— CHAPTER 21 —
THE CONFIDENTIALITY AGREEMENT

SUNDAY 13th NOVEMBER,
1983

THE waiting room in Hawkins hospital is certainly a sight for sore eyes.

Everyone looks as though they have been through hell and back — which in truth, they have. Cath sits uncomfortably upright in the plastic chair, both due to its shape and as a way of stopping herself from dozing off. Lucas and Dustin have already succumbed to the wave of exhaustion that hit them all after everything was over, leaning on each other and snoring quietly. Mike, on her other side, sits in shell-shocked silence.

She looks opposite her to Daphne, slumped in her chair and cradling a bandaged hand, her cut properly treated by a nurse. Nancy and Jonathan have the same cut — apparently they cut it themselves, to which Cath, forever the worrier, had panicked over. What puzzles her the most is that Steve Harrington is also sat next to Daphne, sporting a bloodied face and looking rather glum. When did he come into the mix?

It doesn't matter, because it was all worth it. At least, she hopes so. They're still waiting for him to wake up...

Will Byers is alive. And he's in the next room.

The story goes that Joyce and Hopper found him in the Upside Down themselves. He hadn't been breathing when they found him, pale and limp, but they had somehow managed to resuscitate him. And now he was here.

     Now, she waits for Will to wake up and for her dad to arrive. A friendly nurse had informed she and Daphne that he was on his way, but was held up by being questioned. Cath couldn't help but overthink it when she first heard the news. Questioned by who? If Hopper was here, how could they be sure it was the police? What if the Bad Men were tricking him, just like they tried to do with Mike's parents?

     Don't be silly, Cath, she tries to calm herself down. Stop worrying. They found Will. It's over.

     Still, she can't shake off the feeling that they are being watched even now.

Cath finds herself finally having a moment's peace to reflect on this week. She is not the same girl she was on that seemingly normal Monday. One knock on the door and a stupid decision to follow three boys into the rain, and her life has been changed forever. She doesn't know how, but Cath feels... different. Like some things don't make sense anymore. She certainly has no clue how they will all return to some form of normality at school again.

Tick, tick, tick...

The incessant clock is the loudest sound in the waiting room, the only white noise being the distant coughs and squeaking of trolley wheels throughout the hospital. Cath looks up at the time — midnight. It suddenly strikes her that all of this happened in one day, right from hearing Will on the radio to losing Eleven; a twinge of guilt makes her flinch.

To stop herself from dwelling, she turns to Mike for a distraction. "Hey..." she whispers, nodding up to the clock. "It's Sunday. Look."

"Yeah..." he mumbles tiredly.

A long pause. Tapping of feet. Steve coughs.

"I still can't believe they found him," she whispers again.

"Me neither."

"It's a miracle."

Reading his mood, Cath decides it would be best if she stayed quiet. Mike certainly doesn't seem in the mood for miracles. She doesn't know why she is pushing him to talk. He has barely spoken since Eleven's sacrifice, and when he does, the most she can get out of him is two laboured words at a time. It is starting to really concern her. She isn't used to seeing the Wheeler boy so beaten down — usually he's so chipper, the one who rallied the group together this whole week. But comforting words fail her.

     Instead, she decides to stare at the whitewash walls, and the giant poster about cardiac arrest pinned to a cork board. Cath notices the floor number, and it suddenly occurs to her that she was born on the next floor up. Then she's thinking about how her mother also died on that floor, most likely. The thought completely catches her off-guard — she has never even considered it that way before, but maybe this week's events have just shaken her up too much.

     "You know, Will used to talk a lot about you to us."

     It takes Cath a second to realise Mike is speaking, and to her. She turns to face him, the words being processed too, and stares at him in surprised puzzlement.

     "I remember at the Science Fair last year," Mike goes on, lightening up slightly at the memory, "he saw you were alone at the stall, and he literally dragged us over to see. And then when you guys won, he didn't even seem mad about it. He was just really, really, really happy for you..."

