-- JOYCE --
The day passed in a whirlwind of discussion. Will's hospital room grew warm from afternoon sunlight through the windows, and bodies huddled together, each of them gravitating toward her son.
It seemed like years had passed since she last saw him safe and laughing with his friends.
Hardly longer than a week, but his shy smiles and determined expressioned loosened something painful in her chest.
She sat at his elbow and listened attentively as the boys alternated between DND terminology and her son's recounting of the dark world. In a distant sort of way, she was aware of how unbelievable it sounded from an outsider's perspective, but she remembered the heft of an axe in her hand - the meaty splitting of that breathy membrane.
Danny kept coming up - she'd only seen a flash of him through the hole before it closed. She'd caught a glimpse of a pale face, had heard him urging the two through.
Joyce didn't have enough information about him to make any judgements, but she trusted her son.
And Will said he was good - that Danny protected him, helped him survive for days between monsters she'd only ever imagined could come from imagination. (But Barb's wounds weren't anyone's imagination, and the living thing that her son had coughed up was real enough to make her stomach churn.
If that boy was alone again, of course he'd need saving.
On the same note, she could see the tension in Will's shoulders when it was his turn to talk. Could see the way he stopped himself at odd points, describing Danny. Subtle things that she might have brushed off as nervousness if not for the way it kept happening .
How'd Danny stop the monsters from coming into the apartment, if it had windows?
How'd he fight off the monsters?
Will mentioned he'd lost the gun, and didn't describe other weapons. He glossed over moments with a nervous glance in her direction.
"How old is Danny?" She asked.
Another hesitation, a quick consideration, then a hesitant response.
"He's a teenager? Maybe Johnathan's age."
Joyce nodded, and Johnathan seemed thoughtful.
Will, though… kept trying to change the subject away from detailing Danny's behaviors, a nervous smile on his lips. Would praise him endlessly, but when it came to how - that was too much, and he changed the subject to focus instead on weaknesses of the creatures and the dangers of the world.
How he had been able to communicate with her through the christmas lights.
The boys looked at her with open admiration at that, and she offered a small smile.
It was nice for her 'crackpot' behavior to be validated.
(anything to save her son.)
But that didn't stop her concern for his hedging.
Around lunchtime, Nancy left to visit Barb, and Hopper followed with an announcement that he needed to get back to work. His expression sharpened as he closed the door behind him.
Joyce listened to the latch gently snap into place and wondered where Mike was - it was unusual for him to not be here. Lucas offered her an overzealous explanation of bathrooms and 'Absolutely needing to go' that made her even more suspicious than she started.
Visiting hours slowly drew to an end, and the sun arced up across the sky, settling into a growing orange dusk.
They hadn't really decided on a plan, theorizing about portal holes in the woods, magnetic fields, even theorizing that Will's walkie talkie could reach out to call Danny, if his 'wizard powers' had stayed with him, now that he was back in the real world.
She wanted to protest.
Wanted to insist that they were children and didn't have to be involved. Wanted to lock them away and demand that they leave it up to the adults. She still might, in all honesty, but they kept dropping terribly imaginative bombs of information that roiled around in her head.
Could they detect a portal with magnets or electricity?
Would fire help fight them?
What about sunlight, if they could trap them until sunrise?
Lucas and Dustin left after giving Will some awkward hugs and a promise to connect first thing in the morning. Johnathan nervously volunteered to get the house ready for their return.
"Maybe put away all the lights." He muttered, and Will cracked a wry grin.
"I dunno," her youngest sighed, "It's kinda festive." He perked up. "Actually, if Danny is still at the house, I might be able to send him a message with the letters on the wall. I never tested if my electric thing goes both ways."
Joyce nodded.
"We can leave the lights up until he comes home." She agreed, and Will's smile was blinding.
"Then," Jonathan said, "I'll get you both a change of clothes."
"That would be lovely, thank you so much." She desperately needed a shower, but clean clothes would do nicely. Technically, since Will wasn't severely injured and just staying for observation, she couldn't legally stick around after dark. Thankfully, the nurses offered permission before she even asked, citing 'extenuating circumstances' and 'we all thought he'd died, of course you don't want to leave his side-'
Probably a good choice for them - she'd been ready to fight anyone who tried to kick her out.
