Thanks so much to Croatoan Cameos for the amazing art, and to Queen Onion for BETAing the hell out of this fic...
Hope you enjoy!
When The Wall Fell
00:30
"Do you have to smoke in here?" Eleven asked, resting her head in her hands. She'd always had a delicate sense of smell, and tobacco made her nauseous.
"I don't have to." He shrugged. "But you know how rare it is to find moments to indulge my one vice…" Sixteen walked up to the window before taking his next drag, lifting the heavy wooden shutters. The smoke began to seep out, being replaced by cool evening air. She watched him slump back into a kitchen chair, rolling the lit paper between his fingers.
"Thanks." Eleven muttered, nodding at the gesture. She had still never quite managed to understand his smoking habit, or exactly how it had developed. All she knew was that it had been there since before The Contact, back before they knew each other and all lived in isolation. He'd been one of the more...troubled Ultras, and the cigarettes seemed to calm his nerves. She wondered if maybe the guards had used them as a way to help keep him in check. Either way, Papa certainly disapproved of it.
Their studio apartment was tiny, like a lot of the apartments in this part of Berlin. It consisted of just one room, a combined bedroom-plus-living-area, and a small bathroom attached. The furniture all looked about thirty years old, with dark wood and old floral-style patterns on the fabrics. The couch was soft and worn from decades of use, its light shade of green matching the faded wallpaper that coated three of the four walls (the other was exposed brickwork). Their flight had landed late, so their suitcases sat waiting to be unpacked on the bed.
"I'm telling you, we're here because something big is about to happen." He was gazing out the window, down at the empty street six stories below. "I have a feeling."
"You always have a feeling, Sixteen." She sighed. "Remember Krakow?" They had spent two days following around a government official that Sixteen was convinced was at the center of a Soviet plot against Solidarity, the burgeoning new democratic party in Poland. In the end they found out that he was really just engaged in petty corruption. Dark alleys and brown envelopes don't always mean a big conspiracy – sometimes it's just someone siphoning off parking fines.
"Yes, I remember Krakow, Elsa." He replied petulantly. "This is different, it's something in the air. It's metaphysical." He waved his hand through the smoky air. "I think we're about to witness the beginning of the end." He stubbed out his cigarette against the window ledge and flicked the butt down onto the street below. "And don't call me Sixteen."
"Sorry, Simone." Eleven had always found it easier to slip in and out of personas as their work required. Sixteen – and most of the other Ultras – liked to remain 'in character' the entire time they were on a mission, to avoid any slip ups. Whatever name and backstory Eleven was given, she had the advantage of imbuing the character with some of her own traits – the quiet demeanour and her slightly edgy, standoffish appearance meant she didn't usually have to do much talking.
"You don't find it strange?" He asked, raising an eyebrow. "That we've been sent here at the last minute, unaccompanied, with no clear instructions?" His short hair was dyed platinum blonde, a style that was apparently popular in Berlin at the moment, but his eyebrows were still their usual chestnut brown, making him look (in Eleven's opinion at least) completely ridiculous. She'd been able to leave her own hair alone – it was cropped short in a pixie cut, a sweep of brown hair trailing above her left eye.
"I suppose." She shrugged. "I prefer not to over-think things."
"That much we know, Elsa." Sixteen smirked.
"Shut up."
She had to admit it was clear that something odd was going on. Normally their missions were planned months in advance, and they would be accompanied by at least one namer (that was their term for the ordinary agents at the Energy department). The whole mission felt very last-minute, and the only instruction they had been given was to place a tap on a man named Egon Krenz, head of the Central Committee of East Germany.
Eleven unzipped her suitcase and rummaged around looking for her toothbrush. It was meticulously packed with clothes pressed and folded in neat piles, but they weren't her clothes, and she hadn't packed them. They were always handed everything they needed by a namer just before they boarded the plane. She could see long skirts and turtleneck jumpers, lots of shades of dark gray and brown. It seemed Elsa had been given a very particular style.
She spat and rinsed her mouth in the small sink in the corner, before crawling under the bed sheets. She had slept on the couch in Krakow, so this time the bed was all hers. A black pager was sat on the bedside table ominously. When it went off they would know it was time to find a payphone and call Hawkins.
Sixteen was still sat by the window, and he'd turned on the TV to watch CNN with the volume down low. They were staying in the American quarter of the city, so fortunately they had access to Western media. The lead story was the demonstrations in East Berlin, where a group of protesters had gathered in Alexanderplatz for the third night in a row. They were holding signs and chanting 'Wir woollen raus' ('We want out'). Some were lifting up photographs of family members who had been trapped the other side of the wall for decades.
Sixteen turned and gave her a knowing smirk, conveying those words again with just his smile.
It's the beginning of the end.
She reached over and flicked off the lights.
06:30
Eleven dreamt that night.
