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Will was stirring salt in the back of a rural Nevada Surfer Boy Pizza, and Jonathan looked at his younger brother, really looked at his younger brother.
Years ago, before their grandmother, their mom’s mom, had died, she had once referred to Will as a sad child. Jonathan was pretty sure Mom had been pissed about it. Jonathan had looked at his younger brother, maybe six at the time, and wondered how anyone could take a look at someone like Will, who, to Jonathan, had always been so bursting with life and say he was sad.
Jonathan thought he understood now.
When Lonnie had left, Jonathan was confident that that would be the event that cleaved his life into before and after. There was before, lots of arguing, a too-tight grip around his wrist, and the way Lonnie screamed at Will any time he cried. Then there was after, where things were a bit tighter, where Jonathan lied about his age so he could get a job at 14 to do something, anything, to help, but it was just the three of them, and they all had each other, no matter what. Harder in a different way, but still unquestionably better than before.
And then Jonathan picked up an extra shift on a Sunday in November, and Will was missing for a week that cracked a new, painful divide of before and after open.
(Jonathan still wasn’t sure if they were in the after yet. Or if they ever would be. Not after burying Will, not after his possession, and not after Jonathan killed Tom in the hospital last summer.)
Ultimately, Jonathan wasn’t stupid and wasn’t oblivious to his brother’s struggles. He didn’t know the full details of Will’s time in the Upside Down. Or his possession. Or whatever had happened in Will’s friend group last summer. Jonathan highly doubted that anyone other than Will ever would.
But then there was the conversation between Will and Mike in the car, the painting Jonathan hadn’t been allowed to see, and Jonathan knew El hadn’t been allowed to see since she had asked him about it. There had been Will crying in the back of the car, Mike oblivious a foot away.
When you’re different, sometimes, you feel like a mistake.
Jonathan had always felt fondly toward Mike. Mike was the kind of childhood friend for Will that Jonathan hadn’t had himself. Nancy (and even just thinking about her ached, in a gaping, hollow sort of way) had commented more than once that Mike had the observation skills of a brick.
It wasn’t Jonathan’s place to interrupt in the car, but fuck, hearing that Will could ever possibly think he was a mistake gutted Jonathan.
Jonathan watched Will look up at the sound of El’s laughter. Argyle had made a pizza, and El, Argyle, and Mike were all joking around in the front of the store.
Will looked defeated. Jonathan knew that if he asked Will if he was okay, Will would say he was, even though that clearly wasn’t the case.
But if nothing else, he needed Will to know.
You shouldn’t like things just because people tell you you’re supposed to. Jonathan had said it years ago, on one of those shouting match days between his parents, one of their many arguments about Will that Jonathan had always prayed Will wouldn’t remember. Jonathan had meant it then, and he still does. Under whatever interpretation it may take.
Jonathan stopped stirring. “Do you remember when you told me you had a Lego stuck up your nose?”
“What?” Will asked, surprised like he had half-forgotten Jonathan was there.
“It was like, ah, one of those construction guys. You called him Larry.” Jonathan pressed on as Will continued to stare at him blankly. “Oh come, on, you don’t remember? He had like, the high-vis jacket and the removable hat.”
“Yeah,” Will said finally, lying he was reaching for a hazy memory. “Vaguely.”
“I remember like it was yesterday.” Will was probably three at the time, tears welling in his big eyes as he entered Jonathan’s room. “Cause Larry was way, way up there. So far up there that I couldn’t even figure out how you got him in there. I had to do surgery, I – I had to use tweezers to pull him out.”
“Bull,” Will said, half a smile on his face. Jonathan’s heart hurt. When was the last time he had seen Will smile?
“No, I swear on my life,” Jonathan said. They fall back into silence, and Jonathan knew, instinctively, that if he was going to say anything, he had to do it now.
“I don’t know, I just –“ Jonathan took a deep breath. “I feel like you used to come to me more for help.” Will looked away, staring down at the metal rim of the freezer. “Or to just talk, you know? It feels like you don’t do that anymore. Not like before.” Jonathan can’t pinpoint what before he means (before California? The Mind Flayer? The night Will went missing?) but hoped Will would understand.
“A lot of that is probably my fault. This past year … I know I’ve been distant.” Jonathan can’t meet Will’s eyes. Because it’s true, ultimately, because California was hard, moving senior year was hard, and even before that, he spent all of the last summer with Nancy.
“Or stoned.” It’s half a joke, half an accusation.
