Archive of Our Own

Will Byers looks at the bleeding sky that should remind him of horrible, terrible things, and doesn't feel much of anything.

It ought to concern him more, the stumbling way his mind loses focus, all the sharp edges dulled out like a stone being shaped by a steady trickle of water. Instead, days like this are kind of nice, not having to think as much, to feel less fear haunting his every waking moment. It's a gift of oblivion, his mind whispers to him, and so he doesn't tell anyone.

He lays on the low-incline roof of the Wheeler’s garage, and all he can see is the dark stretch of nothing above him and the dance of ash against it — the spores, really, fungi and rotten in nature, but there is something about the word ash that feels right in the way it sits on Will's tongue, fits itself in the mouths of those spreading gospel over the town. It barely ever touches the ground, not like snow would. It flows gently up and down, sways from side to side, suspended in the air; or it congregates in clumps, tucks itself between floorboards and in cracks on the pavement. Will watches it settle over the town, and remembers the slick way the particles would stick together with the moist grime of the Upside Down, like a layer of dust coating every surface.

He looks into the rolling, dark grey of the clouds and smoke up above him, mixed with the off-blue of the sky, little real tone left of what used to be brilliant and vibrant shades of navy and azure at the height of summer. That too, is sort of nice, in a twisted way. He missed the clouds a lot, back in that year they spent in Lenora, where it was all open vast expense and dry heat, and Will felt like a spec of dirt, insignificant in the face of the sky. It's not the same now, of course, because these are not ordinary clouds but a constant reminder of the encroaching end of the world — no one dares call it that, save for maybe the church-goers claiming the coming of Anti-Christ, but they all know it is. But both the pale Hawkins sky and the gloomy one of the Upside Down are a familiar sight, and Will has always found comfort in what is tired and familiar.

He missed feeling grounded then, missed the familiarity, however daunting. There was a lot he missed back in California.

Though the heat was pleasant, Will had thought back then, despite the way sweat clung to his skin and the roots of his hair, the way the West Coast sun stung at his eyes even in the depth of winter, all the normal human discomforts. It was nice to start anew and not be the boy who came back to life that one time in ‘83. He had thought he could learn to move on there, figure parts of him out that got tainted and cracked by everything that happened. Thought he could learn to feel safe again.

But the world is ending, and Hawkins doesn't feel quite so cold anymore anyways, so maybe it didn't matter that much in the first place.

It's familiar, the flowing and gentle way nothingness tingles at his fingers and toes, like frostbite eating away at the nerve ends under his skin. Will doesn't feel the biting chill anymore, not unless he thinks about it. Maybe he ran out of the energy to feel the terror raking through his body in waves, along with the crawly sensation of the Mindflayer — the Upside Down, the hivemind, Hawkins, all of it — on the back of his neck, got used to it just like he did the cold.

It's an exhaustion that pulls his limbs and face muscles down, rendering them unwilling to form much expression. It's familiar, because it's the same feeling that took him back when he was stuck in the Upside Down — the final moments there, in a filthy replica of the safety of childhood, shivering and dying. And then the feeling followed him out too. They — the lab people, week after week after week of check ins and tests — spoke in soft and clinical words about things like trauma, and made him take pills. To help with the sadness, they said, and Will took them with slim fingers, hesitant but trusting, eager to be fixed. Sadness was such a small word to describe the vastness of his ache, the plethora of things he was and wasn't feeling, he had thought back then, but what did he know? The pills were small and white and bitter, clanking together in bright orange containers, and they lived in the drawer of his night stand but then got moved to the surface next to his nightlight because he kept forgetting that they were there. 

Most of them got left back in Lenora, lost to the chaos. No one seems to remember about it, so Will doesn't bring it up.

Will lies sprawled out on the roof of the Wheeler's garage, the indentations of it digging into his back, ash and spores falling down, down, down above him, and closes his eyes for a moment. He lets himself pretend that he's floating, lets himself imagine for a moment what it would be like if he could just stay here and let the spores cover him whole, fit themselves between his ribs and in the bloody cracks on his lips, settle over him in a heavy blanket that would eat through his skin and flesh, and leave only scarred bones in its wake.

“Will?” Mike's voice calls from somewhere close next to him, a weird edge to it. Will gives himself a moment to breathe in and out, once, twice, and opens his eyes to face him. 

The sky hasn't changed in the seconds — minutes? — he had his eyes shut, but now there is the addition of Mike looking down at him, hanging out of the opened window to his own bedroom, the same one Will used to get out here. Weird, Will didn’t hear him open it. He’d closed it, hadn't he? They are supposed to, especially when the rippling sky acts up and spores float denser in the air, even here on the edge of town where the air isn't actually toxic, not like it gets closer to the cracks in the earth — so he must have closed it behind him in his hazy attempt to get a moment of peace. 

“Hey,” he rasps back, not really making an attempt to get up, just rolling his head to the side a little to get a better view of Mike's face.

Mike watches him for a moment, as if waiting for something. He looks away briefly when they lock eyes, gaze flicking aside momentarily to sweep over the neighbourhood before going back, but that's the new normal for them now — the hesitant way Mike approaches him, the tired way Will answers. Will doesn't like it, but he isn't sure what there is to do about it at this point.

“What are you doing out here?” Mike prompts in that soft voice of his, when Will doesn't say anything.

Will shrugs, his shoulders brushing over the neat roof plates. “Getting some air.” 

It's not a good reply, he knows. It is sure to raise questions, suspicions, but in the end of the day it's Mike, and Will doesn't like lying to him, still, even after all this time and despite how it has seemingly gotten easier lately. It's Mike, and they might not have talked much in these last few months, and he might not care as much to be honest with him right now — or anyone, for that matter — but it's easier to settle on a vague half-truth, a noncommittal shrug and hum, than waste his energy on making up any more lies and excuses.

Mike glances sceptically around them. He hasn't started coughing yet, so the air must be nicer today, thinner. That's good, Will thinks. Plausible deniability. 

He isn't sure what it is that he's hiding.

“Okay,” Mike says, looking a little apprehensive still, and folds his arms on the window sill, long sleeves creasing, his fingers digging into the where fabric folds thickly, and hooks his chin on top of them.

He looks almost casual — softened by the grey glow of the sky, looking down at Will with dark and open eyes, like this is something they are in on together, like this is all normal. It's a sore thing, the way he could fold himself in the space next to Will with practiced ease, the familiar tilt of his head. Mike was always good at taking Will and all of his weird moods at a stride, allowing him space without taking any up in standing next to him. It would work now, if it wasn't for the way Will sees him fiddle with his sleeves, the loose threads there, an anxious habit. If he didn't look stilted and cautious, carefully posed, as if going through the motions he isn't sure he knows how to do anymore, isn't sure that he's allowed to. There was a lot Will missed about Hawkins in California, and a lot he didn't get to come back to.

“Why?” Mike asks, and there it is, the other shoe.

Will shrugs again, drags his half-lidded eyes away from Mike and back to the sky. He makes an I don't know sort of noise, then says, plainly, “It was getting loud in there.” 

He hears Mike breathe out in understanding, sees his lips drop into an O shape out of the corner of his eye. It's a lot of people bundled together in the Wheeler house today, some supply run discussion on the side of just hanging out in an attempt to brighten up the mood. Last he remembers, Robin was putting music on in the basement, while Dustin was arguing with her tapes of choice, Nancy and Jonathan hunched together over a map of Hawkins, a vision that has become all too familiar in the last weeks. Lucas and Mike were there next to them too, voices raising over each other while they talked about something Will can't quite recall.

Will isn't sure how much time has passed while he was out here. Maybe they have all left now.

“Yeah, I— That's fair,” Mike says. “Are you cold?”

He glances down at the thin long-sleeved shirt Will is wearing, one that would be just fine for a normal summer, but very little has been normal in Hawkins for a long time now. 

“A little,” Will says, because he knows Mike will exhale in relief at that and smile, will offer him a sweater or a blanket, glad to be useful. 

“You should come back in,” Mike says softly. “Robin, Dustin and Lucas have left for their rounds, so it's just Jonathan and Nancy. And me,” he adds unnecessarily, biting at his lip and looking at Will intently.

Will wishes he didn't say any of that, because he kind of wants to stay here — where the air is dense and quiet and all he can see is the sky and not the concern and tenseness on everyone's faces — a while longer. But no, he doesn't want to stay, not really, it's just the idea of getting up that makes him want to groan in exhaustion and his bones to creak. It's like he is rooted in place here, pushed down into the rough texture of the roof by force of gravity alone. He doesn't want to go, doesn't want to sit there in silence while Jonathan and Nancy whisper about something, and Mike is throwing unsubtle glances at him every other second, but he doesn't have the energy to fight it. Will isn't sure what he wants anymore. He sighs.

“Yeah, okay,” he says, and goes to sit up in an excruciating movement that probably doesn't look quite as slow as it feels.

Mike scrambled out of the window to give Will space, disappearing back into the depth of the house. Will takes his time, gives himself a moment to throw one last look out, one that slides down from the sky and follows the bend of the road down the street, the empty houses there and their maw-like, dark, dark windows.

His eyes drift and suddenly catch on someone — a woman — walking down the street on the other side of the road, a lone figure — one of the few other people left on this street of rich people who could afford to uproot their life and leave in a spur of the moment before the town got locked down. She is pretty far away, but he can see dark hair falling over her shoulders in tight, fake curls, her hands fiddling with something in her bag, distracted and agitated. She's young, Will notes for some reason. Probably not more than five years older than he is.

Something about it gives him pause, makes him linger with his arms propping him up as breeze combs gently through his hair. She has fear in her, something in Will whispers, dark and knowing. He can picture this woman, so clearly all of a sudden, around a dark wooden dinner table, fork gripped tightly in hand as voices rise; her, young, on a church bench, next to a man — older, old — who doesn't look at her but his grip around her wrist is bruising. The sound of the tree branches rattling against the garage roof almost sounds like voices at the edge of his mind. Look, look, look, they mutter.

The woman stops suddenly, her whole body going rigid, and slowly turns around, her head tilting up, eyes widening when she sees Will already staring at her unblinkingly. Will doesn't get a chance to look away before her lips start moving and she mutters something under her breath, eyes dark and poisonous, hand clutching at something hidden within the ruffles of her dress shirt, and walks away briskly. Will blinks, and for a moment the shadows look almost hungry in the way they stretch after her, reaching.

The moment has gone and passed before he knows it, and the next time his eyes refocus on the pavement, there is no one there. Huh, Will thinks, and for the life of him can't place the weird feeling in his gut, the eerie emptiness in his mind. The sky rumbles. 

He shakes it off and goes to get up, moving in stilted half-motions — finding purchase with a hand on the roof and pushing his body upward, centering himself with the other hand, rolling his impossible weight onto his legs and perching up on the roof. He moves to the window and climbs back in entirely ungracefully, feeling like he is missing something important. Mike is there to steady him with a hand shooting up to grasp at Will's shoulder, but he retreats it back immediately after, as if burned.

Will doesn't say anything, and Mike doesn't either, though he looks like he might want to. Will gives him a few seconds before he turns away and walks out of the room.

It’s still unnerving to see Max like this, ghostly pale and unmoving.

There are needles sticking in the bends of her elbows, taped down by white gauze, fluids trickling in and out. It makes Will think of Chester inexplicably, that cold winter night when they rode out with his whining filling the car and came back to the house empty and had to clean his food bowl and put it away. They stuck a needle in Chester too, and Will watched numbly, tears and snot running down his face — right in the aftermath of his possession, when everything was a little fuzzy around the edges and some days all he could do was cry — as he went soundless and still.

The thought fills him with guilt, because it's different, of course it is. Max is not dying, and the tubes are not pushing deadly toxins into her system, quite the opposite. But there are needles in her arms, and she is deathly still and quiet, and he wants her not to be so badly, with that same childish desperation that filled him in that vet room when they were told what needed to be done. 

He misses her in the same way he misses California, weirdly, the freeing detachment from what happened to him, the fiery confidence it gave him sometimes. He wants to tell her things, wants to talk to her about California again, the high skies and the open roads, this time while being able to see her face, not just read about it in her scratchy handwriting.

In those last few months before they moved away Max would come to their house a lot — mostly for El, but her and Will became closer because of it too. They'd all sit together on the floor, music blasting loud enough to drown out any inkling of the profound and tired sadness hanging over the room. 

Max tried teaching both him and El how to ride a skateboard on one cloudy August day at the tail end of that summer, while moving boxes started littering their living room. It was the first time he had heard El laugh unabashedly back then, when she got it right and glided down the road ten whole feet before her legs began to wobble. It was easy to laugh along with her then, the sound rippling out of him against his will, and he had thought that maybe it wasn't all bad. Will got his knees scrapped up that afternoon too, blood trickling down his calves and gravel stuck in the cuts. It didn't scar, but it aches like it did as he sits in the uncomfortable and stiff hospital chair. 

