Chapter Text
Of his many, many childhood memories of Jonathan, he comes back to the making of Castle Byers most often.
The original drawing had come about many weeks prior, the idea striking him late one night, lightning in a bottle. He’d spent the entirety of the following day in a crazed frenzy, fueled by a visceral need to see the vision come to life. Every colour in the box, every technique in his arsenal. Every object of his dreams and every last drop of his creative energy – thus was born Castle Byers, glorious and all in a day’s work.
“D’you know what?” Jonathan had said. “This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.”
It meant that bit much more, coming from the coolest person in the world.
Little things each time, different things each time. The weather, stormy and blue-black-grey, screaming and scary. The television, blaring into the void, being watched by nobody at all. Will, unsure of everything, and Jonathan, determined to change that. Dad, yelling at him for being in the way between him and the door, and Jonathan, not yelling at him for letting the hammer slip to the mud for the seventeenth time. Will, easily satisfied, and Jonathan, refusing to compromise the original blueprint on his behalf.
“About this tall?”
“Um. Yeah—um, yeah, that’s fine.”
“You can tell me if I’m doing it wrong.”
“You’re not.”
“But—?”
“Uh—we don’t have to, but can it be a bit taller?”
And so it was.
How dark it was, how dark and wet, how they huddled together behind the beam of their one flashlight, how Jonathan held onto the back of his jacket and the possibility that he would let go never even crossed Will’s mind. How a new problem popped up to test their patience every few minutes, and how Jonathan had a solution up his sleeve for each and every one.
Jonathan always had solutions. Mom had reassurances, apologies, soft words and secure arms, and Jonathan had solutions. Mom’s hands were warm when they cupped his cheeks to wipe away his tears. Jonathan’s hands were cool when they settled on his shoulders to steer him into his room, to whisk him away to an imaginary world of musicians, of artists and writers, one that made him forget why he was crying in the first place.
“I wanna listen to that one.”
“Which one?”
“You know the one!”
“Again?”
Darling, you gotta let me know. Mike called it strange, and Will knew it was. That’s why he liked it. Should I stay or should I go?
He missed his friends when he was at home, so Jonathan talked Mom into getting him a walkie-talkie. He wanted to get to Mike’s right now to tell him something vitally important, so Jonathan biked him there. He wanted to go on his own, a couple of years later, so Jonathan taught him how to do that, too.
Dad left discomfort in his wake, his absence and his aftertaste permeating each corner of their home, slowly seeping away at its safety. So – Jonathan built him a home away from home, the true culmination of all his solutions.
And then he handed him the key.
“You should come up with a password.”
“A password?”
“Y’know, for safety. So that only people that you really trust can come inside.”
“Like you?”
“Like Mom, like Mike and Lucas. And like me.”
“Will you help?”
“If you hadn’t figured it out by now,” Jonathan says, mischief in his eyes. “Your wish is my command.”
He has the Dad conversation twice, once the dust has settled. Once with Mom and once with Jonathan, morning and evening of the very same day.
Mom asks him if he has any questions. He stares at her. He has too many. He doesn’t know where to start. He asks her if she’s okay.
“I’ll be fine,” she says, smiling and sparkling and almost-but-not-quite-crying. “We’ll be fine.”
She tells him things are going to be a little different around the house, but that they’ll be fine. She tells him it’s normal to feel confused or scared about the whole thing, but they’ll be fine. She tells him that this is a fresh start, the beginning of a better life for all of them, one in which they would be fine. Good. Great, even.
He asks her if Dad will get to be a part of this life. Probably not on a day-to-day basis, she says, apologetic but unwilling to budge. To what extent, then?
“I don’t exactly know, honey,” she admits, kernels of bitterness leaking through her tone. “It depends on him, I suppose.”
That part scares him. It’s something he knows to be true without question, with no particular memory of learning it from anywhere. A fact of his universe, perfectly consistent across time and space. Mom hugs him when he gets upset, Jonathan lets him have both their shares of candy each Halloween, and Dad—
Dad doesn’t like him very much. It depends on Dad how much Dad wants to see him, and Dad doesn’t like him very much. Two plus two equals four minus four equals zero.
It’s the frontmost thought in his head when he corners Jonathan later in the day. He’s in his room, tinkering with something or the other on the bed, when Will walks in and gets right into it.
“D’you think Dad will come visit?”
Jonathan’s head shoots up, taken by surprise. He recovers, just a little too quickly. “I don’t know. Do you want him to?”
An innocuous enough question, on the surface, but they both know what he’s really asking. Because Dad is his dad and Will loves him because he’s supposed to, but Dad also has a bunch of other, more prominent personalities. More often, Dad is the guy who shouts at Mom (and scorns her, and demeans her, all in the same breath) and makes her cry. Dad is the guy who thinks all of Will’s favourite things about Jonathan are actually things he needs to work on and overcome. Dad is the guy who broke his brand new—
Well, that was an accident. He was sorry about it.
Still. Does he want Dad to visit?
“I don’t know,” Will echoes. “Mom says that he’s supposed to.”
He wants Dad to want to visit, he supposes.
“Yeah,” Jonathan says, patting the mattress beside him for Will to come over. “But, uh, you know how Dad is.”
On the topic of liking and loving – Jonathan doesn’t like Dad. Will’s pretty sure Jonathan doesn’t love him either, and if he does, he doesn’t like the fact that he does. He tries to hide it, for the most part, but then he goes and says Dad like the word gets stuck in his throat, prickly and uncomfortable and too big to swallow around, and his feelings on the matter become crystal clear for anyone with eyes to see.
“Maybe we could go visit him,” he says, knowing what’s coming and compelled by an unknown force to provoke the reaction, still.
“Maybe,” Jonathan manages, and there it is, the tightness in the voice, the stilling of the hands, the bowing down of the head. He feels bad for causing it. “If you want.”
“Do you know where he went?”
“No. Mom says he’ll probably go back to the city, though.”
“Is that far?”
Jonathan smiles, still not looking at him. “You think Dustin’s house is far.”
“Because it is!”
“Well, this is the distance to Dustin’s house times a hundred.”
That feels like a lot of effort to put into visiting the guy who shouts at Mom and makes her cry, who thinks all of Will’s favourite things about Jonathan are actually things he needs to work on and overcome. But Miss Potts says you do for family, so maybe he should just suck it up. (Dad says suck it up. Used to say, that is.)
“Do you want to visit him?” he asks Jonathan.
“Uh.” He stalls, lacing his fingers together and pressing them hard over his eyes. “No, can’t say that I do.”
Also on the topic of liking and loving – Dad likes Jonathan more than Will. He never says (said?) it, of course, and Will never says it either, but anyone can tell. Dad thinks Jonathan does everything the wrong way, but he takes it upon himself to demonstrate the right way to him. Dad thinks Will does everything the wrong way, too, but the most he does about that is blame Mom for it.
“He won’t want to see me if I go alone.”
Jonathan looks at him then, all serious, soulful eyes. “But you won’t be alone.”
“You said you didn’t want to see him.”
“Who says I’ll be going for him?” Jonathan says, hints of a smile manifesting. “I’ll be going to spend time with you.”
