Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

There's a Starman waiting in the sky
He'd like to come and meet us
But he thinks he'd blow our minds.

Will Byers was excellent at hiding.

There was a certain art to it. An abstract way to cinch his limbs together, to angle his torso in just the right way so as to disappear completely. He’d used this to his advantage many times. In games of hide and seek with Mike and the others as kids. Cramming himself under his bed whenever his dad was drunk and angry before the divorce. Once, for a week in a rather cold place, in a rather painful way that he’d rather not think about.

Once, in his own brain, hiding behind synapses and nervous tissue from something dark and large and eight-legged that towered over him taller than any building in Hawkins. He’d hid so well that time he almost disappeared from himself, the humanity in his neurons dissipating as he crawled towards the slowly dwindling bits of warmth stashed away in the corners of his mind.

Will Byers was excellent at hiding.

That was how he, despite unwittingly wearing his heart on his sleeve, was able to keep secrets. By hiding them away, even from himself, sometimes. He figured out a way to seal a secret in packing tape and cardboard and place it on the highest mental shelf he could find, tucked so far away even dust particles wouldn’t be able to find it.

The lightbulb in Mike's basement swayed on a thin chain, emitting a low buzzing noise. Will felt the light like sparks in his teeth. Like stars in his hair. Like a deep and large cold in his veins. It shed light on the Dungeons and Dragons gaming table, still yet to be set up. A fit of harsh anger swelled in Will, and he tried to stuff it down, tried to hide from it, tried to keep his face cheery and his demeanor hopeful, but he still couldn’t squirrel away from his disappointment.

“I thought we were going to dress up?” His voice sounded whiny, even to him.

The rest of The Party, save Max and El per Will’s request, sat around the table. Dustin, Mike, and Lucas bent at awkward angles to fit themselves into the tiny chairs they’d used since they were kids.

They were wearing street clothes. Normal clothes.

Dustin wore his emerald green camp shirt, thin and sun faded from the domineering August heat. Lucas wore denim shorts and a striped tee shirt that would’ve been baggy on him last year, but now found itself molding around newfound muscles.

And Mike wore what he always wore. Khakis. A Tee. sometimes a button-up. Will didn’t think about it too hard. He didn’t focus on the way the shirt clung to Mike's now broadening shoulders or the way it raised to expose his navel, alabaster and smooth, when Mike stretched.

This mattered, the clothing his friends wore, mattered because Will was stood before them, dressed in a royal purple wizard cloak. The silver stars hand sewn and glimmering in the pale fluorescent. His pointed, matching hat sat skewed atop his head. He’d even gone so far as to paint tiny stars below the corners of his eyes with a stick of his mom’s eyeliner that he’d stolen. He’d been very proud of himself on the bike ride here, the costume stashed away in his orange backpack. He’d been so excited, in fact, that he’d hurriedly put the cloak on in Mike's garage, hoping to make an entrance walking downstairs to the basement, light reflecting like fireballs off his costume.

The wizard cloak was one of the few things that made Will feel powerful. When he wore it he wasn’t Will Byers anymore. He wasn’t Zombie Boy. He wasn’t the little kid that went missing in the night. He was Will the Wise. He had magic. Heart. Friends around him. He could change the fabric of reality with his mind, cast spells, bring matter into existence with his hands.

It was hard to feel powerful standing in a poorly lit basement, when his friends wore regular clothes and Will was wearing, what he realized to an outsider, may come across as a dress.

And makeup.

Christ, he’d forgotten about the stars on his face.

He could feel the tears coming. Feel them pounding to be released from behind the shield of his eyes, Dragged down his cheeks by gravity, smudging the stars, washing them away until there was no more mask for Will to hide behind.

Someone, Dustin, Will thought, cleared their throat.

Dustin, at the very least, looked guilty. His face reddened, eyes cast downward, as he mumbled something akin to an apology.

“Sorry Will. Didn’t fit anymore.”

