Chapter Text
The first condition of immorality is death — Stanisław Jerzy Lec.
The headlights of your beat-up Ford shone through the fog of the late night. The fog was almost unnatural; it was like a suffocating blanket that swallowed everything in its path. You drove through it whilst passing through the woods of Hawkins, muting the rest of the world around you. The only thing that you could hear was the persistent sound of your car's engine and the rhythm of your tires screeching over the hard asphalt. Due to the fog, you found yourself driving slower than usual, your knuckles white, gripping the steering wheel. Not to mention how tired your shift had made you.
This stretch of road near the old energy plant always made you feel different after what the government dubbed the “’86 earthquakes.” Tonight, you could’ve sworn that it felt alive. The combination of the fog appearing and the thick scent of wet soil and decay was a sharp presence. It had a similar feeling to the air right after a lightning strike. This scent coiled not only in the air, but it also wrapped around the pine trees and lane dividers, making everything disappear just a few feet ahead of your bumper.
As you drove, you looked out the window to your left, taking in the broken silhouette of the energy plant. The chain-link fence reminded you of a jagged scar, and the building's windows were strikingly black, like hollowed-out, blind eyes. Everyone in Hawkins had heard the stories at this point, rumors that had festered so long they felt like truth. You didn’t believe most of it–you couldn’t afford to for your own sake. But you believe in the feeling, there was always a deep hollow pit in your stomach when you drove on this road. Even tonight, it having nothing to do with the lack of food you’ve had. It was almost like a primal signal warning you of the building.
You then gently pressed your foot onto the accelerator, urging your car forward. You wanted nothing to do with this area, and you wanted to leave it all behind. The fog seemed to thicken just past the property line; it swirled more aggressively than before as if something had just moved out of sight. It was quiet, almost eerily so; you didn't even hear the chirping of crickets, or the call of any birds for that matter. It was a vacuum of noise, so quiet that you could hear the rush of your own blood through your ears.
You had almost made it clear of that road, the worst of the visibility issues behind you already, when you swore you saw something up ahead. A shadow detached itself from the treeline–not on the side of the road– but lurching directly into your lane.
What you had thought to be a shadow turned out not to be a deer or a fallen branch, but a man–or the sickening outline of one. He was tall–you could tell, but he was bent over, staggering forward, as if a puppet with its strings cut. For one second, he was just a dark smudge in the fog until the next, where he was fully in the bright glare of your high beams.
What the light of your headlights painted was what could only be described as a nightmare in front of you.
He was clad in tattered remnants of, upon further glance, white clothing, though they didn't appear that way, given how dirty they appeared. Strips of fabric hung from a frame that was all sharp angles and wiry strength. His skin was pale as bone between the smears of blood and flecks of dirt that adorned the little unripped fabric of his clothes. In the parts of the skin that could be seen were countless scars and fresh, glistening wounds. There was also a deep, savage laceration in his cheek, spreading from his temple down to his jaw, blood dripping from it. He clutched one arm awkwardly against his chest while the other dangled from his side, uselessly.
He took another faltering step into your path, and you could see his head lift.
Eyes–strikingly blue and shockingly vivid in the blinding light–locked onto yours from outside your car. They held no plea, no animal panic as one might have expected. Instead, his eyes were feral, burning with a rage so profound that you could feel the force of them in his glance.
Thankfully, your body was able to react before your mind could, and as the force of pure adrenaline shot through your veins, your foot slammed into the brake pedal with all of your might.
The world became one of shrieking rubber and the smell that remained with it on the asphalt. Your car then skidded sideways, seatbelt locking and biting into the meat of your shoulder. For a second, you felt the tires lose their traction on the wet ground of the road.
You shuddered as you and your car came to a crooked halt right in front of him, not hitting him.
The silence suddenly rushed back into you, broken only by the loud hammering of your heart in your chest. It felt like it could burst out. For anything to happen, of course, it had to be on this road. The hood of your Ford stood just a few feet from where he was standing in your headlights, frozen in the aftermath of it.
