Chapter Text
The worst day of Will’s life began just like any other day. When a continuous bang on the bedroom door forced him to squint open his eyes, he glanced at the digital clock propped on the side table and realized that he was late. Will knuckled his eyes and sighed. Last night, he had dodged his way through all of the toys littering his three-bedroom apartment and found himself in the kitchen, a sanctuary where he had spent the next hour popping one beer after another in a futile attempt to suppress the aftertaste of his nightmares. They still did not leave him alone. They rarely did.
His head throbbed with pain as he lifted himself from the bed, his eyes blinking rapidly to acquaint themselves with the light peeking in through the curtains. When he finally managed to open the door after checking in on the dark pits beneath his eyes, he was met with the frowning face of his five-year-old daughter. It was a face he knew as well as his own, whose deep lines, scowls, and moles he had committed to his memory as well as the face of another man. He had never known a love like it before.
Amy’s eyes were only half-open, but her chin was jutting out in an accusatory manner. Her brown eyes did all the talking as she fixed Will with a look of pure rage, then turned and started retracing her way back to the kitchen, her long penguin-print bottoms dragging behind her. Will was fucked, and his daughter was never going to forgive him for being late on the first day of summer camp.
Although Will had been initiated into the geriatric group of twenty-five only recently, he could not help but feel older, a feeling aggravated by the presence of the dictator who ran his house, coupled with the burden he still dragged from his haunted past. It seemed as if a fairy had sprinkled some dust onto his life and made him grow ten years in a span of one, then left him to deal with the repercussions all alone. But that was not how it had always been. There was a time when –
“Papa, you are late.”
The determined voice of Amy drew him out of his monologue. Her face was still painted with the same frown, except now she had propped herself onto the kitchen counter.
“I know, baby, I am so sorry!”
He attempted to apologize by closing the distance between them, only for Amy to resist being lifted into his embrace by planting her hips firmly against the granite counter.
Will sighed.
“What do you want? Pancakes?”
Her look turned into a glare.
“Okay…how about banana pancakes?”
The glare intensified.
“Fine, cereal it is – for the hundredth time!”
Amy smiled a smile that encompassed her entire face, and in a second, Will was transported from his New York City apartment to that summer in Hawkins with Mike, the summer in which they had not spent a minute apart from each other’s arms, the summer that had eventually led to Amy.
He could never erase Mike’s habit of crunching loudly on his unnecessarily sugary cereal during breakfasts at the Byers’ house from his mind. As much as he had hated it, he had loved it too. How could he ever hold it against their daughter for inheriting her dad’s habits, and how could he ever win an argument with her when he had never even managed to win one against her dad?
As Will opened and shut drawers in his hunt for cereal, a thing he did often now owing to spells of forgetfulness followed by inebriation, Amy dragged her drawing book from her bedroom with an artist’s vehemence, climbed her chair, and began to scrawl across it with blue and yellow crayons. When Will finally succeeded in procuring the cereal from its cozy hiding place in the left drawer, he poured it into Amy’s whale-shaped bowl and sneaked a glance at the drawing from over her head.
It was a messy, barely recognizable drawing with a sun whose yellow was weeping out of the circle and an ocean that did not resemble its real-life alternative in the slightest. Will smiled, faint traces of the rainbow ship he had drawn at Amy’s age spilling into the forefront of his mind. It was Will’s most cherished memory besides one another, but he did not want to revisit them, not now at eight in the morning when it seemed like they belonged to another person from another life. It was better that way. They hurt too much.
He ran his fingers through Amy’s dark curls, handed her the bowl, and moved towards the wall decorated with only two items: a calendar and his and Amy’s framed photograph. The photograph captured a moment from the seaside vacation they had undertaken a year ago; Amy was snugly fit into his arms, her hands were around his neck, their noses were nuzzled into one another, and the sun was sinking into the ocean behind them and reflecting remnants of red, pink, and purple into the sky. It was the most perfect thing Will owned.
Will’s heart dropped to the depths of his stomach as he reluctantly lowered his eyes to the calendar and saw the big red circle marking the day. ‘The Party’ said the letters accompanying the circle. It was 21 April. Will was, perhaps, more fucked than he had initially realized.
A month ago, Will’s telephone had rung at a shrill volume and forced him to abandon his dinner halfway to pick it up. It was Dustin, forever the bearer of good news, calling to let him know that the entire party—Lucas, Max, and he—were going to pay a month-long visit to his city, the ever-charming New York. "We are going to have so much fun, Byers! It would be just like the old days!" Dustin had said, and for a moment, Will had let himself believe that he could go back in time and land in a world where the dreadful November 6 had never existed. But there was no such world, and there were no good old days. It was all a fantasy. Yet, Will could not help but feel warmth bloom in his chest at the prospect of being close to his friends again, riding on his bike with Lucas again, teasing Dustin again, laughing at Lucas’s unfunny jokes with Max again. "We are counting down the days. It’s been so long since we last met Amy!"
And that was true.
The last time they had met her had been six months ago when Will had driven to Hawkins to drop his daughter off at Mike’s. He had been anxious the entire morning, jittery with his nerves all over the place. This will end in flames, the teasing part of his mind had kept on repeating like a broken tape. And yet, Will had promised Mike two months in the year with his daughter five minutes after her birth. His body had been soaked with sweat, his vision had been blurry, but somehow, that promise had seemed more important to him than anything else. He was not going to go back on it because of his nerves at the last moment.