“But will Dad—”
“Will, hey, just forget about him for a second, okay?” he says, pivoting back to serious again. “Who cares what he thinks? He has no idea what he’s missing out on.”
He finds, just for this moment, that forgetting is surprisingly easy.
Sometimes, Jonathan falls asleep in Will’s room.
It doesn’t happen often. More often than not, it happens the other way around. At midnight, deep into the night, in the early hours of the morning, just before the alarm clocks go off. The defining quality of Jonathan’s room is that the door is always open.
But, sometimes, it goes like this.
He turns off the TV some time past ten at Jonathan’s reminder. He turns in for the night, Tolkien in hand and bedside lamp on, nowhere near done. He makes his way through twenty pages, twenty-five, thirty, progressively enraptured, on the verge of losing awareness of his surroundings. Then, Jonathan knocks softly on the half-open door.
“Minute of your time?”
“Yeah, okay,” he agrees through a laugh.
“Well, move over, then.”
Will does. Jonathan stretches out over the covers on his side, propping himself up on his elbow. He traces the pattern on the bedsheet with his finger.
“So, tomorrow.”
Will sets his book down dutifully, his place in it still intact. “Uh-huh.”
“You’re at Mike’s after school?”
“Yeah.”
“But you’re home for dinner?”
“That’s the plan,” Will says. “Unless—”
“No, that’s fine. My shift is late tomorrow but I think Mom’s gonna be home early so you guys can eat together.”
One of many possible configurations. I’m working late, but Mom will be there, said with the subtlest sigh. Mom’s working late, but I’ll be there, said like a co-conspirator. We’re both working late, so keep the door locked, okay? said with a bad attempt at concealing his concern. Oh, you’re gonna stay at Mike’s? That’s great, buddy, said with a hint of relief. Problem solved, for now, onto the next thing on the docket.
(All too rarely, the solution is blissfully simple. I think we’re both going to be home tomorrow.)
Will nods his head. It’s important, and not particularly difficult, to set Jonathan’s mind at ease about this. “O-kay.”
“Okay,” Jonathan says, relaxing immediately (Will notes with satisfaction), and that signals the end of the conversation. More than a minute, less than five. But Jonathan stays for longer than that, usually, silent and still, struggling against the inertia of rest.
And ten more minutes go by, and something occurs to Will. And he asks out loud, “Does Mom know you’re gonna work late?”
And he’s met with silence, because Jonathan has conked out by this point, right on top of the covers with his head pillowed on his arm. And Will knows he’s going to startle awake at the slightest movement, disoriented and doubly self-flagellating. So he tries his best not to move at all, and he reads another ten, fifteen, twenty pages.
(Once – only once, from what he can remember – Jonathan fell asleep around the time he was supposed to make dinner. And he stayed asleep through Will’s convoluted attempt at retrieving and heating up last night’s leftovers. And everything turned out fine, and Will had his fun with the whole thing, if he may say so himself, but none of that meant he could prevent Jonathan from eventually waking up and apologizing about a million times. Sometimes, that is how it goes, and all he can do is threaten silent treatment if he hears the word sorry one more time.)
Will reaches over him to turn out the light soon after, and he never finds out what exactly happens next because Jonathan is always gone in the morning. Well, gone in the sense that he’s up and about, leaning over him to nudge him awake.
So, not really gone.
He hears Jonathan cry across the boundary between worlds. He hears him cry, and there’s nothing he can do about it.
I’m here, he screams. Jonathan ignores him. I’m alive. I’m right next to you. Jonathan ignores him.
Will curls into himself on the rotted, slithery bed, and continues mumbling their song.
He supposes one of them had to find out about the supernatural slugs at some point. Fifty-fifty odds. If he’s being honest, he’d rather have it be Jonathan, anyway.
“You can’t tell Mom,” is the first thing out of his mouth, five minutes after they finish clean-up in the sink, queasiness not completely dissipated.
“We can talk about that later,” Jonathan says, and it sounds like it’s taking him a great effort to force those particular words out. “Do you feel better?”
“Sure,” he replies, tongue reeling from the metallic sourness still coating his teeth. Not really.
Jonathan gets that look in his eyes, the one that’s intent and intense in equal measure, half-desperate around the corners. He trains that gaze on Will, silently pleading, and Will can’t not succumb to it, least of all in this state.
It’s automatic, the correction. “Not really.”
Jonathan’s hand hasn’t left the back of his neck this entire time, fingers threading in and out of his hair. It grinds to a stop now, though, panic swiftly taking over, and in his rush to make amends, Will ends up saying, “It’s no big deal, it usually takes a while.”
He curses himself inwardly as the doomed silence falls, seemingly so long when it probably is not. So much for playing it cool.
“Will,” Jonathan says finally, teetering on the edge of something. “Has this happened before?”
Finding no better alternative, he squirms in place. “Like, once, maybe?”
Running a hand through his hair, Jonathan smiles without humour. “Sure, bud.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“Don’t do that,” he says. “And don’t pretend like I can’t tell when you lie to me.”
One more hour. If only he’d kept it down for one more hour, Jonathan would have been well out of the house and Pandora’s box would have remained firmly shut. It would have tapered off on its own at some point, anyway, he’s sure of it, and they could all have gotten through it without losing sleep.
Jonathan’s problem (inherited from Mom) is that he can’t ever keep it casual. Everything he says, everything he does, has to be put under the microscope, has to be examined and picked apart piece by piece. Not in a judgemental way, granted, but resulting in a similar kind of nervous anticipation riding on whether he’s passed or failed, caused or successfully avoided adding to his stress. Or Mom’s.
And he’s back at square one.
“You can’t tell Mom.”
He’d rather it be Jonathan, because Jonathan can be coerced. He’d rather it be Jonathan, because Jonathan cares too much about his opinion to enforce his own. Mom would have driven them all back to the Lab by now.
Jonathan sighs. “What do you think will happen if we tell Mom?”
“She’ll nag, just like you are.”
“I’m nagging?” Jonathan doesn’t shout, ever, but his voice gets all jagged and frustrated like this sometimes. Full of frenetic energy, like he’ll get up and begin pacing any second. “You’re throwing up things that move, Will!”
“I know that,” he snaps. “Don’t you think I know that?”
“I’m sorry.” Jonathan cools down five times as fast (and with twice as much sincerity) as he flares up. “Of course you do. I just meant that this isn’t something we can just ignore.”
“Why not?”
“It’s hurting you, for one.”
“Not that much.”
“However much it is,” Jonathan insists. “The doctors said they’d handle this stuff if it came up, didn’t they?”
The doctors said it. The doctors from Hawkins Lab, the worst place in the world, the site of half of his nightmares. They’d drive there, a terse, tense, tired trio, strung up too tight, and then some lady would tell them to wait on the couch till someone could be with them. Mom would pull him into her side, reassure herself under the guise of reassuring him. (Jonathan would bite his nails.) Then the white coats would appear in his periphery, lead him down the hallway. They’d take one look at him and turn to Mom. In solemn voices, they’d confirm and acknowledge the inevitable truth. Mrs. Byers, they’d say. We’re very sorry, but there’s something very wrong here.
He's beyond our help.
“Hey, I won’t tell Mom without your permission,” Jonathan says. “I promise.”
