"I love you."
Was it just a memory, or was he losing his mind? It was a question Billy Hargrove often posed to himself.
Granted, he was wrong on both accounts. He was just too scared to let the third option actually become an option.
Even two weeks removed from the event, he couldn't help but think about waking up after passing out on top of his textbooks and hearing Tatum's voice as clear as a bell. It had to be her.
But how many times had he heard her say 'I love you'? Too many times to count, but never enough. He couldn't dismiss the fact that he was always dreaming about her, about conversations past and making up ones that might've happened if fate wasn't such a cruel mistress.
They say that you heal with time, but Billy was growing more weary of the concept as the days ticked by without her.
Although he tried to tap along to the beat of a Kiss song as he sped down the highway, he couldn't shake it. There was something different about that last time, about how strong her voice had been. He always seemed to hear her, but not quite like that.
And even with the answer right in front of him, he settled for memories being responsible instead.
Billy tipped his sunglasses down as he raced past the freshly repainted Welcome to Hawkins sign, sighing softly to himself as he cut his speed in half. The last thing he needed was to get a ticket, because even though he wasn't a minor anymore, there was a one hundred percent chance that his dad would be the first to know if he got pulled over.
He was hoping to avoid his father entirely over Thanksgiving break, which was exactly why instead of splitting for his own neighborhood, he took a path well known from his year spent in Hawkins.
Billy let the camaro roll to a stop just shy of the Harrington driveway, his eyes focused instead across the street as he put the vehicle in park. As he slid out of the driver's seat and into the late November air, he found himself unable to get very far. He leaned back against his car, pulling the cigarette from behind his ear and lighting it as he stared at the old Rivers house still bearing a for sale sign in the yard.
It would either be empty forever or would become a dark tourist spot. Either way, it would always taunt him.
He was tempted to sneak into the backyard and check if the trellis was too overgrown to climb up anymore. A small part of him thought he might find Tatum inside if he just opened the front door.
"Hargrove!"
Billy slid his sunglasses on top of his head as the clanking of bike chains sounded in the distance, a grin growing as he spotted a fleet of kids headed his way. He snubbed out his cigarette, barely able to take a step forward before Max hopped off of Lucas' handlebars and wrapped her arms around him. "H-hey," he greeted happily, squeezing her tight. "How are you guys?"
Mike, Lucas and Dustin all put down the kickstands of their bikes, exchanging short handshakes with Billy once Max finally let him go.
"Oh my god, where is your hair?" Dustin asked, jaw gaping.
Lucas groaned. "The mullet was our only way of identifying you."
"You guys happy for a break from school?" Billy asked as he laughed, slinging an arm around Max's shoulders as they lingered at the edge of the Harrington driveway.
"God, absolutely!" Mike cried, waving his hands up at the sky. "And it couldn't have come any slower. I feel like I've aged ten years since I saw El last."
"Did they make it out of New York okay? The snow wasn't too bad?"
Mike nodded. "My mom said Joyce called her from a gas station a few hours ago. They should be at my house soon."
"Are you guys have a party in my driveway without even inviting me?" Steve asked as he reached the street, hands pocketed in his jeans. He greeted Billy with snappy handshake, the smirk on his face growing into a grin. "Guess who got into IU for the spring?"
Both Billy and the high schoolers cheered, giving Steve congratulating pats on the back.
"I'll call my landlord, man," Billy grinned.
Max couldn't hold back a laugh. "You two being roommates is going to be hilarious."
"Steve sings in the shower," Dustin said as he elbowed the video store worker.
"Dude, I told you that in confidence!" Steve whined.
Billy failed to hide a laugh before pointing a thumb back towards his camaro. "Should we head over to the Wheeler's so we beat the Byers' there?"
"We'll all fit in one," Lucas assured, the four high schoolers cramming into the backseat as Billy and Steve took the front. "Hey, Steve, what are you going to major in at IU?" he asked, wrapping his arms around Max's waist as she sat on his lap.
"I think I'm just going to start with general stuff and see what I like from there," he replied with a shrug as the camaro pulled back to avoid running over any bikes. "Maybe Physical Therapy? I'd take an excuse to play sports forever."
Billy glanced into the rearview mirror and he headed out of the neighborhood. "Hey, Dustin, how's Suzie?"
Dustin's lips pursed as a parade of off key singing met him. "Suzie is doing great, thank you for asking. Her family might even let her visit next summer."
