Archive of Our Own ^beta

The first time the word abuse is thrown into the Byers’ household is on the night before Will’s eleventh birthday.

Jonathan is, ordinarily, the softest person Will knows. When everyone else plays with Chester by roughing him up, Jonathan always calms him down with gentle head pats, smoothing down his fur sticking out like little wings. His room is always neat, his bed always made, his floor always swept. One time, a few years ago, Will broke his finger after falling off his bike – he was so conscious of fracturing his wrist that when he couldn’t help but stick out his hand, he twisted his arm until only his little finger broke his fall – and Jonathan had been the Party’s first point of contact. They both knew they couldn’t afford hospital bills so Jon, freshly fourteen, ‘borrowed’ mom’s old Ford Falcon and bandaged Will’s finger right on the Cherry street sidewalk, a small stick a makeshift splint. When Will was getting an x-ray after mom, inevitably, insisted that she would pick up some extra shifts to cover their debt, the sweet nurse complimented Jonathan’s first aid skills: Tight enough to support, loose enough for proper blood flow, and not to hurt, of course, she had said, examining Wills finger before peering at Jonathan through the corner of her oceanic eyes, this is impressive, Mister Byers. You have a future in medicine yet! Will thinks Jonathan must’ve liked her, because instead of his usual act of dismissiveness, he coyly accepted them compliment, bit the corner of his lip and quickly looked away.

All to say Jonathan doesn’t fight. He doesn’t raise his voice or act rashly. He evaluates situations carefully and allows time to tip his scales of judgement. His foremost concern, always, is how to find a solution while staying in his garden of wallflowers. Some solutions, Will’s starting to learn, force you to leave your wall.

He’s been arguing with Mom for the past 45 minutes and Will is reminded, once again, that the Byers’ walls are very thin; it’s okay though, Will is very practiced at feigning ignorance from the sanctity of his room. It’s always been harder to ignore when it’s about him though, so despite his better judgement, Will finds himself with his back pressed against his closed door and his knees huddled against his chest.

It just left Jonathan’s mouth, the big, scary a-word that they’ve not ever muttered. It sounds very serious, like something they’d claim as a final verdict in a courtroom drama, and something about the way Jon’s voice cracks when he says it makes Will thinks it is. To Jonathan, at least. Will rolls it around on his own tongue, but he dares not say it. Not even a whisper. It feels too final to ever say, like something far detached from his own life. Will’s still walking upright, isn’t he? How could he ever claim that for himself?

There’s a stillness in the air before Mom squeaks, “Abuse?”  Her voice is meek and bewildered, toeing a line between broken and accepting. Will can’t even begin to picture the expression on her face. “Your dad’s a lot of things, but abusive isn’t one of them.”

She sounds like she hardly believes the words as they come out of her mouth. Jonathan seems to think so too, his voice dropping from a yell to something firm, but with sprinkles of his characteristic softness. “Yes he is, Mom. He only showed up for my birthday because you kept hounding him for weeks, and then he spent three hours screaming at all of us because I got a camera and he was upset we didn’t give him anything for his birthday. Do you remember that?”

“Of course I do.”

“Then what else would you call that? Banter?”

“I don’t know, Jonathan, abuse is just so… bad,” her voice breaks and so does Will’s heart, just a little more, “you can’t come back from that.”

Will gets it, he thinks. Abuse is such an ugly word, jagged edges and lifelong stares. It would follow them like sin, poisoning them until there’s nothing left outside of these four walls. He can hear it so clearly: That’s why the Byers are so fucked up, it’s because Lonnie abused them. He can see it so clearly, a dark bruise on his arm from where he was grabbed too roughly, little red veins blooming under the skin. Abuse means being hit which Will, personally, never has been, even if it was only because his dad always made a show of his barely restrained anger. Abuse means crying all the time which, okay, Will does but he almost never cries about his dad! Not unless he’s actively being yelled at and, even then, he’s gotten pretty good at holding it back until he can get to his little sanctuary, his back pressed against his door like this. Abuse would mean cops get involved, the Byers’ brothers shuffled through foster homes when they still have a perfectly loving family. Abuse is entirely ill fitting, a shirt that’s way too big for Will and his dad’s anger issues.

“Jesus, you’re looking for a chance for him to come back?”  The thought makes Will a little uneasy, like dripping water into the small pool of dread that sits deep in his stomach, normally undisturbed. He focuses on the twinkle of a particularly bright star hidden behind the branches of a tall tree, reaching out like twisting arms reaching towards the sky, or maybe the other trees. Thinking about trees holding hands makes him feel better, somehow.

Mom’s voice picks up again, “What?! No! It’s hard for you two to come back from! I would do anything for you boys, anything. Don’t ever think I’d go back to him, do not insult me like that!”

(Will will, inevitably, think back on this moment when he’s older. When he thinks back on this, he’ll finally understand just how true his mom’s dedication is and how vast her love can be, even if she was too scared to push back against Lonnie when everyone was a little younger, naiver. He’ll also think about how people always like to imagine they’ll be stronger than they ever are.

No one in his family ever tells him that Dad was at the funeral, his funeral. No one ever tells him that they briefly got back together, but when he’s in the hospital bed, his lungs weak and shaky, Dustin tells him that he saw Will’s mom and dad share a melancholy kiss at his wake with a sympathetic look on his face. It’s the kind of pain that, among his friends, only Dustin would be able to understand. Lonnie’s gone by the time Will’s found, and the only trace of him is a large rip straight down the middle of Jon’s Evil Dead poster. But no one ever tells him anything about Dad, so Will’s sure that he’ll die before ever finding out why Dad came to his funeral when he couldn’t even be bothered to come to his graduation despite the multiple invites Will sent.

It'll all seem very different when he’s older. That is, if he can remember it.)

Will’s sure Jonathan feels bad, but he keeps charging forward anyway, total tunnel vision. “It was only a few months ago, and you’ve just forgiven him?! You know what he’s like with Will, and you know the only reason Will even lets you invite him is because he’s too nice to say no.”

Yet again, Will finds his name being used for a victory without anyone actually asking what he wants. Jonathan’s fighting his own battle, vindication for the catastrophe that was his own birthday; Will’s name is just convenient for this sort of thing because Mom teeters back and forth between treating him like a baby and leaving him to face domestic monsters alone. Everyone always acts like Will couldn’t possibly know any better. That being said, Jonathan’s not exactly wrong. Will loves his dad, of course he does, but he doesn’t really want to run the risk of making him angry because Dad’s anger is infectious and, like always, Will ends up with his back pressed against his door through the shouting and slapping, waiting for the roar of an engine and tyres screeching as they skid into the road; violent salvation. He doesn’t want to spend his birthday waiting for a bomb to go off, waiting until its diffused. Even if it never gets to that point, the thought is scary. How he wishes, more than anything, that birthdays didn’t always have to be some big event. Otherwise, he could just celebrate with a campaign, Will and his best friends all managing to sweating as spring’s heat slowly bleeds in.

“God forbid I want my kids to have a relationship with their dad!”

It would nice though, wouldn’t it? He’s sure there’s something salvageable with Dad beyond the moment he leaves.  He used to like when Will suggested they play baseball together, though that normally ended in tears. Dad’s started skipping their meets after he realised that the other guys on his team aren’t exactly Will’s friends—something about being embarrassed—so clinging to that seems counterproductive anyway. That doesn’t mean their relationship is irreparable, though. Like that one time they—

“But your kids never want to see him again!”

Or when Dad—

“You know it’s not that easy, Jonathan.”

Or even all the way back to—

A soft, sharp exhale escapes Will’s mouth. He can’t remember any good times with his dad. It’s not like every time they’re in the same vicinity Lonnie just starts screaming—Will is objectively aware that things aren’t always bad. He knows the good memories must exist because, sure, children are biologically wired to seek comfort and safety from their parents, but it’s not like Will’s an idiot. He knows that there’s a deeper reason he loves his dad, obviously. It’s just that he can’t remember them.

If he thinks about it, actually, Will can hardly even remember the bad memories. Up until the day Dad left, Will’s childhood memories are so spotty. Overall, his most distinct memories are of his friends – those are pretty clear, actually. As clear as anyone’s early memories can be which is, of course, still pretty fuzzy, but they’re among his most tangible, even if it’s only a handful. He’s sure that if he picked up a pencil he could sketch a fairly accurate recount of them. The ones with Jonathan and his mom are blurrier, but they’re there. He can still reach out and grab them, pluck them out of the catacombs of his mind and spin them into a narrative.

His absolute clearest memories are of his dad, but they’re scarce—photos, not film. His dad threatening to drive them all headfirst into a light post because, for some reason, he thought it would be funny. Public reprimand for a misdeed he doesn’t understand, dragged away by his wrist and being told that if you don’t shut the fuck up, I’m gonna beat it out of you. A fight about what he can only assume is money – Will doesn’t know, he’s about six in this memory – that ends in Dad slamming the door so hard the whole house shakes. Called a stupid faggot for accidentally breaking a glass. Those are his clearest memories from up until he was almost nine years old, the memories that define his childhood. He’s almost certain Mike was there to witness his dad’s explosions at least once, but he has no memory of what actually happened there and he’s sure as Hell not going to ask Mike about it. Everything else is a blur, it’s just that small handful that he’s managed to sift out through all the darkness.

It's not something he’s ever really thought about. It’s not really upset him previously, but now that he’s thinking about it, Will can feel tears welling up in his eyes for what must be the fifth time tonight. Jonathan remembers his childhood. He remembers everything, even when he was a toddler, way before Will was born. He can’t imagine what that must be like, but he can’t help but feel like it would be better than having all these gaps in his memory.

Because, without the memory of it, it’s like it never happened at all.

“I think you just don’t care.”

It wasn’t worth anything. Will can’t even use the pain anecdotally. It’s barely his.

Mom roars, her throat ripping as she screams, “God, I hate when you do this! You twist my words just like your dad because you think everyone’s against you!”

How can Will possibly claim abuse if he can’t even remember it?

The branches beyond the window sway with the wind, scattering their leaves like pixie dust. The sky is so dark – it’s darker on this side of town than it is from the Wheeler’s house. At least you can see the stars out here.

Will doesn’t understand why his brain isn’t wired like everyone else’s. That’s not just about the kids at baseball who call him all sorts of mean names whenever he misses a swing—why can’t he remember his childhood? Everyone else can, but every shot he makes is yet another blank. It’s just so far out of his reach; he tries over and over but every single time Will can only scrape his fingertips. The still image of Dad in the kitchen holding a broken beer bottle is the only yield he receives, the fruits of his labour.  It makes absolutely no sense, but any clarifying questions he asked would be met with a firm brick wall. He can’t believe he has to ask clarifying questions about his own life.

Sometimes, Will thinks Dad’s cursed him with his anger, a marred black spot right on his forehead like a target. Or maybe he’s just fundamentally been built wrong, maybe his dad was right to try and correct his behaviour. Will doesn’t really know what to make of nature versus nurture. Some part of him hopes it’s nature anyway. If it was nurture, then, theoretically, Will could fix himself, swap over all the right cords and be able to function normally. But he can’t, because he’d need to consult his assembly manual and his assembly manual is gone, moments that seem to linger in his body yet never in his psyche. It feels so unfair that Will could scream.  

Footfall echoes loudly down the hall, pausing momentarily outside Will’s door before charging forward into the kitchen. His heart is beating so hard in his chest that he can feel it working up his throat; Will’s sure he’s going to vomit it up any second now. Mom’s calling out Jonathan’s name, but he’s not stopping. The jingle of keys barely travels from the kitchen, but even from his bedroom Will can hear the slam of their heavy front door. There’s an engine stuttering to life and he hears the distinctive skid of tyres into the road, speeding away. Mom calls out one last time, a choked, pained cry that catches in her throat, and even if he can only remember it in fragments, Will knows this scene very, very well.

Years later, Will can only assume that the burnt holes in his memory are something called psychogenic amnesia. It’s supposedly a coping mechanism, the brain’s way of defending itself from memories that his conscious isn’t equipped to handle. He’s sure that, had he been told this as he listened to Mom and Jonathan’s screaming match of the eve of his eleventh birthday, Will would’ve gotten upset about it, started freaking out about how he was too pathetic, too weak, Dad was right. He was right, he was right. Will’s still sympathetic to his past plight but, now, it just seems so trivial. Much worse things can happen to kids than having a mean parent.

They’ve given him a laundry list of diagnoses and treatments, mostly physical, but the doctor was adamant that Will needed a thorough psychological examination before they even considered discharge. He’s always hated doctors, hates the feeling of being pathologised and prodded, but at least the doctors at Hawkins General are nice. They give him space, let him see his friends, and when he started feeling a little better—when he could talk and swallow without the apparent bruising in his throat tripping him into a coughing fit—his nurse started slipping him candy bars from the vending machine with a quick wink.

At Hawkins Lab, the ‘speciality’ ward that no one’s explained to him just yet, the doctors are completely sterile and unfeeling. Will’s been told that these are the good guys here to help him, that he doesn’t have to lie to them because they know all about the dark, cold version of Hawkins overrun by vines and monsters, but he doesn’t know how much he believes that. After spending what he’s been told was a week there (but he’ll swear until his dying day that it was so much longer), Will doesn’t even understand it. He doesn’t know what it is or how he got there, doesn’t understand how he came back so dehydrated when everything was so damp. Tall creatures with faces that unfurl and peel out like petals forced to bloom, lined with rows and rows of tiny razor-like teeth – Will has no idea what to make of that, what would a bunch of doctors who’ve never been there know? They’re all relying on Will’s frustratingly fleeting memories to make sense of it, before regurgitating back exactly what he’s already said only in a stern, scientific voice.

