Chapter Text
At fourteen years old, here’s what Mike Wheeler knows about kissing.
First of all, it’s not as bad as he originally thought. It can be a little boring, sure, but it gets better with practice. It’s still kind of weird, smashing his lips against someone else’s, but that’s just how kissing is.
Secondly, and more importantly, you’ve gotta have fun with it. Because of the previously-mentioned boringness, if there’s no fun involved, it’s just a drag. And Mike and El spend a lot of time kissing, so it would be a bummer if it was always boring.
Luckily, Mike’s learned how to make it better.
He presses further into El, searching for that telltale taste of strawberries and eggos, taking comfort in the fluttery movement of her hands over his chest. The room fills with soft smacking sounds as they connect and separate, hardly coming up for air. Mike’s hands lay awkwardly in his lap, and he wonders, not for the first time, if he should be doing something with them. He wishes he had some examples, so he could, like, take notes or something. And that sounds weird, okay, he’s aware, but he always feels a little uncertain in times like this, even after nearly seven months.
It’s a good thing that El seems to like it. That she seems to like him, even if he really isn’t sure what he’s doing.
The familiar boredom starts to creep over Mike, and he drifts off as they kiss, feeling the urge to break away and go do something else, like read or play a game or—ooh, this is a good song. He recognizes it from the mixtape he almost gave to Will. Not like he can give it to him now, because it’s been way too long, and it would just be… weird. For a lot of reasons.
Anyway, Never Surrender keeps playing, and he starts humming along in his head, timing his kisses to the beat of the music. Just a little uncertainty— kiss— can bring you down— kiss—
Okay, that’s enough of that.
Mike breaks away, catching El’s arms where they’re slung over his shoulders, holding them up in fists. “And nobody wants to know you nowww,” he sings dramatically, making some clashing drum noises with his mouth. “Nobody wants to show youuuu—”
“Mike!” El yelps, laughing a little and leaning forward to try and smother his mouth with her hand.
Oh, it’s on.
Mike doubles both his efforts and his ridiculousness, wiggling free of her palm to keep singing: “So if you’re lost and on your ownnnnn—”
“Mike, stop!” El giggles, trying to wrench free of his hold as he grips her wrists again.
Yeah, this is better. This is loads more fun.
“Mike!”
Mike pretends not to notice El’s continued call, each repetition more baffled than the last. “You can never surrenderrrr,” he sings, sticking his tongue out at the end, the way he’s seen rock stars do on stage. In his head, he’s not in El’s bedroom—he’s on stage, smashing guitars and lighting shit on fire. He’s killing it.
El stops struggling for a second, mouth dropping open in bewildered shock, exhaling out a little disbelieving laugh.
She doesn’t like it, Mike’s brain taunts unhelpfully. She thinks it’s annoying, thinks it’s too much, that you’re too much, she doesn’t like it, she doesn’t like you—
Mike pushes those thoughts wayyy back, to the back of his brain. If he dwells on that right now, if he gets all weird and self-conscious, it’ll just ruin the mood, and then El will feel bad, and—yeah. It’ll just be a whole big mess, and he doesn’t want it to be a whole big mess. He just wants to have fun with his girlfriend.
He raises an eyebrow, taking care to keep his voice light and playful. “What, you don’t like it?”
El’s laughing, but she shakes her head. “No!” she yelps, voice wavering with uncertain giggles.
Well, okay. That stings.
But she’s having fun, and she’s not actually mad at him, and Mike wants to distract from the childish dark pit in his stomach, the one that gets all butthurt over what was clearly just a joke, so he leans in again. Kisses her.
She likes that more than his singing.
A gentle, soft hand reaches out to cup his jaw, and Mike leans into the contact. It feels safe, when El touches him. She’s so strong, so powerful, and she’s always been able to protect him and the Party. Her hands are capable of so much. And now they’re trailing over his jaw, over the bony jut of his shoulders, directing his kisses.
