Remember when Will said he'd do better from now on?

Yeah. That doesn't happen. Turns out, recovering is a lot easier said than done.

He really does try. He tells himself everything will be different now that El and Jonathan know, and he even fills in Dustin and Lucas the next time he talks to each of them on the phone, although he doesn't go so far as to admit to either of them what he did (or almost did) on that bridge. Carlotta is the hardest person to tell—he's got some kind of complex where he doesn't want to admit to her that he's failed her, that none of the lessons she's taught him have apparently stuck—but he still does it in the hopes that she'll have enough advice to get him through this.

And she does have advice—tells him not to be so critical of himself, first of all, but also to keep practicing putting his mind on other things so that he's not so hyper-focused on Mike all the time. She recommends that he take up meditation, which is supposed to be all about letting go of your thoughts as soon as you think them so that thought cross in and out without ever really sticking. Unsurprisingly, Will is terrible at it. He only tries it a few times, but whenever he does, he finds his mind sticking persistently on Mike and then, on top of it, winds up feeling ashamed that he can't make it stop.

Unfortunately, now that the thought of suicide is in Will's head, it seems to be stuck there, too, right along with all his internal mental chatter about Mike. He keeps catching himself fantasizing about ways to do it, wondering what it would feel like if he did. He pretty much stands by what he thought on that bridge, that there's nothing waiting for him on the other side, and finds himself deriving an enormous amount of comfort from the idea that he'll just bleep out of existence—that the suffering will end.

He just wants his suffering to end.

The one respite Will generally gets is when he's asleep: he dreams about Mike and depression and suicide some nights, but not most. Even if he can't remember most of his dreams when he wakes, they provide enough of a buffer that he can usually get through the first few hours of his day without feeling so much baggage from all the previous days—but then that baggage piles up and up and up as the hours pass until it's time for bed and he can barely stand to breathe any longer. He starts sneaking down to the basement after everybody goes to bed, sitting by the phone where he can imagine dialing Mike's number and talking to him just one more time, just once, just to tide himself over.

Will knows where that road leads—knows he shouldn't. But some nights, the only thing that stops him from calling is the knowledge that he'd wake up the whole Wheeler house and embarrass himself to Mike's parents and probably not even get to talk to Mike at all, if he were already asleep.

Still, it's tempting. It's so tempting that, one night in early May, he even picks up the phone and has dialed half of Mike's number before he has to slam it back into its cradle and talk himself down.

He needs someone. Nobody understands—nobody knows what it's like to be addicted to another person, to want to die just to get out—the only one who might anywhere close to understand is Carlotta, and he only has her business number, and she's obviously not going to be in the office at one A.M. on a Saturday.

That's when he remembers the promise he made to Jasper. If he can't talk to anyone else about it—and it certainly doesn't feel like tonight he can, not healthily, anyway—then it's at least worth a shot. Worst-case scenario, Jasper didn't really mean what he said, and Will doesn't have to feel embarrassed about it because he hasn't got any emotional attachment to Jasper to begin with.

It takes him a few solid minutes of looking through his things (quietly, so as not to wake Jonathan) to find where he stowed Jasper's number. He eventually digs it out of the back of his underwear drawer, right there with the crumpled-up diary page he shared with Jonathan and El a few weeks ago. His heart is thudding as he tiptoes back into the hall, down the stairs, and over to the basement phone to dial it.

With the number of people who live in Jasper's house, odds are that he won't be the one to pick up the phone, if indeed anybody picks up at all. He's surprised, therefore, when somebody answers halfway through the first ring, and that somebody is, in fact, Jasper: his is the only voice that Will imagines he would recognize. "Hello?"

"Hi. Sorry. It's—it's Will Byers. You said I could call if I needed somebody to talk to, and, well…"

"I'm glad you did," says Jasper, not that that makes Will feel any less stupid than he suddenly does. "What do you need?"

"I don't know," Will admits in a whisper. "I don't know what I need. I know what I want, but none of it is good for me, and…"

Jasper allows Will to trail off into silence for a moment before asking, "How tired are you? Do you think you'll be asleep in the next, say, fifteen minutes?"

Will tries to take stock of himself. "Probably not. I'm tired, but my brain won't turn off. It's just… sorry. I'm sorry. This was stupid."

"It wasn't stupid. Hang on, okay? I'm going to call you back from my car phone while I come and get you."

"Oh, no, you don't have to—"

"I want to. Don't worry; you're not forcing me."

"But my family will be worried if they realize I'm gone."

"I won't keep you out all night. There's a 24-hour diner nearby where we can go and get some food. I'll just talk you down and bring you back before anybody even notices you're gone."

Will considers this for a second. The only way this might come back to bite him is if Jonathan wakes up and finds Will missing, but how often does Jonathan ever wake up in the night? "Okay," he says uncertainly. "But you'd better give me the number for your car phone. If you call here, it'll wake the whole house up."

So Jasper gives him the number, and Will waits five minutes and then calls back on it. Jasper is already driving—with the windows down, Will thinks, because he can hear the air whooshing as the car speeds down the road. "So you'll be here in fifteen minutes? I swear it took us at least thirty the last time you dropped me off."

