Chapter Text
Will froze immediately at the sound of the boy's voice. Potter? Clearly the boy had been mistaken, he thought Will was somebody else—unless this was some weird form of bullying Will was experiencing for the first time.
What Will didn't expect, though, was who he was met with upon turning around. This boy, most likely his age, if not, the slightest bit younger—could have been Mike's twin. He was tall, and skinny as hell, complimented by the deathly pale tone of his skin. His hair was wild and unkempt, pitch black in the darkness of the night, just like his eyes, which had made him look almost soulless, and the dark circles underneath them only contributed to his catatonic look. However, most importantly, his face held the same froggish and bony structure Will knew so well. He could have sworn he felt his heart drop to his feet.
"Uh, sorry I—" Will attempted, and failed, until the boy before him spoke up instead.
"Oops. Not who I thought. I am sorry." Will could only stand there in shock—was this guy real? Mixed with his appearance, the boy's voice was enough to convince Will he was dreaming. A strange conglomerate of foreign accents, something eastern European being the most clear, filled his ears.
"I—" Will croaked, just as the boy was about to turn around and leave. He couldn't let him go. He'd never forgive himself. He at least wanted a longer look at his face, just to see something familiar.
The boy stopped, and the two stood for an awkward second, looking at each other.
"I thought you were my friend," the mysterious boy started. Will eased up a little, but not completely. "I think, 'this is crazy if it is Potter,'" He let out a small laugh.
"Do you guys live around here?" What the hell? Will didn't know what he was doing, only that he was doing it. It felt oddly natural, though, to talk to this guy—he didn't seem affected much by the awkwardness. If anything, he wasn't even aware of it.
"A little," he said, and Will had no idea what the hell it meant. He didn't think to ask, though. "You? I have never seen you here."
"Oh, yeah, no. I'm from California. Or, I guess, Indiana."
"I understand. From many places too," Mike's doppelganger stuck his hands in his pockets and flailed his foot around the pavement. Will could definitely tell he was from many places, obviously more than he was himself. The conversation started to seem pointless, but Will didn't feel like going to sleep.
"Do you know what people do around here? Y'know, like, for fun?" Will asked, and even though he knew a guy like this one probably wouldn't be much help for him, he also knew he probably wouldn't get any other opportunity to find out.
"Not much. Well, not much 'group activity,' you know. I and Potter, we have fun, though," the boy's dark eyes bore into Will's soul, and Will found himself feeling a little creeped out. His movements were kind of erratic; jittery and unsure. "Potter, my friend, who I thought was you."
"Oh, okay. Thank you," Will smiled, and the boy gave him one in return, although Will could tell there wasn't much polite intent behind it. Silently, the boy turned around and walked away. Well, there goes that, Will thought. He'd gave up a chance at a friend, but he didn't feel like there was much of a major loss to be had—the guy was kind of sketchy.
Slightly disoriented from the past ten minutes, Will finally turned the doorknob and slowly entered the room as to not wake Joyce. As he slipped into bed, Will couldn't help but think of Mike again. It wasn't really his fault—the guy looked so much like Mike, anyone would have thought of him. Although, they definitely wouldn't have thought of Mike the way Will did.
But, hey, Will thought—it's not like he thinks of Mike differently or anything—
Shit, I so do, whatever, what's the point, he doesn't care, he'll never care, so I can do whatever, there's so many better things to care about
just let it go, go to sleep
* * *
The next morning, Will awoke feeling massively hungover, even though he'd been sober his whole life. Joyce was already awake and up, Will could tell even as he barely opened his eyes; her voice became louder and Will could make out her voice, seemingly talking to someone on the phone.
Will rose and rubbed his hands into his eyes, then sat as his vision cleared. He thought about what he'd do today, especially after the day before was such a failure. He thought about the boy from last night, how even though he was someone Will would never even consider associating with, he was a human connection that could probably give him something to do. He quickly forgot the idea, however, as the humiliating thoughts of 1) seeking the boy out and desperately begging to hang out with him, 2) hanging out with him in general, and, disgustingly, deep down, 3) being reminded so much of Mike, were too overbearing. So, Will would suffer. He packed his sketchbook for a reason; he could finally get around to drawing like he always said he would and never did. However, Will knew that wouldn’t be happening anytime soon.
