✓ | 1. subject thirteen [STRANGER THINGS]

two.

CHAPTER TWO:
MIKE'S

[ THE WEIRDO ON MAPLE STREET PART I ]

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The boys argued all the way back through the woods, and their heated discussions didn't cease for a moment once they reached their destination, either. They seemed to be a nice and tightly knit group of friends, yet kept mentioning someone else who they knew and seemed to be looking for.

THIRTEEN thought he caught his name around the third time he was mentioned — Will.

Their destination was a house on the corner of a street made of tall, wide houses and clean lawns with white picket fences. It was a place THIRTEEN found wonderful and, quite frankly, rather beautiful in the silver moonlight, a place he knew he would have delighted in spending the past few years. A railway sat behind the row of grand houses, and beyond that trees stretched out into the horizon.

         The stars felt like a dome that night, and maybe every night — this was only THIRTEEN's second night ever outside of the Lab, after all — and he felt like beyond the trees, the night's sky simply met with the earth and trapped the small town he and ELEVEN had found themselves in, in a type of gigantic snow globe.

He and ELEVEN and the three boys snuck through up a long driveway, through a garage, ducked under a doorway that lead to a flight of stone steps into a basement.

ELEVEN grabbed THIRTEEN's hand at the stop of the stairs, before all the lights had been switched on and it was truly dark, darker than the outside, darker then the woods, dark like a cell. Not even the layers of mud on his feet could shield his flesh from the ice cold stone floor, which was much like the flooring of his iron cell.

         He looked down at her in surprise, jumping a little at the sudden intrusion of her touch. Her hand, in his. Voluntarily. It was something he'd been trying to get her to do for three days now.

"ELEVEN?" he asked.

        She stared straight ahead, right into the dark, saying nothing.

        When he bent forward, leaning on his knees so they were eye to eye, she blanched at the sight of him, like she'd forgotten he was there. "ELEVEN," he said, forcing his voice to be warm, saying her name mostly for the purpose of stalling before he said anything else. He didn't really know what to say; he'd never spoken to a kid before, and never a little girl. Eventually, as a hand hesitantly squeezed her shoulder, noticing how her yellow shirt was absolutely drenched from the rain beneath his hand, he said, "It's okay. They can't get us."

          ELEVEN met his eyes and paused before she shook her head. "Not that," she said, with endearing exasperation. She nodded past his shoulders, toward the basement steps and the three boys fussing around and bickering at the bottom. "Trust them?"