In the absence of objective criteria for measuring the success of rumor spreading, the amount of time it took for the rumor they'd started to make it back to their respective families seemed like a fair benchmark.

In the Sinclair home, Erica (perhaps not so) innocently asked what a "bastard child" was and after surviving a threat to have her mouth washed out with soap if she ever repeated the offensive phrase again explained that's she'd overheard her friend's mother talking on the phone saying that Chief Hopper has one of those kinds of kids.

"Erica, you know better than to spread gossip," Mrs Sinclair admonished.

"I'm not spreading gossip," she insisted, "I'm just telling you what Tiffany's mom said."

Lucas set aside his irritation that Erica could get away with sass that would never fly coming from him and silently celebrated the victory of their strategically leaked information.

Claudia Henderson was more direct and just came out and asked Dustin if he knew anything, Dustin being friends with Will and the Byers' being closer to Hopper than anyone else in town.

Karen Wheeler had heard the news at the grocery store and was itching to ask Michael for the same reason Claudia Henderson assumed Dustin knew the truth of the matter, but didn't feel like she could just ask, so she tried to find a way to work it into the dinner conversation. She reported on what she and Holly had done that day, asked Nancy what she had been up to and then zeroed in on Mike.

"So, Michael?

"Yeah?"

"I've barely seen you or your friends this summer," she remarked casually, "Did you four find a better basement?"

"It's summer, Mom. We've just doing stuff," he responded vaguely.

"Well, as long as you're staying out of trouble, I guess. You've been a different kid since Christmas, I'd hate to see you slide back into bad behaviors," it was as though she didn't even realize how much of a left handed compliment that was.

"I'm fine, Mom," his annoyance was evident in his tone.

"I didn't think he was going to have that much of a positive affect on you, but spending time with Chief Hopper has really kept you out of trouble," Karen continued, still hoping to naturally steer the conversation towards what she wanted to know. "Of course, the way I hear it, he isn't going to have as much free time now."

She looked meaningfully at Mike who pointedly avoided looking at Nancy because if he did, he wouldn't be able to keep a straight face.

"What is that supposed to mean, Karen?" Ted Wheeler was generally in the habit of tuning out his wife, but they'd been married for long enough that he knew fishing when he heard it.

"Well," she said slowly, "it's just that I heard he has a child who's going to be coming to live with him."

"I thought his daughter died years ago," Ted wondered aloud.

"Well, I think it's great, personally," Nancy announced and Mike barely avoided choking on his glass of milk. "I'm sure there are a lot of men who have kids they were never told about, but I doubt very many would step up and take them once they found out." And then because she knew how to exploit her father's prejudices, "It's a lot better than being some kind of deadbeat dad, right?"

Not for the first time, Mike marveled at Nancy's intuitive ability to manipulate their parents. Without saying anything objectionable, she'd simultaneously shamed their mother, brought their father into alliance with Hopper and artfully disclosed an additional detail that would no doubt be added to the general pool of public knowledge the next day.

"Well, of course it's always better to take responsibility," Karen said backpedaling and the conversation just sort of stagnated as Mike inhaled the last of his dinner so he could get the hell out of the dining room.

For his part, Hopper considered the rumor to have come full circle when it made its way back to the station in the form of his long time secretary suddenly feeling the need to tell him she was leaving for the day even though she had never been in the habit of doing so.

"Ok," he told her not bothering to look up from the plans for street closures to accommodate the annual Fourth of July parade.

"If I leave your keys here on your desk, will you lose them?"

"I'm sure I'll manage somehow."

"I need the shift schedules back from you tomorrow if you want to stay on rotation," she reminded him as she looked over his office for any unfinished work he might be hiding.

"Where did you leave those for me?" He finally looked up.

"They're right here," she told him pointing to a folder.

"Ah. Under my keys then."

He knew damn good and well why she was stalling, but he enjoyed toying with her because she was usually blunt to the point of being abrasive. "I thought you were going home, Flo," he said calling her out on what they both knew was pretense, "Is there a reason you're still standing there?"

"I heard the latest rumors," she finally told him.

"Did you now?" he asked rhetorically. This was the Flo he knew. Cut right to the chase. "That didn't take long."

"We all know how fast news travels around here. Will we be meeting him? Her?"

"Her. And yeah. Eventually."

"Does she have a name?"

