Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

"I was just saying, why don't they stay with us?" Mike suggested, the words casual, almost lost between bites of meatloaf.

A heavy silence fell over the Wheeler dining table. His mom and Joyce shared one of those infuriating adult looks, a whole conversation happening in a glance that excluded him. "That is…incredibly sweet of you to offer Mike—" Joyce began, her voice gentle.

"Awesome," Mike cut in, too fast, too eager. The plan crystallized instantly, perfect and clear. "Will can share my room, and you guys can— I don't know, Mom'll figure it out." He couldn't look at Will, afraid he'd see the same hesitant hope that was making Mike's own palms sweat.

"Michael." His mother's voice was a warning shot.

"What?" Mike questioned, his brow furrowed in genuine confusion. What part of safety in an apocalypse was so hard to grasp? Across the table, Will was staring hard at his plate, shoulders tense. Mike felt a twist of frustration. Why was everyone being so difficult?

"We can't put you out, " Joyce said softly, but she looked so tired. Mike's resolve hardened.

"I don't mind sharing," Will said, his voice quiet but firm. When he finally glanced up, a tiny, shy smile touched his lips. "It'll be like a sleepover."

Yes, Mike thought, fiercely. Exactly. It would be like it used to be. Before the distance, before California, before everything got so screwed up. Will understood.

“Will,” Jonathan cautioned, his tone low. He gave his brother a look that said let it go. “I think what Mom’s saying is we wouldn’t want to put them out.”

"But Joyce is right," Karen interjected smoothly, reclaiming control of the conversation. "It was a kind offer, Michael."

Mike sank back in his chair, a scowl etching itself onto his face. They were worried about politeness, about space, about imposing, while gates were literally open to hell. It was insane. He grumbled into his chest, the injustice of it burning hot and clean in his gut. Where would Will stay? The Byers could not stay with Hopper—as far as Hawkins was concerned, he was dead. Mike snuck a glance back over to Will, watching as his hopeful look faltered and his face shutter closed.

"Well," His mom said brightly, pushing back from the table with a scrape of chair legs, "Who wants dessert?"

Later, the familiar chaos of his own bedroom felt like the only sane place in the world. Will was a quiet presence on the end of his bed, a grounding point as Mike wore a path in the carpet.

"I don't get it!" he exploded, the frustration from the dinner table boiling over. He dragged a hand through his hair. "Where are you supposed to go? Some gross FEMA trailer in a parking lot? No way. That's not safe, not with…everything." He didn't say Vecna's name. He didn't have to. The threat was a third person in the room, sucking the air out of it.

"Mike, it's fine," Will said. His voice was calm, but it sounded hollow, resigned. It was the sound of someone already accepting the worst. Mike hated it. Will shouldn’t be resigned to danger. He should be fighting it, or better yet, being kept away from it entirely.

“Fine?” Mike stopped pacing, turning to face him. “Forget fine. Forget normal.” The word ‘normal’ tasted like ash. Normal was gone. His new mission was crystal clear. “You’re staying here. You still have your walkie?”

Will nodded, and a flicker of something—not quite a smile, but close—touched his lips. “In my backpack.”

“Good. Okay. Just… let me handle it.” The plan was already solidifying. He’d wear his mom down. Logic, guilt, persistence—he’d use every weapon. “I can be persuasive. I’ve been told my puppy-dog eyes are elite-level.”

A soft, unexpected snort came from Will. The sound was like a crack in the tension. “Yeah, maybe when you were nine.”

Mike felt a grin break across his face, quick and instinctive. Will’s laughter, even that small huff of it, was a victory. It was proof that the Will he knew—the one who got his stupid jokes—was still in there, under all the fear and California distance. “Whatever. I’ll talk to you soon, okay?” He took a step closer, his voice dropping into seriousness. “And radio me immediately if you… sense anything. Promise?”

“Promise,” Will said, the word a little thick.

The way Will looked at him then—a mix of gratitude and something else, something sad and deep—sent a weird, warm ache through Mike’s chest. He didn’t examine it. It was just part of the package deal when it came to Will: worry, protectiveness, and this… this rightness when he was close. Having him here, in his room, even under these terrible circumstances, made the swirling panic in his head quiet to a manageable hum.

He didn’t think about the ruins of last summer, or the stilted letters, or the brutal fight at the roller rink. Those memories were quarantined, locked away in a box labeled ‘Before.’ This was ‘Now.’ Now, they were a team again. Now, Mike had a purpose: get Will safe, keep him safe.

He didn’t see the quiet, aching finality in Will’s eyes. He didn’t see the compartments being built behind them. All Mike saw was his best friend, back in Hawkins, back in his orbit, and a problem he was absolutely going to solve.

He just had to make everyone else see it, too.

Hawkins is a complete hellscape.

The military peddled their bullshit earthquake cover story, but nobody bought it—not with four massive, glowing gashes still tearing through the town. The air itself hummed with a sickening, otherworldly static, a constant reminder that the ground could split again at any moment. The shelters were packed to bursting. The Byers were lucky to snag three lumpy cots in the high school gymnasium the night before, but a harried Red Cross volunteer had warned them not to get too comfortable—space was a daily gamble.

That was what Will had told them as he moved beside him at the sandwich assembly line, pale and a bit more quiet.

Mike's hand were clumsy with helpless anger that had no outlet. "This is stupid," he muttered, attacking a slice of bread with a ferocity it didn't deserve.

"What is?" Will asked.

"This." Mike gestured vaguely with his knife, leaving a smudge of grape jelly on the table. "Making sandwiches while the world is literally split open. Like a bunch of…ants trying to fix a crater with grains of sand."

"It's something to do," Will offered quietly. "It helps people who are hungry. It's not nothing."

"I know, I know." Mike sighed, his shoulders slumping. Of course Will would say that. Will was always good, always finding purpose in the mundane. It just made Mike feel more useless. "I just feel like we should be doing something. The real something. Not…this."

"We are," Will said, layering another finished sandwich onto the wobbly pile. "We're waiting. We're keeping our heads down. Hopper and El will find a lead."

They worked in compatible silence for a while after that, the rhythmic scrape-spread of knives on bread filling the space between them. They would visit Max after this. Lucas was already at the hospital, holding his daily vigil by her bedside, talking to her, playing Running Up That Hill on loop—a desperate lifeline cast into the voice of her coma. The rest of the Party tried to be there as often as they could, a rotating guard of grief and hope.

Finally, a question spilled out of Mike, raw and unplanned. "Do you ever think about California? Like, what if you'd never come back?"

Will stiffened at the question. "Sometimes," Will admitted, his voice tight. He kept his eyes on his work. "It was…different there."

"Different bad?" Mike pressed, needing—he didn't know what. A confession? Proof that the year of distance had hurt Will, too?

"Just different." Will shrugged, a defensive gesture. "Sunny. No monsters. Well, no old monsters." He finally glanced up, trying for a weak smile. "I missed Hawkins, though. I missed…everyone."

Did you miss me? The question was unasked, but hung, unspoken, in the charged air between them. It was the ghost that haunted every interaction since the airport.

Will tried to deflect, turning it into a dark joke. "Do you ever wish we hadn't come back?"

"No." The word was a gunshot in the humid air. Too loud. Too fast. He didn't mean for it to sound like that, but he couldn't let Will think that for a second. Not after everything.

"I mean…you being gone…" He fumbled, forcing the words out. "Hawkins felt wrong. Empty." He looked right at Will, trying make him understand. "I feel better with you close by."

It was true. With Will nearby, the frantic, scattered panic in his mind—the fear for El, the guilt over Max, the overwhelming pressure—simply quieted. Will was a steadying force. A foundational part of his world that had been missing.

He saw the effect his words had: the slight hitch in Will’s breath, the wide, darting glance. That weird, warm satisfaction spread in Mike’s chest again.

He leaned in, voice dropping to a whisper. “I’m still working on my parents. My mom's almost there. My dad's being a hard-ass, but don't worry about it. I'll wear him down.”

Will tried to protest, to accept the grim shelter life, and Mike’s protective fury flared. “It’s not fine. You should be somewhere safe. With… with people who get it.” With me, his brain screamed, but that was just shorthand. Obviously.

"I'm safe enough." Will tried to protest, "And we're together. The Party. That's what matters."

“But it’s not enough just to be in the same town anymore,” he insisted, the vision clear in his head: walls, a roof, a shared space. Safety. “We need to be… closer. Like a fortress,” he said, the word solid and right. “No one gets left in the cold again. Not you. Not ever.”

For a second, he wasn’t talking about monsters. He was talking about the chasm of the past year, the anger, the silence. He was vowing to build a bridge.

The lights flickered—a cheap, terrifying trick from the Upside Down—and the moment shattered. Will turned away, becoming practical, and Mike let him. The strange, charged energy between them faded, leaving only the confusing echo of that warmth in his chest. He diagnosed it quickly: Righteous conviction. The satisfaction of a good plan.

Victory, when it finally came, was a quiet, exhausted sigh from his mother. His dad had just grunted from behind his newspaper, which Mike took as surrender. The Byers were moving in.

The logistics were a puzzle, and Mike solved it with swift, tactical certainty. “Mom, Joyce should take my room.” He said it as a statement, leaving no room for debate. His idea, his sacrifice. It felt right, a tangible proof of his commitment.

Will had watched the exchange, his expression unreadable—a mix of gratitude and that familiar, weary caution. Mike brushed it off. Will was probably just feeling like an imposition. Mike would prove he was anything but.

The basement was their domain: a sprawling, linoleum-floored dungeon of the musty old paisley couch, stacked board games, and the ghost of a hundred childhood sleepovers.

Mike dragged two heavy, plastic-scented air mattresses from the hall closet, the ones his family used for maybe one camping trip three years ago. He unrolled them side-by-side against the far wall, their surfaces wrinkling like pale, plastic skin. He plugged in the electric pump, and its high-pitched whine filled the quiet as the mattresses slowly inflated into twin, lumpy rectangles.

Jonathan came down with his own bag, took one look at the two air mattresses on the floor, then at the couch. His eyebrows lifted slightly, but he said nothing. He just dumped his stuff on the floor with a soft thud.

Mike caught the look. “It’s the most logical setup,” he announced, a little too defensively. “You get the couch. Will and I take the floors. Equal distribution of discomfort.” He tried for a grin, but it felt stiff.

Jonathan just shrugged, that infuriatingly calm Byers expression on his face. “Whatever works, man.” But his eyes lingered on the two mattresses, so close their edges nearly touched, before he turned to unpack his bag.

When Will descended the stairs later, his duffel bag in hand, Mike launched into his explanation again. “Okay, so Jonathan gets the couch. You and I are on air support over here.” He gestured to the two bloated rectangles. “I tested them. The left one has a slow leak near the valve, so I’ll take that one.”

Will stared at the setup. Two mattresses on the floor, side-by-side. Like a permanent, weird sleepover. He looked from them to Mike’s face, which was a mask of forced practicality.

“Mike, I can take the leaky one,” Will said softly. “It’s your house.”

“And it’s my plan,” Mike fired back, the familiar frustration bubbling up. Why did everyone keep challenging his perfectly good plans? “My fortress, my rules. I get the defective equipment. It’s basic leadership.” He flashed a grin, this one more genuine, hoping to disarm him.

A small, real smile finally broke through Will’s reserve. “Okay. Thanks, Mike.”

The way he said it, so quietly sincere, made a fierce, warm satisfaction bloom in Mike’s chest. He busied himself violently fluffing a pathetic, flat camp pillow to hide it. The gratification of providing, he told himself. Of being a good friend.

