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Will’s body feels bad bad bad bad bad.
His head feels lopsided and full of sand, and he bangs it against the wall on accident a million times, because it's too heavy to hold up. His hands feel like they're filled with sand too, or the biting gravel of his driveway, and he bites his palms hard to get sensation back into them.
His skin is too small to hold all of him. He shudders apart and tries his bestest to tie himself together. He squeezes his blankets tight around him, until they rip and tear, and mom has to buy him new ones. His fingers feel backward and achy.
He wants to go to bed. He wants to go to bed, but he can't sleep. He ripped up all the blankets and now he doesn't have any, not until mom goes to the store tomorrow. It doesnt matter because he’s too warm anyway. Sweat trickles down his face, and catches on his eyelashes.
He craves last winter, after he got home from the upside down. He forgot his mittens at home one day, and during outside break his fingers went numb and red. Mom told him he couldve gotten frostbite. He wants frostbite now. He wants to be numb and cold and feel little pieces of ice crystalize inside of his skin.
Will wipes his sweaty face on his pillow. He wants to wake up Jonathan, but he refuses to. Jonathan treats him like a little kid, and he’s thirteen now. A whole teenager. He’s going to be fourteen in a few months.
Will reaches for his walkie talkie. He fumbles with the antenna, pulling it out, pushing it in, pulling it out again.
Will is nearly fourteen, and should be able to handle his problems on his own. He shouldn’t need Jonathan, or Mike or Lucas or Dustin. Not to go to sleep.
He just can’t shake the feeling that there’s something else inside of him, squirming around, trying to get to sleep too.
Will can bite himself and tear at his skin, he can hold himself tight, but that thing isn’t going to leave.
Maybe the mindflayer left, but it also left something behind. Like the dregs of coffee grounds in a cup. There’s traces of the mindflayer all around in Will’s guts. Will has tried to throw it up before. He’s done it a couple times. In the sink he expels an inky black viscous liquid, thick and a little watery around the edges.
He never feels better after he does it, so he’s stopped doing it. He lets the black rot inside his stomach.
Keeping his insides on the inside feels like the best thing to do, logically, not physically.
But physically he always feels bad bad bad bad bad. He was put together all wrong. Maybe, he thinks, maybe the mindflayer took out all his insides and replaced them with more of that inky black stuff. And maybe that’s why he feels wrong and lopsided, and why his skin buzzes and feels too warm.
He can’t fix any of that. Will bites his fingers until they get all bloody and sting, but he can’t fix any of that.
But he is warm, and the outside is cold. It’s snowing.
Will gets out of bed. He goes to his window, open, and smells the outside air that blows at his curtains. It doesn’t feel cold. He doesn’t feel any refreshed, although refreshed is a distant sensation by now. It’s like remembering what the sun feels like in the middle of winter.
Will doesn’t want to go outside for long. He just wants to feel the snow under his feet.
Will crawls out his window.
The snow is cool beneath his feet, and Will could crumple in on himself if he wasn’t braced against the wall. It feels nice. It feels like how it’s meant to.
Will crouches, grabbing the snow by a handful. It squeaks like styrofoam when he squeezes it tight, and when he releases he can see the imprint of his palm lines, smeared with the blood of his fingers.
Will feels hot. He bites on the snow. It melts in his mouth and tastes like pennies. Will hadn’t realized his mouth was so dry.
That’s good, so he eats more until he feels strands of grass between his teeth. He picks out the stuck ones, and swallows the rest. They slither down his throat like little tiny snakes.
It doesn't taste bad, and Will thinks that maybe it should. That maybe if he asked Mike to eat grass and tell him what it tasted like, Mike would refuse a billion times and never ever do it.
He wants to talk to Mike. maybe Mike would be nice and humour him like he did at the hospital, and maybe he’d sit outside with will until he didn't feel so sweltering hot.
Will is almost fourteen and he should be able to handle these things on his own but he really, really wants his friends.
Will walks.
When he walks these little dark shapes squirm just outside the reach of his focus, and they disappear every time he tries to look at them. He thinks they’re animals. Outdoor cats or raccoons or something, or maybe they’re stray pieces of the mindflayer, and they’re looking for home, flitting away every time Will catches on.