Slowly, reluctantly, people trickled out of the room.
It seemed colder without them, but Joyce remained at her son's side.
Just as visiting hours ended, the door creaked open without a knock to herald it.
Mike and a girl she didn't recognize slipped into the room.
She was slight, wearing a blonde wig sitting slightly askew and a bubblegum pink dress. She held herself stiffly, examining Joyce and Will first, the medical equipment, then the rest of the room in darting glances. The two of them seemed harried.
"Hello." Joyce welcomed. If Mike wanted to nip in at the last minute, that was fine - better late than never!
"Sorry Mrs. Byers! Please don't tell." Mike's words stumbled out in a rush as he pushed the girl into the tiny bathroom connected to Will's room and closed the door behind them.
Hardly a moment after that confusing interaction, the main door swung open once more.
Joyce saw the dark suits, the grim faces, and felt her spine straighten.
She hardened her gaze, and she lifted her chin.
"Joyce Byers," One of them spoke - an address rather than a question.
Of course they knew exactly who she was. She expected them earlier, honestly.
"Gentlemen."
She stood up, took a step forward to meet them at the corner of Will's bed, rather than backed against a wall. Mike and his friend were quiet in the bathroom, and Will's had shrunk down in his blankets.
The men's suits were as stiff as their spines, with a gritty sort of presence that spoke more of dirty asphalt streets and smoggy cities than the rough-and-tumble messiness she knew from Hopper and the other small-town cops.
"We have some questions."
The one not dressed in a sharp suit reached out a hand to shake hers, mouth quirking in a facsimile of a smile. Silver glasses were perched on his face, clothes similar to a doctor without the hospital's logo or visible nametag. A dangerous ploy, in a hospital.
She glanced down at his hand, and folded her own in front of her.
"I'm sure you do."
The lines were drawn.
-- BARB --
A respirator crinkled stiff plastic, electric cycles pulling oxygen to pour smoothly, unrelentingly down the tubes into her lungs.
She could feel the strange fullness of air pressed behind her ribs, the pull of dry eyes and chapped lips stuck together.
She could feel someone's cold hands gripping her own limp fingers. Was aware of the thin pillow under her neck, and the comfortable numbness of her body drugged to oblivion.
It is that, perhaps, that lets the cold mist still churning between sips of oxygen to press against her mind so firmly. To wrap itself into every crack and crevice of her exhausted brain.
She is in the hospital, but she is also in a glass tube.
Floating weightless, numb, watching as a monster paced furiously around the thin pane of her protection.
Her prison.
His eyes are like green fire in the dim shadows, and they are both trapped in the amalgamation of rooms that make up her memory. His fingers are curled into fists. He circles, circles, pacing like a trapped tiger.
He ignores childish drawings pinned with magnets to pillars. Walks past mirrors and chairs and copies of that awful table and brushes past like they're made of metal instead of terror.
He slows, blazing emerald turning to the shelves along the wall that reveal themselves in a recoiling shiver of vines.
She offers the items in fear, in hope.
In the quiet desperation of a rat eating her newborns to survive.
Bits of chain and helmets from the men who were devoured. Cameras, Flashlights, bulky radios and weapons covered in blood and filth. A glove with two of the fingers bitten off.
He ignores the tokens of lives she'd taken, plucking carefully up an odd tube with green paneling. He holds it uncomfortably at first, like something from long ago, nearly forgotten. He twists it, and a cap pops easily off. He secures it back on, and his arms fall limply to his sides. The device sways, hanging by one loop from his finger, close to falling.
"You led me here." He says.
Barbara blinks past the foggy water, brows furrowing.
"You wanted me to see this - to see you." He says.
She tries to shake her head, but her neck is stiff and numb and she feels angry and powerless.
"Why, after all this time?"
She was afraid. Not Barbara, but- someone else whose cold skin Barb is shivering in.
"Why not months ago?! Years?! If you could have shown me this from the beginning, I could have started helping you back then!"
Barbara flinches when his fist flies toward the glass, turning at the last minute to slap his palm against it. She could see his eyes, pupils thin and furious lines cutting through shining green.
They are, strangely, shining with tears.