The machines beep, and Max lays still. Lucas handed him the letter with his name neatly atop it when they got back to Hawkins, but Will hadn't opened it yet, tucked it away neatly between the pages of his sketchbook instead, the weight of it unbearable. 

It’s the last letter he got from her, but it was far from the first.

He twiddles with the edge of the envelope sticking out between the pages now, recalls blinking in surprise when he got an envelope with both his and her names on it for the first time that fall, remembers opening it tentatively. Dear Will, it read, and then she asked him about school and his new house and life, all the same things his other friends did, but it felt a little more special coming from her, this girl who wasn't his friend since before he was tall enough to reach the kitchen counter, this girl who has met him in the worst of states, detached and sweating through his shirt and muttering nonsense, and had every reason to steer clear. He didn't really expect her to make an effort to keep in touch, all these miles apart and through the fog of grief — but she did, and so there would be a letter waiting for him in the mailbox every few weeks. 

He would send her a drawing back with each one of his, coloured pencil sketches of his new town, random street signs and people passing by, all toned slightly yellow, as if the colours got burned out after being left out in the sun for too long. He didn't use to share his art so freely before, but Max had asked (and Mike didn't write to him by then, so maybe it wasn't a big deal then, Will thought a little spitefully), and then it felt like an afterthought to rip a page of his sketchbook out and fold it in with the letter to her.

Now, he brings his sketchbook with him every time he visits, pencil gliding forcefully over the page even on days when his fingers feel stiff and every line comes out wrong. It's the only time he ever does these days, through the fatigue and general unenthusiasm to, because it's for Max.

He draws the flowers they leave for her in vases, rare and mostly a little dry — Will knows Lucas goes out of his way to pick them out through the withering fields every week, like clockwork, and he draws them so that she knows about it when she wakes up — a proof of just how much Lucas cares for her. It makes Will's heart ache. 

He doodles characters and scenes from whatever book Lucas leaves on the bedside table if he has read it. Mostly, he draws their friends, El and her quiet determination, her growing out hair falling in soft curls, Dustin with crumbs all over his face, Lucas with a smile tugging at his lips, sometimes even Mike, but that feels too incriminating most days, too intimate, too detailed. He tries to capture or conjure good moments from memory as he listens to the rhythmic noise of the machines. He writes notes on the pages too, narrates moments and memories, just like he would in their letters, and leaves them in a neat little stack on her bedside table, tucked near the boombox. 

Sometimes, he draws her, not how she is right now but how she was, fierce and bright and always moving, but those stay on the pages of his sketchbook, to be traced over with his fingertips as if that would make her come to life on the page. He's been meaning to show them to Lucas, but the thought keeps slipping away from him.

He can feel Mike watching him as his pencil scratches over a blank page, the beginnings of the patch of forest near El's cabin — without all the evidence of the Upside Down's corruption — starting to form in dark brown lines, but pays him no mind. They almost never visit Max together like this — there is usually at least one person with her as a rule, but it's only for the best when they talk to her and their voices crack if there is no one else in the room to hear it. The general schedule is a little up in the air, but Lucas usually visits every day and then whoever is free replaces him so he can rest. They have a bit of a system that ebbs and flows as things come up, but generally Tuesdays and Thursdays are Will's days.

But then Mike had tentatively approached him this afternoon while Will was standing idly in the hallway, waiting for Jonathan to get ready so he could drop Will off at the hospital for the day and pick Lucas up. 

“Hey,” he said, a thin smile on his lips. “Can I go with you?”

Will looked at him for a moment, before the words actually caught up to him, and he nodded, shrugging a bit and looking away, “Sure.”

And here they are, coated in heavy silence that Will has no desire of breaking, their seats pulled next to Max's bed as Will sketches and Mike seemingly drives himself to madness with fidgeting listlessly, shifting in his seat relentlessly, music murmuring softly around them.  

“What are you drawing?” Mike finally speaks up, which was really only a matter of time so Will can't even be mad about it, despite the spike of irritation that flares up in his chest briefly before being dulled down with every measured movement of his hand over the page. Still, it leaves a bad taste in his mouth. He doesn't like being annoyed at Mike, especially for normal things like talking and fiddling with his shirt sleeves in agitation — all the stuff that always made him magnetic, to Will at least, the constant buzzing of kinetic energy like a magnetic pull, a proof of all the life brimming in him.

“A forest,” Will says blandly, noncommittal, scritching some texture over the tree bark in thin lines.

Mike waits a beat for Will to say more. Will doesn't have to glance at him and check to know that he is tapping his foot restlessly, his eyes searching over Will's side profile, the weight of his attention so palpable it makes Will's skin crawl in faint discomfort.

“I never see you draw anymore,” Mike notes in a weird tone that Will doesn't understand. He shrugs, not looking up, shaping the background with freefalling, careless lines, pouring all his resolve into looking busy.

“Haven't really felt like it, I guess,” he says. 

Mike hums; Will senses him move in the periphery of his vision, sees him prop his chin up on the palm of his hand, hanging a little over the gap between their chairs so he has a clearer view of Will's sketchbook. Will swallows down the urge to twist away. 

“You used to draw all the time,” Mike points out. Will isn't really sure what he's trying to achieve with that comment, nor the gentle and probing way he looks at Will when Will risks a glance in his direction. His words reek of unspoken knowledge, familiarity with Will and all the way he ticks, a nudge to Will for him to open up.

You used to draw all the time, he says, but what goes unspoken is: because that's the one thing that made your hands feel purposeful and not tainted. You used to draw all the time, because putting the incomprehensible horrors on paper always eased the pledging weight of memory on your mind. You used to draw all the time, and so it's out of character for you not to. And within it hides the question of, Why? What's wrong?

Something curls up in his gut, reaching uncomfortably and clammy to the core Will's chest. I don't owe you anything, it wants him to snarl, wants his eyes to go hard and cold, his words to cut to the bone. You lost the right to my mind when the letters stopped, when you still couldn't give me a reason why. It's a bitter thought, a cruel one. It doesn't sit right with him, misplaced and too angry for it to be his, really his, right? He had let it go, because he is a lovesick fool, and between Mike's words and the endless stretch of nothing out of a pizza van window, state line after state line crossed, it felt silly to stay mad. 

“Things change,” is what he says in the end, because it's true. He really doesn't mean for it to be a jab at the chasm still lingering between them, but he sees Mike's face twitch in something that might be guilt as he leans back into his chair, fingers tapping on the handreasts. “The world is ending.”

Will thinks Mike might have flinched at that a bit, but that can just be his imagination. Still, discomfort doesn't look good on him, Will thinks, but then it has become so familiar that it's hard to discern these days. The blinds are drawn over the hospital windows, but Will can feel the spores grazing the glass like it's a splattering of rain on his skin.

“Yeah,” Mike replies faintly, and the conversation dies down there, melting back into a hospital kind of silence that is all white noise. Will thinks back to those initial few weeks after they dragged him out of the Upside Down that he had spent in this same hospital, before he was allowed to go home and the lab got taken over and all of his appointments transferred there. It's hazy in his memory, but what he does remember — the kind of memory that is all echos of touch and sound — is his mom and Jonathan at his bedside at all times back when their hovering was reassuring instead of suffocating; what he does remember is Mike, rushing in and nearly crushing Will under his warm weight, under the force of his relief, not a flash of hesitation on his face. Will can feel it now too, how grounding it was back then. 

Beep, beep, beep, goes Max's heart monitor, the line of her pulse jumping up and down in steady waves. Will wonders what Mike usually does when he's visiting alone. 

“Max and I got pretty close last year, y’know?” Mike breaks the silence again, what feels like hours later and their conversation is just a lingering aftershock of musing thoughts in the back of Will's mind. His words are quiet, thoughtful, as are his eyes drifting over Max.

Will looks at him out of the corner of his eye, blue pencil doodling shapes and stars, mapping out beginnings of El's face on the flip side of the page now. “Yeah?”

“Yeah, I mean,” Mike fiddles with the handrests on the stiff hospital chair, fingers sliding back and forth over the surface of it, eyes hesitant when he glances at Will, “We had Spanish together? Failed it together too,” Mike huffs, bittersweet. “She'd come to my basement a lot when her mom was going through the divorce, and we'd just kind of hang out alone.” 

Will blinks in muffled surprise, turning his head to face Mike more fully now, hands falling still over the open sketchbook. “I didn't know about that,” he says softly after a moment of silence filled only with the beeping of Max's heart and the thrum of music. 

Unaware, I'm tearing you asunder, spills out the song around them, Oh, there is thunder in our hearts.

“Yeah,” Mike breathes over the music, eyes downturned, “We never really told anyone about it. I mean, she threatened me to not tell anyone. Not like I was going to anyway. Even when she wasn't really talking to Dustin and Lucas or even me outside of that.”

Will isn't really sure what to do with that, so he doesn't say anything, lets the silence stretch between them. He watches Mike bite at the skin around his nails, his dark eyes deep in thought, the slumped line of his shoulders. It's a little funny, how Max had found both of them in those uncertain months where fall turned to winter and bleed sluggishly into spring. Last he remembers Mike and Max had a tenuous friendship that consisted mostly of them bickering and coexisting in the same friendgroup. But, as he himself put it, things change. Will wonders if that's why Mike is telling him this. An attempt to bridge the gap, an olive branch of sorts. A step closer to acknowledging it than running away from it.

“I should have known,” Mike is saying. “She wasn't doing well — that's why she got targeted in the first place — but I didn't notice how bad it was because I was so fucking self-absorbed, and now she's…”

He trails off, staring into space blankly. Will wants to reach out and touch his hand, bring him out of his head. He grips the hardcover edges of his sketchbook harder. There isn't much he can say here, he knows. They are all gnawed at by the same sort of guilt, the same endless repetition of could’ve, would’ve, should’ve.

“She was good at pushing people away,” Will says; it tastes like blood on the root of his tongue. “Maybe— Maybe she just wasn't ready to accept help back then. Maybe she would have later.”

It sounds weak and hollow to his own ears, a barren excuse in an attempt to make them feel better about all the spaces where Max fell through the cracks. The truth is that they were all robbed of time to figure it out, find a way to meet somewhere in the middle. The truth is that knowing that doesn't change anything.

“Still, we should’ve tried harder,” Mike shakes his head. Will's heart aches for him and all the guilt hiding in the creases over his face; his fingers itch to smooth it out. 

“Yeah,” he admits weakly, an empty sound that is barely an agreement but not a denial either. It takes all of what's little left of him to dig around and try to find that version of him hiding behind his ribcage that used to find giving Mike comfort as easy as breathing. “But you did help. She went to you when she needed a place to stay. I think that's worth something.”

“But it wasn't enough,” Mike says, his voice breaking a little in the middle.

“I don't know what would have been,” Will says honestly after a long pause where all he can do is watch Mike and scream himself hoarse internally.

Will looks down at the drawing in his lap. It's for Max, but the machines beep on, and then there is Lucas's voice in his head — She will probably go blind or have very poor sight when— when she wakes up — so Will isn't really sure what he's doing it for. His fingers shake. Still, he presses down hard on the pencil, leaving dents in the paper.

Mike doesn't say anything. They both look at Max, her motionless frame, tucked neatly under the hospital bedcovers, the room filled with a somber silence that tastes stale and bitter on the root of Will's tongue. It's not fair, Will thinks, looking down at his hands, the sentiment dull and worn-down but no less painful. The scar near his ribs throbs; the skin on his knees prickles.

And I'd get him to swap our places, croons Kate Bush lowly from the boombox.

Beep, beep, beep, go the machines. Will watches air be forced into Max's lungs, and wonders what it feels like to sleep and not wake up.

Nancy stands over the fold-out table in the basement, palms digging into the edges in a way that makes Will worry about the weight-bearing abilities of it. She studies the map with a frown on her face that with the weak basement light looks more like a scowl. Almost everyone is here now, converging around the table or sprawled out around the space, save for Jonathan holding watch over Max in the hospital and Joyce looking after El as she tries to find something, anything, through the veil of static. Low chatter fills the space; it makes Will's head throb slightly, the dissonance of noises.

Vivian Lodge, reads the new line of text on the big whiteboard, a number next to it that is yet to have a correlating one marking a dot on another map of Hawkins hanging on the board. Dark curled up hair, big green eyes, Nancy tells them, she disappeared on her way home from church somewhere between eight and nine in the evening yesterday. Will isn't sure why it all sounds so familiar. His eyes dance over the map as the others discuss something behind him, from one dot to another, trying and failing to concentrate on the subject matter.

The end of the world comes slowly — the sky bleeds, the ground shakes, the grass withers, and people get snatched away at random, in secluded corners of the town when the night grows dark. Victims to the democreatures is what they are, food to fill the empty void of their hunger now that they have a much easier access to their hunting ground. A sliced hand, a bruised and bleeding knuckle, a scrapped up knee — that's all it takes. That and something else that they are yet to figure out, since it's not every bleeding person in Hawkins that they go after. There must be a pattern there, they all say. 

