Chapter Text
He's cold, his skin.
Which isn't particularly terrifying; he'd never run particularly hot before. His smile's the same though, the ones with teeth and the ones without, Will sometimes thinks the ones where his lips stay closed after there's been no words out of them for a while are particularly lovely.
Not that he especially likes this new ‘Mike’ who hardly ever speaks and has skin as cold as ice, but Mike at all is better than Mike where they'd all left him four days ago.
Everyone else shed tears right from the understating.
Micheal Wheeler is a corpse, the hole in his chest is real, this isn't a twisted mass hallucination orchestrated by Henry Creel.
He doesn't, he doesn't particularly feel the urge to, just a sinking feeling and a cloud of thought that won't dissipate into anything logical. He helps, he looks at ‘his’ closed eyes and stares at Micheal’s slowly greying face, it's probably- practically imperceptible but the light pink at the top of his cheekbones from two hours ago is gone.
When they stop at the somehow still standing morgue across from the sheriff’s office, he almost asks what they’re doing here. It doesn’t make sense. Why can’t Mike just come home with him? He can have the bed.
Mike doesn’t respond when Will asks telepathically for a sleepover, like he usually does, his eyelids don’t flicker open, their pupils don’t meet across the back of Hopper’s dingy van. Mike lays there or sits? Will’s not entirely sure. He’s there and his eyes don’t open, there’s a blood soaked hole in his diaphragm.
Will doesn’t protest when Hopper lifts and cradles Mike to his chest from the back of the vehicle, he looks on silently as their merged figures disappear into the double doors a wide berth away and then slowly everyone else, Mrs. Wheeler, Nancy, Lucas, Jonathan, El, Dustin, his Mom, everyone, they all file in behind.
He doesn't move.
What for…?
Something doesn't make sense but- he’s not entirely sure.
Will doesn't make his way inside like he probably should, like he suspects they may all be waiting for— if anyone at all has noticed his quiet absence. Likely not with grief clouding their already foggy vision.
He leaves.