He pounds a fist against the glass. Steps back and clutches the strange cylinder to his stomach like it could protect him somehow.
"I don't even know how long I've been here. How long you've kept me trapped."
Barbara exhales, but the girl does not.
She is-
They are-
Still.
"Why?" he asks brokenly.
They don't answer.
She can feel the threads of storm creeping under the city, stretching long fingers back to the hospital where she is sleeping. Smoke digging tunnels through the earth like creeping roots.
Can feel the horror of her own wounds and forgien carcass she now inhabits in a kind of self-awareness that might not have been possible without the otherworldly thing - no, she's just a girl - that lingered in her head
.
She didn't react to her parents murmuring to her when she opened her eyes, blinking dully at the white wall and afternoon sun shining brightly across from her. Didn't react when Danny whispered his first demand in the darkness.
"Let me go."
Sleep was tempting, but the girl's fear echoed through their bond.
Why would she be scared?
She had power enough to ruin a body, to craft hungry monsters and storms and a world that devoured everything.
Why would she be scared?
Barb turned the idea over, considered through the haze of painkillers and the steady beep of machines. She could still feel the water against her skin, the tubes tubes that wiggling into her, devouring instead of healing. They resonated strangely with the warmer ones that flowed air into her stuttering lungs.
"You have to - I know you can hear me, you wouldn't bring me here accidentally."
Barb can see his sharp eyes in the darkness behind her eyelids with every slow blink. It crept up again in a slow tide, like sinking into dark water. Reality is strange. Too close.
Too meshed together with someone who keeps her still and silent, because she can't let him go, in the same way that she can't let herself go.
She wants to say with a throat that can't form words that she didn't bring him her, that she wasn't in control of the monsters or the rot or anything that made this place horrible.
They wanted out
They chased him down, drove him here, and watched with churning fury behind the glass.
They wanted out
They festered and frenzied and tried to burrow beyond her borders, enraged when something only let the smallest pieces of them escape.
They wanted out!
They tried to steal another girl to ride away, but the prison's recurving walls wouldn't allow that, and now there were two of them , sharing mottled water and sucking fear.
"Let me out." He asked again, but those are their demands.
They wanted out.
They wanted out.
They all wanted out, but she'd never escaped so how could they?
The first wet split of a peeling egg had the green-eyed boy backpedaling away from her prison. His fists lit up, and Barb couldn't look away from his venomous expression.
On the ceiling, a field of tightly clustered eggs shivered and started to bloom
They couldn't kill her, but he could .
And he didn't know the difference between them.
-- MIKE --
Mike had never been in a hospital bathroom before, and some childish part of him wished he could investigate the new place further.
The realistic side of him was thankful it was pitch black. A reminder to be quiet, to stay safe.
He could see the edges of his sneakers through the gap below the door. Could hear the steps and sounds of those men that El feared filing into Will's hospital room.
Their shadows passed like knives to cut flickers out of the wane light.
El's hand was clammy and warm in his, but her breath was much steadier.
He knew she was scared - she had to be, if what she said was true. If these were the bad men, who hurt her. Men from the lab, evil enough that she fled through the woods, barefoot, to find any semblance of safety.
And now nothing was between her and them but a flimsy wooden door that couldn't even lock from the inside.
He squeezed her hand, tried to be comforting. She squeezed back, but he couldn't tell her expression in the dark.
"I'm sure you do." Ms Byers said, and her voice was cool and steely. Mike swallowed, tried to shove down the lump in his throat. Will's mom had always been pretty cool. She let him bike over even when it was late. Let him stay the night often. His friend never had anything bad to say about her, that he could remember.
She let them flicker the lights, and stomp around to make a monster encounter feel more scary, but was always ready with warm blankets when it was time to chase away the darkness they'd conjured from their sessions. Battles might end, but stories lingered, replaying in your head in the darkness.
But , he thought, and let his shoulder brush against El's, real humans could also be scary.
You couldn't really go after a fed with a blanket, unless you wanted to get shot.
The men's words were muffled, lost in the quiet echoes of their own breath in the tiny room.
Mike twitched as he felt a hand slide over the back of his head, but held himself frozen to let it happen.
