luck of the draw - henderhop week day 5 (teacherhop)
This was, in fact, the culmination of Hawkins Middle School's Spirit Week, which officially consisted of dress up days and fundraising events and unofficially included a prank war between the teachers that only got more brutal each year.
Thwack!
El leered back as a glob of whipped cream sailed past her head and to the floor of the gymnasium behind her. She turned, laughing at the sea of middle schoolers in their thunderous applause and then back to Will as he removed the tin pie pan from his face, wiping his eyes and licking his lips and giving the students a thumbs up.
"Congratulations to the eighth graders!" The principal announced, barely heard over the students' noise.
Will flinched as Lucas brought a hand towel to his face and tried to wipe him off. This was karma, El supposed.
This was, in fact, the culmination of Hawkins Middle School's Spirit Week, which officially consisted of dress up days and fundraising events and unofficially included a prank war between the teachers that only got more brutal each year.
For example, El had her name, Ms. Hopper, written on the corner of her chalkboard. Her first period students had started a “___ days until Mrs. Henderson” countdown beneath it that she considered erasing until she saw how genuinely excited they were. All of this to say, none of them were responsible for the note-perfect Teletubbies drawn on the board when she walked in Monday morning. All signs pointed to her brother, whose art classroom was in shambles of its own after Ms. Wheeler from the seventh grade wing had hidden whoopee cushions all over the place.
And then, it was technically blood-against-blood for El to help Will cover Lucas' classroom in sticky notes, seeing as the grade levels were supposed to be a united front against each other. She and Lucas were the first line of defense should the sixth grade wing come under attack. In retaliation, Lucas had slipped extra into the eighth-grader's fundraising pot because they had selected Will for the end-of-the-week pieing should they raise the most money, sacrificing the win for the sake of revenge.
El caught Dustin's eye across the gym. He shot her a wink. El would've interpreted it as a flirty gesture from her fiance were it not this week, this day, the biggest day of the war.
Dustin and El had been striking others all week. El had hidden a radio behind Mykie's shelf of Ready To Read Shakespeare books so they could send cryptic messages or just play funny noises across her room while they were watching Orlando or whatever it was she had them doing in there. Dustin had put rubber spiders all across Max's shop classroom, each one returned sliced through the middle by her table saw.
However, sticky notes and rubber spiders were small potatoes for them. That wink told El all she needed to know- something was coming, something big, and she was determined to figure out what it was before it was too late.
After the celebration in the gym, El had gotten Will cleaned up and headed back to her classroom to prep for her afternoon classes. She stuck her head in first, making sure that there were no tripwires in the doorway or wet sponges on the floor (truly, the worst idea any of them had had the year before) before relenting safety and stepping in. All she had to do was make it nine feet across the room to her desk. One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three. Simple and done.
No whoopee cushions on her chair. No spiders. She sat, shutting her eyes and letting out a relieved sigh. As fun as the prank war always was, it was exhilaratingly stressful, being the perfect mix of excited and on edge all week just to see what would get pulled this year.
El's peace, however, was remarkably short lived. Almost just as soon as she settled down, a snap! noise alerted her to a painted box above her head opening and dropping something on a string so it bounced and stopped above her head. El gripped the armrests of her seat tight until she heard cackling behind her.
With an unavoidable smile, El turned in her chair to see Dustin in the doorway of the classroom, remote in hand. Her shoulders slumped. "Really? That was your big one?"
"Uh, yeah," Dustin sauntered in, tossing and catching the remote. "Look."
He pointed to what he'd dropped. El looked up and realized exactly what she was looking at.
"Mistletoe? It's October," El folded her arms. "And we are at work."
Dustin raised his arms noncommittally. "Hey, I don't make the rules. Plus, I don't see anyone else in here."
Rolling her eyes, El stood and accepted a small peck on the lips from her fiance and pushed him back by the chest when he tried to go in for another one.
"I saw the carnage in Lucas' room," Dustin shook his head. "The betrayal."
"I was assisting Will. It wasn't me specifically." El insisted.
"Sure it wasn't," Dustin chided. "It wasn't payback for you getting caught in the crossfire when he water-ballooned Max?"
"The war has no rules. Friendly fire can be repaid," El reminded him. "Don't you have classes to be preparing for?"
Dustin shrugged. "Yeah, but one little pit stop to see my wife can't hurt.”
