Papa's Journals
Hawkins, IN
June 9, 1986
The next morning, Hopper had found them still together in the living room, laying on their sides now, Mike still wrapped protectively around her. Hopper had realized upon waking that once again, with Mike there, her nightmares seemed to have stayed away for the night. He had woken them while he stacked the files back into their boxes, organizing as he went so they could be found again as needed.
Over breakfast, Hopper and Mike once again joined forces in expressing their concern over everything she had read, and begged her not to read the journals without one of them being there. While she was a little resentful that they acted like she couldn't handle the gory details alone, she knew their hearts were in the right place and for that she was grateful. She knew they sometimes forgot she had actually lived much of what was written in those countless pages.
At Hopper's insistence, she had gone back to bed to rest, once more having little energy to fight him. Mike returned home and let himself in through the basement. When he walked upstairs, his parents greeted him and asked if he had slept down there all night again; they hadn't even noticed he never came home. He lied and said yes, if nothing else than to avoid having to talk to them further about it.
At school on Monday, Eleven was back to normal, more or less. Physically she was recovered from the ordeal, and mentally, she had processed enough of what she saw that it didn't cause her to break down. That week was their last of school before the start of Summer break, so there was plenty to do and enough distractions that she managed to not go looking for the journals.
That weekend, Hopper took Mike and Eleven out fishing. It had been a tradition with his own father growing up, as a way to kick off summer vacation. Not long after moving back from the cabin, Hopper had decided that he needed a personal car in addition to the department Blazer, now that his life was not 100% devoted to being a cop. He knew Jane didn't need the town constantly reminded she was the Chief's daughter, and on trips out of town, it was more appropriate taking his own car. Eleven wasn't particularly interested in the fishing itself, but it meant she got to sit snuggled up to Mike in the backseat of the car for several hours on the drive without him giving them exasperated looks all the time.
It was only once Monday rolled around that her resolve to ignore the journals started to fall apart. She was home alone. Mike wasn't allowed to be over without Hopper there, and he was at work. She sat in her room and read a book. She told herself she wasn't going to think about the journals. She walked into the kitchen to get a snack. She refused to look at the boxes stacked in the corner of the living room on her way through. She went back to her room and worked on a puzzle Mike had given her; a basket of kittens. She told herself she was doing good, not thinking about the journals. She walked out to the kitchen to fix lunch. Sitting at the kitchen table she flipped through a fashion magazine Nancy had given her. Eleven didn't care much about the articles, but some of the pages were ads for perfumes, and those smelled pretty. She was proud of herself, doing such a good job not thinking about the journals. She walked back to her room again.
Eleven settled on her bed and separated the journals into two neat stacks; one for her's, one for Twelve's. She knew she shouldn't look - these were Papa's words and nothing he had to say could be good - but still she started reading. She alternated between reading her own, and her sister's, in an effort to keep roughly in sync between the two. For the first year, the pages were roughly duplicates of one another, although Papa had taken the time to write separate entries in both. The passages detailed Papa's observations, tests that were administered to look for specific special gifts, things like that. Mostly Papa was waiting for the girls to give him some sign of abilities. The biggest surprise, though she realized it it shouldn't come as much of a shock, was that Papa had decided as soon as they were born to raise the girls entirely separate from one another. His theory was that once the girls had displayed some degree of powers, the separation would allow him to tailor an environment for each that would nurture their gifts.
Just before the girls turned one, Papa got the birthday present he had been waiting for. On a day when Twelve was being particularly disagreeable, the lab caregivers had been at their wits end trying to figure out what would calm her down. Finally, as she was offered a bottle of formula once more, Twelve had reached out one chubby little arm and from across the room, pulled over her favorite stuffed rabbit. Immediately, she settled down, while the caregivers in the room went into a panic. They all had some idea about the kinds of things the children might do someday, but to actually see it happen before their eyes was something entirely different. Papa, according to his writings, was overjoyed.
