Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“i don’t forgive you / but please don’t hold me to it.”
—“kyoto”, phoebe bridgers

“maybe they don’t forget about you, but they forget to remember you. i don’t think people mean to forget. i think it just happens.”
—home alone 2: lost in new york

✉

June 1993

Dear Will,

This is the fourth time I’ve tried to write this letter. I guess the fact that I only seem to be able to write it late at night means it’s a bad idea, but I’ve always been good at those, haven’t I?

That was a bad joke. I don’t think I’ve ever told a good one, but at least they used to make you laugh. I remember Max always told me I wouldn’t know funny if it hit me in the face with a pie, but you laughed every time. I think about that, sometimes. It was nice of you.

I’m getting off-topic again. Maybe I was never on it in the first place.

✉

In Mike’s defense, the letter seemed like a good idea at the time.

That probably should have said something, though, because the time started as melancholy late nights in his dorm room, listening to strangers’ laughter on the other side of the wall and remembering when he used to have friends like that. That’s where it began: a seed planted in the dark and quiet spaces left behind in his heart when other loves were uprooted. A seed that he carried through two years of college and three nights in the hospital, and every night in his childhood bedroom since. Somewhere along the way, it must have sprouted, because suddenly the loneliness covered his insides like ivy on a house, and somewhere outside of Hawkins, all his old friends were graduating, including the person who used to know him best when he was eleven and loudmouthed and two and a half feet shorter.

And so Mike wrote four drafts of a letter he never should have sent, all because it had seemed like a good idea, something he famously does not have.

But even still—it had felt like one. It had seemed like a nice gesture, a way to find closure after all these years.

He should’ve known better. He’s not the kind of guy who gets that. He’s always been an open wound of a person; a human-shaped bruise on the skinned knee of his life.

The problem with Mike Wheeler, of course (or one of them, anyway; from where he stands, there’s a hell of a lot more than one), is that knowing better isn’t exactly his forte. Never has been. His mother, his sisters, and all his teachers could all tell you this; his father could not, but only because he stopped paying attention to Mike sometime around 1985 and never bothered to start back up again.

All this is to say, he writes Will Byers a letter across a string of late nights—Will, who he hasn’t seen since his freshman year of high school; Will, who he can go months and months without thinking about and then remember in one terrible gut punch of a moment; Will, who used to be his best friend. The writing always takes place under the fanciful assumption that he will throw it away in the morning and it will never find its way into so much as an envelope, much less the Byers’ mailbox out in California, assuming they even live there anymore.

For what it’s worth, and for the first three drafts, he’s right. Come morning, Mike reads them over, shakes his head in disgust, and shreds them methodically into his wastebasket, which he always dumps directly into the trash bin right before taking it to the curb just to be sure no nosy mothers or curious little sisters will try to pick through the remains.

The fourth version, however, he doesn’t hate. The fourth version he finishes at three in the morning, on his eighth night of struggling to sleep before the sun creeps above the horizon. It says the things he wants to say, and it doesn’t say anything that he doesn’t, and because it’s three twenty-two in the morning and Mike Wheeler is lonely and has been for years, he does something very, very stupid.

He sends it.

He folds the letter into thirds, slips it into an envelope, and scrawls an address on the front as the clock ticks over to three twenty-three and the house sleeps on around him. He doesn’t know if the address that he still remembers is correct anymore, or if Joyce Byers might have moved in the seven years since Mike last visited California. He doesn’t know if Will is ever going to read it, or if he’ll chuck it straight in the garbage, unopened and unread, the moment he reads the return address. He doesn’t know if Will even cares enough to remember him, and he’s not sure if he likes that thought or not. Frankly, Mike Wheeler doesn’t know a lot of things. It’s the not knowing that does him in, when it comes down to it. It’s always been easier for Mike to leap without looking.

It's three twenty-seven in the morning when he creeps down the stairs, digs a stamp out of his mother’s purse, and slips the letter into the mailbox under the streetlights’ dreamsicle-orange glow. He does this because he is lonely, and tired, and maybe a little bit nostalgic in the way only late summer nights spent in your childhood bedroom with the window and your own chest cracked open in equal measure can make you.

(Something Mike has learned over the last seven years is the two things you miss most in life as you get older are yourself and your childhood best friend. The letter feels like it’s meant for both of them.)

By three thirty-four, he’s back in his room, curling up in his bed with his well-worn copy of The Fellowship of the Ring to keep him company for the rest of his inevitably sleepless night. When he wakes up tomorrow afternoon, the letter will be far out of his reach, already on its way from the Hawkins Post Office to the Indianapolis-area mail processing center. Not that Mike will be thinking about this. The letter is out of sight and out of mind, and the same can be said for Will Byers, more or less. Mike’s said his piece, held his peace, and tried to let it go. He’s not exactly good at letting things go, mind you, but sometimes it’s the thought that counts, right?

He thinks, foolishly, hopefully, wretchedly, at any point over the next few weeks whenever he happens to remember it, that that’s the end of it. All of it.

As it turns out, he’s wrong.

✉

I guess you’re graduating tomorrow. Well, I don’t guess. I know. My mom told me. That’s a big deal. Maybe it’s weird of me to say I’m proud of you since we don’t really know each other talk anymore, but I am. I know how hard you’ve worked for this, or I can guess, anyway. You’ve never been the kind of person who does things by halves. Anyway, I wanted to say congratulations. I thought about calling but I didn’t know what to say to you. I guess I’ve never been very good at saying anything.

✉

The story of Mike and Will’s friendship, generally abridged, goes something like this:

When Mike is five years old, he sees a boy on the swing sets, all alone on the first day of school. He asks the boy, whose name he later learns is Will Byers, to be his friend. The boy says yes. For seven years, they are best friends and inseparable.

When Mike is twelve years old, Will gets lost in the woods on his way home one Sunday night in November. Half the town shrugs and assumes he’s run away to live with his father—something anyone who knows the Byers family even the slightest would never consider—and a good portion of the other half decide he’s been murdered—“probably by some other queer; you know how they are.” The handful that are left include Mike, Will’s mom and brother, the rest of their friends, and unexpectedly, the local sheriff, Jim Hopper. It’s his daughter who eventually finds Will sick, half-frozen, and delirious in the woods a week later. He spends a month in the hospital recovering, and Mike is there every day after school.

When Mike is fourteen, the local mall burns down with Hopper still inside. The fire is suspected to be and investigated as arson, considering the unrest surrounding the closure of multiple local businesses all over town, but no conviction is ever made. The Byerses take in his daughter, by now a close friend to all of them. This would have been fine if not for the fact that Joyce Byers, with one more mouth to feed and one less friend in a town that has been anything but kind to her, finds a better job out in California and moves her whole family there two and a half months into their freshman year of high school. They all promise to keep in touch. To not let go. At first, this is not a lie.

Two weeks before Mike’s fifteenth birthday, he spends his spring break in Lenora Hills, California, visiting the Byers family. Things are stiff and awkward at first, mostly because Mike feels like he misplaced all the essential parts of himself somewhere between here and turning thirteen, but by the end, he’s clinging to Will in the airport as his flight is boarding, trying not to cry at the thought of going home. That’s one of the last times that things between them make sense.

Things unravel after that, and so do they, but so slowly that it’s easy to ignore it happening. High school, that great mundane tragedy, takes all of Mike’s middle school friendships and does its damnedest to throttle them to death. Lucas joins the basketball team, and Dustin gets a job. Max is busy keeping her mother from falling apart, and Nancy’s off in college.

Mike, for his part—well, it’s not that he doesn’t care. He’ll always care, probably too much. But it’s harder to find the energy to do anything about it. When people ask him how he’s doing, the only thing he can say is fine because telling the truth would mean admitting how terribly empty he feels, how miserable things are at home, how he doesn’t have anywhere to run away to on weekends now that Hopper’s dead, Max is busy, and Will lives two-thousand-odd miles away. More often than not, he has to stay home and babysit Holly anyway, so eventually he just stops leaving the house except to go to school.

There’s no real reason he stops talking to Will, because he doesn’t count any of his problems as real. Mike knows he’s better off than most of his friends. Better to have two parents who don’t care than one who used to hit you, or one who’s dead, or one who drinks herself into oblivion every night because she can’t cope with the guilt of being left behind by a man who wasn’t even halfway decent, right? So what if he’s lonely? He’s the one always hiding at home. So what if he’s sad? Everyone’s sad sometimes. So what if no one likes him? He doesn’t even like himself. But all of them combine into a snarled mess in his guts and his ribcage and the back of his skull until he blinks and realizes he’s forgotten to write Will back for three months; looks at the calendar and can’t remember when the last time they called is; gets himself grounded for skipping school because he couldn’t find the will to get out of bed one too many times and has to cancel on his next chance to visit California.

For a while, Will doesn’t let it get to him, because he’s something of a saint to Mike and always has been. He keeps writing, keeps calling, even suggests they might go to school together somewhere, because surely there’s a university they can both get into that has good art and writing programs both. (Mike doesn’t have the heart to tell him that he’s going to major in business, a ‘real major’, or his dad said he can forget about college at all.)

But even saintly patience has its limit, and Will eventually reaches his. By the time they graduate, they haven’t talked properly in months. Mike goes to school in Indianapolis. He assumes Will goes somewhere in California, but he doesn’t know for sure.

Life goes on. Mike makes it two weeks into his junior year before he can’t take it anymore. In a string of impressively bad decisions, all made within a month in what his counselors have called a mental break and his parents refuse to call anything at all, he’s dropped out, crashed his car, and ended up right back where he started: alone in his parents’ house in Hawkins. It’s impressive, really, that they’re even letting him live with them after all of that. On his worst nights, Mike wishes they wouldn’t. He wishes people would make it easier for him to finish destroying himself, instead of watching him closely so he’s left to pick himself apart one miserable thread at a time, here in the town where he grew up.

(Sometimes, he gets the feeling this town wants to eat him alive. It’s the kind of thing he might have confided in Will, once, but those days are long over, and it’s not really anyone’s fault but his.)

Now Mike is twenty-two, working the occasional shift at Melvald’s on Main, and he doesn’t have a car or a plan or a friend to talk to. What he does have is a longing like a knife in his ribs, like blood on his hands, and he couldn’t tell you if it’s to go back or to go forward or to go nowhere at all. He lies awake in his bed every night and he walks the same streets he used to bike every day as a kid and he reads the same books but finds none of the wonder they once possessed. He is twenty-two and out looking for himself, but the person he used to be is not where Mike left him.

Sometimes, he’s afraid that person never existed at all.

And in all of that mess, when summer rolls in with watermelon and lemonade and late nights choked with memories as loud as the cicadas outside his window, Mike finds himself thinking about Will, something he’s spent a long time trying not to do, and then simply not doing at all. Their friendship, or rather the death of it, has become a bruise he can’t stop pressing; a hangnail he’s always chewing; a scab Mike keeps picking off so the wound can never truly heal.

It's half guilt, half self-flagellation, and all fear, because the truth is that Will is still something of a constant in Mike’s life, or at least in the way he’s been living it. He doesn’t know if moving on is a thing he can do, because it’s hard to remember a time when he didn’t have Will, except for the times he was missing him. Sometimes, he’s paralyzed by the fear that Will is out there somewhere, feeling the same way, and it’s all Mike’s fault.

Call the letter a Hail Mary of sorts, then. A last-ditch effort to do one good thing in his life. A band-aid over the open sore he’s created to stop him from keeping it that way, or an exorcism to rid him of this loneliness that’s been haunting him since he was fourteen years old. Give it any number of names or metaphors you want. He doesn’t think it matters either way.

Mike never expected anything to come of it. It’s been a long time since he’s expected anything of Will. And that, perhaps, is his first mistake—second, if you count the letter as his first, but maybe it was anything but.

Maybe the thing that was supposed to be an ending is a beginning all on its own, but we’ll get to that soon enough, and so will Mike.

So the story of Mike and Will, as they know it, goes something like this: they’re best friends until they aren’t. Growing up steals the closeness, and a lot of other things besides, because adulthood is a thief; because there has never been a way to grow up without some kind of violence, without finding yourself with your hands around the throat of your childhood and realizing you’ve been killing parts of yourself for years to make room for the person you’re supposed to grow into. For the person who is supposed to grow into you and all the spaces you’ve hollowed out. One day you’re twelve and best friends and happy, and the next you’re twenty-two and alone and it’s all over. The time has passed you by and the ending came before you knew it.

But here is a secret about stories: sometimes, what we think is an ending is nothing more than a chapter break.

Sometimes, it’s not an ending at all.

✉

I wanted to say some other things, too. It’s probably selfish of me to do it this way, where only I get to talk, but I didn’t know how else to do it. At least this way I know you won’t hang up on me if I say something stupid.

✉

The fourth worst day of Mike Wheeler’s day starts out just fine. As far as mid-June Tuesdays spent living with your parents go, it’s about as normal as they come.

And then the phone rings.

Normally, this would be fine. Mike’s got nothing against phones, though he doesn’t exactly use them much these days. But today the phone, as his mother informs him by yelling his name up the stairs, is directly his concern.

“Michael!” she calls, already sounding half-distracted because there’s always one hundred and one things demanding Karen Wheeler’s attention, and Mike himself is not often high on the priority list. “Phone for you!”

It’s been years, but he’s always Michael. Never Mike.

Sighing, he extracts himself from the depths of his bed, where he’s spent the last three hours only halfway comprehending the Battle of Helm’s Deep for the umpteenth time, and trudges downstairs to take the phone out of his mother’s hands so she can go back to whatever it is she does when Mike isn’t paying attention. Cooking, maybe, or arguing with his father. She seems to do those a lot.

“Hello?” he asks, wondering who in the world could be calling for him. Nancy, maybe?

“I got your letter,” says one Will Byers on the other end of the phone, and Mike nearly drops the receiver in shock. “I think we should talk.”