The harsh overhead lights makes Doctor Samuel Owens, as he’s been introduced, look really tired, his skin blotchy and carved with deep wrinkles along his forehead, trailing down between his eyebrows and settling under his eyes in big purple bags. He has kind, if not distant, eyes but he doesn’t use them to look at Will, jumping between Mom and his clipboard. Owens is clearly a seasoned doctor, but he’s obviously nervous about this and Will can’t help but feel a little bad for him. It’s not every day a kid gets sucked into another dimension. This is as new for all of them as it is for Will, he just wishes he wasn’t being poked and examined like a lab rat. It just feels like a new kind of Hell, one more cerebral than the Hell he just came back from, but he’s sure it’ll slowly kill him all the same.

“So this… amnesia,” Mom speaks very slowly and deliberately like she’s not trying to trigger Will. If he wasn’t so happy to be back home with her, he’d roll his eyes. “Does it go away?”

Owens sighs, “Ordinarily it does, but most of what we know about it is from veterans, so it’s hard to say how it’ll affect Will. It’s very situational, and in conjunction with that hypoxic brain injury and the head trauma, I can’t promise anything.”

She leans forward in her chair as if that’ll shield Will from yet another conversation about himself he has to pretend not to listen to, “How do you know it’s not just the brain injury?”

“We don’t,” he grants, “but if Will’s recount and the hospital’s data are both relatively accurate, we can pretty comfortably assume that both traumatic injuries only occurred sometime towards the end. And it’s not as if that can’t cause retroactive amnesia, but seeing as we’re highly considering a PTSD diagnosis as well, I can’t say it’s something to rule out.”

Even when he was still in the hospital, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder was thrown around a lot. It’s weird to think of what he went through as a trauma, but it’s not as if Will has any other word for it. Still, when they first floated the idea and explained what it actually was, he hoped more than anything that he wouldn’t have it. Even considered praying, just in case that would do something. He’d have to keep coming back, have to leave school early at least once a fortnight and explain to his teachers that, at twelve-years-old, Will was already so screwed up that he has to see a shrink. The memories would come back to him in flashbacks and hallucinations but only Will’s body would remember the feeling of the cold wrapping around his bones—it’s just fear without a cause even when, cognitively, he knows exactly where the tremors are coming from.

Maybe they’re right to keep him here. Maybe Will needs to be locked up, strapped to the bed and sedated until they can fix whatever’s so viscerally wrong with him. The only problem is that, at this point, Will’s not sure there’s anything left to fix. He’s just scrap parts now, gutted of everything that made him him. He’s a little surprised his friends even still want to be around him now that he’s like this, so dull and void of anything but this creeping, gnawing fear itching to get out from under his skin.

But these are doctors, no? Even if Will’s faith in their understanding is very, very shallow, fixing people is their job. They went to school for it, get paid for it and these are the people who, for whatever reason, have been declared the most capable of helping him out. And, besides, is it a piece of paper that makes Will a freak or the behaviour warranting a diagnosis in the first place? At least then, the doctors have something tangible to help with, an easy place to start when Will keeps getting lost in the labyrinth of his emotions, memories and terrors. He surprises himself, a little, when he asks, “How can we test for it?”

Owens tries not to let his own surprise of Will’s question bleed through his façade, but it’s a very weak attempt. “W-well, we still don’t really have a concrete way to test for it, like I said, there’s a lot we don’t know, but what I’d suggest is we continue down the path of a PTSD diagnosis, monitoring for any other symptoms of course, but we start scanning via EEG.” He pauses, realising he got lost in his paperwork yet again. “Do you know what that is?”

Of course he does. They must’ve explained it to him about fifty times when he was in the hospital. He slips a good measure of artificial ignorance into his response anyway, just in case. “The one with the wires and the paper? It tracks your brain activity.”

“Very good!” He smiles brightly as if Will just answered a question correctly in class. Will thinks he’s far too excited considering their topic of conversation. “You’re a clever young man.”

Will forces a weak half smile and looks down at his hands.

“And then what?” Mom starts, short and insistent like always, and Will loves her ferocity more than anything but all he wants right now is for this to end. He’s not been home for almost a month now and he really misses his bed.

Owens blinks himself out of whatever stupor Will’s sudden interest sent him into. “I’m sorry?”

Mom rolls her eyes, her patience clearly wearing incredibly thin. He doesn’t blame her – he’s not quite there yet, not really feeling much of anything except a sense of existential doom slowly crushing him like a human-sized hydraulic press, but he’s sure eventually he’ll start feeling it too. Surely. “So, we hook him up to a bunch of wires, and then what? I don’t understand how that helps him.”

Owens shifts uncomfortably in his seat, flitting his eyes from Mom back to Will, only for a moment. Between the kids at school looking for a punching bag and the monsters sniffing out their next meal, Will knows what it looks like when someone sizes him up and Owens’ attempt to hide it is very, very poor. “I mean, diagnoses are just tools so we can start looking at treatment options.”

“At the hospital, they gave him medication! Antibiotics and morphine and… I don’t know, can’t we get him something for this?” she all but pleads—Will can’t say it doesn’t hurt, hearing her so desperate for him to be normal but it’s not as if he doesn’t feel the same. He’s just not sure he could actually ever deliver; normalcy was barely in the cards even before this all happened.

“Psychiatric medicine works very differently to regular medicine so unless you want your twelve-year-old on experimental anti-depressants or Valium, this is our best chance,” he says with a lazy half smile. Will thinks it’s meant to be funny, but the weight of Will becoming something unfixable is too heavy to be lifted by humour. It just makes him feel like more of a freak having something untreatable and he knows that it won’t help his mom’s mood.

Her face hardens as she presses her mouth into a thin, tight line. “Will, go wait out in the hall.”

He doesn’t need to be asked twice, immediately getting up and, without so much as a look behind him, pulling the heavy door shut. The thick wood muffles the words, but Will can hear his mom yelling from the hallway anyhow.

It’s probably a good thing that everything about the Other World is so vague and faded, like a worn tape or erased pencil marks. He’s not sure how much he buys into the idea of amnesia necessarily—maybe it’s just because having a name makes it feel real, like there’s some medical consequences of what, at this point, just feels like a very strange nightmare – but if it is, he supposes it’s a blessing. It proves he’s capable of self-preservation even if his efforts in loading the gun were fruitless. There’s at least some part of him, somewhere deep down, that’s clawing and fighting to be okay.

Does forgetting something means it never happened? It sort of feels like it. He knows he can’t just pretend it didn’t happen because he has the scars to prove that he was hunted: a deep, ugly gash along his right ankle, deep bruises littered over his flesh like polka dots, tired eyes and hollowed cheeks. Waking up every morning surprised he’s alive, having to remind himself that his skin’s not rotting and his heart is still beating even though he was, medically, dead for 140 seconds. This is his new reality, he just can’t remember when he fell through the wormhole. He’s not entirely certain he wants to.

Owens said that the memories are meant to come back, right? Whether he wants them to or not, they’ll start to trickle in until he’s drowning in them. He doesn’t want to remember, of course he doesn’t, but doesn’t he deserve to know what he’s been through as if he’s actually been through it? Even worse, what does it mean if his memories don’t come back? He’s just too weak to handle them, too fragile to know what to do with himself. How long until he forgets everything else? What happens when he forgets himself?

Mom bursts into the hall, her shoulders heaving with every breath she takes. When he realises that Owens isn’t lurking behind her, the knot in his chest unwinds just a little. “Come on,” her words almost die on her breath, “let’s go pack your stuff. I’m taking you home.”

Sometimes, it feels like Will’s at the epicentre of all this but time and time again, it’s proven that he’s the fault line. It radiates out from him. Every movement he makes causes a destructive wave that rips through the town, the people he loves, and Will doesn’t actually know if he can do much about that. It’s comfortable enough that he can’t help but think that this is among his truest forms. Will Byers isn’t much of a person, and he’s not sure if he has been for a long time.

It’s not for a lack of trying: he’s sitting on a chair with his calves folded up under his thighs because he needs to get this drawing done and he needs it to be perfect. That’s what Will Byers does; he tries in vain to bandage over his crimes with bright colours and aimless apologies. It feels so far away right now, like digging through old photographs to try and spark a memory that never existed, but it’s his modus operandi. He knows that’s what he’s like, so he needs to act like himself to become himself again. Memory is penance but guilt is repentance. Deep down, somewhere far, far inside, guilt is just love, right? It proves you care and Will Byers always cares. That’s what his mom says, his brother and his friends. He can’t love hard enough to bring anyone back, but maybe he could love enough just to show that he never meant it in the first place? Does that count for anything?

Will’s not sure it does, but he’s been sitting at the kitchen table for so long that his legs feel numb anyway. It’s a drawing of Bob, his arms stretched out as he flies through the air. The pose is from an old Superman comic which, yes, is maybe derivative but it was important to him to get it right. Bob deserves a drawing where he looks right. It’s the only thing that’ll do. After everything Will’s put his family through, he can’t deliver anything less.

His stomach claws angrily, but he pays it no mind. There are more important things to attend to. The table is set up perfectly so he could get this done today while he’s home alone; Mom’s busy with work and Jonathan needs to be studying for his upcoming midterms if he wants any chance of getting into NYU, so Will doesn’t need them to worry about his cold or his repentance. He’ll just stick it up on the fridge once he’s done, won’t say anything about it and trust that, since they’re avoiding Bob’s death like a pothole, they won’t either. Will’s ensured he has everything he needs right in front of him anyway: pencils, pens, his nice expensive coloured pencils Mike gave him for his birthday that he’s yet to touch, paper stacked two inches high, a ruler, a compass with a brand-new pointy graphite tip, different Superman comics where he’s flying through the sky, an old photo of Bob when he was younger and less troubled found at the bottom of one of the AV room’s archival boxes. Tissues, a box of the painkillers that make him drowsy in the event that Will starts to feel someone other than himself creep behind his eyes and burrow under his skin again, a water bottle in case he needs to take the pills until he passes out. If he’s fully intent on finishing this beyond the best that his hands can manage, he can’t afford to waste time getting things.

This is his best attempt thus far—definitely the most proportionate. Will’s not sure he can be proud of it considering the circumstances it exists under, but it’s definitely one of his better drawings. Maybe even good enough to outline with his fineline pen, but it’s 2:20 which means he has a little under an hour until Jonathan gets home, which is definitely not enough time for Will to detail  and colour without risk of smudging the ink. Instead, he slides the yellow pencil out of the tin and begins lightly shading Bob’s shirt. He vaguely remembers Bob wearing a shirt like this once, but he's clinging onto the thought. Yellow’s a happy colour, and Bob was a happy person. It works, even if it’s not something he distinctly remembers him by.

His memory’s been like that a lot lately, weird gaps his mind keeps supplementing with fairytales. He keeps telling stories that never happened, the most embarrassing being last week, when Mike asked what Will thought of him inviting Eleven to the Snowball Dance—Will referenced a conversation they had about her at a sleepover they had in June and Mike only looked at him with a vacant, confused stare even though Will remembers, in detail, the hot tears that streamed down his face all night, no real explanation beyond a sudden chilling misery settling in his bone marrow. It’s more than that, though; they realised that Will’s flashbacks weren’t flashbacks at all, sure, but he’s still getting flashbacks, just without the Evil. They look much the same: dark, cold, slimy, plants corroding with some false acidity, vines taking their place and spreading like a virus. It doesn’t feel like a flashback whenever it happens, though, just a daydream. In fact, it’s the evil that makes them make any sense. Will keeps thinking about grabbing a shovel and digging into the tunnels to see if they’d feel like home.

Reality seems vague and distant; his house feels like a movie set, the people who stuck around actors. Will’s constantly waiting for the slap of the film slate so he can jump back in, pretend that everything’s alright, but it just never happens. His script is hidden under lock and key, and he’s just improvising and hoping that it sounds close enough to his character. Will doesn’t even know who he is anymore, not really. He can’t look to his memories to deduce it because, evidentially, they’re wrong and he can’t even begin to explain it, but somehow he knows that these wrong memories: these nights where he cries until the sun came up, this desperate bloodlust that breaks into an animalistic sprint, the feeling of spreading the evil in him through the whole town like veins—all the memories he shouldn’t have are slowly covering up the ones he should. There’s no rhyme or reason to that; there’s no explanation for any of this. Will just knows things now and he knows that day by day, he’s slipping away.

It goes beyond the way that Will feels about it as well. He can see it in the way everyone looks just past him without ever quite meeting his eyes, like they can see His imprint on Will’s mind, forever staining him with a great charcoal smear. Even when they’re nice enough, people at school avoid him like he’s diseased; on the first day of after he came back to school last year, 3 of his deskmates asked to switch the seating plan. Soon, once Will the Queer evolved into Will the Zombie Boy, no one wanted to even be in a 3ft radius of him, hallways parting like the red sea as the fluorescents became an inescapable spotlight. He fought so damn hard to prove them wrong, tried to be normal even when his eyes became glassy when the temperatures dropped, tried to still his beating heart every time a light bulb flickered. Maintaining a sense of normalcy was the cure to whatever sickness people seemed to think he carried, and Will acted so fucking normal. At least, he tried.

