A/N: So I wasn't planning on writing any more of this series until Season 5 eventually drops, but then I got the idea for this, and I can't shake it off. Part 4 will be a crossover with Twilight. I know it sounds like a very weird crossover, but hear me out! The series is still primarily Byler, and Byler themes will feature heavily in this fic.
No Twilight knowledge is needed to read this part. I have very, very little experience with the Twilight series, so apologies if the Twilight characters are OOC.
CW: suicide attempt.
xx
This time isn't like all the other times, Will keeps telling himself. Before, he hadn't consistently been taking his trazodone; he hadn't yet told his mom or Hopper or his friends what was going on; he didn't have a therapist. Sure, it sucks that he's back to dwelling on what he can't have with Mike every second of every day—doubly so because Mike actually wants him this time and the only thing in the way is Will's stupid disease—but he's been through this before, and he didn't have the support back then that he does now. If he could get through it all those times before, he can certainly get through it now. Hell, by comparison, what he's going through now is practically easy.
He counts out ten-minute intervals every day as he works methodically through his studies, cooks with El, writes, draws, paints. "Unknown Boy," he titles all his sketches, when really they're all just variations on Mike's face, their features tweaked and exaggerated just enough to be unrecognizable. He tells his family and Carlotta and himself that he's fine, it's fine, everything's fine. They seem skeptical, but he's going through the motions, so nobody questions it too loudly.
It was stupid of him, really, thinking that he could exposure therapy his way into a relationship with Mike. Fuck the Upside-Down, really. Fuck everything that's started happening in Hawkins all over again. Fuck Vecna and Max's coma and Will's conviction that he's got to keep Mike in his life so that he can stop it all again someday. It's happening in Hawkins right now, and nobody's asked Will to uproot his life to stop it. Nobody's stopping it at all, and it's all fine without him—and without his devolving back into the puddle of a boy he becomes every time Mike Wheeler is in the room.
No one needs Will's help. He's just as useless as the rest of them. He put himself through this and strayed from his recovery for nothing.
He tells himself it's good practice, getting over Mike again. Withdrawal is a bitch, and this whole setback may have been utterly unnecessary, but if restraint from attachment is a skill, then maybe it's good for Will to have to use it before enough time passes that he forgets how. After all, it's too much to expect that he should never have to use it again in his life—that he'll learn and stop falling in love and be better.
Will isn't better. He's starting to doubt that anybody with this diagnosis ever gets better. There's remission, and there's relapse, and there's nothing else that will ever matter to him.
Carlotta says that happiness—remission, in Will's words—isn't the goal, that everybody's life has got ups and downs that they have to weather. According to Carlotta, even the happiest person in the world has problems—has bad days. Will's bad days just look more disordered than other people's do, and he's just going to have to accept that for what it is.
This isn't an epiphany: the realization of it, just like the realization that he's back in hell again, is slow. He really did believe that first day in Carlotta's office, talking about how he said goodbye-for-now to Mike, that he was okay—but he knows now that, at the time, he'd just been basking in the afterglow of his and Mike's last conversation. It hadn't worn off yet: the reality that Mike was gone again hadn't yet set in. Now that it has—
He's fine. It's fine. Everything's fine. He says it enough time that he actually starts to believe his own bullshit.
Will starts thinking obsessively about the nature of his own mental illnesses—about whether this time really is easier than the times before, whether he's got any right at all to feel so helpless and lost and angry. If it was worse last time, when he was recovering from trazodone withdrawal, or the time before, when he wasn't even on trazodone yet, then why is he making such a big deal out of how he feels with the trazodone? Why can't he just suck it up and be grateful that it's not as bad as it could be?
Still, Will thinks there must be a long-ass half-life on withdrawal—that all the times he's lived it have accumulated in his bloodstream more loudly than the trazodone has. Sure, this time isn't as bad—this time, everything's fine—but it's coming too soon after the last one, and the last one before that one, and the last.
By mid-April, this has gone on long enough that he admits to himself, at least, that everything's not fine—that he needs help. But he's spent so long telling everyone that this isn't like the other times that he feels a hot twist of shame when he imagines telling anyone, even Carlotta, what's really going on—how badly he went and messed it all up this time.
He goes through the motions, but turns inward. He starts doing everything he can to spend time alone without rousing anybody's suspicions at home. In practice, this means Will starts spending a lot of time taking walks outside, claiming that he's just trying to get into healthier habits.
It helps a little, going for walks. Without knowing the full extent of it, Carlotta suggests using the time to try to notice his surroundings and make observations, so that his inner life is a little less internal. It doesn't really work; he ends up spending all of his walks buried in his head without much awareness of where he's going. Sometimes, he'll wind up half an hour from home with no idea where he made a wrong turn or how he's supposed to get back to the house.
He spends a lot of time picturing what it felt like all those rare times he was able to kiss Mike—imagining Mike's arms back around him—wondering whether Mike has given up hope yet or moved onto the next person. Will had him. He had him, and he still screwed it all up.
Once, just once, Will wants to take what he needs without getting addicted. Just once, Will wants to be addicted without being miserable.
To stop himself from getting lost, he starts following IL-32 out of town for—miles, sometimes. It's your typical Midwestern highway, just two lanes of asphalt surrounded by nothing but grass and trees and the occasional one-story building. He walks on the grass a few feet away, follows the road south until his legs are screaming as loudly as his mind, then plops down on the ground and recovers his body, if not his mind, for a while before turning around.
It's a Saturday morning, and he's walking farther than he ever has down this path when the highway turns into a bridge over some kind of river or lake. The road still has a shoulder, so Will follows it, stops there halfway down the bridge, drapes his arms over the guardrail. Looks out on the water. It's only a narrow stretch of it, so it probably doesn't go to deep, and he finds himself wondering—
—would it be so bad, really? Either nothing happens besides Will getting soaked, or he escapes and puts an end to this misery. If he's right about death and there's really no afterlife waiting for him on the other side, he won't even have to be self-aware to feel guilty about what he knows he'd put Mom and Jonathan through by doing it.
A passing car blares its horn at him like he shouldn't be out here standing on the highway, and it's right—he shouldn't—but he doesn't care. Let the crossing cars mow him over—see what he cares. He's standing on the shoulder, anyway, plenty far enough out of their way.
It feels like Will has been flirting with this moment for years. It's never really consciously come into his mind until today, but this is the logical next step, isn't it? Plenty of people with borderline personality disorder are suicidal—it's one of the hallmarks of the disorder. It's what Carlotta has always just been a touch nervous might happen to Will, because she's seen it before, and she'll see it again, maybe in someone else but maybe in him.
If he does this, he'll never see Mike again. No—better—if he does this, he'll never care that he's never going to see Mike again.
That's what clinches it, really. He's breathing hard, and not just because he's walked a good four miles from home; his heart thuds in his chest as he swings his legs over the guardrail and lets his feet dangle above the water.
He takes a deep breath.