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They called Will a sensitive child. When he looked up the word in the dictionary, its synonyms jumped out at him like arrows, piercing his useless armor. Thin-skinned. Neurotic. Fragile. He hated the word sensitive.
His father said it in plainer terms. One of those damn queers. I won’t raise a pussy under my roof, you hear me, Joyce?
Plainer didn’t always mean easier to hear, after all.
Jonathan said Lonnie had been different, once, a long time ago. Long before time had a name, Will thought, except it didn’t make him smile. He hadn’t ever hit Will but he didn’t need to; the echoes of his slurred words stung more than any bruises he could have left.
If Will was sensitive, fragile, thin-skinned, then his mother wasn’t any one of those things. His earliest memories were of her as a shield to his father’s executioner’s blade. She would block the doorway so Lonnie couldn’t get at Will and raise her voice higher than his could go.
He hated that, Lonnie Byers. Hated that his wife could do something he couldn’t. Hated that she would defend her sissy son.
It was a relief when he finally left and Will could breathe, the air no longer permeated with fear and unspoken words.
Well. The latter certainly still existed, but he didn’t like thinking about that. Will wasn’t hurting anybody by keeping it a secret; in fact, the only person that felt the weight of those words was him. He felt them sitting on his chest like a stack of weights when he laid down at night. He felt them hanging like a cross around his neck when he went out in public and was confronted with the absolute normalcy of everyone else.
And he felt them, electric and angry, jumping in his stomach when he was with Mike.
Will knew that he had to get the words out somehow. It was like sweating out the Mind Flayer’s influence under all those blankets. It was like cutting off a finger to save the hand; it simply had to be done. Yet when he tried to speak of these feelings, it felt as though he had swallowed tar and it was sliding down his throat in a slow funeral march. The words sunk down along with it; they twisted around his vocal cords until he couldn’t make a sound even if he wanted to. He could only stare at Mike giving El his sweater, standing beside her, telling her she was amazing.
And she was; she had saved them all. Will wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for El and her powers. No wonder Mike liked her; the world was flooding and she was the bit of driftwood that he could cling to. Will saw the way that his eyes lit up when he looked at El. Mike’s childhood innocence had left him in the past years, as had Will’s, the light of his existence dimmed into hard, cold shards of the icy moon.
But when El was around, he suddenly sparked with golden sun-fire again, an echo of his young self who had believed in dragons and wizards, who had turned a hut of twigs and leaves into a castle. He was hopeful. He was the knight that Will slashed with his pens onto canvas, the boy whose fingers slipped into his in dreams, in the spaces between seconds when no one was paying attention.
In the nights, the darkness pressed in on him, suffocating and endless, and he remembered the cold of the Upside Down,
/ darling, you’ve got to let me know /
/ should I stay or should I go /
and he wondered what it would be like to be El, who had saved him the first time, saved all of them countless times after. If he was her, he could bring the sun back to the sky and light hope in everyone’s hearts like a thousand candles.
Maybe then he would be interesting again.
Maybe then Mike would look at him like he used to do.
He knew the chances were little to none. No, they were none, absolute zero. Compared to El, he was nothing. No easier to swallow than the words a damn queer, but somehow simpler to accept, because they were not a bitter truth that others had put into his mouth before he could understand what it meant but rather a simple fact about the universe.
Was there something wrong with him?
She had saved the world. She had saved the world and he couldn’t even say any of the words he wanted to say, not just to Mike, I love you, but to his mother, thank you, and to everyone else, I’m sorry. He felt responsible for everything, the Demogorgons, the deaths, Hopper, the move to Lenora and the subsequent move back because Hawkins is our home. And yet those words had remained locked away with the other ones; what was the point of having a mouth if he couldn’t even speak?
So yes, it made sense that Mike would choose El over Will, and yes, it made sense that Will loved him. He loved Mike the same way that he knew his mother loved Hawkins, not despite all that had happened there but because of it, a defiant kind of love; she loved it in the way that you could love a person if they hurt you enough, and wouldn’t Will know exactly what that felt like?
Loving Mike felt like tipping over the edge of a balcony, hurtling towards the ground.
But maybe some part of Will had always wanted to fall.