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“I saw her. Here,” El reached into her pocket, fingers curling around the photo. One of them, a large man, uncrossed his arms, a movement so sudden that it made her tense.
“Uh-uh. Hand out of pocket,” he demanded. “Slow,”
El obeyed, slowly pulling the piece of paper from her pocket and hesitantly holding it out, only for it to be immediately snatched by the other man. “Give me that shit,” he hissed, glancing down at it and—pausing?
One of the women plucked it from his hand. “Is that Kali?”
“Kali?” El’s head tilted slightly in question.
“How’d you find us?” The lanky man took a step toward her. “Who else knows you’re here?”
“No one,” she said quickly. If she’d been thinking, she would’ve said that she had people who knew she was there, who would come looking for her, so they’d be more hesitant to hurt her.
“So, what then? You just—poof!—show up like magic with that picture?”
“Hey, stay calm, she’s just a kid,”
“A kid who could get us all killed!” He snapped, and she shrank, taking a step back. She didn’t like yelling. Yelling never meant anything good. He pulled out a switchblade, moving closer again. “If I have to ask again, Shirley, you’ll start losing things,”
“Starting with those pretty little locks of yours, yeah?” He lifted his hand to wave the blade in her face. She cringed, eyes darting from the weapon to his face to his hand and back to the weapon.
“Come on, Axe, put down the knife,”
“How did you find us?” He demanded.
“I—I saw her—”
“That’s not an answer,” he barked, grabbing her shoulder. El flinched, shrinking in on herself. Yelling, grabbing, weapons, threats, fists—
Her vision blurred, her breath starting to pick up.
He—the man—Axe—screamed. He let go of her. He dropped the knife. He rubbed his hands all over his body, scratching, trying to get—oh. There were little black things with long, spindly legs on his hand. Crawling all over his fingers, over his palm, around his wrist, up his arm, under his sleeve—
“You’re a terrible dancer, Axel,”
The voice was calm. Soothing. Threatening.
“I told you, stay out of my head!”
“So, we’re threatening little girls now, are we?” She walked down the steps, coming closer.
“She knows about you,” Axel hissed.
“She had this,” the woman with a bow in her hair handed the photo to El’s sister.
“She said she’s lookin’ for her sister. I think she’s a schizo or somethin’,” Axel bent down to grab his knife, only for it to fly from the concrete floor into Eleven’s hand.
“What is your name?” Her sister—Kali—asked, circling her.
“Ele—Jane,” she cursed herself inwardly for almost slipping up. Kali grabbed her wrist, making her tense and flinch ever so slightly. She rolled her sleeve down to reveal the tattoo on the inside of her wrist—the one that marked her as if she were livestock. 011.
El hesitantly rolled her sister’s sleeve to find a similar tattoo. 008.
Kali sucked in a sharp breath. “Holy shit,” she whispered. “Someone else made it out. I mean, I was only there for, like, a year or two, but—you—how long did—?”
“Long time,” El murmured, remembering the pain, remembering the loneliness, remembering the cold, just—just remembering. “Born there. Until…last year. Escaped,”
“How…how old are you?” The not-hair-bow woman asked.
El raised her tattooed wrist so that the woman could see the number, then said, “plus two,”
“You were there for twelve years?” Kali yelled, her body language screaming anger anger anger ANGER.
Eleven flinched, taking a step back and raising her arms to cover her head.
Yelling was bad.
Yelling meant she was bad.
Yelling meant punishment and isolation and pain and cold and needles and pain and pain and—
“Shit—hey, Jane, hey, it’s—it’s okay, you’re okay,” her sister’s voice lowered to a comforting, shaky, raspy whisper. “I’m—I’m not yelling at you, I’m not mad at you, okay? I—I promise, I promise, I’m not upset with you,”
She tried to listen, she tried to believe her, she—she did, she just—she couldn’t form a proper thought, and her vision was getting blurrier by the second. She stumbled backward, crashing into the nearest wall, her back pressed against it as she slid down to the floor. She reached desperately into her pocket for the inhaler that Hopper had insisted she carry everywhere with her after he’d learned that she had difficulty breathing. She—she wasn’t even having a hard time breathing yet, but she needed it—she—she needed it! She shook it, put the canister in front of her mouth, and pressed down, inhaling the puff of mist. After a second or two, she did it again, dropped it, and clutched her head in her hands, shaking.
“Shit,” someone cursed, and she could vaguely hear footsteps getting closer to her. “Hey, hey, kid, you’re okay, you’re okay, everything’s okay. Can you try and breathe with me?”
She tried—she swears she tried—
“No? That’s—that’s okay, that’s alright. Can you—can you tell me five things you can see?”
Her eyes darted around. “Th—the floor. M-my MDI. You’re h-hand, y-you’re—shoe?”
“Yeah, yeah, that’s good, that’s good. Can you name one more thing?”
She shook her head, letting out a small whimper and screwing her eyes shut.
“That’s—that’s okay, that’s okay. What about four things you can feel?”
“My hair. The—the wall, and—and the floor, a-and m-my chest—my chest hurts,”
“Okay, okay, you’re—you’re doing good, you’re doing great, alright? How about three things you can hear? Can you do that for me?”
“Your voice. My—my voice, and—and my heartbeat,”
“We’re almost done, okay? Two things you can smell?”
“The f-fire, and…c-cologne…?”
“And what’s one thing you can taste?”
“Th—the waffle I had last night,”
“Yeah, yeah, there we go. Breathe in, two, three, four. Hold, two, three, four. Out, two, three, four. Hold, two three four,”
She breathed in. Held. Breathed out. Held. In. Hold. Out. Hold.
In.
Hold.
Out.
Hold.
Her breathing started to steady, and she hesitantly opened one eye to see Axel crouched in front of her, not too close, but not too far, either.
“Hey,” he said gently. “Are you feeling better?”
She nodded. “Thank—thank you,” she whispered, her voice hoarse and her throat dry. Then, quieter somehow, “‘m sorry,”
“No, no, I—you don’t have anything to apologize for, okay? I’m—I’m sorry, for—for scaring you earlier. That…that wasn’t okay. I shouldn’t have done that,” he turned his head to look at Kali. “And Kal shouldn’t have raised her voice. She’s working on her anger, right, Kal?”
“I—I wasn’t angry. Well—I was,” her sister fiddled with her sleeve. “But—I wasn’t mad at you. I was mad at—at them. At him. For what they’ve done to me, to us—to…to you,”
She’d never had somebody angry…for her, rather than with her. The bad men—the men that worked for Papa—they never even batted an eye when Papa had used the shock collar on her, or chained her to the wall, or locked her in the isolation room, or beat her to unconsciousness. They just…stood there. Sometimes they’d look away.
Eleven decided that she liked Kali and her friends so, so, so much more than Papa and his men.