Chapter Text
William and Amanda Byers are born on March 22nd, 1971.
It’s a freezing night. The wind howls through the hospital’s corridors, bending the trees outside the darkened windows.
Joyce Byers is just shy of 29 years old, and delivers her children alone, with only the night-shift nurses to hold her hand.
Amanda is the first to come, a healthy – if somewhat small – baby girl covered in blood and yellow gunk. She comes out shaking her fists and screaming her tiny lungs out, angry at being pulled out into the harsh white lighting of the hospital. William came next, eleven minutes and twenty seconds after his twin at the very end of a 16-hours-long labor.
He’s born smaller than his sister, too small, and comes out silent, his lips blue and fingers purple. When two heartbeats pass and not a single breath has moved his tiny chest, the delivery room bursts into action, the doctor and nurses fearing the worst. Joyce - lonely, terrified and in so much pain – can barely lift up her head to demand answers, tears mingling with the sweat on her face as she whispers over and over through cracked lips to the nearest nurse, demanding the woman to just tell her what is wrong with her baby boy.
Amanda wails, loud in the arms of a frantic nurse, and then -
William breathes.
A loud cry comes from his lips, and Joyce sobs with relief, and then both children are placed in her arms.
Just like that, all the pain, fear and loneliness she had felt in the last sixteen hours is forgotten.
Once the two babies are just little bundles in their matching pink and blue blankets, Joyce manages to convince one of the nurses to call her husband, Lonnie, who had walked out of the room on the 4th hour of labor and hadn’t returned since. He stumbles back to the hospital smelling like sweat and beer, his eyes glassy and his cheeks pink around a dazed smile. He pukes in a trashcan in the entrance hall, and pushes a nurse when she tries to stop him from coming into Joyce’s room.
The doctor that delivered her babies steps in then, and doesn’t let him inside.
Lonnie is only allowed back hours later, this time smelling like soap and shampoo.
Jonathan comes with him this time, the Tom & Jerry backpack he’d taken to stay at the neighbors’ clutched in his four-year-old grip. He jumps onto his mother’s bed, brown eyes wide under his blonde bowl-cut. His knees dig into Joyce’s thigh, but she can’t find it in herself to complain, and simply moves herself so her now eldest child can see his brother and sister for the first time.
“Jonathan, this is your little brother William,” She nods at Will, sleeping peacefully cradled in her arms, then at Amanda, wrapped in a pink blanket in a crib by her bed. “and that one is your little sister Amanda.”
Jonathan smiles, big and dimpled, his chubby hands smelling of rubbing alcohol. He raises a finger and caresses William’s hair, impossibly gentle, as he always is.
“Will.” Jonathan says, a determined frown on his brow as he does his best to memorize their names. He looks over at his sister, a smile breaking out on his face. He reaches to the crib, one pudgy hand curling around its rim to lightly sway it back and forth, rocking Amanda’s tiny form. “and ’Manda.”
Lonnie huffs at the edge of Joyce’s bed, disdainful of his son’s softness. Joyce’s heart twists, but she doesn’t let it show as she continues smiling at her eldest son.
Jonathan is perfect just the way he is, her little love, her little joy.
“I like them. They can sleep in my room.”
Joyce smiles, “They already have their own bedroom, honey, remember? It’s the one you helped me paint.”
“Oh, right.” Jonathan nods, serious. He rocks Amanda in her crib, furrowing his brows. “They sleeped a lot in your belly, why are they sleeping now? Can’t we play?”
“Not right now, baby. They’re really, really tired.”
Jonathan pouts, and scoots over to lay down next to Joyce. She laughs, expertly avoiding being kicked in the stomach as he throws all his weight on her left side. Will gets jostled a bit, but continues to sleep peacefully in her arms.
“But I want to play now. I waited forever.” Jonathan insists, “And I brought my dinosaur.”
“They still have to grow up a little bit for the three of you to play together, baby.” Joyce explains, freeing one of her hands to brush back Jonathan’s fringe, “And then you’re going to play a lot, and be the best of friends. You can teach them how to play with your blocks, you can play with your dinosaurs and your plushies… You’ll have so much fun together. I promise you it won’t take long for that to happen.”
