It is not realistic that every person must be forgiven for every harm they have ever done to another. Instead, it must be enough that they are trying to do better - to do better for the future, and to do right by the past.
An apology alone does not correct harm already done in the world.
(but doing nothing only furthers arm )
It only took a few moments to comfort El after her panic. Joyce rolled her shoulder, deciding not to mention the deep ache as the odd girl explained what she had seen with halting words and trembling shoulders. She had plenty of bruises from knocking against tables and doorknobs - a thump like that would heal just the same.
More interesting though, was her son's reluctance to abandon the walkie-talkie, even after words stopped coming out of it.
Will stared into the receiver, listening to static fuzz like it was the most interesting thing in the world. Joyce didn't disturb him; only laid some towels down to start cleaning up the water before it could do any damage to the baseboards.
She did startle a little when he started narrating events, pausing oddly like he was watching a television and trying to come up with the words to explain what he was seeing. It was through the static that Will learned about Hopper arriving in the other world, and leaving it. Joyce couldn't make heads or tails of how he knew it, but she trusted her boy, and made sure the bathroom was clean enough to be used when 'Danny' arrived - so long as he didn't need to go to the hospital, first.
Will moved himself to the couch along the way, with the others orbited around him to wait for his reports on the events he could somehow pick out from the subtle shifts in static. Even El listened closely, focused as always.
When he finally turned it off, it was with a wide, glowing smile.
"They're out, and on their way back."
Joyce hugged her youngest son, kissing him on the head.
She was so proud.
--
Peter Burton (Hawkins Lab Head of Security) was at the grocery store when he got the news that the local Sheriff had volunteered to throw himself into the dark world. He wondered if someone had written the message as a joke, at first - surely he couldn't be reading his pager correctly.
Still - he was off-duty, and his wife was out of town to visit her parents, so it was up to him to refill the fridge. He was contemplating the prices between bananas and apples when another text beeped in from his hip.
Peter sighed, choosing apples and wheeling himself to checkout. If it was urgent enough that they paged him over and over, he couldn't ignore it. He didn't check the message until he had paid for his items, smiling charmingly to the woman scanning his food so diligently.
Plucking an apple out of the paper bag to crunch into, he fumbled his keys to unlock his car door, and slid inside to a silent bounce of well-oiled shocks.
Peter set the bag on his passenger seat, buckled himself in, and started his car with a lovely purr.
Finally, he checked the pager.
Beautiful new tires shrieked across asphalt as he threw the car into reverse, then forward again with a manic whip of the steering wheel.
Fuck!
They were really sending the nosy, paranoid asshole of a town sheriff INTO THE GATE! What kind of moronic fuckhead had he left in charge, who was okay with that?! People were already starting to stir in unease from the government presence in their town, another missing person was unacceptable! Especially if Hopper fuckin' told anyone where he was going.
Peter slammed his palms against the steering wheel with an incoherent noise of rage, hunched against the G-forces pushing him back into the seat as the car accelerated noisily down main street.
They were fucked.
15 minutes later, his car slid to a grinding stop in front of the security gate - bars already lifting. He shot the traffic officer a poisonous glare, memorizing his face at a glance to tear him a new asshole once he was finished inside. He should have waited for him to show his fucking clearance codes.
GodDAMMIT!
His car roared down the short driveway, slamming to a stop in his parking spot and nearly throwing his keys with the force he yanked them out of the ignition.
The woman at the front door, at least, asked for his ID, even if she jumped like a scared rabbit when he slapped it down on the counter, jaw clenching and unclenching as he imagined all the fucking damage this could do to their entire operation.
Did anyone fucking check him for spy cameras or microphones? FUCK! Hopper was a dog with a damn bone after their 'suspicious behavior', and any commie with half a brain cell would be able to ID him as an eager traitor with the right lies.
His shoes snapped against the tile floors as he pocketed his ID, power-walking with all the dignity he could muster toward his security headquarters. Someone was getting fired today, he promised darkly. Someone was going to loose everything for this gigantic cock-up.
Peter swiped his ID through a scanner, barely waiting for the green to light up before jerking the door open.
