Chapter Text
Will misses his friends the way most would miss a phantom limb. Part of that, he thinks, most of it even, is missing the relationship he has - had - with Mike.
After their fight that summer, he’s not surprised by the shift, the seemingly yawning chasm that separates them now. If Mike really does know, if he really did figure out Will’s… nature, then it makes sense that he would pull back. Will understands, even if watching it happen is like a physical force, claws into his tender chest and settles there like a stone.
California is almost a blessing. The crushing loneliness from missing his friends wars with the joy of being away from Hawkins, far from any reminder of why he’s so messed up and twisted, and the nightmares no longer come for him every night.
El is still grieving. She wakes with screams from her own nightmares that put near-permanent dark circles beneath her eyes and make her hands tremble for hours afterward. An overwhelming sense of guilt consumes Will when he sees her, like he shifted his own trauma onto her somehow, and the nauseous feeling nudges him into offering to teach her to draw, just for a distraction. He thinks they’re both equally as surprised when she accepts.
Spending time with El, just them two alone, is strange, at first. They’ve only really known each other for just under a year now, and in that time she spent most of her free time with Mike alone, so they don’t have anything else to talk about. It hurts Will to tell her his stories and memories of their friends, of Mike, but it always brings that spark of life back to her eyes, so he does it anyway.
After a week of trying and failing to teach her to draw a recognizable human figure, he tells her about the time Mike and Dustin got chased down by an angry mama bird after disturbing her nest, and makes her laugh for the first time. After that day, they truly feel like brother and sister.
They start freshman year of high school, and it’s just fine. Jane Hopper is outgoing and friendly, but she’s weird. She garners the attention of the nastiest bullies right away. Will Byers is weird, too, but he’s quiet and unassuming. For the most part, he is left alone.
Joyce looks for work, anything that is close to home but involved enough to keep her mind off Hopper. She finds it in a telemarketing gig, selling encyclopedias at home, and while it doesn’t pay particularly well and hogs the phone line, it keeps her busy.
The first day of school, Jonathan makes a new friend. Argyle is tall, has long black hair, and has seemingly unlimited access to a van from the pizzeria where he works. He’s also constantly stoned. And then, so is Jonathan.
It’s upsetting. Will and Jonathan have always been so close, a product of their upbringing. “You’re my best friend,” he’d told Will once, so earnest. Jonathan was like a second parent to him, after Lonnie left, and Will hadn’t appreciated that enough at the time, because now Jonathan floats around like a ghost, high as a kite, or else brittle and irritable. They don’t talk.
Days after they settle into their new house, both El and Will receive letters from their friends, the mailbox stuffed full with envelopes. After a month, the letters slow, then eventually they stop coming at all. Except a lone envelope, weekly, from Mike. For El.
Will sends one final letter to each of his friends. He gets no responses.
The phone calls too start out nightly, until the phone bills are mailed out. They become weekly instead, the party gathered in the Wheeler’s and Byers-Hopper’s kitchens at precisely eight every Saturday night, and they all share the phone and gab excitedly to one another.
Then Max stops coming. Then Lucas. Then El and Mike spend so long hogging the line that Dustin stops coming, too. And Will would stand in the hallway and listen to El, laughing and telling Mike how much she missed him.
The worst part is that he really does understand why no one wants to talk to him. After spending some time with him so far away, they must have realized what everyone else in Hawkins had known since he was born: he was a freak.
That wasn’t true though, was it? They were best friends, they loved him.
If that were true, wouldn’t they try harder? Wouldn’t they care enough to write, at least, to ask how he was doing? They must not love him all that much.
He does his best to ignore that insidious little voice in the back of his head. It doesn’t work very well.
They start painting in his extra-curricular art class, and he immediately falls in love with the medium. Joyce doesn’t require much begging to buy him the supplies, and his art teacher lets him take home an old wobbly easel. He slid an empty tin beneath a leg to stabilize it and got to work.
He painted whatever caught his eye. The bouquet of flowers Joyce gives El for her birthday in November. El carefully pressing the flowers between the pages of a copy of Anne of Green Gables, because she loved them so much she couldn’t bear to throw them away. A pretty blue bird that sits outside his window, until it leaves one day and never returns. The night after they go to the beach for the first time, he paints the ocean, focuses on the horizon where they’d watched the sunset and he’d burned the image into his brain. Unlike with simple drawings, his style here shifts and changes, becomes softer, less precise. It’s scary, in a way, but exciting, too, recognizing that it's growing with him.