He looks down. “Okay.”
“But will you just hear me out?”
He nods.
“I know you don’t want her to worry,” he starts. “But I really do think it’ll help if you give her, like, a target to focus on.”
“What?”
“She’s worried all the time already, about everything. I’m just saying, if you tell her some of the details, maybe she’ll worry about just this one thing and maybe we can even figure something out.”
“At the Lab?” he can’t stop himself from asking. He’s following his logic so far, except for this very end bit which plummets into the bad and the ugly. “I don’t wanna go there, Jonathan.”
“We don’t have to think about that right now,” Jonathan says. “Small steps.”
He breathes in, breathes out. The bitter-sour taste in his mouth has subsided. Small steps, Jonathan says, and suddenly, his world shrinks down to something surmountable, one foot in front of the other.
“There’s something I need to tell you, Mom?”
Jonathan smiles. “That’s a good start.”
“Don’t be mad, please?”
“She won’t be,” he assures. “I promise you that, too.”
“For real?”
“Have I ever made you a promise I didn’t keep?”
Will shoves him, feeling the corners of his mouth tick up. “Guess not.”
There’s not a lot of time for thinking, amidst now-memories and then-memories, burning patches of hot and cold, hands on him, needles on him, vines on him. Everything, everywhere, all at once, terrifying in its rapidity.
Pools of darkness alternate with snatches of Mom and Mike and their big, scared eyes, of many others that he doesn’t—can’t—recognize. And he wonders, in short, desperate bursts, where Jonathan is.
Half-lucid, an answer floats up to the surface, one he can’t stand, one he dispels before it even fully forms. There’s no way he wouldn’t recognize Jonathan. Right?
There’s no way.
Mom comes home from work one evening, and he feels something shift in the air immediately. She’s unsteady on her feet, faulty in her ability to maintain eye contact with him, barely able to hold herself up. Sparing him a glance, a cursory kiss on the head and an offhand comment to not wait for her at dinner, she sways and staggers to her room, door closing behind her, not loud but not casual.
His thoughts go, inevitably and intensely, to the one place they’re not supposed to. It could be a million different things, of course, could be as something as simple as a bad day at work, but he waits—for twenty minutes, forty-five, an hour, and she doesn’t emerge. He listens outside her door with a weird unease lingering in his chest, and he thinks he hears things that confirm the worst. His eyes wander, from unlocked door handle to drawing pinned to refrigerator to telephone.
He calls the Wheeler residence.
“Hello?”
It’s Mike, as loud and excited as always. “Oh, hey, Mike.”
“Will! What’s up?”
“Is, um.” He chews on his bottom lip. “Is Jonathan still there?”
“I’m not sure,” Mike says, and his heart sinks. “Should I go check?”
“Yeah, uh—could you?”
“Is everything alright?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Will says on autopilot, more to prevent Mike from working himself up than anything. “Could you go check once?”
The click of the receiver being placed somewhere answers him, followed by furious, pounding footsteps. Looking towards Mom’s door, he taps his own foot in a repetitive, mounting rhythm on the floor till a different voice comes through.
“Hey,” Jonathan says, and then, again: “What’s up?”
“When will you be home?” he blurts.
“Uh,” comes the response. “In a bit, why?”
He tries for unaffected but it comes out more defensive. “No reason.”
“There’s gotta be some reason, no?”
“I just wanted to know whether you were gonna eat here or there.”
“Did something happen?”
“No,” he says, for once and for all. “Have fun with Nancy.”
Fifteen minutes later, he spots Jonathan’s car pulling up in the driveway. He kind of already figured. Easier thing to imply and infer than to say, at the end of the day. Mom’s sad, come fix it. When the door opens, he points Jonathan in the direction of her bedroom, wordlessly hands over the reins. Doesn’t bother waiting around for whatever expression passes over his face, doesn’t bother trying to listen in on the resulting push-and-pull.
What he knows: that he spends an undefined amount of time in his room thinking in circles about last Halloween, feeling decidedly guilty, decidedly unhelpful, decidedly bad. That he sits up straight, startled, when Jonathan knocks on his door a further fifteen minutes later, that he relaxes halfway when he sits cross-legged at his feet, right there on the floor.
“She’s gonna be okay,” he whispers, leaving out the when and where and how. “She just wants to be left alone for a bit.”
Will stares at his hands, folded in his lap. “’Kay.”
Jonathan inches closer, searches his eyes out. “Did you get scared?”
“No,” he mutters. Untrue. Not to mention, humiliating.
“Okay,” Jonathan says. He sighs, rests his head against the frame of the bed. “Good for you. I know I did, the first couple times.”
The first couple times happened eons ago, before the monsters and ghosts, just after Dad left. Will was scared, too, but only really because Jonathan was scared and hadn’t learnt to hide it yet. The pattern wasn’t obvious, back then. They didn’t know if she’d ever be back. She was, though, eventually. She always, always is, eventually.
He’s not scared. Scared paints him too much a victim of the circumstances, an innocent bystander who just so happened to get caught in the middle. Scared indicates a certain naivety, an ignorance, a blameless, faultless state of being. Poor, poor, little Will Byers. No, scared is too generous a descriptor when—
“It’s because of Bob, isn’t it?” He looks at Jonathan now, ready to stomach any possible resentment. Hungry for it, in fact. “It’s because of me.”
Jonathan’s face doesn’t change, other than the initial flash of shock that sparks up and dies out. His hand finds Will’s knee. Slowly, he asks, “Did she say that to you?”
He jerks Jonathan’s hand away. Wetness springs up in his eyes, a disloyal ambush. “Does she have to? It’s obvious she’s all messed up about him.”
“That may be true,” Jonathan starts. “But it has nothing to do with you.”
“Oh, it has nothing to do with me, huh?” He scoffs. “Tell me why he was in that lab in the first place, Jonathan. Tell me who he was there for.”
“C’mon.”
“Tell me who he gave his life for.”
“Okay, whoa, let’s just—”
“No, let’s not calm down or take deep breaths or whatever it is you’re about to say.” He feels the voice crack coming before it arrives, refuses to let it deter him. “I mean, technically, just the fact that the Mind Flayer was even able to control those things in our world can be traced back to—”
He can’t reach the end of that sentence. He can’t look at Jonathan anymore. He can’t, he can’t, he won’t.
Time passes them by, just like that. Could be five minutes, could be fifteen. Could be an hour. He stares at his hands, folded in his lap.
“Tell me something,” Jonathan says after five minutes, fifteen minutes, an hour. “Do you blame me for what happened to you that first time?”
His mouth, unable to form words. His body, cold, cold, cold.
“I mean, technically, it only happened because you were alone and you were only alone because I wasn’t there with you when I was supposed to be. Technically, every minute you spent down there, every last bit of your pain is my fault, isn’t it? Technically, it’s only because I was a smartass and didn’t listen to Mom that you had to go through all of that hell, that so many people got hurt, that so many people died and—”
“Stop,” Will chokes out through the tears. When did they start falling? “Don’t say that.”
Jonathan tugs, and he goes, down onto the floor and into his arms. For five minutes, fifteen minutes, an hour, hand pressed between his shoulder blades, hand on the back of his head. I’ve got you, I’ve got you.
