Prelude. Renegade
"Listen, kid," says Jim Hopper, eyes tired, hand twitching for a cigarette. He shoves it into the hoop of his pants instead. He promised El he'd quit, and she somehow always knows when he breaks a promise, and then it's angry looks and slamming doors and friends don't lie whispered over stale dinners.
The universe, however, has decided one volatile teenager isn't enough, because this is the third time he's gotten a call about something lurking in the woods — and this is the third time that something has turned out to be Jessica Bressett. She's looking at her feet, chewing her lip, not meeting his gaze as much as he tries to get her to.
"Yeah, yeah," she interrupts, because apparently the title Chief of Police does nothing to teenagers these days.
Jim looks around, resisting a sigh. "Listen, kid," he repeats, and then tries again, unsuccessfully, to get the girl to meet his eyes. "What are you doing out here? It's Saturday. Shouldn't you be... god, I don't know. Hanging out with friends?"
Jessica scoffs, and crosses her arms. Shifts her weight to the other foot and kicks something in his overall direction. "Haven't you heard?" she asks, in a tone that is clearly mocking. "I'm the freak of the town."
He has, of course. Jessica Bressett, looking for her missing sister. Jessica Bressett, acting like her sister is gone. Jessica Bressett, refusing to acknowledge the fact that Autumn Bressett came back, that she's very much back, very much alive. It's strange, but it's not really Jim's business. Maybe the girl's sick, or something. Mentally. Jim knew her mother in high school. Definitely a possibility.
This time, he does sigh, and at that, Jessica kicks something with her foot again. Her eyebrows furrow down, but she still doesn't meet his gaze. "I swear," she mutters. "Half this fucking town thinks I'm deaf."
"Language," quips Jim, because spending all his time with a bunch of middle schoolers who swear like sailors is rubbing off on him. And also because Jessica looks to be about sixteen and looks like she weighs a hundred and ten soaking wet. It's a little bit ridiculous, the fact that Jim has reverted back to this kind of adult, so he looks around and squints his eyes. Pretends he's thinking about something.
She's looking at him now, at least. Frowning slightly, her eyebrows tilted up in surprise. "I'm not twelve," she argues, and really, Jim does not want to be dealing with this on a Saturday. It's three in the afternoon. He should be spending time with El. Resting.
"Sorry, force of habit," he apologizes, knowing he doesn't sound very sorry at all. "Listen, Jessica —"
"Jesse."
For god's sake. "Listen, Jesse, you gotta go home. You can't be running around people's properties."
"Says who?" she's looking at the ground again.
Jim's eyebrows go a little bit up. "Says me," he answers, pointing at his chest, a little bit too forcefully.
The girl shifts her weight again. "Whatever."
Jim sighs once again; cracks his knuckles. The urge for a cigarette is a permanent itch in the back of his head — and shit, maybe he shouldn't have started smoking at the ripe age of eleven years old, but it's not like he can turn back time. Not that that would be his number one concern. There are a lot of things he would do differently. A lot of things he would change.
He closes his eyes; brings up a hand to try and press away the upcoming headache. "This is the third time I've been called by some terrified mother that something is lurking in their backyard. You are trespassing, you realize that?"
"I'm not bothering anybody," the girl says, like Jim didn't just say that people are, in fact, bothered.
"This isn't the best time to be creeping people out," Jim continues, albeit a little forcefully. "People are still on edge, since —"
"Will Byers disappeared, yeah, I know." she bites the corner of her lip in an action that Jim recognizes from the mirror as something angry. "That was, like, two years ago. He's fine now, isn't he?"
If only she knew.
Jim resist the urge to outright growl and instead sends up a prayer to God asking what the hell he ever did in his life to deserve to deal with the town of Hawkins, Indiana.
God doesn't answer, of course. Him and Jim are a bit on the outs. Jim sniffs.
"Jessica — Jesse," he starts, instead, back to the task of trying to get the girl to look at him. "If you keep doing this I'm —"
Jessica's head suddenly snaps up to stare at him, eyes wide, panicked. "You can't call my mom."