"Watch the hands, Sinclair," Billy warned as he reached back and flicked Max's knee.
"Hey, look!" Mike shouted as he pressed a hand against the window, the camaro rolling up Maple St and coming to a stop outside the Wheeler's. "I think that's them!"
The six piled out of the car and onto the lawn as a familiar green car drew close and pulled into the driveway. Yelling like contestants on a game show as the Byers' cark shifted into park, the high schoolers tackled the first body they could get their hands on.
The front door of the Wheeler house flew open as Jonathan greeted Steve and Billy, the senior pulled from the boys as Nancy ran across the lawn.
With Will engulfed by Dustin, Lucas and Max, and Mike shamelessly kissing Eleven, Joyce singled Billy out to give him a warm hug.
"How are you, sweetie?" she asked him, beaming despite the lengthy drive.
Billy offered a smile as Joyce pulled back. "Just taking it one day at a time."
"As we should," Joyce sighed.
"Do you guys want to head to Marty's?" Jonathan asked, rejoining the group with his arm around Nancy. "Is that alright, Mom?"
"I'll go help Karen with getting ready for dinner tomorrow." Joyce patted Jonathan's shoulder, placing her keys in his hand before heading towards the house.
"I've been craving their burgers for weeks," El expressed, pulling Mike towards Joyce's car as Jonathan fired up the engine.
The group of ten split evenly for the two cars, bopping their way through Hawkins with excited conversation. Entering Marty's like a nightmare storm, they took up the back booth that just barely managed to fit them all.
Burning through their meals happily, they bounced between one large discussion, to several side conversations and back for two hours without pause, never a dead moment among them. They covered everything from Jonathan and Nancy working on their college applications, to the differences between A/V clubs in Indiana and New York and even what it was like for the kids to party with Nancy.
At one end of the booth, Steve sighed softly to himself as he looked across the diner to the booth he and Tatum occupied once a week for as long as he could remember. Sometimes he couldn't remember what Hawkins had been like before Tate rolled into town. He wished they had tried to make more time for one another after graduation, but life always seemed to get in the way.
He wasn't sure what he would do to have just one more babysitter's club, just one more chance to sit at that table across from Tate and talk about anything under the sun.
Even when he descended through the ranks of popularity at school for ditching toxic friends, she had always been there. He could always count on her to have his back, even if that meant breaking him out of a secret Russian base.
Even when it meant giving her life for his, she did it without question.
"Enjoy your time with them."
Steve's brows drew in, blinking several times as a small voice invaded his head. Although he looked around the diner, everyone else was enveloped in their own conversation.
Part of him didn't understand what had just happened, and the other knew exactly who's voice it had been.
He just didn't want to share it with anyone else.
||
A single drop of blood trailed down Tate's upper lip as she opened her eyes, bearing a soft smile as she wiped the bright red away with a tissue.
Her morning peace was soon taken away, the mechanical locks on her door unfurling themselves with several loud clunks. Just as he had every morning for the past three weeks, one of the blond Soviet soldiers appeared in the doorway of her room silently.
Unlike the others, he kept his weapon holstered when escorting Tate to and from the training rooms and Zharkov's office.
Tate sighed as she climbed off her made bed, bare feet scuffing the freezing concrete floor. "How long do you think it's going to take Zharkov to realize this is all useless?" she asked aloud in Russian as she coolly strolled out of her room, the level of the facility she resided on engrained in her memory. "Still nothing from you, Kamenev?"
The guard following close behind Tate remained quiet, leisure in his pace unlike the other soldiers that could barely breathe around her. The other guards often scurried, but he simply strolled.
"Every day for three weeks and not a word," Tate mused, absently peering through the small windows on her way down the hall. "Who knows how long I'll be here? Are you really not going to talk to me?"
"Eitan."
Tate's brow quirked, glancing over her shoulder. "Is that your name?"
Sergeant Kamenev, notable only by his rank and name tag, came to a stop as they reached Zharkov's office. He took his normal stance just outside the door, folding his hands in front of himself as kept his gaze on the wall. "Yes."
Tatum grinned, laughing softly to herself as she stepped into the office alone and let the door shut between them. She blew a wave of hair from her face as she sat in the chair beside Zharkov's workstation, offering out her arm without pause.
She still had bruises from resisting in the beginning, so it was best to just offer.
"Have you eaten?" Zharkov asked as he wrapped a tourniquet around her upper arm, his glasses low on his nose.
