PRETTY SICK!
— a "happy" birthday ☆

Angie had no idea how many people she would hurt.

How her mother wept; wailed into the dull-gray walls of the empty trailer home they shared—she failed, she failed as a mother and disgraced the name of her mother and the mother before her; Vincent slammed the phone on the receiver the moment he heard the news, poor Chief Hopper hadn't gotten a word in after, "Your sister was in an accident." before the line went dead. Neither needing, nor wanting that in his conscience; hearing it from the chief of police was bad, the calls from berserk Julie Bell were bad, and the lack of communication from Angie was bad. Out of sight, out of mind, she assumed Vincent's thought process when he went M.I.A.

Freshly amputated, no one took the news well when people caught wind of the case of Angie's missing arm. Apparently Raymond blamed it on a tractor, a goddamn tractor, as if she hadn't gone through enough embarrassment having lost everything up to just above the elbow in the first place.

No sense of relief came when the judgment bestowed upon her was lifted; Pete and Barbara were declared dead through foul play, and Angelica Bell hadn't been so kooky after all when she declared the same fact all those months ago. But who could blame them, right? Nothing bad ever happened in their perfect little nook they called Hawkins. One too many mysterious instances created a shockwave throughout the town, and it was no secret: small towns bred big mouths.

First it was the details, or rather, lack thereof surrounding the death of beloved Bob Newby; then the majority of employees in the lab, who miraculously packed all of their bags and moved to separate divisions, each on the same day, and each never to be heard from again; finally, word got 'round that innocent little Angie Bell had an accident, something involving a faulty tractor she happened to be maimed by in search of a small, injured animal.

These "components" to the mystery of Hawkins revealed themselves heretofore the lab's inevitable downfall; havoc stirred beneath the surface of the asphalt that lined their town, residents whispered to each other behind their hands, the word cursed floated through loose lips and between the cracks of their fingers. At the very least, they had names and faces to blame, now. The lab, only the lab—God forbid they spoke of the real government's name in vain, for, the people of Hawkins, Indiana were good people.

Good Samaritans who deserved peace in their lives.

Yeah, right. Angie scoffed in her head every time the hospital door swung open with a visitor on the other side. "Good Samaritans" didn't exist in Hawkins, not when Satan's gate loomed on the edge of town.

She kept her back to the door, always, deducing when it'd be a visitor or a doctor from how they opened the door: heavy handed and anxious, or softly, pitifully, as not to scare the sweet creature who rested within the room.

The first couple of days during her prolonged stay in hell were reminiscent of a morphine induced fever dream (which it very well could have been), a haze of jumbled up scenes and words that Angie couldn't quite attach to any faces. Karen Wheeler came with her mother, she thought, and a couple of cops questioned her until they arrived at the conclusion that she "didn't remember" much of the events from that night. How wrong they were, she remembered every second of it. Every minute detail.

When she closed her eyes, when she made the trek down the hospital's cramped hallways to use the bathroom; lifeless eyes stared back at her, limp bodies propped up against the pristine, white walls, they echoed in every memory as taunting apparitions—a reminder of her position in the world, a fluke.

Angie was, in all sense of the word, a fluke from that night. She shouldn't have survived past the lobby, hell, past her first encounter with one of those things. But, apparently, the demons that lurked beneath the surface of her town infected much more than only her. The last person she expected to be intertwined in this mess was King Steve, her friend Steve Harrington, who never had a hair on his head out of place. But, when non-familial-slash-government-official only visitation wore off, Steve appeared by her bedside everyday to recount the ventures of his past year, whether Angie seemed responsive or not.

He called them "Demodogs", derived from the Demogorgon he apparently fought a year prior alongside Nancy Wheeler and Jonathan Byers. It didn't really make sense, the way he described it, he talked in circles about it, jumping from point to point, backwards and forwards. Steve couldn't even be annoyed when Angie's face screwed up in confusion.

Desperate for a solution, he brought his snarky, curly-haired friend to lay the story out accurately; Dustin Henderson had been there since the beginning, why wouldn't he know? But Dustin insisted that Mike told the story better, whereas he knew more of the technical parts of the whole ordeal, and Mike insisted that Eleven be there, in which they promptly got distracted with each other and Dustin had to call Lucas over to help explain instead... who brought Max and Will.

