Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

    Zaniet settles before middle school, which is early– too early, Steve’s father says, because he always has to criticize something. And Steve’s mother just says girls mature faster, and Steve just gives them a mild ‘I guess so’ so that he can get away.

    Zan is a rabbit, and a boy, and Steve’s proud of him for figuring himself out, or… proud of the person he’s the missing piece of. Well, not missing, because he is with Steve, which is where he belongs. 

    Not even Steve’s parents and not even Tommy know about Zan being a boy. Steve knows the kind of shit you can get into for that, so for now it’s their secret, but Steve doesn’t feel wrong when he thinks about a person who’s like Zan, who’ll love him someday. Zan is his best friend, and he doesn’t think girls are gross or anything, he guesses Carol’s nice to hang out with sometimes, but… he doesn’t get why he would ever want his soulmate to be a girl, if he’s honest. He’s just… never honest with anyone who isn’t Zan.

    None of the other boys in Steve’s class last year had another boy for a soulmate, but he’ll be going into middle school. There’s gonna be plenty of people he doesn’t know yet. And even if his own soulmate isn’t in Hawkins now, it would still be nice to meet someone else who’s like him. They could start a secret club. Build a fort and have a password, even if middle school’s kind of old for kiddie stuff like that, according to some of the guys.

-

    Brom has been a sheepdog since Nancy was about five years old. The big soft kind– she used to fall asleep against his side, the rise and fall lulling her into a nap. 

    A real sheepdog would have come in handy, once Mike was mobile. Her mother had sighed over the early settling, and at the time, Nancy hadn’t understood what the problem was. 

    She doesn’t like that it means Nancy will marry someone older someday, maybe, but it’s not as if there’s a science to when daemons settle, and anyway, the idea of having to marry any of the boys in her class makes Nancy want to gag, so she doesn’t think it’s a bad thing if he is. 

-

    Pav has never been anything other than a fox. 

-

    Eddie’s practically out of high school when Len becomes a lion, magnificent and agitated and too big for his room. 

    He’s the most amazing thing Eddie’s ever seen. He’s been wild animals before, but it’s never felt like this. Like to reach out and touch him is so close to reaching out and touching a real lion and yet so different. He wants to know what he’s done or will do or could do to deserve this. 

    That first night, Eddie doesn’t think once about the logistical problems of having a lion for a daemon. He just loves him for all that he is. 

-

    Cara hasn’t settled, though Robin feels like she will soon. She’ll have to.

    She’ll be a cat, maybe, she spends a lot of time as a cat, though she still becomes a hummingbird to flit around Robin’s head and shoulders when she’s walking between classes, or a little monkey riding on her backpack when she’s on her bike– or a mouse that can ride in her pocket. The point is just that she still changes.

    She’ll settle soon, like everyone else’s.

-

    For several years, Anatoli didn’t really… do anything. He might be a dove or a lizard or a hamster, but he’d be that thing sitting on the bedroom shelf, and wouldn’t follow or complain if left behind. 

    It had been disconcerting, too different from what was normal in a daemon. But then one day he had snapped out of it. 

    In public, he was meek, small, silent… not so different from his days as an ornamental shelf-sitter. But alone… alone he’s everything that he can’t be anywhere else, and it’s easy to love him, to imagine the person somewhere who contains all the bright, sharp, sweet pieces of him and love him, too. 

    It’s no surprise when he stretches out one day and sits back down fully settled, all plush fur and sharp fangs, a study in contrasts. 

Chapter Text

    At Steve’s first high school party, Shannon Hendricks drags him into a corner and asks if they’re going to make out.

    “I don’t… I don’t think you’re my soulmate.” He says, thinks it sounds a little softer, a little kinder, not to just come out and say he knows she’s not.

    “Steve, we’re in high school.” She scoffs, leading his hands to her waist, despite the mutinous grumbling of her own daemon. “Most people aren’t Tommy and Carol. We’re probably not going to meet our soulmates until, like… college. It doesn’t mean we can’t practice, right? I mean, you don’t want to get out into the real world and find your soulmate and not know how to kiss, right?”

    “I guess not…” He looks over to Zan– if Zan looks half as upset at the idea as Shannon’s daemon, he’ll call it off, but Zan just shrugs, as much as a rabbit can shrug, expression kind of bored. A little uncertain, but not upset. Curious, even. Steve takes that as a go-ahead. 

    He kisses Shannon Hendricks for a while, and there are no fireworks or anything, but it’s still kind of fun. A couple of the guys cheer him on after, which feels nice in a complicated kind of a way. 

    “What was it like?” Zan asks him, when they’re alone after the party. 

    “Making out?”

    “No, the shitty vodka punch. Yeah, making out.” He rolls his eyes. 

    Steve hadn’t had much of the vodka punch– enough to know it was, indeed, shitty. It kind of burned going down in a way that had as much to do with the punch as the vodka. 

    “It was okay. I think it’d be better with, like… somebody who actually cares about me?”

    “But now everyone at the party knows you like girls.” Zan worms his way into Steve’s lap. “So we’re safe, right?”

    “Yeah.” He strokes the soft brown fur of his ears, his back. “We’ll keep each other safe, okay? Always.”

    After Shannon, a bunch of other girls seek Steve out at parties for the same, and Zan is sometimes a little annoyed, and sometimes not. If he ever seemed really upset by it, then Steve would say no– a couple of times he does, and he lets the girl in question know she can tell people whatever she wants about him. The first time, he thought she might badmouth him, ‘cause he guesses boys aren’t supposed to be the one who says no to making out. But then Amy said they went all the way when they hadn’t even kissed, and they were still kind of friends after, and he never told anyone that she made it up.

    So, sometimes girls will say nothing happened, and sometimes they’ll make up something that did, but in the end, none of them ever say anything bad about him, even if it’s only for their own reputations– whether they want to be seen as mostly-good or want to be seen as worldly and desirable affects what the story is. Steve’s reputation gets cemented either way. The more girls he doesn’t make out with, the more the story gets around that he’s the all-time stud of Hawkins High.

    Zan thinks it’s hilarious.

    He thinks it’s less hilarious, when Steve says yes to Nancy Wheeler. But Nancy was unexpected– she’s not the kind of girl who goes to most of these parties, she’s in advanced classes. They’re in some of the same classes even though she’s a year below him, and she’s so serious, and he likes the idea of someone like her noticing him, even if they’re not soulmates. He doesn’t want to just make out with her once at a party, he wants to get to know her. He wants her to think he’s smart, too, or interesting at least.

-

    Nancy is pretty sure Steve’s not it for her, when she approaches him at the party. She doesn’t know how she even got an invite, but she’s heard a lot of stories about him, and she’s not sure how true half of it is, but she’s curious, and he’s cute, and if she’s not going to find her soulmate until she’s all grown up and out in the world, then she really doesn’t think there’s any harm in having some teenage experiences. 

    She’d asked Brom, before they even went to the party, if he thought it would be a problem, if it was the kind of party where they played seven minutes in heaven or something like that, if she kissed a boy or two, and he’d said he didn’t think it would be. It’s the kind of thing some people do, and Nancy’s not just someone’s future soulmate, she’s her own person. He’d said it with a quiet conviction and she hadn’t realized how much she needed to hear that until he’d said it.

    Her parents aren’t soulmates. They both lost their daemons before they married, which only happens if your soulmate dies, as far as she knows. And plenty of people who lose their soulmates have happy, successful marriages with someone else who knows what it’s like. Growing up, she always assumed that’s what it was for them, a sort of deep understanding.

    Nowadays she’s less sure. She thinks sometimes that maybe they were both just afraid of being alone, and they settled for the first person who was in the same position, and they never knew how to make each other happy, not really. It’s hard to imagine Ted making anyone happy. She thinks maybe that’s why her mother doesn’t want to see her marry an older man. 

    But it won’t be settling when Nancy does it, if she does it. That’s the difference. She wants to know the person that Brom is a slice of. He’s always been so soft-spoken, so meek, for an animal who could flatten a coyote without breaking a sweat. Well… okay, not ‘sweat’. He barely even has visible paw pads to sweat from under all the shaggy fluff of him. He’s quiet, but not in that shut-down way that her father is. He’s thoughtful, and watchful. He flinches at loud sounds and raised voices sometimes, but he’d put himself between her and actual danger in a heartbeat anyway, and he’s nicer to Mike than she is most of the time, and whoever that person is… she wouldn’t be settling. 

    But her life is still her own until she finds him, and if she wants to make out with Steve Harrington just once to see what all the fuss is about, this little piece of him gets it, and thinks she should just be a girl for now and have fun.

    Steve’s not her soulmate, that much is already obvious. For one thing, she knows she’s not the silent little bunny rabbit that hops along at his side. There had been a moment once, where she’d wondered– where she’d seen Steve shut down some of the other guys from the basketball team when they’d been hassling some freshman, a kid she kind of sort of knows from the school paper, but not well. Even the senior in the group had backed down when Steve had said they were being really uncool. 

    But… he doesn’t quite have that certain something she sees in Brom. She thinks he’s a real sweet guy, even if he’s kind of a playboy, and some girl somewhere probably has a daemon that’s not too different from Brom, something that herds and protects and is just a little louder and a little more confident and a little more ‘cool’. 

    And even if she was a bunny rabbit, she wouldn’t be silent.

-

    Shortly after Will goes missing, Xanthippe settles into a bloodhound. 

    It doesn’t help Jonathan find him any better, but he appreciates it. He hopes that the girl she’s a piece of finds what she’s hunting for so hard that the hunt is the core of who she’ll be for the rest of her life.

-

    “Honestly? Why are we even upset about this?” Zan flops out, in a huff. 

    “Uh, I’m upset because my girlfriend had another guy in her bedroom and it’s the guy who was taking pictures of my house?”

    “Girlfriend.” He sneers, and rolls over so his belly is no longer exposed. “Is that what you want, a girlfriend?”

    “I don’t– I just– It was nice. It’s like… relationship practice.” Steve defends.

    “Do you even want to find me still?” Zan asks, voice cracking. “Do you even want to be with the person I’m part of? Or do you want a girlfriend, who you can hold hands with in public?”

    “Nancy doesn’t like holding hands that much, actually.”

    “Well, great, you can not hold hands with her, then.”

    “I don’t know who you’re a part of!” He spreads his arms. “I don’t know him yet, okay? You think I haven’t looked for other guys like me? But this is Hawkins, Zan! What happened to keeping each other safe? Nancy’s safe. And– and it feels good to have someone like Nancy think I’m worth something, okay? Okay? I mean… he hasn’t found me either, your– your other half! I’m not the only one who isn’t looking in the right places, or who can’t look in the right places. Of course I want to find you. Finding you is the only thing I’ve ever wanted so much it hurts.”

    “But Nancy being with someone else hurts, too.”

    “Yeah, but that’s different. I don’t… I don’t know what’s going on with Nancy. And I’m pissed that Byers was creeping around the bushes outside my house, okay? And that she’s fine with it! Like, do you get that? Do you get why being spied on freaks me out? Because if someone could take pictures of me with Nancy, someone could find out a lot of other shit about me, and I don’t mean just throwing parties while my parents are out of town. What happens when I find you and people are– are hiding in the bushes taking pictures of my bedroom window? What happens then?”

    Zan shuffles forward, and once he reaches Steve’s feet, he rolls back onto his side, showing his belly again, which is as good as forgiveness or apology, even if he’s stubborn about admitting as much. He won’t meet Steve’s eye just yet, but he will let him bend down to touch his soft, vulnerable underbelly, with gentle fingers. 

    “I want the rest of you.” Steve promises. “I want to know what you’re like as a person.”

    “Handsome, probably.”

    “Yeah. Probably.” He smiles. “I’m hurt about this, and you can’t just pout me into not being hurt. But that’s got nothing to do with you and it doesn’t mean you’re not my number one.”

    “What if Byers is Nancy’s soulmate? You’d have broken up with her if you found me, right?”

    “Yeah, of course. I mean, she didn’t break up with me, is the thing, she was just… with him.”

    “Were they making out?”

    “No. But I wasn’t gonna stick around and wait to see them do it, because unlike some people, I’m not a colossal perv and a creep.” He huffs, straightening back up. Zan rolls over and hops up into Steve’s lap, cuddling into his stomach. “And even if they are soulmates, it doesn’t make it okay to take those pictures. And I don’t care if she’s cool with it, I’m not, and it was my window.”

    “But does it change anything if they are?”

    “Dunno. Maybe. I mean I guess I get it, I just… it sucks, okay?”

    “Yeah. I mean you’re sending me mixed messages here, Stevie, when I hate her I’m being a dick and when I stick up for her I’m being a dick, what do you want me to say?”

    “I want you to be mad for the right reasons. And I know you’re not.” He accuses, and gets snuggled into even harder. 

    “Okay, well you wanna know what I think?”

    “I don’t know, do I?”

    “I think you should talk to Byers instead of to Nancy, first. I think you should tell him you’re sorry for breaking his camera–”

    “I am not sorry for breaking his camera. He’s a fucking pervert.”

    “Yes you are. Perv or not, that’s, like… His family’s poor, you know? And he can’t afford to replace something like that. And it really sucks to not be able to afford shit.”

    “How would you know?” Steve snorts. “You’re living in the lap of luxury, my friend.”

    “You’re luxury now?” Zan teases, but he goes still for a moment, considering. “I just know.”

    Steve’s soulmate must not have much, then. Maybe is in a situation not so different from Byers, where that kind of thing is concerned. Maybe wherever he is, he has something, like… one beautiful thing that he loves that he couldn’t replace, if some jerk smashed it.

    “I’m not very sorry.” He maintains anyway.

    “You don’t have to be very sorry, you just have to apologize. And then you can tell him that you did it because he crossed a line first and what he did really freaked you out, and he can’t do shit like that, and it doesn’t matter if he’s going through some shit or if Nancy’s his soulmate. I’m not asking you to roll over for the guy. But if you’re gonna lay it all out, you should do it like a real man, not like the assholes at school. Tommy and Andy and the girls think that kind of thing is funny, but that’s not you, Steve.”

    “Why don’t you tell me how you really feel?” 

    “You’re better than all the jerk jocks. And you don’t stand for them bullying underclassmen–”

    “I wasn’t bullying an underclassman.”

    “Maybe not, but do you really think the guys you run with at school aren’t going to run with any excuse to pick on someone weaker than them?”

    “They’re not…” He hesitates. “Not all of the guys are like that. And he deserved it.”

    “Well, the Steve I know isn’t gonna feel right until he makes it right, no matter who started it and no matter who was worse.” Zan insists.

    “God fucking dammit.” Steve groans, because he’s right. “Okay, but I’m not doing it tonight. Tonight I get to be mad about all of this shit. I can be the bigger person tomorrow.”

Chapter Text

    If Jonathan didn’t already know Nancy was it for him, this whole thing would cement it. Despite their brothers being close friends, they never really got to know each other all that well, growing up– Jonathan was used to being more or less on his own, as a kid. It was easier than letting people know him, back when Lonnie was around. But driving out to Sesser and everything they have planned for the trip, he has to wonder why he didn’t know sooner. 

    Honestly, the second Xanthippe settled, he should have talked to Nancy. 

    They haven’t actually discussed the soulmate thing much. Acknowledged it, sort of, but… there’s a lot going on that’s a lot bigger than they are, and if they’re meant to be, then they’ll be. Right now, they have other priorities.

-

    Foxes are cunning, and clever. For all that some may treat them as pests or trophies, there is something resilient and wily and wild in a fox, something beautiful. A fox may have only a fraction of a wolf’s size and strength, but– at least in stories– the fox will outwit the wolf every time. Or, as in Vuk, even the human hunter. 

    Look, when you’re born with a fox for a daemon, you don’t really feel any shame in watching a cartoon about foxes. It’s Hungarian, which is kind of an impediment, and Pav doesn’t speak Hungarian either, but it’s a cartoon, it doesn’t take a genius to follow a cartoon in another language, if it’s any good then the pictures tell the story. 

    Pav is cunning, and clever. Whoever Pav is connected to, out there in the world, is a thinker, a survivor. Perhaps even a trickster. 

    He has a remarkable talent for remaining invisible, despite a flashy copper coat and the bright white tip of his tail, when it’s safer to be quiet. Which is… most of the time. There’s no peace and no privacy at home, let alone anywhere else. Even the word ‘home’ feels like a bad joke, but then, what doesn’t? It’s not like anyone else has it so much better. If history has taught absolutely any lesson whatsoever it’s that everyone’s lives have been shit forever, basically, so why shouldn’t life be kind of shit now?

    It would be nice if it wasn’t. Nice to believe that there’s something better. Nice to believe that the constant oppressive threat in the air isn’t forever, because somewhere out there is a life with someone…

    It’s hard to believe in that. It’s hard to believe in soulmates and happily ever afters, but it’s easy to believe in Pav, who thinks the Beatles are overrated but could sing every word of ‘Stop in the Name of Love’ and ‘I Only Have Eyes For You’ because they used to listen to those records with Tamara in her bedroom, and who whispers hopeful things in the middle of the darkest nights, and who’s always known himself, and who wants to know everything else, too. Pav, cautious as he is cunning, guarded all the time but full of love. 

-

    Murray Bauman is… a lot. Everything about this whole thing is a lot. 

    Stepping inside, Brom presses close to Nancy, and she sinks a hand into his fur, rubs at his ear. She watches Xanthippe take off to investigate the space they find themselves in the second the gate past the foyer is open– she watches the fond smile on Jonathan’s face. 

    “You know, I’m not really a dog person.” Bauman says, when she attempts to nose her way into one of his filing cabinets. 

    “Good thing I’m not really a dog, then.” Xanthippe huffs, giving up on the cabinet but sniffing around at everything else, investigating stacks of books and papers. 

    “Touche.” He grimaces. “Do you mind?”

    “No.” Her tail wags once. 

    “Well. I hope you didn’t come all this way to tell me about the bear in the Harrington kid’s backyard.” He says, gamely ignoring her. “I’ve heard that one before.”

    Nancy isn’t sure what to say to that– none of them really are.

    Bauman leads them through one more door, and what’s behind this one is more than any of the rest of it.

    “Take a look, go ahead, don’t be shy.” He waves them in, and in Nancy goes, drawn to the board with everything she could have imagined and more. Everything she might have hoped. Because with all of this, he has to believe them. “I followed up on two hundred tips, most bogus, but that’s how these things always go, okay? I know every last step Barbara took that day, every last person she talked to. The answer to what happened to your friend, it’s up here somewhere. I assure you that. I just gotta connect the right dots.”

    “Timeline’s wrong.” She tells him.

    “Ha.” A man’s voice from the corner– she whirls around, startled, and sees a snow leopard there, lying in what is definitely the same kind of dog bed Brom has at home.

    In most rooms, a leopard would probably be the most interesting thing. In this room, she hadn’t even noticed it. Him. Bauman’s… wife’s daemon? He doesn’t exactly look like a man who has a wife somewhere, although Nancy guesses you never can tell. It’s hard to imagine a woman being willing to live in a place like this, but more power to her for not cleaning up after him. It’s not some woman’s job to make his home livable or make him put on something other than a bathrobe.

    “I’m sorry?” He says, while she’s still processing the leopard. Which seems like a strange animal, to embody somebody who does answer the door in his bathrobe. The snow leopard picks up his tail in his jaws and sets his chin down, expression unreadable.

    “Your timeline is wrong.” She turns back to Bauman. “And the girl with the buzzed hair, she’s not Russian. She’s from Hawkins lab.”

    “I am telling you this.” The leopard drops his tail in order to deliver this taunt to Bauman, putting on a Russian accent to do it in. As far as Nancy can really tell, it’s a good one. “You are wrong, I am right, like always.”

    “Enough from the peanut gallery.” He waves a hand at the daemon, and she realizes, looking at them, that the daemon is his. 

    Really not the type of man who has a wife somewhere, then.

    “Sorry, you were saying, before we were so rudely interrupted?” He smiles at her. It’s not a particularly nice smile, but for an adult man being corrected by a teenage girl, she thinks it’s nice enough. Certainly he’s open to hearing from her in a way Ted never is, in a way none of her teachers ever are. Even if he’s waiting for her to prove herself, he’s at least waiting.

    “Her name was Eleven.”

    “You might wanna… sit down for this.” Jonathan suggests.

    Bauman sits. His daemon pads over to the striped couch– there’s a pillow at one end that suggests he sometimes sleeps in his office, presumably they both do. He’s holding his tail in his mouth again and he gives Nancy and Jonathan a wary, sidelong look, before resting his chin on Bauman’s knee, turns big sad eyes up towards him. 

    “Don’t.” Bauman says softly, stroking the big cat’s cheek. “You know I don’t really mind if you interrupt. Oh, they don’t mind, either. Do you?”

    “We don’t mind at all.” Jonathan says, and there’s a weight to the way that he says it, that has nothing to do with interruptions. 

    “Tolya doesn’t normally talk in front of people.” He explains. “But I don’t exactly keep it a secret. So, no harm done.”

    Nancy thinks she should be feeling safer about being in his warehouse bunker in the middle of nowhere, knowing this, except she honestly hadn’t felt unsafe, not really. What she is thinking is about all the people she knows whose daemons have never spoken a word in front of her. Barb was her best friend, but she honestly can’t remember a time she spoke with her daemon. In all the time she spent with Steve, his never said a thing, not to her and not in front of her.

    “No, no harm done.” She says, and brings out the tape recorder.

    It doesn’t take long for Bauman to look like he’s glad he sat down, and she can see the way the gears are turning in his head, behind the thousand yard stare. In Tolya’s, too, judging by the flicking of the tail he’s no longer biting, and the way he looks between them, and the new tension in his frame that has nothing to do with his own fear of discovery.

    “So… is it enough?” She asks, and Bauman raises his head slowly, still half-lost in the fog of his own swirling thoughts. “The tape recording, is it… enough? Is it incriminating?”

    He rises wordlessly and walks out of the room, leaving the two of them alone. Well, alone with Tolya, who’s practically vibrating, looking towards the door and waiting for his return. And she guesses if he’s waiting instead of following, that Bauman must be coming back, but she still feels more than a little adrift.

    In the end, she and Jonathan follow Bauman out first, finding him in his kitchen with a bottle of vodka in front of him.

    “What are you doing?” She demands.

    “Thinking.” He bites the word out.

    “With vodka?”

    “It’s a central nervous system depressant, so yes, with vodka.”

    Tolya coughs, from behind Nancy, and to her credit she only jumps a little. 

    “Where is mine, please?”

    “I’m not sure you have a central nervous system.” Bauman moves past him, glass in hand. 

    “Right now I think I am a central nervous system.” The leopard growls, following him to the stereo system, where he is now getting a record out. “What is happening here is very bad.”

    “Believe me, I picked up on that.”

    “Music? Really?” Nancy asks, exasperated.

    “Yes. It helps me…”

    “What, think?” Jonathan prompts, when he just trails off, but he only gives a distracted nod, glass in one hand again and the other resting on his daemon’s head as the two of them begin a sedate path across the living room floor. 

    “How long is this gonna take?”

    “Longer, if you keep talking.”

    “Is the tape incriminating or not? It’s a simple question.”

    Bauman laughs, turning to her– which is at least something. Better than pacing the floor staring off into space. “There’s nothing simple about it. Nothing simple about anything you’ve told me.”

    “You don’t believe us, do you?” Jonathan comes up to stand at Nancy’s elbow, on the side where Brom isn’t. It feels like being five years old again and lying against him, the way he could block out the whole world. 

    “Of course he believes you.” Tolya snorts, looking at Jonathan like he’s just said something incredibly stupid, which Nancy doesn’t think is very fair.

    “Mm, but that’s not the problem.” Bauman nods. “You don’t need me to believe you, you need Them to believe you.”

    “Them?”

    “Them.” He points at… well, nothing really. At the idea of this ‘them’. And then he’s in motion again, his daemon moving with him, coming to stand before a wall of TV sets. “With a capital T. Your priest, your postman, your teacher, the world at large. They won’t believe any of this.”

    “That’s why we made the tape.” Nancy presses.

    “Oh. That’s easy to bury. Easy.”

    “He admits it. You heard it! He admits culpability.”

    “You’re being naive, Nancy!” Bauman snaps, and it’s not a thing she’s been accused of being very often. And not about things that matter. It stings. “Those people… They’re not wired like me and you, okay? They don’t spend their lives trying to get a look at what’s behind the curtain. They like the curtain.”

    “Can you blame them? Looking behind the wrong curtain is enough to get some people killed. Or worse.” Tolya adds grimly. 

    There’s probably no un-grim way to put it.

    “Even when it doesn’t… the curtain provides them stability, comfort, definition. This… this would open the curtain, and open the curtain behind that curtain, okay? So the minute someone with an ounce of authority calls bullshit, everyone will nod their heads and say ‘see? Ha! I knew it! It was bullshit.’ That is, if you even get their attention at all.”

    “You’re saying we did all of this for nothing?” She asks, and she feels furious. With Brenner and with Bauman and with the whole fucking world. And she feels heartbroken all over again, but furious is easier. Furious is better. Furious she can do something with, and if she lets herself feel heartbroken, she doesn’t know if she’ll ever start moving again.

    “I’m saying I’m thinking.” He finally takes an actual drink of his vodka, only to immediately make both a face and a noise– two noises– which do not make her think that the vodka is helping any.

    Tolya follows him back towards the kitchen, where he’s opening one of the two bottles again. Though at least this time it’s the club soda and not the vodka, which has to count for something.

    It counts for one disappointed leopard, at any rate.

    “This is ridiculous.” Jonathan and Brom say in unison, though Jonathan at least says it under his breath.

    “That’s it. That’s it!”

    “What’s it?”

    “It’s just too strong. Too strong.” He explains, if you can call it explaining, while he pours. She would like to have faith that an actual explanation is incoming, but instead he just takes another sip, adds another pour. “Better. Perfect.”

    “Again, where, please, is mine?” Tolya growls, only to be ignored. 

    “We water it down.” Nancy smiles, the picture coming into focus.

    “Precisely.” Murray grins at her.

    “Wait, what?” Jonathan rejoins them. 

    “Your story. We moderate it.” He gets two more glasses and a bowl out. “Just like this drink here. We make it more tolerable. Perhaps Barbara was exposed to some dangerous toxins.”

    “Mine.” Tolya whispers, watching the mixology happening at hand eagerly. Nancy’s not sure if daemons can actually get drunk, and also not sure if there’s some guy who’s going to feel it if he can.

