Chapter Text
Arguably, Will understood the importance of boundaries and privacy more than anyone else in the Party. No was his favorite word— so it was unfortunate that the rest of his friends were clueless as to what it meant.
He knew when to stop pushing for details, unlike Dustin and Max, who thought ‘my secret’ meant ‘our secret’. He understood the concept of alone time, unlike Lucas and El, who thought it entirely acceptable to barge into any Party members’ house at any time of day, be it six in the morning or eleven at night. He even respected his friends’ personal space, unlike Mike, who thought of Will as more of a personal armrest than his best friend at this point— but that was an entirely separate topic Will couldn’t think about without triggering a bout of frustrated screaming into his poor, well-loved (see abused) pillow.
Suffice to say, Will considered himself a very understanding person. He would never sneak behind a friend's back for secrets, or use their lap as a human leg rest (looking at you, Wheeler), or climb through someone’s window in the dead of night because he was ‘bored’ (seriously, El, it was four in the morning; if she was that bored, then why not sleep? And his door was literally right there, so what was even the point of going through the window?).
Will would never do anything with even the slightest possibility of making his friends uncomfortable, because he knew how it felt to have your boundaries violated in the worst way possible. He knew how it felt to be pried open from the inside out, to have your entire brain fed to an interdimensional monster and lose even the thought of personal space because said monster was literally curled up inside of him. He wouldn’t wish that sickening feeling on his worst enemy, so even if it meant resisting the urge to ask exactly how Dustin had been permanently banned from ever taking an art class at Hawkins High again, he would refrain from crossing even the smallest of boundaries, because there was nothing more important to Will than making his friends feel at ease.
So why, out of all people, was Will the one stuck with uncontrollable telepathic powers?
It’s not like he was against the idea of having superpowers in general— honestly, he partially thought his newfound powers were pretty cool. His fifth-grade self would have thought they were awesome, definitely; before magic had become more scary than captivating, Will had been prone to zoning out during boring classes and losing himself in vivid daydreams of Will the Wise, the fire-wielding cleric he had always wished he was. . . so, yeah, maybe he had always secretly yearned for magical powers.
But out of all the possible superpowers he could have gotten, mind-reading was definitely the least desirable choice— and honestly, he was terrified of the concept. If he could read minds, who said someone else couldn’t have telepathy, too? That led to the terrifying thought of someone actually reading his mind, and all his secrets becoming public information— and he had far too many secrets for that scenario to go over well with anyone who discovered all the skeletons hanging in his (literal) closet.
For the moment, though, Will was pretty sure that he was the only telepath in a hundred-mile radius. He was about ninety-nine percent sure that his powers were a product of the Upside Down’s permanent influence on his brain, and he had been the only one to come out of that place alive, after all. If nothing else, Will could rest assured that his own thoughts were safe, even if the rest of the world's minds laid entirely open.
But— okay, it's not like Will wanted to read their minds! He just had one little problem; he couldn't control his powers quite yet. And he was still unsure on exactly how to keep them under control— but he was working on it, even if 'working on it' meant isolating himself from everyone he knew for the moment. That had to count for something, right?
It wasn't like he had any other choice at the moment. Spending even a second around someone would let every one of their thoughts pass through his brain, no matter how insignificant or embarrassing or sometimes just plain horrific, really. If he was lucky, he could almost push out the thoughts of one singular person, but if he was around a crowd, it was next to impossible to quiet his mind— and, to put it plainly, it was hell.
Even standing outside the school doors was like living in a waking nightmare. And he didn't even want to think about those crowded hallways; teeming with bodies, every person yelling to each other in their real voices and screaming incoherently in their internal voices, turning his once-coherent thoughts into an incomprehensible tangle of static noise. And it only took a few minutes of that nonstop noise to bring the slight prick of grating voices up to the aching pain of a full-on migraine, turning his vision blurry and turn his steps unsteady as he wobbled to the bathroom so he could collapse in peace.
