A/N First of all, thanks to everyone who is reading and giving feedback. It's affirming to hear from people who enjoy the things bouncing around in my head. There are a little over 200 people who seem to be reading this consistently, so hello to you all and thanks for humoring me.

We're in early/mid May 1985, picking things up Saturday morning while Hopper is at Murray Bauman's. Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

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May in Hawkins was the peak of rainy season. Dreary and damp mornings gave way to humid afternoons before storm clouds rolled in and started the cycle all over again. Within a month, it would be summer, but for now it was just wet. Most days. But not that Saturday.

That Saturday it was blue skies and sunshine and the sort of day that made following the rules so hard. Mike had shown up on the Byers' porch as soon as he could justify being there, keen to take advantage of a time with Eleven that was not supervised by Hopper. The other members of the party would eventually trickle in, but only Mike was there bright and early.

Will answered the front door, stepped aside and called back into the house, "Its ok, it's just Mike!"

"Gee, thanks," Mike quipped with mock offense.

"You can't have Rice Crispy treats for breakfast," Mrs Byers' voice came from the kitchen, "those are a dessert."

"Could we have Rice Crispies?" Eleven asked.

"Yes."

"Then what's the difference?" she argued even though this was most likely crossing the line into the back talking Hopper had told her not to do.

"The marshmallows," Mrs Byers answered.

"Sorry, El," Will said walking into the kitchen with Mike, "I'm going to have to give that point to Mom."

"If you had Eggos," Eleven was not finished making her case, "we would have put syrup on them."

Mike understood the problem now. Eleven did not take kindly to missing out on her favorite breakfast food.

"Probably," Mrs Byers allowed.

"Syrup is sugar just like marshmallows," El waited a beat before following with, "So. What's the difference?"

"She's got you there, Mom," Will decreed tipping the scale on the breakfast vs dessert debate back in Eleven's favor.

"Ok, fine," Mrs Byers gave in, "just have a glass of milk with it because if it was cereal, you'd have it with milk. And if Hop asks, you had cereal." Because like hell she was going to eat her words after giving Hopper crap for not feeding the child a proper diet. He was right, she was impossible.

Will, Eleven and Mike helped themselves to what had been newly classified as a breakfast food and settled in at the kitchen table. Mike and Will started discussing the finalization of a school project and Eleven was distracted by the bright blue sky visible through the kitchen window.

"El?" Mike called to her after awhile.

"Hmm?"

"You were about a million miles away," Mike joked.

"Sorry, just thinking."

"You'd rather be outside, wouldn't you?" There were times when Mike and Eleven thought they could almost read each other's mind.

"It's not safe to be outside here yet," she deflected.

"What if we went somewhere else?" Mike offered, thinking aloud.

The real answer was that Hopper would lose his shit if she went somewhere else, but she didn't want to acknowledge that. Not yet. She wanted to entertain the thought for at least a little while even if it was a doomed idea. Instead, she just asked, "Where?"

"Well...," Mike realized quickly that he hadn't thought that far ahead. His familiarity with areas surrounding Hawkins was defined by what could be reached by bicycle. The quarry, the lab, Hopper's cabin and the Byers residence itself were the most remote locations he knew and they were all flawed choices for various reasons. "I guess I don't really know," he finally admitted hating to disappoint her.

"It's ok," she told him, intent on remaining positive. "Next spring we won't have to worry."

Eleven's resignation to the absolute unfairness of her situation made Mike even more angry about the whole thing. Holding her captive for twelve years was bad enough, but then forcing her to spend another two years after that hiding was just adding insult to injury. She shouldn't have to wait another year to just be able to walk outside and enjoy a sunny day.

"I know what we can do today," Will broke in. "Jonathan was showing me how to use the stop action button on the video camera that Bob left us and I have a blank tape."

Eleven didn't immediately catch on to why this bit of information made Mike's eyes light up, but she couldn't wait to find out. She quickly drank the last of the not quite right milk that turned a dessert into a breakfast, snagged one more sticky treat and headed into Will's room with the boys.

Eleven had never given any though to how cartoons were made or how creatures like the ones in Clash of the Titans worked. She watched fascinated as Will showed her the tiny illustrations he'd drawn on the bottom corner of each page of his school notebook that, when the pages were thumbed very quickly, gave the appearance of a tiny stick figure waving. Mike called this a "flip book" and Eleven made a mental note to attempt some on the corners of her own notebooks when she got home.

The stop action button on the camera took just a second of video and then the drawing could be changed or the toy could be moved before another second of video was taken. "It works just like the flip book," Mike explained. "But instead of a bunch of drawings that blur together because they go so fast, you have a bunch of little video shots that blur together."

An hour later, they had successfully made a small car drive independently across Will's bed before an impossible number of LEGO figures climbed out. For a person with an over abundance of time on her hands, spending an hour to produce 30 seconds of video was a marvelous new hobby.