Like a dial being cranked free of static, the quiet voices on the other side of the door were suddenly crisp and loud in his ear.
Another power? Floating, and this-
Mike licked his lips, closed his eyes against the black, and listened to Ms. Byer's finish her sentence.
" -parasites, and he's been given medications to deal with them."
"And our doctors would be able to give a more thorough inspection. They know what it's like in there, what he experienced." A man spoke soothingly, but something about his voice - or maybe the way El's hand tightened on the back of his head - made his scalp prickle uncomfortably.
"How would they know?" Will asked.
There was a gap, like they were surprised he'd chimed in at all.
Some rustling.
"We've studied the world extensively-" one of them started, but WIll - timid, careful Will, who only spoke up in the safety of his friends, interrupted him.
"None of your guys ever made it." Will stated with certainty. "Danny was sad, but I remember what he said. That all of them who came in were eaten. So how would you people know about what the world was like?" There was a pause. "And how many did you send in to die?"
Mike's shock was hidden by the shadows, and he could feel the edges of El's curiosity leaking through whatever amplification she was doing. It felt like his own emotions, somehow separate. Like hearing your name from another room when no one spoke.
(If girls with powers existed, did ghosts? Vampires? He didn't know if he wanted to know.)
"The offer stands." The feds didn't answer Will's question, and that didn't bode well. "This must be hard on your family, after all. So much that could go wrong, that the doctors here just wouldn't know how to handle."
"Is that a threat?" Ms. Byer's voice was positively icy.
"Of course not!"
But then, no one made overt threats these days. It was all subterfuge and implied hints, and Mike knew a threat when he heard it.
"Then what do you want?"
"We just want for this to be kept quiet. You already told your friends. We'll talk to them as well. This doesn't leave the town. That's all. People talk. Rumors spread. Finances can be hard. No one believes in monsters anymore. You want to attend college, right young man?"
A beat of silence as the "statements" crystalized into a guillotine of promise hanging a blade bright and eager over them.
"We'd be happy to make that happen, after the misfortune here. We're all glad you're back safely."
Mike wished he could see the room, instead of just hearing the long pauses between meaningful glances and oily words.
"Before we leave," another man spoke, and El's alarm spiked through him. She recognized him. "You didn't happen to see a little girl in there, did you? About your age. She's an old missing person's case. Figured you might have seen her in there, or… her remains."
"No." Will answered plainly. Another statement, confident. Mike felt a starburst of admiration spike through his chest.
"If that's all?" Joyce asked sharply.
"Yes, of course. We'll come back tomorrow. If anything else happens, keep us informed. And, Mr. Byers...
Stay safe."
Slowly, achingly, the people filed out of the room. Their shoes scuffed on tile, fabric rustling in a subtle rasp of presence until - finally - they were alone.
A plastic chair creaked and skidded across the floor.
"You can come out, now."
El's hand slid off the back of Mike's head. He could still feel the warm spot, and prickles as his hair moved back into place.
He opened the door slowly, cautiously.
Joyce was slumped in the plastic hospital chair, elbows to knees, forehead to fingertips with a business card trapped between two knuckles. He didn't think he'd ever seen her like this. Will, too, was pale, but Mike didn't know if that was a result of the place he'd been trapped in, or the meeting just now. Maybe both.
El's grip on his hand was painful, grinding the bones against each other.
"They're after you, too, huh?" Will was the first to speak, offering her a wane smile.
El nodded.
"Are you from… that place?
"Dark place?" El asked, and Will nodded again, relieved. El shook her head, watching Joyce from behind her lashes.
"I've… seen it. Saw… there. Not from there."
Wll nodded, glanced between Mike and El curiously.
"I'm Will, by the way. This is my mom. Nice to meet you." He shuffled his blankets and pulled a hand out, offering it to her outstretched.
El just looked at it with the same puzzlement she had when encountering a wig for the first time.
"Ah- you shake it. See, like this. Will, this is El. She's my friend. El; Will. Nice to meet you." Mike stepped forward quickly to shake Will's hand, and understanding lit up El's face.
"And, uh- over here is Mrs. Byers."
"Joyce Byers." The woman nodded.
