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El wanted to be able to move on.
She wanted to be able to accept Hop’s death as a simple fact. She wanted to be able to do what everybody else seemed to: slot the reality that Jim Hopper was dead into a neat file inside their brains, leaving lots of room for lots of other things.
El didn’t have much other room. She had space for Mike, and space for Will, and Joyce, and Jonathan, and Dustin, and Lucas, and Max. She had a tiny bit of room for school, and a little bit to worry about the Upside Down still being somewhere, because she wasn’t sure it could ever really be gone.
But it was hard not to notice that all those things were being squished up against the walls of her brain by the huge, unavoidable blob that was her dad was gone. The blob would always be at the fringes, always there and always heavy, and always making her bones ache.
It seemed like Joyce noticed the blob. Joyce asked her if she was okay a lot. Like a lot. At least four or five times every day. El thinks that she has a blob too, the same one. She sees her staring at the windows sometimes, staring through them like she’s imagining that she’s far away – far away enough that just maybe, she could make it back into the past. El knew that wasn’t how it works. But she understood. She wanted to pretend she was in the past too.
There were some days when the blob seemed to grow so big that it actually managed to push out all the other things; Mike, and Will, and Joyce, and Jonathan, and Dustin, and Lucas, and Max, and school, and the Upside Down. Nothing in her head at all apart from the blob, reminding her on a loop Hopper is gone, Hopper is gone, Hopper is gone. She’d be able to tell if it was a day like that from the minute she woke up, because the backs of her eyes would throb and her whole body would feel like it was weighed down into the mattress of her bed. Will would notice if it was a day like that too, poking his head into her room with a hot chocolate in his hand that he’d deposit onto her nightstand. She cried to him a lot on those days, and he’d rub a hand down her back while looking at her with so much sympathy it made her cry harder. She was lucky to have a brother now.
The only thing she managed to cling to was that life was different. Life was normal. More normal than hers had ever been, despite Angela and all the people that weren’t very nice. She was lying to Mike, but not about anything that could end up destroying the world. Just about school. She would get up in the mornings, and eat Eggos, and get in Argyle’s van with Jonathan and Will, and she’d go to school. She’d do her homework when she got home, and she’d write to Mike, and she’d help Joyce with dinner and cleaning. There were no experiments, no Papa, no hiding in the woods, no defeating Demogorgons or Mind Flayers. It was normal.
Then normal got ripped away.
Mike came, and she hit Angela with that rollerblade, and she got arrested, and Owens found her. And she’d been right, she’d been right, it wasn’t the end, the Upside Down was still coming and it was bad, it sounded really bad.
So she went with Owens, into the place underground that was too much like before, and Papa was there, and the tank, and the experiments. But she needed her powers, because all the adults looked scared- even Papa- and she knew that wasn’t good.
The one thing she liked about the experiments was that it shrunk the blob. It shrunk the aching, because she was so focused on the memories that kept appearing that they only left a little space for the blob. She got to distract herself for a little bit.
And then she got to the end of the memories, where 001 was talking to her about a new life they could have together, and he killed so many people, and wanted her help to kill more. It was the final straw, bringing back her powers with full force, fully recharged. Papa wanted to keep her there and Owens wanted to do more tests to make sure they’d done it right but she couldn’t waste anymore time because if it was really this bad she needed to get back to Mike and Will and Jonathan and Argyle, and then get them all back to Hawkins because the rest of her friends were there and in danger.
It was a blur: she found them in Utah with her powers, she managed to find her way to them, but she really wasn’t quite sure how only that suddenly she was meeting Suzie, Dustin’s girlfriend, and Mike was hugging her so tight and kissing her and asking her if she was okay. And Will hugged her too, and so did Jonathan, and Argyle waved. And she told them what was happening, and they got into Argyle’s van and spent almost two days driving back to Hawkins, Indiana.
When they got there, it was bad. Will kept touching the back of his neck and looking around like he was hearing things in the silence. Max had almost died, and Nancy was stuck in the Upside Down, and 001 was now Vecna, and he was killing more people. There was someone called Eddie who had hair almost as strange as Steve’s but stared at her with wide eyes when he found out she was ‘the one with superpowers’. Dustin, Max and Lucas were happy to see them, but even more scared for what was going to happen.
El almost died. Again. Vecna remembered her, and he was angry. They fought, Vecna’s world and the real one blurring together. It was the blob that saved her. The Hawkins Party explained to her that music is what saves you from his mind games, so she had headphones on with ‘You Don’t Mess Around With Jim’ blasting in her ears. The song that Hopper played when they first cleaned out the cabin. When he’d saved her.
