Time After Time (a Stranger Things fanfiction)

Smooth Operator

Smooth Operator

No place for beginners or sensitive hearts

When sentiment is left to chance

No place to be ending but somewhere to start

- Sade

As armed guards with MP armbands surrounded them, Joyce and Hopper put their hands up. "It's all right," he said to her softly, with a reassurance he was far from feeling. "Let me do the talking."

There was an unnerving silence as they were herded toward the door. Hopper was still distracted by the MP armbands. If the lab was being backed up by the military, they weren't playing any longer. How could he protect Joyce, and protect the kids, and save Will, and get them all out of here without anyone ending up as a science experiment?

Inside, they were taken to the lab portion of the building, and one of the MPs grabbed Joyce by the arm, pulling her toward an interrogation room. "No," she said, trying to twist away. "No. Hop?"

"It's okay, Joyce. Just don't say anything."

He was grabbed and taken to a different room, craning his neck trying to watch her, to be sure she was going to be okay. He could still hear her shouting "No" and struggling when the door was slammed behind him.

*****

Joyce eventually lost the fight and was handcuffed to a chair in the cold room with the tiled walls, as she had expected would happen. And then they left her there for what felt like an eternity, an eternity in which Will was still in that place, still lost and hiding and terrified and needing his mother. "Hurry," he had told Eleven. Joyce was trying, and she was increasingly enraged at these people who had tortured that little girl and left her son trapped on the other side of reality and were now keeping her from going after him.

"Let me out of here!" she screamed at them. "Somebody!" She tugged and twisted at the handcuffs and shifted the chair around, trying to find some way, any way, to get loose and find Hopper. "Please!" She pulled at the handcuffs hard, until it hurt. "Let me out!"

After longer than she would have liked, the door opened and a tall man with white hair came into the room. He closed the door carefully behind him, put his hands in the pockets of his immaculate suit, and began walking slowly toward her, as if he had all the time in the world.

Joyce just stared at him, waiting for him to speak.

"Your son," he said at last. "We know you've been in contact with him."

She was stunned. They knew? They knew, and they hadn't done anything? These were the people who had let her have a fake funeral, she reminded herself. So upset she could barely think straight, she stammered, "You have to let me ... let me ..."

"When?" he demanded. "And how did you make contact with him?"

"What?"

"Hm?" He waited, then whispered, "Six."

"What?"

"Six," he repeated. He moved to the chair opposite her, taking off his jacket and hanging it on the back. "Six people have been taken this week. This ... thing that took your son? We don't really understand it. But its behavior is predictable. Like all animals, it eats." He pulled out the chair and took his seat, tucking his tie carefully behind the table and resting his clasped hands in front of him.