Archive of Our Own

There wasn’t a time

I didn’t have

a brother

(...)  Our origins blur

into a single birth

between us

and so between us

is a world

and its beginning.

I tell myself

there’s not a world

without my brother in it.

I tell myself

I’d follow him anywhere

to keep the world

from ending.

Dustin Pearson - The World at its Beginning.

Once, under cover of night and humming cicadas, El had crept in– dodging around the easel and hopping over a jam jar full of paint water with all the clever grace of a predator, only she never was one was she? raised in captivity as she was– and curled up under his covers.

Childlike, old as time, curved like a parenthesis, an ammonite now– calcified in retrospect.

"What is God?" She'd asked, tucking her head in the crook of his neck. Her fingers finding his on the pillow, thin and cold despite the California heat, her hair tickling his chin, itching.

Will had stared up at the ceiling, counting his own glow-in-the-dark stars, and said “I don't know.” Honestly, because he didn't.

A week later, their mom received an envelope full of cash in the mail, the first of many such government funded ‘shut up’ stipends.

“We're going to the beach.” She said, smacking the envelope on the palm of her hand repeatedly, “We're going today.”

El's mouth dropped open, still full of cereal. Will realised that so had his.

Jonathan nearly knocked over his pan of scrambled eggs as he twisted around to stare at her, “The beach? but it's November.” he waved the spatula in the air.

“I don't care. We need a holiday. Besides, it's California, it's always warm.”

Will couldn't remember a single time they'd ever gone on a holiday. There was just never enough money for one.

El swirled her spoon around in her bowl in circles until a milky little whirlpool formed in the middle, she told Will once that she liked to imagine each of her fruitloops as part of a fleet of pirate ships braving an awful storm, she never told him what happened after– when they'd all succumbed to the spoon, been chewed up and swallowed. He'd never asked.

Now she said “I like the beach, I want to go.” The early morning light poured in through the kitchen window, catching on her glittery, purple, butterfly earrings and casting minuscule reflections across her cheek. They're clip-ons because she wouldn't let them pierce her ears for real. Will wondered how it was possible someone could stand so tall in the face of certain death and yet shrink away at the sight of a sharp bit of metal.

Maybe it's not about the fear really, maybe it's about necessity. About the fact that now there was no need to be brave, and therefore no reason to endure pain unnecessarily, even the benign kind.

Mom frowned, “I didn't know you'd been to the beach, El. When was that?” She muttered distractedly as she flicked through the bills, counting.

“Only in Billy's mind, before he tried to kill me.”

Mom looked up, “Oh… uh, right, well, hopefully, this will be a tad more pleasant.” She cleared her throat.

El nodded and smiled around her spoon. Jonathan, at the stove, shrugged. Will just hoped the water wouldn't be cold.

A day trip, they decided as they loaded up the trunk with as many ham sandwiches they could make in half an hour and the entire fruit bowl shoved in a cooler under a pile of towels. Two hours to get there, two back, enough time to soak it all in and be home by dinnertime.

Their mom called the school, claiming a nasty stomach bug had taken them all hostage in the night, and yes, they would be looking after themselves. Thank you very much. Jonathan managed to wedge the old, battered acoustic guitar he never played and a mandolin he stole from Hawkins’ music club when he was twelve in as well. El had found the guitar in a box in the shed a few days before they'd moved and spent an hour tugging on his sleeves, begging him to teach her how to play until he'd dragged her to the library and took out damn near every book they could find on string instruments.

So far, she'd been faring far better than he had, and their mom swore up and down she'd be singing on the radio in no time. Will painted her a guitar pick at her request, lavender with a little yellow flower in the middle.

“Do we really need this much food?” He asked as they slammed the trunk door shut.

Jonathan hummed, “I mean, you never know, we could wash out to sea and end up on a desert island.” He took the driver's seat and tossed Will the roadmap through the car window. “Then you'd be really glad for it.”

“If we got stuck on a desert island, that would be my last concern.” Will leaned back against the door. Somewhere in the house, he could hear his mom slamming the doors open and shut. What had she lost this time? Not the keys, surely, Jon had them.

“What is a dessert island?” El asked as she came out the door cradling a big canvass bag and a floppy sun-hat balanced atop their picnic blanket.