Eventually, he had gathered courage and thrown Amy’s toys (a Rapunzel, a caterpillar, and a mic) into a princess-themed backpack, arranged her clothes into a trolley, dressed her in a purple dress as she had cried for the pink one (it was worn down, he reminded her for the tenth time), shoved them with effort into the backseat of his rundown car, and driven to Hell. His fingers had drummed and drummed against the steering wheel till Amy had asked him to keep it down.
Her face was the antithesis of Will’s throughout the entire ride. While he was visibly wrecked, a nervous shivering, sweating mess who could barely keep his eyes on the road, Amy sang and swung her legs again and again. To say that she was excited to meet Mike would have been the understatement of the century. Sometimes, in the dead of the night, Will feared that she preferred Mike over him as a father. One day, she would leave for Hawkins and never return, his inner voice smirked, and Will would finally have evidence for what he had known all along. That he was unworthy of love. Mike’s love. And now, his daughter’s love too.
The moment Will had pulled into the parking lot outside Mike’s, Amy had lunged out of the car with a ferocity and knocked into Mike’s outstretched arms. He had been waiting for them, Will realized as he stepped out of the car. The moment his eyes landed on Mike, the sun beating down upon his head felt hotter. All the nerves in his body felt as if they had been narrowed down to a sharp point. It was a feeling exacerbated by the white light which shot needles at him despite the linen shirt and shorts sticking to his body.
When Will’s vision finally cleared after a minute, he saw that Mike was still lost in his daughter’s embrace. From afar, it was difficult to have a clear view of his face as it was buried in Amy’s hair. When he eventually pulled away from her and rose to his feet after what seemed like ages, Will felt like dying. He looked better than Will had anticipated, better than the Mike who showed up unbidden in Will’s fantasies at night and swallowed his shaft with an unprecedented expertise, better than how he had looked the moment Will had taken his swollen knot four years ago, his face twisted in throes of pleasure as he had pulsed inside of Will again and again.
Will’s face had turned red. He had not wanted Mike to notice and had hoped that the sun’s rays would count as a feasible excuse. When Mike had made a beeline toward him, dressed in his taut white shirt, his dark hair hanging from his forehead and kissing his eyes, Will had outstretched his hand for a formal shake. Mike, however, had had other plans as he had taken a look at the hand, shook his head slightly, and pulled Will into his arms with the urgency of a starved man. Will had almost collapsed on the spot in the moment, but fortunately for his dignity, the rest of the party had rushed out of the house and pulled him out of Mike’s embrace for their turns at hugging him.
As Will stared at the red circle marking 21 now, he felt a sudden wave of relief washing down on him at the realization that Mike was not going to tag along with the rest of the party to his apartment. The last thing he needed was a constant reminder of his failure. The last thing he needed was Amy showering Mike with kisses on his face. The last thing he needed was a reminder that the only reason she could not have this every day was him.
But right now, Will needed to make a run for the nearest shopping centre and load his cart with the groceries his friends would demand the minute they landed at his door. He was, Will realized once again, extremely late.
“Papa, let’s go now!”
Will looked down at the girl who had materialized by his side out of the blue and was tugging at his hand toward the front door. She had dressed herself in a baby pink dress with lace-lined edges. It had been one of those dresses which she had wailed and wailed in the store about when Will had insisted against the purchase. It had only been her teary eyes which had finally gotten the job done. Along with the accusatory eyes of the store employees who had looked at him as if he had committed a first-degree crime but that was a story for another day.
“Did you get your bag?”
“I did!”
“Your bottle?”
“Yes!” She looked exasperated. “Let’s go now!”
Will looked toward his bedroom. “Let me get my things.”
While Will hunted around in the crevices of his bedroom for his keys, getting increasingly frustrated with his memory with each passing minute, the doorbell rang. Who the fuck, Will thought as he stomped across the hardwood floor to the front door, thinks it is a good idea to knock at someone’s house at nine in the morning? It was probably the next-door neighbour’s kid, and this time, Will was not going to let him go without a good lecture on communal harmony. Or respect.
When he pulled the door open with fury sitting hot at the tip of his tongue, the scream collapsed in his throat before it could even claw its way up. Will swallowed.
“Mike,” he whispered before the rational half of his brain could stop him. The moment the sound left his mouth, he registered a blur of motion darting past him and straight into Mike’s arms, who lifted the tiny dictator up into the air.
“Daddy!” Amy screamed, and Will was sure he would be at the receiving end of a lecture on communal harmony, and not the other way around. “Daddy, you are home!”
Before Will could even fully register the gravity of what was happening, lost in the way Amy was pressing firm kisses to Mike’s cheeks and eyes, Dustin, Lucas, and Max appeared in the hallway with their arms full of luggage, bags, and gifts. They shielded Mike by pushing him back against the hallway’s scraped wall and covering Will’s view.
A frost settled over Will’s features.
“Will,” Max breathed and Will had never seen her so unsure. “Hear us out.”
When Max’s words could not warm his glare, Dustin took a shot with “Please?”
Will was, as the poets say, completely fucked.