Chapter Text
Will had been certain that the strange and supernatural would stop following him the second he left Hawkins.
It was a hope he clung to every second of the school year after the Mindflayer had invaded Hawkins, and his body, and a dream that slowly slipped between his fingers like grains of sand during that awfully weird summer where the Mindflayer came back for a few days.
Thankfully, he wasn’t going to have to wait until college to find out. The prospect of leaving town for school had seemed so far away and unobtainable, but when Joyce sat him, El, and Jonathan down with a grim look on her face, something like joy and heartbreak had warred in his heart for a few beats.
Heartbreak had won out, and continued to win out during the two day drive California, but the further away Hawkins became in their rear-view mirror, the less anxious Will became. The cold prickling that rose gooseflesh against his skin during random moments slowly dulled until it became completely unnoticeable. The panicked static the rested just beneath Will’s heartbeat slowly died away like someone had clicked off a switch inside of him.
By the time they pulled into the driveway of the pleasant two-story house that the Byers were to call home, Will felt calmer than he had in years.
All of that flew out the window on the second day of school.
It started like this:
Mike Wheeler’s slightly shorter clone walked into the biology lab, made the most intense contact with Will that he’d ever experienced with anyone–including Mike Wheeler himself–and then sat down next to him.
Which, okay.
Maybe the supernatural wasn’t as far from Will as he’d previously thought.
Focusing on class was impossible now. There was a small chance that Will had somehow fallen into a parallel universe where Mike Wheeler was two inches shorter, wore thick framed glasses and combat boots, and snored his way through 9th grade biology like he didn’t care about his transcript. It was a slightly better universe than the one where Hawkins was covered in deadly spores and vines, but not by much if Mike was wrong.
It was a miracle that Will made it through class without being called on. It was an even greater miracle that NotMike didn’t get called on for sleeping through their second day of bio lab, but Mr. Greene seemed just as bored with teaching the class as everyone else was taking it.
The bell rang, and Will’s snoring lab partner didn’t stir. He gathered his books up, watching the boy curiously. His glasses were askew, falling down the bridge of his nose, and his curly hair–far more tangled and untamed than Mike’s–were flopped on his forehead and falling into his eyes.
Looking closer, Will realized that some of the proportions were wrong. This boy’s nose was smaller, and lacking the smattering of freckles across them. And his eyes–oh his eyes had opened.
They were a lighter shade of brown than Mike’s. And looking directly into Will’s.
“Dude,” the voice was wrong, “you are being seriously creepy.”
Will flushed.
Day two in Lenora High and people were already going to label him as the resident queer. Great.
“Sorry,” he muttered, shoving his notebooks into his backpack. He avoided the other boy’s eyes, but could feel them following him across the room, burning into the back of his neck.
Hopefully, he wouldn’t tell anyone about Will staring intently at him while he slept and would just pick a different table tomorrow.
If school had made him anxious, home gave Will depression.
Joyce teetered precariously between annoyingly chipper and concerning quiet. El had gone straight to her room after school shut the door. And Jonathan was nowhere to be found. He was probably out looking for job postings, or looking for new haunts where he could get away from everyone.
Which left Will to either follow El and lock himself in his room, or suffer the product of Joyce’s nervous energy.
Joyce was unpacking boxes in the kitchen when Will walked in. Despite having been in Lenora three weeks, Will had a feeling that it was going to take longer than just a month to be fully unpacked.
She glanced up, face pulling into a tight smile, when Will walked in. “Hey, sweetie,” she said. “How was school?”
Will shrugged, not wanting to get into it. It was better than Hawkins, but most things were better than Hawkins. “How’s El?” he asked, instead. She had been quiet on the drive home, ignoring Will and Jonathan’s tentative attempts to make conversation with her.
Joyce looked at the stairs leading up to El’s room. Her brow pinched. It was the same look when she was worried about Jonathan or Will. It warmed something in him. He’d thought it was weird at first to have another family member, but El had been so sad ever since Chief Hopper died that Will just wanted her to be happy.
He hoped that they could make her happy.
“I think something happened between her and Mike,” Joyce said, tone pitched low. “Don’t push her to talk about it, though. She’ll say something when she’s ready.”
Will’s heart felt like it was going to beat right out of his chest. He felt simultaneously sick and relieved, and then irritated with himself for being relieved. So what if Mike and El maybe broke up? Mike was still halfway across the country and his disgusted face when he accused Will of not liking girls was still burned behind Will’s eyeballs.
He still had healing cuts on his palms from breaking Castle Byers down with his bare hands.
El and Mike breaking up wouldn’t take the sting away.
The guilt hit a few seconds after. His first concern should be El, who was shut in her room and mourning a dying relationship the same way Will had mourned the corpse of his friendship a few months ago.
