Invisible- Stranger Things Fanfiction

Chapter Thirty One: Nightmares?

   It was mid-autumn, and I could see a little girl, blonde hair in two little pigtails in either side of her head. She was running, but she was smiling. Soon enough, a man appeared behind her.
   "It's the troll's favorite food! Roasted princess!" The man picked up the small girl, swinging her up over his shoulder and pretending to eat her.
   "No, Daddy, no!" she giggled, squirming as any little kid would.
   The man kept on doing what he was doing a woman, also blonde, came up behind the two of them.
   The little girl stopped laughing. Her eyes darted about, her breathing becoming more and more irregular. Following her gaze, I saw a huge monster- well, huge to her, probably the size of an adult panther- skulking toward the three humans. Her father put the girl down, both adults trying to get her breathing back on track.
   Why aren't they more scared about this huge-ass creature? I wondered. It was huge and slimy and disgusting. But their focus stayed on the little blonde. 
   "Sarah. Honey? Just breathe. With me: in... and out."
   Sarah? This all seemed way too weird.
   When I turned back to the creature, I noticed it was gone. Wherever it went, I was glad. It terrified that poor kid, and the parents didn't even notice.
   My parents didn't even notice.
   How could this be happening? An out-of-body experience? Why was I reliving a memory I didn't remember living to begin with. Was I ever that blonde? Damn, I looked dorky in pigtails.
   "Honey? Are you okay?" The blonde woman I could only assume was my mother stroked my cheek, looking between me and my dad, Chief Hopper. He was so much younger then, his eyes so light, his face unwrinkled.
   My dad looked at her, then at me. "We have to get her to the hospital."
  
   Everything whirred last me. Next thing I knew, I was back. Back there. I remembered all of this. I remembered him. Down to his last white hair.
   "Trust me, Chief Hopper," Brenner's psychotically calm voice said. "Sarah will be just fine here on her own."
   "I still think she should come home with-"
   "The hospital told you to bring her here to have some tests done, yes?" A nod. "Then she will stay until those tests are complete."
   My mother hugged Little Sarah, who was covered by a little white hospital gown, hair taken out and curling at the shoulders. "We'll be back soon, honey."
   As we watched them walk away, Brenner pulled out a big metal rod. Backwards, it revealed the numbers 001. He switched a button on the side, causing the rod to glow orange and yellow. Grabbing my tiny wrist, he chuckled. "This should only hurt a bit."
  
   Another scene change. This time, I was in that room. That damn room, the room where I last saw them. Dad was reading to the tiny, bald version of me on the bed, IVs and wires strategically placed so he could sit next to me. He had the hair tie I used for my pigtails around his wrist, reading one of my favorite books with my stuffed tiger next to me.
   Again, this monster appeared. Again, I was the only one of the Hoppers to see it. The monitor attached to me beeped and beeped, my little face paling and my breath stopping. The beeping turned to one long beep, and my parents were both escorted from the room as Little Sarah's eyes closed, passed out from fear.
   They faked my death.
   Walking to the window, Teenaged Me saw my father, sitting at the corner of the staircase, screaming in agonizing volume. My mother fled, running down the stairs with tears streaming down her face. That was the last I time I ever saw her.
   A little time passed before my dad finally got the strength to stand and leave. When he did, Brenner came back in, his terrifying grin bigger than ever.
   "Now you're all ours, One."
  Little Sarah was now fully conscious, watching the doorway in horror. Not only was she in the same room as Brenner, but the monster was right behind him.
   She let out an ear-piercing shriek, and I ran to her, trying to comfort the tiny thing I used to be. But I was the one thing she couldn't see, her pale face growing moist with sweat. In frustration, I screamed too. I had to help this kid. This poor, petrified-
  
