Coffee and Contemplation | tempted halo

[horn held halo]

It was May 23rd, 1984. The supposed April showers had long ago worn out their welcome, and with the third massive rainstorm of the month having barely given the last one enough time to let the ground return everything it had soaked up before it was becoming increasingly unlikely that they'd ever get a chance to see the damn flowers in full bloom.

More to the point, four in the morning was far too early for any kind of inclement weather to be pounding that loudly on the thin roof of James Hopper's mobile home. Outside maybe, the steady thudding of the heavy rainfall on the front overhang harmoniously syncing with the spiking water of the lake would have made for a soothing natural symphony to enjoy a hot cup of coffee to, just barely safe from the torrential downpour on account of the flimsy structure over his head. Give him a couple more hours of sleep and a day off to follow, and he'd have been the torchbearer for that sounding like a damn fine idea. Instead, he was given an answer to his frustrated throwing of a pillow over his head by way of thunder so damn potent that it set the wood-paneling of his squalid little domicile rattling almost as much as his teeth did in sympathy.

The message was clear. Time to get up.




When you weren't trying to sleep through it, there was a peaceful solitude about a really good storm. If you didn't have to be worried about your minuscule living quarters literally coming down around you or blowing back into the lake on account of a particularly stiff breeze, so much the better. Plenty of people liked to say that pets ended up resembling their owners, but this was one case of a house that did the same. After all, you could take one look at the chief's living situation and make some pretty clear assumptions; it was built for transience, not much to look at on the outside, and disorderly to the point of chaos on the inside. All that bein' said, the damn thing still weathered every storm you could throw at it, and what looked like chaos to most made perfect sense when you were the one living in the middle of it. As for not being much to look at, well, exceptions prove the rule sometime.

Still, he looked a sight better after a fresh (if uncomfortably cold) shower than he had upon waking up. There was plenty of time to let his hair dry itself out even if the rain coming down made that a more or less moot consideration, and looking to the porch for the paper in this kind of weather was a fool's errand to even consider. He'd have to be at least half as dimwitted as some of his coworkers seemed to think behind his back to expect that the antennae was holding up any better outside, much less that there'd be anything on the TV worth putting up with this early.

He stuck to the rain for his company and entertainment. The pot of coffee had just begun to bear fruit by the time he'd pulled his undershirt down to tuck it in and cinch his belt tight, but he gave it a little more time before he even wanted to button up his jacket and look smart and ready for work hours yet before the station opened its doors. There was no crime happening at this hour in Hawkins, rainstorm or clear skies. Hell, there was no crime happening in Hawkins period. Not of the variety of old spouses sniping at one another, not teenagers vandalizing the corners on Main street, and since last November, not even any secretly going on right beneath all of their ignorant, trustworthy noses.

Jim returned to the only source of light currently casting shadows around the trailer that weren't flickering in the wake of a particularly brilliant lightning strike to take up his straight razor, run the water hot, and trim his goatee while the drip of the coffee pot was lost in the rain.




A part of him wondered if Will was up right now.

He'd been thinking about the kid a lot, off and on, ever since he'd vanished just over six months ago. In the week following his disappearance, it had been only damn right that he'd been thinking about the kid given that it had been his job to find him, and he'd been one of the only people in the city who had even begun to scratch the surface of what is vanishing had really been about. Most disappearances didn't end up in a funeral being held for the missing with a fake body in the casket.

Most disappearances didn't lead to you disappearing yourself into a twisted nightmare of what you thought the world was.

Hopper hadn't dealt with a lot of nightmares in his life. Like most people, he'd had those moments of stark terror that sent him bolt upright in bed, but unlike several others, he never remembered the cause of them. He only remembered the fear and the adrenaline of waking up, and before that, blackness. A part of him had begun to suspect that the other world that had nearly consumed Will Byers was that same blackness that nightmares had been made of, a memory from a time and place that he'd never known but which had always been right there, under his own feet. As black as the coffee steaming in the mug as he leaned out on the railing of the steps into his home, staring at the grey torrent of water washing out the world in front of him.

If it weren't for the occasional bolt of lightning clarifying the world, Jim would've damn sworn that Hawkins had never looked more like the other Hawkins than it did right now, or than it had during the two prior, equally torrential rainstorms that had swept the state. And if he was going to be forced to remember that, Will was part and parcel with it. Will Byers, Joyce Byers, and that girl.

They were all inextricably linked to the other Hawkins in Hopper's memory, and it was going to be one of the three who surfaced in the steam of his mug. Most likely, it was going to be one after the other.

Hopper had been asked, insomuch as the government really ever asked anyone to do anything that they were ordering you to do, to keep an eye on the kid. He had been sure when he'd stepped into that car last November that it was going to be the last Hawkins had ever seen of him, and with a little boy back in his mother's arms, that was alright by him. If they needed him for something -- hell, if they just wanted him gone, then that was going to be the end of it. But they didn't know.

No one had ever been through that portal, without protection, for as long as Will Byers had.

They didn't know.

They didn't know what kind of effect that would have on anyone, much less a boy as young as Will. They didn't know if he was dying or if he was superhuman, or if he was just the same young man he'd been before his world had gotten turned upside down. What they knew was that MK Ultra was at an end, and Hawkins was finally going to get to be the small, independent town that it had already thought it was. They were going to get to live their lives. And yet they still needed to know.

They needed someone they could trust to do the right thing, not just for the greater good, but for Will's specific good. Just keep an eye on him. Make sure he gets his check-ups.

And call us if you need anything.






Hopper took a sip of the coffee, feeling the bracing acidity of the instant mix coax him further awake, and rolled his broad shoulders back into something that was almost a stretch.

It went without saying that the number was to be used immediately if he came across any information about their missing person. And James Hopper had looked them in the eyes and promised them that they'd be the first people to know if he learned anything. When you were honest, trustworthy, and loyal, it was even easier to lie to people than they would have expected an outright con artist to be capable of. Never mind that they had no information on what happened to someone when they crossed through to the other side for a week, they damn well didn't know what happened to someone who had been there for six months. And Hopper, for all his lack of superstition, knew that she was.

It could've been a raccoon stealing from his stash for all he knew. That's most likely what it was, the clever little trash-possums. But raccoons or no raccoons, every week for six months, Hopper had gone out and left his care package on Friday night. And every Friday night afterward, the box was empty and waiting for another one. At first it had only been food, leftovers and Eggos. Then he'd put a book from the library in, Where the Red Fern Grows, and he was pretty damn sure no raccoon wanted anything to do with that. It had still disappeared.

A flashlight. A screwdriver. A blanket.

He didn't know what to keep putting in the box, didn't know what was needed, didn't know what was or wasn't helping.

The only thing Jim Hopper knew was that it felt like the right thing to do. That was the only thing he'd ever known when it came to deciding what came next in his life. And when you face down your nightmares, walk into them, and emerge to repair the hole in someone else's life it's hard not to start wondering if that had been the reason you'd been put on Earth all along. In a lot of ways, Hopper would never do anything better than saving Will Byers, who might well be up and staring out his window as the rainstorm made it impossible to sleep across town. He couldn't save his own, but he could save someone else. It felt right. A neat little button on his story.

But something still had to happen after that. Pushing paperwork for a series of disputes and matters of civil discourse down at the station for another twenty or thirty years couldn't be it. It was small, unexplainable even to himself, but putting things into that box every week gave him a reason to keep going until the next week. It gave him a reason to remain clear headed whenever the second or third beer in the fridge started to look better, until two or three months after he'd started, it was down to pushing aside even that first one. There was a purpose in the purposelessness of making Eggos and knick knacks disappear to an audience of none, the worst magician that Hawkins had never seen, and even if it did nothing but make him feel as though he was doing something, Hopper was content with that.

Had anyone ever found their source of contentment in the mundanity of life by making frozen waffles disappear into a box in the woods? Maybe not.

But stranger things had happened.

 

[Temptationist]

Hawkins National Laboratory – Department of Energy.
November 23rd, 1983.​

While Dr. Brenner and his team of Staties tore through Hawkins High School in a desperate search to capture subject Eleven, another group of state agents stood guard in the lab, watching over the portal. A separate team of specialists sat before their computer screens; hidden behind a glass window that maintained an oversight on the gateway to Upside Down. They watched for thermal conductivity, thermal heat ratings, magnetism, and most importantly, radioactivity, as they awaited for Chief Hopper and Joyce Byers to return from their rescue escapade. Every single person in that lab held zero belief that neither Joyce nor James would emerge again from the guck mess that was the portal. No one who went in, ever came back out. To them, this scenario would be no different.

Except, this scenario was vastly different. The one cause of death among every being to ever go through the portal previously has been the Monster - the infamous beast Eleven had made contact with during her last interaction with the creature in her mind. This time, however, the beast had come out of hiding, currently terrorizing the Hawkins present-time reality in search for what it was really looking for... Eleven. Despite belief that Jim and Joyce would die in this dark underworld alongside Will Byers, the three of them were momentarily free of the monstrous threat while Dr. Brenner and his team attempted to end this all.