"Just the unidentifiable breakfast I get every morning," she replied, resting her head back as the blood draw began. Both crooks of her arm had mean, green bruises, but it didn't stop Zharkov from tapping a vein every other day to keep the injections consistent for the other prisoners.
"You get more than the others."
"Maybe you should change that if you want them to succeed," Tate told him, almost unable to feel the blood leaving her body after so many times. "You're already putting their bodies under intense circumstances. They need sustenance if you want an improvement. They deserve more. They work hard."
Zharkov's brows lifted, still not meeting her gaze as he worked. "Your Russian is improving greatly. Your grammar was a little choppy when we first met, but now you sound like a native speaker."
"I wonder why," she mused. "Can I see Hopper today?"
"You'll be working with just sixteen today."
Tate furrowed her eyebrows. "We've been doing groups for weeks."
Zharkov sighed as he pulled the needle from her arm, securing a cotton ball and band-aid over it as he leaned back in his chair. "And there's been minimal improvement. I believe working with them individually will be more effective. One person a day, they practice on their own the rest of the week." He rose from his chair, carting the three tubes of blood to the centrifuge. "If improvement does not occur in the next couple of weeks, we will choose another method."
Tatum rolled her eyes as his back was turned to her, grabbing the wrapped stick of jerky he always had for her after blood draws. "What should I focus on?"
"You're the one with powers, are you not?" he asked, pushing his glasses up his nose as he turned around. "You know what we need from them."
Sighing as she rose from the chair, she slipped out of his office with the rest of the jerky in hand. "Which room, Eitan?" she asked, only to find her guard already heading down the east wing. She rolled her eyes, unwilling to spend the energy to catch up to him and instead walked steadily as she finished her jerky. "What do you do for fun when you're not on duty?"
Eitan lightly rolled his eyes, not looking over his shoulder as they headed for the training room. "We do not have fun here."
"So it's just as much of a prison for you as it is for me," Tate mused. "You don't play cards? Durak? My brother taught me that one when we were in secondary school."
Eitan held a bemused expression as he stopped outside of the third training room, holding open the door for her. "No one chooses to be here."
Tatum paused, managing to catch his stoic gaze for just a moment. She only nodded, his sincerity enough to keep her quiet before passing under his arm into the padded room.
Bound by handcuffs, Aella's head lifted as Tate entered, her dark hair braided into two large sections that hung down the back of her dirty scrubs.
"Dobroye utro," Tate greeted the familiar face. "Aella, vernyy?" She gestured two fingers in her direction, the cuffs unlatching and tumbling to the floor. "English or Russian?"
With their former group sessions highly monitored, there was little opportunity for making connections with one another. Even with being in contact with the other experiments for weeks, none of them knew much about one another.
"English is okay," Aella replied, massaging her wrists as the door closed the two of them inside. "It was one of my studies at university in Saint Petersburg. I quite enjoyed it."
Tate's brows lifted as she took a slow walk around the room, checking for cameras. "You were in university before this?" She squinted at a piece in the corner, unable to spot an audio attachment. "I should be at university right now, too." She looked to Aella as she picked up an old security image of Hopper before gesturing towards the middle of the mat. She had requested images of all the prisoners for attempting to train them in the Void. "What were you studying?"
Aella joined her on the ground, wincing slightly as she folded her legs underneath her. Her bones hadn't stopped aching since she arrived in Kamchatka. "Literature. I was taken the day I was supposed to meet with an agent about a fiction manuscript I wrote."
A soft smile threatened to grace her hollow face. "My father's an author. A great one, even." She paused, brows furrowing. "How long have you been here?" she asked, setting the photograph aside to stretch her back, waving a hand for Aella to follow.
"Since the middle of August." Aella copied Tate's stretches with ease, as all of their prior group sessions opened with stretching, mostly just to piss off Ozerov. She was sore from being cramped up in her cell, missing her tiny apartment in St. Petersburg that seemed like a mansion in comparison. "It is hard to keep track of the days."
"I know what you mean." Tate picked up the photograph of Hopper and set it in front of Aella, tapping the pixelated face. "Here's Hop. He's only a few halls away from us. I want to see if we can get you to him in the Void. Just observe."
Aella's lips pursed in thought, hesitantly looking up to Tate. "You can see people across the world by doing this?"
Tate nodded, humming. "I check in on friends in the United States every few days, but I don't need pictures anymore."
The brunette's brows pulled in tight. "You don't?"
