Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The room was dark, the only illumination coming from the flashing red lights embedded in the walls. Alarms scraped and grated at their ears, and the lost children huddled closer together, hands squeezing tight.

There were five of them in the room. One was missing.

The lights were bright and the alarms were piercingly loud, and the children were terrified. One of them was crying softly, and another wrapped her arms around his shoulders and buried her face in his chest.

The boy nearest the door noticed first. There was a crack of darkness running the length of the door, between the door and the frame. He reached out a hand, tentative and cautious, and touched it.

It swung silently open, perfectly balanced on its hinges.

The children exchanged startled glances. The door was open. If she had had the words to do so, the girl could have explained that the electricity that powered the locks had failed, due to a catastrophe deeper in the facility. She could not have explained how she knew this, either, but she did.

The other children did not know this, and they didn’t need to. All they knew was this:

The door was open, the defenses down.

They could leave. It might be their only chance to escape. But...

They were missing someone.

They couldn’t leave without her.

They all understood this with the silent, natural telepathy granted to a group of friends who had spent all their lives together, and also with the decidedly unnatural telepathy granted by highly illegal and secretive experimentation.

The lights in the hallway were flickering madly as they filed silently out of the room, bare feet light on the cold floor. They kept close together, moving in a tight knot. The boy who had opened the door took the lead.

There was a long smear of blood down the wall opposite them. The boy in front averted his eyes quickly. He knew that it had to have come from one of their tormentors, one of the guards who dragged them down the long hallways, but he still didn’t like to see it. He tried to shepherd the others away quicker.

Every instinct screamed against it, but he lead them deeper into the innards of the building, down hallways and flights of stairs. The facility, usually so busy, was deserted, and the ragged breathing of the frightened children was the only sound audible besides the blaring of the alarms.

Still they pressed on, towards the room they all dreaded, the room where they knew their missing sister to be. The testing room.

There was a body. The boy leading the way ground to a halt, throwing one arm out to signal a stop. The body was one the boy recognized; one of the women who had come in the day before as ‘observers.’ The children had disliked them immediately. They had had greedy eyes and had poked and prodded at the children as though they were livestock to be bought and sold.

Those eyes weren’t greedy and hungry anymore, though. They were just blank, holding a memory of awful terror. The boy couldn’t bring himself to hate her anymore. He bent down and gently closed her eyelids. His fingers came away bloody.

At an unspoken signal, they moved on.

The lights were strobing now, flashing wildly as though in warning. They passed more bodies, more pools of blood congealing on the floor. They tried to step around them at first, but soon there were simply too many too avoid, and they were forced to walk through. Their bare feet left bloody footprints behind them on the rare patches of clean floor.

The air was getting colder. It happened gradually, so that the children didn’t notice at first, but as they approached the testing rooms, the chill became biting. The boy in front could see his breath.

He hated the cold.

He cupped his hands in front of his chest and concentrated, screwing his eyes shut. After a tense moment, a small flame bloomed to life in his hands, lighting his face with a warm red glow and dispelling the cold, driving it back momentarily.

He held the fire in one hand and raised the other to wipe his nose, painting a bloody stripe across the back of it.

The air was full of floating somethings, tiny white motes that landed on the children’s skin. Had they ever been outdoors, they would have compared them to snow.

The elevator was painted with blood, splattered across the floor, the walls, the ceiling. On the ceiling was something else as well- an unidentifiable wet patch that seemed to throb and pulse. The children watched it apprehensively for a moment, but the pull of their sister was stronger, and they boarded the elevator.

The buttons were dark, but as the red-haired girl reached out to press them, they flickered to life. She pushed the down arrow, and down they went.

It was there that they found their sister, struggling down the hall, supporting herself with one hand on the wall. She was soaked, and her face was covered with blood, spilling from her nostrils and dripping from her chin onto the floor. The expression in her eyes was one of pure relief when she saw them. As if she’d thought she’d had to escape on her own. As if she’d thought they’d ever leave her.

The boy took her hand and helped her to stand, supporting her with one arm, letting the sputtering flame in his hand warm her wet and shaking from.

It’s okay. We’re here now. We’re here.

The strongest of the boys picked her up, and her head drooped onto his shoulder as she finally succumbed to bone-deep exhaustion.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, half-conscious. “I’m sorry.”

He squeezed her hand, comforting and understanding and caring.

They were together again, all six of them, the way it was meant to be, the way it always had been.

They were together, and all the doors were open.

The way back up was easier, because it no longer felt like they were falling deeper and deeper into a hole with something cruel and awful waiting at the bottom. Instead, they were ascending, finally leaving the place where they had been imprisoned for so long. Every step they took away from the testing rooms, the air grew warmer, and the weights on their chests fell away.

One of the surviving guards tried to stop them at the door, but they were too close to the freedom they had longed for, too high on the idea of it, to be denied now. The red haired girl flung her hand out on impulse and a jagged bolt of lighting flashed across the room, sending the guard flying like a rag doll. He hit the window behind him so hard a spiderweb of cracks ran across it.

The girl swayed on her feet, eyes drooping, blood running from both nostrils. The dark-skinned boy was at her side in an instant and caught her before she could collapse, supporting her over his shoulders.

When they stepped outside, it was raining, great buckets pouring down from the sky, washing the blood from their skin, letting them feel clean and alive for the first time in far too long. Before, their experiences with water were harsh, cold showers and the claustrophobic darkness of the bathtub. This was different. It was so, so different. It was gentle, and cool, and cleansing.

It felt like freedom on their skin.

Chapter Text

Jonathan Byers blinked awake slowly, then all at once when the scent of smoke reached his nose. He tumbled gracelessly out of bed, and almost sprinted out his door. When he reached the hallway, he averted his eyes from the closed door to Will’s room out of long-worn habit.

When he reached the kitchen, he looked around worriedly. He didn’t see any fire, which was good. His mother was standing at the stove, poking at something on a pan.

“Mom?” Jonathan asked carefully, still on edge.

She swung around, still holding the pan. “Jonathan! Good morning! I, um, I tried to make bacon,” she said with a sheepish smile, holding out the pan so he could see. Sure enough, there were five strips of blackened bacon sizzling on the cast iron. “They got a little burned.”

Jonathan’s shoulders slumped in poorly-disguised relief, and he felt the careful, fixed smile on his face melt into something much more genuine. Today was a Good Day, then.

Jonathan categorized his mother’s behavior, day by day, into three categories. Good Days, Okay Days, and Bad Days. Good Days, like today, were when she seemed fine, and did something like make breakfast or clean the house unprompted. When everything was like it should be. On Okay Days, which were by far the most common, she was quieter, distracted, and frequently ended up calling Hopper.

On Bad Days… well, the last bad day had been a week ago, and Jonathan had had to leave school to pick her up from where she’d collapsed raving in the supermarket.

But today was one of the rare Good Days, and he watched for a moment longer as she fussed over the burned bacon, just drinking in the sight of her when she was at her best, before she ordered him into his seat and poured him a glass of orange juice.

It was the Good Days that made the Bad Days worth it. Jonathan loved his mother, he really did. He’d much rather live with her and act as her caretaker, and put up with being known as the kid with the crazy mom, than the alternative. The alternative was getting sent to live with Lonnie in Indianapolis, and he didn’t want that.

She was a good mother, and she loved her sons. That was the problem.

The problem was that Joyce Byers only had one son. The problem was that Joyce Byers thought she had two.

Jonathan slid into his seat and she set a plate of scrambled eggs and burned bacon in front of him before sitting down across from him.

“Did you take your medicine this morning?” he asked, knowing it was an awful, tactless question and needing to ask it anyways.

“Yes,” she said, pointing at him with her fork. “I’m going to do better at that from now on. I promise. I owe you that much.”

Jonathan was relieved beyond words. Her medication had been adjusted recently, and she’d resisted taking it because, in her words, they were ‘trying to make her forget.’ He didn’t need to ask what she thought they were trying to make it forget.

It was Will. The ghost who’d lived in their house for twelve years, haunting the corners and driving his mother insane. The little brother he’d never had. Jonathan had been five when his brother was born dead, sitting in the waiting room as his mother screamed and sobbed.

It wasn’t that he didn’t miss his brother. He did. He’d done his mourning and moved on. His mother hadn’t. She couldn’t. She insisted, consistently, that Will was still alive. That he’d been stolen away by the scientists at Hawkins Lab, that they’d taken him to use as a weapon or a spy or something else, like something out of a conspiracy movie.

Jonathan was just so tired of hearing about Will. He was tired of walking past a dead boy’s room every morning.

On the worst days, when she was screaming in the supermarket or curled in the corner, he found himself wishing Will would die for real, that his ghost would stop haunting their house and let him have his mother back.

“Thanks, Mom,” he said, and meant it.

Behind them, unbeknownst to him, Joyce’s morning pill disappeared down the drain.

~~~

Nancy Wheeler was a perfect girl. She had perfect grades and a perfect smile and perfect hair. She was popular without being mean, she had a boyfriend, she had a baby sister and her parents were together and everything about her life was perfect.

Right?

So long as you ignored the baby brother that never was, everything was perfect.

Nancy’s parents were masters of the Stepford Smile. They were happy, and fine, and in love. They had their two perfect daughters in their perfect house at the end of the cul de sac, and everything was fine. Yes, they’d lost a son, but they were perfectly stable, perfectly normal, and nothing at all like crazy Joyce Byers up on the hill.

Nancy saw Jonathan Byers out of the corner of her eye, and immediately felt guilty for what she’d thought about his mother. He walked with his head down, staring fixedly at the dirty hallway floor, scuffed by hundreds of pairs of shoes, his shoulders bowed like there was a heavy weight on his shoulders.

Nancy chewed on his lower lip for a moment, tasting strawberry lip gloss, considering whether to approach him, to ask him what was wrong (or not, Jesus, what was wrong with her, everyone in town knew what was wrong). She’d just made up her mind to do so when Barb rounded the corner and started towards her and the opportunity vanished.

Jonathan glanced up, met her eyes for a heartbeat, then looked away and moved on. Nancy felt inexplicably guilty, then berated herself for feeling that way.

So instead, she gossiped with Barb about Steve who was definitely not her boyfriend, and invited her to his party, and got a note in her locker and kissed Steve in the second-floor girl’s bathroom, and tried her hardest to be normal, perfect Nancy.

Her mother and father had been in the hospital room, but she’d been in the hallway, waiting anxiously to know what had happened. She’d seen the nurse carry her stillborn baby brother out, and she’d heard his weak cries.

They said he wasn’t breathing when he was born.

She knew they were lying.

She was late to first period.

~~~

Jim Hopper had grown accustomed to the regular delusional phone calls from Joyce Byers. It had become part of his routine- wake up with a splitting headache, chase it off with whiskey and painkillers, get dressed, arrive late to work, eat a donut before Flo could catch him and replace it with an apple, and get a call from Joyce Byers about how her son wasn’t really dead.

He was in no way qualified to act as her therapist. He’d encouraged her, many times, to see a professional to help her work through everything, and she’d even gone to a few appointments he’d helped her set up, but never stuck with it.

He always felt like a hypocrite when he did that anyways, considering his own preferred method of therapy came out of a bottle.

Taking her calls seemed like the least he could do. He knew what it was to lose a kid, after all, and he could still be there as a friend, if nothing else.

“She call yet?” he asked Flo as he ducked into the station. He didn’t need to clarify who ‘she’ was.

“Yep,” she confirmed. “Jim, there was also a call from-”

He was already turning away, tuning out the incoming lecture. He grabbed a chocolate doughnut and took a bite before she could stop him. He had the Byers’ phone number by memory.

She picked up on the first ring, and he wondered if that meant she’d been sitting by the phone waiting for him to call.

“Hey, Joyce,” he said.

“Hey, Hop.”

“What’s going on?” he asked, always the first question he asked when she called. The answers varied wildly, but it always got her talking about what was on her mind.

“Don’t laugh.”

“I never do.”

“I think something happened last night, Hop. At the lab.”

“Yeah?”

“There were alarms. Going off. And lights flashing, and-”

“Joyce,” Hopper interrupted carefully. “Why were you at the lab?”

Silence on the other end of the line. Hopper raised a hand to his head and rubbed his temples with forefinger and thumb, closing his eyes. His headache had not retreated at all, and this conversation was only serving to aggravate it.

“Joyce, we talked about this," he said when she didn't answer. "It’s trespassing. You have to stop doing that.”

“I didn’t stay long,” she mumbled. Sometimes Hopper felt like he was talking to a little kid when he spoke with her. “And I didn’t even cross the fence. I just… needed to see.”

“Goddammit, Joyce. One of these days you’ll get caught, and then they can press charges. We both know you can’t afford a legal battle like that. I get that you’re willing to risk it, I do, but think about Jonathan for a damn minute, would you? What would that do to him if you went to prison?”

Flo was waving for his attention. He held up a finger to signal one minute, and she replied by holding up the phone and mouthing it’s important.

“Listen, Joyce, I gotta go, there’s something important-”

“Just,” she cut him off, “look into it? Please, Hopper. I really think there’s something there this time. For me.”

How many times had he heard that now? There’s something this time. I have proof this time. This time I know it’s real. Look into it. Please.

“Alright, Joyce,” he said with an exhausted sigh. “Talk to you later.”

“Thanks, Hop.”

He hung up the phone with a click and sat there for a moment, feeling the headache abate slightly now that that conversation was over with.

Flo waved for his attention again, and he levered himself to his feet with a grunt and went to see what was so important. He was expecting another story about a stupid group of teenagers drinking underage or something like that, something barely worth his time.

Nothing ever happened in Hawkins, anyway.