Apparently when you search for one, the rest appeared shortly after, like a flock of ducklings following their mother into a lake (they surely fell over the visitor limit).

Bees swarmed in her ears every time they spoke, especially when they all started to talk at the same time. They did this often, by the way, extremely often. Her addled state of mind got ignored, Angie let her discomfort slide under the rug to watch them buzz around her bed, busily, like an attempt to cheer her up or something. It never worked, obviously but... Come on, honestly, what kind of insensitive asshole kicked out a group of freshly traumatized children from their hospital room?

Steve did without issue. Multiple times.

He played some kind of "body-guard" role for her, at times. Angie started to remind him that he had to attend school for more than half of the day, or else his grades would slip even further down the slope that they'd already been barreling towards; he argued, he persisted, Steve sighed and moaned an groaned until he realized that maybe her spirit had been lost, but the empty shell that took up space on the hospital bed still remained stubborn as ever. He felt a bit better that parts of her were left intact after the accident, so much so in fact, on the evening of November twenty-first, 1984, Steve Harrington showed up at her hospital door with poorly decorated birthday cupcakes in his arms and several children and teenagers in tow.

Genuinely, Angie hadn't even remembered her birthday. She sat up from her bed and stared blankly, mouth agape and hanging as they cheered in unison. They still held that hesitant quietness in the backs of their throats, like if they spoke too loud she would burst into a million pieces.

Angie didn't deserve all of that. The praise and attention, let alone the sympathy; everything that happened, happened because of her. All of the pain happened because she couldn't just let something fucking go, there'd been no "accident" or "wrong place at the wrong time", only a severe fuck up on Angelica's part—not just an "Oh, shit." fuck up, an oh-my-fucking-god-my-life-is-over, the dream crushing kind.

No ballet company wanted a woman with one arm to dance for them, a lead no less, so bye-bye lifelong dream of playing Giselle.

A fair punishment, all things considered, but it felt so much like a stab to the gut whenever one of the children looked at her in her cloudy blue eyes and offered her a meek, "Sorry about your arm.". This wasn't something she needed pity for, or anything close to it, if any of the circumstances were different, if she'd really been run over by a tractor rather than an inter-dimensional creature, none of them would be standing around her bed with gifts in hand.

And then the godforsaken Happy Birthday song. Each out of tune note she withheld a cringe and every pair of intent eyes added onto the unneeded stress of the situation, she found solace in the fact that it ended just as quick as it began and the feeling that she was about to bash her head into the nearest solid object dissipated.

Angie excused herself to the bathroom, she needed a smoke.

She took a right instead of a left; uneven steps turned into a slow, monotonous shuffle when she began to lose her balance and maneuvered her body unskillfully. Angelica's skeleton remained in a body that did not belong to her anymore, her elegant stride she practiced throughout childhood became something clumsy, unlike herself or anything she'd ever imagined herself to be. She swallowed dryly and felt the ghost of her right hand clench and unclench, she felt the silver rings adorned on her index and middle fingers.

Angie went to twist them nervously and her face went sour. Machines from the room down the hall beeped at in laughter, doctors stared in pity.

The hallways taunted her, they always did, they beckoned her to stand in the center, stare straight ahead and stare down the long stretch of corridor until the walls began to tilt into themselves and she closed her eyes in a childish way, like it would end the phantasmic nightmares that plagued her new normal. If only, when she opened her eyes, she would be standing on the edge of Lake Morrow, frozen over and a brilliant shade of forest green, as large as the moon and stretched as far as the eye could see. Pete always said you could see the edge in the fall, when the leaves and greenery browned with speckles of orange and blew into the water. She opened her eyes and faced the cruel reality of life, the indomitable certainty of her entire life leading up to this very moment.

Wide-eyed and armless in a world that wanted her to raise her hands in surrender to it. A first row seat to her own demise.

Denial became her friend and the tone of her heavenly macrocosm had a gray underpainting. Everything looked soft, almost fuzzy, as if the scene in front of her was exhaled onto the surface of a window pane.

