strangerThings oneshots

cherry, or no deal (strawberry is good, too)

cherry, or no deal (strawberry is good, too)

Anonymous

Murray does not escape quickly or discretely. Not that he thought he could, beyond wishful thinking.

Hopper blew his cover, and he isn’t in a position to melt into middle America anymore. In a few years, perhaps, but not now. He can’t well hide from the American government if he wants protection, much less keep his head.

He can’t stay in the open, though. Certainly not in Hawkins.

So he gets away at the first available opportunity.

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The thing about second hand cars is that sometimes they’re not all there. Sometimes it’s a windshield wiper, wiring, or lights. AC. The radio.

Murray’s car, second hand, (read: cheaper) starts just fine, runs quite well, doesn’t have miles through the roof.

It’s one blemish is a notable lack of a functional radio.

Murray didn’t think it an issue; he doesn’t use the radio when he drives anyhow. The silence of the car irks him, though.

Joyce and Hopper aren’t bickering in the front; there’s not yelling, no noise. Joyce isn’t being a one-woman hurricane, screaming about her kids, heir antics, their safety. Hopper isn’t here, isn’t anywhere. Neither is Alexei.

To think that Murray is this broken up about a Russian, much less a Russian blatantly in the service of the Soviet government, is inconceivable. Preposterous.

And yet.

When he pulls over to get gas, he gets a cherry slushee. When he turns on the TV in the motel room he’s staying at for the evening, he is pleased (oddly but not, all the same) to see Woody the Woodpecker, even as his stomach twists.

It was so odd to realize that Russians were human, too, in more than the literal sense. But Alexei wasn’t anything else, beyond that initial moment, before he first opened his mouth.

Alexei changed Murray’s world. He probably didn’t even notice. Murray didn’t, certainly. Not without retrospect, which Alexei didn’t really have the time for.

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If Murray gets cherry slushees more frequently than he used to, no one’s about who knows or cares to call him out.

If maybe he wants to help Alexei drink slurpees vicariously from wherever he’s ended up, that’s for Murray alone to be concerned with.