It makes Will think of Barb a lot, her final scream a shrill sound that has reached him through the haze of fear. A casualty. A freak accident. Something else. Will wonders what that makes him.

People go missing, and they check the areas out, looking for a trace of blood left, a scar of a portal being torn open, eating away at the wood or walls with it, spores growing through every crack in the bark and concrete, roots twisted up and bulging in places, covered in the tiniest of vines, like veins pumping black ooze through the earth. It's another way for the Upside Down to spread, Will thinks privately. The seams stitching the two sides together torn carelessly by the creatures, all to leave its mark on Hawkins when taking something that shouldn't belong to the other side.

Finding the actual scars is usually a tedious process that takes a few days, with the vague descriptions and notes of what happened they can gather from the missing person's posters, El listening in with her powers and Nancy and Robin snooping, and the compass method not really working when there are four giant gates running through the ground. But it gives them all a sense of purpose, in mapping out these happenings, just in case, as they try to figure out what to do next. It feels a little desperate to Will sometimes, but it is what it is.

Most of the red dots are around the outskirts of town, like an uneven circle, with a cross that is the Upside Down gates placed inside it in red ink by Will's own hand. X marks the spot, Will thinks inanely at some point, and still can't place where the thought came from.

“We have a few options,” Nancy is saying. “She lived a few houses down, so the nearby forest is an obvious one, and the one around the church too.” 

“And then what, everything in between?” Dustin questions.

“Let's hope we don't need to,” Nancy says. “Robin and I can take her house, and the rest of you can have Steve drive you out to the church.” She pauses briefly, probably waiting for noises of complaint but none come, so she goes on, “You are gonna have to be quick because of the drive around, get out of there before nightfall, got it?” 

That causes a faint murmur of acknowledgment from the room but nothing more, and the room springs into action. Dustin starts questioning Steve and subsequently Nancy — who is already distracted with Robin saying something low into her ear — on logistics, and Will stops paying attention after that. His eyes drag instinctively down the map to the little dull square indicating his old house and the thought is gone. He wonders what happened to the shed there, the one where on a cold November night a lightbulb went searing white and a creature ripped a hole in the floor open. He wonders if there is a scar left there too that they don't know about. He was never quite able to walk inside it again, to cross that threshold, not until he was blinded and tied there, locked out of his own body.

Will feels a tug at his sleeve, and turns his head to see Mike standing next to him, his fingers pinched over Will's sweatshirt sleeve gently — the gesture so sweetly reminiscent of when they were kids, it sidetracks Will's train of thought completely for a moment. 

“Hey,” Mike says, voice low under the chatter in the room. Will hates himself a little for the way he wants to lean in closer instinctively to chase the way Mike always could make the room seem smaller than it is when he was talking to Will. “Are you okay?”

Will feels himself frown. “Yeah, of course. Why?” 

Mike gives him a little shrug. “You just seem tired is all. You don't have to go with us if you don't feel like it.” 

The way he says it isn't condescending; it would usually make him feel good, being noticed by Mike and his quiet knowing eyes. It used to mean the world to him, like all of his fluttering emotions and thoughts finally took up coherent shape only when he was under the weight of it. Will wonders at what point it started making him want to run and hide. He shakes his sleeve out of Mike's loose grip, moving away a little. 

“No, I'm good,” he says, gives Mike a tight-lipped expression that is barely a smile, and walks away to the corner of the room where his jacket is stashed before Mike can say anything else.

He goes through the motions of getting ready along with everyone else mechanically, throwing on a dark blue jacket over his sweatshirt, tying his shoes tight enough for it to hurt and be a little uncomfortable, making him constantly aware of the pressure around his feet. The others move across the room in practiced precision. Nancy opens the hidden compartment within the staircase where some of their firearms are stored and starts giving weapons out.

Will slinks the strap of a rifle over his shoulder, the leather worn down and smooth under his fingers when he raises his hand up to hold onto it, like a kid on the first day of school with his fingers tucked under the strap of his backpack. 

There was a lot of fuss in the beginning about “the kids” joining in on the whole armed action, which caused a lot of loud protests from everyone on the kid's side involved. It was a quick argument, with Dustin's eyes dark and haunted with the memory of what happened to Eddie, and Lucas's hard and determined with grief; with the somber mood in the room and the spores falling down behind closed windows. Everyone knew they'd find a way to get involved either way and it was for everyone's benefit that they were taught how to use a gun properly. 

Will hated every second of that impromptu shooting class that he got dragged to for no real reason, forced to have his ears ringing with the deafening booming of gunshots. It made his skin crawl with memory, and the knowing glances Jonathan kept shooting his way didn't help. There was also the hard nod of respect from Nancy when he aced most of his shots, which instantly reaffirmed the knowledge in him that if someone would do what needed to be done, it would be Nancy — something he knew already, the burn scar on his torso a forever proof of that, but in those first uncertain days of the apocalypse he needed the reassurance.

He watches as the others get ready, backpacks with gear slung over their shoulders, guns tucked away in heavy and thick jackets thrown on in an attempt to battle the deathly chill in the air. His eyes catch on Mike — because of course they do, always drawn to him by a force far beyond Will's control — in time to see his arms raise to wrap a scarf around his neck, covering the lower half of his face with it. It's unfair, how good he looks even now, with his hair a black mess of waves, unkept, gloves with fingers cut off and neck adorned in a dark yellow scarf, too-big jacket and all. There are a few seconds where Will looks, and there isn't shame pulling low in his stomach for it, but then Mike's eyes catch his for a split second, and Will forces himself to look away.

The air is denser than usual tonight, smoke rising over the town that isn't just from the split in the earth but also from the military burning the spreading vines down routinely — which gives them all a nice cover to go exploring. It also forces everyone to bundle up heavier, wrappings over their faces to protect themselves from the toxic air. They all wrinkle their noses on days like this. It smells like disease, they say. Like rot. Like that one time the gas in their house leaked and it smelled like rotten eggs, Jonathan says.

He makes sure to let Lucas get into the backseat before him, just so that he doesn't have to sit with Mike's knee pressed into his the entire way there — a coward's choice, but Will thinks the warmth of Mike's body next to him might just send him over the edge he'd been teetering on all day. Dustin claims the front seat, and they set off, Lucas leaning in and resting his elbows on the two front seats shoulders as they chat idly. Will feels Mike throw glances his way behind Lucas’s back, but turns to press his forehead to the cool glass of the window. The dull pressure and coolness are kind against the pain in his temples. The shotgun rifle sits between his knees, resting against his leg with the dark circles of the barrel openings facing upward, almost aiming in the direction of Will's head. Will watches the town pass by in a blur of empty and grey buildings showered in low grey light managing to break out of the sky, before letting his eyes drop closed.

He can't quite manage to disappear into the mist of nothingness and have the ride pass in a split moment without his realisation — instead, his eyes feel as if they are opened as he watches the darkness behind his eyelids with too much attention, conscious of the low hum of the car engine and every bump on the road, every turn they make. His head knocks against the window but he doesn't open his eyes. He is hyperaware of his own breathing, the air whistling through his nose and the mechanical up and down of his chest with it. 

With the military presence all over the center of town, they have to take the long way around, at some point rolling onto a dirt road cutting though the forest so that they can pass around the splits in the ground. It takes a while, and Will feels every excruciating second of it, but eventually the car rolls to a stop a bit away from the church, on a patch of cleared out dirt next to the road, the dark forest stretching up and inward to the right of them. Will's skin prickles with goosebumps even before he opens his eyes to see it.

Steve cuts the engine, the passenger doors swinging open in quick succession — first Dustin's, who starts to walk around the car to open the trunk immediately, then Mike's, then Will's, admittedly slower than the others, his hands tired under the weight of it, however light. He shakes his hands out, snaps at himself to get it together and concentrate. He throws the rifle over his shoulder again, the stretch of road around them eerily empty — it's still pretty light out, just dampened by the smoke hanging over the sky. He fixes the wrappings around his face, bringing them back up to his nose, each of his exhales getting trapped there and coating warmth over the skin around his lips. 

“So,” Steve claps his hands together, his nail bat leaning with its decidedly non sharp part against the car. Will privately thinks it seems pretty useless against the democreatures — but the guns are also not that effective, so it's all really an illusion of protection that they all cling to. “How do you rascals wanna do this?”

“Buddy system,” Dustin chimes in with the obvious, coming up next to him so that they are all standing in a loose semi-circle, facing the woods. 

“We can split tree-to-two and have one group go up closer to the church and do a circle there, and the other one start from here and do the deeper woods,” Mike suggests with a shrug.

“Dibs on the first team,” Dustin cuts in, looking antsy to get a move on already, “Odds are it's closer to the church precipice if it even is somewhere around here to begin with, and I want to get this over with as fast as possible.”

“Alright, then I'm assuming Steve is going with you,” Mike concludes, all business. “Will?”

Will rolls his neck to look at the group from where he has been staring out into the woods, pressing his feet into the ground and feeling every spike of small stones against the soles of his shoes. He blinks to Mike for what probably is a second too long, and hates the way his brain latches onto the imaginary way Mike's voice goes just a tad softer around the edges when he addresses Will. 

“I'd rather stay further in the woods,” Will says in the end, shrugging a bit, shoulders curling inward and down at the same time. 

“Why?” Mike frowns, which is fair, considering Will's history with the woods and wandering them for hours, but it's no less uncomfortable to have his confused and concerned look be directed at him like this.

“They don't like me much around there,” Will reminds the group at large flatly, but can't help but catalogue Mike's unsettled expression and not the winces that probably tug at the faces of everyone else.

“I'll stay with you,” Mike says. “Lucas?”

“Um,” Lucas starts, glancing between Mike and Will a bit awkwardly, put on the spot. Will wonders what his face conveys, and preys it's the mental message of, Please, please, stay with us, I don't know if I can talk to Mike without my skin feeling like it's on fire and something in me breaking, because it feels like he can see right through me. Whatever it ends up being is clearly not that, since what Lucas settles on is, “We should have the first group be bigger, so I'll go with them.”

“Great, let's do it then,” Mike says, coming up to stand next to Will, their shoulders brushing. Will is momentarily torn between the rivalling instincts to lean in closer, push back, and the one that wants him to flinch away. 

“Back here in two hours?” Dustin asks, not looking up from where he is tracing something over on the map they have with them. The others hum in agreement, so Dustin continues, “And you two,” he points a finger between Mike and Will, giving them a look, “be careful. And for the love of God, don't get lost.”

“Same to you,” Mike grumbles back from under the scarf over his mouth, and Dustin rolls his eyes. 

They wait until everything is double checked, and Steve, Lucas and Dustin start walking down the road, disappearing from view fairly quickly. And then it's just Mike and Will, next to Steve's Beamer and the forest they will have to delve into.

“Shall we?” Mike asks pointlessly after a moment passes, knocking their shoulders together in a way that has to be purposeful. Will begins walking without replying, not allowing the touch to linger. 

Will tries his hardest not to shiver when he crosses the forest line and his feet touch the dry soil there. He can feel the Upside Down presence here stronger, recent, and knows inexplicably, that they are going in the right direction. They are closer to the rift too, and a heavy gust of wind blows residue smoke from there, the sky alight in a dim shade of orange far away behind them. Will feels the burn of it against his lungs but doesn't cough like Mike does. The road disappears behind them fairly quickly, and then it's only evergreen trees gone leafless and grey with the Upside Down influence around them. Will lets Mike do the marking of their way every five minutes, dutifully pauses while he ties a bright yellow ribbon on a tree branch — they can't use compasses for navigation because of the magnetic fields always emanating from the gates, so they have to keep careful track of their way.

Will's eyes wander over the forest numbly, tracing over the tree trunks and bushes, all a normal level of Upside Down fucked-up so far. His footsteps shuffle over the brushery, dragging over the ground, Mike walking in step next to him.

“The sky is so dark already from all the smoke,” Mike comments after a while. If Will had the energy for humor he'd find something like irony in Mike attempting to make small talk by talking about the hellish weather that has become the new normal for Hawkins. 

“Yeah,” Will mumbles in agreement, eyes not flicking away from watching the dance of particles that had started falling over them a few minutes earlier, likely chased away from the rifts with all the activity there. He tries to trace a pattern in it, find a place where they congregate thicker, like fairylights in a children's book, guiding the way.

“Y'know, sometimes I wonder what's gonna happen with our bodies after inhaling all that Upside Down air,” Mike says.

“Mhm,” Will hums back vaguely, looking to the side as they pass a thick tree trunk. 

“I mean you were breathing that stuff for a week straight and you ended up being fine, right?” Mike continues, kicking at a stray stone and sending it ricocheting off the ground a bit ahead of them. 

“Right,” Will mutters back, watching the ground closely as he steps over a fallen log that has halfway merged into the ground. He shivers at the phantom feeling of fingers brushing over his back as he does. 

“Right,” Mike repeats, catching up to him. “I wonder what will happen to all of this Upside Down stuff once we close all the gates."

“I imagine it will all fall off and dissipate into dust if we do,” Will says halfheartedly back, barely processing the words, the sentiment in it hollow and fake. 