“Call from Benny’s,” was what she said instead. “I think you need to go there right away.”

~~~

“Oh, Jesus,” Hopper swore when he saw the scene of the crime. The diner’s usual warm aroma of grease, meat and cheese had been replaced by the rotting stench of decay, and there were flies buzzing lazily through the air, crawling over the body. Benny was sprawled across the table, gunshot wound in the side of his head, pistol in his hand.

“What the hell,” Callahan echoed from behind him, seemingly without a smart remark for once in his life. “Suicide?”

Hopper didn’t answer immediately, tuning out his officers and looking around the room. It was a real mess. There was a massive blood spatter on one of the walls, probably from the gunshot, but…

Hopper’s thoughts trailed off. It was on the wrong wall. If Benny had shot himself in the side of the head, where the entry wound was, the blood should have sprayed in the direction of the kitchen. But it hadn’t. It was behind him.

With that fact slotted into place, he could see the wrongness of the crime scene clearly. There were pots and pans scattered across the kitchen floor, and what looked like a scorch mark near one of the walls. There was something else, too. Hopper frowned, and crouched down on his haunches to get a better look.

There were dragging marks on the dirty floor, all leading out the door. Almost like someone had been towing bodies away.

“Chief?” Powell asked from behind him. Hopper stood again, shaken out of his reverie, and turned to face him.

“It’s not a suicide. Something’s wrong here.”

“Well, what else could it be? Murder? Everyone loved Benny. And besides, Chief, this is Hawkins, remember?”

I think something happened last night, Hop.

“Find everyone who was in the diner over the last few days,” he said instead, his tone leaving no room for argument. “Ask them if they saw anything suspicious.”

Something was very, very wrong.

Chapter Text

“Did Benny seem… depressed at all, when you were there?”

The witness- Hopper had already forgotten his name- shook his head emphatically. “No sir, chief. Benny was as friendly as ever. Big smile. He and some of the boys and I were planning a fishing trip for the weekend.”

“Was there anyone there you didn’t know? Anyone suspicious, maybe?”

The man frowned for a second, screwing up his bearded face in exaggerated thought. “Uh, I don’t think so.”

Hopper sighed and began to look away. There had been five men in the diner that day, so far as he’d been able to tell, and this was the fifth. The other four hadn’t been able to tell him anything, and it seemed like this one was going to be exactly as unhelpful.

“Wait.”

Hopper stilled. “What?”

“Well, I don’t know if it’s what you’re looking for, but… there were those kids.”

Hopper’s head snapped back around, all his attention on the man once more. This was the first real lead he’d had all day. “What kids?”

The man shifted uncomfortably. “I mean, I didn’t get a good look-“

“What. Kids.”

“There were a few of them. Looked like they’d been sleeping in the woods or something. Real short hair, wearing… I don’t know. Looked almost like those plastic dresses they give sick people.”

“Hospital gowns?” Hopper repeated incredulously.

“Yeah, maybe. I don’t know, man, like I said, I only saw three of ‘em. Couldn’t even tell you if they were boys or girls.”

~Before~

The children slept in the woods. The youngest of the boys, the one with ‘012’ tattooed on his wrist, had closed his eyes for a long moment and seen a place where they could find shelter, and so they’d gone, to a place where an overhang was formed by a fallen tree that sheltered them from the elements and kept them from view. They scraped together a pile of fallen leaves and dry sticks, and the boy who had led them out of the facility, concentrating carefully, let sparks spill from his fingers and set the tinder ablaze. The flames licked at the sticks, then caught, and soon the children were huddled around a small but merry fire.

In another life, that boy’s name would have been Mike Wheeler, but that is not the world this story takes place in. In this world, that boy had only ever been known as Six, and he had no idea that he had an older sister nearby who was trying desperately not to think about him.

“We made it,” he said aloud, the first words any of them had spoken since their escape. In the facility, where they could be punished cruelly for speaking out of turn, silence had been their shield. To speak freely, finally, outside the safety of their heads, was liberating.

“We made it,” he repeated, and the words moved in a wave around the campfire as the tired, dirty, and free children echoed them, their voices soft and rough from disuse. There was more to discuss, and to plan, and to do, but for the moment all that seemed far away and unimportant compared to the warmth of the fire, the nearness of friends, and the overwhelming drowsiness darkening their vision.

They slept that way, curled together, as the rain slowed and became a drizzle, and as their campfire burned down to ashes. As the clouds cleared in the early hours of the morning and stars the children had never seen before shone down from above, they slept, and guarded each other against nightmares of sharp scalpels and gloved hands.

~~~

The day dawned cold and grey, the thin sunlight of autumn shining through the gaps between bare branches. When they woke late in the morning, they were hungry. Hunger was far from a new sensation for any of the six- their health and happiness had never been a priority for the men holding them prisoner- but they had always known they would be fed eventually. Not anymore. If they didn’t find food, they wouldn’t eat.

They were free, and they agreed, unanimously, that that was a good thing. It was something they had hungered for as long as any of them could remember. However, equally undeniable was another fact: with freedom came danger.

They were free, but in leaving their prison, they had also left a place that was, in its twisted way, the only home they had ever known. Aside from each other, they were utterly alone.

They would make their own way. So long as they had each other, they could do that. They could do anything.

~~~

Six liked Benny Hammond. He had a friendly, genuine smile, and despite his intimidating appearance, was very gentle with the children who had slunk into his diner in ratty, dirt-smeared hospital gowns, holding hands like they’d die if they let go.

The plan had been this: Six, Eleven and Twelve would go inside and try to get something to eat, and the other three would stand guard outside. This plan had rather predictably flown off the rails moments after the three entered the diner, when they were caught in the kitchen. They’d flinched back, Six trying to put himself in front of his brother and sister, but Benny had seen their terror and any anger he might have held towards them evaporated. After a halting conversation, in which the children didn’t know enough words and Benny didn’t know which questions to ask, they’d managed to reach a tentative deal.

They told him, in fumbling speech, their names (numbers) and that they had come from someplace very bad. The sympathy on Benny’s face made Six wonder if maybe he had come from someplace bad as well. He had set them up with a pile of hamburgers and French fries, then left to ‘place a call.’

Eleven had stared at the too-small tables for a moment, then jerked her head to one side and four of them flew together. That was where they sat, stuffing their faces with diner food, eyes widening at the taste.

Six had never eaten what Benny called ‘French fries’ before, but he decided he loved them. They had a flavor entirely unlike the tasteless meals that had made up his diet until that point, salty and greasy and warm.

After a while, Benny rejoined them, laughing softly at the amount of food they’d managed to consume. “Guess you guys were really hungry, huh?” he said. Six nodded rapidly, mouth full of hamburger.

“I called some people who’re gonna take care of you guys, okay? Child Protective Services. They’re going to make sure you’re safe and fed, and they’ll make sure the fu- the bad people who did this to you will get caught and punished. Sound good?”

The children exchanged looks and thoughts around the table. Food and safety and justice did sound good. It sounded amazing. Six looked back at Benny and nodded his assent.

“Good,” Benny said with a decisive nod. “You kids ever have milkshakes?”

That was when Twelve, the boy who had been born Will Byers, began to scream, and all of the children immediately looked to him in alarm and terror. All of them had… abilities. Eleven could move things without touching them, and Six could create fire from nothing.

Twelve saw things before they happened.

“They’re here!” he wailed, eyes screwed shut. “They’re here!”

A bullet hole appeared in Benny’s forehead, splattering the wall behind him with gruesome red. Nine, the girl who could have been Max Mayfield, made a despairing, moaning scream, and buried her face in Ten’s shoulder.

The diner exploded into chaos. Both doors flew open, and soldiers holding stun-guns charged in, boots loud and heavy on the greasy floor. Six threw out a hand and the first soldiers were burned alive by a jet of fire, leaving a scorch mark on the floor that would later bewilder Jim Hopper the next morning. It sapped his strength, and he sagged against Eleven’s shoulder as the smaller girl struggled to support him.

The soldiers just kept coming, stepping over the bodies of their fallen comrades.

Across the room, he saw Nine make a sharp gesture, and the stun-guns of the men near her exploded, electricity arcing up and down their bodies before they collapsed like puppets with cut strings.

The soldiers just kept coming, stepping over the bodies of their fallen comrades.

Six suddenly saw clearly that this was a fight they couldn’t win. For all their powers, they were just six children. They couldn’t stand against an endless supply of trained soldiers sent to recapture them.

“Run!” he screamed, voice cracking. “Split up and run!”

He grabbed Eleven’s hand, and they ran.

~Now~

“This is the night of the seventh?” Hopper asked, watching the surveillance footage closely.

The suited man gave him a nod of confirmation. The grainy video ran for a few more seconds, then cut out completely. Hopper blinked.

“That’s it?”

“I told you,” the man said, looking insufferably smug. Hopper wanted to punch the smirk off of his face. “Nothing happened that day. We had a minor security system malfunction, but nothing else. Is there anything else I can help you with, Sheriff?”

“It’s Chief, and actually, I do have one more question. You don’t have any kids around here, do you?”

There was just a moment of shocked recognition in the man’s eyes before he rearranged his face back into the same bland, indulgent smile, so quickly Hopper almost missed it. “Of course not, Chief Hopper. This is no place for children.”

Hopper left Hawkins Lab certain of two things.

One: It had rained on the night of the seventh. It had poured. And yet there were no signs of the storm on the recording he’d been shown.

Two: He was being lied to.

~~~

Jonathan Byers was in the woods, his camera a reassuringly heavy weight against his chest. These nighttime excursions of his had become more and more common lately. Between his mother’s deteriorating condition and school restarting, the woods had become his refuge, the place where he could be alone and relax with nothing expected of him, free from the judgmental eyes of his classmates and the pressures of caring for his mother.

He liked being invisible, liked seeing without being seen.

He raised the camera and snapped another picture of the girl sitting on the diving board, feet dangling in the pool as steam rose from the warm water into the cold autumn air. She looked lonely.

Jonathan could sympathize. He was intimately familiar with loneliness.

The camera clicked and he looked down to rewind it, just for a moment. When he looked up again, she was gone, and the light in the pool was out. She must have gone inside. He pushed himself to his feet, legs cramped after spending more than an hour crouched awkwardly in the bushes, and started back through the woods towards his house.

The noise of a few rustling leaves and a stick snapping beneath a bare foot was the only notice he got before he found himself staring at two kids, propping each other up. They were stick-thin, with shaved heads and big eyes in hollow-cheeked faces. One of them had dried blood crusted beneath his nose, and had placed himself defensively in front of the other.

“Hey,” Jonathan said carefully, acutely aware of the terror in their eyes and stances, like they could bolt at any minute. He found himself focusing on the one in front. There was something distantly familiar in those features, like an echo of someone he knew.

“I’m not gonna hurt you,” he promised, unconsciously switching to the way he spoke to his mother on her worst days: carefully and patiently, like he was addressing a wounded, wild animal that could flee or bite at one wrong move. “Are- are you okay? Do you have someplace to go?”

The one in back- a girl, Jonathan thought, but he wasn’t sure- shook her head slowly.

“Okay. Listen. My car is nearby. I can take you home, get you some food and a place to sleep, and- figure it out.” He could call the chief. He would know what to do. How to find their parents, or their homes, or… something. If it wasn’t their parents who’d done this, which was an idea that made him feel sick. They looked battered and exhausted, and the part of him that had never gotten to be a big brother wanted to see them safe.

The boy murmured something. Jonathan had to strain to make it out. “Find… friends?”

“You’re looking for your friends?” Jonathan checked.

The boy nodded, looking like he was about to cry.

“Okay. We’ll find your friends. Promise.”

“Promise?” the girl repeated back, and the look of confusion on her face broke Jonathan’s heart.

“Yeah,” he said, bending down slightly to look her in the eye. “Promise. It’s something you can’t ever break.”

“Promise,” she whispered to herself, testing out the word. She met his eyes, and nodded once with a solemnity beyond her years. Jonathan had the distinct feeling that a pact had just been sealed.

“Alright. Let’s go.”

~~~

Twelve was lost, and all alone. His brothers and sisters had fled the ambush successfully, and he took some small measure of comfort in that, but he was still cold, and lost, and very alone.

He hadn’t been truly alone, away from all of his brothers and sisters, for a very long time. Longer than he could remember. Even when they’d been locked up in their rooms, they were still close enough to sense over their shared connection. Now, however, they were too far away even for that. He could only get the vaguest of senses of them.

If nothing else, they were all alive. He would know if they weren’t.

He hugged himself tightly, trying to warm himself against the creeping nighttime chill. His bare feet were cold, and the slimy feeling of wet leaves on his skin made him shudder.

His foot caught on a root hidden under the layer of fallen leaves and he crashed to the ground, knocking the wind from his lungs and biting his tongue hard enough to taste iron. He whimpered involuntarily and rolled over, and a fat red drop of blood fell from his mouth and dripped to the ground.

Suddenly, without warning, a vision flashed across his eyes of a faceless head that opened like a gruesome flower to reveal a gaping mouth studded all the way around with teeth. The image cleared after a moment, and he bit back a scream. If he’d seen it, it was coming. He only had seconds. He shoved himself to his feet and sprinted through the silent forest, unsure where he was going except away.

He could hear it moving through the trees behind him, and he tried to run faster, but it always sounded like it was just steps behind him.

Help! he cried out to his friends, but there was no one around to hear.

The trees were thinning out. He could see a halo of orange light cast by a streetlight. Just a little further. If he could reach that light, he’d be safe.

He turned to look over his shoulder, and was greeted by the open mouth from his vision, an image from a nightmare.

The monster pounced.

The streetlight flickered, then went out.

Chapter Text

They all felt it when Twelve vanished. A wave of pure, overwhelming fear crashed over their connection, then his presence, already faint from distance, vanished almost entirely, leaving only the barest of impressions in the backs of their minds.

Jonathan pulled the car over when he heard soft crying from the backseat. The girl had buried her face in her hands, shoulders shaking, and the boy was pressed against his side as close as he could get, arms wrapped around her midsection.

She looked up at him through her fingers, eyes swollen and red, face solemn. “Friend… gone.”

He understood.

~~~

This was a bad idea. This was an emphatically bad idea. This was the exact thing that Hopper had told Joyce to stop doing, and he really needed to take his own damn advice and leave well enough alone when it came to Hawkins Lab.

