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Will.
There was never any question. Even before their dad left, Jonathan was more of a father to Will than Lonnie was, and when Joyce was gone, at work or lost in her own head, Jonathan was the one that Will went to. For everything. For Band-Aids and food and comfort and even choosing what to wear, sometimes, when the options were overwhelming, and he didn’t know what went best with what.
He sat on the floor of their living room, his Dungeons and Dragons books spread out all around him, a calculator by his elbow, dice scattered haphazardly about. He stared at the blank character sheet in front of him, stuck in a rut. He didn’t even know how to do this. Why did he tell Mike that he would figure it out by himself? He felt like such an idiot. Why did he ever think that he could do this on his own?
The front door opened and shut quietly from behind him, and there was the clanking-jangle of Jonathan putting his housekeys in the bowl on the kitchen counter by the door. His footsteps, slow and soft, like he was trying very hard to be quiet, approached Will, and he knew exactly when Jonathan caught sight of him and could tell that something was bothering him, because he did that little hitching-breathy-hum he did whenever he caught sight of Will worrying at the skin around his fingernails with single-minded focus. “Hey, bud, what’s the matter?” he sunk to the carpet beside Will, careful not to nudge a single dice or ruffle any paper. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” Will lied. Jonathan wrapped a hand around his wrist and gently lowered it from his mouth. “I’m fine.”
“No, come on, tell me,” Jonathan ducked his head down to peer up into Will’s face. It was one of the things that he both loved and hated the most about his brother – he was even more stubborn than their mother when it came to worrying about Will. “You know I’m not going to leave you alone until you tell me, so you might as well just get it over with.”
Will scrubbed his hand across his face, clearing away any tears that had fallen without his permission. “It’s stupid,” he muttered pathetically, but Jonathan just kept looking at him the way that he did, and the words just came pouring out of him before he could stop them. “I just, Mike, Dustin, Lucas and I are going to start playing that new game soon, Dungeons and Dragons?” He said, and Jonathan nodded. Of course, he knew. It had been all Will could talk about for weeks. “Well, I told Mike that I would try making my own character before he helped me, but now I’m looking at all the stuff I have to do, and I just don’t think I can do it.”
Frowning, Jonathan glanced down at the character sheet in front of him. “Yeah,” he said slowly. “That does look like a lot of math.”
Groaning, Will buried his face in his hands. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he bemoaned, voice muffled. “I know I could just ask Mike, but I want to try it myself first! Is that weird? Am I making this harder than it has to be?”
“Yes, you are,” Jonathan said simply, and Will would’ve glared at him if he wasn’t smiling so softly. “But I get it, you know. Wanting to try it yourself first. Here, why don’t we do a practice first? Why don’t you make a character for me, and then you can get the hang of it? That way, maybe you’ll have a better idea of how to make your own.”
Sniffling, Will looked at him, really looked at him, to see if he was joking. Jonathan met his eyes, deathly serious. “Yeah?” he managed. “Jonathan the Gentle?”
Jonathan’s face split into a grin, like the clouds breaking and letting in the first bit of midday sunlight. “Jonathan the Gentle, huh? Sure, I like that. What do you think?”
“What do you want to be?” Will asked, excited now. More excited than he thought he would be. “You can be a cleric, or a magic user, or a fighter, or a thief. You can be a human – oh, if you’re a dwarf then you have to be a fighter, and if you’re an elf you can be a fighter or a magic user, and if you’re a halfling you can be a thief or - ”
“Okay, okay,” Jonathan stopped Will with a hand clamped over his mouth, very obviously trying not to laugh. “Why don’t you just tell me what you think I should be. You know more about it anyway. All I know is from reading The Lord of the Rings.”
“Well, human is the easiest,” Will told him when he lowered his hand. He wasn’t so worried about planning his own character, for some reason, that dark cloud still weighing heavily overhead, but had drifted a little further out, not quite so oppressive. That was just a thing that Jonathan did, without even trying. He peered at his brother from under his eyebrows, squinting, as he considered. “You can be…”
He tried to think of the perfect class. His first instinct was cleric, for the person who patched up all of Will’s scraped palms and kissed his banged knees. Maybe magic user, for the person who always managed to cheer Will up no matter what and could take pictures that made Will feel like something otherworldly.
But then he thought of Jonathan’s face as he interposed himself between Will and Lonnie, the way he shouted at the top of his lungs when Lonnie wrapped one of his large hands around Joyce’s arm, the way he scowled something fierce when they came home to Lonnie drinking on the couch surrounded by empty bottles, the way Lonnie would shove Jonathan up against the wall whenever he was being practically impertinent and the way that Jonathan would push back.
If he closed his eyes, thinking with paint and brush and canvas, and pictured Jonathan the Gentle, it was with him wearing gleaming silver armour, a shield in one hand and a great-axe in the other, as willing to draw blood as he was to shield the ones he cared about, ready to put his own body on the line if it meant keeping Will and Joyce safe. It wasn’t that hard to picture, really.
“Fighter, I think,” Will said quietly as he filled the information into the sheet with a pencil. “A human fighter.”