"It took me a long time to get the hang of it." Tatum leaned over to adjust Aella's hand placement, setting one to rest on leg and the other atop the image of Hopper. "So we'll stick to having physical aids for everyone else. Do you feel ready?"
"I never feel ready, but we can begin."
Tate nodded, holding off a soft smile. "Close your eyes. Let yourself be surrounded by the darkness. There's a thin layer of water at your feet, but it isn't cold. It's almost soothing. As you step, the water ripples around you. How does it feel?"
Aella's eyes seemed to fight under her eyelids, the tension in her body opposite of Tate's calm stature. "It's cold."
"Just calm down. Breathe. You can do this, just ease into. Let the water warm. Get comfortable." Tate took careful account of the droplet of blood beginning to descend down Aella's upper lip. "Can you hear Jim?"
"I think I can hear singing."
"Follow the sound," Tatum encouraged, tracking the shift in Aella's face as she struggled to hold a connection. "Can you tell me the lyrics?"
Aella's brows furrowed. "Don't...mess around with, um...Jim?"
Tate sat up a little straighter as fresh blood came from Aella's other nostril, threatening to spill over her lip. "You've got him. Go ahead and let him go." She reached for a box of tissues at the edge of the mat, handing it over to Aella as her eyes opened. "Good job. That's one of his favorite songs. He must be in a good mood today."
"You know him well?" Aella asked, letting her posture rest as she blotted the blood from her nose. "But you are English and he is American?"
Tatum smiled. "I lived in the city that he was Police Chief of in America for about a year. We went through a lot together. We were taken from that city together. We exposed a hidden base there and suffered the consequences." She rested back on her palms as Aella wiped another tissue along her upper lip. "Why are you here?"
Aella scoffed, setting the tissue aside. "War crimes."
"I thought you were a university student? How were you committing war crimes there?"
"I never did anything," she replied. "My older brother was a scientist for the military. He committed treason. When he died..." her brows furrowed ever so slightly, "they decided that wasn't enough. But my family had not seen him in almost a year. He was working on a secret project. We knew nothing."
Tate's stomach began to swirl as she digested Aella's words, unnamed guilt biting at her. A cherry soda. Crooked wire glasses. "What, uh...what was your brother's name?"
"Alexei."
Her lips parted as she drew in a sharp breath, a heavy hand gripping at her heart. "Oh, god," she whispered.
Aella's expression faltered from sorrow to confusion. "I do not understand, Tatum."
Tate could see it now; The natural curls peeking out from her braids, the shape of her eyes. This was the sister of a man she sent to his death, now locked in prison because of her. The gears in her head began to spin, her consciousness nearly leaving her body until a gentle hand reached out to squeeze hers.
"Talk to me," Aella softly requested, weak but warm eyes focused on Tate. "Does it have to do with my brother?"
"I met him," she gulped, her former summer tan banished by a ghost. "The secret project he was working on was the American base Hopper and I uncovered." A deep guilt rippled in her stomach. "The treason he committed was for my friends and I. He drew the plans for us to know how to destroy what they were working on. I'm...I'm so sorry. This is all my fault."
Although some of the warmth had slipped from her face, Aella didn't hold an expression of distress or anger. "You carry heavy guilt in your heart, Tatum, but you do not have to. I do not blame you for the choices the government made." She squeezed the brunette's hand, lowering her voice ever so slightly. "It does not matter how we got here if we can work together to find a way out."
Tate's lips parted as she processed Aella's words, her brows raising as the dots connected. "I see."
"Before you arrived, we were kept separate. Now that you've been tasked to work with us, we've been able to make connections." Although her accent was bold, there was no question is her intentions. Her eyes dashed briefly to the door before returning to Tate. "Even if we are only able to see you now that training in one on one, I think we could join up."
"Right under their noses," she quietly said, nodding with narrowed eyes.
"If we can get out of this facility, is there someone you know that can help us?"
Tate's eyes widened, hand still holding on to Aella's.
She thought of Dr. Sam Owens, bloody in a stairwell, of his kind eyes – of the birth certificate he had made for Eleven so she could lead a normal life. She remembered the distant whir of helicopters as she laid dying in Starcourt Mall, hundreds of men flown in by Owens in an attempt to save their lives.
"I absolutely do."
Aella's mouth nearly ached as a wide smile stretched across her face for the first time in months, a long burned out spark ignited behind her eyes. "Where do we start?"
Tate winced. "I guess we need to get everyone permanent superpowers."
"Oh, is that all?"