╭ ╮

━━━━ " 📂 "

𝙈 𝙊 𝙍 𝙏 𝘼 𝙇 𝙋 𝙍 𝙊 𝙅 𝙀 𝘾 𝙏 𝙄 𝙊 𝙉 𝙎

╰ ╯

INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA
1985

NOBODY LOOKED UP AS THE GIRL stepped off of the bus, a duffel bag slung over her shoulder and more eyeliner smudging at her eyes than anyone else who followed. It was only as she crossed the street, shuffling into a group of women wearing all too similar dresses with all too similar hairstyles - far more put together than the straggly, uneven blonde - that gruesome, judgemental wrinkle of the nose, the furrowing of the brows came as she brushed past them all without so much as a glance back, all too used to it.

Diana Seymour had taken on many appearances over the past couple of years, since that moment when she was pulled into the pool and landed on the dry concrete and everything had changed. Nothing was the same since then, and she had come to the conclusion that the faded black hair dye, all the piercings, pale skin and that hollow look and purple bags beneath her eyes that made her appear ghost-like was exactly what she had expected to look like after months in a programme like she had.

Before she reached the payphone outside the bus station, it was as something shocked her, and she came to a stop by a trash can, reaching into the depths of the duffel bag to pull out a particular hefty, leather-bound book, wrapped it in a scraggly t-shirt with an embroidered cross, logo and name, and threw it away. She refused to simply discard the gold chain around her neck, supposing she could sell it when she needed to.

Digging into the pockets of her jeans, she found the loose change from her bus fare and pushed the few coins needed into the awaiting slot, picking up the handset, fingers playing with the metal-wrapped wire hanging from it and could only hope that they still had the right number. The dial tone echoed through her, until eventually she heard a click.

"Yup?" The voice asked, so, so familiar and so, so welcome.

"Hi..." Diana held her arms tight to her, one covering the shadowed, exposed skin on her stomach, the warmth of the sun on her back. "Is that Wayne Munson?" She asked.

The man heaved a sigh. "Yeah, that's me." He replied, that southern-twinge to his words having only become stronger in her absence. "If this is one of those God-damn telemarketers again, I've told you time and time-"

"No, no, I'm not a telemarketer." She was grinning despite herself. "Yeah, I was wondering if I could talk to Eddie, if he's there?"

Wayne's words softened, just slightly, as he realised that perhaps the young girl on the other end of the phone wasn't about to ask him about his TV or insurance policies, not that he had any to begin with. "He might be around here somewhere..." Diana listened as he put the phone down on the table and stood up, beginning to shout his nephew's name far louder than he needed to, considering they lived in a trailer.

Heavy footsteps could be heard approaching the discarded phone. "Yup?"

Not caring if she looked too crazy, Diana's lips spread into a smile. "Eddie?" She asked, feet padding over the sidewalk in small circles, wrapping herself in the wire attaching the phone. Her fingers tingled in the heat, warm with familiarity.

"Yeah, that's me." Came the reply.

Her heart thudded in her ears, didn't quite know what to say, filled with some sense of relief, some sense of anxiety and utmost fear that it would have been too long. "How would you feel about driving up to Indianapolis?" She asked.

"Jesus Christ." He breathed out. "Di? What the fuck - where are you?"

"Near the bus station. I don't really know." She replied, her arm wrapped tight around her stomach again, swallowing back those nerves, that feeling of the hair on the back of her neck rising in shame. "I don't have enough money to get to Hawkins." Diana admitted in a small voice.

"God, yeah, I'll leave now. Do you need anything else? Clothes? Food? Shit, I don't know." Eddie asked.

"Good music would be great. And some cigarettes?"

"I'll be there soon, Di, promise." Eddie was already scrambling to get his shit together, car keys rattling. "Don't go any-"

The line went dead, and Diana let out a sigh, placing the phone back on the hook.

✧

Diana didn't know how she had stayed still. Every inch of her was itching to somehow find a way out of there, but she really didn't know Indianapolis that well and had nowhere to go with the little money left. She was somehow terrified of seeing Eddie again, because it had been so long, and she had been forced away from Hawkins, unable to contact anyone.

She felt sick, a thudding, dull pain that sat in her stomach that only worsened as time passed. With nothing to do but sit there and watch people, her fingers drummed a dull pattern into the bare skin on her knee, there was no way she could feel any better about it. Travelling since dawn, awake since the moment she was dragged out of her bed by the burly orderlies who were there to do nothing but force them into brainless zombies and told her that she was to leave, everything within her ached.

