Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

"Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made." - Immanuel Kant

October 27, 1997

“We haven’t even started and you’re already sighing. We normally do better than that.”

Will pauses. There’s no judgement in Dr. Eady’s voice; just the usual, carefully calibrated mix of curiosity and patience. Will meets her gaze and finds it no less opaque. He wonders, not for the first time, if this is something that therapists are taught – how to become a closed book, revealing no more and no less than what the situation calls for. Not for the first time, he considers asking. Instead, he just says: “Sorry.”

The word hangs in the air. She can do the heavy lifting today, Will thinks.

“There’s no need to apologize, William. We’re here for your benefit,” Dr. Eady says, her tone still maddeningly free of any kind of judgement. She sits there, sphinx-like, waiting for Will to respond. Will gets the sense that she could wait until the heat death of the universe.

They sit in silence for a moment longer. Two moments. Three. Will knows what she’s doing. “I feel,” he starts to say, “like you’re just waiting for me to get sick of the silence.”

“Is it working?” Dr. Eady asks, her voice sweet and serene. For the briefest of moments, something suspiciously like amusement dances across her face.

Will breaks first. He always does. “Yeah,” he grumbles. “Yeah, it is. Sorry; I used to be better with silence.”

Dr. Eady makes an intrigued noise. “Oh? What makes you say that?”

Shit, Will thinks. “Sorry; that wasn’t– I don’t know why I said that. You don’t have to do…” – Will gestures vaguely in Dr. Eady’s direction – “…whatever it is you’re doing right now. We can just talk about, I dunno, normal therapy things. Or whatever.”

“What am I doing right now?” Dr. Eady asks, impassively.

Will feels his blood pressure rise slightly. He likes Dr. Eady. He really does. He’s been seeing her for almost six years, and he is, on the whole, better for it. He can even admit that the mind games – Dr. Eady would never call them that, but whatever – aren’t entirely devoid of therapeutic value. Today, though…

Will collects himself. “The thing where you take a little thing and blow it up into a big thing. Sometimes I just… say things. Isn’t that– doesn’t everyone? You’re trying to figure out how ‘Will used to be better with silence’ fits into your grand unified theory of how my brain works, and I’m saying you don’t have to do that. That’s not– that's not why I came here today. We can talk about other things. Real things.”

Silence again. Will isn’t sure why he’s so frustrated. It’s not normally like this with Dr. Eady. Tense. It was, at first, but that was years ago. Today, Will feels like an exposed nerve, and he’s certain that Dr. Eady can tell. The woman is like a fucking boodhound for trauma. Not once has Will succeeded in keeping her at bay, and not for lack of effort.

Will started seeing Dr. Eady in his junior year of college – a development for which Jonathan still takes credit, over Will’s objections. Will was never opposed to seeing a therapist. He always understood, at some level, that he’d never be fully free of everything that happened to him – everything that he survived. He just wanted to deal with it on his own terms, for once in his life.

And he did! Or, rather, he tried to. He tried for two whole years – his first at NYU. All things considered, he did a pretty good job of pretending to be a vaguely normal college kid. He made friends, he did well in school, he impressed his professors. He saw Jonathan every week and his mom and Hopper every month. He stayed in touch with the Party - all of them. He even kissed a guy or two. 

They never went away, though. The memories. The dark thoughts. The nightmares, where Henry and the Mind Flayer still cling to some kind of life, and everyone who died for Will – or because of him – just keeps dying, over and over again until Will loses count.

Will still found himself struggling to breathe more often than he cared to admit. Still trying and failing to get his traitor of a body to stop fucking shaking. Still looking in the mirror and wondering if he ever truly come back from the Upside Down, or if the boy looking back at him was just a demon that had stolen his face somewhere along the way.  

And then there are the things that Will still struggles to put into words, even today. He learned the hard way that he needs to be in control. He drinks, sure, but not like his friends and classmates do. Agency, he feels, is too ephemeral a thing to be played with so glibly. It’s more than that, though.

The first guy to touch Will – really touch him – somehow tripped a wire that Will didn't know was there, and, for a fragile few seconds, it was as if Will became someone else. Something else, maybe. Whatever you call a human body stripped of everything but its fear and its will to survive. Will doesn’t remember what happened all that clearly, but he remembers Jason’s face – confusion, then fear, then a mortifying flash of understanding – and that’s more than enough.

Jason was, in the end, almost jarringly kind about the whole thing, although the relationship never recovered. He never asked for an explanation, and Will couldn’t have offered one if he’d tried. Weeks later, Jason suggested – very tentatively – that there might be “resources” for people who’ve “been through what you have.” At first, Will didn’t understand the implication. Then, comprehension knocked the air from his lungs, and with it came a whole new world of shame.

I won’t be that kind of victim, Will thought. I won’t. He went home, vomited, and – with a final, snarled “I won’t” at his reflection – buried the thought. 

Not every scar needs to be examined.

Eventually, Will told Jonathan… not everything, but enough. He begged, through frustrated tears, for just a chance at a normal life. Or, as normal as possible, for someone like him.

“Will,” Jonathan said, taking Will’s hand, “literally no one deserves happiness more than you – no one – but this thing you’re doing isn’t working. You can’t do this by yourself, and that’s fine! None of us can! So you can keep shouting at the rain and getting mad when it doesn’t stop, or you can try talking to someone. It’s up to you.”

Jonathan was right, of course. He helped Will find Dr. Eady, who turned out to be a lesbian, and that lifted Will’s spirits somewhat. He hadn’t known that people like him – People like us, he remembers thinking, with a rush of excitement – could hold real, professional jobs without hiding part of who they were. Dr. Eady never really talks about her personal life – it took Will two years of increasingly obvious prodding to get her to refer to her partner as ‘she’ – but she doesn’t need to. The mere fact of her existence is enough, at least for Will. Not that he’d ever admit it. He can’t be too desperate for approval.

