-8-
Sister's Reunited.
-8-
As she got off the bus with a brief but grateful thank you to the driver, Eleven looked around a little nervously. She had never been to a city before, and she looked around the bustling streets and the towering towers, which were far taller and bigger than anything she had seen before (the building blocks of Hawkins Lab did not count, as the lab didn't have a maze of buildings surrounding it), and she spun on the spot after the bus left to get her bearings.
Once she had seen the right landmarks, Eleven headed off slowly through the streets. Unfortunately, she made the mistake of brushing past someone.
"Hey, watch it, kid!"
Eleven ignored them, and she carried on her way towards the streets where she knew Kali would be. As she walked there, her stomach churned with nerves. Her insides were twisting, wondering how this would go. If she played her cards right, then Kali would accept her readily but at the same time, Eleven still didn't understand or know why Kali had left the Lab without taking her with her. In the worst-case scenario, Kali had decided to be selfish and decided to just walk away and never look back.
But then again… Eleven stopped, looking absently into space, remembering a fairly recent memory.
She and Kali had always been close when they were younger. They had played together in the Rainbow Room and they had practiced their powers with each other; it was an unspoken rule among the other kids in the lab, but especially Kali and Eleven, to keep their true power levels hidden from Brenner and the others. Kali was one of the few children in the Lab who not been raised from a toddler in the Lab, she had grown up with memories which had become increasingly dimmer as time passed of a family, but she remembered them, and she knew there was far more to life than the Lab, as a child Eleven had been enthralled with her tales, considering them the equivalent of fairy tales before she had grown old enough to tell fact from fiction.
Together the two girls had been very close, and they had practiced their powers together, with Eleven demonstrating and practicing her telepathy and telekinesis, while Kali did the same with her illusions. They had occasionally played games against one another, and they shared and swapped plans to get out of the Lab one day.
The idea was daunting to Eleven, who had known nothing but the Lab, with its sterile rooms, the stark white Rainbow Room, the training rooms where Brenner or the other doctors and nurses pushed them to master their powers with varying degrees of hostility while others were more patient. But the desire for freedom was compelling, and the two girls started making plans.
And then it all went wrong. Eleven was still unsure of what happened, it had been so sudden it had taken her by surprise. Brenner and his men had burst into her room while she and Kali were practicing/talking, and they had dragged Kali away while one of the men jabbed her with a baton and an electric shock raced through her body, and she screamed her head off, but at the same time, Eleven had heard Kali's screams before she was knocked unconscious. Even now Eleven didn't know how long she had been out, but when she came to and went to the Rainbow Room, there was no sign of Kali anywhere, and nobody knew either although, as a test subject herself she heard things the others didn't.
Kali had run.
Eleven had been shocked and she wondered why Kali hadn't tried to take her out as well, but there was a way she could find out. It was one of the primary reasons she was here now. Eleven tensed as she passed a crowd of people who clearly lived out here, huddled against the burning fires they'd started in garbage cans for warmth, but aside from a few looks, none of them paid her any mind, but she was still tense; Eleven wasn't looking for a fight, but she was more than capable of lashing out if she wanted to. Some of the people staring at her made her more worried and concerned, and more than a few times, Eleven was tempted to just use her powers to throw them away, but fortunately, they didn't make any sudden moves towards her, and so she went on.
Thanks to her time in the void, Eleven had quickly found the warehouse Kali and her friends were using as a home/base, and while seeing it in the real world was something really different, she walked in regardless. She heard the low sounds of rock music - really bad rock music - playing. Slowly she walked in, hoping that Kali and her gang were here, and that others hadn't just moved in on a whim and driven her sister out.
No. She didn't see it; Kali would never let something like that happen, with her powers she could render herself invisible and be more than a match for her enemies; all she'd need to do would be to vanish, and then slash their throats, or plant suggestions and images in their minds to drive them insane, and her gang didn't seem like the types to just accept something like that happening. She might not know any of them personally, but Eleven knew they were strong, and confident and they were seen as outcasts. People like that never stood back.
As she walked closer, she could see that her initial fears were unfounded; she recognised the mohawked man as Axel and the dark-skinned large man as Funshine. They were sitting around, eating pizza.
Eleven stopped. "Hello? Kali?" She called.
The gang leapt up.
"Who are you?" A pale-faced woman with insane hair demanded.
"A friend, I hope," Eleven kept very still. "Is Kali here?"
"How'd'ya know Kali?" A dark-skinned woman that she recognised quickly as Mick demanded.
Eleven just looked around for a moment before her eyes lit up. She held out a hand and a nearby moth-eaten sofa suddenly lifted into the air, making Mick and Dottie yelp in astonishment - she wasn't bothered about the sounds they made since it could get Kali's attention if she was even here.
"My god," Mick hissed, gazing at the still-levitating sofa and Eleven.
"Tell Kali, and use these exact words, 'Your sister Eleven is here,'" and here Eleven rolled up her sleeve and showed Mick the 011 tattoo; she didn't know for sure if the gang had even seen Kali's tattoo or not, but she didn't care. If Kali heard her friend say she had seen it, with luck Kali would come out and believe it.
