Chapter Text
When Will wakes up, it takes a second to place his surroundings.
To be fair, he’s been deaf for less than a year, and his vision is still blurry from heavy sleep, so he’s trying to discern where he is with two out of five senses out of commission, but the sharp smell of antiseptic and bleach plus the familiar feeling of just-too-scratchy-to-be-comfortable blankets gives it away. He’s in the hospital.
Will groans - it’s a very strange feeling, as apparently his hearing aids are out so it mostly feels like a vibration in his throat - and points his toes to stretch his legs as he blinks, trying to get his eyes to calibrate to the point where, you know, he can actually see.
In a very strange way, the quiet of his hearing being gone is… almost comforting. All of it is.
He can move if he tries, but someone must have given him pain medication, because the aches and stings of his life - of surviving ten years with a monster, a full war, an angry mob, being tortured for a week, being kept in a nightmare dimension full of monsters for a week and then months, being possessed, being in a firefight, being in a shootout, just… making it - are notably near-absent, like it’s just a fuzzy buzz in the back of his mind, maybe a two on the pain-scale instead of a five or six. He’s not too inclined to move. When he closes his eyes, it’s peaceful and dark, and with his hearing aids out, the world is quiet too. Everything smells mildly like antiseptic, and his mouth tastes like mouthwash and that strange lack of anything when you’ve drank water recently, and he vaguely registers IVs in the crooks of his elbows and his hands, but he feels calm. It’s dark, it’s quiet, he’s not in pain, he’s warm and practically feels like he’s floating even if the mattress is uncomfortable and the blankets are heavy enough to pull him back to the ground - it’s isolation and sensory deprivation in a way that’s comforting, not frightening, like he’s been carried to his room and tucked into bed instead of thrown back into the sensory deprivation tank.
Even though he can’t hear it, Will hums - first a simple, long note, then shorter, changing ones as it goes from a plain piano key to ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ by Joy Division. The vibrations, even inside his own chest, are soothing.
It’s probably strange, but Will loves - loved? - to lay on people’s chests way back when. Their heartbeats, their breathing - it started with the little-kid obsession with laying his head over his mom’s heart and listening to her body as well as her voice as she talked about her day as she stroked his hair, then it turned into liking the vibration of their voices, and then in the Upside Down with Mike, it became just a need to know he was safe, to feel him breathing and singing.
(Mike’s always been a self-conscious singer, but somehow, he’s willing to sing and hum when Will is falling asleep on his chest. Will loves him. So, so much.)
His eyes move underneath the warm darkness of his eyelids, and it apparently makes his eyes move enough that his eyelashes brush his cheeks, making him half-jump a little bit, which then makes his hair brush his shoulders when he finally blinks his eyes open again.
(God, it’s weird to think that he hasn’t cut his hair in so long. He cut it last March, a tiny trim when he was still fourteen, and now his hair is almost to his shoulders now that it’s apparently winter and it was snowing on the drive and he must be almost sixteen and he’s lived through hell. Mike cut his hair in the Upside Down, saying he wanted to keep the short look - Will didn’t have the energy to do his own, barely having the willpower to sit in the bathroom and let Mike shave his face most days. (Once again, Will adores Mike - when Will could hardly function because he wanted to go home from the Upside Down and he felt alone and shattered and miserable, Mike just quietly shaved his face and either held him or left him alone (depending on how close to the surface all the bad memories were) until he had the willpower to brush his teeth and smoke a cigarette (which Mike brought easily a dozen packs of to the Upside Down because the goof didn’t know how many Will smoked a day.))
It’s so… strange.
Will is so, so lucky. Even though he’s gay, even though it’s… sometime in the late 80’s (he still doesn’t know), Will’s been broken by men in the past and the whole world is against them, Will somehow got Mike. Somehow, Will got Mike - his Mike, the boy who he’s been in love with for years and best friends with for longer, longer than he can remember, really. Somehow, despite all his faults and cracks and failures, despite the odds of Mike loving him back being so slim, it happened. Will got Mike. He has his family, his mom and brother and now a sister and a Hopper too, and he has his friends, because miraculously, most of his inner circle weren’t killed even in a year of hell (and periodic really rough weeks before that).
But at the same time… well… God, everything that’s happened to him - if anyone’s watching over him, if there’s any kind of divine intervention or even just the complicated, intangible thing of luck, they have a fucked sense of humor or justice or whatever you call it.
Will takes a deep breath, trying to remember what happened before he woke up.
They drove all the way to Bedford, Indiana where the refugee camp was. One look at them, they got shepherded into the hospital. Mike got dragged off to surgery along with half of the Party, mostly because of amputations gone wrong or limbs needing help (like Mike’s leg), and Will went to wait, but then the rest of them that weren’t as badly injured got put in hospital rooms anyway and given IVs and medicines and shit.
Will blinks his eyes open again from where they’ve involuntarily fluttered closed, looking up at the IV bags. There are four - he has to squint to see the labels.
And, of course, that’s when he gets jumpscared by someone touching him.
It’s just a light tap to his arm, but Will practically jumps out of his skin, at least partially because he wasn’t expecting it.