“We can’t keep doing this to ourselves, bud,” Jonathan says into his hair, and we flutters all the way down his spine and reverberates at the base. “We’ve got lives to live.”
He nods, breathing in through his mouth. His nose is blocked.
“And dinner to eat,” he adds, quiet and nasally.
“That’s right.”
“On the couch?”
Jonathan breathes out a laugh. He holds him tighter. “Sure, why not?”
After a good three months of putting up with a new romantic relationship blooming everywhere he looks, Will puts his feet up in Jonathan’s lap, and says, “Can I ask you a question?”
“Always,” Jonathan replies, distracted, humming along to the showtune blaring from the TV. Jonathan always says always. Although, this time around, he may regret handing Will the blanket pass. Hopefully not, though.
He’s dedicated some of his own time to mulling this over. Not so much the answer, but the question itself. It’s a rather—multifaceted, as Jonathan would say—issue, he supposes, so it’s crucial he picks the right angle.
There is always the option of starting the story from the top. Of going through it all incident by incident, conversation by conversation. Lucas’s blank-eyed devotion, Mike’s supposedly credible research. That one bizarre picture Dustin had managed to procure from a place he’d really rather not hear about. The resulting questions, lots and lots of them.
Jonathan would listen. Listening is Jonathan’s favourite thing to do, which is why he’s far better at it than anyone else Will’s ever met. The only thing holding him back – the full story is highly likely to trip Jonathan’s switch from laidback to concerned, and he’d really rather have the former version here for this.
After extensive deliberation, a winner has been selected. Just impersonal enough and just tangential enough, plenty of room for deflection and redirection if the need so arises. Conversely, an ideal starting point to confirm his suspicions, if everything goes well.
He takes a deep breath. “How did you know you wanted to date Nancy?”
Jonathan looks over to him, an uncertain hand going up to rub at the back of his neck simultaneously. Eyes wide, he says, “Um, well, I love Nancy.”
Will rolls his eyes. He’d braced himself for a minimal amount of the sappy sentimentality that romantic endeavors seemed to endow upon everyone, that had swept up his friends in its overwhelming tide, but he had at least been hoping to avoid it within the first minute. At least with Jonathan.
“That’s so helpful, Jonathan.”
“Alright, that’s fair,” he concedes. Grabbing the remote, he mutes the generic program running in the background. “I think—for starters, I realized I quite like the version of myself that comes out around her.”
The negative space of that statement almost compels him enough to ignore its actual contents. How much did this version differ from Will’s Jonathan? Did Jonathan not like the version of himself that existed around Will, around Mom? He has his biases, admittedly, but he’s unsure how anyone could not like that version.
“Uh-huh?”
Jonathan clears his throat, hand now picking at a loose thread on Will’s trousers. He looks almost bashful. “And I guess, I felt myself wanting to spend all of my free time with her.”
Will’s first reactive thought is predictable, frustrating. Flash of dark hair, warm lights and a slightly damp smell, intricate storytelling setup spreading out under his nose. Will the Wise, after all, not Will the Stupid. He’s just trying not to jump to conclusions.
“But.” He pauses, readjusting his angle, and Jonathan, chin in hand, looks at him like any and every follow-up question he might come up with will be worthy of his attention. “That happens with friends too, right?”
He considers. “Right. It’s up to each person, of course, but I don’t think it’s all that different from close friendship, honestly.”
“But it is different?”
If he could only get some insight into what the normal person feels about childhood friends and the pretty girls that capture their attention, the places where those two intersect, the translucent curtain separating one from the other, he’s sure he could work the rest out on his own.
“I mean—I’d assume there would be something a little extra special about your relationship with that person. And you’d feel just that bit more understood by them than others.”
With a sinking feeling, Will tries to dissipate the mental image his mind conjures up for him. (A face, a familiar one.) One more try, he tells himself. Just to make sure.
“Okay, but then, how can you tell for sure?”
This is where other people would start developing curiosities of their own. Justifiably. A wink, a smirk, a suggestion. Why do you ask? Where is this coming from, all of a sudden? Is there someone…?
But Jonathan has always taken his inquiries as they are, at face value and discussed just because. Ready to do his part and go no further, pre-programmed say-the-right-thing machine. Consequently, always the patient recipient of even more questions.
“I can’t tell,” he says now. “I don’t have any friends, remember?”
Will groans. “I told you I didn’t mean it like that!”
Jonathan grins. Absentmindedly, he runs the pad of his thumb over the scaly texture of a scab peeking out from under Will’s trouser leg. “Have you been picking at this again?”
“No.”
“No?”
“What’s it to you?”
“It’s nothing to me. It should be something to you, though, because it’s going to get worse this way.”
“Good,” he says, sticking his tongue out. He likes it when scratches leave scars. One more to add to the collection. The temptation to make it sprout beads of blood is too intoxicating to leave alone, anyway.
“Listen,” Jonathan says after a pause. “I know you don’t want to hear some you’ll-know-it-when-you-feel-it bullshit—”
“Definitely not,” he agrees, even as he feels uneasy recognition click into place in the back of his mind.
“But you don’t have to have it all figured out right this moment either,” he finishes. “Like, I’m just saying. There’s no pressure to start seeing someone, or even liking someone, right away. Or, there shouldn’t be, I suppose.”
Not subtle, but he appreciates it just the same.
“No, yeah, I know that.”
“Like, I certainly didn’t care very much about any of this shit,” he says, waving his hand around vaguely. “When I was your age.”
Will thinks, pathetically, Mike’s laughter echoing in his ears, that the problem might not be that he doesn’t care, but just how much he does.
The topic of contention: does he have the cooler sibling or does Mike?
No comparison, no argument. The only obstacles that may stop him from winning the whole debate outright are Mike’s superior vocabulary and sentence formation abilities.
“This isn’t even a question,” Mike says, which is exactly how Will feels from a diametrically opposite perspective. “Jonathan is, like, the nicest guy ever.”
His friends say this to him all the time. He’s so nice to you, Will, it’s so cool. He smiles, awkward and lopsided, because he’s not sure what they expect him to do about it. Possibly spend the rest of his life paying off the debt? No one asked Jonathan to be the way he is. A thought for the jury’s consideration - maybe he’s sick of hearing about it.
“So?” he retorts. “We said cool, not nice. And anyway, Nancy’s nice, too.”
Mike fixes him with a look, downright disgusted. “Nancy is quite literally the exact opposite of nice.”
Nancy is perfectly nice to Will, of course, as well as to every person in Hawkins not named Mike. He is acutely aware of this fact, now that she’s seemingly pledged to spend every minute of her free time in Jonathan’s room, emerging intermittently to smile brightly at him or Mom. Can I help you with anything, Mrs. Byers?
Still, he recognizes the flaws in his strategy. He’s seen plenty of Mike versus Nancy over the years. Figures that nice is somewhat incompatible with Mike’s image of his bossy older sister. (He doesn’t know the half of it.)
“She’s, like, chill.”
“Chill?” Mike repeats, flabbergasted. “As in – doesn’t pick fights about inconsequential things and threaten to rat me out to Mom and Dad at the drop of a hat?”
