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“Murray, look! Look, it’s not rigged! It’s not rigged—”
It feels, at first, like he’s been punched in the solar plexus – a nonsensical, dull impact, what hit me? It isn’t until he moves the stuffed toy and looks down at the red stain spreading across his shirt that he feels the pain.
He shot me, Alexei thinks, as the world slows down, as Murray stares at him wide-eyed across the crowd of children running and laughing like nothing is wrong. Grigori shot me and walked away. In the middle of a carnival. He shot me.
Murray is there to catch him by the time his knees buckle, drags him into the shadows between tents because the mercenary could come back, any minute now. There’s too much blood where there shouldn’t be, sticky on his hands and in the back of his throat. It hurts, it hurts, and the fear is worse than the pain.
He’s going to die. He’s going to die, here, on the ground in a field in America while music plays and fireworks burst and the countdown to the apocalypse keeps ticking, because he was an idiot who wanted to have fun. He’s only thirty. He’s never done anything with his life but win a stupid carnival game and build a gate to let monsters into the world.
Murray is kneeling in front of him, pressing his shirt to the bullet wound, mouth moving. Alexei focuses over the ringing in his ears and hears “—keep pressure on it, I’m going to get help. Just stay here till I come back.”
Alexei opens his mouth to say something sarcastic, something brave, like Where the hell would I go exactly, but his breath catches and hitches and the only thing that comes out is a breathy whine like a wounded animal. He is going to die if he stays here. He doesn’t want to die alone.
He grabs Murray’s wrist, stopping the man as he starts to get up, and gasps, “Murray. Don’t leave me. Please.”
Murray looks up and down the length of the booths. Looks at the dark mess of Alexei’s shirt. Swears to himself in Russian and English. Says, “Can you walk?”
No, absolutely not, that sounds like the worst possible thing to do right now, Alexei thinks. He grits his teeth.
“Yes,” he says.
He manages by some miracle of willpower not to pass out when Murray pulls him upright, still holding the bloody denim to the wound. Murray is not a particularly strong man, but he slings one of Alexei’s arms over his shoulders and holds steady.
One step. Another step. The multicolored lights are too bright, his vision spinning, and he is absolutely not going to make it. He focuses on Murray’s solid shoulders holding him up and drags his feet onward. Keep going. Just for a little while, keep going.
He’s not a brave man. He’s not a soldier. But he doesn’t have a choice.
His senses have narrowed to a blurry tunnel by the time they reach the car. He can barely hear Joyce’s voice and Murray’s urgent reply, doesn’t think he could parse the words even if they were in a language he understood. He lets himself be maneuvered into the back seat and collapses against the cool leather and Murray’s warm, sticky skin. Sweat or blood, he doesn’t know. Maybe both.
The engine is running by the time Hopper shouts from somewhere to their right, shakes the car vaulting into the passenger seat. His eyes are closed but he catches the word Alexei, the worried tone, and thinks, so Fat Rambo knows my name after all.
They didn’t leave him. They could have left him, but they didn’t leave him. The back of a car is a better place to drift away than the cold grass and dirt.
Alexei reaches up blindly in search of Murray’s hand, interlaces their fingers when he finds it. There’s a moment of nothing, of stillness, and then Murray squeezes his hand and holds on.
Murray is talking to him, Alexei realizes distantly, run-on sentences which don’t seem to be conveying anything important. Trying to keep him awake, probably. He just can’t remember why he’s supposed to stay awake.
“—to the hospital and you’ll be just fine, Alyosha, you just have to hang on till then, I promise I’m going to fix this but you have to stay awake, come on, Lyosha— Alexei— please—”
He drifts, in and out of awareness, for a while. There is shouting, movement, cold hands under his shirt, sharp stinging pain which fades into a dull ache. He wonders vaguely why his bunk keeps jostling – maybe an earthquake, but he hasn’t heard the facility alarms go off. His chest hurts. He prefers the nightmares where he at least understands what’s happening.
When he surfaces again he’s in a different car, this one with a roof. There’s a radio crackling behind him, and a small dark-skinned girl sitting across from him with a box of medical supplies on her lap, looking none too pleased. Alexei manages to swivel his head toward the front seats of the car, and discovers they are occupied by two slightly older and paler children. The one who isn’t driving has a nasty black eye. They are both wearing cute little sailor uniforms.
It’s not terribly surprising that he would be hallucinating, Alexei supposes. He’s not a medical doctor, but he can tell he’s lost a lot of blood.
“Where am I?” he asks the car in general. He figures if this is his hallucination, the people in it should be able to speak Russian. Probably.
None of the children pay any attention to him. He’s not sure whether this is a point for or against their objective existence.
Either way, his attention doesn’t seem to be required currently. He closes his eyes and lets the bickering he doesn’t understand (shouldbebacktherehelpingEl, weAREhelpingandincidentallydrivingtowardthegoddamnhospital, guysshutupIhavetolistentotheradio) carry him out to sea again.
