Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Amy did not like not knowing what was happening. In fact, she had specifically chosen the career path based around figuring out what has happened somewhere. But, somehow, she now found herself at a complete and utter loss. In fact, she had a terrible feeling that no amount of detective skills would be able to fully unravel this mystery.

That mystery of course being the fact that she was standing in a random forest in a hospital gown and no shoes, hair shaved off, nose bleeding, and alone. Out of everything - and this may sound weird but damn did she not care at all if she sounded weird right now - the thing that was bothering her the most was the fact that it was summer. She was in a random forest she’s never seen before in what, if she had to guess, was the appearance of a runaway from the hospital, but the most unsettling thing was the fact that the season was wrong.

She was dizzy just from, well, whatever must have landed her in the hospital to begin with (which must be what had happened because why the hell else would she be in a hospital gown?) but also from just trying to understand what was going on.

Slow down, Amy. Breathe. Go over the information you have.

Okay, what did she know? She knew that the last thing she remembers was being on a trip to visit the Boyle family home in Iowa because Grand Auntie Boyle was hosting some kind of apparently very important Starter Dough rehoming ceremony. Amy wasn’t sure what that really meant but the whole squad had decided to go (read: finally agreed after months of pestering from Charles and somehow his entire extended family who had gotten their phone numbers). She and the squad were all travelling in the same large van because of course they had to be. They had been coming up on some sort of abandoned lab building in some tiny town in Indiana. Jake had made a joke about it looking like it could be from a supervillian’s origin story and she had laughed and then… nothing. She was here. In the wrong place, in the wrong month, in the wrong clothes and the squad and their van were nowhere to be found. Jake was nowhere to be found.

There was only really one possibility, then. They’d been in some sort of accident and she’d been taken to the hospital (god she hoped it was only her, she didn’t want to think about any of the others hurt or worse) where she’d had her head shaved, probably for some sort of procedure. She must have been in a coma. And then she’d gotten spooked and run away. Because that was definitely something she would do. Definitely.

Amy was broken from her thoughts by probably the best thing she’d ever heard.

“Amy?”

Chapter Text

Amy had barely turned around when she was enveloped in a hug. She knew Rosa wasn’t as opposed to physical affection as she once had been, but she was still surprised that Rosa would initiate.
Rosa quickly pulled away, though. Amy looked her up and down. Her hair was short - just like Amy’s. Instead of a hospital gown, however, she was wearing a grey sweatshirt and pants, the knees of which were stained with mud. She looked pale and thin, and most disturbingly, scared.

Amy had seen Rosa shocked before, or jumpy. She’d seen Rosa worried (though that was mostly expressed through aggression) and she’d seen Rosa panicked the day Mac was born, but she was not used to seeing Rosa appear genuinely afraid like this. Her eyes were flicking back and forth between Amy and the forest around them, and despite ending the hug she was gripping Amy’s wrist so tightly she might be starting to cut off circulation.

And how was she here? Amy supposed that if the accident had happened around the time of her last memory, Rosa must have been there too, but why was she in sweats? Why was she scared? Why did she have bags under her eyes and -
Amy’s gaze had finally landed on Rosa’s wrist. On it was some kind of code in black ink: TT2207. Or, that was what Amy assumed it said. It had scars covering parts of it, as if someone had tried to scrape it off. That had definitely not been there before.

“What - what’s going on?” Amy choked out, eyes still locked onto the tattoo. Looking at it sent a creeping feeling up her spine, made her feel like someone was breathing down her neck.

Rosa lifted her hands to either side of Amy’s face, forcing her to look up. “Are you okay? Do you remember what happened?” She asked.

“I - no? Where are we? How did I get here?” Where’s Jake? was on the tip of her tongue, but she couldn’t seem to get the noise out. If there really had been a huge accident that landed Amy and Rosa in the hospital, she couldn’t bear to think what might have happened to Jake.