He doesn’t paint any of the party, simply because the one time he tries, he automatically finds himself drawing their classes and has to force himself to throw the canvas away. D&D was a thing of the past, he told himself firmly. That was kid stuff. It was time to grow up.
Time passes this way, and Mike is not allowed to visit for Thanksgiving like he’d promised. El is visibly upset, but she cheers up on the day itself, when Jonathan, remarkably sober for once, lets her help him bake the pumpkin pie. She helps Joyce baste the turkey, diligently watching the timer to stop the bird from drying out. She peels and boils and mashes the potatoes, or tries to, before Will announces that she’s being too soft and comes up behind her, wraps his arms around her, places his hands over hers on the masher, and begins slamming the utensil down so hard and fast that potato bits fly everywhere. El laughs so loud and long that she can’t even hold herself up and collapses back into Will’s arms, giggling wildly. He groans theatrically and collapses them to the floor, where they sit laughing and catching their breath until Jonathan threatens to drop the cranberry jelly on their heads. It’s a good day.
Things go back to normal afterwards, but it was nice, to feel like he had his family back, at least for a day.
Christmas is much the same. Will receives new paints and canvas, El gets the next three books in the Anne series and a pretty new dress. Jonathan insists that he doesn’t need anything, but his siblings both pitch in with their allowances to get him a new vinyl record he’d mentioned. And Joyce actually insists she doesn’t need anything, so they instead make Christmas dinner all on their own to give her a break, and miraculously, nothing burns. Another good day.
Another swift return to the norm.
Winter is just beginning to melt into Spring, or whatever accounts for these seasons in California, when El receives the news. One night at the end of February, she tells everyone Mike was coming to visit for Spring Break! Only one month from now, Will, can you believe it?! Oh they were going to have so much fun!
The very next day, he begins working on The Painting.
El’s excitement was infectious, and his own bitterness disappeared as he was drawn in. She spends hours planning out Mike’s stay, pressed against Will’s side on his bed or hers, and she was always asking his opinion. Would Mike prefer to visit the beach first or the aquarium? Will they have enough time to go to the beach more than once, does Will think, or should they just make a day of it? Would Mike like to watch the sunset on the beach like they had? Does Mike like roller skating?
It’s a week away when he glances at the calendar in the kitchen and notices El’s carefully written “Mike" with bright red hearts, and sees the exact date Mike arrives. And he’s overjoyed. Mike is coming to visit, they’re going to the roller rink together, Mike’s going to be here for Will’s birthday. The distance between them will vanish and they’ll have the perfect day. He’s so convinced of the fact that when the day arrives, he rolls up his newly finished and dried painting and brings it to the airport.
Then Mike barely acknowledges him. He stares right at Will like he doesn’t recognize him, turns Will’s hug into an awkward pat, and shows casual disinterest in the painting Will brought to the airport. To see Mike. He expends more energy on his weird interaction with Argyle.
And as they’re leaving, El’s gushing about their plans, lies to Mike’s face, glares at Will when he questions her in confusion. Says, “I want this day to be about me and you” and something cracks in Will’s chest as he unconsciously tightens his grip on the painting, bending it nearly in half.
The day is hell. He spends his fifteenth birthday arguing with or being ignored by his best friend and sister, forced to watch as his sister is cruelly bullied before attacking that bully with the business end of a roller skate. Listens to his mom make up some bullshit excuse about an encyclopedia telemarketer’s conference she has to attend. In Alaska. Watches Jonathan not care about any of it.
No one tells him happy birthday. No one even remembers. He lays in bed later that night, staring up at the ceiling as tears roll down the side of his face unimpeded, and tries to rationalize it in his head.
There was a lot going on. Mike’s visit, Joyce’s whatever, Jonathan’s relationship drama. They were all just too busy to notice. Will hadn’t even noticed until he’d seen the calendar. It was understandable.
