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The bass hummed around him. Someone had lit a joint, smoke clouded the space around him. Reminding him of Jonathan when they lived in California. The scent of weed and alcohol hung thickly in the air around him. So much that he was practically choking on it. People danced around him and made out in the dark corners of the house. Tongues down each other's throats and half dressed.
Will was regretting coming, even though his- what could he call her? Not his friend. Not like the Party was. She was his classmate, his peer, someone who would never leave him alone- had dragged him here for moral support.
Savannah was an eccentric artist whose idea of artist inspiration was getting high and trying to write down her every thought till. Somehow making something tangible out of it when she was sober. So in a way she was his friend, a friend with distance built around them. With topics quickly skirted away and hidden like the weapons in his dorm room. Hiding the fact that something was missing within him, a chest cavity that should be full.
So there he was, standing alone in a room full of people in various states of sobriety. Unacknowledged by the fact that today was the last day of spring break, they has classes tomorrow. Though this was nothing new, Will himself had gone to class between hangovers. Something, when he was a kid, he’d promised himself he’d never do.
The first time he could remember Lonnie drunk he’d sworn to himself never to touch the stuff. When he’d rampaged through the house, Will memorized the sound of his steps. When Jonathan told him to hide in his room. He had, he was a kid. Jonathan came back a while later and sat at the end of Will’s bed. Will’s eyes still cracked despite Jonathan thinking he was asleep. Under his breath he heard him murmur, “I’m sorry, Will. I’m so, so sorry.” The color around his eye was all wrong, blackened with a punch and the tears streaming down his face felt as though they should belong to another person. Not his brother, never had he imagined his brother with tear stained cheeks. Yet that was reality.
The first time he saw Ted drunk he promised Mike they’d never sink that low to cope with their emotions. When Ted had shouted at Mike, telling him everything he found wrong with Mike. Starting with his appearance and ending in slurs neither boy understood the gravity of yet.
Looking around now, he was considering asking Savannah to share her joint with him. He’d broken that promise to Mike years ago, only a few weeks after he’d...
When he thought of that day, tears no longer gathered in his eyes, his muscles no longer gave out at the very thought. Once, it had been impossible to think Will would live in a world without him in it. It was only a bitter reality now. One he had to swallow each morning.
Where Will lived out the life they planned together. He lived in the dorm they were going to share. He illustrated the stories Mike had yet to write, ones he didn’t have time to finish. He closes up their shared DM case and stuck it in the back of his closet instead of playing that last game. His other half was missing, and it was a reminder in each task he took. In each breath he heavied onwards.
All except this, because Mike hated drunkenness.
Savannah washed down a drag with the cheap, shitty beer Lonnie used to buy and talked too loudly considering the closeness of the people around her. Not that it mattered, everything was too loud here. It was meant to be. Voices overlapping and rising over one another. The crashes of beer cans crushed and glasses shattering. It was all a part of the experience, as she had told him. She had a way of drawing people near her, her own sun making each hurtling meteor fall into her orbit. Will had been a meteor hurtling towards debris, a rock thinking space and all its peacefulness was the solution.
A shrill, high laugh sounded next to him. He laughed along with everyone else despite not hearing a word she’d said. Some days he was still that rock hurtling towards destruction, despite the orbits held on him. Today was one of those days.
Will took the beer he was handed and ignored the acid taste it left on his tongue. He closed his eyes and willed tainted memories from breaching the surface. He’d been ignoring the constant knocking on his dorm room by his pissed off RA. The phone rang for him all day long. Even spread over different time zones it was still that day.
The phone would not stop ringing. And Will couldn’t find it in himself to pick it up. Not this year. No this year it was easier to indulge in the things Mike hated if it meant forgetting his face for one night. If it meant forgetting the memories they shared. If only for a day, to forget the hurt that clung to his skin.
He tried to focus on Savannah's half coherent story, she was acting drunker than she really was. Her tolerance was high, this was nothing for her. But she was falling over her words and slurring them at the right points. This too, was a part of her gift. It made him wonder why she wasn’t a theater major.
Getting the hint he interjected, “I think it's time to get her home.”
For her credit she gave him a hard time, in clear Savannah-ness so as not to raise suspicion. Someone wolf whistled as he wrapped his arm around her shoulders, steadying her as they walked down the street. He ignored that too. Savannah knew he had no interest in her and she had none in him. People were just people, ignorant to the painfully obvious truth.
He let go once they were out of sight of the house. Savannah straightened, leaving the facade of drunkenness behind her. Still she was only slightly less tipsy as Will was. The house party was close to campus, a fifteen minute walk. Neither of them owned a car.
“Why’d we leave? Another creepy guy hitting on you?”
She scoffed, shaking her head. “You look miserable.”