“Agent 13 to Dep. 00, do you copy? Over.” A guard awaited for his response, hovering the com device over his lips, ready to engage. The advanced walky-talky beeped before a semi-muffled voice chimed back. 'Dep. 00 to Agent 13, Affirmative. Over.' The voice on the other end blared. The guard turned his head to look at the box-shaped room hanging above him – just four panels of glass that appeared as two-way mirrors. You couldn't see in, but you could certainly see out. There rested Department 00, a board of scientist and various specialist, all in front of computer screens, monitoring the portal's every move. The guard swallowed roughly. “Agent 13 to Dep. 00, we've got movement. Over.” The com began to shudder, white noise emitting from it to break the clarity of its function. The lights began to flicker in the building, the computer ratings beginning to spike – there was activity. The portal began to pulse, like a lung breathing, the slimy texture of its alien-like flesh protruding then receding. It's sticky strings were shifting, fusing together one piece at a time as if to close the portal.

Another Statie, standing beside Agent 13, instantly raised his own com device. Pressing the button to connect its signal to the biosuit of Jim Hops, he urgently barked, “The portal is shutting. ABORT MISSION. I repeat, the portal is CLOSING. ABORT.” The signal was choppy, only transmitting through the unit in fragments of a message. The State agent continued to repeat, this time louder, and more desperate as he watched the skin of the life-like gate mutate faster and faster. “THE PORTAL IS CLOSING. ABORT MISSION. THE PORTAL IS CLOSING. GET OUT OF THERE, NOW!!!”

A single bead of sweat fell from the crevice of Agent 13's hairline. Jim Hopper, Joyce Byers, and her son Will - the three of them were out of time. The portal was morphing; shrinking in size as the gate began to worm all of its being back into its own disturbed reality. Little did anyone know, that in just several minutes, the portal would fuse together completely; closing its metaphoric doors and subsequently terminating the otherworld connection indefinitely.

[ * * * ]​

With blood seeping from my nose, I had made my decision. I rose my hand to the monster, facing my nightmare head on to finally fight the fear. The beast squirmed and squealed in its attempt to squander, but he could not escape my abysmal wrath. I hit it without every bit of energy I had left in me. It now lay pinned to the wall, groaning as I sent waves of pains over its entire form. He could not move. He could not escape. Not anymore. There was a darkness inside of me. A darkness inside my mind. It tormented me; it tortured me. It controlled my every thought, my every move, and my every breath. But now I was taking back control, I was unleashing the darkness within me; pulling it back into my reign. I closed my eyes to focus my powers. The moment I made contact with the Demogorgon, the darkness seemed to lift. The monster vanished as it disintegrated to but a cloud of ashes before me.

I opened my eyes again. But this time, my heart sank.

Darkness.
There was darkness again.

My eyes widened as a distorted reality surrounded me. Upside Down - I had returned. My breaths were heavy, increasing in their intensity as panic set in. I was alone; virtually deserted in what I had previously thought were the confines of my own mind. But this strange world was no longer familiar. It was foreign; so foreign that it could not have possibly been a product of my own subconscious. I was left not only confused, but completely lost. I turned around again and again, shifting my body in circles as I tried to identify this black abyss of a wasteland. I was no longer in Hawkins. Not in its present time nor its altered dimension.

I felt this overwhelming need to cry. I needed to cry. I wanted to sob, but in this place I felt void of that ability. As hard as I tried amidst an increasing panic, I was physically incapable of shedding a tear. I was like a a ghost... now just an empty shell.

____________________________________________________________________________

Mirkwood Forest, Hawkins. December 24th, 1983.​

"You really think this bloke will show? It's fuckin' Christmas Eve. What the hell are we doing here, man." A man grumbled.

"Hey Scrooge, will ya keep ya fuckin' voice down?" Another snapped back, "You know the orders. And he'll show. I know it."

The agent grumbled again at that response, shifting over in his seat as they stared out into black nothingness. The forest was bare of any light. In order to maintain their secretive status, the two agents were sitting in their undercover vehicle waiting. "What's this guy's connection to the girl, anyways?" He turned to the folder in his hands, flipping it over to read the file on Chief James Hopper. "Pfft, of course." He snuffed, "Daughter issues. Dude's got a dead one. Cancer. Just a kid, too." He flipped the folder shut.

His partner, ignoring him entirely as he glared through binoculars, finally responded. "There." He lowered the spectacles, pointing out the window to a fair distance half a mile away.

"Well whatdyaknow, Jimbo strikes again." The annoyed agent mocked, "What a joke." He took the binoculars from his partner's hand, seeing for himself the lonesome Chief of Hawkins Police park his car by Mirkwood, the two roads where Cornwallis and Kerley met. The Chief exited his vehicle, hands full of holiday goodies. The two waited for Hopper to return and leave; ensuring he was long gone before emerging from their own vehicle. The two tread through the musky forest to reach the drop-box. Arriving at the wooden bin, the partner opened it up, seeing the two eggos and tupperware of homemade food. "Does he think she's really crawling into the woods to collect this shit? The guy's nuts." He picked up the eggos, flipping it over to examine the stiff plastic. Still frozen from being freshly unpackaged just 15 minutes before.

"If you ask me..." Finally adding his two cents, the partner popped open a transport container to allow the agent to submit the evidence. "... the lab's little science freak is dead." He snapped the ziploc shut. "Just like that Chief's daughter."

____________________________________________________________________________

Hopper Household, Hawkins. May 23rd, 1984. ​

The storm had long flooded the small town streets of the City of Hawkins. It was a long cry from the start of the summer anyone wanted in this suburbia, but it was the sad reality nonetheless. Things had returned more or less to normal. No more strange things had occurred since that fateful day exactly six months ago. The torrential down poor well-past April was about as unusual as it came, and even then, it was a big slice of normality in comparison to that memorable week in November of 83. Despite the electrical repercussions of the United States Department of Energy, most Hawkins citizens were healthy and they were happy.

A flash of lightning tore through the sky, bearing its wicked might down onto a near-by electrical pole. Striking the post, the distribution transformer completely fried. The unit sparked and sizzled, nearly exploding from the electrical shock of the lightning strike. The unstoppable tide of nature left the entire block and housing district void of any electrical current. Without any power, citizens like Jim Hopper were left in the dark. Any electrical device now null and ineffective. The clock that once flashed the time in big bold red numbers now lay unlit and useless. Although everything seemed to stop amid the barren storm, suddenly the vintage television propped in the living room right near the entrance of the door came to life. With its volume on full-blast, the TV instantly tuned into an unknown channel blasting the 1974 classic film, Where The Red Fern Grows – based on the book of the same title. On the stereo's loudest setting, the film's opening monologue as well as its renowned theme song, could be heard clear as day inside and out of the home.

When I was a boy, I grew up in the Ozarks of Oklahoma.
My folks were poor, and the partial land we lived on was allotted to my mother because of the Cherokee blood that flowed in her veins.
Except for one thing, I was the happiest boy alive.
But it's hard for any boy to be completely happy when he wants something so bad, it gnaws on his heart and gets all mixed up in his dreams.

♪♫♪
In the morning of my life,
I ran through the hills,
and the whippoorwills sand their songs just for me
And each brand new day,
was a sweet melody

In the morning of my life,
We'd swim in the creek, playing hide and seek
Like the wind wild and free,
And each brand new day,
was a sweet melody

But now the world has grown so old
The songs have been sung
There's no one left for me to hold
But all of my memories remain so young

In the twilight of my life,
I dream of the hill,
And whippoorwills who once sand just for me
Day is fading fast and now alas

Evening is here! Evening is here!
How I long for one more song
Out of the sweet...
Morning of my life
♪♫♪​

The TV instantaneously began to bug as the song ended. Just 2 and a half minutes into the film, it black-screened, completely shutting down as it should without any power or electric current to the house. However, the dead TV would last only mere seconds before flashing back on again, this time displaying a static, no-signal screen. The previously flashing clock did not re-illuminate. Neither did the microwave, stove, or any other electronic in the house. However, the stereo connected to the television did. Although the nobs did not physically slide back and forth, the radio was tuning - on its own. Aside from the static and white noise, strange sounds were being transmitted through the radio. As if the unit itself were possessed, the sound of heavy, distorted breathing resonated over the entire living room. It sounded as if someone was suffocating, even drowning amid the sound of sloshing. It was enough of a disturbing combination of noises to make the hair on even the most grown man stand up on the back of his neck. It was the sound of someone drowning; gasping unsuccessful for oxygen. It was a struggle for life.

Suddenly, a black mold appeared to grow out from the TV. It glossed over the screen like a thin sheet, fingers of some kind seemingly protruding from it as if something within it needed to escape. The hand was held open, pushing out hard until the black sheet began to molten; finally breaking apart to reveal a human figure. The hand was slender and feminine, though the nails were longer, almost unnaturally sharp. There was a toxicity in the air, the kind of eerie feel that caused a sinking feeling in the stomach. As if it needed an exorcism, the TV continued to spew out black gunk. Another flash of lightning erupted nearby, sending a wave of strikingly bright light to wash over the figure. Along with another hand, a head emerged with shoulders perched forward. Within seconds, the television was vomiting a hauntingly familiar goo. It gushed out onto the floor; nearly flooding the entire room with an inky water. As the body pulled itself out of the parallel portal, the naked curvaceous physique was visibly undeniable.

This was no monster from Upside Down, this was a human.
This thing was a woman.

