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The first time his father called him a fag, Will was seven and a half.
He was sniffling in the kitchen, after dropping a saucer and watching it shatter on the tile. He’d felt so bad. So bad it didn’t fit in his little body. So bad he shook with it, let it leak from his eyes like rainwater.
He’s going to be mad, he thought, staring at the pieces between his feet. The porcelain had been a wedding gift. Expensive.
Will had only been trying to get a good look at it, honest. There were tiny roses, delicate pink painted into lovely little accents. He wanted to see the lines, their curve and color. But he was clumsy, almost eight and weak at the elbows.
He’s going to be mad. Lonnie Byers was always mad.
Thing is, the china didn’t mean a damn thing to him. It was a reason to yell, and God knows he’d have taken any of those. But on his march to pin Will to the cabinets, his boot crunched the polished glass into the floor. That’s the stupid fucking thing. He didn’t care about the plate, he didn’t care that it was broken. All he cared was that his son was in tears like a little girl. All he cared was that his son was weak.
“Stop crying, boy” he’d said. Always boy. Never son, never just Will.
Two fingers held his chin, pinched like a playground kid pulling legs off a fly. His father’s eyes were hellfire, a dull blaze. By then, he was already tired of trying to shape Will into some semblance of anything. Like watching a lame horse, knowing you’ve got to pick up the gun and put it out of its misery. His parents would get at each other’s throats about it, and Jonathan would turn the radio up and up, and Will would pretend he couldn’t hear a thing.
“I’m not raising a fag,” his father said, spit between his teeth. He let Will go then, slinking down the hall to do better things like drink beer on the couch and put his feet on the coffee table.
Will stared at the space where he used to be. He wanted to say you’re not raising anyone, but he’s always had trouble with nerve, so he wiped his hands on his pants and went to fetch a dustpan.
Will has always been a sensitive kid. His mom would say that like it was a compliment, frame his drawings and sew his DnD costumes and pretend not to know why the bullies were shoving his face into the mulch. Jonathan insisted being different was the only thing to be. So what if you got your first broken nose in kindergarten? All those other people? They’re boring. Bowie was different, and Freddie Mercury, and every other king of the world.
But Will knew, even when he was seven and a half, that there was something wrong with him. His father’s knuckle against his soft cheek told him that. The look in his mom’s eyes when he came home bruised at the knees told him. Troy Walsh grabbed him by the hair to tell him three times a week. Not normal. Not even close.
He remembers the first time he really felt it. James was tugging on his arm, pulling him backwards, and Troy had him by the front of his shirt. He was ten, then, and just starting to recognize the pit in his stomach as a permanent resident of his body. Troy was calling him a fairy or a loser or a bitch, some tired insult like a dull knife in a small hand.
Will had said “stop,” only once, and the boys had laughed and laughed. Sometimes, he worried they would kill him. But not that day.
That day, Mike Wheeler turned the corner at just the right moment, like kismet. He was wearing a blue shirt with red stripes, little white sneakers. His face was red, and his eyes were fiery, and Will will remember the way he looked for the rest of his life, paint it into a thousand sketchbooks. He shoved Troy in the chest with the weight of his whole body, kicked dirt over him and screamed his head off.
“Get off him you bastard! You motherfucker! Let him go!”
And by some miracle of God, Troy did, scampered off like a wounded dog, James in tow.
“Faggots!” James yelled as they went, still barking. But Will had heard that enough times that it barely stung.
Mike crouched down next to Will, sprawled on the ground, bleeding at the elbows. His eyes were wide and earnest, and he put a hand on Will’s shoulder.
“Are you okay?” His voice was soft.
Will sat up, brushed the dirt off his pants. He couldn’t look at Mike, for some reason. He could feel his heartbeat under his tongue.
“I’m okay,” he said. Then, for the sake of it, “you don’t have to worry about me.”
“I’m always worried about you,” Mike said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
And that’s when Will felt it, sat in the gravel. This giant feeling, like a bird trying to squeeze its wings into the tiny space of his chest, like trying to look directly at the sun in a cloudless sky. He didn’t get it, yet, but he felt it, like the buzz of a warm drink in your mouth in the dead of freezing winter.
Mike Wheeler. Stupid Mike Wheeler.
And stupid Will, always ruining his own life.
Once, he and Jonathan were bickering at the kitchen table, and Jonathan said that to him. They were fighting about the chore chart. It was Will’s week to wash dishes, but his mom had made Jonathan do it, because using the step stool by the sink made Will feel like a giant baby.
