El lets them lead her away, numb, body and mind alive with despair, grief. Perhaps it gives her strength enough to close the Gate. For good.
It's waiting for them, back in the lab, in the room with the Bath. She climbs through it, taking her first breath of fresh air in several weeks. She hardly notices. Her mouth tastes like blood. The others make their way through, too, weak and exhausted and weary but alive. Home, for the first time in four years.
When Will changed for the last time, when he called the Queen, he opened the gate.
She's closing it for the last time.
Enough.
El raises her hand, fingers outstretched, mustering up every ounce of strength she has left. The plant matter stretches across itself, pulling together like a stitched wound. The light inside it fades, and the vines hand limp and lifeless.
She steps back, wipes at the blood that begins to trickle out of her nose, and crumples to the ground. The world slips through her fingers, and everything goes dark.
. . .
Hopper speeds down Mirkwood. In his rearview mirror, he catches sight of another car, an old Ford pickup, it's doors thrown wide open. He slams on the brakes, pulling over. He walks toward the other car, gun clasped in one shaking hand. He peers inside. There's blood all over the passenger seat, and a bunch of broken glass. Candy wrappers and an empty bag of barbeque chips are strewn about the floor. He swallows, puzzled, and glances in the backseat.
There, on the scuffed leather, sits Dustin's old baseball cap. The one he wore when he was twelve, the one he still wears now.
Hopper's heart drops.
A blood-chilling shriek rips through the air, followed by a scream. More yelling. Hopper takes off into the woods, cold fear dragging him down. The kids are out there, alone. His kids. Henderson and probably Wheeler and Sinclair . . .
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck . . .
He stops when he reaches the treeline surrounding the chainlink.
And everything happens all at once. A scream builds in Hopper's throat.
The Wheeler kid goes down. At the same time, a huge sound, a sonic boom of sorts, if that's even the right word, shakes the Earth. In Hopper's memory, it's matched only by two other incidents. The first, the time he saw a meteor rocketing toward earth, lighting up the night sky a brilliant orange. It happened sometime in his childhood. It broke the sound barrier. The second, when El killed the Demogorgon. He claps his hands over his ears.
The monsters in the clearing begin to convulse. Their eyes roll, their mouths froth. They seem to be shrinking, collapsing in on themselves. Before his eyes, they revert back to humanoid forms. Hair sprouts from the top of their heads. They blink, massaging their heads and limbs, looking pained, confused.
Hopper rushes forward.
"Are you alright?" He yells, towards the kids. Henderson is helping a skinny redheaded girl to her feet. The whole front of her shirt is covered in blood. Sinclair is shaking, pointing at Mike.
"No." He yells. "Mike's hurt . . . he's hurt . . ." He yells, frantically. Hopper kneels beside the Wheeler boy. He's pale, bruised badly, and covered in blood that may or may not be his own. Hopper catches sight of the spiked bat lying in the dirt just inches from him, rusty nails also coated in blood. Several monster corpses are scattered about. They don't change, though. They're still monsters, limp and bloody and very very dead. It's somehow easier to deal with.
Hopper checks the boy's pulse. It beats steadily against his fingers. Hopper sighs, a wave of relief washing over him.
"He's alive." He says. "Just unconscious." Hopper straightens, pulling the military radio out of his pocket. He contacts every military official within fifteen miles of Hawkins, calling for an ambulance, police backup, anything.
Ten minutes later, they begin to hear sirens in the distance, accompanied by the drone of a helicopter. Sinclair helps him tend to the Pestilence-victims. They're returning to normal, disoriented and pale, but alright. He helps them to their feet, checks their vitals. Several EMTs arrive with stretchers and first aid kits, shouting to one another. Hopper stands back, letting them load the Wheeler boy onto a stretcher and cart him away. The other three kids, Henderson and Sinclair and the redhead, follow the paramedics back to the ambulance.
Hopper bites his tongue, suddenly exhausted, struggling to process everything.
It doesn't make any sense.
They changed back . . .
A twig breaks behind him, and he turns on his heel. His eyes widen as they land on the two people standing in front of him. They wear tattered clothes. Their hair is matted, their eyes wild, their faces and fingernails grimy.
"What . . ." He begins, and falls silent. The tallest of the pair steps forward, looking frightened.
"Please," she says, voice breaking, "help us."
. . .