“Desert island, not dessert. Like an island with nobody on it, not an island made of desserts.” Will said, cramming the bag under his seat and leaving the blanket in the back to serve as a cushion in case any of them wanted to take a nap.

 “Could it be a dessert island though if you ate desserts on it? Like an island only for eating cakes and ice-creams and other things?”

“I suppose it could be, yeah.”

She tilted her head to the side, birdlike. “Can we find one?”

Jonathan snorted “No, El, they're all too far away.”

“Oh.”

Will nudged her in the side as her face fell, “Hey, well maybe we could make one, a tiny one, with sand!”

“Okay but we have to eat something sweet too, or it won't be a real dessert island.”

“Deal.”

He hooked his pinky around hers and pressed their thumbs together. This used to be Will and Jonathan's thing many years ago– a pinky promise stamped and sealed, more official, unbreakable– now it was Will and El's.

Their mom finally appeared in a great flurry of movement, rushing them all to the car as if she hadn't been the one taking so long. “Come on, come on! we have to go before the traffic gets bad.” Will's old swimming goggles swung from her wrist in a great pendular motion, bright orange and incredibly ugly in his opinion.

Mystery solved, he thought. He would not be wearing them.

Mom and El piled into the backseat, Will took shotgun, and Jonathan started up the engine, “This is California. Traffic is always bad.” He grumbled.

There was something endless about California, all sand and palms and blazing blue sky going on forever and ever. Sometimes, when they drove around the outskirts, Will liked to stare out into the dunes and picture himself walking out into the dust clouds until they swallowed him up and eroded him out of existence, scrubbed clean and shiny, free of goosebumps and fireplace poker scars. All the things that made him rot from the inside out.

Clouds were rare here. They came sporadically as thin, wispy apparitions and left with the wind like busy spirits with somewhere to be.

Will missed how Hawkins’ always settled thick and heavy like soap-suds or cotton wool on an open wound– soft and purifying– though he did not miss the cold. And he missed Mike, though he didn't miss feeling like he'd swallowed something hard and unforgiving every time he saw him.

El got a letter from him the very first week they arrived, all chicken-scratch on printer paper, signed ‘From Mike’.  Will got a Polaroid of the party all grinning, arms tossed around each other's shoulders, with a collective “We miss you!” scrawled on the back in Sharpie.

Some things for others, he supposed as he watched the hills roll on by, freckled with dark, dry bits of greenery; a brambly bush here, a cactus there, a lone palm tree off in the distance.

Jonathan put in a Joy Division cassette and bobbed his head in time with the beat. In the backseat, El insisted on rolling the windows all the way down and poking her head out so all her hair went streaming out like a flag fanning in the wind despite Will telling her a passing trailer might take her whole head off if she leaned out too far. She already had a plastic bag in her lap and had sucked on a lemon somewhere on the I-10, but she swore this was the only way she wouldn't get car sick.

“Could you put something a bit less dreary on, please, Jon?” Mom said, tugging El back into her seat.

“This is the only one I've got.” He said and glanced conspicuously over at Will, who he'd conspired with to smuggle the rest of the cassettes back into the house and under the sofa cushions before they left

“Then put the radio on!” El called out over the wind vortex she'd created.

“Oh, I don't know…”

She unclipped her seatbelt and squeezed in between the passenger and driver's seats, “Please Jon! Please, please, please!” She cried, hooking her chin over his shoulder and staring up at him through the rear view mirror.

Jonathan shook his head.

Will laughed as El gasped in betrayal, then immediately regretted it when she whirled around to glare at him and shove him hard enough his own seatbelt dug into his chest.

Not for the first time, Will found himself very glad she could no longer make his throat snap or his brain bleed at the snap of a finger.

“I hate you both.”

“Enough! No more fighting! This is supposed to be a nice, relaxing holiday.” Will didn't need to see his mom to know she had a hand pressed to her brow and the other gesturing vaguely in the air. “Jonathan, turn the radio on. El, sit down, and Will, stop looking so smug.”

“What? I'm not doing anything!”

El sat back and crossed her arms, “Yeah Will! Stop being smug!” she said, looking quite smug herself.

