Chapter Text
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David Bowie - Changes
The Smiths - Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now
Fleetwood Mac - Landslide
Painting makes things make sense.
No matter how complicated the world is, there is always this: shapes, colors, shades and hues, an array of light and shadows forming an image, a story.
Will has his walkman on, and it’s David Bowie crooning through his headphones so he doesn’t wake El or his mom in the rest of the house.
He almost doesn’t hear the knock on his window. He whirls around and almost rubs his eyes, as if the late night could be making him see things. But even when he blinks, he’s still there—
Mike Wheeler is outside his window, perched in a tree, hands pressed to the glass.
Will is still for a moment, processing, and it’s so reminiscent of a simpler time, when Mike would show up at his window to sneak in for a sleepover, back before everything got messy and they grew distant, that Will almost thinks he’s dreaming.
Through the glass, surrounded by leaves and haloed by a streetlight outside, Mike lifts a sheepish hand in a wave.
Will pushes his headphones down around his neck, puts his paintbrush in a cup of murky water, and crosses to the window, pushing the window open with a heaving upward shove, and Mike all but tumbles in through the opening, bringing with him the smell of beer and sweat, landing in a heap on Will’s bed before leaping up, perky and victorious.
“Ha!” says Mike. “Dustin said I wouldn’t be able to pull it off anymore, I told him it was just like riding a bike, you don’t just forget how to climb a tree into someone’s house—”
“What are you doing here?”
Mike stands from the bed, flushed and swaying slightly, and it’s all Will can do not to take a precautionary step back with Mike in his space like this.
“It’s your birthday,” says Mike.
Will almost laughs.
When they were younger, he and Mike used to stay up late the day before their birthdays, waiting until midnight, so they could be the first to wish each other a happy birthday.
Except, Mike had missed 14 and 15, and by 16 they could barely be called acquaintances let alone friends, so now that Will is minutes from 17, Mike has been far from his mind.
“How drunk are you?” Will asks.
Mike blows a raspberry, tucks his fingers into his jeans pockets. “Just a tad.”
“And you came here to—”
“Say happy birthday.”
“Okay,” Will says. Mike just smiles at him, like him showing up here isn’t completely out of the blue.
Mike is just kind of smiling at him, swaying, glassy-eyed, and it’s disorienting. Because Will’s seen Mike in the past few years, obviously, but mostly from across school hallways or the cafeteria. Never close up like this. He’s so familiar, but so different. His hair is longer and has a little curl to it. His angles are more defined.
Will clears his throat. “Well?”
Mike looks over Will’s shoulder where a digital clock shows the numbers 11:59.
“Oh. Well, you still have a minute left.”
“Why?”
“’Cause that’s how birthdays work, I don’t make the rules—”
“I mean, why do you want to tell me happy birthday? It’s… I mean, it’s been a while.” He crosses his arms across his chest.
Mike shrugs. “Even more reason to do it.”
Will is unimpressed, but Mike doesn’t notice, looking past Will, right to the easel, the canvas with wet paint in pinks and blues and silvery greys.
“Whoa,” breathes Mike. “Did you paint this?”
He strides across the small room, long limbs crossing the distance easily, stopping in front of the canvas with a slack expression.
It makes Will fidget, stepping half-toward the easel protectively, like Mike might take it or touch it or smear it, but Mike just stares on while a slow smile grows across his face.
It’s an abstract cityscape, skyscrapers reaching toward the sky but in thick, impressionist strokes and swirling vibrant colors. Tucked against the corner of the canvas is the letter that inspired it, the scholarship offer that only he knows about.
“Yeah,” says Will. He wants to defend it, apologize for it, explain it, but his art teacher has been scolding that out of him for all of high school, so he leaves it at that.
“This is amazing! God, you’ve always been good, but you’ve gotten so much better since—” He pauses. Cuts a glance to Will and goes back to eyeing the painting. Since we were friends. “Well, like you said. It’s been a while.”
“Yeah,” says Will, and suddenly he’s very tired. Not just because it’s late, but because he doesn’t want to replay the last years of Mike pulling away and Will getting over it. He remembers perfectly fine, thanks. “Look, thanks, I appreciate it and all but—I was going to bed, actually. You should probably…”
It lingers in the air before Mike catches his implication and deflates. “Right,” he says. “Of course. Sorry.”
Mike looks down for a beat before turning, slowly, back toward the window, as if hoping Will might stop him. But Mike stops himself and whirls back toward Will and Will tenses.
“Look, I’m sorry, you know?” says Mike.