But between Joyce’s stories about the place, Benny’s murder and everything wrong with the crime scene, stories about shaved kids in hospital gowns, and now falsified security footage… well. If nothing else, it was worth checking out. Maybe Joyce was onto something after all.

He ducked through the hole he’d chopped in the chain-link fence, resting one hand carefully on the handle of his service pistol, and started towards the building.

~~~

The laboratory was eerily quiet, and Hopper’s booted footsteps sounded too loud in the silence. The fluorescent lights were dimmed for the night, but he still felt uncomfortably exposed in the open hallways. He was acutely aware of how many laws he was breaking here, for the sole purpose of indulging a delusional woman’s fantasies.

Except that wasn’t the only reason, and he knew it. There was also all the bizarre details of Benny’s death, and eyewitness accounts of children with shaved heads straight out of some conspiracy film, and that bullshit security footage they’d tried to pass off as real when he’d attempted to question them legitimately.

He rounded a corner and found himself looking down a long corridor lined with metal doors. Each had a number carved into it: 001 through 012. The first five or so were empty, as was number eight, but the remaining six looked disturbingly like children’s rooms, albeit very empty and sterile ones. There were stuffed animals in some of them. Room nine had a couple of toy cars, and room ten had a few books about animals. Room twelve was practically wallpapered with impressively detailed crayon drawings. Room eleven had a stuffed animal of some kind, and room seven had some toy soldiers. Room six had, of all things, an old Dungeons and Dragons monster manual and dungeon master’s guide, and some dice.

“Jesus Christ,” he muttered under his breath, utterly disgusted. He hadn’t believed Joyce. He hadn’t wanted to. Experiments on little kids? Who could be cruel enough to do that? But he couldn’t deny the evidence in front of his eyes. He felt sick. How long had this been going on? Ten years? More? Joyce’s stillbirth had been eleven or twelve years ago, he thought, so if her son really was… part of all this, it had to have been at least that long.

The same age Sarah would be, he thought, and had to force himself to loosen his white-knuckled fingers on the handle of his gun. He hoped he wouldn’t run into any personnel. In the mood he was in, he wasn’t sure if he’d be able to stop himself from shooting.

The halls were perfectly clean and white, with no sign of the bloody footprints six children had left not so long before. The illusion of clean efficiency was only spoiled by the plastic biohazard curtains blocking off sections of the building. He’d noticed them earlier that day, on his more legitimate visit. He shoved one aside and moved into the quarantine zone.

He drew his gun and proceeded with more caution than before down into the bowels of the building. He was under no illusions as to his likelihood of survival if he was caught.

He stepped into an elevator and stabbed the down button with more force necessary, noting with no small amount of apprehension the three different layers of sheet metal that slid into place as the door closed.

Whatever was down there, they sure as hell didn’t want it getting out.

He stepped out of the elevator slowly. The air was full of floating particles, drifting lazily. Hopper half-wished he’d brought something to cover his face- god know if that crap was toxic or radioactive or something else- but if he left now there was no guarantee he’d ever be able to get back in. He had to press on.

After about a hundred feet of clean floor and toxic air, the hallway opened into a large, round room. The first thing Hopper noticed was the tank. It was big- not big enough for an adult, but a child could fit comfortably. One of the sides was shattered, and the bottom six inches or so still held lukewarm salt water.

The second thing he noticed was the wound.

That was the only way he could describe it. There was a gaping, pulsing wound in the far wall. He took a few careful steps closer, until he was close enough to touch it. It looked like it was made of something stringy and translucent, almost like mucus, and it was spreading. As he looked, he saw the tentacle-like growths crawl a little further along the walls.

He reached out and touched it, caught someplace between fascinated horror and complete disgust. The strands of mucus stretching across the opening resisted for a moment, then parted. He pulled his hand back.

Something stung him in the neck. He blinked and brought his hand up in pure impulse. When he pulled it away, dark blood glistened on his fingers.

His vision began to go fuzzy as he tried to turn around, but his legs suddenly didn’t want to support his weight, and he collapsed onto his side, fighting to free his gun with unresponsive fingers.

He was able to make out a few blurry white shapes, and then the world went dark.

~~~

Jonathan had never been in Will’s room before. He had never been forbidden to enter, but the room was treated with the sort of respect you would give a shrine or a sacred place. Jonathan didn’t go in there, and neither did his mother. Besides, the presence of Will’s ghost was strong enough in the rest of the house.

If it were up to him, he’d never go in. It was a painful reminder of the splinter in their family, the injury that wouldn’t heal, the one that had driven his mother insane with denial and grief. But the kids needed someplace to sleep, and he wanted to keep his mother out of the matter entirely, and Will’s room was the only one she never entered.

So he pushed the door open carefully, and stepped inside.

“This was my brother’s room,” he quietly informed the kids, who were examining their surroundings with watchful, curious eyes.

The air was thick with dust, a soft coating over every exposed surface. Behind him, one of the kids sneezed. Jonathan grimaced. The walls were painted a soft blue with ivory trim, and there was a small bed in one corner piled with blankets and stuffed animals, still waiting for a baby boy that had never come home. Next to it was a lamp on a table. Jonathan switched it on and the room was lit with soft yellow light that illuminated the dust motes dancing in the air.

One of the children whispered something behind him, too quiet for Jonathan to hear. “Brother.”

“What are your names?” he asked, adding after a moment of silence, “...do you have names? I’m Jonathan.”

The two shared a look, then the boy slowly extended his wrist. Jonathan had to squint to read the numbers- they were tattooed, who did that to a kid- in the low lighting.

006.

“Six? Is that… your name?”

The boy nodded, then pointed at the girl and said, “Eleven.”

Jonathan started to answer, maybe to ask why they had numbers instead of names or who gave them to them, but before he could, he was interrupted.

“Jonathan?” his mother’s sleepy voice called from down the hall, and he froze, gesturing frantically for the children to be quiet. They just looked confused. “Is that you?”

“Yeah, it’s me,” he answered after a moment, voice strained. “Just got home.”

“Were you talking to someone?”

“No, Mom. Go back to sleep.”

There was the faint noise of rustling blankets and the creaking of a mattress as his mother readjusted herself in bed, then, already beginning to drift off again: “Night, Jonathan. I love you.”

“Love you too,” he said, voice smaller, suddenly feeling dangerously close to tears. He scrubbed at his eyes with his sleeve to stop them before they could fall.

He stood for an awkward few minutes in silence, until he was certain she was asleep, then heaved a heavy sigh, suddenly feeling exhausted.

“Lie,” the girl- Eleven- said suddenly.

Jonathan blinked. “What?”

“You lied.”

“I- yeah, I did. That was my mom, and she’s… she’s sick, okay? She got sick because she was very, very sad, and sometimes she can’t tell what’s real anymore. So… we’re just going to let her sleep and not bother her with any of this.”

Eleven stared at him for a long moment, then raised a hand to tap at her temple. “Sick… here?”

Jonathan nodded, tight-lipped, and broke eye contact to stare at the wall, unable to keep looking into those big, sad eyes. “Yeah.”

“What’s a… mom?” Six asked, and the honest confusion in his eyes hit Jonathan like a physical blow to the chest.

“A mom is the person who made you,” he said after a long moment of trying to decide how to define such a fundamental concept, rubbing a hand through his hair. “She loves you and cares about you more than anything else. That’s why my mom is sick. She cared too much.”

Oh, Six mouthed, and tucked himself up against Eleven’s side again.

“You don’t… you don’t have parents?”

“Papa,” Eleven murmured. “Bad.”

Her words only served to confirm what Jonathan had already more or less guessed- the kids were fleeing an abusive home. He understood awful fathers, and he meant it when he said, “He’s not going to get you. Okay?”

Eleven nodded slowly, squeezing Six’s hand.

“Okay,” she whispered.

“You two, get some sleep,” Jonathan said after a beat. “You’re safe here.”

They looked at him searchingly for a long minute, then seemed to find what they were looking for, because they turned as one and filed over to the undersized bed. As he watched, they both climbed under the blankets patterned with cars and airplanes, seeming to have no reservations at all about sharing, and curled up together, holding each other tight.

Within minutes, they were fast asleep.

Jonathan smiled faintly, and turned out the light.

Chapter Text

When Hopper woke up, his head was pounding, and his brain felt like it was wrapped in cotton. He tried shaking his head to clear it, but that only worsened the headache and he regretted it immediately. He blinked his eyes open and got a split second glance of scattered empty beer cans and pill bottles before the sunlight stabbed into his eyes and pain shot right into his brain. He groaned and slammed them shut again, groping for details about what had happened last night.

There was nothing. The night before was a complete blank slate in his mind, inaccessible. Which was strange, because usually after drinking he could remember almost everything until passing out. He scrabbled uselessly for details, managing up come up with a few random images: hallways, water, stuffed animals-

Kids. That was right, there were kids. Kids who needed help. He grabbed that detail from the jumble of his memory and held onto it as everything began to come together again. There were… kids’ rooms, and he had been at…

Hawkins Lab.

Joyce was right.

Joyce was right.

With that thought, he slowly forced his eyes open again, shielding them from the sun with one hand. The urge to close them, soothe his aching head and go back to sleep was strong, but he resisted it. He needed to call Joyce. Needed to talk to her, and tell her she was right, about the lab, about the children, about everything. Needed to find out what, exactly, she knew.

He struggled to his feet, bracing himself against the wall with one arm and making his way to the phone. He reached for it- and stopped.

They were listening. They had to be.

He took a step back and looked around the room, looking at all the appliances, all the places a microphone or a camera could hidden.

He sighed, and got to work.

~~~

Eleven drowsed awake slowly. She was warm, and safe, and with her brother. She couldn’t remember the last time she had felt truly safe, without having to fear being hunted or tested or tormented. It wasn’t perfect, of course; the bad men were still coming for them, and they would keep coming, they were separated from four of their siblings and something had happened to twelve, something bad. It wasn’t perfect, but for the moment, it was enough.

She sent out a directionless thought- Hello? -and waited hopefully for an answer from her missing siblings, but nothing came. They must have been too far away yet, or… something else, but she thought she would know if they were in trouble, and she knew she would know if any of them had been killed.

Six stirred next to her. If nothing else, he was still with her. He was safe.

They were safe.

She suddenly became aware of the soft cadence of speech nearby. It was too soft for her to make it out. She eased herself out of the bed, careful to slip out of her sleeping brother’s arms without waking him. He needed his rest.

She padded across the floor, enjoying the feel of the plush carpet on the soles of her bare feet. It was so different from the cold, sterile halls of the laboratory where she’d lived her entire life. It was warm, and soft, and pleasant, all things that the laboratory had never been.

She supposed that this was what a home was supposed to be like.

She liked it.

She reached the door and eased it open, slowly so that it didn’t creak. She knew the art of keeping quiet. They had all been raised in a place where they were tools to be used when needed and to draw no attention the rest of the time. Silent, obedient little dolls.

The kind boy who had brought them home- Jonathan, Eleven remembered- was leaning against the wall with his back to her, holding something to his ear. A phone?

“The chief’s not there yet?” he was asking, sounding worried, scrubbing his free hand through his hair as he spoke. “Well, what time does he usually get there? ...an hour ago, great. That’s just… great. Can you ask him to call me back when he gets in? ...no, no, my mom is fine, it’s not about that. It’s-“

Eleven’s eyes widened. A call. That’s what this was. He was placing a call to someone who he thought could help.

Just like Benny.

Eleven thought of Benny, lying on the diner’s greasy floor with his eyes wide in an almost comical expression of shock and a hole in his forehead the size of a dime. Benny who had fed them and been so angry on their behalf, so eager to get them justice, who was dead because of them. She thought of Jonathan, who had taken her and Six home and given them a place to sleep and let them feel safe, being shot between the eyes by the next retrieval team to come for them.

Collateral damage. That was a phrase she knew. It was one of Papa’s favorites.

She reacted on instinct. She jerked her head to one side, hard, and the phone flew out of Jonathan’s hand and smashed itself against the wall hard enough to crack the pink plastic casing.

Far away, a surveillance agent on one of the upper floors of Hawkins Lab frowned in mild confusion as the call he’d been listening in on suddenly dropped, the line going dead.

Jonathan whipped around, looking shocked and- terrified, and no, she didn’t want that, she didn’t want him to be frightened of her but this was important and she needed to make him understand.

“No,” she said, trying to make her voice sound firm, trying to get rid of the quake of fear in her words and not succeeding.

Jonathan stared at her blankly for a moment, uncomprehending, then gestured at the phone, now dangling limply on the end of its cord, a few inches from the carpeting. “Did… you do that?”

“Not safe,” she said, trying to find the right words to express the danger in her limited vocabulary, hating her inability to say what she meant. When she was talking to her siblings over their connection, she was always understood, but when speaking aloud she just didn’t have enough words. “Bad men… listening.”

“You think there’s people listening to the phone call?” Jonathan repeated, and the disbelief in his voice was edged with caution. He didn’t move for the phone again, which Eleven took as a good sign.

“Yes,” she confirmed. “Bad men. They hear, and…” she trailed off again, wordlessly frustrated. After a moment of thinking, she folded her hand into a gun-shape, index finger extended, and pointed it at his chest.

“Like that,” she whispered. “Gone.”

The disbelief had mostly cleared from his face, she was relieved to see. Instead, there was concern. “Have you… seen that happen?”

She nodded slowly, thinking of the spray of blood on the far wall of the diner, of Benny’s body collapsing bonelessly to the floor. She couldn’t stop seeing it.

“...alright. Alright. But we’re going to have to do something. This isn’t… sustainable.”

“Sustainable?” Eleven echoed, confused.

“Means we can’t keep going like this,” Jonathan defined. “Me hiding you in Will’s room. I have school, and my mom to worry about, and… if there really are bad people after you, I don’t want her getting hurt.”

Eleven nodded. She understood the desire to protect family.

“I don’t know how to fix this, okay? Which is why we need help. But first…” He pointed at the phone again. “How did you do that?”

Eleven slowly raised a finger and tapped it against her temple. “Here.”

Jonathan’s eyes widened with something she couldn’t identify. Shock, or confusion, or…

Recognition?

All he said though, was, “...I have to go to school. Stay with your friend in the room and stay quiet until my mom leaves for work, then you can go around the house. We’ll… we’ll figure this out when I get home.”

He shouldered a backpack onto his back, and Eleven startled backwards slightly, surprised, when a piece of bread sprang out of the toaster with a popping noise. Jonathan grabbed it and opened the door with his free hand.

He added, quickly, “Don’t answer the door.”

The door shut, and Eleven was alone.

