runtowardsomething | (no subject)

Entry tags:

eleven

(no subject)

tw: allusions to sexual abuse

Steady as things have been of late, the nightmares still come most nights. That probably isn't the right word for it, anyway. Steady doesn't exactly describe one of her best friends losing a hand in some weird fucking zombie fight. It doesn't, either, encompass what it feels like to be staring down the barrel of her last semester of high school, without a clue what she wants to do next. In a few short months, she'll be 18. The thought is both thrilling and terrifying.

Maybe that's why these particular dreams come — not ones of a dark future, but of an awful past, rough possessive hands and Are you still my little girl? and she's not, she won't ever be, not again, but in the dreams, she's frozen, and she knows that on some level she always will be. There's no getting away from it, part of her marked indelibly.

When Beverly wakes with a start, it's late, well after midnight and pitch black outside, and she knows there's no sense in trying to get back to sleep. Nights like these, there never is. She gets up instead, putting on a pair of pajama pants and her heavy winter coat, a pack of cigarettes and a lighter already in one pocket. She's careful, as she moves through the house, to be as quiet as she can, letting out a breath like she's been holding it when she finally gets out to the backyard. It probably shouldn't make much difference, but still, the cool, fresh air helps her breathe a little easier as she takes a seat and lights a cigarette, huddled in her coat and waiting to feel halfway present again.

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Eleven doesn't stir when Beverly walks through the house. She doesn't wake at at the quiet latching of the door. It's her cat that wakes her: he stirs when he hears someone moving around outside of the normal hours, and stands up on the bed, stretches hard, then pads over El's pillow. She mumbles as she wakes, reaching up to pet him, but he keeps walking and jumps off the bed to look out the window. It's odd, odd enough that she sits up to watch him, then climbs out of bed to see what he's looking at.

From this angle, she can't see anyone, but she does see a small plume of cigarette smoke. Stroking down his back one more time, Eleven pushes her feet into her slippers and makes her way to the back door. She grabs her coat and opens the door, and when she spots Beverly, she slips out.

"Why are you awake?" she asks. Her voice is a soft, sleepy whisper, and as she settles in to sit beside her, she tucks her hair behind her ears and hugs her knees.

Beverly really isn't expecting anyone else to wake up. She's used to sneaking out, after all, a habit she had to pick up long before Darrow, and she thought she'd been pretty quiet. Still, at least she isn't so out of it that she doesn't hear the door opening, which clues her into someone else's presence before El comes to sit beside her, and she finds she doesn't mind the company, even if she doesn't know what to say.

She has no idea, after all, how much El actually knows about her past, what Hopper might have explained or some of their mutual friends might have shared. For her part, she doesn't really talk about it, which is the approach she sticks with now, the safest, easiest one. At least it's honest.

"Woke up," she says, her voice just as quiet, the awkward tension in her shrug betraying the lack of ease behind the gesture. "Couldn't get back to sleep. So I thought I'd get some air."

Eleven watches her, then looks out towards the yard. The tension in Beverly's shoulders feels obvious, but she isn't sure if she's allowed to talk about it. She doesn't want to upset her.

"I don't dream," she says instead, "usually... But... sometimes, when I do, it's bad things. I don't like sleeping, when it's bad things."

Beverly nods slowly, expression thoughtful. It's not quite a sentiment to which she can relate — she dreams far more often than she would like — but it still gets rather neatly to the heart of the matter. She wonders if it's just that obvious, or if it's just one person who's been through some shit recognizing it in someone else, or maybe some combination of the two. Either way, though, she doesn't see the sense in trying to brush it off.

"I dream every night," she admits, frowning. "It's always bad things." These, fewer and further between, might be the worst of them. Horrible futures can maybe be avoided. The past already happened, though, the damage done and indelible. "Did... Did Hopper ever tell you anything about where I came from?"

She shakes her head. "Just that you needed a family," she says honestly. She'd wanted to ask, but she knows it wasn't her business, any more than it was his business to tell her. El wouldn't have wanted him to tell anyone, even Beverly, about her own history with Hawkins Lab, so she never asked him to tell her any of Beverly's secrets.

It isn't exactly surprising, but Beverly still finds herself relieved at the answer. Before Darrow, she never told anyone about what was going on at home, and here, there's still only a very small handful of people who know about it. She doesn't mind it now the way she once would have, but she's been talked — whispered, rumored — about enough without that sort of information getting around without her input. The only problem is, she still doesn't really know how to talk about it. Even with her therapist, she usually doesn't talk much about it, or about anything.

Maybe it's because she's already shaken, too much so to pretend she isn't, or maybe it's just because she's tired of keeping it hidden, like she's the one who should feel ashamed over what someone else did, but she thinks there's no reason for Eleven not to know. She just has to figure out how to say it.

"My dad used to... hurt me," she says, looking off to the side and taking another drag of her cigarette. Even that isn't quite right, but it's good enough for now. "My mom wasn't around anymore. He always said I looked like her."

If El had grown up outside of Hawkins Lab, she might be able to do the math and understand what Beverly means, specifically. It's bad enough to hear that her Papa used to hurt her, though — she doesn't understand the nuance behind it.

That doesn't stop the swell of protectiveness she feels for Beverly, though. She frowns, reaching to touch her wrist gently.