Night fell, heavy and quiet. The house settled into creaks and sighs. Jonathan, after an hour of pretending to sleep, had vanished upstairs with the silent skill of a spy. Mike didn’t need to guess where he’d gone.

Suddenly, the vast basement felt very small, and very, very alone. Just him and Will, lying in the dark on their separate-yet-joined islands of plastic and air. Mike’s mattress gave a soft, melancholic sigh beneath him, already betraying him.

“You awake?” Mike whispered into the blackness. His voice sounded too loud.

“Yeah.” Will’s reply was a quiet exhale, so close in the dark.

“Jonathan bail?”

A soft rustle as Will nodded. “Yeah.”

“Makes sense,” Mike said. He stared at the ceiling tiles he couldn’t see. The silence that followed was full of the sound of Will breathing, the faint, clean scent of his soap cutting through the basement’s damp, the quiet shush of his sleeping bag as he shifted. “It’s… kind of nice, actually.”

“What is?” Will’s voice was carefully neutral, closer than Mike expected.

This. You. Here. The quiet not feeling lonely for once. “This,” Mike said, rolling onto his side to face the dark shape of Will, barely an arm’s length away. “It’s quiet. Just us.” He paused, the words feeling dangerous and true. “Feels like it did. Before everything got so… complicated.”

Before the Upside Down, before the lies and the distance.

Mike focused on the calm that had settled over him. The frantic buzz of the day—the moving, the planning, the underlying fear—was gone. In its place was a deep, surprising peace. Will’s presence a few inches away wasn’t a pressure; it was an anchor. For the first time since the gates tore open, Mike felt his shoulders truly relax against the deflating plastic.

He didn’t need to fill the silence. It was comfortable. It was enough.

He could hear Will’s breathing even out, slow and steady, easing into sleep. Mike closed his eyes, a small, unconscious smile touching his lips. The fortress was built. Its first and most important resident was safe inside, right beside him.

And Mike, for the first time in a long time, felt like he was home.

The Wheeler kitchen at 8 AM on a normal day was a tomb of quiet chewing and the rustle of the Hawkins Post. Today, it felt like a different planet.

Mike’s father, Ted, was his usual monument to disinterest, hidden behind the newspaper, grumbling about “inconvenience” into his coffee cup. His mother moved between the stove and the table with a strained, hostess smile. The silence should have been oppressive.

But it wasn’t.

It was filled with the soft, overlapping chatter of the Byers. Joyce was gently teasing Jonathan about his hair, her laughter a warm, unfamiliar sound in the sterile room. Jonathan was rolling his eyes but smiling. And Will…

Will was patiently showing Holly how to draw a frog on a napkin, his voice low and kind. “See, the circle is his body, and these two bigger circles are his eyes…”

“They’re googly!” Holly giggled.

Mike stood in the doorway for a second, just watching. His chest did that thing again—a tight, achy warmth. This was noise. Life. This was what a family meal was supposed to sound like. Not the cold, polite silence he’d grown up with. He wanted to bottle the sound and keep it.

He pulled out the chair directly next to Will and sat down. The action felt like claiming a spot in that warmth. Will glanced up from the napkin-frog, giving him a small, quick smile before looking back at Holly. Mike busied himself with the scrambled eggs, the simple proximity settling something restless in him. Of course I would sit by him, he reasoned. He’s my best friend. It’s normal.

“So,” Karen said, her voice slicing through the pleasant buzz. “What are everyone’s plans for the day?” Her question was pointed, aimed at the Byers, a polite demand for a schedule.

One by one, they each provided their own flimsy excuse believable enough to the Wheelers. They excused themselves from the strange, two-tiered breakfast. As Mike and Will headed to the garage for their bikes, Mike felt the ghost of the warm, noisy kitchen clinging to him. It felt like a secret he and Will were sharing, bigger than just the lie about where they were going. He pushed the feeling aside. It was just relief. Relief that the plan was in motion.

The bike ride to Hopper's cabin was taken in a focused, breathless silence, all back roads and ears straining for the rumble of military trucks. By the time they ducked into the woods surrounding Hopper’s cabin, the normalcy of the Wheeler breakfast felt like a distant dream.

The cabin itself was a pressure cooker of grim intent. Hopper loomed over a crude map spread on the table, Joyce at his shoulder. Nancy and Jonathan were already there, having arrived separately. Steve and Robin were bickering quietly in the corner. And El…

El was by the cold fireplace. She turned when they entered. Her eyes found Mike’s, held for a second, and then flicked away. There was no anger, just a vast, exhausted distance. His big, clumsy confession in the pizza restaurant felt like a script he’d badly read for a play that was now over. She gave a tiny, impersonal nod—a soldier acknowledging another unit—before her gaze went to Will. “Will,” she said, and her voice was slightly softer.

“Hey, El,” Will replied, offering her a tentative smile that Mike, stupidly, wished was directed at him instead. He immediately buried abrupt stab of jealousy under a landslide of guilt. She’s your girlfriend. She’s been through hell. Be supportive, you idiot. He cared about her, so much it sometimes felt like a physical weight. She was a hero, his friend, a fixed star in his chaotic universe. But the easy warmth he felt sitting next to Will at breakfast was gone, replaced by a familiar, brittle anxiety. He never knew what to say to her anymore.

Mike shoved the thought down. Focus.

Hopper didn’t waste time. “The military’s got a net around the town, but it’s full of holes. They’re looking for looters and reporters, not us. Our problem isn’t getting around them. It’s getting back in.” He stabbed a thick finger at the map, at the four marked Gates. “We can’t use the main entrances. It’s a shooting gallery. We need a weak spot. A… a tear they haven’t found yet.”

“Vecna’s still in there,” Nancy said, her voice clinical. “He’s hurt, but he’s not gone. We find a way in, we find him, we end this.”

A heavy, hopeless silence settled over the room. The plan was a ghost—no substance, no starting point. And everyone’s eyes, as they always did when the Upside Down was the topic, drifted slowly, inevitably, toward Will.

Mike felt it like a physical blow—a surge of protective dread so violent it made his hands curl into fists. He hated it. He hated that Will was their compass for hell. He stepped slightly closer to Will, as if he could physically block the weight of their expectations.

The question had to be asked. It was tactical. It was necessary. Mike’s mouth was sandpaper. He made himself say it, his voice low but clear in the quiet cabin.

“Will.” He waited until Will looked up from the floor, his eyes wide and anxious. Mike kept his gaze steady, trying to beam some kind of strength into him. “Have you… sensed him? At all? Since last time?”

Will flinched. He wrapped his arms around himself, a familiar defensive gesture that made Mike’s heart clench. “No,” Will whispered. He swallowed. “It’s quiet. But… it’s the wrong kind of quiet. It’s thick. Like… like he’s holding his breath.” He looked straight at Mike, and the fear in his eyes was raw and unmistakable. “He’s waiting. For us to make a mistake.”

Mike held his gaze, the rest of the room blurring. That thick, waiting quiet wasn’t just in the Upside Down; it was here, in his own chest, coiled around the confusing warmth he felt for the scared boy in front of him. The mission was suddenly, terrifyingly simple and impossible: breach an apocalyptic dimension, kill a nightmare wizard, and do it all without losing Will.

He gave Will the smallest, firmest nod he could manage. I’m here. It was all he could offer.

The warmth, the guilt, the dizzying fear—it was all just noise. The only signal was Will, and keeping him safe. The fortress needed a door into the enemy’s kingdom, and Mike would be the first one through it.

The first month bled into the second, a grim procession of days marked by what the Party, in grimly typical fashion, dubbed “The Crawls.”

The plan was born from desperate observation. After weeks of risky, distant surveillance—binoculars from tree lines, radio frequency scanning with Dustin’s janky equipment—they discovered a terrifying, game-changing fact: The military wasn’t just containing the Gates. They were going in.

Heavily armored convoys would arrive at the perimeter of a Gate, a squad would disappear into the glowing, vine-choked fissure for hours, and return, sometimes with fewer men, sometimes with sealed steel canisters. They were scavenging. Or hunting. No one knew.

“It’s our ticket in,” Hopper growled, staring at the recon photos Jonathan had risked his life to take. “They’ve got a path. A routine. I hide in one of their trucks, get dropped in, and I find that son of a bitch in his own backyard.”

The argument that followed was volcanic. El was adamant, fierce. “I go with you. I am ready. I can fight him.”

“No,” Hopper said, the word final as a slammed door. “They have your picture, kid. They have orders to shoot on sight. You step one foot near that perimeter, it’s a death warrant. You’re not ready to take on an army and Vecna.” His voice softened, just a fraction. “Your job is here. Getting stronger. Being our ace in the hole when we need it.”

El’s silence was a storm. She looked at Mike, a fleeting, frustrated glance that seemed to say, ‘You tell him.’ Mike opened his mouth, but no sound came out. What could he say? Hopper was right. The protectiveness he felt was a double-edged sword—one side for El, one side for Will, both keeping him paralyzed. He looked down, ashamed of his own silence.

The order for the rest of them was simple: Lay low. No more risky reconnaissance. No drawing attention. Their war went underground, into a tense, waiting pattern.

Visiting Max became a sacred, painful ritual. A reminder of the cost.

Lucas was already there, of course. He looked older, his eyes holding a depth of grief that his usual basketball-star confidence couldn’t mask. He was reading to her from The Talisman, his voice a steady, loving monotone.

“Hey, man,” Mike said, clapping a hand on his shoulder. The gesture felt inadequate.

“Hey,” Lucas said, not looking up from the page. “She had a good night. Stable.”

Will hung back, then stepped forward. He pulled a cassette tape from his jacket pocket, holding it out to Lucas. “I, um. Found this. In a donation bin for the shelter. It’s David Bowie. ‘Heroes.’ I just… thought maybe she’d like something different. Or… you would.”

Lucas took the tape, turning it over in his hands. For the first time, a ghost of a smile touched his lips. “Bowie, huh? She’d make fun of your taste, but she’d secretly love it.” He looked at Will. “Thanks, man.”

Mike, who had been leaning against the wall, felt a grin spread across his face. The tension in the room needed to break. “You stole from a disaster relief donation bin?”

“I didn’t steal!” Will protested, his ears turning pink. “It was a cassette tape. No one was donating that for food or blankets! It was just… there!”

“So you looted it,” Dustin said from the doorway, a faint, rusty attempt at his old smirk on his face. He was wearing Eddie’s Hellfire shirt again, the fabric growing thin. “Byers, you rebel. Couldn’t snag a better jacket while you were at it?”

“It’s not looting, it’s… strategic acquisition,” Will defended, a faint blush on his cheeks. “And my jacket is fine.”

“It’s got a hole the size of my fist,” Dustin shot back, but there was no real heat in it. Just a hollow echo of their old banter. Dustin’s humor had turned brittle, his smiles sharp and quick to fade. The death of Eddie Munson had forged something hard and angry in him where there used to be boundless, goofy enthusiasm. He wore the Hellfire shirt like armor and a target, daring the world to say something.

The moment of lightness—Will’s embarrassed defense, the familiar rhythm of their teasing—felt like a gulp of air in a submerged room. It lasted only a second before the ever-present beep of the heart monitor dragged them back under.

On the bike ride home, the quiet between Mike and Will felt different. Less charged with panic, more filled with the heavy weight of their new normal.

“Dustin’s… really messed up about Eddie,” Will said softly, his voice carried away by the wind.

Mike pedaled harder, the familiar twist of guilt and sadness in his gut. “Yeah. He doesn’t talk about it. Just gets pissed off instead.”

“It’s easier than being sad,” Will said, and he said it with such quiet authority that Mike knew he wasn’t just talking about Dustin.

