WHAT: Eleven gets a canon bump to Vol.1 WHERE: The cabin WHEN: Before the DJ Plot WARNINGS: Talks of child experimentation and Hopper's imprisonment STATUS: Complete
It always did for El. Couldn't blame faulty wiring in the cabin either - that had been one the essentials that had just gotten replaced, leaving behind some cosmetics and janky furniture to work through. So, no. Not the wiring. Not when some things that had been flickering weren’t even on to begin with; it was a spastic, violent surge with a bulb or two shattering from intensity.
She wouldn’t know that, though. Eleven had been sleeping, eyes rapidly moving behind her lids. Over six months of happenings, an immersion of memories within memories jam-packed in one night into an already strange little mind. Her hero project, a bouquet of purple and yellow wild flowers, the strobe lights of a roller rink (what did you do, El?), the absolute feelings of being an outsider (I do not belong). Handcuffs and interrogations, monster, Dr. Owens.
Papa.
The Nina Project.
You’re regressing, Eleven.
Her heart restarting too many times. Blood smears, what did you do? Water and salt. There was something she needed to see and remember and she was there, almost there. She could feel it; could taste the blood on her lips from it running down her eyes and nose.
Eleven’s eyes snapped open. The lights stopped flickering. She gasped, and the sharp inhale of breath caused her chest to hurt. This wasn’t a medical cot with an oxygen mask over her mouth and Papa’s fingers weren’t on her pulse to count the beats, a flurry of medical personnel working around them. It was the walls of her green bedroom, the yellow curtains and a dresser that needed to be replaced that she woke up to. She was home.
A metallic smell was up her nose. El went to tentatively touch it, and she had never been so relieved to see red stain her fingers like this. It wasn’t back yet, not completely - but her powers were there, struggling to come out of the box they had been locked in. “Dad!” she called out, kicking the covers off herself and failing to take notice that she was lacking most of her hair. “I have blood!”
There were better ways to have said that.
Hopper and sleep were in a complicated relationship these days. Sometimes insomnia reigned supreme. Sometimes he slept so light, all it took was an owl hoot five hundred feet away for him to jerk awake. And sometimes, he slept the coma of the deeply exhausted. He wished he could say that last one was more frequent but he wasn't that lucky.
He felt like he woke up the half second before she screamed "Dad", he was up and out of the bed so fast. He crashed into her room with the words I have blood ringing in his ears.
The sight of her head shaved made him stumble. "Jesus, what--are you okay? Was somebody here? Something...?" Hopper searched the room with a murderous gaze as he moved towards her, clearly ready to shield her from whatever they were facing.
“Yes,” came her simple answer, eyes blinking owlishly at him since she hadn’t expected him to come in so startled, but - that was also her fault. It was like that leftover electrical shock from those things they put on her chest (she didn’t know the word for it, must search on Google) was coursing through her veins because she was still jittery. There was some disorientation too, not unlike when she first got the memories of what happened at Starcourt.
El should be more shaken than she was. That had been a lot; a whirlwind of emotions from feeling rejected by Mike, seeing Papa again, the cracked memories her mind was trying to piece together of that massacre. The fact that her friends were in danger and she was powerless was a heavy weight that made her feel useless; this had started with her, after all. Her friends were suffering because of it. Hawkins was suffering because of it.
But to know she was so, so close to getting them back to protect them breathed relief into her. “I mean - I am okay. No one is here. I remember.” She used her shirt to wipe the blood off her hands, and went to instinctively push hair away from her face except there was… none. She felt her scalp, and there was some left but not enough. Not what she had proudly grown over the past few years. Gone again. It wasn’t important, in the scheme of things. “Lenora. California.” Life there, trying to fit in and failing spectacularly, lying to Mike, Angela.
(She was going to try and forget the Angela part.)
“Joyce said she had to go to Alaska. With Murray,” she said, looking at Hopper with a squint. “That was a lie.”
