090 — Unlucky Bob
Eleven set her fork down in the middle of dinner.
She sat with it for a moment — the information settling through her in layers, each one landing differently. Her mother was alive. Her mother had walked up to the lab alone and demanded her back. Her mother had done that for her, for a daughter she'd never stopped looking for, and the lab had broken her for it.
Eleven's eyes filled and spilled over before she'd made any decision to cry. She didn't wipe it away.
She'd built the idea of a mother mostly from observation — Mike's house, Will's house, the particular quality of attention that moved through those spaces when a mom was in them. The way Joyce could read Will across a crowded room. The way Karen Wheeler's frustration with her kids still had warmth underneath it, visible if you knew what you were looking for. Eleven had catalogued all of it without meaning to, the way you catalogued things you wanted and weren't sure you were allowed to want.
And now there was a real one. Damaged, unreachable, sitting in a rocking chair repeating words that didn't connect to anything anymore — but alive. Present in the world. Proof that she had been wanted badly enough that someone had walked into the most dangerous place in Hawkins to try to get her back.
That felt like something. It felt like a lot.
"I'm sorry," Hopper said. He meant it in the way he meant most things — without decoration, straight through.
"Don't be." Eleven reached across the table and put her hand over his — his big, scarred, coffee-stained hand that had taught her to tie her shoes and argued with her about Eggos and sat outside her door the first night she'd had a nightmare bad enough to wake the whole cabin. She squeezed it. "You're a good dad. The best."
Hopper's jaw worked. His eyes went somewhere above her head for a moment. Then he cleared his throat, nodded once, and picked up his fork like a man with somewhere urgent to be.
Eleven smiled and went back to her Eggos.
The Palace Arcade on a Friday night was the loudest place in Hawkins by a significant margin, which was either its best or worst quality depending on who you asked.
Max had been at the Dig Dug machine for the better part of an hour, and the crowd around her had gone from two people to six to the current configuration of Mike, Will, Lucas, and Dustin in a loose semicircle, monitoring her score with the focused intensity usually reserved for sporting events. She broke the house record with the focused calm of someone who had been doing this long enough that the adrenaline had converted into something more like muscle memory, and accepted the resulting chaos from her friends with a faint smile and both hands out for the high-fives.
"That was insane," Dustin announced, to no one specifically and everyone generally.
"Thank you," Max said, rotating her wrist. "My arm is completely dead."
It was getting late — the kind of late that had a parental consequence attached to it — so the group filtered out through the arcade's front door into the cooling evening air, bikes lined up along the rack, the neon signs throwing color across the parking lot asphalt.
Lucas and Dustin arrived at the bike rack at the same moment, looked at each other, looked at Max, and both opened their mouths at the same time.
"Hey, do you need a ride home —"
"I can ride you home if you want —"
They stopped. The look they exchanged had moved past strange into something more like a standoff.
Max watched this with the expression of someone watching a nature documentary and finding it more interesting than expected. She unslung her skateboard from her back and set it on the ground, rolling it lightly under her foot. "I was just going to skate. It's not that far."
"It's kind of far though," Lucas said.
"Kind of dark," Dustin added.
"I could —"
"I was actually going to —"
Max bit the inside of her cheek to keep from smiling. She was about to say something that would have made both of them turn red when headlights swept across the parking lot and a car came in too fast, braking hard and kicking up a spray of loose gravel that sent everyone stepping back and covering their faces.
The engine idled. The window came down.
Billy looked out at the group with the expression he seemed to have settled on as his default — bored contempt, with the specific targeting system of someone who'd already identified the weakest point in any room. His eyes went past Mike, past Will, past Lucas and Dustin, and landed on Max.
"You were supposed to wait at school." His voice had the flat quality of someone performing patience they didn't have. "Get in."
The smile left Max's face completely. She didn't say goodbye — didn't have the window to — just picked up her skateboard, gave the group one quick apologetic look that contained a lot of information in a short space, and got in.
The car was gone before the dust settled.
"What the —" Mike spat grit and looked at where the taillights had been.
"That's her stepbrother," Will said. "Jonathan mentioned him. The transfer student."
Dustin watched the empty road. "She looked scared of him."
Nobody had a good answer to that. The mood had gone out of the evening. Mike gave the signal — late, go home, parents will be waiting — and they split off toward their respective neighborhoods, moving fast to make up for the time they'd lost.
Will made it home with enough lead in his legs to feel the ride. The kitchen was lit up warm, and through the window he could see Joyce and Bob moving around each other in the easy, slightly bumping-into-each-other way of people who'd gotten comfortable in a shared space. Dinner smelled like it was done.
He came through the door and Bob spotted the dust in his hair a half-second before Joyce turned around. Without a word, Bob stepped slightly into Joyce's sightline and made a small gesture toward Will's head — fix it — while keeping his expression neutral.
