Archive of Our Own

“even where the affections are not strongly moved by any superior excellence, the companions of our childhood always possess a certain power over our minds, which hardly any later friend can obtain.”

—frankenstein, mary shelley

“one day we’re gonna realize / it was just that the time was wrong.”

—“romeo and juliet”, indigo girls

🝔

He sees Mike Wheeler for the first time in the better part of a decade at a bar in New York, and the worst part is Will hardly even recognizes him.

This is for two reasons, to be exact, decade spent apart notwithstanding. The first is that Mike grew up damn pretty. Which, okay, to be clear: that’s not very surprising to Will, because in his opinion (biased though it may have been), Mike’s always been pretty, and he was headed even further down that road the last time Will saw him back in high school, all cheekbones and dark eyes and legs a mile long. If he tries—which he prefers not to—Will can remember with crystal clarity the second he spotted Mike in the airport in California that first day of spring break back in ’86. He can recall exactly how he felt all the breath go out of him at how different Mike looked. Not a bad kind of different either, despite his stupid getup at the time. Not at all. (The way he acted, though, now that’s a different story. It’s a story Will’s spent years trying to close the book on, to varying degrees of success.)

If Mike was pretty then, there’s not even a good word for how he looks now, sitting at the corner of the bar, cheekbones stark in the lowlights, hair longer and just as curly and soft-looking and pulled into a goddamn ponytail at the nape of his neck. He’s still got that same sharpness as he used to, is still made of angles and edges in a way that Will’s fingers always itched to draw, somewhere between chiaroscuro and Cubism, but he wears it better now. Less awkwardly. Less like his body’s some kind of puppet he hasn’t yet figured out how to string along. If he slouches now, it’s out of confidence, comfort in his own skin, not because he’s trying to disappear into the fringes where no one but Will would ever notice him.

All this to say: he looks good. He looks very good, and it takes a solid thirty seconds of gawping for Will’s brain to fire and register exactly why his eyes keep catching on a stranger’s profile no matter what else is going on in the bar. It’s a profile Will has drawn hundreds of times, in crayon and pencil and acrylic alike, over and over until he knows it better than he knows his own reflection, even if he doesn’t know the person it belongs to anymore. Even before Will understands who he’s looking at, Mike’s face is familiar enough to stand out in a crowded bar in a strange city after ten years of no contact, no nothing. That should probably signal to Will that the book isn’t as closed as he thought it might be, but regardless—Mike looks good, really good, and Will’s having a hard time believing that Mike’s here, still wonders if he’s dreaming or secretly on LSD or fell out of his universe and into another one that must exist if you hit the Upside Down and keep fucking going—and that’s because of reason number two.

That being, of course, that it’s a gay bar they’re in.

It’s a fucking gay bar.

Mike Wheeler. Michael goddamn Wheeler. In a gay bar. In the same gay bar as Will. Mike Wheeler, getting chatted up by some guy in chinos, grinning up at him all toothy and confident as he runs a hand down Mike’s arm.

Will feels—

Will has no idea what he feels, actually. Like he’s going to pass out from shock, maybe? Like he needs more than just the one drink for sure. Like he might scream or kick something or lie down and die on the spot at the absurdity of it all. Mike Wheeler, with the ponytail, in the gay bar—that’s how the police report will read. That would be how he goes out, huh? Because no matter what Will does, his life keeps circling back to his childhood best friend who never fucking loved him back.

It's been nearly ten years since they saw each other. Ten years since they lived in the same state, much less occupied the same room. Ten years since they were friends; eight and a half since Will stopped referring to Mike as such, much less his best one.

Ten years, and here Mike is, and here Will is, and here’s the guy in the chinos who just bought Will’s first friend, first love, first heartbreak a drink. Here is what the poets call cosmic fucking irony, Will thinks: the setup for the world’s unfunniest a guy walks into a bar joke, and Will’s the punchline. Will’s been punched in the gut.

Will Byers sees Mike Wheeler for the first time in ten years in a gay bar in New York, and then he turns and leaves without a word.

🝔

He tells himself he’s not going to think about it, but that’s a lie, or impossible, or both, because Will does essentially nothing but think about it for days after. He lies awake in bed that night and half the next morning thinking about it. He thinks about it in the studio and the store and the subway. He’s thinking about it when El calls him two days later, too; enough that she stops in the middle of relating a very elaborate story about her and their mother’s disastrously failed attempt to make brownies for the community college bake sale to ask if he’s okay because he was too distracted to laugh at the image of her throwing a smoking pan out the window with her mind.

“I’m fine, El,” he sighs, tucking the phone against his shoulder and leaning back into the shitty plywood cabinets of his apartment’s tiny kitchenette. The counter creaks, and he has to fumble to catch his sketchpad before it can slide off his knee. On the open page are a half-dozen scratched out sketches of a familiar face, rendered in shadowy blue colored pencil. Will didn’t even mean to draw him. He never does. That didn’t stop half his senior art show at CalArts from featuring characters bearing (an entirely accidental, if anyone asked) striking resemblance to his childhood best friend.

No one did end up asking, thankfully, but he knows his family definitely noticed because he spent the entire show dodging Jonathan’s looks and El’s thoughtful expression and his mother’s sympathy. At least all Hopper did was grunt and tell him it looked real good, kid, real great. Will’s gotten better about varying his subjects now—he hasn’t drawn Mike in years. Until today.

“You just seem like you have something on your mind,” Eleven is saying in that carefully probing way she always does when she wants him to know that she knows something’s wrong. But nothing’s wrong. Will’s world has just been turned upside down, and not in the supernatural other dimension way, that’s all. It’s a regular Tuesday for him, thanks.

And the only thing he has on his mind is what he needs to be working on for his next gallery show, and thumbnailing for the portrait commission he has, and the gleam of indigo lights off dark, curling hair, and—

“It’s nothing,” he says firmly. He’s not sure if he’s talking to himself or to El. “I just have a lot going on right now. Tell me what happened with the bake sale, yeah?”

He’s dodging the question, and they both know it, but after a few seconds of silence, El sighs and resumes talking. She lets it go, in the end.

Will doesn’t.

🝔

Will hasn’t thought about Mike this much since senior year of high school, probably. It’s getting to be a problem, considering the fact that he doesn’t even know for sure it was Mike he saw in the bar. None of his friends have talked to Mike since they graduated and he hightailed it out of Hawkins like he was wanted for murder or something, so it’s not like Will can just call up Dustin and say, Hey, I know you’re busy inventing the world’s newest supercomputer in California or whatever it is you’ve been doing, but have you heard from Mike lately? You know, our friend from middle school, the tragically straight one who I spent all high school and half of college getting over, who we haven’t spoken to since we were teenagers? Oh, no reason, I just thought I saw him here. Crazy, right? Does he even live in New York?

Yeah, that’s not happening.

He could ask Jonathan, who could ask Nancy, but that’s not really a can of worms Will’s ready to open back up with his brother. Or with his brother’s girlfriend, for that matter. It’s not like he can explain why he’s asking, either, because he doesn’t know if Nancy knows about Mike being, you know, gay—assuming that was Mike, and Will is kind of starting to hope it wasn’t, for his sanity’s sake—and Will’s not just going to go around telling people, all right? He’s better than that.

