brynn stone ⚜️ [eleven] (leggomyeggo) wrote in dunhavenic, @ 2018-09-17 14:23:00 |
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Since she’d begun studying for the GRE, Brynn had become a staple at a number of places around town (even more than she already was): she was at Java Chip to pick up coffee every day she wasn’t working, or she had commandeered one of the picnic tables at the park, or she was sitting in a quiet booth in the corner of Grandma’s with a large plate in front of her. Studying was going to be bad for her waistline. Worth it, in the end, or so she hoped, but still bad. She was enormously grateful that Hop let her sit around the diner when she wasn’t working, and especially when she wasn’t ordering a non-stop stream of food. The diner had been a constant presence in her life since she’d moved to Dunhaven, a glimmer of simplicity and small-town charm that made her feel warm and fuzzy. She’d expected to feel lonely, so far away from the city she’d called home, but instead, she would step into Grandma’s with a gaggle of schoolgirl friends and talk into the wee hours. It felt like home. It still felt like home, years later. Moreso once she came back to Dunhaven and started working part-time, and even moreso over the last few months, as she hung around just to have a place to work. If she passed, she’d have to get Hop something really nice, she thought. Though Jebediah Hopkins knew most people in Dunhaven by virtue of being a life-long citizen and a beloved business owner, there were always new people flitting in and out of the town as well. He didn’t take to most of them. Even others that had grown up in Dunhaven sometimes didn’t find themselves in his favor. He would tolerate most anyone, within reason. He would even be passably civil with the majority of customers, but as for people that he wanted to spend time around or felt attached to? The list was small. He had his goddaughter and her friends, his favorite customers, a spare few employees, and the occasional person he considered an actual friend. Brynn was one amongst that number. She wasn’t a native of their small town, but she’d been a good worker and he appreciated her tenacity. She was reliable and driven, and he had never complained when she occupied a booth to study. It wasn’t as though it was costing him anything extra to let her sit there. His dark t-shirt was covered in food stains from a day’s work, the white apron tied around his waist just as spattered and colorful, especially in the places where he often wiped his hands. There was a plate in front of him with two fluffy, golden waffles stacked on top of one another. The slightest touch of powdered sugar had been dusted to the top, and then he had piled up colorful berries on the top. It was a slow night, and with the rest of the diner taken care of, he had turned his attention to the lack of a plate on Brynn’s table. Snagging the small-batch lemon-mint syrup that he typically reserved for himself and Cerys, amongst anyone that she wanted to share it with, he picked up the plate and brought it to the table, sliding the waffles onto the table and placing the syrup canister beside them along with a roll of silverware, “Study fuel.” Brynn was so immersed in the book in front of her that she didn’t see Jebediah approach, even though she had a clear view of the rest of the diner. It was the plate of waffles that first got her attention, and she looked up, grinning -- Hopper cut into the stack of waffles with a knife, ignoring how some of the candies rolled off. She was angry at him, really angry, but she still couldn’t resist a triple-decker Eggo extravaganza. That didn’t mean she wanted to talk, though. “Good, right?” He looked happy. El wanted to hit him. Instead, she took another bite of her piece. “You know the good thing about it? It’s only 8000 calories.” She just stared at him. The waffles were quickly ignored, once he started asking her questions about visiting Mike. She wanted to see him. She needed to see him, and he didn’t understand why. He wouldn’t listen to her, and he didn’t care. El had been bottling all of her anger and her frustration and her loneliness up, waiting for the day she could finally leave the cabin again and see her friends. He didn’t understand and he didn’t care, and all of the waffles in the world couldn’t fix his lies. Their voices raised each time she made a demand to know when it wouldn’t be dangerous and he couldn’t say. Finally, she flung the dishes across the table at him. “Friends don’t lie!” -- and she was still grinning, like a moron now, and she had no idea how long it’d been. Could have been seconds, or minutes, for all she knew. “Seriously? You didn’t have to do that.” For a moment, Brynn looked up at him with a grin, and didn’t say anything. He started to ask if she had cut waffles out of her diet, but she had a far away look in her eyes. Then she blinked, and acted as though the pause had never happened at all. He shrugged one shoulder