Chapter Text
“It was a seven.”
“What?”
“The roll, it was a seven. The Demogorgon. It got me.” Will sighed and mounted his bike. “Well, I’ll see you tomorrow!” He smiled and biked away, joining Dustin and Lucas.
After a few minutes, he turned down the street to his own house. He heard a noise and it spooked him so bad he fell off his bike. He saw something. He knew he did. Abandoning his bike, he ran home as fast as he could and locked the door. He pet his dog quickly before running to his room and trying to bolt the door shut. Unfortunately for him, it opened like it had a mind of its own.
Will heard footsteps. Crap crap crap. There was someone, or something, there. He needed to fight. The shed had guns, right? He remembered Lonnie used to keep guns in there for when he wanted to run around murdering animals.
Will bolted to the shed and grabbed the nearest gun. He loaded it with shaky hands, trying to stop the shaking unsuccessfully. The single lightbulb in the shed began to flicker, and Will decided to ignore it as he raised the gun and prepared to strike at whatever was there.
Unfortunately for him, he never got the chance to strike at whatever it was.
—
Cold.
The first thing Will noticed was that it was cold.
The second thing he noticed was that it was dark. He was being dragged by something, but he still had his gun. He forced himself to aim it at the thing’s head, or what could be its head anyway, and shot. The thing hissed in pain and growled, but it let him go.
Will jumped up and ran. He was in the forest. A forest he recognized. It was the one near his house. That meant his home was nearby. He got there in a matter of minutes, but another one of those things was patrolling around his house. But Will knew this wasn't actually his house. It looked like it, sure, but it was all wrong. Vines covered the walls and ground near the entrance, and it just looked wrong.
Maybe Castle Byers would be safe.
He decided to try it, and upon moving inside he found some blankets on the ground of the fort. He curled up in them immediately, and somehow drifted off into sleep.
He woke to it still being dark for some reason.
Odd.
He didn’t want to leave the fort, not with the monsters out there. And from in this fort, he felt safe. He felt like maybe he wasn’t about to die in whatever this place was, and maybe those things wouldn’t get them.
He really needed a better name for them. He’d have to workshop something.
To pass the time, he started singing softly to himself. It was more out of boredom than anything, but it somehow made him feel more connected to Jonathan and his mom, to home.
He didn’t know how long he was singing to himself when he heard a growl not unlike the growl from the monster earlier. He jolted up, loading his gun, and when the monster came into view, he shot at it until he ran out of ammo. The monster staggered, giving Will the chance to run. He ran as fast as he could. He heard thunder in the distance, but it wasn’t raining. Maybe a storm was nearby? He couldn’t be sure though, he couldn’t be sure about anything in wherever he was.
The monster was gaining on him, but maybe it couldn’t climb. Surely, right? He abandoned the gun, climbing up the closest tree. And the monster followed. Because of course it did.
He reached the top of the tree and jumped to the next, but his hands couldn’t grip the slimy branch and he fell. His backpack caught him, and for a second he thought maybe he was safe, but then the strap broke and he fell.
—
Will woke to being tied down. He was tied to a wall by those vines he’d seen around before, and something was coming towards him.
“At long last, we can begin.” Not something then, someone. But this someone wasn’t human. He was covered in the vines, and his voice was too low to be fully human. “You and I, we are going to do such beautiful things together, William. Such beautiful things.”
How did he know Will’s name? Who was he? Will didn’t have much time to think, unfortunately, because something came towards him and connected to his mouth, and his vision faded to black.
—
He faded in and out of consciousness for some amount of time. Time worked weirdly there. It was always night time for some reason, maybe there wasn’t even a sun. It was always dark.
This had to be an alternate dimension. He didn’t even know that those actually existed, it had always been an idea from science fiction, or a hypothetical scenario that scientists discussed. It wasn’t somewhere you actually ended up. Everything was dark. It was so, so dark. Maybe he could dub this dimension ‘The Dark.’ It was fitting enough.
The talking monster came back to check on him occasionally. Will had dubbed him the talking monster, because he looked like a monster, and he talked. Creative, right?