They just don’t care. He’s a freak, he’s a queer, he’s filthy, disgusting, a mistake, he should’ve let the Mind Flayer keep him, he should’ve given in and let the demogorgon kill him, he should’ve listened to Him. He’s a burden to his family, an annoyance to his friends, a stain on the town of Hawkins, a mistake, a mistake, a mistake.
The next day things get complicated. Joyce leaves, El gets arrested, then taken, then the government agents, then… Mike. Mike apologizes. They’re in Will’s room, and he tells Will how much he misses him. How lost he feels. How Hawkins doesn’t feel the same without Will. How he wants them to be a team again - “Friends. Best friends.” with a shy, beautiful smile. Will just barely manages to hold back his tears. It’s not quite what he wants to hear, but it’s more than he expected. More than he deserves.
Then the day gets shitty again. Their house is shot up by more government agents. The good agent man dies in their arms, in the back of Argyle’s van, before he can give them the clue to find El. They’re forced to dig a grave in a junkyard, while Argyle freaks out around them. He says something about El dying before going to get high again, and Jonathan snaps at Will when he questions the validity of more weed, is that a good idea?, and Mike is visibly upset, even though he tries to hide it when he sees Will looking.
They talk about it, and Will says more than he should, about how scary it is to open up to people for fear of rejection, and it’s too honest because Mike just looks at him. Then Argyle is making a headstone, and Mike figures out the pen-clue, and they’re off again, racing to find a phone booth.
Will reads the number off as Mike dials, leans in when Mike holds out the receiver to listen. They both recognize it, saw the movie together at the age of twelve, mere months before Will’s life fell apart. WarGames. Will’s hand brushes Mike’s and the contact burns.
Mike points out Salt Lake City on the map, explains that they need a hacker, and Will realizes and laughs because of course this is how they meet Suzie, of Planck’s constant fame. He sings the song to annoy Jonathan, feeling like a normal little brother for once as Jonathan groans at the reminder. Mike manages to convince Jonathan, who reluctantly orders them all back into the van, and they all reluctantly climb back in.
It takes nearly ten hours altogether, but they pull over that night to sleep once Jonathan’s eyes start to cross in his exhaustion. The van isn’t the most luxurious place to sleep, but they make it work, Will insisting that his brother and Argyle take the back and offering to sleep on the floor between the front and back seats while Mike takes the seat itself. Mike calls him an idiot and crawls down into the cramped space before Will can even move. He falls asleep with a smile on his face.
Suzie’s house is… chaotic.
The less said about what they saw there, the better.
Suzie herself is… a force. He can tell immediately why Dustin likes her. She’s no-nonsense, staring incredulously as Mike and Will tag-team spin a yarn of such bullshit proportions that it blows encyclopedia telemarketer’s conference out of the water, and he fully expects her to kick them and their lies out the front door. But then he mentions Dustin, and her eyes soften, and he realizes that however gone Dustin is for this girl, it’s completely reciprocated. Wonder what that’s like.
She brainstorms a plan to reach her confiscated computer and they get the rowdy children on board, and boom, they’re in. Suzie is a force here too, explaining what she’s doing as she does it in words that make no sense but sound official, and just like that, they have the information they need.
He’s almost sad to leave. Sure, Suzie’s home life is insane, but being with her makes him feel closer to Dustin. The wave of homesickness the thought brings is staggering; not just because he misses his friends, but because he also misses Hawkins. He supposes the adage “absence makes the heart grow fonder” must be true, because when he thinks of his hometown, it is all good. Like his brain is tricking itself into forgetting all the bad things.
But they have to leave eventually, so they say their goodbyes, and it might be weird, but Will hugs Suzie, tells her he’ll give Dustin an extra hug for her too when he gets back to Hawkins. She seems surprised by the offer but allows it, squeezes him back in turn, tells him that Dustin told her all about them at camp and he always had nice things to say about Will. For the second time in as many days, he has to will the tears away.
The coordinates aren’t too far from Suzie’s, or at least less time than it had taken to get there in the first place, and they’re already tired from that morning's antics, so the interior of the van is quiet, save for the low reggae music Argyle insists on. Jonathan is yawning, slapping himself awake more than once, and Will wants to offer to drive, even if he doesn’t have his permit yet, but that would bring attention to the birthday they’d all missed, so he stays silent.
