send me an angel (right now)

“Can you blame him? Nobody likes to talk about Will. It must be exhausting feeling like you’re the only one who misses somebody.”

The words feel like a punch to the gut. Hawkins, Indiana isn’t particularly forgiving to people that don’t fit its uncanny, cookie-cutter standards. Apparently, a missing child doesn’t adhere to Hawkins’ aesthetic. So, after the mandated search parties and the assembly and the week wherein everyone dropped off sympathy pot roasts for Joyce, Hawkins moved on from Will Byers. It was like he never even existed.

Back then, the hardest realization was that it was no longer ‘Mike and Will’; it was just ‘Mike’. It is just ‘Mike’.

But Mike doesn’t like being Mike without Will to soften his sharp edges, to make him laugh and feel fuzzy on the inside, to remind him he’s human under his tireless doubt, to let the sun in when there’s seemingly no light in the world. ‘Mike’ feels like a fragmented sentence without ‘Will’.”

(or Will goes missing seven years before canon and Steve takes his place in 1983 ft. a whole lot of yearning and a whole lot of doing whatever the heck i want with canon because i hate the duffer brothers).