Archive of Our Own ^beta

The first thing they do is tend his burn with cold water and a dry towel. Nancy apologizes twice—once to Will and once to his mother, and both times, she is forgiven, if for different reasons. His mother forgives because she saved him. Will forgives because it was the right thing to do. These are the things Will believes in: honesty, loyalty, and doing the right thing.

He sleeps for three days before his friends can visit him. Lucas and Dustin welcome him back, as does Max. Each give him knuckle bumps or hair ruffles and welcoming smiles. Mike comes last, smiling shyly and offering his arms in a fragile hug, and Will clings to him like his life depends on it. Will cannot remember a time when he did not love Mike Wheeler. He doesn’t plan on stopping soon.

Behind Mike is a girl, and Will knows without a shadow of a doubt, that this is El. He reaches his arms to her, and for a long time, they just hold each other and cry.

El says, “I watched you, in the upside down. You were very brave.”

Will shakes his head, because he was not brave. He lay in the place he built to keep himself safe, and sang his favorite song over and over until the words became a prayer (should I stay or should I go), and he hid from the monster. Perhaps he outsmarted the monster. But no, he is not brave. He is just a boy in need of saving.

After—or perhaps it is after the after—things go back to “normal.” Will goes to school, bikes with his friends (including Max on her skateboard, and, when Hopper allows her, El), and he draws. Sometimes he draws normal pictures, but other times he draws the demigorgon, or the mind flayer, or Zombie Boy (now with possession upgrades!). Those he hides so his mother won’t find them. Jonathan says it’s a way of processing.

Will doesn’t think of it that way. He draws for the same reason he breathes: if he didn’t, he would die.

When Will was two, his mother gave him a box of crayons for his birthday. His favorite one is blue, and he uses it until it is no more than a stub. Will draws picture after picture to put on the fridge. When Lonnie comes home, he tears them down and throws them away.

(There will be other pictures, ones that his mother hides and that don’t get torn; a purple dragon at four; a rainbow ship at eight; a wizard at ten. Will’s art is his escape, his safety, his true love.)

Lonnie means shouting and heavy steps, slurred words and air that smells like something in the fridge went bad. Lonnie’s hands are hard and heavy. Will hides under is bed when Lonnie comes home.

Joyce coaxes him from under the bed and asks him what he is afraid of. He answers honestly, and something happens to Joyce’s face then—it slides, or maybe it breaks. He learns his first lesson about honesty: the truth hurts.

In kindergarten, Will meets Mike Wheeler, and it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to him. He and Mike have sleepovers in Mike’s basement (no Lonnie at Mike’s house; Mike’s house is quiet) and play games and watch movies. Will has found a safe place.

One night, in a fit of childish fear, he makes his mother promise that she will never let Lonnie come get him from Mike’s house. She cups her hands in his and says, “Honey, I promise that your dad will not go to Mike’s house. And I promise that he will never hurt Mike. Okay?”

Will whispers, “Okay.”

This is his first act of loyalty for Mike, offered in trembling, bony hands. My father shall not hurt you.

(And while it’s not that Lonnie would hurt someone else’s kid, but Will doesn’t understand that yet. All he sees is a big man with a loud voice and a quick hand.)

It’s like that for a while—Mike and Will, Will and Mike—and then Lucas joins them, and eventually, Dustin.

In fifth grade, Dustin brings a book from the library.

“The complete Dungeons and Dragons Manuel,” he lisps, thumping it heavily on the table in Mike’s basement. Four heads bend over the book, murmuring.

A giant red dragon looms over a small knight, a sinister sneer curling his scaly lips.

“Cool,” says Lucas softly.

“I know,” says Dustin. “I was thinking maybe we could play.”

“Sure,” says Mike. “What are the rules?”

That is only the beginning. They make a good party, filling in the others’ gaps. Lucas is the ranger, Dustin is the bard, Mike is the paladin, and Will is the cleric.

Lucas is the most likely to dive in and fight, trying to get the job done. Dustin charms and bargains his way out of all his problems, or sometimes just bluffs and fakes the opponent out. Mike is the leader, the planner.

And Will? Will stays back and heals. Will learns how to cast spells quickly, how to hide so Lucas can kill the monster, how to protect his fragile body. Clerics are reluctant to shed blood. Their job is to heal and to pray.

A cleric has domain over life and death. They can enter the realm of the dead and come back unscathed.

(Will enters the realm of the dead, and he comes back, but not unscathed.)

