private multimuse written by v (she/her, 30+). muses & more info under cut.
this blog contains mature, unsavory and potentially triggering content including but not limited to narrative explorations of e.g. trauma, horror (including gore & body horror), toxic relationships, power imbalances, age gap relationships, and more. 👉 proceed or hardblock at your own discretion.
Mike’s laugh is a small thing, more of a chuckle, that Will rushes into apologizing. They’ve had their stumbling blocks — mostly, it seemed, when it came to the persob currently being discussed — but this won’t be one of them.
“I have ideas, but I don’t know either of your powers the way you guys do,” he more or less finishes the rest of Will’s sentence, which is really just saying his own thoughts out loud. His smile is meant to assure Will that Mike knows exactly what he meant.
“Plus, you guys really should be figuring out if there’s something you can do the rest of us can’t think of.”
“You think I know?” Will shakes his head, laughing low. “I feel like throwing darts with my eyes closed and my hands tied behind my back every time. It’s more…” He’s gesticulating, as he’s wont to do when he’s in the middle of an explanation and the words seem to run out. His hand opens and closes and opens again. “It’s more like a feeling than a conscious doing, if that makes sense? I don’t know.”
But they’re not his powers to begin with.
Shouldn’t stop him from trying to throw them back into Vecna’s face, anyhow.
Incredulity. And does he know the whalebone cage of girlhood? And how she pried it apart, enough to squeeze through? And how it seems that to this day, at times, she is still halfway stuck?
“You of all people,” Eleanor spits-hisses like a cat, “should know better.”
He was there, after all: when she walked the beach that day, feet in the sand like the sinking felt like flying. He was there when she said her first fuck-you to the man who resented her wingspan: her father.
If Charles wanted to clip her wings too, good fucking luck. He better get in line.
Not that it matters. Not that any of his posturing matters - or hers, for that measure - when she knows that all that truly matters is the key on his belt.
“You’ll think back on this,” she snarls. “When all is said and done, you’ll think back on this and eat your own fucking words.”
Or she’ll eat hers. Tide’s a fickle bedfellow; fickler still than any pirate.
The corner of his mouth curls, but there isn’t a soul to say if it would have become a snarl or smile. This isn’t the boy weeping to be let go; this is the boy that twisted his leg until it snapped.
The only one besides Eleven to find a way to match him without first clipping away his claws.
Eyes never leave Will’s. “Your freedom is temporary, William,” he says, voice in that odd in-between his mouth is still set in.
You’ll always have to come back to me. It didn’t matter what Will might try; asleep, awake, he could not sever himself from his mind. And Henry would always be there, waiting for whatever fix Will had found to wear off.
…and don’t he know it.
Not that he can’t throw himself head first into denial; not that he won’t pretend there is a future out there, for him, where his mind is his own and Henry is a just memory, not a haunting.
Is that why he hasn’t told anyone? Because he thinks he just has to sit it out?
It almost worked once. But he was only twelve then, a scared child lost in the woods, and for every breadcrumb to guide him home, the roots ensnared him closer,
and closer,
and closer.
As if to prove a point, he closes his eyes, empties his lungs. A breath. A deepening. He starts counting backwards from hundred.
It feels like leaving behind a war in the middle of it.
But Will stands between them. Reaches for him, touches him however lightly. Almost impossible to feel, except for how deeply attuned to Will he is.
He’s been a creature of pure hunger since that day in the cavern. An all-consuming, overriding need to consume life around him. Physical hunger — that died in the same moment. Without outward reminders, he’s not going to remember to eat or drink. It’s rarely been a problem; first it was school and his mother, then the lab with its strict schedule. His body in the Abyss had seemed to exist outside of necessities.
Pie doesn’t sound all that appealing, but he nods. Accepts the demand-request. Releases the countertop’s edge to shadow the pads of his fingers along Will’s wrist as he straightens.
Looks at Joyce one last time before going to join Jim and Jonathan. It won’t go much better than things had been going with her, but it hasn’t been worse, either.
An anchor can be many things: lodestone, grounding, death knell. Sometimes, it’s simply the weight you drop because you can. Because a weight shared is a weight halved.
Joyce feels the sting of his attention like something that rankles. If she returned the look, she’d put too much of her unguarded turmoil into it, and she thinks he isn’t worth the irritation that would come with feeding into his gloating.