The monster spoke to Will of all the things Will would do for him. “You are my builder,” the monster told him, “and you are going to help me reshape the world.”
Will never knew what the monster meant. Maybe whatever was being pumped into him by the tube was supposed to help him ‘be the builder’?
Eventually, the talking monster stopped coming by, and Will was left to the other monsters. Flower dogs, he decided on. Another stupid name yeah, but aside from drawing, Will had never been the most creative. That had always been Mike.
God, he missed Mike. He missed Mike, and Lucas and Dustin, and Jonathan, and his mom. He even missed school right now, because despite the teasing at least it was something normal. Something he was used to. Not… whatever this was.
He would try to convince himself this was all some nightmare if he hadn’t been knocked out multiple times and hurt, because there’s no way his brain could come up with something this traumatic.
—
Will tried to escape, multiple times. Key word being tried.
He would manage to wiggle his way out of his prison of vines, and he would run from that church, but someone always caught him. It wasn’t always the talking monster. Sometimes it was people in green uniforms, who tazed him and took him to a lab where a tall man in his 50s or 60s would talk in a voice that was uncharacteristically calm for what was happening. The man was trying to earn his trust. He’d introduced himself as ‘Papa.’ Will didn’t like this ‘papa’, who infused Will with blood and shaved his head so he could attach wires to it. But ‘papa’ was useful for some things. The talking monster’s name was One, which was an odd name, but ‘papa’ also tattooed a ‘020’ onto Will’s wrist and only referred to Will as Twenty, so maybe One was also an experiment? But what had gone so wrong to turn One into that? Was that what ‘papa’ wanted to do to Will? Will didn’t want to be a monster.
So Will escaped again. And he ended up back in One’s lair. This back and forth went on for a while. WIll escaped one place, ended up in the other, and back and forth he went for a long time. The last he’d heard from ‘papa’, it was 1985. So it had been two years, give or take.
There were a few ‘highlights’ from this back and forth, if you could call them ‘highlights.’ ‘Papa’ had begun to use Will to spy on One, since Will had some sort of connection to the Dark due to his time spent there. One figured this out eventually, and Will consequently had his eye gouged out by a Flower Dog. Nice.
‘Papa’ had helped him figure out he had powers. Weird telekinetic, psychic abilities. He could do things that most people couldn’t. He’d crushed a coke can with his mind, and he could go into other people’s minds and dissect their thoughts. He could create illusions around others and he could even lift things if he had enough strength that day.
When Will wasn’t with ‘Papa’, his mind didn’t feel entirely like his own. One had a way of twisting things, of showing Will things that surely couldn’t be real, but One insisted very much were real. Will didn’t believe him. But it wasn’t just that. When Will was held by One, he felt some other thing inside him, something that definitely was not Will Byers. The thing whispered to him, told him he’d be a good host, and a good ‘builder.’ Will saw tunnels in his dreams, and he somehow had a full mental map of them. His memory began to fade, to the point that he could barely remember the name ‘Mike Wheeler’ or ‘Jonathan’ or ‘Mom.’ He couldn’t see their faces, he didn’t know what they were like, he only knew that they had loved him.
When he was with ‘Papa’ the memories came back little by little. Maybe distance was the key. But when he was with ‘Papa’ they tested his powers more and more, until instead of crushing cans of coke with his mind he was lifting tables and crushing bones of cats. He’d cried a lot before finally doing it, and he remembered watching his older brother (what was his name again?) being forced to shoot a rabbit by a man in the woods.
—
Finally, one day, Will’s escape plan was successful. Instead of running back to his house, or Castle Byers, Will decided to run to his best friend’s house. He hoped maybe the military and One wouldn’t think to check there. He hid in the other boy’s room for some time, only leaving to get another can of food from the pantry and then rushing back to the room to eat it. He stole some of the boy’s clothes from his closet, throwing on a t-shirt and jeans. Will knew the other kid had always been taller than WIll, even if he couldn’t remember his name. So the clothes should be too big on him. But for some reason the teenager’s closet only held clothes fit for a kid that was maybe 12 or 13, which was when Will had gone missing. The clothes were a tad too small on him, but he didn’t really care, he was just grateful to be out of that stupid hospital gown.