His tone is level, but without a face to go with it, Mike can’t immediately tell if that’s good or not. Then what Will is saying sinks in, and yeah, scratch that—nothing about this can be good. It’s been two weeks since he sent the letter. Mike didn’t expect Will to call. He didn’t expect anything.

“I don’t know,” he says carefully, because his mother is still eyeing him from across the kitchen with a faint curiosity, “if that’s a good idea.”

“You don’t know if it’s a good idea,” Will repeats tonelessly. Well. That’s definitely bad.

Mike winces, sinks his fingernails into his palm, tries to remember how to breathe. “I said everything I needed to.”

Everything I should. And some of the things he shouldn’t have besides, now that he thinks about it.

“Oh, really? ‘Dear Will, thanks for being my friend, you were great but let’s never do this again. Talk to you never. Goodbye!’ That’s all you have to say for yourself?”

That was the gist of it, yeah. Will doesn’t sound too thrilled about it.

Mike closes his eyes. “Will.”

“Fuck you, Mike.”

There’s a clatter of plastic on plastic, and it takes Mike a moment to realize that he’s hung up the phone without even thinking about it, and now he’s just standing there in the kitchen, hand trembling where it still rests on the receiver. He takes one breath, then two, struggling to remember if this is what breathing is supposed to feel like, then has to stop and swallow down the bile that rises in his throat.

He never should have sent that letter. It had seemed like a good idea. It had. Probably that should have been his first warning not to do it, but he’s never been one to notice red flags, now has he?

“Michael?” his mother asks. When he looks up at her, she’s staring at him in concern, which means he probably looks about as shell-shocked as he feels right now. “Honey, are you okay?”

He can’t quite recall the last time she called him honey, much less asked if he was okay. She’s known the answer for long enough now that there’s little point in asking. The answer hasn’t changed. It’s probably never, he reflects bitterly, going to change. God knows Mike hasn’t.

“Fine,” he manages, like the eternal liar that he is, and then beats the fastest retreat to the stairs that he can without flat-out running, which would only raise more questions than he has answers, or even lies.

✉

I know things between us were weird before we stopped talking. I know that’s probably my fault. It was just weird, I think, knowing that you used to know me better than anyone else in the world, and you didn’t anymore. Like, how do you fix that? Can you? I guess not, since we ended up here.

✉

He’s been back in his bed for all of half an hour, curled on his side with his palm pressed against his shuddering chest as he talks himself back into some semblance of regular breathing, when the doorbell rings downstairs. His mother is still home, so Mike doesn’t move, just shoves his face into his pillow and counts his heartbeats out, trying to fumble his way back to a normal rate of beats per minute, trying not to feel like a two-minute phone conversation cracked his chest open like some ancient tomb, exposing all that lies dead within it.

Clearly, he’s not succeeding.

At least he knows not to pick up the phone again. At least he’s very far out of reach of any more consequences of his stupid, stupid mistake.

He closes his eyes, listening to the sound of his mother’s laughter downstairs. If he doesn’t move, doesn’t think, doesn’t listen too hard, he can almost pretend this is summer five years ago. Ten. That he’s still a little kid and Nancy’s just on the other side of the wall and he’s never done anything stupider than cheating on a math test, never lost more than a toy or two.

The conversation downstairs dies out, and he hears the front door close, then the sound of someone climbing the stairs. His mother, probably. Mike brings his knees up to his chest and ignores it in hopes that she’s not coming to talk to him about something. It’s barely noon and he can already tell he’s not going to be budging from this spot until dinner. But because he’s the unluckiest person in all of Indiana, the footsteps pause outside his door, and Mike can’t help the way he tenses.

Please go away, he wills his mother.

There’s a knock at the door. He freezes.

Karen Wheeler never knocks.

Frowning, Mike sits up. There’s a second knock, this one quicker, sharper.

“I know you’re in there,” says an exasperated voice from the hall, except—

Mike scrambles hastily out of bed and jerks open the door. Will Byers is standing there with his arms folded and his eyes ablaze and his hair cut shorter than the last time Mike saw him. Other than looking older and angrier, he might well have stepped right out of a memory and into Mike’s bedroom, brushing past him standing dumbstruck in the doorway like he’s made of smoke. A memory, Mike wonders, watching Will pivot in the center of the room and turn back to look at him with raised brows, or a nightmare?

“What did you mean, ‘we’re not friends anymore’?” Will demands.

“Oh god,” Mike says faintly, because he can’t think of a single other thing to say.

“It’s Will, actually,” Will says. “Or maybe you forgot that in the five years since you last bothered to speak to me before you sent me this.”

He unfolds his arms to brandish a crumpled envelope in Mike’s face, and he knows without even looking at his own handwriting on the front exactly what it is.

“I thought you were in California,” Mike manages. His hand is still fisted around the doorknob. He doesn’t know if he’s holding it because he needs something to hold onto or if he’s just flat-out forgotten how to let go.

“Mom’s moving back to Hawkins,” Will says, and Mike jerks back in shock. “I didn’t say anything because I was going to surprise you, and then this showed up in the forwarded mail. Imagine my surprise.”

“What are you doing here?” he asks and hates himself for how afraid he sounds.

“You tell me,” Will says acidly. The letter creases in his grip. He’s practically throttling it. He looks like he wants to throttle Mike instead. “What is this, Mike?”

Mike still feels like none of this is real, somehow, so he says, “You read it?”

It comes out more questioning than he intends.

“Did you think,” Will asks, “that I wouldn’t?”

Mike opens his mouth and closes it without finding a single word to explain, but Will has never needed him to say anything to understand exactly what Mike means. He laughs. It’s a bitter, incredulous sound, and it cuts Mike to the bone.

“You really thought— god, I can’t believe you.”

Mike says, helpless, hopeless, halting, “I didn’t know if you wanted to hear from me. I didn’t know if you thought about me at all.”

“God,” Will repeats, like a plea. Like a curse. “Of course I do, Mike. How could I not?”

“We haven’t talked in years, Will.”

“Who’s fucking fault is that?” Will looks about two seconds from stomping his foot in sheer frustration. “You barely called, Mike. You barely wrote. It was like pulling teeth to get you to talk to me. You never came to visit, and then you went off to Indianapolis instead of looking at any colleges with me like we talked about, and you didn’t even tell me until that summer! It’s like you just disappeared. What was I supposed to do? Keep trying?”

Yes, some nonsensical and selfish part of Mike wants to say, because Will was always the one who never gave up. He was always the best of them, and that’s why Mike was always running away from him, maybe. Because Will was good, and Mike hasn’t done anything to deserve that. He’s done the literal opposite. It would have been unfair to drag him down into Mike’s mess—or so he’s been telling himself for a long, long time.

“I just,” Mike tries, and then stops and swallows and wrings the doorknob within an inch of its life. He thinks his fingers might be shaking, but it’s hard to tell when he has them clenched so tightly around the metal. Everything is so big and disastrous and terrible that he doesn’t know if he can fit it into words, this black hole that’s been yawning behind his ribs for years now, not in any way that makes sense. “I didn’t want to hold you back. My mom said that I needed to— to make my own friends. Here. When I got older.”

Will seems unimpressed with this explanation. He scoffs, “You can have more than one friend, Mike.”

But how to explain that he’s never had a friend like Will, and he thinks he never will again? That sometimes you meet a person, and they fit into your life so perfectly it’s like you were born to know them, that you grow with and beside and around them so thoroughly that when they leave it’s like you’ve been flayed open and gutted and hung out to dry? How to explain that he went out to California when he was fourteen years old and saw Will the happiest he’d ever been, no longer an outcast or a freak or that kid who got lost in the woods for a week in ’83? How to explain the things his mother said to him when he was seventeen and lonely and begged to go back to California for just one more visit?

The last one, at least, is the easiest. Looking down at his feet to avoid Will’s accusatory gaze, Mike settles on, “Yeah, well. She said I needed to let you make your own friends, too.”

She said other things, too. That sometimes people grow apart, and you need to let them move on. That he was holding Will back from living his own life apart from Mike and all their childhood plans, though she hadn’t said it so harshly, or in so many words. And the worst part was that Mike had believed her, and still does.

He’s always had a way of holding on too tight, of clinging to things until they fall apart or suffocate or claw him up in an attempt to get away from him. Every stuffed animal he owned as a child he wore down into the same ratty, slate-grey shade. He cares too much, and everyone knows it. It’s killed everything Mike cares about, one way or another. He thinks that one day it will kill him too, if he’s not careful, and if he’s honest, he’s been anything but.

Mike clears his throat, glancing up to meet Will’s gaze, and says, “I didn’t know how to be there for you when I wasn’t there.”

Will huffs. “That’s shitty.”

“Yeah,” he says miserably. “I know.”

They’re both quiet for a moment. Will shifts from foot to foot, brow furrowed, studying him like Mike’s a puzzle whose pieces he’s trying to fit together. Mike wishes he wouldn’t look at him like that. He also never wants him to look away.

“So,” Will says, slower, still sharp-edged and upset and confused, “that’s why you stopped writing?”

Mike finally releases the doorknob, flexing his aching fingers where they fall at his side. He doesn’t move any closer to Will, doesn’t dare do anything but stay exactly where he is by the still-open door.

“I don’t know,” he says. It’s easier than telling the truth, whole and unfettered and ugly—but only just. He feels like when he’s bitten his lip one too many times, worried at a loose piece of skin and torn it right off, only to realize how much more of it has come away than expected. He feels like the exposed spot left behind, tender and raw and just the slightest bit bloody. He’s a split lip and a bald-faced lie and a skinned knee and he needs Will to leave before he says something he shouldn’t. Something he can’t take back. “I didn’t mean for any of this to happen.”

“Me neither,” says Will shortly. “Still did, though.”

He’s clearly waiting for a better explanation, but Mike simply doesn’t have one.

Instead, he just says, “Yeah.”

“Mike,” Will begins, quieter now. “Why did you write me a letter if you didn’t think I was going to read it?”

Closing his eyes, Mike lets out a long, ragged breath. “I guess I missed you,” he says, because he at least owes Will that much of the truth.

Will hesitates. “You guess?”

Mike chews the inside of his cheek. “I know.”

“What do you want from me?” he asks, frustrated. Pleading.

Nothing, Mike thinks desperately. Everything. Forgiveness. For you to be my friend again, because I’m the one who broke us, but I don’t think I really meant to.

He says none of this. He can’t. Mike just shrugs.

“Mike,” Will says again. A warning, maybe. “Talk to me.”

“I did,” he manages, with an aborted gesture towards the letter still crumpled in Will’s grip.

“Yeah, and I don’t understand what the hell you were trying to say in this. ‘We don’t know each other anymore’?”

Mike bites down on his lip so hard he tastes blood. “Ask me what your favorite color is.”

Will squints at him. “What?”

“Just. Please?”

He sighs. “Fine. What’s my favorite color?”

Mike says, “I don’t know.”

Will just stares at him, eyebrows raised like he’s waiting for an answer. Mike doesn’t know how to explain to him that he’s already given one.

“I don’t know,” Mike repeats. “I don’t know your favorite color, or your favorite song, or where you went to college, or if you ever fucking learned how to drive. I don’t know what you majored in. I don’t—fuck, Will. I don’t know any of it. I don’t even know myself anymore. How can we still be friends if we don’t know each other?”

For a long, long moment, Will keeps staring at him. Then, slowly, he shakes his head in disbelief.

“Jesus,” he says. “You don’t make any sense sometimes, you know that? You don’t know me, but you miss me, but you don’t— you don’t think we should be friends anymore? Is that it?”

“That’s not,” Mike says, swallowing roughly, “what I wrote. You know it’s not.”

“Then what, Mike?” Will demands, holding up the letter again. “What was the fucking point of this?”

His voice is louder than Mike has ever heard it, and he flinches back in surprise. Will’s always been soft-spoken and slow to anger, but maybe that changed, too, when Mike wasn’t looking. When Mike wasn’t there.

Will must notice Mike’s reaction, because he stops and takes a measured breath through his nose before saying, “I’m not angry, okay? I just want some answers.”

“Bullshit,” Mike says. “Nobody who isn’t angry says that.”

“I’m not, Mike.”

Mike snorts. “Clearly you are, and I— I get it. But friends don’t—”

And then his brain catches up to his mouth, and Mike swallows back the rest of what he’d been about to say, because he doesn’t get to say that anymore. He’s lost the fucking right.

Will just looks at him.

“Say it,” he challenges. “Finish the sentence.”

Mike says, “Get out.”

“Mike.” He doesn’t sound angry anymore. Mostly, he just sounds tired.

“You need to go,” Mike manages. “Just— go. Please.”

For a long and unbearable moment, Will studies him, still standing there in the middle of Mike’s room, the past he killed and buried in an unmarked grave come back to haunt him at last.

And then Will nods, just once, and he goes.

Mike has to shut the door behind him to keep himself from doing something he’ll regret, like watching Will go, or worse, following him and begging him to come back and forget any of this ever happened. Mike made his bed a long time ago, and now he has to sleep in it.

Only when Will’s footsteps have retreated down the stairs and he’s certain he’s heard the front door close does Mike release his doorknob and stumble back across the room to his bed, where he buries his face in his pillow and screams until he can’t anymore.

It doesn’t make him feel anything but hoarse.

✉

Sorry, I’m rambling. I wanted to say I’m sorry for that. I never meant to hurt you lose you push you away. I had a lot going on. Still do. That’s not much of an excuse, I guess. There’s always something going on. I just didn’t want to put all that on you. Maybe I should have. I don’t know. I’m sorry.

✉

By morning, he’s pieced himself back together enough to decide that this isn’t the end of the world. Probably. Will’s back in town, sure, but Mike can work with this, or at least avoid it. Hawkins is small, but it’s not that small. Mike doesn’t know what part of town Joyce has moved back to, but the chances of running into her or Will anywhere outside of his shifts at work have got to be pretty low. He doesn’t exactly get out much, and Will can’t be here forever, can he? He’d only mentioned Joyce moving back, not himself or El or Jonathan.