"Jane," and then he figured he may as well lay the foundation for her chosen name as well as her given name so he amended, "Jane Elizabeth." He'd heard the story of the kids passing her off as Mike's cousin Eleanor so he didn't want to reuse that name on the off chance it triggered anyone's memory and Elizabeth was the only viable alternative that came to him on short notice. He hoped she wouldn't object.

"I think this will be good for you," she told him matter of factly.

"That so?"

"It's not good for a person to be alone so much," she said on her way out the door.

He snorted softly. Little did she know, he'd barely had time to himself since Eleven came to live with him. His days of working until it was late enough to either hit the bars in search of a pretty face to warm his bed or go home and drink himself into numbness were long over. He hadn't been on a proper date since Will Byers disappeared (or a one night stand since he'd been found). Flo was right about one thing though: Eleven had been good for him.

For any parent to lose a child under any circumstance is soul crushing in a way that can never be sufficiently articulated. There is nothing right or fair about the loss of a child. But when there is a person at fault, the anger over the injustice of that child's death can be aimed at someone. When a child is claimed by illness, the only thing to be angry at is life in all of its arbitrariness. Eleven would never be a replacement for Sara; that would be a disservice to both girls. But she was an opportunity for life in all of its arbitrariness to redeem itself.

.

.

.

Eleven knew to expect Hopper late for the next several days while he spent time fixing up the trailer after work. It was never exactly homey to start with, but add to that the fact that he'd hadn't exactly put it back together after he'd searched it for bugs and then left it vacant for a year and a half and the trailer had reached the level of a certified disaster area. In fairness, the cabin had also been a mess when he'd first brought her there, but setting up the cabin together had been a way for the two of them to create their own space. They'd gotten used to each other's presence working alongside one another without the pressure of spending time together with no distractions. It was a process that allowed them to each create a fresh start. In contrast, the abandoned trailer held the remnants of his past that he didn't want to drag Eleven into.

November 1983 had been a wake up call for Hopper. In particular, being detained and tortured in an interrogation room, desperately wanting to reach Will and being made aware of just how easy it would be to pass off his death as an overdose had been a revelation. And if there was any room left for doubt or denial, it was made crystal clear just how vulnerable he'd made himself a few days later when he was picked up outside the hospital by a darkly tinted vehicle for his first meeting with Dr. Owens to discuss the quid pro quo relationship he wasn't given any sort of option to decline. He went home that night, gathered gathered up every prescription bottle he could lay hands on and disposed of the contents right then and there in an attempt to rid himself of his self imposed Achilles heel. Cleansing the trailer of anything other than the various and sundry orange bottles had not been a particularly high priority and within a month, he was only going to the trailer often enough to give the pretense of living there. So it was, figuratively and literally, the last of the mess he'd made of his life and it was finally time to clean it up.

While Hopper worked to pack away the vestiges of his most self destructive period, Eleven tolerated the nights of being alone knowing that there was a purpose to it. It also helped that between being told she should spend as much time as possible engaged in conversation with other people and feeling guilty about leaving her for long hours, Hopper had been convinced to expand the visitation hours and to add an extra day. At this rate, it felt like the boys were spending more time in his cabin than he was.

The first evening, he didn't let Joyce know what he was up to because he wanted an opportunity to clear out the worst of the trailer on his own. He filled up the back of the Blazer with bagged garbage and took it to the dump before returning home so late that he had to wake Eleven up to get her to open the cabin's locks. The whole process was surprising cathartic.

But after that first night, he discovered that he actually enjoyed the help, the company and the freedom of having nothing left to hide. Joyce came armed with cleaning supplies, Hopper with hot pizza and cold beer and they set to work.

"Jesus, Hop, what the hell happened to your sofa?" Joyce asked upon seeing the poorly patched together upholstery.

"Remember when I figured out my house was bugged? I had to search through everything to find the wire tap."

"Including your furniture?"

"I didn't want to leave anything to chance." These were, after all the same people who went so far as to create a convincing fake corpse for Will. "I figured duct tape was a good enough short term fix, but then I wasn't in here very long before I started living in the cabin."

"Please tell me you're replacing it."

"Yes, I'm replacing it. I just have to get around to doing it."

Joyce moved into the adjacent kitchen and began to empty and sort the contents of the cabinets while Hopper used his height to his advantage and targeted the light fixtures he had never completely reassembled.

"Did you realize you don't have two single plates that match?" She asked him surveying the array of dishes now stacked on the counter while she pulled out fresh shelf paper to line the cabinets.

"I did realize that, actually, I've just never cared."

"And how is it you have seventeen forks and no spoons?" she was now clearly amused.