“Will, honey?” Joyce said. It took Will a second to realize she’d been calling his name for a while. “Are you okay?”
Great, now his mom was worried. “Yeah, I’m just tired,” he said. “Long day at school.”
“Any new friends?”
She looked so hopeful. Will pressed his lips together and put on a brave face for her. “Too soon to tell.” I have a lab partner who looks like Mike, he imagined saying. Her eyebrows would fly up her face and she’d get worried. Because of course Will had a lab partner who looked like Mike, and of course Will desperately wanted to either befriend him or run a million miles away because he looked like Mike.
But unfortunately Will had creeped the guy out, so he’d be spending the next school year quietly avoiding him.
“Do we have any lasagna left?” Will asked, changing the subject. It turned out that when you moved to new places, the neighbors brought over enough glass tins of lasagna and cookies to feed an army.
And El loved lasagna, they’d discovered.
Joyce gestured towards the fridge. “Save some for El.”
Will was planning to bring some to El. He heated it up in the microwave beforehand, because he wasn’t a total weirdo like Dustin who would eat cold pasta and pizza because it tasted better that way apparently, and took it upstairs to El’s room. He knocked on the door tentatively, hoping he wasn’t about to get his head bit off.
She was lying on her stomach on her bed when Will walked in, but sat up when they made eye contact.
“I didn’t see you at lunch,” Will began awkwardly. They had the same lunch period, thank god, but Will hadn’t seen her today or yesterday. “I thought you might be hungry?”
He held up the plate of lasagna and El smiled. “Thank you,” she said, taking it from him. And then, “you and Joyce were talking about me.”
Well, then.
Will rubbed the back of his neck, embarrassed. “Sorry.”
“You do not have to be sorry.” Her voice was so gentle all the time. It only ever became harsh or loud when something dangerous or scary was happening. “Joyce worries."
Understatement of the year. “It’s because she loves us,” Will said, sitting at the foot of El’s bed.
El nodded seriously. She stabbed into her food with her fork and took a bite. Will couldn’t help but watch with fascination at the contentment that crossed her face at the flavor. There was just something so innocent about watching El enjoy mundane things like they were precious. Will could understand some of it. There were things that he just couldn’t ever take for granted. But watching those same feelings freely show on El’s face made his heart squeeze painfully in his chest.
There was no world where he could ever truly hate her. He thought he might for a moment, the first time he met her and watched the way Mike moved towards her like a flower tilting it’s face up towards the sun. But that had been dashed to pieces the second she took both of his hands in her own and had said his name with a quiet reverence.
Max had–loudly and obviously enough for everyone to hear–told her that stupid boys should never get between friendships. Will had decided that Max might be the smartest person in the Party.
“I just wanted to make sure you’re okay,” he said at last.
El took her time, chewing and staring thoughtfully into the distance. “We did not break up.”
Will’s hopes dashed. He told himself to stop being stupid.
“He is being weird.”
“That’s just Mike,” Will blurted out.
El’s eyes widened, and then she laughed. “Will!”
“I know, I know,” he said, laughing too. “Just…Mike’s just. You know.” She probably did. She had spent eight hours a day pretty much alone with him for an entire summer. God.
“He is being new weird.”
Okay, Will could work with that. “Do you want to talk about it?” he asked, channeling his inner Joyce. He tried to put on his most helpful expression.
El considered for a moment, and then shook her head. “Sorry.”
“Its okay,” Will replied, heart twisting. Of course she didn’t want to talk to Will about this. Will wouldn’t want to talk to Will about this. Everyone knew he was weird about Mike. It probably looked like he was prying for information.
“Do you want to go for a walk?” he asked, instead. Hopeful. Anything to get out of this house.
But El shook her head again. “I think. I want to be alone.”
Will nodded, standing up immediately. “Okay. If you change your mind-” he gestured with his hands uselessly, “-uhm. Yeah. I hope you feel better.”
“Thank you, Will.” It felt like a dismissal. Will couldn’t tell. He didn’t know El yet, and it looked like she didn’t want him to anyway, so he just–yeah.
He left her room and headed towards the basement.
It made his head hurt and his heart feel sick that there had been a basement bedroom, because all it did was remind him where he actually wanted to be.
Mike’s mysterious clone did not pick another table the next day.
He threw himself down next to Will with an explosive sigh. “I cannot believe we are having a quiz today,” he complained. “What is there even to quiz us on? We’ve been here, like, five minutes.”
Will kept his eyes on the whiteboard, not daring to breath. NotMike was all gangly limbs thrown about, shoulder bumping against Will as he roughly dragged his textbooks out of his bag and tossed them onto the table. He wasn’t acting like he was weirded out by Will, but it was nine in the morning. Maybe it just hadn’t registered in his brain yet that he was getting all up in some freak’s space.