He tries to focus. Tries to move his mouth in a way that isn’t completely unpracticed and horrible. But—well, he’s had no complaints so far. Maybe there’s no real way to be bad at kissing. As long as there’s not, like, biting involved. That would probably hurt.
Despite how desperately he tries to stay in the zone, he finds himself drifting off again. He likes El, he really does, but in the end, skin is just skin, and lips are just lips. It’s not anything amazing.
Out of the corner of his eye, he peeks at his watch. Not much time left now. The Party will kill him if he’s late again.
He won’t be, though. It’ll be fine. And right now, he’s got a beautiful girlfriend, who smiles pretty and smells nice, who wants to keep kissing him.
He closes his eyes again and hesitantly moves his lips, pushing forward and back, then forward again. His hands fidget in his lap. He still doesn’t know what to do with them.
Shit, maybe he should ask Lucas. Somehow, though, that just sounds really awkward. And he’d probably never hear the end of it.
“HEY!”
Mike separates from El with a soft smacking sound, and he glances over to the door. He would be more startled, usually, but this is becoming familiar, too. Hopper’s narrowed eyes through the crack of the door, his steeply reclined chair and his dimly playing action movie. Familiar.
And it’s also familiar the way El flings a hand out, rolling her eyes and slamming the door with nothing more than a thought. Her nose barely even bleeds, but Mike wipes it for her anyway. Then he realizes he has nose blood on his thumb, and he grimaces, gaze darting around for somewhere to wipe it before eventually giving up and smearing it on his jeans. Gross.
He doesn’t communicate this grossness to El, though, because that would probably be rude, and even he knows that. Instead, he continues on in their familiar act: grabbing a comic from the nightstand, wiping at the back of his mouth, fixing the flyaways in his hair, and arranging himself as innocently as possible across the bedspread.
In the background, Hopper’s shouts get increasingly frustrated, and worryingly unhinged. “Hey! Three-inch minumum—leave the door open three inches, come on!”
There’s a slam against the door as Mike flips to a random page in the book, eyes drifting lazily over Superman and his sidekicks. He’s already read this one, but whatever. That’s not the point.
“El, open this door,” Hopper grits out, banging rapidly against the frame. The doorknob jiggles, and El clears her throat, sitting gingerly back against the headboard and cracking open her own comic. She pats her hair back into place, crosses her ankles, and shoots a mischievous smile at Mike.
Then, with a lazy flick of her fingers, she unlocks the door.
Hopper stumbles through the threshold, disheveled and fuming, cheeks an alarmingly bright shade of red. His eyes flicker around the room, searching for something incriminating. Something he can pin them for.
Mike puts on his best I-wasn’t-just-kissing-your-daughter expression. Cocks his head to the side. “What’s wrong?” he asks.
Hopper’s mouth flattens into a thin, annoyed line. Clearly, he can’t bust them for anything, because they’re not doing anything.
Not anymore, at least.
“Nothing,” he grunts. “It’s just getting late. Get a move on, Wheeler. Come on, you know the drill.”
Something inside of Mike rejoices, because he’s really running late for the movie now, and he’s been looking forward to it, to hanging out with the Party. Then he feels bad, though, because El won’t be there, and she’s part of the Party, too. They voted and everything, back in December.
Unfortunately, at Lucas’s insistence, that vote also included Max. But Mike likes to ignore that part.
Anyway, Mike does know the drill, so he closes the comic and sets it on El’s nightstand, giving her a quick peck on the cheek under Hopper’s narrowed gaze. “Bye, El,” he murmurs, leaning down to tie his shoelaces. “See you later.”
“See you,” she agrees happily, uncaring of the thick tension Hopper’s brought into the room, like a foul-smelling cloud of gas. Or maybe he just farted.
Mike stifles a snort at the thought, then finishes up his shoe-tying and stands to his feet. Hopper frog-marches him out of the cabin, and he makes it to his bike without much fanfare. Shit, Hop doesn’t even say goodbye, which Mike thinks is a little rude. But he’s used to it by now, so whatever.
