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This can't be happening.

Stan tells himself he's overreacting, that he's just having a hard time connecting with Will. It doesn't have to mean to very worst. His phone could be dead, and that's why Stan hasn't heard from him since yesterday morning. He could be wrapped up in a project, and that's why he's not with the usual people or in the usual places.

He doesn't panic outwardly, because he knows he has a tendency to make things so much worse in his head. If anyone asks questions, once he's confirmed Will's not there, he just tells them he thinks Will's phone might be dead.

There's no reason to think Will could be--

Only he checks some of their usual places themselves, and still nothing,

"Please," he murmurs, looking down at his phone, at the last message he'd sent. "Please be somewhere."

Stan heads out early, needing to clear his head.

Everything keeps happening all at once, and it feels noisy, both inside and out of his head, his body. It's when he catches himself cleaning the kitchen at two in the morning, scrubbing at a spot on the stove that never comes completely clean, that he knows he's on the edge, and though he stubbornly drags himself to bed, he doesn't sleep.

Instead, he gets back out of bed at six, and ends up hauling a thermos of coffee and his birdwatching backpack out to a remote corner of the park, one of his favorite spots. Not a lot of foot traffic, but enough that someone would find his body if he were murdered, for one. A variety of birds but the soothing knowledge of which ones he's going to see, for another.

The morning is cold, but he's dressed for it, the coffee taking care of the rest even if it does nothing for his nerves. He knows he should be studying for finals. Instead, he watches a brilliantly colored male indigo bunting hop from branch to branch, sketchpad open and untouched.

Stanley Uris wakes up one morning, and there's a pile of papers on his typically immaculate desk.

Even though he's never seen them before, a sort of numbness spreads through his limbs. That's his own writing, and the sight of it nearly pins him to his bed. Only after what feels like hours of forcing breath through his body, what his clock tells him is two minutes, can he stand up and go over. Six papers, all of them identical.

He takes the one on top back to his bed, and folds his legs up under him as he smooths the paper out.

Dear Losers, it reads.

I know what this must seem like, but this is not a suicide note.

He wants to close his eyes. He wants to tear up the note. He knows what it is, even if he doesn't know when, or how, or-- no. He does know why.

It's hard to read the rest of the letter as it shakes in his hands, and upon bolting back over to the pile of them, he pushes through the same letter five more times.

His eyes burn and he can't breathe. He doesn't notice when one singular letter escapes being stuffed in his backpack as Stan makes a break for it. Taking the care doesn't occur to him, despite the weather, his bike leaving an unsteady line in the snow as he peddles.

The cold feels good on his bare arms. Clean.

He can't be sure where he's going, just that he's probably almost there when his bike slides and he wipes out hard.

I took myself off the board. Did it work?

That's the fucking thing.

He's pretty sure it did.

The night stretches on, bloody and claustrophobic, and awful. When the morning comes and they get out, when there's been reunions and a hospital trip, time moves double. Even the waiting, when it comes, flies by, and that might be for a dozen different reasons.

And maybe Stan's too tired to be as deeply re-traumatized as he ought to be, or comfortably numb, but he thinks it's just as likely that it's the same reason he makes sure that as the last of it winds down, he makes sure that he's next to Fraser.

"Hey," he says quietly, nudging Fraser a bit further from any lingering group, "don't go back to the Home. Come back with me. We'll make someone talk to them. I mean, if you-- you shouldn't have to go back alone. We can do sleeping bags or," and God, would he be any better at talking if he were less tired? He'd like to think so. "I'd feel better about going to sleep if I knew you were there."

The days stretch on, and the people don't come back.

Stan still thinks, for the most part, that the disappearances suit him just fine. Out of the people that are left, the people who all came to Darrow from hundreds of different places, he can't imagine that any of them are as carelessly cruel as the entire freshman class of Darrow High.

Not that he hasn't heard things about Petros, too.

He heads to the empty boardwalk, fascinated and a little creeped out by it-- but he's not scared.

There's always the beach if it's too much. Stan's already texted El to see if she wants to meet up here, and he stands just at the edge of where the concrete ends and the wood begins, leading to the maze of booths and machinery.

