She owns the titles they’ve branded her with; strange, weird, a freak. These are words that she’s come to treasure as something that make her different, and she knows that she’s not alone. El will always have her favorite brand of outcasts in the form of Mike, Will, Max, Lucas, and Dustin. Her party members. They took her in and gave her a home when she was running from the only one she ever knew. They helped her to unlearn years of psychological torment and abuse at the hands of a man she thought loved her. Whenever she was afraid she knew that she could go to any one of them, and they’d be there in an instant. They were home.
Then she met chief Hopper. Her dad. A man that gave her everything papa never would. He loved her without question. It was no easy journey for them to reach the point where she could smile and call him that, her dad. They both had a temper a mile wide and had to learn to curve it with some patience and by trying to understand the other better. El learned so many lessons about the world from Hopper, but he learned just as much from her. The two worked together to make things better, and life was good. One of her favorite things to do was to watch soap operas on the TV set, and some days she would even be lucky enough to wrangle Hopper into sitting and watching them with her as she explained what was happening, because he had a lot to catch up on. Those were some of her favorite days.
One of her favorite people in the world had to be Joyce. She was kind and pretty, and El thought the world of her. She saw her as a mother, even though she didn’t know what that feeling was like. She was sure her own mom would have been a lot like Joyce. Sometimes she’d go over to the Byers’ home to spend the night with Will. They’d all sit in the living room, watching a movie and El would look around the room at Will and Jonathon, who had just gotten home from work or being out with Nancy and sometimes, Steve. Her eyes would follow a path over to Joyce, sitting in her chair, and El would feel warmth envelop her. Her hand would reach out for Will’s, and she’d turn her eyes back to whatever was on the television screen. This family had welcomed her into their lives, and it brought her such a feeling of deep comfort inside. Home, that’s what will had called it when she asked what that feeling meant.
Nancy was pretty. That was the first thing El had ever noticed about her. But then she got to actually know her too, and she was more than that. She was smart and taught her so many things, things that her dad just couldn’t. Nancy also gave her pretty things because as much as El liked to dress like the boys and Max, sometimes she wanted to dress like Nancy and have pins in her hair or have her nails colored. There was one particular time that they laughed together to see Steve try his hand at doing her hair while Jonathon took pictures of it all. That was the time they decided that Nancy would be the one to stick to doing her hair from now on, or maybe they’d let Jonathon try next time.
El found many things through her friends, her new dad, her friends’ family- no, they were her family. She learned what it was to be loved and to be accepted for who she was. She didn’t have to be stronger than she was. There were no ulterior motives. It was unconditional, what they had together, and she would protect that love that they shared with everything she had. This family was hers. They brought her, they brought her home.
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