Mike DM’s most of the time—he has the best campaigns, sometimes taking as long as two or three weeks to plan one out. Lucas and Dustin co-dm, spending hours at Dustin’s house to plan challenges for Mike and Will. Dustin gets more and more books, discovering more characters, more worlds, more games. Mike sets up the D&D headquarters at his house—after all, he has an entire basement where they can conquer the beasts.

Fifth grade is also the year his parents divorce. The day his dad leaves, he and Jonathan go into the back yard and build a fort out of logs. They name it Castle Byers, hanging the name over the door. It was raining, but they stay out there anyway.

They hacked and sniffled their way through the next week, and Joyce makes them soup and hot tea. But even with his nose clogged so much he can hardly breathe, he still feels freer than he ever remembers. He is safe. His father is gone.

Their newfound lightness does not last.

Joyce picks up extra shifts at work, and she doesn’t come home until late. Jonathan starts making dinner for them, making peanut butter sandwiches and finding cans of soup in the pantry. One night he burns his hand with the soup, biting off a word Will had heard from his father’s lips, but never from Jonathan’s.

Will runs to the back bathroom and comes back with salve and a bandage. He wraps Jonathan’s hand carefully, to not touch the burn with his fingers.

“Thanks, buddy.”

Will shrugs. “No problem.” It’s what he does—he heals.

Joyce does her best, but things are still hard. At Christmas, they get hand-knit scarves, and nothing else. Mike gets a giant Millennium Falcon, and Lucas gets a set of walkie-talkies, and Dustin gets a Masters of the Universe playset, but Will gets a scarf.

When his friends ask him about his Christmas, he shrugs, smiles, says, “It was a good Christmas.”

And it was. He and Jonathan and his mother had a nice meal and they watched a movie and cuddled on the couch. His family surrounded him with a warm blanket of love that no toy or game could ever bestow.

(But when you’re eleven, and all your friends get cool things and you get a scarf, that’s hard to remember.)

In the sixth grade that they set up their desks in a square so they can all sit together. That’s the year Mr. Clarke came to the school. Dustin listens to a single lesson about physics and starts to hero-worship him a bit. One by one, they gravitate toward the man, who sets up the Hawkins AV club.

(They win first place in the science fair three years running.)

And then came November 1983.

Will wonders, sometimes, if he prophesied, that night. The demigorgon, he said, it got me. Was it just his roll of the dice? That he would be the one sucked into the cold hellscape? Had he been marked since birth to be the one to go and not die?

Whatever happened, it left it’s mark on him, because he blinks back and forth for a year. One moment he’s here, the next he is there. Doc Owens says it’s all in his head. Will knows it is real.

He never tells anyone, not about the slugs, or the blinking or the constant unrelenting fear.

(What is he afraid of? Of death. Of the Upside Down. Of the chains that tether his soul to the lifeless realm.)

Once, he comes close to telling Jonathan, as they listen to The Clash in his bedroom. Jonathan’s working on a new mixtape.

“You’ve been awful quiet lately,” Jonathan says.

Will looks at him, thinks of nothing to say, shrugs.

“See there, that’s what I mean.”

Will smiles.

“I mean, being quiet’s not a bad thing. It just worries mom.”

“Sorry.”

Jonathan shakes his head. “Don’t apologize. You—you went through a lot.” The little half-smile falls from his face, and he turns so Will doesn’t see his face.

“I’m still…I’m…I’ll do better.” He wonders what he was going to say. I’m not okay? I’m still flashing back? Please help me?

Jonathan backpedals. “I’m sorry, bud, I just…”

“No. It’s okay. Mom needs help.”

Jonathan sighs. “Yeah.”

Will wants to help people. It’s the right thing to do. He is the cleric—he heals. But this he cannot heal. So he just…doesn’t tell them.

Yes, Will believes in honesty, but when honesty is harmful, perhaps it is better to not say the truth. Lies of omission. Friends don’t lie. Will came up with that rule. By the letter of the law, he never lies. By the spirit, well, there are many things he does not say.

Like, for example, that he loves Mike in a way that isn’t the same way Dustin and Lucas love Mike. When he says Mike is my best friend, this is a truth. When he says, I’m fine, this is a lie. When he thinks, I love you, Mike Wheeler, this is both a truth and a lie.

When Mike first talks about El, he wonders if she knows what she has gained: the awful and fearless love of Mike Wheeler. It is not until later, when he first sees them together, that he realizes that perhaps Mike is the one who does not understand what he has earned: the terrible and unflinching love of Jane Hopper.

