Work Text:
Living a Boy’s Adventure Tale
Christmas lights don’t mean family dinners anymore.
They mean nightmares woven with claws, teeth and something cold moving behind the walls. They mean coloured bulbs blinking one after another until light itself becomes a language. They mean his mother’s voice reaching him from the other side, close enough to hear and impossibly far away. They mean finding a way to answer when ordinary words no longer could.
Abandoned laboratories don’t mean UFO sightings anymore, or the kind of government conspiracies Mike and Dustin used to argue about when they were twelve, trading theories across the basement table until Will stopped listening and started drawing in the margins.
They mean other dimensions. They mean children behind locked doors. They mean needles and blood and people in white coats discussing a frightened boy as if he isn’t sitting right there listening to every word.
Secret military bases don’t mean blockbusters at the movie theatre anymore.
They mean Russians beneath a shopping mall full of families eating ice cream and teenagers buying records and women going to aerobics classes without knowing that somewhere below their feet men are trying to tear open a doorway into another world.
The police and the Army don’t mean safety anymore either.
Sometimes they do.
Hopper does.
But uniforms themselves mean very little to Will now. He knows how easily the people wearing them can decide that protecting the country means destroying one child. He knows how quickly adults can call something necessary when they aren’t the ones strapped to the table.
People died in Hawkins because of all of those things. Most of the people who still live here will never know why.
They know about fires and earthquakes and toxic contamination and freak weather. They know about buildings collapsing and military evacuations, about funerals with closed caskets and neighbours who disappeared in the middle of the night.
They know Hawkins has suffered a run of tragedies so statistically absurd Dustin once spent twenty minutes explaining that the town should have been mathematically impossible years ago.
They don’t know about the Upside Down. They don’t know about demogorgons or vines or gates. They don’t know about Vecna or the Mind Flayer.
They don’t know about El.
Will knows.
He has known too much for most of his life. And somehow, before he has even properly started being an adult, he has lived long enough to tell the tale.
Maybe not out loud. Not all of it.
But he can drag graphite across paper until a shadow becomes a shape. He can push charcoal into the grain until his fingers turn black. He can stroke paint across canvas and make red skies no one outside their circle would recognize for what they are, because memory can hold a colour more precisely than words ever could.
He can build a stage world out of plywood, paint, borrowed furniture and carefully placed light, turning a bare platform into a street, a kitchen, a forest, somewhere impossible that an audience can believe in for two hours. That draws him more than standing at the centre of it.
He still takes smaller parts when the director needs him, and sometimes he likes becoming someone else for a scene or two, but what he loves most is watching something that existed first in his head become a place other people can step into.
Or maybe, lately, the harder and stranger thing is learning that he doesn’t have to become someone else at all.
There are only a handful of people he can speak to about what really happened.
The Party. His mom and Jonathan. Hopper, who belongs somewhere inside the word family now too. Robin, Steve and Nancy. People who know what Hawkins really was because it dragged them into the impossible and left them there long enough to survive it together.
And his therapist.
Sort of.
The therapist is another complication.
Will knows he probably shouldn’t trust her completely. Mike certainly doesn’t.
Mike doesn’t trust Owens either, and Will understands why. Owens is better than Brenner. That’s a very low bar. Better doesn’t mean safe, and useful doesn’t mean trustworthy. Owens helped them. Owens tried to protect El when other people wanted to use her. He arranged doctors and documents and therapy when everything was over. But Owens is still attached to the same machine. Different department. Different face. Different intentions, maybe. Still the machine.
So Will talks carefully.
He talks about nightmares. He talks about claustrophobia and hospitals and how sometimes the smell of disinfectant makes his stomach turn before he even understands what he’s remembering.
He talks about losing time when he’s anxious. About waking with his hands clenched so hard his nails leave crescents in his palms. About how difficult it is to trust calm after years of learning that calm only means the monster hasn’t arrived yet.
He talks about grief. He has even talked about being gay. Not immediately. That took months. But eventually.
What he doesn’t say is that sometimes, when he’s very tired, he still feels something at the back of his mind. Not a voice. Not exactly.
More like an afterimage. The residue left when you stare at something too bright and then close your eyes.
He doesn’t tell her what it was like to be part of the hive mind, to sense movement through creatures that didn’t belong to him, to understand direction without seeing it, to know hunger that wasn’t his hunger and rage that wasn’t his rage. He doesn’t describe how his own body became something he occupied alongside another thing. He doesn’t tell her how terrifyingly easy it became after a while to stop knowing where Will ended and it began. He doesn’t tell her that during the fight with Vecna there were moments when that old connection opened again so violently he could almost see through it.
He doesn’t tell her that for one second, just one, he thought he could control it. That he could take all those years of being invaded and watched and used and turn them around. That maybe knowing how the monsters thought meant he could outthink them.
Then they sensed him.
Sensed the fear he tried to bury. Sensed all the softest places inside him. Mike. His family. His terror of losing people. His shame. The old conviction that there must be something wrong with him because wanting one person too much had somehow never made him enough. And whatever control he thought he had disappeared.
That part still visits him in dreams.
Not Vecna. Not always.
Sometimes the worst dreams are simply about opening his mouth and discovering someone else is speaking through it.
