AN:

Hey guys! So this is my first story on here. It's really high on angst—the kids are all grown up, so obviously the myriad of issues they have to deal with has exponentially expanded—but hopefully the humour of Steve and Dustin will lighten the mood a little from time to time. There's no smut in the first few chapters, as El and Mike haven't seen each other in years and circumstances have torn them apart in a really horrible, seemingly permanent way. But I can promise a lot of flashbacks and A LOT of tension in the interim. Meanwhile, there's a lot of adventure and intrigue. Hope you enjoy!

Grown-up Mileven. All rights belong to the Duffer brothers – this story is obviously not canon.

Rated M for violence, adult themes, and smut in later chapters. Forewarning, it won't be light lemon.

One Oceans

"Could you state for the record your name and today's date?"

"Jane Hopper. November twelfth, nineteen-ninety-three."

Her psychiatrist scribbled something in his folder and regarded Jane again through his wiry, gold-rimmed glasses.

It was the same thing every day. She'd be shepherded into this tiny, stark white room in her stark white hospital gown and answer the same banal questions about the weather and her house back home and what books she was reading and how they made her feel. It was like Dr Welling thought asking for long enough would eventually bring about entirely different answers.

And then there was the whole conversation piece about 'The Room.' Jane didn't know what kind of psychoanalysis the good doctor was conducting as he took her through the familiar scenario but she didn't really care. Truth be told, she was beyond caring.

'The Room' was inside her head. It could be anywhere, filled with anything. All she had to do was close her eyes and build on what was there, every day. If she thought about it at all between sessions, she was supposed to talk about it. If she imagined anyone else visiting, she was supposed to talk about it. Welling framed it to her as a place of refuge, a safehouse… But there was nothing private about it, with all the sharing. Nothing safe. It didn't feel like hers, and so the only times she visited it outside sessions were in her dreams.

Well, nightmares, she supposed, but then, calling them that didn't feel right either. It wasn't a frightening or dangerous room—she had created it, after all. There were no monsters, no government officials in suits or orderlies or doctors poking and prodding her or sensory deprivation tanks. It was just a room, gathering dust.

What was in it?

Everything.

Maybe that's why she never wanted to go back.

On the mantle above the fireplace—which was never lit and the room just stayed suspended in dim half-light—was a framed photograph of Jim Hopper holding Jane's sixteen-year-old self just after he'd taught her how to drive. They were standing in front of Joyce's beaten-down but cosy house, leaning against his truck, laughing and happy. It was candid. Jonathan had taken the picture from his usual place at Nancy's side. It had been such a family-oriented day. Jane had driven with her father for hours before they'd pulled up for dinner back home at the Byers'—now also Hoppers'—residence. It had taken him long enough, but Hopper finally popped the question just after Jane's birthday that year and the whole family was living together within the month. It was a tight fit—not nearly enough space for everybody in that old house—but they'd made it work. Hopper, Joyce, Jonathan, Will, Jane. It had made so much sense back then.

That day, it was the height of summer so as well as being swelteringly hot, the sun hadn't set until late. It had felt like the never-ending, perfect day. The usual extras were in tow: Nancy, attached to Jonathan just as unashamedly as he was to her. It wasn't gross or anything, even for a young and naïve Jane back then. They'd just wanted to feel each other, to reassure each other. At any point in time when they were close enough to touch, they would: Jonathan would have his hand against Nancy's lower back or she'd rest hers on his knee, or he'd have his arm around her shoulders or she hers around his waist. Jane hadn't known much about romance or love back then—definitely nothing about sex—but she'd known she'd wanted to have that one day.

And with that thought, there he was, branded into her memory clear as day. He'd laughed too as Jane had fallen shakily into her father's arms and the camera's shutter clicked. He'd stolen her a moment later, wrapping his lanky arms around her and hoisting her off the ground in a hug she wanted to be lost in forever. He'd grown so tall so suddenly, it still came as a shock.

"Congratulations, you didn't crash," he'd said with a laugh.

He'd told her he was proud of her. She'd felt giddy, elated. She'd felt like such a grown up. And that night, while her parents enjoyed a quiet drink on the grass out front and Will delighted Nancy and Jonathan with his new art portfolio, she'd taken his hand and led him into her bedroom, telling him she had one more first she wanted to share with him—just him.

Maybe it had been too soon. She really hadn't known anything beyond the clinical overview she'd received in class. It was a moment that passed by very quickly. She hadn't known what she was expecting, but it wasn't that.

He'd seemed embarrassed; before, throughout, but especially after. That was when she'd caught his hands as he'd hurried to dress, muttering something about getting caught, and kissed him softly.

