IF THE PHONE'S sharp ringing hadn't already doused the once heated moment between Ana and Hopper like a bucket of ice water to the face, what was relayed through the line thereafter certainly drenched any warmth that remained.
With the exception of Yuri, who was undoubtedly stalling in his efforts to fix the grounded Katinka, everyone else had gathered inside the church, listening intently as Hopper relayed the details of his coded conversation.
"Okay, and, uh, who exactly was this mystery woman?" Murray asked the former police chief. They'd been hoping to reach Dr. Owens, someone they knew and trusted, but that willful optimism was quickly dashed.
The sun had set in the hours since their arrival, and the lamps lighting the modified storage room threw dark shadows across downtrodden faces. "Not sure. I mean, she wasn't exactly Miss Talkative. You know?" Hopper explained, shoulders slumped in defeat. "I spent five minutes trying to convince her I was real. I'm supposed to be dead, remember? Anyway, I finally get around to half-convincing her, she starts to open up a little, then says that she's a friend of the doc's—"
Sitting beside him, Ana lent forward to complete his clarification, the confession turning the air surrounding them stale. "And that Dr. Owens was indisposed."
"Indisposed?" Murray echoed in perplexity, the descriptor providing little in the way of elucidation.
"It gets worse," Hopper warned, causing both Murray and Joyce's brows to rise in apprehension. "She said the doc's with the girl. And the girl went off to fight some evil in Hawkins. Then they all went off-grid. The doc, the girl, everybody."
That revelation had spurned another bout of regret within Hopper, who was already feeling plenty guilty for sending Joyce his message in the first place. It was a shame Ana now shared, unfortunately. She'd justified leaving both her children to go traipsing off on a doomed rescue mission under the false assumption they'd be safe—and she'd been unbelievably wrong.
Robby wasn't safe in Hawkins. El wasn't safe in California. Hell, they definitely weren't safe in Russia. Even with thousands of miles separating the three groups, things had still managed to turn upside down for them simultaneously.
"The girl, meaning...El," Murray reiterated though the answer was apparent.
Hopper sighed heavily at the acknowledgment of their greatest fear, one that Ana's hand rubbing soothing circles into his back could never hope to soften the blow of. "Yeah, it has to be."
Dimitri, who'd remained silent for much of the retelling, probably confused by references to people and places that meant nothing to him, finally interjected. "This is your daughter, American?"
"Mm-hmm," Hopper hummed his agreement, catching Ana's wayward hand to slot her fingers between his own. "Ours. And they're not alone. Joyce's kids are with 'em." Being off-grid explained why none of the Byers had been reachable in the days prior, but the realization didn't make anything better for their knowing. Safety in numbers hadn't been as reassuring as promised.
"Okay, I...I see the mood here is bleak," Murray started carefully, eyes bouncing from one worried face to another. "And understandably so. But I do think we need to consider the very real possibility that this mystery woman is, in fact, KGB. And she's—"
He didn't get to finish his conspiracy theory before Joyce was trampling all over the suggestion. "No. She's telling the truth. When we were in the lab, those particles we saw, they were alive. And if they're alive, that means a gate's open in Hawkins."
"Gate? What does this mean?" Dimitri inquired in bemusement.
Ana could only shake her head in exasperation as Hopper's touch disappeared when he stood and began pacing. "For us, gate translates to fucked," she remarked to the disgraced guard, causing his eyes to widen.
"It means we have to go home right now," Hopper pressed with finality. "What is taking so long? I thought you said he was close."
When it came to Yuri, close likely meant he was biding time to concoct an alternate plan for betrayal. Yet, everyone had lifted from their seats to trail after Hopper as he lumbered towards the window to overlook the smuggler's tinkering.
Murray seemed to hold the same disbelief because he scoffed loudly and grumbled, "yeah, close to sabotaging us, you mean."
"We think he's playing us again," Dimitri said, paralleling his pessimism. No one held any belief that the pilot was out in the snow doing his absolute best.
"So put a goddamn gun to his head," Hopper asserted through gritted teeth, restraint wearing thin to the point of snapping.
"And then what? He just spits out more lies," Dimitri countered, and not without reason. Yuri had double-crossed them all too many times to count. It was understandable that any measure of faith they held in the criminal was a little shaky.
This observation seemed to deflate some of Hopper's palpable anger, to be replaced by an exhaustion that drew down his eyes. He busied his hands with unwrapping a cigarette pack as Murray mused around them, pulling out two thin white sticks to pass Ana one, the other finding its home behind his ear.
"It's moot anyway," the bespectacled man reasoned. "If your kids are truly in some kind of imminent danger, even if we were to leave at this very moment, we wouldn't make it in time. The earliest we can get there is late tomorrow." And that would be far too little too late.
Their one voice of confidence, the only one of maintained conviction, really, came from Joyce. "No, we...we don't have to make it back. Not tonight," she rationalized. "Whatever this evil is, we know it's connected to the hive mind. And now we know part of that hive mind is in Russia. So we don't need to get back to Hawkins to fight it." Hive mind, like peanut butter, was another thing Ana hoped to forget existed one day.
"All we need is to destroy those particles," Hopper surmised, the understanding bringing some of the sureness back into his blue eyes.
At this, Joyce vehemently nodded her head in confirmation. "And if we're lucky, it'll hurt it enough to give the kids the upper hand." What they could do was buy their children more time, if nothing else, and hope their labors weren't in vain.
