Work Text:
Winnie (daughter)
Winnie is what her mama calls her, when she’s born a month too early, red-faced and screaming in the arms of the midwife in the middle of March, snow swirling in front of the sunrise outside the window of the small flat.
Her birth certificate is a simple thing, stating that Arwen Joyce Ives was born to Elenor Jane Ives on March 12th, 1990. No father listed.
It’s embroidered on her clothes as she grows up, the shirts her mama spends hours sewing in front of the wood-stove every evening as Winnie flips through books on the carpet, looking at the pictures and eventually sounding out the words. She learns how to write her name in shaky lettering with her left hand, her mother practicing her Icelandic alongside her English as she guides Winnie through the shapes of the letters, the way the letters work together, “as a team,” to form a word.
Winnie starts reading when she’s three and a half, devouring any and all books she can get her hands on. She’s an inquisitive child, absorbing knowledge like a sponge, whether that be learning how to make bread from Edda while her mother buys fabric from the next town over or deconstructing and reconstructing the walkie talkie that her mama pulled out of a shoebox in the closet for her, the shoebox that Winnie wasn’t, under any circumstances, allowed to touch.
Her mama tells her stories every night before she goes to sleep, stories about monsters and vines, about sorcerers and family. She does little voices for each of them, deep and gruff for a man called Hop, slow and kind for a woman named Joyce, loud and rambly for a Mike, weaving the settings of a cabin in the woods, of a mall in the middle of the United States, of the sunny desert of California.
Winnie doesn’t miss how her mama’s eyes shine a bit every night when they’re done. How the stories sound less like stories and more like memories when Winnie’s drifting off to sleep, how some nights, if her mama’s tired enough, she can see what she’s talking about, walking around from memory to memory with her.
(Those nights are only ever for the happy memories. For waffles and halloween and the mall. For a boy with curls and a gapped smile, posing in front of an Icelandic pub in a sweatshirt with the letters MIT while her mama’s memory giggles.)
One night, she catches a glimpse of a group of children in hospital gowns, playing with sad-looking toys in a room with a rainbow on the floor before mama jerks up, pushing Winnie out, eyes harried in the kind of way that she gets when there’s a group of American tourists coming through the town, loud voices echoing over the cobble.
“Winnie-” Her mama’s voice is strangled, raw in a way that Winnie only hears from the living room when she thinks Winnie’s asleep and she can hear the rustle of the shoebox being pulled down from the closet and set on the floor.
“Who was the girl at the chess set, mama? I haven’t seen her before.”
Her mama gets a far away look in her eyes, the kind that Edda used to get sometimes when she was thinking about her son who had moved to Denmark, moving to run her hands through Winnie’s hair, long and unruly down her back, voice soft as she speaks. “That was my sister, baby.”
“Oh,” Winnie’s hands play with the fringe of her quilt, “ Where does she live?”
Her mama’s face twists up, fingers tracing patterns on Winnie’s back, “She lives far away baby, too far for us to find her.”
“But why?”
Mama sighs, “Maybe I’ll tell you about her sometime,” A pause, “ When you’re older.”
(She learns, eventually, that her sister was a hero, and that mama carries one of her rings on a necklace, always beneath her shirt to be close to her heart).
Ari (superhero)
When she starts primary school the kids call her Ari, an eagle. She likes the nickname, thinks it makes her sound strong, like her mama. Plus, it makes it sound like she can fly, which she can, sorta. Not that anyone is allowed to know that she can jump higher than normal, stay in the air just longer than what would be physically possible. Mama says she’s a superhero, that she has powers, but, like the heroes in the comics that appear in Mama’s bedside table every now and then, she has to keep her powers a secret, because “the world isn’t a safe place for superheroes.”
Mama says it's to keep them safe from the bad men, the ones in the memories that she refuses to show at night. Winnie wonders if it's related to the reason they've moved towns twice in the past year, the way her mama looks over her shoulder every few seconds when they’re at the store together, jumps every time they hear an American. Her mama’s a superhero too, eventually immortalized on the pages of a book that her mama brings home one day after they’ve just moved to Sweden, a book with a dedication that reads:
to the bard, the cleric,
the ranger, the zoomer,
and
to the mage,
good campaign,
- the paladin
Winnie reads it, The Upside Down by Mike Wheeler, for the first time when she’s seven, a few months after mama brings it home. It has a pretty cover, Winnie thinks, almost like a comic, covered in vines and dice and gaping teeth, with a group of kids on their bikes in the middle. Mama says the cover was done by a Will when she asks, and when she asks who that is, she responds with a soft “my brother, he always was such a good artist.”
