Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The moment Will opens his eyes, all he can see is red. Red rock soaked in red mud, red vapour misting over once-white sneakers, red creepers coiling, snake-like, around his ankles.

The dread comes slowly, to the sounds of rumbling thunder. It soaks into the sponge of his mind as he blinks his way to awareness, notices how his shoulders ache from where his arms are spreadeagle above his head, bound at the wrists by cold, slimy tendrils.

The discordant chime of a broken grandfather clock cracks through his thoughts, and ice runs down his spine. He has to look, he has to see—

The clock, floating in the distance, backdropped by gathering storm clouds in the red, red sky. Bits and pieces of the Creel house are sprayed over the landscape like an explosion frozen in time, with gnarled, dead tree trunks stabbing through the empty spaces.

And then he sees Mike.

Mike, just a few feet away from him, tethered to a thick trunk. Like Will, his arms are spread, suspended on either side by taut vines that hang from the branches of the tree, with more vines coiling around his ankles at the roots. But the worst thing—the thing that makes Will’s breath catch in his lungs—is the collection of vines as thick as his wrists, wrapping around Mike’s neck.

“No,” Will breathes.

“Oh, yes,” says a booming voice filled with gravel, and Will goes cold all over, goosebumps rising on his skin. His head turns slowly toward the sound, and his heart nearly stops when he sees him.

Vecna emerges from the floating debris, the ropes of his skin slithering and winding around him like living things. As he grows closer, Will can hear them—the vines, they’re vines—crackling wetly in time with the ones around his own arms, like they’re all moving in tandem.

Will straightens against whatever surface he’s bound to and forces steel into his voice as he says, “Let him go.”

Vecna keeps moving toward him like he hadn’t spoken, his eyes milky blue and void of emotion. Then he stops between him and Mike, and looks at Mike over his shoulder.

“Don’t,” Will says, his voice trembling now despite himself. “Don’t touch him.”

Vecna raises a hand toward Mike and clenches his fist in the air.

Even in sleep, Mike begins to choke. The vines around his neck tighten, and the sound of his gagging and struggling sends a rocket of horror through Will as he flings himself against his bonds.

“Stop!” He screams. “Please, stop!”

Vecna unclenches his fist, and Mike slumps, wheezing, as the vines loosen their hold. He hangs there, somehow still unconscious, his inky hair plastered to his forehead.

It had only been a few seconds, but it felt like a lifetime, and Will takes in a shuddering breath as hot tears skip down his cheeks.

In the corner of his eye, Vecna cocks his head curiously as he looks at him. “So…upset.”

No shit, Will wants to scream, but he’s frozen with fear, with dread, with the knowledge that this monster, this thing, could take Mike’s life with a wave of his hand.

“So very upset,” he continues. There’s a pause as he observes Will in his peripheral vision. “When he wakes…I want you to tell him.”

Will’s eyes snap toward him, his stomach bottoming out. “What?”

“I want you to tell him why you're so upset," Vecna says, and Will swears he sees the curl of a smile in the scarred webbing of his face. “I want to watch you lose him.”

Then he turns, slowly, and starts toward Mike.

Will’s fists clench as he lurches against the vines again. He growls in frustration, his heart beginning to hammer as Vecna blocks Mike from view. He raises his gnarled hand above Mike’s head, and before Will can even scream, he hears Mike gasp like he’s surfaced from under water.

“Mike!” Will calls desperately, but Mike has launched into a coughing fit, and when it subsides, Vecna steps out of the way just in time for Will to see the grimace of pain on Mike’s face as he leans his head back against the tree.

“Mike?” Will says, panicked. “Mike, are you okay?”

“Will?” he rasps. He tips his head forward, opening his eyes. Before he can properly take in Will, his gaze darts to Vecna still towering beside him, and even in the blood-red hues of this place, Will can see his face pale.

Mike’s eyes whip back to Will, raking over him like he’s checking for injuries. He strains against his bonds, grunting. When he gives up, his eyes are wide and filling with dread as he looks back at him, like an animal caught in a trap.

Will hates that look on his face so intensely that he looks away, locking his eyes on Vecna’s horrible face instead.

“You—you can take me,” he says. “You can do whatever you want with me, just let him go.”

“Will,” Mike says.

Vecna begins to move, slow and deliberate, toward Will. But when he speaks, his words are for Mike: “Do you see, Michael, how he tries to save you. How he cries for you. How he wishes to sacrifice himself for you.”

A whirlwind kicks up in Will’s stomach, making him nauseous. He knows what Vecna intends to do. He didn’t expect anything less.

Vecna raises a crooked finger, places the sharp point of his nail at Will’s temple.

“Hey, leave him alone!” Mike yells.

Will doesn’t breathe as Vecna trails his fingernail, featherlight, down his cheek.

“Tell him why, William,” he says, his voice like rubble and glass.

“Get your hands off him, you bastard!” Mike says from somewhere behind him, grunting as he struggles against his bonds.

The sharpened point of Vecna's nail rests at Will’s jaw as his cataract eyes bore into his, and Will has to suppress a shiver. He closes his eyes, swallows against his heart in his throat.

“Because he’s my best friend,” he says tightly.

“No,” Vecna growls, making Will flinch. His finger curls, the nail digging deeper into his skin. “Tell him the real reason.”

Will hears him step away from him, leaving a stinging scratch on his face. He opens his eyes to see Mike, whose face is scrunched up in fury as he stares daggers at Vecna.

“What the hell are you saying?” Mike spits at him.

Tell him, Vecna says again, and this time Will knows that the gravelly voice grinding through his head is only for him. Or I will flay him alive.

Mike's eyes dart back to Will, and the horror must show on Will’s face, because there’s a wary uncertainty smoothing out the rage on his own. “Will, what’s going on?”

He’s staring back at him, his brow tightening, and Will knows that if he could, if he wasn’t pinned by the vines, he’d be shaking his head in that way he does when he’s trying to ask Will what’s wrong without words. But words are failing Will just the same, and when he opens his mouth, nothing comes out.

Then, the panicked widening of Mike’s eyes and a horrible choking noise as the tendrils around his neck begin to tighten, slamming his head back against the tree. He thrusts his chin into the air, wheezing as he tries to suck in a breath.

“No. No, stop!” Will screams, his head swivelling to look Vecna in the eye as if it’ll make any fucking difference. “Just stop! I…I’ll do it! I’ll tell him, just please—”

His voice breaks off.

This has to be a nightmare. It has to be. It can’t happen like this.

But when he squeezes his eyes shut and opens them again, they’re still in Hell, and Mike is still choking, and he will not watch him die, he won’t.

He will do anything. Anything.

"Mike," he says roughly, and Vecna must feel his renewed determination, because the tendrils at Mike’s throat slither back just slightly, letting him gasp and cough as he sucks in air.

Relief flushes through Will—that is, until Mike’s recovered, his head hanging forward and his eyes dragging up to Will’s from under his lashes, and the relief is just as quickly snuffed out by the tumbling dread of what he’s about to do.

“You already know,” Will says, and it’s not a question—it’s a plea. “Mike, tell me you already know so I don’t have to say it.”

He didn’t know he could sound like that, so ragged and despairing. Mike must wonder at it too, because his eyes are turning into those round pools of concern, that same look that he’s directed at Will so many times before, like he’s the only thing in the whole goddamn universe; the look that Will has never felt he deserved.

Mike catches his breath and says, so gently despite the fresh hoarseness of his voice that it might actually drive Will insane: “Will, what…?” He shakes his head as best he can and starts again. “Just tell me, okay? Just tell me whatever, and then we’ll kick this fucker’s ass from here to the edge of the Upside Down, all right? It’ll be okay.”

the heart the heart the heart, Will thinks. Even in here, even tortured and bound and fearing for his life, he is the heart.

It takes everything in Will’s power not to sob. His next words sit like a grenade on his tongue, his hammering heartbeat threatening to set them off. It’s suicide, it’s suicide, it’s worse than suicide—

But he remembers the vines tightening around Mike’s neck, remembers that horrible noise he made when he was trying to suck in air, and he can’t watch that again. He can’t.

So he says, just loud enough to be heard above the rumbling thunder: “I love you.”

And Mike—

Mike, bless him, furrows his brow like he’s trying to solve a particularly stubborn math equation.

“I mean…” Mike says, “I love you, too, man. You’re my best friend, you know that.”

Will feels a hot tear trickle down his cheek when he blinks, and he tries to keep his chin from wobbling. “Not like that, Mike.”

Mike’s mask of confusion and concern twitches, just a little. Will knows it isn’t full comprehension of what he’s said, not yet.

No, what Will thinks he sees on Mike’s face at that moment is the first stage of grief:

Denial.

Keep going, Vecna booms through his head again. He’s disappeared from Will’s line of sight, but Will can feel him looming somewhere behind him. Tell him.

Mike is staring at him, waiting, his eyebrows still knitted in confusion. Will feels stripped down to the bone. He feels, in this moment, like he’s never going to recover. And maybe that—the knowing that this is the end, that he’s lost everything and nothing he does now can change that—is the only reason the words start pouring out of him almost easily now, like a runaway train.

“I love you like—like Jonathan loves Nancy, and like Lucas loves Max, and Dustin loves Suzie, and like you—” his voice breaks. “Like you love El. All the ways I’m not supposed to. And I never would have told you because you’re the most important…Mike, you’re the most important thing in my whole life. You always have been, and the thought of losing that…the thought of losing everything? I never would have risked that, not for anything, you have to believe me. I only ever wanted you to be happy and I would have died, I would have died before I ruined this and I’m so sorry, Mike, I’m so sorry—”

He does sob this time, cutting himself off. He squeezes his eyes shut and shakes his head and he wants to scream, he wants to wail, he wants to rip Vecna’s head off his neck with his bare hands, he wants to do anything but open his eyes again and see the look he knows is on Mike’s face, the look of disgust, of disbelief, of outrage, the look that’s never going to go away when he looks at him.

The silence stretches on so long, too long, and not even the crack of thunder in the distance or that horrible chiming of the Creel house clock is enough to fill it, until—

“You’re a real piece of shit, you know that?”

Will feels a dagger driving into his heart, and his eyes fly open as all the blood leaves his face.

But Mike wasn’t looking at him when he said those words. Mike is looking passed him, over his shoulder, where Will knows Vecna is looming, proud as a cat with a mouse between its teeth.

Mike’s voice is a quiet, dangerous thing, shaking with rage as he says, “And I’m going to kill you. I’m going to rip your fucking head off, asshole, just wait. Just wait—”

For the first time, Vecna laughs, and the sound is like rocks in a blender. 

“How you’ve upset him, William,” he says, the smile in his voice making Will’s fists clench.

“No, fuck you,” Mike spits, lurching against the vines. “Fuck you, you know that’s not—”

The rest of Mike’s words are drowned out by a strange, warbling sound, flooding across the sky. It reminds Will, briefly, of a voice from a tin can on the end of a string, but quickly resolves into something else, something familiar that makes his heart leap against his ribs.

It’s a guitar. A looping, flanging guitar, the melody gentle and dreamlike even as it echoes as eerily as everything else through this place. Will’s eyes dart to Mike’s face despite himself, but Mike is looking at the sky, his eyes wide and his lips parting slowly.

A drum beat rolls in, shaking the world around them. Just as a drawn out synthesizer hums through Will’s bones, Mike laughs. A short, high-pitched giggle, drunk with astonishment, and it’s the best thing Will has ever heard.

“Holly,” Mike says, and he breathes another laugh as his shining eyes meet Will’s. “It’s Holly.”

Chapter Text

Since the start of the end of the world, Mike and Will had spent many nights in the Wheelers’ basement, teaching Holly the ins and outs of D&D. She had taken well to becoming Holly the Heroic, and was shaping up to be a powerful cleric—except when she was too hopped up on Kool-Aid or Pop-Tarts to pay attention to the campaign.

There was one particular night where Holly had taken over the cassette player, which she had been obsessed with since she was old enough to know how to use one. Mike and Will were still sat at the table with their dice and figurines, and Mike had his head slung over the back of his chair. Will watched his Adam’s apple sliding up and down as he said: “Oh my God, Holly, just sit down and stop changing the music, seriously.”

Holly ignored him as a new song began to play, the beginnings of a hopeful, flanging guitar riff. She jumped up from the cassette player and squealed, “This one! This is the one that’s about you guys.”

Mike lifted his head, his brow furrowing. Will sputtered a laugh. “What?”

“Just listen!” Holly said as she began twirling around the room.

Stay with me
My love, I hope you’ll always be

Will wasn’t sure how his face could go ice-cold and fire-hot at the same time. He ducked his head, pasting his widening eyes to the table.

“Since when do you listen to Genesis?” Mike said. Will didn’t dare look at him, but he seemed to be speaking much louder than he needed to, like he was trying to drown out the next lyrics. Will could still hear them, though.

Right here by my side
If ever I need you
Oh my love

“Jonathan showed them to me,” Holly said lightly. “He said he liked the Peter Gabriel era better, but I think I like Phil better.”

In your arms
I feel so safe, and so secure…

Will scratched his forehead and cleared his throat as flashbulb memories of every time Mike had ever held him pop-pop-popped across his mind. In his peripheral vision, Mike shifted in his chair.

And every day is such a perfect day to spend
Alone with you…

Holly wasn’t wrong about the song. At least, to Will she wasn’t wrong. She was so far from wrong, to him. And perhaps that was why Will felt he was about to faint, or die, or both, until finally the chorus came crashing in—

I will follow you, will you follow me
All the days and nights that we know will be
I will stay with you, will you stay with me

—and Holly interrupted her own humming to say, “See! Because you guys are always following each other around. Like always.”

And some of the tension left Will’s shoulders, because okay, that was pretty harmless. And kind of true. She probably wasn’t even considering the dozen L-bombs dropped throughout the rest of the song.

He lifted his head, risking a glance at Mike. Beneath the indignant scrunch of his expression, Will could swear the colour—that beautiful, rosy flush muddying his freckles—was higher and brighter in his cheeks than it had been before.

“That’s because we live together,” Mike said, his voice pitched high and defensive.

Holly was still twirling. “And bike together, and go to school together, and come home together, and eat dinner together, and watch TV together, and—”

“Okay!” Mike said, slapping his hands on the table. “We get it!” 

Finally, Mike’s eyes darted to his, but they glanced away just as quickly, and his throat bobbed as he swallowed. Will knew he had to say something to break the awkwardness of his silence, or he was about to look awfully suspicious.

“It’s…” he turned his face to Holly. “I mean it’s the apocalypse. If ever there was a time for the buddy system…”

Mike flung out an arm toward him in agreement. “Yeah, see? It’s the apocalypse, Holly.”

All my fears
Are drifting by me so slowly now
Fading away…

Now, as Genesis’ Follow You Follow Me rolls through the blood-red abyss of Vecna’s mind palace, Will feels almost nostalgic for the mortification he felt in that moment. That moment, which had been weeks before Holly was taken, lured by Vecna to the Upside Down.

Will would never forget the look on Mike’s face when they’d come home to an inconsolable Karen and found out she was missing. The light had drained from Mike’s eyes, and he’d rocked backwards from the force of the realization, shaking his head in denial.

Will, who had been lightheaded from the news, swallowed his own panic and gripped Mike’s shoulder. “We’ll get her back. I swear to you, Mike, we’re going to get her back.”

And they’d been trying to do just that when somehow—Will couldn't remember now—they ended up here. And it was not lost on Will that Vecna was able to take two people at the same time now. No piggybacking from pizza dough freezers; just him, taking who he wanted, when he wanted.

To find Holly, they’d been breaking down the battered barrier between the Rightside Up and the Upside Down even further, and Will had had to use his connection to that place, to him, to spy. Not only had it taken a toll on him—the nightmares, the paranoia, the hallucinations, the increasing inability to distinguish between his thoughts and feelings and his own—but poking around in Vecna’s mind seemed to strengthen him more than it hurt him. Like to him, Will was less of a parasite and more of a battery. And that scared the hell out of Will more than anything, because what the hell did that mean, that he made Vecna stronger?

