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When Mike kisses Will for the first time, it’s desperate, and it’s when they’re both sure the world is about to end in another dimension with a sky the color of blood and full of ash.
But that was nearly a year ago, now, and the world didn’t end. They actually won, against all odds. Vecna is dead, the Upside Down permanently closed.
Now, they don’t have to be teenagers fighting a supernatural war, child soldiers dragged into something so much bigger than themselves. They can be normal again, without the looming threat of death, of another monster emerging from the depths of hell to terrorize them some more.
Mike and Will, especially, use this newfound freedom as much as possible.
Which is why Mike is in his basement at midnight, opening the door as quietly as he can to let a giggling Will inside, when Will is supposed to be at home, and Mike is supposed to be asleep in his bedroom.
The second the door shuts behind Will, he launches himself into Mike’s arms. “Hey,” he whispers, arms winding around Mike’s neck.
“Hey, yourself,” Mike whispers back, grinning from ear to ear. He presses a kiss to Will’s lips, chapped from his horrible habit of licking them, winding his own arms around Will’s waist. Will hums into the kiss, and Mike can taste his smile.
He pulls back, rests his forehead against Will’s. “So, how did you manage to escape your house?”
Will closes his eyes as if praying to the gods for strength and breathes out through his nose. “I owe Jane a week and a half of chores. That she can do easily with her powers.”
Mike snorts. “If I didn’t think Hopper might actually kill me and then cover it up, I would’ve come to yours.”
Will grimaces. “They’d never find your body. He does not like you, like at all.”
“I’m like, super aware. He glared at me the entire time I was over the other day. I was actively helping Joyce with dinner! I didn’t even do anything!”
Will juts out his bottom lip in a fake pout. “Poor Michael Wheeler, doomed to be hated by his father-in-law forever.”
Mike rolls his eyes, pulling completely away from Will. (He misses him immediately. He needs Will’s touch like water, like oxygen. He can’t get enough of him.) “Whatever. Come on, there’s no one upstairs,
Mike interlaces their fingers, dragging Will through the basement and up the stairs. “Wait,” Will says, coming to a complete halt. “If I don’t get a Dr Pepper right now, I’m going to drop dead.”
“No, you won’t.”
“Yes, I will. Right here in this kitchen.”
Concern passes over Mike’s features. He knows Will is lying. He knows. But the thought of Will dying is too much to bear. He mumbles something unintelligible as he opens the fridge and hands Will a can.
Will grins and intertwines their hands again, snickering quietly at Mike.
Will, a genius in his own right, the one who helped come up with the plan to kill Vecna, opens his can on the stairs. The noise causes Mike to startle and trip, hands thump thumping when they hit the ground.
Holly’s door opens, yellow light from her lamp spilling into the upstairs hallway. Mike stands up as fast as he can; Will turns sideways on the stairs, hiding behind Mike, heartbeat thumping in his ears.
Holly walks to the top of the stairs, staring suspiciously down at Mike. Mike was not aware she was awake. (Actually, now he thinks of it, she shouldn’t be awake anyway. She’s too little to be up this late.)
“Mike?” She asks, little arms crossing. “What are you doing?”
“I fell. Sorry, Holls.”
“Why are you down there anyway?”
Mike blanks. “I was. I was cleaning.” Will jostles Mike with a hand on his back at the stupid lie.
“You were cleaning?”
“Yes.”
“Is that Will?” Holly says, craning her head to the left.
“No?” He asks helplessly, rather than asserts, as Holly beams and runs down to meet them.
“Hi Will! I didn’t know you were coming for a sleepover!” She says, louder than she should be, and Mike’s eyes widen as he strains his ears for the squeak of his parents’ door hinge.
Will hugs her back one-armed, the other holding that godforsaken Dr Pepper. “It was a surprise.”
Mike, the most jealous person in the entire world, scowls ever so slightly. Why does Holly get to hug his boyfriend right now? Then, Mike realizes how insanely stupid that is, and sighs as Holly pulls away.
“You can’t tell mom and dad, okay, Holls? They don’t know Will is here.”
“Is that why he's allowed to be in your room instead of the basement?”
Mike lets out a long-suffering sigh, going beet red, and Will snorts. “Yes, nosy, go to bed,” Mike snaps, and Holly gives him a look.
“Fine,” she starts, narrowing her eyes, “but I want Will to give me a drawing lesson this weekend.”
“Deal,” Will says, linking their pinkies. He and Holly kiss their thumbs and touch them together.
“You can’t break a pinkie promise!” Holly says, smiling with all her teeth.
“Of course not. That would be dishonest,” Will says, “Go to bed.”
Holly nods her head and scampers up the stairs, shutting her door behind her, and the hallway descends into darkness again.
“That was the scariest moment of my life,” Mike announces, socked feet sliding on the wood stair to turn him around.