Winnie doesn’t ask any more questions, especially not when she notices her mama’s bloody nose and red-rimmed eyes later that night, a bandana lying haphazardly next to the sofa.
She devours it in less than a week anyway, reading about a girl named Eleven with superpowers and thinking that she’s just like her mama, and isn’t that silly that their names are similar? Although mama hates being called El, prefers Nora, so maybe they aren’t so similar after all. The other characters are the same as the ones that fight monsters in the stories mama would tell her at night, although Winnie doesn’t remember a boy named Will going missing in mama’s stories, and she wonders how they could be so similar and yet so different.
(Winnie learns, when she’s nine and the second book comes out, that the tattoo on her mama’s wrist under the watch she always wears isn’t just for fun, and that maybe some stories are less made-up than she thought.)
After that, she asks more questions about it. Asks her mama to tell her stories about the lab, the creatures from another world, saying that “Mike’s story is good, but I want to hear the real story mama.”
And so, she does what she does best, hangs on to every word that spills from her mama’s lips on the rug in their new apartment, a cozy thing in Manitoba, learning everything she can about “the party” and the horrors of the Upside Down. She keeps a small notebook under a loose floorboard under her bed, cataloging everything she can remember after her mama leaves every night, all in the search of one question.
Dad?
Known:
- Mama knew before Iceland
- MIT sweatshirt
- Curly hair
- Fun smile
- Lord of the Rings?
- In the Party?
Will Byers - brother
Mike Wheeler - not MIT
Dustin Henderson?
Lucas Sinclair - with Max
AJ (niece)
When she’s barely two her mama leaves for a week, coming back with a round of bruises that make Edda dote on her and a small bag of books that she tells Edda are from “an old friend” that she had “lost contact with” for a while, all said with a soft smile.
A few months later they start getting small packages of snack cakes, Winnie’s favorite, delivered to her mama’s business PO box in Stockholm that she visits every few weeks. Mama doesn’t mention where they’re from and Winnie doesn’t ask, happily grabbing for them whenever they get set on the table.
It’s not until Winnie has the grand idea of looking for her mama’s sister (the night after she’s told to wait until she’s older) that she meets him. She doesn’t know what mama’s sister would have looked like, but tries to look anyway, figuring that she was probably a superhero too, channels the feeling of blood dripping down her nose until she’s walking through a shallow pool of water, deep chords coming from somewhere in the distance.
She doesn’t find mama’s sister, though, instead, she finds a man perched on the side of a bed, tongue tucked between his lips, strumming on an odd-looking guitar that her mama would probably call “bitchin’”, long curls down over his shoulders. The music is coming from him, and as she gets closer she can feel the rhythm, a speaker next to the bed pulsing in time with the beat.
His head snaps up when she touches the speaker, seeing if she can feel the vibrations of the odd-looking guitar, eyes meeting hers before he grins, all teeth that are slightly too pointy.
“Didn’t think I’d be seeing you for a little while longer AJ, you’ve gotten a lot taller than the last card your mom sent my way.”
Winnie’s eyebrows furrow, “AJ?” She thinks back to the extra copies of school pictures that her mama buys every year, the envelopes with international postage that end up in the mailbox. She wonders if she’s found an answer to one of her mama’s many mysteries.
The man grins, twirling a guitar pick around in his right hand, drumming on his thigh with his right, “Arwen Jo, AJ, you’ve got the name of a rockstar there kid. Or a superhero, take your pick really.”
She takes a step back before he continues, “I’m a friend of your mom’s, kid. My name’s Eddie.”
Nodding, she looks at him, noticing the package of snack cakes under the bed, shoved haphazardly into a package with a Swedish address scrawled on the side. She just grins, giving a small wave as she lets herself fade back into her own bed, ripping the mask off her eyes and turning over to go to sleep, a smile still on her face.
It becomes a weekly ritual, and Winnie ends up with a guitar for her eighth birthday so she can finally learn the chords that Eddie’s been demonstrating for her from afar. She sends him cards from a P.O. Box, as well as the occasional trinket or patch for his battle vest, her favorite of which is a tiny one that he sews onto the inside of his breast-pocket, a purple bat that reads world’s most metal uncle.
Also for her eighth birthday, she gets given a gorgeous boxed set of the Lord of the Rings from the bag that had lived in the hall closet for years, pages embossed and covers gloriously thick, smelling like the best bookshop she’s ever been in.
That night, under the soft glow of her flashlight, she reads:
AJ,
You’re a metal kid. Don’t forget that.