Casting a glance around the room, Will realized that no one was looking at them. Huh.
When he turned back, NotMike was frowning at him. “You know I don’t bite, right?”
“What?”
An eye roll. “You’re looking at me like I’m going to steal your lunch money and shove your face in a toilet. Which, for the record, I don’t think I’ve ever been accused of doing in my life, so this role reversal is giving me a weird complex. Usually I’m the one giving someone mournful puppy-dog eyes because they want to shove me into a toilet.”
Will looked him up and down for a second. He was wearing a shirt repping a band Will had never heard of with a necklace tucked underneath it.
Definitely the kind of guy who didn’t fly under the radar or follow the status quo.
“Anyway. I’m Richie,” he continued, casually. “Richie Tozier.
“Uhm. Will Byers.”
“Swell. Did you take any notes yesterday?”
Ah. Okay, now Will understood. It was easier to make nice right now and make it through Mr. Greene’s class. It was treatment he was familiar with. Better to go along with it now than prematurely burn his bridges.
He pulled out his notebook and flipped to the page he’d studiously scribbled all over yesterday, trying to shove down the anxious feeling in his stomach at the sketches and doodles he’d made in the margins.
Just because Richie shared a similar eyeshape as Mike didn’t mean that Richie was going to think that Will had been sketching him.
God.
Richie made a grateful noise, eyes rapidly skimming over the paper. “Perfect. We have exactly nothing to go on here.”
Unable to help himself, Will grinned. “It could be worse. One of my teachers used to give us pop quizzes on a random Monday each month.”
Richie groaned. “Oh, that’s disgusting. Where was this, prison school?”
“Close enough,” Will muttered, dragging his notebook back towards him and flipping the cover to hide his suspicious sketches. Not that it mattered. Richie had already seen them.
He wasn’t commenting on them, though. He had already turned back to the whiteboard, squinting at the chicken scratch instructions Mr. Greene had left on them. “I’m going to be so real with you, Will. I skipped the first day because I needed to stand in the ocean for a few hours and contemplate life, and yesterday was a bust because I slept through every class. I have no idea how or why we are supposed to be analyzing blood types.”
Will grimaced. “I was paying attention and I have no idea what we’re supposed to be doing.” He looked at some of the other tables. Mostly everyone else had already started, but a few tables looked just as confused as they did.
“Christ, we should have just cut class.” Richie paused, eyes drifting towards where Mr. Greene was leaning against his desk, face propped on one hand.
A thoughtful look passed over Richie’s face. “We could just cut class.”
Will cast a fervent glance towards their teacher. He looked ready to fall asleep. “That’s a terrible idea,” he whispered. “They grade these quizzes.”
“Well fuck, I can’t believe we can’t go to college just because we got a whomping zero on a quiz.”
“Attendance,” Will reminded him.
“Again, I reiterate. I can’t believe we can’t go to college just because we cut class one time.”
“I have a feeling it’s never just one time with you.”
Richie looked delighted. “I bet you’ve never cut class in your entire life.”
The urge to say something insane like, “Well, there was that one time three years ago where I went missing in an alternate dimension for a week,” welled up inside of him. There was something about Richie that was bringing out that sarcastic edge that Will use to irritate Jonathan with, back before every interaction with everyone felt like stepping on glass with his bare feet.
Instead of giving into the impulse to tease Richie back, Will tried one last time, “there’s no way we’re sneaking past Greene.”
Richie’s face lit up in a grin. “Are you sure about that?” He pointed with his thumb towards where…Mr. Greene was dozing.
There was one desk between them and the door, and the three girls sitting at it were fully invested in their conversation about a movie they were seeing that afternoon. The chances of them slipping past unnoticed were actually fairly high.
Richie was already shoving his books in his backpack. He kicked Will’s ankle, head jerking towards his own bag. “C’mon. I’ll make sure we’re back in time for next period.”
Which was exactly how Will Byers found himself behind the bleachers, watching Richie Tozier choke on a cigarette.
“I think you’re supposed to breathe it in before-”
“Shut up.” Richie glared at him. “You try it.”
Will had watched his mom smoke for years. He’d cataloged the way the tip turned a warm amber and the smoke pushed out of her mouth and her shoulders relaxed unconsciously after a few drags and he’d put it down on paper in his favorite sketchbook, the one that had all drawings of his friends, and his mom, and Jonathan all doing things unconsciously. Images of the determined look Lucas got on his face before doing something daring, or the concentrated furrow of Dustin’s brow, and Mike, Mike, Mike–Mike doing all sorts of things, like chewing on the inside of his cheek while he scribbled in his DND notebook, or the softening of his gaze when he looked at El.
All of these moments were burned in the back of Will’s eyelids, but he needed to put it to paper as if doing that was proof that he loved them. I see you, he sometimes wanted to scream at everyone, look back and see me.