The night air is cool and sweet against Mike’s skin, a nice respite from the stale smell of the cabin. His radio crackles, a sure sign of El calling him, and he picks up immediately. Within seconds, before they even say anything, they’re already laughing.
“My god, that was priceless!” Mike says, raising his voice a little to be heard over the whirring of his bike chain and the whistling of the wind. “Did you see his face?”
El lets out a breathy chuckle, and there’s some shifting sounds against the bed. “It was like a tomato!” she giggles, unable to say the words with an even tone.
“Yeah, a fat tomato,” Mike agrees, grinning. Maybe Hopper’s not the worst guy in the world, okay, but that doesn’t mean it’s not fun to rag on him a little bit. Really, what were Mike and El doing that was soooo bad? They were just kissing! They’re fourteen! They’re dating! Kissing is a perfectly normal activity!
Meanwhile, Hop acts like they’ve been… Mike doesn’t know. Doing something gross. Something horrible.
Mike doesn’t think he or El deserves this treatment. It’s just not fair.
“I wish I was still with you,” El confesses, voice softening.
Mike furrows his brows, thinking of the rank cabin and the taken-aback look on El’s face and Hopper’s disapproving glare. “I know,” he says into the walkie. “Me too.”
It’s not a lie. It’s just… not the full truth. That’s okay, right?
Mike tries not to think about it. El wants to hear those words, and it’s what a good boyfriend would say, so that’s all that matters.
Anyway, he reasons, it would be nice if El came to the movies with them. Just because he doesn’t want to go to the cabin doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to see her at all. If she was ever let out of the fucking house—
But she’s not, and she can’t be, so. Whatever, right?
“I’ll see you tomorrow, alright?” he soothes, when the silence has stretched for too long. “First thing.”
“Tomorrow,” El agrees, a sweet sigh, and the corner of Mike’s lip quirks up.
Then there’s a lull in the conversation, only somewhat uncomfortable, before they decide in unspoken agreement to hang up, bidding each other goodnight and returning to their respective lives. Mike, biking out to Starcourt, and El… doing something, presumably. Finding a way to keep busy inside her wooden tower. Reading a comic, maybe. He’s loaned her lots of them, in hopes that they’ll stave off her boredom a little bit.
In the silence, Mike bears down harder on his handles, pushes his feet further into the pedals.
He’s gonna be so fucking late.
***
Mike’s running late. At this point, Will’s not even surprised.
It’s been like this all summer. Since before summer, even. Will didn’t realize that Mike getting a girlfriend would mean so much time away from the Party. Especially since El’s in the Party, Will’s vote sealing the deal to initiate her. He’d hoped, stupidly, that if she was part of their group, Mike would bring her around more. That they would hang out as friends, that they wouldn’t just hole up in Hopper’s cabin and never see the light of day.
But, like Will said, that’s stupid. It’s not even El’s fault, or Mike’s, or Hopper’s. She’s a weapon. A person of interest. And it’ll never be safe for her, not really, not in the outside world.
So hoping for her and Mike to hang out with them more is just selfish. Will knows the real reason he voted yes, and it wasn’t entirely for El’s sake.
He’d just wanted to see Mike more.
Stupid.
But it’s fine, because at least Mike’s here now, pulling up to the bike rack with windswept hair and flushed cheeks, the collar of his shirt askew. Will tries not to imagine how it got like that.
(He’s not sure how much he succeeds.)
Lucas, always braver than Will by tenfold, steps right up to the sidewalk, arms crossed and toe tapping. “You’re late,” he says bluntly. “Again.”
Will, encouraged by Lucas’s complaining, decides to be a little snippy, too. “We’re gonna miss the opening,” he points out, because it’s true, and they are.
Not to mention that he doesn’t even remember what movie they’re seeing. That’s besides the point.
Mike raises an eyebrow, securing the front wheel of his bike and hopping off. “Yeah, if you guys keep whining about it,” he says defensively. “Let’s go!”