Lucas nodded in agreement, “Neither does mine. Couldn’t get it over my shoulders. Erica walked in when I was trying. I don’t think I’m ever going to recover from the names she called me.”

He shuddered, jokingly, limbs exaggerated and face twisted in a comical wince. The tension didn’t break though. Will had built this day up too much in his head to let his fury be washed away with a laugh.

Mike rolled his eyes. Not in the endeared way. In the annoyed way. As if he were sick of Will’s antics.

As if he weren't there when Will had become a monster.

As if he hadn’t once looked at Will with terror in his eyes. With recognition fading from his irises.

A black hole opened in Will's stomach. His organs lurching down to the floor. Of course he’d noticed his friends sprouting like weeds, their legs growing long, bones extending both outward and up. He’d seen the way their faces carved away the last of the baby fat, the way their voices lowered like thunder. The way their eyes flicked to the girls they passed more and more.

Max and Lucas. Suzie and Dustin. Mike and El.

It wasn’t like Will hadn’t grown at all. He had. Quite a bit, in fact. The door frame where his mom measured him and Jonathan decreed he’d grown over an inch in the last year, bones creaking with elongation just the same as his friends. As a result, his cloak rose over his ankles just a bit, exposing the cuffed ends of the denim jeans he wore underneath.

But that was it. Slightly shorter. The rest of the costume fit as it always had.

While the party was going through Tylenol bottles to keep growing pains at bay that last summer, Will had been keeping warm. Wearing sweaters in the swelter of July. Heat lamp pointed at his bed at night, sweating what must’ve been pound after pound off every day to keep away the cold. To keep away him. The— the thing he didn’t like to think about. The thing that almost reduced him to nothing.

His mom tried to reassure Will that the monster was gone. But Will knew that wasn’t the case. He could feel him, like a gust of winter air, on the back of his neck.

Now in the basement, he felt the breath. Felt the cold eat away at the skin on the nape of his neck. His breath hitched, sounding too much like a sob.

“And you?” Will turned to Mike.

Mike didn’t even have the nerve to look guilty. His face bore a combination of annoyance and embarrassment. The embarrassment, Will was startled to realize, wasn’t self-directed, but rather a flash of secondhand embarrassment for him. For Will. Mike was embarrassed for him.

“Couldn’t find it. Mom must’ve given it away with the other kid stuff.” Mike said nonchalantly, “I didn’t think it mattered anyway. We haven’t run a campaign since winter break.”

“Exactly!” Will finally exploded, anger burning cold and needle thin behind his eyes, jaw working to keep his teeth from grinding. “You said you’d come up with one after—”

Something fluttered at his brainstem. Internal, not external like the Mind Flayer. This feeling was different. Will knew what it was. He didn’t like it. Tucked it away, and tried to tuck his anger away next to it.

“After I got better.” He finished lamely.

“School started up again. Besides, why is this on me? You could’ve reminded me about it!”

“I did!”

Anger again.

“Not enough, apparently. Sorry there are other things in my life besides Dungeons and Dragons, Will.” He spat the words like venom. Like he meant for them to hurt.

And they did. Enough that the tears finally spilled over. A streak or two curling down his face, clinging to the still present baby fat. He was sure they'd messed up the stars, painting his face in thin, long strips of dark matter.

Dustin sat, eyes wide, body stone still in the midst of the argument. Lucas, however, was swiveling his head back and forth, channeling in on whoever was speaking, as if this was some drama on television.

“I know, Mike.” Will ground out.