and brushed off the comment, “It wasn’t a problem.” He would rather his more generous gestures go unnoticed by people. It helped him maintain the illusion of not caring as much as he was really prone to do. “You okay?” he asked before he could stop himself, hesitating before he could walk back towards the kitchen, “You kind of spaced out on me there for a second.” Maybe she just needed sugar or maybe she - like him - had gotten caught up in all of this horror dreaming bullshit like so many others in town had confessed to experiencing. He hadn’t been so forthcoming with anyone, preferring to keep his inner white dude with a dad-bod as private as possible. He didn’t like how well he was beginning to understand Jim Hopper, despite the absolutely insane circumstances the other man sometimes found himself in, “Maybe you need the sugar rush.” “Um.” Normally she would have just said she was fine, and that he was probably right, but he’d been so generous that she felt guilty for even thinking about lying. After a moment, Brynn shrugged. “I’m tired of studying all this shit and I’m ready for it to be over,” she said, gesturing at the papers in front of her, “which I know is ironic because I’m going to be studying more if I get into grad school. And the, ah, waffle… it just was familiar. Like deja vu. You know?” God, she hoped he did. She said it all in a rush, like she was afraid she’d hesitate and stop herself and change the subject. “Like I’ve sat across a table from someone before with a spread like this.” Leaning his hip against the seat of the booth, Jeb considered her ramblings. Truthfully, he’d been thinking about waffles a lot lately. More than usual, anyway. He kept having pesky dreams about leaving boxes of eggos in a wooden box in the middle of a forest and a small, scrawny kid who was the recipient of those eggos. He had thought he’d seen Brynn eating waffles before, but maybe that was some strange projection from his dreams. “Well, one exactly like that is hard to come by. Most people don’t have the pleasure of knowing what lemon-mint syrup is. And Grandma had a secret ingredient for the batter that I add when no one is looking.” He half-heartedly shrugged one shoulder and then a crooked kind of smile came over his face. He didn’t know why he said it, really, but maybe she would find his joke funny and equally ironic to her studying predicament, “I mean, they’re not eggos or anything, but they’re all right.” Brynn was about to say they weren’t exactly like the ones at Grandma’s -- nothing could compare, really, with perfection -- when he mentioned Eggos. A shiver went down her spine, but this time she felt emboldened. “Dude, don’t knock Eggos. Eggos are the shit. I mean, no, of course they have nothing on these,” she clarified, “but you haven’t lived until you’ve had a stack of Eggos with whipped cream and candy in between. It’s like 8000 calories and it’s beautiful.” Even though she couldn’t remember ever doing that herself, she still knew that was special. Even though the memory was tinged with anger, too. It had still been special. Embarrassed by her admission, then, she blushed. “Still not as good as yours, though.” Jeb actually didn’t dislike eggos, though he’d rarely had occasion to eat them given the fact that his grandmother had always cooked. He’d learned the skill early on in his life, knowing just how to be careful around hot stoves and food processors and sharp knives. He could still remember a few times in his life, however, going to a friend’s house and cooking eggos in a toaster or a conventional oven and drenching them in regular, sugar-processed syrup. And in a jolt, it was like he could remember cutting his way through crisped eggos layered in whipped cream, loaded with chocolate chips and various jellied candies for a bit of color. Good, right? You know the good thing about it? It’s only 8000 calories. He could taste the whipped cream on his tongue from licking the butter knife, and the sugar rush from the candy. Jeb cleared his throat and stuck his hands in his pockets, “What could beat something like that? A Triple Decker Eggo Extravaganza sounds beautiful. It’s OK if it’s better candy loaded than topped with fruit.” How did he know that? Brynn narrowed her eyes. “Okay, now this is getting weird.” She’d never thought that anyone would have overlap with her - well, that wasn’t true. She had thought about it and hoped for it. She’d been sad to realize her own brother didn’t share her dreams. She’d felt left out, and alone. The waffles were getting to get cold if she didn’t dig in soon, though, so she gestured towards them. “Wanna share? And you can tell me why you called it by that name.” The second sentence wasn’t a question; it was a statement, almost a demand. Jeb raised a brow at her comment that their conversation was taking a turn for the strange. Was it that odd to have had eggos with whipped cream and candy? In this life or the next? OK, maybe it was. He wasn’t particularly hungry, but