"Diane gave me a box of kitchen stuff after the divorce and I didn't have the energy to question it."

"Which would explain why none of your pot lids are the same size as any of your pots. She was really fucking with you, wasn't she?"

"I checked out, she got angry," Hopper shrugged. "We all grieve in our own way, I guess."

"You're very understanding about it. You're a bigger person than I am."

"I wasn't at the time," he corrected, "I'm only a bigger person in hindsight."

They each returned to their respective projects and repairs. Hopper was lost in the task of bringing a water heater back to life when Joyce called out to him from the back bedroom.

"Hey Hop? What's in these boxes?"

"I'm not sure," he called back. "Those are from Diane. She just kind of decided what I should have. Once I found my clothes and stuff I needed to eat, I stopped looking through them."

She leaned backwards out of the bedroom into the hallway so he would be sure to see her disbelieving eyebrow. "You've been divorced for what? Six years now? How have you not even looked?"

"Seeing as how she gave me only mismatched dishes and no spoons, I'm sure it's all crap."

"Do you care if I look?" Joyce was now totally intrigued.

"Help yourself," he said it nonchalantly but if the boxes were going to be opened anyway, he couldn't ignore it. He took a break from the water heater having made a mental list of supplies he needed, grabbed a couple of beers from the fridge and handed one to Joyce as he joined her on the floor.

The first box was a disappointing assortment of Christmas decorations, mostly broken. "In fairness," Hopper told her, "that could have happened before or after they'd been packed."

They went immediately into the growing "take to the dump" pile. Several boxes contained an assortment of knick knacks, linens and books. Hopper dragged them all to the "take to the thift store" pile and brought them each a fresh beer. The project was feeling a lot more disappointing than Joyce had hoped.

"Jackpot!" Joyce gleefully announced when she opened the eighth box. "Pictures! And not just any pictures," she added looking into a manilla envelope, "wedding pictures."

"Those are going in the dump pile," Hopper tried taking the entire envelope out of her hand, but she held it out of his reach.

"Oh come on," she pleaded holding up a very traditional, very staged, very not Jim Hopper photo of him in a really awful suit posing next to Diane in a gauzy off the shoulder gown, "you should keep at least one. You don't think Eleven will get a kick out of this?"

"You don't think she'll use that picture to find Diane?" he countered.

"Oh shit, didn't think about that."

"Don't worry, you'll get the hang of her," he assured, taking the offending picture out of her hand and relegating the entire thing to the dump pile. "Don't give her pictures of people you don't want her spying on. She's terrible about resisting temptation."

Joyce continued to look through envelopes of photos, "Vacation...Christmas...I'm assuming this is some sort of promotion ceremony?...vacation...some kind of party...and oh..." Joyce's voice fell flat.

"What?"

"Sara," she said softly as she passed him a packet of pictures. "Did you know about these? Sorry, stupid question." He'd never looked in the boxes, how could he have known?

"No, I assumed..." and then words failed Hopper as he was taken back looking at pictures he'd forgotten ever existed ranging from infancy to just before she got sick. After several moments, he elaborated, "I took a few things," the hairband, some drawings, a couple pictures, their copy of Anne of Green Gables "but Diane had such a hard time parting with anything," and because she blamed him, rational or not, "I never would have guessed she would have volunteered anything else."

"You want to call it a night?" Joyce asked, suddenly feeling like she was intruding. "I'm sure you weren't expecting those. They're kind of a gut punch."

"No, it's ok," and for the first time perhaps ever, that wasn't a lie. Hopper could finally look at those pictures and remember those times fondly without the anger and regret and guilt being tangled up with it. "Really, I'm ok."

"Let's set them aside. You can pick some to frame and we'll put the rest in their own book."

"Yeah, alright," he told her somewhat absently before setting that envelope of pictures in a safe place.

The next two boxes were, thankfully unremarkable odds and ends and finally they were down to the final one.

"Last box," Joyce told him. "Wanna guess what's in it?"

"You really are taking a lot more joy in this than me," he pointed out blandly, though he had to admit, it was nice to not have them just sitting taking up the back bedroom of the trailer.

"And the verdict is..." she paused to slice through the aging packing tape with her car keys, "stuff from high school!"

"Well that can all go straight to the dump."

"Don't you dare!" Joyce covered the box protectively and he just smiled.

"Let's see what we have in here," she continued. "It's your letterman sweater—"

"—that you wore more than me," he recalled.