With a ginger hand, Will took the cigarette between two of his fingers, the way he’d seen Joyce hold it. The smell was awful, but comforting.
He pulled a lung full of smoke in. It tasted disgusting. He didn’t gag like Richie had, though. Maybe inhaling spores for an entire week had killed his gag-reflex. Or maybe one of the dozens of demodog larva sliding up his throat as he coughed and coughed and coughed had done it.
The cigarette was bad, but nowhere near as bad as that.
He held the smoke in his lungs for a second, before letting it out.
When he looked back at Richie, the guy looked impressed.
“Well fuck, Will,” he said, tapping the ash off the tip. “Are you secretly cool?”
Will shot him a look before sliding to the ground, back against one of the pillars supporting the bleachers. His fingers itched to pull out a paper and pen and sketch Richie. He was leaning against the opposite support beam, face pulled in disgust at each drag of the cigarette. He looked ridiculous.
“No one,” Will said, trying to mimic Richie’s cadence, “has ever accused me of being cool.”
Lie. Mike used to stare at him like he put every single star in the sky. That is sooo cool, Will, he’d gush, eyes roving over Will’s artwork like he wanted to clutch it to his chest and never let go.
Richie grinned. “I mean. No offense, but the hair.”
Okay, this guy was an asshole. “My hair? Have you ever heard of a comb?”
“It’s tastefully windswept!”
Yeah, if by windswept he meant he’d walked through a tornado on purpose. “Sure. Did you really convince me to cut class just to insult my hair and choke your way through a cigarette you don’t even like?”
"You can go back any time you want."
"Sneaking back into class is even worse than sneaking out."
Richie sat down in the dirt across from Will. Thankfully it was several feet away, so if someone did come across them, nothing about this scene would look suspicious. Just two boys, trading a cigarette back and forth every few minutes while they waited for the bell to ring.
"You're new," Richie said, at last.
"You'd know that if you didn't miss the first day."
"Christ, you're mean too," he laughed. "Or am I just lucky?"
Will thought Richie might be unlucky, because he couldn't remember the last time he gave this much backtalk to anyone, including Mike.
"You bring it out in me, I think," he admitted, holding a hand out.
Richie graciously handed over the cigarette. "Where are you from?"
"Indiana. You?"
"What, I don't give off that Cali spirit?" Richie's voice was almost bitter, which surprised Will. "I'm from Maine. Moved last spring."
"Oh. That's a long way to come to just live in Lenora." At least the Byers were physically running from supernatural trauma. Will couldn't imagine a normal or mundane reason to uproot your life to and replant the entire way across the country.
"Yeah, I guess," Richie muttered, looking just as unhappy as Will felt. "Everyone is so different here."
Will thought about his neighbors bringing over food and wearing pasted-on smiles. He thought about the lack of clothing layers due to the heat and how some of the boys' hair at school was blonde because of the sun.
"Yeah, I get what you mean." He took another drag from the cigarette. It still tasted awful. This was probably the last one he'd ever smoke. "Do you miss Maine?"
Richie looked up, surprise flittering across his face. "Oh. Uhm." The effortless faux cool boy image that he'd been putting on for the past forty minutes seemed to melt away. For the first time, Richie had an unsure look on his face. "I miss. People."
Unbidden, Mike's face flashed in the back of his mind, followed by the rest of the Party.
"Yeah." Will's throat felt dry.
Richie took back the cigarette. "Yeah." The look in his eyes was familiar. Will had seen it every single day in the mirror for the past month.
Someone had broken Richie's heart.
It was as if something slotted into place. He knew that Richie pretended he was cooler than he was and choked on cigarette smoke, but he didn't know Richie, not really.
Not yet.
But he knew that he and Richie had more than one thing in common. They were outsiders and they were lonely. And they were both missing someone.
Will hadn't wanted to make new friends. The thought of going through the motions of getting to know someone new and letting them take space in his heart and mind was exhausting.
He didn't want to join a new Party. But maybe this wasn't about him.
"You should sit with me and my sister during lunch," Will heard himself saying before he'd even consulted himself on it. He'd bet anything that Richie sat alone, if he even showed up in the cafeteria.
Richie was looking at him with an indecipherable expression. It made Will's insides squirm, but not for the same reasons as a look like that from Mike would have.
In fact, the longer Will looked at Richie, the less he looked like Mike Wheeler. It was both a relieving and disappointing, for reasons he really didn't want to examine, but he clung to the relief.
Every second of the day it felt like he was looking for Mike around every corner. He didn't want Mike to haunt him through this boy with the sad eyes and the messy bedhead.
"Sure," Richie said, lips pursing. "It's the least I can do since we're definitely going to get detention for cutting class."
Will blinked.
"We're fucking what."