Invisible- Stranger Things Fanfiction

Chapter Thirty: Make-Shift Family

*Nikki's POV*
"So, you're telling me our principal's really a bad guy?"
   "Well, he's definitely not a good guy, Max!"
"He attacked Sarah and Nikki."
I woke up to the sound of my friends barking at each other. My head still hurt like a bitch, and there was a slight blur in my vision. Everything looked like a Picasso painting or some shit.
Will was the first to notice I had regained consciousness. "Would you all shut up? Even I have a headache, and I wasn't the one thrown into a desk." He smiled lightly at me, swiftly getting up and walking out of the room. As I tried to register everything that had happened, I realized we were no longer at school, but in El and Sarah's living room.
"Mon, you're up!" Dustin rushed to me, kneeling next to the sofa. "How're you feeling?"
"Oh, fan-bloody-tastic," I muttered, covering my head with my hand. "Damn!" I retracted my hand when I realized I was burning up. How the hell do I have a fever right now?
Will came back into the room, holding a Ziploc of ice covered in a paper towel. "This might help," he said. "I can get you another towel if it's too cold."
Taking the ice from him, I put it directly on my forehead. The bag drooped over my eyes, completely taking my blurry vision away. "Thanks, Byers. Now, can someone explain how the hell I got here?"
"O'Connell threw you into his desk, which we've discovered Sarah apparently threw at the wall." Mike's voice came loud and clear from what sounded like right above me. "That's her power, super-strength, that's why O'Connell tased her. He wanted to put the odds in his favor so he could fight her. You and Sarah were both kind of out of it for a while, but she was back in the swing of things by the time we kicked O'Connell's ass and decided to haul our own asses out of there. She carried you back here, and we've all just kinda been talking since then."
"So, you mean to tell me," I said, "that we all ditched the first day of school after you guys tased the principal?"
"El almost strangled him," Lucas added. "It was scary."
I groaned. "We're all going to Hell."
"To be fair, you didn't do anything except take his taser, so all you did was help save Sarah," Dustin clarified.
"Don't try to make me feel better."
El lifted the bag of ice slightly from my head, her big eyes staring back into mine. "Thank you for saving my sister."
Looking back at her, I rolled my eyes, which also hurt like a bitch to do. "You saved her, I just got in the way."
"You got O'Connell's way," El corrected. "For me, you were my teammate. So, thank you."
"El, really, I-"
"Thank you." She delicately put back the ice, and soon I heard her dainty footsteps making their way across the carpet.
A hand made its way to mine, warming up my freezing fingers. "You did good, Harrington." Dustin's voice was quieter now, over the initial excitement of my being awake, aware that every word was like a hammer to my pounding head.
"Shut up Henderson," I muttered with a smirk.
Wham!
"What the hell is going on?"
Dustin's grip tightened on my hand as Hopper's voice echoed through the house.
"Why are you kids home in the middle of the day?"
Middle? How long was I unconscious?
That's really not the thing to worry about right now.
"Hopper, we can explain-"
"Oh, I bet you can, Mike. What happened to Nikki? El, why's there dried blood all over- You little shits got into a fight, didn't you?"
"Chief." Sarah's voice was soft and calm. I heard it right next to her father's, barely loud enough to reach my spot on the sofa. "I'll explain."
She told him everything. Down to the reason we all got sent to the office in the first place. (Her.) She didn't even miss a beat before taking full responsibility.
"O'Connell," she said, "he- he used to work at the Lab. He left when Eleven was around five or six, so we wouldn't remember him much. He thought they weren't brutal enough with their experiments. If you thought Brenner was bad, this douchebag made him look like Florence Nightingale. When he and Brenner had a disagreement about how to treat 'the experiments,' he left.
"O'Connell recognized me instantly, and I think I recognized him even before that. Within a nanosecond, he was telling me how I never would've escaped if he was still at the lab. Soon, he was trying to restrain me so he could take me back and perform more experiments. He talked about finding El and taking her, too. I didn't want to use my power, but- but I had to. I couldn't just let him go after her. So these guys were only trying to help me, it's all my fault."
Hopper was silent. Everyone was. Then the chief cleared his throat: "Why isn't your nose bloody, then, if you used your power?"
"Mine doesn't bleed so much anymore. I don't know how, I've just learned how to control it." Sarah answered slowly, as though she'd never thought of this before.
Again, Hopper cleared his throat. That seemed to be his thing. "Well, as long as none of you were really hurt- although, maybe we should take Nikki to a doctor, just in case."
"And tell them what, Hop? That I got attacked by an evil mad scientist-turned-school principal?"
"She's okay," Will insisted. "As someone who's suffered a few concussions from when my dad tried to play catch with me, I can verify that she's not in any way, shape, or form concussed. Just a little sore due to being thrown into a huge block of metal."
   I raised my eyebrows with a snort. "Concussions? From catch?"
   "It was a big, hard ball!" Will shrieked, obviously annoyed that I found this funny. "Shut up, Harrington."
   Hopper rolled his eyes. "You little shits should've called me," he said sternly. "But, that being said... I'm glad you're not dead."
   "Does that go for everyone, or just your kids?" Max asked.
   "Let's face it," Lucas said. "We're all his kids now."
   "Seeing as you come to my house after you do stupid shit, yes, I'd say you're basically my kids now."
   "Don't tell Steve," I chimed in. "He'll start a custody battle, I shit you not."
   The chief couldn't help but laugh at this. "Shut up, Harrington."