Her hand cupped the glass of the window beside the automatic doors and she pressed her face into her thumb, letting her breaths cloud her sight of the waning crescent moon, Angie looked crazy and she didn't care. The first snow would fall soon. She wiped the condensation off and stepped outside, shivering in the late November air underneath one of Pete's old sweaters, it was dark green and burgundy with gray kittens on the front wearing Christmas hats. It didn't smell like him anymore, it smelled like the back of the dresser; Gen dug it out for her when she and Nancy helped Steve bring a few of her items to make her hospital stay more bearable. It helped a little.

She sat down on the bench closest to the entrance and sifted in her pockets for her carton of Marlboros, stolen from Steve's mother's nightstand. Unlike she'd notice, though, she had a horrible memory from what Angie recalled during their sparse meetings.

Her hand found null in either pocket of her sweatpants and she sighed to herself, shutting her eyes tiredly and letting her back hit the cool metal of the seat. It stung through the sweater and her first day of adulthood seemed better if it would be her last.

She noticed, as weeks passed from that night at the lab, the fleeting fear of a Demodog jumping from her peripheral and finishing what it started molded itself into something more of a comfort. The circle of her life could finally close and the fluke of having survived would be mended. A sort of retribution.

The automatic doors slid open again and she paid the figure who exited no mind until they stopped to the right handle of the bench, their hands shoved into their pockets.

"Hey," Steve said with a casual drawl he put on in order to appear nonchalant, something that had begun to annoy Angie to no end. He was allowed to pretend to be normal. Steve could go home at the end of the day and the only thing he had to prove for the supernatural instances in the town were his thoughts and word of mouth, Angie had a constant reminder that hung off of her right shoulder.

"Hey," she repeated slowly and glanced at him, though she wanted to spit the most venomous things she could think of, as if he were merely a stranger who rammed into her on the sidewalks of Chicago.

Steve fumbled in the pocket of his jeans and held out the white and red box she'd searched for moments prior. "Missing this?" he asked, then pulled it back towards him so he could wipe it clean of blue lint, "I figured you'd disappear on everyone sooner than later."

Angie fell silent and pursed her lips in distaste, he cringed at the same time. A synchronous dance of expressions they passed to each other like a gift, something they'd both become unacclimated with all of those months ago. He handed her the box.

"Sorry," muttered Steve, and he plopped next to her in silent defeat of his confidence, shoulders shrunken in slightly.

Without missing a beat. "It's fine. D'you have a light?"

"Yeah, here." He pulled a lighter from his other pocket and flicked it a few times until the spark became a small orange flame. The silver lighter looked new and Angie wondered if he replaced the one that she engraved her, Carol, and Tommy's name into with a thumbtack during tenth grade Biology.

Angie leaned forward with the cigarette in her mouth, and Steve cupped his hand over the flame, hidden from the night breeze. She glanced up at him; his heavy brows pinched in focus while the dull, yet warm light illuminated his face. The yellow and green remnants of a bruise blossomed across his brow bone, cheekbone, and nose became clear and visible. He refused to tell her what happened. She hated that, not knowing. Angie wanted to know what thoughts lingered behind his mahogany eyes, to peel his skull open and pick at his brain until she figured out what exactly he thought when he looked at her, saw her, heard her. She wanted to question his reasoning, his confidence, and his judgment until the sun came up over the beige brick buildings. She wanted to know him like she knew him when they were freshmen who couldn't help but overshare.

Did they still know each other like that? Did he want to know her like that? She pulled away from the flame and inhaled, feeling her stress melt from the heat of the smoke that burned the back of her throat. If Steve peeled back her skull, he'd find rot as deep as his fingers could dig, dirt under his nails.

"You got a new lighter," Angie pointed out, smoke billowing from her lips.

"Oh." He glanced down at it and tossed it hand to hand, shrugging slightly. "Yeah, shit—I, uh, I wanted to keep it safe but we needed it to light the tunnels up..." A beat. "You know?"

"I know. The tunnels," she recalled and a distant wistfulness disembodied her voice.

She imagined the sight: purple, fleshy walls set ablaze by the silver lighter, then she inhaled another huff from the cigarette and watched the smoke swirl above her head from the glowing tip. Her fingers itched to pull at the collar of her sweater. "Were you scared?"

