Chapter Text
When she was married, being right was bittersweet. Not like dark chocolate, but like sweet, almost loving kisses with an aftertaste of beer. Like pressing her fingers into bruises with sick fascination, before covering them up with dollar store foundation. Like smoking more and more every day and never quite losing the habit even after her divorce.
She was right.
It’s neither bitter, nor is it sweet. It feels disorienting, like waking up from a nightmare with a glass of ice water to the face. Or like Jim Hopper bursting into her house in a whirlwind of unscrewed Christmas lights. Either one is fine, as far as she’s concerned.
He’s gasping for air, heaving large breaths—it reminds her of when they smoked together under the bleachers for the first time all those years ago and he choked on the first drag of menthol cigarettes they shoplifted the day before.
“I went to the morgue, Joyce,” he says, his whole body moving with each pant, shoulders rolling forward. “Last night. It wasn’t him.”
She brings a shaky hand to cover her mouth, “What?”
“Will’s body. It was a fake,” he whispers.
The boards Lonnie nailed into the wall she broke through glare at her with contempt. They scream ‘you gave up’ with the terrified, betrayed voice of her baby boy. Beneath them, she can almost hear mocking laughter sounding like her ex-husband's.
“You were right, Joyce.” His voice is solemn, but not unkind. “This whole time, you were right.”
His story ripples like oil on water, unbelievable and insane, but not crazier than what she’s felt for the past few days. Not crazier than a small body in the morgue missing a birthmark she’s seen through diaper changes and doctor’s appointments. Every fact stands out, yet nothing seems concrete. Which means they’re missing something. They have to be.
She’s grasping at threads until one of them snags.
“You never told me about a drawing,” she says. It seems appropriate that, out of all things, she would find Will in art.
Hop frowns, like he doesn’t see her point.“There was a kid’s drawing on the wall. Two figures, an adult and child holding hands. It said ‘Eleven,’ I think—The eleventh drawing or something?”
The contents don’t matter, though. Only— “Was it good?”
“What?” He sends her a blank look.
“This drawing. Was it good or bad?” Maybe she isn’t the most objective person on the subject, what with being his mother and all. But practice makes perfect. And Will?
Boy, did he practice. As soon as he could hold a pencil it was over for any piece of paper in the grabbing vicinity. And her walls.
She has multiple overstuffed folders full of his art, and considering how many times she had to fight Mike for a Will Byers Original over the years, there’s probably just as much stashed away somewhere at the Wheelers’.
“It was a kid’s drawing, Joyce, stick figures.” Hopper seems to be reconsidering his doubts regarding her rumoured insanity.
She huffs, annoyed by his bullheadedness, and stomps toward the fridge. With one jerky movement, she rips a drawing off the door, the magnet clattering loudly to the floor.
With far too much flourish and not enough satisfaction, she slams it on the table in front of Hopper. “Then Will didn’t draw it.”
Hopper stares at the page for a few long seconds before suddenly shooting to his feet, practically throwing himself at the stack of case files.
“Earl—the night Benny died, he saw a kid with a shaved head. With Benny.” He rifles through the folders frantically. “He said it might’ve been Will after I pressed him, but at first he didn’t think so—”
“So it wasn’t him.”
“I don’t know. If it’s not the lab, and we’ve been searching for a completely different kid…” He trails off. “I had one more theory.”
He pulls out a folder and slides it toward her with a grim expression.
She takes the folder cautiously, unsure what she's going to find in there. Records of fake bodies? Government conspiracies? She opens it, reads the label multiple times as if it might change, then turns the page.
Scanning over the lines of text, she begins growing more and more confused with the contents.
Hepathological mutation… Passed genetically… Commonly called ‘vampirism’… Wheeler: Karen, Michael, Nancy… Full assimilation within society…
Having read enough, she passes the folder back to Hop, hoping for an explanation. “Okay? What about them?”
Now it's her turn to not get the point, as it seems. What does the Wheelers being vampires have to do with anything?
Hopper stares at her in disbelief. "There are secret vampires in town while your kid is missing and you don't find it weird?"
And that, for the first time in days, startles a laugh out of her through the sheer ridiculousness of the statement. Great joke, really.
"Hop, if Mike Wheeler, a twelve year old, I might add, were to eat my kid, I assume he'd do so while he was a kindergartner with biting tendencies." Hell, if that was the case, she's pretty confident they'd know by now—nothing would stop the poor boy from turning himself in and demanding the death penalty.
