Risky Business ｡ Stranger Things

44 : The Warriors

Darkness hovered outside the hospital windows, making every clean surface of the ward glean too brightly. The waxed floor shone with the harsh fluorescent lights and doctor coats seemed too white, too starched with bleach to rid them of blood. But the bloodstains were there, threaded into the very fibre of the thick material, the colour just stripped out by chemicals. The whole idea, the whole thought of blood, made Prue's head spin sickly even though she had never had a problem with blood before. Nancy and Jonathan had left Prue with the kids in the waiting room as they went to find Mrs Driscoll on level four. She didn't mind playing babysitter, she actually preferred it; she didn't want to see an old lady that had been flayed by the hands of Billy. No one was saying that he was the tool the Mind Flayer was using, but the knowledge was there, threaded and soaked deep under everyone's words and under their weary skin, just like the bloodstains in the white doctor coats. The Hawkins Hospital was strangely quiet and only had the bare minimum of staff on the second floor this time of night. A television buzzed somewhere and the nurse at the desk was chatting casually on the phone. Prue's leg bounced as Mike and Lucas manhandled a vending machine full of chocolate and candy, slapping at the glass, hoping to shake the chocolate free.

"Come on, you piece of shit!" Mike shouted. "That's not even my money to eat." The few coins he had loaded into the vending machine were actually Prue's that she had found at the bottom of the pockets of her overalls. A smirk twisted Prue's lip up as El made all the candy in the machine fall, wiping at her nose as she idly flipped through a magazine next to Max.

Prue looked to Will sitting beside her; he was fidgeting around too. "Can I ask you something?" she questioned softly. Will's brown eyes were wide but he nodded a little. Prue shifted around in the uncomfortable chair. "Last year when you were possessed—"

"You want to know if Billy's conscious when the Mind Flayer's controlling him, right?" Will rebutted quickly, already knowing exactly what the teenager wanted to know, what she needed to know.

"Right," she echoed.

Will nodded gravely. "I remember everything... I remember sending those soldiers down into the tunnel for the demodogs to get," he paused, swallowing down his sorrow, his guilt. "It's like being trapped in your body, like a bad dream, only it's not a dream. You can still see everything and feel everything. You just can't do anything to stop it... to stop him." The boy's words were low and dark and gooseflesh prickled along Prue's arms, over the bruises Billy had left on her forearms days ago: they were more yellow than purple now.

"So, Billy can still feel pain. When he went through the wall, he felt that?" Her throat was tight and the words barely squeezed out.

"He can feel his body breaking but he can't stop it," Will confirmed. Prue let out a shaking breath, looking away from the boy that knew too much about being possessed by a shadow monster. She remembered vividly when Will Byers had been wheeled into the lab on a gurney last year. She remembered his screams, his blood-curdling wails, as her father tried to help him, tried to figure out what wrong with him. She could only assume Billy was screaming and wailing too, in his mind at least, for the shadow monster had control of his tongue. "Can I ask you something now?" he asked, leaning forward, his hands curling around the armrest.

"Of course," she replied.

"Why did you go into the Upside Down?" His voice was clear and steady, his wide eyes blinking. Will couldn't begin to imagine why anyone would want to go into the hellish world that he had spent days in afraid and cold, but he was curious to know why the teenage girl sitting beside him had made a portal and crawled on through.

Prue considered the question for a long moment before answering the young boy that only deserved sunshine and happiness. "You know when you get a few lines of a song stuck in your head and it just keeps playing over and over, but never the whole song?" Will nodded, waiting for her to continue on. "And you get desperate to hear the rest of the song just so it feels complete and you can let it go? It's like that. I needed to see the Upside Down in full, so I could let it go from my mind."