But something good came from everything that happened too.
Will hates admitting that.
For a long time it felt like betrayal to believe anything good could grow from something that destroyed so much. He doesn’t think what happened made him strong. Mostly, it hurt. Took things from him. The strength came later, in what he learned to build around the parts it damaged.
He’s more compassionate now because he knows what fear looks like when someone is hiding it, more patient because he knows some truths have to be approached sideways before they can be faced directly, more determined because he has lost enough time already.
And, strangely, he’s more himself than he has ever been. Not entirely. He’s still working on that. But for the first time he can imagine a future in which being Will Byers isn’t something he has to apologize for.
He’s going to live the life that, too many times, felt borrowed. He’s going to make things. He’s going to paint. He’s going to build worlds on stages, and step into them sometimes if he wants to. He’s going to leave Hawkins. He’s going to California.
He’s going to apply to CalArts, even though merely thinking the name sometimes turns his stomach over with a mixture of excitement and terror.
He’s going to try.
And there’s nothing that can stop him.
****
Except, apparently, laundry.
“Will?”
His mother’s voice reaches him from somewhere beyond the half-open bedroom door. Will’s pencil stops. He looks toward the pile of clothes in the corner. Then toward the clock. Then back at the clothes.
Several hours ago. Right.
“Will?”
“Yes, Mom?”
He answers politely even though the sigh is already halfway out of his mouth.
There’s a pause. He knows that pause. It’s the sound of his mother deciding whether she wants to remind him of something gently or with maternal precision.
“Did the laundry perhaps develop legs while I wasn’t looking?”
Will closes his eyes.
“No.”
“Did it learn to use the washing machine?”
“No.”
“Interesting.”
He sets the pencil down.
“I was going to do it.”
“Uh huh.”
“I was.”
His mother appears in the doorway before he can construct a better defence, one hand resting against the frame. Then she sees the room. Her expression changes.
“Oh, honey.”
Will follows her gaze and, for the first time in several hours, sees the room from somewhere outside his own head.
It’s a disaster.
Not a dirty disaster, exactly. An art disaster.
Paper covers most of the bed. A nearly finished charcoal study rests against the dresser. Two stretched canvases lean beside the closet, one dry, the other still carrying the sharp smell of paint. Sketchbooks are stacked on the floor beside three library books on modern art, a folded CalArts information packet and a course catalogue from a community college near the part of California where they hope to settle, one Will requested by mail after his mother pointed out that he could take a few classes while he worked on the application.
A cardboard portfolio case lies open near the desk.
He has started putting his strongest drawings there temporarily, though Jonathan has already warned him not to send original work through the mail unless the school specifically asks for it.
“Photograph everything first,” Jonathan told him.
Twice. Actually, three times. His brother is becoming increasingly paranoid about Will mailing away artwork that took weeks to make. Will thinks New York has made him worse.
His mother steps into the room carefully, navigating between pieces of paper.
“Do you even have a place to sleep tonight?”
“I will.”
“Where?”
Will points toward approximately six inches of visible mattress near the pillow. Mom looks at him. He lowers his hand.
“Okay. I’ll move them.”
She smiles despite herself and bends toward one of the pieces on the bed.
“Can I?”
Will nods. She lifts it by the edges. It’s one of the newer drawings, charcoal and white pencil on grey paper. At first glance it looks like a doorway opening onto darkness. Only when someone looks longer do the figures become visible: one standing inside, another beyond, neither drawn clearly enough to tell who’s leaving and who’s waiting.
His mother studies it for a long time. Will watches her face instead of the picture. He always does that. It’s easier to look at someone else when they look at his work. Their reactions tell him things words often don’t.
Mom’s eyes soften first. Then her mouth tightens. Not sadness exactly. Recognition.
“This one’s new.”
“From yesterday.”
“It feels different.”
Will shifts in his chair. “Different bad?”
“No.” She looks at him immediately. “No, honey. Different… different like you stopped trying to make it pretty.”
He blinks.
“That sounded terrible.”
“A little.”
“You know what I mean.”
He does.
Actually, he knows exactly what she means.
The older pieces are controlled. Technically careful. Shadows where shadows belong. Colour arranged deliberately. Perspective corrected until buildings stand straight and faces look recognizable.
The newer work is stranger. Some of it almost embarrasses him. There’s a self-portrait where the face is unfinished but the hands are drawn in painful detail. There’s a painting of a dining room at Christmas with no people in it, only coloured lights reflected across a black window. There’s a small ink drawing of a boy underwater with no water around him.
There’s one of El from memory, though most people wouldn’t know it was her. She’s standing with her back toward the viewer in a white field so bright the edges of her body almost disappear into it. Will hasn’t shown that one to Mike. He isn’t sure he ever will. Mom picks up another.
“This is beautiful.”
She says it with the same complete conviction she would use if she were standing in front of van Gogh. Or Rembrandt. Or one of those paintings in the books Will keeps borrowing from the library.
“Mooom.”
“What?”
“You say that about everything.”
“I do not.”
“You told me the dragon I drew when I was nine was beautiful.”
“It was.”
“It had seven legs.”
“It was a very imaginative dragon.”
“It was supposed to have four.”
“Well, I didn’t know that.”
