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It starts at a post-graduation party in Hawkins, Indiana. More specifically, it starts with Will, and Max, and the spiked bowl of fruit punch.
Max is draped over his shoulder, blissfully drunk while Lucas goes to refill their cups. “Nancy said she would pull strings to get me accepted anywhere,” she’s saying. “Apparently almost dying and being held hostage by the government earns you pity points, or something.”
Will hums and shifts her grip over his shoulder, leaning against her just as much to keep himself upright. “Come to NYU,” he says. Mouth moving before he really knows what he’s saying, what he’s offering. Thinking not about Mom, or Mike, or the ghosts of this town, but of himself, and what he wants. “With me. You and Lucas. Let’s all go. I’m sick of Hawkins.”
Max barks out a sharp laugh. Her breath is warm against his ear. “Aren’t we all.” She turns and cups a hand around her mouth. “Lucas!”
Lucas looks up from where he’s ladling punch into a second solo cup in the kitchen.
“Want to go to NYU with us?” she yells.
Lucas meets Will’s gaze, smiles, and cups a hand around his mouth in turn. “Okay!” he yells back.
And it is, for the moment, the end of some things and the beginning of others.
Fall arrives surreptitiously, and goodbyes come bittersweetly thereafter.
Jonathan helps them move in. It’s a small three bedroom, cramped in all the right ways. Will majors in Art History. Max wavered between English and Psychology for a while, but her experience leading the kids out of Camazotz has her leaning into a future in social work. Lucas makes the basketball team on scholarship and is studying to be a sports trainer for physical therapy. He practices on Max at home, and when she’s done with her sessions they’ll pester Will into doing one so his hands don’t cramp around his paintbrushes.
Holly calls Max almost nightly. Sometimes Will hears them through the paper thin walls, talking into the early hours of the morning. Max saying quiet reassurances of he’s gone and I’m okay. You’re okay. I wouldn’t let him hurt you. Sometimes he finds her asleep on the sofa, the phone cord stretched all the way across the room. Max is basically an honorary Wheeler at this point, if Holly and Nancy have any say in the matter.
Will remembers the moment of quiet after everything, when Holly had seen Max in the wheelchair and had pried herself away from her sister to launch into a hug Max struggled to return, crying in massive, heaving sobs that he she’d probably been bottling up since they rescued her.
Nancy had made her way over more carefully, and her eyes had found his, watching from the side, concerned and confused and sad as she placed a hand on her sister’s shoulder and asked if she was okay.
“She saved me,” Holly had whispered, soft with reverence, burrowing her face deeper into Max’s shoulder. “She saved all of us.”
And Will remembers how Nancy’s whole countenance had softened, and the way she'd bent down to gently pull Max into a hug, too, and— yeah. Max is a Wheeler in every way that matters.
He thinks the phone calls and the affirmations help Max and Holly both. It’s proof of life. Evidence of one’s survival against impossible odds. He would know.
Max isn’t the only one that hogs the phone, though. Erica calls Lucas for homework help. Not that she really needs it, Will thinks. He has a sneaking suspicion that she’s just making sure her brother is still alive. Whenever she’s suitably harassed him, she’ll pass him off to their parents
And Will? Will calls Mom every Saturday, for hours at a time or until a distant Hopper starts to complain about the phone bill. He starts to lose himself in his classwork and the bustle of the city, and at the end of the day he walks home to a small flat where Lucas and Max are waiting for him, and somewhere, in all of it, old wounds start to scar.
Will paints El for his midterm. He doesn’t mean to, not really, but he has to paint a portrait, and through time and the stroke of his brush, it morphs into the shape of a girl. A girl with curly brown hair and eyes like open doors to her good heart. Smiling and alive, and Will realizes in painting it that this will be his last effigy of El. The brain only remembers things for so long, and she is still a raw wound. Her loss still aches, and if he does not memorialize her now, he will lose her forever.
He spends hours in his room every day, dedicated to it. She’ll never see it, but he feels like he owes it to her to make it the best piece of art he’s ever made. This, of course, lasts all of a week before Max is kicking into his room without knocking, brow drawn in thinly-veiled concern.
“You still alive in here?” she says, propping a hand on her hip. “I don’t mean to interrupt your flow, but it’s been a week, Will. You’ve been a ghost in this apartment.”
“Sorry,” he says, a little chastised, but unwilling to pull himself away just yet as he paints along the shell of an ear. “Midterm portrait. I just… I want to do right by her.”
Max goes quiet as she comes up to his side, and he knows that she must recognize the painting for who it is.
“It’s called impasto,” he says, leaning back to let her take a look. Deep, rich colors, the paint viscous and thick. “It adds texture to painting. So you’re not just seeing it, but feeling it. I can show you better once this layer dries.”
