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Will wakes up one night with something inside of him.
Its an obvious intrusion. The feeling of it, lodging deep. Like a splinter somewhere in his stomach. It pushes against his liver and makes his breath catch for one singular, endless moment. It feels like last week, when Troy came back from his out-of-school suspension and pushed Will off the monkey bars.
“You’re a fairy, not a monkey, right?” he asked with a sneer, right before the fall. “So use your wings.”
He would let Troy push him off the playground a million times if it meant he didn’t have to hurt like this again.
He feels every single one of them. He’s home, but he’s not home. He can see himself everywhere; every tree, every pebble, each house. The monster is behind him but it stays back. Mr. Clarke told them once, when he revealed the astonishing fact that humans are animals, that humans were persistence hunters. They were patient. They chased and chased until their prey dropped dead from exhaustion. His monster looks enough like a man that Will has given up hope that it’ll leave him behind.
Except then it does. And then he feels it.
His father had only hit him a few times. But, once a few years ago, he hit hard enough to knock out a baby tooth that wasn’t even loose. This feels the same, amplified by a thousand.
He sees red hair, feels the metal cut into the tender skin of a finger. He can feel the crippling loneliness spreading down from his heart into his toes into the pool. The teeth feel like nothing else he’s ever felt. He cries out as he’s pulled back down, a name desperate and terrified and so, so alone, until it’s over and he feels nothing at all.
He feels it three more times. It happens twice at once, he can see two men on a boat, holding hands and sighing and grabbing hair until suddenly it’s teeth and claws and fear and then nothing. He doesn’t even remember the last time.
This is home, he can tell. It’s dark and cold but it’s home and so achingly familiar. He feels like his fingers are branches and every hair on his head is one of his people in their warm house. His people who are dying. He, who is torn open with a hole in his chest and the breath plucked right from his lungs with all the loving handling of a car crash.
The monster takes him in gentle arms. He’s propped against the wall and the vine slowly makes its way down and then his eyes close.
When they open again, he sees a little blond girl at the base of the quarry and sees her open palms are the color blue, before she vanishes and he feels the pounding in his chest and can hear a man yelling in his ear and he knows his mother’s fingers are cradling his head. He can see the girl again, through blearily opening eyelids and heaving something up from his stomach, in the man's wide, frantic eyes.
–
When he coughs up a slug for the first time– yes, the first time– he knows this is not something that will leave him quietly.
He doesn’t feel twelve. Sometimes he feels as old as his mother and then he feels as old as the dirt beneath his feet. Mike takes his hand less than he did when they were younger but his eyes, dark as Will's night sky, never leave Will, not even once. Lucas grounds him, settles him like a stone. Dustin distracts, doing what he does best and taking the attention off of Will and onto himself, getting them all to laugh.
The town says no one knows what happened to Barb, Nancy’s friend who disappeared around the time he did. He knows, though. He knows before his mother can tell him. He was there. He can’t tell his mother that, though, or she’d worry. He nods his head and cries for her, remembering the gnashing teeth and heartbreak. The frozen cuts on her palms from the side of the empty pool. Nancy can't look at him but he feels her heaving sobs as she cries into her pillow each and every night and each and every early morning, stabbing her own heart over and over again.
He throws up another slug. This time, he feels its tiny thud against the porcelain of the sink. A bump to the back of his neck, a tingle down his lower spine. He lets the wind outside into his lungs with a deep breath and releases it and a leaf falls to the ground outside. Almost October, almost November. Almost time. It feels like he’s stretching an arm out, an arm he’s never used before. It’s wrong, it feels clumsily sewn onto his back. He can feel the tunnels running under his skin like a shiver. He puts another shirt on and keeps his mouth shut.
Max is nice enough, he decides. She judges too quickly, perhaps, with eyes boring into the back of his head during class and a forced concession to her brother at the hand of his tight fist. Will welcomes her. A warm patch of sun for her to hide in, a soft landing when she trips over her skateboard. He knows the second she crosses his border that she is staying, never going, never being pulled away him.
On Halloween, he runs. The clowns laugh when he falls and he can feel their joy at the torment of a young boy they’ve barely ever laid eyes on before, only ever heard stories about. He almost laughs with them but the fear catches him first.
Zombie Boy, they call him. They jeer. They love their home but they hate him. They turn their backs on him and let the dark-cold-dampness of the Upside Down take over and fall like a curtain all around him. He's frozen again. Solidly, and without hesitation or remorse.
The shadow is not him. It’s Him.
It’s beyond Will. It’s something that chases him, another predator, another arm reaching out and clawing a hand over his mouth and shrieking in his ear. It calls his name, just one other thing he didn’t freely give away and yet this place and this monster wields it jaggedly.