    “A leak from the lab. Like Three Mile Island or something.”

    “Something scary, but familiar. Close enough that it hits The Man right where it hurts.” He sets the bowl down on the floor first, and then a glass in front of each of them.

    Nancy picks hers up.

    “And those assholes that killed Barb…”

    “They’ll go down.” He says, and she believes him. 

    Tolya seems as sober as Murray does, which makes sense– a snow leopard is not a small animal, and it’s a single fairly weak drink. Enough that some of her nerves loosen up for the frenetically paced work that follows, but not enough that she actually feels like her central nervous system is being depressed. Certainly not by much. Unlike Murray’s initial drink, hers, Jonathan’s, and Tolya’s seem to be mostly club soda.

    The drinks after, when the doctored tapes are all recorded and the envelopes are all stuffed and addressed… that one is a little stronger. 

    More than a little.

    She probably does feel safer about drinking it, knowing Murray lives with a very male daemon. 

    “Commie bastards sure know how to make a spirit, am I right?” He grins, sinking back into his chair. 

    “List of things commie bastards know better than Americans grows ever longer.” Tolya says, in what is in fact his own accent. Which has to be weird. She’s never actually thought about how you’d know if your soulmate was in another country, but apparently you can tell. 

    “You love it here.” Murray shakes his head. “Your person is probably defecting as we speak. Even now, making his way towards that ultimate beacon of freedom, that tall, bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities. Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.”

    “That city you said you would never go back to if they paid you?”

    “I said that about the newspaper, not the city.” Murray wags a finger.

    “Well, the newspaper definitely does not plan on paying you again.” He snorts. “Much less the city, which you did say it about.”

    “I’m willing to go that far if it’s to meet my soulmate, but he’s the one crossing borders for me, not the other way around.” He leans forward to top off their glasses. 

    He also offers his guest room when they protest– and it’s not like there’s any time to sober up from this one and then make it all the way back to Hawkins.

    “Could I use the sofa?” Jonathan asks. 

    Murray looks between the two of them and their daemons, apparently flummoxed by what feels like a very basic request. 

    “Okay, I’m confused. What’s going on here? A lover’s quarrel?”

    “No. No, I mean– we’re just friends.” He says, though there’s a momentary hesitation. There’s that thing they both suspect that sits untested between them. 

    Murray and Tolya both look at them for half a moment, before turning to each other and bursting out laughing. 

    Like, it goes on for a while.

    She’s really not sure how to feel about that. She’s not sure how anyone would. It is, at the very least, disconcerting, and kind of irritating. Tolya says something in Russian, but Nancy gets the gist.

    Ha ha.

    “You’ve told me a lot of shockers today, but that, that is the first lie.”

    “It’s not a lie.” She says, because technically, it’s not.

    “No? You’re not the bloodhound?” He quirks an eyebrow. “Jonathan, that’s not just a little piece of you over there? So if you’re not together, the question is why not. Trust issues, am I right? Something to do with your dad?”

    “What? No.” Jonathan protests. “I mean, my dad’s–”

    “An asshole.” Nancy finishes. Lonnie’s enough to make her grateful for Ted.

    “Hmm. It is a curse to see so clearly.” He shakes his head. 

    “And he calls me conceited.” Tolya huffs, laying his chin on Murray’s knee. “Listen to this man.”

    “You, you’re harder to read. Probably, like everyone, afraid of what might happen if you accepted yourself for who you really are… what it means for your future if destiny is real. I mean… everyone’s got one, but no one has to like that they do.” He says, and Nancy meets his gaze and wonders if he’s actually talking about her, or himself.

    After the day they’ve had, she’s not sure there’s really that much difference between them. 

    “You didn’t want a soulmate, not the way you wanted a career.” He continues. “Soulmates come with… baggage. No offense to Jonathan, all of them do. Just like we come with baggage for them. Human condition, everyone’s got baggage. And you need to be able to travel light. It’s a cold, hard world and it’s more than a little stacked against you. Is that it? So, when you find him… you don’t fall into his arms, because the world we live in is a little less Valley Girl and a little more Silkwood.”

    “I’m not afraid of having a soulmate.”

    “I didn’t say afraid.” He tilts his head like he’s caught her out.

    “I don’t resent having a soulmate, then.” 

    “It’s just kind of not a priority right now.” Jonathan adds. “Kind of… more important stuff.”

    “Oh, of course. Like the shared revenge for all the shared trauma. Your brother, that was also related to Hawkins Lab? I mean… that’s the kind of experience that can really make a person, set the course of their life. Losing him or getting him back.”

    Only it didn’t. She can see why Murray would think so– the missing brother, the sheepdog, she gets it. But Jonathan has been guarding Will since before he could walk.

    “If I ever see Lonnie, I’m going to shoot him with his own gun.” She mutters. She still has it, the one Jonathan stole out of his dad’s car.

    He looks over at her, startled. Murray also looks at her, not startled.

    “My goodness, you two are adorable, aren’t you?” He says, gently dislodging the snow leopard from his knee and getting to his feet. “Listen… there’s a pull-out sofa in the study if you want it. But if I were you, I’d just cut the bullshit, and share the damn bed.”

    He salutes them with the bottle of vodka in his hand and heads upstairs, Tolya on his heels, and she wonders if that’s actually true. If he would, in their position. If, faced with a strange Russian man with a suspiciously silent daemon, Murray wouldn’t offer his guest room or offer to take the pull-out sofa, just to have one more night where he wouldn’t have to face destiny.

-

    “Hawkins, Indiana… what do you think?”

    “Well, I don’t think living in Hawkins, Indiana is actually going to be so different from living anywhere else.” Pav says, something strange and sharp and not unfamiliar, in the tone with which he pronounces the name of the place. It feels like the wrong answer. Living in Hawkins, Indiana is the… most different that anything could be. It’s a whole different world. Everything about having to move to Hawkins, Indiana is wrong and bad and just so different.

    Maybe different isn’t worse… but it’s hard to see what Hawkins itself is going to have to do with that . ‘Better’ and ‘worse’ are their own categories, unaffected by simple geography. 

    Hawkins might be different, but life is going to be the same, Pav isn’t wrong about that. Moving to Hawkins, Indiana doesn’t mean freedom, not for them. Just like anywhere else, the two of them have to be invisible, and when they can’t be invisible, they have to be silent, emotionless, expressionless, still. Pav is a survivor, though– they both are. Right now, this is what survival looks like. You can’t say the wrong thing if you don’t say anything at all, anything except maybe yes, I’ll do this, I’ll fix that, of course everything is fine, everything is better than fine. You can’t do the wrong thing if you just keep your head down and do what you’re told and never let them see the wrong kind of look on your face. Survival means you don’t frown and you don’t smile, and your only opinion is of course you’re right.

    And the two of them are surviving Hawkins. No matter what.

    That’s not different from anything else.

Chapter Text

    Murray thinks a lot about snow leopards. Since Tolya settled, he’s learned a lot of facts about them. 

    He wouldn’t admit to cowardice if pressed, but the idea of searching for his soulmate is… beyond daunting. A man who’s half a world away and probably not actually dreaming about defecting any way he can just to get to Chicago, and from there to a not-very-welcoming barely converted warehouse in Sesser of all places? It just feels unlikely that either of them could find each other, if he’s honest. Much like his soulmate would never find Sesser on his own, even if Murray did go to Russia to look for him… where would he go? Moscow, St. Petersburg… and that’s it. Not that two enormous cities wouldn’t be too much to search anyway, but he would never find him if he were out in the middle of nowhere, he would never think of some small town, or know how to get to one.

    Still. He thinks about the things he does know.

    Snow leopards are the only big cat not to roar. They’re perhaps the best-camouflaged. They’re incredibly non-aggressive, too, compared to the others, doing anything to avoid human detection in particular. He imagines a man who is quiet. Who keeps his head down. Who hides himself. 

    Who has to.

    Snow leopards are incredibly efficient hunters– and incredibly efficient diners. They’re also incredibly efficient climbers, scaling mountainsides with long leaps and perfect balance– the long tails come in handy there. He imagines a man who is efficient, and precise. He imagines a man with a light tread, unobtrusively at home in whatever his natural environment may be. Quietly successful.

    Snow leopards can travel twenty five miles in a single day. Or, night. Either way, he imagines a man with stamina. 

    He spends a lot of time imagining a man with stamina. 

-

    Steve and Nancy might not be together anymore– definitely for the best at this point, and it’s kind of hard to have any hard feelings when monsters are real? And anyway, they’ve had the chance to kind of make up the misunderstanding– but when he notices something’s off with her and she doesn’t show up at school, he still thinks he ought to head over to her place. Not as an ex boyfriend, but… well, he guesses as just a guy who knows monsters are real. 

    Nancy’s not there, and apparently neither is her snot-nosed little brother. Dustin Henderson is, though. Also, as far as Steve can tell, pretty damn snot-nosed.

    Still… he can’t let this kid go out alone if he might get into trouble, right? He looks over to Zan, who seems nervous, but not ready to bolt, and Steve’s always trusted him absolutely with this kind of thing. He’s urged Steve to not be in places where he’s thought there might be trouble, before, but he’s also believed in him when there was no choice.

    By the end of the night, Steve’s pretty sure he and Zan are ready to bleed for the little shit, if not die for him. By the time they reach the junkyard, the following day, Steve actually likes the kid. 

    He’s not thrilled to be babysitting the whole squad. Byers’ little brother is at a doctors’ appointment or something like that, and his replacement for this particular venture is the girl Henderson and Sinclair both have a little crush on. 

    She and her daemon are more of a matched set than most, in Steve’s eyes– both small and sharp-eyed. Tense and watchful, with Max asking questions about a rabid dog and her daemon ready to believe the group as a whole– the kids and their own daemons. 

    “He’s already settled?” One of the boys asks her, when theirs have been taking turns at being different things, chasing each other over and under bus seats just for a break in the monotony. 

    “What’s it to you?” She asks, arms folded. Sizes them all up to see if having a daemon settle too early is a thing they’ll tease her for.

    “Mine, too.” Steve gives her a little nod.

    “Duh, you’re like a senior.”

    “I mean when I was your age, wiseass.” He rolls his eyes right back, but there’s no real heat under it.

    “Oh. Sure.”

    “I always thought it made us pretty cool.”

    “Duh.” She says again, but there’s a tentative smile, only there for a second.

-

    There are upsides to Anatoli himself, all five furry feet of him. It’s not just the things Murray imagines the shape of him could mean about the man he’s the essence of, it’s his Tolya, his Tchotchke, his constant companion. 

    Being five feet long and some hundred and fifteen or twenty pounds, he doesn’t exactly fit to sit on his shelves anymore. He has his sofa in the living room, or his bed in the office, or his side of Murray’s bed. He has his run of the place and any furniture that won’t collapse under him. If he’s in a contrary mood, he’ll ignore his own much softer living room sofa in favor of pushing all of Murray’s important files and research off of the leather sofa opposite, and he’ll make himself comfortable there instead. Which Murray guesses is about as close to sitting on a shelf as it gets, because the leather sofa really is just one big shelf in terms of how it gets used. When they’re in the living room, Tolya has his sofa and Murray has his armchair and footstool, the other sofa is for holding materials he wants close at hand.

    Unless, again, Tolya is in a mood.

    The moods are, if he is honest, an upside. They… add something, to Murray’s life. It’s not that he loves picking up all his scattered papers and clippings, he does not, but he isn’t alone.

    Tolya varies his days, gives him someone to bicker with, reminds him that he’s alive through every worst thing life can hit him with.

    In the dead of brutal winters, he keeps Murray warm. When he gets lost in his work, he reminds him to eat. 

    It’s not the same as having a human soulmate with him, not in every respect. But if it’s as close as he ever gets, it’s good. It’s good just to have someone who keeps him on his toes, and who insists on his taking care of himself on at least some basic level.

-

    “That is… the most terrified I have ever been in my life.” Zan declares in a whisper, zipped into Steve’s jacket as he and the kids make their way cautiously through the woods. Better than spending all night in a rusted out bus in a junkyard, monsters or no monsters. Jesus, these kids must have parents who are worried about them, right? Or do they all lie for each other and say they’re staying at each others’ houses?

    They probably do that.

    Steve doesn’t really know what normal kids do when they want to sneak around in the middle of the night.

    “Yeah, but only because you were hiding under the car back when I fought the big one.” He teases gently. 

    He can feel Zan’s restless energy, the twitching and trembling, but he’s not about to let him run loose, small and edible as he is. God, one of those things could snap him up like that, or even just a normal owl could, and Steve doesn’t know what that would do to his soulmate, but he knows it would break him. 

    “You told me I should wait for you.” He fires back, though he still keeps his voice low, below the chatter of the kids and their own daemons. “I believe we agreed I wouldn’t be much good to you in a fight.”

    “Yeah.” Steve pats him. “Even Brom didn’t get too close to that thing. And he might be able to take down one of these…”

    “I wish he was here.” Zan shudders and presses even closer. For all that he’d never really been crazy about Nancy, been kind of extra-shy of her at times and jealous of her at others, he had always liked Brom. Whenever Steve and Nancy were walking between classes together, Zan used to keep himself all but underfoot, between Brom’s paws or underneath the bulk of him, like he was worried about some predator swooping down from overhead if he didn’t hop-shuffle along beneath the big, shaggy dog. 

    They never actually talked to each other, but Steve kind of got the idea that that was a big part of the appeal for Brom, anyway. That it was kind of easier for him to have a quiet friend, and nice for him to be trusted by a small one.

    “Yeah, me, too.” Steve agrees, because Brom and Nancy would keep these little shitheads in line and help keep them safe, and maybe then Nancy would catch him up on whatever was going on with her. In case her thing and his thing might be part of the same thing, like the same-as-last-time thing.

    Still… when those things had showed up, Steve had been brave this time. Braver than before, when he hadn’t felt brave even when he’d been beating it back with bat in hand. This time… he’d been freaked, but he’d also been brave. 

    He wonders what else he could be brave about.

    Dating guys, maybe. Or, one guy. A guy who’s funny, like Zan, and emotional, and active. Okay, hyperactive. Open, the way Zan is, about enjoying life and loving things, and loving Steve. 

    If he’s brave enough to face these monsters, is he brave enough to face the all-too-human kind? Is he brave enough to hold a boy’s hand in a movie theater, to share dessert with him in a diner? To meet his parents someday?

    Maybe he won’t be that brave tomorrow, or the day after. Maybe he can’t be that brave in Hawkins. Maybe some day he’ll be in a big city where no one knows him and he’ll find his person there. When he does, he’ll keep him safe. He’ll keep the baseball bat in his trunk, and if he never has to use it on another weird, slimy, toothy creature, he won’t be afraid to take a swing at an asshole if he has to. 

    … Steve doesn’t think he’s that kind of… well, not even brave. It’s something other than bravery, that it would take to swing a nail bat into a human being’s face or gut or even shoulder. 

-

    “We could bury him in the backyard.” Lucas’ daemon says cooly. 

    “He’s not dead.” Max rolls her eyes, adjusts her grip on Steve’s bat a little. Her palms are still sweating and she feels shaky, but she did it. And he said he would stop.

    And if he doesn’t stop, she wonders if Steve would notice, if she kept his bat.

    “He doesn’t have to be dead to get buried.”

    “Jana!” Lucas sounds vaguely scandalized. “Burying people alive is a bad solution to our problems!”

    “Pretty sure Will’s whole family could get in trouble for having a body in the backyard.” Mike adds, pouting. 

    “This time, let’s just… do the rest of the plan.” Max pokes tentatively at Billy’s shoe with the bat, satisfied that he’s out.

    “Sorry, are we planning on a next time?” Her daemon asks.

    “I’m not planning on it, but I’m not not planning on it.” She shrugs, retrieving his car keys. “Come on.”

    “We could bring him with us and use him as bait.” Lucas’ daemon adds. 

    “We’re not gonna have room in the car. Get Steve up, come on, let’s go.” 

    “I don’t think he can drive like this.” Dustin says, as he and Lucas do their best to get him up, while his daemon hops around them, agitated. 

    “I’ll drive. But we can’t just leave him here.” She says, and Steve’s daemon sticks close to her side since there’s a boy under each of Steve’s armpits who would kick her if she didn’t. It’s not exactly easy to read a rabbit’s facial expression… but she thinks the look she gives her is approving.

Chapter Text

    Steve doesn’t get into college.

    He’d known he wasn’t going to. His grades have always been average– a few duds, the occasional really good one, but… mostly as a student he’s straight down the middle. GPA high enough to keep playing, and it was looking okay right up until senior year. The concussion didn’t help things, and the shit with Billy Hargrove… there was mostly an uneasy detente, after the fight, though Steve hadn’t really been sure why. He lost his captaincy thanks to the concussion, though, and he spent most of the season riding the pine. 

    The thing is… if he’d been able to play, he’d have had his personal record to show off, he’d have been able to show what he could do in front of the college scouts. If he’d been the captain, called the shots differently, he thinks they would have made it to the championship, even if they didn’t win. But the way it played out, he couldn’t get in on sports, and he couldn’t get in on grades. 

    By spring, he was cleared to play baseball, at least, but Hawkins High wasn’t known for their baseball team, they didn’t get scouted by college coaches. Even with his extracurriculars, it just wasn’t good enough, and he got so in his head that he blew his exams. He graduated, sure, but he just… didn’t have it.

    His parents had a lot to say about that. The big topic when they came home for his graduation was all the colleges he didn’t get into. 

    And it’s not like they’re being unfair about everything. They don’t know about all the shit he went through, all they know is his junior year sucked compared to his sophomore year and his senior year really sucked, on every front. All they know is he didn’t get into any of the schools he applied to, almost all of which his father deemed safety schools anyway. Him getting a job isn’t unreasonable, as much as he wants to complain about it. He’s out of high school, that means his options are college or work, but it’s not like he chose not to get into college. 

    He just wishes he could… take a year off and take another run at it. Take a gap year and then reapply. But he already has his grades, he doesn’t know what difference another application would make. There’s a community college, and he thinks they have to take you even if you suck, but it feels like admitting defeat. It hadn’t even been an option his parents had raised.

    The only thing that makes him feel better about the whole mess is Zan. Whenever they’re alone, Zan has endless rants about the ultimate meaninglessness of academic success– and he’s also probably the only one who could get away with pointing out that doing more school actually sounds like hell and the job is for the summer, not for forever. It’s something he can put on his resume when something better comes along. Whenever he has to be quiet around people, he cuddles and nuzzles against Steve until he feels a little less anxious and a little less heartbroken. 

    Steve’s dad arranges the job so he doesn’t have to wander around getting rejected a dozen more times, knows one of the guys involved in opening the new mall who needs someone reliable. Steve’s mom says he’ll keep getting gas money wired to his account, enough for the commute to and from work– anywhere else he wants to go, he’ll have to pay for, he guesses– and when they do plan to go out of town again in July, she promises grocery money, and his dad grunts and says he should think about putting away what he doesn’t need to spend on groceries into his savings.

    Which feels ridiculous, when he’s making minimum wage, but he figures he probably should. His grandparents gave him a chunk at graduation that went straight into a savings account, for like if he ever needed car repairs or something like that. Or insurance? For now that’s one thing he doesn’t have to worry about, he’s still on his parents’, but he has to learn about it at some point.

    What he’s mad about isn’t the job– as Zan is again the one to point out. It’s his parents and their lukewarm support. Yeah, maybe he is lucky that they’re still helping him with stuff like gas and groceries, and that they’re making sure he understands the importance of putting away money for the future instead of blowing all his pay on having fun just because he doesn’t need to use it on said gas and groceries. But where were they when he was struggling in school? Where were they when he was dealing with serious real shit? When he was concussed? It’s so easy for them to take credit for his successes, where are they when he fails? Why is that always all on him?

    He’s not thrilled about the job, though.

    The work itself isn’t bad, but the uniform is embarrassing. Zan thinks it’s funny, Zan reminds him before they leave the house his first day that he can’t forget his little sailor hat, Zan says seeing Steve try to flirt with female customers while wearing the stupid fucking uniform is going to be worth having to keep his mouth shut all day.

    The free ice cream on breaks is a trap, Steve figures that out quick– if he ate all the free ice cream he was allowed to, he’d get sick of it fast. Or, more likely, he’d get sick, period. He’d make himself so sick in his first week that he’d never take a free scoop again. He thinks that’s what they’re counting on– given the choice between as much ice cream you can eat on your break, or taking home a pint a week, your average kid working his first job is gonna think oh, as much free ice cream as I want on break is the better deal. Then he’s gonna get sick within his first week on the job, then he’s not gonna take any ice cream.

    If Steve was still on one or two sports teams at any given time, he’d probably actually be able to take that deal. As it is, he plans on spending the summer stocking his garage freezer with all the ice cream he can– his free pint a week, and if there’s one he really likes, he might buy a couple with his employee discount, just to keep from going through it too fast. Well, okay, to keep Dustin from going through it too fast. He has some kind of computer nerd camp in the beginning of his summer break, but they’ll hang out again once he’s back, and if he brings all his little nerd friends over, they’re gonna get into Steve’s ice cream stash. And because they’ve been through so much fucking shit, he’s gonna let them. Even Mike.

    He’s going to call them fucking little shits, but he’s still gonna let them have some damn ice cream. 

-

    It’s the summer before senior year, and Cara still hasn’t settled. 

    Robin kind of hopes it doesn’t mean she’s much younger. Sure, they have their whole lifetimes to find each other, whatever. But she wants to find her soulmate now, or at least soon. In college, maybe. And if her soulmate is that much younger, then meeting in college is out of the question.

    She’s given up on the idea that it could be Tammy. Tammy really seems like she has it together, she knows exactly who she is and what she wants out of life– if Tammy was Robin’s soulmate, then Cara would have settled by now. But Tammy is still… Maybe she’s getting over her, but nothing has really eclipsed her in Robin’s heart yet. 

    She’s excited about her summer job, anyway. It’s all money she can put away for when college does come, for starting her new life far away from Hawkins. Plus, it’s all the ice cream you can eat during your breaks. Literally no downside.

    And then, she gets introduced to her new coworker.

    All summer, it’s going to be her, and Steve Fucking Harrington.

    She doesn’t even think Tammy still likes him, but even if Tammy’s feelings for Steve have faded faster than her own feelings for Tammy, the memory is still sharp. Steve, who was too cool, who didn’t even look at her despite his reputation among all the… well, all the straight girls. Steve, who had the attentions of the most beautiful girl in the whole school and didn’t even care and definitely didn’t deserve her. 

    Steve, who’s always distracted or goofing off. Yeah, that’s gonna be fun. She’ll probably have to do all the work while he stands around looking pretty and staring vacantly into space. He’ll probably make a mess and never even notice.

    His little daemon is already settled in the back room when she goes to hang up her bag and stash her helmet, the brown wild rabbit that she remembers parking herself under Steve’s desk in Click’s class and occasionally chewing on his backpack. She’s probably going to have to be careful not to call them the dumb bunnies out loud, now that they have to work together. 

    They sit through the short employee training video before opening on the first day, which is stupid– who doesn’t know how to scoop ice cream? Sure, there’s stuff about time sheets and clocking in and rules about when and how to clean things to comply with the health code, but there’s a lot of shit that she feels she did not need to get there early for.

    Steve takes notes.

    Dumbass.

-

    Steve’s new coworker does not like him. Which is fine. He’s not sure what crowd she hung with in high school– he only sees her in her uniform, it’s kind of hard to judge. She seems… cool? She can’t be that cool or he would have known her, but maybe she’s new. Maybe she didn’t get to Hawkins, or just didn’t get cool, until Steve’s star was already on the decline. Maybe she knows him as the guy who lost captaincy of the basketball team to Hargrove, and who spent most of the season benched, and who used to be fun at parties but not anymore. 

    His life would be easier, or at least more pleasant, if she did like him, but it’s whatever, it’s fine. It’s just… he can’t talk to Zan when she’s around– or, Zan can’t talk back– even when he’s on his break she’s too close and she could overhear. So his only real option for ongoing conversation about which customers are a pain and how the day’s going is Robin, except that the only conversation they ever seem to have is the one where she loves that he strikes out every time he lays on the charm with a babe.

    It’s not like he really wants to pick girls up, but he’d like to just… charm someone a little. He’d like to have something. To seem cool enough to not mock incessantly, if not cool enough to talk to. He doesn’t mind Zan laughing, obviously Zan knows why he doesn’t care. He just wishes Robin would be like… even remotely chill.

-

    Cara doesn’t talk at work for obvious reasons. She never talks anywhere, she can’t. When they go off to college, they’ll figure out where it’s safe. But she definitely doesn’t talk in front of Steve Fucking Harrington.

    He’s kind of pathetic now, which felt really damn good the first day and a half, but doesn’t now. Sure, if he strikes out with a girl, she’ll still make fun of him, he deserves it then, but sometimes he’s just kind of… there, and the idea of hating him seems so stupid. Like he’s just some guy now, he’s not cool, girls don’t care about him. There’s nothing left to envy. 

    But he used to be friends with Carol Perkins, which is enough reason not to actually try to be friends with him.

    Also, he keeps doing this stupid flippy-tossy thing with his ice cream scooper, like he thinks he’s so cool every time he catches it, and he just dropped it on the floor.

    Dumbass.

-

    It takes about a week to figure out the flow, what the peak ice cream hours are. When the summer gets hotter, he expects it to get busier, even during the slow times. It’s slowest in the mornings, and busiest between noon and three, and then it drops off, but there’s a slight uptick right before closing, from people who had dinner at the food court and want dessert. Steve thinks the pattern will mostly hold, it seems pretty reliable.

    When it is slow, he likes just people-watching. Some stores have size limits on daemons– and most fit, though sometimes he’ll see a couple big dogs or a goat– or once, a black bear– chatting by the benches and planters while their people shop, keeping an eye or one ear on them, but not separated enough to be anxious. 

    He sees more daemons-without-people than people-without-daemons because of it– if the shop with the size restriction is out of his sightline but nearby, the bench is an easy meeting spot. He knows the shop right next door is too small and cramped for some larger daemons to fit between the racks, so he sometimes sees them congregate there without ever seeing the people they came with.

    The only person he knows he sees without a daemon at all is Eddie Munson– presumably headed for Sam Goody. 

