What Are You Hiding? | Henry Creel / Peter Ballard / 001

Part 1 - The Beginnings of a Conspiracy

a/n: In this fic, Henry manipulated Eleven into killing all of the other children without revealing his powers to her, then convinced Brenner that he had nothing to do with the murders. He still continued to work as an orderly, and is still an orderly at Hawkins Lab at the beginning of this fic.  Everything else that happened leading up to El escaping the lab is canon.  This begins the night that the boys discover El.

"What in the hell are you doing?" I whisper-yell at my idiot brother, who happens to be in the middle of pulling his bike out of the garage despite the fact that his best friend is missing and our parents gave us strict orders to stay in the house.

Mike winces as he stops dead in his tracks, the bike coming to a halt by his side. "Jules, please don't tell mom and dad," he pleads, using the desperate voice that he uses when begging one of our parents to let him have five more minutes of D&D since there's some "major event" coming up.

I cross my arms skeptically. "What is it that has you sneaking out this late?"

He sighs defeatedly. "Come on, can't you go bother somebody else - like Steve over there!"

I look over my shoulder at Steve pathetically attempting to climb up into Nancy's - my fraternal twin sister's - bedroom. I sigh in annoyance; besides our smarts, Nancy and I are polar opposites (and even then, I'm much smarter than her). She's very insecure and shacking up with assholes like Steve just to try to feel cool. I, however, don't give a damn about what people think and am fine with being the loser who has to watch my little brother and his weird friends to make sure they don't get themselves killed with their slightly idiotic tendencies.

"Hey, Steve!" I call out. "Maybe if you didn't skip leg day, this wouldn't be a problem!"

He flips me the bird, not even bothering to look at me as I turn back to Mike. "There, Steve's taken care of," I shrug. "Now, tell me what's important enough to have you breaking the rules like this."

He looks at me defeatedly, finally caving in. "Lucas, Dustin, and I are going to search for Will."

"Oh. Well in that case." I walk towards the garage without explanation, immediately earning panicked pleas from Mike.

"Jules, please don't tell mom and dad! They'll kill me! Just don't tell them, and if I get caught, I'll pretend this conversation never happened!"

I emerge from the garage with my bike and raincoat, immediately earning a confused head tilt from Mike. "What are you doing?"

"What does it look like? I'm helping you find Will."

"Thank god," he exhales in relief.

"Come on, you need somebody to make sure you don't get yourselves killed. Mom and dad would kill me too if they found out I just let you ride off," I tease, hopping onto my bike and immediately riding past him.

He chuckles as he hops onto his bike, quickly taking off after me. "You had me there, Jules!"

I wait for him to catch up to me, then add on. "What, did you seriously think I was going to snitch?  Didn't I coin the phrase snitches get stitches?"

"Yeah, yeah, trust me I know. Every time I snitched on you that was your comeback. I only ever got stitches from you one time though."

"Meh," I shrug. "Taught you a good enough lesson though."

We continue down the street, taking jabs at each other the whole way to meet up with Dustin and Lucas.

2 days later