“Fighter?” Jonathan asked, surprised. “The guy called ‘the gentle’ walking about with a big sword?”
“An axe, actually - like Gimli,” Will grinned up at his brother to find Jonathan already smiling at him. “A big great-axe and a suit of armour and a really cool shield.”
“Cool,” Jonathan said, as if he just couldn’t help it. And yeah, Will had to agree – his brother was cool. “Now what?”
“Uh,” Will had gotten so caught up in the joy of making Jonathan a character that he hadn’t thought about what would come after. But this was his brother. He didn’t have to worry about messing up because Jonathan wouldn’t laugh at him or tell him to try harder; he would just help him, and they’d get through it together. This was just a practice, after all. He scrambled for a set of dice – a black and yellow set that Joyce had brought him – and handed them to Jonathan. “Now you roll your stats.”
Smiling softly, Jonathan folded Will’s fingers back around the dice in his palm instead of taking them. “Nah,” he said. “You roll them for me? I wouldn’t know what I was rolling for, anyway. Make me awesome, okay?”
And, well, what else was Will supposed to do with that other than deliver?
Mike.
Mike didn’t scare easily, okay? Have you seen some of the monsters, beasts and creatures in his Dungeons and Dragons books? They were pretty scary. Sometimes they were so scary that he didn’t use them in the game because he didn’t want to give Will, Dustin and Lucas nightmares and scare them so bad that they didn’t want to play.
But walking home was a whole other type of scary. Nobody could pick him up, and he didn’t have his bike, so he had to walk home, hike his bag up over his shoulder and march on home. He thought it was stupid. Nancy’s jerk boyfriend had a car, and Ted and Karen could both drive, so why the hell did Mike have to walk home? Dustin didn’t have to walk home. Lucas didn’t have to walk home. Will –
So Mike didn’t scare easily, but when a cat jumped out of a rubbish bin behind him, he still whirled around with a startled yelp of fear. Leaves scattered across the footpath as the black bag was ripped under the cat's sharp claws. It was nothing. Just a cat looking for food scraps. But for the rest of the walk, Mike was hyper-aware of every little sound – birds flying from one tree to another, his shoes scraping too loud against the concrete, the clanking of the dice in his backpack, the harshness of his own breathing, somebody's dog barking loudly in their backyard, the jingle of his zipper.
What if somebody jumped out of the shadows and took him? Just snatched him right up, wrapped a hand around his mouth and picked him up like a sack of potatoes and carried him away? Would anybody even know? How long would it take before anybody knew he was missing? He knew, realistically, that he shouldn’t be thinking about these kinds of things, but he just couldn’t help it. Sometimes, when it came to Hawkins, the worst things you could think of tended to come true, like a bad dream you just couldn’t wake up from.
Instead of all the worst-case scenarios, he tried to think of better, happier things. He thought of Will the Wise, Sundar the Bold, and Nog, thought about the Demogorgon and the world within a world and the dragon erupting out of the earth, thought about the lich king and the Hand of Vecna and things that his friends didn’t even know about yet. He thought about him catching Nancy as she crept back to her bedroom after spending the night out with her boyfriend, and thought about colouring in with Holly. He thought about Karen’s chocolate chip cookies, Miss Henderson's meatloaf, Miss Sinclair’s Jello salad and Joyce’s hot chocolate.
A noise from behind him, and he whirled around with a scream trapped in the back of his throat. There was nobody there, but he had been so sure that he could hear footsteps, the crunch of dead leaves under somebody’s shoes, the dance of their shadow mere steps behind Mike. He had been so sure! Almost positive that he could hear someone following him. Or maybe just someone on their own way home, totally minding their business, not worrying about him at all. But how would he even know until it was too late? He hated walking home. It was the middle of the day, but he still hated walking home. His heart was pounding with adrenaline, and he could hear the blood rushing in his ears. He was starting to feel faint with anxiety, his breath shallow in his lungs as his feet scrabbled across the concrete as he sped up. What was he running from? Absolutely nothing. But the fear started to consume him anyway.
A car came to a screeching halt beside him, climbing up onto the nature strip and filling the air with exhaust smoke as a tyre mark was left on the road. Mike was frozen in fear, his heart pounding so fast that he thought it was going to jump right out of his chest, until the passenger window was wound down and he belatedly realised that he recognised this car. “Mike?”
“Uh, hey, Jonathan,” Mike waved shakily as Jonathan ducked his head down to squint at Mike through the now-open window. “How’s it going?”
“What are you doing out here?” Jonathan questioned. “Where are your parents?”
“They’re out somewhere,” Mike told him. “I’m walking home.”
“Absolutely not,” Jonathan leaned across the centre console and stretched his arm forward to open the passenger side door from the inside and shove it open. It croaked on protesting hinges as it came to a rusty stop. “Get in.”
More relieved than he had words for, Mike needed no further prompting, and he clambered into the passenger seat of Jonathan’s beat-up old car and quickly shut the door after him. He strapped on his seat belt as Jonathan pulled away from the curb and resumed his drive. “Thanks,” he said quietly, his backpack bundled on his lap.
