Chapter Text
Will dreamed of this place often. The field of flowers where the end began. Now, it was all gray. Dead. That day - half a year ago now, was it? - he had felt… Fear? Anxiety? Perhaps terror?
But none of those were quite right. He had felt all those things, yes, but more than anything he felt acceptance. An end to their tale must come and it had arrived. He was there with all of the most important people in his life, and like he told Mike just days before in his room in California, it was up to them.
He knew that all of this started with him and that one way or another it would end with him. He didn’t know how, but he knew this truth.
The flowers crunched under him as he walked like dead leaves in late fall. On instinct, he inhaled the scent of nature's yearly change, but instead, he smelled nothing in this dream. Probably for the best as the Upside Down infested this illusory field of flowers.
Usually, he would run by now as soon enough Vecna would arrive. Vecna - the name given to the monster, the person, that had made his life a living hell for the last 4 years. But not today. He was tired of running.
Yet fear still ate at him. The last time he had stopped running, it had gotten him. The Mindflayer. It had gotten him so fully and completely that sometimes he still felt its tendrils crawling along his skin as it entered everywhere - every hole and orifice, even through his eyes, under his nails, and through every last pore of his skin.
But that wasn’t what this was, his mind told him despite his fear. Despite his experience. This was different. Now that he knew that Vecna was behind all of this, he just wasn’t that afraid. Yeah, from his friends' tales - Nancy and El in particular - he knew that Vecna was dangerous.
Fear was found in the unknown, but Vecna? He was human. Demogorgons, the Mindflayer, an entire dimension that wanted to kill him. That was scary. But a human?
I can handle shitty humans, Will thought. Been doing that all my life.
That’s why he didn’t run when he appeared in his molten, tentacled flesh. Familiar, when it shouldn’t be.
“We finally meet,” the monster rasped. He sounded calm. Almost happy. “You have finally stopped running from your destiny.”
Will kept his voice stoic as he spoke. “Vecna.”
“Will.” Vecna mirrored.
Will scoffed. “Why are we here? What do you want from me? You’d have killed me already if you could… or if you wanted to.” Somehow he knew his death was not Vecna’s desire.
The creature stepped closer.
“You reached out to me, did you not?”
Will thought for a moment. “I don’t know. Not consciously. But, we are connected.”
Vecna nodded. His movement was slight and his eyes closed ever so slightly. A sage nod as if he appreciated and even respected what Will said. After a moment, he spoke. “Inevitable, as all things are. My mirror. My friend.”
Will felt all the air leave his lungs and he backpedaled without intent or purpose.
“Friend… you’re out of your mind. And mirror. What do you even mean?”
“You and I are the same,” Vecna said after a moment. “I see you in myself, and myself in you. Hurt, rejected by the world. You deserve better. We deserve better.”
“Okay,” Will replied. There wasn’t much else to say. For a while, Vecna did not speak and Will was forced to study him. He was always an observant person. The quiet kid with little to say, so he watched. This meeting with Vecna was not what he expected. He expected to fear, expected his heart to beat out of his chest as this monster killed him as he had been trying to do for years. But this monster was calm. More human than monster.
“Okay,” Will repeated. “Let’s talk. What do you want?”
“I want you to join me. You understand better than anyone how wretched humanity is. A reject from birth. A fact your father beat into you.”
Will flinched as Vecna continued.
“Even now you don’t feel at home with your friends, your family. Why is this Will? There is no shame here, Will, not with me. In a world beyond humanity, sexuality is not a sin. And love is not a hindrance. With me, you can help create a more beautiful world without the faults of humanity.”
I was wrong, Will thought, his heart racing. His first encounter with Vecna would be horrific. But it wasn’t because Vecna was the monster. Will was. He could handle shitty humans, yes, but, I can’t handle myself.
And with that, he ran. Ran as the dream collapsed around him. And as he woke, he only heard the echo of Vecna’s voice - “We’ll meet again, soon, my friend” - and his own whimper of a scream.
Will was breathing heavily when he woke up. For seconds that felt like an eternity, he tried to figure out where he was as his perception of the world formed around him.
It was dark but familiar, the room lit only by the soft glow of his alarm clock and the starlit night sky - shockingly clear this night given the end of the world and all. He was in the room he shared with El, and if he focused he could hear the soft sounds of El’s breathing in her bed against the opposite wall. Could hear her breathing change as she awoke, sensing his distress.
“Will, are you awake?” she asked softly. He heard her climb out of bed and make her way over towards his, soft footsteps of socked feet on rug at the edge of his consciousness. Over the year that they had been siblings, she had picked up the concept of a rhetorical question and no longer awaited an answer. This particular scene of comforting one another from a harsh night’s sleep is more familiar than not. They could sense each other even back in Lenora where they didn’t share a room.
She climbed into bed with him and he allowed himself to enjoy the comfort despite every part of him screaming that he just wanted to be alone and wallow in despair alone. He was a monster who didn’t deserve her comfort. He was disgusting and even if, say, the world they lived in didn’t despise him - if the world they lived in even had a space for someone like him - he was still destined to cause harm. Maybe it began with the Mindflayer, or the Upside Down, or even when his father had knocked up his mother in an already failing marriage. Whenever it started, Vecna was convinced that he would join him. Be his friend. Vecna’s plan had never gone perfectly, but Will couldn’t shake the feeling that parts of the plans were destined. Like the role of Max’s death in opening the Supergate.
“I searched for her for so long,” El spoke.
