Work Text:
It was close to midnight and Will was still awake.
He was sketching almost mindlessly in his sketchbook, practicing anatomy as his art teacher had recommended in order to hone his skills even more. He knew he should probably go to bed soon despite it being a Friday night. He knew how his mother still worries and hovers in the mornings, checking all her kids as if to console herself that they were–relatively, despite the lingering trauma that seemed to follow them no matter what– fine.
That was not what kept him awake at the moment–although it often did persist; the telling sign of coldness, the emptying feeling of loneliness and fear of death that came from surviving what he did.
No, it had been that particular painting for a certain someone he had been working on for a few weeks now. The one he currently had up on his easel, but abandoned out of frustration in the moment.
Sometimes, Will wondered if he was cursed because other than the obvious life altering fucked up events of tragedy in his 15 years of life, he wondered why he was cursed to be…. different.
Will sighed loudly, accidentally pressing into the paper harshly with his pencil. He blinked, annoyance colouring his face as he realised he had just slightly ruined his sketch.
Before he could attempt to erase it, a light knock can be heard from his door. The door, which was kept slightly opened at the moment did not move which hinted to Will on who exactly had knocked. He quickly moved the painting off the easel, hiding it from sight.
“You can come in, El”.
The door creaked as she pushed the door open. Will looked up his sketchbook with a small smile, ready to talk to El as he had been doing these past 5 months where they’d make it a habit to converse well late into the night–only to find her in a state of evident distress. Her eyes were puffy and her lips were pursed into a thin and serious line, as if holding back the enormity of whatever was bothering her.
Will quickly shuffled to make space for her on his bed, something which she usually takes as an invitation. However, tonight she stood in front of him, hands pulling at the loose ends of her sweater–something which Will recognised as one of Joyce’s hand-me-downs.
Uncomfortable silence wrapped itself in Will’s bedroom. Will stared at El, unsure how to break it.
Thankfully after a few more awkward beats of silence, El decided to spill.
“Mike sent me another letter,” she said, in lieu of an explanation.
Will pointedly ignored the familiar pang of jealousy and hurt. It’s fine, Mike hadn’t written back to Will at all. It’s fine honestly, Will didn’t need his letters to be responded to–he’s never given for the same in hopes of receiving something back. It’s fine.
El sniffed, wiping her face with the back of her hand which effectively dragged Wills back to reality. Shit, now Will felt worse.
Will fumbled for the right words to say. “Sorry, I uh- I mean, he did? Was the letter…Did it make you sad?”. Which was quite redundant as it obviously did but Will was approaching this with the tact of somebody who knew exactly how to go about this...which was zero to none.
El nodded, her eyes flitting to the carpet of Will’s floor.
“Oh…Uhm, do you miss him? Is that why you’re…upset?”.
Will knew he does miss Hawkins, despite aforementioned trauma which again, as thought before, had ruined his life. He misses his friends, misses playing DND in Mike’s armpit of a basement, misses Mike.
‘I miss clouds. I miss you’.
“No”, El choked out. Will froze. What?
Her eyes widened. “No, I mean of course I miss him, and our friends. Especially Max. But-”, she paused, eyes turning sad again. “That’s not why I’m upset”.
Will tilted his head, inquisitively. He was asking her to go on without actually saying it. She apparently did not understand this.
El shook her head, as if she had woken from a daze. “Never mind. It’s dumb, you’re his best friend so you’ll probably think I’m being dramatic-”.
Will’s eyes widened as he quickly shook his own head. “What? No- you’re not- El, I would never call or think you’re dramatic!”.
“Well, boys always think so".
Will grimaced, recognising the truth in those words.
“Well, I’m…different from the other boys. Boys in Hawkins would always call me dramatic too.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah”.
El sighed, before moving to sit at the edge of Will’s bed, beside him. Will scooted over to make more space for her.
“He can’t say it”.
“Huh?”.
El turned to look at Will, hurt in her eyes. “Mike. He can’t say ‘I love you’ to me.”
Oh.
Will swallowed heavily, pushing down the wreck of emotions that bubbled inside of him at that revelation. El sighed, folding into herself even more.
“Last letter, I told him ‘I love you’. Like those very words instead of just ending it with ‘Love, Jane’ like I usually do to tell him how much I love him.” El shook her head. “I thought he needed more time. I thought maybe he was waiting for me to write it and say it again.”
