Chapter Text
𝓣he first thing she remembered was the hum.
Not a sound exactly — more like something living beneath the silence, thrumming in her bones.
If grief had a voice, it would sound like this; low, endless, and almost kind.
Sometimes, in dreams, she saw the flash — a blinding white that swallowed the walls of the strangely familiar room, the static crawling up the metal doors like frost. But when she woke, it's gone; and the hum remains.
Evelyn Marsh only knew fragments now.
A mother's hand fading into shadow.
A hallway that smells like metal and ozone.
A name scratched into the corner of a file — hers, half-burned.
They told her she was lucky to have survived. That forgetting was mercy.
But mercy, she was learning, felt a lot like losing yourself on purpose.
Some nights, she swore she could hear her own voice calling back to her,
"Remember me."
And somewhere in Hawkins, beneath the hiss of radio waves and flickering streetlights, something would answer.
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The morning chill seeped through the car windows, the scenery flashing by looked both foreign and familiar — like a photograph she's seen a thousand times but never lived inside.
The old Welcome to Hawkings sign leaned slightly to one side, rust clinging to it like a memory.
The car radio crackled softly before Material Girl's intro started flowing through the speakers.
Her aunt, Elaine, turned the volume up like she was scoring a movie montage, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel in perfect sync with the beat.
"Now this," she said with a grin, "is what I call road-trip music."
Evelyn groaned in dismay. Her aunt had been blasting the song at least ten times a day ever since it was released. It wasn't exactly horrible. Evelyn actually liked it at first.
But the amount of times she was forced to listen to it repeatedly made her want to either rip her hair out or jump off a cliff.
At the moment, she was somewhere in between.
Ignoring her niece's discomfort, Elaine started singing along to the lyrics, her off-key enthusiasm filling the car with the kind of confidence only someone completely tone-deaf could have.
After a few more minutes of listening to her aunt's torture playlist, Evelyn was finally free of her moving cell as they reached the driveway of the new-bought house.
It wasn't a suburban two-story house on the cul-de-sac, but it was decent — beige siding, a slanted roof that needed cleaning, and a porch light that flickered when her aunt jiggled the switch. The kind of place people drove past without really seeing.
Evelyn followed her aunt up the walkway, suitcase wheels rattling against the uneven path. The late afternoon sun made the windows glow, a few dry leaves scraping along the pavement in rhythm with the breeze.
Her aunt fumbled with the keys, muttering about the previous owner's "poor taste in locks." She unlocked the front door, pushing it open with her hip. The air inside was faintly dusty, the smell of new paint still clinging to the walls. Boxes lined the entryway, half-unpacked.
Elaine sighed, tossing her purse on the counter.
"Home sweet home," she said, collapsing on the couch.
Evelyn nodded, her eyes scanning the small living room — beige carpet, a soft brown couch, a kitchen that opened into the space with white cabinets and a window that looked out onto the street.
For a moment, it almost felt peaceful — like maybe quiet towns really could offer new beginnings, untouched by whatever came before.
But peace never seemed to last long in Hawkins, did it?