Chapter Text
"What about this fella here? Do you know who that is?"
Everything hurts , Will thinks, his head weighing on his shoulders like a cast-iron cannon ball. Everything hurts. Absolutely everything.
Each muscle in Will Byers’ neck aches thoroughly as he lifts his gaze to see who the elderly doctor standing by his bedside was referring to, his hand outstretched as though he is presenting an entertainer to an audience. It has felt like this since he’d woken up a few days before, even subtly. These gatherings felt to Will like some morbid talent show, the people surrounding him each giving dismal attempts at trying to bring the boy back to some distant memory they had once shared together. None of them have fallen into place, however. They won’t no matter how frustrated Will gets over it. No matter how often be begs for something to slip through the cracks.
Will has been in this bed for three days, though only the remaining few hours of the third day has he seen. The rest he has spent wrapped in black nothingness, entangled inside of it like a bug in a web. Even in the few hours he’s been awake and lucid, the pearly colour of the wallpaper has become seemingly more and more saturated and off-white, and the flowers he’d been gifted have already practically grown more dead than they were prior. He scrounges for some sense of understanding, for some emotional response to these stories beyond basic human compassion but he only comes up empty handed. He only watches in discomfort and worry as absolute strangers, though they weren’t always, try and reel him back in. He only notices these flowers, the wallpaper, decaying with his memory. He just watches, confused, afraid-- curious. What else is there to do?
The last thing he remembers that isn't tainted like water splotches against old photographs is the few peaceful minutes of the beginning of his bike ride home. He'd been pedaling so hard, the doctor had suggested that he had veered off onto the manmade path through the woods that he had been eyeballing and flung himself face first down into the dirt, splitting his head open in an electric flash of pain that Will could only compare to the likes of being shot. Of course, the boy has never been shot. He’s never been in any sort of dangerous situation like this one.
Everything from then on remains stippled and fuzzy, indistinct and distant like it’s a memory that is years and years away, front or back. As much as Will crushes his face and squeezes his eyes and grips the cold metal arms of his hospital bed, he can’t seem to make these stories come to fruition in his mind. What they entail, who they belong to-- he doesn’t know. He wasn't able to tell years from minutes in the memories that do remain. However few they are.
Hell. He can’t remember almost anything .
Each memory proposed to him feels like looking at a picture through an out of focus lens, desperately trying to make out the fine details of what once was a picturesque time in his childhood. Will falls short and hard every time. He knows the moment he is proposed such a question as that he will fall again, as his dark eyes settle on the sight of a tall, thin boy standing at the foot of his hospital bed. The boy, raven haired and doey-eyed, looks older than Will himself, in a certain way. The lines under his eyes, which are puffy and dark and exhausted. He’d been wrapped in a thin black sweater with a blazen red strip across the front of it. His hair, overgrown and wavy, sticks out in sleepless little strands here and there. He looks like he’s never had a solid night’s sleep. He looks unfamiliar, but warm. Warm even through the obvious distress painted across his face. He’s a friend , Will thinks. He was a friend. Who is he now?
The boy looks like he has aged a year in merely days. Something tells the Byers boy that he isn’t entirely devoid of blame.
He remembers going skating once with the older woman who brings him dark pink flowers and sleeps with her head resting against his hospital bed, just past his left kneecap. She’s been there almost consistently, only parting from him a few times as he'd been told. Joyce. He knows this is his mother, and he knows this mostly by logic though he wouldn't admit it to her. He can sense the pain this causes her, the stress and tired hue that she’s radiating. Why would he tell her such a thing? What good would that bring either of them? She was the first one who had come in to see him, following a frail looking gentleman who’s older than him but not by much. Jonathan.
Joyce. Mom. Jonathan. Brother.
The young man at the foot of his bed, the boy who looks about his age in every way but his tired face, does not give a title. He doesn’t give anything, really. He gives a small meek, ground-up sounding ‘ hey’ when he first enters that morning, but not to Will. He spares no name, no line delivery. He spares no memory, even. When Will talks to him, the boy only seems to stare and fidget. Now that the two are really on the spot, he seems to be having trouble keeping eye contact.
It's been almost three full days. He hasn't left more than once, according to Joyce.
"Take your time."
Will stares at the boy, and after a few unblinking moments, the boy stares back. There is something sorrowful in his gaze, something reflective of secrets and evenings spent awake and stories that he knows Will won’t be able to recite. Something broken sits deep inside the young man, something that aches just like Will does. Say my name, Will , it says.
Will wants to— remember, that is. The lens grows blurrier and blurrier, and the more he struggles to try and focus on the bleeding lines that trace out his fallen memories, the more he feels like he is upside down, trying to retrace his steps back to infancy.
Say my name. You know my name.
Will answers, sleepy and wounded, and his own voice sounded as foreign as he feels.
"No, I don't."