-8-

Eleven didn't really have much of a plan for when she walked into the Party's HQ, but she would have preferred something a bit more discreet, especially when the inevitable occurred. She would have preferred to find another way in, but she wanted to just get in, and then get out, and truthfully she didn't have the patience to find a backdoor or a ventilation shaft, or something like that.

She merely just walked in through the front door, ignoring the guards.

"Stop!" One of them called.

"Get out of here, kid!"

"Why was she let in?" Someone wondered.

Eleven stopped and turned, glaring at them intently. "Mouth breathers," she said, to their surprise before it transformed into anger.

"What did you call us?" One demanded.

She wasn't surprised; so many people were so predictable. Insult them and they became annoyed.

Eleven narrowed her eyes before she hurled them telekinetically through the lobby. The men screamed in shock as they were yanked off of their feet, before they groaned as their bodies smashed into each other, before being crushed against a wall. The audience watched in fear, and they ran away when Eleven waved a hand, blood trickling freely from one of her nostrils as she drove them away, but she stopped a cleaner that she saw.

Immobilising her and holding her against a wall, Eleven raised a hand and focused on the older woman's mind.

The woman screamed as she felt Eleven's presence in her head, but the girl ignored her screams and the way she thrashed around while Eleven looked into her mind for everything she knew about the HQ. In her mind, Eleven's knowledge of the place grew, but there was still so much she didn't know, with luck it would be enough.

As Eleven pulled out of the woman's mind, she sent some reassurances and some mental apologies to the woman, that she knew were hollow, but it was the best she could do, and she let the woman go. Leaving the unfortunate cleaning victim behind in a heap on the ground, Eleven walked through the building, drawing on the cleaner's knowledge of the place to help her reach the Party's meeting room.

-8-

"What the hell is going on?!" Adam Sutler, the leader of the Norsefire party and the High Chancellor of Great Britain, ground out furiously as he stood from his seat. He glared angrily around the room, expecting them to give him a straight answer for what was happening. The meeting of the inner circle had been disturbed by the alarms. Sadly for his already rapidly worsening mood, they didn't have anything for him, but what frustrated him the most was how none of the guards had evacuated them, and no reports were coming in.

The doors burst open before anyone could say anything and a guard ran in. "Chancellor, some….kid with weird powers is killing everyone!" He managed to get out, while he was left panting out of breath.

Sutler was foaming at the mouth with rage. "A child?" He spat in disbelief. His mind was now made up, he was sure this was some really poorly thought-out prank. When he found out who was behind it, he was going to make sure they wound up executed. "A child is attacking my building? I find that hard to believe!"

The guard was babbling with fear, both towards the man in front of him and what he had seen. "Sir, I would not have believed it myself if I hadn't seen it, but she is here. She's terrifying. She tore guns out of our hands, and crushed them without even moving! It's like magic!"

"There's no such thing as magic!" Lewis growled. "Now stop bleating and get back out there!"

Sutler shot him a look, partly grateful for his assertiveness and part suspicion. He wondered if this was some trick of Lewis's, but that made no sense, and besides Lewis's sense of humour would never make him try something this absurd.

Fear overrode the guard's 'respect' for the Party. He turned and glared at Lewis. "Oh yeah?!" He spat back. "You're the one who keeps shouting "ENGLAND PREVAILS!" Why don't you come out with me, and see what we're dealing with?!"

Suddenly the sounds of screaming outside became louder, and from the still open door Sutler and the others witnessed for themselves a gang of guards rushing past before an enormous piece of what looked like the ceiling was chucked at them, and they heard a squelching sound. One of the guards was still standing, begging.

"No, no, please," he screamed as his head and neck were twisted at an unnatural angle.

Sutler gasped, anger leaking out of him. Suddenly the guard's story didn't seem like a fairy tale. Speaking of the guard, he was staring at his colleague's corpse with horror.

Silence. And then they heard the tapping of small footsteps and a child appeared, a girl. Sutler stared at her in disbelief. She was tiny, looking…underdeveloped. She looked like she was on the way to becoming a teenager, but she appeared a bit too young for that. She wore a shirt, a skirt, and shoes. The strangest thing about the girl was her shaved head. A trail of blood was leaking from her left nostril. She was glaring at them intensely.

Her dark eyes were pools of intelligence.

Sutler decided to try to reason with her. One of his gifts and talents was the ability to manipulate somebody. If she was intelligent, as he could see she was, then maybe he could persuade her, use her.

"Hello, there," Sutler tried to smile off what he had seen the girl do, "I'm sure you're confused, and frightened, but why are you here? Why are you doing this? There's no call for violence."

"Oh, but there is, Mr Sutler," the girl spoke. Sutler frowned when he caught her accent. American? This was becoming increasingly bizarre by the minute. Why was an American girl barely older than….14, he had trouble estimating or guessing her age, here. "I'm here to stop this country from destroying itself. I was there, at Larkhill. I destroyed Larkhill. I looked into the minds of some of the people in Britain, and I'm disgusted by it. I grew up in a place like Larkhill; that pretty much tells me everything I need to know about you."

