Chapter Text
When Will Byers was seven years old his father had told him that he would burn in Hell for being gay.
When he had been taken to the Upside-Down, Will couldn’t get it out of his mind that that was exactly what had come to pass.
Except, Hell was cold and the thing that gave him the strength to stay alive was remembering how Mike Wheeler’s eyes could laugh even when he was crying. He hid with his ribs pressed to the slimy dirt, filling the decaying Fort Byers with the Clash shaking from his blue lips. He shrieked for his mom when he felt her near, wanting her to wrap her arms around him and take him back to his room like she would do when Lonnie started throwing things.
Nobody saved him, not until after days and nights in Hell. Will comforted himself with memories of nights gone by. His heart was straining to beat but his mind was nestled in his own light side bedroom. Curled up like a cat in his sleeping bag cocoon Mikes snores purred, drooling on Will’s Camelot 3000 comic. Looking at him in the lonely lamplight of being the last to fall asleep, he had known. When the two would awake the next morning with their hands on each other’s middles and their legs locked only one of them would feel the stinging shame of an imagined significance, making something out of every sleepover nothing until Will could hardly stand it.
When they were younger, that was all easier to push to the back of his mind. Board games and exploring imagined worlds were all a billion times more important than feelings that bubbled deep in the pit of his stomach
It got harder once the world decided it was time to get harder.
Will struggled to find practical ways to love Mike. Love was letting Mike borrow his bike when he blew out the tire of his own. Mike always let the air pressure get too low but Will didn’t say a word of ridicule. Love was hiking back to Will’s bedroom when it was rainy and pulling out his top dresser drawer to reveal his humble tape collection, playing him ‘real music’ for once. It wasn’t story-book romance, but it was as close as he could get. Will would do anything Mike told him, go anywhere Mike told him. He would never lie to Mike. He would lay down his life for Mike. Sometimes Will felt as though Mike might understand what he meant, understand the way Will was different. Only sometimes.
Then, where Mike was oblivious others started to become informed, noticing what was different about the mousy, earnest boy with crayons shoved in his shorts pockets.
Now it wasn’t just his father poiting it out, it was everyone everywhere he went. ‘Gay’ flung from lips and followed him like an irritated wasp, the unrelenting sting never leaving him a moment to process the pain. Of course, people could always be counted on to defend his honor. The party, Johnathan, his mom, they were always quick to reassure him. What they say isn’t true. They don’t mean it. You shouldn’t listen to them. He loved them so much for it, but the problem with their defense was that they were wrong. He was everything that they said, a queer, a freak, a sissy.
When Will came back to the right-side Hawkins (Heaven, as he began to call it in his head), everything went back to normal again, happy again. At least, everything was back to normal when everyone was together. In Mike’s ever-familiar basement Will, the Wise donned his purple robes and ripples of laughter choked the hot breath right from their lungs. They burned through every sentence that they had been deprived of saying while Will was in Hell. They constantly threw kindling into the proverbial fire, everyone joking, swapping stories, and making up games as they beat the silence back fiercely. The party was constantly trying to keep the ball rolling.
Because when the ball fell it fell hard.
When they broke off into pairs or god forbid singles the pauses were filled with thoughts that no one wanted to think about, broken words crept into the happy reunions.
“Yeah, it’s okay. It’s just-”
“I know”
“We had a funeral for you, you know.”
“I know, and Jennifer Hayes was there, you said.”
“No, but I mean.. Will, I’ve been to your funeral.”
“Yeah?”
“I thought about you a lot down there.”
“I thought I’d never see you again.”
“I miss her.”
“I missed you.”
“I still see it all sometimes.”
“It still feels so real.”
“Why are you being so quiet?”
“It’s nothing”
Will slept in his mom’s bed for two weeks after he first came back, wrapping him up in garish and fading quilt until he was certain of where he was. When Will told Mike that fact the other boy shrugged and didn’t say anything and Will loved him for it.
Will was scared.
Sleeping like that helped. Sleepovers helped too, but his mom didn’t really let him leave the house like that anymore. He couldn’t say he blamed her but it was hard knowing that they were together without him. What’s the difference? They had been together without him while he was down there, so he assumed it was all just the same for them. Well, except for the disappearance of the infamous El.
