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It was once your dream, to live in Mike’s basement. A secret dream, one you couldn’t share with Mom or Jonathan for fear of hurting them. And one that was hard to put into words, because it wasn’t that you wanted less of them, or to give up Castle Byers, or even to never see your own cramped, beat-up house again, you just—wanted, without being able to explain.
You have always been bad at explaining things.
The tactless doctors in their white coats, tell me where it hurts, and the shrinks in their polyester suits, how does that make you feel, and your mom, your mom with her night-dark eyes and the love in her heart like a thing with claws, a thing that makes her bleed—
What is it, Will? Talk to me, baby. What’s wrong?
Everything’s wrong, but you live in Mike’s basement now.
You live in Mike’s basement, but it isn’t enough.
California feels like a dream. Not a nightmare—you have had too many to class haze with horror, uncertainty with the howling unknown. No, California is a dream of half-finished sketches, washed with the strange colorlessness of a land lit by too much sun. You were supposed to find yourself at home there, but you didn’t. Instead of sanding you down into something that fit, you had only grit under your eyelids and a shoreline of unanswered questions.
Now Hawkins fences you in. The walls rise high. You have stopped running, but you haven’t stopped wondering. At any moment, the footsteps on the stairs will be the wrong footsteps. The shape in the doorway will be the wrong shape.
The voice in your head won’t be your own.
“Are you sure you two are comfortable down here?” Mom asks, surveying the queasy twists of your unmade beds on the floor. You sometimes can’t believe that this—cramped, dank, untidy—is the same place where Mike and Lucas and Dustin and you made, with eerie perfection, the Dungeon. Where the colors seemed rich and the shadows alive. Does everything have to wither with age?
(Not everything. Some poisons, some feelings, bloom.)
“Yeah, mom, it’s fine,” Jonathan says. He hasn’t even tried to sneak upstairs to Nancy’s room, in the few weeks—or is it a month?—that you’ve been here. Jonathan isn’t always happy, but he doesn’t push the boundaries of his own existence very much.
He doesn’t want what he can’t have.
“Yeah, mom, it’s fine,” you echo.
She quirks an eyebrow, her warm gaze a blanket that covers you both.
“You just say the word if you want a change,” she says. “I can do a few nights on the couch.”
“No way,” Jonathan says, in that soft, final tone you haven’t heard in ages.
“I wish we had a rooftop observatory,” Mike says, jamming the palms of his hands into his eyes. “And a telescope.”
You laugh. You can’t help it.
You can’t help a lot of things.
“What? Since when are you into astronomy?” It’s noon, September. The sky is clear, and bright with daylight. The air is cleaner than it’s been since—since.
“Since we couldn’t go in any cardinal direction without a freakin’ SWAT team.” Mike brushes the question off with a flail of one hand, even while he answers it.
He still moves in fits and jerks when he’s irritable, or curious, or thinking too hard to keep matter over mind, just as he has since forever. You remember Mike in kindergarten, better than you at pretty much everything, pumping on the swings with his legs kicking in and out, in and out. He was galloping through the air, a flying horse.
Better than pretty much everything.
“Makes sense,” you say, even though the roof itself would be enough for you. Sitting high above the worlds you used to know, alone but not alone—
“I guess we all have to believe in aliens now,” Mike muses. “Because… well, it would be dumb as hell not to. So yeah. I’d like a closer look at the stars.”
You look up, squinting at the sun. Memories flock back like birds.
—if you could see a radio signal, what color do you think it would be?—stupid, light doesn’t have a color—did you know that some constellations are circumpolar? They never set below the horizon—Dustin, you’re such a nerd—
“Draco,” you say.
“What?” It’s Mike’s turn to be confused.
“Oh.” You can feel your face getting hot. You’re not yourself, or you’re too much yourself, and nothing is simple, nothing is what you want. “Dustin told me about it once. It’s one of those… circumpolar constellations. They never set.”
“Huh.” Mike wrinkles his nose. His features are sharp, like Nancy’s, but they soften when he’s undecided, stepping out into the unknown.
Not the howling unknown, but the curious unknown. The stuff of legends, not loss.
(Maybe loss is just part of life now.)
(Maybe? Definitely.)
“Draco,” Mike echoes. “The dragon.”
“Yeah,” you say. And you can’t stand it anymore, the thing in your heart with claws, so you don’t. You turn a shoulder towards the front door of the house on Maple Street, the house where you live now. This is a door you have passed through a thousand times. How were you to know when a time becomes the last time?
No more dungeons; only dragons.
Stars that don’t set; graves that don’t close.
“Do you miss—California?” you ask.
Jonathan’s staring at the basement ceiling. He was gone for a few hours this evening; Nancy looked for him, brow furrowed towards the empty place in the crowded living room.
Jonathan’s eyes are half-lidded, bloodshot. There’s a whiff of smoke on his clothes.
“No,” he says.
“Me neither,” you say, because at least some things are worth losing.
“Good,” says Jonathan, and he flicks off the light.
It was once your dream, to fall asleep in a house full of other people. You can’t explain it, exactly, how much the distant laughter, the dish-clatter of washing-up rather than breaking down, would have meant to you.
You used to want a different voice in your head.