     When she doesn't say anything in response, he continues. "Will's always said great things about you. So we'd be like, 'Well, why don't you just ask her to hang out with us?' but he didn't, because he said he never knew how."

     Cath leans back in her chair, taking all of this in. What Mike has just told her mirrors the exact same way she always felt — scared, for no reason at all, to re-kindle their old friendship... maybe out of fear that she might screw it up again, since people like Stacy Albright and Pamela Gillespie didn't seem to find her at all friend-worthy. But to think he felt the same way, the same hesitance, makes her somehow feel a little bit braver.

     "I thought I'd put him off me," she admits. It would make sense if I had, Cath thinks. They just drifted away with no explanation. But in truth, so many of her fondest childhood memories have the doe-eyed Will Byers in the picture.

     Mike shakes his head earnestly. "Will trusts you. And he doesn't trust just anyone, you earn that. You're his friend."

     Another pause. The bouncing of his foot slows a little.

     "So... I guess that's kinda why we came knocking on your door that night."

     "Not just because I was the closest thing to a witness?"

     "Because we knew you'd care enough to say yes."

     The pause is a little longer this time. Cath rubs her hands thoughtfully with her thumb, drawing circles in her palm.

     "And was it worth it in the end?" she asks hesitantly. "You know, having me tag along?"

     Mike doesn't say anything. Instead, after a few moments, he smiles at her. It is a tired one, through closed lips, but in his eyes she can see how genuine it is. It comes so unexpectedly that Cath can't help but return it, and suddenly she doesn't want him to explain anything, because for the first time in a long time she thinks she's enjoying a moment of bonding with a friend — with no reservations, second-guessing of their actions. This is what it is supposed to feel like.

     Suddenly Jonathan bursts into the room, he himself smiling so contagiously that it makes everyone in the room perk up. He has fresh tears left in his eyes, but she can see he is glowing through his fatigue.

     "He's awake," he announces.

He's awake. Before Cath has time to process any coherent thought about Will, Mike is pulling her up from her seat and nudging the other two awake. She follows them blindly down more whitewashed corridors, lined with fluorescent lights, and watches them file into a patient room. Their whoops and cheers of his name reach her before the door does. Cath freezes in the doorway.

All of a sudden, he's just... there.

The other boys are blocking her view, moving about dynamically so she gets fleeting glimpses of his body and face. And then she hears weak snippets of his voice between their babbling. Those alone are enough to confirm that he's actually alive. He's safe.

"Sweetie, are you okay?" Joyce asks her. Cath looks up at her, and feels a warmth spread through her chest at how content the mother looks. It is the most at-peace she has looked all week.

"Yeah. I just... can't believe he's actually here."

Joyce sighs, squeezing Cath's shoulder fondly. Out of nowhere, Will begins to cough — at first it is only a little bit, but as the others quieten down out of concern, it grows more violent, coughing with so much force it makes him sit up in bed slightly. One cough sounds particularly chesty, like the sound of phlegm shifting, and Cath's hand instinctively flies to her chest; reminiscent of the time she was bed-ridden with horrible bronchitis-turned-pneumonia. When he finally stops, he sinks back into the bed, shallowly catching his breath.

"Are you okay?"

"The demogorgon," Will murmurs. "It got me."

"We know."

"It's okay," Lucas assured him. "It's dead."

Will nods, as if comforted by this information. A gap has naturally formed between two of the boys, and through it Will's eyes suddenly lock onto hers — he appears to perk up, shifting to get a better look. Following his gaze, the others turn around to look at Cath.

"Cath, what are you hiding over there for?" Dustin grins. "C'mon, come on over!"

Mike steps further apart from Lucas, allowing enough of a gap for her to fit in. Sheepishly, Cath wanders over and fills it, now standing right over Will at his bedside. He looks right up at her, transfixed, as a smile spreads across his face.

"... Hi," he finally says.

"Hi," she replies, with a breathy laugh.