"I took the long way around that time, and I normally go—uh—well over the speed limit," Jasper admits. "But I'll only go ten over after I pick you up, I promise."

"'Only?'" echoes Will.

"Five over?"

"I'll allow it," Will says dully.

Jasper laughs. "I'm actually already more like ten minutes from your house—I left pretty soon after we hung up."

"You didn't have to—put on day clothes or go looking for your keys or anything?"

"Nope." Jasper doesn't elaborate, so Will doesn't ask. "Do you want to tell me what's going on, or do you want me to get your mind off of it?"

Will considers this for a second. "I want to talk about it," he confesses, "but I'm sick of listening to myself think about it, if that makes sense."

"I hear you," Jasper murmurs. Will can barely hear him over the sound of the car driving. "You didn't do anything dangerous, did you? I don't have to take you to the hospital or anything?"

"No, nothing like that. I just—I almost called Mike, and I can't stop thinking about…"

"Dying?"

Jasper says this so matter-of-factly that Will isn't sure how to react, but he decides a second later that he likes it: at least Jasper isn't skirting around it like he's afraid of it. "Yeah. About dying."

For a few moments, all Will can hear is the wind. Then—"I'm not trying to tell you how to live your life, but maybe think of it this way? Nobody can say for sure what will happen when you die, but we do know that, if you died tonight, you wouldn't… your life would stop. I know it feels unbearable right now, but if you quit now, you won't get the chance to get through this part and be better for it. You have no way of knowing what you'll miss out on if you're not alive to see any of it."

But Will knows it's not just going to get better and stay better. It's going to get better and worse and better and worse, and he doesn't… he doesn't have the energy. He doesn't want to fight anymore, not after…

Jasper doesn't know where Will's house is, so Will has to guide him to it once Jasper crosses into Sullivan. Jasper's on the correct street and Will is in the middle of describing what the front of his house looks like when Jasper interrupts, "God, Will, how do you…?"

"What?"

"Nothing," says Jasper quickly. "Sorry. I'm here; you can come out now."

And then—then Will feels a sudden flood of calm not unlike when he first woke up in Jasper's house last month. It's going to be okay, he tells himself. Jasper's here, and Jasper coming means that Will—

—what? That Will what? He can't explain it, the way he's felt both times he's been in Jasper's proximity, and he can't explain how it could be anything but a coincidence, but the fact remains that both times he's ever been feet away from Jasper—

He takes pains to be quiet as he ascends the stairs from the basement and lets himself out of the house. When he clambers into the passenger seat of the Ferrari, Jasper claps him on the back for a moment. His hand is cold, too cold—Will can feel it even through the sleeve of his T-shirt. "Hey, kid. Let's get some food in you, okay?"

"Why are you calling me 'kid?' You're, like, what, nineteen? Twenty?"

As he puts the car in gear, Jasper looks conflicted about how to answer for reasons that totally escape Will. "I'm only sixteen, actually," he says finally. "My sister and our foster siblings and I are all still in high school."

"Is it Rosalie or Alice who's your biological sister?"

Jasper snorts. "Rosalie. Definitely Rosalie. Alice is my girlfriend."

"You're dating your foster sister? Isn't that weird?"

"You ask a lot of questions, you know that?"

Will shrugs. "You know all my innermost secrets, and I know hardly anything about you."

"That's fair," says Jasper, but it seems like he's saying it more to himself than to Will. "Well, let's see. My last name is Hale—Jasper Hale. I'm from, um… from Texas."

"Really? You don't have a Southern accent."

"I had to beat it out of myself. It took more than a few years."

"You say that like you're a lot older than sixteen."

Jasper purses his lips. "Sometimes, I feel a lot older than I am physically."

"How long have you been living in the North?"

"Most of my life. I don't really… I don't like talking about my life from before the Cullens took me in. It was… let's just say I didn't have the happiest formative years."

Will nods. "That's fair. Sorry if I—"

"No, you haven't done anything wrong, Will. It's okay."

For a second, Will just marvels that he's sitting here in Jasper's car having a normal conversation as if—as if he weren't thinking about killing himself just three minutes ago. What is it about Jasper that makes Will feel so at ease—so stable? He'd thought it was drugs last time, but it can't be drugs tonight, not when he hasn't lost any time or passed out or done anything besides be on the phone with Jasper when Jasper pulled up to the house and Will's mood suddenly switched over. It's almost like Jasper is deliberately manipulating him, like something about him—

—but that's impossible. The only way would be if Jasper were one of Brenner's experiments, like El, but Brenner was never operating in Texas, and not even El can sense or affect the way other people feel.

And then—

—then, Will decides he doesn't care. He's been a borderline disaster for so long that he can hardly remember the last time he felt the way Jasper makes him feel, and if being around Jasper means he can remember it again, remember it and live it like it's his own, then Will doesn't care how strange it is or how Jasper's doing it or what it means about supernatural forces in the world: he just wants to take advantage of it as much as he can.

A stray thought crosses his mind that he needs to be careful—doesn't want to displace his disordered attachment from Mike onto Jasper instead. He dismisses it so easily that Carlotta would be proud.