If he had known then– how it would all end– he would have stopped the car right then and there, told her to get out and run as fast and far away as she could. Would have told her he loved her before it was too late.

Instead, he'd laughed with her, foolishly, comfortably naive in his belief that this would last forever.

But nothing ever did, did it?

☆

Seal Beach was a long, unbroken ribbon of sand and cool blue sea rippling in the breeze, practically empty now that Thanksgiving break had just come to an end.

They parked the car near the pier and hoped nobody would come tow it away while they swam. El hardly waited for Jonathan to stop the car before she was gone, stumbling down to the shore still in her dress and sneakers.

She stopped abruptly about a foot away from the water's edge, staring out into the horizon.

“Look Will, the sea!” She said, breathless, as he set the cooler down beside her. As if he might have missed it otherwise.

And indeed, there was the sea, and beyond it was the whole world. Will felt smaller than any grain of sand on this beach.

He thought of Max, back in Hawkins, and how could she have ever survived this? having seen the horizon curve and blur eternally every day of her life and then never again? Will thinks it would have killed him.

El smiled at the gulls squawking overhead, “I think I know now why she misses it so much.” she said, as if reading his mind. She did that a lot these days.

They found an empty spot by a large tangle of seaweed and driftwood and tried to spread out the picnic blanket as the wind kept ballooning it upwards and away as if trying to steal it.

Jonathan had the clever idea to run up and down the beach finding stones to weigh the corners down with as Will and El sat on either end of the blanket cackling with laughter and desperately trying to keep it down. By the time he'd found enough, the wind had kicked up enough sand to coat it entirely, and they might as well have just sat down on the ground.

“Where's mom?” Will asked, dusting his pants off as El shook out her hair.

“Said she went to find us some bathing suits, ‘dunno where though. I think there's a stall over there.”

El said, “I hope they're nicer than the one from the lab.” and cupped her hands in the sand, letting it stream out through her fingers and into her lap.

Jonathan bumped his shoulder into hers, gently, as if to say I'm sorry your childhood was so awful, or I love you, please stop talking about scary things like they're normal. then did the same to Will.

Parallel, always.

Their mom manifested a little while later with a matching set of generic dark blue broad shorts for Will and Jonathan, and a stripey, bright pink one-piece for El, who looked as delighted as if she'd received a diamond or a slice of the moon.

Will thinks if there was anyone on earth who deserved either of those things, it would be her.

Swimming in Hawkins’ public pool was a lot easier than swimming in the sea, he found as he got a mouthful of sandy salt water and poked his foot on a sharp rock all at once, so he resigned himself to sit waist-deep in the shallows sifting through the waves for shells and pretty bits of sea glass.

The sun beat down on his bare back and the nape of his neck, burning, cleansing.

Further in, Jonathan and El floated on their backs, starfished and symmetrical, with their hands clasped together like otters to keep from drifting away until a particularly strong wave pulled them down and under a rolling blanket of foam.

Will wondered if heaven was personalized, if when he died he'd just come right back to this time and place. Perhaps if that were the case, he wouldn't be so scared all the time anymore.

El emerged a moment later with a loud splutter, and Jonathan with his hair hanging limp, plastered all over his face as he coughed. He shook his head ferociously from side to side, flicking drops of water in El's face like a bad dog, Will's old goggles hung around his neck, entirely useless. Each drop glowed a warm pinkish-gold as it fell and melted back into the sea.

Will thought about how the ocean really isn't blue at all, and how if he were to paint this memory, it would be yellow all over.

They ate their sandwiches– gone soggy now– all strewn around on the blanket, burning still.

“There's more sand in this than meat.” Will said around a mouthful. Mom had long fallen asleep on her stomach and therefore couldn't protest when he stole her sun-hat.

El peeled an orange with such concentration one might think she was performing surgery, “It's seasoning.” she said. A long, yellow-ish line of juice dripped down and around the curve of her wrist, her nose and shoulders had gone all red. Will could already feel his starting to itch so he couldn't be faring any better. Jon had been the only one sensible enough to really lather the sunscreen on properly and even he was starting to burn, or maybe he'd just lucked out in the genetic lottery and come out with thicker skin.