    It makes him a little uncomfortable. Tommy and Carol had gotten a kick out of spreading the rumor that he didn’t have a soulmate, at one point, something about telling incoming freshmen that he was some kind of freak. They didn’t start it, but they thought it was funny, and Steve had had math class and gym with him, he knew Munson had had one before. It was a little black cat, at least mostly. He’s not sure if she ever settled, before she…

    Steve’s old friends were– are?-- assholes. But he doesn’t think they actually thought about it. That it must have meant some girl somewhere died young before they could find each other. That he must have been hurting. They never said it to his face, they weren’t that cruel, Steve doesn’t think. Tommy could say some awful shit, but he rarely said it to someone’s face. 

    Steve doesn’t actually think much of Munson– he spent their shared math class goofing off and he rarely even showed up for gym, and while Steve had indirectly benefited from the guy’s dealing, it also skeeved him out a little. Back before he had real things to worry about, he’d toss Tommy a little cash if he knew he was going to buy, just to avoid going out to the woods himself. But he still uses his employee discount when he rings him up, the only time he ever comes in to buy a cone, just because he can’t imagine what he’d do if he lost Zan. He thinks he’d throw himself into the quarry or something. 

    Maybe that’s being dramatic. He’s never actually contemplated throwing himself off of or into anything before, the only times he’s ever willingly put himself in danger have been to keep someone else alive and he’d love to keep it that way. Or like… he’d really love to not, ever again? It’s just that a life without Zan, especially without ever getting to find the guy Zan kind of sort of is, he can’t imagine it.

-

    Cara doesn’t talk at work for obvious reasons. Neither does Zan.

-

    Steve Harrington undercharges Eddie for an ice cream cone. 

    Eddie tells himself not to have any kind of feelings about that. Yes, Steve is hot. Yes, even in the goofy hat. 

    Okay, if he’s honest, the hat kind of does it for him. The overall uniform is on the goofy side and obviously Eddie believes that the military as it exists is the definition of evil, but the only skin mag Eddie’s ever been able to get his hands on featured a lot of guys in sailor uniforms. It’s given him a pavlovian reaction to the hat. Some part of his brain assumes it means there’s a big dick somewhere.

    Combined with a guy who definitely never spoke to him in high school being nice to him for no reason he can come up with, it’s just… it’s doing irrational things to him.

Chapter Text

    Everything is better when Dustin gets back. Also, everything is weirder. Like, so much weirder.

    Although it turns out cracking a Russian code is a really good bonding activity. Robin is kind of standoffish, but really excited to join in, and it’s nice, like… having that.

    “I wish I could help.” Zan huffs, having jumped and batted at the door into the back corridors until Steve ducked out with him.

    “Yeah, ‘cause you speak Russian now?” Steve snorts, scooping him up into his arms. 

    “I bet I could figure out a few words.”

    “Any of the words in the code?”

    “Maybe not. Still, it sucks. I don’t… I don’t wanna be useless. I’ve got great ears, too, you know. And… it just sucks.” He throws his head down dramatically, dangling over Steve’s arm. “I wanna be friends with Dustin. And Robin.”

    “I want that, too, buddy.” He pulls Zan up higher so he can kiss the top of his head. “I… They would love you, I know they would. I just… don’t know that they’d love us, you know? But it’s not– They would love you.”

    “I guess.”

    “You want a banana?” He offers. He sometimes breaks off a bite when he’s having one, to give to Zan, who’s generally a big fan.

    “What about ice cream?”

    “What kind?” Steve sighs. 

    “Rainbow.” Zan wriggles in his arms, and Steve can’t say no. 

    He gives Zan a small scoop and half a banana, eating the other half while he watches Robin and Dustin work. Well, mostly Robin. Robin’s doing, like, all the real work. Still, Dustin’s contributing more than Steve is, and he feels kind of bad about that.

    And then, when they lock up and head out, Steve sees it, and realizes what that music was. Dustin and Robin had thought he was being ridiculous, but that was the song, the kiddie ride in the mall. It’s not just the same song, it’s the same recording of the song, he’s sure of it.

    Zan leaps around him as Dustin digs out his recording to confirm it, practically doing backflips just to get his excitement out without speaking. Whatever else this all means… whatever fucked up, scary thing this might mean, it’s nice to have that enthusiasm for his own contribution.

-

    It gets fucked up fast, actually.

    When they fail to get Dustin into the vent, Steve snaps his fingers.

    “One of you two could send your daemon through to report back to us. See if there’s any other way.”

    “Why one of us two?” Robin demands. “Why not you? Your daemon’s small enough to fit in a vent.”

    “You guys’ daemons aren’t settled yet, they could be anything.” He points out. “It’s not just getting through the vent– Zan can’t let us in on the other side.”

    “Mine can’t–” Robin stammers, scooping her own daemon up into her arms.

    “I’ll go, then.” Dustin’s daemon slides up the wall as an anaconda and slithers into the vent. “I’d have gone anyway if Dusty fit. You’ll be okay without me, though?”

    “Yeah. I’ll meet you on the other side.” He nods. “Be careful.”

    Steve still can’t believe Dustin actually met his soulmate before their daemons settled. It’s the kind of thing that happens for, like, Tommy and Carol, but if your soulmate’s in another state, what are the odds? 

    Well… good for him. And hey, Steve will get there someday. Zan’s person is out there for him. He just… has to deal with all this shit, and then someday he’ll get out there and find him.

-

    An elevator.

    The room is an elevator.

    Robin screams, like, the whole time. But so does everyone else.

    So does everyone else.

    So does Cara, but when they hit the bottom and come to a stop, no one turns and says hey, Robin, why do you have a girl daemon, because in all the screaming, there was Dustin and his daemon and Robin and Steve… and a female voice, and a male voice. 

    She looks over at Steve, uncertain. He gives her the same look. She hefts Cara up in her arms a little more. Steve has Zan inside his shirt. He nods. 

    It’s… She’s still freaking out, and with good reason, but it’s something.

-

    Sometimes, it’s easy to forget being a person. When all there is is work, and when the work is what it is, it’s easy not to feel like a person. Sometimes it’s days between the kind of thing that could remind you…

    When Alexei was a child, it was easier. He never didn’t feel like a person, he was a person. He wasn’t always a happy person, or one who had an easy time. But he never felt as if he wasn’t someone. Knowing a piece of his soul was off somewhere in the world with someone else, and he had Pav in exchange, it didn’t make him feel incomplete. 

    Now he never feels so sure. University offered him a lot, but dormitory living was just one more place where they weren’t even free to whisper. He was still Alexei then, still a complete person, if a lonely one. 

    Sometimes he thinks this job will break him.

    If he fails, his life is forfeit. That much he understands all too well. But if he succeeds…

    Success scares him, too.

    Pav hadn’t thought much would change, a base is a base, but it feels as if they get even less time. 

    It’s been three days since Pav could speak two words to him, and he doesn’t know what’s left of this part of his soul that hasn’t been corroded by the ceaseless grind, the loneliness, the constant surveillance, and the project. The project… 

    He doesn’t know much of why, because he doesn’t have to. His job is only how.

    Tonight, his job is to fix the power out at the Hess site, and all that he wants, with whatever is left of him, is a moment where he can hear his daemon’s voice. Where he can remember there’s more to him than a cog in the machine. But when he’d tried to excuse himself for a cigarette, the technician had joined him, and that’s the only thing he’s got. To say he needs a smoke away from the repairs they’re doing is not suspicious at all. To say he wants to be alone, in a room or for a walk around the building, that could be. That’s the thing, the surveillance isn’t top down, isn’t only their bosses keeping an eye on them always, the surveillance is everywhere and it is everyone. 

    When the American policeman arrives, Alexei does his best, wonders why he never tried to learn anything useful in English. He casts Pav a desperate look– Pav, who could translate every song from his cousin’s bootleg collection of Western music, but who absolutely cannot speak in front of anyone.

    Alexei is handcuffed to the power equipment, for his troubles. When the firefight breaks out, he curls himself around Pav as best he can, turns him towards the wall. He whimpers, desperate and afraid, each time a bullet pings off a surface too near him– one comes close enough he can feel the displaced air around it. He’s waiting to be hit, or… or something, and all he can do is try to make sure Pav isn’t. He can’t use his arms, and he can only even turn his body so far, but he does what he can. 

    The Americans don’t have daemons– then again, neither does Grigori. In most cases, it means a soulmate has died, and Alexei assumes the same is true for the Americans. In Grigori’s case, he’s willing to believe it’s because you can’t have a soulmate if you don’t have a soul. When they cuff Alexei to the policeman and drag him up the stairs, Pav tucked into his one now-free arm, Grigori doesn’t hesitate a moment in firing after all of them. If they meant to use him as a human shield, they’re out of luck.

    When he’s pulled up into a truck, there’s a little black bear in the very back. One of the Americans’ daemon, then. 

    Pav licks Alexei’s cheek once, in lieu of being able to offer a comforting word, as they race down the dark empty road.

    They stop when they can no longer ignore how much rattling the truck is doing, among other worrying noises. The sun is up, and the policeman instructs his companion to pull off the road entirely, they creep slowly into the woods, to where they have some cover, before all piling out. 

    Alexei is handcuffed to a tree, which feels extreme. Where is he supposed to go, exactly? What is he going to do? Isn’t it enough to have a bear guard him? Even if it is the smallest adult bear he’s ever seen.

    … He guesses he hasn’t seen that many adult bears. Not like there are a bunch of bears roaming the city, and it’s not a common shape for a daemon to settle in. He’s been to a zoo before, though. He tends to think of bears as being… large. A couple meters tall, when standing. This isn’t that. 

    Still, it’s plenty big enough to guard one handcuffed scientist!

    The woman comes over, while the policeman is working on the truck. He has yet to figure out if she is police, too– she doesn’t have her own handcuffs, or gun, but if she isn’t, then why is she here?

    He can’t understand much, but he figures out when she’s giving her name– Joyce, she pronounces it with a sound that’s harder than a zh– and he doesn’t really see a reason not to give his own, just his first name. If only because he’s getting tired of the policeman calling him Smirnov, in his grating, American accent. Most of the questions she starts with, he can’t answer. He can’t understand most of it. He does his best to. Even if he can’t tell her anything she wants to know, he does his best to try and follow what she’s saying, until she’s called back over to the truck.

    The truck which is definitely going to explode.

    Alexei knows a handful of words in English, can reliably remember not as many as he’d like. He knows a couple of phrases which are never useful.

    But he knows the only word he really needs. 

    “Hey. Hey.” He leans forward, tentative in spite of himself at the idea of drawing the big American’s attention. He doesn’t like having the big American’s attention, he doesn’t like having anyone’s attention most of the time and he likes this man even less so, but he kind of needs to get it, and he kind of doesn’t have a lot of time to waste. “Stop, Stop!”

    It doesn’t go over well. He doesn’t expect a more in-depth and less English explanation to go over well, but it bubbles out of him anyway, before the truck inevitably blows up, just like he said it would. 

    “Stop.” He shakes his head. 

    He’s un-cuffed from around the tree, after that, cuffed back to himself. They keep walking deeper into the woods, and if he’s honest, Alexei feels more like a person than he has in weeks. The trees, the birds, the sunlight. It’s been so long since he’s seen sunlight, since he’s been able to see a horizon, since he’s been able to breathe fresh air. It feels like he’s just been born into a new world. 

    It would be great, if it wasn’t for the American policeman who keeps roughly grabbing him to make sure he walks in the correct direction, at the correct speed. 

    There are bugs, and the heat keeps getting more, and his feet are tired, though so is the rest of him. But he’s outdoors in the daytime for the first time in a long time, and it returns some little piece of himself that had been withering away. 

    He is still incomplete. Pav remains silent at his side, though he’s itching not to be and he snaps at the policeman every time Alexei is grabbed or shoved. He can’t touch him without it being painful for him too, it’s not worth it over a little rough treatment, Alexei shoots him a look when he looks like he might just bite the man anyway and Pav backs down. Still… if things were bad enough, he thinks Pav would do more than snap and snarl. He doesn’t want him to, but he likes knowing he would.

    He can’t carry him in his arms, thanks to the cuffs, though he wishes he could. He doesn’t know if he’ll have the chance to hear his voice at the end of this. He doesn’t know what’s going to happen to him.

    If he’s killed here, without ever having found his soulmate… 

    He’s always known the best thing for them both is to never find each other. If they did, the temptation would be too great, and the risk… Alexei is under more scrutiny than a lot of people. He would be putting his soulmate in great danger, danger he could avoid. Even if he opted to love another, it would be better for him, Alexei comes with too much… But that’s not the best thing for Pav, is it?

    If Alexei had found his soulmate, Pav would have someone to return to. Pav would be able to remain a united soul. It’s accepted to have a daemon of your own sex, if you’re widowed– it’s understood that you and your soulmate’s daemon have only each other in the wake of your two greatest losses, the twin pieces of your lover’s soul. 

    If Pav had been late to settle, Alexei could have fooled some. Not his family– he’s never been able to come up with a story where he simply gets to live with Pav normally, they would know him. But at work, he could have pretended that he had found his soulmate at university, and after her sudden, untimely death, he was left with her daemon. Pav would still have to act, but having to act is better than constant silence.

    But every single photo of Alexei in existence is a photo of Pav, exactly as he is. His childhood is not widely commemorated, but there’s enough to hang him by.

    And now, if these Americans decide Alexei is more trouble than he’s worth? If he’s killed? Pav will be trapped in a strange country, with no way of finding the rest of him.

    He wonders what he looks like, the missing piece of his own soul. He wonders if his soulmate will have to watch him fade away, knowing what’s happened too late to do anything about it. He wonders what shape he could possibly have in someone’s life. A mouse? Most days he’s felt like less.

-

    There’s not a whole lot of relief in escaping the elevator. There’s relief , sure, but it comes with a whole hell of a lot of yes, but.

    Steve wants to talk to Robin, because despite being just as massive a nerd as Dustin Henderson, she’s the only person he’s ever met to have the same thing, with her daemon. Unless he’s going crazy or making shit up in his head, they’re the same. 

    It feels like that makes them something. Not soulmates, but soulmate adjacent.

    They have to figure their way out of all of this before they can stop and breathe and even think about that.

    He can’t say any of what he wants to, so he teases her a little for being a nerd, when she spent like a month acting too cool for him.

-

    Pav sits between Alexei’s feet in the front seat of the stolen car, and nuzzles occasionally at a leg, and Alexei lets himself just enjoy whatever this is. 

    He has no idea where they’re going or why he’s with them at this point, but he’s in the front seat of a convertible, and he has this thing, this delightfully sugary artificial cherry thing, and all of the drinks are so cold and the day had gotten so hot so fast, and the wind is rushing past him, and he knows the American policeman hates that he’s in the front of the car, he knows that he does. But Alexei has to sit in the front, otherwise he would be completely pressed up against the bear in the back, and even though it is a very small bear in his opinion, with what he has seen of them, it still takes up a lot of space in a car.

-

    Steve and Dustin have something they’re not saying, at least not fully, which feels more than a little bit unfair. Although, Robin guesses, she has her own desired sidebar with Steve. But she at least has the good grace to not talk around secret shit in front of another person! 

    When the walkie talkie comes to life, though, all is forgiven– they’re picking up the code now, and that means they can find a way to radio Steve’s other child nerds. Or even the authorities! Just… whoever has a radio? It’s kind of a desperate, crazy plan, because the Russians are no doubt also going to hear a couple American kids hopping on their top secret transmission, but it’s kind of all they’ve got.

    And it’s kind of exciting.

Chapter Text

    Why does no one know what a camera is? Why is this the problem every damn time?

    The quality isn’t great, but he obviously recognizes Jim. Not the man and woman he’s with. Tolya perks up, gaze fixed on the screen. Tolya doesn’t particularly get along with Jim, but then, it’s not like they get much company. He guesses it’s been a while since they’ve been out. Even if he never says a word in front of people if he can help it, he likes being around them. 

    Murray gives his head an apologetic stroke– they’re overdue a trip to the grocery store, at least… 

    “Identify yourselves.” He prompts. 

    “Jim Hopper, Joyce Byers, Smirnoff.” Jim huffs, grabs the young man’s face– next to anyone else, he’d probably look tall enough, shoulders broad enough. Next to Jim he looks like a boy. Pleasant enough face, up until Jim grabs it and his expression goes mutinous, and oh.

    Oh.

    He is not here of his own volition. And he is definitely not named ‘Smirnoff’-- Joyce Byers, mother of Jonathan, mother of Will, corrects him, the young man’s name is Alexei– but that’s what Jim’s calling him, because Jim picked up a fucking Russian, he told him, what, a year ago? He told him there were Russians in Hawkins. And Tolya had agreed with him that it was highly unlikely that his soulmate was a spy, an enemy of the state. They kept their ears to the ground for obvious reasons, he’d been willing to listen for news of someone defecting, but when that never happened…

    But now Jim’s caught a guy and brought him here, brought him, okay, brought him here because he doesn’t speak English and Jim doesn’t speak Russian, right, Murray’s got it, puzzle pieces snapped into place, Jim brought a spy to his house like he isn’t hiding out from his own government after taking down the Hawkins Lab and their little secret operation there. 

    Well, okay, the kids did the lion’s share of the work and no doubt they’re not off the radar entirely, but… Murray put his name on it. One teenager already died, he didn’t love the idea of a couple others being out there on their own. He at least had already made enough of a retreat from the world, was an adult with a string of failures to his name and the skills to survive worse. He couldn’t hang a couple of kids out with targets on their back and not put himself out with them. They were soulmates, it was sweet, they had their whole lives ahead of them, and Nancy Wheeler at least was going to be very successful. She was getting an important lesson early in her career.

    So, yeah. The last thing Murray needs is to get dragged into some spy shit now.

    “Surname?” He presses, because it’s not fucking Smirnoff.

    “I don’t know.” 

    “Family name?”

    “Yeah, I know, I told– I don’t know, okay?”

    “You could ask him.” Tolya says.

    “Later.” Murray shakes his head. “Maybe.”

    Right now… it’s enough to know Jim really doesn’t know. They’ll figure out the rest of this fucking shit in time.

    “Open the damn door!” Jim demands.

    “What are you doing?” Tolya hisses, as Murray grabs the shotgun.

    “Opening the damn door.” He says. It’s not like it’s loaded, it never has been. He’s never needed to load it. He hopes he never does, but if it comes down to it, he knows how to and he will. If it comes down to it, there’s a go bag and a mattress in his van and he and Tolya could take the shotgun and disappear. 

    “But–” He protests, and cuts himself off. And Murray knows, okay? He knows what he’s going to say. But what if it’s him? But Murray knows it can’t be. The guy’s too young, even with his crappy camera, he could tell that, he’s… he’s young, and he’s some kind of spy, and the way Jim’s handling him, he’s not an intentional defector who tried to bring intel to Hawkins PD. They might have called Murray on the phone and asked him to come down, if that was the case, and he’d have broken the speed limit. No, Jim’s handling him like he hunted him down and he doesn’t want him to run, which means he’s an enemy of the state and a bad guy and not Murray’s soulmate.

    The door swings open, the shotgun swings up, Murray doesn’t yet bother with switching to Russian when he asks for the man’s name. If he’s been faking it to avoid answering questions, then they’re about to find out, aren’t they?

    He expects fear, if not compliance– there’s a flash of it, the young man’s cuffed hands coming up, the widening of his eyes, but he’s not remotely prepared for what he gets.

    “Get that out of my face, you bald American pig.” He doesn’t shout, exactly, but he’s firm. And his gaze remains fixed on the barrel of the gun while he speaks. He shakes, as much from anger as fear, and it’s…

    Very interesting. 

-

    Oh. Nice. Alexei is being held at gunpoint, and Pav walks into the building like he owns the place. The moment the door opens, he slides right past the stranger in the doorway, before Alexei can stop him or call him back, and then there is a gun in his face, and it’s suddenly just the last thing he can take. 

    “Get that out of my face, you bald, American pig.” He demands, looks up from the gun to the man holding it in time to see the grin transform his face. 

    “I may be bald, but you’re the one in handcuffs, soviet scum.” He says. The accent is… not too grating, or the voice is pleasant enough to make up for it, which is an insane thought to be having, under the circumstances. He clearly is an American, but he still speaks well. 

    Well enough, after putting up with the idiot and Joyce– she at least tries, and seems fairly nice for a kidnapper, but it’s still frustrating not to be able to follow a conversation with each other. The fact that this man speaks Russian at all feels like he’s stumbled across an oasis. 

    He greets the idiot policeman Jim Hopper, and then he does let them inside. And inside is…

    Well, it is. If it wasn’t so hot, Alexei would much prefer outside. The trees, the sun, the air, the birds, everything he’s missed for so long. But it’s cool inside this… hidden spy base? Is that what this man is? He speaks Russian well enough for this, if not for undercover. Possibly he normally handles transcripts, better with written than spoken? Maybe… there are places with regional accents, even if he doubts that’s what any of them sound like. Even with so much standardized… if you didn’t expect an American spy, maybe you think he’s from somewhere, as long as he watches what he says. As long as he never tries to pass himself off as a Muscovite.

    He stops Alexei– Pav is still investigating everything, but Alexei is a little more arrested by the sight of the American’s daemon. 

    She’s a snow leopard, pacing the floor, agitated– he can’t blame her– and she pauses to look into his eyes a moment and Alexei is just… stunned. 

    This… this is the embodiment of this man’s soulmate? This truly remarkable creature? Alexei can’t think of a time he’s ever been so captivated by a stranger’s daemon. True, he might not spare a second glance to the woman herself if he saw her, but… 

    He gives the man a second look, taking that into consideration. Yes, he is severely underdressed for work or receiving company, and certainly he is balding on top, but… balding does not mean unattractive. And there is… there is a magnetism. Maybe he can see what would draw such an elegant expression of a soul to him. 

    And then the metal detector beeps at the handcuffs, because obviously it would beep at the handcuffs, which are… Well, the moment of appreciation is definitely over, at that point.

    “Watch it!” Alexei snaps. 

    “Silence, scum.” The American snaps back, before turning to argue with the idiot policeman.

-

    Tolya paces, tail held firmly in his jaws, the way he does when he wants to say something and is opting to hold his tongue, and Murray lets him– up until he jumps up onto the table, knocking a stack of books to the floor with one swipe of a paw.

    “Tchotchke, get down.” He says, distracted. He’s got enough going on with Jim and his unwanted houseguests. He can hear another stack of books follow, and that’s fine, but the table can only take the weight of an adult male snow leopard for so long before it’s no longer a table. “Can we do this later, please? No one is having a good day today, I can promise you.”

    It’s not as if Tolya needs all of his attention every hour of the day. He’s always been clingy, and he settled late into… well, this. In turns the most majestic and dignified form a daemon’s ever taken, and the goofiest. The point is, he doesn’t normally throw a fit over, say, needing to work or to talk to other people in the course of said work. And even if he doesn’t like Jim, he’s never complained about having him in the house before. As for work, he might come in to be petted idly at– a lot of research and a lot of phone calls get done from under a leopard, but Murray is also allowed to have interactions that said leopard is not involved in. Today, apparently, a moment of his focus on everything actually going on and his belongings hit the floor.

    “She’s… spirited.” Joyce Byers says, and Tolya lets out a snort.

    “He is, yes. If by ‘spirited’, you mean ‘an asshole’.” He rolls his eyes. He didn’t make it this far in life just to hide, after all. And given her eldest’s reaction, he isn’t worried about Joyce. 

    “Since when?” Jim squints.

    “What do you mean since when? Since always, you know my daemon, Jim!”

    “I didn’t know he was a– that he–”

    “Is that a problem? I mean, you’re welcome to get the hell out of my house if that’s a problem, but it’s never been a problem before!”

    “Jesus, I’m just saying I didn’t know. No one cares, Murray.”

    “A lot of people care, actually. Bedtime for Bonzo in the White House thinks I should probably die about it, so. It’s not a ‘no one cares’ situation.”

    “I don’t care. Can we please get on with this?”

    Honestly… that’s probably as well as that could have gone, that was really good, objectively. 

    Tolya allows Jim to sit on his sofa without protest, which is more stamp of approval than he’s ever given him before. Murray is still ninety nine percent sure he’s mentioned Tolya being male to Jim before. He’ll take it as proof Jim tunes him out before he’ll take it as proof he’d just not ever mentioned. He’s left the table, disappeared into the kitchen, and he comes back in carrying the remainder of a loaf of bread in his mouth, drops the bag on the coffee table with a look that says you’re being a terrible host. Not like he can actually whip something up– and with what they currently have on hand it would be… not much, he really does need to go to the store.

    There’s a little fox there that glares at him, when Murray turns to his own chair, and he feels suddenly far too tired to deal with this, so instead of sticking this Alexei on the sofa with Jim and Joyce Byers, he motions him over towards the chair. 

    “Sit. That’s your daemon? Sit.” He says, moving an armload of boxes off the second sofa, so he can at least have somewhere to sit in the absence of his own chair. There’s another papery crash, while he’s carrying those towards the office, and when he comes back, the rest of his shit is on the floor and Tolya is taking up the whole of the leather sofa. Leopards can’t pout, physically, but this is Tolya pouting. “Really?”

    Tolya flattens himself down, makes himself unmovable. 

    “All right, does someone want to tell me what the hell is going on here, then?” Murray asks, in English this time, grabbing his footstool and perching on that.

-

    Normally, Alexei wouldn’t put his shoes up on a coffee table. Feet, maybe, depending, but shoes, no. But his feet still ache even after the long drive, from the long walk that came before that, and he really has absolutely no reason to be polite to these people, who have already pointed guns at him and kidnapped him. 

    The Americans give the man here their account of what happened– mostly Joyce does. He can’t really tell how full or fair an account it is, but he looks between them all, waits to see if he’s pointed to or looked at, if anyone’s attitude towards him changes. 

    Finally, their translator turns to him. 

    “It sounds like you’ve had an incredibly long day.”

    “Considering it began before midnight last night, yes.” He says, feels somehow emboldened. Maybe it’s getting to see the sky and breathe the air. He shouted at a man with a gun pointed in his face and he feels so unlike himself, or he feels like himself for the first time, and he’s not sure which is true. He hugs Pav to his chest a little, as best as the handcuffs allow.

    “They have a lot of questions.”

    “That’s interesting. Do you Americans always kidnap people at gunpoint when you have questions?”

    “No, that would be all him.” He groans, gesturing towards the policeman. “Believe me, my investigations are a lot more subtle.”

    “You pointed an even bigger gun at me.” Alexei reminds him.