   "Sarah!"
   My body shook as Will's face appeared above me, his hand on my shoulder.
   It had all been a dream. Well, a flashback and a dream, I guess.
   "What?" I asked, trying to be as casual as possible after being jolted awake by a boy whose haircut matched his mother's.
   Will's face, I now noticed, was pure white, his eyes saucers of concern. "I-I heard you screaming. You were saying a bunch of... words. I couldn't make them all out, but- but you said your own name a few times, something about 'behind you!', and you kept calling for someone to come back."
   Hopper was in the doorway. "I heard screaming?" It came out as a question, his voice all gravelly and heavy with sleep.
   "She's been going on for twenty minutes, you just heard the screaming?"
   He shrugged. "I suffer from very vivid dreams. Figured it was a nightmare... before I realized the screams didn't match my dream."
   Dying to get the subject off of me, I spoke: "What was your dream?"
   "Not important."
   "Hopper," I insisted.
The chief looked down and muttered, "Dancing in a meadow of butterflies."
Will and I both lost it, laughing our similarly-sized asses off as the chief laughed a bit too. When the laughing stopped, I remembered the contents of my dream. How happy Hopper was in those days. He's gotten so much older, too old for the relatively small time gap between my 'death' and now. His hair (what's left of it) a dark storm cloud, rather than its former resemblance of tree bark. His face, wrapping paper, crinkled around the edges. Where there used to be smooth was now crinkled, all of the color in his face turned to grey. Even his mustache was a shadow of its former glory, more matted than bushy. All of this, I realized, was because of me. Because he thought I was gone, and that broke him. I broke him.
"Dad." I jumped up from my bed, hugging the police chief as if I hadn't seen him for a decade. Oh wait- I hadn't. At first, he seemed surprised, but got over it and wrapped his arms around me.
"Yeah, Sarah," he whispered in a soothing register. "It's me."
I heard soft footsteps leaving my room. "I'll give you a minute," Will whispered, retreating to another part of the house.
After hugging for a few more minutes, Dad and I sat on my bed. It was weird thinking of him as my dad again; so far, he'd just been the guy who I left ten years ago.
"Where did she go?" I asked quietly.
"Where'd who go, honey?"
"My mom."
Dad sighed, unable to look at me while he answered. "Your mom... well, she-she left."
"Why?"
"It seems," he said slowly, "that you were the only thing keeping her in Hawkins. When you- when we thought you were- when you were gone, so was her reason to stay."
That didn't make sense. "What about you?"
He scoffed. "I- I think I stopped being a reason for her to stay long before we lost you, little girl."
"Did you love you?"
"At one time, she did." Any light that was still in his eyes up to that point was now long gone. "She really did. But some time after you were born, it just... the spark went out."
In an effort to comfort both of us, I put my head on my dad's shoulder, holding one of his hands in both of mine. "She left both of us."
"Honey, she thought you were-"
"In the lab," I interrupted. "That day. While you stayed and cried for me, she left."
Dad inches away from me, causing me to stare into his eyes. "Sarah, how do you know she left?"
"That was part of my nightmare tonight. I watched- I saw everything. The first time I had an episode, first time we met Brenner. I watched it all. Including Mama leaving." I didn't even realize I was crying until the tear dropped into my palm.
Dad pulled me to him, his arm hung all the way around my small shoulders. "It's okay, honey. It's okay."
"Why am I even crying over this bitch? I haven't seen her since I died!" I was basically in hysterics now, the reality of this entire situation finally hitting me. Looking back, I realized I'd never really had a good cry about any of it. Took me ten years, but I finally let everything out. My tough exterior had finally been hammered through.
After crying a bit more, I got up to grab a tissue and wipe my eyes. Walking into the kitchen with my dad, I splashed my face with cold water. As I looked into the living room, I realized all of my friends were sleeping on the floor. (With the exception of Nikki, whose melting ice pack was lying on the arm of the sofa next to her.) "What're they still doing here?"
"Do you not remember anything from before you went to bed?" Dad looked at me in concern.
Thinking, I tried to remember earlier that day. "We went to school, fought the principal, came back here, and... um... well, I remember you coming home and... that's- that's it."
My father breathed for a moment. "Honey, you asked them to stay the night so you wouldn't be alone. You all decided to watch a movie. I don't know how you ended up in your room."
"I probably got up to sleep in my own bed," I suggested.
"I don't think so." Will was still up, sitting on the floor. "Sarah, when I went in to check on you after the screaming, you weren't in bed. You weren't even in your room at first. You just kind of appeared there out of thin air."
"Will, are you sure you didn't have a weird dream too?" Dad asked.
"I know what I saw," Will answered confidently.
Will had seen some pretty weird things in his life, according to Dustin. Nobody believed him when he talked about it, but I saw the monsters he talked about. I thought it was a nightmare, but what if I actually traveled back in time? What if I went back to the Upside Down and didn't realize it?
What the hell is going on with me?