Chapter Text
WILL
"Wake up . Grab a brush and put a little make-up Hide the scars to fade away"
He stabs the slippery pea with the tip of his fork.
He chews and chews the meatloaf. It tastes like rubber, and his mouth fills with sour saliva. His stomach twists and aches, wanting to shut down and expel the food.
He swallows, smiles, forces himself to breathe slowly. No one notices.
He becomes a good actor.
Only one person lingers their gaze on him, and he stiffens in his chair. He shovels another spoonful into his mouth — enough to appease those black eyes that stare at him like lasers.
But his attention is fleeting now, inconsistent. Now Will isn’t the missing boy, nor the traumatized one, not even the possessed one.
He’s just Will Byers.
The strange and needy boy who disappeared once.
Mike’s eyes, which used to follow him everywhere, have now found a brighter focus. In fact, everyone seemed to have found interesting people that summer, and Will was still just Will.
The boy stuck in time, trapped between two worlds. Whether it was the upside-down one or not. He still felt like he was inside the wall, screaming for help. Trapped, running through backward-spinning slides.
_________
The bed wakes soaked again. His skin is cold and sticky. His whole body aches as if it had twisted all night. Panting, he wipes his face, feels saliva pooled at the corner of his mouth, and notices a puddle on the pillow. His nose wrinkles in disgust.
He feels disgusting.
Will doesn't know how he didn’t wake the whole house. Or maybe he does. He still feels pressure on his throat. A phantom, supernatural force pressing down. The sensation of something opening his mouth and crawling in, sliding down his insides. He vomits into the bucket beneath the bed and feels disgust — sour, rancid.
He bends over himself, stomach aching and contracting.
Always contracting, trying to expel. It was useless then. It’s useless now. He rises silently and strips the sheets. He’ll wait for his mom to leave before putting them in the wash.
No one needs to know.
As much as he wanted to tell, his lips were sealed. Those lost days were murky, faded.
A puzzle with missing pieces that only surfaced at night, and he tried to reach out and gather them. Other times, he threw them as far away as possible, wanting nothing more than to forget forever.
But the memories remain hidden, slithering like a snake. Coiling around his leg, climbing, climbing.
Invading. Invading.
He felt invaded.
Full and empty at the same time.
_________
He turns on the shower and twists the knob to the limit, making the water as hot as the old boiler could still manage.
He observes the greasy tiles, some cracked, and closes his eyes, feeling his skin burn under the scalding stream.
The heat felt good. The burning reminded him he was still here. It was the only proof he hadn’t been swallowed again — that it, the thing inside him, hadn’t taken everything.
He scrubs his body with the sponge until it hurts, until his skin is raw.
Only then does he feel clean, purified.
He remembers the masses his grandmother forced his mom to attend, and how she’d take him along, clutching his hand tightly as they walked down the long church aisle. The tall doors looked like castles, heavy as judgment, and the stained glass dyed the air with strange lights, as if the world outside had ceased to exist. Will was just a small boy, curled behind his mother’s leg, wide-eyed at the altar. Everything was too big. The columns rose like infinite trees, the vaulted ceiling seemed like the sky collapsing. And the saints... oh, the saints.
They were everywhere, cold, still, with glass eyes fixed on something he couldn’t see — or maybe fixed on him. Their expressions showed pain, mouths half-open in eternal groans, hands raised as if begging or cursing. One of them, covered in wounds, had thorns buried in his head and a gaze Will never forgot. It looked like he was crying for him.
The priest spoke in a deep, echoing voice, as if God himself was on the microphone.
“And if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never goes out.Mark 9:43”
Will clutched his mother’s hand tighter. He didn’t understand everything, but enough to tremble. He didn’t want to burn. He didn’t want to lose his hand. The crucified man bled in silence above the altar, and Will felt that if he looked for too long, he’d end up nailed there too, under the glass eyes of the saints.
That night, Will pulled the blanket up to his chin and asked in a small voice while his mom turned off the lamp:
“Mom... why did God let his son die like that, all nailed up?”
Jonathan, leaning on the doorframe with crossed arms, raised an eyebrow at their mom. Shifted his weight from one leg to the other, impatient. Joyce frowned, lifting the boy onto her lap to settle him better in bed. For a moment, she seemed to search for the right words.
“It’s like the priest said, baby. Jesus had to sacrifice himself... to save us.”
“But the priest also said that if you sin, you burn in eternal fire.” Will’s voice trembled. He looked at his older brother with wide eyes, confused, almost begging for some logic. Jonathan sighed, impatient, but said nothing yet.
“Yes, he said that...” Joyce replied, hesitant.
“But... if he sacrificed his son to save us from sin, why do we still go to hell?” He sniffled and rubbed his eyes with his fist. The image of the man on the cross wouldn’t leave his mind — blood dripping from wounds, nails hammered in, a face twisted in pain.
“Oh, baby...” Joyce pulled him into her arms and rocked him, pressing a gentle kiss to his sweaty forehead. Jonathan approached silently, his expression hardened, and sat beside them on the bed. He rubbed his brother’s back with a rough hand, one too big for stories of heaven and hell.