Now? He knows that’s naive. Between the malice pumping through his veins, the blood trail he leaves behind and the hot flush in his stomach he’s been getting at the sight of Mike lately, Will’s not sure that he’s not contagious. He came back wrong, a few vital pieces missing and now he’s defective and dangerous.

Cruelty like that is pervasive but, somehow, the memory of his rot is as distant as the memories of his kinder, simpler days. Both are out of his reach, hidden somewhere totally inaccessible in the recesses of his mind, but even now, when he’s doing the one thing that would prove that there’s still something redeemable deep in the trenches of his mind, he can still feel his body slowly expunging his humanity and giving into the decay, like it's just part of him now.

Finishing the drawing proves that the grief he feels over Bob’s death is real and his own. If Will is capable of caring then he is capable of guilt and repentance, and he’s prepared to spend his whole life on his knees, muttering a prayer to a God he never once believed in, until he can make things right. Will knows, though, that making things right would be to completely eliminate the threat of Him and the Upside Down, but that won’t happen if he’s still breathing. Whether he’s a fault line or just an aftershock, Will knows that the monsters see his body as a perfect means for survival, something fragile enough to sink their teeth into and syphon out his resolve. The only way to end this all is to die, even if he already feels himself melting from the inside, his stomach and lungs turned to the ashy powder that drifts in the Upside Down like leaves on the wind. Somehow, it seemed so much easier to let himself go when he wouldn’t have to be the person pulling the trigger.

He presses harder and his fingers slip as the wax breaks and crumbles onto the paper, but he just can’t stop. He keeps drawing, drawing because not getting this done would be the end of the world, it would be the end of everything and Will needs to get this done before he loses himself again. He doesn’t know how much time he has left, but he knows that nothing good comes from waiting anymore. Not when he’s fighting to inhabit his own body. If he’s going to lose control again and slip into the recesses of his mind where there’s nothing in him but memories that play and skip like a worn and shred like a worn tape, where he can’t even recognise himself, can’t recognise the people he loves, can only recognise Him—if Will’s going there again, he at the very least needs to get this done so he can prove that he tried to be a good person, even if it was only in vain. Will tried, and he’s colouring with a feverishness that he’s only felt once before, when visions ran through his head and the only thing he could try and do was getitoutgetitoutgetitout. Before he even realises it, Will’s holding the pencil like a knife and digging into the paper with a vengeance. He moves too harshly, and a dark stroke of yellow cuts through Bob’s left shoulder in a big loop.

He drops the pencil abruptly and takes in the mess he's made. The dark ugly lines remind Will of the harsh scratches on his arm that he sometimes wakes up to — a half-cognisant driving to dig under his skin and strip his muscles of whatever it is that lurks there, which he’s sure Owens would note as some kind of psychotic hallucination. It looks like someone’s tried to rid Bob of an evil he never knew, and that’s just not fair to him. Will’s the only person who’s felt the Shadow Monster’s cool misanthropy; the brush of His lust satiated only by sacrifice. Bob never knew Him, and Will would like to keep it that way even if only in memory. Maybe Will’s the last person who’s ever felt should be drawing this, seeing as he was the one who got him killed and even now, he’s tarnishing Bob’s memory, contaminating it with the malice that just seems to bleed out of his fingertips and spreads like watercolours; no matter what colour he tries, it seems to turn into a shade of smoke or blood. He’s taken on the mantle of care as if he wasn’t the executioner because Bob deserves to remembered for who he really was: a hero.

And maybe Will really isn’t the right person to be doing this, but if he doesn’t no one will. Bob wasn’t involved in their family enough for his death to be a family affair, necessarily, but his absence is palpable anyway. They didn’t plan his funeral but they went to it anyway; they didn’t sort his belongings but Mom walks around in one of his sweaters anyway. His death left a chasm, and it’s like they’re all walking across a tightrope, pretending they’re on solid ground. Even Jonathan, with his open scrutiny, avoids saying Bob’s name like it’s sacrilege to even acknowledge that there was a loss at all. Like that’ll betray his memory because Bob would want us to move on and they were never close enough to let grief settle in their walls anyway. 

Because, sure, Bob was lame. He liked boring movies and dull, twangy music and had a habit of interrupting at the most inopportune of times. He was the AV kid to end all AV kids and, sometimes, the way he carried himself looked like he never fully grew out of that mentality, like he was waiting for someone to pick on him at any moment. For God’s sake, when he thought Will was sick he brought over a Rubik’s Cube, but for the first time in Will’s entire life, the little house on Cornwallis Street was balanced — his gentle logic scaling against Mom’s justifiable emotion. Simple pleasures, simple troubles. Something easy and nuclear. You don’t just learn what that feels like and let yourself forget it. Will knows he’ll always remember the feeling; no matter how brief or alien it was, it was nice. Slow. It made him feel normal, like all his problems in life were as inconsequential as awkward family movie nights. They could’ve had it forever if Will didn’t ruin it, call the monsters over for a feast.

At least, that’s what he’s been told happened. Will wouldn’t know, he spent the entire week trying to hold his head above water lest he suffocate in Him and His calculated apathy. The moments of lucidity were brief and incredibly fleeting, only enough to realise that He was using his voice to lure them to doom like some horrific, unwilling piper. Except there’s a giant hole where the battle for his body should have been, and Will is going to die not knowing whether he fought and lost or if some part of him just wanted to give in and let the darkness corrupt and consume. 

It settled in his lungs and bloomed there, choking them and weaving between his ribs until there was nothing left of him and Will couldn’t even watch anymore. It’s simply gone from his head like it never happened. Everyone says he’s innocent, that he fought hard and long, but Will’s not so sure about that. Is plunging the knife into someone’s chest what constitutes guilt? Is an executioner innocent if they’re only following orders? More importantly, can a whole ever operate as two independent parts, or is it just a throbbing amalgamation bleeding onto the floor as it learns compromise?

If Will could scratch his skin raw until it tore open his chest and arms, flare out his stringy muscle and dig through his organs like dirt, squeeze his heart until it’s dry and still and break his ribcage, would he even find the Evil or just himself? 

He doesn’t know, but the anguish is his and his alone. His burdens, his consequences. They shouldn’t hurt Bob more than they already have. 

With a sigh, Will grabs a fresh piece of paper from the stack and begins sketching out the shape of Bob’s body for the fifth time today. 

Will can remember the day this all started. Of course he does. Holographic blue and silver streamers draped from the roof, the refraction of the mirror ball’s light dancing around the hall.  Paper snowflakes hung from the ceiling garters twirled and blew with the breeze as if they were truly falling from a cloud. Winter in a heated room; winter without the angry spikes of December snowfall. He had half a mind to try and commit the moment to memory so he can get home and let it be captured in graphite, but he wasn’t sure he’d do it justice. It was too beautiful for his pencil and the ink would dry and settle into the paper much too fast; the moment wouldn’t linger, it would just stain. 

Will was out of his depth, obviously, but it had been a good night, a chance to feel normal through it all. His recurrent problem, however, is that Will Byers is not normal. 

The first hairline fracture in his precarious sanctity was in his living room, where he knew he was going to fall short of Mom and Jonathan’s expectations because people like Will just weren't destined for romance. The second was realising that, for once, he was going to meet them, that Mike wanted him to meet them but Will wanted nothing less. The third crack — the final breaking point, the moment that wrenched his heart dry — was dancing with a sweet girl while his not-so-sweet best friend had his first kiss just feet away, totally lost in his own little tunnel of love.

The memory is distinct, the way the mirror ball’s glint shone on them for just a moment as if they were the only people in the room, the way Mike softened and settled into a gentleness Will had never seen before. El’s face was painted with eyeshadow, fuchsia like the trim of her dress. He wished he could carry his art on him like that, show everyone his work and feel beautiful like she was. He wished he could stand under the mirror ball, under the streamers, with the love of his life and feel the world slow. 

Will knew jealousy, he was very well acquainted with it. When he’d come back from Lucas’ house— warm and permeated with sun and laughter that flooded the living room, choruses of disgust whenever Mr. and Mrs. Sinclair would kiss that were universally understood to be an affirmation of their love— back to his own dark and dreary dry wall that failed to absorb any noise, names and insults echoing down hallways, Will knew jealousy. Kids who would get picked up from school to go to sports games rather than appointments. Mrs. Wheeler always at home to open the blinds. Friends who could bike home. New clothes, new toys just because. People who celebrated Father’s Day. People who were funnier than him, braver than him, more talented than him. Will knew jealousy far more intimately than he would like to admit to anyone. He buried it deep, covered in six feet of dirt pounded flat, but the ache that radiated from his heart through his body and out through his fingertips was beyond recognisable. The ache meant he was hurt, and the scratch on one of his already bleeding vulnerabilities meant he was jealous, it was a simple equation. Will wished more than anything he was content with a loving family and kind friends because so many people don’t even get that, but he had always been insatiable. Jealousy was an unwanted shadow that lingered a little too long, but it was one he was familiar with. 

That night, for the first time, that equation had changed, the shadow had morphed. Malice was a new factor, one that bloomed inside of Will the second Eleven kissed Mike. There was a near liberation in the way his heart sped up and teeth carved the inside of his cheek like the rotten meat he is, like this was something he was always meant to be feeling. Maybe he got it from his dad. She had done nothing wrong, Will owed her everything, but in that moment, he decided that he could not, under any circumstances, like Eleven. She was the reason Mike had been so distracted lately; she was going to be the death of the Party Will had grown up with. His disdain was misplaced, Will knew that, but the hot anger surging through his veins was too strong to ignore. It threatened to leak out through a shaky breath, but he bolted his mouth shut before it could. 

That night, under the twinkle of the stars and the watchful eye that documented his every thought and movement, Will lied to his mom and promised that he had the best time. He wondered, not for the first time but finally in explicit terms, whether this was a cause or consequence of everything that happened to him. Maybe that’s the next test the doctors should run; it’d be a medical revolution, he’s sure.

After that night, he saw both less and more of El; police chief Jim Hopper clearly couldn’t handle just how insistent a teenager in love could be and his rules bent accordingly. Still, the feeling never went away, even when he barely saw her. Even when he finally spoke to El and realised that she’s actually lovely, fiercely loyal and eager to swallow life by the gallon, the feeling still fused with his skin and beat with the rhythm of his heart. He just couldn’t shake it.

It lingers even now, as he thumbs through the pages of his comic. The paper’s stained with water, only little droplets but the ink’s bleeding into itself and spreading across the page like plague, and Will doesn’t know whether the water is from the rain or from his tears, but he’s not sure it really matters at this point. It’s all the same, and he’s not even reading anyway, just giving himself some task so he feels a little less pathetic. It doesn’t work. 

Will is 14 years old, he’s been running from the same feeling for the past 7 months, been hiding from his internal rot for the past 19 months, and he’s been sitting in the same spot since he was 8. The same sticks that sheltered him from reality have become his prison, and he’s dragging everyone down with him. They don’t deserve that, not El and definitely not Mike. It’s time he learned to face reality, learned to grow up. It just feels so unfair, even when he knows he should move on with his life, just like everyone else has.

What’s he doing instead? Sitting here in his tears as the rain pounds on the tarp like a fist banging at his door. Sitting and waiting for someone — a particular person, if he’s being totally candid here which, right now, Will doesn’t know if he can be anything but — to swoop in and save the day like some brilliant knight in shining armour. No wonder everyone always treats him like some kind of fragile object; he enforces it onto people. Putting himself in a position to be cared for constantly as opposed to doing anything for himself, or dealing his own problems in the solitude of his room at night. His nagging persistence to be loved made every friend, every teacher, every acquaintance another of Will’s carers. He was so used to cutting his heart open and bearing it to the world, every secret and fear laid out in alphabetical order. Existing any other way destined him to failure. Time proved again and again what happened when Will was alone, reiterating just how abnormal he was.

Castle Byers is full of memories, not so distant pasts that feel like a lifetime ago. All his Dungeon guides soaked from the rain, photos of happier times — all of which were pillowed by an indiscernible, hazy feeling of sadness, but at least he had his friends with him. Now what does he have? The only memory that even fits inside his fort anymore is one he can’t remember: vines and monsters are the only things that belong in here now, and he finds himself among them.

Hell, what is he doing in here? Every time he even comes near his palace of sticks his heart pounds so heavily, he feels like he’s going to die again. There’s nothing here for him now, nothing but faded memories from an aggressively mediocre childhood and a week where he was being hunted for sports. He’s holding onto a prayer, but Will’s never prayed because he knows that even if there was a God, no one would answer when it comes from his mouth. 

He’s clinging onto this — this childish lifeboat of a crush because it’s the last remnant of a life before anyone grew up where he could cling onto friendship like it meant eternity. How naive of him to think that just because he’ll keep playing Peter Pan until the day he dies that his friends will remain Lost Boys ad infinitum. He’s the only one with something broken in him. He’s the only one whose peace, identity, life was stolen and the most he’d gotten in return, until tonight, was splinters. Tonight, it was daggers, merciless and sharp, so very human. That’s new, but it makes sense. It’s good. None of that cognitive dissonance he feels when his friends say they care about him. For the first time in a long time, Will’s life makes sense and his memories click. 