He swayed.
The once-defiant rage in his eyes flickered–now with confusion–until it breached into terror. His eyes dropped to his own trembling body and hands as if they had belonged to someone he no longer recognized. Finally, a shuddering breath came out of his lips.
Then, as if the last supporting string of that puppet was snipped, his body gave out. His knees folded, and he collapsed forward, hitting the asphalt with a terrible, final-sounding thud. He lay motionless there, in a halo of the lights of your car, blood-soaked and pooling at his body, his mangled figure being swallowed in by that same eerie fog.
Your heart continued its frantic drum beat against your ribs, your breaths becoming sharp, desperate pants in the cold, wet air. For a long while, you just sat there, paralyzed in the leather seats of your car, and watched–waited for anything from the crumbled life in front of you. Every self-preserving instinct of your body told you to run, lock your doors, and reverse so far that none of this ever happened.
But he wasn't moving.
You gripped the steering wheel until your fingers ached, and finally forced yourself to move off the seat. The door creaked open, the sound a stark contrast to the quiet of the environment. The fog wrapped around both you and your car, damp and chilling. You slowly stepped forward, sneakers scraping against the wet road.
“Hey,” you called out, voice thin and weary, being swallowed by the heavy feel of the air. “Hey, can you hear me? Are you okay?”
There was no response from him. You crept a bit closer, the headlights throwing your long and distorted shadow over his body. You got another look at that wound on his face, and it was much deeper and ugly then your thought prior. His clothes appeared to be burnt by some sort of fire or acid rather than just ripped. You looked down and saw the unnatural angle of his forearm, as well as the way that one leg bent wrong beneath him. You couldn’t quite see it yet, but there was a much larger gash on his back.
Still keeping your distance, you knelt, hand reaching out hesitantly. “Mister? You’re hurt real bad… I need to call an–”
His eyes flew open.
Except this time his eyes weren't clouded with the confusion of before. His eyes were sharp and focused, filled with a malevolence that should have had no place on a human face. They locked onto yours, and a new kind of terror seized you—not of physical danger, no, but of how wrong he felt.
A pressure that felt cold and invasive breached your mind. It wasn’t quite a sound; it sounded more like a command. It was a psychic shove with such undiluted menace, and it carried a single message: Leave.
You flinched hard as you felt in your mind, a gasp tearing from your throat, your hands coming up to cover your temples. For a moment, the pressure continued its intense feeling, terrifying… until it spluttered. It fractured in your mind like a weak radio signal, dissolving into a static budge before completely dissolving.
The man–no, creature– widened his eyes in a raw, undisguised panic. He stared at you and then back down to his hands again, his breath ragged and panting. He tried to push himself up, but his good arm buckled instantly. A low and pained sound escaped him, but it was drowned out by the silence. Not the silence of what was left in the fog, but instead the absence of his own powers.
“Get… away,” he rasped, his voice a ruined, grating thing, raw from disuse or perhaps screaming. He tried to employ that same psychic threat with his words, but instead, they were just hollow and desperate. “Don’t… touch me. Don’t… look at me.”
He finally managed to get his good elbow under him with a tremor wracking his entire frame. “I said leave.”
He tried to rise again with an ultimate, violent effort. His broken leg gave way entirely. A choked-out cry was cut short as he collapsed back onto the road, his head striking the asphalt with a sickening crack. This time, his body went utterly limp, the rise and fall of his chest the only sign that he was still alive.
Trembling, you staggered to your own feet. You debated whether you should help this man or not, either out of fear or pity. You should leave, get in the car, and go. Call the police from a payphone miles away. This is not your problem.
But the image of him trying to crawl, of the sheer animal panic when trying to threaten you failed, of the way he lay broken in the road…
You looked at your old Ford, then down at the blood-soaked stranger. The hospital. That was the sane, responsible answer.
“Okay,” you whispered, more speaking to yourself than to him. “Okay, just… stay still. I'm gonna get you to a hospital. They can help you there.”
