The Savior. PG-13, general/sci-fi, canon pairings.
"Save the lost child, save the world." Initially, Mike thinks future!Dustin was talking about Will. But then he and his friends find a telekinetic girl wandering around the forest on a rainy night, and now he isn't so sure.
Note: This will mostly follow the plot of the TV show with some very specific changes. Any scene from the show you don't see here, it's because it happens more or less the same as it did on the show.
Note 2: I want to dedicate this one to Genesis Malfoy over at FFN, because she's probably very close to bringing a brand-new tiny human into the world and that's pretty damn heroic in and of itself. Good luck, my friend! Here's hoping the kid is born with superpowers— but only the cool ones, lol. ;)
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"A plane out of phase," Dustin states, dramatically reading the description of the Vale of Shadows off his patched-together copy of the Dungeons & Dragons Expert Rules Set 2. "A place of monsters. It is right next to you, and you don't even see it."
"An alternate dimension," Mike summarizes helpfully.
"But how do we get there?" Lucas asks, always the practical one.
"You cast Shadow Walk," Dustin answers immediately, always the readiest when it came to remembering arcane rules of the game.
Lucas rolls his eyes. "In real life, dummy."
They quiet down for a moment as they think of a possible answer, but Mike is the only one who comes up with an idea, albeit a far-fetched one. "Dustin, do you think you could maybe teleport yourself there?" he suggests excitedly.
"Why would I be able to teleport myself to the Upside Down?" Dustin retorts, confused.
"You said you think you can alter the space-time continuum, right?" Mike prompts. "So, space is a part of it. If you can control space, that means you should be able to teleport to different places."
"We don't actually know that he can alter the space-time continuum, though," Lucas points out with a shake of his head. "We're just assuming he does. We don't know what the rules are."
"Yeah, if you think it's that easy, why don't you try it yourself?" Dustin throws back at Mike, given that they seemed to share their time-manipulation powers.
"I can't," Mike replies with a groan. "I told you, I haven't been able to manipulate time again since that first time I did it in my bedroom."
"Because you're just copying my powers!" Dustin returns triumphantly, like that was all he needed for his theory to be proven correct.
Now it was Mike's turn to roll his eyes. "Sure, whatever. The point is, if you can't do it, I can't do it. So what do we do?" Looking for a solution, he grabs hold of Dustin's manual, pulls it over to his side of the table and turns it around so he can read.
"Well, we can't shadow walk," Dustin starts, "but maybe she can." With a nod of his head he signals past his two friends toward Eleven, who's lying down on the couch, still wearing her pink dress and her blond wig.
Mike and Lucas turn to look at Eleven, too, and she seems nervous about suddenly being in the spotlight. Mike asks her if she knows how to get to the Upside Down and, without words, she answers in the negative. "Great," Lucas laments. "What do we do now?"
"We need to ask someone who knows more about alternate dimensions than we do," Mike posits.
"Like who?" Lucas asks.
Dustin gives them both a toothless grin. "I know who we can ask."
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Hopper wakes up with a jolt the next morning, and it takes him a second or two to realize that he's no longer in the lab— instead, he's on his couch in his trailer. He doesn't know how he got there, so he can only assume the lab assholes dumped him here after drugging him.
After everything he saw last night, he's lucky to be alive. Why hadn't they killed him?
Still feeling some aftereffects of whatever drug it was they doped him with, he makes his way to the bathroom to wash the grogginess off his face. As he stands there looking at himself in the mirror and inspecting the barely-visible needle mark they left on the side of his neck, he catches sight of the beer can that is still embedded in his bathroom sink.
He looks at it skeptically for a moment before reaching out to grab hold of the top ring of the can. He shakes off the prickle of foolishness that momentarily creeps up and inhales deeply before pulling the can upward. It comes out intact. So is the laminate top of the sink, which doesn't have any holes or nicks, or anything to remotely show that something had been forcefully embedded into it just a minute ago.
So he hadn't just dreamed the whole phasing thing, then.
As he examines the can, though, a thought occurs to him: just because pranksters hadn't broken into his trailer like he once thought, didn't mean no one had. He'd woken up on his couch, after all.
Immediately fully awake, he looks up at the lamp above his bathroom mirror. He stares at it for a heartbeat before hurrying to unscrew the glass shade, looking for bugs. He needed to check every nook and cranny of his trailer, and he needed to do it right now.
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At Hawkins National Laboratory, Dr. Martin Brenner watches a TV screen over the shoulder of his head of Security. There are several in the room they're all in, but he's only focused on one in particular.
"Show me camera 3 again," he orders, and his head of Security complies. He watches for a few seconds before calling out, "Change to 2 now." His head of Security presses a button on his keyboard and the feed switches to a different angle. "Slow it down."
He leans forward and narrows his eyes, trying to take in the details out of the security camera video. It was hard to see, but as far as he could tell, the bullet had indeed gone right through the police chief's abdomen, then proceeding to embed itself against the wall behind him.
But there is no visible impact on the man's body, at least not as far as they can tell from the video. They hadn't found any blood out in the hallway. When they'd checked the chief for injuries the night before, they had found none.
The quality of the security footage was poor, and the two would-be witnesses had sustained concussions either from the knocks to the head or from the fall right after. A man being able to become intangible at will? Any scientist in their right mind would've thought it's impossible.
Martin Brenner is not in the habit of thinking anything is impossible.
"Delete the tapes," he orders, knowing his staff has more than enough experience with such a procedure. His head of Security nods. "Your priority remains subject 011," he instructs further. "I'll deal with this myself."
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"I went to the quarry on the way over here. I just wanted to look around, you know? Couldn't believe it." Joyce just stares at Lonnie, confused, wondering why he's suddenly talking about the Sattler Company completely out of the blue. What does that have to do with Will or the lights?
"I just couldn't believe it," he repeats. "No warning signs, no fence, no nothing," he adds as he realigns the plank of wood he's placing against the wall. "Ought to be held accountable if you ask me."
Millions of dollars, probably, Joyce hears as he starts to hammer again. How much is a wrongful death lawsuit going for these days? At least a million, surely. And since Will's a kid and all, might be able to milk it for even more. Judge's bound to feel for the grieving parents.
Joyce feels the pit of her stomach freeze over as she stands there, listening to the words he isn't saying with his voice. She should've known; she should've known there was more to Lonnie's— what had he just called it?— "grieving father" routine than a genuine sadness for their son's disappearance and apparent death.
He had never cared about Will. He'd never cared about Jonathan, and he'd long ago stopped caring about her, if he ever had. All Lonnie cares about is himself, and no family tragedy is going to change that. And Joyce isn't having it anymore.
"All right, that's that," he says eventually, as he finishes patching up the hole on the wall. Dropping the hammer on the floor by the toolbox and the box of nails, he turns to her with a sigh. "I'm all covered in soot from the shed now. I'm gonna take a shower, okay?" he declares and walks around her toward the back of the house. Joyce remains quiet, watching him as he goes.
As soon as he's out of sight, she makes a dive for his bag, which he left lying on the couch by the window.
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"She used us, all of us!" Lucas is screaming, the anger obvious in his tense expression as he stared down his supposed friend. "She helped just enough so she could get what she wants: Food and a bed. She's like a stray dog."
"Screw you, Lucas!" Mike retorts, furious on El's behalf. Who did Lucas think he was? El had been wandering in the forest, on her own, in the middle of the night, in a storm, wearing only a large t-shirt. She hadn't even been wearing shoes! She was clearly in trouble, and she needed help. You don't offer to help someone in need for what they could do for you; you help because they are human beings and they deserve compassion, and El deserved their compassion and their help.
So what if she couldn't take them exactly to where Will was? So what if she'd led them down the wrong path this once because she was afraid they were going somewhere dangerous? She'd still done more for their search than they ever would've pulled off on their own. She wanted to help them. She was key to this mission. Why couldn't Lucas see that?
"No! Screw you, Mike. You're blind," the dark-skinned boy retorts forcefully. "You're blind because you think she's the 'lost child' or whatever."
"Well, maybe she is!" Mike throws back just as forcefully.