It’s the last thing Will expected to hear from his mouth. But Mike’s eyes are wide and earnest, his expression pleading, and he looks so much like the Mike that Will had really fucking loved, once.
“We used to be—like, best friends. And I know it’s my fault we’re not anymore but—” Mike breaks off and exhales. “Just—happy birthday, yeah?”
He moves to duck out the window, shoulders hunched, and Will is frozen, the moment splitting into two choices. Like a choose-your-own-adventure book. To protect your heart and let Mike walk out of your life, possibly for good this time, turn to page 3. To risk getting your heart stomped on again and stop him, turn to page 7.
Will jolts forward. It was never really a choice.
“Wait!” Will says, and Mike turns where he’s halfway out the window, crouched, perfectly framed by it, searching Will’s eyes with something adjacent to hope. Will sighs. “Do you…”
Mike is silent, still hanging out the window.
No turning back now.
“Do you actually want to be friends again, or are you just—drunk, and nostalgic?”
Mike’s brows furrow, not confused, but almost hurt. But then the pinch between his brows smooths and Mike looks him dead in the eye.
He seems stone cold sober when he says, “I want you in my life again.”
Will exhales, not having realized he was holding his breath, but it comes out a sigh. Which is good, because it makes him sound like he’s annoyed or exasperated, which is a lot safer than the truth. That Mike coming here, saying this, feels like a dream, and he doesn’t trust it, but god does he like it.
“You shouldn’t go all the way home this late,” Will said. “If you need to crash—”
Mike surges from the window. “Yeah? A sleepover, like old times?”
Will nods, not trusting his voice when Mike is suddenly in his space again, eyes bright, smiling. Will turns away to get the spare blankets and pillows down from his closet.
They don’t say much as they awkwardly dance around each other in the small space. Mike settles on the floor next to Will’s bed, just like he used to when they were kids and they would stay up late talking until the dark outside turned bright again.
This time, Will just asks Mike if it’s okay to shut off the light.
Once Will is tucked in bed, he listens to Mike breathing a few inches and several thousand miles away.
“Goodnight,” Mike whispers, shortly before his breathing evens out as he's lulled to sleep.
Will stays awake for a long time.
✧⋄⋆⋅⋆⋄✧⋄⋆⋅⋆⋄✧
Max slams Will’s locker shut, closing the door he’s been using as a shield while he updates her about the night before.
“And then what?” Max demands.
“What do you mean? That’s it.” Will pointedly re-opens his locker to continue rearranging his textbooks like a kid playing with their food. “He slept over. Snuck out and left the next morning. Said see you around.”
“See you around? What a complete dick.”
Max has always kind of hated Mike, but back when they were a party, it was more of a begrudging frenemies situation. But when Mike started distancing himself, Will turned to Max and they grew close. Then, when Mike dumped El out of the blue, splitting the party irreparably, Max, Will, and El became a sort of trio.
So when it comes to Mike Wheeler, Max maybe has reason to be protective.
“What do you want him to have said?”
“I don’t know, sorry? Or thank you?”
“He did say sorry. And what would he thank me for—?”
“For not kicking his sorry ass out in the street? What kind of idiot thinks he can just come knocking on your window after three years of ignoring you? I should kick his ass—”
“No!” Will says. “No, don’t talk to him about it.”
Max is still dating Lucas, who is still friends with Mike, so sometimes Max peripherally interacts with Mike. Will stopped asking for updates a while ago.
Max goes silent, glancing over Will’s shoulder down the hallway.
“And anyways, it’s not like it means anything,” Will says. “He was drunk. In a week we’ll forget about this and laugh.”
Max clears her throat, nodding discreetly toward something behind Will, and that’s the only warning he gets before he is—for the second time in 12 hours—shocked by the sight of Mike Wheeler stood in front of him.
Mike, wearing a black and white Hellfire Club baseball tee and a backpack slung over one shoulder, stopped in the middle of the bustling hallway with his eyes on Will.
“Hey, man, thanks for saving me last night,” Mike says, like it is totally normal for him to acknowledge Will in the hallways in the year of their lord 1989. “See you around, yeah?”
Will squints at Mike for half a beat, then Mike thumps Will on the shoulder in the bro way that guys do and heads off toward class.
Max, who of course, watched this encounter with narrowed eyes and a dangerous mix of humor and defensiveness, arches her eyebrows at Will.
“And, uh, just out of curiosity,” she says. Will ducks forward to hide his face in the dark depths of his locker. “What was that?”
“I have no idea,” Will says. When he emerges from his locker, she’s still arching her brows at him.
“Hm,” she says, pointedly. It’s somehow worse than if she’d said something sarcastic and cutting.