“But he didn’t write it back,” Will concluded for her. She nodded, sniffling again.
Will swallowed harshly. He knew part of him couldn’t help but feel…something at the prospect that Mike hasn’t responded to El’s I love you’s through her letters. But the bigger part of him was overridden with empathy, especially as the source of his empathy was clearly holding back her sobs at the foot of his bed in the moment.
“Mike has always…struggled to convey what he feels verbally,” Will spoke softly, in an attempt to cheer up El. “It doesn’t mean he doesn’t care. He’s…he has the biggest heart, he just sometimes sucks at…saying what he feels?”.
El scoffed, pulling one of Will’s pillows to her chest and she ungraciously flopped onto Will’s bed. “He had no problem saying it to you last week.”
Will froze. What?
El continued as if she hadn’t just essentially suspended him in time and wrecked him with a debilitating truth. “We were calling the party, remember? You passed the phone to me to let me say goodbye to them but you passed it too early. Mike said ‘Bye Will, love you’. He said it so casually too, like he wasn’t even thinking about it.”
Will felt his hands shake in his lap. He wordlessly began to fiddle with his fingers, a sense of hopelessness crawling up his throat. He shook his head, clearing away his thoughts. His heart burned and yearned for Mike, even though he knows it shouldn’t.
“Well, I mean we have been friends since we were like, five.”
Mike and Will have loved each other since. Mike slips in an “I love you” almost as often as Will does (Though somewhere between the lines of growing up, Will begins to understand his own "I love yous" coming in a double meaning). Desperately, Will wondered why Mike still said it and yet didn’t call as often, yet never wrote back to him, and why he seemed to push Will away.
“I know that…it’s just…”, El sighed again. “Does he not want me anymore?”.
Funnily enough, Will found himself feeling an almost sense of kinship to El’s struggle. Maybe that’s why his words of consolation do not come as difficult as it once would’ve.
“Sometimes people say it without needing to, you know- actually verbally say it?”, he offered.
El frowns. “That’s silly. How else would you tell someone that you love them?”.
Will hesitated, at first deciding if he should tell her their unofficial Byers tradition. El had all but truly become part of their family- -but there was still some awkwardness and clear gap that came with suddenly becoming ‘siblings’ in the span of the 5 months since they moved to Lenora.
El broke his train of thought again. “I don’t get it. On TV, it’s easy.”
Will asked, confused, "On…TV?”.
“Every perfect couple has their big I love you scene on TV!”.
“Well, life isn’t a movie,” he reminded her, not unkindly.
El groaned, fully covering her face with the pillow. “It’s just-”, she stops herself, suddenly conscious.
Will hummed as if assuring her to go on. El doesn’t at first, she had gone slightly still as if pondering if she should actually tell him. Will suddenly empathised with Jonathan who had endured through many difficult and vulnerable conversations with an emotionally bounded Will, who like El had closed off right before he confessed what was truly bothering him.
Screw DNA, El was definitely their sibling.
So Will waited patiently, erasing and going over a part of the sketch on his notebook. Should an arm bend that way at that angle? Maybe he could get El to help be his reference-
“Do you think I’m hard to love?”, came tumbling out of El’s mouth.
Will’s eyes had snap to El, who had gone eerily still.
“Like there’s…something wrong with me. Like I’m…I’m broken.”
Oddly, he felt that kinship again. He knew what it was like. Will knew what it’s like to feel different. He knew what it's like to feel undeserving of love. He knew what it’s like to want to be loved.
“El, Jane. There is nothing wrong or broken with you-”, he started, stressing out every syllable to punctuate his sincerity but El interrupted him with an indignant, “So why can’t he say it!”.
“I- Well, I- I can’t tell you why Mike can’t say it but what I can tell you is that love isn’t-”. Will paused to thread carefully in his words, eyes paused on the halfway done diorama of Hopper’s cabin placed beside Will’s board of Alan Turing. “Love isn’t necessarily just romance, you know?”.
El peeked her head from her (his) pillow. Her hair was rustled, bangs messed up in the way that reminded Will so much of his mom’s. Even to the way El’s face scrunches up slightly as her eyebrows dip down.
“Well, duh!”.
Will rolled his eyes, pushing the pillow back into El’s face. El yelped, pushing his hand away. Will chuckled at the playful frown adorned on her face.
“What I was trying to say is that I think society values romantic love too much over platonic and familial love.”
