Chapter Text
My alarm clock shrieks its jarring electronic cry, splitting the heavy silence of the cabin. I slam my hand down on it, fumbling in the gloom. The cheap plastic groans but falls silent. For a second, I lie here, the secrets like rocks in my gut. The ones I carry for the town of Hawkins, and the new, darker ones eating me alive from the inside out.
The dream still clings to me like spiderwebs. Her. Always her.
Eleven.
Shocking imagery dances behind my closed eyelids. Not the nightmare-vision of the Upside Down or the shrieking monstrous creatures that live there. No, this is another kinda monster. This one wears my face and does things that make my skin crawl and my blood heat in the same breath.
I shove myself upright, the sudden movement sending a spike of pain through my skull. Too much whiskey last night. Lately I've been drinking more and more, a desperate, pathetic attempt to drown out the whispers in my head. But the alcohol doesn't touch the dreams. Nothing does. They're encoded in me now, deeper than marrow.
I scrub a hand over my face, the rasp of my beard loud in the quiet room as I stumble to the bathroom and flip on the light. The fluorescent bulb flickers, buzzing, casting a harsh, unflattering glow on my reflection. A wreck stares back. Bloodshot eyes, dark circles etched deep beneath them. A face haunted. I look away, focusing on the toilet, the sink, anywhere but at the man in the mirror.
The water from the faucet is mind-numbingly cold. I splash it on my face, the icy shock a brief reprieve. It's not enough. The guilt returns, a tidal wave of sickening shame as fragments come back to me: sweat-slicked skin, her delicate wrists pinned above her head, my mouth moving against the fragile shell of her ear, hoarse whispers I can't remember but know were filth.
She's a thirteen-year-old girl.
I lean against the sink, breathing hard, the porcelain cold and slick under my palms. My stomach heaves, and I lurch for the toilet, expelling nothing but bile and the sour remains of yesterday’s cheap rotgut. Disgust, hot and acrid, crawls up my throat along with the acid. It's aimed at myself. At this monstrous thing I'm becoming.
What the fuck is wrong with me? El's just a kid. A kid I'm supposed to be protecting. A kid who's been through shit that would break most adults.
My hands shake as I fumble with the fly of my khaki pants, the metal button stiff and uncooperative. I slept in my chief of police uniform again, stinking of stale sweat and failure. The zipper screeches down, and my hand guides my half-hard dick out of the rough cotton.
The sound of footsteps, soft and bare on the wooden floorboards of the main room, makes me freeze. My head snaps up, my heart starting that frantic, guilty pounding again. Shit.
The bathroom door doesn't latch properly anymore. It never did after an incident with a cereal box and her temper. It hangs slightly ajar, a sliver of the main room visible through the crack. And in that sliver, a small figure stands. Watching me.
"Jesus, El!" I bark, my half-hard cock bobbing as I scramble to tuck myself back into my pants. My big body shuffles like I'm trying to simultaneously hide an evidence locker and win a three-legged race. "You don't just sneak up on people when they're doing their business. Ever. What did I tell you about that?"
She doesn't flinch. She doesn't even look sorry. And that's the least of my problems.
The bathroom door creaks open, and there she stands, small and delicate, her short hair a tangled mess. And naked. Completely, unselfconsciously naked.
The air punches out of my lungs. It’s not the first time. It’s becoming more frequent, this shedding of clothes. Modesty's a luxury she's never learned, a rule she sees no reason to follow. I’ve told her. I’ve yelled. But it's like trying to explain color to someone who's only ever seen gray.
"Eggos?" she asks, her voice soft with sleep, doe-brown eyes blinking slowly.
A strangled noise escapes my throat. "Get dressed, Eleven."
"No."
It's not defiance, not really. Just a simple fact. A statement of existence. She walks past me as if I'm nothing more than a piece of furniture, her trajectory clear and direct: the toilet. My gaze betrays me. Drags down the delicate curve of her spine, over the soft globes of her little ass, and stays glued to her as she settles onto the seat, her legs splayed apart, her most intimate areas completely open to me.
I see it all. The smooth, hairless mound of flesh at her apex, delicate as a closed bud. Small. Perfect. Little ruffles of pink peek out from between puffy, outer lips that are slightly parted.
A now familiar mixture of heat and shame washes over me. "El, we wear clothes in this house. What have I told you?" My voice is harsher than I intend. A bark to hide the tremor running through me.
