❝ you walk hand in hand with the
omen of death, don't you, harrington?
but, somehow, you're the only one
i can't run away from. ❞
→ 𝐢𝐧 𝐰𝐡𝐢𝐜𝐡 she claims to hate him, but fate decided to prove her wrong.
or two teens who think they're nothi...
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NOVEMBER 3rd, 1987
IF IT WEREN'T FOR THE RADIO PLAYING DAVID BOWIE'S "HEROES" FOR HER TO HUM ALONG TO and the excitement beating in her heart, Rory Hargrove would have already fallen asleep from the monotony of the dark road lit only by the incandescent glow of her Chevrolet Camaro's headlights.
She had spent about three straight hours behind the wheel, and her arms were going numb from being stretched out for so long. But when she saw the sign announcing that she had reached the infamous town of Hawkins, she pressed her tired foot even harder on the accelerator, eager to reach her final destination as quickly as possible.
And there was no danger in doing so, because no one else had had the same idea as her—to drive to the small town in the middle of Indiana in early November. So the road was empty, and her engine was the only thing responsible for the reverberating sound echoing through the nighttime silence.
"Hello, Hawkins. I'm back, baby," she murmured hoarsely, adjusting her posture in the seat.
She noticed she was almost out of fuel, but maybe it would be enough to make it to the best place in the world. Her true home—the arms of her Steve Harrington.
Indeed, Hawkins was a place of mixed feelings. On the one hand, her family was still there—some alive, some not—and that turned the town into a bitter memory.
Her subconscious seemed to take pleasure in punishing her whenever she felt excitement or genuine joy. Like quick, painful jabs from a syringe needle, the dark memories she had made there rose up in her mind again. Like an automatic PTSD reflex.
Billy's death. Max's near-death. The discovery that her family tree was a lie and that she carried something strange in her body—something different—that she tried every day to turn into a blessing.
It was as if the people she loved kept slipping through her fingers while she uncovered new, revolutionary truths about her past. That had been her life for the last three years.
She tightened her grip around the steering wheel until her knuckles went pale, then eased the tension in her muscles by rolling her neck from side to side.
Partly to shake off the drowsiness the monotonous, midnight road was bringing on—but mostly as a way to push away and fight the bad thoughts. Nothing was going to ruin this night. She wasn't going to let her trauma make her vulnerable now.
She was in her third year of college and spent most of it unraveling cases and riddles, burying her face in books about crime theories, learning the U.S. legal system inside and out. Her anxiety was due to the fact that next semester she would have the chance to intern at a police department in Chicago, for which her GPA had to remain perfect.