Perhaps it was hypocritical of him to say that when he yearned to be loved in that sense. Or perhaps he was honest, in the frustrated way that he still held that feeling of being left out by his friends last summer. Perhaps it was in the way he felt reminded of how different he was when he watched a movie or a show where a man and a woman would be depicted in love.
El scoffed. “I know that. And I know I am loved. But…”.
“You can’t help but still want to hear it from him”, Will noted, understanding.
She nodded sagely. “Because I say it. I say it to him”.
Will ignored that confusing mix of emotions which began bubbling underneath his skin again. He went for carefulness, "Sometimes, saying the word is…hard for some people”.
“It’s heavy,” El acknowledged.
“Yeah, the implications always are.”
Jane tilted her head slightly. "Implications?”
“Hidden, deeper meaning”, Will explained kindly.
“Oh”.
She frowned, pondering this. He tried again. “Sometimes love doesn’t need to be said verbally for it to still be said”.
“But how do you say things without actually saying it?”.
Will hesitated for a second before then reaching over to cover her right hand with his. El looked at this curiously, evidently confused. Will squeezed her hand three times. El instinctively squeezed back, but only once as she was unsure why he had done it.
Will began explaining. "When…I was younger. I used to be nonverbal”.
El’s eyes widened in recognition, and understanding. “Like…you couldn’t talk?”.
“Yeah. I uh- mum had to take me to a speech therapist and stuff. Lonnie kept going on about how I was broken and…and wrong”.
El frowned, this time serious and no longer playful. “He is the one wrong. And dumb.”. Her eyes lit up in anger and for a second, Will recognised that deadly look in her eyes which she wore when using her powers back then. “He’s the one who should be actually broken. I can break him-”.
Will laughed lightly, quickly cutting off her violent train of thought as the heaviness in his chest lifted a bit. During one of their deep talks, Will had opened up to El about his…father, a repayment as she had vulnerably opened up to him about Dr. Brenner.
“Yeah but this isn’t about him. The point is; mom and Jon would always say I love you to me and I kind of…got frustrated I couldn't say it back? Mom she uh- figured it out and taught me that squeezing someone’s hand three times-”.
“Means I love you,” El realised, cutting in as her lips turned up in a brightening smile.
El’s wonderment and joy was infectious so Will smiled too. He echoed her words. “Yeah. Means I love you.”
El’s smile dropped a bit. “So were you just…showing it to me or do you-”. Will could trace the insecurity in her voice. As if she couldn’t believe she would be loved even in the familial sense. Which didn't surprise Will as he knew her past.
So Will squeezed her hand once. Then again, and another as tears began blooming in her eyes once more.
Once upon a time, Will Byers came back to Hawkins miraculously (and by an act of perseverance strengthened by the love held for him) and survived the Upside Down for a week. Once upon a time, a traumatised girl with superpowers had been the one to save him. Ever since then, even as they only properly met after the whole possession thing and Hopper keeping her hidden from the rest of the world, the two have been interlinked and intertwined in each other’s life in some way or another.
Now, Hopper was dead and El had become (through the government's eyes and everyone who knew them in California) a part of the Byers family. Will knew, despite the kindness, care and welcoming attitude his family consistently gave El, she had a hard time truly accepting it.
So Will smiled, his mind made up. “I uh- kind of always wanted a sister?”. El’s eyes widened in astonishment.
“Jon’s great, I’m his best friend you know? But he’s always been…”, Will stumbled as he tried to find the right word which encompassed the complicated relationship he and Jonathan had.
They loved each other deeply no doubt, but in some ways Jonathan was more…protective and parentified then most normal older siblings. Jonathan was always going to be Will’s protector and hero, even if Will wished he could return it.
“Older,” Will settled for instead. He thought El understood anyway, with a silent nod of her head and gentle eyes.
“I never thought about siblings- I mean, I have and love my sister Kali-”, she trailed off, eyes turning sadder at the mention of her sister. “But I never thought…I would be accepted into a family.”
Will felt saddened at that. He also felt a burst of rage at the unfairness of it all. Why was the world so cruel that someone sweet as Jane, was forced into a weapon?
Suddenly, he understood El’s prior desire to break Lonnie. He felt that same tempt of ire towards Brenner and his project.
“Well, you are. Mom and Hopper were practically…Well, even if they weren’t it doesn’t matter because you’re with us now and we love you”.
El softened imperceptibly. Tears flooded her eyes.
