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DOMINIC WAS THIRTY SECONDS OUT from taking the metal clasp of his unworn seatbelt and smashing it through the window. Seriously, this was not how Thursday was supposed to go.
As if the predicament he and Dustin had found themselves in wasn't bad enough, he now found himself sprawled out across the backseat of Steve Harrington's stupid car. Yes, King Steve. Dom would never finish staring daggers—he imagined the little bayonets strapped to his rogue DnD persona's legs, to be precise—at Dustin in the passenger seat. The very friend who decided this was a proper plan B. Who sentenced Dominic to suffocate on musk and bergamot in a BMW because, as it turned out, Steve wore way too much fucking cologne.
"Wait a sec. How big?" Steve was asking, looking to Dustin. He was referring to a creature the two younger boys had once regarded as a pollywog. Well, until its face petalled open like a Demogorgon and layers upon layers of sharp teeth testified otherwise. Oops.
"First he was like that." Dustin spread a couple of inches between his fingers. "Now he's like this." The space widened by a good foot. Dom nodded from the back, lips pursed, which Steve caught in the rearview mirror.
Steve filtered out a sigh. "I swear to God if this is some little lizard—"
"It's not a lizard, alright?" Dom grumbled.
"Yeah, and how do you know that, big guy?" Steve sent back. Dom faced him with eyebrows knit inward.
"How do I know it's not a lizard? Because its face opened up and it made breakfast of Dustin's cat!"
"It did. As far as D'Artagnan was concerned, Mews was bacon," said Dustin, whose lips pouted, hand draped up over his heart in memorium.
Steve made a face. "D'Artagnan? The hell does that even—?" Dustin's lips parted, only a small (and inappropriately excited) breath allowed to escape them, before— "You know what? Forget it. Don't explain that. No, I don't want to know what that's from."
"Three Musketeers," Dustin mumbled in correction, thoroughly disappointed. Steve gave him a look that became the catalyst for silence. Dominic sat back in it, watching a murky blur out his window until Dustin spoke up again. "Wait—Dom, what's your sister's car doing out here?"
"What?"
Dom pulsed forward to hover between the two front seats. He squinted. Tucked over onto the side of the road sat was a tiny green car. Somewhere between honeydew and mint chip ice cream green, Mel's car green. Dom had yet to see anyone else in Hawkins deranged enough to choose that color. The fuck?
As his eyes stalled along the treeline, Dominic saw nothing but the news headlines magnified from Mel's leftover microfiche.
"Stop the car," He said, tongue numb. Dread had already enveloped him. He couldn't explain it, could only feel it. Steve offered him an unusual look that was flicked back through the rearview mirror. "I said stop the car!"
"Alright, alright. Jesus Christ," muttered Steve. He eased on the breaks, pulling up in front of Mel's car. "Stay here." His door folded open and a pair of Nikes touched down on the grass. Dominic and Dustin watched as Steve seemed to weigh his options, before winding around back.
They heard the trunk pop and hopped up on their knees to peer out the back window to where Steve armed himself with a flashlight and his formidably modified baseball bat. He stalked slowly toward the edge of the woods all while muttering profanities. Starlight caught along the nails of his bat, swept down the sharp angle of his nose. He armored up with a breath and stepped into the forest.
As soon as Steve and his swoopy hair and fitted jeans fell away, Dom and Dustin shared a look. A spark of silent thought. Then, they hopped out of the car after him.
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YEAH, THIS WASN'T IDEAL.
Enough of Mel's sanity had orbited back for her to conclude that much. Something was able to click in place and send the proper chemical signals down into her legs. Mel scuffled back from the buzzing of flies around the corpse. In her fingertips, a blooming sensation pricked. Like plasma energy trickling from the gloss of her eyes, down her spine, over the nerves of her fingers, and into the flashlight handle.
Each crunch of leaf skeletons beneath her sneakers became another whisper. Leave this place, they told her, delicate and haunting. Leave now and don't look back.