That might seem mundane, except for the fact that in the entire span of her life, Eleven had never dreamt before. She knew what dreams were, or at least she had a rough idea from the others discussing theirs over the years (an activity she had never understood the appeal of), but until now she had never experienced one of her own. She assumed that because of some strange working of her mind she simply didn't have them. It wouldn't even be in the top five strange things about her.
Sometimes she was glad of it. The others would often talk about frightening visions of gunfire or of Papa's disapproving stare. Strangely, there was one dream that a few of them had shared – an image of some terrifying, gangly, faceless monster. Anyone who dreamt of 'The Beast' - as they called it - seemed to wake up pale and jumpy, often being on edge for days afterwards.
Eleven's first dream was none of those things. It was a strange feeling; she knew dreams were visions, but she wasn't expecting them to be as full of sounds and smells as hers was. She wondered if all dreams were as unsettling as this. It was somehow realistic but grainy and loosely defined at the same time; like staring at the smashed fragments of a stained glass window and trying to piece together the whole.
She could remember clearly that she was running – barefoot – through long grass. It was slick and wet between her toes. The wall around the lab in Hawkins was on one side of her, towering yet familiar, with a wide meadow on the other side. Then, slowly, barbed wire began to emerge from the ground. Concrete followed, nudging its way through the dirt, a wall beginning to block off the meadow. All the while she kept running. Soon it loomed even taller than the first wall, and she was moving through a corridor in the gap between them. Graffiti began to appear on it, scrawled words in German that she was running too quickly to read. Was it the Berlin Wall? At the top it was crumbling, and she was dodging the chunks of falling rock. It began to close in on her, squeezing out the space as she kept sprinting through the long grass. There was barely enough room for her body between the banks of concrete. It was suffocating. Then...there was a momentary blackness.
When her eyes opened again, the menacing concrete walls had become an ordinary corridor, with a roof, and rows of white doors on each side. The grass was now a dark brown carpet, soft and warm. It was a blur at this point, with no sense of time or space – she wasn't sure which fragment of the dream belonged where – but she remembered hearing laughter from behind the doors, and a voice. It sounded like a boy. He was happy. There was a thick smell in the air, like someone was cooking something rich and salty.
It was at that point that she had woken up with a jolt. She was back in the apartment. It was dawn, the first glimpses of weak light were poking through the shutters and she could hear rain pattering against the street outside. She went to the sink and splashed water on her face, partly to cool off and partly to double check that she was fully awake. Sixteen was still asleep on the couch. They had work to do, and unsurprisingly the idea of going back to bed didn't appeal, so she decided to slip out. She left the reconnaissance dossier on the coffee table in front of the couch, hoping Sixteen would get the hint and start reading when he woke.
Strangely, she had never been to Berlin before. Krakow, St. Petersburg, and Moscow twice, but never Berlin.
Her first impression wasn't good. She meandered through town until she reached Friedrichstrasse, trying to get a feel for the surroundings and scope out their most likely crossing point into East Berlin – the main gate known as Checkpoint C, or Charlie. It was the only place that foreign vehicles could cross through the wall (assuming they had somehow obtained a permit), so it made the most sense. They would have to slip through in the back of someone's car.
The streets were dirty and the buildings looked a little run down, but the place was buzzing with energy. It was that horrible suffocating feeling of being in a crowd, the strange weaving and pulsing of people moving around each other that Eleven had never managed to get used to.
To be fair, she had hated every city she had been in. As strange as it sounded, after each brief trip she was often relieved to step out of the jeep and find herself back in Hawkins, back in the comfort of her dorm.
She leaned against a shop wall and watched the gate for a while, slipping her hands into the deep pockets of her charcoal trench coat. A spy in a trench coat. Obviously the namers who had packed her bag had a sense of humor.
The wall itself was less impressive than it had been in her dream. It was tall, sure, but not drastically taller than the one around the compound back home in Indiana. There was certainly a lot of graffiti, with names, pictures and illegible scrawls covering almost every inch of concrete. You could tell it had been erected in a rush – it was still possible to see the dividing lines between the concrete slabs that made up the barrier.
The two guards on the American side obviously wouldn't be an issue, given their military papers, but Eleven couldn't quite tell how many Soviets were on the other side. She counted at least four when she had brief glimpses through the checkpoint. Only two vehicles were let through in the hour or so she was there, and both looked like diplomatic cars, smart and painted black, with tinted windows. Up to eight guards she could probably handle, any more than that might prove difficult.
She moved aside to allow a woman with a stroller past her on the sidewalk. The young mother was trying to carry bags of shopping, quieten her child and re-apply her bright red lipstick all at the same time. Inevitably it seemed none were going well.
She seemed completely oblivious, Eleven thought. Papa was right, as usual – there was no way she could ever fit in with these people. From her limited observations, normals only seemed to care about eating, drinking, and having children.
A sideways glance from a guard broke her train of thought, and she realised she'd been stood in the same spot for almost two hours. She turned and slipped into a side street, blending back into the natural hubbub of West Berlin.