“I never thought I could have a twin,” Will confessed, half joking as the two had agreed at school to explain them being related and the same age as that they were biological twins.
El squeezed his hand, three times with certainty. “Twins,” she agreed, with full seriousness.
He felt warmth wrapping itself comfortably around his soul, like he does when his mother and Jon squeeze his hand too. Still, he was aware that they were diverting from the original issue which had brought El to his room in the first place. He didn’t want to seem as if he was brushing off her initial concern and hurt. “I know this doesn’t erase your pain.”
“No,” she admitted, but the heaviness from earlier lightened into something less of a wound and now merely a scab. “But I do feel better. I still can’t help but want to be loved that way but– you reminded me that there is more to life than stupid boys”.
El broke into a giggle at the last part, like she was laughing at an inside joke Will is yet to be let in on. Whatever, he knew she would spill one of these nights during their long talks again.
“I’m a boy!”, he pointed out.
El makes an annoyed humph sound, as if it's obvious. "But you’re not stupid.”
“Okay, Mike’s not stupid-”.
El rolled her eyes with amusement lit in them. “Whatever, let’s not talk about him right now. We’re gonna build a fort and eat ice cream, and then I also want to watch a movie”.
She threw the pillow back where it came from and abruptly stood up, pulling Will up with her to head out his bedroom.
Will groaned. "Oh god, your picks are always the worst!”
“No it’s not! You just want to rewatch Star Wars or Ghostbusters again- boring!”
“I wasn’t even going to suggest that!”
El gave him a knowing and teasing look. “Yeah, okay, nerd”.
Will felt a sense of Deja Vu as her tone mimicked one of Erica Sinclair, who notoriously loved calling Lucas out for his nerdiness all the time. At that realisation, Will understood that El was doing what she did best; copying what she learnt from others to experience it herself.
Will would indulge it, I mean they’ve already bickered like siblings at times even before they admitted they were now siblings beyond the convenience of an alibi.
As they stood outside his bedroom door, Will elbowed her at her side which caused her to loudly yelp. “Shut up, Jane!”
She elbowed him back- ouch!, a shit-eating grin on her face. “Shut up, William!”.
They both were grinning ear to ear, no actual malice in their voice.
“Shut up both of you,” complained a voice from the hallway.
They turned to see Jonathan who had red rimmed eyes and smelled suspiciously like pine and skunky grass.
He groaned, running a hand through messy hair. “It is too late for you both to be so giggly and loud.”
The two went quiet before exchanging similar smirks. El broke first, laughing so loudly her entire frame practically started shaking. That set Will off immediately, who joined in the rambunctious and infectious laughter.
Jonathan huffed but the corner of his lips tilted in an amused smile, betraying his non-existent ire to his siblings. “Children”.
He shook his head, sleep clearly gnawing at his eyes. He smiled, ruffling Will’s hair affectionately and then turned to do the same to El. He reached over and squeezed both their shoulders, three times. El beamed. “Goodnight you two. Don’t sleep so late”.
“Okay, mom”, they teased, simultaneously.
Will and El’s eyes widen at the same time, looking at each other. Jonathan snorted bemusedly before leaving the hall.
“TWIN TELEPATHY!”, El declared excitedly.
Will grinned. “El, that’s not a real thing".
But El ignored this, eyes lightened with an idea. “Who cares? I know what we’re gonna do now. Grab the ice cream, we are gonna work on our telepathy!”.
“How-”
“Simple. We learn to say things without actually saying it! Like you said, right? That’s how we become even more twin-like!”.
El suddenly pulls him into a tight hug which Will quickly reciprocates. She squeezed him three times, almost as if since learning this secret language, she finds herself unable to stop practicing it. Will said it back in the same language, of course he does.
“We’re gonna be so believable as twins, no one will ever ask how we are related again!”.
Will laughed but didn't discourage this. Most people already did assume the two were atleast siblings–-though perhaps that could be attributed to Joyce’s infamous bangs she cut for El.
El smiled again before practically dashing to her room. He lets himself wander to the kitchen as El excitedly went to grab who knows what.
As he pulled out two bowls (One yellow and one purple, of course), he finds himself unable to get rid of the smile on his face.
In some ways, El was right. It did not fully erase the pain but in many ways; Will knew he would endure and bear it if it meant his sister was happy.
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“I love my sister more than anything in this life. I will choose her happiness over mine everytime.” -Angelica Schuyler