Chapter Text
April 1st, 1984
The picnic table is damp with half melted snow. The whole forest is filled with the sloshy, dripping sounds of early spring. Will’s jacket crinkles loudly under him when he shifts. It’s that awkward time of year where jackets are a must, but they mostly end up being used as cushions to keep your butt from getting wet.
Will has claimed the only semi-dry spot on the table for his new sketchbook, listening to Mike complain as he sketches.
“I mean, do we even need new family photos? Who the hell is even looking at those anyway?”
It’s kinda funny watching Mike gesture furiously with only one arm, his other held perfectly still as he lets Will’s pen ink ‘tattoos’ dry on his forearm. The sleeve of his sweater is bunched at the elbow, and he keeps absent-mindedly going to tug it down before pushing it back up again.
“- And Mom’s probably going to make me wear a suit, or some shit. Which is just, like, totally unnecessary for these stupid pictures. Aren’t they supposed to show what our family looks like normally? Who the hell is wearing suits casually?”
Cora’s tail is lashing with agitation, the bottom of it already damp from skimming over the wet tabletop.
“You should wear a tank top. Show off your new ink,” says Will without looking up.
“Ugh!” replies Mike, who has almost as much derision for tank tops as he does getting his photo taken.
“Do you think it’s dry yet?” Mike holds his arm up, tentatively poking at the skin around Will’s doodles. It’s mostly dumb stuff, the same things Will draws in the margins of his notebooks: spirals, cartoon eyes, stars. The main feature is the wizard hat and somewhat wobbly looking sword that take up most of Mike’s arm.
“Don’t touch it with wet hands! It’ll definitely smudge.” Normally Will just draws on Mike’s hand when he gets bored, but apparently Mrs. Wheeler has been on a tirade about Mike’s ink covered hands, so now they’re hiding it under his sweater.
It feels a bit weird now. Will used to doodle on his friends all the time when they were still in elementary school, but they all kind of outgrew the habit a couple years ago. Ever since Will came back from the Upside Down Mike has been requesting ‘tattoos’ or shoving his hands into Will’s face every time Will looks remotely fidgety.
“But I’m cold,” Mike whines. “How are you not even wearing a sweater?”
Will shrugs. The air is still a bit brisk, but the sun is bright, and the slight chill on his skin doesn’t bother him.
Cora turns around to lick the base of her tail. Will switches to a different thumbnail sketch. There’s no use asking her to sit still, he just has to wait for her to go back to the previous position. The pencil scratches as he tries to capture the marbling in her fur as she twists. Mike goes back to his rant.
“I don’t even know if I want a settling party anyway! It’s been months since it happened. And what’s the point if we’re just merging it with my birthday? Most people get two parties. Nancy got two parties.”
“Jonathan didn’t.” Tanis’s voice comes from above them. He’s perched on a sapling a couple feet away from the picnic table, bobbing happily in the breeze as he soaks in the sun. Will hums in agreement.
Jonathan’s settling/birthday had been a quiet family celebration: An evening spent roasting marshmallows over the firepit in late August. Store-bought birthday pie instead of birthday cake. A black ring, patterned with scales just like Allie, from Mom; and a painting of Alcestis in her settled form, done by 11-year-old Will on the good painting paper. Will cringes every time he sees that painting – Alcestis looks like a black garden hose with a face – but Jonathan still has it proudly hung up in his room.
Will’s settling party had been pretty similar, actually. More of a glorified hang out than a party despite his Mom’s best efforts. The Party had come over on the first day of winter break, bearing various owl-themed gifts. They had made a giant nest of blankets and pillows in the living room in front of the TV, and proceeded to eat so much candy that they almost made themselves sick. (Will actually was sick, but he’s pretty confident that it was unrelated to the candy.) It was exactly what Will wanted.
The Wheelers can actually afford two proper parties though, so Will kinda understands why Mike is so put out.
“Yeah, but Jonathan’s cool so it’s fine.” Mike dries his hands on Cora’s back and dodges her retaliatory nip, poking at the ink and confirming it’s dry before pulling his sleeve back down. “My grandparents are gonna be there, dude. It’s going to be so awkward.”
“We’ll be there. The rest of the Party will be there,” Will says. If Cora would just sit still for 5 minutes maybe Will could manage to get the sketch for Mike’s painting done. He’s only got 7 days to finish it, and it’s going to be a damn sight better than the mess he made for Jonathan and Allie.