Will gives her a look. She laughs softly, and then returns her attention to the drawing in her hands.
“These really are beautiful.”
“Thank you.”
He means it, even if taking praise still makes something uncomfortable squirm beneath his ribs.
“I tried some different things this time,” he says. “I need more range. Not just drawings. And I don’t want it all to look like… I don’t know. Like school assignments.”
His mother lowers the paper.
“For CalArts?”
“Yeah.”
There it is again. The name.
He has said it enough times that it should sound ordinary by now.
It doesn’t.
California Institute of the Arts. Valencia.
A place with studios and stages and people who choose to spend their lives making things instead of treating art like the subject you take because you need another credit. A place where, maybe, being strange isn’t automatically something to survive.
The information packet has been opened so often the folds are going soft. He’s read every page, then read it again, then started making lists. Work to finish. Work to photograph. People he could ask for recommendations. Questions about money. Questions about housing.
Questions about whether he’s actually good enough or simply the best artist among a group of people who mostly draw stick figures on campaign maps.
The application won’t be due until winter. January, maybe later depending on whatever final information the admissions office sends for the next cycle.
He has time. Everyone keeps telling him that. For once, time doesn’t sound like a threat.
“I was thinking,” he continues, “when we get to California, I could take a class before I finish the portfolio. Maybe two if it isn’t too expensive.”
His mother glances toward the catalogue on the desk.
“You circled half of that thing.”
“I did not.”
She picks it up, flips through two pages and holds the catalogue toward him with one finger planted beside the first pencilled circle.
“Drawing.”
“That’s one.”
“Life drawing.”
“Different.”
“Painting.”
“Also different.”
“Art history.”
“That’s not even studio.”
“Will.”
He tries not to smile.
“I’m looking.”
“Uh huh.”
“There are evening classes.”
“I saw.”
“And I don’t have to take all of them.”
“That’s reassuring, because I was starting to wonder if you planned on sleeping between September and January.”
Will reaches for the catalogue and she lets him take it.
“I just want to be ready.”
“I know.”
The answer changes something in the room. Her humour doesn’t disappear, but it softens at the edges. Will looks down at the circled course titles.
“I’m starting later than everybody else.”
It comes out quieter than he means it to. Mom sits on the edge of his desk chair because there’s nowhere else available without moving artwork.
“So?”
“So everybody’s leaving now.”
“And?”
“And I’m not.”
“You are.”
“In September.”
“That’s two months.”
“I know.”
She watches him. He hates when she does that because he inherited the exact same habit and knows precisely what it means.
“Do you think you should have gone this year?”
“No.”
The answer comes quickly. For once it’s also true. He could have applied. Maybe. Eventually. But the last year had been too much. Recovery had taken longer than he expected. Therapy. Nightmares. The theatre club. The simple work of learning how to move through ordinary days without treating every flickering light like a warning.
For the first time in years, Will had been allowed to decide he wasn’t ready for something. Nobody dragged him forward because the world needed saving. Nobody told him there wasn’t time. He chose to wait.
A year.
One more year to rebuild. One more year to figure out what kind of art he actually wants to make instead of producing only the things that pour out of him when he can’t sleep. One more year to learn what adulthood might look like when it isn’t defined by running.
“I don’t regret waiting,” he says.
“Good.”
“I just…”
He rubs his thumb against the edge of the catalogue.
“Sometimes it feels like I’m behind.”
His mother’s expression changes immediately.
“Oh, Will.”
“I know. I know it’s stupid.”
“It’s not stupid.”
“Everyone else is starting college.”
“And you survived being trapped in another dimension when you were twelve.”
He stares at her.
“That’s not really an admissions category.”
“It should be.”
He laughs. She doesn’t. Not immediately.
“You lost years, honey.”
The words catch him. Mom continues carefully.
“Not all of them. You had good things too. Your friends. Jonathan. School. Us. But you lost pieces of being a kid because people and things kept taking them from you. If you want one year where nobody gets to tell you when you have to be ready, then you take it.”
Will’s throat tightens. She reaches out and rests her hand against his shoulder.
“You don’t owe anybody the fastest version of getting better.”
He looks at the drawing on the bed. The doorway. The two figures.
“I don’t know if I’m getting better.”
“You are.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I’m your mother.”
“That’s not evidence.”
“It’s excellent evidence.”
Will looks at her, one corner of his mouth lifting despite himself. “You’ve been living with Hopper too long.”
His mother makes a face and nudges his shoulder with hers.
“Don’t tell him that. I’ll never hear the end of it.”
That gets another laugh out of Will, warmer this time, and some of the tightness in his chest eases with it.
Then her thumb moves once against his shoulder, the smallest gesture.
“And because you’re planning things you want,” she says. “Not just things you think you’re supposed to do.”
Will looks at her. The room goes very quiet. She does that sometimes. Says something simple enough that it takes him several seconds to understand why it hurts.
For years, almost everything he wanted had somehow narrowed back to one thing.
Mike.
Mike looking at him the right way. Mike choosing him. Mike needing him. Mike understanding without Will ever having to say the words.
He had wanted other things too, of course.
Art. Home. His family safe.
But love had become tangled with hope so tightly that sometimes he couldn’t separate one from the other.
