#el lives

Skateboarding with Max is a failure because El has issues balancing on her board. She ends up roller skating with Max once she’s physically recovered from being in bed for 18 months.

Basketball with Lucas is frustrating since she can’t use her powers to shoot the ball. She instead cheers Lucas on in any pick up games he plays with Steve.

She doesn’t mind painting with Will but struggles with being as imaginative as he is. Whenever Will wants company when he’s pairing at his easel, she ends up painting miniature figures that he uses in D & D.

El likes writing with Mike but finds that she’s not as good at writing fiction as he is. She starts keeping a journal where she documents her emotions and observations of the people and things around her. She occasionally shares what’s she’s written to others.

Engineering with Dustin ends up with her setting part of his bedroom carpet on fire. She ends up reading one of his many library books next to him whenever she visits and he’s building the next Cerebro.

It sort of just happens one night when El asks Joyce a bunch of questions about her production of “Oklahoma” in high school. Joyce encourages El to try out for the Hawkins High drama club. She auditions along with Dustin and gets a small role in their musical production of Bye Bye Birdie and ends up falling in love with being on stage. The costumes, the music, the dialogue and the sets are all fascinating to her. Dustin’s also excited that El likes acting as much as he does. Steve, Erica, Mrs. Henderson, the rest of the Party, Joyce and Hopper are all in the front row opening night. Hopper and Joyce give El yellow flowers after the show’s over.

The "You can't have a girl with superpowers running around" bullshit aside, it was super clear to me that he didn't want to be asked that question or talk about it at all.

That said, here are some more numbers to throw around:

1. Valentine's Day. I can't remember my thinking on this originally, but...why not?🤷‍♀️

2. The 15th. Because someone said they mentioned # 15 in the doc, but tbh I wasn't paying enough attention to pick up on it.

3. The 17th. 1...7. Again, why not?

4. The 18th. Here are 2 why's: because Jamie said 12 when he put out that Vecna exercise vid on the Tonight Show on the 6th, and 6+12=18! Also because blue is supposed to meet yellow in the west, which would be 9:45, and 9+4+5=18!

5. Then again, there's always November 6.

My heart is begging for Alive!El. I have a few ideas.

[This is also on AO3]

The Possibility of Hope

For Mike Wheeler, believing had never meant going to church on Sundays. Karen and Ted had given up trying to bring him closer to God when he was eight years old. It was pointless.

As a storyteller, Mike brimmed with wild imagination, fantasy, a force that had always poured out of him like waterfalls. But he knew it had limits. He did not believe in God.

For Mike, belief instead meant allowing what was at least theoretically possible. Anything that could not be ruled out remained possible. Even if the plausibility of El’s survival – the possibility of hope itself – was as thin as a butterfly’s wing, liable to slip through his fingers if he did not hold on tightly enough: as long as something was not utterly impossible, he could believe in it. And so he did.

Mr. Clarke had once told Mike and his friends about the principle of openness, on one of those days when the rest of the class had already drifted away, mentally. Keep your horizon open. Don’t rule out explanations too early. A hypothesis, Mr. Clarke had said, should only be discarded once it has been falsified.

Mike had considered the entire space of possibilities – and in one tiny, almost invisible corner of it, she was still alive.

Because of Kali. Kali’s vision. Her projection, her conjured up image that distracted everyone and hid the truth:

El, running. El, alive.

Safe. Far away.

Probability was against her. But probability was not proof. Zero was not the same as 0.000001. Mike held on to that hope with gritted teeth and a heart that desperately kept beating in spite of the futility of it all.

He kept himself afloat. His hope was his only tool of survival. It was how he moved through his days without drowning. He slipped – more like a ghost, really – from one demand of everyday life to the next. He checked off life’s tasks like a robot. Stayed above water, just barely, without drowning in the pain of the loss of her. The loss of everything. He believed – not the way you believe in a god, but the way you believe in asteroid strikes. It. Was. Possible.

He believed and believed, but nothing could have prepared him for the day that came, without any omens.

The mild spring day of 1990. The day he lay on top of his bed at college and reality suddenly flickered in front of his eyes. Turned black – blacker than the deepest night or outer space, darker than anything on Earth. The emptiness before his eyes, the emptiness he knew, the specific emptiness he remembered too well – there was nothing but black, only for milliseconds at a time, but it happened three times, four times. And then he was back on his bed in his college dorm room, breathing hard, his heart racing, his eyes wide open, fingers digging into his mattress.

It had been the void. He was more sure of that than he had been of anything in the past two and a half years. It had been the void.

(credit @somepomegranatetea)

but who is gonna write this.

i am not qualified as i am not icelandic, nor do i live on a farm, nor am i a lesbian (i think?), nor am i a girl. i feel that i should have at least 2 of those traits to be eligible to write this