The thought doesn’t hit him when he would expect it to. It doesn’t come when her eyes are flying across the room to a scientist lookalike, when he’s holding her as the flashbacks leave her shaking, or when she’s sunk down too deep into the memories to smile or laugh. Instead it appears to him in flashes. So quick it takes several times before the full thought becomes coherent. It flickers past when her cheeks are red from the winter gusts or pink from the sidewalks in the summer. It startles him when she’s laughing and her hair is spread out wildly across the carpet. It gives him a jolt when she shyly reaches for his hand.
He isn’t afraid of what she went through, no matter how many times he wishes she never went through it at all. Nothing about the thought deters him from sticking to her side just as he has been since her return. It’s mainly a question of how.
How did they do it? There’s the physical things that jump out at him from time to time- the curls he loves to watch bounce around with her nods and words were once shorn down to her scalp. The forehead he presses kisses to was measured and tested and drawn on and tried. Just above where his fingers link with hers is the mark they gave her. Indelible and unchanging. Someone grabbed and twisted at her arms- the same ones that rushed to wrap around Max after she learned that Billy was staying in Hawkins to work instead of leaving for college and the same ones that pressed against his own whenever they sat close enough and the same ones that carried his little sister home when she fell off the tire swing at the park. He doesn’t let himself think beyond that, mainly because he knows she doesn’t want him to. It’s hard to process even just that.
Harder still are the less direct abuses. Someone saw her face split into a grin and they took notes. Someone saw her eyes brighten and they put security cameras in her prison cell. Someone heard what few words she then had to say and they exploited her nonetheless. Over and over again. Year after year. She was a number. To be calculated and manipulated as any other common variable. She looked at the sky like she could somehow melt into it. She had a stubborn order of favorite to least favorite ice cream flavors. She could notice if a friend Mike had known for years was hurting after only knowing them for a fraction of the time. None of those things translated into something as clipped and cold as a number. And yet somehow she’d been pushed into that role. Somehow someone had seen her and believed that her humanity should be reduced down to machinery.
She was a part of the puzzle. A gear in the wheel. A weapon in their barracks. A number.
He’ll never understand it, but he knows he should stop trying. It has never been pity guiding their relationship and it would be ridiculous if that cropped up now after she’d shown him so much strength.
Their noses bump together before a less planned-out kiss, and her blush radiates off her cheeks. As it spreads onto his own, the thought crops up again. She was a number. This sweet, beautiful girl was a number her whole life. He stops himself. The thought has been increasingly dormant lately, but on the rare occasions it does arise he can combat it with one word: was. She was abused and dehumanized and it will never make sense. She was a number.
His lips briefly catch hers. She’ll never be a number again. That much he knows. And when she lets her forehead rest against his, he knows that she’s sure of it too. Never again.