Work Text:
A field eleven miles away from Hawkins, sometime in the future:
“Thought it’d be louder. The end of the world.”
Mike nods in assent. “Expected more— fanfare. Like in the stories. All the gods fighting. At least a storm, you know, one to wash the sins away or whatever.”
Will does know. “Like Noah’s ark, right? And the flood.” He was never too religious, not like Mom and the synagogue they attended before they moved to this town consisting of one church and a spare prayer on the wind, but he knows the stories. Noah’s ark and his animals and the flood that wiped the world clean. There’s a storm here, but no flood, and only those pretending to be gods.
Mike hums an acknowledgement, propping his head up to face the burning skies. A gust of wind catches his hair, tousling it like Max would, except Max left town months ago and won’t return to see its destruction. “Like the ark, yeah. Oh– it’s Friday, isn’t it?” he asks, turning his head to squint at Will through the glow of a crumbling crimson moon. “Shabbat Shalom.”
A puff of laughter, the bump of Will’s shoulder against Mike’s. “Shabbat Shalom, I guess. Not that it means much when the world’s literally ending, but-” He cuts himself off, a habit. A stupid one to enforce, too, while the world is ending in front of his eyes.
Mike grins, though, a crinkle of his eyes and a close-lipped smile. “It’s weird to think that that might be the last time anyone says Shabbat Shalom. Like, there have been these traditions for thousands of years, and we’ve been around for so long, and all of it’s just– ending. Now.”
“Well, we haven’t… been around for that long. We’re fifteen.”
He pokes Will’s arm with a stalk of some plant reminiscent of wheat. “No, not we as in you and me, we as in humanity. We as a species have been around for, like, 300,000 years. It’s so weird that we just– won’t be around anymore.”
“There are the people in the bunkers.” Will knows a couple people like that, trying to find a way to outsmart the universe. They’ve been preparing for this, sprucing up old bunkers from when nuclear war was still a threat and hiding in deep basements. The asteroid isn’t hitting America, they say, so if they just prepare here, then they can survive. The government encourages this behavior. Will thinks it’s–
“Bullshit. They’re getting obliterated too.”
“Yeah, just ‘cause they’re underground–”
“It wiped out the dinosaurs, it’s going to wipe us out too.” They’ve had many a passionate conversation about this topic since the world found out two months ago. “We’re not special because we’re an advanced civilization or something, that’s bullshit!”
“Nothing will be around,” Will adds, murmured. There won’t be a universe at all anymore, and there certainly won’t be an Earth. At least that’s what he’s heard. That’s what the scientists think, at least. Thousands of years of human development – gone, just like that. They couldn’t change the will of the stars for all the technology in the world. “It’s inevitable.”
“Yeah, exactly! And–” Mike pushes himself up, propped on his elbows. “And they’ve predicted the world ending so many times. I had this phase – I don’t know if you remember – where I searched up all the ways they thought the world would end. There was that time in Greece, and then the whole thing in 2012– anyways. But it’s so weird that we’re the ones seeing it, you know? Just two… fifteen year old boys at the end of the world.”
“I wonder if this is how all our ancestors thought it’d end.” This meaning because of space and storms and forces humans still can’t control, not the bombs and the guns. Or if they forgot the sheer inevitability of death by natural causes.
Mike lies back down, splaying his arms out as he looks up. Something brushes against Will’s hand: Mike, unsurprisingly. He doesn’t think too hard about intertwining their fingers. He will cease to exist tomorrow, and so will time, and so will hatred. They’re in the depths of a field of grass, two boy-shaped imprints in the golden field miles away from Hawkins, and the world can’t see them here.
“There was Halley’s comet. 1910. Lots of people thought it’d crash into Earth.”
“Like now?”
Mike murmurs a yes. “Yeah, but it's been scientifically proven that, like, we are dying today. One of these are going to kill us, it's not just a fucking light show - I don’t know what shit goes through people’s minds sometimes. They’ve run thousands of projections! We’re fucked! God, people are idiots.”
A star chips itself away from the edge of the cosmos and falls, a streak of flame across the sky. A second later, a rumble shakes the ground underneath them, not for the first time this evening. Will flinches, braces for impact, his hand tightening in Mike’s.
Mike blinks up at it, unfazed. A constant, again, his hand steady in Will’s. “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” he replies, and he is. “Just– on edge.”
“Hey–” And he’s pushing aside a couple more blades of gold now, tugging Will closer until his head lands on Mike’s chest and Mike’s arms are wrapping around his back. “It’s gonna be okay, alright? It’s going to be okay.”
Even in the middle of nowhere, even when they’re lit by the glow of falling stars and scarlet-tinted moonlight and the brightness of car headlights, his arms feel like home. Will feels the familiar crinkle of Mike’s smile into his neck and resists the urge to sob. “You don’t know that.” He presses his eyes shut. “The world’s ending– how is that okay?”
“You’re here, right? And I’m here, and we’re both alive for right now, and that’s kind of all I need. It’d be shit if I had to go even a day without you.”