With a coat several inches thick of mucus over my face, I could not breathe, I could not see. My senses were overloaded. A loud ringing filled my ears, deafening me and only intensifying my increasing panic. The lack of oxygen was causing my body to spasm. With my entire body exposed to the real world for the first time in years, it went it to total physical shock. I began to convulse uncontrollably. Although my mind went black, my slimy body was still completely out of control. I was launched into an explosive seizure, my muscles stiffening and my body becoming rigid with the hyper tonic movements as I shook. My brain felt as though it was being electrocuted, and as a knee-jerk response, my hand erupted to grab the nearest aid. With unparalleled strength, I latched onto whatever was closest to me. The layer of slime that previously confined my hand and arm broke free, revealing a single speck of black imagery against the grey color of my cold skin. The paroxysm lasted many long seconds, but paired with the suffocation, lead to a loss of oxygen to my brain. I fell unconscious, my death grip relinquishing as the life from my body left me. I sank to the ground, the struggle ceasing as I lay there naked and motionless. There was darkness within my mind again, except this time, it wasn't because I was trapped in an alternate dimension; this time, it was because my heart had stopped beating.

Another strike of lightning illuminated the room again, shedding a beam of light on the tattoo printed on my left wrist.

Zero-One-One.
011
Zero Eleven.
Elle.​

 

[horn held halo]

"But what happened after that?"

"I don't know, sweetheart. That's why it's the end of the book. We have to tell our own stories once one ends."

"But she didn't belong there. She made the island her home."

"Well even if being with people again was very different for her, and she didn't like certain parts of it, nobody deserves to be alone. Don't you think so?"​

"Jesus, Mary and Joseph." Hopper's curse was mild enough to offend none of them. The blinding instant in which the early morning darkness turned to the brilliance of day was enough to set anyone's eyes spotty, but it was the immediacy with which the thunder rolled in right after that set his whispered plea into the dulling deafness of the rainstorm beyond his porch. In that instant of light, everything became polarized. The dark became light, and the solid became ghosts, the innocuous nature of even the trees in question as their skeletal hands reached toward the rolling clouds high above.

If lightning was coming down on his doorstep close enough that he could feel it rattling his bones and bracing his boots to the wood beneath him, that seemed a damn good reason to take his cup of coffee back inside. Above the oppressive familiarity of wet earth and grass, the crisp ionization of the lightning coming down managed to hint at its existence, whisked away in the lingering steam of a mug of coffee and of a bachelor's existence by the time the door had shut behind him again.

Had he taken their names in vain even seconds before, maybe the lightning would've come a lot closer. But you can only see so many things in one lifetime before you begin to trade faith for coincidence and tell-tale signs as nothing more than delusions. Make no mistake, Jim had a good feeling that he'd pissed someone off just the same upon stepping back into his home only to learn that the light he'd left on in the bathroom had switched itself off. The clock was silent. Even the rumble of the air conditioner was dead and gone. In the teeth-clenching roar of the thunder that followed the lightning, the sound of a transformer going up in sparks and going still had been lost entirely, leaving the chief of police to get his news the old fashioned way. The rat-a-tat-tat of the rain on the roof, if you listened closely enough, might as well have been the sound of the wire bringing the breaking story to the news room. In it's own way, faith was like that lightning. It didn't create the shapes in the darkness, it merely revealed them to you as they may or may not have been. It was up to you and you alone to decide what you really saw in a world where there was, for that instant, nothing but black and white.

Prayer wasn't the sort of thing that brought daughters back to their parents. Hawkins had learned that the hard way, even if they might have suspected it before. What twisted alchemy of God and Man had seen to it that a child who's funeral had been attended, witnessed, grieved over, and internalized should have returned mere days later as whole and hale as he had been before the town had turned out to discover whichever shadow he had disappeared into in the first place -- all while the Hollands grew increasingly desperate as their teenaged daughter remained missing?

Chief Hopper had listened to Mr. and Mrs. Holland's prayers day after day. He had lived through their pleading, their grief, and their absolute certainty that if Will Byers wasn't really dead, then neither was their Barbara. The case was still open to this day, and when there was nothing more pressing demanding his attention at the station (most days, then) Jim had little choice but to try to track down another lead for her disappearance so that the Holland's would have one less avenue of hope that their daughter might have still been alive. He could only listen to them demanding to talk to the kids at the party so many times before he had to fall back on reminding himself that the truth as he knew it -- only a part of the truth, no matter how certain he might have been of it -- wasn't something that they would understand or find comfort in. That a monster had taken their daughter where it had spared Will Byers. And yes, Joyce had fought, and she refused to give up, and she had faith in things that no rational person should have had faith in, and she had prayed.

But prayer wasn't the sort of thing that brought daughters back to their parents.

Grief and desperation were salves for those who remained, not solutions to return those who were gone.

And ways to step through those shadows, into the world of black and white where you could reshape faith to be what you wanted it to be, what you needed it to be, no longer existed in Hawkins, Indiana.





Jim set his mug of coffee down on the end of the counter, the barest light from outside only just enough to work in tandem with his familiarity with the inside of his own house to let him avoid crashing hip first into the table near the door on his right or the television on his left. Enough time spent stumbling in without his proper cognitive faculties in place made it easier when nearly blind but stone-cold sober to not slam shin-first into his coffee table either. Maybe a year before, he would have had a lot more reason to curse than a startling bolt of lightning and a timelessness that only a power outage could truly summon. His legs still bore the minute scars to prove just how much damage a man could do to himself if he was confident there wasn't a table in his way before reality violently course corrected such foolhardy thoughts.

He added another one as his shin began profusely bleeding just seconds later. Not because he had blindly wandered into his coffee table at full speed in the darkness, but because the deafening volume of the television almost physically pushed him to step away from it and straight into the piece of furniture that most deserved to be strapped to the bed of a pick-up and taken down to the dump. His curse was much less mild this time as he spun around, desperately grasping for the volume on the television with one hand and trying not to let his wounded leg buckle him down to the knees in the process. He managed to spin the knob hard to the left right before he fell to sit on the floor in front of it in a way he hadn't honestly watched television since he was a boy, the necessity of alleviating the pressure on his shin bringing him down.

But despite the frantic twist of the knob, the volume remained deafening on the set in front of him, with the blinding light of the Oklahoma Ozarks nearly reflected across the police chief's face while he stared incredulously at the screen in front of him. It was a hard call between putting his hands over his ears and wrapping his palm around the space where he'd jammed his shin into the coffee table, but the ear-splitting volume of the television set ended up necessitating the former. It dulled the sound, but it was far from inaudible.

Like the thunder, he could feel it in his bones. Every word.

"I'm pretty tired. Maybe we can read chapter two tomorrow?"

"Of course we can. You get some sleep."​

The television remained dark and black, the haunting song still lingering in the air and the pain in Hopper's leg long forgotten. Over the course of two and a half minutes, the pain had subsided every bit as much as it had ripped into new and unseeable parts of him. It strangled him from the inside. The air tasted old and stale, the air of a hospital where no one ever went home. Even the bright scent of coffee still warm on the countertop above him to his left couldn't eradicate the oppressive sense memory of something that he could never truly forget. It had only been a fraction of the story, and then it was over. It wasn't going to be finished.

Yet the television came back on. Just as Jim put his hand onto the cursed coffee table and hoisted himself (tenderly) up to his boots, testing his weight on his injured leg and finding it to be far less debilitating than it always seemed after the initial moment of impact, static erupted into the room while the knobs on the stereo began to twist wildly, the harsh click, click, click of the buttons hitting their physical limit and returning to try again creating a rhythm. It was like the beat of a heart, or the timing it took to make a breath. It was a machine, drawing up air, pumping it in. Click, click, click. The sterile white light painted the walls, stripping them of their cheap wood paneling and turning them into nothing more than the nightmares that Jim Hopper didn't have -- the nightmares that he couldn't have, because he'd had enough salve, enough time to know how little prayers ever worked.

But then she began having trouble breathing, and his hands were on the radio.

"Sarah."

He gripped it like it was his lifeline to a time that had already gone away a long, long time ago. He tried to keep the knobs still, trying to focus on the sound of wet lungs desperate for air, and it was seconds and it was hours before the broad end of his hand was slapping down against the top of the stereo in frustration to get it to stop going in and out. "Sarah I know that's you, sweetheart, I know, I can hear you. I'm here."

Belief and faith were very different things. And just because you lost one didn't always mean you lost the other. And sometimes losing something only meant it was going to turn up when you least expected it.

He might have believed in Joyce Byers, and he might have done anything to support her own beliefs by the end of their hunt for her son, but empathy had its limits. You could never know what someone else really and truly felt until the instant that your circumstances aligned with theirs, and no matter how minuscule it might have been, you understood that there was some chance of returning what you'd lost. Just past four in the morning in the center of one of the worst May storms Hawkins had ever seen, Jim Hopper learned what had kept Joyce up at night, staring at her wall, stringing up Christmas lights. A single sound.

A sound that no amount of prayers had been able to stop, until it had, and so had all others. Everything except a mechanical clicking, and the quiet, persistent, beeping whir, like static on a broken television. But hospitals were sterile, antiseptic places. Even when death came to them, you never smelled the way that one life passed on and others remained.

The blooming of the rafflesia never touched even those closest to death in the clean, white walls of the hospital.







In the basement of the Department of Energy, it had overwhelmed the senses even before you ever saw the portal. The stench of something that should not have been. It wasn't revolting in the same way meat gone bad or garbage lit aflame was. It was almost sweet, in every way that it wasn't, and it seemed to light up every flaming, angry warning light that the human senses had at its very first brush with another world entirely. And when it crept into Jim Hopper's little house, it took with it any misguided notion that his little girl had come back to him. His knuckles were white, he was pressing down on the stereo with such force, and the machine alone seemed to be keeping the tremble in his limbs from bringing him back to the ground again.

