This is my headcanon on what happened to El post series which the Duffers can pry from my cold dead hands, which I already wrote into a fanfic but I just thought Iâd post it here with a bit more detail. Iâve tried to figure out whether this is realistic, Iâve researched some of the legal points of the story and have tried to make it as plausible as possible, but obviously itâs kind of hard to research all the legal details considering that most of them take place in the late 80s and early 90s. But Iâve done my best and am shrugging my shoulders at this point because this is my headcanon and I can do what I want. Also yes I did heavily borrow from Gilmore girls for part of this lol. And Iâm reposting/copy pasting this this from my main blog @meepmorperaltiago so I can pin it on here.
â While everyone is reacting to Elâs apparent death, she stops off at the cabin one last time. She takes a yellow backpack and packs it with clothes, an atlas, some food, some money, everything she may need to survive on the road, including her high school ID from Lenora and her birth certificate from Owens.
â Later on, after sheâs long gone, Hopper notices some stuff thatâs missing from the cabin and it gives him enough pause to think that she might have got away, which is part of why heâs so ok in the epilogue.
â Taking buses and working in diners, sweeping floors along the way to survive, she eventually reaches the Canadian border and enters Canada using the identification she packed from the cabin.
â this is where she comes across the town with the three waterfalls. She thinks of Mike and it gives her hope. She arrives in the town and sheâs strong but sheâs struggling at this point, she practically collapses at the door of an inn in the town.
â The inn is owned by a very kind woman, Anna, who takes her in and gives her a job there as a maid. She tells everyone an adjusted version of her story. She tells everyone that Hopper is her biological dad, that she was kidnapped and experimented on by a powerful cult rather than the US government, that she escaped and found Hopper, briefly moved to California when her father was thought to be dead in a mall fire, then moved back to Hawkins. But eventually they realised that no matter where she went the cult would always be after her, so she had to flee the US for her safety and the safety of her loved ones. And obviously she takes out all of the supernatural parts of her story.
â she bonds with and becomes integrated in and loved and fully supported by her new community. With her evidence including her IDs proving that she is Jane Hopper, her 011 tattoo, a diagnosis of PTSD which matches perfectly to her story, testimony from everyone in the town about the state she was in when she arrived and how much sheâs grown and how sheâs now a well loved productive member of their community with a steady job, her story is believed and sheâs granted a visa on Humanitarian and Compassionate grounds in 1989. And sheâs very lucky with the timing: because this is pre-digitalisation and wider electronic data sharing/databases like today and because the military âpacked up and moved town with no Eleven to chase anymoreâ, and because it would have been done based on a box ticking literal paper trail, sheâs able to do all of this without being caught back in the US.
â In 1995, from this visa sheâs able to become a Canadian citizen. For the first time in her life, sheâs a safe, legal person who is free to live the life that she wants, something she never thought she could have, with the bittersweet sting that she can still never ever reenter the US and she doesnât feel she can ever risk contacting her loved ones back in Hawkins
â Over the years she works her way up, taking on more and more responsibility at the inn, until at some point she eventually becomes the manager and when the woman who owns the inn retires she hands the place over to her altogether.
â On a cold night the late 90s, much like the one where Hopper found her and took her into the cabin, a baby girl is found abandoned at the inn. Thinking of how Hopper once gave her a home, she takes the girl in as her emergency foster mother and fully adopts her a year later, when no biological family has claimed her.
â In this place where sheâs found a new home, she raises her daughter, Violet Anna Maxine Hopper, Anna is the name of the lady who runs the inn) with all the love and laughter and comfort she didnât have in her own childhood. As Hopper once said, she gives her âeverything she didnât haveâ