She shrugs, clearly oblivious to my internal war. To the way the room suddenly feels ten degrees hotter, to the sweat prickling at my hairline. Her body tenses slightly as she prepares to urinate, her breath hitching, a tiny, almost inaudible gasp. I watch, frozen, my body going stock-still, my mind screaming for me to look away.
Why can't I look away?
Her stream starts, a steady golden arc into the bowl. As she voids her bladder, her back arches just a fraction, her small frame giving a little shudder. My gaze is trapped, dragged downward by a force I can't name. "Goddamn it, El."
I'm hard. I'm so fucking hard it hurts. A vicious, painful throb in my jeans that makes me wanna punch a hole in the wall.
"Bad?" she asks, looking up at me with those huge, innocent eyes, her head tilted. She thinks she's in trouble. She's got no idea of how she's twisting me into a fucking pretzel.
"It's bad not to do as you're told, yeah," I rasp out, the word scraping my throat raw. "Finish up and get dressed."
Eleven shakes her head. "Not bad," she says. She huffs out a frustrated breath, the sound childish and petulant, her breath coming in soft pants and her eyes drifting shut. A flush blooms on her chest, a pretty pink that makes her little nipples stand out, the puffy areolas with their small, sensitive tips, tightening into hard little points. Her hips give a tiny rock against the ceramic of the toilet seat, a subtle seeking motion that is so intimate, so utterly raw, it feels like a violation to even witness it.
A dawning, sickening realization crashes over me, cold and sharp as ice water. She's enjoying this. She's getting off on it.
"Stop this, you hear me?" I bark out, grabbing her little delicate chin in my big hand, forcing her to look at me. I'm trying to be firm, trying to be the father-figure she needs, but I'm shaking.
Her eyes, when they flutter open, are glassy. "Stop?" she repeats, her voice thick and slurry. One small hand darts between her legs. Not to wipe. Not to clean. Her fingers hover over her slit without landing, the movement restless. Needy. She stares up at me with an expression that can only be described as a plea. Another whine that isn't a whine. It's a silent, desperate question.
My blood runs cold, then hot, then cold again. My stomach twists into a knot of revulsion and unwilling fascination. This isn't just a lack of modesty. This is...conditioning.
My gaze drops to her pussy again, and that's when I see it: the tiny, swollen button standing stiff beneath its protective hood. Her clit is hard. The knowledge is a lit match dropped on gasoline. My dick jerks in my pants, a traitorous, bastard organ with a mind of its own. It wants things it's got no fucking right to. The urge to drop to my knees, to put my mouth on her, to taste her, to force her to make that whine again—this time on purpose—is a physical craving, a need so profound it scares the shit outta me. I wrench my gaze away, my breathing ragged, my hand still gripping her chin.
"Eleven," I say, my voice dangerously low. "If you don't go to your room right now and put on some goddamn clothes..." I don't finish the threat. What can I threaten her with? More isolation? More rules? "I'll...I'll be forced to take action!" I finish lamely.
Her reaction is not what I expect. Her breath catches in her throat. The flush on her chest deepens, spreading up to her neck. Her eyes widen, the plea in them becoming more frantic, her whole body vibrating with a tension that's got nothing to do with my anger and everything to do with a desperate, needy hum I can almost feel radiating from her skin.
Then she does something that makes the bottom drop out of my world. She slowly, deliberately, spreads her legs wider. Offering herself to me.
"Papa fix," she whispers, the words so faint I almost think I imagine them. "Papa make...better."
Papa.
I back up, stumbling out of the bathroom like there's poison in the fucking air. It's too thick with her scent and my own disgusting desire. I slam the door shut behind me, leaning against it, my chest heaving, my mind a fucking riot.
What the fuck did those bastards at Hawkins Lab do to her?
"I'm headed to work!" I yell, grabbing the first pair of boots I come into contact with and shoving my feet into them, sans socks. I don't need a shower. I mean, I do, but I can do without one for today. "I'll probably be working late, so just...stay here and be good."
"Okay," I hear her say from inside the bathroom. Her voice is small, defeated. And it kills me. The guilt is a hot poker in my gut. She doesn't understand. She thinks she's being punished. She thinks I'm angry.
I am. But not at her. At myself. At the sick, twisted part of me that looks at her and feels a pull that goes against every instinct, every moral code I thought I had. I'm angry at the monster in a lab coat who took a child's vulnerability and need for affection and used it to his advantage.