The person’s hand - which he doesn’t recognize, just like he doesn’t recognize her when he looks up - withdraws quickly, and there’s the quiet, muffled thrumming that means she’s talking.
“I’m deaf. I can’t hear you.” Will says, trying to ignore how the touch makes his skin itchy.
The woman - she has brown eyes and hair and a skin tone similar to Will’s - stills, staring off and clearly thinking before she walks across what Will is recognizing as a hospital room, going over to the dresser and coming back with a notepad and pen. She writes for a bit before she hands it over.
‘Hi. I’m Nora, one of the gov nurses. The people who came here with you said that you’re Will Byers?’
Will blinks, trying to process when he’s still so tired. “Uh… yeah, I’m Will Byers. Um… sorry to bother you, but, um, what… what’s the date?”
She takes it back and writes again. ‘February 19, 1987.’
Will blinks again. They went into the Upside Down in late August… so they must’ve been there for about six months…. but then Mike’s eye had just scabbed, and that usually only takes about a week, maximum… but his hair’s grown down to his shoulders… that means he turns 16 in a month…
The bliss is gone, Will blinking hard and struggling to sit up. She hits a button on the bed and it inclines up, and she quickly puts a pillow behind his head before writing again.
‘When did you think it was?’
Will shrugs slightly, struggling to focus on her as his brain runs wild with calculations of how long it’s been since different things. “I don’t know. I knew it was winter since it’s snowing…”
‘You were definitely right on that.’
She flashes him a small smile, but when Will tries to lift his hand to take the notepad and pen, try to draw a quick timeline for himself, he can’t lift his hand far, and when he looks, his wrist is in a soft restraint.
Nora frowns, quickly writing as Will starts to panic and tries to yank his hand away, twisting his arm.
‘They’re just soft restraints on your wrists and stomach. We didn’t want you moving around and disturbing your injuries or hurting yourself, and the government doesn’t want there to be a possibility of you leaving.’
The government asked for his wrists to be tied down. They handcuffed him at Nova-
Will starts to gasp as he frantically pulls harder. If they get to him, they’ll make him- they- he can’t do that again, he can’t, God, no-
She tries to show him the notepad, but he’s more focused on getting out before they send people to hurt him.
He can’t escape. Even if he’s not as skinny as he was, he’s exhausted and still not as strong as he could be, and he can’t get out of the restraints. Will’s helpless.
He’s gonna be sick.
“I’m gonna throw up.” Will whispers, then (he hopes) louder: “I’m gonna throw up.”
Nora moves fast, a bucket placed in his lap, and Will does indeed puke, leaning forward to retch even as it makes the strap across his stomach dig into his skin and hurt.
It’s not even a real flashback. He’s just… sick at the memory, even if it doesn’t immediately replay.
He vomits into the bucket again, so hard that he chokes, and she rubs small circles on his back, angling the bucket so that he doesn’t have to lean as far.
He feels bad, because she’s being kind, but he doesn’t want Nora-the-government-nurse. He wants his mom. He wants Mike. He wants Jonathan and El. He wants his friends. He wants to be home.
(He doesn’t have one. Hawkins is gone.)
Nora unhooks the restraint around his waist and one of his wrists, and Will moves fast, wrapping his arm around the bucket and leaning forward to rest his head on the clean plastic rim the same way he’s leaned his head onto cool porcelain easily a hundred times as tears fall silently, making his eyes itch.
“I want my mom.” Will whispers hoarsely, and maybe he’s too old to want her, since apparently he’s about to be sixteen, but he just… he just wants his mom. “Please, can I just see my mom? Her… her name is Joyce Byers. Or… Joyce Maldonado. We’re… I don’t know what last name we have anymore.”
Will squeezes his eyes shut. “Please, I just want to see my mom.”
She writes for a long time before setting a thick packet on his legs and showing him the notebook again. Will has to look up from the bucket, and she takes it, though she sets it on the floor next to the bed, still accessible.
‘I’m so sorry, but I can’t. Nobody’s allowed to see each other until they’ve met with the lawyer.’
“Lawyer, what… what lawyer?” Will manages, quickly using his non-restrained hand to scrub at his face. She flips the page. Apparently she’d anticipated this question.
‘The federal government has sent attorneys to manage compensation, relocation, and NDAs and covenants not to sue. They’re supposed to meet with everyone who evacuated from Hawkins and work out what you get in exchange for agreeing to not sue and not talk about it. The packet is your medical history and treatment so you can properly discuss compensation.’
It’s not Will’s first time signing an NDA, but it still makes him feel mildly nauseous again. “Wh… how many people evacuated from Hawkins?”
She hesitates, then takes the notepad back and writes for a while.
‘About five hundred people evacuated before things got bad. When Hawkins was absorbed into the actual land, about forty people escaped, including the sixteen people in your group.’
It can’t even sink in.
When Will moved away, the population was fourteen thousand.
Now there are… what, 540 people left? That’s… less than four percent that survived. And the people who survived past July, when shit actually hit the fan… he knows about half had evacuated, so… division…
That’s less than half a percent. Half of one percent survived. One out of two hundred, and that’s rounded.
Will pukes again, once again into the bucket, and for the first time, he feels bad that only one person in their group died. (But then that thought makes him feel even worse, and he vomits once again.)