“Yeah, I— guess so,” Mike says, quieter. Will can feel him trying to come up with something else to say, but in the end silence falls over them again.

They walk through the forest, and the sky grows ever darker above them, almost too dark for comfort. A spike of red flashes somewhere far away.

“Are you mad at me or something?” Mike says suddenly, words spilling out of his mouth like a pipe bursting.

Will's head throbs.

“What? No,” he says briskly, not slowing down his walking. The ground mutters in something like warning under his feet, but that might just be the slight ringing in his ears from the headache.

“I don't know, you seem pretty mad right now,” Mike points out from a bit behind him, not unkindly but not exactly cheerily either. Will really wishes they didn't have to have this conversation right now.

“I'm not mad at you, Mike,” Will says again, giving in the urge to roll his eyes. Mike doesn't see — probably — since Will's head is turned slightly away from him. They pass between two trees, one leaning heavily onto the other and forming a crooked arch, bark sprinkled off and broken halfway through the tree trunk.

“Well, that was convincing,” Mike mutters, brows drawn together over a wide-eyed look, as if taken aback; Will can almost picture his mouth twisted up a bit under the scarf. 

Will's ears ring.

He freezes, Mike's rushed steps coming to a halt next to him, but Will soundly ignores him, brow furrowed in concentration. Something isn’t right. He feels as though his ears should be twitching with the familiar warbling sound of a democreatere's clicking voice. His feet echo with footsteps that aren't there. 

“Mike—”

“Just tell me what it is! I'm sure—”

“Mike,” Will grabs him by the wrist roughly. He doesn't look at Mike, and keeps scanning over the area around them attentively, but it shuts Mike up pretty effectively. 

“Wh—” Mike starts, quieter, but Will cuts him off with a sharp look, pressing a finger to his own lips over the bandana covering his face, eyes widening slightly. Mike finally catches onto Will's meaning and goes silent, listening out. 

There is a faint rushing sound from the canopies up above, leaves rustling on leaves, branches creaking. No birds, no animals, just a dead stillness. The ringing in Will's ears grows louder, pitched low and warbling, like sound waves on a radio. His heart thumps against his ribcage, and in its rhythm he hears both the screaming shrill of danger and a bloodthirsty rush.

After a long stretch of time Mike turns back to Will, looking like he is about to say something, but he never gets to, as Will snaps his head instinctively to the side a split second before a shape of a deer limps out, and a hulking form of a demogorgon comes into view right behind it between the trees somewhere a bit off in the woods, a good distance away from where Mike and Will are. The creature doesn't barrel out, but it doesn't crawl either — it walks on all fours with an erratic energy of a creature half-mad. It's a little unusual, Will notes with a scientific detachment. The demogorgons are stalking things of shadow, their movements powerful and smooth, measured, even if their steps might get stompy and crushing in the heat of a chase. They are getting ecstatic with the hunt, Will thinks, studying the creature with narrowed down eyes as it approaches the injured deer, its myriad of teeth clicking together. Taking its time is what it's doing, Will realises with a start. 

Him and Mike are ducked behind a thick tree trunk, under the cover of some bushes; not that it would matter considering the demogorgons can't actually see.

It's good news for Mike and Will, the distraction that the blood coating its claw-like fingers poses, the smell the only thing the creature can feel now. Will's nose tickles with the familiar metallic tang. He is faintly aware of Mike's hand grabbing frantically at his sleeve, his upper arm and his jacket front, fingers clammy when they brush over WIll's skin. Will lets himself be tugged closer and tears his eyes from the demogorgon making its way around the trees, wandering with purpose Will doesn't understand.

They stand in tense stillness, Mike's breathing loud and hot next to Will's ear, his shoulder overlapping with Will's, pressed close together, every rise and fall of his chest pushing against Will's back. He lets it be a reminder to his traitorous mind that this is different, that there is no need to flash with memories of that night he was taken. These are different woods, and he is older now, surer in where he stands, and this demogorgon is not the one that took him. He isn't alone, even if that makes his blood spike with fear, not for himself but for Mike now.

Will leans back against the tree, and subsequently closer to Mike, closes his eyes to pitch-black darkness, and lets the world fade to the feeling of the ground beneath his feet and the echo of a mind that isn't his pressing on his senses. The feeling in his fingers disappears, and he thinks about the Upside Down, and how it's all united and the same there, how it doesn't care for eating its own meat. 

They wait for what feels like years but is probably mere minutes, for the wailing of the animal to get cut short by a crunching of bones and meat, and Will knows, inexplicably, the exact moment the creature claws itself out of their world and falls back into its a few seconds later.

“It's gone now,” he whispers, letting his eyes slip open. 

Mike blinks at him in shock, his hand moving in a jerky half-motion after him when Will goes to step away, widening the distance between their bodies. He decidedly doesn't shiver at the sudden chill air filling in the space where Mike's warmth just was, and looks around carefully, even though he knows there isn't anything but them in this patch of the woods now. His bandana has fallen down onto his neck but he doesn't make an effort to fix it.

Mike stays silent, and when Will glances back at him, his eyes are wide, watching Will with a weird expression on his face. Will looks questioningly back.

“You can sense them,” Mike breathes out in realisation.

“Well— Yeah?” Will furrows his brows, face pinched in confusion. “I told you I could feel him here in Hawkins.” 

“I thought it was just the general Mindflayer presence or whatever!” Mike exclaims, throwing his hands out, his voice still barely above a whisper. “Not like when you were— not like this!”

“It's not like when I was possessed.” Will glares at him, but it's weak, more unimpressed than actually heated. “But it's a hivemind, Mike.”

It is all him, he doesn't say.

“Yeah, and we burnt it out of you! You shouldn't be that connected, like you are still a part of it.” One of Mike's hands goes to grip at his hair, fingers getting tangled in the waves, with way more distress than Will thinks this warrants. “Why haven't you said anything? How much is it? Do you feel their pain?”

“No,” Will says, opting not to tell Mike about the random aches he gets in his bones in the dead of night sometimes. He doesn't acknowledge the other questions.

“You should have told us,” Mike says, eyes narrowed in a way that sends Will immediately on edge.

“And what, have you lock me in a shed again? Give everyone more of a reason to look at me like I'm about to turn on you any moment now?” Will throws his hands up in turn, head pounding, his bloodstream flailing with frustration and anger that feel like they are his but twisted somehow. His, but different. 

He remembers it so clearly, every second of it, from the field to the tunnels and the pain of the creatures being burned to being tied and blinded to the thing being forced out of him. His body remembers the pain, and every emotion that has run through his mind and affected his system in a rush of chemicals. He was a passenger in his own body, but he had felt it — and remembers it, still, all these years later — the excruciating pain and the fear running in his veins, even if it was a half-mad thing that belonged to the darkness that had settled inside of him, its existence too grand and all-encompasing for a human mind to truly comprehend, Will's body wrecked and still aching with the force of it. Even the sheer memory of it makes Will's heart trash around in phantom panic.

He knows he isn't being fair or logical, knows that they all did what needed to be done, remembers wanting them to. They saved him, saved him from possession and endless pain and death, but it never really felt like it, did it?

Mike's face twists up in pain; he shifts on his feet as if not knowing whether to recoil or to step closer. “You— It wasn't you! And you would have died if we didn't! We would have all died!”

“And I'm telling you now, this is different!”

“How do you know?” Mike questions, his eyes roaming over Will assessingly, searchingly. Cautiously.

“I just do. Do you think I don't remember what it’s like to have all of my agency taken by an interdimensional monster? This is just—” he waves a vague and frustrated hand around, "the aftereffects.”

“Will…” Mike starts, brows knit together in gentle concern, arms crossed over his chest in uncertainty, back hunched so he can meet Will at eye level. 

“Just trust me, Mike,” Will says, before Mike can make a pleading case that will completely ruin his composure. His mouth feels like a torn wound, the metallic taste of blood from the demogorgon still lingering. “It's fine, I'm fine, everything’s fine. I'd tell you if something was wrong.” 

Mike makes an incredulous face, mouth falling open with a retort that doesn't come.

“What?” Will snaps.

Mike looks at him with unreadable eyes, torso turned to the side, away from Will, half his face cast in shadow. For once, it's Will who's eyes settle on Mike for a prolonged moment of time and not the other way around. A tense moment passes, then another. He looks away. “Nothing.” 

Will doesn't say anything, turns his head to the side, rendered exhausted by this conversation. He just hopes his body isn't swaying with the sudden onslaught of dizziness he is feeling. He closes his eyes, forces a deep breath of disgusting, stale air into his lungs. 

“The tree should be that way,” he points vaguely in a direction, and starts walking. 

The hinges of the bike scream violently with every move of Will's legs, squealing under the pressure of his weight. It's grating. It's noise. He really needs to oil it.

He glides down the streets of Hawkins, creasing right on the edge of town, where the roads are all potholes and dirt mixed with gravel, the frame of his bike rattling a bit over the uneven ground. He should realistically not be out alone like this, not with the end of the world raging over their heads and the town not safe for boys marked by a special kind of darkness — but that's kind of the point of sneaking out, isn't it? He thinks if there was someone else here with him, all posed concern and poorly masked wariness, he would scream and claw his eyes out. A little dramatic, but all of the attention gets on his nerves, makes him irritable on days when numbness doesn't quite take all of it away. He hates it, hates feeling so unstable. He just needs a moment to himself, a true quiet, where no one will come looking for him and ringing alarm bells, to get his thoughts straight. 

He left a note even, a very plain and straight to the point ‘Went out to see El, be back for dinner —Will’ on top of his folded up blankets in the basement, in clear line of sight of anyone who might come looking. He knows he'll get reprimanded for it when he comes back — by Jonathan, probably, by Mike, maybe, in a form of intense but hesitant looks, the ground between them unstable. But he needed to get out, and he is going to see El, just— with a bit of a detour that no one needs to know about.

The houses grow rare and few in between. Repent for your sins, a banner reads, strung over a high fence. He reaches a true edge of town, enters the forest in the wide gap between some abandoned houses, not far away from where his old house stays empty as well. He jumps off his bike and guides it next to him when the foliage grows denser, the bushes thick and scratchy, catching on his jeans. The corruption stretches here too, dark spots of decay here and there — a batch of grass yellowing slightly, seemingly at random, a leafless bit of tree creating a gap in the perfect coverage, spreading like a disease. But it's less than in other parts of town, where the grass is just dry and dead, mixed in with dirt, fungi growing between the cracks of tree bark, vines sprawling over roads until someone cuts or burns them down. Hawkins got ripped open in a near perfect crest, four jagged lines tearing the hearts apart and meeting in the center of town, swallowing the library with it, and Will thinks this might be the one part least affected by it so far. 

Every step is heavy, like trudging through murky water, his feet sinking in sand. He sees himself moving through the woods as if his consciousness is hovering a few feet away, lagging behind. There is a shrill ringing in the back of his mind, barely there, a pull in his gut that makes it feel like he is in a constant state of falling. It feels like strings woven into his limbs, an impatient hand tugging lightly for him to move, to stop his walking and go back. He ignores the urge. How far is enough? How far will he have to go for Hawkins to stop following him?

Will walks in a daze, until the forest looks almost normal, as a normal Midwestern forest in a normal Midwestern summer in a normal Midwestern town should be if you ignore the decay and the unnaturally chill. The sky is strung over with heavy dark clouds, but Will finds a patch of trees that have most of their leaves intact somehow, a dulled out shade of green but green none the less. He lets his bike drop on the ground, then follows suit, sitting cross legged against a tree that he knows is dead on the inside but at least doesn't look like it for now.

He can't hear the rattling of the Upside Down quite as much anymore while he's out here, but the heavy and fuzzy feeling in his head lingers. The earth is soft and a little wet under him, dirt laying with a light layer of yellow and blue-ish moss. He lets his fingers dig into it a bit, doesn't think of the dirt that will stain his hands and will get stuck under his fingernails. He wants to— wants to feel the soft and grainy sensation against his skin all over, wants his flesh to merge with the soil and decompose gently into nothing, wants the tiny veins of the hive-mind there to encompass him whole. He wants to lay down forever. 

Will slumps back against a tree, closes his eyes and watches the dancing and swaying darkness behind his eyelids glow in ripples from the pale light coming down from the sky. It should be easy to pretend for a moment, trick his mind into believing that everything is fine.

Time passes, slipping between his fingers just like his line of thought. His t-shirt collar digs uncomfortably into his neck, fabric too scratchy and present over his skin every time he shifts, skin on the back of his neck prickling, like he is being watched. He opens his eyes and looks to the side at one point, but there is nothing there. His bangs fall over his eyes, outgrown and messy. Branches rustle gently overhead. No birds sing. It's calm, but it's all wrong.

He doesn't startle at the sound of footsteps meeting the earth and shrubbery somewhere to the left of him, but his body tenses instinctively before he even registers the sound. He waits in hollow calmness, and between one blink and the next El's familiar figure is stepping out from between the trees. Her eyes are already on him, hard-set and unreadable from the distance.

