Chapter Text
Chapter 1 -
February 19 1984
Eleven
I was a year older today, Papa said. I did not know what that meant but it seemed a happy occasion that involved Eggos and ice cream. “You are 13 today, Eleven,” he said sitting beside me after placing the treat with a candle in the middle of it. “On this candle you blow it out and make a wish.”
“Wish?” I did not know how to make a wish, I never had made one before.
“Yes. Something you desire to happen,” he said. I thought about it: the only thing I had wanted other than Eggos and to make people happy was to get away from the Bad Place, which I had months ago when people called reporters had come and had cameras to see inside the Bad Place. I remembered many of the Bad Men did not welcome these cameras, but for some reason Papa had known about them and was not scared. I think he might have invited them there.
I always had a theory that despite all he had done to me, Papa loved me. He had saved me from the Bad Place. So maybe that was love. Since then, he was sweet. He said often
“I blow out?” I asked Papa, wondering if he wanted me to blow out the flame with my powers, something relatively easy.
“Yes. And wish, Eleven, but do not tell what you wished.” The candle flickered and then went out just staring at it. Papa came up behind me and placed his hands on my shoulders, softly. No hurt, just nice.
I wished for happiness like this forever. And I wouldn’t tell for fear it might not come true. “I love you, Eleven.”
“Love?” I didn’t know that word. “What is love?”
“Love is when people care about others but it comes in all different sorts,” he said kneeling down so he could be at my level and giving me a hug. “I care about you, Eleven.”
Martin Brenner
After Eleven ate her Eggo treat I had found how to make in the paper I gave her the present I had bought for her to celebrate this milestone in her life that Maggie never got to experience. I suppose that it was because of this loss and knowing the true evil of the MKUltra program first hand that I was here after coming out of some alternative dimension wherein a bereaved man would be turned into very much the monsters that had taken everything from him when they’d taken her. It might be exactly that or it could be deeper: that I had realized that in my infiltration I was the only monster there was because of my willingness to submit if that meant finding out the truth. Submission becomes complacency and complacency roots evil. The version of me that Maggie had known in her childhood was not the man Eleven knew as ‘Papa’ and for that Maggie’s specter hated the man I was trying to destroy since the escape.
But then again my time with Eleven had already brought me challenges that I would never
Perhaps that was the reason why I wanted Eleven to be given the world was that need for atonement, to make Maggie see that in trying to find out what had been done to her I found myself after losing sight of the man a child thought had hung the stars. Today I was going to tell Eleven her name and once again find myself at the feet of this little child, teenager now, that I had taken so much from. Not me, but who I had become. Who I hated. Who used the degrees awarded to me for what he defined as good but soon had twisted the notion of the word.
“This is for you,” I handed her the wrapped packages, “You open them.” Obedient, she did. The silver paper tore away to reveal photographs in frames: one of Terry Ives, one of her in a dress she had selected not long after escaping the lab with me after I had burned the place in an act of freeing arson. In the picture, Eleven’s hair had grown quickly to be at her chin and the yellow dress she had wanted making her look like a young girl, manifesting my shame almost like Maggie was standing there looking at me and staring at me in disappointment. It should’ve been her and now she has to make sure the Bad Man, the warped because of loss Martin Brenner, not return to hurt my second chance.
“Pretty,” Eleven said. She held up the picture of her mother, “Who?”
“Your mother.”
“Mama?”
“Yes.”
“Where?” Eleven’s light in her brown eyes almost made me want to look away. There was nothing I could tell her about Terry Ives’ fate that wouldn’t stir her curiosity and manifest Maggie as my ghost of shame as I tried to escape my past as hard as the girl before me, the one who trusted me in spite of all I’d done to wrong her.
“We will see her one day,” If I had at any chance at redemption with Eleven I must not dance around Terry Ives or I lose. I lose, and my redemption is meaningless. I lose, and it’s just like nothing ever happened. I lose, and the idea of redemption itself shatters. Eleven looked at the picture longer and then picked up the one of herself that on the frame had her true name written.
“Papa? Jane?” she pointed to the letters, “Who?”
“You,” I told her. She shook her head and showed me the number on her arm, the idea I was no better than the Germans rising in my throat as I could almost hear Maggie, innocent as Eleven but having use of words she didn’t. You did this to her. They did it to me. I thought you were coming to save me, Papa! But you didn’t! You let them hurt her! “You are Jane, Eleven. Jane Mildred Ives.”
“Jane. Pretty. I am Jane, Papa.”