This plan seemed plausible enough to Joyce, Hopper, and Ana, but Murray certainly wasn't sold. "Wait, time out," he barked, dramatically waving his arms about. "We're talking about the particles inside the prison? The prison that we just narrowly escaped from?"
"We broke out. We can break back in," Hopper stated as if it were that simple.
This dismissal had Murray careening his head towards Ana, and she thought she might've heard his neck crack with the way that it whipped towards her, his stare begging for support. However, he only received a noncommittal shrug in return. "Like he said. Easy peasy."
With no one to aid in his dispute, Murray hurried off after Hopper to continue expressing his fervent disagreement. "Jim! The entire Soviet army is looking for us."
"Sure. And we'll be exactly where they least expect," Hopper defended their scheme, throwing open a box of weapons before he began distributing the AKs inside.
Murray hastily shouldered the firearm that was handed to him, but that didn't stop the onslaught of naysaying. "Alright. There is a fine line between courage and stupidity, and this falls very far on the side of stupid. This is Dirty Dozen stuff. Except there are, uh, five of us."
"Four, actually," Hopper corrected, and Ana's eyebrows shot up to meet her hairline.
There was no way he was doing this to her again. "You've got to be kidding me," she scoffed in indignation. "I'm not sitting out on Weathertop this time." She'd given in to his sidelining in the name of being pregnant during the battle at Starcourt Mall, but that excuse no longer held water when it came to keeping her skin out of the game.
Hopper looked puzzled for a second, eyeing her in uncertainty before his head shook. "Not you," he said, moving past her, hand running reassuringly down the length of her arm as he moved to approach Dimitri. "Breaking back in's gonna be easier than breaking out. That's why we need an airlift. This is where you come in. I don't care what it takes. you get Yuri in line, and you get that bird in the air."
A slight smirk pulled at the side of Dimitri's mouth as he nodded firmly. "On it."
With him gone, only the four Americans remained. "Yu... Yuri mentioned something about a flamethrower, right?" Joyce stammered in remembrance.
This led to another crate being unceremoniously tossed open, and inside sat the one thing Demogorgons fear above all else. "Oh, yeah. This'll do. This'll do just fine," Hopper simpered while cradling the machine in admiration, wonderment twinkling behind his bright eyes.
"Why don't you ever look at me like that?" Ana teased, and he put the weapon right back down.
Looking past her, Hopper addressed the other two lingering nearby. "Think you can handle getting everything ready?" When there were murmurs and nods of agreement, he stood and grabbed her hand, pulling them both away from the crowd. "Good, we'll just be a minute."
Dragged out back, away from Yuri and Dimitri managing Katinka in front, and far from Joyce and Murray's watchful eyes, Hopper pressed Ana's back against the metal building. The steel was cold, even through her thick coat, but she couldn't feel the biting chill with the heat of his body pressing upon hers. "I don't think a minute is gonna be long enough," she moaned as he peppered kisses along her jaw, his slowly returning stubble chaffing her face in a way she'd missed.
"When was the last time I told you that I loved you?" He chuckled against her skin, calloused hands lifting that atrocious yellow shirt to find purchase across her stomach. His greedy palms grasping at supple flesh caused her body to come alive, the static of her nerves making her entire frame feel like it was vibrating with repressed energy.
Ana sighed contentedly against him, fingers fisted in the waist of his denim jeans she knew there wasn't enough time to remove. "Not, uh, not recently...I don't think," she said through a stuttered breath as his grip on her hips drew them even closer.
"I didn't think so," he whispered before catching her mouth with his own. Even if it was a brief respite, it was one they both needed. Too much time had passed without the other, too many nights spent alone, that they could grant themselves this one indulgence. Hopper's tongue traced the seam of her lips, and she whimpered, melting into him, but the thrill was over too quickly.
Pulling back, his heavy exhales danced across her flushed face like a light breeze. "I love you," he finally expressed, his intense gaze burning into her very soul, igniting a fire that had craved to be relit.
"I love you too," Ana panted, clutching to his figure as if it were the only thing keeping her grounded—which she supposed it was. "But just a little. Not enough to do something crazy like breaking back into a Russian prison."
The familiar sarcasm made him smile, eyes softening as they took in every one of her delicate features, recommitting them to memory. "We do this, and we get home. Back to our kids," he pledged firmly, his palm encasing the side of her face, fingers long enough to tickle the base of her neck while his thumb ran gently along the apple of her cheek.
Turning into his touch, Ana allowed the pad of his thumb to ghost across her lips, feeling the grooves unique to only him as they pressed against her still moist mouth. "Keep talking like that, and we won't make it back inside," she forewarned even if the threat was favorable, although entirely empty.
"I wish we could," he expressed in regret, his wanton caress falling down to her thigh, which he lifted to settle over his hip, the evidence of his own desire pressing into her in such a way that stars splatter in unrecognizable constellations across her vision. "Fuck," Hopper hissed and drew away, allowing her leg to fall so her foot could meet the ground once again. "We'll just have to be patient."
The sudden loss of friction drew a disappointed sound from her throat, lamenting the absence of his closeness and weight settling upon her. "Patience isn't my strong suit," Ana grumbled in dissatisfaction, thoroughly agitated with the minimal progress when it came to their reuniting.
"Later," he swore while adjusting, not that their rouged lips and blushed faces weren't going to be telling enough. "You're not gonna walk for a week when I'm through with you."
Promises, promises, Ana thought wryly as she followed him dutifully back inside the church.
Loved hearing where everyone is from. Crazy to think this dumb little story has reached so many diverse places across the globe. Glad you're all here ❤️