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It’s embarrassing how close his current reality is to daydreams he had when he was eight years old. All he does every day is go to school, see his friends, and plan heroic recon missions to help take down the Big Bad. His best friend lives in his house.
Mike wakes up every day to the chaos of adults shouting and doors slamming and feels completely content.
And then the guilt hits him.
He thinks about El. He can picture her waking up miles away, choking down a non-Eggo breakfast, and walking through the disgusting, old tunnels — all so she can work her ass off to, for the billionth time, save the world. He thinks about what an asshole he is for not being able to make it better, for never knowing what to do or say when he’s alone with her, for wishing he could rewind to the days when things felt easy between them. Lately, being alone with El is just frustrating. It feels like he’s been shoved onstage at a play where everybody got a script except for him.
So every morning he wakes up, feels happy for two horrible seconds, and then feels guilty, like he should. And then he sees the painting — the beautiful D&D scene that his loving girlfriend thoughtfully commissioned for him, tacked right across from his bed — and the guilt marathon really begins.
Because the truth (and this is the part he knows he can’t ever say aloud, not even under duress) is that looking at the painting across from his bed doesn’t remind him of his loving, thoughtful girlfriend. It reminds him of Will.
Will, who he shouldn’t even need reminders of, by the way — since he is the aforementioned best friend living in Mike’s very own house — but who his brain is apparently hell-bent on bringing up regardless.
He sits next to Will at the breakfast table. Bikes alongside him on the way to school and shares all of his classes with him. Sees him at every strategy meeting. Sits next to him at the dinner table. Mike gets nothing but Will Byers data points every minute of every day. And still, it’s like there’s something about Will that his brain won’t stop trying to figure out. He watches Will buy his soda at lunch, fascinated, as if Will has ever not bought a Coke. He watches Will in strategy sessions — the way he clenches his jaw when Joyce shuts down one of his ideas, the way he holds his pencil when he’s drawing maps. The other day, he saw a bright orange maple leaf on the ground and he thought, completely unbidden, I wonder if Will would like that leaf.
He’d stayed up until three a.m. wondering what the fuck that was about. What reason could he possibly have to care what Will thought about a leaf?
At first Mike thought he was just, you know, trying to catch up. Fill in the blanks from the interminable stretch when Will was in California and they were — and this is where a very specific kind of Will-related guilt hits him — incommunicado. Eight months is a long time when you’re a teenager, even just from a developmental standpoint. For instance, when he was out in California, Mike noticed that, in just eight months, Will had:
- Grown taller (significantly)
- Developed a deeper voice
- Gotten a haircut (probably several)
- Gotten tanner (slightly)
- Developed his craft as an artist, adding painting to his repertoire
- Increased his confidence/self-esteem/ability to speak up for himself
- Developed a crush on a girl at his school (alleged but not observed, reported secondhand before trip — lent credence by observed increase in confidence and Will’s inferences to his own need to confess something to someone)
Obviously there was a lot Mike still had to learn about the Will he’d missed out on, even after Hawkins split open, and military quarantine gave him all the time in the world. He was determined to undo the rift he’d caused in their friendship. Embrace change. Yeah, sometimes being around Will still scared him — put an unwelcome lump in his throat and a weird tightness in his chest — but he owed it to Will to stick around anyway, to get used to all this new information, so that they could be real best friends again.
Mike gathers more data, almost none of it of note. He tries to run some of his observations by other scientifically-minded third parties, get a bit of peer review going. He asks Dustin if Will ever mentioned a girl when he wrote to him from Lenora, and Dustin — the most animated he’s been in weeks — looks at him like he has two heads. He asks Lucas if he’s noticed that Will’s eyes (which used to be brown, he’s almost positive) have been looking particularly green lately. Lucas just stares at him for a second and then says, “No, man.”
Mike ceases further attempts at peer review.
What Mike’s one-man study reveals is that Will, actually, has not changed very much. Physically, sure — taller. Deeper voice. Different hair. (Green eyes?) But the rest of it, his general Will-ness, is basically the same. The supposed crush he had on a Lenora girl has either been forgotten or repressed — either way, it’s never mentioned again. He loves art and D&D and his family, and he has a sweet tooth that would make a dentist cry. He still breezes through science and history classes, but he asks Mike to proofread his English essays and Dustin to double-check his math. He talks Hopper out of a few contraband Band-Aids one time after Holly falls off of her bike and skins her knee. He’s still Mike’s soft-spoken, talented, funny, sensitive, loyal friend.
The terrible truth, Mike realizes about six weeks in, is that if Will hasn’t changed, that must mean that Mike has. Because he still gets that lump-in-his-throat, vise-around-his-ribcage thing around Will sometimes. Sometimes he’ll be with Will, doing absolutely nothing at all, and he’ll suddenly want to run as fast and as far away from him as possible.