12.30
Her hunger crept up on her suddenly, a violent reminder that she'd forgotten to eat breakfast. She decided to find somewhere to grab a quick bite before heading to the flat, hoping that Sixteen would have finished studying the dossier on Krenz by the time she got back.
The best she could find was a small, old fashioned looking German deli near Potsdamer Platz. It was tiny, with just four or five wooden tables, and it smelt strongly of salty meat and something vinegary Eleven didn't recognise. She joined the short line for food.
Irritatingly, she found her mind wandering again, this time back to what Sixteen had said last night. Was this really the end of the war? A war she had spent her entire life trying to win? She felt strangely empty inside at the thought.
"Kann ich...das haben bitte?" She tried to point at a ham sandwich. She was fluent in Russian, but her German didn't go far beyond basic pleasantries. "Und…das." She pointed to something else behind the counter that had caught her eye instantly – a square waffle covered in a dusting of icing sugar. The stern-looking brunette nodded glumly and began retrieving the order.
"Drei Mark sechsteen." The woman held out a hand for the money, and Eleven instantly realised she'd forgotten her Deutschemarks back at the apartment. She'd seen the money sitting in a plastic wallet in the back of her suitcase this morning and had still somehow forgotten to grab it.
She checked her coat pockets again and then hesitated, trying to remember how to apologise in German. "Es tut mir leid…" She began.
"Here, let me." She heard a voice behind her and turned round to see a boy holding out a banknote. She began to shake her head but he stepped past her and handed it to the Fraulein behind the counter, who just shrugged and pocketed it. She opened her mouth to say something but he was quicker again.
"You're not from here, are you?" He asked in an American accent. He was quite tall, about a foot taller than her at least, and was wearing a navy bomber jacket and a black beanie. There were just a few strands of messy black hair poking out from under the hat.
"I'm from New York." She said simply. Their identities always involved big cities, and 'Elsa' was no different. The pack Eleven had studied on the flight over said she was from lower Brooklyn. She watched as the boy pointed to something on the menu board.
"That's cool." He handed the miserable woman another note and turned to face her. "Better than being from suburban Indiana." He laughed.
She just nodded. She should be walking away. The protocol was crystal clear here: keep interactions with normals as brief as possible, less than two minutes at all costs. She could picture Papa's stern yet gentle explanation...
You're not equipped for long conversations with ordinary people. Your training has required…an unusual upbringing. Spending too much time with the public will endanger the mission. It will endanger you, Eleven. All we want is to keep you safe...
"Um...do you need any money, to get a taxi or something?" He asked, leaning against the counter. There was something awkward about him. His unsettlingly large eyes were staring at her. He seemed impossibly familiar in some way she couldn't put her finger on. Thirty seconds gone.
"No, no I'm fine." She said quickly, glancing at the door. She had to get away from this guy. "Thanks." She turned for the exit, letting out a relieved breath.
"Wait!" She heard his voice behind her and she braced herself, spinning around. She fixed him with her coldest stare.
"Listen-" She began.
"You forgot your sandwich." He said simply, the faintest hint of an amused smile on his face. She stared gormlessly at the brown paper bag in his outstretched hand. One minute.
"Are you...okay? You seem a little lost..." She snapped out of her momentary trance and looked up at him. She could tell he was genuinely concerned – his eyes were ridiculously, laughably emotive. Strangely, that was something the other numbers often said about her: her eyes worked twice as hard to make up for her quiet mouth. "Um, not to be rude or anything..." He added.
"Oh, sorry." She took the bag from his still-outstretched arm. "I have been a little...distracted." Ninety seconds.
"Probably jetlag. Did you just arrive?" She nodded, and he smiled warmly at her. "You should take it easy. Come sit and eat with us," his eyes were almost pleading with her. "I'll even throw in some travel advice from a local..." He gestured towards a table in the corner by the window, where another boy was sat working his way through a huge pile of fried potatoes. He had curly hair, with a red and white baseball cap perched on the top like a bird on a straw nest.
"My name's Michael by the way. You can call me Mike though, everyone does."
The two minutes were up.
He began to walk to his table, and she found her legs following him. She felt strangely out of control around him, like her brain was clouded in fog.
"Ok, first tip when you visit Berlin: if you don't want to have to pay for stuff, visit the communist side." He laughed. "Sorry, bad joke I know. I can't help myself sometimes."
This boy wouldn't stop talking. Were all normals this talkative? Eleven didn't think so; she'd had a few brief conversations with hotel staff or waiters before and they usually seemed just as keen to get out of it as she was.
"This is Dustin." He said pointing at the boy shovelling carbohydrates in his mouth at an absurd speed. Dustin looked up and gave her a wide smile, his eyes scrunching up at the effort. "We both go to Humboldt University here." There were papers spread on the table and a satchel of books propped up against one of the chairs.
