#hystare

for just a moment, domesticity lives right here. funeral walls still scarred with old damage, bullet holes patched, windows filmed over with DUST AND TIME. habitable. “ wait really? ” it hardly lands before she's already in motion, momentum seizing her like grace mid-fall. beth is up from the table and off, chair legs scraping a startled protest, boots light against warped floorboards. it's an energy spark! decision rewound in her spine, sprinting toward the second room. it's been weeks, feels like months, of stillness and such an idea feels illicit. “ i'll be so fast, i swear! ” her voice ricochets back from the next room over, BUOYANT AND BRIGHT and threaded through with rummaging drawers opened too quickly, metal kissing metal as her fingertips find blade, pack shrugged on with the ease that comes with ritual. bethany speaks while she moves, words tumbling around themselves, “ think we'll find somethin' good? soup, maybe ... canned peaches? ” hope slips into such questions SIDEWAYS, peeking out from behind the ribs and testing the air.

for a moment, the world narrows to an image of shelves and dust-coated labels. peaches mean summers on the farm that didn't end up in smoke, soup means clear-polished hands wrapped around its warmth rather than blades. they are artifacts.

it begins with a call home,  something she doesn’t always do,  even if she did happen to be missing his voice.   what follows is a voicemail left,  bereft of anything useful   — like what time she’ll be at the house or whether she needs him to call back.   instead,  there is only her voice,  softened by the static that pervades all technological lines connecting Charlotte to the rest of the world,  telling him that it is,  in fact,  her calling and she’ll see him when she sees him.   it’s a picture made from the more harmless of the obvious,  hoping to hide what would otherwise also be plain yet in the painful sort of way.   she calls ahead to get something of a head start on her detective and yet the ironic way it goes is this:  he still sees her before she sees him.   she,  who has left herself vulnerable still  ( always,  perhaps )  to the unexpected.   hers,  being a nature inclined to move faster than a pattern can form..   now pressed up and intertwined strangely with his,  one that she thinks could never allow him to be outpaced,

no matter what,  no matter who; Charlotte should’ve seen this coming. / @hystare

amongst the flood of travellers pouring out of the dimly lit mouth of the greyhound terminal,  wearied by the liminality of a too - long bus ride packed shoulder to shoulder with indifferent strangers,  she appears like a bright spot of sun gliding along the murky surface of water.   the uncanny creature emerges from the spaces between here and there with steps lively,  not sluggish;   her face refreshed,  marred not by a single line of strain,  free to showcase in its unabashed entirety of her pleasurable surprise at spotting him off to the side   —   and the quick realization that he was already looking at her.   the body follows the head,  whipped into a slight dizziness from her double - take.     “  you’re not here waiting for me,  are you?  ”

it's catastrophically hopeful, such brittle buoyancy of a punctured balloon, an sos encoded in boyish bravado. the hair in question, tragic topography of half-shorn ambitions , this jagged battlefield where steve harrington's arrogance made its final stand. the evidence of such sits askew upon dustin's skull like a fool's cap, tufts pointing skyward in all angles that offend entire geometries. practically every strand bears the unmistakable signature of someone who should definitely never be allowed near scissors again.

eleven turns toward him with that owl-like precision, eyes dilating like wide moons. she is witnessing not merely a haircut, but a cosmic misalignment of one deeply unlucky child. with the innocence of someone identifying the location of the sun or the existence of wet water, she confirms: “  yes. it is noticeable. ”

the words exist like a collapsing star, unadorned and unsoftened, delivered with that gentle and fatal neutrality that only eleven could wield. it's a scalpel that isn't much aware of the fact that it's sharp. she leans in close, the tilt of her head subtly avian and inquisitive, her eyes tracing the chaotic architecture of chopped curls. “  maybe, if you do not move.. ” holds him still at the shoulders, as if testing her hypothesis. “  it will not be. ”