Jonathan also worked with Will on a carefully constructed account of Will’s childhood – Jonathan calls it “the narrative”; Will calls it “bullshit” – that would give Dr. Eady some understanding of Will’s menagerie of demons. They omitted the eldritch terrors, obviously, and landed on something that sounded a lot like what had been reported publicly in the years since 1983. 

Dr. Eady understands that Will’s father was abusive, that Will went missing when he was twelve, and that he somehow got caught up in whatever happened in Hawkins. She understands that Will grew up gay in a small, conservative town in the Midwest. She understands that Will’s sister died when they were both sixteen. She understands the Party well enough. Maybe she even understands Mike, although Will has always been too terrified to ask.

It’s not perfect, but it works, and it has helped. Will would never deny that. He owes Dr. Eady more than he could ever properly express. Even if she doesn’t truly get it, she makes him feel something like normal. Will’s life isn’t what he imagined at twenty-one or eighteen, let alone earlier, when the prospect of having any kind of life felt like a fantasy. It’s good, though. He came to NYU – to New York, the greatest city in the world! – to be an artist, but soon found himself haunted by the big questions. What does it mean for something to be good? To be evil? To be human? What does the existence of the Upside Down and the Abyss, and of the alien intelligence that ruled them, mean for anything? For everything? 

Naturally, Dustin had thoughts on all this, and encouraged Will to take a philosophy course. “Maybe theoretical physics isn’t for you, but there’s more than one way of thinking about this kind of– about the big stuff. Have you considered philosophy?” Will was only mildly offended by the implication. Sure, he was interested in thinking about what it meant to punch a hole in the fabric of reality, but Dustin might go ahead and do it for real. In any event, he took Dustin’s advice, one thing had led to another, and now Will finds himself in grad school. Grad school! At NYU! He’ll always be an artist at heart, but, for now, what he’s after is understanding. Wisdom, even. And it’s good. It feels right. 

Dr. Eady’s voice yanks Will out of his reverie and back to the present. “So why did you come here today?”

“Sorry?” Will says.

“You said you didn’t come here today to talk about silence, so I’m asking why you did come here today.”

“I came here today,” Will says, through gritted teeth and feeling a bit childish, “because I had an appointment.”

Dr. Eady laughs. Really laughs. Will can’t exactly tell if Dr. Eady is laughing with him or at him, but he smiles regardless. “I didn’t think it was that funny,” he mutters, mostly to himself.

“It really wasn’t,” Dr. Eady says, in a tone that would be condescending coming from anyone else, “but something is clearly bothering you, and I was feeling generous. I take it you haven’t been sleeping well?”

“Yeah, I guess,” Will concedes. “Is it– am I that obvious?”

“To me? After six years? Yes, you are. Is this about Hawkins?”

Will rolls his eyes. “Not everything is about my childhood! I have, like, a grown-up life now. I have a real job, sort of. I have exams to mark and– and a presentation to work on. I have a dissertation I could write, if I ever got really desperate. Plenty of things could be bothering me.”

“Yes, they could – a fact of which you remind me frequently. But I haven’t forgotten that you’ve been called back to Hawkins for the first time in… almost a year, if I recall correctly, and it would be completely understandable if you weren’t sure how to feel about that, especially given the purpose–”

Will cuts her off. Not yet. “Why did you say it like that?”

“Like what?”

“You said I’d been ‘called back’ to Hawkins. You make it sound like, I dunno, an alarm is going off or something.”

“Well, is that how you feel?” The question is innocent enough, but Will knows perfectly well that he has, once again, walked into a trap.

How the fuck do I keep doing this to myself? “Okay, this isn’t– I already said you don’t have to– yes, it’s about Hawkins, but it’s also… not about Hawkins. Going back home – to where I grew up, I mean – will never be a totally normal thing for me. It’ll always be like this, at least a little. I get that. I just feel like– like it shouldn’t still be this hard. The stupid trip isn’t for another month or so, and I’m already losing sleep over it…”

“Did you feel like this last time?” Dr. Eady asks. “When you went back last Christmas, before–”

Will knows where this is going. Not yet. Notyetnotyetnotyet. “That was different. It was Christmas. Everyone was in a good mood. There was a… structure, I guess, that kept me from getting, like, lost in my own head.”

“And there won’t be a structure this time?”

“No, there will,” Will sighs, on the verge of admitting defeat. “Just go ahead and– why don’t you just ask what you’ve been trying to ask since I got here?”

“Well,” she begins, “it occurs to me that the way you’re feeling might have something to do with Mike.”

Will grips the armrests. Notyetnotyetnotyet.

“You two have a complicated history. We’ve discussed it at some length. You’ve always described him as your best friend, but it’s clear – to me – that you worry about losing him. You’ve said as much. You’re not sure you understand each other anymore, and now he’s getting married–”

“I’m not jealous,” Will says, more forcefully than he really means to. “That’s not what this is about. I don’t– that’s not how I feel. About him.” He’s acutely aware of his blood pressure rising, and he feels the chill of a phantom shame, like the past is holding him at knifepoint.

Dr. Eady looks at him with genuine empathy and – Will relaxes, very slightly – understanding. “I know you aren’t, and I know it isn’t. I’m not suggesting that this is something as simple as you struggling to move on from a boyhood crush. You have moved on from it, William. I know that. What I’m suggesting is that you and Mike – who you love, very much – haven’t had a real conversation in years, and then he–”

“And then he goes and gets engaged!" Will shouts, or maybe wails. It comes out as a mix of the two. “To– to someone he’d never even mentioned! When I saw him last Christmas, things were fine. Good, even. Better– better than they’d been in a long time. He’s just been so sad and… adrift for so long, and I don’t know how to help him. I should, but… I don’t. We’ve all taken turns trying to talk to him, and we all have fuck-all to show for it.” Will takes a breath. “And then, last Christmas, it was like– it was like he was coming out of his shell, just a little bit. There were flickers of… of the way he used to be. We talked - maybe not about everything, but it was definitely something, and he said he wanted to talk more, but…”

“But?” Dr. Eady asks.