"So, you never told me your name." Mike said, sitting down. She copied him, taking a chair by the window. Three minutes. What was she doing?
"Ele-" She quickly caught herself. "Elsa." That had never happened to her before.
"That's nice." Mike said simply. "I should have warned you, don't expect much conversation from Dustin..." Mike pointed at his friend. "When there's food in front of him it's like we all just disappear..."
"Ey!" Dustin complained with a full mouth. "But yeah, talk amongst yourselves." He grinned skewering another potato with his fork.
Eleven couldn't help letting out a giggle. For some reason, that seemed to make Mike give her an affectionate smile, holding her gaze.
"You're on holiday here?" Dustin asked between mouthfuls.
She nodded. There was a brief silence after that and she realised they probably expected her to say something more, to carry on the conversation. With the other Ultras she would have been able to, but this felt...different. She noticed her hands were clasped anxiously against the table.
"I like your face." She blurted out earnestly, looking at Mike.
It was true, she did. He had warm, inviting brown eyes and a cute nose dotted with freckles. She heard a coughing sound and turned to see Dustin choking on his food.
"I'm okay, I'm okay..." He mumbled. Mike's face meanwhile was frozen in shock, mouth hanging slightly agape. Clearly she had said the wrong thing.
"T-thanks..." Mike stuttered eventually. His face had turned a deep shade of red. "I...um, like your face too." He said with a nervous laugh.
"Jesus." Dustin said. He had successfully swallowed and was now watching the two of them with his arms folded, shaking his head. "This is like blind dating for the socially inept. Want me to clear the table so you two can bone?"
"Shut up." Mike said, laughing. Eleven kept silent, looking down at her uneaten sandwich. If she didn't speak she couldn't say anything else stupid.
"Hey..." Mike said, the tone of his voice getting her to look up. "I thought it was nice." Something about the way he smiled washed away her anxiety. She'd lost count of the time.
She took a bite from her sandwich to avoid filling the momentary silence with another social catastrophe.
That was when she saw it. Her eyes wandered to the brown satchel stuffed with books that was lying on the floor. Poking out of the top was one of the few books she actually recognized.
The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles. She felt a hard lump forming in her throat.
"You're...Communists?" Her words were almost whispered. She edged her chair back from the table. How could people who seemed so nice turn out to be evil?
Mike followed her gaze to the book and laughed. "No, we're politics students." He lifted the manifesto from the bag. "It's for an assignment."
Eleven nodded slowly, not taking her eyes off the book.
"Are you really that terrified of commies?" Mike raised an eyebrow. "I mean they're only people..."
"Evil." She said firmly, her heart rate still high. "They want to kill us – nuclear war and pogroms and gulags and-" She realised she was being incoherent, her voice getting high pitched. She felt like her conversational ability had lapsed back to when she was twelve and could barely string a sentence together.
"Hey, hey." Mike reached across the table and grasped her arm reassuringly. "Sorry, you're right, I'm sorry." She could see Dustin had stopped eating and was giving her a strange look. This was what Papa was talking about – she could tell they were beginning to realise something was different about her. She was putting the mission at risk.
"I did think about it for a while. Communism, I mean." Mike continued, scratching his head over his beanie. "I saw my dad working a job he fucking hated his whole life, and I saw how our government lied to us all the time, and I just thought hey, maybe it's all lies and the Soviets have it right." He took a sip from his drink. "But any country that has to keep its citizens walled in must be doing something wrong."
Eleven nodded, feeling herself calm down a little, though she still couldn't understand how Americans could even contemplate communism. Maybe they hadn't been shown what she had, and didn't know the true horror of what they were up against, what she had spent her life fighting.
One thing he said stuck in her mind. "Why do you say the government lies? Government protects us."
Mike smiled. "American propaganda has really done a number on you, hasn't it?" He laughed warmly. "The government is mostly good, sure, but they do lie."
He seemed to pause for a second before continuing. "You're probably going to think I'm some kind of weird conspiracy theorist when I tell you this, but fuck it. Near where I - where we grew up" He nodded at Dustin, "there was this building owned by the Department of Energy. One night when I was about thirteen the entire town saw this huge power surge and we felt this...this earthquake almost. No one knew what it was, but Dustin noticed that our compasses were all thrown out. We followed them and it took us to this weird laboratory place. The official story was that there was some fault with the power grid, but we're sure they were testing some crazy secret weapon in that building, like an Electro Magnetic Pulse Bomb or something. Pretty messed up."
Eleven nodded again slowly, the pieces falling into place delicately, quickly. She didn't really need to ask the question, but she asked it anyway. "Where are you from? In Indiana..."
Mike shrugged his shoulders slightly. "A small town you won't have heard of. It's called Hawkins."
The odds seemed so tiny, so remote that it was ridiculous. She knew exactly the night they were referring to.