~~~

Barb wasn’t at school. That was the first thing Nancy noticed when she arrived. They always met up at her locker to talk at the start of the day and then walked to first period together, but Barb wasn’t there. It wasn’t like her to be late.

She’d figured Barb had just left the party early once she and Steve were… in his room (her cheeks felt hot just thinking about it), and she couldn’t blame her, but she couldn’t remember Barb missing a day of school in her life. Maybe she’d slept in?

But as the class periods wore on, and Barb still didn’t show, Nancy grew more and more anxious. The teacher droned on in the background, but Nancy, usually an attentive student, couldn’t even bring herself to listen, instead alternately staring at Barb’s conspicuously empty desk and watching the door.

“Miss Wheeler? Mr. Byers? Is something more interesting than your education?” Mrs. Eddiman snapped, her voice sudden and piercing. Nancy snapped to attention, and out of the corner of her eye, she saw Jonathan Byers do the same.

“N-no, Mrs. Eddiman,” Nancy answered, shamefaced. “I’m sorry.”

The teacher stared at her through the glasses perched on the end of her nose for a moment longer before nodding, apparently satisfied, and turning towards Jonathan, who squirmed under her gaze.

“I was distracted,” he mumbled, staring fixedly at the surface of his desk. “Sorry.”

The teacher’s expression softened slightly. “Your mother?”

Jonathan looked like he’d swallowed something sour, and nodded jerkily. Nancy felt bad for him. He didn’t deserve to have that discussed in front of the whole class- and indeed, Tommy and Carol were watching the show with undisguised glee.

“Well. I’m sorry, Mr. Byers, but school is a place for learning. I expect to see you taking notes. Now, in 1957-“

~~~

She found him after class.

“Hey,” she said, and he looked up in surprise. Behind his bangs, his eyes were wide and shocked- the phrase deer in the headlights came immediately to mind and Nancy had to stifle a hysterical giggle. She pressed on regardless, too late to turn back now. “Are you okay?”

He stared at her for a moment longer, and she wondered how many people asked him that on a given day. She’d guess not many. “Fine,” he said after the silence had stretched just long enough to be uncomfortable.

“She shouldn’t have done that,” Nancy said. “I’m sorry.”

He shrugged one shoulder, still not meeting her eyes. “It’s okay. It’s… I’m used to it.”

“That doesn’t make it okay,” Nancy objected with a frown, but Jonathan didn’t reply. “Hey, you haven’t seen Barb at school today, have you?”

He hesitated, then shook his head. “No. Sorry. Why?”

“She came with me to a party at Steve’s,” she explained, not sure why she was telling this to Jonathan Byers of all people. He didn’t even know Barb. But who else was there? She’d heard Tommy calling Barb a dyke behind her back, heard Carol laugh like a hyena and even Steve chuckle a little. They wouldn’t care. “She was gone in… the morning,” she continued, cheeks reddening again as she realized she’d inadvertently revealed she’d spent the night at Steve Harrington’s house. “I thought she’d just gone home, but… now I’m worried.”

“No, I... haven’t seen her today,” Jonathan said. Nancy suddenly realized he was looking at her face closely, and she shifted uncomfortably.

“What are you looking at?” she asked, more defensively than she meant to, and he immediately looked away.

“Sorry. I just… you remind me of someone I met recently. You… do you have any cousins, or… I don’t know…”

“Brothers?” she blurted before she could stop herself. He was looking at her curiously from under his bangs, and she had to pause to recollect herself. “I- no. I don’t. I just have a little sister, but-“

She stopped. She was doing the exact same thing she hated her parents doing- lying and pretending like everything was fine. That there had never been any little brother, and there was just the two Wheeler daughters.

She was so tired of acting like everything was fine.

“I had a little brother,” she said simply. “Or… I would have had one. My mom carried to term, and everything. He… um. He died.”

“Oh- shit, I’m sorry, I didn’t-“ Jonathan stammered. Nancy shook her head.

“Know? It’s okay. Nobody does. My parents like to pretend he never existed. He ruins their image of the ‘perfect family.’ It’s… kind of nice to finally talk about it.”

Jonathan nodded, and the slightest touch of a wry smile graced his lips. It occurred to Nancy, all of a sudden, that she didn’t think she’d ever seen him smile before. “Guess we’ve got more in common than we thought.”

It took Nancy a split second before she remembered- miscarrying a baby boy was what had sent Joyce Byers over the edge. They were both big siblings to dead brothers.

It was such a morbid thing to bond over, but she found herself mirroring his smile anyways. “Guess so.”

Jonathan opened his mouth, paused, then closed it again. The smile vanished as quickly as it had appeared, like the sun behind a cloud, and Nancy frowned.

“What is it?”

He shifted on his feet, again looking anywhere but her face. When he spoke, the words sounded like they were being dragged out of him against his will. “I didn’t see Barb today. But… fuck. You’re going to think I’m such a creep. I… was in the woods last night, taking pictures, and I saw… here.”

Nancy watched as he rummaged through his bag, eventually producing a black-and-white photograph. He handed it over to her, and she frowned down at it.

She recognized it immediately. It was Barb, sitting on the diving board with her feet in the water. The low lighting combined with the graininess of the picture served to partially obscure her face, but she looked sad. Nancy felt a pang of guilt. She shouldn’t have left her out there like that.

She looked back up at Jonathan. “You took this?”

He nodded once, still staring steadfastly at the ground. “I-I heard the music, and came to see what was going on. It… I thought it was a good picture, that’s all. I took it, and then I looked down to rewind my camera, and… she was gone. The pool light was out, too. I figured she’d just gone inside, but. Now I don’t know.”

Nancy didn’t respond right away, instead focused on examining the picture closer. You could see Steve’s bedroom window from where he had taken it from, and her cheeks got involuntarily hot again as she realized Jonathan might have seen them up there together. Then, any embarrassment was forgotten as she noticed something else.

“What’s this?” she asked, holding out the photo and tapping on the slim grey shape on the far right. Jonathan squinted at it for a moment, but shook his head, looking just as bewildered as she felt.

“I… don’t know,” he admitted. “Could be a distortion, but I wasn’t using a wide-angle lens. Could be a problem with the negative…”

“Is there any way to know?”

“Yeah, if I redeveloped the picture and enlarged that part, we could get a clearer look at-”

The bell rang, and Nancy suddenly realized that the halls had emptied as they were talking, leaving them alone as everyone else went to their next class. From the stunned look on Jonathan’s face, he’d lost track of time as well.

“Um, can we meet after school? To talk more?” Nancy asked hopefully, shouldering her bag again and glancing down the hall. Hopefully her parents wouldn’t get called about her being late to class.

Jonathan hesitated. “I have some other stuff I need to take care of after school, but… I guess so. Meet me in the school darkroom after seventh period.”

“We have a darkroom?” Nancy asked.

Jonathan laughed and turned away, already moving towards the stairs. “In the basement by the art room,” he called over his shoulder.

“See you there!” she called back.

~~~

Steve Harrington was not in a great mood.

His day had started out awesome. He’d scored with Nancy Wheeler, Hawkins’ resident Perfect Girl, and it had been as perfect as everything else about her. He’d thought nothing could ruin the day after that, but he’d been wrong, because he’d overheard her making afterschool plans with Jonathan Byers, the freak with the crazy mom, of all people.

Seriously. The darkroom? There was no way they were just going to be ‘developing photos’ in there. No way.

He’d been tempted to head there himself and interrupt their little rendezvous, but he’d decided against it- partly because missing too many more basketball practices would disqualify him from lettering, mostly because it didn’t seem like enough. He’d work out some other way to get back at Miss Good Girl Nancy Wheeler.

So he’d gone to practice, and played worse than usual while Nance and the freak were probably getting it on in the darkroom, and steadily worked himself into a darker and darker mood until by the end of practice he just wanted to punch Jonathan Byers in his pretentious little shit face.

His mood was not improved when he got home and saw a kid in a dress napping on his porch. He looked like one of those cancer kids you saw in the Red Cross Donate Now commercials- too thin, head shaved, wearing a plastic hospital gown with a simplistic yellow flowery pattern.

Steve stared for a moment, but confused impatience and the bad mood that had been festering all day soon won out over the gentle approach.

“Kid. Hey, kid, wake the hell up,” he demanded irritably. The boy blinked once, groaned softly, then big brown eyes flicked up to Steve’s face. The change in demeanor was immediate- the moment the boy realized there was someone else there with him, he snapped the rest of the way awake and scrambled backwards with his hands and feet until his back bumped against the front door, making it rattle softly in his frame.

The clear terror in the boy’s eyes made Steve feel a little guilty, but he pressed on. “What are you doing here, huh? This is my house. Go home.”

“Sorry,” the boy babbled, shaking, and Steve noticed he had a noticeable lisp. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. Sorry. Felt… safe. Here. Sorry.”

“Stop saying sorry,” Steve ordered, feeling steadily worse about obviously terrifying the poor kid out of his wits.

“Sorry,” the kid said again. Steve mentally gave up.

“Look, are you, uh, lost, or something?”

The boy nodded, seeming to calm down slightly. That was good, because Steve was in no way equipped to deal with a hysterical little kid. “Lost friends.”

“O-kay. Do... you live near here?”

The boy tensed up again- dammit, he thought they’d been making progress- and shook his head wildly. “No. No no no. Not... back there.”

Steve sighed, goodwill beginning to evaporate in favor of impatience. “I’m not gonna make you go anywhere except off my porch, okay?”

The boy nodded jerkily and pushed himself to his feet, edging carefully around Steve and down the stairs. Once he was standing, it was even more obvious how unhealthily thin and skeletal he looked. Steve kind of felt like an asshole watching the kid walk slowly down the sidewalk, looking completely forlorn.

He shoved the feeling aside, went inside, plopped down the cough and tried to watch the football game and relax, but he couldn’t focus. Less than five minutes in, he found himself thinking about the kid again, the dirt on his face and the fear on his eyes.

A soft tapping sound drew his eyes to the window, and he saw it’d started to rain.

“Goddammit,” he swore under his breath.

Luckily, the boy hadn’t made it too far- only a couple blocks. He was still slowly walking down the sidewalk, staring down at his feet, getting slowly soaked as the rain fell heavier.

“Kid! Hey, kid!”

~~~

The other two children, Seven and Nine, were together. After the attack on the diner, they’d fled in the opposite direction from many of the others- not towards the town, but instead deeper into the woods. They were tucked into the roots of an oversized tree, trying to hide from the impromptu rainstorm.

As the rainfall began to abate though, and the sun began to shine through once more, the children grew restless. The girl elbowed the boy and nodded towards the top of the tree with an excited smile, reverting to their old speechless language out of habit.

Race you to the top?

The boy, busy scanning the woods around them, shook his head. Not safe.

Come on! she urged. You’ll be able to see better from the top.

Her bright smile won him over, and he found himself softening, smiling back. There was nothing he wouldn’t do for her, and they both knew it. She’d do the same for him- and in the absence of all their other siblings, taking care of each other was more important than ever.

Fine, he acquiesced. Nine whooped aloud and bolted for the nearest branch. Seven followed at a more careful pace, but once she called down a taunt from several feet above him, he grinned and threw caution to the wind, quickly catching up to her.

The next few minutes were filled with wordless laughter, the sound of creaking branches, and the soft thuds of pine cones that their climb had shaken loose falling to the ground.

Then, the air was pierced by a snapping sound, and the branch disappeared from under Seven’s feet. His eyes widened for just a moment before he began to fall- and then her hand closed around his wrist, stopping him short. She hauled him up, shoulders shaking with the exertion, and after a terrifying moment he could reach the more solid branch she was perched on and clawed himself onto it, collapsing next to her.

For a long minute, the only sound was their ragged breathing.

Then, a touch smugly, Nine whispered, I win.

Seven laughed aloud and shoved her playfully, gentle enough that there would be no danger of her falling off of the branch. You win.

They fell into a comfortable silence, staring out over the expanse of forest laid out below them.

They didn’t see the soldiers moving silently through the underbrush.

Chapter Text

The trap slid shut silently. The soldiers positioned themselves just out of sight in the underbrush around the clearing at the base of the tree, surrounding it completely. Doctor Brenner nodded a signal to the sniper beside him, who took careful aim up at the two silhouettes, clear targets against the blue sky.

One second, Nine and Seven were watching the dim autumn sun begin to arc lazily down towards the horizon, enjoying the moment of sweet, peaceful freedom.

Then there was the muffled crack of a silenced rifle, shattering the calm serenity, and Nine made a small, pained groan as the sleep dart pierced her skin, and Seven reached for her a moment too late, and then she was falling.

Seven didn’t think.

He acted.

He’d never done anything with his powers at such a distance before, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except saving her. He thrust his hands downward, a sharp pain pinging in the front of his mind, and the air beneath her froze, crystallized, and formed a thick cushion of snow beneath her moments before she hit the ground.

The soldiers emerged from the bushes, two of them approaching her half-conscious and battered body with- was that a collar?

Seven saw red.

No.

He jumped.

The impact sent shock up his legs, but the snow caught him, cradled him. He positioned himself defensively over her, glaring daggers at the approaching soldiers. They wisely paused, and one of them look a step back.

A drop of blood fell from his nose, and splattered scarlet on the snow.

“Leave... her... alone,” he said, voice shaking slightly with fear and fury and exertion, as he felt the power build up in his fingertips and behind his temples, ready to be unleashed. He held onto it, letting it accumulate.

If they went here, at least they wouldn’t go quietly.

“Stand down,” commanded a voice that was so horribly familiar Seven almost lost control, nearly froze everything around him on instinct as pain fear pain papa echoed through his head.

Doctor Brenner- Papa- stepped forward, the line of soldiers parting to make way for him.

“Seven,” he said, a warmth in his voice that crawled across Seven’s skin and made him shudder. “What do you think you’re doing out here?”

Seven didn’t answer.

Brenner took a step closer, and Seven tensed, but he didn’t make any other moves. He just crouched down to look at Nine, who was still half-asleep. A small groan escaped her when he entered her field of vision, and she shuffled backwards as well as she could on unresponsive limbs. “Hello, Nine.”

“Leave her alone,” Seven repeated, the words curling into a snarl. Brenner just shook his head, like he was disappointed in them, like Seven was being an unreasonable, disobedient child.

“Look at her, Seven. She’s hurt. You don’t look well either. I don’t know why you decided to do this to yourselves, but listen. It’s not safe out here. I have always cared for you as if you were my own. Out here, there is no one to feed you, or heal you when you’re hurt. You need to come home, Seven,” Brenner said, sounding so earnest that for just a moment, a prickle of doubt edged into his mind.

Then Nine made another broken, pained sound, and sent him a panicked, almost incoherent thought- no no no no blood pain walls no tests no pain no- and any doubts melted away, replaced by steely determination.

“Leave us alone,” he said one more time, hands curling into fists. Brenner didn’t seem to notice. The pain and power was pounding inside his head, making it difficult to think about anything else.

“You know I can’t do that, Seven,” Brenner said. “Last chance. Come home willingly, and I won’t have to resort to… distasteful methods.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Seven saw sunlight glinting off metal as the soldier who had sniped Nine raised his gun.

“I said,” he said slowly, struggling to piece together phrases through the fog of pain in his head, “leave… us… alone!”

The dam broke. First the cold came like a physical blow, dropping the clearing fifty degrees in a matter of seconds, and then a split second after came the ice. It raced across the ground and crawled up the legs of the soldiers, fixing them in place. Frost iced over their guns, rendering them useless as some of them tried to shoot.

Brenner scrambled backwards frantically before the creeping ice could reach him, and Seven managed a weak grin, because seeing his condescending composure slip was entirely worth the pain.

He pulled Nine to her feet. The sedative must have been wearing off, because after a moment of struggle she managed to stay upright. They leaned on each other heavily as they worked their way back towards the safety of the tree line.

As they reached the edge of the clearing, Seven could hear Papa yelling behind them, pleas and threats and promises.

They didn’t look back.