“Not all of the Party, though,” says Mike, slumping down to rest his head on his arms. Cora flicks her ears at him, and continues licking the damp patch Mike left on her back. Will bites the inside of his cheek instead of rolling his eyes, and starts a new sketch of Cora. He already knows where this is going.
“It just sucks that she can’t be there, you know?” Will hums noncommittally in response. “I mean, she was there when Cora settled!”
Will wasn’t, but it was sort of indirectly his fault, so he supposes that’s good enough to garner him an invitation. Tanis flaps his wings, making the sapling sway back and forth. Will watches a single downy feather float down to the forest floor, and feels so guilty for the thought that it makes his stomach hurt.
“I wish you could have met El. And Too. I think you guys would have gotten along really well.” All of Mike’s indignance over his settling party has melted away into his new, patented, Moping-About-El mood.
Will knows for a fact that Mike calls her every night on the radio.
Will would genuinely like to meet Eleven, even if only to thank her for helping find him. He hopes that she’s safe and okay, wherever she is now.
The others have talked about her non-stop since he got back, always in a tone of awe-tinged sadness. Mike’s fixation on her hasn’t waned in the slightest, even as Dustin and Lucas have become slowly resigned to her disappearance. Will feels bad for him – he really, really does – it’s just that they’ve had this conversation countless times and it’s started leaving a bitter taste in Will’s mouth.
“ – And Too was so cool! He could take all these crazy forms. Like, impossible shit. You wouldn’t believe it if you saw it!” Will probably would believe it, actually, given that Mike and the others have listed every impossible form Too took (and most of the normal ones) at least a hundred times by now. “Sometimes I wish Cora could still shift. We never really got the chance to try any of those shapes. I don’t even know if we could do it, but it would be cool to try.”
Will just nods. He presses down a little too hard with the pencil and has to erase Cora’s ears and start over.
Tanis passes him a memory: Mike's wrist, pulse warm under Will’s fingers, the glide of black pen on pale skin, Mike’s quiet breathing as he watches Will draw in silence. The weird, warm butterflies in Will’s stomach.
The bitter feeling is replaced by a hot flush in his face. Will glares at his daemon. Tanis clacks his beak cheekily and turns his face back towards the sun.
Mike looks up at the sound, resting his head in his hand as he stares up at Tanis. “An owl just makes so much sense for you guys.” Tanis blinks back down at him.
“And it’s such a good form too! You can fly, and you’ve got these wicked claws, but you’re still all soft and cuddly –” Will blushes at the thought of Mike thinking Tanis is cuddly and tries to cover it up by squinting at Cora in what he hopes is a critical-artist way. “Owls are perfect for Hawkins, they can blend in so well with all the trees, with, like, camouflage and shit.”
Will looks up at Tanis, who is the precise shade of a perfectly roasted marshmallow, the colour diluted all over his feathers as though he was painted in watercolour. He sits at the top of the spindly sapling, bending it under his weight like a particularly dense Christmas tree topper. Nothing about him really says camouflage.
“It must be nice to still be able to fly whenever you want.” There’s a weird wistfulness to Cora’s voice, especially considering that Will knows she never really liked being birds in the first place.
She’s sitting on the edge of the table staring up at Tanis, tail tucked neatly over her paws. It’s a very elegant framing, Will thinks, and he’s not sure whether the thought came from him or from Tanis. He hurries to get the shapes down before she moves.
Tanis doesn’t really fly anyway. It’s the curse of all bird daemons to be tethered to the earth by the range of their bond, but Tanis doesn’t even take advantage of that meager freedom. Even when they’re biking with the Party he just holds onto Will’s handlebars or backpack instead of joining Fides and Minnie in the air. Ever since the Upside Down, since that half remembered sensation of falling away from his soul, they’ve stayed close. Almost always within arms reach.
Will rubs at the new scar just under his hairline. Tanis rouses his feathers and spreads his wings, preening under the attention.
“Do you know what people say about owl daemons?”
“Lemme guess … are they wise?”
“Bing, bing, bing! Ten points to Will the Wise!” Mike gets briefly distracted making gameshow airhorn sounds. Will snorts.