Will was almost relieved when he heard about Eleven and Mike. Mike, ever his best friend confided to him in low voiced secrecy how they had kissed. Mike had told him everything Will, you would like her so much. She’s so cool. Did you hear how- Yes, he had heard. Of course, he had heard. He had heard it all. Will was happy for Mike. He was sure he would like her, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear the stories anymore. Though when Mike stopped talking, that was worse. When he fell down from the high of tales of El he fell back to the empty space where El used to be. Will let him sit in silence.
Will knew that the pain he felt missing El was terrible. Not being able to be with the person you want to be with. Imagine that. But Will wasn’t bitter, it wasn’t a competition. At least, he really did try to be happy for him. Will knew that even with El dead Mike was in for much less pain as a result of loving her than he would be loving Will. Because that would mean he was like Will. He didn’t want Mike to feel the same way he felt. The way he felt was agonizing.
When El came back, when he met her and saw her; he understood. That was the most frustrating thing to him, he understood. He could hardly blame the other for forgetting about him to hold her close. How could a little scared scrawny pale zombie boy compete with a beautiful brave kind girl with superpowers? The pros and cons lists could never measure up.
Besides, Eleven needed Mike more than he did. Despite Will’s trembling nights and the “off” days where he felt like he wasn’t really anywhere and the unpredictable moments when memories would deck him out of nowhere, Eleven needed him more. There was no one alive in Hawkins, Indiana who could measure up to what she had been through. And Will knew full well how much better Mike could make someone feel. He hoped he was helping El the way it had helped him. Hoped when she cried his hands were the same sturdy palms on her back. Being held by Mike was warm and soft and slightly sweaty and perfect.
When The Mind Flayer took over Will he felt a sickly familiarity. An infected mind was an everyday affair.
The pain in his body as he tried to resist was new and terrible and he thought that he would die, go back to hell. Once he didn’t Will couldn’t help but think that he would rip himself in two to get rid of the part of his brain that was in love with his best friend.
He tried it. He beat his skull hard against the back of his bed frame on nights when he couldn’t sleep. Over and over, just quiet enough to keep his mom from coming running. Was the only way to fix a broken brain to break it twice?
No. It never worked. Will knew he was disgusted in a way that freezing swim trips to the lake with the rest of the party would never wash off. The filth was in his blood. He couldn’t remove it. It wasn’t a demon he could exercise, it was his cross to bear.
Sitting under juniper trees alone, Mike and El up the hill; they were his feelings to tamp down.
He managed to settle it all, at least a bit. Time was passing and that was good, he reassured himself of that.
All their faces changed so quickly he hardly noticed and now El and Mike looked serious when they held hands. They weren’t kids playing boyfriend and girlfriend anymore. They were El and Mike, glorious and unstoppable. Will was still Just Will. Always the same, despite the inches he had gained since last fall.
How could his friends not notice when he became terrified again?
How?
Girls. That was how.
The girls were his friends too, but it still wasn’t the same. Will could see how Mike’s eyes turned to El when they were in danger, they used to turn to him. Everyone was distracted in every which way until there was no more time for Will Byers. When Joyce and Johnathan were at work Will would sit alone in his room. He would put his tapes on. He would signal on the radio. He would draw.
Somewhere they had diverged. Will didn’t like girls, at least not as far as he knew, but if that was the whole story Will could deal with that.
Everything was changing.
He had just gotten his life back together, they all had. Now, it felt like it was all slipping through his fingers again. His head spun with no time to slow down. The rocks of his life. Sleepovers, game nights, they were so few and far between. He felt like soon it wouldn’t exist.
The world that he had used to comfort himself in the upside-down didn’t exist anymore. The party altogether, shining and innocent with nothing to do but be together. He would never get that back.
Will hadn’t had adventure after adventure to turn himself into an action hero like the rest of them. He had had two nightmares that he had just barely gotten to end.
It had made them all grow up faster, feel like they could do anything. Will gripped white-knuckled on the hands of the clock, trying to turn them back. Get them to slow down.
He wanted to be the boy with crayons in his pocket again.