“No worries,” Jonathan took his eyes off the road long enough to smile at him. “You tell your mum that the next time you have to walk home, give me a ring, okay? I’ll come and get you.”
That was… surprisingly nice of him. “Why?”
“Why?” Jonathan frowned as if the question just didn’t make sense. “Because you're Will’s best friend?”
“Oh,” That made sense, Mike supposed. He liked Jonathan well enough. He was always nice, and he drove Will over to the Wheeler’s when Joyce was busy, and if Will asked him to he would drive Dustin, Lucas, Mike and him to the arcade or the movies or the mall to buy them lunch, and he was always helping with their homework when he could, and he took pictures of them as often as he took pictures of Will and apparently kept them all in a shoebox in his bedroom. “Thank you.”
Laughing slightly, Jonathan nudged Mike in the arm with his elbow. “You wanna listen to some music? We just got the radio working again. I know you’re not the biggest fan of the mixtapes.”
Mike didn’t have a problem with the mixtapes. He wasn’t really into the kind of music that Jonathan and Will tended to listen to. But he smiled anyway and said, “Yeah, sure,” and Jonathan fiddled with the radio until a crackly station came on and played some music. He tapped his fingers against the steering wheel and hummed to himself as he drove.
Mike wasn’t stupid. He knew what people in Hawkins’s said about Jonathan, that they called him a weirdo and a freak. Even Nancy said it sometimes in that pitying tone, like she wished it wasn’t the truth, but there was no point fighting facts. And sure, maybe Jonathan was a bit odd, but Will was odd too, and Will was Mike’s best friend, so being odd didn’t really make you a bad person or anything. He knew that for sure.
When they pulled up at the Wheeler house, Mike hurriedly thanked him and scurried up the driveway to hammer incessantly at the door and shout through the wood. When he glanced over his shoulder as Ted opened the door, surprised that Mike had made it home so soon, it was to see Jonathan still parked out front their house, watching and waiting to make sure Mike made it inside safely.
Dustin.
It was late, later than Dustin would usually be out alone, but he thought he would be fine, because he biked this way every other day and he knew the route by heart and with his eyes closed, so honestly, he thought everything was going to be perfectly fine.
He didn’t see the tree branch lying across the road, having fallen from a tree in somebody’s front yard after the storm last night, and the front tyre of his bike caught against it and sent him flying, airborne and breathless, right over the front of his handlebars. He rolled harshly across the rough asphalt, his bike skidding loudly beside him, and when he came to a very sudden and very painful halt in the gutter, he almost gagged on the pain. His head was spinning, not because he had hit it or anything, but because he was in so much pain that he couldn’t even think about where it was coming from without getting dizzy.
His mother had always been nagging him to pay more attention, but Dustin hadn’t really been paying attention to her when she did. Why would he? He loved his mum, he really did, but she just didn’t –
He forced himself to glance down at himself and assess the damage, and could’ve cried – his palms were bloodied and pockmarked with tiny stones, and his pants were completely shredded where he had scraped his knees so bad that he could feel warm blood slithering wetly down his thighs. Sobbing, he chambered sluggishly to his feet and righted his bike. That, at least, seemed to have escaped the fall unscathed.
Dustin didn’t know what to do now. He prided himself on his brilliant ideas and his ability to think through any obstacle, but he was in too much pain to think straight, and he didn’t really know anybody in the nearby houses, so he couldn’t knock on anybody’s door and ask them to call his mum. But it was dark and cold, and he was in a lot of pain, and he really wanted to go home.
But there – Dustin recognised that ugly yellow letter box, and the old tree that looked like a face, and the house that had colourful Christmas lights hanging on their fence all year long. The Byers lived near here, a short walk away, and the thought made all the fear and uncertainty leave him at once. Joyce could help him. It was going to be fine.
He trudged achingly through the dark streets, flinching at every noise, jumping at every rustle of a tree or the meow of a cat in the darkness, and even his own shadow shifting across somebody’s rubbish bins, but eventually, he stumbled his way to the Byers’s front door. He knocked hard on the wood, close to tears, and hissed as his hand started bleeding again as he pounded on the door.
“Miss Byers?” He called, shakingly. “Miss Byers, it’s Dustin. Can I come in?”
There was no car in the driveway. All the lights were off. Nobody was coming to answer the door. The realisation shook Dustin to his core. He had been so sure that this was where he would be safe and cared for and that as soon as he stepped past the threshold, everything would be okay, and he could call his mum and get patched up by Joyce, and he could go home. But now it was looking increasingly like he was going to sit here on the stoop and wait for Joyce to come home, and who the hell knew how long that would be –
The front door was yanked open so suddenly that Dustin almost jumped, and he blinked the tears from his eyes as he came face to face with Jonathan. His hair was mussed and rumpled, and he was in a pair of pyjamas that looked too short on him, his expression bleary, as if he had just woken up, which he probably had. It was late, and Dustin knew that he had to work. “Dustin?” he demanded, glancing over his shoulder. “What’s the matter? What are you doing here?”
“I fell off my bike,” Dustin sniffled, so relieved he felt his knees shake, but that might’ve been the adrenaline. “I hurt myself pretty bad. Is your mum here?”