“Or stoned, yeah.” He admitted. “But that has nothing to do with you. That’s just me, dealing with my own shit and hiding from my own problems.”
Here is what Jonathan will not say: I stabbed my boss in the neck with a pair of scissors. I watched him die, and I didn’t even like him. I can’t leave you and Mom in California to go to Boston because I’m paralyzed by the fear something will happen, and you’ll both die, and I’ll be 3,000 miles away.
Ultimately, Jonathan will not lay his issues, his trauma, at Will’s feet and ask his younger brother, who used to cry when their father stepped on bugs and who has seen horrors Jonathan will never understand, to deal with it.
“The truth is, I miss talking to you,” Jonathan admitted. Will was Jonathan’s favorite person on Earth and likely always would be. “I like, really miss it. And I think, right now, we need to talk more than ever because things are getting complicated. Like, a lot more complicated than Legos up the nose.”
Will’s nodding. He didn’t make a move to speak, so Jonathan plowed on.
“I just – I don’t want you to forget that I’m here, and I will always be here. No matter what. Because you’re my brother, and I love you.” Jonathan could see Will was about to cry, and Jonathan needed, desperately, for Will to know. To understand.
Jonathan had heard the rumors and slurs hurled at Will since he was a child, from his own father and the world at large. Jonathan had lived in a world without his younger brother for a long, terrible week. When Will came back, Jonathan knew, with a sort of staggering clarity he hadn’t had before, that there was never anything about Will that could matter more than the fact that he was here. Jonathan has lost Will once, and he won’t do it again. Not for anything.
Especially not for who Will loved.
“And there is nothing in this world, okay, absolutely nothing, that will ever change that. You got that?”
Will nodded, his leg bouncing, clearly on the precipice of something but trying not to give in. “Yeah –“ Will’s voice cracked immediately on the first syllable, barely repressing tears. Jonathan wanted to cry. He can’t, though. Not now. “And I’m always here for you, too.”
“I know,” Jonathan said quietly.
Something escaped Will’s throat that was dangerously close to a sob, and Jonathan put down the wood slab, moving to his brother. “I know you are. Come here.”
Jonathan pulled Will in tightly, wrapping his arms around his brother. He can feel his brother shaking, muffling a sob into Jonathan’s shoulder. But, more than anything, Jonathan wanted Will to know he could let it out.
Just for a moment, Jonathan was struck by how big Will was now. Practically taller than Jonathan was. When did Will grow up, and how did Jonathan miss it?
(When was the last time Jonathan had hugged him? Last summer, at Starcourt? Before that?)
Will pulled away after only a few moments like he wouldn’t allow himself to lean into the comfort. Jonathan resisted the urge to hold Will tighter as he pulled away. Jonathan didn’t let him get too far and held Will with both of Jonathan’s hands on his elbows.
“It’s gonna be okay,” Jonathan said quietly, filled with a confident conviction he hoped Will could hear. “It’s all going to be okay.”
Jonathan hoped Will believed him.
After, when El had come out of the freezer-turned-depravation tank, they needed to get out of Nevada. Quickly. So even though it’s nearly sunrise and they haven’t slept in what feels like years but was, in reality, only a few days, they drove.
For the second time that week, the dried-out white sand of the Nevada Basin painstakingly gave way to the fiery red rocks of southern Utah.
Argyle was asleep against the window in the passenger seat. Jonathan, as a result, was left with nothing but time to analyze every moment of the past few days painstakingly.
As always, all paths began and ended with Will.
As soon as Jonathan started thinking about Will, really thinking about Will, in the way that used to be his default nature, in the way he’s lost sight of, he couldn’t stop.
Here was the thing: Jonathan knew first-hand the exact kind of stupid shit that hurt people without trying. Not because he meant to, but because he just wasn’t paying enough attention.
It’s obvious now, in the same way it had been before, that Will was struggling. Maybe at some point, Will slipped through the cracks. The thought gutted Jonathan.
But Jonathan had had an unprecedented, quite literal front-row seat to everything between Mike and Will for the past few days. It was different back in Lenora. Jonathan knew how much El and Mike talked, and he had thought – no, known – that Will was probably feeling left out. But to see it play out in real-time, right in front of him, was something else.
