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On the third doorbell ring, Will went to the door.
The first one, he’d ignored, because that was what he did; his mom had always told him not to answer the door for strangers, and anyone they knew well enough would just waltz into the living room and drape themselves over the couch, the way that Max often did when she was there to gossip with El.
He’d just continued painting, paint stained hand hovering over the volume dial on his speaker, caught between wanting to drown out the sound of the visitor — probably a door-to-door salesman of some sort, or a trick-or-treater that had chosen trick a few days early — and wanting to eavesdrop. If there was one thing that Will was, it was nosy.
He was just about to shrug it off and turn the volume up when the doorbell rang again.
He froze; who rang doorbells twice? It was rude, honestly, to ring someone’s doorbell twice, much less in such quick succession. There were very few rude people that the Hopper-Byers still associated with, and one of them was in the house, as far as Will knew, sawing logs in the bedroom he shared with Joyce.
Hopper wasn’t rude to Will , necessarily, or any other of his step-kids, but he sure as hell let the badge get to his head, sometimes. There were very few times that Will wanted to punch Hopper right in his mustache, but when he did, it was a wonder Hopper was still conscious.
Otherwise, he was a pretty cool dad. But Will could let himself be a moody teenager if he wanted to; he’d been through more than enough to deserve it, he thought.
The doorbell rang a third time, and Will tossed his paintbrush into the cup of dirty water and threw open his bedroom door, undoubtedly leaving a green handprint on the brass door handle.
He blinked at the darkness of the hallway and suddenly remembered just how late it probably was. He glanced down at his watch — the watch that was missing its matching half, the watch he probably should have gotten rid of ages ago but was too sentimental to — and the green face was so bright it made him squint.
1:11 a.m.
Who the hell had the nerve to ring their doorbell not once — not even twice — but three times at one in the fucking morning?
Will stomped down the stairs as quietly as he could — he was allowing himself to be a little petulant, but unlike whoever was ringing the doorbell, he could do so without waking up the entire house — and stopped short at the base of them, staring at the already open front door.
Joyce looked over her shoulder at him, a single curler on top of her head to get her bangs ready for the next morning. She was holding the door open with one hand and keeping her other arm extended across the doorway, like she was trying to keep someone from getting in the house.
“Will? Is that you?”
Will had to wrap his arms around his stomach to keep himself from shivering.
There were maybe two people in the entire world who would ring Will’s doorbell three times at one in the fucking morning. The first was drunk Lonnie Byers, but after the last time that he’d come over — holding his ugly, scarred finger on the doorbell until it broke and yelling until Hopper finally went downstairs and threatened him — it wasn’t likely they were going to be seeing him again for a long, long time.
The second was, of course, Mike Wheeler.
“He won’t leave,” Joyce said quietly as Will approached the front door slowly. “Want me to wake up Hop?”
Will shook his head and placed what he hoped was a comforting hand on his mother’s outstretched arm. “He’s not worth it,” he said, voice barely above a whisper, even though Mike had gone so quiet he could probably hear every word. “You can go to bed, Mom.”
Joyce watched Will carefully for a moment, and he watched back, giving her a small nod. She sighed, and in the glow of their moth-littered porch light, she looked ten years older than she really was. Will wanted to wrap her up in a hug, wanted to slam the door in Mike’s face, but he couldn’t for the same reason he couldn’t get rid of his stupid fucking watch.
He was too sentimental for his own good.
“Don’t you dare hurt my son,” Joyce said, voice nearing the most venomous Will had ever heard. “If you hurt him again, I’ll -“
“Mom,” Will said, squeezing her arm. He was half trying to pull her away from Mike and half trying to shrink behind her. “I’ll be okay.”
Joyce dropped her hand from across the doorway to put it on Will’s cheek. “I know, baby,” she said, and the venom had drained from her voice enough that now she just sounded tired. So, so tired . “I know.”