A pang of sympathy runs through Jim's body, and he attempts to soften his features as much as he can, but he doubts that it actually works. "I didn't call her the last two times, but I'll have to if you keep doing this."
The girl's doing a pretty bad job of concealing her panic, her eyes darting around, so Jim takes off his hat and asks, quietly: "What's so important in the woods, anyway?"
Jessica's expression shutters close so quickly that Jim fails to hide away the small sliver of disappointment, and it shows on his face. The girl looks back to the ground. Furrows her brow into that vaguely angry, teenage angst look.
"Nothing," she says, cold, punctuating. She kicks the ground once more, and then lifts her head and looks Jim straight in the eye. "I won't bother anybody."
And then she turns on her heel.
Jim sighs and puts his hat back on, and then puts his hands on his hips. Breathes.
Jessica's about ten feet away when she spares him one last glance. "Don't call her," she calls, and doesn't look away until he nods.
📼📼📼
Tommy licks his lips, tasting copper and iron, and something vaguely fruity at the corner of his mouth from Carol's lipstick. It takes him a while to focus — shapes melt and change somewhere in his peripheral vision, and everything's kind of blurry, but not the good kind. He vaguely wants to throw up.
When he does focus, however, it takes him another while to actually identify his surroundings — cold, wet, dark. The forest.
How the hell did he get here?
He groans, twirling around in a circle, trying to figure out which way he came from, and then —
Someone's there, sitting against the tree, their face tilted up into the moonlight. Tommy gasps, involuntarily, and the leaves crunch under his feet as he stumbles back, and then falls on his ass.
"Fuck," he curses. He sits up, hands flying to his face, shaking even now, pressed tightly into his eyes, against his cheeks. Fuck, fuck, fuck, what was that —
"Hey," says the figure, blurry in the near-dark, their head suddenly snapping into his direction. The voice is quiet, but it still somehow reverberates all over his head. Tommy scrambles on the floor again, his breathing uneven, palms digging into twigs and stones. He squints, desperately trying to get his eyes to focus —
Autumn Bressett stares back.
Tommy's eyes widen. "Fuck, what the hell are you doing here?" the question comes out breathy, unstable. He gulps and looks to the side in embarrassment. Hottest girl in the fuckin' town. He grits his teeth and forces himself to look back at her.
The air here is somehow damp, thick — almost suffocating. Autumn continues to stare at him, eyes brighter than her face, her pupils blown so wide that Tommy can even see them from here. She doesn't answer, but she does grin; a wide, uncomfortable thing. It looks so... forced. It looks like it's going to split her face in two.
Tommy shakes his head. The weed must be playing with his mind, or something. Fuck, he'll kill that son of a bitch, giving him bad —
"Tommy."
Fuck. He jumps, air forced out of his lungs, a shiver running down the base of his spine; he resists the sudden and uncontrollable urge to crawl even further backwards. He clenches his jaw, so hard that it hurts — fuck, what is going on, why can't he —
His lips are quivering. They won't close over his teeth. He takes a deep, shaking breath, and tries to regain some semblance of control.
By his side, his fingers close against a rock.
Tommy tries for a smile. "Y-you know my name?" he questions, like it's casual, like they're two friends catching up, like they're not in a forest in the middle of the night, like Autumn Bressett doesn't look like there's something off about her, in the fundamental sense. But his voice is shaking, and it's so dark, it's so fucking dark —
Fuck, says the sane part of Tommy's brain, again. Stand up. Calm down. You can't be that fucking far from home. Hawkins is a small town.
"It's not," whispers Autumn, craning her head a little bit closer to his. Tommy's fingers twitch violently against the cold, wet rock. He thinks, instantly, that Autumn can't see the rock. He can't let her see the rock. He licks his lips. She's still grinning, still smiling, all her teeth too white even in the dark, too straight.
"Not what?" he asks, in a desperate sort of tone, his voice thin and cracking.
But Autumn doesn't say anything else. She just sits there, her face split open with that eerie fucking smile of hers, and it's so dark, he shouldn't even be able to see her from this far off. But he does see her, and her blown up black eyes, the skin that stretches too tight over her cheeks.