Right away, in her own room, Eleven was repeatedly given toys to determine her favorites, only to have them taken away and placed on the far side of the room to see if she could get them back. Eleven, of course, had no idea what it was they wanted her to do, so she had just watched in quiet curiosity as they shoved toy after toy into her tiny hands and then took them away again. While he was disappointed, Papa wasn't entirely surprised; this first display had been an involuntary reaction rather than deliberate act. It took Twelve almost a year before she repeated the action.
She had made it through their second birthday when Eleven realized that Hopper would be home soon. Guiltily, she filed the journals back into their proper spots and replaced the lid on the box. Ever observant, Hopper knew as soon as he got home that she had gone into the boxes. It was a small detail, but the swirled pattern on the lid matched up with the pattern on the sides of the box only when it was closed in one direction; she had put the lid on the other way around when she closed it back up. He wasn't sure if was going to be a problem or not, but he decided to say nothing about it. Over dinner, she seemed her usual, cheery self, and she was never one to hide what she was feeling; hiding her feelings was like lying, and everyone knew her thoughts on that.
Hopper listened closer than usual as Eleven had her nightly chat with Mike that evening. Though he could only hear half of the conversation, he was pleased that nothing seemed to come up regarding journals or the lab, or anything like that. He hoped that perhaps he had been wrong about her looking at the journals after all as he sat in the living room with the newspaper.
The next day was more of the same. Eleven tried her very hardest to leave the journals alone. She even made it back to her room after lunch without grabbing them. An hour later, though, she lost the fight again and dug once more into her past. After age two, the girls began to differ greatly in their abilities. Twelve had shown strong, deliberate abilities to move things around with her thoughts. She was pulling heavier and heavier objects around, or throwing them away from herself. By four she was well on her way to becoming a dangerous weapon. Papa had found that her progress grew rapidly under his constant praise; she thrived on trying to make him happy and proud. To that end, he moved her out of her room near the caretakers and into a little room on the top floor of the lab, right next to his own.
Eleven, on the other hand, wasn't showing the same levels of promise as her sister. She could perform basic, small movements on objects; she could reach out with her thoughts and roll a pencil or slide a glass of water across the table. But her strength was nowhere near that of Twelve. Papa had been considering sending her away like so many of the children who had failed to live up to his expectations. However, his option changed entirely a little before she turned four. It struck him one day that whenever he entered her room, she was already standing and looking expectantly at the door. After conferring with some of the caregivers, they confirmed that she did the same thing with them. He had a camera installed in the corner of her room to correspond to the one out in the hallway. Sure enough, as people would approach her room, she would stop what she was doing, rise to her feet and wait expectantly for whatever activity was to come.
"Remarkable," he had described it in the journal. It was with a bittersweet smile that she recalled all the times he had told her she was remarkable; always when she had revealed some new depth to her abilities, that he could further exploit.
He went on to describe the game he had created to test his theory about her powers. It was a game she could, in some distant part of her memory, recall. He would hand her a drawing of the section of the lab she lived in, and 5 photographs. Sometimes it was people she knew, sometimes lab workers she had never met.
"Find where they are hiding, Eleven," he would instruct her.
She would close her eyes and think, and somehow it would come to her where each person was. She would lay the pictures in the different rooms to indicate where those people were right then. According to Papa's notes, even before she turned four, she was already right more than 90% of the time. Even the times she thought she did bad because she couldn't find them, she was actually right.
"I can't find them Papa," she would tearfully tell him.
"Next time, you'll do better," he would say, cold and matter-of-factly.
All these years later, reading through his notes, she could remember how much it hurt to disappoint him. It turned out, most of the times she couldn't find someone, it was a picture he had slipped into the pile of a person nowhere near the lab. It was a test to see just how far her reach could go to find someone. The further she read, the more she realized her whole life had been a carefully orchestrated lie.
Onward she read, through age four. Through age five. Papa's special plans for both girls; how to get the best results. For Twelve, intense training and boundless loving attention from Papa. For Eleven, an isolated existence bordering on abandonment. The sad, frail girl who refused to look at the camera made more sense with every page she read. Around age eight, she just couldn't go any further. Not bothering to remove the folders from her bed she freed half of a blanket and pulled it around her body like a protective cocoon and laid her head on her pillow. She sniffled as the tears began to fall. They were not tears of anguish or deep sorrow. There was a general sadness behind them, but more than anything, they were the tears of being overwhelmed.
