STRANGER THINGS IMAGINES

-Lost-

Someone suggested doing a prequel to the previous piece about the reader is taken by the Demogorgon and Jonathan having to search for her, so here goes.

________

No contact, no contact from you in a full 48 hours. He hadn't seen you at school, or your work. Even when he went to visit you at your house, he knew there were going to be no recent signs of you in the empty building. Maybe your parents and you left on an urgent trip and you forgot to tell him. Except you never rang either, every time the phone chimed he would race towards it, only to be disappointed by a different voice at the other end of the line. 

He started thinking that maybe you were just avoiding him for a reason that was unknown to him as if it was his fault that you were no longer around. And maybe, it was. He tried not to let your disappearance worry him, except he knew it wasn't normal when suddenly his little brother went missing too.

Suddenly he was panic-stricken, desperate to find the two of you when everything seemed to be thrown into chaos. People believed that both you and Will were dead, and all that would be found would be your putrid skeletal remains. With no clues or witnesses to your disappearance either, they had nothing to go on apart from a girl with strange capabilities and the haunting whisperings of Joyce Byers, a mother on the edge of sanity. 

It got a lot worse before it got any better. Soon they were pulling a body out from deep beneath the cold damp earth, skin cut deep and eyes cold and empty of light. It was your body, every single thing familiar but also so different, as if your actual life was a distant memory to him after seeing your remains. And then Will's body was found in the quarry, submerged in the filthy water, and suddenly both Joyce and Jonathan's lives were crumbling around them, mere fragments of what they previously were.

While your friends and loved ones searched desperately for you and the youngest Byers, the two of you were trapped in a place that couldn't be described as anything close to safe, warm or home. Instead, it was cold, wet, and terrifying. You never expected to be in this scenario, clutching to life and protecting a pre-teen who had been taken for no ultimate reason. 

You felt as if your mind was being destroyed from the inside, worry and fear plaguing your existence and your heart always racing, as if you were running during every moment of being trapped in this nightmare. 

Will was not coping well either, it was as if the life was draining out of him, skin pale and sickly, voice quiet and breathing shallow. He wanted his family, he wanted his mum to hold him and his brother to make him smile when nothing else could. But they were not here. You were the only one who could comfort him, who could protect him, who could save him from the demons within.

The funeral was like putting the whole Byers family under a microscope, the whole town of Hawkins staring in and trivializing their pain and suffering, gossiping about how it seemed that Joyce had lost her mind, how her child had died after running away, and how the freak teenager Jonathan was probably a killer. It was as if everyone who was at the funeral who wasn't family or friends thought of the who situation as something out of a thriller movie, with the killer being in plain sight.