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Language:
English
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Published:
2023-07-01
Completed:
2024-06-28
Words:
123,054
Chapters:
32/32
Comments:
189
Kudos:
320
Bookmarks:
69
Hits:
9,626

Living After Midnight, Rocking To The Dawn

Summary:

AU. Will Byers enters his sophomore year at Hawkins High School unsure of what to expect. It certainly wasn’t how much Will and his friends quickly became the school rebels, especially since Hellfire Club has to meet secretly due to it being banned, but Gareth Emerson, the only original member still in school, runs a good show as the new DM and leader, and he seems to have taken a liking to Will.

Title taken from a lyric from Living After Midnight by Judas Priest

Notes:

Hey guys, gals, and nonbinary pals!

First off, Happy Canada Day if you are Canadian or a Canadian ex-pat!

So this fic is something I'm doing for July's Camp Nanowrimo. It’ll be 30 chapters plus an epilogue (and a floor plan, apparently) in 31 days, and a 50,000-word goal. If you've seen or read any of my previous stuff, you probably think my Stranger Things content is purely Steve and/or Steddie, but it's not true! Some of the unfinished drafts in my ST fics google drive folders have main characters that include Will (multiple possible pairings), Max (pretty much always Lumax), Suzie and Eden Bingham, OCs, etc. Living After Midnight, Rocking To The Dawn is a Will-perspective story with endgame Will/Gareth. It will start in Summer 1986 and span the 1986-1987 school year. The Upside Down has been resolved as of the start of the fic, and Will is going into his sophomore year and Gareth is going into his senior year at Hawkins High. Will and Gareth start as 15 and 17, and end as 16 and 18, respectively (ignoring the epilogue), which is why this is going to be T the whole way through because even though it isn't a weird age gap, even after they do get together, Gareth does actively make the choice to hold off on doing anything too mature or explicit with Will until Will's a little older and wiser.

Tags and warnings will update as I go along, but I don't have any right now that haven't already been mentioned.

Now let's get this up so I can actually put up Chapter 1

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Chapter 1: Chapter 0: Floor Plan

Chapter Text

Hey everyone! Chapter 1 will be up either within a few hours or around 11pm my time, depending on whether or not I get finished before DnD. But the first half of Chapter 1 involves the Byers moving back to Hawkins, and I was having trouble visualizing the scene, so despite not being able to draw at all, I utilized my computer skills and the 9th-grade interior design elective I took about a dozen years ago to create this kinda-not-really to scale floorplan of their renovated house! Honestly, I feel like it's A+ for effort, C+ for results, but I figure you might want to see it anyway, and this way I can get my tags up and stuff too.

Floor Plan

Hopefully you should be able to read the labels. The brown splotches are doors, the pale blue splotches are windows, and those two light gray ones are mostly-glass French doors that are pretty much always left open when people are awake to keep the common areas open (Hopper and Joyce only close those if everyone is home and/or gone to bed).