He made himself a blanket fort that he hid under. Maybe it was a tad childish, but it made him feel safe again. And he hadn’t felt safe since he’d first come to the Dark and hid in Castle Byers. He took some chalk and began marking the days on the wall. Maybe they weren’t actually days, but ‘sleeps’ anyway. Each time he woke up, he added a new tally.
—
At the thirty eighth tally, Will ran out of food in the pantry. This resulted in Will stealing a backpack from the room and running to the next door neighbor’s house. He didn’t know the family, but considering this wasn’t their actual house, he figured they wouldn’t mind him stealing their food. He transferred all the cans to the backpack and then ran back to the house and into what was becoming his room. He made sure to grab a can opener, fork, bowl, and plate from the kitchen so he could try to ‘cook’ something.
Emptying out the cans, he looked over his haul. Five cans of green beans, three cans of tuna (maybe the family had a cat?), four cans of lentils, and a can of chicken. He’d also found some cartons of vegetable stock that he’d thrown into the backpack, along with a few water bottles.
This would be enough for a while. Not a long while, but if he rationed it out, he may be okay. He poured a bit of the stock into the bowl, along with a quarter can of lentils and half a can of the green beans. Lentils had protein, right? And green beans were considered a vegetable as far as he knew. So this was a balanced meal. His mom would be proud.
He wolfed the meal down and sighed. He was getting bored, if he was being honest. He looked over at the bookshelf and pulled out The Lord of the Rings. He’d read it before, but he couldn’t remember much from it, and it had been before he’d been taken to the Dark, so he was past due for a reread.
—
The time passed quicker when Will was doing something, but he finished the book after only three days. His clothes were starting to smell too, and even if he was in an alternate dimension, he wanted some clothes that fit him better. He was about his brother’s size, he thought. So maybe if he could sneak back to his old house he could find something.
He didn’t want to go that far unarmed, though.
Maybe his friend’s dad kept some guns in the house? But where would he keep them? He knew there was a safe in the garage. That felt like the best bet, so he pulled on his backpack and went downstairs and into the garage. He found a gun in the corner and grabbed it, slinging it over his shoulder before finding the safe. He didn’t know where the key was, but he might as well use his psychic powers for something besides experiments. The safe unlocked with a click and Will found some smaller guns and ammo. He took the safe upstairs to his room, and chose his weapon and loaded it. He felt somewhat ready, and there was no time like the present right?
He ventured out and walked the path to his old house. He didn’t know why he remembered this, and the fact that there had been guns in the garage, and that he’d read Lord of the Rings before, and yet he couldn’t seem to remember hardly anything about his old life.
The thing that One had put inside him still hung around, but Will chose to ignore it when it tried to talk to him. He was used to ignoring bad thoughts, afterall.
Will made it to his house and found his brother’s room. He took some jeans, shirts, and jackets, considering the Dark was absolutely freezing at all times. He looked over at the older boy’s dresser and noticed a cassette player resting on it. Inside was a cassette titled Will. Will remembered seeing a cassette player at his friend’s house when he was hiding there, meaning he would only need the cassette itself to play the music. He saw some headphones connected to the machine and threw those into the backpack as well. It was starting to get full, but he wanted to check his own room before going back to his friend’s house. Upon entering, he found it was decorated with posters and looked like a normal bedroom, but he saw a book on his desk.
Opening it, he found a ton of drawings that looked oddly good. Maybe he used to be an artist? He didn’t have enough memories to remember hobbies, but this book seemed to spark something in his chest, so he threw the book and some regular and colored pencils into the backpack. Satisfied with what he’d found, he hiked back to his friend’s house.
Maybe it wasn’t his friend’s house so much anymore. It was starting to feel more and more like a home base of sorts.
He changed into a new pair of jeans and then put on a black long sleeved shirt and threw a yellow t-shirt over top, finishing it off with a jacket that had a fur collar. He finally felt warm for once, and content with what he had, he stuck to the room. He read the rest of the books on the shelf and drew until he’d run out of pages, listening to the cassette over and over.
