The Savior. PG-13, general/sci-fi, canon pairings.
"Save the lost child, save the world." Initially, Mike thinks future!Dustin was talking about Will. But then he and his friends find a telekinetic girl wandering around the forest on a rainy night, and now he isn't so sure.

Note: This will mostly follow the plot of the TV show with some very specific changes. Any scene from the show you don't see here, it's because it happens more or less the same as it did on the show.

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"It was a seven."

Mike turns to Will with a confused expression. "Huh?"

"The roll," Will explains further, looking up at his friend from the seat of his bike. "It was a seven. The Demogorgon— it got me."

"Oh. Okay," Mike says, caught a little off guard. Now that their campaign had been interrupted by his mother, he isn't hung up on the little details; the hype has deflated a bit. Besides, he has something else on his mind. "Um, Will?" he asks. "That girl you drew... with the punk clothes and her hand outstretched in front of her... who is she?"

Will's eyes widen. "You saw that?" he asks, looking surprised and a little worried.

"Yeah." At one point during a particularly rambunctious reaction, Will's bag had fallen off the back of his chair and his stuff had spilled on the floor. Mike was closer, so he'd bent over to help pick everything up. "Your sketchbook fell open to that page earlier and I caught a glimpse," Mike says.

He doesn't add that the drawing caught his eye because the girl seemed so familiar. There's no way he can explain that he's been having dreams about that same girl— her hair is blond instead of dark and she's wearing different clothes, but Mike has no doubt it's the same girl— for a few days now. "Who is she?" he asks again, instead. "Do you know her from somewhere?"

Once again, Will looks shocked and a little uncomfortable. "No, I, uh— I made her up," he finally stutters out, not too convincingly. "You know, like a D&D character. I just thought... I thought it would be a cool style, that's all."

Mike nods, wanting to press further but at the same time not wanting to reveal what's been going on with him. He already feels like he's going crazy as it is. "Well," Will says. "The guys are probably waiting for me. See you tomorrow!" he says and starts pedaling away from Mike's garage like there was a monster on his tail. Mike watches him go, his stomach roiling with unease.

Then he catches sight of the garage lights flickering behind him and when he turns to look, he finds himself face to face with Dustin. "Why are you still here? I could've sworn I saw you bike away with the others," he tells his friend, who just stands there looking around like he can't believe where he is. "Did you go to the bathroom or something? Will's already gone on without you."

He narrows his eyes. Something's different... last he saw Dustin, he'd been wearing a brown jacket and a white t-shirt; now, he's wearing a maroon hoodie, and his t-shirt is bright yellow. The night is dark, but it's not dark enough for him not to be able to tell the difference. "Did you change your clothes?"

"It worked!" Dustin says with a big, toothy grin. Then he turns to Mike urgently. "Listen, I don't have much time, even with Steve helping me—"

"Steve?" Mike interrupts with a befuddled expression. Steve as in Steve Harrington? Since when does Dustin even talk to Mike's sister's new boyfriend? "Dustin, what are you—"

"Mike! Focus!" Dustin exclaims, snapping his fingers in front of Mike's face suddenly, which makes Mike take a step back in surprise. "Listen, I'm not that Dustin. Well, I am, but not yet. I'm from the future."

Mike lifted one eyebrow as he stared back at his friend with a flat expression. "The future. Right." He looked around them, searching for something. "Is Lucas going to jump out from behind the trash bin to scare me now?"

"This isn't a joke," Dustin presses in an imperative tone. "Listen, I don't have much time, and there's something you need to know." He takes a deep breath and continues speaking before Mike has a chance to interrupt. "Someone's in trouble, and we're the only ones who can help them. We have to save them, otherwise something really bad will happen."

"What? What do you mean 'bad'?" Mike asks. He still doesn't believe any of this is real— his friends are pulling a prank on him, surely— but he's a sucker for a good story.

"I mean 'bad' as in hundreds-of-people-will-die bad," Dustin elaborates, emphasizing his words with a nod of his head. "Look, I don't have time to explain. I'm already being pulled back, I can feel it." Mike has no idea what he means by that— he doesn't see anything pulling Dustin anywhere. "Just remember," Dustin adds, "save the lost child, save the world."

"Lost child? What lost child? Dustin—" The garage lights flicker again, and Mike cuts himself off to look up at the lamp, worried that it might go out completely. It doesn't, and when Mike turns back to his friend, Dustin is gone.

Mike looks around for any sign of him (or Lucas), but his eyes don't catch anything. So he shakes his head, rolls his eyes, and calls out, "Real funny, guys!" into the night before moving to turn off the garage lights and heading back inside.

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The next morning, Chief Jim Hopper wakes up in his trailer still tired, in pain, and honestly, still a little bit drunk.

He's already late, so he figures he might as well take some time for a smoke before (reluctantly) getting ready for work. Then he takes a quick and completely unrelaxing shower, trims his mustache, gets dressed, pops a couple of pills and swallows them down with what's left of his (fifth or sixth) beer from last night.

Once he's dressed, he takes a deep breath, puts on his hat, and makes his way out of his trailer without bothering to turn off the television, and without noticing that, somehow, his beer can has ended up embedded in the laminate surface of his bathroom sink.

He wouldn't notice that until later. As it stands, he has to steel himself to step into the tedium that is everyday small-town policing, and no amount of coffee and contemplation could prepare him for dealing with a distraught Joyce Byers first thing in the morning.

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"Just find my son, Hop. Find him!"

Jesus, Joyce, calm down. Kid's been gone for half a day, there's no need to go into hysterics.

Now, Joyce considers herself a fairly patient person, if a little high-strung, but that is the straw that breaks the camel's back for her. "I am not hysterical!" she throws back, first taking a second to glare at him like she used to do when they were young and he was being a dick (which happened more often than he would ever admit), and then starting to pace in front of his desk again.

"Joyce, I didn't say—"

"And I know, I know he hasn't been missing for 24 hours, or however long it is that you cops are supposed to wait," she continues without letting him get a word in edgewise, "but Will has never spent the night away from home without letting me know first, and I can't— I can't just— sit and wait and go to work and pretend everything's normal because whatever's happening here, Hop, it is most definitely not normal."

