PRETTY SICK!
— walking with a ghost ☆

"Hello!" Angie's voice strained, hoarse and raw from shouting out for what felt like hours since she'd awoken from her sudden loss of consciousness.

The cuffs that locked her wrists together were connected on a chain that rattled the finicky table whenever she tugged on it, the metal dug into her skin and left bright red marks. Her own fault, of course, much like the entire predicament in general. Her chest ached. She wondered if they forgot about her and would leave her there until she died of dehydration or something stupid.

The walls, tiled with dull ivory acrylic, ricocheted her voice around all four corners of the room. Surely someone heard her through the small crack under the door, or at the very least on a dinky screen in the next room over; the light from a security camera remained on for the entire duration she'd sat in there. She started to tug at her confines again, her skin begging her to stop unless she felt like seeing crimson red drip down her arms and onto the table.

Her head slumped forward and her forehead hit the table in front of her harder than intended. Everyone had been right about her. Being crazy and all. This was crazy, the "Demogorgon" was crazy, and now, Angie had to pay for her mistakes in the form of getting taken out by the government.

She found it funny, in some sick way. Like, the "holy shit, this is actually happening to me" way — surrealism never felt like a palpable thing for her, most of her life was raw and real, the rawest that someone could get. A childhood spent watching her father spiral into a drug addiction, then her brother, an ill mother and the alleys behind her red-brick townhouse taunted her memories daily. But her entire past year having led up to this? Angie chuckled to herself and squeezed her eyes shut, "Shit. Shit — shit — shit."

If you asked her a week ago where she thought she would be, she'd have said at work, or maybe at home on a day off. Stuck in Hawkins Lab with information that could very well get her killed?

More than likely, but definitely not something she'd have wanted to hear.

The heavy door opened with a slight squeak of the hinges, were they unused? Or overused? Angie didn't know, or question anything as she raised her head and glared at the man who entered. He looked old, tired, or rather exhausted from the wear and tear of the day; his coily hair had long been greyed and the lines on his face deepened with each slight of his facial muscles. His speckled hands flattened out his lab coat and one gripped a stress ball in his left, and it looked like he grimaced once his eyes landed on her shackled up hands.

"Oh, good heavens, I told them — you know what? Let me just help you out of these," he sighed and fumbled with a small key for a moment, unlocking the cuffs from her wrists.

Angie rubbed them, the tender skin burned with each touch of her cool fingers. She glanced up at the man, and without a moment's thought she blurted out, "I want a lawyer."

His brows raised for a second and he chuckled at her. "Smart girl," he complimented and made his way over towards the seat across from her, "I must say — I was pleasantly, or... well, unpleasantly surprised when I heard you broke in. That isn't exactly the most achievable feat for someone with no practice."

"I — want — a — lawyer," Angie repeated herself, her voice wavered alongside her faux-confidence and gall. If she were any more frightened, she may have bursted into tears right then and there and flooded the entire floor. The man must have sensed her fear, or something along the lines of it, because he relaxed his face to appear less stern.

"Look, Miss Bell, I understand you're upset but we don't want to work against you." His explanation fell on deaf ears, or rather, ears that refused to listen to anything some murderer had to say. "You want this to have the best outcome, and I want this to have the best outcome; to do that, we have to work together."

She swallowed back a miniscule amount of her pride, and it slid down her throat like raging lava from an active volcano.

Her father's voice screamed at her to cough it up.

"Who are you?" murmured Angie, her head tilted downwards involuntarily as she became more passive. The scared girl trapped inside of her skull always came out one way or another, in spite of what raged throughout the rest of her body.

"Doctor Sam Owens, I — well, practically run the show here," Sam, if that was his real name, explained. He watched her shoulders shrink into themselves and glanced up at the ugly beige ceiling. "There are... things you may have found out about through the disappearance of your brother, things we kept under wraps for an important reason, a few, actually. The most important being to keep other people from having the same fate —"

"You killed my brother." She looked up at him and stared blankly, then dropped her head back down to watch her twiddling thumbs, "And Barbara Holland."

"The people responsible for that are gone, I'm the schmuck they sent in to fix things, for better or for worse," replied Doctor Owens, folding his hands together in front of himself on the table. His eyes watched Angie intently, who furrowed her brows together in thought.

That sounded like a lie. Did he think she was stupid? Angie's eyes narrowed, her head barely bowed for him. "You couldn't have fired an entire lab of people who were just doing their job, you — you just moved them around elsewhere, right? I'm not an idiot."