~

The first time he sees Nancy after the Upside Down, she gives him a gentle hug.

“I’m glad you’re back, Will.”

Will nods. He knows Nancy. Nancy came with Mike, a presence on the fringes. And Jonathan likes Nancy.

It’s Jonathan who tells him, later.

“She helped me. She did all she could. And she can shoot a gun better than me.”

Will nods. “You never did like guns.”

Jonathan flinches a little. “No.” He sighs. “She’s dating Steve. I’m glad she’s happy.”

Will sees then, how his brother thinks he found himself in Nancy. Maybe he’s right, and maybe Nancy found a bit of herself in Jonathan, but that does not change how Nancy chose Steve.

(For Christmas, Nancy gives Jonathan a camera, and he lights up brighter than a flash bulb.)

All that winter, Will covers himself in streaks of color to wash away the grey of the Upside Down. He goes through and entire 64 color box of Crayola crayons, drawing dragons and wizards and magical creatures.

He tries something new, too. He draws his friends—Mike the Paladin, Lucas the Ranger, Dustin the Bard. He draws his brother, and his mom. It’s not very good at first, but he gets better with practice.

He decorates his room and Castle Byers with the bright colors. He still feels grey inside.

Even Castle Byers does not feel as safe as it once had.

He tried to go out to the back shed, but the blood rushed to his ears and he couldn’t find his breath and the world tilted and spun until he dropped to his knees. He cannot go to the shed.

He tries to cut through Mirkwood, but there the trees grow dark and looming and he sees a demigorgon around every turn. Lucas bikes with him one day in the middle of summer. They go slowly, and with Lucas by his side, the woods are not so scary after all. Doesn’t mean he likes the shortcut.

There is a lurking fear, no matter where he goes, that he will become snared in the Upside down once again. Any time he flashes back, vines crawl up his throat and he counts his heartbeats until he blinks back.

He lays in bed one night, staring at the dark of the ceiling, thinking, What if I can’t get back? What would I do?

He goes, of course, to Dustin.

“I want to learn Morse code.”

Dustin doesn’t even blink. “Let me go get a book.”

He comes back with a book on Morse code and another on memorization methods, and a third, on Jeremiah Denton.

“He used Morse code to communicate while a prisoner of war,” Dustin grins. “Pretty cool, right?”

“Right,” Will says. Prisoner of war reverberates in his head. And he thinks of the Christmas lights crowding his house. Prisoner of war.

Dustin is already laying on his stomach, book spread open to the Morse code page. “Here, Will,” he says, pointing, “Let’s start with the letter A.”

So, bit by bit, Will rebuilds himself. He puts his body back together one bone at a time.

That summer, Joyce starts dating Bob Newby. Bob is thoughtful, genuine, even if he fumbles when around the boys. It’s good to see his mother happy, but their family was fine the way it was. Bob is a nice addition, if not perfect. In a funny way, he reminds Will of Sam from the Hobbit—kind, loyal, solid.

Bob likes puzzles, and he brings Will Sudoku puzzles and crosswords and riddles. Sometimes, he challenges Will to riddle contests: Who can come up with the best riddle. Will likes Bob.

Jonathan gives him a new mixtape with a lot of songs from Journey and David Bowie and the Clash. Always the Clash.

“Tell me what’s your favorite,” Jonathan says. “I’m working on finding some new things.”

(Will wears out the tape from how often he plays it, just like with every other tape from Jonathan.)

Hopper and Joyce take him to Doc Owens every week. Hopper claps a giant hand on Will’s skinny shoulder and says, “We’ll get you fixed, kid.”

Will thinks about how Hopper’s hands are big and strong, but he never raises them to harm. Perhaps men with big hands are not always to be feared.

Sometimes, when Will looks at Hopper, he sees the father he never had.

The arcade comes to town, and the party starts spending every spare quarter defeating the games. There is nothing quite like the shiver and thrill of shooting the enemy in Galaga or eating the ghosts in Pac-man.

The Upside Down can’t even let him have that. It’s at the arcade that Will first sees the Mind Flayer, looming over his house, coming for him.

It swallows him whole.

He has to be told later about Dart eating Mews, about burning the tunnels, about fighting the physical war while Will is trapped in his own mind, while he could not even control what he says.

Of course he wasn’t able to fight. It’s what he’s always done, isn’t it? Stay back while everyone else does the hard work? What a bitter brew to drink—to always be the one hurt and lost and in need of saving.

Thank God for the Morse code. If it had not been for the hours of discovery and practice on Dustin’s floor, Will wouldn’t have been able to give the sacrificial message.