Then he finally told the truth. Not every part of it. He never said, I have loved you for years. He didn’t need to. Mike understood. Will suspected the others closest to him had understood enough.
And Mike had looked at him with heartbreak in his eyes because he loved Will, just not in the way Will had spent years quietly wishing he might.
It had hurt. It still did sometimes. But the world hadn’t ended. That had been the revelation. The gates didn’t open. The walls didn’t split. Mike didn’t leave. Will didn’t disappear. He was still here.
And after the pain came something he hadn’t expected: space. Space where all that hoping used to live. Enough space, maybe, to ask what else he wanted. His mother is still watching him.
“You still wanna go there?” she asks eventually, nodding toward the CalArts packet.
“Yes.”
No hesitation this time.
“What do you think?”
“I think if it’s your choice, and you feel like that’s where you want to try, then you should.”
She picks up one of his drawings again.
“And I think they’d be fools not to accept you.”
“Mooom.”
“What?”
“You can’t say things like that.”
“I just did.”
“What if they don’t?”
Her answer takes longer. That matters to Will. She doesn’t tell him they definitely will. She doesn’t promise the universe rewards deserving people. They both know better than that.
“Then you’ll be disappointed,” she says. “Probably furious. You might lock yourself in your room for a couple days and make all of us miserable.”
“Thanks.”
“I’m being realistic.”
“Apparently.”
“And then you’ll figure out what comes next.”
She squeezes his shoulder.
“But whatever happens, you won’t be figuring it out alone.”
Something burns unexpectedly behind his eyes. He looks away before she can notice. Of course she notices. She always notices. But she lets him have the second.
“And Will?”
He looks back. There’s so much love in her face that sometimes it still astonishes him. Not because he ever doubted she loved him, but because he spent so long believing some truths about himself might make love more difficult. His mother made that fear feel smaller almost immediately.
Not the danger. She understood the danger better than most people. She knew what Hawkins could be, what people could say, what people could do. But never him. Never his being gay. That part, she treated as something the world might punish him for and never something he needed to punish himself for first.
“No matter what,” she says, “I’m proud of you.”
Will swallows.
“I love you, Mom.”
Her face softens.
“Love you too, honey.”
For a moment, neither of them says anything. Then she looks toward the corner.
“Now.”
Will follows her gaze. The laundry. He sighs.
“Mom.”
“It’s been there since breakfast.”
“I was working.”
“You own more than one shirt, Michelangelo.”
He looks at her.
“Jonathan taught you that, didn’t he?”
“No.”
“Hopper?”
She smiles suspiciously.
“Do the laundry.”
He groans loudly enough to make his opinion clear. She reaches the hallway.
“I heard that!”
“I know!”
Her laugh follows her toward the kitchen.
Will sits there smiling despite himself. Then he turns back to the room. He puts the pencils into their tin. Stacks the loose papers carefully. The pieces he thinks might belong in the portfolio go into the large cardboard case for now, separated with clean sheets so the charcoal doesn’t transfer. He keeps another list on his desk of which ones should be photographed when they have access to better light and a decent camera.
Jonathan suggested colour slide film for the paintings and black-and-white copies as backup documentation if Will can afford it. The thought of tiny versions of his work mounted inside little white slide frames makes the whole application feel strangely real.
Not yet. But coming.
He reaches for the laundry basket. The doorway drawing remains on top of the pile.
For some reason, he doesn’t put it away.
****
Jonathan calls that evening.
Long-distance calls are still something Mom notices because money is money, so Jonathan usually calls them rather than the other way around.
Tonight the telephone rings just after dinner, and Will hears his mother answer before shouting down the hallway.
“Will! New York!”
Will nearly trips over the laundry basket he still hasn’t carried all the way upstairs from the dryer. Hopper looks up from the couch.
“That thing been following you all day?”
Will gives him a look. Hopper raises both hands.
“Not my business.”
“Correct.”
“Your mother’s gonna make it my business eventually.”
“Will!” Mom calls again.
“I’m coming!”
He grabs the receiver.
“Hello?”
“Hey.”
Jonathan sounds tired and impossibly far away and exactly like himself. Will smiles automatically.
“Hey.”
“How’s the masterpiece factory?”
“Mom told you.”
“Mom tells me everything.”
“Traitor.”
“Also she says you’re losing a war against laundry.”
Will turns toward the kitchen. His mother very deliberately keeps her back to him.
“I’m hanging up.”
“No, you’re not.”
“No.”
Jonathan laughs. For a while they talk about ordinary things. New York. Jonathan’s latest work, which seems to consist mostly of carrying equipment for people who never remember his name until something breaks. A short film somebody is trying to finance. A music video shoot he got to watch. He tells Will about lighting setups and lenses and one director who yelled at everyone for an hour because the colour of a wall looked wrong on camera. Will listens to everything.
Not because he plans on becoming a filmmaker. He doesn’t know exactly what he plans on becoming, and that is becoming less frightening too. The categories seem less important than they once did: painter, illustrator, scenic designer, maybe someone who works in theatre without needing to be the person everyone watches. Maybe an actor sometimes. Something involving film. Maybe more than one. The idea that he could be several things instead of finding one correct answer feels almost rebellious.
Eventually Jonathan asks, “You figure out the recording?”
“Sort of.”