“You shouldn't be here alone,” she says in lieu of a greeting when there are only a few steps left between them, a little frown tugging at her browbone, so miniscule he can probably only spot it because he knows her well. He looks up at her, expressionless, thoughts sluggish, his eyes grazing over her light get up — sport pants and a t-shirt with a jean jacket that used to belong to Jonathan, a thin bandana twisted up over her neck, curls falling over her forehead and ears in a round shape, softening her features slightly. He lets himself take her in, register her presence next to him as something real and solid.

“You are alone,” he points out.

“I can protect myself,” she states calmly, and Will thinks that he feels the barest of shifts in the air that he has learned to associate with her powers by now. She wears it with a heaviness he doesn't like, the lines of her face gaunt and haunted, but she walks with an easy confidence, like she suddenly gained long-lost vision — nothing like the careful way she did in the beginning of their year together, when her steps fell uncertain over the floorboards of their house. He isn't sure what to feel about it, isn't sure how she does either, considering they barely talked since coming back to Hawkins.

“So can I,” he says, as she moves to sit cross-legged across from him, face to face, just like they did on late evenings in Lenora, with schoolwork or drawing paper spilled between them and music playing softly from the radio.

“Will,” she chides, but it's faint, like she thinks that he knows she's right and is just arguing for the sake of it.

“It's light out,” he argues, the words familiar even from before hell broke loose on Hawkins, the same frustrated irritation of having to be watched over at all times for the fear of him disappearing from everyone's view again, smothered in the others' worry.

“Still. Bad things happen,” El says in a dark tone. She sits with her back straight and posture alert, as opposed to Will's sagging and curled inward stance. “Does anyone know where you are?”

“Yes,” he answers flatly.

She doesn't blink an eye. “And they let you go alone?”

“Yes,” the lie slips between his lips before he knows it. It tastes bitter, so he decides to sweeten it by adding, “They know I went to see you.”

“You are sitting in a forest,” she points out, not really judgmental but a little confused.

“I was going to see you,” he corrects, huffing in annoyance, then narrows his eyes at her. “How’d you find me?”

El looks vaguely guilty, eyes flicking down. She fiddles a bit with a ring on her finger, the one that came from Max with one of her letters, a habit she picked up from Mike — or Jonathan, or Will, or all of them — as she shrugs. 

“You spied on me, didn't you?” he asks, already knowing the answer. 

She sighs, nods. “Mike radioed me.”

“Why?”

“You were gone,” she explains, watching him with an expression he doesn't understand. It makes his skin crawl but he forces himself to stay still. “He is worried about you.”

“Why'd you ask me if anyone knew I was gone if you knew the answer already?” he asks, choosing not to comment on the Mike thing, or the spying thing, for now. 

She shrugs again, but her composure changes, careful and determined as she looks at him. “I wanted to see if you would lie.” Will feels his stomach drop, his muscles locking in instinctual alert, posed to run. “Mike said you are being weird. Feeling things,” El continues when Will doesn't say anything.

“I'm not feeling anything new,” Will says, a touch too defensive, a mistake he realises when El's face goes taut in a carefully masked alarm, uncertain on how to approach. She doesn't believe him, he knows instantly. “And I'm not being weird.”

“You are sitting alone in a forest,” she says again, blunt. 

“I just wanted a moment to myself,” he retorts, fingers digging into his thighs, dragging over the rough-textured denim in an attempt to calm the unsettled feeling stirring in his chest.

“Will…” she starts, leaning closer in. 

“I'm not possessed again,” he interrupts, punching down on each word in annoyance, not moving.

“Okay,” she says easily, too easily. “Let me check then.”

“What?” he splutters out, leaning away, shoulders curling up defensively. The idea of her combing through his thoughts makes him nauseous, shame filling his mind like static. A trashing need to run and hide his head in the sand races through his veins, boiling hot, like being out under the Californian sun for too long and he is clammy all over, burning up from the inside.

“I won't…look into your mind,” she says, probably seeing all of it on his face. “Just sense if he's there.”

Will feels like screaming. He knows what the right answer is here, knows what refusing her would look like. Still, his mind reels. Still, his heart pounds. 

“Do you promise?” he asks in a defeated tone but making sure to put weight on it. 

El nods solemnly, extending a hand with just her pinky stuck out. “Promise.”

He forces himself to intertwine his finger with hers. He wants to feel reassured by it, this little thing he taught her, this thing that is just theirs. He wants to look at her and not feel scared of what she might see in the tangled web of his mind, the disgust that would colour her face if she did. He wants for the world to stop falling apart and their shared evenings back, wants her next to him as they move through high school, wants her unwavering curiosity and for her face to go round and soft with happiness again. Most of all, he wants for life to figure itself out, and to go back to when his body didn't feel like it was giving out under his weight with every step.

He shakes their interlinked hands once, twice, and lets go. “Okay,” he says.

She doesn't let his hand get far, fingers circling over his wrist, bringing it closer to her over the gap between them. Her thumb rests over the point of his pulse, feather-light and gentle. Will exhales shakily, willing his heartbeat to fall back into a steady rhythm. With her other hand she reaches for her radio, nimble fingers dialling it up until all they can hear is the muffled static coming out of the mouthpiece. Will suppresses a shudder. He watches as El stills, her eyes falling closed, and follows suit a moment later for the lack of anything better to do. 

He has always been more sensitive to her powers than the others. El had said to him once, during a night where she curled up on the opposite side of his bed, hair spilling over the sheets after she had stopped shaking in frustration over her simple human hands, that it felt like he could sense her presence whenever she used her powers on him. He confessed in turn that he remembered her, a vision of a girl in pink coming to take his pain away, an angel of death that appeared in his thoughts like a fleeting image that he couldn't place until much, much later.

And now, he knows the exact moment her consciousness reaches towards him. It's different from how he feels the demogorgons — not a chilling and sinking feeling but more of a dull and dry pressure, like a light breeze at the high of summer heat. He forces himself not to fight it, concentrates his mind on going fuzzy with the static, a thoughtless fog. It doesn't stop his heart from beating frantically in panic, nor the itching in his bones to snatch his hand away. It doesn't stop him from instinctually trying to detect her presence in his mind, or around it. 

Before he knows it she is squeezing his wrist, and he opens his eyes a few seconds later to find her already looking at him. 

“Nothing,” she shakes her head, but nothing in her face relaxes. 

He tugs his wrist back to himself, trying not to feel guilty about it. He looks away, eyes settling on some small boulders a bit behind her and to the side. “Told you I'm fine.”

Something in her expression shifts.

“Will. You are being… distant. Avoidant,” El says, not accusingly, but words careful on her tongue in a way that used to make some of her speech sound clunky and uncertain — but makes her words feel like they hold more weight now, measured, enunciated in a tone that feels special.

“The world is ending! The Upside Down is all over Hawkins!” he throws his hands up for what feels like the millionth time this month. He doesn't raise his voice much, and the tone of it stays more annoyed and frustrated than mad. “Of course it has me feeling a certain way!”

Silence hangs over them for a long moment; El chooses her words carefully, clearly struggling for a way to express herself. “You need to— not be alone when you feel like this,” she says in the end, reciting the sentiment carefully, with that intent and open look of hers. “We promised.”

Her words make him recoil, make him want to laugh himself horse hysterically. He has been promised a great many things in life, most of them false. He was told that if he stays quiet and still when his father's voice rose with words like faggot and fairy and queer nothing bad will happen, if he didn't cry, and man up, eventually he would grow out of those disgusting things. He was told that if he didn't give the bullies a reaction they would leave well enough alone, that their taunts were meaningless — They don't know what they are talking about, Will, his friends said. He was promised that there were things — friendships, people — he would get to keep forever, games of D&D and easy laughter and touch that didn't burn. He was promised that some love is unconditional and there is nothing that could change that, was promised that there are a great many beautiful things waiting for him out there in the world. He was promised that it would get better, that it would all eventually go away. 

Promises are important — one of their Party rules after all — but so was honesty and all the things they whispered to each other in the dark. None of it matters in the end, Will thinks. With the sky falling over their heads, and that same misery following him around like a stray dog whining for attention. It tears him apart from the inside, like a demodog's thousand teeth sinking into his flesh all at once, the fact that everyone seems to want something from him on top of it all, when all he wants to do is close his eyes and let the world figure itself out.

It's unfair, he thinks, looking down at his hands, and for the first time allows himself to feel bitter about it.

“Oh, don't act like you hold that promise up yourself!” Will hears himself spitting back, that same bitterness and bite to it. “You are so focused on being all serious and strong since you got your powers back you barely even talk to anyone! What happened to Jane? To being my sister? Mike's girlfriend?” 

He regrets it the moment he says it — because it's El, who had saved him again and again, who had been dealt nothing short of a horrible hand, and he loves her like a sister, like a part of his soul that was wrenched out and cracked open, and a shard had landed in her. They have always been good at understanding each other, and they both know that he is right, just like they both know that she is. Still, Jane is important and special to her, something precious and complicated, but it's too late to take the words back. Things have never been simple between them, with too much similarity, too much jealousy doubling on guilt hanging in the air; pain mirrored and echoed, ricocheting back and forth like bullets. It's one of the things that is so alike within them, Will had learned — the petulant wants to scream and hurt and retreat into themselves when things get hard, emotions spiking and uncontrollable. 

His has always been that gaping hole that the part of him that got left behind in the cold horror of the Upside Down, and then the one that eroded and fell apart like ash after the Mindflayer used to occupy, the skin around it charred and twisted up. Stupid, he had thought, again and again and again, at the ruin of his childhood, and tried to convince himself that giving up on filling that gap would help.

Stuck, El had confessed to him on a dark night that winter they were learning to be siblings in Lenora, after screaming in frustration at her English worksheet. I feel like I'm stuck there again, and forget how— how to do this right. 

This being life. This being knowing how and when to act, how to say the right thing, how to go each day without breaking down in tears. This being moving on. Dealing.

He had sat there in stupor for a long moment, then moved closer, and told her, in words shaky and a little detached, that he feels stuck too. It felt easier than it ever did when it was his mom asking what's wrong, or Jonathan nudging him to open up, the rational voices of doctors in his mind chiding him for not processing right. It felt easy to use those words when it was about helping her. Being gentle with her. They made a deal that night, a promise, to come to each other when they feel that way, to drag each other out of the places they get trapped in. 

But that too, got lost in the mess of coming back to Hawkins. 

She deserves nothing but kindness, and he is sick, sick and wrong and horrible, for giving in to the wicked thing under his skin. He doesn't know why he can't reach it in himself now, that kindness that used to come as easy as breathing, the one that got him called names and sent his father into a rampage.

What he should have done was reach out more. What he should have done was ask her softly if she was doing okay, ask how the return of her powers and the subsequent end of the world made her feel. Ask if she was losing herself in this fight too, if she was giving up on ever being normal just like him.

But it's too late now, and so Will sees the exact moment the switch flips in her, eyes going cold and stormy in echoed bitterness, all closed off and boiling ferocity that feels like the warping of air over a fire burning low. She has every right to. He was being cruel.

“Mike and I broke up,” she says in the same steady tone, mirroring his technique of picking and choosing which words to reply to, but it feels like she is throwing it in his face somehow. 

“Wh— What? Why? When?” Will stummers out, mind reeling and struggling to catch up with reality, drowned out in a complicated rush of guilt. 

“A few weeks ago,” she says, and oh, there is a bite to it that bleeds raw and reeks of poison, subtle but all too familiar.

“El…” he gets out, a mess of stuttering thoughts, but he knows one thing, and it's that he needs to stop acting like an asshole to her. “I'm sorry.”

“I'm not,” she shrugs, unbothered, any semblance of anger gone now, just something unsettling and knowing in her eyes. He doesn't understand. Will tastes bile on the back of his throat, right before she hits the final nail in the coffin. “But I thought you should know.”

If he was a better brother he'd ask more, ask things like why they broke up if they were so fucking perfect for each other, their love great enough to leave friends behind in the dust; and why she looks so unbothered if all she wanted was for Mike to love her, which he did, he did — from the day they found her in the woods and through all the bad and good, right? All he ever wanted was for them — these two most important people in his life — to be happy, and Will with his sinful, bleeding feelings didn't matter, but—

I thought you should know.

It rakes itself over and over and over in his mind, stomach going nauseous with it, his throat prickling tightly with every breath. What did you see, he wants to ask, while simultaneously feeling like he might throw up. Was it something in his mind? Did she snoop around anyway and see all the things that are fundamentally different and wrong about him? It can't be accidental, can't not mean what he knows it means — El always chose her words carefully when her voice got like it did just now, all deliberate and sharp, so—

“You should go home,” El says, getting up in a graceful motion, looking down at him for a moment, before starting to walk away, and all he can do is stare after her numbly. 

Liar, liar, liar, shrills a knowing voice in Will's mind, and it sounds like El, sounds like his father, sounds like Mike.

