NINE / Past, Present, Future

Nine watched out of the car window as the new world flew by. It was strange and large and overwhelming. And there were people. So many people. Of the ones she met so far, her sister seemed to know all of them. How did she keep them all straight?

Nine did her best to remember names and faces, but it was a lot to keep up with. She knew Ten, of course, though Nine seemed to be the only one to call her that. Then there was Eleven. She had a second name, too, but Nine stuck to just the one for now. They boy called Dustin was one of the ones from the forest and the one she trusted the most to show her past to. A boy called Steve was the oldest of the trio that found her in the woods, and he seemed to care about Ten a lot. Jonathan was the name of the boy driving the car. His pretty friend next to him was Nancy, and she pretended not to care about Steve. Other than them, Nine felt clueless. But it was enough for now.

Squeezed in the back seat between Eleven on the passenger's side and Ten on the driver's side, Nine spent the car ride making up for lost time with her sister. Before the night at the lab, Nine and Ten had never spent more than a few hours apart, so they knew anything and everything about each other. Now that they were together again, a piece of her sister felt like a stranger, and in order to rectify that Nine felt like she needed to see everything that happened to Ten while they were apart. Ten, out of anyone, understood that. However, a year was a long time, so Ten tried to focus on just the small moments that shaped the big picture. To her, those seemed to matter the most.

The girls gave Ten clothes to borrow. They were strange and new and warm. They boy - Tack - set a plate of food down in front of her, though she did not recognize it at the time. Her eyes danced between the plate and the boy.

"There's more if you want. Ty and his roommate buy the best food but always end up just going to McDonalds or some shit."

Food. She nodded and smiled and Tack passed her a piece of metal. It was long and skinny and had four points at one end. As she studied the object, her new acquaintances studied her.

"It's a fork…"
"Where did you say you were from again?"
"She didn't."

…

Tack and Ten were on a walk, though she could not remember where Yaya and Alisha had gone. Ten would point to things, and Tack would tell her the word for it. She would echo it back, testing how the new vocabulary felt in her own mouth.

Crosswalk. Rock. Newspaper. Backpack. Coins. Cigarette. Pole. Pigeon. Cup. Disgusting.

Tack found the game very amusing. Ten was fascinated.

…

"He's cute," Alisha whispered to Ten. They sat together on a bench at the park in the dead of winter. Yaya and Tack were enjoying a snowball fight not too far away.

"Cute?"

"Yeah," Alisha shrugged. "Like when you think someone is good-looking… Attractive, but maybe not hot."

"Like pretty?"

"Yeah… Like pretty. Except most guys don't like to be called pretty, so people call them cute instead."

Ten looked over to the boy Alisha was talking about. She was right. He was pretty. "Cute," she agreed. Alisha grinned.

…

"Hey, cutie," some drunk guy greeted.

The group of four were at a frat party for some college none of them went to, and after Ten had sold out of Tack's pot she had decided to hide in the kitchen to wait for everyone else.

"I don't have any more shit," Ten told him, looking down into the cup of the drink she was nursing.

"Oh," he said simply. "Well, I'm not looking for buds."

She looked up at the boy in front of her. His messy hair was dirty blonde and his eyes were glazed over with intoxication. He stepped closer and she stepped back. He stepped closer again, and she pressed her back into the counter, crossing her arms over her chest.

"I'm guessing you're here alone? 'Cause if you were mine I wouldn't let you out of my sight," he slurred, reaching out to touch her. Ten recoiled instinctively.

"Hey, asshole," Yaya's voice rang through the kitchen. She was at Ten's side promptly, pulling her out from between the counter and the boy. "Why don't you leave her alone, you fuckin' wastoid, she's clearly not interested."

Yaya swept Ten away before he could reply, and then out of the party entirely. They waited outside for Alisha and Tack, never spoking of the boy. Instead, Yaya told her stories that were completely unrelated but made Ten laugh.

...

Yaya had a friend named Shelby, who went out of town for a week and told her they could stay in her shoebox apartment as long as they took care of her dog and watered her plants. The group of four gladly accepted the offer.

Ten sat in the living room as she flipped through the Shelby's record collection and admired the artwork with Tack. Meanwhile, the other two girls nosily explored the rest of the apartment.

"Rose, come here!" she hard Yaya call from the bedroom. "This would look so good on you."

She jumped up and walked to the bedroom to find Yaya digging through the clothes in Shelby's closet while Alisha put everything back carefully to make it seem like they had never been there. In Yaya's hand was a dress on a hanger, which she insisted Ten try on. Alisha nodded in agreement.

The dress was a brilliant blue, similar to her eyes. The material was soft and the design simple, with off-the-shoulder long sleeves and a tight fit the whole way down to where it stopped just above the knee. Ten had never worn anything like it before, usually drowning in her oversized shirts tucked into hand-me-down jeans.

She emerged from the bathroom after changing into the dress and watched as Tack's eyebrows flew up his forehead, Yaya's mouth fell open slightly, and Alisha's face split into a wide grin.