“You’ve heard all this before,” Will answers, with a wave of his hand.

“I have. But I think you might benefit from saying it again.”

Will inhales. “But then it was radio silence. Again. Or, it might as well have been. Until fucking July, when he calls me – with no warning – to tell me he’s getting fucking married. Apparently her name is Laura.”

“And you still don’t approve of Laura?” Dr. Eady asks. She knows the answer; this is just another therapist mind trick. 

“No, I didn’t– I didn’t mean it like that. Look, I’m sure this Laura person is lovely, although I wouldn’t know, because I’ve never met her and didn’t even know she existed until three months ago. And that hasn’t– I still don’t really know anything about her. No one does. Mike’s never even really dated. Not in a serious way. He writes and he works. It was hard for him after…”

“After Elle died,” Dr. Eady supplies. It’s a statement, not a question. Why would it be anything else? As far as Dr. Eady is concerned, El is dead. It was the part of the narrative – The bullshit, Will thinks, bitterly – that was hardest for Will to stomach. Even his years-long duel with a dark god was easier to dress up as something comprehensible. Something approximating normal, run-of-the-mill trauma.

What happened to El was different, though. They all promised each other. I believe, they said, half-oath and half-prayer. The promised Mike. Will isn’t even sure, anymore, if he believes that El could be out there somewhere. Maybe he never did, but a promise is a promise, and Will can’t shake the feeling that he betrays El – and Mike, and the others – every time he lets Dr. Eady say, matter-of-factly, that El is dead. El died once in 1987, and she dies again every time Will lets his faith falter. He’s never even told Dr. Eady that her name was ‘El,’ not ‘Elle,’ and those stupid surplus letters are anything but silent. Sometimes, they’re even louder than Will’s guilt.

“Yeah,” he forces himself to say. “After El died. It was… awful for all of us, and especially for him, but at least we sort of had each other, even if we didn’t really talk about it. At first, anyway. Then we all left, and– I don’t want to say ‘moved on,’ because you never really– but we all built lives. I’m here, Dustin is in Boston, Lucas and Max are in Los Angeles, and Mike is… still there.”

“I thought he moved to Indianapolis?” Dr. Eady supplies.

“He did,” Will concedes. “He’s been there for– well, since high school, I guess. Went to IU. Majored in English. He works at a bookstore now, and he still writes sometimes, which is great, but I don’t think he has many friends – like, friends in the area – and he’s always been pretty cagey about it.” Will pauses. “I’ve tried, y’know? To get him to go do something, but it was like talking to a ghost. He didn’t even try to argue with me. I think– I think I’d feel better if he did, but it was like he just… went somewhere else whenever the conversation got a bit too real.”

Will pauses. He thinks back to last Christmas, when Mike was a bit less phantasmal than unusual, and admitted, for the first time, to being lonely. They had a chance to talk privately one night at the Wheeler house - on the porch, freezing, after everyone else had either left or gone to bed. The sudden weight of the conversation took Will by surprise. They’d gone from talking about nothing to talking about something in the space of a single breath. 

“Sometimes I feel,” Mike said, without any kind of prompting, “like maybe I’m just a stubborn person with nothing to be stubborn about. Like… like I’m only useful if I have a mission or, I dunno, a quest.” 

“What do you mean?” Will asked, trying his best not to disturb whatever mysterious equilibrium had caused Mike to do… whatever this was. Mike the Brave had always recoiled from vulnerability, even before El’s disappearance and the years that followed. No one else would so reliably run towards monsters from another dimension and away from his own feelings. Now, though, there weren’t any monsters left to run towards. In truth, Will didn't need any clarification; he knew exactly what Mike meant. A paladin without a quest. He just needed Mike to be the one to put it into words.

“I mean,” Mike began, hesitantly, “that you all have quests. You’re in New York, thinking and talking about things I barely understand, and I don’t understand Dustin’s stuff – his research, I mean – at all. Lucas saves lives for a living, and Max is gonna change the world, or maybe just, like, set it on fire. It’s sometimes hard to tell the difference with her,” he said with a smirk. “Anyway, I can’t– I don’t have anything like that. I haven’t in… not since we were kids, I don’t think. I sell books! That’s what I do. I guess it’s nice to feel useful, some of the time.”

Mike forced a smile, then, and maybe a weak laugh, but all that Will remembers is being utterly entranced by the sadness in his best friend's eyes. Mike has always been loud, but his eyes have always been louder. Will would know. He’s spent years studying them.

In the seconds that passed after Mike finished speaking, Will took as long as he could to come up with a response that wouldn’t send Mike back to the… liminal space that his mind now seems to call home, even when his body is present. This was the most open – the most vulnerable – that Mike had been in years. Will didn’t know the cause, and frankly, he didn’t care. What he knew, in that moment, was that he held in his hands a precious, fragile wisp of a thing, and that the light in front of him was worth more than every star in the sky. He’d snuff them all out in a heartbeat, if that was the price to be paid.

Later, it would occur to Will that a better person might’ve thought longer – more deeply – about what Mike was saying. What he needed. But Will has always been selfish when it comes to Mike, and his mind could accommodate only one thought: I want my best friend back. In the end, Will let his desperation take the lead, and what came out was a simple, plaintive: “I miss you, too.”

For a brief moment, Will wondered if perhaps he’d presumed too much, and he felt a familiar tightness in his chest. Neither one of them had ever acknowledged Will’s boyhood feelings – not explicitly, and maybe not even implicitly, depending on how Will chooses to parse what Mike said that day on the tower. 

