One week in, he thinks, 'someone should get that kid to eat something other than frozen waffles.'

Two weeks in, he realizes, 'shit, that's me.'

Not right away. He has to build a little trust here before he starts tossing wrenches into the works. From what he can tell, she's more attached to Eggos than she is to him, and making her choose between them this early on is a battle he's not sure he'll win.

But eventually, he has to suck it up and prepare for what he's damn sure is going to be a confrontation. Because the kid is all skin and bones and telekinesis, and Hopper may not know much about nutrition, but he does know that something stores stock between the ice cream and frozen pizzas probably doesn't have any.

(Not that he's above feeding her ice cream and frozen pizzas. Any variety's good variety at this point, and he's a desperate man, fucking sue him.)

Plan A is to act casual.

Plan B is to tell her Kellogg's went out of business and hope she likes him well enough to forgive him by the time she gets out in the world and discovers the lie.

He doesn't love Plan B.

But he's not dead-set against it either.

He sucks his lips against his teeth as he puts the plate in front of her, hoping his face is somehow miraculously making the expression it normally does when he's acting normal and definitely not up to something.

El frowns.

"I eat Eggos," she reminds him gently.

Jim sighs. On the plus side, as limited as her education's been, they now know she can definitely tell the difference between waffles and spaghetti.

"I remember." He gives her a thumbs up and slides into his own chair. "Nice sentence, by the way."

He can tell it was a complete one because it had…a verb…and a…

It just sounded right, okay?

She ignores the compliment and stares across the table at him, eyes wide and sympathetic. The message in the look is clear. Oh no, it says. Poor guy's lost it. He has no idea what he's supposed to be doing.

She's not wrong.

She's not right like she thinks she's right, but…she's not wrong.

He has no idea what he's supposed to be doing.

"Tonight, we're gonna try spaghetti," he announces finally- more authoritative than he's really feeling.

El blinks.

"And then we'll have waffles," he concedes. "As dessert."

That was not part of the plan.

Spaghetti- she likes. Tacos and any derivatives thereof- she doesn't.

Other hits include peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (which she prefers on waffles but will tolerate on bread), grilled cheese (always on bread, but not for lack of trying on her part), and grapes. The face she makes after trying a mouthful of lima beans is so priceless that he fleetingly considers buying a camera.

Everything else falls somewhere in between. He can work with that.

That hair of hers grows in wild.

He realizes she's been washing it with plain old soap when it gets so tangled and oily that when he tousles her hair, he nearly loses a finger in it. So he ends up in an aisle of the grocery store that he's never needed to spend much time in before, and then making awkward eye contact with the cashier that's known him long enough to know there's no one but him in the house to use it.

"I like to smell like a field of lavender," he snaps, forcefully chucking his own items in a bag when it appears the cashier is too busy staring at him to do it. "Fight me on it."

At first, El makes a face at the girly, purple bottles he dumps on the kitchen table. But when he snaps the cap open and holds it under her nose, she warms up to the idea. Being raised in a sterile laboratory's given her an appreciation of good smells- everything from his coffee to the soap he uses on their clothes.

"You don't want to get that in your eyes," he hollers as she's on her way to shower.

She stops to give him the look that he's come to think of as her equivalent to rolling her eyes.

Oh sure. That's obvious to her, but she had absolutely no idea she wasn't supposed to flush unwanted vegetables down the toilet.

Go figure.

The 'don't move what you can't see' rule is enacted when she pulls a box of Eggos from the freezer to her bed and takes out a lamp.

It's broken for the first time less than a minute later when she tries to move the toaster too and just about brains him with it.

"Sorry," she says urgently, smoothing a band-aid over the scrape on his temple. "Very, very sorry."

She pats the wound a little too hard, and he winces, catching her hand in his.

"I know you are," Hopper assures. "Don't worry about it. Just don't do it again, and then we'll be square, understand?"

"Square?" She's frowning, using her finger to trace the shape in the air between them.