Even while unconscious, his body shuddered violently at the word. His brow furrowed as if he were fighting the unconsciousness himself. You saw his lips move, barely, but you were able to catch what he said.
“No…” he murmured, the words thick with terror. “No doctors… no lab… They’ll… finish it…”
As soon as he was awake, he drifted out of consciousness and was gone again, back into oblivion. You left alone once again in the silent fog.
For a few heartbeats, you stood frozen in the night, the word “lab” echoing through your mind. You thought back to the twisted sight of the Electric plant down the road… dubbed “Hawkins Lab” by conspiracy theorists. Everything adds to the stories you desperately try to ignore.
He stirred once more, a low groan tearing from his throat. His eyes opened again, his vision clouded with pain, but aware. His eyes found your face once more, and the panic rose within him once again, but sharpened with a furious pride.
“Foolish girl,” he rasped, “You think that you're saving a man?” He then made a bitter, choked noise that almost sounded like a laugh. “You’re putting a viper in your pocket. I have… done things. Terrible things. And I will do them again.” He bared his teeth. “When I am healed… the first terrible thing I will do is kill you.”
He was trying to will his threat into truth, trying to conjure that aura of dread that had failed him before, just a few minutes ago. But it fell flat, undercut by the way that his body was trembling pressed against the asphalt.
“You’re not scaring me,” you said, and, surprised at that, to find that it was mostly true. Yes, you were terrified of the thing that pressed against your mind earlier. This was just a desperate, wounded animal, lashing out. “You can't even stand up.”
A flicker of pure unadulterated fury crossed his face. “You have no conception of what I am.”
“Right now, you're someone who is gonna die on this road if I leave you here,” you said, the decision finalizing itself as you spoke. Fear was one thing. Leaving someone–something–to die in fog was another. You remember as a small child your father telling you that "we don’t leave things to suffer," when you had found an injured bird out in the backyard.
He tried to push himself up again, a snarl on his lips. “Do not… touch me.”
You ignored him. Moving with a resolve that you didn't even know you had, you threw open the door to the backseat of your car. The logistics of this were going to be a nightmare, to say the least. He was tall, and even though he was gaunt, he was still dead weight.
“This is going to hurt,” you warned, voice flat.
He was still muttering threats and curses against you. They sounded more like madness than actual menace.
You hooked your hands underneath his shoulders from behind, ignoring the way that your hands came back, warm and sticky. He cried out–a sharp, agonized sound that was abruptly cut off as he bit down on his lip. You dragged him back a few more inches, his head lolling against your chest. The scent of blood invaded your senses as he did so.
It was clumsy and brutal. You pulled and hefted, muscles aching. He had managed to slip from your grasp once, his broken arm jarring against the ground with a whimper escaping him before he could stifle it. That whimper, vulnerable sound, had done even more to solidify your resolve against his threats.
Finally, with one last grunting heave, you managed to lever him into the backseat of your car, his legs dangling off the side as he was too tall to spread out. You had to lift his broken leg yourself, trying to be gentle, and folded it into the footwell. He was unconscious once more, his head tilted back against the seat, neck barred.
You stood there panting for a moment, your clothes and hands stained with his blood, looking at the figure slumped in your car.
You now had a viper in your pocket. Or maybe just a shattered, broken man.
You slammed the door shut and walked over to the driver's side door. You then got in and shifted your car into drive. The headlights cut through what remained of the fog and pointed away from the lab, towards the direction of where you lived. You didn't look into the backseat. You couldn’t. You just drove in an eerie silence through the remaining stretch of that road.
And that was the only sound for the next few minutes. You remained focused on the road and the hypnotic sway of your wipers cleaning off the condensation on your windshield, on anything besides the blood that was slowly but surely seeping into your backseat.
The silence was broken with a pained gasp.
After, a frantic clawing noise as his good hand clawed at the door handle, fumbling for a purchase that wasn't there. His head jerked up, his eyes wide and disoriented, scanned the dark passing trees as if they were prison bars.