Instead, she looks to Will – for explanation, for absolution, for a way to stop time and reroute the trajectory of their lives.
When all he gives her back is a wooden smile, she huffs her exasperation into the empty kitchen space that still smells bitter, like coffee. “So are we just going to pretend that this is all sunshine and rainbows? Will.”
He sighs. He sounds too young to sigh like that.
She knows he’s not a kid anymore, it’s just–
“I’m not just sunshine and rainbows, Mom. This?” He gestures towards the hallway. “This is who I am, too. He sees that part of me that I can’t show anyone else. Not even you.”
They say honesty lives in children’s mouths, but…
Joyce is trembling. She hasn’t stopped trembling since Will showed up, good on his word and not alone.
“Mom…”
She shakes her head, not unkind; smiles, not entirely happy. The way she leans against the kitchen counter, her hands rubbing her face, is a mirror image of Will when he’s stressed. He reads their shared language of overwhelm in her, and it makes him reach out, makes him put a hand on her arm, and–
–the relief when she takes it feels like an avalanche letting go.
“And there's… no one else you could show that part to? Maybe you just haven’t met them yet.”
Will swallows.
She’s his mother, and she’s nothing if not persistent.
“What do your friends think?”
His turn to take a deep breath. When he breaks eye contact with her, it’s so he can gather his thoughts. He’s tall enough that his gaze is level above her head. He’s been tall enough for a while, like that. It doesn’t change the fact that she was the one who fought tooth and nail for him, back then.
Back then.
“I haven’t told them yet,” he admits. Looks at his mom again. “I wanted to… I needed to tell you first.”
From beyond the kitchen hallway, Jonathan’s girl laughs about something someone said in a whiskey smooth voice. Will doesn’t need to hear it word for word; he would know that cadence anywhere. He shrugs his shoulders back, straightens his spine, hates himself a little for the way his mom looks at him.
There’s hope and there’s hope.
He’ll have to put it down either way, and that’s a hard thing to do when you’re the son of a woman who went through hell and back for you. Twice.
Three times, he thinks. Older memories that recently got dredged up, still raw.
“If you don’t trust him, trust me. Please.”
“I just want you to be safe, Will – I need you to be safe!”
“Mom, I am. I am.”
“I can’t lose you again. And certainly not to him. Not again. Not. Again.”
“And you’re not going to. You’re not going to.” His voice drops to a whisper when he gathers her in his arms, his small, fierce mother, pressing his mouth into her hair and closing his eyes and holding her close, close, close.
In a memory cast away to the edges of his mind, there is a boy who found himself in the devastating cold. A cold that seeped into his bones for he could take a single breath; a cold that should have hurt. Would have been deadly in only his scouts uniform if not for the stone spreading through his veins.
Everything had become crystal clear that night.
The chill in the air surrounding them now is not nearly so lethal but he feels it more than he should have.
“Do you see it now?” The vision bestowed upon him, taking up every space in his mind until he could think of nothing else but bringing it to life.
“What I see is a frightened boy.”
Not unlike the one he would find if he opened his own cabinet of memories, and the irony of that isn’t lost on him. Will takes a step forward, then another – the first one’s hesitant, the second more assured. The cold comes to him like he’s wrapped in gauze. It’s there but not really.
This can’t hurt you now.
You, general? You, imperative? You, objective?
He looks back at Henry at the edge of the vision. Tilts his head. And slowly, so slowly, holds out his hand.
He does not, in fact, know if he’s capable of love. He doesn’t know if that’s what anyone could quantify his feelings towards Will as. He does know that Will is his, and that he has come to enjoy making him smile as much as he enjoys making him whimper.
He knows, in the bone-deep mind-excoriated way that he knows Will and Will knows him, that he belongs to Will as much as Will belongs to him.
So he accepts it with an almost-smirk, the ghost of shoulders lifted in a shrug. Opens his mouth to tell Joyce the rabbit ran down the wolf’s throat willingly —
— “All good,” he echoes instead without taking his gaze off of her.
The quantifier is the silent stitches in the way they orbit each other. It’s the verbal reverb that strikes a chord in Will. It’s the way he steps into the kitchen with his torso turned his way, sunflower to light.