He smiles. "Another double meaning word. Means good. No sorries needed."

Eleven nods solemnly. "Square is no sorries needed."

They shake on it. El makes her waffle in the kitchen instead. She seems a little hesitant to use her abilities for the next couple days.

That doesn't last.

"Woah…"

He shouts it, low and loud, the second the locks flick themselves open and he steps into the cabin. "What the hell happened here?"

There's a log laying on top of the overturned couch and a layer of broken glass on the floor that's sparkling like fallen icicles.

"I moved," El said quietly, shaking and looking a little war-worn. "Didn't see."

She takes a step towards him, and he thrusts a hand out to stop her in her tracks.

"Shoes!" he barks. "Put some shoes on, then you can some help me."

While they're busy sweeping up the glass and hammering some boards over the space where the window used to be, he slowly but surely prods the gist of the incident out of her. The fire went out. Instead of turning on the space heater ("doesn't smell as good," she explained weakly when that option was presented to her), she decided to get a log for herself. Being that she couldn't go outside, she devised a way to bring the log in. The window was not accounted for in this bright and shiny idea.

"Kid, the point of you not going outside is so that if anyone's watching, they won't see anything weird. You didn't think flying firewood would fall into that category?"

Eleven shrugged. "Not to me."

She has a point there.

Hopper rubs a hand over the back of his neck. This is new to him. Sarah was so little when she died that discipline was never much of an issue.

Parents are always dragging their kids into the station. And when they weren't prodding them into saying they were right there and saw the guy their dad says backed into his truck, they were tugging little troublemakers along behind them and explaining that 'this is where the bad kids go' so they better straighten up and fly right. (Jim's only been at this for a couple months or so but he feels confident even he's better than that.)

"Listen kid," Jim sighs, leaning against the freshly patched wall. "I think you should go lay down in your room for a while."

El tilts her head, seeming confused but thankfully not traumatized. "Not tired," she offers quietly.

"That's sort of the point, here."

She nods slowly, like she still doesn't understand but is okay with humoring him.

"Point is…awake sleeping?"

"The point is thinking," he corrects. "About why we have rules and why it's important to follow them."

Frowning, El nods.

He doesn't hear a peep out of her until dinner time. By the time he works up the nerve to knock, his mind has come up with this elaborate scenario wherein she decided she'd had enough of his cruelty and escaped through her nonexistent bedroom window.

Not only is she there when he opens the door, she's on her side and staring straight at him.

"Hey, wrecking ball." He groans as he lowers himself into the chair by her bed. "Doing okay in here?"

She nods, not quite looking at him.

"We are…round?"

It takes him a second or two, but eventually he realizes she's using round to mean 'not square'.

Jesus, he is pathetically fond of this kid.

"No, kid." There's something tight in his chest and he coughs to clear it. Doesn't work. "You and me, we're good. You did your time."

Her whole body relaxes, and he realizes she must have been wound pretty tight. Shuffling a few centimeters at a time, she moves until she's on the edge of the bed, her forehead resting against his knee.

What kind of monster punishes a sweet kid like that?

A draft seeps in from the broken window, and he doesn't feel quite as bad.

Much later, he'll wonder- why didn't he think of grounding her from Eggos in the first place?

He hears the rattle in her chest before he notices anything else.

Doesn't seem to bother El much. Maybe she can't even hear it over the volume of the TV. (Should he be on her about that? They don't make TVs so loud they can actually damage your hearing, do they? Seems like that shouldn't be legal- he'll look into it.) But Jim can hear it and immediately remembers one of the ladies from the secretarial pool rubbing at puffy raccoon eyes and explaining that her youngest was up wheezing all night. Something about the weather cooling and his asthma?

Before he can dig himself too far down into that rabbit hole, the cough starts.

It's wet sounding and shakes her entire body. The first one has her staring wide-eyed and frightened at him because as awful as the assholes that had her before were, they apparently weren't negligent enough to let her get sick.

Jim can't say the same for himself.

"Hop up here."