Despite everything, Will’s heart burst with pride and he pulled her closer, and he buried his nose into her neck. She was getting so good at interpersonal relationships, something she had struggled with for so long. She knew that he didn’t want to talk, would not be the first to talk if he spoke at all. So she shared her nightmare with him first. To bond like the siblings, the twins, that they were becoming.
“It’s the same, every night,” El continued, voice breaking. “Just an endless void, as if her soul is no longer a part of this world. It’s not like the dead. I can feel the echoes of the dead. I know that they once existed. But with Max, it’s different. Like she had never been there at all. And if we forget her-” El’s voice broke in a sob. This was new information to him, his heart breaking for her as he wondered if this thought has been eating at her for weeks, months, or if it were just tonight’s revelation. Tonight’s realization of the depths of the human condition. A fault of humanity, echoed in the back of his mind.
“- if we forget her for even a moment, she will have never existed at all. Will, I have to find her.”
“And we will,” he said, voice breaking from disuse. The words were mostly empty, but they were the words Mike used to comfort him, and like a reversal of that day in the van, he used himself as a conduit to comfort a friend. “We’ll find her. We’ll defeat Vecna. And we’ll have our happily ever after like all the stories.”
His eyes were adjusting to the dark now and he could see El’s lips upturn into a smile.
“As long as I’m not alone, I know we will,” she said. “And you’re not alone either… do you want to tell me about your dream?”
“Between you and me?” he asked. A rhetorical question as they had long established that their nightly talks were sacred. “I don’t think it was a dream.”
“Vecna?”
Will hummed an affirmative. “I didn’t run this time. It was dumb, I know, after the Mindflayer, but I’m tired of running. I just want this to be over…” he let the thought linger for just a moment, but continued before El could take it somewhere. “I spoke with him this time. It was weird. Like, he didn’t want to hurt me. In fact… he called me his friend. Said we are the same.”
El let out a deep sigh. “He’s lonely. Despite everything, he wants someone to join him and believe in his plan. He’s like Papa…”
Will shushed her with a gentle finger on the lips. She didn’t need to repeat those memories, she had told him before on a night just like this.
“Weirder still,” he continued, “he seemed as shocked as I was to be there. Implied I was the one reaching out to him.”
“Were you?” El asked. Curious, but not fearful. Unlike him, she didn’t and could never believe he was a monster in all of this.
“I don’t know. I just want this all to be over.”
“You’re connected with him,” El pondered. “Because of the Mindflayer?”
He heard the question in her voice. “I don’t know. Sometimes, I feel like it’s more. Hey, El,” he began, then was quiet for a long while, not wanting to speak the words into existence. El was patient, as always. There was not an impatient or otherwise bad bone in her body when it came to those she cared about.
“Hey, El,” he began again. “I’ve never said this aloud, and barely allowed myself to think it. But, what if, the day I was taken to the Upside Down, I was chosen? You opened the gate and the first thing Vecna does is pull me into the Upside Down?”
“The demogorgon came through the gate and began to hunt,” El stated. “I escaped in the chaos.”
“Yes,” Will said. “But, think, how would it have escaped the facility and come across me? Why would I be alive if it got me? I don’t think it was the demogorgon,” he finished quietly. “I only saw its shadow, and only on the road that night. I spent the rest of the time running too scared to look back. And how do we explain,” he shook his head, these details somehow never being spoken aloud before, “the way it unlocked the door. Demogorogons can’t do that, they don’t have psychic powers. Plus, it would have just broken the door. So, yeah,” and he began to ramble to reach his thought’s conclusion before he forced those thoughts back inside to never see the light of day. “What if Vecna projected himself so I was alone and scared? Vulnerable for him to take? What if it were never the demogorgon at all, but him? And why?”
“I don’t know,” El replied. “Maybe you’re like him?”
“The same?” Will repeated Vecna’s words from earlier.
“Henry was kind, once. Like an older brother. He loved me, in his way, before everything. I don’t doubt that. You remind me of him. I hope that doesn’t bother you?”
It shook Will to his core, but he wouldn’t speak that. Instead, he said, “Kindness is never a bad thing. Maybe he did all of this so we could become siblings?” He pondered in the silly way kids do when a thought crosses ones mind and it only makes sense to ask the question. It reminded him of when he and Mike were kids and they asked, “What if the Force were real?” and they would spend hours trying to move things with their minds even if they knew from the start the question itself should never have been asked.
“I’m happy we are,” El said. “You’re my best friend.” Her voice carried that unique quality of hers that could convey multiple complex emotions at once. Earnestly, she viewed him as her best friend, but also with a hint of sadness of how Max was lost. Will didn’t interpret that as being second place, as he knew all too well from his years as the Party that they were all his best friends in different ways. He was best friends with El as twins, best friends with Lucas in the way they always had each other's back without words, best friends with Dustin with their shared curiosity, and best friends with Mike… in a way that pained him to think about. And right now, with El in his arms, he wouldn’t.
“I wish I could have gotten to know Max better,” Will said softly.
“She always wanted to get to know you better, but… there just wasn’t time, was there?” She was quiet for a moment in contemplation. “When she’s better, we should all hang out. And we can go clothes shopping again! She said we can go to Indianapolis one day for the bigger malls there! And, you’re hair,” El said as she flushed her fingers through his recently trimmed bowl-cut. “She wanted to get it cut so bad!”
Will could only smile, enjoying as his sister imagined a future that would never come.