“No, she and Will are out,” Jonathan blinked at Dustin, his lips twisted downward in a worried frown. He opened the door wider and gestured Dustin in. “Come on. Sit down, let me see what I can do.”
Nodding, Dustin let Jonathan lead him deeper into the house and deposited him gently on the well-worn couch that smelled of cigarette smoke and spilled coffee, but Dustin couldn’t think of a single thing more comforting. Jonathan nudged the coffee table out of the way and sank down in front of Dustin, inspecting his wounds, and he wordlessly extended his hands palms-up for his assessment.
“Oh man,” Jonathan winced as he gently took Dustin’s hands and turned them over. He carefully plucked Dustin’s pants away from his mangled knees, the fabric peeling away from the drying, congealed blood, and Dustin flinched at the sharp stab of pain. “You really did a number on yourself, huh? Just sit tight for a second, I’ll be right back. Take your pants off, okay?”
Dustin shimmied out of his pants and waited anxiously on the couch in his undies as Jonathan stood and disappeared down the hall, where he knew the bedrooms would be. He came back so fast that Dustin suspected that he had sprinted back, and he returned to his spot perched on the coffee table and opened his first aid kit. “Alright, alright, let me see how bad it is,” he said softly, like soothing a startled horse, and Dustin wrung his hands together as Jonathan set out a jar of betadine, a bunch of cotton pads, a yellowed roll of bandages and a whole box of Band-Aids on the table beside him. He glanced at Dustin’s knees, and something complicated flickered across his face before he affixed a perfectly practised smile like a mask. “That’s not so bad. I’ll fix you right up, and you’ll be good as new, but this is going to sting a bit, okay? You let me know if you need to take a break.”
Nodding, Dustin tried not to cry again as Jonathan poured betadine onto the cotton swabs with expert hands, as if he was so used to doing this for Will that he barely had to look, and gently began to wipe the blood and dirt and grit from his knees, dislodging any pebbles and bark that had pierced his skin, and he was right, it did really hurt, but Jonathan was speaking to him in gentle tones and telling him that he was doing a really great job and that he was almost finished, and it was easier to focus on his encouragement than it was to worry about the pain.
“Great job, man,” Jonathan grinned up at him as he swiped the betadine across his hands. “Great job.”
He covered Dustin in a frankly obscene amount of cartoon Band-Aids and ruffled his hair as he packed up. He made Dustin a very chocolatey hot chocolate with marshmallows and the last of their whipped cream that he sipped at while they waited for Miss Henderson to come pick him up. When Jonathan finally sat down beside him on the couch and the two of them watched cartoons on the television, Dustin let himself slump into Jonathan’s side with his feet pulled up on the couch as the stress and adrenaline caught up with him, and when Jonathan wrapped his arm around Dustin’s shoulders and held him close, he felt like the safest kid in the world.
Lucas
Lucas wasn’t known to be absent-minded, but when he was invested in a good book, the world tended to fall away around him until nothing existed but him, the characters on the page and the story they were telling. Sometimes, if the book was good enough, even Lucas ceased to exist, and he could imagine that he was there, between the pages, watching the story unfold with his own eyes as if he could touch and taste and smell it all, breathe the adventure.
When the librarian came to him to tell him that the library was closing for the night, he was shocked. He glanced around, and sure enough, it was pitch black outside, and there was nobody else in the library but him. He hadn’t even noticed anybody packing up their things and leaving; how hadn’t he noticed any of it?
The librarian let him use the payphone to call someone to come pick him up. He couldn’t call his mum, because he told her that he would be hanging out with the Party after he picked up a book at the library, but Mike and Dustin had cancelled at the last minute with some family stuff, and he just ended up staying in the library all day instead. So, he called the only other person he assumed – hoped – would be available.
He punched in the number to the Byers’s phone and waited for Joyce to pick up. But it wasn’t Joyce who answered. “Hello?” said Jonathan in a vaguely confused way, like he couldn’t think of anyone who would be calling them at this hour.
Lucas’s heart sank. “Oh, hey, it’s Lucas? I was just wondering if Miss Byers was there?”
“No, she’s not,” Jonathan said, and Lucas thunked his head against the wall. Maybe he would have to call his mum after all. “Why, what’s the matter?”
“I lost track of time and don’t have anyone to pick me up from the library,” he said defeatedly into the phone. He felt a little silly, admitting this to his friend’s brother, but what could he do? The librarian was pretending not to watch him out of the corner of her eye, and well, Lucas wanted to get out of here as much as he wanted to stay. “I was hoping that she could come and get me.”
“Hey man, that’s not a problem,” Jonathan said cheerfully. “I was actually about to head out to buy Will and me some dinner. I can swing by and get you.”
“Really?” Lucas felt hope returning to him like a deflated balloon. “You sure?”
“Yeah, buddy, sit tight. I’ll be there in five,” Jonathan said as he hung up the phone.
