-8-

Mike stepped forward, his eyes wide with surprise as he took in the girl he'd found in the woods, the girl who'd saved him from James and Troy, and who he'd thought had died, and thought he'd imagined seeing in the window after his parents' stupidly believed the government agent's senseless lies about how she was a dangerous Russian spy.

Like him, she'd gone through a growth spurt, and without the buzzcut, her hair was much longer even if he was curious about her new look. Mike thought it actually suited her, but he was still curious.

He...he wanted to know how she'd been.

He wanted to know what she'd been doing.

How long she'd been inside the Upside Down before she found a way out, what happened then, and why she hadn't contacted him or the others.

What about her new look, how had she gotten it?

How was she doing now?

"El," he said, completely oblivious to the looks they were getting, from his parents, from his schoolmates, and from the thing in Will.

"Mike," El whispered, and they embraced tightly before they pulled away.

"I've missed you. I thought about you every day for..."

"353 days," El smiled at him sheepishly when he stared at her in surprise. "I heard. I visited you every single night, in the Void. I saw you."

Mike stared at her in disbelief. "Then…why didn't you tell me you were there? You must have known how much I missed you?"

El bit her lip, but fortunately, Hop spoke up, "Because I didn't let her."

Mike swung around in shock and betrayal. "What?" He needed a moment to think about what the Police chief had just told him. "You knew she'd escaped the Upside Down all the time, and you didn't say?"

Hopper sighed and ran a tired hand through his head. He knew he'd made a mistake, not telling the Party about El for a whole year, especially since he knew they could be trusted…but with the Lab so close and even if Owens wasn't as bad as Brenner, he still didn't trust the man….

Oh god, he didn't have any excuse.

But he was man enough not to admit it.

"I was scared," Hopper admitted quietly, his gaze moving from El to Mike, not ashamed at having to bare his soul for all to see, "I had seen what Brenner and the Lab had done to Terri Ives; they'd fried her brain, Mike," Hopper paused for a second when El gasped at the name, only for the girl to look down and his heart broke at her expression and he had a good idea where she'd gone now, "then there's all of those experiments he did to all of those kids who were kidnapped, abused, and what happened last year when that monster tore its way through Hawkins. I didn't want you to go through all of that again, kid. I should have told you, but I didn't want to see your face and know how much your mother has suffered because of those bastards. It did not happen because of you, El. She loved you. She loved you so much she was prepared to take whatever was thrown her own way. I should have told you, but I was a coward and I was scared of how you would react. That's the truth."

Hopper had not looked away from El in all the time he'd been speaking, and he could see the girl's usual calm demeanour was close to breaking; tears were rolling down her cheeks, and judging from the way she was biting down on her lip, she was trying not to break down into tears. It broke his heart to see it.

"I was also scared about what the Lab would do to Mike, to Nancy, to Will, to Joyce, Dustin, and Lucas, and everyone else involved. For fuck's sake, they'd lied and gave us a fake corpse of Will, and they'd lied about Barb and were responsible for the death of an innocent man who'd only tried to help you; they wouldn't have batted an eyelash at the thought of silencing all of us," Hopper went on.

"Barb…?"

Hopper flinched, and he turned slowly and found Barbara Holland's parents suddenly there.

"What happened to Barb? The truth?!" Mrs Holland demanded.

Nancy had lived with the guilt of what had happened to her best friend for over a year. More than once, she had wanted to confess to what happened, but with the Lab's legal team looping puppet strings around her and everyone else involved in the massive horror movie last year, she'd had to bite her tongue.

Did it matter now?

No.

"Last year, Barb was snatched into the Upside Down," she said, "where she was killed by the Demogorgon, this….this monster; we don't really have a good name for the monster that came out of the Upside Down, so don't ask."

"Wait, you've known this whole time?" Mr Holland shouted.

Nancy cringed. "We had no choice. Nobody would have believed us. We had no proof and the Lab had made sure if we did talk, they would kill us."

"The Lab killed Benny just because he took El in," Hopper said. "She'd only just escaped from the Lab and she was starving. Benny gave her a shirt but he was killed shortly afterwards and she had to escape again."

Eleven lowered her gaze.

In her life, she had counted on a handful of kind people, and while their time was brief, Benny was one of the nicest people she had ever met. Seeing him be killed so cruelly still haunted her with guilt; in her mind, if she hadn't gone near him, he would still be here, he would still be alive.

But no.