"—and graduation program...football team t-shirt...oh good grief, a library book? I'm telling Dustin you're as bad as he is...oh and more pictures!"

He leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes, allowing the memories of simpler time to flood back.

"Twenty-five year reunion is next year," Joyce commented, "Wanna go?"

"You asking me on a date?" he teased.

"You wish," she scoffed. "I'm asking if you want to go, I didn't say I was going."

Joyce continued thumbing through the stack of old photos. "Oh. My. God."

"Now what?" Hopper opened one eye. There was no telling what Joyce might find in there.

"Is this what I think it is?" She held up a small black and white photo yellowed with age.

"No," he said quickly.

"Yes it is, you big liar. Its the picture of us at homecoming you had taped inside your locker!"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"So you are at least a little sentimental," she needled.

"Well, I didn't have one from prom because you dumped me," he needled her right back.

"Oh, God, don't remind me," Joyce groaned. "One of my worst decisions."

"I'm flattered," he deadpanned in return.

"Oh no," she clarified, "you were an ass. Dumping you was a good decision. At least it was at the time. Dumping you for Lonnie was the bad decision."

"You're terrible for my ego, you know that?" he asked, sounding as wounded as possible. He wasn't really wounded.

"Eh," she waived him off, "your ego can take a few hits."

"You're right though."

"That your ego can take a few hits?"

"No, that I was an ass," he admitted.

"You were seventeen. I'm not going to hold that against you forever. And you weren't all bad."

"Gee. Thanks," he mocked while squeezing her knee affectionately.

"I mean, let's be honest," she nudged him back, "I wasn't perfect either."

"I was going to be nice and not point that out," he teased and she had the decency to play along and look offended.

"Oh and look, you have our senior year book," she pulled it from the bottom of the box. "Mine got lost a long time ago."

She moved next to Hopper so they could both look at the book together, slowly turning through the pages of composite photos until she found the two of them.

"I haven't looked at this thing since they handed them out," Hopper admitted. "Were we really that young?"

"No," she said dismissively, "not possible."

She sighed to herself, lost in time and memories.

"What are you thinking?" he asked her.

"What the me in this picture would think about my life now."

"I guess that depends. Is the you in that picture before or after you started hating me? Because if it was after, she'd probably be pretty pissed at you hanging out with me." Joyce glared at him and he laughed.

"I feel like I've made a mess of my life," she admitted and he nodded in commiseration.

"The thing about being that age," he paused to pull a cigarette from his breast pocket and light it, "is your entire life is still potential, not reality. What's possible is always more exciting than what already is, but eventually you actually have to go live your life."

"Yeah, I guess," she allowed taking the cigarette from him for a pull.

"And it's not a complete mess," he continued, the roll of resident optimist unfamiliar to him. "You've got your boys."

"And it may have taken me two decades to get it right, but I did manage to lose Lonnie and get you back," she told him and they locked eyes with the intensity of a man dying of thirst setting sight on a desert oasis.

He had the presence of mind to extinguish the shared cigarette into the flat remained of a nearby can of beer before leaning in to accept the kiss she offered.

"So are we doing this now?" He echoed her words back into her lips, their forehead still touching.

"I don't know. I'm not exactly working with a plan here," she told him completing the mirror image deja vu before adding, "but I'm willing to take the risk. Just promise me we won't screw things up again."

"Of course we'll screw things up," he told her honestly. "But I promise we won't go twenty years without putting them back together."

.

.

.

Eleven woke up on the sofa to an empty cabin. The few stations the cabin's rabbit ear antenna could pick up were no longer broadcasting, the flickering light from television static made the emptiness even more pronounced. Hopper's bed was clearly not slept in and the red numbers of his digital alarm clock read 11:57.

And so it was that she found herself alone, late at night, worried about Hopper with the television conveniently tuned into static. Eleven knew she wasn't supposed to use the Void to spy on Hopper because she was bored or curious, but this was different. Hopper should have been home hours ago. He could be in danger and how else would she know if she didn't look?

She tied the blindfold around her head and concentrated on Hopper, letting her consciousness sink into the blackness. It took a moment for Eleven to register what she was seeing. There was Hopper...tangled up with Mrs Byers. Eleven was so shocked, she lost her concentration and was instantly out of the Void and back on the sofa. She was hardly the first child to walk in on a parent during an intimate moment, but she was probably one of the few who was more pleased about it than disturbed.

"Only took 437 cranes, not a thousand," she said aloud in the empty cabin more than a little satisfied with herself.