Instead, he thinks about it, and thinks about it, and tells himself that’s enough thinking about it, no more, and then goes and thinks about it some more. He rolls it over in his mind enough to wear the edges down so they don’t quite cut anymore, just sort of sting when he thinks about the potential unfairness of it all. Will spent years telling himself he didn’t have a chance, only to find out—what, that maybe things weren’t so hopeless after all? After he spent years moving on and falling for other people and finally managing to get to a point where the guy he liked as a fourteen-year-old isn’t the first person he thinks of when somebody mentions love?

It’s dumb, probably, but he’s honestly a little mad about it. It’s like finding out one of the fundamental laws of the universe was actually bullshit all along and nobody told him. Like how you learn certain things are impossible in math, and then you get into advanced math, and they say, Surprise! The square root of negative one is a thing we do now! Have fun with imaginary goddamn numbers! Except in advanced math, Will had teachers to explain everything. In life, he walks into a gay bar and has an immutable fact of life turn, well, mutable; impossible becomes theoretical becomes real, about six and a half years too late.

Listen, if you’d been going about your entire life assuming the sky is blue, and you suddenly found out it was actually orange and no one ever told you, well, wouldn’t you be a little upset? It’s not a perfect metaphor, sure, but Will’s not a perfect writer, or even a little bit of one.

That was always Mike’s department.

…And now he’s thinking about Mike again.

Will stares down at his paper diner placemat where he’s been doodling absentmindedly while waiting for his fries. Predictably, it’s covered in sketches of one Michael Wheeler. Will sighs. He feels like a teenager again, and he doesn’t like that one bit.

🝔

(When the waitress shows up to deposit his basket of fries in front of him, she asks him about who he’s drawing with the kind of tone that he knows means she’ll ask whether he has Mike’s phone number next if he gives her an inch. He knows this because it’s the exact tone four separate girls used to ask him about his “friend from spring break” when he got back from saving the world in Indiana freshman year. Apparently even stories of your sister brutalizing another girl in the roller rink aren’t enough to stop girls from falling all over themselves to get a cute guy’s number.

Will tells her the same thing he told all those girls in high school: Sorry, he’s not available. It was a lie then, and for all he knows, it’s a lie now, but it tastes less bitter than telling the truth: He’s no one I know.

It’s right there in the diner on a Thursday afternoon that Will thinks, God, I need a drink.

And he just so happens to know a place to get one.)

🝔

There’s more than just one bar in New York City, to be sure, and even more than one gay bar, something that felt like paradise when Will first moved here after half his life and the rest of his summers spent in Hawkins, where there were two bars total, neither of them gay, and the bartenders and half the patrons still knew him as the boy who went missing back in ’83, which was only marginally better than being Lonnie Byers’ son. Now, that fact feels like it’s mocking Will a little, because he has the pick of the entire city, the most populated city in all of America, and yet he’s going right back to where he was four nights ago when this whole mess started.

The chances of running into Mike again are astronomically low, he knows—it’s New York City, home to seven-million-odd residents. It’s not like Hawkins, where Will spent half his first summer home from college tiptoeing around and checking around proverbial corners until Nancy bothered to tell the Party that Mike wasn’t coming back from Chicago that year.

(He didn’t come back the next year, either. Or the next. Somehow, the greatest tragedy of Will’s teenage years wasn’t the time he spent a week trapped and hiding from monsters in a hellish mirror dimension, or the time he was possessed by said hellish mirror dimension, or any of the other terrible things that happened to him when he was supposed to be having fun with his friends and being a kid. The real tragedy to Will, at the time, was that Mike Wheeler left and didn’t look back. Still hasn’t. Still won’t.)

He tells himself he’s not going there for Mike, or even the chance of him.

Will’s almost managed to convince himself that he means it as he makes his way inside, fingers already digging into his pocket for his wallet, eyes sweeping the room just in case—

And then he sees him, parked in a corner booth with three notebooks spread out in front of him, hair still in a ponytail, pencil tucked behind one ear, and Will can’t lie to himself anymore.

🝔

(He leaves before the bartender can give him so much as a baffled stare, walks the entire nine blocks to the next nearest bar he knows because he still needs a drink, and then walks another fifteen towards his apartment before he gives up and takes the train.

Mike had looked so at home there in the corner, pen scratching away and tongue caught between his teeth just like when they were in sixth grade and he’d spend his lunch breaks planning campaigns for the weekend. Like he’s done this before. Like maybe he’s always been sitting in the corner of Will’s favorite bar, just waiting for Will to see him.

Except it’s Mike, who left, who quit talking to Will and everyone else, who never sent him letters for months and months and months, and none of this makes any kind of sense no matter how Will twists and turns and tangles it up in his head.

And it was Mike, is Mike, he knows for sure. He knows because when he gets back to his apartment, he digs through his closet to pull out a book, Mike’s first book, which he bought years ago and read half of before he felt pathetic and stupid and shoved it where he couldn’t see it and be ashamed of himself. There’s an author photo inside the back cover. Will never looked at it before, but when he flips it open, there’s Mike staring up at him in glossy black-and-white. There’s his former best friend, all grown up. There’s the man from the bar. They’re one and the same. He already knew this, really, because Will would know Mike anywhere. Even now.

People say the universe sings, that matter and light and even empty space have noise; that if you sit in a soundproof room, it will never really be silent because you’ll still hear your heartbeat, your breathing, the buzz of your own existence that never goes away. For Will, the whole world has been soundproofed since he was five years old, and Mike’s presence is as loud and constant as his own heartbeat.

He spent years ripping out the soundproofing, letting the noise of the rest of the world back in, giving his heart away to other boys and then other men, getting it back and getting it broken more than a few times. But call him an unnamed narrator, because the heart he buried under the floorboards is beating again, and Will feels, just a little, like maybe it’s finally going to drive him crazy.)

🝔

Mike didn’t see him the first time, or the second. He doesn’t see Will on the third, either, when Will finally gives up avoiding, you know, his favorite bar two weeks later because sue him, it’s hard to find a place he likes that has both decent alcohol and decent music, and he’s not letting the ghost of his high school past stop him from the small pleasures of life.

If he ends up stealing glances at the corner booth (weekday afternoons) or the corner of the bar (weekend evenings) where said ghost always sits, and sometimes sketching what he sees out on his cocktail napkin, well, that’s Will’s business. There aren’t any laws against drawing strangers in bars, and he can always use the practice.

It’s weirdly nice, knowing there’s a familiar face in the seven million that make up the rest of the city, what with Dustin in California and Jonathan in Boston and everyone else in the wind until a major holiday draws them all back to Hawkins like moths to a flame, despite the fact that it’s only the Wheelers—sans Mike, and mostly sans Nancy—who still live there. Dustin’s mom moved out to California to be closer to him and his Silicon Valley job, and the Sinclairs live in Indianapolis, and last Will checked, Steve somehow ended up in Maine. It’s—yeah, nice is probably the best word for it, because anything else is a bit strong for however you’re supposed to feel when you see someone you used to know in a gay bar and then keep on seeing them without actually doing anything about it. So, it’s nice.

