C H A P T E R   T W E N T Y - S I X

" THE REVELATION "

!

!! PRE-NOTE !! :

this chapter has a lot going on,
& it's very intricately detailed,
so as long as you pay careful attention,
it should all make sense :)

it explains a lot.

buckle in, & i hope you enjoy!

･ ｡ﾟ ⋆✩⋆ ･ ｡ﾟ

| D E C E M B E R 25th , 1986 |

K a m c h a t k a , R u s s i a

HOPPER & Y/N

( picks up right where we left off
at the end of chapter twenty-four )

"THESE ARE NEW. AND THERE WASN'T JUST ONE PERSON, THERE WAS TWO."

Hopper observed, using his tracking skills for when he used to hunt. When he actually had the time for things like that, before the whole 'upside down invasion of Hawkins' fiasco.

Y/N then remembered what the announcement said, about unknown entries entering through the gate earlier.
She thought it was Mike who had entered through the gate with someone else, but whoever did enter, was no longer here.

Which could only mean, that they were somewhere in the facility, against Y/N's instruction.

And that angered her. How could Mike do this?

She gave him specific instructions to stay out of their way. And he ignored her. It pissed her off.
She was fuming so intensely, that she didn't even notice her father get up and look around the gate room.

Until he stumbled across something strangely intriguing. Something he shouldn't see.

"Hey, kid." Hopper called, getting Y/N to turn her head to see.
She saw him staring and reading some papers that were at some lab desks, sprawled out as he shuffled through them.

She took a breath as she silently stored her anger towards Mike away, for now.

She then directed her attention towards Hopper.
"What are those?" She asked her dad as she made her way over to him, her combat boots making thick tapping sounds against the polished ground.

Hopper remained silent as he focused on the papers and cream manila folders that he skimmed before him, shuffling through them as he seemed to be alarmed.

His eyes widened upon finding a certain manila folder, labeled something in Russian in bold letters, but it was obvious that it concealed something important.
He opened it, his eyes quickly skimming the pages before realization dawned on him.

"This bastard." He mumbled disbelievingly to himself as he flipped through the folder quickly.

Y/N scrunched her nose, "What? What is it?"

Hopper shook his head questioningly, trying to understand what he was reading.

"I-I don't know for sure because you know, I'm not fluent in Russian," He joked through sarcastic lips. "But from what words I do understand, it says 'nuclear reactor.'"

Y/N furrows her eyebrows as she leans closer over the side of her dad's arm, peeking at the papers before reaching to grab them from his hand.

Her eyes turned grey as she tried using her telepathy to see what the pages were trying to say when they were written, but it wasn't working.
Instead, Hopper took the pages back. His eyes turned to the lightest shade of his natural blue eye color as he begun to use his empathic abilities to feel the page's meaning. He figured that he could use his own abilities to try and read the Russian writing in the documents.

He placed both hands firmly on the papers, closing his eyes as he used his abilities to seem to read the paper through his closed eyes.
Y/N watched intently as the room seemed to still, before Hopper suddenly shot his eyes open.

Y/N leaned forward a bit to see his face better. His eyes were wide with disbelieving surprise.
It looked like he had just read something that  perhaps he wasn't supposed to.

"What is it?" Y/N inquired intensely.

Hopper's wide eyes then turned to look at his daughter with worriedly anxious eyes. It was hard to tell exactly what emotions he was feeling, because it seemed to be a mix of anger, disbelief, and just straight fear all at once.

"Brenner is a goddamn psychotic son of a bitch, that's what!" He practically yelled, his forehead slightly shiny from the nervousness reading these files.

Y/N furrowed her eyebrows confusedly, "Why? What'd you read?"

Hopper just continued to shake his head. It just seemed that he could not fathom what he had just read.
He walked around his daughter, pacing as he pinched the bridge of his nose stressfully with one hand while the folder was clenched tightly in his other hand in a fist.

"Dad.." Y/N said with a mellow voice, "Dad, what'd you read?" She was trying to calm him down.

Her father shook his head again, stopping to look up to see his daughter's beautiful pools of e/c eyes that never failed to calm him.
They were just like her mother's, as well as Sarah's.

Then, as he recalled Y/N's mother, he couldn't help but think of Joyce. Joyce is waiting for him.
The woman who's had his heart since high school.
Her toothy grin as she laughed with him, her frizzed hair, her short height that always gave him an excuse to tease her about being short.

He needed to gather himself for Y/N.

He needed to focus on helping him and his daughter escape the place where they've been tortured. And hell, he is going to get him and Y/N out, if it's the last thing he ever does.

They will make it out of here. He will see Joyce again. He will save his daughter.