Close gate. I am in the domain of death and there is no chance of me coming back. Close gate.

The monster is destroyed with fire and fury, and Will lives.

Will lives, and he carries on.

Lucas and Dustin tell him later, in reverent near-whispers, of El and Mike’s reunion. Three hundred fifty three days, they whisper.

Will aches. He aches because he knows Mike won’t feel like that for him. He aches for El. He aches on Mike’s behalf.

There was a boy crumbling beside him for an entire year. Mike’s chest had been caving in, rib by rib, one chunk of bone at a time. How had Will missed the rumble and crash?

Perhaps it was because Will himself was fracturing along his edges, cracks lacing up his spine.

Hopper starts coming over more often. He usually has a pretext—hang Christmas lights, change the oil in Joyce’s car, “let El see Will.”

El comes armed with notebooks and pencils. “Will you help me with my homework?”

“Sure. What do you have?”

“Everything.”

El’s homework is what Hopper has been teaching her. She knows how to read, but math is a struggle, so Will walks her through the basic problems. And El listens, and then does it perfectly.

That’s the thing about El—she listens, really listens, watching intently with big eyes.

He shows her his art, and she spends hours watching him draw. He draws her, big brown eyes and short curly hair.

“Pretty,” she declares.

Will introduces her to music. The Clash, of course, and Cyndi Lauper and The Police and Peter Gabriel. She learns the words and he discovers she has a nice voice—sweet and quiet.

When they have their homework sessions, one of them starts singing—softly at first, then building in volume until they are playing air drums and guitar on their pencils.

Sometimes, Will can be drawing or studying and a video tape will float into his vision. It will hover there until Will takes it to the living room, where El is watching. Sometimes it’s movies (she’s particular to E.T.) and sometimes it’s soap operas (Will ends up knowing entirely too much about the plot and characters of All my Children).

El loves blanket forts, and they build one in Will’s room. There they hide, laughing. Blanket forts are for giggles and games.

They listen to their parents’ toeing the line of a relationship. They seem stuck in this phase of not in a relationship but not not in a relationship. It’s weird.

“Dad really cares for your mom,” El offers.

“Yeah,” Will says. “I’m glad. She needs someone like that, y’know?”

“What is your…father like?” El asks, and Will tenses beside her. “Is he like Papa?” she whispers.

Will shakes his head. “Not…like your papa. He was…” Will tips his head back until it touches the wall. “He was not kind. He yelled. He tore down my drawings. He hit mom a few times. He drank. Once he made Jonathan go hunting and said Jonathan would never be a man. He lives in a different town now.”

El curls into his side. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. He’s gone now, right?”

“And if he ever comes back…” she leaves the sentence hanging, and for a moment Will fears for Lonnie’s life.

Blanket forts are for giggles, but they are also for promises. They are for loyalty. They are for honesty. They are for friends.

Will tells her about the Upside Down, halting, stumbling. El listens and says nothing.

“I was so afraid El,” he whispers, nearly at the point of tears.

She puts her arms around him. “It’s okay.”

Bravery is not the absence of fear. Bravery is doing the right thing. Bravery is carrying on when the world falls apart. Bravery is in Will, tucked into his corners and hovering at the edges of his smile. Bravery is the boy who walked into death and came back alive.

Still, somewhere deep in his soul, Will is afraid. He is afraid that next year—in the fall, in the winter, the Upside Down will come for him. Something will come and it will take him again. He will never be free from this.

He thinks about it, sometimes, of making it so they can’t get him again. It’s a noiseless thought that lurks at the back of his mind, quietly whispering that he could stop anything from ever hurting him again. He could save them the trouble.

It’s the same whisper that says his friends will never stop looking at him like he might burst into tears at any moment. He just wants to be able to be alone again, not always have Jonathan or his mother in the house with him. It’s not like he will vanish into thin air, he thinks, but yet, it is. He just wishes his mother would stop looking at him like that. Like he is broken and she must fix him. Sometimes Mike looks at him the same way, and he wants to scream. Can he not be a normal fourteen-year-old boy again?

But that’s the thing, isn’t it. He’s not normal. He will never quite shake the name of “zombie boy.” It will follow him, like the scent of rotting flesh, for years afterward.