On the fifty seventh tally on the wall, Will ran out of food again. So thus began a new routine. Grab a gun and his backpack, and plumage the neighbors houses. Sometimes his haul was better than others, and he was honestly a bit frustrated that he’d chosen to hole up in a richer neighborhood. If he’d set up at his old house, he knew that maybe they’d have more canned food instead of rotted groceries. But too late now.
He made sure to check all the rooms for interesting things, and he oftentimes found more clothes, which he was grateful for since it meant he now had a stack of clothes back at the base.
The flower dogs began to show up on the hundred and eighth tally, and so Will ran. He ended up in the sheriff’s station, and he took the opportunity to grab more weapons. He tried returning home and thankfully, the dogs were gone, so he hid the guns in his base.
He had to create some sort of barrier.
He wasn’t very strong, physically, but his powers had been thrumming under his skin, begging to be used. And who was he to deny them. He moved the furniture from downstairs out and created a makeshift wall around the doors and windows. He added the furniture from his friend’s sisters and parents’ rooms to the mix and it was enough to cover all the windows on the first story. He shut the blinds on the second floor, and decided that any time he had to go out he would just jump. How hard could it be?
Very hard, as it turns out. The first time he jumped out he ended up twisting his leg in the wrong direction when he hit the ground and he had to use his mind to twist it back into place. It hurt like a bitch, but he had to move considering he was out of food. He was running out of houses in the culdesac; after this one he only had one left. He got the food he needed and when he returned to base he stared at the wall he’d created. “Well fuck me.” He whispered under his breath, his voice cracking from lack of use. There had to be a way up. He didn’t want to climb in case he ruined the wall, but maybe he could fly? It sounded crazy, but so did everything else in his life so whatever. To his surprise, it worked. He overshot it a bit and ended up on the roof, having to jump down through the window. But it worked.
He was starting to get pretty good at this whole ‘surviving’ thing. The flower dogs still came by on occasion, but Will began to take his rifle and shoot at the monsters through the window. If that didn’t work, he let the power take over for a moment so he could snap the dog’s limbs. He now had a graveyard of flower dog bodies outside his base, and while a little unsettling to walk through it felt like a sort of symbol of what he’d managed to build in the Dark.
He even started hunting the dogs. He still wanted to go back to the world he was originally from, despite everything. He wanted to get to know his friends and family again, if they were still around. Maybe they’d all moved on already, but he still wanted to see them.
And the truth is, Will was getting lonely. He’d been alone for years, and sure sometimes he had the ‘company’ of One or the scientists, but they weren’t friendly faces. Will had gotten so lonely, in fact, that when he went on a hunt and found a baby flower dog, he took it back to his base and started raising it like a pet. He wasn’t sure what to name the dog for a while, until one day the dog started moving Will’s things around and he settled on ‘Loki’ after the Norse god of mischief and chaos. He found a few bandanas on one of his grocery runs, and when he got back to base he wrapped a bright red bandana around Loki’s neck so the dog could run off to hunt and eat and come back without Will freaking out.
Will began to talk to the dog, though he was really talking to himself. His thoughts always moved a mile a second, and he needed a way to get them out, and the solution seemed to be talking. He would rant about the books he’d finished rereading, he’d narrate himself cooking or drawing, he’d talk about the weather (it was always dark and cold), and he honestly felt like he was going crazy. The most response he ever got from Loki was a whine or sigh or tilt of his head, but sometimes Will would hallucinate a voice coming from the walkie talkie in his room, the voice so realistic that the static would cut out some of the words. He needed to interact with actual people again. And to do that he would have to get rid of One. And the first step was getting rid of the flower dogs (minus Loki, of course.)
Time went on, and eventually all his walls were covered in tally marks. Nine hundred and thirty six, to be exact. He was going out for another hunt, he’d made sure to let Loki out earlier so the dog could get his fill without seeing Will kill his brethren. He whistled softly as he walked the tracks.
The goal was to attract flower dogs, but instead he heard a voice. “Hello?”