She ruffles his hair, half affectionate and half pitying, before heading off to her first period.
Will finishes gathering his things from his locker and he turns toward his first class of the day, the senior level art class. He shoulders his backpack and carries his box of art supplies in one hand.
Mike is only a bit ahead of them down the hall, tall and bony with his long dark hair that stands out in a crowd, and across the way, and Will can’t help but keep his eyes glued to Mike as he moves down the hallway.
They’ve barely made it two yards down the hall—the crowds of students milling around thinning out as the bell threatens to ring—before a mass of something collides with his shoulder and then hands are shoving him back and Will barely has a second to register that he’s run into Troy Walsh before he’s stumbling back.
“Watch it, faggot.”
Will throws his arm out to catch himself and his art supplies box tumbles to the ground and opens, sending pencils and erasers and paints and brushes scattering in all directions.
Troy and his entourage laugh and keep walking. Troy has been pestering Will for as long as Will can remember. Even though he mostly stopped messing with the rest of the party, it’s like Will is a special case. But then, Troy’s taunts to Will had always hit too close to the truth.
Will inhales, long and shaky, fighting the burning behind his eyes that threatens, and exhales. He won’t cry, because he’s not weak like they think he is. He won’t give them that satisfaction.
He kneels down and starts gathering pencils. The box’s clasp is broken and won’t stay closed anymore, but whatever. He keeps his head down until his eyes stop watering, and when he glances up, it’s none other than Mike’s face he’s drawn to in the crowd—stopped across the hallway, watching Will with a frown, frozen, conflicted.
The bell rings, trilling sharply, and the students in the hallway disperse around Will and his mess of art supplies which scatter further across the hall under the uncaring feet of a hundred students.
Mike and Will are the only stationary ones in a sea of people moving around them, and then the hallway is empty and it’s just them. Mike breaks their gaze to look over both shoulders, making sure they’re alone.
Only then does Mike move from his frozen state to close the distance between them, crossing the hallway and kneeling a safe distance away from Will to help gather stray colored pencils.
“Are you okay?” Mike asks.
Will frowns and ducks his head again, focusing on the task at hand, shoveling things haphazardly into the box at this point.
“I’m fine, it’s fine—but we’re gonna be late to class now,” Will says.
He couldn’t really care less about being late, but it feels safer to complain about that than to admit that Will has just gotten used to Troy’s little abuses as a part of life.
“Hey, you’re right,” Mike says, and the grin in his voice is so clear that Will lifts his face to see it. It’s like sunshine, that smile, the rays of it warming Will’s face. “We’re already late. You wanna do something fun?”
Will narrows his eyes.
“What do you mean?”
That damned smile only grows, and well, Will’s never been able to say no to Mike Wheeler.
✧⋄⋆⋅⋆⋄✧⋄⋆⋅⋆⋄✧
One thing that’s changed in the time since they were last friends: Mike has a car. Where Will’s is a falling apart junker he bought with scraped-together savings from working at the used book store, Mike’s car is shiny and new, a gift from his parents from when he’d turned 16, apparently.
So Mike drives, turns the radio on and rolls the windows down. Will watches the road, watches each turn he makes, and tries not to watch Mike himself out of the corner of his eye.
Will is expecting the arcade, or the diner, maybe, but Mike turns away from what makes up Hawkins’ so-called downtown and keeps driving, up the hill, in the woods, on a road that grows more and more narrow, less and less paved.
Will is halfway through crafting a casual joking way to ask whether Mike was plotting to murder him out here when the car takes a last curve and the trees open up to a wide clearing leading to an overlook. Will peers out the window as Mike parks the car just at the edge, and Will gasps when he sees the view.
He’s never seen Hawkins from high up and far away like this, and it shocks him. It’s kind of beautiful—browns and greys and reds of buildings with greenery shrouding it and endless blue sky above.
“Whoa,” Will breathes. Doesn’t mean to, really, but it’s worth the risk because Mike’s got a pleased little smile on his face.
Will ducks out of the car and goes toward the edge of the overlook, just taking it all in, while Mike rolls down the car’s windows and turns the volume up to the max so they can hear the music. Mike materializes beside him after a moment and when Will turns to sneak a look at him, he catches Mike already watching him. Like he had been for a minute or so.
Mike glances away and back again and away before turning fully, and Will follows his lead in climbing up onto the hood of the car to recline with their legs kicked out. It feels like a secret club, being up here alone together.
“Didn’t know you had a secret hideaway,” Will said.