Steve made a noise from the back of his throat, and every microexpression on his face read yes absolutely. Instead, he said, "Not really."

"Not even a little?"

"Nope."

"I was scared."

And then he inhaled sharply. Angie watched his eyes flicker towards the bandaged stump beside him, hidden under her sweater, then he glanced down at his hands in shame. She didn't think he realized she was trying to comfort him, in her own way ("It's okay to be scared. I was scared." Was what she should have said.), or he did and simply felt too bad to brush the comment off.

"Ange, I—I didn't... I want to say sorry, but I don't know how. I should've been there... before any of this even happened: last week, last month, last year. I should have done something," Steve confessed, his hand came up to pinch the bridge of his nose. It hovered, unsuccessfully hiding his glossy eyes. "And I know it's a little late for this. Too late. But from now on, I'm here, just shout and I'll be there, and I'm just so, so sorry about everything."

For a moment, she wanted to cut him off, to pull his hands from his face and scream at him that if he was about to cry, cry like a man. With his chest. With any last amount of fight he had in him. She wanted to see his face, red and puffy, tear stains tracked down his cheeks and brown pools reflecting something that wouldn't make her feel so alone in her tenderness. It was the least he could do for her.

But Steve treaded carefully, he stepped over the fissures and gaps she laid out for him, cradling his man-made pride in a baby-blue blanket. She could picture his father standing beside him with his hand iron-locked on Steve's shoulder as he hovered over him like a wool suit wearing ghost—Mr. Harrington always had a grip on his shoulder: night and day, with friends and family and lovers—she knew this because a boney, pale hand always sat atop her shoulder too. It felt easier to get mad at Steve, though, rather than the invisible family noose that constantly hung from his neck.

Angie grimaced in response and rubbed her face with the back of her hand, cigarette still lit. "You don't have to blame yourself, or give me sympathy. I drove myself crazy and it had nothing to do with you, so, just don't bother," she paused, "There was no stopping this."

She didn't believe herself, but she wanted to believe that she believed because when she worried about the mistakes she made in the past, she made worse mistakes to overshadow them.

"Uh," he cleared his throat and thought for a moment. "Though sympathy alone can't alter facts, it can help to make them more bearable." Steve said this in a poorly articulated British accent, glancing on and off at Angie every other word in reassurance that the reference wouldn't fly over her head.

"You read Dracula?" she questioned dubiously. "Bram Stoker's Dracula?"

"Last year."

Her brows raised.

"You don't think I can read a book?" Steve grinned softly and tried not to sound annoyed, though genuine discontent dripped from his tongue.

"That's not it." Angie shook her head. "It's just—It was written in British-English during the turn of the century. I mean, honestly. I only ever read it in the library 'cause I could look at any of the encyclopedias and dictionaries while I read."

"So... what? I did all that stuff too."

"Did you even like it?"

"You know—It's a little pretentious, but nothing Steve Harrington can't handle."

"Oh, really? 'Cause last I heard, Harrington skim read Romeo and Juliet."

"That's Shakespear. Cut me some slack."

"I just never took you as the 'classics' kind of guy, Steve."

Steve seemed to not grasp that Angie knew there was more to the story. He shrugged. "I'm not."

"Why'd you read it, then?" she replied, expression skeptical yet bemused while she watched him glance upward, brows dancing left and right and he racked his brain for an explanation. Instead, she got a confession.

His head lolled to the side idly and in the darkness, two black spots met her own eyes with a sudden candor. "You."

Sometimes she didn't need to read his mind, he'd pry his own skull open for her and offer the thoughts she longed to know in bits and pieces that came together in a disjointed puzzle. He never opened the door wide enough for Angie to walk right in, but he lingered in the arch uncomfortably instead of slamming it shut the moment she came near; she would drop something on her way out so he could open the door again and return it to her until the lingering turned from uncomfortable to awkward to warm again.

That was good enough for her.

"Me?" Angie questioned, breathy and quiet as she let the cigarette dangle loosely from her fingers and burn to ash, forgotten.