    “That is true. Look, let’s– let’s start over. I’m… guessing that you do not find a couple of slices of stale bread from a bag with giant teeth marks in it to be… particularly hospitable. That’s fair. I will… Jim will go and get you something, and we’ll just talk. No more guns.”

    “That is not an apology, for pointing a big gun at me.”

    “Okay, here’s the thing, you’re not getting an apology from that one. If that’s part of the negotiation, it’s just not going to happen. But.” He sucks in a breath, expression pained. “I am sorry… that I opened the door with a gun. And pointed it at your face. That was… not helpful.”

    Alexei takes full advantage of the height that the chair gives him, over the man currently using a small stool rather than dislodging his daemon or attempting to squeeze in with the others, and of the fact that he is apparently necessary enough to draw a moment out. It’s a feeling of power he knows comes with steep drawbacks, he is still a prisoner and if he pushes his luck too far, it could go very badly for him. But… if he’s too quick to comply, he doesn’t think that’s so good, either. 

    “I accept. But I have not yet decided to talk. I am not very happy with your friend.”

    “I wouldn’t call him a friend.” The man makes a face. “And, as I said, an apology out of him is not likely. But… beyond my own promise to be a… better host, is there anything you want?”

    It’s a big question. He’s spent so much of his life not allowing himself to want anything– almost everything he’s ever wanted he’s wanted out of himself, to do well in school, to be the top of his class, to graduate, to do good work… beyond that, if he could have the occasional private moment with Pav, if he could… eat, occasionally sleep, he stopped asking for anything else. 

    And now, he’s here, and the question is so open, and there’s so much… He wants to go outside. He wants to watch television. He wants to go into a store again and… and just take things off the shelves if they look good, and buy them. He wants five whole minutes alone in a room where no one will be listening to him.

    “I want your name, please.” He says, startling himself.

    “You… do?”

    “It’s not a condition of my cooperation, but I want to know what to call you.”

    “Oh. Right. Makes sense. Murray. And your actual conditions?”

    “Murray. Well, Murray, I would like to have five minutes to discuss the matter with my daemon, in private. No one else listening in.”

    “Five minutes.” He nods. “In the bathroom– in case you were thinking of escaping, you can’t. But… you’ll have privacy. You can discuss your terms and then come back out.”

    He shows Alexei over to said bathroom, closes the door behind him. Even with the door shut, Alexei starts the water running before Pav can speak.

    “This isn’t necessarily bad.” He says, right off, keeping his voice low.

    “You were wrong about Hawkins. Life has gotten very different.”

    “Well… but this isn’t Hawkins.” He lets Alexei set him down gently. As long as he’s in the bathroom, he might as well use it, might as well clean up to the best of his ability while they talk. “Anyway, I think first we need to think about food. He said they could go out and bring back food, right? And how long since you’ve eaten?”

    “You know how long.”

    “You can’t keep going if you don’t eat and rest.”

    “I want to be allowed to go outside. They will not allow it. Not right away. Whatever the questions are… I answer them slowly. Prove I can be trusted. But… to answer more, they have to give more also. You think?”

     “I don’t know. If they get the most important information first and we play hard to get with things they need less… I think it’s best to lay everything out, cooperate. Arrange to become an American– you have valuable information, more than that, you’re valuable. The government will want everything you can tell them, not just what some small town policeman asks. They know a little already, but they don’t understand it. Even then… The best thing you can do now is to go all in. There’s nothing for us back there.”

    “And… Where will we even start?”

    “I don’t know. We start where we’re at.” His tail swishes through the air. “We’ll be careful. I’ll keep quiet, until we know we’re safe. For now… ask for whatever you want to eat. Get an American hamburger.” And he darts forward to nuzzle at Alexei’s calf, while he washes up. “Get two.”

    “Oh, one for me and one for you?”

    “Whatever you can’t finish. And french fries.”

    “And… what was that thing called?”

    “The slurpee? What are you, part hummingbird?” Pav teases. 

    “Maybe I am, I won’t know until… Two hamburgers, and french fries, and a cherry slurpee. And no more guns in my face. Then I will start to talk.” He nods. “It is good to hear your voice.”

    “It’s good to talk again.”

    “You know… you are all that matters, my friend. Whatever happens to us from here… that doesn’t matter to me. But… a home for you. I never thought of how to secure a home for you, if I was gone, and…”

    “You’re not going to get gone.” Pav growls. “You’ll live, and I’ll live with you. Whatever happens to us from here.”

-

    With Alexei and his daemon sequestered in the other room, Tolya rounds on Murray, free to speak privately in front of Jim and Joyce provided he speaks Russian now.

    “A fantastic first impression you make. What if it’s him?”

    “It’s not him.”

    “What if we found him? And now he won’t want anything to do with us!”

    “It’s not possible.”

    “Why not?”

    “Because the only thing you’re going off is that he’s Russian. Because he got dragged here in handcuffs, he’s not– And look at him. He’s– he’s too young for me.” He insists. “He…”

    Nine years, nearly ten, Tolya… Tolya existed without fully being. Nearly ten years when Tolya’s eyes held no light, when he didn’t even express the most basic of sentiments. When he simply sat there. And Murray never knew what it meant. A coma, maybe. He never thought about what it would look like, if there just wasn’t a person yet, to put life into him. Which would make Alexei not too young at all.

    It’s not proof. It’s two things that could well be a coincidence, and he doesn’t actually know how young Alexei is, he hasn’t got a timeline, and it’s irresponsible to jump to conclusions without so much as a fucking timeline. 

    “You’re afraid. You’re afraid to finally have him.”

    “I’m not afraid of having a soulmate.”

    “Don’t you want to hold a real man in your arms?” Tolya’s tail lashes against the sofa. “Don’t you want a human being you can make love to? Or are you going to not even try , because it is complicated. Because it is frightening. Are you going to spend the rest of your life acting like you are married to a leopard, just because you won’t reach out and see if it is him, when he came right to your door? You don’t even have to go to Chicago for him, he’s here.”

    “And what if he’s nothing like you?” He shakes his head. “What if you just want to find the rest of us so badly you’re seeing something that’s not there?”

    “Knowing is still better than not knowing, isn’t it?”

    “We are not having this conversation right now. We are not having this conversation.” He turns on one of the televisions in the bank. “There– watch your shows.”

    “Not because you are telling me to.” Tolya grumbles, turning to stare at the screen. “Because I was going to say to put television on for me if you did not. Because I tell you every week put television on for me, not because you are telling me.”

Chapter Text

    Finding the comms room takes forever, and they almost get caught so many times before they get there. 

    “Who knew infiltrating a top secret Russian base would be so hard, right?” Robin groans, ducking out of sight of the window and casting about for cover. 

    “Fighting the Russians looked a lot easier in Red Dawn.” Dustin agrees.

    “No duh, dipshit, it’s a movie. And they didn’t have a freaking… Death Star under the town.”

    “Touchy.”

    The door opens. Zan darts in, and Steve catches the door before it can close, motioning the others and their daemons through. 

    There’s like… a dude there still. The rat sitting on his shoulder notices them first, and says… well, something in Russian, and Steve panics a little. 

    Although, so does Robin, so that’s something. Maybe.

    She tries repeating the code, because it’s the only Russian any of them know. It’s not great, or even good, but it gives Steve the moment he needs to pull himself back together, to launch himself at the comms guy. 

    “Sorry!” Dustin’s daemon says, suddenly an owl, scooping up the little rat daemon in her talons as carefully as possible. Dustin opens a desk drawer, and when his daemon drops the rat inside, he slams it shut before she can get her bearings and get out to raise an alarm.

    When Steve finally manages to knock the guy out with the phone handset, a little worse for wear and more than a little out of breath, Dustin’s attempting to jam the chair under the drawer handle, in a move Steve’s pretty sure isn’t going to work, but hey, what the hell does he know.

    “Dude, you did it! You won a fight!” Dustin grins.

    “Yeah. So… did you. Against a rat. Which is great.” He nods. “Great work, team.”

    “Guys.” Robin’s voice sounds a little strained, and Steve turns to see her at the foot of a staircase. “There’s something up there.”

-

    The policeman is the one to knock on the door, in the end, and so Alexei and Pav emerge, and Murray gives them the green chair again. Alexei spots the bear daemon, dozing in the corner after everything, and Joyce on one sofa, and the snow leopard on the other, only she’s facing the other way this time, to be able to watch TV.

    It’s been a long time since he could watch TV. He doesn’t know the program, of course– American. Something colorful, animated, and the leopard’s tail twitches minutely with the action on-screen. 

    Alexei puts his feet back up, and welcomes Pav back into his lap, and tears his attention back away to negotiate the terms of his cooperation– surprised when a cup of tea is pressed into his hands before any demands can be made. 

    “Now you are a proper host?” He raises an eyebrow, but it’s… it comes out gentler than he thinks he means. 

    “That depends. Are you a proper guest?”

    “Still in handcuffs. I did not try to escape through your bathroom window.”

    “I don’t think you’d fit.”

    “I did not try to send my daemon out, then.” He shrugs, but he never could have. They’re too far, and even if Pav could go for help, he couldn’t speak to anyone about coming for him. But… Murray does not need to know this. Just the distance, then. “I… intend to cooperate. But, I want to be treated better. I don’t appreciate being pushed. Or grabbed. Having my face grabbed, I do not appreciate. And my name is not ‘Smirnov’, and if he calls me that again I will not answer him. But… I will talk to Joyce. I will talk to you. If I can eat?”

    Murray nods, perching on the stool again, forearms resting across bare thighs. With the heat outside, maybe he can’t begrudge him the shorts, even if they are… not very professional. It doesn’t seem he works with anyone but his daemon. And the company was unexpected. 

    “Do you know what you want?”

    “Burger King? We would each like a hamburger. And we want fries. And, I expect a cherry slurpee, before I explain everything. And cigarettes.” He adds, though he and Pav hadn’t discussed that. “I have not smoked since… last night, maybe twenty past eleven. I want my own. I believe a condemned man is allowed that, as well as his last meal?”

    Pav pushes his nose into Alexei’s arm hard at that, not appreciating the joke at all. 

    “And I was not trespassing.” He adds. “I didn’t deserve this.”

    He’s not sure if that’s true. Arguments could be made… And Pav had had a point, this whole mess could still prove a blessing in disguise, somehow. Still.

    “Drink.” He motions to the tea. “I’ll send Jim out to get you your food. And your cigarettes.”

    “And slurpee.”

    “And slurpee.”

    “Cherry.”

    “I have not forgotten.” 

    Pav sniffs at the teacup, before giving Alexei a nod, and Alexei returns his attention to the television screen.

-

    Robin doesn’t know what to make of the room at the top of the stairs. There’s a lot of equipment. There’s like, a giant laser, so that’s probably a big deal. 

    Dustin and Steve don’t look freaked. Well, no, they look beyond freaked. What they don’t look is surprised, or not…

    They don’t look like they just found a giant doomsday machine in a Russian base under a shopping mall for the first time in their lives, is the thing. Zan’s foot is going soundlessly in mid-air where Steve holds him, twitch-twitch-twitch THUMP THUMP THUMP twitch-twitch-twitch, and she’s just glad he’s not down on the ground accidentally calling attention to them. 

    They start back the way they came, moving slow and silent. They just need to get to the radio so they can send a distress call, and then…

    The alarm starts blaring before they reach it.

    Cool. Great. Perfect.

-

    The TV provides enough distraction for Alexei, at least, while they wait on Jim. Murray guesses he could sit on Tolya’s usual sofa, with Joyce, since he’s given up his chair. And… he’s still apparently in the doghouse with Tolya, who has not relinquished any of the leather sofa. He doesn’t think the TV would distract him.

    Joyce Byers is half-dozing, understandable. Murray’s not sure where he’d start a conversation, anyway. 

    He paces. He asks himself what if.

    What if Alexei is it for him?

    What would he feel about that?

    He doesn’t know. He can’t know. It can’t be, he refuses to accept the possibility until he knows more about what he’s doing here and what he’s done. Murray is allowed to be an enemy of the U.S. government, it’s his government, but if Alexei is involved in something… 

    It’s different. 

    Is he attractive? Yes, that’s not the issue. That’s… not relevant. Nothing is relevant except for whether or not Alexei is dangerous, which they have yet to establish. 

    Okay, sure, he’s not… he’s not physically dangerous, probably. He’s… he’s in decent shape, and he’s certainly not spineless, but he’s… he’s probably not dangerous, in the sense that he’s going to hurt somebody. The question is what he’s doing with these machines out in Hawkins, the question is who that hurts, and why. 

    And even if he was the most harmless man on earth, does Murray really want a soulmate who puts his feet on the coffee table? Shoes and all? 

    It’s not him.

    It’s probably not him.

-

    The door’s not going to hold. 

    “Zan, you need to go with Dustin.” Steve grunts, throwing every ounce of strength he has into buying them all the time they can get. 

    “I’m not going.” Dustin insists. “Not without you. Steve!”

    “No, you have to. You all have to. You have to find a way out. You can get help, but you have to all go together, right?”

    Zan hesitates, eyes seeming even bigger than usual.

    “Steve’s right.” Robin says, nodding for her daemon to make for the vent. “You have a better chance of getting a message out, or getting back to the surface, if you all go. I– we need you to.”

    “You have to look out for him for me.” Steve says, and that settles Zan– he leaps after Dustin, ready to bully him along any way he has to. “And Dustin… you got this, okay?”

    “I won’t forget you!” Dustin promises, and then with Steve and Robin’s daemons in tow, he’s ducking down into the vent, the cover clanging shut after him.

     “This isn’t how I wanted to get you alone.” Steve chuckles. It’s a little hollow. It’s kind of strangled.

    “Well, don’t worry, I don’t think we’re going to be alone for very long.” She shrugs. 

    Long enough. Long enough to give Dustin and the daemons a head start.

    “I never– You’re the first person I’ve ever met, who’s like me.”

    “Yeah. Yeah– me, too.”

    “I… I wish we’d been…”

    “Me, too.” Her hand inches across the door they’re struggling to hold. Her pinky hooks his.

    When the door comes crashing in, they’re dragged apart. But at least they got to hold onto each other a moment first.

Chapter Text

    “Burger King is nowhere near the Seven-Eleven, by the way.” Jim grouses, once he’s delivered his end of the bargain.

    “Never said it was.” Murray smiles. If Jim wants to get into it on who exactly is inconveniencing whom here, he’s happy to lay out his argument. 

    Alexei tears a chunk off of his burger to feed to his daemon, rather than simply letting the little thing tear into the second one, both of them wolfing down enormous mouthfuls.

    “Alexei.” Joyce says gently, gets his attention– which would clearly rather be on the TV. “The generators… what are they powering?”

    “And tell him that we know it is not the Starcourt Mall, so he can stop selling us that crap.” Jim adds, huffy. Probably not necessary, at this point, but Murray guesses having to drive a stolen car to two different locations makes a man grumpy.

    Murray turns to Alexei, who is still barely tearing what focus the food doesn’t command from the TV to listen to him. He would turn the TV off, but if he does that, Tolya’s going to find something else to knock onto the floor in protest… and the closest thing to him now is Murray’s cookie jar, which is breakable, and also still has cookies in it. He’s only barely allowed Murray half of his own sofa. “Those generators you were working on. What are you powering? We already know it is not the shopping center.”

    That’s correct, he thinks. If there’s another word for ‘mall’, he doesn’t know it. ‘Shopping center’ is how he refers to the little strip mall with the couple of shops he and Tolya sometimes go to, if he happens to be saying it in Russian. Really, Jim should thank his lucky stars Tolya’s kept Murray from getting too rusty. He’d probably have let his Russian lapse entirely without him, and the pidgin Russian-English they sometimes speak at home… Even then, if the language gets particularly technical, he’s not sure how well he’ll do. Even Tolya he can’t expect to know that.

    Alexei doesn’t answer– he takes a sip of his drink, clearly intending to answer, and then he’s spitting it out– you know, fantastic, all over the floor and everything.

    “This tastes like shit strawberry!” He complains. Under the circumstances, he must really hate artificial strawberry. Murray’s not sure he hates anything as much as Alexei seems to hate artificial strawberry, and he has a reputation for hating everything.

    “What’d he say?” Jim asks, like he does not already know, as an adult man who can read, and would know the difference between ‘cherry’ and ‘strawberry’, and is a petty asshole, a subject Murray would know from.

    “He says, it’s strawberry.” Murray keeps his tone pleasant. Finds it’s usually more effective. Though with Jim in a snit, who knows… Alexei is literally scrubbing his mouth out with his napkin, though, so… that’s something.

    “I’m sorry?”

    “His… Slurpee. He says it’s strawberry.”

    “So what?” Jim shakes his head, eyes boring into Murray but somehow seeing past him. There is no possible way the 7-11 was that bad. The man’s been in an actual war zone, not to mention Hawkins, and all the shit that’s apparently been going on there the past couple of years, but no, the 7-11 gives him problems.

    “Hop, he did ask for cherry.” Joyce says, and Murray likes her. She’s reasonable. “I mean…”

    “You had to know this might happen.” Jim’s daemon adds.

    “Well they didn’t have cherry. They didn’t have it. And it doesn’t matter, because it all tastes the same, okay?” He says, although if that was true, Alexei wouldn’t have spit a mouthful of the stuff all over Murray’s floor, would he have? He would not have shoved a napkin in his mouth just to taste anything else. They can have a completely separate argument over whether this is an overreaction, Murray would readily agree that it was, but obviously there’s some difference here. But when Jim does turn back to him, he is clearly in no mood for Murray to state the obvious. “It is sugar on ice. You tell him that.”

    “Tell him what?” Tell him his own senses are lying to him? What is Murray supposed to do with that? Tell him they were out of cherry? Actually, that makes sense, why even ask? Tell him they didn’t have it.

    “You tell him that it all tastes the goddamn same!”

    Oh, no, the first thing, the one that’s stupid, of course. How silly of him to think otherwise. 

    “Shh.” Tolya hisses, tail thwapping against Murray’s legs as he shoots Jim a glare for talking over the TV too loudly.

    “It’s all the same.” Murray tells Alexei, unconvincingly. “Sugar on ice. No difference.”

    “Tell that stupid man it is not the same in the slightest, and I would like the cherry I requested.” Alexei goes from looking at Murray– imperiously enough, leaning back in Murray’s armchair– to glaring over at Jim.

    For a guy who’s still in handcuffs, he’s found quite the set of balls. Murray elects not to translate the ‘stupid man’ portion.

    “He respectfully disagrees. It’s not the same at all, and he would like… cherry.” He trails off, momentarily distracted– shakes it off. Alexei does not distract him. There is nothing cute or appealing about Alexei watching Woody Woodpecker and feeding french fries to his daemon. His smile is not charming, and Murray couldn’t even tell you about how he wears a long night/day.

    “Oh yeah? You tell him… he can forget it.”

    Yeah. Yeah, they’ve hit critical snit. An all time Jim Hopper Mood. Joyce might run out and just… pick up another drink, if Alexei has a second choice? Murray’s not leaving them alone with Alexei in his home to go and do it himself, so if Jim isn’t going to negotiate, then it’s down to his far more reasonable lady friend. If they’ve been together long, there’s no way it’s her first rodeo cleaning up after his ‘people skills’.

    “He says forget it. No cherry.” Murray offers an apologetic shrug, before slipping an arm around Tolya to scratch through thick, soft fur. 

    “No cherry, no deal.” Alexei shrugs back. 

    Right– Murray really should have explained that they were out of cherry, that cherry is not a viable option, at least in Slurpee form, and that perhaps they could negotiate… some different drink and then… he doesn’t know. Would a cherry candy be acceptable? 

    Woody Woodpecker must be doing something, because Alexei– again, a grown man Murray has now been led to believe is some kind of technician or engineer– laughs out loud, and Murray can feel the near-silent amused huff Tolya gives.

    This is what he’s dealing with.

    “He says, no cherry, no deal.” Murray reports, and Jim nods, leaning forward, and Murray

    Regrets

    Everything.

    He should have just taken over negotiating. He should have made another cup of tea. He should have… ransacked his desk drawers for cough drops and explained the problem at the 7-11 and talked to Joyce instead of Jim about what else they could do, he honestly never should have listened to Jim in the first place and said the two things taste the same, why did he listen to Jim?

    There’s a moment where he thinks they could almost come back from this. They really could.

    And then Jim is on his feet and Jim is lunging towards Alexei, and it’s too late.

    “Oh, shit!” Murray scrambles to his own feet, but it feels beyond too late. Tolya whirls around to take up the space he’s vacated, back arched, fur on end, growling– he even lifts a paw, swiping tentatively in Jim’s direction while shrinking back, far too far from them to make contact as Jim grabs Alexei… “Shit!”

    And what if he’s right, what if it’s true?

    “Wait wait wait wait wait!” Murray shouts, as Alexei is slammed onto the table and Tolya yowls and Alexei’s daemon clamps its little jaws down around Jim’s calf only to be shaken off…

    “I’m not gonna hurt him!” Jim thunders, utterly nonsensically , and the daemon bites him again, even though it feel just as much hurt from the contact.

    “Come on! Come on–”

    Jim kicks the daemon this time, after shaking him off, after slamming Alexei down, and maybe it’s all just coincidence.

    And maybe it’s not.

    Either way…

    “I said wait!” He throws himself between Alexei, who is on the ground whimpering, and Jim, who… Murray doesn’t even want to know what else fits under Jim’s banner of ‘not hurting him’, at this point. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

    “What’s wrong with me?”

    Murray grabs his arm, steering him towards the door, taking full advantage of Jim being too surprised to plant his feet. “What the hell is wrong with you, yes– out, get out, get the hell out of my house!”

    “What–”

    “OUT!” He wrenches the door open, shoving. “And you find cherry, dammit, or you find something else, or you take a fucking walk and think about what it feels like to take a gigantic boot to your kidney!”

    “I didn’t kick Smirnoff–”

    “You kicked his daemon. And you’re lucky you didn’t get bitten–”

    “I got bitten!” Jim shouts back, past the surprise now. “That little monster bit me first, that was self-defense!”

    “If you don’t mind letting me finish? You’re lucky you didn’t get bitten by Tolya. Who could rip your throat out. And didn’t. But he probably still wants to.”

    “I’m not getting him a damn cherry slurpee, they don’t have it!”

    “Then you do not have to come back inside.”

    “Hop.” Jim’s daemon huffs, shouldering past Murray to nudge Jim further outside. “Take a walk.”

    “Shouldn’t you be on my side?”

    “This is me on your side.”

    “Wait–” Murray snaps his fingers, before Jim can actually go anywhere. Sees the ‘glad you’re coming to your senses’ nod and decides to let him think that for a moment. “Keys to the handcuffs.”

    “You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

    “Well, I’m not.”

    “What happened to ‘enemy of the state’?”

    “Give me the keys, so I can at least try to salvage something out of the perfect shitstorm you’ve created. And that chair better not be broken.”

    Jim drops the keys to the handcuffs into Murray’s waiting palm, giving him a long, hard look. 

    “If you and Joyce wanna try to good cop your way through this while he makes bigger and bigger demands, be my guest. I’ll be out here when you’re ready to play hardball.”

    “Have fun. I hear it's a hundred degrees out there.” Murray says, and slams the door in his face.

    When he comes back in, Alexei is a little stunned, still– is still on the floor, shaken. He lets out a whimper when Murray gets close, curling in on himself, and even if he’s no one to him… 

    Tolya is over by Alexei’s daemon, grooming it– grooming him?-- There’s something almost frantic about it, not the pace of each careful lick, but… something. And it’s just… coincidence. Coincidences. Just a twinge, not even new, just… 

    “Here.” He offers Alexei a hand. “Here, come on, let’s get you up on the sofa. Okay?”

    Alexei nods, tentative. Murray turns off the television once he’s got him settled– too much stimulation right now, his head’s still ringing from everything. Under the circumstances, he thinks Tolya will let his cookie jar live. Murray just focuses on getting the handcuffs off and then getting Alexei the second burger, which hasn’t been ruined in an idiotic rampage– it’s… slightly flat, even with the box, but… it’s fine. It’s food, which he needs. 

    “Where… where is–?”

    “Your daemon?” Murray gestures over to where Tolya is still grooming the little fox, tail lashing in agitation, tongue gentle. Well, as gentle as something with the texture of sandpaper gets. But against fur, gentle enough.

    “Oh. That’s… very kind.” Alexei gives a distracted nod, hands still shaking as he opens his burger and takes a bite. 

    When Tolya is satisfied that the grooming job is thorough enough, he leaves the other daemon’s side, launching himself upstairs in a single bound. Returning a moment later to run down the wall more than the stairs, pillow in his jaws. 

    “Showoff.” Murray snorts.

    Alexei shakes his head. “Physics. To walk down the stairs like person… not efficient. Not what this body is built for. Slow. Jumping up the stairs all at once… impact is not so hard. More effort at the front, but no more than is required. Still this is better than walking up each step individually. This is what body is built for. Jumping down all at once, impact is hard. So– step, step, step.” He points to the spots Tolya had bounced off of. “Minimal time, minimal impact, minimal effort. Perfectly calculated, perfectly calibrated, perfectly executed.”

    Murray… understood some of that– his stairs are not a snow-covered mountain, but the principle is the same. Snow leopards are built to move vertically, and as for... calibrating? He thinks calibrating, well… that’s what the tail is for, and the ass-wiggling that Tolya does before making a jump. He’d never thought of it in terms of physics. But of course it is.

    “Interesting.”

    “It’s beautiful, really.”

    Tolya drops the pillow down next to Alexei’s daemon, and gently nudges him– maybe him, maybe not him, maybe not him– up onto it, before retrieving the burger that had been ruined for human consumption, also dropping that onto the pillow.

    “That had better not be mine.” He frowns. He knows it is, though. 

    Well, it’s not like Tolya actually uses the other pillow, it’s not like it matters if Murray takes the pillow from the other side of the bed. It’s just the principle of the thing, is all.

-

    “Hey– Steve! Steve?”

    Things swim back into focus, some. Robin. If they hurt her…

    Well, realistically, he’s got no idea what. He’s already been beaten to a pulp because the Russians wouldn’t accept ‘I work for Scoops Ahoy’ as an answer, and he guesses he’s reached his quota on Russian Dudes I Can Knock Out. One.

    Which was still pretty cool. 

    It still counts even if he was only out a short time.