Lucas isn't having it. "But she's not! She's right here! Will is the one who's lost, and just because you like that there's one girl in the world who's not grossed out by you, you're choosing her over him!"
"That's not true—" Mike tries to interject, but Lucas is on a roll.
"Wake up, man!" he barks out, getting all up on Mike's face. "Wake the hell up! She knows where Will is, and now she's just letting him die in the Upside Down."
"Shut up!" Mike isn't going to let him talk like that about Eleven. She's their best shot at finding Will, and he's going to make Lucas see that one way or the other.
"For all we know, it's her fault."
"Shut up!"
"We're looking for some stupid monster," Lucas continues, his tone incisive, "but did you ever stop to think... that maybe she's the monster?"
He points in Eleven's direction, and she looks so devastated that Mike can't hold himself back anymore. "I said shut up!" he growls, and before he really knows what he's doing, he takes a swing at Lucas. Next thing he knows, they're both rolling around on the ground throwing punches.
Mike can barely hear his friends screaming at them to stop over the sound of his own heart beating in his ears, and he's pretty sure Lucas is going to get one up on him if they keep going at this, but his righteous anger will not let him quit as he continues trying to land hits as best as he can.
And then, suddenly, Lucas's weight is off him, an unseen force pushing his friend off of him and off to the side nearly ten feet away. Except, when Mike gathers his bearings and manages to look in that direction, he sees that instead of hitting what looked like an aluminum roof panel propped up against the trunk of a tree, Lucas is a few feet in front of it, and he appears to be... floating about a foot in the air.
Mike's first thought is to turn to Dustin. "Are you doing this?" he asks, but as soon as the question leaves his lips he realizes this looks different than that one time they froze time; Lucas is suspended by nothing, that's true, but he's still moving— he's blinking and his jaw is slack and he's running his arms through the empty space beneath his legs as if looking for some measure of support. On top of that, he's ever-so-slightly bobbing up and down, as if he were floating on a dense, wavy liquid.
Dustin shakes his head, his eyes as wide as Mike himself feels his are. "Are you doing this?" Mike shakes his head, and in uncanny unison they both turn toward Eleven. She shakes her head as well.
Just as the three of them turn to look at Lucas again, whatever was holding him up in the air seems to disappear, and he drops a foot or so down to the ground, falling squarely on his butt.
Mike and Dustin make their way to his side immediately. "Are you okay?" Mike asks, wanting to make sure he hadn't hit anything on the way that might've hurt him.
"How did you do that?" Dustin asks instead.
"Get off me," Lucas grunts, slapping his friends' hands away from him before pushing himself to his feet and dusting himself off. "I'm not talking to either of you anymore." He signaled behind them with a nod of his head. "At least not until you stop hanging out with her."
"You can't do that!" Mike exclaims right away, planting himself directly in front of Lucas so he can't take a step forward. "Party rules! If you want to exclude someone from the party, we have to take a vote—"
"Well, technically we never took a vote to include her," Dustin points out smartly.
Lucas shakes his head and takes a step closer to Mike, staring him down. "Read my lips, Mike: I don't care." He scoffs. "You wanna stay with her? Fine. I'm going to find Will with or without you. Now get out of my way."
He pushes Mike back, and Mike stumbles, windmilling his arms as if looking for something to hold onto, but there's nothing around him he can support himself against. So he falls back, but before he can hit the ground he feels his fall cushioned by something, and when he looks down he realizes he's floating a couple of inches off the ground, much like Lucas had.
"You're flying, too!" Dustin exclaims, a massive grin drawing on his face.
"I'm flying, too!" Mike exclaims, matching his enthusiasm. He turns to look at Lucas. "Are you doing this?" he asks, wondering if maybe Lucas had powers like Eleven's. If she could push Lucas off him earlier, then surely her powers would allow her to make a person fly. Maybe Lucas had telekinesis, too.
But Lucas just shakes his head with a grunt. "Whatever, man." He walks a few steps away from them and crouches lightly, like he's about to jump. But he doesn't jump; instead he shoots straight up hundreds of feet in the air. Like freaking Superman.
"Holy shit, are you seeing this?" Dustin asks, but Mike only manages to keep his eyes on Lucas's disappearing form for a moment before he, too, drops to the ground on his fanny.
"Ow," he moans momentarily, not expecting just a couple of inches of falling to hit that hard. But regardless, he pushes himself to his feet, looking at the little dot near the horizon that he knew to be his so-called friend. "Lucas, come on!" he yells out, but Lucas is probably too far away to hear him.
"Let him go," Dustin cautions wisely. "I mean, he does have a point," he conceded. "Eleven could've killed him."
"Don't you start now," Mike retorts with a frown. "You know she was only trying to help. And who cares, anyway?" He shakes his head. "Did you not see what just happened? I can fly!"
"No, he can fly," Dustin corrects, pointing in the direction Lucas just disappeared. "You are probably just copying his powers." He grins. "See? It's like I've been saying all along!"
"How do you know I don't just have two powers?" Mike throws back, unwilling to admit that Lucas was the one with the cool superpower.
"Well, try and fly now that he's gone, then," Dustin dares him, and Mike has to at least try. He crouches like he'd seen Lucas do earlier, and tries to push himself off the ground, but all he manages is a feeble jump before gravity pulls him straight back down.
He tries again and fails again. On his third try he somehow trips and ends up sprawled butt-first on the ground again. Dustin grins. "See?" he says, signaling to Mike's form on the ground as if it proved his theory entirely correct.
"Fine, you were right," Mike begrudgingly grumbles under his breath as he pushes himself to his feet, having to wipe the dust off his jeans all over again. "But then how come I can't copy Eleven's..." His voice trails off as he turns around to look at the girl and realizes she's nowhere to be seen. "...Where's El?"
"Oh no," Dustin says, but before he can turn to look around the junkyard, Mike is already calling out for Eleven, hoping that wherever she's gone she can still hear him and come back. He'll never forgive Lucas if something happens to El because of his big mouth.
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Jonathan doesn't notice it as it's happening, busy as he is with trying to pull Nancy out of whatever hell she's seemingly stuck in. He grabs the hand she's managed to push through the hole, pushes his feet against the trunk of the tree for leverage and pulls, the vine-covered portal finally giving way as Nancy's entire body makes its way out, covered in some kind of disgusting goo but otherwise unharmed.
It's only minutes later, as he wraps her in his arms and whispers gentle words of comfort into her ear, that he notices: over her shoulder, he can see that not only is the portal gone, but it is gone because the entire trunk of the tree is split in half, like a tremor had run through it from the base to the top.
"I think that was you," Nancy tells him the next morning when he wakes up and finds her poring over a biology textbook.
"You think I split the tree in half?" Jonathan asks, because it sounds ludicrous to his ears, but then again, it sounds better than "the magic portal just closed on its own." What other explanation could there be?
Nancy nods. "When you were trying to pull me out you pushed against the tree with your feet. But it would take incredible force for that to split the tree apart." She looks up at him with those big blue eyes of hers. "Have you noticed anything different lately? About yourself, I mean."
"Maybe." He had, but he hadn't thought it strange back then. It's only recently that he's started to realize something's off— like how the driver's side door of his car seems to be looser than usual, or how Lonnie had kept complaining about back pain the entire time he was in Hawkins for Will's funeral. So he knows something weird's going on, but he doesn't know what, exactly. "But why would that place have anything to do with me?"
"I don't know," Nancy admits, "but I think... sometimes when extraneous creatures arrive at a specific location, they cause the entire ecosystem around them to change in order to adapt," she explained, passing the pages of her book back and forth as if looking for something.
"And you think the fact that this creature is around is making people... is making me... super strong?" he asks, following her theory just enough to start feeling like pieces were falling into place.
"Maybe," she says, shaking her head. "Or maybe it's just something in the water. I don't know. All I know is it can't be a coincidence. Just like it's not a coincidence that this creature happens to be around right when Will and Barbara disappeared." She keeps passing pages. "Wherever I was... that place... I think that it lives there. It was feeding there. Feeding on that deer." She noticeably shivers.
"That means if..." She takes a deep breath as if steeling herself for what she's about to say. "...If Will and Barbara..."