Mike glanced over at him. Will was staring straight ahead, his profile outlined against the grey Indiana sky. “Do you think the music helps? With Max?”

“I hope so,” Will said simply. “Sometimes… just knowing people are trying, that they’re remembering you… that’s got to mean something, even if you can’t hear it.”

Mike nodded, the words sinking deep. Remembering you. He thought of Will in California, feeling forgotten. The guilt was an old, familiar companion.

They rode the rest of the way in silence, but it was the kind of silence that felt like a conversation they were both too scared to have. The world was in ruins, their friend was in a coma, another was a ghost haunting his own life, and they were biking home to a basement they shared. In the midst of it all, Mike was hyper-aware of the few feet of asphalt between their tires, wanting to close the gap, terrified of what might happen if he did.

Life in the Wheeler house settled into a strange, dual rhythm. There was the surface rhythm of a crowded home: Ted’s grumbles, Karen’s anxious hostessing, the clatter of dishes. And then there was the deeper, secret rhythm Mike lived for: Will’s quiet presence in his space.

Mike found himself seeking out that quiet like a hearth. One afternoon, he came upstairs from the basement to find Will at the kitchen table, bent over a piece of paper with Holly. Holly’s tongue was poked out in concentration as she wrestled with a crayon.

“Like this,” Will said softly, his hand gently guiding hers. “You don’t have to press so hard. Let the color do the work.” He demonstrated, shading in the sky of a lopsided house with a smooth, even blue.

Mike stopped in the doorway, frozen. He watched Will’s patient focus, the way Holly mimicked his movements, her small face screwed up in serious imitation. A feeling swept over him—a profound, deep calm. This was it. This was the antidote to the constant, buzzing anxiety of the Crawls, of Dustin’s anger, of El’s silent disapproval. Just Will, being gentle. Making something normal in the middle of the chaos.

He didn’t realize how long he’d been standing there until Nancy’s voice, low and close to his ear, made him jump.

“He’s good with her.”

Mike flushed, as if caught doing something wrong. “Yeah. He is.”

Nancy followed his gaze for a moment longer, then gave him a curious, sidelong look. “You know, I was down in the basement looking for Dad’s toolbox yesterday.” She paused, a knowing glint in her eye. “I see you still have Will’s old drawings pinned up. The ones from, like, fourth grade.”

Mike’s heart did a stupid, traitorous lurch. “So?” he said, too defensively. “They’re good. They’re… nostalgic. It’s not like I took them down to put up posters of… of Metallica.”

“Mhm,” Nancy said, her smile faint and infuriatingly perceptive. “Just nostalgic.” She didn’t press further, just squeezed his shoulder and walked away, leaving Mike standing there, his ears burning. He looked back at Will. Nostalgic. That was all it was. Of course. They were relics of a simpler time. That’s why he kept them up. It had nothing to do with the artist.

Another month blurred by. The "quake" story was getting harder to sell as summer began to wane. The school board, in a staggering act of either denial or desperation, began murmuring about reopening Hawkins High in the fall.

“It’s a deathtrap,” Dustin spat during a meeting at the new hub. “The north wing is five feet from a fissure that pulses like a diseased heart. But sure, let’s have algebra next to it.”

The hub was their masterstroke. With the real owner of WSQK—"The Squawk"—having fled town, Robin, with Steve’s dubious help as a “technical advisor,” had simply… moved in. She now hosted the afternoon drive-time slot, “Rockin’ Robin,” her rapid-fire, slightly unhinged commentary a bizarre comfort to a traumatized town. To the average listener, it was a weird girl playing Flock of Seagles and talking about the emotional resonance of synth-pop. To the Party, it was their central nervous system.

Coded messages were woven into song dedications and fake weather reports. “And that last one was for Betty in Loch Nora, hoping your garden survives the frost,” meant a military convoy was headed to the Gate near the Loch Nora subdivision. It was genius.

Murray, posing as a bespectacled, deeply unimpressed delivery driver became their procurement officer. He could come and go from the quarantined town with relative ease, bringing in their requested gear—high-grade flashlights, gas masks, seismic readers—which they stored in a locked back room at the station, disguised as old broadcasting equipment.

It was during one of these meetings, surrounded by the comforting smell of dusty vinyl and electronic equipment, that Mike felt the strange new normal crystallize. They had a headquarters. They had a pipeline. They had a mission on pause, waiting for Hopper’s signal from inside the Upside Down. And he had Will, every day, in his basement, at his table, a constant, steadying presence.

Sitting on a ragged studio couch, listening to Robin argue with Steve about the covert meaning of “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” Mike’s eyes found Will, who was studying one of Murray’s complicated schematics. Will caught him looking and raised a questioning eyebrow.

Mike just shook his head, offering a small smile. Nothing. Will smiled back, a little shy, before returning to the blueprint.

The warmth that spread through Mike’s chest at that simple exchange was immediate and intense. He didn’t fight it or diagnose it this time. He just let it sit there, a private, glowing coal in the dark cellar of his anxieties. It felt… natural. It felt like friendship, but a friendship that was the most important thing in his world. He knew, intellectually, that his girlfriend was a superhero waiting for her call to battle, that his other best friend was consumed by grief, that the world was broken.

But in this moment, with the hum of the radio transmitter and Will’s focused profile across the room, Mike Wheeler felt, for the first time in months, something dangerously close to okay. It was a fragile, probably stupid feeling. But it was his.

Going back to Hawkins High in late August felt less like a return to school and more like a occupation of a haunted house. They’d patched the physical cracks from the “earthquake,” but the air itself felt sick, thick with the smell of ozone and the distant, constant industrial thrum from the military perimeter.

The mandatory “welcome back” assembly was a farce. A stone-faced officer stood where Coach Gable used to, lecturing them on curfews, restricted zones, and the “critical importance” of the perimeter fences.

“They’re treating us like we’re the prisoners,” Mike muttered under his breath to Will, who sat stiffly beside him in the bleachers.

The officer’s voice boomed. “...and you will treat the security fencing with the respect it deserves. It is there for your safety and the integrity of our ongoing study.”

Mike couldn’t stop himself. He made a face—a brief, contemptuous twist of his lips, an are-you-kidding-me look aimed at the back of the officer’s head. Respect the fence that’s caging us in our own disaster zone?

A soft, sharp snort came from his right. He glanced over. Will had his fist pressed to his mouth, but his eyes were squeezed shut, shoulders trembling with silent, helpless laughter. He’d seen it.

The effect was instantaneous. A jolt of pure, giddy triumph shot through Mike. He’d cut through the grimness and found Will’s laughter. In this oppressive room, they’d shared a secret joke. A grin split Mike’s face, the warmth in his chest blooming so fast it felt like a sunburn from the inside.

That warmth carried him through the bizarre day. He had third-period Chemistry with Dustin, Lucas, and Will. Dustin slouched in, his Hellfire shirt a silent scream in the sterile room. He was all sharp edges and scowls, the death of Eddie a perpetual storm cloud over him.

But having Will there, sharing a lab table, passing a note that just said “His tie is attacking him” with a little arrow… it was a piece of something nice. A shard of their old life. When Will leaned over to point at a formula, his shoulder brushing Mike’s, Mike didn’t pull away. He leaned in, just a fraction, anchoring himself in the simple, clean scent of Will’s soap.

After lunch, he had History and English with Lucas. And Lucas—Lucas was different. Not solemn, but focused. There was a determined set to his jaw, a light in his eyes that hadn’t been extinguished. In the hall between classes, he was the one herding them, a general of optimism.

“You see the way Dustin almost smiled in Chem when Will set his paper on fire with that Bunsen burner?” Lucas said, clapping Mike on the back. “Progress. We just need more controlled explosions.”

“It was a very small fire,” Will defended, but he was smiling.

“See? Team bonding,” Lucas said, his grin easy and genuine. “We’re getting our rhythm back. It’s good. This is good.” He said it like a mantra, like he was convincing the universe. For Max, he seemed to be saying. We have to be okay, so she can come back to something okay.

Having the four of them together in the same grimy, familiar hallways—Lucas steering with hope, Dustin trailing in angry silence, Will a quiet, calming presence at Mike’s side—it was the most normal thing to happen in months. It was a fragile ecosystem, but it was theirs.

And Will… Will’s presence was the keystone. Mike’s eyes would find him instinctively in every crowded hallway. In class, his attention would drift from the droning teacher to the careful, precise way Will underlined a sentence in his book. Will’s quiet concentration was a lullaby against the background anxiety. He didn’t just make it bearable; he made the pretending feel, for moments at a time, almost real.

Biking home, the four of them together for the first few blocks, Lucas was already planning. “Okay, Robin’s show is at 3. We decode, we meet at the Squawk by 4:30. We’re a well-oiled machine now, gentlemen. Vecna doesn’t stand a chance.”

Mike fell into pace beside Will. “Weirdly not the worst day ever,” Mike offered.

Will looked at him, that soft, real smile touching his lips again. “No,” he agreed. “It felt… almost normal. In a weird way. Having a schedule. Being with everyone.”

With you, Mike’s brain echoed, clinging to the implication. He didn’t correct it.

That night in the basement, homework spread between them, the silence was the comfortable, focused kind. Mike glanced up from the rise of post-war suburbanism to see Will, forehead resting on his hand, solving for X. He looked peaceful. He looked like he was exactly where he was supposed to be.

And with a clarity that stole his breath, Mike knew he never wanted this to end. This shared quiet, this easy partnership, this was the core of it all. Lucas had his hope, Dustin his anger, El her determination. Mike had this. He had Will, back in the center of his life, making the unlivable world not just survivable, but sometimes, quietly, good.

The thought of the Crawls, of no new reports from Hopper, of the clock ticking down in the Upside Down, was a cold hand on the back of his neck. But he leaned into the warmth of the desk lamp, the sound of Will’s pencil scratching paper, and let Lucas’s borrowed optimism whisper in his head: It’s good. This is good. We’re going to make it.

The feeling in his chest wasn’t a mystery to be solved anymore. It was just a fact. The most important fact he knew.

Saturday night. The concept felt like a borrowed shirt from a past life—it didn’t quite fit anymore. But Lucas had been adamant. “Movie night. My place. Mandatory. We remember how to be people, or we forget forever.”

The Sinclair living room was a cave of flickering light from the TV, where The Thing was playing. Lucas’s logic was, as always, tactical: “It’s about trust and betrayal in close quarters! It’s a bonding exercise!”

Mike was tucked into the corner of the couch. Will sat beside him, a careful, warm line of contact from shoulder to knee. Dustin was in the armchair, quieter than his old self, but not scowling. He was watching the movie, actually watching, a bowl of popcorn balanced on his stomach.

For a while, there was just the howling wind of the movie and the shared, almost-forgotten rhythm of just… hanging out. The pretending felt a little less forced. The movie reached a tense, quiet scene—just the groan of Antarctic ice and the characters’ wary breathing. In the dim light, Mike saw Lucas’s profile, his gaze fixed on the screen but distant, like he was watching something else entirely.

As the scene faded to a suspenseful hold, Lucas spoke without looking away from the TV, his voice low in the shared dark. “You think she’s sick of it yet?” His tone was deceptively light, but the question hung in the air, heavier than the movie’s silence. “Running Up That Hill. I’ve probably worn the tape out.”

The movie’s tension bled seamlessly into theirs. Will, who’d been quietly tracing the seam of the couch cushion with his thumb, stilled his hand and looked up. “No,” he said with gentle certainty. “Music doesn’t work like that when it’s a lifeline. It becomes… an anchor. You don’t get tired of your anchor.”

Mike watched him, captivated. Will spoke about it like he was reading from a manual only he possessed.