Odd thoughts like this had started to cross his mind since El had become a permanent fixture in their lives, things like how come El and Jon got mom's nose and I had to get dad's? or, of course, El can't stand spice. It's hereditary, none of us can. Only it's not, because she wasn't there when Will learned how to crawl and nearly locked himself in the pantry or when Jonathan got his first loose tooth and swallowed it. He thinks she should have been, somehow, it was hard to imagine a time without her, a time where there wouldn't have been anyone to stand between him and Jon in pictures or sit on his rug and bug him to paint her nails or tell her about the far-away cultures of the world, a time when they'd have to split the orange into two instead of three.

“I want to play a song.” She declared, then pleaded until Will relented and went to go fetch the guitar and mandolin.

Jonathan had been teaching her Don't Worry, Be Happy since the California hippy bug had infected him almost as soon as they'd crossed the border and hadn't let go since.

“I've got three” Their mom had said a week ago, standing in line at the DMV, “A painter, a photographer, and a musician.” El had practically glowed all the way back home.

Now on the beach, she plucked through the chords as Jonathan hummed along and Will– for lack of musical talent, rocked from side to side waving his arms above his head like one would at a concert.

They never did build their deserted dessert island, but they sang the song enough times that Will could feel it settle into his bones like a mantra, don't worry, be happy, don't worry, be happy!

And he would be, for a year and a half at least, until time opened his gaping maw and swallowed them whole.

☆

Dying, as it turns out, is quite easy.

It's everything else leading up to it that's the hard part.

In her mind, Mike still won't tell her he loves her, won't even lie to spare her feelings. But that's alright, that’s not what she needs him for.

She doesn't need a savior, never has. Now, she needs a mouthpiece to speak with the others and soothe their wounds when she can't be there to do so. Mike will serve his purpose well. It had to be him. There's no possible way she could look Will, or Jonathan, or Max in the eye and still leave them.

And she has to, she has to leave.

So Mike, it is.

He kisses her one last time, and she allows it as a small act of mercy even though she can feel his hands stiff at her sides, cringing away even now.

Then she tells him he's the only one who'd ever understood her because it's true.

Everybody else chose to look past all her ragged bloody edges and love her regardless, but he'd known what she was from that very first day they'd found her in the woods, shivering and soaked to the bone– a monster, a freak.

Oh well, at least it will all be over soon. She thinks as the upside-down spins apart in a great whirling mess and takes her with it.

Dying is quite easy. Waking up again is a lot harder.

At first, there is nothing, a whole lot of it.

And then she is fourteen again, floating on her back in her stripey pink swimsuit at Seal Beach as the gentle waves rock her back and forth like a baby in a cradle, newborn or born-again only not quite– not yet.

Distantly, she can hear voices from the shore, muffled and intelligible with her ears full of water. One of them sounds like Jonathan– or might it be Will? Their voices are so similar, and now it's hard to tell.

All she can see is the great, cloudless blue sky stretching endlessly in every direction, like she's hovering in space. Will has a big, world-shaped plastic globe on his desk. He used to tell her about the countries and the continents and the capital cities of the world. She used to pretend she might go there one day.

He taught her about space, too, and how gravity is the only thing keeping it spinning– it's the only thing keeping her here now as well, stopping her from falling right out of the sea and into the vastness of space.

It occurs to her that she is dead.

It isn't nearly as bad as she'd thought it would be. There is no pain anymore, just the sky and the sea and an awful sense of exhaustion.

Every so often, she can feel herself drift further out to sea with the growing tides, then after a long while, be pulled back in until she can feel the wet sand beneath her toes again. When she lifts her head up, she expects to find Jonathan floating by her side and Will over at the water's edge, but the beach is entirely deserted, not a soul to be found, yet every time she dips back under, she can hear them again, faintly. Occasionally, she can even hear Max's voice or Dustin and Lucas's even though they weren't there on the beach that day, all too far away to really make anything out.

How strange.

She swims sometimes–it's easier now she doesn't need to hold her breath, and the water doesn't sting her eyes– watching the little fish flicker by in shimmering clouds. Most days, she prefers to lay on her back and see the sun set and rise over and over, around and around until it blurs into one long continuous streak of color splitting the sky in half.