Rosa took a breath and relaxed her shoulders, less in a “We’re out of the woods” way, but more of a “Oh boy, it’s gonna be a long day” way. Not a great sign.
“An alarm went off in the east wing, we took our chance. I don’t know if the others made it.” Her voice broke on the last words, and Amy’s heart sank. She had no idea what was going on, “the others” could only really mean the rest of the squad.

Amy felt tears begin to collect in her eyes, and then the day got even weirder. The feeling of her eyes burning and a lump in her throat as she looked at Rosa made a strong sense of deja vu come over her. She’d done this before, 13 times in the past 11 weeks and two days. Exactly.

What? Where did that come from?And that couldn’t be right. She hadn’t seen Rosa for a few weeks before the trip and she definitely hadn’t cried. And how did she know the exact numbers? She didn’t even remember how she got here. And it had been December when they started the trip, it didn’t go from December to summer in 11 weeks.

An awful picture was being painted in her head as she tried to add up the information she had. They must have been in a huge accident, putting her and Rosa (atleast) into a coma (and apparently in need of brain surgery, if the hair was anything to go off of) until 3 months prior. If they were crying that meant that the rest of the squad was worse off, Jake was probably dead and Mac - oh god, Mac was all alone, he must be so much bigger by now and she’d missed all of it and -

“Amy. Look at me.” Rosa’s voice cut through her hyperventilating (when had she started hyperventilating?) and she opened her eyes (when had she closed them? She was so lost, she hated being lost).

Rosa rested her hands on her shoulders. “Breathe, Amy. In for four seconds, out for four seconds.”
Amy did as she was told, feeling a little more steady with every exhale. Rosa nodded and then re-began her effort to piece together where Amy had gotten lost.

“Okay, so what’s the last thing you remember?”

Amy felt more tears burn her eyes. “The trip.”

Rosa’s face scrunched in confusion, “The trip? Like, back to your room?”

Amy was caught somewhere between a cough and a sob. She must mean her hospital room.

“No. To Iowa.”

Rosa stared at her. She blinked slowly and opened her mouth. Then closed it. Then opened it and said, “You mean, you don’t remember anything from the last months? None of it?”

Amy shook her head. “No, no I don’t. What happened? The last thing I remember was coming up on some old lab building in Indiana, I think. Hawkins?”

Rosa gave her an unreadable look. “Okay. Okay. We’re gonna find somewhere less out in the open and I’m gonna fill you in. God, I can’t believe you get to forget everything.”

Rosa put her arm around Amy’s back and tugged her around, starting to walk further into the forest. Or out of it. Amy didn’t know. Her mind was reeling and she was crying and she was so tired, when had she become tired? What the hell was going on?

And what did Rosa mean by “get to forget”?

Chapter Text

Rosa wasn’t sure how long they’d been walking, but she was exhausted. To be fair, she couldn’t think of a time recently when she hadn’t been exhausted, but this time it came with having actually done something.

She’d espaced. She was out.

Now she just had to get Amy safe and caught up, find the others and get them all on the run. Or kill Martin Brenner and destroy all his technology. Actually, scratch that; kill Martin Brenner, destroy all his tech except for the thing that had brought them here, and figure out how to set that on a timer so they could use it and then it would self-destruct. Yep, that’s the one. Now to actually pull it off.

She had Amy. Amy was safe. Amy was unharmed. And Amy didn’t remember.

Rosa was honestly jealous. She wanted so desperately to forget everything that had happened since That Day. That Day which was actually somehow two days - December 16th, 2022, and March 23rd, 1986.

But that wasn’t for right now. Right now, they’d reached a dense part of the forest with a small clearing in the middle. And there was a cabin in it. It looked old - like it had been broken down and rebuilt and then abandoned. Nice.

“Stay here. I’m going to see if it’s empty.” Rosa hoped her voice sounded steadier than she felt. She felt like running right back to that lab and blowing it up. She felt like running far, far away. She felt like hugging Arlo. She missed Arlo.