“No,” Will huffs, patience waning in the face of Mike’s voice, limbs, gaze going everywhere all at once. He’s been antsy all morning, probably because he’s expected at El’s later today. “As in respects you enough to talk shit at you.”
He’s been in audience for a lot of Nancy and Mike’s squabbles, after all. And a lot of Lucas and Erica’s. And a lot of Steve and Dustin’s, for that matter. He’s seen the spontaneity of the back-and-forth battle of wits, the inherent entertainment of it, the intellectual validation that comes with it.
Mike stops his pacing. “Huh? What does that mean?”
His bad. He didn’t think about how it would sound out loud, without context. Yes, you see, she’s better because she calls you names.
“Nothing,” he tries. “Forget about it.”
Mike, as always, is astonishingly bad at forgetting about it. His eyes well up with the need to know, all his attention converging onto Will as he takes a seat next to him, close enough that their knees touch. “No, what?”
“I’m just saying,” he sighs. “At least she doesn’t breathe down your neck all the time.”
“Yeah.” Mike grins. “Why should she when she can just call me an asshole instead?”
Will tries to imagine Jonathan calling him an asshole.
Do you and Nancy have to make so much noise?
Oh, uh, sorry about that.
I’m serious, you do realize our walls are super thin and there are other people in the house?
That’s a little unfair, don’t you think, bud—I mean, you fucking asshole?
It’s laughable.
He shakes his head to get rid of the thought. Turning back to Mike, he tries to tease. “It’s not like you’ve ever shied away from calling her an asshole.”
(Can you stop being so weird—I mean, such an asshole? That’s pretty laughable, too.)
For a moment, Mike is silent, stumped. Asshole hardly even counts as an insult anymore, not with how liberally Mike and Nancy lob it at each other. He knows this. It’s tit for tat, blow for blow, it’s fair play. By no means does it take away from Nancy’s rock-solid case.
But, then:
“Jonathan lets you pick the movie,” Mike says, delighted at having discovered the first loophole of many.
He scrambles. The problem: he doesn’t actually know Nancy that well. “Nancy played DnD with us.”
“Jonathan lets you borrow his stuff.”
Take, Will almost wants to correct. Jonathan lets me take his stuff. “Nancy lets you—”
“Jonathan spends money on you,” Mike declares with an air of finality, like no rebuttal could possibly be good enough. “Ha! I win.”
Which—Mike’s not even wrong. That’s kind of the whole problem.
“I guess you do,” he lets up, resigned smile in place, taking what solace he can in the other’s triumphant celebration.
Jonathan would probably tell him he’s proud of him for being graceful in defeat.
Caught in a storm of various too big feelings with no direct access to his preferred targets, he accuses Jonathan of not caring anymore. Jonathan looks down at the glass he’s holding, water swishing and swirling inside, and says quietly, “You’re the reason I’m still here.”
“Like, you feel stuck in Hawkins because of me? If that’s the case, then you—”
“No, Will.” His eyes dart up. “You’re the reason I’m still here.”
(As it turns out, none of them remain stuck in Hawkins for much longer.)
The night before they’re all supposed to start school afresh in Lenora Hills, Mom pulls him aside after dinner.
“What’s up?” he says, sitting down beside her on the bed. She looks slightly out of it (regularly scheduled programming), but she brightens up when his eyes seek hers out. She always does.
“Nervous about tomorrow?” she asks. Likely place for this conversation to go, he’s just now realizing.
“A little,” he admits. He has to give her something, or she’ll think he’s hiding his feelings from her. At the same time, he can’t give her too much, or she’ll get that little furrow between her eyebrows (never a good sign). “I’m fine, though, Mom. You don’t have to worry.”
“Oh, sweetheart,” she says ruefully, like an inevitability. “I always worry.”
“In that case.” He smiles in solidarity. “Not too much, maybe?”
“I’ll try,” she grimaces. After a pause, she says, more to herself than to him: “You’re gonna do great.”
He doesn’t need great, or even good. In the privacy of his own mind, he thinks his best shot is to get by unperceived, leave the environment he finds entirely undisturbed. Still, he plasters on a smile for her sake. “I hope so.”
“You will,” she reemphasizes. “And so will your sister.”
It takes him a moment to process that she’s talking about El. She started calling El his sister from the first night she moved in, possibly in a shaky attempt to boost collective morale. He doesn’t really have an opinion on it. Most days, it still takes him a moment, though.
“For sure.”
“That’s kind of what I wanted to talk to you about, honey,” Mom says. “All of this school stuff – it’s going to be really new and confusing for her.”
“Right, yeah,” he nods, sensing what’s coming next.
“I guess what I’m saying is.” She takes a deep breath, in and out, hand coming up to brush the hair out of his eyes. “I know you will even without me asking, but just—help her out where you can, yeah?”
“Of course,” he assures her, all in a rush, and that’s that.
The result: eight-thirty p.m. on an irritatingly warm November night, sheets of math concealing every square inch of dinner table, desperate sister and her desperate brother.
“No, like—not like that,” he says awkwardly, peering at El’s work over her shoulder. “If you add four on this side, you gotta do it on the other side too.”
She points with the tip of her pencil and objects for what must be the thirtieth time tonight. “But I have six on the other side.”
“Doesn’t matter. Because we chose the four to mess around with, right?”
“Mess around with?”
“Uh,” he says. He runs through a mental glossary. Eliminate, no. Manipulate, no. Equalize, no. “To take out of the equation to make our work easier.”
She lets out a distressed sound, leaning forward till her homework is flattened beneath her chest. Unsatisfactory, incompatible answer. Clueless teacher. “But why the four and not the six?”
He sighs, pushing off the back of her chair. Round and round in circles they go (if not the six, then the four, if not the four, then the six), and he really can’t help but think that El’s other brother would be much better suited for this job. Too bad he seems to want to have nothing to do with any of them recently.
“Will?”
“Yeah, I’m coming, I’m coming, just getting some water,” he calls as he walks backwards into the kitchen, making no move to do such a thing. Rubbing at his forehead, he adds, “Just move on to the next one, okay?”
El’s other brother had experience in these matters, unassailable patience born from said experience. El’s other brother was good at teaching and explaining (and being a brother). Lifetimes ago, El’s other brother helped his brother, and he did it in a way that was both enjoyable and efficient and didn’t lead to either of them losing their temper.
D’you know the cool thing about this? he’d ask, leaning in close enough to make Will giggle. You can work backwards.
Add when you see obtain. Subtract when you see left with. When in doubt, read again. If still in doubt, multiply and move on. Tips and tricks, handpicked by Mr. Clarke and supplemented by Jonathan. (Been there, done that, returned with empty hands. Tips and tricks are shortcuts, El insists. Cheating, lying. Friends don’t lie.)
Just have a go, he would suggest, hands wrapped tightly around his knees on the couch. Surely something’s calling to you.
And sure enough, bits and pieces of the problem would beckon to Will, lure him into playing around with them, consider their phrasing and the information contained within, until a concrete number revealed itself. Right or wrong was secondary, and he was right more often than wrong. (The thing about El is that she is wrong more often than right.)
In extreme scenarios, Will tying himself up into knots, perspective stuck in one, wrong way and refusing to give way, he’d pile him into his car and say: let’s think about something else.
