dream boy • stranger things

𝐭𝐡𝐫𝐞𝐞

Dustin carefully entered the house, not wanting to startle the creature, and also not wanting whatever weird ass thing he'd captured to startle his mother. He closed the door quietly behind him.

"So, how was it?" His mother asked.

"What?" The question caught Dustin by surprise. He was on edge about what he'd found outside in the trash can just a few moments earlier.

"The best night of the year of course." His mother replied cheerfully.

"Oh. That. It was good, yeah I had a lot of fun. Tubular."

"What's wrong with you?"

"Nothing."

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah."

"You're acting weird."

"Mom, he whined. I am not acting weird."

The thing jumped inside his trap. "Yeah, I uh, rigged the trap with a motor to look like I caught a ghost." He laughed. His mother started laughing too. "Just like in the movie."

She finally let him go to his room. "I told you to keep quiet." He scolded the creature. Once he finally got into his room, he decided to move his turtle into a separate container. He didn't know what thing things was but he decided he was keeping it.

"You hungry little guy?" He asked, looking down at it's cage.

He started dropping in some bits of his nougat chocolate bar into the cage to see if the creature would eat it. It started going out, then crawling back under the rock it'd been sitting under. "Oh, you don't like the light, sorry." He quickly switched off the light in its cage. It crawled out from under the rock and started eating the chocolate. "You like nougat too? So do I. You're pretty cute, you know that. I'm glad that I found you. Dartanion. I'm going to call you Dartanion, Dart for short."

As he slept that night, Dustin didn't notice that the creature was already begging to change. Begging to grow. Get stronger, more fierce. Dart was already starting to transform into the monster that he would soon become. But for now, Dustin remained unaware of the monster that he'd accidentally brought into his home. He slept like a baby that night, tired from along night out and a sugar crash from all the candy.

Later the next day, Dustin went over to the local library as quickly as he could on his bike, not bothering to throw up the kickstand as he arrived. He knew that he probably couldn't leave Dart alone for long, not knowing what kind of trouble the little guy could get in or whether or not his mother would come in to clean up his room and accidentally catch site of what he'd brought into their house.

He scrambled throughout the bookshelf, tracing his fingers along the spines and grabbing anything and everything he could find on mythological creatures, monsters, animals, and biology. He was determined to figure out the mystery, having a bit of a natural talent for science, and always keen on knowing more. He grabbed a lot more books on reptiles. The thing looked as though it might have been reptilian, at least.

"Mr. Henderson, you know the rules, five books at a time."

"Yeah. One, two, three, four, five." He counted out the books, feeling frustrated with the librarian.

"You already have five books taken out," She lectured him, tired of missing books.

"Wait, what is that!" Dustin yelled, pointing somewhere behind her. When she turned around, he grabbed the books and ran out of the library.

That was when Dustin also realized that he was going to be late for biology class. He tried as hard as he could to speed faster on his bike, pushing forward as hard as the pedals would go and running through the halls when he finally arrived. He threw open the door, accidentally slamming it against the wall in the process.