Eventually, Mike knows, Will is going to leave again. He wishes that didn’t make his chest feel as tight as it does, but better that than the pain of having to look Will in the eye again. Better that than anything else.

Mike just has to go about his life as normal, keeping to the house, and it will be fine. He won’t have to see Will.

It’s fine.

✉

I’m sorry we don’t know each other anymore. I’m sorry that we haven’t talked in so long. I’m sorry if it’s my fault, and I’m sorry for not reaching out before now. I don’t know what I’m trying to say with any of this.

✉

It’s not fine, actually, because it turns out that never leaving the house isn’t a very effective defense against your own mother inviting the very person you’re trying to avoid over for dinner.

“You don’t work tonight, do you?” Karen asks the next morning, peering into the kitchen as Mike nurses a cup of coffee and wishes he’d gotten more sleep.

“No,” he mumbles into his mug. “Not ‘til Friday.”

“Good,” chirps his mother in a voice that can’t mean anything actually good, “because we’re having Joyce and Will over for dinner.”

Mike nearly drops the mug. He fumbles and manages to save it, but not without slopping hot coffee all over his wrist. “What?”

Karen Wheeler is not impressed by his spectacular mug rescue. She raises both eyebrows at him in a way that says, Really, Michael? without her even having to open her mouth. “Didn’t Will mention it yesterday when you were talking? They’re back in town, obviously, and I thought it would be nice to have them over. It’s been such a long time, you know.”

Doesn’t he ever.

She must catch something of his thoughts on his face, then, because his mother gives him a look and says, “You’ll be here for dinner, of course.”

Her tone does not allow room for argument, and he can’t even lie and say he has work, so Mike, full of equal parts coffee and dread, just nods. Only when she’s disappeared back into the den and started the vacuum up does he let his head fall back against the cabinets as he groans.

“Gosh,” says Holly as she flounces into the room, nearly scaring him into dropping his mug a second time, “what’s gotten into you?”

✉

Did you know, I don’t remember the last time we talked? I know it must have been sometime after high school, probably before college, but I don’t know when it was. I don’t remember what we said. I don’t know what the last thing I said to you was, and I kind of hate that. You were my best friend. Why can’t I remember that?

✉

The Byerses are supposed to be there by six, but it ends up being closer to six twenty-five. Joyce arrives bearing ice cream and a half-dozen apologies—something about plumbers, not that Mike’s paying much attention—with Will trailing behind. Being on time has never been Joyce Byers’ strong suit, but nobody minds. Mike, for his part, is almost glad she’s here, because it means now his mother is firmly in hostess mode, rather than obsessively cleaning every room in the house, up to and including the upstairs linen closet that has nothing to do with dinner at all. Mike’s been dodging her attempts to recruit him to the cause all afternoon. At least now she’ll leave him alone.

The downside of the Byerses being here, of course, is the Byerses being here, and Mike along with them.

When Joyce sees him, her whole face lights up so thoroughly that Mike’s too busy wondering what she’s so excited about to manage to dodge her when she wraps him in a hug.

It’s been years since he last saw Joyce Byers. He had six inches on her then, and he has at least eight on her now, but somehow she feels larger than life, smelling of cigarettes and cedar and lye soap and home. Mike has no idea why she’s hugging him of all people. He’s so surprised he forgets how to hug back.

“Hi, sweetie,” she says, apparently oblivious to Mike’s bewilderment as she rocks him side to side for a second or two before releasing him and stepping back to tug at the ends of his hair and squeeze his shoulders. “Look at you, all grown up! It’s been so long.”

“Hi, Mrs. Byers,” he manages.

“You know you can just call me Joyce,” she clucks. Mike does not know this, and the look on his father’s face tells him he’s not going to be doing it either, at least not when she’s one of their dinner guests.

At her shoulder, Will is looking intently at Mike, and Mike looks just as intently away. It’s just him and his mom, no Jonathan or El, and Mike only halfway listens to the conversation that starts up about what the other Byers children are up to as they all head into the dining room. In truth, he’s a bit preoccupied with trying not to feel like he’s marching to his own execution.

“So, Mike,” Joyce asks kindly once the ice cream is put away in the kitchen and everyone is served. “Have you graduated already?”

Mike picks at the meatloaf on his plate, studiously ignoring the daggers both his parents are staring at him. If putting up with this family were a major, he’d have graduated ten years ago with a masters, he decides. “I’m not in school right now, actually.”

“Oh?”

Well, at least she sounds more curious than judgmental.

He shrugs. “I’m taking a break. Figuring things out. Working, mostly.”

“He has your old job at Melvald’s, Joyce,” his mother cuts in, just a little too brightly. Mike didn’t particularly want Will to know that’s where he could find him outside his house, but it’s too late to do anything about that now. Maybe he’ll get lucky and Will’ll avoid the old general store now.

“Melvald’s is still around, huh?” Joyce asks. “Donald still running the place?”

Mike shakes his head. “He retired a while ago. His niece manages things now.”

“I never thought I’d see the day,” she says, halfway to herself. “Do you have any plans for the summer, then?”

He offers another shrug, hoping the conversation will end there. But of course, he can’t have nice things.

“You should come over sometime,” Joyce suggests. “See the new place. I’m sure Will would like that, wouldn’t you, honey?”

And now it’s Will’s turn to glare daggers at Mike. If looks could kill, Mike would be Julius Caesar by now.

“Maybe some time,” Mike manages so he won’t have to hear whatever Will has to say about that, and then stares determinedly down at his food as the dinner conversation progresses to other, less miserable topics.

✉

Anyway. I’ve been thinking a lot lately, and Mom told me you were graduating, and I thought that even if I never see you again, I might as well say something worth remembering now.

✉

Halfway through dinner, Mike excuses himself to go to the bathroom. He does not, in fact, go to the bathroom. Instead, he slips into Nancy’s long-vacant room, still not converted to the extra guest room his mother always says it’ll be, and crawls out the window onto the roof.

Back during the single year of high school they shared, he and his older sister weren’t what most people would call close. Still, they talked a lot more than they used to. It got paradoxically easier when Nancy went off to college—something about the distance, the lack of constancy, made them crave each other’s companionship for the first time since Mike was in preschool, maybe—but even at fifteen, Mike was finally at an age where he understood somewhat why Nancy acted the way she did, and Nancy was old enough to recognize the loneliness that starting high school brings.

Sometimes, on particularly miserable nights, she’d come knock on his door and he’d follow her into her bedroom and out the window onto the roof for an hour or two. Sometimes they’d talk, but mostly they’d just sit and watch the stars. Mike hasn’t done it so often since she went off to Emerson, and even less since he came back from Indianapolis, mostly because it just reminds him of the fact that she’s not here anymore, but tonight he needs to go somewhere no one will know where to look. Where Will won’t know to look.

In many ways, Mike is still in the same place where Will left him back in 1985. This house is one of them, and that doesn’t leave him with a lot of options for places to hide—not where Will won’t know where to find him, anyway.

The shingles are gritty and hot under his palms, reluctant to give up all the summer warmth they soaked up during the day, but Mike bites down on the inside of his cheek and bears it until he’s sitting cross-legged with his back against the wall outside Nancy’s window, stinging hands curled into loose fists on his lap. Once he’s situated, he realizes it was a little stupid to come out here without anything to keep him occupied, not even a Walkman, but it’s too late now—it would be too easy to get caught trying to sneak into his room and then back into Nancy’s to get to the roof. Not for the first time since the time when he was twelve and saw Steve Harrington climbing through Nancy’s window, Mike wishes he had one of the corner rooms. Everything would be so much easier if he could access the roof from the comfort of his own bedroom.

But better to be bored than downstairs with his sister and his parents and Joyce Byers, to say nothing of Will right across the table, Mike decides, and closes his eyes, resigning himself to the long and quiet span of time that stretches out before him.

As it turns out, it’s not nearly as long as he expects.

An indeterminate amount of time later, when Mike is approximately halfway through very quietly humming every ABBA song he knows—of which there are many—someone shoves the window sash back up and slips out onto the roof. Mike jumps, swears, and swears again when he realizes who it is.

“Was the meatloaf really that bad?” Will asks, giving Mike a very unimpressed look. “Or am I just so unbearable to be around you decided to risk breaking your neck instead of having to talk to me?”

“I’m not going to break my neck,” is unfortunately the first rather indignant response Mike can muster. “It’s not even twelve feet to the ground, come on.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. And there’s bushes.”

“Well, I’m glad we cleared that up,” says Will. “Now move.”

He elbows, pokes, and otherwise prods Mike until Mike gives in and scoots away from the wall so he’s further out onto the roof, giving Will room to settle down next to him. For a long, unbearable minute, and then another, Mike very carefully doesn’t look at Will. Neither of them says anything. It’s so quiet that Mike can hear Will’s breathing over the crickets in the bushes below. He doesn’t hear his own because, as he realizes just a second later, he’s holding it. The silence is so awkward that Mike briefly weighs his chances of serious injury if he actually were to fling himself off the roof and into said bushes to escape.

Next to him, there’s a rustling of fabric and a subsequent click-fwoosh. A moment later, a familiar acrid scent hits his nostrils, and Mike glances over in surprise to see Will tucking a pack of Camels into his back pocket one-handed, lit cigarette dangling easily from the other where he’s braced his elbow against his knee.

“You smoke?” Mike blurts in surprise, and then flushes at the way it makes him sound roughly twelve years old and stupid.

Will raises an eyebrow. “You have a problem with that?”

“No,” he says, because it’s not his place to have a problem with anything Will does anymore. “No, I—didn’t know, that’s all.”

“Clearly.” Will takes a drag, and the cigarette flares briefly like one of the fireflies beginning to wink on and off out in the yard. Mike’s never been partial to the smell of cigarette smoke—if anything, it gives him headaches—but there’s something a little mesmerizing about the practiced way Will holds it and exhales a long, curling stream of smoke through his teeth. “I didn’t start until senior year of high school. Do you want one?”

Mike blinks. “Do I—?”

“You don’t smoke?” Will asks, a teasing echo of Mike’s earlier shock. Mike scowls at him.

“My mother would kill me.”

This earns him a faintly furrowed brow. “You’re twenty-two, Mike. Live a little.”

“I am living,” Mike says, aware he sounds like a petulant child, like he’s everything everyone thinks of him when they find out he’s in his twenties and a dropout and still living at home: immature, unmotivated, useless. He folds his arms atop his knees and directs his gaze out toward the street rather than see whatever expression Will’s surely giving him. “I’m living in her house, if you didn’t notice. It’s just easier not to bother, okay?”

“It’s okay, Mike,” Will answers quietly. Mike really doesn’t think it is. “I was just teasing.”

Mike sighs, hating how he can hear the shudder in his breath. “I know. I’m sorry.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Will says mildly. He has no idea how wrong he is. There’s a thoughtful silence, and then suddenly Will’s hand, still holding the cigarette, is waving itself in Mike’s face where he can’t avoid looking at it. “Seriously, though. Do you want to try?”

Mike does not want to try. Or—he doesn’t think he does, exactly, because he’s only ever felt a sort of passing curiosity about smoking, mostly when he was a kid and peeking into the living room on his way back from the bathroom during sleepovers at Will’s to see Joyce Byers standing at the open window, smoking a cigarette and staring out into the darkness like some kind of sentry against the night her son was once lost in. He lost that curiosity somewhere along the way. He thinks it was probably around high school, when he discovered most alcohol actually tastes disgusting, and kissing girls isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and honestly there’s not much excitement in having a later curfew if you haven’t got anyone to be out late with. Mike somehow ended up figuring that smoking must be as much of a disappointment as everything else he was supposed to be looking forward to being able to do as an adult. In the end, he never even bothered to try it.

But now Will’s offering, and he’s offering his own cigarette, which had his mouth on it just a minute ago, and that really ought to bother Mike more than it does, except Mike finds himself glancing from the offered cigarette to Will’s face, expression lingering somewhere between curious and thoughtful and maybe something else, too, something Mike isn’t sure what to do with, and—

“Okay,” he says, and it comes out a little strangled. “I—yeah, okay. I’ll try it.”

Will does not hand him the cigarette like Mike expects him to. Instead, he holds it closer in clear invitation, and Mike, once he catches on, leans forward to wrap his lips around the proffered filter and take a tentative drag. For just a second, his eyes meet Will’s.

Will looks—

He looks—

And then the smoke hits the back of Mike’s throat, the taste of it flooding his mouth, and he jerks away from Will’s hand, spluttering, to bury his face in his elbow and cough. God, cigarettes taste downright nasty. Mike wants to die.

“Oh my god,” Will snickers, covering his laughter with one hand as Mike wheezes. “You’ve really never done this, have you?”

“No, Jesus,” Mike rasps. He just barely resists the urge to scrub his tongue on his shirt to get the taste of what he presumes to be nicotine out of his mouth. “You like this shit? You do this for fun? That was disgusting. Remind me never to do that again.”

Will takes another drag and chuckles at Mike’s scrunched-up expression, smoke escaping his mouth in lazy curls. “It’s probably for the best,” he says, leaning back on his free hand and smiling over at Mike. “You get hooked on the taste.”

“The taste?” Mike repeats, incredulously. “The taste?”

Will just laughs at him again, and Mike can’t help his own snort of amusement from escaping. It’s an absurd situation they’re in, after all, and Will’s always been easy to laugh with. The laughter peters out after a few seconds, but those few seconds were all they needed. Some of the horrible tension between them has been shattered and swept off the edge of the roof. Mike feels lighter. When he breathes in, it feels like his first proper breath since he opened the door to find Will on the other side of it.

Maybe being in the same space, same house, same town as Will Byers isn’t the category five disaster he thought it’d be.