She planted one foot in front of the other, soaking up the feeling of cool grass on her feet and fresh air in her lungs - luxuries she hadn’t had access to for … 11 weeks, 2 days, if the wall she’d been scratching tally marks into was to be trusted. Could she trust it? It was her doing, but they could have tampered with it just to mess with her. God, they loved messing with her. The way that stupid evil scientist had smiled when he saw her starting to break was something she’d never be able to remove from her memory, no matter how hard she tried. But Amy didn’t remember that.

Nope, not time for that yet, she told herself.

She made it up to the only window that wasn’t boarded up. No people in view, just some old furniture. A TV (old fashioned TV, because they were decades from home), a raggedy couch and lazy boy, and some boxes. She couldn’t hear anything on the inside. The door handle was dusty, as was the porch. No mud to be seen, despite the many recent storms.
No one was home and chances were nobody would be coming home for quite a while. They were in luck.

She motioned to Amy and tried the door handle. Locked, obviously, so she tried the mat. There was a key hiding there, sure enough. She pushed it into the lock and turned just as Amy came up behind her.

The door swung open, and the smell of dust and mold had never been so good. The two women took careful steps inside, Rosa closing the door, key held tightly.

“Okay,” Rosa began “First: water. Second: Explanation. Third: Shower and real clothes.”

~~~~~

The refrigerator in the small kitchen area was unplugged and mostly empty, but there was a working sink and a couple of dusty glasses. Rosa used the fabric of her sweatshirt to wipe some of the particles from out of two of the glasses and filled them up with what appeared to be perfectly clean water. She held one of them out to Amy and took a long sip from the other. This talk would require hydration.

She and Amy took a seat on the old couch and Rosa surveyed her friend again. Her hair was clipped short, although it had grown out a bit since the last time it was shaved. She was pale and gaunt, a ghost of her former self, just like the rest of them, and she didn’t even remember why. Her hospital gown was ripped at the bottom and stained with dirt and sweat. Part of Rosa wanted to skip the explanation entirely and get them both clean and wearing whatever had been left in this old place, but she knew that wasn’t fair.

“Okay,” Rosa started, “The last thing you remember was coming up to the lab, right?”

Amy nodded.

Rosa took a breath. “Look, I know this is hard to hear, and I won’t blame you if you don’t believe me, but we time traveled. To 1986.”

Amy blinked. She looked like she was waiting for Rosa to start laughing and telling her what had actually happened, because no way was that true. But, as the seconds dragged on, Amy’s silence seemed to solidify into acceptance. She slowly nodded.

“Yeah,” Her voice was weak, “I . . . I believe you. I really, really wish I didn’t, but. . . I think I know that’s what happened. Somehow.”

Rosa let out a breath she didn’t realize she was holding. Now for the next part of the world flipping news.

“So, the people at the lab had made this time machine to get back their leader, or something. But, it misfired and caught us. They took the opportunity to experiment on us. That’s what the tattoos are, by the way. Their claim to us. And we’ve been here for a few months now.”

Amy stared at her. Rosa assumed she’d process this as she had the first news; realizing that she’d subconsciously known it, but Amy’s brown furrowed.

“Tattoos? Wait, do I -” She looked at her wrist and sure enough, there hers: TT2206.
“Jake is 05, you’re 07, Charles is 03, Holt is 01, Terry’s 02, Gina is 04.” She recited in an almost trance - like way.

So, Rosa thought, Her power’s still intact. Guess that’s next.