"Why?"

There was no question as to what, but after six months, why now? Why was the nightmare emerging into the ostensibly waking world that had pulled Hopper out of his sleep hours before his alarm was supposed to go off? Why was the sickly-sweet scent of a toxic mockery of Hawkins, Indiana not in a locked down facility where it could be studied, but in the center of his own living room? And what monster was it birthing to claim the man who had taken its rightful prize from it, the blood for blood that demanded something be returned where Will Byers had been stolen?

The portal didn't answer. Jim didn't feel much like asking it any more questions that didn't end with something that anyone within earshot would simply assume was more thunder, and he turned to snatch his revolver off of the top of the coffee table. There was more than enough light to see the way the molding, creeping crevices of the portal overtook his television, but the way it bulged and distended outward, there was no shape or form to the thing that was emerging from the other side. There wouldn't be, either, as he took steady aim.

The lie of his steadiness was apparent in his wrists even before the thunder once again followed the lightning so close as to be nearly simultaneous, and the shapeless took shape. It was almost human, and every bit Upside Down. Where there might have been hair, there was only the black detritus of another dimension. Where there might have been flesh, there was only the expunged remnants of something else, slick and wet and nearly personable. Jim twisted his hands down and took aim again, stepping back until his calves brushed much more gently with the coffee table than his shin had before, but still he didn't pull the trigger. The memory was too fresh in his mind, the sound of the suffocation.

Sarah.

It gripped his legs with an abrupt, angry surge of speed and strength, and in the flickering of the screen and the lightning, it seemed far more human all at once. Not just human, but feminine, the shapeless mass of its skin like a cocoon wrapped in a shimmering outline of what lay beneath, a chrysalis awaiting its eventual molting. Where there was webbing and the idea of arms there were truly arms, pushing against the interior of the suffocating surface and soaking bone-cold dampness through his trousers the instant the arms seized around him. It wasn't attacking him, it was desperate, shaking and twisting and trembling against his legs. The revolver found a home somewhere on the carpet, but Hopper had tossed it so quickly and with such little care that he wasn't going to be sure where until the lights had come back on.

His fingers were too quickly buried in the mass of slime and overgrowth that was strangling the girl on the floor, sinking helplessly into the muck and finding it reabsorbing and shifting around his fingers rather than crumbling or tearing away. He clawed at the figure beneath, trying to remove the mess that was impairing her breathing, but made no headway, not even as her arm managed to come up and seize his wrist, the chilling effect of the slime like applying an ice pack directly to his skin. He shook his head, desperately sparing a glance at the grabbing wrist. "I'm trying, I'm trying goddamnit, just hold on," he told them, whether they could understand him or not. Whoever she was, whatever she was --

The lightning clarified the world. The smell of crisp, clean ionization cut through even the sickly sweet corpse flower smell of the Upside Down just long enough for Jim Hopper's eyes to focus on the three little characters on the wrist clutching to his own. It was impossible.

But so was hearing his dying daughter in the radio, and he had believed that as truly and sharply and briefly as the lightning strike itself.

"Hold on, hold on Elle," he muttered, the word sounding foreign and unpleasant against his teeth, in the same way that your eventual favorite song always did the first time you tested it on your tongue. He had to pry with as much strength as he could muster just to get out of her lingeringly slippery grip, to force himself up and away from where she lay prone before the portal that had once been his television, to stumble blindly yet knowingly into his bathroom. He jammed the knobs on the bathtub as hard to the side as he could, a torrent of water exploding onto the porcelain below.

And then coming to an immediate stop, trickling, dripping, and nothing. Not nearly enough to submerge her, to dilute the slime or wash it away. For a moment, it was Chief Hopper who was unable to breathe, the oppressive reality of the past meeting the present putting him in the helpless situation of watching her die all over again for the first time. The doctors had done all that they could.

But he hadn't. He didn't need the faucet.





She was shockingly light. Alarmingly so. The clammy chill of the muck that covered her seemed like it went straight through him, from one side to the other, but it was almost like a warm hug compared to the bracing downpour of the torrential rain as he descended the stairs, his kicked open door still angrily complaining behind him by the time his boots touched mud and the overhang ceased to offer any protection. It was right there, down in the mud, that her shoulders met the ground and his hands began wicking away as much of the clinging slime as he could. He wrenched at the black roots twisting and wrapping around her neck and shoulders, trying to toss them to the side. It was then that Jim realized that it was her hair, and not some demonic kudzu from another world. Her hair, dark as to be black in the night, with so much of it that even down in the mud she'd never be as covered by the wet earth even if she came to life and rolled around in it.

Elle with hair. That was nearly as novel as her erupting from his television.

He had scarcely realized in the flickering of his home how her small body had not been of the same sort of smallness it had been before, because at his size, a certain range of height all seemed to be simply occupied in his mind as 'small'. It was a rude awakening when his palms brushed, knuckles still cold and white, back and forth across her shoulders and turned her chin toward him, and he kept pushing the slime away even as the pounding rain began to dilute, dissolve, and remove it with far more alacrity than his fingers alone were managing. He couldn't feel her breath, but he pinched down on her nose, leaned in, and placed his lips against hers. In. Out. His recently trimmed goatee would have itched terribly, a prickly, curious sensation, if she'd been awake.

His hands slipped down, finding her breast bone after slickly sliding warm, steadied fingers between breasts --

novelty abounded

-- and managed to avoid worrying about his own confusion for the simple act that separated heroes from bystanders. One acted, while the other worried. Hopper acted, compressing once, twice, his hands folded over one another as he knelt in the pouring rain. Fifteen. Twenty. Thirty.

He leaned down, pinched her nose, and blew again.

One. Five. Ten. Twenty.

He said something, but over the rain, over his own heartbeat, over the oppressive blackness of a Hawkins that might still have been trapped in a nightmare, who was truly to say if the words mattered at all?

 

[Temptationist]

How many years had I been here? How much time had I lost? How much of my life had been wasted to this land of desolation? All these questions bore the same answer. I didn't know. Despite each tick for what I assumed was a day, lightly engraved on the side of a building I had found refuge in, I had long ago lost track. In a land of darkness, there was virtually no concept of time. There was no moonlight, and no sunrise or sunset. Just darkness, at every second, of every minute, of every hour, of everyday. I had only my own body to reference the lapses in time. My hair, no longer shaved to my scalp, now fell way beyond my shoulders. My breasts had grown, two fleshy lumps protruding from my chest. My body had stretched, my legs and arms longer, a fact I knew simply by marking my height with a wall and a rock. But in this wasteland, who knew if my body had even developed through time, or through radiation. Although the constant feeling of ailment had passed long ago, I wondered day in and day out if I would one day collapse suddenly, lifelessly. With every night I closed my eyes, allowing my mind to drift to sleep, I always awoke in surprise – amazed at my ability to live through another night.

Despite the unfamiliarity of the foreign city I had awoken to on my final return to Upside Down, if I wanted a chance at finding Hawkins again, I had to keep moving. We walked endless miles on these dark streets; no longer sheltered and afraid of the dangers that may await us out in the open. At times there were new landscapes, new ruins, and new challenges, but as time morphed in and out of what I assumed was night and day, not even the most terrifying of creatures could stop my journey. And there were plenty of them. It was a rude awakening discovering such vast array of different beasts and critters – but with every world came most any source of life. If Upside Down truly were a reflection of our own world, surely it came with an abundance of creepy crawlers. Perhaps the most surprising in this barren universe was not the actual beings that roamed these shadowy lands, but moreso their absolute determination to survive. Upside Down certainly had food, even fauna, though it was scarce and most of it was rotten and stale. It was kill or be killed, and eat or be eaten – there was no other option. Though, with resources so slim, you begin to develop a lack of need; lack of need for food, lack of need for sleep, lack of need of compassion.

Upside Down was a lonely place. Upon falling trapped within the confines of this empty space, I wondered how long my young mind could withstand the lack of companionship. Bound to a laboratory for my entire life, my resilience for human contact was strong. I had so little healthy interactions with people that I had already grown accustomed to the loneliness. The Lonely had become my best friend from a young age. But even the sad four white walls and a bed provided by the Department of Energy were more comforting than a life of darkness. Despite my childhood consumed by isolation, I had never felt more alone than I did in this twisted universe. I did not know God, but if I had, I would have prayed every time I closed my eyes; prayed that he would send me someone – something – to fill the growing hole in my heart. My soul, already so withered by the conditions of the forlorness, was falling weaker and weaker. My will to live shrivelled like a grape in the sun; even a raisin having more vivacity than I. Though, it seemed that the God I did not know had heard the prayers I did not pray.

Somewhere among the rubble of this otherworld, I had stumbled upon a desolate institution. From the outside, it looked like everything else; an abandoned building torn to shreds in the deplorable conditions of Upside Down. But as I entered the building, I felt the creeping sensation of The Lonely even stronger than before. The type of feeling that leaves you physically ill. Before I could even enter the building, I immediately curled over, my hand barely catching the outside wall before I began to hurl the contents of my empty stomach. The vomit, little in quantity from lack of food, spilled on the decayed garden pit beside the entrance door. I had felt ill many times in Upside Down, but I had rarely become so ill that I expelled bile. Taking a deep, suffocated breath in, I dry heaved a couple more times before biting my tongue. One more breath in, and I forced myself back up again. My hair, now falling just below my shoulders, barely escaped the contamination of my own bodily function. I moved it out of my face, looking ahead of me as I crawled past the broken door. Entering the facility, my jaw dropped. The hair on the back of my neck stood up as I looked at the wonders ahead of me. This wasn't just any ordinary building – shambled and in ruins – this was a library, filled with shuffled papers and abandoned tables. Though my gasp was a soft one, it echoed throughout this hollow space. The space, like a maze of different rooms, was filled with books. With bookshelves ceiling-high, the majority of books, stacked together one after the other, were still intact. In complete amazement, I rose my hands to the shelves, delicately grazing my fingertips along the spines of several of many thousand novels.