“You really think it helps?” Lucas pressed, finally tearing his eyes from the screen, needing the fuel.

“I know it does,” Will said softly. “When I was… there. The first time. In the Upside Down.” He didn’t look at them, his gaze on the frozen, grotesque image on the TV. “Jonathan used to play me Should I Stay or Should I Go by The Clash to drown out our parents fighting. It was ours. And when I was there, lost and cold, I’d… I’d cling to it. Hum it. Sing it out loud. It was the only thing that felt like home. The only thing that proved I was still me. I think… I think it’s the reason I was able to stay sane for as long as I could.”

The room held its breath. Mike felt a visceral twist in his gut—heartbreak for what Will had endured, and a fierce, aching pride. He’d never heard him articulate the horror so plainly, or the salvation so simply.

“So, yeah,” Will finished, meeting Lucas’s eyes with a small, knowing smile. “It helps. Your song is her anchor.”

Lucas nodded, a satisfied look on his face, as if a hypothesis had been proven. “Good. That’s what I thought.”

Dustin shifted in his chair, his voice less a grumble and more a thoughtful murmur. “So we all gotta have one, then. A Vecna-fighting anthem. Standard operating procedure.”

Will nodded. “Heroes. David Bowie.” He said it without hesitation, a quiet conviction. “For the same reason. Being brave, even just for one day.”

“Mine’s Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” Lucas said. Tears for Fears. It made perfect sense—grand, anthemic, about the seduction and burden of power.

Dustin was quiet for a beat, then said, “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” Metallica. A song about sacrifice and inevitable conflict. It wasn’t just anger; it was solemn duty. Eddie would have approved of the choice.

Then, all eyes landed on Mike. His mind scrambled. He should pick something obvious, something loud and normal. But his pulse was thrumming in his ears, and his gaze drifted to Will’s attentive, waiting face.

“Boys Don’t Cry,” Mike said. The words left his mouth flatly, almost a challenge.

Will’s eyebrows lifted slightly in recognition.

“The Cure?” Dustin said, but it wasn’t a jab. It was just an observation.

Mike shrugged, the gesture tight. “It’s… accurate.” He didn’t elaborate. He couldn’t. The song was an apology wrapped in a jangly guitar line. It was about saying terrible things and regretting them, about hiding true feelings behind a tough facade because showing them seemed like a weakness. It was about him. It was about every time he’d snapped at Will or El or anyone, every harsh word he’d used as a shield, every feeling he’d swallowed down because that’s what he thought he was supposed to do. I try to laugh about it, hiding the tears in my eyes.

“Will was the first one to play it for me,” Mike added, as if that explained the deeply personal indictment he’d just chosen as his psychological shield. And maybe it did. Will had introduced him to the soundtrack of his own hidden heart.

Will was looking at him with an intensity that made the air feel thin. There was no smile now, just a deep, searching understanding. He heard it. He heard the confession in the choice.

Lucas, sensing the shift, masterfully deflected. “Okay. Bowie, Tears for Fears, Metallica, The Cure. Eclectic. I like it. Our odds just improved by ten percent.”

On screen, the tension broke—a sudden jump-scare, a blast of action, the movie’s own soundtrack swelling to fill the silence they’d left behind. The moment was over, buried under the familiar, comforting noise of someone else’s crisis. Mike didn’t see the alien thawing on the screen. He sat in the dark, hyper-aware of the point where his leg pressed against Will’s. The song’s simple, regretful melody looped in his head. “Took you for granted, thought that you needed me more, more, more…”

The movie played on, a story about monsters wearing familiar faces. But in the shared warmth of the couch, for the first time in a long time, Mike felt a little less like he was wearing one. And beside him, Dustin quietly passed the popcorn bowl to Lucas, a small, almost normal gesture in their very abnormal lives.

The basement was their world after dinner. Joyce was upstairs helping Karen with something, Jonathan and Nancy were… somewhere, and the faint sound of Ted’s television news filtered down like distant thunder.

Will was stuck. He’d been chewing on the end of his pencil for ten minutes over the same geometry proof. Mike, who had breezed through his own math twenty minutes ago, was pretending to read The Once and Future King for English but was actually watching Will’s frustration build in the lamp light.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Will finally muttered, more to the graph paper than to Mike. “The angles don’t correspond. The book has to be wrong.”

“The book’s not wrong, you’re just being stubborn,” Mike said, putting his own book down. He slid his chair closer until their shoulders were almost touching and looked at Will’s paper. “See, you’re assuming this is a right angle, but they never said it was. You have to use the alternate interior postulate here.”

“I am using it,” Will insisted, pointing at a scribbled note. His finger brushed Mike’s hand.

Mike didn’t pull away. He felt a minor electric jolt at the contact but ignored it, focusing on the puzzle. “No, you’re using it on the wrong transversal. Look.” He took the pencil from Will’s hand. His fingers brushed Will’s again. This time, he noticed the warmth. Weird, he thought, and then immediately forgot about it.

He redrew a line, his head bent close to Will’s to see the diagram. He could smell Will’s shampoo again, and the faint, familiar scent of graphite and paper. “There. Now try it.”

Will was silent for a moment, his eyes tracking Mike’s correction. Mike watched his face, saw the exact moment understanding dawned—the slight parting of his lips, the relaxation of his brow. A pure, uncomplicated wave of satisfaction washed over Mike. He got it. I helped him get it.

“Oh,” Will said softly. He took the pencil back, his movements slow, and finished the proof in three neat steps. He sat back, a triumphant little smile on his face. “Huh.”

“Told you,” Mike said, grinning. He didn’t move his chair back. He liked it here, in this pool of lamplight, shoulder-to-shoulder. It felt… correct.

“You're not always right, though. You’re still wrong about the Gelatinous Cube.” Will said, the smile turning mischievous.

Mike’s jaw dropped. “I am not! In the Monster Manual, the attack is clearly listed as—”

“—as engulf,” Will cut in, eyes sparkling. “Which implies a slow, surrounding motion. Not a lunge. You ruled it could lunge ten feet last weekend. That’s homebrew nonsense and you know it.”

“It was dramatically appropriate!” Mike argued, his voice rising in mock outrage. He nudged Will’s shoulder with his own. “You’re just mad because your precious wizard almost got dissolved.”

“I’m mad because you make up rules to spite me!”

“I do not! I make up rules to make the game better!”

They bickered for five solid minutes, a rapid-fire volley of D&D mechanics and old campaign grievances. It was pointless, exhilarating, and normal. Karen called down the stairs for them to keep it quiet, and they both clapped hands over their mouths to stifle their laughter, eyes wide and shining at each other over their fingers.

When they finally settled, the quiet that returned was warmer, softer than before. Will went back to his homework, but he was still smiling. Mike picked up his book but didn’t read a word.

He replayed the last half-hour. The shared focus, the problem solved, the effortless, stupid argument about a fictional cube. This was what he’d missed. No, not just missed—this was what fixed him. Talking to El felt like walking on a frozen lake, every step fraught with the fear of saying the wrong thing and falling through. With Will, he was just… swimming. It was easy.

He glanced at Will, who was now humming softly under his breath as he worked.

Mike’s heart did a slow, heavy roll in his chest. The warmth was back, spreading from his core out to his fingertips. He didn’t try to name it or diagnose it. He just accepted it as the essential condition of his life now: Will’s presence was comfort. Will’s happiness was his objective. Will’s nearness was peace.

The thought that this was anything other than the world’s greatest friendship didn’t even cross his mind. It was too big, too fundamental. It was like asking a fish to diagnose water.

He was just happy to be swimming.

The bike ride to Hopper’s cabin felt longer than usual. Mike’s backpack was heavy with a borrowed walkie and some comics he thought El might like, but the real weight was in his chest. He was going to see his girlfriend.

They still talked, as often as they could. About everything and nothing. Their strained relationship following their defeat at the hands of Vecna got better, bit by bit. But the topic of them, of whatever they were, was never really touched. As though the two of them were too afraid to bring it up.

Girlfriend. He tested the word in his mind as he dodged a low-hanging branch. Did it even fit anymore? What did it mean? He thought of his parents. His mom was his dad’s wife. That meant shared silences, separate chairs, a life of quiet resentment built around a raising their children. Was that what a girlfriend was supposed to lead to? A blueprint for mutual unhappiness?

No. That wasn’t it. He thought of Jonathan and Nancy. They were… a unit. They moved together, thought together, fought together. They were partners. But their connection felt forged in fire, a meeting of two fiercely independent minds. He and El… their beginning hadn’t been like that.

His mind drifted back. The rain-soaked girl in the woods, big eyes full of terror. He’d been her guide, her translator, her protector. She had needed him with a desperation that was intoxicating. It made him feel strong, important, essential. In the chaos of his own life—being the awkward kid, the one with too many feelings—being needed by someone so unique was like a drug. He’d clung to that role. When they kissed, it felt like a confirmation that he was doing it right. That this—the protector, the one who understood her—was who he was supposed to be.

But was it who he was? Or just who he’d been trying so hard to be?

He’d given her grand speeches about her being amazing, extraordinary, different. He called her a super hero, meant it as the highest praise. But now, he wondered if all he’d ever done was put her on a pedestal she never asked to be on. Did she want to be his amazing, powerful girlfriend, or did she just want to be El? Did he even know the difference?

The guilt came next, a familiar, cold wave. She was El. She was all things light and beautiful, kind despite growing up in a world that had been too cruel to her. She was magnetic, electric. And he loved her. That was a fact. But loving someone and being in love with them aren't the same thing. And he’d tried. God, he’d tried to make them be.

He’d held onto that script—the protector and the superhero—long after the pages had started to feel foreign. He’d written her letters full of words that felt hollow even as he’d penned them. He’d given grand speeches about love because that’s what you were supposed to do when the girl you were with was in danger. It was what the story of Mike and El demanded.

And he’d wanted, so desperately, for it to be true. For the frantic, panicked feeling in his chest when she was in trouble to be proof of a great romance. But all it felt like was a performance. A performance of being the boyfriend of someone incredible, instead of just being with her.

He reached the edge of the clearing and stopped, his thoughts scattering.

Mike found El in the clearing behind Hopper’s cabin, now a tactical training ground. Makeshift targets—rusted car doors, stacked logs—were scarred with deep gouges and dents.

El stood in the center, her back to him, facing a heavy sack hung from a thick oak limb. Her shoulders were tense, her hands clenched at her sides. She wore simple clothes, her hair grown out into a short, messy bob.

For a moment, Mike just watched. He saw her take a slow, deep breath. Then, with a sharp, controlled exhale, her hand shot out. The sack didn’t just swing; it rocketed backward, the rope groaning in protest, before swinging back like a pendulum. She stopped it dead in the air with a flat palm, holding it there, trembling with the effort, before letting it drop.

He didn’t see a superhero. He saw a person. A person honing a part of herself with grim, relentless focus. A person who was more than her powers, but who needed those powers to survive, to protect, to fight for the people she loved. She wasn’t on a pedestal. She was in the dirt, working.

She was powerful. Not as a symbol, but as a fact. And he was in awe of her—not as a character in his story, but as a real, complicated girl doing an impossible thing.

“You’re gonna rip that tree out of the ground,” Mike said, announcing his presence.

El turned, a flicker of a smile touched her lips, followed by a look of mild irritation. “Hopper says I need more control. Not more power. It is… frustrating.”

“Looks plenty controlled to me,” Mike said, walking closer. He shoved his hands in his pockets. “How’s it going? The… everything.”

“It is going,” she said simply. She gestured to a fallen log nearby, and they sat. “I am getting stronger. Every day. For Max. For everyone.” She said it with a quiet ferocity that left no room for doubt.