"Wow," said Tack, the first to break the silence.

"You look…" Yaya started, trailing off to find the right word.

"Striking," Alisha finished. They all nodded in agreement.

Ten was not all too sure what it meant, but took the compliment anyways as she looked down at her body in the figure-hugging dress. Her grown out hair flopped into her face and she tried to push it back out of the way to no avail.

"Here," said Alisha, pushing past Ten and into the bathroom behind her. Grabbing a black headband from the counter, she used it to push Ten's hair back before stepping away to check out her friend once more. "I'm tellin' you, babe, I hope you know that you could get any guy you wanted."

"Even the gay ones," Tack joked from his spot in the living room. "I know I'd go back in the closet for you."

…

Later that night, after Ten changed back into her regular clothes, they all watched some cheesy romance movie, and in the end they guy kissed the girl.

"What's that like?" she asked her friends, who's heads all snapped toward her. At this point they knew where she had come from, but most of the time she easily passed for a regular girl. They often forgot how little life experience she had.

Alisha, sitting next to her, looked from Ten to Tack to Yaya and then back to Ten.

"Don't take this the wrong way," she said, sifting to face Ten. "I'm doing this because you're my friend and I love you and support you, and not because you have really nice lips and we all just found out you're secretly super hot. But if you want, I'm gonna kiss you now. Okay?"

"Yes," Ten giggled.

Then Alisha's lips were on hers and Ten was pushing her visions away. It was soft and sweet and innocent. Ten pulled away before her nose started bleeding.

Alisha nodded approvingly. "Like I said, you could get any guy you wanted."

...

Ten put her hands on the edge of the counter and leaned into them. She studied the face of the boy sitting next to her while he looked at floor. 'Cute,' she thought, knowing Alisha would agree.

...

Later that night, everyone around her was shouting (Ten! Tack! Are you alright?! Matt, how the fuck could you hit a girl?! Holy shit, Ten, I'm so sorry). But in the midst of all the madness, Ten was in the eye of the hurricane, blocking out the chaos like white noise. There was only one thing her mind could focus on: She had seen the future, and then she changed it.

...

She returned to the present to discover Steve shaking his head in disbelief as he ran a finger over Ten's tattoo. It was like he was trying to make sure that it was real. That she was real.

...

Papa's grip tightened around Ten's arm. "You can come with me, or I can have Harrington killed."

"I'll go with you, Papa," Ten made her decision before he finished his sentence.

…

Steve kissed her slowly and lightly, as if he wanted it to last but feared she would disappear entirely if he went any deeper.

...

"You can be my niece!" Joyce shouted in the midst of an epiphany while she, Ten, Steve, and Hop were trying to figure out a fake backstory and pseudonym for Ten and her forged documents. "We'll make you Rose Byers. How does that sound?"

…

Ten could not read what the sign said, but she knew what it meant. The house she had seen in her future vision was for sale. "Are you coming?" she asked Steve with a giggle on her way out of the car.

…

Nightmare: The baby cried out in the distance, so Ten ran in the direction of the sound, leading her to the doors at the back of the church. No matter how hard she pushed and pulled, the doors never budged and the baby's cries grew louder. Suddenly, the lights in the church began turning off one by one until it was completely dark. Until she was surrounded by nothing but black.

…

Nightmare: "She has your eyes, Ten," Papa's voice repeated for the last time before she could not take it anymore. Covering her ears with her hands, she let a piercing scream rip through her throat. And then the light finally burst.

Everything went black.

"Nine! Nine! Nine!" she screamed. She felt Steve shift next to her. She heard the click of the lamp. She had woken up, but the nightmare never ended. She was stuck in the black. Deep and dark and endless.

Nine released her sisters hand, stricken upon recognizing the scream from the night she went into the Void. And then the realization hit her like a ton of bricks.

"You see, Nine, part of what your Papa was studying was your connection to your sister," the doctor had said. "It seems you two share one power between each other rather than having two similar, but separate, abilities."

"There's more," said Ten, but Nine's mind was elsewhere.
"You can't see because of me," said Nine out loud.

The entire car fell silent, any conversation between Nancy and Jonathan and Eleven ceased. Nancy and Eleven turned to stare at Nine, and Jonathan glanced at her briefly through the rearview mirror before turning his attention back to the road.

Ten's brows drew together and the expression on her face told Nine that she was crazy.

"It's true," said Nine.
"How?" asked Ten and Eleven simultaneously.
"We share one power," said Nine, projecting to her what the doctor had said for emphasis. "I have it all."
"But what does that have to do with me being blind?" asked Ten.
"The nightmares were right," mumbled Nine with a shrug.
"What nightmares?" asked Eleven.

Ten huffed and went on to explain to Eleven what she had dreamt about. First she described the one with Nine in the mirror and the burst of light before the black. Then she went on to tell her of Papa giving her the baby, and how it screamed but she could not get to it.

