Archive of Our Own

There were lots of things about saving the world that weren’t quite what Mike Wheeler thought they were going to be.

For a start, no one had prepared him for how anticlimactic the actual thing would feel. All those battles and fights and losses and all that fear and in the end, it had come down to fighting demodogs while Will, Max and El sat with blank, white eyes, some battle raging in their heads that the rest of them had no part in.

Mike would like to say he’d done more in the actual fighting too, but really, it had been mostly Steve, Nancy and Hopper that had been frontline against the monsters that had tried to come for Will, Max and El. Truthfully, Mike’s biggest contributions had always been of the intellectual sort, but even then, it had been Will who had figured it out. 

That there was some connection that he and Max had to Vecna, through their experiences in the Upside Down. And really, he still didn’t know what exactly had gone on when they had been all horror-movie-eyes. Whenever he tried to ask any of them, they all gave him similar responses. It all seemed very hypothetical and unhelpful. 

All said, it just kind of… ended. The three of them woke back up and Eleven told them all it was over. And that was just… that. It was over.

The second thing was what would happen after it was over. One of the main things that had bound them all was gone. And where the hell did that leave the rest of them? What kept them together if not that? 

The answer, ultimately, was nothing. 

Hopper and Joyce stayed in California, and Mike hated to be left behind by his best friend and girlfriend, but soon that sort of became normal too. It didn’t take long for his relationship with El to fall apart, for the two of them to realise they had become something more like best friends. Something more like what Robin and Steve had been. 

Steve was first to go after Armageddon came and went. He took it upon himself to shield Eddie from anyone finding out he had survived the “earthquake” that supposedly killed him. They had no proof that he’d killed anybody, but that had never stopped people from blaming him before, so the two of them had left. Last Mike heard, they were in Nevada somewhere. He didn’t get correspondence as much, but he knew that Robin, Nancy, Max and Dustin did. 

The older teens had gone next, all finishing high school at the same time. 

Robin was nearly finished in college; Mike always forgot which one, but he knew it was an Ivy League. Nancy had gone to Emerson to write, Jonathan had gone to NYU.

Max went to some special program to recover, and after three or so years, she could walk pretty confidently on her own on crutches, and it seemed like that was more than they could’ve ever asked for. But the program had been experimental, hard to get into, and far away. When Max had gone, Lucas had gone with her. Her Mom wasn’t very involved — Max didn’t talk about that much — and Lucas’ family had become just as fiercely protective of her as he was. 

The last to go was Dustin. In the end, he’d gone to Suzie. Or, rather, he and Suzie had both gone to Harvard. It was no great shock, not when you were a child genius who helped save the world and had a government that wanted to keep you silent. Dustin probably would’ve gotten in on his own, but there wasn’t anyone in the know willing to cross him, not after what he’d seen and experienced. He was too willing to burn it all down.

 All in all, the unthinkable had happened. The party had fallen apart.

It was just Mike left in Hawkins. Everyone else he cared about was gone. 

The third thing that happened after the world didn’t end was this: Mike Wheeler had no fucking clue what he was supposed to do with his life.

Maybe it was that he hadn’t expected it to go on this long, not in the end. Maybe it was that it was just… boring.

When you read a fantasy novel, or played through a campaign, when it ended, you had a sense of satisfaction. They lived happily ever after. The game was over. 

But now… but now, life was still going, the clocks were still ticking, Mike’s nightmares were still drowning him, but no one cared. Being a washed up hero fucking sucked, and at eighteen, Mike just wanted to never see Hawkins again. 

NYU had been a natural choice. He could say it was because they had a great science program. He could say it was because it was eleven hours away from his parents. He could even say he just wanted a fresh start. But the truth was that it was because Will was going to a college just nearby. 

The truth was that he was following Will. That he’d lost everyone and the voice he couldn’t get out of his head was Will’s. 

Of course, Will had started at the arts college long before Mike had, because he’d dropped out and gone early with Joyce’s full support. Will moved with his best friend from Cali, a boy named Harry that Mike really, really tried not to hate. 

Will lived in a tiny, crappy apartment with Harry and another boy named Brian. 

Mike lived in a dorm with a guy who shoulder checked him at least once a day. 

Mike at eighteen wasn’t much different than Mike at fourteen. He felt like a giant standing beside any of his friends. He had gotten to Steve’s height, which — though not as tall as Hopper — put him well above any of the party and even Jonathan. It wasn’t just the height though, it was how gangly he felt. Like his limbs were too long and too awkward, like his features were all out of whack, like he would never stop being that twelve year old in a basement with his best friends, only they were all gone. 

Will at eighteen was something else entirely. While he hadn’t gotten as tall as Mike, he’d grown into himself more. He’d filled out in the correct places, and though he was still shy, he had a much more imposing presence, much stronger and more self assured. His hair was finally different (bless whoever had made him do that), and he seemed to have developed more of a personal style. He smiled more too. 

In short, Will had grown up in all the ways Mike hadn’t. 

All of these things are the essential ingredients that led Mike to the terrible, awful decision he’d made on October 31st 1989. 

The decision to actually turn up to the party Will had invited him to.

They’d barely seen each other in months. Mike had been back within driving distance of Will for months, and he still barely saw him. Because Will had Harry. Will had Brian.