In light of this bizarre, anguishing clarity, here’s what he knows: Will Byers, 14 years old, is still playing in Neverland because he’s too scared to live in a world where he can’t recognise himself. He can’t recognise himself because any good in him was soiled when he was taken by the monster — not the Demogorgon, the monster. Demogorgon is a creature of great power yet so little dominion, constantly torn between two minds. The monsters don’t even have one mind, they don’t think at all, they screech, obey and hunt, unfurling the petals of their heads like spring in bloom. The Mind Flayer spreads and conquers, takes and takes until everything is in its palm; The Shadow corrupts and leaves empty husks. Maybe they’re real to everyone else, but only a handful have ever been hunted by the monster and only Will has ever felt His true power, raw and unfettered as it ran through his blood and mind. Demogorgon isn’t real, but the monsters are. Their saliva is thick and pungent; it stings skin and it doesn’t dry. Will can’t imagine a world where he could ever forget that or, worse, taint his happiest memories with the monsters. With Him. Said happiest memories are with his friends who’ve long since moved onto girls. Will doesn’t like girls, it’s his own fault or a punishment or something, and it’s a frustratingly open secret, but he does like Mike—he knows that he’ll never forget that—and Will vows to take it to his grave. 

He knows that the anger that consumed him that night at their 8th grade dance isn’t anger against El, it’s the rot that’s been eating him since he was saved when he long should’ve died. Mayne it’s existed long before that, maybe that was just the final push he needed; someone grabbing his jaw and forcing him to look in the mirror and really, really fucking look. 

God, he’s drowning in his own reflection and all he can see when he looks on the walls of his childhood is a little boy playing pretend. That’s all he even is, and unless he does something about it, that’s all he ever will be. He grabs one of the photos, a photo from last Halloween, barely 8 months ago now, and tears it in half, watching as his younger self falls away from Mike and Dustin.

Here’s what he’s going to do about it: Will Byers is going to stop worrying about the past, shove his nightmares down and tuck his fears in his ribcage. He’s going to stay quiet and stay out of the way unless he has a good reason to. He’s going to stop worrying about slipping away from himself and learn to accept that he’s a broken portrait of a life, that he can never be whole because, for better or worse, the memories that make him a whole person don’t exist anymore and the good ones he has just can’t balance it anymore. He’s going to be nice to El, and he’s going to get over Mike. He’s going to get over his childhood and stop feeling so entitled to reliving the past just because he doesn’t know how to move forward. 

It’s not tactful, the way he’s ripping at the walls like he rips at the thin skin on his hand, but it does what he needs it to. He can’t stand to look at his reflection anymore, if he keeps looking at himself for another second he’ll die, the monsters will get him he’s sure of it, so he pulls it all down. He feels pathetic as he does it, like a kid playing dress up in his dad’s Sunday best, but he can’t keep drowning in his own self-pity because he, what, was too weak to defend himself? He only won because Will didn’t try hard enough to fight back; He sensed his weakness when he tried standing up to Him and acted accordingly, sinking his teeth deep into Will’s insecurities and memories, learning to wear his skin well enough to lull them into a false security. Prime livestock. Perfect pet. Perfect vessel. He doesn’t ever want to feel that way again. 

He grabs the bat — the stupid fucking bat from that stupid fucking baseball team Dad made him join in hopes that his son could ever be something worth staying around for — and Will grows up.

Ghosts are something of a staple in the Byers’ household. Not that, to Will’s knowledge, their house was ever haunted—though it was supernaturally stalked and lived in which, he supposes, is a kind of haunting—but the constant reminder of their past and a crushing fear of the future lingers in the hallways all the same. He knows why his heart starts racing when the night gets too cold, why Jonathan likes to linger in shared spaces around Will, why Mom insists that Jonathan shouldn’t worry about any chores and should just take the chance to enjoy the rest of his adolescence, why he's allowed to stay out late but Will has to be home by night fall. Even back when life was normal, there were ghosts. Ghosts of his dad, mostly—but no one ever filled Will in on what actually happened to warrant the haunting, so he had to be content in knowing that every step he took was treading on another skeleton that’d never see the light of day.

Naïve as he’s always been, Will hoped that, since they were being forced to move, they could at least shake the ghosts and leave the demons to their demons. He’s quickly realised that’s not feasible.

See, Will’s under no disillusionment that he’ll be looking for monsters until the day he dies, that the feeling of slipping away from his consciousness as he grows tired will always send him into high alert. He knows that’ll happen, he gets it. What he doesn’t get, however, is why it’s his very certainly alive family that are haunting the house.

Mom’s a shadow of her former self: always distant and up in the air since Hopper’s death. She’s been talking about getting back to work now that this round of Government hush-money is running thin, but the Joyce Byers Will knows would’ve applied before she even moved. She’s not even that fussed anymore whenever Jonathan goes out on one of his late-night walks, and he can’t tell whether its because she genuinely believes Lenora is safer or because, most of the time, she would also rather be anywhere than at home, trying her best to swim through the grief and piece together a broken family as if they’ve ever been truly whole.

Jonathan’s walks are also new and deeply, deeply obvious. Will can’t hold it against him, not really, not when Jonathan’s seen everything that he’s seen and his mind has ensnared it all deep in his memories like Will knows it has, but he still doesn’t know what to make of this new Jonathan. What happened to the brother who would sit with Will and rifle through his collections to ensure that this little nine-year-old has a good grasp on the distinction between post-punk and new wave? What happened to the brother who told him that friendless freaks were worth more than a hollow normalcy? It’s selfish, he supposes, to expect Jonathan to stagnate just because Will knows that’s what he’s historically done. Jonathan is his own person with his own life beyond the way he plays house, and Will doesn’t want him to abandon that even if he’d rather his brother stay straight-edge, but he’s not used to looking for Jonathan and not finding him, even when they make eye contact. It seems easier to let yourself drift away on a high. He’s been using almost as long as they’ve been here, and it’s really not all that frequent—initially recreationally, but now it’s mostly right before he goes to sleep—so it’s not as if Will’s necessarily concerned about his use. It’s just strange and uncomfortable; everything keeps changing before his eyes and, like with everything else, Will just has to close them and swallow. At least Jon’s considerate enough to leave the house whenever he decides that he needs a cone.

Will himself feels like a bit of a ghost. Not in the way of Jonathan and his mom where he’s watching them slip through his fingers and is totally unable to stop it, but a ghost nonetheless. It’s his expectations of his family that haunt them all—he doesn’t know what to do with all this freshly bestowed freedom sprouting from Mom and Jonathan’s sudden disinterest, and it’s not as if he can use it to spend more time with his friends so, instead, he drifts aimlessly through Lenora’s school halls like a spectre, barely making eye contact with anyone, his feet barely touching the ground. He tries, briefly, to get along with people but the second someone spits an insult so familiar to Will that he’d probably respond to it in lieu of his name he knows that trying is redundant when he’s been branded with a scarlet letter. One everyone could see all along, apparently. He’d rather everyone simply look through him. Besides, he hasn’t felt Him here at all, but that doesn’t mean Lenora’s safe from the supernatural threat that follows Will like his shadow. For longevity’s sake, it’s for the best that he keeps himself distant, but Will knows he’s shedding pieces of himself every time someone tries to make small talk with him and he responds with nothing but nods or paraphrased repetitions of their last sentence. He’s safe here, he knows that he is, but Will thinks—rather, he knows—that something about Hawkins and its tired, grey skies is simply integral to who he is. It’s too sunny. Will’s here in California, but his heart beats thousands of miles away back in Indiana.

This leads him to a few conclusions, some pertaining to the way he’s been moulded by The Upside Down, some pertaining to a certain splatter of freckled constellations across a face that’s slowly losing baby fat, but Will doesn’t indulge either train of thought. He just keeps wandering.

When he wanders like this, he always finds himself back in the same spot. Normally he can ignore it and blink it away like sleep but that’s always been much easier when she’s not, quite literally, standing in front of him.

Earlier this morning, Will was convinced that their new house was haunted—like, legitimately haunted. Which is, admittedly, ridiculous but in his defence! it was 4am and it wouldn’t be the first time a horror movie actualised before his very eyes. Their old house was small and secluded enough that Will could trace every single creak of the wood or squeal of a door to a footstep or room. The new house is massive, maybe even bigger than the Wheeler house that Will’s always understood to be the heights of middle-class wealth, and it’s new enough that the wood doesn’t move under anyone’s weight; what else could Will possibly assume an unfamiliar pattern of footfall outside his door is?

Maybe it was because he was barely awake, but Will wasn’t necessarily perturbed by the thought of a ghost bumping through their hallways in the night – he’s had weirder, more insidious encounters of the third kind – but what did leave him feeling a little nauseated was the revelation, only a few hours later, that it was El. Because El is his sister now.

It’s not something easily forgotten, trying to work another person into your tightly, if only messily, knit family and yet somehow, in the day’s early hours, Will had managed to go to a place without her at all. A land where she was only a seed of a memory from some of his darkest days. It’s cruel, he knows it is, but it’s one of those shadowy corners of his mind that he dares not wander into lest he’s covered in the superficial anonymity of darkness. He cares about El; now that she’s in his life, he doesn’t want her to leave and Will could not ever overstate just how he quite literally owes El his life. Even now, every time they talk, Will can see it dawn on her again and again that she’s talking to the greyish, half-dead boy she apparently met so long ago and it, frankly, makes him slightly uncomfortable but his first thought upon meeting her properly had very little to do with the way she saved him and quite a lot to do with Mike, so it’s not as if he’s in any righteous position when it comes to first impressions.

They don’t really talk much anyway, and Will’s not sure he could ever see her as a sister but he tries. Yet, despite his best efforts, he sometimes can’t help but wish to go back to brighter, simpler times. Not to a life without her necessarily, but just to linger in the last week of his life where alternate dimensions and telekinesis were only Sci-Fi. Let himself find comfort in the stasis. Sometimes he wonders whether she would’ve managed escape had she not opened the initial gate, but he never lets himself follow that trail down to the end. It’s too bleak and unforgiving, and having El in his life is a net positive anyway.

Isn’t it?

Besides, the only family she’s ever known are gone. He can’t hold the past over her head, especially when she’s processing this depth of grief. She’s gone through a lot, and Will owes her even more.

Still, sometimes it’s so easy to think of her as a ghost first and foremost. For so long she’s just been this intangible in his life; a mythic girl who stepped up to take Will’s place whenever His torment left Will incapacitated or, otherwise, just whenever the inadequacy he barely hid from his friends bled out through his eyes and caught in his eyelashes like shattered glass. She exists, primarily, through stories told by his friends--Eleven, the girl with a shaved head, wide eyes and the ability to do just about anything—but she’s not real to Will. Maybe she should be, but he can’t remember meeting her in the Upside Down, so first and foremost, Eleven is an interesting superhero and not an actual girl. Even after they met-met, El was always Mike’s girlfriend, squirreled away deep in the woods and when she’d come out she’d spend most her time glued to Mike and whispering in his ear like she was merely an extension of him, perhaps even a representation of everything Will wanted but could never have, not the superhero he imagined and definitely not an actual girl.

Even in the new house, her footfalls are feather-light and she doesn’t linger in shared spaces unless his (her? Their? Is this another piece of his life that he has to learn to share with her?) mom’s home. It’s like she’s haunting them, watching and waiting but never learning to move or take up space despite being so extraordinarily vivacious in public. It makes no sense that she’s here this late, then, but nothing about Eleven makes much sense at all to Will. Even now, she’s standing in his under his doorframe and in the dead of night he can only make out her silhouette and red-rimmed eyes. It’s supernatural and sends a quick pluck of a nerve right up his spine. “El, hey. Are you – are you okay?”

Her voice is almost unnervingly still when she says, “I have a problem.” She shuffles into Will’s room, closes the door behind her, and sits on the edge of his bed, picking at her fingernails almost compulsively.

Will jaw falls slightly open. So much for being afraid to take up space; clearly, he doesn’t know her very well at all. He and El don’t exactly have the kind of relationship where they confide in each other – it’s mostly El saving him from whatever horror he’s stumbled into and Will selfishly letting jealousy become his second skin anyway – but it’s not as if she really has anyone else, he guesses. Maybe Max, but he’s sure El would feel bad using their brief calls to complain. Maybe Mike, but Will’s kind of getting the impression that he’s been busy lately. He guesses he is El’s closest friend at the moment, the thought settling uncomfortably in his stomach. She deserves a better friend than Will.

Still, he’s glad she’s finally talking about it. Will’s no stranger to bullies, but he’s never seen anyone deal their cruelty out as psychologically torturous as Angela does. On their first day, he tried telling her that Angela had that spark of cruelty in her eye but El, in all her optimism and beautiful effervescence, insisted that he was being paranoid and bounded over to their lunch table with bright eyes as they slowly picked her apart. Neither of them said anything when El suddenly stopped bringing her up, but that hasn’t stopped Angela from slowly gnawing at her spirit. Angela’s snide boyfriend has already found Will’s bruise to keep poking at just enough to keep him chained, so it’s not as if Will is actually much help here, but at least he can show her that she’s not alone.  “What kind of problem?””

She takes a deep breath like she’s gathering her resolve, but she still decidedly avoids eye contact when she explains, “I have to finish a paper for English. On Friday.”

“Oh.” That probably makes more sense than expecting someone who’s more-or-less an acquaintance to lean on him, but it’s easy to forget that English and Maths are the only two classes they don’t share. Content-wise, El’s surprisingly confident but his mom seemed concerned that El’s literacy would impede on her grades, so while Will got filed into Pre-Algebra, El was slotted into remedial English. Beyond that, they’re basically treated as one entity both socially and academically, a relationship stamped with FRAGILE: DO NOT SEPARATE lest they realise how broken their foundations are. Will’s not really sure how to feel about it.  “Do you need help with your grammar or spelling or… something?”

El shakes her head, “I do not know what to write.”

“Well, what’s the assignment?”