Mike had explained the term to her during one of their study sessions, getting her ready to start school, and it seemed to fit the situation now. "It's like, when you have so many different thoughts going through your head all at once. And they all feel super important at the same time. And you try to grab a thought and deal with it, but it slips away as you grab at another."
Somewhere among the tears and the overwhelmed and the sad, she drifted off to sleep.
"Jane, I'm home," Hopper called sometime later as he hung his hat on the hook by the door and removed his holster. He looked around in concern when she didn't answer.
Instinctively he looked at the boxes in the corner of the room, but the lid was still in place where it had been that morning. He walked down the hall to her bedroom and pushed open the door.
"Shit," he swore, not in anger but in the confirmation of what he had known he was going to find.
There she was, still curled tight in a blanket ball, asleep but murmuring fitfully. Her cheeks were streaked raw where the tears had long since dried. All around her, spread open and spilling their horrible secrets, where Brenner's journals. He knew he should have taken the boxes to the station until they had decided how best to go through them. He should have explained to her better that living through the life detailed in those pages, and reading that sadistic son of a bitch's every thought and motivation behind them would be two vastly different experiences. He resigned himself to the fact that, now that she had started reading them, there would be nothing to do but finish them. He gathered the journals into a single pile and scooped them up.
"Jane." He leaned down and gently shook her shoulder, "Jane. Time to wake up Jane."
Her eyes fluttered open and darted around the room in a panic, trying to clear the fog and sort out where she was. She had been dreaming she was once more in her little room in the lab, and Papa had just come to take her down to the bath again. Her eyes landed on Hoppers face and she relaxed with relief.
"Daddy?" she asked. Her eyes slid down to the stack of journals held in his other arm and she shrank back in panic, quickly sitting up and pulling her knees to her chest. "I'm sorry. I know you said not to look at them without you. I tried not to look. I'm so sorry."
The apologies came pouring out faster than she could form them. Part of her brain was still back in the lab, remembering the terrible things Papa did when she was bad. Daddy would never do those things to her, she knew that, but in the moment it was hard to pull those thoughts out of the haze.
Startled at the panic, he quickly pulled her into a hug with his free arm. "Shhh," he soothed, "it's okay. I'm not mad. It's okay."
She looked at his face again and saw the truth in what he was saying. The rest of the fog cleared and fresh tears threatened to break loose once more.
"Come on. You need something to perk you back up and we'll figure out what to do about these," he said, indicating the stack of journals. He stood and held out an arm to her. She climbed into his arm, wrapped herself around his side and rested her head on his shoulder. It was one of those early childhood habits she had missed out on, but had instinctively picked up when they were living in the cabin. When she was upset, she liked to be carried. Hopper wasn't sure how many years his back could withstand it, but right then, he didn't mind one bit as he carried her and the journals down the hall toward the kitchen.
After a plate of Eggos and a mug of cocoa had worked their healing magic, he nodded at the stack of journals in the middle of the table.
"So how far did you get?" he asked, fighting to keep any tone of accusation out of his voice.
"Eight years," she admitted, feeling slightly ashamed for looking at them; partly because he had asked her not to, partly because he had been right that reading them alone was a bad idea.
"For both of you, or just one?"
"Both of us."
"That was pretty smart doing them together," he complimented, eliciting a half smile from her. He was impressed she had thought to try and process everything together rather than reading one set of journals and then going to back twelve years to start again.
"So here's what I think we need to do. You're not going to get any peace until you've finished these journals and I'm not going to get any peace if I am worrying about you sitting here by yourself reading them. So you're going to go put on your fluffiest pajamas and brush your teeth. You're going to grab your favorite blankets and a pillow and your bear, and you're going to build yourself a little nest on the couch. I'm going to get a stiff drink and a box of tissues." He paused, shaking his head at how ridiculous this was sounding, "and I am going to sit right there on the couch with you and read you the worst bedtime story ever."