I am miserable. “Is that so?”
“CJ’s pissed at you for not picking up the phone.”
“I know, he’s been bugging me all day.”
“Are you ghosting a boyfriend I’ve never heard about.” Her tone alight in teasingness.
“No…no I’m not.” It came out rawer than he’d intended it to.
“Hey, come on. What’s going on?”
“I don’t like parties you know that.”
“It’s more than that.”
“How would you know?” It was harsh, a cruel tilt to his words he had never wanted to develop.
Her voice suddenly grew very soft, “Because it always is with you.”
Maybe it was his tipsiness verging on drunk. Or the fact that it had been so long since he’d talked to anyone about him. Maybe it was because it was the first, if partial, truth he could give Savanah about himself. A part that might make her understand his hurt. “My best friend Michael- Mike, our Dad’s were big drinkers, so he hated all that stuff. Parties too.”
Only once had Mike drank. After Hawkins fell into Vecna's hands. After they found his parents and his sister dead, when he was screaming and sobbing into Will's arms of the unfairness of everything. Of the shitty cards they were dealt. Of the life Holly Wheeler had left to live.
“Where's Michael tonight?” Curiosity and caution laced her voice. Gentler then she'd ever been before.
“Oh, he jumped off the quarry ledge five years ago today.”
It had been five years since he’d lost the love of his life.
Five years since he saw the tilt of his smile and the stories he twisted. Five years since he saw the determination in his eyes, since he saw the protectiveness he held for everything close to him. He wasn’t their heart, not entirely, but he was Will’s heart.
It wasn’t technically a lie. Not from what Dustin had told him when Will was in the hospital.
It had been six weeks since Vecna took Mike. Took not killed. Because before Vecna killed he made his victims remember every trauma they’d ever experienced, he reduced them to their pain till they were so hopeless, so broken, that he could kill them without a second thought of resistance.
When they had found Will bleeding out on the bathroom floor. He remembered that night in flashes. Hopper breaking down the door. Mom and Jonathan sobbing. Wheeled down the hallways of a sterile white hospital. The beeping of the machines kept him alive when he’d tried so hard to end it all.
Dustin had come into his room to visit once, alone which was odd. “I thought we lost you Will. I really, really thought we lost you again.” There were tears streaming down his face and his words were unsteady. “I was the one who noticed you were gone, I was the one who got Hopper. And I kept thinking another one of my friends committed suicide in front of me.”
“What? Who else?” Mike was dead, but it wasn’t by choice. Not Vecna had ripped his way through the threads of him.
“Mike. When you were missing Troy held a knife to my gums, told Mike if he didn’t jump he’d cut my teeth out. We could have ran, Troy thought he was tough but he was really a chicken shit y’know. If we would have admitted defeat he would have left. But Mike… he stood on the ledge and he jumped. Right where they found your fake body, Will. Right there. He would have died if El hadn’t come. If she’d been a second too late he wouldn’t have seen you again”
So that was it. The missing piece, why Vecna had targeted Mike out of all of them. Mike had already been ready to kill himself, years ago, all Vecna had to do was bring it back to the surface.
“Oh. Oh Will. I’m so sorry,” Savannah said.
A self deprecating laugh rose in the air between them. “You want to know the worst part. We thought it was over, we thought everyone was going to be alright. We’d-we’d already lost so many people Savannah. So many. And somehow I never thought I’d lose him, not really.” He paused, blinking the welled up tears in his eyes. Shaking out his tense muscles. As much as he told himself talking about Mike didn’t hurt anymore, it did. It was a lie because it would always hurt in some way. If not a stab in the heart then an ache resounding through his bones.
He scrubbed a hand through his hair. He’d grown it out in the last few years, longer than Jonathan, shorter than Mike’s had been. He kept speaking, he needed to get it all out. In some ways it was an injustice to his memory not to tell it all. Not to say the truth, even if most of what she knew about him was a lie. Mike may not have committed suicide that day, but Vecna had dropped Mike back at the quarry one last time. Only this time he was pushed instead of jumping.
“In the end he wasn’t my best friend. He was my boyfriend, we spent years pinning after each other and not realizing it. We’d just finally got together and he died… he left us all. I was supposed to save him and I let him down.”
He remembered the night before Mike died, when they all believed they weren’t going to make it to the next morning. Hawkins was slowly being corrupted by the Upside Down, Vecna was growing an army of monsters. Everything was hopeless. They were banking on the feeble hope that El’s plan would work.
None of them had gone home in days. Sleeping on the musty mattresses spread over the floor of Hoppers cabin. The roof a quick patch job of tarps and plywood to keep them dry. The distant rumbling of thunder surrounded them, not their world's thunder. Upside Down storms, yet to turn lightning red strikes through the sky.
