Chapter Text
When they frantically enter the Hogwarts’ Common Room, after encountering the Fat Lady’s stammering shock as she accepted the hastily thrown password even despite the Slytherin that was present (that she’d never have granted access had the situation not absolutely called for it), they do so to the shock of a few lounging Gryffindor students.
They pay them no mind as Mike shouts an alarming: “Where does he sleep?”
Lucas leads the charge, uncovering the fact that Will was nowhere to be seen in a vacant bed, covers hurriedly thrown aside, and his notebook, open, almost damningly, on the last drawing he’d been working on.
The dread is so thick in the air that Mike can’t hear his own heart beating in his chest, though he knows it’s thundering and loud.
“El,” Mike says, swallowing. “Find a professor. Tell them Will’s missing, and that we’re going to the seventh floor to find him.”
It was an eerie, disquieting silence when Mike and the others finally entered the Come and Go Room, as they’d now done dozens of times before. This wasn’t like those times, however.
The room had lost its vibrancy, and the normally roaring fire was unlit. The window to the Forbidden Forest was wide open, like the maw of a python upon its prey, and the room was frighteningly cold.
“He was supposed to be here,” Mike whispers, distraught. “Why isn’t he here?”
“Mike—” Lucas touches his arm, and Mike jumps.
“I don’t understand—he can’t—he was supposed to be here!”
THWIP! THWIP!
They startle, and Max exclaims, “What was that?” But then they see it.
The wallpaper torn in huge diagonal strips from the wall—and beyond it: something strange; something… almost ethereal.
A tattered black curtain, fluttering under an invisible wind, and a hand pressing up against it; only visibly seen with a trained eye.
A small, pale, familiar hand.
Mike darts toward it, and faint whispering and murmuring noises grow louder in his ears, the words unintelligible, but Will’s hand disappears as sudden as he’d seen it, and then he can’t hear anything for the life of him through the buzzing in his ears.
Max leaps out to stop him, clutching his arm in a frenzied grasp. “Don’t you dare, Mike—”
“Let go, he needs me—” he says frantically.
“Go through there, and you won’t be alive long enough to help,” Max yells, eyes wide and hair a frizzy mess, so unlike her, that he actually listens.
“What?” Mike whispers, deadly still.
“I’ve only read about it, there were campaigns for its removal and destruction, especially after the Second Wizarding War—”
Dustin flickers to life, eyes straying away from the silken cloth swaying in the wall. “Fuck, of course… It’s the Veil.”
Max nods, biting her lip, “A secret of the Department of Mysteries that suddenly wasn’t so secret anymore. It’s said that anyone who passes through… they never return.”
Mike’s expression shutters into blankness.
Days pass with Will missing after they recount what they’d seen to Headmistress Sprout, who had invited them up to her office, quietly uttering a password to a Gargoyle that had shifted to offer passage up a long, winding staircase.
Aurors had swarmed Hogwarts’ grounds; it was decidedly difficult to find a place out of their earshot as they patrolled day and night. The seventh floor had been entirely cordoned off, par the Headmistress’ office, to which you had to be invited and formally accompanied to pass the Aurors guarding it.
And still, there had been no word of Will’s whereabouts; no desire to even interview them (past the initial encounter, when they all had, one after another, talked about what they’d seen in the Come and Go Room to the rapidly paling faces of their teachers). But it was them who had the most pressing information about where Will could possibly be, and not one Auror had actually questioned them.
Each night that goes by, Mike remembers Will’s small, pale hand reaching out to him in his nightmares, and he feels a sinking realisation that Will was being failed every time he bolts awake.
There were talks, as well, of shutting Hogwarts down.
Some students had already been pulled from the school by panicked parents in droves, including Lucas and Dustin, to their immediate antagonism. Mike and Nancy both fought to stay, and surprisingly won out against their mother when they said that they wouldn’t just abandon their friends; that they’d rather die than go home with their tails between their legs. She’d simply said that they may have no choice when Hogwarts decided to send all students home regardless, but had backed off at their resolute expressions; while Ted, their father, hadn’t so much as raised any resistance.
The idea of Hogwarts closing, to Mike, felt too much that they were just… giving up on Will, that Mike had yelled obscenities at the Aurors gossiping on duty about it—of course, earning himself a detention he hadn’t showed up to (but then hadn’t been challenged on attending again).
Then, new Ministry officials turned up to the school, and while in his Potions classroom, pretending to listen to his Head of House’s instructions with an empty gaze casted on the empty seat beside him, Professor Fledgling enters.
Professor Malfoy raised an eyebrow in question, though Mike notices his eyes drifting toward him for a second too long, as though already ascertaining what it is that was needed.
“If you could excuse Michael Wheeler for today?” he asks, with utmost respect.
“Of course,” Professor Malfoy says demurely, getting promptly back to explaining the usefulness of flobberworms in whichever-potion they were making today; Mike doesn’t know. He’s not exactly had an appetite for learning since…
Mike grabs his bags quickly, and follows silently behind Professor Fledgling to the increasingly familiar Gargoyle statue sitting idly in an otherwise vacant corridor.