They didn’t know for sure why Vecna took Holly, but Will had an inkling. It was because he knew they would come after her—all of them, but especially Mike. And Vecna, who had made a home inside his mind, knew that Will, in turn, would do anything for Mike, even if it meant letting that monster use him, violate him, break him until…

Until God knows what. God knows what he really planned to do with him.

But that was why Mike wore that brilliant smile now, despite still being in the worst place he could be. Because no one else knew the two of them had any connection to this song—no one but Holly.

And this—the song, the thought of Holly warm and safe and waiting for him—seems to be enough for Mike. He pulls hard against the vines around one of his wrists, his face twisted with the effort, until it comes free with a wet, tearing noise. All the other vines screech as they flinch away from him. They loosen enough that he can pull himself all the way free, stumbling off and away from the tree he was bound to.

As Mike steadies himself with swivelling arms, his eyes seem to latch on to something on the ground, just beyond Will. He turns his wide eyes to Vecna, who growls and starts forward.

Mike dives toward whatever he’d seen by Will’s feet, and Vecna lurches toward him. He latches on to his leg, sends him sprawling flat on his stomach with a grunt.

Will’s heart leaps into his throat, choking him. “Mike!”

But Mike’s still scrabbling forward, reaching for something.

And then there’s the sound of steel scraping against rock, and faster than Will can even comprehend, Mike has flipped over and plunged an honest to god sword into Vecna’s stomach.

Vines screech and hiss all around them as Vecna trips back, stunned. The ones encircling Will snatch away from him like they've been burned, and Will falls to his knees on the rocks.

Vecna, still stumbling back from them, looks down at the sword hilt sticking out of his stomach, one leathery hand hovering uselessly over it. The wound won’t kill him, but Will feels an echo of his pain like someone pressing on a fresh bruise in his abdomen. And below that, rising to the surface, is his shock giving way to anger.

Suddenly, strong, warm hands grasp Will’s biceps, helping him to his feet. Will can’t seem to tear his eyes away from Vecna, from the sword that came out of nowhere. He lets Mike tug him against his chest as he shuffles backward.

“We’ve gotta go,” Mike says, his breath hot in his ear. “We’ve gotta go now.”

Vecna raises those furious, milky eyes at them. Mike takes Will’s hand and pulls, and it’s enough to finally turn him around to face him. Mike’s panting, and his face is hard, determined. His eyes are wide and dark and endless as he squeezes Will’s hand.

“Follow me,” he says. “And stay close.”

Chapter Text

Everything is shaking apart—the earth trembles beneath their feet, the sky rumbles and cracks, and Will is losing count of how many times they’ve had to push or pull each other out of the way of falling debris threatening to crush them flat. The violence is so at odds with the music still echoing around them that Will has to swallow against the hysterical laughter bubbling up inside him, until Mike finally yells:

“There!”

He points toward the horizon, but all Will sees is red, red, red.

“What?” Will pants.

Mike gives him a double-take over his shoulder, but neither of them slow down. “You don’t see them?”

“Who!?”

“It’s—” Mike starts, but his eyes flick skyward and go round as saucers. He grabs Will by the jacket and wrenches him back just as a jagged rock twice the size of him crashes into the earth where he’d been standing.

“Jesus,” Mike breathes in his ear, his fist still twisted in the fabric at Will’s lower back and his voice shaking all the way through. “Never mind, just hang on to me, okay? Don’t let go.”

With that, he takes Will’s hand again, and they keep running. To Will, staring ahead at that unbroken horizon, it seems like they’ll be running forever. But he focuses on Mike’s hand wrapped around his own and takes one step, then another, then another, until the world shifts as suddenly as if he’s opened his eyes from a nightmare.

He doesn’t have enough time to realize he’s floating in the air before he crashes to the ground, hard.

When his breath returns to his lungs, he’s looking at Mike, curled up on the sand next to him. Mike lifts his head, and there’s a pocket of time, maybe a second, maybe a year, where it is just Will, and pain, and Mike’s wide, dark eyes boring into his, and pain, and Mike’s eyes, and pain, and Mike’s eyes, and pain—

And then the world starts spinning again, filling with voices and movement.

“Will!” Someone lands behind him and grips his shoulder. He watches Robin doing the same behind Mike, before he turns his face up to see Jonathan kneeling over him.

There’s a primal sort of relief that fills him whenever he sees his brother after something harrowing, like an oxygen mask in a room full of smoke. He feels it now, despite everything, and has to hold himself back from launching into his arms like he’s ten years old again.

“Are you okay?” Jonathan says, his face pale and his voice shaking. Will nods and grips his brother’s arm, both to reassure him and to use as leverage to pull himself into a seated position.

“I’m fine,” Will says, though he aches all over, and is still breathless from the air being knocked out of him during his fall. He scans himself for broken limbs and bleeding eyes, then does the same with Mike, who’s slowly coming to his senses and is fully intact as far as Will can see. “We’re good.”

They’re on the sandy ground of the barn at the McCorkle farm, the site of one of the entry points to the Upside Down’s tunnel system. While Nancy, Steve, and Dustin had entered the gate beneath the rotten pumpkin patch, it was Will, Mike, Robin, and Jonathan that had stayed at the barn, hoping to torch the place (distracting the hive mind with a hell of a lot of pain) while the others searched the Upside Down for Holly.

“He took both of you,” Robin says, wide-eyed as she helps Mike to his feet. “Did we know he could do that?”

There’s a heavy silence in the wake of her words, and no one answers. A little ways off, a cassette player sits in the sand, silent.

“Holly,” Mike says, looking around the barn with a dazed look in his eyes. “I thought Holly…”

“It was her,” Jonathan cuts in. “Nancy’s got her and they’re all on their way back. Holly’s the one who gave us the song when we radioed for suggestions.”

“We tried the ones we thought would work individually,” Robin explains, “but I guess when he takes two…”

“…we need a song that connects to both people,” Jonathan says.

“And that makes things a hell of a lot more complicated,” Robin finishes. She puts her hands on her hips, her eyebrows raising as she glances between Mike and Will. “So I guess it’s kind of a good thing that he chose you two dorks, because I don’t think Jonathan and I have bonding music.”

Will’s face flushes with heat, and he steadfastly avoids meeting anyone’s eyes.

He isn’t sure they’re entirely right, because Will doesn’t think it was the song that saved him. He doesn’t think he’d be alive right now if it weren’t for Mike. 

When they were running toward the horizon in Vecna’s mind palace, Mike said he saw them—Robin and Jonathan, he realizes—waiting for them on the other side, and it had driven him forward along with the hope of seeing his little sister again. But Will hadn’t seen anyone; he had followed Mike blindly through the rift. And now, as exhaustion seeps into his bones and his stomach flips with dread just thinking about looking Mike in the eye again, he knows why.

He hadn’t really wanted to leave that place. He didn’t want to have to face the consequences of the words that had come out of his mouth, to watch everything change irrevocably.

If he stayed—if he died—Mike would have lost Will, but Will wouldn’t have lost Mike. He would have died with their friendship still whole, Mike still frozen in his mind as his best friend, his saviour, his paladin.

The unrequited love of his life, safe in his ignorance.

It’s the most selfish thought he’s ever had, but then again, he can’t help but think they’d all be better off if he were gone. They would have certainly been better off if he’d never come home all those years ago. If it had been his real body in the quarry, he wouldn’t have become the Mind Flayer’s puppet, and he wouldn’t have put so many people through hell.

As if summoned by his thoughts, the back of Will’s neck starts crawling, and a faint echo of Vecna’s pain slices through Will’s stomach. Deeper still is his anger, his feeling of impotence as he slinks back to his hole to heal.

Mike is saying, “But she’s okay? Holly? Nancy?”

“They’re all fine, for now,” Jonathan says. “Guess One had his hands full with you guys.”

Robin lifts an orange gas canister in the air. “Should we still torch the place?”

“No,” Will says softly, his hand on the back of his neck to soothe the nauseating reverberation of his connection. “He’s already hurt. I don’t think he has the strength to go after them now.”

They’re all looking at him, and he can feel Mike’s gaze heavy on the side of his face, but he doesn’t dare look back at him.

“Well,” Robin says. “Let’s get the others and get the hell out of here, then.”

Holly doesn’t look too worse for wear—a little pale and disheveled, with streaks of Upside Down grime on her clothes and skin, but she looks strong. When she, Nancy, Steve, and Dustin crawl out of the gate, Mike breathes her name like a sigh of relief. Holly scrambles up from the ground and runs to him, her head barely reaching his ribcage as he hugs her against him.

And then, to Will’s utter surprise, Holly hugs Will, too. And his heart breaks. His heart breaks into a thousand pieces because all he can think about is when he was taken, and he was terrified and alone and freezing and hunted, and he can’t bear the thought that she went through the same thing. He just can’t take it.

When Holly releases him—he gives her as much of a smile as he can muster, tells her he’s glad she’s okay as he ruffles her hair—and everyone continues reuniting and swapping information, Will uses the opportunity to slip away into the back of Jonathan’s car, alone.

In the back seat, he closes his eyes. Everything swirling inside him—the terror, the humiliation, the devastation, the regret, the shame, and below it all, the fresh lightness of having finally, finally freed himself—seems to compress into an all-consuming numbness, like he’s reached the eye of the hurricane and is watching, untouched, as it wreaks destruction all around him.

He opens his eyes only when the passenger side door clicks opens. Robin Buckley slips inside and shuts the door behind her. She’s silent for so long that Will thinks she didn’t even notice him in the backseat.

Then she says, “Is it ridiculous that even while we’re covered in bat guts or tiptoeing over sentient vines or literally on the brink of being horribly murdered at any moment, all I keep thinking about is how I’m going to ask out the girl I like when all of this is over?”

Will’s heart stops. He meets her gaze in the rearview mirror, sees her eyes crinkle as she grins. She turns around in her seat to look at him, her grin thinning to a smirk.

“Such shock, Will Byers,” she says teasingly.

Will shakes his head, his cheeks heating, and stammers out: “Sorry. Sorry. It’s not—I mean, that’s cool. With me, I mean. And just in general. I guess I didn’t expect…but yeah, that makes sense.”

Robin raises her eyebrows. “It makes sense that I’m gay or that my priorities are completely wacko?”

Another zing of disbelief and exhilaration shoots down his spine, hearing her say those words out loud like they’re nothing. “Not that you’re…no, I meant it’s not ridiculous. Last year when all hell was breaking loose, I just kept thinking about how my friends didn’t want to play D&D with me anymore.”

Robin frowns in consideration. “You could argue that this is all just like highly immersive D&D. So really they haven’t stopped playing at all. In fact, I think we’re all very enthusiastic about this campaign.”

This makes Will smile, and not even because of what she said, but because of how she’s saying it so casually like this isn’t a big deal at all.

“Kind of scary what happened to you and Beanstalk back there,” she says, then squeezes her eyes shut and shakes her head. “I mean, Mike. I definitely don’t call him Beanstalk behind his back.”

Will grins, but the muscles in his face feel so heavy that it falls just as fast, and all he can say is, “It was bad.”

“You wanna talk about it?”

He shakes his head. “Not really.”

“Well if you do want to talk, you know…people can surprise you. Even people like Steve Harrington.”

“Steve Harrington?” Will’s eyebrows fly up. He knows Steve is just as entrenched in this shit as anyone else, but he hadn’t spent enough time with him to see him as much more than his older brother’s high school bully. “You told him?”

Robin purses her lips and nods.

“And he was…he was fine?”

“I think he was a bit bummed that he wasn’t my type,” she says, a smug grin creeping across her face. Then her smile softens into something genuine and wistful. “But yeah. He was fine. He was great, actually.”

Will swallows hard. “That must have been terrifying.”

Robin shrugs. “Yes and no. It was like…it was like we’d reached a point where I just knew that I could take it, whatever his reaction was going to be. We’d been through so much shit together already, I thought that if we could survive being kidnapped by Russians, then I could risk telling him I liked kissing girls.”

Part of Will wants to spill his guts to her right this second—everything, all of it. He imagines how good it would feel, like lancing an abscess. But his tongue feels swollen and heavy in his mouth. He feels like he’s been wrapped in gauze, layers of it muffling him from the outside world, and he doesn’t know if he has the strength to break free.

So he only says, through the lump in his throat, “Thank you. For telling me, I mean. You didn’t have to do that.”

“I don’t know,” she says thoughtfully, and her smile brightens the night. “I’m kind of getting used to it.”

Chapter Text

Mike, Nancy, and Holly are already piling out of Steve’s car when Will and Jonathan pull up to the curb of the Wheeler-Byers household that night. Karen, who’d been watching and waiting at the front window, flies out of the house, wrapping Holly into a bone-crushing hug while Mike and Nancy stand off to the side with watery smiles, so close that their arms are touching.

“Hey, look,” Jonathan says after killing the engine. “They’re not bursting into flame.”

Will breathes a laugh through his nose. Mike and Nancy might not have the same kind of relationship he and Jonathan do—a closeness forged out of surviving their abusive father together—but they both know that the Wheeler siblings would burn the world down for each other when it came down to it.

He turns his face away from the window, feeling like he should be giving them some privacy. It’s been months since he and his family moved in to the Wheeler house, but he still feels like they’re invading sometimes, taking up space that they just don’t have.

Jonathan must decide the same, because he doesn't move to get out of the car. They're sitting there listening to the ticking of the cooling radiator when Jonathan finally says, “Will, are you sure you’re okay? I…God, I thought we wouldn’t get you guys back. I thought you were—”

“I’m okay,” Will says. Jonathan’s lips tighten, unconvinced, so he shrugs and offers, “A bit shaken up, I guess. That place was something out of a horror movie.”

He suppresses a shiver, thinking again of the vines tightening around Mike’s neck.

“Were you in there together? Could you see Mike?”

Will nods, turning back to the window. The Wheelers are heading into the house now. Mike, at the tail of the group, looks over his shoulder in the direction of their car, and Will quickly turns his eyes back toward his lap.

He swallows against the lump in his throat. “He saved us. I mean, the music helped, but Mike…Mike was the one that saved me.”

And then, to Will’s horror, he starts crying. It creeps up on him, the tears welling up in his eyes so fast it feels impossible. And he’s too tired to try to hide it, so he just leans his head back against the seat and closes his eyes, letting the tears track down his cheeks.

“Will,” Jonathan says, his voice carrying the weight of the world. “Please talk to me.”

God, he wants to tell him. He knows that it’s childish and pathetic, but he just needs to hear from his big brother that everything will be okay.

Robin’s words echo, suddenly, through his head: People can surprise you.

Then her voice morphs into Jonathan’s, into the words he’d spoken to him at the back of the pizza parlour, when he told him exactly what he needed to hear:

You’re my brother, and I love you. And there is nothing in this world, absolutely nothing, that will ever change that.

And Will—so drained, so unbelievably exhausted—suddenly finds it almost easy to open his mouth and say, “He made me tell him. He made me…he was going to kill him if I didn’t tell him I...that I…”

“I know,” Jonathan says softly. “I know how you feel about him.”

Will’s heart fills with gratitude for his brother keeping him from having to say it again, and something about the hugeness of the emotion pushes Will over the edge. He squeezes his eyes shut tighter and brings his hands up to his mouth, clapping one over the other in an effort to hold everything back, but he can’t do it. It’s like holding back the ocean with his bare hands.

He drops them from his mouth and wheezes out, “Oh Jesus, Jonathan, I’ve ruined everything.”

And that’s all he can manage before he doubles over with the pain of it, great, gasping sobs tearing out of him.  Jonathan drapes himself over the console and covers Will like he’s shielding him from the blast of a grenade, his chin digging into his shoulder, his hand gripping his bicep.

“No you didn’t,” he murmurs. “It’s okay, it’s gonna be okay…” 

Jonathan keeps talking as Will collapses in on himself, letting out everything he’s been feeling since…God, since the beginning of time, he thinks, and Jonathan lets him. He holds him and keeps whispering words that soothe him despite their uselessness, their nothingness. Because it isn’t going to be okay, and Will knows it, but he’s glad his brother is there to hold him up at the end of the world.

Will doesn’t know if Nancy saw them through a window and knew not to interfere, or if she's just programmed with good timing, but she only comes out of the house when Will has cried himself dry and is finally getting out of the car.