"...you knew?!"
“I’ve known the kid since he was five years old, Hop.” She motions vaguely to the folder. “Either way, it’s not him. Keep looking. It has to be something else.”
Really.
She has to do everything herself.
MEMORIES OF:
JOYCE BYERS
HAWKINS, INDIANA
September, 1976
PLAY ▶
As terrible as it feels to admit it to herself, sending Jonathan off for the first day of kindergarten wasn’t nearly as nervewracking, despite him being her firstborn. Maybe it’s because while Jonathan was quiet, it was not necessarily because he was shy or meek, as much as the fact that from a very young age he carried this calmness and assurance that soothed any worry she might have. If he wanted to play with other kids, he would. If he didn’t, then he wouldn’t.
It was as simple as that.
Prior experience with the matter does absolutely nothing to provide her confidence that it would be the case for her youngest as well. Sending Will off to kindergarten feels like she’s about to face judgement day and she finds herself itching for a cigarette despite quitting during her second pregnancy.
She loves her son terribly, exactly as he is, but she has very little faith in his future experience with other children. It’s not that she doubts he’s lovable—not at all. He might honestly be impossible not to love if someone just gives him a chance, but…
To be completely honest, Will is bullying waiting to happen and that vastly lowers his chances at surviving in any sort of social structure. He’s shy—adorably so, of course—but in a way that makes him speak only when spoken to. He flinches at loud noises, including Saturday morning cartoons turned up too high, and she sincerely doubts he’d approach another child first even with a gun to his head.
Simply put, she knows he’s going to get eaten alive.
Which is why seeing him vibrate with happiness at the very first pickup takes her off guard, especially considering he’d spent drop-off crying into her leg just a few hours earlier. Will has made a friend. The very first day—with no bullying to be reported. Joyce feels like a terrible mother for having doubts, but it’s quickly overpowered by relief.
In the coming days, “Mike” becomes a hot topic in the Byers household. Every family member obligatorily learns that his favorite color is blue, can lift a desk with one hand—which must be an incredible exaggeration she’s come to expect from children—and hates the sun. He also has “lots of dots” on his face, which Joyce explains are called freckles, and is supposedly a legendary picky eater. She sincerely hopes that part won’t prove contagious, but knowing children, she doesn’t have high hopes.
They all have yet to learn Mike’s last name, but through trial and error with Jonathan, she’s long since accepted that surnames will be beyond Will’s capabilities for another two years or so. She still has yet to convince him that her and Lonnie’s names aren’t ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’.
Another fact she learns, thankfully while Lonnie’s not present, as he’s the enemy of imagination, creativity, and all things related, is that ‘Mike’ sincerely believes he’s a vampire. A fact of which he convinced her sweet, apparently somewhat naive—or at the very least, desperate enough for peer approval to agree—son.
She looks at Will’s most recent drawing, already way too good for his age and hopes that he sees the grimace frozen on her face as a smile.
He’s graduated from stick figures already and his vision is legible enough—two very small people, one with carefully colored in brown half of a circle that could only be a bowl cut and another with… very sharp teeth highlighted with a red crayon. For a few days after that, she hesitantly entertains the thought that this ‘Mike’ might actually be an imaginary friend. It’s fueled partly by the fact that she has yet to see the kid with her own eyes, but with her work schedule, Will is more often than not the first kid to be dropped off and the last to be picked up, so it’s not exactly surprising.
She abandons this line of thinking when, in between bites of knock off Lucky Charms that they had to buy because it’s Mike’s favorite cereal, Will offhandedly mentions, “Mike said I look like Bambi.”
As far as she’s aware, neither of her kids has ever seen the movie. Unless Lonnie was secretly a softie for cartoons he loudly proclaimed too girly for growing boys and rented the tape behind her back. So rationally, someone had to tell Will about it—which means that there’s a fair chance ‘Mike’ is real after all.
It’s not as much relief as she initially thought it would be. “Oh? How so?”
“He says I’m like a small animal,” Will happily munches on the sugary monstrosity of cereal, while purposefully avoiding the milk. “Because I’m soft and have big eyes.”
Oh God.
She’s really glad Lonnie isn’t hearing this. He’d throw a fit that other kids already see their son as girly and weak. Will doesn’t need to hear that—as concerning as the phrasing it, he genuinely believes it to be a compliment and Joyce is content with not ruining that for him.