-EM
And:
AJ,
Your mom went on this sort of journey once. You should ask her to tell you about it sometime. It was no Mordor, but it was pretty goddamn close.
-EM
And finally, tucked in the back of Return of the King is a sticky note:
AJ,
Your dad would be proud of you kid. This one was his favorite.
-EM
Winnie Jo (student)
She starts going by Winnie Jo after they move (again), this time to a small apartment in a town in Manitoba. She’s a grade ahead now, in the sixth grade instead of the fifth, something that manages to make her feel both incredibly big and infinitesimally small at the same time, the school louder, bigger, and somehow more alive than any of her previous schools.
She spends hours before her first day of school in front of the mirror, rehearsing how to speak in a way that doesn't divulge any hint of an accent that might make her seem odd, pulling her curls in and out of ponytails and braids until she wants to cry. She’s pulled every sweater out of her closet and thrown them onto the floor when her mama gets home from work, knocking on the door gently so as to not poke the bear.
“Winnie, baby, are you okay in there?” Her voice is soft, but tired after a long shift at the local hospital, a social work job that has made her the happiest Winnie has seen her in a while.
Winnie looks up at her with tears in her eyes, voice quiet, clutching a pair of jeans like they’re going to run off, “What if they don’t like me, mama? What if they think I’m stupid, or awkward? Do people still get shoved in lockers?”
Her mama grimaces, coming to sit next to her on the bed, pulling her into her arms and smoothing out her hair like she used to do when Winnie was a lot younger “Baby, have I ever told you about Angela?”
“Who?” Winnie chokes out.
“When I moved to California, right before high school, there was this girl, Angela. She made fun of me sometimes,” Her mama’s face was sour, like a lemon, “Or, well, a lot of the time. Anyway, I let her get to me, and ended up throwing a rollerskate at her face.”
“Ouch,” Winnie rubs her nose in sympathy.
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure she needed surgery to get her nose reset,” Mama says, and Winnie isn’t sure if she’s kidding or not, “Anyways, my point is,” She looks Winnie dead in the eyes, “If they don’t like you, that’s their problem. And if anyone, and I mean anyone, gives you trouble, you come tell me, yeah?”
“Okay mama,” Winnie mutters, not fully believing it.
“I love you Winnie Jo,” She drops a kiss on Winnie’s forehead.
“I love you too mama,” She sniffles softly, “Can you help me pick out an outfit for tomorrow please?”
“Of course baby,” she picks up a soft yellow sweater, secretly Winnie’s favorite from Eddie a year ago, and a pair of jeans, “These look okay?”
Winnie just nods, head still swirling.
“Oh, and baby? Please don’t hit anyone with an ice skate to try and be like me.”
Winnie giggles at that, her chest feeling slightly lighter, nerves still thrumming under her skin.
Despite her nerves, she makes a friend that first day, a girl with flaming red hair named Rhonda whose mom works at the same hospital as Winnie’s mama, in pediatrics. They have their first sleepover two weeks later, and after that the two are inseparable, with dinners at the Hiegleman house twice a week becoming part of Winnie’s routine.
(And if her mama slips up and calls Rhonda “Max” once or twice, well, Winnie’s too busy with her newfound friend to notice.)
Ives (athlete)
“IVES!” is what her teammates yell at her when she’s on the ice, a nudge to slip them the puck, or, better yet, take out whoever is right next to her with a well-timed hit to the back of the knee and a sugary sweet “Sorry!”
Her jersey number is 11, after her mama, the number a bold red on the white fabric under IVES; a reclamation of sorts as she skates around on the ice, taking out boys a full head taller than her with all the grace and finesse of a flailing baby bird.
She had started playing when she was six, when her mama realized that she “needed an outlet for her emotions,” so that they didn’t come out in “bloody noses and coverups.” She wasn’t fully sure what that meant, but the prospect of being allowed on the lake by their apartment to practice excited her so much that it didn’t matter. Her first skates were clunky and slightly too small for her feet, but she loved them so much that she cried when she eventually grew out of them.
(They live in a shoebox under her bed, alongside a green scrunchie her mama gave her, some miniatures Eddie sent her, and a blurry polaroid of Dustin Henderson with some guy named Steve, who Winnie is pretty sure is wearing one of Eddie’s shirts).
She still loves it, even if she’s the only girl left on the team, with Rhonda finding herself better suited to figure skating than to hockey. Her days are now split between school and the rink, then either going to Rhonda’s house or back to her own apartment depending on the timing of their mothers’ shifts, getting dinner together before either having a sleepover or riding back to their respective homes.