She pauses only to breathe and glare at Hopper some more. "Something's wrong, I can feel it, and I know you don't care, but just because your daughter didn't—" Joyce cuts herself off as soon as she realizes what she's saying, knowing she's pushing it too far, but from his stony expression— a litany of Sara Sara Sara Sara bouncing violently against a foot-thick wall of ice— she knows she wasn't fast enough.

"I'm sorry," she apologizes quickly, sincerely; she can only imagine how painful it must be for him to be reminded of what happened to his little girl. "I'm just— you understand, right?" she adds, pausing in her pacing to look hopefully at him. "If my son is in danger, and there was something I could've done, and I didn't at least try..."

Hopper swallows hard and says, "I know, Joyce," before standing up and walking around his desk so he could stand in front of her and put a hand on her shoulder. "Look, you go call Lonnie, okay? And look for a recent picture of the kid, maybe we could put up some flyers around town in case anyone's seen him. I'll go ask around; maybe one of his friends knows something. But we don't have to wait around, all right? We're gonna find your boy."

Joyce nods, feeling a little comfort in the fact that when she looks up into Hopper's face, she can see his determination not to fail Will like he'd failed Sara. She is so frazzled, so worried about her son, that it doesn't even occur to her that Hopper had never told her his daughter's name, at least not that she could remember.

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As soon as they left the Principal's office, Mike pulls Dustin and Lucas into the A/V Club room and tells them all about his weird encounter from the night before. Dustin seems into it the moment Mike mentions superpowers, but Lucas, as expected, is skeptical. "Look," he starts, "I think it's cute that you're fantasizing about Dustin like this, but we've got other things to be worrying about right now. Like, you know, our missing friend."

"But that's the thing, Lucas!" Dustin exclaims. "What if this does have something to do with Will? You heard what he said." He shakes his head. "What I said. Whatever. You heard it loud and clear: save the lost child. If that's not Will, who else is it going to be?"

Lucas sighs and rolls his eyes. "How are you buying this?"

Instead of answering his rhetorical question, Dustin turned to Mike. "Did I look older?"

Mike remains quiet for a moment, thinking. "Not really," he replies, trying to think back to every detail he could recall. "But you were wearing different clothes. And— oh!" He snaps his fingers as an important detail comes back to him. "You had teeth!"

"My teeth had come in?" Dustin asks, his lips immediately drawing into a bright, wide grin. "Man! My teeth come in, I hang out with Steve Harrington, and I have superpowers! I like this future," he quips, elbowing Lucas's side.

Lucas groans. "'This future' is not real," he declares, then turns to Mike. "You can't seriously think any of this is real. You probably just ate something weird and indigestion made you have a nightmare or something."

It's Mike's turn to roll his eyes. "Right. And then out of all the people in Hawkins, our friend Will just happens to go missing that exact same night." He shakes his head. "Lucas! Come on. That can't be a coincidence."

But Lucas doesn't budge. It isn't until later that night when he finally started to give a little. "This isn't about your hallucination from yesterday again, is it?" he asks after Mike radioes him, shortly after dinner. "I think your imagination is getting the better of you, man. Over."

"It wasn't a hallucination," Mike replies, "but no, I'm not talking about that. Over."

"Then what is it? Over."

"Leaving aside the whole saving-the-world thing," Mike posited, "we should still do something about Will. Go look for him or something. If my encounter from last night was real, then we'll have done something amazing; and if it was just a nightmare like you said earlier, then we'll at least have found Will! Over."

Lucas still didn't seem fully convinced. "The cops are already looking for him. You really think we'd find him before they do? Over."

"We've been down Mirkwood a thousand times in our lives, Lucas! We can find him, I'm sure we can. And you know Will would do the same for us. Remember yesterday? He could've cast Protection last night, but he didn't. He cast Fireball. Over."

"What's your point? Over."

"My point is," Mike retorted, "he could've played it safe, but he didn't. He put himself in danger to help the party. Over."

Lucas remains silent for almost half a minute, and that's when Mike knows he's broken his resolve. "Meet me in ten. Over and out," Lucas finally says, and Mike has to keep himself from cheering into the walkie. Instead, he starts throwing things inside his bag and starts looking for his raincoat, just in case.

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"So, listen, this is gonna sound a little weird," Mike asks Eleven once he's handed her a warm and toasty Eggo and she's bitten into it with gusto, "but I just need you to go out there. Then go to the front door and ring the doorbell. My mom will answer. You can't tell her about last night or that you know me. Understand? Just tell her that you're lost and that you need help. She'll know what to do."

He pauses as his own words register in his ears. "That's right... you were lost last night when we found you, weren't you?" he asks. Like Will, he thinks, although he doesn't say that part out loud. Initially, Mike had thought that future!Dustin was talking about Will in their encounter two nights ago. But then he and his friends found a girl wandering around the forest on a rainy night, and now he isn't so sure.

Eleven nods, and Mike wonders what that means in regards to future!Dustin's message. Not for the first time, he finds himself wishing future!Dustin had been more explicit. Why did messages from the future always have to be so vague? He'd only spoken of one lost child, so it could be Will or Eleven. But how would they know which? Mike figured he would ask his Mom to help Eleven either way, just in case, while they looked for Will. They could kill two birds with one stone that way. He would have no world-ending catastrophes on his watch.

But if it isn't El, then how could he explain the fact that he'd been dreaming about her for a few days already? She looks different in his dreams, but he's sure it is her. When you put that together with Will's drawing and future!Dustin's warning, how can it mean anyone else? And does it make him a terrible friend for choosing Eleven over Will? He's still determined to help both of them, of course— he would never just abandon Will— but there is something about El that just... draws him to her. Even if she turns out not to be the person Dustin meant, he still wants to help her. He has to.

"Anyway," he adds when he realizes that he's been quiet for too long and Eleven is staring at him questioningly, "it's no big deal. We'll just pretend to meet each other again. And my mom, she'll know who to call."