"Hey," he interrupts her, "my mom said she talked to Will. If he's alive, there's a chance Barbara is, too," he adds, trying to say something, anything, to make her feel better. He knows she blames herself for what happened to Barb, and she shouldn't.
She seems to buy that, but the wariness in her eyes doesn't go away. "That means she's trapped in that place," she says, still worried. But there's a determination in her tone come her next sentence. "We have to find it again."
"You wanna go back out there?" he asks, already knowing that he will go back there with her no matter what.
"Maybe we don't have to." She looks at him, jaw tense, and explains what he thinks is the best and worst plan he's ever heard in his life. But it's the only option they have if they want to do anything to help Will and Barbara, so they're going with it. Now all they need is some supplies.
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Dustin and Mike watch warily as Lucas paces in front of them, to the point that they're a little startled when he stops and speaks for the first time since he let them in. "Okay, I'll shake," he concedes magnanimously.
Mike smiles, relieved, and stretches a hand out for the peace gesture. But then Lucas unexpectedly continues speaking. "On one condition," he says. "I want Mike to admit that the weirdo isn't the lost child."
Mike frowns and pulls back his hand. "You don't know that," he counters straight away, already starting to get angry all over again.
"Uh, yes, I do," Lucas retorts snottily. "Or do you not remember that she's been around all along while Will hasn't been seen in days? What kind of a lost child is she if she isn't even lost?"
"Well, she's lost now," Mike throws back harshly. "Thanks to you, by the way. We have no idea where she is, and she could be in danger! We have to find her as soon as possible, or do you want the world to be destroyed?"
"The world isn't going to be destroyed, because she's not the lost child!" Lucas insists, glaring at Mike. "Will is, and unless you want the world to end, we gotta forget about your little girlfriend and go straight to the gate."
"No. Deal's off," Mike declares, incensed— Dustin isn't sure if it's because Lucas refuses to entertain the possibility that Eleven might be the lost child in question, or if it's just because he called her Mike's girlfriend and he's embarrassed, but the specificity is irrelevant at this point.
"Fine!"
"Fine!"
"No, no, not fine!" Dustin intervenes when they start to look like two rams about to butt heads. "Guys, seriously? Do you even remember what happened on the Bloodstone Pass?" Both boys look at him cluelessly, and he sighs. "We couldn't agree on what path to take, so we split up the party and those trolls took us out one by one. And it all went to shit. And we were all disabled!"
He glares at his two stubborn, knuckleheaded best friends, almost wishing he could cram into their heads that splitting up was never a good idea. Son of a bitch, they should know this stuff by now! Dustin doesn't know who the lost child really is, but it's one of the two, and that means they have to find both. It's that simple. "So we stick together, no matter what!"
Unfortunately for him, as intense as his motivational speech had been, it doesn't work. Lucas can't forgive the fact that Eleven had almost hurt him, and Mike can't convince him that Eleven could be useful for their search. On top of that, Eleven isn't even around to explain herself, so it's all a big mess.
As they leave Lucas's house empty-handed, the mythical handshake of peace is even further away than it was when they first came over.
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Jonathan and Nancy realize that her theory about his super strength is correct when he almost kills Tommy H. just by shoving him off.
It's by sheer willpower that he doesn't kill Steve— a part of him wanted to— but another part of his mind is actively making him pull his punches, knowing that he needs to shut him up but not being the kind of person to want to cause any permanent damage. He's so focused on controlling his blows, though, that he doesn't expect Tommy H. to suddenly attempt to throw him off his friend, and when he pushes him off without even looking at him, Tommy flies ten feet back and slams hard against a garbage disposal container.
Carol screeches, "Tommy!" and then he hears her and Nicole and Nancy rush over to Tommy, who's apparently unconscious. Jonathan tries to stop punching to look in their direction, figure out what's happening, but Steve won't stop fighting, still attempting to land at least as many hits as he got. His attempts were failing.
Jonathan grabs him by the arms and pins him down forcefully, but his newfound strength means he isn't even breaking a sweat despite Steve's struggling. Unfortunately for him, before he could give Steve a piece of his mind instead of letting his fists do the talking, they hear sirens. The thunderous slam of Tommy H.'s back against the trash container must've alerted the police that some disturbance was taking place in the alleyway.
"Cops!" Nicole screams as the revolving lights of the police cruisers start to become visible. "We have to go!"
"What about Tommy?!" Carol asks, concerned about her boyfriend, who was still unresponsive.
"They'll take him to the hospital! We have to go!" Nicole replies, and without giving it any more consideration, the two of them take off running toward the back of the alleyway and away from the police cruisers now making their way to them.
"Where are you going? You can't just leave them here!" Nancy calls out at their retreating forms at the same time Jonathan says, "Nancy! Let's go!" but before he can even move, Officer Callahan is pulling him off Steve, who is in turn being pulled to his feet by Officer Powell. It's a small miracle that Callahan doesn't suffer the same fate as Tommy H. when Jonathan automatically struggles in his grasp.
Thankfully, he manages to pull back just enough that this time his attempt at pushing someone off doesn't get anyone hurt, though it does get him arrested on charges of assaulting a police officer. Nancy's crying— whether in fear or frustration Jonathan doesn't know— as she kneels down to take Tommy's pulse.
Tommy and Steve, who's bruised so bad one of his eyes is nearly swollen shut, are loaded into one of the cruisers and taken to the nearest hospital while Jonathan and Nancy are pushed into another and transported to the police station for booking. Jonathan won't know what happens to Tommy H. until days later, when it becomes obvious that Steve isn't going to be hanging out with him and Carol any longer.
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This flying thing really comes in handy, Lucas thinks as he circles over Hawkins Lab from the sky. He's mostly trying to keep to above the trees, because it's hard to fly and use his binoculars at the same time and the trees give him something to hang on to in case he falls, but also because he doesn't want to be out in the open in case someone at the lab just happens to look up.
But then he catches sight of a large group of people exiting the building and heading toward a row of white vans parked near the entrance. Intrigued, he lowers himself to the top of a tall oak tree and looks through his binoculars, just in time to catch the sign on the side of the vans: HAWKINS POWER AND LIGHT.
He knew those vans. He'd seen them around his neighborhood.
Around Mike's house.
He quickly latches his binoculars onto his utility belt and pushes himself off the tree in the direction of the corner where he'd stashed his bike. Mike was right: El is in danger, and now so are his friends. He needs to warn them, and quick.
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"Dentist's office opens in five..."
Mike looks down at the water, his heart beating so hard he can hardly hear Troy's countdown, and knows without a doubt that if he jumps, he's never making it back up except in pieces.
"Four!"
Maybe if he uses Dustin's powers to freeze time. But Dustin is too far away now— they should've tried that earlier, but in their hurried attempt to run from Troy and James, it hadn't occurred to either of them— and even if Dustin manages to stop time in the middle of Mike's fall, how would he get back up to the ledge anyway? They'd never taken the time to figure out how or when exactly the powers worked, and now Mike wants to kick himself for that.
"Three!"
If only Lucas were here, Mike could tap into his flying power, or he could catch Mike himself. But Lucas wasn't around, and that was probably Mike's fault. He shouldn't have been so prideful; Lucas was just being protective, just like El had been. He should've tried harder to understand. Dammit, Lucas, he thinks, wishing his other best friend was here.
"Two!"
"Mike!" Dustin calls out, still begging him not to jump. But Mike can't risk it. He's not going to let Troy hurt his friend if there's anything he can do about it.
He can only hope that when he's gone, his friends will help El. They need her, and she needs them, too; they need each other if they want to save the world. Mike knows that in his soul. Dustin would take care of her in his absence, he felt. And Lucas would come around. And they would find Will, and everything would be okay. Everything... except Mike wouldn't be there.
"One!"
He lets himself fall.
And just as he's bracing himself for a painful impact with the water, he feels a harsh tug— suddenly his fall is broken by nothing but air as an invisible force keeps him hovering about halfway down the cliff. For a second he thinks Dustin managed to freeze time after all, but he can still feel the breeze on his face, and he starts flailing, unsure of what's happening or how long he can hold out for.