It was a good thing El had already explained that people picked up memories from home or Hopper might've had a hard time keeping up. His own recent run in with memories of home hadn't even been his own. They'd been El's, viewed through some kind of magic glacier. And he hadn't worked up the nerve to talk to her about them yet. Now was probably going to need to be that time, but first things first.
Hopper sat down on the edge of her bed. "Guess I shouldn't be surprised she made up a story. She probably didn't want to tell you I was alive until she was sure." Or more like, she didn't want to tell her until she got him home still alive, since there'd been pretty slim odds of that. He frowned at her hair and reached out to move her head gently this way and that. A haircut brought Brenner to mind and that made a rolling fury start up in Hopper's gut, but he tried to focus on making sure she was physically healthy before he moved onto the rest. "Are you sure you're okay? What's the story with the hair?"
Lies, Eleven had learned, were complex. She couldn’t blame Joyce for telling them some fake cover up story. There would have been questions, outbursts; she would insist on going even if she couldn’t be of any help. But the point was that Joyce found him. He was coming home. Hop was coming home.
Except she wasn’t exactly too sure where home even was anymore? El wasn’t in Lenora. She wasn’t sure where she would end up yet.
“Um,” she sounded out, doing the wide-eyed blinking again at that question. “Owens found me.” After I got arrested. “He said Hawkins is in danger, and that they needed me to help fight what is happening there. He took me to this underground place. To work on getting my powers back.”
She stood up off the bed to slowly approach the mirror atop her dresser. She knew this reflection well; she had seen it while she remembered everything in her sleep, she had grown up with it most of her life. It was familiar. It was also always forced on her, and she could remember the feeling of the needle in her neck - the sedative that got pumped into her blood.
El inhaled sharply for the next part. “He did not tell me Papa was there.”
"Owens found you in California?" Of all the government they'd dealt with, Owens was the least self-serving garbage human of the lot. As far as Hopper knew anyway. Maybe things had changed. He didn't appreciate that El had been pulled back into things, but if they were trying to power her back up, then the problem was probably a lot bigger than the military could handle. The demogorgon in the prison might have been a sign of worse that he just hadnt' seen before getting pulled here.
His worry for Joyce flared up for a moment but the name Papa cut through sharp as a blade.
"He's alive? And they're working with him again? Goddamn it." Hopper rubbed a hand over his face roughly. His expression was sadder when his hand fell away. He stepped towards her and nodded towards her hair. "Brenner did this to you." It wasn't a question. "What else did he do?"
“Nothing he has not done before,” Eleven answered quietly. Maybe that wasn’t entirely true, either - she didn’t remember needing to have her heart restarted more than once but she had also learned there were things she hadn’t remembered, period. “But he says my… signals? They got scrambled when I was attacked. Like… a stroke. I have to re-learn how to use my powers.”
Which involved going back to her roots - the isolation tanks, the nodes they would attach to her head to gauge brain activity. “He is having me go back into my memories. There was something I forgot that happened. Something bad. Something I thought I did.”
The lights. Blood stains on the linoleum floors. Broken bones, twisted limbs, cracks in the wall. El could almost swear that if she had woken up a little later then she would have known. She was close. So close. “Something that…” she swallowed, ashamed. “Made me think I was a monster.”
Hopper didn’t like the sound of any of that and it showed in the thunderous expression he barely managed to get under control. If he could strangle Brenner with his bare hands, he would. He’d feed him to a wood chipper. He’d—Hopper clenched his teeth and took a deep breath in, trying to calm himself before he said anything. El didn’t need his useless venom. He grabbed her by the biceps and turned her towards him. At his height, he towered over her if he didn’t do anything about it, so he ducked his head to be closer to eye level.
“Hey. Listen to me. I don’t care what you did or didn’t do while those bastards were treating you like a lab rat. You are not a monster. Not then, and not now, and not ever. You hear me?” He waited for acknowledgement for a moment and then softened his tone as his eyes dropped to the blood she’d wiped off on her shirt. “Your powers…do you remember this…something bad?”