They led him through the lab, down the stairs to the room with the isolation tank. The Gate. And there she was, lying on the ground, blood flowing steadily from her nose and her ears. Another of the ghostly people, a girl of thirteen or fourteen, probably, kept watch over her. Hopper would learn, later, the identity of these people. Joyce, despite her grief, would open her home to them.
El's face was white and chalky, her eyes half-lidded, her lips purple. The front of her sweatshirt was completely soaked with dark blood. Too much blood. More than could come from her nose or ears alone. And for one terrible, fleeting moment he thought she was dead. And for another terrible moment the name that popped into his head was not Eleven but Sarah.
He would learn that Will's last transformation opened the Gate, and El used what remaining strength she had left to close it.
In the ambulance, as he sat with her, she floated between consciousness. And somewhere in the middle, she was coherent enough to tell him, in a detached, numb sort of way, that Will is dead.
Now, here he is, sitting by her bedside in the small hours of the morning, watching the clock as the hand travels from two
to two-thirty and so on. He can still hear the sirens every now and then. And soon there will be reporters and investigators, who will want a good story. They'll ask questions. Too many questions. He thinks of his mad break from the hospital up in Greenville. Hell, they might even arrest him.
He ought to take a vacation.
He clasps El's (good) hand in his own, and it's small and bony but warm. His throats tightens, which surprises him, because he's never considered himself to be all that close to this girl. The girl with the haunted eyes, the one with abilities that could damn well be called super powers. He sighs, looking at her, gazing at the swollen wound him her arm and the bruises and scars on her skin. She's so small, so sick.
For a split second he's holding Sarah's hand. He drops it, as if it's burning him. He blinks, rubbing his hands over the whiskers on his face, bowing out a long breath. He could really use a cigarette.
Outside, thunder claps and rattles the window panes. El shifts in her sleep, whimpers, doesn't wake.
Hopper pushes Sarah from his mind and takes up her hand again. His mind jumps, randomly, to Will. The thought is so foul his brain immediately rejects it. He can't think about that now. Now is not the time, oh no. He's going to fall off the edge. Already has, probably.
El's hand tightens, almost imperceptibly, around his own. Or was it his imagination playing tricks?
. . .
Less than twelve hours later, the Department of Homeland Security will begin the clean-up. The cover-up. The citizens of Hawkins will be released from the "secure facilities" all across Roane County. The monster corpses will be removed, the damage repaired, the reporters pacified and witnesses quieted with threats or bribes or both.
Hopper will face the thing he dreads. He will be the bearer of bad news, again. And he'll hold Joyce while she weeps. He'll cry, himself, because maybe some small part of him loves her, and a part of him loved that kid, too.
Some promises can't be kept.
. . .
El swims between consciousness and slumber, fitful and restless. Sometimes, she can feel the stiff sheets encasing her body like a cocoon. She can hear the beeping heart monitor, or a distance voice. Once, she becomes quite aware of someone sitting beside her, holding her hand.
Other times, she's locked in a bizarre world of her own invention. A world where monsters whisper strange things in the dark and wander through shadowed forests turned upside down. A world where children without tongues wear hospital gowns stained red. A world where a pale, freckle-faced boy cries himself to sleep and another boy gives his life to save her own.
There are different variations of this world. Sometimes, it's softer. Lighter. In this world, she sleeps soundly, safe and warm, swathed in a too-big borrowed sweater, beneath the cotton ceiling of a blanket fort. Soothed to sleep by a familiar voice painted in static. In this world, she lies on a carpeted floor and paints pictures, and the exhausted mother of two plus one arrives home from a twelve-hour shift at Melvald's General Store with a cigarette between her teeth. In this world, she sits patiently and attentively while the boys, her boys, teach her the basics of the not-quite-new-anymore Atari game system. In this world, her mother, her real mother, sends her to school with a kiss on the forehead and a gentle brush of the cheek. In this world, she is loved. She is safe and whole. And she belongs.
. . .
Mike jolts wake with a sharp intake of breath. He tries to sit up, and immediately stops, nauseated, when the room begins to spin in great, lazy circles. He twists around and promptly vomits all over the clean, white sheets. His fists clench, and he heaves until there's nothing left. The ache in his abdomen worsens, and his head begins to pound. Mike's throat burns, and his eyes sting with tears. He wipes his mouth, fumbling with the nurse call button. He presses it, and slumps back against the pillows. The lights are much too bright. And the room won't stop spinning . . .