Then the same invisible force starts jerking him up toward the ledge, and he realizes something else is happening. He flies in an arc over the edge, over Troy and James and Dustin's heads, and then he feels the force give way and drop him to the ground with only a couple of feet to go (he can't help the "Ow!" that leaves his lips because, well, it hurt).
He looks around to see if he can spot who did this... and then he sees her.
She's walking toward them with thundering determination, her wig gone and her face and dress streaked with dirt, but there's a fire in her eyes that Mike can't look away from. She looks like an avenging angel, and that's when Mike knows this is it. She is it. Save the lost child, save the world. It has never been clearer than in this moment.
She makes quick work of Troy and James, and as they run off with their metaphorical tails between their legs, he hears Dustin yell after them, boasting about what she's going to do to them if they come after any of them again. But Mike only has eyes for El: her eyes are closing, and her stance is wavering, and a moment later she's falling, and Mike rushes to her side, heart in his throat.
"El? El! Come on, El," he begs as he tries to shake her awake, but it's for naught as it takes almost a full minute before she finally stirs. "El, are you okay?" he asks as he sees her adjust to her surroundings. "El?"
She looks up at him and her eyes widen, starting to well up with tears. "Mike..." she starts. "I'm sorry."
He doesn't understand at first. "Sorry? What are you sorry for?" he asks, almost with a scoff. It's silly to even think that she needs to apologize for anything; she'd just saved his life big time.
But she seems genuinely contrite despite his assurance to the contrary. "The gate," she explains, "I opened it." It starts to dawn on Mike what she meant. He still doesn't think she's at fault, but he can see why she'd feel guilty. "I'm the monster."
His heart aches for her and his arms itch to wrap around her shoulders. "No," he starts, his tone soft but assertive. Dustin stands beside them, listening quietly. "No, El, you're not the monster," he assures her. And when her eyes meet his, he smiles at her. "You're the savior."
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Years down the road, when someone asks Dustin what the most memorable moment of his life was, he'll point them to this exact moment.
Eyes wide and mouth wide open, he gets off his bike and around behind Lucas— whose face is frozen in an equally astonished expression— to look at the van floating above their heads from the opposite side. It looks like it is nosediving straight at them, the driver and his fellow bad man on the passenger-side seat looking down at him with terror in their eyes. Oops, wouldn't wanna be them right then.
He walks further, coming to stand right beside Mike's bike, and takes another look. He can see the entire undercarriage of the vehicle from an angle that very few people would ever see. "Man, I wish I had a Polaroid camera right now," he mumbles to himself as he stares, knowing no one's going to believe him when he tells them.
Just as he's going to walk around Mike and Eleven, he starts to feel a twinge of something, almost like the feeling in your stomach when you're riding a rollercoaster and reaching the highest point of the ride, that breathless split second right before the car turns and you know you're about to go down the highest drop and your stomach feels like it wants to jump up into your throat.
He's never felt that before while having both feet planted firmly on the ground, so he immediately assumes it has something to do with his powers— specifically, that he'd been gawking way too long and his unintentional "pause button" was about to expire. He doesn't fancy the idea of being crushed by a ton plus of Hawkins Power and Light van while he stands there like an idiot, so he runs for his bike again and gets into pedaling position, then closes his eyes, focusing his thoughts on letting time move forward again.
He doesn't open his eyes again until he hears a massive crashing sound behind him; it's only then that he turns to look at the van— or what remains of it— on the ground, flipped upside down like a dead cockroach between them and the rest of the vans, effectively blocking them from catching the three bikes.
Lucas turns to look at Mike, who mirrors his astonished expression, before looking back at Dustin. Dustin can only grin in response. His powers might be vague and unreliable, and he definitely needed to study them more to get a hold of their proper usage, but it couldn't be denied that they were wicked cool.
"Did— did you see what she did to that van?!" he asks the others as they arrive at the junkyard, still in disbelief that he knew someone who could flip vans with her mind like they weighed about as much as tin cans.
Mike replies with a sarcastic quip, but Lucas agrees that it was awesome, and turns toward Eleven to apologize for being an ass. Dustin can't help but smile proudly as Lucas says, "I'm sorry. Look, I don't know if you're the lost child or not, but I know that you're important to the mission, and you're our friend."
Eleven apologizes for lying to them, and soon Mike is apologizing as well, just like Dustin told him he should. As Mike and Lucas shake hands, Dustin almost wants to freeze time again just to frame this moment for posterity, but they've got more important things to think about right then. Namely, how to get to the gate.
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"Why is he wearing handcuffs?" Joyce demands first thing when she and Hopper walk into the police station to find Jonathan and Nancy sitting by Callahan's desk, quietly waiting.
"Well, your boy assaulted a police officer and sent two other kids to the hospital," Powell explains as she glares his way. "That's why."
"That's not his fault!" Nancy intervenes, also glaring at Powell. "He couldn't control it," she asks, shaking her head so emphatically that the end of her ponytail flies from side to side of her head with the movement.
"It?" Hopper asks, not missing that little nugget of truth that Nancy unwittingly dropped. "What's it? What can't he control?" Before Nancy can explain, however— or attempt to dodge the question somehow, as it may be— Joyce demands the handcuffs come off and an argument erupts as the supplies they just bought are brought out of Jonathan's car. It's a little difficult to explain what two teenagers are planning to do with a bear trap, but Hopper wants to hear it.
Joyce can't believe it's the first she's hearing about it, either. "That is not good enough, Jonathan," she declares once the two of them are out in the hall, Nancy having stayed with Hopper in his office, still going over what they had learned about the creature that kidnapped Will. It had taken a demonstration for them to actually buy the whole super-strength thing— Flo would not be happy that the stapler she had left in Hopper's office that morning had "suddenly broken" in Jonathan's hand— but after that they followed along with everything else the teenagers explained, just trying to take it in stride.
Jonathan tries to assure her that he knows, that he's aware he should've told her, especially when it comes to his newfound strength, but she's not having it. "That's not even close. That's not even in the— in the ballpark."
"I wanted to tell you, I just..." Jonathan starts, then cuts himself off as he thinks of how to put it. "I figured it wasn't important compared to what's going on with Will. I didn't want to distract you or anything."
"Jonathan, you're my son," Joyce assures him with a sigh. "Anything that's going on with you, I want to know. The fact that you suddenly developed unnatural strength? That's kind of a big deal. It's the kind of thing I need to know, as your mother. You need to tell me these things." She shook her head. "What if this thing took you, too? You risked your life... and Nancy's."
"I thought I could save Will," Jonathan insists. "I still do."
"This is not your problem to fix," Joyce throws back. "You may be super strong now, Jonathan, but that doesn't make you invincible, okay? You're still sixteen. You're still a child, my child, and you can't do this alone." She shoves at his shoulder frustratedly. "You act like you're all alone out there in the world, but you're not. You're not alone."
Jonathan gives himself over to his mother's concerned embrace and takes solace in the fact that even with literal monsters lurking around Hawkins, and sudden superpowers appearing with no explanation, at least there were some things in his life that still made sense.
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Dustin's pacing back and forth on the aisle between the seats when they hear it. Not at first, because he's also ranting— "I don't feel good about this. I don't feel good about this!"— and Lucas is responding equally bitingly, but after that it's quiet and Dustin, being closest to the front of the bus, both hears it and sees it.
Cars. Approaching fast.
The others join him at the front just in time to see three cars coming in from three different sides, practically surrounding the bus. "Shit!" Dustin exclaims, just as Mike starts urging everyone to run to the back of the bus and hide. "Guys, wait!" Dustin calls out, however, not moving from his spot.
"Dustin, get back here!" Mike snaps urgently, but Dustin does not heed his warning. Instead, he closes his eyes tightly for a second and when he opens them, everything stops: The noise from the live engines can't be heard anymore, the wind isn't moving the tree leaves around the clearing anymore, and one of the three bad men that were just about to come grab them and possibly kill them is frozen halfway through exiting his vehicle, unmoving as a mannequin.
Dustin turns back to look at his friends and sees that, just like that time in Mike's room, they are indeed still able to move. "I did it! I froze time again!" he declares with a bright grin. Just as his friends are about to cheer, though, Dustin starts feeling that tug at his stomach again, and his smile drops. "Guys, we gotta go. Quick."
