Time After Time (a Stranger Things fanfiction)

Hello Walls

"Hello Walls"

Hello, window

Well, I see that you're still here

- Willie Nelson

After all the hope, and the planning, and the fighting, and ... everything, Hopper was back where he had started. In a Russian prison, being beaten.

He knelt there and he took it because it was the only thing left to do. It didn't matter if they killed him; they were probably going to do that anyway. He had tried and he had failed, and he would go out letting them know they hadn't broken him. It was all he had left.

Someone finally called "Enough!" and the sound of boots hitting body stopped at last. A man in a highly decorated coat, clearly an officer, shouted something in Russian at the guards, ending by calling them "fools". He hunkered down next to Hopper. "What I tell you, American? No run. You don't listen."

Hopper was tempted to tell the guy that he never had been good at listening, but he was past clever repartee.

"Now is going to be much pain," the officer continued. "Much!"

There had already been plenty of pain, Hopper thought, and then a blow landed hard against his back and merciful blackness took him.

He came to outside, feeling the gentle kiss of snowflakes on his face and the rough scrape of his poor, bare, abused feet on the ground beneath him. They were dragging him across some kind of courtyard. He clenched his teeth against the cries of agony he wanted to give—they weren't getting the satisfaction of that from him. Enough remained of Jim Hopper's stubbornness for that.

Up some stairs, his knees banging painfully against the risers, and shoved into an open air cell with snow drifted across the floor.

He pushed himself slowly, painfully, up to a sitting position.

Behind him, a familiar voice said, "It could be worse, American. At least you have company."

Hopper turned toward Antonov, startled to see him there in the cell. It was obvious he had been worked over by the guards, too. If Hopper had been a betting man, he'd have bet that Antonov had betrayed him. But now it became clear that Antonov had been betrayed, as well. He got gingerly to his feet, his shock distracting him from the pain.

"Your eyes don't deceive you. I'm a prisoner now. Like you. Yuri, the smuggler—he betrayed me. Betrayed us."

Without a second's thought, Hopper slugged him, putting all his remaining strength behind the blow.

There were other prisoners in the cell with them, and they crowded around, evidently enjoying the sight of the ex-guard being beaten up by a prisoner.

Shoving Antonov back against the wall, Hopper howled at him, "You said we could trust him! You swore to me!"

"Because I believed we could. You think this is what I planned? I have lost everything. Everything! We both knew the risks. Both of us."

One of the other prisoners called out in Russian, exhorting Hopper to finish Antonov off. He wanted to; God, did he want to. After everything today, after the end of his hopes, the sure signing of his death warrant, he wanted to take this slimy bastard out with him.

"We gambled today," Antonov whispered painfully around the choke hold Hopper had on him, "and we lost. We lost."

"Finish him!" the other prisoner shouted, but Hopper no longer had the strength. The full implications of Yuri's betrayal had suddenly come clear to him, and the pain of it was far greater than anything any Russian beating had ever done to him.

He let Antonov go and reeled away from him as he slid down the wall, to the clear disappointment of the other prisoners. "Joyce," he said. "What about Joyce?"

Antonov turned to look at him, and the truth was there in his eyes. Yuri's betrayal had been complete. Hopper had enticed her into a trap, and because of him she was dead at the hands of a Russian smuggler.

Just one more way that Jim Hopper managed to poison everything he touched. It would have been better for everyone if he'd just let that Russian bastard kill him, there in the installation far beneath the Hawkins Mall.

*****

Joyce returned to consciousness tied up in the back of a plane next to Murray. She glared at him—wasn't he supposed to be the conspiracy nut who kept them from falling into traps like that?—and he glared back, indicating that coffee was a necessity of life and how was he to know anyone would use it to betray them?

They sat like that for a while, not looking at one another, listening to Yuri bang on the plane and the not-at-all-reassuring noises it made in response, until finally the engine sputtered and came to life, much to Joyce's disappointment. The nice, safe commercial airliner had been bad enough. This hunk of junk? She was tempted to ask for more drugged coffee, so when the thing went down in pieces she could at least sleep through it.

Yuri appeared in the open doorway next to them, grinning that stupid grin of his. "Why the long faces? Are you not excited for your journey across the Iron Curtain?"

He shut the door.

Joyce tried one desperate gamble. "Yuri, I have a family. I have three kids waiting for me."

Ignoring her, Yuri picked up a jar of peanut butter. "Did you know? Peanut butter is banned in motherland. I buy for dollar thirty here, sell for twenty dollars there."

"Your mother must be very proud," Murray said.

"My mother is dead." Yuri frowned at the jar. "Dead ... tired of living like a bum!" He grinned at them again. "You see? Yuri has family, too. And with money I earn from selling you, I will buy her a new house. I will buy my daughter ... a pony. Whatever they desire from now on, they will have. And yes, for that, my mother will be very, very proud."

Carrying the jar of peanut butter, he went into the cockpit and the plane began to move.

"Hold tight," he called back to them. "This is not American Airlines. Is going to get bit choppy."

Joyce and Murray closed their eyes and held their breath until somehow, improbably enough, the battered old plane made it into the air.