Will wouldn’t want to, too caught up in his own failure, set on repenting. But—
Ten minutes.
You swear?
I swear.
They’d make it back just in time, as promised, ten precise minutes of cruising the Hawkins backroads and suddenly, perspective willing to bend and budge, to be persuaded of a different kind of logic. Ten minutes in the car, that’s all it took. (The car doesn’t work anymore. Jonathan refuses to fix it.)
Still, he walks back to El. He places a hand on her shoulder. When she looks up at him, promptly stopping her doodling, hopelessness quickly taking over cobbled-together determination in her eyes, he realizes that they’ll just have to make do.
“Let’s take a break. You wanna go for a walk?”
Her smile is all the answer he needs.
The noises in his head get worse the colder it gets.
On some level, he wonders if it’d be better if they were voices. Tangible voices speaking concrete words, laying out definitive paths of action for him to pursue. Run away, they’d say, perhaps, and perhaps he’d consider it. Let go, they’d say, and he would try. Kill yourself, they’d say, and at least it would be something.
When has he ever been that lucky?
Buzzy, staticky, white noise, manifesting and disappearing at its whim. In his ears, in his head, in his bones and his sinuses. In English class, in bed, in front of the TV, in between two sentences of a mostly pleasant conversation. Most times accompanied by a headache balancing on a tightrope, hurting just behind his eyes and nowhere else. Sometimes accompanied by a deep, deep pull towards that other world, jumbled flashes floating around in his mind, waiting to be caught.
An unexplained bout of shivering. Lights appearing dim when they are anything but. Being watched at night. Things like that.
He zones out at dinner, straining to make out the muffled message he’s certain is hiding behind the curtain of static. Jonathan looks at him like he’s going to spontaneously combust. Lowers his eyes and says, “You okay?”
Can he not see?
“Jesus Christ, are you ever going to stop asking me that?”
Of course he can’t. Jonathan still looks, as always, but he doesn’t see anymore. Especially not Will, especially not post-hangout session with his new best friend. Figures that it’s harder to think when you’re stoned out of your mind.
He’s not the boss of Jonathan. Obviously. That stuff is—helping him, or whatever. Doesn’t mean he has to like it. He shouldn’t ever have to look at Jonathan and feel embarrassed. That’s just how it is.
It’s an inherent disconnect, he supposes. Jonathan isn’t supposed to be smiling so big for no reason, especially not at his food. He isn’t supposed to be using so many words to say so much of nothing. He isn’t supposed to be using so many words, full stop. And for God’s sake, he isn’t supposed to just give up when Will evades his questions once.
The room goes pitch black and slimy for five seconds. Nobody at the table reacts. Will thinks, not for the first time, that he should just bite the bullet and demand that Jonathan let him try a joint. It’d probably help.
Dopiness and stupidity seem to be the primary effects, from what he’s observed, followed by a dulling of the edges of your consciousness, a blissful, blessed loss of awareness of your surroundings, of yourself. To Will, it all just sounds like respite. He’d just have to get past the smell, and then he’d be all set.
Jonathan’s eyes get kind of half-closed in the immediate aftermath, just like they are now. He wonders if it feels something close to being on the brink of falling asleep, half-in half-out, thoughts breaking down the middle and attaching themselves to other places, dreams waiting for their cue just offstage. He wonders how Mom hasn’t noticed the incriminating evidence yet. (Then again, Mom hasn’t noticed him either.)
He pushes his food around on his plate, left to right and back. The buzz returns, doubly loud, and he shakes his head without meaning to. Jonathan looks over, attention drawn by the movement, but the recognition in his eyes fades away just as fast.
He knows how that discussion will go, is the thing. First, they’ll both play dumb. Then, Jonathan will try to deny it—either his use in its totality, or the volume and frequency of it. Then, they’ll reach the crux of the matter, the central question being circled around. Jonathan will say no, with a brief but meaningful interlude about his hypocrisy on Will’s end. All arguments and justifications considered, Jonathan will look away from him. He’ll sigh, drum his fingers on his knees, run a hand through his hair and then, he’ll still say no. Then he’ll apologize for saying no and walk away. He has Jonathan memorized by now.
The room stutters again, simultaneously shiny and new and overrun by a shadowy wilderness, weeds and vines and tree trunks. He closes his eyes and shovels food into his mouth.
Maybe he’ll just steal some from his room.
Here’s what he misses:
He misses falling asleep on the couch and waking up in his bed, with no knowledge of how he got there. Well, not no knowledge. (Mom took a picture once, overcome by fondness for both her boys). No conscious recollection, at the very least.
Jonathan doesn’t want to go to college. It’s a whole thing.
It’s Jonathan, so of course it is. Everything should, and nothing ever does, boil down to anything concrete. It just twists round and round and round in that head of his, looping around and cartwheeling over and threading through itself, till it becomes much bigger than its original form and ruins the rare Sunday family breakfast in three seconds flat.
He’s not sure what came over Jonathan. It feels supremely uncharacteristic of him to sit down at the table with an announcement, then get through that announcement without any major hiccups. Doesn’t matter now, anyway. Cat’s out of the bag and all.
“So, um, what I wanted to say,” he said, because even in his most decisive moments (none of the above is a valid choice, after all; stupid but valid), he couldn’t let go of his beloved ums and uhs. “I don’t think I’ll be going away to Boston.”
What follows is a series of rationalizations, neatly lined up like a row of ducks. Perhaps this sudden bravery comes from preparation, long stretches of lying awake at night and playing the various permutations of this very conversation in his head. Of working it all out like a math problem well in advance. Which only begs the question – how along ago did he give up on himself?
First, Mom goes down the list one by one, determined to break him down with logic alone. Jonathan answers steadily, in short and precise sentences, eyes alternating between Mom and his plate with an ease that’s been absent for some time now.
Has he thought of an alternative? Yes, he has. What is it? Lenora Community College, which is more than happy to take him at minimal cost. Does he realize that money can be arranged for? Yes, he realizes, but he feels it’s unwise to rely on outside factors. Has he told Nancy? No, not yet, but he recognizes that it is his responsibility and he will handle it.
Why? Because it’s what he wants.
It feels like he’s come to them with the aftermath of an explosion. He wants them to remain calm and assist in the cleanup. With matters of hands-on bomb diffusion? He doesn’t trust them, never will.
Later on, Mom cries. He’s almost sure of it. She doesn’t do it in front of him or El, of course, because the fundamental mechanics of the four of them hinge on Mom and Jonathan’s shared and continued delusion that there’s still some innocence left to protect there, but definitely once the door shuts after them. Definitely after can I talk to you alone for a minute, sweetheart?
Will imagines it goes a little bit like how it always goes. That it quickly turns from being about Jonathan’s self-sabotage to being about Mom’s resulting sadness, that Jonathan cleverly flips the script to make it play out that way. He envisions it ending with his quiet, heartfelt reassurances. It’s going to be okay, Mom. It’s not your fault.
For his part, he plants himself firmly at the foot of Jonathan’s bed that night.
“Because I want to isn’t a real answer,” he says flatly.