At the time, he felt that Mike had understood, but he was mostly just relieved – selfishly, given everything that was happening – that Mike still wanted to be friends (“Best friends!” He said). He hoped that maybe they’d get another chance to clear the air, but then they lost El, and grief had taken over. The air was as clear as it would ever be, and Will made his peace with that. He moved on with that part of his life. He even introduced Mike to his first real boyfriend, and it went well enough. Mike wasn't any more awkward than usual.

“Sorry,” Will started to say, “I didn’t mean to–”

“No!” Mike interjected, with enough force to make Will flinch. “Don’t– don’t apologize You didn’t– I do miss you. I miss the whole Party, but– best friends, right? Sometimes it’s just hard for me to… talk. And I’d like to do that more. Talk, I mean. If that’s okay with you. I don’t want to be… alone anymore, and I’m so tired of feeling useless. I guess I could use some… help. Whatever that looks like.”

Thank you, Will thought, expressing his gratitude to no one in particular. The cosmos, maybe. “You’re not useless, Mike. You’ve never been useless.” Mike stared at his feet and shuffled uncomfortably. “You’d do anything for the people you love. I think about that all the time – how far you’re willing to go. How far you did go, and– look, I also tried to deal with… everything we’ve been through on my own, and it didn’t go well. At first, I thought I’d failed, but… this is just how life is. It’s like, no one wants to play DnD alone. I know you can, technically, but it’s a waste of fucking time. A cleric without a party wouldn’t last very long, right?”

Mike was silent, but he hadn’t broken eye contact. I haven’t lost him yet, Will thought, so he forged ahead. “Anyway, yeah, I’d love to talk more. I’d really love that. And maybe this – how you’re feeling - is something we can figure out together?”

Mike beamed. “Yeah?”

Will beamed back. “Of course.”

“That’s… good.” Mike looked a bit dumbstruck. “I just sometimes feel like you’ve, I dunno, outgrown me. Our friendship. Like– like you don’t need it anymore, and I’m just… weighing you down.” Like you don’t need me anymore. Mike didn’t say it, but he didn’t need to. They’d become very practiced at having two conversations at once – one animated by spoken words, and another animated by twenty years of unspoken understandings. 

Will chose to respond to what Mike had meant, not what he said. “Of course I still need you, Mike. I’ll always need you.” If Mike noticed the change in pronoun, he didn’t let on. “You’re still my best friend in the whole world. I know things have been… different for a while now, and that can be scary – for both of us – but I’m still here. Still your best friend. And I really don’t want that to change.”

Mike hugged him then, and they held each other tightly for the longest time. Please don’t let go this time, Will thought. It felt like the clouds had parted, just a little. It felt like the beginning of something. Will allowed himself to think that maybe, this time, he could be the one to save Mike. Stupid. Selfish.

“Will? Now you’re the one who’s somewhere else.” Dr. Eady, once again dragging Will back to the present.

“Sorry. I was thinking about– about last Christmas. We were finally getting somewhere – I thought so, anyway – and then he disappears for five months and comes back engaged to a fucking stranger. Maybe if I’d stayed longer… I tried, y’know? I thought about going back to Indianapolis with him, just for a week or two. I just… I had to get back. My life is here.” Will leans back, eyes transfixed on the ceiling.

“Do you feel like you abandoned him?” It’s not an accusation, and Dr. Eady knows the answer.

“Yes,” Will says, without any hesitation. “All the time. That’s how I felt when I moved to New York, and it’s how I feel every time I see him. Speak to him. And he’d never say it, but I know he feels abandoned. I just… couldn’t stay.” Will’s eyes are wet, but he will not allow himself to cry. Not about this. Not after all this time. “There’s no place for me there. There never was. I deserve a life, and so does he, and I hate being made to feel like I’m choosing my life over his.”

“You think he needs you that much? If you’d never left for New York, if you were still in Indiana – would that really make everything better?”

Will chokes out a bitter laugh. “No! It’s never– he’s never needed me like that; he just needs something to throw himself at. Something to fight, or to protect. He protected me when we were little, and then– and then El came along and he protected her instead. That’s probably the worst part of all of this, y’know? He couldn’t protect El, and now I’m as close as he can get to her. I’ve known that for years, but I’m still as desperate for his friendship as I was at sixteen, when I thought I was fucking in love with him!”

Will stops, closes his eyes, and takes a deep breath. Then another. Then another. He’s crying for real, but he learned long ago how to speak through the tears and maintain some vestige of composure. He can’t ever give up his ability to speak for himself, no matter how hard it gets. Dr. Eady knows this. In fact, she was the one to point it out. She doesn’t interrupt.

“And that’s all fine,” Will continues, mainly for his own benefit. “I’m… it’s just how things are. Like you said, we have a complicated history. We love each other and we’ll always be friends.” Best friends, he thinks. “But it’d be dumb of me to expect two people who’ve… who’ve been through what we’ve been through to have, like, a totally normal friendship. That was always… childish, even when I thought it wasn’t. I just wish I knew what to make of all this. Of him. It’s…” – Will hesitates, his mind drawn to a memory of pouring rain and shouted words and fear and pain and rage - “…it’s not my fault he’s the way he is. It can’t be.”

The words are like acid in his mouth. They’re a moment’s cruel indulgence that Mike will never hear, and Dr. Eady doesn’t even know what happened that day in the rain, but Will hates himself all the same. In truth, Will has never really known what to do with this part of his relationship with Mike - the anger. It remains almost entirely unexamined, even after six years of therapy. Most of the time, it simply hides, and Will is able to forget that it’s there. Then, it comes roaring back, white-hot, at moments like this.

“I have an observation, if I may,” Dr. Eady offers.

Will snorts. “You may. Please. I’m tired of talking,” he says, and begins to dry his eyes.