Max hums, leaning closer to inspect it. Will’s come to appreciate her critical eye— Lucas will drown anything he makes in compliments, but if Will can impress Max, then he knows it’s good enough for his professors. She hasn’t said anything in a minute, though, so he sets down his brush and smooths his hands over his jeans to soothe his nerves.
“I practiced when you were in your coma,” he adds belatedly. He’s not sure why he’s telling her this. It’s not like it matters, but the words come easily because it’s Max, and he likes telling her things, and that seems to be all the reason he needs. “In case you woke up blind. I wanted you to still be able to… I wanted to be able to show you. In a way you could see.”
Her nose wrinkles, and for a second Will worries she’s going to yell at him. But her eyes go wet and glassy, and the corner of her mouth fights to smile, and he thinks that he has horribly misjudged the quality of her character, jumping to such awful conclusions.
“Will Byers,” she says, some raw emotion in her voice that he’s never heard before, “you are the nicest person I have ever met.”
She reaches out to trace the upper edges of the background that frame El’s face. The deep brown of the eyes, staring at the viewer. Will hopes they convey the last thing he saw in them. Comfort. Peace. The paints are just a tool, and he’d wanted to immortalize her as he knew her. A beautiful person, inside and out. He’d never wanted anyone to forget that’s what she was in the end. He thinks Max gets it, more than anyone ever could.
El was Max’s Mike. Part of her love died that day, too.
“She saved me, you know,” Max says, dropping her hand to wipe discreetly at her eyes.
Will does know this. El had confessed it to him in broken pieces, bent over Max’s hospital bed. She’d reached out into the vast power of the universe and she’d restarted her best friend’s heart. He remembers holding her after, as she’d wept, because it had been almost a year to the day and she still hadn’t found Max anywhere. He remembers feeling a lot of things, but mostly relieved, because Max was, impossibly, back from the dead. An echo of himself from years before, and it was an awful thing to think, but he’d been relieved, just knowing he wasn’t alone in that experience anymore.
“I know,” is what he says. “The Creel House, right?”
Max smiles sadly and shakes her head. “I mean before that. After Billy died, I— well, you know. But she and I would write letters, and I would tell her things I felt like I couldn’t tell anyone else. And I’d write to you while I was avoiding Lucas, because it was like there was part of him in you. That was the most that I talked to people, really, and somehow it was enough to survive one really shitty year. When I just wanted to disappear, you guys were enough.”
Will looks at the side of her face, then down her arms, where her short-sleeved shirt reveals the pale skin beneath. The faint scars from surgery at her elbows that you’d only know were there if you knew where to look. He reaches out and takes her hand, squeezes her fingers between his and smudges paint over her knuckles.
“I’m glad you’re here” He wishes El was, too, but they can’t have what they want. “I’m really, really glad.”
She turns and meets his eyes, her smile unsteady on her face. “You’re my best friend, you know?”
Will thinks back to Mike and the radio tower. How hollowly the words had fallen from Mike’s mouth. It has a weight to it, coming from Max. Because Max Mayfield will do anything other than say she loves you, but she’ll show you how much she does in a thousand different ways.
He thought about telling her his secret, in one of those letter correspondences, but he looks at her now and he thinks she always knew. She’s the only one that never treated him like glass. He wonders how much would have changed if he’d ever leaned into that warmth.
“I know,” he says, meaning it.
They get home from a party somewhere between two and three in the morning. Will is sandwiched between Max and Lucas on their bed, the ceiling fan lilting and swaying, fruity liquor still sweet on his lips. His head is pillowed on Lucas’ arm and he’s working diligently not to think about the muscle mass there.
“I don’t know if I want to play DnD anymore,” he admits to the ceiling. Words soft and clumsy, but true.
“Maybe you just need a new group,” Max says. Indignant on his behalf. “You can’t let Mike consume your life anymore.”
There will always be some small part of Will Byers carved away for Mike Wheeler, but he thinks she has a point. “I just… I don’t want to break up the party,” he says.
She rolls a shoulder in a shrug. “Party's already broken, Will. Dustin’s at MIT. Mike’s going to live in his mom’s basement forever. Change isn’t always a bad thing. Besides, you’ll still have me and Lucas.”
Will turns on his side to look at her. “You guys would still be in my party?”
Lucas hums from his other side, eyes shut. “We would follow you anywhere.”
You’re the heart of the party. Will had told Mike that, once. But Will is also a zombie, and zombies have no need of hearts. He thinks, belatedly, that he very well might have everything he needs right here.
They’re at another party. The basketball team is having a rager, and Lucas invited him and Max, because he invites them to everything and beams when they agree to come. Lucas is off in a corner celebrating with some of his teammates, and Max left briefly to commandeer a bathroom. Will is a few drinks in and talking to one of the other art students he knows when someone taps his shoulder.