Or maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it’s Will's overactive imagination making things up.
Maybe he’ll ask Mike what he thinks.
It doesn’t take long to walk to Mike’s house. It’s the furthest away from him, all the way across town, but time sort of blips out a little bit, it skips over itself like someone cut out the frames of a movie and glued them together again.
He doesn’t eat more snow, because it’s road snow and ew, Will, yucky, don’t eat that! He remembers Jonathan saying from a long long time ago.
He doesn’t go to Dustin’s house either, because Dustin doesn’t… he’s the closest but he doesn’t know that Will’s bad bad bad bad bad. Maybe he could tell him… one day, but he doesn’t want to. Not today. Not when he’s already feeling all wrong.
He doesn’t know what time it is when he gets to Mike's house, only that it’s late and Will’s body is shivering, and his feet are red and they prickle like he’s stepping on cacti.
He doesn’t knock on the door, and he doesn’t ring to doorbell either. He doesn’t want to wake anyone up, because all the lights are off.
Will walks around back, where the snow gets up to his ankles, until he’s right under Mike’s window, cracked open a tiny bit.
He thinks of throwing a pebble. He reaches down, sifts through the snow and feels through the dead grass for a rock he can throw, but his fingers touch something soft instead.
He pulls it up.
A bird. A dead one. Will presses his finger to its soft underbelly, half-expecting to feel the faint beating of a little heart. But it doesn’t, because the bird is dead. Dead.
Either that, or Will’s fingers are so numb he can’t feel anything.
Will takes the bird in his numb, fumbling fingers, and presses it to his ear. There’s a stinging at the top, like the sharp poke of a needle, but he can’t hear anything.
And the bird is cold. Frozen over.
And will still feels so hot.
Without considering it for even a second, will unhinges his jaw, and he bites
Down.
It’s sticky. And tastes like how he thinks a bird would taste. And it crunches. All the bones break underneath the weight of his teeth and they cut up the insides of his cheeks.
Will draws back, chewing up the things inside the bird that stretch until they snap. Its beady eye stares at him.
Will swallows. He can feel the cold bird travel down his esophagus, can feel it settle into his stomach.
It’s a relief— he feels it. He feels how frozen it is. It’s like ice against a sunburn— so cold it’s almost hot.
He eats more. The beak cuts his tongue until his mouth spills over with his blood, or the bird’s blood, maybe both— and the feathers are silky in his mouth.
He eats it— he eats it and licks his fingers, until the only things left in his gripped hand is a couple of feet, attached to legs like sticks.
He gnaws on one, like a toothpick, even though the heat from his hands warmed it up. He needs to keep going. To finish the job, to get rid of the evidence.
Bird bones are easy to snap. They’re sharp on the inside, ‘cause there’s nothing in there but air and tiny bridges made out of more bone, to keep it from collapsing in on itself.
Will eats it, because he can’t stop himself from eating it, like something really, really bad Will happen if he stops, if he quits, if he gives up, because Byers aren’t quitters, and—
“Will?”
Will looks up at the sound of Mike’s voice. His voice is always so gentle. It sounds malleable. Will learned that word in science. Mr. Clark said that gold was malleable, meaning it could bend and squish, and Will thinks that if Mike’s voice was able to be touched, he could twist it around in any way he wanted it to go. His voice sounds warm. Golden. Like the sun.
Will can’t help but smile at him, with all his teeth like on picture day. “Hi, Mike,” he says.
“Will, what are you— are you okay? Why are you bleeding?” Mike crosses his arms, like he’s cold. He’s wearing a plaid pajama set, something his mom got him for Christmas. Was he not so so so hot? Will was still sweating, even in a t-shirt and Jonathan’s old shorts.
Will presses his bloody tongue to the roof of his mouth. It hurts, bad.
Mike’s eyes rove over him, until they settle on the bird leg still in his hand. His breath shudders, and he makes a sound like he’s being strangled.
“Did you eat that bird?” He asks after a moment, voice all breathy.
“Almost,” Will says.
“Almost?”
“I’m almost done.” He runs his thumb down the bumpy skin of the bird’s leg. “The legs are bad and they don’t taste good, so it takes me a long long long time to chew.”