The theatre program is putting together a small late-summer production, nothing enormous, mostly scenes and short pieces rather than a full play. Will has agreed to play two small supporting parts, but that isn’t what keeps him there after rehearsals.
He spends longer helping build the worlds around the actors: painting flats and backdrops, arranging furniture so a bare stage can become three different rooms, repairing and making props, testing where a lamp or a painted shadow changes the whole feeling of a scene. He likes the practical mess of it, the sawdust and paint-stiff brushes and the moment a collection of ordinary materials finally looks like somewhere else.
He wants a record of that work as much as of the performance itself, not because CalArts has specifically asked for one, but because Jonathan told him that if he’s serious about making things, he should start documenting them before they disappear. The theatre director has access to a camcorder. Will knows what he wants it to show; he just has no idea how to make it show it well. Jonathan does.
“Start with one wide recording,” Jonathan says. “Far enough back that you can see the whole stage, especially if you want the sets in it. Just don’t put the camera in another zip code.”
Will winds the telephone cord once around his fingers. “I thought the point was getting the whole stage.”
“It is. Middle of the house, if they’ll let you. Tripod. Whole stage. Then if they let you record a run-through, get closer for the actors and the props.”
“Won’t it look strange?”
“It’ll look like you can actually see what you made.”
Will leans his shoulder against the wall, smiling faintly. “Helpful.”
“I’m a professional.”
“You carry cables.”
“I carry very important cables.”
“Mom said you got coffee for somebody for six hours.”
“Mom needs fewer details.”
Will laughs, and Jonathan lets him before his voice turns more practical again. “Get the whole performance first. Don’t try to get fancy before you have that. Watch the windows too.”
“The windows?”
“If daylight’s behind the stage, you’ll turn everybody into shadows.”
“Oh.”
“And sound matters more than you think. If you can’t hear anything, it doesn’t matter how nice it looks.”
Will writes that down on the edge of a notepad even though he knows he will remember. There’s something comforting about Jonathan explaining problems that have edges and solutions: camera placement, light, tape length, sound. Things you can adjust and try again.
“Are you putting any of it in the portfolio?” Jonathan asks.
“Maybe.”
“Good.”
“I don’t know if it counts.”
“Counts as what?”
“Art.”
There’s a brief silence. Jonathan makes a sound halfway between a laugh and a sigh.
“You’re definitely applying to CalArts.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you’ve started asking whether things count as art before you even get there.”
Will smiles.
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
Jonathan’s voice softens.
“If it matters to you, document it. You can decide later whether anybody else needs to see it.”
Will looks toward his bedroom. The doorway drawing is still on his desk. Something about Jonathan’s sentence settles beside it.
“You can decide later.”
Maybe that’s what this whole year is. Making things before deciding what they mean. Feeling things before deciding what they have to become. Letting them exist.
“Okay,” Will says.
“Okay.”
They talk for another few minutes. Before hanging up, Jonathan says, “Hey, Will?”
“Yeah?”
“You sound good.”
Will goes still. He doesn’t know what to do with that.
“I am.”
Then, because he’s trying harder lately not to lie simply because the truth is complicated, he adds, “Mostly.” Jonathan understands.
“Mostly’s pretty good.”
“Yeah.”
Afterward Will holds the receiver for a second after the line has gone dead.
Mostly.
He thinks he can live with mostly.
****
Will is not an idiot.
He’s observant. He learned that because he had to.
There was a time when knowing whether someone’s tone changed could mean understanding whether they believed him. A time when noticing the temperature dropping meant danger. A time when the movement of a shadow could mean run.
His brain learned patterns before he knew there was a word for it. Sometimes the knowing arrives before the explanation does. That’s the part he has started calling his gut feeling. It sounds ordinary enough when someone asks. Almost laughably ordinary. After everything else.
“Just a gut feeling.”
Nothing supernatural about that. Nothing that might send somebody reaching for a telephone and calling Dr. Owens.
But Will knows it’s more complicated.
He was connected to something enormous once. For too long. He felt its creatures move. He felt its attention. He felt Vecna. Maybe something of that rewired him. Maybe not. He doesn’t know, and for now he's trying to let not knowing be enough.
The feeling had been useful with Dustin too. Will noticed the change in the way he looked at Steve long before either of them said anything, but he knew better than to name it for him. Will had spent years not understanding his own feelings for Mike, and the last couple of them being afraid someone else might understand them first. So when Dustin struggled, Will simply made sure he knew someone was there. The rest belonged to Dustin. Lately, whatever had been strained between him and Steve seemed easier again, and Will was glad to leave it there.
Mike is different too. That worries him more.
Everybody mourned El. There’s no version of their circle after her death that doesn’t contain the empty space she left.
Will misses her in strange moments. Eggo boxes. Mall music. Someone saying something with complete seriousness that everyone else finds funny. A girl with short hair seen from behind. The colour yellow. He misses how blunt she could be. How she could make Mike stop talking with one look. How she understood more about being treated like something other than human than anyone should.
Will had thought sometimes, especially after he came out, that El might have understood that part too. Not being gay. Being watched for signs of wrongness.
Being told who you were before you had the language to decide for yourself. He wishes they had talked about it. There are hundreds of things he wishes now.