Jonathan is lying on his back, paperback shoved in front of his face. He yawns. “What counts as a real answer to you?”
“A specific one.”
“Okay, uh, it’s what my heart desires. It’s my calling. It’s what I was put on this Earth to—”
“Did Nancy break up with you?”
A pause. “No.”
“Do you think I’m going to die if you don’t keep an eye on me? Because I’ll have you know, that’s probably going to happen regardless of what you do.”
Longer pause. “No.” (Why doesn’t he chastise him for talking about dying?)
“So you’re just gonna throw away your future for no reason?”
“Wow,” Jonathan chuckles, putting down his book. It doesn’t sound anything like him, too dry and too sure of himself. “You’re really gonna say that to me?”
And Will so badly wants to say – if it gets you to go, then yes. He wonders briefly (nonsensically) if all this is about the edge factor. If Jonathan sat here in his room and looked at the piece of paper that was his ticket out of this hellhole, with his perfect girlfriend and his perfect photographs, and he tricked himself somehow into believing the easiest decision in the world was secretly some planned ambush, like being normal and going to a decent college would be too…predictable, or something.
“Then what?”
Jonathan sits up. He looks off to the side, contemplating, then directly at him, expression perfectly neutral. He says, “You know what, I don’t have to explain myself to you.”
Something must change in Will’s eyes, then, something he doesn’t claim manifesting in there against his will, because Jonathan follows it up immediately with, “Oh, God, I’m sorry.”
He lets Jonathan inch closer, place a tentative hand on his shoulder, mainly because he’s not so sure what’s happening. Or of what he should do or say to prevent the impending catastrophe.
“Please don’t do this just for me.”
And Jonathan’s arm wraps fully around him at that (how does he still fit in here?), and he says – whispers, really. “I’m not.”
He thinks it’s probably the first time Jonathan’s ever lied to him.
What am I gonna do without you, huh?
Jonathan used to say that to him all the time. On the phone when he was in the hospital. Out loud when he would fold the laundry in advance. Hushed when he was moments away from falling asleep. Mostly light-hearted, always in total earnest. What would I do without you?
Jonathan had a way of saying most things in total earnest.
“I don’t know,” he used to say in response when he was younger. He’d say that and he’d shrug his shoulders, a little disappointed in his own answer.
Later on, he’d get snarky about it. He’d cock his head and recite in monotone: “Die and perish out of a lack of someone to serve.”
It’s not like Jonathan would ever bite back.
All along, a little part of him would want to say: better. Without me, you would do better.
The thing about staying mad at Jonathan – you can’t, because at any given moment, he’s probably even madder at himself. Anything you could say to him is no match for what he’s already said to himself, repeatedly, in much harsher tones and much crueler words. Why even try?
Jonathan says he’s sorry, and Will’s not even sure for what. He says it’s all his fault, when they both know that’s not true. And then it feels like it’s Will’s turn to say something, say the one thing, but he doesn’t, he can’t, so Jonathan skips past the stutter and says what he would have said in response, anyway.
I’m always gonna be here. There is nothing in this world (absolutely nothing) that will ever change that. And then, I love you.
And he wishes he could live in this moment forever.
In the aftermath of the greatest battle of his life which he never even got to see, Surfer Boy Pizzeria stands eerily still. They have no way of knowing anything – success or failure, partial or complete, friends and family dead or not. A limbo, in the truest, most awful, most excruciating sense of the word.
El shakes violently. She makes high keening sounds, writhing in place with Will and Mike on either side, Jonathan crouched in front. Tears in her eyes and no words in her throat, she struggles to tell them something, everything. He—she—they need to—Max—she tried—Hawkins—
“Sleep,” he tells her firmly, the arm around her shoulders easing her into lying down, retracting its support. “This isn’t helpful.”
For a fleeting moment, she looks at him, and he feels the full force of all of her naked desperation, her childlike stubbornness. And he thinks that maybe this is what Jonathan has felt his entire life.
“Go to sleep,” he tells her again, gentler this time. “Just for a little while.”
She’s out within the minute.
Mike sits like a statue opposite El’s sleeping form. Jonathan perches on the counter, the opposite of still with his fidgety leg-tapping, his anxious nail-biting. Argyle is—wherever Jonathan told him to go with kind eyes and a sturdy pat on the back, either out back or in the van.
Will weighs his options for three seconds. It isn’t a difficult decision, really. When has he ever been able to do for Jonathan what Jonathan does for him?
I don’t want you to forget that I’m here.
And I’m always here for you, too.
Yeah, right.
He coaxes Mike into sliding over. Mike goes wordlessly. He’s been wordless this entire time, ever since he erupted into his flurry of passionate declarations at the hour of need. I love you, he said. My life started the day I met you in the woods. And Will’s heart had no right to clench the way it did.
“How’s it going?”
He grimaces, gesturing around. “Y’know.”
“Yeah.”
“Will,” he says, gripping his wrist, louder all of a sudden. His eyes don’t leave El. “We’re going to be okay, right?”
It still feels strange, Mike (or anybody) looking to him for reassurance. Mike, who is made of conviction and confidence and rousing speeches in his mind. Mike, who looks smaller than he is in this light, hollowed out, the creases of his body folding into themselves.
“Of course.” He squeezes his hand, tries not to hold on like it’s his only lifeline. “We’ll be fine.”
He believed it when Jonathan said it. Everything’s gonna be okay. Yeah? Yeah. Out of his own mouth, the words sound much more like the baseless assumption that they are.
“Yeah,” Mike relaxes anyway. He smiles at him, and Will releases his hand a moment before he needs to. “You’re right.”
“You were great, by the way,” he forces himself to add. The fate of the world balanced against his petty, petty feelings. No competition. At least, there shouldn’t be.
Mike nudges his shoulder. “All thanks to you, eh?”
Will glances over at El. She’s mumbling something undiscernible in her sleep, but she seems fine otherwise. “You should get some sleep too, Mike.”
Mike nods, more agreeable than he’d expected him to be, residual exhaustion leaving no room for debate. “You too.”
He shifts away towards the inner edge of the booth, probably to give them both some more space. Conversation tapering out, Will watches Mike close his eyes and curl further into himself. He sets his cocktail of emotions free, each insignificant thought ebbing and flowing, arising and drifting away, till it all boils over to a dull ache. Then, he draws his legs up and follows suit.
Maybe in the morning, it would all be gone.
When he comes to next, it’s still nighttime. The headache-inducing artificial lights are still on. El is still asleep, stretched out on her bench. Mike is still asleep, even more of a ball. Argyle is here now, passed out on a stool with his head buried in his arms. Jonathan is still—
Jonathan is now situated at the table next to them. He’s very much awake, although he very much shouldn’t be.
Rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, Will barely manages to take the two steps it takes to get from his booth to the other.
“What’re you doing?” he asks, semiconscious that his words are slipping and sliding over each other. These lights are so goddamn bright. He burrows into Jonathan’s shirt sleeve to hide from them.
“I am,” Jonathan says, and Will feels him shift to accommodate him. “Seeing how much money we have left.”
Blearily, reluctantly, Will lifts his head, wanting to see for himself. It’s true. Jonathan’s hands are busy, the contents of his wallet strewn across the table, counting cash with feverish dedication. A rough estimate going under his breath. Twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five, forty. It’s soothing, the repetitive syllables in a familiar voice.