“Not totally a secret,” Mike says. “Eddie Munson showed me and some of the other Hellfire Club guys, but I’ve never run into anyone here. It’s good to just…”
“Escape for a while,” Will finishes.
Mike smiles. “Yeah.”
They fall into a silence that’s more comfortable than not, looking out over the town that looks so, so small from up here.
“Now, tell me, Will Byers,” Mike says, rolling on his side to turn fully toward Will, all serious, and a jolt of panic rushes through Will but then—”In the last few years—you ever smoke weed?”
“Mike Wheeler,” Will parrots back, “I’m more shocked at the implication that you have.”
“We’ve both done some growing up, yeah?”
“I guess so,” Will says. Then, “But for the record, I have.”
“Smoked? Seriously?”
“Jonathan’s, like, a full-blown stoner nowadays. Whenever he comes back from college we smoke together, it’s—it’s nice.”
“Well,” says Mike, and he reaches into his jacket and summons a lumpy but hefty joint and dangles it between his thumb and two fingers, “does that mean you’re in?”
Will raises an eyebrow like a challenge.
A minute later, Will is watching Mike light the joint. He never thought it a particularly intimate experience, but Mike looks good doing anything. Mike presses the joint between his lips, and god, now Will is looking at his lips. One hand loops around the lighter while the other curls around the joint, protecting the flame of the lighter against the wind as he lights up, inhaling. He looks like he’s had some practice.
“Trying to impress me?” Will teases, and Mike startles out a laugh that turns into a cough as he wheezes out smoke, breaking out of the trance of watching Mike’s lips and fingers.
“Please, I haven’t even tried to do smoke rings yet,” Mike says. Then Mike is inhaling again, long and slow, chest rising with it, the curl of smoke intoxicating even though Will hasn’t taken a hit.
When he passes the joint and Will’s inhaling the acrid smoke himself, Mike watching him in turn, it only gets worse. As the smoke hits his system and his head grows light and cloudy, he finds himself just looking at Mike. He can’t help it. He looks so different from when Will had last had him memorized; it would take some time to relearn it. Will was more than willing to take the time.
They pass the joint back and forth for a few minutes while Mike attempts his best smoke rings, failing most of the time but cheering for himself when he manages one clean one.
Eventually, they settle down, finishing up the joint, and that’s when Mike turns to him.
“I hear you and El are headed to IU Bloomington,” Mike says, too casually.
Will’s stomach drops and for a second Will worries Mike had seen the letter in his room, but then, he’d been drunk, right?
“Uh, yeah, that’s the plan,” says Will.
It’s not a lie. That is the plan that has been established. It’s just that no one knows about the letter from the prestigious school in Chicago with a scholarship offer that could change his life.
“The plan?”
The instinct to tell Mike rises in him so fast and familiar it shocks him. Like this is the same old Mike he would tell anything, back when he was a kid having panic attacks in crowded places. He glances over at Mike, the smoke curling around him, making him hazy and dreamlike, impossibly beautiful.
“Yeah,” Will says. “The plan. It makes sense. It’s affordable, it’s not too far, we can come visit Mom on the weekends.”
“Sounds,” Mike says, hesitant, “reasonable?”
And of course Mike can sense that Will’s conflicted, because his tells have been the same since he was a kid—he’s fidgeting with his sleeves, his fingers, he’s looking away and talking too fast.
It scares him a little, that Mike still knows him. It’s that, or maybe the weed, that makes Will brazen.
“Can I tell you something?” Will asks, sitting up from where they’re reclined and turning toward Mike, folding a leg under himself.
At the movement, Mike sits up too, mirroring him easily, and they’re face-to-face again.
“Of course,” Mike says. “Obviously. Are you okay?”
Will can’t help but laugh. “I’m fine. It’s—a good kind of problem, if anything. You can’t…” he pauses. “No one else knows about this yet.”
Mike prods Will’s shoulder, “Come on, your secret’s safe with me. You gotta tell me now.”
“It’s—I got a full ride to the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and—” and this part he hasn’t even admitted to himself out loud— “I really want to go.”
“Wait, seriously?”
Will nods.
Mike breaks out into a grin, wide and unabashed. Then he throws his arms out and leans over their curled up legs to hug Will, tugging him by the shoulders toward Mike.
“Holy shit, Will, that’s amazing!”
Will goes, half shocked and half eager, tucking his nose against Mike’s shoulder and breathing him in. Shit, he really is high now, he must be, because Mike smells familiar, clean skin mixed with the scent of weed. Will puts his arms up around Mike’s back and he tries not to cling too desperately.