“How did I know that? What do the numbers mean, Rosa?”

Rosa gently took hold of Amy’s wrist and pointed to the symbols as she explained.
“ ‘ TT’ is “time travel”, 22 is the year we came from, the last numbers are in the order of who’s oldest. Holt’s the oldest so he’s 01, I’m the youngest so I’m 07. And,” She let go of Amy’s wrist and set her hand gently on top of her friend’s, “You know that because the experiments they did on us gave us superhuman abilities. You have the coolest and the lamest. Telekinesis and ‘pattern detecting’.”

Amy nodded. She still appeared to be in a state of shock, despite believing and accepting all of the information she was given. Rosa didn’t blame her.

“Okay. Okay, I want to have a shower and put on real clothes, but first,” Her voice was shaking, “Where are the others?” Amy looked like she was expecting the worst.

Finally, good news. “I’m pretty sure they got out at the same time as us. I saw Gina just behind us and I heard some chaos from where Terry should have been.”

Amy relaxed slightly. Time for showers.

Chapter Text

The shower was grimy and its water wasn’t anywhere near warm, but there was a washcloth on the counter and not-quite-empty soap bottles. It was enough for Amy.

As she scrubbed herself as well as she could she thought about how ridiculous everything that had happened today was. And that’s not even everything, she thought, reminding herself that her memories had started after the day’s events began.

Amy leaned back against the cold walls and let the water wash over her. She wanted to say that this wasn’t real. She wanted to close her eyes and hear Mac’s laughter and Jake asking her if she slept well. But, she couldn’t. The cold was too real, the tattoo on her wrist was too real, and every logical bone in her body was breaking, but she knew it was real. She just knew it. She wanted to cry.
She dug her fingernails into her thighs, then her stomach, then her arms. This was real. How could this be real?!

She desperately wanted to make a binder, to grill Rosa for every detail, to bury herself in books about Hawkins, Indiana (She wasn’t even sure if Rosa had told her that name, she just knew it from deep within her subconscious, buried with the last few months) but she couldn’t. Atleast, not yet and not as thoroughly as she wished.

At first, Amy didn’t notice the way the bathroom had started to shake, the way the water was twisting and splashing at her feet, the sound of Rosa opening the door in a panic. She was lost in the world inside her head. She was pulled out by the sound of Rosa yelling her name.

“Amy! Are you okay?”

Amy looked up and pulled back the curtain enough to see her friend. The room looked more disheveled than it had when she’d gotten into the shower. Something metallic was dripping onto her lips. Blood she realized.

“What . . . what just happened?” Amy asked, voice unsteady. She had a guess - more than a guess, she knew, but she didn’t want to face her subconscious knowledge. There was too much in there that she wasn’t ready to confront.

Rosa gave her a sympathetic look. Disturbing. “You happened. That was your telekinesis. I think it’s related to your emotions.”

Amy let out a dry sob. “I can’t do this, Rosa, I’m an emotional person. What if I hurt someone?”

Rosa handed her a towel and Amy gladly took it, wrapping it around herself as she stepped out of the shower and turned off the water.
“You won’t. You were . . . less than stable in the lab, but that was an awful environment. Of course your emotions were wack. I fully believe that you’ll be able to take control now that we’re out of that place. For now, just take some deep breaths, alright?”

Amy nodded. She knew talking emotions was out of Rosa’s comfort zone, but she was still so glad to have Rosa with her.

Time to get dressed and sleep.

