Chapter Text
Hopper.
When he finally gets up in the early afternoon and stands yawning at the porch-facing window, the first thing Jim notices is a chunky drop of blood about two feet from the door. Not enough to be alarming, but enough to immediately check on El. He finds her and Will snoozing top-and-tail on her bed.
Any lecture he might launch is suspended, first by El’s soft just-woke-up face, and second by the fact that it is Will, not her, who looks suspiciously crusty around the nose.
El follows him into the kitchen and watches him forage for the coffee tin.
‘So,’ he starts, and sends out a pawn. ‘Will stayed over last night.’
‘You said I didn’t have to ask about Will or Jonathan because they’re my brothers,’ El responds, sniping the pawn immediately. Jim’s not a chess champion by far, but he’s pretty sure you’re not supposed to do that.
‘I didn’t say you could share a bed,’ Jim counters.
He knows that the odds of Will stealing El from Mike are pelagically low, but then again, last night he pulled a slimy salamander-dog headfirst out of one of the local racists and watched it barf up a beer can, so nothing’s impossible.
‘You didn’t say I couldn’t.’
‘You know what I meant.’
El stares him down, letting the awkward silence tell him just how unreasonable he’s being. He decides it’s not worth the energy to explain why sleepovers with Will aren’t the same as sleepovers with Max.
Max. That reminds him.
‘I’m checking in on Max’s mom this morning. Ring and see if she’s at the hospital while I make you a hot chocolate, will ya?’
‘Max is awake.’
He looks up from trying to peel out an old paper filter out of the coffee maker.
Will shuffles out of El’s room and flops into a seat at the table. Jim notices that Will’s wearing one of his old flannel shirts. It nearly reaches the kid’s knees. He’s is also still crusty, as if he hasn’t noticed yet, or is just too tired to wipe his nose.
Jim sighs.
‘Alright. Two questions, and I want you both to answer honestly.’
Will looks up, owl-eyed, and El glares in preparation to argue.
‘First, I want to know what happened with Max. Second, I need to know whether I should be worried about this,’ he looks Will meaningfully in the eye and makes a circular gesture around his nostrils. Will hurriedly wipes his nose and looks down at the flakes of blood on his (or rather Jim’s) sleeve.
El grabs the coffee pot out of Jim’s hands and rinses it aggressively in the sink.
‘The buildup adds flavour,’ Jim protests.
‘No. It’s gross.’
Jim sits down opposite a surly Will. Out of the corner of his eye he watches El dump three tablespoons of chocolate powder into her mug. He decides, for the second time that morning, to pick his battles and redirects his attention to his stepson.
‘Was it boys from school?’ he asks. Will shakes his head. He doesn’t have any bruises, so Jim doesn’t push.
The table feels small with all three of them, but with Will and El taking a side to themselves and Jim facing his body to the left to stretch out his legs, there’s an accommodating sort of equilibrium between them that makes it easier to wait for answers.
‘We found Max,’ El says, once she has drunk half her mug.
‘We?’ Jim repeats. El looks at Will. They both nod slowly.
Jim absorbs this information slower than his coffee, so he returns to the kitchen bench. When he’s done pouring a refill he turns his frown back on Will.
‘How long has this been going on? You being like El, I mean. The nosebleed, that didn’t happen when you were possessed.’
‘I’m not like El. I just … hold things.’
Jim rubs his face, then returns to the table with the whole coffee pot plus the milk carton for good measure. Will gratefully tops up.
‘Alright. Hold what?’ Jim asks.
‘People,’ El says. ‘And he doesn’t just see the upside down now. He sees other things too.’
‘We don’t know how it works,’ Will cuts in. It sounds more like an interruption than an eagerness to explain, which prompts Jim to make a mental note. He decides to ask El later in private what sorts of “things” Will is seeing.
‘Well, sounds like a big night. And if you woke Max up, then her mom should probably be with her by now. So how about you show me where your shirt is, I’ll give you some tips on how to get blood out of it, and then we’ll grab lunch on the way to the hospital? Okay?’
While El gets dressed and Will soaks his sweater in a bucket (with blood all down the front, yeesh, no wonder the kid looks anaemic), Jim calls the Wheelers. It goes to the answering machine. Of course everyone’s out, they volunteer on saturdays. He curses softly and wonders if his memory is going. He’s pretty sure he had a weird dream last night about being very old.
He smiles to himself as he dials Joyce’s workplace. It was a nice dream.
Mike.
When Will was maybe eight years old, he shot a coyote. Mike remembers because of the shock.