“I’m gonna catch your hair on fire,” Will threatens, because the joint in his hand is still burning. It’s so ridiculously not what he wants to say that he giggles, outright giggles, and then Mike laughs too and they’re sitting there, stoned, hugging, and laughing leaned up against each other.
Will’s the one to finally pull back, maybe after a beat or twenty too long, but Mike lets go of him hesitantly, arms hovering over Will’s shoulders a beat too long like he wants to touch them, keep touching him. But then they drop to his lap.
Will extends the joint, dwindling now. Mike reaches out, and steadies Will’s hand with his own where it hovers in the air, entirely too much skin-to-skin contact just to pass a joint, and Will feels hot from the inside out. He’s sure he’s blushing, like some fair maiden in a fairy tale, where just Mike touching his hands awakens something in him.
Goddammit. He’d really meant not to let Mike back under his skin like this.
“So you’re gonna go to Chicago, then? Leave this small town in your rearview mirror, forget all about us little people, go be a famous artist?”
“Shut up,” Will says, shoving his shoulder playfully. God, flirtatiously?
When Mike next offers him the joint, Will shakes his head. He’d had enough, clearly.
“Why shut up? It’s not so crazy, I mean—a full ride?” Mike is grinning again and Will is a little lost in it for a minute, watching Mike’s lips stretch around white teeth. Mike continues, “Why haven’t you told anyone?”
Will tears his eyes away from Mike’s mouth and meets his eyes. Watching Will, studying him.
“I don’t know,” Will says, honestly. “I only got the letter a few days ago.”
It’s a weak excuse. He’d been bursting to tell someone since he opened it.
“It’s just,” Will says, “El was so excited for us to go to school together, right? And Mom can’t stop saying how happy she is that we’ll be close and I’ve seen how much she misses Jonathan when he’s away and it’s just—IU was the plan. I should stick to it. Right?”
Mike blinks. “El, your mom, Jonathan, sure. IU is logical. But what do you want?”
Right now? To lean forward and figure out what Mike’s lips feel like. What they taste like.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Bullshit.”
“Oh yeah? Well what about you, then? What are your grand plans after high school? I haven’t heard—” he cuts off, “I mean, Max didn’t mention anything.”
“’Cause there’s not much to say,” Mike says, something bitter coloring his voice. “I’m doing a gap year.”
“Oh,” Will says. He doesn’t know what to say to that—doesn’t know how Mike feels about it, and his face is giving away nothing.
“Realistically? I’ll probably get a job and save up some money and get out of my parents house. Apply to college the next year, maybe.”
Will fidgets with the end of his pant leg. Mike’s expression is pinched and carefully neutral as he looks out over the town, flicking the end of the joint off the edge.
“Realistically,” Will repeats, slow. “Does that mean… What would you do, in a perfect world?”
Mike’s head whips toward Will and for a second, that guarded expression is gone, and he’s just Mike, open and impulsive and expressive as ever. Jaw slack, mouth parting, eyebrows up, eyes soft. And Will reads him like a book, the way they always used to. Mike hadn’t expected Will to ask that, but it was the right question.
Mike bites back his smile as he shrugs.
“I’ve kind of imagined going on a road trip. Seeing the country.”
“That sounds nice.”
“Yeah? So does Chicago. Maybe I’ll come visit you.”
“Yeah?” Will asks. It’s strange to think of a future where that’s real. Chicago feels more realistic than Mike staying in his life should he go there.
“Yeah.”
Mike reclines back on the windshield again and throws an arm over his eyes to block out the sun, hiding his face.
“I wasn’t just drunk and nostalgic, by the way,” Mike says. “I meant it. I’ve missed you, you know?”
Will’s heart is in his throat, beating like a drum.
Why? Will wants to ask. Why now? Why did you change your mind?
He doesn’t say it. He says something true instead:
“I missed you too, Mike.”
Will lays back too, and when he puts his hand down in the space between them, his hand nudges against Mike’s. Neither of them move.
They stay out there a while, smoking more, listening to music, talking. Eventually, the high starts to wear off, and the sun starts to lower down over the town’s horizon, painting the sky pink and orange, casting a golden glow across Mike’s skin. Eventually, Mike will drive Will home. But for now, Will sits with the knowledge that he’s broken his promise to himself: he’s let himself pine over Mike all over again.
Because too much about Mike is familiar. Such as, the way Will’s heart flutters when Mike laughs, or the way his mouth goes dry when Mike looks at him a certain way.
Will had been—not quite certain he was over Mike, but he hadn’t thought he’d sink right back into it like the years of distance never happened. It scares the shit out of him, frankly, the speed and intensity of his feelings returning.