“Does your mom know?” Mike finds himself asking, too curious to help himself.

“What, that I smoke?” Will considers the question, and then shrugs. “Probably. It’s not like I’m hiding it. And she does, too, you know.”

“Yeah,” Mike murmurs. “I remember.”

Will doesn’t seem to have a reply for that, so Mike doesn’t say anything either. They just sit and watch the fireflies in the yard for a while. Mike keeps expecting to hear his mother come barging up the stairs, but she never does.

Finally, as Will finishes his cigarette and stubs the butt out against the shingles, Mike musters his thoughts and courage enough to speak again.

“How’d you find me?” he asks. “We never came out here.”

“Give me a little credit, Mike,” Will says, and though his tone is casual, the words are anything but. “You used to vent to me every time you caught Steve Harrington sneaking in Nancy’s window the entire year they were dating. Which, by the way, was a lot of times.”

Mike did do that, now that he thinks about it. And he stands by it, because, like, gross.

“Plus,” Will continues, and now he sounds a little looser, a little warmer, “our siblings used to date too, if you recall.”

It’s immediately clear to Mike what he’s implying, which is also gross. Thanks a lot, Will.

“Don’t remind me,” Mike moans.

“It’s a little late for that.”

Nancy and Jonathan had dated from around when Mike and Will turned thirteen up until the Byers moved, and they both decided a clean break would be easier than trying to do long distance. Since breaking up with Jonathan, Nancy has all but married the concept of journalism, which she seems perfectly content with, and Mike has about as much idea of how Jonathan’s doing as he does his bullies from third grade, who moved to Indianapolis back in middle school.

He could ask Will now. If he wanted.

But instead, when he opens his mouth, Mike asks, “Why did you come looking for me, anyway?” When Will is silent, he clarifies, “After yesterday, I mean.”

It’s finally late enough that the sun is going down behind the trees behind the house, dividing the world into strips of light and patches of shadow. The section of roof they’re on now means they’re sitting in one of those shadows, so it’s hard for Mike to make out exactly what kind of expression Will’s face makes when he asks this. It certainly does something, though. For the space of eight heartbeats, Will is quiet.

And then, lieu of an answer, he looks over at Mike and says, “Do you want to get out of here?”

There’s something fierce in the way he looks at Mike right then, something Mike doesn’t want to call desperate but doesn’t have a better name for—hopeful, maybe? But it’s not the kind of hope that they read about in AP English, not like Emily Dickinson described. This hope is asking something of Mike, directly and not. It’s like Will’s asking two things at once, and Mike doesn’t know how to answer either.

“With you?” he asks dumbly.

“No, with my mom,” Will snaps. “Yes, with me, Mike. Who else?”

“Where?”

Will shrugs. “I don’t care. Somewhere that isn’t your roof, where our moms will probably come looking for us sooner or later. Do you want to go or not?”

He does and he doesn’t. He’s spent so many years missing Will in the back of his mind that having him back in town, back in Mike’s life in any capacity, feels a little like being on drugs. Like anything is possible.

It’s also fucking terrifying, because he knows just how easy it would be to fuck this up—for good, this time.

Because here is a secret: Mike doesn’t trust himself with good things. Will used to be the best thing in his life, and it’s been so long since Mike had anything good he’s not sure he even knows what to do with good anymore. He’s forgotten how to have friends, how to be a friend. How to let Will into his life.

But maybe friendship isn’t something you can forget so easily, whispers some part of his head or maybe his heart, the part that loathes the years of distance between them, still condensed into the careful six inches of space left between them here on the roof. The part that wants to lean into Will’s warm presence and memorize all the ways he’s changed since Mike knew him last, wants to know him again, like he used to. The part that wrote a letter at three in the morning and sent it without a second thought, because once upon a time, being friends wasn’t something Mike thought about. It was just something he did. Maybe friendship is a muscle, and with Will, Mike’s has always been involuntary. Like breathing—better off left out of his control.

What’s the worst that can happen? he wonders, trying not to squirm under the intensity of Will’s scrutiny. He has a feeling Will’s not going to wait forever for Mike to answer. He might have, once. Not anymore.

The truth is that Mike’s not worried about the worst that can happen, because he’s already lived through it once. That is not the thing that scares him, and he knows it.

But he’s always had a hard time saying no to Will Byers.

“Okay,” Mike says. “Lead the way.”

✉

I guess what I’m trying to say is I’m sorry we’re not friends anymore. I guess what I’m saying is goodbye, too.

✉

They don’t go back through the house, for which Mike is grateful. Instead, despite his words, Mike goes first off the edge of the roof, demonstrating how to drop neatly from the shingles to the hutch where they keep the garden hose below, then stepping down onto the front walk from there. It’s easier for Mike, who still has several inches on Will after all these years. He offers his hand for balance when Will scrambles down, but Will just shakes his head, and Mike lets his arm drop awkwardly back to his side.

“I don’t suppose you brought any car keys with you,” Will says, glancing over his shoulder at the Wheelers’ driveway where it leads back to the garage.

Mike shakes his head. Since the incident with his own car, he’s not allowed to drive either of his parents’, and he hasn’t saved up nearly enough to buy another one, no matter how junky. He almost doesn’t want to, though he knows he’ll need one if he ever wants to get out of Hawkins again, not that it did him much good last time. He doesn’t tell Will any of this, however, and Will just shrugs.

“Walking it is,” he says, and tramps across the lawn to the street. Mike blows out a breath and follows; there’s not much else to do.

Will is silent so long they’ve walked the length of Maple and turned onto Water Street, probably heading for the center of town, before he speaks again.

“So,” he says, swinging out an elbow to jostle Mike’s own gently. “What are you still doing in Hawkins? I thought you’d be somewhere like Chicago or New York by now.”

It’s surprising to Mike even now that Will has thought of him at all since high school. Truthfully, Mike Wheeler has always believed that he is at least a little bit unlovable at his core. He’s begun to fear it’s more than a little these days, and the thought of being remembered, and thought about, and missed after everything—it feels just a little unbearable, somehow.

But none of that is an answer to Will’s question, so Mike swallows down several dozen whys­—why would you think about me, why do you care, why are you still here, why do you want to know—along with the lump in his throat, while he’s at it.

“I dropped out of school,” he says lowly, kicking at a loose pebble and watching it clatter down the sidewalk in front of them. “Last year.”

“Why?” Will asks. His tone has none of the judgement Mike’s used to receiving when people learn he hasn’t graduated, and it makes his shoulders relax some of the tension that’s been creeping back in since their laughter on the rooftop.

It’s a good question. It’s a shame Mike doesn’t have a good answer for it.

He shrugs. “Business sucks. I might go back”—(one of the biggest, most frequent lies he’s ever told)—“eventually. I’m— I’m working. Figuring things out, I guess. What about you?”

“What about me?”

When he glances over, he sees Will’s eyebrows are raised. Mike shrugs again. “Why are you back? I thought you liked it in California.”

“California’s fine,” Will says, though the careful neutrality of his tone does little to indicate how he feels either way. “School was fine, too. El still lives there, actually. She’s got an apartment in San Diego.”

El, short for Eleven, short for Jane Hopper-Byers, his adoptive sister. Another person Mike hasn’t spoken to in years. He wonders what story she’s telling people about her nickname now—her favorite when they were kids, which he thinks is probably the truth, though she’d always wink and shrug him off when he asked, is that it’s because of her birthday, November eleventh. She had at least a dozen stories she liked to tell people—her birthday, her lucky number, Hop’s lucky number, she worked for the government and that was her code name, her middle name was Eleanor; on and on and on. She proclaimed anything to do with the number eleven as being lucky. El always loved numbers. She used to say they made more sense than people. These days, Mike’s inclined to agree.

“I wasn’t asking about El,” he says, though he wonders if maybe he should be. She is Will’s sister now, after all—but she’s not here, and Will is, and they were certainly friends when they were younger, but Mike hasn’t spent eight years with an Eleven-shaped hole in his life, not the way he has with Will. Some friendships are simply made different. His and Will’s was one of them.

They turn off of Water Street and down another, heading vaguely in the direction of the high school. Will doesn’t seem to be paying much attention to where.

He says, “We had a lot of space in Lenora, and we don’t really need it anymore. Mom only ever looked at places around here, even before she decided to sell. She missed it here, I guess.”

He doesn’t say if he missed it, though Mike doesn’t know why he would. Hawkins was never particularly kind to the Byers, or any of Mike’s friends for that matter.

“Are you just here to help her move in?” he asks. What he’s really asking is how long are you staying, is when do you leave, is how soon do I have to go back to missing you? But he’s not brave enough to say any of that aloud.

“I don’t know,” Will says. “I’m not really sure what I want to do now that I’m out of school, y’know?”

“Yeah,” Mike replies. He didn’t even know what he wanted to do when he was in school, much less now. “I get that.”

“I thought maybe it might be nice to be back for a while,” Will admits, and while it sounds more than a little sheepish, there’s also the faintest bit of wistfulness in his voice. Maybe it’s easier to miss something that hurt you when you’ve spent years out of its reach.

Maybe that’s why Will’s even talking to Mike now.

The thought makes something tighten in the back of Mike’s throat, so he doesn’t say anything at all. They walk on in silence, aimlessly wandering down Main Street and back up it to Mulberry as the streetlamps flicker on in the dusk. Will occasionally points out something he doesn’t recognize, but mostly Hawkins is a time capsule of their childhoods, and probably their parents’ childhoods as well. Not much changes here. Not many people leave. Mike tried, and look where that got him?

They’ve turned off Mulberry onto one side street and then another when Mike suddenly recognizes where they are. He turns sharply down a corner to their left, ignoring Will’s questioning noise, and strides down the road until he finds what he’s looking for, surrounded by a rusty chain link fence.

“Oh,” says Will softly, drawing up behind him. “I didn’t realize this was still here.”

One of the few things that has changed about Hawkins since the eighties is that Hawkins Elementary combined with Hawkins Middle School a few years ago. Initially, it was meant to be temporary. The school board, or maybe it was the city council—hell if Mike paid attention—intended to renovate the old building and move everything back, but like most everything about Hawkins since Starcourt burned to the ground, it stalled out and fell through. The place has been rotting ever since, just like Benny’s down on Randolph, or the old lab on Mirkwood, near where Will used to live.

The playground that lies before them now is in much worse shape than it was when they were five. The sandbox is overgrown with weeds, and vines have climbed over the merry-go-round. Half of the swings are broken, dangling from rusty chains on an even rustier framework. It’s hardly recognizable as the place where they met. Mike tries not to take that as some kind of karmic sign from above as he hops the fence.

“The gate’s right over there,” Will says, sounding amused, but when Mike glances back at him, he’s clambering over after him. Maybe things haven’t changed all that much, then.

“Gates are for losers,” Mike calls back, tramping through the weeds to the swing set.

“Right, and you’re definitely not a loser for hanging out on an abandoned playground from when we were in kindergarten.”

Mike tests one of the three unbroken swings before plopping down on the seat and stretching his legs out in front of him, gazing up at Will with the most unimpressed look he can muster.

“Takes one to know one, Byers. I’m not alone on this playground, you know.”

Will rolls his eyes, but he settles on the swing next to Mike, hooking his elbows around the chains and rocking forward and back once or twice. Mike feels too old and too young at once, like he’s five years old in a twenty-two-year-old’s body, too big in all the wrong places, too small in all the rest. He and Will found something here, years and years ago, and he doesn’t know when, specifically, they lost it, but lose it they did. He wonders if it’s something that can ever be found twice.

“I was mad,” Will says quietly after a minute, “when I got your letter.”

Mike flinches. “I’m sorry.”

“No,” Will says, shaking his head. It’s almost fully dark now, and the only decent illumination comes from a streetlight just outside the fence. Mike can make out his profile and the line of his shoulders in the darkness, but nothing of his expression when he’s turned away like this. “No, don’t be, it’s— I wasn’t mad at you, not really. I was mad because it was true, or at least a little true, that we didn’t really know each other anymore. I hated that.”

Mike wraps his fingers around his swing’s chains until the metal digs uncomfortably into the meat of his palms. Will keeps talking, kicking at a clump of dandelions in front of him with the toe of one sneaker.

“I didn’t like to think about us,” he says. “Our friendship. Ever. Like, in my head, you would always be here. If I ever came back, you’d be waiting for me in Hawkins, and nothing here would be different, even if I was. I guess I thought that if I just didn’t think about it, nothing would change.”

“Schrödinger’s cat,” Mike murmurs.

“Nerd,” Will accuses, but Mike can hear the smile in his voice, even if he can’t see it very well. “But…yeah. Pretty much. And then I got your letter, and— and I was wrong. And that made me mad.”

He pauses. Mike holds his breath almost without realizing. A car passes them on the street, and in the glow of its headlights, Will looks tired. Tired, and young, and uncertain.

He looks an awful lot like the kid Mike met here on the first day of school seventeen years ago.

Will looks over at him and says, very clearly, “And then I realized that I missed you.”

“Oh,” Mike breathes. He’s clenching the chains so tightly his fingers have gone numb.

“I don’t think I told you that,” Will continues. “When we talked, yesterday—you said you missed me. I didn’t say it then, but…I missed you, too. I still miss you. And my favorite color is yellow, by the way.”

Mike thinks he knew that, somewhere deep down, down where he keeps the memories of Will’s yellow-painted bedroom walls and his drawings of sunflowers and yellow plaid button-downs he always used to wear. He’s always thought of Will as some kind of sun, after all. He has a gravity all his own. Light, warmth, and fire—these are the things that make up Will Byers.

Swallowing hard, Mike says, “I’m sorry we fell out of touch. I didn’t mean to.”

“Like I said before, neither did I. So why did we?” Will asks, finally turning to face him.