He wasn’t shocked that Lonnie taught Will to shoot. Plenty of kids in Hawkins learned that stuff pretty young. No, it was the mental picture of Will, his round eyes picking out a grinning carnivore in the twilight, bracing the heavy shotgun in his mickey mouse gloves.
Mike always hated Lonnie. For slapping Will across the face in front of him once. For the vile things he’d say. But secretly he hated him most for the corruption. He couldn’t think of a better word for it. Will simply wasn’t supposed to exist in the same world as a stinking coyote pelt hanging on the washing line. He was supposed to sit in the grass with Mike, staring up at a cloud of fireflies, and go home with an empty jar because it “feels too mean to trap them”.
Lonnie wryly proclaimed that Maybe, just maybe, Will could grow up to be a real man after all, and Mike hated him so much it made him nauseous.
Will hadn’t cried, at least not immediately. The coyote was thought responsible for massacring their neighbour’s chickens, so the guilt was slow in coming. When it did come, Will was helping Mike pack up the basement after a game. Mike had suggested including a coyote monster in the next campaign, perhaps in a naïve attempt to stroke Will’s ego, but instead Will broke into violent sobs and became inconsolable.
It was alive, and now it’s dead, and it’s all my fault. It would still be alive if I didn’t kill it. It screamed like a person.
God, Mike hates Lonnie.
He’s not sure why the memory comes back so strong on the bike ride to the cabin. Maybe it’s the recent increase in gunshot sounds as more and more exclusion zones get cordoned off, or the fact he hasn’t seen a single coyote since Vecna drew his massive X on top of Hawkins.
Come to think of it, he hasn’t seen any deer either. The only flash of red he used to see would be cardinals in the shrubs, but they too seem to be vanishing one by one, all the birds and skinks and rattlesnakes, into the relentless gaping mouths of eldritch predators that no-one evolved to deal with.
He arrives just as Hopper is piling Will and El into the car. It’s still weird to see him drive anything other than the sheriff’s truck. Weirder still is the sight of Will drowning in a huge flannel shirt.
Mike leaves his bike on the cabin porch, unbothered by the news that they’re apparently heading right back in the direction he came from. El sits in front next to Hopper, so Mike sprawls in the back with Will, knees skimming the seats in front.
‘I was worried when you weren’t there this morning,’ he admits quietly. He knows it can’t be comfortable, sleeping in a sleeping bag on the floor of his bedroom, but Will wanted to give Jonathan the pull-out couch in the basement and Joyce has their spare room, so they haven’t had much choice. ‘Did you sneak out last night?’
Will’s face is apologetic.
‘Me and El went to visit Max.’
‘I know,’ Mike says. ‘I went to the hospital. They said you were there when she woke up.’
Dead trees melt into a grey-brown blur out the window. El says nothing in the front seat, but he thinks he catches her glance in the rearview mirror.
Mike reaches over and pinches Will’s sleeve.
‘You look kind of like when we were little,’ he says, trying for levity. The air in the car feels strange. ‘Remember, when you used to wear Jonathan’s hand-me-downs.’
Will half-smiles. He really does look younger, Mike thinks. His hair has grown since returning to Hawkins, not as long as it used to be but long enough to soften his face.
‘My sweater got dirty. I wasn’t planning on being out overnight so I didn’t think to bring a spare.’
Mike donated at least half of Will’s clothes himself, so he knows he doesn’t have many to begin with. Mostly shirts, since their height difference is in the leg. It doesn’t come anywhere near replacing the entire wardrobe left behind in California.
Mike likes seeing Will in his clothes, not that he’d ever say so. He can’t help it. It’s like matching team jerseys or something, but for a special secret two-person team. It’s comforting, it’s nice. But he’d never say it out loud.
When they stop for fuel and sandwiches, Will stays in the car. Mike approaches El. He tries to look casual browsing the severely depleted candy bar shelf. Hopper has taken to arguing recreationally with gas attendants, so he knows they’ve got time to talk.
‘I missed you at school yesterday,’ Mike says, handing El a Lotsa Fizz. ‘My treat?’
‘You don’t have to do that,’ El says. She doesn’t say it sharply, but it feels sharp.
It’s unfair. He’s been trying since they got back. He knows she wants more attention, but when he gives it she withdraws like a hermit crab.
‘I know I don’t have to,’ he says, and reaches for her hand. She lets him, but she doesn’t grasp him like she used to.