That was some stern affirmation she didn’t know she needed. Her response was a succession of rapid nods, because the monster thing - it was a sore spot. El wasn’t normal. She wasn’t born normal, and the more she saw herself trying to live a regular life back home (and failing spectacularly), she knew she would never be normal. Her responses to things could be considered extreme (murder, without a second thought). That anger, that urge to hurt someone when they’ve wronged her in ways that were not just a scuffle in a high school parking lot scared.
It was why it was so easy to feel like what happened at the laboratory - the children, slaughtered - was her doing.
“Not all,” El carefully responded, gently placing her hands on his forearms. “Only… some parts. Someone killed the other subjects. They were kids, like me. It was violent. They were killed like - like I kill people but it was bad. Worse.” She couldn’t get it out of her head; the gouged eyes, the way their limbs were all bent and broken. It was very methodical. “I was the only one left. I know I used my powers but I do not know who I used them on. So it… had to be me. I was the monster. The curse.”
That last part was a word used on purpose, and with a squeeze of her hands around him. Eleven knew about that conversation from the glacier. She hadn’t brought it up either because it felt intrusive? It gnawed at her, the way Hopper viewed himself. She knew what it felt like. She understood. “But don’t think it was me anymore. Papa wants me to remember who it was.”
"Jesus. That's awful." Nothing about the lab really surprised Hopper anymore, but it could still horrify. All those kids brutally murdered and Eleven left to think there was no one else it could've been but her? The thought curdled in his gut.
And the word curse made him pull back in surprise, as if burned.
He frowned down at her before recovering his focus. "Why doesn't he just tell you who it was? Wait, why am I even asking. It's cause he's a soulless manipulator and he wants you to be powerful and under his thumb so he can feel powerful." It didn't matter that Brenner wasn't there and there was less than nothing that Hopper could do to protect Eleven from him. He gave her a hug anyway. "Sorry I wasn't there, kid. Even if I don't think it would've been better if--well, it doesn't matter. You're here now."
“I am okay,” she promised, not a moment’s hesitation in hugging him back with eyes screwed shut. Hopper was different from Papa, and Eleven hated that she still called him that when he was anything but. “I can handle him. I can… do it. I was close. But then I woke up.”
It would have been easier for Papa to tell her exactly what she needed to remember, wouldn’t it - but it would not have the same effect. This was a lesson, and El knew how his lessons worked. They were often thorough. Sometimes cruel, even if he would caress her cheek and tell her this is for your own good. It was easy to believe him back when she didn’t know what it was like to really have a dad; someone who genuinely cared, who didn’t use you as a weapon.
It made her squeeze Hopper that much tighter before relinquishing him.
“We have matching hair now,” she then said, offering him a dimpled little smile. Eleven figured his own haircut hadn’t been willingly given either.
"I know you can handle him. You're tougher than that weasel." It changed exactly zero percent to talk trash about Brenner here, but it made Hopper feel just a tiny smidge better. El's smile helped too. He rubbed a big hand over her bristled head, remembering when there'd been a head full of curls under his palm. "Think you pull the look off better too."
His expression shifted back to serious, and a little anxious.
"Hey so. Something happened recently and I wasn't sure how to bring it up. With the glacier?" He scratched awkwardly at his jawline. "It showed me what happened at the skating rink. I was uh…hoping we could talk about it."
Eleven’s eyes were known to be expressive. The ‘deer caught in headlights’ look was one that she was mastering right now and if one looked closely they could almost see her brain short circuiting.
Weirdly, discussing Papa was a lot easier than discussing… that. Being abducted and used for experimentation? Been there, done that. Dealing with someone like Angela in the hellscape of the school hierarchy, all while being powerless and feeling absolutely dumb because she felt like she didn’t know anything - not even social cues that were obvious to everyone else - had been territory she did not like being in. It was uncomfortable and unknown. She was happy to never talk about it or pretend it didn’t happen.
