Chapter Text
By the time he gets back to school, everyone seems to have listened to him. They’re all staying the fuck away. Really he should be grateful. It’s what he asked for. But instead he feels sick every time he walks down a corridor and catches the eyes of fellow students fixed on him. They don’t even look away anymore; don’t even pretend they weren’t staring. He’s a psycho, a nutcase, but not one that demands any sort of fear. Just one little kids point and laugh at.
Max won’t look at him in English. She just stares straight ahead, watching the chalkboard as if the secrets of the universe are scrawled there. Will doesn’t blame her. It’s what he asked for, after all.
He doesn’t see Lucas or Dustin in the weeks that follow, and he doesn’t actively seek them out either. It makes his chest ache. Even after everything he did, he always had Dustin and Lucas. Pounding on his backdoor. Waving to him in the hallway. Keeping their distance, sure, but always there.
He had thought before that they had hated him. Now he realises how it truly feels to be hated by everybody.
He only sees El once. He’s shuffling to Algebra, sticking close to the lockers as though high school has become some sort of savannah. It’s been three weeks since the party, one and a half weeks since he came back to school and four days since he stopped eating for good. Walking’s hard right now, but then again, so is everything.
She’s at her locker, fiddling with the code. She looks tired, he realises, eyes shadowed with bags that match his own. Her nails have been gnawed down to the skin and she keeps kicking at the locker, as though somehow that action will magically make it open.
For the first time since September, he feels truly and utterly lost. A month ago she had bumped their feet together under his kitchen table. Three months ago they had taken dumb photos in their Halloween costumes at the bottom of his stairs. And now he has to look away when her eyes briefly flit to his.
El looks like she’s about to say something. She moves away from the locker, pushing it too as she takes a few confident steps into the hallway.
But then she falters. Flinches away from his hardened stare and looks instead to the other end of the hallway where signature hair and letterman jacket waits. Mike doesn’t look at him. He deserves that.
El shoots him a watery smile as she takes the steps back and nearly collides into Mike’s side. She looks sad. So sad. She should look happy.
Will stumbles to the double doors and throws up in response. He’s got nothing left to throw up, left retching and heaving, scrabbling blindly at the brick wall next to him.
Of all the routines established in senior year, this quickly becomes his least favourite. Mornings are for waking up, tipping his meds down the drain and arguing with his mom. Each day the arguments become viler yet somehow more tired. After a week of this, his mom takes to leaving early for work, probably so she’s not worn out before the day’s even begun. She is replaced instead by Jonathan, who is less argumentative. He just shoves breakfast towards Will, even though he knows it will go straight in the bin.
Then he walks to school. The car journeys are long gone. He tried, his first day back, but instead he found himself taking a left, then a right, another right and a left until he found the car parked on the edge of the quarry. The Chief had found him there, just as the sky was beginning to darken, contemplating letting his body fall of the edge like a crumpled rag doll.
Chief Hopper had driven him home. They didn’t talk of El, or the party, or of anything. Instead Hopper had given him a mars bar and turned the radio up to drown out his thoughts. Will hadn’t eaten the mars bar.
He couldn’t get on his bike again. Even if he wanted to, his hands shake too much now with his missing doses. He would take it, but it makes him feel nothing and he really needs to feel this hurt. He owes that to Mike and El.
Jonathan had offered to drop him off, an offer he flat out refused, which left walking.
So now he walks to school. He likes it. When it’s sleeting he can feel it carving into his skin and wearing down at his clothes. It takes his mind of everything, feeling his bones are peaking out of his skin.
It’s raining the day the dam bursts. The rain seems never-ending, a thundering storm that splits open the heavens.
Will’s walking in it when it starts. It’s not a school day, so he has nowhere to be, but he just had to get out of the house. It used to be his safe haven, but now it’s filled with ghosts and painful reminders of something long dead.