“You’re not going to hell,” he murmured. “No one’s going to hell. That stuff’s crap!”
“Jonathan!” Joyce snapped, shooting him a sharp look.
“What?” he huffed, eyes widening in indignation. “It’s true.”
Joyce inhaled deeply, clearly too tired to argue theology at eleven at night.
“What your brother meant... is that God doesn’t want anyone to go to hell. That’s why he sent Jesus. It’s not death that saves... it’s love. His love for us. That’s what saves us.”
Will nestled into his mother’s warm embrace, trying to hide among the soft fabrics of her nightgown. The room was dimly lit, with yellow light from the hallway spilling in through the cracked door. The walls were covered in slightly crooked superhero posters, and the crucifix above the headboard seemed to watch everything with heavy eyes.
Outside, Jonathan muttered muffled protests. He didn’t believe in God. Or anything.
Will wasn’t sure if he believed either. But he hated thinking about that man nailed to the cross. When he needed to pray — like in the little illustrated book his mom gave him, with shiny pages and pink-cheeked angels — he knelt and pleaded hard. He prayed the way the book told him. Asked for help.
But his dad never stopped drinking. And Will never stopped being strange. And being strange, over time, became normal.
He remembers screaming for God. Or for anything above him. A force, a presence, an invisible eye watching the world from above.
Maybe he screamed too loud. Or chose the wrong words.
Because what answered wasn’t the son of God.
He remembers the growl.
The putrid smell, like rotting flesh left in the sun. He remembers the pain. The creature’s jaw sinking into his ankle and dragging him toward what felt like his final destination. He remembers the cold seeping into his body. As if his soul were being sucked away. As if every good memory, every smile, every joy… was being extinguished like a candle's flame.
He tried to close his eyes, but they stayed open. Wide. Rolling in pain and despair.
And then he remembered the man on the cross. And he understood that Jonathan had been wrong. Hell existed.
But the priest had been wrong too. Because it wasn’t hot.
It was cold. Cold, damp, and foul. It was hungry. Dark. It ran through the shadows like a wild beast, devouring everything that still breathed.
Will prayed to the heavens, begged to be normal. To be like the others. But he was born wrong. And he was punished for it.
His father had been right, after all.
____
The air was dense. Heavy like a soaked curtain, hard to breathe. A fine, reddish sand spun in silent spirals, clinging to his skin, his lashes, his tongue. The entire world seemed covered by a crimson filter.
The sky above — if that was still sky — twisted in dark clouds slashed by red lightning, pulsing like electric veins inside the body of something alive.
Will shrank down, his feet sinking slightly into the cracked, hot ground. Around him, everything was empty, rocky, broken.
Hell had no visible demons, but it was everywhere. It vibrated in the ground, in the muffled sound of the wind, in the fear twisting his stomach. And then he saw it. A shape. Giant. Not whole, but suggested: eyes blinking from the sky like beacons from beyond, watching with an erratic and menacing rhythm.
It wasn’t a creature — it was a presence. A hungry consciousness the world had tried to hide, but here it was, exposed.
Will closed his eyes.
The music came on its own.
It always did, when he needed it.
"Should I stay or should I go now..."
The voice was just a trembling whisper. But he kept going.
He swayed lightly, arms wrapped around his knees, like he used to do when thunder woke him at night and Jonathan took too long to come home.
He thought of his brother — Jonathan soaked from the rain, building Castle Byers under the storm, like an old ranger trying to protect the last bastion of light.
Joyce kissing his forehead before turning off the lights, her brow furrowed and her voice full of tired love.
Dustin and Lucas — his favorite bard and barbarian — arguing over which Transformer was the strongest.
And Mike…
Mike on the swing, laughing. Always smiling. Like the leader of the party. Like Captain America, but with worn Converse and messy hair.
The boy on the swing.
Smaller than he was now.
Shorter dark brown hair, bangs falling into his eyes with the faint glow of summer afternoons. A loose T-shirt, scraped bony knees, small hands gripping tightly to the swing's chains.
One sneaker buried in the red sand — or was it from the school playground? — he dragged his foot gently, like he was deciding whether to stop or fly.
Will remembered the hesitation in his smile. The missing teeth — that gapped, crooked grin, almost shy, like smiling at someone meant revealing a precious secret.
Then Mike lifted his head.
His brown eyes, sweet and serious, met his.
And he smiled.
A full smile now.
Strong.
A spell against all of hell.
Will clung to that moment with everything he had.
As if that smile were a magic artifact — an enchanted anchor pulling him back to the surface.
He inhaled sharply, as if he could breathe those memories into his lungs like oxygen.
And then everything trembled.
The blood-red sky cracked like glass, and right before his eyes, hell began to unravel — or to reshape.
The rocks shifted, the outlines gained form. The red mist receded.
And there, forming from nothing, Hawkins emerged.
Still shrouded in shadow, still distorted — but unmistakable.
The rusted Ferris wheel at the fair.
The main street.
The streetlights.
His house.
And he woke with a jolt, eyes wide, ches
t heaving like he’d been pulled from the bottom of a well.
But the image of that world...
That hell that mirrored his home.