I'm out the door before she can emerge from the bathroom, the cold morning air a welcome blast that does little to cool the fire raging beneath my skin. The pine needles crunch under my boots, each step an accusation. I'm running. From her. From myself. From the ugly truth that's been clawing at my insides since the moment I found her.
It's been almost two months of this, of hiding her away, of trying to piece together some semblance of a life for her while wrestling with my own demons. But the last few days, with her getting naked at every available opportunity, something's shifted.
Is it teenage hormones? She should be hitting puberty soon. Could that account for her...changes? There's a restless, unsettling energy to her now, an almost predatory focus in those innocent, doe-like eyes. Or is it something else? Something more sinister? Something that whispers of vials and machines and God knows what else. Something that happened to her in that fucking lab?
My truck rumbles to life, a familiar, comforting sound that usually calms my frayed nerves. Not today. I keep seeing that look on her face. The flush on her skin. The hard little bud of her clit, a tiny beacon of arousal in a girl much too young to be experiencing such an adult feeling.
The anger's a living thing inside me now, a growling beast that wants to tear something apart. And not just any something. It's focused. It has a name.
Dr. Martin Brenner. If I didn't know that psycho was dead already, I'd hunt him down and make him pay. I'd make him suffer a thousand times over for what he did to my girl.
My girl. The thought is a jolt. When did she become mine? When did this arrangement, this burden, this responsibility, morph into something so much more?
I need to get to the station. Need to bury myself in work. In something, anything, that'll take my mind off the torment that awaits me when I return to that cabin. But instead of taking the familiar trajectory toward Hawkins P. D., I drive two blocks down and into a parking spot in front of the library.
I need to understand. Not just what was done to El, but how. The mechanics of it. The precise, cruel craftsmanship of her conditioning.
I remember the article well. The one I found last year when the madness started. It told of a top-secret government program called MKUltra. The name sounds like something out of a comic book, a villain's secret project, but I know it's real. I also know the answers to what ails Eleven are buried in the Hawkins library microfilm reels.
The imposing building looks like a mausoleum, a tomb of forgotten stories and dead languages. I push through the heavy oak doors, and the silence hits me like a physical wall. A place of order, of knowledge, of all the things I'm not.
An all-too familiar face behind the circulation desk looks up as I approach. Marissa. When our eyes meet, her expression shifts from boredom to something cold. Not polite disapproval; that would be too goddamn kind. This is a deliberate, calculated chill, a frost she's been cultivating since I forgot to call after fucking her in the stacks.
Her fingers still against her keyboard, and for a moment, I think she's gonna ask me to leave. But she doesn't. She just watches me, her silence a more powerful accusation than any words she could speak. Chief Hopper. Town drunk. Bad date. A real catch.
I ignore her and head for the very back. The reading room is an even quieter, cramped space smelling of dust and aging plastic. The microfiche reader groans to life with a low, mournful hum. I search starting from the nineteen-sixties. Years before Eleven was even born.
My finger is a blur on the fast-forward button, article after article flying by in a dizzying smear of black and white. Then I see it. A small article tucked away on page seven, dated May nineteen-sixty-two. "Government Grant Awarded for Advanced Neurological Research." Hawkins Lab, it says, under the direction of Dr. Martin Brenner. Now we're getting somewhere.
I search through all of sixty-two. Sixty-three. Sixty-four. It's slow, agonizing work, the squeak of the reel and the clatter of the machine the only sounds. In sixty-six, an article catches my eye. "Woman Files Suit Against Hawkins Lab." I stop scrolling, my heart thudding. This one isn't about Eleven's mother, but someone named Carol Miller. She claims Dr. Brenner subjected her to unorthodox therapeutic techniques after she sought treatment for depression. Techniques that included hypnosis and sensory stimulation. The article doesn't go into detail, but it's a start.
Then, in sixty-seven, another article. This one's about a nurse who worked at the lab. Maryanne Whittaker. She quit her job and accused Brenner of conducting illegal experiments on patients. Experiments she claimed, involved intense physical and psychological coercion. She was fired, her accusations dismissed as the ravings of a "mentally unstable individual." No one believed her. But I do.
Then I find it. The jackpot, on the front page of a seventy-nine edition of the Hawkins Post. It's from a woman who identified herself only as "Survivor." She mentions Brenner by name. The lab. The experiments. And the sexual abuse.
My stomach lurches as I read her words, the typed sentences searing themselves into my brain. She writes of being subjected to painful, invasive procedures while being kept in a state of constant sexual arousal. She claims the arousal was not for her pleasure, but to break down her defenses, to make her more receptive to suggestion.