~~~

It took several hours and the destruction of almost everything in his trailer, but after finding (and smashing) three microphones and a little bulb he thought was probably a camera, Hopper was satisfied with the security of his home. The new problem (because of course there was one) was that he could no longer call Joyce even with all the surveillance equipment gone, because he’d dismembered his phone in his search.

(Unbeknownst to him, the Byers home phone had been rendered completely useless several hours before when Eleven had violently smashed it against the wall, ironically to prevent Jonathan from contacting Hopper, rendering the entire point moot.)

He checked his watch and swore. He was supposed to be at work ages ago. Flo had to be both worried out of her mind and absolutely pissed. He was not looking forward to the lecture he was going to get by the time he got in. First, though, he needed to do something else.

He had to find Joyce.

~~~

She was at work, and as Hopper shouldered his way through the swinging door, the little bell mounted on the door frame gave a high-pitched ding!

“Joyce. Can you take a break?”

She blinked twice. “Hop? What’re you doing here? Where were you this morning? I’ve been trying to call you all day.”

“I need to talk to you. Somewhere not here. Can you take a break?”

“My shift’s almost done. What’s this about?”

“Not here.”

Joyce gave a strained laugh as she moved out from behind the checkout counter. “Careful, Hop. You’re starting to sound like me.”

She waited for him to laugh too, but he couldn’t see anything funny about the situation.

“Alright. Okay. Donald!” she called to the back of the general store. “My shift’s over, I’m gonna head home!”

“Alright, have a good day, Joyce,” Hopper heard her boss call faintly back.

Donald was a good man. Kind enough to give Joyce a job even when her… issues meant she wasn’t the best worker, and wise enough to only give her short shifts with relatively easy jobs to do. Hopper was pretty sure he paid her a little more than he strictly needed to, too. He ought to take him out for a beer sometime.

“Where’re we going?” she asked quietly as they left the store together.

“Library. I need your help to look some things up. And on the way, I want you to tell me everything you know about Hawkins Lab… and Will.”

“You’re... listening to me. You’re actually listening to me?” she said, and the overjoyed disbelief in her voice was genuine enough to hurt.

“Joyce. I’ve always listened to you. I just… didn’t believe you. And I’m sorry for that. I’m gonna make it right.”

“What- Hop, what happened? Why now?”

He looked around as inconspicuously as he could before answering. With most adults at work and most kids at school, combined with the onset of fall driving most folks either indoors or out into the woods to hunt, the sidewalks were mostly empty, so he felt comfortable lowering his voice and saying, “I broke into the lab.”

He stopped, turned to face her. She stared up at him, hope lighting her face and making her look more alive, more there, than she had in years.

“You were right. You were right this whole time.”

~~~

Steve wasn’t entirely sure how he’d gotten into this situation.

Found cancer kid on his doorstep, check. Told said kid to shove off and then felt guilty about it, check. Ran after kid in the rain and made himself look like a dumbass to tell him he could come inside after all, check. He’d meant to just harbor him until the rain stopped, and then maybe drive him to the police station or something and let them take care of him. He understood how all that had happened.

He didn’t understand how, several hours later, the kid was sitting on his couch wearing some of his old hand-me-downs, methodically working his way through an entire tub of chocolate ice cream he’d found in Steve’s freezer while watching The Empire Strikes Back.

He really needed to stop thinking of him as the kid.

“What’s your name, anyway?” he asked, plopping down on the couch next to the kid. Those frightened brown eyes flicked up to meet him.

“You have one, don’t you?” Steve pressed when no answer was forthcoming, because… shit, even if the kid came from bad circumstances or whatever, everybody had a name.

The boy wedged the spoon back into the slowly melting ice cream and held out his wrist. Steve had to tilt his head awkwardly to read the digits tattooed there.

“Ten?” he read aloud, confused tone making the word into a question. “That’s not a name, kid. That’s a number.”

“Mine,” the boy- Ten, apparently- muttered.

“Well, I’m not calling you that.”

Ten shrugged, apparently ambivalent, still entirely focused on the screen as Yoda instructed Luke on the ways of the Force.

“It okay if I just keep calling you kid?”

Ten cocked his head thoughtfully to the side, then nodded.

“Alright, kid, quit hogging the ice cream.”

~~~

“You take the Times, I’ll take the Post, and we’ll work our way through.”

“And- Hopper, w-what are we looking for, exactly?”

“Stories. Like yours.”

~~~

Twelve wanted to go home.

Not back to the lab. That place had never been their home. It had been their prison, and on some occasions he’d thought it would be their tomb as well. But they’d managed to escape, and they were never, ever going back.

Living in a place didn’t make it a home, anyways. It was people that made a home.

Twelve’s home was where his friends, his brothers and sisters were, the closest people to him in the world. No matter where they were, if he was with them, he was home.

Now he just needed to get back to them.

He’d been quick and lucky so far. The… thing that had dragged him into this place was a terrifyingly efficient hunter, but it was also apparently blind, which at least gave him a chance of hiding from it, and he usually got warning of its attacks a minute or so in advance thanks to his gift.

He couldn’t go on like this forever, though. He knew he couldn’t. With nothing to eat and never getting more than an hour or two of sleep at a time due to fear of being caught, his strength was draining rapidly. He wished he had his friends with him. Even just one, someone whose talents could actually help fight the monster instead of running away. Six would know what to do. It was a selfish wish, he knew, because they were certainly better off far away from him and the monster and this dark dimension, but he found himself wishing it all the same.

The warning flash of teeth and grey, slimy skin appeared in front of his eyes, and he ran.

He needed to find a way out.

~~~

“I found something!” Joyce said suddenly, loud in the quiet of the library, making Hopper start. He turned away from his own screen to face her.

“Me too. What do you got?”

“Claudia Henderson. Single mom, lives-oh. Lived in Indianapolis. Her two-month-old son died in the crib around eleven years ago, and she insisted that he wasn’t dead. That he was kidnapped. She… um. She killed herself seven years ago after getting laughed out of every newspaper she tried to bring the story to.”

She fell silent, and Hopper was sure she was thinking the same thing he was- that could so easily have been her. If she’d lived in a bigger city, if she hadn’t had Jonathan to think about… if she hadn’t had someone at the police station who was always willing to take her calls.

“I found one too,” he said finally, breaking the silence. “Fred and Amelia Sinclair. Their son Lucas died shortly after being born. They made a ruckus for awhile, brought a case for medical malpractice and got a settlement, and… well, she quieted down, but he kept going for a while. Then he stopped too, all of a sudden. Apparently they moved to Chicago.”

The silence fell again, heavier and suffocating, as the sheer scope of the operation began to dawn on them. Hopper didn’t know what had happened to make Fred Sinclair quiet down about his son, but he was damned sure the man hadn’t just given up.

“Joyce… I think you should stop taking those pills.”

She was quiet for a moment, then, sounding slightly sheepish but unrepentant: “...I haven’t been taking them for a month and a half.”

He couldn’t help it. He snorted, because she really had been right about everything all along, and all of a sudden they were both laughing, filling the library with much-needed amusement until Jeanette at the front desk shot them a dark glare.

For the next few minutes, their search was accompanied only by the clicking of the microfilm viewers until a realization slid into place in Hopper’s head, and he blinked.

“Joyce.”

“What?”

“You know the Wheelers?”

“Sort of. Not well. Karen tried to give me a casserole after Will was… taken and told me she was sorry for my loss. I slapped her across the face and told her to get out of my house. We don’t get along.” She paused, then, with disbelieving shock, “You don’t think they…”

“I don’t know,” he cut her off. “I just remembered… you know their daughter, Nancy? I think it was about five years ago, cause I’d just come back to Hawkins and rejoined the department. She was maybe ten. Came up to me one day and said she’d like to report a crime.”

“A crime?” Joyce echoed.

“Yeah. She said her little brother had been kidnapped.”

“The Wheelers don’t… have a son,” Joyce stated uncertainly, her tone turning it into a question.

“No. They don’t. I went and asked them about it, and apparently Karen had a miscarriage a long time ago, that’s it, end of story. They didn’t want to talk about it, and I got the sense they weren’t pleased with Nancy for telling me either. At the time, I thought it was probably just a kid being a kid and not really being able to understand what had really happened, but…” he trailed off.

“But now you think she might have been onto something,” Joyce finished for him.

“Yeah.”

~~~

The girl who might have been onto something, in the meantime, was squinting into a tray, watching as a photo slowly developed. Jonathan was a few steps behind her, trying to give her as much respectful space as was possible in the cramped darkroom, and observing the complete focus on her face. He wished he could take a picture of it.

Suddenly, she gasped, and he moved closer to look over her shoulder at the photo as it came into focus.

“There,” she said, stabbing at the still-developing picture with one finger, fascination and revulsion mingling in her voice. “What is that?”

With the picture enlarged so much, there could be no more doubt that there was something there. It looked sort of like a person, at least in basic shape, but the proportions were strange and the apparent lack of a face made it look so deeply, viscerally wrong.

Jonathan had been maybe twenty feet away from that thing when he’d taken the picture, which was a revelation that made him feel nauseous. He hadn’t even known it was there.

“Well, it’s definitely not a distortion,” he managed after a moment, and was rewarded with her laugh, which had a distinctly hysterical note to it.

“I don’t care what it is,” Nancy decided firmly after a moment. Jonathan admired the way she looked when she was set on something- strong, determined, and completely different from the perfect, straight-A suburban girl he’d always written her off as. “I want to find it. Maybe if we do...”

The we did not escape Jonathan’s notice. “...we might find Barbara, too.”

“Exactly.”

She straightened, and looked him directly in his eyes. “I- I don’t want to drag you into this any further, but… I feel like if I tell anybody else, they’ll think I’m crazy. You don’t have to, but-“

“I’ll help,” he interrupted, surprising himself. He had two kids at home who he still didn’t know what to do about and who could do things with their minds he really didn’t want to think too hard about, and…

...his train of thought slammed to a halt as a lot of things came together all at once.

She really did look like Six. Not in the traditional way- her hair and eyes were lighter, and obviously she looked much healthier, but… Jonathan knew faces. He studied them as a hobby. They had the same cheekbones, the same nose.

She was still talking, but he couldn’t hear her. All he could hear was his mom, rambling about babies being kidnapped at birth, about children being turned into weapons, and he thought about the phone flying out of his hand, about the fact that Nancy’s baby brother had disappeared.

Guess we’ve got more in common than we thought.

“Jonathan?” Nancy was saying, sounding worried, and he finally blinked out of his trance.

“Nancy,” he said slowly, “are you absolutely certain that your brother is dead?”

She stared at him in stunned silence for a long moment and he just had time to think he had ruined their budding friendship and was about to get punched in the face before she whispered, “...how did you know that?”

“I,” he started, then stopped. His throat was suddenly too dry to talk, because if Six really was Nancy’s brother, and he really had been kidnapped and hadn’t died at birth, then that meant-

That meant.

He couldn’t think about that.

“I think there’s someone you should meet.”

Chapter Text

In another world, one where only one child escaped the lab that fateful night, where Claudia Henderson was still alive and Jonathan Byers had a little brother, one where Six had grown up as Mike Wheeler, he probably would have gotten bored after being left in a relatively empty house all day.