He thinks it’s Lucas and turns with a smile, but it isn’t. It’s a peppy looking blonde with thick lashes. She looks a little like Angela, so Will doesn’t trust her out of principle.
“Can I help you?” he asks, just to be polite. Maybe she’s lost, or needs help, but the dark look in her eyes doesn’t make him confident in her good intentions.
“Maybe,” she says, edging closer into his space. He can smell the alcohol heavy on her breath. Her fingers play at the folded collar of his top. “Wanna get out of here?”
A hot flash of discomfort surges up his chest. When he glances around for the art student, she is nowhere to be found. “Um—”
“There you are.” An arm threads through his, and through his peripheral he can see Max’s ginger waves as she tucks herself into his side. “Making friends, Willy-bun?”
It almost makes him laugh, but that would break whatever illusion she’s trying to conjure here, so he just leans back into her and tilts their heads together like he’s seen her and Lucas do. “Just saying hello,” he says.
He has no idea how well they’re selling this act, considering his shirt is mostly unbuttoned and tucked into his purple corduroy pants; his outfit couldn’t be saying I am a homosexual any louder if he tried. But Max’s presence and the arm she drapes around his collarbone has caused the other girl’s lip to curl in disappointment. She scoffs and turns on her heel to stalk back into the crowd somewhere.
Max pulls away to look at him, and they last all of two seconds before bursting into laughter.
“Come on,” she says, still laughing as she grabs his hand. “Lucas wants to introduce us to his boys.”
“Whatever you say, Maxie-poo,” he croons, and she shoves at his shoulder, laughing all the louder.
Max goes to Nancy’s for the evening. A girl’s night with her and Robin, she said, which leaves the apartment to him and Lucas. They decide to spend it re-watching the entire Star Wars trilogy. It’s Lucas’ favorite, and Will chose the movie last time.
They’re halfway into the second film when the thought comes to him, sudden and sullen. The guilt like a sour aftertaste that always chases the thought of Mike Wheeler.
“Is it bad that I want to move on?” he asks quietly as Luke arrives at Dagobah. Just a boy alone in a lost, unknown land. It never used to make his skin crawl, but a lot’s changed since he last saw this part.
Lucas pauses the movie and turns to look at him with a furrow in his brow. Will likes that Lucas always takes him seriously.
“From Hawkins,” he clarifies, in case it wasn’t clear. “And everything that happened.”
Lucas mulls over the question for a minute or two in silence, not rushing into any immediate consolation or response. Will likes that, too. Mike would have churned out some empty platitude or another. Meaningless comfort. Will knows he shouldn't compare everything to Mike, but he can’t help it; Mike holds the standard, even if it’s not a very good one.
“I don’t think so,” Lucas says eventually. “I think you’ve been through a lot. We all have. And for some of us, that was never going to heal where we were. I don’t think it gets better until you let it. And I think—” he hesitates, meeting Will’s gaze before continuing, “I think you’ve already started. I think you’re doing better than you think.”
And maybe he is, Will thinks. He meets up with Jonathan for lunch on campus, or they’ll go all three of them to meet Nancy for coffee, and he fools about town with Robin when she takes the train down from Boston for the weekend. He collects postcards for El and writes letters on each one that he will never send, because through it all, in this little slice of life, he’s found that he is happy.
There is no room to think of Mike here, and every absence he left is being filled with something warm and bright and beautiful. Will should feel sadder, he thinks, and in some way he is. But he thinks that El would want him to be happy, and he’s trying. Here, in a small New York apartment with his two best friends in the world, he is trying to move past it.
And Mike, who has neither written a letter nor called, has become a footnote in his life. Will mourns it only in the way he has spent most of his life mourning Mike. He can survive loss. He already knows this. He will survive letting go of his broken heart.
“I think you’re right,” he says, blinking the tears out of his eyes.
Lucas takes his hand and doesn’t let go, even as he starts the movie again. “I know I am,” he says.
It feels like a catastrophic moral failing to have a crush on people that are nice to him. A betrayal to Mike, maybe.
Not that Will has a crush on Max— he is, rather decidedly, very gay. It’s like a friend-crush. Anywhere he goes, some part of him wants her there, too. Like a painting that isn’t complete without her sunset-red hue. She is his best friend, and it’s different to how Mike used to be.
Every time she moves forward, she always stops and looks back. Like he is as essential to her as she is to him. Her attentiveness sometimes forces him to wonder if Mike was ever a good friend to him. From what Lucas tells him, Mike treated him better when he thought Will was dead.
Will can’t deny that he’s probably looking at things with rose-tinted glasses. Mike has been his best friend since they could walk, but that never really accounted for much in the end, did it? Mike still ditched him at every opportunity. He still trapped El in a relationship that served no purpose but to get her killed.