Maybe, Stan thinks, as he rides along empty street after empty street, weaving through abandoned cars, he shouldn't feel so relieved at the way the city's emptied out. There could be dangers, and he's thought of plenty. He and Eddie can compile a spreadsheet later, maybe.

But it's so quiet, without being completely silent.

Even better... none of the usual assholes he might be worried about are around. Stan's come a long way in being afraid of them, but the knowledge that he doesn't event have to consider them as a possibility gives him incredible relief.

He's aware that most of his friends are safe in their homes and experiencing various levels of anxiety and interest in the whole situation. Still, he's drawn back to the Home, where he dutifully locks his bike to the rack and heads inside.

"Fraser?" he calls out, letting his voice ring out more than it ever did when he lived here.

For all of the things that have been getting better since that day, Stan's been putting something off, a quiet little extra kick in the ribs. He spends a lot of time not thinking about it, and feeling a shadow of the same buzzing compulsion that had led to him to use the bleach when he does.

Before anyone had found him that day, before he'd made it back to the Home, Stan had stood there, dripping from the hose, and pulled out his birding notebook. Everything he needed to know was in the way the color beaded up on the edges and dripped to the ground, blues and reds now murky with diluted sewer water.

He's not sure at all where he threw it it; the memory flickers too much. The image of the ruined journal sticks with him, and only over the span of weeks does the way it jabs him stop hurting so sharply.

Stan tries a few times to buy a new one, finally successful when he's at some colorful little store with El, and he doesn't even think about it so much as pick up the small book with a hard cover and smooth blank pages. He hardly puts it all together until they're walking down the street and he's got in in his hands, mouth opening to tell El how he's planning to start with a coastal bird, if he can.

The unfortunate linchpin in the realization happens to be the sharp tones of one of Evan's friends, walking the other way with some upperclassmen. "Oh look," says either Taylor or Tyler, Stan doesn't remember. "Sewer bitch out on dry land, new little coloring book and a girl--"

"Fuck off," Stan says, immediately, sharply, and he waits for the regret to set in.

( The video. )

Once Stan figures out that he needs to talk to Eddie, he doesn't wait. Well, he does wait, until El really is settled and he's been basically dismissed by the adults, and the it's been such an unusual day that he leaves a note for Richie and just gets on his bike. It's cold and almost all the way day, but the air feels good on his face. For once, the dark doesn't seem threatening, but offers some safety after feeling so exposed.

Stan knows he has issues and that he's definitely repressing, and it's not really going well, but he thinks he can maybe talk about this. He can talk about it to Eddie, who he's seen in as many shades of panic as Stan's felt.

Shit, he should have texted.

Still, he makes sure his bike is safe and secured and then before he knows it, he's knocking on the door.

[Voicemails and texts go here.]

[Mail goes here!]

The teacher says they're doing a gallery walk, and the anxious energy that always seems to be in Stan's stomach these day just starts to roil. He can't put his finger on why until the whole English class dutifully moves to another room, and then it's time to evaluate his options.

He can hear his teacher talking about how the book they're reading has all of these ties to surrealism in art, but the majority of his attention is on the color posters of paintings all over the walls. To most of his class, judging from groans and whispers, they're just stupid, boring paintings.

Stan--

Stan can smell the sewers and the greywater, and the cold seeping into his skin, the kind of cold that comes from being all alone when the monster comes. On the side of his face, the scars feel like they're on fire.

He's breathing too hard, and some of his classmates are looking at him, like they know he's not just a loser, that he's worse than a loser because he's all on his own and he's panicking over a painting, and they know, they know there's something wrong with him. Even if there aren't that many eyes on him that he can count, he knows they're all looking, they all know

Stan knocks over a desk and two chairs as he flees the classroom, sliding down the mostly empty hallways and sprinting for the doors. He doesn't know where to go, doesn't know where he's going until suddenly he's drenched in sunlight, tripping over himself onto grass, and with a strangled whine, crawling into some bushes usually meant for bird-watching.

Pulling his knees to his chest, Stan squeezes his eyes shut and waits to feel anything but cold and alone.