an unethical surgery

. ✧ ・゜. +・o ✧

Robin was the only one who seemed completely out of the loop. Staring back at the damaged car and the dead men on the ground, she said, "I don't understand what happened to that car." Her eyes were bulging, her mind probably whirling. Gabe knew how that felt. He'd been the last one to be told everything about the Upside Down last year, and when he had eventually been told everything about it, he hadn't even known what to think. But the attack of the Demodogs made it so he had believed them, and so it was that he was standing here right now.

Dustin jerked a finger at the girl who'd caused the damage. "El has superpowers," he explained. "So does Al, but—"

"I'm sorry?"

"Superpowers," Steve echoed. He looked like he'd been beaten up. Again. Though probably not by Billy this time, given that Billy—flayed or not—would've been eager to pound him into paste instead of merely giving him a swollen eye and a split lip. He and Robin were both still wearing their Scoops Ahoy uniforms, but they were crusted in vomit and blood. "She threw it with her mind," Steve continued. "C'mon, catch up."

Erica seemed to be more knowledgeable than Robin was. "That's El?" she asked, pointing at the girl. Well, Gabe assumed Dustin must've told her everything. It made sense, given that she hadn't been at all fazed when a literal car had gone flying through the air.

"Who's El?" Robin asked, blinking.

"I'm sorry," said Nancy, "who are you?"

"I'm Robin. I work with Steve."

"She cracked the top-secret code," Dustin explained. Now it was Gabe's turn to blink. What top-secret code? What was he talking about?

Steve continued, "Yeah, which is how we found out about the Russians in the first place." Gabe's eyes swivelled between him, Dustin and Robin like he was watching a tennis match. What the hell was going on here? What was the code, and what did this have to do with Russians? And how had Erica Sinclair—who was still clutching Alina for dear life—and Robin gotten dragged into this?

Jonathan seemed equally as confused. "Russians?" he echoed. "Wait, what Russians?"

"The Russians!" Steve repeated. He didn't seem to understand that literally nobody had any idea what he was talking about.

"Those were Russians?" Max asked, her eyes flicking back to the dead men on the ground. Gabe swallowed. He could see their blood staining the tiles, and although he knew El had killed them for a good reason, it still made him uncomfortable. He'd never witnessed such a brutal killing before—no, scratch that, a killing in general.

"Some of them," said Erica, her braided hair swinging as she spoke.

"Evil Russians?" Gabe asked. "I thought that was just propaganda. I mean, that's what my grandma told me. She said the US made up a bunch of stuff about them because our countries are fighting or whatever."

"Nope, these are real evil commie shitheads," Erica replied. Gabe thought to reprimand her for cursing—after all, she was a literal ten-year-old—but closed his mouth in horror as he realized he was slowly turning into his grandma. Well, not quite. If Dolores Burton was here, she wouldn't simply reprimand Erica, she'd whoop her ass. Gabe didn't think he was there yet.

"What are you talking about?" Lucas asked.

"Didn't you hear our code red?" Dustin asked.

"Yeah," snapped Mike, "and I couldn't understand half of what you were saying."

"Goddamn low battery!"

"How many times do I have to tell you with the low battery?" Steve snapped, clapping his hands between each word, reverting back to his babysitting tendencies. Gabe smiled. He was glad Steve had been with Dustin.

"I mean, I heard them speaking another language outside," Alina began, "but I didn't know it was Russian."

"Do you have super hearing along with your super good eyesight?" Will asked from beside her. "Because I just heard a bunch of mumbling."

"Well, everything worked out, didn't it, Steve?" Dustin asked smugly.

"Worked out?" Erica repeated. "We almost died."

"Welcome to the club, Erica Sinclair," Gabe muttered. Erica looked up at him.

"Okay, seriously, nerd, what happened to your face? You look like you were run over by a truck."