El waited a moment and when Will offered his palm, she wrapped her fingers around it and shook it gently with a look of utter concentration. Mike wasn't sure where the spike of jealousy came from, but he kept it to himself.
"You're cold."
Will's smile fell at the blunt statement, and he nodded jerkily.
"Yeah, that place is really cold. I'm getting better, though. Did you-"
Will paused, licking his lips. "Did you see a teenager, in there? In the dark place??
El paused, then nodded slowly.
"Green."
"He has green eyes, yeah." Will seemed relieved, and Joyce sat up with a slow sigh, stuffing the business card into her coat pocket.
"Do you know how to get him out?" Will asked.
El shook her head again.
Mike offered a stilted smile to his friend, not really sure how to deal with one more wild newness in his world. One girl with powers was a lot. His friend returning, talking about dark places and strangers-
He awkwardly half-sat on the edge of Will's bed and watched the two of them talk, but passing headlights lighting up the wall through the window made him flinch and duck on reflex.
"You're hiding from them?"
It was Will's mom, now looking at him intensely.
He nodded on El's behalf. Joyce twisted in her seat to consider something out the window for a moment. Already lights had turned on in the hospital parking lot, and far away a nurse walked from her car up to the sidewalk, a long lanyard swinging down around her knee.
"Jonathan will be here with clothes, soon. We're on the first floor. I'll have him pull up to the window, and you two can climb out, get a ride to my house. You can spend the night, if you need to. It's fine in Will's room, don't worry about the lamps- Mike, you know where the extra blankets are.'
Surprised, Mike nodded. El still looked like everything just spoken was utterly meaningless to her.
"Thanks, Mrs. Byers. Those guys have been hanging around the hospital all day."
Joyce just sighed, slouching in her chair and drumming her fingers in a rapid pattern he recognized as a way to distract from craving a smoke.
"Thank me when we're all free of this sh- this crap." she glanced at them.
"You can say 'shit' in front of me." Mike protested, not really meaning it. He was tired, and El's palm was clammy in his own. She probably hadn't gotten much sleep, and being chased was exhausting.
The idea of curling up somewhere familiar - safe - was terribly temping.
"Call your parents when you get there, let them know you're staying, and I gave permission."
"Will do, Mrs. Byers. Thanks."
El just gripped his hand a little tighter.
— ELEVEN —
Eleven had never ridden in a car.
A bike? Sure, she rode on the back of one of those. Had liked the feel of wind buffeting her face.
But a car had doors and wheels that squeaked a shrill note that hurt her ears, and the whole thing rocked when anyone moved, even before they'd started down the road.
The inside smelled strange, and the whole thing growled and grumbled at every intersection they paused at.
Both she and Mike had been told to stay low, tucked down against cloth seats and dried mud on the floor mats, unable to talk for the worry of this new person overhearing them. Out of sight of the windows.
Her knees ached from holding the same crouched position, and Mike kept wiggling around, but neither wanted to be spotted by the men who asked after her in the hospital. She didn't trust him yet - Jonathan - but Mike said he was a good person. Will's older brother.
Will was the one who had been singing in the dark world.
Danny was the one with the green eyes, still in there.
She didn't realize everyone out here had names, at first. Not everyone in the bad place had names - or if they had one, she never had to learn. Here, everyone had names and it seemed terribly important that they call each other by it.
So, she tried to push the names into her brain, feeling the unfamiliar chains of syllables on her tongue.
They were important.
—
Time seemed to stretch on forever.
Until suddenly, the car rolled to a stop and stilled with a jingle of keys.
Jonathan twisted in his seat, both staring and avoiding eye contact in a way Eleven was deeply familiar with. Something tense in her eased a little, seeing her own mannerisms in him. No one had punished him until he forced eye contact. Or, maybe he was more stubborn than Eleven.
"I don't see anyone around, so it should be safe to come in." He said.
Mike slithered up onto the seat proper, peering out the windows for a moment.
"Yeah, it looks good. El?" Her friend turned. "You alright?"
She nodded, carefully unfolding herself.
The autumn air was crisp and clean, more similar to the woods she'd escaped through than the city hospital.
The house felt unsettlingly familiar. Something about the air - the overlap of this world and the next, she can sense in every creak of floorboards and the way smoke-stained warmth envelops them when they enter.