After a few hours of watching Mike stare at the map like it’s going to make the distance shrink, Will starts talking. At first it’s nonsensical ramblings, a story about El trying Chinese take-out for the first time and using her chopsticks to spear her orange chicken, or when Joyce almost burned their new home down because she left a casserole in the oven and got into a heated non-argument with a customer over the phone about whether they could only purchase the encyclopedias of the vowels and whether that included Y. He knew it wasn’t quite working, but at least he made Mike weakly laugh a few times. Then he moved onto Vegas and asking El to cheat them into becoming rich, and he makes the mistake again, of including himself in their plans for the future. “We could just play D&D and Nintendo for the rest of our lives.”
In his head, he hears Mike’s voice from last summer. “What, did you think we were never going to get girlfriends? That we were just gonna hang out in my basement and play D&D for the rest of our lives?”
Yeah, Mike. I guess I did.
Mike blows it off again, and Will knows he’s just worried about El, but fuck. So is Will. So is Jonathan, probably.
He tries to make it better, but he doesn’t know how. When Mike starts speaking, talking about how El is so special and Mike is nobody, doubting himself and his place in El’s life, Will feels it. The urge to soothe, to affirm, to let Mike know just how fucking special he is. And he knows what to do.
He reaches for his painting. It’s been there this whole time, safely stored inside its transport tube, this thing he created for Mike, to Mike, as some sort of proxy for all the emotions Mike evokes inside of Will. It’s not a painting, hasn’t been a painting since he put graphite to canvas and pulled a rough sketch out of his soul. It’s his blood, his skin, his bones and marrow, pulled up from some place deep inside and bled out onto canvas, his wants and needs, his fears. When he’s finished, it’s his childhood, there in bold technicolor. And his entire childhood is also Mike, so it is also his heart.
He hands it to Mike, and it’s… it’s magical. The way Mike unscrolls it so carefully, the way he takes it in, the soft wondering noise followed by a tender smile. His genuine, “This is amazing! Did you paint this?” looking at Will with delight, the way he used to whenever Will gifted a drawing, like it was an expensive present he’d received for Christmas.
And then Will… lies.
“Y-yeah, yeah, I mean… I mean, I mean El asked me to. She commissioned it, basically. I mean. She told me what to draw.”
The rest of the lie is…
When he was working on that artwork, it wasn’t supposed to mean so much. He heard Mike was visiting, El’s excitement was contagious, and it all propelled him into doing what made him happiest, his newfound passion: painting. He chose a scene from their last real campaign, before last summer, before their fight, and he set out to recreate it. But as he sketched out the scene, laying the groundwork, his brain kept replaying the memory. The party coming together to slay the dreaded beast, the penultimate battle to bring peace back to the burned and desecrated land, to round out the exciting campaign they’d worked on collectively for weeks. Each party member brought their own special skill sets to the fight, working together, for what none of them knew would be the last time.
One of the last moments in his life where he’d been in the Wheeler’s basement, with his three best friends seated around him, as the original party, and he’d been so fucking happy.
The emotion was too much. It bubbled up inside him, slithered through his veins, crawled up his throat, burned his eyes and stole his breath. So he did what he did best. He took the feelings, all of them, and poured them down his arms, through his hands, into the brush, and onto the canvas. Smeared them into the paint he blended, stored it inside careful brushstrokes. Sealed it, finally, into a bright red heart, laid onto a shield.
This painting was a love letter to his childhood, to his friends, to the boy he’d reluctantly come to terms with loving, after months of denial. And he gave it to Mike, along with the confession he’d unconsciously formulated as he painted. And it all spilled from his lips as a lie.
She, she, she, he says and maybe it’s just to him that it sounds like I, I, I. At one point he catches a flash of Jonathan’s face, staring right at him in the rearview mirror. He can’t hold the eye contact.
After he finally stops talking Mike looks so happy, so in love, and Will carefully turns to face the window, places a hand over his mouth to muffle any sound, and cries.
Will Byers has a big heart, his mom always said. He loves and he loves and he loves. He gives it away because it’s too much to be contained inside one small human organ, too full to bursting. It’s always been this way, his whole life, giving away love; to crying girls in sandboxes, to loud boys on swing sets, to uncaring fathers who yell and break things and force him to change, only to leave anyway. By the time he realizes the love isn’t infinite, it’s too late to fight his nature, and his heart bleeds out, year by year, until he’s drained and tired and empty.