There were bruises all over her body, the remnants of those pills they made them take lingering behind, a headache thumping in her ears as she waited for Eddie to come. Somehow so oblivious of her surroundings, she picked at the skin around her bitten fingernails until blood pooled around them.

Certainly, Diana was not scared of Eddie. Her time in New Hope had only pushed for her awaiting seeing him again. She hated praying, but each time she did in those awful lectures during which her hands were most likely bound together, fingers pointed towards the heavens, she had just waited to see him, dreamed about the days when she would wait in her room for that familiar rumble of his van's engine so she could escape out of her hell home once more.

But it had been months since she had seen him, and the time she needed for supposed reformation had done nothing but make how she felt before worse. And the tremors in her hands as she tried to still them against her knees spoke for themselves.

Somehow it seemed simultaneously hours and just minutes since the phone call. And she waited patiently, used to doing nothing but sit there for now, itching, picking, waiting, trying to stop herself from questioning if he was even coming at all, the need for self-doubt somehow prominent now.

And then she heard it. Eddie's van, shitty, old and held together by duct tape, clunking down the road, swerving between traffic and cutting off the taxi rank as he pulled up outside the bus station, practically falling out the door and forgetting to lock it as she pulled herself to her feet, feeling sick.

"Jesus, what the hell." He said, scooping her up into a hug before she could even say anything. "Thought you were dead, Di. Jesus, fuck, you look like it. Shit."

"You dyed your hair." The girl frowned as he put her back down, and she finally got a look at him. "And you got more piercings?" Her eyes squinted in the sun, bypassing the question so, so easily. "Lip and eyebrow? Geez."

"Yeah, yeah I did." He nodded, and he was looking at her like it was some kind of miracle. He swallowed, awkwardly, like he had finally seen her stood there and living, not like some apparition, and seen the state she was in. "Shit." Eddie repeated, shaking his head, eyes flickering over her, before he realised what he was doing. "That yours?" He asked, pointing out the bag.

She nodded. "Yeah, didn't have a lot to bring back." Diana let him pull the strap off her shoulder, hauling it over his back with ease.

"C'mon." He gestured towards the van. "Before I get towed." He added, glancing around, noticing the looks and glares they were getting. "Jesus, it's like nobody's ever seen someone with a bit of personality before." Eddie said, loud enough for them all to hear.

Diana followed behind him, as he basked in the disgust they showed, the red, demonic face on the front of his Hellfire shirt, the black sleeves rolled up to his elbows. She shrunk away from it, somehow, didn't find the same joy in the obvious eyes upon them, sliding into the front seat.

"What music?" Eddie asked.

"Just whatever you'd been listening to." Diana replied, as he twisted the key in the ignition. Familiar chords began to play, loud enough to drown out the city, the sun beating down through the window. Eddie moved to turn it down, before pulling out from in front of the bus station, following a familiar path out of the city and towards Hawkins. He used to visit the city all the time, back when his dad was around, and knew his way out like the back of his hand.

When they were on the road again, windows rolled all the way down, he held out a pack of Marlboros to her. "Go on, have one." He urged, pushing one up from the block of filters with his thumb.

"Thanks." She took one out of habit, her caution thrown out of the window, reaching down into the side pocket, finding what she had expected to. He still kept a lighter there. Diana reached over the console as Eddie stuck out his chin, eyes half on the road, and she lit his first, then her own.

It was strange. She hadn't smoked since being taken from Hawkins, and slipping back into the habit was more than welcome, that ease of memory falling into her limbs as she took the first drag, harsher than she remembered. She blew smoke out, and it swarmed back into her face, over the pale, pinched skin, and Diana would only welcome it.

Her gaze fell on the slowly diminishing houses as they left behind the suburbs of the city and melded into the countryside. She could feel how Eddie kept glancing at her and she couldn't help but shiver, even if the action was something she had known so long.

He reached to turn the volume down further. "How did you get out?" Eddie asked.

"I... guess, well..." Diana sighed, "I got kicked out."

"What?"

"Yeah... didn't do well with the programme..." The shame crept up her back. "Couldn't follow the steps. They couldn't... couldn't fix me, that.... the design of the programme didn't work for me."

Eddie didn't say anything for a while as she wallowed in it, feeling ashamed right down to the tips of her fingers and toes, biting her tongue. "It didn't work for you?" He repeated eventually.

She shook her head, eyes firmly set on the stretch of road ahead.

It was all very matter-of-fact. But Eddie hadn't seen her for months and still knew, just from how voice, that it was more than that, and he didn't press anymore. The girl that sat before him was nothing like what he remembered. The spirit was still there, the rebellion, the empty holes climbing up her ears, the one in her nose, the tattoos on her arms. But there was so much different. Too much.