Sutler listened to this with growing disbelief and horror. News of what had happened at Larkhill was…hard to come by; so many people had died there, and an investigative team had been despatched, but they hadn't found anything yet.

"You were at Larkhill?" He whispered.

"Yes."

"What did you do?" Sutler growled.

The girl smiled. Sutler wished she wouldn't; with her intense glare, the smile only made her elfin good looks extremely unsettling. "I unleashed monsters on the monsters," she said simply.

"I don't know what you saw at the camp, but I assure you-," Sutler began.

"I was raised in a similar place to Larkhill; do you really think you can dismiss all of their crimes and everything they did because of your sick beliefs?" The girl snapped, glaring at him angrily.

That was enough for Lewis. He had been trying to use the girl's distraction to sneak up behind her. In his hand was a heavy-looking fire extinguisher. Sutler said nothing, gave no hint that he knew about what Lewis was doing.

But they had all made a mistake. Eleven had been watching all of the Party members, and she had been standing in such a way that she had them all in her line of sight; she had raped the minds of several people in this building and she knew only too well about how devious and treacherous these men were. She had no intention of playing games with them, not when the chances she could return to Mike and the others were so strong.

Lewis barely had time to get close, before he was frozen and then he started choking. Fresh blood trickled down from their nostrils as Eleven held out her hands slowly in a gripping gesture.

As she choked them, Eleven looked around the room before she slipped one of her hands into a pocket, and drew out a radio she had stolen. Switching it on, she began mind-raping them all, and she also focused her attention on the rip into the Upside Down.

Eleven suddenly gasped over the sounds of the screaming. She suddenly saw the man from Larkhill, the one she'd met in the corridor, dressed in a black cloak and wearing a white mask set as a face. She saw him successfully fight off the Norsefire regime. Eleven was so shaken by the vision, she started to rethink her plan to just end the regime, here and now, and return to Hawkins, but as she thought about Hawkins once more, she suddenly saw sequences….

Herself being found by Hopper, who took her to a cabin, but he would keep her there for the best part of a year. While she would be safe, she would be isolated, and she would spend days completely alone. Hopper had a habit of working long hours, so she would be left alone, watching TV and learning from that, and eating junk food; after the sudden theft of knowledge, she didn't need it too much.

Hopper teaching her the basics of the English language; writing, reading, etc.

Eleven's heart ached as she witnessed Mike's sadness she was gone, while the others believed she was dead.

Periodic arguments with Hopper, sometimes they had shouting matches as Hopper began showing signs of going back on a promise made to her, about being allowed to go back into the world; she saw how desperate she would become.

Discovering a hidden box containing information about her mother - her mother! - and going to visit her, and meeting her biological aunt, Becky, and her mother, who had been tortured by Brenner. Eleven's eyes watered as she witnessed the vision of her mother rampaging through the lab with a gun, only to find two girls in the upper Rainbow room, only to be taken away.

One of the girls, the one of Indian descent, would go on to escape the Lab and Eleven watched as she grew into a vigilante, who would hunt down anyone who would hurt her, and others like her. Outcasts. Eleven watched as a version of herself met this girl, Kali, and for a time they had a strong bond, but it soured when Kali forced her to kill a man who had two young children.

The sequence went on and on until the events of the Starcourt mall occurred and Eleven lost her powers for a year. She was bullied by a blonde girl called Angela and arrested, during a time when there was doubt between herself and Mike…only to be saved by Dr Sam Owens, who persuaded her to help them fight a new evil.

Eleven gasped in horror when she saw she would get her powers back….with the help of Papa. He was still alive.

-8-

Sutler panted in agony. His head felt like it was splitting in half; he had seen images of his life flashing before him, and he had been horrified by the girl's power. And scared, so he was understandably surprised when he found himself and the rest of the Party members still alive.

But the girl was gone.

She had vanished.

-8-

It took Eleven longer than she would have wanted to just return to the alley where the rip in the Upside Down was. As she stepped in, she didn't relax until she had closed the Gate, her mind noisy with a desire to close the rip completely. Unlike Hawkins, the Upside Down's presence in this version of London was minimal, so there wasn't a full-on Demogorgon infestation.

With her mind, she was able to find a safe route back to Hawkins.

-8-

Mike Wheeler sighed with relief as he came back to his house. School had been hard, what with Will's return - Mike bit his tongue when Troy harassed him and everyone else mocked him, calling him a zombie, or something like that and once more he cursed the Lab for faking Will's death in such a callous manner because of their own mistakes - so he was glad to be home.

"Mum? Dad?" He called.