Sam shook his head and waved his hand in an up and down motion, wordlessly silencing the girl. "No, no, I'm sure you're a very intelligent girl — obviously if you managed to get in here. And you're right, to an extent; but what matters now is that they're out of control."

"So, what? My brother's dead and you get a slap on the wrist?" she deadpanned, and she paid close attention to his microexpressions. The slight twitch of his eye, how his brow barely moved upwards.

"I'm here to fix things. To prevent incidents, like your brother, from happening again."

Do not let anyone you wouldn't let in your home speak down to you, her father's conscience became her own. Bite back.

Something flicked on in Angie's mind, a switch to a certain deviousness that crawled in the depths of her brain. Rarely did it come out on a day to day basis, but the fact that he treated the poor people who fell victim to that thing as simply an "incident" — it poured gasoline on an already burning flame in her chest. "Oh, bite me," she snapped, "Pete wasn't an "incident", he's a man with a family and dreams."

"A poor choice of words on my part." Dr. Owens frowned at her sudden change in demeanor, his lips pressed together into a line. "I understand if you're angry but—"

"No, no, you don't understand."

"But I need you to listen to me," he insisted, "You're a smart girl with a bright future; you can get off of this practically scott-free as long as you promise a few things, sign a few things, and arrange some kind of agreement."

Angie's jaw clenched, and her brows knitted together so deeply that she saw them at the top of her eyeline. "And if I don't listen to you, I'll go to jail, right? We aren't arranging some kind of "agreement", you're just making me sign a prewritten NDA."

He sighed and pushed a clipboard towards her, a stack of papers clipped to it. "Yes. Don't forget that you did break into a government facility and accessed confidential records; trespassing, burglary, treason," Sam replied, his face pinched unpleasantly. "They won't be nearly as tolerant of you as I am. But if you'd like, we can come to a real agreement."

Angie wondered if they held his job above his head like a carrot.

"I want everyone to know what you did. Send me to jail. Someone else'll find out and tell people and it'll have the same outcome." She nudged the clipboard away, her wrists still throbbed from the cuffs that had long since been removed. The doctor looked rather exhausted when she did that, shutting his eyes for the briefest moment before he set a pen down on the table.

"We confiscated all of the evidence in your room, which was... quite extensive, I might say."

Angie pursed her lips, they went through her room? It wasn't the time to pay attention to that, she reasoned, "And? Like you said — I'm a smart girl with a bright future, what business do I have getting arrested for trespassing on a government facility? Smart girls don't do that without a good reason. And sure, you can blame it on "psychosis that runs in the family" or some half-assed excuse you pulled outta nowhere, but there's people who know that's not what happened. They'll find the copies and photos I took of everything I did, my journals, my notes. Everything I hid." Her lips barely twitched into a pained smile as she spoke, it was brief, but still obvious enough that Sam narrowed his eyes at her. The smile covered up the raging nerves that struck her body with each cocky proclamation and she heard Norman's voice come from her throat. "Send me to jail; I'd give it a year or two tops before it all unravels and I get retried and freed, probably. If not, then I'd gladly watch from my cell as this place gets burned to the fucking ground."

A beat of silence was all it took for Angie's stomach to churn and her chest to constrict in on itself, her ribs surely squeezed her organs with how hard she sucked a breath in through her teeth; feigned confidence never lasted forever. Her false image of grandeur faltered and Doctor Sam Owens caught it. The frown lines on his face deepend, years of having made the same expression of pity set in irreversible stone — she was a stupid kid with poor grieving skills to him, Angie felt like a stupid kid. Maybe he'd just kill her. Frame it as a suicide, or maybe he'd send her to the Demogorgon as a treat to placate it.

He placed a hand on the table as he stood up, the other on the clipboard, pushing it towards her once again. "In doing that, you place more people at risk — children, other brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers; your grief is completely understandable, and no life will compare to his, but you would only be taking down the people that want to help you. I doubt Peter would have wanted you to end up like this," Sam sighed, Angie's eyes locked on her shiny black heels, "I have other things to attend to, so I'll leave you with some food for thought as you cool down: no amount of compensation will be able to pay for a life, but maybe you can have something good come from this for you and your family. Covering funeral costs, medical bills for your mother, tuition, things like that. Think about it."

The door swung open with a screech once again and slammed shut behind the doctor, who rushed to whatever business he had to attend to with an alarming pace. Angie paid little to no mind to that. She stared blankly at the floor, unblinking and unmoving from her sitting position; it felt like she had too many thoughts at once, and none all the same. Pete would be so disappointed. He'd be guilty if something bad happened to her because of him.

No, not because of anyone — this was her own fault, no one pulled on her strings to make her act fucking crazy.