She shouldn't have come here, not at night. Mel hadn't been thinking. She'd gotten so caught up in her own insanity. Oh, God, this wasn't closure.
"Hello? Is anyone out there?" Mel could've sworn a voice carried through the air, from closer to the road. Barely intelligible, yes, but there was familiarity in it. "Mel?" She had jolted toward the source, flashlight beam following closely behind. She was overwhelmed. Overwhelmed by all the distress signals going off and overwhelmed by how badly her reality had to have shattered to be standing where she was. Still, it didn't matter. None of the inner turmoil mattered because Mel was stuck staring out at nothing, doing nothing.
That was when something else—the shuffle of a bush, snap of a twig—brought her attention back to where it had been before. Only this time, bathed in her light was something of a canine-reptilian hybrid.
Mel froze. Her very soul seemed to hover up, seep out of her shoulders. With it went her ability to form thoughts.
The thing stared back at her from all fours. It was horrendous. Slick-skinned and twisted like a creature of war. Something from medieval fantasy. Mel tried to look into its face; it wasn't there. All she could find staring back at her was a lump of disturbed flesh, clefted by five concave lines. From eyes she couldn't see, it seemed to examine her, nimble on elongated limbs. Its arms with their lean muscle would have looked human if they weren't wicking off slime and shining like roasted seaweed under the moon.
Monster. The only word Mel could piece together in thought.
When she finally made a move, it was only to let her flashlight slip through her fingers. Just as it tumbled to the forest floor, the seaweed creature screeched. Its entire face bloomed open. Five triangular sections of jagged teeth unfurled with strings of saliva threaded between them.
No time for calculation. The creature was lunging at her.
Mel screamed. She narrowly ducked the attack and used the split-second of rebound to take off in the other direction.
Shoved into overdrive, her muscles seared on. Her ears swam with blood. Panic clashed against her skin from the inside. Heartbeat between her teeth. Her once soft face was now contaminated with terror, casting horrid shadows. Mel could barely think. She could only sprint on toward the road, reaching further and further into where headlights punctured the tree gaps.
It had been only a quick backward glance that betrayed her. When Mel looked forward again, a fallen tree was in her path.
She rushed to clear the roadblock, but her reaction time faltered. On it, her feet caught, motion ceased, body jutted down into a freefall. Like some flightless bird. A strangled sound got caught in her throat as she fell. The bone of her hip absorbed the brunt of the shock, crushed to the forest floor.
Mel scrambled against the ache to spring back. The creature, however, had already pounced over her legs with claws pressed in a smear of dirt to the outside of her thigh. In a second that crawled out like slow motion, Mel felt them hook in and drag. She heard her flesh tear, a guttural cry falling from her lips. Her body was frozen over completely. All she could do was stare, petrified, into rows and rows of teeth, down the black hole of a throat. This was it. This was how all the insanity found its end.
Toward too many directions to count, Mel thought, I'm sorry.
Somehow, the end never happened. Somehow, the weight of the mutant seaweed monster was lifted from her body.
It had been a blunt object to the skull. The creature was wrenched sideways, tumbling to the ground with its skin torn and bleeding. Upon lifting her bleached face, Mel saw the hazy, shadowed-over image of Steve Harrington over her. He wielded a nail-studded baseball bat and an equally terrified expression, strands of golden brown falling over his forehead.
"Son of a bitch!" He exclaimed and swung again at the creature once it tried to scramble back up. There was enough force in the strike to launch its limp body sideways so that it collided with a tree and collapsed over pine needles. Before Mel could take her first full breath, Steve was grasping for her forearms. "Come on, come on!" She was up and running in no time, stumbling over her own feet with Steve's arms linked around her.
Blood, warm and thick, pooled down her leg. A swarm of darkness was mushrooming up to stain her pants, under the pleats of khaki material around her waist.
No! They were nice pants. Hold on, that's not important.
