#what if your sphinx decides she hates wet food and demands cheetos | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

middayfiddler · 7 years ago

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Geodes

AO3

Walking feels like being trapped in the joints of a mechanical giant, every movement of the cogwheels and springs resonates deep into his bone marrow. The smell of copper and taste of rot - as if every living being in the world died many years ago and left him to spend eternity counting their bones - and he screams and screams and his own voice echoes on his eardrums thousandfold. It doesn’t sound like his voice anymore. It feels like the darkness around him stole it right from his vocal chords, just like it stole his sight and touch and hearing. He screams and there are no words anymore, because he doesn’t remember what words are. There is no one to call for, no one to save him; and soon there is nothing, nothing anymore.

“And don’t forget,” mom says in her no-nonsense voice over a stack of cardboard boxes under her chin, “bills will be split in half .”

“Sure,” Hopper mumbles, chewing an unlit cigarette. He’s easy to read once one gets over his scary Police Chief exterior; there is no doubt he will pay only half of the bills, just like there is no doubt there will be insane amounts of food appearing in the fridge, followed by a rant about how grateful people bring those to the station to “rot, Joyce, really, and those people are so unrelenting .” Will would know, even if he hadn’t overheard him explain his plan to Mrs. Flo. Will likes Mrs. Flo. She gives him and the boys the donuts she forbade Hopper to eat and pats him on the head in what he imagines is the grandmotherly way.

There are no donuts today. Only reheated chilli and Eggos and whipped cream for El and beer for Hopper, new staples in the Byers’ pantry. It’s good; the changes are good and make Will feel less like something is crawling under his skin.

El doesn’t speak. She is sitting in the living room window, feet with mismatched woolen socks hanging outside and touching long-unmowed grass. Her cuffs are stained with blood from her nose, even though hers and Hopper’s things were mostly light stacks of papers and easily packed onto the backseat of Jonathan’s car. There is something calming in knowing that you can come out of the Upside Down and still be a good person.

Will sometimes doesn’t even feels like a person. Other times, he feels it too much.

“I put El’s things in Will’s room,” Jonathan says and flicks Will’s forehead. It’s how Will wanted it; he keeps on saying that Jonathan’s room is better and has wanted it for years. Everyone pretends they believe him.

Not everyone; El doesn’t. El knows.

Music starts playing and he startles. There used to be no record player in the living room; apparently there is now, and it’s El-controlled and playing something that sounds like music Hopper might have listened to in high school.

Sure it is - Hopper and mom put the boxes away and start dancing in the small space between the sofa and the table, much slower than the rhythm of the song demands. Mom puts the unlit cigarette in her mouth and smiles, her hands on his shoulders and their legs entangled to fit into the space. They look like they belong there, like the space exists just for the two of them to be there at some point in time.

Jonathan leans to his ear and whispers: “Do you think he will arrest me if I tell them to get a room?” and they both laugh, because there is weird and there is supernatural-weird, but then there is the local Police Chief in love with your mother in your living room.

Later, when everything finds its place in the Byers-Hopper house and the record player mysteriously keeps on putting the needle to the start of the record right after it finishes, El is still sitting in the window, although the evening has gone cold and wet with dew. It’s fine with Will; it’s easier to draw people when they are not looking. The neon light from the television screen throws pretty shadows on her back.

“Mike,” she says silently, only for Will to hear.

The boys are not coming until tommorrow. Will cannot see her face, but he’s drawn enough people to recognize the tilt of the head, the posture of shoulders, the level of cheekbones to know when a person is smiling. After the Upside Down, names and people and atoms of matter are more concept than anything else. El originated from there; that’s how language works for her. Will knows. Will understands.

“Yes,” he says, only for Eleven to hear, and it’s good, it’s good, for an evening, everything is so good.

There is fire under his skin, inside his muscles, inside his organs. His body - what used to be him, because what are people without their bodies - is disintegrating into ash, but the ash is still him and it still burns and it still hurts. And he cannot scream, for he has no voice, and he cannot cry, for he has no eyes. And it hurts, it hurts, with pain human bodies were not created to endure.There is something terrible happening - somewhere, out there, outside of the range of his forgotten senses, of his clouded mind, somewhere in the world filled with people he has no remembrance of - but there is the pain-filled nothingness and he’s floating in million pieces and it’s almost - almost - like he’s at peace.

“...and as you’re coming close to the source of the weird sound, you turn to the passage to the right, and there is it - the Sphinx!”

“No, not the Sphinx! Steve! It’s your turn!”

“Ehh...I...hit it with a racing car.”

“You’re a bard, Steve. You don’t have a car.”

“A racing car, kid. And there’s nowhere written in that thing that I can’t have a car.”