Abruptly, the bookcase shook; instantly causing one of the books to fall from a shelf above me. The novel fell splat on it's back; the sound of condense paper smacking the floor echoed throughout the room. Startled by it, I jumped back slightly; the sound of scattering claws following the shaking of the bookcase. I looked around, my heart racing as I searched for the culprit. Something was moving. I was surely not alone. Despite my wandering eyes, I found nothing around me. I became too distracted by the book before me. Even among the dark, it's eerie cover called out to me. Crouching down to pick it up, it read Where The Red Fern Grows, the cover depicting a boy is a dark forest, accompanied by two trusted Coonhounds.

The moment my fingers came in contact with the book, I was launched into a vision.

I was suddenly back in Hawkins; back on Mirkwood. It was a dark Friday night; something I could sense solely from the expectation of the weekend. It was cold out, but despite the frisky weather, I could see Jim Hopper roam the forest freely. He was confident in his trail, moving freely through the trees until he met his destination; a small wooden dropbox. Lifting open the boxes lid, the Chief of Hawkins Police Department gave a smile. The smile was weak, but it was genuine – the first smile I had ever seen to grace his lonely face. He placed inside the box two frozen eggos, a screwdriver, and a book, Where The Red Fern Grows.

Snapping back to reality, I opened my eyes to see the same book in my hands. I became overwhelmed; a feeling I had not had since I had become trapped in this world. A single tear shed from my eye. It fell from my lid, streaming slowly down my cold cheeks. Bringing one hand up to my face, I pushed the tips of my fingers into my frigid flesh. I lowered my hand before me, looking down upon the single tear that had now transferred to my index. In the dark of night, my face lit up – radiating like a teenager being asked to prom. This was much more than a tear... This was emotion, compassion. But more than anything, this was hope.

A boisterous bark cut the silence like a jab to the heart. I jumped, my body nearly falling backwards as I looked up from my hand to the room before me. My eyes widened. Sitting before me, just a couple meters from my feet, was the pupil responsible. It was not a beast, nor was it a person. It was a product of Upside Down; one that resembled that of the dogs on the cover of the book. The small creature was nearly hairless, with a bulging forehead and a toothy mouth that protruded from his jaw. His long rat-like tail was wagging back and forth behind him as he sat upright. He stared at me with foggy eyes, with nothing but a screwdriver held comfortably in his deformed mouth. He stood from his position, moving his pudgy wolf-sized body calmly over to me. Dropping the screwdriver at my feet, he bowed his head to me and licked my leg. Panting, he looked up at me, tail still wagging and his long paws tapping lightly on the ground in anticipation. I stared blankly at him, wondering if this apparent friendly creature was truly real, or just a figment of my lonely imagination. Picking up the tool, the mutated canine jumped up and down; ready to play. A small smile, weak though genuine just like Hoppers, graced my face. I flung my arm forward, launching the screwdriver across the empty hall. The dog flung into action, barking once more as he bolted for the item. Disappearing into the darkness, there was silence again. Moments went by and he did not return. I waited, and waited, but still, nothing. Feeling The Lonely creep back again, my head dropped down; my eyes stared at the ground below me. The illusion, just short lived. Though, as I glared down at my own two feet, a screwdriver rolled on the ground before me. Eyes lighting up again, my head shot back up, and lay the same canine, drool dripping from his gums, just waiting for me to throw the tool again.

From that moment forward, He was Redbone - the Coonhound of Upside Down.

____________________________________________________________________________​

All the years Dr. Brenner spent courting me into death had failed to make me immune to the concept. He failed to make me void of any compassion like he had. He may have played the role of my father, but he certainly wasn't, and that was blatantly apparent in my enormous sense of love for animals. This same emotion was what lead to his ultimate demise. Death – and how ironic that truly was.

That same unconditional admiration for life is ultimately what allowed me to survive Upside Down for so long. Despite even the most monster of monstrosity, I still always found a way to empathize with their pain. These were creatures of a disastrous dimension; a parallel to the real world drained of absolutely all presence of light. There was no good in this place; only bad. But somehow after all the time I spent here, I realized somewhere down the line that bad did not equate to evil. These monsters that roamed this strange Earth were dangerous, but they were not evil. In fact, evil only walked the streets in a world of hope and tenderness. Evil fed on the intentions of good people. It required good to exist. But without any existing good in Upside Down, evil could not exist; for evil could not know how to exist. Evil crept on vulnerable souls. It fed on the insecurities of human flaw. Evil was constantly thirsty, not in its quest for blood, but in its quest for innocence. For in all my unique experiences, there was only one evil I had ever known... and it wasn't the Demogorgon.

Doctor Martin Brenner, who I had once referred to as Papa since the day of my birth, leaned in to comfort me.

“Eleven.” He said, not even bothering to have given me a name that carried dignity. “Will you trust me?”

At that moment, I thought I did. I had instilled all of my childish love into the only parental figure I had ever come close to seeing. He courted my ego, he reassured my feelings... he manipulated me in every way.

Without so much as a single word, I looked up at him, my head adorned with that dreaded electrode cap, used only to hurt me into complying. Even with that blasted contraption on, I still looked at Papa with eager eyes. Without so much as a single word, I lowered my chin into a weak nod. He smiled at me, the same empty smile, void of any true paternal feelings. He reached over into a box that had been set on the cold, steel table before me, and he pulled out a stray cat. My stomach sank in that moment, pitting down to my knees. I felt a wave of nausea hit me like a ton of bricks. My panicked eyes darted straight for Papa, searching for answers amid increasing anxiety.

But I was returned with no such answers... only that same, cold, empty smile.​

The memories of Hawkins Indiana were painfully drifting from my scattered mind. Although the moments I shared with its citizens would never leave me, I found my ability to recognize many of its physical features weakening. I had seen so many tattered buildings, streets, and city sweeps in Upside Down, that among this never-ending abyss, they all began to look the same. I convinced myself that when I did find Hawkins again, I would remember it. It would be like a lightbulb illuminating in a dark room for the first time. An epiphany. I would see it, in all of its dusted debris, and I would just know. With every mile I travelled, I felt the reality of Hawkins, even if inverted within this world, was closer and closer. Though, I wondered if that was just my own delusion. A sort of fantasy I had created just to keep whatever shred of sanity I had left.

There was a familiarity with the forest I had just entered. Although its misty air and looming trees looked like virtually any other assortment of Upside Down vegetation, something about this strip of land felt comforting. Redbone began to bark, throwing himself forward and darting suddenly into uncharted territory. I gasped, yelling after him as I chased him down. Though, my screams would be distorted in sound, fading in and out with every tree that I passed. I could barely keep up with his unstoppable speed, and within moments. I had lost him. There was dead silence again as I spun my body around and around in attempt to locate him. I failed, miserably, until I heard his faithful bark again. Despite the sound echoing in virtually every direction, a gut-feeling lead me straight to his location. He continued to bark, even as I approached him. He was standing at the edge of a mountain. Any step closer and he would have fallen overboard. I slowed my tracks, looking around me as that same feeling of familiarity consumed me. I knew this place. I didn't recognize it, but I knew that I knew it. I knew that at one time long ago, I would have recognized it. But I couldn't pin point, I couldn't see it.

Redbone continued to pant, a sort of display of panic I had rarely seen in him. It was a strange mix of excitement, and fear. The sort of emotion you would expect from a human, not an animal. He crept the edge more and more, his front paws grasping as the crumbling rocks that fell from the side. He barked again, urging me to come closer. I did as he wanted, taking another step forward before my head loomed just enough over the crater to see what was below. Feeling short of breath, it was as if the entire world stopped moving; but my mind was still spinning. I was thrown into another vision, but this time, it was no connection to the present-world, but from the past. I was lodged into my own memory. As I looked over the edge to the ocean of black goo hundreds of feet below me, it suddenly came to me. This was no ordinary forest; this was Mirkwood. This was not just any lake, it was the lake. We were in Hawkins. We were home.

____________________________________________________________________________​

Bark.
Bark.
Bark.

Howl. ​

Those were the last sounds I could hear before launching myself over the cliff. Leaving everything in Upside Down behind as my feet left the shadow's Earth for the last time, my body soared over the precipice as I fell for my inevitable death. There was nothing but darkness below me, and even with a bed of blackness that reflected water in real-time Hawkins, I had virtually no guarantee that emerging myself in the equidistant slime would allow me enough strength to open another portal. The jump was suicide. Nothing that went over the cliff ever came back out. But despite that fact, I no longer had anything to lose. I could accept an eternity in Upside Down, or I could push myself past my limits and take the chance. Hope was a dangerous instance of emotion, but I relied on that feeling more than anything else in this turmoil world.