“That’s not a real reason not to do something.” Jonathan said, scowling.
“Is too.”
“No, it isn’t. If you got over it and used the stool, you’d be able to get cups for yourself instead of having me and mom do it for you.”
“Who cares?”
“I do! You’re ruining your own life.”
This made Will so angry he cried, and his mom had come home to Jonathan antagonizing him about the tears, something which he never did, and which made Will feel tender and foolish.
Their mom said “Jonathan, stop it, you sound like your father,” and Jonathan shut right up, looking sick.
Will doesn’t know what was worse: the look on Jonathan’s face or the feeling in his ribcage, like his heart suffocating between beats. You’re ruining your own life.
A month before Will turned eleven, Lonnie Byers rammed the front of Chevy into a guardrail on I-70, drunk off his ass. He left his baby on the road, hitchhiked home with a bloody forehead, a mouthful of Jack Daniel’s, and a bone to pick with the whole damn world. He threw Will’s mother into the wall, broke her elbow. Will can still remember the sound of the snapping bone, like dropping a hammer in a room with no furniture. Jonathan did his best to not kill his father, because he was fifteen years old and he didn’t know shit about killing except you had to be insanely angry and unbelievably stupid. He had Will go call the police. You’re ruining your own life.
This was before Hopper was chief. If it had been Hopper, maybe something would’ve come of the whole thing. As it so happens, it was Officer Bell, an old, wiry man with a crooked front tooth and a penchant for ignoring domestic disputes. Lonnie Byers got off with nothing, and Joyce Byers got another PTA meeting where all the other mothers whispered about her behind her back.
That night, Will’s father stormed out behind Officer Bell, tore off to God-Knows-Where. They didn’t hear from him for two days, during which he and Jonathan spent many anxious hours building a fort out of sticks in the rain.
Eventually, they both got the flu. Eventually, their mom got ahold of their father and told him to stay the fuck away. She called off work that week, spent seven days filling out paperwork and weeping on and off and making him and Jonathan chicken noodle soup.
He went back to school exactly one Monday after his father left, and his friends squashed him into a massive group hug in the parking lot.
“My mom told me what happened,” Lucas said. “She said your dad has always been a ‘real motherfucker.’”
“Yeah,” Dustin said, nodding like a bobble head. “My mom says he’s a nutcase.”
And Will couldn’t really argue with that. Especially not when Mike wordlessly took his hand and squeezed it.
When Will was twelve, the world ended, and Lonnie Byers became the least of his problems. He tells his mom that he doesn’t remember what happened, and it’s true, mostly. But he remembers the bike ride home, the moonlight, the otherworldly movement of the latch on the door, the paper thin walls of the shed. He remembers the monster, ten feet tall, a nightmare he couldn’t shake himself awake from.
When he was twelve, the world ended, but he had to keep living in it. Zombie Boy. Not even close to normal. The next few years were a thousand dead earths, a thousand apocalypses. An apocalypse of hearts and an apocalypse of words. Of sisters and best friends and California sun on pale midwestern skin. An apocalypse of growing pains and father fingers gripping tiny baby wrists.
It’s been five years since he last saw Lonnie Byers, the bang of a slamming door, the smell of whiskey and cigarettes and sweat. Six years since he figured out how to fall in love, since he learned how to hate himself, wet with blood and mulch, three feet from the old swing set. Four since the Upside Down. Two since pouring rain and it’s not my fault you don’t like girls. One and a quarter since California dreaming. One since the earth tried to swallow itself.
Time keeps moving around him. He feels like his friends are all thirty feet tall and he’s half an inch. The same kid who couldn’t tell Lonnie to just fuck off and die. The same kid who let Henry Creel wreck him.
Will Byers hasn’t been twelve for a very long time. He hasn’t been eleven or ten or seven and a half. Sometimes, it’s hard to remember that. Sometimes, everything reminds him.
Like: He biked to his old house this week. Where he lived before (There is a dichotomy to his life, like world history. Before Vecna. After him). He’s not so sure why he did it, just that at half past 11:00 PM last Thursday he felt his bones itching under his skin, and the Wheeler’s place was like a hand around his throat choking his breath away. Just that he wanted to hide, and he used to be so good at hiding.
He climbed out the basement window, the small one tucked in the top corner, that lets all the light in. The streetlamps dusted everything yellow and glowy, a blanket of dew over the whole neighborhood. Will looked at them long, chest tight as the tough lid of a jar. Then he got on his bike and rode home.
