It's not fair. It's just not fair. All Eleven wants to do is to be as normal as a telekinetic girl can be, for Hopper to fulfill his promises to her and let her be a kid. But it's just not happening fast enough to her liking.

She hadn't been able to go trick-or-treating, even when she'd promised she'd keep her ghost costume on the entire time. El spent day after day in the cabin, watching Westerns and whatever else was on TV during the day as she she tried to keep her mind off the outside world calling to her. She'd been good, she'd behaved. So why was she still not allowed to go out?

"It's too early," Hopper keeps telling her, "we need to make sure that the bad men won't come looking for you." But they haven't. Papa's dead— the Demogorgon's dead— and yet she's practically traded one prison for another.

So she'd snuck out to Hawkins Middle in search of her friends, maybe caused a bit of a ruckus with her telekinesis— that redheaded girl had it coming, honestly— and came home only to have an argument with Hopper about it. Words were exchanged, TV privileges were revoked, and all of the cabin's windows and lightbulbs were blown out with a single cry. El's been confined to her room since, crying with the regret of causing such a mess and the desperate longing for any kind of normalcy.

Eleven flinches when her bedroom door slowly creaks open, and she readies herself to slam it in Hopper's face when you peek your head through the space. You're Hopper's kid— a "troublemaker" he'd called you once, she remembers— and El lets her shoulders droop.

"... Come in," she murmurs, because you don't seem like a troublemaker, not like the bullies she'd scared off at the Quarry by breaking one of their arms. No, you seem... nice. "I am sorry."

The anxiety that's been building in her chest grows as you sit down beside her on the floor, mindful of stray glass and wood while you settle in. Eleven's ready for you to yell or snap, but you just wrap her up in a hug instead.

Oh. Oh. You really are nice.