Mike swallows. “Oh,” he says, voice splintering straight down the centre. He takes a step, hesitates, and then takes another, until Mike’s breath fogs up against Will's face, and it feels like the steam coming from a kettle. Mike’s fingers thread through his, until he has the bird’s leg. For a moment, Will thinks he’s going to eat it too, but he wrenches his arm back and flings it into the woods. Will watches it go.
“Come inside,” Mike says, grasping his hand, and will follows him.
Inside the wheeler’s house is like a furnace room, and Will longs for the snow again. His body is shivering and shaking like a leaf, jerking around inside of his skin. He doesn’t detach himself from Mike’s hand, even as Mike takes a second to kick off his winter boots. Mike drags him upstairs, and into the bathroom, where he shuts the door behind them both, letting go of Will’s hand to sit him down on the floor.
Will squints through the harsh yellow light, eyes avoiding the fixture, focusing on the dark crevices of the room. The partially closed medicine cabinet. The deep corners where spiders live. Behind the shower curtain.
Mike wets a wad of toilet paper, and kneels in front of Will, dabbing up the blood on his chin wordlessly.
Will tries to lick it off his lips before Mike can wipe it away, and it only works a little.
“I’m gonna call your mom, okay?” Mike whispers.
“No!” Will startles himself with his shout, and he must startle Mike too, because Mike slaps a hand over his mouth.
Mike peels his hand back after a second, eyes wide and panicky.
“Don’t call her,” Will says. “She’s sleeping.”
“I know,” Mike says. “I know, but she might wanna know where you are.”
Will shakes his head. It feels like there’s marbles rolling around where his brain used to be. “Don’t call her.”
“She’s not gonna be mad, Will,”
“No, but maybe she is. And maybe I won’t sleep, never in my bed because I’m wrong, Mike, I feel bad bad bad bad—“
“Okay— okay. We can sleep in my bed? We can sleep in my bed then, right?”
Will feel wetness on his face, and runs the back of his hand against his cheek. It’s sweat or tears and he can’t tell.
“Right.” Will says resolutely.
Mike finishes wiping the blood up from Will’s face, making small noises of frustration when the toilet paper pills and breaks apart.
Mike holds his hands and looks at his fingers, but Will doesn’t think he knows what he’s looking for. They can still wriggle and bend, but probably not as much as they should. They’re blue-ish now, just like his toes.
Will bites a finger, and it still feels like it’s just a plastic doctor’s glove filled with gravel. He can’t feel his teeth around it. He could bite it clean off and never notice.
Mike makes a face at him, and Will pulls the finger out of his mouth, a string of pink-ish spit snapping in the air.
He doesn’t say anything though.
Mike helps him up, and Will’s stomach swoops uncomfortably— like the black stuff inside of him is raging, writhing against its confines.
There has to be something on his face, because Mike says: “Will?” In his soft-malleable-golden voice.
Will doesn’t have the chance to respond, because then he’s hacking out the stuff trying to get out of him.
Something wet thwacks against the porcelain sink, and it only takes a second of looking before Will decides it’s the liver. It looks like a chewed-up heart, but the heart went down whole, he thinks. It's darker than anything he's seen at the grocery store, stained with Will's bile. It's almost as purple as wine.
Mike makes another frightened animal noise, fingers squeezing tight around Will’s bicep.
Will tries to grab it with slippery fingers, pinching it between his pointer and thumb, and bringing it to his mouth again—
“Don’t!” Mike hisses, slapping the liver out of his fingers. It smacks to the floor between them. “You can’t—“ he takes a deep breath, as if he’d just run a race. “You can’t eat birds, Will.”
“But I did,” Will says.
“But it’s bad for you— don’t— don’t do it again.”
Will frowns. “People eat birds.”
“No they don’t.”
“I’m a person.”
“I know— I know. But people don’t eat birds.”
“What about chicken?”
“Chicken is— it’s cooked Will. People don’t find chickens on the ground and eat them raw.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s bad for you,” Mike grits his teeth. Done with the argument, he picks up the bird liver with a wrinkled nose, wrapping it in toilet paper and burying it deep in the trash can.
