stop her eyes closing.
Some unknown amount of time passed before a sharp pain brought her back awake, and she looked with horror to see a woman in blue putting the wire back into her wrist. It looked like it was filled with some kind of liquid.
"Oh, you're awake!" The woman looked at her – she was middle aged and had short-ish brown hair. She looked a bit like Joyce, almost, but a little more fat, El decided. But she seemed to have a kind face, which was confusing. "I'm sorry this hurts a little honey, but try to leave it in this time ok? It's for your own good."
The woman left briefly, and El turned to look at her wrist. She didn't know whether to leave the strange wire in or not. What if they were poisoning her? Maybe this was why she felt so tired? A sudden memory flashed in her mind of Mike, of looking up at his face, and he was crying. She couldn't place it.
Then the door swung open again, and in came…Nancy, followed by the nurse from before. "Oh you're awake!" Nancy came over and put a hand on her head. "We've been so worried about you."
El looked at her – she still didn't understand what was going, or how she got here.
"Don't worry." Nancy seemed to sense her confusion. "Everything is fine, you're safe now. You're home."
Something about hearing Nancy say that word made her heart warm.
Xx
"Mike, seriously, chill out." Lucas looked at his friend, whose knee was nervously bouncing up and down under his desk so violently that it was making a thudding noise. "She'll still be there when school's out."
"Sorry." Mike forced his leg to stop moving, but found his fingers started drumming at the desk instead. He frowned, stuffing his hands into his pockets. "I don't see why Nancy gets to skip school and we have to be here. We were the ones who found her."
"We were pretty screwed without Nancy and Steve." Dustin chipped in, watching Mike check his watch for the twentieth time. "Besides, she's kind of a badass now, remember? If you try to skip school she'll end you."
Before Mike had a chance to respond, Mr. Clarke stood up from his seat. "Ok class, today we're going to be talking about molecular structure." He was straining to speak loudly (well, loud by his mild standards) to try to make himself heard over the chatter. "Open up your textbooks to page forty-three."
"We'll go straight away after school." Lucas whispered to the other three. "Will can finally meet El as well."
Will just smiled at the others. Mike knew was never really one to talk in class, even if it was a teacher as understanding as Mr. Clarke. Dustin and Lucas on the other hand seemed to never stop annoying each other during lessons.
"Structure is everything. Two substances can have the exact same molecular formula - they can contain the exact same number of atoms from the exact same elements – but they can behave completely differently depending on how those atoms are arranged…"
For a while, Mr. Clarke's enthusiasm for the wonders of isomers almost managed to get his mind off whatever was happening at the hospital. He couldn't tell if he really loved science (at least, if he loved it with the same passion that Dustin did), or if he just loved Mr. Clarke's classes. He couldn't picture himself as a scientist when he was grown up, but then he couldn't really picture himself as anything. He didn't really have any hobbies that would translate into a job. He was good at making up stories, but that was about it. Besides, he never did that well in Mrs. Broadwater's English classes. She was fond of telling him his writing 'lacked clarity and focus'.
The bell rang, and they were just heading to the lockers when Mike heard a shout from behind them.
"Hey, Wheeler!" He would recognise that voice anywhere. He turned around slowly to see Troy and James approaching. The taller boy stepped close to him and looked down, his face so close that Mike was hit by the off-milk smell of his breath. "Don't think I've forgotten about you." As Troy left he gave Mike a hard shove, sending him back into the lockers, his head clanging against a metal door.
"You okay?" Will asked once Troy and James were out of earshot.
"…Yeah." Mike rubbed the back of his head and checked his hand – no blood. It was just going to be a bump. "I was just getting used to being left alone by those two." Troy's arm had been in a sling until last week, and he'd blissfully ignored them.
"Man, that is so sweet." Dustin laughed, putting the last of his textbooks away.
"Exactly how is what just happened 'sweet'?" Mike asked incredulously.
"Don't you get it?" He chuckled again. "Their timing is perfect – they start bothering us the very next day after we find Eleven again. I can't wait to see his face when he realises she's back."