It took just seconds for me to reach the bottom, a large pool of black fluid. I hit the water hard; the strike taking all of the wind from me on impact. I had never felt physical pain in Upside Down, not until today. As if every bone in my body had broken, I was limp in the water. The black goo came to life upon impact, like my presence had initiated an awakening. It grabbed me with its slimy strings; clawing at my figure and swallowing me whole. It pulled me deeper and deeper into it, my entire body now submerged in black. Within moments, the breath I had left in my lungs had parted; I could not hold it anymore. I gasped, but nothing but slime was sucked into my mouth. I swallowed the toxic content, my body now launched into a full blown panic as I began to drown. Becoming surrounded by flashing memories of past and present, I was flooded with emotions. Among the black's suffocating hold, I became deprived of all of my senses.

Silence. Darkness.
Nothing more.​

[ * * * ]​

The compressions kick-started my heart, while the air forced the fluid in my lungs to exudate from my mouth. In just a few moments, I erupted from my momentary coma. My body suddenly jerked upwards, rising like a demon amid an exorcism. It was almost paranormal, the way my back arched and my head rolled back. But even in this contorted position, slime began spewing from my mouth. In came in outstanding quantity, cascading out of me like a waterfall. As the fluid ceased just seconds into spilling, I whipped my body to the side, nearly jutting over your husky frame. Instinctively rolling over, my hand grasped your shoulder with extraordinary force; using you as a crutch as my other hand held me above the muddy grounds. I took a loud, demonic gasp before heaving once more. My stomach steeply depressed, causing me to hurl violently into the puddle below me. After all the contents of my stomach exited my body, I took a deep, raucous breath. The sound of my first gasp of air was not only triumphant, but slightly disturbing. It sounded as if I had not breathed air in days, months, even years. I remained in a near fetal position in front of you, my hand somehow holding on to yours. During the expulsion of the remnants of Upside Down from my body, I had somehow managed to slide my hand down your arm to interlock it with your own hand.

The rain continued to pour over us, washing away all of the muck I had carried with me in the descent. Despite my heart beating and my lungs breathing, it was not enough to keep my knees from buckling. My entire body trembled fiercely, the sort of violent shaking one would expect from hypothermia. Though, my skin was flaming to the touch. My skin was no longer fleshy in colour. It was not a standard tan, or pale white. With Upside Down completely void of sunlight, my skin had dulled to a gray undertone. My body still in complete shock, my muscles ceased and I collapsed on to you. My backside sunk against your front, melting into your arms as I curled myself into you. Clenching on to the uniform that made you Chief, my eyes finally opened.

My chest inflated and collapsed back and forth, trying desperately to breathe while I became overwhelmed with emotion. For a moment I lay speechless, taking in the feeling of rain beating soothingly on my face. Another flash of lightning lit up the sky around us. I blinked several times, having to flicker my eyelids in order to clear the water around my eyes. My eyes opened a little more with every flutter, finally widening enough for you to see my dark browns had lifted to a hazel color, with soft olive green speckled around the pupils. I opened my mouth, as if to speak again, but the sound of roaring thunder interrupted my thoughts.

The slime had swiftly deteriorated, the pouring rain having washed away all of its thick, goo-ridden texture. I lay in your arms, but an exposed woman now, not some alternate creature. Over a full foot shorter than your tall brutish form, my petite figure cherished the comfort of your big embrace. Completely buck naked, the only decency covering my body was the dark of the night and the mass of my chocolate brown, aberrant hair (over 3 feet in length). Although high in volume, the hair was soaked through, shriveling its size. Barely enough to cover my bare breasts, their lush breadth was enough to confirm a complete maturation. I was no longer the little girl from November of last year. In just the six months that had elapsed, I had blossomed into a svelte young woman.

“Jim...” My voice just a whimper as I tried to inhale enough air to even squeeze a voice out of my lungs. “I-” I exhaled, my tongue bating against the back of my throat as my esophagus found the strength to speak. “I'm Home.”

Little did either of us know, in just short of an hours time, the phone in James “Jim” Hopper's home would ring.
It would be Joyce Byers in near hysterics calling from the hospital.
Will would have had a grand mal seizure, and he would be comatose.
​

 

[horn held halo]

Everyone wears masks. Some are more thoughtful, some are more sturdy, but no one is who they seem at all times. That the human mind was capable of building such masks, recognizing them in others and in oneself, was precisely the kind of testament to human thinking that made humans very, very good about patting themselves on their back about how very clever they are to be the only animals smart enough to construct different versions of themselves to present socially to one another. This is because few individuals ever stop to wonder if their dogs act differently around different groups of people, or other dogs, because they're just as adept at adapting to situations as necessary. Nobody except those specifically looking for the answers ever questions whether or not trees might grow in different directions for reasons reaching beyond the shortest path to sunlight.

Humanity's egotism toward humanity allowed only the possibility of ultimate thought and purpose, toward the concept and malleability of identity, to exist in humans. It was beyond consideration that the world they inhabited might be nothing more than the mask it chose to present, and what madness could lurk in the minds of those pierced the veil. Humanity wasn't ready to consider that they might be just as susceptible to the lies, tricks, and masquerades of anything that didn't look and act like they did as they were to one another. When friend or foe looked like you, two arms, two legs, one head, whether it was true or not it was all too easy to believe that you at least had a common base of knowledge with which to make your next decisions.

The residents of Hawkins, Indiana might have discovered the outline of a mask that sat over the only world they knew, but even those who might have glimpsed the string that held it together were ill prepared to truly internalize what it meant when one's entire world wasn't a lie, but could nonetheless choose how it wanted to present itself under different circumstances. A portal to another world and the tell tale proof that you'd only been seeing a single color in the entire prism of possibility wasn't the completeness of understanding. It was only the beginning. The two plus two equals four of advanced calculus.

Discovering who somebody was behind the masks they chose to wear couldn't begin and end at the realization that there was a mask at all -- it required questioning, investigation, interest. It could take vast loathing or all-consuming compassion. Learning who someone else really was could be a messy, dirty business that dragged everyone involved through a darkness they had never before imagined until at long last they emerged on the other side of it, and whether or not everyone came out for the better ..

Well, that often depended on just how much was truly being hidden.

The small handful of citizens of Hawkins who internalized the theory of the flea and the acrobat might have come to understand that there was another side of the rope, but truly internalizing just how far reaching the rope itself might have been was another step entirely. It was difficult enough to imagine that there was another Hawkins, a city shrouded in shadow and drenched with the growth of a world they couldn't understand. It took another level of desire to understand entirely to consider what it meant for there to be an entire other world that didn't care for a small town's problems, or for the gaps between them that could be wrenched forth in the basement of an insidious research facility or in a cheap, dis-repaired television set perched in a squat little house on the edge of the lake.

How much fortitude would it have taken, then, to make the other place your home? To lift the mask the world presented itself in and attempt to understand what lay hidden beyond the surface?

Madness wasn't a risk. It was an inevitability. Just as you could never find true empathy for another person without compromise and readjusting expectations, how could anyone accept that there was another world like the Upside Down without changing their own way of thinking to include its existence in every consideration they made? Someone who understood it, empathized with it, evolved in it --

Would they still be human?






Hopper's hand sunk into the mud, the heel of his palm digging a furrow among sparse and stamped down grass. Twisting his body to one side didn't entirely throw him into the pooling muck that once, on a far brighter and sunnier day, might have been recognizable as his lawn but it did keep him just off balance enough that the sliding of his hand against the shifting earth beneath him nearly sent him further back down against the ground. Getting dressed this morning, much less getting into the shower, seemed like a fool's errand that had been rightfully chastised for thinking that waking up at an ungodly hour was the same as a cue to actually try to begin the day like it was any other one. The world turned white and negative, the pallid grey flesh of otherworldly creature that bore the tattoo that belonged to a young girl turning to horrific silhouette.

There was no way to describe it but a waking nightmare. The thunderous clap that reverberated around them in time with Elle's shoulders squaring and her body lunging upward accompanied motions that seemed to come not from a living creature, but through the filtered lens of a movie. Twenty four frames per second of motion in a world that didn't rely on the shuttering of a camera, her ascension to the bowed curve of a harp made her a thing every bit as monstrous, unknowable, and wrong to the eye as the carnivorous 'Demogorgon' that had stalked the town mere months before. Where its flesh might have peeled away to reveal the sickly sweet rot of prior meals olfactorily clinging to its jagged maw, this eleven opened as wide as something that belonged flickering on a seedy theater screen. Eroticism and horror, femininity and destruction.

Jim could scarcely make sense of it, his own eyes betraying him in the slight slide of his weight in the mud, even as she erupted as though the detritus ejecting from her lips wasn't just making room for the oxygen she so dearly needed. The willowbranch tautness of her spine and hunched, silent scream to the sky reversed the rain itself with ink pouring forth, a fountain from a deranged landscaper dreamt into horrific existence. With every cleansing wave of water so oppressive as to try to force them down into the muck anew, one plus one seemed determined to equal something he had never seen before.

One plus one. She wasn't Eleven. Not just Eleven. She was something else, some hand of another world entirely manipulating a puppet from within, holding her aloft and escaping into Hawkins as surely as she had clawed her way out of the portal opening in his own television. The gun.

The gun was still in the house. Still somewhere on the floor.

Protection or mercy? Which one would it bring?

