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"DO IT, NINE."
The words hung harshly within those four walls. They were closing in on the young girl whose weight fell through her palms upon a cold metal table. Just over her shoulder, the man stood in tall and thin stature. His sharp nose painted him like the villain of a fairytale. That was, of the original, untouched tales ending in grim tragedy.
Under her rich, dark brown eyes gone bloodshot, the girl's cheeks were blotchy with moisture. Long black locks hung down across her face in messy tendrils matted down by a cap of webbing on her head. On the other side of the table sat a boy no older than twelve. The blue-tinted light washed his olive skin gray, flushing the faded evidence of a black eye. His hair was buzzed to the scalp. In the everything of his eyes was the same glint of fear as all the other children.
He watched the younger girl with the hatred breaking from behind those flecked hazel eyes.
"I said do it, Nine. I won't ask again," The man spoke, behind her. His voice could freeze the whole room over, even more so than before. It jabbed her with a pain that almost felt physical and sent a tear to catch in her eyelashes.
She winced. Then, bridged a link between his mind and hers, and found a narrow pathway inside. Her eyelids fluttered shut. And so she dipped into his memory as though one would stretch a hand into a bath of blackened water and pond scum. Strained and apprehensive.
The boy's mind was a winding maze of intricacies. His memories were sprinkled loosely within the twists and turns. At first, they were of nothing but his life in the lab, hitting the girl in monochrome, until she strained further with a sharp ache to dig to the depths. And as she detached from her own consciousness into everything that his was, she was met with a growth of vibrant color. A feeling of warmth, of security.
She felt snippets of the hot southern sun, a mother's bubbly laugh, and the taste of sweet orange juice on a parched tongue. Faint, but undeniably there, were secrets shared between brothers and the scent of a blooming lilac bush shifting with the sway of the breeze, all swept up in the heat of summer. But she couldn't stay. The girl knew one thing very well and it was that she had one job slithering into his memories. Erase it all. Everything that dated from before he became nothing but a number. Everything that made him human. Everything still tinged with hope.
Her heart had never ached as much as it did in this moment. She couldn't remember herself to be so mournful and full of grief. With the presence of the man's hand on her arm, she squeezed her eyes shut further in concentration and swallowed the pain splitting across her head. Carefully, she pulled up those memories, and she ripped them away. The path was severed. The only trace that they ever were, was in her own memory of this moment.
The girl was thrown back into her own consciousness all at once, struck with the agony of regret and a debilitating headache. A sharp gasp felt like razor blades in her throat. Her mind went blank until she found herself weeping on the floor. Blood that dripped from her nose had found its way over her lip and into her mouth in a smear across her teeth. A sickening flavor of iron.
Across the table, the boy was grabbing at his head in the grappling of what she had done. She hoped he would be able to recover the memories someday. With everything in her being, she prayed they weren't lost forever.
And then there was a cold hand resting on her shoulder and a voice filtering through the stale air.
"You did well, Nine. You did very well. Now, you must make yourself forget."
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WHEN MEL AWOKE, SHE SWORE she could still feel the chill of his palm on her shoulder. Her chest was heaving. Sheets tangled around her legs. Fingers hooked into the comforter. Mel pulled herself upright and collapsed into a hunched curve, darkness enveloping the concavities of her body. Thin streaks of moonlight seeping under the gaps in the blinds did nothing to absolve her. The silent tears still fell.
Since that December day Chief Hopper stood at her doorstep, it wasn't rare that Mel dreamed of the lab. Always with the recurring theme of the tall man and his sinister eyes. But this nightmare... This one was the first to be true to the past. Scene by scene, in perfect detail, like a horror film. A flashback in its entirety. Mel could even still feel shreds of Nine's headache ringing in her ears. In, out, in, out. Breathing never did much good when it felt like choking down metal.
It was her conscience. It had to be. Punishing her with what she couldn't escape: herself. And now there was nothing left to do. It was as perpetual as a stitch unraveling seam by seam, tugging, tugging, tugging no matter how often she cut the loose thread.
As Mel cornered her heart rate into something a little more steady, lowering back onto her pillow, she couldn't pull herself from the guilt. She thought of the three souls from Hawkins Lab who had fallen to her powers. Three people dead, whose blood still stained her skin, couldn't be scratched off over the countless showers she'd taken in between. Permanent as the scar burned into her wrist.
She hadn't known them. They were just three blips in a timeline that favored a monster like Nine. Three whole lives sacrificed for childsplay. It tore at her insides to this day. Within those walls, the oldest she had ever been was twelve years old.
The first of the three was a man who spoke a funny language. Little Nine thought it sounded like something from a cartoon. His strange words intrigued her until she was told they shouldn't. He was only there so she could retrieve information from him. Some of which couldn't be tortured out of his lips given the language barrier, so as soon as Nine's powers were discovered, she became the bridge. Memories knew no language barrier. And it would've been easy if six-year-old Nine had been given more practice.
Instead, she got tangled up. Ensnared in his memories, barely breaking free, leaving too many severed threads. He was motionless when she finally found a way out of his mind. Nine was far too young to understand.
Second had been one of the children. "Three," Dr Brenner told her in the confidentiality of a tiny silver room. "He's been keeping secrets. Bad, bad secrets that are hurtful to your papa. Nine, I need you to find them. Can you do that for me?"
"He plans to escape," whispered Nine, seven years old and sitting across from Three, whose tears fell like stars. "Under his pillow. He's hiding something." None of the children would see Three again after that. Stories echoed throughout the halls that the guards were unable to pry a stolen butter knife from his fingers until an electric collar shocked him completely limp. None of the children dared to imagine a world outside the laboratory after that.
Lastly, a woman. She was blonde, blue-eyed, and vengeful. Thrashing against the arms of guards, screaming of a daughter who had been stolen out of her womb. She remained a beast all throughout Nine's tearful erasing of her memory. She refused to fall still, even once there was nothing left in her mind of a daughter to struggle for. The woman may have not known why she was fighting back, but her hurt would never be taken away from her. So, she was sent off to electro-shock therapy, never to be seen by Nine again.
Three death tolls rang out in Mel's brain. For three people corroded from existence. Without haunting visions of the past, Mel could hardly prove they had ever been.
Memory was so, so fragile.
Worst was that through all the inhumanity, Nine was the only child to be granted the right to remain human. While the others were stripped of love, of parents, of identity, and sealed tightly in a cold room to sleep, Nine had a home to go back to each night. For reasons unknown to her, she was released from the lab altogether even before puberty could strike. Granted a shot at a relatively happy childhood.
It made Mel sick. There was nothing at her core that could prove she and Nine were the same. All the atrocities her hands were tugged into place for were alien if only Mel's memory hadn't come back. Outlining it all in a ring of blood in her mind. This was exactly why she shoved it away. Exactly why she was so eager to obey her parents' wishes for a daughter dedicated solely to ballet and academics. There was no room for reminiscing during a perfectly executed pirouette, or an Honors English exam. Neither during all the back-breaking repetition of practice Mel took leading up to those moments.
Once again, she sat up in bed.
Breathe in, five counts. Out another five. It doesn't matter if your breath shakes. All your breath needs to be is there. All you need is to be alive.
Bare feet hit the floor with no mind to the frost that would shoot through them. Her alarm clock apprised of early morning hours, the darkness soaking into the landscape outside her window in its agreement, but Mel was wide awake. Without care, she wrenched on some socks and grabbed her sneakers. Dashing through the sleeping house, she tried not to let the door slam behind her.
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originally published: 4/24/20
edited: 12/25/22
note: merry christmas, have some heartbreak :,)