But Eleven says no, and when she reveals she's being chased by bad people who are trying to hurt her, Mike's blood chills. When she mimics a gun pointed at her head and then at his, he realizes he can't get his mother involved in this; he can't get anyone new involved in this. They are going to have to help Eleven on their own— save her from people with guns!— all the while also looking for Will.

Why couldn't saving the world just be easy?

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"All that matters is, after school, the freak will be back in the loony bin, and we can focus on what really matters: Finding Will," Lucas declares as Mr. Clarke moves to the front of the room to check his notes before the class has to start.

"You just said you thought Mike's plan had failed," Dustin reminds him, leaning forward in his desk.

"Well, we won't know until after school," Lucas retorted with a shake of his head. "It's only first period. Can we not talk about this until later? It's gonna get really old with you going on and on and on about superpowers every five minutes until three."

"Oh!" Dustin says suddenly, like a super cool idea had just occurred to him. "Maybe I can fast-forward time until school's out. Watch the clock for me," he signals Lucas to look at the clock on the wall above the blackboard before closing his eyes and pretending to make a lot of effort, making sounds almost like it hurt. His "hnngh" sound was so loud that the girl sitting in front of him turns to look, probably wondering if he was trying to go number two in his seat.

Lucas rolls his eyes and shakes his head. "Quit it. You look like an idiot," he mutters between his teeth, abashed at his friend's behavior.

Dustin opens his eyes and looks up at the clock again. "Did it work?" He frowns when he realizes even if it had worked, he couldn't tell the difference anyway. With a sigh, he turns to Lucas. "Man! The seconds hand didn't move ahead even just a little?"

Lucas looks at him with a deadpan expression. "You don't have superpowers," he insists for what feels like the seventeenth time just that day.

Dustin clicks his tongue at him. "Maybe I just need more practice," he suggests with a pout just as Mr. Clarke straightens up and starts his lecture on the exciting world of photosynthesis.

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"Yeah, uh, I was thinking... two weeks?"

"Um, yes, I understand but— you know, I have to pay Jeffrey for covering," Donald replies, and his jaw tightens, and Joyce can almost hear him thinking You've worked here long enough, Joyce. You know very well I can't afford to pay both of you at the same time.

It is that, more than anything, that strengthens her resolve. She plucks up her courage and goes for it. "Donald. I've been here... ten years, right? Have I ever called in sick or missed a shift once? I've worked, uh, Christmas Eve and Thanksgiving."

Damn it, Joyce, is what she sees when she looks into his eyes, and she knows she's breaking him, so she doubles down. "I don't know where my boy is. He's gone. I don't know if I'm gonna ever see him again, if he's hurt... I, uh, I need this phone, and two weeks' advance."

Great. How do you say no to that? She could ask me for anything and I'd have to say yes. Donald nods and moves to open the register. Joyce bounces a little on the balls of her feet, looks down at the money in his hands, and decides one more little request won't hurt. "And a pack of Camels."

He stares at her for a moment, like saying Really? Eventually, Donald nods, and Joyce bends over backward thanking him for his help. She feels a little bit terrible for manipulating him like that, but only a little bit. She needs this. Smoking calms her down, and she's going to need a lot of calming down until Hopper finds her Will.

Plus, smoking helps her focus a little bit less on what other people might be thinking— and she can't afford that right now. Not when her son is in danger.

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When Lonnie suddenly appears and pins Jonathan to the wall, he's caught off guard for a second, before he feels himself tremble with anger. "Get off!" he growls before pushing Lonnie away from him so hard that he slams against the opposite wall with a loud thud.

"Shit, that hurt!" Lonnie exclaims, just as Cynthia yells out his name, sounding scared. She comes up to her boyfriend and starts fussing over him, checking him all over for injuries, but Lonnie just points to the back of his head and asks, "Am I bleeding?"

When the answer is negative, he shakes his head and turns to Jonathan, who's still where he was standing before, watching him warily. "Damn, you've gotten stronger," Lonnie says, almost— almost— sounding like he's proud.

"Will someone please explain what the hell is going on?" Cynthia screeches, looking between the two of them like they're some sideshow spectacle.

"Jonathan, Cynthia," Lonnie signals to his girlfriend, then the opposite way. "Cynthia, this is Jonathan. My oldest." He pauses for a moment and looks him up and down. "Come here," he then says, moving forward to pull his son in for a hug.

This time Jonathan sees it coming, and pushes him away by shoving his shoulder. "Get off me, man," he repeats just as Lonnie lifts a hand to rub at his arm, like Jonathan's shove hurt him bad.

"Damn," he says, hissing in pain as he touches the joint. "You liftin' weights or something?" he asks, but Jonathan isn't in the mood to give him the time of day. All he needs is to find Will, so he ignores Lonnie's theatrics and turns on his heels to walk into the nearest bedroom, hoping his little brother would be there.

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They're still staring slackjawed at Eleven, whose nose is bleeding— bleeding!— and oh, who also happens to have closed the door to Mike's room with her mind, when Mike's mom's voice startles them out of their shock. "Michael, you can't slam the door like that! You'll damage it." Then the doorknob shakes. "And why are you locked in? What are you doing in there?"

The four of them look at each other with eyes wide as plates as the doorknob shakes again. "Michael?"

"Um, I'm just— changing!" Mike blurts out an impromptu excuse, clearly the first thing that pops into his mind. "I spilled something on my shirt. I'll be right out!"

As soon as the words are out of his mouth, he turns to Eleven. "You have to go in the closet again," he declares in a whisper, and Dustin and Lucas have no idea when the first time was, but they're both just as urgently wishing for her to hide somewhere.

"Oh, well, give it to me, then," Mike's mom's voice comes in through the closed door again. "I've got a load ready to wash." The doorknob shakes yet again, and the three boys look at each other, panic spiking. "Michael?"

They turn to Eleven again, Mike's eyes pleading. "El, please."

"But..." the girl says, clearly reluctant, almost like she was about to protest, but then she doesn't say another word.

Mike seems to get what she's trying to say, though, because his tone softens immediately. "I know, I'm sorry. I won't close the door all the way, I promise. We'll leave it open just a sliver and I'll stand in front of it, but unless you want my mom to find you, you have to hide."

