Chapter Text
When they asked her, it wasn’t cynical.
El thought it was, because her brain couldn’t even register, just considering who it came from. Not anyone in her circle.
Naturally, she again thought this was a carefully curated government set-up, since that one out-of-the-hat question sounded like they were asking if the sky was blue. Before, a lot of people had come in and out of the room, but all the questions stayed the same. All except for that one specifically. And it came from a doctor, of all people. An older man with a lanyard that clipped in the back and the words BEHAVIORAL SPECIALIST typewritten in bold red.
The alarms in her head were screaming louder than the buzzing ever could. She knew why. In the midst of all this authority and badges instead of names, a doctor was asking her this question. Like it was casual or something. He repeated himself a lot. She knew if he was asking if she was delusional in a way that didn’t scream “delusion”, so whatever this may be, perhaps it was less criminal than they thought.
No, she didn’t believe she had special powers. She knew she did. There was a difference. But should she admit that, she’d be opening Pandora’s Box (if she hadn’t done that already). El did what she managed to do in therapy. Twisted the yeses into no’s or vice versa, and bended the truth without completely lying. That had always come naturally for survival tactics.
“No,” she said, looking him directly in the eye.
She had been questioned by twelve different people in eight hours. The clock on the wall was her only proof of time, which, if correct, Hawkins High had been released over an hour ago. Which meant, for nearly eight hours, no one had cared about the questions she had been asking them, only the ones they were asking her. The politeness was infuriating because there was always some nice way to say bad things. They went with “We will notify your stepmother.”
She’d asked about Hopper, then Mike, then Max. They’d only replied about Joyce. In fact, all the answers she received since getting here were the same kind someone would get from a goddamn Magic 8 Ball. That, with the sheer frustration, exhaustion, and stress swirling around the buzzing in El’s brain, made for one hell of a storm.
And they expected her to be able to explain to them an entire history she had been trying to uncover all on her own, and for what? Because her notebook scared them? It was never supposed to be pretty. That’s exactly why it was a secret, and why her own psychologist had never seen it either. And because of that, the police officers kept saying she wasn’t under arrest, but this would be easier for her if she talked. What would be easier? The detectives kept saying they were just following protocol, but were threatening warrants to search her house (though El was sure it was not just a threat). Anyone who even appeared to be medical claimed that they weren’t here to judge her but rather understand “what she was going through” — though the moment they stepped outside the small room, she heard them throw out possibly psychotic depression or early-onset schizophrenia like bingo numbers.
She tried. Told them, point blank, “I’m not crazy,” when they came returned. One lady smiled as wide as the yellow happy face stickers on her badge and nodded very slowly, but the indicator was that she didn’t exactly agree nor disagree. No one did.
The last person who talked to El that night was a detective: Lydia Lynn. This was supposed to be the person, El overheard them a cop talking about outside with a more annoyed tone of voice, that was “supposed to go easy on her because she’s retared or something like that.”
Sure.
Lydia Lynn treated things like a crime show.
She asked El a lot of questions about the notebook, showed her the photocopied “evidence” that she had supposedly written, then had supposedly denied — all thirty-some pieces of Exhibit A alone. This lady gave El the impression that seemed to say that I have you figured out from the moment she stepped in the room, but not in a way that was beneficial. It couldn’t be very beneficial if she brought a tape recorder and started with this: “I’m sorry that today hasn’t been a very good day for you, Jane. I’m sure you can understand the mutual feeling.”
Within minutes, El figured out that the introduction was Lydia being nice. One little “I don’t know” and she was on her bad side for the rest of the not-interrogation, the same not-interrogation that made her say her name and date of birth on record.
Detective Lynn had cut to the chase, like this was the kind of case she’d been waiting for all her life. She dropped the words like a bomb from the sky, in the most hardass attitude possible. No pretense. No time to think.
“Jane, why are you planning a massacre?”
For a split second, El froze. She actually froze, everything in her going cold like she’d been electrocuted. The color in her face drained. The buzzing even stopped for a fleeting moment. But the word rattled in her head like empty space — massacre.
Then, it triggered something. A thought. Blood. And when that static came back, it came back louder. Her heart, which had slowed from shock, leapt like running. White walls everywhere, covered in blood, the walls were supposed to be tiled and white, but instead, they were stained and red. She thought of bodies. Disfigured and purpled limbs. Tattoos. Dead. They all flashed through her head.
Apparently, that was where she made her first error
“Jane.”
And then, she snapped back.
“You’re planning to hurt people,” Detective Lynn accused again, looking directly at El. Not the tape recorder. Not the papers. El.
“No, I’m not,” her words flew out fast. That’s what this was about? “I’m not planning to hurt anyone.”
And that still wasn’t a lie. Let them try to read between the lines. And stop her. El had never told a single soul. They didn’t know.
