Chapter Text
As he got older, it was getting harder and harder to hide.
It didn’t help that the number of people he was living seemed never to stop increasing. Will had actually lost count of how many people lived here permanently and how many were technically just camping out here between missions. And half of these people he barely knew, and there were none of them he’d trust with it. Not Mike or Jonathan or even Mom. And there had been more and more close calls, and more and more ways they might find out. Because he was getting worse, was getting more obvious, was having to remember to conceal too many different things, to hold too many different lies to too many different people in too many different contexts and combinations in his head. He only had to slip up once and then it would be undeniable, and then all hell would break loose.
For, the thing was, Will had been dead since 1983.
For all the happy ending – ha! – of that first November, the Upside Down had killed him all those years ago, and what Hopper had brought back ... well, he wasn’t not Will, but he wasn’t the same, either.
He hadn’t realized at first. He didn’t really remember his time in the Upside Down all that well. It came in patches and flashes and nightmares, all jumbled up and horrifying, as his young brain struggled to cope with everything that had happened to him. But he eventually came to realize, one night some time around his thirteenth birthday, that Hopper had been ten or twelve hours too late. That when the vine had gone down his throat, everything had gone black, and that had been the end of his life.
The night that he realized that, he’d wet the bed for the first time in seven years, and though he’d cleaned it up in the careful silence born of living with an unpredictable father, he knew his mom knew by the way she watched him for weeks afterwards. But she never said anything, never asked anything, and never saw what he now knew to be true.
It was difficult to explain how he knew this, especially given the whole continuing to walk and talk, go to school, play DnD, watch movies, ride his bike thing. And for the first few months after coming back, nothing much seemed to have changed beyond a general tiredness, nausea, headaches, and the feeling like he was somehow detached from everyone else. Also, dogs went crazy around him. Barking, snapping, snarling, trembling. Chester had died soon after he came back, just after Christmas; weirdly, he didn’t remember exactly how or what they’d done with the body, but it had been something of a relief, if he were honest.
Sometimes over that first summer, he wondered if that two-AM revelation had been a mistake, a manifestation of his trauma, that it was his brain detaching him from his previous life in order to protect him from fully remembering what had happened to him.
But if that were the case, it didn’t stop the memories of that week intensifying, the nightmares increasing in frequency, then the slipping back between dimensions. If that were the case, then his brain was doing a pretty shitty job of protecting him. And the cold inside him continued, and it became increasingly clear that death was less binary and more of a spectrum than he’d thought as various bits of him shut down.
And then he knew for certain, because he kept on going despite the failure of most of his organs, which started in earnest after his exposure to the Mindflayer. Maybe it had triggered it, but he suspected it had been happening all along. Whatever the timeline, it became undeniable after that. Like, these weren’t things you could skip over and carry on unless some supernatural force was keeping you going: his heart had slowed and stopped shortly before Christmas 1984. And maybe he should have said something instead of waiting out those three terrifying weeks as his body very obviously went very seriously wrong, but, after Bob, his mom was in no state to deal with that. And maybe that was selfish, too, because wasn’t he just risking her finding him dead in his bed one morning?
But then his irregular, painful, heartbeat stopped, and he kept getting out of bed, and it was all too unbelievable to bring up. Which was how it had been ever since, as less and less of him functioned normally.
There was no logic to it as far as Will could work out. He had, until recently, still grown, got bigger, got older, like his friends. So, to the outside world, he probably looked almost normal. But, every day, Will knew he woke up dead.
The days oozed by. The threat never dissipated, but it never seemed to build in intensity, either. Going out was a risk, but often no more so than crossing a busy road. Or maybe they were just used to it. Will had mentioned this to Dustin once, saying that it was like frogs in boiling water. Dustin had said there was no evidence frogs did that, and, like most conversations with Dustin since Will had come back from Lenora, there the conversation had ended. So maybe they were all dumber than frogs.
Will wondered whether the issue was that, unlike the previous times, there was nobody to find, no mystery to unravel, just a known threat that was too powerful to deal with directly and which seemed content to grind them down, pick them off one by one, never risking itself in any dramatic confrontation. So they resisted, and they tried to survive.
This November found Will sitting on the back porch of Hopper’s cabin, staring into the woods, a gun at his side, just in case.
He’d had to get out of there. Mike and Hopper had been at each other’s throats about something Will hadn’t been able to follow, but there was a rippling spiral of discontent depending on which side you supported, which seemed to be more personal than anything to do with the strength of their respective arguments. It was happening daily, more than daily, now, and Will had no idea who was right and who was wrong, or what that would even look like, how you’d even tell. He didn’t even really know what they were being right or wrong about anymore.