    Steve tries to ask if she’s okay, and the words don’t come out and his lips don’t move, and also his eyes don’t open, and things swim right back out of focus and Steve register suggesting confusion lumpy.

    Wait, that

-

    “Look at the camera.”

    “It’s me.” He grits the words out. Goddamn Murray.

    “Look at the camera, please.”

    “You know it’s me.” He adds, but he glares up at the camera anyway.

    “Identify yourself.”

    “You know it’s me, dammit.” Still… he holds up the six pack so it’s identifiable. “Okay, look. Cherry Coke. Coke with cherry. You happy now? You gonna let me in?”

    “Is there a stolen car on my property?”

    Again, god damn Murray. “No.”

    “Are you sure?”

    “It’s like a… block from here.” He guesses. Tries to think of what a block would look like on a stretch of country road. “Open the damn door.”

    Murray does, snatching the six pack out of his hands. Pours one into a glass with just a couple of cubes of ice, which doesn’t seem like much, says something in Russian to Smirnoff. Alexei.

    Whatever.

    “And what do we say?” Bell prompts, her muzzle nudging at him.

    “Oh, I’m not sorry.” He crosses his arms. “I brought the drinks, that’s enough.”

    “That’s your problem, Hop.”

    “I am not the one with the problem.” He hisses, and she ambles past him to go lean against the arm of the couch.

-

    The soda is acceptable, if not by any means his new favorite thing. The cookies, also acceptable. Different from what Alexei is used to, but… he likes them. And the jar is not snatched away after he has one, or after he has two. Even if it is only to try and make up for the incident with the brute… Alexei helps himself to a third, and Murray does not complain. Though he does put the lid back on, the jar remains in easy reach. He sets it on the coffee table and gets Alexei the ashtray, and lights his cigarette before he can even pat himself down to see if he still has a lighter on him or if he’d left it on the table where he’d taken his smoke break last night.

    “I am trying to decide if you are very skilled at playing me, or if you do not have a good enough stomach to be a spy.” Alexei says, taking a slow drag. Trying to let it calm him. His nerves don’t want to be calmed, that is his problem. And why light his cigarette for him, instead of lending him a lighter for a moment? What could he do with a lighter?

    “Oh, I don’t have a good enough stomach to be a spy.” Murray says easily.

    “I think maybe no. Maybe yes. Maybe you find men like me and turn them. Blackmail. Maybe you do not believe when I say I will help you before, or maybe because your friend is a shit negotiator and the deal was in doubt, you think you have to win me this way.” He shrugs one shoulder. 

    “Well… friend, not the word I would use today. But I am not a spy. I’m just the only person he knows who could translate…”

    “You are not a spy? I am to believe this?”

    “Believe what you want to believe, but no. I am… a professional dissident.”

    “Professional?” Alexei raises an eyebrow. But, he’s not un-intrigued.

    “Well… reduced to a passionate amateur. I… used to be. A journalist.” He says, something brittle in his voice on ‘used to be’. “And you? Spy, or not spy?”

    “Not spy. My background is in physics and engineering. The machines she is asking about, that is the power source. I am qualified to maintain– I am over-qualified to maintain, actually. That is… The system is imperfect– when there are large enough fluctuations, that is what is causing magnets to fall from fridge. Very simple. To run something so large, these things happen, but… problem is momentary, each time. This is not dangerous.”

    Presumably, Murray translates this while he is picking his chair back up and reassuring himself as to its structural integrity, about it not being dangerous, though Joyce does not look reassured.

    “And the shopping center? How is that involved? Starcourt?”

    “Starcourt, yes. That is… the base of operations.” He sighs, shoulders dropping a little. “But it is correct that we are not powering… ah, just, lights for stores, such things. I have never seen actual shopping center. Unnecessary for me to be there. It is… useful. Many stores, money comes in, I do not know anything about how this works. I only guess, no one asks questions about construction, no one asks questions about large trucks, ah, shipping containers?”

    “Then… the base of operations is…?”

    “Far beneath.” He nods. “This base houses several labs. My project, that was… that was the whole point. Until this project is successful, there is nothing else to be done, they are… waiting.”

    “Waiting…?”

    “For data, study materials, specimens. These things are all well outside my disciplines. Murray… what I tell you now– this will sound unbelievable to you. More unbelievable than a secret Russian base beneath a shopping center. I will explain it all the best way that I know how. You will… not want to believe this.”

    “I will.” He interrupts– though Alexei’s speech has grown halting enough he may not realize it is an interruption. “Believing difficult, unpleasant things is what I do best. I will do my best to keep up with anything technical. If… if I don’t know a word, then…”

    “I will try to account for it. A layman’s explanation.” Alexei nods. “You have understood me so far?”

    “Very well.” He nods as well. Catches him looking again towards where the fox is resting. “Your daemon is in good hands. Paws. Tolya won’t let anything else happen.”

    “Tolya… Well– thank you. It’s appreciated. It– it is easier, to focus on explaining, if… if I can know that. Ah– can I get… pen, paper? Maybe this is easier– I can show you also.”

-

    “Steve.” Robin says. Again. She’s lost count. It was concerned, and then urgent, and now it’s kind of background noise. Like a smoke alarm that’s needed its batteries changed for too long. “Steve. Steve. Steve. Steve.”

    Sometimes he moves a little bit and she can feel it, and he made a little sound once, barely. So he’s alive.

-

    Okay. Okay okay okay. 

    He doesn’t like it. But he believes it. 

    Alexei has maps, technical drawings, diagrams, equations. Murray can only understand a fraction of that, and he considers himself no slouch when it comes to the odd engineering project. But he’s a wordsmith before he’s a numbers guy. Being able to put a vacuum cleaner back together, set up a home security system, or jury-rig a metal detector is one thing, the stuff Alexei is on? Well, he’ll do his best. 

    “He calls it the key.” He translates for Alexei, going slow– giving Tolya every chance to correct him if he does get something wrong, picks something archaic or slightly inaccurate to how Tolya understands it. Though, ‘key’, that much is easy. “And this key emits a great energy. It requires much strength, power. Those houses, like the one you found, they’re located near, uh, transformers. They’re stealing… from your town’s power grid.”

    “Why build this key here?” Jim demands. Murray considers not translating him. “Why are they not doing this in their own backyard? What are they trying to do, blow us to smithereens?”

    Unfortunately… it is a fair question. Murray passes it along.

    He does not have feelings about the little dismissive laugh Alexei gives the idea. He’s here– rather, everyone else is here, in his house– so that he can do a job, which he does. No distractions.

    He’s… sitting on the stool, pulled up to where Alexei is seated, right by the leather sofa. Which… he obviously decided to do because his armchair must have been wobbly. After the rough treatment. Not… It has nothing to do with believing anything about Alexei, or soulmates, or… Anyway, it’s easier. If he sits closer to him. Translating is easier from here.

    He’s not sitting next to him, on the sofa. That would mean something, and he’s not. And if there was anything to mean, then… he’d just sit with him. Which he isn’t.

    Not a big deal.

    “There were many of these, uh, keys before, in Russia… but they turned out… wrong.” He translates along as Alexei speaks. “Uh, they had to come to where the… where the, uh…”

    “Where the what?”

    “I don’t understand what he’s saying.” He casts around for Tolya, but Tolya has retreated to the spare bedroom with Alexei’s daemon, wanting an easier space to guard, something that would feel safer and more den-like for the already scared and injured fox.

    “I thought you were fluent.” Joyce’s brow furrows.

    “Oh, I’m sorry. Are my free translation services not good enough for you? Because you can just go ahead and file your complaint right up my ass!”

    Alexei picks up on the gap just fine, grabs for the empty fry box and a straw, holding them up. Easier than drawing out whatever he’s trying to explain. A thing Jim does not immediately pick up on, but hey, that’s what Murray is here for, understanding absolutely fucking everything for everybody, same as always.

    Actually, he does think he’s following what Alexei is doing. He hadn’t caught a word, hadn’t been able to translate it, but now that Alexei is re-wording his explanation from the bottom up, it’s clearer. Murray catches ‘I want to’ and misses a step, but this time around he catches up right away.

    “Oh, okay… Uh, he says the straw, they’re using it to penetrate a hole…” Mm, no, bad wording. Bad translation. Alexei and ‘penetrate’ and ‘hole’ belong in separate thoughts. 

    Murray’s probably just being paranoid and Jim isn’t thinking ‘oh wow, Murray sure is thinking about Alexei penetrating his hole right now’, that’s not what that face means. That’s not a ‘just found out my old acquaintance is gay today even though he definitely came out to me years ago, and even though I’ve spent most of today and in fact the better part of two years being real clueless, now that he has told me again that he’s gay and I actually listened to him, I can immediately tell when he’s thinking about having gay sex, and that time is now’ face. Because that’s a face that doesn’t exist. 

    And… isn’t even accurate. 

    It isn’t even very accurate.

    Murray honestly doesn’t care who pitches. 

    Because it’s not, because they aren’t. They’re not having sex, so. Not an issue. 

    And paranoid is a thing he’s often been accused of being, he’s being it again now, Jim probably… doesn’t even think about men having anal sex. Most straight guys don’t think about that. Kind of their whole sad deal.

    “Sorry.” He coughs, turning to Alexei. “A hole in a box?”

    There’s a joke in there somewhere. If anyone thinks of it, they’re polite enough not to make it public.

    “The straw represents the key, which emits a great energy.” He says, before anyone can change their minds on that stupid joke. It’s a good explanation– Alexei’s bright-eyed, engaging, the expression of his hands elegant even in holding fast food garbage. “They’re using this energy… to break through a barrier, to open… a doorway. A doorway between worlds.”

    And okay. Now we’re back to things you wouldn’t believe, if you hadn’t seen some pretty wild bullshit already. Like Hawkins Lab, and the… creature that killed Barbara Holland because of what they did. And the children they– Murray can’t even think about that. Burning it all down isn’t enough, if he thinks about that. 

    Hawkins…

    The straw bends against the cardboard. Alexei continues, but none of them are paying as much attention as they could be. He expected an uphill battle to be believed, he’s got the opposite. 

    “But it seems this key was only half the equation.” Murray continues, subdued. Doesn’t think he actually missed anything this time, everything just feels… It just feels like they’re all missing a step, but there’s no other way for it to feel. “Location– Location was the other half.”

    Alexei hands a burger wrapper to Joyce, motioning for her to bring her hands up, to hold it. 

    “Please.” He nods, and Murray doesn’t bother translating only that. 

    He knows what the straw is going to do to the paper. 

    “In Hawkins, this door had been opened once.” He continues, helpless. He understands Alexei’s word choice entirely too well, and it’s… evocative. It’s not going to be what anyone wants to hear. “It was still… healing.”

    The straw does to the paper what it couldn’t do to the box. Alexei sits back.

    Okay, it’s really bad timing, but yes, Murray is thinking about… things. Look, it’s been a while since anything penetrated his hole, is he not a red-blooded man with needs like any other? Needs which he puts on the back burner just a little too often? 

    If he uses the batteries from his emergency supply for a non-emergency, he has to go out and buy new batteries, and it’s a whole thing and it’s just been a while!

    “Jesus christ.” Jim mutters.

    Murray is pretty sure about the straw thing and he didn’t say any of that sex stuff out loud, because if he had, Alexei would probably be looking at him… Joyce would, right?

    “So this door is open now?” Joyce clarifies. Probably the most important question to pass along, actually.

    Way more important than the… other stuff. 

    If he wouldn’t sit like that, you know, framing it, hands in his lap, then maybe Murray wouldn’t think about… 

    Okay, he needs to get it together. Just do the translating.

    But would it be such a bad thing? If his soulmate was someone cute? Intelligent? Interesting? 

    “He says it is… opening.” Murray nods. Which is not remotely the worst answer that question could have had, but it sends Joyce off in half a panic anyway.

    “Where are you going?” Jim asks. 

    “To call our children.” She says, and yeah.

    Shit, yeah. 

    Well… Jonathan can handle… something, here, right? The ‘our’ gives Murray pause, but the ‘children’ he understands. Are there new ones? Jim… had a child, but… Well, anyway, regardless, he’s not about to stop her from calling Jonathan, telling him to pack up however many kiddos are involved now, drive them out to just about anywhere. Little late for a Fourth of July trip, but hey, that just means they missed the traffic!

    “Can we watch Looney Tunes now?” Alexei asks, because he of course has no idea about the whole children problem that everyone else is now worrying over. 

    “No.” Murray shakes his head. A little relieved that Tolya is otherwise occupied, because this would definitely become a fight. Not over the TV, more an… I was right and you were wrong fight.

    And right now, Jim is tearing his kitchen apart, so he has to go deal with that.

    “Can I help you with something?”

    “Whiskey.”

    “Don’t have any.” Murray smiles. 

    “Well, what do you have?”

    “Cherry Coke?” 

    “Don’t bullshit me, Murray, you have something.”

    “I have Cherry Coke.” The smile is about double what it started out as. “Do you want one, Jim? Aw, not your first choice, is it? But I gotta say, it’s not the worst thing you could ask for.”

    “I’m not in the mood–”

    “Well that’s great, ‘cause, and I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but neither am I!” He gets his vodka out of the freezer. Bowl, glass, second glass. Tucks the bottle under his arm so no one can help himself to any, when he determines it’s just a little too much to empty into two glasses and one not-too-generous bowl. Is it petty? Absolutely. Is it helpful? Absolutely not. Does it make him feel better? It might!

    “You could have just said vodka.”

    “Mm, not for you.” He shrugs, carrying everything with him. The bowl to the guest bedroom first, set down for Tolya, who perks up. He hands a glass over to Alexei. “To your health.”

    “... To your health.” He nods, a little confused at being offered a drink now, but he doesn’t say no.

    “Oh, come on, Murray. What–” Jim stops short, before his rant can get going. Murray watches the gears turn. The look over to the guest bedroom, to Murray, to Alexei, to the coffee table and not quite to the front door, and to Murray. “... Did you feel it?”

    “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

    “You know what I’m talking about. You’re… pissed at me, ‘cause…” He waves a hand in Alexei’s general direction and, it must be noted, does not say ‘sorry’. “Okay. Fair. That’s fair.”

    “Like I said, don’t know what you’re talking about. Just pissed at you because I was having a quiet, ordinary day until you showed up.”

    “Sure.”

-

    “Hey… what’s the matter?” Eddie coos, voice soft. “Len, honey?”

    Len groans, curling in on himself even tighter– he’s moved out of the bed and attempted to shove himself into the closet, which is never a good sign. It’s not the first time… sometimes he has an answer– headache, upset stomach. Sometimes he doesn’t know. 

    It’s usually a headache. Sometimes it’s not too bad, or it passes quickly. Sometimes he’s there all day. Sometimes Eddie looks to see if anyone he knows is out of school, when Len’s sick. But of course when he’s at school, or at work, he’s got no way of knowing if Len’s hiding in the bottom of the closet or having a normal day. 

    “Do you want some water?” Eddie offers, hand hovering over Len’s flank.

    “Okay.” 

    “You want anything else?”

    Sometimes, Len does– for Eddie to turn off the lights, or hang a quilt over the window to block the world out a little more. One time he asked if he could try saltines and ginger ale, but usually it’s about making the room darker.

    “Buffalo.” Len grunts.

    “Baby boy, I do not have a buffalo.” Eddie tries not to laugh.

    “Then a peanut butter sandwich.”

    “I can do that.”

Chapter Text

    “The key, is there a way to turn it off?” Murray asks him, moving to sit on the sofa itself after some minor conversation with the brute. 

    He does not like that said brute is right across from him, not at the distance he had been before. On the whole it seems like Americans prefer an unnatural level of personal space, but when it comes to this particular American, Alexei would prefer it.

    But… it feels better, to have Murray close beside him. Murray, who… he had not been able to protect him completely, yet he stepped in to protect him when he could. He made sure that Pav would eat as well as rest, after, and his own daemon had been happy to help protect him… Murray, who made him a cup of tea before, and offered him vodka now, and even though he answered the door with a gun, he was not so proud that he could not apologize. He is… kind, Alexei thinks, but he is accustomed to hiding that part of himself. Murray, who he believes when he says he is not a spy, he is not doing this to fool him or to gain leverage over him, they are just… cooperating. And… if Murray protected him before, then Alexei thinks maybe he will again. To sit close beside him feels safe, anyway.

    Alexei shrugs, rolling his now-empty glass between his hands. The question is unexpected, but the answer is simple enough.

    “Of course I can– could Edison not turn off a lamp? Could Bell not hang up a telephone?” He says, slow enough for Murray to translate for him. He can feel the warmth of his arm, very nearly pressing into his own and not quite. He feels something he would rather not name, when he thinks about the closeness of Murray’s attention. Still, he is aware he has it, could play with it, could keep it for as long as he has something of interest to say. Unfortunately, all he can tell him now is that he can be of no use to him in this regard. “But… now I’m compromised.”

    The brute stares at him, and Alexei shrugs again, hears Murray stumble over explaining just a little. Really, they can hardly be surprised. By now he has to know, Alexei can never go back, it’s this stupid policeman’s own fault. Information, he can give them, but he can’t be any good if what they want is an inside man, it’s too late for that. Even if he was ready to risk that kind of sabotage– goodness knows he’s thought about it before, and pushed the thought down deep– they would never let him anywhere near it. If he were lucky, they would simply shoot him in the head and be done with it.

    The policeman grabs him, though this time it is less rough. He still freezes, when it happens, heart pounding, but this is…

    This is very different from before. He doesn’t shout, and he is gentler, and he looks Alexei in the eye, and even though that, too, feels dangerous for one horrible moment, it isn’t. 

    He could guess what he’s saying even without understanding the words. He wants to go in, and stop the key, stop the doorway from opening. Of course he does, there is no telling until the other world can be properly explored and cataloged, what a thing like that could do beneath his town. It’s not safe, just because it is not a weapon. In a little place like Hawkins, he has probably never faced a problem which was too much for him and his badge. He doesn’t know what he would be walking into. He pictures himself like the hero in the story, because he is American. American stories have heroes, maybe they storm bases single-handed and beat all the bad guys up. The story ends when there is an explosion and the hero escapes to ride off into the sunset, and everyone is John Wayne.

    Murray still translates for him, and even if it’s not truly a surprise– he knows the word ‘key’ now, he’s heard Murray say it enough– Alexei laughs. He can’t help it.

    This isn’t an American story just because this is America, this isn’t about one hero who always wins. Sometimes you intend to do your best, and you try to know what your duty is in the world, and you are trying to fix or to heal but you keep causing harm, and those ripples carry on and on, and years after your death an old friend or a family member will reflect that they never really knew you, and they will not remember the beautiful things you did, though they will know your mistakes. Some places are suicide to enter, and everyone knows that it isn’t worth it for the men who go in, sometimes you do it anyway because you think if you do one last great thing, it will make up for something else. Sometimes you poison everyone that you love because you thought a little glory was worth the risk of an ugly death, and even if you could do everything right, even if you could get the one thing you wish for in all the world, the truth is you never would have wanted for it in the first place if you had just known not to start. That is the kind of story this is.

    And maybe it’s not funny, not really. But if you can’t laugh at it, you’re left with how bleak your story is.

    He looks over to Murray, wants him to understand, but of course Murray knows even less, what they would be up against. 

    “What’s funny about that?” He asks, with the bitchy edge of a man stretched just a little thin. Alexei thinks on that, they understand each other.

    “He’s brave. Like… fat Rambo.” He says, coming down from it. “But even thin Rambo couldn’t get to there– key is in a fortified base, underground, designed by the greatest Russian minds. It’s guarded by our most elite soldiers. Breaking in… impossible.”

-

    At some point in the vent, Robin’s daemon had also taken the shape of a rabbit like Steve’s. 

    It’s kind of cute, like they’re a matched set. And sure, obviously being a matched set has nothing to do with whether or not you’re someone’s soulmate, because most people aren’t. And he’ll probably change into something else when they’re not crawling through a vent where being a rabbit comes in handy. Like if they had to fight their way out?

    The point is, this is why Dustin thinks Steve should date Robin, they seem really perfect together and their daemons obviously get along, and when he saves them and they’ve had a horrible, dangerous experience together, then they can fall into each others’ arms and confess their undying love, and then obviously they’ll name their firstborn Dustin.

    Unless it’s a girl. 

    They could name a girl ‘Dusty’, though! He wouldn’t mind that. It would be like Dusty Springfield, people would get that it’s a girls’ name, but like… he would know that they named the baby after him because he saved their lives from a bunch of Russians.

    “Are you sure you can drive this thing?” His own daemon helpfully questions, when he finds the little truck-cart thingy. 

    “How hard can it be? Max did it.” He hops behind the wheel and looks for a key. Why wouldn’t you leave the key in the thing? Like, if you’re in a base like this where no one is around who isn’t supposed to be, what’s the big deal?

    Only, maybe they took the keys because the alarm was sounded before…

    "Okay, okay… no, it’s gotta be somewhere.”

    “Open up this panel here.” Robin’s daemon says, the first ever time Dustin’s ever heard him speak. He turns and does a little handstand so he can thump a back foot against it. 

    “What?”

    “Trust me, okay? I promised I was gonna look out for you, so do what I say. We don’t need keys, but we need tools.”

    There are tools. There are tools on the truck. Cart. Thingy. Robin’s daemon walks Dustin through getting the right wires stripped and joined, so that the engine comes to life, mostly patient even when he tells him to stop being a contrary little shit because he doesn’t know how he knows how to do this. 

    Which feels like proof that Steve and Robin are soulmates, right? Not the hotwiring thing, although Steve does know about cars, and really cares a lot about his car, and he probably took some kind of shop class in high school and maybe he learned about that. But the part where he gets really intense and serious about being Dustin’s babysitter, and the way he’s patient and impatient all at once.

-

    “Are you laughing?” Steve accuses. He has not been conscious for very long, and he has not enjoyed the time he spent conscious, and now he’s on the floor, although he guesses the good news is he already hurt so bad that falling over kind of didn’t hurt at all by comparison, and Robin is laughing.

    He kind of feels like maybe he broke her. Well, he didn’t, but he still feels responsible.

    “Yeah.” She laughs.

    “Jesus.”

    “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry. It’s just… I can’t believe… I’m gonna die in a secret Russian base with Steve ‘the Hair’ Harrington. It’s just too trippy, man.”

    “We’re not gonna die.” He says, more reflex than anything. But he thinks he’s survived worse than this. Maybe. Or, he’s definitely survived some bad shit! And they can’t die now. “We’re gonna get out of here, okay? You just, you gotta let me just think for a second.”

    Zan is going to find a way to the surface… and then they’re going to get help. Dustin is going to tell Hopper and Hopper is gonna call those military guys back to Hawkins.

    They just need to stay alive long enough to get rescued. Get out of this little predicament so they can go back into hiding until the cavalry arrives, that’s all.

    He’s trying to figure out exactly how they’re going to do that, maybe how they could take a second run at those scissors, when Robin brings up Mrs. Click’s class. It was sophomore history, but he’d needed to retake it junior year. The school counselor said he wasn’t in trouble or anything, he didn’t flunk out, there was just some kind of transcript problem? Or, maybe that’s not right. There was some kind of problem in the school’s computer system? And he didn’t even mind it ‘cause it was an easy A, ‘cause he took it before and he even had some of his work still, stuff he’d shoved into his desk instead of throwing out. And he didn’t have to feel dumb because half the class was in the same boat, and that one semester it was like… half sophomores, and half juniors who had to retake it. The same thing happened in one of the math classes– was it because it was a brand new computer system?

    Anyway, if Steve had to choose between re-taking math and re-taking history, history all day. It wasn’t his favorite class, generally speaking, but he thought maybe he could get a better grade than what he’s sure would have been a generous C-, and without having to work hard.

    No fucking idea why they’re talking about it now, though.

    “It was first period.” Robin says, and oh, Steve was in first period. “Tuesdays and Thursdays, so you were always late. And, you always had the same breakfast. Bacon, egg, and cheese on a sesame bagel. I sat behind you, two days a week, for a year. Mister Funny. Mister Cool. The king of Hawkins High himself.”

    This isn’t the conversation he thought they were going to have. It’s not the conversation he wants to be having. He’d barely been that, by then… he hadn’t felt like the king of anything. 

    “Do you even remember me from that class?” She whispers. But she’d been behind him, and… he hadn’t looked at any of the girls. Most days he was barely awake. It’s not that it’s her, or that she was a dweeb, it’s that his whole life was falling apart that year and if he hadn’t been in that class because he’d needed to retake it, he wouldn’t remember anything about it at all.

    He shakes his head. It doesn’t occur to him that she can’t see him. He doesn’t know if she can feel him. He’s too aware of Zan’s absence.

    “Of course you don’t. You were a real asshole, you know that?”

    “Yeah. I know.”

    “But it didn’t even matter. It didn’t matter that you were an ass, I was still… obsessed with you.” She says, which is also very much not how he expected this to go. “Even though all of us losers pretend to be above it all, we still just wanna be popular… accepted. Normal.”

    “If it makes you feel any better, I’m… definitely not normal.”

    “That does make me feel better.”

    “Robin… if I had known– if I had known you were like me, I… I would have turned around once in a while. In Click’s class. I wouldn’t have cared about popular. Not for you.”

    “If I had known you were like me… I don’t know.”

    “You’d have been friends with me?”

    “Yeah. I’d have been friends with you.”

    “Hey… we can always start.” He chuckles weakly. 

    “We can always start being friends in sophomore history?”

    “Yeah. What did you get on question three?”

    “I got… C. What did you get on question… five?”

    “Oh, I put a B. ‘Cause I hadn’t… I hadn’t had one of those yet. And I didn’t think I could go the whole quiz and none of them would be a B, right? That would be weird.”

    “I always like it when the quiz answers go A, B, B, A.” She giggles.

    “Or A, C, D, C.” He giggles with her. Or, like, some kind of little laugh that’s manlier than giggling. “I’m glad we’re in this class together. Would’ve… would’ve really sucked without a friend.”

    “Yeah. It really would have.” She says, and before she can say anything else, the door buzzes and swings open.

-

    With the TV turned off, Alexei lies down right there on the couch, out like a light, and Murray finally lets himself take stock of the situation.

    That’s his soulmate. 

    He’s not sure if this is going to be welcome news or not. It doesn’t feel possible. Alexei is young, and good-looking, brilliant… he must have dreamed of something else. But… he must have at least dreamed of a man. 