When El finally looks at him, her eyes are bloodshot and glassy. She seems horribly, horribly real right now. Nothing like the ghost that’s been awkwardly side-stepping all Byers' family moments. “My childhood,” her voice shakes.

Barbed dread coils around his stomach, pricking it until it starts to bleed. That’s why it couldn’t wait. “You have to write about your childhood? Like, the whole thing or just a story?”

“Only one story. And a,” she scrunches her nose like even saying it is painful, “a ‘family tree.’ Is that a… tradition?”

It’s a perfectly reasonable question, but something about the way she asks, the way her voice quivers as she forces out every syllable, Will’s heart crumbles like tissue paper. He may not know how to exist around her, but El doesn’t know how to exist in this world at all. Sometimes, Will thinks he doesn’t either. “No, it’s, uh, it’s just a figure of speech. They mean just mean your family – it’s a tree because of how it branches out. Your parents, your grandparents, cousins, that sort of thing.”

She nods solemnly to herself and lets herself fall back onto Will’s mattress, the bed shaking under the thud. Will thinks, distantly, of how close El and Max became over a few hours despite barely orbiting each other for the 7 months they’d known each other, and he can only assume that the way she’s brushing past small talk and spatial boundaries right now must be the reason for that. He doesn’t really know what to do with her trust, but he doesn’t want to be the stone that disrupts water’s tranquillity, so he tries to act like this is normal. He looks at the weak spot she’s marked for him and tries, ever so gently, to dig. “So… you have to do both?”

She sighs, her chest caving in as she sinks deeper into both the mattress and her own body. “Both are bad,” she says instead, watery and blunt, choking on her own words.

And it’s not El’s problem nor her fault, but something about that is so frustratingly intrusive that he asks anyway—"Why would they ask about your childhood?”

El laughs sardonically before cutting herself off, succinct even in her frustration. It’s not a noise Will’s ever heard her make before, and it’s not one he honestly ever expected from her. Despite her powers, he’s never thought of her as a violent or vindictive person, maybe only when her and Mike were on the rocks but that was different; seeing her get upset like this feels dissonant, as if her soft features weren’t made for the kind of angst she bears. “She wanted us to write something… familiar.”

Familiar being an inherently safe place to land is a luxury only so many people can afford, and one only so many people can actually attest to. Will, for example, would rather spend the rest of his living under his dad’s roof if it meant he could rewrite the past so that he never set foot in the Upside Down, but he’s not sure El would be so willing to return to the lab no matter what she was promised. It’s not exactly hospitable, even if you know its sterile lights and the staff’s empty stares like you know your own hand. Sometimes something is too familiar, it fits you so perfectly that you want to die lest you embrace fate. It’s often burdensome, actually; even for people with less dramatic backstories, even for people who feel that familiar is synonymous with some kind of good, nostalgia isn’t an easy thing to grapple.

The weight of the familiar is heavy on El’s body, so Will does what he’s always done when the familiar’s dragged him underwater instead of keeping him afloat: he looks to the sunlight and prays for an escape. “Well, I guess it doesn’t have to be true,” he sits next to her but keeps to the edge of the bed, the mattress dipping and squeaking under his weight. “I can help you make up a story.”

“Friends don’t lie,” she says a little petulantly, furrowing her eyebrows.

Will laughs, “Do you consider your English teacher a friend?”  She scoffs lightly, and only after he says it does he realise that it’s little rude, definitely inappropriate for their kind of relationship. He tries again, softer this time. “Come on, El. It’s just to keep you safe. It doesn’t even have to be a total lie, like, if you just wrote about Hopper or Max or something. It might even help.”

She doesn’t say anything—doesn’t even attempt a non-verbal noise or movement—but in the night’s shades of violet, black and blue, he can just make out the way she’s blinking rapidly. Will cringes and turns away, looks at the toy stegosaurs sitting on his dresser. That was probably the wrong thing to say. When Will’s upset, it normally helps him to hide in the light until the rainclouds pass, but El’s not him. She’s, seemingly, just as much of a contradiction though, a bubbly pessimist; if someone vivisected them both, maybe their parts could be rearranged to form one coherent, normal person.

Though, he does understand why it upsets her. Whether out of guilt or grief, Will spent a lot of time thinking about Bob in the aftermath of his death. It was important to him to keep his memory alive, that his sacrifices in both life and death weren’t in vain. It still is; he made sure to pack Bob’s old Rubik’s Cube when they were moving, and it’s sitting on his shelf right now. But he was probably the only person in his family who brought up Bob autonomously in the first few months after he died. Will still doesn’t know what Jonathan thinks about the whole thing, but he knows that the weight of Mom’s grief is unbearable. Every time she dares to speak it, the words die on her tongue; too much anguish to ever articulate. He’s had people die before, that goes without saying at this point, but no one he loved as intensely as Mom loved Bob, the way El loved Hopper. He can’t fathom how heavy his name must feel on her tongue, but even then, Will’s just assuming. After all this time, he and El are still basically strangers.

He hates this weird dance as he gets to know another person, but the worst part is that he should know how to exist around her. He should know what she likes, how she jerks away whenever she’s pushed, what makes her laugh, what makes her shut down. Will’s known her long enough to know all that, but he’s been so blinded by his stupid, childish jealousy that the El sitting in front of him isn’t a superhero nor Mike’s girlfriend, just a spectral illusion pouring herself into his uncupped hands. He doesn’t know what to do with her. Would she know what to do with him if it was Will who came into her room in the middle of the night looking for sympathy? He likes to imagine she wouldn’t either, just because it makes him feel a little better.

Though, Will’s not sure he could handle himself. El’s unloading on to him, but she’s still quiet and considerate, not demanding anything of him other than his presence. When Will opens his closet and reveals his skeletons—not even his skeletons, actually, maybe a vertebra—it always escalates into him screaming cruel demands for attention. It always ends in words he can never take back. At least El’s silent slow burn won’t end in that. He thinks. He hopes.

Finally, she breaks their stalemate, her voice small and frayed. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Can you,” she takes a deep, long-suffering breath as she pulls herself together, “can you tell me a story from your childhood?”

It’s the most blatant attempt at distraction that Will’s ever seen, but he doesn’t bring it up. He can’t imagine that she’d love to ruminate on her childhood, though he doesn’t understand why she’d rather hear about someone else’s normal, suburban childhood instead. El must just be less bitter than he is.

Comparably, Will’s childhood was an absolute dream, but it still wasn’t exactly anything he’d love to write home about—cold showers and loud banging certainly isn’t a fantasy for El to get lost in. Not that he’s going to tell her about any of that, obviously, but it’s not as if he has a wealth of happy memories to choose from. He can barely remember the bad ones. The only conclusive proof that Will can ever believe to prove that he was alive before his dad left were photo albums, a younger version of himself drowning in bright over-exposed edges and formaldehyde, embalmed in innocence. Nostalgia is his funerary gown, he knows this very well, but nostalgia only has so much sway when Will was barely even there when the photos were taken. He really isn’t the best person to ask about this. He frowns playfully as it that could veil the shock in his voice and the weight such a question holds, “My childhood?”

Having said her piece, El only nods, her lips drawn thin across her face which is, otherwise, uncannily neutral like she’s been practicing it. Will takes his dread out on a lose piece of thread from his bedsheets and lets himself flip through his mental gallery. He’s always found that photo albums feel like a graveyard, but he’s sure Jonathan would have some semi-impolite opinions on that, so he’s never mentioned it. Now that he scans through it like a rolodex, he’s finding the unsurprising conclusion that it’s mostly blanks, where every picture serves foremost as a tombstone rather than a stilled moment. 

With every obituary, his options are cut down. It’s not like he wants to leave El hanging like this, especially not when she’s clearly upset, but there’s really not a whole lot he can use here. A moment his heart broke, a moment his faith wavered, a moment his innocence was desecrated just a little more, building to a catastrophic conclusion on November 6^th 1983. The scraps of his memory are just that—scraps. He only picks from it because he has nothing else left anymore. His skin crawls at the thought.

There’s one memory that’s so vivid that Will could paint it. It’s a happy one as well, absolutely none of the melancholy that has a habit of attaching onto his bright days like a leech. It’s exactly the kind of thing he knows that she’s searching for, except—

Well.

He knows it’s selfish, but he can’t bring himself to give the last pieces of Mike that he recognises as his own away. His skin crawls at the thought of it. If El is truly going to have him till the day he dies, Will can at least hang onto the past. Just this one thing. If he’s selfish about just this one thing, he can be kind about everything else; he just needs something that’s still his, just something to prove that Mike Wheeler did, once upon a time, look for Will in a crowded room full of people. Things are different now, but Will knows he was once Mike’s favourite person just like how Mike is still Will’s. He’s not sure that can change.

He just can’t share that one. There has to be something else.

Will flips through his memories again, but nothing changes. Blank, blank, Dad, blank, blank, Mike, blank, blank, The Party but the ink is so faded it’s barely legible. He keeps circling back to the same handful of memories and, for better or worse, they’re his. They’re far too precious and fragile to be held anywhere other than his own mind, carefully stored away. It feels like saying them aloud will make them fade, just like all the others. 

There is one that’s not too tender, only tangentially shrouded in the bitterness of retrospect; he actual memory itself is thick with the childlike whimsy she seems to be chasing. It’s as fragile as the rest, but Will knows that he has someone who can retell it to him ad nauseum. After all, Jonathan’s been distant, but it’s not as if they’re going to stop talking. Much worse has come between them than weed. He can give this piece of himself to El; there’s only so much that he can keep hoarded in his mind anyway.

“Alright.” Will shuffles on further the bed, crossing his legs and sitting up straight. It’s all bravado—he keeps his stare firmly locked onto the glass on his wall, his chest wound up into a tight ball—but El doesn’t need to know that. She sits up on her elbows and makes perfect eye contact with him, sweet and attentive in a way that sends a shiver down his spine, but he pretends not to notice. “On the day my dad left—"

“Dad?”

Will blinks, “Well, yeah.” She furrows her eyebrows deeply and, oh. It occurs to him very suddenly that even if Will had never personally gotten The Talk, playgrounds basically double as insider information trading rings and El’s never had that. He’s not sure if she’s ever been around this many people her age at once – Hawkins’ school hallways can already feel overwhelming at times and Lenora’s much larger than their little backwater town. At what point does sex become something you just start to know? “Y’know,” he tries to prod a little and hopes to God this isn’t something he has to explain, “when a mom and a dad love each other very much.”

Whether or not she understands what he’s talking about, El nods slowly to herself like she’s processing. He guesses it makes sense for the thought of a Father Byers to have never crossed her mind; El’s history with family hasn’t exactly been nuclear and it’s not like she’s actually spent much time with the Byers before getting hauled across the country with them. No one ever talks about it anyway; they just carefully blot his face out of family photos and let the black ink speak for itself. Still, it’s a little endearing to watch her brain work to accommodate her new discovery; she’s taking this very seriously. No wonder Mike likes her.

“Okay,” she says with a finality that barely disguises the far-off look in her eyes, “your dad left.”

“He left. And at the time I didn’t realise he was gone for good because he'd left and come back before, and I wanted to be able to get away from their fighting so I drew this little fort and asked Jonathan to help me build it.”

With the hard part done, he lets out a little sigh and shuffles closer to El and her curious eyes searching his face, “And Jonathan knew what was going on, obviously,  but he let me drag him out into the woods behind my house anyway and started helping me collect wood—sticks, really. We spent hours searching for the perfect sticks and branches, and then we spent almost the same amount of time just looking for nails in our shed. It took all night, and I kept telling Jonathan that he didn’t have to help me but he was insistent that it was something we should do together. He tried to teach me how to hammer, I guess because he knew Dad wasn’t going to be around to show me how, but I kept bending all the nails so it took forever. He let me keep trying though, all through the night until we were finished.”

Will’s so deep in the memory, he barely even notices how wide his smile is. He remembers the feverish push to find some sense of autonomy in their little nightmare and the way Jonathan kept insisting to him that things could and would get better. He remembers the rain on his skin and the cool fall night wrapping around them. He remembers sitting inside it for the first time, arranging all his drawings and toys, ticket stubs and comics—all the things Dad never wanted him to keep in the house anyway—and watching the magic come to life before his eyes. He didn’t realise he has that much to say about it, really. He didn’t realise he has that much to say about anything at all. He’s normally more of the listener, but at El’s genuine interest the words seem to just burst out of him, like he’s been holding it back for years.

“Oh,” there’s a kind of wistful sadness on her face, but she makes deliberate eye contact with him anyway, “is it Castle Byers?”

Will’s heart stops dead in his chest.

El shouldn’t know about Castle Byers. By the time she was slowly integrated into the Party, Will was pretty much the only person who ever visited it, there would’ve been no chance for El to have seen it. There’s no way she could know about Castle Byers because she never even told him. Unless Mike took her there because he knew it would be a quiet place for them to make out. Unless she watched the moment the Castle—let’s be honest, the salvageable remains of Will’s childhood—fell to the hands of his malice, his malice that keeps rotting away the only good in his life. He’s not sure what would be worse.

A quiet, burning dread coils tightly in his chest and completely jails Will from the vague freedom he found in talking about his childhood so liberally. He sucks air between his teeth, “Yeah. Castle Byers.”

El must catch the way his face crumples because, finally looking away from him, she rushes to explain, “I met you there. In my mind, when you were stuck.”

Oh.