Will looks at Lucas across their small, round dining table, where he is poking fun at something Max said, and before he can rationalize the thought or the action, he is speaking.
“I wonder if things would have been different,” he starts. “If I had a crush on you, instead.”
Lucas and Max stop mid-sentence and turn to look at him. They glance at each other, then back again, and Will wonders what it’s supposed to mean that neither of them are particularly surprised by this statement.
Lucas rests his chin on his hand and grins crookedly. “No time like the present.”
It’s a teasing tone, but it’s frighteningly earnest. Will casts a nervous look over at Max, but she’s just watching him evenly, gauging his reaction. He shouldn’t feel so nervous around the two people he trusts most in the world, but fear has been a knee-jerk response since it was drilled into him.
“Are you sure?” he asks, voice a weak thing that wavers in his throat. Hesitating before the jump, because this is the part that always bites him, the part that bruises.
Lucas takes his hand, closing warm fingers over his. Moving slowly, but with a sureness that settles something in Will’s chest. “I’m sure,” he says.
Here is what Will has learned: Max and Lucas are not jealous people. Fiercely protective, yes, but so secure in their love for each other. He knew that well before this conversation was even conceptualized. But it’s one thing to think it and another thing to see it in front of him. The fact that two people can want him to be so happy that they would open that love to him.
Will glances at Max again, just to be sure. The blue of her eyes stays steady, saying things without any words necessary. His head bobs in a slight nod and he turns back to Lucas.
“If I wanted to kiss you right now, what would you say?”
An easy smile rolls over Lucas’ lips. “That depends,” he says. “Do you want to kiss me?”
Will swallows around the hot, syrupy feeling in his throat and nods again.
Lucas leans in closer. Close enough now that Will can smell their detergent on his laundry-warm sweater. “Then I think you better do it.”
So Will reaches up to hold Lucas’ jaw while he laughs, and he does.
It’s the first morning of summer break when Will wakes up and thinks, by some miracle, that he is happy.
Feeling brave, he throws on one of Lucas’ NYU sweatshirts and steps out into the kitchen where Lucas is turning eggs in a pan and Max is bent over one of her coursework books. Her shorts reveal the interlocked metal of her knee brace, which she only wears on bad days. It must be a bad day for her bones, which explains why Lucas is making a full breakfast, waffles and all.
Will slides into the barstool next to her and hooks their ankles together.
She doesn’t look up from her book, but she does sway their feet a little in silent acknowledgement of his arrival. “I’m going to die,” is what she says. “Again. From psychology labs.”
Will rests his chin on his hand. “Well, if you die, then I’ll have to die, too. Again. And then Lucas will have to bury us next to each other and come up with some insane plan to bring us back from the dead.”
“Hi, it’s me, Lucas,” Lucas says calmly from the stove. “Don’t do that.”
Max keeps working diligently at her book while Lucas finishes up, and Will steals a pen to start doodling in her margins. When Lucas passes him a plate of waffles and eggs, he leans over the counter to thank him with a kiss.
“Excuse me?”
Will startles and turns to see Erica and Holly standing in the doorway of what is usually Max’s bedroom. He had, in the sleepy morning lull, forgotten that they came to stay in New York for the summer. Holly is technically supposed to be staying at Nancy’s flat, but she asks to sleep over every night, so they just say she’s at Nancy’s to appease Karen when she asks. The apartment is cramped and full of life with the five of them there.
“Um,” he says, leaning away from Lucas, trying to telepathically figure out what Lucas has told his sister and if this is a bad thing. Lucas just blinks back at him owlishly, so he sighs and turns to Erica and Holly, rubbing at his neck. “Hey, um. So. I’m with Lucas. He’s with Max. We’re cool. We’re cool, right?”
Erica just looks massively unimpressed, like none of this is news to her. Holly blinks once, then twice.
“Okay,” she says, unconcerned. “Can we play DnD now?”
Will turns to look at Max, because he knows she must have had something to do with their utter non-reaction, but she just smiles coyly and shrugs, closing her textbook.
“They’ve been asking to play since six in the morning,” she says. “We had a little girl talk in the meantime. Secret business.”
Lucas comes around the counter with Max’s plate and kisses her, too. “You girls and your secrets. Did you finally decide between fighter and barbarian?”
“Barbarian,” Max says. “Duh.”
Will had agreed to run something over the summer, since the new party would all be in town. Lucas already made his druid. He thinks Erica settled on warlock, while Holly debuts her cleric. It’s just a short campaign about diving into the Nine Hells, just to get back into the swing of things.
He smiles and relaxes back into his stool. Sated that the world isn’t ending just because he kissed Lucas Sinclair.
“Just let me eat,” he tells the two younger girls, smiling wider at the way their eyes brighten. How long has it been since someone looked at him with that much magic? That youthful hope at the dawn of a new adventure? “Then we can start.”