Surrender // Steve Harrington x Reader

𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐏𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐓𝐖𝐎

NOVEMBER 8TH 1983.

Four years. 

It had been almost four years since Henry had disappeared from your life, leaving you a desolate husk with no idea where you were, what to do, or if you would even survive. You tried to hide, tried to use your powers to cloak you as you hid in the woodland surrounding the lab, but the men with guns came to recapture you eventually. 

From that point on, Brenner kept you shut inside a small padded room, a Soteria device of your own settled in the side of your neck to keep you docile and powerless.

Oh, how you'd screamed and kicked and fought with all your might.

It just wasn't enough. Your days now consisted of pacing around the room, sitting on your thin mattress that was resting only on the floor with no frame, glaring into the security camera watching you and eating the three meals a day that would slide through the metal hatch in the door. You had a small shower in the corner of the room and toilet, but were deprived of much else.

No access to other people. No access to entertainment. Just the same isolated existence, day after day, for years. It was hell. A punishment for your help in massacring the others, you figured.

After the first few months you thought you might go insane, but then you remembered something Henry had told you when being a subject in the lab was becoming overwhelming all those years ago.

"They can trap your body, but they can never trap your spirit..." He'd said, a comforting hand resting on your small shoulder. "One day, little one, you will be free. Remember that. Focus on it when you think you might break and use it to fuel the anger you'll need to get out of here. You can do this. Just keep going. Fight through it."

The words repeated in your mind often, steadying your thoughts and focus in ways only Henry seemed to know how to do. You missed him so much it hurt sometimes, craving his sound mind and gentle parental nature with you that made you feel like everything would be just fine. But you realised a long time ago that he was dead and gone, and you were truly alone now. 

One day though, you'd make it out of here. You knew that. And as you grew older, sixteen already, you knew you'd have the strength to do it eventually.

You just didn't know yet that it would be today. But as you sit on the floor in the center of the room, eyes fixated on the small hole in the wall beside the door and how it looks like the sun, the latch to it clangs open, making you jump and hug your knees tighter from the unexpected sound. 

It had been so long that you'd even spoken to another person, let alone saw one; so as a guard pries open the heavy door, revealing himself and Doctor Brenner beside him, you almost burst into tears from how overwhelming it all felt. Alone for so long, your eyes almost refused to focus in on their disgruntled features. 

"Number Two." Brenner addresses you, voice as impassive yet disappointed in you as ever. Your eyes meet his own, nothing in them but exhausted interest. They refused to turn the lights off in the room, always wanting visual access to you from the security camera, so restless nights were a thing of normalcy now. "I think you've been in here long enough. Are you ready to come out?"

Communicating seemed foreign to you now, your voice a stranger as it sat unused in the little box in your throat. So after a long while of simply staring, you lower your head into a small nod.

Seeing his face again after all this time renewed the dormant anger within you, and you could feel it begin to simmer and rise ever so slightly as he regarded you like you were nothing more than a thorn in his side.

He had the grace to try with you a couple of times in those first few months, but after you'd clawed your way through whatever guards preceded him, he'd decided you were a lost cause and all but threw away the key to your cell; too cowardly to kill you and too proud to let you be free.