No amount of money could bring him back, but no amount of revenge felt satisfactory for her; she wasn't supposed to make it this far. Angie survived past her expiry date when she outlived Pete.

Maybe that was for a reason, to make something of herself and have him not die in vain... she never understood things like that — Fate and higher power.

Her head ached, she needed food, and she wanted some kind of explaination as to what that fucking thing was in the photo. Surely, it had to be real or there wouldn't be a clipboard in front of her with uniformly typed words and blank spaces where she needed to sign. She shakily hovered her hand over the pen for a moment, she hesitated, then grabbed it and started to carefully read each line of the non-disclosure-agreement. Angie wished someone came with her, she wished she still had someone like Pete to guide her through things.

Even when she searched for what happened to him, there was a kind of "spirit" there to point her in the right direction, Angie always asked herself: what would lead her to Pete? But now, the road cleared and she felt stuck in her own head. Pete would take the money and sign, she thought, he never wanted to hurt other people with his own issues.

But, Pete was dead.

Killed by some monstrous creature that only existed in movies and books. Plus, Angie never really liked sci-fi, she was completely out of her element.

If everything got revealed, more people were put in danger, Angie reminded herself, people she knows and cares about. She sucked in a breath and started to sign the first sheet, then the second and third, careful to watch for any loopholes in the contract that would screw her over in the long run. She wondered what time it was, and if her scheduled date with Billy had long passed, was it Monday already? The blonde had no clue about the time, or even how long she'd been unconscious.

The thought that Pete died in pain plagued her mind; it made her tear up within a few moments of her brain coming up with it. No one deserved that, especially not him. Kind-hearted, selfless Peter Bell should not have died like that. He should not have died, period. Angie wished she never attended that stupid party, nothing good came of it, nothing at all.

An overwhelming sense of sadness racked her body as she fought back guttural sobs — she wished it'd been her instead. Her eyes squeezed themselves shut and her head fell into her hands once tears streamed down her cheeks. Why him? Her death wouldn't have meant much to the grand scheme of things, unless it somehow created a domino effect in which another person spiraled in a similar fashion to her. A long, grueling spiral. Why did the world have to torture Angie more than it already had by killing him? Now she had to do everything in her power to make sure his death wasn't in vain; a responsibility that hung heavy on her back and shoulders. It burned unpleasantly against her skin, everything felt uncomfortably hot as her own tears scorched her.

The world was on fire. Her home was on fire. Her mind was on fire. Everything was lit up in flames and Angie struggled to tell the difference between water and gasoline.

When she raised her head to continue signing the pages on the clipboard, the lights in the interrogation room went out, replaced by yellow emergency lights that flashed in beat with the alarm that started to go off. It sounded less like a fire alarm, and more like something reminiscent of a tornado warning, or the Emergency Alert System on the television.

Angie shot out of her seat as the door bursted open, a guard waved her over to him, "C'mon, get behind me! Get behind me!" he ushered over the blaring alarm, several other people trailed behind him, each clad in pristine lab coats. "Move, move!"

She pressed her hands to her ears and obliged to his orders. Gunshots echoed through the hallways, and the blonde had to force her legs to keep moving despite her heart racketing against her ribcage. "What's going on?" Angie yelled over the noise, looking down each hall they passed.

"We're on lockdown!" The woman in front of her shouted, her mousy brown hair tousled from the brash movements.

They bumped into each other when the guard ahead of them stopped, and Angie struggled to see around the entire group at what the hold up was. She heard his gun cock, then started to unload itself on whatever blocked them from passing. People nudged each other out of the way to get further away from it, Angie backed up from them to avoid being knocked over, and several of them screamed once there was an animalistic growl, something she'd never heard before, and the sound of the gun clattering onto the linoleum alongside the guard's body.

The group split, and first she locked eyes with the guard, who stared blankly at the ceiling — his eyes dulled by the second, then she slowly lifted her vision onto the thing on top of him.

Its skin looked slimy with bumps and ridges that only exaggerated the shine that came from it whenever the emergency lights hit it; her eyes struggled to make out exactly the color that it was, but it looked something close to dark green, maybe speckled with black and red. This was, undoubtedly, a smaller Demogorgon. She backed away when it raised its head and roared, a throaty croak that echoed down the hallway, teeth covered in a thick layer of gore from the guard's body.

"Run!"

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AUTHOR'S NOTE
——— reformatting the a/ns eventually bc the other ones are ugly af. im really sorry for the slow updates, i've been down in the dumps and my head's all over the place rn 😓 im trying to get back on track

——— votes and comments appreciated!!

PRETTY SICK!
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