"That's it, Eleven. Be brave." She stepped off the platform and began to be lowered into the tank. The water was warm, body temperature. She was almost up to her neck when the heavy helmet came over her head. "Don't stop this time, no matter what." Papa's eyes staring through her were the last thing she saw before she was submerged in darkness.
She opened her eyes and the helmet was gone, the tank was gone, Papa was gone. It was just a never ending blackness. The floor was wet. She took a step forward.
Suddenly, she saw a man in the distance. He was wearing a heavy green coat. Above his lip was a thick gray moustache. It was the man from the photographs, the one she was looking for. She walked towards him.
As she took a step the ground seemed to shake. She was frightened. The water beneath her feet was icy cold, not like the warm salt water in the tank. The man was talking on a large phone, but she was too far away to make out the words.
She stepped closer again and this time the ground shook violently, and there was a high pitched noise, a squeal coming from the air all around her. She remembered Papa's words. Be brave. She kept going. She reached her arm out slowly, and she touched him. There was a sudden, bright flash of light.
She had woken up four hours later, with the lab in a state of chaos. There had been some...complications, the extent of which she was never fully told. That was the last time they ever attempted long-distance connections. She remembered the lab had come under more scrutiny from 'Washington' after that, which seemed to annoy Papa. It was the first time she remembered clearly realizing that there were people even more powerful than him in the world.
The next day, she had been introduced to the other Ultras. From then on, they began to be taught Russian, and began to have what Papa called their 'education sessions' about the war, about America and the eternal struggle between communism and freedom. She still shuddered at the hours of footage she'd been forced to watch: reels of gaunt, hollow-eyed children starving in the gulags, billowing mushroom clouds and despondent American prisoners being tortured. She had cried uncontrollably and fought each week, until they had been forced to hold her eyelids open with tape to make her watch.
"Are you okay?" She looked up to see Mike staring at her, the concerned look back in his eyes.
She just nodded, offering him a weak smile as proof.
"Look, if you're here on your own, you can come hang out with us this evening, if you want? We're having a few people over, you're welcome to join, right?" He nudged Dustin, who nodded in agreement. "Here, give me your hand."
She looked at him confused, but for some reason she followed the instructions again. She was careful to hold out the hand that didn't have her tattoo. He took a pen and began scribbling on her wrist. She bit her lip to avoid giggling at the tickling sensation, but she saw Mike notice and smirk at her.
"Our address is 132 Hoffstadt. Apartment 6B." He released her hand and she examined the black writing, running her finger of the words.
A waitress came over and placed a cast iron bowl in front of Mike. It was filled with some kind of cheesy pasta, with herbs scattered on top. The smell was strangely familiar.
"It's kasspatzle." Mike said, and then he scooped up a forkful and held it out to her. "It's so good, trust me. German food sucks, it's the only thing I miss about Indiana, but this is heaven."
She wrapped her lips around the fork. Instantly she recognised it – the rich, smoky taste – it was the smell from her dream, in the brown corridor.
"I should go."
18:30
It was late afternoon when the pager finally went off. It was strange – on the phone Papa had sounded almost...panicked. They were told to find Egon Krenz right away, and intercept all communications.
Eleven had spent the past few hours mostly in silence, her mind still whirring over the thought of Mike and Dustin living their normal lives just a few miles from her and the others in the lab. It was strangely exhilarating. She clenched the sleeve of her turtleneck sweater between her fingers, making sure to keep his writing covered. Sixteen had spent the afternoon glued to the TV, as the media speculation about the protests in East Berlin kept mounting. There were rumors that the protestors planned to storm the wall at midnight tonight.
They spoke to the lieutenant on the American side of Checkpoint Charlie, who found them a ride in a junior British diplomat's car. They were to hide in the foot-wells of the back seats, covered by some moth-eaten blankets and a couple of empty suitcases. The man looked worryingly nervous. He kept dabbing sweat from his brow and talking too quickly. She was mentally ready to have to come out fighting if they were caught.
Surprisingly, they slipped through without a problem. The car drove on for a few blocks away from the checkpoint, the two of them holding their cramped position in the back. Eventually it came to a stop in a quiet side street, and they slipped out into the night.
On the surface, the differences between East and West Berlin seemed slight. There were fewer coffee shops and restaurants, and fewer adverts pinned up on lampposts and in shop windows. The buildings looked slightly more rundown, but it didn't feel like stepping into another world the way it had when she visited Moscow.
The streets were eerily quiet. Eleven figured people were either at the protests in Alexanderplatz or were locked up safely inside, trying to avoid them. They made their way through the empty roads towards the Politburo. Sixteen had memorised the map of the entire area this morning – his brain worked in strange ways.
"Tonight's the night then." Sixteen said, his breath steaming up in the chilly air. "What are you going to do when it's all over and we're free?"
Eleven shrugged. Papa always told them once they won the war they would tell the world about the Ultra program, and the sacrifices they had made for their country. They would have the choice to either carry on living together at the lab or to go free, whichever they preferred.
