Chapter Text
Will hated the cold.
Of course, he’s not the only person in the world who’s ever hated the cold. He grew up on freezing walks to school and waiting for the heat in Jonathan’s beat-up car to turn on, waiting to feel that relief. He didn’t believe that anyone who grew up in the Midwest could truly love being cold.
There was also that whole Upside Down business that he tried not to think about too hard. After he had come back, he was so cold, no matter how many blankets his mom piled on him. It was a bone-deep kind of cold, a chill that never truly went away. The same cold rush he felt whenever Vecna or the Mind Flayer were close. That cold that meant “panic,” meant “danger.”
But it had been a long time since he had felt that chill, and the Upside Down was nothing more than a dark spot in his teenage years. Or at least, he tried to act like it was.
But right now, Will was cold. Not Upside-Down-cold, just January-in-Chicago-cold. Today was right in the middle of a week of constant snowstorms, and the world outside his window was mostly white and gray. It was the perfect weather for Will to hole up in his apartment and draw, but he had to get out. For one, he had to run some errands. He was also worried that if he stayed in his apartment, he might never leave it again. Keep ordering delivery and watching old movies in his pajamas until the snow melted, giving way to spring’s green.
In short, he had to get out.
He also loved living in Chicago. He had complicated feelings at best about his hometown. That was where he met all his childhood friends, where his mom and Hopper used to live, and where he learned to love who he was. However, Hawkins was also the place he and his friends had to repeatedly defeat otherworldly monsters, where he was captured and trapped in another dimension, and where he had been ruthlessly bullied throughout his childhood.
But looking past all of that (if he even could look past it), he hated how small Hawkins felt. Downtown Hawkins had approximately three stores, he knew every single person in his graduating class, and he could bike from one end of town to the other in an afternoon.
In comparison, Chicago was like a whole other universe. He loved how he could discover something new every day, even in his own neighborhood. There were hundreds of thousands of people who he had never met, who might be his new best friends, who might say they loved him and mean it.
When he thought about it like that, having to run errands today didn’t seem so bad. He grabbed a scarf and his Walkman and headed out the door.
Leaving his apartment building, the cold hit him like a truck. He knew it would, of course, but that didn’t make it any better. He had a very specific list of things to do, though: stop at the pharmacy for more cough drops, look for new cassette tapes at the store a couple blocks away, and stop at a coffee shop to try to get started on an assignment for one of his classes.
The first stop, the pharmacy, was easy. All he needed was cough drops because he had a bad habit of needing something in his mouth while he worked on his projects for school. He had another bad habit of getting sick every time he was excessively stressed. He was always stressed, so he was almost always sick. It was a problem, certainly, but he couldn’t see a solution besides dropping out of school to live in the woods (which he seriously considered at least once a week).
So, he was in desperate need of cough drops.
He made a beeline for that aisle and was pondering which flavor to go for when he heard an all-too-familiar voice.
It was a bored voice, a too-loud voice, a voice that made you want to fight for the attention of its speaker. It was a voice that dripped down Will’s spine like honey, giving him goosebumps despite his many layers.
Will hadn’t heard that voice in years, but he knew without a doubt that it was Mike Wheeler.
Sure enough, when he peeked out of the aisle, he saw a scruffy mop of black hair that could only belong to Mike. It looked like he had changed his haircut in the years since Will had seen him, which made sense. They had all grown since the end of high school. It was no longer so overgrown and awkward, easy for Mike to hide behind. It was still messy in a way that made Will’s heart squeeze, but it was more him.
Will had thought about this moment for ages, what he might say to Mike when he saw him again. Ideally, he would be somewhere much cooler, not in a pharmacy with a lingering cough. But Mike was here.
Whoever Mike was with said something Will couldn’t hear, but it must have been funny. Mike tipped his head back and cackled, a laugh Will remembered from late nights in the Wheeler basement and lazy summer days biking around.
Will’s heart squeezed again, more painfully this time. He could have been having very serious heart problems, for all he knew.
He couldn’t be here. Near Mike. He couldn’t do this.
He grabbed the first bag of cough drops he found (cherry flavored, as if he would have chosen anything else) and began creeping to the front of the store. He kept one eye trained on Mike as he meandered through the aisles. Will prayed to whoever was out there to let him get out of here without any awkward run-ins with the guy he had been thinking about for the past three years.
In a rare stroke of luck, Will made it out without any incident. A bored-looking cashier rang him up and he was out on the street in no time.
Outside, it was much easier to breathe. Will felt like a coward for hiding from Mike the way he did, but it was his only option. He hadn’t spoken to Mike since their conversation after graduation that Will would rather not think about. Maybe someday, Will would be in the right state of mind to give him a call or write him a letter or something.
But not now. Not today.