Work Text:
mike wheeler is angry. he’s furious all the time. he doesn’t know it necessarily, but it’s always burning inside of him. nothing makes sense anymore, not the way it used to pretend to be before he told his parents. before he thought he had gathered the courage and came out-- turns out he had only built a powerful enough disillusion.
he was wrong. about everything.
They weren’t going to come around. being gay was the worst thing mike could have told them. mike was intermingled with revenge killings and the supernatural and being gay was the worst thing they could think of. homosexuality sat firmly on the end of the scale, no matter what. mike was researching colleges out of state-- out of the country-- and they were more likely to accept that than him being happy.
his mother always complained how mike had closed up in the past years. she said he was hiding something and that they weren’t as close anymore. and when mike told her the secret he had been keeping at his very core, he was “wrong”. the woman who had stopped raising him-- the true Mike and not simply the body at the dinner table-- at fourteen claimed to know him better and therefore dictate who he could be: not her son. no way. she didn’t see it. he wasn’t like the other gay people she saw. mike wasn’t like them.
because he never let her see it. now he’s angry. he’d hidden himself away afraid of being seen and outed, but it was the very same visibility that could have made it easier for his mother to accept now. mike felt like he had made a horrible, irreversible mistake. a knot in his throat that could go numb, but never go away.
he had gotten his answer: no. you aren’t that way. the discussion was over. and every day that passed afterward felt like a countdown. there was no destination. mike would just have to spend the rest of his life dreaming and pretending.
he is angry. but he’d rather live angry than die quiet.