He’s gone, for a while. Something else moves his hand. He feels the tunnels move quicker than they did before. He feels hollow and full, his head near bursting. There’s two in there, himself and another. His head is too small.
Several die. His hands shake as he points around the table, the monster showing the doctors where he wants them to go. It’s a betrayal. These men who have families, who have lungs and hearts and feet that move and mouths that talk and laugh. They burn him, He kills them. Will wants Him to stop but can’t find where his mouth is. His heart throbs warmly and a tendon in his ankle is cut.
The hate in his heart when he looks at his mother isn’t his own. His words aren’t his own. Nothing is his. He will fall into the gaping maw of this shadow and its monster and Will is going to be swallowed whole.
The fire at his side burns so brightly all he can see is white. The arm on his back is gone, two wounds where he bleeds nothing but feels all that pain. It’s been torn off and thrown away, thrown away from him and his people and through the pulsing, thorned mouth of the monster and the mouth closes. There’s a shadow hiding in the trees, slipping past bushes, but he looks at his mother, bruising a dark red around her neck, and feels nothing but two-fold relief. He sees her and she sees him and she takes him to her chest as he cries. The wind outside howls and rages until his brother's palm soothes against his sweaty hair.
–
El is electricity.
She’s a shock to the system. She’s not his, not his like Max wasn't his at first, but different. He knows she’s always been here, has felt her small feet patter against cold tile and her arms kick against her mother’s stomach, but she isn’t his. That’s okay, Will doesn’t mind. She has a handle on herself more than he ever could do anything to help her.
Every time she talks, every word she utters, feels like lightning. Mike’s eyes are glued to her and see nothing else. He can feel Mike’s admiration of her as if it were his own. Mostly, he doesn’t feel anything about El except for gratitude and pity in equal measure. He thinks she feels the same way about him.
Billy was never his, he didn’t want to be and never let Will take root. He longed for the ocean, something Will didn’t have. He was mean to Lucas, something Will could not excuse. He still feels it when Billy is taken. Feels him wicked out and then reassembled into something that was almost Billy but oozed something, a trickle of parasitic water that poisoned his steps and his hands. Heather is gone, then her parents, then everyone.
Will’s neck is covered in goosebumps for a full night, never leaving, aching like sores. He shivers but doesn’t want to ask Mike for a jacket. He doesn’t know what Mike would say this time.
His people are no longer his people. He knows they’re in there, can feel them writhing and screaming and mindless, but they are no longer his. They charge forward, boxing Nancy in. El raises her hand and throws them through the window. He hears their crashing fall like everyone else does, not once feeling the stinging cut of a blade of grass or the scrape of pavement. They fall through his cracks and leave him and Will knows they are gone from him forever. He can’t even whisper a good-bye, too busy running and leaping over death, but his heart feels it. It feels like nothing else, like something has happened he has not even the colors for, not even a scrap of paper. It's a whimper, a child's cry. A small, little thing forgotten.
–
He leaves.
He doesn’t know how, half expecting to wake up in Hawkins, but he leaves and he stays. Lenora is unwelcoming. He wonders if this is how Billy felt when he met Will and stepped inside and spat on the ground. Will doesn’t want to spit, doesn’t want to repeat the disrespect.
California is dry and hot and he lets that envelope him instead of the emptiness in his stomach. He focuses on how he breathes easier here than in Hawkins and leaves the feeling of hurt behind him with his soul and his stones and his library and his streets.
There’s a hole in him somewhere he can’t see or feel. He cannot plug it up.
Mike is supposedly coming back to him, returning like a long lost and most beloved pet, one never meant to leave the security and safety of the house. Will hasn’t spoken a word to him since he left. He wonders if that’s why the chasm feels so large. He feels so alone in California, no longer crammed full of family and love and wooded land and twisting vines. He can’t feel Mike, doesn’t know if the stolen sense is shared between them or if Will has to face the fact that the one he wants to love him the most can’t wait to leave him.
Mike wants to leave Hawkins, to leave and never return. Will knows that where he goes, Hawkins follows. Mike is just out of reach, a hair's breadth from his fingertips. It would only be right for Mike, for Will’s first person and not all the people he has always been, for Will to let go.
Mike, in his garish yellow, kisses El. Will, despite everything, feels excitement pool in his chest, almost filling the black tar pit inside. He pushes it away, bounces on the balls of his feet as Mike shoves some of Will’s flowers, Will’s own flowers, into El’s waiting hands. He knows the excitement is all his own, but can’t help but shamelessly and shamefully wonder how much better it might feel if Mike felt it too.