Which is probably why, like every other nice thing in Will’s life since he was old enough to realize his dad hated him for reasons he couldn’t yet understand, it doesn’t last.

All this to say, on the seventh time, Will’s halfway to the bar, eyes darting to the end of it out of instinct or habit or something else entirely. Mike’s there, like always, and—

Will freezes.

He’s looking back.

It’s the seventh time since Will first saw him, and this time Mike’s looking back. And more than that, more than just seeing, he recognizes Will, and Will knows this because he knows Mike, knew Mike, can read the spark of recognition in his eyes, knows the furrow of surprise in his brow as well as if he’d drawn it there himself, one bold line of graphite followed by the pad of his thumb to soften and shade it just the tiniest bit. Mike sees him and knows immediately who he’s looking at, and Mike’s pushing himself up from his seat and taking a step towards Will, dodging around someone trying to catch his attention and two guys making out very passionately on one of the stools, and Will—

Will can’t do this.

It was stupid of him to think he ever could.

Mike takes another step, mouth opening like he’s about to call Will’s name, and Will cannot do this.

He turns around and leaves the bar as fast as his feet will carry him.

🝔

There are a lot of things Will regrets about the way things ended with Mike, perhaps chief among them being he still doesn’t even know when the actual end came about, or why. Nothing particularly killed their friendship, at least from where Will stands. They never fought after that one disastrous spring break. They kept in touch when the Byers and Hopper and El moved back to California after everything finally ended with Vecna and the Upside Down. Will came to visit every summer and Thanksgiving break like clockwork. But things were never really the same.

Maybe it was when they went back to California and mostly stayed there. Maybe it was when they moved there the first time. Maybe it was before that; the summer when Mike started spending all his time with El, the summer they argued in his garage while the rain pelted down all around. Sometimes, Will thinks maybe everything really did end when he disappeared that night in November and Mike met Eleven the very next day. Sometimes, he wonders if everything they had after was just the last bolt of a dying plant; something already doomed but still going until it couldn’t anymore, running on fumes, on the memory of them. Like how people say corpses’ hair and fingernails keep right on growing after death, but really it’s just an illusion as what was once a living thing shrinks, peels back, withers away.

They held on for a few summers after ’86, sure, and Mike sent letters, but Will—Will needed space. He needed to let go of his feelings, both for his own good and for their friendship. He didn’t hang on the telephone, didn’t answer every letter from Mike; did his best to treat him like a friend, always, but nothing more. It turned out to be easier, Will learned, being the one who did the pulling away. Back in California, he learned to appreciate the distance between them and the buffer it provided.

He didn’t think it would end up as a permanent fixture.

Will never meant to pull so far that they ended up here, but he can’t undo it now. He can’t take back the summer after graduation when they pulled into the Wheelers’ driveway, just like always, and Will got out to Nancy back from college with her arms folded, looking him in the eye and saying, Will, I need to talk to you.

He didn’t want to lose Mike, not after everything, so he backed off, took some space—and then Will lost him anyway.

It’s hard to pick a worst part out of the whole grand mess of it, but if Will had to choose, it might be the fact that it wasn’t really Mike’s fault that it happened, and it probably wasn’t Will’s either, which makes everything that much harder, in the end. Life’s always easier when you know who to blame.

It all comes down to this, really: for most of Will Byers’ life, he had Mike Wheeler as his best friend. And then they grew up.

Now Mike isn’t his best friend anymore, isn’t even a friend, isn’t an acquaintance or a conscious regret or more than a vague and dull-edged ache in Will’s temples and throat when he’s back in Hawkins or with his old friends or thinks too hard about the first fifteen years of his life. And one day, though Will doesn’t like to think about it, it won’t even be most of Will’s life that they were friends, or half, or a lot. Just part.

He thought that was the end of it, bitter though it may be.

Turns out he was wrong.

🝔

Will’s a block away before Mike catches up to him, walking as fast as he can without flat-out running, elbowing his way around other pedestrians with his hands sunk deep in his pockets against the chill. It’s been an unseasonably cold week for this late in spring, which means tonight Will misses California and all its warmth. It’s April in New York, but sometimes, on chilly nights like these, Will could close his eyes and swear he’s back in Hawkins in autumn, biking home in the dark, sitting in his room with the windows open, losing himself one piece at a time.

Cold air blasts over him as a taxi speeds by, and Will hunches his shoulders against it.

“Will!” comes a voice from behind him, still impossibly familiar, and Will hunches his shoulders against that, too. “Will, wait!”

He keeps walking. He might just keep on walking until he runs out of sidewalk. Until he leaves the city behind, until he walks all the way to Hawkins, all the way back to California, from the East Coast to the West, and then down into the surf, down where the water covers him from ankles to knees to throat. The ocean might be kinder than whatever Mike Wheeler has to say to him after all these years.

“Will,” says Mike again, suddenly right at his elbow. Damn him and his long legs, how he’s still managed to keep a few inches on Will after all.

Will stops so abruptly that he expects Mike to run into him, but he puts the brakes on at the exact same time, stopping in perfect unison while the rest of New York goes on around them. Will doesn’t know what to make of that.

He very carefully does not look back at Mike. Neither of them says anything for a minute as Will clenches his jaw and his fists and his lungs in an attempt to get his breathing under control. It’s ragged and uneven, and he can’t tell if it’s because of his too-fast walking or because of Mike Wheeler standing entirely too close behind him and looking so intently Will can feel it, like he used to be able to feel the Upside Down, the Mind Flayer, Vecna—but heavier, somehow. Sadder.

“What,” he grits out at last. It’s not quite a question, because he doesn’t quite want to know the answer. “What do you want, Mike?”

Mike is silent for one heartbeat, two—

His fingers land on Will’s elbow, just barely there through the denim and fleece of his sleeve. Will feels them all the same.

“Can we talk?” Mike asks. That’s all.

After ten years of silence, here is what Mike Wheeler gives him to work with: hand on his elbow. Warmth at his back. Can we talk.

Will says, rather hoarsely, “What could we possibly have to talk about?”

As if the answer isn’t anything or maybe everything; the answer is something Will should not still want. The answer shouldn’t matter, and he should pull away from Mike Wheeler right now and not stop walking until there’s another ten years of distance between them in which he can hide.

“I’d just—I’d like to,” Mike answers very softly. His hand does not move from Will’s arm. The warmth of it is beginning to seep through the fabric, through Will’s skin, down to his bones. “It’s been a long time, Will.”

Will does not say, And whose fault is that? He doesn’t want to know the answer to that one, either.

He breathes out. Breathes in. Tips his head back and stares up at the smoggy sky, where not even a single star is visible. Even in Lenora they could still see stars, he remembers—not as many as Hawkins, but some. Staring up at the nothingness, he tries to reason with himself, to remember exactly why this is a bad idea, this is a door he shouldn’t be opening, this is, like, Pandora’s fucking Box or something and everyone knows how that ended.

Mike says, a little uncertainly, “Like, for old times’ sake, or whatever.”

Will closes his eyes. Bluebeard. Pandora. Ten years of no contact. Don’t open the box, Byers.

And then: “Please?”

The thing about Pandora, though, which Will learned in the classics and mythology course he took on a whim sophomore year—the thing about Pandora is she was made to open the box. The box was never going to stay closed because the gods made Pandora to open it. She didn’t stand a chance. She never had one.