“Really?” Jonathan says, a bit too loud for a newborn’s ears.
Joyce can’t fault his enthusiasm, and shushes him fondly, not actually reprimanding. “Really. ”
Jonathan smiles even wider, smushing his cheek against her arm and looking down at Will pure adoration on his face.
At the foot of the bed, Lonnie grunts and rolls his eyes.
Cold fury ignites her chest. Here she is, after sixteen fucking hours of labor, heart still jumping from the terror of Will almost not making it, and this is how her husband - the father of her children - acts? He hasn’t said a word about Mia and Will, not a single fucking word-
“Mommy look!” Jonathan says, a hand slapping against her elbow and shaking it none too gently. “She’s yawning!”
And so she is. Amanda opens her pink mouth in a large ‘O’, whole face screwing up. Her nose is red, and so are her cheeks. Her eyes, a dark, blind green, open just a sliver, looking around before closing once again.
Joyce’s fury immediately fades.
She looks at Jonathan, at his wide brown eyes and kind cheeks, and all she feels is love in her heart, that has now grown two sizes bigger to accommodate her littlest babies.
There might have been a time when Lonnie was in there too, in a fresh, red space carved out just for him at the tender age of eighteen, but that part has been shrinking for so long and so steadily, that it had barely stung when Lonnie walked out of the hospital’s door earlier that day.
Now, she feels that shriveled up, blackened piece blink out of existence.
Now there’s only space for Jonathan and Will and Amanda – they are and will always be the true loves of her life. The only ones she’ll ever need.
They’re hers, and only hers, and she’s damn well proud of them, even if Lonnie isn’t.
*
Still, Joyce can’t afford to raise three kids on her own.
William learns to smile before Amanda, who then proceeds to stand up before Will has even mastered crawling around the living room rug. Will’s first word is ‘Mama’, and Amanda’s is ‘No’, and soon after their first birthday, Jonathan proclaims them both Will and Mia, the nicknames sticking like the glitter in Jonathan’s colorful drawing of their family that hangs on the fridge.
Their names are too big, too old, Jonathan says, these ones are small and brand new, made just for them.
Joyce loves their nicknames.
Lonnie only calls them William and Amanda.
Will and Mia are two years old and terrible when they move from Indianapolis back to Hawkins, Indiana. It’s June and Lonnie has refused to pay the increased rent of their shitty suburban home on the west end of town, so they all pack their bags and move to the house that had once belonged to Joyce’s mother, which had been sitting empty at the end of a long dirt road ever since Joyce married Lonnie and moved out.
Lonnie hates the house.
He hates how small it is, hates the crumbling shed out back, hates that the house only has one floor, four rooms and a kitchen that was last renovated in the forties. He hates the lack of neighbors, hates the faulty wiring that he has to replace on their first week there, and hates the way the windows freeze during winter.
But most of all, Lonnie hates how much Joyce loves it.
How could she not love it? It’s her childhood home.
She looks at the crumbling shed and remembers the tools she used to keep in it to explore the woods in their backyard; sees the front yard and thinks of her first kiss under the porchlight. She looks at the four rooms and remembers her father’s cigarette-ash smell, the office that was full to the brim with his students’ tests and homework from the high-school that Joyce had graduated in. She remembers the sound of her mother’s sewing machine coming from the room right next to hers. No neighbors around had once meant loud music until the early morning hours, spinning on top of her father’s shoes; and the faulty wiring meant candle-light dinners during the worst summer storms, her mother’s bright smile a lighthouse in the darkness, while outside the winds threatened to shake the house apart.
Now, the empty bookshelves that once held her father’s most cherished books hold Lonnie’s records and magazines. Joyce’s sunflower-yellow childhood bedroom becomes Mia and Will’s, the sounds that used to come from Cynthia Byers’ sewing room turning into the shouts and giggles of Jonathan’s make-pretend games.
Lonnie and Joyce take her parents’ old bedroom, the only one with air conditioning, where her growth spurt from ‘54 is etched in her mother’s chicken-scratch handwriting on the door jamb. She looks at the popcorn ceiling and her heart longs for the nights when she would curl up in bed between her parents, safe and warm in a way she’s rarely felt after they died when she was 17.