Will had a friend named Serenity and another named Carlotta. But the party belonged to a friend named Apollo, which Mike thought was just kind of an objectively stupid name. But, truthfully, Will had lots of friends with stupid names these days, and Mike wasn’t really in a position to criticise, not when he was barely clinging to his best friend. 

A Halloween party.

Why the fuck had he agreed to go to a Halloween party with Will’s arty friends? They just looked at Mike like the most boring person in the world. He felt like it too. 

He readjusted the — frankly, bad — costume before walking up towards the open door and the college kids that practically pulsated within it. The music felt like it was pounding in his ears, and it felt so overwhelming. 

He would know, like, five people tops at this entire party. He wished he could call Dustin back, remind him how terrible an idea this had been.

(“Just go! The two of you are eventually going to have to talk properly.”

“There’s nothing to talk about.”

“Don’t you lie to me, Michael. It’ll be fine. He obviously wants you to go or he wouldn’t have called to invite you.”

“He’s just being nice because I have no friends and he has this whole new… family.” 

“Mike, I promise you, it’s worse if you don’t go. Way weirder.”)

He was halfway through the house when he recognised someone, and he couldn’t remember whether her name was Mimosa or not. It was something like Mimosa. It was alcoholic. 

Either way, she was his first port of call. 

Which led him to the backyard.

Which led him to Harry, who told Mike that Will was definitely back inside the house and he must have walked right by him. ( Fucking Harry.) 

When he finally did find Will, he was hit with a wave of… something. A rush of feelings he didn’t have solid names for. He definitely tasted relief and fear, but he knew there was more to it.

Because there was something else. Something a thousand times more bitter than either of those. A sudden blink of realisation that Harry and Will were dressed up as Johnny Castle and Baby. 

He tried not to react to the realisation, instead moving to hug Will, long past the weird fear he used to feel about hugging Will in front of people. 

Will hugged him back tight, but it was fleeting, interrupted by Will yelling over his shoulder at someone Mike didn’t know, something that sounded like an inside joke Mike wasn’t in on. 

Why would he be? He wasn’t Will’s best friend anymore. He was his childhood friend. That wasn’t even close to the same thing, was it?

It made him think of their childhoods, of how Will used to call out for him first when something was wrong, and he had to shove away that same insidious rush of feelings. Mike would still call for Will first, but he knew the same wasn’t true for Will. He knew time had moved on without him.

“Same year.” Will was finally addressing him properly, and Mike couldn’t really remember the last time he’d really felt the weight of Will properly looking at him. Apparently that was something he really missed. 

“Huh?” Mike asked, nonplussed, and Will just smiled at him.

“Our costumes. They’re from the same year.”

Mike looked down at himself. “Oh! Oh, yeah. I wasn’t sure if I was even recognisable.”

“Please,” Will grinned, “I loved that movie. Rodents of Unusual Size? I relate.” He was teasing, and he seemed so… light. Not like the scared kid who’d hidden back, the kid who’d whispered to Mike whenever something was wrong. He was happy. Healed, maybe. Mike wanted that for him, he did. It was just… 

“And, uh, are you also super into Dirty Dancing these days? Last I remember, you danced like a confused baby deer.” He felt out of sorts, but he wasn’t going to let it stop him. 

It was rewarded pretty quickly anyway, because then Will was laughing again, full bodied and whole, and Mike hoped he wasn’t staring.

“Yeah, that’s Harry’s fault. He’s got some big idea that we’re going to do the lift later, but he’s been wasted for like, two whole hours already, and he’s the one who’s meant to be lifting me, so I really don’t foresee that happening. And like, I can’t say I’m complaining about that. I get the joke, y’know, that it’ll look backwards because I’m dressed as Johnny or whatever, but like… I’m not sure how good I feel about it. He’s not that much more coordinated than me.”

Mike really wanted to just laugh at all of that, to be purely happy for Will that he was clearly so happy, but he was caught in something else too. 

Dustin had pointed that out first too.

(“Dude, it’s not even embarrassing at this point, everyone knows there’s something going on. Like, everyone.”

“Okay, but like… there isn’t. Clearly. I’ve been here for like, nearly three months already and he barely speaks to me and—”

“Yeah, because he’s already done his share of the pining. You’re the one who needs to cross that gay bridge already.”

“I—” 

“Don’t fight me on this, Michael Wheeler, you won’t convince me I’m wrong.”)

It was jealousy and he knew it. He hated that colour on himself. He hated feeling jealous of anything, because he had no right to be. It was him who had put the distance between himself and Will in the first place, even if he knew he had legitimate reasons for having done so. Even if it was all that fear and all that trauma and all of that pain of being a fourteen year old boy who had always just assumed he was like everyone else because nothing else had seemed like an option at the time.

“I mean, you should’ve told me to borrow a camera from Jonathan if you were going to do the Dirty Dancing move.” Mike tried to act normal, to joke it all off casually. “I feel like it’s only fair that that gets documented.”

Will was laughing again, and he had a hand on Mike’s shoulder, and it was all so fucking stupid. It was stupid because Mike should have realised way earlier. It was stupid because Dustin was right, that maybe things might have been different if he had realised earlier. It was stupid because he should’ve followed one of his other friends. Or gone to a college just for his own sake. It was stupid because he was following WIll like some lost puppy and if he had any self respect, he’d have given up when he got there and realised whatever hopes he had had died a long time ago.