Much like her entire high school experience in Lenora.
“Umm.” El stepped back, wringing her hands nervously. Thinking. “If we… talk about it,” she started. “Then can we talk about what I saw at the glacier? Compromise.” Hopper did teach her that word, after all.
He probably should've seen that coming. She was too smart for her old man sometimes. There was a sliver of discomfort - if she'd seen him say he was a curse, what else had she seen? But he couldn't back down now. Hopper huffed a humorless laugh and nudged her towards the bed where he sat down on the edge.
"Yeah, alright. Deal." He wished Joyce was here. She was better at the heart to heart stuff. But he was determined to try, and to do it better than he had before. And he'd hated watching Eleven hurt and strike out to ease her pain. "Tell me about it. The girl." He said "girl" like he suspected Angela didn't deserve to be called anything but an asshole. "And how you were feeling."
“I wanted to be her friend,” she said simply, shoulders lifting into a small shrug. Angela represented everything normal to her - she was well-liked, had good grades, a social circle, pretty. “But she did not like me. She said… things.” Ugly things. Mean things. Angela made comments to needle her where it hurt the most (like losing her dad), and made her feel stupid. She reminded her of some of the girls at school here, too; smiling while saying something vicious.
Eleven went back towards her bed, sitting at the edge as she wiped her palms over her pajama pants. They were a little sweaty. Nerves. “Then she did… that. I was angry, and hurt, and I wanted to hurt her back. So I did. But I think I took it too far, and when I got arrested the next day they told me I gave her a concussion and I was being charged.”
Then, after a second, she said (with a wince), “I don’t regret what I did.”
None of that surprised Hopper. He'd seen enough of what happened and the lead up to get the gist. And he wasn't exactly surprised Eleven had struggled to fit in. She was special and strange. More average kids got bullied every day.
"You don't regret it but you think you took it too far? Maybe what you don't regret is standing up for yourself." He turned a thoughtful gaze her way and grimaced. "Bullies, they…they make themselves feel bigger by tearing people down. But you've suffered worse bullies than some snot-nosed brat who's probably never struggled in her life. I want you to feel like you can stand up for yourself, El. I just don't want some dumb kid to ruin your chance at a future. And I don't want you to think the only way you can solve problems is by kicking their ass."
He paused and gave her a reluctant sideways smirk. "Even when they really really deserve it."
Well, she was mostly sure she didn’t regret it. El could recognize that brute force was excessive. That moment where the skate met her face, though - she was sure that felt like what people called ‘therapy.’ Then, afterwards, came the shame. People looked at her like she was a psycho. Mike looked at her with a degree of horror. It was a bad feeling.
She sighed.
“Violence always solved my problems before,” Eleven mumbled, picking beneath her nails. Was she pouting? Kind of. Monsters and people with guns were what she usually dealt with. High school girls were new. They were monsters in their own way, and she didn’t know how else to defend herself or make Angela stop. “But I do not want to get arrested again or have everyone… stare at me like that. I will try to keep the skates on my feet next time. And I have not gotten into any fights in school here even if people in high school are assholes, so.”
That counted for something, right?
Hopper snorted. "I know it usually works for you. But high school bullies--" He emphasized the word in response to her colorful language, but sounded more indulgent than preachy. "--Are a different problem than monsters and government goons. Your problem-solving skills are like bringing a bazooka to a debate."
It wasn't lost on him that he was a person who had punched his way to resolutions too often to not feel like a hypocrite. But he had to try, for her sake. Whatever this world was like, however long they were here, she'd need all the same skills to survive away from the world of superpowered heroes. He nudged her gently with an elbow.
"It's not your fault, okay? What that girl did to you. It wasn't right. Come talk to me if it happens again. And try to remember that you made your best friends by being yourself. Anybody who thinks less of you isn't worth your time."