Mike grinned at that. "What was it you said?" He nudged Dustin "She's our friend and she's crazy!"
"Damn straight."
Xx
Now she was finally awake and felt a little less tired, she was bored. Nancy was asleep on a chair beside her, and Steve, who had briefly been in the room, seemed to have left. Eleven looked at the tray of food in front of her, a mix of mush in a range of different colors, and gingerly put it back on the side table. She didn't feel like food for some reason, which wasn't at all normal.
The room was basically bare, and all painted plain white, but there was a black box on the far wall. It looked a little similar to the one in Mike's living room, where she had seen the weird images of the red cola can. She focused on the biggest button until the screen burst into life, grey moving lines covering the surface and a buzz emanating into the room. She kept focusing, probing at the airwaves the same way she did with the radio, until eventually she managed to make the pictures settle on a woman, who was stood outside somewhere in the snow, talking excitedly.
"That's right, much of Gosport lost power last night for upwards of an hour, and as of now we're still waiting for an official explanation…" This woman seemed unnecessarily loud, El thought.
"The heavy snow yesterday must have brought down a power line somewhere – and early indications are that houses like these behind me, which are located close to the river, were worst affected. Back to you."
Suddenly the pictures shifted back inside, to a colorful room with two smartly dressed middle-aged people behind a desk, and music started to play. It wasn't like the nursery rhymes she occasionally heard in the lab – it was much louder, and she found it unsettling. She strained again until she managed to switch the box off again, and the room returned to blissful silence. She felt a familiar warmth and put her hand towards her face, but she was just too slow to stop a drop of blood from hitting the bedsheets. She frowned.
"Wow." El turned her head to see Nancy was now wide awake, and staring at her in wide-eyed amazement. "You know, you can use this." Nancy held out a strange black rectangle covered in buttons, and she demonstrated it, pointing at the box and pressing a red button to make it come alive, then again to go back to black. "It's called a remote control. It's pretty cool, only newer TVs have them. Ours at home is too old." So the black box was called a tee-vee. She made a mental note to find out why later.
Nancy put the black rectangle on the side table where El could reach it, before looking at the delicate silver watch that hung on her wrist. "You know, Joyce and the boys should be here soon, it's almost four." El touched her own wrist with her other hand. It was bare, and she missed the feel of Mike's chunky watch pressing to her skin, even if she never understood what any of those hundreds of tiny buttons did. When the numbers read 3, 1, 5, meet us under the power lines. She smiled at the memory.
It felt like a while before they actually, finally arrived. She heard them even before the door opened, their excited voices carrying up the hallway ahead of them.
"Eleven!" The door swung open and Dustin and Lucas came piling in, embracing her in a carefully-gentle bear hug. "Where were you? Were you in the upside down? How did you get back?" They kept asking more questions before she had a chance to answer, but behind them she watched as Mike entered sheepishly, followed by another boy – Will. Dustin and Lucas let her go, and sat perched on the side of her bed.
Mike walked over, but he hung back a little, standing a few feet from the bed. "How do you feel?" He asked. It felt so strange to see him, to see all of them again. She had forced herself to believe she never would. "Sorry I couldn't stay with you all day, Nancy wouldn't let me." She saw him shoot his sister a glare.
She wanted to say something but she wasn't sure what. She just smiled at him, hoping that somehow the gesture would convey everything she was trying to express. Then suddenly she remembered what he had said to her after the first time she had run away, after she had accidentally hurt Lucas. "Happy…to be home."
He smiled. "I'm happy you're home too." She watched as he scratched the back of his neck. He was being weird. "Oh, I almost forgot, this is Will." He gestured to the small boy next to him.
El looked at him and suddenly she felt something twist in her stomach, something bad. She frowned, then caught herself and forced a smile. This was her friends' friend, which meant he was hers too. At least she thought that was how it worked. "Hi." She said softly.
"Hi. It's good to finally meet you. I've heard so much awesome stuff about you." He looked weak, though not as weak as when she saw him in the upside down. There was a pause for a bit, and El realised everyone probably expected her to say something, but again she wasn't sure what, so she just smiled and nodded once.