Lonnie looks at the ceiling and complains about infiltration.
Lonnie drinks and is always late to his work at night. Joyce works the entire day at local stores, trusting a sixteen-year-old Leah Callahan to watch them while Lonnie sleeps, doing her best to spend what little time she has free with her babies. They grow like weeds, filling her to bursting with pride and love.
(And shame too, because Jonathan’s shirts don’t always fit. Will’s shoes rip wide open while playing in the yard and Mia more often than not gets her brother’s hand-me-downs. Joyce knows how it feels to look like a boy when you don’t want to look like one, knows that ache in the back of the throat whenever looking at summer dresses and sparkly earrings on the shops downtown, because she had felt it too, once, and too often she sees that same ache in Mia’s green eyes, whenever Joyce tells her they can’t buy this dress now, sweetheart, maybe on your birthday, alright?)
Some nights, however, Joyce stays awake in the kitchen, smoking.
She looks out at the dark trees and imagines a life in which there’s no Lonnie lying in her bed, still smelling of beer. Imagines a big house, with a brand new kitchen and no fire-hazards, where she lives, happily with her kids, watching them grow instead of having to slave away at her work for most of the day to pay the babysitter and the groceries and the fucking light above their heads while her husband, the father of her children does nothing at all but sit on his ass and burn most of the money that should be going towards their family and not to his booze and -
But she snaps out of it. She puts out her cigarette, opens the kitchen window to air out the smoke.
The kids need a father, and she can barely afford raising two toddlers and a child on her own, much less afford remodeling the house.
Such dreams bring nothing but heartache.
Two years pass in the blink of an eye, Lonnie loses his job, the babysitter moves to Ohio, and a million other things happen, and before she notices, Joyce’s taking pictures of Mia and Will side by side on their first day of kindergarten.
Jonathan stands impatiently by the front door, squirming on his feet, anxious to show his birthday present, a new toy car, to his best and only friend Steve.
Lonnie barks at him to cut that shit off, already, and a hush falls over the room.
Joyce glares at Lonnie, who glares right back.
Jonathan’s quiet after that, eyes turned to the floor. Joyce lays a hand on his shoulder and steers him to the car, cursing Lonnie inside her head.
Joyce curses him the entire ride to the school, listening with half an ear to Mia and Will chattering about what they think their day will be like, how Mia’s going to show her Big Bird plushie to everyone in the school and how Will is already planning to give their teacher, Mrs. Buckley, the Kermit drawing he’d made just for her last night.
The twins had met Mrs. Buckley last week and the first thing they did, obviously, was ask her which Sesame Street character was her favorite. Much to Will’s happiness, she had answered Kermit. Mia, whose favorite character was Oscar the Grouch, hadn’t been all that happy and had proceeded to pout until Mrs. Buckley told her they had an Oscar plushie in the classroom’s toy box. After that, the little upset had been promptly forgotten about.
Joyce leaves them at the school, and spends the entire day looking anxiously at the clock of the store, hoping to God that Lonnie won’t forget to pick up the twins when 14:40 arrives, because she’s only getting off work at six today.
She arrives home to the wonderful sight of Jonathan and the twins curled up on the couch together, the two four-year olds fast asleep on Jonathan’s thighs while Jonathan reads an X-Men comic over their heads, tracing the words with his fingers. Lonnie sits by the kitchen table, two cans of beer in front of his half-eaten plate of microwaved lasagna. The kids’ plates are piled by the sink, empty.
At least he had fed the kids tonight.
Joyce heats up some lasagna for herself, while Jonathan tries – and fails – to extricate himself from his siblings without waking them up. Mia and Will are wide awake as soon as he moves, and once they realize Joyce’s home, run over on bare feet to stand by her on the kitchen sink, one on either side of her.
They each grip one belt loop of her jeans while they watch the lasagna turn around inside the microwave, and launch into their story of their first ever day of kindergarten.
Mia tells Joyce about a girl in blonde pigtails that had tried to grab her Big Bird plushie, and Will tells about his new bestest friend, a boy named Mike Wheeler that lives on Maple Street, and has the best lunchbox, and can he please, please, please go visit?
Joyce glances at Mia, sees her looking a bit enviously at Will.