It was the third day of school, and Will had already feigned sickness twice to get home early and rest in the peace of a quiet house. He couldn’t leave early for the third day in a row, especially not when school had barely started; his friends were already onto him, wondering why he was absent from their lunch group or Biology lab table for two days in a row. Will didn't want to draw more suspicion to his already obvious problem, and he really didn't want to make his friends worry any more than they already were. The Upside Down was gone for good, and the Party deserved some peace— even if Will still couldn’t catch a break— so he absolutely refused to tell anyone what was wrong with him, again. He wasn’t about to ruin their first normal school year in three years with his headaches, and he definitely wasn’t going to tell them what was causing the headaches. There was no way they’d want to be around him after they found out he could search their subconsciouses for their deepest, darkest secrets— which he wasn’t actually doing! He could, which he found out after getting a little too involved in a passerby’s internal worry over her lost pet and found out she was cheating on her already unfaithful husband with— no, that was something he definitely did not want to think about again, never mind.
The point is— Will stuck resolutely to only listening in on any shallow thoughts that passed through his mind. He wasn't sure he could bear the guilt if he actually tried to dig through someone's brain— though he knew his friends probably still wouldn’t appreciate being spied on, no matter how surface-level his uncontrollable spying was.
After enduring first period and the monotonous drone of I’m so tired, I want to go home that came with it, Will was honestly considering skipping school entirely. Who cared if his friends wondered where he was, and who cared if he was marked absent in every class, and who cared if his mom found out and got not mad, but disappointed— something she would definitely say, so Joyce-like that Will could hear her downcast voice perfectly in his mind.
(He cared a lot, actually. The thought of an absence on his report card did worry him a little bit, but what was a little rebellion when he'd already gone missing for a week at twelve? He didn't particularly like to pull the I-went-missing-in-an-alternate-dimension card, but with the state his throbbing head was in, it seemed like a necessity.)
It seemed easy to slip out the back doors and trudge behind the football-field bleachers, then waste the rest of the day in the nearby woods. Only a few weeks ago, he would have been appalled by even the idea of ditching school— but now, he couldn’t think of anything better. He saw no point in sticking for the next seven hours if all he could barely manage to touch his pencil to paper without crying from the effort it took to concentrate on moving his hands, so by the time the bell rang, Will had made up his mind. He would sneak off, then somehow figure out a way to stop accidentally reading peoples’ minds, even if it meant carving out his brain with a blunt stick.
He had gotten halfway across the football field when a roadblock in the shape of a five-foot-four, brightly clothed girl derailed his plan. The treeline was so close he could almost reach out and brush his fingertips against the clusters of pine needles, but no, El just had to have a second period gym class, and like the rest of her boundary-pushing, needlessly-concerned friends, she just had to ask why he was wandering off into the woods when school had barely started.
”Is there a building in the woods?” she asked, tilting her head like a confused puppy— which, on any other occasion, Will would have found endearing. At present, however, he was about one minor inconvenience away from slamming his head (or someone else’s head) into a wall, hard.
El had grown to be one of Will’s closest friends in the few months they had spent together so far, despite his initial wariness towards her. At first, he was honestly intimidated by El, since she had the ability to quite literally make Will’s brain explode if he so much as slightly annoyed her. He had tried his best to disguise his terror with an abundance of politeness, but El saw through him instantly.
Along with his moderate fear of being snapped in half via telekinesis, Will had also felt somewhat envious of El— though it’s not like he wanted to! He had no good reason for the feeling, considering she had saved his life twice. If anything, he should feel grateful, and he did— but every time she leaned on Mike’s shoulder, or Mike ditched another one of Will’s D&D sessions to spend time with El, he found it impossible to shove down the nauseating bile that rose in his throat, bringing with it the sick idea that the closer Mike and El became, the further he and Will would drift apart.
Afraid of destroying the already tenuous friendship he and Mike were rebuilding after the battle at Starcourt, Will bottled his resentment away and hoped to hide it under a thick layer of neutral civility. If he kept quiet about his stupid abandonment issue to El, and kept his facial expressions calm instead of mildly distraught whenever Mike and El snuck away together, then maybe the problem would just— go away.
What Will hadn’t noticed amidst the chaos of summer, though, was that Mike and El had stayed broken up. This led to El spending most of her free time with Max, which led to Max teaching El ‘people skills’ (also known as ‘how to see into someone’s soul and figure out their deepest, darkest secrets with just one look’ skills, because Max was scarily good at reading people), which led to El barging into the Byers’ household at an unreasonably early hour, dragging him outside, and mentally shaking him down until he had confessed nearly every single one of his insecurities— not unkindly, of course, because El could never be intentionally, genuinely mean. She was just curious and, to Will's detriment, neverendingly persistent, which was why she had sat on his front porch for hours until she knew exactly why Will would never look her in the eye.