“Yeah, yeah — so who’s your Buttercup, man? Pretty sure my sister isn’t in town.” Will was joking, obviously, but it hit Mike in an awkward place. Was that always going to be something? Even years after they’d broken up, on completely amicable terms? Even after El and Mike had agreed that they had really only ever been best friends, that they’d felt like they were supposed to be something else, but that best friends was what they should be? They talked every day still, sometimes for hours on the phone, but they weren’t romantic. Hadn’t been in a very long time. In fact, Mike had a feeling El might have a girlfriend she wasn’t telling him about yet. 

“Please, El is more Ripley than Buttercup. And anyway, we’d go as Doc and Marty before we did as Buttercup and Westley.” 

Will gave him a look Mike really tried to decipher. He didn’t think it was skepticism exactly. It was something though. Judgement. Disapproval. Disbelief? He couldn’t find a word. 

“I’m sure I could introduce you to someone who’d love to be your Buttercup.” Will offered, glancing over his shoulder, bright and back to his lighter, happier self. “Her name is Chelle. She’s even got the right hair for it, saw us hanging out once and kept asking me about you.”

Mike brought a hand up to his shaggy hair like he was questioning himself. Why him? It had been one thing when they were all just awkward gawky kids, but they weren’t anymore. Everyone else had filled out, grown into their features. Not Mike. Mike was still all limbs, at least in his own mind. 

“Uh…” 

Dustin’s voice in his head again. Fuck it, he clearly needed to talk about his feelings with someone other than Dustin.

(“Does he even know?” 

“No? He doesn’t need to know, okay? It’s not like, a big deal or anything.”

“He needs to know, dumbass. I know you keep insisting you don’t even know for sure he’s into boys, but trust me, he is and he thinks you aren’t.”)

“Hey, Chelle!” Will was calling before Mike could even get a grip on himself, and then there was a pretty blonde girl with slightly too-large eyes smiling at him. And yeah, Mike wasn’t entirely sure he wanted a girl staring at him, because he was just trying to get five minutes with Will and he was getting absolutely nowhere. 

“Michael, right?”

Mike was watching over her shoulder as Will jogged back towards Harry, some kind of playful gesture between them that Mike couldn’t figure out. An inside joke, maybe. Something that reminded Mike how different things were. 

“It’s Mike.”

“Will says you’re an amazing writer, that you used to tell your friends stories all the time.”

Mike forced himself to focus on her face. She was pretty. She was. Her eyes were a little intense, and the gaze made his skin itch, but she was just being nice. He should try to be nice back, it wasn’t like he was overwhelmed with friends lately. 

“Uh, yeah. I mean, kinda. It was more like, as part of a game but— but it doesn’t matter.” He told her, smiling a little and trying hard to be polite and friendly about it all. 

She was nodding, and god, she really was overzealous. Mike had no idea why she was so excited to talk to him though. 

“That’s so cool! So I’m guessing you’re a writer now or something, right? You totally seem like a writer, something about your energy, maybe!”

Mike felt bad for how distracted he was, but he found himself looking for Will over her shoulder again, all the noise and chaos and intense staring was getting to him, he just wanted to see Will. He only came here for Will.

And now Will was gone again and—

“Uh, no, I’m doing robotics.”

She was talking again, but Mike wasn’t listening. Mike wasn’t listening to anything, because he felt stupid and he wanted to go home. 

He zoned in long enough to hear Chelle going on about her fear of robots playing god. 

He just wanted to leave.

“Like, I just think that if God had wanted us to have robots, he would’ve given them to us, y’know?” She was saying, looking at Mike with that weirdly intense gaze. Really, what the hell was he meant to say to that? “And anyway, the government is smarter than to run dangerous experiments and risk all of our safety.”

Oh boy, did he have a story to tell her. He managed to keep quiet, nodding politely as she kept talking about her feelings on his chosen life path. He sort of missed when all he wanted to do was write. He was going to be a writer once. Now he was doing this robotics thing because it seemed like the smart thing, and because his father insisted that Mike was too smart to be a ‘two-bit-writer with an alcohol problem and a shitty tweed jacket’. Which left Mike with very few options and no desire to have the name ‘doctor’ attached to his name, given the terrible things he’d seen doctors do to innocent people.

“So you and Will were like, friends? Growing up, right?” She asked, apparently having just noticed that Mike hadn’t spoken in an embarrassingly long time.

“Um, yeah. We were friends.” Were. “Best friends. Used to spend pretty much every day hanging out in my basement.” He didn’t even realise he was smiling until he saw the way she was looking at him, then he cleared his throat, bringing his cup up to his lips just for something to do other than make a fool out of himself. 

There were a few more awkward minutes of conversation (if something like this could actually be called that), before Mike started to think he was going to be sick. 

“I gotta go. Toilet. Gotta… toilet.” He was powering away before she could answer, one foot in front of the other, on and on till he found the toilet. The line for the toilet. 

It was a shitty thing to do and he knew it, but he shoved ahead of the queue as soon as someone came out, closing the door behind himself and locking it.