And so Lucas sat out front of the library under the yellow flickering street light with his book open in his lap, until Jonathan and his beat-up old car parked in front of him. He slid his book back into his bag and hopped into the passenger seat to find Jonathan grinning at him. “Thank you,” he said, breathless with emotion. “I was really worried about how I was getting home.”
“All good, man,” Jonathan hummed. “You couldn’t call your mum?”
“She thinks I’m with Dustin and Mike and Will,” Lucas said. “But they cancelled, and I forgot to tell her.”
“Ah, yeah, I know about that,” Jonathan said, and of course, he knew about it. Will had been pretty disappointed, and he probably told Jonathan about it all day. “Oh, speaking of, Will wanted me to ask you if you felt up to coming back to our place? I brought extra KFC in case you wanted to stay for dinner. Make up for missing out today.”
Lucas blinked, surprised. He knew that the Byers didn’t have that much money, not even with both Jonathan and Joyce working so many jobs, so his buying an extra serving of fast food just for Lucas was astounding. “Really? You sure?”
“Yeah, of course,” Jonathan chuckled, but Lucas didn’t feel like he was being laughed at, more like they were both sharing an inside joke. “I’ve already brought the extra chicken, so if somebody needs to eat it, it might as well be you. Besides, it’ll really cheer Will up.”
“Wow,” Lucas gushed. “Thanks.”
The interior of the car smelled of old cigarettes, fried chicken and chips. Jonathan hummed to the music playing from the mixtape. Lucas couldn’t remember the last time he had ever spent uninterrupted one-on-one time with Jonathan in the entire time that he had known him, but it didn’t feel as weird as he thought it probably should have.
“Where was your head when you missed the library closing?” Jonathan asked. Lucas expected it to come out scolding, judgmental, but it was just curious. “Find a good magazine or something?”
“I found a copy of Carrie by Steven King,” Lucas said, a little embarrassed. It wasn’t the type of book that people would expect him to read, and he didn’t talk about it very much, but you liked what you liked. He just hoped that Jonathan wouldn’t find it weird. “I got really into it. You know the kind of invested where you forget where you are?”
“Oh man, do I,” Jonathan laughed softly. “If you like Steven King’s stuff, I’ve got some books at home that I can lend you. Or I can give you some recommendations for the library. I’ve got a few, but they were already second or third hand when I got them, so they might be a bit beat up.”
They turned down the street that led to the quiet place on the edge of the forest where the Byers' house was. Lucas couldn’t even remember his previous downward spiral of anxiety, the feeling of dread at the prospect of calling his mum to explain to her what happened – not only that he hadn’t told her the whole truth but also that he hadn’t been paying attention to his surroundings like he promised her he always would and had put himself in an unsavoury situation that could’ve led to danger. But now, he was in the car with someone he trusted, being taken somewhere he would be safe, about to see one of his best friends in the whole world and eat a delicious meal. His borrowed book that had gotten him in this situation in the first place was tucked carefully away in his backpack. This day was turning out pretty good.
They parked in the Byers' driveway, and Lucas started to unbuckle his seatbelt. “Can I use your phone to call my mum so I can tell her where to come get me?”
“Sure,” Jonathan said, reaching into the backseat for the chicken. “But I can just drive you home.”
“Oh,” Lucas was starting to feel like a fool about how shocked he was by Jonathan being nice to him. But he was Will’s brother – what else did he really expect? “Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it,” Jonathan ruffled his hair just like he ruffled Will’s and led the way to the front door, jangling his keys in his hand. They could hear the television playing a very loud cartoon through the door. “We’re always here if you need us.”
“Yeah,” Lucas said, staring up at Jonathan as if he had never seen him before. He was so much taller than Lucas. He had the same bowl haircut that Joyce gave to both her children, so identifiable that he could pick them out of a crowd from miles away, but he felt like he had never seen Jonathan before in his life. “I know.”
Jonathan
Everything had been so crazy these past few hours – Nancy, Steve, Jonathan and Dustin returning from the Upside Down, Vikkie, Robin, Lucas and a newly conscious Max arriving from the hospital – and Will had been a little overwhelmed. Okay, so maybe a lot overwhelmed, but could you blame him, really? So many people he loved were put into so many inconceivable dangers in the past few hours that he could barely keep track of them all.
“Hey, man,” Dustin grinned at him as he approached. Will was just so glad to see him – weary and aching but unharmed – that he slung an arm around his shoulder and pulled him up against his side, holding him close. Dustin laughed a little and bumped his head against Will’s in a very gentle headbutt. He jerked his chin towards Jonathan. “Have you checked in with your brother yet? How’s he doing?”
Will frowned, glancing up at where Jonathan was standing by himself in the corner of the room. He was coated in this gross white ooze, caked in his hair and drying stiffly on his clothes, and he was holding his shoulder with a tentative grasp, hand smoothing gently across it, wincing a little. Had he been hurt and just hadn’t said anything? It wouldn't be the first time, and nobody would be surprised. “No?” Will replied after an assessing moment. “Why?”
“Dude, he almost died in there,” Dustin said incredulously. “He and Nancy both. Steve and I got there in the nick of time, but we were fully convinced that they were dead.”
