Chapter Text
It’s cold.
Will can’t feel his limbs. His toes, his fingers, his arms and knees, they’ve all gone numb. He’s staring out at the clouded sky that flickers an awful shade of red, not being able to move his eyes, his head. Now that he really thinks about it: he can’t feel anything at all. Not the stomachache that he had not too long ago after eating his mother’s home-cooked meal, though he can’t remember how long ago. Not his blood running through his veins, or the drum of his heartbeat in his ears.
Just the cold.
And, suddenly, Will is acutely aware of the fact that he is dying.
It must have been a lengthy process—he had always assumed he would remember more at the end. There was this lightbulb, growing brighter and brighter. A shiver in the air. Some kind of creature, willing to take him.
The next thing he knew he was lying on the forest floor, staring up at a sky that didn’t look like the sky at all. And he just couldn’t remember, for the life of him, how he’d gotten here.
But maybe all that doesn’t matter. Maybe, just maybe, remembering them is enough. He thinks about his mother, and how he’s so so very sorry, because he knows how worried she can get. He thinks about his brother, Jonathan, how he could be annoying sometimes, taking pictures at all the wrong moments—moments of Will that he would have otherwise kept to himself, of him and his friends—but how he loves him even so. He thinks about his friends, Lucas, Dustin, and Mike—especially Mike. How he would make him laugh all the time while playing Dungeons & Dragons. How they first met at that swing at recess in kindergarten. How easy it was to make friends back then. He just had to nod and laugh and say “Yes.” Yes, I’ll be your friend if you’ll be mine.
And, at that moment, Will realizes something fundamental.
He doesn’t want to die.
Tears he had tried to hold in, well up in his eyes. He doesn’t know why he had tried to stay strong. He’d always been a crybaby. It wasn’t hard letting go.
It’s just the thought of Mike, how lonely he’ll be without him.
Will breaks. His eyes release tears that wet his cheeks and ears before falling to the ground. His heart breaks in thousands of glass fractures, cutting the surrounding organs from the inside out. He remembers he has a voice, small and frail.
“Please.”
The sky lights up. Watching. Listening.
“Please, anyone.”
There is a sound. A kind of whisper in the air, different from the red-lit thunder. Through half-lidded eyes Will sees a sort of shadow. A creature maybe—different from that thing that had tried to take him. But it was something alive. Something that could reach him. He finds the strength to lift his arm.
Will outstretches his hand towards the sound, towards the being that answered his prayers.
Please. Don’t let Mike feel lonely.”
Then it’s here. The shadow crashes onto Will’s body as if there’s a magnetic force that pulls the two of them together. Will’s body shakes violently as the shadow enters him through his mouth. It’s cold and full and thick and needy. It nestles under his skin, takes control of his brain, his thoughts, his feelings, his memories.
As his consciousness slowly fades away, Will thinks to himself that maybe it isn’t that cold after all. And maybe, if it really is that cold, then the sensation isn’t as bad as he had thought.
After all, he likes it cold.