A long time ago, he biked this way. Four years, at this point. At 8:00 instead of 11:00. With Dustin, for about fifteen minutes at first. Once he biked this way and he died. His little life, wreckage, an X-Men comic collecting dust at the bottom of a bedroom drawer, his father’s shotgun shaking in his trembling hands, the rattling cupboard.
He’d done everything right. That’s the worst part, he knows he’d done everything right. Lock the door, load the gun. He was fast, and he was smart, and it still wasn’t enough.
Will stopped in the woods outside his old house. He got off his bike and let it fall into the grass. Without thinking, his feet had taken him here. Castle Byers, a pile of sticks and nails and rust. He stared at the debris, branches covered in the dust of the forest. Like a broken heart buried in the woods. Lost to time. Lost like him.
He knelt down to pick up a piece of the sign on the front, just to feel it, to prove it wasn’t some desperate mirage his drowning mind invented to placate him. “All friends welcome” it to used to say, but now it said just “me,” a lonely word in the hands of a lonely boy. A bit on the nose. Funny.
He never used to be lonely. At five years old, Will made a friend and thought he was a permanent cure to being alone. Mike Wheeler was as good as a shadow, for how much time he spent attached to Will’s hip. “Do you want to be my friend?” on a busted set of swings, creaking in the wind. He said yes. He said yes.
His entire childhood is over-full with sleepovers and secrets and dungeons and dragons and midnight games of twenty questions. He knows how Mike took his hot cocoa (jumbo marshmallows, like a lunatic), and which shoes made his feet ache, and what he wanted to be when he grew up. But somewhere along the way, Will got stupid. He forgot how to act, or he never learned the steps to the new dance Mike had started insisting on.
All of a sudden, everyone had a girlfriend, and they hated games, and they didn’t want to talk to each other. And Will’s head spun, trying to trace his way back to what he missed, where he went wrong. To him, it felt like one minute, they were all watching Ghostbusters in Mike’s basement, and the next, it was the Tower of Babylon, and none of them remembered how to speak the same language.
“But then one day, I was cleaning bat shit out of my parents’ garage, and I found this 8-millimeter film reel. You know?” Robin said, face shadowed by the low hanging ceiling of the tunnel. “And it was just from this silly movie that I made in fourth grade, but I got it up on the projector, and all of a sudden, I was looking at this little version of myself. And that little me, I could hardly recognize her.”
Will knew the feeling. Will had become that feeling. Longing like a whimper, like clenching your teeth until they crack.
“You know, she was so carefree and, like, fearless. She just loved every part of herself. And that’s when it hit me. It was never about Tone-deaf Tammy. It was always just about me.”
The first day his mom and dad really fought, Jonathan taught him how to ballroom dance in the driveway.
He was taking a class for it in school, because ‘I wasn’t about to take PE as my second period.’
He took Will’s wrists, showed him the box step. “When I go backwards, you go forwards. It’s easy, you’ll see.”
Inside, Lonnie was smashing glassware against the cabinets, and his mother was howling. But out there, Jonathan was playing a shitty Beethoven tape he’d borrowed from the library for class, and they were pretending to be in Jane Austen. Will watched their feet as they went, focusing so hard his head was starting to hurt. They got into a sort of groove, where Will would only step on a shoe every few minutes, lost to the piano and the repetition of footwork.
But then Jonathan grabbed him by the hand, spun him around and around and around. Will burst out laughing, the sort of laughter that’s like sunlight, the kind that only exists in terrible places where the joy is all the more joyous. And he felt like wind. He felt like a paper airplane and the drop of a roller coaster and the second you decide to jump off the swings when they’re the highest they go. Air and terror and freedom.
(I had all the answers.)
Will had laughed his stomach to aching, Jonathan keeled over next to him.
“I don’t think I’m very good at that,” he said, breathless.
Jonathan brushed Will’s hair out of his face. “Don’t worry, bud. One day, someone will love you in spite of your middling ballroom dancing skills.”
(I just had to stop being so goddamn scared.)
On the ground in the MAC-Z, Will Byers is sure he’s dying. Under the searing pain, he manages to think that there’s something almost poetic about this whole thing.
He’s burning up, flailing under his mother’s soft hands. Everything is in chaos around them, popping guns, screaming soldiers, devils and angels and clashing swords.