One summer morning, he thought it might be fun to beat Joyce down to the basement and wake Will up. He’d spent half the night outrunning insomnia by outlining a new campaign, and he was dying to present it to Will, so he zoomed downstairs, intentionally stomping on the staircase as he went. At the bottom, he was met with a half-awake Will, his hair rumpled and one of Mike’s old T-shirts twisted halfway up his torso, and suddenly, out of nowhere, Mike’s body was doing all kinds of weird shit again. His heart was trying to wriggle up into his esophagus and his feet were itching like they wanted him to run straight to Illinois, and instead of boisterously announcing himself, like he’d planned, he found himself standing still at the base of the basement stairs, vaguely nauseous. Will blinked blearily up at him. Behind him, Jonathan stared at Mike with a gaze far too piercing for seven a.m.
Just about a week ago, he and Will had been killing time in the basement — Mike aimlessly flipping through a comic on one side of the couch, Will doodling in his sketchbook on the other — when Mike discovered a new data point. He looked up to say something to Will about Superman, and the low light was hitting Will just so, and Mike saw the shadow of facial hair on Will’s upper lip. It nearly eclipsed the mole just above the corner of Will’s mouth, the one that Mike sometimes watched inch upwards when he smiled. Mike stared at the crest of Will’s mouth, made to look even softer by warm light and downy hair, and he felt absolutely, inexplicably insane — like if he opened his own mouth, even just a little bit, he would scream.
He excused himself to the basement bathroom, feeling like he’d forgotten how to walk, and stared at his own face in the bathroom mirror until it became meaningless. Dark spills on a pale canvas. For reasons completely unknown to him, Mike felt like he might cry. He felt like the loneliest person in the universe. He opened the medicine cabinet, saw two orange, plastic razors perched on one of the shelves, and very nearly threw up.
That’s part of the trouble — he never knows when a data point is going to betray him and turn into a fucking land mine.
Beyond not understanding what the fuck is wrong with him, like, physically, Mike becomes worried that he’s once again sabotaging his friendship with Will. He knows how smart Will is. He’s sure Will notices Mike’s weird little episodes — and, knowing Will, probably takes them personally. He’ll throw his guard up, sometimes, especially when Mike is trying to get closer to him.
Mike knocks his shoulder against Will’s at the lunch table when Dustin says something stupid. He tosses Will a note in Spanish class with a bad drawing of Señorita Eriksen, then bounces his eyebrows at Will while he opens it and tries, valiantly, not to smile. He claps a hand on Will’s shoulder, once, when he comes up with a good idea before a crawl. He tells Will, very enthusiastically, that he likes one of his drawings. He kicks Will’s foot under the dinner table, just because he’s bored.
Sometimes Mike makes these overtures in a half-assed attempt at atoning for his own weirdness. Mostly he makes them because, well, sue him, it feels nice to be close to Will. Will is his best friend. And a lot of the time, it’s fine. Will will smile back at him — the full-wattage smile, with his big front teeth on full display — or bite down on a laugh. Everything will feel normal. Better than normal, really. For Mike, in those moments, everything feels fucking great. The lump in his throat is sugar; the pressure in his chest is a squeeze from a dear friend.
But there was that one time, when Mike grabbed Will by the wrist and pulled him into an empty classroom to show him his new minis, and Will yanked his arm away like he’d been burned. There was that other time, when Mike told Will — for no reason at all, really — that he was so happy they were living together, and Will looked absolutely terrified. For every knowing glance they’ve shared, every wordless sentence they’ve spoken, there have been times when Will has, very pointedly, looked away. There have been moments where Mike has studied Will without interruption — the pattern of moles on the side of his face; the straight, sure lines of his eyebrows — and there have been moments where Will has met his gaze and frowned.
Mike replays the mishaps over and over again before he’s dragged down by the weight of sleep. Fearful Will, confused Will. He tries to understand the difference between Will, smiling and carefree, and Will, wary and hunted. Mike knows that, no matter how much he reasons and excuses and justifies, the common denominator is him.
Mike knows that he should be thinking about something — honestly anything — else. What they’re serving for lunch at the cafeteria. The town-wide battery shortage. Tomorrow’s history test. Holly’s newfound love for fantasy. That he can’t remember the last time he heard Dustin and Lucas fight. The bottles of wine he saw his mom hiding behind cleaning supplies last week. Max. His girlfriend, alone and shouldering an unspeakable burden. The fact that he knows — somewhere, deep down, he knows — that it shouldn’t take so much effort to love someone, that love is a feeling you’re supposed to feel, not create. The fact that El needs his love to defeat Vecna and save the only home he has ever known.
He wishes he could think about any of that stuff. He wishes, more than anything, that he could just not fucking think at all.
But he does.
He thinks about Will. He thinks about that tight feeling in his chest.
He thinks there might be something wrong with him, and he thinks it might mean the end of the world.