Instinctually, Will glanced across to Nancy, who was in the middle of a serious conversation with Steve, Robin and Vikkie. Maybe trying to explain to her what the hell was going on, maybe trying to keep her from freaking out, maybe trying to debrief the amount of craziness that they were facing. He didn’t know, and honestly, he didn’t really care. His only thought was on his brother, and the way he was slowly shuffling away from the group into another room, walking stiffly. It would be so like Jonathan to get hurt and not say anything to anyone about it, not wanting to make a big deal, not wanting to draw any attention to himself, not wanting anyone to think that he couldn’t take care of himself.
“Thanks for telling me,” Will smiled thinly at Dustin. “I’m going to go check on him.”
“I’ll come with you,” Dustin said. “I haven’t gotten to talk to him yet.”
The two of them weaved through the radio tower, falling into familiar lock step, until they found Mike counting bullets and writing numbers down on a little sheet of paper, seemingly content with his own company. If the situation were different, Will might’ve gone over to join him, or at least asked if he needed any company, but all he could think about was Jonathan and the fist of dread that had settled into his stomach like a paperweight, impossible to ignore and painful to focus on.
“Hey,” Will quietly approached Mike. “Have you seen the first aid kid?”
“Yeah, it’s just here,” Mike said with a frown as he procured the first aid kit from the ground beside him, freshly restocked and categorised. His eyes swiped first across Will, then across Dustin, checking them from head to toe for any injuries or wounds. “Why? What’s wrong?”
“I think Jonathan might’ve gotten hurt in the Upside Down,” Will told him. “But he won’t say anything. I’m just going to check on him.”
“Okay, let’s go,” Mike said with a strangely determined expression. Sometimes, it was hard for Will to remember that there were people who cared about them, who cared about his brother, too. For so long, it had been just the two of them, brothers and freaks and best friends, so it was strange to have Dustin and Mike following behind him as he marched towards where he saw Jonathan disappear. It was strange but not unwelcome.
They were stopped partway there by Lucas, standing from the chair he had slumped into with Max’s hand held in his. “What’s up? You look like you’re off to fight a war.”
“We might be,” Dustin said before Will could explain. “Checking up on Jonathan.”
Lucas’s brow furrowed. “Did something happen?”
“I don’t know, but you know how he is,” Will said, even though none of them could really know how he was, but that didn’t seem to matter. Lucas pursed his lips in understanding, and both Dustin and Mike were nodding as if they knew exactly what he was talking about. “I just want to make sure he’s okay.”
For a moment, Lucas looked as if he were about to follow them, to join them on their quest to wrestle Jonathan into some first aid, but he remembered Max’s hand in his at the last moment and froze. He glanced down at her, her hand held limply but securely in his, with a complicated expression. But Max didn’t wait for him to speak. “Go,” she said with a soft laugh, tired and fond. She gestured at herself and the wheelchair she was in with her other hand. “I’m not going anywhere, I promise. Go check on your friend.”
“I’ll be right back,” Lucas promised as he ducked down to place a kiss on the back of Max’s knuckles and rest her hand gently in her lap. “Don’t fall into anymore comas while I’m gone.”
Max pursed her lips, but her eyes were laughing. “Too soon.”
The four of them – and didn’t that feel like a blast from the past, a memory of four little kids from long ago? – walked through the halls of the radio station with Will leading the charge and Mike holding the first aid kit. It was a little surreal to want to look after Jonathan like this. How many times had Jonathan patched them up, pulled splinters from their fingers, put Band-Aids on scraped knees and wiped tears from their eyes? He had once hosed them down with the garden hose when they had splashed in a mud puddle, and then he made them hot chocolate and popcorn, and they watched a movie afterwards, bundled up in blankets until their clothes had dried. Will couldn’t remember, so many years later, if Jonathan had eaten dinner that night or if he had been so busy fretting about letting them make a mess of themselves to even think about eating. Will couldn't remember if he'd ever told Jonathan how much fun they'd had that day.
They honestly only found him because Will knew his brother as well as he did, and immediately made a beeline for the quietest, darkest, most secluded room in the building at the very end of a long, dark hallway partially blocked by boxes. Mike had shot him a questioning look, but Will had been certain, and he led them through the maze of obstacles into the darkness until they reached the door at the end. It wasn’t open, but it wasn’t closed either, the latch bolt resting against the frame and not all the way into the plate hole. He didn’t hesitate to push the door open without bothering to turn the handle.
Jonathan was in there, alright, and he jerked away as the door opened, standing there as if he had been caught doing something illegal. For a split second, before the door creaked open and Jonathan had reacted, Will had seen him struggling to pull his shirt up and over his head, but now it settled back against his narrow frame as if it had never been moved in the first place.
“Will,” Jonathan breathed a sigh of relief before he caught sight of the rest of the Party, and his eyes narrowed in concern. “Hey, guys. What’s the matter?” His eyes darted towards the first aid kit in Mike’s hand, and his entire body went tense and ramrod straight as if he had been electrocuted. “Is anyone hurt? Are you okay?"