A hard snap of the door behind him made him flick his head around, and there was Mike with a dark cloud hanging in his face. Will felt slightly guilty for walking out instead of doing anything to back him up.
Mike nodded at Will, already feeling inside his leather jacket, and came to the edge of the veranda. He brought out a packet of cigarettes and a lighter, and lit one in an uncharacteristically fluent movement. Tucking the packet back into his pocket, he frowned down at Will, who was just in a thin long-sleeved shirt. “Are you not cold?”
“Oh!” Will pulled his arms around himself, pretending to notice. “Oh, uh, yeah, actually.”
Putting the cigarette in his mouth, Mike shrugged off his jacket and went to drape it around Will’s shoulders.
“Hey, no, Mike – don’t – no, you shouldn’t – don’t – I’m fine, really – leave it –”
“For Christ’s sake, Will, fucking take it!” snapped Mike, taking the cigarette out of his mouth and jabbing it down towards Will. His eyes widened. “Sorry – I mean – I meant – sorry – I – I – I’m sorry.”
Will nodded slowly, eyes on Mike, then lifted his shoulders slightly. Gently, Mike wrapped the jacket around them.
His hand brushed Will’s neck. “You are cold,” he said, straightening up and tugging down the sleeves of his green woolen jumper.
Will waved his hand around. “Well, duh. It’s November.”
“Yeah. Shittiest time of the year.”
“Tell me about it,” said Will. He reached up and held two fingers out for the cigarette, which Mike, after a deep drag, obligingly put between them. It wouldn’t do anything for him, but it would at least disguise the absence of any puffs of breath misting from his mouth.
Mike sat down next to him, pulling his knees in tight. He was silent for a while, moving only to accept the cig back. “Most days –” He broke off, and rubbed at his arms. He took a couple more drags in quick succession.
“Yeah?”
“It doesn’t matter. I shouldn’t – It doesn’t matter.”
“What shouldn’t you?”
Mike was silent again. Out of the corner of his eye, Will saw him drop his head into his knees.
Will nudged his best friend. “C’mon. It’s me. We’re a team, right?” He clenched and flexed his fingers, and wondered vaguely if his fingernails had stopped growing. Would they fall off one day? “We tell each other everything.”
“Mmm.”
“Mike?”
“Most days...” Mike took an enviably deep breath. “Most days I think we’re not going to make it. We’re going to lose.” He let the breath out slowly, a thin stream of smoke piercing the night. He tipped his head back. “And it’s not that I think that if people do what I say then we’ll survive. I don’t, at all. I think – I think my ideas are the worst, most of the time. I feel sick every time people do what I say.” Mike pulled on the cigarette quite roughly, then held it out to Will. “I remember when I was so confident. That little arrogant shit.”
Will put the cigarette into his mouth, feeling Mike’s spit dampen his dry mouth. He pretended to inhale, then dropped his hands into his lap, watching the brightness of the tip fade and the smoke curl away into the night. “You weren’t that bad.”
“I’m pretty sure I was. Mouthy. Moody. Intolerant of other people’s opinions.”
“You were right, though. Most of the time.”
“And what good has that done, in the end?”
“You never stopped looking for me, Mike. You did that. I – I’m – I’m a-” Will looked away into the woods. “I’m here.”
“Yeah, well, maybe you’re just the sole repository of all the best things I’ve ever done. I’ll ever do.”
Will flicked his head back round. “Mike...” He met his best friend’s eyes. They seemed very big right now, very dark and terribly sad. Before he could say any more, Mike started forward, to Will’s confusion.
“Hey, careful – you’ll burn yourself!”
“Oh, whoops...” Will thrust the cigarette back at Mike and flicked the ash off his sleeve with his other hand, quickly tugging down the hem. “Don’t want to set this place on fire.”
“Yeah,” said Mike, slowly. “Wouldn’t want that. Not when we have so many other ways to die.” Holding the cigarette, almost burnt down to the filter, between finger and thumb, he frowned out into the woods and took a couple more deep drags. “I just – I just don’t see a way out. I think this is it. It’s just a matter of when. We’re like – like some little bird that a cat’s brought into the house, not yet dead, so he can play with us a bit more.” He ground the cigarette out on the deck and flicked it into the weeds. “And there’s really nothing any of us can do about it.”
They sat in silence for a while. Something screeched in the distance. Will wondered if the trees beyond the barricades had always been so blurry in the red twilight.
Will looked away from the woods and glanced across at the shotgun. “Can I tell you a secret?”
Mike nodded. “Anything,” he said, voice hoarse.
“I think so, too.”
Will watched Dustin plough through a bag of chips across the other side of the room. The worst thing lately had been the food. He wished he could claim that he barely remembered what it was like to eat, but he remembered very well, and it made him hungry.