When his forehead banged against the closed door, he wondered if he was stupid to come here. Stupid to think he could do this. Stupid to think that Will would want him here. It had been a million years, and the space that existed between them, it had come from both of them in the end. They had started off calling each other a lot. Letters and daily phone calls, laughing about the girl in Will’s class who called him Wally or the boy in Mike’s who insisted that aliens had caused the earthquakes in Hawkins. For a while, it had been… good. But then it hadn’t. Will had stopped taking his calls, and Mike had stopped making them. The letters got further apart, got shorter in length, and all of a sudden there was just… nothing. 

Or very little, at least.

So what had his dumb ass done? He’d followed Will here.

And when that hadn’t worked, Dustin had talked him into coming to this stupid party.

(“No, it’ll be good. You should dress up as something like, suave. Try to really look good. Channel Steve.”

“Ew, I don’t want to channel Steve. He dated my sister.”

“Exactly, Mike. Exactly. He knew what he was doing.”)

He yanked the stupid mask off his face and flung it into the empty bathtub on the other side of the bathroom, leaning over the sink and taking long, deep breaths. He didn’t look like Steve. He wouldn’t ever look like Steve. He looked like a freckle-faced, gangly, awkward kid who didn’t belong amongst these people, who all had more personality in their little fingers than Mike had in his whole body.

Maybe Mike had had something going for him once. When he was young and smart, when he got to help save the world. But he’d dated a girl who actually, literally saved the world multiple times and was pretty sure he was hopelessly in love with a boy who had helped save it many times, so there wasn’t anything impressive about Mike’s above average deduction skills by comparison. 

But Will was the hero in the end out of the two of them. Little Will, who had told Mike the truth before he’d rode off into the dark. Mike wasn’t sure he’d ever cried as hard as he did the day they’d pulled Will’s “body” out of that lake. The day he really thought he’d lost him forever. The boy who’d figured it out. Who’d fought the monster. Who’d rode off into the sunset this time, safe and happy and with his brother and sister and mother. With Hopper. 

It had started right then. The beginning of the end. The start of Mike’s life falling apart entirely. God, he really did miss it. He missed the party. He missed him, Lucas, Will and Dustin gathered around that little table and screaming about their mission. He missed hearing El and Max giggle as they ganged up on him and Lucas. He missed Nancy throwing things at him over the dinner table when he teased her about school. 

He missed his life before he’d felt so… isolated. And ordinary. Their fight had sucked, but it had purpose. 

Now, he was just some guy. 

And now he was just some guy staring at himself in a dusty bathroom mirror flecked with what he assumed was toothpaste and dried splashes of water. 

He found himself dropping onto the closed toilet seat, ignoring the weird pink fluffy cover they had on it (why did people do that? It was so gross). He dropped his head into his hands and breathed heavily, wondering if it was normal to feel so fucking panicked when nothing had actually happened.

Or, it had, but it had been building up for years. It wasn’t an incident, it was a slow decline into being completely and utterly alone after all that time with such a tight circle. 

It was slow and it hadn’t felt quite so terrifying at the time, but now Mike was alone, and the world had moved on, and there were no demogorgons or other worldly monsters coming for him, just the crushing weight of his own sad thoughts. 

The thing was, Mike had been anxious a lot in his life. He had spent a lot of time feeling like he was being crushed by it all, but having no choice but to keep moving. The stillness, it turned out, was the most frightening part. 

There and then, folded over himself on an ugly pink toilet, Mike felt like he was being smacked in the face with just how real it all was. It felt like the hand of the grim reaper crawling up his spine. It felt like smoke slowly enveloping him, toxic and tangible. It felt like a cloudiness in front of his eyes, and his breath uneven and short. It felt like panic, and Mike had no idea how to make it stop.

Suddenly, he thought he might topple off the toilet, because balance was alluding him, and suddenly the bathtub with the ugly blue stickers to stop it from being slippery seemed like a better choice than the ugly pink toilet.

(He should’ve picked a less ugly place to have a panic attack, frankly.)

It was barely nine pm on a Friday evening, and Mike was laying in a stranger’s bathtub, his legs hanging over the edge, head tipped back against the tile. It was altogether uncomfortably, tiles hard against his head, the bath uncomfortably pointed against the bottoms of his knees, the annoying stickers of the tub uncomfortably indented against his butt. But hey, he couldn’t topple out of this position, and in a weird way, all the uncomfortable or even painful things kind of helped.

They grounded him.

It felt like a very little thing, but it did help a lot.

What did not help was all the noise from outside the toilet door. Despite the harsh toilet lighting and the ugly colours of the ugly toilet, he could still hear the party outside. He could hear people arguing about who was next in line, and he could hear someone calling out loudly to ask whoever was in there to ‘hurry the fuck up’.

He pretended not to hear them.

He could hear the music too, muffled through the walls, but still audible, hear people singing and whooping downstairs. He could hear the familiar sound of people who had lives outside of feeling sad about everything that had gone away.

He wondered if Will had even noticed if he was gone. 

He wondered if Chelle had told him that Mike had run away in a panic.

He wondered if Will would care if she did.

He had better things to care about, he had Harry and all his oddly named friends, he had a whole life and a future and a family that no longer included Mike.