Mike half-jogs over to them, and they follow after him, Lucas griping the whole time. “If you guys keep whining about it,” he mocks, as Mike drifts over to his side. “Nyeh-nyeh-nyeh—”
“Please stop talking, dude,” Mike grumbles, shoving his hands in his pockets.
Will falls into step with Max, right behind Lucas and Mike. Lucas, to his credit, does not stop talking. “Let me guess,” he continues, voice saccharine-sweet. “You were busy. Mwah, mwah, mwah.”
“Oh, yeah— real mature, Lucas,” Mike shoots back.
Lucas isn’t bothered. “Oh, El,” he says dramatically, smooching the air. “I wish we could make out forever, and never hang out with any of our friends.”
The words aren’t that funny, when Will thinks about it, but he’s not. Thinking about it, that is. And the tone is funny, and the drama of it all is funny, and the fact that Will’s not the only one annoyed by the Mike-and-El thing is, honestly, a huge relief. So he can’t help it when he laughs a little, feeling lighter than he has since he first got dropped off at the mall.
“Lucas, stop,” Max chides, but she’s smiling, too. Will can tell.
Lucas twists around, searching their faces. When his eyes land on Will, his smile widens. “Will thinks it’s funny,” he says triumphantly, turning back around.
“Yeah, because it is,” Will admits, snorting. His steps get bouncier. It is funny. That’s all. Nothing else. He doesn’t feel any other way about it.
Mike, however, has other thoughts. “Yeah, it’s so funny that I want to spend romantic time with my girlfriend,” he says exasperatedly, throwing his hands up, and that cold pit of jealousy works its way right back into Will’s stomach. Crap.
He looks at the ground, at his new hand-me-down shoes, and tries to collect himself. It’s cool. It’s all so cool and so fine and so great and so funny. Will is fourteen, and they’re not babies anymore, and everything is fine.
He’s gonna have a nice time at the movies if it kills him. He’s determined.
“I’m spending romantic time with my girlfriend,” Lucas points out, stepping back and slinging an arm around Max. She rolls her eyes, but leans into it. Will tries not to watch them. Instead, he keeps his eyes on Mike, who seems annoyed, but not genuinely upset.
“You know it’s not the same,” Mike points out. Lucas doesn’t argue, because he does know. They all do.
Anyway, they’ve gotta get down the escalator, so the conversation’s effectively put to a halt as they shove and push their way through the crowd, because they’re really running late now.
Will feels bad for pushing, so he throws out lots of excuse me ’s and sorry ’s as he goes, trying to keep his elbows and hands to himself as much as possible. They make it down to the first floor, though, and there’s no angry mob of disgruntled mall-goers coming after them, so it’s mostly a success.
Mike doesn’t seem to have the same reservations as Will, because he comes stumbling off the escalator and straight into an older girl, pushing past her with a mumbled sorry and not much else, even as she stops in her tracks, lipglossed mouth falling open in disbelief. “Watch it!” she yelps.
“Sorry,” Will adds as he rushes past her. Even though he wasn’t the one running into her, he still feels bad, so he pastes on a big, innocent smile when she turns to look at him, and she softens a little bit.
Anyway. Onwards!
Erica and her little friends are sitting by the mall fountain, eating ice cream from Scoops, which makes Will’s stomach growl by proxy. He loves Scoops.
Erica, somewhat older and mouthier than she was last year, smirks at them. “Yeah, watch it, nerds!” she echoes, though it’s mostly directed at Lucas, so Will doesn’t mind that much.
“Isn’t it past your bedtime?” Lucas snarks.
Erica’s not deterred. “Isn’t it time you died?” she shoots back, and Will has to hold back a snort of laughter. The Sinclair siblings are definitely… something. He doesn’t really get it, but it is funny.
“Psycho!” Lucas yells over his shoulder as they pass.
“Butthead!”
“Mall rat!”
“Fart face!” Erica yells, raising her voice to the point where people stop and stare at her. She doesn’t seem to care.