It hadn’t been raining when he left, so he had abandoned the rain coat at home. He wouldn’t have brought one anyone, not even if it was already thundering, because he likes the cold. It reminds him he’s human.
He’s just walking to nowhere, kicking through the grass at the side of the road. The rain starts slowly at first, just enough to slick his hair and creep down the back of his jumper. But then it becomes heavy, persistent, hard droplets digging into his scalp.
He doesn’t remember starting to run but he must do because his legs are burning and his vision is blurring and when was the last time he ate? He scrubs at his eyes but the black spots don’t dissipate. He knows he should rest, that if he punishes himself too much, he’ll keel over, but he can’t. He has to keep going. He has a destination to reach- he’s sure of that now.
He goes slower, but still running, because the rain is chasing him and coating his skin. He keeps stopping to breathe, but that just makes the rain fall heavier, so in the end he pushes through and just keeps running.
He can feel something welling inside him. The rain seems to be flooding a dam fit to burst.
By the time he reaches the porch, all he wants to do is curl up into a ball and let the rain take him. instead he forces his burning thighs to climb the last few steps, then raises his hand to knock. Once. Twice. Three times.
El answers the door. It’s some sort of miracle. He wasn’t even sure if he had the right house, given the fact that all the streets in Hawkins look the same and the rain has obstructed most of his vision. Even then, it could’ve be Hopper who answered the door.
But it’s El, rubbing at her eyes with the back of an oversized shirt sleeve. It’s El, who’s brow is furrowed with a look that could be mistaken for intense concentration. It’s El, who doesn’t even hesitate to pull Will into her arms when he starts to openly weep.
It feels like they spend an age hugging on his doorstep, arms wrapped firmly around his back, head buried into her shoulder. After a minute or a millennia, she gently tugs him inside and escorts him to the bathroom. He’s never seen her house properly before, he realises as she hangs a towel round his shoulders and uses another to dab at his face. Just another thing he doesn’t know about the girl who has nothing to hide.
He’s still crying, tears undoing any attempt El makes to dry his face.
“I should have something that will fit you,” she’s murmuring as she leads him into her bedroom. It’s a girl’s room through and through, with a bunny rabbit duvet and a hoard of stuffed animals crowding her desk. He doesn’t know what he was expecting.
She’s so careful as she hands him a stack of folded clothes, and he has to try not to cry harder because she’s being so nice to him. He doesn’t deserve this. He’ll never deserve this.
He gets changed in the bathroom. She’s right, the clothes do fit. If anything they hang way too loose on his body. He’s brittle, all bones and sharp angles. Easy to snap. He hides it all under the soft sweatshirt in his hands.
El is waiting for him, in her room. She’s sat cross-legged, facing a space that is, as of yet, unoccupied.
He falls into it naturally, as though it’s default. She beams at him when he does and he can feel something inside of him cracking.
She grabs at the hand resting on his lap. Squeezes it, tight. “Will,” she starts, cautiously, “you can tell me. You can tell me anything you need to. I’ll just sit here and… listen.”
So he tells her it all. Not because he’s scared someone else will tell her first. Not because he wants to push her away.
But because she deserves to know. Because she has kind eyes and warm hands and she always tells Will everything. Because he’ll burst at the seams if he doesn’t.
So he tells her.
He tells her how middle school was hell, but how he had Dustin and Lucas and Mike by his side. About how they made ‘fairy’ and ‘queer’ tolerable. How they would always scoop themselves up after each jibe and how each one brought them closer together. They were friends, but they were more than that. They were each other’s bodyguards, part of an intrinsically layered family. They had it each other’s backs. It felt good.
He tells her how he was always the smallest of the group. If they wanted to get rid of the weakest link, that would be him. But, for some reason he never knew, they didn’t. They certainly made their lives harder with him in their midst, but if he ever brought up how he was different, Dustin would point out how they were all different until Will smiled and reluctantly accepted that they wanted him around.