“Actually-”

A half-empty pack of Cheetos flies a circle around Will’s head before landing neatly on the kitchen counter. Will looks where El and Max are sitting in the corner of Byers’ living room, Max immersed in Mike’s Atari and El immersed in watching Max play. Both of them claimed they didn’t have enough patience for hours-long campaigns. But Will notices El startling with every monster conquered, every kill claimed. He knows; he will read her bedtime story, after, with everyone gone, a story with happy ending and summer and flowers and little girls with loving fathers.

“How come he rolled eighteen? How does he always roll so high?”

The Sphinx is, indeed, defeated by the wondrous appearance of a racing car. Lucas seems offended on a personal level, while Dustin is attempting to convince Mike to let the whole party into the vehicle and just ride through the dungeon. Steve seems equally confused as he did at the beginning, except now with the enthusiasm of a person unexpectedly accomplishing something.

Mike leans to Will: “When I die, write on my gravestone: Cause of death - My D&D party.”

Will chuckles weakly. They survived unimaginable monsters, other dimensions, possessions and multiple almost-ends of the world, and yet he knows that his - Will’s - cause of death will probably be the warmth of Mike’s breath on his ear, his heart palpitating at the sound of his voice breathy in whisper, his barely suppressed need to turn his head just a tiny, tiny bit to where Mike’s lips are and where they will stop being in the matter of seconds. And, most of all, that he shouldn’t feel any of that.

Will is sure the cause of his death will be one Michael Wheeler.

And then it’s Will’s turn, and he uses magic - reasonable, from the manual - and throws twenty, then he miraculously keeps throwing twenty again and again while Steve’s character obtains a nailed baseball, a flamethrower and a flying racing car. Steve is banned from playing as a bard ever again by common decision, which Mike repeats to Will’s ear in that certain kind of whisper. Will wants to run away, but he doesn’t, because they are winning and Mike gives him a half-hug and a smile.

And if a cup of hot chocolate with marshmallows inconspicuously lands in front of Will sometime during the campaign, well, no one seems to take notice.

The neon arcade sign is turning slowly in the nightmare-tinted night. There is snow falling, and it tastes like ash, but the ash tastes like despair and fear and he is alone, alone, alone. The pavement is empty and cracked, as if all the people on the Earth just decided that since this minute, he’s not worthy of being one of them, of being in their material, fluctuant, erratic presence. He isn’t, maybe; there is no one to ask, and his screams return to him thousandfold, unanswered. Stay with me, he hears the clouds whisper, and the trees and the walls and the grass under his feet (have they always had a voice? he can’t remember; yet their whisper is familiar, and calming, and enticing at the same time; he’s heard it before, somewhere). You belong here, with us, they say. His hands are covered with lichen, his lungs full of spores that will grow into vines through his respiratory tract, he’s becoming one with this other world. Maybe I do, he wants to say, but there are no mouth anymore to make a voice.

The girl is called Donna. She was in his English class last year, and Mike’s mom sometimes goes to her mom to get her hair done.

Will disliked her the moment she came to ask him to dance, then disliked her more when Mike’s hand touched his elbow only to push him to the dancefloor. He hated the way her waist felt under his fingers - curved in premonition of woman to come, pliant and criss-crossed with the humpy lines of her blouse seams. And he hated, hated so much the look in her eyes, when she leaned to his cheek - the same way the couples around them were doing, the same way Mike and Eleven were doing, and Will’s eyes are burning and his throat is itching with bile and he wants to look away and can’t - and whispered: “You’re too obvious, Zombie Boy. Tone down the staring on Wheeler.”

She’s waiting for him by his locker now. Her eyes are following him from under eyelashes painted black and curled. He is almost sure he can hear the thoughts of the passing students; it’s the way they wordlessly agreed, back then, from behind fake smiles and eyes straying sideways. It was infinitely easier to start rumours than to wait for another ones to be started.

Will doesn’t want to be here. The boys are probably in the AV room already, with Max pretending not to be fascinated by the machinery and El - Jane now, at school always Jane Hopper - training her reading by syllabizing the Heathkit manual. It doesn’t seem to matter; not wanting to be where he is seems to be Will’s perpetual, unavoidable state of mind.

“I kissed Maggie Thompson,” Donna says. She’s wearing the ugly ribbon headband all the girls seem to wear this year, and her farce of a smile is more forced than usual.

“Congratulations,” he says. “How did it happen?”

“She saw Rick Jordan kissing some girl behind the church,” she says. “I told her he was an asshole. And that we could practice kissing.”

Will thinks that if they weren’t standing in the school hall, with a carefully crafted image to keep, she would be crying.

“Was it-”

There is nothing to say, really, and if there was, Will wouldn’t know. I would never do that , he could say and doesn’t.