She pressed a gentle kiss to Will’s forehead — you can do this, it said, and it comforted Will like his mother’s gentle reassurances always did — and turned towards the stairs without sparing Mike a second glance.
Will grabbed the handle of the front door and pulled it closed behind him, crowding Mike towards the steps of the small porch. “What are you doing here?” He hissed, crossing his arms in front of him to protect himself — from Mike or from the cold, he wasn’t sure.
Mike was just as beautiful as the last time that Will saw him; he had the same curious eyes, the same unruly mop of hair, the same plush lips that Will had imagined kissing, once upon a time.
If he still did, then that was nobody’s business but his own.
“I -“ Mike said, but then cut himself off, blinking at Will like he just realized he was there. “Are you - are you mad at me?”
Will sighed and pressed his hands to his eyes, but instead of feeling the cold of his own skin, he felt the scratchy fabric of his too-big pajama sweater. As if he would have forgotten it was one in the morning otherwise. “No, I actually really appreciate being woken up in the middle of the fucking night.”
Mike frowned at him. “Okay, well, let’s tone down the attitude -“
“You want me to tone down the attitude?” Will asked, throwing his hands down and looking at Mike, hoping his disbelief was clear on his face. “After you came to my house and woke up my mother?”
Mike had the decency to wince. “Does she still have the morning shift?” He asked, fidgeting with the hem of his shirt.
Will blinked at him, surprised he even remembered. It'd been ages since he’d let Mike know anything about him, much less anything about his family. “Yeah – um, it starts in three hours.”
His voice was quickly losing its bite; it was growing tired, like his mom’s, but it was also gaining something entirely different too, something soft and just the tiniest bit sweet. Will hated himself for it, but he couldn’t stop it. There was only so much fighting he could do in his brain before it stumbled upon the inevitable facts — that Mike had been there, once upon a time, and that he’d been Will’s everything.
Now the only times Will saw him — other than at one in the fucking morning — was in passing, like when Will was pulling into his parking spot in the morning and couldn’t help letting his eyes wander to Mike’s new car, couldn’t help staring at the curly haired mess in the front seat, or when Will would forget himself and take the shortest way to class and bump shoulders with Mike in the process.
Will glanced down at Mike’s wrist. The watch there matched his own exactly, gear for gear, and all it did was make Will want to cry.
“I’m sorry,” Mike said, and he sounded earnest enough, but Will had grown used to not trusting anything about him. He was too manipulative, too slippery to catch in a lie until it was too late and Will was left crying in the backseat of his big brother’s car. “I wasn’t thinking, but I - I really just needed to see you.”
Will’s immediate response died on his tongue; the flippant don’t hurt yourself that he would’ve said at eleven or twelve was gone, replaced only by his careful: “Is everything all right?”
Mike’s face twisted into something that only he could manage to make beautiful, even though he looked like he was confused about what Will was getting at. “Yeah, of course everything’s okay, I just -“
“Then what are you doing here, Mike?”
There was a time in Will’s life when he would have relished being able to talk to Mike like this, free and reckless and easy, their words meaning everything to Will but nothing at all in the great expanse of darkness that surrounded them. There was a time where he did — where he screenshotted every late night text that gave him butterflies, where he would have to press his face into his pillow to muffle his scream of pure joy when Mike did something that could’ve passed as friendly or something else entirely.
There was a time where Will would’ve been elated to find Mike Wheeler waiting at his door, faded yellow sleep shirt speckled with raindrops from the early morning clouds growing above them. This would’ve meant something wonderful was about to happen, that Mike had finally decided Will was worth a grand romantic gesture, that Will deserved to feel like he was in a romantic comedy for a moment, instead of in a tragic coming of age.
Now, Will wanted nothing more than to go to sleep.
Something like pain crossed Mike’s face, and Will used to be able to read him like his favorite comic book, but those days were long gone. “I just needed to talk to you,” he said, voice dying out a little towards the end, like he knew his mission to the Hopper-Byers house had already failed.