The final straw joins the hayloft of her worries around three weeks after she first sent her youngest off into the world.
She doesn’t notice it at first, the mark mostly concealed by the lingering redness the late September sun left on Will’s cheeks. Once they get home, though, it catches her eye almost immediately after he kicks off his shoes by the door.
With a gentle hand, she cups her son’s chin and turns his head to see better the imprints of tiny teeth left on soft, sunkissed skin. Her gaze catches on the gap in the bitemark where normally a front tooth would be and, a little hysterically, all her previous worries of bullying resurface with full force.
Dropping her hand, she kneels in front of Will, at a loss on how to approach the issue, “who did this to you, baby?”
Will, for a second, seems confused on what she’s talking about, before his tiny palm flies to his face and he brushes over the injury another kid inflicted on him.
“Oh,” he says easily. “That was Mike. He does that.”
Joyce feels slightly sick.
“What do you mean, ‘he does that?’” she whispers, doing all in her power not to sound like she wants to strangle an unknown child.
Her son lights up like a Christmas tree, eyes twinkling happily as he smiles and rolls up his sleeves. “Mike likes biting me—I told you he’s a vampire!”
To her horror, Will’s forearms are covered in about a dozen of bruised bitemarks in various stages of healing, yellowed, green, purple—all with a front tooth missing. She gasps, hand flying to her mouth. Will tilts his head in confusion and she forces her expression to soften instantly. The last thing she wants is for him to feel ashamed or defensive.
Dear God. She hadn’t noticed any of these. Jonathan helps Will get dressed most mornings while she makes breakfast. Why hasn’t he told her?
“Why is he biting you?” she asks, hesitantly. It’s becoming painfully clear that her son has wildly misunderstood his dynamic with the other child.
Never before has she seen such an unimpressed expression on Will’s face. “Because we’re friends,” he explains matter of factly. “It makes him calm when he feels bad. Or when he’s happy.”
Unwillingly, Joyce wonders if it’s her fault that her son perceives harm as affection. If she broke something in him by raising him in a family like this. If he ever saw the bruises on her wrists or heard her throw a plate at Lonnie and decided this is what love looks like.
“That doesn’t mean he can hurt you,” she says weakly. “Nobody has the right to touch you in ways you don’t like, even if they’re your friend, baby.”
Will steps away, expression closing off and her stomach drops through the floor, “I like it,” he insists. “It doesn’t hurt.”
Biting her lip, she nods. “Okay,” she relents, already making plans to drop Will off a little later tomorrow in hopes of catching this ‘vampire Mike’. It’s not hard to read between the lines, not really. The other kid probably has an overactive imagination and unfortunately Will is easy to exploit in that area, too happy to have a friend to notice, let alone protest against abuse.
She’s not sure whether her son’s so-called ‘friend’ means to coerce him into accepting harm as a condition for affection or simply doesn’t know any better. In her mind, though, she sees a tiny psychopath, preying on her sweet, gullible boy. The prey animal imagery sure makes him seem like a serial killer in making.
The following morning feels even more foreboding than the first time she’s seen Will off. She spends the night tossing and turning, repeatedly wondering whether her marriage is the reason her son accepts this behavior as normal. For the first time ever, she briefly—very briefly, immediately dismissing the notion—considers leaving Lonnie.
She’s not sure what she expects, dragging out the drop off as long as is humanly possible—long enough to make her son suspicious, since she always rushes through, barely in time for her shift. None of the children really stand out to her, but she keeps looking for anyone memorable in the crowd with an intensity that would be concerning were she not a parent.
Will seems to have more luck in that regard, because he barely gives the schoolyard a once over before he wiggles out of her arms and Joyce becomes a witness to her five year old becoming a high speed attack missile in real time.
“Mike!” He runs through the playground faster than she thought children were capable of running, launching himself at another kid with force that makes her physically wince.
Impressively enough, the other kid, who she assumes is the infamous Mike, does not stumble. It throws her for a loop, because while Will is positively tiny, even for his age, this sort of impact would topple Jonathan over any day. Yet, Mike catches Will’s hug and only then does it occur to her how unusual this sort of behaviour is for her son.
Dumbfounded, she watches the hug play out. After a few seconds, she vaguely considers checking her watch just to see how long it’s been going on, but she doesn’t want to miss anything—it’s unclear at this point whether she’s waiting for the other kid to slip up or if she’s amazed at how animated her son suddenly became after spotting him, but the scene holds her full attention.