When he wakes up this time, he is still in the same car but it’s stopped moving, and someone has just slapped him in the face. He groans, blinks, and focuses in time to catch the slapper – a fourth child, as far as he can make out, this one with curly hair and missing teeth – standing over him with his hand raised, ready to strike again. When he sees that Alexei is awake, he lowers his hand and grimaces in apology, then ducks out of the car. Alexei stares uncomprehendingly as the child reappears with part of a radio set, says a sentence into it, and shoves it in Alexei’s face.
“Who are all of you—” Alexei starts to ask. And then the radio crackles, and Alexei has never in his life been happier to hear an American’s voice.
“Alexei? Dustin says you’re awake? Can you hear me?”
“Murray? Where are you? Who are these children? What—”
“I’ll explain everything later, my friend,” Murray says quickly. “Little busy right now. Glad you’re still alive. What’s Planck’s constant?”
“What? You said you had it memorized,” Alexei says numbly. The gate. Dear god, they’re still trying to close the gate, and they’re going to fail because of course Murray doesn’t actually know the number. Murray isn’t an engineer, Murray isn’t an anything, is just a kind madman who happened to speak Russian, and Alexei is—
He’s awake, for now. He can do this one thing.
“Yeah, yeah, you can hold it over me later when we all survive,” Murray is saying. “Just tell me.”
Alexei takes a deep breath, bandages tight over his ribs, and tells him.
He listens as Murray translates the numbers for someone else. The children surrounding the car wait in tense silence. He can hear crickets. He thinks they might be in a field.
Joyce, on the radio – still alive – says something short, a confirming sentence. The children erupt in cheers. Alexei feels like throwing up.
“Alexei, my friend,” Murray says, “you just saved the world.”
“Yaaay,” Alexei says weakly, and blacks out.
He wakes up – he wakes up, which is a nice surprise – in an actual bed. The pain in his torso is blessedly absent, and it’s quiet. The only background noise is a faint hum of fluorescent lighting.
For a moment he thinks he’s still in the facility. That his life has continued as planned after all, nothing ever went wrong, his last few days’ worth of memories were only some bizarre dream. This should be a welcome thought. It shouldn’t leave him feeling hollow.
The illusion is gone as soon as he cracks his eyes open. He’s never been in this room before. His surroundings are mostly a white blur without his glasses, but he makes out blinking lights on equipment in the corner, a tube in his arm. Ah. A hospital.
His brain is working slower than usual, which is frustrating. He’s still trying to figure out what the connectible dots even are when a woman – a nurse – hurries in. She shines a light in his eyes, checks his IV, begins filling him in on everything. At least, that’s what Alexei assumes she’s doing. He can’t understand a goddamn word she’s saying.
The staff think he can speak English. He isn’t chained to the bed. They don’t know who he is.
He smiles and nods at the nurse, keeps his mouth shut and prays. Smiles and nods.
The passage of time happens, although he is doing a terrible job at paying attention to it. Someone hands him a juice box at one point. His eyeglasses reappear. Alexei muses on the efficacy of the painkillers they must be pumping into him. American pharmaceuticals have their advantages.
There are a few small vases of sort-of-fresh flowers on his bedside table, and a card. Alexei examines it, sipping overly-sweet apple juice through a tiny straw. It reads, in the careful block print of someone who has never written in Cyrillic before in their life, Sorry toward striking you on the confront. Welcome into America! It’s signed with four names in Latin script, which he hopes belong to the children he remembers.
He honestly cannot decide whether the message is supposed to be sarcastic.
He dozes. Drinks more juice. Tries to calculate his odds of successfully making a break for it in his current state, decides they’re pretty low. Is just starting to think he might be in trouble after all when somebody knocks on his open doorframe.
It’s Joyce and Murray, both looking equally pleased and sheepish as they peek in. He gives them a little wave, not sure what he might be giving away by speaking.
“Hello, Alexei,” Joyce recites in Russian. “I am glad you are awake.” It’s obviously rote, but her accent isn’t half bad. He beams at her.
Murray nudges the door closed with his foot, managing to only look averagely suspicious as he does so. “It should be okay,” he says, “they’re too busy to spend much time listening in. They shouldn’t ask you too many questions – I told them you’re my cousin from Minnesota who’s a little,” he taps his head, “you know.”
Alexei quells the urge to roll his eyes. It’s objectively not a bad cover story. They are trying to get him out of here in one piece, which is more than he would have expected. He can play a slow American for a few days.
“Thank you,” he says. “For… everything.” For not leaving me. “You closed the gate?”
“Yep. Thoroughly exploded.”
“No one turned to dust,” Joyce confirms, translated through Murray. “Except the… Terminator man?”
Alexei snorts. “Grigori? Good.”
Murray nods. There’s a tightness around his eyes, a hint of genuine anger. “Screw that guy.”
It’s a slow, halting conversation, Alexei still not entirely focused and Murray having to translate between him and Joyce. It’s still a relief not to be alone. There are many parts to what happened that night, apparently, and he missed most of them – there was a monster that came through the gate, and the mall caught on fire as they tried to stop it. Townspeople died. He can sense there are some things they aren’t telling him, and he understands. Hawkins has been strange since before the Russian gate was built. The things his team did were only possible because the Americans tried the same things first.