"I love you," she'd said, staring into his eyes. "And we haven't done anything wrong."

They weren't caught that night, but about two months later, after caution had steadily disintegrated to naught more than a chock under the door, they had found themselves in a world of pain. Thank God it had been Joyce and not Hopper, but even then, she'd gone her own version of ballistic.

There was so much life in that one photograph, so many memories woven together to make up those two smiles. It prompted so much yearning, of so many kinds.

It was the only item in the room not covered beyond recognition in dust.

Welling cleared his throat, drawing Jane's attention back to the present. "Let's talk about what you see outside the window."

"Nothing," she said automatically. "The drapes are shut." The room was a time capsule, after all.

Looking troubled, Welling sat forward, scrutinising her as one might a fly under a microscope. "Are you afraid of what's outside, Jane?"

I'm not afraid of anything anymore, she thought, and it was true. To be afraid, you had to be afraid of losing something.

At his presumptuous and smug expression—as if he knew exactly what she feared and why—she rolled her eyes. "Fine, I'll open the drapes!"

"Better yet, open the door," he challenged. "Tell me what you see."

Jane shot him a withering look before closing her eyes again. As much as she loathed this game—if you could even call it that—she was good at it. It was only seconds before she lost all sensation of that uncomfortable metal chair under her and she was standing back inside the room. Plush carpet underfoot, she made her way to the front door, reached for the knob, and paused, a sudden chill running through her, raising gooseflesh.

Welling was an asshole, but this experiment was well-designed. By building on it day by day, the room was an amalgamation of many scattered thoughts and feelings; that which was covered in dust hadn't used to be. For four years she'd been working on this room. Four years. She'd been eighteen when she'd started, everything so fresh in her mind, and now, at twenty-two, some things that had been so essential once just weren't anymore. She wasn't a high school student anymore. She wasn't a freshman in college. She wasn't Jane Hopper, daughter of Jim Hopper. Actually, she'd been so inconsolable when they'd first brought her here, that was the first one they'd pulled out of her. Now, she was a solitary unit.

It was November twelfth, nineteen-ninety-three. She'd been a patient at Central State Hospital, Indiana, for four years. In all that time, she had received no visitors, had made no contact with the outside world. She was a prisoner here as effectively as in any real prison. Sometimes she thought she would prefer it there.

"Jane, what do you see?" Welling's voice echoed around the room, so she pushed herself further into it, thinking not for the first time that it probably wasn't the most remedial avenue to encourage a mental patient to cast herself deeper into a delusion.

What are you afraid of, Jane?

In a moment of stiff defiance—perhaps insolence—Jane ripped the door open, exposing what was outside.

Well, more accurately, it felt like she was finally exposing herself. Somehow the lack of other witnesses didn't remedy her humiliation.

She was a fraud.

Because there he was.

Mike.

She'd spent so long trying not to think his name, let alone picture his face. That's why it was her father she had immortalised on her mantle—there was guilt there too, but she could at least face it. Her father would love her forever; unconditionally, he'd told her. Despite everything. But Mike…

She stared at him as he stared back at her. He'd be older now, in reality. But in her mind, he was the same age as she'd last seen him: eighteen. Still impressively tall but starting to fill out a bit, with wild hair and deep, searching eyes, so dark a brown they were almost black, and his skin so pale that Jane had used to joke about losing him amongst her sheets. He had always been so beautiful to her, even when she didn't really understand why—even when she didn't really understand anything. He'd always just been Mike, but because he was there, she never noticed anybody else. There was no comparison.

He stood before her, just a hair's breadth from a raging snowstorm behind him. The blur of white and the wail of the wind was so close, she needed only to reach by him and she'd surely be sucked out to her death. But she didn't dare reach out. She knew, rationally, he wasn't here. If she stepped any closer, she knew she wouldn't feel the warmth of his body, or be able to smell his distinctively 'Mike' scent. Sea salt had always come to mind and she remembered trying to explain it to him once; sea salt and a vaguely smoky kind of spice. Jane had never been much of a culinary aficionado.

She wanted to ask him what he wanted. She wanted to ask why he was here and why he hadn't come sooner. She wanted to ask why he couldn't just stay away.

But he had stayed away.

He hadn't wanted to see her ever again after what happened. And truth be told, she couldn't blame him.

He was nothing more than a figment of her subconscious right now. But this room, this exercise—this whole stupid thing—was supposed to tell her who she really was, what she was really thinking. She didn't know exactly what Dr Welling got out of it, but that's what it was for her. And now, Mike standing here in a snowstorm? What the fuck was that supposed to tell her about herself?