"Cath was with us the whole time," Mike says proudly. "She helped us."

She tries covering her cheeks with her hands, feeling them heat up from embarrassment.

     "Yeah, she was our voice of reason," Dustin says.

     "Hey!" Lucas retorts. "I had plenty of reason too."

     "Yeah... but it's Cath."

     Lucas throws his arms up in the air and continues to bicker with Dustin. Muffled under the noise, Will says something to her but she can't quite hear, so she leans in closer over the bed.

     "Did you hear me?" Will asks, "On the radio?" He has this hopeful look about him, blinking at her curiously as he sits up slight in bed, tugging the tubes threaded into his arms with him.

     "Yeah," Cath replies, "I heard you."

     "And... is Daphne okay?"

     "She's fine," she says, although confused as to why he's interested.

     Puffing out what seems to be a sigh of relief, he lets his head sink back into the pillow and stares up at the ceiling. Cath didn't realise how much she missed this until now. It feels surreal, seeing him animated like this, hearing him talking. Even just watching him blink fills her with the joy that he has been found, safe and sound.

     "Welcome back home, Will," Cath says, placing a hand on his mattress.

━━━━━━

DAPHNE hates hospitals. She always has done, since her mother died. She hates the whitewashed walls, hates the clinical smell of everything, hates the eerie silence of them. When her hand was being treated by the nurse, she didn't know where to look. It isn't that she is particularly squeamish, or anything... it's this place. It is still haunted for her. The quickest chance they get to leave the hospital, Daphne is taking it. Hurry up, Dad...

In the seat next to her, Steve raises his arms above his head to stretch, almost knocking her out with his elbow. She awkwardly ducks out of the line of fire until he drops his arms again. Daphne still doesn't know how to talk to him. After what he did... there is no doubt about it. He saved her life, and now she owes him.

But owe him what? How do you repay that kind of deed, especially when it is to someone like Steve Harrington?

"How's your face?" she asks uneasily. The large gash on his head has been stitched up by one of the nurses, just like the one above Daphne's eyebrow has been — it's like their battle scars.

"It's painful," Steve shrugs.

He seems otherwise preoccupied as he stares ahead at Nancy, who lingers by Will's room sadly. It doesn't take much observation for Daphne to read her. She wishes it was Barb. Similarly, Daphne knows that feeling. She is still slowly realising the reality of Tonya's death that she is now going to have to live with daily. But at least she didn't lose one of her best friends like Nancy. Just imagining it makes her heart sink — what if it had been Felix, or Amy?

She looks from Nancy to Steve, before finally giving him a gentle nudge. "Go on," Daphne urges him. "Talk to her."

Steve seems reluctant at first, hovering in mid-air above his seat. "But what am I gonna say?" he asks.

"You don't have to say anything. Just be there."

Finally, Steve plucks up some courage. Daphne watches from afar as he walks over, hands in the back pockets of his jeans as he approaches her, almost warily. They seem to exchange a couple of quiet words that she can't make out, before Nancy slowly walks into his embrace. He soothingly rubs her back, caught up in the moment himself, but she stares vacantly over his shoulder as if she is only half in the moment.

Familiar footsteps catch Daphne's attention, and she sits up in her seat. She doesn't try getting up until she sees her dad turn the corner into the waiting room. They make eye contact.

"Dad..."

She is unsure of whether to approach for a moment. She anticipates another lecture, about where on Earth she's been — and she would understand that. However, his arms are already open, and Daphne doesn't hesitate a moment to go into them. In a few bold strides she is in her father's arms, feeling not like an Ellen Ripley-esque monster slayer from hours before, but instead a scared little girl who wants to hide from the world.

"I'm so sorry for leaving again," she stammers as she breaks from the hug, still clinging to his sleeves. "I— I should have taken more care of Cath, and—"

"No, I'm sorry," Thomas interjects, with a firm earnestness. "I'm just so glad you're safe... by the way, they told me everything. About what happened."