After a while, when Mike hadn’t written a new campaign, despite Will’s constant requests, he’d just decided to do it himself. He told Mike and the others he’d call them together when it was finished. Will spent weeks pouring over his manuals, trying to create the perfect campaign. Something crazy and dangerous, with battle after battle, with dragons and monsters, and nothing even remotely close to anything they’d seen before. In the game, or in real life. He’d been careful to design all the NPC’s to be unflirtable. Made the campaign a one-shot, knowing that trying for a multi-week or even multi-day campaign might be pushing it. He’d thought of everything, tried to be as considerate of his friend's likes, desires, and limits as he possibly could. Told them weeks in advance to find their old costumes and prepare their stat sheets, and none of them had even bothered to warn him that he would look like an idiot. Look like a freak. Like the little kid he was, still tiny enough to fit in the wizard costume he’d made before he’d been taken away to the—

Before he’d been—

Before he’d been sick. The first time. The week long sick. The cold. The taste of a rock song Jonathan showed him still coating his throat like burnt vines.

All he’d wanted was one day where it was just them again. The four of them. Where they laughed and fought monsters and weren’t embarrassed to wear their nerdy costumes, because it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered when it was the four of them. They could tell each other anything, do anything, be anything and not risk judgment or mockery. Not like how it was at school, where kids made fun of Will for nearly dying.

Called him names for surviving.

Shoved him into walls when he cried about it. Cried about the flashbacks he couldn’t hide well enough away from, the ones that ripped themselves into his mind in the middle of English class, cold and harsh and murky, until he sank to the floor.

The first few times that happened, Mike crawled to the floor next to him, helped him up, tossed an arm over his shoulder, and the two would stagger to the nurse. Now, whenever it happened, maybe once a month or so, Mike would just turn his head away. Like the sight of Will on the floor, crying and cold, always so cold, was too painful to look at. Too embarrassing to look at. As if he hadn’t been there when Will’s brain was torn apart.

The light above them sparked, flickered once, and then went out.

All four heads whipped up to stare at it, a single bulb hanging from a chain, swaying in the light draft of the basement. A different emotion written across each face, concern on Dustin's. Anger on Mike’s. Reproach on Lucas’s. A deep, bone-aching, marrow-filling fear on Will’s.

“What was that?” Dustin asked, being the first to interrupt the fight. His voice wavered, only slightly, an unsurity echoed in his tone. The typically lighthearted warble now laced with a slight hysteria.

Will looked down at his feet. At the worn grey and blue sneakers that peeked out from beneath the cuffs of his jeans.

“Was that—” Lucas asked.

“—Just the light,” Mike said, assuredly. “It’s old. Mom hasn’t changed it in forever. Since I was born, probably.”

Mike looked at Will for the first time since he’d arrived, anger melting into something else. Into a searching. A desire for reassurance. As if Will was the expert on all this. As if Will knew which flashing lights were normal and which flashing lights were monsters.

Will looked up. A flare shot through him at the eye contact. A myogenic swelling of his heart. A thrum of blood. A creaking of his joints.

The light popped to life above them, again.

Will held Mike’s eyes through the spark.

“Yeah.” Will said. “Just an old bulb.”

Chapter Text

Chapter Two

“Then the loud sound did seem to fade
Came back like a slow voice on a wave of phase
That weren't no DJ
That was hazy cosmic trace.”

…

The campaign was stilted. Stiff. Every action Mike, Lucas, and Dustin made felt juvenile, amateur as if they’d somehow forgotten how to play. Or didn’t want to try. Will hoped it was the first option, but he knew it was the latter.

The four of them sat in that stagnant basement, Will still stubbornly in his cloak, stars smudged and half faded on his cheeks from tears, until a Level 4 aboleth killed every player. Mike was the last to die. He didn’t even try. Will knew how many hit points he had. Knew the way Mike's brain worked when he fought, saw the way the gears turned behind his eyes, calculating the quickest way to end a battle. One way or another.

Once dead, Mike and Lucas didn’t waste a second before toppling over themselves to get to the walkie-talkie radio stashed away in El’s fort.

Will didn’t know why it was still called that. El’s fort. El had slept there for less than a week. and before it was El’s, it was Will’s.

That was how it used to be. Mike planning campaigns at the table. Will sat in the warm fort, sketching their battles in crayon. Sometimes they’d play music, the cassette tapes Jonathan gave Will. Sometimes they’d sit in silence. A nice silence. One that glimmered like light. Like stars.