His eyes faltered from their lock on hers and drifted slowly to her lips. His parted.

"Eleven," he murmured.

Jane's eyes snapped open and she took a deep breath. It didn't quite qualify as a gasp but it was enough that she knew she wasn't diving any deeper today.

"Talk to me, Jane," Welling commanded, his impatience only thinly veiled. "What did you see?"

She took a second to centre herself. "A snowstorm."

He seemed to believe the half-lie. "Did it scare you?"

"I wasn't expecting it," she answered tactfully.

He cocked his head to the side, scribbling again in his folder. There was something so lazy and arrogant about the way he scribbled. Jane knew it was an odd thought to have—a very odd reason for resentment—but she resented him for it all the same. He was effectively scribbling what her life would be onto the paper, deciding whether or not she was fit to be treated as a regular human being—deciding whether her answers reached the standards of his personally-set bar.

Once he was finished and he returned his attention to her, Jane glanced between the folder and his face. "So? Did I pass?"

He smirked at the joke and replied, "That depends on how you answer these last few questions."

She groaned inside but aloud insisted, "Hit me."

He clicked his pen multiple times before starting on a fresh page in the folder. Bloody folder.

"Knowing what you now know about what lies outside, would you opt to remain in your room or to venture forth and explore the snowstorm?" he asked.

A flash of Mike's face and the cold burn of the whipping snow made Jane's throat go dry, but she didn't miss a beat. "If I say 'stay in the room', you'll think I'm hiding from something, won't you?"

"Would you be?" he countered, another annoying knowing smile pinching his mouth.

Jane had half a mind to throw him through a wall—with her mind or her bare hands, it didn't really matter.

"I'm somehow at home with the dust and the doilies," she jested.

"Is that right?" His smile was definitely a smirk now. How quickly it morphed into something truly unsightly. "Have you ever opened that door before?"

"You know I haven't," she said.

"Well, this is the first time we've discussed it," he allowed, but now he frowned, feigning confusion—as if it wasn't just a pathetically transparent attempt to mock her with whatever winning blow he would strike with his next remark. "But then tell me… How does the dust accumulate?"

For a moment, Jane forgot herself. "It's not a cleanroom, you moron."

He stiffened at the insult but moved past it to continue this line of questioning, apparently committed to proving her logic inferior.

"How does that much dust accumulate, Jane?"

He was scrutinising her again. God, it made her uncomfortable.

"Is it even really dust? Or did you cover it all up so you wouldn't have to see it anymore? So you wouldn't have to face it? Is that what the snowstorm is, just a veil to cover whatever is really waiting outside?"

Jane held her ground. "I told you, I'm not afraid of what's outside."

"But what's inside?" Welling's gaze bore into her and she looked away.

Again, Mike's face flashed through her mind, but this time it was closely followed by Hopper's. But he wasn't smiling like in the photograph. He was as she had last seen him, holding his shotgun up, aimed directly at her head. Well, a couple of inches above her head, but she knew in that moment what it was like to stare directly down the barrel. She saw anger and fear fade to resignation in a split second, and when he lowered his gun in the next, she knew before the shot rang out in her ears that it was over.

Despite the ringing making it impossible to hear, she knew she had never screamed louder. Every window and drinking glass within a six-block radius shattered as she watched her father crumple to the ground.

"It wasn't me!" she'd shouted over and over when they dragged her away.

But really, it had been. Maybe she hadn't pulled the trigger but that hadn't mattered in the end. It didn't matter now. Everything had, without a doubt, been entirely her fault. In one evening, she'd ruined the lives of everyone closest to her and lost the single most important person in her life.

She looked up again, this time unwavering. No jokes, no attitude. There were no jokes when it came to Hopper. Not ever. "What's inside is locked up here."

"And Mike?" he pushed further. "I know you miss him."

"I don't miss Mike," she said automatically, but it was strange—this was the first time she knew she meant it.

They had been oceans apart for years now. She'd used to go to sleep crying over the thought of all the things she'd miss, like his graduation, his first day at his dream job, his wedding—all events that for so long she hadn't questioned she'd be a part of. But everything was different now. The oceans between them weren't obstacles keeping them apart, evil gates or barricades standing in the way of their beautiful, happy future.

The oceans were bars, and the bars were there to keep her in.

They had to.

AN:

I'll try to upload at least twice a week, but I do work and study, so some weeks it might only be once. Please leave me all the feedback you wish, good or bad. I'll try to make sure I stay on top of reading it! Thanks so much for sticking with me thus far and I'll have the next chapter up ASAP. -Inara