Up until now, El's life has been dictated by instructions: from Brenner, her scientist "Papa"; from Mike, trying to keep her safe; and from Hopper, doing the same. She receives one more in her connection with her mom, the memory loop that reveals another gifted girl with Eleven back at the lab.
"I think this is why Mama wanted to talk," Eleven tells her aunt.
She reaches out into the telepathic beyond to find the person she saw in her mother's newspaper clippings, the one about a vanished Indian girl from London. Eleven can't find her, but then she appears in a dream, illuminated by a trash fire. the one with the power of illusion.
Her aunt Becky is on the phone with the Hawkins police, trying to reach Hopper, and Eleven can't take the chance of being found out. She skips out and catches a bus across the Illinois state line.
She arrives in the big city, nervous and excited but Eleven knows little to nothing of the world outside of Hopper's cabin. She makes her way into the urban underbelly, through an avenue of squatters and drifters toward a warehouse with a fire in the window.
The punks inside, led by a dude with a mohawk named Axel, try to scare her off, but it's Axel who ends up scared: he sees spiders crawling on his hand and dances away from Eleven.
No one else sees them: they're in his mind alone, planted by Kali, the group's leader and the lost girl from Eleven's mother's memory message. She's grown now, older than Eleven, and the two connect in a sisterhood that turns quickly to manipulation. After a moment of familial warmth with Eleven, Kali convinces her punk squad her rediscovered sister can be useful: "She can find people."
Asleep, Eleven hears Hopper's apology in her dreams, but Kali pulls her awake to introduce Axel, Dottie, Funshine, and Mick, the freaks to Will, Mike, Lucas, and Dustin's geeks. "Freaks!" Axel says. (Yes, we get it. Despite the hour we get to spend with these folks, they're expendable), their identities less fully formed than the 3-D friends Eleven's left behind. Kali helped them, and now they helped her: that's all we get. Kali explains their morally dubious mission: killing Hawkins lab veterans, going one-by-one through the people who participated in Kali and Eleven's captivity. It wasn't just an apartment robbery: it was a murder.
Eleven's shaken. "You—kill them?" she says.
"They're criminals," Kali says. "We simply make them pay for their crimes."
She takes Eleven out to test herself the next day, to test her power on a train car. Eleven can barely move it, but Kali gives her a way: her anger.
Your whole life you've been lied to," Kali says, leading Eleven through a montage of the reasons for the rage building inside her all season. "The bad men took away your home, your mother."
It's true, but Kali has no space in her vision for sympathy here: Eleven is her new family, but she treats her immediately as a weapon.
They seek out a target, Ray, the man who electro-shocked Eleven's mom, and prepare for action: Eleven gets a punk makeover complete with slicked-back hair. She's one of them now, The punks make trouble immediately, robbing a gas station and outracing police sirens after Kali and Eleven's powers make for a one-two punch that leaves the innocent owner smashed into a wall. They make their way to Ray's and put on their masks. Inside, Ray's watching TV and drinking beer: for whatever reason, he looks miserable.
Eleven telekinetically picks his lock, and the punks steal his wallet and prescription pills as Kali and Eleven confront him. Kali shows him an illusion of their childhood, and he realizes what he's facing as Eleven begins to batter him. Ray makes excuses just following orders! And offers up a bigger fish: Brenner, who appeared to meet his doom by Demogorgon. (At least I hope he's dead, if he's not then he'll meet his doom in S4.)
Eleven reaches out like Darth Vader and does her best force-choke, until she sees a shattered picture of Ray and his two daughters. Her rage eases away, and she stops Kali from shooting him.
After they escape, Kali tries to turn sisterly again, telling a story of finding a new family and losing them that's too generic to carry much weight.
"You're now faced with the same choice, Jane go back into hiding, or fight, and face him again," she says, and the advice pushes into manipulation: Brenner suddenly stands in the room, Kali's illusion, and he wonders why Eleven hasn't telepathically looked for him.
Kali's choice is a false binary. Eleven holds her flannel shirt, the vestige of her other life, and sees Hopper in the telepathic void: he's sick at the lab, and there's Mike, shouting against the soldiers about the coming monster onslaught. Eleven can't see what's wrong, but she knows they need her.
Cops break into the warehouse, and after a few more Kali illusions help the punks escape, Eleven decides to make her own getaway. They can't save you, Kali warns her. No, Eleven knows. But there's another path between hiding and murder. "I can save them," she says, and gets back on a bus, rolling slowly toward Indiana.
This gives Eleven her own path, an agency and an independent way forward she's never had before. She finds herself and her heroic purpose. But it happens in ways that sidesteps strengths, with a choice that loosens the path she wants to follow to make her own decisions.
It also leaves questions, But let's get back to Hawkins shall we?
(Hey guys I've been rewatching ST recently during lockdown and the lost sister's episode was mostly in El's POV so that's what I did for this chapter instead of it being everyone I can't wait for you guys to read the next chapter.)
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The End of Chapter 7
YOU ARE READING
Symmetrical Stranger Things Book Two
FanfictionCeleste & Will can finally lead normal lives again or so they thought until they get through this dilemma where they'll slowly fade away from their older selves losing bits and pieces of themselves over the course of two days. Cover made by @-saoirs...
