Fallout || Stranger Things [2]

twenty-eight || drones and drawings

Despite Tatum's determination during her stay in Kamchatka not to think about what her first night free might look like, little assumptions had always prodded at the back of her mind when she let her thoughts wander in her tiny cell.

With night after night spent on a mattress even college students would find unacceptable, she assumed the moment her body hit a real bed and pillow she would melt away into her first peaceful sleep since the summer before.

But her bunk was empty while the rest of the Soviet prison survivors slept with blankets tucked up to their necks and smiles on their faces.

Instead of finding solace in fresh bed sheets like the rest, Tatum sat curled up on the well-loved sofa in the lounge. She worked in her sketchpad under a single lamp light, all of the overhead lights in the bunk section long turned off with several hours to go until the unit would wake up. Smeared with graphite from a pencil she'd snagged from the nerve center, the side of her hand moved smoothly along the paper as the lines of her cell's floor were defined against the utterly detailed concrete block back wall.

It'd taken her an hour just to get the walls right and all it had done was lock her back in her mind as if she'd never left.

Tate blew a wisp of hair from her face as she flipped the sketchbook closed and plopped it onto the leather seat beside her. Her eyes flickered up to the temporary wall ahead of her, a crease defined every few inches to allow the walls to be folded up and transported anywhere.

Moveable. No true restriction.

Gray eyes moved further, trailing over the towering ceiling clouded in muted darkness. The few lights left on across the hangar in the nerve center pooled out but failed to give her a clear view.

Two exits. One guard each. Alarm panels by the door. Unlikely exit without approval.

Tatum's ears pulled back, picking up on a pair of shoes shuffling in her direction from the north hall. She eased back against the couch and forced her eyes  down to give her attention to her cuticles as if she'd been doing it for twenty minutes.

"Tate?" Billy's voice came out rough as he poked his head in the doorway of the lounge, eyes squinted with one hand to shield them and the other clinging on to a blanket.

"I'm in here," she replied, tipping her head toward him as she let her hands rest. She stretched back against the couch, breathing in a mock yawn that never truly made her tired. "What are you doing up?"

Billy crossed the lounge and settled on the couch beside her, draping the blanket across both of them. "I think it's the generators," he said with a groggy sigh as he pulled her legs across his lap. "I was fine for a while, but I think I was dreaming about the noise. Steve and I keep the apartment pretty quiet at night."

Tatum grinned as she rested an elbow on his shoulder and toyed with the hair at the nape of his neck.

Sleepy eyes tracked Tate's face as a smile rose. "What?"

"I know I've seen glimpses but actually hearing you say 'Steve and I' is really something else," she laughed. "I can't believe you live together."

Billy chuckled softly, leaning into her fingers as they ran through his hair. "I went from beating him up to carrying his drunk ass to bed when he passes out in the living room or my car on a weekly basis." He sighed. "I think it surprised me just as much as it did him."

"I hate what it took but I'm glad you're friends with them," she told him genuinely. "That's all I ever really wanted."

"Now you have it," he replied with a grin. "We'll all be fighting each other off to spend time with you."