“Seriously though, it’s totally uncanny how you just became your D&D daemon. I would have given anything to have settled as a wolf.” Cora’s ears flick back at that, and Will feels the steady trickle of guilt in his stomach, dripping like the snowmelt in the forest around them.
“What do people say about owls?” Tanis asks. Will knows most of the surface level stuff: wise, solitary, sneaky, but Mike loves daemon symbology. He insists he needs to know all of the possible symbolism for his writing.
“Well the whole wisdom thing comes from Greece, with the goddess Athena. Hey, do you think Dustin’s gonna settle as an owl? Since Minerva is another name for Athena?”
Will and Tanis consider this. Really the only owl they can picture Minnie as is one of those comically small owls that look perpetually startled. It doesn’t seem like the sort of form that would stick for Dustin, no matter how poetic it might be.
“Probably not,” Will says.
“Yeah. Anyway, it’s not just wisdom but also perception. There’s a whole bunch of stuff about owl-souled people being able to sense things others can’t. A ton of different cultures have stories about owl-souls being able to See Beyond the Veil and talk to dead people and stuff – hey do you have a ouija board? We could totally test this out next time you sleepover at my place.”
“No? Why would I have a ouija board?”
“I don’t know! Your mom’s cool, I thought Jonathan might have one or something. ANYWAY! There are other stereotypes too: owl-souls are hard to read, good liars, not very emotional, solitary, blah, blah, blah. The cool stuff is the whole seeing beyond the veil of this world thing. I think most of the other stuff just comes from people’s opinions about, like, actual owls.”
Will smiles, and tells Mike “That’s really cool! I had no idea!” and tries to ignore the icy feeling at the back of his neck, running down his spine. He tries to be flattered that Mike has put so much thought into Tanis’s form. He very deliberately does not think about how sometimes when he blinks wrong he opens his eyes in the Upside Down.
Cora wanders over and peers over the sketchbook page. Will tips it up and turns it to show her, angling it away from Mike so that he can’t see it. Mike, used to this, starts rambling to Tanis instead. She inspects each sketch closely, leaning carefully over Will’s wrist to touch the latest thumbnail with her pink nose. It’s the one where she’s looking up at Tanis.
“I like that one best,” she says, leaning only marginally out of his space.
“Me too,” Will agrees.
Cora is, without a doubt, the prettiest cat Will or Tanis have ever seen. The afternoon sunlight makes her white fur glow, and when she moves the patterns in her plush fur catch the light like she’s been covered in glitter. It’s as though there’s too much Dust in her body for this little form and the excess has been scattered across her fur. This shimmer is disrupted only by the rivers and pools of black in her coat, the same light-swallowing ink-black as Mike’s hair. Will both loves and is frustrated by the fact that she chose a shape that will require him to always have pencil crayons on hand (at the very least). Graphite alone does not do justice to the play of colours across her fur.
He just wishes Mike could see it too.
Mike was so clearly not ready to settle. He complains constantly about the inconvenience of Cora not being able to change shape. He gets awkward and grumpy whenever Fides and Minnie play-wrestle with Cora and win by shifting shapes. He goes silent and stone faced anytime someone so much as mentions her settled form.
Mike and Cora used to fight constantly and with great relish. Watching Mike brainstorm story ideas used to be a bit like watching a comedy special mixed with a particularly vigorous cross-examination. Now they hardly talk to each other.
It makes Will and Tanis feel sick with guilt every time they think about it. If Will hadn’t gotten caught, if he didn’t go missing, Mike never would have been at the quarry. Cora would still be free to wear whatever shape she wanted.
There’s a part of Will that wants very badly to apologize for making Mike settle, but Mike has developed an impressive ability to steamroll through a conversation anytime he gets even an inkling that someone is going to ask about Cora. Even with Will he skirts around the edges of the topic, never willing to talk about it for long.
He glances between his sketchbook and Cora. She’s still standing close enough that if Will breathed too hard, if he moved his wrist even half an inch, he would touch the soft fur of her side. He holds very still.
“Hey, did you know that Cora has a heart on her?”
Both Cora and Mike turn to him in unison. “What?”
“Here, on her fur.” He holds the very tip of the eraser in his hand, delicately tracing the shape of the heart on her side with the end of his pencil. It’s subtle, a little patch of warm brown outlined in jet-black, splotched and tilted slightly on the middle of her left side. It's unmistakably a heart once you see it.