“Okay,” says Will, resigned. The tension goes out of Mike so abruptly he can practically feel it happen—like he was braced for a blow that Will never gave. Like Will was ever going to say anything else. He sighs. “Okay, we can— one drink.”

And he follows Mike back into the bar.

🝔

When they return to the spot where Mike was previously sitting, they find the stool still empty despite the crowd and the bartender standing vigil over the sheaf of notebooks and paper Mike left behind. Will wonders, not for the first time, just how much time Mike spends here. How long has he been coming? How many times have they missed one another in the crowd, and why is it only now that they haven’t?

He's so caught up in his thoughts he completely misses whatever exchange Mike has with the bartender, but suddenly there’s a hand on his wrist and he’s being led across the room to the corner booth—also unoccupied—where Mike dumps the notebooks and says something about be right back that the music half-obscures. And then he’s gone, back into the crush of the Saturday night crowd, and Will does the only thing he can think to do: he sits down.

Usually, when Will comes here, he occupies himself with a drink, or a dance partner, or by listening to the music. Tonight, he doesn’t yet have his drink, and no one approaches the corner booth—not that he could just get up and leave, even if they did; that would be rude, and Joyce Byers didn’t raise rude sons—and he can hardly focus on Whitney Houston playing in the background. Mike is nowhere to be seen, so it’s just Will and the pile of notebooks in front of him.

There are at least a dozen loose pieces of notebook paper jumbled into the stack which slid out across the tabletop when Mike slapped them down. Will tilts his head a little to make out what seems to be the outline for a magic system covering one of the pages in Mike’s handwriting, just as spidery and meandering as it always was. He used to write his school assignments and thank-you notes and addresses on envelopes in careful block letters, Will remembers, but everything else—D&D plans, fantasy stories he never let Will read before they were finished, letters—in his normal messy scrawl. It seems odd to see it again, virtually unchanged, when everything else is so different. When they’re so different.

Not wanting to think about it, he tugs another one of the pages towards him with the tips of his fingers. This one has notes on sword-smithing, and how to incorporate it with the half-formed magic system he’d been reading about. There’s also a grocery list in the left corner of the page, which makes Will smile a little. Maybe some things aren’t so different after all.

Mike chooses that moment to reappear with two bottles of cider in hand, and Will jumps back guiltily from the papers—as much as one can jump back in a booth, anyway.

Raising one eyebrow, Mike slides into the opposite seat and hands Will one of the bottles. “Read anything interesting?”

“Sorry,” Will apologizes hastily, wrapping his fingers around the neck of the bottle. The condensation is cold against his skin. “The, um, papers fell out, and—well, the magic system seems interesting.”

Mike gives him an unreadable look, and Will downs a hasty gulp of cider, so cold it hurts the backs of his teeth.

“Sorry,” he says again. “I guess it’s for a book, and you probably don’t want anyone seeing it yet, right?”

“Oh,” Mike waves a hand, “I don’t mind. I mean, yeah, it’s for a book, but it’s just you.”

Just you. What the hell is Will supposed to do with that?

Nothing, apparently, because Mike keeps talking.

“—I dedicated, like, half my books to you anyway,” he’s saying.

Will blinks. “You—what?”

“What as in you didn’t hear me, or what as in…?” Mike doesn’t finish the sentence, for which Will is oddly grateful. It leaves the ball in his court, not that he knows how to handle it.

“You dedicated your books to me?” he asks, rather faintly, very baffled.

Something goes a little closed off in Mike’s expression, like a door shutting somewhere far off in the night, one you hadn’t even noticed was open until it takes the light with it when it closes.

“Well, yeah,” Mike says, though he won’t meet Will’s gaze, instead focusing very intently on nudging the scattered papers back into some semblance of order with his free hand while the cider drips condensation down the knuckles of his other. “You didn’t see, I guess. I mean, I figured. It’s not like I expected you to read my books, or anything, but—”

Will swallows. “I read them.”

It’s partially a lie, because he’s just got the one and he never finished it, but he knows about the others. He stops and reads the backs of them, sometimes, when he’s in the bookstore, or the airport, or the library. They always sound good. They are good, according to Lucas and Mrs. Wheeler and even El, not that Will ever doubted it.

“Oh,” Mike says in a soft, small voice, barely audible over the music. He sounds so surprised that Will wishes he hadn’t said anything at all.

“I just—I didn’t see them,” he says hurriedly. “The dedications. I didn’t think you, um, thought about me.”

“I think about you all the time,” is Mike’s immediate response. He pulls a face, looks up at Will under lashes and furrowed brows. “Sorry, is that weird to say?”

Is it? Will thinks helplessly. Everything about this situation feels weird, so can that really count? They’re in uncharted waters here, without a star to sail by. The best response he can muster is a halfhearted sort of shrug.

“It’s like,” Mike says, and then gestures vaguely with his cider, which explains absolutely nothing about what it is or is like. “You know. You were my best friend.”

Then why did you leave? Will wants to ask. Instead, he grips his bottle so hard his knuckles protest. Across from him, Mike stares contemplatively down at his stack of notebooks.

“I dunno, who else am I supposed to dedicate my books to?”

“Okay, but no one actually reads book dedications,” Will says, trying for joking, because it’s beginning to feel like all the oxygen is being sucked out of the space between them and he can’t stand it anymore. He needs to breathe, or maybe leave and never look back.

“Hey!” Mike protests, though he sounds only vaguely offended. “I read them!”

Will snorts. “You didn’t used to.”

“People change,” he says dismissively, and then seems to register the weight of it after.

Yeah, thinks Will. I guess they do.

They fall into an awkward silence after that, listening to Billy Joel playing over the speakers. Will still doesn’t know what Mike wants out of all of this, much less himself. Yet here he is, sitting across from Mike Wheeler in silence and hardly daring to drink his cider, his one drink, because then he’ll finish it and be fresh out of pretenses to stay. Instead, he pulls a napkin from the dispenser to set his cider on, and then another, just to have something to do with his hands. Mike watches him, and Will watches him watching.

Finally, Mike clears his throat and rolls his shoulders back, just a little.

“So,” he says. Will glances up at him, wondering what he’s going to say. Nothing could have prepared him for Mike’s next words, which are, thrillingly: “Did you see the third Karate Kid movie?”

Will stares at him because—what?

“You’re looking at me weird,” Mike says after a moment, very unhelpfully. “It was an honest question!”

Pinching the bridge of his nose, Will fights the urge to groan. “Okay, first, we haven’t seen each other since high school, and you want to talk about movies?”

When Mike opens his mouth, Will holds up a hand, effectively cutting him off.

“Also, second,” he continues, “there was more than one?”

Mike looks momentarily bewildered. “One what?”

“Karate Kid movie, Mike.”

“Oh, yeah. There’s three, obviously, but the second one came out during”—here, he waves his cider around again—“all of that mess.”

Will raises his eyebrows questioningly, because really, all of that mess could describe anything from freshman year of high school to his entire fucking life.

“Nineteen eighty-six,” Mike clarifies, which actually does make a lot of sense.

“Oh,” Will says.