She also claimed Brenner locked her in a room, naked, for days. He'd touch her, probe her, stimulate her until she was begging, not for release, but for the process to stop. The paper published portions of the woman's journal, harrowing entries I know will haunt me. Especially one particular entry, scribbled in a frantic hand: "The sessions are worse now. He has a new test subject, a little girl. So young. He calls her "special." Says she's the future. I hear her cries at night, but they're not the normal cries of a child. They're the cries of innocence being stolen."
The blood drains from my face. My hands tremble as I scan the date. July nineteen-seventy-nine. Eleven would've been eight years old. The thought is so vile, so monstrous, it makes me wanna rip the microfilm machine from its moorings and smash it against the wall.
I sit there for a long time, the hum of the machine a drone in my ears, the words from the journal echoing in the silence of my skull. The pieces click into place with a sickening finality. El's restlessness. Her constant need for stimulation. The way she offers herself to me, not with the budding curiosity of a teenager, but with the desperation of a junkie in need of a fix.
Fix.
Fuck.
That word she used this morning. Was it a word, or was it a concept her broken little mind latched onto from her past? How many times has she said it to Brenner?
The image of her in the bathroom flashes in my mind again, her legs spread, her small sex flushed and swollen with a need she couldn't name. If what these articles say is true, then it's safe to say Brenner kept her that way. Nude, accessible. Always ready. The thought makes me taste bile.
Her behavior, then, is just a symptom. A manifestation of her trauma. A regression to a time and place that feels comfortable to her. Familiar.
Brenner didn't just abuse her. He weaponized her sexuality. Conditioned her, twisted her, rewired her pleasure centers until they're a tangled, desperate mess of need and confusion. If he weren't already dead, I'd be driving to that fucking lab and beating his skull in. He wasn't just a mad scientist. He was a predator. A monster in a white coat who used the guise of science to feed his own sick appetites.
A strange sense of calm settles over me. A cold, hard clarity. I finally understand what's wrong with Eleven. Even more terrifying, I know what she needs from me. But it's something I can't under any circumstances give.
I can't go into work today. There's too much swirling in my head to focus on parking tickets and kids shoplifting at Melvald's. And going home isn't an option, not with the image of Eleven naked burned onto my retinas.
I need a fucking drink.
***
I push through the door of the Hideaway with more force than necessary, the hinges groaning like they’re tired of me already. The place is mostly empty, just a couple of guys murmuring at the far table and a flickering neon beer sign that really oughta be put out of its misery.
But I’m not here for company or for the ambience. I’m here because I can’t go home, I can’t go to work, and I can’t drive around in circles any longer or I’ll end up wrapped around a tree.
I drop onto my usual stool at the end of the bar. The leather groans as I settle onto it, my body feeling a hundred years old and twice as heavy. The bartender doesn’t ask what I want—just reaches for the bourbon. Guess I’ve become predictable. It’s embarrassing how easy I am to read, but I’m too wrung out to care. My chest still feels tight from what I read at the library, the printed words branding themselves onto the inside of my skull.
I stare at the shelves of liquor behind the bar, the rows of bottles looking like a line-up of potential solutions. Is that a bottle of something that’ll make me forget my own name for a few hours? Yep. How about something that’ll make me forget Eleven’s flushed, aroused little face as she offered herself to me this morning?
No chance of that.
I snatch the glass up as soon as it hits the counter. The first sip burns in that good way, the way that quiets the buzzing under my skin. I tell myself I’m just cooling off, giving El some space before I stomp back in and make things worse, but that’s bullshit and I know it. She got to me. The sight of the rounded softness of her mound pushing up from her groin, her body showing hints of what she'll soon become. The surge of my own lecherous biology firing up as if she's a woman and not a thirteen-year-old kid.
I tap the counter. “Make it a double. Keep them coming.” Bracing my elbows on the bar, I stare at the wood grain like it might offer answers. It doesn’t.
I’m halfway through my fourth drink when someone sits a couple stools down. I don’t look over. My mind keeps circling back to Brenner, to the lab, to El.
Her in a sterile white room, a doll on a metal table with her legs parted, and him leaning over her, a predator with a calm, clinical smile. I picture him explaining the mechanics of her body in that smug, professorial tone, stimulating her to a response she was far too young to understand.
“I’m never getting that image out of my head,” I mutter into my empty glass.
"Visual imagery can be a real son of a bitch that way," a woman’s voice says, cutting through the bourbon haze. Her tone is cultured, but also warm. Easy.