"I got beat up by Billy Hargrove." Of course, that required further explanation, because it seemed like this group hadn't met up with the flayed man. "He's flayed. Possessed. Which, it looks like, you have no idea about. Anyway, he kind of kicked all of our asses in the sauna. We were testing him, you know, because the Mind Flayer likes it cold. I think he got pissed 'cause I stabbed him in the arm. He also hit Alina in the ribs and nearly choked El to death."

"I'm sorry, what?" Robin asked.

"It's a long story," Will said eventually. He reached out, his fingers brushing Gabe's hand, and then he was holding it again. He was the one to take it. He was the one to hold on.

If Gabe wasn't so confused, he thought he might die on the spot.

"Anyway," Dustin coughed. "We didn't die, did we, Erica?"

"It was pretty damn close," said Steve.

"I can see that," said Alina, gesturing to his mess of a face. "Dude, they beat the shit out of you."

Lucas was still stuck on what the new group had been saying before. "Okay, Russians?" he asked. "As in, they're working for the Russian government?"

"What is it that you're not comprehending?" snapped Dustin. "Am I not speaking English? We have a full-blown Red Dawn situation."

"So, this has nothing to do with the gate?" Max asked.

"It has everything to do with the gate."

"Dustin, whatever you think we know, we don't," said Alina. "How about you start from the beginning and tell us why the hell you have evil Russians after you and what this has to do with the gate. And then we can tell you about all of the shit we've been through during these past few days."

It was a good idea to start from the beginning, because everyone was rambling and nobody getting to the point, but, unfortunately, for now there was no time to actually go through with it, because just then, a thud startled all of them out of their conversations. Everyone whirled around, and found El lying on the ground, whimpering in pain, her face glazed with tears.

Predictably, Mike was the first to speak. "El! El!" he shouted, sprinting over to crouch beside his ex-girlfriend. He helped roll her onto her back, where blood was sprouting from both nostrils and she was moaning. Everyone followed Mike, until they were gathered around the girl, confused as to what had happened.

"What's wrong with her?" Erica asked.

"What's wrong?" Mike asked the question three times, repeating himself in his panic. El sobbed, her hair clinging to her forehead with sweat.

"My leg," she wailed. "My leg."

"Her leg, her leg," Jonathan repeated. "Okay. Get that off." His hands fluttered down to the bloody bandages adorning El's leg as the girl in question sobbed and moaned. Quickly, he managed to peel back the messy layers Max had applied, and they expected... well, Gabe didn't know what he had expected to see. A swollen leg, maybe? Some more bleeding? Certainly not this.

El's leg was completely red with blood now, but that wasn't what was making bile rise up in Gabe's throat. No, that was because what had previously merely been a gaping hole in the flesh of her shin was now an inflamed, purple sore, bursting with pus and blood. It was larger than a bouncy ball now—more golf ball in size—and to make matters worse, there was something moving inside it, wriggling around beneath her skin and pushing against it. Black veins crawled out of the wound, and Gabe immediately knew that a piece of the Mind Flayer had seeped its way into her skin before Mike had pulled its claws off of her. And now it looked like it was aching to get out, or perhaps just to spread. To take over El from the inside-out.

El grunted in pain as everyone else immediately let out cries of disgust, unable to take their eyes off the revolting thing. Gabe forced himself to swallow down the bitter vomit, but his face immediately paled as nausea swirled up inside of him. As the creature squirmed, El's grunts turned to wails, her face almost as red as her blood-painted leg.

Mike looked around wildly. "El! El!" he shook her. "El! El, are you okay? El! El! El!"

El let out a feral scream, and Gabe winced. "Holy shit!" he found himself yelling. "Holy shit! What the fuck is that? What the fuck is that?!"

He'd never said that word in his entire life, but he thought now would be a good time to lose his f-word virginity. El continued to scream, her sobs intermingled in a brutal harmony, and that was when things got bad to worse. The creature shoved itself against her swollen leg with a disgusting sizzle of flesh, and it was all Gabe could do to stumble back, away from his friends before he was retching, and then puking. His stomach lurched, but it kept coming out, and it was probably long overdue, anyway, given literally everything that had happened lately. The leg was the last straw for him.