Will knows, when he looks in the mirror, that he stopped growing. Mike is growing faster than his mind can keep up, awkward elbows and knees and hands too big for his wrists. His jeans are perpetually too short and sometimes his voice breaks and suddenly some of the girls at school don’t dismiss him as a nerd anymore. Dustin is growing too, gaining teeth, and also a fancy new hairstyle. Lucas and Max both are tall enough that Will knows, he knows, that his own growth, somewhere, stopped. Maybe it was the mind flayer, living inside him, that stopped him. Maybe he’ll perpetually be five-feet-nothing. Or maybe he just hasn’t grown up yet.

“Honey, you’re just a late bloomer,” Joyce says. “Jonathan was the same way.”

Will nods at his mother. “Sure.” When he looks at Joyce, he does not see a mother. He sees the cigarettes stubbed out on the drainboard of the sink, the shadows that have taken permanent residence under he eyes, and the tired splintered smile. So he says nothing about his fears, and carries on.

Sometimes healing others doesn’t mean doing something. It means not doing something. It means saving them wounds that would be inflicted by the truth.

The Upside down never leaves him. He never blinks back, not like before, but he does dream. He dreams he is back hiding in Castle Byers. He dreams he is running from the demigorgon. He dreams the mindflayer is consuming him again. He dreams his friends are dead at his betrayal. He dreams himself back at the hospital strapped to a bed. He dreams of his mother’s cold empty eyes. He wakes, sweating and panting, in his bed.

Sometimes he dreams when awake. He sees a slug on the sidewalk and suddenly he is hunched over the sink in the bathroom, coughing. He sees a candle lighter and suddenly it is a flame thrower and his insides are burning.

He confesses, late at night, when the whole party is sleeping over at his house.

“It’s not like I mean it or want it,” he whispers, focusing on the floorboard. “It just…happens.”

“PTSD,” Dustin says from across the room. “I read about it.”

“You mean you have the same thing that soldiers get?” Lucas asks, eyebrows quirked in a sad twist. “Man, I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” El says softly. “Sometimes I do the same thing.”

Will meets his almost-sister’s eyes. She offers a smile. “Dad says you just have to learn to live with it. You have to learn to fight it.”

Mike grabs his forearm in comfort. “Crazy together, remember?”

Will nods. “Yeah, crazy together.”

Max glances around at all of them. “We’ll help you, okay? We’re all here for you.”

Will ducks his head. “Yeah. I know.”

The mean it. It’s a promise.

That winter is hard. Icicles hang off roofs like swords and old men’s beards. Will hates every minute of it.

He is always too cold. He puts on layer after layer. He develops a love for flannel shirts over t-shirts, for a sweatshirt to sleep in at night. He bundles in a parka, a stocking cap, and the scarf his mother gave him years ago.

“Geez, man, are you cold?” Lucas asks sarcastically.

Will nods. “Yeah.”

Max slings her arm over his shoulder. “Me too. Maybe we should move back to California together.”

Will smiles at her. “Let’s go. Can you teach me to surf?”

Max sighs. “Sadly, we are stuck here, and I can only teach you to skateboard. How does that sound?”

Will grins. “Really?”

“Absolutely.”

Being cooped up inside sparks the revival of D&D sessions, this time with Max and El included.

And, oddly enough, Steve Harrington.

At first, Will is wary of Steve. Although Jonathan had never said, Will had a pretty good idea who broke Jonathan’s camera. But Dustin has a bad case of idolization for Steve, and he insists on dragging him everywhere. Or rather, Dustin convinces Steve to drive them everywhere. As it is very cold, biking from house to house or to the arcade is not an option, so Dustin begs Steve to chauffer them.

Max or Dustin always scuffle for shotgun, but after one time too many, Steve swats them away from the door.

“No! Give someone else a turn, ya lil’ shits.” His eyes land on Will, and his expression softens a little bit. “Will—get up here!”

Will slides into the front with caution. Steve swings into the driver’s seat. “What kind of music are you into, buddy? You pick the radio station.”

So Will fiddles with the dial until he finds a good station.

“Good choice,” says Steve. He reaches a hand behind him to swat at Dustin, Max, and Lucas bickering in the back. “Shut up until we get to the Wheeler’s would you? I want to listen to the music!”

It takes time and several car rides before Will is convinced of Steve’s integrity. Steve is always gentle with Will, but he never treats him like he’ll break. He rumples his hair and punches his shoulder, but he never fails to complement Will’s artwork or let Will introduce him to some new music.

After graduation, Steve stays in town and gets a job. He continues to join them on their quests—D&D quests or quests to the arcade or quests to get ice cream.

Will turns fourteen that March. His friends throw him a party, a celebration of life.