Shouts erupted as Dominic and Dustin materialized before Mel's eyes, having snuck into the edge of the forest. Neither of them needed a formal rundown to be convinced to join in running. Muffled growling was springing up through the trees. Soon, they met the edge of the road and threw themselves into Steve's car, Mel and the two boys diving into the backseat. Steve clambered behind the wheel and launched his bat into the passenger side. His hands trembled in grasping for his keys and were worse as he started the engine. Claws caught up to them, scraping against the outside of the driver's side door.
"Steve, drive!" Dustin shrieked. The car shot forward, crumbling over stray pebbles as Steve swerved onto the road.
Dom watched through the back window as the creature leaped up onto the hood of Mel's car. Its featureless face was tipped up into the air in a reflection of dim light, gargled noises spilling out. It watched from its perch as they left before becoming a mere speck in the distance. Then, Dominic's eyes settled back into Steve's car, and more specifically on the giant blood patch taking over his sister's leg. His breath hitched.
Mel stared down. Her thigh wasn't supposed to look like that. She wasn't supposed to see three ravines where her flesh would otherwise only don faded stretch marks and cellulite texture. The scratches streaked at least five inches of her upper thigh, blood pooling up and seeping over.
There was never a moment in her life where Mel didn't hate the sight of blood. Now, the aversion roared in her ears. So did her brother's voice, cursing, "Ssibal! "
Dustin was upright and angled right behind his shoulder, though it was clear he actively avoided looking down.
"Hey, hey." Steve had wrestled to pry off his jacket and simultaneously keep them on the road. Once his arms were freed, he tossed the jacket to Dustin, eyes drilling into him. "Wrap it with this—tie it tight—and apply pressure. Don't let up, okay?" He instructed. The car jerked as Steve flicked his attention forward again.
Dustin did as he was told—he knew all sorts of first aid knots from boyhood as a scout—although, shaky hands posed some difficulty. Once he'd tied it off with something of a reef knot, he unsurely pressed his palms over the wound. Mel's subsequent sound of pain made Dustin lift up by instinct. Brows set sternly, Dominic slapped his hands away and took over. He didn't waste a second, applying firm and steady pressure. Mel cried out at the mere force of it, but Dom held the proper determination.
Finally, silence could phase in. For a while.
"Dominic..?"
The boy looked up at Mel's slumped form, chin dipped to her chest. Her voice came with strain.
"Yeah?" His gaze ever-so-slightly softened.
"Why aren't you—?" Mel continued, nearly breathless. Her dark eyes, half-lidded, drifted up to where he sat between her and Dustin. "Why aren't you wearing your seatbelt?"
Dom's expression snapped cold. He sputtered in disbelief. "You almost just got your leg torn off and you're still going goddamn PSA mode on me?"
Delirious, Mel trilled, "Safety first."
"No fucking way," muttered Dominic, who lifted one hand from her wound to frustratedly click on his stupid seatbelt. Despite his horror, Dustin managed to crack a smile.
Mel collapsed back against the inside of her car door. The blur of trees, streetlights, and houses outside was gradually becoming more familiar. She may not have been able to see as clearly as she normally could, but Mel could feel it.
Gently, her focus changed from outside the window to the window itself. Mel exhaled softly, and swore she saw the same smudges of child fingers she had once left in her parents' car, outlining where the moon would cling to her window. Where it always tagged along, so bold, to puzzle her little mind all the way home. How the moon was able to follow her to the ends of the Earth, she once didn't know, but its presence was a comfort when Mel needed it most. Even now, as she understood it, there was still magic. While every other big white light made her shiver, the moon was never unnatural or harsh or buzzing. Only cool and sweet and diluted. A canopy of silver silk that highlighted her dark hair lavender-blue.
Mel closed her eyes and felt childhood. Felt innocence. Intermittently, her memory would flicker with experimentation and dribbling nosebleeds, but, now, she let herself only taste the ice cream smiles.
"Do you think I'll play Odette one day?" Mel asked, only ten, around a spoon of blue moon. She wore a pretty dress of her favorite lavender shade and heart-patterned tights. An outfit her little mind deemed most elegant to see Swan Lake with her mother for the first time. "On a stage as big as that one? No, bigger!"