Will blinked at him, then crossed his arms again. “Then talk.”
Will gave out too many second chances. El had stepped on his wet canvases five times now, but he still left his door unlocked and open while he was drying his paintings and it was only a matter of time until there was a sixth. Max had scratched his only DVD of Scream IV and he still let her borrow his movies. Jonathan had burned the last box of macaroni and cheese that one time, but Will still let him cook dinner every once in a while — just like old times , Jonathan would say with a smile and a wink, and just that would make it all worth it.
Mike, though.
Will had already given Mike a second chance, a third chance — hell, Will had lost track a long time ago of the number of chances he’d given out to Mike, but even he knew it was far too many.
He just didn’t quite know how to stop.
Mike was silent for a moment, and Will just about took back his chance — just about lost his mind enough to turn his back on Mike for the last time — when Mike finally blurted, “I had a dream about you.”
Will squinted at Mike, but he did not change under the dim light that was buzzing quietly above them, save for the slight pinkening of his cheeks. “Okay?” Will offered, confused but mostly unimpressed.
How’d he ever fall for Mike in the first place? Couldn’t eight year old Will see into the future, see all the pain and suffering and awkward silences that he’d force himself to endure by loving this one boy?
When he was thirteen, it was worth it. Now, at seventeen, he wasn’t so sure.
Mike exhaled loudly and lifted his hands to Will’s shoulder height, like he wanted to reach forward and grab him and shake him until he understood, but knew that he couldn’t. Mike had lost the privilege of touching Will a long time ago. “I…had a dream,” he repeated, and he sounded so frustrated at being unable to articulate himself, but Will was at an absolute loss for how to help. He was tired, he was growing colder with every passing minute spent in the cold October morning, and he was being forced to stare at the face he’d tried to make himself forget in millions of different ways, none of which had had the decency to stick. “About…about you.”
Will could feel a frown forming on his face, could feel the crease in his brow deepening. “You said that already.”
Mike shrugged him off with a shake of his head and Will watched, entranced, as his hair moved around his face in the light breeze. “About you and about me…about us .”
Oh .
Well, that certainly didn’t warrant arriving at Will’s door at one in the morning, but it did explain quite a lot.
“Okay,” Will said slowly, trying to let his brain catch up to what this all was.
The Mike-and-Will that had defined Will’s childhood — every single minute of every hour of every day, from age five to age eleven — had shifted, in the latter years of their not-quite-a-friendship, not-quite-anything-more. It’d gone from Mike-and-Will, to MikeandWill , to Will , alone in just a matter of years, and while Will was sometimes still trying to wrap his head around the fact that there was no name for his to follow anymore, that the other half of the person he’d been a part of had left him grasping in the dark for answers, he’d grown accustomed to being Will, alone . It had taken time, and it had taken hard work on his part, but he’d finally been okay, for a little bit, with not having his best friend anymore — with losing one of the only people he’d watched grown up and had watched him grow, too.
Sometimes, Will villainized Mike so much that he forgot the splitting of MikeandWill meant that Mike was Mike, alone too; that he, too, had had to deal with the lack of a name following his, of losing his other half.
He hadn’t dealt with it quite as well as Will had, in Will’s opinion, but maybe he was also a little biased.
“We were dating,” Mike blurted out. “We were dating in my dream, and you were…you were so happy –” his voice was fading now, and Will could feel some tears welling up in his eyes. Mike looked away and blinked a couple of times in rapid succession, and Will wondered, for a moment, why Mike was getting so emotional about Will being happy when he’d been the singular reason he’d been so un happy in the past few years.
“I –” Will started, because Mike seemed incapable of continuing, still refusing to look at him. He was cut off, though, by the press of a hand against his mouth, and Mike shook his head.