“Really? All the near-death experiences didn’t cut it?”
“No,” He says seriously, but he’s betrayed by the uptick of his lips, so small no one but Will could ever possibly notice it.
Will raises an eyebrow and hums in disbelief. “I’m sure,” he says dryly, and then reaches forward abruptly, turning Mike back around by the waist and pushing him forwards with one hand.
Mike giggles, giggles, and continues up the stairs, expertly dodging the creaky ones, because god forbid Nancy, or worse, Karen, came to check. (Never Ted- no, Mike's dad was much too heavy of a sleeper to even notice. Mike knows because he'd tested it once, when he was seven, and his dad fell asleep in his chair while watching Mike.)
The second the door to Mike's bedroom closes behind them, Will crowds Mike up against it. (Mike thinks he put his soda down somewhere, but for all he cares it could be seeping into his carpet. When Will is near him everything else fades to background noise, and he just doesn't care.) He brings one hand up, resting it against Mike's cheek, thumb brushing over his cheekbone in a soothing, repetitive motion, and the other hand wrapping around Mike's waist.
“Hi,” he says, smiling so warmly Mike imagines he can feel the heat radiating from it.
“Hi,” Mike says back, gentle (as he always speaks when it’s Will), both of his arms winding around Will’s waist, finding a home there.
Will hums, and leans closer, so close Mike can feel his breath ghosting over his lips. But not close enough, because he isn’t kissing Mike, and Mike is going to implode.
“Will,” he mutters, eyes half lidded, staring into his eyes, so green Mike could write sonnets about them. (And he has, they’re locked away in an old shoebox under Mike’s bed, all the poetry Mike has ever written about Will. He thinks he’s going to need a second box to store any more.)
Will hums, not moving any closer. “Yeah?”
“Will,” Mike honest to god whines, one hand dragging up Will’s spine to tangle in his hair. Will shudders. He still doesn’t kiss Mike.
“Will, please,” he breathes, tugging on Will’s hair insistently.
Will only hums, and Mike gets fed up. “Insufferable,” he mumbles, and pulls Will the rest of the way in.
Will hums into the kiss, tightening his grip on Mike’s waist, fingers digging into his skin, Mike thinks he’s going to leave a bruise. (He hopes he does.)
One of Mike’s hand stays tangled in Will’s hair, the other drifts to the thin strip of skin where his shirt has managed to ride up, lightly tracing patterns onto the warm skin there.
It's sweet, slow, unhurried, because they have all the time in the world to do this, have done it a thousand times already, will do it hundreds of thousands times more. It’s a familiar rhythm, the slow drag of their lips against one another, the way their heartbeats sync together in their chests.
Mike pulls away from Will’s lips but he doesn’t go far, trailing kisses down his jaw while Will hums in pleasure above him. He mouths at that spot he knows makes Will gasp, grins against his neck when Will does.
Will pulls completely away, grinning, interlaces their fingers and pulls Mike towards the bed. They’re both giggling and shushing each other, not trying particularly hard to not get caught, even though they should be.
They fall on the bed in a tangle of limbs, still giggling. Mike untangles himself from Will, rolls to hover above him, one leg slotted between Will’s and one hand planted on either side of his head.
Will’s hair is splayed out on the pillow, creating a halo. The lamp from Mike’s bedside illuminates Will in a soft yellow light, eyes twinkling with amusement and what Mike knows, now, is love. His lips are reddened by Mike's own, spit slick, and the only thing running through Mike's head is prettyprettypretty.
“You’re beautiful,” he whispers, one hand coming up to gently, reverently, trace Will's features.
Will blushes red, and Mike grins, proud of himself. Will looks even prettier with the blush high on his cheeks, stark against his pale skin.
“Mike,” Will mumbles, looking away, and Mike just can't have that. He wants Will to look at him all the time, wants to feel the burn under his skin at eye contact, the warmth that spreads slow and sticky like honey through him when he feels Will's eyes on him.
“You are,” Mike's hand pauses its tracing, thumbing softly at Will's cheekbone, willing Will to look back at him. He does. “Promise.”
Will, evidently not being able to take it anymore, threads his hands through Mike's hair, and yanks Mike down to his mouth.
Will gasps into the kiss, and Mike swallows it down, hand falling from Will’s face to under his shirt, moves to explore the warm skin there.
Mike always feels a little insane when he’s with Will, but when they’re like this, he feels truly crazy. (Crazy together, right?, he thinks, and wow, his thirteen year old self could not have been more right.) His lips on Will’s, skin against skin, not knowing where one boy ends and the other begins. Mike kind of wants to crawl inside Will’s chest, curl up next to his heart, make a home there, the comforting thumpthumpthump lulling him to an unshakeable calm.