She hadn’t said anything about making friends today.
“Of course you can, honey.” Joyce tells Will, taking her plate out of the microwave and shoveling forkfuls of half-hot-half-cold lasagna in her mouth. “Why don’t you take Mia with you? I’m sure she’d love to be friends with Mike as well.”
Will takes one look at Mia’s hopeful hazel eyes and nods enthusiastically.
Will gasps suddenly, bringing up his other hand to grip the hem of Joyce’s jeans, nearly pulling the whole thing down her hip, and hoisting himself up against her side, clinging with all four limbs to her leg and stomach.
Will’s favorite thing since he was six-months old was climbing over Joyce like a little monkey, and despite the bruises he’s sure to leave from how tight he’s squeezing her, it warms her, knowing that this, at least, is something he hasn’t outgrown yet.
“Mommy, mommy, mommy!” Will shouts, “I have three bestest friends now!”
“Three?” She hadn’t heard any other name other than Mike Wheeler and the Sinclair boy that had accidentally kicked Will during nap time.
Will beams at her, bright and dimpled, “Mia and Jonathan and Mike!”
Joyce’s heart just about melts.
When she sits down to eat, Will and Jonathan ask for bites of her lasagna and end up eating half of it. Mia drinks the last of the orange juice. Joyce takes note to buy more food tomorrow, and goes to bed, still hungry.
She’d give her children the world even if it meant she’d have none of it.
*
When the twins turn five, Lucas Sinclair is invited to Will’s birthday party. Lucas, Mike, Mia and Will immediately become the best of friends during a game of tag and afterwards, Joyce adds another address and phone number to her fridge.
Lucas is a sweet, polite little boy that always includes Mia in their plays. He has a little sister named Erica that sometimes comes along and trails behind them all like a tiny duckling in corduroy overalls.
Will colors a cute picture of all of them on a spaceship, with the 120-colors crayon pack that Joyce gifts him as a birthday present. The new puppy that Mia had gotten as a present - named Chester, like the cheese, she had said, probably meaning to say Cheddar - watches dutifully from Will’s lap all the while.
Once it’s finished, Joyce hangs the drawing in the fridge.
Joyce and Lonnie argue that night - what the hell were they going to do with a dog, and was she insane, how could she spend that much money on crayons?
At least she had given them something. He couldn’t even be bothered to show up to his children’s birthday party at his own house.
Lonnie shouts at her. Joyce shouts at him. Lonnie takes the drawing down from the fridge and rips it in half.
The next morning, when Will asks about it, Joyce tells him Chester had eaten it.
When the twins turn 8, Dustin Henderson and his mother Claudia, move into a house on the odd side of Oak Lane. Dustin is a chubby kid, all curly hair and sweet smiles, even though he’s at that age where boys are usually rough and rambunctious. He’s shy too, hanging onto his mother’s hand when Claudia comes into Melvald’s store.
Something in him makes Joyce think he’ll get along well with her babies, and she is not at all surprised when she sees Dustin sitting with Will and Mia, as well as Lucas and Mike, three days later, when she comes to pick the twins up from their first day of 3rd Grade.
That same year, their new science teacher, Mrs. Blackburn, assigns Will and Mia’s class a solar system project, to be done in pairs. Mike had grabbed Will before Mia could do so, and Lucas had grabbed Dustin, so Mia had ended up paired with the Hayes girl, Jennifer, a blonde pigtailed little thing, absolutely covered in colored marker scribbles.
Joyce’s seen her multiple times on the backseat of the Hayes’ car around town, and every week her mother came out of melvald’s with a handful of new art supplies.
Jennifer stops by the Byers’ house on two consecutive Saturdays to do the project with Mia. Which means that on one saturday, the girls throw glitter over a piece of Styrofoam painted indigo blue by Joyce; and on the other, they stick the planets, that Joyce and Jennifer’s mom had also colored, into barbecue sticks, which they stick with a bit too much glee into the Styrofoam space.
Jennifer leaves with half a cup of glitter in her blonde pigtails and their styrofoam Jupiter ends up pink. Mia says it’s an artistic license, mommy. And after that, Jennifer continues to come over on Saturday evenings even when there’s no school project to be done.