“It’s…not a massacre,” El finally mumbled, fidgeting with her jacket sleeve, letting the threads unravel under her fingers. “Not that.”
“Not that?” Detective Lynn asked, the incredulity hanging in her words. “What does “not that” mean?”
El opened her mouth, then stopped. She was forgetting what she wanted to say. Her brain felt foggy again. Every word she grasped slipped through her mind like a cloud. “I don’t want to hurt anyone anymore.”
And did that…condemn her? She still was not lying. Anyone didn’t mean herself. The truth really was that El didn’t want to hurt anyone anymore. She couldn’t undo what had already been done. But anymore was still her truth. That was something she couldn’t be punished for. Just because she had lost control once didn’t mean she would again.
Did it?
“What do you mean you don’t want to hurt anyone anymore?” Detective Lynn kept going. “Is that something else we need to know? Is someone making you do something against your will?”
“Not really.” Again, not anymore. Not anymore, Lydia.
Her eye narrowed. “So you did this out of your own accord?”
El’s voice dropped again. She wished it could just turn defiant, like her emotions could take control in the same way it did to her powers. Sometimes, when she spoke, her voice went on the autopilot her head never authorized. It sounded like someone who was scared. “I don’t know.”
“Great,” Detective Lynn muttered, though obviously, it was not “great”. She pulled out more of the copies, and then one of El’s class assignments from English. “Look here, Jane. I know this is your handwriting. You admitted this notebook belongs to you. You told Sheriff Lee that you didn’t remember writing it in at all, but now you’re admitting that there was some level of premeditation involved. Is that all this was? Spitballing and then you backed out?”
“I guess.”
“There’s no guessing here, Jane. It’s either a yes or a no answer.”
El inhaled, both sharply and sickly. “I always back out. But it’s not to hurt other people. Not like you think.” God. She was trying. Didn’t that count for something?
Detective Lynn actually scoffed at that, shuffling through the papers like she had the discovery of the year. She handed it over. “Funny you should mention that, because this page says otherwise.”
That one, El did remember. Ironically, because she could see the spots in the copies where she had been crying, something had equally provoked her to do it and stop an hour later. It was a list. The top was titled “Would I hurt them?” and had ten names underneath with checkboxes next to them. If Detective Lynn, or Sheriff Lee, or anyone with a title and an L name had looked any further than an assumption, perhaps then they would see who these names actually belonged to. It was her family. Her friends. Her mother. Ten names and ten checks.
Was that supposed to look fucking bad? They didn’t know anything, and that was the whole point. Who said anything about anyone seeing it? Somehow that equated massacre.
El swallowed. “There’s nothing wrong with this.”
“You don’t see a problem with a checklist saying, “Would I hurt them with checkboxes?” she asked.
El shook her head. “No. Because these,” she pointed to the three names encasing Will, Jonathan, and Max. “Are my siblings. These are my parents. These are my friends.”
“So what you’re saying is that you want to hurt your family and friends? Jane-,”
“No!” she nearly yelled because that was the furthest thing from the truth, at least in the way Detective Lynn thought.
“Okay, then, let’s reroute,” Detective Lynn said, sliding three more papers across the table. “Because you seem to have a lot of lists in this notebook of yours. A “liability” list. Two separate lists with completely different names. We did a little cross-matching, Jane. A lot of these names match the names of the kids you go to school with. Wanna explain that?”
She almost said no again, if the question genuinely counted as one. No, she didn’t want to explain anything anymore. They weren’t going to understand either way, and the legal bindings El was surrounded with, figuratively and literally? Hell no.
And then she actually did say it. “No.”
For one precious second, Detective Lydia Lynn looked genuinely taken aback. El’s slight anger seemed unexpected to her, maybe, but that pressure had been building like a volcano for a while. El was tired of explaining stuff. “You want to know what’s worse than a checklist of names, Jane?” She slid the photo across the table. “Finding guns that don’t belong to you. Plural.”
It was turned just enough for her to see the yellow evidence tags, the barrel, the grip, the towel beneath it. She didn’t recognize the angle, but she recognized the closet because it was her closet. Detective Lynn watched her eyes carefully, like she was waiting for the exact moment the panic set in. “Funny thing about warrants,” she added, almost conversational. “They tend to uncover the things people forget to mention.”
El’s mouth closed, slowly, like a bear trap she was trying not to set off. So they did search her house. Okay, yes, they were her parents’ guns. Yes, they were in her closet. No, she wasn’t going to explain why they were there or what she was planning to use them for. But it couldn’t have been as bad as whatever they thought was happening.
