ok but please consider. isaac turning bitter towards will after he leaves. because i (like many people in this fandom) don't think will told the rest of upp about ANYTHING before he left. i'm not even sure they knew he died. so will leaves and- hang on a minute im getting into the rand parallels again. oops. shit. ANYWAYS. will leaves deadwood and the rest of upp are left reeling. and the years go by and maybe they start to drift apart. maybe eventually one of them sees will on the news and they realize he's not dead, not missing, he just...left. and i think they all cope in different ways. i think they all know there must have been a reason, he wouldn't just leave them like that, he loved them. they loved him. but i think isaac, over time, isaac brooks who has been betrayed so many times, who doesn't really have anyone anymore, who has grown used to the thought that everyone is going to abandon him eventually, starts to think, of course he did. of course william left, left them all, left him. and even though he knows, still, there must have been a real reason, that fear and hopelessness from fucking years of trauma weighing on him starts to overpower that logic. and he starts to get angrier and more and more bitter and it starts to push norah and lui away even more than they already were. and then bella moves out, leaves town to go live as far away from deadwood as she can manage. and then norah goes to college in new haven, and it's just him and lui, and lui was the only one of them who was ever really content in deadwood but he wants to do other things, too, travel the world and start researching the occult all over. so he does. he wanted to stay, somewhat, at least to be there for isaac, but isaac has been...unpleasant to be around, in recent years, and lui knows it would only hurt them both. so he leaves and it's just isaac and his mom, twenty-year-old isaac brooks and his mother who's barely in her fifties but already seems to be wasting away. i think she dies when he's twenty-three years old and then it's just him, stuck in deadwood, working minimum wage and fucking miserable because he knew he never had potential, he always knew it, but some part of him wanted to cling to that hope of proving every adult in his life wrong. and he didn't. and it's just him in a too-big house he inherited with a cross around his neck and no faith that god ever cared about him, because why would he. he starts going back to church anyways. he starts trying his best to help out in the community because maybe a little bit of his teenaged stubbornness is still there, and maybe he wants to at least make a positive mark on the world, however small, even if he's never going anywhere. and he starts to at least feel a little more content with his place in the world. he reconnects with bella, and she visits every so often, tries to convince him to leave but he doesn't really see the point. so he stays.
.....and then maybe, years later, one of the others decides to reach out. try and have the four of them reconnect, be friends again. norah reconnected with will years ago, through a few mutual friends norah made at college, and learned the whole reason will left. isaac's been so disconnected from the world of superheroes, staying in deadwood, he has no idea of anything that's happened, except that once when he was 17 or 18, when he and norah and lui were still together, the whole town had to evacuate for a while. even then he stayed out of it. solving mysteries didn't really have an appeal anymore, and he had a bit of hatred for superheroes after, well- everything. them ignoring deadwood until that day. william leaving and becoming one.
but. it's been years. he's twenty-seven. he wants to get over it. he wants to be like they were when they were kids. so he accepts, and he learns about what happened when they were 16, gets the full story of why they were left behind- he's still a little bitter, he thinks, because will could've at least told them, if only he hadn't been such a fucking coward- but, then, he was sixteen. they all were. they made mistakes. mistakes that william wants to try to fix. better late than never- isaac still has a right to be angry, though, and the other three agree, and will's doing his best to make it up to him and to norah and lui.
william and his other friends- the ones he made in new haven- are famous famous now. on account of the superhero thing. the red-haired one, dakota (isaac likes him a lot), is a big name in reforming the way superheroes operate. getting rid of the corruption in the system. and, after years of wanting to but having to deal with far too many larger-scale complications, the prime defenders have finally gotten to the project will wanted to work on most: helping out deadwood. it's still riddled with supernatural threats, and it's still not assisted by anyone, not anymore. so they want to fix that. finally have the heroes be there for it. (finally have will be there for isaac.)
i think it takes a long time, and i think it's tough because there's so much else to do and there are so many old wounds and all isaac's friends are fucking famous, even if in norah and lui's case it's only in very specific niches, and he's just isaac brooks and it's impossible not to feel a little bit of envy and lack of self-worth from that, but. i think they heal. i think they become friends again and i think after a while isaac is finally convinced to leave deadwood for the first time and i think with all the improvements it's had he's finally really, truly happy staying there but he's not stuck anymore. he goes out and visits his friends and they visit him and idk man. he's happy.
..........jesus CHRIST this post got away from me it wasnt even supposed to be about anything past isaac getting to be angry. fucking hell. adhd huh. man. funny thing is i don't even think isaac DOES get stuck in deadwood. i think it makes sense narratively but it makes me sad and there are always other routes that still make sense so im always flip-flopping between this and that. and yet i still make this long-ass post that genuinely took me like an hour to write. christ. hope you enjoyed i am simply a highschool student with failing grades who is supposed to be doing chores and homework right now while my parents are out or else i'll get in trouble but instead i have spent hours on my puter making posts about upp. be grateful /vvvsilly
oh yeah this post was inspired by me adding "screwing in a lightbulb" by everybody's worried about owen to my upp playlist and then remembering the last bit of it + this thought i had earlier btw. if anyone is interested in that kinda stuff