They were curled up on a mattress under the window. Arms and legs twined together, embracing. Flinching at the angry howl of thunder beating on the cabin. Mike kissed his lips, soft and slow as though they had all the time in the world. They both knew they had no time at all. They whispered a thousand promises to each other. They planned the life they’d live when this was all over, the stories they’d create through words and through art. Like two little kids at a sleepover.
“If I don’t make it, Will-”
“Don’t. You’ll make it. I swear to you we’ll all make it.”
Something in Mike's expression makes him freeze. A part of him knew that night what Mike was really trying to say. Or moreover, what Mike wasn’t saying. Everyone had the signs of Vecna memorized now. It was only a matter of time.
“If I don’t make it,” He started again and Will didn’t stop him this time. “Know that I love you so much, Will Byers. You deserve everything on the right side up and more.”
His heart stuttered to a halt then. They hadn’t been dating for long, hardly three weeks but it was impossibly right to say. They’d gone through so much, they’d seen the horror of the world. They’d fought monsters for fucks sake. “I love you too.”
It was a promise.
Tears were swarming their sicky path down his face. The world around him dulled from the drinks he’d had earlier that night. There was a hand on his arm, squeezing it, grounding him to reality. Pulling him out of memories. Someone was talking and he could feel the coldness of concrete around him. The heat of his body wrapped around itself.
Like he had so many years before with the Mindflayer. For a crazy moment he thought it was Mike drawing him out of the panic attack. Telling him that they would go crazy together. But it wasn’t. Savannah was crouched in front of him, guiding him breathing, holding his hands. “It’s alright. It’s alright. It’s alright. I’m here, we’re in New York. It’s alright.”
Eventually his breathing slowed, and his tears ran slowly. “I’m sorry. I-I didn’t mean to-”
“None of that. I should have never dragged you out tonight, let's just go to the dorms.”
The idea of being left alone in the darkness of his dorm where there should be two people seemed impossible to handle. That too making him remember the boy he should be with. The first and only boy he lent his heart out to. “No. Let’s just- can we get ice cream?” A sudden thought hit him. He wanted to be anywhere but alone with that phone ringing on and on and on.
Savannah smiled her soft genuine smile, “Yeah Will, lets get ice cream.”
The parlor was abandoned at this time of night. Only one employee working the graveyard shift, who had made their orders and slunk back to the break room to watch TV. They sat at a booth in the corner. The place between the darkness, where they were hidden from being seen from the windows but could watch everyone else pass by. For a while they did, sitting in silence and watching the nighttime crowds pass. In his head Will made up stories about them: Where they were going. The lives they led. It was something he and Mike used to do when they were young. When Will had just started practicing drawing people and Mike was working his way through his first complete manuscript.
Mike would point out details of the people while Will drew. He’d make up stories about them till they were so far from reality they’d laughed themselves to tears.
The sketchbook was tattered now with water stains and flooded edges. The manuscript was lost altogether.
The people who traversed through the night were odd, disjointed creatures. Drunk friend groups hanging off each other's arms. A couple holding hands and stepping in sync. People going to the bus station at the end of their graveyard shift. Wearing grease stained aprons and kitchen clogs.
He ate his ice cream. Not really tasting it.
“Tell me about him,” Savannah said suddenly.
“What?”
“Tell me about him, who he was when he was alive.” She lowered her voice despite being the only ones there. “I want to know how one man could be perfect enough to catch my friend’s eyes.”
“He wasn’t perfect, not really.” He remembered the summer of 85’. Of all the fights they’d gotten into. And he remembered Mike promising they would go crazy together. Their laughter, and their childhood, and their unending love for each other. “But he tried and that was enough.
He conquered the imagine of Mike again. Seeing every detail in his mind's eye. His personality, his flaws and faults, his strength and love. He told Savannah everything, all the words he’d kept bottled up for years as though it would dull the pain of loss. As though forgetting him was better.
He knew now, he’d rather have Mike in his life for a short time than not at all.
When he was done telling all the stories he knew Mike could have crafted better than him, it was like a weight had been removed from his chest. Mike had lived and he had loved him. It was true, someone else, besides the Party, knew. It was what Mike deserved. To keep living on after his death.
By the time they got back to the dorm Savannah was dead on her feet. He dragged her to her room, waking up her pissed off roommate to get her into bed. He went back to the commons, to the back corner where a phone stayed.
He didn’t know what the time difference was and frankly he didn’t care. It was time to start living again. After all, he hadn’t been the one that died. The person on the other end picked up at the second ring.
“Hey Lucas, it's been a while.”
At the time he’d thought he saw the end of the world. But the world kept spinning no matter who was in it, and who had left.