Jonathan stays in his seat, ducking to look at him through the open passenger door. “Nancy and I were gonna drive for a bit, but I can stay if you…”

“No,” Will says in a rush. “No, I’m just gonna go to bed. I’ll be fine.”

Jonathan purses his lips, still uncertain.

“Go,” Will insists.

Nancy reaches the car then, laying a hand softly on Will’s arm in greeting. “You doing okay, Will?”

Will nods. “Yeah. Are you?”

“Better now that Holly’s back,” she says with a smile. She glances back at the house. “Mike’s up in her room. I think she’s been asking for you.”

Will’s stomach tightens, but he thanks her, and Nancy nods and drops into the passenger seat. Will heads toward the house, not wanting to give Jonathan anymore reason to worry. 

Once the car is out of sight, he stops in the middle of the driveway.

It isn’t just his hesitance about running into Mike when he gets inside. Something else is bugging him, something that has him turning around in a circle, searching for predators.

Nothing. Just the monstrous shadows of trees and gnats buzzing in the glow of the porch light.

But then the back of his neck begins to crawl, and his bones are seized by a cold dread just before a voice, rough with rage and so, so loud, rumbles through his skull:

Make no mistake. You’re mine, William Byers.

And then, the floodgates of their connection burst wide open, and Will feels a tearing in his abdomen like Vecna has shoved a fist inside the stab wound Mike made, just to let Will feel it.

The pain is so sudden and shocking that at first, Will’s every muscle freezes, and his throat closes up so he can’t make a sound. He falls to his knees on the pavement, doubling over, his mouth open in a silent scream.

Then his brain seems to catch up to the fire in his nerves, and Will’s vision whites out. A scream breaks out of him as claws and knives and fishhooks and barbed wire tear his guts to shreds.

He doesn’t know how long he’s been screaming before there’s the sound of the door wrenching open, and footsteps scuffing to a stop beside him.

“Will! Hey, hey, hey—” Mike’s voice, frantic. He drops down beside him, his hands hovering over him like he doesn’t know where it’s safe to touch. “Tell me what’s wrong—”

But Will can’t, he can’t, his teeth are gritted shut, he’s making some godawful noise and his brain is a fuzzy chorus of kill me kill me kill me because anything is better than the fire burning out from his stomach, eating him alive. He thinks he’s bitten his tongue, because he tastes blood.

“Will, please,” Mike begs.

He gasps, his hand shooting out to wrap in the fabric of Mike’s t-shirt just below his ribs. He thinks he hears the stitching tear a little as he pulls him toward him.

“It’s him,” he growls through gritted teeth. Definitely blood on his tongue. “His stomach.”

Something flashes in Mike’s eyes, his face going slack. Even through his pain, even in the dark, Will can see exactly what’s going through his head. He wants to reassure him, to tell him it’s not his fault, but he can’t muster anymore words. He slumps back, and Mike’s arm shoots out to cushion his neck before his head can crack against the pavement.

Mike drags him up against his chest, and a sob tears out of Will as fresh pain blooms over his stomach and ricochets up his spine.

“I’m sorry,” Mike says, his voice strangled. His arms wrap around his chest, and he leans over Will so his lips are against his ear. “I’ve got you, Will. I’ve got you.”

When Will opens his eyes to the familiar sight of the wood panelled ceiling in Mike’s basement, all he can think is: At least it’s not the hospital. Again.

When he turns his head, he sees Mike sitting on a chair next to the lumpy couch Will is laid out on. His elbows are on his knees and his fingers are laced behind his neck, his face obscured by lank dark hair. Like Will, he's still in the filthy, sand-dusted clothes he’d been wearing at the barn.

For a moment, Will thinks about being selfish and just watching him, not saying a word. It would be easier, he thinks, to pretend to sleep until Mike finally slipped out of the room. But he looks so uncomfortable in that hard chair, long limbs wrapped around himself like that, tension holding his shoulders stiff, and Will can’t bring himself to do it.

“Mike,” he says, his voice hoarse—probably from the screaming.

Mike’s head whips up so fast, he nearly spills out of the chair. He grips the arm rests, his eyes wide and sparkling as they lock on Will.

“Hey,” he says, a smile tugging at his lips and his voice soft with relief. “You okay?”

Will nods. His tongue feels swollen and stinging from where he'd bit it, but otherwise all he feels is exhaustion. “I can’t…feel it anymore.”

Mike isn’t crying, but his face is blotchy like he had been not long ago, and the moment he sees the guilt pooling in his eyes, Will remembers why.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Will croaks.

Mike’s lips press together tight. He shakes his head. “I didn’t even think about…I should have thought about what it would do to you if I hurt him—”

“Mike,” Will says again, as firm as he can manage. “It wasn’t your fault. You saved us. We would have died in there.”

Mike’s eyebrows twitch together. “I don’t even know where the hell that sword came from. That was…I mean that was crazy, right? It’s like, I knew what I wanted in that moment and it just showed up.”

Will tries for a wry smile as he picks at the threadbare blanket that had been draped over him. “I guess we can add that to the mile-long list of shit we don’t understand.”

Mike’s eyes are still weighed down with guilt. As if to distract himself, he reaches for a glass of water at the end of the coffee table and holds it out to Will. He takes it gratefully and starts chugging, washing down the taste of blood. Before he can down the last half, though, Mike gently grabs the glass and guides it away from him.

“Maybe don’t drown yourself the second I get you back,” he says with a half smile.

Heat rushes toward Will’s face. The second I get you back.

Like he’s his.

For one glorious second, Will wonders if Mike doesn’t remember what he said, or if it was all a dream—one of Vecna’s tricks. Because surely he wouldn’t be talking like that if he remembered. If he knew.

But then Mike, whose knee has started bouncing up and down, looks at him from under his lashes and swallows hard, and Will feels dread trickle down his spine.

“Will, was it true?” Mike asks.

Will turns his gaze to the ceiling and implores himself not to cry again. Mike isn’t stupid. Will can’t lie now and say that he’d been lying then, that he’d been acting to appease Vecna. He’d bared his soul to him and he couldn’t take it back, so he just balls his fists at his sides and nods.

Mike is quiet for a moment before saying, very softly, “I didn’t know.”

God, this is more excruciating than the psychic stab wound. Will wants to beg him not to drag this out, to just get it over with, but then Mike continues, “But I guess…I guess I’m not surprised?”

Will can’t help it—his eyes snap to Mike’s. He swears he sees the colour rise in his cheeks before he straightens in the chair, words rushing out of him: “Not to say—I don’t mean that in an egotistical way like of course you would, and I don’t mean that I knew you were…I mean, maybe I suspected, sometimes, but—do you want to talk about this right now? Sorry, I just realized you’ve technically been stabbed and you can totally tell me to shut up if you want.”

Deep in the back of Will’s mind, he registers that Mike is talking fast and bumbling like he does when he’s nervous. Nervous like he’s gearing up to let him down gently, to wrap their ruined friendship up in a bow and leave it to rot at his bedside.

Will swallows, fixing his eyes on his outstretched legs. “I think I’d rather we just rip off the bandaid, if that’s okay.”

Will feels Mike tense beside him. “That. What you said.”

He risks a glance at him under his lashes. “What?” 

“You said that in the pizza van, when you gave me the painting.”

Oh Christ, the painting. Will is suddenly thinking about that jagged rock that almost crushed him back in the mind palace, and how he wishes Vecna had better aim.

“That’s when I knew there was something you weren’t telling me,” Mike continues. He’s dropped his gaze to the skirt of the couch, a furrow in his brow and his eyes darting back and forth like they do when he’s thinking. “I just didn’t know exactly what it was at the time. But now…I mean, you did tell me, didn’t you?” Mike lifts his eyes to his. “You told me then. I was just so dumb and so wrapped up in my own shit to get it.”

“I didn’t want you to get it,” Will blurts out, his heart beating hard. “I never wanted you to get it, Mike. You were…you were so angry.”

His voice thins into a shaky whisper at the end. Mike frowns for a moment, until something clicks behind his widening eyes. He shakes his head. “No, Will, that wasn’t—I was pissed at him for making you do that, for—for manipulating you. The look on your face, I could’ve—” he cuts himself off, a muscle jumping in his jaw. He shakes his head at his lap. “God, I wanted to kill him. I’m sorry I didn’t. But I was never mad at you, Will. And I wasn’t angry about…about what you said.”

Will tries to keep his voice steady. “You’re not angry, and you’re not surprised. But you must be…you must be something, Mike, and I think I just really need you to tell me now, whatever it is.”

Mike’s leg is still bouncing. He turns his head toward the washroom, then to the floor, then his gaze lands on the skirt of the couch again.

“That’s kind of the thing, I…I don’t know. I don’t know what I am. I always…feel so much when it comes to you that sometimes I think I’m going crazy.” He lets out a breathy laugh, but it dies too quickly. “Like even when we were kids—honestly, since the day we met, it’s just been different. I can’t explain it.”

He digs the heel of his hand into his forehead and takes a shaky breath, and when he drops it, his face is pinched with something agonizing. “And I’m kind of scared out of my mind of what that means.”

That, Will can understand. He understands it all too well, that terror. And knowing that Mike might feel it too, knowing what that might mean, has his heart crashing in his ears.

Still, not daring to hope, Will says, “Nothing needs to change. If you can…if you can just forget it, Mike, I promise I’ll bury it.”

His voice cracks on those words. I’ll bury it. He’ll have to dig for miles. He’ll have to dig to the centre of the earth.

Mike’s leg stops bouncing. He wipes his hands down the legs of his jeans, and Will senses something change in him, then. He sees him closing off before his very eyes, sending his heart into a nosedive.

“Let’s just…I think we need to sleep,” Mike says. He pushes a hand back through his hair, and when he fixes his eyes on Will's, they’re distant, almost clinical. “It’s been a really long day, and you’ve been through hell, and I think…” He rises from his chair now, nodding as if he’s agreeing with himself. “I think we just need to sleep.”

Will’s heart is breaking. A door has closed, and he has to wonder if it will ever open again. He has to wonder how far Mike is going to walk away from it.

“Yeah,” Will croaks. “Sure.”

Mike nods again, avoiding Will’s eyes. He turns to go, but stops at the bottom of the stairs, turning his face just enough so Will can see the tip of his nose. “Will you just…if it happens again and I can’t hear you, will you turn on the walkie? I don’t want you to be alone.”

Will nods, before realizing Mike probably can’t see him.

“Yeah,” he whispers.

“Okay,” Mike says. “Goodnight.”

“Goodnight,” Will says, but Mike is too far gone to hear it.

Chapter Text

Will startles awake to something falling onto his chest with a clatter. He paws at it instinctively before opening his eyes to see a Stereo walkman and a pair of headphones with bright yellow ear pads.

“You are keeping that on you from now on,” his mother says sharply. “Every second, Will, I mean it.”

Joyce is standing over him with the dishevelled air of a woman who's just walked out of a hurricane. 

“Good morning to you, too,” Will grumbles as he pulls himself up on the couch.

“Jonathan wasn’t even planning on telling me what happened last night,” she says, her voice pitched high with disbelief. “I had to weasel it out of Mike when he was acting weird at breakfast.”

Will, who really doesn’t want to talk about this before his brain has fully turned on, busies himself with opening the tape compartment. “What’s in here?”

“It’s Meat Loaf,” Joyce says angrily. “Don’t change the subject.”

Will wrinkles his nose at her music choice and shuts the compartment, making a mental note to raid Jonathan’s music collection later. Joyce is still staring at him with her hands on her hips, her jaw working so hard he can hear her teeth creak.

“What?” Will sighs, exasperated. “We had the cassette player in case anything happened.”

“Well something did happen, Will. What were you, using yourself as bait?”

“We were going to distract him from the others by lighting the rot on fire. We just didn’t get the chance.”

Joyce looks away from him, shaking her head. “You shouldn’t have been there. You shouldn’t be provoking him, Will. Especially not you.”

Will’s face scrunches up in indignation. “It was for Holly! And I’m in just as much danger as everyone else. I’m not just going to sit by and let them do the fighting when this is all basically my fault anyway.”

“Don’t,” Joyce says, pointing a hard finger at him. “Don’t you dare say that.”

Will bites his tongue, then has to hide a flinch when his teeth catch on the old wound he made there yesterday. He crosses his arms and digs his fingers into his biceps instead.

“It’s different for you,” Joyce continues. “He can hurt you in ways he can’t hurt us, and that makes it different.”

He can use him, is what she probably meant to say. He can use him in ways he can’t use them.

Will notices that Joyce’s mask of anger is trembling into something like worry, and something clicks in the back of his sleep-fogged brain.

“Mike told you,” he guesses, his voice flat. “He told you what happened in the driveway.”

“He’s worried about you. And he should be.”

Will wishes he could extinguish the hot, dizzying fondness that rushes through him at those words, because it only serves to twist the knife in his heart.

Joyce sighs, finally seeming to deflate. As much as Will can understand her worry and her anger, he also suspects she knows that it’s hopeless to expect that anyone can be kept safe in this fight. As long as Vecna’s out there and the Upside Down is still thriving, they’ve all got their heads in guillotines.

“Just...keep the walkman on you, okay?” she says, the exasperation seeping out of her voice. “And from now on I want to be kept in the loop. I don’t care what you guys are up to, you’re going to tell me about it.”

Will pulls himself up and swings his legs over the couch, running a hand through his hair. “Yeah. Okay.”

Now that he’s actually woken up a bit, a jolt runs through him as he remembers why his mom wasn’t around yesterday. “Wait, how’s El? Is she okay?”

Joyce lets out another breath. She’s patting her back pocket, probably checking for cigarettes. “Hopper’s taking care of her. She’s doing fine.”

“As fine as she can be while being hunted by the military, you mean,” Will says, bitterness seeping into his voice. Sometimes he’s so overcome with the unfairness of his sister’s situation, with the unfairness of her entire life, that it makes him want to burn everything down.

“Yeah,” Joyce says, mirroring his bitterness. “Anyway, come upstairs when you’re ready. Holly’s been asking for you.”

Will remembers Nancy saying the same thing to him before she left with Jonathan last night, and he feels an odd stir of unease in his gut. Probably a product of his near constant paranoia, causing him to see patterns where there aren't any. 

Once his mom has left him alone—off to meet Murray for reasons Will doesn’t even want to begin to understand—Will gets dressed, clips the walkman to his jeans and loops the headphones around his neck, then makes his way upstairs. He was going to head for the kitchen, but he hears a very loud radio broadcast coming from the living room. It's just some show host raving about the new Whitney Houston album, but it's both loud and unusual enough for eight o’clock on a Sunday morning that he decides to investigate.

When he gets to the living room, Karen Wheeler is kneeling in front of a boombox—which is now blaring I Wanna Dance with Somebody—with a stack of cassettes next to her, rifling through what appears to be even more cassettes in a cardboard box. She’s doing this less like she’s undertaking some casual spring cleaning and more like a woman strapped to a ticking time bomb.

“Mom, that’s not how it works,” says Mike, who’s sitting on the couch with his elbows on his knees, watching her. His tone suggests this isn’t the first time he’s said this.

Karen continues to claw through the cardboard box. “I realize that, Mike, but I can’t find—where the hell is it? I swear it was in here—”

Mike sighs and collapses against the cushions, his neck hooked over the back of the couch. “I really don’t think Holly likes Sesame Street anymore.”

He rolls his head toward the living room entrance then, spotting Will. As if he’d been waiting for an excuse, he hops up from the couch and starts toward him. He bugs out his eyes and jerks his head, signalling him to follow.

Will tails him into the kitchen, where Mike spins on him.

“Holly told my mom way too much, and now she’s lost it,” he says, his words coming fast and just loud enough to be heard over the music. “At first she thought she could just play the radio, but then I stupidly told her how it really works, and now she thinks she’s going to single-handedly protect Holly from Vecna by blasting the Honker-Duckie-Dinger Jamboree all day.”

It takes a moment for Will to register what Mike has just said, but when he does, he has to press his lips together to keep from laughing.

“It’s not funny,” he says, his eyebrows comically worried and his voice pitched high and indignant.

“It’s not,” Will concedes, but he’s still on the verge of cracking up. “Sorry, what was the song—?”