"Well, I want to buy a farm." Sixteen said with a smile. "Somewhere out west where it's warmer. Find a wife, have a couple of kids..."
"Who would marry you?" Eleven asked seriously. "We grew up in a lab. We've seen things. You know we're not like the normals."
Sixteen snorted. "I'll be a war hero, Elsa. There will be women queuing down the street."
"Actually..." He snorted, continuing. "I wonder if Papa will be annoyed that after all he's gone through the war isn't going to be won by his special agents. It's going to be won by the ordinary people of Berlin..."
Making their way inside the Politburo was easy enough, with Eleven sending the two armed guards backwards into the wall, hard enough to knock them unconscious but not hard enough to kill. She then moved them back into their seats and positioned them to look like they'd fallen asleep on the job.
Finding their mark, Egon Krenz, was harder. The building was a huge, redbrick affair, and without signs or a map to follow all they could do was sweep rooms, remembering his picture from the dossier. He had mottled gray and black hair, swept back to reveal a long forehead, a weak chin with a hint of an under bite, and surprisingly unthreatening brown eyes for a man guilty of war crimes.
Going undetected was going to be impossible. The hallways were teeming with staff, police and politicians, and without knowing the layout of the building there was no way they could take a quiet route. It was beginning to dawn on her that this mission was a lot more dangerous than Papa had made it seem. They had been sent into the bear's den without so much as a map.
They worked their way through the building, walking with purpose and trying to avoid making eye contact with the countless men in suits that walked past them. As they went up through the floors, the building became quieter and the search was more promising; the offices were getting larger and the furniture more impressive.
"Wo gehst du?" They were halted by the gravelly voice of a guard on the fifth floor. He was overweight, and sat heavily in a plastic chair that didn't look suitable for holding someone even half his mass. They both hesitated to reply, and the guard's hand moved towards the radio on his belt.
There was a loud thump as his head made contact with the wall behind him, the radio clattering to the ground. His body slumped forward again in the chair, arms hanging limply downwards. There was a gruesome symmetry as drops of blood trickled down the white wall behind his head, while Sixteen used the back of a shirt sleeve to wipe a drop of blood from his own nose.
"Let's get a move on. It won't be long now before they realize something's wrong." He said, setting off down the corridor. Eleven nodded, but she paused for a moment to look at the guard. Except it wasn't just a guard, she recognised the badge on his shirt – he was Stasi, secret police. She picked up the fallen radio before chasing after.
When they finally found the office bearing the name Egon Krenz over the door, it was empty. They went to work quickly, Sixteen unscrewing the case of the phone on his desk and fitting a small bugging device while she watched the door. It would send all calls through Hawkins before they reached their destination.
Then, as silently as they had come, they ghosted back out into the hallway. As they reached the stairs again they heard two angry voices echoing up towards them. She began to panic but Sixteen shot her a glance and put his finger to his lips.
"Not about us." He said simply. His German was significantly better than her own. They began to descend towards the voices, Eleven clutching her hand around the stolen radio in her coat pocket. As they passed them on the stairs, she recognised the face of Egon Krenz instantly. He was dejected looking, with a pale look and a resigned smile on his face. The man next to him was yelling something into his ear that she didn't understand. He gave her a strange look as they passed, but she kept staring forward.
They took another few steps before she turned to see Sixteen's face, wide-eyed and a wearing a huge grin. "You heard that right? Please tell me you heard that..." He whispered, stopping to lean against the banister. She just shook her head.
"Krenz has given the order." He shook his head in disbelief, his ludicrous brown eyebrows rising on his forehead. "The guards on the wall are forbidden from using force against the protestors. They'll instruct them to open the gates just before midnight."
She gasped, before grinning back at him. He had been right. This was it. "You'd better start learning how to farm..."
What was she going to do next?
Before she could even begin to grapple with this existential question, they heard a door open somewhere above them and the sound of jackboots clattering against the stone floor. Sixteen grabbed her hand and began pulling her down the steps, her feet almost tripping.
They kept sprinting, but Eleven could barely keep up with his long legs bounding down four steps at a time. They finally reached the bottom of the stairwell and burst through the fire escape doors and out into a large lamp-lit courtyard, setting off an alarm that drowned out the sound of the pursuing footsteps.
"Don't fucking stop!" He yelled, turning to make sure she was keeping up. Her lungs burned in her chest and all she could hear was the defeating, hot pounding of her heartbeat in her ears. They had another hundred yards or so of open ground left to cover.
She saw the blood before she heard the gunshot. There was so much of it. The bullet must have gone straight through the back of his head, and his momentum carried him forward another half step before he tumbled to the ground. She jolted to a stop, her mouth opening to scream but unable to either let any noise out or any air in. Sixteen was sprawled out on the cobblestones, his platinum blonde hair dyed again, but this time crimson.