Mike’s grief had been enormous. Nobody expected otherwise.
At first he barely functioned. Anger came next. Then bargaining, though Mike never called it that. Questions. Possibilities.
What if. What if. What if.
Eventually he seemed to settle.
Eventually people seemed to relax around him. Lucas stopped watching every silence. Dustin argued with him normally again. Even Hopper no longer seemed to study Mike every time El’s name came up. Mike became calmer, or at least better at looking calm.
He played D&D. He made plans for college. He talked about a dorm. He joked again sometimes.
Nineteen months. That is long enough that people want grief to have changed into something manageable.
Mike gives them manageable.
Will watches him do it. And something about it feels wrong. Not false exactly.
Mike does laugh. He does enjoy the games. Sometimes he even sounds interested when he talks about college, or at least about getting out of Hawkins.
But the acceptance feels performed. Not entirely false; more like Mike has learned which parts of himself make everyone else relax. Will has spent enough time around rehearsals now to recognize the difference between speaking the right lines and believing them. The most convincing performance isn’t always becoming someone else. Sometimes it’s showing only the parts of yourself the audience expects.
Will thinks Mike is doing that. The campaign. The forms. The occasional memory of El spoken with a sadness that looks survivable. He can’t prove Mike hides the rest, but he notices small things.
Mike has become quicker to cover loose papers when someone comes downstairs unexpectedly, though Will rarely sees enough to know what they are.
And every so often he steers an ordinary conversation somewhere strange.
Once, while Dustin was complaining about interference on a radio he was fixing, Mike asked whether certain kinds of weather could make a weak signal travel farther.
Another time he asked Will whether the library kept old newspapers from outside Hawkins, then added, a little too quickly, that he wanted headlines to make the campaign feel more real.
None of it proves anything. Mike always has an explanation: a puzzle he wants to make realistic, research for the game, some detail that supposedly matters to the story. Will nods. He doesn’t believe every explanation.
The gut feeling settles every time. Something is there. Something Mike isn’t telling them.
A few days later, Will arrives at the Wheelers’ early for D&D. The basement is cooler than the afternoon upstairs, the small windows near the ceiling cutting the sunlight into pale bars across the carpet. He hears the scratch of Mike’s pencil before he reaches the last step. Mike is bent over the table with the campaign spread in front of him, but another sheet lies half-hidden beneath it, thinner than the graph paper they use. Will catches only a corner printed with pale road lines before Mike shifts the campaign map across it. The movement is quick enough to look casual if Will weren’t already looking.
Mike glances up. “You’re early.”
Will comes down the last few steps with his sketchbook tucked against his side.
“Mom had errands.”
“Oh.” Mike reaches for the Dungeon Master’s Guide and sets it across the edge of the papers. Not hurriedly. That almost makes it more obvious.
Will puts his sketchbook on the table and takes the chair beside him without looking again at the edge of printed paper beneath the book.
It’s an agreement they never made: Mike doesn’t ask about the things Will doesn’t tell him, and Will doesn’t tear open the things Mike is clearly not ready to say.
Sometimes friendship is knowing when silence is trust and when it’s avoidance. Will hasn’t decided which this is yet.
He taps the campaign map instead. “You finish the cave?”
Some of the tension leaves Mike’s shoulders. “Mostly.”
“That means no.”
“It means mostly.”
Will pulls his chair closer to the table, and for a while they work the way they always have, Mike making notes in the margins while Will shades the same corner of his sketchbook until the charcoal softens under his thumb.
The silence between them is easy. That matters. It is one of the reasons Will knows he can survive loving Mike differently now: being beside him no longer feels like constantly waiting for something to happen. Mostly.
Eventually Mike nods toward the sketchbook. “What’s that?”
Will keeps shading. “Nothing.”
“You’ve been drawing it for twenty minutes.”
“It can still be nothing.”
Mike rolls his eyes, and Will turns the book around. It’s only a hand, open palm, fingers slightly curled, with a line of dark charcoal passing behind the wrist without touching it. Mike studies it longer than Will expects.
“Portfolio?”
“Maybe.”
“For California?”
Will nods, and Mike’s eyes drop back to the page. His thumb rubs once along the edge of the pencil in his hand.
“You’re really going.”
There’s something strange in the way he says it. Not resentment. Not even sadness exactly. More like the words have reminded him of something he was trying not to think about.
Everyone is leaving.
“Yeah.”
Mike nods. “You’ll like it.”
“You don’t know that.”
“You decided yet?”
“CalArts.”
Mike’s mouth lifts faintly. “You’ll love that.”
“How do you know?”
“Gut feeling.”
Will almost laughs. Instead, a small unease settles low in his stomach, quieter than the old cold at the back of his neck and somehow easier to trust.
Mike looks away a little too quickly, toward the Dungeon Master’s Guide and whatever sits beneath it. There it is again: the sense of a hidden door somewhere in a room he knows by heart.
He could ask what’s under the campaign. He could ask why Mike keeps finding reasons to talk about signals and old newspapers, or why college sounds more like a plan Mike has memorized than one he’s excited to live.
He could ask whether any of it has something to do with El.
He doesn’t.
Mike has spent nineteen months surrounded by people who want grief to become understandable, manageable, finished. Will won’t become one more person forcing open a door simply because he has noticed the handle move.