Lucas turns around and walks backwards to face her, blowing a huge raspberry in her direction. Next to him, Max grabs his elbow, turning him back around to face Scoops. “Well, that was mature,” she says sarcastically, and Lucas hunches in on himself a little, looking mildly embarrassed.
It’s whatever, though. Will doesn’t care, because they’re finally here.
They make it up to the counter, Mike at the head of the Party, before he rings the bell repeatedly and insistently, even though Steve’s coworker, Robin, is standing right in front of him.
She doesn’t bat an eye. “Oh, dingus!” she calls, eyes trained on the Party. “Your children are here!”
Steve’s blurry outline appears behind the shop window, and then he’s wrenching the glass panels apart, a severely unamused look on his face as he takes them in. “Really? Again?”
Mike stares him dead in the eye. He rings the bell again.
Robin rolls her eyes, then walks away to go fold napkins or scoop ice cream or—something, Will’s not really sure what. Steve waves them on back, because he’s never not indulged them, even though Dustin’s not here and everyone knows he’s closer to Steve than anyone else in the Party. The favors transfer through, like, association. And the fact that Steve’s supposedly fought off Demodogs with a nail-studded baseball bat, which Will still has a hard time believing, but whatever.
Will finds himself struggling to keep up, jogging along after everyone else as they hustle through the back door and into the secret employee hallways behind Scoops Ahoy.
“If anyone hears about this—” Steve starts, wagging a finger out the door.
“We’re dead!” the Party choruses back, like they always do. So far, Steve hasn’t made good on that promise. Then again, so far, no one’s heard about it. So it’s a win-win situation, in Will’s opinion.
They continue on, speeding down the familiar hallway, before Mike pushes open the handle of the movie theater door, sticking his head out and looking around. The Party waits in an anticipatory, impatient silence as Mike looks left, then right, then left again.
“All clear,” he says, hushed and urgent.
The Party follows, looking as casual and innocent as possible as they sneak into the movies. At the beginning of this summer, Will had some concerns about the morality of this, but then he realized how expensive the movies are, and how going to the movies in the first place means spending time with Mike, sans-Eleven, and after that, he hadn’t had many complaints.
Again. Selfish.
They pass the Day of the Dead poster on the way in, and Will suddenly remembers the premise: zombies. That’s about all he needs to know, really.
Mike gets into the row first, and there’s a bit of a lull as Lucas waits for Will to take his spot next to him. Which—it’s not like that means anything, okay. It’s Lucas and Max, who are obviously a couple, right, and then there’s Mike. And Will. Separately. It doesn’t mean anything, and it’s not weird. It’s just the Party. It’s just because Dustin’s at camp, and El’s stuck at home. It’s…
It’s fine. Will feels very cool and normal about all of this.
The intro music waves gently over to them as they sit, Will wrangling off his backpack and setting it down on his lap, and Mike leans forward in his seat to hiss at Lucas: “See? We made it!”
Lucas cranes his neck to look back at him. “We missed the previews,” he points out, voice low.
“Still made it,” Max whispers. “Fart face.”
Lucas shushes her, but Will ignores the rest of the exchange. Instead, he wrestles open the zipper of his backpack, and Mike huddles in to look with him at their snack options. Will’s always tasked with bringing and concealing the snacks, because apparently he looks the “most innocent.” He’s not sure if he agrees with that.
(Vines, twisting, writhing, blood-soaked canines, burning from the inside out—)
Yeah. He’s not sure at all.
Mike’s hands brush his as he pulls out his soda and popcorn, and Will tries to not feel any sort of way about it, even as sparks of electricity race up his arms and into his shoulders, halting the movement of his hands for just a second. Mike seems not to notice, settling back against his chair and popping open the tab of his soda can, so Will takes a second, collects himself, and moves on.
He locates Lucas’s Sprite and Skittles, then leans around Max to hand them over.
“Thanks, man,” Lucas says, nodding in acknowledgement, and Will nods back.