“I’m serious. This is serious,” Mike says, ditching Will to make his way over to the refrigerator. “I’m not living here anymore if she finds that tape. I’m going to—” he shakes his head, his eyes faraway as he gazes into the open fridge. “I don’t know. I’ll leave the country.”

Will lets his grin loose, but quickly tries to smother it for Mike’s sake. As Mike grabs a quarter-full milk jug from the fridge and starts chugging from it, Will gestures back to the living room. “So what, she knows everything now?”

It was sort of hard to keep Karen out of the loop when Hawkins cracked apart, opening up giant glowing rifts all through town, and again when they all entered military lockdown. Her and Joyce have grown closer since living under the same roof, and Joyce has told Karen a lot, but she’s been leaving out the extent of her children’s involvement in everything—and by extension, all the stuff about Vecna. Will can see how that might’ve had to change since he took Holly.

“She knows enough,” Mike says, gasping as he finishes up the milk. He twists the cap on the jug and tosses it on the counter before leaning against it, shrugging. “I thought she'd at least be a little skeptical, but at this point, I guess it isn’t all that hard to believe.” 

Will nods, long and slow. He feels the steam running out of their conversation, and he knows as soon as it does, as soon as they no longer have anything to say about the strange things happening around them, they’ll have to address the even stranger things happening between them.

Mike must feel it, too, because he’s gripping the edge of the counter behind him, long fingers tapping out a nervous rhythm. His gaze darts to Will, then to the floor, then back to Will, then to a pair of empty, used cereal bowls still sitting on the kitchen table. His eyes widen and he straightens up, his cheeks flushing.

“Oh, shit, did you want cereal?” he asks, jerking a thumb back at the now empty milk jug.

Will’s lips tug into a side smile. “I’ll live.”

“Sorry, I’m an asshole. I can—I can go get some more.”

“It’s seriously okay,” Will says with a laugh. The boy is absurd, panicking about milk in the middle of the apocalypse, and Will feels that unbearable fondness welling up in his chest again.

He makes his way to the bread box just to give himself something to do, and he can’t tell if he wishes Mike would stay or go. He feels like they never came down in that barn—they’re both still floating in the air, waiting for gravity to swoop back in and determine where they land.

Finally, when Will gets two slices of bread in the toaster, Mike clears his throat and says, “Oh, uh, Holly’s been asking for you.”

“So I’ve heard,” Will says, that subtle, uncomfortable stir returning to his gut. “I haven’t seen her. Is she okay?”

Mike bows his head, massaging the back of his neck. “Yeah, she’s just been up in her room. She's fine—just resting, you know. But I think she’s like, obsessed with you or something.”

He breathes an airy laugh through his nose and looks up. Will doesn’t know what the hell to say to that, and something on his face causes Mike’s smile to fade. He swallows, and Will doesn’t catch himself in time—he watches the smooth passage of his Adam’s apple in the pale column of his throat. When his eyes wander back up, Mike feels about a thousand miles closer than he had been a second ago. His freckles are standing out in sharp relief, his cheekbones are high and rosy, his bangs ink-black and perfectly messy, his eyes the rare sparkle on the surface of a dark, dark lake.

And then, because the universe hates William Byers specifically, his ears tune to the vaguely familiar and undeniably sexy yacht rock song that’s been playing on the living room radio. It hasn’t changed in volume, but it seems to flood into the kitchen right then, the lyrics suddenly crystal clear and loud as an airhorn next to their heads:

I am so into you

I can’t think of nothing else

They are frozen, he thinks. Frozen in time. Will can’t move, Mike doesn’t move, except his lips which are parting so slowly. They may as well be a lighthouse on an endless grey sea for how Will’s eyes are drawn to them. 

Thinking how it’s going to be

Whenever I get you next to me

Mike, goddamn him, licks his lips. He doesn’t mean it, he looks like maybe he’s about to say something, but fucking hell—

The toast pops, and Will jumps out of his skin, while Mike’s head snaps forward like a soldier at attention.

Will’s legs feel like jelly. He keeps his eyes far away from Mike’s face as he moves toward the toast he is not at all hungry for. He tries not to look so mechanical as he drops the slices on a plate, but his muscles are going haywire. 

Gonna love you all over

Over and over

He clears his throat, but his voice comes out rough like he hasn’t used it for days. “Cool, I’ll uh—I’ll go see her.”

Me and you you and me me and you—

“Cool,” Mike says, his voice too light, and the song lapses into one of the sexiest guitar riffs Will has ever heard, and his lower belly is still on fire from whatever the hell that was, and he has to leave. He has to leave now.

Will has not put anything on his toast, but he doesn’t care. He takes the plate of dry bread and flashes a tight smile in Mike’s direction, not daring to meet his eyes. He doesn’t think he should ever look Mike Wheeler in the eye ever again.

At the foot of the stairs, he closes his eyes and lets out an aggravated breath through his nostrils, half-hoping Karen finds that goddamn Sesame Street tape.

Chapter Text

When Will knocks on Holly’s door, she doesn’t ask who it is before she calls, “Come in!”

She’s sitting crosslegged in the middle of her bed, dressed in her usual colourful attire, working on a small, circular cross stitch. Her room, covered from wall to ceiling with rainbow flowers, is cast in a warm yellow glow, and she grins at him when she raises her head.

For someone who has just been kidnapped to an alternate dimension, she seems in a bright mood. She’s been in a bright mood for pretty much as long as Will has known her, and he knows he should be glad that she’s okay. But given he knows from personal experience what it’s like to go through the hell of being trapped and alone in the Upside Down, he can’t help the surprise—and, deeper, the suspicion—he feels about how normal she seems.

Will shuts the door and puts his dry toast down on Holly’s dresser before he crosses over to her. He gestures to the bed, “Okay if I sit?”

“Sure,” she says, her voice as bright as everything else.

He perches himself on the side of her bed. He subtly scans her for scratches and bruises, but finds none. He glances at the cross stitch in her lap, but she’s barely started—just a couple stripes of blue and grey threads.

“So, how are you feeling?” he asks.

She cocks her head and frowns a little. “I feel…weird. But not bad.”

“Well,” Will says, trying for a smile. “I can relate to weird.”

Holly grins. “Yeah, I know. Henry said he does, too.”

Will goes ice cold. The hair rises on the back of his neck, and there’s nothing supernatural about it.

“Henry?” Will asks, his mouth dry. She said his name like they’re friendly.

“Yeah, he said you and him were friends.”

Will opens his mouth to protest, but stops himself. If Henry…if Vecna manipulated Holly in some way, put thoughts in her head, then he needs to find out what—and why.

So Will swallows and says, “Oh. Why? Did he…what did he say, exactly?”

“When he visited me, he told me I was like Alice,” Holly says. “You know, like Alice in Wonderland? And he was the Mad Hatter, and he was going to show me down the rabbit hole. I wasn’t sure at first, but he told me you and him were friends. I thought maybe he was tricking me, but when I tested him on it, he answered all my questions about you. So I guessed he was telling the truth.”

Will is so cold now, he feels numb. “And he took you somewhere?”

She nods. “Down the rabbit hole.”

“The place where Nancy rescued you from.”

“Yes. In that place, he…he got scary. Like a monster. He said it was just what happened when he came down the rabbit hole and turned into the Mad Hatter, and I didn’t have to be afraid because he was still Henry. He told me he would let Nancy and the others come for me.”

He would let them? To Will, that sounds like a trap. But if that were true, if he took Holly just to lure them to the Upside Down and kill them, then why did they all make it out alive?

“Holly,” Will says softly, “Did he…did he say why he took you there?”

Holly’s eyebrows twitch together, like she’s wondering why Will is being so dense. “Because you told him about our campaign. He said if he couldn’t have Will the Wise on his side, he would have Holly the Heroic.”

That’s when Will notices something—something that makes him lurch up from the bed and stumble back.

The small, circular cross stitch is still on Holly’s lap, but the needle is moving on its own, an invisible hand weaving blue thread in and out of the linen.

Holly follows his gaze, her long blonde hair obscuring her face. Then she slowly drags her head up again, and when she turns her face to him, her eyes have darkened to a solid brown, incongruous with the face of the girl he knows and loves.

“What’s wrong, Will?” she asks.

“No,” Will breathes, the air punching out of his lungs. He recoils until his back hits the wall next to the door.

The pretence of childlike innocence dissolves from Holly’s face, leaving behind a flat expression that looks a lot like disapproval.

“He’s tried everything to show you the truth, you know,” she says. It’s her voice, but with someone else’s eyes and the stillness with which she holds herself, he can feel the wrongness of her. “He tried to show you how easily they would abandon you if they knew who you really were, but you wouldn’t listen. You refused to join him, to go where you belong. And so he takes another. He will take me.”

All the blood has left Will’s face. His heart is breaking all over again seeing Holly—vibrant, bright, innocent Holly—darkened by the Mind Flayer. He knows exactly what’s going on inside of her: the paralysis, the feeling of being buried alive under someone else’s dark and terrible thoughts to the point of being unable to distinguish them from your own. He knows she can see everything, can feel everything, and she can’t do a thing about it.

“Holly,” Will starts. He peels himself from the wall and steps forward tentatively, like approaching a wild animal. “Holly, I know you can hear me. We’re going to help you, okay? Me and Mike and Nancy—”

“You will try and you will fail,” Holly says.

(But no, it isn’t Holly. It’s him. It’s the Mind Flayer.)

“Unless,” the Mind Flayer continues, “you join him in my place.”

Will shakes his head, his brow furrowing in a mix of confusion and anguish. “Why? Why does he want me?”

“Because you’re just like him. And because you have no idea what beautiful things you can do together, Will. But only if you join him.”

The monster wearing Holly’s skin gets up from the bed then, the cross-stitch sliding off her lap to land facedown on the floor, the needle dropping out of the air to follow it. She looks down at it, detached, like she’d forgotten it was there.

“He’s already started teaching me,” she says, then drags her gaze back up to his, her flat, painted eyes turning Will’s stomach. “I will be his student. And then I will be his cleric, until his vision comes to pass.”

“You’re bluffing,” Will says, filling his voice with steel. When he speaks again, his words are directly for Vecna, who he knows, somehow, is listening. “You wouldn’t do that. Because if you do, that would make you just like him. Like Brenner.”

The Mind Flayer flinches—just an infinitesimal flash of the eyes, a barely perceptible jerk of the chin. The anger on Holly’s face is subtle, but an unnatural growl comes into her voice when she next speaks. “I don’t need to break her to unlock her powers.”

Will is glad Vecna has finally dropped the pretence of speaking about himself in third person. Now, he knows, the thing speaking is no longer the Mind Flayer—it’s Vecna himself.

“She is powerful in her own right,” he continues. “And so are you, William Byers. A sensitive child. An ostracized child. A child of sight in a blind world. I was just like you, once. We could rule together. We could be kings.”

Will shakes his head, trying to buck off the crawling sensation wracking his spine. “No, don’t—you don’t know anything about me. I would rather die. You hear me? I would rather die then have anything to do with you.”

Something like a pantomime of heartbreak overtakes Holly’s face, and her voice changes again, sounding far closer to her natural one. “Then he will take me. And it will break Mike’s heart, you know. To lose me. It will break him far worse than it would ever break him to lose you. You know that, don’t you, Will? And you would have to live with yourself, knowing you could have stopped it.”

Will grits his teeth against the sharp, stabbing pain in his chest. His next words come from a place inside of him that feels like a fresh bruise, his voice ragged and raw. “I can’t do anything. I couldn’t help you even if I wanted to.”

He sees flashing images of his friends behind his eyes: of El with her hand outstretched and blood trailing from her nose, of Mike with the sword, of Dustin and Steve and Robin bruised and battered in their Upside Down gear, of Max and Lucas braving the horrors of the Creel house, of Nancy with a gun, of his mother with an axe.

The monster cocks Holly’s head, staring deep, deep into him with those flat, flat eyes, and Will has this uncanny feeling like something’s poking around in his mind.

“Isn’t it sad how everyone underestimates a steady artist’s hand?”

Will didn’t think this conversation could get any more horrific, until now—until something fierce shoots through his belly, so quick he can barely register it before it’s smothered by his shame, but he knows. He knows what it was:

Agreement. Recognition. A horrible, righteous sympathy.

The monster steps closer to him. “You could build worlds, and they would still see you as weak.”

Nancy had told them Henry was an artist as a child. Will is letting him get into his head, letting him connect with him, exactly how he means to.

The fresh, hot shame whirling inside of him burns itself into fury. He’s so fucking tired of being manipulated.

“You’re going to have to do better than that,” he says, his voice hard, “if you expect me to kill all of my friends with you.”

“Don’t worry. We will have you soon enough.” Holly’s face twitches into a barely-there smile, like the Mind Flayer is having trouble controlling her muscles. “All you need is a little push.”

Holly steps back then, and Will’s heart plunges into his stomach, because suddenly she’s jerking back, her spine arching, her face snapping toward the ceiling. He watches in horror as her jaw is wrenched open, as if by an invisible force, and a rasping noise seeps out of her throat.

“Ho-Holly?” Will breathes, his knees feeling weak. Please, God, he cannot watch her die right now. He cannot watch Holly Wheeler die right now—

She begins to choke, her body convulsing. Will snaps himself out of it, refusing to freeze, and lurches forward, gripping her by her trembling shoulders. “No no no, Holly, please—”

But then he sees it. Dark, pulsing black, creeping up her throat like ink, like vines, as a demonic wailing comes from deep inside her, and Will snatches back like he’s been burned.

He remembers this. He remembers the way it felt, like an earthquake kicking up a boulder inside of him, like the boulder crushing his insides on its way up from somewhere way too deep. He remembers that crushing pressure in his chest, an unbearable lack of air, the earthquake tearing apart bone and muscle and sinew until—

An explosion.

Will is flung backward, his arms flying out behind him to cushion his fall, his wrists smarting on impact. His eyes are open but everything is black, and there’s roaring in his ears, and if he peers through the swirling blackness he can just make out Holly’s rigid, seizing form shrouded in what looks like dark, heavy smoke, but it isn’t smoke—

The blackness is sweeping itself up into a tornado, and then there’s the deafening shatter of glass as it surges through the bedroom window and into the bright morning light.

Holly’s mouth snaps closed. Her body goes slack.

She crumples to the floor.

Chapter Text

Will almost calls for Mike. It’s always his first thought: Get Mike. Call Mike. Need Mike. Mike Mike Mike. It’s been that way for as long as he’s known him. Even before that, he never liked to call for his mom, or for Jonathan, because they had so much to deal with already, it made him feel like a burden to trouble them with nightmares or knee scrapes or particularly huge bugs in the bathroom.

But with Mike, it’s easy. It’s instinct, like huddling under the covers at the sight of a monstrous shadow in his closet. Whenever Mike shows up—immediately, without hesitation—it’s like he and the thing that scares Will can’t exist in the same space, can’t breathe the same air. Because Mike means safe. Mike is the solid, immovable thing in the face of danger that Will has never had trouble hiding behind.

He almost calls for Mike, but he’s already there. The sound of the shattered window was enough, and he bursts into the room—immediately, without hesitation—and the door cracks against the wall and bounces back toward him so he has to fling his arm out against it. There’s a moment of wild eyes swinging between Will and Holly on the floor, but Will doesn’t wait for him to catch up. He scrambles toward Holly on his hands and knees, turning her face up to him. Mike dives down next to him a second later, a high, frenzied edge to his voice as he demands: “What happened?!”

Will can barely hear him over the chorus of don’t be dead don’t be dead don’t be dead screaming through his head, but then he smooths Holly’s hair back, and suddenly she stirs. A little groan escapes her as her eyelids begin to flutter, and everything inside of Will settles back into place.

Will sits back on his heels, slumping with a breath of relief.

“Holly?” Mike’s asking, his hand taking Will’s place on his little sister’s face. He turns to Will again, dark eyes wide and wild and searching. “Will, what happened?”

Will closes his eyes.

They end up at the Squawk: formerly the rundown WSQK radio station that they commandeered as their base after the rifts hit. It’s big, it’s isolated, and most importantly, it’s slowly giving them the means to eavesdrop on the military’s radio communications.

So, overall, much better than Mike’s basement, which he supposes had been their headquarters before it had become Will’s bedroom.