He didn't question it, but he knew it was wrong, that she wasn't telling him the whole truth. But how could he suggest otherwise? Her arms remained curled up on her lap, over her stomach like she was somehow cold, or uncomfortable, knees pulled up to her chest, smoking the dregs of her cigarette, stubbing the butt out in the tray in the console.

"How's Corroded Coffin?" She asked, deciding against wallowing in the pitiful reminder. It had been hard enough to live within Hawkins with just the horrors of what Nancy Wheeler had told her was called the Upside Down bearing down on her shoulders. With the memory of New Hope too, it seemed impossible. But she needed to finish high school somewhere, and there was no possibility of her starting anew in a city across the country. She hardly had enough money to get to Indianapolis, let alone survive somewhere else entirely.

"Good. Got a new drummer, started in February." Eddie replied. "Called Gareth, Dougie brought him along one day."

"And Jeff's still playing?"

"Course he is. Couldn't drag him away from the guitar even if the world was ending around him." Eddie said, his thumb tapping against the wheel. "I'm still singing."

"Of course. Managed to graduate?" Despite the shake of his head, Eddie was grinning. That was the girl he remembered, her lips setting into an amused smirk. "Thought so. '86 is your year though, right?"

"Right." Eddie nodded. "Can't have you walking the stage alone."

"God forbid."

They were reaching the suburbs of the city now. The city blocks slowly becoming more seperated by larger and larger patches of green. Trees, moss, ivy, those prickly brushes that always used to snag on the white woollen tights of her childhood. In the summer, with that sticky sun pouring through the canopy of leaves, and not in the dregs of autumn with the mounds of dead, orange leaves that liked to taunt her from the past, it seemed almost magical.

Eddie glanced to his right, taking his eyes the road for the briefest of seconds. It was by no means a new sight for him, living in a trailer park and all, but Diana was all but pressed up against the glass of the window. There was a small circle of condensation from her breath.

"What, you never seen trees before?" He joked, still somehow trying to gauge just how traumatised his ex-girlfriend was. It had been months, mere months, and she was different. Changed. More mature, experience in an area of life that he would never understood. In that moment of hearing her voice on the end of a crackling phone line it was almost like nothing had happened. Like there hadn't just been a cessation of phone calls, or a band practise she suddenly missed, and he didn't drive over to her parents house after asking around for a day or two if anyone had seen her.

Diana's hands clasped against the ridge on the door as though she were only moments from reaching to open the door to jump out and run into the edge of the trees. "They didn't let us look outside." She murmured, without even thinking about it.

Eddie decisively focused on the road, hands gripping anxiously to the picked-at rubber of the steering wheel. "They didn't let you look outside?" He repeated slowly, because he had never heard anything so insane. She nodded, warily glancing his way. Eddie let out a slow huff of air. "Di, I know you don't want to talk about it... but I've been going crazy these past few months and now you're here and I picked you up and they didn't fucking let you look outside?"

"Yeah. Something like that." Diana replied. "It's... it's like a tiered rewards system. Like how McDonalds have that free breakfast on your fifth purchase sort of bullshit. But in reverse? You'd get points for doing something bad, like looking out the window. Couldn't look out the window... they thought you were planning your escape or some shit. Couldn't talk to people, couldn't turn the lights off in your room, couldn't look at boys. Got points if you didn't do what they wanted you to do, regardless if it was in the rules or not. Get no points for long enough, work the programme, you move up." She shrugged, as if that was it. As if it was all as easy as that.

"You didn't move up then, I'm guessing." Eddie replied.

"Nope." She crossed her arms tight across her chest as they entered the town, away from the patches of green. "They thought I was high-risk... I guess for suicide or something," she brushed over it again with a shrug, "so they kept an eye on me, wanted me to take all these pills, put me in solitary, made me sleep in the hallway. I didn't pray, I kept talking, looking at people, but that's nothing. I wasn't high risk, I just didn't want to work the programme."

"Good." Eddie swallowed, tongue running over the metal of his lip piercing. In the sweltering heat, even that wasn't cold anymore and the lack of sensation was undermined by the tension in his shoulders and the story he was hearing and managed to create a ripple effect, sending a shockwave of goosebumps down his spine. "You shouldn't have. I'm glad you didn't. And that's why they sent you home? Because you didn't work... didn't work the programme?"

"Didn't want to. Couldn't force myself, no matter how much they punished me for it." Diana's nose wrinkled, and she reached for another cigarette, lighting it quickly and taking a drag. "I guess, after months of everything failing, they decided they couldn't actually fix me... that and I stole a sewing needle from one of the seminars and gave another girl a piercing." She smiled again, shaking her head. "They couldn't fix me in all the time I was there, so why should they try?"