As the song played, the blob grew, filled with every memory she’d ever shared with Hopper. The blob grew, and as it grew, it forced out Vecna’s long fingers from her head. She thought of their evenings together eating Eggos for dinner, him teaching her what he knew about hunting, watching movies that she never understood but he always laughed at, so she enjoyed them anyway. All the hugs that he’d ever given her, tight and warm and punctuated by something just right whispered into her ear for comfort. Lecturing her on something really stupid, so that they yelled at each other until they ended up laughing. The relief in his eyes whenever he came back to the cabin to see her right there. The notes he left her, always with a wonky smiley face in the corners.
The blob allowed her to fight back, dragging Vecna into the real world, into their domain, where she could properly defeat him after all these years.
El did it, right this time. He was gone, and they were all panting and about to keel over with exhaustion, but alive.
Then Joyce came bursting through the doors.
She looked terrified and just as tired as them, but her whole body eased as she found all her children safe. She ran towards them, and El didn’t miss the fact that she was now counted in Joyce’s frantic embraces, kissing her atop the head and muttering about how glad she was they were safe.
The door opened again.
Heavy footsteps echoed on the floor.
A choked sigh, that sounded like a mix between disbelief and happiness.
Murray didn’t sound like that, his footsteps weren’t that loud.
El turned.
No.
No, no, no.
It couldn’t be.
“…Kid.” It was a whisper, a breath.
A face that she didn’t ever think she’d see in person ever again was staring at her, looking so very drained but so very glad. He was different – his head was shaved, just like hers, and he no longer had a moustache. His clothes were dark and dirty. He looked smaller too, thinner, like he hadn’t been eating properly.
The sob wrenched itself out of her throat, loud and broken. Her hand clamped itself over her mouth, stopping the shrill cry that was trying to claw up from her chest. Tears were already blurring her vision and his figure became fuzzy and slanted.
This isn’t possible.
She heard the footsteps again, and suddenly as she blinked, he was right there, right in front of her, eyes wide with an arm outstretched in concern.
“Hey,” he whispered. “Hey, I’m here.”
El couldn’t stop it anymore. Her whole body collapsed forwards into his, and he immediately wrapped himself around her, holding her tight and safe against him.
“I’ve got you,” he said into her ear, “I’ve got you now. I’m so, so sorry. I’m here.”
Her hands made fists in his dirtied shirt, desperate to feel that he was here, he was really here.
“You were gone,” she choked out, tears making a damp patch on his shoulder. “You were gone, you were dead. I thought you were dead.” She pulled back, looking him in the eyes. “I thought you were dead,” she said again, punctuating with a firm punch to his chest.
He cupped her face in his hand. “I know. I know you did. I am so sorry. I promised you I’d never go away again, and I did. I’m so sorry.”
“You were dead,” she said again, “I thought my dad was dead. It was all that I thought for a really long time, I couldn’t fit anything else in. Only that… that you were gone.”
He grimaced, in a way that looked so heartbroken. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered yet again. “I’m here now. I’m back. I’m not going anywhere ever again.”
She reached her arm out so that her hand was on his cheek too. Her face was still wet, tear tracks running down it. “No more going away?”
He smiled. “No more going away.”
She flung herself at him again, wrapping her arms around him and squeezing. She had to be sure. She had to be sure that he was real.
He was.
They went to Hopper’s trailer that night. El had wanted to go to the cabin, but she’d forgotten that it was completely destroyed and overgrown and a mess. She’d never been in his trailer before. She was pretty sure that she liked it.
“I made a diorama,” she said, once they’d found his musty couch to sit on. “Of you. And of the cabin.”
“Oh?” His head was cocked to the side. It looked funny with the bald head. “For school?”
She nodded. “We had to do a project on a hero. Everyone else picked stupid old people who made telephones. I chose a real hero. A hero who sacrificed himself for the people he loved.”
Hopper smiled. “Jesus. You really make me feel like I’m a pretty good person, you know that?”
“You are,” she said, cocking her head to the side to mimic him. “You’re my dad, the hero.” She grinned. “And you’re alive.”
“Very much alive,” he said. His face grew fond, the distant kind of fond. “Listen, I don’t think I ever said it properly and outright, but if being where I’ve been has taught me anything it’s that I have to.” He reached his hand out and squeezed her arm. “I love you, kid.”
“I love you, too,” she said, grinning more than she ever thought she’d be able to.
Hopper was back, and the blob was gone, and she was okay.