Eventually, she gets bored of it, lonely, and the fish were never very good conversationalists.

I need to talk to Will, she thinks, as she usually does when something frightening happens.

☆

A year and a half ago El had crawled into his bed in the dead of night and asked about God, so Will had thought about Christmas, the church they never went to, and the men on TV who called him a plague.

A year and a half ago, he hadn't known what to say, but he did now.

On the 6th of November, 1988, El had stood in a rift between worlds–offering herself up like a sacrificial lamb at the altar– and Will had prayed for the first time in his life.

 Please don't let her die. Please don't let me lose her. Please let her be okay. Please, please, please. Over and over until the words lost all meaning.

If she were here, he would tell her something like I know now, God is what I pray to that you are still alive, or maybe God is who I curse for letting you die. But then again, if she was here, he wouldn't need to, wouldn't want to tell her anything at all except for I love you, I love you, I love you.

He was never much of a believer, anyway. He just wants his sister back.

The months that follow pass in a strange, delirious haze. By the time they all– no, not all, never all anymore– crowd around the television and watch the ball drop, he hardly remembers any of it.

He remembers the funeral only vaguely. He thinks he might have thrown up at some point, or maybe that was Jonathan. It all seemed to blur together. There was no body to bury, so Dr. Owens had to come down from California and beg the army to let him buy her a headstone anyway.

They allow it so long as they bury her as Jane Doe.

What a small, miraculous act of mercy. Had Terry Ives known then, how it would all end when she'd named her daughter? Had she known?

Hopper takes down a vase, a lamp, and a number of mugs and plates when he finds out. “It should be Hopper,” He says over the phone, standing in the wreckage of what was once Jane's favorite mug. “It should be Jane Hopper.”

“Not legally, no. She doesn't even have a birth certificate. I'm sorry, Jim.” Says Dr. Owens. Will doesn't mention the mug.

He remembers Jonathan finding a stack of photos he'd taken the year prior– Jane, blurry and spinning in the living room, Jane with her tongue stuck out between her teeth, Jane in the backseat asleep on Will's shoulder, hair still wet.

Jane here, Jane there. Jane, now, nowhere.

Jonathan hiccups and presses his palms hard over his eyes, tells him that the last time he'd cried was when he thought Will was dead. Will thinks there should be a different word for this, not crying– this to crying what starving is to dying.

Six months later, Mike tells them his theory, and it's all nonsense. He can see it through and through, but there are worse habits to keep than to hope, so he swallows it down.

Every so often, he dreams of water, of the sun high up in the sky and the smell of salt. Come back to me, He thinks each time.

☆

It doesn't take her very long to find Will, though she can never keep a hold of him for very long. She sees him in flashes, fading in and out like a dream half remembered.

Sometimes in the cabin, sometimes at school or in Mike's basement, usually talking to Jonathan or laughing at something Max had said.

Once she finds him in a smelly, brightly coloured room full of loud people.

There is a boy beside him, perched on a tall stool and leaning in so close his forehead nearly brushes Will's, “Do you have any?” he says.

Will nods, “Yeah, I've got two - a brother and a sister.” He smiles, an odd fleeting thing that tugs the corners of his mouth down. “She's my twin, actually.”

The boy's eyebrows fly up into his hairline, “No way! that's so cool. I've always wanted a twin. Are you two like… identical?”

“Uh… kind of, everyone says we look a lot alike.”

“That's so cool.”

El wants to say hello! I'm right here, I'm the twin! But the boy keeps looking right past her, as if seeing through her, and Will hasn't turned around once, so she figures she must be in a memory.

And oh, what an awful thing, to be so close and yet so far away from the other half of your soul.

Something gold glints in the light– a tiny hoop hangs from Will's ear, it glows pink, then blue as the lights change. El wonders where her butterfly earrings ended up. Their mom bought them for her after she'd earned her first ever B+ in English. She would have asked to be buried in them, only she'd known there wouldn't be anything left of her to bury anyway.

Unlike the other memories, this one doesn't slip through her fingers after a few minutes, there is something slightly more solid and vivid about it so she hoists herself up on the stool to Will's left and stays, watching him sip his beer and murmur things into the boy's ear every few minutes.