“No,” he choked out. “No, no no.” The words escalated from a groan to him shouting. He threw his weight against the door, a tremor of agony wracking him as his broken arm jostled. “Stop the car. Let me out. Now.”
“I'm not stopping,” you said, voice tight. You kept your eyes forward, hands still at ten and two. “You’ll die out there.”
“That is not your concern,” he snarled, turning his furious gaze towards you. The menace from earlier was back, but it was undercut by the way that he was shivering violently, whether it was from shock, blood loss, or cold, you didn't know. “You think this is mercy? This is stupidity. A profound, terminal stupidity.” He paused for a moment. “Where are you taking me?”
“Somewhere safe,” you said.
He let out a sharp, derisive breath. “There is no ‘safe.’ Not for me. Not for you if you are near me. Turn this… machine around and leave me where you found me. It is the only intelligent choice.”
The fear was still a cold, persistent knot in your stomach, but it was beginning to be unwound with a spike of frustration. “The intelligent choice was not to walk in the middle of the road in intense fog! You want me to make an intelligent choice? Fine. The intelligent choice is not to let someone bleed out in the backseat of my car. You need a doctor.”
“NO!” He lashed out, word full of unadulterated terror. You flinched. He was panting, chest heaving. “No doctors, no hospitals. If you deliver me to them, you are delivering me to executioners. They will not heal me. They will open me up on a table and see what makes me tick until I stop ticking.” His voice was venomous, a desperate whisper. “Is that what you want? To be the one who hands me over? To be part of my execution?”
You glanced at him through the rearview mirror. In the fleeting glow of the passing streetlight, you saw the raw, animal fear in his eyes. It was the same panic you saw in his eyes when he tried getting into your head earlier. He truly believed in what he was saying.
The frustration bled out of you, leaving a wary resolve behind. “I'm not taking you to a hospital,” you said quietly.
He stilled, suspicion etching into every sharp line of his face. “Then where?”
“My House.”
There was a beat of stunned silence. The low incredulous sound. “Your… house. You intend to do what? Offer me tea and sympathy? I am not some stray cat.”
“My father was a doctor,” words came out before you could second-guess them. You navigated a turn onto your street, the familiar rows of houses offering a sliver of normalcy to your otherwise insane night. “A GP, not a surgeon, but I know how to clean a wound, set a fracture, and stop bleeding. I have a first aid kit. A good one. It's… It's that or nothing. So you can keep shouting, or you can shut up, sit still, and let me try to keep you from dying or getting an infection.”
He fell silent once more. The only sounds were the engine, the tires, and his ragged breathing. The fight drained out of him once more, replaced by a tense exhaustion. He stared out the window, his profile pale and sharp against the glass.
“Your father,” he said, voice rough. “Was he a kind man?”
The question was so unexpected, so devoid of the earlier malice, that it took you a second to process it and to answer. “Yes,” you said softly. “He was.”
Henry Creel said nothing else. He just closed his eyes, a muscle working in his jaw, as you pulled into your driveway. The debate was over, for now anyway.
You turned your keys to the left, effectively killing the engine. The adrenaline was wearing off, leaving your hands shaking slightly as you unbuckled your seatbelt. A glance at the backseat told you that his eyes were closed again, his head resting against the window. The tense line of his jaw was what told you that he was conscious.
You got out, the cool air of the night shocking. You hurried around the back of the car to his door. When you pulled it open, you were met immediately with the coppery smell of blood.
“Come on,” you said in a firm voice. “We have to get inside.”
His eyes finally opened. The sharpness of his blue gaze was temporarily dulled by pain, but it still looked sharp enough to cut. He wearily looked at you, and then to your house, and then back at you. “This is a mistake,” he murmured, but it lacked force. I was a cursed fact.
“I'm starting to agree,” you muttered, leaning in. “Put your good arm around my shoulders.”
He hesitated for a moment, a final flicker of his defiance. You didn't move, just waited. With a low groan of pain, he slowly and painfully lifted his right arm and draped it across your shoulders. The weight of it was substantial even in his now weakened state. His long and cold fingers curled loosely against his collarbone.