This security headquarters, as it happened, had a hallway connection to the surveying room overlooking The Gate.
Rows of greyscale screens displayed all areas of town, from the grocery to the library and known hangout spots of communist-leaning individuals. One corner, dedicated to surveying the Gate, was busy with motion.
Painted with dark shapes between pale static, the screens buzzed faintly as they depicted a scene of gore and horror - men screaming and fighting for their life against a swarm of monsters bigger and stronger than themselves.
Limbs being torn, glass panels sprayed with arterial blood, then shattered as slimy dark shapes punched through them with sinuous bodies and blood-darkened arms.
Fire lit up for a brief moment, a flamethrower thrashing wild as doglike creatures ravaged a man's legs, eating his face right off his skull.
Peter would have been horrified at these things, if he'd seen it. He had a solid stomach, but the sight likely would have made him empty his guts right there on the floor.
As it stood, he was a little busy having the contents of his stomach eaten out of him, head twisted back at an unnatural angle as two flower-mouthed monsters tore into him.
Slithering things with too many legs and too many teeth flowed out into the halls that had been guarded behind security gates. Fleshy vines followed, sweeping up and out and swallowing up any human they came across.
—
Katherine had accepted the job as a receptionist about 4 years ago. She'd been a dedicated, punctual employee - enjoying take-home pay that supported herself and her daughter with ease. The background checks had seemed excessive at first, for an electric company, but she gathered that there was something more to it in her second week, when several men in dark suits and others in lab coats strolled through the hallways with Very Serious Expressions.
By the end of her first year, she concluded that this company was certainly a front for some government secret program, and the thought of it excited her. No wonder the pay was so good!
so, she kept her mouth shut and did her best to do her job Perfectly.
Except… lately, there was something off about work. She felt herself growing uneasy every time she clocked in, and leaving the building felt like something predatory was watching her heels. Something was wrong, but for the life of her she couldn't figure out what it was.
October arrived, and the feeling got worse. She overheard people taking about a missing girl, then in town a boy went missing! It made the hours at her desk crawl like molasses, and her scalp itchy at the thought that the missing persons had something to do with THEM.
Katherine considered taking her pay and her daughter and leaving the state. Maybe visit her family on the east coast. Her mom hadn't gotten a visit in nearly two years, maybe it was due.
At precisely 11:04 am, She heard someone shriek like they were dying, and other screams filled the halls.
That was that, and Katherine decided promptly that she really ought to take her holiday hours right away.
By the time the long-legged things were tipping over her chair and spilling pencils across the floor with huffing sniffs to find where she was hiding, her sensible heels were already crunching over gravel cement - car door closing with a snap a few moments later.
She calmly flashed her ID to the traffic officer, forcing a grimace of a smile when he met her eyes.
The guard rail swung up, and she pressed on the gas a little bit too hard as a dark shape in her rear-view mirror punched out from her workplace's upper windows - black vines with hooking tendrils like reaching fingers shaping to claw across limestone and bricks.
Yeah, visiting family in Maryland sounded like a good idea.
The building crunched, shearing and sagging inward, like the entire multi-story underground complex was being sucked into an enormous mouth. The traffic officer stepped out of his booth, taking his hat off as if that would change his view.
She resigned herself to brushing the dust off her resume, and hoped her future job prospects wouldn't try calling her last workplace to ask about performance. She was pretty sure her higher-ups had just been killed.
Maybe her mom would let her move back in if she asked nicely
--
Hopper, to his own delighted shock, wasn't significantly hurt in the shuffle. The tough suit they'd put him in had the hood ripped off, and he'd gotten some toothy scratches across his arm and leg where something had latched on for a moment, but it wasn't anything that couldn't be solved with an extra helping of antiseptic. Diane, his ex-wife, would probably have bullied him into going to the hospital.
However, she wasn't here at the moment, and his arms were full of another too-skinny supernatural teenager, so honestly he had more important things to worry about.
He didn't know what was going on when the monsters started avoiding him and the kid, but he coudn't say he was too shook up about the people who happily sent him to be eaten alive got eaten themselves.