Tommy has a horrible, horrible feeling bury itself in the bottom of his gut.
"Tommy. Tommy," says Autumn, and she's standing up now, but something about it makes Tommy's blood run cold, because she's not exactly standing up, she's unfolding, one limb after another. It's so fucking quiet, and so fucking slow, and she's still fucking grinning, she's still fucking grinning —
— it's probably the dark. Nothing but the dark. He's losing his mind. He's going insane. He's never gonna smoke weed ever again, for god's sake. The rock is digging into his palm, but his body refuses to acknowledge it, and Tommy can tell that it hurts, that it's splitting his skin open, but instead his hands coil into even tighter fists. He leans back, tries to plant his feet, but his ass is still glued to the ground.
Autumn's standing now, and Tommy can swear she was never that fucking tall, even when he was five foot five and in freshman year, and she wore heels every day, junior and towering over everyone. Something flips in his stomach, and it's wrong, everything's wrong, fuck, is he dreaming —
"Tommy," she repeats, and takes a step closer, right on the dry, fallen leaves, but it doesn't make a sound. It should make a sound. It should. It should. Tommy breathes in, and everything's shaking, his eyes frozen on that one spot where Autumn's foot stands, in her red pump heels, the sole almost black with caked mud.
It's so fucking dark.
"Tommy."
She's somehow even closer now, only a few feet away. Crouching on the tips of her toes, her hands swinging side to side, all of it slow, so slow —
Probably the cold, says the part of Tommy's brain that is no longer rational, just desperately grasping at straws, holding on to the side of the boat as to not get dragged underwater. His fingers dig themselves into the soft, wet dirt, and his eyes snap away from Autumn's red, red, red shoes and meet her gaze.
"You have to —" says Autumn, but cuts herself off. Her eyebrows droop down low, way too low, and the top of her lip curls, but she's still smiling, and Tommy's voice is stuck in his throat, deep, dark earth under his fingernails, and, fuck, why is it warm, it shouldn't be this fucking warm —
The corners of Autumn's mouth curl down, but her mouth is still open, a baring of teeth. Tommy's brain makes one final attempt at normalcy — it finally wills his legs to move. He pushes back against the ground, muscles alive and jerking in all different directions like an exposed wire, feet slick against the warm, wet dirt. He finally takes a painful gasp, and the cold air that hits his lungs almost makes him freeze — why is it so cold, why is the dirt warm, why is Autumn Bressett's face doing that — but his legs have made up a mind of their own, and he slowly moves backwards, away, away, away —
His back hits something hard.
He watches as Autumn raises her hands up to her face, her eyes opened wide, black spots in the middle of a sea of milky white. Her fingers settle at her cheekbones, and Tommy can see that there's dirt underneath her fingernails, stained into her skin, all the way up to her knuckles.
Autumn Bressett pushes down, and her cheekbones form like putty.
Fuck, thinks Tommy, even though he doesn't understand what the fuck is going on, scrabbling against the ground, against the earth, blindly flailing and jerking, away, away, away, away, away awayawayawayAWAYAWAY —
He doesn't realize what's he's done until his hand hits something solid, something cold.
The rocks buries itself into Autumn's temple. Tommy retreats back into the tree with a directionless, yanking movement, his breaths coming in and out shaking, stuttering.
Her head's not screwed on right. Her head's not screwed on right. Her head's not screwed on right, Tommy, her mom's crazy, but fuck, she is hot —
Her head's not fucking right. The rock doesn't fall to the ground, but instead sticks, stuck in Autumn Bressett's skin like it's fucking clay, and fuck, fuck, Tommy can't breathe, his hands digging into the ground, the tree, anything —
Autumn picks the rock out of her skin, her fucking skull, and stares at it, her mouth deformed, half open and half closed, teeth still stacked straight and white. Holds it up in front of her face, stares at it like she doesn't quite know what it is. Her eyebrows are too low, and her lips are stretched too wide, and Tommy can't look, but he can't look away, breaths coming — not at all, they're not coming at all, because Tommy can't fucking breathe —
Autumn's head snaps up to look at him with a sick, disjointed crack.