They're all pleading for her to go into the closet when they hear the lock on the door unlatch. They turn to look at it horrified just as the doorknob turns all the way and the door starts to open.

"Mom, stop!"

All of a sudden, it's like every movement halts. The door is halfway open, and Mike's mom is half past the doorframe, but it's like she's frozen, mouth partway through forming a sound, eyes fixed right in front of her but looking like she wasn't really seeing anything. She isn't moving. She isn't even blinking. The air around them feels stale, still, like it does in the summer when the A/C is turned off.

Mike turns to his friends with a gobsmacked expression on his face, and they return it. They turn to El, wondering if she did this, but she shakes her head, just as surprised as all three of them are.

They're all silent for a moment before someone screams "Oh my God!" and then they're all cheering together, realizing that one of them (maybe Dustin because of the whole future prophecy thing, but even he's not sure) has achieved something mind-blowingly amazing.

"You have to hide," Mike is the first one to remember how they got to that point. He quickly ushers Eleven into the closet, leaving the door open just a sliver, like he had promised. He stands at an angle in front of the door, where he thinks his mother won't be able to see El, and tells Dustin, "Okay, unfreeze it." Because that's how it works in comics, right? Time can't just remain frozen forever.

Dustin tries clapping, clapping twice, jumping, flapping his arms, screaming "Go!" and even using Professor Xavier's signature hand gestures, but nothing works. Lucas even gives it a go, but it becomes clear quickly enough that he's not the one doing this either. It's not until Mike sighs and mutters "All right, that's enough," that the world starts moving forward again, and then his mother is on him and he doesn't even have a chance to react.

"Okay, hand the shirt over," she says, and Mike stands there stiffly for a minute, not entirely sure how to respond. His brain is still stuck on what happened just a moment ago, and he's only just realizing that he hadn't actually changed his shirt like he'd told her he had.

"Oh, uh," he stutters for a minute before getting his bearings again. "Yeah, uh, I thought I had spilled something on the back, but Lucas just let me know that I didn't," he finally says. He turns around slightly to show his mother that the back of his shirt was still pristine.

"All right," she retorts, though they aren't sure she 100% believes him as she's still giving him a suspicious look. But regardless, she seems to buy it well enough. "Don't slam the door," she warns, pointing a finger at him in that way moms often do. "And don't lock it." With that, she pulls out of the room.

As the door gently slides closed in her wake, Mike steps away quickly so that El can come out of the closet, and they stare at each other with wide eyes for half a minute, still in shock, before Lucas interrupts by jumping on Mike, pushing down on his shoulders. "You stopped time!"

Mike's mouth draws into a bright grin. "I stopped time!" he similarly exclaims and starts jumping just as exuberantly. He pulls El by the arm and she laughs, starting to jump with them and enjoying the moment just as much as the other two.

The only one left out is Dustin, who sits down on Mike's bed with a pout. "Man! I thought manipulating time was my thing!" he complains, watching the other three with as they jumped around the room and he didn't. "Son of a bitch," he mutters, but he's only partly disappointed— he's sad that he wasn't the one to do it, but at the same time that was still the coolest experience of his life...

It doesn't take long for him to join the others in their excitement.

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It's just Dustin's luck that when he finally manages to stop time on his own, none of his friends are around to see it— mainly because they're all frozen by his awesome time-manipulating powers.

It happens right after Mike's mom kind of invites them all to a school event for Will that he's pretty sure Nancy's making up anyway. Her mother clearly doesn't know that, though, so she seems pretty confused when they all refuse, and they're all scrambling to think of an excuse when suddenly El comes down the stairs and walks across the entrance of the dining room.

Lucas startles, Mike almost chokes on his milk, and Dustin almost jumps out of his seat when it looks for a second like Mike's mom is going to turn around and catch El in flagrante. But then, suddenly, everything goes still.

Really, "still" was an understatement. Droplets from Mike's spit-take are floating on air as if someone had taken a photo at the exact moment he coughed. Dustin marvels at it for a minute before he realizes he's literally the only person in the room who can still move. He doesn't know how he did it, but this time it is definitely his doing.

He quickly stands up and runs toward El; he doesn't know how this power works, so he doesn't know how much time he has, and he has to make sure she isn't seen. He quickly drags her toward the door to the basement— she is surprisingly light when frozen in time, something he will ponder about later— and hopes she will get the hint when time starts moving forward again.

He comes back to his seat and has a brief moment of panic when he can't remember what Mike had said earlier to restart the flow of time— what if he'd just hit on the magic words by accident and now Dustin couldn't get them right? Frustrated, he bangs twice on the table, and next thing he knows, everybody's heads, even Holly's, are snapping toward him in distress.

"Sorry," he says, giving them all a sheepish smile. "Spasm."

Later, when he and Lucas and Mike are down in the basement with Eleven, he tries to convince them of the incredible feat of superpowers they had just missed. "I'm telling you, I froze time! It really did happen!"

Lucas groans. "Stop. You're just jealous because Mike was able to do it and you weren't."

"I'm telling you, I just did it a few minutes ago!" Dustin insists, turning to Mike. "You saw El in the entrance to the dining room, right?" Mike assents. "And suddenly she was just gone, right?" Mike assents again. Dustin points at himself emphatically. "Exactly! That was it! That was me! I stopped time right at that moment, and then I moved her so that your mom wouldn't see her."

He turns to El, instead. "You were walking past the dining room entrance, weren't you?" She nods, eyes wide. "And then you were suddenly standing in front of the basement door, right?" She nods again. "And you don't know how you got there, right?" She shakes her head this time. Dustin turns to Lucas. "See? That's because she was frozen and I moved her!"

Lucas still doesn't seem convinced. "We don't know what her powers all are. Maybe she teleported herself or something without realizing it."

El shakes her head, and Dustin is glad for once to have the telekinetic girl on his side. He glares at Lucas. "Really? You'll let her have two different superpowers before you let me have even one?"