Mike closes his eyes, lets out a long, careful breath. “I guess— I guess it was just easier to tell myself I’d talk to you when I saw you in person again. I’m not…I’m not good at long-distance.”

(This is perhaps the understatement of the year. Mike Wheeler is not built for distance, sports, or casual friendships. This situation qualifies for two out of three, more or less, so it’s not all that surprising things turned out this way.)

“But I just—” He hisses out a breath, somewhere between a laugh and a sob, and continues, ignoring Will’s noise of concern. “I just kept fucking everything up. And, I don’t know, I—”

I got scared, he does not say, because he’s still scared. He’s always fucking scared. Mike thinks he’s forgotten how not to be.

“It seemed easier,” he manages, “not to talk at all, after a while. So I didn’t.”

“Was it?” Will asks at length.

Mike lets out a strangled laugh. “No. God, no. It fucking sucked.”

But he was used to things sucking, wasn’t he? Still is. So he never tried to fix it, not until the letter, and even now he’s not so sure the letter wasn’t just another attempt to send what remained of their friendship to an early grave. To ensure no one else could break the thing he held most dear. To take the blame, like any good son would.

He doesn’t say any of this either. Instead, finally opening his eyes and turning to look at Will in the streetlight’s peachsoft glow, Mike whispers, “Can we— can we try again?”

He doesn’t know how long Will is going to be in Hawkins. He doesn’t know if he’ll fuck it up all over again, or if Will can ever forgive him for fucking things up in the first place. But what Mike does know is that he misses Will, misses his friendship, misses him even when he’s sitting next to Mike, close enough to reach out and touch. Mike is tired of missing people. Mike is tired in general.

“I want to be friends again,” he adds, and his voice cracks right down the middle on the last word, so he has to stop and swallow and compose himself before he can continue. “If you’ll let me.”

For a long and terrible moment, Will looks at him and doesn’t say anything at all. Mike is certain, for a span of sixty-two seconds, for three shaking breaths, that Will is going to tell him to get lost. That maybe he’s changed so much out in California that he’s going to laugh right in Mike’s face, something Mike thinks he probably deserves. It’s the single worst minute of Mike’s life.

And then—

“You know, Mike,” Will says softly, with something just a little sadder than a smile on his face, “I don’t think we ever stopped.”

✉

I’m really glad I knew you while I did. Asking you to be my friend was the best thing I’ve ever done. Thank you for being friends with me when we were kids. It meant a lot.

Goodbye, Will, and congratulations. I know you’ll have a great life.

                                                                                                      Love,     
                                                                                                      Mike

Chapter Text

“sometimes we don’t realize what we’ve learned until we’ve already known it for a very long time.”
—what now?, ann patchett

✉

When they straggle their way back through the front door of Mike’s house, it’s to discover their mothers perched on opposite ends of the sitting room sofa, deep in conversation as Ted Wheeler snores in his adjacent recliner. Holly is nowhere to be seen.

“Oh,” says Joyce, startling when she sees them standing in the doorway. “Where have you two been?”

Will glances at Mike, who shrugs back at him helplessly. There’s not exactly any reason for them to lie from where Mike stands.

“Out on a walk,” is all Will says in the end. Joyce takes this in stride, and Mike’s own mother nods and smiles and waves them towards the kitchen, where there’s leftover brownies and ice cream waiting.

Somehow it’s still strange to Mike that they can do things like that now—just get up and leave in the middle of dinner; disappear for hours without anyone noticing or minding that they’re gone. It’s true that he’s never had the most mindful parents, but family meals and being home before dark were always where his mother drew the line that marked out the boundaries of his childhood. Sometimes, Mike forgets he’s an adult, especially as he’s still living in this house, and now walking home with Will by his side again and sitting next to him on the kitchen stools, eating brownies and half-melted ice cream like they’re in their tweens instead of twenties. Sometimes, Mike forgets he’s allowed to cross the lines, and so he just goes on living inside of them without any good reason to leave.

“Do you want to do something tomorrow?” Will asks once they’ve finished their dessert, arms folded on the counter as Mike rinses the bowls out in the sink.

He shuts off the tap and wipes his hands on his pants. “Like what?”

“I mean, we don’t have to—”

Mike shakes his head. “I don’t mean that I don’t want to. I’m just curious what you had in mind.”

Will shrugs. “I didn’t really have anything in particular. I haven’t lived here since the eighties, remember? Maybe none of the places we used to go are still around. I don’t even know if they opened another mall.”

“They didn’t,” Mike tells him. “Everything else is pretty much the same, but would you even want to do that?” Will tips his head curiously, so Mike elaborates, “I mean, we’re not thirteen anymore. Would it be weird to hang around at the arcade all day, or my basement, or, like, the movies?”

“Movies are normal, Mike.”

He waves a hand, flushing a little under Will’s amused gaze. “You get my point.”

“I do,” Will concedes. He scrunches his brow, thinking. “I don’t know, what did all of you guys usually do after I moved? Like when you came back from college, maybe?”

Mike picks up a dish towel from the counter and starts wiping up imaginary spatters of water, then stops when he realizes he’s seen his mother do the same thing at least twenty times in the last month alone. He knows he’s making it awkward, and he’ll have to talk about this sooner or later, seeing as Will might already know, and Mike ought to be honest with him regardless if they’re going to be friends again, but—

Well. It’s still a little shameful for him to admit, even now.

“None of us really hung out much after you moved,” he manages after a moment too long spent staying silent. “Um. At all, really.”

Will says, “Oh.”

“It was partly my fault, maybe,” Mike admits, squeezing the towel until his knuckles turn white, staring down at the kitchen tiles instead of up at Will. “I had— a not-so-great time in high school, I guess. But everyone had shit going on, and by the time we got to college, we just weren’t, you know?”

“Weren’t what?”

“Friends,” Mike whispers, still tight in the throat at the thought of it after all these years.

“Oh,” Will says again. He sounds very sad. Mike knows the feeling.

He breathes out sharply, shaking out the towel and folding it atop the counter, lining up all the edges and corners very precisely because he needs something to focus on besides the sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, the one that’s been coming and going since he started high school and couldn’t escape the lingering feeling that everything good was going to end someday soon.

Mike clears his throat and says, “Anyway. I had to babysit Holly a lot when Nancy went to college, so. I didn’t really get out much after growing out of the arcade and stuff.”

“You’re telling me,” Will says, eyebrows raised, “that you haven’t played Dig Dug since you were thirteen?”

“Well—”

“You wouldn’t ever want to go to the arcade again, just because you’re an adult?”

Mike wishes he hadn’t folded the towel, because he’s very tempted to flick it at Will’s teasing face right now. “I didn’t say that!” he protests. “If you want to go to the arcade, we can go to the arcade, geez.”

Huffing out a laugh, Will shakes his head. “That’s not what I’m saying. I mean, sure, we can go to the arcade, but I’m asking what you usually do.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want to do something you hate, and I want to spend time with you, dumbass.”

Mike blinks. “You—”

“Oh god,” Will says, sounding somewhere between amused and distressed. “Mike, that’s what friends do. They hang out.”

“I know that!” he hisses. His face feels like it’s on fire. If it’s possible to be out of practice at friendship, apparently Mike is. The fact that he can’t remember the last time he hung out with someone who wasn’t his teenage sister probably isn’t a good sign. Sagging back against the counter, he repeats, softer, “I know that. It’s just been a while, okay?”

“Hey,” Will says, leaning across the counter to lay his hand on Mike’s wrist. He waits until Mike looks at him. “We don’t have to do anything if you don’t want to. I’d be okay with doing whatever, as long as it’s you and me, okay? I’d just like to spend time with you again.”

Ducking his head, trying not to stare at Will’s hand, still on his wrist, Mike replies, “Yeah, I’d, uh— I’d like that too.”

✉

They part ways without settling on what to do the next day, just the decision to meet on Main at eleven. Joyce hugs Mike so hard he can hardly breathe and tells him all over again how glad she is to see him, and he won’t deny that it pleasantly warms his chest to hear. He even remembers to hug her back this time.

Will doesn’t hug him goodbye, but he gives Mike’s shoulder a reassuring squeeze before heading out the door after his mom. Mike has to force himself to close the door and go up to his room so he won’t stand there staring after them and letting all the bugs in.

That night, for the first time all summer, he falls asleep before dawn.

✉

By the time he’s properly woken up the next morning, Mike’s figured out exactly where to take Will. It’s not the most thrilling destination, but then, this is Hawkins. The most thrill they ever get nowadays is whatever is showing at the Hawk.

It’s already miserably hot by the time Mike’s coffee has kicked in—hot enough that he doesn’t want to walk all the way to Main, but he also doesn’t want to call and ask Will for a ride, because that means explaining the car situation, which still makes shame curdle deep in his stomach. Instead, Mike manages to convince his mother to let him out on her way to the store. It means he feels like a kid getting dropped off at school again, but it saves him a hell of a lot of sweat and discomfort of a different sort, so he takes it. Will’s already there, standing in the shadow of one of the storefronts’ awnings.

“Know where we’re going yet?” he asks, stepping out of the shade and falling into step with Mike, who keeps walking past Pam’s and the furniture store.

“Yep,” Mike answers, but doesn’t elaborate, and Will doesn’t pry. He was always good at that, Mike recalls. He remembers a lot of things about Will, and a surprising amount of them have held true even now. He hopes that the thing he’s banking on for this morning is one of them.

It only takes about half a block to reach their destination—a narrow storefront with no awning and peeling green paint. Back when Will still lived here, before the owner sold it and moved down to Miami, it used to be called Main Street Vinyl. Now it carries vinyl, cassettes, and CDs, and the neon sign in the window reads Hawkins Music. Mike’s been here more than a few times since the change in ownership, but after hauling a box of music to and from his dorm in Indianapolis, he stopped collecting quite so many albums. Will, however, used to love music, almost as much as his brother, who used to lend him and Mike tapes every time he got new ones. He’d recommend this artist or that album, and it’s because of Jonathan Byers that Mike still catches himself mindlessly humming The Clash while he cleans.

“Ta-da,” Mike says, a little belatedly, and gestures at the door. “You’re still into music, right? I mean, dumb question. Who isn’t into music, right? But you know what I meant, probably, because of Jonathan and stuff. I know it’s not much, but they’ve got a pretty good variety, and—”

Will shakes his head, blessedly cutting Mike’s rambling off, and by the way his whole face has lit up Mike can tell that he guessed right again. He says, “No, this is great!”

Maybe it wasn’t guessing, Mike thinks, pulling the door open and following Will inside. Maybe it was knowing. Maybe they aren’t such strangers after all.

✉

(“Hey, look at this,” he says, sometime later, holding up a copy of Wish for Will to see across the stacks. He doesn’t have his own copy, but he’s heard “Friday, I’m in Love” on the radio every weekend for months. “You still like The Cure, right?”

Will raises his eyebrows and snorts. “I don’t know, you haven’t suddenly stopped singing ABBA’s praises since I last checked, have you?”

“Touché,” Mike answers, thinking of the collection of albums he has stored under his bed at home—one box dedicated entirely to ABBA and ABBA alone—and gives Will the album when he holds out his hand for it. They lapse back into silent browsing after that, but they’re both smiling.

Things aren’t the same as when they were kids, but maybe they don’t have to be. Not all of it. Maybe different can be good, too. If they can be new people and still love the same bands, surely they can find common ground again. They can make this work.

All in all, their afternoon in Hawkins Music isn’t anything monumental, but it’s a first step back towards finding each other. It’s a start. That’s all Mike needs it to be.)

✉

They reconnect cautiously, picking up old habits and newfound confidence over a span of days, then a week, then two. They go for walks and watch old movies in Mike’s basement. Mike loses Dig Dug spectacularly at the arcade. Will picks him up in Joyce’s ancient Pinto, now handed down to him, and they go for drives just to talk or listen to new albums. Mike tells him about the books he’s read, and Will talks about college.

(He went to CalArts on a scholarship. His least favorite medium is sculpture. He learned how to drive in eleventh grade, and his favorite song is still “Should I Stay Or Should I Go?” Mike tucks every new thing he learns away for safekeeping, a dragon with a hoard he never expected to have again.)

For the first time in a long time, Hawkins starts to feel like home again, and Mike starts to feel like himself.

✉

Joyce has bought a three-bedroom ranch house on Cherry Street, close enough for Mike to walk to on cooler days. It’s so much closer than her old house on Kerley. It’s strange, having Will so near again, but Mike’s not complaining.

The walls in Will’s new bedroom are plain beige, but he invites Mike over one Tuesday afternoon and breaks out a bucket of sunshine-yellow paint, hands Mike a paintbrush, and sets to work. Repainting Will’s room takes the entire afternoon. Mike plays ABBA tapes on Will’s stereo until he smacks Mike with his brush until he agrees to change the music. They get nearly as much paint on themselves as the walls and have to open a window because the fumes are so overwhelming. That night, Mike goes home with a headache and permanently ruined jeans, and he wouldn’t have it any other way.

✉

Mid-July, they go swimming in the quarry like they were never allowed to when they were kids. The Sattler Company still owns the place, but it’s been abandoned for years. Lovers’ Lake and Lake Jordan are still more popular swimming spots for people who aren’t looking to brave the Hawkins Community pool, but the quarry has grown more popular in recent years as all the old rumors about it being haunted have mostly died off. They still have the place mostly to themselves in the afternoon, and it’s just the two of them by the time the light’s turned golden and syrupy-slow.

Mike crouches at the water’s edge, skipping stones while Will sits beside him and smokes. The smell doesn’t bother him so much anymore. If anything, it reminds him of being a kid in the backseat of Joyce’s Pinto again, windows down, riding home from school with Will on the rare Fridays when he got to stay over at Will’s instead of the other way around.

They haven’t said anything for a long time. Mike doesn’t mind. With other people, silence becomes smothering, heavy with unspoken questions and judgements and expectations for his life. With Will, it’s just silence. They can just sit here and smoke and skip rocks and nothing about that is weird or uncomfortable or slowly compacting Mike’s lungs down into the size of a teaspoon. He likes it.