He’d had what his mom referred to in phone calls that he wasn’t meant to overhear to Mrs. Wheeler and Mrs. Henderson and Mrs. Sinclair as a delicate tummy ever since he’d come back the first time, and it was quite plausible that the week of not eating, or eating only from the Upside Down, or whatever the vine had been shoving down his throat, had screwed with his digestive system. And that seemed even more likely when he’d coughed up that creature. He’d even hoped that might be an end of it.
Certainly, the bloated feeling stopped, and he had a better time swallowing, but the underlying discomfort never really went away. And a couple of years ago, about the time they left for California, it got worse again. At first he’d thought it had been a persistent stomach bug. Maybe the different water, the different food, all the pizza. Whatever. Stress. Some late onset digestive disorder. He tried cutting things out to see if it made a difference – he went two weeks without bread once, several days without milk, as long as he could without eggs – but nothing changed except for the ever increasing likelihood of his stomach issues. He suspected the teachers at Lenora High were getting a bit fed up of giving him hall passes.
And then they’d come back to Hawkins, and he’d prayed for a week that he’d picked up food poisoning from one of the terrible motels and diners they’d stopped in on the way. But it had lingered, worsened, and after two months with the Wheelers anything that went in one end made a very swift exit at the other, usually only leaving him a few minutes’ grace to excuse himself. He could still drink, it seemed, which was a handy distraction when other people were eating, though the frequency of his bathroom breaks was increasing worryingly there, too. Though maybe it was just that he was drinking more.
So, yeah. No more food for Will. Ever.
Will had no idea exactly what was keeping him going. Like everything else about being undead, it didn’t seem to follow any laws of biology, or even common sense. But something was still propelling him around. He didn’t feel weaker. He wasn’t wasting away. As far as he could tell, he was exactly the same as before he’d stopped trying to eat. He was tired a lot, he supposed, but he’d been tired before.
The main thing, though, was his head. Things were fuzzier, and thinking was a struggle, like his brain was made of cotton wool, and there was a constant high-pitched hum in his ears. And it was debilitating, really. It was incredibly hard to concentrate on anything. He’d start sentences and trail off, frowning, as the ending escaped him, he’d start something, walk away, and stumble back across it hours later, having forgotten that he’d even started. He lost interest in everything, all the time. Anything that required him to make a decision, or to do more than mechanical actions, would cause him to frown, grimace, and put it off for later.
Time bent. Tasks, plans, projects were started, but no matter how much time he had, he never really did anything. Each day seemed to stretch long and empty ahead of him, and every night he went to bed having managed to achieve nothing at all. He had plenty of time each morning, and then he looked away from the ceiling that he’d been staring at for a minute or so and it was late in the evening. He remembered, dimly, having an active mind, having been constantly curious and inventive instead of feeling like his brain was underwater, like every synapse was clogged with syrup. He couldn’t tell if he fronted well enough for other people not to notice. He’d always been quiet, but now he said nothing at all unless directly engaged.
There was yet another planning meeting or something going on right now, and Will knew it was important, because they were all important, but he just couldn’t follow it. Hopper may as well have been speaking Greek for all the sense it was making to Will. And there was a constant buzzing sound in his head, like everything was being broadcast to him over a staticky radio from another room, instead of happening for real right in front of him. He remembered Robin saying how impressed she was at how calm he managed to remain during these meetings. He hadn’t the heart to tell her that he wasn’t choosing to be. He was just passive. Vacant. He was no longer capable of the mental energy of panicking.
He tried. He really did. But even as he tried really hard to grasp the start of a sentence, it just burbled off into incoherence in his ears by the end. He was sort of nodding along, his eyes generally following whatever Mike was doing. But mostly he found himself staring at his hands, mottled with scratches and cuts and little injuries that didn’t really heal. Under his left sleeve, the cigarette burn on his wrist had been subsumed by a red welt on his forearm where he’d spilled some boiling water on himself and hadn’t noticed. Being unable to feel pain was in its own way the only real benefit of his, uh, condition, but it didn’t mean he was invulnerable, and it was almost certainly the thing that would get him found out.
His nervous system had died off starting at the extremities: he had somehow lost a little toe in the destruction of Starcourt and hadn’t even noticed until he got to Lenora. One day in the bright dawn of a Californian morning he’d got out of bed, looked down, frowned, looked more closely, and passed out. When he came to a couple of minutes later, he was sure it was a trick of his imagination. So, from his position on the floor, he’d sat up slowly, leaning against the bed, and brought his foot closer to him.
No. Sure enough, what he had somehow thought on every previous day was his toenail, slightly overgrown into a pale point, was, in fact, a stub of bone sticking out of a healed-over wound.