Whatever it takes.

Hopper finally stopped with his worried pacing, taking a stressed breath before he took careful steps back toward's Y/N to slap the folder into her hand.

He took a breath. "Brenner's been working on top of a power plant."

Y/N knitted her brows together, still obviously confused. "W-What?"

Hopper sighed before taking the folder back to the desk he found it on; back where all the other papers were. He laid the folder down, opening it to flip through before he stopped at a page that seemed to resemble a map and diagram of the entire facility.

Y/N's eyes followed her father's guide. There was the cell block and laboratory that was on the lower level of the facility, but there was a level even lower that that.

"Brenner has been working in this facility, experimenting and testing his experiments, all on top of a power plant all this time that has a nuclear reactor." Hopper tried to explain, guiding his finger across the map to help Y/N visualize.

"Okay, I got that part," She nodded, placing her finger where the supposed power plant is. "But why does he have a whole damn nuclear reactor in his basement? What could he possibly use that for?"

Hopper then moved his finger across the paper to skim it over some Russian writing he had read. "He's using his nuclear reactor to power these turbines that keep the gate open. Apparently, it's a hell of a lot harder to close with nuclear power, but it hasn't been used because of the intense radiation."

Y/N scoffed, the air seemed to be taken out of her lungs. She might sincerely hate Brenner, but she had to admit, the man wasn't dumb when it came to semantics.

"Why? Why the hell would he need to keep the gate open so powerfully for so long?" Y/N asked, shaking her head with disbelief like her father had.

Her father huffed as well. "According to the files, he keeps the gate open to keep retrieving demogorgon eggs to grow into adulthood. Why? Because he needs them for their fresh DNA samples to experiment with, and for them to act as a disposal method to kill and get rid of his failed experiments and facility prisoners."

Y/N squinted in confusion. "I knew there was prisoners here, but why? Why are they being kept here?"

"These prisoners are prisoners of war. Apparently, while we were stuck on the upside down all those months and this hellhole, we missed the war that's going on outside. That explains why in the beginning, Brenner went on about making us 'heightened humans' and his deal with Russia.
We were supposed to aid the Russians in the war as heightened soldiers."

Y/N finally understood now.
It all connected back to the beginning when Hopper and Y/N were first found in the upside down by the Russians, and when they began to be injected and experimented on.

It was all one big psychopathic plan.

"But that's not all it says. There's another file that said that 'The gate must remain open for heightened experiments to remain at full strength to gather reliable testing results.' "

Hopper looked up at his daughter with worried eyes. He feared that he understood what the file meant, and he hated it. And judging from the fearful look on Y/N's face, he could tell that she understood what that meant as well.

They drew their energy from the upside down to use their abilities.

They're connected to the upside down in more ways then they originally thought. It would explain a lot.

And that absolutely terrified them.

"Goddammit.." Hopper muttered to himself, his hands running over his face to drag at his mouth.
This was stressful to take in all at once, especially considering that the gate was obviously weakened.

Which meant, that the turbines weren't working enough. Which meant that the nuclear reactor wasn't on. Which meant that the gate didn't have enough of a power source to allow them access through.

Which could only mean..

"We're gonna have to turn on the nuclear reactor, aren't we?" Y/N finally spoke into the room, that seemed eerily quiet despite the alarms still ringing loudly.

Hopper turned to look at his daughter who seemed to be matured beyond her years to offer that choice to begin with. It was then that he realized, that she didn't have much of a choice.

She grew up fast—way too fast for a fifteen, almost sixteen year old teenage girl. She's undergone trauma that no one should ever go through, yet here Y/N stood—strong and ready to face whatever she had to face.

It was a prideful moment for Hopper.

"Yeah.." He breathed worriedly, "Yeah, I think we might."

This was a difficult decision to make, considering the colossal consequences that could happen if they turn on a nuclear reactor that has enough radiation to practically kill upon contact.

But what choice did they have? They were this close to finally escaping, and their determination was too powerful to be deterred.

"Alright." Y/N huffed, running her hand through her short hair that she had grown back fairly quickly thanks to her advanced healing abilities. "Then let's set this baby off."

Hopper nodded, walking over to the control station that was set in the gate room that control the opening and closing of the gate, seeing the infinite controls and buttons on the desktop.

However, Y/N's sense of precognition helped her choose the right controls that should turn on the reactor downstairs, thus allowing them to get through. "It's these buttons." She guided her father.

Hopper nodded, his hand hovering over the large buttons, obviously hesitant to press against them. Were they doing the right thing? Was this absolutely necessary to their escape?

How do they know nothing else will happen?

That's the thing. They don't. And they won't stick around to find out.