He’s lost sight of the kids, of Mike. Something is terribly wrong. Will’s vision is Dutch Angling, his head screaming, but it’s all background noise, ringing ears. All he can really recognize is the pain. He kicks his legs, tries to shake it out of him. The heat is an agony he remembers like pressing a thumb to a scar and feeling it sting. When he was thirteen, it was a kitchen table exorcism, a fire poker to the ribs. He still has the mark. It’s poetic, his stupid life, always rhyming.
They tried to bleed the evil out of him then, Nancy, Jonathan, Mom, and a room full of space heaters. It went mostly, but like ink on fingers some shadow lingered, clung to him like a burrowing tick. They tried to bleed the evil out of him, and when it didn’t work they forgot him. Left him stumbling, always a few feet behind, always unable to wrap his head around why. Ruining your own life. Will doesn’t blame them. He never could. It’s only that sometimes he feels he could dissolve into just sorrow, just tears. It’s a sad poem.
He thinks, distantly, that he must be screaming, with the way his throat aches. He is not strong enough to do this again. He’s sad and pliant. He’s not scared to die. But he doesn’t want to.
Vecna drags him away from his mother. He looks the way Will remembers. Like a nightmare. And Will is so mad he could kill someone, but he’s helpless, scrambling and terrified and totally fucking useless.
“Some minds are not meant for this world,” Vecna says. And doesn’t Will know it. For sixteen years he’s been nothing but out of place. Always wrong-footed, always too gentle, too fragile.
Lonnie said to kill the rabbit. He took Jonathan out and made him shoot one. But Will had thrown a fit when he tried that with him, so catastrophic that his father didn’t even bother. He didn’t want to be a killer. But everything is different now. He’s tried so hard to change that he can hardly remember what it feels like to be soft without crippling guilt. Will Byers has always been a sensitive kid.
“They belong in mine,” Vecna tears a finger down his cheek, and his mind is flooded with awful memories. Castle Byers under the bat in his hands, full body tears. Pressing his forehead to the window of the Pizza Boy van, praying to God that Mike won’t notice Will killing himself beside him.
Vecna drops him, then. He’s reminded, bizarrely, of that day when he was seven and a half. His father pushing him against the kitchen cabinets.
But he isn’t seven. Not anymore. The world has ended before, and it will end again again again. And he knows what to do.
(Scared of who I really was.)
When Will’s eyes clear, it’s just tears and Mike across the way, a demogorgon clawing towards him.
(Once I did that, I felt so free. It’s like I could fly!)
Something clicks. He’s not sure what it is, but his resolve hardens to stone. All the fear in his gut turns into something different.
Mike on the swings, his rainbow ship, Castle Byers on a day with no rain.
He reaches out a hand. He wants the demogorgon to stop, so he tells it to stop, and it does.
His eyes move, and Robin and Lucas are cowering before him, and that won’t do. His hands snap out. The monsters rise like angels in ascension, but he wants them dead. So they die.
And then it’s over. The lights around them are flickering like there’s a power surge, and he feels something wet under his nose. He swipes it away. He falls.
When his knees hit the floor, all the air goes out of his lungs. It’s like a slamming door, all of a sudden he’s tipped sideways, strings cut. His jaw jams into the concrete and his teeth rattle.
“Will!” He hears a shout. It’s Mike, of course, footsteps echoing. It’s so silent now, wind and dead men. Will tries to sit up, spills back out onto the pavement.
“Will!” Mike says again. He puts a hand on his shoulder, pulls him up until he’s sitting. Will’s vision is blurred, his head is swimming. “Are you okay?”
“I’m okay,” Will says. He feels dizzy, but he also feels good. Mike doesn’t look convinced. “You don’t have to worry about me,” Will insists.
“I’m always worried about you,” Mike says. And when Will really looks at him, he seems. Different.
“Are you okay?” Will frowns.
“Am I?” Mike says. His face is red. “Yeah—I’m. That was incredible, Will. It’s—I’m okay, I’m good.” He sounds crazy to Will, but that feels like a later problem.
“We need to go,” he says. “Vecna might come back.”
“Right,” Mike says, eyes going round. “Got it.”
He hauls Will up to his feet.
When they’re back at the barn, Mike tells everyone the story. Will’s a thousand percent sure it wasn’t as grand as he’s making it sound, but Lucas punches him in the shoulder, grinning like a madman.
“Knew you had it in you, Byers.”
Mike scowls, crossing his arms. “No, you did not.”