After a second of staring at the floor, Will could tell Joyce had gotten off the phone and turned back to look at her.
"Good morning! How'd you sleep?" She beamed, a little too cheerful this early in the morning, but she'd meant well.
A dream; scary, but not now-memory dream scary, just emotionally provoking and weirdly symbolic. Stressful, really. Will had been lost in a crowd of some 500 people. Where, he didn't know. He could remember feeling as though he shouldn't have been there, like there was something else he had to get to, maybe even someone else. His urgency peaked once he'd realized exactly who it was he should have been finding; a glance upwards at the right moment led Will's eyes directly to the back of someone's head, a head, completed by a tidy shape of black hair. Immediately, without even having to check, Will knew it was Mike. And, since with this he knew what his mission was—get to Mike—Will pushed frantically through the crowd, not particularly caring about anyone's tolerance for getting pushed.
Then, as he reached the boy, right as his hand made contact with his back, Will felt something strange happen. With a jolt, most likely visible in Will's real, sleeping body, Mike disappeared. He was gone, and no matter how many times Will looked around or called out for him, he wasn't coming back.
For what felt like years, the dream repeated itself, but throughout it the location or situation changed, the stakes getting increasingly more dire as time passed. Mike, about to get mugged by men that only Will knew how to stop. Mike, standing on the edge of a cliff. Mike, with a gun pointed to his temple. Mike, in some uncanny abyss, about to fall backwards into the darkness with a colorful cloud of smoke and a ripple of the black walls surrounding him as his body hit the conceptual floor and disappeared.
Every time, though, Will's mission stayed the same. Every time, he had to save Mike. And every time, he failed. Mike got beat up, jumped off the cliff, was shot in the head, and, sure as hell, he disappeared. There was nothing Will could do, no amount of effort could have protected Mike from the cruelty of inevitability.
Will knew what this meant. There was no point in trying. Even if he had been there, in Hawkins, nothing would have changed. Mike was gone. Mike was gone from Will. He had lost him to the curse of growing up and moving away. And there was no point in trying.
"Good, actually." Will lied.
"It's a pretty nice day out. If you wanted, I could drive you somewhere." Joyce got up from where she was sitting to approach Will and give him a loving ruffle of the hair.
"Yeah, maybe. I'm not sure where, though." Will looked up at her, trying to look as okay as he could. He figured he could try and get Joyce to drive him someplace far away, and maybe he could explore the area a little bit, and then his whole day could be spent on attempting to get back to the motel.
"Well, get ready, and I'll drive ya quickly. It's almost twelve, sleepyhead!"
Once he got in the car, Will realized he'd acted a little impulsively. He had no clue where to go, and Joyce hadn't the faintest one either. So, what he did, was he just made her drive, and chose at random when the car reached a junction. Left, left, right, left. Whatever had felt correct in the moment.
Eventually, Will figured Joyce was probably getting a bit annoyed, and he'd also figured he might as well stop so that she wouldn't have trouble going back to the motel. However, once he'd come to this conclusion, he wasn't exactly in a spot that seemed recreationally stimulating in any way you looked at it.
"I can just get out here," Will said, and Joyce reluctantly took her foot off of the gas.
"Seriously?"
Outside the window lay absolutely nothing but desert, but once looking ahead, there seemed to be some signs of life. A rich kid community of some sort, just a bunch of houses that all looked the exact same. Why not?
"Yeah. I'll find something, I promise."
"...okay," Joyce sighed. "Just please, please, do not get lost. I'm trusting you, Will."
"I promise."
