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Will Byers has been rereading The Return of the King. This by itself is not anything weird. He has the same editions his mom bought him when he was too young to understand much about the plot but just old enough to be captivated by its otherworldly magic. These books are beaten up to hell and back, the covers taped and retaped onto the binding and random pages dog-eared for reference during campaigns.
It’s not weird that Will is rereading the series but it is weird that he’s only reading The Return of the King. That one wasn’t even his favourite growing up; he liked The Fellowship of the Ring, because he loved when everyone started the adventure and everything felt fresh and new. When there was wonder and magic without the loss, when things got scary but Tom Bombadil always swooped in to carry everyone back to his cottage. And he liked Frodo best before he was beaten down by his journey. By the time The Return of the King came around, Frodo just made Will sad.
Yesterday Will busted three demogorgons then promptly passed out into the muck. Things have been quiet since them. The Wheeler parents are still in the hospital, half the group is still in the Upside Down, the kids are missing, but Joyce has been fussing over Will endlessly and for once Will is happy to let her. It’s better than being stared at owlishly by Robin, or making small talk with Lucas, or—well—anyway, Will has been reading a lot. He can’t sleep.
He sits at the dining room table and tries not to look at the bloodstains and thinks about in grade eight when they all assigned each other characters from the series.
“Mike is for sure Aragorn,” Dustin had said decisively, “because he’s the leader.”
“No I’m Aragorn, I’m literally a ranger, Dustin,” Lucas shot back, “or do you need me to get our book of role descriptions?”
Dustin rolled his eyes. “You can’t just go based on our D&D roles, because that would make Will Gandalf, and Will isn’t Gandalf.”
“I could be Gandalf,” Will offered, mostly to his school lunch.
“Will could totally be Gandalf,” Mike chimed in, and Will ignored the tiny pang in his stomach caused by Mike saying his name.
“No, no, no. You guys aren’t listening to me, I’ve sorted it all out already,” Dustin paused to sip from his pop as the rest of the boys stared at him. “Okay. Lucas, you’re Legolas, and that’s what fits because you’re a ranger. Mike is Aragorn, which I already said, I’m Gimli, and Will is Frodo.”
“Frodo?” Lucas and Mike said in unison.
“Yeah, you know, cause he was brought on a journey to an evil place and accidentally became the hero.” Dustin grinned at Will, clearly meaning this character assignment as a compliment. And it sort of was. But it didn’t feel like one.
“I can’t believe you think I’m Legolas. Legolas is lame. All he does is run around and sing elf songs!”
“Legolas is not lame, I think you need to reread the books. I consulted them very heavily this weekend.”
Mike looked perfectly happy with being Aragorn. And it matched perfectly, because Eleven was totally Arwen, Will remembers thinking bitterly. Just, like—pretty—and magic—and chose a human life with him … whatever.
When Will had woken up from his telekinetic fugue state, Joyce’s face was hovering over him anxiously, a sight that had become unfortunately familiar in the last four years. But Mike was also there, gripping his hand so hard it hurt. Will mostly looked at his mom, but his eyes kept darting to Mike. Mike was only looking at him.
They carried him to the Wheelers’ house, and Mike wordlessly handed him a half-eaten granola bar along the way, ignoring the residual chaos in the military compound. Will tried not to notice the way the soldiers gaped at him as they walked by, or the demogorgon’s twisted corpse on the ground. When he did turn his head to look, Mike said firmly, “We’re gonna deal with that later.”
By the time they finished the long walk home and were making their way up the driveway, Will felt less like his head had been put through a meat grinder and could almost stand on his own.
The three of them sat in the living room, Mike gingerly prodding his injured arm and Joyce looking at Will the way she had when he was in that hospital bed at age 12. He knew that she was wishing for all the world that she could somehow undo everything that happened in the last few years.
As much as he could identify Joyce’s feelings, he certainly couldn’t identify any of his own and desperately didn’t want anyone to ask. “I think I might go to bed,” he offered, and both Joyce and Mike sprang up to help him. “No, listen, I can make it down to the basement myself.”
Joyce vehemently shook her head. “But you’re not staying there alone,” she’d said without hesitating. “I’m going to wait up here for the others. Mike can go down with you.”