Liar, the ground echoes, deep and guttural, like a death sentence.

It takes him a few more hours to get back, mostly because sometime after El leaves tears start stinging in his eyes and his breath starts coming out ragged and shallow, desperate sobs. 

The devastating helplessness hits him like a spear to the gut, like being dragged like a ragdoll by the leg into a twisted alternate dimension. He stays sitting there, in a clearing that could almost be a normal forest but isn't, fingers going numb with the chill in the air, for a long, long time. The Upside Down — the Mindflayer, really — loves it when Will is all up in his feels, the most human and dirty ones, the kind that aren't sadness or exhaustion or horror that come with monsters with teeth, ones that had latched onto him and refuse to let go, but the type that are all just Will.

The unstable feeling doesn't leave him, but eventually he does get up, knees wobbling after staying in the same position for a long time, and he picks up his bike, palm digging sharply into where the paint is chipped and a jagged piece of rusted metal is exposed. The way back is a blur, as familiar as it always has been, as it always will be, because at the end of the day Will is trapped here, forced to watch it all crumble around him as he bikes down the familiar roads. There are storm clouds gathering on the horizon, tinged maroon. His bike hinges scream. 

The windows of the Wheeler house glow pale yellow through the grayness of the streets. He lays his bike gently against the garage wall, right next to Mike's, and slips quietly through the basement door. The floorboards creak under his feet, and he feels like a breeze passing through the walls, a ghost, only a soft whining song of the flooring and the pipes to prove his presence. 

“Will?” comes a voice, and the illusion is broken. Jonathan looks up at him from the couch, dark circles under his eyes, clearly having been waiting. He has one of Nancy's hairties in his fingers, wrapping it around his fingers and twisting in thoughtless motions. 

“Hey,” Will says, voice cracking a little. He clears his throat.

“Hey,” Jonathan replies. “Heard you went to see El?” Will hums vaguely in confirmation, his fingernails leaving crescents in the skin of his palms. “You should have waited for me. We could’ve gone together.” Jonathan says, and Will shrugs, looking down. “But I get it if you wanted to talk to just her.”

“I just thought you were busy,” Will tries weakly, looking over the lines making up the floorboards, the spot where Mike had spilled soda over the carpet and tried to cover it up by shifting it so the stain was under their D&D table. 

“Next time then,” Jonathan agrees easily, but Will knows that he doesn't believe him. “How is she?”

“Fine,” Will says, thinking about her hard-set eyes, her blunt and steady words, her attempt at getting him to open up with her tone and face pinched the same way Jonathan's is right now, a learned technique — before he had gone and fucked it up with his inability to get himself together.

“And you?”

“What?” Will looks up at him.

“Anything you wanna talk about?” Jonathan asks gently. 

Will shifts on his feet uncomfortably. It's not the chiding he was expecting, but it's also worse, the easy invitation in his brother's eyes. It's the same look from the back of the pizza place, the unspoken thing there, and it would be easy to revert back to the way things were, to reach for his brother's warmth and tell him everything, but — Jonathan has Nancy's hair tie in his hands, another on his wrist, and he is leaning against the couch he is supposed to sleep in every night but doesn't, because he has someone else's bed to crawl into and a hand to hold in the light. There is trust there in his eyes and acknowledgment that Will doesn't know what to do with, the weight of it impossible to escape, and it makes it worse somehow, knowing that Jonathan knows, without Will ever having to admit to it. 

Hiding, Will has found out, is simultaneously the easiest and hardest thing in the world. 

“No, not really,” he says, and feels sick to his stomach.

“Okay,” Jonathan sighs a bit, a deep drag of a breath, “Well, if you do…”

“Yeah, I know,” Will cuts in, smiling tightly, trying for reassuring, for collected, and gives it his all to keep his face straight, the muscles of his face tense.

Jonathan studies him for a moment, before finally giving up. “Dinner should be ready soon,” he says, and the matter is dropped. Will breathes out silently in relief.  

Upstairs, the Wheeler family is all orbiting each other in familiar formations. Mrs Wheeler greets them with a soft but hurried smile and some words thrown over her shoulder, Mr Wheeler has the TV on loudly in the living room; Holly runs up to Will and starts chatting his ear off about some drawing she made, and he lets her, nodding along and smiling agreeably, barely listening as she leads him to the dinner table, where Nancy and Mike are already sitting, talking about something with their brows furrowed. 

They both look up when Jonathan, Holly and Will enter, but whereas Nancy's eyes jump to Jonathan and she starts talking to him pretty immediately, Mike's gaze lingers on Will without him actually saying anything, a conflicted expression on his face. For a moment Will's mind spins wild with ideas of what it might be that Mike is thinking, all too fast for him to catch, but doused heavily in fear. Mike keeps staring at him, and Will looks away, because avoidance seems to be his new best friends these days.  

Unfortunately for Will, their seating arrangement is long decided and settled, so he ends up pulling the chair next to Mike out mostly out of habit. Everyone else shuffles into their seats soon after, plates of food laid out onto the table. Today's dinner is some sort of canned meat covered in sharp-smelling sauce and some mushed potatoes on the side. Will doesn't allow himself to think, and cuts a piece off, putting it in his mouth quickly. 

Chatter hangs over the table. Forks and knives clutter against the porcelain plates. The smell of meat is thick and musty in the air. Mike's eyes drill holes on Will's face. 

Will shoves another spoonful into his mouth. He chews, and chews, and chews, for what probably is longer than necessary. Swallow, he orders himself. But the food is a gushy mush in his mouth, slick and lumpy, and he feels it slide and crawl in his throat before even swallowing, like blood, like rot, a vision so clear and nauseating, and it's familiar, it's familiar because— Mike's knee knocks into his under the table, interrupting that line of thought abruptly. Will breathes out shakily through his nose, pushes the food down through the bile rising up his throat, and still doesn't look at Mike. 

His plate is still mostly full when he excuses himself, lungs feeling constricted. He says something about being tired and having actually eaten some of his mom's cooking earlier, thank you for the dinner though. He doesn't acknowledge the looks Jonathan gives him, nor the ones from Mike that chase him all the way to the basement. 

The door clicks shut behind him, and Will leans against it, body tilted back, the back of his head knocking into the wood, the pressure of it doing nothing to soothe the ache in his bones. The basement is dark and quiet. Chills rise over Will's arms. Tears are prickling in his eyes again. 

Will stands at the top of the stairs, measures the impossible and painfully familiar distance down — imagines his body tumbling down like a sack of flour. Imagines it staying there, boneless. He thinks about Jonathan and his mom, El — his family — and wonders what their life would be without him in it, the thought process reminiscent of when he had first disappeared, the aftermath of it. He would see his mothers shaking fingers, her paranoia, his brothers hovering concern and haunted eyes, all the lengths they went for him, before and after and in between, and he daydreamed how their lives would play out if he never was found, curled into himself with their weight next to him in his tiny bed after he woke them up with his screaming from the nightmares yet again — the visions tinged with guilt, with disgust at his own selfishness after all the length they went to get him back, all for him to still despise the stretch of his skin over his fragile bones, to hate every waking and dreaming moment.

Will stomps his way down the stairs, hand sliding down the railing in an attempt to keep himself from toppling over. He stops at the last step, swallows the saliva that had gathered under his tongue down, and it feels so much like the slick moisture of the Upside Down, the place that he had thought to be Hell for broken little boys like him. It feels like the food sliding down his throat at dinner just now, the aftertaste of it still lingering in his mouth, and the sick crunch of meat on the demodog's fangs, how he felt them feast with every pore of his being, as if it was him tearing through skin and flesh with his bare teeth. 

He is shaking from the cold, and his mouth feels like there are tiny vines digging along the veins in his throat, feels like something being pushed in, filling his body to the brim. It feels like sitting at a Christmas dinner with his family after thinking he will never get to again, and something still feeling wrong, something foreign clawing at his insides, coming up his throat, sliding up, up, up, and—

He is hunching over the toilet in the basement bathroom before he knows it, fingers curling over white cool surface, as the remnants of his barely digested dinner push themselves out of his system. Tears spill over his eyes, burning hot, and he feels disgusting all over, losing sight of the line separating the Upside Down haunting his body and mind, and the devastating loneliness ringing through his body that no mirrored pain in El's face or the comforting presence of his brother, the gentle words of his mother can make go away.

He doesn't need them here, he thinks to himself stubbornly. Yet he pictures someone's steps thumping down the stairs, the bathroom door creaking open and a cool hand touching his forehead gently. It would be easy to pretend like that would be enough, he thinks, and forget for a moment, of all the ways they can never understand parts of him.

He imagines being held until it all fades away, imagines all the things he refuses to admit he wants.

He rests his head on his forearm, the skin there clammy and feverish, like on a hot summer day, and closes his eyes for a moment. Takes in the silence of the basement, only the faint buzzing of lights overhead and the thumping of feet from the upper floors, oblivious and uncarring. Will counts to three, drags himself up and to his feet after a while. He flushes the toilet, washes away the bitter taste out of his mouth, before shuffling his way to his mattress.

He takes a pillow from the couch, lumps it up with a bit of blanket, and hugs it close to his chest. He closes his eyes, pretends it's another person’s body next to him, steady and warm, and drifts to sleep.

He is twelve again, shivering under the twig and plank cover of Castle Byers, and the shadows stretch towards him with crooked fingers. He is humming, shakily and weakly, a familiar tune. The sky rumbles, and in its gurgling voice Will hears the threat, the promise, the hunger— 

He is running, the forest floor a wet and crunching road under his young and short feet, the leafless trees stretching upward like tombstones. All he can hear is the erratic beat of his heart going boom, boom, boom against his ribcage, falling in and out of tune with the rumbling sky. He is running, because the faceless monsters lurk ever closer, the clickety clack of their teeth, the reverberating call of their voices all around him, and he can't hum anymore, lest he call for their attention. He is running, because that's what he does best — that, and hiding, in the darkest of corners, the smallest of spaces. He is running, but it's pointless, because no child can outrun his fate, his doom. 

He turns the corner of a street, shoes skidding down the sleek, vine-riddled ground, and the center of his gravity shifts, his hands meeting harsh gravel. He lifts his head up and— 

He is thirteen, there is blood on his teeth, clogging up his nose— pennies, it tastes like pennies— and the dark creature takes, and takes, and takes, until there is nothing left of him to give. Will looks down at his— his? What is his and what is the creature's now? What is left of— bare feet, the hospital gown swishing softly over his knees, a gentle touch that feels like crawling of bugs on his skin; his eyes move forward and there is blood smeared on the white tile floor, like brushtrokes of paint, drying into a ruddy and dark brown from the stark and shiny red. The lights flicker, and there is a rhythm to it, he's sure of it, a melody that speaks in voices no one but Will and the creatures can understand. The hive-mind is an orchestra of noises, an endless cycle of repetition, and the thing, the one inside of Will is the conductor.

Will's body walks through the massacre, indifferent to the horrified screaming of his mind, and the lights flicker, one-two-one-three-one-two-one-two-one—  

He pushes the double doors open and the arcade sign spins and spins and spins before him, neon orange and yellow. The sky is a churning smear of black and red, and in the flashes of it Will can almost make out the shape of the creature, and it turns its massive head to look at Will, and it sees him, it can read through all the things that riddle his mad, mad, broken mind, and it wants him to give in, wants it all and then some, and wouldn't it be nice to sleep and not— 

There is a presence next to him, something that doesn't belong. Someone. Will blinks. Turns his head ever so slowly to the side. Mike—

—The shape of his name is familiar in Will's mind, seared there like a brand. Mike, Mike, Mike, bounces around his skull, tucks itself into the darkest corners of his desires, hush velvet, burns low with the smog of his shames. Mike, his voice high with youth, full of laughter: Do you wanna be friends? and Will was there too, wasn't he? An old playground swing screeches, back and forth, back and forth, like the floorboards of his old house would screech, like the hinges to his room did, like the creatures—

Mike is looking at him, isn't he?

Will blinks, and there are Mike's wild and wide eyes again, staring right back into Will's own, and he is saying something, Will can tell by the way his mouth moves, lips shaping sound that Will can't quite make out, lost to the static—

—Will remembers the static, the crackling hum of it though the mouthpiece of the phone in his house, the yellow one. He remembers calling, punching numbers in with shaky fingers, but there was only static, static, static, one Will didn't know yet was speaking to him in the gurgling voice of what was waiting on the other side—

Mike is probably wondering if he should call someone. Will sees it in the frantic dance of his eyes, humbird quick as they jump from Will to somewhere to the side. Maybe he is calling for someone, Will wouldn't know, just like no one knew when he did, his panicked words bouncing around the thin walls of his house, the crooked ones in the other place—

Who would Mike call for anyway, if there is only Will here? It's only Will, in a place that is like home but dark and wrong; only Will, screaming, yelling, calling for help, and it being swallowed whole in the cacophony of the dark place. It's only Will and the faceless creatures of hunger, only Will and the never-changing sky, only Will and the darkness, only Will—

The pressure around his wrist tightens, and oh, there is Mike here too, his worried eyes, a crease between his brows. Mike is looking him in the eyes, but that's wrong — Mike shouldn't be here, and Will doesn't have eyes, not ones that belong to him anyway, and he can't look but he can see like the creatures can, through the blood that burns hot and pulsing, through their shared not-sight of knowing without seeing.

