characters: Eleven and You (ota)
location: Miner's Castle #2, Edge of Forest, Bonfire
date/time: January 4
content: Eleven is struggling to cope with her power loss, until she stops coping altogether
warnings: panic attack, volatile emotions of a teenager who was taught only bad coping mechanisms, blood, references to past trauma/abuse
➣ Closed to Cast Mates
Two hands that are white, can't put up the fight
Bereft of all strength and the flames in her eyes[ Not so long ago, Eleven made strange, seemingly disconnected requests, and has been a rare sight around Beacon outside of her Santa's Secret Game mission. Those requests were walkie talkies from Rastus, and help in building a blanket fort that's been occupying her corner of her shared room with Nancy ever since.
It's in there that she sits now, cross legged, and to Nancy especially it would paint a familiar picture of Mike Wheeler. Eleven takes a breath. She has better ways to try and reach out, across vast distances, across dimensions, but those have been taken from her.
( She remembers falling and falling and falling into an endless void, near consumed, head bursting and a sense of amusement, a morself to be played with. )
So she has this. A walkie talkie set to the frequency her and Mike used.
Others understand but they don't know, not like Mike does, or even Dustin or Luke. Nancy and Steve know, but they don't know the way the boys do from that brief period of their young lives, when lives collided like a slow, beautiful catastrophe.
Eleven talks to him, when she thinks herself alone. Most often in the blanket fort. but sometimes she finds a quiet spot around Beacon. It helps. It's just pretend, and she knows that. But it helps. She listens to the crackle of static for a moment. ]Mike. It's day Nine...ty-six. Ninety-six.
[ Her voice catches. ] I played the... Santa Game. It didn't.. help. Nothing helps...
➣ Open
The infant, the damage, the plunder, the pillage
Her ruins of smoke, this river can't choke[ Eleven has set up near the edge of the forest for the day, and she spends a good long time there. She's dizzy, she's light headed, and yet the malnourished space of her mind remains empty, and nothing moves. Nothing happens, nothing ever happens.
Just recharging batteries. Just... just recharging.
She doesn't have much to practice with. On a log sits the christmas ornament, some sticks and rocks, her lantern. She takes a slow deep breath. She's... been at this for a while. Even in the chill of the air, her face is red with effort.
Eleven stands there, still, one hand outstretched with her palm facing outwards towards the objects on the log. She thinks of crushing soda cans, she thinks of liquifying brains, she thinks of flipping cars and pushing trains and rending flesh asunder, she thinks of big things and little things, and she focuses, she focuses so hard, body shaking with the effort to channel what little energy it has. And it refuses, just stubbornly refuses to be more than the body of a normal 14 year old girl, helpless and hapless and utterly, infuriatingly powerless.
When something snaps, it's not the empty space where power should sit, easily tapped into. It's herself, her progress and her being. It's dark and it's cold and she's trapped, and no words conquered and friends met will ever change the fact that she's right back where she started, trapped in the dark, and before long she's breathing hard, near hyperventilation, bile sitting at the back of her throat. The edge of the forest might well be a wall closing in on her, and the light of her lantern seems to wobble away from her, and she thinks, for a dizzying moment, that she pushed it instead of pulling... only to realize it's not moving, it's her mind spinning out of control in the dark, and she yells 'I hate you' at the forest, picks twigs and pebbles and clumps of earth up and hurls them, weakly and impotently at the looming wall of trees until she's red in the face and out of breath, and unsteady on her feet.
It's not enough. It's never enough, and nothing helps, and it's dark, it's always so dark, and her powers are gone, and so is she. Trapped like this, she might as well be 011 and not Jane Hopper, not El.
She grabs the things on the log eventually, and she stalks towards Beacon, towards the treacherous lie of the fire, promising comfort like Papa, and like Papa, it never comes, not really, not truly, not ever, not for her. Nothing good happens, things just get worse and hurt worse. She's close enough to be in the light by the time she trips, unsteady on her feet, and the christmas ornament the Baubledook left her with drops. Eleven sucks a painful breath in between clenched teeth.
It doesn't break, and she just stands there for a moment, hand outstretched, but it doesn't return to her. It doesn't break, it doesn't move, it doesn't change, nothing is going to change here, and she snarls, she bends down and picks the ornament up, and with a loud scream of anger and frustration and pain and contempt she smashes it down, breaks the pretty bauble into shards, and bends down without thinking, grabs with her bare hands and doesn't mind that she cuts herself, just hurls the shards into the fire with an angry yell. Next is a random, hapless twig, and she revels in it, in the pain and the sting and what little acts of destruction she can still inflict in this state. The spirits are burning things in the bonfire, and she wants to burn all of Beacon in it, and have it burn out that dark patch in her heart that try as she might she can never, ever scrub clean.
And she reaches for it, yanks the lantern off the clip on her belt - a gift, something nice, and she feels worse because it's not helping; nothing is, and she's halfway through a throw when she thinks better of it. Let's the lantern drop - short distance, it lands heavy but with no more damage than a dent, but Eleven pulls her hair, kicks a bench and whirls, intending to stalk into the darkness without the lie of the lantern, and collides with a body, and she doesn't hold her furious temper back, just immediately yells:]Go AWAY.
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