It was cathartic, in a way, to spill his soul to El— though, really, El had knocked over his tightly capped bottle of buried emotions and spilled the contents directly into her boundary-pushing hands. Even so, having El discover his hidden homosexuality (actually thinking the word still kind of made Will feel a little sick, but he was working on it, okay?) was probably the best case scenario, considering El had little to no understanding of societal norms. When he had tried to explain the multitude of reasons he felt bad for not just being interested in girls like the rest of his friends were, she had simply shrugged and said “It is just a feeling. Why would I be mad at you for having emotions?”
She might be mad if she knew about the Mike thing, but he tried not to think about it. No matter what, Will would probably end up with no friends at all if they found out about the— Mike thing, so he did his best to cling to the ones he had while they still cared about him. He wasn't sure if they would stay once they found out what was really wrong with him, so it was best not mentioning it at all. The Mike thing would stay locked up in his head, sealed tight unless he was one-thousand percent sure its existence would do no damage to his friendships— and he could never really be sure, so he'd probably carry it to the grave. Oh well.
But Will couldn’t really argue with El's words, so he stopped trying to explain the concept of homophobia to her beyond the idea that sometimes being harmlessly different is all that it takes to be hated, an idea that El understood all too well.
That was the reason he and El usually got along so easily; they understood what it felt like to be ostracized from the rest of the world, to be considered an ‘other’ for something they couldn’t control. The rest of Will’s friends might have understood what it was like to simply be unpopular, sure— but only El could understand how it felt to be so different that it was hard to be considered fully human.
At the moment, though, Will was not getting along with El at all.
A tiny asterisk might need to be tacked onto the statement that El knew all of Will’s secrets, Mike situation notwithstanding. When El had first discovered the rest of his secrets, his telepathy had only existed in the form of a faint tickle in the back of his mind, indiscernible from his own thoughts. He hadn’t even thought his subtle headaches worth mentioning in the midst of other more pressing problems, so the weird, scratchy headaches he'd been having went unsaid. Now that they were more than tiny headaches, though, and had been for weeks, El would probably not be happy with him— considering how she had taken the mantra of ‘friends don’t lie’ and ran so far with it Will wasn't even sure how their saying had even started.
Speaking of running, El was terrifyingly fast, and had managed to cross the wide stretch of grass between the concrete path and the back of the bleachers in the few seconds Will had spent wondering how he could convince El that yes, his World History class was just behind that tree. She stood still in front of him, looking a little concerned, and rephrased her question. “Where are you going?”
“I— uh,” Will started, his mind pulling a blank on any possible way to reason himself out of this. “I just got turned around on my way to class, so—”
El narrowed her eyes as her gaze flickered from the map of the school crumpled in her hand to his guilty face. In response, Will tried to turn his grimace into a sheepish smile in the hopes of distracting El from the way he was still slowly edging towards the woods.
When he stepped on a dead leaf and an unfortunate crackling noise echoed throughout the field, Will knew there was no getting out of this, short of sprinting into the woods and never returning (though El could just freeze him in place with her powers, so, yeah. He was definitely stuck).
“There are no classrooms in the woods,” El said, consulting her map just to make sure. “And you are a very bad liar. Friends don’t lie, but you could have at least tried to make it believable.”
Will sighed, holding his throbbing head in his hands as he continued to walk towards the woods. El didn’t really care for the concept of being trapped in any sort of building all day, anyway, so she was more than willing to follow him and ditch on a whim— and Will couldn’t bring himself to care about anything except escaping his headache, so he didn’t bother to push her away.
An uncomfortable silence grew thick between them as they continued to walk, now far past the bleachers and well into the woods. By the time the school building had turned to a vague blue behind him, the buzzing in his head turned to silence, replaced with the soft shifting of dirt under his feet and the gentle swish of leaves far above his head. He held back a sigh of relief as his headache faded away— though knowing how little it took for the pain to come rushing back dulled most of the comfort he felt.