A hospital. Another damn hospital.
His hand finds the back of his head, where a lumpy knob rises under the skin. There's a couple stitches, too. And his hair is matted with dried blood, and it crumbles beneath his fingertips.
The door swings open, and Mike nearly jumps five feet in the air. A nurse appears in the door, dressed in pale blue scrubs, her hair pulled back in a lopsided bun. Her move from his face to the vomit on the sheets, and she sighs sympathetically, brows knitting together.
"You're awake." She says, gently. "I'm glad. I was beginning to worry you'd never come around. How do you feel?"
"Like crap." He says. His voice is broken and raspy. The nurse clicks her tongue.
"You sustained quite the head injury. It stitched up nicely, though. You'll be dizzy for a couple days. The other cuts and scrapes weren't deep enough to require too much attention. I cleaned you up, though. You'll be good as new in a week or two."
"What . . . what happened?" He says. The nurse frowns.
"I'm not sure I'm the right person to ask. They won't tell me much, honey. I'm sorry." Mike shrugs. The nurse gestures to the mess on the sheets.
"Why don't I go get someone to clean that up?"
Mike sighs, too exhausted and weak to be embarrassed.
"That would be wonderful."
. . .
Mike continues to slip in and out of sleep, his head aching, his thoughts muddled and slow. The next time he regains consciousness for more than a few minutes, Hopper is sitting in a chair at the foot of his bed. His shoulders are stooped, his eyes are bloodshot and red, from exhaustion or tears . . . Mike doesn't know. It's so strange, seeing the Chief sitting there like his own mother would, that he has to blink a couple times to make sure it's not some hallucination.
"Hopper?" He asks, struggling to sit up. The Chief jumps to his feet, looking weary.
"How're you feeling, kid? It's good to see your eyes."
Mike ignores him, cold fear settling into the pit of his stomach.
"Are they alive?"
Hopper hesitates before he speaks.
"Yes, they're alive. Max is being kept just a few doors down from you. She's got quite a few injuries, but she'll be alright. Dustin and Lucas have already been released. They're at home. Nancy, too, Mike they're okay."
An overwhelming wave of relief crashes over him. He blows out a long breath, squeezing his eyes shut.
"And, uh, there's something else you should know." Hopper says, slowly. "It's El. Mike . . . she came back. She's home."
Mike's eyes fly open. He gazes at Hopper with a new, almost manic longing in his eyes.
"Hopper . . . where is she?"
"Mike . . ."
"Where is she?" He's yelling now. Tears pour down his cheeks, and he's trembling badly, unable to keep his hands steady. A thousand emotions are erupting inside his chest, squeezing his lungs, making it hard to think. Hard to breathe.
She's home. She came back to him.
She's home.
He reaches for the IV in his arm and tugs it out, ignoring the brief pain and the various alarms that begin to beep. He gets to his feet, swaying a little as the room begins to spin again. He stops, willing the dizziness to fade.
"Mike, wait a minute."
"Hopper, tell me where she is . . ." Mike growls. He meets the Chief's eyes, confused by the grief in them, the pain . . .
The not-knowing scares him.
Hopper sniffs, shaking his head. He tries to tell the Wheeler boy about Will, about his death . . . He opens his mouth, but no sound comes out. Hopper avoids Mike's anxious gaze, staring at the floor.
"Hopper . . ."
"She's in room 304." He gets out, finally. Now is not the time.
Mike pushes the door open, slipping in sock feet as he runs down the hall. The numbers printed on the doors blur together.
He pauses outside her door, hand on the knob, steeling himself. He steps inside, holding his breath, eyes stinging with unshed tears.
She's sitting up. A nurse stands at her bedside, offering her a spoonful of ice chips. She takes the spoon in a thin, trembling hand. El turns quickly as the door creaks open. Mike's breath catches in the back of his throat.
The hospital gown she wears seems to smother her, hanging too loosely from her skeletal form. Her eyes are sunken too far, the bones in her cheeks too prominent. The bags under her eyes seem to weigh her down. She's too pale, too thin . . .
She's home.
He makes a strange choking noise, stepping towards her. She drops the spoon, reaches over to to detach herself from the various monitors. The nurse tries to stop her, but she's pushed backward several feet by some invisible force. (El's telekinesis)
El clambers out of bed, tripping over herself in the effort to close the space between them. Tears spring in her eyes, and her mouth forms a twisted smile.