“We don’t have much choice, me and you,” she says carelessly and the ribbon moves from side to side like a trapped moth; but there is sadness in her eyes, the sadness of a person who knows that some things will never change. Will recognizes it. It’s the sadness on Hopper’s face, when he forgets to go to sleep and stares at the out-of-reception TV in the hours before dawn; it’s the one his mom tries to hide when she’s looking at him. He doesn’t want to know what his own face looks like when he’s not careful. He has a hunch; it always mirrors in Mike’s eyes, wide and scared and full of unreasonable resolve to shield his friends from any harm. Will knows that falling out of love with him would be impossible, even if he tried.

“Maybe you should tell someone,” Donna says. She’s put her head on his shoulder. Wetness is soaking into his sweater, but she doesn’t sob or hiccup and maybe it’s just his own sweat. Will can hear some girls go “awww” in the hallway and they are both good at lying, so good. “After something like this, there is no way back.”

Will pats her on the back. He will not; his mom knows, maybe, and El for sure. He’s not sure either of them knows what it means. It feels like there are many people living inside Will, some of them still trapped in the Upside Down, some of them in the labyrinth of the Mind Flyer, some of them in the 80’s Indiana. Neither of them is a particularly good place to be.

He’s a hero, Mike said once, and so he has to be.

“I know,” he says, because people like them are both great at lying and terrible at it.

It’s a game of chase or being chased. And his legs are tied and his eyes are blindfolded; he’s touching the walls, but the walls are shifting and right is left and up is down and the end is the beginning and all is the same. Run, run, run, he’s calling, or maybe it’s his mind or maybe someone else.

It’s not him. Someone else is being chased; he’s just standing inside it all, unmoving like a stalactite, with eyes closed and yet still seeing. He sees shadows and the light that brought them to life. He sees the shadows move. They have bodies and limbs and look like someone had drawn them on a piece of paper and left it outside during rainpour. He wants to touch them, feel their ethereal existence on his fingertips, but his fingers are blocks of ice and he cannot move. Someone is talking, but the words - mother, friend, his own name - the words have no meaning. They are but an entropy of sounds and the sounds are hurting his ears. His ears are bleeding, but they are bleeding crystals of frost. It’s pretty, white and glistening and dead, and thus harmless.

Run, run, run, someone calls, but he cannot recall what it means.

Jonathan is home from New York and Nancy from Indianapolis, which is as good reason as any for everyone being gathered in the Byer-Hopper’s living room.

The room did not get any bigger since the last time; if something, it got only more cramped, with Hopper’s new armchair and El’s blanket fort she doesn’t allow to be taken down. It does not seem to matter to anyone. The painted letters are hidden under the new pink wallpaper; the drawing of Bob was taken down last year together with all the other Will’s drawings.

The stories are being told that Will has heard thousand times before; but it’s what is connecting all these people beside unconditional love for each other, and Jonathan has no stories from the college to tell and Nancy pretends to have none. How Mike wanted to attack a perpetrator with a candlestick. How Dustin locked a demodog in Henderson’s cellar using a trail of ham. How Hopper made a random kid sell him the whole stack of Halloween candy. The last one is new; it feels nice to hear a story no one else has been present to. It feels less like standing behind a glass wall, watching everyone assuring themselves that what happened was but a series of unfortunate, maybe entertaining events. Mike is laughing and Dustin chokes on his Coke; Steve pats him on his back and jokes that he should have become a kindergarten teacher instead of Hopper’s assistant.

A finger is put between Will’s eyebrows.

“Bad lines,” El says, reaching from her favorite chair near the record player. Her curls are hidden under Hopper’s police hat and she’s got whipped cream on her upper lip.

“Wrinkles,” Will corrects her.

“No. Bad lines. Go away.”

Will smiles. She’s whispering; she’s been taught concept of privacy and concept of things not being talked about loud, and that’s how Will knows she’s not trying to learn a new word. Mike was right, back then - El understands, understands everything, without unnecessary words, as if they were born from the same womb. And, like any other older brother, he pretends to be oblivious.

“Full sentences, El, remember?”

She shakes like an annoyed cat, but complies. “I don’t want you to be sad.”

He wants to say that he’s not; her eyes slide to Steve, recounting some event Will recognizes and doesn’t care about, then stop at Mike - smiling, happy Mike, with his long legs folded carefully under the coffee table and wonderful ability to see through Will’s lies, but not through what Will doesn’t say at all. He doesn’t say anything. She knows, of course she knows.

“I’m sorry,” he says, even though he knows it carries concepts El didn’t grasp yet, like being sorry for things that don’t hurt anyone. So he crosses his eyes to look at her finger, still stuck to his forehead, and makes her laugh. He pinches her nose and pretends to point out her own wrinkles and teases her about her hair like any other brother would and ignores her pointed looks amidst the bursts of laughter and what they mean.