It’s a lot kinder than the extreme brushstrokes of cruelty he’s been so quick to paint his friends with lately, and it was very different circumstantially, but Will can’t help but shift uncomfortably anyway. He only knew El through mythologised stories, but El also only knew Will through his worst moments, the times where he was consumed by despair and a last attempt to survive. This must be as weird for her as it is for him.

He doesn’t like thinking that anyone’s seen him sink to such a low, but the thought El specifically witnessing his slow deterioration makes his skin crawl with that bone-deep itch. Will doesn’t even remember it, not beyond the feeling of his body slowly decaying with every shaky breath, but that’s the first thing El’s always going to think of when he sees him, just like how he’s always going to see a girl with a cape. A debt he can never repay. He forgets, sometimes, that the strange liminality of their relationship extends beyond himself and how he’s felt since she started occupying a space in his life even prior to them formally meeting. El must just be better at hiding it, though sometimes he still can’t help but look at her and see everything he’s lost. His time in the Upside Down isn’t something he wants to remember but he doesn’t like thinking about the fact that he lost the memories anyway—El has them though. She probably remembers more about it than Will does. He even has to share his traumas with her; nothing can live and die with him alone.

Except Will’s never had a problem with sharing before, so either he came back wrong or he really does have a problem with Eleven. It would explain why his imagination went straight to its cruellest depths for just long enough to forget that she saved him. He’s not sure which of his theories are worse.

It’s so ridiculous to have a problem with El, of all people, because she has so much love to give, even if she clearly doesn’t know what to do with it. She haunts the house like she’s unsure if she’s allowed to live, but Will catches her expression whenever he and Jonathan are watching a movie and trading opinions like cards, or when they have family discussions around the table and she sits in her silence, fighting the itch to reach out. The fight for community is an integral drive, and Will knows better than to assume that El loses it the second she gets home from school. He doesn’t know what to make of El, not really, but he knows that she’s always reaching out, just waiting until she feels a hand looking for her as well. He can’t let his jealousy, his anger and grief that any of this happened in the first place, hold him back from loving her.

Can he?

He’s done sharing with her for today and she can absolutely tell. She sits up fully, and the way she rests on her thigh and absentmindedly feeds her hair—now long enough to slip down her shoulders and begin to fall down her back—reminds him of a painting of a mermaid he once saw. Mythical, even in her vulnerability. She looks ahead absently, but there’s a fondness in her voice when she says, “That sounds fun. Building it with Jonathan.”

“It was.”

The silence engulfs them, momentarily, and only now does Will realise how silent the house is outside of his room. He hasn’t even heard Jonathan creeping down the stairs, turning the squeaky door handle. It must be late, but Will knows that even if she left now, he wouldn’t be able to sleep.

El’s voice is shaky and distant like static as she breaks the silence with confession, “I… have a sister.”

“You do?” Will makes no attempt to hide his surprise.

She smiles gently, “Kali. I ran away from Hop to find Mama, and then I ran to her and her,” she furrows her eyebrows, “friends. In Chicago.”

Mama? Sister? It feels strange hearing about the mundane—perhaps, more accurately, the untraveled timelines—of a superhero. He understands why El was confused about Dad earlier. “When?”

“November,” she shrugs. That explains why this is news to him but still, even if El wasn’t the most talkative person, surely someone would have mentioned it before. Surely her boyfriend would consider it important enough to note and check-in on, but he’s never heard Mike, or anyone for that matter, even allude to El having any family besides Hopper. Her explanation is clumsy and stunted, like she’s not thought about how to explain any of this until she opens her mouth, her lips stuttering around the story. He wonders, vaguely, if this is the first time she’s actually talked about it—at least, with someone besides Hopper.

“She and her friends dress… funny. Black clothes and big hair, but some bright colours. They wore jewellery and makeup—boys and girls. Bitchin’,” she giggles under her breath and Will can’t help the smile that creeps on his face. It sounds fun, running away to a big city where you can disappear in a crowd and play pretend, finding himself by blending in. It sounds like one of his late-night fantasies, the kind that leaves him too hopeful for his own good. He can almost imagine El’s big curious eyes bouncing around the sky scrapers and narrow streets as she drowns in the evening rush and hope.

“Did you stay for long?”

The smile slips from her face and she shakes her head, her eyes glazing over. “Only one or two days. Kali was… angry. She wanted me to be angry too. I want to stop my anger. I love her… but it couldn’t work. My friends needed me.”

We’re happy you came back feels like the appropriate response here, but Will can’t bring himself to say it. Even if he is happy El is here with him—which, make no mistake, despite everything, he absolutely is—it feels disingenuous. El deserves to have a sister to guide her and pull her back up, to help her build her fantasies, damp stick by damp stick; bent nail by bent nail. She deserves the family she never had. Instead, he keeps rattling off questions; it’s the only way she ever talks about herself. Will gets it. He frowns, “She was angry?”

Pursing her lips, El is clearly struggling to find the words. “Kali is Eight. She is angry at Papa. At the lab,” she explained, her voice even as tears well up in her eyes. Sisters not by blood but by circumstance, by experiment, then. Yet they were separated anyway, torn away from the one person who knows how it feels to ache like you do. The one person who would treat you like just another kid because they know how it feels when someone hurts you like an adult. Somehow, Will thinks that must hurt even more than if they were related.

He doesn’t really know what to say to that because, frankly, what is there to say? Nothing he says will heal her wounds, and he can’t even truly empathise because, through everything, Will’s always been able to come home to his brother and mom. El hasn’t. His heart aches for her, but every platitude he could possibly come up with would be hollow in the face of her pain. She’s in his room, on his bed, looking in Will’s eyes and telling him this for a reason. He can’t just let the weight sit in the air; they don’t know each other well enough to understand that it’ll eventually dissolve. He tries something else, “Why don’t you write about her for your assignment? I don’t know if you… got a chance to just be kids together, but—"

She cuts him off, stern and blunt, “I don’t remember.”

“You don’t remember your sister?”

El opens her mouth to speak, hesitates, and shuts it tight. She starts again, but only a choked sound comes out. With a restrained growl, she flips onto her knees and shuffles closer to Will, grabbing his hand like a lifeline. As she twists her wrist, black ink begins to peek out from under her loose flannel sleeve; she looks up at Will through her eyelashes and back down to her wrist as if she’s asking him something. Somehow, he knows exactly what she means and, with his free hand, he pushes her the flannel back, revealing her tattoo. She swallows and tries once more, “Eleven. If I am number eleven, then there’s Ten. And Nine. Down to One. Maybe there is more, even Twelve. But I don’t know. I only saw Kali in Mama’s memories, not in mine. They are my memories, I know they are, I can feel it in my body, but it’s gone.”

With that, El pulls her hands away and letting her sleeve fall. At the same time, some fundamental cog in Will’s head clicks into place, and the gnawing feeling ebbs and transforms into something more meaningful. That is exactly what he’s been waiting for someone to say his entire life; exactly. The fear of forgetting more, the way it lingers under your skin and crawls and scratches at you until you’ve no choice but to bleed it all out, even down to the way that she couldn’t find the words to explain the intensity of the chasm in her mind, he knows what that’s like and it is so inexplicably frustrating.

For the first time, Will stops looking past El and looks at her, really looks at her, and as she materialises before his eyes into a real girl, Will’s struck by how similar they look.  Her jaw is rounder and her lips poutier, but she has the same wide eyes as him, deep set and framed by eyebrows that fall over her eyelids and her cheekbone curling prominently around the hollow of her skull. Her jawline is stronger than his, but her chin sits forward all the same. Her nose is cute and buttonish but at its bottom, her philtrum is wide and long, just like his. She has this haunted look in her eyes, cradling a reserved ember of hope somewhere deep within them, and he recognises it instantly. It’s a little strange, actually, and for the first time he understands why people at school call them The Twins despite having different last names. He and El are a lot more similar than he ever allowed himself to realise. When he looks at her, something lurks under his skin but there's no trace of the malice that normally resides there. Will can’t believe it’s taken him this long to set aside his nerves and to just look. 

“Yeah. I think I understand that.”

There’s no anger, no jealousy, no debt he must repay. There’s only El who, whether he likes it or not, is his sister now. Will knows well enough how siblings treat each other to know how to treat her.

The cool metal of the coat hanger hook sears into Will’s fingers as the shirt dangles down. Dark grey with ropes of blue that splashed across it, trailing up to the sleeves. It’s a little bland, not something he’d necessarily wear when given the choice, but he doesn’t really have the luxury to be fussy at the moment. The material is thick and high quality, there’s no stains or holes and it’s large enough that he’ll be able to layer a shirt or two underneath it.  He throws it onto the pile in his shopping cart, already half-full.

Out of the corner of his eye, Mike crosses his arms tightly across his chest and pouts, muttering something to himself. Will barely suppresses the urge to roll his eyes.

He likes to think of himself as a relatively tolerant person. Whenever hot anger licks at his stomach, he snuffs the flame with reason and logic. The fire spits smoke and ash into his body and mind, lets it rest on his tongue, but he always manages an explanation that tampers the heat for, at least, a moment: he tries to swallow the smothering attention his mom gives him while accepting the slow IV drip from his friends because, logically, Mom should be paranoid about Will’s safety and his friends should focus their energy on their relationships. Even if it doesn’t quell his emotions completely, it manages to subdue the anger into the base, defenceless hurt that’s at the core of his frustration.

The problem is that’s Will’s patience is entirely taught. He’ll nod his head and accept whatever spurns prick and dig into his skin, but the frustration stays skin-deep until someone deals the final blow—always something otherwise inconsequential—and it comes gushing out like hot blood. It looks like a crime scene every single time, and it winds up with Will rushing to clean the evidence before anyone can realise the depth of his anger or examine his words too closely. He always says something incriminating, and in the face of everything going on right now, Will’s not sure he can handle someone finally following the trail of blood he leaves behind every time he explodes.

It's not the worst thing that could happen at the moment, obviously, but Will’s barely holding it together as it is. His secrets are itching to be revealed – something about a slow-motion apocalypse fills him with reckless abandon – and he’s almost certain the next time his body becomes too full of teenage angst the fire burning inside him will leave embers that he can’t explain away. They can’t afford any disharmony right now, and Will can’t afford to say anything that could risk him being evicted from the Wheeler house. His stay is already tenuous: after a week of sleeping on the floor in Hopper’s cabin, Will’s found himself crashing on the Wheeler’s bedroom couch at Mike’s own insistence but both Mike’s parents and Will’s mom seem eager for the boundaries that’ve protected the Wheeler’s cold stoicism for decades to fall back into play. Picking a fight with your host must be universally considered a bad idea, exasperated only when said host is Mike Wheeler.

Still, he’s been like this all day and it’s getting more than a little irritating. “Did you say something?” Will asks, light and airy as if it’ll compensate for the ash behind his words.

Mike shrugs, running his hand along the rails, his fingers bumping with the ridges of tightly-packed coat hangers. “I just don’t really understand how buying used clothes is any different to getting used clothes for free.”

This again? “There’s a lot of people in Hawkins who need clothes. We can’t just take all of them,” but Will’s had this conversation about 8 times in the past week and he knows Mike’s rehearsed response to that: you’re one of those people! So, for good measure, he tacks on, “Besides, we have more options here.”

“I mean, yeah, but we drove all the way to Indianapolis just to get clothes, and out of our limitless options, you pick something grey?” He all but spits, as if Will’s choices personally offended him, as if he hasn’t had to suffer through dozens of parent-teacher interviews where the main feedback they relay is for him to tone it down a bit. Not that Mike would necessarily know about that, but Will’s not naïve enough to believe that he’s never thought it himself. “Your mom gave you $70. You can probably buy something new you actually like.”

Will rolls his eyes—it’s times like this when he remembers that him and Mike had vastly different upbringings. “Mike, I have three changes of clothes at the moment. $70 is not going to cover an entirely brand-new wardrobe.”

“I offered you some of my clothes,” he furrows his eyebrows, like he’s genuinely confused why that’s not an option. Which is a good thing, Mike shouldn’t know, but the way he says it so casually as if he were just offering to buy Will bread makes his heart hurt and his cheeks embarrassingly hot. There’s an instinctive urge to justify the ball of mortification knotting in his stomach, it wraps around his spine like vines pulling him back down to Earth: of course Will is embarrassed at the prospect of borrowing Mike’s clothes—he doesn’t want to overstay his welcome!

The excuse is so lame that it makes him feel more embarrassed. Will’s not sure there’s much point in pretending that the core of this is anything other than it really is anymore, but the impulse is still there, wedged deep into his sternum and spreading like a tumour, growing into something inoperable. Almost as inoperable as the base feelings themselves, though he knows, somehow, that those are much deeper. When his body inevitably gives in to the rot and finally allows his skin to decay, the only things that will remain of William Byers is his skeleton, whatever Evil it is that lurks under his skin and the way he feels about Mike. There’s not much to him beyond that.

In an incredibly weak attempt to distract from the sugary pink blush painting his face, Will makes quick work of flipping through the coat hangers, barely even looking at the shirts. “I know, and I appreciate it but I really don’t know if they’ll fit. You’re a lot taller than me.”

However, the universe is cruel to Will, so Mike insists, “Still, they’ll fit. They always used to.”

“When we were kids,” he laughs, but there’s enough of a finality to convince Mike to drop it. Thank God—Will always used to feel so unstoppable when he slipped into Mike’s sweaters on cold nights where their campaigns ran through the night. Something about the soft wool felt like a warm, reassuring hug that pushed Will towards action and impulse, as if the sweater could promise a safe haven to return to no matter the consequences. Lately, Will’s impulses have strayed far from casting fireball with only 4 hit-points remaining and, instead, tend to look more like spilling all the secrets that’ve sat eagerly on his tongue for years, running straight into the Upside Down and pleading with Him to end His reign of terror.