Lucas rolls his eyes. "I'm just saying, Mike already has a superpower. What are the odds of you having the exact same one?"

"Well, maybe he's copying my superpower!" Dustin retorts, sounding offended. "Have you ever thought about that possibility, huh, Lucas? After all, I was the one who traveled back from the future two nights ago, not Mike."

"It would've been weird for Mike to travel back in time to talk to himself," Lucas throws back with a vigorous shake of his head. "Maybe it would've caused a time paradox or something. We don't know what the rules are!"

"I'm pretty sure we can guess what the rules are—"

"Guys. Guys!" Mike finally interrupts, having had enough of their bickering for the moment. "It doesn't matter. If Dustin does have superpowers, he'll figure them out eventually. In the meantime what matters is that El wasn't found out, and we can go out to look for Will tomorrow after school. So make sure to pack anything you think we might need. We meet here in the morning."

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"Just— just give me a minute out here," Hopper asks, and watches distractedly as Sandra makes her way back inside, not really intending to follow anytime soon.

He knows very well he won't get any sleep that night; he can feel it in his bones. That's why, instead of heading back to bed, he makes his way to the bathroom, to splash some water on his face. If he's going to be up all night, he might as well try to remain as awake as possible so he could think of the next moves to make in the search. He needs his senses sharp.

Just as he's drying himself off and looking up at his obviously weathered face in the mirror, he notices something odd. There's a beer can by his left hand— that in itself isn't odd at all, as his trailer was often littered with trash he never bothered to clean out— but the beer can in question is half embedded into the surface of the sink in a way that... shouldn't have been possible.

He tugs at it experimentally, trying to figure out if the furniture had cracked or rotted, causing the can to simply fall through. No deal; it was shoved in tightly. He opens the cabinet under the sink and can see just a little bit of the bottom of the can peeking out through the thick wood. It was almost like someone had drilled a hole into his bathroom sink and shoved the can in tightly with a hammer— except that surely would've dented the can, and it did not seem damaged in any way.

And anyway, who would do that? Through his years as Chief of Police of a small town, Hopper had had to deal with his fair share of stupid pranks— kids these days needed to find better hobbies, dammit— but this seemed too small and too inconsequential to be the work of some cocky teenager trying to pull a fast one on an authority figure. And the last time he remembered seeing that beer can was when he took his pills two mornings ago...

Curious, he tries to take a look inside the can; maybe whoever had done this had left some kind of calling card or signature— or worse: dog shit, or something equally nasty. Thankfully, he can't smell anything like that, only the typical smell of beer, but he also can't see very well at this hour, so he doesn't know if there's anything inside the can.

Figuring he already has enough to deal with without getting dragged into some kid's stupid prank war, he takes a quick look around for anything else out of place, just to be thorough, but finds nothing, so he goes back to bed, where he proceeds to toss around and stare at the ceiling until the sun comes up.

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As Joyce stacked up packages of Christmas lights on the checkout counter, she could just feel Donald looking at her like he was thinking This is it. She's finally gone 'round the bend. She's not gonna ask for another advance on her salary, is she?

That's why, when she heard him start a sentence, she was ready with a glare and a straightforward response. "Just ring me up, Donald."

He must've read in her expression that she wasn't in the mood to argue, so he did exactly as told.

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It happens just after Troy trips Mike.

They spend the first half of their recess period looking for rocks for the Wrist Rocket (or, well, Mike and Lucas do— Dustin spends most of that time throwing rocks into the air and trying to freeze time before they hit the ground, but he's never able to do it), and just as Lucas starts teasing Mike about his (very obvious, in Dustin's opinion) growing crush on Eleven, Troy and James make their appearance.

Dustin stands up just as they start taunting them about Will, saying he's probably dead and they'll never find him, and Mike encourages them to ignore the two bullies, but just as he tries to walk past them, Troy sticks his foot out and trips him, causing him to fall.

Lucas and Dustin are too far behind to catch him and prevent him from knocking his chin against a large rock on the ground with a pained bellow, but Dustin doesn't even get a chance to move before everything starts happening backward, the world around him suddenly looking like a VCR tape being rewound.

"...he was probably killed by some other queer," Troy is saying. Again. Just like he had a minute ago. Or had he?

Mike groans just as Dustin realizes what's happening, what he just did. "Come on. Just ignore them," he says, and as he starts taking a step forward, Dustin grabs him by the arm and yanks him about a foot to the side. "What are you doing?" he hisses, seeming annoyed that Dustin had interrupted his dramatic walkout.

"Just watch where you're going," Dustin retorts, satisfied now that he'd moved his friend out of the path he had previously been about to take.

"Yeah, watch where you're going, Frogface," Troy sneers, and trips him again, only this time Mike falls right against soft grass rather than smacking his chin against the rock. He gets grass stains on his jacket and mud tracks on his jeans, but there's no blood anywhere, and Dustin mentally pats himself on the back for a job well done, even if he hadn't exactly meant to do it in the first place.

These time-manipulation powers could come in handy.

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.

.

"Joyce, I want you to know something," Karen starts. "If you need anything— anything at all— Ted and I are here for you."

And Joyce knows she means it. Karen can be a little clueless sometimes, too caught up in her pristine suburban mom life to understand certain things, but Joyce could tell very clearly that when she tells her this, she is sincere. And Joyce appreciates that, whether she could really be of any help or not.

So she thanks her and tries to make small talk about Mike and tries to accept her casserole with as much gratefulness as she can muster under the circumstances. She tries to share her feelings in a somewhat superficial matter— she couldn't exactly tell Karen about how she was trying to communicate with Will, nor about the... other stuff... that was suddenly going on in her life— but when Holly goes off exploring in Will's room of all places, that's when Joyce's patience hits the limit.

Then she sees the terrified expression on the girl's face and realizes there is more to this than just a little child's curiosity run amok. "Wait, did you see something?" Holly nods, taking her hand up to her mouth as if she were about to suck her thumb. "What did what did you see? Tell me," Joyce insists. "What did you see?"

Monster, the girl is thinking, but cannot verbalize. Scary monster. Wanna go home!