Will would face another Demogorgon in a heartbeat if it meant they could go back to that. He’d fight a thousand mind flayers.

The lightbulb dimmed. A red game piece near Will’s clenched fist tremored quietly. A sharp pain. A rush of anger.

He likes it cold.

Dustin was still sitting at the table. His death seemed the least intentional. He’d been the first, a few strokes of bad luck, some nat ones on his part and several critical hits against him.
The radio buzzing from the couch brought life to Will's neurons. That was something he’d discovered after he got sick. His brain worked better in the white noise, liked how the static blurred the real world and left the tunnels of his mind open and clear. A force inside him channeled the sound naturally. Will tried to hold it back. Beat it down. He plugged his ears, hoping to bring life back into focus again.

The radio switched and the girls had picked up. The sound was gone.

Will sat, his mind raw and exposed, the light above his head shining brighter and brighter by the second. A few feet away a 20 sided die rolled over on its own, scoring a 19.

No one noticed as Will’s nose trickled the slightest trail of blood, small and faint as stardust.

…

It was raining. Because of course it was. It always rained during moments like this.

Fat drops plummeted from the sky, bursting open on grass blades, frigid and thick. It was the kind of rain that Will would’ve loved when he was younger. The kind that would make him put on his green goulashes and his raincoat, the yellow one with the rubber duck on the pocket, and splash in the puddles until dark. Sometimes even after, if his mom was distracted.

He hadn’t been allowed out past dark for months.

He only ever caught glimpses of the stars, now, from his bedroom window, saw the way they glinted behind paned sheets of glass, brightening his room in pinpricks of extraplanetary light.

Sometimes when it was late, hours after everyone else had gone to sleep, Will would lay on his bed and watch as his navy curtains ever so slowly opened entirely on their own, revealing inch after inch of precious sky.

He wanted to ask his mother for a telescope. Or glow in the dark plastic stars for his ceiling. Or permission to be alive again. But he didn’t know how to ask for anything, so instead, he just stayed quiet.

He always stayed quiet.

The kickstand to his bike was jammed, a wad of dirt preventing it from closing enough to let Will ride away. He hadn’t changed out of his robe yet, he’d been in such a hurry to get out of the basement. He didn’t want them to see him cry. Again. It seemed like any time anyone saw Will, they saw him when he was weak. When he was crying. When he was dying. When he was sick.

but you’re not weak, something cold whispered to him, you’re not.

And he wasn’t.

Mike burst into the garage, the radio no longer in his hand. He was saying something, but Will was too busy fighting with his kickstand to listen.

“—sorry! It was a good campaign— We can try it again sometime!”

The bike jerked forward on its own, a wild thing, nearly torn out of wills grip. The dirt clump exploded, leaving the exposed metal clean as the first day Will's mom bought it for him.

Will prepared himself to swing up on the bike. He didn’t answer Mike. He didn’t look at him. He didn't give in.

He wasn’t weak.

“Will, come on!”

you’re not weak.

A warm hand closed around his forearm. So hot it almost scorched the skin. Like a sunburn in Winter. Like an ant being burned alive under a magnifying glass. Will felt every imprint of Mike’s hand on him. Felt each dip and curve of his fingers. The skin was smooth. Not calloused like Wills. Not half numb like Will’s. Not frostbite scarred like Will’s.

“Will.” Mike’s voice was softer now, less commanding. More pleading. It rang through Will’s ears loud enough to drown out the static and the pouring rain. It flowed sweet as blood.

you’re not weak.

But he was.

So he gave in, jutting his chin up just enough to look Mike in the eyes.

A flash of light. A warmth. A few degrees brighter. A few degrees hotter.

“You can’t leave, it's raining.” Mike tried again.

Mike’s face was a language Will didn’t understand, his eyes still angry. Still annoyed. Still holding second-hand embarrassment. But the roughness of his expression wore down like a river stone. His eyebrows creased in just as much concern as frustration. His nose twitching. His mouth—

God, Will spent too much time thinking about Mike’s mouth.