The reality of seeing men ripped apart, though- that would stick with him. He anticipated some truly nightmarish dreams in the coming weeks.
He kept his eyes forward, trying to tune out the screams that the kid staggering against his side kept flinching at. The boy fought like a beast possessed at first, but when the tides started turning away from him, he froze up and… changed color, somehow. The weird floaty hair dropped to black, and a sizzle of light had him obeying gravity a lot more than he had before.
Hopper was still dealing with the existential crisis of magic being real, and this damn town was apparently soaked in it. He could panic about the monsters and a color=shifting kid later. For now, his priority was to get them both out of the building, to relative safety.
It had been mid-morning when he pulled up to Hawkins lab. Probably closer to noon now. Pushing the emergency exit open with his shoulder, Hopper yelled when the body leaning against his shoulder suddenly dropped like a sack of potatoes. The 'emergency door' siren blared angrily at them
"Kid, don't you dare pass out on me now. You can sleep in the car, C'mon." He grabbed the teen's upper arm, pulling it up over his shoulder so he could use his legs to lift the gangly body.
The boy's blue eyes were wide open, though. Chest heaving, pupils blown into wide black circles. Drugs? The kid was just looking up at the clouds.
"We gotta go." He repeated, and half-dragged the kid out to the parking lot.
Thank god no one stopped them.
He got the kid into the passenger seat of his cruiser, and the kid sorta halfway worked with him to get his legs into position - and buckled his own seatbelt, small mercies.
Hopper sped them out of the parking lot and away from the lab - traffic gate already open, the officer nowhere in sight.
The fleshy whatever the fuck that was seemed to consume the huge building behind him, corroding and crushing it into the earth until the fleshy portal could swallow it up. The collapse shook the ground like a cargo train roaring under him, rattling car windows and thrumming through the air like thunder.
He worried that the portal thing would keep spreading - would keep devouring the earth until there was nothing left. Had he kicked off the apocalypse?
But no - once the building had been consumed, the fleshy gape of a dimensional mouth seemed to seal itself up, dissolving into flaky black ash. It drifted up into the sky as a trail of smoke in his rear-view mirror.
Hopper didn't know what the kid had been dosed with while he was in there, but he prayed it wasn't lethal. He tracked the kid out of the corner of his eye as he drove, just in case he got violent. Luckily, all he seemed to want to do was touch things weirdly. Dragged his palms over the well-worn upholstery, fingered the seatbelt for a long time. Sniffed a bit of cigarette ash, like that wasn't embarrassing as hell. Kept checking that the odd metal thermos was still clipped to his belt loop. Stared for ages out the window, face open and awestruck at the blue sky with its puffy white clouds.
"You alright?" He asked, not sure what else to say as they idled at a stoplight.
The kid startled like he honestly forgot Hopper was even driving the damn car. Jesus.
Nodded.
"I'm Sheriff Hopper." He introduced himself, then glanced at the kid pointedly.
"Danny." The kid murmured, fidgetin, and Hopper felt his shoulders sag in relief. Got the right kid, thank god.
"Alright, Danny.
Let's get you home."
--
Barbara opened her eyes, and her mother was sleeping in a chair beside her bed. Sunlight streaming in through the gaps in the curtains and highlighted greying hairs into a wispy gold and silver halo. Her mom's lips grimaced even in sleep against the strange position that would doubtlessly give her aches and pains when she finally awoke.
Barbara had never been truly alone, had she? Even now, her mother's hand rested limp on her mattress, arm stretched out to rest her palm up and open like she was just waiting for Barb to wake up and hold her hand.
She could feel Mary take a bracing breath in the darkness between blinks as the girl opened the door to the other world , letting blazing green light flood in and scrub clean her little pocket of void like a flood of hot acid.
The last strands of a dark world pulled apart, faded, eaten away to ribbons by a world that was so full of color and light and emotion that the ghosts fleeing outward into swirling green were seemed to blend in with the starbright hum of energy.
She could still feel the dead girl's nervous tension humming somewhere in her chest, but that didn't alarm her. She wasn't scared.
For the first time in a long time-
Barb felt warm.