Internally, Joyce both cheers and despairs. She feels vindicated because she's not going crazy, she's not seeing things— something really did come out of Will's bedroom wall. She despairs because there's a monster hunting for her son and the only person who will ever believe her is a three-year-old girl. How do you fight something like that on your own, when you don't even understand it yourself?

"What— Joyce. Joyce!" Karen tries to interject, surely to ask why she was suddenly screaming in her daughter's face, but Joyce can't deal with her anymore after the knowledge she just gained. What she needs is to get them both out of there right away.

"Listen, Karen, thank you for the casserole, but I need you to leave," she declares. "Okay?" She pushes them toward the exit, only feeling a teeny bit guilty. After all, Holly has just confirmed that her house is dangerous. If she has to be rude to ensure their safety, that's what she will do.

When they finally leave, Joyce makes a beeline for her pack of Camels. She really could use a cigarette just about then.

.

.

.

"Why are you dirty?"

"What? Oh, that. Uh, I just fell at recess."

Dustin rolls his eyes at Mike's poor attempt to not seem like a complete loser in front of his crush. Mike and Eleven are walking a few feet ahead of him and Lucas, and it's not like he's trying to eavesdrop or anything; it's just that Eleven is a much more receptive audience for Mike than Lucas is for him. "I'm telling you, I'm almost 100% sure that I'm the one with the time-manipulation powers and Mike is somehow copying them."

As expected, Lucas rolls his eyes. "Where's your proof?"

"Uh, have you seen Mike freeze time when I'm not around?" Dustin counters, his eyebrows lifting under his fringe as if to emphasize his pointing out an obvious fact.

"No, but I haven't seen you do it when he's not around, either," Lucas retorts with a shake of his head. Dustin has to admit he has a point, but that's not his fault either; it's the nature of the powers that the people who are frozen in time can't see what the person freezing time is doing.

If only he could find a way to leave his friends unaffected while freezing everything around them, like Mike did that first time... Maybe it was the sense of impending danger that did it; that was the only explanation he could think of. Whatever the reason is, it merits more experimentation.

In the meantime, there's not much he can do about his friends' skepticism. "Whatever. I rewound time earlier today. I saved Mike from splitting his chin open against a rock! I'm a freaking hero!" He shakes his head. "Why can't you just believe me? Why do you have to be such a jerk?"

Lucas glares at him. "Oh, so I should believe you like the time you said there was a monster in your closet and it turned out to be your own cat?"

"I was nine and I had just seen Alien!" Dustin throws back, feeling the need to remind his friend that they had all been scaredy cats back then. "Besides, now we know that monsters actually exist, so you can't use that one against me anymore."

"We don't know that monsters exist," Lucas points out. "We're just taking the weirdo's word for it because Mike's sweet on her. For all we know, she's just making it up, like with the powers. Seriously, we're just wasting a bunch of time we should be using looking for Will."

Dustin stares at him with a befuddled expression. "You've seen her use her powers. She's not making up her powers! And neither am I, by the way." He sniffs, pretending to be offended. "You're just jealous."

Lucas scoffs. "Jealous of what? And I know her powers are real," he clarifies, probably only admitting it because he'd seen her use them with his own eyes. "What I'm saying is that we don't know what all powers she actually has. Maybe her freaky mind powers are causing your freaky time powers. Have you ever thought about that possibility, huh?"

"She said it wasn't her!" Dustin retorts, then looks away from Lucas to focus on the twosome walking in front of them. "Hey, Eleven? You're sure you're not the one doing the time-freezing, right?"

She and Mike are so busy making goo-goo eyes at each other that Dustin's sudden question startles her a little, so it takes her a moment to look at him over her shoulder and shake her head. "See?" Dustin says as he turns back to Lucas, who looks up in response, like he's praying to Heaven for patience. Dustin snickers. "You're just jealous we have powers and you don't."

"Yeah. Sure. That's it." Lucas lets out a huff and pulls his bike closer, starting to walk faster as if to catch up with Mike. When he makes it to his other friend's side, however, all he says is "Let me know if we have to turn somewhere," before walking past him as well. Dustin shakes his head. Let him walk alone for a while if he wants to; he'll get over it soon enough.

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.

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"God. I-I need you to believe me. Please," Joyce begs. "Please."

Hopper's mind remains frustratingly blank.

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.

.

His mother sends him up to his room to sleep the tears off, but despite the natural exhaustion that came from crying so much, Mike can't stay asleep for long. Mainly because he's so angry about everything that happened, but also because whenever he does manage to nod off, he dreams about Eleven— the dreams he's been having for a few days now, where she has long blond hair and is wearing a pink dress— and that only makes him angrier.

So he goes down to the basement hoping to find something that will get his mind off of it. He knows Eleven is down there— he saw through his bedroom window earlier when Dustin dropped her off— but he is determined to ignore her presence as best as he can. It's not hard since she barely even speaks.

He's browsing through some of Will's old drawings of their D&D characters using their powers when the idea comes to him: why can't he use his superpower to make this better? They'd been too late to save Will, but who's to say that was the end of it?

According to Dustin, he'd managed to rewind time earlier at recess. Surely that meant Mike could go back to a point before he believed El's lies, or before he decided to help her. Clearly that had been a mistake. Or he could even go back to the night Will went missing, and make sure he got home alright.

Save the lost child, save the world, right? There's no need to save Will if he never disappears.

He puts Will's drawings to the side and closes his eyes, trying to focus hard like Dustin said he should. When he opens his eyes again, he's still in his basement, El tinkering with his Supercomm over in her blanket fort. He holds back a frustrated huff.

So he tries again. And again. And again. After seven or eight failed attempts he's borderline fuming, and wondering if he's doing something wrong. Maybe the powers only activate in moments when there's some kind of imminent trouble, like Dustin had suggested. Maybe you need to be really, really desperate for them to work. For a moment Mike is almost willing to go upstairs and tell his mother that he's hiding a girl in the basement to see if his mom's anger would do the trick, but immediately he pulls back, knowing that he would be in deep shit if his genius idea fails.