And then the moment passed. Whatever it was, it had escaped her, poured down her cheeks and into the mud, and it was so much rainwater and dirt mingling together. She twisted, not just to keep the brackish horror from returning to her lungs, but like something within her that had been holding her up was no longer present. She deflated as surely as any toy that no longer had its puppeteer animating it, and she was a girl again. Whatever she had been, whatever she might be, in the readjustment of the dark morning sky returning her from vivid beast to shivering body in Jim Hopper's focusing eyes she was just a girl, a sick, nearly drowned girl who needed someone to help her stay until the call of the blackness subsided entirely. It wasn't just the vulnerability of her posture, twisted onto her knees and bending her head, or the new violent expulsion of everything that remained in her stomach and lungs that began anew --

A girl who had drunk far, far too much at a party bent over at the side of the road while Hopper waited patiently, his arms folded over his chest, with the back of the car still open while he leaned against the hood. She wasn't going to run in that state. He wasn't going to get the back seat of his car in need of a good power wash, much less his uniform. Get her to the station, call her mom, and she'd have a talking to and a hangover the next day that were going to be worse than anything he could book her with.

This was about as exciting as things got on the weekends in Hawkins. And as dirty as he'd ever get his hands, if he could help it.

-- it was her hand grasping his, and his hand grasping her drenched hair, balling it up with easy, swift motions of his fingers to pull it back and away from her face. While her fingernails dipped into the muck where his hand had stuck fast, clenching around his hand and pressing her slender arm to the thick trunk of his own, he made sure she remained upright and free while she finished choking up the flood that the traversal from one world to the next had filled her small body with. Never mind whatever got on his uniform. Never mind if he ended up with fine, brown hairs twirling around his fingers even when he let her go.

Six months ago, Hopper had finally had every reason to think of to get his hands dirty. He hadn't forgotten that already.

"That's it. Get it all out."

For all the softness tempering the edge of his words, they were close enough together and far enough from the latest pounding of thunder that even through the sheets of water trying to return them both to the earth under the intensity of its pressure, he was clearly audible. Sympathy came easy to some, but even now, Jim managed to navigate it as deftly as a man of his size could navigate a waltz. He knew the steps, but it never seemed quite as though it was coming from a natural place or flow. Where to put his hands, how to reassure someone, it always took an extra second of thought that could be taken for hesitation.

And it left him somewhat off guard when Eleven proved to have so little hesitation as to be running purely on instinct. For every second it might have taken him to focus his thoughts even to help her continue spitting up the last of the black lake that had taken her whole, she seemed to have borrowed it to simply move as she knew she needed to. To take his hand, to adjust her knees, and then to fall against him with a sinuous bonelessness that came from utter exhaustion. Something cold blooded seeking warmth didn't have to think about doing so. It simply did. And for all that it tried, no amount of city-drowning rain could entirely mask the furnace of heat that he managed to generate almost carelessly.

But where he might have expected her to be the opposite, clammy and frozen to the bone for the way she trembled, she amplified his own heat. It was a wonder that the rain wasn't sizzling on her naked skin, shrouding her in a fog as otherworldly as the slime that had been steadily thinning out and dripping indistinguishably into the ground below. She was utterly, feverishly burning up in such a way that Jim nearly cursed himself for not throwing on his jacket when he'd gotten otherwise buttoned up, since now he had nothing to swaddle her in. And there were many reasons to do so. Her alarming temperature. Her teeth-rattling shuddering. Her exposure.

Fathers were men. Men were fathers. A father who had lost his daughter didn't remove every prior mask he'd worn, but he certainly carried himself in a different fashion that he might have at a different age, in a different time, under different circumstances. There was genuinely no thought in Hopper's mind that wasn't relegated to helping the girl who clung to him like a rope in quicksand, but then, not every thought came entirely from the rational mind. It was hard to see how he had, even a minute beforehand, glimpsed her as something unknown and upside down when she was so clearly the girl that he had known six months prior, the girl who he might have never quite given up on even while he never quite entirely believed she was still around to be given up on. Schrodinger's survivor. And yet the line of her jaw, the way her eyes seemed to see a little more than they ought to when they finally opened in the dim of the morning and saw him in the same moment that he saw her, even the tension in her fingers against him, his soaked-through clothing all said she was no different than who she had been.

And everything else whispered with insidious clarity how untrue that actually was.

He couldn't sit up in the rain without feeling weight against him that shouldn't have been there. There was a little too much leg for his hand to move beneath in order to find the underside of her knees, far too much hair clinging to her back when his palm spread to support her shoulders. It wasn't as though he hadn't experienced change firsthand -- his knees wouldn't have popped and protested a decade ago when he bent them to stand up in the slippery mud the way they did now -- but everything that he felt completely contradicted the clear image he had in his mind of how Eleven ought to have looked. Even though her face was the same, months and years had gotten confused as to which one ought to have been passing for her. She'd vanished as a girl, and returned as a woman.

.. or a woman, as a man might have seen her. As Hopper herself might have seen her, even a few years prior. But it was difficult to see her, trembling, malnourished, and feverish, as anything but a girl.

Difficult. Not impossible. Not the time. Some aspects of him didn't care. It's still before dawn. You're still tired. That's what they said. You're just dreaming. Just go along with it.

I'm Home. That's what she said.

"Come on, we need to dry you out," he murmured, jostling her in his arms as he turned to walk the small distance in the rain back toward the steps to his home, each wooden plank seeming to creak a little more loudly than it ought to have as he bore more than his own weight alone up them. He needed to stain his door with a stamp of mud to nudge it back open and get her over the threshold, worries about what he was tracking into the house about as far gone about any worries he'd have about dry-cleaning his pants or whether or not his coffee had gone cold.

He set her on his couch, bending just at the knees after avoiding another painful collision with his shin on the table by sheer luck and the memory of his most recent incident, and then took a step back. The eerie, power-gone silence remained even while the intensity of the storm seemed to have grown so much lesser for not being directly in the center of it, the artificial pattering on the rooftop and odd, staccato comfort compared to being the center of the downpour. Hopper looked down at her then, beneath the tiniest veneer of moonlight that managed to escape the clouds and rain, leaving her as little more than a silhouette in the darkness. Not the demonic rise that she had been as she'd lurched out of unconsciousness, but as the girl she was. Elegance and vulnerability, and youth and maturation, a paradoxical whole out of parts his mind couldn't quite square the arithmetic of.

Just as he, his clothing wrinkled and heavy and adhering to him like an impressionistic painting of clothing on a masculine frame and shadowed in the darkness until each line of him seemed to be constructed to suggest a man of his size rather than actually reveal one. Without any lights and little understanding, they might as well have been sketches of people. Nothing but their masks. Hopper found himself hesitating the single second.

Just one. One second to look at her, for too many reasons to fit into just one second.

"Wait right here, I'll get you a blanket," he promised, even his careful steps seeming to tremble the floor beneath them in the small, well-worn solitude of his house.








Joyce Byers might never have realized anything had happened at all had he not screamed first. Jonathan might have remained face down in his pillow, buried under his comforter, snoring through the storm. But the peace of their household was shattered with something that wasn't just a night terror, wasn't just a fantasy come to life -- Will screamed the scream that only someone like his family could truly recognize. It was a scream of seeing what shouldn't be seen, something the brought a little piece of what lay beyond the veil and introduced it into the world that they'd known. It was a maddened, panicked sound, clipped off at the end with a hard clenching of teeth.

By the time she had burst into her son's room, followed by his brother barely two steps behind, Will had hit the floor, twisting violently to the side.

By the time James Hopper lay Eleven down on his couch in his too-small, cluttered little home, the Byers were racing through the rain with nothing but the early hour and their own prayers keeping them from colliding with anything in the blinding torrent of water blanketing the city, Joyce desperately cradling one son while the other recklessly pushed the pedal still closer to the floor.

 

[Temptationist]

Joyce Byers sobbed endlessly as she cradled her son. "No-no-no..." She moaned out, barely breathing as her panic consumed every ounce of her. "No-no-no..." She moaned again, dragging on her words as she took another deep, sulking breath in. "You can't do this to me, Will." She took another huffing breath. She nearly drowned in all of her tears, the very fear of Will dying in her arms merely unbearable. "Stay with me, baby." Her voice just a stutter as she tried to console the child, just short of 12 years old, who continued to convulse in her arms.

Jonathan, the rhyme and reason to every scenario, attempted to contain his emotions, and upkeep his composure. His eyes were wide, glossed over with the need to cry but the strength to not shed a single tear. His chest was tight, him too, struggling to breath as he floored it down the empty streets of Hawkins. With virtually no one on the dark roads, there was that reckless liberty to surpass double the speed limit. With the dead of morning and few resources in such a small town, the Byers knew an ambulance was not an option. If they wanted Will to survive, they had to take the law into their own hands and race through the puddle-ridden roads.

"He's going to live. He's going to be OK." Jonathan tried to reassure his mother, but the ultimate truth was uncertain. Although his calm voice seemed to always be the motion against calamity, the older Byer son was feeding her white lies. Glancing briefly over to his baby brother, the reality of the situation was setting in. He was deteriorating by the minute. Now foaming from the mouth, Will's eyes were rolled in the back of his skull, and he had clenched so hard on his own tongue, that blood seeped from the corner of his lips. "We're almost there!" With the hospital nearly 20 miles out, it was a race against the clock.

Within minutes, the Byers family would see the inside of an empty emergency room. As Jonathan burst through the doors, Joyce began immediately crying out for help. “Help me, please! HELP MY SON!” The commotion lead to a domino effect of medical urgency. Several workers gathered around, one nurse instantly rolling out a stretcher to lay Will in. By this point on, Will's violent convulsions had ceased, but his muscles remained tense – his body completely rigid like a immobile action figure.

