|| Nine and Three || A Stranger Things AU Story ||

9 & 3

Nine and Three shared a room in the Hawkins National Laboratory as test subjects.

Well... Now they shared an apartment room. They had both been twelve years old when they escaped. Hunkered down until the searches for them seemingly came to a stop and they took a bus to a few cities over just to get themselves away. Find some way to make their lives meaningful. They even found names:

Nine was Hazel.

Three was Antone.

Both boys had been inspired by the escape of Eight (Kali) whom they looked up to since she was older. And she knew how to control her gifts. She created hallucinations.

Clearly Papa had underestimated her.

Papa had underestimated Nine and Three too.

Hazel's gift was that he could read minds and transmit messages to people from afar if they could picture them in his mind. He could also manipulate thoughts and steal memories. Only so many, though, because he would lose energy after too much.

Antone's gift was that he could use invisibility and teleportation. But he could only travel so far, or else one of his body parts would be left behind (results of an accident). And his invisibility had limits too: it only lasted about five minutes before his opacity became clearer and clearer until he was seen as a solid, and he would usually collapse of exhaustion afterward.

They were both pushed to the limit every single day of experiments, and slept soundly every night in that cold, dull room in The Laboratory.

Most days now, they were trying to perfect their gifts, then recharge themselves at night.

Hazel sometimes stayed up to send messages to the other numbers to see if any were still in captivity.

Lots were.

He tried to get to Kali but it was almost like she disappeared or went missing because he could never get a hint of a reply.