So he makes a quieter decision instead: pay attention. Be there.
If Mike starts drowning, step in. Not because Will is responsible for whatever Mike is hiding, but because being there is different from dragging the truth out of him.
Maybe this is part of who Will is becoming too. Not the boy who always needs saving, and not someone who has to save everyone else. Someone who knows how to sit beside the closed door until the person behind it is ready.
****
That night he dreams about the lab.
It hasn’t happened in weeks.
In the dream he’s younger.
He always is.
That’s one of the cruellest things about nightmares.
His mind knows exactly which version of him was easiest to frighten.
He’s lying beneath white light.
No.
On a bed.
No.
A table.
The details change every time he tries to look directly at them.
Something cold presses against his temple.
A voice says his name.
Another voice says he’s responding.
Someone asks whether he can feel it.
Will tries to say no.
His mouth opens.
Black smoke comes out.
He wakes before he screams.
The bedroom is dark.
For several seconds he doesn’t know where he is.
His hand flies to the back of his neck.
Nothing.
His heart is hammering.
The room smells like summer and paper and the faint trace of paint thinner he should probably stop keeping uncapped.
Window.
Desk.
Closet.
California catalogue.
Laundry basket.
Home.
Hawkins.
July 1989.
Eighteen.
Alive.
He sits up.
The old instinct tells him to listen.
So he does.
Pipes.
Refrigerator.
Someone shifting in another room.
No vines.
No creatures.
No breathing that doesn’t belong to someone in the house.
Will puts both feet on the floor.
His therapist taught him to anchor himself in whatever is actually here. Will looks around the room and names things until they stop being shapes in the dark: desk, curtain, shoes, sketchbook, lamp. Then he presses his palm into the twisted sheet, his feet harder against the floor, and notices the cotton of his T-shirt against his skin. By the time he can feel each thing separately, his breathing has slowed.
There’s another sound in the hallway.
A floorboard.
Will looks toward the door.
For one second his body tightens.
Then Hopper’s voice comes quietly from the other side.
“You awake?”
Will almost laughs.
“Yeah.”
The door opens a few inches. Hopper looks in. His hair is flattened on one side. He looks ridiculous.
“You okay?”
“Nightmare.”
Hopper nods. No questions. Will appreciates him for that.
“You need your mom?”
“No.”
Another nod.
“You need anything?”
Will thinks.
“No.”
“Okay.”
Hopper starts to close the door.
“Hop?”
He pauses.
“Yeah?”
“Thanks.”
Hopper’s expression changes in that awkward way it always does when someone gives him direct affection without warning.
“Sure.”
The door closes.
Will sits in the darkness.
For years he thought strength would feel like not being afraid. He knows better now. Strength is waking terrified and knowing where you are. It’s recognising the nightmare before it becomes the room. It’s asking for help when you need it. It’s knowing when you don’t.
He switches on the desk lamp. Sleep probably isn’t coming back soon. That used to mean losing. Tonight he doesn’t treat it that way.
He sits at the desk. The drawing of the doorway waits where he left it. He moves it aside. Then pulls out a clean sheet of heavy paper. For several minutes he does nothing. He thinks about the dream.
About Mike. About El. About California.
About the strange thing he calls intuition because anything else sounds too close to the Upside Down.
Maybe he has been thinking about it wrong. For months he has wondered whether the instinct is something the Mind Flayer left behind, some fragment still lodged inside him, a scar that can sense other scars. But that explanation gives the monster too much credit.
The Mind Flayer didn’t teach him the difference between Mike’s real smile and the one he uses when everyone is watching. The hive mind didn’t teach him how his mother’s voice changes when she’s frightened and trying not to frighten him too. Those things are Will. Maybe the connection sharpened them. Maybe trauma did. Maybe being an artist did too.
Drawing is mostly looking. Really looking. Seeing the angle of a shoulder before drawing the shirt around it. Seeing where shadow actually falls instead of where you assume it should. Seeing that two colours you thought were the same aren’t.
Maybe intuition is just observation moving faster than language. Maybe sometimes his body reaches the answer before his conscious mind catches up. The thought is strangely comforting. It means not everything strange about him belongs to something that hurt him.
Will places his hand against the paper. Then traces around it lightly in pencil. Not perfectly. Just enough to catch the shape. He moves his hand away. The outline remains.
An absence shaped exactly like something that was there.
He stares at it.
Then begins to draw.
****
Morning finds him asleep over the desk.
His mother wakes him by opening the curtains. Will groans and shields his face.
“Cruel.”
“It’s ten-thirty.”
“Still cruel.”
She looks at the paper beneath his arm. Her hand stops on the curtain.
Will follows her gaze.
He barely remembers finishing it. The drawing is larger than he intended. Two hands. One is only an outline. The other is rendered heavily in charcoal, dark and solid, fingers reaching toward the empty shape but not quite touching it. Behind them, almost invisible, are thin lines spreading outward like cracks.
Or roots.
Or veins.
Or roads.
He hasn’t decided.
Mom doesn’t ask what it means. She has learned that too. Instead she says, “Portfolio?”
Will looks at the drawing. Yesterday he would have said maybe. Today something inside him settles.