She throws her arms around him, fingers grabbing fistfuls of his shirt. He clutches the small of her back, letting everything burst out of him. He starts to sob, and she's sobbing, too. They crash to the floor, knees hitting the tiles. He holds her on his lap, rocking her back and forth, burying his face in her long, matted hair. His fingers find the swollen puncture wounds in her arm, cleaned but unstitched and unbandaged. He takes her face in his hands and kisses her, but the kiss is punctured by their tears.
"El." He says, weakly. "You're safe. You're home. El . . .
El clings to him, pouring herself into his arms. She's shaking, violently. She raises her head, and one trembling hand, traces the cuts and bruises on his face, his brows his lips.
"You're real?" She asks, her voice wavering. Almost disbelieving. Mike laughs through his tears.
"Yeah, I'm real. I'm right here, El. I'm real."
She smiles, and dissolves into fresh tears, her knuckles turning white as she clings to him, her arms wrapped around his neck. She cries so hard it hurts.
"Mike," she says, voice breaking, "Will's dead."
. . .
He's stunned into a shocked sort of silence. He doesn't feel anything at first, which, in a way, is worse. He's too numb, too overwhelmed, to feel anything at all.
"What?" He says, hoarsely.
I heard her wrong, is all. Will's not dead. He can't be dead. He can't . . .
She shakes her head. Her mouth twists and warps into an agonized grimace.
"Will . . . I-I couldn't save h-him." She cries, covering her mouth with her hands.
The world shatters and falls down around him, then. He feels like he's witnessing a car crash in slow-motion. He's in the road, watching the glass fly in every direction, watching the tires spin out on the sun-beaten asphalt. There's fire behind in his eyes, lead in his limbs. Every nerve, every cell and neuron and organ is lost in the flames. Sitting on the cool tiles of that hospital rooms, with his heart beating too fast and the sound of El's strangled weeping tearing a hole in his chest, he swears he can smell the burning rubber, the gasoline, the smoke.
What a strange thought . . .
. . .
The full realization hits him two days later, after he is released from the hospital. His mother's waiting to drive him home, her cheeks wet with tears. He greets the rest of his family outside of their house at the end of the cul-de-sac. Nancy clings to him, weeping. Holly hugs him around the waist. His father ruffles his hair. He doesn't cry.
He tropes up the stairs and heads straight for his room, longing for the solitude, the darkness, the time to think or cry or sleep without interruption. He pushes open the door, noting the layer of dust that lingers over every surface.
Mike bumps into his desk and stubs his toe. A pile of haphazardly stacked papers and notebooks crash to the floor.
"Shit!" He yells, grabbing his foot.
"Mike, are you alright?" His mother's muffled voice inquires, worriedly, from downstairs.
"Yeah, I'm fine." He replies, wincing, massaging his foot. He stoops down, beginning to gather up the papers spread across the carpeted floor. He picks up a slightly wrinkled sheet of copy paper and turns it over. He freezes. All the oxygen in the room seems to dissipate.
He stares down at one of Will's drawings, art for a D&d campaign. Mike's knees hit the carpeted floor, and his fists clench around the paper, reducing it to an unrecognizable, crumpled ball.
The truth, the realization, crashes over him like a wave, breaking over his head, dragging him down, down, down . . . He struggles to draw a breath, choking on his tears.
He shatters.
He clutches the drawing in one clenched fist, eyes screwed up against the fat tears that pour from the corners of his eyes, nose running, gasping for air. His breath is like a sharp stone lodged deep inside his throat.
It's the worst pain in the world.
He stays there, on the floor, with that damn drawing in his hand, for hours. He cries so hard he barely makes it to the bathroom before he vomits once again, unloading his lunch into the ghostly white porcelain toilet bowl. He slumps back, sweat glistening on his forehead, intermingling with the tears and snot. Thoughts, memories, really, of Will swirl inside his head. And it hurts. It hurts so bad. He winds up on the bathroom floor, hand clamped over his mouth as the strangled cries and gasps burst from his lips. The seconds bleed into minutes, an hour . . .
And he cries himself into oblivion.
. . .
Mike wakes, eyes stinging and head pounding, still curled on the tiled floor of the bathroom. He drags himself to his feet. He realizes, with a slow kind of surprise, that Will's drawing is still crumbled in the palm of his hand. He unravels it, staring at it dumbly for a moment. Tentatively, he traces the lines with his fingers, noting the places where his tears fell on the page, where the ink began to bleed . . .