Things had been hard on him and Nancy after the Bad men, or the agents of the government came to the house, and lied to his parents about El, describing her as a deranged Russian spy. The idea was so laughably insane and absurd, that Mike could not understand nor work out what they were thinking by coming up with it. But what surprised him the most was how his own parents believed it, and a part of him wished he had gotten his parents, or his mother, in the on the whole thing.

He and Nancy had been walking on eggshells for the past month now, and Mike was becoming tired of it. He and his friends tried to return to normal, but it was impossible now they knew about what the Lab was really doing, and their meeting with Eleven had changed everything to say nothing of what they'd seen the Upside Down do.

"Mike?" Mike's heart leapt to his throat when he heard the familiar soft voice, and then she appeared, showing this was not a dream.

"El?" He breathed, gazing at her. She hadn't changed that much; she had the same shaved head, the same malnourished appearance, but she was dressed differently. "Where have you been?"

El smiled, and she took him back to the basement - for a moment he wished they could just hang around in the sitting room, but since there was a chance they were being watched, it was not a good move.

"Where were you?" Mike saw something was truly different about this incredible girl, who was his first kiss. She had been occupying his thoughts for a long time.

"I think I saw a possible future, where Britain became a fascist state," El said.

Okay, she really had changed. For the next hour, Mike sat and listened as El regaled him with her adventures in the world she had seen; he was horrified when she told him about the conditions in Larkhill, and how she escaped to attack the fascist's party before she escaped. He was a little surprised when she told him she had seen the future, but she wouldn't say what it held, much to his frustration. But El was firm. She wasn't going to talk.

He was sad when she told him she was leaving Hawkins, but when she told him about the box inside Hopper's cabin which had the details of her mother's address, he understood her reasoning.

"I'll be back, Mike," El said at last. "I won't be gone for long."

"I know, but I wish you could stay," Mike looked down at his hands. "I feel like I've broken my promise."

"I don't understand."

"Remember, at the school when I said you could stay here?" Mike countered.

El looked down. "You didn't. Mike, I knew there was a chance they would try and take me again. It wasn't your fault. I stopped the Demogorgon…for you. I didn't want you hurt because of my mistake. I didn't want you to see me as the monster."

"El, you're not a monster!" Mike argued. He was annoyed, and upset, she would see himself as one. "To me, you're incredible. And even if you didn't stop Sutler, the fact you attacked him will likely send ripples through whatever resistance there is in that world."

El was relieved he didn't see her as a monster. "Thank you. I will be back, and I will contact you from the void. Just let me know when there are signs of the Upside Down coming back."

Mike shuddered. She had given hints that something was still not right with Will; that fit since he had to visit the lab, per the agreement Hop and Joyce had made.

"Believe me, I will," Mike promised, and this time it was a promise he was determined to hold up to.

Eleven leaned forward and they kissed. "I'll be there, in the void."

"I'll call every night," Mike promised, sealing it with another kiss.

El smiled into his lips.

"Why are you going? I mean, like, you've told me about your mother, why are you going?" Mike persisted.

"The lab is still running, Mike, and I can't stay here. I can't put you all in danger. And besides…I have a sister."

"What?" Mike whispered.

"An adoptive sister. Her name is Kali. She was at the Lab, but I don't know why she left me there, but I want to know. She's tried to make a normal life for herself, but it didn't work. Now she's a vigilante, she goes after people who have harmed her and others like her."

Mike blinked in surprise. "You mean she kills people?" He asked in disbelief, surprised that El would just go to someone like that.

"Yes," El nodded. "But only those who deserve it. I saw the way those people were treated at Larkhill. The people who hurt them, they were worse than the bad men in the lab. I don't like what Kali's doing, but I understand it. If I stay here, I will just be forced to hide, and I don't want that. I want to visit my mother. And if I stay with Kali, the Lab will not catch me again."

-8-

Hopper knew something was wrong as he approached his cabin. Slowly, his gun out, he walked inside. To his shock, the boxes he had hidden here were out and open. He was the only one who knew where they were, so he was surprised to see them there. But he was worried; for a moment he wondered if the Lab had found them, but if they had then why were they just…left here?

Just before he was about to see what was touched, Hopper spotted a piece of paper stuck to a wall. Curious, he walked over to it and read.

"I will be back soon. Thanks for my mother's address - El."

Hopper gasped.

El was here?

Quickly he ran out, and he began a search, but since it was dark he gave up quickly - there were shadows everywhere, and El could be hiding in one. He had been searching for the girl since school for weeks now, and the weather was getting cold. A part of him was tempted to go out to Becky Ives's place and get her back, but he decided that was a bad move. The Lab wouldn't be watching the Ives' place, and besides they didn't know El had come out of the Upside Down.

He had to face facts, El deserved to know her family. Sighing he went back to his cabin. Just as he was about to walk back inside, he stopped and turned around.

"Be careful, Eleven," he whispered.

The End.