Noticing how deadly serious he is, none of them object, and the foursome make their way out of the bus, pushing each other out of the way to get at each of their bikes, which they had hidden underneath it, and past the bad men's cars. Just as they're out of sight of the junkyard, though, they come across another vehicle, also frozen in time, but this one unrelated to Hawkins lab: it is the chief's truck, with Hopper himself at the wheel.
"Go, go, go, go!" Dustin urges them in the direction of the Blazer. Though there's a small kerfluffle when all of them try to get their bikes into the trunk of the truck at the same time (Eleven has to shove all three of them in with her powers, and Dustin can only hope his precious bike hasn't gotten dinged in the process), they do eventually make it onto the back seat, Mike closing the door behind him just as Dustin feels the tug give way.
The car lurches forward like it had never stopped, but it takes Hopper a second to realize that his back seat is suddenly occupied.
"Jesus Christ!" he exclaims, his foot instinctively stomping on the brake pedal. The car halts so abruptly that Lucas smashes his face against the back of Hopper's seat, Dustin almost flies through the windshield, and Mike, who was sitting mostly sideways as he was the last to come in, can't find anything to hold on to, so he ends up in the gap between the back seat and the front seat, hands grabbing at El's ankles like they could somehow stop his momentum. (News flash: they couldn't.)
Hopper looks at them through the rearview mirror with a stunned expression. "How the hell did you—"
"It's a long story," Mike cuts him off as he pushes himself up to the seat again, Eleven scooching a little to the side to give him space. "You probably wouldn't believe us if we told you."
Hopper scoffs. "Lot of that going around today." Before any of them can ponder what that means, Lucas reminds them all that the bad men are just over the hill and definitely looking for them. Hopper immediately sets the car in reverse. "All right, we're heading back to the Byers', and once we get there, you four are going to tell us everything that's been going on. And I mean everything, you got that?"
It's obviously a rhetorical question as, before any of them could open their mouth to reply, Hopper floors the gas pedal and the car screeches backward. Much to their chagrin, the four of them go flying off their seats once again.
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Joyce slams the car door closed behind her when she's firmly seated inside. "So, what's the plan?" she asks, taking a deep breath to steel himself for whatever it is Hopper's about to tell her. She's scared out of her wits, but she'll do anything to get her boy back.
"Don't worry about it," Hopper replies as he sets the Blazer in reverse. "I know how to deal with these guys. I got this."
"What do you mean, 'you got this'?" Joyce throws back, almost offended that she's being sidelined, even though she knew he would try and do that. He's a cop, so he just assumes it's up to him to handle these things. "I can't just stand there! Tell me how I can help."
"You don't need to do anything, Joyce," Hopper insists as he pulls the car out of the gravel-covered parking space in front of the Middle School gym. "I'll handle it. Once we're in that Upside Down place and looking for Will, that's when I could use two pairs of eyes."
"But—" She's about to point out that she has skills that could be useful, but then she remembers that she'd never actually told him what she could do. They'd been so busy focusing on the kids and everything that was going on with them that her newfound psychic abilities had completely slipped her mind.
"I can read people's minds," she blurts out as they drive on a wide curve around the edge of the forest, and it's a miracle they didn't outright drive straight into a tree with the way Hopper's head snaps from the forest to her face, an incredulous expression marking his features.
He looks at her, his eyebrows arching high on his forehead. "You can... read people's minds..." he repeats, not so much as a question but as a statement he simply can't wrap his mind around. She can't be serious. The stress must be getting to her.
"Yes, I'm serious, and no, it's not the stress," she snaps back and sees his expression morph into realization as she repeats his thoughts, ones he hasn't voiced out loud, right back at him. She scoffs and shakes her head. "Honestly, Hopper. Stranger things have happened."
Hopper runs the hand that isn't holding the steering wheel over his mouth and chin, ruffling his mustache in the process. He's looking at the road rather than at her, but she doesn't need to be a mind reader to recognize that in his mind he's probably running down a list of every single weird thing they'd encountered this week, starting with but not limited to the fact that they were on the way to rescue her son from a hostile alternate dimension.
"You got a point there," he concedes. He doesn't fill her in on any more of his plan, but she doesn't ask again because soon enough, they're nearing the premises of Hawkins Lab. They get out of the car, and she notices that Hopper doesn't even bother getting a bolt cutter from the trunk as they approach the chain-link fence.
"Are you planning on climbing the fence, or...?" she lets her voice trail off as she looks at the top of the fence, which is helpfully decorated with coils of barbed wire. "I'm sure you've got many good qualities, Hop, but I don't think climbing is one of them."
"Ha ha," he replies sarcastically, before turning fully toward her and extending his arm toward her. "Give me your hand."
She looks at his hand dubiously, then up at his face. "What for?" She huffs. "Hopper, I don't think this is the time for—"
"There's a point to this, I swear. Just give me your hand," he insists, and before she can move he's grabbing it, and pulling her closer to the fence. Once they're standing right in front of it, he pushes his free hand against chain-link metal material... and then right through it.
She stares, eyes as wide as plates, at the wires currently sticking out of the man's wrist, then back at Hopper's face, then back at his wrist, then back at his face again. "When were you planning on telling me you could do this?" she asks, utterly baffled at what she is seeing. Stranger things, indeed, she thinks to herself. It isn't just her and Hopper, but the kids and Jonathan, too— where are all these weird superpowers coming from?
"We'll talk about it when it starts making sense," Hopper mumbles under his breath, but the night is quiet enough that she hears it loud and clear. Before she can properly prepare for what's about to happen, he's pulling her forward and through the fence just as his hand had, and Joyce swears it's the weirdest feeling she's ever felt in her life— at least up until that moment.
The awkward wonder doesn't last long, though, because break-in or no break-in, soon enough they're caught by the lab's security and taken inside at gunpoint.
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"Six."
"What?" Joyce asks, confused as to why this man is even here, why they are keeping her locked up in this room while her son is out there in that... place... probably fighting for his life. What is the point of talking right now?
"Six," Brenner repeats. "Six people have been taken this week." That's six too many to be explained away in a small town like Hawkins, his thoughts come through loud and clear, even as his actual voice softens in a poor imitation of compassion. "This thing that took your son... we don't really understand it.
"But its behavior is predictable," he adds. "Like all animals, it eats. It will take more sons. More daughters." More than we have the manpower to contain, she hears in the silence between his sentences. It's bad enough that the first one out of the gate turned out to be a child— that's guaranteed to keep everyone's attention on this story, he laments in his head, sounding much more frustrated than his tone would imply. There's got to be a way to study that other dimension without requiring this much clean-up.
It's that, more than anything, that pisses Joyce off something major. How dare he? He got her son into this mess simply because he wanted to study another dimension? He just said that six people were missing and he couldn't give a rat's ass for any of them! What kind of monster was this man?
That's why, as Brenner goes on and on about wanting to save people— wanting to save Will— but needing her help to do so, Joyce's jaw clenches tightly. "Stop," she all but orders him with a glare. "I know who you are. I know what you're thinking. I know what you've done." She shook her head. "You took my boy away from me! You left him in that place to die! You— faked his death! We had a funeral, we buried him. And now you're asking for my help?"
She leans forward and pins him with a stare dripping with fury. "You don't care about any of those people. You don't care about my son. All you care about is your crazy experiments gaining you some kind of recognition so you can get out of here and not have to deal with the clean-up," she declares, knowing very well that her words rang true.
Brenner's eyes widen for a second in realization before narrowing in suspicion. "How did you know—"
She doesn't let him finish. "Go to hell," she throws back at him, and leans back in her chair, crossing her arms defiantly. Unless his next words are "you can go save your son," she's not interested in anything this man has to say.
He studies her quietly for a minute or so while she seethes, as if measuring what he could say or offer to get her to speak. Eventually, however, it seems like he understands she's never going to help him, because he pushes his chair back and stands up, making his way to the door.
Joyce barely has a second to react. "Where are you going? Let me go get my son! You—" But before she can follow him out the door, she's pushed back by two guards who then close the door between her and the man that holds her son's life in his hands. She bangs a fist against the door, more in frustration than with any actual purpose. Oh, how she wishes she had Hopper's ability to walk through solid objects right about then.