"Dad?" Y/N persisted, her voice gently encouraging.

Hopper nodded once again before turning his head to shoot a smile back at his daughter, "You ready to get out of here, kid?"

Y/N smiled weakly, nodding back. "Yeah. Let's do this."

And with that, Hopper pressed two consecutive buttons to trigger the warning that the reactor was about to be activated before there was one final button to confirm its launch. With one last look at Y/N, she nodded, and Hopper pressed the final button.

The console above the buttons that triggered the reactor's activity now glowed a screen, text appearing on the screen that read in Russian : 'NUCLEAR REACTOR NOW ACTIVE.'

It wasn't long before the gate now surged to glow a more powerfully bright reddish purple, the vines now stretched to grow again, planting it's roots anywhere close to the entrance of the gate.

Y/N and Hopper gazed up at the gate's eerie beauty, their lips curling into excited smiles at their theory proving to work out to be a success.
"We did it.." Y/N breathed excitedly, turning to look at her dad, who returned her excitement as the gate's glow hue reflected on their faces.

They're finally getting out. They're finally getting away from their torturers.

"Let's get the hell out of here, kid-.."

Hopper's sentence was cut off by a shrill alarm that came from the console of the control desk they were just at, by the gate's controls.

Hopper and Y/N then ran over to see what caused the console to ring out an alarm, when they saw the screen that once read :
'NUCLEAR REACTOR NOW ACTIVE.'

The screen now read :

'WARNING : NUCLEAR REACTOR OVERHEATED. TURN OFF IMMEDIATELY.'

Y/N glanced up worriedly at her father, seeing his own eyes widened at the unpromising sight of the screen.

"What do we do?" Y/N yelled over the alarm, her eyes squinted as she tried to look at her father through the hue of the gate's light that now wavered.

Hopper turned to look at his daughter, his face now determined. There was no way he was giving up now, especially now that they're this close to making it out.

"We have to leave before the gate closes!" Hopper yelled over the alarm, his hand over his eyes as the gate continued to waver in it's light, the entrance gradually becoming weaker by the second.

But then, to add on to their worries, there was a loud pounding at the door of the gate room. The thuds sounds like fists banging frustratedly against the door, to then go to the door handle to try to open it that way.

It sounded like whoever was trying to get in, was desperately trying. It was almost like they didn't know how.

But the fists didn't seem to be loud enough to belong to that of a bulky Russian guard..

"Ah shit!" Hopper cursed, hearing the pounds at the door, assuming it to be more Russian guards trying to get in.

Y/N found that she felt a strange pull towards the door, like her precognition was telling her that she needed to open that door.
That whoever was on the other side of that door, they needed them.

"Come on, kid! We have to go, now!" Hopper yelled again, this time, taking her by her wrist to pull her along with him.

The door's pounding stopped.

"Wait, the banging stopped-.." Y/N tried to tell her father as he led her closer to the gate, but he didn't seem to see the importance in her observations.

"Kid, now!"

He was right. They didn't have any time left.

Y/N snapped out of her immersive thoughts, now aware that Hopper had brought her with him to the very front of the gate.
They were so close, they could feel the energy radiate off of the web-like vines that were stung across the entrance.

Y/N subconsciously reached to hold her father's hand beside her for reassurance, to which he held her hand in his tightly.

They took one last look at each other, the alarms ringing in the background, before they nodded reassuringly.

And with that, they took a breath, and stepped through the vines to enter through the gate.

And at that same exact moment, the gate room door burst open.

Joyce caught one glimpse at the pair of people that just stepped through the gate, but she immediately knew.
"Jim! Y/N!" She tried yelling for them to get their attention, but there was no way they could hear Joyce over all the alarms.

And then, they were already gone.

They were already through the gate.

But Joyce knew it was Hopper and Y/N.

So, she left Murray's side, and without a word, made a sprinting bolt for the gate's entrance, and disappeared into the upside down..

⋆

Author's Note :

sorry if that was confusing, that was a lot to take in!

if you have any questions about what has happened in this chapter , just ask, & I'll answer!

I KNOW, IM SORRY I LEFT YOU ON THAT CLIFFHANGER & I WOULDVE WRITTEN MORE BUT IM JUST TOO SLEEP DEPRIVED RN

( i'll be writing the next update soon, that way you won't be left on that cliffhanger for too long )

N E X T C H A P T E R : OK FOR REAL THIS TIME GUYS ISTG YOU'L GET JOPPER (in person)

you'll see.. ;)

it's not proofread :3

.

what do you think about all this ??

any theories ? any predictions?

thanks for reading.. stay tuned !!

PUBLISHED
JULY 16 2020
at 1:05 AM

2924 words