"S-Sister?"
Eleven turned her head, and saw, partially hidden in the shadows halfway up a small flight of stairs leading to a part of the warehouse where she knew Kali had her own rooms, the young woman she had come to see. Her heart leapt to her chest, and while she was astonished by the amount of hurt she felt her precious big sister hadn't taken her out of the Lab, she was happy to see her. She looked well enough; her hair was longer, wilder, as if in defiance of those cropped hair cuts Papa had favoured the most to the point of madness, she wore dark eye makeup, and her clothes were so dark that it was hard for Eleven to pick her out of the shadows.
"Hello, Kali, it's good to see you again," Eleven said.
Kali walked down the steps quickly and urgently and rushed towards her. At first, Eleven tensed up, but Kali wrapped her arms around her chest. The smell of Kali's hair wafted up her nose.
"K-Kali?" Eleven said.
Kali pulled away, her eyes watering. "You're alive!"
Eleven's eyes widened. "What?"
"When they dragged me out of your room, they shocked me with their batons."
"Yeah, they did the same thing to me."
Kali nodded. "I could hear your screams. I was in so much pain I was knocked out, but when I came to, Brenner walked into my room and showed me a bloodied gown with your number on the label."
Eleven gasped in surprise. She hadn't expected this. "What?"
"I've got it upstairs. I managed to save it and I kept it with me ever since until I could get it vacuum-sealed. But anyway, after he came into my room to tell me what happened, he berated me, told me that he had done it because of how attached we had become, and he didn't like it, so he'd decided to take steps, but he claimed you were as weak as you appeared and how he'd always known you could never take such punishment," the tears were rolling down Kali's cheeks freely now as she remembered that time. "I didn't believe it at first, but when I got out, there was no sign of you. I used my powers to try to find out if it was an elaborate hoax of Brenner's, but it wasn't, or so I thought at the time. After that, I made plans to leave, and I snuck out of the lab soon afterwards," Kali explained.
Eleven had been listening to the story with growing anger. She could well believe Kali's version of events since it tallied with what she knew, and she knew Kali well enough to see she was genuine. On top of that, she could picture Brenner doing this. For some reason, he had always wanted every kid in the Lab under his dubious care to be strictly alone.
But she had not expected him to be so brutal with his lies.
"What happened when you left the Lab?" Eleven asked.
"First, I went into Hawkins town, and I explored some of it but I couldn't stay long. You know what Brenner is like; once he realised one of us escaped, then he would immediately hunt them down. So I moved quickly, and I went around the town before I stole some food, money, and clothes, and I made my way out of Hawkins for good. I met a good family, but I had problems with them since they couldn't relate to me; I tried to be normal, Eleven, but no matter what I tried, I would get into violent fights and I was arrested a few times. After that, they couldn't cope and neither could they, so I had to get out and I came here. I met the gang, and we've been together ever since. Eleven, if I had known you were still alive, I would have gotten you out," Kali told her, staring at her desperately.
Eleven held up a hand. "It's okay, sister," she told her. "I believe you."
And she did. She could see the honesty in her sister's eyes. "So, what do you do now?" She asked.
"We hunt the people who hurt us," Kali said honestly and she smiled hopefully. "Are you staying?"
"I don't have anywhere else to go, Kali," Eleven said. "Everyone barring a few at the Lab is dead."
"What?" Kali gaped in shock.
"It's a long story, Kali," Eleven said. "Basically I was manipulated. One of the orderlies quietly began giving me advice, before he spent more time with me and told me Papa was jealous and fearful of my powers, after a nasty beating I got, thanks to Two. And he promised to help me escape."
"Two always did have a bloated belief of his own importance," Kali said. "So you got out with his help, then?"
"No, and as for Two….He's dead now. They're all gone. You and me, we're all that's left," Eleven said sadly. "The orderly had a chip in his neck. He told me it was to keep track of him, and I tore it out in the hopes he could come with me when I tore it out, but he went on a rampage, and he killed everyone he met, including the other kids in the Rainbow Room."
"What?"
Eleven nodded. "He showed me he had a tattoo himself. He was one of us. The first of us."
"What?" Kali repeated in shock. "But nobody knows what happened to One. Brenner would never allow us to find out."
"I know. But Brenner had kept One trapped in the Lab all this time; I don't know when it happened, all I know is One was insane, Kali. He slaughtered everyone in the Lab easily, and he ranted about how his family were twisted people whom he hated, and he sees everyone and everything else as essentially wrong."
"What do you mean, wrong?"
"I don't know how to describe it, really; he sees everyone's lives as undesirable, and he wants to kill everyone. I managed to stop him in a brutal fight, but then….," Eleven shook her head as she tried to put into words what happened with him in that last confrontation in the Rainbow Room. "I destroyed him, Kali. I nearly collapsed after that, but I managed to fight the urge, and I got out of the Lab and I came looking for you when I saw you in my mind."
"You came after me?" Kali repeated.
"Of course," Eleven wrapped her arms around Kali, who gladly wrapped her own arms around Eleven.
"I've missed you, Sister."
"So have I, sister," Eleven smiled. 4