She’s Mia’s best friend now, and Joyce couldn’t be happier to see her little girl finally making some friends of her own.
Jonathan, on the other hand, has been too quiet lately. He’s been getting into fights at school, and his previous friendship with Steve Harrington seems to have fallen through after Tommy Hughes sat with Steve in Science, from the little that Jonathan tells her about his days.
Lonnie, as usual, is far from happy.
They fight every day now, over what Lonnie thinks is proper ‘manly behavior’ from Jonathan, over Will’s colorful drawings, over the ‘tomboy’ Hayes girl that instilled a newfound love for softball in Mia, over what Joyce spends her money on, their lackluster sex life, what Joyce wears, what Joyce makes for them to eat.
Nothing is ever good enough for Lonnie: not their kids, not their house, and certainly not Joyce.
And then, one night after a particularly loud argument, Lonnie shoves Joyce against the fridge, his hand curling around her throat.
Before she can process the terror rising inside herself, there’s a yell from the doorway and Jonathan comes running, his fists raised. Lonnie barely looks at Jonathan, before he turns around and slaps him in the face with the back of his hand, throwing him to the ground.
Joyce sees red.
She doesn’t know how she does it, but she breaks out of Lonnie’s grip and strikes the heel of her palm against his nose, just like Jim Hopper had showed her to hit pervs back when they were seventeen.
No one puts a hand on her kids. Much less Lonnie.
She breaks Lonnie’s nose that night. While he’s at the hospital getting it checked out, Joyce packs his things and leaves them by the front door.
Months later, Joyce would regret sending him off with his car and his bags and not on the back of a police cruise.
Because that’s when Joyce begins to question the ease with which Lonnie had just turned around and smacked their kid. That’s when she realizes that Jonathan hadn’t even cried afterwards, had just stood with tears in his eyes and a clenched jaw while Joyce pressed a bag of peas from the freezer to his face.
He hadn’t been scared or confused that his dad had hit him, hadn't even looked surprised.
She realized it then.
It had happened before.
She thinks back on the split lip she had seen on Jonathan when she came back from work one evening (I was playing with Will, Mom), thinks back on the times Lonnie had been called to school because Jonathan – Jonathan, who was such a sweet, caring boy – had been involved in a fight.
Or so Lonnie had said.
She thinks back on every single slur Lonnie had said when talking to her about Will, every pull of shirt collar, every shove to the shoulder, every hard clutch of an upper arm she had ever glimpsed. She thinks of all those times and hates herself for not seeing it sooner.
She’s such a fucking terrible mom.
Joyce officially asks for the divorce and and gets full custody of her kids. Lonnie gets a few court-mandated weekends, but he never comes around to pick the kids up.
Joyce couldn’t be happier.
In the months that follow, Joyce struggles to keep her family afloat, struggles to find a way to talk to Mia, Will and Jonathan about Lonnie.
Jonathan, at first, doesn’t tell her anything, just listening as she asks question after question about his time with Lonnie, with his head ducked down. He starts opening up little by little over the course of weeks. About how rough dad was with him, the backhanded slaps, the punches to the stomach, the hunting trips to the woods to toughen him up and make him become a “real man”.
Will caves in easily on a single afternoon. He cries in her arms, fingers clenched tight on the back of Joyce’s shirt as he tells her everything his father had said to him these past years, the occasional slap to the face whenever he ‘did something wrong’, the rough shoves and shaking. Will sobs and trembles in her arms, saying he doesn’t understand what he did wrong for his father to never love him.
Joyce regrets sending Lonnie off without punching his teeth out. Or ripping out his arms with her bare hands.
Mia, on the other hand, had very little to say about Lonnie.
“Is Daddy ever coming back?” Mia had asked, scratching her freckled cheek.
Joyce had just explained to her again that she and Lonnie were getting divorced and that meant that Daddy wouldn’t be living with them anymore.
Joyce had told it to the three of them at the table that very first morning after kicking Lonnie out on his ass, but while Jonathan swallowed down his tears and Will had started sobbing, Mia hadn’t even seemed to register it, continuing to eat her scrambled eggs as if it was any other morning. Time and time again in these past weeks, Joyce had taken her aside to see how she was taking it.