By late morning when the other kids had arrived, the time killing ideas were free flowing and the tape was filling up. Eleven sat back to enjoy Dustin and Lucas argue over the best way to make a peanut butter sandwich eat itself while Max egged them on. Mike joined her on the sidelines and they sat side by side, knee to knee, shoulder to shoulder on the floor leaning their backs against the wall.

"There's only about a month of school left," Mike told her with a mix of excitement and trepidation. Middle school certainly had its problems, but it was at least he Devil he knew.

"Summer vacation?" She asked brightly. Eleven remembered Mike's narrative from the previous year. Day 181: last day of school. Day 182: first day of summer vacation.

"Yeah," Mike said nodding and then added, "Sorry we couldn't think of a way for you to go outside today."

"It's ok, Mike. Really. Even staying inside this year is much better than last year." And she meant it sincerely. Last spring she would have happily given up any chance of the outdoors to be sitting with him. As long as she could have Mike, she could wait for everything else.

"Still, we should figure something out for the summer." Eleven may not have been so bothered by what she was missing, but Mike was. It wasn't right.

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Hopper wasn't gone nearly as late as he thought he might be. The late afternoon shadows were just about to fade into dusk when he signaled that he was about an hour away. Eleven signaled back "bring dinner" having had enough of the unfamiliar cooking. She was rewarded for her troubles with containers of shredded barbecued pork that tasted good but burned her lips. She knew from experience that the creamy sauce that went with the shredded lettuce (she found "slaw" to be an inherently unappealing word for food) would ease the burn, but she held out as long as she could on principle because she felt the whole thing was a cheap trick to coerce her into eating vegetables.

Eleven looked around the kitchen table and thought that she could get used to this, burning lips and slaw notwithstanding. She and Will were neither blind nor stupid and had been quietly speculating as to the nature of their parents' friendship for months now. Eleven wondered if Hopper realized how comfortable this gathering felt, he was a bit dense when it came to this particular subject. She and Will shared a knowing glance and she knew he was thinking the same thing.

Eventually, it was time to leave and after giving Mrs Byers an extra tight hug, she climbed into Hopper's car. He wasn't very talkative on the drive home. He asked if she'd had fun and if she'd behaved herself, but the questions felt perfunctory and he was barely listening to the answers, his mind clearly elsewhere. He was quiet after that and thankful that Eleven did not mind silences that other people would find awkward. It gave him space to think around her.

"Sit down, kid, we need to talk," he said indicating the sofa when they finally reached the cabin.

"Something bad?" she asked, worried by his heavy tone.

"No, nothing bad," he quickly reassured her, "just stuff we gotta think about."

They sat, her on the sofa, he in the adjacent arm chair. He gathered his thoughts a moment more before beginning. "The guy I left to talk to is Murray Bauman. Short version of the story, people hire him to investigate things for them. He's the one who helped Nancy and Jonathan get out the tape they made of Dr Owens." Eleven nodded, she was familiar with the events leading up to the DOE leaving Hawkins. "Apparently," Hopper continued, "he knows all about you. About how you were in the lab, your abilities, your mom and your birth certificate. So he knows about us."

Eleven panicked that everything was going to unravel when the end was so, so near. The lights flickered and Hopper reached for her hand and spoke softly, "Hey, it's ok. He's a nuisance but he's not out to cause problems for you. In fact, he thinks he's helping, but I'll get to that in a minute, ok? Just don't worry, I have it all under control. Trust me?"

She nodded slowly, but her chest was still tight. It was easier to think of Hopper as being over protective and paranoid, that he could be right and someone outside of their trusted circle of friends knew about her was unexpectedly frightening.

"So like I said, people hire him to investigate things for them. In this case to find someone."

"Like you?" El asked.

"No," he said disdainfully, "not like me. No one has to pay the police money to help them. That's just what we do."

"So someone paid him money to find someone," Eleven pieced together.

"Yes."

"And he can't find the person."

"No."

"So he wants me to help?"

"That's the gist of things."

"You don't like him," Eleven observed.

"No, I don't," Hopper stated plainly.

"Why not?" This was someone who helped get the lab shut down and someone who knew all about her including her brand new birth certificate. Hopper wasn't worried that he knew and yet he didn't like him. This seemed contradictory to Eleven.

"He takes advantage of desperate people by feeding them a bunch of cock and bull false hope," Hopper explained. "The Holland's were in the process of selling their house to pay him to chase conspiracy theories."

"If I find the person, will he hurt them?" Eleven was still trying to get a handle on what sort of person this Murray Bauman was.

"No, kid, I'm not worried about that."

"Then why are you worried?"

"Well, for starters, I'm worried it won't stop. He successfully finds this person and then he uses that to get someone else to hire him and next thing we know, he's making a career for himself using you."

