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the survivors
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. ✧ ・゜. +・o ✧
"Are you going to tell me what happened?" Jonathan asked. He and Alina were leaning against the trees while the other members of the group caught up with one another. He'd already gotten the gist of things—about what had gone down with Dart, and he'd decided to have a one-on-one conversation with the girl he lived with. Alina noticed that there were bags etched under his eyes, and the scraps of a mustache at his lips. He looked terrible, there was no other word for it. Alina wondered what had happened to him, if he'd succeeded in his mission to tell Barb's parents the truth.
"To what?" she asked now. The cool night air was making her feel a little better, but she was still unwell, sweat clinging to her forehead and pooling around her shirt. Jonathan looked at her like she was crazy.
"Your leg!" he said. "What, did you think I wouldn't notice? You've been limping around it this entire time, and I can see the blood on that bandage! Seriously, Alina, what happened?"
"Oh," said Alina. "Well, it's kind of a long story." She took a deep breath, hoping that Jonathan wouldn't be angry. "It kind of has to do with those... things in the lab right now. One of them kind of... bit me."
She trained her gaze on the still-dark lab now. This was the place where Eleven had lived for nearly all of her life, only being granted a week of freedom from that horrible place before her life had been cut short. This was her personal version of hell, the fire and skulls replaced by yellowed walls and headpieces, demons with men in lab coats who knew a little too much, who had no qualms with murdering children in order to get their special test subject back.
The lab was the place that her dad had brought Alina, too, where she'd met Eleven for the first time, where Brenner had told her she could work one day. It was the place where she and Will had to go—he more than she did—and where she'd been subjected to injections and headpieces and all sorts of other horror to see if her abilities had returned.
They had now, and that was what made Alina so afraid as she studied the darkened walls. If the lab went up-and-running again, the scientists miraculously managing to survive the attack of dozens of miniature Demogorgons—which she figured they would, given that she, an untrained thirteen-year-old and Steve, a goof with a bat and perfect hair, had managed to—they would figure it out eventually. Hear about the holes burnt into tree trunks and the way Alina's nose always seemed to bleed. What worried her was what they would do to her because of this. Would they take her? Stamp a number on her wrist? Shave her head? Would Alina Fairgrieves become Twelve, cursed to haunt the halls of Hawkins Lab, her abilities exploited?