Finally the boys break apart and in the most unlikely turn of events, she sees Will practically stick his hand in the other boy’s mouth with no warning whatsoever.
Oh.
She winces, feeling apologetic as Mike’s eyes widen, the child obviously startled. After a second, he hesitantly opens his mouth and bites down on the offered hand, before pulling away with pure adoration painting his features. If they were older, Joyce would’ve called the look on Mike’s face lovestruck.
Under different circumstances, that might’ve concerned her more than it currently does considering they’re both boys.
Unfortunately, she is currently too distracted by the possibility that one of those boys genuinely believes he’s a vampire.
She finally tears her gaze away, deciding to search for a different target whatsoever. With much more success, she spots a vaguely familiar woman near a cubby labeled Michael W.
Being a parent means enduring difficult conversations, she tells herself firmly, before beginning her approach. Two steps in, the woman’s head snaps in her direction, making Joyce feel oddly exposed. Still, she marches on.
“Hello, may I take a minute?” she starts, hoping she sounds friendly and not accusing. “I’m Joyce Byers, Will’s mom—I was hoping to talk about Mike for a moment.”
The woman visibly winces.
“Karen Wheeler,” she sighs. “What did he do this time?”
Karen seems unsurprised to be approached, more resigned than defensive. This is clearly something she anticipated sooner rather than later.
“It seems your son might have a bit of an overactive imagination,” she begins cautiously. “He appears completely convinced he’s a vampire. And unfortunately, he’s convinced Will too.”
Karen closes her eyes briefly and sighs through her nose.
“Right.”
Then she pastes on a strained but polite smile.
“Are you free right now? I think this conversation should happen somewhere else.”
SKIP TO THE NEXT MEMORY?
▶▶❙
MEMORIES OF:
JOYCE BYERS
HAWKINS, INDIANA
October, 1976
PLAY ▶
A couple weeks after Joyce is introduced to the existence of a whole other subspecies—a fact she decided would be best if her husband stayed unaware of, just like the majority of the population—she arranges the first playdate of Will Byers’s life. Coincidentally, it’s also the first playdate of Mike Wheeler’s.
Though, from what she’s gathered from Karen, it’s for a vastly different reason.
Apparently, while Joyce always worried about the fact that Will was criminally shy, Karen spent the past few years afraid her son would commit an actual crime.
The thought almost makes her want to reconsider the whole arrangement, but that could actually make Will die from heartbreak, so she perseveres.
What convinces her in the end, though, is not the conjoined twins dynamic the children developed, but the fact that Karen insisted on being present throughout the entire experience. Somehow, facing a child allegedly capable of lifting ten times his body weight feels significantly less daunting with an adult similarly inclined in strength present. Who would’ve thought?
Not to mention that she has questions—a whole lot of them in fact, even though the very basics Karen explained initially have left Joyce’s head spinning with enhanced senses, government mandated supplementation and actual, honest to God blood drinking. Trust her son to somehow attract this kind of a friend, huh?
She fumbles around the house back and forth, dusting off the same bookshelf for the fourth time, while Will is coloring at the kitchen table, blissfully oblivious to her anxiety. Lonnie took Jonathan out for some ‘man time’ which sounds about as promising as it actually is.
Never before has the doorbell startled her quite as badly, which ironically, causes some of the tension to leave her as she laughs at her own stupidity. Will sends her a vaguely concerned look, as if he’s wondering whether his mom lost her mind. The seriousness of such expression on a five year old makes her laugh even harder and she feels much better about finally opening the door.
“Karen, Mike! Hello!”
“It’s great to see you, Joyce,” Karen smiles warmly and Joyce briefly wonders whether her teeth are any sharper than they should be, before shaking the thought off. “Michael, say hello to Mrs Byers.”
Up close, Mike Wheeler looks startlingly normal, like any child does really. Maybe just a little grumpy for a five year old and definitely staring way too hard, but nothing else really screams ‘a secret vampire kindergartener’ to her.
“Hello, Mrs Byers,” he says in that practiced monotone children have drilled into them. Then his head snaps up as if he’s heard something and he leans slightly to the side, looking behind Joyce. Momentarily, he lights up with so much joy that she wants to capture it in a picture. Karen’s face betrays a very similar sentiment. “Will!”
Seconds later, she feels her son weave between her legs to reach the other boy, “hi!”