“I don’t understand,” Max says, two fiery red braids swinging as she shakes her head. “Holly was possessed by the Mind Flayer, but then he just…left her? Why would he do that?”

Max is sitting next to Lucas on the couch, her broken leg propped up on the coffee table in front of her. Robin is perched on the arm, next to Steve leaning up against the wall, and Dustin’s on a barstool they found on the side of the road, spinning back and forth, back and forth. Meanwhile, Will is standing in front of the room by the whiteboard like he’s giving the world’s most depressing school presentation.

Mike is furthest from him—or at least it feels that way. He’s on a hard table chair on the opposite side of the couch from Robin, one long leg crossed over the other, hugging his ribs and chewing the inside of his cheek. He’s going to draw blood if he keeps at it.

Will tears his eyes away from Mike not for the first time and says to Max, “Because he only took her to send a message. She was never meant to be a spy. She’s more like…like a hostage.”

This doesn’t seem to clear anything up for his friends, and Lucas, Max and Dustin share looks before Lucas turns back to him. “Will, you gotta tell us exactly what he said, man. Like, everything.”

Will knows he’s never going to tell them everything about that conversation, but he also knows he has to tell them the kicker—the thing that makes him a liability. The thing that makes him the reason Holly’s in this in the first place.

He licks his lips, his heart speeding up in his chest. “Before he took over her…or, I don’t know, maybe it was him the whole time, but when I thought it was Holly, she was talking about meeting him like it was…like it was this fairy tale. She kept bringing up Alice in Wonderland. And she called him Henry, like they were friends.”

Will feels Mike tense at the other side of the room, but when he glances at him, he’s still staring at the floor in front of him.

“But she said when he brought her to the Upside Down, he turned into a monster,” Will continues. “So I think he was meeting with her before he took her there, like in dreams or visions or somewhere where he could project himself to look like how he used to, when he was human.”

One more glance at Mike because Jesus Christ he wishes he didn’t have to say this next part. He wishes Mike just stayed at home with Holly.

“I think that’s how he plans to get to her from here on out,” he finishes.

There’s a long, heavy silence. Then, to his surprise, it’s Mike who speaks first, his eyes still glued to the floor. “Because we can’t rescue her from her dreams.”

Will swallows. “Exactly.”

Mike lifts his head. His eyebrows raise, slowly, as he scans their faces, and Will sees in the sharp cut of his jaw the real reason behind his despondence—it’s barely an outline of what he’d seen back in Vecna’s mind lair, but it’s there all the same:

Fury.

“I want to be the one to kill him,” Mike says, his voice trembling slightly. “The next time we see him, I’m cutting that bastard’s head off.”

“Uh, no,” Max cuts in loudly. She raises her eyebrows right back at Mike, gesturing to her casted leg. “I’m cutting his head off. And then when my stupid leg heals, I’m going to use it for soccer practice.”

This makes Lucas smile proudly, scanning the room like he’s expecting them all to be proud, too. Instead, Dustin says, “Jesus, okay,” and blows out a breath. He directs his next question to Will. “What do you mean by hostage?”

Steve asks, “Yeah, like, is he holding her mind for ransom or something?”

Dustin spins on the barstool to narrow his eyes at Steve. “Did you seriously just ask that? Yeah, Vecna wants money so he can afford his vacation to the Rightside Up.”

Steve tuts, rolling his eyes. “I obviously didn’t mean money. Ransom can be lots of stuff.”

“No, I’m pretty sure ransom literally just means money,” Robin adds lightly.

“In those cop shows the burglars always ask for pizza and getaway cars and shit.”

“Those are demands—”

“Would you guys shut up?” Mike snaps, loud enough that they all look at him. He lets out a sound somewhere between a breath and a growl and leans forward, elbows on his knees, clawing his hands through his hair.

Silence rings through the room, and Will’s heart is in a vice grip. He can’t remember the last time he’s seen Mike this on edge.

Will takes a few steps closer to him almost without realizing it, drawn like a magnet. Then he says, softly but with as much confidence as he can muster, “Mike, he’s not going to hurt her. That’s not what he wants.” 

“Then what?” Mike says, wrenching his head back up to look at him, his eyes glittering and his eyebrows turned up at the inner corners. “Will, what does he want?”

And that’s when Will knows, when he sees the end-of-the-rope anguish and exhaustion on Mike’s face, that now’s the time. He’s been stalling, beating around the bush because he knows, he knows this will change everything.

Will lets his eyes roam the rest of the room, searching for the easiest person to look at, but all of them are staring at him with varying expressions of unease, waiting for the bomb to drop. And because Mike is still looking at him with that pleading expression, he swallows against his racing heart and rests his gaze back on him.

“He...he gave me an ultimatum. He said he’ll leave Holly alone…in exchange for me.”

Mike straightens in his chair, lips parting, and his face goes so white that Will is momentarily afraid he’s going to faint. He rushes to clarify: “Not—not to kill me, just…he asked me to join him. Whatever the hell that means.”

This does nothing to help Mike’s expression, caught somewhere between dumbstruck and horrified. His eyes dart somewhere around Will’s elbow, and he blinks slowly.

Then Lucas says, “Wait, what?” and Will is happy for the excuse to turn his attention on someone else. Lucas has his face scrunched up in confusion. “Why would he…?” He shakes his head. “I mean, no offence, dude, but why you?”

Will folds his arms and shrugs. “Your guess is as good as mine.” 

He’s drawn momentarily to Robin, who for some reason is looking across the room at Mike with something that looks suspiciously like pity in her eyes.

“What if you have abilities that you don’t know you have?” Dustin offers. “What if you’re like El, but dormant? What if he wants to like…activate you?”

Will sighs. “El was experimented on in a lab. I’m pretty sure I’d remember if that happened to me.” 

Robin, who finally tears her gaze away from Mike, adds: “But Nancy said Henry didn’t get his powers from the lab either. He already had them, and that’s why Brenner took him in the first place.”

And Lucas adds, “Or what if something else happened to you while he had you in the Upside Down? What if he did something to you that makes you useful to him?”

“Besides turning me into a spy?” Will says.

No one has anything to say to this, and the next person to speak after a long silence is Mike.

“He chose to take you,” he says, voice flat and void. They all look at him, hunched over in his chair like the weight of the world is settled on his back. “That night, he…he chose you. There’s a reason for that.”

“Convenience?” Steve offers. Mike’s head snaps toward him, his brow furrowing into a glare, and Steve holds up his hands. “I’m sorry, but it’s possible, isn’t it? He was a 12-year-old kid riding his bike alone at night. He was basically gift-wrapped.”

Robin punches him in the arm.

“Ow—What?”

“If that were true,” Max chimes in, “we wouldn’t be having this conversation. He could have taken anyone he wanted, and he didn’t have to rely on the dark or them being alone to do it. I’m proof of that, and so are Chrissy and Patrick. Mike’s right.”

Lucas looks suddenly like he’s been hit in the back of the head. He blinks down at Max. “I never thought I’d hear those two words leave your mouth.”

Max pushes out her lips and pinches his side, making him yelp.

“Okay, so we’re back to square one,” Dustin says. He spreads his hands conclusively. “It has to be superpowers.”

They all launch into more speculation, talking over one another. Will feels frustration building like a band tightening around his skull. He knows they’re all just trying to figure this out, same as him, but he still hates being talked about like he’s not in the room.

He holds his hands up, raising his voice loud enough that the chatter dies. “Guys, I don’t have superpowers, okay? If I did, you’d think they would have kicked in during, I don’t know, the months I was possessed by a shadow monster? Or during the sauna test? Or in Hopper’s cabin when El got her leg chewed up? Or Starcourt? Seriously, if I have powers, I’m literally the most useless superhero on the planet.”

Robin frowns. “What the hell’s the sauna test?”

Max scrunches her nose and waves her off, mouthing, “Tell you later.”

It’s at that moment that static crackles from where Cerebro is set up in the corner of the room.

“Come in, Bird’s Nest,” a voice filters through. The words are as stilted as they always are with El. “This is Assault and Battery. Do you copy. Over.”

Dustin hops up from the barstool in excitement, his mouth falling open. He flings his arms out toward Cerebro with sparkling eyes. “She used them,” he says, voice filled with wonder. A laugh squawks out of him. “She used the code names!”

Will refrains from rolling his eyes and moves to snatch up Cerebro’s handset himself. “El, we’re here. Are you okay?”

Dustin slumps in disappointment, pouting. Will does roll his eyes this time, but adds, “This is Picasso. And—and everyone else.”

“Will.” El says his name like a sigh, and he can hear the smile in her voice. “Yes, I am okay. Hopper’s okay, too. Are you?”

And that’s how Will ends up going through it a second time, explaining what happened to Holly, and why, and how this is all happening because of him—again. He’s sure there will be a third and fourth time in his future, when he has to tell Jonathan and his mom, which he’s looking forward to about as much as his next root canal.

El doesn’t sound surprised by anything he’s said. “He’s tried this before,” she says darkly. “With me. He wanted me to join him. He…he wanted a partner.”

“But she actually does have superpowers,” Mike says to the room, too far away to speak into Cerebro himself. “It makes sense he would want her on his side instead of against him.”

“Wait, that’s actually a good point,” Max says, and Lucas snaps his head toward her again. Then he bugs his eyes out at Dustin over her head as if to say, why the hell does she keep agreeing with Mike?

“What if Will isn’t just useful to him?” Max continues. “What if he’s a threat in some way?” She meets Will’s eyes then, which he appreciates. “You were the first one in the Upside Down. What if you know something about it that we could use against him?”

Will shrugs. “Then he’d just kill me to shut me up.”

Max considers this for a moment before falling back against the couch cushions. “Touché.”

Cerebro crackles again. “Guys?”

Now Dustin does move to snatch the handset from Will, glaring at the entire room like they’ve all forgotten good walkie etiquette.

“We’re listening,” he says into the handset. “Over.”

“We called because we found something,” El says. “The Upside Down…it has an end.”

Dustin frowns. “What? How?”

“We went down there to look through the lab, but we noticed a trail, and it led us to the woods. And then at the end of the woods, there was a wall. It was a wall…of meat.”

Everyone blinks at each other. Steve pinches the bridge of his nose and says, “I’m sorry, did she just say the words wall of meat?”

Dustin clears his throat. “El, yeah, we’re going to need you to elaborate on that one.”

But it’s Hopper’s gruff, exasperated voice that cuts in instead. “Look, it was a floor to ceiling wall made up of some kind of vegetation. Like the usual vines, plus some other stuff. Some…Jesus, I don’t know. Egg sacs? Pods? Something alien.”

“That must be where the monsters are coming from,” Max says. “Like, where they’re born.”

“The point being, there’s a barrier down there,” Hopper continues. “As far as we could see, it surrounds the entire Upside Down Hawkins, and we know there’s no wall up here. Which means it’s limited. And if it’s limited, that can only mean—”

“The Upside Down isn’t natural,” Dustin finishes. He looks up at everyone in turn, eyes widening with realization. “It was created.”

Chapter Text

Tomorrow. They’ll figure it out tomorrow.

That’s what they decide, anyway, after Hopper and El’s revelation, because no one knows what the hell it means and everyone has a headache.

That night, Mike, Will, Nancy, and Jonathan take turns watching Holly as she sleeps (Karen doesn’t need to know). They aren’t sure how it’s going to help, because they can’t protect her from her dreams, and they can’t expect an eight-year-old to stay awake until they figure out how to kill the monster. But they warned her as best as they could: Don’t listen to him. When Henry comes, don’t let him trick you.

All that did was scare the shit out of her.

They just have to hope. They have to hope she can stand her ground against whatever whimsical mindfuckery Vecna brings down on her in her own head that makes her see him as a friend.

Will, however, is having no trouble staying awake at Holly’s bedside. They’d set up a dining chair in there, but he’s on the floor, back pressed against the wall, knees up against his chest with an old quilt thrown over them.

Tomorrow. That was what they decided. But his mind won’t let him wait until tomorrow. His mind is running so fast he can barely keep up.

Dustin had once said the Upside Down was likely down there for thousands of years, maybe the beginning of time, and no one ever questioned that. But now they know: it was created. And Nancy had said that it was stuck in time on the day he went missing, which means it was likely created that same day, right? Except when Will closes his eyes and tries to remember that day, to remember the moment he’d left the Rightside Up for the first time, he comes up blank but for the memory of a feeling: fear, like he’s never felt before. The kind of fear that stops hearts. And then he remembers waking up in a cold, wet, wrong version of Castle Byers, and the long, tedious, agonizing fight for survival that followed.

He never really thought about it before, that gap in his memory where there should have been some transition to the Upside Down, some point of arrival. All this time he just figured he went unconscious the moment he was taken.

He didn't think about how that doesn’t make any sense.

If he passed out, the Demogorgon could have taken him anywhere. And what, it chose to tuck him into his safe space, in the nest of blankets under the patchwork roof of Castle Byers? And then it chose to leave, just to come back to hunt him in the days that followed?

It doesn’t make sense, and he knows it, and the question turns in his mind over and over: How did I get there? How did I get there? How did I get there?

Holly’s stirring snatches him from his thoughts, and he tenses, bracing himself to shoot up from the floor. But she only turns over to face him, still asleep, sighing contentedly as she settles.

He watches her face, washed in the red glow of her nightlight—a colour that reminds him too keenly of Vecna’s mind lair. He tries to reconcile the serenity and childish innocence with that horrible mask, those twitching smiles and flat, painted eyes he’d seen earlier that day.

Is that what he looked like, when it happened to him? Did Mike and Jonathan and his mom look at him sometimes and see that dead-eyed thing reflected back at them?

He shivers, pressing himself tighter against the wall, squeezing his arms around his knees.

Thankfully, Holly doesn’t remember much of her possession, which strikes Will as odd because he remembers—and would never forget—a great deal of his. And it has him thinking: Maybe Vecna is keeping his word. Maybe he’s shielding her from pain, somehow. Maybe he really is just…mentoring her, whatever that means. Teaching her to float tapestry needles with her mind.

And then he shuts that thought down with a grimace and a sick roiling in his gut, because the last thing he needs is to be giving Vecna the benefit of the doubt.

He’s still wide awake when, about an hour later, Holly’s door creaks open, and Nancy pokes her head in. Her eyes are puffy with sleep, and the cloud of dark hair around her pale face is matted in places. She looks beyond tired, though he imagines anyone who ever told her that would get smacked upside the head.

Nancy smiles tightly in greeting. Time for a shift change.

Will pulls himself up from the floor, tailbone aching and spine popping as he stretches. When he and Nancy switch places at the door, she places a hand softly on his arm to stop him.

“Hey, I just wanted to say thank you,” she says, just above a whisper. “For doing this. I know she’s not your sister and you don’t have to…”

Will shakes his head. “Hey, she means a lot to me, too. And it’s the least I can do.”

He didn’t mean for that last part to come out so dark and loaded, but Nancy catches it anyway, and her expression flattens into something serious, determined. She leans forward a bit, her fingers tightening on his arm, her eyes huge and shining in the dark.

“Whatever that bastard is playing at, this isn’t on you. You know that, right?”

Will can’t help the little smile that escapes him, the way she sounds so much like Mike right now.

Or, technically, how much Mike sounds like her.

“Yeah,” he says lightly, and his voice cracks on the lie. He swallows hard, then adds, “Goodnight, Nance.”

Nancy’s lips press together, and he’s practically cringing waiting for her to keep talking, but then all that determination falls from her eyes like a star winking out, and something like exhaustion and disappointment takes its place as she lets him go. “'Night, Will.”

Once Will has made a quick stop to the bathroom—he’s had to pee like a racehorse for the last two hours, but he wasn’t going to risk leaving Holly for a second—he starts heading toward the stairs, until he hears a sound from Mike’s bedroom. His door is open a crack and there’s nothing but faint moonlight coming through, but he recognizes the squeal of the window pane being slid up.

Will glances at his watch. It’s after 3am, and Mike had been on first watch, and he should be sleeping by now.

He teeters at the top of the stairs for a moment, wondering if this is his business.

Then there’s a thud, like something small and heavy falling onto the carpet, and what he thinks is a whispered, “Shit.” Will decides that Mike is up to no good. He pads down the hall to his room and pushes the door open just enough to peek around the doorframe.