Joyce made a U-turn once Will had exited the car and, accidentally blowing a taunting gust of sand at him, drove off. Will stood there for a second, a bit shocked, as if he didn't expect for this to actually happen. But, since it did, he decided he'd go straight ahead, in the opposite direction of the strange looking gated community, since there probably wasn't much to do there except get shot for trespassing.
The walk wasn't so bad, Will thought, though he'd had to roll his sleeves up again, and he knew that the sand that kept getting in his eyes was bound to annoy him eventually. He walked, though, until something caught his eye.
Far up ahead lay a square of land in which several metal structures were sited, which, upon nearing closer, Will realized were playground equipment. Behind it, homes similar to the ones he had seen down the road were placed sparingly across the area. The playground, while relatively charming, had an eerie quality to it—the rust on the equipment's metal and its overall age and state of neglect, the sad, strange houses that rest beyond it, and it's location, in the middle of the desert, had made the area seem almost post-apocalyptic.
Feeling as if he had no other choice, Will trudged towards the playground and sat down on the swing set, its heat burning his legs through his pants. He swung half-hearted and glum, the tip of his shoe gliding harshly against the sand each time he came forward.
Will sat on the hot swing, his solitude inadvertently making him think of his first friend back home. He cursed himself, but deep down, he didn't regret it. In fact, while he'd been pushing the thought of Mike down the entire day, and had sworn that after assessing last night's dream, he wouldn't think of him for the rest of the week, Will had been waiting for something, even if it was the tiniest thing, to remind him of Mike. And, with the swing, as lifeless and unfamiliar as it stood, he could close his eyes and relive the first day of kindergarten over and over again. Finally, Will thought. A good memory.
A friend was all he needed. Will waited impatiently for Mike to approach him and ask if he wanted to be friends. He got annoyed when it didn't happen, as if it could have in the first place, as if Mike wasn't following the script. And, in a way, he wasn't. The two of them were supposed to be best friends forever, closer than anyone else they'd known—and, to his embarrassment, in the back of Will's mind lay an image of them in the not so far future, free and allowed to do whatever the hell they wanted: Will, to touch Mike with more passion than just a consoling shoulder pat, and Mike, to not be so afraid when it would happen. But, Will wasn't exactly following the script either—in fact, he might as well have burned the manuscript altogether. By moving away, he had ruined everything. Will didn't exactly know who was at fault, but he wanted to just about kill whoever was. And he wouldn't have really minded if it had been him.
As the sun reached its highest point, Will realized that he'd been rotting on the swing for almost an hour, but he hadn't found himself ready to change that just yet. He'd just been staring straight ahead, trying to make out the shapes of the homes down the road, which now, from where Will sat, appeared as grey and brown blobs in the distance. While he remained stagnant, his mind, on the other hand, ran laps. These laps involved bizarre and inconvenient shortcuts that had been designed to keep Will from reaching the thought of Mike again. He wondered what Lucas was doing. Was he with Max? How about Dustin? In a half-assed letter, Will remembered, Mike spoke of Dustin's growing friendship with some super-super senior Will had since forgotten the name of who they met through joining some D&D party—and hey, yeah, what the hell, some D&D party? I'd been gone what, two months? Way to tell me what I meant to you Mi—shit.
Since he'd just lost at his own game, Will decided that maybe it was time to head back to the motel. Standing up, he'd felt even more eager to get out of there upon hearing aggressive footsteps near, accompanied with a sickening smell that had reminded Will of the time his childhood dog had been sprayed by a skunk, and, strangely, of Jonathan as well. He patted off the sand he'd accidentally kicked up onto himself while swinging as quickly as he could so that he could bolt home. However, just as he was about to start walking, Will was interrupted by a strangely familiar voice, a strange sense of déjà vu washing over him as he was unable to identify where he'd heard it before.
"Hey! Is you again!" the voice called out, and Will cringed. Immediately, with the help of his entirely unique accent, Will registered that the boy he'd met last night was stood behind him. Will turned around and instinctively rubbed the back of his neck. Once the two met one another's squinted eyes, the boy gave him an airy wave and grinned as to show almost all of his teeth. In return, Will shot up his hand and pursed his lips in a less enthusiastic smile.
