The age old story of two best friends falling in love...
... Only, one's a lab experiment with an entire Upside Down hunting her down, and the other won't leave her side, no matter how hard she tries.
steve harrington x fem oc / season 2 o...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
chapter thirty-seven ruby hopper
🖤
RUBY WAKES UP THE NEXT MORNING with a revived sense of purpose.
She wakes up, goes on a run, does a Pilates routine in the living room. Ruby has a quick shower, feeling comforted by the near-boiling water (a side-effect of being Flayed: an intense appreciation for a hot shower), then finds herself downstairs. She's dressed, her muscles warmed up for the day ahead. She finds herself flicking through her grandfather's brain-teaser books, doing a couple of puzzles. A fired-up body is only as ready as the brain, she thinks, the sort of thing her grandpa would tell her.
Here's the thing. Ruby needs to be ready for whatever is lurking in Hawkins' shadow. And she is ready this time — she's had six months of training, and whilst she expected to have more under her belt when she returned to this hellfire, the point still stands. Ruby's body is ready.
So. She eats her breakfast — a healthy one, porridge (slow-releasing energy) with fruit. She drinks her green tea, and almost likes it. (It's starting to taste less like grass, and not the fun kind you smoke.) She forces down the concoction of vitamins and medications her grandpa's lined up for her, all to keep her mind and body and powers in their prime. At the end, she eats a spoonful of sea moss, since some girl in her Pilates class told her it was good for the skin. It is, but Ruby retches as she swallows it. My body is a temple, she tells herself, before caving and drinking a coffee.
She wanders around her grandfather's house with her coffee in her hand. Last night, she found her mom's clothes from when she was in high school, a delicious collection of dresses from the sixties. Today, she's decided to test-drive a brown gingham mini dress, one that's certainly meant to be a pinafore dress, but Ruby thinks it's cute on it's own. She laces up her Converse, wishing she had a pair of Doc Martens with her. They'd be better suited for this supernatural climate... She can just stomp on Vecna if she had those.
Ruby finds her grandfather's study, and breaks in, getting an axe from the garage and slamming it into the lock. (She's reserving her powers for any Vecna-caused troubles, she needs to be creative.) Letting herself in, she flicks through old case files, old photographs. There's a whole folder dedicated to that Creel house, where the dad killed the entire family in the fifties. Ruby doesn't like true crime, so she puts that back.
She does, however, like to be nosey.
She switches on the radio in her grandpa's office, and after a minute of tweaking the station, realises it's tuned to pick up on police frequencies. Ruby sits and sips her morning coffee, trying to figure out what any of the jargon means. As she finishes her cup, and is about to leave to wash it in the sink, she hears a phrase she understands completely:
"It's a dead body. Paramedics are on their way."
Then, there's a knock at the door.
Ruby looks down, at the flurry of confidential government documents she's scattered around her grandfather's abandoned study. Worried, she turns off the radio, and she picks up the rug, placing it on top of all of the papers, closing the door behind her.