Maybe he just isn't focusing enough. It's too easy to get distracted by the staticky sounds coming from the walkie-talkie in Eleven's hands.

Angry all over again, he turns to look at her directly for the first time since he'd come down to the basement. "Can you please stop that?" he asks, a demand in tone if not in wording. She doesn't answer, concentrating on the Supercomm as she is. It only annoys him more. "Are you deaf?"

As upset and impotent as he feels, he just unloads on her, telling her he should never have thought she was the lost child they had to save, how he'd been wrong about her from the beginning and how much her lies had hurt him. She doesn't say anything, only looks up at him with pain-filled eyes which he tries to not pay attention to.

But then Will's voice comes through the walkie, and it's like someone managed to reset time without even trying: in the blink of an eye, he's once again absolutely certain that whatever is going on, whoever the "lost child" is, Eleven is going to play a huge part in solving the puzzle.

As he looks from the Supercomm, now in his hands, to Eleven, who's giving him a weak smile punctuated by the blood flowing from her nose, he immediately feels terrible. How could he have ever thought that maybe it was better not to help her? Even if she wasn't the lost child in question, she was in trouble herself, and everybody deserved help. It wasn't her fault that Will just happened to disappear on the same day she wound up lost in the forest, right?

Thinking back on everything that happened, details started to stand out to him, such as Eleven knowing where Will lived without ever having been there. He and the boys had been tired and cranky, and hadn't stopped to think that there was no way she could've known where Will lived before throwing her help back in her face. How could he have been such a big jerk? He should've known she wouldn't lead them on a wild goose chase. Why would she do that? She's trying to help them, even though she doesn't have to. She doesn't even know Will, but she wants to save him just as much as any of them did. He knows she does.

"I'm sorry," he blurts out, feeling his cheeks heat up as she looks up at him with those big brown eyes of hers. "I shouldn't have said all those things I said before. We are friends. I shouldn't have jumped to conclusions. I should've let you explain, and I didn't. That was wrong."

He purses his lips for a moment before looking down at his hands. "You're not a liar. You're... you're important to m— to us. Can you... can you forgive me?" He looks up at her with a bit of a wince, bracing himself for a rebuke, but she's smiling again, a little bit more energetic this time, and when their eyes meet, she nods.

Mike's heart starts beating a mile a minute, almost defying space-time itself, and he decides right then and there that being able to make El smile was a bigger rush than any superpower he could ever have.

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.

.

"Okay, let me get this straight. Will, that's not his body, because he's in the lights, right? And there's a monster in the wall? Do you even hear yourself?"

"I know it sounds crazy," Joyce retorts straight away. "I sound crazy! You think I don't know that? It is crazy!"

Joyce knows, she knows that Jonathan has a point— if this had been anyone else, she would've marched them straight to Pennhurst. He thinks she's having a breakdown, that Will's supposed death has destroyed her sanity, and to be honest, maybe it has. Maybe she is going insane, but if she is, she's going down fighting.

"But I heard him, Jonathan," she pleads. "He talked to me! Will is— is calling to me! I don't know why I'm the only one who can hear him, I can't explain it. But he's out there, and he's alone, and he's scared, and I-I don't care if anyone believes me! I am not gonna stop looking for him until I find him and bring him home," she declares, incensed. "I am going to bring him home!"

She spins around on her heel, ignoring Jonathan's bellows from behind her. She knows she's hurting him, but Will's wellbeing is her priority at the moment. She doesn't know why she's been given this ability; she couldn't even pinpoint when it had started, but that meant she can't know when it will fade. And if this weird mind-reading power is the only thing still connecting her to her son, she can't afford to let it go to waste.

Whether Jonathan finds it in him to support her or not, she's going to follow that link back to Will, whatever it takes.

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.

.

When Eleven comes out of Nancy's room all dressed up, Mike's breath catches in his throat for several reasons.

First, because she looks so pretty. Not that she doesn't always look pretty, he would begrudgingly admit to himself later on while remembering how she giggled when he showed her his dad's La-Z-Boy or how she smiled at him when she found Will with the Supercomm. It wasn't like the wig and the dress turned her into a different person or anything, but there's something about the way she carries herself now, a kind of brightness coming from inside her that hadn't quite been there before, and he finds himself drawn to it like a moth to a flame. Everybody can tell that's what he's thinking, too, mainly because he blurts it out like a wastoid.

(He can hear Dustin snickering behind him, and knows he's never going to live this down, even after his lame attempt to "fix" it.)

When she moves to look at herself in the mirror, Mike takes a moment to ponder the second reason why he was so stupefied when she walked out: She looks exactly like she did in his dreams.

When he told Dustin and Lucas to go down to the basement and browse through his mother's Goodwill boxes for something for El to wear, he didn't even remember they had any of that stuff down there; he thought they'd gotten rid of Nancy's old Halloween wigs ages ago, and he can't even remember her ever owning that dress. But here El stands, looking like she stepped out of his reveries, and he has no idea what it means.

Has he been dreaming about the future? He already thought something weird was going on when they found Eleven in the forest and he realized he had dreamed about her, but he has seen the exact moment she walked out the door in his dreams, down to the smallest detail of the way she looks. That can't be a coincidence. Does it have something to do with the time-manipulation powers? But he hasn't been able to freeze or rewind time since that one and only time, so how is it possible that he's flashing forward in time in his dreams?

And he's also reminded of Will's drawing that Mike saw the night he disappeared. Eleven looked completely different in the drawing, but Mike is certain that it's her. Is that also something that's going to happen eventually? Can Will draw the future? And does that mean Eleven will stay around for a while longer?

Looking at her as she looks at herself in the mirror, he really hopes she does.

"We really have to go now," he says as she stands there almost subconsciously touching the ends of her blond wig. "Are you ready?" he asks her softly.

She stares into the mirror for a heartbeat longer, almost sighing at her reflection, before turning to him with a brilliant smile. "Yes," she says, and Mike feels his heart going pitter-patter as the four of them walk down the stairs and out the door.

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.

.