“Now on three, I want you to push with your good leg. One, two–”
You didn't wait for three. On two, you heaved, taking as much of his weight as you could. As you did it, he let out a sharp, stifled gasp, his body rigid with agony as he was lifted from the seat. For a terrifying blink of an eye, you both wobbled, a tangled mess of limbs on the verge of crashing down on the concrete.
But eventually he found his balance, his good leg locking beneath him. He was far taller than you and leaned on you heavily. You could feel his breath coming in pained bursts against your temple. Together, you both took an awkward, shuffled step towards your front door. Then another.
The distance to your front door was relatively short, but it felt like a mile. You put your focus on the porch light as a beacon of normalcy. He was silent except for his breathing, and every ounce of his concentration bent on the torturous act of moving forward without collapsing.
You finally reached the steps up to your porch. “Just two,” you coaxed with your own muscles burning.
He stared at the steps as if they were a mountain in front of him. A tremor racked through his body. “I can't," he gasped, the admission sounding as if it was ripped from him.
“Yes, you can,” you said, tightening your grip. “Lean your weight on me. All of it. Now.”
With something that sounded like a sob, he let his weight fall onto you. You took the first step, grunting with the effort, half-dragging him up the stairs. Then the second. And then finally, you were on the porch. Your free hand dug into your pocket and started fumbling with your keys. The man known as Henry Creel was still a shaking, bleeding mess against your side, his face becoming buried in the juncture of your neck and shoulder.
By some miracle, you were able to get the key into the lock, and you shoved the door open, stumbling into the darkness of your living room. The familiar scent of your home–vanilla, old books, and the faintest trace of chai tea–was violently disrupted by the scent of his blood and the cold night air clinging to them.
“Easy,” you whispered, more a reassurance to yourself than to him, as you guided him to the couch. He was easily dead weight now, his early resistance completely gone. He was passive now. His head lolled against your shoulder.
For your sanity, you couldn't put him on the nice fabric of your couch. Not with the state he was in.
“Wait here, for just a second. Don't fall. Please,” you said with a strange calmness to your voice. You slowly and carefully started to extricate yourself from under his arm.
The moment you pulled away, his legs buckled. He made no sound, but his good hand shot out to brace himself against the back of the couch. He stood there swaying with his hand clinging to the furniture as a lifeline.
You didn't wait. You hurried down the short hall to the linen closet, heart hammering. You grabbed some of the oldest and thickest bath towels that you had– they were faded and reserved for messes. Rushing back over to the couch, you spread them hastily over the cushions of your sofa.
When you turned back to him, he hadn't moved an inch yet. He was still holding the couch in his state of suffering.
“Okay,” you spoke while moving over to his side once more. “It's ready, let me lay you down.”
This time, he offered no help at all. You carried his heavy weight and guided him as he sank, his body folding awkwardly onto the towel-draped couch. A low moan escaped him as his broken limbs settled. He immediately tried to curl into himself, a protective instinct. You noticed a sheen layer of cold sweat on his brow, even in the dim light.
As he lay there propped at an awkward angle against the armrest, his eyes were open and fixed on the ceiling, seeing nothing.
The reality of the situation crashed down on you. You were standing in your living room with a very strange and potentially dangerous man, dying on your couch. And you had promised to fix him.
“Don't move, okay… I'm getting the kit.”
For a long moment, you just stood there staring down at him, at his blood staining into the light blue of the towels.
"I'll be right back," you said, though you weren't sure he heard you.
You walked down the hall to the hall closet, your movements feeling slow and deliberate. You pulled out the heavily worn metal box with the red cross on its lid. It was your father's old kit. You carried it back into the living room and set it on the table with a solid thunk.
The sound made him flinch. His eyes glanced over to the box. You met his gaze. The silence stretched, thick and heavy, filled with the unspoken enormity of whatever was going to come next. You had a monster on your couch. Or a victim. Or both. And you were all he had.