This earns him a snort. “Yeah, oh. I didn’t watch it until way after. The third came out in eighty-nine, I think. I guess you haven’t seen either of them, then?”

“No.” Will frowns, leaning back in the booth. Despite the absurdity of this conversation topic, he can’t deny that it’s calming his nerves a bit with the simple mundanity of it all. “I’m not sure I’ve even seen the first one.”

“You have,” Mike says easily. “We went to see it the summer it came out. Eighth grade, remember? Dustin had the flu, and he was so mad we went without him that we all had to go see it again two weeks later, except you had to go to the lab”—he falters a little at this, and it’s only years of work that keeps Will from flinching, too—“so you didn’t get to come that time.”

“Oh,” Will says again, looking down at where he’s been absentmindedly shredding his napkin into strips. “You remember all that?”

“’Course,” says Mike with a hint of a smile. “Mom had to stop me from crane kicking stuff for weeks. She caught me trying to teach Holly and I got in so much trouble. Like, no sleepovers, no allowance, helping with the dishes every night for two weeks kind of trouble.”

Now that he says all this, Will vaguely recalls it, though his memories from that year aren’t the greatest. Even before that fall, with the Mind Flayer and the gate, it felt like he was sleepwalking through half his days, never quite able to wake up fully and rejoin the land of the living.

But he doesn’t let himself think too hard about that, because Mike’s still talking, as always, since apparently karate movies are something he’s passionate about now, or maybe he always has been.

“Technically,” Mike’s saying when Will tunes back in, “there’s four of them, ‘cause another came out a few years ago, but it didn’t have Macchio in it, so like, what’s the point?”

“Mhm,” says Will. He’s thinking, Macchio, as in, Ralph Macchio? As in, technically the reason he rented Naked in New York so many times the Blockbuster staff started giving him looks every time he walked in the store? That Macchio? But then Mike says something that halts that train of thought dead in its tracks.

“That’s what I said to Max, anyway, and she told me I was being a, quote-unquote, ‘typical guy’ just because the movie had a girl as the main character instead of, oh, the iconic face of the franchise, or whatever. Like, how can you make a Karate Kid movie without the literal karate kid?”

“Wait,” says Will. Mike does not wait. He’s on a roll now.

“Besides,” he continues, “I literally went to see it, so it’s not like I was just hating it for no reason, Maxine. It wasn’t bad, but—I mean, what’s The Karate Kid without Daniel LaRusso?”

This time, he actually stops and takes a breath and looks at Will like the question wasn’t rhetorical and he’s genuinely expecting a response.

“Daniel LaRusso,” Will repeats, squinting a little as he tries valiantly to remember anything about the movie he’s supposedly seen. “He’s, uh—”

“The karate kid?” Mike supplies, failing to hide a smirk behind his bottle of cider. Will very determinedly stares down at his own drink, feeling the tips of his ears go hot. “Yeah, that’d be him. He reminds me of you, you know.”

And Will can’t even begin to unpack that, because he’s frankly still hung up on the fact that Mike’s apparently been talking to Max sometime within the last few years, which is news to Will. He wants to ask about that, but he also doesn’t want to say it like an accusation, so he stays quiet for the time being, letting Mike ramble on about other movies they missed when the world was going to hell in Indiana. His brain unhelpfully reminds him that Mike always talks too much when he’s nervous. Will tells his brain to fuck off. Predictably, it doesn’t.

“There was a Star Trek movie that came out that November, too,” Mike remembers. He’s picked up his pen at some point and is flipping it back and forth and back and forth in a loop over his knuckles, which is easier to pay attention to than his face. “I actually went to see that one when we went to visit my nana for Thanksgiving.”

Will wrinkles his nose. “You watch Star Trek?”

After all the debates over Star Wars versus Star Trek, with Mike always firmly on the side of all things Force- and lightsaber-related, it’s hard to picture.

“Okay, listen,” Mike says, laughing a little like he knows exactly what Will’s thinking, “it was really good, man.” And then, like this somehow explains everything: “It had whales.”

🝔

Eventually, Mike runs out of movies to talk about, though not before Will’s learned that apparently Bowie was in a movie (also in ’86, because what didn’t happen that year) and he somehow missed that little cultural moment, even after they were finished saving the world. The conversation peters out until they’re both sitting in silence again. At least this time, it’s less awkward. Not quite comfortable, to be sure, but not bad enough that Will wishes he were anywhere but here.

He's not sure when he stopped wishing that, exactly, but somewhere between fingers on his elbow and the corner booth and an impassioned tangent about movies Will’s never seen, he stopped minding being here so much.

Here is a secret: he’s not so sure that’s a bad thing.

Either way, it’s not something Will wants to think about too hard, so maybe it’s his turn to break the silence. Now, he thinks, would be a good time to ask about what he said. Now would be the time to bring Max and all their friends up.

Except Will Byers is maybe a little bit of a coward at heart, after everything, because when he opens his mouth and says something inane to start, like so, or hey, Mike looks up at him with curiosity, and Will absolutely chickens out.

What comes out instead is: “So, you’re, uh,” and a vague gesture around the bar, an echo of Mike’s own from before, which is somehow worse than what he was going to say, and Will has so, so many regrets. He finishes, lamely, “You know.”

Mike just looks at him for long enough that Will has a sudden and frankly irrational fear that he’s going to make Will say it, spell it out for him, only to reveal it was all some elaborate prank and Will’s read everything wrong and then laugh in his face. Which is stupid and, again, irrational, but hey, that doesn’t stop Will from thinking it, or his sudden inability to say what he means from making it worse.

In the end, though, Mike spares him the trouble, for which Will feels grateful, and then a little silly.

“Gay?” Mike finishes, when it’s clear Will isn’t going to, and raises his eyebrows. “I mean, I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t.”

Which is fair enough, and a little obvious, but it still feels like Will’s world has tipped over so it’s spinning on its side, and all known laws of the universe are running just a little wonky.

Mike says, thoughtfully, “You too, I guess.”

“Well, yeah,” Will replies before he can think better of it. Now Mike’s looking at him funny. He frowns. “What?”

“Why’d you say it like that?”

“Like what?” Will’s confused.

Mike shrugs—a jerky, aborted motion. “Like I already knew, or something.”

Will can’t help the disbelieving laugh that escapes him. “You mean you didn’t?”

“Why would I have?”

He stares. Across the table, Mike throws up his hands, seeming genuinely bewildered. Will knows the feeling. All this time, and Mike didn’t even know? After years of listening to people call him a queer, after every single other person he came out to seemed completely unsurprised, after that summer in his garage, with the rain, with it’s not my fault you don’t like—

He didn’t know. He didn’t know?

Will wants to balk at the thought, to deny it, except there’s nothing but sincerity in the confused look Mike is giving him from the other side of the booth. Jesus, Will thinks, a little dizzy. Mike hadn’t even known. And if he hadn’t known that…

“It just seemed like everyone knew already,” Will hears himself say as though from a great distance. His fingers tighten around the edge of the table. He doesn’t remember grabbing it, but he grips that table like a buoy in a storm-tossed sea. “I mean, even in middle school they were— and my dad, and—”

“Just because people call you things,” Mike replies, “doesn’t mean they’re right.”