“I can’t help but notice” – Oh, this should be good, Will thinks – “that you seem to be talking around the fact of Mike’s engagement. Yes, his fiancée may be a stranger to you, but she’s presumably a real person, and I’m wondering why you’ve been so quick to discount the possibility that this relationship is a good omen– ”

“Because it doesn’t make any fucking sense!” Will all but shouts, his heart pounding. “There’s no–”

“William, this is therapy, not a soapbox. Please, let me finish.” 

“Sorry,” Will grumbles, petulantly.

“What I was saying,” Dr. Eady continues, “is that this relationship might be a good omen, not a bad one. It could be a sign of growth on Mike’s part. If you’re right, and what Mike really needs is ‘something to throw himself at,’ then would it really be so bad if he’d found a partner?”

Will opens his mouth to object, but Dr. Eady’s index finger freezes him in place. “And, before you start, I’m not suggesting that you want Mike to be alone. This has all taken you by surprise, and you have some reservations. That’s all very understandable, given the circumstances. Still, you’re going back to Hawkins for an engagement party. All of your closest friends will be there. Mike has asked you to be his best man. Is it really so inconceivable that this could be a happy occasion?” She stops speaking and waits, impervious to the passage of time. 

So does Will.

She speaks again: “That wasn’t a rhetorical question. I’d like you to try to answer it, if you can.”

For two whole minutes, Will does battle with the storm in his head. With everything he’s ever known about Mike. Then, he begins to speak, very deliberately: “No,” he says. “I can’t.”

Will can tell that Dr. Eady was expecting a different answer, so he presses on. “You asked if it’s conceivable that this is a good thing, and– and it’s just not, because I literally can’t conceive of a world where Mike going from… where he was in December to being engaged in May makes sense. I can’t– there’s no one who knows Mike better than I do. There just isn’t. So either I’m right, and this is some brand new type of impulsive Mike Wheeler bullshit I haven’t figured out yet, or I’m wrong, and the Mike I’m going to see in Hawkins is a completely different person. And both options scare the shit out of me.”

“You could be right,” Dr. Eady says, more tentatively than usual. Her tone makes Will nervous. He’s never known her to be uncertain about much of anything. It doesn’t suit her.

“Right about…?”

“About there being no third option,” she finishes. “But, William – Will – people really do change, and it’s not always a bad thing. You certainly have.”

“They don’t change; they grow,” Will counters. He doesn’t usually challenge her this directly, but fuck it. “And this doesn’t feel like growth; it feels like… like something bad. I don’t know how else to describe it. I know him. I know him. I’m not wrong.”

I know him

Will stops at the church on the way home. “The church” is the Church of St. Francis Xavier, in the Flatiron District. Will is aware, of course, that there are other churches around, but he doesn’t concern himself with them. Religion was largely absent from Will’s childhood – the Wheelers went to church sometimes, but that was it – and Will doesn’t really understand how all the institutional pieces are supposed to fit together. For him, there’s just St. Francis Xavier.

He came to the church for the first time two years ago, at the behest of his second serious boyfriend. The invitation came as a surprise. He’d known that Tomás was Catholic - a real one - but they’d never really talked about it. 

“Is that even allowed?” Will asked. “Are you sure I won’t burst into flames?”

Tomás smiled weakly, but didn't laugh. Will immediately regretted his stupid joke. “It’s not like that,” Tomás said. “Well, sometimes it is. Maybe most of the time. But this place is different. Or trying to be, anyway. They make a point of being… welcoming. To people like you and me, I mean. They even started a support group last year, for gay people in the church. Pretty sure it’s the only one in the city!” Will’s eyebrows must have jumped of their own accord, because Tomás hurried to add: And it’s… it’s an actual support group. They’re serious about it. They’re not trying to ‘cure’ you or anything. The archbishop doesn’t approve, but he mostly looks the other way.”

Will didn’t know who or what the archbishop was. Will didn’t know what to do with any of this. He was in uncharted waters. It was as if Tomás was speaking a language that Will didn’t understand. Fortunately, Tomás wasn’t done. “Hey,” he said, “you don’t have to come if you think you’d feel weird about it. I know you’re not sure what you believe in, and that’s cool. You don’t ever have to be sure. You’re just important to me, and I’d like you to see this part of my life.” 

Will appreciated the off-ramp — Tomás has always been far kinder than the world deserved, given the life that he’s lived — but his mind lingered on what Tomás had said about Will not being sure what he believed in. It was, Will acknowledged, true enough that he didn’t know what he believed in, but that was just the tip of the epistemic iceberg. In truth, Will didn’t even know what it meant to believe in something. He didn’t need to believe that monsters and other dimensions were real. He’d seen them. Felt them. They were as real as anything else. Demodogs were as real as golden retrievers. Or they had been, anyway. 

Those were the thoughts that led Will to take Tomás up on his offer, and so, after a few weeks of vacillating, he’d followed Tomás to mass. 

These people, he remembers thinking, believe that Jesus walked on water and rose from the dead. They believe that Moses parted the Red Sea. They believe that the sun stood still in the sky at Joshua’s command. They believe that Elijah flew across the sky and up into heaven on a chariot made wholly of fire — and that was all before you took account of 2,000 years of saints and wonder-workers. 

What would the people of St. Francis Xavier have made of El? Their tradition was thick with stories of men and women with supernatural abilities. Some could fly. Others could heal. Others still could separate their minds from their bodies, something that the church tended to call ‘bilocation,’ although it sounded a lot like astral projection. Will would know. He’s a cleric, after all.

El flew, more or less, and she definitely did the mind-body thing. Did she bring Max back from the dead? Will still isn’t sure. Maybe that was just a case of miraculous healing. Would Tomás have seen El as holy? Or as some kind of demon? The church teaches that God isn’t the sole author of the supernatural — the devil can do it, too. Didn't El’s powers come from the Mind Flayer, courtesy of Henry’s blood? Could there be space in the church’s cosmology, populated as it is with angels and demons and other strange intelligences, for something as alien as the Mind Flayer? Could there be space in Will Byers’ cosmology for something like God? 