“We’re fine,” Will was the first one into the room, and Lucas shut the door behind him, and then it was just Jonathan and the Party alone together in this isolated back room. “We’re not the ones who almost died.”
Jonathan sighed and glanced across at Dustin, who was too jaded and too tired to be cowed. “Will, I’m fine. We didn’t almost die, and – “
“Why can’t you take your shirt off?” Will demanded, and Jonathan froze, caught. He looked like a deer in headlights, staring somewhere over Mike and Will’s shoulders, at some graffiti scrawled on the back wall. His brother was an utterly abysmal liar, and Will could read his tells better than anyone – he knew that some absolute bullshit was about to come out of his mouth. He took a step forward so their shoes were almost touching. “Just tell me, Jonathan. I’ve come too close to losing too many people I care about, and I’m not about to add you to that list.”
For a fraction of a second, Will saw Jonathan about to come up with another half-hearted deflection, another bad lie to explain away why nobody should worry about him. But he also saw the moment that he relented, giving in to the stubbornness that all Byers seemed to inherit, and his shoulders slumped. “Fine,” He grumbled, refusing to meet his eyes. Jonathan reached up and tugged the neck of his shirt aside, dragging it all the way down to reveal the bare skin of his shoulder and the angry purple bruise that spread like split paint across his flesh.
“Fuck me!” Dustin cried as he stumbled over himself in his haste to reach them. Lucas and Mike followed quickly after him, but Will was too busy staring at the massive, blackened bruise on his brother’s skin. “I thought you said that you guys got out of there fine?”
“We did, we did,” Jonathan tried to soothe, but he was wincing as the position twinged his aching muscles. “I tried to break the door down to get us out of that room before you and Steve cut that hole in the wall, but you know how well that worked out.”
Will felt a little bit like his vision was blacking out, like the world around him was fading away until nothing existed except for Will, Jonathan and the bruise spreading across his bruised flesh. His hands were scraped, covered in nicks and cuts and grazes, and that white ooze dried on his bare skin was almost caustic, where his flesh was pinkened and raw.
Wordlessly, Will wriggled his fingers beneath Jonathan’s shirt and began to yank it upwards by the hem. Jonathan hissed as he was roughly jostled, and though Will felt a spark of regret, his desire to tend to his brother and see the full extent of his injuries mattered more to him than a temporary pain, even some such as this. With no help from Jonathan, as if he were deliberately making it harder than it needed to be, he was able to pull the shirt up over his head and toss it absently to the ground. He placed a hand on Jonathan’s sternum and gently pushed him backwards until the back of his knees hit the edge of the couch, and he fell into it with a surprised gasp, dust escaping the old cushions at the impact.
“I’ll go get some ice,” Mike said as he darted out of the room. Lucas already had the first aid kit open on the ground and was pulling items out.
“That looks gnarly, man,” Dustin said, where he was hovering above them. “You did this?”
“We were trapped,” Jonathan said through gritted teeth as Lucas gently prodded at the bruise on his shoulder, one hand on his arm to keep him steady. “I didn’t think you and Steve would be coming.”
Dustin frowned, vaguely insulted. “Of course, we were coming. We weren’t just going to leave you there.”
“I didn’t mean – I thought you guys would’ve been too hurt to come,” Jonathan was not one to get frustrated easily, but Will could tell that he was building up to that level. He tried to push himself up from the couch, but Dustin, Will and Lucas all reached out to push him back. “Alright, look, guys, cut it out. I appreciate that you’re worried about me, I really do, but it’s just a bruise. I’m going to be fine.”
“Why do you do that?” Will frowned at him, Jonathan’s irritation fuelling his own. “Always brush things off and make them less of a big deal?”
“I don’t know what to tell you, Will,” Jonathan bit out. “In a series of very bad days, today has been a lot worse than most.”
The door to the room opened and shut, and Mike returned to the room with a couple of icepacks from the kitchen wrapped in towels. Will glanced up at in him in acknowledgement before glancing back at Jonathan. He did look more tired than usual, which was saying something about his brother, who almost always looked like he had skipped a few too many nights of sleep in a row and was nursing a catastrophic sleep debt. He looked older, and worn, and aching in ways that Will suspected didn’t entirely relate to the massive bruise and the various cuts and scrapes that lined his body. How long had he looked like the weight of the world was balanced precariously on his shoulders? As long as Will could remember, at least, so probably since long before their dad left and Jonathan was forced to put all their broken pieces back together.
But he hated when he did this – when he was hurting or suffering or falling apart at the seams like an old and well-loved doll, its stuffing bursting out from broken stitches and its fur no longer soft and fluffy but coarse and patchy. That’s how Will thought about Jonathan sometimes, when the shadows under his eyes were particularly dark, and the frown lines around his eyes and mouth were particularly deep. He reminded him of an old toy he had loved to destruction, that Joyce had mended up time and time again so he could still cuddle with it at night. But he was becoming more aware as he got older that you couldn’t just fix people like you could fix a beloved toy.
“It’s just a bruise,” Jonathan sighed, defeated. He looked so small, swarmed by these young men whom he had known as little boys. Overwhelmed, too, if Will knew his brother. He was never very good at letting people fret over him. “You know as well as I do that there’s nothing you can do about a bruise.”
