The hospital was too clean.
The walls echoed with a hollow resonance, hard and unsettling. Neat corners cut through the world like razors, untouched by the slow collapse of rot and hunger. Too sharp and neat. Too white.
Perfect in a way that seemed unnatural and fake.
Will fidgeted with his thin blanket, shifting uncomfortably in the open-backed gown they'd given him. Stripped of his filth-covered clothes and awaiting the doctor's return, he obediently let his mother half-crush his hand.
That, at least, was a comfort. His mom still smelled like old smoke and detergent, still wore the cardigan with a small hole near the collar she insisted she'd repair eventually. Hair more tangled than usual, wrists just as thin. Delicate wrinkles sprawled from the corners of her eyes, and when she looked up at him with a tight smile, they formed around her mouth as well.
Imperfect.
Real.
He squeezed her hand, twitching a little when a solid knock rang out from the closed door. The Nurse entered in a smooth whirl of stiff fabric and shuffling paper.
He couldn't stop staring at how white the walls were. Even Danny's safehouse had a thin film over (streaked into?) the fresh paint.
"I left a note for your brother." His mom said softly, thumb stroking back and forth over his knuckles.
"Oh." The sound sat strangely in his mouth. "That's… good? That's good!" He forced a shaky smile, but his mom was unconvinced.
"Alright William Byer, was it?"
They both looked up at the nurse's question, nodding and letting her explain her way through taking his blood pressure and heartbeat. Will didn't remember his gown was open in the back until after he'd been weighed, and fought the warm flush in his cheeks.
Her pen scribbled notes into a clipboard as she asked about health history, confirming vaccinations with his mom.
The wall clock's second hand spun smoothly instead of ticking, a thin red line against white and black.
It felt so fake.
Will took deep breaths in, exhaling slowly as icy cold metal pressed against his back to listen to his lungs. He coughed on accident, apologizing through the last of the rasps and clearing his throat loud enough to ring faintly within their hard box of a room.
The nurse was speaking again, but he wasn't really listening any more, letting her prod and shine lights wherever. A laminated diagram on the wall showed a cutaway of the human body, red blood vessels sprawling a tangled web across darker organs. Lines pointed out the names of the parts and bones. Ribs to cartilage, straps of tendons down to hips and-
Barbra choking on a gasp, bone slithered between twitching muscle, shining slick and heavy as blood spread in fern frost spirals across the floor-
Will pulled his head away from the tongue depressor, the sharp taste too much like iron. His mouth watered, throat closing up as he squirmed away from the reaching hands. His mother must have read something in his expression, because she snatched the waste bin from the corner and shoved it under his face just in time.
He emptied his stomach in a quick purge, hacking phlegm out and almost thankful for the acid-burn smell that completely erased the heavy memory-tang of exposed flesh and blood. It was disgusting, but it was real.
Will accepted a paper cup of water, panting over the waste bin as he considered if his stomach if it wanted to rebel again.
His throat tickled and he coughed, hacking until he could spit out the last of of the sick. He wearily swished water in his mouth, spitting that out as well and tiredly nodding or shaking his head when his mom and the nurse traded off asking about how he felt.
He just wanted to sleep. Somewhere warm and safe. Somewhere he could pretend that whole nightmare was just a fever dream.
A tiny slip of movement caught his eye.
There, in the clear water pooling like a resinous film on top of his emptied stomach, a little thing twitched.
Delicate filaments fluttered uselessly, caught in the surface tension like a beached jellyfish.
A tiny spore.
—
In another room, adults rushed around the body of a prone girl, carefully cutting rough stitches and taking measurements in an efficient whirlwind of called tools and numbers.
Further still was the spray of gravel under car tires, two desperate parents rushing into the waiting room to demand information. Yes of course they were her parents, they were the emergency contact-
Several blocks away, three boys pedaled furiously down the town's dark roads - a bloody-nosed girl clinging tightly on the back of one. They'd heard the shouts of their friends over a hijacked radio, after a girl known only as "Eleven" had promised in stumbling words that Will was alive. Promised, and then proved it.
Across town, Johnathan Byers found his front door still unlocked. That alone wouldn't have been a worry, but for the deep tire tracks in the dirt, and thick blood smeared into the living room carpet. An axe tacky with something fiberous, almost glued into the carpet by it. Hardly 90 seconds after pulling in the drive, he was already sprinting out, praying the tire tracks were from an ambulance, praying that his mom was alright.
Funeral fliers slid across his passenger seat as his car shrieked around a sharp corner. He couldn't lose anyone else