Your blurb about Deena after Hawkins almost made me cry. I love how you fit her into the character's lives without make it intrusive or predictable. The part about waiting to hear Jane's voice on the walkie talkie really got to me.
ooc | character dynamic & development | always accepting
oh this is so sweet 😭 thank you! genuinely. and also....i need everyone to stop turning my silly little safe space into something that keeps making me emotional because I am starting to suspect ya'll are all conspiring against me at this point. (brace yourself this is going to be long)
but the post-hawkins headcanon is really important to me, mostly because i never wanted deena to feel trapped there forever. as much as hawkins changes her, i always knew her story ended with her leaving. not in a way that means she's untouched by it or that she can just shut the door and be done, but in the way all of them eventually have to keep living. i wanted her to have that, too. i wanted her to get older. to get softness. to have a life that isn't only defined by the worst things that ever happened to her.
the thing is, deena doesn't really know how to leave people behind, even when she leaves places behind. that's a huge part of why the url of this page is ghostsofhawkins in the first place. hawkins is full of ghosts for her, but not just in the supernatural sense. it's barb. it's jane. it's all the people who vanished while everyone else was already halfway to deciding they were gone for good. and deena understands that kind of disappearance in a way that's personal. she grew up feeling like a ghost in her own house. people looked the other way. adults missed things, ignored things, didn't ask questions they should've asked. she learned very early what it felt like to be there and still somehow not be seen. so when barb disappears, when jane disappears, when max is hurting, when hopper is unraveling, when the kids are trying to hold the world together with tape and walkie-talkies and hope, deena internalizes all of it. she collects people's grief like receipts she doesn't know how to throw away.
i think one of the saddest truths about her is that her biggest ache has always been wanting to be useful. useful enough to keep people safe. useful enough to make sense of them. useful enough that they stay. there's a part of her that really believes her mother left because deena wasn't enough to save them both. there's a part of her that believes her father hated how useless she was to him, even though she was literally just a child. and then that same wound keeps repeating itself : she feels useless when barb disappears, when jane disappears, when max is drowning in everything she can't say, when hopper is carrying the weight of the world and pretending it isn't heavy. so even after she leaves hawkins, she never really disengages, because in her mind these people are not casual friendships or nostalgic hometown ties. they bled together. they survived something together. that matters to her in a way she can't just file away and move on from.
so yeah, she still leaves the wine out for barb. she still calls nancy every year on barb's birthday. she still checks in on steve. she still sends dustin and will money when she can. she still makes sure max knows there's always a place for her if she needs one. because loving people, for deena, has a lot to do with refusing to let them disappear quietly.
and jane....jane is such a massive part of that. deena never really calls her eleven in her own head because "eleven" feels like a brand, a cage, a thing they stamped onto her to make her easier to weaponize. jane hopper is the girl. the person. the version of her that hopper fought for and that deena wants to believe survived all of it. so the walkie-talkie matters for a million reasons, not just because deena hopes jane might use it one day, but because that's how this whole thing started for her. mike's voice over the static is what pulled her into all of it in the first place. that little radio is basically the hinge her life swung on. and when mike talked about jane's sister hearing hopper's plea and choosing to save her? deena's brain never let it go. because how would mike know that if jane hadn't shown him? how would he know details from a room he was never in unless she wanted him to understand what she was doing? to pass the message along because she knew she wouldn't get to explain it herself? deena's investigative brain latches onto things like that and never really loosens its grip. so she keeps the walkie charged because part of her genuinely believes jane is out there some where, alive, quiet, unreachable on purpose because the government would never stop if they knew where she was. and honestly? deena doesn't even resent that. if jane finally got to become a person instead of a weapon, if she got peace and privacy and a life that belonged to her, then deena would rather keep one line open forever than risk being the reason that gets taken from her.
so i think the post-hawkins stuff is me trying to let deena's story come full circle a little. she leaves. she grows up. she builds a life. she gets love. but she also keeps the ghosts. not because she's nicapable of moving on, but because loving people after surviving them is one of the truest things about her. and if i'm being honest, that's probably the part of her that hurts me the most too.