“Might not just be a bruise though, right?” Lucas said, standing from the first aid kit on the floor with the length of bandage that he began to unwind. “You could’ve given yourself a muscle strain, or a spinal injury like whiplash, or soft tissue damage.”
Jonathan squinted at him, incredulous. “How would you know that?”
“Basketball,” Lucas shrugged like it was no big deal, but he was looking a little bashful. “We learn all about the ways we can get hurt and how to take care of ourselves in health class.”
When Jonathan grinned, Will could practically see the pride in his eyes, because he saw it pretty much every time he looked at him. “Wow, that’s amazing.”
Ducking his head, Lucas glanced at Mike, who was juggling the wrapped icepacks in his hands as the cold stung him. “He’s right, there’s nothing we can really do about it, but we can cool it and wrap it. Here, hand me an icepack.”
With an expression of intense concentration on his face, Lucas took the ice pack that Mike offered to him and pressed it up against Jonathan’s shoulder. Jonathan hissed at the cold shock as Dustin quickly held it in place while Lucas wrapped the bandage around it, expertly folding in the two icepacks and wrapping Jonathan’s shoulder at the same time. Mike watched on worriedly, his expression pinched as he warned Lucas redundantly to be careful and pointed out bare areas that he had missed, the three of them working together to patch Jonathan up as securely and carefully as possible.
Feeling useless and hating it, Will moved around his friends to sink gracelessly into the couch beside Jonathan, feeling his brother's arm move immediately around him. But that didn’t feel right – he was here to comfort Jonathan, not be the one getting comforted, so he shifted slightly so he could bring a hand up to card through Jonathan’s hair, somehow messier and neater and longer and shorter than it was in Lennora, to try and dislodge some of the gross white gunk caked in his hair. It caught and tangled against Will’s hands, but he gently worked his fingers through the tacky strands to separate the matted clusters, and he felt Jonathan slowly melt into his side. He didn’t think that the rest of the Party noticed, too busy fretting over him, but that was for the best, especially for this.
“Are you okay?” Will asked quietly, only for Jonathan’s ears.
“I will be,” Jonathan managed to smile back, weak and tired and small, but still very much the same smile that he gave Will all his life. He slumped against him so he could rest his head on the top of Will’s. Though Will was taller than him now – and wasn’t that a crazy thought? – Jonathan still fit above him like it was always meant to be. “Better now, though.”
“Good,” Will muttered into the side of Jonathan’s neck, working out a rather tough tangle in his hair. “No more heroics today, okay? Just stay here with me. I don’t want you getting hurt again.”
“Hey,” Jonathan knocked their heads gently together. “That’s my line.”
Above them, his friends had graduated from the ‘worried about Jonathan’ stage into the ‘bickering like an old married couple’ stage. “What are you doing?” Dustin complained, waving his hands at Jonathan’s shoulder and the many layers of bandages wrapped around it. “You’re turning him into a mummy. He still needs to be able to move his arm!”
“I know what I’m doing, okay?” Lucas protested, but Will could admit – he was using an obscene number of bandages. “I’d like to see you do any better.”
“Guys, come on,” Mike interjected before the argument could really get started. “Let’s have a pissing competition later. Can we just get on with this now? We’ve got stuff to do. Nancy is probably looking for me.”
“Don’t get your hopes up,” Dustin snorted, but he was trying hard not to smile, and failing. “I was with her in the Upside Down, you know. All she could talk about was how good it was to get away from you for a little bit.”
“It must’ve been like a vacation for her,” Lucas said, diverting from bickering with Dustin to immediately teasing Mike. It was so nice to see a hint of his humorous, care-free self after so long being worried about Max. “Better keep an eye on her, or she might want to go back.”
“Fuck you guys,” Mike replied, but he was smiling too, arms crossed over his chest.
Will glanced up at Jonathan and found him looking at Mike, Dustin and Lucas with an unreadable expression, something awed and starstruck and fascinated, and maybe a little melancholy, right around the eyes. Will knew it well, because his brother always seemed to be a little melancholy, even when he was happy, which he decidedly was not. He knew what he was thinking of, too. It didn’t feel like all that long ago when it was Jonathan who would patch up their wounds and comfort them, who would make them meals when they stayed late at night and bring them snacks when they hung out at the Byers house during the day, and drive them around town and watch scary movies with them that their parents wouldn’t let them watch, and would pick them up when they fell over and hold them tight until they could stand on their own again. And now, here they were, not children but adults, taking care of him, patching up his wounds and comforting him, just like he did over the many, many years. The contrast was so stark that it probably made him ill.
Jonathan glanced over to look down at Will, and his eyes were dazzling, wide and wonderful. Will didn’t think it was possible to love anyone as much as he loved his brother – even when he got himself hurt and was too stupid to ask for help. But Will loved him even then. And Jonathan had so much love in his heart that he spent most of his life loving three other little boys like they were his brothers, too and didn’t even bat an eye.
Steve Harrington might've been known these days as the babysitter, but sometimes people forgot – Jonathan was there first.