“I know you are,” Mike said, and he meant it with every fiber of his being. The awe he felt for her was immense, and utterly free of jealousy or insecurity. “You’re amazing, El.”

She looked at him, her brown eyes searching his face. “You are different, Mike.”

His stomach dropped. “Different how?”

“Quieter. But… calmer here.” She pointed a finger at his chest. “At your house. With Will.”

There it was. Mike’s throat tightened. He’d come here today knowing, on some level, that this conversation was hovering on the horizon. The calm she sensed was real, and it was tied to a specific person in a specific basement.

“It’s… it’s good to have everyone under one roof,” he said, the evasion weak even to his own ears.

“Yes,” El agreed. But she wasn’t letting him off the hook. She was quiet for a long moment, watching a leaf drift down between them. “When I lived in your basement, you were my first friend. You gave me a home. You taught me about… feeling things. Happy, sad. Love.” She said the last word carefully, testing its weight.

“El…” Mike started, a rush of guilt and affection swelling in him.

“I love you, Mike,” she said, and her voice was so steady, so sure, it stopped his heart. Then she continued. “I love Will. And Lucas. And Dustin. And Max. And Hopper. It is… a big feeling. But it is not all the same feeling.”

Mike stared at her, his mind reeling. She was articulating something he’d been fumbling toward in the dark for months.

“When I came to your house,” she went on, her gaze distant, remembering. “I had no words. No friends. You were… my first everything. My first friend. My first… boyfriend.” She looked back at him. “It was a good story. The boy who found the lost girl. But stories… they end. Or they change.”

Tears pricked at the back of Mike’s eyes. Not from sadness, but from a profound, overwhelming relief. She understood. She saw it too.

“I think… I liked being needed,” Mike confessed, the truth spilling out in the safety of her understanding. “And you needed me so much. It felt… big. And important. And I wanted it to be the big, important feeling. The one in movies. Because you deserved that.”

“And you?” El asked softly. “What do you need?”

The question was a key turning in a lock. The image that flashed in his mind wasn’t of a superhero or a grand destiny. It was of a quiet basement, a shared lamp, a stupid argument about a Gelatinous Cube, and the feeling of a shoulder pressed against his own. It was a feeling of coming home, not of launching into an adventure.

He didn’t say it. He didn’t have to.

El nodded, as if he’d spoken aloud. “I need to be strong. To fight. To get Max back. I do not need a boyfriend.” She said it not with cruelty, but with the same clarity she used to stop the swinging sack. “I need my friend Mike. Who believes I am amazing. Who fights with me.”

A single tear escaped and traced a path down Mike’s cheek. He didn’t wipe it away. “You’ll always have that. No matter what. I promise.”

“I know,” she said, and this time her smile was full and real, easing the weary lines on her face. She reached out and took his hand, squeezing it. It wasn’t the desperate, clinging grip of the past. It was a pact. A new treaty. “And you will always have me. As your friend.”

They sat there for a while longer in the quiet clearing, hands clasped, the tension that had hummed between them for years finally dissolving. It wasn’t an explosion. It was a gentle release, like a held breath finally let go.

When Mike stood to leave, he felt lighter than he had in years. The obligation, the guilt, the fear of not measuring up—it was gone. What remained was pure, uncomplicated love for this incredible person in front of him.

“Hey, El?” he said, turning back.

“Yes, Mike?”

“Thank you. For… for everything. For keeping up with my bullshit all this time. You're my friend. And you always will be.”

Her eyes glistened, and she gave him a firm, final nod. “Good.”

Mike walked back through the woods, the autumn sun dappling the path. His heart ached, but it was a clean ache, like a bone finally set right. He wasn’t losing her. They were just finding the right shape for their love, one that fit them both. And for the first time, he felt absolutely sure that the big, important feeling he’d been searching for wasn’t behind him.

It was waiting for him at home.

Another winter had come and gone. The Crawls were now routine, reporting no progress, only a persistent, chilling truth: “He’s still here. Waiting.”

In the basement, the war felt far away. Mike was rolling a worn d20 across the carpet. Will was sketching, but his mind wasn’t on mind flayers tonight.

“I never told you about this,” Mike began, his voice cutting through the quiet. “Last year. Right before spring break. Eddie was running a campaign, but Lucas had a basketball match.”

Will looked up, his pencil stilling. This was a story from the year he was gone. A year of Mike’s life he’d only heard fragments of.

“We were desperate for another member,” Mike continued, a faint, nostalgic smile on his face. “Guess who we ended up recruiting? Erica Sinclair."

Will’s eyebrows shot up. “Erica? Lucas’ little sister?”

“The very one.” Mike’s smile widened. “And she was… unbelievable. Played a level 14, chaotic good, half-elf rogue. Rolled a perfect 20 to kill Vecna. Eddie said it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.” Mike’s voice hitched just slightly on Eddie’s name, but the memory was too bright to be swallowed by the dark.

Will was listening intently, a soft, wistful look on his face. “She sounds amazing,” Will said quietly.

“She was,” Mike said. He looked at Will, really looked at him, and saw the gentle sadness there. He understood, then, what he was doing. He wasn’t just sharing a funny story. He was trying to hand Will a piece of that lost year, to bridge the gap. “I wish you’d been there. You would’ve loved it. The look on Eddie's face…”

“I wish I’d been there too,” Will said, and the honesty in it was a quiet ache between them.

Mike cleared his throat, the mood shifting. “It got me thinking, though… about Holly.”

Will blinked, pulled from the past. “Holly?”

“Yeah. Do you think… years from now… she’d ever want to play? With us?” The question was a lifeline thrown forward, away from the bittersweet past toward a future they could maybe build together.

A real smile returned to Will’s face, easing the wistfulness. He looked toward the ceiling. “Maybe. She likes the drawings. She’s got a good imagination. She might be a natural, like Erica.”

“What would she play, though?” Mike pressed, scooting closer on the floor, the earlier melancholy forgotten in the thrill of a new “what if.”

They volleyed ideas—fighter, ranger, bard—their voices a low, eager hum in the basement. It was them building something together again, out of thin air.

Then Mike’s eyes landed on a small, forgotten figurine on his shelf: a cleric in humble robes, holding a simple wooden staff. He fetched it and placed it gently on the carpet between them.

“A cleric,” Mike said, his voice dropping into his DM’s cadence. He picked up the die. “Not just a healer. A beacon. She could…” He rolled the die. It clattered and came up a natural 20. “…channel pure light to repel the darkness. Shield her friends.” He looked at Will, his eyes serious. “Maybe even find paths no one else can see. Open doors.”

Will was staring at the figurine, then at Mike, his expression one of awe. “Holly the Heroic,” he breathed, the name a perfect incantation.

“Holly the Heroic,” Mike repeated, the title settling like a promise.

Will immediately grabbed a fresh sheet of paper and began to draw. Not a monster from a shared past, but a hero for a hopeful future. A small, fierce girl with Holly’s determined eyes, clutching a staff, ready for adventure.

Mike watched him draw, the warmth in his chest a steady, glowing coal. This was it. This was how they fought Vecna tonight. Not with plans or radios, but by daring to imagine a girl they loved growing up in a world safe enough for make-believe.

“Do you ever think about it?” Mike whispered, his eyes on Will’s moving hands. “After all this? If there’s an ‘after’?”

Will’s pencil didn’t stop. “It’s the only thing that keeps me from feeling like we’re just… waiting to lose,” he admitted, his voice thick. “Fighting for movie nights. For stupid arguments about Gelatinous Cubes.” He glanced up, his eyes meeting Mike’s. “For teaching Holly how to roll a natural twenty.”

For this, Mike thought, his gaze locked with Will’s. We’re fighting for this. For the right to sit in a basement and dream together.

“We’ll wait,” Mike said, his voice firm. “Until she’s older. We’ll ask her then.”

Will held his gaze for a long moment, then nodded, a silent pact sealed. “Yeah,” he said, returning to his drawing. “We’ll wait.”

And in the quiet that followed, filled only with the sound of pencil on paper, Mike knew with absolute certainty that no matter what came, no matter how long the wait, he wanted Will Byers there beside him, dreaming up the future, when it finally arrived.

Spring had technically arrived, but in Hawkins, it just meant the mud was warmer. One rainy Saturday afternoon, the rest of the house was a vortex of activity—Karen and Joyce planning a grocery trip, Nancy and Jonathan holed up with Murray’s latest blueprints, Holly chattering to a radio play. The basement was their only escape.

Will was on the couch, re-reading The Hobbit for what was probably the tenth time. Mike was on the floor, back against the couch beside Will’s legs, trying and failing to fix the loose arm on one of his old GI Joes. The silence was the good kind, filled with the tap of rain on the high windows and the soft rustle of Will turning a page.

Then Mike felt it. A light, tentative pressure against the back of his head. Will had shifted, and his knee was now gently resting against Mike’s shoulder blade. It wasn’t an accident. The contact was deliberate, soft.

Mike froze, the tiny screwdriver poised in his hand. His heart did a funny, skipping beat. The warmth from that single point of contact spread through him like a spilled drink, slow and pervasive.

It’s just Will. He’s just getting comfortable. The thought was automatic, a defense drilled into him by years of watching his dad stiffen if his mom touched his arm during the news.

Will didn't move. His knee stayed there, a warm, solid weight. And instead of the tense, wary feeling he associated with touch, Mike felt… calm. His shoulders, which had been hunched with frustration over the toy, slowly relaxed. He let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding and leaned back, just a fraction, into the touch.

It was an invitation. An acceptance.

Will’s hand, holding the book, came down. His fingers brushed lightly through Mike’s hair, just once, a casual, tousling gesture. “You’re going to cross your eyes staring at that thing,” Will said, his voice a low murmur near Mike’s ear.

The touch in his hair was electric. It short-circuited Mike’s rational brain. He had no reference for this. His dad never touched his mom’s hair. Steve Harrington touched girls’ hair. That was a boyfriend thing. But this was Will. Will, who was his best friend. Best friends didn’t… but it felt so nice.

“It’s broken,” Mike mumbled, his voice sounding strange to his own ears. He didn’t pull away. He tilted his head back, resting it more fully against Will’s knee, looking up at him. Will was smiling down at him, a soft, private smile that made Mike’s stomach swoop.

“Everything’s a little broken,” Will said, his thumb unconsciously stroking the edge of the book’s spine. His gaze was so tender it felt like a physical caress.

This. This was it. This quiet, this touch, this unspoken understanding. This was the exact opposite of the cold, clipped exchanges between his parents, the way his mother’s cheerful questions met his father’s grunts. This felt like a language Mike had always wanted to speak but never learned the words for.

It should have been a revelation. Instead, a familiar, cold dread seeped in.

This isn’t normal.

The thought was like a bucket of ice water. This easy, wordless intimacy… it wasn’t what guys did. Guys punched shoulders. They gave noogies. They didn’t sit letting their best friend use their knee as a pillow while rain pattered outside. That was… that was something else. Something he had no name for, and therefore, something dangerous.

What he and Will had was good, but because it was good in a way he’d never seen, his brain, trained on a model of dysfunction, flagged it as a problem.

He sat up abruptly, breaking the contact. The warmth on his shoulder and head vanished, replaced by a cold emptiness.

“I need a different screwdriver,” he said, his voice too loud in the quiet room. He didn’t look at Will. He couldn’t. He busied himself with the toolbox, his hands slightly unsteady.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Will’s smile fade. He saw him pull his legs up onto the couch, creating distance. The easy moment was gone, shattered by Mike’s retreat.