Cora cranes her neck to try to see her own side clearly. Mike squints and comes around to sit next to Will on his side of the table, kneeling on the bench so he can lean past and look at his daemon.
Cora looks back up at Will. “I don’t see it.”
Mike leans past Will and scoops her up, back legs flailing and dangling.
“Stop grabbing me! You know I hate it!” Cora shrieks shrilly as Mike plops her down in front of him, stretching her out like a prize winner at a cat show so he can inspect her side.
“Stop hiding behind Will!”
“UGH!”
“Well, let me look!”
Tanis flies over from his perch. Will instinctively shifts his posture so that he can land on his shoulder. It’s funny how fast muscle memory can set in.
“There! Do you see it?” Will points with the pencil again, glancing at Mike. He sees the precise moment that Mike does, in fact, see what he’s talking about and decides to be difficult anyway.
Mike picks Cora up, still stretched out like a tube and wriggling madly. “Hmmm, I don’t know, Will.” He holds her out at arms length and brings her back in with the air of an appraiser taking in some new haul dumped in a pawn shop. Cora is spitting every swear word she and Mike know, and making up a few new ones along the way. (Tanis echos an especially venomous “Get fucked, dickbitch!” in a faintly awed tone next to Will’s ear.)
“Jesus Christ, Mike! Look!” Against his better judgement, Will flips the sketchbook around, tapping a thumbnail sketch of Cora cleaning her back that very clearly shows a heart-shape outlined in graphite.
Mike continues to hold Cora in the air with faux-skepticism as he takes in the page. Will rolls his eyes, well aware that this is what Mike was gunning for all along.
“Just put her down, Mike,” says Tanis. Mike lets Cora spill out of his arms and onto the table, where she hisses at him like a wild animal and shoots off the tabletop and onto the forest floor.
Tanis flies off to join her in the underbrush some 8 feet away. Mike leans back without looking away from the sketchbook to avoid getting clipped by his wings.
“Those sketches look really good!” Mike says, having already moved on from the altercation with his daemon. Once upon a time, Cora would have taken revenge by turning into a python and squeezing Mike until he fell over, or shifting into a seal and sitting on him until he apologized. Now she sits seething in the undergrowth, Tanis keeping her company at a distance from Will that he wouldn’t go to for any other daemon. It’s the closest they can get to an apology.
“Her patterns are fun to draw,” is all Will says.
“Yeah, the heart is cool. I never noticed before!” Mike seems genuinely enthused about this, so Will takes it as a win.
“Most people’s daemons don’t come with ready-made tattoos, you know,” Will says, nodding at Mike’s arm.
“Oh shit! Wait, can you add another one? So we match?” Mike is already rolling up his sleeve.
Will heaves an entirely fake sigh and digs out his black pen.
Mike’s arm is warm against his hands. Will clenches his teeth and concentrates very hard on finding a spot for the heart.
“You're gonna keep this covered, right?”
“Yeah, of course. My mom would flip her shit.” Of course Mike wouldn’t even consider the implications of Will drawing a heart on his arm. Anyone who knows anything about Will would immediately know that he was the one who drew it.
There’s a spot just below the hilt of the sword and the brim of the wizard hat. Will shifts closer and sets the pen to skin. Their daemons tumble out of the underbrush, roughhousing like children.
“It’s weird, isn’t it?”
Will’s pen skitters slightly, giving one arc of the heart a weirdly flat edge. “What is?”
“Being the first ones.” Mike is watching their daemons as they rampage closer. “I don’t get why everyone is so freaked out by it, someone has to be first every year.”
“I think it's the reason why they settled that gets to people.”
“That’s bullshit. It’s not like that was your fault. Or mine.”
Will just shrugs. He leans back to assess his work and goes back in to thicken up a line.
“You ready for tomorrow?” Mike’s voice has gone soft as he ducks his head to catch Will’s eye. Mondays are the worst right now. Everyone knows he gets called out of class early for his appointments at The Lab every other Monday. It only makes the whispers louder.
“I’ll be fine. Besides, tomorrow it’ll only be 6 more days until your birthday!” He scoots out of Mike’s space. “Don’t smudge that.”
Cora hops back up on the bench. Mike holds his arm out to her for inspection.
Will is pleased to note that he got the tilt of the heart exactly right.