"Hi," he acknowledged, then hesitated to turn back around. "Sorry, I should probably go home."
"Now?" the boy's head craned upwards to look at the sun, as if to point it out. "Walking all the way back to the motel? You will melt. Certainly not now."
"I'll be okay."
"No, I am serious, Shestov, don't go now. You will die. Stay here, you could spend time with me."
Will stood there for a second. For the second time in one day, the two boys stood facing each other, not saying a word. The mysterious boy let Will take a second to decide, but did not seem very eager to convince him, as if he knew Will would say yes. And, as things were looking, he would. Joyce, even though she'd absolutely murder Will for staying out later, didn't exactly set a curfew, and Will figured she'd understand that he didn't want to walk in extreme heat. Yet, Will wasn't entirely up for spending time with this guy. It seemed to him as though saying yes would be allowing himself to be corrupted by this boy and whatever he smelt of. However, it seemed rather odd that the two met again—fate, maybe, had been telling Will to just suck it up, that it was time to make at least a single friend.
"I don't know if—"
"I am harmless, trust me," the boy said, with a dramatic raise of his left hand, which Will now noticed held a joint.
"Okay, but if you kill me—"
"Harmless!" the boy threw his hands up again, nearly losing grip of his cigarette, and almost throwing it directly at Will's face as he walked closer.
"Okay. But not for too long."
"Okay with me, Shestov." he smiled and clapped a hand on Will's shoulder. Then, using the hand that held him, the boy turned Will around to face the swing set. "We can sit there. Was going to, anyways, before I saw you." Will returned to his swing, and his new, unreal friend took a seat on the one beside him.
"Boris," the boy said, and, as if the two were some seriously solemn detectives in a 1950s noir, put out his hand for Will to shake.
"Will." He grabbed Boris's hand and shook it, slightly taken aback by the firmness of the boy's grasp.
"Glad meeting you, Will," Boris moved his hand back to hold the chain of the swing, then, put the hand holding the joint in front of Will to offer him a hit.
"You too," Will replied, slightly unaware of what to say, since he'd not gotten much practice in the art of introducing himself to new people. Then, to refuse the weed, he'd simply put his own hand up and said "no thank you."
"Polite," Boris laughed, maybe a little louder than intended, Will thought. He watched, with some silent judgement, as Boris took a hit himself, and wondered how it could have been enjoyable. And, now that he'd been alone with both his thoughts and the image of Boris, even if just for a second, he thought of Mike again. He tried to imagine Mike getting high. He couldn't.
However, Will figured that maybe he needed to be near someone who wasn't like Mike whatsoever. It'd be easy not to think of Mike if nothing reminded Will of him, even though he and Boris looked so similar. But, now that he could get a real, close-up look at Boris, Will searched him for Mike—he could find him in his nose, his cheekbones, and maybe his hair or his mouth, but everything else had been as if Will had drawn Mike from memory (he could make this analogy, because, unadmittedly, he had done so before.) Overall, the striking similarities Will had seen the night before had faded, and he wondered if he might've just had Mike on the mind at the time, since he so often did.
Desperate to stop thinking about Mike's face, Will spoke up. "Shestov?"
"Hm?" Boris said, snapping out of his own zoned-out trance.
"Why did you call me that? I mean, Shestov?" Will began to drag his shoe along the sand again. "Am I saying that right?"
"Philosopher. You asked me lots of questions last night. Very curious, very philosophical." Boris chuckled, quieter this time.
"Oh. Well, I guess I was just curious."
"Yes, and now you see, this is what we do here." he gestured openly towards the surrounding area, as if to signify: nothing.
"I could have assumed." Will mumbled under his breath.
"Hey, don't be catty, Shestov." he gave Will a playful push on the arm. "Is not so bad. Like I said, we have fun." Boris said, talking emphatically, carelessly moving his hands around.
"Yeah? You and your friend?" Will asked, suddenly remembering the infamous Potter.