He cries into his hand and wonders what will happen to him when he’s truly empty. Wonders if that day is rapidly approaching. Wonders if it’s already here.
For the rest of the ride, he… fades out. Time passes in the blink of an eye, most of it for him spent staring out the window at what seems like the same stretch of desert, giving short monosyllabic answers when a query is directed his way. At some point they begin arguing over the map, Jonathan and Mike griping about the coordinates, and Jonathan is being more biting than usual, and Argyle is still fucking high.
Then they stop to argue some more, Argyle finds the military tire tracks, and suddenly time starts to move at its normal pacing as they take off after them.
When they arrive, they’re just in time to see the carnage, to watch as El stands, amidst dust and sand and fallen bodies, holds out her arms, and brings an entire fucking helicopter out of the sky with an earsplitting, agonized scream.
She stands there, hair gone, dressed in unfamiliar clothes, some fucking collar around her neck, and this is the first time Will’s really seeing but he recognizes her from Mike’s endlessly recounted stories, after he returned from the Upside Down. Eleven, fully powered up, and enraged. It’s like something from a comic book, Jean Grey pulled straight from her panel into real life.
She’s amazing.
Then Mike touches her shoulder, hugs her, and there are tears in her eyes and her voice as she clings to him. And that’s El, that’s his sister, and the relief Will feels is staggering. He can’t even feel sadness or envy when they press their foreheads together, so full of love is he for the two people in front of him.
It feels worth it, witnessing their reunion, knowing that he helped, even in such a small way, to keep this for them.
So Will waits while they reunite, waits with trembling hands because the carnage around them and her beloved hair is shorn and there’s a fucking collar around her neck, and his heart is racing with adrenaline that has no outlet. Mike says something and El turns to see Will, and her face just crumples.
She comes to him and he meets her halfway, wraps his arms around her, presses his face into her shoulder as she does the same, and sobs. They’re both crying and hugging for so long, longer than she’d even hugged Mike, while Argyle freaks out somewhere behind him. Finally he pulls back, shaking, scanning her up and down for any obvious injuries. “Are, are you okay?” he breathes, and she nods and, equally breathless, says, “I’m okay.”
The next few minutes are a blur; the collar disengaging, El going to the man on the ground, the man who created her and ruined her, saying goodbye and leaving him there. Driving away. And just when Will starts to feel like they can finally relax, El tells them about what’s happening in Hawkins.
There’s no physical way to travel two thousand miles in a matter of hours. They find a gas station and commandeer their payphone, going through dozens of quarters as Jonathan tries to find at least El a flight to Indiana. Nothing.
El comes up with a solution of sorts. She explains, using a simple diagram on the van window, and despite the grim circumstances, Will has to bite back a smile at the memory it evokes. Drawing with El, back at home. Her stick figures. The memory fades too soon, disintegrates into nothing, and Will forces himself to pay attention.
Somehow, Argyle figures out the next part. He brings them to the nearest Surfer Boy Pizzeria, and it’s so stupidly brilliant Will could kiss him. They bribe the weird Jonathan-Argyle hybrid behind the counter and begin emptying and preparing the pizza dough freezer that will serve as El’s saltwater tank. Will helps Jonathan stir in the salt while Mike fashions a pair of goggles for El out of pizza boxes and tape.
Will watches. Watches the moment turn silly. Watches it turn emotional and charged. Watches it turn silly again with the untimely interruption of Argyle. He watches it all, two of his most important people wrapped up in each other, and he knows it’s not about him. But it still pulls at that yawning chasm in his chest, that loneliness, that ache in his cold, empty heart. He has to look away.
And in that old Jonathan way, the Jonathan that’s seemed so far away in the last couple years, his brother notices.
“Do you remember that time you told me you had a Lego stuck up your nose?” he asks.
“What?” Will does not remember this, at all. It seems like a thing he would remember, having hard plastic jammed up his nostril, but kids have notably fickle memories, so he takes Jonathan’s word for it.
His brother weaves this tale of panic and surgery via tweezer, and Will doesn’t recall any of this but inserts the right words to keep the teasing anecdote flowing, and he listens to the warmth in Jonathan’s voice, basking in the affection like sun rays.