“Jane, I’m going to break this down for you, nice and simple, okay? The things you’ve written down in this notebook are going into our police records as evidence. And without any sort of explanation, things might start to look really bad for you if our officers find something they aren’t going to like at your residence. If you start to reason with me on why I am finding such disturbing content in your notebook or guns in your closet, I might start to understand what’s actually going on here. But if you don’t, I have no choice but to believe that you pose a serious threat to school safety.”
A threat to school safety?
Wasn’t that a loaded statement? No good-cop, bad-cop; it was all Detective Lynn and her stupid tape recorder, holding El’s stupid notebook like the keys to heaven. If she was already screwed over, there was no point in trying. She couldn’t confess to anything, and she wasn’t about to make things worse by admitting either of the things that terrified her the most. Nothing was planned, though.
Detective Lynn had been correct about one thing — it was spitballing.
This shit lasted for hours. Hours of her asking El questions she didn’t know the answers to until it was too late for her to backtrack, because Detective Lynn not only knew how to outmaneuver her, she knew how to make El say the wrong things.
“You’ve already admitted you wrote it. So are you saying you didn’t mean it?”
Catch-22. Yes said she lied when she wrote it. No said she meant it, which had a motive attached to it. And El had no idea until after Detective Lynn left, after the warrant had gone through, after she’d made one mistake too many, did she realize she’d been played. When she was exhausted, and her eyes were red, and she wanted to talk to Hopper, that was when another police officer grabbed her by the arm.
“Jane Hopper, you’re under arrest for intimidation.”
She didn’t try to fight back because she was still in this weird in-between of being frozen and being confused. When had she intimidated someone? When had she scared them? How did they get school threats from her notebook?
She’d confessed. She’d confessed and hadn’t even realized it. Somewhere down the line, she had said the wrong thing to a question, and it had to be that one, meaning El had basically handed it to them that she had meant “it”. Whatever the hell “it” meant. But never had she been planning to hurt other people. She meant something entirely different. They didn’t know that. And she couldn’t explain it. Not like this.
I don’t understand everything that happens in my brain. I don’t understand why I can’t remember. But I do know what I saw. And I think I might be a murderer. I see myself angry. And I see blood on the walls. But I can’t tell anyone that. Owens doesn’t know. No one else would understand. Please, don’t make me try to understand. It’s terrifying.
She’d thought she had control of the words. That was the trick. If she could just keep them in a straight line, if she could just nod and shake her head at the right intervals, the truth would stay hidden, the nightmare wouldn’t leak out of her mouth. But somewhere between “I don’t want to hurt anyone anymore” and “I guess,” she’d cracked open a door. One that led to hell, apparently.
“But I didn’t scare anyone-,” she tried to protest even as the cuffs clicked behind her. “Wait, I didn’t scare anyone.”
“You scared your school, that’s who you scared,” he said back, acting as if this were another casual arrest and not El’s life flashing before her eyes. “Everyone remembers what happened in ‘79, honey. Those poor children in San Diego. We aren’t doing that in Hawkins.”
‘79? What happened in ‘79?
Rights. She had rights about this, she knew. Hopper told her, Nancy told her, hell, Miami Vice told her. And the more she thought about it, they hadn’t even told her any rights. She would’ve mentioned this. Except she was too much in shock to even open her mouth, and the fact that she was being arrested hadn’t even hit her yet.
They took her to another room, smaller, darker, less like a place where they wanted to talk and more like a place they wanted to trap her. The cuffs clinked into a loop on the table, making her basically sit with her wrists attached to a bench, and using her powers seemed like a useless idea right now, even if they would save her.
They said she could make a phone call soon. That her parents would be here even later, but she can’t go home with them. El ended up sitting there for another hour. She didn’t know where Hopper was, or rather, why he wasn’t coming in. He didn’t only love his badge until it suited him, so then, where was he? Or Joyce, for that matter.
What was happening to her?
By the time Joyce reached her, she was nearly in tears. All the confusion combined with just general rage and anxiety was doing nothing to settle her brain, less the feelings of being as exposed as she felt. She let Joyce rush over and hug her, as if she had less than a choice, but the only thing she wanted to do was sob.
“I’m so sorry,” she tried to force out. “I didn’t mean for them to see it, I promise.”
“El-,”
The apologies kept flowing out faster than she remembered speaking. “I didn’t mean to scare anyone. I didn’t know what was gonna happen but I wasn’t trying to do that-,”
“Honey, I know that, but you need to tell me what is happening,” Joyce replied, holding El against her shoulder.
“I don’t know.” For the life of her, El didn’t understand why they couldn’t just accept that — she didn’t know — and take her word that she wasn’t trying to hurt anyone. The justice system was a lot harder than that. Why was she here in the first place? It was just her notebook. Personal, not a crime scene. “I promise.”
Joyce took her face in her hands, her tear-streaked face meeting the ones that were trying to stay calm. “El. I don’t believe that you were trying to hurt anyone. I know that, and I know you. But whatever this is, you need to tell me what’s going on so I can help you.”