"I won't let him," she promises. He probably isn't here, but if he ever were, she would protect Beverly as fiercely as she would any of her friends from Hawkins.

It's unexpectedly touching, though perhaps it shouldn't be. It's just that, for a long time, Beverly didn't have anyone to protect her at all. That's supposed to be a parent's job, and hers failed at that fucking miserably. Her biological father did, anyway. As far as she's concerned, Hopper is her dad now, the best one she could have asked for, the only one she recognizes as such. With that has come more of a family now, too. The way El says that, Beverly knows she means it, and to her, that means the world.

"Thanks," she whispers. "It's why I don't sleep well sometimes. I dream that I'm back there."

Eleven nods, fingers still so gently on Beverly's wrist. She can't protect Beverly from dreams, but she can at least let her know she's not alone. It's different, she knows it is. She's certain that Beverly's papa didn't lock her in a cell or make her go into small, dark spaces, or use her to find people so they could be killed. She doesn't know exactly how he hurt her, but hurt comes in so many different forms.

"Sometimes, I dream that, too," she admits. "That I'm back with my papa, and he's locking me in the small room. I dream that I never got out, and I never found Hop. Hop never found me." Her eyes go distant as she pictures it, and she takes a breath and shakes it off again. "But it's just a dream. Not real."

Beverly nods slowly, eyes wide as she looks over at Eleven in the dark. She knows just enough about what was going on back there, things Hopper told her a little about before they had any idea Eleven would ever be here herself, to know that it was bad, that El has plenty of reasons to be haunted, too. Maybe it makes sense, in that way, that they were found by the same person, someone who was able to give them both the kind of life that they should have had in the first place, the one they were both deprived of for so long.

"Not real," she echoes. "They're not here, and... they couldn't hurt us again even if they were."

"I wouldn't let them," she promises seriously. "Not ever again." Her brow furrows, and she looks out towards the yard.

It would be so easy to demonstrate her power to Beverly, to prove that she's capable of protecting them both. But it feels like it would be wrong to do that. Maybe she already knows. Maybe she doesn't, and it would just scare her. Or maybe it would just make her think El is showing off. (Maybe she would be, just a little.)

"Me neither," Beverly says, as solemn a promise as she can make. She doesn't know how much she'd be able to do, really, but it's always been easier for her to fight for someone else's sake than her own, as if some part of her sensed, or just internalized, that she wouldn't deserve it. Against her dad, she has no idea how much good she'd be. Against El's, though, she'd fuck him up if he ever got near her again.

She almost smiles, small and tired but real. "Or Hopper," she adds. "I know he wouldn't."

"He definitely wouldn't," El agrees. She smiles, small and warm. "He's the best papa." She doesn't have a lot of experience with dads, but in the time she's known Hopper, she prefers him to anything she'd ever known at the lab.

"He is," Beverly says, her own smile widening just a touch at that, still small but steadier now, and sure. As far as she's concerned, Hopper is her dad now. She may never be able to erase the father she was born to or the damage he did, but she doesn't have to give him any part of who she is now. "I never knew it could be like that, you know? Having a parent who actually... cares about you. Looks out for you."

She nods, brow furrowing. "I thought Papa cared about me. But he only cared about my powers. What I could do with them. When I met Hop and Mrs. Byers I knew... it could be better." She's angry, a little, when she realizes that both of them went through horrible things, even if, in her own way, she didn't know it was horrible for a long time.

"It was Hop who made me realize it, too," Beverly says, nodding slowly in agreement. Pretty much from the first time they met, he was kinder, more caring, than any other adult she'd ever known. It took her a while to really trust that, to let it sink in, but it did, and she's been grateful ever since. "My dad... he said he cared about me. But he also told me all the time that no one ever would. And the things he did, that wasn't care."

Eleven nods, understanding what she means. "'Care' doesn't hurt," she murmurs. "'Care' doesn't make you afraid, or sad." Hopper cares, and sometimes the way he shows it makes El angry, but he's never hurt her, or made her feel less than, or made her feel like she wasn't good — like she couldn't be good. She can only imagine that he's been the same for Beverly.

"It isn't just about what you can do for someone else, either," Beverly says, a quiet agreement. "What they can take from you." It's different, but not terribly so, similar enough that she thinks El will get what she means. The bullshit they dealt with wasn't the same, but it came from the same sort of place, she thinks, and it's fucked up. No one should have to go through what either of them went through.

Beverly's cigarette is almost done, down to the little colored band where she holds it with two fingers, and El looks back towards the house to make sure Hopper hasn't woken up, yet. She looks at her again.

"Come inside," she says. "I know how to make cocoa. We can have dessert and cocoa."

Dessert, Beverly has probably long-since learned, is usually Eggo waffles with various ice cream toppings on them, and it's way too late to eat anything like that, but Eleven offers, anyway.

Everything around them is dark, quiet. Even the city isn't as loud as usual at this hour, though there's still the steady, persistent hum of white noise in the distance, a far cry from what she was used to before she got here. Beverly likes that, though. Something about it — the stillness but not too much of that — makes her feel safe, which she badly needs when her mind has been trying to make her feel otherwise.

The offer helps, too, a ghost of a smile curving her mouth as she stubs the cigarette out in the ashtray she keeps out here just for this purpose. "Dessert and cocoa sounds good," she says. "Let's do it."

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