“You don’t have a monopoly on believing in Will, Mike.”
“Definitely not,” says Robin, and then she’s scooping him into a big hug, so tight his feet lift off the ground. “Thank you for saving my life, Baby Byers,” she says, in the tone a grandma has when she pinches your cheeks.
“My pleasure, Rockin’ Robin,” Will dutifully replies.
“No hug from mom?” she asks, setting him back on the ground, “figured she’d be all over you with worry.”
“Mike had him,” his mother says, sliding up to them. Her hands are in her pockets, and her eyes are bagged. “Nothing to worry about.” But she kisses his cheeks anyways and says, “I’m so proud of you, baby.”
And when Will says, “I know,” he means it.
After about half an hour more of crowding, Will goes up to the hayloft, willing to bear the inevitable sneezing for a second of quiet.
He sits with his back against a hay bale. He looks at his hands, flips them over. He’s still not sure exactly how he did it. He knows that what Robin said helped, that it made something in him unlock. He’s afraid now that he’s opened this door, too aware of two way streets and the ways in which your eyes can become not your eyes. But tonight, for once in his fucking life, he did something brave. He got to be the hero, even if there is so much more to do and so much more to lose. Even if there is Holly and Derek, and Max, and his friends in the Upside Down.
The ladder creaks. When he looks up, Mike is looking back at him.
“Hey,” Will says.
“Hey.” Mike crawls the rest of the way into the loft, scoots until he’s matching Will, back against the hay. “Everyone’s gone off to separate corners to crash.”
“Makes sense,” says Will. “It’s been a long day.”
“Especially for you,” Mike bumps their arms.
“Yeah, yeah.” He waves away the attention. Mike has always been like this about supernatural bullshit. Before he and El broke up, he would talk about her powers with him for hours, trying to work out the logistics. It was only sort of torturous.
“Seriously,” he says. “You were awesome today. I mean, you’re always awesome.”
“Mike.”
“Will. I’m not kidding. I knew you could do it, not because of Vecna or whatever. Because it’s you.”
“Me,” Will says. “Because I’m so great.”
“Duh,” says Mike. He still looks strange. He seems antsy. His fingers are moving, tapping at his sides. He’s chewing his lip, fidgeting like he’s about to burst. And his face is so close, like he’s been inching forward while Will’s been distracted.
“Do you have something to say, Mike?” He asks, because he can’t fathom what disease Mike could’ve contracted to melt him like this.
“Sort of,” Mike says, too fast. “I’ve always—" he looks down to Will’s chin then back to his eyes. “I mean. You always—"
Apparently, he decides against words. Will goes to ask again, but then Mike is leaning in and kissing him and Will is frozen solid.
It’s half a moment, just a brush of lips and breath and Mike is already pulling away. Will’s heart is beating like a rainstorm.
“Why did you do that?” His voice is barely above a whisper, but Mike is so close it hardly matters. His eyes are saucers.
“I don’t know,” says Mike. He looks ill. “I guess, I just wanted to.”
“Is this a joke?” Will says, though he’s fairly certain it isn’t. “I don’t understand.”
“It’s not a joke,” Mike says immediately. He grabs Will’s elbow. “I wouldn’t joke about something like this, I wouldn’t.”
“Then what is it?”
“I don’t know. You’re just—you’re beautiful, do you know that?” Will doesn’t, in fact, know that. “And you make me crazy. Ugh!”
Mike drops his arm, presses the heels of his hands into his eyes. Will’s pretty sure his heart is racing so fast that the rush of his blood could power a building.
“Crazy?”
“Absolutely fucking crazy, Will Byers.”
Will feels totally lost. “Why?”
“Because you always have,” he says like it’s obvious. “Because you’re so good at being good. And everyone is changing, but you’re still you.”
“I thought that was a bad thing.”
Mike meets his eyes, clear as water. “How could that ever be a bad thing?”
Will wants to say that Mike told him it was, that Mike spit at his heart and said he was small and weak and dumb, that Will has spent his life gutting himself, that Mike has been killing him for years. More than that, he wants—
“Kiss me again,” Will says, forgetting to think. “Kiss me. Kiss me.”
Mike blinks for a half second and then, like gravity, he leans back in.