“I guess,” says Will. “But they, uh. They were. About that.”

He peers down at the shredded strips of napkin littering the table in front of him, suddenly needing to do something with his hands. He’d like to draw, but he didn’t bring his sketchbook, and he’d really rather not sketch with an audience anyway, at least if the audience happens to be Mike, so he settles for tearing the strips into pieces and lining them up like squares on a chessboard. Will can feel Mike watching him. He clears his throat.

“Can I ask,” Will begins, and stops. Swallows. “You don’t have to answer this, but…how did you figure it out?”

He sneaks a glance upwards at Mike, where a wry sort of smile twists the corners of his mouth upwards, just for a moment—there and then gone between one blink and the next. Some part of Will wants to grab that smile and pin it down, try to decipher what it means. He keeps ripping his napkin into squares instead.

Mike says, “Some guy at senior prom kissed me out of nowhere and I freaked out about it for a while.”

Will blinks at him in shock. Mike only leans back in the booth, draping one arm along the back, and takes a sip of his drink. He has a silver ring on the middle finger of his right hand. Will hadn’t noticed it before.

“I figured it out,” he says, “eventually. What about you?”

“Me?” Will half-croaks, because never in even his wildest fourteen-year-old fantasies did he ever think they’d end up here: across from each other in a gay bar with Mike asking him how he figured out he was gay. “Um.”

Because the thing is, Will’s gay realization is sitting right across from him, stretched languidly across the cracked vinyl booth like a cat, sporting rings and a ponytail and a leather jacket that probably would have killed his teenage self dead on the spot if he’d ever seen it. What about you? The answer is it was you, obviously, is who else could it have been, is I figured it out about when I figured out I wanted to kiss you—but it’s not like Will’s going to say that. He still has some sense of self-preservation, thank you very much.

Instead, he says, miraculously casual, “I think I just always kind of…knew, I guess.”

Mike nods but doesn’t say anything. Will doesn’t know if there’s anything to say, really.

“So,” he finally says again, tapping his fingers against the edge of the table, “do you—I mean, have you kept up with anyone? From Hawkins, I mean. Dustin, or Lucas, or…?”

Until tonight, he wouldn’t ever have thought to ask that question, because he’d have known the answer to be a resounding no, seeing as Will’s kept up with all of them himself. After a certain point, it was like a ritual of sorts—show up to whatever holiday gathering or summer get-together they were having and go around in a circle to see if anyone had heard from Mike. No one ever had, except Nancy, probably, but no one wanted to put her on the spot about her brother, so they quit asking her after it became evident Mike wasn’t talking to any of them.

At least, that’s what they thought.

Mike blows out a breath, staring down at the table. There’s an expression somewhere between guilty and amused lingering on his face. It’s not one Will’s accustomed to seeing, if he can still be accustomed to any of Mike’s faces after so long.

“Okay, don’t laugh,” Mike says, “but—yeah, I talk to Max, sometimes.”

And Will knew this, he did, because Mike practically admitted it ten minutes ago, but it still catches him off guard somehow, the thought of Mike keeping up with Max Mayfield of all people. The girl he fought so hard against joining their party, way back in middle school. Will can’t remember a time he saw them when they weren’t at each other’s throats. Hell, Max woke up in the hospital with four broken limbs and ten minutes later was finding a way to get a rise out of Mike, and Will remembers standing in the corner thinking everything would be okay in the end because Mike and Max hadn’t changed, even if it felt like everything else had.

His disbelief must be showing on his face because Mike kicks at his ankle under the table.

“I said don’t laugh,” he whines, sounding twelve years old again, shoulders pulling up sheepishly around his ears.

“I’m not laughing!” Will insists, except maybe he is a little, but it’s mostly because of Mike’s face right now. “I’m just surprised, is all. I mean, I thought you and Max didn’t like each other.”

“Oh, we don’t,” Mike says, like a complete and total liar. “She just won’t leave me alone, ever, so I’ve resigned myself to my fate.”

“I find that hard to believe, somehow.”

Mike pulls a face again, but there’s an unexpected fondness to it, softening all the edges and making Will’s heart take a leap in the general direction of his throat. Stop that, he tells himself, like he has any control over it or ever could.

“I mean it,” Mike insists. “She wouldn’t stop bothering me in high school, or after I moved to Chicago, so I kind of just…got used to it. I still am, I guess.”

“Why did you leave?” Will finds himself asking. He doesn’t mean to, but it slips out anyway. Maybe it was always bound to happen; after all, it’s a question he’s been asking himself for years.

Mike lets out a breath. “Not pulling any punches tonight, huh?”

“Sorry,” Will apologizes automatically, though he isn’t. Mostly. “You don’t have to—”

“No, it’s okay.” His arm has dropped off from the back of the booth, falling back to his side. From where Will sits, it looks an awful lot like Mike’s pulling in on himself, shrinking back down to the slouching, don’t-see-me posture of their high school days, the one that never really worked on bullies when they had your number.

Does that make Will the bully in this scenario?

“It’s okay,” Mike says again, like he knows what Will’s thinking, and a little bit like he’s trying to convince himself of it, too. “I don’t mind. I owe you an explanation, don’t I?”

Will’s not sure that Mike Wheeler owes him anything, but the truth is he’s willing to take whatever Mike will give.

“It’s just,” begins Mike, and then he stops, shaking his head. “I don’t know how to explain this well."

"That’s okay,” Will says.

“Not really,” he sighs. “It was like, after Vecna—after we finally won, I guess, and everything was supposed to go back to normal—I didn’t know what to do. You guys moved back to Lenora, and Dustin had Steve and Robin, and Lucas had Max and basketball, and Nancy went to college, and I was just me, you know?”

“Yeah,” he says, even though Mike probably didn’t mean that as an actual question. Because Will does know.

Mike rolls the neck of the mostly empty bottle of cider back and forth between his thumb and forefinger, rests his cheek on the knuckles of his other hand. “I did a lot of thinking. A lot of trying to get my shit together, which wasn’t really working because I was just stuck, you know, in Hawkins, after everything. Again.” He laughs, but it’s a bitter, choked-off sound. “I felt like I was going crazy. I just wanted to leave, and I thought…well. I was an asshole.”

Will begins, “You weren’t—”

Mike silences him with a look. “I was. Everyone knew it. I was just so angry, and I could never figure out why.” He sighs. “I didn’t know who I wanted to be, or who I even was, but I knew he wasn’t—he wasn’t a good person. He wasn’t someone I thought anyone really wanted to be around.”

He falls silent for long enough that Will deems it safe to speak again, though Mike still won’t look at him.

“So,” he prompts gently, “you left?”

“So I left,” Mike agrees quietly. His eyes flicker up to meet Will’s before darting away. In the dim, colorful lighting, Will can just make out the bob of his throat as he swallows. “I thought it would be easier, I guess, if I just wasn’t there. If I didn’t talk to you.”

Here, he stops, and gives Will a quick sideways look.

“Any of you,” he clarifies.

“Oh,” says Will, because he’s not really sure what to do with any of this. Is this—is this really how Mike felt? Feels? He swallows, mouth inexplicably dry. He asks, hardly above a whisper, “Was it? Easier, I mean.”