Spent too much time looking at Mike's mouth.

It was pink as seashell, curled taut in a half-depleted grimace. Cupid’s bow defined so strongly it lifted off his face like marble. Will sometimes would imagine what it would be like to sketch Mike’s lips. He imagined how the light would hit them, the crevices where he would cross hatch. He wondered what they would feel like on the page.

He wondered what they would feel like on him.

“At least let my mom give you a ride home—”

A flash of light. Anger again. Ice water pouring down his spine. Eight legs and shadows.

“Let me go.” Will snarled.

Startled, Mike took a step back, releasing his hold on Will. The softness on his face, the bits of sympathy he’d let slip through hardened from snow to ice, eyes blazing as he met Will’s fury with his own.

“God, Will, it's just a game! Why are you freaking the fuck out?”

not weak. not weak. not weak.

“Oh, I don’t know, it’s not as if we’ve been planning this campaign for weeks. It’s not as if we haven’t played a game since winter break—”

“I’ve— we’ve— been distracted! You know that! I’ve been busy tutoring El, Max is teaching Lucas skateboarding, and Dustin was at camp.”

“Yeah, I noticed, Mike. I noticed that everyone suddenly forgot about the party—”

forgot about you. thinks you’re weak.

“—It's like I'm the only one who cares anymore!” Will exploded.

“Maybe you are! Did you ever think of that? Maybe we grew up. Maybe you should too.”

“Growing up means swapping spit with some stupid girl?”

“El’s not stupid! It’s not my fault you don’t like girls.”

He wouldn’t cry. The words hurt. They were dull. A blunt force object to the head. A sucker punch to the lungs.

not weak. not weak.

The thing was, Will didn’t like girls.

Well, sure he liked them. El was nice enough and Max shared her fruit-by-the-foots with him at lunch sometimes. But he didn’t want to kiss them. He knew he should. Knew he should be crushing on Lauren Braggart or Wanda Jones, asking out any girl who would look at him twice. He’d even danced with a girl once. He forgot her name though.

He knew he should like them, but he didn’t. Every time he tried, he got distracted. Thought of other things. Seashell pink lips. Arms slung around him, hobbling out of English class. Whispering, “It's okay, Will. You’re safe. You’re safe. You’re safe.”

But he wasn’t safe. Not out here. Not in the open. Not when those words carried such a devastating weight and both boys, however subconsciously, knew it. Every prey animal knew the only way to be safe was to hide.

not weak.

But Will wasn’t prey. Not anymore. So he didn’t hide. He ran. Swung his leg over the bike and peddled fast as he could. He didn’t care that he was still in his wizard robe. Didn’t care that Mike was half-assedly running after him shouting apologies. Didn’t care that the rain washed away the rest of the smudged black stars on his face. Didn’t care that the water would ruin the costume, dull the stars, shrink the fabric.

He relished in the acrid bite of the rain on his face. The way the freezing drops sliced into his skin like needles. Like his every pore was being opened up, like he was being twisted into ice. Like he reached atomic zero, kept so frozen his molecules wouldn’t ever move again.

He peddled and peddled, the cold in his mind cheering. not weak. It said. not weak.

The tears were gone. Washed off with the rain. Washed off with the stars. Will peddled harder, standing on his bike to get the momentum going even faster. He felt alive. He felt powerful. He was not weak. He was bright as a supernova. Strong as stars. He was a luminary. A giant in the vacuum of space.

A smile split over his face, opening his skull, his mouth so wide the teeth practically distended from their sockets.

A flash. A glimmer of Mike’s lips. A flush of warm blush to his cheeks. Rain, cool on his skin.

not weak. not weak. not weak.

Will cut through the rain. Tore the ground up behind him, a thing of fury and stars.

not weak anymore.

As Will savored his strength, he peddled harder, completely unaware that his bike was hovering three inches off the ground.