Even though he was gripping the bed tightly as he tried to contain his revulsion, he looked at it with a weird sort of calm. It wasn’t part of him. It couldn’t be part of him. It was like something you’d see in a jar at the back of a weird cupboard in one of the science classrooms that hadn’t been altered since the ‘30s. It was like something you’d see at the side of the road, a bird or squirrel or something, that had been picked almost clean over the weekend by the time you were going that way again to school, little bits of dried flesh and skin still stuck to it.
Grimacing, he’d put his finger out and, after shrinking back a few times, put his finger on the bone. He didn’t know what he expected to feel when he did that – excruciating pain? nausea? ticklish? – but what he actually felt was nothing at all.
His tongue curved back in his mouth, he’d winced as he scraped his finger up and down it. Bits of dried stuff flaked off onto the pale carpet. He wasn’t quite sure how many bones you were meant to have in your little toe. Was it two or three? Will could only count two.
The disgust flooded through him again, and he’d squeezed his eyes shut.
He hadn’t even known what to do about it. He could hardly tell his mom. Would raise way too many questions about why he hadn’t noticed the agony of his toe being ripped off. How he hadn’t noticed the blood. The way his flesh had rotted away around it. What the fuck was going on. Questions like that.
He couldn’t have left it like that, though. You couldn’t just have a bit of your inside on the outside. Forcing his eyes open, he’d taken another look. Maybe it wasn’t so bad. Maybe he could just fold the skin over and hide it. Nobody would really clock that his little toe was a little bit littler than it was meant to be. Who would be looking at his feet that closely, anyway?
He’d looked. He’d looked away. He’d wanted to retch. It was so bad. Just a shard of bone, sheared off at the end, sticking out, bare, from the end of his foot. Nothing to hide it with. Still not looking, he’d felt for it. Maybe half an inch of smoothness before his foot started. As he held the bone between his fingers, a sudden awful clarity had exposed to him his only option.
In a daze, he’d shoved his foot into one of his slippers and headed to the kitchen. His mom was already on the phone, and smiled and waved at him as he passed her, and didn’t notice on the way back that he was holding a large heavy-bladed knife against his thigh.
He’d gone into the bathroom and locked the door, thought for a moment, then sat on the edge of the bath, his legs inside. He pulled off his slipper and dropped it onto the mat behind him. The image of his decayed toe forced itself back into Will’s mind and then the memory took him over completely.
Was he really going to do this?
Setting his squeamishness aside, he picked up the knife, and trailed it down the side of his foot until the tip found the joint, just below where the bone erupted from his flesh. It had to be there. It was a big knife, but it would hardly slice through bone. And, even if that were possible with the tools available, it would just leave a whole lot of new splintered ends a bit further down his foot.
No. A complete amputation was the only way to go. Quick and clean. He prodded with the end of the knife. Even just lightly wielded, it drew a narrow cut across his toe, though no blood came out. Will shifted, and switched the handle round so that the heel of the knife was over the joint. This was almost certainly extremely foolish.
Now to test the theory that this wasn’t going to hurt.
Gritting his teeth and gripping the handle firmly, he put his weight behind it and shoved down hard. There was a strange tugging feeling, and then the remains of his toe was pinging around the bathtub. There was no pain, no blood. Just a little flap of skin at the end of the rightmost edge of his foot. He sat for a few moments, dropping his head into his hands, suddenly feeling exhausted.
This was his life now. A body no more responsive than a lump of meat in a butcher’s shop. The weird out-of-body experience which had propelled him had come to an abrupt end, and now he was just a kid in his pajamas staring at the bit of himself he’d just hacked off.
He remembered that he had picked up the bone, supposing he ought to hang onto it. He’d put it in his pocket for safekeeping. He had no idea where it was these days – probably somewhere in the ruins of their home in Lenora.
He’d neatened up the resulting flap of skin with a pair of scissors from the bathroom cabinet, and run a few clumsy stitches across it, then used a sticking plaster to cover it up. He’d realized then that he probably could have done the same without the amputation, but it wasn’t like he could stick his toe back on now.
He trained his eyes on his sneakers, back in the cabin in Hawkins, Hopper still droning on about something. Fail-safes. Whatever. He sucked his lip and flexed the four toes of his right foot inside his shoe. Nobody had ever noticed. Having nine toes didn’t really affect him in any meaningful way. Maybe he was still a little wobbly if he ever had to stand on his right foot.
He looked up as someone jostled his shoulder.
“You really zoned out there for a while, huh?” said Dustin, brushing flakes of chips off his hands and onto the carpet. “Proper zombie mode.”
Will smiled thinly. “Sorry, was there something I should be doing?”