"Where were you? In the upside down?" Dustin eventually asked again. El nodded. "For that whole time?" He seemed shocked.
"How did you get back?" Lucas asked. "I thought you couldn't shadow walk?"
"Shadow…walk?" She knew she had heard the term before but she couldn't remember what it meant.
"Like, did you make a new portal? To the upside down?" Had she? She hoped not. She didn't think so – she hadn't seen the demagorgon in there, let alone touched it again – but then she couldn't really remember how she got back.
"Guys, leave it for now, ok?" Mike looked worried. "Stop piling on questions." El couldn't help but let out a small sigh of relief. She wasn't sure she had any answers.
"We brought some stuff for you, Mike has it." Will broke the silence, nodding to Mike. "Trust me, I can remember how boring it is to be stuck in a hospital all day."
Mike finally moved over, sitting in the chair beside the bed that Nancy had vacated. He took off his backpack and pulled out a bundle of papers, holding them out to her. They were very colorful, and had pictures of men and women in strange, bright clothes.
"Those are my Marvel comics." Dustin said excitedly, pointing at the front of the first little book. "That's Wolverine. He has giant claws that shoot out of his hands." She turned through some pages slowly, not really listening while Dustin rambled about the different characters. She barely noticed that she had started to frown slightly.
"It doesn't matter if you can't read the writing, El." Mike said quietly. The others all turned to look at her, and she suddenly felt the tips of her ears become warm, her face flushed with embarrassment. She could read, but only a little. Papa hadn't spent much time on that sort of thing.
"Yeah, the story is in the pictures." Lucas agreed. "Plus, it's just Marvel. Like, most of the writing just says 'POW' or 'WHAM'." He seemed to direct this comment more at Dustin than at her.
"Oh, I'm sorry Mister DC!" Dustin waved his arms in an 'ooh lah lah' motion. "Because Batman is sooo sophisticated…" El looked at Mike and barely suppressed a giggle. He had that 'someone save me' face on, like he always did when Dustin and Lucas bickered.
"Anyway." Mike seemed to see her laugh and his face quickly snapped back to normal. "Will brought you this." He passed over a plain wooden box, gesturing for her to open it.
She looked inside and saw a set of crayons, some paper and pens. "In case you want to draw something of your own…" Will smiled.
"Thanks." She muttered, avoiding his gaze. His niceness didn't fit with the unsettling feeling she got whenever she looked him in the eyes.
"I brought you this!" Lucas reached over into Mike's bag and pulled out a strange box, covered in little squares of lots of different colors. "It's a Rubik's cube-"
They were interrupted by a cursory knock at the door, before Joyce walked in. She was wearing some kind of blue outfit with a badge on her chest. "Boys, it's time to go, sorry." They all reluctantly got up, saying their goodbyes, except Mike.
"I'm heading back with Nancy in a little while, if that's okay Mrs. Byers?" El felt a surge of relief that he was staying, for a little longer at least, and she wouldn't be left alone here again.
"Of course." She walked up to El before she left. "It's so good to see you again sweetie. We all missed you. I'm coming back later to spend the evening with you, okay?" She patted her on the head, smiling. Something about her made El feel all safe. For some reason she trusted this woman – an adult – maybe as much as she trusted the boys.
After Joyce left, El looked down at the plastic cube. What was it? She heard Mike laugh, and she looked up at him. Was it weird that she didn't know what this was? She felt her face heat up again with embarrassment.
He reached out and touched her hand gently. "Sorry. I'm not laughing at you, El." He seemed to notice his hand and quickly pulled it away again. She still thought he was behaving…differently.
"It's just that, I mean, it's really not obvious what that's for…" He laughed, pointing at the cube. "I wouldn't have had a clue if someone hadn't told me." She smiled a little, and looked up at him, waiting for an explanation.
"It's a game." He said, reaching over and taking it in his hands. "You're supposed to twist it, like this…" She watched as he turned the little squares on the cube, first across, then up and down. "Until each side is completely one color. It's pretty hard – it took me ages to do it."
"Why?" It seemed like an entirely pointless exercise.
