UNDER EDITING & SLOW UPDATING
" you're a terrible person, hargrove. you just- "
" jesus, dannie, i don't care. "
where a girl struggling with the secrets of her past meets a boy struggling with the pains of his present and future.
[{ stranger...
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November 25, 1984
"You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas," a man's voice states, sound crackling through the old TV speakers. "You've just crossed over into the Twilight Zone."
Dannie listened as the next episode of the Twilight Zone reruns began and she mindlessly flipped through a couple of magazines. She had lost track of time, not knowing just how long she had been sitting in the same spot on the living room couch, but she had managed to catch up on several issues of Rolling Stone and had even gazed over a few editions of her mother's Vogue collection. She didn't know how many episodes had played as the show became background noise, but she felt like she had heard several different stories by now. Each one that passed was just as ridiculous as the one that aired before it.
Well, maybe after what she had discovered in the past few weeks, these stories weren't as ridiculous and otherworldly as she originally thought.
It had been nearly three weeks since that night at the Byers's house, and since then, quite a lot has changed. After returning home and crashing from the exhaustion that night caused, she woke up to Dustin rambling on and on about what she missed—the tunnels, Dart, the blinding lights as Eleven closed the Gate. Dannie tried to piece everything together as her dear brother continued to let words pour out from his mouth, feeling as if her brain would catch on fire and smoke would rise from her ears.
But once she got Dustin to slow down and elaborate, the puzzle pieces started to connect and the picture was less opaque. Instead of taking Steve to the hospital, they went down into tunnels created by Dart and what he called the "Demodogs" to distract them. They had to keep them from going to Hawkins Lab so that Eleven could close the Gate. It took Dannie a moment to remember who Eleven was, and it took her even longer to understand what Dustin meant when he talked about the Gate. He summed it up by saying, "It's like a huge portal. You know what a portal is, right?" In her state of confusion, Dannie didn't think to ask what was on the other side of this Gate, but she quickly assumed that she did not want to know. As curious as she was, she figured that the less she actually knew, the better. Even though she was involved and mixed up in the mess created by Hawkins Lab, she kept telling herself that the less she knew about the creatures, the other dimension, and her own abilities, the more chance she would have at living a normal, teenage life. Curiosity did kill the cat—her cat Mews, specifically—after all.
While trying to maintain the life she knew before, Dannie was also trying to explore more of what she hadn't known. She talked to her mother more about what she had forced herself to forget—how they met the night she escaped the laboratory and her adoption. She started meeting with Dr. Owens often so that she could learn more about the project she was born into, the man she knew as Papa, and what she was supposedly capable of. She even reached out to Chief Hopper after Dr. Owens suggested he may have the final answers she was looking for.