Mike brushed his hand against her knuckles. She thankfully laced their fingers together again.
The first steps inside the house were like stepping into a smoky tomb, but then Johnathan flicked the lights on and everything is awash with color.
A rainbow of lights hung in criss-cossing dangles across the ceiling, gleaming on the wall above a sticky black alphabet.
The smell/pressure of the dark world clung to the walls, but it was hard for its shadowy hate to get a good grip in a place so brightly lit. Mike's wondrous glee at the lights helped to burn it away further.
"Pretty." she murmured, and Mike nodded appreciatively.
She didn't know the ritual of "staying the night" so kept herself carefully out of the way as the other boys arranged blankets and pillows on the couch and on the floor. How Johnathan offered to cook them dinner after Mike's stomach rumbled, but Mike felt like embarrassment and guilt as he refused.
She slept in a tent of blankets last night, in Mike's basement.
They didn't make a tent here, and Eleven felt uneasy. The burning rainbow lights were pretty, but she didn't trust them to hide her.
Johnathan turned off the main lights, leaving the christmas ones casting a thousand overlapping shadows. Eleven watched him pace uneasily up and down the hall, touching lights and walls, staring for a long time at the letters stained in black.
Even as she drifted off, Eleven could feel the echoes of the dark world ripple through house - opened once, and slow to heal. Old bruises.
Could feel threads of familiar power still lingering in the rainbow of lights hung overhead like stars.
Could feel something else - that acidic, lightning-sting aura of that boy in the darkness.
Mike tried to make conversation for a while, but she didn't know what to say. She nodded along, giving answers she did know, but he spoke of games and faraway places and words she didn't recognize but should have. Father never told her about parks or zoos or places in the wilderness where people slept in tents to watch the stars turn and… fight bears, maybe. Mike worried about bears, though Eleven wasn't sure she knew why.
Mike fell asleep first, his shoulders slumping where he lay on the floor.
Eleven held still for a while, but she had never slept in the same room as another person - not since she can remember. White walls and childish drawings - a bed much smaller and less plush than the bed the boys insisted she sleep in.
Feeling restless, she slid out from under the covers and carefully let herself out into the hall. The carpet dipped in the middle from wear, and the wall bore innumerable little smudges and dents from a lifetime of living.
Johnathan was still awake - he watched her sit down at the kitchen table across from him, unknowingly mimicking the kind man who helped her at the diner.
He poured her milk into a colorful, scratched-up plastic cup, and carefully spread jam over a piece of toasted bread. The metal knife scraped softly in the silence of the kitchen.
Strawberry.
She could trust him.
—
She woke up on the couch with a blanket tucked tightly around her feet, and the smell of old cigarette smoke clinging to her skin. Her morning drowsiness popped abruptly when tires pulled up the dirt driveway, doors opening and shutting.
She recognized the woman's voice, and pushed herself upright just as the front door swung open, Joyce and Will bustling inside with another man tight on their heels.
Eleven froze as she recognized the uniform as someone of authority, distrust of adults roaring to the forefront of her mind.
She felt her powers swell up, rearing in preparation of a fight. Will's eyes snapped to her, wide and alarmed.
At once, a few things happened.
First, Will took a quick step forward and to the side, shoving himself between Eleven and his mother.
Second, the man still crowded into the doorway missed his step over the threshold, boot snagging a corner and sending him stumbling forward. Eleven shoved him back on instinct, and his voice yelped half a curse as he sprawled backwards out the door.
Third, more distracting than the people suddenly yelling at her, was the surge of pressure pushing back . All around her, colorful lights buzzed brighter, starshine hornets leashed overhead.
"STOP!"
Will was the one who shouted, hand outstretched in a mirror of her own splayed fingers.
She stopped.
Lowered her hand. Her powers banked back down, and the lights dimmed slightly, but didn't stop their angry hum.
Jonathan stood silently in the kitchen doorway, hands cradling a bowl of soup.
Hopper groaned as he hauled himself to his feet, and Will's bedroom door scraped open to let Mike run the few strides it took to get to the end of the short hallway.
He braced himself on the walls, mussed hair giving his alarmed expression more mania than he probably felt.