Mike gives the same kind of resigned, theatrical sigh that his mother does, “Are you at least going to get a new coat? You can’t afford to have a shitty used one.”

For the first time all day, Mike’s made a good point; Will cannot stand the cold. it sends him spiralling until he’s reached a place deep in the back of his mind, one he doesn’t know how to get out of. The first winter after he came back from the Upside Down was bad enough, but ever since He got to Will, the cold sends him back to the place where Will and the Shadow Monster were synonymous, lingering even after He was forced out. If Will wants to make it through to next January, he can’t afford to have a jacket that won’t keep him warm. He also can’t afford a jacket in general so, really, he’s already damned.  That’s not exactly news at this point.

“It’s nice to come out here, though,” he pivots instead of answering and hopes that wherever he lands is still relatively safe. “It’ll be our last chance to before the military moves in.”

Mike groans, rolling his eyes, “Don’t remind me.”

It’s light and playful, but Will knows that the military problem is much lot more severe than an annoyed groan could warrant. An indefinite town-wide quarantine, government scouring the town for El and surely keeping a close eye on the rest of them, doctors, probably. Hawkins felt inescapable at the best of times—an umbilical cord harnessing Will to the gates, waiting for the moment he’s finally reborn after his death all those years ago; a slow, painful nostalgia that drips on his skin like candle wax, an eternal scar reminding him of what he’s lost by pulling away from his home, whatever his real home may be—and now they’re keeping them physically barricaded away from the outside world? They’ll be stuck with the monsters, awaiting their judgement day with no chance of escape.

Judgement day already has struck, though. At least, according to the standing churches that people flock to indiscriminately; almost every signboard in town says something about a sixth seal, paired with a call to arms leading them away from volunteering and towards daily sermons and intense prayer. Despite his Christian burial, Will can count the number of times he’s been to church on his fingers, but it still stirs something hopeful in him to see the people of Hawkins so desperate to save their town, even if he knows that whether or not God is real, no light touches the Upside Down as It bleeds through the membrane between worlds.

Still, even the churches are starting to scare him. Maybe its just because, for a multitude of reasons, Will knows that preachers and devotees spit his name like his disappearance was a fulcrum in everyone’s collective suffering, but the antagonism had begun to leak out of the four walls of salvation. He was getting the impression that, in the 8 months they were gone, the Byers family had become something of an Urban Legend so it was back to people avoiding him like he was seeking a soul to corrupt every time he walked into a room. It’s dehumanising in all the same ways it’s always been, but he’s better off than his friends. Dustin still wasn’t talking to them—he’d come to meetings, listen and sit and observe, but there was no trace of the smartass he’s always known him to be, as if Eddie’s death had utterly hollowed him. Lucas started avoiding school when the rumours that Hellfire tried to sacrifice Max spread. The newspaper listing Max as one of the gravely injured with YOU DID THIS written crudely in thick, black Sharpie, shoved into Lucas’s locker was the last straw. He spends most his time volunteering or with Max, anything to preoccupy him.

Mike, on the other hand, was completely normal. More like himself than he’s been in the past 18 months, almost like the optimistic kid Will knew like the back of his hand. Grief consumed him for days, as it does everyone, but Eddie’s death rolled off his back. He’ll whine about small tragedies that littered his days and completely skirt around the ones that actually mean something, like he’s barricaded himself from thinking about any of it. Part of him thinks that’s the main reason why he’s trailing Will like his shadow and why he insisted on coming down to Indianapolis with him and Jonathan today—Will’s current condition of having to do his laundry three times a week is tedious and annoying, but it’s a problem with a solution. This is something Mike can actually help solve.

Will makes quick work of flipping through every shirt hanging on the rail until something catches his attention. Reluctant as he is to admit it, Mike’s right; everything is so monotone and brown. The only colour that he can reliably look for is flannel, but—and not that he’d ever admit this—he’s not that big on wearing patterns even when it’s not flannel. He hoped that a big city would have at least some block colours, but clearly Will’s tastes are too eccentric for anywhere in Indiana. Even California was barely better; the only time Will’s ever been able to find clothes that he actually liked was when Starcourt conspicuously established itself as rural Indiana’s number one mall, a world of trends at his disposal. It doesn’t matter, though. He has to start again anyway.

He feels a like a bit of a girl spending so much energy on clothes, mourning his favourite shirts, but he just can’t help it. There was something satisfying about putting on his own clothes that felt like something he’d actually wear. It brought a dab of light to his days, allowed him to actually see Will Byers in his entirety whenever he looked in the mirror. Now, it’s like none of that ever happened and there’s no point in seeking that anymore, not when it keeps getting torn away; not when there’s more important matters at hand. He just needs to keep his head down and focus on surviving both the monsters and the strange looks he’s gotten since moving back.

Mike’s clumsy voice snaps him out of his frenzied search; he’s digging through his pockets in a very lame attempt at pretending he’s casual about this, as if Will doesn’t know him well enough to know that he’s already scripted this conversation. “Oh, but—hey. The reason I actually came over was to give you this.” He finally finds what he’s looking for and flips it in his hand before presenting it, and Will’s heart stutters to a stop. “You like this band, right?”

It’s a Violent Femmes’ tape, coated in a thick layer of dust that dances in the light as it falls off. There’s a name engraved into the case that catches the sun’s glare, but the handwriting’s too messy for him to read it. Instead, and despite his better judgment, he stares at Mike whose face is twitching with earnestness as he’s trying to play this off casually.

Will does like them, but he also doesn’t talk music with anyone except Jonathan and he cannot stand the Femmes: The lyrics aren’t even clever; he’s just stammering out every spoilt 16 year old’s diary entry. All the instruments they use make me feel like I’m listening to a school band.

Since Jonathan’s incidental shaming, Will’s not told a single soul he likes Violent Femmes. He’s been too embarrassed to. He can’t even begin to work out where Mike learnt this from, or why he’s suddenly interested in Will’s music after years of claiming it was too weird, but all he knows is that this means that Mike’s been watching, in one way or another. Maybe counting on his total obliviousness to keep Will’s little problem under wraps is a much weaker strategy than anticipated.

He flips the tape over and starts reading the tracklist with a very concentrated pout that makes Will’s heart do a little flip in his chest. “Am I wrong? It has the song, right? With the black and white music video and the guy with the face and the girl dancing?”

Will’s very practiced at supplementing the silence with quiet smiles and short quips whenever Mike does something that flusters him beyond reason but right now, he feels like he’s thirteen again and learning that memorising the curve of your friend’s nose is, perhaps, a little creepy. He opens his mouth to speak, but his throat is sutured impossibly tight and, instead, he makes some weird, strained, half choking noise, but Will’s shame goes straight over Mike’s head. “You know, she’s dancing with the sailor, and there’s a dinner table?” He keeps trying to explain, like he genuinely thinks that Will is just confused—which, in all fairness, he is, but anyone with eyes could see that the only thing he’s concerned about right now is the pink blush on Mike’s knuckles wrapping around the case and the little divots between Mike’s dark , curious eyebrows.

And, as if God saw he was still standing and decided to smite William Byers for all his sins, Mike starts trying to sing it.

It occurs to him, suddenly, that he’s not actually heard Mike sing before and even with his memory, he’s certain of that. It’s just one of those hard lines he has for himself and Will’s never had the chance to see him cross it; he tries not to focus on why this is what makes him bend his rules to life like Will’s been secretly hoping he’ll do for years, but the answer can only be that he feels comfortable enough in his own skin to let Will drink in a little more of him. In daydreams he had when he was younger, the kind he would rather die than admit to, he’d imagine sitting in a cozy basement, Mike singing with him and even now he can still hear the melodies imaginary-Mike’s voice carried and the way it dipped and turned with the music; soft and tender with this occasional masculine grit that would manage to sneak in and texturise his words, reveal his emotions just enough so Will can pine a little more.

Except now, in a thrift store in the middle of Indianapolis, his voice is terrible, actually, and it’s not as if Gone Daddy Gone is a vocally complex song but his voice cracks anyway under the pressure of the forced depth he drops to. Somehow, it’s better than all his prepubescent fantasies. It’s the single dorkiest thing Will’s ever seen and he wants so badly that his bones ache. It’s a miracle, truly, but Will’s slight musical pretention trumps the fluttering in his stomach when he manages, “It’s… lovely dress.”  

“Lovely dress? Not love your?”

“Yeah: beautiful girl, lovely dress, high school smiles—he’s not—whatever, it doesn’t matter,” he cuts himself off abruptly but the second he does it, all the tenderness of his heart starts banging against his chest like a drumline. Just because he can’t help himself, because Will is so deeply selfish, he tacks it on: “I can’t believe you remembered.”

Mike rolls his eyes like that shouldn’t even be something Will questions, “Obviously I would. I’m not a complete asshole.”

“Okay but… this was released in ’82 and it’s still not that popular. It mostly gets airplay on college radio – you hardly even listen to The Squawk.”

Mike scoffs, “Because the guy that did the morning shows played basically nothing but Corey Hart and Madonna and he literally said that the only reason he plays her so much is because he finds her hot! His replacement isn’t top priority or anything, obviously, but I hope whoever they bring in has at least slightly better taste.”

“I mean, sure, but I’m talking about that album.”

“I guess, but,” Mike takes a deep sigh and drops his voice, looking just about anywhere but Will, “just before you left, we had that sleepover at mine, remember? And none of us wanted to sleep but we were all too tired to do or pay attention to anything, so we put on MTV as background noise at, like, 1:30 in the morning. When it came on, you were singing it to yourself.”

Will flushes a deep shade of pink. He didn’t know Mike paid that much attention to him.

Sometimes, he wants to grab Mike by the shoulders and just shake him until he realises exactly what he’s doing to him. How his innocuous, platonic efforts restart his heart with a false sense of hope again and again despite Will’s better judgement. Other times, he wants nothing more than to keep playing pretend. He knows he shouldn’t, not only for the disappointment that’ll worm its way under his skin and nest and fester into something hateful again, but more for El and Mike’s sake. They’re in a weird spot, that’s obvious, but they’re still in love, a love so deep that it makes what Will feels like is the ocean of his affection look more like a tiny, half evaporated puddle. Even if he did meddle, for whatever selfish reason he can justify to himself, it would only be wish fulfilment, maybe inch Mike closer to that realisation that part of Will’s so desperate for him to come to already so he can just let this go.

(Will knows, deep in his heart, that he’ll never let this go. This is integral to the rhythm of his heart, the flowing of his blood. Even without his feelings, Mike is a fundamental part of Will that he’ll never be able to unlearn. Luck would have it that the first friend Will ever makes is the only person who can sort his tangled soul into legible strings, learn to interpret it as poetry. Or maybe it’s some kind of karmic punishment from another life, but Will can’t help but think that he’s doomed to trail after Mike in every life. He can’t tell if things could be different in another, if the problem isn’t his gender but his corrupt being. It’s all very theoretical, nothing he actually believes in, but he wonders and wonders and wonders. He can’t help it.

Somehow, Hawkins feels like its own life, restless and vindictive, every hour a minute to the outside world. Maybe that’s why he was so confident in California, so ready to spill his heart out on a canvas, and maybe that’s why he’s even allowing himself to wonder now beyond town lines, Entertaining the thought is dangerous enough, but in the secrecy of the city, he can’t help but indulge himself.)

Will bites back a smile, averting his gaze to hide his blush. “I forgot about that. I didn’t realise you noticed.”

“Of course I do, it’s you.” If Will didn’t know better, he’d say that Mike’s face is shining with something close to pride and, if he really looks closely, a rosy tinge. It’s incriminatingly sweet, the kind of thing that would definitely draw attention in a school hallway, but Mike just keeps staring at Will with those soft eyes, letting the confession settle between them. Will feels his shoulders relax as a dopey grin creeps onto his face. He doesn’t know how this could ever be wrong when it makes him feel this right. Mike smiles back, but as soon as he does he awkwardly clears his throat and drops Will’s gaze, “Anyway, um, I know you’re here to get clothes but we’re meant to be stocking up on music anyway, just in case something happens.”

He can’t help but laugh, “I don’t know if Violent Femmes, of all bands, is going to save me from Vecna.”

“Well, you like it anyway, right? All your stuff’s still in California, and I know it’s not the same, obviously but, I don’t know. I feel like you should have something that’s still yours, y’know? I’ll even get it for you, I just… you deserve something.”

He knows Mike just feels bad for him, obviously he knows. Mike likes to rush in and solve all of Will’s problems while unknowingly causing enough that Will could fill a library with his romantic sonnets and woes. He’s always done this, ever since they were kids when Will would come to school crying for whatever reason, so it’s no surprise. Nothing he hasn’t trained for. Still, he can’t stop his heart from leaping and stuttering and his kindness. His stupid, selfish kindness that Will would fall for again and again. He’s so caring that it’s suffocating, so beautiful he wants to scream. It’s enough to make Will forget who he is and what he’s doing; the waves of his emotions are enough to erode all of the firm boundaries he’s written up to keep them both safe. It almost makes him feel okay about it all.