Mike is silent for so long the song playing over the speakers ends and a new one starts. It’s another Will recognizes—Dire Straits. It’s a song about bad timing, because of course it is.

“Yeah,” Mike says finally, reining Will’s attention back in. “Yeah, it was.”

There’s something in his eyes, something about the way he’s sitting, elbows tucked in, shoulders tense, something that makes Will want to tell him that friends don’t lie, but—

Well. Mike isn’t his friend, now is he? Not anymore.

In the end, Will doesn’t say anything. Mike doesn’t seem surprised.

“Anyway,” he says at length, when it’s clear Will doesn’t have a reply, “It’s not like I could have come back after I graduated college, so.”

Will furrows his brows. “Why not?”

“I came out,” Mike replies casually, but his knuckles have gone white. There’s a sting to it, a bitterness snaking underneath the lightheartedness he’s been clinging to with tooth and nail.

Will’s eyebrows shoot up. “And it didn’t…?”

“Didn’t go well?” Mike snorts. “Three guesses, first two don’t count.”

He grimaces. “Your dad?”

“Yep,” Mike says, popping the p. “Mom came around eventually, but you know, if she hadn’t divorced him by then.”

He doesn’t finish the thought, but then, he doesn’t really need to. Will’s known for years what the inner workings of the Wheeler household are like. It’s still a little baffling to him that Karen Wheeler could take down a Demogorgon with a shotgun when the world was going to hell, but still stay with her sorry excuse for a husband after everything.

“I’m sorry,” Will says softly. It seems too small a thing to say, but Mike gives him a tiny smile, a real one, so maybe it was worth something after all.

“She and Holly come up to visit every New Year’s, since I can’t go see them,” Mike continues, playing with the ends of his hair, wrapping one strand around his fingertip so tightly it goes red. “Holly calls sometimes. But Ted Wheeler says no fags under his roof, and a lot of other bullshit, so I just”—here, a tight shrug—“stayed in Chicago on my own, after. Ended up in New York a couple years ago.”

Will stops gnawing on his lip long enough to ask, “Why didn’t you go to Nancy? Didn’t she have an apartment by then?”

(If Mike is surprised to hear Will keeps up with his sister, he doesn’t show it. It would be hard for Will not to, anyway, since she and Jonathan are living together and have been for years.)

He doesn’t know why he’s asking. It feels like maybe Will shouldn’t even be allowed to ask, because as he seems to keep forgetting more and more tonight, they aren’t friends. They haven’t been for years. He shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t want to know these things, shouldn’t have to stop himself from blurting out something stupid like why didn’t you come to us, any of us? To me?

But Mike doesn’t seem to mind. He just raises an eyebrow and says, “Well, your brother lives with her.”

“And?” Will fails to see how that applies, considering Jonathan’s, like, the most chill person he’s ever met when it comes to the whole being gay thing, including at least half the gay people Will knows. If anyone would be okay with their girlfriend’s gay brother crashing on their couch after getting kicked out, it would be Jonathan Byers.

Mike, it seems, doesn’t agree.

He snorts. “And he’s been out to get me since we were, like, fourteen! He hates me.”

Will snickers at the thought of Jonathan being out to get anyone, much less Mike Wheeler, but Mike waves a finger at him.

“No, don’t deny it,” he says, even though he’s halfway to a grin. “He hates me, man! Your whole family does!”

Will rolls his eyes. As if Mike Wheeler is Public Enemy Number One to the Hopper-Byers family, what a thought. “No, they don’t.”

“Um, yes,” says Mike. He holds up one hand and starts listing people off on his fingers. “Jonathan, Hopper, even Eleven for a while there—”

“My mom doesn’t hate you,” Will interjects hurriedly before Mike can continue that list with something like you. “You know that. You could’ve gone to us, to her, if you needed to.” He shifts, and the booth creaks under him. “You know, after.”

“Yeah,” Mike says, sounding nonplussed, “but she’s your mom, Will.”

Will isn’t sure if he means it like she’s your mom, not mine, or, like, she’s your mom so that rules her out, you know, because I couldn’t stand to be around you anymore. Probably the first, considering what Mike’s told him tonight, but then, how should Will know? And anyway, Joyce Byers loves Mike like a third son and has for years—everyone knows it. Or she had, anyway; maybe not so much now, but that’s only for want of contact. It’s hard to love someone you don’t know or see anymore, though you can certainly keep on loving who they were. The memory of them. The idea. Will knows this firsthand. He probably got it from his mom, after all, who still keeps framed photos with Mike in them around the house, carefully arranged behind all the others when Will comes around, because his mom has always known him too well.

He wonders how Mike would react if he knew about that. Mike’s never been too good at letting people love him. This, it seems, hasn’t changed.

“She’s your mom,” Mike says again, unwinding the hair from around his finger, then winding it back up again and giving it a tug that makes Will want to wince. “I didn’t want…”

“To see me?” Will finds himself saying before he can think better of it. He wishes he could take the words and stuff them back down his throat, but it’s too late for that. Mike’s giving him that look again, unreadable and vaguely amused.

“To barge back into your life just because I got kicked out of mine, Will,” he says easily. Almost too easily. There was a time when Mike Wheeler never could have barged into Will’s life because the door was already open for him. A time when he was always welcome. Will still couldn’t tell you when that time ended. Sometimes, he wonders if it ever really did.

“I wouldn’t,” whispers Will, “have minded.”

He’s too overwhelmed to parse out if that’s a lie or not. He had a lot going on in college, and after, but he certainly wasn’t angry at Mike. In fact, Will isn’t sure he thought about Mike much at all after he graduated, but he can’t imagine he would have turned Mike away if he needed help. None of them would have. Still wouldn’t.

And yet, Mike seems to think so. Mike seems to think a lot of things, and Will doesn’t know where half of them came from, or what he’s supposed to do with them, if anything. They’re not friends. He hardly knows the person Mike is now. He’s just another person Will used to know, like Troy Walsh or Jennifer Hayes or Mark his college roommate or Angela whose last name he never bothered to learn.

The difference, though, is Jennifer Hayes didn’t know twelve-year-old Will like the back of her hand. Troy Walsh certainly didn’t stay by Will’s side nearly every second of every episode he had during the autumn of 1984. No one else was so convinced Will was alive when he went missing; no one else sat next to him on a couch on Halloween, knees and elbows knocking, and promised they’d go crazy together if crazy was where they were headed.

Mike did.

And Will can’t forget that, no matter how hard he’s tried to before.

“Bullshit,” Mike says, shaking his head. “You had your own things going on.”

Will frowns. “How would you know? You weren’t there.”

It comes out sharper than he intends, even if it’s just the truth. Mike wasn’t there. He hasn’t been for a long time. Will made his peace with that years ago, or he thought he did.

“Because you’re you,” says Mike. “You went back to California and made friends and took art classes, and I know this because you told me. Or you did for a while, and then we stopped talking as much, and you didn’t write me back half the time, and—well, I got the hint. So yeah, I wasn’t there, and that’s because you didn’t want me to be.”

The worst part, Will thinks, is that he doesn’t even seem upset about it. He’s saying all of this like it’s nothing. Like he doesn’t care, or like he deserved it. The second isn’t true. Will doesn’t know about the first. He wonders why he cares so much.