“Mom-” Will began to protest, his eyes sliding over to Mike’s.
“It’s cool, Will. My room is wrecked anyway. I’ll bring down my blankets.” Mike turned to go upstairs, leaving Will and Joyce alone in the dark room.
All Will could think about as he sat there was the moment his hands shot forward and eyes rolled back. His entire head had filled with red smoke and he looked down on the military compound from some higher-up place, as if he was moving little D&D figurines around on a table. All of Hawkins was beneath him, and those demogorgons seized up like he was crumpling paper. He felt sick. Possessed. His hands shook and he shoved them under his thighs.
They went down to the basement together. Will was glad to escape Joyce’s nervous eyes, as horrible as it felt to think that. Besides, the basement was comfortingly unchanged. Except for the piles of Jonathan and Will’s stuff, it could still be October 1983. The cold, slightly damp smell was the same.
Will watched Mike pile blankets on the couch and wondered if he was thinking the same thing. He could still feel Mike’s thumb pressing into the top of his hand.
It had to be nearing 2am. Mike had changed into his pajamas and Will couldn’t help noticing that the flannel pants were a little short around the ankles, unreplaced since the last growth spurt that finally left him taller than Will.
Will had sort of shuffled his cot so he could be closer to where Mike was camped out on the couch, sitting cross-legged and looking like he might begin a speech about the orcs and goblins their party would be facing next.
“Do you think the others are okay?”
The others. That could mean anyone—the ever-growing group in the Upside Down, Robin and Murray, Lucas—and Will didn’t have an answer. “Hopefully Robin and Lucas are on their way back here.” They were the easiest to comment on.
“Yeah, I’m sure your mom is contacting them now,” Mike agreed, leaning back onto his pillows and yawning. “What a night, huh?”
Will cracked a small smile. “Yeah, what a night.”
Mike dropped off almost immediately, buried under childhood quilts with a face made soft and young by sleep. But Will couldn’t close his eyes. He lay awake and listened as the front door opened and murmured voices shared stories above him. The floor creaked but no one came down to the basement; presumably Joyce had told everyone to leave him alone. Then everything was silent, the kind of silence that gaped wide open and used to send him running to Jonathan when he was a kid. But Jonathan was somewhere in the Upside Down, hopefully alive, not that Will would ever be able to tell unless he happened to be back in that red, smoky, dark place, both within and one with the demogorgon bearing down on him, and—he sat up, eyes wide. Sleep was absolutely out of the question that night.
He stared at Mike, who was almost eye-level with him on the couch, and had wrapped his arms around his pillow. His face was dimly lit by the glow from the streetlight outside. Will wondered how Mike could fall asleep so quickly after the events of the day, wondered if he was haunted by what happened to his parents. He hadn’t given any sign of it, but in the last few years Mike had played his cards increasingly closer to his chest. Sometimes Will felt like he barely knew him at all anymore. But Mike had brought his bedding downstairs to the basement without complaint, had biked with Will to get food during their lunch hour at school, and had been ready with a hand on Will’s shoulder when he had the first vision of Holly in the woods.
But he was also dating Eleven, Will reminded himself, blinking forcefully against the urge to keep watching Mike doze. The problem was that everything felt so familiar and foreign at the same time. He couldn’t count the amount of sleepovers they’d had down in this basement, giggling underneath the same blankets. Above everything else—the fear, the uncertainty—Will felt a sinking sense of loss.
That was when Will had reached into his bag for a book and a flashlight, anything to keep himself out of his head. He cracked open The Return of the King and lost himself in the comforting pulses of the story until the light outside the basement window began to turn grey and he finally nodded to sleep with the flashlight clutched in his right hand.
Now it's evening, and everyone has been making aborted attempts at discussing a plan all day. They look at Will like he’s a nuclear bomb, useful but liable to blow at any moment. That’s pretty much how he feels.
Mostly Will just clutches his copy of The Return of the King like a security blanket, stealing a few pages here and there. He’s been really stuck on the last two chapters, where Sam, Frodo, Merry, and Pippin all return to the Shire to find it completely destroyed by the last arm of Sauron’s evil strength. Nothing is as it was when they left on their adventure the year before.