Daphne blinks. "Wait, really?"

Before he can answer, Cath's disembodied voice travels their way. "Dad!"

Behind her, her sister stands eagerly watching her father, who crouches down and opens his arms to her as she runs into his arms. In the heat of the moment, he even picks her up off her feet and swings her around, before setting her down again — something he hasn't done with Cath for a couple of years now. Fleetingly, Daphne feels a pang of jealousy that she now assumes the older-sister role again, but it vanishes as quickly as it came. All of them being together again is the best feeling she's had for a few nights now.

With this, they bid the others goodbye and make the drive home. It feels like such an anti-climactic end to the most turbulent week of Daphne's life. She rides shotgun, whilst Cath falls asleep in the backseat on the short trip home — she can even feel herself snoozing. When they get back, Ringo is all loved up to Cath, and even her (which makes a first). It doesn't take long before Daphne heads off to bed. She leaves her lamp on, hoping that the demogorgon won't reach into her dreams...

━━━━━━

SHE wakes up a few hours around lunch time that same Sunday. Daphne awakens to the smell of canned tomato soup travelling upstairs, and the warm glow of her bedside lamp still on. It is one of the strangest night's sleeps she has ever had — completely dreamless, almost like anaesthesia, skipping straight to when she forces her eyes open. She doesn't feel any more rested than before.

Slinking downstairs, she arrives in the kitchen to the sight of Thomas laying bowls of Campbell's tomato soup for each of them. Cath is already seated, forever the early bird, as she blows on the soup to cool it down. Once again, it all feels like such an anti-climax. Surely there has to be more, Daphne thinks warily.

"How long was I out?" she asks, slumping into a seat next to Cath.

"You were asleep for a good ten hours," Thomas says impressively. "I kept checking on you."

"And you?" she asks Cath.

Finishing a gulp of water, Cath shrugs. "Maybe eight hours at the most... I stayed up to see the sunrise before I slept."

"What did you do all that time before you slept?"

"... Homework," she answers sheepishly. Thomas chuckles at this, sitting down and blowing on a spoonful of soup. But when he isn't looking, Cath whispers to Daphne, "I couldn't sleep. It was just something normal to do... for once."

The mealtime mostly passes without much comment, shovelling spoonfuls of soup down their throats. It isn't until halfway through the meal that Daphne's curiosity gets the better of her.

"Dad?"

"Mm-hmm?"

"When you say they told you everything, what do you mean?"

"I mean, everything..." Thomas senses this isn't enough of a response, and sets down his glass of water. "Well, about how they mistook Will's body for another kid. Tonya and Barbara are still missing, the poor things. You girls were out trying to look for them, which I know already... there was a little Russian kid who escaped from somewhere, or something? Honestly it's all a blur."

Daphne goes still in her chair. That can't be right. Where is this false information coming from? And who are 'they'?

Before she can ask, the phone rings in the hallway. Thomas gets up to go answer it, and she listens carefully to snippets of the one-sided conversation:

"Hello?... I'm sorry, who is this?... yeah... yeah... what do you mean, where we can't be seen?... okay... fine... we'll be there in half an hour, tops. Thank you. Goodbye."

Daphne and Cath share a confused glance as he walks back into the kitchen. Even he looks somewhat perplexed.

"... We have to go to the police station," he says, in a tone that suggests he's reciting what he heard.

"What? Why?" Daphne asks.

"There's someone who wants to see you two, about everything that's happened this week. They said he's talking to everyone involved."

     Something about this doesn't sit right with Daphne. Nevertheless, she complies, riding shotgun once again with Cath in the back of the car — but this time her sister is completely alert, staring anxiously out of the window. If she had it her way, she would flush any association with the Hawkins Lab out of her life forever. She doesn't want it even remotely touch the lives of her family or friends.

Her suspicion only festers when her dad takes a different route to the police station, parking around the back where Hopper allows him to enter — according to him, the speaker on the phone instructed him on this route. The clouds hang above them in translucent puffs of smoke, as they are ushered in the back entrance of the police station.