"And then we met her in the woods while we were looking for Will, and they came after us in vans," Lucas finished before he gazed pointedly at the Hollands. "What makes you think they wouldn't have arranged for something to happen to us? To you, if you raised a stink? Believe me, Mr and Mrs Holland, we wanted to talk and yell to the skies what happened last year but we couldn't."

Karen Wheeler's mind was spinning with the influx of information they were getting. "Look, I'm really confused right now," she shouted, startling her kids and upsetting an already hurt and upset Holly, who whimpered in her arms, "but can somebody explain please what the hell is going on!" Karen turned to El, who stared back at her nervously. "Who are you? What does Eleven mean, and why are you called that?"

Joyce was about to step forwards, but El took off her wrist band she'd gotten from Kali's gang, and showed them.

Karen and the Hollands, and just about everyone else saw the black tattoo printed on her wrist.

011.

Karen recoiled, shocked that this young girl had a tattoo like this and she was given a number instead of a name. Things began ticking off in her mind; she had heard this girl was a dangerous Russian spy, cunningly disguised as a little girl. But then the thing in Will said she'd had a shaved head, now Karen had heard of Nazi concentration camps, where Jewish prisoners received numbers tattooed into their arms and their heads shaved.

W-why would the USA do the same thing, to children?

It was sick.

"My real name is Jane Ives, but I've only just learnt about my real name; for my whole life, I went by Eleven," Eleven said quietly, but something in her quiet tone put the fear of god into everyone as it trembled with pain. "Terri Ives was my mother; both of my parents took part in an experiment for Dr Brenner, who was the Head of the Lab here in Hawkins. When I was born, my mother had enough time to hear me cry, but she was later told I was dead. She struggled for years to regain custody of me, but she didn't. One day she took a gun and stormed the Lab, and she killed someone. She found me playing with another girl, but she barely had a chance to say my name before they took her, and they destroyed her brain; all that's left of my mother is a shell, but there's still a spark of her left."

"I stayed in the Lab and they experimented on me to make me develop my powers, while my mama suffered. I had…powers," El turned to Mike for help, and he reluctantly obliged since he wasn't sure what he could say.

"She can move things with her mind, and she can also read minds," he said.

"She used her powers to find Will," Joyce interrupted.

Several people scoffed. "Yeah, right-!"

"Hold on," Troy stormed up to the door, stopping when El turned her calm gaze on him, and he shivered a little as he saw a flicker of recognition in her eyes, which then narrowed dangerously. "You're the girl who broke my arm-!" Suddenly Troy screamed in panic as Eleven lifted her hand.

People screamed, gasped, or cowered at the sight. But Eleven was not bothered.

Eleven had been tempted to break Troy's arm again, to make him see threatening her and her friends was not a wise move. But this would do, and besides she needed everyone to see she meant them no harm.

She lifted him up in the air, not too high but high enough to prove to everyone in the room she had powers.

"You threatened my friends," she told him over the screams, "you threatened Dustin with a knife, while you tried to make Mike jump off a cliff to his death. You should be grateful; I've killed people by destroying their brains."

Troy stared back at her with fear.

So did many others.

"El," Hopper said slowly.

El turned to him for a second, her gaze inscrutable. But then she turned back to face Troy.

Pointedly she lowered him down.

"I'm not going to hurt you, but stay away from me, and from my friends. You're not worth the bother," Eleven said blandly as if Troy was nothing more than an annoying bug. "I am not frightened of you. I have lived my whole life in a lab, poked and prodded every day. I saw from my mother's memories how her brain was fried. Do you really think I am going to be frightened of a boy with a knife when I can snap you in half with only a thought?"

Troy slowly backed away.

To the room at large, Eleven pointed at the Demogorgon she had killed only now. "I am here to help you. I can stop this. But please, don't be frightened of me; I don't mean any of you harm, and I can help in ways you can't imagine."

But Mr Holland was not happy. "If you can help, why didn't you help Barb?" He asked, shaking but nobody except Eleven could tell what the emotions were.

Eleven stared back at the Hollands with such open, genuine sympathy that it hurt. "I am so sorry, Barb's parents," she said, glancing at Nancy hesitantly as she didn't really know how to address them. "But she was already dead; if I could have saved her then I would have done. I was only able to find Will and help get him out of the Upside Down because his mind was different from your daughter's."

"How was it different?"

Eleven turned to Mike, unsure of how to respond.

Mike just shrugged. "Because Will loves fantasy? Sci-fi movies? Maybe it had something to do with his mind."

Eleven had been feeling the eyes of someone watching her, and she turned and she shivered uncomfortably at the look she was getting from the possessed Will Byers.

She walked slowly towards him.