At some point that day someone had wiped up the blood from the kitchen, but they must have missed the handprint on the kitchen island because Will has been staring at it for the last hour. Lucas and Mike were halfheartedly cleaning Mike’s room earlier in the afternoon, chucking the fragments of his closet from his bedroom window onto the garden below. Joyce flinched every time a piece crashed to the ground.
Will is miserable. He can’t focus on anything, just keeps replaying Vecna’s words to him over and over in his head: Some minds, it turns out, simply do not belong in this world. They belong in mine. He feels helpless, bowing before an unstoppable force that seems to have altered his very DNA. He turns the page.
Well here we are, just the four of us that started out together … We have left all the rest behind, one after another. It seems almost like a dream that has slowly faded.
Not to me, said Frodo. To me it feels more like falling asleep again.
Very little changes going into the night. Eleven and Hopper have been mysteriously silent, which Will tries not to focus on. The others have been slowly making their way to Hawkins Lab, where they think they’ll find something central to the new wall that has materialized in the Upside Down. Everyone in the Rightside-up is frozen in stasis, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Will is pretty sure this will be a big shoe, maybe the final shoe. And he’s going to be under it.
He and Mike are sitting in the basement. Will reads, Mike flips aimlessly through a comic book. This is the longest they’ve been alone since that fateful crawl, but Will is trying not to think about that. You’re more like a sorcerer.
Mike breaks the silence first. “So, what’s with the Lord of the Rings thing all of a sudden?”
Will shrugs. “I don’t know. It’s comforting.”
“Yeah, I guess it’s nice how everything works out in the end,” Mike says, putting aside his book and reaching for Will’s. He reads aloud from the page Will had open: “But I have been too deeply hurt, Sam. I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me.” He glares at Will. “You’re reading the depressing shit!”
“Mike—” Will reaches for the book, “—you said yourself that the ending was happy.”
“Yeah, well, cause it all pretty much resolves nicely, I guess. But the Frodo stuff is—” Mike pauses, then lets the book fall to the couch. His eyes are piercing right through Will. “Will. Are you thinking about eighth grade?”
Will sort of grunts non-commitally. “I can’t believe you remember that conversation.”
“Of course I remember that conversation, Dustin and Lucas argued for weeks about it afterwards.”
Will and Mike had each been sitting on opposite sides of the couch, tucked into their respective corners. Now Mike scoots closer, wrapped in an ancient crochet blanket they used to make into a wizard cape in elementary school. He picks up the book again. “It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them.” He goes quiet.
The water heater clanks on the other side of the room. Mike silently flips the page, reading the end of the book to himself. Will doesn’t know where to put his hands.
“Bullshit, Will.” he says when he finishes. “Bullshit, this isn’t how things are going to go!”
Something about Mike recognizing the exact pattern of Will’s thoughts cracks him wide open. “But it is, Mike! Or it might, anyway. I don’t see how anything can go back to normal.” Will twists his hands together. “I’m different now, I’m fucked up. I’m completely tied to Vecna, and I don’t see how, however this goes, I can just go back to school like a regular person.”
He takes a deep breath. “The rest of you totally could. You aren’t, like, soul-tied to that monster. I’m totally fucked, Mike.” His voice cracks as he says Mike’s name. “And you just seem to handle it, all of it. You just pick up the shovel and go. But I’m not like you, I’m not strong.”
Mike is shaking his head. “No, you don’t get to do this. You don’t get to sit up there on your sacrificial high horse and think that just because you’ve got powers now, you’re going to—to shuffle off to Valinor. That’s not fair.” A beat of silence. Will begins to wish he’d accepted Robin’s offer to go for a walk outside. Shuffling through half-decomposed November leaves would be preferable to sitting in this basement that now feels like a pressure cooker, with all of Will’s fears laid bare with the ferocity of a curtain being viciously ripped back.
“And you know what?” This time it’s Mike’s turn for his voice to crack as the blanket falls from his shoulders. He turns fully to face Will. “You don’t—you don’t get to have a monopoly on being permanently, like, transformed by this whole stupid situation. I know you have powers now, but I mean everything else.” He takes a deep breath and pushes his hair back. “I mean, my parents are comatose in a hospital right now. I walk around this house seeing their ghosts. I had to help Lucas mop up my own mother’s blood this morning!”