She tried not to smile as she shrugged off the hands trying to sneak around her waist. El lifted a single finger to nudge him away and gestured to the chalkboard. "It looks like you are twenty-two days early on that."
"W-wait, what's in twenty-two days?!" Dustin looked around frantically, making El laugh.
"I get an idiot for a husband," El grabbed a stack of worksheets and started to lay them out on her students' desks. "He is lucky he is pretty."
"D'aww." Dustin placed his hands on his cheeks to hide the fact that he was genuinely blushing.
With a promise not to set anyone on fire in the chemistry lab, Dustin skipped off to handle his next class while El's fifth period trickled in. The conversation with Dustin and the arrival of two girls locked in an argument over a Destiny's Child lyric had set El on the course of forgetting to be vigilant. Her mind was, rightfully so, occupied with integers and fractions and why Colin in the second row seemed to be sleeping a lot more than usual.
When the day finally came to an end, waving off her final group of students, El lit up when she saw the custodian coming down the hallway with two boxes on a trolley. She'd been asking since the beginning of the summer for new workbooks and she had only just now gotten them in. She eagerly grabbed her scissors and waved to the custodian as he set them on the desks and backed the trolley out of the room and down the hall.
The first box was lined with twenty-six workbooks, the amount El had requested, so it stood to reason that she should have known something was up with the second one.
Nonetheless, she opened it.
Boom!
El yelped, dropping her scissors and stumbling backwards against the wall.
The box exploded into a shiny array of glitter and confetti that fluttered down and settled across the room and all over El.
With her back against the chalkboard, El devolved into snorting laughter as she observed the carnage of pink and purple sparkles dotted across her linoleum classroom floor, how it had certainly wormed its way into her skin and hair. Okay, Dustin, this one was diabolical.
"Oh no, babe, what happened?"
Speak of the devil.
He appeared, once again, in the doorway with a shit-eating grin, ducking as El scooped up a handful of confetti and tossed it at him. He spat out a pink confetti flake and laughed loudly.
"That…was good," El said, still holding in laughter as she smeared Dustin's face with loose glitter. "But you must help poor Mr. Bronson clean all of this up."
"Already promised," Dustin swore with a scout's honor. "I told him when I gave him the trick box."
El looked down. At least she'd taken off her fancy sweater earlier, but with short sleeves on there was now glitter stuck all over her arms. "And me? How am I supposed to get all of this off?"
"Oh, you wanna loosen up the plastic particles, so," Dustin looked around and leaned in, lowering his voice. "You'll need a hot, steamy shower, and, uh, if you need help with that-"
El placed a glittery hand on Dustin's face and pushed him away. "You need to calm down."
"I'm not hearing a no."
"I am not giving you one," El murmured. "I am giving you an 'I'll see you at home', yeah?"
"Yeah, yeah," Dustin nodded, watching El collect her bag and grading folder. "Where- uh- where are you going now?"
"Well, I was going to dinner with Max and Mykie, but I think I will have to raincheck." El explained.
Dustin's face fell. "Oh, gosh, I'm sorry, El, I didn't mean to ruin your plans."
El shook her head. "You did not ruin anything, I promise.”
"You sure?"
El pressed a kiss into Dustin's glittery cheek. "I am sure. I will see you at home."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. And if you could take that mistletoe off the ceiling, too, I would appreciate it."
He'd barely gotten any sleep anyways due to the fact that he was sleeping on a makeshift bed of cardboard, not to mention that his jumpsuit was wet from wading in the creek to get away from the geckos that had attacked him the day before and was hanging over a desk in the corner.
So, there was a gun in his face and he was in his underwear.
"Who are you?" the person behind the gun asked. Dustin noticed a slight quiver in the person's hand as it clasped the handle tight. there was dirt and grime on their hands and fingernails. They had a green scarf wrapped around most of their face, so Dustin could make out no defining features.
"I'm from a Vault," Dustin gestured to the damp Vault 44 jumpsuit in the corner. "I thought that would've been obvious."
"No, not really," the person continued. "For all I know you are a pillaging, raiding rapist who stole that jumpsuit off of some innocent vaultie after murdering them."
"Uh-um- no, I didn't I- uh-" Dustin went to go reach for the jumpsuit but the gun clicked and he sat right back down in his spot. "It has my name embroidered in the back. My- my mom didn't want it to get mixed up with- with everyone else's. You can read it, my name, it's Dustin Henderson."