This time, he holds Will’s face, hand sliding up his jaw, stinging the bruise there. His fingers are soft, and his mouth is softer. Kissing is wetter than Will imagined, and louder too. But mostly, it’s just Mike and the heat he’s been feeling since he was ten. He’s warm and familiar. Will tilts his head, and all of a sudden their teeth are bumping, and Mike’s tongue is in his mouth and he feels sick in a good way, dizzy and nauseous and hungry. He feels like he is his heartbeat. His hands find Mike’s waist, and he presses his fingers there, needing something to hold. Above them, the dusty light-bulbs are twinkling.
He pulls back to gasp, “Mike,” but Mike ignores him, just kisses him again like a man on a mission. He puts his palms on Mikes chest, pushes back “Mike.”
Mike goes, mouth clicking shut. “What?” He is obscenely annoyed, eyebrows scrunching. His face is red and his lips are dark. He looks stupidly pretty.
“I’m,” Will says, still deciding if he’s embarrassed by this. “I think I’m making the lights go.”
Mike glances up, and the bulbs are dimming and beaming. “Oh,” he says. “That’s cool,” distracted, like it doesn’t bother him one way or another. “That’s really cool. Can I kiss you again?”
Will rolls his eyes and scoffs but lets Mike press his lips next to his mouth, then to his cheek, then to the curve of his jaw. He feels like he’s vibrating.
“Mike,” he says again.
“Huh?”
“We need to sleep.”
Mike kisses his neck once, twice. “Do we?”
Will can’t believe he’s saying this, because this is essentially a dream he’s had a thousand different ways, except this is real and not at all a dream. But he killed three demogorgons today. And got hit by a car. And snatched up by a demigod. And set on fire. And exhausted isn’t a big enough word for the way his body feels.
“Yes, actually.”
Mike frowns and pulls away. “Fine,” he says, and then he smiles a little, like he can’t help it, and Will grins back.
“We could just sleep here,” Mike says, glancing around. It feels a bit awkward now that they’re not kissing. Will is worried he might be hallucinating. The lights have calmed back to a buzz, and Will pulls the string to turn them off.
“Alright,” Will says.
They both lay on the hay. It’s sort of itchy, but Will has slept in far worse places with far worse company.
“I make you crazy?” Will says into the air. Mike presses their arms together, links their pinkies. His hands are shaking just a little bit.
“Insane.” He says.
“Okay,” says Will. He pauses. “You, um. You make me crazy too, Mike.” And those aren’t exactly the right words for it all, but he trusts Mike will figure it out.
He can feel Mike smile. “Cool,” he says.
“Cool,” Will echoes.
When Will Byers was thirteen and everything was falling apart, Mike Wheeler held his hand in the decay. He can, when he tries, still feel the weight of his fingers, the rough fabric of the couch underneath them. The basement was colder than usual. Will hadn’t thought anything of it at the time. Now, he thinks about it a lot.
He was worried, so much that he could hardly eat. About himself, about his mom. He couldn’t trust his eyes, because Will Byers had died, and something else remained. Flat on his back in the Upside Down, his heart stalled to a stop. The world used to be so much smaller. He could trace his terror to all its sources, to Lonnie Byers and his snarling mouth, to the shrill sound of Troy Walsh’s voice hounding him in the schoolyard. Will was never like other kids, but now it was worse. It wasn’t a jab, it was a diagnosis, a needle in his arm and a chart that said something’s not right.
He died. They pulled a body out of the quarry, and it wasn’t Will, but he used to wish it was, just to simplify everything back to logic. To save his mom and his brother the trouble of sniping peers. To save himself from how mean everything had become. He never understood it. Cruelty as a response to fear. He was only fear, back then, just four and a half feet of panic. But it never made him spiteful. It just made him sad.
“Well, if we’re both going crazy,” Mike said, all intensity, “then we’ll go crazy together, right?”
Will smiled, every awful thing in his gut melting down to Mike Wheeler's hand against his hand, to Mike’s eyes, warm as ever. He felt it again, smoothing out all his rough edges. A balm over the horror, for just a moment. No more normal or not normal. No more ruining his life.
He’s different now, than he was back then. Everything was easier before, even the difficult stuff. You can look at a bully and draw a line from dot A to dot B, this is why everything is terrible. But monsters don’t work like that, and neither does hating yourself. It doesn’t make sense, it just feels like hell.
He’s different now, than he was back then, but some things don’t ever change. Like his heart in his chest, like his father’s misery, or his mom's sweet smile, or his brother's crackling old radio. Or like Will Byers and Mike Wheeler in the same sentence. In the same room, with the same hands, going crazy.
“Yeah,” Will said. “Crazy together.”