When all he could hear was the faint sound of birdsong, Will stopped walking and collapsed against a tree trunk, resting his head on the rough bark and letting his eyes drift shut. Sleep was just in reach, and god, he needed it, because he could probably count the amount of hours he’d slept in the past week on one hand. He was already a light sleeper, and the grating noise of everyone’s thoughts bouncing around in his brain did not help— but now that his mind was quiet, all he had to do was close his eyes and—
“So,” El said, yanking Will away from blissful sleep, “why are you actually in the woods?”
Will let his head loll over towards El, too exhausted to actually turn himself to face her. “I just— I had a headache, and I didn’t want to call my mom and make her pick me up for the third time in a row.”
”Are you sick? You know Ms. Byers would let you stay home if you didn’t feel well,” she responded, raising a hand up to Will’s forehead to check his temperature. Will flinched, scrabbling away from her palm as though she could absorb all his secrets through a brush of her fingertips.
Will knew that lying to El was pointless. For one, she could see through lies like looking through a window, and Will was a bad liar to begin with— and he couldn’t keep up a pretense of being sick forever, so what was the use in pretending in the first place? If anything, telling El the truth could even help him. She was the only other person he knew with weird mind-powers, after all, so maybe she knew a way to block out other people’s thoughts— and, out of everyone, El would probably be the least mad about having their privacy invaded, since Will literally couldn’t read her thoughts. For some reason, they never crossed his mind like everyone else’s, and he wasn’t about to test his luck by actually trying to break into her mind, so he didn’t question it. Maybe it was due to her similar mind-based powers, or her connection to the Upside Down; either way, Will didn’t care what the reason was, as long as there was one less person’s voice ringing through his head.
So, basically; he had a near-perfect solution to (almost) all his problems, but didn’t bother to ask said solution for help because he was afraid of a potential negative reaction. Bottling up all his problems until he inevitably exploded— literally, maybe, considering the pounding pain in his head. Typical.
Will steadied his trembling hands on the rough fabric of his jeans. He took a deep breath and willed his words not to shake as he spoke. “No, I’m not sick, but— I think—“ He stopped for a moment to inhale, because for some reason his throat was closing up into a tight knot at the thought of being so vulnerable, even to someone who already knew his deepest fears— “I think there’s something else wrong with me.”
El took this shaky confession quite calmly; all she did was nod, frown slightly, and say “Is that why you didn’t want to talk to Mike last week?”
Oh. Well, about Mike— shit, Will did not want to think about him right now. But when did his thoughts ever go in the direction he wanted them to?
Will had dodged every attempt Mike had made to spend time with him in the past few weeks because, quite frankly, hanging out with Mike and his nausea-inducing mind was exhausting. He could stand hanging out with Lucas and Dustin, because while their thoughts were unreasonably loud and chaotic, they at least made sense. Mike’s, on the other hand— well, he couldn’t even stand in the same building as Mike without wanting to scream in frustration. His thoughts were like turning a radio’s volume all the way up when the knob was shifted between channels; half garbled static, half snippets of images and dialogue that could hardly be strung into a coherent sentence. And the thoughts that he could piece together were somehow even more confusing, especially since they were almost always about Will.
If he dwelt on Mike’s thoughts for one more second, Will might have thrown up from the mere thought of the dizzying feeling that accompanied Mike Wheeler’s consciousness, so he willed that train of thought out of his mind.
Instead of vomiting into the bushes, he turned to fully face El, though he still couldn’t find the strength to meet her eyes. “Kind of, I guess? It’s not about Mike though, not really. I don’t— well, you might not believe me.”
El crossed her arms, raising one incredulous eyebrow. “Will, we have both seen monsters the size of, uh. . . whatever those tall buildings are called. Nothing is hard to believe after that.”
”I— okay, fair,” he responded, laughing a little. “It’s just that— do you think it would be possible for the Upside Down to give people powers? Not like your telekinesis, but— like, what if someone was possessed by a monster from the Upside Down, and it never really left their body? Do you think that could change them, maybe? In an ‘I have mind-reading powers, now’ sort of way, maybe? Oh, and ‘those tall buildings’ are skyscrapers.”