The longest skip he’s gotten so far is six. He wings a rock out onto the water. Three. Another, and this one makes it five. Mike hums to himself and rakes his fingers through the pebbles at his feet, trying to find a good one—flat and smooth and not too big, just like Lucas taught him in second grade.

He’s assembled a small pile of potential skipping candidates when Will reaches over and taps his wrist. When Mike looks up, he’s holding out a hand and rippling his fingers in solicitation.

“Rock me,” says Will. The setting sun has limned his hair in liquid gold.

Mike drops one of the flatter stones into his waiting palm, and after a moment of squinting carefully across the water, Will sits forward and skips the rock out onto it with a measured flick of his wrist. Mike counts nine skips before it sinks far out in the quarry, sending ripples cascading every which way.

Mike whistles. “Damn. Who taught you to skip rocks like that?”

Will laughs and says, “You did.”

It’s funny how quickly we forget things. How easily they come back.

✉

When they’re in the car and on their way back into town, Will pulls to a stop at an intersection and glances over at Mike, fingers tapping nervously on the steering wheel. His eyes are dark in the streetlights’ dim glow.

“Hey, so,” he begins, reaching over and turning the radio down. “I told you Jonathan’s working in Chicago right now, yeah?”

Mike nods, wondering where this is going.

“Well, he has this Friday off, and he wants me to come up and visit for the day. See the city a little. The Art Institute.”

“That sounds like fun.”

Will’s fingers keep tapping on the wheel as the light turns green and he accelerates through the intersection. “I was wondering if— I mean, you don’t have to, but would you want to…you know.”

Mike says, “I know…what?”

This earns him an eyeroll. “Would you want to come with me?”

He means to hesitate. He means to think it over—if it’s a good idea, if Will really wants him to go, if seeing Jonathan again after being such a shitty friend to his brother is a good idea. He doesn’t.

Instead, before he even really registers his mouth moving, Mike says, “Yeah. Yeah, I want to.”

Will lights up like a goddamn Christmas tree, so clearly it can’t really be a bad idea.

“Cool,” he says, flashing Mike a sidelong smile. “I’ll pick you up Friday morning.”

“Cool,” Mike echoes. He can’t help himself, not when Will’s involved. He smiles back and hopes the darkness will hide how fond it probably looks.

✉

Will picks him up at six-thirty on Friday morning. He laughs at Mike’s sleepiness, hands him a thermos of coffee (because he’s still Will Byers and a saint even if he’s terrible for waking Mike up this early) and lets Mike sleep for another hour while they cruise down the I-65. When he wakes up again, he’s the furthest he’s been from Hawkins in nearly two full years.

It only takes another two hours to get to Chicago. They spend most of it listening to the radio and talking about nothing in particular. Mike’s been before—senior year they took a class trip and mostly visited Navy Pier, the Sears Tower, and the science museum. By that point, the most he was speaking to anyone was telling Jennifer Hayes okay, sure, when she asked if he would take her and her friends’ picture in front of Lake Michigan. They didn’t go the Art Institute. Mike remembers the bus driving past it, glimpsing the lions out front, and thinking Will would have been so jealous if Mike went without him.

Funny how these things work out.

The plan is to spend a few hours in the Art Institute and then meet Jonathan for lunch. There’s nothing Mike particularly wants to see in the city, but Will has a list a mile long. Mike’s unconvinced half of it isn’t just specific paintings on showcase in the Institute. As for himself, he’s not what he’d call an art connoisseur, nor does he know much about it at all, but Will’s excited enough for both of them, and frankly, Mike’s just happy to be out of Hawkins for a day.

They spend four hours in the Art Institute. Will’s hand darts out to grasp Mike’s wrist in giddy anticipation the second he glimpses American Gothic across a room, and he doesn’t let go for three full galleries. Mike doesn’t say anything, just lets himself be towed from room to room, painting to painting to sculpture to painting again, even though Will’s enthusiastic grip is practically tight enough to bruise. He doesn’t mind it.

Kind of the opposite, if he’s honest, though he wouldn’t be if you asked.

Will does let go eventually, pulling a sketchbook and pencil out of his bag and stopping here and there to sketch museumgoers and works of art alike. He holds the pencil tight as he held Mike’s wrist, and his first few sketches are shaky with excitement.

“Hey, Monet’s not going anywhere,” Mike says, jostling Will’s elbow with his own—but only after he sets the pencil down for a second to flex his fingers. “Breathe a little, will you?”

Flushing, Will says, “I just— that’s a Monet,” and gestures to the painting in front of them like it hung all the stars in the sky. He’s sketched out the mother and her daughter currently standing in front of it, hand in hand.

“And that’s a Byers,” Mike teases, nodding to the open sketchbook. Will’s somehow managed to capture the little girl’s tip-toed pose with just a few quick lines. It’s like magic. Mike watched him do it, and he still doesn’t understand how it worked. One minute the page is blank, the next there’s an entire person there, radiating emotion and movement and life.

“You’re ridiculous,” Will decides, knocking his shoulder against Mike’s. “I dunno, I’m just excited about being here, you know? Seeing all these paintings I learned about in school hanging on a wall, like, three feet away from me…”

“It’s cool,” surmises Mike.

“Very cool,” Will agrees, picking his pencil back up, then pausing to glance up at Mike. “Hey, you know we don’t have to sit here for so long, right? I can— I can be done sketching.”

Mike shrugs. “It’s fine.”

“No, I mean,” Will says, and then stops, chewing his lip. “I mean, like, if you’re bored, you don’t have to sit here with me. We can go, or you can look at stuff on your own. You don’t have to sit here and watch me draw.”

“I like watching you draw,” he says, and it makes him feel raw and skittish and clingy, but it’s true. Fuck the museum. Fuck Monet. Mike would be happy to watch Will draw all day long, if Will would let him.

“Okay,” Will says, soft and rather pleased, and this is going to be the death of Mike, maybe, probably, for sure.

Will goes back to drawing, and Mike goes back to rubbing his wrist and pretending he’s not jealous of the pencil.

✉

He loses Will at one point. Obviously it isn’t on purpose, but one of the paintings catches his eye across the mostly-empty room—probably because it’s huge and dark and impossible to miss—and at some point between Mike noticing the painting and crossing the gallery to look at it, Will wanders off into some other room, and Mike doesn’t even notice.

The painting is tall, maybe eight or nine feet, and towers above Mike so he has to crane his neck up to see it fully. It’s nothing particularly special, outside of the size; in fact, it’s just a door with a wreath on it.

But also, it’s not just a door. There’s an incredible level of detail, down to the wilted roses of the wreath, the petals strewing the doorstep, the carved doorframe, the nicks and scratches on the varnished wood.

And there’s the hand. A wrinkled one, old and weatherbeaten as the door itself, resting gently on the doorframe, just above the knob, like the owner wants to go in but isn’t brave enough. Like they’ve been standing there outside that door for years, and might just go on standing there forever.

It’s silly, maybe, to feel this captivated by a hand on a door, but Mike can’t stop staring. It’s like the painting has cast a fishhook into his mouth, catching him in the tender skin of his cheek, holding him there while it reaches down his throat to grasp at his insides and squeeze.

Open it, he wants to urge the hand’s owner. Open the door. Just open it.

But they aren’t going to, he knows. Mike has a feeling that maybe it’s too late anyway. It’s not a feeling he likes.

✉

(“What are you looking at?” Will asks, appearing at Mike’s shoulder and making him jump. He leans in and reads the placard next to the painting: “That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do, or The Door. Wow, look at the details. And the layers of color here on the wood— wow. Wow.”

Mike swallows around what seems like a throatful of gravel and says, “Yeah. It’s very—tall.”

“Reminds me of you,” Will teases.

As he loops his elbow through Mike’s and tugs him away, Mike steals one last glance at The Door and wonders if Will realizes just how right he is.)

✉

There’s so much to see at the Institute that despite Will’s dedication to cram in as much as possible, Mike still feels like he’s only seen a fraction of the artwork on display. His personal favorites are the miniature rooms—Will has to pry him away from some of the tiny intricate displays despite Mike’s protests of Wait, Will, look at the chandelier!

Will says his favorite is Nighthawks—a painting of a diner they both stand and look at for so long that they end up running thirty minutes late to lunch with Jonathan later. It’s just a diner, really, painted mostly in shades of blue and green and yellow—but also, it’s like the door from earlier.

“It’s so lonely,” Mike surprises himself by saying, shoving his hands into his pockets. “Like, they’re all just sitting there by themselves.”

“Yeah,” Will says. He’s standing close enough that their arms are just barely pressed together from shoulder to elbow. He hums, melancholic. “It reminds me of college.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Just—lots of people but not much community, I guess? A lot of California was like that.”

“Oh,” Mike says.

Will glances at him, slantwise and thoughtful, and asks, “What does it remind you of?”

And Mike says, “Honestly? Home.”

They don’t discuss many paintings too closely after that, but Mike still catches Will shooting him thoughtful looks all the way to the café where they’re meeting Jonathan. He doesn’t know what to do about that, so in the end he does nothing at all.

✉

Lunch with Jonathan goes, in a word, well. He and Will have clearly talked since June, because he doesn’t seem at all surprised at Mike’s presence, though sometimes Mike catches him peering curiously across the table at him, glancing between Mike and Will in a way that makes Mike feel like the time Will took him to the beach on their spring break trip and he could feel sand in his shoes for days afterward. Like then, he feels rubbed raw and uncomfortable and hyper-aware of his own body. But Jonathan never does more than look, so Mike can thankfully pretend that he doesn’t notice it. He hopes Will doesn’t, either, but he feels entirely too exposed to glance over and check. It takes extra effort to stay tuned into the conversation.

“I don’t know,” he answers when Jonathan asks him about his interests since high school. “I mean, I used to write—short stories, mostly, but I worked for the school paper in college for a while. I liked it.”

“You write?” Will asks, looking at him in surprise. That’s right—Mike never told him.

“Wrote,” Mike corrects. “It’s been a while.”

“You’ll have to let me read some of your stories,” Will says, poking him gently. “I bet they’re great. You came up with the best campaigns when we were kids.”

“Oh, um, sure. I guess.” He can feel his face heating with something like embarrassment. Across the table, Jonathan looks on in amusement, poorly hiding his smile behind a sip of water.

“Maybe you should try writing again,” he suggests when he sets the glass down. “Will always used to rave about those campaigns.”

“Jonathan,” Will hisses. Under the table, there’s a scuffling and a sound of someone’s foot (Mike assumes Will’s) connecting with someone else’s leg (that must be Jonathan’s). As Jonathan’s words sink in, Mike’s face heats even further and he shoves a chip into his mouth as a helpful distraction. It tastes like nothing at all.

When he finishes chewing, he says, “Sure. Maybe.”

Thankfully, the conversation moves on after that.

Mike spends the rest of their time in the café focusing down on his sandwich and chips while listening to Jonathan tell Will about his job for the Tribune and all the bands he’s gotten to see since moving to the city. (It’s a lot of bands. Mike’s pretty impressed, honestly.) He joins the conversation when invited, fielding questions about Nancy, Hawkins, how his summer’s going; but mostly he’s content to sit and listen while his knee knocks against Will’s under the table where he can pretend it’s only an accident.

Mike knows better. He thinks Jonathan might know, too.

✉

Jonathan shows them around the city for the rest of the afternoon and insists on taking pictures of the while he does it. It makes Mike feel like a little kid again, posing on Halloween and before D&D games and on Will’s birthday for Jonathan to practice photography and archive every important memory they shared from kindergarten to freshman year. He’s never liked having his picture taken, much to his mother’s displeasure, but Mike doesn’t mind so much when it’s Jonathan taking it. Or maybe he just doesn’t mind that when Jonathan’s taking his picture, it’s always with Will.

They end the trip in a bar as night is falling, though they can’t exactly drink much, since they have to drive back to Hawkins tonight. Jonathan offers his spare room to them like any good brother, but Mike has a morning shift tomorrow he really can’t miss, and they have to decline.

Still, they split a bottle of cider and talk at the bar for a time. A girl pulls Jonathan away to dance, and Will laughs at him as he goes. Mike keeps expecting Will to venture out onto the dance floor himself—enough girls are certainly making eyes at him—but he never leaves Mike’s side, except once, to go to the bathroom. While he’s gone, a pretty blonde who vaguely resembles Jennifer Hayes slides up next to him and runs her hand down Mike’s arm.

“Hi,” she says, and, honest to God, bats her eyelashes.

“Uh,” Mike says, glancing down at her hand. Her hand, on his arm. “Hi?”

He almost says who are you, or maybe what do you want, but then thinks better of it. His mother did manage to instill some manners in him, after all.

“Are you going to wait for me to ask you to dance,” the girl inquires coyly, “or are you just going to sit there looking lonely all night?”

Oh. Oh.

“Sorry, but I’m here with someone,” Mike blurts apologetically before he can think better of it. The girl’s hand slips immediately away from his arm.

“I see,” she answers, sounding somewhere between disbelieving and disappointed. “Well, you know where to find me if you change your mind.”

She gives him a faux pout, tosses her hair over her shoulder, and sashays back into the crowd. Mike drains the last of his and Will’s cider—sorry, Will—and tries not to grimace.

“Who was that?” Will asks, suddenly appearing and plopping back down onto the stool at Mike’s side. Mike nearly jumps out of his skin.

“Just some girl,” Mike shrugs, swallowing past what feels like his entire heart in his throat.

“Did she want to dance with you?” asks Will. “You know you can do that, right? You don’t have to sit here with me the whole night.”

The thing is, he doesn’t sound very fond of that. Of Mike, dancing. Or maybe just dancing with that girl, or any girl. But—no, that’s probably not it. Mike’s being ridiculous. Why would Will care?

