Time After Time (a Stranger Things fanfiction)

We're Not Gonna Take It

"We're Not Gonna Take It"

Oh, you're so condescending

Your gall is never ending

We don't want nothin', not a thing from you

Your life is trite and jaded

Boring and confiscated

If that's your best, your best won't do

- Twisted Sister

He was waiting for her when she came back to the cabin, standing on the porch working on at least his tenth cigarette.

Eleven stopped short as soon as she saw him. He could see the guilt on her face from here, even in the moonlight. Good. She should feel guilty. She'd been stupid, going out and letting people see her, making swings whip around in front of some panicked mom, for God's sake!

Hopper stubbed out his cigarette firmly, to show her he meant business. He had left his hat on for the same reason.

She stalked straight past him, up the steps and into the cabin, banging the door in the process. So she was pissed at him? Good. Because he was pissed at her, too.

Hopper stormed into the cabin behind her, slamming the door shut behind him. "Friends don't lie!" he said, throwing her own words back at her. "Isn't that your bullshit saying? Hey! Hey! Hey!" He caught the door of her room as she attempted to shut it in his face. "Don't walk away from me!" Shoving the door open, he stood there glaring at her.

Eleven looked back at him. There was something in her eyes under the anger, some pain or sadness, and he forced himself to calm down a little.

"Where'd you go on your little field trip? Huh?" She didn't answer, so he asked again, more firmly. "Where?"

Still no answer. He recognized this—sometimes she simply couldn't find the words, or force them out. A reaction to a childhood spent speaking only when spoken to, and then in very few words.

"Did you go see Mike?" He knew that's where she would have gone. The first place.

"He didn't see me," Eleven said defensively.

"Yeah, well, that mother and her daughter did, and they called the cops." He moved into the room so he could look into her face, so he could underscore the seriousness of his next question. "Now. Did anyone else see you? Anyone? At all? Come on, I need you to think!" He was desperate now. Didn't she understand what could happen? She could be taken away from him—far away where he could never find her. She would be lost to him. Didn't she understand that?

"Nobody saw me!" she shouted at him.

Hopper walked across the room, trying to find the words, and the rationality, to make her truly understand. "You put us in danger. You realize that, right?"

Eleven shook her finger in his face. "You promised I'd go. And I never leave!" She screamed the last words at him. "Nothing ever happens!"

"Yeah! Nothing happens and you stay safe!" He slammed his hand down on the dresser. Eleven recoiled from the sound, or possibly from his anger. He was so upset, so freaked out, he wanted to cry. These past hours had told him just how important to him she was, how lost and broken he would be if he lost another girl.

But Eleven couldn't see that. She screamed at him again. "You LIE!"

"I don't lie. I protect and I feed and I teach. And all I ask of you is that you follow three simple rules. Three rules. And you know what? You can't even do that!"

She looked as though she was about to cry, and it was because of him, and all of this had happened because he fucking screwed up. Again. He couldn't take it. He turned and left the room before he said or did something he would regret.

From across the cabin, he stopped to look at her. "You're grounded. You know what that means?" He went to the refrigerator. "It means no Eggos." He threw the boxes into the trash. "And no TV. For a week." He bent to pick up the TV, but he couldn't lift it. She was holding it there with her mind. Hopper glared at her over his shoulder. He could see the blood trickling from her nose. "All right, knock it off. Let go."

Eleven shook her head.

He tried again, but couldn't lift it. "Okay. Two weeks." Still couldn't. "Let go!"

Another shake of the head.

"A month." He wished he hadn't started this with her, made this a battle of wills, but now he had and he couldn't back down. She had to understand who was in charge, had to understand that the rules were there for a reason, for her safety.

"No," Eleven said flatly.

"Well, congratulations. You just graduated from no TV for a month to no TV at all." He yanked the plug out of the wall.

This time she screamed her "No" at him. She kept saying no while she went to the TV and tried to get it to come back, fiddling with the antennas.

"You have got to understand that there are consequences to your actions."

"You are like Papa!" she shouted at him.

The shot struck home. He had never meant it to be this way. He had meant to protect her, not to imprison her. Didn't she know that? "You think I'm like that psychotic son of a bitch? All right. You want to go back in the lab?"

Eleven shook her head. He could see tears in her eyes now, but he had gone too far to stop now.

"One phone call, I can make that happen."

"I hate you!"

"Yeah, well, I'm not too crazy about you, either. You know why? 'Cause you're a brat. You know what that words means? How 'bout that be your word for the day, huh? Brat. Why don't we look it up? B-r-a-t. Brat." He tossed the dictionary at her, but she caught it in midair with her powers and sent it hurtling back at him. It glanced off his chest and fell to the floor while he stood and watched, unable to believe she would do that to him. "Hey! What the hell is wrong with you?"

With a sweep of her arm she sent the couch crashing into his knees.

He stared at her in shock. "Hey!"

Eleven turned her back on him, marching back into her room, knocking over a bookcase in the process.

Hopper kept shouting "Hey!" until he crashed into the unyielding door of her room. She had slammed it shut behind her, and was keeping it closed against him with all the force of her mind.

"Open this door!" he screamed, banging on it. "Open the damned door! You want to go out in the world? You better grow up! Grow the hell up!" He was screaming now, losing it, the anger and the pain and the betrayal getting the best of him. He couldn't stop, even as he heard her sobbing on the other side of the door.

Then she screamed, and every pane of glass in every window in the cabin shattered. Hopper stood in the middle of the wreckage of the home he had tried to create and wondered where the hell it had all gone so far wrong.