One of Will’s hands stays tangled in his hair, scratching at his scalp, the stinging sensation sending waves of pleasure through Mike. He deepens the kiss, bruising, trying to push himself closer, trying to meld him and Will into one being. The other roams all over Mike- tracing gentle lines down his arm, slipping under his shirt to draw patterns and words (iloveyou, Mike thinks, but it might just be wishful thinking.), gripping his waist with a bruising strength and then starting the pattern over.
Eventually, the kisses lose steam, turn sugar sweet and soft as silk. They stay like this for what feels like years (but is probably only thirty minutes, give or take a few), trading soft kisses and gentle touches.
Unfortunately, the human body needs things like sleep to survive, so Mike rolls off Will and stares up at the ceiling, breathing heavy. Their hands are still intertwined, and Will is rubbing his thumb back and forth over Mike’s hand, and god, he really loves him. “I love you,” he whispers to the ceiling, and Mike can hear Will’s grin when he whispers back, “I love you too.” And Mike really, really, wants to kiss him again, but he’s falling asleep, eyes heavy and stinging with the effort of keeping them open.
“Are you falling asleep?” he hears Will ask, distantly.
“No,” he mumbles, but he's betrayed by the sleepiness in his tone, the way the word comes out slow and curled instead of sharp and defined like usual.
Will huffs a soft laugh, reaches over to turn off the lamp, and then turns to face Mike. (Oh, that’s where the Dr Pepper went, sitting practically untouched on Mike’s desk.) Mike, who wants nothing more than to stare at Will for the rest of time, until the universe implodes on itself and they’re nothing but stardust, turns to look at Will.
He can’t see much in the darkness, can just barely make out the general shape of Will’s features, but that’s okay because Mike knows Will’s face like he knows DnD, like he knows the intricacies of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. So he stares where he knows Will’s eyes are, wishing he could see them in light.
“Come here,” Will mumbles, arms reaching to curl behind Mike, and Mike goes easily, burying his head in the space where neck meets collarbone and sighing contentededly. He thinks he hears Will whisper a goodnight, but he’s already too tired to speak.
-
Mike wakes up some hours later to the feeling of Will pulling away, standing up. He panics.
“Wait,” he mumbles, eyes not fully open, voice deep with sleep and confusion, “where are you going?”
The moonlight streaming in through Mike’s half closed curtains allows Mike to see when Will raises an eyebrow in amusement. “Home, Mike.”
Mike pouts, reaching an arm out to grip Will’s shirt. “No.”
“Mike,” Will says, staring down at him. “My mom is going to freak out if I’m not home.”
“El’ll tell her,” he reasons, tugging on Will’s shirt to drag him back to bed, back into Mike’s orbit.
Will thinks about this. “And then Hopper will know I snuck out to go see Mike Wheeler and he’ll hate you more.”
Mike groans. “Don’t care,” he says, and when he tugs again Will falls back into the bed easily.
“Fine. Didn’t really want to leave you anyway,” Will mutters, pulling Mike back in, and Mike grins into Will’s neck, and he’s back asleep in seconds to the feeling of Will running his fingers through his hair.
-
Mike wakes up to sunlight streaming through his curtains, illuminating Will in a way that makes him glow, and Mike grins, tightening his hold on Will just barely.
They’ve shifted positions in their sleep, Mike no longer curled into Will’s chest like a particularly content cat. His arms are wrapped around Will, and his left one is going a little numb because of Will’s weight on top of it, but Mike can’t be bothered to care. Their legs are tangled together, both of Will’s slotted in between Mike’s, and their faces are inches apart.
Mike knows it’s a little odd, a little strange, but he loves watching Will sleep. His features soft and relaxed, breathing slow and deep. He likes knowing that Will is okay, that he’s safe. (It’s not like when Will has nightmares, and Mike has to shake him awake while Will whines incoherently, turning this way and that, no doubt thinking Vecna has come back, or he’s in the Upside Down again. Mike hates it when Will has nightmares, hates seeing the pain on his face, the fear in his voice. He’s only glad that they’re getting rarer as the months go by, that he knows how to calm Will down in minutes instead of the hour it took the first time he witnessed one.)
Will wakes up slowly, blinking and yawning and stretching not unlike a cat. Once he does wake up fully, his eyes widen, and he sits up so fast he rolls into the floor.
Mike blinks.
He leans on one elbow, peering over the edge of the bed like a meerkat. “Good morning?”
Will scrambles to stand up. “Mike,” he hisses, eyes full of panic, and okay, now Mike is getting a little afraid, because the last time Will had been this scared-
“What? Is it Vecna? There’s no way he’s back, we-” Mike cuts himself off abruptly when Will frantically shakes his head, but Will doesn’t speak again, just looks around as if searching for answers.