“I’m not done,” he said, voice quiet but firm, urgent, and Will could feel his eyes widen enough that a tear slid down his cheek and landed on the soft curve of Mike’s fingers. “I’m – you were so happy, I’d finally made you happy. And then I woke up when we –” He trailed off again, cheeks pinkening the slightest bit, and Will wanted to scream, because despite how much he thought he hated Mike, he always looked so adorable, so kissable it still made him sick, sometimes. “– when we kissed,” he said quietly, looking down, before shaking himself off. “And I had to remind myself that I didn't have you like that anymore, but it felt like I was missing something...something important, so I had to just come tell you.”
Will let the silence drag on for a minute, for long enough for Mike to start shifting from foot to foot, before he asked, “what did you think that would do?” His voice was muffled by Mike’s hand still covering his mouth, but Mike’s reaction told him he’d gotten his point across well enough.
“I –” Mike started, stunned, but Will shook his head, shook Mike’s hand off of his face.
“What did you think that would do, Mike?” He asked again, voice getting louder with each word. His fourteen-year-old self would have been proud that he was letting himself get angry at Mike again, that he was letting himself throw a little bit of a fit. Mike deserved it, he thought. Mike deserved everything. “Did you think it would make up for the way you treated me? Did you think your stupid dream about us…about us kissing would fix everything you’ve done to me?”
Will could see Mike’s anger flare in the way he set his jaw. “What I’ve done to you ? You ignored me for years! I had to go out of my way just to see you!”
Will threw his hands in the air to keep from reaching forward and hitting Mike in the chest to punctuate his point. “You were being an asshole! Why should I deal with someone who’s treating me like shit?”
“Because I liked you!” Mike said, all but yelling by now, and Will could feel himself shrinking back against the door, tears returning to his eyes. Mike looked at him and something in his facade crumbled; his eyebrows furrowed together just enough to let Will know that he knew he’d crossed a line by shouting. “I’m sorry,” he said, much quieter. “I was being an asshole because I liked you, and I didn’t know how to deal with it.”
Will was silent. He was…he didn’t know how he was feeling, honestly. He knew he was fuming ; that much was for sure. He hated Mike, had hated him for almost three years now, and for a while couldn’t even stand to look at him without crying. The hatred had dulled though, somehow, into something not quite as painful as a cut; it’d become more like a bruise, one that only hurt when Will pressed on it.
He’d pressed on it a lot. He couldn’t help it.
But there was something so incredibly good about Mike, something bright and wonderful that he’d shown Will a handful of times in the past few years. Even after Will had begun to avoid him, there were times when he’d be forced to interact; like when they would both be invited to Max’s birthday parties, or they’d be assigned to sit next to each other in a class. Mike had always been so kind, so gentle with his words, and he’d pull Will out of his shell enough to make him laugh and forget a little bit about all of the shit Mike had put him through.
Will would always get scared, though, that Mike was just doing it to manipulate him somehow, that he had some other angle that Will wasn’t privy to. So he’d block himself off, and he’d be just mean enough to make sure that Mike knew he couldn’t mess with Will. Not again.
“I just…you were so good,” Mike said, holding out his hands in front of him like Will was some sort of light that he could hold in the palms of his hands. “You were so good, and it made me so mad that I liked you that I just – I just freaked out, okay? I know that doesn’t excuse what I did to you when we were younger, but you don’t exactly have clean hands here, either.”
Will looked away from him. His throat was starting to sting from unshed tears; this was all entirely too big, too raw of a conversation to have at one in the morning, but here they were.
“I still love you,” Mike was saying, barrelling on as if Will had answered. “I still think about when we used to be friends – when we used to be best friends – and it hurts so much I can barely breathe.”
Will thinks about that sometimes, too. He thinks about how maybe Mike was the right person — was his person — but that they just found each other at the wrong time. That happened sometimes, didn’t it? People fell in love, but the universe decided they didn’t deserve it yet.