~~~~~

Jake felt numb. He knew he should be elated, finally out of that hell hole called Hawkins Lab (He’d officially decided he hated anything named Hawkins. First Melanie, now this.) but all he could muster was exhaustion and a false pretense of hope.

The last however long it had been had drained him of everything he had. His wife, his best friends, and his father figure were all shells of who they should be. He hadn’t hugged Amy in so long. And Mac . . .

Mac was his little buddy. Mac was his light and love and now he didn’t even exist. He’d tried to wrap his mind around that concept but it just got worse every time. At least Mac wasn’t all alone, but Jake couldn’t hold him. He couldn’t look at his son and watch him waddle around and learn about the world. He was lost without Mac.

Mac would have loved the weather Jake was surrounded by. It was warm and everything was green and his grandpa Holt was right there next to him.

Holt. Not his captain anymore, but pretty much his dad. Holt was walking next to him in gray sweats. He was barefoot, same as Jake. Holt’s eyes were sunken and tired. The way he held himself was worse than when he’d been demoted. It was worse than the honeymoon. He was on another level of ‘given up’. He was without Cheddar and Kevin and his career.
He had a hand on Jake’s shoulder. Jake barely felt it.

Holt and Jake were somehow still putting one foot in front of the other. They’d gotten out of the woods (geographically) and were slowly making their way down past some sort of cliff edge down a gravel path that led to more woods. Jake wondered briefly if it would be so much worse to just jump off into the water fifty feet below the cliff edge. Then he thought about Amy. Amy. Amy.
Her name began bouncing around his head like a ping pong ball. A really, really pretty and smart ping pong ball who he just wanted to crash into the arms of. If she hadn’t been caught by the lab people and taken back, probably with one of those shock collars on her neck.

Jake started walking faster.

“Jacob?” Holt’s voice came two feet behind him. Jake turned around and looked. There was a small light in his eyes that he hadn’t noticed before. Hope, maybe? Jake wasn’t sure if he wanted it to be hope. He didn’t want to see Holt get crushed again.

“Yeah? What’s up?” His voice came out gravelly.

“Are you alright?” Holt seemed to rethink his question “Is something ailing you that I am not aware of?”

Jake sighed, “No, I just. . . the sooner we get somewhere else the sooner we can find the others.”

Holt gave a stiff nod and motioned for Jake to keep walking.

Soon enough they had gotten through the next part of the woods and were standing on a sidewalk. Across from houses. People lived in houses. People were going to see them and wonder why the hell there were two random men, one in a hospital gown, were standing barefoot having just come out of the forest.

Holt cleared his throat, “Maybe we should walk along the edge of the trees, just behind them, that way we can follow the road but not be -”

“What’s up with your outfits?”

“. . . Seen.”

A car was stalling at the curb with the windows open. The speaker was a boy with crazy black hair sitting in the backseat. The two teenagers in the front immediately turned around and glared at the kid.

“What the fuck Mike?” The boy in the driver's seat whisper-yelled before turning around and leaning past the girl next to him to poke his head out the window.
“Sorry about him, we were just wondering about the whole . . . hospital . . . gown. . .” He trailed off as his gaze fixed on Jake’s wrist, on his tattoo.

“Fuck.” The teenager said.

Chapter Text

All Steve had wanted was a chill day, probably with Robin and whatever old movie she had picked out.
But no, he got stuck with taking Medium Size Wheeler to the Byers/Hopper-Byers house, because apparently Mrs Wheeler didn’t want her kid out and about on his own in a town where the ground had cracked open revealing a fiery hell just months before. Go figure.

He'd just turned the corner of Maple when Robin had noticed the two men, one in a hospital gown. Steve had agreed that this was odd and concerning considering the hospital was nowhere near here, plus they were barefoot and the curb had some broken glass at the bottom of it.

He had slowed the car to what Robin referred to as an “Earth killing stop” (the engine was still going, it’s not like she was wrong) and was about to lean out and ask the men if they were OK, but Mike beat him to it.

“What’s up with your outfits?”

Great start, kid, that’ll definitely come across as polite and concerned.

“What the fuck, Mike?” Steve turned and attempted to whisper at the backseater.

He cleared his throat and moved to lean past Robin, an uncomfortable position for both of them, and gave an apologetic smile to the men.

“Sorry about him, we were just wondering about the whole . . .” Steve’s eyes trailed down and landed on a tattoo on the white man’s wrist: TT2205

He’d never seen that kind of tattoo before. At Least, not the first four characters of it. The bold 05, however, had a striking resemblance to the numbers inked onto the skin of a very special kid he knew.

“Hospital . . . gown . . .”

Short hair, hospital gown, bare feet, number tattoo. He glanced back at Mike and saw a grave look on his face. Mike recognized it, too, and he was much more familiar with Eleven’s wrist than Steve was.

“Fuck.”

“Uh,” came the voice of the man whose wrist they were staring at, “Sorry, we were just, uh, on our way to the -”

“Library.” The other man interjected. The white man gave him a confused look, but nodded.

“Yes, the library, where we will be getting books to research,” he looked around quickly, “trees.”

