Shutter [Jonathan Byers] Stranger Things I

XXXIII: Calamity

ca·lam·i·ty

noun

an event causing great and often sudden damage or distress; a disaster.

Jonathan's intent was to go home, but as he drove by the location where they had found Will's bike, he pulled the car over and sat inside the warmth for a moment. It was November, and winter was on its way, bringing the cold with it. However, he didn't feel cold when he stepped out of the car and walked around to the trunk. Popping it open, keys jangling in his hands, he grabbed his camera and casually placed the strap around his neck. Closing up the car, he walked down the small hill where police had investigated over and over. Technically, this was a crime scene, evidence that should not be tampered with. But the police had found nothing; Will just vanished in thin air. No signs of struggle anywhere along the way, nothing except his bike discarded and left behind.

"Where are you?" Jonathan asked the world, the forests where his brother was last anyone could pinpoint. He snapped pictures of the woods, but he knew that the answers would not come to him this way. They already took pictures of this area, looking for any clues that might signal he was taken, or that he ran off through the woods. The reality of it was that Will would have run home, but Jonathan hadn't been there to see if he'd even arrived. He stopped taking pictures for a moment, feeling that guilt consume him from the inside out, like rot.

Then he heard the scream.

Emilia stood in the hallway, her eyes on her bedroom door, wishing she could teleport there. Glancing up at her father, she wondered how she was going to explain everything. She clutched onto her books and the file folder of the images a little tighter. "Dad..."

"You're home so late every goddamn night, and I put up with that!" He shouted, spit landing on Emilia's cheeks. It smelled of beer, and she didn't wipe it away. "You didn't come home last night, do you know how scared I was!?"

"Oh, like you care!" She stood taller, shouting back at her father with some unknown force within her.

"Unfortunately I do," he snarled. "Where the hell were you?"

"It doesn't matter," she retorted; she was not going to let him figure out she was at Jonathan's, because then he would piece it all together. "You didn't even call the station, did you? Will Byers goes missing, and I don't show up one night, you didn't do a damn thing, did you?"

He raised his lip, the unshaven stubble upon his lip shining grey and white in the overhead light. "I knew you weren't missin'! You're just a delinquent; stayin' out just to make me worry."

"You're wrong," she went to step around him, but he put his arm out so fast to stop her, that he knocked her books out of her hand. She gasped and stepped backwards, away from his arm as if she was about to be hit. When the books hit the floor, the file folder fell open, and all those glorious, hidden images were revealed. Something that meant so much to her, so much more than just intimacy, would not be seen as beautiful to her father.

He knelt down before she could grab the pictures and hide them. Grabbing the first one, he looked away quickly. In his very hands were images of his half-nude daughter. "What the hell is this, Emilia?"

"It doesn't matter," she said. "Give it back."

He stood up, still holding the picture. "IT DOESN'T MATTER? I will NOT have my daughter whoring around like this!"