Will sometimes caught himself thinking that maybe he was in the wrong, that maybe Mike was a good person, and Will was so caught up in protecting himself that he just turned Mike into something bad. He knew that was part of it — that he had built Mike up as something more than he was, as a giant shadow creature that was out to hurt Will when all it was was that he was standing in front of a light that cast the shadow of his little body onto a too-tall wall — but he also knew the real pain that Mike’s words had elicited that one summer, when he had yelled at Will that it wasn’t his fault Will didn’t like girls.
It was; it was Mike’s fault, but not in the way that he’d said it, not in the way that he’d meant it, because Will had been all too careful to not let his feelings show. At least, he’d thought it wasn’t obvious.
Maybe it was.
“I still love you, too,” Will found himself saying, the words slipping past his lips before he could get a good grip on them and put them back into the box that he reserved for lonely nights. “I miss you.”
Mike laughed, and it was wet with tears, but Will mirrored it, because that was what was so absurd about all of this. He missed Mike more than anything; he missed talking with him, laughing with him, loving him without the sharp reminder of the pain that doing so had caused. Mike was right in that it hurt so much he could barely breathe; Will was so overcome with the pain of missing his other half sometimes that it was a struggle just to get up in the morning.
But he did. He got up every morning, and he stared himself in the mirror and thought about Mike, about the blue toothbrush that would always have a place in his bathroom cabinet, and he went downstairs and ate the same breakfast that he and Mike used to have after sleepovers, and he would pour syrup on his eggs and try to tell himself that he’d always eaten them like that. He would get dressed in the morning and see the Queen poster that Mike had gotten for him for his tenth birthday, the only gifted decoration that Will hadn’t had the guts to rip down the night they’d fought; he’d see the shoebox where he kept all of their pictures, all of the scattered remnants of their shattered friendship that Will had been able to collect over the years, each one stained with tears.
He’d go through his daily life and every single second he would be reminded of Mike, because his absence was almost more of a physical thing than his presence was. The weight of it was tangible, and sometimes it weighed so heavy on Will he wondered how he would survive.
The hatred that Will had concocted — the hatred that had spread to his mother and brother like a wildfire that Will had accidentally started — was all his defense mechanism. It was either hate Mike or miss him, and hating him was a hell of a lot less painful than missing him.
“I miss you too,” Mike said, voice tight with tears, and he reached forward as if to pull Will into a hug. He stopped himself half way there, spooked, like he had been doing it subconsciously and was only now realizing how that may seem. He brought his hand to his hair instead, ran his fingers through it, with another wet laugh. “God, I miss you so much.”
Will took a few shuffled steps forward and wrapped his arms around Mike’s torso, surprising both Mike and himself. He felt hands fall around his back, and a face bury into his shoulder, and Will let out something like a painful sob into Mike’s chest.
“Shh,” Mike whispered into Will’s hair as he let out another sob. “It’s okay. We’re – you’re okay.”
Will hated himself for seeking comfort in Mike again.
But hugging him was so nice, and it reminded Will that he hadn’t really touched anyone outside of his family in a long, long time, and Mike was built different now than he was when they were thirteen, but he still had the same warm presence that made Will melt a little bit.
“I know,” he said quietly, into Mike’s hair. He still smelled like the soap that Karen bought when they were kids, even though there was the sharp smell of something different there too, something like cologne that reminded Will he didn’t know Mike, not anymore. “I know.”
They stood like that for much too long, and Will would have pulled away but it was just so… nice to be able to hold onto Mike like he was the only thing keeping Will upright.
He thought it was even nicer, too, that Mike was holding onto him the same way.
When he finally pulled away, Will looked at his watch. “My mom is gonna wake up soon,” he said quietly, and even though he was trying not to break the fragility of the moment, he did it anyway.
Mike nodded at him, then reached up to wipe the tears off of his cheeks. Will would have done it for him, but he was frozen in place, the hug already more than he was expecting to get from Mike tonight. “I should go,” Mike said, then promptly stayed exactly where he was.