‘Did I do something wrong?’ he asks. This finally makes El look at him. ‘I mean, if I’m smothering you or something, you can tell me to back off. It’s okay. I just … if I’m supposed to pursue you or something, I’d like some sign that’s what you want.’
El’s eyeline travels over Mike’s shoulder out the window. Mike follows it to where Hopper is leaning against the hood. Will rests with his arms crossed over the roof of the car, toeing the concrete. As they watch, he visibly sighs.
Mike can read him like a book. Will’s not bored, he’s anxious. The annoyance returns in full force. He should be able to read El that way. She’s his girlfriend.
‘Hey,’ he says, turning his attention back to El. He risks a move he saw on TV, and takes El’s chin in his hand, gently guiding her gaze to meet his. She shakes him loose, and it hurts his pride.
‘I just want to know what you want,’ he pleads.
‘I want to be in love with someone who’s in love with me,’ El says.
Mike doesn’t throw his arms up, but it’s a near thing. He huffs instead, shoves his hands in his pockets and indulges in a full minute of silent treatment while El listlessly picks up and puts back various bags of potato chips.
‘I thought that’s what we were doing,’ Mike finally says.
El picks a bag of chips and hands him another. He’s inexplicably mad that she’s picked his favourite.
‘You don’t understand, Mike.’
‘What don’t I understand?’ he asks, a little too loud. The guy at the counter looks over at them, then away. Just another teen drama. Whatever.
There’s something she’s trying to tell him, he just knows it, but it’s like she’s speaking backward or in code. It’s like they’re right back where they started in the woods: small, wet, bewildered strangers.
‘I love you,’ she says simply. ‘But I don’t think we’re in love.’
‘I said I loved you and I meant it,’ Mike says immediately. ‘What more do you want me to say?’
‘You don’t have to say anything. I know you care about me,’ El says. It’s like it reassures her even to say it out loud. ‘We care about each other. I’ve been scared of losing that, and maybe you have too, but it’s not enough.’
When Mike’s family went to the Grand Canyon, he stood on a platform and looked between his shoes through the metal grate at a drop of two thousand feet. Inexplicably, it’s the closest nameless emotion he’s ever felt to hearing El say, for the second time and in much kinder words, “I dump your ass.”
‘What are you saying?’ he asks, somewhat redundantly.
El takes his hand, not limply this time but firmly.
‘I want to be in love with someone who’s in love with me. But not right now.’ She holds his hand with the same conviction she did before California. ‘And that’s not us. And I think, if you’re honest, you know it too.’
He’s so blindsided he can’t stand it. A second ago he was offering his girlfriend a candy bar and now he’s single? They’d fixed it. He’d fixed it.
He wishes he hadn’t left his bike at the cabin. He wishes Hopper had a bike rack on the back of his car so Mike could storm out and ride off into the sunset (or at least the mid-afternoon overcast gloom) and not look back.
‘But what about the painting?’ he asks, hating how pathetic it sounds.
‘What painting?’
‘The painting you commissioned from Will,’ he says. ‘The one where I’m leading the party and I’ve got a heart on my shield. The one where I’m the heart.’
‘I didn’t commission a painting from Will.’
El sounds puzzled. For a split second Mike is about to spit “bullshit”, but she’s lied to him before and Mike likes to think he’s developed a sense for it over time. She’s not lying. And why would she, about this?
The final additional confusion tips Mike over the edge and he snatches his hand back. He marches fuming out of the store, only stopping to slam a couple of quarters on the counter when the gas attendant confronts him about the bag of chips he’s still holding.
Mike opens the door so hard it sends the bell dinging like a security alarm. Will’s head spins around. Hopper raises an eyebrow and tucks his wallet back into his pocket, already half-sitting in the front seat.
‘What’s got your dander up?’ he asks, and something about the tone of his drawl makes Mike want to scream.
Instead he seethes like a volcano on the verge of eruption, not speaking when El emerges from the store or when they all bundle back into the car and peel out of the station. He stares moodily at the back of El’s head and ignores Will when he whispers a gentle query, asking what’s wrong.
Sitting next to Will suddenly feels like standing on lake ice that may or may not be thick enough to hold his weight, and may or may not be too slippery to walk on. It feels like riding a bike in the moonless dark with all the street lights out, trusting the road to stay under his tyres.
If El didn’t lie about the painting, then Will did. And Mike can’t speak a word to either of them until the tornado in his skull exhausts itself, and the right questions reveal themselves. And in the moment, he can’t help believing there are no right questions, and whatever the answer is, it’s going to suck.