Risky Business ｡ Stranger Things

35 : Night of the Comet

He was still stuck on her hours later. His kisses still coloured her lips. His grip had bruised her skin. And whenever she thought about him—his fingers slipping underneath the thin material of her underwear and his hot mouth on her fragile flesh—an aching blush would move across her cheeks, migrating to her whole body. 

Billy Hargrove was distracting and Prue needed to stay focused as she taped the polaroid of the Upside Down to the back of her bedroom door. The entire wooden door was covered with her research. Her handwritten notes from her conversations with Will and Nancy were next to a map of Hawkins, the forest on Mirkwood circled in red. She had ripped out pages and passages on interdimensional travel from the textbooks she had gotten from the Fontanas and tacked them beside a terrible sketch she had drawn of a demodog. She was sitting cross-legged on her carpet, staring at her collection of research, feeling like Nancy Drew herself. 

The pedestal fan was blowing air on her back as she tapped her red marker against her lips. She wondered if Grey would be impressed with the research for a resurrected Mission Strange; she was waiting for Grey to get home from the pool to show him everything. Her main interest was the portal or wound in Mirkwood forest, the very one that Nancy Wheeler had crawled through over a year and a half ago. Prue wanted to find it. She leaned forward on her knees, tracing her index over Mirkwood. The forest was a big area to cover but surely there was something leftover from a portal to another dimension opening up.

The house phone screamed, calling for an answer urgently. Surely there would be something that had remained from a tear in the fabric of time and space, a scar between two ripped worlds. Her eyes narrowed in hard on the map. The weather wasn't great for trekking through a forest hunting for something that may not be there anymore; the heat could get to her but at least the sunlight would last longer. The phone continued to ring out and it jolted Prue from her obsessive thinking.

"ARE YOU GONNA GET THAT, DAD?" she yelled out, her voice echoing through the Owens's house. There was no response save for the ringing. Prue grunted, dropping her red marker to the carpet as she tore open her bedroom door, storming down the stairs. All the while, she vexed her father who should be home. She picked up the phone attached to the kitchen wall. "Whoever this is, know that you're interrupting something very—" she roared down the line.

"Prue, it's Patrick," he butted in with a shaking voice.

Her anger quelled. "Hey, Patrick," she greeted him as a feeling of unease awoke in her stomach. "Are you okay?" she asked.

"Yeah, it's not me but Grey," he muttered, voice still wavering.

Her heart and stomach both launched. "What?" she questioned as she pressed the receiver closer to her ear.

"He was at the pool and some kid pushed him. He fell—"

Fear shattered Prue's heart. "Is Grey okay?" She squeezed her eyes shut, the darkness there played a memory. She could see the dim hallway in Hawkins Lab and see a fallen Grey as a demodog stood over him, its head opening like a flower to expose pink flesh bordered with teeth. She could hear Grey's scream merging with her own.

"Yeah, but he has a broken arm," Patrick informed her. Relief washed over her as she sucked in a well-needed breath. "I took him to the hospital."

"I'm on my way," she said, hanging up the phone. She didn't change out of her sundress but did search the house for her father but he was nowhere to be found. The question of her father's whereabouts anchored heavily in her mind.

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Hawkins Hospital was rather small but it didn't make it any easier for Prue to locate her brother. She rushed down corridors with worry pushing her legs faster. She finally found a nurse and was pointed in the direction of Grey's room. Patrick was sitting outside the room still in his lifeguard uniform, his whistle dangling around his neck. He got to his feet the minute he spotted Prue rushing towards him.