I tap the bar for another and ignore her, hoping she'll get the picture from my gruff, closed off, stay-the-hell-away-from-me energy. I’m not good company.
But she persists. Her eyes are on me, I can feel them. She leans closer, and a waft of perfume hits me. Expensive. She smells like a completely different world.
“Rough day, Officer?”
I stiffen. I don’t look over. “Something like that.” If I open my mouth, all the poison will spill out. My filth. My secrets, and Eleven's too.
“Thought so. You have that look.”
“What look?”
“The one people get when the world’s been kicking them around a little too hard.”
I huff out a poor excuse for a laugh. “Hell, that obvious?” I turn to her at last, surprised to find myself sitting next to quite a looker. Blonde hair. Blue eyes. She’s wearing a silk blouse stretched across her generous breasts that's probably worth more than my truck. Now those are the kinda tits I should be turned on by, not a thirteen-year-old’s bee-stings that don't even fill out an A-cup.
And I usually am. I love tits. Big, beautiful melons I can sink my face between are what I fucking live for. But all I’ve been wondering all day is how a particular pair of barely existing puffs will feel like beneath my calloused hands. There's a sweet little freckle dotting one. Just to the left of one tiny, beaded nipple. I shouldn't know that, yet I do. Because she won't stop prancing around the cabin in various states of undress.
The woman beside me is speaking. Fuck. I should at least pretend to pay attention. "Sorry, come again?"
"I said I've worn it too."
"Worn what?"
She gestures at my face. "That 'kicked-around' look." She slides onto the stool next to me without invitation and glances sideways at me, not in a prying way—more like she’s checking if she’s annoying me. “If I’m interrupting your solitude, just tell me. Some people want company; some don’t.”
I should fuck her. Lord knows I need to fuck somebody, and it can't be the prepubescent kid in my cabin.
I turn on my most charming smile, the one that gets me free burgers and milkshakes at the diner. “What's your name, mystery woman?"
I actually don't care, but women have this thing about wanting you to take an interest in them before they'll flip up their skirt for you. I'd rather cut right to the chase, but that never gets me anywhere fast.
She smiles back. "Ava."
"Like, Ava Gardner?"
"That's my namesake, yes. My mother was a fan." Her head cants. "You look like you could use a distraction."
"That’s the God’s honest truth," I admit, swirling the amber liquid in my glass. I’m trying not to think of a young girl’s parted legs. Trying and failing. "You got somewhere to be, Ava?"
"Should I?"
She's flirting back. Always a good sign.
I lean an inch closer, my eyes falling on her full, pouting, mouth. I’ve spent too long thinking about El’s perfect little cupid’s bow, and I’m trying very, very hard to think of something else. "How'd you like to take a ride in my cop car? I'll give you the full experience. Handcuff you and everything."
"Why Chief Hopper," Ava purrs, her honeyed, sweet-as-sin tone of voice telling me everything I need to know about her intent. "I have done absolutely nothing wrong."
I toss the rest of my bourbon down, slap some bills on the bar, and stand. "Shall we?"
***
Ten minutes later, we’re in the back of my cruiser, parked behind the old sawmill. The cheap vinyl of the seat sticks to my skin. The whole truck smells of stale coffee, cigarettes, and now, her fancy perfume. Her silk blouse is unbuttoned, her bra unhooked. I suck one of her nipples into my mouth.
Her tits are large globes that my big hands can barely hold, but I squeeze them anyway. I'm trying to get lost in this, to drown my thoughts in a sea of adult female flesh. To remind my dick what a real woman looks like.
I drop one hand between her legs and rub her through her expensive, silky panties. I can feel the damp heat of her through the fabric, and I tell myself this is what I want. A grown woman who knows the score. A quick, anonymous fuck to burn the poison out of my system.
***
When it's over, I feel worse than I did before, which doesn't make any damn sense. My body is sated, but my mind's a mess. I drive Ava back to the Hideaway in silence, but she doesn't seem to mind. She does the talking for both of us.
“Do you have a first name, Chief?"
"Jim."
"Well, then. It's nice to meet you, Jim. Thanks for the...ride."
"Yeah, no problem."
Back at the bar, she slips a card into my hand, closing my fingers around it. "Call me if you ever want to talk, Jim. About anything."
I watch her go, a sleek silhouette in the sunlight, a beautiful, normal woman I should wanna see again.
I don't look at the card. I toss it onto the passenger seat and start the engine.