She finds a stray coaster and rolls it back and forth along its edge like a wheel until it spins too far and hits Will's bottle with a ping!

The boy laughs. “Where'd that come from?”

Will doesn't respond. His eyes have blown wide open, scanning the air where El's sat, crisscross-applesauce on her stool.

He stood then suddenly, fishing a crumpled up bill out of his pocket and tossing it towards the bar with a litany of ‘I'm sorry’ s and ‘I really must go’ s.

El follows him out the doors and finds herself standing inside a dark, shimmering, kaleidoscope of flashing lights and honking car horns barreling down the street, passing through her though she was made of smoke.

The buildings here stretch up impossibly tall, like long fingers dipping into the night sky, all squarish and glittery like fish scales.

An airplane whooshes overhead, a tiny red light blinking across the skyline. She wonders how many people are up there now, where they're going.

She wonders if any of them are also about to meet their brother again.

Hurrying along so as not to lose him amongst the crowd, she trails behind him across the street, then down a long set of turns and corners. She thinks of lighthouses, how Jonathan had told her they led the ships to safety through awful storms and hurricanes, she thinks of her fruitloops floating in her bowl, how sometimes Will would dip his finger in and ‘rescue’ one, set it on the tablecloth to dry. She thinks of him now, the steady up and down sway of his shoulders weaving in and around the effervescent masses, leading her through the gloom.

I'd follow you anywhere, She thinks as he stops before a grubby brick building and fumbles for his keys.

I'd follow you anywhere, She thinks as they make their way up what must be at least fifteen flights of stairs, I'd follow you anywhere, but why couldn't you choose a shorter house?

The apartment is small and cramped, full of odd mismatched furniture and stacks of books teetering on every surface, there is an easel stood in front of the radiator, a tiny kitchen overflowing with potted plants, an ugly brown sofa, and a big, wide window overlooking a fire escape.

It smells warm. It smells like Will's old room back in California, like drying paint and the only brand of laundry detergent that doesn't make his skin itch.

Will drops his coat over the sofa's armrest and flicks on the kitchen light.

He lets out a long, shuddering breath, then turns around.

☆

It strikes him then, as he meets her eyes, that since that one awful night the constant running prayer of Please, please, please had stayed there, humming in the back of his mind like his very own heartbeat.

Now, at last, it goes quiet.

Jane stands there in the kitchen doorway as solid and true as the day he'd met her– which is to say not quite, not at all, maybe.

Which is to say he can see her silhouette blurring around the edges, flickering in time with the shitty light bulb. Her hair hangs limp and damp over her shoulders, she's in a swimsuit– not the one she died in, this one is striped through in shades of pink and white– the one she'd worn that day at Seal Beach.

“Jane…” He says, and his voice breaks, splitting in two like an apple sliced right down the middle, like a twin without a pair– only here she is, here she is!

Jane reaches out a hand. He expects it to fade right through him. It doesn't. “Hello, Will.” She says, her hand appears to solidify somewhere in the air between them and settles there over his collarbone. Her fingers are cold and damp and lightly pruned as if she'd been swimming.

Then her face crumples, and she falls blindly into his arms with a choked out cry.

He's crying too, he realises, of course he is. It comes written in his very bone marrow. If she cries, he cries.

“I'm dead, Will,” She mumbles into his shirt as his arms come up to wrap around her, “I died! I had to die.”

“I know, it's okay, I understand.” He does. He would have done the same had it been him, he'd thought about it endlessly, how he would have taken her place in a heartbeat.

“I'm sorry.”

“It's okay, it's okay, Jane. I'm just happy you're back.”

She sniffles and rubs her nose in Will's collar, he can't even bring himself to mind. “It's been almost five years. Five years! Where were you all this time?” he asks.

“Swimming.” Jane says, simply.

“Swimming?” He repeats, incredulous. “You were swimming for five years? Jeez, no wonder you're all pruney”

“It did not feel like five years,” she frowns,”It was hard to find you, I went through your memories.”

“Wha- hang on, you went through my memories? Like… all of them?” Will balks.

“No, I don't think so, only the ones where you were thinking about me.”