In the wash of moonlight, he sees Mike in blue plaid pyjama pants and a white sleeveless tee, his hands braced on the windowsill as he sticks his head out into the night air.

“Mike?” Will says, amusement seeping into his voice because what the hell is he doing?

That ends up being a mistake. Mike jerks up and hits his head on the window pane, hard. Will flinches in sympathy as Mike hisses, a hand clapping the back of his head as he reels back into the room.

“Ow, shit, are you okay?” Will asks, slipping into the room. He keeps his voice low so as to not wake anyone up. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

Mike waves him off, still grimacing. “It’s fine. I’m fine.”

Will moves to the window, lifting his chin to peer outside, but all he sees is the two storey drop to the grass below. “What were you doing?”

“I was just trying to—get some air,” Mike says, his hand falling from his head. It moves to his sternum as he straightens up, a tight, pained look on his moon-pale face. “It’s—fucking hot—hot like hell in here.”

Will’s frown deepens at the stilted, breathless way he’s talking. He takes an unconscious step toward him, then immediately feels cool liquid seeping into his sock. Looking down, he sees the source of the thud he’d heard—a heavy glass of water, overturned. He must have knocked it off the windowsill.

When he looks back up, Mike is curling and uncurling his hands at his sides and looking around the room, less like he’s searching for something and more like he’s trying to look anywhere but at Will.

“Mike, are you okay?” Will says.

Mike nods, eyes still darting around the room. He keeps nodding, faster, like it’s the only thing he can do, and a sound bubbles up and dies in his throat—something like a whimper, something that makes the alarm bells in Will’s head start blaring. Mike wipes his hands down the sides of his pants, and Will notices his fingers trembling. The flyaways in the dark waves of his hair are shaking, too.

“Okay, hey,” Will says, holding up his hands between them like he’s ready to catch him if he falls forward. “What’s going on?”

Mike, his eyes now glued somewhere beyond Will’s shoulder, looks like he takes in a breath through his nose. The fine bones of his throat and the knobs of his collarbones are thrown into sharp relief, and then they just stay there, like he’s stuck on the inhale. And suddenly—

Suddenly Mike looks terrified. His eyes blow wide, dark and glinting in the fuzzy blue light, and he’s frozen on that breath like he’s on the battlefield staring down the maw of a beast instead of standing in his pyjamas in the middle of his bedroom. Then those dark, shining eyes swivel to Will, and his eyebrows come up in an expression like pleading, just before he starts flailing a hand in front of his face.

Will’s stomach swoops with realization.

He knows exactly what this is.

“Oh,” he breathes. “Oh, it’s okay—all right—”

He looks around frantically, stupidly, like he might find something to help him. There’s nothing, of course, and he snaps his eyes back to Mike and hopes he doesn’t look as flustered as he feels.

Mike, still seemingly unable to breathe, backs himself up to the wall next to the window, hard, like he’s trying to knock the breath out of his lungs. It doesn’t work, and Will doesn’t know if it’s right—it’s probably not, it’s probably the opposite of what he should do—but he lurches toward him. He snatches up Mike’s clammy hands at his sides and grips them hard.

“Mike, I’m right here,” he says determinedly. Mike’s eyes lock on him, and Jesus Christ he’s trembling, tears shivering in his eyes. Will adjusts his grip, letting his thumbs skirt soothingly over the tops of Mike’s soft hands. “You can breathe, okay? I promise, you’re just panicking.”

Mike closes his eyes, and those shivering tears skip down his cheeks. His throat spasms and his face twists into an awful grimace. He’s in pain, and Will isn’t doing enough, it’s not enough—

Will lets go of Mike’s hands and lets his hands come up to his face instead, cupping his cheeks. He brushes his thumbs over the wet tracks on his cheekbones, ignoring the fluttering at the back of his skull. 

“Shh,” he whispers, trying to keep his voice even, trying to keep himself together for him. “You’re okay. You’re safe, Mike. Everyone’s okay.”

Mike opens his eyes. They dart back and forth over Will’s face, and maybe Will’s making it up, but he thinks they look the tiniest fraction less anguished and afraid than they had a moment before.

Then Mike gasps. He gasps so hard he folds in half, and Will’s hands snatch away from his face to catch him around the ribs instead. Mike’s face lands in the crook of Will’s neck, and he spasms in his arms as he sucks in another drowning man’s breath. Will holds him tighter, letting his hand slide down his back, over the fabric plastered to the cold sweat on his skin.

“Okay, you’re okay, Mike,” he says again, half trying to convince himself as his heart beats out of his chest. “You’re all right.”

Mike slumps, almost too heavy against him as the tension melts away from his body. He’s no longer gasping—he’s breathing again, a quiet wheeze in his throat as his hot panting breaths send goosebumps spreading across Will’s back. Will closes his eyes and puts everything he has into holding Mike, tethering him to the earth with him. He begins to rub circles between his heaving shoulder blades, and Mike shudders in his arms. 

Will's heart is swelling in his chest, filling with what feels like all the love in the world, the extent of what a person can feel for another person. It’s so full it hurts, fuck it hurts, it hurts that he can’t simply reach inside of Mike and bat away all of the bad feelings, all of the pain, all of the shit he would take into himself in a heartbeat. It hurts that he can’t hold him like this forever, feeling his breathing slow, feeling his heartbeat sync up with his own, knowing he’s safe.

It hurts that it has to end, and end it does. He feels the moment Mike’s thoughts catch up to him, realizing where he is and what he’s doing and who is holding him. He begins to tense up, and Will lets go of him and pulls away before Mike can, smothering the sting that shoots through his heart. He keeps one hand spread over Mike’s bicep as he straightens, steadying him. 

Mike glances at him, then glances just as quickly to the carpet. He takes a deep breath, and on the shaking exhale, breathes the word, “Sorry.”

Will shakes his head. “Seriously, don’t apologize.”

“Yeah, I know, it’s just I’m—” he gestures to himself, head bowed. “I’m all sweaty and…snot, and yeah. Sorry.”

Will doesn’t even dignify that with a response. “Can we—can you come sit on the bed?” He moves his hand from Mike’s arm to his shoulder, gripping it like he means to steer him there if he refuses. “Just, you look kind of…like you need to sit.”

Mike scratches the back of his head, still avoiding Will’s gaze, but he nods. Will leads the way to the end of Mike’s bed, plopping down on it. After a second, Mike drops down next to him and leans forward, letting out a slow, shaky breath. Will has to resist the urge to put a hand on his back again.

“Have you had one of those before?” Will asks softly. “A…panic attack?”

Mike flinches at the term, but seems to catch himself last minute, passing it off as a shrug. “I don’t know what that was. But I’m fine.”

That doesn’t really answer Will’s question. He hesitates a moment. Then, slowly, tentatively, he says: “Mike, it’s okay to not be fine.”

Mike looks at Will, his mouth opening. He looks like he’s got a thousand retorts for this and he’s just deciding which one to go with, but then his mouth snaps shut again, and he gulps. Then he looks away from him, eyes dropping to the floor and says, “This whole thing has been kicking up a lot of old shit, I guess. I don’t know.” 

“Yeah,” Will says. “I get that.”

He does. He’s no stranger to panic attacks. He’s no stranger to thinking everything is over only to be haunted by the past around every corner.

He knows what it’s like to begin to heal, then to have to face his worst nightmare all over again.

There’s a long pause in which Will can feel Mike thinking, can feel him gathering words on his tongue. Then he wets his lips, turning his head just enough to look at Will beneath his lashes. “Will, you’re not going to do something stupid, right?”

Will’s blood spikes in his ears. His mind is reeling back to everything that just happened, to the searing intimacy of it, to the way he rubbed circles on Mike’s back, and he’s so sure, he’s so sure that by something stupid, he means kiss him, or touch him in a wrong way, or otherwise destroy their friendship even further with his stupid fucking feelings.

But then Mike continues, “Whatever he wants with you, you can’t go to him. Because we’re going to figure this out together, as a team, like we always do.”

Oh. Will is suddenly aware of the cold sweat that had pricked up at the back of his neck, and he wipes a hand over it. “Yeah. Yeah, I know.”

Mike shakes his head, his eyes growing wide and desperate. “No, I need to hear you say you won’t do it, okay? Because I can’t—I can’t go through it again. You don’t get—I saw them pull you out of the lake. You seriously can’t understand—“

“I know,” Will says, a little startled at Mike’s sudden desperation. “Mike, I know. I’m sorry. I promise, I’m not going to do anything stupid.”

Mike searches him, his eyes darting all over his face until Will feels like his cheeks are on fire. But whatever Mike finds there, he doesn’t like it. He sighs as he looks away.

“What?” Will asks.

Mike shakes his head again. “You’re just so calm. Like if anyone should be freaking out, it should be you. But you’re just so…you’re so calm, and honestly, Will, that freaks me out.”

Will frowns. “I’m not…I’m not calm. What do you mean?”

“When you told us he was after you, it was like it meant nothing to you. Like it was just a fact. Like you’re not…scared.”

And maybe he isn’t. Maybe he isn’t scared of Vecna, not when it comes to himself. Maybe he feels calm because he finally has the ball in his court. He could give himself up, and it would save Holly.

And, he supposes, that’s exactly Mike’s point. But he doesn’t need to know that.

Will wracks his mind for the right words. “Maybe I just…believe in us. In you.”

Mike frowns. “Me?”

“Yeah, I mean, you kinda tore him a new one even though he could have killed you at any moment. You were tied up and you called him an asshole. And then you stabbed him. In the stomach. With a sword.”

“I—yeah, I remember.”

“I’m just saying it was pretty badass.”

The frown smooths from Mike’s face, and he snorts.

Will grins. “It was.”

“Okay. Shut up,” Mike says knocking his shoulder lightly against Will’s. He’s got his head bowed, but even so, and even in the moonlight, Will can see the blush darkening his face. And despite everything, all Will can think about in that moment is how goddamn elated he is that he can make Mike Wheeler blush.

Which is maybe why he feels a bit daring in the dark and pushes himself to say, lamely and with a grin already breaking over his face: “My knight in shining armour.”

Mike rolls his eyes, but Will can tell he’s biting down on a smile. “Jesus, cut it out.”

Will chuckles. They fall into silence, and for some reason it’s not awkward or uneasy. It settles on them like a blanket around their shoulders.

Then Mike says, “Can I ask you something?”

And Will feels a stir of apprehension, but they’re still shrouded in the bubble of that comfortable silence, and he figures he could offer Mike a bit of vulnerability after what he just witnessed him go through. So he says, “Sure.”

Mike swallows. He looks at Will, a bit of a furrow between his dark eyes, and his voice is barely above a whisper as he asks, “Would you have ever told me? If Vecna hadn’t…you know. Would you have told me eventually?”

He doesn’t have to spell out what he’s talking about.

Now it’s Will’s turn to look away. “No. I don’t think so.”

There’s a long silence that follows this, and Will surprises himself when he realizes he would give anything, anything in that second to know what Mike is thinking. He’s usually happy to be sheltered from his thoughts, to be blissfully unaware of what his best friend thinks about how much of a disaster he is. But now—yeah, he’d never ask for anything again if he could just have this one moment inside Mike Wheeler’s head.

“Would you have at least told me…” Mike continues carefully, “that you…that you, you know. Like boys?”

Will snorts. “I think you probably would’ve figured it out eventually.”

“But you wouldn’t have told me,” Mike says, disappointment flattening his voice. “Did you not…trust me? Did you think I wouldn’t be okay with it?”

Will shifts uncomfortably, scratching at his calf. “It’s kind of complicated, Mike.”

A beat. Then Mike says softly, “Yeah. I guess.”

Something about the moment breaks, making Will feel twitchy. The hour seems to be catching up to him, too, because his eyes feel gritty and sore with sleeplessness. He rubs his hands down his thighs, then gets up from the bed.

“I’m going to get you some more water,” he says, stooping for the glass on the floor. He turns to Mike. “And then I really think you should get some sleep.”

Mike is looking up at him from his spot on the bed, and he looks…sad. He looks sad and small and vulnerable and way too akin to a child that’s just lost their carnival balloon.

One moment. Just one moment inside Mike Wheeler’s head, he would give anything.

Mike nods, resigned, and Will heads to the door.

“Will,” Mike calls roughly when he reaches it.

Will turns, his pulse fluttering. “Yeah?”

“Just…thank you,” he says, fingers curling into the comforter around the edge of the bed. He dips his chin to look at him beneath his lashes, his eyebrows raising earnestly. “Really, thank you.”

His gratitude is an odd thing to receive when Will is the one who is grateful to have been there for him, to have been the one to hold him up.

“Of course,” Will says with a soft smile, and slips out of the room, wondering if Mike knows just how much he would do for him if he asked.

Chapter Text

Will is finally, finally on the verge of sleep when the words come back to him, unbidden, hitting him like a sledgehammer to the solar plexus:

You could build worlds, and they would still see you as weak.

He jolts upright with a sharp intake of breath. His bones ache and his tired eyes sting in the dark, but his mind is running at full speed.

Isn’t it sad how everyone underestimates a steady artist’s hand?

These were the words Vecna had chosen to say to him when he had his brief control over Holly. Had he just been trying to rile him up? Relate to him? Get him to sympathize with him?

Or was there something more to the words? Something—

Something he’d have to have an ego the size of Mars to even consider. But he’s still thinking about that blank spot where he should have remembered his arrival to the Upside Down. He’s still thinking about that wall, about an upside down world frozen in time on the day his world stopped turning.

And so the idea is in him now like a fishhook tugging at the back of his brain. It’s still there when he lies back down and stares at the ceiling, and when his alarm goes off two hours later, and when he pulls himself into clothes and up the stairs and out the door, and while he’s dissociating through the first half of the school day because not even the world falling apart will shut down Hawkins High.

The fishhook is still there when Will joins Mike, Lucas, and Dustin at their table in the cafeteria (sans Max, who is finally getting the cast off her leg). He interrupts what has become a typical conversation for them at 11:45AM on a random Monday:

“How would we start enough fires? One fire isn’t going to spread that far.”

“We could drop a bomb through one of the gates.”

“Where the hell are you going to find a bomb big enough to obliterate a dimension the size of Hawkins? Or are you going to use your fireworks again?”

“Those fireworks saved our lives, I’ll have you remember—“

Mike turns his face up to Will and says, loudly and with a pointed effort to get Lucas and Dustin to shut up, “Hey, Will.”

Will didn't see Mike that morning—he assumed he was running late as usual, or maybe checking in on Holly, or maybe simply avoiding Will after last night. But Will notices he looks better now than he did then. There are still dark hollows under his eyes, probably on account of not going to sleep until 3AM, if at all, but he doesn’t look so haunted and wane; there’s colour in his cheeks standing out against the royal blue of his sweatshirt, his dark curls are charmingly disheveled, and as he looks up at Will, tiny smile lines pool at the corner of his mouth that have him feeling suddenly lightheaded.

Dustin and Lucas pause their banter to mumble in near-unison, “Hey Will.”

Will tears his eyes away from Mike and sets his tray down on the table next to him, taking the empty seat. “Are we talking about blowing up the Upside Down again?”

“Operation Ring of Fire,” Dustin explains. “We know there’s a wall now, and Mike made the point that if it’s a load-bearing wall, it wouldn’t just be keeping things in or out. It could be holding up some kind of ceiling, whatever that looks like.” 

Lucas says, “So we figured if we set the whole wall on fire…”

“The Upside Down could collapse on top of itself,” Dustin finishes.

Will plucks a grape off his lunch tray and pops it in his mouth, shaking his head. “That would take ages. Even if we spread out and splashed gasoline on every inch of it, he would find out what we’re up to and send an army before we could finish. And that’s assuming it has a ceiling, which it might not. It might just go on forever.”

“See?” Dustin says, looking pointedly at Lucas. “That’s what I’ve been saying.”

Up to that point, Will had been turning over his new idea in his head, wondering if he should even bring it up. But as he sits here with his friends, his Party, he realizes that if there’s even the slightest possibility he’s right, they need to know. Not just because he’s going to need them to figure out what the hell it means, but because if he’s right, then he could be a danger to them.