Will caught on fast. "Hey, Mom. I got kind of sweaty on the ride home, can I grab a quick shower before we eat?"
"Sure, honey." Joyce was already pulling a serving dish from the cabinet, attention split.
Will mouthed thanks at Bob on his way to the bathroom. Bob gave him a small nod and went back to setting the table.
After dinner, Bob found an opportunity to knock on Will's door. He settled into the desk chair and they talked for a while about nothing in particular before Bob circled around to the dust.
Will told him about the parking lot. Billy's car, the gravel, the way Max had gotten in without looking back.
Bob listened without interrupting, which Will was starting to notice was something that not all adults did. When Will finished, Bob was quiet for a moment, then said, "That kid's behavior isn't okay. You know that, right? That's not just brothers being rough."
"Yeah." Will looked at his hands. "I know."
"I'm not going to make it a whole thing with your mom unless it becomes a safety issue," Bob said. "But I want you to tell me if it gets worse. Deal?"
Will looked up. Bob had the expression of someone making an actual commitment, not just saying the thing adults said. "Deal."
Bob reached over and ruffled his hair once, quick and affectionate. "Good man."
He got up to leave, then paused in the doorway. "For what it's worth — I think you'd make a really good older brother to somebody someday."
Will considered this. "You'd make a good dad."
Bob's face did something complicated and happy. He pointed at Will in acknowledgment and let himself out.
He was still humming to himself twenty minutes later, driving back to his apartment on the far side of town. The streets were empty at this hour — Hawkins rolled up early on weeknights — and he had the road to himself, the radio low, the windows cracked to the November chill.
He was thinking about Joyce. About the conversation they hadn't quite had yet, the one where he stopped dancing around the word future and just said it plainly. He thought he knew what she'd say. He was pretty sure he knew. He was —
The shape came out of the dark between one second and the next.
Bob hit the brakes but there wasn't enough distance. The car connected with something solid, the impact shuddering up through the frame, and then the thing was on the hood — on the hood — and the windshield was covered in something dark and viscous and wrong, and he could see through a clear patch of glass that whatever was on the ground in front of his car was not a person, had never been a person, and was getting back up.
Bob sat completely still for approximately four seconds.
Then he got out of the car. Which, in retrospect, he would later acknowledge was not the best available decision.
"Hello?" His voice came out embarrassingly small. The shape on the ground was moving — pulling itself upright in a way that had too many joints, the face opening like a flower in the headlights, the sound it made not like anything biological. "Sir? Ma'am? Are you —"
The thing oriented toward him.
The machete came out of the dark so fast Bob didn't see it until after, the blade catching the headlight beam and throwing a streak of reflected light across the road. One clean stroke. The thing dropped and stayed down.
Richard stood over it, breathing steady, and looked at Bob on the ground.
"Bob."
Bob looked up at him from the asphalt where he'd sat down at some point without deciding to.
"Richard."
They ended up at Benny's, which was the only place still open, nursing coffees while Richard walked Bob through the short version of what he'd found under the lab. Bob ate most of a burger and about a third of his fries and periodically said oh man in a way that suggested he was processing on a slight delay.
"So the thing I hit with my car," Bob said finally.
"Demogorgon. Leftover from before the Gate closed."
"And you've been down in the sewers hunting them."
"Since this afternoon, yeah."
Bob absorbed this. He picked up a fry, looked at it, set it back down. "I genuinely thought I was going to prison tonight. I had this whole moment where I was thinking about how I was going to explain this to Joyce."
"You're not going to prison."
"I know that now." He finally ate the fry. "Chade. Richard. Whatever I'm supposed to —" He stopped. "Are we safe? Is Joyce safe? Are the kids safe?"
"Working on it. I'm going to loop in Hopper tomorrow and we'll run a proper sweep. It's contained to underground for now." Richard watched him settle slightly. "You and Joyce — how's that going?"
Bob laughed, short and a little self-conscious. "We're getting there. It's not a small thing, you know? She's got the boys, she's got her whole life here. I don't want to rush anything."
"She'd say yes."
Bob looked at him. "You think?"
"I think you already know that."
Bob looked out the window at the empty parking lot for a moment. Then he nodded, slowly, like a man filing something away to act on.
Richard reached into his backpack and pulled out a small stack of floppy disks, setting them on the table between the coffee mugs. "Different subject. I've got a proposal I've been putting together — computer operating system development. Early stage, but I think the architecture is solid." He slid them across. "You're the best technical mind I know in this town. I'd want you as a partner if you're interested."
Bob picked up one of the disks and turned it over in his hands, the professional curiosity clicking on immediately behind his eyes.
"Operating system," he said. "Like — from the ground up?"
"From the ground up."
Bob set the disk down and looked at the stack. The night had included a car accident, a monster, and a near-death experience. He picked up his coffee.
"Okay," he said. "I'm listening."
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