He shrugs, picking at the label on the empty cider bottle. “Thanks, but no thanks. I’m not gonna ditch you, man.”

“Are you sure?”

Will’s brows are furrowed, and he looks at Mike like he’s some kind of riddle to be solved. Mike doesn’t feel like a riddle. He just feels uncomfortable.

“Yeah,” he manages. “Besides, I, uh— I wasn’t interested anyway.”

For a moment, Will looks like he wants to say something, but then his eyes dip down to the bottle in Mike’s hand and he’s too distracted by Mike finishing all the cider without him to pry. Mike finds himself equal parts disappointed and relieved. He breathes out a sigh, and when he looks over Will’s shoulder, he sees Jonathan standing there.

The look he gives Mike tells him he saw the whole thing. More than that—it’s a look that says he definitely knows.

Mike’s still not sure if that’s a good thing.

✉

At the car, Jonathan hugs Will so tight Mike’s amazed he doesn’t crack a rib.

“You know you can always come visit, right?” he asks.

“I know.”

“Anytime. I mean that,” Jonathan says, pulling back and giving Will a gentle shake, then ruffling his hair until Will ducks out from under him, swatting at his hands and laughing. “I’ve got a bed with your name on it, okay? My offer still stands.”

“I know,” Will repeats, quieter, but no less fond. “Thanks, Jonathan.”

And then Jonathan moves so he’s standing in front of Mike.

“Take care of yourself,” he says, then nods towards Will. “And keep an eye on this one for me, okay?”

“Okay,” Mike says, and then he doesn’t say anything at all, because Jonathan reaches out and hugs him, too. It’s a quick hug, and not nearly as back-breaking as Will’s, but it’s Jonathan and he’s hugging Mike and frankly, Mike thinks he’ll never stop being astounded at the Byers family’s ability to forgive and forget.

After a second’s hesitation, he reaches up and hugs back. It’s nice. Solid. Like what Mike imagines any brother’s hug would feel like.

Then Jonathan lets go, and before Mike can really process half of what’s happened, they’re climbing into the car and pulling out onto the street, heading back towards the I-65 and their sleepy, waiting town.

“Today was fun,” Will says as they accelerate down the road.

Mike hums in agreement.

“Thanks for coming. I’m glad you were here.” It’s too dark to tell, but Mike thinks he can hear the smile in Will’s voice.

“I’m glad too,” he says, and then he has to fold his hands together and tuck them between his knees, just to be sure he doesn’t do anything stupid. It doesn’t stop him from wanting to do it any less, though.

✉

(They stop for a late, late dinner at a little diner halfway between Chicago and Hawkins. It’s cramped and cheap and a little dirty, but it’s full of golden light and they have the best pancakes Mike has ever eaten. He pours syrup on his eggs like he did when he was a kid, and Will calls him gross while doing the same.

Mike kicks his shin under the table. Will squawks and kicks back, but Mike just catches Will’s ankle between both of his and holds it there.

Will lets him.

Mike holds on, and Will doesn’t move away.

It’s a tiny thing, and it opens a universe behind Mike’s ribs.

The diner is full of light and life and Will, here, ankle resting against Mike’s, head thrown back as he laughs at something stupid and meaningless Mike’s said to make him do just that, and all Mike can think is how this, too, is home, and it’s nothing like the diner in that painting at all.)

✉

It’s getting closer to being early than late by the time they cross back into Hawkins. With his luck, Mike’s probably not going to manage to get more than four or five hours of sleep before he has to be up again for his morning shift, but he can’t really bring himself to care, not when today was so good. Not when Will’s beside him in the car, happier than Mike’s seen him all summer.

Will pulls to a stop on the street by the Wheelers’ mailbox. The lights in most of the houses are off by now, theirs included. His mother has left the porch light on for him.

“Thanks again for coming,” Will says, turning to look at Mike. “I’m glad we could do this.”

“Yeah,” Mike says, and tries not to sound like a complete idiot. “See you.”

He unbuckles, climbs out of the car, and is two steps across his front lawn before he hears the sound of a car door behind him. A second later, Will’s at his side.

“What are you doing?” Mike asks, bemused.

“Walking you to your door.” Will shrugs as he says it, like this is the most normal thing in the world.

“It’s, like, ten yards away.”

“And it’s late,” Will counters teasingly.

“It’s Hawkins.”

“It’s like you want me to play the nineteen eighty-three card.”

Mike says, “Will,” and tries not to sound endeared.

“Mike,” Will deadpans right back.

“You’re a dork,” he decides. Will just tilts his head and stares at him until Mike relents and starts back across the yard. Halfway to his front door, something occurs to him. “Hey, what did Jonathan mean about an offer?”

“Oh,” Will says, sounding almost too nonchalant, “he invited me to live with him.”

Mike stops in his tracks. “In Chicago?”

Will makes it two steps before noticing Mike isn’t beside him anymore. He swings around, raising his eyebrows. “Well, yeah. That’s where his apartment is. He has a spare bedroom, and it’s as good a place as any to break into the art scene.”

Mike has to roll that one over in his head a few times before the full implications hit him. When they do, it’s like a punch to the chest. “Are you?”

“Am I what?” Will asks. Mike’s pretty sure he knows what.

He says, a little haltingly, “Going to live with him. In Chicago.”

Will looks down, twisting the toe of his Converse into the grass. Finally, he shrugs, but it’s anything but casual. “I don’t know. Maybe, when summer’s over—” He makes a frustrated noise, shoving his hands into his pockets. “But I don’t know. I’m thinking about it.”

Mike wants to ask him why he didn’t immediately accept Jonathan’s offer. Why he would even consider staying here in Hawkins when he could be anywhere else, but especially somewhere like that, full of people and artwork and opportunity. Why he would hesitate to live with his brother, who Mike knows he might be closer to than anyone. He is so, so afraid of what Will’s answer might be—he’s afraid Will might not have an answer—but it’s not fear that stops him from asking, in the end.

No, that award goes to the fucking sprinkler system, which Mike managed to forget switches on at night when everyone is supposed to be asleep and very much not standing in the middle of the front lawn, like he and Will are right now. One catches Mike full in the face before it rotates away across the grass with a chk-chk-chk and a glistening stream of water. They’re both drenched in seconds, too shocked to move out of the spray.

Very slowly, Mike reaches up and wipes his hair out of his eyes, sidestepping so the sprinkler won’t hit him head-on when it comes back around. He meets Will’s eyes, and he can’t help it. He laughs. He laughs so hard he can’t breathe, and Will laughs along with him, doubling over as the sprinklers keep running, drenching them even further, laughter ringing out like church bells on the otherwise silent cul-de-sac. It goes on for so long Mike’s ribs begin to ache, but every time he calms down enough to look at Will, utterly sodden and bedraggled, he loses it all over again. It’s like being drunk. Like being a little kid again, playing in the sprinklers with his best friend, knowing everything will be okay. Mike wonders when it was they forgot how to be those kids.

At some point, they end up sprawled out on the wet grass, side by side, breathlessly giggling as the sprinklers finally shut off all around them. Chicago and Jonathan’s offer aren’t forgotten, exactly, but the thought of them doesn’t hang over both of them quite so heavily, like the sword of Damocles with its thread ready to snap.

“Oh my god,” Will finally wheezes, once they’ve both calmed down enough to think straight. “I can’t believe this. I’m going to ruin my car seats.”

“I can lend you some towels,” Mike tells him, rolling his head over to take in Will’s grin, flushed cheek pressed into the cool, damp grass that isn’t nearly tall enough to hide his own smile. At least he can blame his breathlessness on the laughter.

✉

They have to hold in several more bouts of exhausted giggles as they creep through the sleeping house. Mike leaves his sodden tennis shoes at the door and sends Will on his way with a bundle of towels and the promise to come by the next day.

“See you tomorrow!” Will calls over his shoulder as he heads back across the glistening lawn.

“See you,” Mike answers, softly, fondly, even though he knows it’s too quiet for Will to hear.

In the morning, he’ll get an earful from his mother for tracking water and grass clippings all over the entryway, but tonight Mike leans back against the front door, stupidly smiling face hidden in his hands, and can’t bring himself to care.

✉

The next day, he gets off work to find Will leaning against his car at the curb.

“Hey, stranger,” Will says, smiling brightly. It’s like staring at the sun.

✉

He spends the afternoon lying on Will’s bed in his bedroom with the yellow-painted walls, still crammed full of boxes that are only half-unpacked, watching Will paint. When they were kids, Will was always the better artist, drawing their D&D characters and his dog and all their friends as the Ghostbusters. This is different—more abstract; full of swirls of explosive colors and bold strokes. The canvas is done almost entirely in shades of blue. As he works, he tells Mike about various abstract art movements he learned about in college—about Picasso and Pollock and Rothko. Mike doesn’t understand all of it, but he likes to listen. He likes hearing Will’s excitement and watching his hands dart here and there, splashing blue after blue on the canvas until it’s something wonderful and incredible like Mike’s never seen.

“I think it’s amazing how a painting can be about anything without having to look like it,” Will says rather dreamily, “you know? It’s like I’m painting the feeling.”

Mike clears his throat. “So, what’s this one then?”

Will grins at him. There’s a streak of bright cyan across his cheekbone. Mike wants to reach out and rub it away, but he folds his fingers into his palms instead.

“Can’t you tell?” Will asks brightly. “It’s you.”

✉

Later, Joyce pops her head in through the door and asks Mike to stay for dinner. He surprises himself by agreeing. Mike hasn’t seen much of Joyce Byers since that first night at his house, but now that things are better between him and Will, he doesn’t find the thought of being around her to be quite so terrifying.

It helps that Jonathan didn’t seem angry at him either, if he’s honest.

She makes lasagna and only burns it a little. They eat it at the kitchen table because the dining room is still full of boxes and paint cans, and Mike doesn’t mind a bit.

Afterwards, he helps carry the dishes into the kitchen. When Joyce starts filling the sink with hot water, he finds himself lingering instead of retreating to the living room, where Will is picking through records to put on. The thought of going home hasn’t crossed his mind.

“Can I help?” he offers awkwardly.

Joyce Byers looks him up and down, and then, instead of booting him from her kitchen like Mike’s mother does every time he’s tried to help since he was eight years old and broke her gravy boat on Thanksgiving Day, she smiles a slow, fond smile, and nods.

“I’ll wash,” she says, handing him a dish towel from the counter, “and you dry.”

They work in silence for a while. In the living room, Will puts on a Kenny Rogers album, likely for his mother’s benefit. He pokes his head in at one point, but Joyce shoos him away.

“You can have your friend back when I’m done with him,” she says, and Will pretends to roll his eyes as he disappears back into the depths of the house.

It’s surprisingly relaxing, doing the dishes. Mike leans against the counter while Joyce scrubs at the casserole dish, running the towel through his fingers and humming vaguely along to the music. The A-side runs out before the dish is ready to dry, so he goes to flip it.

When he gets back, Joyce pauses her washing to look at him, still wrist-deep in soapy water.

“You know, Mike,” she says, “I’m glad you’re here.”

He thinks she means here as in the kitchen, as in helping with the dishes. When he says so, she smiles slightly and shakes her head, turning back to the sink and rinsing the suds off the casserole dish.

“No, no. Just—here. With us. With Will. It’s good to see you two this close again.”

“Oh,” Mike says, flustered. He nearly fumbles the pan when she hands it to him, but manages to hold on, just standing there and holding it for a full ten seconds before he remembers he’s supposed to be drying it, too. “Yeah, me too. I, um—I missed him.”

It’s a normal thing to say, but somehow it feels like he’s taken one of Joyce Byers’ kitchen knives and slit himself open for her to look inside. Mike’s always had a bit of an honesty problem; either he lies, or he tells the truth in the worst possible way. He’s been doing a lot of both lately.

“He missed you, too, honey,” Joyce says. She reaches out as though to touch his shoulder, then glances at her soapy hand and seems to think better of it. “We all did, you know, but especially Will.”

“Yeah,” Mike manages, throat unexpectedly tight. He ducks his head and stares determinedly down at the dish in his hands, working the towel into all the corners to collect any stray moisture.

“He’s been lonely for a long time,” Joyce confides, sighing. “I’m glad he has you again. You’re good for him, Mike.”

Mike’s not so sure if he believes that, seeing as he’s never felt anywhere near good in his life, but he clutches the thought close to his heart anyway, folded right between his ribs. “I think he’s the one who’s good for me,” he admits. It feels like he’s saying so much more.

This time, Joyce does touch his shoulder, sweeping her thumb soothingly over his collarbone even as his shirt grows dark with dishwater.

“Oh, sweetie,” she says sympathetically, and that’s all it takes for the tears Mike didn’t even realize he was holding back to start slipping out. She shakes her other hand out over the water and pulls him into a hug, rocking him back and forth right there in front of the sink, lets him press his face into her shoulder like a child. “I can tell.”

They stay that way until the end of the song and half of the next, Joyce holding him and Mike letting himself be held, letting himself bask in the fact that somehow, some way, he hasn’t completely fucked things up with her or her son or even his older brother. That there are still good things in his life despite his past self’s manic determination to prove that there aren’t and shouldn’t ever be again.

“Mom,” Will complains, startling them both from where he stands in the doorway. He sounds mildly horrified. “He’s crying. What did you even say to make Mike cry?”

Pulling away from Joyce and wiping at his eyes, Mike can’t help himself—he laughs.

It’s good to be home.

✉

July wears on and fades into August. Usually, it’s Mike’s least favorite time of year, when the days are stretching on endlessly and emptily and it seems like summer will never end and he’ll be stuck in his bedroom forever. Then he dropped out of college, and suddenly his life shrank back down to his parents’ house in Hawkins and stayed that way. Every month became August.

Things are different this year. This year, he has Will again. This year, there are things he can lose that aren’t just himself.