Will swallows, the familiar burn of tears pricking the back of his eyelids, his jaw. “But I– I… I thought we would get more time. I mean, I’ve spent ten years with you in my life, and it’s not enough. Thought we’d do a million different things together. We didn’t even get to leave the Midwest, and we said we’d go to college together, and we– we’re not even making it to eighteen, fuck–”
“Yeah, but I’m glad we got the time we did. I’d rather have that than nothing. And it sucks that we’ll never get to do those things, but they won’t exist in a day and neither will we, so there’s not much we can really do.”
“I hate that you’re being reasonable right now,” Will groans, muffled into his shoulder. “I hate you. So much.”
“Shut up, you love me,” Mike says delightedly, tipping backwards into the grass. Will squawks and Mike throws his head back the best he can and laughs, the sound clear as a bell over the rumble of another falling star.
An involuntary, watery laugh escapes his mouth as Will lands on top of him, head tucked into the crook of Mike’s shoulder and his arms around his neck. “Yeah, I do.”
He pulls back just enough to see Mike’s grin, decides that’s long enough, and burrows his head into the mass of black curls cascading around them. “That’s good,” Mike murmurs, brushing a hand through Will’s hair. “Make this whole partner thing kind of uncomfortable if you don't.”
“You– you shut the fuck up,” he grumbles. “World’s ending, did you forget?”
“I’m trying to,” Mike sighs, his hand loosening in Will’s hair. “I wanna believe this is just our version of a date, and I’ll wake up tomorrow in this field, and you’ll be next to me. I want to think this is normal for a bit longer. Not the last day I’ll ever have.”
Will rolls off of him, Mike’s arms floating out beside him as he does. Three stars peel themselves away and fall this time around, and this time he’s prepared the best he can be when the earthquake hits. Mike tucks his arm around him anyways.
“I think this is the universe unmaking itself.”
A chorus of shouting begins in the distance, so far removed from the two of them it could just be the river winding its way through the forest beside them. Will closes his eyes, pretends it’s the brook and he’s buried far, far away from everyone except Mike, and when he opens them again Mike is still there and the rest of the world’s population is not.
“Like– the more you go back in time, the less stars there are. There used to be more dark space in it, so the sky wasn’t just white all the time from all of the stars. They made constellations and stuff out of them, they, like– made shapes with them and gave them meanings. Like we used to do in those connect the dots worksheets.”
“Why’d they stop?” They shouldn’t have stopped. He likes the idea of that.
“Too many stars. Couldn’t connect any of them. Now all the constellations are pretty much forgotten, I think. Nobody talks about them because no one can see them.”
“Bet they can now. There’s dark space.” Will thinks he wants the stars back, the white light; the world is growing dark now, ink stains spreading across a fresh sheet of paper. The calm before the storm. Dark before the light, except this light will kill them, so he’ll take what he can get.
“No one can remember them. They had some maps in a couple books I read once, I think. Or we could search it up.”
“What if the asteroid hits and the last thing you do is look at your phone?”
Mike pauses, his hand already en route to his pocket. “Fair enough.” His arm flops out beside him, crushing a couple more stalks. “Guess I’m just not going to do anything in case the asteroid happens.”
“Fuck off, is being with me not enough?” But Will grins, and Mike laughs, and Will’s smile turns softer. The effect Mike has on him– God. “Well, there’s not much else we could be doing anyways. It’s bound to hit soon. It’s not worth, like, leaving right now to go somewhere.”
“Yeah, we step into the car and that’s it, there we go, no more car–” Mike swipes a hand through the hair, giggling into Will’s hair. “God, that’d suck.”
He glances up. The sky’s still intact. “Well, don’t jinx it–”
“I’m not jinxing it if we’re not leaving. We are staying in this field until the end of time. Literally,” he adds, a smile fighting its way onto his face.
“How else did they think the world would end?”
“Well,” Mike begins, his hands in Will’s hair again. Mike could never sit still, Will notes absently, always so restless and fidgety. What does he have to be anxious for, now? Why would he possibly want to speed up the end of the world? “They thought it’d go in 2008, ‘cause they made a machine that could make a black hole. It was called the Large Hadron Collider, and it could make subatomic particles move so quickly that it could make a black hole and swallow us all.”
“Seems realistic enough. I’d believe that if I was alive back then.”
“A lot of people did. ‘Cause, like, science.”
“Eloquent. That’s– that’s not how we’re going to go, right?” All the words spill out at once, a jumble, thrown atop each other. He asks it as if they hadn’t been preparing this day for weeks. One of these falling stars is going to take them out, and then they won’t be around anymore. Asteroids.
“Nah. If anything, it’ll be more like Halley’s Comet. One of them is going to hit.” Them. The stars. The world. There’s not going to be anything left.
“Weather was right for once,” Will muses absentmindedly. “Stormy. Winds. High chance of meteors.”
“And the apocalypse,” Mike adds.