    How high can his expectations be? Sure, there are… worse animals to be. When Murray thinks about the wildlife just around Sesser, foxes are… middling? It’s better than discovering you’re a skunk. Or a lesser weasel. It’s not exactly majestic, but it’s all right.

    It’s kind of cute, all curled up on the guest bed, with Tolya curled around it. Him. Definitely him. Yes, there’s mustard on Murray’s pillow, which is lying on the floor, but…

    He watches them a moment, it feels less creepy than just sitting over Alexei and watching him sleep. But he’s allowed to watch his own daemon sleep.

    Could this be theirs? Alexei selling out this secret base, couldn’t that secure him citizenship? How could it not? And if it did, would he opt to stay and give the soulmate thing a try? Not everyone does, not everyone wants to. Some people can’t make it work even with a soulmate, if they get lazy about the work of being in a relationship. He might have different dreams. Might want… a career, in a city. A life Murray can’t provide.

    But he might stay.

    Tolya might pout a little at being ousted from Murray’s bed, at first, but he would probably be pleased enough at moving Alexei in, not to be too upset. Not when he’d be able to spend his nights like this, curled around Alexei’s daemon in their own bed– here in the guest room, or on his sofa, where there would be more than enough room to tuck a fox in beside him. Even in his oversized pet bed in the office.

    He can picture the office. Not greatly transformed, but… rearranged. The desk, his big board for arranging case information… a workbench, Alexei tinkering on small engineering projects. If he elects to stay with Murray rather than pursuing a career with any prestige, he’ll still want to be able to do work for himself. Murray certainly has enough shit he could take apart and put together. Small appliance repair is below him, as jobs go, but if he’d enjoy the chance to do it… If he wanted a shelf with physics texts in Russian, he could have it. 

    He’ll have to ask him, what he wants. He’ll have to tell him, that there’s a place for him here. A soulmate, if he wants that. 

    The little fox stretches, and noses into Tolya’s fur, and neither of them stir beyond that.

    “I’m sorry about Hopper.” Jim's daemon says, keeping a little distance from the room where the other two are sleeping. 

    “It’s not your job to apologize for him. I know what he’s like.” Murray shakes his head. “But thanks. Do you…”

    “Hm?”

    “Nothing. I dunno.” He pushes his glasses up to his forehead so he can run a hand over his face. “Do you like being a bear?”

    It’s an inane question, but… when he thinks about whether or not he’s happy knowing out of any animal he could be, he’s a fox, and what he even thinks that means about him, he has to think, daemons don’t choose what they settle as. They get to choose a hundred shapes before that if they want to, and then… they just are something. If it’s anyone’s fault that Murray is, at heart, a fox, it’s somehow his own, isn’t it?

    “Yeah. I wasn’t always.” She sits down, looking up at him. Like this, it’s easy to be put in the mind of your prototypical teddy bear. He imagines there have been enough people who’ve seen her very differently. Even a small bear is a bear. Imagine trying to run from an arrest and running right into one. “I mean… I thought I settled, once. I was a bird for a while, it felt like me. But it wasn’t. This is.”

    “It’s nice to know there’s room to grow, even when things look set in stone.”

    “You think you’re still finding the real you?”

    “No. I think I’ve probably been the real me for a long time. And… the kinds of things that are life changing, that could still happen to me, they aren’t… They wouldn’t change the shape of me. You know?”

    “Yeah. I think I do.”

    “Murray, using your phone!” Jim yells.

    “Keep your voice down.” He hisses, motioning to Alexei, who… actually, seems exhausted enough not to notice. “I thought you were already using my phone, why are you telling me this?”

    “Joyce was using your phone to try and call her kids, last time Jonathan was at work and Will was–”

    “Oh my god, he went to the movies, that’s at the mall.”

    “Maybe they were at the Hawk.”

    “No. Kids don’t go to the Hawk anymore.”

    “Well, the movie’s over by now–”

    “And no teenager ever hung out at the mall before.” She rolls her eyes. “Jesus, Hop–”

    “Okay, first, and Rollie’s with ‘em, right?”

    “Sorry, who is Rollie? You trust your children to someone named ‘Rollie’?” Murray interrupts.

    “Roland’s her daemon, keep up, Murray. He’s taking them to the thing, for the Fourth.”

    “You still have a daemon. And he… babysits the kids, okay. All caught up, continue.”

    “Rollie’s with Will, and he would never let anything happen to Will. He probably wouldn’t even let something happen to Mike Wheeler.”

    “Mike’s a good kid.” She sighs, like it’s an old argument. 

    “Up for debate. And– and– those kids aren’t gonna want to hang out at the mall all day. I mean, it’s the Fourth of July, you told me they were going–”

    “And the fireworks won’t be for hours, that gate could open up under their feet!”

    “And they’re gonna want to go ride something that spins around until they’re sick before the fireworks show starts, Joyce, it’s fine. And nothing is opening up under their feet, because I’m calling the number Owens gave me right now, and the U.S. military is gonna take care of it.”

    “Sorry, you’re calling what ?” Murray grabs for his phone, and Jim holds it up out of reach.

    “If Smirnof– if Alexei says we can’t rambo our way into this fortress of his, then I’m calling someone who can.”

    “Jim, you do know I’m currently hiding from the government. You remember that, right? Owens is the monster who ran the lab that I took partial credit for getting shut down?”

    “Well, ‘monster’ is kind of harsh.” Joyce frowns.

    “Is it?”

    “And I’m not sure he ran it. Or… he was the reasonable one.”

    “Nothing I learned about that place makes me think anyone there gets to call himself the reasonable one.” He says, but he drops his hands and stops trying to get his phone back. “Two minutes, Jim. It’s a secure line, but any longer than that and they could trace you.”

    “Yeah, I want ‘em to trace me.”

    “... What?”

    Fuck, why did he let this man into his life, and his home? He finally finds his soulmate and now he’s going to be locked up somewhere. 

    He’s not sure where. Not prison, obviously, because they’re going to want to disappear him without a trial, but thanks to fucking Reagan, they can’t just stick him in an institution and trust he’ll never resurface, so instead they’ll probably have to take him to wherever they’ve set up shop with their new lab, or black site, or…

    And what about Alexei?

    He could still be all right. He has valuable information. Odds are the government will want to force him to replicate his work. But… he’d live. There’d be some safety. And maybe he could fudge some things and say it’s no longer possible, the conditions that allowed the experiment to move forward have shifted… any further attempts will be like the keys in Russia, wrong. Too bad, so sad, maybe something with NASA.

    Murray’s going to have to go on the run, though. Maybe he can take one of the houseplants, but he doesn’t have time to pack what isn’t already in the van. He wouldn’t know where to start. Should he be burning all of his files? Oh god, what has he gotten himself into? No– what has Jim gotten him into? Why would he want them to trace him here of all places, when he wants them in Hawkins?

    “Identification code…” Jim looks over to Joyce like a man who expects his wife to remember his social security number.

    “You must be joking.” Murray hisses. 

    “Oh, no, no, I got it, I got it.” He pulls his wallet out, because why not just make this all a thousand times worse. “I got it.”

    “You wrote it down and kept it in your wallet?” 

    Jim waves him off, he flips Jim the double bird, and time continues to move forward at its regular pace, towards the moment where Murray’s life as he knows it will end, and swift retribution will come racing towards his happy home.

    Well, his home.

    It isn’t unhappy.

    Okay, it is now.

    He feels like he can’t breathe, all he can do is will Jim to hang up the damn phone. 

    Not only does Jim not hang up the phone, he gives the government Murray’s number.

    He hadn’t thought he’d really do it. Take it about to the limit, sure, but he’d thought Jim would have to realize it would be unnecessary and unhelpful, to actually bring anyone from the government here, when where they need them is Hawkins. He thought maybe they’d… scrape in under the wire. And even if they didn’t, surely he wouldn’t hand over his number.

    “You compromised me, Jim.” He feels lost. Small. Since everything, he hasn’t felt this. Not quite this. “You do realize that, don’t you? I’m gonna have to relocate.”

    Tolya pads up to him, front paws coming up off the floor so he can gently butt his head into Murray’s stomach.

    “What is wrong? What relocate?”

    “He compromised us. We can’t stay here, what if– what if we’re not safe here? We were supposed to be safe, I…”

    “You will be safe.” He winds around Murray’s legs a couple of times, and nearly unbalances him. “You are worrying too much?”

    “Am I?”

    “This is not about you. Much bigger problems. Murray…” He switches over to Russian. “I know. You have never felt safe. The world has never felt safe. Even without all of this… All we have ever known is a world on the brink, I know this. But you are not listening to your head.”

    “I can’t–”

    “I know. This is not paranoid, if someone is really after you. I know every reason for being scared. I know that things can get worse. Things can become dangerous. But… when the world is already bad, things can get better, also. Don’t get ahead of yourself. Maybe… we take a break. We take a drive. If black helicopters swarm our home, we do not come back. But if that does not happen, Murray?”

    “We’re still relocating. Somewhere… somewhere they wouldn’t look. Somewhere they wouldn’t look in a million years.”

    “Maybe… somewhere for two– or, for four?”

    “That’s… not up to only me.” He ruffles the fur around Tolya’s face. 

    “A house. House with picket fence.”

    “Absolutely not.” 

    “Yes. And many birdfeeders, and I will watch the birds. Every morning.” He winds around his legs again. “Except for on Saturdays, I will watch TV.”

    “Sounds horrible.”

    “Good, you can complain every morning. You will be happy.”

    Joyce gets Alexei up, and Murray grabs all of his notes, just in case– if there’s anything he doesn’t want someone breaking down his door to find, it’s these. He and Tolya follow them all out.

    “You’re taking him back to Hawkins?” He demands.

    “... Where is the car?” Alexei frowns, looking between Jim and Murray. “What happened to the car?”

    “Okay, well… since I am not staying here.” Murray sighs, and flags Jim down before he can get too far hiking, motioning him towards the van. “I guess we’re all sticking together.”

    “I’m driving.”

    “Jim, it’s my van. And I know the way to Hawkins.”

    “Yeah, but I’m driving. You– you go over all the…” He motions to the handful of papers Murray is holding. “With Alexei. Make sure we know what we’re talking about, when we get there?”

-

    It’s Eddie’s day off, so he can at least stay with Len. He’s used to being quiet when Wayne’s turned in for the day, but if it’s not Len’s head, then Eddie can read out loud to him, or play music really, really softly.

    He fills up the big stock pot with cold water and lugs that back to his room, before making them each a peanut butter sandwich. He’s almost out of his bedroom peanut butter supply, but it’s enough he could make them another one to split. 

    “How are you feeling, big guy?” He asks, when Len’s eaten and had some water. He prefers being close to the ground when he feels bad, but he’s at least come out of the closet with the lights off and the curtain drawn. It’s enough light for Eddie to see by, when it’s still the middle of the day. He’s really hoping Len just feels better before the fireworks start. Enough people will just go to the show, but some of the neighbors will set off little ones. Eddie may or may not go to the carnival later, but he wants to know Len will be okay before he makes that decision.

    “I feel… really good.” Len laughs, then winces a little and sets his head back down on his paws. “Just a little dizzy. But good.”

    “Ah, looks like my soulmate has discovered the fine art of self-medicating.” Eddie laughs with him, flopping down across his bed and reaching out to play with Len’s mane. “I’m a little hurt that he’s got another dealer, but that’s okay. He’s… probably not in Hawkins. It’s good, it’s good, he’s… That’s good, ‘cause when we meet, and I say, yeah, I used to deal a little weed back in high school, he’ll say he used to buy a little weed in high school. Or college. Or whatever. And someone has to sell it if people are gonna buy it, so he won’t think I’m just some dirtbag. You sure you feel good?”

    “Mm. I just wanna sleep. Hey, Eddie?”

    “Yeah?”

    “If you go to the Fourth of July tonight, will you bring me back a sick present?” He shoots him the big eyes, which Eddie’s kind of a sucker for. 

    Whenever Eddie used to get sick, real sick, Wayne would bring him a comic book– or when he was a little older, it might be a magazine– something he could read quietly, and when he got through reading, he could look at the pictures all over again, if he was home sick all day while Wayne needed to sleep. His yo-yo was from when he twisted his ankle over a summer break and needed something to fidget with to keep him from going crazy when he couldn’t run around. It was never like a whole book or an action figure, like he might get on his birthday, it was always something inexpensive, but… it was something. One time, when he had to go to work and Len had to stay home with a headache, hiding his head under the pile of clean laundry in the bottom of Eddie’s closet, Eddie had come home with a cassette tape– most of his music collection is of the loud and fast variety. The tape had been kind of big for a sick present, but it felt right– it was an old album, it came out when he was a kid and he’d just stumbled across it at the record store. A little pop, a little gospel, a little dixieland jazz, a little folk. It was as eclectic as Len’s tastes, and he’d brought it home. And every day he had to leave for work or school, he’d take whatever tape he’d been listening to out, and he’d put Len’s tape in and set the volume real low for him. He could hold an old drumstick in his mouth and use it to press play or stop or rewind.

    The drumstick had been left in the back of the van once by Gareth, after he’d broken its twin, and needed to buy a new pair, and he’d been more than happy to let Eddie find a good use for it. 

    “I’ll bring you back anything you want.” Eddie promises, pulling himself across the bed on his belly and stretching down to be able to kiss Len’s forehead. They each get a faceful of the other’s hair, and Len laughs.

    “I can’t believe you’re high right now.” Eddie kisses him again. “Hey. I love you.”

    “I love you.”

    “Who’s my big fuzzy baby?”

    “Uhhhhh… I am. God, is this what you feel like when you’re high?”

    “I dunno.” He gives him one last kiss to the head before pulling away. He honestly doesn’t get high very often, though more than a few times he babysits someone who is, especially the few times he’s had something stronger. But given the choice between getting high for a while and having money, money wins out almost every time. Eddie is pretty good at finding a nice altered state without it– which is maybe why people assume he’s always using his stuff. That and that he’s just… a weird guy. But for him, the right music cuts through his brain better than smoking does, or…

    Or shit like this carnival, like being surrounded by a bunch of colorful lights and a lot of sound. Whether it’s a good or a bad trip is something he always finds out when it happens, but he figures that’s fair. Just… sensation, shoving himself full of too much of it, does for him what the weed does for some of his friends and clientele. Makes him feel… something. Can start his brain buzzing or shut the buzzing off, can make him feel loose and easy– or jumpy and paranoid. All the stuff other people like doing when they’re already high seems to him like it pulls just as much weight. The right song can send him tingling and floating on air, so why not ride that for free? Other people have a way better time on drugs than Eddie usually does. Like something’s wired backwards in his brain, and the stuff that makes him feel good does nothing for the next guy and vice versa. 

    Maybe he shouldn’t be surprised. When Wayne wakes up for the night shift, he and Eddie share a pot of coffee. Wakes Wayne up, helps Eddie sleep.

    “I want… a candy apple.” Len says dreamily. 

    “Are you sure you want a candy apple?” He presses, because it’s not something Len’s ever had, and it doesn’t sound like something he’d enjoy.

    “I want a hot dog on a stick.”

    “Like a corn dog, or like you don’t want the corn?” Eddie’s brow furrows. It won’t be hot by the time he gets it home, but maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe he can get an empty drink cup to put it in, so he won’t have to hold it the whole time he’s driving? “You want me to eat the corn off a corn dog and bring you home the meat part?”

    “Or cotton candy.” He looks up at Eddie again, with those big eyes. “Will you go and buy me a cotton candy?”

    “Yeah. Of course I will. I won’t stay long when I go, okay? But I’ll go and buy you a cotton candy. I want you to try and sleep it off, and when you wake up, you tell me if you’re feeling good still. And I’m gonna put the quilt up over the window before the fireworks start. Wayne’s got a half-day off and he’s not going to the fireworks, so… you guys look out for each other, okay? He’s gonna look after you, too, if the neighbors make too much noise and your head hurts.”

-

    Murray doesn’t love letting someone else’s daemon use the bed in the back of his van– such as it is. But that’s where there’s room for a bear, and Tolya is more than happy to share with Bell as well as Pav. 

    “So… tell me, how did you come to work on this key?” He asks. It’s not exactly what Jim wanted them to get nailed down, but it’s important to Murray. It’s what he needs to know.

    “I was… promising, in school. I worked hard. When I was recruited to do work for the government… this is not what I imagined.” He snorts. “I did not feel that I could say no. What other options did I have? If I refused, none– no one else would touch me, you have to understand. I was given the only job. There is not much, ah… what would you call…”

    “Private sector?” Tolya offers, from behind them.

    “I think, yes. That is not– I didn’t think it would be what it was, so even if I could have said no, probably I would not have then. It was a prestigious posting for someone who had just received his doctorate. It would pay a good salary, but more importantly… there are many things a good salary won’t get you. There are no guarantees– but… if you have a good job and you prove you are reliable, and the right person notices you, your name might be put up. You might get opportunities. Maybe life is a little better. And… when I was told I would be moving to a base, the first time… I did not think this would be so bad. A dormitory on a base is no different from a dormitory in the city, but the commute to work is much easier.” He chuckles humorlessly. “They gave me only a little piece of the problem to start. For a long time, it was only like that. Solve this little problem, look at this or that. Or… It was like…”

    “Think tank.” Tolya nods. 

    “Yes. Much was… theoretical. Or so we thought. Then I was pulled from that lab and taken to another within the base. Still it was… small pieces. And…” He frowns. Murray hangs on every nanosecond of the pause. “Pav asks me once, what do I think I am building. They have moved me between physics and engineering, back and forth some times… They have put me on what I think is… many different projects. Some of them… maybe for some kind of industrial equipment. Others maybe space travel. ‘Think tank’. But, I am not building anything.”

    “One of your colleagues got wise?”

    “My daemon.” He sits up a little straighter, pride evident. “Of course, even being through university with me, Pav is not a physicist, or an engineer, but… enough grasp. More important, Pav… sees the way things fit together. Even when it does not mean understanding the answer. After that, I am placed in the main lab. And… we begin to learn what it is I have been doing. It is… exciting, then. I do not know enough yet to be afraid of it. My direct superior explains that this is… beginning from the ground up. They tried once before, and failed. Now they are using our ideas to try smarter. And… I am flattered.”

    He looks down at that, as if he bears it as a personal failing. Too eager to be the one to solve the problem, too proud to be told he could be, to stop and ask about what failure looked like?

    “And then?” Murray rests a hand on his arm, and Alexei looks back up at him, some of the heaviness leaving him.

    “There are many projections. There are… tests, not of the key itself, but, to give us an idea of how the real thing will behave. Everything is promising. Every day I am fixing something, preparing something. One of the tests… there is a setback. Major setback. We disassemble the key, we move to another base, more remote. Safety concerns are addressed. Work resumes. While I am here… I barely see the outside. Sometimes I am able to get to a window. We are… far north. All the time I am there, the weather never changes, I don’t think. But… there is little time for frivolity. Sometimes… I imagine what it would be like to go outside.”

    “Freezing?”

    “Ah, but I am built for it. I just… when I lie down at night, and sleep won’t come, I imagine… how this hike would go. If maybe even this far north I see birds. If I go up to where there is a ridge, or… if I am near water, maybe. If there is any tree as far as I can see. If we are near a town that I could see if I did make it to the ridge. Once, I imagine… I imagine I bundle up, and Pav is inside my coat, and I make it over the ridge and down to a little town, and there is a place there, where for the first time since all of this began, I eat a meal that tastes like my mother would make. And… it feels better to warm up because I was so cold. But, of course, I do not believe any such town exists there. This is part of the safety precautions we are taking, to move so far from anyone. And I never go out. Only sometimes I look out and think it looks so peaceful outside, no matter what we are doing inside.”

    “But your tests still failed, because… you were at the wrong location.” Murray nods.

    “Yes. The failure here was… catastrophic. But… I was promoted.” He says, the words tight in his throat. Murray doesn’t press. “They tell me… the new base of operations is nearly complete. The doorway has opened naturally in Hawkins, or the Americans have learned to open it, we must do the same. And… they have managed to secure some– I do not know. Something was secured in Hawkins, because of this opening. It is not for me to know, my only priority is to be the key. I will work with a few other lead scientists across different divisions, under the same man, he is coming with us, and his best people… I am introduced to the other project heads. We disassemble the key again, and prepare for travel. To get into the country is… thrilling. Frightening. I never dreamed of travel like this. So much… I cannot even think of, because the whole world changes at once. And I work to prevent the key from failing again like it had before, but… everything that I had loved, when I began, now I hate. I see the workings of it, and I cannot feel pride, or even relief. I only see everything which can go wrong and which has gone wrong. But what can I do?”

    “I guess… tonight we answer that question.” He gives Alexei a smile, gives his arm a gentle squeeze. “Maybe there’s more that you can do than you think.”

    He only realizes he’s slipped into the informal ‘you’ when Alexei raises his eyebrows.

    “Is that so?” He asks, with a smile of his own.

    “Too… personal?”

    “... No. Not if we are doing this together. I do not know… ‘saving the world’ sounds egotistical.”

    “A little late to let that stop you, Edison.”

    “Please.” He sneers a little, but there’s a sparkle in his eyes. “Next to me? Edison would be all talk.”

Chapter Text

    In the end, for all his arguments about how Steve told him to escape and getting help– real help– was the best thing they could do, Dustin can’t.

    He promised Steve, didn’t he? If you die, I die? They’re, like… bonded in sacred brotherhood, or something, and… just, Dustin promised.

    Both Steve and Robin’s normally-silent daemons are chatty, as they set up The Distraction– totally a sign that they just needed to find each other, right?-- and once everything is set to go, Dustin relies on the two of them to find their people, two sets of big, sensitive ears navigating while he drives. There’s a bit of a learning curve, but it’s not that hard. He totally thinks he’s as good a driver as Max.

    “I don’t know what we’re going to do if Robin and Steve aren’t okay.” Steve’s daemon says, and presses closer to Robin’s.

    “They’re gonna be– they have to be.” Robin’s daemon answers. “Steve’s tough, and really brave– isn’t that right, Henderson? So– so he wouldn’t let anything happen to Robin.”

    “Right.” Dustin nods. “Yeah, totally. You saw him fight that one guard. He– he wouldn’t let anything happen. Don’t even worry about that. Once we find them… we’ve got this truck now, and a key card. We’re gonna get Steve and Robin, get out of here, then we’ll all go to the authorities. American heroes.”

    They hang back, until they see guards leaving the room. Once they burst in, it’s just one lone creepy guy in there with them, and with the element of surprise on their side, he’s pretty quickly taken out.

    “Hey, Henderson!” Steve grins, punch-drunk. “I was just talking about you.”

    “Hoo boy, we’ll address that later.” Robin’s daemon says, hopping around in circles with Steve’s, both of them working through some nervous energy while Dustin works on getting Steve freed, then Robin.

    “Just focus on getting them onto the truck.” He shakes his head. “Fast.”

-

    There is a difference Alexei had not been prepared for, between wondering and knowing.

    Tolya. 

    Does he speak Russian because Murray speaks Russian, or did Murray learn Russian because Tolya does? Unlike Murray, Tolya’s accent is native.

    If he reached out and touched him, would it sting of violation or would it be like coming home?

    There must be millions of men more like him. Millions more athletic, more beautiful, more majestic. But can there be millions who are all those things, and attracted to other men as well? All his life, Alexei has felt so alone in that, he has never known anyone else… He would have believed he was some kind of mistake, if it wasn’t for Pav. Pav’s very existence proved he wasn’t completely alone in this. Pav’s reassurances made him feel that however unusual, and however persecuted because of it, he was not in error. Not really.

    It’s hard to believe that he is so great and so lovely… but it is also hard to believe that everything is coincidence. 

    No.

    He does not want to believe it is coincidence. He does not want to believe Murray is like him, but not for him. 

    And… if he can do this, truly shut down the key before the doorway finishes opening, stop it from ever opening again, then…

    Then he can find out, if this could be his home– if this could be him.

    They should be formulating a real plan, he thinks. They should be drilling Murray on the necessary information that others will need. If the American military is sending someone, they have to be able to give them the information.

    But… Murray asks him things, and there’s no ‘should’, he only answers. Not about the base, the key, his own military’s presence here and strength, only… things.

    “What do you do for fun, when you are not working?”

    “I could not say the last time I was not working.” He laughs. 

    “Well… do you like hiking, or do you only like imagining hiking?” Murray shrugs. 

    “After today? Imagining. I never want to hike again. No, I was… I lived in the city most of my life. I have not spent much time in nature, really. I like the idea. I like the smell of spruce trees and I like to hear birds. Lilacs. I used to go sometimes to the lilac gardens, when I was a student. But it turns out I do not like to hike. And you? What do you do?”

    “I don’t know. I mean, I work, when I am not working. I… try to teach myself new things. Otherwise… ehhh, in my head, it gets… not great.” Murray gestures, smiling still. It’s a good smile, lighthearted, a little warm. “It was… easier, when I could just write. When I could always research something and work on something. Now it’s… trying to keep some plants alive. Trying to learn another language. Research for fun. Trying… trying to be busy.”

    “That sounds nice.”

    “You think?”

    “I think, yes. Getting to try different things… it sounds good. I would like being able to do that with my time. To have hobbies. To learn another language. Maybe, for me also, it is not… ideal, to go from working all of the time to doing nothing. But… well, like I said, I can’t go back. And… I do not want to do this again, to… be responsible for a thing like this. But… I can no longer pretend there is anything I could do, that could not become something dangerous. What I thought was pure theory was still made into something capable of… of something terrible. Yes, it is not a weapon. But it’s not good. If I get through this, if I am not… arrested by your military or killed by mine, then… it’s time to learn who I am beyond only work. Always work…”

    Murray nods slowly. His hand brushes against Alexei’s arm, and doesn’t withdraw right away. Warm, against the cranked-up cold air blowing from the front of the van.

    Even if they aren’t made for each other, isn’t it something, that it is a possibility still? Isn’t it something, just knowing Murray, too, desires other men? Has he ever pursued one? Been pursued? What would he think of Alexei’s inexperience? Is Alexei even on his radar? Surely he has… preferences. Probably he likes men who are handsome, or…

    No, but he must be. Even if Murray has met many other men like them, even if this is not some once-in-a-lifetime revelation for him, he must at least consider that there is potential.

    Mustn’t he?

    “Maybe this will be enough, for us. For us to be able to get American citizenship sorted out for you. You won’t have to go back. And… you can find yourself, here. After all… what good is a land of opportunity, if you can’t do that?”