Mike is looking at him, and it's familiar in a way that's good and comforting, but—

Come, the ground murmurs, echoing in the soles of his bare feet, in the grain of his bones. There are vines there; he can feel them crawling just under the thin layer of dirt, reaching ever-outward to the sky. He should feel cold, shouldn't he? Should feel the painful press of the ground on his bare skin. Come, the sky echoes, an enticing tune. Where, Will doesn't wonder, because all is whole and the same to the swarm, the pull of it steady, a magnetic force that doesn't need to be questioned, a True North—

“Will,” he hears Mike say, a whisper in the darkness, and it sounds like rain but kind, a soft drizzle, sounds like low lamplight buzzing in a basement full of his childhood drawings, sounds like home, a sin of thought. “Will, you're scaring me,” Mike says, voice soft and pleading.

Will always hated fear, the way it made home underneath his skin, stuck there in the marrows of his bones. Fear was in the shrill song reverberating in his teeth when his father's beer bottles went flying. Fear was a physical thing of running and hiding when he got lost among things that hunt for blood. Fear was in the hollow pit in his stomach as the news channels murmured words of sin and disease. Fear was in the darkness under his bed and in his thoughts, in the secret that tore at his insides and ate away at his innocence when he had realised that there are things meant to stay hidden, even among the best of friends—

—It's not my fault you don't like girls, gets lost somewhere to the raging storm. How does he know, Will thinks in muffled panic. How obvious was I? Wind howls around him, and his face stings. Is it raining? Will blinks, one, two, three times, and there is water gathering in his eyelashes, heavy droplets sliding down like tears, cleaving down his cheeks, and Mike's face is wet too, eyes squinting against the onslaught, hair plastered all over his forehead, clinging to the pale skin of his neck in swirls so black they might just be the darkness itself, the kind that lives in the absence of light, in the corners of Will's memory, and in the shame around his rotten heart— 

Come, the ground urges, and before he knows it his leg is lifting up and forward in a small step, his center of gravity careening. There is an immediate pull back, and Will's mind leaves his body, drifting out further by the force of inertia, before snapping back into his limbs when his body can't move forward, forcibly stopped by a single point of contact.

There is a hand around his wrist, fingers circling around the point of his pulse — slow, slumping downward to a drag — and Mike is still there, looking at him with panic in his eyes, saying something —It was the best thing I've ever done, and we can go crazy together, and Will— and Will was found, wasn't he? There was his mother's voice —Blink once for yes and twice for no, A, B, C, D, R, U, N, Will, baby, please say something— and then there was the hospital, and Will got out, and he is not there, but he is cold, so cold—

Focus, Will thinks at himself, tries to concentrate on the tips of his fingers, the flesh and not the pull of the hivemind there at his disposal. It's familiar, and he remembers fighting against the darkness, tapping a signal out with the only bit of his body he could tear away, back to being his for just a moment. His fingers twitch, and he feels first the blunt points of his fingernails, the soil stuck there, the nailbeds and the picked cuticles eaten raw. The knuckles, one by one, the broken skin there, up, up, up until he reaches the wrist, feels Mike's hand there, not just a dull presence, but a press of skin to skin. It's grounding, the clammy and sticky feeling of Mike's skin there, and, oh, he can feel his own heartbeat push against it, and it isn't slow, not at all. It's feverish, flattering, and then he can feel its steady boom in his chest as well, echoing painfully somewhere in his head.

“Will?” Mike calls, voice meek and tender. Will looks at him, and something must have changed in his expression, because Mike exhales shakily, scanning Will's face with worried eyes. Will feels himself nod faintly, his tongue still stuck to the back of his mouth, throat dry, but Mike never needed words to understand him — not like the hive-mind didn't need words, Mike just got him like no one else did, could shuffle through his silence with gentle and nimble fingers. “Okay,” Mike breathes out under his breath, smiling weakly but reassuringly, his eyes not once leaving Will's own; and then again, more firmly, “Okay.”

Mike keeps Will looking at him, maintaining eye contact, like it's some sort of trick into having Will be present there, his eyes focused, not lost in the foggy labyrinth of his mind. It might just be, as Will concentrates on the pointed blacks of Mike's pupils, and lets himself be walked away, tugged gently by the hand, Mike's other one hovering hesitantly next to Will's side. Mike murmurs reassurances, soft words that filter in and out of Will's ears like the gentles of white noises.

Will blinks around, and they are in the porch of Mike's house, so he must have been in the yard before this, had wandered out in his sleep without realising, he concludes. It's a little unnerving, not being able to remember the steps it took him to get from point A to point B, but Mike's hand on his is a steady presence still, and he tries to focus on just that and nothing else.

Mike leads him inside, out of the dark and cold, but he doesn't flick the hallway lights on, just continues leading Will deeper into the house. Will follows in a haze, forcing his breathing to come out even and regular as the familiar walls and doors drift in his peripheral vision. The house seems empty, and Will spares a fleeting thought to where Jonathan and Nancy are right now. 

Mike has to turn away from him to traverse the house and climb up the stairs, but he keeps glancing back at Will almost every step of the way, like he's afraid Will will disappear if he is out of Mike's sight for longer than three seconds, despite the way their hands are still connected. Will thinks that he might, so he keeps looking back.

They drip water all over the hardwood floors. Mrs Wheeler will be upset, Will thinks distantly.

Mike leads him into the bathroom on the second floor, flicking the lights on with his free hand. The light is harsh, and Will squints against it, but it snaps him a little further back into reality so that's probably good.

Mike pushes the door closed until it clicks into frame gently, situates Will on the edge of a closed toilet lid, his hands hovering gently over Will, guiding. He has let Will's wrist go sometime after they have entered the room, Will notes with a hint of disappointment. Will sees him clench and unclench his fists a few times before he starts moving again, fussing around the bathroom, muttering to himself a bit. He pulls out two fluffy white towels from a drawer, Will following him with his eyes numbly. Mike turns to him, head and shoulders bent down a bit even though it doesn't make a difference — with the way they are positioned Will has to look up at him either way. Mike extends an arm out, the towel hanging off of it from between his fingers and brushing over Will's knees. Will blinks up at him, confused for a split moment before remembering that, yeah, they are still wet from the rain. He forces the hands that have been laying on his lap to move, his fingers to twitch and curl around the fabric slowly, until Mike lets go, and it drops down into Will's lap in one heap. 

His arms feel tired and heavy, joints stiff, as if frosted over from the inside. He can feel them still, the press of his rain-splattered sweatpants on one side and the soft texture of the fabric on the other. He makes a weak attempt at lifting them up anyway, towel in hand, but can only make it to somewhere around his shoulder, barely brushing his hair, when they fall uselessly down again, the towel spilling out of his grasp and hanging on by just the few points where his fingers are still curled upward like hooks. Will stares forward unseeingly, tired to the bone. The bathroom lights are humming, he notes.

Mike moves into his line of vision suddenly, dropping down to a crouch, and now he is the one looking up, pale reflections of the overhead lights dancing in his eyes along with an emotion Will can't quite place. Will is faintly aware of the shaking in his own hands, the way it rocks his shoulders with it too. Mike's hair is messy, curls going frizzy at the ends from where he was toweling it off aggressively a few moments earlier. It looks soft. Will wants to reach out and touch, the compulsion familiar but bare of most of its usual shame under the weight of his exhaustion.

Mike lifts his hands and tugs the towel out of Will's pliant fingers, and then reaches with it to Will's head, a question in his eyes. Will thinks he must nod, because Mike lets the towel touch down on top of Will's hair, and starts moving it around, letting the water absorb — all in slow and careful motions, so gentle Will could cry. It doesn't make him feel small, the care, the attention — just tired and seen.

Mike gets up from his crouch at some point, still drying Will's hair out, and after that Will lets himself close his eyes for the first time this night. He can feel Mike's fingers drag along his scalp through the towel, and it's nice, so he lets out a content little hum from somewhere in the back of his throat. His body tips forward, beyond his control, his head meeting the soft warmth of Mike's stomach where he is standing right in front of Will, closer than probably needed. Mike stills at that, and the familiar panic begins to rise in the back of Will's head, but Mike relaxes quickly and resumes his movement on Will's hair without a comment, despite the way it's probably harder to do now with most of Will's face buried into Mike's t-shirt. Will exhales breathlessly, inhales through his nose, his muscles unwinding. It's nice. Safe. He can rest for a while.

Will doesn't know how long they stay like that — longer than necessary to get his hair dry, definitely. He feels Mike's stomach and chest move with every one of his breaths.

“Mike,” Will finally gets out, a weak whisper muffled by Mike's shirt. 

Mike makes a sound that Will feels radiating through his temple and cheek, a low hum. He moves his hand back into Will's hair, now without the barrier of the towel, and Will exhales shakily, his eyelashes fluttering.

“Will,” Mike whispers back, sounding a little relieved. “Hey.” 

“Mike,” Will says again, stringy and insistent and so much more, because that might just be the only thing he is capable of saying right now, and he is trembling still, and Mike is warm next to him, but he is cold, freezing, down to the bones, and his mind is a riddle and a plague and a quicksand all at once, and, and, and— There is always an and, isn't there? Things keep piling up, Will folding under the weight, snapping like a thin and dry branch. He feels like a child again, something he despises greatly but can't help anyway. A child with papers thrown all around him, all different and disorganised, and there is a TV on, and a radio too, disjointed and loud, and the lights are flickering, and his head feels heavy, and it's a chaos that is all-consuming and overwhelming. A child, expected to clean up, and not knowing where to start.

He doesn't realise he's shaking more and more violently and his fingers are digging grooves into Mike's shirt and probably into his skin too, not until Mike slides down to his knees in one scrambled movement, and his t-shirt goes all ruffled and twisted up with it, because Will keeps clinging on. Mike pulls him in, Will's face tucked neatly into his shoulder now, and winds his arms around Will's torso, loosely at first, hesitantly, but then Will tugs him closer, hugs impossibly harder, and Mike's arms grow more present around him in turn, a grounding weight. 

It's awkward, their position, with Mike standing up on his knees on the cold tile floor and Will slumped forward on the edge of the toilet lid. Mike draws soothing circles into his back, his voice low and soft as he mutters something into Will's ear. Will sobs harder, breath ragged and shallow, feels the burning sensation of tears cleaving down his face in a heavy stream, like a dam broken.

“I— I'm sorry,” he lets out against his will, clunky and wet, when guilt comes flooding in. 

He feels Mike shake his head against his shoulder immediately. “It's okay,” he says; it sounds sure and easy, like a mantra, like a promise, so it must be what he has been whispering to Will this whole time, Will thinks. 

Will shakes his head in retaliation, a bit frantic. “No—I— Mike—” 

“Will,” Mike interrupts his blubbering gently. Will can't see his face, but Mike can't see Will's either so that might be a good thing. “It's okay, you don't have to say anything. It's okay.”

His voice is sure and soothing, understanding, but Will's heart is still beating like he is being hunted for blood, like he is still twelve and running, thirteen and killing, and he is so, so tired of this. 

“No,” Will says again, still raspy, but steadier, suddenly determined. He pushes Mike gently away from him, but his hands stay on Mike's shoulders, holding on like he might float away or fall apart into pieces without that single point of contact. Mike looks up at him with his eyes just as attentive and carrying as they have been this entire time. Will doesn't deserve it, this kindness, and he doesn't understand it either. There is a compulsion under his skin that tells him that Mike should be repulsed by him, should snatch his hands away from Will lest the rot reach him too, but Will forces it down, because he is selfish and stupid, and opens his mouth and say, 

“It's not okay. There is something wrong with me.” The words echo in his own voice, young and high and scared, eerie similar to the teary-eyed and choked up tone Will says them with now. Again, there is something wrong with him again, goes unspoken, but it bellows down on Will's tired mind, his weak resolve. “I— I don't know what to do, Mike. I feel so tired all the time, and numb, and angry, and like I'm not in my body again, like I'm— like I'm lost.”

He takes a deep shuddering breath, his mouth feeling dry and sticky. He didn't notice Mike rubbing his thumbs in small circles where his hands are laying on Will's arms throughout his wobbling monologue, but he lets himself focus on the feeling now, lets it tether him to the moment. 

“Will,” Mike calls, bringing Will's attention back to his face from where his eyes have drifted closed while he was attempting to gain control over his breathing. His hands climb up Will's shoulders, onto where his neck meets the rest of his body, and higher still, until he is cupping Will's face in his hands gently, fingers splayed on the underside of his jaw and over his blotchy cheeks, thumbs chasing stray tears away. It's intimate in a way that would make Will's insides hurt with longing any other time. Right now, he just lets himself have it. “It's— I know this sucks, but you're gonna be okay. We’ll figure it out, I promise. Let us— let me help you.”