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Unbeknownst to Hopper, his ability to walk through solid objects is the only reason why he's not being tortured right now.
They did put him in handcuffs when they brought him in, though he knows he could get out of those in a second. He won't, though. They've got three of their goons on him at all times and he doesn't want to give them the advantage of knowing what he can do. The element of surprise is the best ace he has up his sleeve.
His old friend the head of Security leans forward on the table from the opposite side Hopper is sitting at and pins him with a glare. "Okay, I'm asking again: What do you know?"
Hopper meets his gaze right on. He would've crossed his arms for effect, but— well, handcuffs. "Did I stutter?" he says instead, figuring these bozos can use as much attitude as he can dish out. "Everything."
The man bangs his hands against the table in frustration, probably wishing the table was Hopper's face. "I really wish I could tase you right now," the man hisses, pulling close so his lower voice traveled.
"Oh, yeah?" Hopper retorted. "And why don't you?" He knows they could do much worse; they hadn't had any qualms about killing Benny, and given everything that happened with Will's fake body, they obviously have the resources to cover up any collateral damage that comes up. So why are they being so hands off with him?
It couldn't just be that he was the chief of police. Sure, his job gave him a higher profile in town than poor Benny the diner guy, but surely they could find a thousand and one ways to make his death or disappearance look like an accident; God knew he drank and popped pills enough to make it easy for them. So what was it?
The man doesn't take his bait. "What do you know?" he asks again, and this time Hopper tells him. He needs to let them know that despite him being in cuffs and locked in this interrogation room right now, he's holding all the cards.
"Here's what's gonna happen," he warns them as he stares all three of them down. "You're gonna let me and Joyce Byers go. You're gonna give us anything we need, and we're gonna find her son. And then we're gonna forget that any of this ever happened."
"Oh, is that right?" the man retorts.
"Yeah, that's right," Hopper repeats, and for a moment he thinks he's got them. It isn't until the three minions leave and Brenner enters the room himself that he realizes there's a piece of the puzzle he's been missing.
"You gotta give me your word," he tells the man, hoping that the leverage he had on them was enough to twist their metaphorical arm. "Nobody's ever gonna find out about this. And those other three kids, those boys, you're gonna leave them alone. Then I'll tell you," he added, the words tasting bitter in his mouth as he said them. He was selling out a little girl to these monsters. What the hell was wrong with him? "Tell you where your little science experiment is."
Brenner looks at him clinically for a moment before crossing his arms. "Alright," he says in a conciliatory manner before his tone sharpens. "But I also want you to tell me how you dodged that bullet."
Hopper stares at him trying to keep his best poker face on, but on the inside he's freaking out. Crap, they knew about the phasing. That's why they didn't tase him. Great, what now? "Don't even bother pretending you don't know what I'm talking about," Brenner adds. "I've got you on tape."
"I don't know how it works," Hopper admits, figuring he's caught in a corner anyway. "It just started happening a few days ago. I don't know what started it, but I figure it's got something to do with you people, because as far as I know I couldn't walk through walls before the Byers kid disappeared a week ago."
"And you don't know what triggered it?" Brenner asks. Hopper once again reiterates that he has no friggin' clue how any of this started. After a moment of silence, Brenner leans forward on the table, much like his head of Security had earlier, but somehow managing to seem even more predatory. "Then you're going to let me study it."
"Study it?" Hopper repeats, hoping he doesn't mean what he thinks he means.
"You," Brenner clarifies, and it chills Hopper's blood. "You come into the lab once every few weeks so we can run some tests and try and figure the limits of your... ability. You don't put up a fight, just let us do what we need to do and I'll let you know when we have no need of you anymore." His eyes narrow. "I want the girl, your consent to this, and everybody walks out of this safe and sound."
Hopper swallows the panic rising in his chest when he sees a glint of victory in the scientist's eyes. Tests? What kind of tests? His mind is only too eager to provide him with a series of dark scenarios where he's poked and prodded like a lab rat, but he has no right to complain. He's putting a little girl in an even worse situation than he will be, and at least if he has periodic access to the lab, he'll be able to keep an eye on her— or maybe even get her out of there someday.
He's a grown-ass man and a cop, and he can allow this one thing out of his control in order to save everyone's goddamn lives. The right choice is obvious. "Yeah, okay," he croaks out through a dry throat. "But you touch a single hair on any of those kids' heads, and the deal's off."
"It won't be," Brenner assures him before pushing off the table and straightening up to his full height. "I presume you can get out of those on your own?" he said with some derision, nodding at the handcuffs around Hopper's wrists.
"Ah, yeah," Hopper says dismissively as he pulls his hands out of the metallic grip like the cuffs weren't even there. He can see Brenner's eyes laser-focus on the movement, the man's eyebrows rising slightly in inherent curiosity.
Whatever. There'll be plenty of chances for him to gawk when this mess is over. Hopper stands up, the feet of his chair screeching as they scrape against the tiled floor, and rubs his wrists. "Now, take me to Joyce and then to the rift. Will doesn't have much time."
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Turns out, embedding nails into a baseball bat is a lot easier when you have super strength. Jonathan doesn't even need to use the hammer.
Once they have everything set up, and they've gone over the plan what feels like five hundred times, they sit there on Jonathan's couch, each mentally weighing what they are just about to do. "This is insane," Jonathan comments as he looks down at the sharp blade of the knife he's holding in his hand. He looks up at Nancy. "Do you think I can even cut myself?"
Nancy pauses for a moment, but then the corners of her lips start curling up into a smirk. "You're super strong, not invulnerable," she points out smartly.
"You don't actually know that," Jonathan retorts, feeling himself start to smile as well.
Nancy shrugs. "Easy enough to prove," she says, then she raises a hand and flicks Jonathan on his forehead. He feels the sting and lets out an "ow!" which causes Nancy to chuckle. "See? Not invulnerable." Jonathan shakes his head as he rubs at his forehead. Nancy sobers up a bit as he does. "What do you think gave you your powers?"
It's his turn to shrug. "I don't know." He looks at her and sees that she's looking curiously around the living room. "Lotta weird things happening around this house, though. Maybe that's it."
"Maybe I'll get a superpower of my own, then," Nancy comments, continuing her visual exploration of Jonathan's house. It was hard to picture what it would look like without all the hanging Christmas lights, but it seemed like a cozy place.
"What makes you think you don't already have one?" Jonathan counters, tapping his fingers against the flat of the knife. "Maybe your superpower is being super smart. We'd never be able to tell the difference."
She has no response for that, but he does see her cheeks redden. He tries to squash down the feeling of success the gesture gives him, reminding himself that she has a boyfriend. She seems to be thinking along the same lines, though, because she abruptly clears her throat. "Okay, we've put this off long enough. Let's do this."
"You ready?" Jonathan asks. She replies in the affirmative, and he adds, "On three." As he starts counting down, however, he sees the fear in her expression. "You don't have to do this—" he starts, but she interrupts him.
"Jonathan, stop talking."
"I'm just saying, you don't have to—"
"Three!" She takes the initiative and since she's already cutting herself, Jonathan has to follow suit. It stings like hell, and blood promptly starts pouring out, so— yeah, definitely not invulnerable. Nancy was right. Again.
They make sure to smear the blood around as well as they can before they bandage their wounds, and just as they're wrapping everything up, the least expected person comes knocking. It's as Nancy tries to send Steve away— even at gunpoint if necessary!— that the Christmas lights start to blink.
"Nancy," he calls out, but she's so busy trying to get Steve to go that she doesn't hear him. "Nancy!" he tries again to no avail. "Nancy!" It's the third time that he calls out to her that she finally hears him. "The lights."
They're ready for it when the beast appears, if one can ever be ready for such a thing. Between Steve freaking out and Nancy shooting at it, however, Jonathan has to almost carry them both toward Will's room so they don't end up as sitting ducks. They wait for the yo-yo to move but it never does, and eventually they walk back out again, to see that the creature has disappeared.
Steve takes his chance to leave, which, honestly, Jonathan is glad for, as it meant one less person to protect from the monster. Just as soon as the door closes behind him, though, the lights start blinking again, and the creature is upon them.