And the worst part was, Mike didn’t even know why he’d done it. He just knew that the feeling had been too big, too good, too different, and in his world, different was a threat to the fragile stability he’d built. He’d chosen the familiar cold over the terrifying warmth.

He spent the next hour fiddling pointlessly with the toy, the ghost of Will’s touch burning on his skin. Will went back to reading, but the silence now was the bad kind—strained and heavy with something unspoken and wounded.

Mike’s heart ached with a confusion so profound it felt like grief. He’d had something perfect in his hands, a key to a door he didn't even know was locked, and he’d thrown it away because the key didn't look like any he'd ever seen before.

And he had no idea how to get it back.

A few nights later, the tension from the couch incident still hung in the basement air, unaddressed. Mike had been trying to act normal, which meant being slightly more annoying than usual. Will had been quiet, retreating into his sketchbook.

After dinner, they were drawn upstairs by the smell of popcorn. Karen had made a bowl, a rare gesture of attempted normalcy. The TV was on in the living room, the blue glow painting Ted’s impassive face.

Mike and Will settled on the floor, backs against the couch, a careful foot of space between them. Holly was already nestled between them, a buffer Mike was both grateful for and frustrated by.

It was the news. The anchor, with his grave, somber tone, was talking about the city council meeting. Then, the segment shifted.

“...and in national news, the public health crisis continues to dominate discourse,” the anchor intoned. Footage flashed of protestors with signs, of doctors in white coats, of a graph with a line shooting upwards. “The President today faced renewed pressure to increase funding for research into the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, as the death toll rises and concerns mount over modes of transmission.”

Mike felt a prickle on the back of his neck. He didn’t know much about AIDS. He knew it was a big, scary word that got muttered at school sometimes, accompanied by nervous laughter or scowls. He knew it had something to do with San Francisco and New York. He knew, in a vague, hazy way, that people said it was a “gay disease.”

On screen, a man with a close-cropped beard, speaking passionately at a podium, was framed by a chyron that read: ACT-UP ADVOCATE: “SILENCE = DEATH”.

Ted Wheeler let out a loud, dismissive tsk from his armchair, not taking his eyes off the screen. “Disgusting,” he muttered, not to anyone in particular, but loud enough for the room to hear. “Parading their perversion on television. And now they want our tax dollars for it.”

The word perversion landed in the quiet room like a physical blow.

Mike froze, a piece of popcorn halfway to his mouth. He didn’t dare look at Will. He could feel Will go perfectly still beside him, a statue.

Karen shifted uncomfortably. “Ted, please,” she said, her voice thin.

“What? It’s the truth,” Ted grumbled, taking a sip of his drink. “It’s a moral issue. They’re getting what they asked for.”

They.

Mike’s stomach turned to lead. The warm, safe feeling from the couch—the feeling he’d craved and then run from—flashed in his mind. That closeness, that tenderness… was that… perversion? Was that what his father saw when he looked at those men on TV? Was that the “they” he was talking about?

A cold, sick dread washed over him. The puzzle pieces his subconscious had been trying to force together now clicked into a horrifying picture. The way his heart raced around Will. The way Will’s smile felt more important than anything. The way he wanted to be near him, to protect him, to touch him. It wasn’t just unusual. In the eyes of the world—in the eyes of his own father—it was disgusting. It was a moral failing. It was a death sentence.

He risked a glance at Will. Will’s profile was pale and rigid, his eyes fixed on the shag carpet as if he could burn a hole through it with his gaze. He looked small. He looked ashamed. Mike had the sudden, overwhelming urge to reach over, to grab his hand, to shield him from his father’s words, from the anchor’s grim report, from the entire world.

But he couldn’t move. His father's voice had pinned him in place. To reach for Will now would be to align himself with the “they.” It would be to confirm his father’s disgust. It would be to step into the crosshairs of that terrifying, faceless epidemic on the screen.

So he did nothing. He ate the piece of popcorn. It tasted like dust.

The news segment ended, moving on to a sports score. The oppressive weight in the room lifted a fraction, but the damage was done. The poison was in the air, and Mike had breathed it in.

Later, in the basement, the silence was a living, screaming thing. Will went straight to his mattress and turned his back, pretending to sleep.

Mike lay on his own mattress, staring at the ceiling tiles. His father’s words echoed alongside the memory of Will’s fingers in his hair. Disgusting. Perversion. The two ideas warred in his head, a brutal civil war.

He cared about Will more than he’d ever cared about anyone. That was the truest thing he knew. But if that care, in its purest, most natural form, was what the world saw on that TV screen… then what did that make him? Was his deepest self something to be ashamed of? Something that could get him sick, get him hated, get him killed?

The internal conflict wasn’t a path to realization anymore; it was a prison. Realization—naming the feeling—now felt less like an awakening and more like a death sentence. It was safer to stay in the confusing, painful fog of denial. To name the feeling was to invite the world’s contempt, and maybe even to lose Will forever if Will didn’t… if he wasn’t…

He squeezed his eyes shut. He couldn’t go down that road. It was too dark, too terrifying.

So he built the walls higher. He told himself the tightness in his chest was anxiety about Vecna. The need to be near Will was just strategic, for the Party. The memory of his touch was just… a thing that happened.

He would be normal. He would be safe. He would be what his father understood.

Even if it meant slowly suffocating the most real part of himself.

The days bled into a tense, strange spring. Vecna was silent. No new leads. The only noise was the one inside Mike’s head, a low, constant hum of static. It was a sound made of two frequencies: a deep, pulling ache that drew him toward Will, and the sharp, crackling fear that screamed at him to pull away. The TV news report had given the fear a voice, a shape. It wasn't just abstract "wrongness" anymore; it was his father’s disgust, it was a terrifying disease, it was a word—perversion—that echoed in the quiet of his own mind.

The fear had won for a while, making him stiff and distant. But the ache was a stubborn thing, and the sight of Will’s quiet, resigned hurt had been its own kind of torture. So, Mike had forced a correction. He’d started making a point of it: passing Will the syrup at breakfast, asking his opinion on a D&D rule, bumping his shoulder as they walked to the Squawk. Small, normal things. Best friend things.

It worked. The tension eased. They could talk again, laugh again. It felt like they were finding their way back to the easy rhythm they’d had before everything got so loud. Externally, at least.

Internally, Mike was a live wire. Every restored moment of normalcy came with a price—a heightened, almost painful awareness. Will’s laugh didn’t just make him happy; it sent a warm, fizzy feeling straight to his stomach. Will’s shoulder against his didn’t just feel familiar; it felt like a grounding point in a spinning world.

The awareness was a secret he carried, a second heartbeat.

It happened in the deep, formless hours. Mike was pulled from sleep by a shift in the darkness. A solid weight settled against his side—warm, real, breathing.

Will.

In his sleep, Will had migrated. He’d rolled right off his own mattress and into the narrow space between them, his body flush against Mike’s side. His forehead was pressed to Mike’s shoulder. One arm was flung out, his hand resting heavily on Mike’s stomach. Mike could feel the firm line of Will’s arm—no longer the skinny limb of the boy who’d gone missing, but stronger, defined from months of stress and survival. Will’s chest, broader now too, rose and fell in a steady rhythm against Mike’s ribs.

Mike didn’t freeze this time. A profound, immediate calm washed over him, silencing the static. This was the truth his body knew, even if his mind fought it. This was peace. Home. He let himself breathe in the scent of Will’s shampoo, let himself feel the solid, reassuring weight. For a few stolen minutes in the dark, he didn’t fight it. He just existed within it.

Then, the fear. It didn’t shout anymore. It whispered, cold and slick.

This is different. This isn’t how you’re supposed to feel about your best friend.

He saw his father’s dismissive face. He didn’t pull away in a panic. Instead, a deep, weary sadness settled over him. He knew what came next. He had to break this perfect thing because the world said it was broken.

As the first grey light touched the windows, he carefully, slowly, extracted himself. He didn’t flee to the edge of the mattress. He just put a respectful few inches of space between them, a deliberate, sorrowful correction.

When Will stirred later, blinking awake, there was no awkward stiffness. Mike was already sitting up, pretending to look for a book. “You hog the blankets,” Mike said, his voice deliberately light, a peace offering.

Will rubbed his eyes, a small, sleepy smile on his face. “You snore.”

“Do not.”

“You do. It’s like a bear with a sinus infection.”

They bickered softly, the pre-dawn intimacy seamlessly folding into their new, careful normal. No mention of the closeness. No awkward silence. Just best friends, starting their day.

But as Mike pulled on his socks, he could still feel the ghost of Will’s hand on his stomach like a brand. The warmth was now a permanent resident in his chest, and the fear was the lock on the door, keeping it trapped inside.

The new awareness was a ghost that followed Mike everywhere. It was there when Will reached across him for another slice of bacon at breakfast, the sleeve of his flannel brushing Mike’s arm. It was there when they hunched over a comic book, their heads so close Mike could count the faint freckles on Will’s nose. It was a constant, low-level buzz, a secret he kept from everyone, especially from Will.

It was also completely one-sided, which made Mike feel both relieved and insane.

The next incident happened on a Saturday. They’d been running drills with Lucas in the woods—Hopper’s idea of “staying sharp”—and had come back sweaty and buzzing with adrenaline. Mike was rummaging in the basement fridge for a soda when he realized he’d left his walkie in their room. He wanted to ask Dustin whether he would be coming over later. He bounded down to the basement and pushed the door open without thinking.

“Hey, have you seen my— oh.”

Will stood with his back to the door, pulling a clean white t-shirt over his head. He wasn’t quick enough. Mike got a flash of tanned skin, the clean lines of his shoulders and back, muscles shifting smoothly. A old, faded scar laddered one shoulder blade. He’d filled out. Not like a jock, but like someone who’d survived hard things and come out stronger.

For a split second, Mike’s brain short-circuited. It wasn’t attraction. It was recognition. A stark, startling recognition of Will as someone who was no longer just the kid from his childhood, but a person. A guy. It was a fact that suddenly seemed immensely significant and utterly confusing.

Will turned, the shirt settling into place. He didn’t look embarrassed, just mildly surprised. “Your walkie’s on your dresser.”

“Right. Yeah. Thanks,” Mike said, his voice thankfully normal. He walked in, grabbed the walkie, trying to keep his eyes strictly on the mission. The image, however, was stuck in his head.

“Drills were good today,” Will said casually, running a hand through his damp hair. “Lucas is fast.”

“Yeah, he’s motivated. Plus, it helps he is already a jock,” Mike replied, fiddling with the walkie’s antenna. He could feel Will’s eyes on him. “You were pretty fast too.”

Will shrugged, a small, pleased smile on his face. “Trying to keep up.”

They stood there for a beat in the comfortable, messy room they shared. The moment wasn’t awkward. It was normal. Will was his friend, changing his shirt. That was all.

But as Mike left the room, the ghost of the awareness followed him, stronger than ever. It wasn’t about the act of seeing him change. It was about seeing him. Really seeing him. And the terrifying, exhilarating realization that the person he saw was someone he never, ever wanted to look away from.

He just had no idea what that meant. So he buried it, added it to the pile of unsorted feelings, and went to the living room to radio Dustin and complain about the drills. On the outside, everything was fine. On the inside, the foundation of everything he thought he knew was quietly, irrevocably shifting.

It was a Wednesday, and the house was a vacuum of quiet. Joyce was with Hopper, helping him set up new obstacle courses for El. Nancy was at the Hawkins Post, trying to dig up any non-classified military reports. Will was at the hospital with Lucas, part of their rotating "Max support squad."

Mike was in the basement, attempting to organize D&D modules he had no energy to run, when he heard the back door slam and footsteps in the kitchen. Heavy, deliberate. Not Will’s.