"Who is the person?"

Hopper took a deep breath and rubbed the back of his neck. "That's the part that makes this hard to say no to. It's a missing kid. A boy about a year older than you. So as much as I really don't want to help Murray Bauman on principle, I can't not think about the kid in the middle of this whole thing."

They sat in silence for several minutes while Eleven processed all the information Hopper had just given her. Just as he appreciated her comfort with silences that allowed him time to think, he forced himself to give her that same courtesy.

"We could call the milk number," she said finally.

"The what?"

Eleven went into the kitchen and returned with a carton of milk. "This number," she pointed to the back of the carton where a grainy picture of a missing child was printed. "If I can find him, you can call and say where he is."

"And Murray doesn't get credit," Hopper filled in. "You're a smart kid, you know that?"

He smiled at her and she beamed. But then his face darkened once again, "I have one other worry about this"

"What?"

"Crime scenes can be pretty gruesome."

She gave him the look that said: really? After all the shit she's seen?

He correctly interpreted her look and quickly qualified, "I'm not going to try to say you haven't seen more than your fair share of bad people, kid, but you haven't seen the limits of human depravity. Trust me."

"Depravity?"

"Another word for evil. Unfortunately, there's a lot of it in the world. You go looking, I don't know what you'll find so I have no way to prepare you. And I'm gonna be honest, once a kid's been missing this long, the chance of them being alive is...well, it's not good. You're probably going looking for a body, kid."

"I want to do it," she said too quickly and he questioned whether she'd really thought this through.

"Are you sure?"

"I'm sure."

She left to fetch her blindfold and Hopper pulled the photograph from his pocket, still having very mixed feelings about the whole thing.

Most of Eleven's forays into the Void happened while Hopper was at work so it had been awhile since he'd watched her do it. He noted how much easier it seemed for her, a vivid reminder of how her powers were clearly growing as she came of age. She was a force to be reckoned with at thirteen years old, he wondered anxiously about the powerhouse she would likely become in adulthood and hoped she would be able to control herself.

Eleven found herself in the familiar blackness, picking her way through the illusion of water searching for any sign of light.

She found him. Alive but looking so ill, her first reaction was to wonder if he were somehow in the Upside Down. He was gaunt, his lips were dry and cracked and the dark circles under his eyes were so pronounced that he looked almost like he had two black eyes. Another figure materialized out of the darkness: a slightly older teen who looked almost as bad as the boy. He passed the boy a funny sort of cigarette. Instead of being made from white paper, it was a clear tube. The figures disappeared in a puff of smoke and the Void was empty again.

Eleven pulled off the blindfold looking somewhat distressed but also hopeful.

"He's not dead," she told Hopper, "but he's not doing well."

"How so?"

She described the scene to Hopper including the very strange cigarette. Eleven thought he would be more happy that the boy was alive, but Hopper closed his eyes, exhaled slowly through his nose, and seemed tired and little sad. "Ok, kid," he said finally, "I don't really know how this works but can you tell me where he is?"

Eleven couldn't explain how she could zero in on a person's physical location when she couldn't see their surroundings and wouldn't recognize them if she did. It was just something she knew after making contact.

She retrieved the driving atlas from the bookshelf and paged through until she found the map she wanted.

"There," she pointed to an industrial area of Indianapolis. "In a warehouse."

"Ok, I'll drive to a pay phone and call it in."

The cabin was particularly quiet after Hopper left, particularly when compared to the twenty-four hours she'd spent with the Byers. She signaled Mike (Marco), he signaled back (Polo) and she felt less alone. She'd come to hate the word soon for its vagueness, but she really was starting to feel like her days in hiding were numbered. It was only a few days into December when Dr Owens told Hopper to give things a year to settle down. It was already the middle of May, that was almost half way. Half way to seeing Mike every day, half way to getting to do regular things, half way to not having to constantly worry about who might be looking for her. Maybe soon was finally the right word after all.

A/N So...some things. For anyone who wasn't a child in the 80's (or wasn't a child of the 80's in the US), a little context. All of a sudden, thanks in large part to John Walsh (the America's Most Wanted guy) and what he did following the kidnapping and murder of his son Adam, kidnapping was an incredibly high profile issue in the early/mid 80's. The thing about it was that most of the awareness campaigns hit children more than adults and a lot of it was pretty poorly executed. I suspect your average Gen X'er has a very clear mental image of what a "kidnapper van" looks like (despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of kidnappings have always been by the non-custodial parent). Pictures of missing children printed on milk cartons were the Amber alerts of their day, but adults weren't the primary audience because kids were more likely to be sitting at the breakfast table staring at a carton of milk. It was one of those things that was part of your daily consciousness that's no longer out there.

Also, crack was the meth of it's day. Cocaine was too expensive for most users, but crack was cheap and readily available.