     They are told to wait outside a door at the back of the station, one of the interrogation rooms. The whole air of secrecy surrounding this visit puts Daphne on edge. She doesn't think what her dad had been told on the phone could have been this sinister, but now she dreads what might be on the other side of that door...

     Eventually they find out, after a five-minute wait of nothing. A man emerges from inside the room — fairly short, and with greying hair atop his head. He wears a pristine white lab coat hastily thrown over a collared shirt and trousers. But despite the exhaustion etched into his features, as if he's had a long night, there is a strangely optimistic air about him. Like someone she should trust, but Daphne can't bring herself to.

     "Ah. Hello, sorry for the wait," he greets them, a New York jilt to his accent. "You must be the Delaneys?"

     "That's right," Thomas says slowly.

     The man goes in for a firm handshake with him, seemingly a strong effort to dispel any hostility towards him. "Pleased to meet you. My name's Dr. Sam Owens, I work with the Hawkins Lab... as you've probably figured out by my coat. It's my Sunday best!"

     When none of the Delaneys laugh at his joke, he clears his throat.

     "Are you... Catherine?" he asks Cath slowly, and when she nods, he extends out his hand. She shyly takes it for the handshake. "Pleased to meet you, Catherine. So then you must be Daphne..."

     Now it's her turn for the handshake. But Daphne stays solitary, her arms folded across her chest. Dr. Owens appears to sense her rejection and doesn't try to push it, although she can feel Thomas glaring at her.

     "What exactly have you brought us here for?" Thomas asks, protectively gazing at his daughters.

     "Well, first of all, I'd just like to offer you my sincerest apologies for everything that has happened this week," Owens insists. "We usually have such a firm grip on our protocol, so to have it slip like this is... unprecedented."

     "So why are you here?" Daphne asks. If he seems so apologetic, unlike the other men from the lab, then what is his role in that place? For her, Owens's personality and a job at the Hawkins Lab almost feel like they should be mutually exclusive events.

     Dr. Owens looks around the corridor, hesitant to say anything. Then he gestures inside the interrogation room. "I'm afraid there's only so much I can say out here. Classified information, you see. Don't want your average Hawkins shoplifter to overhear any of our operations... now, I'll talk to each of you privately for a few minutes at a time, if you don't mind. Daphne, can I talk to you first?"

     She nods silently. It is an attempt to appear brave, or like she isn't afraid, but in truth being locked in that room with one of the people from that lab terrifies her. It seems to have Cath perturbed too, as she stares frantically after her when they disappear into the room. Daphne catches one last glimpse of her sister through a crack in the door before it shuts.

     The interrogation room is barren, except for a small table and two chairs set out on either side. Dr. Owens sets himself down in one, and gestures for her to sit in the other. At his feet, a tattered brown briefcase lays there. Slowly but surely, Daphne walks over to the chair and sits herself down.

     "Who are you, then? In all of this?" she asks, then does a double take. The sound travels strangely in here — it feels all compressed into one space, soundproof, and suddenly a nauseating claustrophobia fills her limbs.

     "I'm the Director of Operations at the Hawkins Lab," he replies. Behind closed doors, that trustworthy disposition remains, although much more solemn now. Much less performative.

     "So you're the one running all these experiments?"

     "Technically, yes. I gotta admit it to you, I'm the newbie. I started this morning. My predecessor was Dr. Martin Brenner, but after last night he was... incapacitated to continue filling the role. I'm essentially cleaning up the mess he left."

     "Does he look like... tall, slim, silver hair?"

     "Spot on."

     Daphne squirms in her seat. It was the man Cath had spoken so fearfully about, the one who was obsessed with getting Eleven back. But now she was gone, and so was he... hopefully they weren't in the same place. Brenner didn't deserve to be within the same universe as Eleven.

     "You work pretty fast then, don't you?"