    “Enough for us.” He echoes. “It will have to be. Pav and I can only move forward now.”

    “Well… you’re both welcome– If it all goes all right, then… you’re welcome to stay with Tolya and I, until you find someplace you would rather be.”

    “Yes.” Tolya whispers, raising his head. His eyes are bright. He looks to Murray first, pleased, before turning an almost smug smile towards Alexei. No– no ‘almost’ about it. “There will not be a better place you could find. We are going to relocate. A nice house.”

    “We’ll see what we get.”

    “With picket fence.” His tail twitches. 

    “He sounds very certain.” Alexei laughs. “You planned on relocating from your…?”

    “You can say ‘hovel’ if you want to, it’s…” Murray waves a hand.

    “Oh, no. I don’t think–”

    “It was secure. And remote. As a writer, I made enemies in Chicago. And then as a private investigator I made even more of them. Right now… you and I are both compromised.”

    “Please don’t take it the wrong way if that makes me feel better.” He shifts, a little, so that his arm rests again against Murray’s. “I can be compromised in good company.”

    “Well, I have some experience.” He snorts. “It’s… not a place I chose for the quality of life it afforded me. I didn’t… think about that for myself. The last year… survival mode, for me. But… it is possible you and I are the answer to each other’s problems?”

    “I considered this also.” Alexei nods. He can’t think of a time he felt so much as if he existed in his own body– not for years. The hair on his arms is standing on end and the barest touch is heavy with the promise of what might be true. 

    And if it isn’t, could it still be fun to find out?

    “Good. Then… we will put an end to things, with your key. And… buy ourselves some goodwill with my government. I think it’s enough, for them to overlook some things, if we are saving America. Then… I’ll help you settle in.”

    “Picket fence.” Tolya whispers, resting his chin on the back of the seat. “Big yard.”

    “For what do we need a big yard?” Murray groans.

    “For gardening, maybe. For birdfeeders.”

    “You think? Because I can keep a couple houseplants alive, next comes a garden? I’m not so sure.”

    Jim Hopper says something, from the front– Alexei catches Murray’s name, and ‘key’, but nothing that comes after as they bicker.

-

    Robin is like… the funniest person Steve’s ever met. He’s really glad Robin is his new best friend. Dustin is his best friend, too– Dustin is, like, a way better driver than Max. Or maybe Steve just didn’t feel this good when Max was driving. He feels really good now. 

    Everything hurts like a son of a bitch, but he feels great anyway.

    It hurts so much Zan can barely cuddle him, even though Steve would let him. But he’s super careful, avoiding his usual cannonball nuzzles. Steve misses it a little, he always loves the way Zan dives against him like he can’t stand not throwing himself into Steve’s arms… but it’s okay. Once they’re home safe, he’ll hold him as tight as they can stand it. 

    And anyway, Robin, Robin is Steve’s best friend who’s his own age! He hasn’t had that since everything with Tommy, and he missed it, and now he and Robin are best friends, it’s great.

-

    “Murray. You getting this thing with the key figured out?” Jim asks. “Or are you two having the conversation back there?”

    “What conversation? There’s no conversation.”

    “So the plan is totally nailed down, one hundred percent? You know the exact steps to tell our military guys– that is, if they’re still coming. I mean, after Joyce–”

    “Oh, excuse me–”

    “Yes. We’re working on it. This is– this is highly complicated, there’s a lot of science background behind the key. Obviously, for the military guys, a short version, but…”

    “You know it’s okay if you do want to have the conversation.”

    “What conversation?” Joyce asks. 

    “We’re not having the conversation right now.”

    “Sure. Sure, okay. I mean, if you wanna know what I think–” Jim starts, and Murray leans up between the front seats to cut him off.

    “If you wanna know what I think, I think you’ve been putting off the conversation a lot longer than I have. And maybe if you just had it, you wouldn’t be coming into my house and bickering like children–”

    “Okay, whoa, there is not a conversation to be had here, okay?”

    “Oh, don’t kid a kidder, Jim.”

    “Our situations are totally different.”

    “I agree completely. My situation is actually complicated. You’re just a big ol’ baby, you can’t own up to your own truth, and I’d encourage you to put it out there, get it over with, and go for it, before we really have to get into whatever’s coming with whatever help we might not be getting, but whatever does happen, and I mean whatever happens, when you rip each other’s clothes off for a quick pre- or post-world-saving fuck, you don’t get to use my bed.”

    “Jesus, Murray!”

    “Where the fuck is that coming from?”

    “Oh, am I wrong?” He makes a face. “Am I? Shall I go on?”

    “Please don’t!” Joyce yells.

    “Jesus, Murray!”

    “You knew.” He shakes his head, with just a little bit of a dismissive sneer. “You’ve known for years– you knew, ‘cause you came back to your old hometown, after all those years away, and you know what you saw?”

    “We are not having this conversation, jesus, we are not having this conversation.”

    “Ya saw the one that got away! Had a bad marriage, coupla kids–”

    “Excuse me, pal, but where do you get off saying I had a bad marriage?”

    “Well, you did. I mean… I’m sure he sold you a line and it sounded good at the time, but he was a shitty father and you knew he wasn’t the one, happens all the time. You live and you learn. And… I get it, you’re hesitant.” He jerks his head towards Jim. “I’m sure you’ve known cops’ wives before and thought, yeah, that’s not a mistake I’m making again.”

    “That is, that is not something I’ve thought.” She sputters.

    “We’re not having sex!” Jim adds.

    “Yeah, I know, I’m saying what’s the hold up?”

    “Way off!”

    “I will bet you a hundred dollars right now, the day your daemon re-settled was within a year of Jonathan being born. Probably not more than a month after, if that. Am I wrong?”

    “Sorry, how do you know my son’s name?”

    “We’ve met.”

    “Okay, you know what?” Jim’s hand cuts through the air, stopping that line of conversation. “Nobody’s having sex in the back of the van on the drive to Hawkins.”

    “Well, it’s my bed, I could have sex in it any time I wanted–”

    “Yeah? Do it, smart guy.”

    “You’ve walked into a trap.” Tolya snorts.

    “... I wouldn’t want to make you feel inadequate.” He sinks back into his seat.

    “What was all of that?” Alexei murmurs.

    “Nothing. I mean… I told them they should have sex…”

    He blinks, looking between Murray and the front seat. “They have not had sex?”

    “No.” He shrugs, with an air of ‘I’m as baffled as you’. He might have kept his cool about the whole thing, if Alexei didn’t start giggling. There’s not another word for it, giggling. And it’s adorable.

    “They haven’t– I was trying to figure out!” He struggles, but the harder he tries not to laugh, the more he has to, and the more he does, the more Murray has to. “Because his daemon is so like her… and she doesn’t have… And what about the children?”

    “I know! I know, it’s obvious. Hers is– she does, she does have one, he’s watching the kids, I don’t even know.”

    “Why haven’t they?” He collapses into Murray’s shoulder.

    “I don’t know! Not exactly any impediments as far as I can see. Not like– I don’t know. They’re being ridiculous.” He shakes his head, and feels the weight of Tolya’s stare at the back of his head.

Chapter Text

    Robin kind of wonders why she never watched a movie high before. Watching a movie high is the best. Steve has no idea what’s going on and it’s so funny and she keeps thinking the next time he leans over to ask her what’s happening, she’ll make up something stupid, but she just tells him what’s happening every time. 

    It might just be that she hasn’t eaten in like a whole day, but popcorn has never tasted better for sure and everything is just…

    It’s just great, she’s totally going to do this. Not with truth serum, for obvious reasons, but she knows how to get pot. She’s never done it, but she could, and her parents wouldn’t even be mad. Her parents have, embarrassingly, gone out of their way to tell her they wouldn’t be mad but to be safe and do it at home. She could get high at home and… 

    What do people do? Put on The Wizard of Oz and The Wall and see if they really line up and if it feels profound instead of just kind of goofy?

    Oh god, is it possible to be bad at watching a movie high? What if she’s bad at watching a movie high?”

    “Steve, what if I’m bad at this?” She whispers. 

    “No, you’re so good at this.” He whispers back. “Hey… do you think… do you think there are… do you think actors work with their own daemons or do you think there are, uh, special actor daemons? Like is Einstein an actor? Or is he just, does he gotta?”

    “Einstein’s a pet dog.” Her brow furrows. “I think. He doesn’t have any lines.”

    “If he wasn’t a daemon, he couldn’t be a test pilot. He wouldn’t be smart enough.”

    “If he was a daemon, Doc wouldn’t use him as a guinea pig?”

    “Are you thirsty? I’m thirsty.” Steve shakes the empty popcorn tub. “I’m gonna go get a drink.”

    Someone shushes them. Robin goes with Steve.

-

    Being told to stay in the van wouldn’t bother Murray if it was just him. He gets it, he pissed Jim off, the kids aren’t his kids and unless they’re with Jonathan, there’s no way they should follow him to a secondary location if he was the one to find them before Jim or Joyce. If he found the kids and said hey, come with me, a weird-looking stranger, your safety depends on your getting in my van, and they actually did it, then he would have to have a long talk with their parents about teaching them to not fucking do that.

    They’re sitting in the back now, since Bell’s freed up space back there, and it’s open for the light, so they can actually go over the plan for real, and honestly he would rather do that than run around a crowded, noisy carnival looking for a couple of specific children he saw pictures of last year, who have no doubt changed considerably, that’s a thing children do.

    But he does catch the way Alexei keeps looking over towards the bright lights, the sounds of laughter and shouting and clanging bells, carnival music. 

-

    Eddie gets off the Gravitron feeling– temporarily– like he’s been fixed. His spine feels straighter, which is kind of nice, he guesses, but mostly it’s just that being spun around so fast that it’s almost like being crushed is apparently the only thing that makes him feel the way he thinks other people walk around feeling all the time, only with the bonus of being kind of dizzy.

    Sometimes Len will kind of crush him back into a functional human being, but he’s always really ginger with his weight, like he won’t just collapse onto Eddie while Eddie lays on a harder, flatter surface than his mattress can really provide, he won’t squish him hard ‘cause he says he’s too heavy, and it’s sweet of him and he still will do some, but the Gravitron is pitiless, merciless, thoughtless. All it does is spin you until you’re squashed good.

    He considers trying to win Len something. He’ll take him back cotton candy either way, and he doesn’t want to waste his time lining up for any of the other rides, even the ones he’d normally be all about, doesn’t want to be out all night while Len has been feeling lousy, but the cotton candy’s gonna be gone in two seconds flat, and if he could take him home something…

    A colorful plastic baseball bat, or a goofy stuffed lion, or…

    Bingo. Little mirror with a picture of something. If it was for him, he’d go for the Iron Maiden one, maybe Garfield, but he’s gotta win the one Len would like the most. And sure, Len likes Iron Maiden fine, he likes Garfield fine, but…

    There’s one with a Pontiac Trans-Am, and it reminds him of flipping through car magazines together, sitting up against Len so he could look over his shoulder. Idle daydreams about what he’d like to own or drive, or what they thought his soulmate might. And Len had said probably wherever he was, he had a pretty normal car and not like… the coolest car in the world. And he’d said he did bet it was red at least, and they’d imagined… they’d imagined Eddie making it as a rock star, and buying any car he wanted, and how it would feel to speed down the highway, Len hanging out the window with the wind in his mane, and how they would be so famous that people just wouldn’t care. They wouldn’t care if his soulmate was another guy because he’d be the most amazing new heavy metal guitarist to hit the scene, and what was more metal than having music videos with a lion in them?

-

    Robin never wants to watch a movie high again. Or do anything else high again. No one told her being high would involve this much vomit.

    “I can’t believe people do this for fun.” She groans. 

    “People don’t do this for fun.” Steve argues back, sounding super confused. 

    “Well… no. Not the getting kidnapped part. I mean people like… when they choose to do this but not this, for fun. I need to lie down…”

    “Ohh. I mean, I dunno.” He says, and she can picture the look on his face, even though they’re in separate stalls so they can vom into separate toilets. “Like, everybody jokes about leather and handcuffs and shit, but I don’t know anyone who actually does it.”

    “The drugs, dingus, not the torture.” 

    Steve gags a little, and it doesn’t make her hurl in sympathy, so she goes ahead and tries lying down. 

    On a bathroom floor, which is gross, but like, she’s gonna want to shower and burn the uniform after this anyway. She might as well see if lying down makes her feel more stable.

    “The ceiling stopped spinning for me.” She reports, once she has her head down on the floor and her legs elevated above her heart. She’s not sure if that last thing actually does anything, but she’s doing it anyway. “Is it still spinning for you?”

    There’s a pause, where presumably Steve stares at the ceiling. 

    “Holy shit.”

    “You should be lying on your side.” Steve’s daemon says, peering under the stall door. 

    “Cut it out.” She giggles, contemplates calling him a perv about it just to be funny, and then giggles harder at the idea of saying it, but doesn’t actually say it.

    “I just think you should be lying on your side just in case. And try and drink some more water.”

    “Water made us throw up.”

    “Pretty sure wolfing down gross movie theater popcorn after not eating all day is what made you throw up.”

    “That and the drugs.” Steve says. She can’t see him nod, but she bets he does. “No, throwing up is good, ‘cause… But now we’re done. You think we puked it all up?”

    “Maybe. Ask me something. Interrogate me.”

    “Okay, interrogate you. Sure.” He laughs. “Um… when was the last time you… uh… peed your pants?”

    “Today.” She says. She’s not sure if it’s because she’s still totally drugged, or if she’s just not ashamed of it under the circumstances. She and Steve are not yet at a level of friendship where they can puke into the same toilet– not at the same time– but they share their biggest secret, so what’s this one more?

    “What?”

    “When the Russian doctor took out the bonesaw.”

    “Oh my god.” He laughs even harder. She kind of wishes they were, like… together-together, and not in separate stalls, but moving feels… difficult, and also she doesn’t want to be over in the same stall as his toilet.

    “Is everything okay in there?” Cara asks, ducking her head in from her position guarding the door and watching for Dustin. 

    “Yeah, your soulmate just peed her pants, that’s all.”

    “It was just a little bit, though.” She giggles. 

    “Yeah, it’s definitely still in her system.” Steve says, and Robin watches Zan hop under the door to his stall. She can kind of see him hop into Steve’s lap from where she is, if she does move, and she tries sitting back up.

    Which she can do without vomiting again, so that’s cool.

    “All right, my turn.” She says.

    “This is gonna be good.” Zan snorts.

    “Okay, hit me.”

    “Have you… ever been in love?”

    “Nope. I mean… I tried it, I tried to be.”

    “You what?” Zan asks.

    “I tried to be. I thought I could, like… try it. Like… practice love. I mean… you don’t get to just tell your heart hey, don’t fall in love with anyone until you find your soulmate, right? Everyone falls in love a couple times along the way.”

    “What do you mean you tried to be?”

    “What I just said! I tried ‘cause I wanted to know what it would be like, and it didn’t happen. I… liked Nancy. Nancy Wheeler?”

    “Oh my god. She’s such a priss.” Robin blurts out. Okay, maybe she’s a little drugged still, because she thinks she’d try not to come right out and say it.

    “Turns out, not really. Anyway, we like… went out and shit, but… I dunno, we just… we knew we were only killing time, you know? She just… wanted to practice going out with someone a little, I guess, and… I knew she couldn’t ever be my soulmate, so those feelings… I dunno. They just didn’t really happen. I mean, obviously they never happened for any other girls.”

    “Right, but boys?” She presses. “You never fell for a guy, or like… had a guy you hoped was your soulmate?”

    “I don’t think my soulmate is anyone in Hawkins. I mean… I always looked, to see if there was anyone else who… like, if a guy had a male daemon, or if I noticed a guy who, you know, his daemon never talked at school. I looked, you know? No one in particular, just… hoping I’d see another guy whose daemon just didn’t talk, but… never did.”

    “Right, but you’re allowed to have a crush anyway. I mean… I knew Tammy Thompson wasn’t my soulmate, but I still had a huge crush on her, which is the whole reason I hated you sophomore year.”

    “Wait, what?”

    “Because you were in Click’s class with me and Tammy Thompson and she was obsessed with you! You didn’t even look at her!”

    “I didn’t even look at girls!” Steve says, and there’s a shuffling as he scoots his way into her stall. “You were mad at me because I didn’t like your crush back?”

    “No, just– like… why you? I wanted her to look at me. But… she couldn’t pull her eyes away from you, and your stupid hair.”

    “Hey.” Zan says, a mild defense, but enough for Steve to stroke his ears. 

    “And I didn’t understand, because you would get bagel crumbs all over the floor–”

    “Everything bagels make a lot of crumbs.” Zan says. “That could happen to anybody.”

    “Yeah, and you used to, like… lick them off his backpack, which was gross.” She can’t help a watery laugh at that. “God, Steve, I bet your soulmate is the grossest boy. It’s exactly what I would have said you deserved, I was so… so mad knowing Tammy hoped it was her, and… and you didn’t even like her, and I would go home… and just scream into my pillow.”

    “Tammy Thompson… probably also has the grossest boy for a soulmate. You’re gonna do way better than her.”

    “Yeah, but I didn’t want to do way better than her. I liked her so much. I… I still kind of do.”

    “Yeah, but… she’s a total dud.”

    “She is not.”

    “She is a little.” Cara says, peering back in. “I mean she was usually nice, but…”

    “She wants to be, like, a singer.” Steve scoffs. “She wants to move to like, Nashville and shit.”

    “And she’s not good.” Zan adds. 

    “She has dreams.”

    “She can’t even hold a tune.”

    “I mean you of all people should know.” Zan adds. “As a fellow member of the genius ears club, you gotta know she’s bad.”

    “She’s practically tone-deaf.” Steve continues, and maybe that’s another club they’re all members of, actually. “Have you heard her? All the time.”

    Robin has no idea what song Steve is singing, at first, because he doesn’t seem to know the words and not knowing the tune is the crucial part of the Tammy Thompson impression. Which is totally exaggerated for unflattering comedic effect.

    “Shut up, she does not sound like that.”

    “She sounds exactly– that’s a great impersonation of her.”

    “She does not.” Robin laughs, and only feels a little disloyal, but… Tammy was a crush– she’s not her soulmate, and she wasn’t even her first love. She doesn’t have to be loyal to a girl who never once looked back at her.

    “You were looking at her through the eyes of love but you were not listening to her through the ears of reality.” Zan says.

    “You sound like a muppet.” Robin accuses, ignoring Zan entirely.

    “She sounds like a muppet. She sounds like a muppet giving birth.” Steve laughs. He launches back into what turns out to be Total Eclipse of the Heart, but bad.

    Zan joins in, but even with a goofy voice of his own, he can’t be actually bad– like, he is very much doing a muppet voice, but he’s perfectly in tune.

    Robin joins in, too, with her own muppet voice, and her own middling attempt at singing out of tune. It turns out when you have a musician’s ear, it’s not easy to be bad on purpose. 

    She wonders if Steve’s soulmate is also a musician, but she doesn’t keep hold of the thought when Dustin barges in on them.

-

    “And why all of this?” Murray asks, the only one in the van whose eyes don’t keep straying to the lights of the fair.

    “If I just turn off the keys, it’s like turning off a car.” Alexei explains, and even if the fair is a formidable distraction, he does at least keep enough attention on the matter at hand. His explanations have been clear and concise. “But then the car still works, does it not?”

    He reaches up to pat the ceiling of the van overhead, in illustration.

    “Yes.” Murray looks up towards the front. Turning off the keys, turning off the key… still leaves them with something anyone could come turn back on. The ignition is right there waiting, the engine is ready to turn.

    “And do you want the car to still work, or do you want it to explode?”

    “I want the car to explode.”

    “Good.” He taps the page of notes, giving Murray a little smile, too brief and then gone. “Then do this. Just make sure you are nowhere near it when it does. It’s not pretty. Turns people into dust.”

    Not pretty indeed. How awful, to know that… how awful to feel even in part responsible. Murray can’t think of a single person he would want to see turned to dust. When he thinks of the worst person alive, he still wouldn’t. Hell, someone he unequivocally believed the world would be better off without, he wouldn’t want to be the guy who had to watch it happen and wonder how much of the dusting was his fault.

    He nods, not sure what to say. 

    “And then…” A little of the light comes back into Alexei’s eyes. The hope. Murray smiles. 

    “It’s over.”

    And not just the key, it feels like… like everything they’re dreading ends with it. Like maybe then, there would be no obstacle…

    “And I become American citizen and join in the fun, yes?” Alexei nods towards the lights again, the sounds, smile a little wistful when he turns to take it all in again. There are other sources of fun, of course, in an entire year. It’s not as if he’ll be sitting around miserable just waiting for his first Fourth of July as a newly-minted American. 

    But why should he have to wait?

    They probably won’t be able to stick around long enough for the big finale, with the fireworks, might see a few… but he should get to see some of it. It’s not just the fireworks, after all, it’s the whole thing. The experience. Whatever ride has the shortest line, or… he doesn’t know. A balloon if he wants one? Hell, there must be something close to a cherry Slurpee somewhere around the place.

    Murray can give him that, at least. Maybe he doesn’t have much to offer as soulmates go, but he can damn well give him that.

    He claps a hand down on Alexei’s shoulder, drawing his attention back, the full focus of it suddenly on him again and he wants to live in it.

    “Who said you had to be an American to join the fun?” He asks, leaning in, and Alexei’s soft laugh is all the answer he needs. 

    “Yes.” Tolya whispers, leaping down from the back of the van. He rears up, hopping a couple of times on his back paws, before whirling around in a circle, impatient for Murray to get the van locked up. He scoops Pav in close with one big, soft paw, before letting him trot over to Alexei’s side, nudging at him eagerly. “No more waiting in car. You will buy me… I think… what do they have here?”

    “You don’t need anything.”

    “And why not? It is also my first time to go here.”

    “You’ve been to a carnival before.”

    He shrugs and gives another little hop. “But it was not like this, with rides. It was… street fair. And you did not want to do anything fun.”

    “That is not how I remember it, I remember I fed you a donut and you scared half the petting zoo and that’s why we left early. Not my fault.” Murray corrects. 

    “Well… it was not on purpose. I did not scare the goat on purpose. I only wanted to pet like everyone else, goat was stupid to mistake me for real dangerous predator.” He grumbles, and leans heavily into Murray’s leg a moment as they walk.

    He winds up buying more tickets than he honestly thinks they have time to use, just in case. His only options seem to be too many or too few, and if Alexei is interested in the games, he’ll be able to go through them faster than waiting in line for a few rides.

    And… even if they’re designed to be largely unwinnable, to offer just enough victories on the cheap prizes to keep people coming back, it’s a harmless enough diversion. Something a little more interesting than waiting in line while Murray gets food handled.

-

    “And… blend.” Dustin instructs, like he isn’t trying to leave the mall with two sweat and puke and pee and blood-drenched sailors.

    Well… mostly sweat and blood. There’s not that much puke on him, and he doesn’t think they’re actually drenched in pee just from being on the bathroom floor. Not from the women’s room. 

    Robin’s a little bit drenched in pee, he guesses. From when the bonesaw came out.

    Honestly Steve’s a little glad the Russians took his keys, he doesn’t want these uniforms anywhere near his upholstery.

    “Now we just have to get on the bus with the rest of these plebes, and home sweet home, here we come.” He murmurs, leading Steve and Robin through the crowd. 

    Robin’s daemon is a little bunny, which is cute. She wasn’t, while she was guarding the door, she wanted to be big for that, but right now, she and Zan match. Like… best friends. Like a friendship bracelet but instead of a bracelet it’s your soulmates being the same kind of animal, even if it’s only temporary.

    Steve wishes he was high enough to stay in that thought, instead of the thought he has to stay in, which is that he may have sold his other best friend out to the Russians a little bit.

    “Uh, Dustin?”

    “What?”

    “Yeah, we might not wanna go to your house.”

    “Why?”

    “Oh boy…” Zan whispers. 

    “Well, I might have told them your full name.” He admits. 

    “What is wrong with you?” Dustin hisses, as if the answer wasn’t super obvious.

    “Dude, I was drugged.” 

    “Dude, he was drugged.” Zan hisses right back, in perfect unison with Steve and a hell of a lot feistier.

    “So?”

    “So?”

    “So you resist. You tough it out. You tough it out like a man.”

    “Oh, yeah, it’s easy for you to say.” He frowns, but… it’s not like he’s going to go into the torture. For Dustin, this kind of thing is like… movies and shit. Action heroes who shrug shit off because it’s not real. Anything beyond a purple nurple and a good scare is more than he can genuinely conceive of and Steve doesn’t really want him getting it. But still.

    It’s Robin who spots the security guy and pulls them both back. And it’s Robin who comes up with the slide maneuver. Steve just feels lucky to be following her lead.

-

    Alexei doesn’t… love navigating the carnival without Murray at his side. Still, the excitement of getting to explore it all is hardly something he can pass up, and as long as he watches what other people do, he’ll be fine. The games aren’t difficult to figure out, he just has to see what the precise rules seem to be, how many tickets he’s expected to hand over, and then do what everyone else does.

    And… if he really runs into something he needs help with…

    He lifts Pav up onto his shoulder, helps him find his balance there. It’s a little awkward, but he’s not at all heavy. And it both saves him having to walk around all the feet in the crowd after the day he’s had, and means if he really has to whisper in Alexei’s ear, he can. With all the noise of the carnival, no one is likely to catch his voice here.

    He does wish now that he had cared about more than having songs translated, when he was younger. Pav could have taught him to get by in the language. But… then, later, there had come a time when he thought maybe it was just safer not to have learned, so… it is what it is now.

    And when it’s over, he’ll have time to learn. He can get help from Pav… from Murray and Tolya. Learning English can be his first hobby, in his new home in America.

    After a little moment’s deliberation, he goes with darts– it seems the easiest. Other games may be rigged, maybe not, but with the darts… he is supposed to pop them in the same color for a better prize, as best he can tell, so he needs to pick a color that has the most balloons which are more fully inflated. It won’t matter if the dart is sharper or duller as long as the surface of the balloon is stretched thin and the velocity is sufficient, and as for hitting his target, well… that’s simple enough. He will have to account for drag, and if a breeze starts up, he may have to account for that, too, but then it’s about letting the weight of the dart itself do the real work. He just has to give it the right start.