“Okay.”
“Okay…is someone putting you up to this?” Joyce asked, carefully wiping El’s face with her sleeve. “Did someone make you write those things?”
El shook her head, watching Joyce’s expression tighten. “Are you sure?” she asked again. “Baby, if someone is making you write this-,”
“There isn’t,” El whispered. “There is no one.”
Maybe that would’ve been the explanation she wanted. Something easier to believe that her stepchild was being pitted up against something rather than force the mystery out of El that she couldn’t stand to admit. Then that would mean it was true.
She glanced out of the corner of her eye as Joyce looked down at the photocopies she had been handed before entering. “El…,”
“It’s not that bad,” she tried to say. “I wasn’t trying to scare anyone. The detective…she said I was planning a massacre, but that’s not true.”
That word again. It made those bloody images flash through her brain.
“Can you explain it to me, then?” Joyce asked, hand reaching El’s back. “Because that way I can help you.”
El considered this. Her voice was already caught in her throat, but those words in particular wouldn’t come out if she tried. “Where’s Hop?”
“He can’t come in,” Joyce admitted softly. “It’s something about-, I’m not sure, a Conflict of Interest?”
“But I didn’t do anything,” El insisted.
“Then tell me.”
“What?”
Joyce looked back at the papers. El could see everything organized, all the parts from her red notebook and whatever they found in her room. And yeah, maybe out of context, it looked bad. Not even maybe, she knew why they may have thought she was planning a massacre, but she wasn’t, and how was she supposed to vocalize that when the alternative is not just humiliating, it’s damning? “I wasn’t going to hurt anyone. That’s not what it was. It was just…thoughts.”
“Thoughts?”
“From before,” El muttered, looking down, tears hitting her clothes. The cuffs shifted uncomfortably. There. That was a half-truth. “They are just things from when I was little. Not a plan.” Then she looked up at Joyce. El’s eyes were filled with tears again, making her pupils look like waves. “Do you really think that I would want to hurt other people? After everything?”
She wasn’t trying to be manipulative. But she didn’t want Joyce to doubt her. How could she, after everything they had done with the Upside Down and Will and the monsters? Wasn’t she supposed to be a superhero?
Some superheroes only became one after the fact, after there was too much destruction. Mike called those anti-heroes.
“I don’t think you want to hurt anyone,” Joyce said, after a while. “But some of these things, they don’t make sense. Who are these people? And-, me? Your dad, your brothers? I mean, Mike? Why do you have so many lists? And that tape?”
El visibly flinched at that. She didn’t think they had gone that far in her room, but was she surprised? If they had listened to the tape…
Everything in her darkened in one second, and it wouldn’t go back. The buzzing started to get louder. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” Joyce repeated, not accusatory, but like she was trying to place El into a puzzle.
“I don’t know.”
She kept saying it wasn’t a plan to slaughter. She wasn’t trying to commit a crime, and no matter if she said it to a detective or a specialist, or her own stepmother, no one was listening to her. Shouldn’t that be it? She had no intent. They couldn’t prove intent if she kept saying no. How come no meant nothing?
“You don’t believe me,” she said suddenly. Her hands gripped the metal as if she might fall over. “You think I want to kill people again.”
“Again?”
El ignored it. “You don’t listen.”
“It’s a lot to understand, baby, trust me. I don’t think you’re trying to hurt anyone, I think I just need to figure out what’s going on-,”
“I told you!” El exclaimed. “I already told you!”
Joyce sighed, head resting on her hand, papers in the other like they couldn’t decide where to go. She looked down at one in particular, on the second page, and slid it down to El. “‘If no one listens when I ask for help, maybe they’ll listen when it’s too late’, ‘If people disappeared, most wouldn’t notice. Not really. Some kids are just space-wasters. Occupying air.’, ‘Joyce won’t stop me’, El what is this?”
Joyce sounded genuinely horrified, and El felt genuinely horrified. She looked up again, once, and her voice shuddered as she spoke. “I don’t know.”
When El left the sheriff’s department, it was dark and cold outside. They put her in a van again, a cop in the front behind the caged barrier. All the same people had said the same things — 72-hour hold at a psychiatric ward of some sort. Not Pennhurst. Somewhere more “active” and urgent, whatever that meant.
The anxiety was ripping her apart. El couldn’t hear anything besides the buzzing, and she was sure something in her brain had broken. She was going through every possible thing they had found in her room, her crafts, her books. If they had found the guns and the tape, what else? What could look bad?
“Who would’ve thought,” she heard the officer driving the car mutter, either to himself or he didn’t care if she replied. “One of them in Hawkins, of all places. And a girl, no less. Someone screwed you over, huh?”
El didn’t say anything.
And she didn’t say anything for a very long time.