“I’m hot,” Will says as Mike runs his socked foot over the place where Will’s bile stained the floor. Mike wears socks to bed, and the thought of that is a little funny. It doesn't make sense, but it seems right that Mike would wear socks to bed. He's kind of weird like that.
“No you’re not,” Mike tells him, “you’re cold. You’re really cold.”
“I'm sweating,” Will says.
Mike draws his sleeve over his hand and wipes Will’s face down. Will lets him, even though he squirms through it, like when his mom licks her finger and tries to smear away a speck of dirt on his face.
“Better?” He asks, and Will nods, even though it’s not.
In Mike’s room— he’s standing in Mike’s room now— Mike makes him take off his clothes and put on Mike’s, and three layers of socks, which make Will feel even more clumsy.
Mike cups Will’s hands in his own, and breathes on them.
“Why are you breathing on my hands?”
Mike looks flustered. “To— to warm you up,” he says, face turning pink.
“Oh,” Will says. He thrusts his hands in front of Mike's face so he can continue, but Mike pushes them away, instead sandwiching them between his own hands.
“What animals eat birds?” Will asks as Mike squishes his hands like one of those penny pressers.
“I dunno. Cats, I think. Foxes too I bet.”
“What if I was a fox?”
“But you're not,”
“But what if I was,”
“Then I guess you’d eat birds too.”
"I just don't understand—"
"You don't need to." Mike interrupts, face as serious as something dead. "Everything's bad for you unless it comes from the store, okay? Don't eat anything unless it's from the store."
Will ducks his chin, rolling the words over in his head. He watches Mike try to push blood into his fingers. He watches blood like little pearls bead up along the edges of his fingernails. It doesn't hurt, and he doesn't want it to, either. "I didn't kill the bird. It was already dead for a while. I made sure. So you can't be mad at me, because I didn't hurt anyone."
Mike's face screws up for a moment, but he doesn't respond to that. it's probably because he's really, really mad, but doesn't want to hurt Will's feelings by saying so. “Do you feel like Will?” he asks. The question is odd, and Will thinks that he must have misheard.
“I am Will,”
“But do you feel like Will?”
Will squints, trying to make sense of it. “I am Will,”
“But do you… feel like something else is inside you?
Will doesn’t feel anything but a sudden tightness to his chest, something like shame. He hasn’t told anyone about the black stuff inside him, but for a moment he thinks that Mike can tell. That maybe it’s lining his mouth, working into the space between his teeth when he smiles. He curls his fingers into Mike’s hand, until Mike makes a hiss of pain.
“No.” Will says. There’s no space for anything else. He takes up all the room inside of his body, and he feels like he’s about to burst. He feels nothing like those bird bones, and wishes he did. He wants to feel empty. He wants to feel alone.
His hands are still pressed between Mike’s, and he slips them out.
“I want to go to sleep.” He says.
Mike nods, and they crawl into Mike’s bed together. Will’s pressed against the wall, and Mike pulls the blanket over him, moving away just for a second so he can close the window tight, and lock it. It's like he thinks Will is going to try to escape, but that would be silly. Will couldn't take that fall without breaking something. If he wanted to escape, he'd go through the front door.
When Mike slips under the covers, Will doesn’t hesitate to wrap his arms around his neck, holding him tight as Mike returns the hug. He might be choking him, but Mike doesn’t complain except for a little noise in the back of his throat.
“We gotta wake up early tomorrow,” Mike says, fingers tracing patterns on Will's shoulder blade. “So we can bike to your house,”
“Don't tell my mom about the bird,” Will pleads, digging his fingers into the back of Mike's neck. “She’s gonna think I’m bad again.”
“Eating birds is bad,” Mike says. His voice echoes in the shell of Will’s ear.
“I know,” Will says, a knot forming in his throat. “I know it’s bad, but I won’t do it again, I promise.”
Mike hesitates, his fingers stuttering to a stop. “Okay,” he says.
“Do you think I’m bad?” Will asks.
Mike takes longer to answer this time, but his voice stays steady. “No. I'm not best friends with bad people.”
“You’re my best friend still?”
Mike nods.
It warms in his chest, and for the first time it isn’t an overwhelming, bad kind of warm. It’s almost comfortable. It's almost a relief.
Will closes his eyes, and tries to go to sleep.