✓ | 1. subject thirteen [STRANGER THINGS]

three.

CHAPTER THREE:
THE HEAD AND THE HEART

[ THE WEIRDO ON MAPLE STREET PART II ]

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There was an accident.

THIRTEEN didn't know much. It was something drilled into him ever since the Doctors found him and took him in, the ignorance toward simple things. He had known how to read and write and run and jump — and then they found him and they took it all away. THIRTEEN was useless now, just a shell of a person who didn't really know anything at all and was only good for the things he could do but not the things he could think.

ELEVEN was the opposite. For ELEVEN, this little girl who THIRTEEN didn't know at all and yet knew better than anybody else, it was all in her head, an entire universe wrapped up inside of her little skull, with worlds and galaxies that would pour out if someone could just crack her.

         That was what the Doctors did. Crack them. ELEVEN didn't say much, and THIRTEEN didn't know much, but the torture they had both gone through was clear in the scars and the nightmares and the unspoken conversations a simple glance could convey. THIRTEEN didn't know much, but he knew that the Doctors who had hurt him had hurt ELEVEN too, to get to the wonders she held inside of her mind. THIRTEEN didn't know much, but he knew about the accident.

         After all, without the accident, THIRTEEN wouldn't have found himself in the warm colour of Mike Wheeler's bedroom with his friend ELEVEN and Dustin and Lucas, and he certainly wouldn't have found himself listening to the group of friends argue until Mike cried out something that made them all shut up:

"She knows about Will!"

There was a beat of silence between the group of boys. ELEVEN glanced uneasily across at THIRTEEN from where she sat crossed-legged on Mike's bed to where THIRTEEN stood beside the window, his body angled toward the glass but his head tilted so he could observe the group of boys and their behaviour. He didn't react to the glance and they both just waited with baited breath for the reaction, any reaction.

"What do you mean she knows about Will?" Dustin asked after a second more of quiet.

With a slight sigh that was somewhat exasperated, Mike moved forward and grabbed the black and white picture from his low shelf, the picture ELEVEN had pointed out. "She pointed at him, at his picture. She knew he was missing, I could tell."

         The spy.

"You could tell?" Lucas repeated sceptically, his tone verging on sarcastic.