     "You have to, in these situations. There can't be any risk of information, or in our case, entities leaking out into the real world. The quicker we work right now, the quicker everyone can get back to their lives."

     "What do you mean?" asks Daphne, getting her first hunch of what he might be asking her.

     Dr. Owens leans forward in his seat, the chair creaking as his hands clasp together. She hates that she can hear both of their breathing, amalgamating, as nervous as each other, and as reluctant to be here as the other. "I'm guessing you have a lot of questions after this crazy week, don't you?"

     She stays silent.

     "Would I be right in saying that you already know exactly what we do?"

     "Human experiments, opening portals to other dimensions... I think I get the gist."

     "You've done your research," Dr. Owens sighs, ignoring her nervous passive-aggressiveness. "Well, it's very important for us that this information doesn't get out into the world."

     "So you and your colleagues don't get a bad rep?" she asks, silently fuming. "So you can profit off of all the crap we've been through?"

     Upon reflection, Daphne holds her tongue and feels the colour drain from her face. What are you doing?! she screams internally. Right opposite her is a man, the head of an administration which has been conducting these horrible experiments right under their noses, and potentially monitoring all of them too... and she's swearing at him like an angsty teenager. Daphne doesn't know what came over her. Maybe it's something about Dr. Owens, his approachability — which she still can't adjust to — that makes it much easier to take out her frustrations on like a punching bag in a lab coat. Nevertheless, he must either have incredible patience or be secretly plotting her punishment, because he barely seems fazed.

     "No..." Dr. Owens sighs, as if he would rather not tell this story. "It's important, so that it doesn't fall into the wrong hands. If the portal to the Upside Down was discovered by, say, the Soviets, there would be a complete disaster. Maybe a whole new kind of warfare unleashed onto humanity. Another layer to the Cold War. This is science in its infancy, and that stage is always incredibly dangerous. And as for you, along with Will and Nancy Wheeler, you've entered the Upside Down and lived to tell the tale, seemingly unscathed... do you have any idea how many colleagues we've lost to that place? How many times we have tried and failed to understand how it works? It's all the more of a reason to keep this on the down-low."

     The front lobes of her brain throb with the intake of information, swirling and digesting in her head. Daphne may not like to admit it, but she can see the legitimacy of his point. The Upside Down is bad enough on its own... but if someone else got a hold of it, to utilise it as a weapon? A horrific image of a dystopia comes into her head, life imitating the movies she loves, where demogorgons crawl everywhere, and Hawkins is the hub of this disease that has now spread all over the world. The thought makes her stomach flip.

     Dr. Owens clicks open his briefcase and slides some sheets of paper across the table to her, followed by a ballpoint pen. "If you could just have a read of these documents, please, and sign when you're ready. Take all the time you need..."

     At the word 'signing', Daphne freezes. She doesn't like the permanent sound of that at all. However, she still goes along with it, bowing her head over the documents and squinting at the huge blocks of writing. Even though Dr. Owens told her to take her time, she feels uneasy reading it silently with her watching him this way, so she tries to skim through a little bit. There is never-ending small print about confidentiality, blah blah blah... but then one part catches her eye.

     "I'm sorry, I don't understand..." Daphne turns the paper around to him and points at a section. "When it says 'the people involved', does that include the... the deceased?"

     "Do you mean Tonya McCarthy?" he asks solemnly.

     She goes quiet. How does he know who she meant? But slowly, she nods.

     Dr. Owens sighs. "Then I'm afraid it does, yes."

     "Then... I'm still confused. I mean, if you need confirmation of what happened, I did— I saw it happen— she... she died right in front of me... we know she's dead—"

     "Not all of us."

     Please stop being so cryptic... she thinks.

     "Until we can retrieve her body from the Upside Down, the assumption has to be that she is alive. This will direct as much attention as possible away from us, to try and fix the problem of closing the Gate. It's so we can prevent anything like this happening again."