It jumps on Jonathan and he's thankful for the first time for his super strength when he manages to push it off what feels like a split second before it takes a bite out of his head. Unfortunately for him, though, he's not super fast, so he can't reach it in time when Nancy starts shooting at it and it decides she'll make for an easier target. That's when Steve comes back in and, managing to grab the bat Jonathan had dropped earlier, swings like a pro and saves Nancy's life. That's when Jonathan decides that even though he doesn't particularly like Steve, he can admit that he's actually a fairly decent guy.
When it's all over, they're not sure that they killed it, but they're pretty sure that they at least hurt it. Hopefully that would be enough. When the lights start blinking again— differently, less frenetically this time— Jonathan feels relief. "Mom?" he calls out, unsure that she was listening, but hoping. She had heard Will through the wall between dimensions, after all. Something tells him she's listening this time, too.
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Is that you? Mom...
"Jonathan?" Joyce asks, stopping in her step and turning around abruptly. She doesn't know where the voice is coming from but she heard it clear as day, so she looks around hoping to pinpoint the source. She can't find it.
"Joyce, come on," Hopper calls out to her from a few paces ahead, but when she doesn't move, he has no choice but to stop so that she doesn't get left behind. "What is it?" he asks, every sense in him telling him it's probably not a good idea for them to stop moving. They're in an unknown dimension and have no idea what might be stalking them in this place.
"Did you hear that?" she asks him in return, still looking around for a disembodied voice. "I thought I heard someone calling out..."
"I didn't hear anything," Hopper tells her, but he can see that she's distraught about this and they won't be able to move on until she's satisfied that whatever she heard was not just in her imagination, so he prompts, "Is it like when you read people's thoughts?"
"I don't know. Maybe?" Joyce replies, sounding unsure. "I think it was Jonathan, and he sounded..." She shakes her head, her expression looking like she was trying to reach for something that she couldn't quite grasp. "I think he's nearby..."
"They're supposed to be at the middle school, watching the kids," Hopper reminds her, and it only makes her confused frown deepen. "Joyce, we'll figure it out later, okay? Right now we have to find Will. We don't have much time," he insists.
"You're right," Joyce concedes, but her gaze is still lost somewhere toward the front door of what passes for her house in this disgusting place. It takes her a few seconds to get herself together. "You're— you're right. Let's go." She lets him lead her toward the back of the house and toward Castle Byers, where they will hopefully find her little boy and get him back home.
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Mike, Dustin, and Lucas have never thought about how cramped the hallways at their school are until they have to run through them four at a time, all the while dodging bullets. "Go go go go!" Mike screeches at the rest when they run straight into a group of guards with semiautomatics aimed straight at them.
The foursome quickly spins on their heels and heads for the opposite end of the hallway, only to come face to face with a second group of guards, equally armed. "Freeze!" the agent at the front of the pack warns them.
That is exactly what Dustin does. Freeze them in time, that is.
"Everyone okay?" he asks when he's completely sure that the guards aren't moving from their position.
His friends all nod. "We have to get out of here," Mike urges, and they take off into a run again, past the guards and toward the emergency exit at the back of the school.
Lucas gets there first and tugs at the handle. "Dammit!" he exclaims once he realizes the door is locked. The other two boys groan in disappointment themselves. "What do we do now?" he asks, looking at his friends' frustrated expressions.
"Dustin, if you can actually teleport, this would be the time to do it," Mike prompts. These sudden bursts of superpowers had gotten them this far, right? So he's hoping against hope that his curly-haired friend has an ace up his sleeve.
Unfortunately for him, Dustin only shakes his head. "I don't even know if I can hold them like this for much longer," he admits, a hand rubbing at his tummy for some reason.
Mike tries the door again, just in case. Nothing happens. "There's got to be a window somewhere we can open," he suggests, looking around for the nearest classroom. Which one of his teachers was it that liked to open the windows in the fall even though it got super cold outside some days?
"And then what?" Lucas argued, always the strategic thinker. "You know they'll have the whole building surrounded. And they have cars! We won't have time to get far enough away."
"So you take Eleven and fly away with her," Mike says, determined.
Eleven intervenes for the first time in the conversation with a firm "No!" and for once Lucas agrees with her. "No way! What about you two?"
Mike shakes his head. "It's not us they want, it's her. That's why we gotta make sure she gets out of here safely." He purses his lips momentarily. "Besides, they won't kill us. We're just kids; they wouldn't outright shoot kids."
"Oh, like they didn't kill Will?" Lucas retorts with a scoff.
"They didn't kill Will, they pretended to kill Will."
"Well, technically they let loose a monster that kidnapped Will," Dustin interjects in a matter-of-fact tone, "and then they covered up the disappearance by pretending Will died in an accident."
"The point is," Mike declares in the most authoritative tone he can muster, "one kid is an accident, three kids is suspicious. They're trying to scare us with those guns, but they're not really going to harm us."
"So your main argument is that they won't kill you because you're too cute to die," Lucas summarizes with a roll of his eyes. "Great. That's great. I don't even know that I can carry Eleven with me while I'm flying! She might be too heavy or something, I don't really know how it all works."
"No," El insists against the idea, shaking her head emphatically, her eyes pleading at Mike not to go through with this plan.
"Guys..." Dustin intervened, the hand at his tummy slowing down as he came to some realization.
Mike forces himself to ignore both of them. "So? You have to at least try!" he replies to Lucas instead, figuring that was the most urgent matter.
"And you want me to try for the first time while we're dozens of feet in the air?" Lucas throws back, and at that point even Mike has to admit his objections make sense. But what else can they do?
"There's gotta be a way—" Mike starts, but he's interrupted by Dustin calling out to them a little more forcefully this time around. "What?" Mike snaps, annoyed that he's the only one throwing out any ideas.
"Whatever we're going to do, we have to do it now," Dustin declares, urgency coloring his every word. "I don't think we have much..." He trails off, hand fisting around the fabric of his t-shirt. "Nope, it's over. Time's moving forward again."
Mike and Lucas's gazes meet, eyes wide, as it hits them that the lab goons are coming for them right now, and they are almost literally backed into a corner. "Run!" Mike exclaims, and the four of them make a mad dash down the hallway.
They turn the opposite corner from where they'd come from originally, hoping there will be fewer guards in that direction, but they have no luck as they are almost immediately confronted with another group of armed men. "Stop right there!" the one right at the front warns them just as Dustin waves his hands and freezes them again.
"Past them, past them!" Mike urges them without stopping, and they pass between the bad guys, headed toward the main entrance instead. The lab people have to be coming in from somewhere, right? So that one at least has to be open, and if Dustin can keep time frozen just long enough to let them get a head start...
"I think it's gonna be a shorter freeze this time, guys!" Dustin warns them as they run, dumping a bucket of ice-cold water on Mike's half-thought-out plans. "I can feel it going away already!"
"Hold it for as long as you ca— whoa!" Mike stops speaking abruptly as he comes face to face with the barrel of a handgun, pointed at him by a woman with blonde hair backed up by a bunch of men with rifles. "Dustin!" Mike pleads, and his curly-haired friend waves his hands in front of him again, but this time the bad men keep moving closer.
"Back, back!" Mike signals for them to turn around, but as they all spin on their heels, they realize there's a second group of armed men coming their way from the opposite end of the hallway. They're cornered. Again.
"Do something!" Lucas begs either of his friends, but as much as both Dustin and Mike try, time's running forward no matter what. Just as they're sure the woman's going to put a bullet through their heads, Eleven steps forward and uses her powers to crush their brains inside their skulls.
And then there's just blood. Blood everywhere.
Eleven faints from the effort, and before the boys can shake her awake they're snatched by the group of guards coming from behind them, just in time to see a tall white-haired man kneel down next to her. He speaks to her like he knows her, like he cares, but the actual words he's saying are dark and manipulative, and Mike knows, he just knows, that this is the man who kept El trapped inside that lab her entire life. This is the man who forced her to release the creature that took Will. He's the monster.
