She supposed that’s what had cemented her resolve in following Jim Hopper through the gate that night. That despair, the devastation. She knew the moment she’d lost Billy Hargrove that she’d refuse to lose Hopper, too. It was visceral, it was instinctual. They didn’t know what was on the other side, but at the very least she knew that whatever it was, she could protect him from it. That’s all she knew, and she clung to it like a lifeline, like a safety blanket. This was what she was builtfor.
She couldn’t have been more wrong. They were met with guns, with violence, with ice. They were met with what they were sure was death.
But as long as she co-operated with them, Hopper would be safe. At least, that was what they promised as they strapped her down and reduced her to a lab rat once more. The poking, the prodding, the continuous cycle of torture and sedation, hoping to provoke the power within; power that had been dampened and stolen by grief. She’d escaped that life once, only to find herself back in it. Only these doctors cared little for much else about her other than what they could steal, replicate; what they could weaponise. Martin Brenner’s embrace had been far from warm, but it scorched in comparison to that of these new beasts, these men clad in white coats, these men who were doctor only in name, and monster in nature.
All the while, she felt it. The stirrings of a malicious force returned, just beyond her reach, tugging at her flimsy tethering to the Upside Down. A warning chord, struck deep within her bones. He’d come back. One had come back. And El… Zara could feel her, too. The pain. The suffering. The rage.
Zara Mathers had spent her entire life trying to escape Hawkins. But now, at the furthest geographical point from it, she’d give everything she had and everything she was to get back.
Zara Mathers had been twelve when she’d been adopted by Doctor Martin Brenner. The background check was far from thorough, his signature barely dry on the papers when she was passed off to him with all the casualness of a potluck casserole, and she was immediately an afterthought in the bustling foster home in which she’d been crammed. She used to look back on those memories with disgust. At the Mathers, whose surname she took, at the system that had dumped her there, at the lack of a damn background check.She couldn’t tell you how she feels about it now.
Zara Mathers had been sixteen when she and a fellow test subject escaped Hawkins Lab. It had meant to be three of them — Zara, Kali, and little Jane — but luck had not been on their side. So desperate for freedom, they left, left their sister, left Jane, and they never looked back, eyes streaked with tears and stolen lab coat sleeves tugged over number branded forearms as they clung to each other, hitch hiking to “anywhere furthest from here.”
It takes a year for Zara Mathers to come back home to Hawkins. Her homecoming is spurred on by guilt and purpose, a mixture that cloys her veins with dread and anticipation. She returns to Doctor Martin Brenner with the apologetic whimpers of a lost child, a long winded fabrication ready on her tongue — anything to get back into his good graces, to get her back to Jane, and to get Jane out. She plays the part of failed pursuer (“Eight was just too fast, you know how her abilities are… I didn’t want to come back empty handed”) and simpering daughter masterfully well. Escape artist? Not so much.
But there is another part she has yet to play on the set stage of Hawkins. Zara Mathers doesn’t know if she fits the role of “hero” just yet, but that’s of no consequence to her. Because right now, she’s just stuck in an ever reprising role of “concerned and increasingly exasperated older sister.”