Will stared at him. He was beautiful, even when his eyes were red-rimmed with tears and his cheeks were splotchy. Mike was one of the most beautiful people Will had ever met, and he’d always firmly believed that no matter how ugly Mike supposedly was on the inside — which was, now that he thought about it, not nearly as hideous as Will had made him out to be — he would continue on being one of the most frustratingly gorgeous human beings on the planet.
“Mhm,” Will agreed noncommittally, because honestly, he wouldn’t mind standing here, staring at Mike for the next couple of lifetimes.
“Can we –” Mike started, then stopped himself, fidgeting with the hem of his sleep shirt again. Will blinked at him, more tired than anything else, now. “Can we…try again, maybe?”
An olive branch.
Mike was so nervous, so anxious about asking about something as simple as trying to be friends again — and maybe something more, God , Will hoped something more — that Will almost started crying again.
Instead, he laughed, offering Mike a small giggle. “Of course,” he said, before he could think twice about it. He put out his hand with a nervous smile. “I’m Will.”
Some more tears slipped down Mike’s cheeks as he took Will’s hand and shook it, his grip soft but firm, like he wasn’t going to let Will slip out of his grasp again. “I’m Mike,” he said, voice cracking in the middle of the sentence, and he smiled sheepishly. “Will you – will you be my friend?”
Will felt his own tears returning to his eyes, and he used the hand not holding Mike’s to wipe them before he could start sobbing all over again. “Yes,” he said, throat hurting with the overflow of emotions, but the grin that broke out on Mike’s face made it more than worth it.
“Okay,” Mike said, pulling his hand away, but not without letting his fingers linger on Will’s palm for a moment too long. He was still smiling as he backed away, still smiling as he almost fell backwards off the steps that led up to the porch. “Cool.”
“Mike,” Will laughed. “Go home, go to sleep.”
Mike nodded, his grin ever present on his stupid beautiful face, and before he walked into the early morning darkness he lifted his hand in a small, awkward wave.
Will offered back a tiny wave of his own. Mike’s smile was so radiant Will thought he was going to be able to watch him walk all the way home.
The light above Will flickered, and he looked up at it, watched it flicker on and off before returning back to its steady buzz. He was tempted to make a comparison to his and Mike’s relationship — how it would flicker sometimes, in intensity, yes, but also just in existence, how it would extinguish itself but leave embers burning for long enough that if they worked at it, it would light again — but decided that was probably just his tired brain electing to be poetic about the whole situation.
It was going to be hard to explain to Joyce, that was for sure. She hated Mike almost more than Will himself did — or, more than Will had convinced himself he did — but once she saw how happy Will was to have Mike back in his life, she would be okay.
And Will was happy. The watch on his wrist wasn’t just a heavy reminder of the friendship that he had lost, but now was proof that his sentimentality had paid off, in the end. And maybe he was getting ahead of himself, here — he and Mike still had a long way to go — but he was beginning to think that maybe they would be okay.
Mike wasn’t a stranger who used to know all of his secrets, anymore. Now, Will could relearn all of Mike’s wonders, all of the things that made him tick, and Mike could do the same for him.
They would be okay, Will thought.
He wandered up the stairs as quietly as he could, skipping the step that always creaked whenever someone put weight on it. He closed his bedroom door behind him and leaned against it as he blew out a breath.
He glanced at the painting he’d been working on when this whole thing had begun — when he’d finally gone downstairs to yell at whoever had rung his doorbell three times — and was surprised to see that it was two hands, pinkies interlaced.
He hadn’t been aware of what he was painting while he was painting it, but the grass background and paint on one of the hands was unmistakable to anyone except for him — and Mike.
Will smiled at it; Mike had even invaded his subconscious, and Will wasn’t too upset by it.
Yeah, he thought. They would be okay.