    He watches a couple of young men ahead of him– one worries too much about throwing hard, but he doesn’t get the arc right and he doesn’t aim for the fuller balloons, just looks at the color. The other understands both how to throw a dart, and that he can’t pop an underfull balloon, but he’s all over the place when it comes to color. Still, it gives him the information he does need– how many tickets he needs to give, the rules of the game, and how many chances he receives in exchange.

    Once he gets to the front, he sets Pav down at his feet, stroking under his chin just once, the way he likes, before straightening up to play the game. He’s already assessed his best bet, and the breeze is negligible. And, almost immediately, it seems like he has a gaggle of children watching, cheering him on. It’s… it’s nice. It’s more than nice. Everything is more than nice.

    He does not hesitate to choose the big plush cartoon bird when he wins. He just needs to find Murray. He spots him up ahead, getting food, Tolya standing up with his front paws on the little shelf of the stall.

    Alexei stops short immediately at the tug to his pants leg, before he can even call out, looking down to Pav. When Pav motions with his head, Alexei pivots to follow, even though it’s the wrong direction, weaving through the crowd and winding up back between a couple of tents.

    “Grigori.” Pav says, by way of explanation.

    “That’s not possible. Why would he look for me here?” Alexei turns to scan the crowd, though he turns back at Pav’s sharp, anxious hiss. 

    “Don’t look, and don’t let anyone see your face. Why would he look for you here? He’s… oh, shit.” He paces in a tight near-circle. “He’s here for the policeman. He knows who he is, that he has a family, and thinks he’ll be here, of course he wouldn’t look for you at the fair, but he would look for the man who took you. He might. Let me put it this way, he’s not here to have fun.”

    “I don’t know where he went, I don’t–”

    “No, and you can’t warn him. I’m going to go back to find Murray and Tolya– it’s… safe, to talk to them. You need to get to the van, and keep that thing up in front of your face, in case there are any others. They won’t be looking for you, and if I’m not with you, you could be anyone– they’ll think you’re someone without a daemon. Then… someone will bring you the keys, someone will find the others.”

    His heart clenches. Split up? He gets why– if he’s spotted, he’s a dead man, he can’t risk crossing paths with Grigori, who he knows will know his face. Someone else might not look twice at him, he’d be just a stranger carrying a plush toy. And without him, of course, no one would recognize Pav on his own. He’d be just a daemon who got separated from his person in the crowd…

    “Pav…”

    “Alexei, please. If you’ve ever trusted me in your life, trust me now. Go. Get to the van and wait for Murray.”

    “And for you?”

    “And for me.” He gives his leg a brief nuzzle. “I’ll be safe.”

    “Okay. But– I don’t want to wait for you a very long time, understand?”

    “I understand. Just– you be safe, too.”

-

    “Hey!” Tolya squawks, though by the time Murray looks down, he’s gone from irritated to pleased, when he sees it’s Pav tugging at his tail.

    Murray is… less pleased. The opposite of pleased. Alexei is nowhere to be seen. What could have happened to him? It was only a minute…

    “What happened?”

    “I sent Alexei to the van.” He says, and… Murray isn’t sure how he expected Pav’s voice to sound. But he thinks this is it. “Your policeman is in danger– the man who shot at us before, he’s here. He has a gun, too.”

    “Alexei–”

    “He never saw him. Probably he assumes Alexei is sitting in a cell somewhere now, and I don’t want him to learn any different.”

    “Okay, okay, keys…” Murray stops short, realizing he’s got a corn dog in each hand, and with a sigh, he bends to hold one down for Pav to take a bite. “Here. It’s hot.”

    He gives a sniff, and then takes as much of the thing in one bite as he can, and Murray feeds the remainder to Tolya– swallowed in a single bite as well, he’s just lucky he didn’t gulp the stick down too while he was at it…

    “I will go warn Jim.” Tolya promises, nosing gently at him as he digs his keys out. “We will come to the van.”

    “All right. Look for Jim and Bell, and if you don’t see them, Joyce. And… hell, I don’t know, if you see Jonathan before you see either of them, get him to send the younger kids out to the parking lot and have him help you look.” He nods. “Then get back to the van.”

    “I said I will, I will. Go– Murray…”

    “Tolya… you were right. I know you were right.”

    He nods. “Go to him.”

    Murray goes.

    Alexei is there, pressed against the side of the van with an enormous stuffed Woody Woodpecker in his arms. Pav runs ahead to reach him first, and Murray gets the van open, hands shaking. Hands the remaining corn dog over to Alexei once he’s inside.

    “Here. it’s… it’s hot.” He says lamely. “It’s– I thought you would be hungry, I should have stayed with you. Are you okay?”

    “I am.” He nods. 

    Alexei blows across the surface of the corn dog, just barely touches it to his lower lip to test if it’s too hot to eat or not, and Murray looks at the ferris wheel as hard as any man ever looked at anything. 

    “Thank you.” He says, mouth full, and Murray climbs into the van after him, leaves the door open for the others. “Tolya went to find him?”

    “He did. Yeah. He… he’ll be all right. He’ll be here soon. Uh, Alexei… look. I– I think… Probably I’m not what you spent your life dreaming about. But… also, I guess you always knew– I mean, you, you’re… young, and brilliant, and beautiful, and what do you get? Apparently I’m best represented by an animal that eats garbage and makes horrible noises at night. And… so, I want you to know, you don’t have to stay forever. Or feel like you owe me anything. Fate… threw us together. But you still get to choose. That’s…”

    “Murray… Then, you think…?”

    He nods, not meeting Alexei’s eye. He can’t.

    “First, my daemon does not eat garbage, or make horrible noises–”

    “That’s what foxes are known for–”

    “Also people shoot at us for fun.” Pav deadpans. 

    “Sure, that, too.”

    “That is not what foxes are known for. Foxes are known for being the most clever of all animals. When a person is compared to a fox it is for being smart, maybe for being tricky. Or for being sexy.”

    “Or crazy.” He adds, because he really… he really can’t let himself dwell on that, can’t hope. He has, in fact, been called crazy, but he’s in touch with objective reality.

    “And, for that matter, I will be the judge of whether any of your night noises are horrible. But don’t– don’t say you are not what I have dreamed of.”

    “How?” He laughs.

    “Because… I find you… I find you very difficult to ignore. And I find you so like the friend who has looked out for me my whole life. So often, he has not been free to speak to me. You and I have only known each other a short while. I have not had enough of either of you to have been certain. But I know… when he rushed to my defense, so did you. And sometimes when you look at me, it feels familiar. And I know… when you touch me, it feels unlike when anyone else has touched me. And… I don’t know how I could possibly be… I don’t know how I could possibly be majestic, like what you are used to. What you have waited for. I don’t feel strong like that, I have never considered myself handsome–”

    “Oh, you are handsome.”

    “Well, so are you.” Alexei laughs, too, but it isn’t a lost and broken sound when he does it. Just joy. “I hoped.”

    “Tolya knew. I told him he was crazy, at first– that he just wanted to find you too much. But…”

    “But?”

    “He’s usually right. About everything.”

    “Well… then it’s true we have one thing in common, at least.” He smiles. Murray wants to reach for him, and can’t quite. As much as he wants nothing more than to pull Alexei into his arms and kiss him, there’s a piece of him that cannot and will not relax until Tolya is back with them, too. He can’t enjoy himself that much, until he knows they’re all going to be safe.

-

    This is officially the most traumatized Eddie thinks he’s ever been in his life.

    Which he guesses is great news for his dad. Hey, guess what, old man? You’re no longer the most fucked up thing I’ve had to deal with.

    He manages the drive back home, goes straight past Wayne and throws himself down against Len the second he’s there.

    “... Eddie? What’s the matter?”

    “Uhh I think I might have seen a guy die tonight?”

    “What?” Len is suddenly alert, sniffing Eddie everywhere, nosing at him to move him so he can be completely checked over, as if there could be some physical wound left by the sight. He tugs him down and crouches over him and licks his chin and cheek with a tongue that could strip meat off of bone, but is always pretty gentle for Eddie. “What the fuck?”

   Eddie wishes he was being smooshed under the weight of him, but he guesses this is enough, Len crouching over him ready to stop anything from touching him.

    “Uhhh, I don’t, I don’t know, man. It was crazy.” He buries his hands in Len’s mane. “There was this huge guy with a gun, I mean I don’t know if he’s dead, but I saw him get mauled by a bear.”

    “You saw him what?”

    “Not a real bear. Chief Hopper’s bear.” Eddie shakes his head. Knows daemons don’t do that unless they don’t have a choice, that it’s an extraordinarily painful thing, that she only did because the guy was huge and he had a gun and he was probably going to use it to shoot someone at the Fourth of July fun fucking fair.

    It was still scary.

    Len snuggles him and doesn’t put quite enough weight on him, until Eddie remembers he has presents for him– and Len follows him out to the van instead of letting him go alone, which he’s more grateful for than he’d like to admit.

    He feeds him the cotton candy first.

    “It’s blue. ‘Cause it’s your favorite color.” He smiles, tearing a strip of fluff off and dropping it onto Len’s tongue.

    “You have some.” Len insists, and the sugar makes him feel a little better, even if he only has a tiny bit and feeds most of it to Len.

    “And I got you this.” He shows him the mirror, in its little cardboard frame, the picture of the car and all. He’s got enough space down at Len’s eye level where he can hang it without covering his posters.

    “The car we’re gonna buy when we’re famous?” Len laughs– more a soft whuff of air than a ‘laugh’, but Eddie knows what it is. 

    “That’s right, baby.”

    “... You got this for me?”

    “I won it for you. Just for you– there was an Iron Maiden one, and a Garfield one, and I didn’t get either of those, I got this one, ‘cause I thought it would be your favorite.”

    “You won it for me?” He puffs up a little, pleased at that, before his gaze returns to the mirror. “I love it.”

    “Good. I’m glad. I wanted you to have a really good sick present. How are you feeling?”

    “Better. Is my tongue blue now?”

    “You’ve got a mirror, you tell me.”

    Len opens his jaws wide, and then the angle is all wrong, and he has to close his mouth halfway to be able to actually look, but he sticks his tongue out, and when it is partly blue, he laughs– a real, out-loud laugh this time. And Eddie can’t help laughing with him. After the turn the night took, he thinks he needs to.

Chapter Text

    The mood in the van relaxes considerably when Tolya shows up with the others in tow– none of them look in the best shape, Tolya is clearly shaken, Jim has taken a few hits, Joyce is frazzled and shaking out a hand, and Bell…

    “What happened?” Murray asks. “No, no, not on my bed, with all that blood, what happened to you?”

    “I mauled a Russian.” She shrugs. 

    “Okay… okay, uh… fuck. Jim, you’re paying to get my upholstery cleaned. Bell, you can take the middle, we’ll move to the back.”

    “Why am I paying to clean your upholstery?”

    “Because it’s your daemon tracking the blood in!” He gestures wildly, before turning to Alexei. “We’re going to move into the back.”

    “Oh. O-okay.” He nods, a little anxious but perfectly willing to trade places. He kicks his shoes off before lying down, to avoid tracking anything from them onto the bed, and he startles when Tolya cuddles right up into his space, relaxing when he realizes that yes, of course they can touch. It’s confirmation, and his face lights up as he ruffles Tolya’s fur, rubbing at his cheeks and his neck, the two of them sharing a little laugh before collapsing down to the mattress. Alexei finds a space where the huge stuffed Woody Woodpecker will fit, but beyond that, he keeps all his attention on Tolya.

    Murray flops down next to him, as the van peels out, all of them rocking against each other a little, and Pav crawls up to settle on his chest. 

    “Sorry. About before.” Murray says, a little tentative in reaching up to rub at his ears. “I didn’t… You’re not so bad.”

    “You expected something better?”

    “In all honesty? No. But… there’s nothing you could have been that I wouldn’t have had something unflattering to say about. That’s just… where I’ve been, lately.”

    “And there’s nothing you could have had to say, that he wouldn’t have defended. I’m just you… and not just you.” His tail wags once, when Murray gets the right spot behind his ear. “I’m the part of you that he needed the most. Observant, careful, clever… a survivor type. None of that pesky self-loathing. And… now he’s got the rest of you. You’ll take care of him, right?”

    “I’ll try.”

    “And give him things? I never could do that.”

    “It’s not a daemon’s job to give a person things.”

    “Maybe not. But I’ve been looking out for him since… always. Since we were born, and I… I was me while he was barely beginning to be him. And I always wanted to give him things. Anything. He knows how to go without. It doesn’t have to be… what you give him, don’t worry about it not being enough, it will be. Just… give him something.”

    “I will. Tolya thinks a house. I don’t… I don’t know, if the same things he thinks of would make Alexei happy, but… he can’t be so far off, can he?”

    “He would like a house– privacy. We’ve never had that. A place that would be just the four of us…” Pav looks over to where Alexei is happily cuddling against Tolya. “Any place that could be just the four of us.”

    “That I can do. Whatever I find… I need space. Security. But… maybe it could be homier. I just… I want to make him happy.”

    “You will.”

    “I wish… I was… better, once.”

    “If it’s the age thing… I wouldn’t worry about that.”

    “The age thing. The… been-a-while-since-I’ve-taken-care-of-myself thing? The… the I-lost-my-career thing. Mostly that. I was somebody, before… maybe I wasn’t much, but I was enough. I wasn’t a madman living in a warehouse, with a shotgun next to the door, I was… better. I think… I used to be someone I’d have been proud to give him. Now? I don’t know anymore.”

    Pav noses at him, gentle. “Still… I’m glad we found you.”

-

    There’s not anything Steve can promise or do. There’s nowhere left that they can go. They’re trapped, taking cover and listening to the progress the guards are making searching for them, and he can’t help but feel responsible. He’s the oldest, after all. He’s done this shit– well, not this shit, but he’s done shit before, and he should have… well, he doesn’t know what, but he still feels like he should have done it. He should have figured it out and done it.

    He doesn’t know how far Zan will have to go, to find the person he belongs with, if something happens to him. Neither of them know how far, or what direction, that’s kind of the thing about not having found your soulmate yet, there’s someone out there that Zan could go to… but what if he can’t ever find him? What if he’s just alone?

    And even that is easier than thinking about the guards being able to catch him. He doesn’t know what they could do to him, in the absence of Steve’s soulmate, if any physical injury would stick. But they could keep him locked up, and that’s still unacceptable.

    He guesses if they kill him, then Zan will run– but he worries he won’t run this time, if they take him prisoner, not after seeing what happened to him the first time.

    He looks between Dustin and Robin, and wills them to just… run, run in different directions, just scatter and let Steve throw himself at whoever finds them. He tenses, readies himself as much as he thinks it’s possible to, and the whole world explodes around them.

-

    “I waited for you.” Tolya whispers, gently butting his head into Alexei. “I wanted to find you. As long as I can remember, I wanted to find you.”

    “I didn’t expect you to be so big.” Alexei laughs, petting at him. His fur is so soft. “I didn’t think you could be. Am I– am I what you thought I would be like?”

    “Braver.”

    “Me? Brave?”

    “Yes. To come all this way. And to go through everything that has happened to you all day! And then, when Jim grabs you, and I was very afraid…”

    “Well, so was I.”

    “But… you were okay after that. And… when we came here, and it was all new, you were brave, too. Of course, it is easier to be brave when something new is fun, like a carnival, but still I think it is brave.”

    “Maybe you’re right.” He allows. There had been a little trepidation, in navigating the carnival alone, unable to speak the language, but the joy had outweighed the fear.

    “I am always right.” His long tail gives a single elegant twitch, and Alexei laughs again, and rubs at his side a little more vigorously. 

    “That… you do get from me.”

    “You will be happy with us.” He wraps one arm around Alexei, big soft paw firm against his back. “I promise. You will want to stay… whatever our new home will be like. Because! You also like Woody Woodpecker, like me, we will watch together every week.”

    “Woody Woodpecker… you watch him every week?” Alexei tilts to look to where the plush is tucked alongside Murray’s pillows, bolstering them a little so that if the van were to brake hard, there would be more of a soft wall keeping them from injury. “Well… maybe you can cuddle with him, then. I don’t mind sharing him with you… if you share Murray with me.”

    “I will share– he is very nice to cuddle. And– Murray is a good cook sometimes! My favorite is when he makes chicken, and then the next day, chicken soup. And he gives some to me always.”

    “I like soup. I’m sure I will be very happy, and Pav also. To be with the both of you.”

    “Sometimes we visit Mama. She makes lamb sometimes, which I like, but Murray does not. He gives his to me and then he complains when we are alone.”

    “Murray’s mother? Is she the one who taught him to be a good cook?” He asks, fondness welling up in him at the idea. He doesn’t know if he’ll ever be able to speak to his mother again, or even get word to her… but he remembers her kitchen fondly. He remembers learning to bake from her. He remembers her soups.

    “No. Soup recipe yes, but mostly he goes from cookbooks, only, you have to put in more garlic than the book says.”

    “Well, I like garlic, too. And… does she– does she know, that we…?”

    “Yes. She will like you. She will just be happy that you are here. We visit sometimes, not so often. When we lived in the city, it was easier, now it is a long drive, and then she will say it is too late to drive back, stay here, and Murray will say if he is tired, he will pull off at a rest stop and there is a bed in the back, and she will say he is being ridiculous, guest room is right there… and then I will say I want to stay and drive in the morning and then we stay.”

    “I see.” He smiles, looking back over to where Murray and Pav are getting to know each other. They speak an easy blend of English and Russian, and he doesn’t eavesdrop on the parts he can understand– he thinks they both need the chance to get to know their missing piece a bit, for that to be a private thing. “He does not deny you very much, then, does he?”

    “He likes to pretend to be grumpy.” Tolya tugs Alexei into an even firmer hug, pushing his face into Alexei’s chest with a happy little chuff of air. “But usually when he says no, he means later it is yes.”

    “I will keep that in mind.”

    “We will make a home for you. And you’ll stay?”

    “We’ll stay.”

    “Good. And, we can all sleep in bed together like this, every night.” He raises his voice a little, to carry over to Pav and Murray.

    “In winter maybe.” Murray cuts in. 

    “We will not sleep in bed together every night?” Tolya lifts his head, looking faintly betrayed. 

    “There’s not enough room for all four of us in my bed– my real bed at home– not when it’s hot. Sharing a bed with just you in the summer is enough to roast a man alive… And– Alexei might… Alexei might want to have a bed of his own, to begin with. Most people get to know each other a little before they move into the same bed, you know. He gets to do that.”

    “And… when we do share a bed, we might prefer some privacy?” Alexei adds, twisting around again to look at him. He’s grateful, of course– the concession to his comfort, when he has so much to adjust to, allowing him his privacy and his personal space– his autonomy even as he may have to rely on Murray for a lot. But eventually… they will, won’t they? Murray will want to… to kiss him, to kiss his throat, to undress him? To… to have him, in all the ways he never dared dwell on? All the things he could start thinking about now…

    “Oh.” Tolya huffs, head dropping back down. “For sex.”

    “Some nights.” Alexei tries not to laugh. Tries not to think– just yet– about what that might mean. He’ll have time to think about it once they actually have privacy and the chance to act on it, when they aren’t worried for their lives and when the key has been destroyed.

    “Well… I wanted for him to have that, but I didn’t think it meant I would not sleep in the bed. All night?”

    “Those nights, you will sleep with Pav, you two can keep each other company. You can keep Woody Woodpecker in bed with you when I am with Murray, remember?” He gives him a good scritch from just behind one ear down along the neck, before carefully rolling himself onto his back. “And… when it’s cold enough, we can all share like this sometimes. Pav… you would share with Tolya some nights?”

    He pretends to need to think about it, but his ears swivel their way, and the wag of his tail is ‘friendly interest’ rather than agitation or aggression. Not quite like a dog’s tail wag, either, Alexei wouldn’t say, but he’s learned to read it. There’s something half-dog, half-cat about the way Pav’s tail expresses his feelings.

    “I don’t see why not.” He says at last, with an exaggerated yawn, the way he does when he feels playful. “He’s pretty nice to sleep next to.”

    “Good. Then that’s settled.” Alexei meets Murray’s eye. “Sometimes… it will just be us.”

    “Glad we got that ironed out.” Murray nods. “Sometimes it will just be us. Whenever… whenever you feel comfortable, with that.”

    “Whenever we feel comfortable.” He bridges the barely-there gap between their hands. Murray’s is soft, is warm but dry. There’s a comfort in the way it wraps around his own. Here, tucked between Murray and Tolya, Alexei feels secure. Yes, he’s lying on an old mattress in the rear of a fast-moving van instead of in a seat with a seatbelt, but… he feels safe anyway.

-

    “I don’t understand what happened to that car.” Robin says, ears still ringing. All of Steve’s weird child friends are here, and his ex girlfriend and her… soulmate? And… the little girl whose sole mission in life, as far as Robin can tell, is making her life miserable, and also a kid she doesn’t think she knows. And also they definitely have more daemons than people with them, although she guesses maybe one of the dogs is just a dog?

    “El has superpowers.” Dustin says. 

    “I’m sorry?” Maybe she got hit in the head harder than she thought. Maybe the drugs are still in her system. Maybe she got shot and this is a dying hallucination where a superpowered child saves them.

    “Superpowers.” Steve says, like it’s normal. Like Robin should just keep up. “She threw it with her mind.”

    “Who’s El?”

    “I’m sorry, who are you?” Miss Priss herself demands. Like she doesn’t obviously work here? Does she have a sign over her head that says ‘after being interrogated by Russians, I really need the third degree again right now’?

    Also, it kind of stings that she knows exactly who Nancy is and Nancy has to ask like she could be anybody. No ‘weren’t you friends with Barb Holland in middle school’ or ‘did we have English together freshman year’ or nothing.

    “I’m Robin. I work with Steve.”

    “She cracked the top secret code.” Dustin says. Definitely her favorite weird child.

    Not that it’s a super tight race, all things considered. 

    “Yeah, which is how we found out about the Russians.”

    “Wait, what Russians?”

    “The Russians!” Steve yells, a little, not that she blames him. 

    “Oh my god , what do you mean what Russians?” If Steve had yelled a little, Zan is basically shrieking. “What do you goddamn think we’ve been fucking dealing with for the past twenty four hours? I mean jesus christ, look at Steve! Do those look like normal ice cream-related injuries to you people?”

    “Didn’t you hear our code red?”

    “Uh, did we hear you squawking? Yes. Did we hear anything about Russians? That would be a no.” The sample policy abuser says, hand on hip, and how does she fit into any of this?

    “Erica.” One of Steve’s child friends hisses. “God, why are you even here?”

    “Because you and your friends decided to drag me into some reckless child endangerment shit?”

    “You didn’t have to come!”

    “Mom said–”

    “Do you always do what mom says?”

    “Yes! I’m the good child! You were supposed to watch me, not watch me almost get eaten!”

    “You cannot tell mom and dad about any of this. Ughhh.”

    “Hi, yeah, back to what’s important.” Dustin cuts into the sibling bickering. “We have a full-blown Red Dawn situation!”

    “And we don’t have Patrick Swayze bailing us out, either.” Cara, still a rabbit, stamps her foot.

    “Steve’s our Patrick Swayze.” Zan looks up at him. “Right?”

    “Uhh, depends, how bad did Swayze get his ass kicked in that movie? ‘Cause… I feel… the least Swayze I’ve ever felt?”

    “Sorry, is there a most Swayze you’ve ever felt?” Robin snorts. 

    “The Comeback Kid?” Cara guesses. Steve doesn’t exactly have Outsiders vibes.

    “I don’t know, god.” He groans. He’s about to say something else, when El, who apparently has car-flipping superpowers, hits the floor, crying out in pain.

-

    “All right, all right.” Murray takes a deep breath, squeezing Alexei’s hand gently, hugging Pav to his chest. Jim and Joyce’s kids are at the mall. “That’s not concerning at all.”

    “Give to me the walkie-talkie.” Tolya demands, hopping up to rest his front paws on the back of the seat. “Bell, please.”

    “What are you going to do with it? You don’t have hands.”

    “You have hands. You can try to find out what is happening.”

    “Yeah, pass us back the walkie.” Pav’s tail gives an agitated wag. “You can’t exactly ask for information on the problem children.”

    Joyce hands the walkie back to Bell, he guesses, because then Tolya is dropping it into his and Alexei’s hands. 

    “I don’t…”

    “Just hold the button.” Pav says, clearing his throat. “Situation report! Where are the intruders now?”

    Nothing. After a pause for anything else, Alexei presses the button for him again.

    “The threat on our end has been neutralized, what about the intruders? Situation back at base, report!”

    “Looks like we’ll be going in with or without the cavalry.” Murray pats Pav gently, before letting him go to curl up in Alexei’s arms. Tolya gives his fur a couple good licks to settle him. “Alexei… whatever happens, I– Obviously you won’t be going in. If I leave you my keys, you can drive these kids to safety once we can get them out to the van, maybe?”

    “Maybe. You would go in?”

    “The thing is… you, they’ll shoot on sight if they think you’ve been compromised–”

    “Best case scenario.” He nods. 

    “Me, I understand the language, I have your instructions for taking the key out, I’m pretty talented when it comes to bullshit artistry… and…”

    “It’s kids.” Another little nod. “And you can’t let something happen to you friends’ kids.”

    “Again, ‘friend’ is a strong word right now, but… anyone’s kids. I don’t like kids, but damned if I’m going to let them get hurt.” Murray sighs, bringing Alexei’s hand up to his lips. He presses a firm kiss to the back, rests his cheek against it. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to let you get hurt.”

    “If you go into the base… Pav should go with you. He knows the way, you won’t have to worry about getting turned around– and, he can help you avoid running into people. It might mean taking a few detours, hiding out while people pass, but…”

    “And Tolya with you. That’s a good plan– Pav won’t be recognized if he’s with a completely different person. Tolya… you and Alexei will keep each other safe, won’t you?”

    “I will.” He promises, rubbing his face against Alexei’s shoulder. “We will. You will not be long? You will hurry?”

    “Yeah.” He lets go of Alexei’s hand, so he can reach past him to rub at Tolya’s cheek. “We’ll be careful. In and out. As soon as we have the kids safe, I can… I can disable the key. Then I’m getting the hell out of that place before it can blow. I promise.”

    “We’ll come back.” Pav licks Alexei’s cheek, then turns to lick Tolya’s nose, which earns him about the most pleased face a snow leopard can make.

    Jim pulls into the mall parking lot, braking hard enough that they all slide forward a little, though the enormous Woody Woodpecker helps cushion them a little.