And, frustratingly, Mike’s not entirely wrong. Seeing his whole life so easily condensed into boxes filled him with an uncomfortable sense of finality in the first place, like his life was so finite and surmisable. He hated it. And now his entire life, 15 years worth of memories, are entirely inaccessible. All he has is the faint, worn and carelessly cut film reel in his head and a reputation that proceeds him. At least that has verifiable evidence; Will doesn’t even have his birth certificate. He lost boxes of photos and ticket stubs, the records Jonathan meticulously schooled him on, his favourite childhood toys, the posters he’s been scabbing off tired employees since he was about 10, the sketchbook that’s incriminating in more ways than one but, fuck, it was his. It’s all gone, and as soon as the military comes in he won’t be able to even survey what’s salvageable until Vecna’s dead at least. Without any of that, with barely any of his memories, who even is he? Is he just Zombie Boy, couch surfing his way through high school? Is that all he can be?

It would be nice to have something again. Something he knows is his own beyond necessity. Maybe it won’t prove that Will was once a normal, worthwhile kid and maybe it won’t bring back all the memories that he’s barely holding onto, but at least it would make him feel a little more like a real person again, not just a cautionary tale or, worse, a bad omen. Besides, the only music Will’s been listening to for the past week or two since he got back is whatever top 40 station Mrs. Wheeler plays while she cooks and Jonathan’s old worn L.A. Woman tape he got for his tenth birthday that, somehow, wound up in Argyle’s glovebox, neither of which Will’s decidedly keen on.

You deserve something rings back in his head. Will’s not sure he deserves anything, not when he brings cosmic terror with his with every step he takes, but isn’t he allowed to want things? Maybe he’s not allowed to want Mike, maybe he’s not allowed to want peace, but this is a material good. Everyone wants something material; it’s the only way they keep the market circular. It’s the one thing he’s explicitly granted permission to want and, besides, it’s twenty cents.

“Okay.”

Mike looks elated in a way that Will has no clue how to translate. “Really? You mean I’m right?”

Oh, Jesus. Thank God their ongoing survival horror was confined to land and wormholes — if this was Jaws, Mike and his ego would’ve tipped them all overboard years ago. Will rolls his eyes so hard he can hear his mom chastising him from back home, but he can’t stop himself from smiling. “You’re often right.”

He shrugs coyly, as if he doesn’t know that, and adds the tape to the pile in the shopping cart. Maybe memories are less stagnant than Will thought.

Will can remember the day this all started. Of course he does. With the browning of the grass fall began to creep in, chasing the end of summer’s high. Will didn’t care—winter was always his favourite anyway, because he liked the cold and warming up with hot cocoa and the muted colours of flowers as they began to wilt was prettier than the bright yellow and purples that thrived under the sun’s glare. What he did mind, though, was that he spent the entire morning alone. He’d never actually been alone like this before; Jonathan always found time out of his day to keep him company until Mom could rush home or until Dad could drag himself out of bed, whatever that counted for. There were teachers, sure, but he’d never really been left to his own devices like this; he didn’t know that rooms full of people could feel so empty. It was scary being alone. At the time, he was sure he was going to be alone forever.

That is, until he felt the A-frame of the swingset he was on balance with the weight of another person. It was the boy who had been staring at him all morning, but stubbornly kept to himself as he played in a corner while Will drew. Dad said that people would stare at him if he kept drawing, but he always said that they’d be mean and this kid didn’t seem mean; he also never warned Will against talking to those people. The boy was a little shorter than him with a mop of black hair, little ringlets that sprung out and down his face. Will was really nervous about ruining his nice new shoes, but the boy’s were already stained with grass and dirt even though the rubber was still shiny and white. His eyes were glassy, but there was a wide smile on his face when he spoke. He remembers there being a butterfly, but Will’s almost certain that those were just the ones in his stomach.

It stands out so distinctly in his childhood memories. It was the first time that someone chose to love him—Will knows, now that he’s older, that you can’t control your feelings but that love is a choice that you keep making, but at the time, the idea of someone seeing him and choosing him was revolutionary. He was so proud of himself for making a friend, even though he was just following Mike’s lead. He was almost certain that something he’d do would’ve upset someone, somehow, so coming home in one piece was exciting enough alone, but, that day, Will came home with a friend!

The memory is sweet, but it’s unwelcome. He can see the demo—himself? Vecna?—hurdling towards Mike with primal drive to seek and destroy. And, God, Mike looks so fucking scared. He’s stumbling back, almost falling back against the bullbar of the defunct military truck, a body slumped over its steering wheel. His breathing is shallow and quick; there’s deep gash on his cheek dripping blood and there’s about to be so much more, bursting from his chest like streamers as he wails in agony and Will gets a front row seat to the way his muscles spasm as they’re attacked. All Will can think about is the little boy who watched him all morning until he found the courage to ask; the little boy with freckles like stars that dot the night’s dark face. That boy, that sweet, moody, understanding, harsh, soft, courageously stupid boy is about to meet his fate and it’s all Will’s fault for being so weak.

It's not just Mike: he can see the way Lucas’ eyes are darting back and forth between the monster and the gate where the children were ripped away from him; he can see the way Robin’s chest rises and falls yet she stills, like she’s resigned to her fate. Will doesn’t want to see any of this. He wants to crawl into his mom’s arms and just lie there, he wants to bury his real horrors in comic books and drawings in Castle Byers, he wants to keep playing pretend in Mike’s basement and just forget about all of this. But he’s seeing all of it, feeling all of their bloodlust run through his veins and his mind like his body’s been violated again because he’s just a means to an end. Mike’s right in front of him, literally right there, and he can’t bring himself to do anything except think about what he’s losing. Mike, maybe for the same reasons as pathetic, weak, broken Will, doesn’t move. He raises his arms to shield his face because what else can he do when their fight is in vain?

Will should do something. He wants to do something. He does nothing except mourn.

The day on the swings was the first time that someone chose to love Will. A day became a week, weeks into months and months into years and, quite literally, Will would not have survived without Mike’s love. He remembers even thinking that when he was a kid. Mike saved him with open doors and warm hugs when Dad was getting too angry. Mike saved him with protective looks and brave retorts when people at school saw something evil in him. Mike knew what Will’s signs of life were and kept searching until he had answers. Mike saved him when there was evil in him; he chose to listen when he knew he couldn’t trust the words out of Will’s mouth. God, he must’ve loved Will so much to keep saving him like that. Will wishes he could save Mike now. Save everyone, end this all right here. Sometimes, he thinks dying would be an easy way to do that now, but Vecna doesn’t care about him. He never has. Will’s death would just be another notch on his belt as he inches closer to total control.

Inches towards control, he reminds himself. Vecna doesn’t have total control; the monsters fall to their master foremost but they have their own sentience that they obey. They’re not even totally amoral—didn’t D’artangan let Will’s friends pass through the tunnels because of his relationship with Dustin? Vecna craves control and dominion because he doesn’t have it for himself. Will, realistically, has more control than Vecna because the hivemind may be in his bloodstream, but it’s not in his mind. Not anymore. If Will’s pet theory is right and Vecna and The Mind Flayer are a lot more of the same than anyone realises, then Vecna has barely any control, barely any independent will. If he’s right, they’ve been both severely over and underestimating Vecna. The Mind Flayer is the one with all the control; Vecna’s just a conduit with psionic abilities.

Then, he realises as his conversation with Mike from earlier bashes urgently against his skull, wouldn’t Will at least partially also wield the Mind Flayer’s control?

Despite being part of the hivemind, Dart was able to fight the Mind Flayer’s control because of his relationship with Dustin, because of love. If Will has that control, has that love, then what’s stopping him?

Love. Will’s always surrounded by so much love, but he never accepts it because it feels unearned. He doesn’t deserve that love, so he shrugs it off and plays it down. But he’s known love since he was born, and there’s not been a second in his life where he was unloved by someone. Jonathan loves him. Mom loves him. His friends love him. Mike loves him. Will loves them, more than what even seems possible. That’s objective, and there’s ample empirical proof for it. Even when he’s cruel and whiny and when he’s totally lost himself, there’s always someone who loves him and is willing to rein him back to shore. That must count for something.

Robin’s words finally, truly, click. Whether he’s good or bad, Will is loved. He is loved simply because he exists, so he cannot be the evil he feels down to his bones. There’s only so much a person can hate themself before they begin to evaporate completely. There’s no amount of hating yourself that can ever make you into a better person, because despite what he’s always been told, misery doesn’t have to be his final destination.

It’s a beautiful clarity rather than a crushing inevitability and, here’s what he knows: Will Byers, 16 years old, lives in a world where he’s always been told that he is, first and foremost, corrupt. He’s been led to believe through his entire life that just because he’s bitter and jealous he must be vindictive. They say his sole purpose on this planet is to test the faith and fortitude of God’s children while disease incubates in his soul. He knows that his heart is overflowing with so much love that he doesn’t know where to place it all, so much so that he cries it out of his body. Will would give everything for the people he loves and they’ve done the same for him a million times over now. The guilt that normally creeps in with that realisation never comes, because wouldn’t he do the exact same for someone he loves? Whether it be his friends, El, Mom, Jonathan or Mike, Will knows he would drop everything in a heartbeat to search for them until they were found. It bursts from his chest; every argument he’s ever had with them is fuelled by nothing but pure love, no malice in sight. The only anger that lingered and consumed was the anger against himself, but holding onto that anger does nothing but push people away. He needs to stop looking in the mirror and expecting Vecna, or his dad, to look back. He needs to stop letting people tell him who he is just because of how and who he loves.

Mom, Jonathan and El are his everything. They’re the people who are always standing guard behind him, ready to pick him up whenever he falls because they see something in him worth picking up the exact same way that he sees it in them. Their patience is eternal, their kindness is everything and they operate on the exact same unsettling frequency that Will does. Even in a crowded room, he’s never really alone because he carries the weight of their love with him constantly. He thinks of the way Mom used to show off his drawings, all that Jonathan sacrificed for Will and how disastrous it would be to throw away all that love. He doesn’t know how to do much else but love; he’s been pretending for far too long that he doesn’t.

Try as he might, loving is at the core of his being, a fragment of his jigsaw heart rather than an extension of it and that extends beyond his family in much, much more complex ways. Of all the sediments of memories he manages to gather, those have the deepest clutch on some tender part of himself that he keeps behind lock-and-key. But learning to love himself means learning to accept the softness Mike brings out of him. It means understanding that through the melancholy and the hurt, loving Mike is sewn into the fabric of his mind, and ripping him out would just unravel Will completely. It hasn’t been a crush for a long time, but he never understood just how deep it ran. He’s not sure there’s a whole lot he can do about it, but Will likes who he is when he’s with Mike. He feels normal, for once, until reality crashes back down over his head. Why should any of that be wrong when he feels so good? 

Yes, it hurts. A lot sometimes. Sometimes like a hammer through his teeth, like the slow collapse of his lungs, like ten pills and a gun against his temple. It aches and cuts and even if he walks away with bruises and lacerations, Mike’s one of the only people who makes Will feel real and worthwhile. It makes him feel like, maybe, his feelings could be too.

He dreams of being able to proudly announce just how deep his love runs even if Mike never reciprocated, because being able to love Mike is a joy in itself. It’s lipstick stains that linger long after the rogue has been scrubbed, it’s knowing that even when you’re not together you’ll share the same moon, it’s in little gifts that signpost that you exist not only in your own bubble, but in your person’s bubble as well. Even if he never has that for himself, isn’t it nice to have something to hold onto, the hope you are worthy of that kind of love? Despite all the frustration and shame, Will wouldn’t change it for the world. How lucky is he to have someone to love and miss and cry for so dearly? And, either way, there’s not a whole lot anyone can do about it. It’s been far too long for Will to come back to shore.

He’s more comfortable with the idea than he ever thought he could be. If Will Byers is irreparably corrupted, Mike’s soft gaze is both his penance and his retribution. He can’t find it in himself to be angry about that anymore. The only thing he’s angry about right now is that Mike’s going to die without ever knowing just how wonderful Will knows he is. The little boy with freckles and curly hair and a wide smile and kind voice is about to die.

The kids are gone, and Will is shrouded in absolute dread because even if the memory isn’t quite there in his head, he knows on an innate level what comes next, but there’s still half a second until Will’s friends are gone too. He doesn’t have the luxury of dwelling. Suddenly, the turn of a key, the tugging of a plug.  The plugging of his selfhood, the turn of the screw into his flesh, maybe. He’s too far removed from himself to even begin to understand what exactly. It’s not for a lack of trying, though, and he clumsily staples a slightly adjusted theory together out of his clouded memories as they slowly reveal themselves to him.

Here’s what Will’s going to do about it: he’s going to try so fucking hard to just make something happen. He’s going to save Mike and Lucas and Robin and he’s going to never put them in any danger again. He’s going to stop trying to draw the creeping under his skin out. He’s going to let the feeling grow and grow until it becomes a buzz, a rush of power. He’s going to save those kids and make sure no child ever suffers the same fate. He’s going to kill Vecna. He’s going to learn to live with himself.

He thinks about the painting, his feelings staining canvas clear as day, and he thinks about the way Mike’s face lit up as he unrolled it like an ancient scroll. He thinks about Mike the Brave—the heart, Will’s heart—leading the party, about Will the Wise standing on the side as he watches Sundar the Bold draw back his bow and Nog cheering their victory while preparing to pick up the pieces. He watches and waits, passive and slow, but Will the Wise is only a support if Will plays him like one. He can be a strong offence.

Will takes a chance—and it’s a big fucking chance seeing as his body is still aching from the burn and his mind reeling, he must be delirious to even be attempting this—and he rolls the dice. It’s a natural 20.