They stopped for gas in Richfield, Utah, and got coffee at the world’s first and hopefully last combination café/steakhouse. They drove a few more hours before stopping at a small diner in Grand Junction, Colorado. El ordered a waffle. Will ordered pancakes. It was a painfully familiar scene. Jonathan wondered if he couldn’t just close his eyes right now and wake up in California. He’d walk out of his room into the mustard yellow of their kitchen and see El and Will in nearly identical positions, debating some movie they had seen or something someone had said at school, Mom buzzing around the house or already on the phone for work.
The old diner TV crackled from somewhere above their heads. “-from the small town of Hawkins, Indiana-“
“Shit, man, that’s your town,” Argyle said. The table fell silent. All heads turned to the grainy television.
“-80 miles north of Indianapolis, where yesterday, a 7.4 magnitude rocked this once quaint, sleepy town. This isn’t the first time the small town of Hawkins has befallen tragedy. This past week, the town has been rocked by sadistic Satanic murders that have taken the lives-“
“The gate,” Will and El said in unison, their eyes landing on each other.
“Oh, shit,” Mike said. The footage cut from the smoldering town hall to an aerial shot, and it stopped Jonathan short. A massive chasm cuts Hawkins into quarters like a thundering compass, staining Hawkins an ominous, familiar dark red.
Across the table, Will wasn’t breathing.
El put a hand on Will’s arm from her spot between Will and Mike and gave him a look. Some kind of silent communication passed quickly between them. Will nodded precisely once, and El dropped her hand.
Jonathan’s stomach sank. Maybe there would never be an after. Maybe all roads would always lead back to Hawkins, no matter how far away they went.
Maybe this was just something they couldn’t outrun. Something they’d never truly escape.
Jonathan and Argyle (mainly Jonathan) decided to call it a day just over the Colorado border in a small town called Colby, Kansas. Just this once, no one protested.
Jonathan paid for two motel rooms with money they may or may not have taken from the Surfer Boy in Nevada. Jonathan probably should have felt worse about that than he did, but he couldn’t muster the energy to care.
Jonathan and Argyle took one room, and El, Will, and Mike took the other. Jonathan wondered, just for a second, if he should do something, like make El and Mike promise to not sleep in the same bed before he promptly decided it didn’t matter and they wouldn’t listen to him anyway.
Argyle passed out immediately, his snores echoing around the small room. Jonathan’s head hurt from all the driving they’ve done, from Lenora to Salt Lake and back again, and all Jonathan wanted, desperately, was to sleep.
Then someone knocked on the door quietly twice.
Jonathan took a deep breath, repressed the urge to groan, and rolled out of bed.
Jonathan glanced through the peephole for a fraction of a second before nearly ripping the door open. “Will. What’s up?”
“Are you doing something?” Will glanced behind Jonathan’s shoulder.
“Nope.” Jonathan could sleep later. He would never say no to Will.
“Can I talk to you?” Will asked, wringing his hands slightly.
Jonathan could feel his heart beating in his chest. “Of course. Give me a second,” Jonathan ran back inside, grabbing the keys off the nightstand and slipping on his shoes before locking the door.
They walked around the motel, not talking about anything. They’ve left the Rockies behind for western Kansas’s flat, sprawling prairie grasses. It was greener here than any of the other states they had driven through, looking far more like Indiana than anything else they had seen in the past ten months. They hadn’t stopped through Kansas when they moved to Lenora, instead taking I-44 through St. Louis and Oklahoma before cutting dead west through Arizona and New Mexico.
They walked to a bench along the side of the motel, out of sight of the office and rooms. The bench faced the empty stretch of road, the cracked pavement cutting through this small Kansas town. The sun had set a while ago, the final dregs of sunset giving way to the blue-grey of dusk.
This time tomorrow, they’d be back in Hawkins.
Jonathan didn’t know how to feel about going back.
“How do you feel about the fact we’re going back to Hawkins?” Jonathan asked after a moment.
“I can’t decide.” Will leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his eyes not meeting Jonathan’s. “Do you think Mom’s actually in Alaska? It’s weird we haven’t heard from her in so long.”
Jonathan felt the pull of the familiar thread of guilt. He would be lying if he said he wasn’t concerned. They had tried calling Mom, both at the number she had left for Alaska and their house. Their landline was busy, probably knocked off in the fight that had destroyed much of their house. The hotel Mom was staying at said she had checked out three days ago and hadn’t returned since.
“I hope so,” Jonathan admitted after a second. “At least if she is, she’s far away from all of this.”
“The more I think about it, the more I think there wasn’t actually a conference with the Brittanicas.”
“No, probably not.”
They sat in uneasy silence for a few moments before Will spoke again. “Do you ever think maybe Dad was right?”