"You're like me." She whispered. .
Will finally lowered his own hand, and the blazing little bulbs relaxed to their normal state. Eleven reached up, not quite touching one of them. She could feel the heat bleeding off from inches away.
"Is- Is everything alright now?" Joyce held herself tightly, glancing between the two preteens.
Will nodded slowly. "And you're alright?"
He nodded again.
It was too early to talk, so Eleven blankly refused to elaborate about her thoughts on the matter when they ask. She isn't sure what to think. She knows he's not the same as her. He wasn't in the lab. There's pictures of him as a child in the house - playing around water, grinning at a table crammed with maps and small statues.
Will isn't like her.
But, he is.
It hurts to think about.
What if she didn't have to be at the lab? If people like her could just live , with normal families and pretty lights, and strawberry jam on toast.
The morning passed gently after that.
She watched Hopper collect a box full of something edible - donuts? - from where he'd spilled them during his fall. Jonathan fussed over Will, who stared at the sugary hoop in his hands for a very long time.
Mike joined her on the couch, and the two of them bumped elbows as they ate a bit of cereal with their donut. The milk was cold and sweet, and their bowls were the same neon-bright color as the cup from last night. Well-worn with love.
Eleven soaked it in.
Nancy arrived briefly, some time later. She announced to the house that she wanted to check on her brother, but spent far more time down the hall, speaking in low tones to Johnathan.
She ended up leaving without Mike in tow, some sort of determined expression on her face.
Her ears picked out words in the conversation happening at the kitchen table. "Monsters" "-World."
She stood and waited for Mike to finish wolfing down his cereal so he could join her.
They rinse the dishware off in the sink, and she considered the current options they were presenting.
First, to try to punch through the hole in Joyce's living room, where Will and Barb had come out.
Eleven had a bad feeling about that plan. Already the house felt thin - too close, too overlapping - with that world. Pushing harder felt wrong.
Next: to try to contact Danny directly. Will offered to try to reach through the electronics to find him. He spoke in soft tones, but something in his expression was set. Stubborn when he looked at her, like he was expecting her to say no.
"Can you do that again? Power me up like that?"
Eleven tilted her head in question.
"Earlier, when you attacked us. I could feel it coming. I haven't been able to make anything glow like I did in… in there, but when you did something - used your powers - I could suddenly feel them all again. All the lights"
He waited until she gave a little nod, then turned back to the papers in front of him. He sketched something, pointing to different shapes and squiggles like it was supposed to mean something.
"So, if Danny is still stuck, I need to track him down somehow, so I can use a telephone and try to talk to him - or a light or something, to show him I'm there and lead him to one. A telephone would be easiest, because I don't think he'd want to come back here, after what happened. But, I also don't know where he'd be staying now - I don't remember the room number, where he was staying across town. It was in those new apartments-"
"I can find him."
The table turned to face her.
"You can?" Mike asked, wary and impressed.
She nodded.
"I know his face. I can find him."
"Right now?"
The question gives her pause.
Eleven shook her head in a small jerk. No, she'd never been able to do it unassisted.
"I need-"
She needed the tank.
Her gaze found the floor, shoulders hunching up in reflexive defence. She took a small step back when Mrs. Byers suddenly reached for her, wide brown eyes tracking the hand's every movement as it gently straightened the crooked shoulder and neckline of her dress.
"Is there something that makes it easier?"
The woman offered her a soft smile, gentling the wrinkles around her eyes.
Eleven gave a small nod.
"What's it like?" she asked.
Eleven reflected for a moment.
"It's…."
Did she really want to endure the tank with strangers?
Her gaze skittered away from them, focused blankly at a cupboard's scratched door.
Then again, she'd always done it with strangers.
Strange people without names - doctors and assistants and technicians. Sir and Ma'am and numbers on doors, and Father.
Did Father have a name?
Why hadn't he told her what it was?
She turned to Mrs. Byers, Mike beside her.
Will, across the table, obviously waiting for an answer without trying to push her.
Jonathan, with his quiet solidarity.
Even the man in uniform, who had introduced himself as Hopper despite the awkward introduction. He looked at her like she was the ghost of someone else.
But he still looked at her.
Carefully, haltingly, she began to explain.