“No, honey.” Joyce says. She kneels down in front of Mia on the living room couch, pretending not to see Jonathan and Will spying on them from around the hallway corner. She pushes Mia’s bangs away from her face, runs a thumb under her daughter’s hazel eyes. It’s almost the same color as Will’s (the same as Lonnie’s) but her hair and face is all Joyce. “Your dad isn’t coming back.”
“Good.” Mia nods her head, swinging her legs to hit her heels against the couch. “He always hurt everyone. I didn’t like it.”
Guilt spreads down to Joyce’s fingertips, lightening fast and cold. She squeezes her hands into fists, but it doesn’t help. The ache is deep, down in her bones. How did she not see it?
Why hadn’t her children come to her?
“Did he ever hurt you, sweetie?” She asks her daughter.
Mia had always been a moody kid, prone to tantrums and pout fests, grouchy and opinionated. Those moods had always reflected in her eyes and all Joyce ever needed to do was look into them to know exactly what was going on through her daughter’s mind.
Now, the ten-year-old looks up at Joyce, and for the first time, Joyce can’t identify the emotion in them.
“Not really.” Mia shrugs, “Can I go play with Will, now?”
Joyce looks her over for a second more, heart in her throat, but relents, gesturing at her to go. Mia pushes herself off the couch, skips to the hallway where Will and Jonathan are scrambling to hide themselves.
Joyce watches her take Will’s and Jonathan’s hands to drag them outside to play, heart aching in her chest.
Not really. Mia’s voice repeats itself in her head late at night, as she tosses and turns on her bed.
Not really, it echoes, as Joyce smokes cigarette after cigarette on their porch, watching the kids play on the lawn the next morning, trying in vain to figure out what it could mean.
*
On the day Joyce signs the last of the divorce papers, Jonathan, Will and Mia start building Castle Byers in the woods behind their home.
Joyce helps them with supplies and cushions and even with her favorite tablecloth to act as the door. It rains terribly for two straight days, but Will doesn’t want to stop and he has both Jonathan and Mia wrapped around his little finger, so Joyce resigns herself to nursing three sick children once the whole fort is up.
She ends up getting sick too, and Jonathan learns how to make tea, and to mix salt and ginger to hot water to relieve all of their sore throats.
They learn how to heal.
Together.
It helps that they also have other people to fall back on. Joyce had few friends growing up, but now, Joyce has found a friend in Claudia Henderson and in a surprisingly kind Karen Wheeler, as well as Abigail Hayes, who always come over with some new baked goods for Joyce to try. Joyce sees them nearly everyday, when the women stop by the store she works at or when they drop off the kids in the evenings she’s at home. They even come by her house, every odd Sunday evening with wine and cold cuts to talk about their lives and watch mind-numbing sitcoms on TV while their kids play together outside.
She hadn’t noticed how alienated Lonnie had made her feel in her own hometown until then.
But she’s not alone anymore. And thankfully, neither are her kids.
Mia and Will certainly aren’t, what with Mike, Lucas and Dustin calling everyday to see if they can all hang out at the Wheelers’ or at the Sinclairs’. Mia sleeps over at Jennifer’s as often as Jennifer sleeps over at their house. Jonathan has even found a new friend in a boy from his photography club, the son of the owner of the Ice Cream Parlor downtown, Jack Shipman, that every now and then comes to their house to listen to music.
Jonathan doesn’t seem to mind having only one friend. He must have gotten it from Joyce. Her twins are the only social butterflies of the family, Will more so than Mia. Will makes friends fast with his wide eyes and open displays of easy friendship. Mia on the other hand, helps him keep those friends, with her laughter and jokes and her stubborn loyalty. Joyce’s amazed at how well they work together: Will helps draw others into his sister’s bubble, the girl too shy to do it herself, and Mia makes sure Will’s friends don’t run over him because of his willingness to accommodate.
Joyce is so proud of them. So proud. She gets all teary-eyed at seeing the three of them together, so strong, so resilient after all that’s happened.
Jonathan may have become quieter, Will more soft-spoken, and Mia less prone to speaking up what’s in her mind, but they’re still there, doing their best at school, and making friends and living.
And that’s more than enough for her.