“Yes, the Coast Redwood is the largest species of tree on Earth.” The black man in sweats nodded.

Steve shared a look with Robin and then Mike. Mike seemed lost for words but his face seemed to be demanding Steve get the two men into their car and to some kind of interrogation room.

“Right, so,” Steve began, mouth dry, “We could take you to the library, or we could take you back to one of our houses? We have real clothes and shoes and stuff.”

The men were about to decline the offer when Robin’s voice cut through, eyes locked onto both of the men’s pairs of eyes, somehow.
“We were also going to the library, actually. Doing some science research. We’re kind of lab rats.” She emphasized the word lab enough that if the men were from where they thought, they’d get it.

And they definitely got it. The white man’s eyes widened and he went to cover his tattoo with his other hand. He turned to his companion and jerked his head to the side, signaling an escape, but before they could move Mike was jumping out of the car and reaching out to grab the white man’s wrist.

“Mike, wait, don’t jump them!” Robin was clambering out of the car after him, followed by Steve.

The black man moved in front of the white man seemingly instinctively, holding himself in a protective yet non threatening stance before Mike.

“I’m sorry, we’ll just be on our way now, no need for a conflict.”

Both Steve and Mike went to say something, but thankfully, Robin beat them to it.
“No, we’re sorry, we don’t mean any harm, we just want to chat.”

Both men remained still, Sweats Man glancing at Hospital Gown Guy, as if asking a silent question. Hospital Gown gave a loose shake of his head, shrugging. He cleared his throat and stared at the younger three. Steve was beginning to feel like they weren’t the ones in control of the interrogation any more.

“What do you know about the lab?” His voice was quiet, Sweats Man was glancing around in a way that should have been paranoid and panicked but on him looked as if he could have simply been admiring his surroundings.

All three teens opened their mouths to answer, but the youngest got his words out first.
“We took it down. We - we know another experiment. She’s -”

Robin cuts Mike off, probably not trusting him to not spill too much. “- Different. Than you. But close enough that we can recognize you. If you’re from the lab you know you aren’t safe here. Steve’s house is big and lonely, we should go there.”

Steve wanted to take offense to the ‘lonely’ part of that description but she wasn’t exactly wrong. His parents had made the permanent move to Indianapolis shortly after the gates opened. It was only at his insistence (which must have looked incredibly childish to Mr. and Mrs. Harrington, who watched their adult son almost throw a tantrum over the idea of leaving Hawkins. Steve wouldn’t get it if he were them, either) that he stayed behind and kept the house. His parents were still expecting him to clear out at some point so they could sell the house, but they weren’t pushing for it to be soon. Very few people were looking to move into the hellmouth of a town, even if the gates had been sealed up within a few weeks of them opening.
No, the only problem with that suggestion was that Steve’s house had some nosey neighbors. It was in a rich part of town with semi-wealthy suburbanites constantly scrutinizing yards for the slightest thing they could call the HOA about. After the events of March many people had gotten closer to each other - become more accepting of things out of the ordinary. The more affluent, however, had shrouded themselves in self pity and patronizingly fake sympathy for the worse off while blaming the horrors on the poor and the outcasts behind closed doors. Many still blamed Eddie for the murders.
It would be better, Steve thought, to use the old Byers house. The family was now living in a bigger two story a few streets away from their old abode. Everybody stayed far, far away from that place. Some people thought it was cursed, others just didn’t want to relive the memories. The elderly couple who moved in the previous fall left as soon as the ground cracked open and started vomiting flames.
“Actually,” Steve started, mostly talking to Robin, “Could we use the Byers’ old place? Lower-profile.”

Hospital Gown Guy made eye contact with his friend and shook his head again. Then he turned towards Robin and nodded.
“We will come with you. But, you will tell us everything and be warned that we have experience as police detectives and we’ll be able to tell if you lie to us.”

All three teenagers nodded and Mike popped open the backseat door for the men. The men climbed in and Steve started the car again. Looks like their troubles weren’t over yet.