In this world, however, where he had only ever known gleaming linoleum floors and blank white walls, the small, messy house was a wonder.

He and Eleven had waited until they heard Jonathan’s mother leave, and then they had practically spilled out the doors in their excitement to explore. The refrigerator took a moment to puzzle out, and Six flinched backwards when he finally wrenched the door open and the cold hit him in the face, reflexively heating the air around him to balance it out.

A box fell out, and both Six and Eleven bent over it, fascinated. It was bright yellow, with loopy red writing. Eleven opened it, and shook out several sealed plastic bags.

She opened one, took a bite, and scrunched up her face. Cold, she said inside his head, following the thought with an image- Jonathan dropping a piece of bread inside the toaster and getting it back warm and delicious a few minutes later.

Unfortunately, they couldn’t get the toaster to work. Six toasted the waffles manually instead, superheating his hands and pressing down on them until they began to turn golden brown and a delicious smell filled the kitchen. It was less hygienic than using the toaster, but they were both hungry and that was quite literally the last thing on their mind.

They ate the entire box, then practically collapsed onto the couch together, feeling warm and safe and secure and full.

Happy, Eleven murmured over their connection, snuggling into Six’s side. Almost happy.

Almost happy, he agreed. They both knew that there was something wrong, something missing, without having to say it or even think it. Everything was close to being perfect, but it wasn’t perfect. Not yet, not with their friends all scattered to the four winds with no idea where to find them- and Twelve even further away than that, judging by his almost total absence from their shared mindspace.

Could you find them? he asked carefully, already knowing she wouldn’t be pleased with the idea. They could all access the dark space where things and people could be found, but Eleven was more adept at it than any of them, aside from perhaps Twelve.

A shudder ran across her shoulders and she shook her head. Six knew why without having to be told, but she said it anyways, whispering without words: Monster. They all knew about the monster, though Eleven was the only one who’d truly come into contact with it, in the dark between-space that the experiments forced her into.

(What they didn’t know, of course, was that Twelve was very familiar with the monster by then.)

All of a sudden, Six just desperately wanted his family back together. He knew he shouldn’t leave the house, knew that Jonathan’s reasoning had merit and the bad people were still out there, but the desire to have them all together again was an almost physical pull.

Sorry, she murmured, detecting his disappointment even though she wasn’t the most empathic of their group.

He squeezed her hand, a wordless not your fault expressed in a simple gesture.

The light flickered.

Both children’s heads snapped up in a unison that would have been downright eerie to an outside observer. The lamp sat on an end table beside the sofa, immobile and dark, but both of them had seen it.

They watched, gazes steady, until it flickered again. And again, as one, they felt it. The first time it had been so brief and faint that Six couldn’t be sure, but the second time, the light flashed for longer, and the presence in the back of his mind, one he’d been missing like a part of himself, was stronger, surer.

Twelve was there. He was there, with them. He had no doubt. They couldn’t see him, but they knew how little that meant. They spoke without hearing and moved things without touching them. Was being unable to see someone and yet know they were there really so strange?

“Twelve?” he whispered aloud, voice quiet and hopeful.

The light pulsed in response.

“Twelve?” Eleven echoed from behind him, leaning around him to stare fixedly at the light.

The light flashed again, and Six reached out hesitantly to touch its side. The feeling of Twelve was still faint, almost to the point of nonexistence, but it was there, and Six felt like a piece of him had slotted back into place with its presence, however weak.

When his fingers made contact, the light lit up again and stayed lit, and the bond between them strengthened. With it came feelings of fear, exhaustion, cold and hunger, and Six ached for his brother.

Eleven laid her hand over his and he could feel her sending comforting, loving thoughts back through the tenuous connection, we’re here and we’ll help you and we love you.

For a moment, Twelve seemed to calm.

Then the light began to flash again, wildly and brighter than the bulb should have been capable of. Across the room, the television flipped on, filling the room with the oppressive, dead sound of static, and the overhead light switched on too, flashing on and off.

Eleven screamed, pulling away from the light as if it had burned her and bringing her hands to her head, closing her eyes against the sensory assault. Six…

Six had seen this before. He had seen it when they were tracking their way uncertainly through the facility that had been their home, bare feet painting bloody prints on the floor as they stepped over the dead bodies of the scientists who had raised them and tortured them… as the sterile fluorescent lights flashed madly overhead.

“The monster,” Eleven half-sobbed, head still buried in her hands. “It’s here!”

The lights strobed more and more wildly, and Six closed his eyes tightly, against the onslaught of light and color as the flashing continued to intensify, still visible through the thin skin of his eyelids.

HELP!

The word was screamed over their connection, drilling into Six’s mind, Twelve’s voice shrill and hoarse with panic. Eleven shrieked.

There was a pop from beside him, and all of a sudden the sound of static cut out, the lights went dark, and everything was still again. Six opened his eyes hesitantly.

The lightbulb in the lamp had burst, and tiny shards of glass were scattered across the table.

“Six,” Eleven said aloud from beside him. He looked up. There were tear tracks down her cheeks, but she made unwavering eye contact with him. “We need to help.”

He nodded in instant agreement. They needed to help their lost brother. He needed them, needed them badly. The only question was how?

To help him, they needed to reach him. And they could reach him through the lights.

They needed more lights.

~~~

They were about a third of the way through Return of the Jedi and Steve was still no closer to figuring out what the fuck to do with the half-starved child and possible runaway(?) sitting on his couch when the kid sat bolt upright, like he’d been electrocuted. Steve definitely did not startle a little. He did look over and frown. Not because he was concerned. Just because he was caught off guard.

“Something wrong, kid?”

The boy shook his head, a smile starting to form on his face and exposing the gap where his front teeth should have been, crinkling his eyes upwards.

“Right.”

That was so completely unhelpful. “Right? What- what does that mean? Was I right? What-”

“Not wrong,” the kid broke in. “Right. Something’s right.”

“That’s not- okay, fine, what’s right?” Steve asked, giving up on explaining that that wasn’t how the saying worked almost immediately.

“Friends.”

“That- that doesn’t- wait, where the fuck are you going?”

As he spoke, the boy had shoved himself off and levered himself to his feet, padding across the thick carpeting towards the door. Steve followed after him, bewildered. The kid struggled with the doorknob for a moment before wrestling it open and starting out into the cold.

“Okay- no, kid- come back here-”

The kid paused in his tracks and gestured for Steve to follow him before resuming his trek towards the woods. Steve shifted on his feet, standing in the doorway and staring incredulously after him. He didn’t have to go after him. He’d done his part, the kid had chosen to leave, and it wasn’t like he gave a shit either way. He should go back inside, try to do his stupid math homework, and forget about the kid.

“Shit,” he muttered, looking skyward for a brief moment before following the kid into the woods.

~~~

“Huh,” Joyce said, immediately drawing all of Hopper’s attention. After the articles on Claudia Henderson and the Sinclairs, they hadn’t had much luck as they combed their way through the archives.

“You find something?”

“I’m… not sure,” she said slowly, and he stood, moving to her side to read over her shoulder.

“Sarah Mayfield?” he asked, reading the name of the woman whose haggard face was splashed across the page.

“Yeah. I’m not sure, because all the other ones have been from around here in a fairly close area- here, Indianapolis- but she lived in California. She miscarried a daughter, apparently had a nervous breakdown as a result and was committed to an institution. She… kept insisting Maxine wasn’t dead.”

They traded a glance. Different location, but it fit their pattern in every other way. That brought their number up to four- five, if he included the Wheelers as a ‘maybe.’

Something about the name, or the case, was pinging in his memory. Something was familiar.

“Wait,” he muttered as it clicked into place. Without another word he crossed the library with long strides, hurriedly making his way to the shelf that held the yearbooks.

“Hop?” Joyce called after him, a familiar shaky uncertainty in her voice. “What’s wrong?”

“Sarah Mayfield,” he called back without looking up from the shelves. “You remember her?”

He found the one he was looking for and pulled it free, shaking a layer of dust off of the spine as he did so. Hawkins High school yearbook, class of 1954.

“No?” Joyce said, confusion lifting the end of the word and turning it into a question.

“Yeah, you wouldn’t have known her too well, and it was a long time ago,” he said, muttering the last part more to himself than to her as he flipped through the pages. “Real long time.”

God, it must have been thirty years at least. Where did all that time go?

He found what he was looking for and set the book in front of her. “There. Sarah Mayfield.”

Sure enough, there she was, pretty as a picture between Roger Mann and Miranda Merriweather. Hopper glanced up at the picture of her on the newspaper scan still displayed on the screen- she looked so young, so beautiful and full of life in the book. The paper image showed her in a straitjacket, screaming something unheard at the camera, tears running down her cheeks.

The girl in the book had no idea what was ahead of her. She had her whole life just ready and waiting. Suddenly it hurt to look at her brilliant smile, and Hopper had to glance away.

“That’s her,” Joyce said, and reached out a tentative hand to touch the portrait. “So she did live here.”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe,” Joyce started, then paused. “Maybe… maybe she knew. Do you think? Maybe she knew they were going to take her baby, and… tried to run. Tried to get away, only…”

She trailed off, and looked back at the woman in the newspaper picture.

“...only they caught her.”

~~~

Nancy didn’t know what to think. She was sitting in the passenger seat of Jonathan Byers’s car, staring at the dark trees as they blurred past. She was pretty sure he was speeding, and she almost wanted to ask him to slow down, to pull over and let her catch her breath. Their destination was approaching with dangerous speed, and some part of her that she hated wanted to do what she always did: shy away from the problem, ignore it, run away from it.

She had spent so long convincing herself that she was wrong; that she’d misheard, of course she had, she’d only been what, five? Six? That the doctors had told the truth because what would they lie? That her brother was dead, and had always been dead.

Then, in one rushed, fumbling conversation, Jonathan Byers had managed to completely overturn everything she thought she understood, and now she was staring out the window of his car as the sky started to turn slowly darker and trying not to feel like her life was suddenly barreling down a collision course.

She wondered what he looked like. Jonathan had said he looked like her, but what did that mean? Did he look like their parents, too? People had always said Nancy looked like her mother, but she’d never been able to see it.

If it was him, she reminded herself severely. It could very well not be. She only had Jonathan’s word to go on. She shouldn’t get her hopes up.

Slow down, she thought. Everything needs to slow down.

“What?” Jonathan asked, and she realized with a jolt that she must have spoken aloud.

“Oh… nothing,” she said.

“Oh.”

Silence fell, thick and uncomfortable, but it only lasted a few seconds before Nancy broke it again, words falling from her mouth before she could have any hope of stopping them. “It’s just- my whole life, this has been something that I didn’t- talk about, or think about, I just sort of- shoved it back, and pretended like it had never happened and didn’t matter, and I guess I convinced myself, sort of, that it never did happen, that I never heard anything, and now…”

She trailed off. “It’s all happening so fast,” she finished in a miserable whimper. “And I don’t… I don’t know what to think. I don’t- I think part of me is convinced there’s no way this is real. A day ago my life was normal. And-and now my best friend is missing, and there’s a monster in the woods, and my… my little brother is…”

She brought her hands to her mouth and a small, choked noise escaped her.

Twelve. He’d be twelve. Or was it eleven? How much of his life had he lost to that place? What had happened to him there?

“It’s just so much,” she muttered into her fingers.

She sat like that for a long time, head in her hands.

Twelve years.

At some point, it occurred to her that the car had stopped moving. She looked up at Jonathan through her fingers and saw him awkwardly looking out the windshield.

“Take your time,” he said quietly. “I’m… sorry I sprung all this on you like this. If you want, we don’t have to-“

“No!” she interrupted, sharper and louder than she intended. “No,” she repeated, quieter. “I need… I need to see him. I need to know.”

He nodded, and after a moment, the car began to move again.

“My parents couldn’t decide on a name,” she whispered after a mile or so, gently breaking the comfortable silence. “They both liked Holly for a girl, and that’s what they ended up naming my little sister. But for a boy, they could never decide. My dad wanted to name him Robert, after his dad, and my mom really liked the names Michael and Samuel, but hated Robert.”

“What do you like?” Jonathan asked, catching her off guard and making her crumple her brow in thought. She’d never really considered it- never been asked.

“I like Michael,” she decided after a moment. “We could call him Mike for short.”

Jonathan nodded, and they fell into the lull of silence once more. He wasn’t very talkative, and Nancy could appreciate that. At the moment, she really just wanted to be thinking, trying to understand all this- but at the same time, she didn’t want it to be silent.

“Hey, could you… put on some music?”

~~~

“Kid- kid, hold on a second, okay? Just hold up for a fucking- look, where are you even going?” Steve yelled as he ducked under another perilously low-hanging branch. A sharp stick clawed at his ankle, and he bit back a curse. The further into the woods the kid pressed, the denser the undergrowth got, and the more it seemed like it was out to personally injure him.

“Friends,” the kid called back without stopping.

“Okay, but what does that mean?” Steve pressed. “Who are your friends? ...why are we looking for them in the woods?”

To these questions, no answers were forthcoming, which wasn’t too surprising.

“It’s starting to get dark,” Steve tried next, and the kid cast a quick glance skyward as though to verify the statement, but still didn’t reply. The light was fading- the sun always started setting pretty fast by late October. Steve still had no idea why he was continuing to follow this kid through the woods as night fell and he had every reason to be in his nice, fancy, warm… empty home.

The boy suddenly broke into a run, bolting for a group of bushes tucked closer together than the rest. Steve scrambled to keep up, and felt something snag at the cuff of his jeans and rip them, scratching the skin beneath in the process and drawing blood. He swore. Yet another souvenir from this crappy adventure.

The boy reached the bushes, and eagerly pulled them aside.

Steve wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting, but seeing too more kids huddled against each other, a boy and girl, faces bruised and scratched and hair dusted with what looked like snow, of all things… that was not it.

The kid- his kid, the original one, Christ, that was gonna get confusing real fast- grabbed the other two in a desperate hug, and they reciprocated with equal fervor.