"Yes," Boris smiled mischievously. "We have fun."
* * *
By the time Will noticed any time had passed, the sun had almost set completely. How he'd spent nearly five hours sitting with Boris was beyond him. The two had gotten to discussing everything they could, or at least, in Will's case, everything he felt like sharing, which severely limited his choices for topics. Boris, on the other hand, introduced several in depth and personal subjects, ranging from normal, like religion, to awkward, like his sex life.
"Is overrated, really," Boris said, leaning over to put his cigarette out on the sand. "Don't bother trying it."
"I wasn't really planning on it." Will laughed, spinning around after he had twisted the chains of the swing and let go.
But, as the air got colder, Will suddenly realized where he was and when he was there. He froze as he looked up and was met with a cobalt, star-dusted sky.
"Oh, jeez, I have to go," he said, standing up abruptly, but not yet walking away, at a slight loss of what to do. "Sorry. This was...um—nice."
"Wait," Boris said, his voice barely above a whisper. He grabbed onto Will's arm softly. "Tomorrow, I can come over to motel. We can talk again, spend time. Maybe you can meet Potter."
Will stood still as the cool breeze picked up. He stared at Boris, shocked that he would want to hang out with him again, especially since they'd barely spent any time together in the first place. Even if the conversation occasionally wandered places Will wished it wouldn't, he didn't exactly mind talking to Boris. There was virtually no harm in being friends with this guy, just to have somebody to talk to—Will would leave at the end of the week, and Boris would cease to exist.
"I— Okay," Will smiled. Then, he remembered his mother, and wondered what she would think if she opened the door to Boris the next morning. "Meet me at the gas station down the street, though."
"Okay. At twelve.”
And, with a hesitant “okay”, Will walked off.
* * *
As soon as Will started his walk home, he was filled with the overwhelming dread of having to face his mother. He didn't mean to stay out so late, but he knew that by now the entire state of Nevada could have been out searching for him.
The walk was relaxing, besides the fact that it was so dark, and navigating was almost impossible. Even though trying to get back seemed harrowing and stressful, and the oncoming scolding from Joyce loomed over him, Will felt strangely calm. He'd gotten to talk to somebody his age who wasn't related to him for the first time in months, and could finally get the feeling of extreme loneliness off his back. He couldn't even let the fact that in a week it'd all be over bother him.
After taking about three wrong turns, Will finally made it back to the motel, and sneakily looking through the window, could tell that Joyce was awake. From what he could see of the television, he was able to gage that it was about eight o'clock. Will took a deep breath and prepared himself for what was to come before slowly twisting the doorknob.
With the noise of the door, Joyce shot up immediately.
"Will! Are you insane?" she snapped, angry, but her relief at the sight of Will alive and safe was not hidden well.
"I'm so sorry, I lost track of time—" Will started, interrupted by Joyce aggressively wrapping her arms around him.
"You are not going to do that to me again, Will," Joyce scolded as she pulled away from the hug. "I'm telling you, right as you walked in, I'd almost called the cops. What were you doing out there, anyway?"
"I met a boy my age. We got to talking, I guess."
"You did? That's great!" Joyce exclaimed as she moved her hand through Will's hair. "I can assume you're tired."
"Yeah," Will laughed. "You too, I bet,"
Joyce nodded. "Okay, go to sleep. I should call Jonathan, if he's awake."
Will got into bed and, by some strange power, did not think of the boy from Hawkins, nor did he feel as sick as he had for the past month. It wasn't as if his mental status had been completely cured in a single day, but, for a second, it could have seemed that way to Will. He lay in the motel bed, which had suddenly felt so comfortable—most likely because he'd been so exhausted from walking so much—and listened to Joyce's phone call to Jonathan, the volume of her voice slowly fading out as Will fell asleep.
And, for the first time in weeks, Will was asleep for the entire night—no nightmares, whether it be over demonic hell-bent creatures chasing him or the same boy they'd always been over. In other words, for the first time in weeks, Will slept peacefully.