It’s sweet, soothing a lot of her worries like honey. She’s been afraid that the drop off was a fluke and seeing her boy come out of his shell like this is such a relief to her as a parent. She looks at the other woman, who observes the exchange with a keen eye, obviously poised to intervene, should the need arise.
“Come in, please,” Joyce steps aside, gesturing to the house. “Would you like anything to drink?”
Karen steps inside. “Do you have coffee?”
Joyce opens her mouth to answer when a tiny voice rings out behind her.
“No, you have to take off your shoes first.” Will stands in the hallway with his hands planted firmly on his hips.
One glance at Karen’s rapidly widening eyes tells Joyce that some kind of disaster is apparently about to unfold, but instead Mike’s mouth briefly falls open in a tiny O before he nods quickly.
“Okay” Then he scrambles to kick off his shoes. As soon as he finishes, Will grabs his hand and immediately starts dragging him further into the house, unconcerned about the fact that his friend is technically stronger than an adult man. Granted, said friend looks perfectly content to follow him without complaint, so maybe Will has the right idea.
Karen watches the interaction open-mouthed, blinking rapidly. After the boys disappear in Will’s room, she whispers, “I think I just witnessed a religious miracle.”
Dumbfounded, Joyce can only nod before leading her into the kitchen to make coffee for both of them.
At first, the other woman keeps sneaking glances at the doorway, obviously anxious not to have the children in her line of sight, but after a few minutes, she settles. When asked, she offhandedly mentions she can hear what’s going on in the other room anyway. And the exchange in the doorway seems to have significantly increased the confidence in this playdate in both of them.
Finally, Joyce decides to just ask. “So, anything I should definitely be aware of?”
Karen purses her lips. “He’s… naturally territorial. That might either pass or get worse with age. It’s hard to tell.” She pauses briefly. “Getting him and his sister to share anything is basically a lost cause.”
Joyce nods slowly.
“He also has a lot of instincts he doesn’t fully understand yet, let alone control. Predator coded behavior is… expected.”
“Like comparing my son to prey animals?” Joyce asks dryly, raising an eyebrow.
Karen visibly winces. “He’s done that?” At least she seems apologetic. “That actually explains… the appeal.”
“The appeal,” Joyce repeats, somewhat dryly. Her son is apparently appealing to predators. Oh joy. “Does this appeal have anything to do with his habit of biting Will?”
She doesn’t expect Karen to freeze like deer in headlights, as ironic as the comparison seems to be. “Did he break the skin?” Karen asks immediately. “Has Will mentioned blood or feeding or—”
Joyce decides to take mercy on her. “No. Nothing like that.” She hesitates. “Will does end up with a lot of bite-shaped bruises, though. He doesn’t seem upset about them. Honestly, kind of the opposite…”
“Oh, okay.” Karen lets out a relieved sigh. “As long as Mike doesn’t feed…” it seems to be a deeper issue than merely being concerned about him eating other children. “If you don’t mind the bruises, the biting alone should be fine.”
“How am I supposed to not mind the—” Joyce cuts herself off, taking a slow breath. “He’s hurting my son.”
Even if, judging by their behavior, Will clearly doesn’t see it that way.
Karen looks deeply conflicted. “It doesn’t really hurt him,” she says carefully.
Then she takes a very long sip of coffee, visibly stalling. Several seconds pass.
“I’m not surprised Will likes it,” she finally admits. “It’s a biological response meant to secure a… long-term food source.” She looks incredibly uncomfortable with the sentence. “It invokes a positive hormonal response, interpreted by the body based on the relationship.”
“So your son is drugging mine,” she asks, horrified.
With a so-so gesture, Karen speaks up again, “it’s a grey area.” Seeing Joyce’s blank look, she continues, “similar hormonal responses happen during hugging too. Just significantly weaker. It’s something of an… momentary emotional enhancement, in this case.”
“In this case.” Great, it seems her conversational skills have been reduced to repeating the sentence. Nice going, Joyce.
To her credit, it says a lot about her graceful and understanding personality that she didn’t pack up and leave the country with her children the second drugging has been implied.
“In that case,” Karen repeats back at her, faintly amused expression fleeting through her face before she turns serious once again. “It’s a two way street.” She sets down her coffee cup and presses her hands together before pulling them apart. “Blood from familiar sources affects vampires in a similar way, though to a greater extent—it amplifies everything, really.” She closes one hand into a fist. Then the other. “Separately, these are… manageable enough.”