“What the fuck,” Steve said blankly.

Kid looked up at him with that smile that seemed to make his whole face crinkle upwards. “Friends.” Which, wow, that explained absolutely nothing.

“Yeah, I can see that,” Steve said slowly.

“Nine,” Kid said, pointing at the girl before turning to the boy, “and Seven.”

More number names. Awesome. He could think of nicknames later. For the moment, he just had to figure out what the fuck to do with three half-starved homeless kids in the woods at night.

A drop of blood beaded up along the shallow scratch in his ankle and fell, silent and unnoticed, to the dirt.

Something moved in the woods.

Chapter Text

He didn’t hear it at first, too preoccupied with what the fuck was he doing to do with all these kids and where they even came from to really pay attention to the ambient forest sounds.

The kids, meanwhile, had fallen into a comfortable unit, pressed closely together and apparently communicating through gestures and significant looks. His ankle was stinging, and he absently bent down to wipe the shallow scratch clean with the cuff of his jeans.

Then he head it. A soft rustling of the leaves not far away, like something large was moving very carefully through the trees. It was subtle enough that it almost could have been the wind, except there was no wind. The air was flat and still. He realized very suddenly and unpleasantly that he hadn’t been paying attention to the twisting route they’d taken through the trees, too focused on keeping up with the kid.

There was no wind, they were lost in the woods with the sun going down, no one knew where they were, and they were not alone.

“Shut up,” Steve hissed, more out of habit than anything else, because none of the kids were talking anyways, but they stilled anyways.

“There’s something in the woods,” he continued quietly, half-expecting them to panic- but they didn’t, just stared up at him with those big, expectant eyes that made him feel wholly uncomfortable. They were waiting for him to do something, to give them instructions or something, he realized after a moment.

He was so not prepared to be the adult in this situation. Or in any situation, really.

The light was dimming further, and coupled with the canopy of pine trees and dead leaves muting the light, he had to squint to make out their faces.

He held still until he heard it again. It was closer, he thought, and his throat went tight with panic. What if it was a bear? They had bears around here, and wolves too. Stephanie from Nancy’s grade had nearly been mauled by one once when she and a group of friends had gone into the woods to get roaring drunk and she’d wandered too far from the group.

There was another whispering rustle of leaves being gently brushed aside. It was very close to them. He could hear something else now, too, a low, near-silent rumbling that could have been a growl.

He hooked his fingers around Ten’s wrist and tilted his head in the direction that they’d come from, not trusting himself to talk with whatever it was so near. Follow me, he mouthed. Keep quiet.

Ten seemed to understand, even though it must have been hard for him to see his face, because he nodded once, and grabbed onto Seven’s hand, who held onto Nine, and then looked up at him expectantly. Slowly, carefully, the three following behind him, Steve started edging back between the trees in the direction he thought they’d come from, squinting to see in the darkening gloom.

He thought he could see something moving, out of the corner of his eye, but when his head snapped up to track the movement, there was nothing there. He swallowed hard and made his steps a little faster, checking over his shoulder every few feet to ensure the kids were still following behind him.

They were.

He thought the trees were thinning, but it might have just been his imagination. Now that they were moving, it was harder to tell whether the sound of leaves rustling was still there.

Something snapped.

He whipped around and met Ten’s guilty eyes, a stick in splinters under his too-big burrowed shoe.

There was a low, rumbling snarl.

“Fuck,” Steve whispered.

The rumbling grew louder.

“Run! he yelled, all attempts at stealth forgottened, breaking into a sprint towards what he really fucking hoped was the edge of the forest, half-dragging Ten and his weird friends behind him. Behind them, far too close, were pounding, heavy footsteps, like whatever it was chasing them had given up the stealth game as well, like it knew its prey was fleeing.

The trees were definitely thinning then, and Steve picked up the pace, fingers locked around Ten’s wrist. He risked a glance over his shoulder to ensure the kids were all still there and saw-

-not a bear what the fuck what the fuck-

-a monster. It was moving through the trees too fast for him to get a clear look at it, but it was tall, far too tall to be a bear or a wolf, and it almost looked like it was moving on two legs, like a person… but it wasn’t a person, the waxing sunlight on flashes of mottled grey skin made that clear.

The kids were flagging, he could see that even in the brief look he got, especially Nine and Seven, as though their tired and battered state was catching up to them, sapping their strength.

He could see the edge of the tree line, and the street beyond it, which sent a burst of fresh energy through him. There was a streetlight at the edge of the road, and cars driving lazily down the asphalt as people started home from work, oblivious to the danger nearby.

They were only feet from safety when one of the kids tripped. He didn’t know which one- they were holding so tight that when one took a wrong step and ate dirt, all three toppled like dominoes. Steve barely avoided falling himself, caught off-guard by the sudden stop, and Ten’s hand was ripped from his by the impact.

The monster was on them instantly, looming over them, and then Steve could see it clearly for the first time, and his heart dropped all the way to his feet. Every instinct was screaming at him to run, to leave the kids and get somewhere far, far away where it was safe and warm and everything made sense.

None of this bullshit had anything to do with him anyways, and he’d done his part, and he should just go, he had the chance, he…

He couldn’t do it.

He saw himself stepping forward, putting himself between the cowering children and the monster. Saliva dripped down onto the ground from its gaping mouth, and a clear string of it splattered against his shirt. He tried not to cringe and failed.

“Hey, asshole,” he said, and thought he kept his voice admirably still for how hard his heart was pounding, “why don’t you pick on someone your own size, huh?”

The monster snarled, low and deep. Steve really, really hoped that the kids were taking advantage of his distraction to run for safety, but he also know, with some buried instinct, that the moment he looked away to check, the monster would pounce. He heard small scuffling movements behind him, and could only hope they were gone.

The monster’s mouth opened wider, unfurling like a flower, throat studded with teeth going back and back and back. Steve squeezed his eyes shut, and waited for pain.

Instead, a thundercrack sounded directly next to his ear, and he opened his eyes again just in time to see an honest-to-god lightning bolt hit the monster in the chest, sending it flying backwards. It struck a tree and slumped to the ground, dazed. Steve whipped around to see the girl slump backwards, apparently spent.

“What the fuck,” he said flatly, but there was little time to be bewildered. Behind them, the monster let out a wet, snarling moan and started to move again, claws sinking deep into the ground as it attempted to right itself. The two boys were struggling to pick the girl up, but they were obviously nearly as exhausted as she was, and their arms were shaking with the effort of even trying to lift her, let alone carry her.

“That’s not gonna work,” Steve muttered, and moved to pick her up himself. For a moment, the new boy- Seven- resisted, giving him a dark look and holding onto her, but Ten touched his arm and some communication must have passed between them, because Seven relented.

Steve hoisted the girl into his arms and cast a quick look over his shoulder. The monster was clawing its way to its feet. They had to move.

The boys at his heels and the girl half-conscious in his arms, he ran.

~~~

The sun was starting to dim through the library windows, and closing time was drawing near. Hopper realized with a small start that he’d lost most of the day already. Fuck, how had that happened? He hadn’t even called into work. Flo was going to kill him.

He was about to call out to Joyce and suggest that they head out and figure out what their next step should be- because where were they even supposed to go from there?- when the next article on the reader caught his eye. He scanned down until he found the woman’s name.

Terry Ives.

~~~

It wasn’t until they were standing on a well-lit corner, the monster nowhere to be seen, that Steve stopped to catch his breath. Truth be told, he’d be happier to keep going until he could be absolutely certain, but the boys were clearly flagging and the girl was a dead weight in his arms.

He leaned against a wall, let out a long breath, and turned to look at the boys, both of whom were studiously avoiding his eyes. Seven’s body was angled away from him, almost like he was expecting a blow, and that made Steve pause and soften his tone before speaking.

“Okay,” he said, and it had a markedly hysterical note to it as everything that had happened in the last half hour began to catch up to him. “Okay. We’re going to find someplace busy with very good lighting, and buy some cheap food, and then you are going to explain to me what the actual fuck just happened. Okay?”

Both of the boys were frozen for a moment, then Ten nodded slowly.

“Okay.” Steve took another deep breath, closed his eyes tightly for a moment, and then nodded. “Let’s go.”

~~~

So come on and let me know… should I stay or should I go?

The song ended just as Jonathan pulled up in front of his house, and the first thing Nancy noticed was how small it was in comparison to her house or Steve’s, or even Barb’s. She was used to houses at least two stories tall, supported by a comfortable upper-middle-class income. The Byers house, in comparison, was a shoebox, and she felt ill as she remembered all the times she’d overheard Jonathan being mocked behind his back for wearing worn-out shoes or working at the movie theatre on weekends. Considering the issues his mother had, she wondered how much of the house’s income rested on his shoulders.

A thought struck her. “Is your mom home?” she asked, feeling nervous at the prospect. Jonathan froze, then swore, banging his hand against the dashboard.

“Fuck! I lost track of time. I meant to be back here right after school before she got home from work, so I could take care of this and so she wouldn’t worry, but…” he trailed off, but Nancy could read his meaning easily, and guilt knotted up her stomach. It was her fault, of course it was. She was the one who’d started the conversation, who’d asked him to stay after school. She was the reason he was late.

“Guess there’s nothing to be done about it now,” he muttered, turning the key in the ignition to kill the engine. He cast a look on the windows, and his shoulders relaxed slightly. “Her car’s not here, so maybe she just took an extra shift or something.”

He turned to face Nancy. “We, um… we should go in. Are you ready?”

She wasn’t, but she also had enough self-awareness to realize that she probably never would be wholly ready, and the only thing to do was just to go for it. She swallowed down the complicated knot of emotions in the back of her throat and nodded, steeling herself.

“I’m ready.”

All the way to the front door, she felt detached, following Jonathan and focusing all her energy on putting one foot in front of the other.

He rapped on the door with one fist. “Mom? Are you home?” he called. “It’s me, Jonathan- sorry I’m late.”

There was no response, and he gave her a tiny shrug before twisting the doorknob and opening the door.

The house was full of light. Nancy stepped through the threshold slowly, eyes wide. The walls and ceiling were strung with tangled Christmas lights in all colors, and lamps that must have been dragged in from the rest of the house rested on every available surface of the living room. The resulting effect gave the room an almost magical feeling.

“Wow,” she whispered, all her chaotic emotions gone for a moment in the face of shocked, childlike wonder.

“This is new,” Jonathan said, apparently just as stunned.

Nancy opened her mouth, unsure what she was going to say- but any words died in her throat as she took another step and the children came into view behind the couch. They were sitting on the floor of the living room, apparently deep in hushed conversation, one of the lights sitting between them and lighting their faces. Jonathan cleared his throat.

“Six? Eleven?”

Both heads swung up in unison.

Nancy’s attention immediately focused on the boy, zeroing in on his face searchingly. She could see the similarities obviously enough now that she was looking for them, though she wasn’t sure she would have noticed them without Jonathan having pointed them out, something that made shame pool in her stomach.

He was looking at her too, she noticed. She wondered if he saw what she did… if he even knew to look. He met her eyes, and she almost wanted to flinch away from the weight of his gaze.

Eleven. He’s only eleven.

“Hello,” she said softly, crouching down in front of him. He blinked, then leaned forward slowly until there was about a foot between them.

“Hello,” he echoed, voice quiet and rusty, like it had barely been used, and hesitantly raised a hand. Nancy raised her own hand, and touched her brother’s fingers for the first time, and her vision went dark.

Memories cascaded across her eyes, a living record of her life from birth to sixteen. Interspersed with the memories she knewwere unfamiliar images. Maybe they were things she just didn’t remember… or maybe they weren’t her memories at all. She saw a long white hallway, a huge tank of water, a light flickering, all interspersed with the constant background montage of her life. The feeling was akin to someone rifling through her mind like a file cabinet.

Apparently, he found what he was looking for, because the fast-forward stopped on one memory and focused on it. Nancy had just a moment to recognize the memory immediately- it had haunted her for years- before she was plunged back into it.

Nancy was five. She was sitting in a plastic chair in a hospital hallway. One of the legs was too short, so the chair rocked back and forth whenever she shifted her weight, legs hitting the linoleum floor with a hollow, repetitive clatter. Her feet didn’t reach the floor, so she kicked her legs back and forth aimlessly in the air.

There was a door to her left. Behind the door, her mother was screaming. Her small hands were tight around the armrests, and one of the lights that lit the hallway with a sterile glow was flickering irregularly. The plastic edges cut into her palms. A nurse had come a few minutes before to try to usher her away to the waiting room, but she’d stubbornly refused to leave her mother.

Suddenly, the screaming stopped, and Nancy craned her head around to stare at the door. After a long, tense second, the door opened, and an orderly slipped out. There was a bundle in her arms.

Nancy went very still. The woman, harried and distracted, didn’t notice her tiny form, a shadow in a chair. She started down the hall, heels clicking on the linoleum.

The bundle moved in her arms, and then a soft wailing began to rise from it, small and distressed. That was a noise that Nancy would remember for the rest of her life, that would play in the back of her mind in the early hours of the morning when she was alone in her dark bedroom with nothing but her thoughts.

The nurse disappeared around the corner, taking the brother Nancy had never met with her, and the scene blurred and changed.

Nancy was six. Her birthday had come and gone while they waited for her mother to come home from the hospital, and it was finally time. Her dad walked in the door pushing her mother in a wheelchair, looking tired and sad but still smiling. She opened her arms for a hug.

“Nancy, darling, come here.”

Nancy didn’t move. She was distracted, searching the scene for the missing piece: her brother. She couldn’t find him.

”Where is he?” she asked, voice small, and her mother’s smile turned glassy and frozen. She suddenly seemed near tears. She mouthed something up to Nancy’s dad: ‘You didn’t tell her?’

Her father shook his head slightly.

Her mother’s carefully studied cheeriness shattered, and when she turned back to Nancy the smile had failed and vanished, replaced by a flat, mournful expression she’d never seen on her mother’s face before. “He’s… he’s gone, baby. He, he wasn’t breathing when he was born. He’s gone.”

”No,” Nancy stated blankly, voice quickly growing unsteady and distressed tears building in her eyes. “No, he’s not. I heard him, he was crying, he was…”

Both of her parents were looking at her with pity. “No, he wasn’t, Nancy,” her father sounded out slowly, like that would make her understand, like it would make sense of the situation. “I’m sorry. He’s dead.”

The picture skipped forward again.

Nancy was ten, and Hawkins’ new Chief of Police, Chief Hopper, had just given a reluctant-sounding speech to the assembled elementary and middle school students about speaking out if you witnessed a crime. Nancy had shifted in her seat the whole way through, the word ‘kidnapping’ ringing in her ears as the redheaded girl who sat beside her, Barbara, cast concerned glances her way.

On the way out, Nancy broke surreptitiously away from the rest of the class and padded up to Chief Hopper’s side.

”Excuse me?” she’d said, voice so quiet he didn’t seem to hear the first time and she had to repeat herself. “Chief Hopper? I’d… I’d like to report a crime.”

He finally noticed her, and looked her up and down before responding. “Yeah? What crime?”

”My… my baby brother. He’s been kidnapped.”

The chief’s eyebrows rose almost to his hairline. “No sh-“ he started before cutting himself and trying again. “Really?”

Nancy nodded. “The hospital people took him.”

”You’re the Wheelers’ girl, right?” he asked, not waiting for confirmation before continuing. “Didn’t think you had a brother.”

”I do. They’re liars,” she insisted. “The hospital people.”

”That’s a serious accusation, kid,” the chief said carefully.

”But it’s true!”

”...okay. I’ll look into it.”

The picture blurred forward again, into a scene at the Wheelers’ house, taking place only a few hours after the last. Nancy was in tears, and the door had just closed behind Chief Hopper as he made his retreat.

Her mother was all sharp edges and injured fury, looming over her, and Nancy shrank back into her chair the same way she’d done five years before, in a hard plastic chair with one leg shorter than the others. “Why did you do that?” she demanded.

”Because it’s true,” Nancy insisted, repeating the words that had become her mantra, trying to keep her voice from trembling in the face of her mother’s anger and failing.”They took him!”

”He’s dead, Nancy!” her mother screamed, voice cracking with pain and anger, and the house went silent. Nancy’s mother stared down at her daughter and seemed to see her white, frightened face, because just like that, all the fight seemed to go out of her. Suddenly, she looked very tired, and very sad, and very old.

”He’s dead.”

Nancy opened her eyes. It might have been seconds or it might have been hours since she’d closed them and entered the strange trance- she wasn’t sure. Jonathan Byers was halfway to panic behind her and the strange girl- Eleven- was examining her face with solemn brown eyes. She barely noticed either of them. All her attention was on the boy in front of her.

Six.

Michael.

Her brother.

“...sister?” he whispered, voice wavering and uncertain.

She felt a tiny smile come to her lips as tears spilled down her cheeks, and he hesitantly matched it, smiling slowly and cautiously.

She opened her mouth to say something, but couldn’t find the words. Instead, she sniffled wordlessly and grabbed the brother she’d never met in a desperate hug, pulling him close to her chest and holding him right, daring anyone to try and take him away again.

Chapter Text

“Library’s closing,” the woman behind the desk said, and Joyce felt like a spell had been broken, the silence that had taken hold over the two of them snapping like a guitar string. Hopper cast a cursory glance at the librarian and nodded to show they’d heard as Joyce started getting to her feet. Her movements felt slow, stunned.

So many stories.

So many children torn from their families.

“What now?” she heard herself ask, her voice barely a breath above the silence. Hopper was silent for a moment, looking towards the door.

“Way I see it, we’ve got two options,” he said after a long pause. “We can head home now, come back tomorrow and see if we can find anything more, or we start following up on the leads we’ve got here, try and track down whoever on this list is still alive and see what they can tell us.”

She met his eyes. They both knew what she wanted to do.

“Excuse me,” she asked the librarian, who gave her an exasperated look in response.

“Yes?” the woman- Joyce thought her name might have been Jeanne or Jeanette- snapped with poorly-concealed impatience. Her stern, irritated expression shrieked why are you still here?

“Can I use your phone? I have to call home and tell my son I’m going to be home late.”

The librarian smirked, a hard, amused thing, cutting her eyes between Joyce and Hopper knowingly, and Joyce felt her face heat up. The woman shook her head and pushed the phone towards her, and Joyce ducked her head as she dialed to hide the embarrassment written across her cheeks.

She picked up the phone, and froze.

Crazy Joyce Byers, the divorced madwoman who lives on that hill at the edge of town. She was in here with the sheriff for an awful long time. Why yes, sir, they were looking through old articles on missing children. What agency did you say you were from again? The Department of Energy?

“I’m sorry,” she half-stuttered, dropping the phone back into the cradle with more force than necessary. “We… we have to go.”

She turned without waiting for the woman’s response and walked to the door as quick as she could without running, panic pounding in her chest. She grabbed Hopper around the wrist so tightly she was certain it had to be hurting him, but she couldn’t make herself loosen her grip. He said nothing, just opened the door for her.

Once it had swung closed, putting a solid barrier between them and the judgemental glare of the librarian and any other listening ears that may have been eavesdropping, she felt like she could breathe again.

“So,” Hopper said, fishing two cigarettes out of his pocket and passing one to her before lighting one for himself. “Ready?”

She nodded, a quick, jerky motion, and inhaled deeply, smoke filling her lungs. “Ready.”

I’m so sorry, Jonathan. I’ll be home soon.