He knew he was making it worse by thinking about all these things, but his brain refused to let him think about anything else, and he heavily lifted his head and let it drop back against the white tiles behind his head. 

There was knocking on the door, and Mike’s brain wouldn’t shut the fuck up.

It got me. The demogorgon. It got me. 

Why wouldn’t they stop fucking knocking?

I’m the only one who’s not acting weird!

He would never stop hearing that stupid Whitney Houston song.

It was the best thing I ever did.

Someone yelled out that it wasn’t fair to hog the bathroom from everyone else.

It’s not my fault you don’t like girls.

Mike had never meant it how it sounded. He had thought that perhaps Will was just scared to grow up. He hadn’t realised until after what he’d said. How it sounded.

We’re friends. We’re just friends.

He dropped his head down against the tiles again, and it really did hurt, but it was better than forgetting where he was, the buzzing in his ears was only getting louder.

She’s always going to need you.

If he had been smarter, sooner, maybe he would’ve done more. Maybe he would’ve said more. Maybe he would’ve looked at that stupid, beautiful painting more closely. 

Best friends. 

He was going to vomit. He was so sure he was going to vomit. And while the joint bath and shower probably wasn’t the best place to vomit, he wasn’t sure he was going to make it solidly back to the toilet at this point.

“Get the fuck out, man, we all gotta use the john!” The voice outside was unfamiliar, but Mike didn’t care. They could fight him for it (he would lose), he didn’t care. He wasn’t going to leave the bathroom when it was his only safe place from whatever the fuck was going on here. From the world outside that didn’t in any way resemble the world that Mike thought he knew once. The future he’d seen for himself.

Or maybe he’d stopped believing he had one at all. Maybe he’d really believed the war would never end. Maybe he didn’t know who he was without it. Maybe he never would.

The door clicked open, and Mike was ready to vomit directly on someone out of spite, but then the door closed again, and Johnny Castle was standing in front of him.

“Mike… Hey…” Will was crouching on the other side of the bath, looking at him, and Mike must’ve truly looked worse for wear, because he didn’t look annoyed that Mike was making a scene at his friend’s party, he only looked… worried.

Mike used to see that expression a lot more. Although, wasn’t it always Mike who worried about Will? Who fussed over him and put his arm around him when he was terrified? Wasn’t he meant to be the one who helped Will to be strong? Since when did he fall apart like this? Since when did that ever happen to him? 

(It happened a lot lately, but no one was usually there to see it.)

“I think I’m gonna puke.” Mike grumbled, covering his face with his hands.

Will frowned, and moved so that he was sitting on his knees, one of his hands resting on Mike’s knee, which, shockingly, did very little to help ground him. In fact, it only made the panic in his chest spike, only made his breathing shorter.

“Did you have too much to drink? Or eat something bad?” Will was asking, and Mike wanted to collapse sideways into the tub proper so that Will wasn’t looking directly at him. Even hidden behind his hands, he felt so exposed. He had no ability to control his own mouth at the best of times, but mid panic was not the right thing, because Will had a way of getting him to talk. He always had.

“Mm-mm,” Mike grumbled, running his hands through his hair. 

He could hear Will sighing.

“Can I come sit with you?” Will asked softly, and Mike only nodded.

The answer should be no. He should ask Will to go so he didn’t have to bear witness to this, and so that Mike wasn’t stupid enough to give the worst kind of answer. The truth.

“What’s going on?” Will asked, his voice so soft that Mike could have curled up on it and gone to sleep. He would cry before this was through, and he wasn’t sure whether that or vomiting on himself seemed like a worse option.

“I shouldn’t be here.” Mike mumbled breathlessly, making a gap through his fingers so that Will would be able to hear him even with his face covered. “I don’t know why I came and I…”

“Why?”

Mike didn’t answer, and the moments stretched out, long and punctuated by the sound of Mike’s short, sharp breaths.

“I shouldn’t have come either.” Will sounded tired suddenly, and Mike actually took his hand away from his face long enough to shoot a look at his friend. Will’s eyes were still so green, and he looks so like the little kid Mike had known in some ways, but so different in others. He was more confident, more solid. His face was just as expressive as it always had been though. 

“Why?”

Will laughed a little, sort of breathlessly. “I shouldn’t be complaining to you while you’re clearly panicking.” 

Mike had about a thousand questions about what they were doing, or how Will had even gotten into the locked bathroom, but those could wait until later. He wanted to know. He wanted to be the person Will talked to again. The person he told things to. He wanted to know what was going on beneath his soft-looking hair, what thoughts lay just beyond the green of his eyes.

“I’d rather listen to you than listen to myself.” Mike managed, and it sounded a little transparent, he thought, obvious how desperate he was to talk to Will, but if Will noticed, he didn’t comment on it. Instead, Will climbed into the bath beside Mike. But where Mike’s legs hung over the edge, Will sat cross-legged. His arm was pressed into the faucet, and it must be uncomfortable, but he didn’t comment on that either. He just sat, still and temporarily silent, looking ahead while Mike tried hard not to watch him.

Not to examine him. To memorise him. He was so familiar. The moles on his face. The curve of his nose. The hard line of his brow. It was all so familiar, and yet so different. It always felt foreign somehow. Almost as though he felt like he’d lost the right to know those things. To memorise though features on Will’s face.