Understanding building somewhere in the back of her head, Joyce asks, “and together?”
“They create a feedback loop,” Karen claps her hand together loudly. “Amplifying each other in turn.”
“Oh.” She feels a little faint.
At that moment, Karen suddenly snaps her head toward the doorway. A few seconds later, two small heads peek around the frame.
“We wanted juice,” Will announces. Beside him, Mike nods eagerly enough that his entire head bobs.
They look painfully adorable, and Joyce finds it difficult to blame Mike for something he apparently can’t help. Doesn’t mean she wishes it wouldn’t affect Will, though.
“Of course.” She gets up, chair scratching loudly over the kitchen tiles. Both Mike and Karen wince at the noise, although the latter hides it much better—Joyce wouldn’t notice at all if she didn’t see the same reaction from her son. She walks up to the fridge, taking out the juice carton, then two glasses from the cupboard. She pours the juice into the first one and, “oh, it seems like we’ve run out. Will, give the juice to your guest.”
Will immediately starts nodding in agreement. Before he can hand it over, Mike blurts, “No, Will should have it. I don’t care about the juice anyways.”
She first looks at the way his eyes dart to the glass, then at Karen’s eyebrows climbing to her hairline. Finally, her eyes land on Will’s surprised smile, “thank you, Mike!”
Mike suddenly looks like he really couldn’t care less about the juice, resembling a dog who received a treat. If he had a tail, Joyce is sure it would be wagging.
Unable to share, huh?
When the boys retreat back to Will’s room, she turns to stunned Karen with a knowing smile, “guess we have to get to know each other better—by the look of it, we will be seeing a lot of each other from now on.”
Karen nods mutely, still looking at the doorway in wonder.
SKIP TO THE NEXT MEMORY?
▶▶❙
MEMORIES OF:
JOYCE BYERS
HAWKINS, INDIANA
April, 1978
PLAY ▶
To absolutely nobody’s surprise, over the next year and a half, Mike Wheeler becomes a permanent fixture in their lives. One day Joyce wakes up and finds she cannot recall what her son was like without a best friend. Lonnie stays just as unaware of Mike’s condition as ever and Jonathan knows about as much as he learns from and believes Will.
She comes to terms with the vampirism easier than she expected to. Mostly because, strangely enough, so much of it simply makes sense once she gets used to the idea.
It also helps that she finds it increasingly impossible not to grow fond of Mike over time. Admittedly, he’s a bit of an acquired taste. One her husband stubbornly refuses to acquire but, thankfully, at least tolerates. Karen insists Will might actually be the one with special abilities because whatever version of Mike he brings out is a version she wants to keep forever.
So far, there hasn’t been a single incident serious enough to make either of them question the friendship, though Karen always remains just slightly more cautious about it than Joyce does.
As far as they know, Will has yet to bleed in front of Mike.
Joyce has to admit she’s lowered her guard, practically forgetting that there was always an underlying layer of danger to her younger son’s best friend.
Which is why she feels so blindsided by the terror she feels when Jonathan bursts into the house in panic.
“Mom!” he screams, looking more terrified than she’s ever seen him.
Last she checked, he’d been watching the boys while they played deeper in the woods.
“Jon?” she asks immediately, already standing. “Baby, what happened?”
“Will—he fell.” Jonathan’s words tumble over each other so quickly they barely sound coherent. “I thought it was okay, they climb that tree all the time, but—Mom, his arm, the bone is sticking out and—and there’s so much blood and—”
Her knees nearly give out beneath her.
“Where is he now?”
“In the woods,” Jonathan says shakily. “Near that tree they always play by. I came back to get help. Mike’s with him—”
The sheer panic that hits her in that moment is something she remembers for the rest of her life. The words ring in her mind like an alert of national disaster. So much blood. Left him with Mike.
Blood.
Mike.
“Baby,” she says weakly, grabbing Jonathan by the shoulders. “I need you to call an ambulance. Can you do that for me?”
As soon as Jonathan gives her a shaky nod, she’s off, sprinting through the forest, pushed forward beyond her usual abilities with pure adrenaline. She got too comfortable, she thinks to herself, feet hitting the forest floor.
She doesn’t know what she’s about to find besides an open fracture. Every conversation she’s ever had with Karen paints a slideshow of gory pictures in her mind.