He wandered upstairs to find Jonathan Byers rummaging in the fridge, pulling out a can of Coke. He looked up, seemed surprised to see Mike, then grabbed another can from the fridge and held it out wordlessly.

Mike took it. “Thanks.”

They stood there in the bright, silent kitchen, the click of the cans opening unbearably loud. Mike had always felt vaguely judged by Jonathan. Not in a mean way, but in a steady, observant way that made Mike feel like a loud, flailing kid next to someone who had life figured out.

“Will’s at the hospital,” Mike said, for lack of anything else.

“I know,” Jonathan said, leaning against the counter. “He said. You didn’t go?”

“I went yesterday. Lucas said it’s better if we… rotate. So it’s not too overwhelming for the nurses.” It was a half-truth. Sometimes, watching Lucas talk to Max’s still form, the sheer weight of it made Mike feel like he was intruding on something sacred.

Jonathan nodded, taking a slow sip. “That’s smart.” He looked out the window at the grey afternoon. “Quiet house.”

“Yeah.”

Another agonizing silence. Mike was about to mutter an excuse and flee back to the basement when Jonathan spoke, his voice low and thoughtful.

“It’s weird, living in someone else’s house. You feel like you’re always taking up space you shouldn’t.”

The admission was so unexpected, so vulnerable, that Mike’s head snapped up. “You guys don’t— I mean, you’re not—”

“I know,” Jonathan said, a faint, tired smile touching his lips. “Your mom’s been great. It’s just… a feeling.”

Mike understood that feeling. The feeling of being a guest in your own life. “Yeah,” he said again, then blurted, “I thought you hated it here.” I thought you hated me.

Now it was Jonathan’s turn to look surprised. “Hate it? No. It’s… safe. For now. That’s what matters.” He studied Mike. “Why would you think that?”

Mike shrugged, picking at the tab on his can. “I don’t know. You’re just… quiet. And you’re always with Nancy, or doing your own thing. And you look at me sometimes like…” He trailed off, unable to articulate the gentle, knowing scrutiny.

“Like I’m trying to figure out if you’re going to hurt my brother,” Jonathan finished, his voice still calm.

The words landed with the force of a truth Mike had been avoiding. He felt his face heat. “I wouldn’t. I’d never—”

“I know,” Jonathan said again, and this time it sounded like a real verdict. “Not on purpose, anyway.”

The qualifier hung in the air. On purpose. Mike thought of all the recent retreats, the awkward silences, the times he’d seen Will’s smile falter because of something he did. He looked down, chastened.

“It’s complicated,” Jonathan said, pushing off the counter. He walked to the kitchen table and sat, gesturing for Mike to join him. It felt like a peace offering. “With Will. It always has been. He feels things… deeper. Gets hurt easier. But he also… he sees people. Really sees them.”

Mike sat, his heart pounding. This was the most Jonathan had ever said to him. “He does,” Mike whispered.

Jonathan watched him for a long moment. “Nancy told me. About you and El.”

Mike froze. He and El hadn’t told anyone. But of course Nancy knew. Nancy saw everything. And of course she told Jonathan. A fresh wave of shame washed over him—for breaking up with El, for whatever this was with Will, for being a mess.

“It’s okay,” Jonathan said, as if reading his mind. “Nancy and I… we weren’t exactly a straight line either.” He gave a dry, humorless chuckle. “I spent about a year convinced she saw me as this pathetic, creepy loner. Which, to be fair, I kind of was.”

Mike couldn’t imagine Jonathan, so steady and sure, ever feeling that unsure. “But you… you knew you liked her. Right from the start.”

“Yeah,” Jonathan admitted. “But knowing it and believing she could ever like someone like me back were two different things. I thought I was… I don’t know. Not what she was supposed to want. Too quiet. Too weird. Too poor.” He met Mike’s eyes. “It’s scary, liking someone that much. It feels like giving them a weapon.”

Mike’s breath caught. “How did you… get past it?” Mike asked, the question ripped from him.

Jonathan’s gaze turned inward. “I guess… I realized that what we had wasn’t about what we were supposed to want. It was just… what we did want. And it was real. And trying to fit it into some other box, or comparing it to what other people had… it just made us both miserable.” He took another sip. “Sometimes the best things are the ones that don’t make sense to anyone else.”

The ones that don’t make sense to anyone else.

The words echoed in the quiet kitchen. Mike thought of his parents’ sensible, loveless marriage. He thought of the perfect, storybook boyfriend-girlfriend narrative he’d tried to force with El. None of it felt real. None of it felt like this—the confusing, terrifying, all-consuming pull he felt toward Will.

He was silent for so long that Jonathan finally stood, taking his empty can to the sink. “He’s tougher than he looks, you know,” he said softly, his back to Mike. “Will. He’s been through hell. But his heart… it’s still the biggest part of him. Just… try to be careful with it, okay?”

It wasn’t a threat. It was a plea. From one brother to someone who, against all odds, might just understand what it meant to love one.

Mike nodded, even though Jonathan couldn’t see him. His throat was too tight to speak.

Jonathan left the kitchen, the house settling back into its quiet. But for Mike, the silence was different. It was no longer filled with his father’s voice or the news anchor’s warnings. It was filled with Jonathan’s quiet certainty: Sometimes the best things are the ones that don’t make sense to anyone else.

For the first time, the terrifying, beautiful feeling inside him didn’t just feel like a sickness or a sin. It felt, impossibly, like it might just be… real.

And that was the most frightening thought of all.

Weeks turned into another month, settling into the constant, grim rhythm of their new world. Mike stood in his old bedroom, now Joyce's quiet sanctuary, feeling like a ghost. He’d come up to find an old library book he borrowed from school. Even at the end of the world, his high school's librarian was relentless with her late notices.

The book wasn’t on his desk. As he closed the drawer, his eyes fell on the closet door. Rummaging through the mess, his fingers brushed against a tube of thick paper shoved to the very back. He knew what it was before he pulled it out.

Unfurling it slowly, the painting came to life. The one Will had given him in the stuffy heat of the Surfer Boy Pizza van. His paladin, front and center, shield adorned with a bright, defiant heart, leading the charge against the crimson dragon. The Party, frozen in a moment of shared, imagined battle.

That’s what holds this whole party together—heart.

The memory washed over him, vivid and layered. The awe at Will’s skill. The profound, unexpected serenity in Will’s voice as he explained it, a calm port in the storm of Mike’s panic. The grounding peace Will had offered when Mike felt most useless. And beneath it all, the persistent, nagging confusion. The confusion when Will told him that El had commissioned the painting.

Will is painting a lot, but he won’t show me what he is working on. Maybe it is for a girl? I think there is someone he likes.

El’s letter. He remembered the strange, sharp feeling it had sparked in him when he’d first read it—a feeling he’d refused to examine. Then, at the airport, seeing Will with the rolled canvas… that feeling had curdled into something colder, something that had made him pull away. He’d told himself it was just the difficulty of distance, the awkwardness of strained friendship. Writing to El was simple. Writing to Will felt like trying to carve his own heart out with a spoon. Hey Will, I miss you so much I can hardly stand it was not a sentence you could send in the mail.

He’d blamed the bitter taste of El’s letter on a childish fear: what if Will gets a girlfriend and forgets about me? He knew, logically, Will would never do that. Will wasn’t like him. But logic hadn’t stopped his brain from inventing elaborate, petty scenarios where this imaginary, perfect girl met a very untimely, monster-related end.

Mike sighed and rolled the painting back up. He’d never hung it, unlike Will’s other drawings that papered his basement walls. This one felt too intimate, like its meaning was a secret conversation just between them. Which was absurd, because its origin was a testament to El’s love, right?

He slid the tube into his backpack and finally found the overdue book. He was visiting El today. Maybe he could talk to her about it. Maybe hearing her confirm it would finally make the confusing pieces settle.

The trip to Hopper’s cabin was made in a blur, the tube in his backpack feeling heavier with every mile. He visited El more often now. Since their quiet understanding in the clearing, a natural ease had returned. She smiled more, a real, unburdened smile that lit up her whole face. He liked seeing it.

He found her in the yard, sitting on the back steps. She looked up, and that easy smile appeared. “Mike. You came.”

“Of course. I come bearing gifts.” He held up a paper bag. “Snacks. The good kind.”

“For my battery.”

He tossed her a bag of chips and sat beside her, telling her about Dustin’s latest radio disaster. It was easy. It was good. This was what they were now—solid, real, and uncomplicated.

“You have a tube,” El said suddenly, her eyes flicking to the canvas poking from his backpack.

“Oh. Yeah.” Mike’s mouth went a bit dry. “It’s, um, the painting Will made. Y’know, the one you commissioned? Back in Lenora?”

El paused, a chip halfway to her mouth. She frowned. “Commissioned? I do not know that word.”

“It means you asked him to make it. For a gift. Usually you pay.”

Understanding dawned, followed swiftly by clear confusion. She shook her head. “No. I did not ask Will for a painting. I did not pay. He would not let me see.” Her voice was certain, innocent of the lie.

A cold trickle traced Mike’s spine. His palms grew slick. “But… the one he gave me. Of the Party. Fighting the dragon. He said you asked him to paint it for me. To give it to me.”

Now El looked truly bewildered. “He gave you a painting? Of the Party? With a dragon?” She said it as if describing a dream she hadn’t had. “No. He never showed me. I did not know.”

The air in Mike’s lungs turned to lead. The memory of the van crashed over him—the sweltering heat, Will’s strained face, eyes too bright with an emotion Mike had mistaken for shared anxiety about El.

These past few months, she’s been so lost without you… you make her feel like she’s not a mistake… So, yeah. El needs you, Mike. And she always will.

She. El.

A lie. A complete, foundational lie.

Why? The question was a silent scream in the hollowing cavity of his chest. His strategic brain short-circuited, searching for an angle, a motive, a monster to slay. But there was no monster. Only Will. Will, who painted their shared childhood. Will, who called him the heart. Will, who looked at him with eyes full of a truth he’d wrapped in a fairy tale.

“Mike.” El’s voice was soft. Her hand came to rest on his, a light, steady pressure. “Friends don’t lie. But… maybe Will… I think he has a reason. He would not lie to hurt.”

He knew that. He knew it better than anyone, especially after his talk with Jonathan. But knowing it didn’t stop the fracture spreading through his chest. The words in that van had been his lifeline. They had given him purpose, clarity, courage. Were they just… lines? A performance to motivate the paladin for the final boss fight?

Was he ever the heart? Or was he just a piece Will knew how to move?

“I have to go,” Mike whispered, the words scraping his throat raw. He stood, mechanical, leaving the rest of the snacks beside her. He clutched the painting tube to his chest—no longer a cherished gift, but a piece of evidence in a crime he was only just beginning to understand.

El didn’t try to stop him. She just watched him go, her expression a tapestry of concern and a deep, sorrowful understanding. She saw the ground give way beneath him.

Mike walked back to his bicycle, the tube a lead weight in his arms. And for the first time, Mike was terrified to look at it. Terrified of the truth he might see staring back from that canvas, and the truth he might finally have to acknowledge in the mirror of his own soul.

Time became a slow, cold syrup. Three days. For seventy-two hours, the painting in its tube leaned against Mike's mattress, a silent, accusing monument. Every time he looked at it, he felt the memory of Will's words in the van—the ones he'd clung to—begin to curdle.

He waited until the house was a tomb of evening quiet. The only sounds were the furnace's groans and the soft scratch of Will's pencil at the table. The normalcy of it was a lie, too.

"Will."