Elementary school was easy. Fun, even. No one minded if they played Star Wars or secluded themselves. No one cared when Lucas would blow milk out his nose from laughing too hard. No one cared when Mike and Will would hug for a little too long. Or when their hands would stay interlocked on the swings. Or when Will would flush a deep pink when Dustin mentioned any of that.
Middle school, however, was a whole different ball game. The nasty kids from their former years just became bigger, and uglier, and a whole lot louder. They still didn’t care about the party, not at first. There were kids easier to pick on. But those kids adapted, or gave way, joining new groups or moving schools.
Which just left Will. He was still small, even then, with a head too big for his shoulders and a happiness that couldn’t be squashed. He was an idiot, he tells El through snot and tears. Stupid and naïve and too trusting.
Middle school was scary, and bullies were mean, but at least he could still hold Mike’s hand.
He doesn’t know when it all started, not even now, looking back on it. It’s a blurry picture in his mind. At the time, it felt like the torture lasted for years. Looking back on it, it was probably only a few weeks at best.
They developed a system, and who was Will to argue with their well-defined schedule? So it became a routine. Avoid them in school. Try to pretend like nothing was wrong with Lucas, Dustin and Mike. Let them beat the shit out of him after school.
It was a deal. They could draw whatever blood they liked, so long as it remained between them, Will and the concrete near the bins.
Jonathan noticed first. He had tried to talk to Will about it, but Will hadn’t talked back. That was the first time. The first time he kept a secret from his brother. It certainly wasn’t the last.
The routine became well established. It hurt like hell, the blows to the back of his head, the scab they kept reopening on his knee, but it hurt a lot less when Mike smiled at him.
If it stayed at that, it could’ve been fine. But their words hurt more than their blows. He was haunted by the things they said, couldn’t escape from that. Not the “fags” or the “queers”. He heard them too much to really be bothered anymore. But he was the runt, and they reminded him of that. Once, one of them had mused that maybe Mike would be better off without him. That he would be better off without Will. That they should just kill him and toss him in the dumpster.
It stung because it was true and he knew it. Will had run home that day and cried into his pillow. It was the beginning of the end.
The words and the blows and the smiles from Mike built like water in his lungs. An unbearable pressure, pushing down on his chest.
There’s a lot in between that he doesn’t tell her. The food and the fear. The time he had jumped out of the car while his mom was driving. The trips to the doctors and the hallucinations. Those things belong to him and him alone. He never even told Mike, when it was all happening.
He didn’t tell Mike anything. Kept the smile in place until it hurt too much. Kept the words inside, until he snapped.
He was stood at his lockers when it happened. The hand on his shoulder felt heavy and foreign, so he took a chance and swung, throwing his full weight into it.
It was Mike who had staggered back. Mike who had clutched at his bleeding nose. He was smiling still, wincing through the pain, more confused than anything.
Will could’ve stopped. Could’ve told Will everything. Apologised for the nose and the flinching and being weird. Taken the taller boys hand in his and squeezed tight.
Instead he had grabbed Mike’s collar and pulled him to the ground. Delivered blow after blow into his face, his torso, until Mike was just a bloody mess underneath him.
He doesn’t know why. Still, after all this time. It just felt like something inside him snapping. Something inside him destroying Mike and everything they could’ve been.
It was Dustin who had hauled him off Mike. Will had thrashed in his arms until he’d freed himself. Then he’d barrelled out the doors before he could be excluded and ran all the way home.
The blows stopped coming after that. Maybe it wasn’t fun anymore. Maybe they liked to beat up something with a bit of life. That wasn’t Will anymore. When he came back to school all those months later he was nothing more than a shell. But that was good, because it meant he didn’t hurt so bad anymore.
El doesn’t say anything. She just folds her legs into her body and listens, chin resting on her knees. She doesn’t react, doesn’t flinch, doesn’t scream at Will to get out of her house. She just listens.
And Will, for his part, cries. He doesn’t remember starting, but then he can’t stop and he’s sobbing and sobbing. He didn’t think he had any tears left to cry about this anymore. He was wrong.