Eleven makes it more than clear that she doesn't want to go back to the lab with the man— not that she can do anything about it in her condition, nor can the boys, trapped as they are— but then the hallway lights start flickering and they're all distracted by the appearance of the Demogorgon.
The men who are holding them let them go so they can start shooting at the beast, and the boys take their chance to grab Eleven and lock themselves inside the nearest classroom, which turns out to be Mr. Clarke's. Eleven is still mostly out of it so Dustin sets her down on one of the desks, and Mike moves forward to talk to her and hold her hand.
They're not dumb. They know that thing is going to get through all the armed guards like they're nothing, and once it does, there's a pretty good chance it will find them locked inside a room they can't get out of. But Mike has to be positive, has to think of a future after that night, because the other option is getting eaten by a monster and thinking about that isn't going to do them any favors.
But reality comes knocking, and when the Demogorgon does finally make its way to the science classroom, they have nothing to use to fight against him except a slingshot. It doesn't affect the creature in the slightest and just as they're sure they're monster chow, something pushes the beast away from them abruptly, pinning it against the blackboard.
El makes her way between them and to the front of the room as they look at her in shock, but this time Mike isn't awed— he's terrified. Her gaze is fixed on the monster with a fiery darkness lurking behind her eyes, and Mike is suddenly terrified that she's going to do something dangerous. Something irreparable.
His feet are urging him forward before he even realizes what he's doing. "Eleven, don't—!" he pleads, but before he can even finish the sentence she waves her hand behind her and Mike feels himself being lifted off the ground and thrown several feet back in the air until his back hits the wooden cabinets where Mr. Clarke stores the Bunsen burners. It hurts, but not as much as the knowledge that he can't move— she's pinning him in place, and he can't reach her.
So he closes his eyes and tries to feel Dustin's presence nearby, Dustin's powers nearby, concentrating so hard that he almost forgets to breathe through the sobs constraining his throat. When he opens his eyes he hopes and prays that he's managed to stop time, but instead he can only see El's face as she looks back at him over her shoulder and says, "Goodbye, Mike."
No.
"Dustin!" he screams in desperation as El turns back to the monster, starting to use her powers with such a strength that it feels like the entire room is shaking. Out of the corner of his eye he sees his friend close his eyes and start to concentrate, but nothing's happening. "Come on!"
"I'm trying!" Dustin responds through gritted teeth, fists clenched and trembling from the effort he was putting into it.
"Dustin!" Mike insists, with so much fear and hope and despair in that one word that his voice cracks as he says it. In front of them, the monster starts twisting as much as it can in that pinned-back position, and howling as if in pain.
"I'm trying!" Dustin repeats, and that's the last of their dialogue as that's when El starts screaming, and the loud sounds emanating from both her and the monster overtake any other attempt at communication in the room.
Then the monster starts to dissolve into ashes that remain afloat in the air and cover their view of the front of the room. When the screaming stops and the ashes begin to fall to the ground, the Demogorgon is gone.
And so is Eleven.
.
.
.
"You okay?"
"The Demogorgon," Will says, voice still a little raspy from his coughing fit. "It got me."
"We know. It's okay," Mike assures him straight away, not wanting Will to feel bad about something he had no control over. All that matters is that he's back with them now, safe and sound. "It's dead," he adds. "We made a new friend. She stopped it. She saved us." His expression falls. "But she's gone now..."
Everybody's silent for a second after he says that, as if remembering her, missing her— Mike's heart aches all over again, reliving the moment she disappeared— until Dustin chimes in: "Her name's Eleven."
"Like the number?" Will asks, and his tone is so bewildered that it makes them all chuckle, immediately breaking the somber mood.
"Well, we call her 'El' for short," Lucas clarifies, and then a short debate emerges about whether Eleven is more like Yoda than like a wizard, and then they all seem to remember at the exact same moment that "Dude! We all have superpowers now!"
"For real?" Will asks, understandably skeptical. They don't blame him— he's missed a lot.
"Yeah!" Dustin eagerly launches into an explanation. "Lucas can fly, and I can manipulate time, and we think Mike can copy other people's powers, though I keep telling him that's probably cheating..."
"It's not cheating," Lucas intervenes, "power mimicry is a legit superpower—"
"Oh, you found a name for it now?" Dustin throws back.
"I've always known that's what it's called—"
"Actually," Mike interrupts before the whole thing can turn into one of Dustin and Lucas's infamous arguments about the science of comic books, "I think Will may have a superpower, too." The remark is predictably met with a barrage of "Whats?" "Huhs?" and "Are you serious?" from his friends, so he elaborates. "Remember that drawing you did that I asked you about the night you disappeared?" Will nods. "That was El."
"I drew Eleven without ever having met her?" Will asks, sounding surprised.
"Wait, you knew Eleven before we even met her?" Lucas asks with a scoff, shoving at Mike's shoulder as if affronted. Mike is suddenly glad he never mentioned the whole dreaming-about-Eleven thing; he hadn't yet figured that one out, and he had no idea how he could ever explain it.
"Oh, man," Dustin starts, his mouth drawing into a shit-eating grin. "That explains so much," he declares with a loud snort.
Mike hisses at him to shut up, but that only makes Will more curious. "Why? What is it?"
"Oh, nothing," Dustin replies in a tone that suggests it is anything but. And then he starts singing. "Just, you know, Mike and Eleven, sittin' in a tree..."
"Shut up!" Mike says and lunges at Dustin to try and cover his mouth as Lucas and Will laugh. Dustin tries to dodge him, still singing the song ("...then comes baby in a floating carriage..."), and it all eventually devolves into a mock wrestling match.
"Hey, hey!" Jonathan calls out to them from behind. "You can't be roughhousing in here, this is a hospital!" He shakes his head as he taps the boys' shoulders to get them to stop. His mother had just left the room to grab something to eat and it was up to him to keep order. "And what's this about Will having superpowers, too?"
The trio launches into a convoluted explanation of everything that's happened in the past few days (starting with the flipped-over van, because of course) and Jonathan stands back and lets them. They are noisy and overexcited and they keep tripping over each other trying to out-cool their reveals.
But in the back of Mike's mind, future!Dustin's words still resonate: Save the lost child, save the world. Was Will the lost child? Did they save the world? It feels like they did, but he can't be sure. El is the one who's lost now— just lost, not dead, he has to believe that— and he doesn't know what that means for the prophecy.
He knows he only knew El for a week, but already his world feels wrong without her in it. And although having Will back is great news, he can't help but think that they failed— they failed the prophecy, they failed her. It's something he can't stop thinking about, and something he will think about repeatedly over the year to come.
He doesn't mention this to his friends, not wanting to bring them down. Friendship is a healing balm, and at least if they focus on the more exciting aspects of the past week, they don't have to think about the sadder parts just now.
But the next day, when they're all back home and back to normal after having dealt with federal agents the entire night and the entire morning, Mike allows himself to think about it. After dinner, he excuses himself and sneaks down to the basement, where he painstakingly rebuilds El's blanket fort until it looks like it's always been there, like she's always been there. Except she's not.
With a sigh he grabs his Supercomm and crawls in, legs crossed Indian-style as he brings the device up to his lips.
"El? Can you hear me? It's me, Mike. It's... it's been one day since you disappeared, but I know... I know you must be out there somewhere. Are you? If you're listening, please let me know. Give me a sign. Tell me how I can find you..."
.
.
Notes: I think I managed to traumatize my poor bb Mike even more than he originally was in the show. Um. Oops?
I do plan on doing season two as well, but I have no idea when that's going to happen. I'm about to go on vacation literally tomorrow, and on top of that things are happening in my real life— good things, to be sure, but time-consuming things nonetheless— so I don't know when I'll have time to rewatch season two, let alone write another 24K-word monster anytime soon. Stay tuned to my Tumblr at girls-are-weird; if I start writing it, I'm likely to post snippets of it over there. I might go back to the Quiet Moments series before I get to it, though.
In the meantime, feel free to speculate on the as-yet-unexplained parts of this in the comments! *crickets* Yeahhh, I know the fandom's kinda dead right now, and the show being on hiatus until next summer seems almost unbearable, but I'd love to hear what you guys think about this and what you think you'll see once I get to writing season two. So don't be shy! I don't bite, I promise. :)