"There's no doubt in my mind," Alice said, wiping a turquoise ice cream drip from her daughter's cheek. "You'll fly high, naui jageun baegjo."
My little swan.
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"I CAN'T GET BLOOD ON THE CARPET," Mel kept saying, with an abrupt swing of conviction. "Seriously, I'm dead if I get blood on the carpet."
Returning to her house kept so clean, Mel's anxieties were rolling in shallow graves. She was sick with the thought of leaving evidence. Every ruby droplet spilled down her leg was another tale of weakness. Imperfection. All for a senseless traipse through the woods. Mel was supposed to take care of the house while her parents were gone, not leave trails of blood through the foyer. God, if her mother found out about this...
"Here," said Steve, who carefully led her into the kitchen. "Hard floor."
There, they sat on the vinyl flooring, half-lit by the stove light. Dustin and Dominic had gone to the living room and were virtually silent now. There was another thing Mel was supposed to manage: taking care of her brother.
A sharp inhale brought air into Mel's lungs as her thigh stung like wildfire. Steve winced, briefly pulling back from disinfecting her wound. She tried not to make a sound, but Steve wasn't stupid. "Sorry," He murmured. "I'm almost done." The shock was dissipating from Mel's body, and that meant the pain was starting to come through in its entirety. She hoped the Tylenol she had popped would help.
As it so happened, no matter how hard Dustin tried (with the help of Steve), Mel vehemently denied a trip to the hospital. Every step of a hospital stay was another circle in Mel's idea of Hell. Medical bills meant her parents would have to know about this, not to mention how eerily the hospital ambiance resembled that of Hawkins Lab. It simply wasn't an option. Steve and a first aid kit were the next best thing to a doctor, apparently. He was doing well so far and that only confused Mel more about him.
"Mel, can I ask?" Steve broke the ice, albeit with hesitance. "What were you doing out there? Especially this late." Her obvious discomfort unsettled him. "It just—it seems uncharacteristic, I guess."
"I was looking for something," She admitted eventually. Her gaze was trained on a world within the patterns on the floor. "Somewhere," She corrected. "Somewhere I can't make myself forget."
"Okay..." Steve muttered, brows furrowing. Not cryptic at all.
"I can't really say. I'm sorry. There's too much to unpack." The wound's too fresh. Mel sucked on the remnants of her words for a while. She watched Steve tuck away the bloodied disinfecting cloths and open a pack of steri strips. "Steve, do you know what that was out there? I mean, that... that... seaweed monster," She found herself letting slip before proper judgment could intervene.
Steve's face drifted up from a focus on closing her wound with the first strip. "Seaweed monster? That's new." He cracked a smile at that. It was short-lived. "Um, there's kind of a lot to unpack with that too. Too much for right now. Here," He said, and pulled up the sleeve of his sweater to reveal a mark on his arm. The very same Mel had pointed out that first night they talked at Tina's stupid Halloween rager. "Remember this scar?"
"Tree-climbing incident?" Mel recalled.
Steve let a breath whistle past his teeth. "Not quite. So, it's November of last year. Picture the seaweed monster, but on two legs, probably nine feet tall." He flexed his fingers into claws, miming the swipe of the Demogorgon's arm through the air with a small 'woosh' through his lips. Mel's eyes were enormous. There's more of them?
"You're joking," She gasped. Steve shook his head.
"Nope. Didn't think it would scar this badly, to be honest, but here we are," He sighed, peering down at it. Mel instinctively wrapped her fingers around her left wrist, as though Steve would notice it again as he had on Halloween. Steve, cracking a smile, continued. "Makes me look badass, doesn't it? Like, hello, superhero," He tutted, angling different flexed muscle poses of the arm. Mel laughed. She didn't know which was better, Steve's tone or the fact that the scar was barely noticeable. "Granted, yours'll look a lot cooler than this little thing."
Mel's heart stopped. Somehow she hadn't thought of that. How hadn't she thought of that?
"No," She breathed. "No, no, no. I can't have scars. Odette doesn't have scars."