“Yeah, that too.”
Wind whistles through the trees, and with it fall more and more stars. A car passes by, speeding on an empty freeway, its headlights too bright in the dark. Will doesn’t feel like closing his eyes against the burning slash of the car, watching the light fade in its wake. “Wonder where they’re going.”
“I bet it was someone who wants to see his long-lost lover again. To apologize. Make things right. And he knows we don’t have much time left, so he’s going fast.”
“He’s gonna run someone over if he keeps going that speed.” There are no cars besides Mike’s, parked at the side of the road, but Will doesn’t mention it, and neither does Mike.
“I don’t know. If this was last year and you were still in California, I’d go that fast to get to you. I wouldn’t be able to die happy thinking– you know.” Thinking I’d fucked everything up for good. That you hated me. “Last year sucked.”
“Glad we all didn’t die last year, then. Everything worked itself out.” Will hasn’t ever been good at saying what he wants to say; he’s not bold and borderline flirtatious in the blunt, honest way Mike is. Everything worked itself out, he says, but he means I’m glad you got your shit together, because now you can actually accept you want to kiss me, and now you can. If he was better, more like Mike, maybe–
Not worth it to think about that. Stupid to do that, actually, ‘cause the world’s going to collapse and nobody besides him cares which personality traits are the bits of Mike that bled into Will so easily. Nobody will be left to remember him.
Mike hums. “Yeah. I’m glad that it did. Really.”
“Yeah?”
“Will, you know I’d be with you at the end of the world even if we weren’t dating? Even if I only thought we were friends. You’ve always been the most important person in the world to me. Genuinely. There’s no one else I’d watch the apocalypse with.”
He’s not good at this; the whole love thing, and the expressing emotions thing, but God, he’s so full of love for Mike that it just might swallow him whole. “I’m glad you’re here,” he simply says instead. It isn’t enough to sum up the past decade of friendship and – companionship, or something, but they don’t have that time and they only really have this moment and maybe the next, so this is all he can get. “Thank you for– for being with me. And existing with me. And being in my life for so long.”
“Of course,” he just answers, the brush of his lips light against the crown of Will’s head. “You’re my favorite.”
“And you’re mine.”
The sky is falling faster now, three or four a minute instead of one. They drop out of the sky and jolt the earth. Constants, Will thinks, look for stable things. Or something.
“Are you scared?” he asks, tilting his head up to look at Mike, a constant if he’s ever seen one.
He’s already looking down at him through half-lidded eyes, thumb stroking Will’s arm through his borrowed flannel. His heart skips several beats. “I’m fucking terrified.”
“Yeah?”
Boom.
Will closes his eyes, and when he opens them again, the sky is all out of order. They’re falling in clumps now, patches of ten, twenty, thirty blinking out and slipping, wracking the world with rolls of thunder, one after another.
“This is it, then,” Mike says, resigned. “It’s kind of pretty. I know that's weird, 'cause we're pretty much watching our death happen, but it is.”
He wants to capture it, the stars, this moment. He knows how he’d do it, too, patches of watercolor reds and whites and yellows among the sky. It’s dark, he notices dimly. Deep black in the spaces where it isn’t bright white. He traces the lines of it on the edges of his flannel: streaks of stars, light brushing of the field, two blobs of people. They’re small, just two dots, and the world is so vast. It’d make a damn good painting. If only he’d thought to bring paint, or colored pencils, or even a pen– this could be something.
He knows there used to be light pollution that prevented anyone from seeing the stars, clouding an inky sky with sponge taps of grey. Then there was just a sky made of paper. They say there are millions of stars in the sky, billions, and that was why they lived in perpetual daytime. There didn't use to be. A recent development.
This, now, is the closest they are going to ever get to the world the way it used to be. The way they wrote about, and there won’t be any people or pens to immortalize it with. It’s fucked up, in a way. Maybe those who have built bunkers in a futile attempt to outrun it will have a poet in them. But they won’t see it, either, not when they’re hidden underground bracing for impact. There’s monitors up in some places, trying to film the beginnings of the apocalypse, but those are useless and forgotten when the entire world can watch it happen. And it'd cut out, anyways.
His eye catches one of them; it’s particularly bright, particularly large, particularly close. His hand hovers in midair when he points at it, though Mike surely already sees. “I think it’s gonna be that one that does it.”
“Definitely.” Mike’s voice shakes. “Oh, that’s the asteroid. Oh God.”
The star growing closer. He keeps his eyes trained on it. It’s something else to watch his death appear in front of his eyes. He has to watch it happen. He won't look away. He won't. He has to look.
God. It’s too bright now. And warm.
Will squeezes Mike’s hand, once, twice, thrice. I love you.
Quick tapping on his wrist in a familiar pattern: I love you too.
“Do you… d’you think it’ll hurt?” Mike asks, quiet.
His eyes are open. His hands are firmly in Mike’s.
“I hope not,” he whispers.
And the world comes apart.