El-ahrairah stuck his head out of the earth and looked up into the sky, after all.
Joyce wants to turn her back on them but she doesn’t. She can’t. That’s her boy. So she juts her chin, meets Henry’s gaze head on, until Will’s between them.
He looks from his mom to his man and back.
And back.
“Saved you a slice of pie,” and with the murmur comes another silent stitch in the tapestry of their mutual Knowing when Will’s fingers trail the hem of Henry’s pullover. Magnet. Moth. Call it what you want. It’s a disassembling.
He jut his chin forward, a sheer act of determination a quiet cry for help, lest the tears spill down his cheeks again. He thought he had gotten better at this, but grief, as he now understood it, was not linear. And just because he was back amongst the land of the living didn’t mean the void in his heart stopped hollowing him out to the point of breathlessness sometimes.
The old Dustin would have reached for Eddie’s jacket the moment the hollowness came back. He would have put it on like armor like a target for others to hurt him so he’d feel something again. The old Dustin would have picked a fight, or rather, gave everyone the perfect ammunition for them to fight him.
The old Dustin would have even pushed Will away in this moment right now.
But he wasn’t that Dustin anymore. Not to that degree. Steve may have brought him back from his self-imposed hellscape (you can’t die because I can’t deal with it again! don’t let it happen again, please… not you), but he was still sad, sometimes. When the sadness resurfaced, he didn’t reach for Eddie’s jacket this time. He just reached for Will and told him the truth.
He knew Will would understand somehow. Dustin saw it in his best friend’s eyes. The ghosts would always be there, but they weren’t always the things that scared people away. They also could keep them afloat. But how could they be both at once?
Slowly, and thanks to Will’s gentle bump, the rigidity in Dustin’s body loosened. He lowered his head, relinquishing the defiance.
Tears promptly fell down his cheeks. Shit. Shit. Shit. SHIT.But there was something else, too. A lop-sided smile broke through.
“Eddie would have loved you,” he affirmed. “Like really. He would have seen the future of Hellfire Club in you before any of us.” A beat. “He would have seen you,” Dustin added, a bit more quietly. “I know it. Because he saw me, too.”
‘Never change, Henderson. ’
“Sometimes I think about wearing it again, you know? His jacket, I mean. Like right now, staring at this.” Dustin gestured to the memorial distastefully. “The jacket somehow feels more real than whatever the hell this is.”
“But I know if I put it back on, it’ll somehow hurt worse. I’ll go back to this version of me I hated. Shit, I don’t know why it’s so goddamn confusing! It doesn’t make sense for something to ground you and destroy you simultaneously.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that…” Will’s shrug wasn’t meant to be self-deprecating no more than the curl of his mouth but preteen habits were hard to shake, right? “You would’ve made an amazing DM. You still would! You just gotta do it more often.”
A beat.
“You– you got a new group? Are Mike and Lucas still–”
He thought about that day they played their final campaign every time he prepared a session for his new group in New York. It was something; but it wasn’t the same. He wondered if anything ever would be, and had a growing suspicion that being an adult meant capitulating before the bittersweet sense of nostalgia that overcame him at the thought.
Dustin, though. Dustin seemed caught in a different kind of prison. Will frowned at him sideways, saw the tears. Felt the familiar tightness in his chest like a knee-jerk reaction to seeing one of his people upset. He used to be embarrassed by it; now he just let it be. Maybe that’s what being an adult does to you, too: put things into perspective. They’d never been shy around each other’s tears, their precious little fellowship – and now that he went out into the world, Will could appreciate it all the more.
He let Dustin rail about the memorial and nodded along, not because he necessarily felt the same strong way about it but because he wanted Dustin to know he had a point. And–
It doesn’t make sense for something to ground you and destroy you simultaneously.
Hell, does he have a point.
Will was silent for a while, leaning forward on the bench they found themselves on, elbows on his knees. Cars around them. Birds, too. The occasional sounds of conversation from an assemblage of rebuilt Main Street stores.
“I know,” Will said eventually, drawn out like a sigh. Better that than the confession he couldn’t afford making right now. He peered up at Dustin from where he was crouched over, all wringing hands and a genuine attempt at a smile. Wasn’t his fault it came out all crooked. “Have you… have you thought about counselling?”