They used to count sheep together, the nights he couldn’t fall asleep. Three hundred twelve, three hundred thirteen. He was an effort-intensive kid to take care of.
Still, he perseveres. “They won’t multiply if you count them, you know.”
“I know.”
“Go to sleep,” he says, closing his eyes again. “God, it’s like nobody listens around here.”
“In a minute.”
“You’re going to crash the car tomorrow,” Will prophesizes, insistence muffled by the material of Jonathan’s shirt. “And then we’re all going to die.”
“Gee, thanks.” Jonathan’s voice lilts upwards, musical and on the brink of breaking into laughter. “Your unwavering faith in my abilities really means so much to me.”
Will snorts. “Come on, already.”
“You’re not asleep either.”
“I was.”
“I noticed,” Jonathan says, jostling him lightly. “What changed?”
“I don’t know, the temperature?”
“Seriously,” he presses. “You’re good?”
“I’m great,” Will tells him, as honest as is fitting of the circumstances. It is a relative term, after all, and the specific problem Jonathan is hinting at hasn’t yet made an appearance, anyway. “You won’t be if you keep this up.”
He’s not sure what’s so special about the fourth—no, fifth attempt, but it seems to work better than the others. Maybe it’s a cumulative effect, weakening the logical foundations of Jonathan’s crisis mode hyperactivity till the good sense in Will’s words bleeds through. If not the logical foundations, then at least the emotional ones.
“No, you know what, you’re right,” he says finally, finally, finally. Heaving a sigh, he starts tucking the dampened, drooping currency notes back into his wallet. “I’m not thinking straight.”
“Of course I’m right,” Will mumbles sleepily, and he doesn’t remember what happens after that.
Jonathan doesn’t crash the car, tomorrow or the day after that. He thinks it’s safe for him to claim at least partial credit.
Days in Hawkins stretch out to weeks in Hawkins stretch out to months in Hawkins, no end in sight. El locks herself into rooms for increasingly extended periods of time. Hopper’s face gets graver by the day. He insists he can help, and a chorus of voices shuts him down. He persists till they find something for him to do.
Lucas lives at the hospital. Mike lives in his head. Holly asks him if he likes waffles or pancakes, and he tells her, I like them both when my brother makes them for me.
Jonathan calls every day and plays him a new song over the receiver.
I want to listen to that one, he tells him on day one hundred and sixteen. You know the one.
Jonathan obliges.
All things considered, the night before feels—not normal, not calm, not quiet—just as big and weighty as it’s supposed to be. Monumental, in some ways. A death sentence, in more prominent ones. He loves me, he loves me not, with each tick of the clock. He’ll kill me, I’ll kill him.
He is—not sleeping (expected). He is—not scared (a first). Straining for the sun to rise. The earlier he leaves, the better. The fewer people he sees before he leaves, the better. The less of a trace he leaves, the better it will be. For them.
This couch is stiff, optimally located. It’s privy to the very many sounds of the half-awake extended household. Glasses clinking and feet tapping, mostly. Yes, no one is sleeping and everyone should be. Hopper’s stuck in a painkiller-induced haze and no one else has a voice convincing enough for reprimand.
Well, Mom, maybe. But Mom has done her fair share of yelling this past week, and her quota is exhausted. Everyone’s done their fair share of yelling this past week, about this and that and then about all the yelling.
He laid out the plan on Tuesday, and everyone looked at him like he’d gone mad. It’s Friday today, and people have generally defaulted to not looking him in the eye at all. They’re afraid to set him off; they look slightly off-center at his cheekbone, the space below his nose. Mike looks further down, always, and he’s not sure if he’s even allowed to feel that little jolt anymore.
I’m not asking you, he’d said, clipped and even, in response to the room going still, Mom already half-poised to protest, Lucas shaking his head vigorously. I’m not asking you, I’m telling you.
Then, the outbreak. Then, the cloudburst. Everyone speaking over everyone else, utter pandemonium. There has to be another way, they all insisted. This is ridiculous, they said, stopping just short of calling him a fucking idiot.
And Hopper said, absolutely not, kid. And Mike said, I can’t afford to lose you, not again. And El said, let me go, it should be me. And Mom held onto his hand, so tight that it hurt, and said no, no, no, I won’t let you, over and over again in an unbearable monotone. And Jonathan—
Jonathan begged, loud and ugly and choked by his own desperation. Please, he said simply. Please, Will.
(What am I gonna do without you, huh?)
That was Tuesday, this is Friday. After no small effort, everyone’s conveyed, words or no words, in their own hesitant little way, that they’ve placed their full trust in him. They’ve memorised his maniacal script, agreed to follow it down to the word, down to the letter, down to the misspellings. They make trips to and from the sink, ready to do their part come morning. Even El, who is the only one still looking him in the eye, hard and stern. Don’t be stupid. Even Mike, who talks exclusively in mumbles now, from around the rim of his glass. It’s going to work, I know it will, said to reassure himself just as much as Will. Even Mom, who stops by every half-hour to hug and kiss and hold. I love you so, so, much. He lets her, just for tonight.
Even Jonathan, quiet as ever when he pads around to the front of the couch, not one but two glasses in hand, one held tight and one passed over.
He sits up, takes a sip. He goes for the obvious joke, increasingly frequent between them as of late. “It’s a little too late to try to forbid me from going.”
“Don’t worry.” Jonathan holds up his free hand. “I’m not here to tell you what you can or cannot do.”
“So you’re here to…”
“…Hydrate?”
“You sure you aren’t here to squeeze in one last pep talk?”
(Please, please, please say yes.)
Jonathan narrows his eyes at him, uncharacteristically irritable. “Better get one in before you fucking die, huh?”
“Fifty-fifty odds,” he counters, involuntary laughter bubbling up.
“How comforting,” Jonathan says, stone-faced. He’s sweating, even though it’s the middle of winter.
Few things can slip through the cracks of his laser focus, his sheer stubborn belief that this is the way to proceed. He knows it, he’s seen it, he can feel it, he knows it. Unfortunately, seeing Jonathan the way he is now – hot and bothered, unstable despite his best efforts, fresh out of platitudes to offer, of temporary white lies to soothe with, is one of them.
Suddenly, like a light switch flipped on and off, he’s not so sure.
None of it is comforting, of course, but Jonathan’s supposed to pretend that it is. He’s supposed to do the smile, the squeeze, he’s supposed to do the bright-side-silver-lining thing he’s so good at, he’s supposed to tell him that—
“I’m sorry, that was—”
“Jonathan,” he says, and Jonathan sputters to a stop, and Will needs to hear him say the thing. “Tell me everything’s going to be okay.”
For a split second, he sees the doubt in his eyes, the selfish urge to scoff in his face. Me saying it isn’t going to change the world.
He forces the eye contact, he replies silently. But it would change my world. Jonathan has never been selfish a day of his life.
He smiles, even as the tears leak out. He squeezes, even as his hand shakes. And he wraps his arms around his shoulders and says it, in careful words and thoughtful pauses.
“Everything’s going to be okay.”
And just like that, the light switch flips back on.