“Sky-scrapers,” El said, sounding the word out slowly on her tongue. “Do we know another person who was possessed by the Mindflayer and is still alive? Maybe we could ask them.”
For a moment, Will thought she was serious, until the corner of her mouth started creeping up into a smirk. Will gaped at her blatant use of sarcasm, another talent she had copied perfectly from Max— who he was beginning to think might not always be the best influence. “Just go with it, okay? Say this person, uh— say he does have mind-reading powers, but he has no idea how to control them and they’re really giving him a headache, and my— uh, his vision literally goes black when he’s in a crowd with a lot of thoughts, so he needs a way to block out those thoughts right now, or he’ll probably never be able to go to school again.”
“I think he should’ve come to me sooner,” El said, though her teasing tone didn’t match up with the concerned look on her face.
Will lowered his chin down to rest on his knees with a forlorn sigh. “Well, he— okay, whatever, I would’ve, but I was worried that you’d be mad about it, since I was literally spying on the most private part of everyone's lives without their consent. I mean, I’m already mad at myself, and if I feel this awful about it, who knows how everyone else would feel.”
El shrugged. ”You can’t control it, so it’s not your fault. I do not mind, anyway. I think my thoughts would be fun to listen to.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Will responded. “You’re the only person I can’t hear, for some reason.”
At that, El looked a little disappointed, lips pursed into a small pout that confused Will to no end— how could she be upset that her privacy wasn’t invaded? Though, to be fair, El played fast and loose with the concept of boundaries all the time, so she probably saw telepathy as a fun activity instead of the horrifying breach of privacy Will thought it to be.
“Did you want me to read your mind or something?” Will looked El up and down with an incredulous stare.
El considered it for a moment, looking off into the distance past Will’s shoulder. The pause was long enough for Will to wonder if he should ask if she was okay— until, suddenly, she turned back and said “I think my thoughts would be entertaining for you, so yes. And I am more quiet than our friends, so I don’t think I would give you a headache.”
Will groaned. “I wish I knew someone whose thoughts are actually quiet— like, you have no idea how loud people think! Like Lucas— oh my god, he's a nightmare. His favorite thing to think about is basketball, and every single noise is blasted into my head, to the point where I can literally hear his shoes squeaking against the floor. It is torture.”
“Whose thoughts are the worst?” El asked, a curious gleam in her eyes. “I bet it’s Mike.”
Will nodded fervently. For a moment, he was so happy to finally have someone to commiserate with over his annoying mind-powers that he forgot exactly what Mike’s thoughts entailed, so he eagerly agreed, saying “Yes! He’s actually the worst— it’s like his mind is half way too-bright pictures, and half rambling sentences that make no sense. It drives me insane, and at this point, I can’t even be in the same room as him, and I know he thinks I’m avoiding him and— well, technically I am, but it’s not his fault, it’s just because he’s always thinking about—“
Will cut himself off just in time, before he could expose both Mike’s and his own secret in one go— like killing two birds with one stone, but both birds were the last shreds of his dignity. Admitting his years-long crush on El’s ex-boyfriend didn’t seem like a good move, no matter how amicable Mike and El were towards each other now. “Uhm,” he said, unsuccessfully searching for a quick way to brush past the topic, “That’s not— well, whatever. Anyways, I don’t want to avoid him, but I can’t be around him without collapsing in pain, so I kind of have to.”
“There should be a way to block thoughts,” El said, looking up into the trees as though she was trying to remember something. “Oh— wait! I read this book a while ago, and it was about these girls who could read minds. Maybe that could help?”
”I have no other options, so sure,” Will said, putting his head in his hands and making a noise that resembled a mix between a laugh and a pained groan, “why not?”
Without warning, El took hold of Will’s arm and yanked him upright. Will wobbled unsteadily for a moment, his free arm flailing as he tried to gain balance— before he was quite literally swept off his feet as El started to run, dragging him through the woods. Will scrambled to start moving alongside El, trying and somewhat failing to avoid being tugged through the dirt; at one point, his leg caught on a low-hanging branch, and he made an undignified yelping noise that El definitely laughed at, despite claiming she had heard no such thing.
”El,” Will panted, out of breath as he struggled to keep up, “where are we going— and could you please slow down?”