A second gunshot rang out, and she actually heard the air hiss next to her ear as the metal travelled past her. She came out of her stupor and glanced at Sixteen once more; there was definitely no way back from this. She turned on her heels, ducking down an alleyway and sprinting back towards the Wall.
22:00
She wasn't sure how she had found her way there. She was stood in the beige hallway from her dream, out of breath, her face streaming with tears and her hand pounding on the door to apartment 6B. Behind the door she could hear the laughter of multiple voices above loud music.
He opened the door already wearing the same worried look on his face, like he'd known it was her just from the frenzied knocking. He was dressed in dark blue jeans and a grey hoodie with some logo on it she didn't recognise.
"...Mike." She said softly. Before she could force out another word, he had already stepped forward, engulfing her in his arms. She sobbed, her tears soaking his chest. Before tonight it had been years since even Papa had seen her cry.
"What's wrong, what happened?" She could hear the other conversations in the room had stopped, and she opened her eyes to see twelve people or so stood around holding drinks, all now silently staring at her.
"Come on." Mike took her hand in his, walking her through the crowded living room. "Show's over. Go back to enjoying yourselves, everyone." He said, taking her into another room and shutting the door behind them. It was a bedroom, but it wasn't like any she had seen before. The walls were covered in music and movie posters, and one wall was completely coated floor-to-ceiling in Polaroids. She found herself staring at them through her blurry eyes. There were lots of Mike with the same three boys, one of whom she recognised as Dustin from the cafe earlier today.
"You don't have to tell me what's going on, if you don't want to." He was staring at her again, his big brown eyes looking straight through her skin. "But if you want to tell me I'll listen and I'll help if I can." He sat on the bed and patted the spot next to him. She sat slowly.
"I can't...bad..." Was all she could think to say, her voice cracking at the effort of getting just those three words out.
"That's ok." He said simply, playing with his hands in his lap. "We can just sit here. Whatever it is, you're safe now okay?" His words were like liquid Valium, washing over her and relaxing her breathing. They sat in silence for a while, the music from the other room bleeding faintly through the wall. Maybe this is what she'll do next. Just sit here, forever, until there's a groove in this bed shaped like her, and Mike has run out of sweet things to say. She wasn't sure Mike could ever run out of sweet things to say. She feels like maybe this was it, the end of her dream, the part she never got to enjoy the first time around because she had woken up too soon; after the horror but before the happy ending.
But then this reality started cracking at the edges, too. It was white static noise, seeping from her trench coat pocket. The radio.
She lifted it out slowly, Mike's eyes watching her. There was a voice speaking German in a slow, deep voice. It was cold and clinical. She could recognize that voice in any language.
"What...is he saying?" She asked. The message only seemed to be about thirty seconds long, before it repeated itself on a loop. How were they doing this, broadcasting on the Stasi's own radio channel? They must be making long-distance contact again, Papa sending one of the other Ultra's to that dark place and interfering with the airwaves. She shuddered.
"Um..." Mike hesitated. "It's an order. To shoot anyone who tries to get over the wall."
She froze at the words. Why? Had Krenz changed his mind? But if he had, why was it Papa's voice on the radio?
"Who is it? Is this the communists?" Mike was staring at the space between his feet on the floor.
The government is mostly good, sure, but they do lie...
"Not the communists." She replied. "It's us."
"What do you mean?" He asked frantically. "Who's us?"
She was staring at the radio, still spewing that awful message, his calm voice looping over and over again. It was 11:30 already. She shut off the machine.
"Water?" She asked simply, ignoring his question.
"Yeah, um, of course, sorry." He got up. "I'll be back in a second."
But he won't be. Or rather, when he got back she'd be gone. She gave it fifteen seconds or so, before scanning the living room quickly and then moving purposefully towards the front door.
One stupid glance back meant she had to see him, stood in the kitchen doorframe, a glass of water in each hand. He saw her too, caught her in the act of leaving. He'd bothered to put ice in the water. Ice. The world was too cruel.
She wandered around the empty streets in search of a payphone, her feet gradually, subconsciously, taking her closer to the wall. Her mind was flooded with images of Sixteen, with his natural brown hair back, stood on his farm out in California or somewhere else hot. He was with a wife, and two children that were really just carbon copies of him. That was all he wanted, to win the war and be free.
The war isn't going to be won by his special agents. It's going to be run by the ordinary people of Berlin...
I wonder if Papa will be annoyed...
Maybe that wasn't what Papa wanted. He was already free. Winning the war meant being shut down by Washington. It meant the end of MK Ultra.
She found a payphone just outside Potsdamer Platz. There was a hum of distant noise coming from the direction of the protests. She rummaged in her pockets for loose change and forced it into the slot.
"Hawkins light and energy, Jenson speaking."
"Papa." She said forcefully.
"Excuse me?"
"Papa. Now." She managed to spit the words out with such venom that she heard the click of her call being placed on hold. Everyone who worked there knew what was meant by the word Papa. It was a word only the Ultras used - only they had been raised with him as their father - and it was a word they weren't meant to use in an official capacity.
