Time After Time (a Stranger Things fanfiction)

Faithfully

"Faithfully"

Wonderin' where I am

Lost without you

- Journey

Murray slept through a good portion of the flight to Alaska while Joyce stared straight ahead of her and willed the plane to go faster and tried not to worry about Hop or El or Will or Jonathan or ... anything.

Fortunately, Murray was an annoying and distracting sleeper, constantly twitching and mumbling and shifting around in his seat. Eventually, he rested his head on Joyce's shoulder, still muttering under his breath. Joyce shoved him off her, taking some satisfaction in the clunk of his head against the window on the other side of him.

The stewardess came by with the food, putting it down on the tray table in front of Joyce. "All right. Here you go."

"Great. Um ... how much longer?"

Putting on a recognizable customer service smile, the stewardess said, "Oh, just a few more hours. Almost there." She must get that question a lot.

Joyce tried not to show how disappointed she was in that answer. She, too, had been in customer service, and it was hardly the stewardess's fault that the plane couldn't go faster.

"You and your husband have exciting plans?"

Briefly, Joyce considered explaining that Murray wasn't her husband, but that would be a long story and probably not one worth telling to someone she was only going to talk to for a few minutes. She settled for, "We're seeing an old friend." Which was hopefully the truth.

"How fun!" And the stewardess was gone, back up the center aisle to ask polite questions of the other passengers.

Joyce opened the box to look at her dinner. Wilted green salad, overcooked green peas, a stale square roll, and ... something covered in a white sauce that looked congealed. Grimacing, she poked at the something with her plastic knife and fork. Chicken, maybe. She'd eaten worse—she'd cooked worse, if she was being honest with herself—but she didn't have much of an appetite at the moment to start with. Only the idea that she had no idea what she would find in Alaska, or how long it would be before she got another meal convinced her to dig into the contents of the box.

*****

Hopper stood in line for the slop they got for lunch, waiting his turn to have the watery gray mess glopped into his bowl. At first, he'd found it repulsive. Now he looked forward to it—food was food, and at least it was usually hot.

"One person, one piece. Don't you understand?" the guard shouted in Russian as a man in line tried to take an extra piece of bread. "I said one piece per person!" he said again as Hopper took the piece of bread handed to him and exited the tent.

He made his way to another tent where a couple of men were already sitting on the rickety benches. Hopper sat next to the big Russian who stood in front of him in line. The man scowled at him, but kept eating and didn't speak.

Looking around, Hopper made sure no one could hear them except the one prisoner on the bench behind them, and Hopper didn't worry too much about him. He was old and weary and kept to himself. Even Hopper could see he wasn't long for this world.

The big Russian next to him was still in his prime, though, and he had the strength to do what Hopper needed him to do. Now to manage to communicate what he needed.

He tapped the Russian on the arm with his bread.

The Russian looked at him, looked at the bread, and shook his head. "I am no fairy," he said in Russian.

"No, no. You ... hit," Hopper said in his limited Russian, and he mimed hitting the shackle on his leg. "You ... hit. I give bread."

Intrigued, his fellow prisoner leaned forward, looking down at Hopper's leg and the circles of metal holding his chains. He said something in Russian that Hopper didn't understand.

This had to work. There was no plan B. This was it. Hopper repeated "You ... hit. I give bread," urgently.

The Russian clearly thought he was crazy, but equally clearly didn't care that much. "And soup."

Hopper nodded.

He put the bread into the metal soup bowl and the Russian reached for it. "Crazy American," he muttered as he returned to his own soup.

He had just agreed to let a man he could barely speak to pound away at his leg with a sledgehammer. He could only hope he had communicated what he wanted well enough to avoid having his bones shattered, which the Russian could easily have done with a single blow.

This had to work, Hopper told himself again. It had to.

They returned to the line, to building this endless railroad that seemed to come from nowhere and to go nowhere and to have no purpose other than to be worked on by the prisoners of Kamchatka. Hopper kept an eye out, watching for when the guards would be distracted.

Spying his moment, he turned to the man behind him. "Now."

He put his sleeve in his mouth to bite down on and waited. The sledgehammer struck the outside of his left leg, at the clasp of the shackle. Hopper cried out in pain, hoping it was muffled enough by his quilted jacket sleeve and the banging of metal on metal all around them not to draw attention.

Turning to the Russian, he gasped, "Again."

And again, and again, and again and again.

Hopper looked up. The guards were done with their smoke break, they were just about to pace the line again. He turned to his Russian friend. "Thank you."

The Russian nodded solemnly, clearly worried about Hopper's sanity. In fact, Hopper was a bit worried about that as well, but if this worked, if he could get free, then it wouldn't matter.

He forced himself to think about the next step, how he would get away, and not about what it might be like if he actually could, or if he could get home, or if he could see Joyce or El again ... One step at a time, that was the way it had to go, or he'd go stark staring mad.