✉

One of Mike’s coworkers, Cindy, goes on maternity leave, meaning Mike’s now taking the lion’s share of her former shifts. He doesn’t mind having the extra money, and he definitely doesn’t mind that Will starts spending Mike’s lunch breaks with him, perched side by side on the hood of his hand-me-down car. Mike eats, and Will smokes, and sometimes they talk. Sometimes they don’t. One day, Mike brings a few of his old stories for Will to read.

They’re bad, mostly. Objectively. They’re full of an innocence Mike lost a long time ago, utterly guileless in their depictions of life and friendship and happiness. Mostly he wrote fantasy, poorly renamed versions of their old D&D characters going on quests and adventures together long after their real-life counterparts stopped talking. It was Mike’s way of denying their distance, maybe, and his role in it. He doesn’t let Will read most of those. But there are a few he’s written that he thinks were close to something better, even if they weren’t quite what he wanted them to be. Two strangers meeting in New Mexico; two cousins on a porch; a sister’s unanswered messages to her hospitalized younger brother. He brings all of them and more for Will to read, a new one every few days. It’s terrifying to relinquish each sheaf of paper to someone else’s hands.

It's also nothing short of wonderful.

“These are amazing, Mike,” Will says. When Mike snorts, he kicks his ankle—hard. “Stop that, I mean it. They’re really, really good. I like them a lot.”

Mike hopes the heat on his cheeks is just his tendency to sunburn instantly on summer afternoons. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Will repeats, nodding. “You should keep writing. If you want to.”

Mike thinks he might want to. Mike wants a lot of things, most of which he shouldn’t, but that’s never stopped him before.

“You really think so?” he asks, unable to meet Will’s gaze. Instead, he picks the crust off his tuna sandwich, still sitting uneaten in his lap. There’s something wild and toothed and yearning in his chest. Something shaped a bit like hope. It’s nothing short of unbearable.

Will says, very softly, laying two fingers on Mike’s elbow, “I do. You could really go places someday, I think.”

Places like Chicago? Mike wants to ask. He swallows the question with a bite of his sandwich and lets it sit like a rock in his stomach. Will hasn’t brought up Jonathan’s offer, one way or another, since that night. The thing is, though, he also hasn’t finished unpacking his room in Joyce’s new house; just leaves everything in a jumble of boxes like he can’t decide if he’s staying or going, like he couldn’t care less either way.

“Thanks,” Mike says to his lap more than Will.

“’Course,” replies Will.

Mike goes back to his sandwich. He hopes summer never ends.

✉

(Here is what Mike doesn’t tell Will: not every story he’s written is fiction. Not every story he’s written is old. He only listened to half of the messages Nancy left him when he was stuck in the hospital in Indianapolis, his mother watching his every move like a hawk, but he still thinks about them sometimes. Enough to write a story, even, but not enough to call her back.

Not enough to tell Will, either.

Not yet.)

✉

Will arrives unexpectedly at the Wheelers’ house one afternoon in late August. Mike opens the door to his determined expression and doesn’t even have time for a hello before Will is saying, “I got an offer to work at the Kinko’s downtown.”

Mike blinks, tries to parse together the rest of what Will’s saying in the line of his shoulders, the set of his jaw. “Um. Congrats?”

“I haven’t said yes yet.”

Mike thinks, yet. Will has been offered a job here in Hawkins. Will could conceivably stay here longer than just the summer. Will might not accept Jonathan’s offer.

Will also hasn’t said yes yet.

“Un-congrats?” Mike offers. Will rolls his eyes the tiniest bit. “Are you going to say yes?”

“It depends.”

Mike steps out the door and closes it behind him before his mother can come downstairs and complain that he’s letting all the cold air out, or letting all the flies in, or whatever else she can find to be unhappy about.

He asks, “Depends on what, Will?”

Shifting from foot to foot, Will chews on his lip. Finally, he nods to himself and says, “On what you’d say if I asked you to come to Chicago with me. And not just— not just for a day trip, okay?

“I thought,” Mike says, and then stops for a moment, feeling a little dizzy as Will’s words sink in. “I thought Jonathan just had one extra room.”

Will shrugs. It’s not nearly as casual as he seems to be aiming for. “We could get bunk beds?”

He says it like a question. Like Mike has the answer. In a way, Mike supposes he’s right. He wants to say yes. He’s never wanted to say yes to someone more in his life, so much so that this doesn’t even feel particularly real, as though he never woke up this morning and is still curled up in his bed upstairs, hidden beneath the covers, retreating to a world where he can have everything he’s ever wanted. Everything he’s never dared to.

“Why?” Mike asks instead. He’s better at wanting than having, after all.

“Why what?”

He folds his arms across his chest as though they could hope to hide everything crammed into his chest; everything that’s been threatening to leak out for months now—an oil spill, a nuclear leak, lead in the groundwater, toxic waste in his mouth. “Why would you want me to move to Chicago with you?”

Will stares at him for a long, long moment, searching gaze probing Mike’s face. He seems surprised, almost. Confused. Like he wasn’t expecting this. Well, that makes two of them.

“Because you’re my best friend, Mike,” he says at length. It sounds like half an answer. “And it’s not would, okay? It’s not hypothetical. I’m really asking. I do want you to go.”

Mike whispers, “Oh.”

“Yeah,” replies Will. “Oh.”

Shuffling his feet, Mike wraps his arms a little tighter around himself despite the heat and stares out over Will’s shoulder, taking in the lawn, the mailbox, the curl of Maple Street beyond, this place where he’s spent all but a few years of his life. This place he’s afraid he’ll die in. There’s something pushing at his ribs, something that’s been waking up all summer. Mike’s afraid it will never go back to sleep. He’s afraid it would kill him if it tried.

“If you don’t want to—” Will begins.

“No,” Mike says, unable to look at him. “No, that’s not it.”

“Then what is?”

He takes in one deep, steadying breath, and then another. Closes his eyes, lets his arms drop from around his middle. Feels the ache of something in his chest, something he’s spent years refusing to put a name to, for his sanity’s sake, or maybe his pride’s. When he opens his eyes again and finally looks at Will, he’s looking back silently and steadily. One thing about Will Byers: he is always looking back. Always reaching. Always searching for Mike in whatever labyrinth he’s constructed to hide in. They’re nearly at the center, now, Mike knows. Nearly at the heart.

“Are you okay with going somewhere?” Mike asks quietly. “There are some things you should know.”

✉

He doesn’t have a specific place in mind, just tells Will to pick somewhere and drive. It doesn’t take long before Will’s pulling up to the curb and shifting the car into park. Mike looks out the window and nearly laughs when he sees where they are.

After everything, it feels appropriate to be back at this damn playground again.

They settle on the swing set with the weeds coming up to their knees, and Will lights a cigarette before twisting a little in his swing so he’s facing more towards Mike than away.

“Okay,” he says. “Talk.”

And Mike does.

“The story I let you read,” he says. “The one about the phone calls. That wasn’t fiction.”

Will just looks at him, brows slightly furrowed. He hasn’t put the pieces together yet. Mike’s mentioned the accident to him once or twice in passing, but he’s never explained it in detail. Never explained that accident isn’t even the right word.

Heedless of the rust and the dirt and the heat, Mike wraps his fingers tightly around the chains of his swing. They burn. Mike aches. That’s the only word for it.

“I’m going to tell you this,” he says slowly, “but I don’t want— anything. Pity. Whatever. I just want you to know the truth. You deserve it.”

“Why?” Will asks. Mike wants to laugh. He wants to cry.

“Because you’re my best friend,” he answers, echoing Will’s words from before. The other half of an answer. The start of a question, unasked. Swallowing roughly, Mike looks over to meet Will’s probing gaze and says, “Do you remember when I told you how I hit that tree two years ago?”

Will nods. He doesn’t look away, so Mike won’t either.

“It wasn’t an accident,” Mike says. Just like that, one of his biggest secrets, one only his mother and his sisters know about, is out and hanging heavy in the summer air between them. “I did it on purpose.”

“Mike,” Will whispers. That’s all.

“Things were bad,” Mike tells him haltingly, hands flexing around the chains. “They had been for a long time, but suddenly I just couldn’t take it anymore, you know? I just wanted it to be over. All of it. So one night I— I found the first sturdy tree I could and put my car into it. It didn’t work, obviously. I woke up in the hospital with a broken leg and everyone telling me I was lucky to be alive. Mom wouldn’t let me out of her sight. I don’t know how she knew, but she figured it out. I guess she told Nancy what happened, because she left me, like, thirty messages and threatened to kill me herself if I ever tried it again.”

He'd never heard his big sister sound so scared. Not once. And Holly had spent every night in the hospital with him, curled up in the same bed because the nurses couldn’t manage to pry her away. They never talked about it afterwards, but sometimes when she looks at him, Mike can tell they’re both remembering. Probably that’s why talking is something they both prefer to avoid.

In all of this, he finds himself laughing, more than a little bitterly, and Will flinches a little at the sound.

“The tree got the worst of it. I felt so fucking bad for that tree. It was just minding its own business, and I couldn’t even put my car into it right.” He releases the chains and folds his hands between his knees, hoping to hide their shaking. “I, um. Actually went out and apologized to it, if you can believe that.”

He offers Will a weak grin, which Will doesn’t return. “Anyway. That’s all in the past now, but I thought— I thought you should know.”

The first thing Will says since Mike launched into his story proper is, “Thank you for telling me.”

Mike shrugs, more than a little stiff.

“Can I ask a question, though?” Will asks.

“Anything,” Mike tells him, and then holds in a wince at how utterly honest he sounds. Way to be subtle, Wheeler.

“What does this have to do with you moving to Chicago with me?”

Everything, Mike thinks. It has everything to do with that. But how to explain it in a way that makes sense, instead of taking Will’s hand and placing it on his chest, fingers splayed to where he can feel the erratic thumping of Mike’s stuttering, starving heart and saying, This. This is what.

“I’m not always okay,” is what he settles on eventually. “Mostly, even. I don’t know if that’s a thing I can be anymore. I don’t— I don’t really know who I even am. I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t want that around all the time.”

“Hey,” Will says, nudging Mike’s foot with his own. “Don’t talk like that.”

“But it’s true.”

Will takes a measured drag on his cigarette before saying, “Yeah, okay, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only thing that matters, you know?”

Mike shakes his head. For years now, most of his life has been defined by the fact that he’s not okay. That nothing is okay. He’s spent twenty months convinced he will die in his childhood bedroom, and there’s nothing he can do about it. How can there be more than this? How can he have it, take it, keep it?

“Nobody’s okay, Mike,” Will says gently. “You aren’t, Jonathan isn’t, my mom isn’t. Fuck, I’m not okay. None of us really know who we are, either. But I know some things.”

“Like what?” he whispers.

“You’re a writer,” Will begins, listing things off on his fingers. “You’re the person who taught me how to skip rocks. You love ABBA and pop music and soft rock. Your favorite color is blue, and you’re my best friend. If you move to Chicago with me, you can be my roommate, too. That’s a start. That’s somebody. And we can figure out the rest together, if you want.”

Mike says, very quietly, “I do.”

“Okay,” Will says, like it’s nothing. It’s probably everything.

“You’re wrong about one thing, actually,” Mike says after a moment. He has one shoulder leaned against the chain further from Will, and he cranes his neck a little so he can look at him sitting there, somehow resplendent in the summer light despite the fact that he’s only wearing a paint-splattered t-shirt and fraying jean shorts.

Will arches one brow. “Oh?”

“Yeah,” Mike says. “I don’t think blue is my favorite color anymore. I think might be yellow.”

Will rolls his eyes, readjusting his grip on his cigarette where he holds it against the chain. There’s rust and ash on his fingertips and a smile tugging at his lips. “Damn. My bad, Mike. I don’t know you at all and we can’t be roommates.” His tone practically drips sarcasm, sticky as a popsicle melting down Mike’s wrist, but he’s also grinning ever wider, bright and warm and endless as the summers of their childhoods. “Is there anything else I should know?”

Mike gazes at him for a moment, taking all of him in, and says, “Yeah. This.”

And then he leans in and kisses Will Byers right on his smile.

Will inhales so sharply that Mike, for one terrible second, thinks, That’s it. That’s the end. Thinks of a car hitting a tree at forty-five miles per hour. Thinks of an old painted door that should have stayed shut. Thinks, It was nice while it lasted. Everything is.

And then with a rattle of chains, Will surges forward, his free hand coming up to grip Mike’s shoulder. Then he opens his mouth and kisses back, and Mike has to grab the chains of the swing to keep himself from losing his balance and tumbling into the weeds like a fool. The angle is awkward and anyone walking by could see them and honestly, Mike doesn’t give a damn. He’s too busy chasing the taste of nicotine and smoke on the backs of Will’s teeth.

He thinks he understands what Will meant all those weeks ago, about the taste being the thing that hooks you. Except maybe it’s not the nicotine that’s going to snare Mike, heady and sharp and addicting. Maybe it’s just Will.

While he’s not exactly capable of forming coherent thoughts at the moment, Mike decides he’d be okay spending the rest of forever like this. Unfortunately, they’re both human beings who possess sets of lungs, and said lungs have a tragically limited supply of oxygen, meaning at some point they have to come up for air. That point comes sooner rather than later. They stretch it out as long as possible, so long Mike might start to forget why he was ever worried about this in the first place, but eventually Will breaks the kiss, pulling back to rest his forehead against Mike’s as he sucks in a slightly ragged breath. For a moment, all is quiet. The swings creak. The insects buzz. They breathe. Will smells like cigarettes and citrus, turpentine and home.

“So,” Will says, more than a little teasingly, “I guess we won’t be needing the bunk beds?”

Mike groans. He doesn’t move away, though, because he is a weak, weak man. “Shut up, Byers.”

“Make me, Wheeler,” Will grins.

And Mike? Well. Mike is only too happy to comply.