"What is that?" Erica asked, staring at the wound in a combination of intrigue and disgust. Gabe continued to puke, and people stayed as far away from them as they could while still being near El. This was not how he'd wanted his birthday to go.

"There's something in there," said Mike.

"No shit!" Alina yelled. "It's the Mind Flayer! It's the goddamn Mind Flayer! It got a piece of it inside her goddamn leg!"

Gabe's puking finally subsided, and he forced himself to come back, wiping his mouth on his shirt. Which was great, because this stupid Hawaiian shirt had actually been clean, and now he was dirtying this one up, too.

El kept wailing, and her blood darkened, but what could they do but stare with gaping mouths at the wound? What could they even do to help her? To keep her from dying? Would this thing kill her? Gabe thought it might just. He wondered how the hell she was still conscious. The pain must've been unbearable. Like, bypassing the ten in his stupid pain-ranking system.

"Jesus Christ," hissed Dustin. His face had turned a ripe green.

Surprisingly, it was Jonathan who decided to take the lead. "Keep her talking," he instructed them. "Keep her awake, okay?" and then he rose to his feet and sprinted into the food court amidst El's screams and wails. After a tense moment, Alina got up and followed him.

"Jesus Christ," said Dustin again.

El's moans were getting fainter, her eyelids drooping, and Mike began to talk to her. "Hey, hey, hey. Stay awake, stay awake," he pleaded. "Let's get her on this side, get her on this side."

"Easy, easy, easy, easy," muttered Steve as they all helped drag El to a proper position. Meanwhile, Robin's voice had grown high, and she began to ramble, just like Gabe often did.

"It's, uh... You know, it's not actually that bad," she told them. When everyone's eyes shot to her, wondering how anything could be even worse than this, she continued, "There was a... the goalie on my soccer team, Beth Wildfire, this other girl slid into her leg, and, like, the whole bone came out of her knee, six inches or something, it was insane."

"Robin," said Steve.

"Yeah?"

"You're not helping."

"I'm sorry."

And then was when Jonathan and Alina returned, sprinting as fast as their legs let them. Jonathan was holding a knife, which, judging by the red aura emanating around it, had been heated up by Alina's powers, a glove, and a wooden spoon. He knelt beside her, his voice tense. "Okay. All right, El? This is gonna hurt like hell, okay?"

El, her face screwed up, managed to choke out, "Okay."

Jonathan fumbled on the glove. "Need you to stay real still," he said, before holding out the wooden spoon. "Here, you're gonna wanna bite down on this, okay?"

Mike took it from Jonathan and put it in El's mouth. "Jesus Christ," said Dustin again, and it hit Gabe what, exactly, Jonathan was planning to do. His eyes went wide.

"You're not going to cut that thing out of her, are you?" he asked. "You aren't, right? Right?"

Jonathan's silence was enough. Gabe thought he might throw up again, especially as Jonathan began to bring the hot knife closer and closer to El's flesh.

"Holy shit, holy shit," cried Dustin.

Jonathan hesitated just before plunging the knife into El's flesh, even with the girl whimpering in pain. It was clear that the lesser of the two evils was to perform this unethical surgery, but Gabe knew why he was hesitating. It was because this was not safe.

But Mike seemed to realize it had to be done. Firmly clutching onto his girlfriend, he instructed, "Do it."

"Okay," Jonathan breathed. He looked like he was going to be sick.

And then he made the first cut into El's leg.

. ✧ ・゜. +・o ✧

a/n: gabe lost his f-word virginity lads 😌 of course it would be at the sight of el's disgusting leg, but whatever!!

ALSO, BIDEN WON??? i mean, obviously he's not the best, but he's LEAGUES better than trump, and as a canadian, i'm SO GLAD y'all got that orange toddler out of office!! the trumpies are gonna be big mad about this LMFAOO 

might do a double update as a celebration for this news 🙈🙈 i'm honestly SO relieved i can't even explain it omg 

'till next time!