Hopper is telling a story about when El started calling him Dad. He’s looking at El fondly, like his own heart was sitting before him, materialized into a curly, gangly girl. El sends him her mostly eaten plate of waffles and then hugs him, when she remembers that’s how other people show affection. Will looks at Mike, still smiling, still happy, still here, still Mike, who looks at him with eyes full of unreadable thoughts. Will figures that maybe not tomorrow or the next year, but one days things will be how they were made to be.

He’s been burnt to ash and put back together; he’s been frozen, his veins blocks of ice under his skin wrinkled like that of old man who forgot to die; he’s been turned into atoms and wandering without hearing and sight and remembrance of who he used to be. And he was scared, in the way one is scared of death or pain or getting lost in the dark and not finding way back.

He’s alone now.

The landscape is that of desolation, of oblivion, of loneliness permeating every molecule of being. There is moss on the walls, dust on the pavement, crumbling stones under his fingers; the skies are empty, as if moon and stars were too much of companions for him. He doesn’t try to scream anymore. He knows there is no one to help, no one at all.

Something touches him, something shakes him. It’s not good; he wants to stay in this quiet, peaceful world, before something else, something more terrifying will come. Something touches him again and he recognizes the pattern of fingertips, recognizes the heat of human skin, recognizes the voice calling for him in desperation and panic. He recognizes his own name and that there are words that his throat can say and that the words can belong to him.

He opens his eyes.

“I’m having nightmares.”

They are sitting on the edge of the quarry, legs hanging toward the water-filled depths. The earth is still a bit too cold to be sitting on, and the breeze seeps through their jackets, but it’s good. It’s spring, and bad things don’t happen in spring.

Will doesn’t turn. There is something mesmerizing about the quarry, about how the sky and water seem to be one and the same. Mike’s breath is on his nape, even though it has no business being there.

“What are they about?”

Mike’s breath hitches. His hand moves on the gravel towards where Will’s rests. It’s warm; the inch of space between their fingers holds whole universes in their hopeless infinity. Will considers crossing it, less because he longs to, and rather because he doesn’t want to listen anymore.

“About you,” Mike says.

There’s the sound of universes shattered, galaxies broken to dust. Will is not El; he doesn’t think he was born a monster or made into one. He doesn’t have nightmares of regimens of people bleeding from their eyes and mouth and writhing in pre-mortal agony, the ones that always wake everyone up and Hopper hugs her until she calms and then hugs Will, too, just for good measure. A small part of his mind - the one that daydreams of school dances and ice cream parlor dates and a world different from the one outside - is pleased that Mike’s dreaming about him.

“Am I hurting you?” he asks anyways.

Mike startles, like the idea never crossed his mind, not now and not before.

“No!” he says and his hand brushes Will’s and maybe, just maybe it was deliberate. “No, nothing like that! It’s just…”

His hand grips Will’s in a spasmic, panicked movement; it’s warm and shaking and it feels like it longs to permeate the skin and the flesh and become one with Will.

“I am you,” Mike whispers. “I’m in the Upside Down and I see the Mind Flayer, and I’m the Mind Flayer, and the Spy, and I’m trapped and alone and no one is coming for me- Oh, God, Will, I’m so sorry, so sorry- “

Will kisses him.

There’s a constellation of freckles that looks like Orion but turned upside down, and it stands out against the pale skin. Mike’s hug is different from Hopper’s - he still has years to come to grow into his limbs - and Will doesn’t remember when it happened. It doesn’t matter; there’s Mike’s cheek under his lips, and it’s warm, the whole world is warm as if all the suns died and were reborn anew again.

“I know,” he hears Mike say, and of course he knows, because he’s Mike and Mike knows .

And before Will apologizes or runs away or throws himself down to the quarry - because now, he is no better than Donna, now, he’s done the worst thing and there is no way back and he doesn’t even regret it - he feels Mike’s cheekbones move and his lips open and he doesn’t have to look to know he’s smiling.

“I’ve always known,” Mike says and the Will in his eyes seems more real than Will himself; and that’s how Will knows that everything is fine and everything is good. He thinks that if this is how it ends, then maybe - just maybe - it was all worth it.

There is white and hospital smell; there is headache and blurry figures.

There is a head of black hair and striped shirt and voice he recognizes.

There is a feeling like his heart is about to burst out of his chest.

That’s the one he knows; he’s been feeling it for a long, long time.

#byeler #byler #stranger things #will byers #mike wheeler #i'm not from USA so i might have gotten stuff wrong #and i've never written for such a big fandom i'm scared

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