El paused for a moment to turn around, causing Will to nearly trip face-first into a bush. “I thought I was walking slow for you,” she said, her face scrunched up in slight confusion, “but I will slow down. And we are going to the library for the book.” She started to move again, this time at a brisk walk instead of a full-on sprint that Will could just barely keep up with.
”How do you just— not realize that you’re running?” Will asked. “Do you not feel tired at all?”
“I am used to running for my life,” El responded, “so no, not really.”
El had unknowingly increased her pace, and Will was now running at an intense jog to avoid being stranded in the woods. “I literally spent a week straight running for my life, so I don’t think that’s the problem here.”
”I did join the summer track club,” El said offhandedly. “Maybe that is also why I am fast, and you are slow.”
”I’m not slow,” Will said through gritted teeth, “you’re just so fast that everything seems slow to you. I walk at a normal pace, actually, I am completely and utterly normal, unlike someone—“
”I am not the best judge of what ‘normal’ is, but I think hearing voices in your head is the opposite of normal,” El said evenly. Will couldn’t really argue with that, so he simply sighed and focused on not slamming into a stray tree trunk.
After what felt like hours of running, the trees finally started to become sparser and sparser, to the point where Will could actually see through the leaves to the town beyond. When he stumbled past a tree and onto a sidewalk directly in front of the library, Will almost cried in relief— though he didn’t actually have any oxygen in his lungs to do so. Instead, he collapsed against the doors of the library and took deep, gasping breaths, ignoring how he sounded like a dying fish flopping outside of it's fishbowl even as El laughed at him.
”Shut— shut up,” Will said between heaving breaths. “I’m just— catching my breath— wait, how did you know this shortcut even existed?”
El looked away sheepishly, an embarrassed flush coating her cheeks as she stared at the floor. “There was this very cute rabbit.”
Will raised an eyebrow. “That doesn’t answer my question at all. I think it just gives me more questions, actually.”
”There was this rabbit,” El said again, “and it was cute, and pretty, and I had never seen a real rabbit before, so I followed it. The rabbit did not want to be followed, so it ran into the woods, but I still really wanted to pet the rabbit, so I followed it anyway. I got very lost, until a nice lady running on a trail led me out of the woods— at least, I remember it being a trail. I guess,” she looked over at Will, who had dirt smeared across a forearm and a trail of thorns stuck to his jeans, “it was not that good of a trail.”
When Will thought of being lost in the woods, he remembered creeping vines and prowling monsters, curling up against mossy branches as he waited to die, and the dull shine of pinprick fangs bared inches from his face. Even now, the thought of getting lost in that thicket of death sent a shiver down his spine— but Will felt he had long surpassed the appropriate time frame to be scared of some stupid trees, so he pushed the memory back into the corner of his mind, willing himself into keeping a neutral expression as he responded to El. “There’s rabbits at the pet store, you know. We could go one day, if you want—“
El practically squealed in delight, bringing her hands up to her mouth in excited shock. ”There’s a pet store here? Really?”
”Yeah,” he said, a smile creeping up onto his face; El’s joy was contagious, to the point where Will sort of wanted to jump around in excitement about bunnies, too. “It’s near here, actually— shit!”
Turns out the door he had been leaning on for the past few minutes could not support his weight indefinitely, actually. In a split second, the door swung wide open, leaving an empty space for Will to careen backwards, limbs flailing as he tried to prevent his imminent doom. In the moment before his head hit the ground, he threw his arms back onto the hard floor, saving himself from slamming headfirst against the floor— but scraped elbows were definitely better than a cracked skull, so he brushed off the stinging sensation as he slowly pushed himself upright again.
Instead of laughing, El made a small noise of concern; her eyes were wide and worried as she leaned over to grab Will’s arm in a well-intentioned attempt to steady him. He was still quite wobbly, though, so he nearly fell over again right on top of El— but just as he was about to collapse again, El yanked on his shirtsleeve, tugging him behind a nearby bookshelf. He almost toppled over in an entirely different direction, until he saw exactly what— or, more precisely, who— El was pointing at, and immediately stiffened.
Browsing the Child Psychology and Development shelf in the upper right-hand corner of the library, a twitchy hand massaging her temple, was none other than Joyce Byers.