The second worst part is that Mike’s at least half right, because Will did do those things, even if he didn’t know how they’d end up. He did them because he had thought he needed them at the time, and maybe he did. But sometimes he wonders if he would have done the same things if he knew where they’d lead.

“It’s not,” Mike’s saying, “like I blame you. I was a mess in high school. I mean, starting high school’s got to be the third worst thing that ever happened to me, and things just went downhill from there for a while. I thought everyone hated me. Hell, I hated myself. And by the time I got my shit together—it felt like too late. Like I missed my chance, you know?”

It’s never too late, Will wants to say, wants to reach across the table, wants to reach back through the years and take Mike by the shoulders and shake him until he understands that. But is it the truth? Does he mean it? If Mike came back to Hawkins next time they had a reunion—

If Mike looked back at him across the table right now and said he wanted to be friends again—

Could things ever be the same, he wonders, or anywhere close to it?

Will doesn’t know the answer, is frankly afraid to know it, and so he says none of what he’s thinking.

Instead, he says, “Third?”

Mike blinks at him, eyebrows raised.

“The third worst thing to ever happen to you,” Will repeats. “That’s very specific, is all.”

“Oh,” says Mike. He relaxes fractionally. Will isn’t sure when he tensed up, or why. “Oh, yeah. The first was—well, you know, when you disappeared.”

He says it like it’s nothing. Like it’s obvious. Like it’s an immutable truth of the universe. It lands like a blow. Will feels a little dizzy thinking about it. His heart feels like it’s slamming against his ribs in a frantic bid for escape, like it’s a wild thing and maybe that’s why it’s called a ribcage, and his is trying to get out and run—somewhere. Away, maybe, hopefully, instead of right back across the table to the person who had it unknowingly for so many years.

Maybe it wasn’t Pandora’s Box that Will opened, after all. Maybe it was Schrödinger’s.

“And the second?” he rasps, throat suddenly tight, lungs squeezing.

“Hm?” Mike asks, sounding very far away. He’s distracted, staring at nothing and tracing patterns on the tabletop with one knuckle.

Will clears his throat, clenches his fists, and tries again. “You know, the second worst thing.”

Mike’s hand stills. One heartbeat, two heartbeats, three. The world around them keeps spinning, but somehow Will feels like all of it, everything that matters, has narrowed down to the single point of this moment in the corner of the bar. Finally, Mike sighs. When he looks back up at Will, there’s something there, in his face, in his eyes, that Will doesn’t know what to do with.

He says, very softly, “When you moved.”

Wetting his lips—when did his mouth get so dry?—Will asks, just as soft, “Which time?”

One corner of Mike’s mouth twitches upwards into the saddest almost-smile Will’s ever seen, which is saying something, because thanks to the universal punch line of his life, Will’s become something of a crack scholar on the subject.

“Both times,” Mike replies. “They were—they were both bad.”

It’s been ten years, and Mike Wheeler is sitting across from Will Byers and telling him some of the worst parts of his life are the parts where Will left. Mike Wheeler chased him down outside a bar and asked him to talk. Mike Wheeler saw him across a crowded bar after ten years of no contact and recognized him on sight.

Will doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do about any of this.

Maybe it’s the honesty Mike’s shown him that does it. Maybe it’s the unexpected circumstances, the fragile chance of it all that’s been stuck so stubbornly in the back of Will’s mind for the last hour—the fact that if maybe one single thing had gone just a little different, they wouldn’t be sitting here at all, and Mike wouldn’t be saying these things, wouldn’t be this vulnerable, and Will wouldn’t get to know them. Maybe it’s the thought that he very well may never see Mike Wheeler again after tonight, because the world is vast and full of people, and they’re just two tiny points on a line that goes on forever, or at least very far out of sight.

Probably it’s just the simple fact that Will wants to be able to tell the truth about this, just once in his life—the whole and unfettered truth. And if this is his last chance to do it—

“I was in love with you,” he says, sounding far calmer than he feels on the inside.

Mike blanches, staring frozen across the table at him like a deer in the headlights. Like a deer already dead and mounted on a wall. Like Will lined up the shot himself, hands steady around the stock and barrel of the gun.

“What?” Mike whispers after a moment or two of his mouth working like he’s forgotten how to speak.

“I was in love with you,” he repeats, and the words are unfamiliar and clumsy in his mouth, tripping over themselves to get out before he changes his mind and stops saying them. “Or whatever the teenage equivalent of love is, I don’t know. I thought—I thought I was being too obvious, because you left, and I thought maybe— maybe you’d figured it out and didn’t want anything to do with me.”

He stops, then, both to take a breath and because his voice is very intently contemplating breaking, and Will refuses to fall apart over this. Mike says nothing, staring at him with an emotion Will isn’t equipped to decipher right now. He tells himself it’s not regret. He’s not so sure it isn’t, but he’s not so sure he isn’t dreaming this up, either.

Will breathes in, breathes out, and keeps going.

“But then nobody had ever heard from you when we got together, after,” he says, “so you weren’t talking to anyone else, either, and I guess it was selfish but I was— God, I was so glad because it meant that it wasn’t just me. That it wasn’t my fault you left.”

“It wasn’t,” Mike says, almost urgently, fingers twitching like he wants to reach across the table and—what, take one of Will’s hands? Will scoffs at the thought. More wishful thinking, even after all this time, all this work. “It wasn’t your fault, Will. It was never—”

“I know,” Will says softly. He does, mostly. He breathes out again, sharper, like if he pushes all the air out of his lungs it will take everything else with it, the terrible jumble of emotions and uncertainty and hope that Will is so, so tired of feeling. When he speaks again, his voice is steadier than it’s ever been.

“You asked how I knew I was gay? That’s— that’s how.” For the third time and good measure both, he says, “I was in love with you.”

Isn’t there a saying, Will thinks, about threes and charms? Let this third time be the charm. Let him let it go now, for good. The truth’s come out. Let this be the end.

For a very long few seconds, and then a minute, and then two, Mike is quiet, eyes darting over Will’s face, like he’s memorizing it, or looking for something. For what, Will can’t fathom. Finally, Mike raises his bottle in a kind of toast, and drains the last mouthful of liquid from it.

One drink, Will had said. And there it goes. There it went.

“Well,” says Mike with a shake of his head, with the faintest of laughs, setting the bottle down ever so gently on the table. He taps one fingernail against it before letting his hand fall away. “I guess we missed each other, huh?”

And then he gives Will a smile, one Will hasn’t seen in years and years and years, and he says, “It was good to see you, Will. It really was.”

He gathers up his stack of papers and notebooks and pens, and before Will can really understand what’s happening, there’s a handful of bills on the table and Mike Wheeler is leaving, is going, is already gone.

Will watches him disappear into the swirl of lights and color and bodies that is the bar or maybe the rest of the world and finds himself wondering, not for the first time, where things went wrong between them.

It’s been ten years, and somehow, they’re right back where they started. Everything has changed, and yet here Will is, alone, and there Mike is, gone, and everything is somehow exactly the same.

And Will still doesn’t know what to do about it.

Maybe, he thinks, staring at the empty seat across from him, there was never anything to do at all.