And that’s how Will became acquainted with St. Francis Xavier. He doesn’t believe like they do – he doubts that he ever could – but he’s fond of the place and the people and how they see the world. He and Tómas parted ways – amicably – just over a year ago, but Will still sees him at the church from time to time. They both volunteer at the soup kitchen. It’s nice. The whole thing. 

For a long time, Will avoided talking to the Party about the church. He didn’t know how, and he didn’t expect them to get it. Sometimes, he wondered if they’d disapprove. They’ve never actually talked about the implications of the Upside Down’s existence. Not in a serious way. Dustin, the scientist among them, would spend his life trying to make sense of what they’d seen, but the things that interested him — exotic matter, wormholes, cosmic strings, the possibility of time travel — were somehow less dangerous than the things that kept Will up at night. If there were other intelligences out there – other beings like the Mind Flayer – then Will was keen to avoid their gaze.

Eventually, Will went to Dustin with all of this. He even put his thoughts in writing and prepared a little speech, anxious to assure Dustin that, no, he hadn’t completely lost it. They were sitting in Killian Court at MIT, and Dustin had been uncharacteristically silent for at least thirty-seconds, which must’ve been some kind of record. Then, mercifully, he began to speak:

“Well, it would be kind of irrational to say something can’t exist, wouldn’t it? Other than a logical contradiction, I mean. Humans have been exploring for thousands of years. We keep digging, and the universe keeps getting stranger. Take wormholes! Physicists have been thinking about them for decades, but we’re the only ones who know for sure that they exist. Or can exist, anyway. There’s a theory that, if wormholes did exist, they wouldn’t be literal tunnels; they’d be… um, let me think about how to explain this.”

Will didn’t have any idea where this sentence was going, and he was pretty confident that Dustin was about to lose him – a familiar experience, by that point – but he waited patiently for Dustin to continue.

“Right!” Dustin continued. “I’ve got it. So, think about one of your paintings, like the one Mike had in his dorm room forever, with the heart on the shield and the Thessalhyrda. You know the one?”

Dorm room? Forever? Will had never seen Mike’s dorm room. He suddenly felt a bit ill. Selfish. “I know the one.”

“Right,” Dustin forged ahead, oblivious to the ringing in Will’s ears. “So, the characters in the painting are two-dimensional beings. Like, they occupy two dimensions. From their perspective, a three-dimensional being like you can do crazy, god-like things. How would they make sense of what they were seeing? We don’t know. Anyway, the idea is that wormholes aren’t literally tunnels; they just look like tunnels because that’s how our three-dimensional brains make sense of stuff happening higher up the dimensional food chain. Brenner would’ve known about the theory, and then one day he literally steps into a wormhole and it’s a literal, physical tunnel to an alien realm. I think about that sometimes. The way we were thinking about things wasn’t too magical; it wasn’t magical enough.

“And we still don’t even know where the Abyss was, man!” Dustin was clearly on a roll, and Will knew better than to get in the way. “Did the Upside Down take us to another universe, or to another place in our universe? Could we have travelled through time? Could we have travelled through space and time? I don’t know what else is out there, but it’d be pretty stupid to rule anything out, right? What are the odds that the universe is exactly what it looks like, except for the stuff we saw when we were kids? Pretty low. What are the odds that we were the very first people to ever come face to face with the… supernatural, or whatever you want to call it? Also pretty low. If the Mind Flayer was real, then all bets are off, but I’m pretty confident that whatever’s still out there - whatever we haven’t discovered - is weirder than we can imagine.” A beat. “Does that help at all?”

“Yeah, I think so,” Will said, still processing. “I mean, it does, but what about the fact that everything we saw was evil? Does that not bother you? The Upside Down, Henry, the Abyss, even El’s powers – it was all the Mind Flayer, and the Mind Flayer was pure evil.”

“Well, we still don’t really know what the Mind Flayer was, or what it–”

“It wanted control,” Will said, firmly. “There was nothing else. It was evil.”

“Right,” Dustin said, abandoning that particular line of inquiry. “I’ve never really thought about the… morality of it all, but, if there’s enough space in the universe for supernatural evil, then maybe there’s enough space for supernatural good, too. We can hope, right?”

Yeah, Will thought. Maybe we can. Will still doesn’t know what, precisely, he hopes is out there, but he finds himself back at St. Francis Xavier all the same.

Will sits at the very back of the church, in his usual spot. It would be selfish and kind of weird, he thinks, to sit any closer to the front. Today, they’re reading Deuteronomy: “The LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, and with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders.”

An outstretched arm. A terrifying display of power. Signs and wonders. I’ve done that, Will thinks, wryly. He sees his own outstretched arm, and his own display of power. He feels the Demogorgons’ bones snap. He feels himself take control of Henry’s arm, and then take the whole fucking arm. He watches – no, feels – Henry die. It must’ve been terrifying, objectively speaking, but Mike didn't seem terrified. He’d seemed awestruck. Enthralled.

Will remembers looking at the Demogorgon’s mangled body - the first one, not that it mattered. Why did it die like Henry’s victims? Was that just how the power worked, or did some part of Will make a choice? They didn’t even have eyes to burst, Will remembers thinking. He shivered then. He shivers now. 

Will doesn’t particularly like these thoughts, although he doesn’t hate them as much as he should. The power never stopped being evil, even when Will used it for good. To save Mike. Will knows that. 

I'm sorry, Mike, Will thinks. I’m sorry I haven’t been there for you. I’m sorry for being so selfish. I should’ve known.

Will closes his eyes, and lets the cosmos in.