El climbs onto the counter while he shakes down the thermometer from the first aid kit he bought back around day 34 or so. The thing about secret parenting, he decides, is that there's no one to brag about your excellent preparedness to.

He brushes the pad of his thumb from her cheek to her chin, wincing at the heat. "Open up."

That gets him a look, but apparently, he's earned some of that trust he was so interested in because she does it without comment.

The kid grows cross-eyed staring down at the thermometer in her mouth. He makes his own eyes cross back at her and grins when that earns him a muffled giggle.

He stops grinning when he checks the reading.

"Shit."

El eyes him warily, eyes dull and drooping like she's seconds away from conking out.

"Your word?"

"Yeah," he confirms, distracted as he digs through the contents of the first aid kit. "I say that one, you don't."

(That rule is hypocritical, but it's also poorly enforced. So everything evens out.)

"Aha!"

He finds what he's looking for and leaves it on the counter while he goes to find a spoon. When he turns back around, El has the bottle in her hand. Her eyes tumble over the letters on the bottle and spark with hopeful recognition.

"Don't get too excited. It's cough syrup." He chuckles and unscrews the cap. "Doesn't taste as good as the regular stuff, but it'll make you feel better."

She slides so far back she nearly topples of the counter.

"Hey, hey," he soothes anxiously, one hand on her back to keep her from going over the edge. "I'm just teasing you, it doesn't taste that bad."

Friends don't lie, a voice singsongs in his head. He frowns and mentally tells it to shut the hell up.

"No," she says firmly.

The spoon flies past his ear and then there's red cough syrup slowly dripping down the wall.

"Hey," he growls. "Knock that off."

She does not.

"Okay," he sighs, running his hands over his face. A fourth spoon has just hit the wall behind him and is now slowing creeping towards a hiding place under the couch. Hopper grabs onto the bottle of cough syrup before it can join it. "Here's what we're gonna do."

He cuts the cough syrup with maple syrup and mixes it with water so it will go down smoother. El's been tracking his every move with careful eagle eyes, so he's expecting a little less reluctance this time. But she still won't let him anywhere near her with his concoction.

He's about to warn her that he's going to get a whole lot less nice here in a second (though what exactly that would entail, he has no idea) when he notices her hands shaking and it fucking hits him.

Oh, shit. It has nothing to do with the taste.

She's not stubborn, she's scared.

He's an idiot. The girl raised as a human lab rat doesn't want to be putting unfamiliar medicines in her body.

(Parents always complain that there are no manuals for raising kids, but they're all full of it because there absolutely fucking are. A metric ton of them. He read three before Sarah was born. You know what there aren't? Manuals on how to raise telekinetic teenagers that escaped from the shit show they were raised in. But it's not like he's asking anyone to throw him a pity party.)

"Watch this," he urges. He knocks back a shot of the stuff himself, making a conscious effort not to wince at the taste. "Me first, okay? So you'll know it's safe?"

They're both quiet for a moment. Hopper starts to think he drank that junk for nothing.

Finally, she nods- a little hesitantly, but he'll take it.

"Safe," she agrees.

Later, after she let him spoon a dose of the cough syrup into her mouth and he let her chase it with regular syrup straight from the bottle, she falls asleep against his chest. It's more contact than either of them are used to, but it's been a long day crammed into an hour and the medicine seems to make her a little foggy.

Balanced on its back two legs and one of Jim's feet, his usual dining room chair is acting as a makeshift rocker. (And boy will he feel like an ass if he accidently tips them over onto their asses.) Any other kid this age would rather be skinned alive than be subjected to this kind of babying, but El probably doesn't even have the word for it, let alone the idea that she's way too old for rocking.

He'll put her to bed soon. Check her temperature first, and maybe they'll both take another hit of the cough stuff.

He thinks he did good today.

The kid is sick, but nowhere near as sick as Sarah was. And he may be a little incompetent, but he's way better than the so-called 'papa' she grew up with. He has better intentions at least.

He can work with that.