On the rare day that she doesn’t have practice, she hangs out with Rhonda in the town’s small library, teaching herself advanced chemistry and French, the latter of which she picked up after a STEM summer camp in Quebec. She goes through books like she’s breathing air, and all three of the librarians know her by name.
Her mama says that she must have picked up her love for the hard sciences “somewhere else,” which Winnie knows is just another way of saying that her father was similarly disposed, even if her mama refuses to tell her much about him. For that, she talks to Eddie, who tells her stories about a loyal and selfless bard, insanely intelligent with a heart of gold.
She learns that he works as an adjunct professor at MIT, his alma mater, conducting research on theoretical physics and astronomy for the university. Eddie says that he has a cat, named Jean Grey, like the comics that lie untouched on mama’s side table, and that he lives in a duplex in Boston. Boston has good youth hockey teams, the computers at the library tell her, some of the only official U18 teams for girls that college scouts even entertain thoughts of.
(Boston also has one of the best STEM magnet schools in North America, not that Winnie’s been researching such a thing.)
She stares at the polaroid under her bed sometimes, fingers itching to tie a bandana around her head and find him. But Eddie tells her not to one day, saying that he doesn’t want her first impression of him to be a “bad day, he gets those a lot nowadays.”
Her mama has bad days too, days where she barely gets out of bed, days where Winnie unwraps the meals covered in foil in the fridge, open if i can’t make food written on the aluminum in her mama’s soft scrawl. Those are the days with the sobs from her mama’s bedroom, the days where the lights flicker and the power company can never find anything wrong.
Winnie wonders what Dustin’s bad days are like, even finds herself wondering whose name he screams in the dead of night after a bad dream.
(Her mama’s are always the same: Eddie. Lucas. Mike. Hop. Joyce. Will. Max. Dustin. Winnie. Eddie. Lucas. Mike. Hop. Joyce. Will. Max. Dustin. Winnie. Eddie. Lucas. Mike. Hop. Joyce. Will. Max. Dustin. Winnie - like a tape that’s stuck, a constant chorus of “NO!” and “Papa!” and “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry-”)
Arwen (H) (daughter, again)
It’s a blustery fall day in 2002 when Dustin sees the notice in the paper’s obituary section for the county, lying discarded on Steve (and Eddie)’s kitchen table. The name stares at him, taunting him like the postcards he gets in the mail every year or so:
Terry Elizabeth Ives
He’s not sure why he feels such a need to go visit, whether its some twisted sense of obligation, a need for closure, or some fucked up hope that somehow things are safe enough that she’d be there, even if he hasn’t seen her in over a decade.
He drags Steve and Eddie with him, because they’re the only two left in Hawkins, Eddie living in Steve’s basement (bedroom?) after he knocked on his door one night, beaten and bloody while sporting the biggest smile on his face that Dustin had ever seen on a dead man, having been there for their annual movie night.
A woman answers the door, face sad but light.
“Hi, um. I’m Dustin, Dustin Henderson. We were, uh, we were friends of Jane’s.”
He tries to not focus too much on the “were” of it all.
There’s a kid lying against the couch in the living room as Becky leads them into the small house. The girl, who can’t be older than 11 or 12 by the looks of it, barely looks up, a full head of curls buried in the book in front of her, Asimov by the looks of it. Her hair is haphazardly braided down her back, spilling out around her face that reminds Dustin so much of her that it hurts. She’s in a pair of leggings and a Madonna tee-shirt over a striped longsleeve, flannel wrapped around her waist.
She’s gotta be Becky’s kid. A cousin or something with the way Becky looks at her, a mild fondness on her face that is surely parental, “Winnie, we have visitors.”
She looks up lazily as Dustin walks in, a small nod of acknowledgement before looking right back down at her book, which Dustin realizes is Asimov in fucking French, which is just weird for a kid who is definitely in middle school in the middle of the middle of bumfuck nowhere Indiana, which isn’t exactly known for its educational system.
“Oh come on AJ, I know I gave you a perfectly fine Black Sabbath shirt for Christmas, and you go on disrespecting me with this!” Eddie comes behind him, Steve on his tail while he’s gesturing at the girl, who he clearly knows, what the actual fuck.
The girl’s eyes lit up, “Mama and I went to see her in Winnipeg last year, Edward. Madonna is perfectly respectable.”
And oh, she’s Canadian? Maybe Becky moved and had someone caring for Terry at the house for her last few years? But then that didn’t make sense, and Dustin knew for a fact that Madonna had been in Chicago on the tour the year prior, so going all the way to fucking Winnipeg didn’t make sense in the slightest.