Hopper bends down to grab the man's keycard, but as he straightens up to open the door, he doesn't see the statie's hand and accidentally trips over it. He lifts up his hands to support himself against the wall but never quite finds it, so he barely manages to keep himself upright, bending his knees to keep himself from falling face down on the floor.

Thankfully no one's around to see his stumble... mainly because he's not even out in the hallway anymore.

As he looks around the freezer room he wonders how the hell he got in there, because the door is still locked and the keycard remains in his hand, unused. But lo and behold he's on the opposite side of the wall he'd been in just a second ago, almost like... almost like he had gone through the wall.

But that's ridiculous, right? He must've opened the door with the keycard and just blanked out somehow. Damn. That's what he gets for mixing pills and alcohol.

He has no time to wonder what the hell is going on with his mind. He needs to do what he came here to do, and he needs to do it quick. So he drops the damn keycard and turns to pull out the drawer containing Will's body, hoping against hope that there was something there, and he wasn't just going insane.

Later, when he makes his way to the lab, he brings his boltcutter with him to cut a hole in the fencing. When he's standing right beside it, though, he remembers the weirdness at the morgue, and a thought occurs to him. He touches his hand against the chain-link fence and pushes.

And his hand goes right through.

He stares, dumbfounded, at the pieces of metal wire sticking out of his wrist, or technically speaking, at his wrist sticking into the metal wire. It should feel weird, but it doesn't— it doesn't feel like anything, really; it's like he's pushing his hand through air— and he can't stop looking between the fence and the unused boltcutter in his other hand.

But Jim Hopper is nothing if not a pragmatist, and he knows he cannot stand there gawking forever; sooner or later someone, a guard or similar, is going to come by and catch him trying to break in, and then he's really going to be in deep shit. Needless to say, the Chief of Police getting caught breaking and entering would not be an easy thing to explain away.

He quickly throws the boltcutter back in the trunk of the Blazer and, making sure there's no one around, approaches the fence again. Seems like he isn't going to need any tools to make his way in, after all.

The phasing thing comes in handy again when he has to make it in the front door; he has to wait until two lab workers make their way out so he's not spotted, and he's not fast enough to grab the door before it closes behind them, but he can walk right through the glass, so that's not an issue. Similarly when he's walking down the hallways of the place and people came along, he could jump straight into the wall right beside him and stay out of sight.

He doesn't know what he's looking for until he comes across a room with a small bed, a plush toy in the shape of a lion, and a little kid's drawing taped to the wall, showing two figures, one with two straight lines above its head ("LL"?) and the other labeled "Papa." That's when he decides Will has to be somewhere in this building, and he's going to find him if it takes him his last breath.

His first real obstacle is the door to the elevator, which seems to have keycard security. The door itself is not the issue— he can get past that in a second— but he doesn't even know if the elevator car is on the other side of the door at the moment, and even if it is, he's pretty sure he wouldn't be able to operate the thing without a keycard anyway.

He's just pondering what to do when he's approached from behind by the lab's head of Security and a guard, both of them brandishing guns at him. "Hands up. Hands up!" the head of Security demands, and Hopper complies, knowing he's serious. "Forgot all the cameras, bub?"

"Look, Dr. Brenner asked for me specifically," Hopper tries to play it off like he's supposed to be there for some actual reason. "Okay? How else do you think I got in here?" he asks with a scoff, praying they'll take the bluff.

He must be a better actor than he thinks because the man cocks his head to the side as if unsure. "What's your name again?" Hopper tells him his name (and title!) and the man narrows his eyes at him. "If you move one finger, I'll shoot you."

"You can try," Hopper mutters under his breath but otherwise remains with his hands raised as the man pulls his walkie-talkie off his belt to transmit the facts of his presence to the higher-ups.

That's when Hopper sees his chance. He knocks out the head of security as he's speaking into his walkie, and turns around just in time to catch the other security guard aiming his gun and pulling the trigger. The bullet flies right through his gut— and by through he means through, not a sign of damage to his body, not even a tiny twinge of pain— to embed itself on the wall behind him with a blunt sound.

The security guard is so baffled by what just happened that he makes it entirely too easy for Hopper to punch him in the face, proceeding to take a gun and the keycard he needed from the slumped down figures and making his way to the elevator just in time for a slew of more security guards not to catch him.

What he finds downstairs almost makes him wish he hadn't decided to come down at all.

He's standing there partly because he doesn't even understand what he's seeing— whatever it is, it looks gross and like it came out of a science fiction movie, and Hopper hasn't seen very many of those— when he hears something behind him. He turns around quickly to see a figure making its way just out of his field of vision and he can't pinpoint what it is, but he's suddenly thinking back to Joyce's descriptions of a humanoid creature without a face.

He looks to the opposite side, hoping to catch whatever it was in his gaze, when he's confronted by a person wearing a white hazmat suit. Whoever it is tries to grab at him, and he quickly steps back through the person's arms, once again using the bewildered reaction to punch them out. But he realizes only too late that there's another hazmat-wearing guy behind him, and isn't fast enough to phase when he finds a syringe embedded in his neck.

The man's mask is the last thing he sees before he falls to the ground and everything goes dark.

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Notes: Eh. I just wanted them to have superpowers. ¯\_(·v·)_/¯

Sorry I was AWOL for so long; I've been writing pretty consistently, but as you might imagine, in order to write this I needed to rewatch the entire first season again one episode at a time, and between the World Cup and real life, that actually took me longer than you might think. But now I've only got to finish the bits from the last episode of season 1, though, so hopefully I'll have part 2 ready sometime next week before I go on holiday. Keep your fingers crossed!

In case you can't tell, this story is pretty directly inspired by the 2006 NBC TV show Heroes (or, well, at least the first season, since that's when that show peaked, lol). Most of the powers here are written to correspond to those of Heroes' main characters, so that's kinda fun to think about. Be sure to comment with any speculation you come up with about any unexplained powers/weirdness presented here! I'm curious to see if anyone's starting to put two and two together when it comes to certain details. FYI, I try to post snippets of this fic as I write on my Tumblr on Fridays, so if you'd like to read some of what's coming up in the future (and/or just want to make sure I'm not dead), be sure to check there.