“I’m the monster,” he hiccups through tears. “I’m the freak that tore us apart. Not anyone else. Me.”
He barely registers the sound of the bed springs as El climbs off. He’s too wrapped up in his own misery. But then he feels a weight drape across his back and arms encircle him and it’s all so warm.
El is hugging him. He can’t remember the last time anyone hugged him. Not like this. It just makes him cry harder.
“It’s not your fault, Will.”
He wants to protest because yes, yes it is. He opens his mouth but all that comes out is an avalanche of sobs that wrack his body.
“It’s not your fault,” she repeats, tone certain. “You were just scared. It’s not your fault, Will.”
She sounds so sure of himself. But Will is pretty sure that punching Mike Wheeler so hard his nose bled is his fault. So was calling them all ‘queers’ as he struggled away from Dustin’s grip. So was telling Lucas to stay the hell away from him. So was slamming the door in Dustin’s face. So was skipping two solid months of school. So was-
He could think of more, but El is pulling back and pressing their foreheads together, and it’s so grounding that he loses his train of thought.
“No one hates you, Will.”
Yes, they do.
Yes, they do.
“Yes, they do.”
She shakes her head, lips pressed together. “No, they don’t. I don’t think they ever did.”
“Then why did they push me away?” His tone is small. Small and mournful.
El laughs at that. “Did it ever occur to you that maybe you were the one to do the pushing?”
Will frowns. That can’t be true. They had to be the ones wanting to get rid of him, because he’s shitty and useless and so, so wrong. His friends were the best thing to ever happen to him. Why would he push them away?
But he was so scared. So scared that they see how wrong Will is. So scared he’d drain them, just like he drained his dad so much that he had to leave. So scared that he didn’t deserve friends.
And then he was so angry. So angry that Mike had just taken the punches and not hit him back like he’d wanted. Because if Mike had hit him back, then they were even. If Mike hated him, Will could live with that.
If Mike hated Will, then maybe Will wouldn’t love him so much.
The thought hits him like a bus and he can’t breathe. But El is still there, her eyes burning into his, as Will realises just how much he had wanted to be alone.
He’s laughing through the pain. El is smiling too. It’s a confusing smile, half-sad, half-happy, but it’s a smile and it’s all Will needs.
Afterwards they’re lying on El’s bed, discarded pizza box lying between them. El is sprawled on her stomach, flicking through a Cosmo, whilst Will stares at her ceiling. It’s decorated with neon stars, arranged into the constellations. For the first time since middle school, Will realises he can breathe again. Not just shallow breathes, but deep lung-fulls of air. It’s a weird sensation and it makes him feel a little dizzy.
El pauses mid page turn and looks up at him. “You know; I think it’s about time people in this town started talking to each other.”
Will nods and rolls onto his side with a groan. “I don’t know where to start.”
“Maybe with a sorry?”
“For what? There’s too much to apologise for.”
“Then just apologise for the party,” El suggests with a shrug. “It’s worth a start.”
Will hums in agreement because, yeah, it’s a start.
Lucas will accept. He always would have, and if the last few months have taught Will anything, it’s that Lucas really hasn’t changed that much.
Dustin is an enigma, but he’s also kind and soft and Will can’t picture him holding a grudge.
He’s going to have hell to pay with Max. But while she may be severe, harsh and fucking hot-headed, she’s also an optimist in the best of ways. And she always saw the best in Will.
Then there’s Mike. The picture of Mike in his mind is always flickering;
Seven years old, holding Will’s hand on the swings.
Twelve years old, face stained red, crumpled on the floor.
Mike, running track.
Mike, watching El dance.
Mike, cornering Will at the lockers.
But now he sees Mike at lunch, passing a note down to El. Laughing with Lucas. Smiling at Will.
So yeah, maybe someday, Mike will accept his apology too.
It’s a start.