“Harry kissed me.” 

Will had breathed the words out, and Mike was fairly certain his own heart actually halted its beating for a moment, like the whole world had stopped turning. Like for a single second, the whole universe died right with Mike, because he had no idea how to repair a heart that he wasn’t sure had ever been right to begin with.

“Oh.” What the fuck was he supposed to say? Should he encourage it? Question it? Will and Mike had never even discussed whether or not they… People had always whispered about Will. About his preferences. Mike had never wanted a bar of it. He had been willing to fight his own bully in front of the whole school over it. Had jumped off a cliff because of the reaction to it. But Mike had always defended. Not because he thought there was anything wrong with it. In truth, he’d never really thought about the reality of it. Two boys or two girls. All he knew was that it wasn’t normal. That the people in his town considered it bad. He knew what his Dad said, and what the bullies said, and what Will’s Dad said, and that was just about it.

It hadn’t actually changed until he’d found out that Steve and Eddie were together. And that had shifted something into sharp focus. An opinion. A thought. A seed of doubt in the world he’d grown up knowing.

And then… And then it had hit him like a ton of bricks. 

Will. 

Because obviously. Because of course. Who else would it ever be for Mike Wheeler except Will Byers? 

Then he’d found out about Robin. He’d heard whispers about Nancy and Robin. About Argyle and Jonathan. Mike stopped caring a long time ago. He stopped believing there was anything wrong with it a long time ago. For his own sanity, he had to. Because he and El had spoken about it, and because they’d promised each other that they would never be convinced there was anything wrong with them, not for a moment. For each others’ sake, if not for their own.

But in all of that, he’d never discussed it with Will. Will had never discussed it with him.

Maybe this was the moment to make absolutely certain that Will knew where Mike stood.

“That’s good.” He sounded so disingenuous. “I mean, it’s good if you want it to be.” He added. Did that clarify anything? Did he still sound totally fake and uncomfortable? It was hard, because he was uncomfortable, but not for the reasons he was worried Will might think.

Will breathed a sigh that Mike had no fucking clue how to interpret and then rubbed the back of his neck. The movement was familiar, but there was none of that terror in Will’s eyes. There was fear, sure, but the normal kind.

“I don’t know.” Will admitted in a quiet voice. “I wanted it to be good.”

What the fuck did that mean? 

“Like… like he’s a bad kisser?” Mike asked, feeling stupid as he did. But he really was genuinely unsure of what Will meant.

Will laughed at that, and Mike wasn’t sure whether to be relieved to hear it or not. “No, he was fine.” Will said quietly, shaking his head. There was another loud bang on the door and Will yelled right back at them. That alone felt like a true testament to how much he’d changed, and Mike was both proud and deeply sad he’d missed so much of it. “It’s more like… It’s more like… I’ve had a crush on him for months.”

Mike’s entire world felt like it had caught fire. He was in space without oxygen. He was a hundred feet below water and the pressure was crushing him. He was Atlas, and the weight of the world had finally gotten too heavy for him. 

Or that was how it felt anyway. Like everything had fallen down around him. Any hope he’d managed to scrape together. 

“Oh.” Mike breathed out again. He sounded so fucking out of his depth. He felt it too. “So it’s good then…?”

Will shrugged again. Someone banged on the door and Mike thought he might murder them if they stopped Will from explaining. 

“Fuck off, mouthbreather!” Mike shouted, about ready to actually hit someone. 

Will laughed again, breathless and small, fiddling with his hands, and Mike realised Will was nervous too.

“It’s just… I don’t know. I thought that when I finally kissed someone it would feel… like something, y’know? Like… I mean, I’m not saying I needed fireworks and choral music or anything, but I thought… I thought… something. But it just felt like nothing. And then I opened my eyes and it was… it was just Harry.”

Mike still didn’t really understand, except… well, he kind of did. For a long time, he’d been convinced that kissing was wildly overrated, that it didn’t feel like anything, and that all those books and movies were just lying to him.

He realised eventually that maybe it was just that he didn’t feel anything about kissing girls. 

That changed everything for him. He adored El. He always had. But not the way he was supposed to. 

“Yeah.” Mike agreed quietly. “Yeah, I understand. Kind of, anyway. I remember being like, thirteen and telling Dustin that kissing was overrated. That it didn’t actually feel like anything.”

Mike was trying not to look at Will, because they’d never talked about kissing before, and because they were talking about El here, and because they both still loved El, but just differently. 

“You… You didn’t feel anything kissing Eleven?” He asked slowly, and Mike shook his head.

“Nah.” He was staring at his knees, at the black jeans that he’d tried to pass off for the Dread Pirate Roberts’ pants. He could feel Will’s eyes on him, but he couldn’t meet them.

He could practically feel Will’s cogs turning. “You, uh… I always thought you and El would get back together eventually. That you’d come back around in the end.” 

“I told you there hadn’t been anything in years. You didn’t believe me.”

“Oh.” 

They sat there in silence for a long moment. Mike started counting the patterns of the tiles on the floor, finding the one that didn’t tesolate quite right. He counted them and then he counted them again. 