he resigned himself to the fact that he’d stuck his foot in his mouth and Brynn wasn’t going to easily let this topic go if her demand that he reveal his reason for naming the waffles such a thing. With a sigh, he scooted himself into the booth. He carefully drizzled the specialty syrup over the stack of waffles, but not too much. Then he stuck a fork into the stack and cut it across one way, then into quarters another. Spearing a bit of waffle with a raspberry, he nibbled on the edge and chewed thoughtfully, stalling for time, “You know these dreams everyone has been having that sounds like a lot of bullshit?” He paused just a moment, knowing that she’d have heard of them at least, whether she was experiencing them or not. Perhaps she was, but Jeb counted on nothing until he knew truths. He didn’t like to operate on assumptions. “Apparently my inner self is like...a middle aged white man with a drinking problem and a sheriff’s badge,” he shrugged his shoulders, “He made a stack of waffles like that once. That’s what he called it.” “Hopper,” Brynn blurted out in between bites of waffle, not thinking twice about it. She thought the dreams were a lot of bullshit, too, since all of hers seemed to be filled of traumatizing things and she hadn’t found anyone to talk to about them. Not that she couldn’t talk to Rhys or Lyllia or Jack, of course. But what they had to go through wasn’t the same as hers, and no matter how much any of them wanted to relate, they all had different stories. She wasn’t part of theirs, either. As much as she thought it was all bullshit, Brynn had ached to talk to someone who’d seen the world she had. Now, it seemed, she’d found someone. In the strangest of places. Figuring she’d better elaborate, she continued, “he made them for a scared, lonely little girl. He was trying to help her but he had no idea how to reach her, and she… wasn’t used to being cared about. She didn’t know how to express herself. El. That’s what everyone calls her.” Brynn said Hopper with the kind of certainty that meant it wasn’t a mere guess in the grand scheme of things. Somehow, she knew. He wasn’t certain that he liked that she knew such a personal, intimate thing about the depths of his mind. Hopper was a secret that he held close to his chest most days, and if he had thought that she would peg him on it so quickly, he might have kept that identity to himself a little while longer. He didn’t fully understand the man he was in his dreams yet, and that lack of understanding made him uneasy. As she continued, it was easier to see why she knew exactly who Hopper was. He had dreamed of her, too. He just hadn’t known it at the time. The girl that she talked about wasn’t just lonely. She was isolated. She was angry. She had been an experiment for most of her life, and her social skills were...lacking. El. “Eleven,” Jeb expanded, sitting his fork down at the edge of the plate, suddenly having had his fill of them even if he’d only taken a few bites. He breathed out a weighty sigh and leaned back in the seat, scrubbing a hand over his face, “I don’t know everything. I just know…enough to make the connections.” He felt that was important to point out, at least, in case she expected him to be vastly insightful about the whole ordeal. There was no taking his back, so he had to accept the fact that now someone knew about Hopper, and he supposed if someone did...it was good that she knew him too, “Have you been having the dreams long?” Despite how much she’d wanted to find someone whose dreams overlapped with hers, Brynn was struck suddenly with intense self-consciousness. She hadn’t really thought it through, what it would mean to find someone, who they might be, how they might see her or see Eleven. She hadn’t thought about what it would feel like, and a part of her wanted to curl into a ball and hide away. She couldn’t, though. She’d opened the door, and now she couldn’t close it again. “Months,” she admitted. “Since…” She wrinkled her nose a little as she tried to remember. “The end of November? On and off. There isn’t really any rhyme or reason to them. What about you?” “Not quite that long,” Jeb admitted, a slight shrug edging its way into his shoulders, “More since maybe March or so?” He tried to think back, but the time seemed to blur a little. He was so busy most of the time that it was a wonder that he slept at all, but when he did, it was almost always of Hopper. “At first, they were seriously mundane dreams. It was just him eating pastries and smoking too much and drinking more, and having a fat lot of nothing to do otherwise,” Jeb leaned back in the booth a bit more, but he rested his hands there on the table, a finger or two tapping no particular rhythm now and then, “There were a few from before all of that, too. Him living in the big city, having a totally normal and stupidly happy life. But in the last couple of months there’s been a smattering of really weird shit happening in the dreams instead. I know that