#thebrainy

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joyce's hands trembled a little, grimy with sweat and sticky with the half - viscousness of drying blood. it no longer tacked itself to her fingers: not now that bob had been bandaged, his skin - deep nips and puncture wounds and grazes cleansed and compressed, but she still felt it, the way it'd seeped into the collar of his shirt, into the rolled sleeves of hers. the way it'd flecked onto the upholstery of hopper's back seat and rubbed off on the couch cushions where she'd gently ushered him down the moment they'd gotten inside. hawkins general's emergency department ought to have been their first port of call — a point she'd frantically pitched, while they'd screeched away from the lab's towering fences and gore - splattered halls with will slumped, unconscious, beside hawkins' chief of police, but that'd gone unheeded given the legion of monsters still out there, running amok.

given the killing field they'd left behind.

" you could have died today, " she rasped, a fraying thread of shellshock still stringing her voice razorwire - tight. exhaustion made itself at home there, but so too did an abundance of undying gratitude, most of all. escape though they had, it'd been by a hair's breadth. one second longer, one deafening volley of bullets fewer from across the night - shaded foyer, and he might not have made it out with his limbs intact, if alive at all. ( still, it'd been him who'd gotten them to safety. it'd been bob, unassuming and far from fearless, who'd taken on the herculean task of getting them free and ensured, with his life on the line, that they hadn't all succumbed to the same fate as the lab techs, the guards - turned six foot smears of human viscera. for that, and for will's life, there weren't words to summate how much it meant. how courageous he'd been. how terrified it'd left her, all the same. )

gingerly, joyce's hand tightened around one of bob's, browning blood still ingrained under the nail of the thumb she let migrate across the rise of his knuckle.

more than anything, she wished that it wasn't: that the extent of the misfortunes that'd rippled through her family's life had begun and ended with juggling enough shifts to keep the lights on and will and jonathan in intact shoes. that the only hurdles they'd needed to surpass existed within the boundaries of school and friends, and not on the fringes of government conspiracies and ravenous monsters, inexplicable nightmares and unidentified, unquantifiable trauma.

it was only natural for most to deny the strange and inexplicable to put a wall up against it, to try to find some reasoning, grounded in known, dependable reality. she knew that. but much as she wanted to shield him from it, he'd been exposed to it — the darkness, the decay that'd crawled through the edges of town, rotting beneath the skin of the farmland, through every root and pumpkin patch it crossed. the incessance of whatever it was that'd gotten hopper by the throat. ( whatever it was that'd taken her boy and kept him hostage. )