He stared at the cross-stitch that asked the occupant to ‘please wash their hands’ and at the dried flowers in the peach vase on the faded pink bench top. He looked at the three toothbrushes in the holder, and thought at least one of them really needed replacing, because someone brushed their teeth too hard. 

“You remember that painting you did? When we were fourteen, the summer I came to California for the weekend and we all nearly died?”

He finally braved a glance at Will, who stared down at his hands, painted with black polish. 

“You didn’t need to give me that much information, Mike, I remember the painting.” He was chewing on his lip, and he looked so uncomfortable it made something in Mike’s chest ache. 

“D’you know I still have it?”

Will did glance up then, brows pinching in the middle. 

“You look like your Mom when you make that face.” Mike whispered fondly. 

“Why do you still have it? Where? I’ve been to your dorm?” Evidently, Mike wasn’t going to be able to pull any punches on that front. 

“It’s under my bed. Rolled up in a little container. It’s safe. I wanted to hang it, but… I don’t know.”

Will’s gaze was intense now, firm and fixed, but not like Chelle’s had been. Will’s gaze was welcomed, even though it made Mike squirm. Chelle’s made him want to peel his skin off. 

“Don’t know what?”

Mike swallowed. Brutal honesty. That was what Dustin had told him. To just be honest. It wasn’t like he had much to lose these days. This was the most they’d properly talked in what felt like years. 

“It kinda makes me sad. Partly because… I fucking miss everyone so bad it’s suffocating me and partly because… partly because I never deserved that.” Mike’s voice was small, but he got the words out, and he was oddly sort of proud of himself for that. 

Will was still peering at him without blinking. “I didn’t know that.”

“Which part?”

“Well… The second part isn’t true, so the first part. I didn’t know you missed everyone that much. You, uh, you seemed like everything was going great for you. You’re going to a great school and you’re in a new DnD club and I thought… I thought everything was good.”

Mike frowned a little. “No.” He said after a moment, “No, because I moved halfway across the fucking country to follow someone who didn’t even want me there to begin with and my dorm fucking sucks and I never wanted to do robotics to begin with and my roommate is an absolute shithead who walks into me on purpose all the time and regularly locks me out of my own dorm so he can hook up with some random girls. And like, it’s not that I’m jealous, I’m not trying to hook up with random girls, but I am trying to sleep because god knows I lost enough sleep as a teenager for a whole lifetime and—“

“Mike, shut up.”

Mike shut up. He closed his mouth instantly, looking up at Will with the doe eyes of a man who hadn’t even realised he was going on for so long. But the only person he ever discussed this with was Dustin, and while Dustin was the best, he wasn’t always the most helpful with stuff like this, because he was good with plans, but not always so great with people.

“Who did you follow?”

Mike froze. He tried to run back his own words in his mind. Did he really say that? He needed to think quickly. Who else could he have followed? 

Jonathan wasn’t at NYU anymore, so that wasn’t much of an option. Nancy was in Boston. Steve and Eddie were in the wind. Neither Dustin nor Lucas were nearby. Which left Mike… with the truth.

“You.”

Mike couldn’t hear anything anymore. No banging, no music, just his own heart beating hard in his ear, betraying his utter panic. 

“Me.” Will repeated. Mike refused to look at him. He refused to see him. “Why me?”

Honesty. He was meant to be honest. What was the worst that could happen? Will said no? Will wasn’t his anyway, it wasn’t like there was something to lose. And Will clearly could like boys, because he’d liked Harry and… 

“You. I followed you because…” How the fuck did he make his words work? He’d been writing since he was a kid and now he had… nothing. Nothing poetic to offer to his best friend. He wanted to write him sonnets and poems. He wanted to create a masterpiece that mattered even half as much as Will’s painting to express it. But all he had was: “Where else would I go?”

Will stared at him. Mike could feel his eyes drilling into his skull. 

“So you followed me because you had no one else?”

“Yes. Wait— no. I mean, kind of. Unintentionally. Or… incidentally.” He paused, took a deep breath. “Just… give me a second to… put my thoughts in order.”

Will fell silent. Mike could feel his desperation to say more. To ask more. He could feel that Will was being driven mad by his desire to clarify. 

“I followed you because you were the biggest gap in my life.” That was… a start. “Because I missed… everyone and everything about the old Hawkins, but there wasn’t anything I missed more than you.”

Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. 

“When I was a kid I was convinced there were tiny ants playing a marching band outside my bedroom window, but it was just my heartbeat.” Mike added uselessly, absolutely terrified by the silence of the bathroom.

Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. 

His heart was screaming at him in his ears. 

The air felt cool and stiff, and Mike felt like everything was going in slow motion. He wasn’t sure whether it was better when he was alone in this bathroom or not. 

“You remember when we were going to write a comic together?”

Mike glanced up. Write a comic together. He did remember. He remembered so clearly. They had plans and characters, they’d been talking about it since they were five years old.

“Mm.”

“I still work on those characters sometimes.” 

Mike glanced at him, and their eyes finally met. Will’s were so green, and Mike thought about how dark they’d been when the Flayer had him, and how glad he was that they were green again. Still big and real and alive and full of all that kindness and grace that Will had always had. That and some famously brutal one-liners. 