(No, not a celebration of life. A celebration that he is alive. There is a difference.)

Will lies awake that night, running his fingers over the starburst scar on his stomach. He thinks about Bob. He thinks about how Will never won the riddle contest. And now he never will.

He thinks about how he can’t sleep without a nightlight anymore. It sits on his bedside table, a little lamp chasing away shadows.

He thinks about the dark.

This is the truth: light cuts through the darkness. We cannot turn on the dark. We can only turn off the light.

Will wonders how to turn on the light.

In early summer, Max carries through on her promise to teach Will to skateboard. They start at school, on the nice flat pavement of the school parking lot.

When Will falls, Max doesn’t rush to his side to help him up. She asks if he’s okay, then gives the skateboard a hard shove with her foot to send it back to Will.

Will smiles, gaining his balance on the board. She is not treating him as though he will break.

And so it is to Max that he first says, “I think I like boys. The way other boys like girls.”

Max blinks at him. “I know,” she says gently.

“You know?”

“I have eyes,” she says, rolling them, and smiling.

Will swallows hard, thinking about the others. “Is it that obvious?”

“Well, to me, maybe, but don’t worry about the others. And don’t worry about Mike. He’s too busy staring at El,” she adds with a wry laugh.

Will nods, cringing.

“Sorry.” She pats his shoulder.

“It’s okay,” he says.

“You know it doesn’t have to be okay. It’s okay to not be okay.”

“No really,” he says. “It’s okay. I get it. There will be a different…”

Max nods in understanding. “He better be good to you or I’ll beat him up.”

Will laughs. “Maybe just don’t tell anyone else yet.”

Max nods sagely. “That sounds like a good idea.”

In a town like Hawkins, someone like Will would be greeted with jeers and threats, not love and acceptance.

Will comes out to Jonathan next, who pats his back and reminds him how overrated normal is.

Will smiles and asks him not to tell Joyce just yet.

And somehow, just saying how he really feels, admitting this part of who he is, it helps. It’s okay to not be okay. Will believes in honesty. It’s time to be honest—with others, and with himself.

He tells Joyce about his PTSD, and reassures her he’s handling it. She circles him in her arms.

“Thank you for telling me,” she says, her voice cracking a little.

Oh, thinks Will, This is healing.

Joyce will help him rebuild, putting mortar in the chinks. He will mend and repair and heal—and so will she.

In the summer, Will hits a growth spurt and nearly catches up to Mike in a month. Maybe it’s the sun, pouring it’s warm life into his veins and evaporating the last of the grey.

He draws his friends, in vibrant colors. Max is red, of course, bright like the sun. Lucas is a gentle determined green. Dustin is friendly oranges and chartreuses. Steve is bright orange. Mike is safe blue and warm gold. El is an array of purples, mysterious and adventurous. Jonathan is tan and deep red. Hopper is solid and safe brown, and Joyce is light greens and gentle blues, the color of home. He tapes them up in his room in a row, and thinks, if it would save you, I’d go right back into the Upside Down.

When his friends come over and see what he drew, they take them down, holding his love in the shape of a flimsy piece of paper.

He draws more pictures—all of them together, laughing; Max coaching El on a skateboard; Lucas and Max together where Lucas is looking only at Max; Dustin and Steve, smirking with matching hair; Mike and El cuddled asleep on a couch. He draws Hopper and Joyce in a quiet moment in the Byer’s kitchen; Dustin and Lucas plotting their next move in the heat of a D&D game; and he draws Mike.

He still loves Mike. He will always love Mike. But things are different now. So he draws Mike, the constellations of his freckles, the slope of his nose, the subtle curl of his hair. He takes a deep breath, staring at the completed drawing. It’s time to move on.

Sometimes your first love will not be your forever love.

All the summer, as they all gain freckles and burn red and peeling (Max tans), as they swim in Steve’s pool, as they venture out to the quarry to wave sparklers before the sunset, as they camp out in El’s front yard, as they stargaze from the Byer’s porch, Will heals. He lets his friends heal him. He tells them about his fears, about the Upside Down, and they wrap him tight with in a cape woven from promises of protection and knots of love.

He stops wanting to die. He starts wanting to live and be alive.

Will still wonders what it would be like to die. He is too young to be thinking of death, but he is also older than his classmates by decades, perhaps by centuries. He is fourteen, but he has looked hell in the eye and walked away. He has shaken hands with death, more than once, and he survived.

Death will always follow him, looming and spectral, but he will outrun it for a long time yet.

He does not fear death. He fears living with nothing to die for.