Time After Time (a Stranger Things fanfiction)

As Long As You Follow

"As Long as You Follow"

I've been wandering

Gone away too far

But the road was rough

To get back where you are

- Fleetwood Mac

Something told Hopper not to go straight to the Wheelers', and he blessed that old second sense. It had gotten him out of a lot of tight places, in the army and as a cop, and now. A line of long black cars, governmental cars, was parked in front of the Wheelers' house, and there were men carrying boxes of items out of the house.

"What's going on?" Nancy asked as Hopper eased the car into park.

"I don't know." He got out, taking the binoculars Joyce handed him with only an instant of surprise that Jonathan had been carrying binoculars and that Joyce knew he would want them. As he studied the men moving like ants in and out of her house, Nancy got out from the back seat and stood at his elbow.

"I have to go home."

"No, you can't."

"My mom! My dad, are there."

"They're gonna be okay," he reassured her absently, taking a step toward the line of black cars as he thought things over rapidly. Mike had to be with the bald girl. There was no other explanation. She had been the one held in that room, she had escaped, and they were looking for her, hunting her down, because she was valuable. Their experiment. So, the boys go out, against his express instructions, hunting for Will, and they find the girl, running from Benny's. They bring her home, they hide her, they protect her.

Nancy went around him, marching down the street.

"Hey." He caught her by the arm. "Hey. Hey hey hey!"

"No! Let go!"

"Hey. Listen to me, listen. The last thing in the world we need is them knowing you're mixed up in all this."

"Mike is over there!"

"They haven't found him," Hopper told her. "Not yet, at least." He pointed at a chopper in the sky.

A chopper over Hawkins. That would get some press.

Nancy stared at it in shock. "For Mike?!"

"Come on, get in the car." He dragged her with him as he went back. Once they were all inside with the door closed, he leaned on the seat, looking at the two kids in the back. "Look, we need to find them before they do. You have any idea where he might have gone?"

"No, I don't!" Nancy proclaimed loudly.

This was no time for sibling fights. "I need you to think."

"I don't know! We haven't talked a lot, I mean, lately."

"Is there any place that your parents don't know about that he might go?" Joyce asked. She was racking her brains, too, but Will liked to have some secrets, and she trusted him—and she was too tired half the time to keep tabs on everywhere he went. That was going to have to change once he was home again, she promised herself.

"I-I-I don't know," Nancy stammered, clearly too distressed and too scared to stop and think logically.

"I might," Jonathan said suddenly. He had been sitting and thinking calmly while the rest of them were panicking, the way he so often did. Joyce was proud of him and despaired of him and his solitude at the same time.