"Eleven?" His voice came through smoothly down the phone, whispering in her ear.
"Why?" She was crying again, which just made her angrier. She hadn't meant to cry.
"I don't know what you're talking about."
She laughed bitterly. "I heard the message. Shoot on sight..."
"Oh Eleven. Sweet Eleven. You never did like violence much. I imagine what happened to Sixteen has you all worked up..." How did he know?
"Why?" She repeated.
"You shouldn't be worrying about this, my child. Just follow your orders and do as you're told." His voice had lost its calm, soothing tone. It was forceful now, agitated even.
"Tell me why." She repeated. She was begging now, her hand tugging on the stiff phone cord.
"Go home, Eleven." The phone clicked off. Silence.
She took a couple of deep breaths to calm her racing heart. It didn't work, and she slammed the receiver into the hook over and over until her arm ached.
She stepped back outside, and began to walk again. If she was going to be responsible for this she would at least see it happen.
Hiding from horror doesn't make it disappear.
She could remember Papa whispering that into her ear while he forced her to watch hours of footage of gruesome communist war crimes.
She reached the wall a couple of minutes before midnight. There was a scattering of a few hundred people gathered on the western side, in a scraggly line about ten feet back from the barrier. She could hear the murmur thousands more behind the concrete to the east, even though there was a strange hush over the assembled masses, with no shouting or chanting. It was as if they were sizing up the guards and waiting to see who would make the first move.
There were four each in two watchtowers either side of the checkpoint, gripping assault rifles firmly. She began to hear a few shouts on the other side of the wall, and the knot in her stomach grew.
She had expected the first trouble to start on the Eastern side, but in fact it was someone just a few feet from her who stepped forward out of the crowd's loose formation. He had long blonde hair and he looked young, maybe young enough to be a student. She could see a rock clasped in his hands.
He began to shout, hurling what she assumed was abuse at the East German guards. One of them raised his rifle and shouted back.
She looked at the man again, but now his hair was black and covered with a beanie, and his face was freckled. He was Mike, and although he was holding up the rock threateningly, he really just looked scared. She turned around, but the couple who had been holding hands next to her were now replaced by Sixteen and his imaginary wife, Sixteen's head still dripping with blood. She heard the man shout once more, and the rock clatter against the concrete watchtower.
But no shot came.
Her gaze was fixed on the figure up high a hundred yards away, whose finger was twitching over the trigger. The others rushed in to help but found themselves equally useless. They could lift their guns to shoot, but they couldn't fire a round.
Slowly, the crowd began to sense an empty threat. They walked towards the wall. A warm trickle of blood slipped from her nose.
An elderly woman was the first to touch it, reaching out a wrinkled hand and pressing it against the cold concrete. Soon, people were clambering on the stone. Her lips tasted metallic.
Then, in just a matter of moments, she knew it was all finished. Checkpoint Charlie stood wide open, the American guards watching as people flooded through in both directions. Two teenagers were sat on the wall, kissing.
She released the guards from their mental prison and she sank to the floor, clutching her head.
What had she done?
She was surrounded by commotion, but to her there was total silence. It was how she imagined it felt to be in a car crash. In one betrayal she had thrown away everything she had ever known, the only home and family she had ever had. Was she meant to feel sad, happy, relieved...afraid? She didn't feel anything at all.
"I thought I'd find you here." His voice broke through her wall of silence somehow. She looked up, and there he was. Real, this time. He sat down next to her on the floor. "Are you okay?" He reached up the sleeve of his hoodie and wiped away the blood from her nose.
She nodded, even though it wasn't true.
"I'm not...who I said I was." She began, trying to calm down again, and focus on the here and now. More and more people were filling the street, having to step awkwardly around them as they sat side by side on the floor.
"I know." He said simply. She gave him a quizzical look.
"How?"
He laughed. "Well you wear a trench coat all the time, and when we first met in the deli your behavior was a little unusual." He paused, giving her an affectionate smile. "Oh, and there was that time an hour ago where you came to my house crying and got me to translate secret Stasi orders on a military radio. Apart from that I was completely fooled by the whole I'm just a girl on holiday story."
She smiled at him, allowing her head rest against his shoulder. News teams were already moving into position around them, cameras pointing at the people waving from the top of the wall, and those rushing through the gate and embracing loved ones. A helicopter had begun to buzz overhead.
"Whatever you did to make this happen, it was worth it. You did a good thing. An amazing thing."
She closed her eyes. She was starting to believe that could be true.
"So, if you're not who you say you are, should we meet all over again?" He stood up, dusting off his jeans, and held out a hand.
"Hello, my name's Mike Wheeler."
She grinned, picking herself up slowly. "Eleven." She shook his hand. His fingers felt warm.
He raised an eyebrow. "Well, it's nice to meet you Eleven." He paused for a moment.
"I like your face."
END