~~~

Jonathan felt like an intruder, watching as Nancy seemed to snap out her trance and grab Six- Mike? -in a grasping, desperate hug. The two siblings shared words, but he couldn’t hear them, and nor did he want to. He knew that whatever conversation was passing between them wasn’t meant for him.

Fingers brushed against his, and he startled, looking down to see Eleven standing by his side. The girl had an unsettling way of moving almost silently, like all her life she’d been raised to be nothing more than a shadow in a corner. She was looking at Six and Nancy’s embrace with a small smile on her face, and in that moment she actually looked like a little girl. Jonathan wondered if she had a family who had been looking for her, too. Siblings, parents…

...a mother.

The idea that had first come to him in the darkroom reared its head again, slamming into his thoughts and derailing them completely.

What if?

What if his mother had been right all this time? If Nancy’s brother really was kidnapped by the laboratory, really was held captive all those years just as his mother described, it was possible…

...it was possible Will was somewhere out there too. It was possible his brother was alive after all, that he really had been stolen away. And if he had been… then maybe Jonathan could find him. Maybe he could bring him home.

Maybe he could get his brother back.

Maybe he could even get his mother back.

~~~

They wound up at Martha’s Kitchen, a twenty-four hour diner with shitty, greasy food and a floor that looked like it had never once been washed. Steve chose it for two reasons- it was always relatively busy, and it had bright lights that were on at all times. The three kids were all bunched into one side of the booth, pressed up against each other- The girl, Nine, against the window; Ten in the middle; and the other boy, Seven, on the outside. Steve sat across from them, feeling the last echoes of adrenaline abandon him, leaving him feeling empty and shell-shocked.

He would like to wake up now, please. As soon as possible. He wanted to go back to the real world, where little girl didn’t toss lightning around and eyeless monsters didn’t chase people through the woods and where the biggest problem in his life was his tanking English grade and the possibility of Nancy Wheeler cheating on him. At the moment, he couldn’t even make himself care about either of those, when earlier that day (it seemed much longer ago) he’d been ready to rip Jonathan Byers’ creep head off.

The children did their explaining with halting, soft voices, made even quieter by something that might have been shame, and he had to strain to hear them over the constant background din of the diner. Plates clattered together, the overworked waitress bustled around, and the cook periodically called out orders in an off-key voice. His head hurt, and he buried his face in his hands, rubbing at his eyes with the heels of his palms.

He wished the kid had never shown up at his fucking door. Why did it have to be him who stumbled into his mess?

If you really wished that, you would have ditched them in the woods, and you know it.

He shook off the little voice in his head, lifted his head from his hands and turned his gaze on the three kids.

“So let me get this straight. You guys grew up at Hawkins Lab.”

The three nodded in perfect unison, a move which sent shivers down Steve’s spine for no reason he could accurately describe. “Don’t do that. ‘S creepy. The nodding thing.”

The children didn’t respond, which Steve chose to take as tacit agreement and continue. “And you ran away, and now you’re being chased by the men in black, and also by a monster.”

Again with the nodding.

Steve took a deep breath, held it in his chest, and counted to ten, then released it in a long, slow exhale just as the waitress, a middle-aged woman with tawny hair in a loose bun and dark circles under her eyes, walked up to them. She was snapping a piece of gum irregularly between her teeth.

“What’re ya having?” she drawled out, pen poised over a notepad, managing to say the whole phrase in the space of one word.

“What’s the greasiest burger you have?” Steve asked rhetorically, and the waitress raised her eyebrows for a moment before scribbling something on her pad and cutting a questioning glance between him and the three kids.

He followed her eyes and looked over at the three, shoved up against each other on the other side of the booth. Under the harsh yellow lighting of the diner, they looked even more shrunken and malnourished, even more pitiful, the circles under their eyes darker.

“...and three pieces of apple pie.”

~~~

Nancy was holding on. It seemed like all she could do in the face of the enormity of the truth, of what the boy in her arms represented. Tears welled up in her eyes and spilled down her cheeks, the knot of emotion twisting in her chest.

She didn’t know what she thought. She didn’t know what she felt.

Her brother was alive.

She’d been lied to her whole life.

Her brother was alive.

Did her parents know?

Her brother was alive.

She didn’t know what to think or how to feel, so she just grabbed the boy in her arms all the tighter. After an embrace that seemed to last years, she finally slackened her grip and leaned back, not yet ready to let go.

She looked at him, really looked, for the first time. He was so small, dark eyes sunk into his head, hair buzzed off, skinny almost to the malnourishment. There was a sweatshirt, probably a hand-me-down from Jonathan, hanging over his shoulders like a quilt. His feet were bare.

She felt the tears threaten again, and raised a hand to quickly swipe them away.

“You’re so old,” she heard herself say, barely above a whisper. He tilted his head to one side in a birdlike gesture of confusion. “I… I only saw you as a baby,” she elaborated, feeling a bittersweet smile twist her lips. “I guess I didn’t realize… you’d grow up.”

~~~

Three cases of hypothermia.

Ten cases of frostbite, of varying severity.

One death.

It didn’t make sense.

Martin Brenner despised when things did not make sense, when the facts did not proceed logically to their proper conclusion. The facts were that 007 had been one of their least promising subjects, far behind the likes of 011 and 012. He had demonstrated limited psychic ability and almost no additional powers beyond a mild temperature drop in his general vicinity. Truth be told, Brenner would probably have removed him from the program a while ago if not for the fact that such a course of action would have distressed the other children unduly, and he tried to avoid that. It tended to skew his results.

Certainly, 007 had never demonstrated power close to what Brenner had witnessed in that clearing. To his mind, there were two possible explanations for the discrepancy in his data.

The first explanation was that the abilities had developed spontaneously in reaction to the subject’s stress and terror, along with his desire to protect 009. Possible, considering the lack of understanding they had about the true nature of the children’s abilities, but unlikely. All other empowered subjects had displayed their abilities from very early in life and had strengthened in steady, small increments as they aged. A sudden, dramatic increase in power would be contradictory to that established trend

The second explanation was that 007 really had been that strong all along- strong enough to kill the soldier nearest him with only sudden, violent cold- but had somehow, over the course of years, managed to keep it hidden, solely so that someday, should he ever come to oppose them, he would have the element of surprise.

Which was ridiculous.

The amount of strategy, of forethought it would have taken… the subjects were naive and trusting. There was no way one of them could ever even have thought to do such a thing. There was no way… but even as he thought it, memories drifted forward of 007 moving slightly, shifting whenever a scientist or nurse entered the room to place himself subtly in front of his companions. Brenner had barely taken note of the habit before, but it suddenly seemed significant.

It was a gesture of protection.

Fury, unexpected and violent, pounded in his chest. He’d been outwitted by a child, and he had no one to blame but himself for falling for the ploy.

He had underestimated one of his subjects.

It would not happen again.

“Sir,” a nearby technician murmured. “We haven’t gotten any input from the audio or video recording devices planted in Chief Hopper’s home all day, or from the bug on Joyce Byers’ phone. It cut out earlier in the middle of a call, and we haven’t heard anything since.”

He frowned. The chief and Ms. Byers posed yet more complications to a situation that was rapidly deteriorating despite his efforts to control it. The Byers woman had already been thoroughly discredited- he wasn’t afraid of what she’d say. If anything, her sudden death would lead people to investigate the claims she’d been making for years. She needed to be monitored closely and, of course, medicated to keep her from acting out, but was otherwise best left alone.

The chief, through. If he could, he would simply make the man disappear, but in a town of this size, such a vanishing could never go unnoticed. And according to the monitors, Chief Hopper was the person who frequently talked Joyce Byers down from doing anything… rash. He was important.

“Send a team to check it out. Be discreet.”

“Yes, sir.”

~~~

“So,” Jonathan muttered to Eleven, keeping his voice low, not wanting to interrupt the reunion in the middle of the room, “why the Christmas lights?”

“Talk,” she said simply. “Talk to… lost friend. Twelve.”

“You’re using the lights… to talk to your lost friend,” Jonathan repeated, more a statement than a question. Somehow, it wasn’t even the strangest thing he’d heard in the last hour.

Stranger things happened in abundance in Hawkins, it seemed.

Eleven nodded. “Brother.”

“He’s your brother?”

She paused, looking torn. “Yes. No. He’s…”

Eleven raised a hand to point, and pure horror rose in Jonathan’s gut.

She was pointing at Will’s door.

”Brother.”