I’m missing things. There are gaps in what I know, but I have...pieces that I’ve been trying to put together.” Brynn understood. Her dreams were coming out of order, or at least it seemed that way most of the time. That made it difficult to make sense of what Eleven’s life was like, when there was so much she was still missing. “Sometimes I wish I’d see it all, all at once,” she admitted quietly, “just to have it over with.” Eleven’s life was mostly terrible, though, and Brynn had enough of that in her own life, so it might have been better dragged out. It was so hard to know. She cut off another piece of waffle and took a bite. “Maybe we can help each other with that,” Brynn suggested. “You know things, I know things. Maybe we’re the puzzle pieces the other’s been missing.” “If I thought I’d still be a fully functioning person at the end of the day, I’d wish for that too. But somehow, with him...I think it would take me some time to recover,” Jebediah didn’t like admitting to that, but he had a good sense of things that Hopper had experienced that Jeb had not yet gone through remembering. Some of the hurts that he suffered were still sharp pains like deeply embedded knives that he just lived with underneath of his skin even after time had passed. He wasn’t looking forward to the memories that he knew were going to tear him down to muscle and bone, raw and exposed. Jeb didn’t bother to pick his fork back up because he knew that he was already done eating despite the fact that there was still plenty on the plate. Talking about Hopper wasn’t something he was used to, and he realized now that it turned his stomach inside out. “Perhaps. Though he has a lot of years without El, so none of that would be particularly helpful. Sometimes familiar things seem to trigger whatever this knowing is. It might help us figure out things faster, even if all the pieces don’t fit quite into one picture yet.” Brynn was quiet for a moment, watching Jeb. She felt confident that she’d already seen the worst of Eleven’s life - or at least she’d seen enough to understand what she hadn’t. Her own childhood had its own horrors, ones that couldn’t really compare but ones that Brynn thought prepared her better for the bad things in life. Not everyone’s was like that, though, she reminded herself. “She lived a lot without him, too,” Brynn reminded Jeb, “but I think he was one of the only bright spots she’d ever had.” She couldn’t guess why she’d said that much; it was so personal. Maybe she just wanted Jeb to know how important Hopper was. That even if there were things that were hard, he’d still saved a little girl’s life. He mattered. “Um. Am I keeping you? You don’t have to stay. I know this is weird as hell.” He immediately understood what Brynn meant, knowing enough to realize that Eleven had gone through hell and back before she ever met Hopper. Honestly, he wasn’t likely the best role model in the world, but she had brought around a part of him that he’d tried to bury. Fatherhood had been his greatest blessing and his most acute torture, and on a lot of levels, Jebediah could relate to that, “She was the first bright spot he’d had in a long time, too.” Scrubbing his hand over his scruffy cheeks, Jeb looked around at the other patrons of the diner and he knew he really should be going around to see if people needed refills or if they’d like to place an order for dessert. He’d been sitting there for a while. He could have gotten someone else to do it, but they were lightly staffed for the slow evening and he wasn’t the kind of business owner that was afraid of doing the job of the waiter. Plus...it was an out. Damn him, but he was going to take it. Just for now. Just...so that he could wrap his head around this a little more before the delved into just how shitty the tales and woes of Hopper and El could be. “Ah...I probably should go make some rounds. And let you get back to studying,” he pointed at the abandoned materials that he’d pulled her focus from, “Not because it’s weird, even though it is. Just...responsibility.” He heaved a sigh that sounded heavier than he wanted it to, but he couldn’t lighten it in the aftermath. He moved to get up out of his seat, but before his feet would carry him away, he paused and rapped his knuckles lightly against the table top, “We’ll talk more about it, though. Maybe sort out some of those missing pieces? Promise.” “Yeah, okay.” Brynn plastered a smile onto her face and tried to look like she believed him, though she wasn’t sure how well it would work. She had an empty pit in her stomach and she couldn’t tell if it was a reaction from her life or El’s, but either way, she could feel herself bracing for disappointment. Brynn had her brothers, Lyllia, Jack, her friends - but none of them knew about this part of her as much as she wished they could. Jeb knew, though. That had to matter, right? “You know where to find me,” she added, sounding perkier than she felt. “And thanks, again. For the waffles.” |