“Oh, thank God.”

“Why?”

Will laughs into her hair, “No reason, don't worry about it.”

“Hmm… Okay.” She says, peering up at him. How strange that he's had all this time to grow up and yet when he sees her now he feels exactly like he did half a decade ago, fourteen– freshly fifteen burning alive yet still cold all over, like he's been walking around without his heart for so long he's forgotten how it feels to be alive, how to be one half of a whole.

“Can anybody else see you?” He runs a hand through her tangled hair. It comes away wet and sandy.

She shakes her head, “I haven't tried, but I don't think so.”

“Why not?”

“Because you're the only one I want to see me.” Jane says.

And he gets it because there are days when even the mirror feels like a voyeur when it sits in front of you so you need somebody parallel to see you from the side instead, to see through you inside-out.

So he bundles her up under every spare blanket he can find and a towel for her hair, parks her on the couch, puts a teapot on the stove, and starts updating her on the party’s comings and goings as he roots around in his cupboards for the chamomile.

“Max and Lucas moved to Chicago last year, I hear it's quite nice over there. She's been trying to find better doctors to help with the pain.”

“Pain?”

“Oh, yeah, you didn't know-” Will clears his throat, “She can walk now. She's fine most of the time, actually, but she says the pain comes and goes.”

Jane chews on her lip, “Oh.” she says as she rubs the towel over the ends of her hair.

“Yeah… Well, she says she's hopeful, anyway. Dustin went to MIT, obviously, Mom and dad are in Montauk, Jonathan went to London for some movie thing - I still don't know honestly, and I got into art school!” He does a little wave with his hands there at the end– jazz hands, they call it– for emphasis.

“Oh! Also I got this apartment, I've got a roommate, but she's always at her boyfriend's, so I mostly just get it to myself.”

“I like it. It smells like you.”

“Is that a good thing?

“Yes, it is.” Jane giggles.

Will lets out a dramatic sigh of relief, “Oh, okay then, thank you.”

The teapot starts to whistle.

“What about Mike? What did he do?”

The teapot screams now, and something inside of him does too, nearly two decades' worth of pressure built up, burning, always burning. And that's the thing about steam, isn't it? Nobody ever expects it to be quite so hot.

“I uh.. I don't know, I haven't heard from him.” Only half a lie, he knows Mike moved to New York in the spring because Lucas told him, and he hasn't heard from him– but only because he tore the phone cord out the wall immediately afterwards and couldn't bring himself to plug it back in. If the world ends again or somebody falls down the stairs they can reach him by post, he figures.

“Your water is boiling.” Jane says, and he knows she doesn't believe him.

She can eat and drink, it turns out, though hunger is a thing of the past and cravings come few and far between.

Will thinks if Dustin were here, he would find it fascinating, would start a whole new course of study on the science of ghosts. Or ghost– singular, as he suspects she might be the only one ever.

That might make him the single luckiest brother in existence.

She falls asleep there, curled up on the sofa cushions still holding her empty mug. There is a certain undifinable quality about her now. She seems both older and younger in a way, as if all the versions of her, both past and future, have melded together. The thought of growing older as she stays forever unchanged and childlike makes something in his chest ache raw like a skinned knee run under water, but the choice between this and never seeing her again is no choice at all.

The mantra changes now, from please, please, please to thank you, thank you, thank you! only not to God or the angels or the upside-down, but to Jane herself, for everything.

“Why do you call me Jane now?” She asks him in the morning, sitting up on the counter and swinging her legs as he burns the eggs.

Will shugs, a funny one-shouldered thing he learned from Jonathan, “I should have a long time ago, honestly.”

She pokes a finger into his cheek, “I like Jane because my mother gave me that name, but I also like El because it rhymes with Will."

“Oh… okay, then.”

He smiles, because maybe it really is that simple.

Maybe now that she will never be useful to anyone ever again she'll have all the time in the world to learn the guitar, sing her songs, stare out the windows and live without fear.

Perhaps one day she'll find it in herself to pay her parents or Jonathan or Max a visit, perhaps one day she'll see the eight wonders of the world with her own two eyes, or perhaps she'll do nothing at all, if that's what she decides.

For now though, she simply is.

fin.