The best-case scenario is Mike panicking and running away. But he’s seven years old, for fuck’s sake.… She can’t expect any self control from him, God knows Karen doesn’t trust he has it in the first place, half of the time. That means she has to prepare herself for the worst.
For skin torn open, bloody teeth, Will barely hanging onto consciousness with blood loss. Having to drag her injured son away from someone he trusted.
She hears the sobbing before she sees the boys, her worst fear instantly halfway confirmed. Yet when they finally come into view, Joyce realizes she couldn’t have been more wrong.
She’s never been happier to be wrong in her entire life.
It looks like a crime scene, but unlike she anticipated, there’s no crime to speak of. Indeed, just like Jonathan described, there’s blood everywhere on the forest floor, leaves stained a horrible shade of crimson. The source of it is quite obvious—an open fracture, her little boy pressing the arm close to his chest. It would make her sick enough to empty her stomach if not for the disgusting kind of relief washing over her.
Mike sits curled beside Will protectively, wrapped around him like parentheses while clutching his uninjured hand in both of his own. His face is partly smushed into Will’s hair. He’s paler than usual, which really means he’s about as white as a sheet of paper. Both his hands are absolutely covered in blood, but, although Joyce hates herself more than ever for feeling the need to check, there’s none near his mouth nor on his face at all.
In fact, nothing about the situation indicates he even attempted to feed.
He looks heart wrenchingly small, shaking violently on the forest floor.
Both boys are sobbing uncontrollably, almost synchronized in their hysteria—they’re too out of it to even notice her approach.
It’s impossible to separate them, even after paramedics arrive, lead to the scene by Jonathan. Only after they put her baby boy under—the fracture apparently too traumatic to operate with him awake—does the other boy calm down whatsoever.
Though, shutting down completely might be a more accurate description. He drives with her and Jonathan in the ambulance, staring blankly at Will’s unconscious form. She lets him process for a while, using the time to wrap her arms around her eldest son and press her lips into his hair, whispering how proud she is, how brave he was. Not for the first time, she’s absolutely blown away by the strength and maturity her son is capable of.
She wishes he didn’t need to be, though.
Lonnie’s unreachable, although the hospital tries. The nurses look at her with unconcealed pity when she admits she has no idea where he is at the moment. They call the Wheelers next—partly because of Mike’s presence, partly because more than anything, Joyce needs a friend’s support right now.
Once Will’s confirmed to be safely off the operating table, but not awake to receive visitors and Jonathan reluctantly occupied with the vending machine snacks one of the nurses was kind enough to buy for him, Joyce turns her attention to Mike.
Her heart shatters into million pieces to see him stare with unparalleled distress at his hands, turning them around in front of his eyes, blood dried just enough to still shine under fluorescents. She gently wraps his small palms in hers.
“Let’s get you cleaned up, baby,” she says, the term of endearment slipping off her tongue easily.
Mike follows her silently to the bathroom. He’s barely tall enough to reach the sink by himself, automatically standing on his tip toes while she carefully soaps and rinses his hands. Then repeats the process several times until the blood is no longer visible, even though she has no doubt he can still smell it.
“I tried so hard,” his voice breaks on the last word.
She can’t imagine how hard it must be, growing up with the knowledge you’re always the danger to people you love. And somewhere in that hospital bathroom, much later than she probably should have, Joyce realizes this child has become hers too in everything but blood.
With that realization fresh in her mind, she kneels in front of him and wraps her arms around him, “I know, baby. You did so good, I promise.”
That causes him to break down into sobs once again, pressing his face into her neck in a way that makes her feel his tears on her skin. He cries and he cries until he cries himself into exhaustion—it’s a wonder it took so much, with how much has happened that day.
Karen arrives to find him asleep in Joyce’s lap in the waiting room, legs stretched awkwardly across the plastic chairs while Jonathan dozes against Joyce’s shoulder on the opposite side. She immediately begins apologising, a pained look stretched across her face as if Mike being accidentally exposed to fresh blood was her personal failure as a parent.
Joyce shuts it down immediately.“Don’t worry,” she says firmly. “He did great. He took such good care of my boy.”
She means it—can pinpoint the exact moment Karen believes it too, because her gaze softens and she gently picks Mike up. The boy latches himself onto her like a baby koala, face pressing into her neck and inhaling.
“Mom?” he mumbles sleepily.
Karen tightens her arms around him and just like Joyce a few hours before with Jonathan, whispers into his hair “I’m so proud of you, baby.”