The grape Will had just eaten sours in his stomach. Nerves flutter through him, and he shifts in his seat, pulling his sleeves over his freezing cold hands.

“Look, I…I have a theory,” Will says. “About the Upside Down.”

They all look at him. Will swallows, his mouth going dry under their attention. This is so stupid. He’s probably completely off base, and they’re going to think he’s really lost it this time.

But then Will glances sideways at Mike, and notices his face is starting to pinch, and he’s going to ask him if he’s okay in a second, and Will is going to chicken out if he has to answer that, so he says: “You remember yesterday, we were talking about…superpowers?”

Lucas’s hands hit the table, and he leans forward on his forearms, eyes widening. “Holy shit, did you activate?”

“No. No, it’s just—since we learned about the wall, it got me thinking. I have these…blank spots. About the night I was taken. The biggest one being that I can’t remember anything between standing in my shed with a rifle and waking up in Castle Byers.”

“Hold up,” Dustin says, raising a hand. “Rewind. You had a rifle?”

Will frowns. “Uh, yeah. A monster was chasing me.”

“So you went for the rifle?” Dustin looks ecstatic now, his eyes twinkling and his mouth hanging open with wonder.

Lucas—looking just as surprised, if not as enthusiastic as Dustin—says, “No offence, man, but I just imagined you hiding under the bed.”

“That’s bullshit,” Mike exclaims, and for a moment Will feels his heart fall, before he sees his comment was aimed at Lucas. “Have you even met Mrs. Byers? You think he was raised to hide under the bed?”

“Little baby Byers with a rifle,” Dustin coos, still beaming.

Will rolls his eyes. “Okay, that’s great. Can I get back to my point now?”

Dustin bows his head and holds up a hand in apology, though a smile still plays at his lips.

Will sighs and continues, “I can’t remember being taken or arriving in the Upside Down. And I can’t help thinking about why that is.”

“Maybe it was too traumatic?” Lucas offers. “That’s what psychologists say, right? That your brain can block out traumatic memories to protect you?” 

Before Will can stop himself, he blurts out: “The whole thing was traumatic.”

The words drop like a penny in church, and Will can feel all three of them hold their breath, their eyes bouncing off one another in silent communication. He can’t blame them—he’s never talked about his time down there. They made their assumptions and he let them. They never asked and he never offered. He thinks if they did ask, he would have talked about it. But they just never did.

In any case, the last thing Will wants to do right now is unload about the worst week of his life in the middle of the high school cafeteria, so he shifts in his chair and continues: “I’m just saying, there’s no reason my brain would block out that part and not everything else. Unless it’s not trauma. At least, not psychological trauma.”

Mike frowns at him. “What do you mean?”

“Remember at Starcourt, when El pushed herself too hard and lost her powers? That was like…psychic trauma. What if…what if I did something during that blank spot that pushed me so hard it wiped my memory of it?”

Lucas says slowly, “‘Did something’…like…”

“The Upside Down is a carbon copy of Hawkins, and only Hawkins, on the day I was taken,” Will presses. His next question is a bit of a gamble, but he hopes it’ll make himself feel like less of a lunatic. “Has it seriously never crossed your minds?”

Dustin leans forward, lowering his voice. “You think you created the Upside Down?”

“Not—not consciously, obviously. Look, I know it sounds crazy,” Will stammers, the emphasis on Dustin’s you making his cheeks heat. “But it would make sense, wouldn’t it? And if I did do it, that would’ve taken a lot out of me.”

“No shit.”

“And so it would also make sense that I couldn’t remember it if it did some kind of psychic damage.” 

There’s a beat in which they all consider his words. Mike is the first one to speak, shaking his head. “No. No, you said it yourself back at the radio station: if you had powers, they would’ve manifested by now. We would have seen it.”

Dustin says, “Not necessarily. We know that psychic contact can open portals. It can probably build stuff, too.”

A chill runs through Will. You could build worlds, and they would still see you as weak.

He blinks, trying to focus on Lucas, who’s talking to him. “So maybe you only have powers when Vecna or the Mind Flayer is making contact with you, like he did when you were taken.”

Mike’s leg, the one nearly touching Will’s, has started bouncing under the table. “Even if Will did create the Upside Down, so what? It’s there now, it doesn’t make a difference where it came from.”

“Maybe it does, though,” says Dustin thoughtfully. “If it was psychically brought into existence, it’s possible it could be psychically erased from existence.”

“And that would also explain why Vecna wants Will so bad,” Lucas says, realization dawning in his voice. “If he has the power to destroy it.”

Will glances at Mike in the corner of his eye. He’s gripping a carrot stick in his fist, his thumbnail scratching up and down along the top of it so that orange shavings gather on top of his hand. He’s going to whittle it down to a weapon.

“This is—” Mike shakes his head stubbornly. “This is all just speculation. It doesn’t help.”

“For now,” Will agrees. “But I think I might know a way to know for sure.”

Mike looks at him, forehead creased and mouth pressed into a worried line. Will can’t help his tone coming out slightly apologetic when he says, “El. She can get into my head. Into my memories.”

Mike’s expression wipes clean, eyes shuttering. Then, a cold, flat: “No.”

“Why not?”

“Why not?” Mike repeats, his voice pitched high in disbelief. “Because that could really mess you up, Will! If your mind is blocking the memory, there’s probably a good reason for it.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Mike’s eyebrows shoot up. “Doesn’t matter?”

“This could be the key to everything, Mike. We can’t just write it off.”

“He’s right,” Dustin says, and Mike swivels to face him, mouth open in betrayal. “I’m sorry, Mike, but he is. If it’s true, Will could be the one to end this once and for all.”

Mike’s bouncing leg is about to start an earthquake. Before he can even think about it, Will places a hand on his knee under the table. His leg stills, and he thinks he hears Mike’s breath catch before he turns to look at him again.

At the tension on his face, Will is reminded again of last night, and his heart aches. He squeezes his leg with as much reassurance as he can offer.

“Mike, it’s El,” he says softly. “She’ll be careful.”

A muscle in Mike’s jaw jumps, and his nostrils flare. Then he tosses his sharpened carrot stick onto his tray and leans back in his chair with a sigh. Will takes his hand off his leg, his skin tingling from the contact.

“Fine,” Mike says begrudgingly. “But I want to be there.”

“Of course,” Will agrees.

“That’s settled then,” Dustin says, like they’ve just made plans for dinner and a movie. “Now Mike, stop playing with your food and eat something, for God’s sake.”

He throws a balled up napkin at Mike’s face, and Mike grimaces and shoots him the finger. Will watches him pick up half a sandwich and bite off a tiny corner, chewing like it’s a Herculean task.

Will, with his own stomach balled into knots, can relate.

“What do you mean rabbits?”

Will and Mike are in the back of Jonathan’s car that evening, the passing streetlights illuminating the irritation on Mike’s face in short, orange bursts.

“I don’t know,” Jonathan replies, exasperated. “That’s just what she said: ‘I was working with the rabbits.’” 

Will isn’t surprised that this is all Holly had to say about her dreams last night. They know full well Vecna can manipulate memories, and in this case, he probably took Holly’s away from her once she woke up so she didn’t reveal too much to them.

That doesn't make him feel any better about it.

Mike turns his confusion on Will. “What the hell does that mean?”

Will shrugs. “More Alice in Wonderland stuff? That seems to be the running theme.” 

“Nancy’s trying to get more out of her,” says Jonathan. “But it looks like she just doesn’t remember.”

Mike leans back in his seat with a sigh and closes his eyes. “Why does everything have to be so fucking cryptic?”

Will grimaces sympathetically. “At least she seems okay. Relatively.”

Mike only gives a tiny nod. Will watches the passing lights play on his face, getting sparser and sparser as they drive further out into the fields, and he wishes he could hold his hand.

Jonathan drops them off at the Squawk where Joyce, Hopper, and El are waiting. Will filled El in on their plan through the walkie, making sure Hopper wasn’t in earshot when he did. As far he and Joyce are concerned, the three of them are just visiting, which is plausible since it’s been at least two weeks since they’ve seen El.

The Squawk is one of the only places off-grid enough for them to meet up without attracting military attention, but that doesn’t stop Hopper’s face from looking like the backend of a cat when they walk in. Will knows he’d prefer El stay as far away from Hawkins as possible, but she’s not exactly the most cooperative of daughters, so all he can do is stay by her side with a gun and a growl as she does whatever she wants.

Will beams when he sees El. Her fashion sense hasn’t gotten any better—she looks like she got dressed with her eyes closed this morning—but that only makes him smile wider. She grins right back at him and runs into him, letting him sweep her up into a hug. Her buzzcut has grown out of its fuzzy phase and is now a super short pixie cut.

“Your hair looks nice,” Will says, smoothing a hand over it.

El brings her own hand up as she steps back, smiling. “Joyce told me I look like Mia Farrow. She’s pretty.”

“You look even better than Mia Farrow, I think.”

This makes her light up, and Will’s heart fills with love for her and the easy joy she still radiates even after everything she’s been through.

Then her eyes flick behind Will, and her smile falters just a little, but she catches it. Will steps aside as she says, “Hi, Mike.”

“Hey,” Mike says lightly, taking a few more tentative steps into the room. “Uh, how—how have you been?”

“Good. I am good.”

Mike raises his eyebrows and gestures to Hopper. “Is he giving you enough junk food?”

El grins at this, and her eyes twinkle as she glances at Hopper. “Yes. Last week he showed me Toaster Strudel.”

“Oh, shit,” Mike says, impressed. “That’s hardcore sugar consumption right there.”

“Yes. Very hardcore.”

Will exchanges a glance with his mom, who raises her eyebrows and pushes out her bottom lip as if to say this isn't as awkward as I thought it would be. Because yeah, as far as anyone knows, Mike and El broke up shortly after they arrived back in Hawkins. El told Will she was the one who broke up with Mike, but Mike told him and the rest of the Party that it was mutual. Will wonders if both things can be true at the same time.

El didn’t get into the details with Will, but she did say she felt good about it. Peaceful, was the word she used. And Mike doesn’t talk about it, but he never seemed too broken up about it either, which unsettles Will.

He knows Mike loves—or at least loved—El. He remembers that summer, the words that had burst from him: I love her and I can’t lose her again. He remembers the pizza van, how terrified Mike had been at the idea of losing her. And he has to wonder if Mike's just been keeping on a brave face around them, if he’s actually heartbroken inside and Will, at some point, stopped being able to notice.  

But from what he's seeing right now, they seem to be at least on good terms, and Will isn't about to poke and pry and make things worse.

“So what, are you guys going to babysit us the whole time?” Mike asks, directing this at Joyce and Hopper who have been watching their exchange with identical crossed arms.

“Do you need babysitting?” Joyce asks pointedly.

“We’re just hanging out,” Will lies.

Hopper rolls his eyes. “You can hang out in the basement. We’ll be staying up here.”

He emphasizes his last point by wrapping his hand protectively around the pistol at his hip. 

Will, Mike, and El exchange looks and seem to silently agree that arguing will get them nowhere. They can only hope whatever El is about to do to inside Will’s head won’t cause too much of a ruckus, because Will knows his mom will kill them if she finds out what they’re doing.

The Squawk’s basement is not exactly homey—every inch of it is cold concrete apart from two second-hand leather couches facing one another on either side of a musty area rug. Most of the light panels overhead are broken, and the ones that aren’t cast patchy, fluorescent light on the space, one of them with a headache-inducing flicker. They’d cleared out most of the janitorial junk that was down here before, but the far wall is still cluttered with obsolete radio and office equipment, piled high on a large executive desk.

Among the junk is an old TV, and El heads straight for it.

Mike’s arm brushes Will’s, and he suppresses a shiver. He keeps his voice low as he asks, “Are you sure about this?”

Will swallows hard. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m good. And we should probably...”

El is struggling to get the TV down off the desk, and Mike takes that as his cue to join her. He and El wrestle it onto the ground by one of the couches and plug it in, and the room fills with static.

When they straighten back up, she and Mike catch each other’s eyes. There seems to be a moment of silent communication during which El’s face goes very serious.

“I will be careful,” she says, echoing Will’s words from earlier.

Mike looks far from convinced, but he doesn’t say anything else. He takes a seat on the couch, while El settles on the carpet. She looks up at Will and pats the spot in front of her. He drops down in a cross-legged position, facing her.

“Are you ready?” El asks, looking at him under her lashes.

Nervous butterflies swirl in his belly, making him nauseous. God knows what she’s going to find in his head—and he’s not even thinking about the supernatural stuff. This journey she’s about to take might just change their entire relationship. 

Will nods, tries to keep his voice strong. “Yeah.”

El nods back once, then wraps the blindfold around her eyes, tightening the knot behind her head. Will’s heart is a jackhammer against his ribs. 

“You should close your eyes,” El says.

Will glances up at Mike despite himself. His apprehension must show in his face, because Mike seems to swallow his own discomfort to give Will an encouraging nod.

So Will closes his eyes, and he waits, listening to the white noise of the TV. He waits long enough that he’s about to ask if he should be doing something to speed up the process, when suddenly—

Will gasps, his muscles tensing.

It’s like the feeling of knowing when someone’s eyes are on you, except it’s multiplied tenfold. A chill shoots down his spine, raising every hair on his body. And then he feels something like a tugging sensation, but it’s inside his mind, and it’s like nothing he’s ever felt before. It feels wrong.

He grits his teeth. It’s only El. He knows it’s only El. But he feels some deep, primal defences rising in him. His skin is crawling all over, and his muscles begin to twitch like he wants to buck her off.

“I can feel you,” Will breathes, his voice shaking.

“Try to relax,” El says, and she’s not speaking out loud. The words shoot through his head, not like a thought but not like a sound in his ears either. It makes him flinch. It’s almost worse than when Vecna speaks to him that way, because at least then he knows he’s only reaching out through some sort of psychic tether, whereas it feels like El is literally inside his head.

He doesn’t like this. She doesn’t belong in there. No one belongs in there.

“Will,” El says again, and he can tell she’s keeping her voice soft, but it still feels like rusty nails raking against the walls of his skull, leaving behind a filthy residue. “I keep…slipping. You have to let me in.”

Will takes a deep breath, trying to relax his shaking muscles and slow his racing heart.

He thinks about El, his sister, about how much he loves her, about how he trusts her with his life.

He thinks about his friends, about how their lives depend on what he knows. On him.

As he exhales, Will lets himself melt. He tries to envision his mind unfurling, opening, like a mouth at the end of a long dark tunnel.

Then El says, “Better.”

“What do I do?” Will asks. Or perhaps he just thinks it—he isn’t sure.

“Go back to that day,” El says. “The day he took you.”

And just like that, a memory fills Will’s mind, but it isn’t the usual kind of memory. This one yanks him around the middle and steals him away until suddenly he is no longer sitting on the carpet in the Squawk’s basement, but standing in his shed, staring down the trembling barrel of a gun. He is encased in ice-cold terror the likes of which he’s never known. His breath shutters violently, his knees feel like liquid and the world slips and slides around him, threatening to knock him over.

Then he feels a shift, like a flag raising at the back of his mind, and a hazy, barely-there thought:

El.

His vision begins to black out at the edges, fuzzy darkness eating away toward the centre. He can’t see her, not dead-on, but he feels her in that shed with him. When he thinks about her being there, the terror begins to ebb, numbing slightly. He thinks she’s in his peripheral vision, and if he just turns his head a little—

“Will, stay,” El says, and her voice sounds distant and strained. “Ignore me. Stay here.”

That blackness in his vision is taking over, like black lace stitching over his eyes. He can’t remember why he’s here. Is he really here? Oh God, is it happening again?

“I don’t want to,” Will says, or screams, or thinks.

From behind him, an otherworldly chittering sound. Will’s heart leaps, knocking chills down his spine.

He begins to turn around. His vision pulses black.

Distantly, a voice: It can’t hurt you. It isn’t real.

It is. It is real, and the lightbulb is beginning to shine, brighter and brighter, and the hairs on Will’s arms are lifting, and his stomach bottoms out like the floor has been swept out from under him—

“—ome on!”