“Okay,” El relented, biting the inside of her cheek. This was… not a bad talk. She didn’t even know what to expect with a talk like this (was this a heart-to-heart?). She could recall Joyce asking her questions about school, friends, how she was acclimating. The answers were lies; the same lies she told Mike and told herself, too afraid to admit to herself that maybe this normalcy everyone else had wasn’t for her.
It was a tough thought shake off. It would take time.
She let a moment of silence float between them, although that was her attempt to figure out what words she wanted to say for the next part. “It is not your fault, either. What happened. With…” With Sara. El paused to pull at the braided bracelet on her wrist, snapping it right over the inked 011. Hopper had told her she died. What he hadn’t told her before all of this was that he blamed himself for it because of - stuff he inhaled? From war? “You were wrong with what you said about me and Joyce, and how we did not need you. But we did. We do.”
El reached out for his hand to squeeze, and the look she was giving him was almost a glare but not quite. There was love behind it, not anger.
Hopper was feeling pretty good about this chat until it turned back around on him. Not that she did it badly. It was a perfect about-face really. A shot right to the heart. He closed his eyes and tried not to let the burn behind his eyes turn into tears. Thinking about Sara would probably never be easy, and he'd probably always blame himself for her illness. But it helped to hear El say it wasn't his fault anyway. It helped to hear her say she needed him.
"I…damn it, El." He covered her hand with his free one and opened his eyes to give her a shaky smile. "Still think I need you both more. You saved me, kid. Made me want to really live again instead of just get by." Letting go of her hand, Hopper wrapped an arm around her and pulled her into a sideways hug. "Sorry you had to see that stuff."
“You saved me too,” El told him, trying not to let the emotion choke her up but that always failed. She was an emotional creature. Oftentimes she felt too much, and that was a dangerous trait for someone who was born and bred to be a government weapon. “But I am glad I saw it. I wanted to know what happened to you. And I know there was more.”
Hopper was gone for months. Months. He lost too much weight, and there were these scars she got glimpses of sometimes but did not know the full extent of. It made her angry but there was nothing she could do with that rage. It seemed like a waste of time to focus on it too, when she had him back and their lives weren’t in the state of constant threat.
She wiped her cheek, nose a little red, and blinked up at him with a bleary smile. “I am glad you kept on fighting. I am always going to need my dad. I needed you in California, and I need you here now too.”
Eleven had been taken care of well. The people at the Barns were nothing but accepting. Atreus let her help around the Sanctuary, and she had Cloud and Kratos to sit around with in comfortable silence. Richie and Max opened their doors to her, made sure she was fed and clothed and went to school. Katou had been her confidant with school woes. But none of them could fill the role that Hopper had.
She was right; there was more. But seeing her emotions painted across her face, so expressive as always, made his heart ache too much for more. The more could stay back in the Soviet Union where it belonged. His kid had been through enough.
"Good. Sounds like we're stuck with each other," he smirked, pressing a kiss to her temple. "I would never have left you by choice, El. I won't ever." That much he could say without an ounce of hesitation or doubt. He glanced behind her at the bed. "Except to let you sleep, that is. Think you can try to grab a few more hours? Or do you want to move this into the living room and see what bad tv is on in this weird place in the middle of the night?"
Sleep was tempting but El was definitely too restless for it. Emotionally exhausted, sure - but physically she felt like she was still running off the jolts of electricity they shot through her for another heart restart. “Television,” she agreed, drying the rest of her face with her hands. “Please. One channel usually plays The Real Housewives of Atlanta and… it is bad.”
Her head tilted to the side, contemplating.
“But in a very funny way. They are all supposed to be real people. I’m not convinced of that yet.”
He’d be lying if he said he wished she had better taste in entertainment. Making fun of terrible tv with her was just as fun as enjoying the good shows.
“I should’ve known you’d already know the answer to that.” Hopper snorted and pushed to his feet, tugging her along with him. “Come on, then. Find the fake housewives on the tv and I’ll get the ice cream out of the freezer.”