"You should not have come back, Eleven," the thing in Will said.

Eleven stopped. "Why are you doing this? What are you anyway?" She asked, curious despite herself.

She had always known there was something about the Upside Down, as if there was something in that other world, watching her. Even in the Void when she had surfed into the thoughts of the Demogorgon that burst out into this world, she had felt something different about the experience than on other occasions, a feeling like she was being watched.

"We are what you would call the Upside Down," the creature said smugly, making Will grin proudly (Eleven was wondering how she could get this thing out of him, and she wondered if he had been taken over from the moment he was inside the Upside Down which would explain why he had survived for so long before they got him out, which would explain Barb's immediate death), "We control everything."

"It's a Hive mind, El, called the Mind-Flayer. It controls everything in the Upside Down, and it's now in Will," Lucas said as quickly and as briefly as he could.

"A hive?" Eleven had seen more than a few nature documentaries in Hopper's cabin over the year to know what a hive was and she had read through the dictionary. "Like a beehive?"

"It's more complicated than that, El," Dustin said patiently, "the Mind-Flayer, the Demogorgons and the Demodogs are like one big creature."

Eleven nodded, suddenly understanding or at least she hoped she did. "So that's how you sent those Demogorgons-."

"Demodogs," Dustin interrupted.

"Here," Eleven finished without paying any heed to Dustins' interruption. What did it matter? "But why?"

Will's smile was terrifying. "For you, we've been doing this all for you, Eleven. Did you really think the One had forgotten you?"

"What?" The look of shock on Eleven's face made it clear to everyone she hadn't expected this. Hearing that shook Eleven more than she imagined. "Forgotten? What do you mean?" Eleven conjured a picture of herself immersed in the tank suit, water surrounding her while she was telepathically reaching for the Demogorgon…

She remembered how sudden those new experiments were; Papa's experiments followed a routine, but those ones were considerably different, and he was much more driven than ever before.

Had…had her prodding that Demogorgon attracted every other unpleasant monster in the Upside Down, and they were coming for her? Was that it?

But she didn't know and couldn't remember what triggered them off.

Had she…done something?

She had confessed to Mike last year she was a monster, that she opened the gate. But had she done something else, something Papa had taken advantage of?

"The One exists because of you, don't you remember?" The possessed Will smiled wider in mocking joy at her shock and growing fear that was becoming more and more visible. "You don't, do you?" Mockingly the Mind-Flayer sang almost childishly. "Eleven doesn't know, Eleven doesn't know, doesn't know!"

Somehow, that childish mockery broke through Eleven's self-control.

"STOP IT!" Eleven shrieked, blood trickling down her nostril again as the walls buckled under the strain of her telekinetic tantrum, making everyone recoil in terror at the visible rage she was exhibiting. But she didn't care; maybe she was a B-R-A-T like Hopper had said, but she was becoming agitated as she racked her brain trying to work out what the Mind-Flayer was telling her. "Who is this One? Why are you doing this? What does he want? What's the point of these deaths, this attack? Tell me!"

"The One wants to remake this world, remove the life here, and make the world into a purer place," the Mind Flayer possessed Will Byer's replied, his response chilling everyone.

"But the world is beautiful already," Eleven argued weakly, shaken by the implications of what she'd heard, "there's wildflowers, trees, birds, lakes…why destroy all of that?" She asked desperately.

"Because it's wrong," the Mind-Flayer said.

When she heard that, Eleven knew any hopes she had to stop this peacefully had just gone up in flames. Gently she reached out telepathically.

Will gasped as he suddenly collapsed, unconscious - or he would have done if Eleven wasn't levitating him gently.

"Will!" Joyce cried, rushing to her son and holding him gently. She turned to Eleven. "What did you just do?"

"I made him go to sleep," El said simply, "with a bit of luck we can keep him like that until we can find some way of getting the Mind-Flayer out of his mind."

Joyce nodded acceptingly, she had been a bit annoyed by Eleven's sudden attack on her son, but she knew the girl was right.

Eleven turned to the crowd, seeing the looks on their faces. So many of them were looking at her with fear, others uncertainly, as they had seen her use her powers.

"So….," she bit her lip, wondering how she could fill the silence, but her social awkwardness was a curse, "we have some time before we need to make a plan to stop all of this, so how about we answer some of your questions?"

Eleven hoped they didn't keep her too long, but she needed everyone to know what was going on, and how serious it was. She had no doubt the gate was in the lab, a place she feared and dreaded so much, but she needed to work with everyone here.

If not, then the One would destroy everything.