Christ, he could feel a migraine coming on.
Eddie smiles, the kind that makes the smile lines around his eyes crinkle, “Make any boys cry yet this season?”
The girl, AJ, Winnie, whatever her name was, thought for a minute before grinning, gapped teeth gleaming in a way that was all too familiar, “Only two. But one of them really deserved it this time.”
“What’d he do?”
“He said some stuff to me. Which I would have been fine with until he said stuff to Rhonda too, and by that point I was like, okay, so you don’t just have a problem with me you just have a problem with girls, so I told him that he would be lucky if he so much as got to touch a girl, and then my skate may have found his face “accidentally” during the next practice.”
“Attagirl,” Eddie grins, “What’d he say?”
“The typical,” She sighed, gently closing her book and setting it on the sofa, leaning her head back slightly, “called us a pair of nerds, said that’s its weird for girls to play hockey, then tried to relate it all back to “daddy issues,” or something like that, which I know really got to Rhonda because her dad’s back in rehab again and it's been really hard on her mom. Then Tommy joined in on it, and I might have made sure he fell as soon as he stepped on the ice. Pretty sure he chipped one of his adult teeth,” She grinned, “And then he cried like a baby.”
“That’s my girl!” Eddie claps the kid on her back, before looking back at Dustin and Steve, who also clearly has no idea who this child that Eddie so clearly knows even is, “Sorry,” his hand goes to the nape of his neck, rubbing at the skin there in a way that he only does when he’s nervous, “Steve, Dustin, this is Winnie Jo, AJ if you want to be metal about it. AJ, this is Steve, Stevie-O, and uh-this is Dustin,” He pauses for a moment, before reiterating it, his eyebrows doing some sort of weird shit on his face that Dustin doesn’t have the mental bandwidth to even begin to decipher, “Dustin Henderson”
Dustin isn’t sure why Eddie looks nervous, or why he pauses for so long as the girl’s eyes look over Dustin before he introduces him.
The girl just nods, looking down at her book quickly as the lamp behind her flickers quickly, hands fidgeting in her lap, before she looks back up at Dustin, eyes darting over his face in a way that makes him feel oddly exposed.
“Holy shit,” she breathes out, “ég get ekki trúað, holy shit.” The light flickers again behind her and that’s all the warning Dustin gets before he’s enveloped in a hug, the girl muttering a string of exclamations against his coat that sound oddly like Icelandic, holding onto him like she’s afraid he’s going to disappear when he lets go.
Dustin is rooted to the floor, several thoughts buzzing around his head all at once, not helping with the way that his head was already pounding:
- Who the fuck was this girl and how did Eddie know her?
- Winnie speaks Icelandic
- That he needed to ask Steve for the prescription shit because he could already tell this migraine was going to be an absolute bitch.
- The last time he saw El was in Iceland
- Winnie speaks fucking Icelandic-
- Winnie was the spitting image of El
- This migraine was absolutely going to kill him
- The last time he saw El, they-
- Oh shit-
Before he can even manage to stutter anything out, the girl (El’s daughter?) lets go of him, looking up at him with eyes that are the echo of her mother’s, “Arwen, my real name’s Arwen. Arwen Joyce H, though I didn’t have a confirmation of the H until approximately five minutes ago, but I could still be wrong so please don’t be too mad at me, yeah?”
“It could stand for Hopper?” His voice comes out all strangled, like he got his throat torn to shreds by Demobats or something, and c’mon, he really couldn’t make a better impression on a girl who he is 85% sure may or may not share his DNA with the way she rambles?
The girl grins, and it's then that Dustin realizes that she’s crying, tears running down her cheeks, “I’m pretty sure it doesn’t,” she laughs weakly, “plus you’re exactly who I saw in the happy memories, so there’s that.”
“Happy memories?” He asks, voice low, trying to keep the tears at bay, because goddamnit he has too much of a headache for this sort of revelation.
“Yeah,” she hugs him tighter, “Mama’s happy memories.”
He can’t help it, but he starts sobbing, pulling Winnie as close as possible, taking a moment to memorize the way her curls are assaulting his shirt, the way the book, still clutched in her left hand, is awkwardly jutting into his back. His head is pounding, his cheeks are wet, but Dustin can feel himself smiling through the tears, “Holy shit.”
She looks up at him again, her smile downright blinding as she nods, “Holy shit.”
That's when he hears the clatter, sees the groceries scattered on the floor around a pair of black boots. His head snaps up, eyes meeting hers from across the room, the jolt that he feels shoot up his spine in sync with the way the lights quickly pulse once before going quiet.
“Holy shit-”