“No,” Jonathan said immediately, not bothering to hide the disdain from his voice. Jonathan didn’t need to know what exactly Will meant to know his answer would not change. “I don’t.”
Will looks back at him for a second, his face pressed against his shoulder. “Really?”
“Really,” Jonathan was only a little surprised to find that he meant it. “Dad was an asshole. Never gave a shit about us. Treated Mom horribly.” Treated you horribly, Jonathan wanted to add. He didn’t because this was the first time Will had brought him up in the six years since their father walked out. Jonathan wasn’t even sure how much Will had remembered. He hoped it wasn’t a lot.
But if Will hadn’t remembered any of that, he wouldn’t be bringing up their father now, would he? “Why?”
“Dad once said the worst day of his life was the day I was born,” Will looked straight ahead. Jonathan’s stomach sank. He had heard their father say that about Will, too. “And I can’t – maybe he was right. I don’t know. And then –“ Will broke off suddenly. Swallowed. “In the pizza shop. Mike said that his life started the day he met El. The day I disappeared.” Will’s voice cracked. “And maybe that’s just a coincidence, that – that I’m the common factor in those two things, but –“
Will broke off, breathing heavily. Jonathan stretched his arms across the back of the plastic bench and took a deep breath.
There was a photo of Will and Jonathan on a corkboard their Mom had hung up in the Lenora house. Dad had taken the picture the day they brought Will home. In the photo, Jonathan was holding newborn Will, wrapped in a blanket and sitting on the hard, lumpy couch covered in the same yellow and white blanket they had until they left Hawkins. Mom used to point it out to Jonathan and say That was the first time you held Will, honey, and I knew then what an amazing big brother you would be. Jonathan was smiling in the photo, like he couldn’t believe he now had a brother, smiling like it was one of the best days of his life.
Jonathan was sure now that it was.
“Dad was always full of shit, saying whatever he thought might land and what he thought would hurt the most,” Jonathan said carefully. He couldn’t speak for Mike. More importantly, Jonathan wouldn’t. He would be lying if he said he hadn’t been stunned at that admission from Mike, at what Mike’s words meant in the context of everything.
Maybe Mike had just been in the moment, and maybe he just hadn’t been thinking, but Mike had said things he couldn’t take back. So now Will had to live with them. It was the latest horrifically unfair circumstance in a long list of horrifically unfair circumstances.
Will already thought he was a mistake, and then his best friend went along and said his life only started when Will left it. Jonathan had a lot of opinions now on Mike, few of them positive, none helpful. It wasn’t what Will needed to hear right now.
“The day you went missing was the second-worst day of my life,” Jonathan said after a slow breath. Will tensed next to him. “I was making eggs, and Mom went to wake you up. Except you weren’t there. I hadn’t looked for you when I got home the night before. The cops thought you were with Dad until they found your bike in a ditch.” Every second of that week and the hours leading up to it are seared into Jonathan’s memory. A nightmare he would never truly escape. “That first night, you still weren’t found. We didn’t – we didn’t know anything yet.” Jonathan watched as a passing car drove by. The house had been so quiet. Will’s absence had burned as sharply as a knife wedged between his ribs. “After the first three days, you still hadn’t shown up.” Jonathan paused. “Do you know what percentage of missing people turn up after 72 hours?”
Will’s breathing was measured. “No.”
“0.2%.” Jonathan could still recall hearing that one on the radio on one of the drive’s back from Nancy’s. “With the odds getting lower every day.”
“The worst day of my life,” Jonathan continued slowly once it was clear Will wasn’t going to speak. “Was the day of your funeral.” Will sat back, staring at Jonathan. “Two days before, the cops had come to the house. Said they pulled your body out of the quarry. Mom and I were standing in the driveway when the police came. Dad showed up for the funeral and was a dick as usual. Someone sang. Dad said some bullshit. Mom, of course, was convinced you were still out there. She talked about your DnD character at the wake, I think.” And every day, Jonathan thinks about what would have happened if Hopper hadn’t taken that chance with her. “And then it ended. Everyone went home. And the only person I wanted to tell about it was you. I got home later, and it was quiet, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that we’d never watch bad TV in the living room again or argue over the toothpaste you left all over the sink. Your absence was everywhere. And it was so goddamn shitty to sit in that house and think about how you would never walk through the door again. ”
“The headstone is still up,” Will said after a long, agonizing moment. “Dustin and I went and vandalized it a few times. Someone always cleaned it up after.” Will looked at the ground. “Do you think about them? All the people that have died?”