He takes out his own Reese's Pieces, then shifts his shoulders back against his seat, trying to get comfortable. The movie starts up, an ominous shot of a woman in an empty room, and Mike’s presence, red-cheeked and glowing in the dim light, makes Will feel like he’s sitting next to a neon sign, feeling warmth and static all along his skin.
Will starts getting sucked into the movie, letting the suspended tension crawl down his throat, not at all helped by the ever-constant awareness that Mike is right there, so close to him, all flushed from his bike ride and smelling like popcorn and candy, arm resting casually on their shared arm rest.
God. He feels like he might pass out.
It’s a good thing there’s a distraction, then. The screen flickers and grows dark, a telltale sign that the mall’s electricity is down. Starcourt is new, and it’s great, really, but still has a lot of bugs in the grid. Or so Will has heard, from the distant grumblings of adults around town. And he’s seen the proof of it, right here at the movies, so he thinks they’re probably right.
“Oh, come on,” Mike groans, tipping his head back against the chair. Will throws his hands up in annoyance, clicking his tongue. In the dark, the tingling in his palms and bees in his stomach are harder to ignore. In the dark, he can’t pretend.
Something flutters at the back of his neck. His scar twinges at his side.
It’s nothing, he tells himself, like he always does. It’s nothing, it’s just—you’re tense, you’re nervous, you’re being stupid, it’s not anything important—
His entire body thrums with a fearful energy. The feeling of otherness in his veins.
It certainly feels important.
But then the projector flickers back on. Just a minor inconvenience. Just a temporary glitch.
Will relaxes back in his seat. Or… he tries to.
His bones are frozen, his chest heaving with increasingly quick intakes of breath. He still feels it. The power’s back on, but his body still feels wrong, like he doesn’t belong in his own skin.
Like He’s back.
The nape of his neck crawls, like there’s little beetles just below the skin, goosebumps prickling over the surface. Tentatively, Will brings a hand up to feel—but there’s nothing there. Of course there’s not. He’s just being stupid.
(Standing on a field, facing a great evil. Shadows in his blood, fire in his veins, come home, come home, come home. Screaming, Bob, the Demodogs, animalistic fury, the foreign desire to eat and kill and consume, the way that he began to lose himself, blending into the Mind, feeling like maybe he did belong—)
“Hey.”
Will jumps about a foot in the air, turning to face Mike. Mike, with his big concerned eyes, and his constellation-scattering of freckles, lit dark blue by the movie screen, and his sweet-smelling breath, like candy and Coke. Mike, who is—really close, actually.
Will’s pulse ticks up. Double-time, beating away in his wrist, like his heartbeat’s screaming to be set loose.
Mike’s eyebrows draw together in concern, and his hand shifts a little closer along the armrest. Will glances down at it, then back at Mike.
“You okay?” Mike presses gently. Just like he always does. Even now, even when they’re fourteen and almost grown-ups, even though Mike has a girlfriend that, arguably, needs way more attention than Will. But Mike’s always looked after him.
It would be selfish to think that he always will. So Will doesn’t. He doesn’t think anything at all.
“Yeah,” he answers, a beat too late.
Mike searches his face, eyes flickering down, then up. “Are you sure?” he whispers.
Will’s never been less sure of anything in his entire life. He feels so warm he’s nearly boiling, his skin is creeping and crawling, and all his nerves are jangling at once, for several different reasons.
But. Well.
“Of course,” he murmurs, nodding quickly. Of course he’s okay. He’s at the movies with Mike. The gate is closed. Eleven’s not here. He’s at the movies with Mike.
Jesus Christ. He needs to get a hold of himself.
“Okay,” Mike murmurs back, shifting away. Will thinks two things at once, eyeing the curve of his neck as it slants back: finally, and no, wait—come back.
His breath trembles in and out as he turns back to the screen, pinching his leg sharply. Pull it together, Will. Pull it together.
Unluckily for Will, he’s never been much good at lying. At pretending to be okay when he’s not.
But he’ll have to. He has to, and he will. He’ll get it under control.
On-screen, a zombified hand bursts out of the wall.
Will doesn’t even flinch.
He’s seen worse.