The story shifts then, becomes something else, and Will’s pulse races and his throat tightens because it sounds like… like…
Tears gather in his eyes as Jonathan acknowledges the space between them, the distance Will despises, and he skirts around what he really wants to say. Will still hears it in the beats between syllables.
“I just… I don’t want you to forget that I’m here,” he says finally, his gaze direct and knowing as it meets Will’s. “And I’ll always be here,” he continues. “No matter what.”
Will has always known, distantly, that he was different in this way. He knew when Lonnie jeered and called him soft, knew it when the kids at school learned the word “queer” and started throwing it around at anyone they deemed other, knew it when he looked at his best friend on a normal day and wondered how it would feel to kiss him and hold his hand. Knew it last year, when the jealousy that welled up in his chest at the sight of El holding Mike’s hand forced him to confront the truth.
And Will wasn’t stupid. He knew it was bad, heard about the gays going to hell, heard it was unnatural, saw the way people turned on others like him when they dared to live their truth. Heard about public beatings, mob justice, queer people murdered in broad daylight while onlookers watched and did nothing. Heard about the disease targeting homosexuals, a sickness sent by god to punish the sinners and send them to Hell.
He knew he’d never be happy.
But looking at Jonathan now, at the acceptance and love in his eyes, it filled him with something so dangerous. Hope.
“Because you’re my brother. And I love you. And there is nothing in this world, okay, absolutely nothing that will ever change that. You got that?”
Will’s voice cracks when he replies. “Yeah, a-and I’m always here for you, too.”
“I know. I know you are.” Jonathan sets down the broom handle in his hands and pulls Will into a tight hug, a Jonathan hug. Will does cry then, because the warmth heals something in his chest, replenishes a bit of that lost love he gives and gives, and he feels better than he has in months.
After a long moment, Jonathan pulls away. He looks into Will’s eyes, hands still braced on his arms, and tells him, “It’s gonna be okay. Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Will croaks, looking back down at the water and telling himself to breathe, to reign in the emotion tugging at his chest.
“I think it’s ready,” Jonathan says, gesturing at the tub, and Will agrees.
Jonathan barges into the dining room, throws open the door like he’s pissed, and a tiny whisper in the back of Will’s mind tells him he’s the reason, he’s being too much again. He tries his best to ignore it.
Jonathan sets up the radio as El readies herself, stripped down to the barest decorum of modesty, and they help her into the freezer, careful not to slosh the water over the side. She slips on the handmade goggles and Mike helps lower her down onto her back - or maybe he’s using it as an excuse to touch her, Will couldn’t say. He himself feels the urge to squeeze El’s hand one last time, for luck, but he reigns it in. She settles down, the electric lights start to flicker and buzz, and so it begins.
“I found them,” El says after a minute.
Mike looks to Will, and they lock eyes for a moment until El continues, “They’re carrying a light. A blue light.”
Another minute passes. Mike impatiently prods, “Okay, El, what’s going on?”
“It’s not working.”
“What, what’s not working?” Will asks. His throat is starting to tighten again and his stomach rolls at it’s not working. Of course; it’s barely begun and already things are going wrong.
“Max’s plan,” she says. She’s silent for several long moments. They can only sit and watch, staring and trying not to interrupt but it’s so difficult. Finally, she says, “He has her.”
Will exchanges worried glances with his brother, with Mike, and they can only wait. The lights go haywire again, and Mike leans even farther forward. “What’s happening now?”
“I think I am in a memory. A Max memory.”
Will jumps in, anxious for answers. “Do you see her? Do you see Max?”
“No. But she’s here. She has to be here.” After another moment, she says, “I found her. But she’s young. She can’t see me. Can’t hear me.”
“Do you see anything weird in this memory? Any sign of Vecna or the Mind Flayer?” Just the name fills Will’s throat with bile.
“No. Everything is normal.” A beat. “There is something that doesn’t fit. I think it is another memory.”
Argyle pipes up for the first time. “A memory within a memory?”
There’s another silence, so long that Will’s skin is crawling with anxiety, and he can see the others aren’t much better. Mike keeps darting little glances at Will, like he has the answers, and he can feel Jonathan’s eyes on him too. But Will keeps staring at El, wills her to hurry, to find Max, to find Vecna.