October 31, 1997

She eyes me like a Pisces when I am weak…

The music is a new thing. Will used to paint in silence. Now, he needs noise. It’s fitting, he thinks. His art has gotten louder, too. His mom would say – does say – that it’s gotten darker, but he disagrees. He just doesn’t have anything left to hold back. 

Will sits in his apartment, engrossed in his current project. It’s a forest, but not a normal one. The colours are slightly off - that's how Will likes them. The plants and animals are kind of otherworldly, because Will doesn’t like his art to be fully constrained by the contours of reality. Today, he’s forcing himself to use a broader range of colours. It took him years to start painting again, after the gates closed. For a long time, he only wanted to work with harsh colours. Vermillion and oxblood. Electric ultramarine and – one of Will’s favourites – vampire black.

Those early paintings left Will feeling physically ill – like he’d defaced the canvas with the darkness inside him. He wondered if maybe art would always be just another thing that had been taken from him. Then, he made a decision. There's room in my life for things that aren’t therapy, he remembers thinking. He marched down to the art supply store, spent far too much money, and then sealed himself in his apartment for three whole days. Day and night, he painted a garden – the most fantastical, over-the-top garden that his mind could dream up. Not a drop of vampire black anywhere. It wasn't been high art by any stretch of the imagination, but it brought Will joy. I guess I can still do bright things after all. The darkness would always be there, but it wouldn't consume him. Not if he didn't let it.

I’ve been locked inside your heart-shaped box for weeks…

So, the forest. Will isn’t entirely sure where he’s going with this one. He might crank the fantasy dial all the way up and add dragons and unicorns and whatever else. He might even add some humans, although humans can be tricky. Limbs, he thinks. It can be hard to get the proportions right. He likes thinking about this stuff, though. He enjoys the creative process. It’s something that he controls. He used to worry that true artistic beauty would always be just beyond his reach – that his eyes had become too accustomed to the darkness to ever truly see the light again. He doesn’t worry about that anymore. Besides, there's more than one type of beauty. Even an apocalypse can be beautiful, in its own wild way.

I’ve been drawn into your magnet tar-pit trap…

And the music! This isn’t a happy song, but it fills the silence well enough, and it acts as a sort of ethereal sponge, soaking up Will’s darker thoughts. Also, he likes Nirvana. He was sad when Cobain died. It doesn’t have to make sense. Besides, if Iron Maiden can help Dustin understand string theory, then Nirvana can keep Will company while he paints his weird little forest.

I wish I could eat your cancer when you turn black…

It’s also, Will can admit, a nice distraction from the Mike situation, even if he still doesn’t really understand the nature of the situation. The stupid party isn’t until the third week of November – inexplicably close to Thanksgiving – which gives Will plenty of time to catastrophize. It’d be really fucking great, he thinks, if the other shoe could just go ahead and drop.

And that’s the other thing – it’s been crickets from the Party. They all know what’s going on. They’ve all been invited. As far as Will knows, they’re all going. So what gives? Why is no one talking about this? Even Max – never one to pull punches, especially where Mike is concerned – has been weirdly circumspect. It’s like they’ve all just disengaged. Like they’ve completely given up on doing anything proactive, and are just waiting for shit to really hit the fan, because maybe then something can happen. Or maybe they’re just circling like vultures.

No, Will thinks. They wouldn’t. That’s not… that’s not who we are to each other.

Hey! Wait! I’ve got a new complaint…

Will attacks the canvas, his brushstrokes less surgical then usual. He doesn’t usually paint like this. He’s normally much more methodical. Now, though, he’s giving his emotions a bit more leash. It’s kind of like being on autopilot. Or like being possessed, he thinks. Will’s hand motions become more erratic – frantic, even. His heart is pounding. “I’m sorry,” he whispers, half to Mike and half to the poor, blameless canvas.

Maybe they’re all waiting for me, he thinks. Maybe they’re waiting for me to do… something about Mike. They think I failed him and they’re waiting for me to fix this. Will’s stomach constricts. He stops painting. The forest can wait.

Well, I can’t. I can’t fix his life for him. I can’t give him what he needs. I don’t even understand what he needs, because he won’t fucking talk to me. If this is what he wants to do, then… maybe I just need to be okay with that. I’ve tried, Mike. I’ve tried so hard, but my life, it– I have to live it. And, who knows, maybe I’m dead wrong, and Dr. Eady is right, and this is all actually–

The phone rings. The cosmos is not without a sense of humour. Will answers.

Forever in debt to your priceless advice…

“Will By–”

“Will? It’s Nancy.”

Time stops. Will’s heart stops. Everything stops. Will has always liked Nancy, even if she scares him. They aren’t friends, though. They have a rapport, but they aren’t friends. More to the point, she’s literally never called him before. He doesn’t even know how she got his number.

“Nancy,” he says. His hands are trembling. Better his hands than his voice. “Is this– is everything okay?” Say what you mean, coward. He does. “Is this about Mike?”

“Yes, it is.” There’s no emotion in Nancy’s voice. None that Will can detect, anyway. It’s terrifying. “Do you have a minute?”

“I–”

“Actually, it doesn’t matter. I don’t know why I asked. I talk; you listen.”

The music seems to get louder. Hey! Wait! I’ve got a new complaint. The cosmos is laughing now. Will manages to speak. “Nancy? Sorry; I need like ten seconds.”

“Ten seconds,” she says.

Will strides across the room to where the boombox lives. He tries to turn it off, but he can’t get his hands to follow his orders. I’ve gone insane. That gives him an idea. He picks up the boombox and hurls it across the room. It shatters, and silence falls. Sorry, Kurt.

His hands are still vibrating, and his heart seems to have decided to get in on the action, too. He takes a deep breath – it doesn’t help – and walks back to the phone.

“Sorry; I’m back. This is– you said this is about Mike?” Is Mike okay? Is he alive?

“What was that noise?”

“Nirvana. Is Mike okay?”