“It’s all been covered up by now anyway,” Murray tells him. “The feds figured out their official story real fast. Rabid rats, fireworks accident, blah blah. You’ve been in a, um… medical sleep?”
“Coma?”
“Coma, yes, for a few days. The bullet missed all of the important parts. You’re a lucky man.”
Alexei remembers the terror of feeling the world fading away. He is lucky, he supposes. A very lucky man.
Joyce says something to Murray, looking slightly anxious. She always looks slightly anxious, so it’s not particularly worrying in this case. “She says she’s glad you stuck around, we couldn’t have closed the gate without you,” Murray relays. “Hopper is, uh… busy, but he said to say thank you too. He’s decided you’re one of the good guys.”
Alexei snickers. He’ll believe that when he hears it in person, from the man himself.
Still, though. One of the good guys. It’s a nice thought.
“What are you going to do now?” Murray asks him, later. “Once you’re discharged, I mean. Planning to chase that American dream after all?”
Joyce has gone by now, offering a half-coherent explanation about her children and ruffling Alexei’s hair as she left. It’s just the two of them, together in what could generously be described as comfortable silence. Murray has pulled one of the horrible hospital chairs up to the bedside and started messing with the flowers, theoretically trying to freshen them up but in practice achieving the opposite. He looks tired, Alexei thinks. He’s wearing a new shirt that doesn’t quite fit him right, and he smells like old sweat and liquor. Alexei thinks about a hand gripping his, about the first time in years someone called him Alyosha.
“I don’t know,” he says. “America will not let me become a citizen, you know that. If I walked into a government building here I would not walk back out. Besides, this country is… fun, yes, but still garbage. Like the cherry ices. Sweet and cheap and tasty and fake.”
“Rigged,” Murray says. “I know, believe me. I told you.”
Alexei hums. Murray crushes a flower petal between his forefinger and thumb.
“So back to Russia, then?” There’s an edge to his voice that Alexei can’t quite identify. Disappointment, maybe. Frustration that Alexei is still what he is, that two days of chaos haven’t supplanted a lifetime of identity. He will not be what they want him to be, won’t turn double agent and spend his time in a different fluorescent room giving out his country’s secrets. He doesn’t want to deal in any country’s secrets anymore. He just wants to feel the breeze on his face.
“Russia tried to execute me,” he says. “I could blend in better there than here, but they might still be looking for me. I’m not sure where I can go. I’m an international fugitive!"
Murray snorts, but doesn’t meet Alexei’s eyes. He seems nervous, fidgeting in his chair. Rubs the back of his neck reflexively.
“Alexei, I—” he starts. Swallows, starts again. “I—it might shock you to hear this, but I don’t have a lot of friends. Contacts, sure, but not friends.”
“I can't imagine why,” Alexei says, deadpan. “Surely it is not because you live in a bunker in the woods and threaten all your visitors with a shotgun.”
“All right, shut up. Commie bastard.”
“Capitalist pig.”
“Can’t live there anymore, though,” Murray says eventually, once they’ve stopped giggling. “Jim and his little girlfriend compromised me to hell and back. Fifteen years, up in smoke.” He makes a little explosion-y gesture with his hands. “I should’ve been thinking about moving anyway, I have a feeling Hawkins isn’t going to get any safer. Been wanting to visit New Mexico for a while.”
“Aliens?” Alexei guesses. It seems like a safe bet.
“Bingo. You a fan?”
“Not really,” Alexei admits. He wasn’t alive for the Tunguska event and he wouldn’t have wanted to be; his uncle used to tell stories about it, almost indistinguishable from science fiction. He’s learned over the past few years that scientific inquiry is all well and good, but sometimes you have to be able to tell yourself that you understand the world around you.
“Oh,” Murray says. “Yeah. I guess not.”
He looks… deflated. And a tiny little lightbulb goes on in Alexei’s head.
He’ll blame it on the painkillers, later, that it took him this long to realize. But Dr. Alexei Kuznetsov is not stupid. He has not gotten to this point in life by being stupid.
“Murray,” he says, “are you asking me to come with you?”
Murray freezes. His expression goes from dejection to pure terror. “I mean—no, obviously not, that’s a stupid idea, paranoid bastard and a Russian government agent, I wouldn’t put myself in that line of fire, I just—I thought—maybe you—”
He trails off abruptly when Alexei puts a hand on his arm.
“I would like that,” Alexei says, “very much. If you are willing.”
“Oh, thank god,” Murray sighs. He slumps in his chair, his whole body relaxing toward their point of contact. “I’d be worried sick if you were wandering around with no one keeping an eye on you, Alyosha.”
“I know,” Alexei says. He squeezes Murray’s arm. "It'll be fun. Like a road trip! One condition, though— you have to do all the fighting if we meet aliens.”
“What? Why just me? You won that game, you’re a great shot.”
“With darts! From ten feet away! Not with a gun!”
“The principle is the same. I can teach you.”
The world is still here, and so are they. Everything is going to be just fine.