“Cockroach cluster,” the professor says, lips twisting in revulsion at the asinine password. “They’re… ah, waiting for you.”
But Mike was already flying ahead up the staircase, panic fluttering in his chest. Was it about Will? Had they found him? Was he alive, or… or had El’s premonition come true? Had he been found… dead?
“And you have to believe me… because if you don’t, it won’t be my fault if something happens to Will, it’ll be yours.”
Mike swallows, throat clicking in its dryness.
Headmistress Sprout’s office was not unlike something you’d see in a Herbology greenhouse; it quite frankly felt alive. There were pots streaking the walls with hanging fanged geraniums, walls hidden mostly behind tall, leafy plants encroaching up to the ceiling in certain places, a section of the wall dedicated to portraits of past Hogwarts’ Headmasters and Headmistresses, only added to the collection upon their passing, but muttering amongst each other so that the there was always a hum of noise when you entered.
But it felt especially noisy now. Sitting directly across from Sprout was a tall woman, with the barest crease of wrinkles around her eyes, and very bushy, wild hair framing her face in crazed curls.
She looked remarkably familiar.
One of the portraits mutters egregiously, “In all my years, an Unspeakable visiting Hogwarts, it’s unheard of!”
Mike’s eyes round in shock. “You’re Hermione Granger.”
“Pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mr. Wheeler. Might I suggest you take a seat?” she says kindly.
Mike does so, although it takes all his purebred training to do so gracefully.
“What’s going on?” he asks, hands tightening on his knees anxiously.
Hermione looks toward Sprout, and Sprout toward him, her mouth frowning. “Will’s been found.”
Mike’s heart, he swears, stops. For an alarming second, he thinks he feels himself tilt in his seat, about to faint, but he shakes himself out of it.
“Is he… alive?” he murmurs, afraid to know the answer.
“Yes,” Hermione Granger utters at once, and Mike flags in his seat with his fingers tingling, stark relief painting his features. “But only barely. He’s weak… Whatever it is he encountered beyond the Veil, and having come back alive… It doesn’t bear thinking about.”
Mike licks his dry mouth. “Can I see him?”
“Soon,” Sprout replies to him now, leaning across her table. “He’s been asking for you. We imagine he’ll be ready for more visitors in a few days. He needs to regain his strength before then. But he’s alive, Mr. Wheeler. It’s… dare I say, but a miracle,” the way she says it, and the inexplicable glance Unspeakable Granger exchanges with her, all serve to make Mike think that this was almost a bad thing.
But Will being alive, he couldn’t imagine it being anything but inconceivably good.
School soon returns to a state of normalcy. The situation is put under swift wraps, while Aurors still stalk near the Forbidden Forest but desert the castle completely, and soon enough, students re-enter Hogwarts’ once-deserted corridors.
The Daily Prophet creates a piece on Will Byers having been recovered safely by Auror teams, having been lost in the Forest but saved by a lonesome centaur, and the piece is designed to question the state of Creature’s Rights in full. Perhaps, the article suggests, the whole malarkey had been staged in order to paint centaurs as looking out for their fellow wizards, in return helping their cause in the Wizengamot for politicians campaigning for Equal Status amongst them.
A load of bullshit, basically.
But it means Lucas and Dustin come back, and are regaled also with the news that Will was stunningly alive, and finally able to talk where he was being held in the Infirmary Wing for observation.
When they enter the Infirmary—a long, high-ceilinged room with large windows that allowed the light of day to cast a natural shine across the room—they locate Will propped up on a cot with thick wool blankets pushed to his knees.
Mike almost—after a week of thinking about the absolute worst-case scenarios—can’t believe his eyes, as his gaze befalls Will smiling softly at them, sitting straighter as what must be his brother—oh, that Hufflepuff he’d seen dart toward his sister in the Great Hall, he remembers—keeps a tight grasp on his hand, squeezing, and his Mum brushes his fringe aside with delicate fingers.
The closer they get, Mike does notice the faint stain of the horrors he must have endured beyond the Veil in the gaunt paleness of his cheeks, and a blackened mark that looks almost like the curl of a clawed hand across his collarbone. Will’s very quick to tug his hospital-appointed gown across it, hiding it from his curious, horrified vantage.
“Hey, guys. Missed me?”
They pile on him in a round of hugs that has the matron—a no-nonsense witch in charge of their welfare—throwing out fierce reprimands until they tug themselves begrudgingly away.
“This guy. Have we missed you?” Lucas starts, voice worked up.
“You wouldn’t know the half of it, mate,” Dustin seconded quickly.
“It was mental with you gone. And you won't believe this, but Rebecca Hayes was crying over you,” Lucas says, wagging his eyebrows mischievously.
It was a poignant pause where Will lets his attention wane in favour of Mike, before Mike startled awake out of his... staring.
“Welcome back, Will,” Mike said so warmly that his cheeks burned. He felt that he was fighting the part of himself that threatened to break down into tears, too, like Jennifer Hayes, who didn't even know Will like Mike did.
“It’s certainly good to be back, Mike,” Will replies, a wan but genuine smile broadening like the gentlest sunshine across his face.