At that, they broke down into a genuine fit of laughter at the absurdity of his suggestion. It was rare to get more than a giggle from her, so full on laughter in spite of everything that was happening reassured Hopper that his little girl was not broken by all of this; she was a survivor. After they had caught their breath, they went their separate ways to run through his checklist and then met back up on the couch to finish what she had started.
Despite missing out on the first two-thirds of the lives detailed on those old pages, Hopper started right where she remembered leaving off. She hated to admit it, but somehow, snuggled into her warm couch-nest and hearing Hopper's voice reading the details, made it all a little easier to hear. It helped even more that she could see his face reacting to the things he was reading. Seeing his face get red and angry let her know that the things that happened were not okay. Seeing him shed a tear, quickly wiped away, reassured her that she had someone who cared that all these things had happened to her. Several times he paused to re-read a passage to himself, side by side with corresponding notes in the other journal. Those were the times he would get the maddest, comparing the treatment of Eleven and Twelve, and he would angrily grab for his drink, only to remember he had finished it a year and half back.
Eventually, agonizingly, they came to the end. Twelve's final entry was dated November 4th, 1983. It was a routine note on her latest strength tests and how she had been able to mentally lift a car and float it from one end of the testing floor to the other, but that it had left her badly drained afterwards. Hopper couldn't help but chuckle at a thought that came to him then. Throughout Brenner's notes, he had always felt that Twelve had the stronger abilities in physical telekinesis. Little did he know that just days after penning this note, he would witness a neglected and abused Eleven toss a full-size van end-over-end and almost crush him with it. Eleven's final entry brought another satisfied smile to his face.
November 7, 1983
Experiment Eleven escaped the grounds of the lab last night during a containment incident. Additional measures are being prepared on her room for her return. As she can no longer be trusted, an exterior lock has been added to her door. An additional guard armed with tranquilizers will be stationed in her hallway, and accompany her on all excursions from her housing.
Recovery should be swift. The girl has never been outside of the lab, much less off grounds. She will be unprepared to cope with the outside world and will likely return of her own volition, without further incident.
Hopper couldn't help but marvel at just how wrong the wise Dr. Martin Brenner had been about a great many things. He had spent twelve years underestimating Jane at every step and she was living proof of how much he misjudged her. Hopper closed the final journals and set them back onto the coffee table. Looking over at Eleven, he was pleased to see the vaguest hint of smile even as she wiped once more at her eyes. She snaked a free hand out from her twist of blankets and grasped his hand.
"Thank you," she whispered, leaning her head back and closing her eyes.
He sat for a long time, just watching her sleep, eventually tucking her hand back in among the warm blankets. His attention fell once more on the pile of journals. It had been heart wrenching just getting through the final four years, but he knew that was only part of the story. After fixing a fresh drink, he settled into his recliner and opened the first two journals to their starting entries and began reading. It took until almost three in the morning, and two more drinks, but he finally reached the point where they had started, hours before. As he set down the journals once more, he had already decided that if Dr. Brenner was truly alive, still out there and trying to carry on his experiments, he had to be stopped once and for all.
To say Hopper was angry would have been an understatement; he was in a boiling rage. If the lab hadn't already been closed, he was quite certain he would have driven over right then and burned the entire place to the ground. He also felt a fresh mountain of guilt weighing him down as he turned to look at her once more, her bear hugged tight to her chest. The last few years that she, and so many others, had been prisoners of the lab, he was the local Chief of Police. So many of the things that happened to her, happened in a place and time where he was responsible for the safety of everyone in the area, and he had unknowingly failed her. Perhaps worst of all was the guilt that, were it not for everything that had happened in the lab, she wouldn't be here with him now; wouldn't be his little girl. Everything she had endured had shaped his Jane into the strong, amazing young woman she had become, and that wasn't something he would trade for anything.
Not again; that was a guilt he kept locked away somewhere deep.