Eddie didn't know what to say to that. He didn't know what he could say to any of it. It all sounded crazy, like she had made it up and was telling him a spooky story by the campfire like she was a kid again. But every bone in his body knew it was the truth. Knew that she had experienced every single bit of it, and knew that she was condensing everything down into a minimal explanation to try and give him a proper explanation to her second - but this time, explained - disappearance from Hawkins without actually giving him the details. She didn't need to. He wouldn't ask again.

Diana tapped ash out of the window, rolling it down even further so she could gaze out and see all that life, all that vibrant green that she had been denied. She cleared her throat and took a premptive drag, blowing smoke out of the window before her gaze travelled across the dashboard to him.

"I don't want to assume anything... and I know that it'll be tight, considering it's already you and your Uncle-" she began, although she was quickly cut off.

"You're staying with us." Eddie confirmed. "You think I'd drive all the way out to pick you up and dump you in their hellhole? With all those goddamn crosses and bibles and everything has to be an awful pale shade of a proper colour?" He shook his head. "Uncle Wayne'll understand. You think I'm some kind of monster?"

"You?" Diana scoffed. "You couldn't hurt a fly even if you tried."

She fell back into the familiar silence of existence after that, and they drove along to the noise of music she didn't recognise. It had been months since she left. Of course she had missed things. And all because of them. It didn't take a genius to figure out that the vague 'their' and 'them' were her parents. Ronald and Mary, who didn't care what she had been through and why she was acting different, and just wanted their daughter back regardless. Who wanted it so much that they would let her disappear again and fade from existence within their nuclear façade, kept away from ruining it all with her misbehaviour and misdemeanours in some teenage penitentiary across state lines.

And in the terror, in the confrontation of her life at New Hope, with the rules and expectations and the staff's need to break her down into nothingness, Diana would never admit to anyone that she had once wanted to change. That she could forget that the past two years never happen and revert to the perfection she once was.

The blonde hair, almost straight and pinned back away from her face. The sweaters and below-the-knee skirts in pastel plaid. The gold cross around her neck that laid flat on the skin between her collarbones seemed to sting a little less when she remembered it was there. The buckled shoes and the diamond studs in her ears. A little lip gloss that was scented like strawberries.

Bible study after school on Fridays, and sometimes church on Sundays. Bake sales and raising money for charity and visits out to Indianapolis for shopping every few months. The car she was promised for her senior year if she kept practising driving with her dad when he didn't go to work. Sticky summers at the pool and the river, vanilla ice cream cones and donating old clothes.

And then she remembered, a harsh jump back to reality, that they had sent her there. They didn't want to try anymore and decided instead to pay someone else to try for them. They had hired the men to come and kidnap her from bed in the middle of the night, who would take her to the place that somehow became more of a hell to her than wherever she had been taken to on that night at Steve Harrington's.

They made her go there. They had agreed to it, to all of it - they paid for it. For the medicine that would make her drowsy and lifeless, the bruises all up her arms, the silence, the beatings, the restraints, the suicide watch. They had asked for it to happen, they had paid for it to happen.

When she had changed, she knew it had been sudden. When she disappeared for a week and they were left wondering where their precious daughter had gone and aforementioned precious daughter had come back with hallucinations and a shell of her former self, Diana had used to comfort herself in the distance created between herself and her parents was because of that sudden change. But it had been a year, a year for them to adjust and try and level with her and try and accept that she would never be the same person as she was before November of 1983.

Diana would never be able to forgive them.

"They're going to know I'm back." She said, as she felt heat to her fingertips and realised she had spaced out again and spilt unsmoked cigarette ash all over her lap. "They'll have known I was coming back before I did." Diana quickly stubbed it out, before she burnt herself.

"That doesn't matter." Eddie waved off her concerns with nods in time to the beat of the music. Pink Floyd. "You're staying in the Trailer Park. Hawkins is a... decently sized place. Maybe you won't run into them."

"I'll have to go there at some point." She said, picking at the skin on her knee. "I don't have any of my stuff. God knows if it's even still there."

"It will be." He replied, with confidence. When she gave him a look, eyebrows raised and looking entirely apprehensive, he just shrugged. "With all your devil-worshipping, they'll be terrified you cursed everything in there."

The corners of her lips turned up into a smile. A proper smile, full and almost entirely happy.

"What?" He narrowed his eyes. "You didn't curse everything in there, did you?"

"No." Diana shook her head. "I just remembered that drew a red pentagram on the box I kept my old Bible in."