"Good question. I…dunno." He laughed again, and she joined in, enjoying that he made her feel like she was actually in on a joke, for once. "I guess it's meant to be fun. Also, it's difficult so it's a way of kind of…testing yourself. To see if you're smart enough to figure it out."
She nodded slowly. Tests were something she definitely understood.
"Anyway, you have a TV in here, so you don't need to worry about this stuff." He picked up the remote and pointed it at the box, bringing the pictures back up. "Have you watched anything yet?"
"No." She said softly. "Too loud."
"Oh." He looked concerned. "Here, you can do this." He held down a different button and the box got much quieter. "Is that better?" She nodded.
"Somewhere in here there should be…" He was looking around under the bed and on the side table. "Here!" He held up a small booklet triumphantly. "This has the TV guide in it." He flicked through the booklet towards the back, and picked up a pen from the side table, and began scribbling on the page.
"Hmm…no…no…no…" El just watched, enjoying the way his lips scrunched together and his eyebrows lowered when he was concentrating.
He seemed to be finished, and his hand went to unstrap his watch. She felt a buzz of happiness, holding out her arm as he wrapped the plastic watch around and fastened it. Somehow her wrist just felt better with it there. "I'm writing this down for you, ok?" He took a piece of blank paper from the wooden box will had given her and started scribbling again.
"When the watch looks like six, zero, zero." He pointed to the first set of numbers, which looked like 6:00. "Press this button." He pointed to the number 3 on the remote, writing it down next to the time. "It's called Whiz Kids, it's kind of childish but it's fun. These kids are really good with computers and they solve crimes."
"Crimes?" El asked, not really understanding the concept.
"Like, anything, robberies, or muggings." She frowned, and Mike seemed to understand why she was still confused. "Crimes are things bad people do. But this is all made up. It's just supposed to be fun."
She nodded, but she wasn't exactly sure she understood.
"If it gets too scary, just turn it off, okay?" He smiled at her. "Besides, this might be better…at eight there's an animal documentary, on channel one." He pointed at the first button on the remote control. "It's just lots of videos of different animals and where they live. You'll like it."
She smiled. She liked animals a lot. "Lions?" She remembered her stuffed toy from back in the lab.
Mike's eyes seemed to light up at her enthusiasm. "Yeah, lions! And loads of other cool animals too." She looked at the piece of paper again. Eight-zero-zero, button one.
Mike looked over at the watch on her wrist. "I'm so sorry but I have to go. Nancy and I have to be at home tonight. But Mrs. Byers is coming back to make sure you aren't alone…" She could see he seemed distressed at leaving her on her own, even for a while.
"It's okay." She said, forcing a smile.
"I brought you one more thing." He reached into his bag, pulling out a long black box. She would recognise it anywhere – it was his walkie-talkie. "I bought a new one, so we could talk. School is probably out of range, but my house should just be in reach. Besides, if it's important maybe you can…you know…boost the signal."
She smiled, nodding.
"If you want to talk to the guys, go to channel six." He pointed at a dial on the front that was pointing at the number six. "For tonight, if you want to talk to me on my own, I'll be on channel seven." He turned the dial up to seven, then back again. "If you get, you know, scared in the night, then just talk to me. I'll wake up."
He stood up to leave, throwing his backpack over his shoulder. "I promise I'll come see you again tomorrow." Promise. She still felt reassured by that word.
As the door shut behind him she looked down at the assortment of presents on her bed. Her hand went straight for the Rubik's Cube. A test. She must have it finished by the time Mike comes back tomorrow.
Xx
Outside the weather had warmed up slightly, and sleet was falling inelegantly in the hospital car park, sloshing onto the snow covered ground which was beginning a transformation into watery slush.
It'll freeze overnight, Hopper thought, grumbling. There will be an inevitable minor car crash to deal with tomorrow when someone back-ends another car after tailing too closely before a traffic light.
He lowered his hat to cover his face as Steve's car drove past on its way out, with Nancy in the passenger seat and the kid in the back. Once they were out of sight he reached for the glove compartment and pulled out a flask of coffee. It was going to be a long night.