“Yeah.”
She smiles.
“Good.”
He sits up, rubbing his eyes.
“It’s weird.”
“Good.”
“It’s not finished.”
“Good.”
“Do you have another word?”
“Nope.”
Will laughs.
She leaves him to get dressed.
He looks at the drawing again. It’s not the most technically impressive thing he has made. There are better hands in other sketches. Cleaner shading. More dramatic compositions. But this one feels like him. That matters more now.
He writes the date lightly on the back. Then, after thinking for a moment, adds a title.
Afterimage.
He isn’t sure he’ll keep it. Titles can change. That’s another thing he’s learning.
****
By the middle of July, Hawkins is beginning to feel temporary. Not because the town itself has changed. That’s the strange part. The grocery store is still there. Family Video still glows under fluorescent lights. The Arcade still smells like overheated machines and carpet that should have been replaced years ago. Mike’s basement is still Mike’s basement. But everything has acquired an expiration date.
Lucas talks about Chicago. Max talks about Chicago too, though she pretends she isn’t as excited.
Robin counts down shifts without actually admitting she’s counting.
Dustin talks about the road trip again now, with enough of his old enthusiasm that Will quietly takes it as a good sign.
Mike talks about Indianapolis with suspicious calm.
Will talks about California.
They are all moving. Maybe that’s why Will sees the future differently now.
For years the future was simply the place he hoped to survive long enough to reach. Now it has details.
September.
Boxes. A moving truck. Hopper complaining about how much everything weighs. Mom crying when nobody is looking and claiming allergies if anyone catches her. California sunlight. A new room. Classes. Applications. A stack of mounted slides with his name written carefully on each one. A blank VHS tape holding a performance where the worlds he helped build are visible behind the actors, and where he appears briefly in a couple of scenes without needing to stand at the centre of them.
January.
An envelope. Maybe yes. Maybe no. Then something after either answer. That’s the important part.
Something after.
Once, Will thought his entire life would always divide into before and after. Before the Upside Down. After the Upside Down. Before possession. After. Before Vecna. After. Before El died. After. He’s tired of measuring himself by catastrophes.
Maybe there can be other dividing lines.
Before California. After. Before he told the truth. After. Before he believed he could make something people might want to see. After.
He doesn’t believe in fate. Not anymore. Fate would mean all of this was supposed to happen. He refuses that. El wasn’t supposed to die so the others could grow. Eddie wasn’t supposed to die so Dustin could become stronger. Will wasn’t supposed to be taken so he could become observant. Pain doesn’t become holy just because you survive it.
Maybe meaning is simply what you make afterward. His mother choosing him, every time. Jonathan calling from New York. Hopper choosing this strange little family even when he doesn’t always know what to do with it. Mike choosing to stay after Will finally told him the truth.
And Will, finally, choosing things too: California. Art. The future. Himself.
Maybe that’s what Will understands now better than he did a year ago. Becoming yourself isn’t one revelation. It’s hundreds of smaller decisions: the shirt you stop pretending not to like, the person you finally tell, the place you apply to even though rejection might hurt, the picture you put in the portfolio because it feels true instead of because it looks impressive, the nightmare you survive without letting it steal the next morning.
The instinct you trust.
He still feels that instinct around Mike. Something hidden. Something unfinished. The feeling hasn’t gone away. Will doesn’t know what it means. But he trusts himself enough now not to dismiss it, and he trusts Mike enough not to force it. If Mike needs him, Will will be there. That doesn’t make Mike’s choices Will’s responsibility. Caring about someone isn’t the same thing as carrying them. He’s beginning to understand the difference.
One afternoon, while sorting the portfolio pieces again, he finds an old drawing shoved inside a sketchbook.
The Party.
All of them as children. Weapons. Costumes. A red dragon above their heads. Mike in the centre.
Will remembers making it. Remembers how important Mike’s face had been, how many times he erased and redrew the line of his jaw because it had to be right.
He smiles. It hurts. But gently.
He doesn’t tear the drawing. He doesn’t hide it again. He puts it in a box with the things he plans to keep but not submit. There’s a difference. The portfolio doesn’t have to contain every part of him. Neither does anyone else. His life can belong to him without becoming completely visible. That thought might be the most healing one of all.
From the kitchen, his mother calls his name.
“Will?”
He looks automatically toward the laundry basket. Empty. For once.
“Yes?”
“Telephone!”
“Coming!”
He starts toward the hallway, then stops. The afternoon sunlight falls across the newest drawing on his desk.
Afterimage.
The dark hand. The empty one. The lines extending beyond both. Yesterday he thought they might be cracks. Today they look more like roads. He decides not to change them.
Some things can be more than one thing at once. Loss and beginning. Scar and map. Fear and instinct. Love and letting go. Hawkins and home. Home and the place you leave.
Will touches two fingers lightly to the edge of the paper. Then he goes to answer the phone. He has no idea what Mike is hiding. No idea whether CalArts will want him.
No idea what California will feel like once it stops being a brochure and becomes a place where he wakes up every morning.
For once, not knowing doesn’t feel like standing in the dark waiting for something terrible to find him. It feels open. It feels unfinished. Like a blank sheet of paper before the first line.
And Will has finally started to trust his own hand enough to draw it.