     The first sentence alone makes her extremely uncomfortable. Lying about Tonya's fate? But maybe it's for her family's protection, so they aren't splashed all over news front pages with Tonya's face and photos of the lab... that would be awful.

     "But Tonya's parents would know about it though, right?"

     Now it's Dr. Owens's turn to fall into uncomfortable silence.

     "... Right?" Daphne repeats, more firmly this time.

     His eyes shift down to the table with a sigh. Daphne finally realises what he is getting at. In retaliation, she chucks her pen onto the table, and it almost clatters onto the floor.

     "No. No way," she insists. "I can't do that. You can't expect me to do that!"

     "Tonya's exact location in the Upside Down is unknown," Dr. Owens tries to calm her down. "Even if we did know where her body was, we couldn't even consider telling the truth to anyone. It's too risky. The best thing for now is to keep assuming she is missing."

     It's so unfair. It's so unfair.

     "So you'd rather protect your reputations than support parents looking for their dead child?" she snaps. "You're just going to leave the McCarthys and the Hollands in the dirt like that?"

     "Look, I never said this was going to be easy—"

     "I'm not lying to my best friend's face about whether Tonya is alive or dead!"

     There it is. Daphne falls back on her chair, running her shaking fingers through her hair. It is the scenario she first imagined, when what Dr. Owens was proposing finally hit her — she realised she was going to have to sit there with Felix and go along with fabrications about his girlfriend's vanishing, looking him right in the eye when she knew full well that Tonya was dead, maybe doting in the Upside Down somewhere. The whole thing makes her feel sick...

     But what if it's the only way?

     "... How long would this be for?" she murmurs.

     "As long as it needs to be."

     "So, forever?"

     "I didn't say that, but..."

     Daphne sits forward in her chair, feeling heavy as she slowly, but reluctantly, starts to accept the truth of what is happening. "And if I don't sign this document... what would happen?"

     Dr. Owens makes a pained expression and curtly shakes his head. "I wouldn't do that if I were you. Take it from me, the lives of you and your loved ones will be much easier if you sign this. You sign this, and that's it. We can leave you alone, you can leave us alone. But if you don't... that is when things get complicated."

     He pauses, noticing how her head is now in her hands.

     "I know this isn't easy, kid. Really. I wish things could be different. What has happened this week is a tragedy, a real tragedy. Hopefully now we can work on making sure it never happens again. Together."

     Daphne lifts her head up tiredly, fingers gingerly touching the plastic of the ballpoint pen. She clicks the pen as the nib hovers over the page. One more question.

     "If I sign this... does this mean my friends will be left alone too? They won't be interrogated, or bugged, or anything?"

     "They shouldn't be, no. You have my word."

     It is the first reassurance she has had since walking into this room. If she is going to have to go through this... then the least she can do is make sure Felix and Amy, but especially Felix, are never tainted by the Hawkins Lab. This is her burden to bear, and she wants her friends left completely out of it...

     Then it is settled. With Tonya lingering in her mind, Daphne scratches her signature onto the document.

━━━━━━

A/N;

TWO! CHAPTERS! LEFT!

AND HAPPY STRANGER THINGS DAY 🎉

not gonna lie, a lot of this chapter is an unedited blur to me, i wanted to get this out today on stranger things day but we've also had so much exciting season 4 content and MY BRAIN BE BUZZIN—

it was so comforting to write will again 🥺 and also i found writing dr. owens really fun! i watched aliens (1986) recently, so seeing paul reiser there just added to it even more, although in stranger things he's much nicer i think. to be honest, storyline-wise i don't really know if it was too soon to bring him in right after brenner "died" but ah well 🤷🏼‍♀️ i enjoyed that scene so much because it was TENSE. but it's so heartbreaking to think of how daphne is going to have to lie to felix's face about tonya... to be explored in book two? m a y b e

as always, thank you so much for reading. only two filler chapters left! these should take us up nicely to december.

— Imogen

[ Published: November 6th, 2021 ]