A doctor – the only one working the night shift - came running in. The nurse, quick to debrief him as they tended to the emergency, was in a professional panic as her and her other colleagues set Will up with oxygen, and an IV. “The missing Byers boy. 12 years old. Unresponsive. Suspected grand mal seizure.” The doctor looked to the machine. Within a minute of his arrival, he was already hooked up to all necessary equipment. The nurse could see the concern on the doctor's face. “Vitals are dropping. Heart rate 51... 45... 33... We're losing him!”

There was a loud, continuous beep. The sound was unmistakable. It was the sound of death.

With the heart ceasing to beat, the doctor delivered a traumatic blow to Will's chest with his fist. Joyce nearly collapsed, virtually melting into the arms of her eldest. With Johnathan no longer capable of holding back his tears, the two wept as they watched their beloved Will slip back in the hands of death.

[ * * * ]

Astronomical twilight, defined by the position of the Sun being between 12 and 18 degrees below the horizon.
Nautical twilight, defined by the position of the Sun being between 6 and 12 degrees below the horizon.
Civil twilight, defined by the position of the Sun being between 0 and 6 degrees below the horizon.
Sunrise, defined by the position of the Sun being over the horizon.​

6:23AM. That is when the sun would rise in on this muddy day of May in Hawkins, Indiana. It is the time where the sun, in its full, shinning glory, would reach the peak of the sky to end the darkness. It is the mark of a new day, and the end of another. The sun, bright and rejuvenated, breathing life into the morning.

But in the dark of this morning, only civil twilight would struggle to begin amid a raging thunder storm. From dusk till dawn, there was still darkness.


My head rolled back into the fold of your arm. I opened my needy eyes to look up at the foggy sky. Heat radiated off my body; my insides broiling internally as the entirety of me was launched into a painful physical transition. Although the rain severed to cool my sizzling skin, it simply paled in comparison to the frigid weather of Upside Down. In a dimension virtually void of all sunlight, the dark universe was hollow and cold. Like an ice pack removed from the confines of its freezer, I was melting. My skin sweating like the condensation of an cold bottle on a hot summer day. In order to survive, I had to swelter. My body had to seep the toxins of Upside Down out of my pores. Just like the bile that spilled from my esophagus, I needed to cleanse. I was cleansing, one bead of sweat at a time.

Even as you hauled me into your strong arms, the expulsion had left me weak and limp. I hung in your arms like dead weight, with barely enough energy to even hold my head up as you carried me. Despite my physical maturation, I weighed little, even for a woman of small stature. At just barely 5 feet tall, my slender body weighed no more than 95 pounds. Considering I had stemmed from a land of desolation, perhaps it was even a miracle that I was alive, let alone that I was capable of growing. Yet, somehow, I had. Although I had not gained much in height, nor that much in weight, my body had transformed even without standard nutrition. Amid all the slime that covered my body, the black tar I vomited, and the portal I had somehow managed to escape, my body had become lost in a sea of rain, a mass of wet hair, and your supporting frame.

I felt my overheating body lay to rest on something soft. I embraced the material, confusing it for a cloud as I sunk in. Despite wanting to curl into a ball and drift away, my mind could only focus on recovering. My thoughts ran in my head at a million miles per second; mashing into one another – barely capable of forming a sentence. Pure instinct consumed me, and in an effort to cool myself down, I sacrificed the dignity I didn't even know I should have. I was sprawled on the couch, several levels below what anyone would consider graceful. Rather than curling into fetal position as you lay me down, instead, I stretched my legs out on the couch. One arm lay dangling off the side, while the other was stationed over the backrest. My head, probably the most telling of my current struggle, was flopped over the edge of the arm rest. I looked strikingly similar to a drunk – the type of person who could only sleep in the comfort of a couch with the tune of blaring television to lull he or she to sleep. All I was missing was a bottle of scotch or wine dangling from my fingers... and of course, an actual functioning TV. I felt as though the retro material of the 3-seater would swallow me whole. Like an animal in heat, my hormones were raging, my adrenaline was high, and I was panting. My exposed chest rose and collapsed, over and over again in slow, but rough, steady motion. I was taking deep breaths, trying to control my panic as my mind spiralled into vertigo. With my head spinning, my respiration was heavy; so much so that the deep pants resulted in a sort of vocal yet breathless moan. The inhaling alone was enough of a sound to fill the house.

I was in limbo – a state of conscious where my body was mostly unresponsive, but still capable of functioning without intervention. My lungs were still breathing, and my heart was still beating. But aside from those two things, I was dazed. My eyes were wide open now, as if I had seen the horrors of Hell. I stared up at the ceiling like it was a portal to death, without so much as a single word to respond to your sentences. In fact, they weren't sentences at all. Just sounds; noises that coined in my ringing ears. I was blinking rapidly; my vision fuzzing in and out of blurriness as my body adjusted to the drastic change in environment. I looked similar to a fish out of water; still glistening as it stares blankly into nothingness, trying to find the strength to breath in an air so foreign. Though, there was a difference here. I wasn't dying slowly, much like that of a goldfish who's jumped out of its bowl, but rather I was trying to come to life. I wasn't a fish, but a bird, resurrecting from the ashes like a Phoenix; having travelled from one dimension to the next. I was alive. And I was changed.

Forcing my head to look at you, my eyes locked on the shadow of a large figure. As another clash of lightning illuminated the room, the sudden flash of light radiated over my form. The quick illumination of white light reflected off the smooth, fresh gloss of my drenched skin. I swallowed hard, actively trying to correct my pattern of breathing to that of a normal human being. My tongue ran over my rain-kissed lips, immediately absorbing the water on my tongue as I did so. Although I tried to breathe normally through my nose, my breaths were still too heavy to cease oral inhalation. I parted my lips again, sighing deeply as I compelled my neck to support my head. I did not want to collapse, not again. I had to fight through the pain; fight through the bodily shock. If I could survive Upside Down, I could certainly survive this.

Though my vision had quickly adjusted, my mind was still in a haze. I wondered if this was truly real, if I was here or if this was all an elaborate dream. Upside Down was a cruel place, and it had played many tricks on me before. Had it infiltrated my brain again? Was this all a product of my imagination? I refused to believe it; refused to believe that all of this tangible memory was just a false illusion. But at the same time, as I watched you disappear into another room, I also could not believe this was real... that I was... Home.


My head bobbed to the side, searching for anything that could disprove the reality; any shred at all of the presence of Upside Down. A strange flower; a speck of black mould, but my eyes found nothing. Were they betraying me, or was there really nothing to see here but a run down motor home in the outskirts of a run down town like Hawkins? I tried to move; tried to get up off the couch. I so desperately wanted my body to reflect the utter chaos in my mind; the panic as my eyes frantically shifted to find an error in this horrendously accurate deception. But my body could not frantically move. I was too weak; perhaps the first symptom of the true reality. Extending my arm out, I grabbed the coffee table and pulled hard. I served only to drag the piece of furniture closer to me, rather than use it as an anchor to lift myself up. Though, as I shifted it over, my eyes caught a glimpse of something colourful. It was a rainbow, something I had long forgotten in the darkness of desolation. It was a strange thing; filled with more colours than my eyes had seen in years.

In my stertorous huffs, I gulped down, narrowing my eyes to focus my attention on the structure. Weakly raising my hand in the air, I used what strength I could muster to lift the object with my mind. The multicoloured object slipped from the cubicle it was stored in, telekinetically floating toward me. My legs felt like noodles, even as I managed to shift them off the couch to touch the ground. My feet grasped the mud-stained carpet below me, but my eyes stayed focused on the hexahedron shape that approached me. I stopped its expedition just inches from my face. Looking closer at it, my pupils restricted as my eyes fell upon small writing; Rubik's CUBE, it read. Now sitting up right, I tilted my head slightly to the side. It spun slowly in the air before me as I guided the shape with my powers. As I looked curiously at it, the sides of the square began to shift. My fascination with this inter-changing device caused my surroundings to melt behind me.

With that last flash of lightning and the last clap of thunder, the storm had concluded. The sound of torrential downpour beating against the windows slowly began to quiet. The dark clouds were passing, and it seemed the more I concentrated, the better the weather became. As the intensity of the storm passed, it took only moments for the home to come to life again. With only a few stuttered flashes, electricity in the home returned. Although power was now restored, the home was still shielded by darkness. Only one small room brought light to the area, and that was the bathroom. Flicking back on, the bathroom cast an infectious light into the living room. My figure remained slightly hunched over, my wet hair sticking my skin like a disease. Still, I remained half in the shadows, only the slenderness of my leg and thinness of my tiny waist graced by the light. Despite the sudden change, my eyes remained fixated on the cube. Not even the sound of approaching footsteps would falter my interest.

It would take only a minute of examining the mathematical concept for me to understand it. As your presence loomed closer, I opened the palms of my hands beneath the cubic puzzle. The Rubik's Cube dropped instantaneously from the air, landing perfectly into both of my hands. The second the toy hit my hands, I immediately began to decipher it. Stringing my fingers up and around like a pianist on a piano, I moved at astounding speed; flipping and twirling the unit. Piece by piece, color by color, the cube began to come together.

June 5, 1982. The Rubik's Cube world record is defeated by Minh Thai, a Vietnamese student from Los Angeles, with a time of 22.95 seconds.

White. Green. Yellow. Orange. Blue. And Red.
Click, clack, cluck, and clock.

Clock time: 16.66 seconds.
Minh Thai wouldn't stand a chance.​