Will looked up, pencil stilling. Something in Mike's tone—a flatness, a weight—made his expression shift from calm to alert. "Yeah?"

“I went to see El.” Mike’s voice was disturbingly even. “I took the painting. I wanted to… I don’t know. Talk about it with her.”

Will's face went carefully, completely blank. It was a defense mechanism Mike recognized. Will was retreating inside himself, building the walls. "Oh," he said, his voice neutral. "What did she think?"

"She didn't know what I was talking about."

The mask on Will's face fractured. His gaze remained locked on the whorls of the wooden table, but Mike saw the exact moment his eyes lost focus, staring at nothing. The color drained from his face, leaving him pale in the lamplight. He didn’t deny it. He offered no excuse. He just… absorbed the impact, his shoulders curling inwards as if making himself a smaller target.

"Why?” The word wasn’t loud. It was a crack in Mike’s own composure, a plea torn from somewhere dark and wounded. “Why would you lie to me about that?”

Silence. Then, a whisper so faint Mike almost missed it. “I thought it would help.”

“Help?” A spark of something hot and jagged ignited in Mike’s chest. “How does lying to me help? Tell me, Will! I need to understand."

Will’s head snapped up, his eyes suddenly blazing. The careful calm was gone. “You were sitting in that van like your world had ended! I could see it. You thought you’d lost her. You thought you were nothing to her. And I had this… this thing I’d made. For you. About you. And I had all these things I wanted to say.” His voice cracked, raw. “And I thought if you thought it was from her… then maybe you’d believe it.”

“So everything you said…” Mike’s own voice was trembling now, the detachment crumbling. “About me being the heart… about her needing me… that was just a… a lie? Things you invented to patch me up?”

“No!” The word exploded from Will, violent and desperate. He surged to his feet, the chair legs scraping harshly against the linoleum. His hands were clenched into white-knuckled fists at his sides. His eyes, wide and glassy with unshed tears, blazed with a ferocity Mike had never seen in him. “They were true! They are the truest things I know! That’s the whole point!” The outburst seemed to shock even him. He stood there, trembling from head to toe, breath coming in ragged gasps, looking both defiant and utterly horrified by his own transparency.

Mike’s heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic drumbeat of hope and terror. He stood up, mirroring Will, the few feet of basement floor between them feeling like a canyon.

“Then why not say they were from you?” Mike pleaded, his voice rising to match Will’s intensity. “If they were your truths, why hand them to me with her name on them? Why hide behind her?” He took a half-step forward, driven by a desperate need to finally see. “What does the painting mean, Will? What were you really trying to tell me? Just say it!”

Will’s eyes held his, and for a terrifying, endless second, they were full of a raw, open struggle. His lips parted—not to speak, but as if the truth was a living thing clawing its way up his throat. Mike saw the words form and die behind his eyes, a desperate, silent battle. Will’s gaze flickered over Mike’s face, searching, yearning, terrified. He lifted a hand, just an inch from the table, fingers curling as if to reach out, or to push something away. His throat worked, but no sound came—just a strained, silent gasp for air that never seemed to reach his lungs.

It wasn’t just panic. It was a civil war. A part of Will was screaming to speak, and another part, a stronger, more terrified part, was suffocating it.

The conflict was so palpable it sucked all the oxygen from the room. Will looked utterly trapped, a prisoner behind his own ribs. A tear, born of this brutal internal stalemate, escaped and traced a path down his cheek. It was the tear of someone losing a fight with themselves.

Mike understood nothing, and he understood everything. He wasn’t being denied an answer. Will was wrestling with a demon Mike couldn’t see, and the fight was tearing him apart. The truth wasn’t a simple fact Will was hiding; it was a beast he was physically straining to contain.

The sight was a knife to Mike’s gut. He’s in pain. I’m causing this.

The memory of another loss—cold rain, a turned back, a year of silence—flooded him with a cold, clarifying dread. All his desperate need to know was smothered by a greater imperative: Stop.

Mike stumbled back a step, the fire in him doused by cold fear. “Forget it,” he whispered, his voice rough. He turned his face away, breaking the agonizing connection. “Just… forget I asked, okay?”

The relief that washed over Will was immediate and devastating. He buried his face in his hands, his shoulders shaking with a single, stifled tremor. The painting sat between them. The truth was no clearer. But he had seen its shape in the contours of Will’s struggle—a huge, silent, terrifying thing that had Will Byers in a stranglehold.

Mike stood, hollowed out. The painting, the beautiful, fraudulent heart, was the least important thing in the room. The important thing was the boy shaking silently beside the table, and the cataclysmic, unspoken thing that had just shaken him.

Will’s muffled voice came, thick with spent emotion. “I’m sorry I lied.”

Mike looked at the top of Will’s bowed head, the familiar curve now a symbol of unbearable weight.

“I know,” Mike said, hollow.

He had chosen ceasefire over conquest. He had chosen Will’s fragile survival over the slaughter of whatever truth was hiding inside him. He had looked into the heart of the storm and chosen to board up the windows, leaving the mystery raging, unsolved, and infinitely more sacred.

The silence after the storm wasn’t empty. It was full of careful movements, of sentences started and deliberately finished, of eyes that met and then skated away, heavy with everything that couldn’t be said. But Mike had made his choice: he would have Will in his life, even if it meant living next to a locked room.

Slowly, the old rhythm returned, but it was transposed into a different, more poignant key. The easiness was still there, but it was now underscored by a constant, low hum of awareness—of the things unsaid, of the painting still rolled and tucked away, of the way Will’s laughter sometimes faded a second too quickly when their eyes met.

Mike began to live in a secret archive of moments, collecting them with a desperate, quiet fervor. He cataloged the weight of Will’s head on his shoulder during a late night at the Squawk, when Will had fallen asleep to the static hiss of the radio band and Mike had held himself statue-still for an hour, thinking, If I could have nothing else for the rest of my life, let me have this. He memorized the feel of Will’s fingers brushing his as they passed LEGO bricks on a rainy afternoon, building a sprawling, ridiculous fortress, Will adding a tiny, perfect flag to the tallest tower with a focused smile that made Mike’s chest ache with a profound, domestic joy. It felt like a glimpse of a whole lifetime, condensed into an hour.

And he held sacred the dark, wordless pact of the nightmares. When the hitched, panicked breathing came from the other mattress, Mike would reach out in the blackness and find Will’s hand. The grip that answered was always vise-tight, a silent scream. They never spoke of it in the morning, just untangled with averted eyes. It was their first new, sacred rule.

The wanting wasn’t a lightning bolt. It was the atmosphere. It was the peace that settled in his bones when Will was near, and the hollow, geometric wrongness of any space Will had just left. It was the unconscious calculation that made him choose Will’s quiet company over anyone else’s noise. It was the ancient, unshakable certainty that if he ever had to walk into the Upside Down, he would only do it with Will at his side—not as a party member, but as his rightful other half.

The fear—his father’s voice, the news reports, the word perversion—was still there. But it had been moved. It was no longer a wall between him and Will; it was a wall around the two of them, a threat from the outside world. His protectiveness had seamlessly merged with his love. They were the same thing.

And the realization didn’t come with fanfare. It came on a Tuesday.

They were walking back from the hospital, the setting sun painting Hawkins in pathetic, beautiful gold. Lucas was passionately explaining why The Empire Strikes Back was objectively the best movie ever made, full of sound and fury.

Will, who had been quiet, finally cut in, his voice calm. "But A New Hope has the better arc. It's a complete hero's journey. Empire is a middle chapter—it's all trauma and cliffhangers. It needs the other movies to mean anything."

Lucas spluttered. "That's the point! The trauma is what makes it deep!"

"It's not deeper," Will said, a faint, challenging smile on his face. "It's just sadder. There's a difference. Hope is harder to write. Anyone can write a sad ending."

The debate raged for two blocks, Will holding his ground with quiet, stubborn logic, his eyes alight with a passion Mike rarely saw outside of their D&D campaigns. He wasn't just arguing about movies; he was arguing about hope as a narrative principle, about the integrity of a story's heart.

Mike watched him—this boy who had been to hell and back, who knew more about sad endings than anyone, yet still, fiercely, believed in the architectural beauty of a hopeful beginning. Who saw the world in stories, and fought for the good ones.

A wave of feeling rose in Mike’s chest, so vast and so quiet it was simply… truth.

I love him.

The thought was clear, final, and utterly tranquil. Not I think I might or This feels like. It was a statement of fact, as indisputable as gravity. I am in love with Will Byers.

And with the love came a grief so sharp it made his eyes sting. Because the other truth, the one written in Will’s terrified silence, in the lie of the painting, was just as clear. He doesn’t see me that way. He can’t.

He would have this friendship. This profound, essential, life-saving friendship. He would have movie nights and shared looks and the right to reach for his hand in the dark. He would have everything, and nothing.

The weight of it—the love and the loss, both existing in the same space inside him—became a physical pressure. It felt too big for his body. The facade of normalcy he wore for Will, for the Party, for the world, began to crack under the strain.

He walked into his house, the laughter from the kitchen—Joyce and Holly making some new recipe—feeling like it was happening in another dimension. He climbed the stairs, passed the closed door of his old room, and found himself standing outside his parents’ bedroom.

Karen was inside, folding laundry. She looked up, surprised. “Michael? Honey, what’s—”

He didn’t let her finish. He crossed the room in three strides and wrapped his arms around her, burying his face in the familiar, clean scent of her sweater. He didn’t sob. He just held on, his entire body trembling with the effort of holding months of confusion, fear, longing, and a love so big it had nowhere to go.

Karen froze for a second, startled. Then, her mother’s instincts—deeper than any puzzle, any unspoken truth—kicked in. Her arms came around him, one hand cradling the back of his head. She didn’t ask what’s wrong. She just held him. “Oh, Michael,” she murmured, her voice a soft, knowing ache. She might not have known the specifics, but she knew the shape of a heart breaking. She knew her son.

He held on, letting the solid, unconditional fact of her love absorb the seismic shock of his own. He wasn’t confessing. He was anchoring himself. In this quiet room, with his mother’s silent understanding, he finally let himself feel the full, terrifying scope of it.

When he finally pulled back, his eyes were dry but raw. Karen cupped his face, her thumbs brushing his cheeks, her own eyes bright. She searched his face, and in her gaze, he saw no judgment, no demand for explanation. Just a boundless, weary love, and a sorrow that perhaps she’d seen this coming—this particular pain—from a mile away.

“It’s okay,” she whispered, though they both knew it wasn’t, not really. “You’re going to be okay.”

Mike nodded, unable to speak. He wasn’t sure he believed her. But for the first time since the thought I love him had crystallized, he didn’t feel entirely alone with it.

He left the room, the weight still there, but now it was a settled thing. A fact. He walked back downstairs. Will was in the basement, bent over his sketchbook in the lamplight, the pencil moving with quiet focus. The world hadn’t changed. The fight was still coming. Vecna was still waiting.

But Mike had changed.

“All good?” Will asked, not looking up, his voice soft in the familiar quiet.

Mike looked at him—at the curve of his neck, the shadow his lashes cast, the entire, precious fact of him being right there. The love didn’t feel like a discovery anymore. It felt like a foundation. It was the ground he stood on.

He managed a small, real smile. It was the first honest expression of his new life. “Yeah,” he said, his voice steady, carrying the quiet truth he’d just chosen to live with. “All good.”

He sat down across from him, in his usual spot. Will glanced up, offered a tentative, answering smile, and went back to his drawing.

Mike Wheeler had finally named the quiet, desperate war inside his own chest. He loved Will Byers.

And that, for now, would have to be enough. It was the only thing he was sure of.