Will doesn’t—can’t—reply. The dam has burst.
“Like, do you think Sam came away fine from the whole thing? The quest, carrying Frodo through everything? No he didn’t, and you know what else? Legolas heard those gulls singing and he was never the same either. And then he and Gimli left for Valinor, too, you know, eventually. And where did that leave Sam? In the house of his dead friend with his wife and kids, holding a big book of their life together.”
Mike pauses. His eyes are red. “My point is,” he continues, then swallows. “My point is that you can’t pretend for a minute that you’re alone in this. You’re not. We’ve all been changed.
“The ending of The Return of the King is stupid, Will. It’s just stupid. Frodo didn’t need to die and go to elf heaven to feel normal, and—and Hawkins is going to feel like home again eventually, alright? For all of us.”
The basement feels very, very quiet. Mike takes a deep breath and Will finds himself echoing it. He doesn’t know what to do with this waterfall of information.
“You know,” he offers against the lump in his throat, “I don’t know if you remember the appendices all that well, because Sam does join Frodo in Valinor eventually.”
Mike stares at Will incredulously, then huffs a laugh as he presses his hands to his eyes. “You nerd, that’s what you took from my big speech?”
“No, I—no.” Will stares down at his lap. “It’s just, you know, they reunite in the end. They come back together.”
“But they could have been together and happy in the Shire,” Mike insists.
Will isn’t completely sure if they’re just talking about Sam and Frodo now. If Mike is saying what it sounds like he’s saying. “Thanks for the pep talk, Aragorn,” he offers, mostly as a test.
Mike looks at him, a small dent forming between his eyebrows. “Do you remember the conversation we had later that day in the cafeteria?” No, Will doesn’t. That was when things were starting to get weird again; entire weeks are missing from his memories of that year. He resists the urge to rub the back of his neck.
“No, I don’t.”
“I cornered you after,” Mike looks at him very intently, “and I told you that Dustin got it wrong, there’s no way I’m Aragorn, he’s boring. I’m Sam, because you’re Frodo, and we’re best friends just like them.”
So Will isn’t misreading things. And Mike is looking at him, really looking at him—Will wants to believe him so badly—he wants to believe that as long as Mike keeps looking at him, Vecna can’t touch them, nothing can touch them.
Fighting against every fear impulse in his body, Will reaches out and puts his hand on Mike’s knee. “I don’t want you to feel like you have to get through everything by yourself.”
“I don’t,” Mike says quietly, “Not while you’re here.” Slowly, hesitatingly, he takes Will’s hand from his knee and holds it in both of his.
And Will knows they’re both thinking about it, that it was Mike that Will locked eyes with before reaching out to the demogorgon yesterday. Maybe Mike is also thinking about the months Will spent in California, when their friendship, which has now reached a kind of fragile steadiness, fractured to a near breaking point.
Maybe if Will can just hold onto this moment, whatever happens tonight, or tomorrow, or the next day, won’t matter. If he and Mike can sit together, hand-in-hand with their knees pressed together and the book abandoned on the ground, time can hold them in a little bubble forever.
“Also,” Mike continues, “You’re not alone in this either. I know things are different now with your powers, but I’m here. Always. Okay?”
“Okay,” Will replies softly. He really tries to believe it. And he doesn’t know what everything will look like when it’s all over; he’s barely allowed himself to picture it. He doesn’t know what will happen with Eleven, with his powers, with Vecna. But he and Mike are sitting in the basement surrounded by pieces of their childhood and the way Mike holds his hand feels like a promise. Will chooses to believe it.
That night, Will lies awake on his cot, thumbing through the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring. Wordlessly, Mike slips out from under his quilts on the couch and stretches out next to Will, pulling the blankets over them both. He wraps his arm around Will and tucks his head into his shoulder.
“Put the book down, Will,” Mike whispers into his arm.
Will does, and feels his heartbeat slowly settle as Mike breathes next to him. Whatever happens tomorrow suddenly doesn’t feel important—there is only Will, and Mike, and their arms entwined around each other in the basement.