The sound of Karen making breakfast floats up from the kitchen, and Mike can hear Nancy and Holly arguing in the hallway.
“Oh, fuck,” Mike says eloquently when he realizes. His entire family is awake, and he can’t get Will to any of the exits in the house. And Will isn’t supposed to be here.
“Fuck,” Will agrees, looking miserable.
“Okay, wait. We can fix this. You... you can go out my window.”
“Your window,” Will deadpans, looking at Mike like he’s a little stupid. “Mike, you live on the second floor, and there’s nothing for me to climb down out there.”
Mike sighs.
Then the door opens, and Mike is still on his bed, Will standing over him, and there’s no time to even attempt to hide him.
“Mom wants you to come down for,” Nancy pauses, eyes flicking between Mike and Will like she's watching a tennis match, “breakfast,” she finishes, stepping into the room and closing the door behind her. She crosses her arms.
“Okay. Will, honey, you were not here last night.”
“No,” Will agrees, standing straight as a rod, avoiding Nancy’s eyes.
Nancy is silent for ten, full, excruciating seconds.
“Does Miss Byers know you’re here?”
“No.”
Nancy sighs, uncrossing her arms and briefly touching her fingers to her temples.
“Nancy-” Mike starts, but immediately closes his mouth when Nancy holds out a singular finger and closes her eyes.
“Okay. Here’s what we’re going to do.”
Mike loves his older sister. He really, really does.
“I’m going to distract Mom by telling her the family portrait in the living room looks off-center. While she’s out of the kitchen, Will, you are going to leave through the back door as quietly as possible.”
“What about Dad?” Mike cuts in, now standing from his bed and standing next to Will.
“He’s watching the news. I’d say we have about ten more minutes to pull this off.”
“Okay, but I still don’t have time to get home before my mom wakes up and freaks out,” Will points out, eyebrows furrowing. (Mike wants to take his face in his hands, smooth it out with his thumbs, or maybe kiss it away, make Will let out that light giggle that Mike loves so much.)
Nancy gives Will a look, and Will winces.
“Ok, sorry. Continue.”
“Then, you’re going to go around the house and come back in through the front door. You’ll call your house and tell Jonathan where you are. Please, for the love of god, do not act guilty,” She pleads, staring at them both and recrossing her arms.
“We know how to lie, Nancy, we did it for like, five years about another dimension, I hid a girl in our basement-”
“And you were bad at that, too,” Nancy interrupts, glaring at Mike. “Mom knew something was going on, she just didn’t think it could’ve been too bad. But now? After she was almost killed by an actual monster? She’s not going to let it slide.”
Mike thinks about this and mutters that Nancy’s right.
“What was that?”
“I said, you’re right,” Mike says through gritted teeth, looking away from her.
“Thank you, I know. Now come on. Come down when you hear Mom yell ‘what’.”
Nancy whips around, opening the door, and walking downstairs at what is frankly, top leisurely a pace for Mike and Will, whose pulses are jackrabbing.
“Mom,” they hear Nancy yell, “The family picture is tilted!”
“What? I told Holly to stop messing with it. Holly!” They hear Karen yell, and Mike watches her cross in front of the staircase.
“Come on,” Mike grabs Will’s hand and drags Will down the stairs as quietly as possible.
When Mike opens the door, Karen yells, “Mike? What are you doing?”
“I’m seeing if I put my bike up!” he yells back, ushering a crouching Will out of the door.
Less than two minutes later, there's a knock at the door.
“Will,” Karen says, smiling warmly, evidently finished fussing over the portrait, “It’s nice to see you. But it’s quite early, isn’t it?” She asks, leaning back to look at the clock while Mike walks into the living room.
“I told him to come over. We’re working on a new campaign today.”
Karen smiles. “Okay, well, come on, call your mom and come eat breakfast, honey.”
When Karen turns around to tell Ted to come eat, Nancy fixes the boys with a glare. “You owe me,” she mouths, rolling her eyes and turning around to walk to the kitchen.
Mike leans against the wall while Will calls his house, laughing when he hears Jonathan tell Will not to leave without telling anyone.
“Yes. Yes. Okay. Sorry, Jonathan. Bye.”
Mike snorts. “Get in trouble?”
“Shut up, Mike.”
They sit side by side at the kitchen table, joining the conversation effortlessly. Mike’s foot hooks over Will’s ankle, and Will glances at him quickly, sending a soft, affection-filled smile.
Mike grins into his eggs.
-
They really do work on a campaign, later, after breakfast, and Karen’s mandatory catch-up she has with every one of Mike’s friends when they come over, and Mike thinks it’s their best yet.
They have a sleepover that night, in the basement, in two separate sleeping bags, because Karen has a habit of coming to check on them if she wakes up in the middle of the night.
They fall asleep holding hands, talking about everything and nothing, smiles on their faces.