"Who's Odette—?"
Now Mel was starting to panic. "How am I supposed to get into Ellison when I look like—" Her eyes darted around. If her leg was fucked up forever, how could she possibly hide it beneath sheer ballet tights her entire career? No—
"We're talking Ellison, Princeton of the ballet world?" asked Steve.
"They don't take abnormalities," Mel explained. "It's all a cookie cutter, Steve. There are no cracks in the cookies. Not by any means." She'd drawn back and curled up against the cabinet. In her mind, with the stripy wood grain, her leg blended into it anyway. "This is going to ruin everything!"
"Hey, take it easy. Stress is not gonna be your friend right now, trust me," Steve assured. He didn't shy away from shuffling on his knees beside her. "Listen, I'll do the best I can here, okay? Then you can slather on all the scar creams in the world, makeup if you have to, and you'll be Ellison's top dancer in no time."
Mel took her first full breath in a while. She wasn't healed, not anywhere close, but was able to settle herself enough to simply stare Steve down. Not angrily—she never really got angry, after all. It was the way his eyes blinked back at her, brimming with a perfect storm of care and encouragement, that conflicted Mel. The tightness in her chest as she realized there was a ring of deep hickory around where they otherwise shined coppery brown. A fleck in his left iris, too. She made a conscious decision to look away.
"You're supposed to be an asshole," She muttered, barely audible.
He exhaled, pressed himself right beside her against the cabinet. Steve shrugged, only a little. "Sorry to disappoint." Mel peered forward, pulling a tiny pout into the corner of her lips. She turned her head. Her eyes trailed up his neck to where his face was turned away, in shadow.
"Was it the seaweed monster?"
"That changed me?" Steve met her gaze. "Yeah. Yeah, it was the seaweed monster. Near-death experiences really do have a way of shifting your perspective."
Steve cleared his throat and ducked his attention back down to placing the last steri strip over the edge of her scratches. Mel let her head rest back against the cabinet. If she focused on counting down in her head—20, 19, 18—her awareness of the pain could slightly ebb away. What remained was the unsettling sentiment that she wasn't fit to be the swan princess after all. Maybe a swan with a broken wing. Mel took another breath, only perking back up at the sound of two slow, scuffling sets of footsteps at the edge of the kitchen.
"Yeah, um, Dart's not in the cellar," Dustin muttered. Everything about him, face and body language, revealed how troubled he was. "He tunneled through the wall. So... that's a, uh..."
"A big whoops on our part," Dom finished loudly from against the doorframe. On his face was a 'well shit' type of expression, tugging his lips flat. For a moment, Steve and Mel blinked up at them.
"I'm sorry," Mel replied softly. "Did you just imply you've been keeping that thing in our storm cellar?"
Barely refraining from interrupting, was Steve: "You went down there? You were supposed to wait for me to take the lead! You dipshits could've gotten mauled! What the hell were you thinking?"
Dom shrugged, nonchalantly. "Got curious."
Steve puttered out an exasperated breath.
"So that thing was your... pet?" Mel asked. "And now it could be anywhere, eating anybody."
"More or less," admitted Dustin, whose hands were gripping the sides of his hat. His frightened eyes trailed across the kitchen floor, over droplets of blood. He winced.
"But we'll fix it!" Dominic rushed to say. "We'll go out and find him, kill the bastard before he becomes a Demogorgon. Operation damage control." He quirked a brow down at the teenagers, one of which had no clue what a Demogorgon even was. "Steve?"
Steve's face was downturned, fingers threaded in his hair. Somewhere in his mind, the Christmas lights were still flickering, flames eating up an entire hallway. "Shit. Shit. Okay, alright," He exhaled into his forearms. The scar on his arm felt like it was tingling and swelling alongside his deep breath, but it couldn't be. That was impossible. He briefly looked to Mel, then up at the boys, hardening his face and keeping steady. "Operation damage control."
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originally published: 5/26/20
edited: 5/29/23
someone pls take em dashes away from me, idk how to restrain myself