“He could be worse,” Nancy starts. Will doesn’t know what that means, but he decides to just let her speak. “Look, this conversation should’ve happened a long time ago, but here we are, so you’re getting the abridged version of a much longer story. The surprise engagement? It’s off. So is the party, obviously. I’m dealing with that. What I need you to do is go to Hawkins anyway. That’s where he is. And, yes, it’s bad. I’ve never seen him this… catatonic.”

Will sits down. He doesn’t trust his feet to keep him upright. “I don’t understand,” he says.

“You do. You’re going to tell me you’re surprised?”

It’s not really a question. “No,” he says. “I’m not. Would it help if I pretended to be?” It’s a bit of gallows humour. Whose execution, though? Will shoves the thought away. 

“It wouldn’t make me feel much of anything, at this point, but your concern for my emotional well-being is appreciated. You’re not surprised, and neither am I. Look, I know how much you and my brother love each other. You’ve been friends since before either one of you really knew what the word meant. I’ve watched you have, like, telepathic conversations across crowded rooms, and I can’t pretend to know what that’s like. I’ve never had a friendship like yours.”

Will doesn’t know when he started crying, but he manages to stifle a sob. 

“We both know that Mike hasn’t been okay in a long time. He’s trapped in his own head. That’s probably the extent of my understanding.” Nancy takes a breath. “Anyway, it seems like the world’s slowest-moving existential crisis may finally have come to a head, and my hope is that… honestly, I don’t even know what to hope for anymore. I know this is a lot and I don’t mean to be callous. It’s just… there’s work to be done. Just go to Hawkins.”

“Why me?”

“Is that a serious question?”

Will sighs. “No, I guess it’s not.”

They’re both quiet for what feels like an age. Will used to take shelter in silence. Now, he crawls on his hands and knees to get to the other side of it. Dr. Eady had been right about that. Fuck her.

“Why is he in Hawkins?”

“Because I put him there.” Nancy sounds exhausted now. “I had Steve fucking Harrington drive to Indianapolis, pick him up, and take him back to my mom’s place. Because that’s what the situation called for. He needs to be somewhere he feels safe, and, for him, that’s Hawkins. I don’t get it, but that’s fine.” She pauses. “Maybe the ghosts keep him company.”

Will has always been terrified of Nancy. This is why. She figures out what needs to be done and she does it. She’s not a dreamer, like her brother. She’s a clear-eyed warrior. She killed people the old-fashioned way – no powers – and never faltered. They always had two soldiers: Hopper and Nancy. The Vietnam veteran and the teenaged girl from a small town in Indiana. What a pair they made. 

“So you’re confident that he’ll, like, talk to me? Listen to me?” Please say yes, Will begs. 

“No, Will, I’m not confident of anything. I’m not confident he’s going to talk to you, and I’m sure as hell not confident he’s going to listen. This is just the best plan I can come up with. If it turns out that even you can’t get through to him, then… I don’t know.”

Nancy takes another breath, and her tone softens very slightly. “Will, I know I’m asking a lot of you, and I know I’m not giving you much of a choice. I’m sure this feels like emotional manipulation, and maybe it is. If you want to hate me forever, that’s fine – but, Will, my brother needs you. Whether he knows it or not, he needs you. And you’d do anything for him.” 

Nancy is right, of course, and she knows it. They’re both pretending that Will actually has a decision to make — that there’s a universe where Will doesn’t do what’s being asked of him. 

At moments like this, Will can feel the timeline start to split. In one timeline, he stays. And that would be fair, wouldn’t it? He’s built a real life for himself – a life that he fucking deserves –  and he can’t be Mike’s keeper forever. It’s not like he hasn’t tried. Maybe he decides that enough is enough, and lets Mike go. Maybe whatever persists between them dies slowly of benign neglect, until all that remains is shared trauma and dead memories that don’t mean what they once did. Or maybe he just never hears Mike’s voice again. He shudders.

And then there’s the other timeline. In that timeline, Will at least has a chance to put everything right. He’s never been willing to risk the friendship in order to save it. To save Mike. He’s always limited himself to half-measures, averting his eyes from the enormity of what, as Nancy would say, the situation called for. That had been selfish of him. He understands that now. But what if it’s not too late? 

Too late for what?

It doesn’t matter. There was never a choice to be made. Will speaks.

“Does he know I’m coming?”

“You’ll go?”

Will’s voice is cold. Clinical, even. “I was going as soon as you asked me to. It’s like you said: I’d do anything for Mike.” I’ve killed for him. “There are a lot of things we both know; I guess that’s one of them. Does he know I’m coming?”

“I’ll tell him.”

“Okay.” What now? “I should…”

“No, it’s fine. I’m sure we both have things to do. I have… more calls to make. My parents…” Nancy’s voice trails off. Please don’t cry, Will thinks. I don’t think I could survive that right now. Mercifully, she recovers. “There’s just a lot to do. Call me when you get to Hawkins. And, Will?”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you. For this and for… everything else.”

Will doesn’t know what that means. “Yeah,” he says. That’s all that he can muster. “I’ll call you.”

She hangs up.

Will’s ears ring as if a bomb has gone off. His hands stopped shaking some time ago, but now it’s his mind that fails him. What have I done to myself?

He gets into bed – fully clothed – and stares up at the ceiling, wondering what fresh chaos tomorrow will bring. This all feels so utterly beyond him. The prospect of facing everything that’s passed between him and Mike, all at once… How is this the best possible timeline? How is any of this fair? To either one of them?

Will closes his eyes, but the mind goes to strange places at times like these, so it’s Dustin’s voice that he hears: “If there’s space in the universe for supernatural evil, then maybe there’s enough space for supernatural good, too. We can hope, right?”

The tears flow. The minutes pass. Will looks up again. He thinks of the sky. He thinks of Mike.

“Please.”