"Yeah, you," mocked Steve teasingly. He copied her tone and poked her knee and Angie was almost fifteen again. She smelled the beer when he smiled at her and felt the cold, metal bleachers under her butt when she chuckled and shifted away; football games, late nights by the pool; Tommy H and Carol, and spontaneous sleepovers. Regret left a bitter taste, but nostalgia tasted sweeter.

His smile faltered slightly and she frowned. "I just thought that... I dunno. One day I would've gotten the balls to walk up to you, quote it, and everything would go back to normal again. Like—and every time I was about to, I remembered that it wouldn't be the same: Pete was still gone, I was—am different."

There was a moment where he paused and looked at her for reassurance, thick brows knitted upwards and the corners of his lips tugged down. She held onto every word intently. Angie reached over and rubbed Steve's shoulder, his muscles tensed and twisted under the gentle contact, a dance under the skin as he decided if he'd let her hand stay or not. For a second she saw the Steve that she met in freshman year, the one she'd scribbled pink hearts in her notebooks for and daydreamed during class about.

"When I looked at you, all I thought about was telling you everything. Everything, y'know. The monsters and Eleven, Will, the rest of the kids, what happened to your brother—just everything. But even more than that, I wanted to protect you and I did a shit job. You found out anyway and I think you ended up worse off for it," he finished, wiping at his eyes for a moment, wincing and hissing when he brushed over the faded bruise.

"Please don't blame yourself," Angie grimaced. "Please don't."

"Easier said than done, Chicago."

Angie sighed and rubbed her face, blurting out words before she processed them in her head, "So what now? Are we just going to do this weird back and forth thing until we leave this shit town and go our separate ways?"

"I don't want that," replied Steve, his hands dropped into his lap in a frantic sort of way to grip at his jeans, shutting the idea down as soon as it escaped her lips. "That's so not what I want, I want to be good again... it might take a long time, but I promise that I'll do everything I can to make things right. Maybe not the same as it was, but right."

Steve always knew just what to say.

She really didn't understand what the fuck was wrong with him sometimes.

He made her want to hold him close, palm pressed to the back of his warm neck with their foreheads touching as she searched in those spacious brown eyes for the reason he wanted to stay. She would smell the mint gum on his breath and the hairspray in his hair, the cologne that he swore brung women to their knees: musky but sweet, like a walk in the woods on the day of the first bloom. Angie wanted to cry, or yell, or laugh, or thrash around until her body dropped to the concrete from exhaustion.

Primal and sweet, a warm viciousness where she longed to hug him with her nails pressed into the center of his shoulder blades as they left messy half-circles in their place.

Instead, she smiled. She smiled, tight-lipped and toothless as she shut her eyes, bobbing her head in agreement.

"I guess we could do that."

It was so childish and plain, like the empty promises they made while sitting on the hood of his car in the blazing sun; 100 degree Julys that held tanned shoulders and splotchy sun kissed cheeks, dotted with freckles and spots which would disappear once September rolled around. So simple, so kind, like the oranges Steve peeled each time he needed a refreshment from the heat, the oranges he never failed to split into halves and share with Angie. The juice would trickle down their arms onto the pavement and they laughed about the mess, they chased each other with sweet mouths and sticky fingers until sweat dripped from the backs of their necks and their brows.

They were so tired, yet they just had to have another orange.

The reality of their now-collided worlds was so daunting, she palmed through the fog of monsters and dimensions and superpowers with a lostness akin to a child that paced through aisles in the grocery store as they searched for their parents. It was so dark without her brother around. But now, Steve emanated a July solar joy, so bright against the gray of November that he looked like a beacon of hope.

—————
——— AUTHOR'S NOTE
sorry for the sudden hiatus again
😓 i got really sick + busy, but!!
finally, the first act of pretty
sick is finished AHHH im so
nervous its like actually kind of
sad (im over dramatic) but it's
here!!!!!

i want to thank everyone SO
much for the reads, votes,
comments, and insane
encouragement that came with
posting this. ive met a lot of
awesome people through this fic
and im so so happy that others enjoy
it as much as me

🫶🫶🫶 pretty sick world
domination!!! i love you all sm
and i hope you like the next two
acts as much as i do

MWAH 💋

PRETTY SICK
girlpools / 2023