"If you're right, then my non-existent baby would have to be the reason I'm bind, too," Ten was quick to add.
"Nine's the baby," said Nancy, almost to herself but not quite.
"What?" asked everyone else in the car.
"Nine's the baby," Nancy said louder this time. "We had a whole lesson on dream interpretation in my psychology course. Babies are supposed to represent the innocent, and usually it's the innocent part of yourself, but in this case it could be Nine. She's innocent because she's never been in the real world before. Not only that, but she died and came back. She was reborn. And maybe the doors being locked represented a part of you, Rose, that knew she was still out there but couldn't get to her. And then the lights went out? Rose, what if your subconscious was seeing your own future and showing you in a way that wasn't too harsh?"

Ten sat in silence for a moment, her face an expression Nine did not recognize. There was part of her that was still a stranger. Nine chose not to dwell on it for the time being and glanced back and forth between Nancy and Ten.

"I think you're reading too far into this. I've always had weird dreams," said Ten.
"I think she's right, Ten," said Nine.
"If you are right, if you did take her sight, then there must be a way to for her to get it back. Right?" offered Jonathan.

Nine shrugged.

"If it happened when you took her powers, then maybe you just have to give it back," said Nancy.
"I wouldn't know how," admitted Nine.
"She'd have to take it," said Eleven.
"What?" asked Ten.
"If she took it from you, it would make sense for you to have to take it back from her."
"I wouldn't know how," said Ten.
"I think I do," said Eleven.

They wasted no time. Eleven had an idea and she was going to execute it in the car on the way to Illinois. "It's a long drive. What else are we supposed to do?" she reasoned. Jonathan joked that there was no time like the present.

Eleven had Ten take Nancy's hand, then instructed her to think of something that makes her angry.

"Nothing makes me angry," protested Ten.
"Nancy should," said Eleven.
"What?" asked both Nancy and Ten.
"Nancy should make you jealous. Angry," said Eleven.
"Because I dated Steve," said Nancy, though the statement sounded like a question.
"Yes," said Eleven.
"But I didn't know Steve then," argued Ten.
"That doesn't matter. You're supposed to be jealous," said Eleven.
"I'm not," said Ten.
"But she broke his heart," said Eleven.

Ten frowned, looking more saddened than anything else. Not angry. Eleven huffed before trying a different angle, one Nine could tell was causing the younger girl to put herself on edge. She ordered Nancy to focus on a specific memory for Ten to see. After a deep breath, her words came like continuous punches to the gut.

"Think about Papa," instructed Eleven.

Ten closed her eyes and focused, but her face showed no signs of anger. Not yet.

"Remember how he kept you and Nine. Remember your room. And the cold. Remember the tests and the punishments. The isolation chamber. How he called himself your father, but he trained you to be weapons. For what? To make sure the enemies were telling the truth? To stay one step ahead of them?"

Nine wanted to tune Eleven out. There was a time when Nine had loved Papa. Part of her still did. But Eleven's words of resentment toward the man reminded Nine of why she and Ten needed to escape in the first place, and so she could not stop listening.

"And then he tracked me down. He followed Mike to Steve and found both of us. He wanted to bring us back."

Ten's eyes opened, staring emptily ahead, and her brows drew together but the rest of her expression remained slack as she gripped onto Nacy. Eleven was getting herself so worked up that the stereo began flipping through channels seemingly on its own.

"He threatened Steve if you didn't go with him. He hurt Steve. Remember how much pain he was in after the bad man shot him? And Papa asked you about Nine as if he didn't know she was alive. As if he hadn't brought her back. As if he hadn't been keeping her hidden? He lied and he hurt and he -"

The next few moments happened all at once, but Nine felt as if she were living them in slow motion: A sharp intake of breath. Ten's. Something flashed so briefly behind her eyes. "Jonathan," she shouted at the exact moment her nose began bleeding. Gushing. The cry of his name caused him to slam on his breaks and look back at her through his rearview mirror. "Jonathan!" someone else - Nancy? - yelled as the breaks began to skid on the frosted road.

Counterclockwise, the car fistialed, and they found themselves going entirely sideways. But car came to a halt suddenly and all too soon, jostling everyone as Eleven screamed, having been the one to stop it. The windows burst with the sound as blood dripped from the younger girl's nose and ears.

Just as Nine thought the moment was coming to an end, the car travelling behind them collided into their own.

A/N: First of all: Happy 2018! I hope you all had a fun and safe New Years.

This chapter was so much fun for me to write! Especially getting into Ten's memories, I got a little carried away and had to cut a bunch of them out because it was just too much. Hopefully I was able to give a little more insight on Ten's dynamic with Yaya and Alisha, and can promise more information on her friendship with Tack in later chapters (hint, hint).

I also wanted to give Nancy a little what-I-learned-in-college moment, as well as give El a little what-I-learned-from-Kali moment, which were also super fun to get into. I hope you enjoyed! I'll be back on Wednesday with a chapter from Steve's POV.