Will wants to cling to him with every cell in his body, a gravity sinkhole pulling him in. He wants to believe him, and he wants to let go, and so much more. He aches for it, and hates himself for it, and he knows, he knows that he can't, not like this, not without feeling like the filthies and most horrible of liars. It's all a mocking echo of their conversation all those years ago, on the Halloween night, and Will hates it, hates how nothing fucking changed, and he still here, crying into Mike's shoulder about all the ways he is damaged, but has no excuse of oblivion to hide behind in not saying the second part of his curse out loud. 

“You can't fix me, Mike,” Will whispers back, lips twisted in a faint grimace, almost apologetic. He wants to laugh, feels like a child again — again, again, again — with all the doctors speaking with a condescending and pitiful cadence to their voices, about trauma and coping and moving on. With his father's voice, and the kids in school, and his own, saying the same thing that is all true. He doesn't really expect Mike to understand what he means, with his blind determination and unwavering loyalty. 

“Not fix,” Mike says, “But— We got you rid of that thing once already, right? We can do it again.”

Will shakes his head slightly, a slow motion that is all devastation that burns against his eyelids when he closes his eyes, trying to get a sniffling breath in. Tears flow freely and smoothly down his face, but he barely feels them now, only the softness of Mike's fingertips on his face as he brushes them away relentlessly. Mike has always had the ability to bring Will back to earth, even in the thorns of interdimensional horror induced state — his soft voice, his hand on Will's — the same one this night as the one on that Halloween night, a searing, golden brand of skin, a steady pull of a heartbeat. But there are shadows that no stolen touch can chase away, not fully.

“You don't understand,” he gets out in a broken voice, forcing his eyes back open, looking up at the ceiling briefly in an attempt to contain his tears. He doesn't let Mike say anything, sees the blind and confused denial on his face and barrels on, pressing his fingers into Mike's skin to keep him from speaking. “It's not just Hawkins, Mike. Or the hivemind, or the Mindflayer, it's— There is something wrong with me that keeps giving in, and I don't know if I can keep going like this, and— it's not just that, it's—it's— some of it has nothing to do with any of this, and I feel so alone all the fucking time, and—”

Will trails off then, struggling for breath, his shoulders sagging even more. He thinks it might be the closest he can get to saying it plainly, and it feels as good as it hurts. Mike stares at him for a long moment, biting at the inside of his cheek. Will lets his vision go a little hazy, staring at nothing in particular but looking in the general direction of the spot where Mike's neck meets his shoulder, the folds on the t-shirt there caused by his arms stretching up to Will, and he waits. 

“Okay,” Mike finally says, and Will's eyes drift back up to catch the split moment something in his eyes shifts. “There isn't anything wrong with you, Will. I mean, you're you,” he says with a hint of a smile, like it's as simple as that — but his face muscles twitch shakily, enunciated by the harsh light of the bathroom. “Even after everything, you didn't lose what made you special. And, Will, you—” Will sees him swallow thickly, and then say, with conviction so vivid, Will can almost taste it on the root of his tongue, “you aren't alone.”

“Mike,” Will chokes out with a pained expression — because surely Mike must know by now, he just must, and Will doesn't think he can confess to it any more than he already did without it killing him.

Mike shakes his head, determined. “I— I get it, y'know? I felt so alone too, when El and— when you moved away, and— I'd hide in my room all day, and barely have the energy to do anything, and I'd lash out on people.”

Will's head throbs with the many things he could say right now, the confusion and fear trapped there. What do you mean, he wants to scream, to plead, but with Mike's hands still lightly around his face for reasons Will doesn't dare think — wonder, dream, crave — about, the world around them silent, all that comes out of his mouth is, “Why?”

“Why what?” Mike asks, jittery and faint, like he is afraid of every syllable that might come out of Will's mouth.

“Why'd you lash out?” is what Will chooses out of the drumming of countless other why's in his mind, willing it all to narrow down to a single-minded point of focus, so he can take it one step at a time without combusting with the force of his feelings, the swarming of his thoughts.

“Oh,” Mike's mouth drops in realisation, eyes going skittish for a moment. “I just hated— I got confused with myself and made it everyone else's problem.”

“Why?” spills out of Will's mouth again before he can even think about it, and it sounds almost eager to his ears. He lets Mike choose how to answer that one for himself.

Mike looks at him for a long, long moment, now on the flip side of this conversation. Will can see it in his eyes and in every line of his body, impossibly easy to read now for some reason — the way Mike wants to lie, to brush it off. It's a good thing then, he thinks, that they never quite figured out how to stop being honest with each other in moments like this — deep in the night and with vulnerability already spilling out like an oozing wound. 

“I don't know. I guess I was scared,” he confesses; the way he looks up at Will, tentative and a little frightened, makes something twist faintly in Will's gut. Will believes him, this boy who has always been the bravest, most steady thing in Will's life — until he wasn't, for reasons Will didn't understand. He doesn't allow himself to question it, nudges his foot at Mike's leg on the floor, and lets it stay there, grounding them both to that point of contact. “Scared of what they'd see in me, if I let them get too close, and— and the world, and then it was so easy to pretend that I was something I wasn't.”

“Why— What changed?” Will's voice cracks a little, his eyes wide. Hope, the cruel and tentative thing that it is, starts seeping into his bones.

He feels like he is on the edge of something, like the air is getting denser and denser, pressing in on all sides. It feels like being fourteen with the rain in his eyes and his best friend saying something that will forever change them and how they thread around each other — but it's flipped now, softer now, enticing but no less terrifying. A point of no return. Mike must feel it too, because he takes his time replying, choosing his words carefully, knowing that it matters. “I don't know,” he says, but it's vain, a placeholder to fill space for the thousands of reasons Will can see in Mike's eyes. “Maybe it wasn't actually easy, but just— the easiest option, I guess. Maybe I couldn't run from myself anymore. Maybe I got tired of it, of not— being there for you. Of letting you be alone.”

He looks at Will searchingly, his wide eyes shining with insistence, open with vulnerability. Will looks at Mike, with his hair long and curling, face pale and dusted in faint freckles, achingly beautiful and real, just like the fear in him is real, and his words are, and his touch is. With the undeniable presence of the thing between them hanging in the air. He feels the warmth of his touch seep into his skin, sneak between his bones, and thinks, Okay.

“Okay,” he breathes, the words escaping his lips like the faintest of breezes, like the most precious of confessions, the quietest of secrets. Like a seal to tie this moment off, forever stuck in the air pooling behind his ribcage and in the beat of his heart. Like a promise.

“Okay,” Mike echoes, sounding relieved, the lines of his face smoothing out as he smiles softly up at Will.

They look at each other for a long, long moment, trapped in it with that same unspoken admission between them, but then Mike's expression melts into something else, something different as he stares up at Will.

The lingering darkness of the Upside Down has shown him a great many things in the fitful sleep he could get in the aftermath. His mother, choked by his own small hands, bruises blooming under his fingers as life seeps out of her with every strangled breath; Jonathan with his skin torn up, his back to the danger and his arms circled around Will, a protective, selfless stance; El, blood riddling her face, trickling up her nose and ears and eyes, looking at him and saying awful things that linger in his mind when he dares look at her with a hint of bitter jealousy; Dustin and Lucas and Max and Mike, slain by the creatures at Will's command, torn apart while all he can do is watch, out of touch with his own body. Mike, his face snarled and disgusted, a torn up canvas of blues and greens and reds in hand, a storm reigning havoc over them.

But there were — are, still, coated heavily in thick and palpable heat — other kinds of dreams too — the ones where it's just Mike. Just Mike and all his smiles dedicated to Will, sweet and real and special. Just Mike, and his eyes half-lidded and dark and soft, his touch a dragging warmth against Will's ribcage, his lips— Well, it's a taunting that is entirely of Will's own making, with no interdimensional horror to write it off on. And this — the way Mike is looking up at him right now through his dark eyelashes and the heavy fall of curls across his forehead, the flicker of his eyes up and down Will's face, more deliberate than ever, the devotion in them — looks a lot like something straight out of a dream. A dangerous, dangerous dream.

Will thinks Mike's face might be moving closer to him — or it might be Will's face, still entrapped in Mike's fingers, inching forward ever so slightly. There is something there in Mike's eyes, glistening with the lights. Will stares into them and the world narrows down to the sliver of space between them, a warm bubble of safety that Will wants to curl up and live in. Mike's fingers move across Will's face, sliding down a bit, one of his thumbs coming to rest right next to the coroner of Will's lip, so close that if Will spoke, or smiled, his finger would go along with it, dip into the crease that would form there. Mike's eyes dip down, and linger, thin shadows drawn over his cheekbones by the flutter of his eyelashes. 

A dangerous dream, Will thinks again, leaning closer, and then Mike's lips are on his, and he doesn't think about anything at all.

The kiss doesn't last longer than a few seconds; Will doesn't have enough time to even close his eyes properly, barely gets to feel it beyond a dry pressure against his lips. Mike's eyes are wide when Will refocuses his vision back on him, panic and fear and guilt all etched into every line of his face. He looks like he is about to say something, but Mike has just kissed him, and, for once, Will can't find it in himself to think, his mind a pleasant and tired fog, the kind that doesn't suffocate but smoothes the edges of reality out still, the fearsome and sharp and judgmental ones, so Will doesn't think about it, tips forward and doesn't let Mike either.

His lips smash into Mike's awkwardly at first, a little off-center, and Will grips into Mike's t-shirt harder, leveraging himself forward. Mike stays still for one long horrible moment, enough for Will to think, Oh, no, and his stomach to drop slightly, but then he feels Mike inhale sharply through his nose and move back against him, lips plush and gentle, his hands guiding Will closer, and oh. Will thinks he gets it now.

Will lets out a noise from somewhere in the back of his throat, content and needy at the same time, crushing his weight forward clumsily, chasing the feeling, his stomach swooping low and warm with every drag of Mike's lips on his. Will lets his hand sneak up and into the thick hair on the back of Mike's neck, getting tangled in it and pulling Mike close, closer. He wonders if the kiss tastes like salt to Mike too, from the tears and all the blood coating the back of his throat, but doesn't stop to ask. 

He slides down onto the floor, knees knocking into Mike's, their lips separating with a soft click for a fraction of a moment before coming back together. It's far from perfect, far from magical, and Will doesn't think, but he knows that this might be the most tethered to his body he has felt in days, the heat running in his bloodstream his, and his only, a hunger that is nothing like the one of the hive-mind, and a touch that is softer and more enticing than anything the Mindflayer could offer him, than whatever tune the ground or the sky bellow. It doesn't take away the heaviness in his limbs, the fog in his mind, but it's more of a reprieve than anything else has been.

“Will,” Mike mutters against his lips, but then dips immediately back down to bring them back together. Will leans into him, fingers a bit feverish and frantic where they glide over Mike's skin, still cool from the rain, but he thinks Mike's fingers might be shaking against his face as well, so it's okay. He knows there are things they need to talk about, a lot of things that have been lying unspoken between them for so long. But right now all Will wants is the resounding soundness in his mind that doesn't feel like he is being stripped of something important. So it can wait.

“Will,” Mike says again, a little more insistent, though his voice is rough and a bit raspy in a way that makes Will's insides sing. Mike uses his hold on Will's face to pull away a little and keep him there, but their foreheads are still touching, so Will doesn't allow the voice of doubt back into his mind. “I— I'm sorry, this is really not— I didn't mean for it to go like this. There is so much more I need to tell you. I had a whole speech prepared. I was going to tell you. I was.”

Will breathes against him for a moment, warm all over. “You can tell me later,” he says, voice low and hushed, wrecked.

There is nothing wrong with you, Mike had said, and Will didn't really believe him, because his body feels broken and disjointed, his mind in a place so dark it's impossible to see the warping flicker of light on the other side. Because there was something wrong with Will, always, before the Upside Down and after it too, that cloying thing under his skin that made his stomach flatter when Mike brushed a hand over his skin, made his eyes linger too long on the turn of his lips, the bridge of his nose — the thing that no pills or beating could fix, the thing everyone was so quick to point out, his father's words, the town and their cruel remarks, before Will ever knew that they were right about him. Because he was so alone in this ache that it intermingled with all of the other broken parts of him.

There is nothing wrong with you, Mike had said, and then kissed him so earnestly it took both their breaths away, kissed him as if trying to prove a point. There is nothing wrong with you, but then his eyes flashed with a fear so innate and resounding, sickening and thick shame, it made Will's stomach twist violently, and he thought that he might understand then, if that was the kind of face Will made that had Mike speaking with such belief, so he poured a mirror of that same conviction into his every movement, every press of skin on skin.

On the edge of the end of the world, Will doesn't let himself think, breathes in the promise lingering in the air over them, the one tucked in the space between their bodies, and in the tingling on Will's lips, in Mike's ragged breath and his shaking hands, the steady pulse of their bodies against each other, and allows himself to believe it.