The lights, flickering mildly, kick up into a frenzy, and Mike says, “She’s fighting him.”
Blood drips from El’s nose.
She begins to convulse.
“El! El, can you hear me? El come on, wake up! Wake up, El! Wake up!”
“She can’t breathe!”
“El, El!”
Things go very wrong, very quickly.
“Please! Help me! Help me!” Mike stands, begins to pull her out of the bath, and they all rush to help, carrying her writhing body to the metal table nearby, Will knocking aside the radio without a second thought. She’s choking and Mike’s pleading for her to answer but she can’t. She can’t speak, because she can’t breathe, his sister is choking to death in front of Will and he can’t help.
He can’t help.
“Mike,” he says, and Mike turns to him immediately, just like he did only moments before, like Will has all the answers. This time, Will does. “Don’t stop, okay?” His voice wavers. “You’re the heart, okay? Remember that.” He steadies his voice, pours confidence he doesn’t feel into the words. “You’re the heart!”
They hold eye contact, fear warring with conviction, and in that moment something clicks into place. We’re a team.
Mike opens his mouth, and he does what Mike does best.
He speaks from the heart.
It’s emotional. It’s real.
It’s devastating.
It feels like every word from Mike’s mouth is another tiny papercut slicing Will’s heart to ribbons in his chest. The warmth of Jonathan’s hug melts away and is gone. In its place is a black hole, sucking up every positive feeling Will’s felt these last few days, sucking up everything, and Will stands there and lets it.
I love you.
But I’m scared that one day you’ll realize you don’t need me anymore.
I don’t know how to live without you.
I feel like my life started that day we found you in the woods.
And I knew right then and there, in that moment, that I loved you.
And I’ve loved you every day since.
I love you for exactly who you are.
You’re my superhero. And… I can’t lose you.
You need to fight. You have to fight.
The lights go crazy again.
Will shoves it all, all the pain, the heartbreak, into a little box and nestles it within his empty heart. Later, he whispers to it. I’ll feel you later.
For now, he has to be here for El, even if she doesn’t know. Even if she doesn’t need him.
He’d promised.
(“You’ll stay? With me?” she’d asked once, after a bad nightmare.
He made her a mug of shitty microwave hot chocolate and sat with her on the couch as it turned cold. She’d only needed the warmth, anyway.
“I’ll always stay,” he promised. Pressed a kiss to her sweaty forehead. Held her other hand until morning.)
Now, he stands and watches her fight for all their lives.
It’s only mere minutes before she calms, then falls silent and still. She’s breathing, but they don’t know what to do.
“Come on,” Mike pleads. “Come on.”
El opens her eyes, and Will finally reaches out to grasp her hand, and he lets himself feel.
~
They arrive back in Hawkins two days later. Two days of soft conversations. Shared stories. Stolen moments at rest stops. Jonathan hugs Will again, twice. Will tries not to feel.
Cars are pouring out of town as they drive in. There are plumes of smoke rising from random areas, billowing up into the sky. There is destruction everywhere. Buildings destroyed. Fires still burning. People gathered at Hawkins High, turned into a temporary shelter.
The radio says it’s an earthquake. There are twenty-two dead. Hundreds injured. People still missing.
It’s Hawkins like they’ve never seen it, broken and bleeding sluggishly from long chasms stretching throughout the town. It’s terrifying. It feels like the end of the world
They finally arrive at the Wheeler’s house and it’s... home.
Will and El take off as one, running straight to Dustin. He manages to get his arms around them both, and it’s so warm and nice and Dustin that Will lets the tears flow unchecked, he’s so happy. He’s vaguely aware of the other reunions going on around him, but he just closes his eyes for a moment and lets himself feel.
They drive to the hospital.
(Before they left, Will pulled Dustin in for another solo hug, one that lasted longer and felt warmer than the one before. He buried his face in Dustin’s hair and told him about his promise to Suzie. His shoulder was wet when he finally pulled away.)
Lucas hugs Will and Mike at the same time too, and Will focuses on his friend to avoid feeling Mike so close, too close, and-
He shuts it off. Focuses on Lucas. Feels.