Mike smooths the paper over his knee and returns it to his desk. He bends down and picks up the remaining fallen papers and notebooks, returning them to their original place in a neat stack.
He peels off his clothes, which smell like hospital and burning rubber and gasoline and smoke . . . and climbs beneath the sheets of his bed. Immediately, he slips into a deep and dreamless sleep.
. . .
El is released from the hospital a day after Mike. Terry and Becky drive to pick her up. They're coming straight from Roane City, from the "secure facility" where they were held. They're in the waiting room, pale and worried. Hopper informs her of their arrival, and she runs down the hall so fast she almost slips in her socks. She launches herself into their arms, and they're both crying and covering her with kisses and she's crying, too.
"I missed you. I love you. I missed you so much." She saying it over and over again. After a few minutes of group hugging and fussing, Becky steps back, eyes glossy with unshed tears. Terry embraces her daughter and speaks the first words that've come out of her mouth since her daughter's disappearance.
. . .
Mike sleeps through a full day. Nobody bothers him. He's cried himself out, thoroughly exhausted. He doesn't dream. No nightmare could trump his reality.
When he wakes, he heaves himself out of bed, pulling on a pair of sweatpants and a possibly-clean Hawkins High t-shirt. He staggers down the stairs, moving blindly toward the kitchen like a dog following a scent on the wind. His appetite has returned, and aggressively so. He paws through the cabinets for awhile and finds nothing but a half-empty box of stale Cheez-Its and a jar of peanut butter. He'll take what he can get.
In the entry room, he can hear the sound of the front door opening and closing.
"Mom?" He calls, mouth full of Cheez-Its. "Nancy?"
He shuffles into the entryway.
El stands by the front door, one hand still on the knob. She wears one of his hoodies and a pair of overlarge basketball shorts. Her hair has been brushed through, and it falls in lazy, chocolate brown curls over her shoulders. Her arm is heavily bandaged, and some color has returned to her cheeks. His heartbeat speeds up, as it always does when she's near.
"Hey." She says, tentatively. He doesn't respond, only opens his arms. She doesn't hesitate to walk straight into them, wrapping her slender arms around his middle. Mike rests his cheek against the top of her head, closing his eyes. He breathes in the scent of her; he listens to the rhythmic sound of her breathing, noticing the way the slow movement of air in and out of her nose ruffles the hair that sweeps across his forehead . . .
Mike and El remain in the entryway for a long while, not talking, not daring to move for fear of disturbing the other, dreading the moment they will have to let go. There's no tears between them this time, only warmth, safety.
Home.
. . .
Mike lies on the La-Z-Boy, and El lies beside him, her head resting over the place where his heart beats, slow and steady and strong. His thumb traces her brows, her lips. Gently, as if the simple act of touching her would cause her to break into a million tiny pieces. Slowly, he reaches up and tucks a strand of hair behind her ear.
She's staring at him with an intensity so great he has to resist the urge to look away. A million unspoken things pass between them. It's hard to put into words, really, how much he missed her. And there's an ache in Mike's chest that won't go away.
"El?"
"Mmmmmm?"
"I love you."
"I love you, too."
And then they're kissing. Her hand is curled and resting on his chest, his hands are in her hair. When she pulls away, he's surprised to find that he's crying. She reaches up and brushes away the tears on his cheeks with shaking fingers. There's a new kind of hunger in her eyes, and Mike is becoming increasingly, distractedly aware of the gentle pressure of her chest and hips against his body.
She settles back down against him, returning her head to the place above his beating heart, interlacing her fingers with his. She closes her eyes, and he keeps stroking her hair, and a terrible ache grows inside his chest. Because he missed her so damn much, and he's not sure he'll ever let her go. Not again.
And right now, he doesn't have to.
Her breathing gets slower, deeper. His fingers find the edge of the bandage on her arm. And tears well in his eyes, looking at it. Another scar.
Mike pushes that too-familiar horde of awful thoughts from his mind. He leans back against the slightly worn fabric of the La-Z-Boy and closes his eyes. El shifts, half-asleep, her hand tightening around his own.
"Mike?" She mumbles, sleepily.
"El?"
"Stay."
"I'm not going anywhere."
"Promise?"
"Promise."
He drifts off.