“I followed you because I realised.” Mike told Will. 

Will didn’t speak, he just stared at Mike with slightly parted lips and big eyes and Mike knew he was waiting. He was waiting, and it should be Mike. It should be Mike because Will had been the one that had copped the worst of Mike’s teen stupidity. Because Will had tried, once upon a time, to hold onto Mike. Because Mike had been young and stupid and scared and he’d let Will go and that was something he had to fix. 

“I’m not the heart of the group, Will. You are. It was me who took El in and who wouldn’t give up on you when you first got taken, but it wasn’t because I was the heart. It wasn’t because there was anything special about me, it was because I couldn’t live with the thought of you being gone. I couldn’t handle it. I… I watched them pull your body out of the lake and I thought… I thought you were gone forever. I thought I’d never see you smile again. And I got you back and then… then the Mind Flayer got you. I think I was so… scared of losing you. It became… it became a fear of being too near you. Like I’d jinx it somehow and I’d fuck it all up.

Like maybe if I pushed you away, then the universe didn’t need to steal you from me again. And then you moved to California and I… everything started changing. I got scared of how much I missed you. I got scared that the feelings I had for you and El were different and I got scared that they were all wrong and I… I thought maybe if I let you go myself, then it wouldn’t hurt so much when the universe or the Upside Down or whoever took you from me again.

But then you figured it out and… and I thought I’d lose you then too. I thought you’d never come back. I thought there was no way it would ever really end. But it did. And then you were gone again. Everyone was gone and… and I didn’t know who to be. Since I was eleven years old, my whole life was about protecting people. Protecting everyone, but mostly protecting you. Always you. And you were gone and I thought maybe I was safer, but…

But I meant it. I meant it when I said that you were the best thing I ever did. I meant it when I begged you to come back. I meant it when I asked you not to move on without me… even if I only said it as don’t join another DnD club. I did what I thought I was meant to do. I was meant to love El. I was meant to be with her. I was meant to grow up and move on from my childhood closeness to my friend. But I didn’t.

And then there was no one else, everyone was gone without me and the choice was… obvious. I just wanted to be with you again.” He breathed out heavily, swallowing back against a lump in his dry throat. “I miss you. I miss you so much. I just want it to be you.”

Maybe Mike had been swallowing this explanation down for a thousand years, because it felt like being able to breathe. It felt like there had been someone ten times bigger than him sitting on his chest. Even if Will didn’t want him, at least Mike had been brave enough to say it. Dustin and Lucas would be proud, he thought. 

“When I met Harry,” Will began to speak, and Mike thought he might vomit again. Was Will just going to ignore Mike pouring his heart out in a shitty Halloween costume? “I thought he might help me finally get over you.”

Mike’s heart just about leapt out of his mouth, and he wondered how pathetically hopeful he looked.

“He was pretty, and nice, and he seemed interested in me. His friends are more open about their sexualities, so I thought… maybe. I’ve been waiting this whole time for him to finally… make a move.” Mike’s heart fell back out of his ass. “But then I opened my eyes and the only thought I had was that he wasn’t you.”

His heart had whiplash. 

“What— what do you mean?”

“I need you, Mike. I always did.” The familiar words weren’t lost on him, but he didn’t care.

Mike shifted a little closer. “Can… can I…?” 

Will looked genuinely panicked, but he nodded jerkily.

Mike shimmied a little closer, ignoring the discomfort and stiffness of his body from his stupid sitting position. He brought one hand up to rest on the side of Will’s cheek, his thumb instinctively running over one of the familiar freckles, the ones Mike would know in his sleep.

When he leaned in, he found that in some ways, it wasn’t different at all. Will’s lips were soft, his skin was soft under Mike’s hand. 

But it was different.

It was different when something in Mike’s chest swooped and soared. It was different when a shiver ran down right from the crown of his head. It was different when he felt something clench in his stomach and was hit with the urge to kiss him more, to never stop kissing him, to hold him closer. 

When he moved back, Will’s eyes stayed shut, and Mike took note of how long his lashes were against his cheek. He ran his thumb over Will’s cheek again, taking advantage of the quiet, close moment to map him out like the night sky. 

“I’m scared that if I open my eyes, you won’t really be here.” Will whispered, and it sounded painfully vulnerable.

“I promise I am.” Mike’s voice was soft. Softer than it was with anyone except Will. A tenderness reserved for Will alone. 

Will’s eyes fluttered open, and he smiled, bright and disbelieving, like he wasn’t sure how they’d ended up here. Like Mike was a surprise to him, even after all these years. 

“I love you.” The words were small and filled with a kind of wonder. Surprise at how easy they were to say. Mike hadn’t ever really heard those words used liberally in love. They’d never felt right with anyone before. But there was no doubt, not even a shred, not in his entire being, that he loved Will. That he’d always loved Will, since the very first day. 

Will smiled a little, and one of his hands lifted to play with a few strands of Mike’s hair. “Always wanted to touch it.” Will whispered, and the bright smile didn’t fall off his face. “I love you too.”

“Thank god.”

Mike leaned in to kiss Will again, awed by how different it really was when it was what you wanted, what you felt, and not just what you wanted to feel. 

“Mike?”

“Mm?”

“Just don’t puke on me, okay?”