Will falls back into his body with a gasp. It’s his real body, his current body, and he’s looking at Mike in front of him, eyes wide and frantic, his fingers digging into his shoulder almost painfully. His other hand is wrapped around El’s shoulder, who has blood trailing from her nose as she fumbles for the blindfold.

Will is panting. His face feels wet, and he’s got the shakes like he’s just run ten miles on pure adrenaline.

“Jesus Christ,” Mike says through a heavy exhale. He falls back, releasing them both as he catches himself on a hand behind him.

El finally gets her blindfold off and looks at Will with wide eyes and an open mouth. Her breathing is a bit heavy, but she seems worlds more collected than Will feels right now.

It was so real. It was like he was back there, feeling everything he felt in that moment. He stills feels it now, that all-consuming fear lingering in his veins like ice. 

Mike is massaging his forehead with his fingers, shaking his head. “This is a bad idea. This is a stupid fucking idea, I told you guys—”

"No," Will says. He takes a deep breath, his heart beginning to slow. “No, I—I want to try again.”

Mike’s eyes snap up to his, looking at him like he’s just grown another head. “What?”

“I need to try again,” Will says firmly. “It was working. I remembered—I remembered something I didn’t before. I never get that far when I just think about it.”

“He’s right,” El says, and they both look at her as her frown deepens. “I could feel something…crumbling.”

Mike’s eyebrows shoot up. “And that’s good?”

El nods. “Yes. I think we can break through next time.”

Mike’s eyebrows have nearly disappeared into his hair now as he looks between them. His voice is too light, bordering on hysterical as he says, “Oh. Okay, great. That’s great. So let’s just keep, what, traumatizing ourselves until something breaks? That’s an amazing plan—”

Will tips forward, running his hands down his sticky, tear-streaked face. He doesn’t know if it’s the emotional toll of what he just did, or if he’s just at the end of his rope, but he’s borderline shouting when he drops his hands and cuts him off with a firm, “Mike.”

It works. The moment Will looks at him, Mike's mouth snaps shut. 

“You know at lunch today,” Will says, “you were the only one not surprised at the idea of me actually defending myself against the Demogorgon?”

Mike’s eyebrows twitch together. “What?”

“Yeah. I don’t think you get how much of a relief it is to know that I have at least one person who doesn’t think I’m completely useless.”

“Will, that wasn’t—”

“Yes, it was. Lucas and Dustin—I know they don’t mean it, Mike, but I know how they see me. They’ve been walking on eggshells around me for years because they think I’m going to break if they say the wrong thing. Jesus, Lucas apologized to me for celebrating Father’s Day just because my dad’s a douche, even though Dustin was right there and his dad isn’t even around. And now you think I can’t handle my own memories.”

“That’s not—”

“They’re my memories, Mike,” Will cuts in, bringing a fist to his own chest. “And if this is the only thing I can do for us, I’m going to do it, even if it sucks.”

“I—” Mike cuts himself off with a small, frustrated noise. He presses his lips together, and looks slightly more demure when he brings his eyes back to Will’s. “It’s not that I don’t think you can handle stuff, Will. I’ve never thought that.”

“I know, and that’s exactly why I’m asking you now to let me do this.”

Mike stares at him with dark, worried eyes, swallowing hard. Will has to force himself to hold his gaze even though it's lighting him on fire from the inside, heat creeping up his neck and pulsing in his ears. 

When Mike finally looks away, he sighs and pulls himself up from the floor. Will waits for him to sit back down on the couch, but he starts pacing instead. 

Then El, who Will is ashamed to admit he forgot was even there, says to Mike: “You don’t have to watch.”

Mike pauses, blinking down at her. “What?”

“You don’t like to watch him hurting,” El says. “So you don’t have to. You can go upstairs.”

Mike’s face turns bright pink. “That’s not—I didn’t—I’m fine. I’m staying.”

With that, Mike drops back down on the couch, scratching the back of his neck as he avoids their eyes. Will shoots a glance at El under his lashes, and she smirks back at him. He supposes she is well-versed in the art of getting Mike Wheeler to shut up.

El takes up the blindfold again and raises her eyebrows at him. “Ready?”

Will straightens, steels himself. He’s going to do this—he’s going to remember. Even if it kills him.

“Ready.”

Chapter Text

The memory is the same; the rifle, the trembling, the ice-cold terror, the overwhelming desire to flee warring with his inability to move.

Stay. Stay, Will.

El. He fights against the black lace pulling over his vision again. He tries to ground himself in that mind-numbing fear until the presence of El and his older, current self dissolves from the back of his mind, and the blackness ebbs.

He’s in it now. He turns around, and the lightbulb glows brighter and brighter.

Then the world drops out from under him.

Will is plunging to his death. He thinks his heart has stopped, but he’s still falling blindly, and flashbulb faces flare at the back of his mind—Mike, mom, Jonathan, Mike, mom, Jonathan—because he wants to see them again, he doesn’t want to die, he needs them to help him, help him, please please please—

He doesn’t land, but the falling stops. He materializes in one of the vinyl chairs at the kitchen table of his old house. He raises his eyes from the plate of chicken nuggets and crinkly fries in front of him. His mom and dad are facing off in the corner by the fridge.

“—came all the way the fuck out here now you’re saying I can’t take him?”

“Not when you’re drunk, Lonnie! You think I’m gonna let you drive drunk with my kid in the backseat?”

“That kid?” Lonnie flings an arm out toward Will sitting at the table, his pointer finger wavering. “That’s my kid too. And that kid needs his dad before he starts walking around in his mom’s old prom dresses—”

“For God’s sake,” Joyce rolls her eyes, her arms slapping down at her sides. “He’s six, Lonnie. He’s six.”

“He’s six and all he does is stare at men in tights and draw faggy little pictures of faggy little fairy tales,” he stumbles over to the fridge and rips down one of the latest drawings Will had done for his mom. “What is this? Fucking rainbow unicorn confetti bullshit—”

He flings the drawing at Joyce, making her flinch. It drifts to floor and slides somewhere under the oven. Will feels a dagger driving into his heart.

Joyce grits her teeth, pinning him with murder in her eyes. “Get out of here, Lonnie. I mean it. You’re not taking him tonight.”

“I don’t wanna go,” Will blurts out, peeling his eyes away from where his drawing had disappeared.

His parents turn to look at him in unison, and his heart jumps into his throat.

Lonnie scoffs, his mouth gaping into a grin. “What’d you say, little shit?”

Will’s vision blurs with tears. He can’t bring himself to answer his dad, so he looks at his mom instead, pleading. “I—I don’t wanna go with him.”

“Hey, you look at me when I talk to you.” Lonnie steps toward him, his eyes bloodshot. “You think you got a choice?”

Suddenly, the thought of going with him, even just for a couple of days, feels like a death sentence. It feels like he’s never going to see his mom again if he goes, and the thought fills him with terror. Before he knows it, he’s springing up from his chair and running toward his room.

He hears his dad laugh, mutter something. Then the floorboards creak, and there’s a shuffle.

“Hey, just leave him alone!”

Will shuts himself in his closet, his heart pounding in his chest.

From somewhere in the hall, his dad growls: “Get off me.” There’s the sound of a body hitting the wall, the pained oof of the air leaving his mother’s lungs. Will whimpers and claps his hands over his ears, sliding down the back of the closet.

Help me, he thinks, and he doesn’t know who he’s asking. Help me help me help me—

He's in the field. The shadow towers over him, swelling. A screeching like nails on a chalkboard fills the air.

“Go. Away.”

It has no eyes, but he can feel it staring down at him. Its shadowy legs come up from the ground like columns of black, swirling smoke, but it isn’t smoke—

“Go. Away! Go. Away! Go away! Go away!”

Its legs converge into a swarm and touchdown. A tremor runs through the earth, and he is plunged into darkness as a tornado blows around him, surrounding him.

He can’t breathe. He is frozen and filling with horror. It’s inside him now, it’s choking him—

Help me. Help me help me help me—

Fire. Fire all over. Every nerve in agony, every square inch of flesh like a salted open wound. He hears nothing above his own screaming until:

“Will? Where does it hurt?”

He tries to form words, tries to tell them it’s all over, it’s—

“Where’s it hurt the most, Will?”

E V E R Y W H E R E

Did he say it out loud? Is anyone hearing him? His throat is tearing out of him so why won’t it stop?

Mike. He wants Mike. Mike will fix him, Mike will end it—

Help me. Help me help me help me—

He’s standing outside Mike Wheeler’s house, rain pelting down around him, heart crumbling in his chest. He feels like a Jenga tower on its last legs, pieces of him having been plucked away one by one for weeks, months, until the final blow: 

“It’s not my fault you don’t like girls!”

The tower collapses. The fatal flaw, the fundamental wrongness of him, out there in plain spoken language from the mouth of the one person who was never supposed to care.

He’s lost him. He’s lost that, whatever they had that made him feel invincible at Mike Wheeler’s side. And now he has no one. He has no one.

He is an idiot for thinking it could have gone any other way.

Help me. Help me help me help me—

All he sees now is red. Red rock soaked in red mud, red vapour misting over once-white sneakers, red creepers coiling, snake-like, around his ankles.

The dread. The chime of the clock. The cold, slimy tendrils around his limbs.

Mike, unconscious just a few feet away from him, vines as thick as Will’s wrists wrapping around his neck.

“No,” Will breathes, and this time it isn’t only his memory-self that says it, but his real, current self. Because he doesn’t want to be back here. This is too much, this is too far. He’s not reliving this one, never again.

El. El can’t see this. El can never, ever see this.

Get out, he says to her, wherever she is. Get out of here.

That vignette returns to his vision, the black lace eating away toward the centre.

Get out!

Will’s vision pulses black, and then there’s a sensation like being lassoed around the stomach, and the scene shifts like he’s jumped forward in time. Mike, concern in his eyes as he says: “Will, what…? Just tell me, okay? Just tell me whatever, and then we’ll kick this fucker’s ass from here to the edge of the Upside Down, all right? It’ll be okay.”

In the memory, Vecna is standing at his side, just out of his peripheral vision. He can feel him there now, but he feels another presence too, on his other side. He feels El.

Thunder rumbles.

No. No, no, no, help me—

His mouth opens to form the words.

Help me. Help me help me help me help me help me help me help me—

He is free-falling again, but this time it is through memories he had forgotten, each one flashing before his eyes in short, sharp bursts of sense and feeling:

a sliver of light splitting the darkness of the closet; shattering glass; his too-loud heartbeat; a TV remote hurtling toward his head; an ear-splitting bang; a wet warmth running down his leg; white-hot shame; a dent in the wall behind him; faggot; shiny, wet boys wrestling in the pool; a hot, spreading feeling in his lower belly; a backhand; the taste of blood; fucking fairy; Troy’s laughter; covers over his head; the smell of old cigarettes; great heaving sobs; a headache splitting down his skull; dreams of Mike’s mouth; gasping awake; queer; Ted Wheeler’s accusatory eyes; lying on his back under blue-grey-black; a beast’s maw like a lotus; fingers stroking his hair; do you remember the first day that we met?; a hot poker in his side—

Will's eyes fly open. He’s in the Squawk’s basement, but he’s no longer sitting. He’s standing in the centre of the room, and for a moment he doesn’t understand what he’s looking at, partly because it doesn’t make any sense, and partly because there is something humming through his bones that is making him feel detached from reality, like he’s hovering between planes of existence.

So he can’t be sure if it’s real, the sight of El huddled against the wall before him, pale as ash, sweat shining on her brow, two twin trails of blood running from her nostrils. He can’t be sure if it’s really Mike standing before her, arms thrown out to shield her, his face ghostly white and drawn with horror.

Will follows Mike’s wide-eyed gaze to the thing standing between them. For a moment he thinks it’s a demodog, before he sees that it’s made of shadow. A living shadow, swarming in the shape of a demodog. Its back is to Will, and its face—a shadowy maw, furling and unfurling—is directed at Mike and El. Its legs are bent and its back arched, like it’s about to pounce. It emits a strange warbling sound, both animalistic and alien. 

He doesn’t need to look to know there are two more flanking him. He feels them there, pent up with the desire to attack. To protect. 

He knows, in a cold, detached way, that he should be panicking. But all he feels is that heady rush of energy thrumming through him, swirling in time with the shadow monsters.

They are extensions of him. They are waiting for his command.

It’s a power he’s never felt before, like clinging onto a live wire. But it’s also a calm he’s never known—no panic, no fear, no emotion whatsoever as he looks on at the horrified faces of his friends, not remembering now how it feels to love them.

He feels free.

“Wi—Will,” Mike breathes. His eyes are watering. He swallows hard and spreads a hand over his own chest. “Will, it’s us. It’s Mike—Mike and El. Your sister, El. She didn’t mean to…she didn’t mean…whatever this is, this isn’t you. Okay? This isn’t you.”

But it is him. This is all him. There is nothing controlling him now. He is the one controlling.

“Will,” El says, barely above a whisper. She looks about ready to collapse, but her eyes stay locked on him as she sways. She grips the back of Mike’s shirt to steady herself, then closes her eyes. She’s going to do it again. She’s going to go in there again.

“Don’t,” Will snaps, just in time with the snapping jaws of the shadow dogs. El’s eyes fly open as she and Mike flinch backward. The dogs chitter hungrily, but they stay where they are.

Will doesn’t even know what they would do to them. What damage can a shadow do? Would they devour them? Would they go inside them, invade them, like the Mind Flayer did to him? He is aware of the horror that should be there at the clinical, detached way he’s able to think about this, but he can’t muster it. He feels empty but for the storm of power still raging through his whole being.

The sound of the basement door opening turns everyone’s heads—shadow dogs included—toward the stairs.

“Kids?” Joyce calls down.

No one answers, and it’s not long after that that she and Hopper are barrelling down the stairs, Hopper with his gun already raised. His face pales as he spots the shadow dogs, and his eyes widen when he spots his daughter, sickly pale and bleeding against the wall.

“What is this?” Hopper asks darkly, aiming his gun at the foremost shadow dog. He hesitates, probably realizing a bullet will just pass right through and ricochet off the concrete.

Joyce’s face is dawning with confusion and alarm as she looks at him. “Will?”

His mother. There’s nothing in him when he looks at her, either. Every feeling, every memory is tamped down by shadow.

“Don’t worry,” El says, drawing Will’s attention back to her. There’s a mix of anger and determination on her face as she says, “I’m going to fix this.”

She closes her eyes. The shadow dogs screech as alarm flares at the back of Will’s head, but this power of his is new and unwieldy, and she’s been doing this for too long. She’s too quick for him, and a memory flares before he can stop it.

He doesn’t fall into it like before, but it’s vivid and strong, like a film superimposed over the real world.

Castle Byers, 1979. The evening sunlight spilling between the logs. One of the beams warms his arm and casts a long strip of yellow over the sketchbook spread across his lap. His red crayon is down to a nub. He’s nearly finished the drawing: a red sleeping dragon curled up in front of a rocky mountain. It’s a good dragon—it protects Will the Wise as he sleeps in the cave behind him.

On the other side of the fort, Mike is standing, making blast noises with his mouth as his Boba Fett and Xenomorph action figures clash together in mid-air. He and Will haven’t spoken a word to each other in nearly 20 minutes, because they don’t have to. They’re in their own worlds, but they’re together, and Will’s chest is warm and sparkling and he can’t stop smiling because this is his friend. This is his friend, in his fort, choosing to spend his time with him even though he’s so nice and he has that big house and all those cool toys and he really doesn’t need to stick around.

This is happiness. This is a degree of happiness he hasn’t felt in a long time, the kind that makes him feel light enough to float off the ground and into the sky. The kind that makes him feel like he’ll never be sad again.

The feeling fills him up, and something inside him snaps back into place. Will—the current, real Will—blinks, and his vision clears as tears skip down his face.

All at once, the shadow dogs dissolve into particles, and the particles dissolve into dust, and the dust scatters until there’s nothing left.

There’s a feeling like someone’s pulled the plug on Will, every last vestige of his energy leaving him in one fell swoop. The aftershock gives him enough strength to lift his head, to zero in on his best friend, on the love of his life still standing dumbstruck before him, and say:

“Mike?”

A question. A plea. An apology. The last thing he says before everything gets too heavy, and Will’s legs give out from under him.