Seeing Max is… hard. The word seems too simple for the tightness in his chest but it’s all that comes to mind. They’ve never been close, not like her and El, but she’s so important to El and Lucas, to people he loves, that she’s important to Will, too. And when Lucas tells them the doctor’s grim prognosis, the pain cuts swift and deep.
“Her heart stopped for over a minute. She died. I-I mean clinically, but… then she came back. The doctors don’t know how. They say it’s a miracle.”
Mike and Will glance at each other as one, then look to El. She sits by Max’s side, so carefully grasps her casted fingers, and whispers, “I’m here, Max.”
They stay there for a long while.
~
El needs a place to hide out, and the only place everyone can agree on is Hopper’s old cabin. The thought of going there again pains El, he can tell, but she hikes up her chin and agrees.
It’s a mess. Besides being filthy and trashed, there’s the biggest problem: the huge hole in the ceiling. Nancy takes charge, unearths the cleaning supplies and puts them all to work.
Will and Mike end up sweeping in the living room with El as she picks up trash, but she’s closed off since they arrived in town. Since Max. She eventually ends up in one of the bedrooms, and Will takes the opportunity to ask Mike if she’s spoken to him yet.
“Not much. I mean, a little bit.” He sighs. “Dr. Brenner,” he sinks down on the flipped couch and Will follows. “He says that she wasn’t ready. And now she’s starting to think he was right.”
“That’s crap. If it wasn’t for her, if she hadn’t left the lab, Max wouldn’t be alive right now!”
“I know. It’s just she’s, um…” he trails off. “She’s never lost before. Not like this.”
(“I lost,” she’d whispered to Will, outside a gas station while the others grabbed snacks for the road. She leaned into his side, her face buried in his gross shirt, and she added her tears to the dirty fabric. “I lost, Will.” He didn't know what to say.)
“She’ll have another chance.” The words come out of Will’s mouth, and it’s not until they do that he realizes it’s true. He’s been forcing himself to hyperfocus, one problem at a time, forcing his feelings on and off like a faucet since they arrived. With one sentence, his walls collapse.
“Let’s hope not,” Mike says. “Let’s hope One is dead and rotting.”
Again, the words slip out. “He’s not.” He knows Mike’s looking at him now, but the knowing, the feeling is rushing in and he can’t stop it. He gulps audibly and his voice shakes as he continues, “Now that I’m here, in Hawkins, I can feel him.”
The vocal confirmation makes that voice in his head, that whisper, awaken, and tears come unbidden to his eyes. “And he’s hurt. He’s hurting. But he’s still alive.”
He wants to cry but chokes it back to continue, “It’s strange, knowing now who it was this whole time, but… I can still remember what he thinks, and how he thinks. And he’s not going to stop. Ever. Not until he’s taken everything. And everyone.” Not until he’s taken everyone Will loves, everyone he’s given himself to, and grinds them into dust. “We have to kill him.”
Mike reaches out, and his words are firm and true when he says, “And we will. We will.” His hand on Will’s shoulder is a brand, grounding him in the present.
A car pulls up outside.
When Hopper steps out, Will’s first thought is of how El mourned, her overwhelming grief, and his relief is immeasurable. Next is his mom, and a sob tears from his throat. She gathers them to her, her boys, and her arms are small but strong enough to hold them. When El and Hopper join them, she lets go to hug El, too, and the love swelling in Will’s chest as he watches them talk is immense and powerful.
Perhaps that is why it happens then.
That old familiar feeling skitters across Will’s neck, brings with it that familiar evil intent, that same despair, and Will gasps as the goosebumps erupt. His hand comes up to cradle his nape and he turns. He’s the first to see it.
The darkening sky. The oncoming storm. The sun disappears, takes the heat of the day with it, and Will watches. Feels it.
Thunder rumbles, and the spores begin to fall.
Will follows Hopper with the others, stumbles along on auto-pilot while his mind is still stuck on the spores. They end up in a clearing and stop to stare. And there it is. Black storm. Red lightning. Will’s frozen besides the heaving of his chest as he fights not to hyperventilate. He can sense Mike next to him, breathing in tandem, and wonders, distantly, how it’s possible to be so in sync with someone. He wants to reach out and grip Mike’s hand. He turns off the feeling.
The end begins.