Jonathan didn’t say I close my eyes and I see Tom. He didn’t say Nancy brings flowers to Barb’s grave every Wednesday night because that’s when they studied together. Jonathan didn’t say I should have been nicer to Bob.
“Of course I do.”
“A lot of people have died because of me. Or for me.” Will ran a hand through his hair. “Bob was just some guy at Radio Shack who had a thing for Mom. And then he met me. And now he’s dead because a monster ripped his face off. And,” Will looked somewhere at the ground again. “All those people that died because of the Mind Flayer. Because he possessed me and then left, and then he moved onto Billy. And I can’t even look at Max because I keep seeing him, and she can’t look at me, and I just feel so guilty.”
Jonathan’s voice softened. “You’re not responsible for what he did. The Mind Flayer or Billy.”
“I’m the only person that survived the Mind Flayer,” Will said quietly after a moment. “And no one else survived the Upside Down. Not for a week. Something’s wrong. I’m the piece that doesn’t fit.”
Jonathan could hear what Will wasn’t saying. Why am I here when they aren’t?
The car conversation rings in Jonathan’s head. You feel like a mistake.
“Listen, Will.” Jonathan grabbed Will by the shoulders, making sure we were making eye contact. Will blinked at the abruptness. “If you never listen to anything I say ever again, listen to this: I have lived in a world with you, and I have lived in a world without you. And without you, it sucks. It was like all the color was gone from the world. The only person I wanted to tell about all the crazy things was you. And that first day, I got home, and your shoes weren’t annoyingly in the middle of the hallway. And I realized you would possibly never leave them there again. And it just …hurt. And you make such beautiful art, and you and El bicker, which is so irritating but incredible to watch because you're both here to do it. And you’re kind and brave, and people’s lives are better because you’re in them. My life is better because you’re in it.”
“You don’t have just to say that,” Will protested. His eyes were watering. “And I never left my shoes in the middle of the hallway.
“I’m not just saying it. I should have told you sooner.” Jonathan reached out, brushing one of the tears that had fallen off Will’s face, the same way Jonathan had when Will fell when they were younger. “There is nothing, not a single thing in this world, that could ever make me love you less.”
“I think – “Will broke off after a second. He tilted his head back, staring at the sky. Jonathan could just make out the faintest stars that had just begun to blink into the sky. Will used to sit outside and learn the constellations. Back before the woods behind their old house were something sinister, something that took and something to be feared. “I think – I don’t like girls.”
“Okay,” Jonathan said. He waited for Will to continue.
“No, I mean –“ Will turned back to him. “I mean, I don’t think I like girls the way I’m supposed to like girls.”
“Okay.”
“Like, I’m never going to have a girlfriend. I’m not going to get married. I don’t… like girls like that.”
“That’s okay.”
“How is any of that–“ Will broke off suddenly. “Even if our world wasn’t always ending, how would any of that be okay? People are arguing on the news, whether people should be left to die for who they love and- and-“
“Things won’t be like that forever,” Jonathan said, feeling helpless. Jonathan could take a bat and knock a monster on the head any day. There wasn’t very much he could do about the state of the world, the inefficiencies of their own government, the gay men currently dying in droves.
“You don’t know that.”
“Of course I do,” Jonathan rested his hand on Will’s back. He tensed for a moment before relaxing almost imperceptibly. “Nothing can last forever. Maybe not the good, but certainly not the bad.”
Will looked at his feet for a moment. “I don’t want to go back to Hawkins. I know we have to, and I understand why we’re going. It’s just – everything bad that has happened goes back to Hawkins. And Lenora wasn’t easy, but at least it was normal, teenager shit, and not the world imploding and the people we love dying.” Jonathan can tell there is something Will isn’t sharing, but Jonathan won’t push on it now.
“Okay,” Jonathan said, rubbing his hand on Will’s back. “I love you. I meant what I said – I’ve lived in this world without you. I love you, and I’m so glad you’re here.”
“I’m not-" Will’s breath cracked on the last syllable. “Please don’t tell Mom. Or El. Or anyone.”
Jonathan nodded. “Of course.” He pulled his younger brother closer, wrapping his arms around him as Will tucked his head into Jonathan's shoulder. “Thank you for telling me,” Jonathan said quietly in the space above Will’s ear.
“Thank you for listening,” Will whispered. Jonathan held on tighter.