The pistol stayed aimed at Dustin's forehead, even as the person holding it maneuvered around to look in the tag of the drying jumpsuit. "Either you're faking it or…you are an idiot who just told a stranger your full name."
Dustin shrugged. "It's not like full names mean much out here."
"They mean more than you would think." The person pulled the scarf off of their head. Underneath the dirt and the grime was, actually, a very pretty face. Long hair pulled into a tousled braid, fear and anger melting away into curiosity as she (at least, Dustin presumed so) inspected his pack.
"Um- I don't mean to intrude, but-" Dustin stammered. "Could I- I have a t-shirt in that backpack, could I put it on? Or just, like, any more clothes than I'm wearing right now?"
She rolled her eyes and kicked the opened pack in Dustin's direction.
"What's yours?" Dustin asked as he rifled for his shirt. "Your name, I mean?"
The person paused. They lowered the pistol and inspected Dustin's shoddy gun. "Nine millimeter. Worst choice you could have made."
"I didn't really have a choice, it was the first thing I could find." he pointed to the gun that was no longer pointed at his face. "What kind is that?"
"Forty-five auto," she clicked the safety on and shoved it into a holster on her hip. "And you can call me El."
"That's a cool name," Dustin said. "Short for something?"
El wasn't listening. She was looking around the room to see what had or hadn't already been salvaged, throwing open filing cabinet drawers and throwing clipboards and loose cigarettes to the ground while pocketing bottle caps and the occasional ammo cartridge. Dustin threw his undershirt over his head and wished the only fucking pants he owned weren't wet. He settled for pulling the threadbare blanket pooling around his waist awkwardly.
"Do you know what this building is?" El asked, not turning to look back at Dustin.
"Uh, it's a factory?" Dustin said.
"It's an old Nuka-Cola facility," El elaborated. "Legend has it that on the day both Quantum and the bombs dropped, the freezer in the basement locked shut automatically. Thousands of untouched bottles, ice cold."
Oh. That did sound tempting. Dustin nodded. "I see. So you're here for the stash?"
"Not quite. I'm here for someone who might've been here for the stash," El explained, a small smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. "Have you seen a big man, with a beard and a mustache? He wears a funny hat and carries a bright green bag."
Dustin shook his head. "No, I haven't, I'm sorry."
"Figures," El kicked at a piece of debris on the ground. She turned around and headed for the door. "That jumpsuit isn't going to hold up forever. I'd suggest taking whatever you can get while you are on the road."
"W-wait, you're just going?" Dustin asked. "You're just, like, leaving me here."
"The alternative is killing you."
"Right, right, uh- well- wait," Dustin sat up, then remembered to take his blanket with him. "I'm also looking for someone. Um, my dad, actually. I just don't know what he looks like, so, it's been kinda hard. But, like, if we're both looking for someone, we could, like, look together, right?"
El turned around. Her eyes treaded up and down, inspecting Dustin's body. "You do not look like you would make a very equal companion, Dustin Henderson. Why would I want to do that?"
"I'm totally equal! I may not be, like, the strongest person in the world, but I'm the smartest kid in my whole Vault. That terminal you saw on your way in? Not only did I disable the turrets without triggering anything, but I rerouted all the securitrons to protect the ground floor."
"You are the one who did that?" El said, eyes wide.
Dustin nodded. "Yeah-huh. I can do so much more than that though. And, uh, I really don't want to die, so I could use someone who actually knows, like, what guns are good and stuff."
There was a brief lull in the room, tensions still high. El pursed her lips and nodded after a minute.
"I will be downstairs in the offices, Dustin Henderson," she said finally. "Meet me there. But put some clothes on first."
Dustin gave a salute as El left the room. "Yes, ma'am."
As soon as she was gone, he lowered his hand and looked at it in confusion. That was lame as hell.
No matter, he figured. He was one step closer to finding his dad, and finding a new water chip to hopefully save Steve's skin back at the Vault. Of all the people he'd encountered so far, El was the only one who hadn't shot before he even got the chance to speak, and that was a pretty good sign to Dustin.
in case you didn’t know @stardewfalls and I have been doing a (mainly henderhop based) rewrite of seasons 3-5 (here’s that link) and we have a big beautiful spreadsheet marking out all the scenes with some really fun stuff on there
